It's been a half-fulfilling month this February as Camera Obscura is finally out for sale on Steam, but I haven't been able to put out any other work the rest of the month. The news of Monty Oum early this month really shook me up since I always wonder how much work I can really get done in my life when Monty barely just started. Yes, I know he did an incredible amount of work in the past 8 years, but I say "barely just started" because I know he had a LOT of ideas he still wanted to share. Despite wanting to get work done, I just wanted able to produce anything this month. In the first half of the month, I focused on getting everything ready for the launch of Camera Obscura. This meant putting together the soundtrack, test running through the game and setting the time goals, and error reporting. Then I finished up another Cover Letter to a potential job opportunity and turned that in. The last half of February, I could have gotten something done and I wanted to at least create one track of audio work. That didn't happen. I started 3 different projects and couldn't really finish any of them because I felt I didn't have the necessary time or resources to do so. Other than that, I've been pretty distracted by the games I've been buying and playing.
I only finished half the amount of games compared to last month, but I got through some pretty interesting games. At the end of January, I finished up Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 which turned out to be pretty fun. It still has an identity problem like it did with the first game with the addition of stealth and open-world exploration and everything, but the game felt a bit more unique. I don't think it's as consistent as the first one since there were many problems throughout the game, but I felt like I enjoyed it a little more because it had personality. Granted, the ending was pretty dumb considering that it's supposed to be the end of the Lords of Shadow series (SPOILER, it was a cliff hanger). I got through games like Super Panda Adventures, Gauntlet, and Crysis 3. They were all sort of entertaining, but nothing worth talking about. I got through the game Transistor pretty quickly and really enjoyed that game. The combat mechanics were unique and intuitive and I'm even considering playing it a second time around if I can find the time for it. I also got through Shovel Knight which turned out to be a lot better than I thought it'd be. I've played a lot of retro-style 2D Action-Platformers only to end up disappointed and this was one of the few times I really liked it. I finally got around to finishing Fantasy Life and really liked the story and music, but the gameplay was still pretty shallow and didn't really make me want to play it all that much after finishing the main story. I got around to playing through Bound by Flame as well. It was really tough in the beginning and I died a LOT. But somewhere along the way, the game got really easy. I read on forums and comments for the game and a lot of people thought the game was incredibly difficult (which in a way it kind of was). Especially the last few parts. I found it to be incredibly easy because of the build I created the perks I picked up. It's an Action-RPG, and I suspect a lot of people focused on melee builds if not a magic build. I went for a Rogue-type build (which was called Ranger path in the game) and focused on my daggers and crossbow. Near the end, I was getting so much resources that I could make 100 bolts for my crossbow and not care (in the beginning, getting even 10 bolts was really good). So near the end of the game, I pretty much made a huge stack of crossbow bolts and ran around the enemies while shooting them. I was able to beat everything without being touched. It was a very unrefined game, but I had fun playing it. I really wanted to find the soundtrack to the game, but there wasn't one. I played three different 2D Action-Platformers (aside from Shovel Knight) this month that really pissed me off. One was Castle in the Darkness, of which I bought when it released since it was so cheap. It's supposed to be a retro-style, hardcore Metroidvania of sorts. At first, it was really fun and enjoyable. But then it got to the point of sadistic level design and boss fights and I just couldn't stand the game anymore. I got through the game and settled for an "okay" ending and then looked up the "best" ending. Near the end of the game, the character felt unreasonably weak while bosses were ridiculously strong with crazy patterns that I couldn't keep up with. Outland is that one platformer that uses the polarity mechanic from Ikaruga as its basis for creating levels. There wasn't anything terribly wrong with the game, but it felt rather underwhelming and I just didn't have as much fun as I thought I would with it. And then the last boss was so incredibly tedious and frustrating that it left a bad impression when I finished. Finally, I got around to playing The Bleed Pixels after installing it for over half a year. I remember watching a bit of it when "Awesome Games Done Quick" was going on (it's a charity stream of speed runners beating games as fast as possible to raise money for the prevent cancer foundation) and thought it was time for me to finally get through the game. Holy smacks, this game was rage inducing. The platforming felt funky, enemies were small and obnoxious, and the game had the worst rendition of "ice floor" mechanics I have ever played in a 2D platformer. I really liked how hard the game was and thought some of the level designs were really smart, but some of the design choices were so infuriating that I couldn't stand the game any more. All three of these platformers got me to rage, yell and complain, but I was stubborn and finished them through. I liked some aspects from each of the game, but I also hated them.
There's two more games I want to talk about. The first being Freedom Wars which I finished just last week (feels like it's been a while already). It's another Monster Hunter-like game made by the same creators of God Eater Burst. Freedom Wars was really unique and had a strong sense of atmosphere and setting. You're a "sinner" in the game, who has been sentenced 1 Millions years to community service, in a post-apocalyptic world where people live underground and go up onto the surface to fight other regions for resources. You meet other "sinners" along the way and work together to fight off oppositions, rescue "civilians" who are valuable resources in engineering and science, and fight off giant robot-like creatures called "abductors" while scraping them for materials. The game is extremely slow in the beginning with a LOT of talking in the first 3 hours of the game. But once I got into the meat of the action, it was a really exciting experience. I still can't get over the first time I heard this song when I was rescuing a civilian:
It was suspenseful and exciting. Even near the end of the game, I didn't get sick of this one particular song. I love it! It really added to the experience when fighting an abductor as they stand 10 times taller than you. In the game, you use guns, explosives, and large melee weapons to take them down. You can't really "jump" per se with a button as the main mechanic for getting around the game is the "thorn" which allows you hook onto different surfaces and enemies to pull yourself to them or to drag down a large enemy and strike them when they're on the floor. Single-player has a bleak yet interesting story to explains the world that they players live in and simulates multiplayer with NPCs helping out. Each character has a robot-like helper called "Accessories" to fight alongside them and single-player allows the player to add in 3 NPCs to help out on a mission. So in total, you'll have 8 fighters out on the field again numerous enemies or a few gigantic enemies. The game can get pretty ridiculous because of its difficulty, though. Right from the very beginning, I was knocked down in 2-3 hits. I was shocked on how difficult the game got right from the very start. Later on, enemies have a ridiculous amount of health and they all one-shot you. Even worse when there's a mission that has 2-3 abductors out at once. Extra missions and end-game content is pretty intense as each mission can last anywhere from 10-45 minutes just fighting one enemy sometimes. The game, in all honesty, was very mediocre. The graphics, the gameplay, the content, etc. They were all very average. But the experience was so unique and immersive that it left a really good impression on me. I loved the game, even if it can get pretty BS at times.
The other game I wanted to talk about I finished just 2 nights ago and only started this week after I finished Freedom Wars. XBlaze - Code: Embryo is a Visual Novel and a prequel to the BlazBlue series. I love the story to BlazBlue, so I was very interested to try out XBlaze. I was thinking it might talk about the 6 heroes and the Black Cauldron, but it seems the story takes place 150 years prior to the events of BlazBlue. In the past, I've always wondered what the attraction to Visual Novels were. Then I played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and realized that reading can be really fun in a game if the story is really good or if the gameplay was interesting (of which the Ace Attorney series excelled in both). XBlaze - Code: Embryo has a weird gameplay mechanic where, instead of making choices when presented to you like in most traditional Visual Novels, the player chooses to read certain articles when they're available on their "TOi" device. It aggregates different articles depending on the interests of its user. Depending on which articles you read, different things happen in the story. There aren't THAT many different routes in the game and is closer to a Kinetic Visual Novel (Straight read through, no choices) than a traditional Visual Novel. Despite the weird game mechanic, I was hooked to the game. The characters were full of personality (or lack thereof which made them interesting) and the story kept me wanting to know more. It might be a bit lengthy to explain the whole story, but I guess I can shorten it to say that the main character was part of an incident that led to the disappearance of 200 people. 10 years later, there are people that want to work with him with other wanting to control him to solve the mysteries that keep happening in his hometown as they all seem to have some link to that incident. I really liked the cast of characters in the game despite them falling into usual tropes in Japanese fiction. It's a lot like watching an animé and it kind of is like watching one if you put on auto-read. The game are mostly still images with some animation in lip-synced speech and blinking. That's something I'm really liking in a lot of games now with 2D images is when the characters are animated with breathing, talking, blinking, and movement while there's dialogue. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that every ending in the game made me sad. They're good endings, but there's no such thing as "best ending" in this one. I'm already feeling a bit sad from the detachment from the game now that I've finished it. It was a really interesting and involving experience. As its relationship to the BlazBlue series, I could say that you don't need to know a single thing about BlazBlue and you can still enjoy the story for XBlaze. Though, it's pretty exciting when you hear key words from BlazBlue like Murakumo, Kusanagi, and Takamagahara. If anything, it only explains one major topic at the very end of the game that explains something very important about BlazBlue. A sequel for XBlaze is already in the works and an announcement for a Western release was put out yesterday. The sequel is called XBlaze - Lost: Memories. I'm looking forward to it.
I'm kind of sad that I still haven't gotten a single audio track produced these past 2 months, so I'm hoping I'll be a busy with them in March and come out with something.
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