I’m way slow on this post, but whatever.

So October was a month where I don’t feel like I played all that much, most of the month was spent on one game. I played very small amounts of other things, so in the end I don’t even really have that much to talk about.

We’re gonna talk about Metaphor, Card-en-Ciel, Rivals 2,Final Fantasy, Hatch Tales and Undisputed. Sounds like a lot, but most of those I barely played.

Let’s go!

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Well that’s the big one. And not one I think I have that much to talk about really. Not because it’s bad though. In fact it’s very good

What Metaphor is, is Persona 6. In everything but name and theme, this is a Persona game. It has the same concept of being time-limited every chapter (you have a certain number of in-game days to do a specific goal), outside of dungeons you have social links and something that’s exactly the same as the social stats (but with more kingly shit), the combat is similar, it’s obviously a similar graphic style… It’s the same game on a technical level, but it takes place in a fantasy world and has its own story, one that I found a lot more interesting than Persona (which is not to say Persona didn’t have great stories).

Basically, if you enjoyed Persona 3/4/5, you will enjoy this. Probably even more. The non-dungeon parts don’t feel as long, boring and dragged out as they do in Persona, which was a big improvement for me. This is helped by the fact that there’s more combat-focused sidequests.

The story itself is about you participating in a contest, caused by special magic done by the previous king after he died, to become chosen as king of the world. The main opponents are a powerful knight named Louis (who previously killed the king), and the church, namely its highest-ranked member, Forden. You play as the leader of a group who want to kill Louis because it seems like he put a curse on the previous Prince (who is thought to be dead but is actually just in a magical coma). The world itself has many races, discrimination and big weird creatures called humans, which you need to navigate through during the competition, with plenty of time-sensitive goals to prove yourself in hopes of bringing up your status among the people. It has a lot of pretty cool moments.

The combat specifically uses the Press Turn system from mainline SMT, rather than the One More system of Persona, though they do have similarities. You get extra turns (up to a maximum of however many turn icons you start a turn win) if you hit crits or weaknesses, and lose turns if you miss attacks, and lose all your turn icons if your attack gets repelled or absorbed. The game also has a class system rather than “Personas”, and all your party members can be any unlocked class (some class upgrades require specific other classes to be certain levels…). You unlock more classes as you improve your social links, and each character has a super-class at the end of their social link.

If there’s any problems I can point out… I find some of the bosses to be a little bit bullshit. It has that same thing as Persona where you do kind have to avoid using magic/skills a lot because, for a lot of the game, there’s not a lot of MP items and they recover very little of it (there are a ton in the endgame though, so nothing to worry about in the last dungeon with its ton of optional bosses). There’s no romance options at all, if you wanted that. The localization is mostly fine, but it has a lot of moments of “actually we’re better than japanese people so let’s spice it up by adding stuff that isn’t in the japanese script” which are both very obvious and very obnoxious… overall though, it seems mostly accurate, based the parts I properly paid attention to the japanese voice acting.

So yeah, check this game out, it’s good.

Card-en-Ciel

I am not far into this one, I may or may not talk about it more next month if I play any more of it.

This is a roguelite card game which is heavily inspired by Mega Man Battle Network.

Battles take place in the same kind of grid as MMBN, 2 sets of 3×3 grids where one side is your’s and the other is your enemies’. However, unlike MMBN and One Step to Eden, this is a turn-based game (sort of). You get a certain number of action points each turn, and using a card takes some of the action points. You can also discard cards to move on the grid. Any movement or action will count down a timer on the enemies, who will launch an attack when it hits 0 (which you can attempt to counter with certain cards). After attacking, enemies usually move and then queue up another attack. The attacks have their AOE highlighted on your side of the field, so avoiding an attack is as simple as just moving out of the affected tiles. If an enemy still has an attack queued up when you end your turn, they will execute them regardless of their “timer”.

Cards can have a bunch of effects like damage, stat boosts, healing, countering, summoning, drawing cards and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m not thinking about. There’s characters you can get called Muses, which activate special effects in battle if you attain some condition, so you generally want to try and build your deck based on the Muses you have on your current run (which is complicated because you start with just one and get more during the run itself).

This is roguelite, so you unlock more stuff as you go, mostly permanent stat boosts and new cards.

Overall, this is pretty decent so far. I don’t know if I’ll finish it because I find the runs to be weirdly long, but it is well made.

Rivals of Aether II

This is Smash but not Smash. As far as Smash clones, Rivals of Aether was probably the best one (worst modern one is Multiversus, very shit game).

Rivals 2 goes from the cool pixel graphics of the original to full 3D. It also adds features you might remember from Smash. It adds a shield, dodge-rolling, grabs, throws and you can hang off ledges. You also have a few new special attacks based on getting up (either on the ground or from a ledge). Despite the shield and dodge rolls, you still have the parry system from the original. Also there’s 2 new characters but a few missing from the first game (based on lists, including some I don’t remember even seeing so they might have popped up later).

Basically this just adds mechanics to the original, and all DLC characters will be free, and it’s really good. Check it out!

Final Fantasy I-VI Collection Anniversary Edition

I got this collection physically as a birthday present. As of the end of October I had only played one game in this collection, that being the first one.

It was a pretty solid version of FF1, where they actually kept the spell charge system from the original NES game (some FF1 ports replaced it with an MP system). It was a much easier version of the game (except for Chaos, he’s really hard), where you have to grind less. It looks really good (the graphics I think being like the GBA or PSP version). There’s both orchestrated and classic versions of the music. You can get the combat to go auto (which reuses the same commands you did on the last manual turn you did) which speeds it up a bit.

Good stuff overall. I played a bit of FF5 since October and that’s solid too, way closer to the SNES version.

Hatch Tales

This is by the Mutant Mudds devs. It was on kickstarter, which I backed. It was called Chicken Wiggle back when I backed it.

This is a simple side-scrolling platformer where you can peck enemies, use a grappling hook sideways or vertically for lateral and vertical movement (no swinging in what I played) and jump. There’s a few pick-ups in each level, and you need certain numbers of them to progress. It has Mutant Mudds levels in it for some reason.

I don’t have much to say about this one, it’s… fine. I legit don’t remember why I backed this.

Undisputed

I got this in early access (and barely played that), but last month was the full release. I’ve been hyped for it because EA just stopped making Fight Night back in the PS3 days for kinda no reason at all.

I started a career. It’s fun so far, but I didn’t play that much of it. The fighting seems solid as far as options and controls, the instant replays are pretty nice (FNR4 did them better), it has a decent amount of real boxers (though some are paid DLC, which I hear actually fucks up online matchmaking, and also it’s really overpriced and seems not worth it).

I hear bad things about the online (lots of people just spamming power punches and somehow winning… sounds like a skill issue TBH), but I don’t care about that shit, I just do the career mode in these games.

I’ll get back into it at some point, seems enjoyable to me.