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that-house

Being a little too cold: brrrr i’m a little too cold !!!

Being a little too warm: i am going to kill the next person who makes eye contact with me.

victusinveritas

ourladyinshadow-deactivated2023

i love when you hear a song and you're like “oh id absolutely stumble through the snow bleeding from a knife stuck in my gut to this”

heartshop

Metaphor: ReFantazio (Review)

Metaphor: ReFantazio is an utterly amazing work of fiction, full of well constructed messaging, gripping narrative & characterization, beautiful artwork, and perfectly picked gameplay elements from previous Atlus titles come together to stitch what I would consider the developer's best game thus far.

The game plays in a way that somehow feels reminiscent of not only both Persona and Shin Megami Tensei, for different reasons, but also of grand scale fantasy JRPGs like Final Fantasy. This combination with the use of the persona-style calendar system, and the SMT press turn system, with the rich feeling of adventure as you journey across the country, created an environment for a story to be told in a truly uniquely captivating way.

The story of this game repeatedly blew my mind at every turn. There's a lot of really elegant foreshadowing that makes the reveals feel very earned and exciting when they happen. I don't want to get too much into talking about the story beyond that though, as to avoid any spoilers.

I also really loved all of the characters in this game, with Eupha and Gallica standing out as favorites. I think all of the "followers" (read: social links) in this game feel very grounded and real, and they're all written in ways that help echo the theming of the game's narrative really well. I also really appreciated that the game didn't have a romance/harem mechanic like what we have in Persona, it would've felt very out of place here I think. Lastly, on the note of characterization, it made me very very happy that our main character wasn't a silent protagonist; whenever you choose a dialogue option for him, you hear him speak it out loud, often with more words than the initial dialogue prompt, and he even has plenty of fully voiced dialogue that's given completely independent of any player input. Moreover, he feels more like a real character, in a way that persona main characters often fail to, in favor of giving way to allow self-insertion instead.

The job system in this game is really amazing, I had so much fun experimenting with all of the different options you get, and some of the later ones have some fun Atlus self-referential names hehe. The job points resource is very very scarce though, and so in order to really have total freedom and repeatedly switch classes on everyone, you may need to do a bit of grinding.

I really loved all of the monster designs that drew clear inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch paintings; they felt so interesting and unique and served really well in making me more curious about the game's world and the direction of the story.

Lastly, I think this game does a better job at sticking the landing when tackling social issues compared to a lot of other JRPGs. I feel like often in this genre, a game will start off by addressing some kind of sociopolitical issue, but ends up dropping it around 3/4 of the way through in place of some other divine or alien threat. Metaphor: ReFantazio hammers in its messaging about wealth & class disparity, racial prejudice, and other social injustices, all throughout its runtime.

It's a truly beautiful game, and I know it'll stay in my mind for a very long time.

Final Score: (10/10)

#metaphor #refantazio #metaphor refantazio #game review

coughdropsandsoftspots

While making dinner tonight, I very very fleetingly, but very seriously and legitimately thought “I should watch Goncharov tonight”

And then I Remembered.

sunglassesbot

That it's no longer on poob?

hornytransgirljenni

niktheniknik

This is incomprehensible outside of tumblr, i love a well maintained closed ecosystem

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Review)

A good metroidvania and a very nice follow up to the somewhat messy Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance has really interesting map exploration, a fun narrative gimmick, and an exceptionally interesting magic system.

The game starts like any other Castlevania title from that era, we explore the castle for a little bit and eventually find the first teleporter room. Juste comments that the room looks the same "but different" after traveling through the teleporter, and it's a small clue, but enough of a hint combined with the opening graphic and the title of the game that this entry is going to be using some kind of inverted castle mechanic just like Symphony of the Night. I sighed. The inverted castle was by far my least favorite aspect of SotN, and I wasn't looking forward to that kind of thing making a return, but it's completely different here. For starters, the castle isn't sickeningly upside down; the layout is identical, but its contents are different in every room (except for save room and teleporters). This implementation led to an interesting exploration rhythm where the player needs to constantly think about which side of the castle they need to interact with to progress, and the abundance of teleport rooms made this gameplay loop fun and fulfilling.

The magic system in this game is a pretty big and sharp double edged sword. On one hand, there's a ton of really interesting effects that you can discover that can drastically alter the way that you play game and deal with normal enemies on a room to room basis. However, on the other hand, the sacred fist sub-weapon combined with the wind spellbook seemed to trivialize most boss fights in my playthrough. I guess this isn't inherently "bad", but I really mean 'trivialize' when I say that; the sheer range and power of that spell led to a situation where I basically never bothered to attempt to learn any bosses patterns, and almost all bosses were beaten on the first try after I came across this combination. Nonetheless, it's a really cool system, and a huge upgrade to the DSS system that we had in the previous game.

I want to also take a moment to talk about how good the whip feels in this game. It's no super castlevania 4, but the whip responsiveness and hit registration just feels amazing in this game. Once you really get a good feel for how long it takes before the hitbox is active and where exactly the bound of the hitbox are, using the whip to starts to feel really good. Then again, you could just keep using the sacred fist wind spell.

Overall, this is really solid title, and I think it's a bit overlooked. It's not as good as aria of sorrow, and there's some early game clumsiness that makes exploration feel obtuse until you really start to get into the groove of things, but once you let yourself really sink it, all of its systems to start to shine.

Final Score: (8/10)

#castlevania #harmony of dissonance #castlevania hod #game review

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (2001) (Review)

This is a pretty good game, but god damn can it be very frustrating.

The level design of Circle of the moon is one of its biggest strengths. Navigating rooms, fending off a great variety of enemies while desperately scrambling to find the next save room was really fun. The art in this game is also pretty good; I liked the character portraits and sprites a lot in particular. Sub weapons feel pretty standard here, and that's mostly a good thing I think. The way the game gates traversing through different areas is pretty interesting and it was really fun to do some final rounds of the castle once I finally had the last item that would let me fully explore everything.

Unfortunately there are a few things that really hold this game back from being truly great, two big things in particular. For starters, let's talk about the DSS system. This game introduces a mechanic where you collect cards (half of them being categorized as "action" and the other half being categorized as "attribute") as you explore the castle and fight enemies. The player then selects 1 action card and 1 attribute card at a time to give themselves the ability to cast a spell based on the cards they're using. There's some really interesting stuff found in these cards too! You can completely change the weapon you use with a good handful of wildly different, albeit situational, options, and there's plenty of other offensive and defensive spells that can come in handy with normal enemies and boss fights. The problem with this system arises with the fact that these cards are all obtained through purely rng drops from normal enemies, and so there can be a ton of grinding you need to slog through if you want to actually collect all of the cards to be able to mess around with them in an interesting way. I think it would've been better if this game had a shop and a money system that allowed for the player to just buy cards, and perhaps certain cards availability in the shop would've been gated by bosses defeated or something. Anyway, the DSS cards were a very cool idea, but I don't think they were implemented well.

The other thing that sours this game a little bit is somewhat tied to the aforementioned cards of the DSS system: the boss fights of Circle of the Moon. To say that the bosses in this game are difficult would be an understatement. Almost every single boss fight in this game was ludicrously tough, and took me somewhere north 30-40 tries before beating (although there was one that I got on my first try!). Part of the difficulty in these fights feels like it comes from the sheer amount of damaging objects that the bosses will flood your screen with at any given time, but possibly more concerning is the extremely large health pools that they have. These fights come across feeling like they're balanced around the player intelligently using the DSS cards to their advantage, and in some scenarios that was the case for me, but often I would look at my pitiful hand of cards and just shrug before I continue another pitiful attempt at whatever boss fight I was on. I made an honest effort to engage with DSS system too, and I think I found it rewarding when it worked out in my favor, but unfortunately, I more often that not just felt like I didn't have the cards in my arsenal to really help me out as optimally as I needed.

At the end of the day, I would still recommend this to people who like the genre or the series. It was really interesting coming at this game having played some of the titles that came both before and after it, namely Symphony of the Night and both Aria/Dawn of Sorrow. I commend the game for experimenting with some interesting ideas, and I'm eager to continue checking out the rest of the series.

Final Score: 7/10

#castlevania #circle of the moon #cotm #game review

Heroes of Hammerwatch II (2025) (Review)

This game is pretty good all things considered, but as someone who really loved Heroes of Hammerwatch 1, this didn't quite hit the mark that I was expecting.

To start with the positives though, the new art in this game is great! Sprites are more detailed and ability effects look visually very interesting. I also liked the addition of choosing a voice in the character creator instead of having the same generic pain sound for all characters. In general the character creator was very good, but it was disappointing that your character's aesthetic ended up being more reliant on the equipment you had and it didn't seem like I had the same opportunities for color customization in the first game, which was too bad. Something else that I did feel very positively towards, however, was the addition of subclasses. Being able to choose a specialization at level 10 and freely experiment with different specializations without having to pay any respec cost (although you do need to pay gold to respec the rest of your character, which is fine) was awesome! I liked being able to play around with the different options the warrior had until I eventually settled on the one that had the shooting chains ability. Finally, I need to praise this game for getting rid of the confusion tiles from the first game; as a matter of fact, I don't think there was any time when the confusion status effect was being imparted on me as the player, despite it occasionally being available the other way around. Confusion was always really annoying to deal with in the previous game, and what seemingly takes its place in this game, shadow curse, is honestly more manageable, even though it has more lasting effects.

To start off with what I didn't like about this game, I want to rewind to what I said about character customization and equipment. It was unfortunate enough that you couldn't customize the colors of your outfit in this game, but honestly I really didn't care for the equipment system in general. I felt like it ended up detracting too much from the trinket system that I was very fond of in the first game. It was soul crushing to finish a hard fought boss fight to get "rewarded" with a blue tier equipment that wasn't even useful to my build. The lack of a starting shop and what felt like less chests in general also was too bad; core elements that supported the first game's run based gameplay being gutted made this game feel like it shouldn't have even been another roguelike in the first place--the game comes across feeling like the developers are at odds with themselves about the game's identity.

The fountain replacement in this game, the architect, was sorely disappointing. In Heroes of Hammerwatch 1, players could use the fountain to balance modifiers that made the run more difficult or more easy, and pay the difference with gold if it leaned heavier on the easy side (and earn more gold if it was the other way around!). In Heroes of Hammerwatch II, the architect is only used for modifiers that make the game easier, and not only do you need to fork over gold every time you want to use him, but town resources as well! Because the architect competes with the guild hall for extremely scarce resources, I barely interacted with the mechanic at all this time around.

Speaking of town resources, why are there so many of them!? In Heroes of Hammerwatch 1, you had ore, and that was it. In this game, you have to manage wood and stone for town upgrades, iron bars for smith upgrades, and a handful of other things for magical upgrades. And it's all frankly too much. The availability of all of these different resources felt far too unreliable; way too often I got stuck with having plenty of wood for the next upgrades I needed, but still only held like 7 stone, and the trader sells you 1 stone for a whopping 1500 gold!

Lastly, let's talk about the boss fights. Unfortunately they couldn't save this game, as many of these bosses are huge damage sponges with uninteresting attacks that test the player's patience more than anything. The first 3 bosses stand completely still while you just keep side stepping a bit until they inevitably fall. There's a double boss fight at some point with two big enemies at once, that seemed pretty cool initially, but I felt pretty sour about it once I discovered that the two have a shared health pool, and players have no option to try and focus fire one first. The final boss was probably the most interesting of the lot, but by the point I just wanted it to be over more than anything.

I don't think I'll revisit this at all with other characters or NG+ like I did with the first one, it's just not fun enough. It's a fine game if you like ARPGs, but I don't think you're missing much of anything if the main appeal to the first game was its run-based gameplay with the trinkets it had.

Final Score: 6/10

#Heroes of Hammerwatch #Heroes of hammerwatch II #Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 #Game Review

This is now primarily a video game review blog. My reviews can also be found here.