cosmicspear

(Originally posted on December 10.)

This was gonna happen sooner or later. One of these days I was gonna talk about a Trails game, and that day has in fact come.

There's something about this series that just...calls to me in a way not a whole lot of games do. If I had to guess what it is, it'd have to be their sheer ambition. I am fond of games that at least try to go the extra mile, after all. And the fact that Trails sticks the landing more often than not certainly helps.

Trails from Zero is the fourth part of what is to date a twelve-part serial sci-fantasy epic that's been going on for nearly 20 years now, which is honestly amazing to think about. I genuinely can't think of a lot of game series that have had continuous narratives lasting that long or longer, pretty much the only ones I can name off the top of my head would have to be fellow Falcom series Ys and Rance of all things.

Anyway, Zero's story takes us to Crossbell State, a small but extremely important city-state nestled in a mountain pass right between the two biggest players in western Zemuria: the Erebonian Empire and the Republic of Calvard. There are...several reasons why this is a less than ideal circumstance. Both the Empire and Republic claim Crossbell as their own territory, but Crossbell itself claims independence, and politicians in both the major powers are willing to entertain these claims to some extent because it's such an effective buffer state for facilitating trade between two countries that are otherwise enemies—and because the state government accepts informal agreements with both of them to not interfere with this status quo. Which effectively means the Empire and Republic get to dictate Crossbell's laws to serve their interests, and the resulting corruption bleeds down into local affairs since their representatives inevitably end up hating each other and throwing the whole political system into deadlock. And you'd better believe there's a problem with organized crime, since the system's full of corruption that's extremely easy to take advantage of by, say, allying with a few key players who happen to have enough power to stop any investigations into what you're doing.

This is the state of the city in which our hero, Lloyd Bannings, lives. Lloyd begins the story as a new recruit to Crossbell's police department (one of the few civilian police departments in Zemuria, as it turns out), trying to follow in the footsteps of his departed brother. He's immediately assigned to the Special Support Section, a division so new the receptionist he meets initially thinks someone must be hazing him. The Special Support Section turns out to be extremely unusual, consisting entirely of Lloyd and three others: wealthy aristocrat Elie MacDowell, fourteen-year-old genius Tio Plato, and ex-military loose cannon Randy Orlando. They're also given the unusual duty of accepting requests for assistance directly from the citizens that might not even have anything to do with solving crimes.

The fact that this duty puts them in direct competition with the Bracer Guild, the international society of do-gooders who can presumably be credited with removing most reasons to establish non-military police (hell, Crossbell only has 'em because they can't set up a real military without the Empire and Republic yelling at them) is not lost on anyone. In fact, it's part of why they founded the SSS in the first place—absolutely nobody has any confidence in the CPD, not even people who'd normally be expected to trust the police. The sheer amount of political pressure and corruption everywhere means that they can't do much in the way of serious investigative work at all, and even the elite First Division is stuck basically just solving high-profile prestige crimes rather than anything that would make things safer for anyone. It doesn't help that Crossbell's Bracer Guild has some particularly impressive people involved, particularly local Sword Dad and all-around badass Arios MacLaine. The purpose (well, one of the purposes, at least) of the SSS, then, is to be a police unit that actually can do the things that need doing, in order to turn the CPD into something people actually trust to any degree whatsoever.

And so the Special Support Section's uphill battle to be respected or even recognized as a force capable of helping people and resolving crimes begins. A lot of their work ends up involving investigations into the local mafia, whose close ties with key government officials protect them from the main police force, and everything seems disconnected at first but naturally there's a bigger picture that emerges over time, and there just might be more tying the SSS to their cases than their professional duties. There's a lot of darkness lying beneath Crossbell's streets, and the question of whether they can overcome the barriers in their way and bring it to light needs to be answered.

(Better get used to people talking about barriers, by the way. This is a story about fighting to overcome corruption at every level and that's very much the metaphor they go with. Hell, they even called the normal battle theme "Get Over the Barrier!" And you'd better believe you'll be doing a lot of that.)

Trails from Zero does a lot to demonstrate just how much characterization and character interaction is the biggest strength of Trails writing. You will get attached to the SSS and the people around them, and in true Trails fashion even the minor non-player characters are given enough characterization to be interesting. The fact that you're spending the whole game in one place instead of running around to a bunch of different regions like in the Sky games just emphasizes that even more.

Then there's the aesthetics. The Trails games take place at the height of a massive technological revolution, and Crossbell does a very good job of showing that off. Cars and guns that look like they'd be at home in a period gangster movie exist alongside more modern vending machines, emerging mobile phone technology, an experimental Internet-like, and the ridiculously overengineered underground utility network that is the Geofront. All of this is presented within a city that looks like it came out of the '50s, aside from a couple of very modern-looking glass buildings. It really shows how rapidly technology is advancing in these games, with all of this stuff coexisting.

There's also a neat trick they do with this if you played the Sky games, which is that Liberl, where those games are set, is a relative backwater where a lot of technological innovations just didn't take hold at all while Crossbell is at the forefront of the technological revolution, so there's this huge culture shock going into Zero and seeing how much more high-tech stuff there is everywhere.

Each district of Crossbell also manages to have more life to it than a lot of entire towns you might see in other RPGs. The affluent Residential District, where all the richest families gather, feels extremely different from the Asian-styled East Street and the slums of the Downtown District, and yet they all still feel like part of the same city. It's seriously impressive how they managed to pull all this off, and it does a lot to make Crossbell feel like somewhere that could exist in real life.

Of course, I also need to mention the issue every Trails game has, which is that this is an ongoing series that expects you to have been following every part of it from the start. That does in fact apply to Zero, which will talk about the events of the Sky trilogy under the assumption that you've played those games. The main plot still makes sense without them, but there's quite a bit that you'll want to at least have a working knowledge of in order to have context for, for instance, who this purple-haired girl who keeps showing up is and why she's a big deal. I guarantee you it's at least worth knowing what went down in those games.

And then there's the game, which is an extremely well-built RPG.

Battles play out on a grid, with characters getting individual turns based on how fast they are. Movement and positioning is important for minimizing the effects of enemy AoE attacks and maximizing the effects of your own, in addition to just being able to get to enemies—unlike in the Cold Steel games it's not uncommon even in the endgame to find yourself out of range to attack what you want to attack. Magic, referred to Arts, runs off of a different meter than physical skills, or Crafts—the latter meter builds up when you deal or take damage. Characters also have supermoves known as S-Crafts, which use at least 100 Craft Points to activate—they get stronger if you have the maximum of 200 but will always drain the whole meter, so it can be beneficial to hold off on using them. Arts, meanwhile, have a casting time for you to worry about.

So far it sounds pretty basic, right? It is in a lot of ways—you'll note that the basic "you have different meters for magic and physical skills and the physical one builds up as you fight" conceit is very similar to the default battle system in modern RPG Maker versions, for instance—but there are a few places where they shake it up.

Twist number one: Individual turns can have bonuses on them, that apply to whoever takes that turn. If you act on a turn with a critical icon, whatever you're doing does a critical hit even if it wouldn't normally be able to. If your turn has an HP recovery icon, you heal some HP. And so forth.

Twist number two: When you have an S-Craft ready to use, you can use it whenever you want, even if it's an enemy's turn. This is called an S-Break, and if you have more than one S-Craft on a character you can choose which one they use. Combined with the previous twist, you can steal turn icons from enemies. It seems like a little thing, but in practice this is does a lot to make the combat more dynamic.

Arts are interesting in their own way, because the way you learn them is mostly disconnected from your leveling up. Arts are tied to your characters' orbments, which are devices that the characters carry to enhance their strength and let them do magic¹. Your orbments have seven slots—one in the center, with six surrounding it—into which you place quartz, which you make from sepith, a material that drops from monsters. Each quartz has a passive effect of some sort, but it also provides elemental values, which are where your Arts come from. The trick here is that the slots are connected to each other in lines that extend from the center slot, and the elemental values of every quartz on the line are combined to determine what Arts that line will give you. Longer lines also grant you more EP, which is what you use to cast Arts in the first place.

There's a lot I like about the orbment system here. You have to arrange quartz carefully to get something that works instead of it just being a "put these gems in some sockets" thing, and there's a direct logical connection between how characters' lines are set up and what their roles end up being—if you've got someone with a bunch of smaller lines they're obviously not gonna be doing a lot of casting so you may as well just focus on making their physical attacks better, while a single unbroken line means you've got a character who should obviously be built as a mage because they're inevitably going to be better at it than anyone else. And those roles logically follow from how the quartz system works, unlike the system they introduced in Cold Steel where Arts are directly granted by quartz and lines are more or less vestigial as a concept.

Also worth noting: If you're at all familiar with the Trails games you know they love their missables. Zero is no stranger to this, of course. At one point to get one of the books you need to get an ultimate weapon you need to turn around immediately after being sent into a dungeon, leave the dungeon, and head to a nearby cafe, with absolutely no warning that there's anything hidden there. There's also plenty of secret sidequests, and recipes hidden in all sorts of places. There's a lot to find in general, really.

There's also the soundtrack, which is one of the best from a really strong era for Falcom soundtracks. There's no less than four songs for just walking around Crossbell, for instance, and all of them show the city's character in their own way. Also, this song that sounds like something you'd expect for the really big fights? That's the normal boss theme, and in the endgame it plays in all regular encounters. The actual major boss theme is even better.

I'd definitely say Zero is one of the stronger Trails games on the whole. It's got everything these games have at their best, and it's just good in general. I know I'm gonna be rejoining the Special Support Section for their continuing adventures in Azure, probably very shortly after posting this

1. In-universe orbments are what power almost all technology because they're more efficient than anything else, but the word used on its own generally refers to the kind people use in combat.

(Originally posted on November 18.)

(Putting the entire trilogy here because they're really short games and I played the commercial release, which has all of them.)

Honestly I mostly picked these games up now in order to do something short before diving headlong into Astlibra, since I've only been playing massive epic RPGs lately and I may as well take a break from that.

LiEat stars a girl named Efina, or Efi for short. She just so happens to be a dragon. What kind of dragon, you ask? The kind who eats lies, of course! I mean, it's kinda in the title there. But LiEat dragons in general are...interesting—they look mostly like humans, they mature quickly and age slowly (Efi is 4 months old in the first game and looks closer to 4 years, and there's another dragon character who's 100 and looks a lot younger than that), and every dragon has a unique power of some sort.

Efi travels with her father figure of sorts, a con artist who goes by a different name in each game. I'll just call him Leo since that's what he uses in the first one and it's simpler that way. He's also the only person whose lies Efi can't eat, and the reason for that isn't directly stated but there's a general implication that it's because he's just too good at lying for her to deal with due to, y'know, being less than a year old. Their dynamic is pretty much what you'd expect from a cynical crook and an adorably innocent little girl, and it's pretty entertaining on the whole.

Anyway, Efi and Leo go about having episodic adventures in various towns, inevitably getting involved in assorted incidents where Efi's ability to sense lies is, as it turns out, incredibly valuable. The lies she senses manifest as creatures that you then have RPG battles against in order to eat them. This leads into a recurring investigation gimmick, where you'll get a testimony that has one or two lies in it, all the statements manifest, and you need to figure out which ones are lies based on what you already know. It's an interesting way of doing things, to be sure.

And I feel the need to emphasize that the battles are, in fact, extremely easy. This isn't a game about throwing combat challenges at you, it's a story that happens to require that you fight enemies a few times. It's even possible to find a set of cheat weapons that make you basically unstoppable in every game, with only the third one requiring you to fight anything before they're available.

Anyway. The general theme of LiEat is obvious enough, given that the main character of the series has the ability to make people's lies take physical form. And indeed, while there are antagonistic presences in every game, the general mood is focused on how their lies pile up, driving them into a corner and corrupting them even when told with good intentions. It's extremely on the nose, but that doesn't make it any less effective.

All told, this was a fun distraction and it makes me want to check out some of Miwashiba's other games

(Originally posted on November 1.)

The back of the Disgaea box proudly declares, "Strategy RPG's are about to get a serious kick in the ass!" And there may be a pretty obvious typo there, but it is a pretty accurate statement.

Disgaea stars Laharl, the crown prince of the Netherworld. At the start of the game he's woken up by his loyal and totally not obviously plotting against him vassal Etna (through the use of such classic sleep-ending implements as swords, flails, drills, and a minigun) who informs him that his father, the great King Krichevskoy, died two years ago. Which he finds more than a little bizarre considering he never intended to sleep that long—his nap was only supposed to last ten days.

Yeah, it's that kind of game.

Anyway, having two years pass between the last Overlord's death and his heir doing anything whatsoever has left the Netherworld full of random warlords trying to take over, none of whom even remotely respect Laharl. So he sets out to take the throne by force, taking on everyone who dares disrespect him.

At the same time, Seraph Lamington, the leader of the angels who rule Celestia, sends a trainee named Flonne on what is ostensibly an assassination mission but is blatantly actually some other scheme whose nature will inevitably be revealed over the course of the game. And other elements in Celestia, as well as on Earth, are also preparing their own plans...

Disgaea approaches all of this with an extremely silly attitude. For instance, Laharl blatantly refuses to show the first boss any respect whatsoever, renaming him Mid-Boss during his introduction, and the game immediately accepts this. A later level features you facing off against the ultimate zombie, armed with the brain of the great sorcerer Mahogany, the body of Hercules...and a horse wiener (and yes, that is exactly how they refer to it), which is the only part Laharl is at all worried about. And all of those parts can be stolen to have your own units use them.

Also of note are the Prinnies, penguin-like demons who explode when thrown, say "dood" a lot, and are constantly the victims of assorted kinds of physical comedy. Like when a bunch of them challenge you to a game of baseball...and your party absolutely refuses to play by their rules, leading to a ridiculously easy fight.

Yet at the same time, Disgaea also knows when to stop joking around. The most famous moment of this is the game's eighth chapter, which I will not spoil but it manages to have more emotional impact than a lot of completely serious stories. And it never lets the jokes undermine the story it's trying to tell, which becomes particularly clear in the second half of the game when all the plot threads start really paying off. There's still jokes, but it's not about to let them overshadow the serious points.

It also benefits heavily from a strong main cast. Laharl, Etna, and Flonne play off each other extremely well, with Etna's cynical and sarcastic attitude and Flonne's extreme belief in the power of love being an effective contrast. Laharl's attitude, which initially looks like a joke as he constantly insists he's the most evil demon around even as he's obviously struggling to hide his kinder side, is particularly important as well—in the end, this is a story about his growth as a person, and his gradual shift away from the heartless persona he initially tries to project is handled more or less perfectly.

And really, Laharl's development is one of the most important elements of the game's theme of how people should be judged by who they are rather than by existing prejudices—a frequently explored idea, yes, but it's a classic for a reason. He contrasts well with Vulcanus, the main angelic antagonist, who despite preaching righteous ideals is blatantly in it only for himself—in essence, being more traditionally demonic than any of the actual demon cast members.

So Disgaea's plot is much more gripping and effective than you probably expected if you only know it as "that game with demons and lots of level grinding." What about the gameplay?

Well, it's very unique, particularly compared to the other kinds of SRPGs that existed at the time. For starters, you deploy units from a base panel instead of choosing them before you start fighting. You can also back out of any movement or actions that haven't yet had an effect on the battlefield, provided the tile your character started the turn on is still open. Characters can also support each other when they attack, which only uses up the attacking unit's turn—so you can then back out of the movement for your other characters and have them do something else, for example.

But wait, there's more! Because you can also lift and throw any unit, ally or enemy. Throw allies to let them move farther! Throw enemies to keep them from attacking your squishies! Throw enemies into each other to combine them and mix their levels together, letting you get more experience! Throw characters who are carrying other characters to get even more range! Lift an enemy guarding a chokepoint, let your guys through, and undo the action to leave the enemy probably stuck between your guys! There's a lot of possibilities with throwing, and it's one of the more fun mechanics out there.

There's also Geo Panels, which are one of the most unique takes on the terrain effects you see in every SRPG that I've run into. You see, instead of certain tile types having fixed effects, tiles might contain a Geo Panel of a particular colour, whose effects are based on objects called Geo Symbols that contain them. If there's red Geo Panels that have an ATK +50% symbol on them, everyone standing on the red panels gets a 50% increase to their offensive stats. If there's green panels that have an EXP +50% symbol on them, anything you kill that's on one of those gives you 50% more experience. If the red panels also have a Damage 20% symbol on them, they also cause anything standing on them to lose 20% of its max HP at the start of every turn. And you can throw the symbols around to change which panels have which effects—if you move the Damage 20% to a green panel, then the green panels are the ones with that effect. But there's more to it, because Geo Symbols are also colour-coded, and if you destroy one on a panel that's a different colour from it, those panels change to match the colour of the symbol you just destroyed! This also produces a shockwave effect that damages everyone on the panels that changed. So in our example, if the ATK +50% symbol on the red panels is green, you can destroy it to turn all the red panels into green ones that have the effects of all the symbols on the green (and everything that was on a red panel takes damage). And if the shockwave from destroying one symbol hits another symbol, it destroys that symbol no matter what its HP is, and if that symbol is a different colour from the panels, it changes them too! And to finish things off, there are also clear Geo Symbols that just destroy the panels they're on if you destroy them, and destroying all the panels gets you a nice boost to your bonus meter. So let's go back to our example and say the ATK +50% is clear, the EXP +50% is red, and the Damage 20% is blue. Destroying the EXP +50% would turn all the green panels red and destroy the Damage 20%. All the red panels would then turn blue, and the ATK +50% would be destroyed. This would then destroy all the blue panels, which is probably all the panels on the field.

(Mind you, most of the time you're not clearing out Geo Panels in the story maps. Usually you have to, say, find a way to get rid of some Enemy Boost symbols that are making a group of regular enemies into seriously dangerous murder machines before they kill you.)

Also of note is the combo system, which makes attacks stronger if you repeatedly attack the same enemy. This only works if you queue up multiple attacks at once and then confirm them, and also gives you more bonus meter (and thus rewards) than attacking separately would. The downside, though, is that the more attacks you set up the harder it is to keep track of what tiles your attacks will hit, which increases your risk of killing one of your own units, which is bad because if you get even one ally kill? You can say goodbye to the good ending until your next loop.

You also have the Dark Assembly, which is where you go to do...a lot of things, really. You use it to upgrade the shops, recruit new generic characters, transmigrate your characters (letting them start over from level 1 with bonuses for what their stats were when you used it), unlock bonus areas, and so forth. A lot of this involves bribing senators to vote for things you want them to, which is a complex and arcane process whose primary variables aren't visible in the bribery interface and just might end up being irrelevant once you get strong enough to pass bills by force instead. They also demand that you reach the right rank to propose certain things, which involves doing promotion exams where you fight solo against specific enemies. The promotion exams, not to put too fine a point on it, suck ass. Not only does the system ignore how a lot of units really don't have the durability for solo combat, but because elemental resistances are random, it's not unheard of for mages to face enemies they literally can't damage. And it's game over if you die in a promotion exam, so good luck!

Then there's the Item World, which is exactly what it sounds like—a world inside every item. Using this has you go through a bunch of short randomly generated maps all in a row, then when you're done the item levels up and gets stronger. You can also run into specialists, which are specific enemies that provide bonus stats, and if you defeat them you can move them to another item or combine them with other specialist of the same type, letting you effectively build ultimate weapon. It's surprisingly fun, and I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any previous SRPG.

And then there's the subject of what everyone knows about Disgaea: the level grinding. If you've heard of these games before, you probably know about how the level cap is 9,999 and you can eventually do millions of damage with each attack. Fortunately this is handled a lot more sensibly than that simple explanation makes it sound. During the main story you're not expected to go above level 100, and even that would be extremely high for it. There's also plenty of maps, both in the main game and the postgame, that exist primarily to give you a place to grind lots of levels extremely quickly. The jump from the final boss being L90 to the first postgame area's boss being L1,000 is a lot less intimidating when you can gain dozens of levels in a single attack even before you start stacking experience-buffing effects.

There's a few different versions of the game out there, and I played the North American PS2 version. There's also the PSP version that adds an alternate story and replaces Etna's English voice with a somewhat less fitting one, the DS version that is surprisingly intact for being a PS2 game ported to DS, the PC version that changes the interface but is mostly just a new coat of paint on the PSP version, and the Complete version, which has different¹ graphics and lets healers get experience for healing like in later games in the series. So there's a decent amount of variety, but there's no really bad versions of the game or anything.

All told, Disgaea is a classic that I'd strongly recommend playing

1. I say "different" and not "better" because for the most part they just pasted the HD sprites from later Disgaea games into the original game without considering things like how a few monsters have a radically different look in the HD sprites or how some types just don't exist in that spriteset.

(Originally posted on October 22.)

In which qureate decides to try their hand at doing a horror game, with decidedly non-terrible results.

This game follows three girls—Nana, Mio, and Azusa—who do a horror stream of exploring an abandoned and almost certainly haunted we're-not-gonna-outright-say-it's-a-love-hotel-for-the-sake-of-ratings-but-it's-totally-a-love-hotel¹ in pursuit of the most noble goal of getting more viewers. Naturally, it goes wrong instantly when Mio gets separated from the other two, who also split up equally quickly, and winds up chased by an animate and extremely murderous mascot costume from the nearby defunct theme park. The three must then run for their lives while figuring out how the hell they're going to get out of the hotel. It's not exactly a complex plot, and the characters aren't particularly complex either, but it gets the job done at least.

So, how does qureate make a game out of this premise? Well, it's a side-scrolling graphical adventure. You need to go around the hotel, collecting everything that isn't nailed down and on fire, solving puzzles, and incidentally also trying not to get murdered by the killer mascot that's running around. That last bit's the main wrinkle here, and the vast majority of encounters with the mascot are non-scripted—he'll show up at random to disrupt your exploration, forcing you to run and hide whenever it does. It's an effective enough jumpscare the first couple of times it happens, but as is the nature of such things it winds up getting tedious after a while when you're backtracking across the hotel for the millionth time and you're suddenly forced to turn around and find the nearest bathroom to cower in. Fortunately your opponent is extremely easy to escape from, having absolutely no ability to sniff out your hiding places even if you hide right in front of him. Though there are absolutely no safeguards against him just teleporting into a room in a position where he blocks your only exit.

For the most part you're dealing with adventure game-type "figure out what the right item to use for this situation is" puzzles, which are simple enough especially since this is not a game that is particularly interested in making you reuse items. Which leads to a very good "this gun exists solely to shoot out a single lock and cannot be used for anything else"-type moment at one point, I have to say. Really, though, it's probably for the best that the puzzles are usually intuitive, since a lot of them are timed. There are some actual puzzle-type puzzles later on, though, which aren't too devious but are effective enough. And the way you get onto the true ending path is some genuine Adventure Game Logic of the highest caliber.

Naturally, since this is qureate and we should not be under any illusions about what kind of developer we're dealing with here, there's plenty of fanservice to go around. This isn't one of their actual eroge offerings so it doesn't go much farther than extremely and sometimes improbably flattering camera angles plus the occasional suggestive situation, but we do get plenty of that, including a panty shot every time you hide in a bathroom². It's not as ludicrously gratuitous as Prison Princess where you wind up seeing panties more or less constantly, but it's still more than a little silly.

Ultimately, though, Livestream: Escape from Hotel Izanami actually does manage to get some decent scares in. It knows how to build suspense, its bad endings do their job for the most part, and it understands how to make gory situations work without actually showing the gore itself. It's hardly the scariest thing out there or anything, but it gets a passing grade on that at least.

Alas, like everything qureate makes, this game is weighed down by the dread incompetence of Medibang. It's a decent showing by their standards, though, which is to say it calls armchairs sofas and insists on calling the murder-suicide case much of the backstory is built around a "forced double suicide" but there is clear character voice and general consistency.

I'll probably end up forgetting this game quickly enough, but it did its job. And sometimes that's all you really need out of a game

1. The nature of the place doesn't really come into play beyond set dressing, honestly

2. You can also hide behind pillars, which obviously doesn't provide that particular result

(Originally posted on September 3.)

Welcome back, Armored Core.

It's good that Fromsoft returned to this, their former flagship series, after Demon's Souls and its derivatives took that spot. Especially since they resisted the urge to take the easy way out and turn it into Mech Souls. I mean, there are some obvious and non-obvious Souls influences here, but the heart of the game is still Armored Core.

The story here is as follows: In the past, the planet Rubicon 3 became extremely important due to a miracle substance called Coral that allowed all sorts of important and popular technological advances. That ended with a disaster known as the Fires of Ibis, where almost all of the Coral suddenly ignited in a blaze that engulfed not just Rubicon but a massive area of space around it. The planet is now officially closed off, but the SpiceCoral must flow and thus corporations continue to illegally operate on Rubicon, chasing profits no matter the risk. It is into this environment that our protagonist, C4-621, is thrust—with a promise from his employer, one Handler Walter, that they'll be able to pay off their debts and have the augmentation surgery that left them barely functional outside of their AC with the money they'll earn. Naturally there's more to it than that, and agendas both overt and very well-hidden will clash before this story is done.

Armored Core 6 is remarkably character-driven compared to the series as it previously stood. Previous games in the series are largely content to focus primarily on the things that happen and tend to have very minimalistic casts, while AC6 has a much wider variety of characters and puts a lot more of the focus on them and what they're doing. Which ends up making this cast a lot more memorable than what you see in previous games. Of particular note is Rusty, the rival character who in a lot of ways feels like what they wanted to do with White Glint back in AC4 but fumbled massively.

Mechanically, this is very much an Armored Core game. The pace of the game movement-wise is less ridiculously fast than AC4 and For Answer, while still being faster than the old Armored Core games. One thing I appreciate is that, unlike the 4 series where you had functionally infinite ground boosting but had to hold the button down, in AC6 there's a toggle for the boost, and it's a separate button from the one you use to jump and hover. You have no idea how valuable that specific point is if you haven't played the older Armored Core games and struggled to not jump when you didn't mean to all the time.

The big mechanic here is the stagger bar, which does what you'd expect—fill it up on an enemy and you stagger them, stopping them in their tracks for a bit and letting you do more damage to them during that time. I'm not sure how I feel about this, because on the one hand it means weapons meant to be high-stagger don't have to accomplish that by constantly pushing you around with every hit, but on the other hand it makes having something that can do significant stagger damage almost mandatory. Which means a lot of builds have to make space for a shotgun or bazooka or missile rack or something to build up to that vital burst window, which in turn reduces the build variety you end up with.

Which isn't to say there's not a hell of a lot of options for how to set up your AC. There's loads of parts, and in true Armored Core tradition there's a ridiculous amount of stats associated with them that allow for some incredibly unique distinguishing features. Seriously, there's separate stats for how quickly generators start recharging normally, how quickly they start recharging when you completely deplete the bar, and how much energy they add to the bar when you're in the latter situation, which is just a level of granularity you can't help but appreciate.

I also have to bring up the elephant in the room: bosses. Armored Core 6 has a lot of bosses, way more than you'd expect from this series. And they're a lot more elaborate than the typical Armored Core boss fight, too, which is honestly the place where the Souls influence is most strongly felt. And on the one hand these boss fights are extremely cool, but on the other hand I can't help but feel that they come at the expense of having less of a focus on AC battles than there really ought to be. Which feels like an odd thing to say when this is one of the few Armored Core games where you get to fight everyone in the arena rankings, but there you go.

Ultimately, though, I enjoyed Armored Core 6. It's definitely a worthy entry in the series, and there's plenty of fun to be had with it.

Now here's hoping we don't have to wait another ten years for Armored Core 7

(Originally posted on August 13.)

I don't think it'll surprise anyone to learn that I liked this game, considering how much I've been talking about it.

This is one of a number of games Aquaplus has made alongside Sting, a partnership that's been going on for quite a while. Surprising absolutely nobody given its name, it's a sequel to the first Dungeon Travelers, which was a spinoff of To Heart 2. I couldn't say what led to that happening, but for Dungeon Travelers 2 they went with an original cast.

The plot here is...not exactly gonna set the world on fire. Once upon a time the evil Demon God nearly conquered the world with her army of monsters, heroes defeated her and sealed her away, now it's 500 years later and the seal is conveniently just about to break, thus creating a crisis for our party to deal with. So pretty much an ISO standard fantasy RPG plot, then. There's a single plot twist that's obvious enough to see coming from a continent away, they briefly touch on the issue of discrimination against monsters but don't really commit, but otherwise it hits the main points and doesn't really go any farther.

The protagonist of this game is technically a young man named Fried Einhard. He's a Libra, a sorcerer who has the ability to seal monsters inside a magic book¹. Working for the kingdom of Romulea's Royal Library, he leads a team of skilled adventurers to deal with monster-related situations.

...I say he's technically the protagonist because I'm honestly unsure what he even adds to the game, other than the things any sole male character in an otherwise all-female cast is good for. Fried is honestly my gold standard for completely useless main characters of that type, being mechanically just a glorified accessory slot and having very little in the way of an actual personality. He likes researching monsters and...that's pretty much it for his character.

Not that you're gonna be playing Dungeon Travelers 2 for the plot, though. There's exactly two draws to this game.

The first is what most people probably heard about it first, which is that this is a game where you fight cute monster girls and every boss fight² is followed by you getting a sexy defeat CG for the boss you just beat. I'm not about to judge you for being into that, it's what first got me interested in the game after all. The CGs in question range from fairly tame to surprisingly over the top given this game was originally sold in regular stores.

Then there's the other draw, which is that this is honestly an extremely well-constructed dungeon RPG.

If you've played any DRPGs the way this all works is probably familiar enough. You've got your first-person dungeon crawling, your party of up to five characters, your class system, all that good stuff. The class system's really in-depth, with five base classes that can be upgraded twice as you level up. The base classes have a small selection of really basic skills, the intermediate classes (2 or 3 choices for each base class) get more specialized, and the advanced classes (3 or 4 depending on your base class) are where you really see some interesting speciation. For instance, a regular Magic User might advance to become a Sorceress for more attack spells, an Enchantress for support, or a Priestess for healing. From there your advanced options include Witch for doing massive magic damage, Bishop for the strongest healing magic, Sage for high-end support effects, or Magical Princess for skipping all this spellcasting nonsense and just whacking enemies with swords instead. You learn skills with skill points, with the number of skill points you get for leveling up dependent on your level and skills having extremely variable costs to learn (which conveniently sidesteps the old Etrian Odyssey problem of the basic skills not being worth learning unless you absolutely need to by making them easier to get to a high level).

The monster sealing comes into play with Sealbooks, which are interesting. Beat enough instances of a particular monster, and you can make 'em into a sealbook that's essentially an extra accessory. Sealbooks are also the best items to sell, and they're used for upgrading non-unique equipment. Bosses instead give you Grand Sealbooks. What makes them so grand, you ask? Fried equips them and they give you an effect that applies to your whole party.

Grand sealbooks are honestly a bit of a wash, as a mechanic. The problem is that a lot of them are really situational, so in practice you probably just use the one that increases critical rate all the way from when you get it in the third area to the final dungeon, since critical hits interrupt magic and that's more useful than, say, slightly reducing the damage you take from a single specific enemy type. Then you get the ones that reduce TP cost for abilities and you never need to think about the mechanic again after that.

The best part of Dungeon Travelers 2, though, is the actual dungeon crawling. At first it's relatively pedestrian, but about halfway through the main story they start introducing map gimmicks and at that point the dungeon design starts getting increasingly Inspired. You get teleporter mazes, one-way wall mazes, very clever use of dark and anti-magic zones, the works. This game's a paradise for people who like DRPG map design, which is probably why I've spent the last week or so gushing about it in that respect. Of course this also means it's really fucking hard, but that's a lot more acceptable in DRPGs than a most other genres.

Which brings us to the difficulty. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but most people probably heard about Dungeon Travelers 2 as a fanservice game, the type of thing you saw all the time on the Vita. So they probably didn't expect something that throws Wizardry-tier difficulty at you on the regular from a relatively early point. But that's what you get: a Vita fanservice game that's also a super-hardcore dungeon RPG. And it's not just the dungeon design, either—there's a fuckton of extremely dangerous enemies to deal with. You'll get hit with deadly AoE spells, deadly instant AoE abilities, regular attacks that can instakill, special attacks that can instakill, multi-hit attacks that do more than an average character's maximum HP, and all sorts of shit along those lines. A lot of the time getting ambushed leaves at least one character down and the rest nearly dead before you can do anything—oh, and did I neglect to mention the enemies that get guaranteed ambushes if your preemptive attack roll fails? Because that's a thing by the endgame. The final boss can just arbitrarily choose to use a target-all fire attack that does most of your HP, activates instantly, and stuns your entire party, and then she can do it again on her next turn and there's nothing you can do to stop that.

Really, DRPGs are probably the only place they could've gotten away with that sort of thing. Almost certainly no other genre would let them do all that and have the result be seen as fun.

But in the end, that's what Dungeon Travelers 2 ends up being. It's nightmarishly difficult, it regularly trolls you, it sometimes wipes your party without you being able to do anything about it, and it manages to make that all fun.

I'm nowhere near done with this game—there's an absolutely massive postgame that genuinely uses the entirety of the available level scale—but I'm confident saying my time was spent well

1. The justification for this is that monsters that are killed just respawn, so sealing them is the only way to get rid of them for good.

2. Except the final boss for Reasons.

(Originally posted on July 28.)

Well, I took my screenname from this game, of course it's a winner in my book.

Valkyrie Profile's story is rooted in Norse mythology. It's not exactly adapting the myths as we know them with any sort of accuracy (for one thing, the game's version of Ragnarok has the Aesir and Vanir going to war when I'm pretty sure all the sources we have say they're supposed to be unified at that point) but then again Norse mythology as we know it is already pretty much crossover fanfic with Christianity so it's hardly the first time that's happened.

Anyway, you're the Valkyrie (whose true name, Lenneth, isn't even remotely a secret but is generally only brought up in conversations with other gods), sent to recruit worthy heroes to serve as einherjar and help Odin win the war. This entails finding people who are about to die and seeing their fates. As such, this is not a happy game—every single one of your party members has already experienced some sort of betrayal, tragedy, defeat, or other terrible thing before they even get to join your party. And you get to see all of it, which has the side benefit of making sure that, despite there being 22 characters not counting the postgame, you're intimately familiar with all of them.

You're not just supposed to find einherjar and send them up, though, because Odin's not about to take time away from his busy schedule of playing with silly ball-string toys and brushing up on his office mini-golf skills to actually train the warriors he asked for. No, you've gotta do it yourself, which means you need to go around fighting evil in Midgard to get them ready. It's honestly an interesting dynamic, in that despite being one of the most powerful gods around you're being actively ordered to go do the murderhobo routine with it being explicitly stated that you're doing it for level grinding purposes. Which leads to the basic gameplay loop: seek out einherjar, witness their stories, then train them up in dungeons until they're ready to be sent up to Asgard, then periodically get called back up to see how they're doing and get your evaluation/goals for the next chapter.

The dungeon crawling and combat is where Valkyrie Profile really starts showing how unique it is, and honestly I've never seen anyone even try to replicate it outside of tri-Ace themselves in some of their other games. The dungeons are presented in 2D platformer form, you see. Lenneth has exactly one trick outside of what you'd expect here, but it's a good one: she can fire energy shots that freeze enemies (and certain environmental obstacles) and create crystals if they instead hit the walls or floor. The crystals you create can be used as platforms, cut up to create fragments you can carry around, or expanded by shooting them again. Shooting a large crystal, meanwhile, makes it explode, launching you away from it if you're close enough and leaving a slowly falling energy field that you can use as a temporary platform.

It's honestly brilliant, because they give you this one ability that you can use in all sorts of creative ways. You can set up crystals in walls to be able to climb them, you can launch yourself at angles you wouldn't be able to get with a jump, you can break them to get a way to activate switches, and there's plenty of opportunities to use them in all of those ways.

Battle, meanwhile, is also extremely unique. You've got four party members and four primary buttons on the PS1 controller, so each party member gets their own button that activates their attacks. You build up combos by having everyone attack, trying to link their attacks together to get them to all hit. And since enemies you hit get knocked around in accordance with how you'd expect the physics of your attacks to move them, that can be fairly difficult to do. The attacks you have access to are also variable based on the weapon you're using—some weapons have three attacks, some have two, some have only one, and the weapons with limited attacks also restrict you to specific parts of your characters' movesets so they can behave in dramatically different ways depending on what they let you use.

...I have to take a moment to think about just how much effort it must've took to put together completely unique attack patterns for the sixteen non-mage characters you get, plus the twelve types of attack magic your mages can get, and have them all behave in a logical way once you start attacking with them. In a sprite-based game, even.

That's not the end of it, though, because in addition to their regular attacks everyone gets a special attack that you can use when you've built up a meter that appears during your attacks. Different attacks build different amounts of meter, and once it's full you just push the button for the character who's special you want to use within a limited amount of time they give you, and if the character was both in the attack chain and not recharging you get to do the attack. But wait, there's more! Because special attacks also fill the meter, letting you chain them together for even more damage! And specials get stronger if you use them later in the chain, in addition to getting bonus damage from combo length! Really, effectively chaining your special attacks together is a big part of success in Valkyrie Profile, and also super satisfying because of how cool the animations for them can be.

With mages there's an additional wrinkle here because each attack spell has two specials associated with it: the regular one where you just cast it multiple times at once, and a Great Magic version that hits everyone and has a badass FMV animation. And which one you get depends on the weapon your mage has equipped, with most weapons that allow you to use Great Magic also having a chance to break when you cast it. Your ability to effectively use Great Magic, then, depends on whether you're stuck with those or you can find the rare weapons that allow it and won't break. Which itself is tied to the difficulty you choose, because there isn't anywhere to get them on Easy mode and Hard mode offers more opportunities to get them.

Which brings us to the difficulty levels, one of the sillier parts of Valkyrie Profile. See, Hard mode is, on paper, supposed to be tougher than the lower difficulties because it gives you the toughest dungeons, and because it starts every character you recruit at level 1 instead of whatever they would've been. Except the new dungeons you get on Hard mode offer way better treasure than the ones you get on Easy and Normal, and starting at level 1 means your characters can make more use of the accessories that let you get extra health and skill points from each level you gain. And the disadvantage of being level 1 is negated entirely by the game having a bonus experience mechanic, so you can start your characters at a reasonable level anyway. All of which means that Hard mode ends up being the easiest difficulty, while Easy mode (which also locks you out of being able to get the good ending) is the hardest.

Oh yeah, there's also a skill system. It's honestly a bit of a stumbling point, because the endgame and postgame are designed around you having a very specific build where everyone in your party has Guts (which lets you randomly survive fatal blows with 1 HP) and Auto Item (which lets you automatically use items without spending a turn) to effectively become immortal. So even though there's a lot of interesting options, you effectively end up just relying on the one specific one that will get you not killed.

Then there's the ending requirements. Getting the best ending in Valkyrie Profile is an interesting process, because it requires you to do a few specific optional things, not all of which are immediately obvious, while also paying attention to a particular value that the game never calls attention to at any point. Fail to do that, and you get one of the very few times you'll run into a genuine "A WINNER IS YOU" ending in an RPG outside of the really old American ones that didn't have enough RAM for a real ending. And it's pretty clear they expect you to fail at least once, because there's a post-credits hint pointing you vaguely in the right direction.

That said, actually trying to get the A ending is extremely satisfying. The scenes leading into it have the bulk of the game's directly explained plot, and all the most memorable characters appear in them. And the scenes leading into A ending's final dungeon are some of the best out there.

I should also mention the music, which is some of Motoi Sakuraba's best work. For cutscenes, you get some incredibly tragic pieces that do a lot to sell Midgard's gradual collapse and the events that the einherjar face. For dungeons and battles, you get the sorts of upbeat songs he's best known for at their finest. And naturally, as is the tri-Ace way, they've all got really pretentious names—the regular boss theme, for instance, is named Confidence in the Domination.

All told, Valkyrie Profile represents the tri-Ace/Wolf Team ethos at its best. It does all sorts of unique and interesting things, and succeeds at almost all of them. It's also got Lezard Valeth, which puts it a few levels above other games that do not have Lezard Valeth.

You should play this game if you're able to. Getting the PS1 version (or the PSP version, which is retrotiled to Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth to match the sequel) will almost certainly run you a lot more than you're willing to spend (this is a game that already regularly went for more than 200 bucks before pandemic grifters happened, can't imagine it's any better now) but if you've got a PS4 or PS5 you can get it digitally for a much more reasonable price (at least in Japan and North America, no idea about other regions). Which I am now telling you to do

(Originally posted on July 9.)

The fifth and also second Tale of Alltynex game, and certainly a very unique game.

RefleX is one of those shmups with a cool mechanical gimmick to set it apart, and it's a pretty damn good one. Your ship, the Phoenix Mk-II, has no bombs or other special attacks and is instead equipped with a special defensive option in the form of its reflection shield. This thing renders you completely invulnerable to all forms of damage other than missiles and direct contact with enemy ships (and there's a few points where they emphasize that you can block anything with utterly massive lasers), and any blue lasers you hit get reflected back at your enemies. Reflected lasers are green, and killing enemies with them gives you a score bonus for a bit, and the total bonus increases if you kill more enemies with reflected attacks while it's active. Not only that, but your regular shot can maintain the bonus, and gets half the multiplier reflected shots get. The trick to the shield, though, is that its energy supply is also used for your normal shot, and energy recharges slower when you're firing—careless shield use can leave you with little more than a peashooter to deal with massive hordes of enemies, which is naturally terrifying. Of course, nothing beats the satisfaction of looking at some of the more bullet hell-y patterns (there's at least one that fills every single pixel on screen with hitboxes) and just laughing as you no-sell the everything like you're Hogan in '87.

The real trick to surviving, then, is figuring out when it's a good idea to use the shield and when you're better off saving it. Overuse the shield, and you can end up not having the firepower you need to get through boss healthbars, or not having the shield when you really need it. And there's also the matter of purple shots, which get destroyed when you hit them with anything but absorb most types of bullets—there's a lot of bullet patterns that give you plenty of blue to reflect but also have purple to stop it from hitting the boss.

(They introduce this in a pretty clever way, first showing you enemies that use purple shots so you can laugh smugly as your regular attacks stop them from doing anything, then after an entire level full of enemies designed to let you take advantage of that by flooding the area in front of them with purple shots, the next boss has multiple patterns where they get in your way and you realize there's a lot more to them than you originally thought.)

So RefleX is extremely fun and well-built mechanically, with every element of its design carefully considered. It's also got a pretty high amount of story for a shmup, and a surprising amount of it's even in the game itself, albeit mostly told via the circumstances of the various levels. There's even a proper cutscene towards the end! And a really cool late-game twist that I'd rather not spoil because it's honestly one of the coolest moments of any game I've played. The basic plot, though, starts with you flying for a rebel organization trying to overthrow a tyrannical government. Typical stuff, really, at least until a third party gets involved and throws a major curveball your way. From there things start getting interesting.

So yeah, you should play RefleX. It's a really good game