And now, SF reports back on the Alex-approved-platformers-with-limited-flying genre.
Cave Story+: Beat this a ~month or so ago. It's fun! I can see why they had to + it, though. No Achievements in the original version? I can only imagine how people who wasted so much time on the original feel, knowing that their accomplishments were futile and will never be given a Steam pop-up of recognition, especially in a game with so much random weird stuff to do.
Anyway, I like Metroid games, and CS is basically indie Metroid, except actually better in a lot of ways (if a tad smaller in scope?). Reminds me a bit of Metroid Fusion in that it's not very exploration focused - here's your next stage, go run it - and also has a plot, although CS's plot is way more enjoyable than Fusion's of course (a low bar to clear). The combat is pretty enjoyable, which is nice (played on Classic difficulty, not wimp difficulty). I already mentioned this in chat, but this is definitely a game whose difficulty curve amps steeply upward - I felt challenged-but-in-control most of the game, defeating some bosses & stages the first try, and occasionally taking a 2nd or 3rd shot when needed. Then the Egg Chamber revisited shows up, and owowowowowow what stop the pain (#$%^ Sisters Dragons right after non-trivial stage w/ no healing). The prison & island's edge were legit, the plantation's easiness put me off my guard, then ZOMGwat the Final Cave, and then the final boss sequence of dying repeatedly. (Of which Malice (?!!) probably picked up the most kills, yes.) Still, hey, that made winning very rewarding. And apparently if I enjoy pain even more, I can do the final cave without the machine gun and with all my weapon levels reduced to 1 if I'm aiming to do the bonus dungeon + true final? Yeesh the difficulty really does keep going up.
The weapon damage mechanic is… interesting, but I'm glad most games don't have it. It makes things very swingy - you get punished for getting hit in losing life, and then you get punished further by nerfing your weapon. It's not a huge deal for the first half of the game, but by the second half when getting hit = losing the godly lvl. 3 Machine Gun of controllable air-dancing, yikes. Like, say, hypothetically after bumping into a spike in the final cave. Hypothetically. Reminds me a bit of how Demon's Souls allegedly punished you a bit for dying.
The plot was… actually rather charming. Killer robots vs. killer bunnies vs. evil sorceress? It's weird, sure, and switches tone a bunch (zany hijinks! comic relief bosses! search for lost puppies! find out the tragic history of 10 years ago! watch your friends die and/or be transformed into horrible beasts!), but dang, it actually works. The funny parts were funny, the sad parts were sad, the menacing parts were actually properly scary & built up. The one thing I could do without were the two bits where your character gets artificially cutscene 'captured' and sent somewhere inconvenient - surely there's a better way to do that?
Anyway, fun game with rewarding bosses. Not really in a hurry to do the extra content but the fact it's there is cool. Definitely recommended for the odd person out there who hasn't played it yet. (Use a gamepad of course - I used my trusty PS2 controller.)
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Touhouvania 2: I don't like Touhou, but I do like Castlevania, and the fact that one Sir Alex helped localize it piqued my interest. It's pretty good! Neat levels, neat boss design, and adding limited flying to the Castlevania formula was definitely an interesting twist. Visually, the game is a fantastic love letter to Castlevania - they really nailed a lot of the iconic Symphony of the Nightish environments while adding their own twist. I'm impressed at the visuals & play-control for a doujin game - it's really professional (except perhaps the fact each character usually only has 1 portrait) The music was okay, but a tad disappointing? Touhou games usually get hype for their music, but nothing super-memorable… except the final boss music, which is awesome and sounds like a Gust final ripoff, and that is a compliment. Okay, the arena stage music was pretty cool too.
Subweapons were strikingly powerful. However, since they are also very helpful vs. the bosses, and you don't get hearts back if you die vs. the boss (well, except the 50 minimum), there was an incentive not to cheese the regular stages too hard with subweapons, except the super-cheap Dagger. Definitely one of the best Daggers in a Castlevania, as a side note. Subweapons were also a tad kept under control for some of the later bosses because they potentially blocked your view of what the heck was going on, which was death.
As another semi-random fact, the damage knockback in this game felt gigantic, especially if you were airborne at the time. Whee go soaring across half the screen. Definitely was the potential for chain lock-ups here, although less likely in normal stages… on the bright side, the invincibility-post-damage time was quite long as well.
Difficulty curve… well, see Cave Story+. With 7 lives per continue, I steadily advanced through the stages; usually something like die to boss, continue, defeat boss, get through next stage on remaining life stock, die to boss, redo stage + boss with 7 lives, die next stage, repeat. I didn't have to learn the boss patterns too deeply because just plain trading damage to get in was often times viable, and then finish with daggers or the axe summon. Alex encouraged 20 lives no shame by !Richter's Arena stage, which helped, but she still wasn't so bad comparatively. The difficulty for stage 7 & 8, though, ouch. S7 Evil butterfly girl slaughtered me repeatedly until I figured out a conservative enough style to get damage in without trading (I did manage to double-KO against her twice, for all that this doesn't count!). Still I must have died a good 40-50 times figuring it out, so pretty respectable. For the final stage, I cranked it down to a more honorable 12 lives per continue to make the stakes a tad higher. S8 !Drac1 was a good fight in that it killed me a bunch early on, but was very clearly 'learnable' - if you don't get hit by beams of doom or the blood-suck attack, all of which are very evadable, the fight's pretty easy. Yukari is just plain easy - she goes down fast and it's very easy to play conservatively vs. her. By later continues, I easily 1-lifed both of these. !Dracula2, however… OW. That was a lot of me just dying and then dying again as doom lasers damage knocked me around the screen into more doom lasers. If you foolishly knock off some of the barriers, I think there are even new beam patterns to learn & die to! Anyway, slowly, agonizingly, I learned the safe spots and how to get to them, and flight patterns that kept me alive and ones that got me dead. The fight is pretty routinized, at least, so I really could feel like I was learning as I went. Oh and running out of magic is of course hilarious instant death usually, so don't accidentally use the spread sword attack or jump kick. So after a ton of deaths (much faster than Cave Story's final sequence at least?) I triumphed, which was properly rewarding, as it was definitely a different kind of Castlevania final battle. More to the point, it didn't feel like a "keep trying till you get lucky" deal; you really have to learn it, and I'd be much more confident in my abilities to defeat her again.
Sadly, if there's a part I didn't like, it'd be the script - sorry Alex! While *visually* the game is totally a Castlevania, the dialogue & plot end up clearly Touhou (with the occasional exception - thanks for 'take you to a good place' at least). I obviously can't complain too much about this - press start to skip & all - but meh. If Cave Story succeeded in being both serious & silly, Touhouvania 2 tried to alternate between them as well, and usually whiffed at both. I will say that as far as menace goes, at least evil butterfly girl succeeded: direct, threatening, to the point, "water the ground with my blood" indeed. The whole style of the fight + music amped up Srs Bizness tension too, nothing like a slow moving instant-death red butterfly to keep you on edge. In the same way, some of the early bosses had some amusing goofball moments (the Marisa battle perhaps?). However, too much time is spent on lame plot exposition of a pretty weak plot (where's my mistress? what's going on? oh something about fighting and unlocking ultimate power, 'k). I think I'd have tried to pick between either straight silliness or tension; and if I went for tension, I'd have actually had there be some sort of evil plot with consequences, and amped up the melodrama for Sakuya betraying her boss. Instead, the game is theoretically serious by the end, except !Drac *wants* Sakuya to fight her, which kills the tension. Like, either Remilia has gone mad with power and Sakuya decides she needs to be put down (srs) OR do the silly case ("let's training! I call vampire lord!!1! isn't this outfit crazy, Sakuya?") I can't blame Alex for any of this, of course, I imagine localizers are somewhat locked down when every other word out of Sakuya's mouth is "Ojou-sama" for the final bits.
Anyway, the above whining is not really relevant to the game and totally skippable, and the game itself was pretty fun. I never liked how the shooter Touhou games seemed to just encourage holding down the fire button and concentrating on nothing but dodging; give the main character a sword and tell 'em that if they want to do damage, they have to get in on enemies, endless dodging won't cut it. So yeah, solid game with good bosses, I approve. Now if only the extra phantasm stage will stop slaughtering me...
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On the note of the above two games, this is a silly idea, but since I've been playing a fair amount of League of Legends lately... LoL is based a lot around dodging 'skillshots', so it seems like it'd make an interesting Metroidvania itself, if Riot ever wanted to dangerously branch out. Which they probably won't (contract it out to someone else, assume lots of brand risk; do it yourself, and risk getting distracted from the true cash cow that is the MOBA). But plenty of LoL characters translate very well to bosses; whee dodging Lux lasers (apparently a Touhou reference anyway, a fact I learned thanks to GlenVeil) or pretty much any other character with fun attacks (Katarina dagger storm?!), and later in the game you get to fight more than one character at once. Rig it so the main character is someone who doesn't really have an ultimate and who has both ranged & close-range attacks - Jayce or Blitzcrank I guess? - then they get to dodge various telegraphed AI ultimates while collecting new weapon upgrades themselves in the castle. And of course in the final boss sequence, there can be the horror in Riven being turned by the evil summoner into her Battle Bunny Riven form if they want to do Cave Story callbacks… well I'm amused thinking about it, at least. Rito pls.
