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Post by nullPointer on Oct 2, 2018 11:15:41 GMT -5
I really need to dive into the Fatal Frame series one of these days. It seems like something I'd enjoy a lot. Looks like you've got a great month planned out Ex !
I don't have much of a plan other than one definite and one tentative selection (which I'll get to in a later post). I did get a bit of an early start this weekend though!
I knew my first game this month would be Silent Hill 2, but after finishing Koudelka I needed a bit of a palate cleanser between two games of more or less unrelenting darkness. So Castlevania: Dracula X (SNES) was just what the doctor ordered! Devoting some time to Castlevania during the month of October is a time honored tradition for me. In point of fact it's often how I kick off the Halloween season, and this year was clearly no different.
So I have to say, I think Dracula X gets a bad rap in a couple of ways. It's not a bad game at all. It's just not a top notch Castlevania game. I think it suffers from the following:
1) It came out after Super Castlevania IV. Regardless of where you stand on the SCIV from a mechanical perspective (I frickin' love it, but also understand the ways in which it subverted the 'classic' style gameplay and why some folks were turned off by that ), it undeniably set the bar for how Castlevania could look/sound/operate on a 16 bit system. Almost anything would have had a hard time following up SCIV. Right out of the gate, Konami created one of the best games not only in franchise, but for the SNES altogether. I suspect if Castlevania: Dracula X had come out before SCIV we might remember it in a slightly better light. It is after all much more in keeping with the classic feel of Castlevania.
2) It's too short, like remarkably short. I'm pretty sure that even CVIII has at least 1.5X the playtime of Dracula X; possibly even more if you account for all the available paths. Dracula X is one of those games where it's suddenly over just as you were really finding your groove. I started the game on Saturday morning and had finished it before anyone else in the house was even up yet. I might add to this minor grievance that the Dracula fight in this title is probably one of the easiest in the entire series (and particularly so if you're using the Axe ... although it's nice to see the Axe finally getting some love!). It's a weird moment of incongruity because Dracula X really does have some challenging moments which hold their own against anything else in the series. I'm not generally one to knock a game based on brevity (hey free time is at a premium!), but in this case it might have been nice to have just a bit more ya know?
3) The looming specter that is Rondo of Blood. Look, Dracula X is not a port of Rondo of Blood. It's more like a (very) scaled back re-imagining of RoB. But if you go into Dracula X expecting Rondo of Blood on the SNES, you're inevitably going to be disappointed. And I'm not one to claim that Rondo of Blood is the be-all and end-all of classic-vania (though there's certainly an argument to be made there), but one cannot deny that RoB a much richer and deeper Castlevania experience than you'll have with Dracula X. So once again Dracula X suffers a bit here when compared against an arguably better Castlevania title that came out earlier in the same generation.
You'll notice though that in this list of grievances, #1 and #3 have nothing to do with the actual content of Castlevania: Dracula X. And in fact #2 is a backhanded compliment insofar as the game leaves you wanting more. On top of all of this, the music is pretty darned fantastic and plays like a greatest hits list of Castlevania favorites. The graphics are quite good as well (though unfortunately can't hold a candle to SCIV in this department). And if you do want a 'classic-vania' experience on the SNES, look no further than Dracula X which replicates the classic feel of the series in a way that SCIV does not. So I'll reiterate to say that Dracula X is not a bad game at all, it's just a bit lackluster for a Castlevania game. There are certainly worse Castlevania titles though! Castlevania: The Adventure, I'm looking in your general direction. And don't even get me started on the horror show that is Vampire Killer for MSX2.
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Post by Sarge on Oct 2, 2018 11:51:31 GMT -5
Honestly, my biggest gripe about Dracula X is that your invincibility frames are ridiculously short, leading to some potential stun-lock deaths. There are ways to avoid the knockback issues, though; just duck! This also comes in handy in that final battle.
I like the game a lot. I've gone on the record saying Rondo is overrated, but still good. Dracula X is tremendously underrated, and is also good. Internet peanut gallery aside, the quality gap is surprisingly minimal between the two.
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Post by Ex on Oct 2, 2018 12:06:14 GMT -5
I really need to dive into the Fatal Frame series one of these days. I didn't realize until today that there are FIVE mainline games now, plus the 3DS spinoff. Access to the FF games has been a shitshow though since Nintendo took over publishing duties. The USA didn't even get FF4, and we only got FF5 via the Wii U eShop... and it's still $50 on the eShop btw. I've got ambition for sure, time perhaps not as much of. When I made my initial list of games to beat this month, I derpishly forgot I'm going to be on vacation for an entire week this month. I'll be in another part of the country, so my consoles won't be accessible to me that week. I might play Laplace's Demon on my phone at night in the hotel though. I can tell you that Sarge and I are both fans at least. I particularly enjoy Dracula X, and I agree it gets unfairly treated by series fans, along with Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. The really crazy thing is I enjoy Dracula X more than Rondo of Blood. Heresy, I know. I honestly think Rondo of Blood got legacy buoyed due to forbidden fruit syndrome. ---
Edit: Missed Sarge's post on the previous page... once I'm not burned out on RPG-ness, Shadow Hearts is still rattling around from last month. Well Shadow Hearts is excellent, and I daresay a notch better than Covenant. Alternatively, you'd discussed interest in Thief: Gold at one point this year. Thief has a very strong horror vibe throughout most of its experience. Thief would fit the October theme appropriately. I for one would love to see -you- play Thief because it's very different from the stuff you usually play, and it's my all time favorite game ever. So reading about your reaction would be an interesting contrast.
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Post by Sarge on Oct 2, 2018 12:21:29 GMT -5
That might be a good choice as well. I wouldn't have necessarily thought of it for October, but it would certainly provide a change of pace.
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Post by nullPointer on Oct 2, 2018 12:21:55 GMT -5
I like the game a lot. I've gone on the record saying Rondo is overrated, but still good. Dracula X is tremendously underrated, and is also good. Internet peanut gallery aside, the quality gap is surprisingly minimal between the two. I like Rondo of Blood quite a lot, but yes it's really built up this mystique in the west due in large part (IMO) to its un-obtainability. It's almost unfathomable in this age of re-releases that in 2018 we can still say Rondo of Blood is soon to be available for the first time in English on a home console. Don't get me wrong, it's a damn fine game IMO, but all these years of built up mystique cannot be understated, particularly when SotN as the direct sequel is heralded as such an unequivocal classic. If Dracula X had a similar amount of content compared to Rondo of Blood, I think you're right; they easily could have shared similar footing within the legacy of the series.
Haha while I was typing this up Ex basically said the same thing. Tl;DR: We always want what we can't have, lol.
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Post by Sarge on Oct 2, 2018 12:26:57 GMT -5
Well, we did get it on PSP at least.
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Post by Ex on Oct 2, 2018 12:47:06 GMT -5
I wouldn't have necessarily thought of it for October Understandable since you've not played it before.
From a distance Thief appears to be a game about stealing stuff in the dark, a burglar simulator. And that's what Thief is, for all of its first mission. The rest of the game deviates from that considerably, and becomes an action-adventure about a bad guy doing a good thing to stop a badder guy. (To boil the plot down to its basest element.) Honestly Garret (protagonist) has more in common with Indiana Jones than Robin Hood, due to the nature of his adventures.
The other aspect not expected is the horror vibe. It's one thing to sneak in the dark, but when the dark is sometimes filled with monsters, skeletons, ghosts, and even demons, well that's another thing entirely. When you've looked into the eye of the abyss, and the eye looked back, and now won't stop staring, even when you look away... yeah, Thief is just as much a survival horror as any other game in that genre. Except Thief is actually scary.
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Post by nullPointer on Oct 2, 2018 13:22:44 GMT -5
Well, we did get it on PSP at least. Truly! I consider Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles to be somewhere in the top 3 essential titles for the PSP. So I gotta tell you guys, at the beginning of the year I made a resolution that I'd write up a mini review of every game I beat this year. Typically I start off the year well enough, but by the time fall rolls around I've typically convinced myself that, "Hey, I’d rather be playing games than writing about them". And while that's not altogether wrong, I do enjoy having a personal archive of reviews just so I can remember what the hell I played should a particular game come up in discussion at a later date. And I mention all of that so I can mention this: I'm currently four games in hole for my review backlog. So what do I do? Come here to talk about Silent Hill 2 of course! In some ways I have to tread lightly because this is a game I can gush about. It's hard to keep my editorial objectivity in check where it comes to SH2. I think I might feel about this game the way Ex feels about King's Field as a series. It's just brilliantly executed. I'm pretty sure every time I play this game I find different layers of meaning and interpretation to the characters, events, and descriptions (regardless of whether this is real or imagined). At any rate, as I was playing last night I was struck with one of the factors that I enjoy the most in this game. It nails a sense of 'dream logic' (albeit 'nightmare logic'). What I mean by this is that in terms of logical progression of events, and even in terms of logical spatial relationships, the game has several moments of this nightmarish dream like quality. SH2 trades in the currency of surrealism and yet from a narrative perspective it still hangs together quite well. That's a pretty tricky accomplishment in any medium let alone that of video games. Too many surrealists get lost in this idea of surrealism as an end to a means (yes William S. Burroughs, I'm talking to you here). Without some foundation in narrative technique, surrealism just becomes this free floating weirdness, unmoored from any meaningful foundation … which is fine I guess, but it's also a bit unfulfilling. Any hoo I guess I'm really going on a tangent here. TL;DR: Silent Hill 2 makes excellent use of surrealism as a tool in its storytelling repertoire. It's something you don't see very often in video games.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 2, 2018 13:39:41 GMT -5
Honestly Garret (protagonist) has more in common with Indiana Jones than Robin Hood, due to the nature of his adventures. Playing as Garrett, I'd steal indiscriminately from the rich/poor/dead and give to myself. That said, he's not a bad guy once it boils down to it - quite on the contrary. It's true though, some of the missions felt very Indiana Jones-y. And yes, Thief definitely fits the horror theme. Especially the first one. It's the kind of game that needs your full and undivided commitment or you'll have a hard time getting into it. Once it clicks though, you won't be able to put it down. TL;DR: Silent Hill 2 makes excellent use of surrealism as a tool in its storytelling repertoire. It's something you don't see very often in video games. That's true, often this so-called surrealism gets abused and the game or movie just turns into a pointless exercise in weirdness. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll reiterate my recommendations for a couple of games that also pull surrealism off very well: Rule of Rose and Pathologic.
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Post by toei on Oct 2, 2018 14:34:07 GMT -5
nullPointer Good point about surrealism in fiction. I can love the stuff, but if there's no real narrative tied to it it just becomes nonsense and I lose interest. One the most memorable horror moment for me in Silent Hill 2 is when you find these hidden stairs going down, and they just keep going down forever, to the point where you wonder if you aren't supposed to go back, until finally you arrive in these sort of sewers where Pyramid Head is walking around in the dark... the sense of foreboding it creates the first time around is great, and if you interpret it in terms of this taking place halfway in his mind, it obviously has an additional meaning.
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