Oh hey it’s the end of March. So I should actually be writing about all the shit I played this month. And by shit, and I mean SHIT. A bit of a meh month as far as games, unfortunately.
Several games I was at least a bit excited about, and they ended up being somewhat disappointing in various ways.
So let’s go through the month of disappointment!
- Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography
- Ufouria: The Saga 2
- Unicorn Overlord
- Contra Operation Galuga
- Dragon’s Dogma 2
- Princess Peach Showtime
- Berserk Boy
- Holo X Break
Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography
This is something I’ve been waiting for for a while, thinking it was an interesting concept. And it turns out it is a pretty cool little thing. The idea is fairly simple. Walk around part of japan, taking pictures of stuff. Those pictures will give you the name of the object in english and japanese, with audio for the japanese, and it includes furigana so you can pronounce the kanji. You can right-click the photo and flip it get more useful vocabulary like adjectives and verbs related to the object. All of that info puts itself on a flashcard with your picture on it. It also features some extra notes such as a katakana/hiragana and some basic things like greetings and vocabulary, which is of kinda random usefulness.
What disappointed me with this one? Well, I took the pictures of all the stuff in the first area, played around with the “find objects” minigame which is a fun way to remember words, did a bit of gacha and was ready to go to the second area. I figured I could go into one of the tunnels, or train stations, and go somewhere else. Nope. The whole game is this one fairly small area. I was hoping for maybe an interior area with an different variety of objects.
A cool idea but one I feel needs more to it. You’re definitely not learning japanese completely from this, not even close. But if you are in the process of learning, it’s at least an okay tool for some vocab learning. I’d recommend Anki instead, there’s a ton of japanese-learning decks for it for various learning levels (here’s one I hear is good for beginner level, I haven’t tried it but it sounds decent).
Ufouria: The Saga 2
Hebereke is a classic NES game I actually haven’t played (but might soon since it’s available on Switch and Steam). I saw some gameplay of it and it looks cool though. It never came out in the US, but it did come out in some english-speaking countries under the name Ufouria: The Saga, so ROMs did make the rounds (including of a US prototype).
I figured I’d try this out because it looked fun and it’s actually a prequel to the first game, so why not. The original was seemingly something of a metroidvania with switchable characters that have different abilities. And that’s where the disappointment appears for this game, because it’s no longer a metroidvania here.
How this game works is that there’s basically paths from the hub to different areas. When you go into a path, you get a random map for it, which means going through the same area will sometimes have a different path through it and they’re all very linear. The levels themselves aren’t very interesting, not just because of the linearity, but because the level design is just kinda meh. The characters having different powers doesn’t even end up being particularly meaningful most of the time, which is unfortunate.
Overall this was okay, but I was expecting a bit more. Also you WILL finish this in an evening, it’s tremendously short.
Unicorn Overlord
I was really excited for this game when we first saw it. It gave me some Ogre Battle vibes, which was (and, kinda continues being) a fairly unique type of strategy RPG.
The game itself is mostly okay. Basically you set up teams of up to 6 characters, and give them orders of where to move on a map to fight enemies or take over bases. The movement itself, is real time, so after giving the orders the characters do it all at the same time. When one of your units and an enemy intersects they can fight (if multiple of your units are really close you can decide which will fight the enemy), and the winner is knocked back (unless they’re in a base, in which case the winner is knocked back). The battles are automatic, though characters will do somewhat set things based on their class and level (and you can set conditions for specific attacks if you want).
The game itself basically has a big open-world map in 2D that you can walk around without any real obstacles, there’s some secrets to find here and there and sidequests, and every town you save has shops so you can update your equipment, and as long as you open up the correct places, you can end up doing much of the game in any order. In fact, I opened up the final mission within the first 2 hours of gameplay, you fix a bridge and it’s right there. You do end up spending a whole lot of time just doing side shit on the map, and much of it is fairly useful since you can get extra characters (without having to spend money on mercenaries).
Fuck the final boss. Basically you need a fairly specific team build to do any damage to him at all, probably multiple teams with such a build to be able to more easily stack damage on him. And, if you don’t have the specific team composition you need to win, you just can’t win because he has a shitload of HP and recovers a ridiculous amount of HP every time you attack him. Fuck that, I watched the ending on youtube.
Overall, the game isn’t bad, but it’s also not great. The gameplay itself is too easy (up to the final boss) and simple, the story is barely there and rather boring, and you end up not seeing the really well-animated sprites that much because you’ll want to skip battle animations pretty early on because it takes so long and the game would literally last 4 times longer if you did all the animations.
That witch sprite though, they didn’t have to go that hard.
Contra Operation Galuga
This is a new proper Contra game! It’s very okay-ish, I didn’t even finish it.
I kinda feel like I should have a lot to say about this one but I kinda don’t. It’s like a less good version of Contra 3 with worse controls, shittier levels, and an annoying amount of unskippable in-level cutscenes. There’s multiple playable characters that you unlock through the game (and afterwards for the Arcade mode), but they unfortunately suck compare to Bill and Lance because they get shittier versions of many of the weapons and their movement abilities aren’t as good as the Double Jump and Dash combo of Bill and Lance (the Probotectors do get these, at least, but they’re not playable in the story mode so whatever man).
Also, why the fuck make a mode where you don’t die in one hit? It’s fucking Contra man. I played with the one-hit kill, but it shouldn’t be an option.
Just meh overall. Play the NES games instead they’re better.
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Dragon’s Dogma was a pretty decent action RPG. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is basically the first game again, pretty much. Not much has changed, from the fairly meh skill progression system to the mostly decent combat to the completely stupid fast travel system to the kinda annoying pawn system… but this game kinda really annoyed me and I gave up on it after 15 hours of gameplay.
It does have some purely objective issues, such as awful performance on all platforms, even the best of PCs. These performance issues are due to the cities having a bunch of NPCs which are controlled entirely by the CPU. Having the best graphic card possible does not help, you ARE dropping to a stuttering nightmare when in town. The performance outside of towns is okay but still much lower than it should be. I dunno, I shouldn’t be running a game with such meh graphics at only ~80-90fps with a 3080. The other objective issue is the microstransactions, which are always bad in all games that have them no matter what they’re for… It’s a Capcom tradition at this point and that’s fucking stupid. Both of those are pretty bad problems, but they’re not the biggest problem the game has.
The biggest problems are related to its actual gameplay. The combat itself is fine, a bit simplistic but it works amd is fun (though the classes other than thief, at least that I played, not being terribly fun to play). What isn’t fun is the open world. It’s big, empty and boring. It’s pretty unfulfilling to explore because there’s nothing of note basically anywhere (and, if you do find something cool, there’s probably a quest related to it so it’s kinda pointless to have found it). This goes for most open world games, of course, but here it really feels like there’s fucking nothing in it. A bit like the first but WAY worse, they compensate for the big empty open world by covering the thing up with enemies. It’s worse in some areas, and I found out I’m not the only one who gave up because of Bakbattal.
The area around Bakbattal is so covered in enemies that it’s almost impossible to not be in battle unless you kill all nearby enemies. The problem is that this game really enjoys spawning enemies close to you just out of sight. When I was near Bakbattal, I figured I was a bit too underleveled and decided to just teleport away, but I was never in a state where I could if I just ran from battles, because there’s enemies literally everywhere (the one place that didn’t have any was a cave… you cant ferrystone out of a cave :D). I figured eventually that I’d kill a lone golem and then I’d have space to teleport. With the golem almost dead, a griffon miniboss which was way too much for me to handle just drops in randomly. And as I decide I should run, I get jumped by a pile of goblins, and it’s back to just running straight into enemies constantly with no possibility of teleporting. Any attempt to fight anything to have space to teleport was thwarted by enemies just spawning out of view and ganging up on me, which really was not able to be dealt with when I was a bit underleveled. So I died, which was bullshit 😀
The fast travel system itself is also stupid, but to be fair it was also stupid in the first game. There’s TWO permanent teleport points in the game, which are fairly close to each other and one of them is 100% useless (I seriously have no idea why it’s there). I didn’t know that, which is why I went to Bakbattal a bit early (and because I had some quests I could start there). I figured I’d activate the Portcrystal there and have a teleport point for later… So there’s no Portcrystal. Instead, you’d have to find a portable Portcrystal item and place it there. The game does not tell you that at all, you just have a Portcrystal in the main city so you assume, like someone who has played games before, all big cities have one. Well fuck you for THINKING. You can also fast travel with ox carts, but Bakbatall happened to not have any (just a poster saying the service wasn’t available because of monsters or something, I assume there’s a quest). Just put Portcrystal in the big cities, it’s really dumb that there aren’t any. The portable ones could then be spent on more interesting things than a central point you NEED to have one in.
It’s really Bakbattal that broke me as far as this game goes. Getting there really highlighted the shit I was not having fun with. I did give the game a big fair chance, but this is where all the stuff I had a feeling about at first really got to me. The open world being boring to explore, the boring open world overcompensating for its emptiness with constant fighting which is just rather annoying, the dumb fast travel system, and a few things I didn’t mention like the need to constantly go to the inn to progress the story which feels foolish (at least early on, maybe this improves after a while but at the start all quests require you to go to sleep for a day and meet with a dude at the tavern specifically at night), or the constant having to get new pawns which feels like a waste of time, and of course the bad performance even on a decent PC (and the consoles aren’t any better on that end, btw).
I want to be clear that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is not a bad game, it’s a decent game with a lot of bad gameplay design, and of course microtransactions and performance issues.
Princess Peach Showtime
Less a disappointment than the other games, but still not a big badass game unfortunately… when it could’ve and, I dare say, should’ve been.
This is a very simplistic game in general, with every “form” of Peach having 2 buttons, one generally for jumping, and one for an attack or special action. This is fine in general, but I feel like a lot of potential is lost. Her base form does very little (she can use her ribbon to make things happier… which is required to progress and there’s no thought or puzzle-solving required to figure out what to do). But the other forms are mostly all more interesting. Though I will say most of the bosses are fought in the base form and those are fun, so all good there (that’s a positive of the game, the bosses are mostly good).
There’s a Swordfighter form which is decently fun but has nothing really special going on. There’s a Ninja form that’s really good with a lot of fun little gameplay element that I almost wish had its own game with deeper mechanics. There’s a Chef form that is just 2 boring minigames repeated over and over. There’s a Detective form which goes away from action gameplay and is about deducing which object or person is the one you’re looking for in each specific area (which you do by talking to people for clues and then using the detective action on the target) which is okay. There’s a Figure Skater form which is somewhat fun where you basically spin into enemies to kill them and either jump or spin on specific spots to get sparkles. There’s a Thief form for some pretty okay platforming and hang glider segments. There’s a Kung Fu form which is kinda fun though the combat has no depth. There’s a Cowgirl form that is very similar to the Thief mode, with horse levels instead of hang glider levels. There’s a Superhero form which is a very simplistic beat’em up (where most things die in one hit). And finally there’s the Mermaid form, which is fucking awful and I hope people got fired over it (you just control fish to push shit, it’s dumb as hell). There’s one more form for the final boss and it’s not worth mentioning, it’s the worst boss fight in the game unfortunately.
Each form has 3 levels each, though, for all of them, the third one is a shorter, easier and overall worse level than the first 2 levels (also the game makes you believe those are optional because, at first, because instead of being labeled as something like “Swordfighter-3”, they’re labeled like “Swordfighter-EX”… that changes once the levels are shown to not be optional so they become “-3”). With the gameplay already being really simplistic, it’s a shame that the ultimate level of each form is just kinda shitty.
Overall I think it’s not bad, just very simplistic. If you do want to 100% it there is plenty of stuff to do, and the presentation isn’t awful though very limiting as far as level design because everything needs to be on a theater stage (which, funny enough, wasn’t a limitation for Mario 3, but it really is here). Peach deserves a better game than this. The one on DS was much better.
And how the fuck does Nintendo, making a game with a SNES-style controller layout, not understand that you put jump on B and attack on Y. You know, like it worked on the SNES and was perfect? The options are jumping with B and attacking with A, or vice-versa. Both options suck. This isn’t the first time in recent years that Nintendo has done this (some Kirby games have done this which is baffling because Super Star on SNES was fine with B to jump and Y to attack, but even the DS remaster of it fucked it up), but why the fuck are they doing it? It’s bad.
Berserk Boy
EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention is that, when launching the game on a Switch, or at least mine, there’s a 5 minute long black screen before it gets to the actual game.
This is a Megaman-ish game that is pretty good. Yeah!
The focus of combat here is dash attacks and a bunch of other attacks you’ll basically never use. Once you get the first transformation, it’s definitely the one you’ll use most due to how crazy versatile it is. You dash into enemies which locks on them to launch electricity at them for more damage, and you also have other attacks and a super. Some of those attacks you need to unlock but that’s fine I guess. After 3 levels, you get a boss fight and steal its orb, which gives you a new form. The forms you get are in the same order each time, so no MM-style level select here. Each form has its own movement and attack abilities, some of which are okay. But the main transformation is the best so whatever.
I think that’s the biggest problem with this game. The fire transformation? Completely useless. You only ever need to use it in specific spots where there’s low spikes that you have to go under (the main thing this power does is dig through the ground), otherwise you have no reason to ever touch it… really would improve the game to remove those spots entirely or make something else about the moveset better. There are places you can dig with it, but you don’t even need to transform into it to dig, the game just automatically does it regardless of what form you’re in. The ice transformation’s attack is okay against some enemies, but it’s only real use is that there’s barriers you need to throw kunai at and 2 minibosses where it’s the better choice. Otherwise the hanging thing is rarely particularly useful and can be replaced by the main form’s double dash upgrade, or the next form’s flying. The wind transformation is crap, except for the fact that it can freely fly in all directions which is occasionally better than the main form’s double dash upgrade… but it has a REALLY shitty attack. The final form, I don’t even know what to call it, is just completely fucking useless other than specific gates it destroys… but then it’s also freakishly powerful against bosses, so once you get to the final level which is a boss rush, just use that and win for free without trying (it’s seriously insanely strong). And there’s another form for the final battle but you use it once and it’s specific to that battle so whatever. It sucks.
The only other real problem I have is that the dash attack frequently puts you into the hitbox of the enemy you dash-attacked, which hurts you. It’s a bit dumb. You can mitigate by gitting gud, of course, but sometimes it just happens. Oh, and it did kinda annoy me I had to replay levels to get berserk medals, but it wasn’t so bad because I got most of what I needed my first time through each level. So outside of this, the gameplay for this is fast and fun. A few bits of kinda-eh level design here and there, but in general, solid stuff.
First not-disappointing game of the month? It’s not amazing or anything, but it’s fun. For a first time dev (literally called Berserk Boy Games) this is a great first try. More experience will certainly help in the sequels.
Holo X Break
And just a quick one to end this post. I didn’t finish it.
A new Hololive fangame made by Kay Yu, known in the Hololive fanbase for animating the 「Q」 music video and also making Holocure, the only good Vampire Survivor-style game. And it’s free, you can find it here on Steam.
Holo X Break is a beat ’em up where you fight members of HoloX (Hololive JP Gen 6), as the members of Hololive Gen 5 (though I looked at things a bit and the HoloX members are unlockable as playable characters). I only played as Polka and didn’t finish the game yet, but it’s a decent, simple beat ’em up. There’s some things that I feel would improve the game such as a jump button so you could have more attack options (and more interesting enemies), and maybe a running feature (for faster movement and more attacks). It replaces some of this with an equipment system where you can get more move speed and attack power and defense and some passive abilities (and you can power those up between levels), which is fine. But I would definitely like more movement options than “walk” and “dodge roll”.
Overall it’s fine. The visuals are great, the music is great, the gameplay is pretty good, overall worth checking out. I’ll just say that Holocure (also free on Steam) is just so much better in every way, .
The Pokemon TCG rotation
Mew VMax is gone yay!
I’ve experimented with plenty of the new decks, my favorite is one very few people are using with Scovillain EX, it’s actually pretty solid against a lot of the meta decks (unfortunately the most popular deck (dark type tera charizard EX) is one it struggles against, but it does win sometimes). There’s a lot of deck variety right now so it’s fun.
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