River City Ransom

So I finished River City Ransom on Stream a few days ago and despite it being my second time to finish this game I've never said anything about it on this blog, which is weird considering how good it is.

On the off chance that you're not familiar, River City Ransom was a game released in 1989 for the NES and you play as a dude called Alex, and maybe one other guy if you're in two player mode, as you go around the town beating up thugs.  The game is actually the third entry in the "Kunio-Kun" series preceded by Super Dodge Ball and Renegade before that.

Gameplay involves walking around a town, beating up dudes until you find a boss dude, then beating him up and getting a hint on where to find the next boss dudes.  When you beat all the boss dudes you go to a school and beat up the final boss dude on the roof and the game ends.  As you beat dudes up they drop money which you use to go to the various shops and buy food items to increase your stats.  I have no idea what most of the stats actually do but you should just aim to get big numbers so you can relieve dudes of there cash in one punch rather than multiple.  It's got a small but open world so it's really up to you to explore and while this can be a little confusing your first time round you'll never really get truly lost.

Despite the NES being famous for having hundreds of really hard games, River City Ransom is kind of on the easy side.  It can be a little challenging at first but once you start to get your stats up and your head round the combat the game becomes an absolute cakewalk.  Late in the game you can pick up some cowboy boots that make your kicks strong enough to kill most enemies, including bosses, in a single attack so once you buy those it really is just game over from there.  My only complaint about this game is that occasionally the enemies will go absolutely crazy and just bully you in a corner until you die and you can't do shit about it.  However this is only really a mild annoyance because in this game death doesn't mean a restart, it just means you lose half your cash and go back to the last shopping area you visited.

So if you've somehow gone your whole life not having played this, go grab it.  I'm sure it's been released for virtual console or whatever given it's legacy and failing that I'm sure you could use some slightly more dubious methods to play it if you were that way inclined.  This series is actually still going too with some of the most recent entries being released for the PS4.  Go get to know good ol' Kunio-Kun, he's a stand up lad

Severed

So when I was on the plane to the USA for my summer holiday I decided to pick one of the random Vita games I got for free as part of PS+ and the first choice my finger went to was a game called Severed.  I didn't have any expectation for this game but what I got was actually really good. 

The first thing I noticed right off the bat was the art style.  I thought I'd seen it before somewhere and it wasn't until I got off the plane, hit Wi-Fi and was able to Google it that I discovered that Severed is made by a developer called Drinkbox Studios who also made another great game called Guacamelee! Just as an aside, if you haven't played that you should also go check it out because it's fantastic.

So the game starts out and you find yourself in the role of a young girl who's family has been taken away by monsters and your arm has been cut off.  You walk through her destroyed house and an evil thing in a mirror gives you a sword and then you go on an adventure to get them back.  The story is a bit bare bones but it's got everything you need to make you want to press on.  A missing family and a world full of weird monsters and places to kill and explore.

Game play wise the game plays sort of like Zelda had a baby with one of those weird first person horror dungeon crawlers on the Amiga or something.  You have to explore dungeons and each dungeon gives you a piece of gear that will not only solve the puzzles in that dungeon but open up extra bits of the world for you to go and find secrets and whatnot.  There are three "worlds" let say with one hub area that connects them and as you gain gear and skills you'll want to back track for heart pieces (for more health of course) and brain pieces (for mana)

It's the combat however where this game really shines.  You use the touch screen to swipe enemies with your sword and each enemy has different patterns that you have to work out in order to deal damage and to block their oncoming attacks.  At first you just work out how to kill them and then kill them but as you progress through the game it starts throwing multiple enemies at you which surround you.  This puts you in situations where your having to manage not only attacks and blocks but doling out the occasional smack to the enemy behind you or to your side so that their attack meter doesn't fill up and slaps a bunch of your life away.  If you deal out enough hits without being attacked or blocked you fill up a bonus meter and when the meter is full it allows you to....SEVER!....enemy body parts which you collect and use to power up your characters skills.

I have two complaints about this game, the first being that it felt a bit short.  I don't know if it's ACTUALLY short but I managed to finish it after spending only a couple hours on the plane and then a couple more on a bus tour ride but it could just be that I'm really good.  Also the upgrade system is broken and you can basically get all the upgrades you need even if you suck at the game.  Sometimes in pots and things you find "giblets" and one of the first skills you learn is how to transmute giblets into upgrade items.  Even if you somehow manage to go the entire game not being able to sever a single body part (impossible) you could still power up enough for the final boss to be a complete cakewalk.

Still, despite these complaints I had a great time with Severed, it's a fun game with a lot of personality.  I played the Vita version but apparently it's on mobile, Wii U and Switch so go check it out.

Etrian Odyssey: Not as Hard As You Think

Very recently I replayed and finished a game called Etrian Odyssey on the DS.  The game was released in 2007 and is a dungeon crawler where the player is tasked with entering a labyrinth and solving its mysteries as they progress down 25 floors of danger.  The game came out in 2007 so this isn't going to be a review but I want to address something people have always said about it's difficulty.

Etrian Odyssey can be a challenging game to a new player, you have a number of classes to pick from who each have their own unique skills.  Then once you've made your team you have to gear them out, go into the dungeon and start to get them to a higher level.  Once you level up you get points to put into a skill and the lists of skills are so long that it would surely overwhelm a lot of new players, it sure as hell did for me my first time round.

So the things I hear the most regarding difficulty is that the encounters can be tough and dying makes you lose a lot of progress.  Well the second one might be true, since save points inside the dungeon are quite few and far between death can me a pretty hefty setback depending on how long you were exploring but encounters, even the special enemies and bosses become disgustingly easy once you get your head round the characters skills.

In my replay I managed to remember all the points required for the best skills and I realized that a great deal of the skills on the characters list are completely useless.  For example, the games version of the warrior has all these skills called things like "stunner" or some whirlwind thing that hits adjacent enemies but it's all crap.  Max out the attack, HP and All Slash skills and he can deal with most of the standard encounters alone.  Another example would be the survivalist who only really needs one skill called Apollon which does massive damage after 3 turns to a single foe.  You can take such a massive chunk of health from a boss in such a short time that the fight becomes almost trivial.  Couple that with a medic who has a maxed Salve 2 and the the game becomes almost too easy.

Granted, you would never know to do all that shit the first time round but I went back to this game with memories of having a hard time but my replay was just pathetically easy.  Even the final boss stood absolutely no chance and I beat him stood in line for a ride at a theme park and barely paying attention.

So what I discovered essentially is that a number of the skills are a bit unbalanced and break the combat a little bit and once you figure out what those skills are the game becomes a cake walk.  I'd recommend Etrian Odyssey since its a great little RPG and fans of dungeon crawl games might get a kick out of the whole draw your own map feature using the DS's lower screen.  It's become a big series too and I've not played a lot of the later ones so I'm curious to see if the later titles are as easily broken as this one.