Games You Beat in 2022: PXoD's Bogus Journey

[danielpholt]

Lego Builders Journey

 

A neat puzzle game that loses its steam once you get over the initial thrill of playing with LEGO on a screen. It has its moments, but I got to the end and I'm glad I won't be going back to it. 

 

Trek To Yomi

 

Ultimately the combat never felt all that good to me, and for a game where 95% of your time is spent doing said combat, it falls a little flat. That's not to say I don't think there's depth there, but I found it more frustrating than anything. 

 

It looks nice I guess. 

[TheMightyEthan]

I tip my hat to you finishing Trek to Yomi, I played like 45 minutes and gave up cause I didn't like how the combat felt.

 

Gorgeous as hell though.

[danielpholt]

1 hour ago, TheMightyEthan said:

I tip my hat to you finishing Trek to Yomi, I played like 45 minutes and gave up cause I didn't like how the combat felt.

 

Gorgeous as hell though.

 

I think the game wants the player to really 'learn' how the combat system works, and if you can find the time to do that then it could be satisfying, unfortunately the game doesn't need the player to do that and so most people won't bother. 

 

Why spend the time to learn how the system works when you could just slash the sword button until you win. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

 

This game is really hard to rate, because I really like a lot of what's there, but it's just so long. Even doing literally nothing but the main quest it took me over 60 hours to finish, because most of the main quest line should have been side quests instead. In fact, the game doesn't really have almost any side quests, because everything's just either part of the main quest or a little one-off world event that only takes a few minutes to finish.

 

The way I traditionally play big games like this is that I play the main story until I feel like I want to explore around, then I run around doing side stuff until I get bored with that, then go back to the main story, and so on. In Odyssey I couldn't do that because the level gating forced me to keep doing side stuff to grind in order to be strong enough for the next main mission. Valhalla did technically solve that problem, but they "solved" it by just making all the side missions part of the main quest, so you have to do them to advance the story. Either way the end result is the same: I have to spend a ton of time running around doing random bullshit I don't care about instead of getting on with the story. 

 

It sucks, because in both games I actually did like the story, both the ancient one and the modern-day one, but they just won't let me play it. I like the core of the gameplay (even if it isn't as much the stealthing and assassinating that I really want from a game called Assassin's Creed), and the world is huge and varied and well done. I probably would even have really liked a lot of the missions if they'd been side missions instead of main missions, because then they wouldn't have felt like they were in my way, and they really are intricate and well made. Like Odyssey before it, this is a game that is so close to being great, but it just can't stop stepping on those rakes.

 

Grade: C

 

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok

 

This has a lot of similar problems to the main game, except it's much smaller in scope (I finished it in about 9 hours), it does a better job of separating out side quests from the main quest, and it's set in the realm of the Norse gods which is inherently cooler to me. Nothing fundamentally different though.

 

Grade: C+

[Thursday Next]

I'm not keen on the concept of RPG Assassin's Creed personally. Wish they would go back to it being an action game.

[TheMightyEthan]

[TheMightyEthan]

Prey: Mooncrash

 

Holy shit, that was great. If you've played Prey, it's more of that, except in a roguelite wrapper, and it just works so so well. The story conceit is that you're investigating what happened on a Transtar moon base shortly before the events of the main game. It's really well put-together considering it's an entirely different structure from the main game, and it fleshes out the story in cool ways. If it had been broken out into a standalone thing like Death of the Outsider then I might have been disappointed with the amount of content (just over 8 hours to completely finish it), but as an add-on it's fantastic.

 

Grade: A+

[toxicitizen]

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva MegaMix+

 

I mean, I guess? It's not really the kind of game you beat. I didn't see the credits or anything but I have finally finishing clearing all 250 songs on normal difficulty. Which, as far as I'm concerned, means the tutorial is over and the real game begins now. The hardest songs on normal were usually pretty easy and the easy ones are almost always dull as hell because of how slow they are (which ironically enough makes me perform worse in them because I have a harder time keeping up with the rhythm). Hard difficulty (and Extreme/Extra Extreme after) should provide a more consistently fun experience across the playlist.

 

Overall, it's pretty much what I expected. At first I felt like the gameplay was simplified from Project Diva F because now you only get face button prompts and the arrow presses just register as their corresponding face button. IIRC in F you had both button and arrow prompts, which made things a little more interesting visually. But this one has some mechanics where you sometimes need to use the arrows for double presses because your right thumb can only do so much by itself so it made sense to change the prompts.

 

The vocaloid music is something you just have to tolerate for that sweet gameplay but a lot of the songs are admittedly pretty catchy. Some are straight bangers but the vocaloid vocals really stick out badly in those. Like, there was one track that was a cabaret style jazz song that I thought was amazing until the robot voice came on and ruined it lol.

 

But yeah, if you like rhythm games and aren't picky about the music in them then you really can't go wrong with this series. It's just so much fun.

Edited June 25, 2022 by toxicitizen

[TheMightyEthan]

Deliver Us the Moon

 

In this game you play as an astronaut investigating a lunar colony that's lost contact with Earth. Most of the game revolves around environmental puzzle solving in the sense of figuring out how to get the right stuff turned on, or opened, or whatever, so you can get where you need to go, and the story of what happened is revealed in bits and pieces along the way. It's all very hard sci-fi, NASA-punk aesthetic. It's basically like this game was designed for me.

 

Grade: A+

[MetalCaveman]

Is Deliver Us the Moon horror? I've seen some bits of it here and there and it looks like it might lean into the horror side of things in some areas, kind of what's keeping me away from it.

 

On Topic:

 

She Will Punish Them

 

Basically Diablo but with sexy succubi and in third person also, no microtransactions.

 

Got this one on early access a while ago, still not on the official "release" version but the devs confirmed it's content complete in terms of story so now I'm marking it as complete.

 

Gameplay is pretty simple, just aim at enemy and left-click away, though there's also a decent variety of weapons with swords, two-handed swords, spears, axes, maces, hammers, bows, all the fun stuff, there's also some spells but they're kinda underwhelming in variety and effects, there's heal, fireball, freeze aura and resurrection, and of these fireball was the only one I found actually useful.

 

You form a party with other succubi you rescue from dungeons as well as skeletons and zombies that you can get from a merchant, succubi are your main party that you can bring with you on quests while the other units can be brought with you, or assigned to protect your strongholds.

 

There's four different types of quests, skirmishes, territories, dungeons and strongholds, skirmishes are short battles in small maps, basically just kill X amount of enemies, territories are larger maps with much more enemies and with a boss at the end you have to defeat, dungeons are how you recruit other succubi, they have infinite enemy spawns and the objective is to reach the prison, destroy the door and free the trapped succubus, strongholds are usually a large area with a ton of enemies and once you defeat a certain amount, the stronghold becomes yours and you can assign units to guard it as they will sometimes come under attack from large enemy forces.

 

These stronghold defence missions can be a pain as they scale to your level, I had one with 260 enemies, all lvl 76 against my army that was mostly lvl 28, that was a thing.

 

Your starting base is a large castle that has several areas locked, you can unlock them with crystals you get from missions and as loot from enemies, you can also buy a small house and later on, a palace, unfortunately, merchants can only be found in the castle, so you have to leave your palace, go to the map, go back to the castle, buy/sell whatever you need and then head back out to the map. Would be neat if you could have more merchants in each of your houses.

 

All in all, I enjoyed it a fair bit, been playing since version .4XX and there's been a fair amount of improvements and content added, certainly got my money's worth out of it.

 

That said, there are still some serious technical issues, in some maps framerate dropped into the single digits, sometimes skirmish icons appear under the map making them unselectable, items and loot will fall through the world and then they're lost to the void, your party can sometimes get stuck in geometry and there's no way to get them out other than just try and complete the area yourself, and other minor bugs here and there, for a version .9XX I feel like there's still a ton of improvements needed before v1.0.

[TheMightyEthan]

1 hour ago, MetalCaveman said:

Is Deliver Us the Moon horror? I've seen some bits of it here and there and it looks like it might lean into the horror side of things in some areas, kind of what's keeping me away from it.

 

Spoiler

No. Starting about 1/3 of the way in I thought it was getting ready to turn into cosmic horror, and I kept thinking that up until almost the end, but it never does, it's just a mundane (in the mundane v fantasy sense) investigation of events that were entirely orchestrated by humans. There's also no horror in the "psycho killer" sense either.

 

Spoilers because I think not knowing the answer to that question is beneficial to the experience.

[danielpholt]

The Quarry

 

Solid entry into Supermassives catalogue. It makes some nice changes to the overall structure but certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel. The plot is solid enough, and the game looks fantastic but...........man the game just ends. Which I guess is a product of the choices I made along the way but holy fuck talk about an underwhelming conclusion. 

[Mister Jack]

Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course

 

This took me about two hours to beat, but I'm fairly good at the game and didn't really get stuck on any boss for long so your mileage may vary. It's only 8 bucks though and the new bosses are fun to fight. The animation, as expected, looks spectacular to a degree that would give Fleischer Studios itself a run for its money. Don't expect it to reinvent the wheel, though. This is, pure and simple, just more Cuphead. If you like Cuphead, you should be happy. One thing worth noting is that if you struggle with Cuphead and could never finish it, playing as Ms. Chalice makes it easier since she has abilities the others do not. She's like the Funky Kong of the game.

[TheMightyEthan]

I want to try Cuphead, but I've been scared away by the difficulty. It would be the perfect Game Pass game.

[danielpholt]

1 hour ago, TheMightyEthan said:

I want to try Cuphead, but I've been scared away by the difficulty. It would be the perfect Game Pass game.

 

Honestly, its mainly pattern recognition. Once you get the moves down it's just a case of executing on it. If I can beat it, you should be fine.

 

 

[Mister Jack]

Yeah, if you can beat Elden Ring then you should be able to handle Cuphead just fine. All the boss attacks are pretty well telegraphed if you pay attention.

[TheMightyEthan]

It's not so much that I think I couldn't do it, it's that those kinds of games are super hit or miss with me, so I don't want to buy it. If it were on Game Pass though I could try it risk-free.

[Thursday Next]

I know where you are coming from @TheMightyEthan. After bouncing off Returnal, I think difficult bullet-hell games are just Not For Me, even if they are otherwise excellent in terms of lore, art-style, best of their genre, etc. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Returnal for some reason doesn't feel like bullet hell to me, because I agree, those are usually not my jam. I think it might be because it's 3D the area available to the player is never as saturated with fire as it gets in 2D ones.

[danielpholt]

Cuphead's Delicious Last Course

 

It's more Cuphead. It's excellent. 'Nuff said.

Edited July 10, 2022 by danielpholt

[TheMightyEthan]

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

 

This game held up. I really enjoyed it, though I do think it was a little too long. The plot advances as you increase your skill rating, which you get by meeting salvage goals on ships, and there's a stretch in the middle where I felt like it was taking too long to get to the next plot event. Aside from that though I loved it.

 

Grade: A

[MetalCaveman]

Moero Chronicle Hyper (Switch)

 

Dungeon crawler RPG with monster girls, part of the Genkai Tokki series which includes Monster Monpiece, Moero Chronicle, Moero Crystal and Seven Pirates H.

 

The story is pretty simple and silly. Monster Girls are attacking humans so Io, your character, embarks on a quest to find the only thing that can restore peace, the purify fabric, which turns out to be a pair of pure white panties, because why the hell not, also Io gets chosen by his village to go out and try to save the world not because he's strong or has a set of special skills, but simply because no one gives a shit if he comes back alive or gets torn to shreds out there. There's some decent serious moments here and there and some neat interactions between different characters, but overall it's pure silliness.

 

Gameplay is OK, nothing out of the ordinary for a dungeon crawler, it's acceptable for a game where the main draw is the characters. Until you get to the epilogue.

 

The epilogue is where things go to hell, after completing the main story you get keys to unlock sealed areas in each of the six regions, there you'll find stronger enemies and special bosses. Thing is, these areas just feel cheap, tons of enemies that can wipe your party in one hit, enemies with AOE paralysis attacks (getting your party into paralysed status is an instant game over), bosses with tons of HP and AOE attacks, traps, one-way doors that force you to retrace your steps, annoying stuff all around.

 

Also, the game doesn't have checkpoints of any kind, if you wipe you'll have to reload your save. Something which I forgot and it cost me hours of progress. To make it worse, you can only save in town or in specific save points inside dungeons, really wish you could just save whenever, that'd make the epilogue dungeons more tolerable.

 

Overall though, I had fun with it, there were some characters I quite liked though fans of more MonMosu style characters might be disappointed since all characters here are more human than monster. To give it a grade:

 

Main game: B+

Epilogue: F

 

[toxicitizen]

Final Fantasy VII Remake

 

Finished it a couple nights ago. I'm kinda conflicted about it and have a lot of thoughts but I don't really feel strongly enough about it to write a wall of text so I'll try to keep it short. Like 90% of the game is fine. A lot of it feels like pointless filler but that bothered me more in the first half than in the second. Honestly couldn't say whether the game just got better or if I got used to it. Some of it was fine when it expanded the characters or gave you side-quests and fun dungeons to go through but some of it also felt like it was wasting your time by stretching things out needlessly. And then there's the ending...

 

 

 

I'll keep this mostly vague and the original is like 25 years old at this point anyway but just in case consider this your SPOILER WARNING.

 

So things start out great. I had been looking forward to the Shinra building section for the entire game so my hype was at its highest. But this is one point where they stretch things to their breaking point. By the time you've spent an hour running around Hojo's lab doing a party-switching dungeon, the game has basically done this to its own pacing:

 

 

The tone of this section in the original is perfect. You finally reach the lab and see blood everywhere and it's like "What the fuck went down here? What did we just walk into?!" and it's the perfect setup for Sephiroth and the rest of the game. How they thought changing this section so drastically was a good idea is beyond me. And then there's chapter 18 which.... the less said about it the better. It's a clusterfuck of incoherent nonsense and what I'm reading online as to what is actually going on does not match what I saw in-game so either I missed something or the game did a piss poor job of explaining itself.

 

So yeah, things end on a shitty note but overall the game was a ton of fun for the most part so I'm not too bothered. I was kind of annoyed as I was going through the last two chapters but that's about it. I'm still looking forward to Rebirth and the Crisis Core remaster.

 

Some more quick nitpicks:

• Why the hell was that one character not a playable party member?! I was wondering if they'd even include him because it's basically the end of the game at that point but then they stretch things out so much that it feels lazy to keep him AI-controlled.
• Combat should've been party/turn-based JRPG combat like the original. Don't @ me!
• The weapon upgrade system was fucking tedious to use. Every time I had enough points to upgrade I just kinda went "UGH" because the animation to load into the menu was so long and as far as I can tell you couldn't just quick-swap betwene them. So you have to back out and go back in each time you wanna switch to a different weapon or character. Every time I had to go in there I wished I was playing FFX or FFXII instead.

Edited July 12, 2022 by toxicitizen

[TheMightyEthan]

8 minutes ago, toxicitizen said:

either I missed something or the game did a piss poor job of explaining itself.

 

I think it's the latter. I had no idea what was going on at the end, but I had so much no idea that it passed me caring and I was just letting it wash over me like the sea.

[toxicitizen]

10 minutes ago, TheMightyEthan said:

 

I think it's the latter. I had no idea what was going on at the end, but I had so much no idea that it passed me caring and I was just letting it wash over me like the sea.

 

More specifically I'm talking about

Spoiler

people saying Sephiroth went back in time to change the events or whatever? I'm not even clear at which point it was the real Sephiroth because it clearly wasn't him in the Shinra building... So after that I guess? But then like... what's the point? It's just such a needlessly convoluted way to go about it lol.

 

Edited July 12, 2022 by toxicitizen