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Post by Xeogred on Aug 13, 2020 13:36:20 GMT -5
I guess this was my last report on my Haunting Ground run: hardcoreretrogaming.boards.net/post/21122/threadCapcom should have pulled a Super Mario Bros 2 (USA) with this game. By that, I mean do a redux version of it and drop mother flipping Jill Valentine in there so I can mop the floor with those goons who chase you in Haunted Ground, lol. The setting/atmosphere was amazing and I would have loved fully exploring those locations, but yeah the gameplay wasn't for me. I guess if the Clock Tower series is anything like it I'll have to avoid that stuff too. I don't see myself ever liking the "hide and seek" horror types much. I've played a few modern ones like Outlast that I enjoyed, maybe first person works better for me here, but it's still not a type of game I ever see myself revisiting. SOMA would probably be the one exception since the story/world was incredible.
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Post by Ex on Aug 13, 2020 14:00:34 GMT -5
I don't see myself ever liking the "hide and seek" horror types much. It's my least favorite kind of survival horror design, because it's so hard to do well. (I mean where you just run and hide, and can't attack your pursuers.) Even highly lauded releases in this formula, like SFC Clock Tower and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, left me unenthused. Right now, I can only think of one survival horror game I played that used this formula, which I did enjoy: Don't let the cute-ish aesthetic fool you, this is some dark shit yo.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 13, 2020 15:00:20 GMT -5
He directed Clock Tower 3's cutscenes, and if you notice, the way the characters move in those scenes is a lot better than what you typically see in game cutscenes, especially on the PS2, and the camera placement more cinematic Yeah, I can see it now. At the time I didn't know a film director was involved, so I didn't pay it much mind. Sounds like a marketing schtick on Capcom's part. That said, I think Clock Tower 3 and Haunting Ground are fine, just not in the range of other PS2 games like SH 2-3, Rule of Rose or Kuon for me. I'll say Haunting Ground seemed much better at first and lost steam towards the end, while Clock Tower 3 is more even in being, well, mostly average. I don't see myself ever liking the "hide and seek" horror types much. They need to make up for the lack of combat with a great story/atmosphere/everything else. And chase sequences must be tense but far and few in between - that's why Mr. X works for me while Nemesis annoyed me. I mean, who actually likes to waste time hiding in a closet? Except streamers and YouTubers.
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Post by Xeogred on Aug 13, 2020 15:13:02 GMT -5
He directed Clock Tower 3's cutscenes, and if you notice, the way the characters move in those scenes is a lot better than what you typically see in game cutscenes, especially on the PS2, and the camera placement more cinematic Yeah, I can see it now. At the time I didn't know a film director was involved, so I didn't pay it much mind. Sounds like a marketing schtick on Capcom's part. That said, I think Clock Tower 3 and Haunting Ground are fine, just not in the range of other PS2 games like SH 2-3, Rule of Rose or Kuon for me. I'll say Haunting Ground seemed much better at first and lost steam towards the end, while Clock Tower 3 is more even in being, well, mostly average. I don't see myself ever liking the "hide and seek" horror types much. They need to make up for the lack of combat with a great story/atmosphere/everything else. And chase sequences must be tense but far and few in between - that's why Mr. X works for me while Nemesis annoyed me. I mean, who actually likes to waste time hiding in a closet? Except streamers and YouTubers. Give me philosophical/existential dread in the vein of Silent Hill and SOMA, then I'm probably hooked haha.
I think Nemesis is a little different in ways, since he's so scripted. Something you just have to brute force get through sometimes or take on. But yeah I know what you mean. People have good arguments for Mr X (unscripted) vs Nemesis (scripted) across both versions for both games. I don't have issues with Nemesis, maybe because of the action focus with RE and all, but Mr X was freaking awesome in REmake 2 for sure and his unpredictability was a lot of fun. Well maybe not the word some would use...
My major nitpick with games like Haunted Ground and Amnesia, is the visual/screen effects and the game messing with the control of your character, making them sluggish or wobbling the screen around. I absolutely can't stand this kind of game design at all personally. Completely opposite of "immersive", it just annoys me.
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Post by toei on Aug 13, 2020 15:54:57 GMT -5
I hate that type of gameplay too. I did play through that one post-Team Silent SH which has nothing but chase sequences instead of fighting, and it was OK, but they're pretty infrequent in that game and they don't involve hiding. They're pretty easy too. I don't mind occasionally running in a horror game, but I need to be able to fight back at one point, and I don't like to do any type of hiding.
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Post by Sarge on Aug 13, 2020 15:56:41 GMT -5
One of the better "run for your life" scenarios wasn't even in a survival horror game, it's running from the SA-X in Metroid Fusion.
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Post by Sarge on Aug 14, 2020 13:27:55 GMT -5
Okay, let's talk about Shin Seikoku: La Wares. Buckle up, y'all.
So when I started this game, it looked like a pretty pleasing little JRPG romp. You know, nothing terribly amazing, but a solid, no-frills jaunt through a fairly boilerplate anime-style storyline. Something something White Mask/Black Mask awesome mech power to rule the world stuff. Combat was simple, but pleasing. And there was a fair amount of plot exposition, such as it was, in the early going.
Too bad it all falls apart! Let me regale you with all the issues I found.
- Uninteresting battles: While I mentioned that the game was pretty simple, what I didn't anticipate is that the combat would never progress beyond the opening depth, if it could be called that. You get on-foot segments and mech segments. In the party sequences, I never found a good use for the spells I learned, as you can actually equip all characters with all weapons and armor, and while some had a spellcasting bent, as far as I could tell, none of the options were better than just hacking away. In the mech sequences, you only get two real options - attack and kick. The first is more accurate but lower damage, the latter is more powerful but misses more. And boy oh boy, are you gonna miss a lot. If you're under the proper level, you literally have no way to beat the mech boss battles. You can't restore your mech's HP in battle, so it's pretty much just an HP race to see who wins. This means...
- Grinding: Yep, lots of grinding. And I realize this might seem like a minor complaint in a game that was done in 10h20m, but so much of the game past the first couple of hours is grinding. The mech bosses are what forces this, as you need to be at a certain level threshold to make sure you're getting enough damage in and have enough HP to survive, and even then, you'll want to save right before fighting them (save often!) because you'll probably need several cracks at it. There were instances where I used the "kick" command every time, and it actually hit every time, yet I still couldn't win. That's just awful. And these fights almost never give a reasonable amount of EXP. Yuck. Compounding this is the way enemies are structured. The overworld sees you walking in your mech (on rails) to the next location, fighting random mechs along the way. In general, these are the only place you can earn money, as very few on-foot enemies give money. Yet this has ill effects, since as far as I can tell, only the main character, Chiffon, gets EXP when fighting in this mode. So you get to grind in dungeons. Well, on top of rarely getting money, combat encounters are all based on Chiffon's level. That means you will fight the same enemies everywhere, no matter the dungeon. So technically, you can grind at any point of the game, because you'll get a fixed set of two types of encounters before they "upgrade" once you gain a level or two. What this effectively means is that even grinding isn't interesting, because you're locked into certain encounters that ensure you can't leap ahead on the level curve. At least games like Dragon Warrior made it interesting by having some random, high-value enemies, not to mention you could wade into a tough area and try to find combat footing to survive there.
- Re-used assets: Dungeon areas all look the same. They have the same tileset. They don't change one iota if they're meant to be underground. Tunes remain pretty much the same throughout the game. There's a boss rush at the end that has you fight like six or seven boss fights again, and you have to grind at least one level for every single one of those to survive. It's like they had plans for a much larger game, and had to compress it all into a small space. I will say, though, that some of the enemies look cool, and I like the varied mech designs on display.
- Limited equipment: Not only can everyone equip the same stuff, but you rarely find useful equipment in dungeons, and there are very few places to upgrade. In the final dungeon, you find a single weapon in a chest... a short sword from the beginning of the game. Well then.
I am absolutely convinced that this was meant to be a more expansive game. I don't know if they ran out of time or money, but the signs are here in the opening that things were meant to be more diverse, and at some point, someone decreed it had to get out the door. All the issues I note seem to indicate changes in the interest of making the game playable without completely breaking it - it ensures combat balance can be tightly managed, regardless, and it also extends the play time so folks wouldn't be super mad about what could have been a 3-4 hour RPG. J-Force, the developer, put out Burning Heroes just a month prior, and it is apparently a better game. This, on the other hand, I do not recommend unless you're looking to deep-dive every Super Famicom RPG. I'm going to give this a... *checks prior ratings of games* 3.5/10. It's better than SFII and Shaq Fu for Game Boy, anyway...
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Post by toei on Aug 14, 2020 14:09:30 GMT -5
Sarge Burning Heroes sucks, my dude. It's got 6 or 8 different protagonists, whichever, and the story isn't complete unless you play through each of their stories, except the actual content is about 75-80% the same every time. Same dungeons, same towns, etc. It's trash. There are also weird basic gameplay issues. I remember attacks missing all the time, both from me and enemies, just dragging the battles on uselessly. Like La Wares, it seems decent at first, but don't be fooled. Man, Dynamic Designs have a knack for picking bad SNES RPGs to translate. Probably a blessing, considering what they do with them. The SNES Lodoss War game is easily the worst SNES RPG I've played, Burning Heroes sucked, Slayers wasn't horrible, but it was still your average slightly below-average licensed title, and Super Shell Monsters Story had an awful endgame that consisted of a long stretch of dungeons with an incredibly high encounter rate and nothing in between (ie story, character interactions, whatever). It was a decent game up to that point, though. FEDA is good, at least.
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Post by Sarge on Aug 14, 2020 16:02:52 GMT -5
Dang, sucks to hear that. It's a little more well-regarded on GameFAQs, but that's not saying much.
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Post by Ex on Aug 14, 2020 16:34:27 GMT -5
SargeIt's a shame Shin Seikoku: La Wares turned out so bad. Screenshots make the game look interesting from afar, it was one of those "someday I want to check that one out" games for me. But now not so much. Many of the issues you described as being annoying in Shin Seikoku: La Wares were indicative of the problems I had with Cyber Knight, another SFC sci-fi mecha JRPG. But I didn't finish that one.
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