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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Angel Paradise Vol 2 - AAB - 33% (3)
Delisoba Deluxe - AA - 50% (2)
Guardian Force - GGGA - 88% (4)
Langrisser 5 - GG - 100% (2)
Panzer Dragoon Saga - GGGGGAGG - 94% (8) (4 SR)
Phantasmagoria - BBG - 33% (3)
I'm actually kind of surprised PDS got only 8 ratings. I guess its extreme price has kept a fair number from playing it despite its reputation.
Games for this topic:
Body Special 264: Girls in Motion Puzzle
Game Tengoku: The Game Paradise
YU-NO
This is the first of the revote topics, so there's fewer games. Please see the next post for the recommendations from the posters who nominated them. Also, Game Tengoku is a bonus game, since it was missed in the original GAB list.
Body Special 264: Girls in Motion Puzzle - G
ReplyDeleteGame Tengoku: The Game Paradise - A
YU-NO - A
It's easy to write this off as a simple fanservice game, but it would also be doing it a tremendous disservice. In many ways, this is basically the true sequel to Pieces on SNES, and it's far better than the actual sequels that game received. What really stands out to me about this game is that for a fanservice game it's extremely well-polished and has a ton of content, like for many games like this they kind of phone it in on the gameplay side of things but clearly whomever worked on this game was super committed to making it the best game they possibly could. First of all we have the movie puzzles, which are a cool concept that puts an interesting twist on the standard experience of doing Jigsaw puzzles, and it's also something that you could only do in game form. I actually really wish more future Jigsaw games had included these, because even after all this time I still think these are really neat. This would probably have been enough to sell for the game on its own, but there's also 150 standard picture puzzles, which is an absolute ton, and then the game also includes a Pieces-esque vs mode that uses the picture puzzles. If you don't know how Pieces works, it's essentially competitive Jigsaw Puzzling, two players race to complete the puzzles as fast as possible but you can use powerups to mess with the opponent. It's very accessible, unique, and hilarious. In Girls in Motion Puzzle both players play on the same board and the contest is to see who can place the most pieces, but it's largely the same experience, except that unlike Pieces it has 150 different puzzles to choose from so there's way less repetition. This mode is really what elevates it beyond simply being a fanservice game, how many fanservice games bother with multiplayer? You can even play it against the AI. Even when it comes to the fanservice in the game, I feel like it has some charm. It's not as blatantly sexual as many games, it's basically just about a bunch of girls on a tropical vacation, which kind of feels like a throwback to a simpler time. I do kind of wish they had done a version of this game that was animals or something because it doesn't need the fanservice aspect to sell the game, but it's still worth playing even if you might otherwise find it somewhat distasteful because it's fairly tame for the most part and there's a surprisingly high-quality game underneath.
Game Tengoku is kind of like a vertical shmup version of Parodius, though not quite as good. The first thing we have to talk about are actually the game's visuals, which are really nice. The game takes place in an arcade, with the first few levels being themed around arcade attractions before shifting to the worlds of various arcade games. Everything is super bright and colourful and the art really pops, which is actually sometimes kind of a problem because the backgrounds can be a bit distracting with everything that's going on onscreen. This is a borderline bullet hell game, and in particular I feel it often feels kind of cheesy because the screen space is so limited. The screen size somehow feels unusually shrunken vertically, which is not helped out by the fact that many of the enemies are enormous, you're often limited to only the bottom 40% or less of the screen, which gives you very little time to dodge bullets. There are also a lot of things that hit an entire column with basically no warning at all. Weapons also feel kinda mediocre, you have a charge shot which is basically your only effective way to do damage besides your bomb, but it charges fairly slow, you can get two options and powerups for your main weapon but they barely do anything and it often feels like your bomb is the only effective way to deal with many situations because it basically screenwipes and has invincibility (plus you get 3 per life). The game does offer infinite continues so it's not hard to see it all, but I feel like the gameplay is average at best, which is too bad because it really is quite gorgeous. Even the menus are really slick and polished, I just wish they had honed the gameplay a little more.
DeleteWell, Yu-No is certainly something. The first thing to note about it is that it is a 3-disc game, and each disk is effectively a completely separate game which are only loosely tied to each other. The first disk, which is often called the prologue, is a bog-standard ecchi visual novel. Well, bog-standard is not really accurate. This section is utterly atrocious, below B-level trash. Our hero, Takuya, is a completely irredeemable scumbag who is impossibly unlikeable, though for whatever reason everyone around him constantly fawns over him even though he is constantly rude and abrasive. This kind of absolute cesspool of a character can sometimes be funny if the rest of the world treats him like crap, but there is absolutely no humour to be had here, the writing for this entire segment is bland and terrible. Something I have to call attention to is that after almost every line of dialogue, Takuya will have 1-2 lines of monologue, which never contains anything important. He will either just repeat what was just said, say ".....", or make some crude sexual remark. This serves no purpose other than to massively bloat the amount of text in this sequence and absolutely destroys the game's pacing. The gameplay here is also bottom of the barrel, in each scene you have a few options, generally look, move, and talk, and there's some specific sequence in which you have to do all of these things to progress, often nonsense like "talk to this person 3 times, then look at these 3 things, then talk two more times, then look at this thing two times, then try to move, then talk to the person again, then move". Everything about this disc is pure torture, absolutely nothing interesting happens from a story perspective, and it's also insanely long, clocking in at around 4 hours of which I would guess there are around 2000 mandatory textboxes to click through. If this section was the whole game, it would easily be bottom 5 in the entire system's library, in fact if you removed games that were obviously broken like bad ports that run at 5fps I think this would actually be dead last. I almost stopped playing this like 10 times just to give the game a B and be done with it, it really is that terrible, you'll be wanting it to be over with before you even get off the first screen. If you were feeling unbelievably generous, you could say that the intention is for this section of the game is probably to come across as the most genericly terrible VN of all time, because the whole point of this game is that at the end of this disc there's a big twist and then the game completely changes, though if that was the intention the game would have massively benefited from making this section way shorter, you could easily have quartered the length of this section without losing any important story content and it would be far less awful to play through.
DeleteYU-NO (cont'd)
DeleteAnyway, after suffering for 3 hours or so the protagonist gets a package from his apparently dead father telling him to come to the beach at night, where a ton of crazy stuff happens that leads into the second part of the game. As noted before, Disk 2 is, for all intents and purposes, a completely separate game. Everything about the game completely changes, including the gameplay. Instead of being a hideously awful pervy VN, it becomes a mystery thriller point and click game, where you need to unravel various murders and conspiracies while making use of a special device that allows you to rewind time. Even the writing drastically improves, with the amount of monologing significantly reduced and Takuya's constant womanizing and jerkassery mostly eliminated. This is probably one of the most abrupt swerves in all of gaming, and I suppose it makes the game notable if nothing else. Unsurprisingly, this section is vastly better, though it still retains some flaws. One of the biggest ones is the game is still pretty linear and overly reliant on making you check everything in a scene before you can move on, which is made doubly problematic by the fact that the game does not in any way indicate which objects in a scene are interactible, so sometimes you just get stuck attempting to click on absolutely everything until something happens. The time rewinding system, while interesting, is also somewhat hampered by this, as when you go back in time you'll be forced to interact with everything in the same sequence as the first time, you can't just do the important things, you have to see every piece of flavor text and mash your way through every cutscene again (of course there's nothing like a cutscene skip or anything like that). There's no question it's a huge improvement over the first disk though. Finally, there's the third disk. This involves another massive shift in tone, to the game now becoming a kind of fantasy-style isekai game. The time travel aspect of the game is removed here, but it retains the point and click-style gameplay of the second segment. While less interesting, you could maybe argue this works to its benefit as you now at least don't have to rewatch scenes you've done before and the odds of getting stuck is way less. Anyway, we've finally mostly finished talking about the plot. I suppose we should also talk about the art and music, which are one of the highlights of this port. This version has full voice acting, and the visuals have been significantly upgraded from the original (and notably, they look way better than the remake, which has a far more generic art style). The music is also pretty decent (in disk 1, whenever suspenseful music shows up, you know it's going to get significantly less awful). In any case, I can see how this was innovative in its time, if you look at a game like Ace Attorney, the investigation segments quite significantly resemble the point and click gameplay from this game, though as with many highly innovative games many parts of it are somewhat unrefined. I'm actually kind of curious to check out the remake, because I wonder if they fixed some of the game's more obnoxious issues, like the amount of pixel hunting in the point and click segments or the overly long and terrible prologue section, as this does indeed feel like a game that could be a lot better with more polish. In any case, it was still kind of an interesting game to look at, but man do you need a lot of patience to get to the good part.