faea gaming: March '25
Hello again! I spent a lot of time playing games in the first half of the month, then kind of dropped off when I started working on my own project – it feels odd re-reading this just before publishing, because I don’t remember all that much about most of these, lol. The project itself is a prototype-ish RPG Maker dungeon crawler I made in a couple weeks, it’s called UNFORMED and you can play it for free here! I’m very happy with it for the timeframe, and it’s getting me buzzed to both carry on making and to jump into more RPGs to keep learning!
Anyway, without further ado!
Games I Finished
Baroque
This is kind of wonderful? It's a first-person Mystery Dungeon clone at heart, but practically all the changes make it feel just a bit *more* than its inspirations. I’m not the biggest fan of its hunger (VT) implementation – a good run just lets you overcome VT entirely and spend as long as you want waiting for passive healing without feeling any pressure – but apart from that I think they’ve got a really strong and satisfying set of mechanics here. I think the bones are my favourite bit: they’re comparable to PMD’s seeds, except they’re both usually unidentified, and *always* give a reasonable chunk of HP/VT healing if you crunch them. Do you identify them by chucking them at something and risking making it invulnerable, or by crunching them and risking having something *really* nasty happen to you?
That said, despite the meta-progression story being what Hades (2019) was praised for but two decades prior, I found its delivery a little weird: the story triggers are MOSTLY pretty easy to find, but the really intriguing bits come from character dialogue that you’ll only get bit-by-bit across a lot of runs. Scrolling through the Nerve Tower fansite is showing me sooo much really compelling dialogue that I just didn’t see, because I beat the game too quickly… though maybe I should be more thankful for the wonderfully-dedicated fanbase – the translators, the patchers, the documenters – that let me experience these games at all.
Madō Monogatari 1
Right now, I’m super interested in ways games can express themselves through elements unique to games, so I’d naturally be drawn to an RPG that drops a numerical interface entirely in favour of communicating HP, MP and status effects through colourful dialogue, character expressions and music changes. Combine that with being a brisk (3-4hr) dungeon crawl with creative puzzles and memorable layouts and you’ve got a really nice little thing here. I also quite like the aesthetic – lots of contrast of the overly cutesy with honestly kind of gruesome and unsettling? Arle Nadja goes to preschool and learns the horrors of violence type thing, it’s cool; I can’t wait to play 2 and 3 to watch her develop into a trained killer.
That said, I think I respect it slightly more than I enjoyed it, because the combat itself is massively rudimentary – it drops some of its cooler ideas as quickly as it introduces them, and winds up as not much more than an A-button masher with a couple of mean tricks up its sleeve. I also got a bit *too* creative and made the final puzzle harder to solve because I got into a room before I was supposed to… but that’s part of the fun, right?
Games I Haven't Finished
Dragon Quest IV
It speaks volumes to the quality of this game that I’m still chipping away at this despite not liking the more forwardly-grindy motions of NES DQ nearly as much as I do NES FF. There is just SO much desperation to push at the boundaries of what even a fairly-basic turn-based RPG can be – it’s clearly a boundary-pushing game, and it still sticks out in the ways it expresses itself thirty-five years of genre evolution later. Saying anything specific feels like telling a secret, but Chapter 3 is SO cool like this sort of thing makes me love video games. Games like this and Madō are so inspiring to me right now because of how intent on pushing boundaries while sticking to a very basic mechanical formula; they’re forced to get creative in how they manipulate all aspects of (and expectations from) video games that make them video games, and often ones we take for granted, that are really easy to overlook when given the power to craft completely bespoke systems. I think there’s so much to learn from games like these!!!
Monster Hunter tri
I don’t think I have the time/patience to really commit myself to one of these nowadays… I kinda dropped off just before the Lagiacrus repel. When I did it though a Ludroth got the final blow on it after I slept it it was insane. It’s a good game though!! As much as I seethe and froth at the mouth at how small monsters are in these games (and I’m on gunner so I can’t even kill them well!!) I think these oldgen Monster Hunters are an absolute treat if you can meet them on their terms. It’s also funny to see what’s genuinely one of the most abrasive series I’ve played in some aspects (huge grind both for monsters and gathering materials, very rigid combat/aforementioned small monster hell) get fairly quickly transformed into something so Triple-A and Marketable. That’s just how things go, huh.
I think this is one of the more interesting old-gen Monster Hunter games to approach considering its uniqueness. Moga has a slow, almost lifesim-y feel with how the Woods and some of the other auxiliary mechanics work that I’m really fond of. The focus on a smaller and near-entirely new set of monsters lets them all feel really unique, and that plus the lack of G-Rank means I’m also not afraid of drowning in Content, despite the general consensus being that that’s a bad thing…. Bowgun customisation is also a lot of fun :)
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition
It’s pretty much exactly how I imagined it!... One part open-world RPG checkmark turbo-buttonmasher Diablo loot-system grot, another part really cute low-level exploration of normal people’s mundane struggles through a near-extinction event. I wish the mundane bits were *more* mundane – I’m less sold on the more grounded problems of the populace when I’m tracking them by means of my map being flooded by markers and solving them by epically slaughtering hordes of native creatures or charging around running into attention-grabber pickup crystals with freaking awesome music blasting in the background, plus a lot of the dialogue is REALLY trying to ignore the fact that that *is* what the game is. I sort of want a version of this game without any combat… All that said, I find the slower and quieter stories cute enough to want to keep playing to chase them… even if the writing is frankly much less compelling than I found it when the game came out (but that’s more of a topic for next time!).
Those map markers are really making me nauseous, though!!
As for the DE changes… I think most of them are pretty stupid and make the game pretty clearly worse than the original?? Quick cooldown is definitely making it feel like a 2025 video game rather than a 2015 one (I’ll let you guess what that means), although it’s admittedly a lot of fun surgically eliminating any difficulty with the game’s systems by popping Overdrive and hammering the Y button on my favourite machine gun art until I hit max count in, like, five seconds. I don’t think the other changes are hugely significant in motion; it’s mainly just part “eliminating extremely minor inconvenience that just seems a bit pointless, really”, and part stuff that’s just a bit silly from a “person who played hundreds of hours of this as a teenager” perspective. I bet the epilogue story is really goofy, but who knows if I’ll even get there!
~*~*~
Thanks for reading :) As I mentioned, I didn’t get to play much this month because of the whole “Making A Video Game In Two Weeks” thing, but next month is going to be very light on personal life, and I’ve got a bunch of games lined up that I wanna play for ““research purposes”” that I wanna try to blow through. Big RPG and horror game month coming up, I think! 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 games subtly (or not-so-subtly) influenced my development on UNFORMED. See you next month!
…hang on.
what’s that sound?
THE TOUHOU LIGHTNING ROUND
So these games are just intensely beautiful, right? There’s something about taking the impressive visual storytelling of arcade shmups and marrying them with Touhou’s wonderfully mystical and feminine aesthetic. And I’m not gonna lie, the LACK of a hitbox in the pre-7 games makes that even more special to me – gliding through seas of technicolour magic unscathed despite your sprite being physically battered by everything almost feels like cheating; it’s magical. Anyway, I played a LOT of these this month and loved it, so here we go!!!
Touhou Gensoukyou ~ Lotus Land Story
I really liked this – hard to say it stands out in any particular way, but it’s good Touhou!! Really nice way to get back into this, and calm enough to come back to for my first 1cc :) (fun fact, I had to clear as Marisa despite having played every other game as Reimu sincewithout a fan-patch Reimu's head is too big and crashes the game at the end on emulator)
Touhou Fuumaroku ~ the Story of Eastern Wonderland
I got quite grumpy with this one and almost dropped it, but it was just because I was playing incredibly badly… by the end I liked it well enough, though it didn’t leave much of an impression. There’s a few attacks that feel incompatible with what Touhou would turn into – with bosses, it specifically feels like some of their attacks are there to intently kill you rather than be awesome patterns to dodge. That said, the latter is a big part of why I like the series so much… so I think I’ll probably like most others more than this
Touhou Yumejikuu ~ The Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream
It’s really impressive how cool the first 3 games are for being so different from each other. It felt unexpectedly easy on Normal (I only dropped lives on 2 of the fights, and I’m not all that good at these games!), though it seems like it’d be most fun as a proper VS game. Someone hmu!!
Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square
Absolutely floored by this one. Impressed me in the same way EoSD did back in 2023, though I’m also a little biased since I got, like, 500 times better at Touhou over the course of my 30-minute clear, and also from being a couple years detached from the later ones… It's beautiful, though – as a specific example, I’m noticing the backgrounds far more than in the later games despite them being much simpler. It’s also definitely the toughest of the PC-98 ones – I’d probably have struggled a ton with the final boss if it weren’t for emulator slowdown kicking in on some of her busier attacks, lol.
Touhou Rei’iden ~ the Highly Responsive to Prayers
Wish I had something interesting to say about a concept this *out-there* but I just found it far too fiddly to get into. Gave it a bunch of goes but don’t think I’ll be finishing it sadly. That said, the stage 1 music Stage 1 music left a huge impression on me, and the messy backgrounds are just SO cool!!
Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
Call me basic, but this is probably my favourite so far... The aesthetics here are firing on all cylinders in a way these games just haven't managed before – Hong Meiling’s patterns are proof that video games are awesome. It's also lovely to reminisce on how hard I found this game back in ‘23, only to glide through to my first clear fairly comfortably on my second go. If that's not character progression, I don't know what is. Since 1ccing LLS, I’ve been trying to get this one down too… but I don’t think I’m good enough without a ton of practice! My routing’s getting better, but my hands just don’t like to do what I want them to. Maybe one day…
Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith
Reached stage 6 but did not clear. I don’t like the dynamics here at all really :( There’s some exceptionally pretty patterns, but the bullet density got so high that it felt built around the new (much more spammable) bomb system at times. And as someone who’s both not great at these games and mostly here for first clears, the retry system made me feel like I was grinding against the final boss as in any other videogame rather than being asked to improve at the game as a whole. I could have probably cleared if I restarted more often so I could pool lives, but if I did that I’d rather just play a game I like more instead. I’ll give it another try some other time, probably, but for now I think I’m gonna stop fiending new ones and just focus on the ones I like.
~*~*~
as a little April 1st aside, despite taking jabs at post-hitbox Touhous earlier I popped a couple runs of PCB today and got the same sort of magic from playing with Reimu's new goofy hitbox and just being able to manifest the ability to dodge everything by simply pretending I can with enough confidence. Anyway, silly little joke done – that’s actually all from me this month! Thanks again for reading :)