Games You've Beat 2021 - PXoD's Excellent Adventure

[Mister Jack]

Damn, you beat it already? Didn't it only come out like two days ago?

[toxicitizen]

3 days but the first one isn't very long. Took me about 15 hours and I barely remembered anything about it, so it can probably be done in 10h or so if you know what you're doing.

[Mister Jack]

They must have rebalanced it or something because I remember the original NES version being quite a grind. Do they use the original stock system for magic or MP? Do they have more than one kind of healing potion? I remember back in the day having to tediously stock up on 99 healing potions, which only healed 60 HP each, and then use them over and over in the Chaos Shrine between fights.

[toxicitizen]

No MP, spells have charges like the original. I think other than some QoL changes they stayed as close to the original as possible for the most part. Although I think there are items in this one that you couldn't buy before, yeah. There's hi-potions (heals for 150 vs 50 for a potion), ether and probably phoenix downs?

 

I can't really compare the difficulty to other versions as I've only played the GBA remake and it was too long ago. I found it to be on the easy side but I was probably overleveled because I spent a good chunk of time basically just going everywhere with my boat when I wasn't sure where to go next. By the end I was basically drowning in gil so I just bought 99 of everything I could. The final boss is the only one that didn't go down almost immediately lol.

 

edit: Just looked at a differences list and it might actually be closer to the GBA version in terms of difficulty. I'd consider those QoL changes, though, because the experience you're describing doesn't sound hard so much as miserable lol.

Edited August 1, 2021 by toxicitizen

[Mister Jack]

Original game didn't have ethers or phoenix downs at all. If someone died you either used a life spell or went all the way back to town to revive them. If you ran out of spells you had to either go back to town or use a tent/cottage/house at the dungeon entrance to restore them. Cutting out that bullshit would definitely make it easier to get through efficiently.

[TheMightyEthan]

A Plague Tale: Innocence

 

This game was pretty good, once I stopped expecting something it wasn't. It's pretty linear, with most encounters being more like a puzzle with only a handful of solutions than the more open stealth games I'm used to, but once I accepted that I really enjoyed it. I really like the aesthetic too, almost like Assassin's Creed with it being set in a realistic historical setting, but then batshit things happen. I'm looking forward to the sequel now, although I'm not sure how they're going to pull it off from a gameplay perspective, given how it ends.

 

4/5

[toxicitizen]

I heard really good things about that game. I really need to play it. I'm so starved for good stealth games these days... Hopefully with the sequel coming it'll show up in Humble Choice in the near future.

[TheMightyEthan]

It's on PC Game Pass.

[toxicitizen]

Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster

 

This is one of the games in the series that I had never played. It's pretty good and in some ways is a massive improvement over the original. But it's also weirdly experimental and as a result has some elements that are... questionable. But let's start with the good.

 

So the main thing is that your characters have no level. They don't level up, they just have skills that rank up with use. Want a character to be good with swords? Equip one and go fight some monsters. Same goes for spells. Max HP and MP goes up when you lose enough of it in battle. This led to a myth that you need to have your characters attack themselves to raise your HP but apparently that wasn't true before and it certainly isn't in this version either because I never did it and I had a fuckton of HP by the end of the game.

 

I found the system a little stressful because I was worried about leveling my party "wrong" but that turned out to be unfounded. Just playing normally led to a fairly balanced (and overpowered) party. The only thing I did was go out of my way to cast more spells than I normally would to both increase my character's max MP and also rank up the spells themselves but that's honestly just how you should play this game anyway. The one thing you could fuck yourself over with is if you switch weapon type on a character. It's nothing that can't be fixed but if you spend half the game fighting with swords and switch to an axe your character's gonna suck with it and may never catch up with the rest of the party. You're better off picking a type for each character at the beginning and sticking with it.

 

There's also this password system where you can learn certain keywords that NPCs tell you and ask others about them. It doesn't really accomplish anything that standard dialogue couldn't do but it's a neat little novelty. At least, up until the point where you're at the end of the game and realize you missed a single fucking keyword earlier and screwed yourself out of an achievement. I was so fucking pissed I just said fuck it and used a trainer to rush through the game at turbo speed with infinite HP/MP and no random encounter. Took me just a little over an hour from start to right before the end when you get the final keyword lol. I liked the game but I wasn't going to replay it just for this one fucking password because, well, we'll get to that in a bit.

 

Then there's the main way where the game feels like a huge step up over the original: the story. In the original game, there's a little bit about saving a princess at the beginning and there's a bit of a twist at the end but most of the game is just "something's wrong with the crystals, go fix them". Sometimes you'll speak to an NPC and get a hint like "There's a vampire in a cave to the east that's been troubling us" but other than that you're mostly just walking around looking for whatever path is now open to you to reach the next town or dungeon. There's not really any kind of story linking it all together.

 

Final Fantasy II not only has a story, it tells it through actual scenes with characters. I've seen people describe it as proto-FFIV and I really can't argue with that. It feels ahead of its time in a way that's kind of impressive. Especially when you add in the skill system that I didn't really see in games until Morrowind. It was probably done before that but it was still surprising to see in FFII.

 

Now for the bad. Well, this game's dungeons were designed by fucking assholes. Like 90% of the doors in any given dungeon lead nowhere, they just spawn you in the middle of a "trap room" that's empty and has a higher monster encounter rate. Out of the entire game, you can count on one hand how many of these actually had chests in them. Yeah...

 

Then there's the way status effects work. Basically, my understanding of it is that if it's inflicted through a melee attack, it's 100% guaranteed to affect you. Protection items straight up do not work against this. In previous versions, the idea was that you would have most of your party on the back row where they're safe and have just one tank up front taking all the hits. By the end of the game, your tank took so many hits that his evasion is super high and he's basically untouchable. They changed that. So now back row characters can get hit and you end up with a more even, but much lower, evasion stat on all your characters. This is a change they did NOT think through. Here's why it fucking sucks.

 

Some encounters will have 4-5 of a single enemy type that will put any character they hit to sleep/paralyzed/stone/etc. Basically status effects that put them entirely out of action. If the monsters somehow get an ambush on you, there is a very decent chance that they will take out your entire party before you even get a turn, no matter how much stronger than them you are. It is utterly infuriating bullshit.

 

 

Just to put this in perspective, consider that during my trainer run I actually died once. Just let that sink in. I opened a chest that had monsters in it and it was one of those bullshit unwinnable fights. I actually died during my infinite HP/one hit kill cheat run. That should tell you how fucking broken this shit is lmao.

 

Thank FUCK the game has autosaves every time you enter a new map because you absolutely need to abuse that shit. Hell, there's also a quick save that you can use in dungeons that, in previous versions, normally would get deleted when you load it back up. In these remasters in doesn't get deleted and I now have a strong suspicion that FFII is the reason why. There are some maze-like maps where the autosaves aren't enough, you need to abuse the quicksave as well because a single unlucky encounter can send you all the way back to the start of the floor. It only happens in a few specific areas and it's honestly kinda rare all things considered but it's definitely an issue.

 

So yeah, it's a pretty good game with some questionable design elements. I'm really glad I finally played it. It's probably not gonna make it into my favorite FFs but it's definitely worth playing at least once. Next up is FFIII, another one I never played. After that, that leaves on FFV although despite having started it several times across different versions, I don't think I ever actually finished FFIV.

 

Also, I just realized that once I'll be done going through all the Pixel Remasters I believe that will leave Final Fantasy IX as the only one I've never played.  @deanb

Edited August 9, 2021 by toxicitizen

[Mister Jack]

You never needed to attack your own party members to level up your HP in FFII, but at least in the original version you could do that to exploit the system and raise your HP to much higher than it should be because the HP leveling worked based on how much HP you lose in battle. I don't know if they fixed that exploit for the remaster but it was definitely a thing back on the Famicom. There was also an annoying stat atrophy system where one stat would decrease when another one increased so it was definitely possible to level up your party wrongly. I know they got rid of that crap in the GBA remake and it sounds like they did the same for the pixel remaster, which is good because that was a terrible idea. Final Fantasy II is a game you can completely break in half if you know how to cheat the system, which can be fun, but I can also see why some people don't like the game because is has pretty much no balance. If you know what you're doing you can even kill the final boss in one turn.

[toxicitizen]

Yeah, maybe I wasn't clear but that's what I meant. The myth was that you needed to do the attack exploit otherwise you would have low HP or something. Definitely not the case in this one. My main 3 party members all had over 5-6K HP by the end of the game. The only times I was remotely in danger were those bullshit status effect fights.

 

I don't know anything about the atrophy system but if it was removed in the GBA version then it's likely gone here as well. I think that's the version the balancing is mostly based on.

 

The only actual thing that's new to this version that I'm aware of is there's now a soft cap to your weapon skill. Basically if you're overpowered and deal too much damage, you stop ranking up. There's an achievement for hitting level 16 on a weapon and to reach it I had to equip the weakest weapons I had and go fight some strong enemies otherwise everything died too quickly and I could never get enough hits in to actually rank up.

Edited August 9, 2021 by toxicitizen

[toxicitizen]

OH I FORGOT TO MENTION!

 

Between my playthroughs of FFI and FFII, someone figured out how to mod in new fonts, so people started making all kinds of pixelated font mods.

 

Spoiler for FFII I guess but it's the only screenshot I took because that line was so stupid and out of nowhere that it made me laugh out loud and I wanted to send it to my friend.

 

 

The font was literally my only nitpick so these remasters are perfect now.

[TheMightyEthan]

11 hours ago, toxicitizen said:

The font was literally my only nitpick so these remasters are perfect now.

 

Except for the back-row thing. 

 

*Edit - I just looked up the font thing and goddamn that's bad. I'd considered getting these, but I would get them on Android, and you can't fix the font on Android, so I guess I won't...

[toxicitizen]

2 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

 

Except for the back-row thing. 

 

I meant nitpick with the remasters in general. That's just FFII being broken.

[TheMightyEthan]

But it's a new broken-ness for this version!

[Mister Jack]

Sunset Overdrive

 

Nice to finally play this former Xbox exclusive. It's unapologetically cheesy and videogamey and the characters will frequently break the fourth wall to comment on the fact they're inside a game, but this is a story where a defective energy drink turns people into mutants. You're really not meant to take it seriously at all and are just supposed to have a bunch of goofy fun. As expected from an Insomniac game, the weapons are a lot of fun to use, although I kinda wished that fully leveled weapons transformed into their stronger versions like in Ratchet and Clank rather than you just having to buy the better version separately, thus rendering the original weapon completely obsolete. Other than that I don't have a lot of complaints. The parkour is fun once you get used to it, there's a good variety of enemies and guns, and there's a decent amount of stuff to do in the city. Definitely worth picking up on a steam sale.

[TheMightyEthan]

I really like that game, I hope they remaster it for Playstation now that Sony owns them.

[toxicitizen]

Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster

 

Going into this one, I was honestly worried about getting burned out playing all three games back-to-back. Especially after the more trying aspects of FFII. But it turned out to be completely unfounded because FFIII ended up being my favorite of the three and it's not even close.

 

The game is sort of a cross between the first two games. It takes the structure of FFI with more of an overall framework than a story (the same old "something something crystals, go fix") but it ups the presentation with actual scripted scenes like in FFII. What surprised me was how much of the storytelling was done through the actual world design. I won't spoil it but that reveal was way more interesting than anything that happened in FFII. I couldn't really say why but exploring the world was way more fun in this one than in either of the previous two. It probably helps that you never have to figure out where you need to go. Even if you're not explicitly told where to go next, you always have at least some hint about where something is so you might as well go check that out.

 

So the big new thing in this one is the introduction of the job system. I had never actually played any of the Finals that have it (as far as I'm aware, that would be III, V and the Zodiac version of XII), so I was coming into this fresh, with no idea what to expect. And I understand why people rave about it now. Just having access to all these options to customize your party is pretty cool in and of itself, but the game also keeps doing interesting things to encourage you to experiment.

 

Early on you're sent to kill a boss in a nearby cave and they give you a sword that's supposed to be really strong against it but can only be equipped by a Red Mage. I switched my Black Mage to Red and ended up liking it so much I stuck with it for most of the game. Sometimes a boss will be designed to be weak to a certain job and will absolutely destroy you if you don't listen when the game tells you, for example, "I hear only a Dragoon can defeat Garuda." There's also a few times where you need to cast the mini status effect on yourself to explore tiny areas and your fighters will be useless in that state so you're better off swapping everyone to Black Mage.

 

Some of the jobs seem kind of redundant (why would I switch someone to Viking when I've already had a Fighter since the beginning of the game?) so I ended up with a pretty standard party but I kinda want to replay it some day and make it a point to go for a weirder party composition, although some jobs seem kind of useless. The Scholar, for example, is necessary for a single boss fight but otherwise didn't seem to really have anything to make it worth sticking with.

 

So yeah, that first trilogy went out on a high note. I can't believe this version of the game had never come out in english before. Fucking Nintendo keeping great JRPGs from us. What is it about JRPGs with 3 in their title that NoA hates so much?

 

Anyway, can't wait for FFIV! I'm also really curious to see how they iterate on the job system in FFV now. I'm still looking forward to FFVI the most, though. Because it's the best one.

[Mister Jack]

Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth

 

This one is a Metroidvania based on the characters of the Record of Lodoss War anime from the 90s. Naturally, you'll get more appreciation if you've seen the anime and are familiar with the characters, but even if you haven't the plot is simple enough that you'll get the gist of it by the end. While I have seen the anime, the reason I really played this is because of its striking similarities to Symphony of the Night, which is my all-time favorite game.

 

It must be said that the graphics of this game are quite similar to Symphony's style and the sprites would look right at home on the PS1. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen another Metroidvania that replicates the style so faithfully. Even Deedlit's walk animation looks similar to Alucard's.

 

The gameplay is pretty similar too, but with some unique twists and modern enhancements. Deedlit uses equippable weapons, armor, and magic just like Alucard, but in general her commands are easier to use than Alucard's were with his special button input combinations. Deedlit just has a dedicated magic button. Her high jump move is also easier to perform than Alucard's. 

 

Unlike Alucard, Deedlit can only take a few hits before dying, but to compensate for this you get two spirits, wind and fire, which you switch between with the press of a button. Each spirit gains power when you do attacks and when you max them out at level 3 your health will automatically regenerate. Taking a hit will level down your spirit though, kind of like the gun in Cave Story, so you will constantly be switching back and forth between the two spirits to keep them both leveled. Each spirit also gives you boosts to certain abilities depending on which one you currently have activated, and enemies will take more or less damage depending on whether you're using wind or fire. You also switch back and forth to absorb wind or fire attacks for MP kind of like Ikaruga with its white and black bullets. It's a pretty neat mechanic overall. 

 

Aside from the spirits, Deedlit's game has a lot of modern QoL improvements to the Symphony formula. There's always a partial minimap in the corner so you have some idea of where you're going without having to pause, the full map and equipment menu are on the same pause screen so you can look at both without any extra button presses, enemy HP and elemental resistances are clearly indicated in the bottom right corner, you can automatically save the game just by running past the save point rather than having to stop and do it manually, and Deedlit can attack in any of the cardinal directions, even while jumping. Am I saying these things make Deedlit the better game? No, of course not. Symphony is still longer, has more content, better music, and more weapons/abilities to play with. I am saying, however, that if Symphony had been made back in the day with these modern mechanics it would be a perfect game. 

[Mister Jack]

Blood: Fresh Supply

 

Finally got around to finishing the last episode. As old school shooters go, this one isn't too bad. A solid 7/10 I'd say. The weapons are unique, there are some cool power-ups, and some of the levels are pretty memorable. The Fresh Supply version of the game also includes a made to order difficulty setting where you can adjust certain parameters, which is how I played and I would strongly suggest turning down the enemy hitscan accuracy because otherwise even the most common human enemies will be sniping you from across the map with pinpoint precision. The difficulty balance in the vanilla version is completely fucked. The weakest enemy in the game should not be more of a threat than the bosses and if you choose to play this way it's going to be a real slog.

 

Also, one thing the custom difficulty can't fix is the fact that flying and underwater enemies are bullshit. They're ludicrously fast and hard to hit, especially when you can't look all the way up over your head. The flying enemies in particular are a pain because they'll zip over your head and then just hang there for ages, becoming completely impossible to hit until they come back down. A lot of times it will be more efficient simply to run away from them than to stay and fight. Swimming enemies are a pain mostly because the swimming controls suck. It was often a struggle just to stay underwater so I could aim at them properly. One other inherent flaw of the game is the fact that there are six different kinds of keys, and since you never know for sure how many will be in a level it's easy to get lost, especially when progressing often depends on you blowing up a wall with an explosive. I had to consult a walkthrough more than once. All these issues do drag the game down a bit. If they weren't in there I'd probably say it's an 8, but as is it's still pretty decent. You'll just have to prepare yourself for some frustration.

Edited August 21, 2021 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island 

 

This is really just more Ghost of Tsushima, but that's perfect for me. The story is good, there's more side stuff to do, and it's more varied than the main game was. It's not going to dramatically change your opinion of the game though.

 

5/5

[Mister Jack]

DUSK

 

This game kicks ass. In fact, it's my favorite shooter since Doom Eternal. There's not a lot of new mechanics or innovations to this one, but what they did was polish the FPS fundamentals to an absolute shine. The movement feels great, the levels are unique and well designed, the guns are super satisfying to use, the music is badass, and the enemies are tough but fair. Honestly, I have no real complaints here. Like I said, it doesn't bring anything new to the table, but when the formula already works this well you really don't need gimmicks just for the sake of having gimmicks. It's an absolute must-play for FPS enthusiasts.  

[TheMightyEthan]

lol Jesus, you're on a roll. Clearing out the backlog?

[Mister Jack]

Pretty much, yeah. I am stuck indoors right now so I might as well.

[toxicitizen]

Chrono Trigger

 

Man, they just don't make them like this anymore. This game is such a gem. There isn't an ounce of filler or padding in that campaign, you never stay in any era or location more than an hour or so and then the game moves on to something else before you have time to get bored. The way things escalate from just low stakes fucking around with time gates to "wait wtf happened in the future?" and the reveal of Lavos. Then a few hours later you're screwing around in the prehistoric era fighting a T-Rex and suddenly Lavos falls down to earth and it's all just paced so perfectly.

 

I started going through New Game+ to unlock the other endings today and the first one I got isn't really an ending despite being the hardest one to get. It just drops you into the developer room where various team members left a message for the player and when you're done talking to everyone another room opens up and you meet the leads, who each have a sprite in their actual likeness and it kinda blew my mind. I'd recognize Akira Toriyama's character designs anywhere but I had no idea that Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii had also worked on this game. Like, no shit it's so fucking good! The creators of Dragon Ball, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest made it. It's like all the best Square-Enix ever had to offer all rolled into a single game.

 

Even the optional side-quests that open up right before the final boss usually add something of substance to the story (on top of giving you powerful gear). The one thing that felt like a waste of time was this Lost Sanctum shit that I guess was added in the DS version. Basically it's just a long series of fetch quests that waste your time making you climb a mountain, then come all the way back down and out of the cave to jump to a different era and climb back up. You do it a bunch of times and by the end of it I was kinda fed up. It gets you some good stuff as rewards but I'm honestly not sure it's worth it.

 

I was going to hold off until I had done all the endings to write this up but I've done like half of them and so far they're mostly all just joke endings or weird little scenes. That's a little disappointing as I was hoping for some things to be fleshed out or expanded upon. I still have six or so to do though, so we'll see but I'm not holding my breath. Most of them only require fighting Lavos at various points in the campaign so I don't expect them to add much but there is one that's gated behind a NG+ only dungeon.

 

Also, I knew they had released a few updates to fix it but the PC version is pretty solid now. You can turn off that gross filter on the sprites and the UI looks decent enough. Hell, it even has a pixelated font! Which makes the lack of one in the FF Pixel Remasters all the more baffling. My only nitpicks are QoL features whose absence I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I hadn't just played the FFPRs: a scanlines filter and a way to speed up combat. It does have an autobattle feature but the animation speed stays the same. But the lack of scanlines bothered me so much I actually installed reshade to inject some lol. It's not perfect since you have to tweak some settings yourself otherwise the text gets way too blurry but I managed to get it looking nice enough.

 

So yeah, this kinda turned into a retro JRPG binge. I'd like to squeeze another one in the two weeks until FFIV but I don't think I have any on hand. I'd love to play Secret of Mana for the first time but the remake isn't on sale anywhere right now and I'd honestly rather play the original first but the collection is exclusive to Switch, for some reason. Maybe I should just emulate it... Or take a break so I don't get sick of JRPGs before FFIV comes out.

 

Also, S-E, I'm gonna need you to do like you did with FFIX and get Chrono Cross out of PS1 jail. You're remastering everything under the sun lately, even those SaGa games. Don't be dicks, just fucking do it!