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How are you even discovering all these games?

Quote (Kane @ 25th January 2025 00:40)

How are you even discovering all these games?

hahahahaha

TL;DR - 2D platformers, JRPGs, pixel art, anime art, and anything looking sufficiently colorful and/or retro catch my eye and I check them out

Pretty much just poking around for games that look interesting, over the course of years. Occasional bouts of boredom have led me to explore tags like "metroidvania", "JRPG", "anime", and so forth. Then I look at store pages and trailers and wishlist whatever seems interesting.

Then there's friend groups where people talk about similar interests. Like, hanging around in a Mega Man fan group led me to find out about games like Rosenkreuzstilette, Rokko-chan, Rockmen R, Metagal, 20XX, 30XX, Mighty No. 9, the whole Gunvolt series, etc..

And then there's just random browsing. Like, there was that time I found out I could buy a bunch of cool doujin games, including English-language versions, on DLsite (many of which are DRM-free). I started by looking for games I knew, but of course I also ran into a bunch of games I hadn't heard of before. And then there's itch.io, which I've occasionally browsed, and where I bought some of those giant bundles (which are usually for charity, though some are for promoting lesser-known devs).



Quick rundown of the games I've mentioned recently:

20XX, 30XX, Rosenkreuzstilette - like I mentioned, all of these are Mega-Man-style fangames known to longtime series fans.

Arietta of Spirits, Blossom Tales: the Sleeping King, Ocean's Heart - all games I got interested in because of they have a 2D-Zelda-like interface, based on the trailers. Found out about each from three different sources (itch, Steam, and GOG, respectively). Anodyne (which I've had for many years now) caught my eye for similar reasons and it was also reasonably well-known among indie games. Guardian of Paradise I picked up many years ago because some friends mentioned its fan-translation. Lenna's Inception is another 2D-Zelda-like; this one seems to have gotten a decent amount of chatter among friends for its fourth-wall-breaking story, but I picked it up via one of the giant itch charity bundles.

Owlboy - had heard about this on and off as a good indie game; picked it up in a GOG bundle along with Dragon Age: Origins.

Ghost 1.0 - from the same dev as Unepic, which I'd played before, and whose work I knew was part of the relatively uncommon lineage of Maze-of-Galious-inspired metroidvanias.

National Park Girls - I found this via browsing JAST USA. I'm one of those weirdos who buys SFW games on a store with mostly NSFW stuff, lol. Later I realized I had the game through one of the giant itch bundles too. Only the first episode though.

Heroines of Swords and Spells - one of the random indie JRPGs I ran into on GOG.

Wonder Boy: the Dragon's Trap - I'd known about but never played the Wonder Boy franchise for many years. The game seemed interesting, so I picked it up. I'm glad I did.

Way of the Red, Tower Hunter, Gato Roboto, Alwa's Awakening (and then Alwa's Legacy, after that) - from some random metroidvania-related searches on GOG.

Metal Unit, Runes Magica - I'm poking around GOG, visually filtering for anime art, and find that these are 2D platformers. Of course I'm going to wishlist them, pick them up on sale, and see what they're like. I mean, why the heck not.

Giral - random little Japanese RPG Maker game I found while browsing DLsite.

Aggelos - from browsing itch. And I'd seen the beta version for a while.

drowning, drowning - random RPG Maker game that I found via some other western-made RPG Maker stuff. I think the same dev made Her Tears Were My Light, which is somewhat better known.

New Super Mario Bros. - I don't think I have to explain this one lol

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Radical Rescue - Had heard that this Game Boy game was a metroidvania, so I wanted to check it out.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 25th January 2025 21:49

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Is anyone still playing Palworld? I’m sure there are a few, because it’s such an addictive game.
I mostly play it with my friends because it’s more fun that way. We even got a private server from SuperCraft(got a recommendation on Reddit), and it makes things run much smoother in terms of speed. Because their public servers are crap.

This post has been edited by mikex827 on 1st February 2025 23:43

I finished Alwa's Legacy a little while ago. It takes the fundamental mechanics of its predecessor, Alwa's Awakening, but expands on it with a more content.

The "cast spell" command actually gets its own dedicated button instead of using up+attack (so there's a little difference in the basic control scheme between the two games), but there's now a separate button to activate an ability. Abilities are things like temporarily allowing Zoe to walk across spikes without harm (you get that ability in the first dungeon). And of course, the special items you get are different.

The overall structure is similar to the first game -- in various parts of the large and interconnected game world, there are several dungeons, each of which has a boss, but you don't actually need to beat the boss to get the ability and get back out. However, the game features even more nonlinearity than the first game, in multiple ways:
* The dungeons don't need to be done in order. You actually get key progression outside of dungeons a few times. I think three of the dungeons can basically be done in any order (and this is just talking about getting the required pickups, not even beating the boss).
* The game does give you the same mobility-related spell upgrades as in the first game, plus a few more, but this time, they're not specific pickups -- you just need to get enough of the 99 blue orbs scattered around the whole game, and go see the wizard in the village. He lets you freely re-spec your spell abilities anytime.
* Furthermore, you can find items that let you turn almost any save point into a warp point. You can choose what save points to turn into warp points. (But it's probably useful to know that there are the same amount of save points as such items, so you don't need to be stingy. Heck, the game actually expects you to do this, as it counts toward completion rate.)

Unlike the first game, there isn't a late-game moment where you can optionally unlock shortcuts by having saved extra keys. There *is* an achievement for carrying three keys (plus some other things) at one time; this would need to be planned for if you wanna do it, (but it's arguably even less a core part of the game than the extra keys thing).

Having played the whole duology, I'm glad I did and can definitely recommend it.

After that I touched Relayer a bit, specifically Relayer Advanced. This is a strategy JRPG with a sci-fi (space and mecha) theme, made and self-published by Dragami Games (formerly known as Kadokawa Games). Despite being set in space, the game (so far) still seems to have traditional 2D battle grids. It also seems to be very resource-intensive (i.e. it makes my computer run hot), but it certainly does look quite nice. The backstory involves a disaster related to the sudden loss of gravity, and some of the main characters are "starchildren" named after the planets, who seem to have some sort of mysterious superpower or something to them; I'm not entirely too sure at this point, but I've only played through basically the end of the prologue. The game comes with English and Japanese voicework; I haven't tried the latter, but I've tried the former and it...sounds decent but too quiet and slow, for some reason.

Also I got back into Ys Origin, again making progress playing Hugo on Hard difficulty. Various observations:
* I've been screenshotting all the "Roonic" messages; this required me to say no, which got me insulted. Amusingly, after I did this, I promptly got my butt handed to me by demons in the tower.
* Beat Nygtilger on my first try. Thanks to fighting this boss many times in time attack as Yunica, I basically knew its pattern like the back of my hand, and with Hugo's range (great for cleanup) and the fact that his Trap Mine ability hits Nygtilger on the wall, I actually knocked out basically all the parts very quickly, and while I got slightly delayed by the boss doing three spins with only its head left undamaged, I finished it quickly after that.
* I was less lucky on Gelaldy. There's still one attack that perplexes me as to whether Gelaldy does it or not.
* Hugo legit has an interesting story. I was expecting that the story would only be slightly different from what I know from Yunica's playthrough, but it's actually quite different. Story beats are paced the same way, since I'm going up the same tower, but the actual story content differs quite a bit. Yunica knows she's incapable of magic but has an absolute devotion to the cause of finding the goddesses for deeply personal reasons. Hugo, on the other hand, is a loner with his own agenda lessons to learn, and all the character interactions are very different as a result. (That said, I am still loving Yunica, despite playing as Hugo. Like, every time she shows up and does stuff I love it. She is absolutely adorable, in the best way possible.)
* Yes, I got the achievement "All Fact Up". Actually that's about where I am right now. Amusingly I got pwned by the enemies right *after* this, as well.
* Hugo's abilities are pretty different from Yunica's. His basic attack is ranged, for starters, which is why he's sometimes regarded as "easy mode" for this game, though I'd say it's not necessarily the most efficient way to play. As for spells, I found myself using Yunica's wind and fire spells very often, but not the thunder spell; for Hugo its the opposite, where the Wind and Fire only seem barely useful but I'm walking everywhere with a charged lightning spell at the ready, because jumping into the fray and detonating a Trap Mine is faster than trying to dink every enemy one shot at a time. I wonder what the third character will be like...

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Games I've finished this year so far:
Alwa's Awakening
Alwa's Legacy

Games I've played significantly this year but not finished:
Runes Magica
Ys Origin

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 21st February 2025 22:11

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Saw the credits roll on Forspoken tonight! Still have more to do in game, but I have to say that I really enjoyed this game and am glad I picked it up months ago when it was on sale. No, it's not a perfect game. But I found Frey easy to relate to, and am glad to have experienced her journey.

Favorite part of the game: collecting the kitties! The world of Forspoken has these familiars which are pretty much magical cats, and you can befriend them and they're really cute. I did not manage to find all of them (yet!) but I did find a good portion.

Frey, to me, was really easy to relate to, though I could see how others would find her annoying. More about her under the spoiler:

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

She's quite stubborn, which is both good and bad, and she's very much a reluctant heroine for a good portion of the game. I felt a kinship with her because I'm also kind of a reluctant heroine in my own life, for reasons I don't want to get into on this forum.

As for story: no, it's not very original. But it's decent enough, and kept me interested! More under spoiler, though I'm being careful not to give anything really away:

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

I foresaw that a certain piece of lore would become important in endgame, but I did not foresee HOW it would become important. I was quite surprised by the major "twist", and I'm still processing it some.

Tonight while playing, I pondered on who scored it, and it turns out Bear McCreary was one of the composers. AH!! Yeah, I can hear his influence. I mostly know his work from Battlestar Galactica but I loved his work there enough to get the soundtracks for it. Man, I should rewatch that sometimes. Starbuck =

We have some post-story stuff to do, plus there is DLC, so won't be completely done with the game for a few more weeks yet. I intend to keep streaming single-player games on Mondays. What's up next? Well, you'll just have to wait and see.

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Watch me play games on Twitch!
Schedule:
Mondays: Forspoken
Fridays: Final Fantasy XI
Saturdays: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail Side Quests & Shenanigans

Quote (AltheaValara @ 10th March 2025 19:44)

Favorite part of the game: collecting the kitties! The world of Forspoken has these familiars which are pretty much magical cats, and you can befriend them and they're really cute. I did not manage to find all of them (yet!) but I did find a good portion.

I'm not actually going to play Forspoken, but nothing before this (nor, I suspect, after this) will make me want to play the game more than this tidbit did.

Finished my Hugo playthrough of Ys Origin.

I'm gonna wait on doing a playthrough with the third character. Though I'm aware that he's the "true" story in the sense that that's the actual canon version of the events. (I still love Yunica though.)

Life got busy in recent days. Work is ramping up, and it's also puzzlehunt season, and I wanna go finish up some movies and anime series I've meant to watch.

Games I've finished this year so far:
Alwa's Awakening
Alwa's Legacy
Ys Origin (Hugo, Hard)

Games I've played significantly this year but not finished:
Runes Magica (almost finished, but significantly buggy)
Relayer Advanced (played the beginning)

Oh, I think I ran into an unfortunate bug in Alba: a Wildlife Adventure. Basically one of the trash pickup locations isn't registering as fully picked up for some reason. I don't think it prevents me from finishing the game, but it might affect completion. I might restart the game sometime, since I'm still relatively early in it I think.

Meanwhile...still want to actually get through a big beefy RPG sometime...

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )