Baud Attitude

Thanks to the power of the dollar/yen exchange rate, I’ve been experimenting with a bunch of different long-running Nintendo franchises, and everyone’s favorite pink Devourer of Worlds is the latest.

No, I’ve never played a Kirby game before.  Well, technically I owned Kirby’s Avalanche on the SNES, but that was just a reskinned Puyo Puyo.  This is the first Kirby platformer I’ve played, anyway, and apparently I picked a good starting point because I had a lot of fun.

I did find SOME things to complain about, and I’ll do that later, but let me start by gushing a bit about the things I liked.

My understanding of Kirby lore, before starting this game, was that he’s a generally nice guy who has cute friends and goes on cute adventures where he eats things to gain their powers and his nemesis is a giant penguin.

My understanding of Kirby lore, now that I’ve finished, has been amended with the information that sometimes the penguin isn’t really an enemy? Like they seem to have a complicated but occasionally friendly relationship.

Or, to put it another way, I don’t think Kirby really HAS Deep Lore.

I kept being reminded of the Klonoa series while playing, and not just because they’re adjacent on the games shelf.  The reaction I had to the main characters from both is nearly identical – they both are just fundamentally likable because they’re genuinely nice dudes who do the right thing because that’s what they do.

In another similarity to Klonoa, it’s very very cute.  One of the activities you can do in the game is collect little toys of all the world assets and it’s the greatest thing because it lets the designers show off how many little pieces they use to make up the world and you can put them on a little table in your adorable dome house and gaze at them lovingly.

Since Nintendo platformers are, arguably, defined by the Mario series, I was pretty interested to see how this differentiates itself.  What I found was a game that emphasizes exploration and combat and is pretty light on the actual platforming.  There are a few segments, mostly in the DLC, where I found some genuine joy from traversal, but it’s not a game that asks a lot of you there.

Exploration is great, though.  I spent a lot of time finding little secret passages, including a few that rewarded walking PAST the end-of-level goal which is a game design that makes me happy when I see it.

Another thing that consistently put a smile on my face was using Kirby’s “Mouthful” forms, where Kirby swallows something massive like a car or sewer pipe and uses it to smash things.

Well, mostly smash things.  Some of the Mouthful forms are used for stuff like cleaning up puddles of muck.  But smashing things is deeply satisfying.  Sure, sometimes you swallow a car and all you do is run around a track to hit a timer, but a lot of times the car sequence ends with hitting a ramp to smash through a concrete wall to solve a puzzle and if enjoying that is wrong then I don’t want to be right.

Honestly, it is a shame that “Appetite for Destruction” was taken as a subtitle somewhere else because it would be the perfect subtitle for a Kirby game.

The combat, though… it’s OK, but I felt the game fell down a bit when it came to bosses, especially considering that there’s a long sequence where you just fight all the previous bosses over again, and it took me a while to understand why I thought they were kind of meh.

Consider, for example, the average video game that decides that one of the bosses needs to be a Big Dang Spider.  These are so common in games that you can practically tick off the attacks and weaknesses of whatever Great Value Shelob you’re going to run into.  It’s going to have a venom attack.  It’s going to have some sort of web attack.  It’s going to be repulsed by fire.  A lot of them have adds during the fight.  And so on.

More critically, on your way to its lair you’re going to run into lots of little versions of it, and you’re going to get used to dealing with venom, or webs, or whatever.  By the time you saunter into its lair, you know what you’re getting.

This sort of thing, where the lead-up to a boss gives you an indication of what you’re fighting and how to fight it, is pretty common.  I should probably write a post about it someday, because I don’t think it gets enough appreciation.

This game doesn’t have the same sort of signposting.  At one point you fight a giant gorilla, and to be fair there is a big stack of bananas in one of the rooms leading up to the big gorilla, but that’s really the only hint of an approaching simian antagonist.   It’s also just, I mean, it’s a gorilla.  There’s not much to say about him, or the leopard, or the armadillo or any of the other end-level bosses until you reach the last one, which I thought was a pretty fun fight even if it does have annoyingly small vulnerability windows.  Pet peeve, there.

I do NOT have kind words for the final boss of the DLC, which is a reskin of a previous boss with annoyingly small vulnerability windows AND a DPS check in the form of a shield break phase.  It’s a bit of a difficulty spike, and I hit it at a point in my day where I’d already stayed up too late, had work in the morning, and did not want to retry a fight as many times as I did.

I think the issue with it is that, if you finish the base game and then go through its post-game content, you get a really overpowered item at the end of it and this item trivializes the last boss of the DLC, but you can go directly from end credits of the base game into the DLC without the side trip through the post-game.  That’s a balancing act that’s difficult to pull off, and I don’t think the developers quite stuck the landing there.

Nonetheless, I beat my adorable pink face off its knuckles until it got tired of winning and got to watch some credits scroll, so that’s all good.

I’m not sure I’m going to look up past entries in the series.  A lot of the glee of this one came from the Mouthful abilities, and those are new to this game, and while I really enjoyed the vibes of four of the six worlds, especially the one that sent you through all sorts of creepy fiery industrial buildings…

…the obligatory “desert” and “ice” worlds were putting me to sleep before I got through them.  And neither is very long!

I think I’ll content myself with looking forward to the next entry, which I understand has already been announced.

If we look back to last October, I decided that it was seasonally appropriate to make a serious attempt at coming to terms with the Resident Evil series, as it’s one of those long-running series that I’ve never managed to click with and when I see a series with that many games I get curious to find out what people see in it.

I didn’t particularly get on with the first game in the series, but once I got to the modern remake of 2 it was off to the races and didn’t stop until I’d played through Village and preordered the then-upcoming Requiem.

So, this October I thought I’d do more of the same and get on with some more spooky gaming.  I had a whole list planned out… and then there was a death in the family and I suddenly had a ton of responsibilities, and getting sucked into a bunch of games didn’t seem as important.

I did make an attempt to play the remaster of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, since I hadn’t played it since the fan translation of the Wii game.  It didn’t go well.  It turns out that I don’t have patience to spare and it’s a game that demands patience.

Nonetheless, with about a week left in the month I decided that I was going to play SOMETHING.  So I walked over to my game shelf, scanned the spines and decided that I was going to play a Kirby game because I’d bought it in Japan and had never played a Kirby game for more than a few minutes and he turns into a car or something and it’s very cute and…

…and then I put it back and picked up Maid of the Dead instead.

I didn’t know much about it that wasn’t obvious from the cover art.  It had maids in it, and the title kind of implied zombies.  I couldn’t even remember buying it, though it seemed like the sort of thing I would buy.

Fortunately, my wife filled in the missing piece there.  Apparently she had seen it on Amazon or somewhere and decided it looked relevant to my interests and had sent me a link to it.  More evidence that marrying her was the best decision ever.

It opens with a dramatic story of two friends caught in the middle of a zombie outbreak with one tragically sacrificing themselves to save the other and the pathos is only slightly diminished by the careful use of camera angles so you can see up one of their skirts.

You know, some opening scenes just set the entire mood for a game.

When it finally got to gameplay, however, I realized that this was the SECOND game I’ve played this year with the exact same concept, which is a huge time saver as I can simply reuse a lot of my previous post about Wedding Witch.

Enter Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead, which is Vampire Survivors but with boobs.

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually played Vampire Survivors.  I’ve played a fair number of games that were reportedly inspired by it, but not the original.  They’ve all struck me as “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree”.  Which is fine, because Robotron:2084 is one of my favorite games of all time.  I have spent a lot of quarters trying to save the last human family.

So is Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead just “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree and boobs“?

Yeah, probably.

To be clear, there’s no actual nudity in the game.  It’s degenerate, but not to the point where you couldn’t play a quick game on the living room TV with your parents visiting.  I mean, they’d probably be pretty disappointed in you.  But would they be any more disappointed than they already were?  If you’re the kind of person to buy Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead, probably not.  They’ve already given up.

OK, that was fun, but I should probably stop there as the two games are very different.  Whereas Wedding Witch is a very story-light game that’s basically a roguelike, Maid of the Dead has a lot of story and a set number of pre-designed levels.  I don’t think there’s any of the randomness you expect from a roguelike at all, and rather than a single rather undefined character you have a whole cast with their own quirks and motivations who are all trying to survive in a Zombie-infested Akihabara and coincidentally thwart the evil plans of Legally Distinct Umbrella Corporation.

This extends to having a Legally Distinct Ada Wong as one of the antagonists.

It’s an 8-chapter game, with most chapters having four levels, and the first few give you a slow drip of information about the zombie virus and why your maid army is the only hope for humanity as you slowly build out the army from a single pink-haired klutz and her heroically-self-sacrificing friend to a full cafe of heavily-armed tactical maids.

There’s also an adorable mad scientist with glasses.  PEAK.

In between rather long – and fully-voiced! – visual novel style story segments, you do a lot of shooting zombies that drop experience points that you can spend on upgrades to shoot zombies better, and at the end of every mission you are scored on how well you did and you can buy some permanent upgrades for your maids to take into the next level.

I will say that the scoring seemed very lenient.  I only ever saw two scores: S-rank and C-rank, with the C-rank coming only when I was overrun by zombies and failed a mission:

There’s also a little mini-game around reversing the effects of the zombification virus on the characters, and I will not post screenshots as it’s the bit of the game you would probably feel least comforable playing with anyone else watching.

One thing I would have liked to see in the visual novel segments was some Live2D-style animation.  The character sprites have mouth movements and some different facial expressions, and the character bodies have a couple of states depending on whether they are armed or not, but that’s about it.  I’ve played a few of Qureate’s other games and they used an E-mote system for sprite animation, but those also tended to have only one main character to animate so it may have been prohibitively expensive to apply to a cast as large as this game has.

Anyway, the first five chapters are all about you recruiting your troops before the final build to the climax, and then level 6-1 is where the game says “We’ve given you everything you need, do you know how to use it?”, because the difficulty spike in that level and the next was quite jarring.  It took me a few attempts to get through the levels in chapter 6, and at one point I went looking for some advice because the strategies that had gotten me that far were not working.

I will sum up the advice, as follows: invest heavily in drones.

After that chapter, though, the difficulty drops way down and it’s a breeze to the final confrontation and some well-deserved credits.

My save file said I spent 12 hours in Undead Akiba, and I enjoyed all of it.  There are a lot of side stories to unlock, so you could spend a few more hours reading, and there’s a survival mode that I expect is just to see how long you can last.  It’s 20 bucks on the Switch eShop or on Steam, and I feel it gives you a lot of game in your game for that money.