Baud Attitude

I don’t think it’s much of a secret that Sekai Project finances their “serious” localization projects with a constant stream of comparatively low-budget borderline-lewd visual novels, and as much as I would like to claim that I am above such base pandering I somehow own all of their “Sakura” games and only one of their serious games.

“Planetarian”, by the way, in case you were curious.  I strongly recommend it if you want an absolutely beautiful story that will punch you in the gut just when you’re starting to think things might turn out all right, then just keeps punching.

But I digress.

Anyway, while the first SEVEN “Sakura” games were Visual Novels, Sakura Dungeon is an old-school-style dungeon crawler, with gridded corridors to map out and hidden doors and pit traps and spinners and teleporters and all of the sorts of things you would expect from the genre.  You have a party of six characters, there’s a “front” and a “back” line to your party, you regularly retreat to an inn to recover and change your party… seriously, it’s a Wizardry game in all but name and art style.

The art style is, of course, probably what caught your eye in the first place, and I will make no excuses for it.  It’s designed for guys who like improbably-proportioned monster girls in skimpy outfits.

Unlike the Wizardry games, you don’t actually create your party members.  Rather, the game starts with you being woken from a magical slumber by a pesky adventurer who has decided to challenge you for, you know, justice and glory and all that.  Did I mention you’re a Demon Lord?  You’re a Demon Lord.  Probably important.  Anyway.  You wake up, you don’t precisely know WHY you were in a magical slumber in the first place, you have juuuuuust enough energy available to you to survive the pesky adventurer attacking you and bind her in a magical contract, and then you need to send her down into your old dungeon to figure out just what has been going on over the last few hundred years.  She can, in turn, capture the monsters in the dungeon and you can recruit them to your team, building up a party of bigger and badder monsters the deeper you go.

Wasn’t this the plot of Wizardry IV?  Something like that, anyway.  If Werdna’s goal had been to Catch Them All, as it were.

So, your begrudgingly-faithful minions wander around, beating up monsters, capturing monsters and slowly figuring out just what’s been going on.  Eventually you regain enough strength to join them in the dungeon, which adds an extra strategic aspect – you’re one of the strongest party members, but if you die it’s Game Over and you’re reloading your last save.

Unlike most “Sakura” games, which are short 2-3 hour affairs, Sakura Dungeon is a full-length game. It took me just about 20 hours to finish the main story and then level up enough to take out the optional dungeon and optional True Ultimate Big Bad , and it never felt like it was dragging.  Occasionally you’ll need to pause and grind up a level or two, but there’s a fast-forward auto-battle option for combat that works pretty well when you’re just beating up on random dungeon trash.  It’s not recommended for boss fights at all, though.

It’s also genuinely funny at times.  There’s a lot of banter between your party members, and all of the monsters you capture have a personality that comes through whenever the whole party stops to talk about the boss they’re about to fight or about things that are happening in the dungeon.  It doesn’t fall prey to the far-too-tempting trap of Building A Fantasy World, which is a refreshing change of pace after one-too-many Serious Business RPGs, but it gives you a little backstory on most of the characters and how they came to be where they are.

And, yes, there’s an awful lot of almost-nudity.

…I mean, just look at those completely naked walls.  For shame!

So if you like dungeon crawlers and have no shame whatsoever, I give it an unqualified recommendation.  It even comes in your choice of Mac, Linux or Windows versions!

Well, the Steam Summer Sale has been a little disappointing this year, owing to no daily deals and no flash sales and no metagame or anything like that.  Also I feel like I already own, like, 90% of everything on Steam already.

But, I didn’t have The Witcher 3, and I really liked the first one, so I dropped the $22.50 to add it to my library.

Then I figured I should probably play the middle chapter.

So some initial thoughts on The Witcher 2: Epic Subtitle Here, after 11 hours played and finishing the prologue and first chapter.

Playing a game five years after launch may be a bit unfair, because I keep running in to small annoyances where my initial thought is “Skyrim (or Dark Souls) did this better” and then I need to remind myself that both of those games came out months after TW2 and had the opportunity to learn from places where CD Projekt RED might have stumbled.  With my possible unfairness documented, I will continue on to say that my initial impressions of TW2 are that it is a game with a really engaging story and compelling world, hampered by mechanical choices that make all of the bits between conversations and cutscenes (you know, the bits where you kill monsters and take their stuff, aka the GAME parts of the game) a right pain in the rear end.

For example: The world is frequently very dark and takes place in swamps and forests, places with lots of underbrush to hide loot and harvestable items, so you have a button for “witcher sense” which sends out a SONAR-like ping that highlights everything you can loot, harvest, or otherwise interact with.  The highlights go away after a few seconds, and the witcher sense button has a short-but-frustrating refresh time tied to it, so a pitched battle with seven or eight enemies is followed up by pushing the button, looting a couple of items, waiting for the button to refresh again, looting the things you can loot, waiting… and all the time hoping that a wandering monster doesn’t happen by, because you are locked out of looting during combat and for several seconds after combat – even if “in combat” just means that something has seen you from a great distance away and is running towards you.

Fortunately, I found a mod that a) highlights every lootable and harvestable object all the time and b) auto-loots enemies as they die regardless of in-combat status, and another mod that pulls back the camera so I can actually see more of the world and less of Geralt’s oh-so-manly clavicles.

There are fewer fixes for things like the number of button presses it takes to navigate your equipment and find or equip an item, or the way the inventory UI makes it terribly easy to unequip your boots, or the way pressing the “Craft This Item” button on the crafting screen creates the last SELECTED recipe rather than the recipe you have highlighted, adding an extra required button press to avoid making the wrong thing and losing hard-gathered crafting components.

Also it has QTEs.  There’s an option to turn off “Difficult QTEs” in the game settings, but what it desperately needs is an option labeled “turn off QTEs entirely and apologize for putting them in the game in the first place.”

The game’s final sin is including stealth bits in a game whose engine does not seem designed around having stealth bits.  Most of the ones I’ve encountered so far have been of the variety where failing at stealth means that you just kill everyone who noticed you, but I was warned that choosing one side over the other when you need to pick sides leads you to a mandatory mission where you MUST be stealthy and where failing at stealth is an insta-fail-start-over situation.  So I picked sides appropriately and am grateful for the warning.

Basically, what I’m trying to get at is that the game is fantastic in spite of itself, because normally I would not have time for this crap.

OK, so I don’t gush a lot and usually it’s because whatever game I’m playing has top-tier waifus to fit every taste, but OMG Lifeless Planet.

The shtick is, you’re an astronaut who volunteered for a one-way trip to a newly discovered habitable planet, and you’ve been in cryosleep for 15 years to get there. Your lander crashes, you wake up with a damaged suit and the other members of your crew missing… oh, and the brilliant green planet you were expecting is a barren wasteland, devoid of all life barring a few exceptionally homicidal plants.

Then you find electrical lines in the middle of said wasteland, and they lead you to an abandoned Russian town that looks like a slice of 1950s Americana, with white picket fences and everything. That’s when your focus shifts from “how am I going to survive” to “how am I going to survive… and what the heck happened here?”

There’s no combat. Three things explode. You fall to your death a lot. There’s some phenomenal atmospheric music to accompany your frequent deaths.

I loaded it up just after midnight to “get a feel for it” with the plan of playing it when I got up in the morning, and I was up until 4 AM.

Available on PC and Mac; I played through it on the Mac and got roughly consistent 30fps at 1920×1080 on my integrated-graphics 2015 iMac so it does not need a lot of oomph.  If you do likewise and want to play with a controller, you’re going to be spending some time in the button assignments menu.  Presumably controller support on the PC is a little more plug and play.

Ninja Blade is one of those games that must have been very cheap at some point, or perhaps part of a bundle, because the name is so ridiculously generic that I can’t think of any other reason it would have wound up in my Steam library.

It turns out that the game is pretty generic as well.  It plays something like an clunkier but easier version of Ninja Gaiden Black with the body horror turned to max.  You run around and hit monstrosities that used to be human, trying to clean up the monster-infested streets of Tokyo before the Government blows the whole thing up to prevent the infestation from spreading.  You get to use three different types of swords, there are a couple of element-based ninja arts that you use for combat and to solve puzzles, there’s lots of wall running and swinging off conveniently-placed poles and a grapple to help you clear long gaps, and it really has a lot of elements that could have made for a really fun game but just kind of don’t.

The saving grace of the game is its sheer absurdity.  You play as a Ninja named “Ken”, the last member of a team of Ninjas that apparently Japan keeps around to deploy in monster-infested-Tokyo situations, and everything you do is so over-the-top that I would question the humanity of someone who can play this game without laughing frequently.

It’s not just the way you ride missiles like surfboards, or hold back a runaway plane with nothing more than a rope in one hand and your sword stuck into the pavement in the other, but things like deploying to a new mission in an Osprey and riding there on the outside of the aircraft.

On one of the wings.

On the underside of the wing.

Hanging UPSIDE DOWN from the underside of the wing.

Because you’re a Ninja and that’s what Ninjas do apparently.

Also you can do all of this while wearing a pink Ninja outfit:

The crazy extends to the far-too-frequent QTEs.  These stink up the game every few minutes, and would absolutely get it tossed into the “never play” pile if it’s weren’t for the ability to set the QTE difficulty independently of the combat difficulty, so you can play with normal or hard combat difficulty while setting the QTEs to “Foolproof”.  With this done, when you are prompted to hit X or dodge or what have you, you can simply press ANY key and the event will succeed and the QTE will continue.

With this done, boss fights all end with particularly gruesome and visceral displays of Ninja Bad-assery, and again you will likely be giggling like a schoolgirl as you watch them.

Or, more accurately, giggling like a full-grown man who should know better.

Sooooo… if you can get it cheap, or if you get it in a bundle or something, I think it’s worth putting in your Steam library.  Probably.  You could do worse.