So, Samurai Shodown is like a fucking trip back to the early ‘90s. My god have they nailed it!
Even better, as I was streaming @Shinriji hopped in and mentioned the loading times and the NGCD monkey and how he should’ve been used…
…HE IS! He’s the animated icon to show network waiting time in online games. 
Anyway, absolutely loving it. I finished a playthrough with Haohmaru. Final boss is pretty incredible. So good.
Should be archived…
That’s great to hear, I love this series and want to get that game someday.
I’m not into beat-‘em-ups but my word that looks gorgeous.
It’s a beautiful game. I am smitten. Neo Geo fans should definitely have a look. It feels like a Neo game in all the right ways, but up to date enough that it doesn’t feel old either.
I wrote up some impressions…
Trying to blog a little, but I hope to stream more often too.
Looks like I might be playing a spiritual sequel to ActRaiser with music by Yuzo Koshiro (!) in a couple weeks?
Looks cool! Wonder if any from the original team works on this?
Anyways, Ive been playing Warcraft 2 recently. Completed the human campaign, and now going through the orc one. Its a great game, but the mission variety is a bit lacking, and the ai is dumb as sin. But still very enjoyable, especially to beat the more challenging levels.
Wow, fantastic!
I haven’t gotten round to playing Actraiser yet - the only Quintet game I’ve played is Terranigma which I guess is the most derivative game in terms of gameplay.
If you take a look at SolSeraph on the Switch eShop it doesn’t leave a good impression, the resolution is so low. I’m glad I had a look at the trailer here.
I’ve been playing Baroque on the Wii lately, with the viewpoint set to first person in order to maximise the atmosphere and have it play as closely as possible to the original Saturn release. It’s good stuff so far - difficulty is a bit uneven mind, but there are few games like it.
Great writeup. While the game is awkwardly playable with the D-Pad what you say about control schemes rings true with NiGHTS - it’s very evident that analogue movement heavily influenced the game’s creation and design. I wish I had played it back in the day, would have been such a memorable game to have experienced.
NiGHTS is like many other Saturn first party games - high quality while also avoiding being derivative, yet not what the market wanted at the time. I have yet to play Burning Rangers but having Sonic Team work on a flying Jester game and a firefighting game was never going to shift Saturns. But we are very happy these games exist (I’m momentarily reminded of Nintendo’s Wii U output). Sega managed to mix mass appeal with new styles of games on Dreamcast, but by then the incoming PlayStation 2 juggernaut was too big for the games to reach their audiences. But they certainly left their mark.
I started playing the first Yo-Kai Watch game on the train in mornings. It’s a surprisingly great game that really looks gorgeous on the 3DS. It feels very much almost nostalgic and reminds me a lot of Attack of the Friday Monsters (also by Level-5) but with much more compelling gameplay and even better character design.
I know this comparison has been done to death, but it really puts modern Pokemon games I’ve tried to shame. Specifically, modern Pokemon games feel comparatively sterile, whereas Yo-Kai feels whimsical, gorgous, and thoroughly charming. The characters and monsters all have much more playful designs and the battle system, while a bit easy at this point, is more interactive and fast paced. Everything runs relatively smoothley, and the whole game feels very engaging and welcoming.
I wish the Pokemon games took a cue from this series, shrunk down the scale, and instead offered more interesting and charming scenarios to play through. Introducing 100 new pokemon each gen just isn’t that interesting.
Not only is 100 new Pokemon every gen not very interesting, but they’ve painted themselves into a corner with that approach and are about to make a lot of people very unhappy with the limitations being introduced in the next game. I’m playing the Dragon Quest Monsters series right now and there are lessons GF could have learned from there, too.
Is that “not all previous Pokemon will be available”?
Sounds like it is.
The biggest issue with the franchise is how the games all feel like pokemon Red and Blue. Like, Final Fantasy, SMT, Dragon Quest, and any other long-time RPG series has its polarizing entries and unique gameplay from installment to installment.
But pokemon is afraid to polarize its audience. And why should they when the games sell so well? They came up with a formula in Gold and Silver of introducing new pokemon in a standard sequel type experience (which was the right move at the time) and decided that such an approach is all the Pokemon mainline series ever could be (which is not that cool to me personally).
Yep. My son and I have been playing through the series for a number of years now and not being able to transfer into the newest games will be a major disappointment. Seems like the entire situation could have been avoided with a different approach. But yeah, feels like things have been on autopilot for a long time now.
So I’m probably playing too many games right now to finish them all. I already gave up on my Chrono Cross play through a few months ago - I wasn’t really enjoying it for some reason. I know it’s an amazing game in many respects. And I absolutely had my fun with it.
But after a while, it felt like I was playing out of obligation. The fact that it was hard to know how to progress (often you had to talk to the right NPC at the right time) and there wasn’t much breathing room to explore uncharted areas really soured me on the experience. It felt limiting.
The battle system was excellent in many ways, but managing all the elements and characters began to bog things down and make the experience feel bloated compared to its predecessor and other beloved RPGs.
It reminds me of Xenoblade Chronicles X compared to the original Xenoblade. Too many characters diluted the experience and eliminated the feeling of character growth/progression.
That said, I’m now playing:
BotW: Master Mode - it’s still a fantastic game, even on a second play through though a tad less magical now that the mystery is gone. The added difficulty is welcomed.
Links Awakening - on a stock GBC using natural window light (it’s amazing like that). This is probably ruining my desire to grab the remake, but I’m cool with grabbing that in a few years at the tail end of the Switch’s life for a fresh take on the hand.
Yo-Kai Watch - this is the most chill and charming game to play when commenting to and from my gal’s place. She recently moved about an hour away from the city and the time flies by during the commute to and from her I do 3-4 times per week.
And finally…
Final Fantasy III on SNES (Aka FFVI) - I just got to a branching storyline where I need to choose between 3 campaigns. I’ve just completed two of them (yes, I suplexed the train lol) and am blown away at just how amazing this game is. Holy crap. It’s my first time playing it and it’s downright phenomenal so far. I’ve never completed a FF game before, but I’m hoping to change that with this one.
It may end up being different for you, but my recent playthrough of LA on a GBC only increased my interest in playing the remake. Especially after watching the DF video preview on it (some minor spoilers)
Yoku’s Island Express works surprisingly well for being a pinball Metroidvania. Wish there were more actual flipper action because 60% of the game is exploration/traversal. I might be compelled to go for 100%.
Played Ghouls’n Ghost for the first time ever today - and actually ended up beating it lol. I knew you had to go throught it twice, and was thus prepared for hell - but I actually found the game surprisingly easy. Not easy in itself of course, but on the level as a normal Castlevania-game. So that was very refreshing. Awesome game btw, with great graphics, very deliberate (but good!) controls and some really cool stages and bosses. Definitely going to beat this again!
FFVI is excellent, I remember being blown away by it when I played it for the first time in '06. It’s the reason why I was so disappointed by Octopath Traveler - that game’s promise of ‘embarking on an adventure all your own’ with several character stories really went by unfulfilled. It all felt heavily project managed where they made a lot of content and had to piece it together in a highly controlled way. FFVI is great because of how it pieces itself together in an unpredictable way - the part you’re on where the party gets split into three groups is a high point.
I just wish the game were more challenging in its first half, makes it harder to replay.
One of my favourite games of last year! Shame there weren’t some scoring-related modes but pinball flippers did make for a great exploratory game.
It always seemed that new LA was the main character of Xenoblade X, to be fair. If you think of it that way, and consider how the city grows as you bring more people and creatures in to refuge and develop its facilities, it’s pretty satisfying moving through the game.
There is an amazing game there for sure. It’s just, you have to work for it. And for some reason I couldn’t sustain the feeling of joy from playing it long term as of yet. I feel like in the right mindset I could invest a few hundred hours into it. But I topped off at about 35 and got distracted by another open world game that came out on shiny new hardware at the time (BotW) and just haven’t been back to Mira since.
I’ll probably give it another shot after FF6.