Return of the King('s Field)

 

A long time ago, before From Software was a household name churning out the massively popular Souls games, they made a series called Kings Field for the PlayStation.  A series of first person person real time dungeon crawlers with a unique vibe that despite looking worse than the Windows95 maze screen saver, really dug its claws into anyone who got their hands on it, including me.  Its a fairly expansive series with games all the way up to the PS2 that also has spin offs like Shadow Tower (PS1) or Eternal Ring (PS2) but it’s a style of game that has been long, LONG dead.  Looking at it you may think it similar to something like Elder Scrolls but you’d be way off base.  If you haven’t played any of them just stop reading this post, go play one and then come back, it’s something worth just seeing for yourself rather than having it described to you. 

Like I said though, it’s a style of game that’s been long dead.  I remember playing Eternal Ring on the PS2 when it was new-ish and then basically nothing in that style for many years. But then in 2023 Lunacid hit the scene, a game very openly inspired by Shadow Tower and Kings Field made by the person who gave us Lost in Vivo.  That combo made me drop everything, buy it instantly and play it immediately rather than letting it sit in the backlog for years.  It’s obviously a modern take on the idea being a lot more fluid than any of the KF games ever were but I enjoyed every minute that I spent with it. Then a free to play sequel (prequel?) was released that I haven’t had the time to play yet but that’s so faithful to the concept that the developer made it on the Sword of Moonlight engine, the Kings Field editor that FromSoft made publicly available back in the day and it’s still usable even in current year.  But I thought that was going to be it.  A fringe enthusiast of esoteric bullshit makes something specifically for my tastes and then the genre goes back to sleep, how wrong I seem to be

I’ve noticed, in the last year or two that there’s been an uptick in games on Steam that are using that old Kings Field style and running with it.  Not QUITE clones, but wearing the inspiration so clearly that unless you have no idea what KF is you can see what these developers are doing.  Games like Monomyth, Verho, Flyknight, Labyrinth of the Demon King and the game that inspired this post at time of writing, Queens Domain (har har).  All games that I’m jumping at the chance to play in the near future simply for just being inspired by the niche yet legendary Kings Field.  I don’t know what started the mini-trend of Field-likes but I’m extremely grateful for it happening. 

So if you’re reading this post and you’ve never played a Kings Field game, the first step is to go fix that and play one.  Buy it, emulate it, I don’t give a fuck what you do, I’m ordering you to go play it.  Then when you’re done with that and you’re now addicted, go support some of these folks trying to start a genre revival and help bring the legacy of Kings Field out from under the shadow of Dark Souls.  Now all I need is one indie dev to rip off Baroque and I can die happy

The Definitive Guide to Japanese Convini Chicken

 

Remember when I used to post about Japan travel stuff? I do, and it’s an aspect of this blog I feel has been neglected for far too long and I’m feeling silly today so let’s talk about Japanese convenience store fried chicken.  There is a great debate about who has the best chicken among both the natives and the gaijin but I’m not interested in any of that.  As a hardcore convini enjoyer, this is the definitive ranking, you can comment, complain, cancel me all you want, I know I’m correct on this and the rankings are FINAL

For the purposes of this post, we’re only considering the following.  Nana-chiki from 7-11, L-Chiki from Lawson and Fami-Chiki from Family Mart.  If you think you know the answer already, you’re a tasteless pleb. 

THE WORST ONE

The award for the worst chicken out of our nominees is easily the Nana-Chiki from 7-11.  It doesn’t taste bad, per se, but it’s the most disappointing of the bunch.  Pretty much all of the fried food in 7-11 sucks ass and I’d rather not eat any of it but that’s ok because their strengths lay elsewhere.  Nana-chiki sucks and if all 7-11s removed their fried food section tomorrow, it would not be missed. 

SIDE NOTE, this isn’t up for discussion, really, but despite what I just said about their fried food, 7-11 does technically have the crown for best chicken of all time when they had the Nana-Chiki Red with Cheese.  It was a different cut of chicken so the texture was better, the coating was spicy and delicious and the melted cheese in the middle was just fucking INCREDIBLE.  The reason I can stand by my previous statements despite this is that that this item was a limited edition thing that has never been brought back.  You were so close to winning 7, but ya fumbled it

THE SOLID SECOND PLACER

Despite what most Hub-Dwelling gaijin or office shackled natives might tell you, fami-chiki is not the best one.  Unlike the 7-11 chicken though, Fami-Chiki is actually incredible though.  The fami chicki is perfect in a pinch, like a warm hug from a loved one on a cold day, you can always count on it to give you something quick and satisfying on the go.  You have to think of the fami-chiki like the shotgun in Doom.  The Doom shotgun is not the best gun in that game but it is the work horse of the load out, old reliable that you can pick up in most situations and get the job done with.  The other thing that elevates the fami-chiki is that all the other fried food in Family Mart sucks.  It stands tall among all the low-rate trash unfit for human consumption behind the glass of the heated cabinet and if not for these glorious cuts of dead bird, Family Mart wouldn’t even be in the conversation

THE SLEEPER WINNER

The L-Chiki from Lawson is the under appreciated gem of Japanese convini chicken.  Slept on by the average native, ignored by the average gaijin, L-Chiki is seriously a food item that you need to have more of in your life.  The regular version tastes incredible with its sort of herby, sort of lemony coating and it always uses perfect cuts of chicken that have an incredible texture.  Maybe it’s unfair to consider it but there is also a Red variant that has a spicy coating that is the closest thing I’m ever going to get to the Nana-Chiki red with cheese.  The problem with the L-Chiki is that its existence is overshadowed by Karaage-Kun, a line of chicken nuggets also sold at Lawson.  I love to eat some karaage-kun as much as anyone but the fact that it’s overshadowing the L-Chiki so hard is a crime.  The marketing department at Lawson HQ belong in prison for this one

Bottom line of this post, eat more L-Chiki.  Don’t argue with me, just go and do it and only talk to me about it after you’ve eaten 1000 pieces.  It’s the best, end of

Onimusha 2 is Insane

 

I'm a big fan of the first Onimusha game.  To sum it up in a pithy, not quite accurate way for anyone who’s never played it, it’s essentially classic Resident Evil but with samurai.  It’s one of those games that I return to at least once a year or so to take up the blade as Samanosuke and show the demons of Gifu Castle what for.  Despite my deep love for the first game though, I have extremely limited experience with the sequels.  I played 2 and 3 briefly at launch, never beat them and then largely forgot about them.  I briefly watched the final moments of Oni 3 in a video game bar a few years ago but I was off my face drunk and not really paying attention so I can’t tell you anything outside of “Jean Reno was there” and you can tell that from the box.  

So recently I decided to make a change to this lapse in my gaming experience and I sat my ass down and played through Onimusha 2 and I did not quite get the experience I was expecting at all.  I hesitate to call the game “bad” per se, but maybe I’ll sink as low as “weird and annoying” 

Right out of the gate, from the moment you hit start the vibes are just off.  Onimusha 1 was a different beast compared to Resident Evil but the DNA was still there.  The horror elements didn't really hit with the fantastical designs and stilted English voice work but an effort was being made.  Oni 2 kicks off with an honest to goodness anime OP but with the vibes of a period drama shown on Japanese tv at 1pm for the housewives circa 1995.  This vibe sticks throughout the whole game with an extremely corny and forced romantic sub plot which is occasionally broken up when it remembers what it’s supposed to be a sequel to.  

The weirdness continues as you are greeted with a gold counter on your menu and the ability to gift items to a number of side characters, which by itself is fine but what makes it weird is that you are totally locked out of the system about 2 hours in.  My 6000 gold from the start of the game sat in my inventory untouched until Nobunaga ate shit at the end.  The other thing is that neglecting this system, because I thought I could engage with it later, completely FUCKED my play through.  I found Onimusha 2 to be brutally difficult, something I wasn’t expecting considering the first game is a free clear.  The ending stats showed me, however, that my neglect for the friendship system locked about half the game out for me which is cool from a replayability standpoint but bad from a first play stress standpoint.  I struggled HARD with the final boss due to a lack of healing resources, a lack I would not have had if the ninja could have opened the trick chests or having extra scenes which I assume would have had more meds and herbs.  

Despite the easily missable game systems, the moment to moment sword play was great.  Basically the same as Oni 1 but the enemies in this game are actually sort of threatening and not just piñatas full of exp to farm as I run from one boss to another.  That said though, the bosses are insufferably shit, feeling mostly unfair rather than posing any kind of interesting challenge.  The worst being the weird pig woman with the umbrella who has attacks that I swear cannot be blocked and does insane damage unless you’ve been pumping your armor and completely ignoring your damage output.  The final form of the final boss also just drops the sword play to turn into a boss fight from Sin and Punishment (N64) but with bad controls which was certainly something I wasn’t wanting or enjoying 

The cutscenes are where things get really unhinged though.  I want to call the English voice work terrible but it’s SO bad that I have to wonder if it’s actually being done on purpose and if that’s true I have to wonder why this game is being treated as such a joke.  The game as many laugh out loud “what the fuck?!” moments that need to be seen to be appreciated such as any scene with the foppish umbrella haircut demon swordsman.  Introduced as what I thought as comic relief, harasses you until the end of the game as a main antagonist where you then have a climactic duel with him in the penultimate area.  The one that got the biggest laugh out of me is when Nobunaga’s first form goes down and he shoots some orbs into a slot machine that spins and then turns into an elephant.  Not a sentence I thought I’d be able to write about Onimusha of all things.  I hate that cliche gag of “were they high when they made this?!” But SOMETHING was being abused in both the writing room and the office of the people making the cutscenes, I’m sure of it.

Overall, I like 2 significantly less than 1.  That said though, I’m excited to go and revisit it now equipped with the hindsight of a first play through.  The weirdness of the presentation is something I don’t think I’ll ever get over but I’ll be interested to replay and re-evaluate in about a year.  Watch this space 

Adaptive Difficulty Is Kinda Cool

 

Whenever a hard game hits the scene there is usually a debate that sparks regarding difficulty in video games.  The people struggling want options, the people who are happy think devs should be free to not include them and the whole thing devolves into an angry mess where people are being called nasty names and accusations of oppression and ableism are being thrown around like candy by the terminally online, it’s a fuckin mess

My attitude to the whole thing is that difficulty options are usually poorly implemented and are an outdated idea that probably shouldn’t be used.  Games should have a baseline experience aimed at all players, so everyone can get the ending or the story and then post-game extra stuff to test the players that want to go further.  Mario 64 is a good example of what I mean here where getting 70 stars to see the ending is quite easy but if you’re pushing to 120 there’s some tricky stuff to deal with. Obviously the opinion is more nuanced than that but for the sake of this post, this simple version will do.

The one facet of this debate I haven’t considered though is adaptive difficulty, games that get harder or easier based on the performance of the player.  It’s not a thing that gets talked about very often but it’s such a cool way of serving both audiences that I’m surprised it’s not used more often.  Games that use this even sometimes have traditional modes AS WELL to set the starting level of difficulty and maybe to prevent it dipping below a certain point.  It’s probably a pain in the ass to implement because you have to track a bunch of factors that controls the difficulty but I feel like this method would stop the whiners while also allowing the hard core players to swing their e-dicks around. 

I caught a shot of adaptive difficulty while playing Aero Fighters the other night and thought it was a neat part of the game I hadn’t previously known about while trying to 1cc it.  I was going through the game on an emulator and saving states in order to practice parts of the game I was struggling with.  Of course, while stating I’m not dying and I’m barely using bombs and about 5 stages in I noticed the game felt just impossibly hard, way harder than I was used to.  I then realized that the game was taking stock of my lives and bombs at the end of each stage and making the game harder or easier based on those numbers.  Going into stage 5 with 5 bombs and 3 lives and the enemies are all shooting like mad men with bullets on fast forward but with no lives and no bombs the enemy pilots age 90 years and get brain damage.  Cool for the players who are cracked at the game because that high score from not continuing represents a greater struggle but if you kinda suck a shmups, a win might still be open to you.  From my perspective trying to 1cc it, it poses an interesting additional mechanic to contend with where I can maybe justify spamming bombs or dying tactically to win on one coin which is not something I usually have to think about.

The first time I remember being conscious of an adaptive difficulty was back in 2008 when Left4Dead came out.  Valve named it “the director” and if my memory isn’t faulty it changed things such as health items, ammo, number of zombies and number of special infected.  It also had traditional difficulty settings and I’m not sure what those affected given the presence of the director but it’s a good example of having both systems in play. I don’t remember thinking that the director had a huge effect on gameplay with the base difficulty being more of a factor in success or failure but it’s cool feature to include in a game that had such a limited amount of actual content. 

A really interesting example of adaptive AI is probably the one found in Resident Evil 4.  I was barely even aware of its existence until I found a YouTube about RE4 speedrun and the narrator touched on it there.  From what I can tell it affects things like enemy aggressiveness, damage taken(?), item drops and stuff like that.  What makes it so interesting is that you would THINK that speedrunners want to run on easy, because an easier game is surely faster to clear, right? But my current understanding is the preferred setting is actually Professional.  Pro mode locks the adaptive difficulty to its highest point in an unmoving state and thus allows for runners to play the game in a more predictable and easily routeable way.  I’ve never once heard of anyone complaining about the challenge behind RE4 so whatever Capcom were cooking, the people are loving it. 

So maybe devs should use more adaptive methods of dictating game challenge, maybe with a setting at the start so more skilled players don’t dip into the easy stuff if things go tits up for them.  The only other alternative I think works is giving players full control over aspects of the difficulty from the options menu but I only enjoy this method when then options allow for insane jacking of numbers for challenge runners.  Really though, at the end of the day, instead of arguing over all this crap, if a game is too hard for you then just turn it off and play something else. 

Neverwinter Nights is bad

Dungeons and Dragons is a game I have a fairly limited amount of experience with.  I first played it in 2010 with some people at the university I was at in Nagoya on my exchange year and then again in a basement gaming bar a few years later.  The experience was mostly a negative one, with the exception of the game bar basements early days but rolling dice around insufferable nerds was not an experience I would be willing to sign up for again in a hurry.  Maybe if a tight knit group of buddies got together like in my one decent group I’d be willing to make a character but otherwise no thanks.

But the problem here is not the game itself, it’s just the people.  The game itself is a deeply interestingly made thing that allows for insane freedom for both story teller (the DM) and the players.  This freedom has been regularly scuppered in my experience by aforementioned insufferable nerds but that’s not the games fault.  The solution, in theory, should be to remove the people from the equation and that solution is available to me in the form of video games based on Dungeons and Dragons.  We sacrifice some of the freedom of the tabletop in exchange for the ability to engage with the core mechanics without the need to be around people who don’t pay their water bills. 

So when I got a double game request on my stream for Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 I was sort of excited.  I had played a little bit of the first game in my younger days and thought it was cool and maybe these games will be the titles that get me to respect western made high fantasy RPGs. I was wrong.  What I got was overly long, buggy, badly written unfun bullshit where every cutscene put me to sleep and every encounter made me want to smash my keyboard

Of the two games, Neverwinter Nights 1 was the worst one by a wide margin.  Starting with an investigation into a plague and then expanding out into a larger conflict, the details of which I barely cared about as I was playing and I have mostly forgotten less than 6 months after seeing the credits roll.  The game suffers from 2 major issues that make it feel awful to play.  The first is the wild difficulty swings that can happen in the blink of an eye.  My Monk, 90% of the time, would have no issue punching his way through whatever monsters of the day were being presented in the current quest and then I’d wander into a room and there would be an enemy that would just one shot me.  The worst part of this is that because everything is based on invisible dice rolls, the solution to the combat was not to go level up or change strategies but instead to just save/load until the game gave me a win.  The roll playing game reduced to a slot machine.  

The second issue is the fact that you can only have one companion.  When I played table top, the groups had to be AT LEAST 3 so Neverwinter Nights only having the player character and a single AI partner is underwhelming to say the least.  On top of that you can’t customize the other party member AT ALL.  Gear is pre set, level ups are done automatically.  The whole thing of building a character and messing with the character sheet as you level up is completely removed.  What compounds this issue is that most of the partners you have access to are trash.  The guy I picked for the majority of the game seems to be the guy that most people pick.  Maybe if we could ROLE PLAY in the ROLE PLAYING GAME with our party we’d see some variance.  Even the old Baldurs Gate games, released way before this piece of shit let you kit your dudes out and interact with them in some actual meaningful ways.  Somehow things got worse as the tech got better

Speaking of, Neverwinter Nights 2, despite being a considerably better game in every way, addressing a lot of the gripes I had with the first one is still kind of a piece of shit.  In 2, the difficultly swings aren’t a huge issue and I have a party I can customize and interact with but holy shit the bugs really bog down the whole thing.  From the jump, the game barely worked AT ALL until I installed a community patch and even then it was still a little fucked.  The camera going crazy and characters rubber banding was highly annoying.  Cutscenes not playing properly often pulled me out of the experience and made certain events hard to follow.  The worst bug I got happened in the final dungeon where all my party members had a stroke and would not listen to commands.  The second worst being the story specific legendary sword de-spawning from my inventory upon entry to the final area that nearly caused a massive time loss.  A better game that’s just absolutely miserable to play

The other thing that sucked about the sequel is the ending.  Without hyperbole one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen in any game I’ve ever played.  A black screen with the text “You Win” written in 12 point Ariel would have been more acceptable.  The whole game revolves around a conflict with the King of Shadows.  You go on this big quest, uncover ancient secrets, forge a legendary sword, kill immortal skeletons by reading a school register at them and then when you finish all that and win the day, the dungeon collapses and you all die.  There’s a 10 minute cutscene of an intern reading Tolkien fan fiction at you but the core of it is “you win but you died also the end”.  I’m not saying that all stories have to have a happy ending but this was so trash out of nowhere that I had to google if I got a bad ending or not. I found out through that search that even fans of this horrible pile of filth think it sucks so at least we’re united on that front.

I never ever want to play Neverwinter Nights again.  I think I would have had more fun playing the table top game by myself as a one man party where I DM my own game.  If you played and enjoyed Baldurs Gate 3 and thought you might plumb the depths of older DnD based games, avoid these two sacks of garbage.  Just play BG 1+2 and call it a day because if you play Neverwinter you may never want to play a CRPG ever again