Thanks for your... concerns? I guess that's the best word to choose in this instance. I'm aware that this life choice (believe me, it feels like Kingdom Hearts is a life choice at this point) is bordering on insanity. One thing I didn't mention, and which may help alleviate the pressure a little, is that the self-imposed time limit is flexible. Much like my Metal Gear May Madness endeavour from a few years back, if I don't complete the entire franchise before the release of Kingdom Hearts III, then the Keyblade Chronicles will continue with a Tetsuya Nomura-inspired "when it's done, it's done" ethos. There's also a little part of me that remains sceptical of that January release date, and I wouldn't be wholly surprised if Kingdom Hearts III gets pushed back a little further into 2019 (buying me a little more time to complete this crazy journey in the process).
@arbitrarywater I hear you on the blogging front duder. The main issue for me this year (and one that I detailed in my previous blog) was one of trying to make a transition from written-form content to video content. My inFamous 2 livestream for the Community Endurance Run back in April gave me a taste for video creation and I spent a fair bit of the time between then and now playing with that. Ultimately though, I have to concede that I'm just not a video personality - I'm far better off scripting something long-form like this and letting my words speak for themselves, even if that means sacrificing audience numbers in the process. As I believe someone once said, "you gotta do you", and this is me - crazy serial blogging endeavours that get the wider community questioning my sanity.
@jeremyf I agree with you completely about Kingdom Hearts' unique brand of nonsense not being for everyone. At this stage, given my less-than-stellar recollection of the story in Kingdom Hearts II, I'm not even sure that it's for me. I will say that based on a pair of back-to-back playthroughs of the first game in 2015, I found that particular game to hold up pretty well as its own thing, in a charmingly nonsensical way. That being said, I can also completely understand why someone wouldn't enjoy it and swear off the entire series as a result. We can at least agree on the music, though - Yoko Shimamura is up there with Nobuo Uematsu and Harry Gregson-Williams in the ranks of video game composers whose original scores came to define my childhood and adolescence. Enjoy the concert if you do decide to go!
@nophilip Burnout is my main concern with this, especially given what happened the first time I attempted this in 2015. However, I think that was primarily down to attempting to play the original Kingdom Hearts three times over in a four-month period. There's also the fact that beyond Kingdom Hearts II, all entries in this franchise are going to be completely new to me, so I'm hoping that novelty will be enough to keep me going even if the gameplay similarities start to wear me down. Good luck with your own attempt to see the series through!
@devise22 Out of interest, which version of Kingdom Hearts are you and your friend playing for your stream? I played the Final Mix version included with HD I.5 ReMIX on PS3 back in 2015, and I found it to have a lot of quality-of-life improvements that would make the 2002 original almost impossible for me to go back to now - camera control mapped to the right stick instead of the shoulder buttons and the implementation of KHII-style Reaction Commands really contribute to the improved "game-feel" of the HD version. I do agree with you about some aspects of the design feeling "very 2002" though, particularly the first visit to Traverse Town and all the dull fetch-questing through Destiny Islands and Wonderland. It definitely gets better the more it opens up, though, with Hollow Bastion being my personal high point.
Sounds like you're off to a great start! I only played A Link to the Past for the first time a few years ago and I have every intention of revisiting it soon, once Breath of the Wild is out of my system, but there is absolutely no way I could attempt something like this. The Hammer and Boomerang seem like very useful pick-ups this early on, hopefully they'll stand you in good stead. It'll be very interesting to see how the Randomizer aspect forces you to detour from the critical path going forward.
Also, I was wondering if you were planning to use different anagrams for each episode title. Seeing that this does indeed appear to be the case, I wish you as much luck with that endeavour as the Let's Play itself!
Oh boy, this is going to be a fun Let's Play to follow. As a fellow purveyor of randomizer runs (albeit in a very different series), this gets my seal of approval. Getting the hookshot this early is going to shape a lot of how this goes, I'm guessing. I'm already excited for the second episode. Great job, Mento.
The dragon was definitely one of my least favourite bosses in Cuphead. As you say, way too much RNG gets in the way of even legitimate strategies on that fight. One of the things I had most trouble with was the little marching flames - the jumping ones seemed to know where I was going to move even before I did!
Looking forward to more of your thoughts on Sleeping Dogs. There seems to be a lot of resurgent love for that game around here at the moment, to the point where it's kinda making me want to replay it.
I really enjoyed Sleeping Dogs when I played it (which, now that I think about it, really doesn't feel like five years ago). It's a bit like Darksiders in that it borrows heavily from a lot of other games (the open-world mission structure of GTA, the melee combat of Batman: Arkham, the whacky stunt position stuff from Just Cause), but each of those parts is so finely honed that their sum ends up being something really special. I hope you continue to enjoy it going forward.
I'm sad to say I had to skip over your Pyre review for fear of spoilers as I haven't played it yet. I'm definitely going to make it a priority once I wrap up one of the games I'm playing right now.
@sparky_buzzsaw: Honestly, I'm not expecting the franchise's move to Switch to be the huge departure that a lot of others seem to think it will be. I've heard a few people speculate that the series is going to follow in the footsteps of Breath of the Wild and go fully open-world, and while I would love and play the hell out of that hypothetical game, I don't ever see it happening. Pokémon is what it is for a very specific reason - it's My First RPG, and the core experience hasn't evolved as much as some long-time fans would like because it needs to cater to a whole new audience each time. As I've played through the whole franchise over the years, it's been fascinating to see Game Freak trying to balance that evergreen kid-friendly adventure aspect with their efforts to satisfy the hardcore veterans with new and exciting developments to the meta-game. I think achieving that is such a challenge in itself that to expect anything more from them just isn't realistic. This is probably a subject for its own blog post, but I'm almost at the point of thinking that the series needs to be two separate games - one following the traditional format it's known for, and another focused on breeding, training and battling to appease the competitive crowd.
One thing's for sure - whatever Pokémon on Switch ends up looking like, I will definitely be playing it.
@sparky_buzzsaw: Dragon Quests I through VI, and also VIII, are all available on the Google Play Store. They're pretty heavily priced for phone games, but they're reasonably priced for JRPGs given the amount of hours you'll get out of them. I, II and III are (I believe) based on the SNES remakes of those games, while IV, V and VI are ports of those snazzy DS remakes that came out almost ten years ago. They play with the phone held vertically, which is kind of weird initially, but it actually works pretty well - if you think about it, the DS games were kind of like this anyway, with the two screens stacked on top of each other. The touch controls work just fine for the most part, although the eight-way movement is a bit finicky based on what little I've played of IV, V and VI.
The only one of the bunch that I wouldn't recommend getting on your cellphone is DQVIII. It's not a great port, it suffers with heavy frame rate drops, and they've both replaced the orchestral score and removed the voice acting that gave the PlayStation 2 original so much personality. It's competent if you have no other way to play it, but it's impossible to recommend it over the PS2 or 3DS releases.
Great write-up Arbitrary. I'm sorry to say I haven't played any of the games on your list, although RE7, Persona 5 and Prey have all made themselves comfortable in my backlog this year. I did play Horizon Zero Dawn though, which will definitely be marking it up as one of my favourite games of 2017. My experience with it felt incredibly fresh, especially the combat and crafting aspects, although admittedly I did go into it after taking a year off from the "AAA open-world formula" (my previous foray into something in that mould being Assassin's Creed Syndicate way back in November 2015). I'm really keen to get back to it, check out the new hardest difficulty that they patched in, and play through the Frozen Wilds DLC next year.
Wishing you a very merry Christmas, and all the best for 2018. Keep on bloggin' duder.
Having now seen the end of Chris Redfield's Standard campaign, I thought I'd come back to weigh in with a few updated thoughts on RE: Director's Cut. I finished up with seventeen saves and just under ten hours on the clock (a long time for this game, I understand, but I'm known for taking my time with things), and I'm happy to say I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Although this blog chronicles my first hour with the game, I actually ended up playing through the opening section three times trying to find the optimum route that wouldn't leave me struggling for ammo. I found that the west wing of the mansion's second floor had a lot less zombies to worry about, so I focused on clearing that side of things first and was able to amass a decent supply of ammo as a result. That in turn made exploring the east wing a lot less stressful, and gave me a better platform to continue on with the rest of the game.
I never found RE: Director's Cut's puzzles to be overly challenging. A lot of the solutions were clearly telegraphed, perhaps too clearly in some cases. Most of the challenge came from navigating the mansion itself, remembering which rooms to visit once the correct items have been acquired and trying to do it all without getting caught by the living dead or running out of ammo trying to put them down. The voice acting was terrible schlock throughout, and I feel like some of the finer points of the story may have been lost in translation, but I was able to follow the gist of it and enjoyed what story was there for what it was.
Perhaps the biggest thing working against RE: Director's Cut these days is the existence and recent ubiquity of 2002's Resident Evil remake, now available on PC, PS3, PS4, X360 and XONE by means of an HD remaster release. It's been a while since I played it but I recall it being better than its inspiration in just about every way - the campy B-movie tone is replaced by an incredible atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife, the puzzles are more developed and intricate, the graphics are mind-blowingly gorgeous, and it boasts a number of small quality-of-life improvements that add up to deliver a much better experience. With all that on offer, it becomes hard to recommend the original under any circumstances. Pretty much the only advantage I can say that RE: Director's Cut has over REmake is that you don't have to worry about any damn Crimson Heads.
Right now I don't have any plans to go back and play through the game again as Jill - a bit of research reveals that aside from some cut-scene dialogue I could easily look up on YouTube, there aren't really any drastic differences between the two that warrant me leaping right back in. I'm not ruling out the possibility of checking out Arranged mode at some point though - the prospect of playing through the same adventure with the presentation and puzzles all shaken up is an interesting one. If I was pressed to give the game a Giant Bomb review rating, I'd probably give it three stars out of five.
Oh, and sorry to disappoint you @arbitrarywater, but the version I played isn't the US Dual Shock Version, so sadly I didn't get to hear *that* soundtrack. The soundtrack that I did hear was largely contextually appropriate, with haunting melodies layered over tense strings and some nice frenetic combat/boss music too. The only music I didn't really care for was the tune that plays the first time Chris meets Rebecca - it sounds a little too much like Aerith's theme from FFVII for my liking.
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