La5t Game You Fini5hed And Your Thought5

Good to know!  I do like the idea of actually constructing battle strategies in the real world and getting to fight with your real-life chums, but... apparently there's some caveats to that too.  

I maintain that intentionally bad sections in a game are still bad, mind.  We don't let the Superola llama off because he looks intentionally smug.

I mean, I don't think the developers would have set out to make a section of their game be utterly miserable to play - that's more of my reading into that it makes sense why the battles were a slog and I can forgive it for that. But, I'd expect OMOCAT to want their players to, y'know, have fun.

Since my last post, I finished



Devil in Me was the last game of 2022 I finished, which is more of the same really from the Dark Pictures, you're even going to like it or not by now.



Decent fighter from Arc and the RPG mode plays like a Street of Rages and made me more excited for Relink



Why I'm now posting as just finished last night, the alleged worst game of 2022 which I oddly really liked. Now with the game shutting down, maybe stuff like the paid content, drops aren't as bad compared to when it launched as what I played for 19hrs was really fun Platinum Games combat, with a great little community still on the game.

I finished some stuff:

A Short Hike

I've had this downloaded with an intention to play it for a while. A really pleasant little slice of exploration, adventurous feeling but not too long. And the dialogue manages to not be too twee or too cynical. Lovely.

Pokemon Violet

Yep, polished this one off on stream. I still think Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are great and I haven't heard a single criticism which I don't either not agree with or just not care about.

Neon White

This was the main thing I played when I had little shots of game time on trains or that during my vacation and I finished it off at the weekend. Like everyone should, I started skipping the story about two cutscenes in. The gameplay is worth it by itself; shooter/ platformer with a tiny card-based puzzle, it brought out the side of me that does something and immediately thinks "I could do that cooler". . . for the first half at least. Missions 1-5 I would finish and immediately go back to get Ace rank on every level. In the second half, the levels are a little too long and a little too complex for it to feel as satisfying to replay them over and over. Still a great little game.

What Remains of Edith Finch

I've heard about this for years and when I heard it would be covered on Watch Out For Fireballs I decided it was time to give it a go. Walking Sim by way of Minigame Collection, it tells a macabre but darkly comic of a family cursive through a series of vignettes about untimely deaths. A rumination on death, how we react to it, and how focusing on it too much can make us forget to live.

Buskalilly wrote:

but darkly comic

I'm curious where you got this part of the tone from - I found the game to be a thoroughly depressing time tonally. The fish factory lad in particular was just crushing. The only one I could see any sort of dark humour being derived from was the comic book part as it definitely leaned into that comic book camp at points, but the rest of the stories were just all a bit sad.

Mas really liking Babylon's Fall is peak Mas. That's a grand selection of games Buska, glad you got through Neon White. It's a shame that game had no story writing or characters whatsoever, none at all, but what can you do eh.




Another JRPG down. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is a game from 2010, but it still feels playable today due to mostly strong writing and one big gameplay bonus.

The strong writing comes from both detailed yet never heavy worldbuilding and some generally appealing dialogue with four good leads, including some genuinely touching scenes. The plot of the game is strong too: by positioning you as part of the police, it allows you to do some proper investigating that makes a nice change of pace for the genre, as well as digging into the corruption of your city-state (the game doesn't shy away from ACAB). Unfortunately the game is part of a broader series of games that aren't on Switch and seem to have worse protagonists, with a sizeable chunk of the ending dedicated to three shiters I absolutely don't care about. There's also a Mary Sue child introduced later on. The devs love her. She's awful.

As for the gameplay, it's adequate turn-based stuff with a light AoE overlay. The pace would be glacial, but for the fast-forward button. I love the fast-forward button. I played most of the game at 4x pace and that's the way to do it, although it can't save the old-feeling monster-filled areas from... well, feeling old and slow. There are some interesting dungeons, though, and the game still looks pretty good for a 2010 artefact. It does nothing special, but even without its predecessors you'd probably have a good time if you picked it up in a sale. 6/10

Buskalilly wrote:

What Remains of Edith Finch

I've heard about this for years and when I heard it would be covered on Watch Out For Fireballs I decided it was time to give it a go. Walking Sim by way of Minigame Collection, it tells a macabre but darkly comic of a family cursive through a series of vignettes about untimely deaths. A rumination on death, how we react to it, and how focusing on it too much can make us forget to live.

JayMoyles wrote:

Buskalilly wrote:

but darkly comic

I'm curious where you got this part of the tone from - I found the game to be a thoroughly depressing time tonally. The fish factory lad in particular was just crushing. The only one I could see any sort of dark humour being derived from was the comic book part as it definitely leaned into that comic book camp at points, but the rest of the stories were just all a bit sad.

There's probably something wrong with me; I couldn't get on with this at all. It felt like the movie AI in tone, but with more motion-sickness.

What doesn't have motion sickness is

Which was a charming puzzle game about a... line of... light. Spent most of the game feeling like a genius for working the puzzles out, and also cursing that I don't have the ability to create that many ideas out of a simple concept. Strangely emotionally attached to the little liney fella (and the way you drop all his mates off home at the end). Probably says a lot (bad) about me that I'm cooing over a small line but got fed up with Edith Finch!

JayMoyles wrote:

I'm curious where you got this part of the tone from - I found the game to be a thoroughly depressing time tonally. The fish factory lad in particular was just crushing. The only one I could see any sort of dark humour being derived from was the comic book part as it definitely leaned into that comic book camp at points, but the rest of the stories were just all a bit sad.

Any one of them could be depressing in isolation, but when they're all lined up in a row there's a certain over-the-top element that seems deliberate to me. Crushed by a dragon-shaped slide, stepping out of his bunker ready to enjoy life only to immediately be hit by a train, swept away by a big gazebo from the wedding he was too stroppy to attend . . .

I think it was mostly quite grim but it felt like there as a bit of a dark joke to it all. The comicbook one definitely clued me in that this was at least partly intentional.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2




Oh, XC2. Where do I start? I guess with my frustrations. I want to preface this by saying I don't think I'd judge XC2 as harshly if it wasn't the sequel to XC1, and it's because of the JRPG-y, anime tropes that are present here that weren't present in the first game.

XC1 was, obviously, a JRPG with imperfections and tropes and wonky bits. However, when it was released, it felt new and different to JRPGs that had gone before it - its open world was bananas for the Wii, its regional accents were novel, and it had attempted to have a serious - arguably po-faced - tone. XC2 has the cool environments, and the regional accents, but the tone is just... you know, if it had been a standalone JRPG, I wouldn't have cared. But it's the fact that it came after a game that felt like it was trying to do things differently, and push the genre forward. XC2 leans heavily into genre traditions, and I guess if you just go with it then it's fine, and I learned to just accept it. I just thought it was a shame that it leans into anime stereotypes that I just couldn't give two fucks about.

Basically: you play as Rex, an earnest teenager who wants to do good things and is plunged into a situation where he must save the world from inevitable doom and there are lots of big swords and warships and all that. He is a bit wet and inoffensive, but not very interesting. So far, so Shulk.

Now, to pre-empt Balla: I know XC1 also didn't have the best female characters and it's going to fail a lot of Rorschach tests. But Pyra and Mythra were so fucking cringe. Combustibaps and Photonitits were each about 80% chebs, 10% tedious "character development", 8% flirty interactions with the male protagonist and 2% "why are they two separate people exactly?". Nia was a great character for most of the game... but her character ultimately boiled down to being obsessed with the male protagonist. I quite liked Morag and her train conductor hat though.

The gameplay was... well, I didn't really take full advantage of the gameplay because the layers of battle systems are - famously - so poorly explained that I never felt like I got to grips with them. I worked out the Break Topple Launch Smash process, but there were so many other aspects to the combat that I just didn't care about and resented having to learn by watching a fucking YouTube tutorial that I played the game on Easy and got through it all without having to learn every nuance.

The pacing was weird - the first few chapters were tedious, the middle few were pretty good albeit confusing, and then the last few made for good story but not great gameplay (exposition -> fight some robots -> exposition -> fight some robots...).

The story got pretty good at the end, and I was genuinely pretty excited when there was a moment that related the game to XC1. I just wasn't as invested for the other 50 hours of the game. I wouldn't have persisted if I wasn't having a good time with it, but there was so much to it where I just wished it was something else. I don't think I would have thought that if it weren't a Xenoblade game, so it feels mean to be that critical... but I just liked XC1 a lot more.

Then, the ending was almost great... until a post-credits moment where I just thought "What? Why?" and rolled my eyes and closed the game knowing I'd never go back to it.

Reading this back, I feel like Balladeer: I liked the game but you'd never know it because I just like talking about all my criticisms. Looking forward to playing XC3!

7/10

For somebody who's hung up on the style of XC1 and never really mastered the battle system (which is more the game's fault than yours), 7/10 feels fair, a good game that doesn't quite scale the heights.  I agree with a lot of the stuff you posted apart from the hung up on XC1 bits, especially the stuff about Pyrah and Mythra being tedious awful anime nonsense.  The worst bit of that entire post, by a country mile, is you claiming that your 5/10-suggesting text to go with a 7/10 score is like me.  I'm not that bad!

I guess I could have detailed some of the other things it did well - I did think for a lot of it "wow, imagine if Pokemon SV had managed to have an open world a bit more like this". It's not the game's fault that there was a lot of depth available to me that I just didn't invest my time into, but equally I did invest over two days' worth of my life into it so I feel like that was more than enough!

I think you should give Torna a whirl, Rum. I genuinely enjoyed that DLC more so than the main game and think it might be up your alley judging from what you didn't enjoy about the main game.

Torna what got me into XC or at least get XC3.

Mmm, maybe! I dunno though, there's a bit of me that'd like to just go into XC3... and physical Torna is spenny.

Two games since my last bunch of finished games


Dude, the story in this is pretty decent bro and set-up MWIII game to come. I didn't try MP, as I was renting the game and it would take forever to install as each bit is like 100GB.


After watching the first episode of the new HBO Last of Us Show, I decided to started my The Last of Us Part I on PS5. TLoU has always been an odd one for me as when it first game out all reviews seemed to say it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, though I've had it on my Top 50, I do think there's a difference still from my sort Top 3 to the ones in like 48th. Yet now 10 years on without all the noise around how great it is, I enjoyed so much more this time around.

The remake does look great, yet it's like is that much better, I'm sure looked like this till I go back and look at the PS3 version plus 60fps now and a wide variety of accessibility options which I even used one for hard of hearing where the DualSense will react different to the speech that you can feel Joel shouting etc. Then of course other stuff with the DualSense with the triggers making it the best way to play the game now in 2023 (Okay maybe PC with a 4080).

Even got the Platinum, which is fairly easy as it's mostly collectables, still took me to around 22hrs to do that.

Power Wash Simulator

This is an enjoyably therapeutic “clean-’em-up” that ate up my evenings. There’s not much to it outside of removing dirt from a variety of arenas or objects, but does have a plot tying it all together that adds a bit of creativity to quite a sterile world. There are challenge modes to add longevity but it’s not the sort of game I’d revisit because the mechanics are rather wooden and PC-like. Regardless, I’d definitely recommend it to anyone wanting a nice calming environment or a list of things to check off. 7/10

Telling Lies

Completed this in one evening and it was a decent mystery story told through actors. Definitely anticlimactic and sometimes confusing, but then I believe it’s designed to be replayed with various endings. It’s not really my thing, given there’s very little gameplay, but it’s good for a night on the sofa with another person. 6/10

Unpacking

Speaking of therapeutic games, Unpacking is one I’d heard lots about and can now understand why it’s the perfect Game Pass game. The Habbo Hotel visuals are charmingly nostalgic and the atmosphere is very welcoming and homely, with some smart bits of visual storytelling. It’s actually quite powerful when you spend hours getting to know this mysterious inhabitant and discover things about them that make you question your own assumptions. I’m surprised there’s no DLC, as a full life cycle would have definitely added to the package but then it does pander to people in their 30s and 40s for its nostalgia.  8/10

I've heard things about Power Wash Simulator - mostly that once it grabs you, it won't let you go, and it'll keep squeezing you tighter and tighter until you burst (okay that bit may have been made up). Based on my addictive style of playing, I think I should stay well away.

gjones wrote:

Telling Lies

Completed this in one evening and it was a decent mystery story told through actors. Definitely anticlimactic and sometimes confusing, but then I believe it’s designed to be replayed with various endings. It’s not really my thing, given there’s very little gameplay, but it’s good for a night on the sofa with another person. 6/10

I wouldn't say it's designed to be replayed - I think a normal playthrough will allow you to piece together what happens in the story fairly well. If you're a bit more comprehensive in finding the video clips, then you'll get a more thorough understanding of what's going on but not to a degree where I'd say it needs another playthrough. In fact, I'd say it isn't replayable at all as the hook of figuring out what's happening is missing on a second playthrough.

Balladeer wrote:

I've heard things about Power Wash Simulator - mostly that once it grabs you, it won't let you go, and it'll keep squeezing you tighter and tighter until you burst

Ironic, really, as I recall that's what you do to women who don't "power wash" the dishes.

Can't believe that meme has returned, especially when I gave you a perfectly good penis joke setup.

Gotta keep ya guessin' baby.

Bayonetta 3



I'll start off by saying this is a brilliant game, I had fun and I'm glad I played it. That said, I think it's the worst Bayonetta game in every way across the board.

I'll start with perhaps the least important element, the story. The first game was all about a kind of rejection of puritanical Catholicism, with a sexy witch killing angels and refusing to be ordered around by male priests. The second game expanded in the only obvious way; incorporating demonic enemies alongside the angellic. This game completes the trilogy by incorporating the third part of the trinity of realities; the mortal world of chaos.

This is manifested in a dimension-hopping story which, to its credit, is closer to an Everything Everywhere All at Once than it is to a Marvel exercise in leveraging intellectual properties. Unfortunately, its all very chaste and boring compared to the first or second. You're fighting obviously villainous sci-fi things. The idea of the monsters is that they're mind-controlled human beings, dehumanised and forced to coalesce into combined forms. This should have been grotesque, but the game portrays it as melting blue goo that lacks a punch.

This leads into a bigger issue; the gameplay. Some of these blob things are very difficult to read, making them a little annoying to fight. This is exacerbated by the new gameplay gimmick, which allows Bayonetta to summon her monsters much more frequently. Unfortunately, this leads to a more zoomed out camera through which its harder to see what's going on. I eventually learned to enjoy the loop of buildign up my meter, using my monsters and repeating, but I would have preferred less of that in exchange for being better able to appreciate the classic Bayo combat.

Worst of all, this continues Bayonetta 2's trajectory of giving less and less opportunity to enjoy the core gameplay. Just fighting monsters as Bayonetta is so fun, I don't need to constantly be given vehicle sections and chase sequences and ten different monsters to control and side-scrolling stealth segments. Even the kaiju boss battles, which are pretty cool, I'd happily swap for a nice combat arena and an interesting smattering of enemies. Playing as Viola, with her counter-based alternate combat was pretty fun, but I'd rather she had her own game and Bayonetta had more time to shine.

Bayonetta 1 is one of my favourite videogames of all time. Each subsequent sequel just waters it down and gives me a little less of what I love.

I’m onto Chapter 8 of Bayonetta 3 but I’m definitely enjoying it less than the first two. It’s well-intentioned with the vehicle sections and monster battles and I can appreciate it’s efforts to mix things up, but they’ve really undervalued how playing as Bayonetta is the best bit of Bayonetta, if that makes sense.

I trust it still gets a Buska 10/10 though.



Chained Echoes is a strange one.  It's a very conventional JRPG in some ways (turn-based, fantasy setting, plenty of tropes) that in other ways is quite unconventional.  It takes influences from a whole bunch of things: Chrono Trigger is the most obvious influence, what with the art style and the enemies hanging about in the world; but there are elements of FFVI and Xenoblade Chronicles X in there too, and some things that are all its own.

The weirdest thing about CE is perhaps the soullessness of large swathes of it.  This is mostly because of the writing, translated from German with several mistakes and without any panache; and because of the characters, helped neither by the writing, nor by the character-less overworld sprites and unchanging dialogue portraits.  Attempts to give the party unique voices do feature but mostly fail.  The plot itself is actually tremendous, a twisty turny tale with epic scope that should be beyond one man's game to deliver; but the characters and the writing, combined with retro-aping sprite art that's mostly pretty drab, lead to this soulless feeling.

And then suddenly, the game will throw something that bursts with character at you.  Whether it's the worldbuilding, unfocussed and scattered but obviously with a whole lot of thought behind it; or a loot description that's genuinely funny; or suddenly a party member's overworld sprite will spring to life, with results that make you wonder why they don't do so more often; or one of those plot twists turning your understanding of the situation on its head; or one of the many beautiful choral musical numbers; or just something really strange, like a group of marmots with flügelhorns and a special move called 'A Watschn' (Viennese slang for 'a slapping' apparently).  At these times it feels less like a slavish soulless tribute to older JRPGs, and more like the development-hell-surviving product of an ambitious mind.

The battle system at least is consistently grand.  The Overdrive mechanic, where you have to pull off randomised types of moves to keep your characters from overheating, combined with an inability to grind (stat-ups are dependant on bosses beaten and equipment only), means that battling never feels simple or solved.  There's a wealth of customisation options, some of which do feel a tad pointless (the crystal system), to help keep things fresh as well.  Halfway through the game you even get mechs, which do the Xenoblade X thing of opening up exploration and also make you feel really powerful, even if battling with them isn't quite as fun.  The battle sprite art too is excellent and characterful in a way the overworld art isn't, and I remain unsure why.

In the end, it's perhaps Iconoclasts that Chained Echoes reminds me of more than anything in its genre.  This is definitely one man's passion project, for better and for worse - unpolished in many places (let me see my class skill learning progress when I'm changing classes you fools!), incomplete in others, yet also with fun and funny aspects that simply would have been edited out of a bigger release.  This is better than Iconoclasts though, with the strong battle system keeping it more consistent.  I'd recommend it to most, even those who may not be the biggest JRPG fans, perhaps especially those.  If it does nothing else, it will surprise you.

BONUS! The Centennial Case - A Shijima Story:

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

they’ve really undervalued how playing as Bayonetta is the best bit of Bayonetta, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that's exactly it. Bayonetta 2 felt like that at times, but 3 is worse.
Also . . .

Ending spoilers, if anyone cares about the story: