Category Archives: Past Generation

Budehuc Castle is My Favorite Suikoden III Character

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Suikoden is a character acquisition simulator that masquerades as a fantasy role-playing and strategy game. Each entry has a background quest of collecting all 108 Stars of Destiny: the frontline and support troops gathered for a common goal. The character recruiting is where Suikoden gets to both expand its world building and provide humor in narratives about war between conflicting countries and tribes. Yet out of all these figures, including  a bathhouse builder found fighting with a tree, a puppeteer that bashes her wolf hand puppet against a house when it insults strangers, or a cowgirl who keeps losing her horses, none can compete with the greatest Suikoden character. Military strategists, great magic users, and duck lieutenants lack the depth and the sheer range of Suikoden III’s dilapidated coastal castle. 

Suikoden stories slowly develop into full-scale conflict  between the heroes and villains, where a main base is introduced to gather and maintain a functioning but temporary community. In the first and second games, the castles need to be cleared of a zombie dragon and a vampire lord, respectively, but not in the third game. Originally called Budehuc, renamed by the player later (I personally used ‘Orange’, a reference to the second game), Budehuc’s level of detail and involvement over the length of III’s story is given greater importance, specifically towards environmental storytelling.  

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The Gore Screaming Show…Never Scared Me

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Comedian Kevin Pollak has a line with his impersonation of actor Christopher Walken that has become part of my everyday vernacular. Pollak discusses how Walken talks with an unconnected line of thought, immortalized in the line “Frankenstein never scared me, marsupials do, cause they’re fast.”. This response to being asked about his most recent movie. “X never scared me” is my go-to reply to all supposedly horrifying pieces of fiction that did not successfully unnerve me. Visual novels, with their focus on character interaction, character point of view, and often expanded length should be a diamond-mine for horror. Not including a few instances, this potential marriage has left me wanting. The best example is Gore Screaming Show, as “The Gore Screaming Show…never scared me”. 

Cards face up on the table: “scary” is such a high bar (instances that could be counted with one, maybe two hands) that eliciting actual fear and dread is a line horror should not have to jump over. Instead, horror needs to be interesting. Interesting is needlessly broad, but examples of good horror involve providing creative and potentially destructive forces and spaces for taboos and complex societal issues to be examined and mangled, usually by following the journey of one or multiple otherwise regular people. None of this is intended as a value judgement; horror that has zero higher aspirations and will gladly remind the audience of such has a place. Unfortunately, Gore Screaming Show takes itself far too seriously to let it slide (even though it’s an erotic game, it designates enough time for world building and character motivations). 

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Willingly Trapped in Farming Sims Hell

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Farming Sims have a particular problem that is hard to solve. The usual farming sim has a predefined town filled with colorful characters, a premise of starting small and growing a home front into a thriving agricultural engine, which  requires a ton of appreciation for routine. The term ‘Moon Tube’ is what I call a niche ecosystem of YouTube farm sim channels. Moon Tube discusses tips and tricks, especially hidden and unexplained strategies to minmax animals. However,  they also impart a relaxed and mellow vibe that is alien to my hyper focused experiences. In other words, a passion found in the mundane. The farming sim page of Steam entices me to make half my wish list of games in this genre, though my relationship with them is so adversarial. Farming sims at their core are about farm work, and buddy, they all soon become just that, long drawn-out work. 

Graveyard Keeper is poison. Tasty, tasty poison drinkable for hours. Building river-crossing bridges and clearing dark dungeon tunnels are the big early tasks for this game’s time traveled protagonist, and for a lot longer than most games, Graveyard Keeper is all about this life. The exploration part of the brain starts flaring when it comes to bridges and tunnels. Farm sim worlds are often small, so investigating each corner via horse riding back and forth, up and down, left and right, is its own limited joy. Oh neat, because of my effort, I now have a secret tunnel to the village center. Good job me, I found the mines where  marble is located. So that’s how embalming works? Graveyard Keeper gives the impression of productivity, like when fifty glass bottles are set to be crafted in the kiln and my character wakes up to dozens of them crowding the ground. Any game about making esoteric items will soon turn into a game about giving away esoteric items, an act of mentally juggling unpleasant people’s scheduling for delivering their every want and need. This is unfortunately the only way to advance Graveyard Keeper’s thin premise of trying to return to your future girlfriend. By the end, I was rewarded with a brief cutscene and a slap on the ass.

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A Field Guide to the Iconography of Explicit Violence and Gore

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Tormented Souls could have been a better game. Dual Effect captured important visual and mechanical parts of PS1 and PS2-era survival horror, with Tormented Souls’ fixed camera angles and narrow hallways. But narratively, it’s a story of escaping an old hospital/mansion/church/research facility that never reaches the height of older-era Silent Hill or the environmental storytelling of the first three Resident Evil games. What Tormented Souls did have, though, was perhaps the most necessary element, a “This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore” start-up warning screen. 

Like the comforting and often remixed startup logo drop of the Game Cube, the horror game warning screen invokes a nostalgic bygone. A proper warning screen is the first snapshot of  survival horror. These images can be broken down into two types: still shots of backgrounds with ominous vibes, and simple portraits of a character mid-combat. Capcom is most attributed to using these  relics. A ten-minute google search did not provide an answer to whom or why these disclaimers were necessary. Backgrounds, like the Resident Evil 2 screen of the Raccoon City Police Station or the castle from Haunting Grounds, are good examples of a term I use when discussing horror, which is utilizing the “bad place”.

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Let the Villains Join the Party

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Tales of Xillia is a bad Tales of game. Outside of the partner system making combat respectable, the rest of the game feels rushed, with an overall story that feels like fifteen hours were excised and the world is copy-pasted gorges. Worst of all, especially for a Tales of game, the characters are not engaging (Milla cannot carry the entire game on her bare shoulders) and half of them are not given anything to do. Tales of Xillia 2, however, fixes this last issue, and in personally the best way possible, by making the first game’s last-minute villains, King Gaius and goddess Muzét, into playable party members.

Villains joining the heroes to fight an even bigger antagonist is one of my favorite literary devices. When the bad guys join, it not only amps up the stakes, but has the potential for conflict-solving with a person whose moral compass does not exactly match the heroes.’ Contextless spoilers for a twenty-year-old TV show, but what pushed me through three-and-a-half seasons of Farscape was the promise that series villain Scorpius, the half “human” half lizard alien commander that had been hunting protagonist John Crichton for answers to how to make wormholes, would join John’s crew. Scorpius is now tasked with keeping the heroes alive to fight an evil worse than himself. A fitting example is an episode where everyone eats space oysters that link each other’s pain receptors when two people share a single massive oyster and will poison them to death in a few hours. At the last minute, Scorpius ritually fills his mouth with everyone’s space oysters, giving them more time for a cure, but at the expense of Scorpius, both a victim and perpetrator of torture, to feel all their intense pain. The episode ends with Scorpius screaming into the air to no one, as pieces of green and yellow space oyster escape his mouth. What if Scorpius learned kaboom at level forty-three and was the only party member that could use shadow magic?

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Childhood Memories of Megaman Legends 2 and How Sequel Games Are Better

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In a gray underground maze in a room without windows, it floats high above the ground. Eyeless, with a completely gold body like a holy monument, I shoot it till it falls over and bursts into crystals. I leave and then reenter the room. The figure is back, but while it might run away when I shoot it, it never defends itself as it explodes once more. I repeat this over and over again. Called the King Miroc, this enemy was how I grinded my way through Megaman Legends 2.

I first played Megaman Legends 2 on my uncle’s PlayStation as a kid. He didn’t have a memory card, which would have come in handy when we played ninety percent of the first Ape Escape in a single day. This meant that I played through the first thirty minutes of Megaman Legends 2 multiple times. I have the first big part where Megaman must put out robot monkey Data’s cooking fire, imprinted into my memory. The best part was when the bathroom door explodes into a tunnel of flames. Having to do that sequence over and over again, I learned that how fast I put out the fires meant Megaman had to spend less money later to rebuild the living room and kitchen. The first town, Yosyonke City, was this dreary, effecting place as a kid, with its snowy tundras and quiet bar. I love its one abandoned house that is never discussed by anyone that sits outside the bounds of the city. I remember fighting the first boss over and over again until I beat it, with each lose meaning I would have to start the entire game over. I finally beat it at one point, but the rest of the game eluded me.

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Lessons in Team Building with Tokyo Mirage Session

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Recently, I finished playing Tokyo Mirage Sessions (or TMS), the hybrid love child born from Nintendo’s Fire Emblem and Atlus’ Megami Tensei. Atlus is mostly known nowadays for its flagship series Shin Megami Tensei (or SMT, look familiar to anyone?) and it’s sister Persona. I had a very good time with TMS,  so it saddens me that it seems to be so overlooked, partly perhaps because of the Wii U’s lack of popularity. What stuck out while playing  TMS is its remarkable ability  at using the entire playable cast, something of an unfortunate rarity in RPGs. I will be breaking down what I feel are the major reasons for this success.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions is successful at creating a gameplay loop that encourages using all  party members evenly and in a balanced way, as well as making them all contribute meaningfully in battle even while not being directly controlled. This ability is mainly  a result of two elements: the session system and the character’s stage rank. The first is the session system, used in battle when exploiting enemy weaknesses to create attack chains. With the session system, a character can strike an enemy’s weakness and if an ally knows a session skill that can follow up on the original attack’s element or weapon, they will execute it immediately. Another ally can then start a third attack if they have a skill to trigger from the second attack. For example, if Tsubasa hits an enemy weak to lances, Itsuki can then utilize lance-slash, from which Touma can now use sword-blaze to finish the chain. Additionally this mechanic creates a sense that the group is fighting as a team and as friends, rather than alone in a group as most RPG battles often play out.

Nothing says teamwork like ganging up on others.

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When Megaman Legends Is to Hard to Handle

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Tan with rust and missing one of its seven-feet long obelisk arms, the Hanmuru Doll still strikes fear. Massive, but mobile, the Hanmuru Doll’s single red eye is impartial to my fate as its still-working arm pummels me flat. I Game Over and realized I had to redo everything, as I had not passed my first save point. This was the moment I realized that Megaman Legends was not going to let me take it easy. I often lament on this site the lack of modern 3-D adventure video games being released now, thus why I decided to go back 20+ years and return to Megaman Legends. I am rather bad at video games, which for the case of Megaman Legends, might just be me pushing against the series’ history with being difficult in general. I wanted worlds to explore and characters to engage with, and I certainly got that, but Megaman Legends really pushed me. But I had to do it for that sweet summer child, Megaman Volnutt.  

Megaman Legends has an easy mode, but it’s locked and only for players who can beat normal difficulty under a few hours. Megaman Legends has a type of game difficulty reminiscent of another Capcom game, Resident Evil, where the best weapons are treated as post game bonuses. Why is the unlimited rocket launcher and unlimited magnum for players who can beat Resident Evil under a certain amount of time? A player would already have to be amazing at the game to  complete such a task, so what is the genuine reward in  completing something difficult, only to let you do it again but easier? Give those weapons to the player who did not sign up for a head smashing evening. Resident Evil 2 and 3 figured this out by giving easy mode extra starting health and ammo.

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Building a Stairway…Off This Island

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Coming up with things to discuss on this site, without dusting off the old chestnuts of RPGs, point-and-clicks, and late 90’s and early 2000’s FPS, is not easy. You write what you know. But as of last year, I have been really getting into resource management games (the internet seems to call these open world survival action-adventures, but that is too long), including Astroneer, Subnautica, and The Survivalists. Granted, calling them resource management games make them sound like factory simulators like Satisfactory, and the perfectly named Factorio. Whatever they are called, these games do provide distinct single and multiplayer experiences.

These types of resource management games, while similar on paper to farming sims, such as  Harvest Moons, Stardew  Valley, or Gleaner Heights, tend to share a different thematic start. Instead of inheriting a farm from a dead or dying relative, the player crash lands on a planet, a deserted island, or a deserted island planet. The Lost in Blue series (or Survival Kids for the five people on this planet who somehow own and played possibly the rarest GBC game) feel like the progenitor of this type of game. Lost In Blue follows different teenagers who find themselves trying to survive on a desolate tropical island. Food and water need to be consumed to keep the player alive, usually in the form of fresh coconuts and river water. Good news was that as  early DS games, Lost in Blue were not as long as the RPG-length sagas the average resource management game requires. Bad news was that as early DS games, Lost in Blue was controlled mostly through the stylus (a pain for those who wanted to do extra combat damage in Magical Starsign). Gameplay focused on constantly tracking vitals and building up a home base that lessens the strain of said vitals start here. But these teens cannot stay on the island forever, they will need to step out of their comfy cave and somehow leave the island. Finally leaving the base continues in later resource management games as a common end goal.

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Wouldn’t it be wild if punching alligators was just incorrectly calculated as being the most effective way to hurt them in Lost In Blue? Like how the butterfly net in some Zelda games works on bosses.

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We Built This City on Card Games

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Video games like to use cards for just about everything. The GameCube seemed to love them for RPGS like the Lost Kingdoms and Baten Kaitos games, where cards were used for combat. Slay the Spire uses it as part of its rogue-like game play. App games like Hearthstone, Ascension, or Magic: The Gathering Arena utilize each respective card game with a focus on online competitive play. But I want some story and characters to get invested in with my card games. Where is the Netrunner game about a cyberpunk future where everyone puts on their goggles and styles their mohawks to play Netrunner at a run-down bar or at a table in front of a ramen shop? Where is the Final Fantasy 8 spin-off where a nameless street urchin plays to become the Triple Triad champion of the world? Where have all the Trading Card Game adventure games gone?

Monster Rancher Battle Card Game GB was a Game Boy Color game about collecting cards representing the dozens of memorable Monster Rancher creatures in a world in which you fight to defeat…something. Joking aside, I never got farther than five minutes into this one as a kid. The Pokemon TCG game for the Game Boy Color was this charming world where everyone on Trading Card Game Island (that’s its real name) only cared about one thing, a kid’s card game. Like regular Pokemon, TCG Island has a resident Professor, this time it’s Dr. Mason (Oyama). People like me who cite Bulbapedia verbatim know that Dr. Mason is based on Pokemon TCG co-creator, Kouichi Ooyama, and compared to Professor Oak, Dr. Mason is flush with funding. Professor Oak has maybe two assistants, whereas Dr. Mason has fifteen, spread across two large rooms. TCG Island clearly cares more about its research of pieces of card board with images of Pokemon on them more than Kanto cares about actual Pokemon.

I think I read somewhere that the island is in the shape of Mew, but don’t quote me out of class on this.

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