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|  "RANDOM GAMES #37: Eternal Dreamcast Edition" , posted Mon 23 Sep 03:42:  
Previous thread: >>RANDOM GAMES #36
In Chaz's absence, it falls to me to save us all from load times with the newest Random Thread, only slightly late for the 20th anniversary of the US Dreamcast's 9.9.99 release! Two decades later, we're still waiting for Shenmue to finish and for another Soul Calibur as perfect as 1, so it's as relevant as ever. MEANWHILE:
You'd better believe MMC is talking about River City Girls!quote:
-It's the best sprite art and 2d animation i've seen from a new game in years.
-Pressing the attack button to perform screen transitions is an idea that never should have made it through testing.
-RCG tries its best, but
-River City Rival Showdown: IT IS EXTREMELY GOOD GO PLAY IT NOW
Speaking of potentially exciting things that are slightly late:
Indivisible has an opening cinema animated by Studio Trigger and is coming out...next month?! Since it's the Skull Girls people and the Cafe features in that, we're honor-bound to try it.
13 Sentinels is also finally coming out in November. I don't like giant robots that are not Escaflowne, but the art is beautiful and they should have paid off Atlus' extortion money by now so they can make other things soon.
Romancing SaGa 3 and Scarlet Grace are coming out in English and you are going to play them now if you didn't play them in Japanese, even if the localization is odd, whether you like it or not!
Finally, I am reading delighted reviews of that Goose game we were talking about before, which appears to be a perfect balance of acting like a jerkoff but in kind of an artsy way, so naturally it's perfect for me.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Mon 23 Sep 06:15] |
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| |  "Re(3):RANDOM GAMES #37: Eternal Dreamcast Edi" , posted Tue 24 Sep 03:42
There is never a reason not to post the most OP video about Geese on the internet (though I see that the new Tier Zoo videos is about hippos, and I need to watch that once I'm done).
Speaking about games and animals, this week-end, I was playing something called Later Alligator, and it could be quite the MMC-compliant game.
It's the story of Pat, a normal alligator of New York City, who has overheard that his family is planning a secret party tonight. After thinking it through, he came to the conclusion the only reason his family would plan a secret party is to murder him (and the fact today is Pat's birthday is totally irrelevant, why are you even bringing this up, what's the connexion between birthdays and family parties anyway?)
He hires you to find out the truth about the secret party, so you're going to walk through the city interviewing each family member. The game is a sort of point-and-click, and each family member challenges you to a mini-game, most of the time very simple and hilarious (unfortunately describing the best ones means ruining the joke, which makes it hard to pitch, so you'll have to trust me on that one). Meanwhile, you'll also have to deal with Pat's increasing paranoia as he calls you to come back urgently to his hotel room because he forgot the code of his door, or because someone tried to kill him with strawberry jelly, or because ghosts in his closet have stolen his shoes.
It's a very dumb and funny game with a distinctive artstyle, groovy soundtrack, and it lasts about 4h which is just the perfect time to have fun without having the game overstaying its welcome. It's not going to win any GOTY awards (those are for Scarlet Grace, Baba is You and Heaven's Door this year), but I'd wholly recommend it if you're at home, sick on a Saturday, and bored out of your mind.
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| | "Re(6):RANDOM GAMES #37: Eternal Oneechan-bara" , posted Sat 28 Sep 03:54:
quote:
While eagerly awaiting an Iggy-ntonian review of Blasphemous which highly reliable sources confirm is coming soon, I'm here to point out the release of Oneechanbara Origin since the Cafe is the #1 English-speaking consumer of the Simple 2000 Series, as far as I can tell. I must admit I wasn't keeping track, but this one combines the 2004 original and its sequel. What's striking is that the fun-because-they-suck graphics are actually now...extremely attracive and cel-shaded-looking?!
I unironically love the Oneechanbara series because it has no qualms whatsoever about being pinky violence trash. We should all be so confident about our place in the world. Heaven knows I don't want every game to be like this but I'm looking forward to trying out Origin... when no one else is home so I don't have to explain what I'm playing.
The Simple 2000 series first gained a following due to their outrageously high concepts and outrageously cheap budgets but I also admire them for their longevity. AAA franchises have come and gone but games like Oneechanbara and EDF continue to plug along year after year. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
As much as I love EDF, the one thing that saddens me about the success of EDF relative to everything else Sandlot has done is that it means Sandlot has never again made a game focused on giant robots fighting giant monsters on home console since the PS2. They made a ridiculously good looking Tetsujin 28 game that has some of the most POWERFUL explosions you'll ever see, too!
It's also important to point out that Sandlot actually hasn't made an EDF game every year, and more than one time they even had quite a large gap between the release of any game at all!
2006 was probably one of the most fortunate years in terms of releases from Sandlot, in that they released two entirely different new games on two entirely different platforms (EDF3 on X360 and a mecha game on the 3DS)!
But from 2006 until 2010, the released nothing at all!
From 2006, if you didn't count Reginleiv, the only EDF games that were released until 2013 were ports of EDF2 and EDF3! The EDF3 port on Vita was a big upgrade with the return of Palewing from EDF2, but if you wanted a truly new EDF game, it was a 7 year wait!
I actually am impressed that the company survived that entire stretch from 2006, because EDF3 was never ported to the Playstation, and Reginleiv never got anything else period. I've got a lot of admiration for Sandlot's resilience, and they are honestly one of the few budget game studios I wouldn't mind working for because I'd love to know how they operate and I'm a huge fan of EDF.
To briefly return to the topic of Oneechanbara:
It's worth remembering that Tamsoft is also the Senran Kagura company! I can see how the pitch for Senran Kagura would've been successful given Tamsoft's prior works (e.g. Oneechanbara), and visual improvements in style and technology from Senran Kagura have surely filtered down to Oneechanbara. I have not played enough Senran Kagura games (to be precise, I have played basically zero SK games....), so I don't know if they used Oneechanbara as a testing ground for things in Senran Kagura. Then again, Senran Kagura has in recent times released a 3rd person shooter, a pinball game, and a reflexology game, and I don't know if Oneechanbara has ever had that kind of breadth.
They've also worked on Neptunia games, which probably have an even clearer path from SK. I imagine Senran Kagura is the money maker for the company, but I am really curious how Oneechanbara games are handled. Do people in the studio who are tired and stressed out from working on SK go to Oneechan for healing in a lower-stress, lower-spec project that has lower expectations? School Girl Zombie Hunter feels like an experiment in Unreal Engine development, having animation problems amateur projects have in doing that complete with camera that behaves like the one you'd get from doing the basic UE tutorial! I imagine that they contracted with Compile Heart for the Neptunia game that was also Unreal Engine, but SG/ZH is them building their own pipeline for making UE games.
I do hope that Senran Kagura doesn't just become a mobage in the future, though. It's ripe for that platform and game style, but it's nice to know somebody out there will make full-fledged cheesecake action/variety games and that those games will make enough money to keep a studio going!
[this message was edited by Spoon on Sat 28 Sep 07:38] |
| | "Re(7):RANDOM GAMES #37: Eternal Blasphemy" , posted Mon 30 Sep 06:40
Indeed, yes! Blasphemous!
It is a good game.
Gameplay-wise, it's surprisingly not as much of a Metroidvania as one would have expected. I obtained my first "traversal upgrade" about 2/3 through the game, and it was something fairly minor. I'm at 99.5%, and I haven't found any of the traditional Metroidvania upgrades such as a double jump. I think I have 5 traversal upgrades, and honestly I'm not sure any of those are necessary to complete the game? They're useful to get collectibles, and there are a great amount of those, but none seem to have been mandatory.
There are many more upgrades (life, mana, power, some moves, and too many equipment slots to fill) though, so the game really seats in a middle of a triangle with "Metroidvania" on one tip, "Chi no Rondo" on another, and "Dark Souls" on the last one, without really fitting into any of the three archetypes.
The first areas are almost classic-Castlevania affairs, then become more and more complex as the game progresses. However, a lot of the discoveries you'll do are ways to backtrack (such as a ladder kicked down to a previous save point, so next time you die you won't have to do the whole detour again). I suppose it’s a way to replace the double jump/flying powers, by making levels easier to travel through once you’ve gone through them once and return to hunt for collectibles.
The main character behaves fairly heavily compared to the pixies that were Alucard or the MC in Hollow Knight. Not to the point of being a Belmont, but still much heavier than, say, Classic Rockman. He has a dash that can be upgraded into a Stinger, but for some inexplicable reason it's tied to an invisible timer (fortunately, an item allow you to lower that timer to almost nothing). His moveset, while fairly adequate, remains limited to a few sword slashes and a couple of spells; nothing comparable to Shanoa or Soma.
Speaking of items, one of the annoying things of the game is the amount of slots you need to equip. You have the rosary beads (the rosary being itself upgradable), the enchantment for the sword, the spells, the relics, on top of which you can collect bones of saints and rescue trapped angels. It's all a bit overwhelming, really.
All in all, it's a good game, without any egregious flaws if you don't expect a new Hollow Knight, and without a lot of elements that distinguish it from the many other 2D action games being released lately.
Except, of course... the art direction.
So, obviously, it's Gothic/Baroque horror, with very good pixel art and animation, and a huge amount of gore and religious imagery.
Which, honestly, wouldn't be anything to write home about... if it wasn't culturally so informed.
We know our Gothic horror in videogames. We've been playing excellent Castlevanias in the past, as well as the 5 Demon/Dark Souls/Borne more recently. They are all very good at the whole "decaying classical European architecture + grim setting + some horribly disfigured corpses" thing.
Something that I had never really thought about until now, however, is that these games are... well... made by Japanese people. Extremely talented Japanese people who have done a tremendous amount of research to make their games appropriately elegant and horrifically refined. But they all focused on the visual aspect, the exterior elements of these religious items and architectures.
Blasphemous, on the other hand, is incredibly Spanish and deeply ingrained in Catholic imagery.
The graphical elements are not some mere tourist tour of Europe. Almost all enemies and backgrounds call back precise paintings or places, some more obvious than others.
For example, these flying guys with spears are cardinals and remind of some Velàzquez paintings, this reanimated corpse held by a lady is a spoof on a Pieta, the shrines that upgrade your sword come from Rodin's atelier, the quest giver in the snow area is obviously a reference to St Sebastian, the lady that upgrades your health bar is any Virgen Dolorosa... etc.
Goya is the main inspiration throughout the game, unsurprisingly (and rightfully). He's everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and more, and more.
The game is extremely Andalusian, with a lot of architecture inspired by Sevilla or Cordoba, and of course all the insane festivities of the semana santa and the hordes of penitents. And that's what makes the game so fascinating: it's not just a giant reference of famous art pieces made "spooky". Every element makes the game richer by evocation, filling a player familiar with the original elements with a web of meanings the more they decipher them, and create a dizzying carnival of symbols that feeds into the main themes of the game.
While Blasphemous doesn't refer to any known religion, the stand-in is transparent. But instead of creating a simple bizarro-catholicism, with God, Jesus, Mary and the saints being replaced by other characters with different visuals and names but similar functions, the religion of Blasphemous uses the actual message and practice of the most pious, orthodox, and fascinatingly morbid Catholicism, with surprisingly little window-dressing.
The entire game resolves about guilt. Normally, Catholicism rejects the idea of the innate depravity of man that Protestants and Lutherans profess (to make it really quick, Protestants generally think that you can't be saved without the grace of God). Catholicism canon teaches that not only the sacraments (Baptism first and foremost) are a remission of the original sin, but also that, since man has been made to God's image, it has free will and is not condemned to commit sin.
Of course, not being condemned to sin doesn’t mean it’s easy or even possible to never sin. And since, contrary to Protestants, you had the possibility to not sin, and did it anyway, it makes the link with personal guilt and responsibility very intimate. Punishment and pardon are two fundamental facets of the everyday faith, along with its companion, blind obedience. Nowadays, punishment is moral, philosophical or ritual; however, the closer you go to the glorious centuries of Spain, the more the public mortifications reached Folsom Fair amount of insanity (and still do in some areas).
Guilt, in Blasphemous, exists outside of time and narration. The main character, the Penitent One, is on a journey to atone for his sins, whose nature is never touched upon and whose existence would be dubious if it were any important. The actual reason for penance is not an meaningful topic; the focus is on suffering and atonement. Forgiveness is not automatic, regardless how much you punish your flesh. Thus, instead of penance being a voyage from sin to forgiveness, it remains, stilted, as its own end, devoid of origin, past, or hope.
There is no conflict in the game, since every enemy or ally is just here for their own mortification as an end to itself, and purification is not assured even after total destruction of the flesh. What makes the game so desperate is that "hope" doesn't have much meaning; what makes the player push forward is the necessity for the penance to continue. The fetishisation of pain and wilful self-torture is more than just goal and end: it's a complete circular system.
I'm sure we all have played countless RPGs with made-up religions, where midway through the game you discover that main religion in which your character had been raised were actually the bad guys all along, and they were actually trying to resurrect the Antichrist, or maybe they were just very very corrupt. It's a very useful trope, but it's also generally a very poor device that more often than not amounts to "fake religions are bad". It's honestly not really convincing, and lack any sense of correlation with the real world.
Where Blasphemous's depiction of religion works in unique and powerful ways is that it follows actual Catholic practice extremely closely, and makes the entire made-up religion of the game a much more terrifying system by removing any threat at the scenario level. No one is an antagonist in the game. Everyone welcomes pain and suffering not only as something necessary, but also something beautiful and deserved. There is no scooby-doo moment where the religion or pope are revealed being something sinister: everything you know from the beginning is all there is to know. No character can even imagine to question the main dogma of penance or look outside of it, since the destruction of their own flesh via self-torture is its own gratification. Paradoxically, there is no salvation, there is no hope in Blasphemous, because everything is already decided. By distillating Catholicism into its more extreme, and grotesque, practices, the game ultimately illustrates one of the main debates that have animated the church for two millennia: how can you have free will if God is omnipotent, how can he know everything if I have free will, how can free will exist in a universe overseen by an infinitely perfect being.
This is why using all that impressive amount of classical art into the game wasn’t mere savvy quotations for hipsters: the game uses art in the same way Catholicism used art and beauty after the Renaissance and beyond, as a mean to meditate over its most sacred mysteries.
This is what separates Blasphemous from Castlevania and Dark Souls's pretty, but hollow, visuals. It only becomes more interesting the more knowledge one has about some general Catholic discussions, from Augustine to the twilight of the XIXth century, towards the end of religion’s reign over the masses, before political ideas and utopias replaced it across Europe with different flavours of horror. My own knowledge is quite basic, so I’m sure I’ve missed a ton of references and keys, but it's enough to make the whole object feel very unique.
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| | "Re(8):RANDOM GAMES #37: Eternal Blasphemy" , posted Tue 1 Oct 00:37
quote:
Indeed, yes! Blasphemous!
It is a good game.
Gameplay-wise, it's surprisingly not as much of a Metroidvania as one would have expected. I obtained my first "traversal upgrade" about 2/3 through the game, and it was something fairly minor. I'm at 99.5%, and I haven't found any of the traditional Metroidvania upgrades such as a double jump. I think I have 5 traversal upgrades, and honestly I'm not sure any of those are necessary to complete the game? They're useful to get collectibles, and there are a great amount of those, but none seem to have been mandatory.
There are many more upgrades (life, mana, power, some moves, and too many equipment slots to fill) though, so the game really seats in a middle of a triangle with "Metroidvania" on one tip, "Chi no Rondo" on another, and "Dark Souls" on the last one, without really fitting into any of the three archetypes.
The first areas are almost classic-Castlevania affairs, then become more and more complex as the game progresses. However, a lot of the discoveries you'll do are ways to backtrack (such as a ladder kicked down to a previous save point, so next time you die you won't have to do the whole detour again). I suppose it’s a way to replace the double jump/flying powers, by making levels easier to travel through once you’ve gone through them once and return to hunt for collectibles.
The main character behaves fairly heavily compared to the pixies that were Alucard or the MC in Hollow Knight. Not to the point of being a Bel
-- Message too long, Autoquote has been Snipped --
Thank you for that beautiful writeup. I absolutely have to support and play this game now!
www.art-eater.com
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| | "Re(8):RANDOM GAMES #37: Eternal Blasphemy" , posted Wed 2 Oct 06:54:
quote:
Iggy's detailed analysis of Blasphemous' aesthetic and themes
Well done, this is very illuminating in terms of historical context and I doubt this specific information could be found elsewhere (at least not until people from other forums have popped by the cafe to sample our wonderful culture). It does sound like the developers have an interesting and coherent vision. A question does leap to mind, though.
Given that the focus is ultimately on suffering and atonement, is the act of penance something the player actively performs while playing the game, or is it just something your character deals with on his own during cutscenes?
People do seem to be describing the game's design as "punishing," so I guess there's that, but I'm wondering if there are other interesting ways the theme carries through to gameplay. Actually, the idea of having so many slots for regalia and relics sounds very clerical to me. But it sounds as though it's more fussy than meaningful.
I realize this stuff is easier said than done, but I also feel like there's usually some room to add some symbolism to gameplay while staying within the broader conventions of an established genre. For games about exploring areas, finding all the things, and killing all the bosses, the Souls games do have some good convergence of mechanics and lore going on.
/ / /
[this message was edited by Mosquiton on Wed 2 Oct 06:55] |
| | "Re(9):RANDOM GAMES #37: Eternal Blasphemy" , posted Thu 3 Oct 04:20
quote:
Given that the focus is ultimately on suffering and atonement, is the act of penance something the player actively performs while playing the game, or is it just something your character deals with on his own during cutscenes?
Ah.
That's a good point...
I would say that the penance performed by the main character is not so much in cutscenes and rather the game itself.
I wouldn't call the game "punishing" for the player, it's certainly easier than G&G or some old Castlevanias. It is, however, an extremely unpleasant experience for the character.
I think it's something I've never considered: however entertaining it was to move Arthur or Belmont or even Rockman in their games, it was entertaining for me, not for the character being thrown into spikes, or lava, or medusa heads and then spikes.
What Blasphemous does is that it highlights the fact the experience, from the point of view of the character, is not a happy adventure in the world of jelly beans, but a gruesome and excruciating pentathlon. Other games were brushing that on the side, explaining the desire for the character to go forward as a natural heroism that sets Arthur and the others aside from other men and robots. They're (literally for Arthur) knights in shining armors, and they don't need to have any emotion besides having innocents to save.
Because the character of Blasphemous has neither name, past nor enemies, and is nothing but "The Penitent One", it's hard to call him a heroic character. He is his penitence.
He does things, some of which are unquestionably good, some which are more strange, or even simply difficult to understand. Yet, this nothingness is not laziness on the part of the devs (the way you'd feel in some games where the developers haven't spent much thought on the MC and he's basically a stand-in for you, the player). The Penitent One is a character for sure, different from the player that controls him, and he's also deliberately "almost nothing". What remains, thus, is just the unpleasantness of the jumps and murders and spikes.
From the point of view of the player, though, it is not more or less unpleasant than any G&G or Rockman. It's definitely a more pleasant time than the worse moments of Dark Souls, be it a particularly difficult boss you're struggling to beat, or a depressing passage like Blightown (or a shitty moment like Bed of Chaos).
I wonder if there has been a discussion on that point between the developers about whether they'd thought of extending the penance to the player.
But then, why would you spend years to develop a game that's a pain to play on purpose?
Pathologic 2 just did that, and that is a beautiful and uncompromising vision: making a world so horrible that exploring it is a terrible and painful experience. I love that it exists, and I love that I can read the experiences of the masochists (penitents?) who have played it through. But do I want to experience it myself? Absolutely not!
If there is a hard weakness to Blasphemous though, it's definitely here. The game didn't have the guts to go where Pathologic 2 went. With the themes it explores, it's a shame. But as someone who enjoyed playing what I did, it was for the better.
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(2):Nioh 2 Beta, Tetris Effect VR" , posted Mon 4 Nov 13:01:
quote:
looter-shooter / stabber-grabber.
if you find the S&P 500 index to be too simplistic N2 has you covered
all the male characters can wear make-up, all the female characters can have facial hair and everyone can darken their teeth
we were berated by some fellow soldiers, one of whom summoned a magic pig
There's no limit to the hilarious reasons to play Nioh 2! Thanks for the report. I hope for a similarly good set of reasons to play 13 Sentinals even if the setting bores me to tears. I may have to stick to Ass-tral Chain for my gorgeous apocalyptic future people for now.
Oh! I played Tetris Effect way late, but at least it was in VR, so I nearly threw up! Needless to say, I loved every minute of it while my body could handle the 3D, which was pretty exciting. You have never seen blocks falling with such intensity, not even since Lumines.
As usual, Mizuguchi's work here is visually and aurally beautiful. A friend and I wondered whether this musical puzzlemaster loves Tetris and was able to use his incredible resume to get to work on this newest one, or whether he's so far beyond Tetris in his incredible visions that they sought him out, and he was like, "Yeah, okay, I'll make a cool Tetris if you like," in the spirit of a licensed game.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Mon 4 Nov 13:23] |
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