Partridge Senpai's 2021 Beaten Games:Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021* indicates a repeat
1.
Dandy Dungeon: The Legend of Brave Yamada (Switch)
2.
Dandy Dungeon 2: The Phantom Bride (Switch)
3.
Mon Amor (Switch)
4.
Terraria (PC)
5. Puppeteer (PS3) *
I last played this game nearly a decade ago not too long after it came out. I got it for cheap on PSN, though for the life of me I can't remember what prompted me to pick it up in the first place, or how I even came to know about it. That was probably the case for most people, really, since late 2013 was quite a busy time for big releases, and Puppeteer just got lost in the shuffle despite being so good. It's something I've been meaning to replay for a while, and now I finally have~. This is yet another game that doesn't count your playtime, so my rough guess is that I spent like 7 or 8 hours beating the main game, and then I spent about that same amount of time achievement hunting because I just didn't wanna stop playing x3
Puppeteer is the story of a little boy named Kutaro. The moon was once a peaceful place where the souls of children went when they embarked on their dreams, but that was before the powerful Moon Bear King stole the dark moon crystal, smashed the light moon crystal, and sealed away the moon goddess. Now the moon is a frightful, totalitarian place run by the Moon Bear King and his generals, where they steal away the souls of earth children to eat! Kutaro is one such child, although he escapes the fate of all the other lost souls even once the MBK eats his head! He's given a new head by the helpful Ying Yang the cat, and with the help of the moon witch, he steals the MBK's magical scissors Calibrus, and sets off on a quest to set the moon kingdom right again.
Puppeteer has the plot of a children's story book, and that's absolutely intended. The whole thing is literally laid out like a puppet show, with little wooden you running across a stage as you interact with other craft-made characters, enemies, and objects as you hop from scene to scene. It's a very tongue-in-cheek silly story full of wacky characters for Kutaro and his pixie friend the sun princess to bounce off of. Some of it sadly does wander into the area of casual racism and homophobia, but it's of the very casual "culture as a costume"-approach for world/level design that so SO many games do, so it's not really experience ruining. It doesn't really have any larger themes its exploring, and is mostly just here to give a good silly time, and it does a pretty bang up job at that.
The gameplay of Puppeteer is a platformer that a lot of my friends who saw me play it compared immediately to Little Big Planet. I think that comparison is quite apt, though Puppeteer differs in that there are no planes to swap through and it also controls much better. There are a couple dozen quite long levels to go through with very generous extra life amounts and checkpoints present. There are also lots of fun boss battles that are really well put together as well. You snip and fly through the air by comboing hits with Calibrus, and it makes for a really fun and quick-paced way to fly through levels if you're so inclined, and it makes for a really snappy action-platforming experience that's admittedly much more platforming than it is action at the end of the day.
The story and mechanics of Puppeteer are fun, but the presentation is one place it shines very VERY well. Very much like one of the more recent Paper Mario games, the attention to detail in bringing a world to life that still looks like its made of stage props is SO well done it does an amazing job of really bringing the whole "stage play" aesthetic to life. The voice acting is also really campy and well done, and adds a ton to that pantomime-esque feel as well~. Many of my friends were surprised to hear that it was a PS3 game with how nice it looks, and the music is also absolutely excellent to boot.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. A lot of people slept on Puppeteer because of when it came out, but that's a darn shame! It's a really excellent action/platformer with really fun writing and a great aesthetic. It's pretty easily picked up for cheap these days too, so it's totally worth tracking down if you want a memorable and fun way to spend a weekend on your PS3~.
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6. Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon (PS1)
A friend of mine recently played through the second Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon game on PS1 (the one that actually came out in English), and him talking about it got me the bug to play some more Mystery Dungeon myself. I thought why not start with the Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon game that never came out in English, and thankfully both games are really common and cheap to pick up here in Japan~. It took me about 8 hours to play through the main game on real hardware, with another hour or two spent dabbling in the post-game stuff (which in grand Mystery Dungeon fashion is very expansive and also MUCH harder, so I didn't complete it all XP).
CMD's story is pretty simple and straightforward. A Chocobo (you!) and his moogle friend come to a small village hunting treasure, but one of the farmers (who is also a Chocobo) suddenly comes across a strange stone in his field. Upon touching it, he's suddenly taken over by the spirit inside, and mysteriously vanishes. The Chocobo & Moogle team try to check in at the inn (oddly run by this farmer) but are tricked into actually entering a mystery dungeon! They decide to stick around and try and not only hunt for treasure, but try to rescue the missing farmer too (he has a cute Chocobo daughter, after all! x3). It's very much a simple story just here to set up the action, but the small amount of dialogue that is there is a nice blend of informative (which is very appreciated for this style of game) and quirky fun that fits the bill just right for what it needs to accomplish~.
Given that this is only the 3rd Mystery Dungeon game to come out on consoles, I figured it'd be pretty hard but also quite conventional without many bells and whistles, and I was actually wrong on both counts! Balance-wise, the main game is actually a really reasonable experience that never feels very unfair. It's a quite typical Mystery Dungeon game in a lot of ways (you have equipment to find and upgrade and combine into new stuff if you want, you can find money to spend in town, you have a persistent level, the effects of equipment/potions/scrolls are unknown until you try them in that run of the dungeon), but it is also very different in a lot of ways.
For starters, quite different to a lot of later Mystery Dungeon games, you only have one 30 floor dungeon to complete. That's the main game. They even make it a lot easier by giving you a special scroll that lets you not only evacuate the dungeon but also go right back to the floor you were at when you wanna re-enter! This game does have a hunger mechanic, but it goes down SO slowly that I really never found it a problem with how you have the teleportation to go back and forth to town at will whenever you want. That all combined with the persistent level and the way that your magic tomes level up a persistent magic stat as you use that particular tome more and more made this a much more fair and balanced experience than I was expecting.
Sure, there are still some issues with some steep difficulty spikes here, and there, but even that is mitigated by the game's most defining, strange, and perhaps a bit not entirely thought out feature: the active time battle system. That's right, just like a normal Final Fantasy game of the era (and notably, unlike its own sequel), this game has ATB for its battles. How that basically works is that once an enemy either notices you or you attack it, a gauge starts filling up above the attacker's head with the move they wanna do. Your speed stat makes this amount go down, and stronger attacks generally take longer while weaker ones are faster. It's a very interesting way to make one of these games, but it's also very easy to just break. The ATB messes with how enemies movement systems work, so a really valid strategy, especially if you have a reliable amount of ranged attacks, is to get in, bop them, then RUN before their gauge fills up next to you so they can bop you back because their gauge will reset when they de-aggro from you. This doesn't work very well with post-game enemies (who usually either maintain their ATB between aggros or have such long range spells it doesn't matter), and it ultimately feels like a really half-baked execution of an interesting idea, but it definitely gives htis game its own unique flavor compared to just about every Mystery Dungeon game out there.
The presentation of the game is quite pretty. There's not much 3D used save for how the environments of the dungeons are constructed (and even then, they blend very well with the 2D sprites). Most everything is made of very pretty 2D sprites, and while they don't have a ton of animation, they're very well detailed and give the game a ton of personality. The music isn't super memorable, but this *is* a SquareSoft game, so it's at the very least pleasant to listen to while you play~.
Verdict: Recommended. This is a game with a fair few warts to its design, but it holds up remarkably well. If there's a fan translation out there or if you have the Japanese ability to read it yourself, this is a game you can enjoy quite easily despite its age. There are certainly more polished and better Mystery Dungeon games that have come out since this, but this one is unique and bite-sized enough that I still say it's worth playing all these years later.
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7. Project Altered Beast (PS2)
This is a game that I had always heard was *awful* but never really expected to play. Then I saw a single manual-less copy at the resale mall and got a little excited to finally see what it was like, but then looked at the price tag and walked away. It wasn't THAT much, but more than I was willing to pay for what I'd been led to believe was a pretty bad time. Then a friend of mine offered to pay for it if I picked it up, and that was all the prompting I needed to go back to the mall and take the plunge xD. It took me about 13.5 hours to go through the Japanese version of the main game on real hardware and then mess around with the extras enough to unlock some of the post-game transformations.
PAB is the story of a muscle-bound, white-haired amnesiac who survives a helicopter crash-landing in a city filled with mutated monsters. He's about to be attacked by some of said monsters when suddenly he undergoes a transformation into a powerful werewolf and slaughters them all! He nearly dies from the exertion, when a mysterious woman approaches and is able to change him back, bringing him back from the brink of death. Solving the mysterious mutations as well as finding out your own identity and who this woman is is the quest you soon embark on in this very odd take on the Altered Beast property. Very much like a Blue Stinger or a God Hand, this game actually has no Japanese voice track despite being made by a Japanese team. Unlike those games, however, it doesn't really have the quantity to keep up with the quality. What's there IS very campy and silly fun (and very much feels like the sort of American action movie parody that Blue Stinger nails so well), but it's so few and far between that it's hard to call it much of a selling point. It mostly just does what it needs to to set up the action, but it's nice that it's also at least funny and entertaining while it's there.
The gameplay of PAB is a sort of brawler metroidvania, which is a fine idea, really, but it's just not really executed on very well here. You have a map to go around that seems quite linear at first, but it opens up a little around the halfway point. That said, that's mostly just in the sense that you can backtrack to get new powerups and such. You can't really sequence break at all. As you fight bosses, you acquire more monster transformations and special movement powers for those monsters that will allow you to access more and more areas. Those in and of themselves are pretty neat ideas. Throw that general gameplay loop in with how beating gate guardians gets you points to spend in a Musou-like combo skill tree, and you have the makings of a bit of a hidden gem on the PS2.
Well, you WOULD have the makings of a hidden gem, if the execution of all of this weren't so flawed. On the more minor end, you have generally rough signposting once you get to the 33%~50% progress point. There were a good few times an area was so big or a puzzle was so vague that I had to look up the solution on where to go next because I simply couldn't be bothered to trial and error anymore. For example, as the minotaur, your unlockable move via defeating a boss is a charge to break walls. You use this to break a wall in that boss's room to escape, and then there's a big flat wall that pushes you from the end of that next hallway. You would logically think that this is a time to use your new charge JUST right (it has a very big lead up) to get in the door at the end. No. You'd actually be incredible wrong to think that. Instead, you need to ACTUALLY use the minotaur's steel-transforming block move to repeatedly block the wall and slowly work your way down the corridor. This poor signposting extends to how to fight bosses and use super moves as well, which was less than fun, and that unclear-ness is definitely one of the biggest factors in making the game a generally not great time to play. It puts a hard timer on your ability to do trial and error, and getting more green transform juice back (especially during boss fights) can be an annoying and time-consuming pain when enemies generally don't infinitely respawn out of boss fights.
This is exacerbated VERY highly by the fact that you actually can't stay transformed indefinitely. You need to keep up a supply of green slime to stay safely transformed, because once you run out, it starts chewing through your health instead. Health is an uncommon drop from enemies or can be regained at save points, but green slime can only be siphoned from weakened enemies using a special move as the human, or it can be gotten in smaller amounts as a drop from most dead enemies. It makes being a big, powerful brawling monster a lot less fun than it should be because you're constantly trying to conserve your power because fighting as the human is a total waste of time because he's so squishy and weak. Adding on top of all that of that is that the hit detection is a bit too much less than perfect, controlling several often used and important mobility forms like the merman and bird are a bit too awkward a bit too often, and generally *every* transformation is worse at fighting than the werewolf (in a non-elemental situation), and you have a brawler that is frustrating just as often as it is satisfying.
The presentation is pretty good. The lab and outdoor environments look nice, and the animations and monster designs also look really cool. The animations for the werewolf were apparently so nice, Sega would even re-use them for Sonic's Werehog transformation in Sonic Unleashed (an eagle-eyed friend of mine who watched me play it pointed out x3). The music is also pretty good, but the way they use it isn't great. Each transformation has its own theme that plays when you're as it, so though you do get to hear those fun themes quite a lot, areas and levels don't really have music associated with them very much as a result.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Especially if you don't mind looking up puzzle solutions when they get you stuck, this game is actually an alright time. It's definitely not worth hunting down particularly, because even AT BEST it is mediocre, but it's still a fun enough and quite interesting piece of Sega's history at the end of the day. Not super worth playing, but an enjoyable enough time if you're gonna sit down with it.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
