I’m still relatively new to visual novels, so I haven’t read that many fan discs…in fact, asides from Future Blessings, this is actually the only other one I’ve read. But generally in media I always want more backstory – it’s infuriating when something is referenced heavily but never actually shown as an event. SHOW, don’t TELL. It’s a golden rule. Not enough media seems to understand that.
Of course, sometimes you’re better off not knowing. Sometimes.
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It’s interesting that despite being disgusted with Game Freak for many, many years, I have never once considered playing a Pokemon fan game. Perhaps it’s simply that one has never met my criterion for what I would consider a good Pokemon game to be – one that has every Pokemon available in it, a narrative that isn’t the same as every other Pokemon game’s, and doesn’t contain any Fakemon. I’m really not a fan of Fakemon.
Or it could just be that I’m not really a PC gamer and I hadn’t managed to hack my PS Vita until just recently. Either way, this is my first Pokemon Romhack experience!
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When it comes to video game narrative, I am both easy and impossible to please – I don’t ask for much to keep me entertained, but to get me genuinely invested and interested I have standards that are impossible for most games to even come close to meeting. I suppose it’s my own fault that I don’t enjoy the story of many games because of this, but…well, I’ve been playing games for over 25 years now. It’s not very often I come across something that surprises me, or is so well-written compared to some past experiences that I stop and take note.
Enter The House in Fata Morgana, one of the most spectacular visual novels I have ever experienced.
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Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you might wish it, it is impossible to go into a game blind. The Last of Us Part II is one such game – whether you go looking for information or not, you’re going to get an avalanche of it if you so much as glance at anything gaming related. As such, I went into this game with a lot of mixed feelings. I came away with only one:
This was a complete and utter waste of my time.
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I love a good SRPG. Finding a good SRPG, though? That’s becoming more and more difficult, as modern takes on the genre keep trying to find new ways to reinvent the wheel – breaking it in the process – or do the bare minimum and are so boring that I wonder how the developers found the courage to release them at all. I suppose not every series can be Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea, but you would think that there would be more room for quality and innovation in such a fantastic genre.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much room for either in this game.
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Is it just me, or has there been an avalanche of pixel art titles being released on the Switch over the last couple of months? It seems like every time I boot up the eShop there is a new one. This is not a market I will tire of any time soon – provided they’re of good quality, of course – but it would be nice if they spaced them out a little more.
Here’s number 109,247,284,289, affectionately known as Flynn: Son of Crimson.
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The early to mid 2010s were a funny period for AAA gaming – everything had to be zombies, and yet nothing was actually called zombies. It was as if developers thought that by NOT naming their shuffling corpses as zombies, they could somehow pretend that this wasn’t exactly what they were. At the time I wrote The Last of Us off as just another zombie game, which was well outside of my sphere of interest.
Fast-forward to now and it’s still not really in my sphere of interest, but I’m not averse to broadening my horizons.
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Like Final Fantasy, I have a strong love/hate relationship with the Tales series. It’s responsible for some of the best (Symphonia, Berseria) and worst (Abyss, Vesperia) JRPGs I’ve played, and I think that strong juxtaposition of quality is what makes it so difficult for me to maintain a more detached perspective when playing through the games: it’s either good or bad.
Unfortunately, Arise is not good. Not good at all.
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Hades was one of the better games I played last year, and I have been half on the lookout for a similar experience (at least gameplay-wise) since I finished it. Earlier this year I played Curse of the Dead Gods…and it was perhaps one of the worst games I’ve played this year, and it put me right off looking for another roguelike. I was going to pass on Dandy Ace for a while after reading it was essentially “Hades with Persona aesthetics” in a preview but…well, I often intend to pass on things and end up getting them anyway. I’m not sure if that’s a problem or not. Depends on how well it turns out I suppose!
This, fortunately, turned out better than Curse of the Dead Gods did.
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Since the Castlevania Anniversary Collection was released, I’ve been hoping they’d release an Advance Collection with the GBA titles. Of course, what I meant whenever I thought or said that was that I wanted Aria of Sorrow on my Switch. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to play Circle of the Moon again, and discover that Harmony of Dissonance wasn’t as bad as I remembered, but this was always the star attraction of the package.
Replaying it after so many years was never going to be anything other than a delight.
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Dawn's Video Game Corner 