Exhuminator wrote:Should you still bother to play old games
You kinda make it sound like that's frowned upon here.
I also post my reviews on HLTB, so that comment was geared towards users of that site, rather than here. There are some people in this thread who still beat old games regularly.
Sarge wrote:Owlboy is done. It was pretty good, but not amazing like the gushing reviews out there. There's no question that it's polished. The presentation, everything from the graphics to the soundtrack to the dialogue and story beats, it's all astounding stuff. But the moment-to-moment gameplay is just... pleasant. Decent enough. Not outstanding. That's okay, of course, it wouldn't be the first 16/32-bit style game that traded on spectacle, but that's exactly what we have here.
I'll try to write up a little more detail later. I know it sounds like I'm ragging on it (and I kinda am), but it's still a good game. Just not as good as it probably could have been.
I think you're in a good zone for judging coming out of Axiom Verge. So yeah, I'll wait for Owlboy to go on sale.
Alcahest ... felt like an arcade game to me haha. Pretty strange blend of action RPG and it was rather short. Absolutely love that OST though and still listen to it frequently.
Yeah, not too long. Alcahest took me about five and a half hours. The last two stages, the boss rush, and the final boss really slowed me down. The final boss was pretty ridiculous, or I wasn't doing it right. I almost ran out of lives at the end.
Xeogred wrote:Absolutely love that OST though and still listen to it frequently.
But it's hard not to list the entire thing. Godly stuff, extra fascinating to me coming from the Kirby composer. A shame he didn't get to do more serious stuff like this. Arcana and HyperZone have great OST's too.
Not a knock on Kirby music, but the Alcahest OST is something else and I love the sound font. That bass BUMPS.
A Japan exclusive action-RPG developed by HAL Labs, released in 1993 for the Super Famicom. The player plays the part of Alen, a knight working with magical guardians to stop an ancient evil from resurrecting. Combat is sword and magic based, nothing groundbreaking. Alcahest is barely an action-RPG really, as experience points only gain extra lives, not levels. Also the game is broken up into stages, rather than a continuous world. The above average graphics and decent OST somewhat make up for repetitive game design and unbalanced difficulty. The best stuff is the offensive magic system and the varied partners that aid the player. Alcahest may not be the best action-RPG you can find on SFC, but it would have been received positively if released in the West. Should you still bother to play old games and enjoy its genre, Alcahest is worth importing or emulating. Yes there is an English fan translation.
I'm currently playing this in my list games I'm currently working on(especially since I got it, 3 ff games, and bahumut for $20 like a year and a half ago). The only issue I have with it is the translation patch sucks for the passwords. There's a ammendum to it that fixes that supposedly but there's not a option for multiple patches on the retron5(and I'm constantly dieing in stupid ways in stage 2 even though I made it to what I assume is the end or near it). In my version I could tell you what the first password was but can't enter it since the screen to enter it is still in japanese and in level two it's a glitched out mess....
My gameroom My systems: NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii, original gba, gba sp(001), ds lite, 3ds, vita, psp, PSone(101 model) ps2, ps3(320gb model), ps4, retron 5, and Dreamcast.
bogusmeatfactory wrote:Ever feel like a wild gazelle in the wilderness?
Yeah I should note I used save states with Alcahest. I try not too thesedays in any capacity (avoiding the save scumming as some call it, but I'll save when I'm done with a play session). But yeah when I saw Alcahest was really short and then felt weirdly arcadey, I didn't feel bad about it.
After Etrian Odyssey, Kazuya Niinou left Atlus and joined Imageepoch. 7th Dragon is the result of it. It takes what he did in Etrian Odyssey and brings things a bit back towards the JRPG style. So while you're back to third person dungeon crawling through less maze-like venues and more story elements you still maintain the character building of Etrian Odyssey. This is the fourth entry in the series (the 2nd and 3rd entries are sort of two halves of a whole story-wise) and the first to make it to the US.
The basic premise of the 7th Dragon games is that humanity is under assault by a massive horde of dragons, let by some super powerful True Dragons, and you need to murder them all. In VFD your specific mission is to collect samples of the first six True Dragons in order to properly analyze their structure so you can stop the 7th True Dragon that is going to utterly destroy humanity. In order to do so you must travel both to the past and the future, helping out those in other eras in the process and forming your standard team of disparate peoples who still manage to overcome adversity. There's some twists in the story that you probably won't see coming until they get close.
Unlike previous 7th Dragon games this game gives you parties of three characters. However, the interesting thing it does is give you two extra parties who follow you. These can be used in a few ways. The first most obvious way is that while exploring you can freely switch between the three parties, though the makeups of the parties are fixed until you go back to base. The more interesting way is that in combat you have the ability to call upon the reserve party members to aid you in battle. This can be giving you status buffs, doing some damage and debuffs to the enemy, or if you give everyone a chance to store up energy you can have all nine party members take a turn with skills costing now resources; this naturally ends up being hugely powerful, especially since this bonus turn doesn't give enemies a chance to react. It adds some depth to the party building, and the game nicely has everyone get the same exp and sp so no one falls behind. There's also a few instances where the parties have to split up, so you have to keep them geared up and up to date with their skills. The final boss also has three forms and you can choose which party fights each form (which can be the same or different each time). Since you don't get a heal in between forms using each party once is probably the best use of resources if you're not massively overleveled.
The game is a bit on the easy side compared to earlier 7th Dragon games (and definitely compared to Etrian Odyssey). If you build your party in a normal fashion you'll have a standard JRPG difficulty curve, but if you figure out the powerful skills or are willing to respect when you unlock a new tier of skills then you can start walking all over everything. By the last third of the game I was one rounding everyone except chapter bosses, and those usually went down in two rounds. On the flip side, since I was doing so well thanks to the care I took to synergize my party and its skills the game was still fun for me, as I enjoy that kind of payoff.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
