Games Beaten 2018

[Sarge]

Scheherazade gets overlooked on NES, but it really is a great game. A little rough in spots, like most of Culture Brain's oeuvre, but worth playing even now.

[pook99]

Magic of Scherezede is one of my favorite nes games, it was way ahead of its time on release and had so many cool ideas that were unheard of at the time, time travel where the world changes based on what you do, team attacks depending on the party members you have recruited, being able to haggle with shop keepers, mix of action + turn based, and probably a few things I am forgetting. I am surprised that it never makes its way onto hidden gems videos

I also just finished curse of the moon like many of you did. Castlevania 3 is my second favorite castlevania game so when I heard about this game(which was literally last week) my hype meter was off the charts. It did not disappoint, levels were cool, the music was outstanding, although I did miss the classic castlevania themes, I think this soundtrack was as good as we could have hoped for. Control was exactly as I expected, and I loved how seamlessly you could switch between characters.

My only complaint was I did feel the game was a little on the easy side. I may go back and try nightmare mode or a solo run for a greater challenge(or maybe a run where I take just one companion ala castlevania 3), but I finished my first playthrough with 13 lives remaining, I think I died a total of 2 times. In fairness to this game, before I knew it was announced I did a classic castlevania marathon where I played through 1, 3, 4, rondo, dracula x, and chronicles back to back so this style of game is very fresh in my mind, so it may have seemed easier than it actually was.

[Sarge]

You absolutely should go through the other modes. It makes a difference. Not nearly as toothless. Also, go for a solo Zangetsu run. That's when you really have to learn the game, and you don't have three other life meters backing you up.

[Exhuminator]

I'm not big on replaying games, especially games I just beat. So how far do I have to go into B:CotM before I hit the new stuff, howabout a hint as to where it starts occurring? I don't want to miss the fork that leads me to the new material.

[lordb0rb4]

Oh come on Exhuminator, is not a long game after all is it?
Yesterday i booted up the game so i scould see what happens when you do not recruit someone and killed Miriam and OH MY GOD...

Zangetsu got a new move!

[Exhuminator]

Oh come on Exhuminator, is not a long game after all is it?

That depends on perspective. I enjoyed B:CotM, and I got my money out of it. But I've got many other games yet unplayed in my library, and very limited time to play them. Replaying games blindly hoping to chance upon new parts isn't conducive to that. I would have appreciated a spoilered response actually answering my question.

Anyway it's cool you enjoy B:CotM so much, and that you're getting a lot of mileage out of it.

[lordb0rb4]

Sorry about that, but yes, the last third of the game is all new stuff.

[Exhuminator]

Sorry about that, but yes, the last third of the game is all new stuff.

Thanks! Is this something that happens automatically? Or do I need to be using a particular character and take a particular shortcut? Do I need to be playing on Nightmare difficulty?

[MrPopo]

You need to be playing on Nightmare. The ship takes you to a different ending section because of the story of Nightmare.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2018 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017
* indicates a repeat

1-20

1. Tyranny (PC)
2. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (PC)
3. SUPERHOT (PC)
4. Hotline Miami (PC)*
5. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC)
6. Mario X Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Switch)
7. Nine Parchments (Switch)
8. X-com: UFO Defense (PC)
9. Chocobo Racing (PS1)
10. Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak (GBA)
11. Dragon Quest Builders (PS4)
12. Dragon Quest (3DS)
13. Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below (PS4)
14. Dragon Quest II (3DS)
15. Kirby Star Allies (Switch)
16. Hearthstone Dungeon Run (PC)
17. My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (3DS)
18. Tales of Legendia (PS2)
19. Retro City Rampage (3DS)
20. Hearthstone Monster Hunt (PC)

21. Deadbolt (Steam)
22. Legend of Grimrock 2 (Steam)
23. The Witness (PS4)
24. Uurnog (PC)

25. Fire Emblem Warriors (Switch)

After my brother and I LOVED playing through Hyrule Warriors co-op so much, I of course was super psyched when Nintendo announced another Omega Force Musou game. I'm not the biggest Fire Emblem fan in the world, but two of the three games represented in this game are ones I've played through, so I thought why not give it a go. The end result of what I got isn't so much a bad game as a disappointing game. FE Warriors is a neat spin on the FE formula into a Musou game, but has far more of the lazier trappings of Omega Force's other Musou games, spin-off or otherwise, and it ends up feeling like an overall downgrade of the fantastic Hyrule Warriors from years prior. The game took me about 15 hours playing through on hard mode and doing about a dozen challenge missions.

The Good:

We'll start with the good things, and they mostly fall under presentation. The visuals look very pretty, which each of the 18 characters in the main game looking very faithful to their art style present in the most recent rendition of their games. The finishing moves all look very flashy and nice as well, and even though the framerate drags a little in co-op, the performance is never to the point where it impacts gameplay. The music is also very good, with this probably being one of my favorite renditions of the Fire Emblem main theme ever done.

The overall gameplay is very much the kind of flair Musou games have had for a long time. Fairly linear maps choke-pointed with bases that you need to capture, and objectives for missions usually revolving around defeating certain bad guys and/or capturing certain bases. You've got weapons and materials you find in each battle, and weapons have different passives and slots for passives and star-rankings that you can fuse weapons together just like in other Musou games. Very familiar to Hyrule Warriors, materials can also be used to perform passive upgrades on each character as well as give them more combos to use.

The Fire Emblem spin on things is how the weapon triangle is used. Just like in FE, there is a weapon triangle where axes beat spears, spears beat swords, and swords beat axes. The three other weapon types present in the game are bows, manatekes, and magic, but they don't really have any particular rock-paper-scissors elements to their uses as magic's weapon triangle is not used in this game, so they act more like an "other" that isn't really good or better (other than magic being bad against pegasus knights and bows like 2-shotting them). Using a superior weapon means you can do a LOT more damage as well as you enemy being unable to block, so it's worth keeping track of.

You also have the ability to pick 4 (of a possible 8 friendly) units per battle that you can use the D-pad to switch between on the fly using the D-pad. You can also pair up units as supports of one another just like in Awakening or Fates for a stat boost as well as being able to toggle between your partner unit if they're one of the playable 4. You can also bring up a big map of the battle field and order units around to do specific tasks like healing a friendly unit, attacking an enemy unit, or guarding a location. This means you can strategically put your 4 playable characters around the map in a way that makes best sense for the strategy you're using to approach that level. That character changing mechanic is probably the best and most significant innovation that this Musou game brings to the table.

The mission design is a mixed bag with a few quite cool and unique missions but a lot of really standard ones. The one that sticks out for me is when you have to keep Xandar and Ryoma from killing one another by taking a fort from each of their teams in quick succession. Past that, there really aren't many missions that make the character-swapping mechanic anything more than a neat convenience or gimmick. No outright bad missions or annoying platforming sections in them like in Dragon Quest Musou, but really nothing to write home about.

The Bad:

This brings us on to what I really didn't like about this game, and that's a fair bit. We'll start with the characters. Despite the large roster of 18 (+3 unlockable through challenge mode) compared to Hyrule Warriors' 9 (+4 through the challenge mode), the weapon triangle seems to have brought with it a real stagnation in character design. Characters like the twin characters that are part of the story of this game are more or less direct clones of one another, along with Chrom and Lucina obviously being near clones of one another. But beyond that, every character's combo list looks nearly identical. While Hyrule Warriors didn't exactly have the most diverse combo system in the world, most characters/weapons felt and played very differently from one another and even often had different dodge timings. Characters of the same class (i.e. weapon and mounted/unmounted) play very very similarly, and that really makes the large roster feel a lot less meaningful.

Without spending AGES In history mode (tons of super repetitive challenge missions that take ages) to unlock a couple more characters, you have 8 sword users (one mounted), 3 axe users (One wyvern mounted, one horse mounted), 3 spear users (all pegasus knights), 3 magic users (one mounted), 2 archers, and one Manakete. This makes it feel more like there are 10 or 11 characters rather than 18 just because so many play so similarly to one another (the pegasus knights are SUPER similar to one another). There are very few direct clones, but if you don't like the weird floaty way the pegasus knights handle, for example, then you're SOL, because there are no other spear users in this game. While the combat is very satisfyingly flashy, this reduction in the variety is a textbook Omega Force tactic to give the impression of more content without actually providing it in a meaningful sense.

The same goes for the way this game's story missions handle its maps. There are 20 missions in the main story, but just about all of them use the Omega Force tactic of using each map twice, but your starting point is different or you can only access half of the map this time. The maps are similar enough in design just by gameplay necessity (compared to say, Dynasty Warriors 3 where each map was so open and non-linear that they felt VERY different) that the small variety isn't a huge problem, but it's something worth mentioning either way.

Next up on the Omega Force nonsense list is "NPC" characters. There are 4 friendly NPC characters (Navarre from OG FE, Owain from Awakening, and Niles and Oboro from Fates) who are completely finished and in the game but arbitrarily not playable at all. Where Hyrule Warriors put characters like this behind its adventure mode to unlock, FE Warriors decides to sell you these characters in its DLC packs. Not a huge problem, but something pretty cynical and shitty on the part of Omega Force to dangle characters you can't have in front of you just to demand more cash if you want to play them.

There are then 4 boss characters that are totally unplayable by any means (3 mages and a sword user). That's not to say that there won't be a patch like Hyrule Warriors got to just make the boss characters playable for free, but it's really weird that something like that STILL hasn't happened where it was one of the first big patches that HW got, while we still haven't seen anything like that for FEW that has released the last of its DLC packs a good few months ago.

The story is pretty standard fare for a Musou crossover game, but at the same time pretty bad for a Fire Emblem game. It's really dull and I almost always wanted to skip it, although I never did. SO much dialogue realestate is spent just repeating the same stuff you already know or reaffirming the same things. The "plot twist" was one I saw coming immediately, but one they never actually quite explain how it happened, in retrospect. Again, the story isn't very interesting, so I didn't really care too much. The English voice acting is absolutely dire (and not 90's fun dire, just modern really bland and boring dire), but the Japanese voice acting is a free download on the eShop and is far, far better.

The last thing I'll mention is the pretty rough difficulty curve. It is one of the smoother ones than other Musou games I've played (it's nowhere near as all over the place as Dragon Quest Musou, for example), but it does have a few missions that really stand out as being far harder than others. The game still has a problem of being a bit too easy overall with most "harder" sections mostly being down to the enemies you need to kill using a weapon you can't get leverage over and/or being insanely fat and taking ages to kill.

Verdict: Not Recommended. Omega Force and Nintendo really dropped the ball on this one. Honestly, given that it has co-op, it isn't quite as hard to recommend as Dragon Quest Musou, but nonetheless I still have a very hard time recommending this when there are so many better Musou games out there, especially Hyrule Warriors that now has a port on both systems this game is available on for about the same price. It isn't a bad game by any means, but it is such a mediocre Musou game that I really can't recommend it to anyone but the staunchest fans of the genre and Fire Emblem or for someone who is just manically hungry for more Musou on their Switch or 3DS after playing Hyrule Warriors to absolute completion.