Mento's Month: February '25

Game of the Month: Ys X: Nordics (Nihon Falcom, 2024)

Thanks for announcing this enhanced edition after I'd already bought Ys X, Falcom. Classy move.

Maaaaan, I had started this month with every intention of getting neck-deep in seafaring adventures with Adol and friends but between one of the longest exploration platformers I've ever encountered, an extremely thorough Super Mario Sunshine playthrough, and at least two other Indies clocking in at double-digits for total hours played I just haven't had the time to really soak this game in. The tenth Ys game (well, eleventh, since there's also Ys Origin) (or thirteenth, since there's three Ys IVs) moves Adol and Dogi to the temperate seas of the Obelia Gulf—which, like most Ys locations, has a real-world equivalent: in this case the Bay of Santander just north of Spain and west of France—where he joins forces with a Norman princess called Karja Balta after being magically cuffed to her by forces unknown just as the local town of Carnac is raided by an undead race known as the Griegr. The game then takes on an open-world aspect reminiscent of Ys VIII as you go exploring the high seas in a boat you spend most of the game upgrading so it can handle rougher waters (which was a prominent characteristic of Skies of Arcadia also, with which this game shares some structural DNA) while finding and rescuing the villagers you met during the prologue. Each found villager tends to add some new function to the ship or the game, from providing vendors in the ship's hold to introducing side-activities like fishing and searching for wild sealife.

Besides that, the core of the experience is classic Ys, as you run around slicing through mobs while exploring every nook and cranny of the map. The game adopts the traversal tools of Ys IX to some extent, giving you things like grappling hooks or a magical hoverboard that can be used to ride floating rails or get over bodies of water. It's a great deal of fun just getting around before you start factoring in the combat which, as has been the case for a while now, is mostly a matter of spamming your specials and resorting to standard attacks when you're temporarily out of juice. Perhaps noticing how easily you could break the game with them in the past, Ys X has modified the Flash Step and Flash Guard maneuvers—which conferred powerful if short-lived buffs whenever you guarded or dodged an incoming attack with the right timing—by not only making them less powerful but also more integral to the game on its hardest difficulty modes. Ys traditionally doesn't go for a Soulsian parry and riposte system—if anything, it's closer to the mindlessly fun Dynasty Warriors/Musou model than it is to the deliberate and cautious Souls—but in this game it's a little more incentivized by having enemies attack with red and blue auras: the former is unblockable but can be perfect-guarded by essentially double-teaming the enemy by temporarily controlling Adol and Karja together, while the latter requires you hold the dodge button down to effortlessly weave between the faster projectiles and deliver a strong counterattack. As I'm playing on Nightmare difficulty, since I'm sick for achievements, most boss attacks will insta-kill me: it's meant that my parry game has had to be on point (though, thankfully, since this is a single-player co-op adventure you have a short window to help your teammate back on their feet if the worst should happen).

I'd love to talk more about the game's features, the freedom to just land on any random island and have a bunch of treasure and points of interest to find, the ship combat (which isn't too bad if a bit repetitive), and how the story's unfolding—with one named boss in particular kicking our asses on our first encounter and cursing Adol with some badass snake tattoo around his neck that will kill him in three months if we can't toughen up and give this dude a real fight—but I'm honestly not far enough into the game to speak on any of that with any authority, so I'll save all that for a Part Two next month. Hopefully I can polish this game off in March by making sure not to assign myself a bunch of equally substantial games to play this time. Darn my poor organizational skills. Well, I think I could probably guess what March's "Game of the Month" will be at least...

Other Gaming Tomfoolery

Been up to some real weird business on Delfino Isle.

I've spent an unholy amount of time this month that I could've spent playing more Ys X on Super Mario Sunshine instead, and specifically the semi-recently added RetroAchievements set for its myriad challenges both intended by the original game and invented by these imaginative RA contributors. At their core, at least when they're working as intended, achievements exist to help us find new angles and foster a deeper appreciation and understanding for our beloved games: they're like side-quests that frequently take on a meta aspect or serve to guide us towards features we might've otherwise passed over and possibilities we may never have considered. When an RA set is good it really breathes new life into these older games and, while Sunshine does have its technical problems, it's a game I have a lot of fondness for that I was pleased to see from all these interesting new perspectives; as before with Super Mario 64 and the previous subjects for Kobayashi Mario, I've learned far more about the game than I ever thought I would.

Anyway, getting the full set of the normal "standard" achievements was a fun enough challenge but it was experimenting with all the glitches and speedrun tech for its bonus subset that was the real eye-opener. Be sure to check out Kobayashi Mario Goes Hawaiian Part One and Part Two for all my struggles with that standard set (which wasn't easy, despite being the more "accessible" set of the ones RA has available) and then grow bewildered by the bizarre shit you can get away with by taking a look at Part Three. Granted, I think I went a little overboard with screenshots and text for that one, but I wanted to wrap everything up this month and move on with my life. As much as I love Sunshine, it's frequently a case of "a little goes a long way".

Talking of coming a long way, I've finally nearing the end of my time with Pictlogica: Final Fantasy having completed the 30th and last of the game's areas, each of which required a cooldown of around two weeks to unlock (can't really buy the microtransaction currency needed to hurry up the process given the 3DS servers are down). If I felt up to it there's still plenty of Memoria to unlock, Pictlogica's name for all the characters you can recruit by completing a set of battles based on monsters from their game, and bonus objectives for prior battles that might force limitations like a party of only men or women, only characters from a certain game, or only characters that use a certain type of weapon: these earn me stars with which to upgrade the Memoria I have. Dunno if I still have the juice to get all that done now that the main draw, the picross puzzles, are exhausted but we'll see. That damn completionist instinct again...

Last, I spent some time considering how much I've been enjoying Gerstmann's Ranking the NES! video series and what I'd like to see in a sequel, whether it's made by him once he's run out of NES games or someone with a similar command of The Science required, and so I constructed a list of consoles released in the '80s and '90s and ranked them by how well they would be the basis of ranking shows. Sort of a recursive thing. Hopefully I adequately explained my reasoning for the order I chose—I prioritized those with libraries that have a lot of high and lows that would make them easier to rank in a mostly objective order, as well as those systems that have a manageable total number of releases to analyze along with plenty of entertaining history lessons to impart—but whatever Jeff decides to do next (even if it's not ranking old-ass games) I'm sure it'll be something worth watching.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Ghostrunner 2 (One More Level, 2023)

I'm really going to have to play Cyberpunk 2077 sometime this year. I hear it works now!

Another bumper crop of Indies this week, most of which came from 2023 which means I'm only two years away from the pulse of modern gaming. That's pretty good for me. My selection for the pick of the month is the only game I awarded a 5 out of 5 (perhaps generously): Ghostrunner 2 (#408), the sequel to 2021's best cyberparkour simulator. The sequel massages the difficulty level to something reasonable—no death counts in the triple figures for any of the stages in this one—as well as expanding the player's repertoire, such as shuriken and decoy clones, while just about keeping the number of tactical options down to something a gamer with an average level of skill (like me) has the wherewithal to juggle when the chips are down and the bullets are flying. The motorcycle sequences, while not adding a whole lot, did at least break up the usual "cycle" of traversal and combat. It still looks really good too; to the point where I wasn't sure I could still call it an "Indie" game given the term has an implied budgetary limit behind the development.

Rounding out the rest of an above average assortment, we have the expansive and ethereal Afterimage (#406): a SOTN-styled explormer that dripfeeds its complex story of a world fighting against its own sudden decline after its guardian deity bails on it, offering a huge world to explore with the usual progress-enabling upgrades and light RPG equipment/accessory/passive skill tree systems. I ran the clock well past fifty hours on my playthrough; not something I usually run into with Indie games and less so the more action-heavy ones like an explormer. The next game threatened to be something as time-consuming but was courteous enough to tap out after about a dozen hours: Garden Story (#407) is a combination Zeldersatz and farming/survival/crafting sim where gathering respawning resources for construction projects and upgrades take up much of the game time, certainly more than the relatively linear and quick dungeon excursions each of the game's "chapters" conclude on. It's a charming, environmentally-focused game that leans into its coziness and empathy while offering plenty to do. Finally, we have what turned out to be the second explormer this month (I swore I thought it was a more stage-based puzzle-platformer) with Teslagrad 2 (#409): the sequel to a 2013 game that has you exploiting opposing magnetic fields colored red and blue to progress through a steampunk-themed world of tyrants and heroes. Much like with its predecessor, the platforming was often spoiled by the unintuitive way the magnets would send you flying and the boss fights too frustrating and poorly conveyed for their own good, but it's an aesthetically sharp game with its hand-drawn animations and uncommon setting.

Next month's selections include a game from last year I've been excited to check out, one of the few bigger names in my backlog from before 2020 I feel the need to see before I feel confident in updating my "Best Indies of the 2010s" list, and the rare treat that is an Indie 3D platformer.

Mastering the Master System (Part Two)

It's been a pretty "SMS"-heavy month between the Sega Master System and Super Mario Sunshine, but then I have some exceedingly specific tastes (man, that sounds so wrong out of context). We have here another batch of three games for Sega's least celebrated... well, OK, after the Sega CD and 32X (and jury's still out on Game Gear) it's probably Sega's third-least celebrated console. The homebrew choice was an obvious one given my picrossclivities (those two words didn't merge together as well as I'd hoped), the randomizer was once again generous in its selection, and my own curated choice was something I'd been curious about a long while that I was glad to finally have an excuse to see in action. Good batch of games in a holistic sense, but what about their achievement sets specifically?

Picross

Type: Selected (Homebrew)
Developer: Maxim
Release Year: 2007

Yeah, I found a Picross game for this system too. Albeit, a fake one. Cribbed together from various legitimate Picross games—which, perhaps, is still more ideal than the way some of these Picross homebrews just find some pixel art and call it a day without considering how carefully designed many of these puzzles actually are—going by the title screen credits, Master System Picross is like the Simpsons trivia game from last month in that it's mostly no-frills and gets to the meat of what it promises quickly and without fuss. To some extent I can respect that but there's some presentational stuff I would've appreciated, like an in-game grid-based menu for its individual puzzles rather than just going left or right through the puzzle numbers on the main menu. It's glitchy too, suggesting certain puzzles are "done" even though you've yet to start on them and if you try to go beyond the maximum number it has you just get end up with some warped kill-screen looking thing. Fortunately, this glitchiness has yet to extend to the puzzles themselves.

On the plus side, the game uses the preferable Wario Mode—that's the variant where mistakes aren't immediately corrected with a time penalty, saving you irritation from misclicks at the cost of not telling you when you've screwed up somewhere—and it has a simple interface that uses its controller's two buttons for confirming a space is part of the puzzle or confirming that it isn't, which is all you really need. Since the puzzles have been purloined from elsewhere—too bad it came too late to crib from the official Sega Picross game Jupiter made for Switch, as some of those would've been thematically apposite here—they're decent enough too.

Hey, it's picross. This is what picross looks like. This is what picross always looks like.

The major downside comes from the achievement set but it's really one of those situations where an RA contributor can only do much with Picross games. Apparently it's a thing that you can download a separate app to auto-solve Picross puzzles for you the way you can with other logical puzzle games such as Sudoku or Sokoban, which really feels like missing the point, so achievement sets are naturally devalued as a result and most won't allow for a huge number of them that reward you a small amount of points each for individual puzzles: since this game has an impressive 208 puzzles saved into its limited memory, points are rewarded instead for every ten solved and an extra condition is that you have to solve all ten in the same session. Not an issue early on with the 5x5s and 10x10s but ten 15x15s (the vast majority of the game's puzzles are this size) usually takes around an hour, if not more if I'm feeling mentally lethargic that day. Definitely one where I had to be careful of my time management if I intended to sweep up as many of these as I could.

Achievements: 21 (of 21) / 100% / RR: x2.10

Golvellius: Valley of Doom

Type: Selected
Developer: Compile
Release Year: 1988

Since I want to do at least the bare minimum of research instead of leaving everything to a randomizer, I do have a mini-list of Master System games I'm using this feature as an excuse to check out including this entry in Compile's Golvellius series of Xanadu/Hydlide/Tower of Druaga-influenced top-down action-RPGs. Launched in April 1987 on the MSX about two months before Ys 1 (and seven before Final Fantasy 1), Golvellius—a.k.a. Maou Golvellius, or "Demon Lord Golvellius"—received this Master System spruce-job the following year which is also the first time it was localized for an overseas audience, appearing in both the US and Europe with its new subtitle of "Valley of Doom". Far as I can tell, it's mostly the same game but with new dungeon and overworld layouts, enhanced graphics, and other tweaks. Since the two versions are only 12 months apart it'd be safe to assume much of the foundation is still functionally identical.

Since I heard it was the secondmost Ys-like game on the system (the first being a port of Ys 1) in addition to it being one of the highest regarded western-released RPGs on the system, perhaps beaten only by the original Phantasy Star, I was naturally drawn to investigating this game. A smarter person might've penciled this in for a month where I wasn't swamped by long Indie games and the homebrew Picross game above so I could luxuriate in those 8-bit pixels some more but I'm nothing if not impulsive with my choices. Turns out it's not an RPG at all: it's a Zeldersatz, and a rather flagrant one. I suppose cribbing from The Legend of Zelda was still a fairly novel idea at the time (we're only about a year out) and while I'm not going to argue that Tower of Druaga or Xanadu didn't have their clear influences—the former in how you had to jump through obtuse hoops occasionally to make caves appear on every screen, the latter in how it alternated between top-down and side-scrolling sections—we are still talking about a game that literally starts with the hero marching into a cave to receive a sword from a pensioner. The only thing that's really different here is that you can hold down a bunch of buttons and turn the old person into a sound test instead (we really didn't treat the elderly well back then).

Bro, what is up with the amount of snakes in this game? Quit it with the snakes!MVP of the friggin' game here. I would die for this thing. Randar!

Anyway, it fails in its RPG status in that you earn no XP nor can you develop your character; rather, you earn cash from every dropped enemy and can use that to buy items from vendors (should you be able to find them) that include new swords, shields (deflects projectiles), pendants (flat bonus to armor), life potions (permanent HP increase), and bibles (increases the maximum amount of money you earn; I haven't read a whole lot of scripture but I'm fairly sure it's not big on money-saving life hacks). The dungeons are either horizontal (the only time you can jump) or vertical (which turns it into an auto-scroller). By walking back into the edge of the screen you came from, you'll immediately exit the dungeon: while this is preferable to dying if you get trapped by a wall, the game uses this excuse to throw all sorts of annoying dead end traps at you to force you to reset. The devs probably played too much Super Mario Bros. in addition to Zelda. As for the achievements, they're mostly basic progression stuff and items you might have to go out of your way to get (but are worth it) though there's some no-damage boss runs too. Not only do these achievements get less humanly possible as you progress deeper into the game but there's no way to reset a boss fight besides dying, which is too much of a pain and would require passing through those annoying dungeons again to retry the battle. As such, I obtained all the achievements but a handful of those no-damage ones which I'm going to chalk up as a success, albeit not a total victory. For all its BS, I might say Golvellius is my favorite Master System game so far at least; I mean, it's Zelda, and I love me some Zelda.

Achievements: 33 (of 38) / 86% / RR: x5.35

Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse

Type: Random
Developer: Sega
Release Year: 1991

If we're talking the 8-bit/16-bit era there were three major sources of Disney games (excluding Disney itself): Sega, Capcom, and Virgin Interactive. Given the value (and possibly some intimidation factor) of the license games made by these three companies tended to be of higher quality than other adaptations of animated properties, and it also meant for a while that you could talk about Mickey Mouse in the same conversation as Mario without it being some deliberate attempt to rankle Mike Minotti. Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse is probably Sega's most famous and well-loved adaptation of Disney, dropping the titular rodent into a fantasy world as he attempts to rescue Minnie from a deranged witch with envy issues. As with Sonic the Hedgehog, a modified version was released on 8-bit systems a little while after the Mega Drive/Genesis debut that altered most of the level design but preserved the core.

CoI is somewhat styled on an earlier non-Sega Disney license, DuckTales, in that it features levels with plenty of secrets to find and an attack that has you hitting a button in mid-air to bounce off enemies or destroy certain parts of the environment. Mickey can also pick up and carry objects, either throwing them at foes to defeat them safely at a distance or using them as platforms to reach higher areas (along with a generously high vertical leap). In addition to extra lives, health refills, and money (which can contribute to an extra life) found in chests scattered around the levels in sometimes hidden areas, Mickey can also extend his health gauge from three hits to five which sticks with him throughout the playthrough regardless of any game overs. With nine continues on the game's standard "Normal" mode it's not looking to give players too much of a challenge to overcome, perhaps figuring the average age of the audience for a Disney platformer might be on the lower side.

She's a cartoon mouse, get over it already.After Super Mario Bros. 2 it felt like every platformer had to incorporate an object-throwing mechanic somewhere.

Unfortunately, while the game itself is easy enough, the achievement set is kinda intense. Not just in the context that it's going to demand some prohibitively high-level Mickey Mousing but more in how the achievement contributors assumed you'd be down for playing through the game multiple times with mutually exclusive conditions. To be precise, the game has six levels and this set wants you to: complete each one normally; complete each one having found all the treasure chests (including the ones that are hidden until you butt-stomp the space they're in); complete each one without destroying any enemy or chest besides the boss (harder than it sounds); and complete each one within a strict time limit. There's also a no-deaths run (noooope), a no-damage/no-deaths run (on Practice difficulty at least, which is a bit more rational), some high-score and low-score runs (I remember those from Sonic as well), some no-damage boss clears (actually pretty attainable: I got all but one), and a couple of easy shortcuts to find. Given the game's only about an hour long I suppose all these variations aren't necessarily a bad thing but, as was the case with Sonic 1 from last month, my investment in this little side adventure is only about at "single full playthrough" level so I'll be taking a small loss on this one. Still, if I ever find myself at a completion % deficit in the future this is a game I wouldn't mind popping back into for another run. Nothing in the rules says I can't revisit earlier games (man, it's great when you're the one writing the rules, huh?).

Achievements: 26 (of 41) / 63% / RR: x3.68

As always, please feel free to consult the official Mastering the Master System spreadsheet and ranking chart over here (I went for the Master System's red and black color scheme but maybe I should switch to something less intense on the eyes?).

Current Net Completion Rate: 69.667% (up from last month)

The Weeb Weeview

Just a smattering of shows this month for which I hadn't read the preceding manga (if there even was one) so they were complete surprises. There's a few other shows I've been meaning to check out but, well, I filled up on junk and now there's no space. I'm sure I'll learn about all the actually good, medium-advancing masterpieces with this season's post-script but, well, I tend to gravitate towards the unchallenging more often than not. Speaking of which:

The internet reacting to my choice of anime to watch this season.

Zenshu: The new Mappa isekai about an overworked director/animator who saves the world of her favorite childhood anime by, uhh, drawing a thousand images a second and falling unconscious for three days afterwards feels a little on the nose for Mappa but, man, I can't fault the animation quality here. Also the little "Zenshu!" theme that plays every time the heroine pulls off a big spectacle is real catchy stuff. I'm not sure why but the show and its setting really reminds me of the dumb Saturday morning animations I used to grow up with: I think partly it's because of the repetitive format (the high quality transformation sequence is just so because it's meant to be stock footage used over and over) but also because it has a punk-ass, horny (in more ways than one) mascot unicorn character and that's giving me acid flashbacks to the D&D cartoon. A bit structurally repetitive, in a knowing way related to the Saturday morning cartoon vibe mentioned above, I feel like there's going to be some stranger and/or darker hidden depth to this show that has yet to transpire. Like, why was the real-world version of this anime so bleak? And in what way did that generate a strong reaction in this mostly impassive animator to put her on this career path?

Headhunted to Another World: It's an isekai but it's a... business isekai? Typical salaryman doormat with exceptional organizational skills is whisked across universes to be the demon lord's fourth "Divine King" henchman (they come in fours, apparently; I've played enough Final Fantasy to know the score there) since he's likely the only person anywhere able to unite the conflicting cultures and egos of a dozen fantasy monster races while ensuring the demon empire doesn't run out of resources in the meanwhile. He gets paired up with a very cute tsundere dragon warrioress (and fellow Divine King) too. The show's a bit like Helck from a few seasons ago, up to and including the flame demon wife, only not quite as dark and entirely played for comedy: I love that the demon lord is the nicest boss this dude's ever had (I sort of wish they did more with that character, like make him an enthusiastic Hank Scorpio type) and that the MC has his own mental izakaya to retreat into whenever he needs to ruminate, since who better to ask about getting along with minotaurs and ogre chiefs than a laid-back bartender in a quiet Tokyo back-street drinking establishment playing enka and citypop in the background?

I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic + Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time: Two enjoyable enough if not particularly insightful or innovative shows about overpowered magician types. Like that 7th Prince show I watched back last spring, if not quite as blissfully unhinged. The first is going for a "TenSura on a budget" feel where its sorcerous protag eventually starts leading a nation after falling in with a powerful dragon, using contract naming magic to evolve various monsters into his humanoid devoted subjects, and the political struggles that come with leading a newly-formed country surrounded by hostile (or at least wary) neighbors. The second is a more typical overpowered isekai adventurer thing as its MC uses creation magic to make life more convenient for his friends and allies on top of being used to defeat monsters; it's the second show that involves the miracle that are Japanese toilets, if you were curious. They're both oddly cool with legalized slavery also, which is a worrying trend I've noticed with a few of these isekai shows going for a mild harem angle: some try to lessen the ick factor by making their system closer to debt bondage or indentured servitude or Danegeld or other similar "conscientious" historical systems of enforced serfdom, but even so. Yikes, dude. Whatever, they're going to be my filler shows for this season and they're not offensively bad (yet) which is really the low bar we're staring glassy-eyed at these days.