What a coincidence. I have actually been thinking about an underwater exploration game for a while now.
I don't know these games except Aquaria, but Aquaria is great. And Abzû looks beautiful.
My only concern is whether my integrated-graphics laptop can run some of these games. (I recently bought Song of the Deep but it doesn't run at full speed.)
All in all, it was...well, just decent, I suppose. Don't get me wrong, the controls are great and everything feels nice, the difficulty is just about right and it only occasionally throws some dick moves at you, but there are some things about the design that I just can't get over. Like the fact that even though it's a metroidvania, the path to the finish is in fact, a straight line, and doesn't actually require any exploration. Or that you can't actually open the menu except at a save point. Or that there's no map. Nothing game breaking, just mildly annoying.
Oh, and the few times the game actually does throw a dick move at you, it's infuriating. Basically reserved for when the game drops spikes on your head. Usually you can see it coming, but sometimes the spikes are colored exactly the same as normal ceiling spikes, and there's at least one moment where it does it in a dark room where you wouldn't be able to see it if you aren't jumping excessively.
Probably 6/10 or 7/10 for me.
I also only died like 300 times, so instead of grinding out the last 200 deaths for the 500 deaths achievement I just wrote a script to do it for me.
So a while back I mentioned an indie game called Goocubelets, which I ended up panning because physics collisions made its grid-based puzzle wildly inconsistent and forcing you to reset often at a moment's notice.
Apparently the developer threw a shitfit recently and put in 400+ achievements for completing a level over and over again.
All in all, it was...well, just decent, I suppose. Don't get me wrong, the controls are great and everything feels nice, the difficulty is just about right and it only occasionally throws some dick moves at you, but there are some things about the design that I just can't get over. Like the fact that even though it's a metroidvania, the path to the finish is in fact, a straight line, and doesn't actually require any exploration. Or that you can't actually open the menu except at a save point. Or that there's no map. Nothing game breaking, just mildly annoying.
Oh, and the few times the game actually does throw a dick move at you, it's infuriating. Basically reserved for when the game drops spikes on your head. Usually you can see it coming, but sometimes the spikes are colored exactly the same as normal ceiling spikes, and there's at least one moment where it does it in a dark room where you wouldn't be able to see it if you aren't jumping excessively.
Probably 6/10 or 7/10 for me.
I also only died like 300 times, so instead of grinding out the last 200 deaths for the 500 deaths achievement I just wrote a script to do it for me.
I found it a little frustrating at times for similar reasons but respawning was very, very fast so it felt a lot less frustrating than I'd otherwise have found it.
Also the game world is littered with side-things-to-do (including ones that you can't do just yet but have to come back later for) and there's like two or three optional dungeons and so on, and even a normal game involves backtracking to buy weapons and get magic and stuff if I recall correctly so it didn't feel particularly linear to me at all.
I don't remember there being a map but I don't remember having much trouble with navigating my way through the game either. Though now that I think about it I think I did use an external map at some point, but only late in the game. The overall map areas did have a usefully linear conceptual progression in terms of going from one area to the next, which helped with easy mental mapping (town -> forest -> cave -> castle entrance -> prison, blue castle -> torture chambers, red castle -> windy castle -> top floor -> optional superboss + final boss).
one of the puzzles, Myahm Agana Apparatus, kind of sucks. It's a regular ol ball in maze puzzle, except you manipulated it with your controller and the weird angle makes it hard to tell when it's flat, so it's kind of bullshit to do. I saw a speedrun of this bit where they just physically smashed the ball to bat it where it was supposed to go.
I couldn't do that, but I did turn the maze upside down and just use it as a plane.
ok here's the deal link. a hundred years ago ganon was beginning
>k
there was a prophecy that the means to defeating him was buried in the ground, so we just kind of dug everything up at random, and found a laser killbot army we could use
>sounds useful
additionally, we found four gundams that are so strong we basically just thought of them as gods
>oh sick
yeah it was sick but then ganon appeared and just nuked everything
>what but the robots!
yeah he took over the robots
>what
a great hero tried to stop ganon and his new robot army, but he was mortally injured and well long story short that's you with amnesia
>what
To review, for you vs. ganon round one, you had an army of laser robots and four evangelion units and still lost. Now ganon has those things, and you have amnesia and that nice sweater i gave you
so far nobody seems to have much of a plan, it's great
whathisname just says find impa
impa says well you should probably try to desuborn the buster machines, because if we have those we downgrade from "existentially fucked" to "eh maybe we won't die"
i like the trials well enough but i kind of miss regular dungeons. i hope there are more wild fort setups that have stuff other than blin, they're kind of like tacticool minidungeons but with just bokobomoblins it's a bit repetitive. (And i understand there are a few regular dungeons later.)
the looking around is of course cool. the world is just very pretty. must be that nuke ecology. also one time i was looking for stuff and looked at mount doom and there was a giant squidbot on it. "Oh," i thought, "that thing is probably going to crush me later'
also something i'm not used to in a zelda game is, well, dying in combat. and more specifically dying in combat with stuff i couldn't possibly beat. when i got off the great plateau i was like meh, fuck the plot, imma go to that cool looking thing, and found a yurt. and from there i was like ah, i'll just quickly grab the tower of this "hyrule kingdom" place. i get there, there's two active stationary guardians. "Well I'm probably not 'supposed' to be here but oh well, I'll just climb up the other side." the other side has an active moving guardian, and i spend the next ten minutes repeatedly being lit on fire
also also link's sheer gecko-ness is cool. it really changes the dynamic of a big world game. like, shadow of the colossus, which i think is pretty comparable in terms of geography and prettiness - if you see a cliff that's a wall. you're fenced in. in this game it's still a wall, but if you really want and have enough drugs you can just climb to the top, look around, maybe jump down, maybe jump to another wall. it goes well with how generally hilly everything is. in oot hyrule is like, a big field surrounded by forests mainly? botw hyrule is a more organic massif kind of place.
i died i think five times the first time i tried to raid a fort* (most of that was just learning combat though). twice the first time after leaving the tutorial-ish-area. four times against a miniboss, the first time being "oh fuck i was just walking along and there's a miniboss".
the game is really stingy with hearts. i'm several hours in and have four. I haven't zeldaded in a while so I don't know if that's really so few, but bokoblins can kill me in two or three good hits. guardians can explode me in one, and the actually-reasonably-fightable guardian scouts in one or two. there's a lot of emphasis on dodging and parrying. you can't just hide behind your shield because it'll disintegrate. even basic enemies have shields so you can't always brute force your way through: you could break their shields but in the process your sword might crack, and there aren't so many of those.
there's a ton of emphasis on stealth. there's a system of enemies noticing you and running to get their weapons, with little ? and ! alert icons. the forts have watchtowers and if the bokoblin on them notices you he'll blow an alert horn and then snipe at you. there is, i think, some kind of invisible MGS3-like stealth measurement, so you can be more stealthy by crouching, being in long grass, stuff. dunno if colored outfits affect that. some of the early forts are positioned so that if you look around without being noticed you see some gotcha way to do it, like dropping rocks on them. failing that, there's usually a good position you can take to headshot the guard and move in all qviet-like.
*"fort" seems like a bit much, there are just these campsites with wooden watchtowers.
Also, my experience with lynels was: some NPC told me about an arena where you could fight dangerous monsters and if you survived, get ca$h. Later I went to a weird looking building and a guy told me this was the arena, where I could fight dangerous monsters and if I survived, get ca$h. So I moseyed on in and a lynel shot me in the face.
Everything is very zelda nonlinear but some areas have tougher motherfuckers in them, and if you wander in unprepared you get fucked up.
Those were the "You walked into the WRONG neighborhood motherFUCKER" monsters in original Zelda
ok well yep they succeed admirably at this
whenever i played zelda games before i didn't really think about them, so i don't know how much of this is actually different from the zeldas i played, let alone the prehistoric zeldas i didn't
Nothing from SNES prior to Link Between Worlds was particularly threatening.
Link Between Worlds was kind of meh for the most part, but on Hero Mode it was brutal. The first time you went to the Dark World there was basically no way to come in prepared enough to not get twoshot by anything that looked at you funny. Lynels hit for...six hearts I think? At range? It was pretty ridiculous.
Skyward Sword was hilariously schizophrenic. It treated you like a preschooler off his Ritalin anytime nothing was trying to kill you, and then the combat was surprisingly difficult for reasons that had nothing to do with any of the things it tried to hold your hand on. Also almost nothing in the game did half/quarter heart damage, and on Hero Mode almost everything did two and no hearts dropped. The last boss would stunlock and murder you for just not nailing his split-second random opening from the right direction.
rough. I'm terrible with that timing stuff. In the combat tutorial I did fine with backflips leading into a smash and stuff, but for the parry you have to get the timing right and there's no indication of when the correct time is. so i lost half my health to the tutorial
i saw video of fighting demon lord whatshisname and it seemed pretty gimmicky. same with not-ganon. guess i was wrong.
Oh and also, between the topography, the Mongols, and the shines looking like stupas and being all over the place kind of randomly and housing sokushinbutsu, then given the idea that the last wasn't originally japanese, i think the botw region could reasonably be identified with sichuan (or more broadly western China). i think that's neat.
Not-Ganon was gimmicky in the second half, but the first was kind of satisfying because it's one of the only straightforward swordfights in the game and you can actually bait and counter his guard if you bother to. Once he electrifies his sword though, he'll stun and demolish you if he successfully parries and you're back to gimmick hunting (and what sucks even worse is that Fi lies to you about the gimmick).
it's the whole, what's it called, floodplains? Like in The Willows, except the trees are all birch. and there's water buffalo (chinaaaaa) and a burned out wreck of a village with a storm mage in it, glad i'm not here at night
back in my day, capra demon? nowhere near as horrifying as the custom trees. you can like go on the thing behind the capra demon and jump on him and avoid the dogs and shit, but the trees? you're fucked kiddo, no amount of "gitting gud" is gonna stop them for stealing your stuff. see, in the 90s devs KNEW how to make an enemy terrifying.
i don't know why he's popular, he's mostly gags, maybe it's later or people like gags, i dunno
i do like the joke though. there's this whole wetlands area, as i mentioned. you can meet a zora far off from zoraland and she says she's been tasked by the prince with finding a hylian and telling said hylian to meet the prince. so you keep going and hey there's another zora, and this zora has been tasked with finding a hylian and etc.! and then three more! and every time there's a mini cutscene where they point to where the prince is, and exhort you to move
i ran into a human and she was like hey, weird place to see a hylian, right? well there were these zora, see... and i met the prince and he was kind of a weirdo and hit on me so i left. you can go if you want a laugh. he probably won't hit on you since you're not as hot as me.
i'm dedicated to avoiding doing the main quest immediately, so instead i fought my way up this nearby mountain to get to the tower (a thing that gives you local maps, so, important). took a while. got to the top and there's a f-in zora. he says he's been tasked by the prince with etc., but now he's on top of this tower and can't get down. and there's a mini cutscene where he points to where the prince is and yells at him for help
then i parachuted down and the resulting cutscene didn't know that i wasn't approaching on foot, heh.
Question: If I loved Persona 5's combat (specifically All-Out Attacks) and social system, but thought Mementos was mostly a chore, should I bother finding and playing the other ones?
Comments
This Kickstarter -- for voicework, for a visual novel with a VR option (though not mandatory) -- is ending in about a week.
Not sure whether I'll back this yet, but I might because the soundtrack level is $15 which is pretty cheap and besides it's Carpe Fulgur.
https://www.humblebundle.com/ocean/oceans-day-bundle
What a coincidence. I have actually been thinking about an underwater exploration game for a while now.
I don't know these games except Aquaria, but Aquaria is great. And Abzû looks beautiful.
My only concern is whether my integrated-graphics laptop can run some of these games. (I recently bought Song of the Deep but it doesn't run at full speed.)
like, im just having this sort of mental image of it
like Marvin the Depressed Android but it's Marvin the Worst Gamer
Also the game world is littered with side-things-to-do (including ones that you can't do just yet but have to come back later for) and there's like two or three optional dungeons and so on, and even a normal game involves backtracking to buy weapons and get magic and stuff if I recall correctly so it didn't feel particularly linear to me at all.
I don't remember there being a map but I don't remember having much trouble with navigating my way through the game either. Though now that I think about it I think I did use an external map at some point, but only late in the game. The overall map areas did have a usefully linear conceptual progression in terms of going from one area to the next, which helped with easy mental mapping (town -> forest -> cave -> castle entrance -> prison, blue castle -> torture chambers, red castle -> windy castle -> top floor -> optional superboss + final boss).
so it's like the original Zelda? better buy that strategy guide from Nintendo Power quick
>what
Also did everyone just forget about Iron Keep?
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
So that was fun.
I wish doing so were a little more, possible.
funny you should call it an "am2r remake" though