Taiku Reviews

Hi! This is a side blog of https://ryotaiku.tumblr.com/ and an experiment to see how I feel about writing longer reviews of stuff. You can also find me on Twitter @Ryotaiku

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New review over on Medium

Hey, I've decided to move this project over to Medium since Tumblr's text interface is absolute ass and it got on my nerves. You can see a new mini-review of PC Building Simulator here: https://medium.com/@Ryotaiku/taikus-quick-view-pc-gaming-simulator-ee42649a994c

I'm probably never going to make a Tumblr post ever again unless I deem it too shitty for Medium, so be sure to follow me on Twitter @Ryotaiku to see when I make Medium posts.

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Taiku Reviews: Metal Gear Solid

Well this is certainly a game.

I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting to replay Metal Gear Solid this year. I'm not even sure what I'd want to say about it. I guess I can start with the basics?

Metal Gear Solid was the first breakout hit of Hideo Kojima, released in 1998 for Playstation. This game also got a PC release in the year 2000.

I played that version.

That's not really anything special nowadays, since you can buy it from GOG alongside its sequ- oh...

Prequel, I guess?

Anyway, you can play the PC version a little bit easier now than you could before, so I gave it a whirl.

How's that sneaking suit working out?

I didn't take screenshots myself so I'm pulling from MobyGames. Be warned that some of these may be modded.

Metal Gear Solid is a stealth game. Rather than gun your way through every obstacle, you're encouraged to hide and go unnoticed; not letting anyone know you were there. It's fairly basic as stealth games come; stay out of an enemy's line of sight, and navigate your way around predictable soldier patrols. I think it gets a free pass for simplicity though. Not only because it's a Kojima game, possibly the only one where the hardware was telling him no instead of his development team, but also because Metal Gear was essentially the original stealth game. If you wanted a game centered around evasion and non-combat, your only other option at the time were Thief and Tenchu.

It's also essentially a remake of a remake; with Metal Gear 2 just retelling Metal Gear 1, and Metal Gear Solid recycling almost all the beats of Metal Gear 2.

So I've heard, don't quote me on that.

A square peg in a round hole

Being a PS1 game, Metal Gear Solid is janky as hell; especially in the movement. If you've ever played a Rockstar game and tried doing a 180° turn, imagine every degree of turn feeling that way. There's no true analog, which is common for a lot of PS1 titles, but coming out almost a year after the release of the Dualshock kinda stings. It would've made an excellent last-minute inclusion.

Aiming weapons is equally rigid, stopping Snake in his tracks just to fire a gun. I don't expect him to run & gun obviously, and it's common for stealth game combat to be imperfect. The easiest way to encourage stealth is to make non-stealth options not as fun. But another common trait among stealth games is there are points where combat is forced. So having combat suck is a real downer.

That's not to say the forced combat sections are bad, but I'll get back to that.

The most frustrating aspect of Metal Gear Solid is the radar. Don't get me wrong, it's useful and does its job, but there are several points where it'll be jammed so you can't see what's coming. And the game uses this to employ really frustrating gotchas. Radar jammed? Let's put a security camera around a corner you can't see. Or claymore mines, since you can't use your mine detector. How about if you play on Hard or Extreme difficulties your radar gets disabled entirely? It doesn't make the game harder, it just makes it frustrating.

I'm sure someone will tell me to git gud for that rant, but do know I have beaten the game on Hard. And I'm never doing that again.

So is there anything good about the game? Well, it has some damn good level design.

Mini Metroid

It's not obvious at first, but Metal Gear Solid is fantastic as a small-scale Metroidvania. It makes sense being a Konami game, but it's something that not a lot of people mention when praising Metal Gear. Paths from one location to another are mostly linear, but there's a lot of backtracking that makes you familiar with the layout of Shadow Moses. It's also easy to miss certain optional items, which combined with two endings and a relatively short playtime gives it a decent amount of replay value.

Also I know I said the combat's not great, but one way it makes up for it is some awesome boss fights.

Every boss fight in Metal Gear Solid either has a fun gimmick, or is a visual spectacle on top of being well designed. The first boss for example, Revolver Ocelot, fights you in a tight square with a barrier in the middle; forcing you to run around the edges in a claustrophobic showdown. Other bosses include two hand-to-hand throwdowns, two sniper duels, three pieces of military equipment, and one fight that I dare not spoil.

If you've played it before, you know the one.

PC/PS1 differences

I've covered about all I had to say about the game itself, but the last thing I should mention are differences between the PC port and the original PS1 release. Despite what many people say, I don't think either one is better or worse, but there are some notable differences. So here goes:

The PC port feels just a little bit better to control than on PS1. There's still no true analog movement, but it feels like there's less input delay than on console. I also kinda like its aesthetic more, being able to run in Direct3D for less jagged/wavy edges. It also lets you play exclusively in first-person (why would you use this?), has a Very Easy mode that gives you an infinite ammo MP5, has Extreme difficulty unlocked right away, lets you save anywhere without taking to Mei Ling (you monster), and includes VR Missions as a separate exe.

However it's got some noticeable audio problems. The sound quality is a lot worse on console, with one music track just flat-out missing, and the voice acting isn't changed to reflect being on PC; so characters will still talk as if you're on console (yes, including for that one boss fight). The codec calls also have some noticeable desync with the subtitles, and all of the stock footage cutscenes don't have subtitles at all. It's a bit of an accessibility nightmare.

I ultimately ended up playing the PC port solely for the better controls, but if it's your first time through I'd recommend the PS1 version first.

Final Verdict

Metal Gear Solid's a true classic. It's definitely got some age, but to this day it's still my favorite in the series, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone.

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Taiku Reviews: Borderlands 3

Randy Pitchford fucking sucks.

Okay with that out of the way let's talk about Borderlands 3.

Same old Pandora

Borderlands is an FPS/RPG hybrid. Damage, health, defense, recoil, bullet spread, reload speed, and mag size are all determined by clear, raw numbers tied to the player, enemies, and the guns.

Especially the guns.

Every gun in the game is procedurally generated with its own level, manufacturer, and unique traits that ensure that almost no gun will be the same as the other. It can be overwhelming to constantly compare numbers to determine if you have the best loadout, but half the fun of an RPG is the gradual increase in power. It's also not 100% random, as stats are clearly defined by level, and certain traits are clearly defined by the gun's manufacturer. There's also several unique guns with baked stats alongside the procedural generation.

The guns themselves feel great for the most part. They're loud and hit hard, though you definitely develop preferences as you go. Any of the guns that require a charge-up, or you throw them to reload, just feel kinda gross to use, and I actively avoided them while playing.

That's the basic gameplay loop: Kill dudes, get gear, level up, kill stronger dudes, get better gear, level up, repeat. There's a 25 hour story mode, and after that is a mountain of endgame content and harder new game plus runs. Conceptually, I like this a lot. It's basically Diablo with guns, and is a good example of genre mixing done right... for the most part.

A common issue you run into with Diablo clones is the level gap; Maybe you're level 21, fighting level 21 enemies, but suddenly the next mission features level 25 enemies, so you need to do side quests to reach level 25 before you can progress. Borderlands is no different, as you run into quite a few of these. It's probably the most obnoxious issue with Borderlands, but I'd honestly call it a minor complaint. Overall Borderlands is good, but I'm unlikely to play it forever.

And... that's Borderlands.

The whole trilogy.

Something interesting happened while I was playing. The way I write these reviews is as I'm playing a game that I know I want to talk about, I'll keep notes of the things that I like/dislike about it. And as I was writing a mental review in my head, I realized that basically all of my talking points could probably be applied to Borderlands 1&2. In terms of game feel, these are all basically identical to each other. But I'll come back to that.

For now, let's talk about Borderlands 3 specific improvements:

Singleplayer

One of my biggest issues with Borderlands 1&2 (especially 2) is it felt like the game actively discouraged playing alone, to the point where some missions were damn near impossible to complete without a partner. The worst example of this is Wilhelm; a boss that constantly regenerates shields, can down you in three hits, and was just an overall nuisance to fight by myself. Granted, I think the hunter I picked wasn't great for solo play (Zer0), but fights like that reached a point where I seriously considered quitting because it was so painful to go through.

Borderlands 3 is the most solo-friendly game in the trilogy.

I played as FL4K, solely because being a pet class seemed the best for going it alone, but in-game I discovered that one of the traits he can spec into is constant regenerating health, to the point where he basically never has to pick up medkits. I felt unstoppable, and sure enough I basically was unstoppable.

I was Wilhelm.

FL4K made playing solo a breeze, but at a glance the other hunters seem like they can hold their own just as well. One of them has a goddamn mecha. And if that's not enough for you, Borderlands 3 also features a less-than-normal difficulty setting, which I ended up turning on at around the level 10 mark.

While I played through the game alone, Borderlands 3 is much more co-op friendly too; featuring an option for client-sided loot drops, and an option for level scaling to bring overleveled partners down to the same stats as the lowest-level in the group. It's a nice feature.

Other improvements include a Lost Loot chest in the hub world, letting you recover anything dropped or missed on your last missions, you can fast travel from any point instead of needing to visit designated fast travel locations, and it brings back the gore mechanics from Borderlands 1. I like a good squish when shooting my bad guys.

But there's also a lot of noticeable BL3-specific downgrades. Most notably...

Where's my goddamn bounty board?

Remember how I said there are noticeable level gaps as you play? Well, when you encountered one of these in BL1 or 2, you could travel to your hub world and pick a quest at your level from the ever-growing bounty board.

(EDIT: Borderlands 2 doesn't actually have the same bounty board. But it does show you side quests you haven't accepted yet in your general quest list)

BORDERLANDS 3 DOESN'T HAVE THIS

If you're underleveled, you're forced to backtrack through previous zones until you find a side quest that matches your recommended level, and they don't even show you on the map what level they are. You have to manually travel to every side quest to see its level and determine if it's worth doing. It's so baaaaad.

Other problems include:

The death sequence is needlessly long. It was just as long in BL2, but all the first game had was a simple transition screen and you were back into the fray. 2&3 pan the camera to show your dead body, do the transition, then show your body being rebuilt before you can get control back to your character. It's just longer for no reason.

The UI is really frustrating. It's noticeably buggy, with temporary HUD elements like item stats (and even permanent elements like your quest marker) just not appearing for some reason. On top of that, when navigating menus, your cursor will just freeze; requiring you to back out & go back in again to unfreeze. Or maybe you'll try to equip a new gun and it just... won't.

Getting a full inventory can be frustrating too, as you'll want to compare prices of what you're carrying to drop the less valuable things, but item value is the only stat that isn't shown to you instantaneously. Instead it ticks up & down so you have to wait and see what it lands on before moving to the next item.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this franchise. Since while I do love it conceptually, and it arguably does the subgenre best, it's also really annoying to play for a myriad of minor but omnipresent reasons that are consistent across all three games.

That's a good and a bad thing.

Art is always broken

You ever hear the term, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? That's an okay thing to live by when you're an engineer, but game's aren't made by engineers. They're artistic products, and art is always broken. So to see these games have minor-but-glaring issues that have been present since the start of the franchise just never get fixed is really frustrating to see. I'd love to play these games forever, but those issues are so prevalent that it makes replaying them something I'll probably never do.

Despite all of their flaws, I do think they're worth playing at least once. But I doubt you'll want to keep playing them afterwards.

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Taiku Reviews: Inscryption

AN IMMEDIATE DISCLAIMER

I can NOT talk about this game without spoiling it, so here's my spoiler-free review:

Inscryption is a deck-building roguelite with some escape room elements. If the roguelite aspect puts you off, I suggest you play it anyway because it's extremely forgiving for a roguelite, and I promise you getting at least one successful run is worth it.

You'll just have to trust me on that.

Seriously, go play the game. You can come back afterwards.

Your loss.

The first thing you'll notice when starting Inscryption is the New Game option is greyed out. This is intentional, as the game is told from the perspective of someone who discovered it on a floppy disk. So it makes sense that there would already be a save file present. I like that.

Act 1 begins with a pretty fantastic card game. Cards are played, and either fight each other, or attack the opposite player; putting teeth on the scale. The winner is whoever tips the scale completely.

Some cards cost blood, which is earned by sacrificing your own cards on the board, or bones; which are earned after cards die for any reason. Cards also have varying effects to add further depth and strategy, and as you play you'll also get unique items (that squirrel bottle & pliers in this screenshot) to give you more of an edge.

I love this, and would absolutely play a real-life version of it.

As you win card battles, you move forward on a map; either encountering more battles or various other persons to help make your deck stronger.

These persons are represented by the other player, who wears wooden masks to represent your encounters, and places tokens or other props on the table. I love these kinds of things. Lots of video games try to replicate tabletop RPGs, but few quite literally are a TTRPG. Adding more to that aesthetic...

You can get up from the table.

The game master's cabin is almost as fun to explore as playing the card game. You're first encouraged to explore the cabin after one of the cards talks to you directly and points you to the code to a safe. Some puzzles are solved up from the table, others have to be solved within the card game, but eventually you get a roll of film.

Oh yeah, every death you get to enter yourself as a card, using variables from other cards from your deck, and the game master takes a picture of you. At the end of this puzzle road, the cards tell you to win the game and get his camera, using the film to take a picture of him. Once you do, you finally get the New Game option, and...

It turns into a top-down adventure game?

Okay, I skipped some things.

The game master is named Leshy. He's one of four Scrybes alongside Grimora, P03, and Magnificus. After you beat Leshy, you're put into a completely different kind of game and asked to pick a deck from the four scrybes.

Here's what's interesting: They all have different playstyles as if they're completely different card games, but the game follows all their rules at once.

Grimora is a necromancer. Her deck is themed around collecting bones by sacrificing her own cards, and using those bones to play stronger cards.

Leshy is the same, but with blood. Unlike Grimora, Leshy's sacrifices need to be alive in order to play his stronger cards.

P03 is energy-based. Every turn you generate more energy, a-la Hearthstone, and have other unique properties fitting for robots.

Magnificus is a wizard, and can only play cards when certain gemstones are in play; either standalone, or generated by other cards.

But all of their rules happen at the same time here. Picking one deck doesn't mean those will be the only rules involved; since no matter which deck you start with, you have to fight all of them.

From here, you have to visit all four holds and defeat the four scrybes before deciding which one to replace.

I'm... not sure how to feel about this sudden shift in gameplay.

It took me about four hours to beat Leshy, and I wasn't really expecting it to keep going after that; or at the very least I was expecting the cabin to be bigger than the one room. Being thrust into this kind of game was pretty novel, but I dunno, it just felt a little off.

What I didn't get sick of though was the video logs.

Oh did you forget? This is all told from the perspective of a YouTuber. Meet Luke; a collectible card game influencer who gets a little bit too into Inscryption.

His story begins when he decides to do a vintage pack opening of a card game called Inscryption, and is surprised to find one of the cards has a set of GPS coordinates written on them. Upon investigating, he finds a floppy disk suggesting there was once an Inscryption video game, and decides to document it while trying to find its origin.

As you play the top-down mode, you get a second set of video logs and he's visited by a woman named 010000010110110101100001011011100110010001100001 claiming to work for the company that made Inscryption, and he gets an email from the company filing a copyright claim to have him send the game back.

After beating all four scrybes, it enters what is honestly the weakest point of the game.

P03 takes full control and the game becomes a sort-of hybrid of Leshy's cabin and the world exploration. Play cards and explore a virtual map at the table, get up and do puzzles in the room on occasion.

Frankly I'm not a fan, and not even because it's badly designed. It's just a weird tonal shift going from the witchy occult cabin to the cold industrial factory. I would much rather have had a sequence with Grimora or even Magnificus, who you do get to play against in 3D, but only for a brief moment as, MAJOR spoilers, the other three scrybes kill P03 and the game is slowly deleted.

Not literally, of course.

P03's section does have some cool moments. If it's not obvious from the bone mechanic in Leshy's cabin, each character's 'zone' seeps into each other. The cuckoo clock from the cabin appears in the factory, characters from the top-down section will appear as cards, and the gem mechanic eventually appears late into P03's map. There's also some fun meta bosses that have the game create cards based on your Steam friends, pull random images from the internet, and even have you dig through real files on your actual storage drives. This is also where the game tells you all the big twists, but you have to hunt for them.

Yeah, the game doesn't tell you everything on a casual playthrough. So to truly find every bit of lore the game has to offer, you have to replay each zone and find what you missed. That's easier than it sounds, as much like Pony Island (the developer's previous game), you're given the option to restart at all five major points of the story.

Or you can read this ARG deconstruction by DaBigKahuna. That's probably what I'll do, unless I decide to replay it at some point.

The last thing to talk about is Kaycee's Mod. This is still in beta, but it's simply an endless version of Leshy's cabin, with some extra lore details from one of the game's characters, Kaycee Hobbes. I've yet to play it, but I probably will sometime, since the start of the game really is the best part and I'd love to play that endlessly.

Don't let any of my negatives turn you away

This game is fantastic. I already had high standards since Daniel Mullens also made Pony Island, but this blew me away for so many different reasons. I didn't even cover everything because there are some things that I think are best left as surprises. Just... play this game. I'm sure most of it is ruined for you just by reading this review, but seriously, play it. It's so goddamn good.

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Taiku Reviews Phantasy Star

Phantasy Star is... interesting. It's an 8-bit JRPG made for the Sega Master System in 1987, and later remade exclusively in Japan for the Playstation 2 in 2008. I played an enhanced Switch port released in 2018.

There is a plot I guess

It's a totally generic revenge plot. A girl named Alis is the sibling of a space detective investigating the rise of a big bad named Lassic, who eventually kills him. This prompts Alis to seek revenge, and go on an interplanetary space adventure to do so.

That's all I really got from the plot. I could say things that could be considered spoilers, but honestly it didn't really do anything to impress me. But there's a lot that did impress me.

Space travel is cool

You ever think about how few video games there are with open worlds that go across planets? There's Mass Effect, The Outer Worlds, Outer Wilds, the more obscure Starflight, and... that's about it. Phantasy Star takes place across three planets in one solar system, and going between them is pretty sweet: There's the valley planet you start on, a neighboring desert planet, and a desolate ice planet that you don't really spend a lot of time in. Having multiple planets gives a bigger sense of scale than just being on one, and is a good reminder to the player that this is, in fact, a Sci-Fi setting.

Oh, that's probably one negative I have for Phantasy Star: It's really easy to forget that it's supposed to be a Sci-Fi setting. The developed towns are pretty obviously bio-domes, and there are weapons & equipment like lightsabers, laser guns, and laser shields to sell that point, but there's also magic and fantasy creatures mixed in. The Fantasy elements honestly kind of outweigh the Sci-Fi elements.

Alright that's one bad thing about the game. Any more good stuff? I can think of one:

Dungeon crawling fuckin rules

Most of the overworld is top-down exploration, but the game shifts to first-person when entering buildings, talking to NPCs, engaging in combat, and my personal favorite: entering dungeons. If you weren't aware, the Master System was a much more powerful console than the NES was, and because of that it could have some of the smoothest dungeon crawling animation I've seen for this era. Many will criticize dungeon crawling as being confusing or easy to get lost in, but that's honestly what makes it fun. The fear of being trapped in a dungeon with limited resources, the wave of relief you get when you finally manage to get out, and the despair of dying and losing progress is exhilarating.

I read somewhere that a lot of old JRPG dungeons aren't designed with checkpoints in mind, because they're meant to be considered an encounter in-of themselves. Every trash encounter in a dungeon is its 'attack,' slowly whittling your health down until you manage to clear it. Every castle, cave, or wine cellar designed this way can be considered a boss fight in a sense. Dungeons like this are a lot more enjoyable to me when I started thinking of them that way.

However some dungeons can be a little too confusing. The Switch port gives you a minimap to make navigation a lot less of a headache, however these dungeons also have multiple floors to them, as well as pit traps to undo your progress if you're not careful. This makes some dungeons, especially one near the end of the game, extremely difficult to reach the end. Even with the in-game map I ended up sourcing a guide.

That would definitely turn some people away. What's another good thing... Oh yeah!

The Switch port is excellent

Sega has released a handful enhanced ports to Switch as their Sega Ages series. I've played two so far (this and OutRun) and both are fantastic. Not only is Phantasy Star a faithful emulation of the original release, it also features the aforementioned minimap, onscreen character info at all times, a modified version that drastically increases EXP gain and less-than-drastically reduces encounter rates, and there's even tables in the game's pause menu to show the effects of consumable items and equipment & armor; even telling you who can equip what. It's one of the most quality-of-life re-releases I've ever seen of a game in this era.

As for the game itself, though...

The combat is bland, but that's okay

As you can see, the Master System's technical limitations require you to stretch your imagination. For example: According to the game, this is an Owlbear

Phantasy Star's combat isn't anything special. There are four party members, and they follow the standard RPG archetypes: Alis is a paladin with melee attacks and light spells, Myau is a pure healer with a few utility spells, Odin can use melee or ranged weapons and is the only party member with no magic, and Odin is a pure wizard with healing & damage spells alike.

If you follow my main blog you may have read that one of the things I get out of RPGs is the party dynamics; having every member of a group serve a specific purpose and contribute to game progression in some meaningful way. With Phantasy Star, it's kinda boring. This is almost definitely because I played the Ages mode, but apart from the last two bosses, the only thought I put into the game was to do the plain attack on everything I see, and occasionally heal with Myau or Lutz.

...oh yeah, Noah is called Lutz in Japan. Apparently was also going to be an intersex character at some point, which is neat, but I'm getting sidetracked.

I personally can put up with combat like that. And if you're not playing the Ages mode, it'd probably be more in-depth than what I experienced.

But if you ask me, the single worst aspect of Phantasy Star is the railroading.

Railroading? In a game this old?

You ever play a game where you know exactly what you're supposed to do, but the game won't let you do it because you need to talk to another NPC to make the action available?

Phantasy Star does that, and it's ridiculous.

I was genuinely surprised at how much railroading this game has; and it doesn't even make logical sense. There are points where you'll walk through a completely empty ruined village, go to a populated town several tiles ahead of it, and an NPC there will tell you about an item crucial to game progression. Then if you go back to that ruined village, the item will suddenly appear in one of the houses.

WHY?

It's even worse than that at times. Remember how this is a Sci-Fi game with space travel? Sometimes you'll need to go back and forth between these planets multiple times to trigger whatever flag the game wants you to hit. It's one of the earliest offenders of this practice, and I didn't think it would be in this kind of game.

And yet... I still kinda like it.

Phantasy Star is good, IF...

I love dungeon crawling. I love playing old games. I love seeing where franchises started and how mechanics evolved. Even though I'll probably never play it again (except maybe the PS2 remake), I enjoyed playing it. And if you're willing to put up with this era of RPG design, I think you would enjoy it too.