Cherrim
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Log Update #38
Beat a few more games...!
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney HD- COMPLETED Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney HD
- COMPLETED DLC Quest
- COMPLETED WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter
- COMPLETED Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
- BEATEN Final Fantasy XVI
I needed a Steam Deck game for winding down in bed at the end of the day and I just finished up my 123/AAI playthroughs and I'd picked up the Apollo Justice trilogy over the holidays so I figured I'd finish up a replay of the series with this.
First up, I was very surprised at the art style... it's like upscaled sprites but still with very thin linework. It's a bit weird at first but it looks very slick and I love it WAY more than the art style of the 1-3 trilogy HD games. It kinda reminds me of like... Blazblue with its intricate spritework. I think it's not as nice as the Edgeworth games I just played though which perfectly rode the line between faithful sprite recreation and not being ugly. But like on the whole I vastly prefer this to how bad the 1-3 trilogy looks to me after having played them on DS. I've always loved the spritework in Ace Attorney so much and that was suuuch a big loss in the move to modern consoles. I wish they'd redo the Phoenix Wright trilogy to update the artwork to be like this. Maybe modders can do it?? [EDIT AFTER WRITING:] Actually the artwork isn't spritework, it just looked like it when scaled to Steam Deck screen size. It was simply very, very well done linework that mimicked the original sprites REALLY well. My absolute kingdom for them to remake AA1-3 with this style instead of the godawful HD style they picked originally that ruins all the beautiful detail work of the sprites.
For the game itself... I really loved Apollo Justice when it came out. I think as a standalone game I might have enjoyed it more than the original trilogy. But having played all the games and coming back to this one after a long time away... idk. I mean I still enjoyed myself and I really like the characters, but there were more plotholes than I remembered and it's extra frustrating knowing that Apollo never really gets Justice (heh) in any of his games because he keeps having to share the spotlight with others. Back when I first played this game, I am pretty sure my takeaway was "yeah, Phoenix sort of stole the show by the end, but this was only Apollo's first game and they probably wanted to do it this way to sort of have Phoenix pass the torch for more focused Apollo games in the future" and then that... didn't really happen in a satisfying way.
That said, while I've played all the games after this, I've never replayed any of the other games in AJ's trilogy, so I'm gonna go in with an extremely open mind because I want to like them more this time around than I did when I first played them.
First up, I was very surprised at the art style... it's like upscaled sprites but still with very thin linework. It's a bit weird at first but it looks very slick and I love it WAY more than the art style of the 1-3 trilogy HD games. It kinda reminds me of like... Blazblue with its intricate spritework. I think it's not as nice as the Edgeworth games I just played though which perfectly rode the line between faithful sprite recreation and not being ugly. But like on the whole I vastly prefer this to how bad the 1-3 trilogy looks to me after having played them on DS. I've always loved the spritework in Ace Attorney so much and that was suuuch a big loss in the move to modern consoles. I wish they'd redo the Phoenix Wright trilogy to update the artwork to be like this. Maybe modders can do it?? [EDIT AFTER WRITING:] Actually the artwork isn't spritework, it just looked like it when scaled to Steam Deck screen size. It was simply very, very well done linework that mimicked the original sprites REALLY well. My absolute kingdom for them to remake AA1-3 with this style instead of the godawful HD style they picked originally that ruins all the beautiful detail work of the sprites.
For the game itself... I really loved Apollo Justice when it came out. I think as a standalone game I might have enjoyed it more than the original trilogy. But having played all the games and coming back to this one after a long time away... idk. I mean I still enjoyed myself and I really like the characters, but there were more plotholes than I remembered and it's extra frustrating knowing that Apollo never really gets Justice (heh) in any of his games because he keeps having to share the spotlight with others. Back when I first played this game, I am pretty sure my takeaway was "yeah, Phoenix sort of stole the show by the end, but this was only Apollo's first game and they probably wanted to do it this way to sort of have Phoenix pass the torch for more focused Apollo games in the future" and then that... didn't really happen in a satisfying way.
That said, while I've played all the games after this, I've never replayed any of the other games in AJ's trilogy, so I'm gonna go in with an extremely open mind because I want to like them more this time around than I did when I first played them.
Status
CompletedSystem
Steam DeckDLC Quest
I was feeling pretty tired one night and just couldn't muster up the energy to do anything other than play a mindless game so I scrolled through my steam list and noticed this game. Haven't played it since close to when it came out so I booted it up and quickly played through both campaigns.
I didn't remember much of this game but it did come back to me as I played. According to my Steam achievements, I played it a week after it came out but couldn't finish the second campaign. But I did this time so that's character development! (It had a LOT more exacting platforming than the "base game" so I'm less surprised that I struggled back then and more surprised that I managed it now... I really HAVE gotten better at platformers in the last 12 years!!!)
Anyway, cute silly little game. It pokes fun at the idea of DLC which, while not terribly new by the time this game came out, was still not as mainstream. You can tell it's old though because while the DLC stuff is kinda evergreen, the predatory stuff that the game riffs on has shifted to lootbox stuff which is visibly missing in this game. (That said the creator did make a second game called Loot Box Quest which is a clicker idle game so RIGHT up my alley and you know I'm going to buy it the moment the next steam sale starts.)
There are a lot of stupid little bits in this but I think my fave one is the stupid horse armour dlc actually coming in clutch at the end. Though honourable mention certainly goes to the Canadian Speech DLC in the second campaign.
I didn't remember much of this game but it did come back to me as I played. According to my Steam achievements, I played it a week after it came out but couldn't finish the second campaign. But I did this time so that's character development! (It had a LOT more exacting platforming than the "base game" so I'm less surprised that I struggled back then and more surprised that I managed it now... I really HAVE gotten better at platformers in the last 12 years!!!)
Anyway, cute silly little game. It pokes fun at the idea of DLC which, while not terribly new by the time this game came out, was still not as mainstream. You can tell it's old though because while the DLC stuff is kinda evergreen, the predatory stuff that the game riffs on has shifted to lootbox stuff which is visibly missing in this game. (That said the creator did make a second game called Loot Box Quest which is a clicker idle game so RIGHT up my alley and you know I'm going to buy it the moment the next steam sale starts.)
There are a lot of stupid little bits in this but I think my fave one is the stupid horse armour dlc actually coming in clutch at the end. Though honourable mention certainly goes to the Canadian Speech DLC in the second campaign.
Status
CompletedSystem
PCFinal Fantasy XVI
Well, this certainly was... a game! I was fairly excited when this was announced because it was pretty much right off the heels of Shadowbringers in FFXIV, which was the best Final Fantasy story I'd ever played. I figured with Yoshi P at the helm of another numbered FF, we might see something really great. And then he kept doing interviews during the publicity circuit and managed to completely mangle any excitement I had for the game, so I really only picked this up because: A) PS5 exclusive, B) it was like $35, C) feels weird having beaten every other mainline FF besides the 11 MMO. Of course, in the time it took me to actually finish my copy, not only did it come out on PC but I've also built a PC that could play it really well LMAO. Alas, I still finished on PS5 which was fine. Still much cheaper there lol.
Anyway, the game was very boring. When they said they took a lot of inspiration from Game of Thrones, it feels like they completely misunderstood what actually made GoT great. It wasn't the gratuitous violence, it was the political intrigue. They basically took all the parts I only tolerated from GoT and highlighted it while completely leaving out the parts that I tolerated all the violence for.
Clive is a nothingburger of a protagonist. The only thing I really enjoy about him is the fact that it's hilarious that every time you encounter, like, anyone, all they can say about him is he's hot. Jill is only there to prop up Clive and everyone else is just... in and out of the story too much to get attached. I feel like the only characters I really liked were NPCs and that may well just be because they didn't overstay their welcome. The game does sooo much timeskipping, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it usually uses the timeskips as an excuse to simply not show anything happening. I don't always believe "show, don't tell" is the be all end all of storytelling, but it was so ridiculous any time there'd be a skip as something really important happened and you're sitting there like... huh? No, show me the fallout! But then for like 5 in-game hours you have to sit there and listen to character imply how terrible something was but at least it's all good now and it just sucks because you feel like you missed out on the most important part which was the character connections and growth as a result of the story unfolding. And this happens over and over again!
Battles feel like a chore because your attack options are very limited at the start and once they expand they're just... not very fun or engaging for an action game. Dodging is slow enough that it feels like maybe you're just not supposed to do it except the game rewards you for it and it's quite clear that it's an important mechanic to deal with. The only time battles were genuinely fun is when you were doing an Eikon battle and even then it's just... alright, I guess, since those also mostly just felt like glorified cutscenes.
Anyway the game was very pretty but it didn't really give me much of a fantasy feel because they tried to make the environments all realistic with the exception of ruins which weren't really used well in the story. And I guess the giant crystals but since those were few and far between I keep forgetting about them. Also the maps were boring to run through because there wasn't really any reward for exploring them. You could pick up items but they weren't useful for anything at all--crafting exists in the game but you can so rarely upgrade stuff anyway it's never worth it.
I guess I'm glad I finally played it, though. I have no intention of ever playing the DLC and I hope they never let the writer of this game near another Final Fantasy again.
Anyway, the game was very boring. When they said they took a lot of inspiration from Game of Thrones, it feels like they completely misunderstood what actually made GoT great. It wasn't the gratuitous violence, it was the political intrigue. They basically took all the parts I only tolerated from GoT and highlighted it while completely leaving out the parts that I tolerated all the violence for.
Clive is a nothingburger of a protagonist. The only thing I really enjoy about him is the fact that it's hilarious that every time you encounter, like, anyone, all they can say about him is he's hot. Jill is only there to prop up Clive and everyone else is just... in and out of the story too much to get attached. I feel like the only characters I really liked were NPCs and that may well just be because they didn't overstay their welcome. The game does sooo much timeskipping, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it usually uses the timeskips as an excuse to simply not show anything happening. I don't always believe "show, don't tell" is the be all end all of storytelling, but it was so ridiculous any time there'd be a skip as something really important happened and you're sitting there like... huh? No, show me the fallout! But then for like 5 in-game hours you have to sit there and listen to character imply how terrible something was but at least it's all good now and it just sucks because you feel like you missed out on the most important part which was the character connections and growth as a result of the story unfolding. And this happens over and over again!
Battles feel like a chore because your attack options are very limited at the start and once they expand they're just... not very fun or engaging for an action game. Dodging is slow enough that it feels like maybe you're just not supposed to do it except the game rewards you for it and it's quite clear that it's an important mechanic to deal with. The only time battles were genuinely fun is when you were doing an Eikon battle and even then it's just... alright, I guess, since those also mostly just felt like glorified cutscenes.
Anyway the game was very pretty but it didn't really give me much of a fantasy feel because they tried to make the environments all realistic with the exception of ruins which weren't really used well in the story. And I guess the giant crystals but since those were few and far between I keep forgetting about them. Also the maps were boring to run through because there wasn't really any reward for exploring them. You could pick up items but they weren't useful for anything at all--crafting exists in the game but you can so rarely upgrade stuff anyway it's never worth it.
I guess I'm glad I finally played it, though. I have no intention of ever playing the DLC and I hope they never let the writer of this game near another Final Fantasy again.
Status
BeatenSystem
PS5WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter
This is a game I played the demo for during the last Steam Next Fest and I loved it soooo much. I missed out buying it during its release discount and was kicking myself, so the very next time it went on sale, I snapped it up immediately, and no regrets!!
I actually highly recommend everyone play the demo because it's one of the most unique demos I've ever played. It frames the full game as, like, the protagonist going to a fortune teller to get advice on whether or not to take the temp job and you get to play through some partial days and it's a really good hook for the story and also lets you play some full levels so to speak. And then that framing is nowhere in the full game, which is just the aftermath of taking the job. It's a fun way to do it and it feels like you're getting extra bonus story.
The gameplay is pretty fun, if simple. You are watching over a vendor stall for cleaning magical artifacts so you have to clean the items everyone passing by hands over to you. You can spin the item to check out every nook and cranny and use different tools (that largely all work the same way) to remove different blemishes on the item. Some of them are dangerous so you have to be really careful with where you click while others are tricky and magical so you have to figure out the trick to finding all the things on them. While you're doing that and making slight choices, a conspiracy unfolds around you.
But what really drew me in and is what I will fondly remember the most is the writing. It's really silly and made me laugh a lot. You play as a goblin who really isn't taking stuff seriously and your dialogue options reflect it and sometimes it's just so ridiculous. the characters are also pretty neat. There's a lot of recurring NPCs who have a whole schtick, like this one spider-looking NPC who keeps bringing you more and more dangerous artifacts to clean in the hopes that you'll die in the process, expressing disappointment every time you successfully hand it back to her. Or the mouse catcher who always sneaks off without paying. The artifacts are just as much characters as the actual characters sometimes, too, and the fact that they're magical makes them really interesting to figure out and clean. Even the background NPCs who walk by on the busy street while you work the stall are interesting to watch with their bizarre alien-like designs. This game is really just such a treat!
My literal only complaint about the game is just that I wish it was a bit faster to play through it. I keep missing this really specific thing to get an achievement and it's on like day 6 of 7 and it's incompatible with some of the other achievements I'd missed so I've played through the game like 4+ times now and last time I went through I accidentally skipped it because I was trying to mash through dialogue so fast and wasn't paying attention, augh! It leads to the only achievements and ending I'm missing and I'm gonna have to do it all again but I think I'll try to save it for a year or so from now when I'm just kind of itching to experience the game again.
I actually highly recommend everyone play the demo because it's one of the most unique demos I've ever played. It frames the full game as, like, the protagonist going to a fortune teller to get advice on whether or not to take the temp job and you get to play through some partial days and it's a really good hook for the story and also lets you play some full levels so to speak. And then that framing is nowhere in the full game, which is just the aftermath of taking the job. It's a fun way to do it and it feels like you're getting extra bonus story.
The gameplay is pretty fun, if simple. You are watching over a vendor stall for cleaning magical artifacts so you have to clean the items everyone passing by hands over to you. You can spin the item to check out every nook and cranny and use different tools (that largely all work the same way) to remove different blemishes on the item. Some of them are dangerous so you have to be really careful with where you click while others are tricky and magical so you have to figure out the trick to finding all the things on them. While you're doing that and making slight choices, a conspiracy unfolds around you.
But what really drew me in and is what I will fondly remember the most is the writing. It's really silly and made me laugh a lot. You play as a goblin who really isn't taking stuff seriously and your dialogue options reflect it and sometimes it's just so ridiculous. the characters are also pretty neat. There's a lot of recurring NPCs who have a whole schtick, like this one spider-looking NPC who keeps bringing you more and more dangerous artifacts to clean in the hopes that you'll die in the process, expressing disappointment every time you successfully hand it back to her. Or the mouse catcher who always sneaks off without paying. The artifacts are just as much characters as the actual characters sometimes, too, and the fact that they're magical makes them really interesting to figure out and clean. Even the background NPCs who walk by on the busy street while you work the stall are interesting to watch with their bizarre alien-like designs. This game is really just such a treat!
My literal only complaint about the game is just that I wish it was a bit faster to play through it. I keep missing this really specific thing to get an achievement and it's on like day 6 of 7 and it's incompatible with some of the other achievements I'd missed so I've played through the game like 4+ times now and last time I went through I accidentally skipped it because I was trying to mash through dialogue so fast and wasn't paying attention, augh! It leads to the only achievements and ending I'm missing and I'm gonna have to do it all again but I think I'll try to save it for a year or so from now when I'm just kind of itching to experience the game again.
Status
BeatenSystem
PCEmio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
Okay, I have to say I do not understand how this game got good reviews. It has some strengths but I don't think they're good enough to offset how boring and uninspired the rest of the game is. I'd never played anything else in the series so a few little references to previous games definitely went over my head, but I think the games are standalone enough that you can play any of them and not feel lost.
That said, the gameplay feels very dated. I think it's basically a slightly more streamlined version of the original games from the 80s. I can see how it might appeal to people in terms of giving you a sense of agency over the investigation, but the fact that there don't seem to be branching paths just makes it feel pointless and annoying in the end. Instead of doing what comes naturally to advance conversations, you're doing this weird song and dance where you ask about a topic until your conversational partner clams up, then you have to figure out how to get them to keep talking but usually it's just some weird combo of talking about other things, showing them something, sometimes looking at them... it's generally not hard to figure out what the game wants because you can always stop and "think" about what to do and it'll often give you a hint, but it was just so tedious going through all the options trying to figure out what weird quirk of writing will finally let something happen. And this is how every single conversation works. It allowed for a few ludonarrative things like one time near the end when someone tells you to stop your investigation and go home and the choice to proceed is to actually hit the "save and quit" option which is usually just for, you know, saving the game and quitting to the main menu, so that was cute. But on the whole, I don't think that anything gained by having this be so convoluted was worth how annoying it was to play this game. But then if they streamlined conversations, the game would probably be half the length because the writing would have to be much tighter... and it's already a pretty short game.
Storywise... I don't know that I've ever experienced such a boring murder mystery. The characters were pretty bland and the POV characters barely did anything at all. Sooo much time was spent on characters that were not relevant to the story. Like the teacher? He's in so many scenes in the early game that amount to absolutely nothing and he's basically just there to hit on his old kouhai (from like? middle school? dude you're a teacher who's graduated university WTF are you doing still pining over someone you knew for a year in middle school) and then make her assure him he's a good teacher when he gets down in the dumps. It was too much, especially with the male detective who, while probably my favourite character at the end, was kind of an annoying womanizer earlier on so going from one character talking to the teacher to the other character talking to the police detective was like ugggghh make it stop.
There were 12 chapters in this game and it truly felt like nothing happened at all for the first 2/3rds of it. You learn the basic details of the case in the prologue and then learn almost nothing else new for several chapters. Any time you do learn a snippet of something, it comes with so much fluff from characters who aren't interesting in the slightest, especially early on AND it's almost always something you'd already deduced yourself from the existing evidence. I will say it picked up near the end and some sections even had proper tension to keep me interested but... even then they'd drop it pretty quickly in favour of spinning your wheels again. Frustratingly, most of the mystery is resolved after the game concludes in an epilogue that is almost entirely just a long anime cutscene (the only one in the game like that). It was so, so unsatisfying! Looking online a lot of people seemed to like this but I hated it because locking basically the entire mystery behind the epilogue meant I didn't really get to know the characters involved at all, most of the investigation I'd done and filled into my notebook in the game was entirely meaningless to the protagonist, and I just didn't feel much of anything except annoyance at the situation. I think people might only like it because it is DARK for a Nintendo game and maybe that's all they ever play and want a change? I have no idea. I did not enjoy basically any part of it.
I can at least say what kept me playing even through the sheer boredom of the first half of the game was the visuals. This game is GORGEOUS. The backgrounds are beautiful, the characters you speak to are slightly animated in live2d style but in ways that look pretty natural and are more engaging than just a still sprite. Even really minor characters seemed to shine. There was one point that impressed me a lot which is when you're talking to this elderly lady in an old folks home and at some point a caregiver goes to get a photo album from her room for the two of you and when she comes back , she appears in the frame and leans down to hand it over. It was just such a minor interaction that in any other game, no one would ever think to fault the devs for just letting it happen off-screen, but they included the whole exchange. idk why that struck me so much, but it just felt like a lot of care went into staging each scene and bringing the characters to life.
Anyway, I guess I'm glad I played it but I will never play anything from this series again. It was not worth the effort it took to play, although thankfully it was a game from the library so at least I didn't have to spend money on it too. I guess I didn't think to take any screenshots of this game so I guess go look up how pretty it is and then don't play it unless you need a good way to fall asleep. (I did actually play this before bed most nights and damn if I didn't play like 5 min at a time because it was boring enough that sleep came very quickly.)
That said, the gameplay feels very dated. I think it's basically a slightly more streamlined version of the original games from the 80s. I can see how it might appeal to people in terms of giving you a sense of agency over the investigation, but the fact that there don't seem to be branching paths just makes it feel pointless and annoying in the end. Instead of doing what comes naturally to advance conversations, you're doing this weird song and dance where you ask about a topic until your conversational partner clams up, then you have to figure out how to get them to keep talking but usually it's just some weird combo of talking about other things, showing them something, sometimes looking at them... it's generally not hard to figure out what the game wants because you can always stop and "think" about what to do and it'll often give you a hint, but it was just so tedious going through all the options trying to figure out what weird quirk of writing will finally let something happen. And this is how every single conversation works. It allowed for a few ludonarrative things like one time near the end when someone tells you to stop your investigation and go home and the choice to proceed is to actually hit the "save and quit" option which is usually just for, you know, saving the game and quitting to the main menu, so that was cute. But on the whole, I don't think that anything gained by having this be so convoluted was worth how annoying it was to play this game. But then if they streamlined conversations, the game would probably be half the length because the writing would have to be much tighter... and it's already a pretty short game.
Storywise... I don't know that I've ever experienced such a boring murder mystery. The characters were pretty bland and the POV characters barely did anything at all. Sooo much time was spent on characters that were not relevant to the story. Like the teacher? He's in so many scenes in the early game that amount to absolutely nothing and he's basically just there to hit on his old kouhai (from like? middle school? dude you're a teacher who's graduated university WTF are you doing still pining over someone you knew for a year in middle school) and then make her assure him he's a good teacher when he gets down in the dumps. It was too much, especially with the male detective who, while probably my favourite character at the end, was kind of an annoying womanizer earlier on so going from one character talking to the teacher to the other character talking to the police detective was like ugggghh make it stop.
There were 12 chapters in this game and it truly felt like nothing happened at all for the first 2/3rds of it. You learn the basic details of the case in the prologue and then learn almost nothing else new for several chapters. Any time you do learn a snippet of something, it comes with so much fluff from characters who aren't interesting in the slightest, especially early on AND it's almost always something you'd already deduced yourself from the existing evidence. I will say it picked up near the end and some sections even had proper tension to keep me interested but... even then they'd drop it pretty quickly in favour of spinning your wheels again. Frustratingly, most of the mystery is resolved after the game concludes in an epilogue that is almost entirely just a long anime cutscene (the only one in the game like that). It was so, so unsatisfying! Looking online a lot of people seemed to like this but I hated it because locking basically the entire mystery behind the epilogue meant I didn't really get to know the characters involved at all, most of the investigation I'd done and filled into my notebook in the game was entirely meaningless to the protagonist, and I just didn't feel much of anything except annoyance at the situation. I think people might only like it because it is DARK for a Nintendo game and maybe that's all they ever play and want a change? I have no idea. I did not enjoy basically any part of it.
I can at least say what kept me playing even through the sheer boredom of the first half of the game was the visuals. This game is GORGEOUS. The backgrounds are beautiful, the characters you speak to are slightly animated in live2d style but in ways that look pretty natural and are more engaging than just a still sprite. Even really minor characters seemed to shine. There was one point that impressed me a lot which is when you're talking to this elderly lady in an old folks home and at some point a caregiver goes to get a photo album from her room for the two of you and when she comes back , she appears in the frame and leans down to hand it over. It was just such a minor interaction that in any other game, no one would ever think to fault the devs for just letting it happen off-screen, but they included the whole exchange. idk why that struck me so much, but it just felt like a lot of care went into staging each scene and bringing the characters to life.
Anyway, I guess I'm glad I played it but I will never play anything from this series again. It was not worth the effort it took to play, although thankfully it was a game from the library so at least I didn't have to spend money on it too. I guess I didn't think to take any screenshots of this game so I guess go look up how pretty it is and then don't play it unless you need a good way to fall asleep. (I did actually play this before bed most nights and damn if I didn't play like 5 min at a time because it was boring enough that sleep came very quickly.)
Status
CompletedSystem
Switch