[Game Journal] The upward spiral of videogames

[Janp]

Phew, what a month this was. I focused more on my work-related stuff and got into (probably not healthy) grindset this month. I was travelling for work and decided to use my time away from everyone and everything that coud serve as a distraction to write my dissertation project proposal. I think it's called that way in english. Basically, before I can conduct my dissertation research, I have to write 30 pages of theoretical background and research design and everything around it and then defend it i nfront of a commission. Which meant I barely had any time for gaming, but especially to write about it here in my journal. And I mean it. I beat Hyperbolica on the 2nd of February and finished Lies of P shortly after that. I even beat Pikmin 4 like a day or two after that, which I'll write about a short review now. It was really a hard month.

Pikmin 4
Pikmin was always a series I was interested in, but never just enough to actually try it. I remember I wanted to get it on 3DS, but there was only a spin-off, or at least that's what it looked like. When I got Switch, I considered Pikmin 3, but there were many games I wanted more. I was closely watching Pikmin 4, when it released and finally snapped to also get ti, when many people pick it as their GOTY of the last year.

And it was worth it. I like the main gameplay loop of using different kind of Pikmins and trying to find the optimal way to use them. It reminded me of the old Lemmings game for some reason. I was always motivated to explore the whole map just in case there is a new type of Pikmin that could help me with getting more treasures and to explore new areas. I don't know if this was case just of this game, but I found the timer for each expedition quite stressful. It felt like I'm wasting my time, when I'm waiting for my Pikmin to finish their work. And at least twice, I run out of time, when I had 99% completion rate on a map and had my Pikmin collecting the last treasure. So I had to waste whole next day just going back and picking the treasure few steps from my base.

I always loved the idea of microworlds. You know the world with its own rules, that is located in our real world. Think of Minuscule. Maybe that's why I also like programming that much. I adore the world of Pikmin. It was so cute and adorable. Each Pikmin had distinct design and personality. The story was fine. It was there to give you some motivation to do stuff, but it made sense for most parts.

What I didn't like was the post-game. Especially the final stretch of the game. I decided to continue and 100% the whole game, because I was having fun and felt like I want more. The story took a huge nosedive. I think the motivation to save your pup was great, but the execution was... pretty weird. There was some random guy just suddenly appearing and being the villain with no apparent reason. The game never bothered to explain, who is he. And then the final act of the game is one huge boring dungeon, where you only fight one boring re-used boss after another. The battle system itself was okay in small dosage, but this dungeon really overdid it. It completely ruined the game for me and I wish I never decided to do the post-game, because this gam would be perfect without it. But the sunk-cost fellacy kicked in and I just had to push through the dungeon to the end and beat the final boss, which was some random dog with barely any relevancy to the rest of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, except for the finale. It had great gameplay loop and the world it build around you was expectional. I'll definitely try the rest of them, since they are all on Switch now. 8.5/10.

March will be same as February. I'll be mostly focusing on work. But I got the Persona bundle on Switch and started playing Persona 3 Portable, so I think I'll beat at least that. And I'll try to pick a game for Game-Along that can be beaten on Switch or using emulators on my phone or work notebook.

 

[Janp]

Okay, Persona 3 Portable is down. I'm ready for the next installment, but first, let's talk about this one.

Persona 3 Portable
Persona and Shin Megami Tensei are another two series I always had my eyes on. I played Shin Megami Tensei 3 remake in 2022 and also wanted to play the 5th one, but didn't get to it yet. And with the new version being released soon, I took a chance with Persona. There was nice offer for all three of them on the Switch, so I picked it up and decided to start with the first one... Well, third one actually. I expected similar experience with all the positives and negatives. And surprisingly, I got exactly that. Maybe a little bit better in some regards and worse in different regards.

Let's start with the positives. I adore the cast of characters the game presents to you. High school romcoms and teen drama are my guilty pleasure. I always enjoyed the sixth Harry Potter movie the most because of that. There is something charming about teens' banal, sometimes trivial, yet important problems they have to tackle on their way to adulthood. Persona kinda felt like a good Slice of Life anime in this regard. I also always preferred character-based stories, ao I was glad that Persona is all about them. Yes, there is some overarching story, but the true strength lies in the characters and their interactions. It was the main driving factor for me to finish the game until the end. I enjoyed deep diving into characters' personalities and slowly building a relationships with them. I think my favourite were Kenji and Yuko. Kenji especially. He had both over-the-top, yet relatable storyline about his love for someone he can never have.

One of the main parts of the game is the life sim. You play as a highschooler and have to go to the school. You have to balance your time wisely around your friends and social life and your academics success. I felt a little overwhelmed by it from time to time, because I felt like I'm falling behind. But I managed to level up all my stats few in-game months before the end. And this part of the game kinda lost its meaningless, because of that, since I couldn't get more rewards. I think if I could see how many activities I need to complete to max the stat, I could probably get more out of the game. But some interactions were locked behind maxxing these stats, so I think it's a good thing I did it this way. I even managed to finish all storylines, except one, which I failed to even start, because I had no idea how.

The second part of the game is all about battles. I like the battle system. It's the same battle system used in Shin Megami Tensei 3 remake, but a little bit more forgiving. There are several types of damage like piercing, ice, electric, light and so on, and each character can have a weakness or resistance (or even the immunity) against these types of damage. So far it's similar to Pokémon. But, if you manage to hit your enemy with super-effective attack (or critical hit), they will be knocked down and you can attack again. And if you manage to knock down all enemies, you can unleash a super powerful AoE attack. But the game has the very same problem as Shin Megami Tensei. Since exploiting weaknesses gives you a big adavantage, pretty much all bosses and mini-bosses have no weaknesses. So you have to slowly beat them out with regular attacks and it gets boring pretty quickly. I don't think I used different strategy on any of them, because of this. Just regular attacks, healing and dispelling debuffs. And most bosses were forgettable because of this. I can think of 2 maybe 3 bosses that had interesting bossfight.

And the battle system isn't the only problem I had with this portion of the game. You are introduced to Tartarus tower at the start of the game. It's a tower full of shadows, your primary enemies and you are told that you have to explore it. But the tower has no relevance to the story three entire game, until the very end. Yet, you are forced to slowly clear it. This was probably the worst part of the game. The tower was divided into several blocks, each with different style. But the floors were all randomly generated and the only difference between floor 20 and 50 was the number of the floor. Floors are made out of the combination of 4 rooms - huge rooms, huge room with stairs, huge room with exit and small hallway. There are occasionally either an enemy or a treasure, but neither of them was interesting. Each block had about 5 enemies that repeated over and over again (and blocks usually had just a recolour of the same enemies) and I don't think I ever found a better equipment in the chests that I already had equiped. If only there weren't that many floors to go through. But having to clear ~250 boring and empty floors was a chore and also a reason why I put the game down several times because I just wasn't feeling like wasting my time on this stupid tower.

Overall, I think the game highly overshoots the pure amount of floors in the tower you have to get through. If only they were somewhat differentiated, but they all have the same structure and are just pain to get through. Which is a shame, because the other half of the game is great and I was looking forward it. 7.5/10.

I plan on playing Persona 4 Golden and 5 Royal, because I heard they have better dungeons, while also keeping the life sim fun to engage with. But first, I'll play my Game-Along game - Untitled Goose Game. And I'm slowly playing Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The first game was fun, and this one is also fun so far, but I don't think I'll 100% it. I'll just go through the story.

 

[Janp]

Okay, it's almost the end of March, I think I should update this thread again. I was mostly traveling for work in March, so I only got some time to play. I managed to finish Marvel's Spider-man: Miles Morales, that I started in December. It was okay, but not that good as the original. I mainly played on my Switch and beat my Game-Along game for this month - Untitled Goose Game. It was fun. Nothing groundbreaking, but fun little game. And just few days ago, I also beat Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion in one sweep. It didn't click with me that much. Let's talk about them all...

Marvel's Spider-man: Miles Morales
As a sequel to the Marvel's Spider-man, I was looking forward to it, because I enjoyed the first game. This one is a little bit smaller, which is always a bonus.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to say about this game to not repeat myself. It has all the positives and negatives of the original, there isn't really anything new. Miles has some new moves, but that's it. It's a solid follow up, but it barely does anything new.

But there was something that I didn't like at all. You start the game fairly strong, so the game throws "strong" enemies your way. You face bullet-sponges and enemies tat can be hit only with one type of attack right from the start. Which is something I hated in the end game of the original. And here this problem is in all fights. And it's not like these enemies have better movesets to make the fight harder. They just have more HP or are immune to must pf your attacks. So the fights are longer and quickly gets boring.

I also wasn't that involved in the story, because I barely know anything about Miles Morales lore. I grew up with Peter Parker and was never interested in comics enough to read more than some of his stories. So the story didn't really have the same effect on me.

Overall, it was alright, but not as the original. 7/10.

Untitled Goose Game
Untitled Goose Game falls into a category of games I was interested in during their release, but not being able to play them for some reason, but then forgetting about them any time I could play them. Which is surprisingly huge list of games. But the Game-Along finally tipped me to play it.

It is an unique game, a "genre" I like. You play as a goose on a mission to wreck a havoc on a peaceful town. It's a puzzle game at a core, with a little bit of stealth thrown in there. You are given a to-do list of evil deeds and have to figure how to complete it. All while dodging the sight of the ones you want to bless with your genius.

It's pretty easy to get a grasp of controls and the laws of the game. The tasks are cryptic, yet fairly easy to decipher once you explore the given area. And I'm pretty sure there are multiple ways to tackle some of them. For example, there was a task to make someone buy one of their stuff back from a market. And I can think of at least 2 NPCs you can steal something from before that. I even think you could probably leave this task for later and make someone from late-game locations buy their stuff back. But what I didn't like was the fact that each location had the same kind of tasks. There was one kind, in which you were suppose to gather some things from the location to a special place. You're gathering food for a picnic in one location, various stuff from the market in another one, dishes and silverware for a romantic dinner in yet another location and so on. It got old pretty quickly, since most NPCs had the same pattern in their behaviour. There were some unique behaviours, for example a kid that is afraid of you, but most of NPCs just shoo you away or ignore you.

The game has a good idea and the novelty of the concept never wears off, since the game is just 2 hours long. And I think that's enough. I can't imagine it being any longer.

Overall, it was fun game, but didn't really leave the lasting impression. 7.5/10.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
Yet another indie title that was on my radar for a long time. And it is finally time to check it out.

The premise of the game is simple. You play as a Turnip Boy, whose glasshouse got confiscated for not paying taxes. And to get it back, you start doing errands for the mayor.

I adore the world of this game. All characters have cute and clever designs based on fruits and vegetables. I was a little bit surprised by the depth the lore goes in, but it was a nice surprise. I didn't explore the world 100%, but I think I get most of the unsettling lore behind the living fruits and vegetables. I also enjoyed the humour of the game.

I think the game was lacking in the gameplay. The main loop is about going from a place A to a place B, getting an item there and going back to the place A. Which sometimes meant a lot of backtracking. For example, at one point, you have to go south from the central village, get an item there, then go north from the village to exchange this item for another one and then go back to south to finally continue the story.

There are puzzles, but I feel like they stay fairly simple the whole time. There wasn't really any depth in them. You usually do one unique puzzle at the start of the dungeon and then repeat this same puzzle the whole dungeon and it never gets more interesting than that first puzzle.

I would say the same about the combat. It's simple and it would be fine, but the game also has bunch of bossfights, which are pretty boring, since there is really just one strategy to beat them.

Overall, it was average experience. The world was fun and the humour landed perfectly. On the other hand, the gameplay was poor and repetitive. 6/10.

Next up is my first 2024 release - Dragon's Dogma 2. I also started playing Persona 4 Golden on Switch. Both of them are fine so far.

 

[Janp]

Phew, the time flies. The start of this month was crazy in uni. Students started hunting for their Bachelor's Thesis supervisors and I've been pretty popular choice. But we quickly run into a problem - I focus on research of teacher's attitudes and competencies towards using digital technologies (and informatics topics like programming) in schools, but the new dean doesn't like the idea of having research as the main focus of BTs. So after few days of fighting, I was able to get some research ideas greenlit and figure out different topics for the rest of the students. But wait, this is gaming journal... I also managed to play a little bit in all this stress. I got Dragon's Dogma 2, a brand new release of 2024. I think it's the first 2024 game I played this year. Good thing - it sets the the bar so low that I don't think I can find a worse game this year. Bad thing - well, actually the same. It took me majority of the month to beat it. So let's talk about this mess.
EDIT: When I started working on this thread, there was still about a half of April left. Now that I'm finishing it, there are only few hours of April left. Yeah, this month was fun...

Dragon's Dogma 2
Where to start with this game? I know about the original and was planning to play it one day. Some of my friends recommended it to me, since it reminded them of Gothic. But since the sequel got released, I decided to go with it instead.

The game starts strong. Like really strong. GOTY contender strong. It drops you in the world fairly quickly and first encounters with goblins and harpies are deadly. There is nice urgency in both the main and side quests. The game showcases that the world evolves around you, even when you don't interact with it. For example, there is a quest to save a guard lost in a woods, but you are put on hidden timer, because the guard fights monsters and you only have time until his HP is depleted. Picking up your first pawns is fun. Finding your first cave to explore is great.

But then... the game stops evolving around 4 hours in. You get stronger, but you still fight the same bunch of goblins and harpies, the story devolves into bunch of incoherent fetch quests, characters become non-existent, there is nothing to explore and you kinda stop to care about everything.

Let's start with the best part of the game - the battle system. The best way to describe it is that it feels like a lite version of MH battle system. At the start of the game, you only have one skill on your picked class and the fights feel hard, yet fair. It feels like every class is needed and you have to make a hard decision of which 4 classes to pick for yourself and your pawns. But as you level up and get better gear, you quickly find out that every class gets a way to deal with every enemy. For example, I started as Thief and struggled with flying enemies, since my pawn's class was Fighter. So I picked Mage and Sorcerer pawns to take care of flying enemies. But as I leveled up my Thief class, I quickly got skills to counter flying enemies. And my Fighter also got skills to bring flyers down. My Thief quickly became unstoppable one-man army. Many battles ended before my pawns could even react. Aside from regular enemies, there is also a bunch of big bosses. And once again, they are fun at first, but you quickly find one universal strategy to kill them all. Again, my Thief basically solo'd them all fairly early in the game.

And here comes the huge problem with the battle system. The lack of enemy variety. There are goblins, lizardmen, harpies, wolves, skeletons, zombies and souls for the regular enemies. And while yeah, there are different kind of goblins, like big goblins, red goblins, green goblins, they all act the same and the only difference is in their HP and power (and maybe their weakness, but the game becomes trivial so quickly that you can just spam regular attacks to kill everything). The same goes for every other enemy type. There are various types of lizardmen, lighting lizardmen, rock lizardmen, and some other that I don't remember, but all of them dies to the same strategy. And while it's cool to cut off their tail a first, you quickly realize that you can do it with every one of them and it becomes less special.

And it comes back to the same problem the game itself has. It's fun for the first few hours, when you're weak and you're discovering what can you do. For example, I managed to catch cyclops's foot with rope, when it puts it up, pull it and make it fall, but it's far from the optimal strategy of just spamming the same combo again and again until the enemy dies. Or I managed to use the rope to pull a harpie down from the sky and straight to the deadly water. When a dragon started flying away from me, I shot it down by breaking one of its wings. It can be fun, but sadly not for long. There is not as much depth to it like for example in MH.

One of the main gimmick of the game is switching classes, leveling them up and using some of their skills together. As I said, I started as a Thief, which was surprisingly an overpowered glass cannon class. This class gets to use a rope as one of its skills and it is overpowered. You can basically pull anything towards you, stun it on the ground and then deliver a OHKO. Combo this with a skill that makes you invincible and powerful AoE attacks and you just solved all encounters, even with bosses in seconds. When I started to get bored with it, I switched to Ranger, because one quest required it, and stayed as Ranger for a while, until I unlocked Mystic Spearhand, which is pretty good mobile class with bunch of broken skills. It can make your whole party invincible, basically making the whole battle system useless, because you can just cast this over and over again with no drawback and win every fight. And I had no reason to ever switch to another class. Since I automatically won every fight, there was no reason for me to change classes and get the passive bonuses from them. Not that they would bring any meaningful bonuses. Usually just few percent increase that's barely noticable.

The story is... well, there is a little bit of a story. And it makes no sense at all. You start with a simple goal of killing the dragon. Which is something the game immediately forgets and tries to introduce a political plot about getting support in the capital city of the human kingdom. Don't ask me for its name, it doesn't matter. You are then sent on a bunch of stealth missions (with no stealth mechanic in the game), after with the game drops this thread and introduces yet another plot, a fetch quest. And then, suddenly, there is the ending! The final location of the game looks kinda cool, but once again, you just have to do some fetch quests and then the game just ends. The dragon appears randomly at the end and you don't even get to fight it properly.

It's such a disappointing attempt at a story. And the characters don't save it at all. There is an evil queen, that is after you and already tried to kill you at the start of the story, and evil fake Arisen, but you interact with each of them maybe once per the whole story. They are barely characters in the world. You can find them and talk to them, but they will just say some generic stuff and nothing happens. You are supposed to be the public enemy number 1 and they compostela ignore you. And it's not like they don't recognize you, the story tries to make you believe that you have to do everything in secret. The character that tells you this will shout "Your majesty" at you on sight, then tell you to meet him somewhere less crowded, after which you have to meet him in the full inn. There is a force ghost character that helps you all the time, he even gives you the whole fetch quest at the end to get a divine weapon that can break the cycle of the world, but then it's randomly revealed that he is the main villain that doesn't want to break the cycle. And he also appears like 3 times in the whole story. There is a character that will help you in the catpeople kingdom, then help you again in one random sidequest, but then is randomly among the villains and you have to fight him. The game also makes him to be this fearsome warrior, yet the battle with him ended before he could even touch me. And the fake Arisen. You investigate his origin, then you never meet him until the endgame, where he's in the same band of villains the previous character is, you fight him and his fake pawns and he barely even says anything. You kill him and that's it. There is a catgirl on the cover of the game, which is a queen of catpeople. Pretty important charater, right? She has no relevance to the story at all. She appears in maybe two side quests and that's her whole part in the game. I think I could write pages about the nonsense of the story and characters.

Overall, this was one huge disappointment. Good start, but I feel like this game needed at least 2 more years of work to make it at least fun to play for more than 2 hours. 5.5/10.

And actually, before I even managed to write down my thoughts on Dragon's Dogma 2, I managed to beat more games. So let's talk about them.

TELETEXT
Okay, do you know what teletext is? It's quite an old technology used on the old TVs to display various pages of informations. And this game is a homage to this idea.

It's a simple Czech puzzle game with a scent of horror. I managed to finish it in about 40 minutes.

You take a role of someone, who is responsible for making the teletext work. You have to investigate the pages, find passwords and login informations to unlock new parts of the system and slowly piece together what is going on and why are you there. I don't want to spoil it, but it was nice story.

The main gameplay-loop is scrapping the page for something that would help you move forward. And I have to say that some puzzles are pretty hard and convoluted. I got stuck few times and had to use the hints that the game offers you. Sometimes, I was so close, yet to far from the solution. I think the game could telegraph what it wants you to do a little bit better. For example, you can let the game take you to the page you're suppose to do something with, but it usually just took me to a page that had the password on it, which I usually already knew, but I had no idea, where to put it. I also like how it plays with your computer. It makes it all more realistic.

Overall, the game's biggest strength is its setting and graphics. Puzzles are fun, but sometimes way too hard. 8.5/10.

The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo
This game is a charming old-school inspired P&C adventure. Well, maybe more of an interactive movie.

It reminds me of the old animated movies and shorts. You follow a character of Mr. Coo on his quest to open a mysterious gift. The world of Mr. Coo is dream-like, a magical ever-changing landscape that is fought upon by two eldritch deities, who can reshape the fabric of the universe itself, even change the flow of time. Or at least this is my interpretation of it, because the game has no dialogue or text that would help you understand what is going on. It employs the visual storytelling and it's up to you to make it all make sense.

It's fairly straightforward in its gameplay. The game switches between linear parts and puzzles and it the game only opens up a little bit at the very end. Which is a little disappointing, especially since the game ends kinda abruptly and on a cliffhanger. Even the whole "many pieces" bit is there for the very end of the game. Not that the game is long, it took me about an hour to finish it, but I can't imagine how much work it had to take to animate all of this.

Overall, I think this is really showcase of the animators, a little bit less of a game tho. 8/10.

Persona 4 Golden
Will put the actual review here in few days, I just wanted to keep all games I've played this month together.

So, that was pretty interesting month. I'm glad I found a fine for shorter indie gems alongside long AAA production. For the next month, I plan on playing yet another 2024 release - Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. I started it and it looks like a well done action adventure game. Nothing mind-blowing, but it looks like it could be fun for few hours. I also plan on playing the last Persona game, Persona 5 Royal. But I'll probably first throw in some shorter indie title, for example DARQ or Don't touch this painting.