The 2021 Tau Awards

 

At time of writing it has just gone midnight and it has become 2022.  To celebrate the new year lets look at the games I played over the last year and give a bunch of fakey award titles to them.  Only games I beat or games that I am currently playing are eligble for a Tau award and you can see the list of games I beat in 2021 over on Twitter and you can see my now playing list over on Discord

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257

Game of the Year

 

Obviously it's Shin Megami Tensei 5.  Once again mainline SMT delivers a top quality product and despite some bullshitty day 1 DLC, it's pretty much everything I could have hoped for.  I bought the Switch specifically for this game and before it's release, I was sort of regretting my purchase but this thing made it all worth it.  Do yourself a favor and go play it 

Best First Playthrough 2021

LISA may have come out in 2014 but I was extremely late to this one but I can't think of a game that I played this year that stuck with me quite as strongly as LISA did.  It's dark, its funny, its challenging, its got crows that are save points that explode when you use them, what more could you possibly want?  Also the soundtrack fucking SLAPS.  The game is like, 7 pounds on Steam so go buy it 

Biggest Liar

This game was a massive piece of shit with its uninteresting story and completely idiotic lead character but the worst offence this game pulls is telling you that repeated deaths will result in a deleted save game.  Well guess what? That's not true.  The dev team had to lie to you to create a sense of tension because the game is so poorly written and poorly made that it can't do it by itself.  Fuck this game

Biggest Dissapointment 

I was pretty interested in Everhood when I first saw it.  It's very clearly trying to do an Undertale but the rhythm game based combat looked like something that was right up my alley.  Playing it was also pretty promising at first too but it's trying so hard to be deep (like Undertale) and mysteries (like Yume Nikki et al) and instead just comes off as pretentious crap.  The soundtrack was good and there are some really strong moments but overall the game felt like a total slog.  If games that have their heads shoved so far up their own arse that they can use their own skulls as periscopes appeal to you, then maybe you'll like it, but I shall not be doing a repeat playthrough of this one in a hurry 

Pleasantest Surprise

So if you look through the Twitter thread you'll notice that this game isn't on there because I'm stupid and forgot to add it to the list when I beat it.  I guess that makes its title in this article also rather appropriate.

I got this game for free off the Epic Game Store and wasn't expecting a lot from it and granted, it's not really anything special.  It's a sort of generic hairy dad game with the hairy dad replaced with a teenage girl and the voice acting is a bit weird but it' rather pleasing visually and I found myself getting pretty attatched to the characters by the end.  Also the game climaxes with you having an all out rat war with the catholic church and that's pretty cool.  Not a masterpiece by any stretch but I was expecting a pile of stinky poop garbage and got something pretty playable that I kept wanting to go back to until I beat it and I'm genuinely happy its getting a sequel. 

Worst Game

I played through many a stinker.  Benbo Quest, Summer of 58, Slender the Arrival, The Tape and a bunch more but none of them were quite as putrid and as unplayable as Bendy and the Ink Machine.  An uninteresting, unscary, slow, boring and buggy mess of a game that did nothing but waste my time and piss me off to no end.  Don't buy this, dont play it even if you get it for free, it's an absolute disgrace to the horror genre and the people who put this out into the world should be ashamed of themselves for creating something so irredeemably vile

Well that's it, that's all I can be bothered to write about this late at night.  I'm now going to wrap up under my sheets and play GOTY Shin Megami Tensei 5 until I fall asleep.  

Happy New Year everyone!

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

 https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

MegaTen Mega Day

 

Today has been a day for Megami Tensei games and that means I had a very good day indeed.

In my work lunch break I broke out the Switch in order to play some Shin Megami Tensei 5 which basically involved me spending the entire hour getting my ass handed to me.  I've come across a side quest that I got from a Lilim who said that she would join me in exchange for going and murdering a Principality.  If you present me with a choice of cute girl in booty shorts or Statue of Liberty lookin-ass angel thing, I know where my loyalty lies.  So off I go, about to spit in the face of God once more, as is customary in these games where I come to the grim realization that I don't actually have a demon that knows Mudo.  This, I thought, would be fine because I'm still doing pretty good damage and despite the damage buff they get from the hard mode they aren't one shotting me or anything.  The problem with this fight however is that there's two of these fuckers and they keep healing each other.  Their heal gets them to full and eventually I just run out of steam before I can take them down.  This of course means that I made exactly 0 progress in my play session today as I went around gathering money from vending machines so that I can go and re-summon or maybe fuse a few things with Mudo.  I wasn't able to beat them this afternoon but I think I'm in a good position to win in my next session.

Afer that I came home from the office, fired up the stream and started playing Persona 2 Innocent Sin.  I'm playing a fan-translation of the original PS1 version because it has a set on Retro Achievements and I'm an absolute whore for that website 

https://retroachievements.org/game/11355

Given that modern Persona sort of bears a fair bit of similarity to mainline in demon gathering and fusion it's definately a change of pace to play a game like Persona 2.  Persona 2 still has a negotiation mechanic but a successful demon chat will result in them giving you a stack of cards of whatever type they are.  You then take these cards to the velvet room and summon them so the whole fusion thing is sort of out of the window and instead you just pay for demons.  Between that, the automated combat that you have to manage to make sure you're ranking things up and fusion spells (powerful magics that also have a chance to randomly raise your stats) there's an awful lot to take in at the start.  I spent my time strolling down easy street beating up on demons for level ups and not progressing the plot much but I have another session penned in for the first hour of tomorrows stream so maybe we can at least get to the first boss within that time. Looking forward to playing both this game and it's follow up, Eternal Punishment!

Massive Rat War

 Well my Sunday was filled with mainly not game related stuff but the one thing I did manage to do was finish A Plague Tale: Innocence.  Like I said in the previous post, it's not a bad game but it doesn't have enough good ideas to support its length.  There was about 16 chapters total with the first 6 and the last 2 being sort of cool and then everything in between feeling like a bunch of stupid padding.  They could have very easily cut the game down to about 10 chapters and it would have been a perfect length but instead it really does start to feel like a slog by the end.  

 Spoilers ahead if you care for some reason

One thing I did find quite interesting though is that in the last few moments of the game you get to actually control the rats and you have to sic them on dudes like little diseased Pikmin.  You spend maybe 2 chapters of the game using this power to get through some guards only for the entire thing to climax in what I can only describe as a rat war with a priest.  I was sort of worried that the game would do that really annoying thing of just having you fight goons while a cutscene happens in the background and you just win when enough of them are dead but there's a full on hilarious boss battle with giant rat towers and it was actually quite the spectacle.  I'm glad that I stuck with it to the end but I'm also glad that I didn't have to pay for it. 6/10 I guess.

Before I wrote this article I actually loaded up a game called Ghost Runner, a sort of Hotline Miami via Mirrors Edge that's kind of fun.  I got half way through a stage though when a spinning platform bugged out when I landed on it and angled itself at about 45 degrees.  When I respawned I could still land on the platform but it was clipping through the wall I was supposed to run along and when I tried to do the wall run I'd get knocked off and fall to my death.  I tried to exit the game and reload my save thinking I could go from the checkpoint but when the game loaded in I was at the start of the stage and upon seeing that I promptly quit the game and it might be a good few days before I drum up the will to play it again.  

Tomorrow I'm hoping will be a bit of a MegaTen day.  I'm working in the office which means I'll be lugging my Switch down with me to play some SMT V in my lunch break and when I get home I'll be firing up the PS1 version of Persona 2 (Innocent Sin) for the Stream!  I'll be back tomorrow to report how many times I got my ass kicked by demons

The Worst Controls on the Playstation

 

Was too sleepy at the end of the stream last night to fire up Blogger and write a post so instead I'll do it now, just after I wake up 

I've been making slow progress on Shin Megami Tensei 5, of course.  I've seemed to have hit a bit of a difficulty spike in the area that I'm in.  Previously every encounter was a walk down easy street and then I hit this next big area and suddenly encounters aren't so much difficult as much as they have the potential to go completely go tits up in a single enemy turn.  One bad critical or one miss and my life flashes before my eyees, especially in a game where the death of the main character means a game over even if all your other demons are just fine.  Nothing however, that a bit of demon management and maybe a little grinding for a level or two can't solve though.

I'm also coming up on the end of A Plague Tale which is a game that's FAR overstaying its welcome.  It's not a bad game by any stretch, a fairly generic hairy dad game where the hairy dad has been replaced with a teenage girl and her child brother but it just doesn't have enough ideas to support it's length.  I'm on chapter 15, hopefully the last one, but it feels like should have ended 5 chapters ago.  There's only so much you can do with "sneak around dudes" and "avoid rats" and you can see the game struggling at around chapter 6 to keep things interesting.  I don't hate this game but I'm sure as hell glad that Epic Game Store gave it to me for free, I might have been a bit less charitable with it if I had actually paid money.

Finally I spent my time on stream playing Megaman Legends on the PS1 which is I'm fairly certain the only series of Megaman games I've not played before unless there's some obscure Megaman Kart on something like the Wonderswan or some shit.  The game is actually pretty fun despite feeling a bit clunky at first but once you get a handle on it all it feels just fine.  Also the way the characters act and that specific brand of 90s anime voice acting makes me feel like I'm playing some kind of Saturday morning cartoon, it's the kind of game that a younger me would have REALLY loved.  One thing I cannot forgive though is the movement controls.  Holy Mary Mother of God these are maybe THE WORST movement controls I've seen in a game maybe ever.  People give classic Survival Horror tank controls shit for being "clunky and hard" but Megaman Legends makes Resident Evil feel like the smoothest thing in the world.  You move forward and back with up and down, as usual, but then you rotate Megaman with L1 and R1 and left and right are this weird strafe thing that isn't good for anything since the camera is too close and you can't see where you're going when strafing.  You can reverse these, which I did, but it still feels weird.  On top of that, the lock-on feature is the most fussy piece of garbage I've ever seen in a game.  If you are locked on to one enemy and another enemy comes even remotely near you, the lock on will start swinging back and forth between the two targets thus making killing either of them next to impossible.  Luckily shots sort of home onto enemies if you fire near them so locking on isn't actually required most of the time but it's still annoying when flying enemies decide to turn up.

With that Mega-man-mega-bitching out of the way I'm now off to try and finish A Plague Tale so that maybe I can spend my evening complaining about it on here. 

Snakes and Organized Crime

 Well I was in the office today so unfortunately the first "game diary" style post I'm putting up, I don't actually have all that much to say.  

In the time I had during my lunch break I, of course, played as much Shin Megami Tensei 5 as I could squeeze in.  I'm currently really enjoying this game and one thing I'm really happy about is my decision to put it on hard mode.  I remember back in my younger days, when I first got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne (Or Lucifers Call as it was called for me) and my unfamiliarity with the series meant that I found the whole thing quite challenging.  Every boss fight was a struggle, a hard earned win that felt good when I figured out a good team of demons or a good strategy.  As I got older and played more MegaTen I eventually "got gud" so when I eventually got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 4 I breezed through that entire game no problem and with that games hard mode being locked behind a full game clear, I haven't yet got around to doing it.  

Shin Megami Tensei 5 on hard, however, has BIG Nocturne energy that I'm really enjoying.  Just as I was getting comfortable running around the map and making short work of enemies, I enter a building and was treated to a boss fight.  I'm not going to spoil what the boss is or anything like that but it involves snakes but not by Tokyo Tower.  This boss stomped my shit effortlessly because my setup was AWFUL for it and unfortunately my lunch break ended before I could get another try.  However I've got some demons in stock that can help, I changed up my resistances so I'm not just granting it free turns and I'm ready to run right back in there and beat it's ass.  Excitement.

The other game I manged to get a fairly long session on today was Yakuza Kiwami, a game I'm playing on stream as part of my Yak-Attack series playthrough.  Most streams I do of that game devolve into me just doing mini-games for completion points but today I actually managed to progress the plot a little and I really like the plot of Kiwami so it's always a treat to see more of those cinematics.  On top of that I beat all the batting challenges which is a feat I'm particularly proud of since when I started the game I could barely even hit the ball AND I won a game of Shogi, a feat I thought was actually impossible.  I didn't get the completion point since you have to win a match without using the take-back function for that but the game can go fuck itself, I'm just happy I got a win at all.

I wanted to sign off each of these posts with a short "wot I plan to play tomorrow" bit but for the forseeable future every day is pretty much going to be playing just as much SMT5 as possible.  I actually think I'm near the end of my first playthrough for A Plague Tale: Innocence so maybe I'll put some time into that and try and see the ending but demon-busting takes main priority. 

2021: A Year For Extreme MegaTen Hype

I'm a bit of a cynical bugger when it comes to new releases, I sort of just assume that everything that's coming out is shit so that when I buy it and it ends up being shit I don't feel too put out.  As a result of this cynicism I tend to ignore things like Nintendo Directs because I don't give a shit about anything they have to say and if something interesting does happen either someone will tell me or I'll just see it on a shelf at some point after release day.  But good lord do I regret not checking out the Nintendo Direct last night because HO-LY SHIT there was some good news to come out of that one.

Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne was a game on PS2 that came out in 2003 and as quite frankly one of the best games on the system.  For the completely uninitiated the game is sort of like grim-dark Pokémon only the goal of a Shin Megami Tensei game isn't so much to collect them all but to survive whatever apocalypse is going on and maybe punch some Gods in the face.  You negotiate with and collect demons to put them in your party and fight with them in a sort of Pokémon-esque way but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

One of the reasons I personally am so happy about this news is because Nocturne is a game that's stupidly expensive to buy here in Japan.  Over here there were 3 versions of the game released, a standard version, a 'Maniax' edition and a third one that featured Raidou from the Devil Summoner series instead of Dante from Devil May Cry.  The standard edition is pretty fairly priced but it's lacking a lot of the features that the Maniax one does.  The Maniax edition, the one we got over in the west, costs about $200 and the one with Raidou costs even more than that.  This remake version is going to apparently cost $60 and is the Raidou version of the game which means that my wallet is just as happy as I am.

But that's not all!  Shin Megami Tensei 5 also got another trailer and it's extremely exciting to see that the game hasn't been forgotten about despite not hearing anything about it for a VERY long time.  The first announcement for SMT5 was the only reason I bought a Switch in the first place.  I don't give a flying rat fuck about Zelda or Mario or whatever tired Nintendo IP is being churned out but I care very much about being able to play SMT5 on the day it comes out.

Not only is this news extremely exciting but it's also extremely funny.  One quick look at Twitter and the amount of crying from various parties had me giggling all throughout my day.  Nintendo fans were butthurt because it wasn't Smash news or something, despite the fact they very clearly stated it was a partner presentation and Persona fans (an SMT spinoff series designed for braindead twats, myself included) were EXTRA butthurt because they have been clamoring for a Switch port of Persona 5 for a good while now.  There was even a small group of butthurt Persona fans crying about how P5Scramble, a Dynasty Warrriors knockoff set in the Persona 5 universe hasn't been localized yet.

July 21st was an extremely good day for MegaTen fans and we can only hope that the success of SMT3 remake will maybe trigger a remake of Digital Devil Saga or maybe, the best game in the franchise, Jack Brothers.  We can dream