crispy4000

Pretty sure most AAA games targeting a global audience wouldn't receive funding today with an overtly sexualized lead. It's no longer in vogue. I've seen ugliness on both sides of this debate. One camp that thinks that there's no room for it anymore in the year 2024, and treats it tantamount to an attack on representation. The other trolls developers for not making their characters curvy enough according to their shifting thirstiness barometer. But if there's one thing they seem to agree on ... Don't you dare shit on Bayonetta! She's a female lead, punk, an implicit bisexual, and has a domineering attitude. Female empowerment. All said, there's probably some rational, reasonable middle ground here that doesn't involve reading too far into things.

I can see it. But for me, it was mainly with fighting guardians over and over in BoTW, and ToTK's: But most of the exploration, puzzles, systems, etc in those games kept me engaged, even if repetitive once you became familiar with the template.

Looking back at the games that I've beaten, I think Beyond Good & Evil is a great example. The first dungeon is a competent Zelda clone in its own right. But then the game insists its a stealth game, but wait, its now a mini-game collection. By the end, you're at the final boss and trying to remember what basic combat feels like. For those I haven't, Baba is You and The Witness. They're so clever, until they're too clever, then esoteric to the point of being actively not fun.

Playing through pixel art games for the other thread and reading reviews got me thinking, what games did you enjoy a lot at the onset, but fell off a cliff? Not just the expected tedium of repetition and of general fatigue. But stuff as the game gets going, where you question how they could fumble it so hard.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: *** I expected this one to be much worse, but came away pleasantly surprised. Metroidvania where you toss your luminescent bat around to light different parts of the room. You can choose either a character with a sword or wolverine claws... so the sword guy might as well not exist. Looks and plays fairly good on the whole. Level design isn't specacular, but I like how you find map fragments that fill out part of a zone instead of the whole thing. The one big gripe I have is with leveling: you can upgrade visibility, defense, or attack. You don't actually get to choose, but instead play a slot machine mini-game for each one, which is hard to time. Why was this needed?

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: **** Is it truly a roguelike if your experience, health, skills, etc, stay for each run? Even more than Moonlighter, your progress goes with you. Like Hades, there's some light storytelling between missions. Combat isn't imediately as fun as that game or Voidogo, but still, there's something here that is addicting all its own, and very approachable. The visuals look like they painted something then reduced it to pixel art form, which becomes more apparent when the camera zooms out. Overall its great. Maybe not the strongest 4-star game I've looked at, but I'm really going to have to return to it.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: ***½ As a Zelda-like, I don't think it feels particularly great, certainly not better than Blossom Tales. But the shop managing and persistent upgrade systems give it a twist that makes it feel much more replayable. I love run-based games where progress carries over, and this does that in a more interesting way than most. The art and animation in particular is also fantastic. The DLC goes for very cheap, even on Epic where the base game was given away ... I might snag it.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: **½ 2D puzzle platformer with character switching. There's powerups that each of your 3 characters can take to transform, giving new abilities. The main twist is that the view is fractured into different viewports scattered almost randomly, some overlapping. I've seen this gimmick before in JRPGs (Baten Kaitos comes to mind), and I like it better as a palette cleanser than as the crux of a larger game. It over-complicates the puzzles artificially.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: *** Relaxed 2d metroidvania. There's something lulling about the character's relatively slow movement and jump animations. Once you get into a rhythm with it, its enjoyable. It's low stakes compared to the other NES-inspired indies I've looked at, which I can also appreciate. Not everything needs to kill you all the time. Frequent checkpoints are also nice. There's still nothing here you haven't seen before, but the puzzle focus elevates it.

Sharp mode's upscaling introduces additional artifacting due to some whack way they scale the output image to 4k. At least that's how it was in the previous patch. I was fine with the smooth mode in the demo, and now that its back, I'm playing at 60fps.

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I’m back to 60fps now that they added smooth mode back. It’s not great still, but I can enjoy it better now at least. I’m in a linear position part, so I’ll see what I can stomach once the open world is back.

Mandatory minigames are my jam. But even if they weren’t, beating the basic modes of them is very easy I’m finding. At least so far, the optional ones are the hardest.

This was one of those EGS exclusives, right?

There is an occasional quest or mini game that isn’t pinpointed out for you. Typically as a result of finishing other quest lines and unlocking something. Yeah and that’s a very good thing. The quests here feel a lot more meaningful than FF16’s. They do pad that with open world activities a bit, but more as a counterbalance.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: **** It feels so good to play, and isn't frustrating in the way that the games that inspired it are. The art is wonderful, arguably better than Shovel Knight's look. Gaining mid-air jumps back by hitting things is a really good idea, I'm a sucker for this sort of canceling shenanigans. This will definitely be one I return to, so it gets the full 4 stars.

Time Spent: 15 minutes Rating: **½ Same lack of originality as Love, but I found this one a little more fun. There's modern touches like wall jumping, but otherwise you just climb up can shoot magic in the cardinal directions. Your character does a little bounce when falling from a high surface, which is a little frustrating. There's very limited lives and a password system, which is odd given that NES games did have save backups. Overall, it's the game you want to remember Kid Icarus being, if it were actually decent.

Yeah, that should be a pretty good pick up. I'm looking forward to it.

Time Spent: 15 minutes Rating: **½ Very minimalist 2d platformer. You can place checkpoints at any time on solid ground to respawn at. No fun physics interactions or anything, and you've seen its platforming concepts elsewhere. It feels good and mostly fair, but loses points for lack of originality.

I expect minor artifacts/ghosting to continue to exist with any upscaller. FSR2 just does especially poorly at lower input resolutions.

Basically, pay up if you want to avoid FSR2 artifacts for the rest of this gen. And stay far away from a Series S at this point.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: ***½ A lighthearted cyperpunk JRPG. The pixel art animation is outstanding in battles, almost 2D Fire Emblem good, and the game has a very slick vibe and presentation overall. The battle system is typical turn-based fare, with limit breaks, elemental weaknesses and and turn orders. It tries to spice things up a bit with phase shifting to swap in spells, but you can easily expand how many of them are equipable at a time, which defeats the point somewhat. There’s a lot of upgrade choices at shops, but what you should buy ends up being fairly obvious at the start. I could see the story being forgettable, so it may not hold up as something outstanding in the long run. But this should be a good time for anyone who likes basic JRPGs and can dig the aesthetic.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: ***½ The pseudo SNES look and sound of this game is nailed perfectly, like a cross of Chrono Trigger and Trials of Mana, with more visible real estate for modern screens. I'm not well versed in traditional tile-based roguelikes, but just for the presentation, this could be the first one I'd get into. Lots of jobs, abilities and classes here, and plenty of other systems running in tandem. It seems overwhelming on the surface, but that's the only thing I'd take from it. The tutorial bits are very text heavy, and I still have no idea what your stamina meter does. Fortunately there's an easy mode for novices, which I'll probably use when I start it again.

I have as much trust of that as I do Microsoft/Sony coercing developers to hit minimum resolution targets with FSR2.