Baud Attitude

Yes, the “X” is part of the name.  I assume that it’s silent, like the X in Hunter X Hunter, Spy X Family or Highschool DXD.  I really do wonder where this style of naming came from, sometimes.  It’s not important for the sake of this post, though.

This is not a game I would normally have thought I’d enjoy, and it’s not one I had ever heard of until the Switch’s eShop dropped it in to the middle of my “recommended” list.  At Y1650 (or about 11 freedom bucks), I figured it was worth a try.

All that out of the way,  Brave X Junction is a very abbreviated JRPG with a really interesting take on combat – it’s Blackjack.  The card game you learned when you were in grade school.  Every fight consists of you trying to get as close as possible to 21 without going over, with your opponents doing the same… usually.  Sometimes they are capped at 19, so you have a considerable advantage, and sometimes they can go as high as 23 without busting which puts you in a much weaker position than you’d think.

Fortunately, you get to cheat.  You can save cards for later and shuffle them in and out of your hand, and do things like steal cards from your opponent’s hand or swap your cards for theirs.  There are all sorts of skills and powers that make the experience considerably more engaging than I expected going into it, and by default all of this is happening with a timer going – let the timer run out and you may find that you were halfway to your perfect hand but now you’re staring at a 13 or something and hoping the other guy busts out.

(You can turn the timer off, but you get fewer rewards from combat if you do.  I liked having the timer on, myself.)

I should actually correct myself  a bit on that last part.  The game has three playable characters that are unlocked over the course of the initial couple of dungeons:

You have the Fighter, who is very much a tanky character that can block attacks and has lots of hit points and generally muscles through things.  She’s who you start with, and if you want a little lower stress experience I think she’s pretty good.

And despite what you might think, she’s very protected, with the power of God and bikini armor on her side.

The Magician is the glass cannon and one of the best examples of that I can remember.  Her play style actually encourages trying to get the opponent to go over their limit and bust out, while having a low scoring hand herself.  Since damage calculated at the end of a turn is partially based on the difference between your two hands, you can either hit something very very hard or you can get crushed – there’s little middle ground.

Also she has one of those character introductions that really brings home the low budget translation on offer.

Finally, the Thief.

Did I mention that the translation was a little dodgy?

Like, to the point of quotability sometimes?

Anyway, she has a lot of skills revolving around chipping away at the enemy’s health while manipulating your hand and theirs and trying not to be physically present when the other guy attacks.  I’m not usually a fan of this play style but when you combine it with the timer it makes for a surprising amount of tension.

Sometimes you don’t dodge in time though.

Finally, she’s the token glasses girl and has an outfit you might conceivably see someone wearing in public.  All around positives for the character.

While there’s not much depth to character customization, you can collect playing cards that increase your hit points or give you new skills.  These come more or less naturally while playing and I had almost all of them before unlocking the final dungeon.  You have a lot more going on with the equipment system.

You get a weapon and an accessory, and both can have multiple skills slotted.  I was fond of this combination of skills that let me get double damage if I won the initial hand of a combat and that let me “win” a tie condition – meaning that if both me and the other guy had a hand of 20, for example, I’d get a hit in.

The combination of the opening-round double damage and the occasional double damage (and flashy animation!) from drawing a blackjack makes for some very, very satisfying big numbers, as an aside.

The point is, it’s not super complicated!  There aren’t a ton of stats to keep track of or a complex skill tree to debate over where points are placed.  It’s just enough to keep the loop of fight-monster-play-blackjack fresh.

Dungeons, likewise just the necessary:

Every floor of a dungeon is a bunch of spaces, each with their own encounter.  There are traps (sometimes you can luck out and not trigger them), treasures, and enemy squares.

Some of the treasure squares are also enemy squares.  If you see two or three treasures in a row, at least one will probably be a Mimic.

Major points for the bit where you open a chest with a potion in it and just immediately use the potion if your inventory is too full to pick up more potions.

More rarely, you’ll run into a merchant who will sell you gear you can’t get in town and offer you the option to buy healing items at exaggerated prices.  You can’t exactly complain that this isn’t made very clear by the merchant’s name, however.

There’s no way to spend just one coin, and I am sad to lose out on the meme potential here.

While there is some post-game content that unlocks after you defeat the Demon King – oh, right, that’s your goal, defeat the Demon King, not a whole lot more to say there, I don’t think I’ll dive into it.  It seems mostly there to make for a few very grindy trophies and I am playing this on the Switch which has no trophy support.  Kind of glad about that.

The game’s credits came with one final surprise…

…and this is how I learned that there is a Kenichi Sonoda who is a game producer in addition to the legendary character designer.

This isn’t the first time I’ve played a game where the combat was… quite this unusual.  Puzzle Quest had you playing Bejeweled against giant rats, and I vaguely remember a PC Engine RPG where all of the fights were mahjong battles.  I didn’t wind up enjoying either of those, though, because the fights were just very long and tedious affairs.  It turns out that, at least for me, having to do very simple mental math with a timer ticking down is just the right sort of thing to tickle my brain.

I used to spend a regrettable amount of money on import gaming stores, all the way back to the Bad Old Days when I would justify dropping a hundred US dollars on an import copy of Toshinden for the Playstation because I couldn’t deal with the English dub and hadn’t yet realized that it was, in fact, an awful game.

I don’t do that often anymore.  For one thing, most stuff comes out in the US and usually includes the original language tracks – and for another,  both the PS5 and Switch make it easy to buy from other region stores so I can get the odd release that doesn’t make it over to the US.

(I really need to stop using so many hyphens – they make my posts look like they came out of an LLM.  I guarantee you that everything you read on this site is 100% human-authored mind rot.)

Despite the decreased need for import game stores, I do occasionally shop at play-asia.  Several years back they seemed to pivot to selling games that don’t get US releases but still have a translation, or games that are only sold in digital form in the US but got a physical release somewhere else… and they can be pretty aggressive about discounting.  These are desirable traits!

But, if I had one thing to say against them it would be that their shipping cost is pretty up there if you don’t meet the threshold for free shipping, and their threshold for free shipping is pretty high and often means that I wind up with just one more game in the shopping basket when I go to check out.

Pretty sure that’s how I wound up with Taboo Trial, because I’m not usually a roguelike player and I don’t have any particular attraction to Norse mythology.  The playable cast is made up of women with FASCINATING ideas of what constitutes battle-appropriate armor, and that would normally mean that it would be right in my wheelhouse, but I just don’t know if that would have been enough to warrant the add-to-cart button.

“Armor”

Anyway.  Whatever my reasoning, I bought it.

And I played it.  And it was, hmm.

Not great?

But let’s explore why “not great” stayed in the Switch until I managed to level up enough to complete a run of the game, because sometimes “not great” still has something interesting going for it.

In this case, ignoring the scantily-clad cast of characters, what it had going for it was some kinda neat enemy designs.

I liked the mechanical vibe of the bosses, even though I’m not sure they match up very well with their mythological counterparts.  And the environments, while not especially high budget, at least give a little bit of variety.

Plus you hit things and big numbers come out.  And the numbers are in different colors depending on what kind of damage you’re doing, which is critical to a proper experience.

I wasn’t very good at maintaining combos but I did see the meter go over 300 a couple of times.  Did it give me anything in return?  I don’t know, but numbers kept coming out.

The actual combat wasn’t much to talk about.  It felt frustratingly close to fun.  Like, at first I felt like everything was way too zoomed out and that my character was weirdly mute and then I dug into the options menu and found a lot of ways to tune my experience to make it better.

While levels and encounters aren’t randomized – which is weird for a roguelike – the skills you pick up during a level are randomized and sometimes you can get some truly game breaking ones.  Honestly I think this is the best selling point of the game, just collecting weird assortments of skills to make bigger and differently-colored numbers come out of things when you hit them with a big axe.

And, in keeping with the genre you can buy permanent upgrades after every run to make yourself stronger for the next one.

In addition, after playing through the game once you can increase the difficulty level which adds modifiers to the enemies but gives better rewards and…  look, honestly I was really confused about the amount of depth in this game because there seems to have been a lot of thought put into the systems but very little in the way of content.

Then I realized that the Switch version is a version locked in time, while the Steam version has gotten dozens of content updates.  So presumably if you want to get really into this game you play it on Steam.

I’m not sure if that version improves on the combat, mind you.  Like I said earlier, it’s close to fun but not quite there.  There’s a certain lack of reaction from the enemies you are slashing up that makes them not much more than red bars you have to empty.  A few sound effects and some a little more attention to impact animations would go a long way here.  Maybe that’s been improved on the PC.  I’m unlikely to ever know.

In addition to grinding for upgrades, you can also collect gifts and bestow them on some of the characters who are hanging around the hub level.  Some of them have even more fascinating ideas about what comprises armor than your main character does.

Oh, right.  You collect “holy water” from bosses.  I’m pretty sure that this is from a Chinese studio and they have some Opinions about alcohol in video games.  Anyway, if you ply some of the NPCs with enough “holy water” you disappear offscreen for some sesbian lex and when you come back you can run around in their skin.

It sounds creepy when I put it that way.

I mean, it IS pretty creepy, so that tracks. I guess.

After about four runs I got a good combination of skills and made it through to the end, which is where I got one of the funniest game over screens I can remember and unlocked a bunch of new systems that I am not going to engage with.

“Triumphed!” (faceplants in the snow)

I’d say it’s a solid 5/10.  There’s a game here that you can play from beginning to end, and it doesn’t ask much of your time.  The Switch continues to be the console where I discover the sort of unpolished or just-plain-weird indie games that would be completely lost in the noise on Steam.

Normally I put a picture of the game’s title screen here, but this game doesn’t have a title screen that really worked for the bit.  In its place, have a picture of my Switch 2 Dashboard.

After finishing Black Flag Resynced and Battlefield 6, then bouncing pretty hard off a couple of games that didn’t hook me, I needed something light and fluffy and that didn’t take up a lot of time.

I spent some time paging through my PS5 and Steam libraries, not really finding anything that fit the bill, and was *this close* to deciding that an Atelier game would fulfill the “light and fluffy” criteria even if it would probably be a bit longer than I was really in the mood for… and then I remembered that the Switch exists and that I have a solid shelf full of games for it that I’ve picked up on trips to Japan.

One of them was Little Witch Nobeta, a game I didn’t know much about other than that one of the voice actresses had made the mistake of saying that Taiwan was a country and enraged a lot of people who do not agree with that sentiment.  Apparently that was enough to get me to drop Y3400 on the game.  That’s like twenty bucks, which is a real bargain considering it’s $50 on the US eShop for no adequately explored reason.

The cover art made me assume it’d be light and fluffy and a quick glance at howlongtobeat gave me a Main Story estimate of 6 and a half hours and that was enough to lock in.

Nobeta’s default outfit.

I did not realize it was actually a soulslike.  Not a hard core one, by any means, but someone in Japan woke up one morning and said to themselves “What if Dark Souls, but cute?” and then MADE IT HAPPEN.  Well done.  Most mornings I wake up and my one resolve is to somehow make it to my desk to pick up my work headset and start taking calls. That’s the extent of my ambition.

That description is a little unfair, and I feel I should expand on it.

Ways in which Little Witch Nobeta is a soulslike:

• You’re in a creepy gothic castle.
• Stuff respawns when you rest at save points.
• You use the same currency for leveling your skills as for buying things.
• Stuff likes to kill you a lot.
• Managing stamina for dodging and sprinting is important.
• Bosses have big red health bars.

Ways in which Little Witch Nobeta is not a soulslike:

• You don’t drop all your souls when you die.
• It’s pretty easy, at least on the “Standard” difficulty.
• Gameplay is mostly 3rd person shooter style while most Souls games are melee heavy.
• Your character is adorable instead of some sort of monstrosity from the depths of a character creator.
• You have a cat.

You’re going to have to forgive me for that picture.  I know it’s super dark, but most of my screenshots involving the cat also involve big story spoilers.

It’s not quite as light and fluffy as I’d expected from the box art, and some of the story does get a little on the heavy side before wrapping up with a happy ending.  Stuff like dealing with a sarcastic talking cat, or unlocking a maid outfit, or watching Nobeta try to open doors by pulling on switches that are well out of her reach help to lighten the mood though.

It also has the best “do not walk forward if there is anything else you still want to do” warning screen I’ve ever seen.  Like, there is no mistaking what happens if you walk forward from this point:

As far as gameplay, I mentioned that it’s a 3rd person shooter – and, barring a melee attack you will occasionally use for breaking open chests, you will spend most of your time cycling through your choice of four weapons spells to fit the needs of the moment.

Fourth not depicted here.  It’s “Lightning”.

While the spells have elemental types, I didn’t run into many cases where enemies were immune to, say, fire.  Rather, the spells differ in what sort of gun they map to.  Fire is your shotgun, Ice is a machine gun, Arcade a semiautomatic rifle or pistol of some sort and Lightning is your sniper.  All of these also have a “charge” attack and these can be quite satisfying.  Lightning’s charge attack is an orbital nuke, for example, and the charged attack for Ice throws a ton of light spears at your target in a way that reminded me a great deal of Aldrich in Dark Souls III, with the exception that you’re the one doing the throwing instead of the one desperately trying to roll out of the way, of course..

Anyway, you have a character I will describe as World’s Best Daughter and you have  satisfying …gunplay? it’s spells, not guns, but “spellplay” doesn’t sound right… and this makes a solid core to build a game around.

The environments and enemies aren’t quite up to the same level of quality, though.  The castle is very gray, though occasionally you’ll go outside or have to navigate platforms over lava pits, and it’s very dark.  Many of the enemies are various colors of blobs that don’t particularly stand out.  There are some exceptions, like a sort of scissors-wielding puppet that is quite nasty, and the one room in the game where you encounter mimics and suddenly you’re fighting extremely mean treasure chests.  But mostly it’s blobs.  Some blobs float, some kind of inch around, some can disappear into the ground and pop out at you.  hashtag-just-blob-things.

The bosses are pretty neat, though.  I didn’t bother taking screenshots of the first boss, because he’s basically just a suit of armor, and I won’t show the final boss because it would be quite the spoiler, but I’ll show off the three bosses that come in between those:

You got your cute girl with giant creepy puppet.

Cute girl riding a very angry bear.

…and the obligatory boob monster.

Since it’s a game for the original Switch, it’s not the greatest looking game.  I wasn’t in the least surprised to see it running at 720p even on the Switch 2 in docked mode.  I doubt there will ever be a Switch 2 patch.  It IS available for PS4 and on Steam so those versions almost certainly look better.

While a Switch 2 resolution patch is unlikely, at least I saw the benefits of the beefy hardware in the newer console.  I’m not particularly sensitive to frame rate, but I understand that the game had some pretty bad frame rates on the older hardware and I saw very little of that.  One of the outdoor bits had some notable stutter, but at least it was during a part that didn’t have anything trying to kill you.

To sum up: while it wasn’t exactly what I expected going in, it turned out to be very much worth the price of admission.  I think I’ll keep going with the fluffy theme and see what else I have that fits.