faea gaming: February '25
Hi! For the first post on here, I thought it’d be nice to port over an idea I had while I was still writing on Backloggd – noting down every game I played each months alongside some current thoughts. It’s not nearly as structured or analytical as anything I’d call Proper Writing, but it’s fun to do and hopefully gets a few eyes on some cool games. Anyway… video games!
Games I Finished
Pokémon Platinum
Back in 2023 I took on Pearl as a way to challenge the consensus of DP being *that much* worse than Plat, and this year I tied a bow on that little story! Even though I was ambivalent on DPP during my childhood, I fell in love with Pearl on my replay, so it’s not surprising I feel similarly about Platinum. The region itself is my favourite part about the game – not just the environments, but the strained relationship it conveys of a culture stuck between tradition and technological advancement, and all the different ways it expresses that – and that’s all already there in DP. What Plat DOES bring is a more Traditionally Good experience – diversifying the dex, and having trainers keep up with you pretty fiercely at the cost of the slight nonlinearity from gyms 3-5 – though I don’t find the appeal of Pokemon comes from the combat, so a lot of the changes are to things that never really bothered me. Despite that, and although I think a lot of the changes themselves are a bit odd, I think I do ultimately like Plat a bit more than DP. I’m not immune to Electabuzz, what can I say…
Anyway, the REAL crime of Plat is that the Frontier Brains don't show up in doubles!! I had a really awesome setup that involved exploding Skuntanks, but for what……
Pokémon Colosseum
I played this to death as a kid, so my favourite way to experience it now is via a Shadow Pokemon randomiser – I did another one :) Here's the team:
Anyway, I’ve always loved Colosseum (and I still do!) but I think I'm cooling on this one a little bit. The highs are really high – I love Doubles as a singleplayer format, and I really want another pokemon game with this level of fun and sometimes straight-up mean encounter design – but there's so much dead air between the memorable moments that really hit me this time round… as it turns out, slowly beating up Lotad-tier Pokemon IS a significant portion of the game. It sorta feels like everything between Dakim and Realgam kinda drags and that's, like, half the game lol? So I don’t think I’m gonna be revisiting this one again any time soon, but I’m still happy about this replay. Maybe I’ll have to take another whack at Orre Colosseum instead…
Shadow Tower: Abyss
I’ve recently become a massive King’s Field fan so I liked it a lot by default (first person dungeon crawlers are to me what games like Balatro probably are to normal people…), but I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed? It's a perfectly good KF/ST game (and I love how alien its environments look in particular!!) but it doesn't really tease the same level of intrigue through its world design as in KF4, or its mechanics as in ST… though all these games bottom out in difficulty quite quickly so praising mechanics doesn't go too far for any of them. Its new ideas are cool in theory and we LOVE a game that uses its right stick for something completely different, but in motion it felt like I was just hitting or shooting things as in any of the others… just that I'm firing an M3 Super 90 Shotgun instead of a bow.
Atelier Marie: The Alchemist of Salburg
The best way I can think to describe this game is as a Dumb Bitch Simulator. And it’s a good one, too: after being told that I'm so stupid I need to hole up in an alchemy lab for the next 5 years until I can make ✨ something ✨, the game proceeds to tell me absolutely nothing about how to play it and I'm left to figure everything out by myself. With a constant 5-year timer ticking down, all the time spent flailing about while getting used to both the crafting and the perfunctory JRPG combat feels pretty meaningful; plus, once it DOES all click, the difficulty flips from sorta-annoying to the very easy game I kind of expected going in. It's basically a knowledge-check RPG and I think that's cool!!
In the final year, I spent so long preparing for the game's Mega Dungeon that I ran out of time to actually go to it… but then the ending I got was really sweet despite being pretty clearly meant to be a bad one. I think I just really like this sort of ultra-low stakes setting; makes me want more of this stuff that isn't also beholden to Cosy Game Trends.
Games I Haven't Finished
moon: Remix RPG Adventure
Definitely become one of my favourite games ever, though I don’t want to say too much since I’d love to write a fuller piece about it. It’s ALSO the biggest dopamine-void I’ve ever played, to the point where it’s taken a month into my second attempt to not even get close to finishing it… but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective otherwise. I’ll finish it one day :’)
Monster Hunter Wilds (demo 2)
It’s hard to put my thoughts down without going on an unedited rant about my general unease towards Modern Monster Hunter (context: 500+ hrs in World, 300+ hours in Rise; I still like the games a lot!!). The horrible optimisation is definitely the straw that broke the camel’s back here, but playing this demo just has me pining for another older game: one with no Freaking Awesome Combat Gimmick to earn free knockdowns, one where monsters force you to proactively manage space rather than rolling out of everything, one where everything’s just a little less convenient? I’ve been telling myself to hop back on Tri for a while, maybe I’ll see you there…
Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn
Bit underwhelmed with this one, sadly; the extremely cute presentation and honestly really cool combat mechanics are brushing up against how it just feels easy to its own detriment. Combat is low-stakes enough to feel inconsequential between low individual fight difficulty and abundance of HP/MP refills, so I feel like I’m less playing a cohesive videogame and moreso hitting speedbumps between the story beats I want to reach… I’ve had to stifle the urge to brand this sort of frictionlesness as a uniquely “RPG” problem, but I think it hurts the most in these games because of how long the combat takes (probably some other things too; I still need to figure that all out). I’m tempted to play a little more to see if the story picks up from where I am, but I don’t see myself crossing the finish line with this one unfortunately.
Baroque
Not far enough into this to attempt any sort of analysis so I’m going to call this "Hades if it was good" and not elaborate
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Thanks for reading :) I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to use this space, but I’m looking forward to it – I think I’ll be able to write much better pieces here than I have been otherwise! Since I don't have a proper solution for comments, feel free to drop something in this box if I said something interesting or if you want to know what colour GBC I had as a kid. See you next month!