faea gaming: April '25
Hello again!! Towards the end of this month, I hit a sort of transitory phase between wearing off the Touhous and re-discovering normal video games… hence the amount of games this month, and particularly ones I didn’t put a great deal of time into! In particular I’ve been trying to find my footing with RPGs again, then found a certain game that’s swinging the pendulum towards… 3D platformers? (And I’ve never been that fond of platformers!) Anyway, there’s a lot here, so let’s get into it!
Games I Finished
Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom
There’s a couple of parts in Stage 4 of Mountain of Faith which stuck out as easily the most memorable parts of that game – a really tight and claustrophobic stage pattern that you needed to weave through in all directions in a way that, once I realised how I was supposed to move through it, felt like struggling up a winding mountain path. Perfect Cherry Blossom’s Stage 4 almost just feels those tiny sections from MoF dragged out to their logical conclusion over the space of four minutes – it’s a constant back-and-forth with bullets that feel endlessly overwhelming and push you to make all sorts of strange and stressful movements if you don’t have total control and understanding of the situation. Less like climbing a mountain, I suppose, and more like being battered back and forth by a tidal wave... Despite PCB ostensibly being the easy one (to which I’d still say at least the PC98s are probably easier), this probably feels the most intense of any Touhou stage I’ve played. So combining the stress and challenge, the innate spectacle of the bullets and the colours, and some of the most empowering stage music I’ve heard so far makes being able to sail through it all unscathed feel absolutely magical.
This stuff encapsulates just what’s so captivating about Touhou: it’s not just a spectacle, it feels like a duet. It’s easy to talk about the fantastic music and the fiendishly satisfying shooting gameplay individually, but they’re inextricable parts of the same performance – the stages’ compositions utilise all of music, visuals and gameplay towards a greater whole, making the act of dodging feel beautiful in a way that elevates the other elements of the piece. Patterns like this wouldn’t be nearly as impressive if the act of dodging through them wasn’t so intrinsically baked into their aesthetic design!! It makes me feel like a performer myself, albeit one who’s always clawing desperately to stay on pace… It’s basically a holistically perfect series and this is really just a flowery couple of paragraphs to justify why I’m fighting back tears every time I ace the more evil parts of Stage 4 oh my god I love video games
I 1cced this one :) :) :) I’m only gonna talk about games I’ve 1cced from now on, both to declutter and because atp just clearing once with continues feels like first impressions more than anything; so much of my appreciation is coming from understanding them on a deeper and deeper level now that I'm able to!
46 Okunen Monogatari: THE Shinka Ron
Utterly unfathomable story. Incredibly entertaining, impressively sharp (and barbed!) at times, and somehow feels like a perfect way to deliver its messaging despite what is literally happening at any point. The way it uses bad endings to compound on its themes feels incredibly forward-thinking!!
You can tell just how much the developers love nature – particularly natural history – and it rubs off in super charming ways: from the constant history tidbits that make it almost feel like enthusiastic edutainment, to the brutally honest admission that some of the playable creatures AREN’T real and are actually fanfiction OC dinosaurs (that usually get funny names like Anubisaurus!!). It’s too charming, it feels almost warm and tender at times. It helps that the gameplay itself is extremely simple, generally quite easy, and very brisk; it spends just enough time with itself to let you enjoy evolving into silly prehistoric creatures while not being obtrusive in a way that’d get in the way of the story. It’s good stuff!
My entire PC-98 experience so far has been this, Madō Monogatari, and the PC-98 Touhous, which have all kinda felt like gems. Really makes me wonder how much gold is hidden in the libraries of these systems that we just aren’t really exposed to in the west. I also played Ys 1+2 on the PC-88, and those were good too! I really wanna dig deeper into these.
Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night
The most bombastic one so far for sure, and also the strongest mechanically IMO – the human/youkai interactions are really fun, and the Scarlet Devil team is SO fun to use. I was getting giddy thinking about routing with them and I’m not even good at these games! The soundtrack is also a clear winner here, even for Touhou standards. My main gripe comes with how unexpressive the stages feel next to all the other hard-hitting Touhous. I’m struggling to remember any specific part of any stage, likely because half of them mostly consist of fairies with spinning bullets! The routing’s fun and all, but I kinda just feel like I’m shooting things while waiting for the bosses to swoop in and steal the show.
I spent a while grinding this as Scarlet Devil Team, but turns out the easier team makes it a bit easier
Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character
Guy spent two years making a game just to call it DOUBLE DEALING CHARACTER. What is a double dealing character. What does this mean. Anyway, compositionally-speaking it’s really strong, and the new shot types are super fun!! The gimmick patterns are great even though You Grow Bigger! makes me want to pull all my teeth out with a pair of tweezers. But it’s sort of bizarrely twisted out of the shape of a typical Touhou experience by the collection bonus mechanic. Collecting enough items at once (via top of the screen or bomb) gives extra bonus bomb or life parts, and… it’s not even that hard to route enough collects to shower yourself in so many bombs and lives that you barely have to play the game. Especially as Sakuya A good looooord her bomb is ridiculous. I still like the game a lot!! It might be my second favourite at this point (behind PCB), despite the fact that it sort of undercuts what I say I value so much about the series. It’s making me think about “it’s a good game, but a bad [SERIES] game!!!” discourse, and how silly that is – it’s the Dark Souls 2 of Touhou……
Anyway I played Sakuya A lol. As of writing my Touhou fixation has sort of dropped, but when I get back into it I think I’d like to try 1ccing either PCB or this on more shot types. Maybe one whose bomb doesn't trivialise this game.....
Madō Monogatari 2
Umm it’s more Madō 1 not much to say here!! Difficulty is a bit wonky like usual. I like the really scratchy tileset later on and the fake wall floor where all the walls reset once you leave it.
Flower
me when i turn hte BAD industrial wasteland into da GOOD industrial wastleand : 🤯🤯🤯
It’s very pretty, particularly around the midpoints where it starts playing with lots of different colours, but its insistence on not being about anything (can’t access the source, but quoting from wikipedia: ”Chen tried to make the game focus more on emotions than on a message; he specifically changed the design of Flower when early testers felt there was a message of promoting green energy in the game.”) means there’s just nothing else to really discuss about it! I don't think we should be afraid of things being about things, personally.
Games I Haven't Finished
Dragon Quest IV
Again, I really love the structure of this game in, like, every possible meaning of the word, and despite what I'm about to say it feels like this should be compulsory for anyone making an RPG. But now that I’m well into Chapter 5, I’m getting a bit tired of the combat. I haven’t played a great deal of JRPGs in the grand scheme of things, so this might be more common than I realise, but now having access to a lot of strong tools makes levels feel less meaningful, and resource management in combat has fallen far to the wayside in favour of… watching my party spam strong multi-target magic and win. Not that I’m expecting the tight earlygame dynamic to persist into the 25+ hour mark of an RPG, but I feel like those dynamics haven’t been meaningfully twisted to make the lategame uniquely interesting. I leant on a guide to nudge me where to go since I must have missed a clue telling me where to find Ragnar, and seeing through that how much longer Chapter 5 was despite me putting a good 10-15 hours into it so far took a lot of wind out of my sails! I’m happy I played it, but I don’t think I’ll get too much more out of finishing it.
Touhou Bunkachou ~ Shoot the Bullet
Haha fricking tricked you!! I didn’t even finish this one!!! That’s because it’s not a shmup that’s why it’s here
Despite being sort of hysterical, I think it’s fun how a Touhou photography game about taking pictures of boss patterns with your camera is conceptually playing with the idea that these games are largely built as an aesthetic experience. It’s also just good fun? I really like Aya’s freakish three-tiered movement, I like that the level-select structure and the lack of actual shooting makes it feel like a training room sorta game. Of particular note is how the die-retry structure lets it play with much harder patterns than in mainline Touhou, so I feel like grinding this is making me far better at these games fundamentally. Although because of that, most of the later stages feel quite a bit too hard for me to ever really “complete” this game – it’s mainly been about finding the three easiest ones in any given set of levels and praying I can get through them without ripping my hair out, lol. It also winds up being pretty compulsive! Which, despite how often “addictive” gets thrown around as a compliment for games, I don’t think is a particularly good thing to be honest.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition
I’m not gonna be too mean about this from here on out considering both that I do find the combat rather fun in a button-mashy sort of way with Overdrive (and with some pretty fun build customisation), and that we should all definitely know what we’re getting into when we play a big-budget open world game. I wanna give some attention to the writing, though, because the combination of a surprisingly un-serious tone and some… interesting approaches to its themes. Despite the game's determination, it is really hard to take the talk about a “unified Mira” very seriously when its only attitudes towards alien species beforehand are either treating them as ontologically-evil (Prone) or as weird punchlines (all the others). And while I was gonna discuss some other parts of the story in more detail, I feel like it's flimsy enough for me to not really want to… it just feels like a story about everyone happily assimilating into the 🦅🦅🦅 United States of America 🦅🦅🦅. I can deal with this stuff while still being critical of it, but between the odd tone of the writing and it being, well, a big-budget open world game with all the baggage that entails, there's just not enough to keep me going through the triple-digit hours it's expecting of me. As a combat system divorced from almost all context, though, it is still pretty fun!
Anyway check out my character she's cooler than you
Radiant Historia
Got assigned this doing a game exchange with a friend (I gave him Community POM). I’m, like, aggressively neutral on this. The combat itself is sorta fun, reminiscent of Press Turn in how it’s a turn manipulation optimisation deal, but rather than hitting weaknesses for extra turns, you shuffle your turns around beforehand to create a big combo, position-manipulating enemies on top of each other to hit as many as possible with each attack. But it’s also a bit fiddly and cumbersome at times, and between that and some pretty unsatisfying progression systems (it’s one of those games where levels feel sort of cosmetic rather than giving noticeable power increases, and new skills didn’t make me feel much stronger either) I’m already finding myself a little irritated when I find myself in a fight I didn’t want to be in.
The writing’s felt a little off to me at times: the most obvious example so far is when the game implies one of the characters’ Tragic Backstories and makes it clear said character does not want to talk about it… then continually finds ways to bring it up, like, four more times over the next 90 minutes until the game successfully beats it out of them. As the game isn’t critical of any of that, it feels like insensitivity on the part of the writing more than anything else. And I’m not finding the setting or story premise especially interesting, so my attention is drawn to how little the main character reacts to his new power or its consequences, despite how badly it would probably mess with pretty much anyone. After a fairly plodding 2-3 hours of intro, I hit a bad ending which explained the entire rest of the war in, like, four sentences, and then kicked me back into the chapter select, which was funny.
The Dark Spire
First impressions were incredibly high as I made my party and saw half of them had FOUR max HP, then went into combat and saw my warrior had four variants on the attack command. This feels like anodyne to the slew of “retro throwback” indies that are too afraid of the idiosyncrasies of their influences to be interesting; it’s a 2008 first-person DRPG that feels likely more abrasive in some ways than some of the classic DRPGs it’s taking inspiration from (I haven't played them yet, though...). It’s a very tough nut to crack; power progression isn’t really explained at all, combat has heaps of randomness (seemingly including whether you actually kill an enemy when you hit it), and the first floor makes it much easier to walk into higher-level areas than it does to actually progress the game. But getting to grips with how all its systems are supposed to be used and the sort of puzzle-solving it’s expecting has been really satisfying! The icing on the cake is the really slick comic-book aesthetic, which can also be swapped for an equally-cool but weirdly-anachronistic Wizardry look that comes complete with a soundtrack swap. These people LOVED Wizardry and old TTRPGs, that much is abundantly clear.
Something that comes to mind with RPGs like this – dungeon navigation itself feels as much of the difficulty as the combat through puzzles and spatial awareness, in a way that isn’t necessarily feeding into attrition. I think these parts can easily feel disparate when pushed to an extreme, since you can power up to make combat easier, but very few navigational ‘upgrades’ exist; as such the ‘RPG’ has little presence outside of combat. It makes me wonder if it’d feel more cohesive if these games attempted more navigational-focused upgrades? (Although it’s hard to say exactly what these would be!) It risks breaking the ‘integrity’ of the puzzles somewhat, but as long as there’s a clear opportunity cost of navigational vs. combat power, I wonder how bad it’d actually be when the result would be a more cohesive-feeling RPG?
Pokémon Emerald
I felt quite lukewarm towards Hoenn during my last playthrough, due to both Emerald being potentially my most-played video game ever, and its region and challenges feeling a bit limp compared to the first two gens I'd played recently beforehand. I still don’t think it’s got da Level Design Chops of its predecessors in terms of making the combat more interesting (in other words, I think it’s still a little dull to play through sometimes), but I’m falling back in love with Hoenn a little as a place. I love the little Gen 1-feeling moments where it drops you off somewhere weird or unexpected: Rusturf basically being the Diglett’s Cave of the region, dropping back down into Rustboro after so long after Meteor Falls, getting left entirely to your own devices after getting Surf. The transition into the jungle routes has to be my absolute favourite part of any Pokemon game save for stepping into Gen 2’s Kanto. But I’m also loving how many different biomes it pulls you through, and how sweet and hopeful the region’s attitude towards nature and coexistence is. A world like that feels like a hopeless fantasy right now, but I think it’s okay to indulge in fantasy sometimes.
Anyway I’m making the game a little more interesting by mostly using pretty bad Pokemon. The current team is Mightyena, Sableye, Gloom, Volbeat, Spinda, and Seviper, and it sucks a lot!!! I’m loving it.
Sonic Adventure
That’s right! This is the first Sonic game I’ve ever played in my life! It has that same This Is The Future Of Gaming!!! energy that I get from FF7, in how both are extremely pretty and also look sort of stupid and ugly, and how both are full of gameplay twists that distract from what you could consider from the “core gameplay loop”. And that’s not to mention how freaky said “core gameplay loop” can actually be, considering in my first twenty minutes of playtime I spindashed through terrain and died as a result, and flew so far off the map as Tails that there was no hope of me knowing where I was actually supposed to be. Anyway, I completely understand why people love this game so much.
I think Sonic’s movement is generally really fun (something I don’t say about platformers very much!!), but the levels themselves push back on blind speed juuust enough to make fast play satisfying when you manage it, and they don’t push back enough to force memorisation before letting you go fast. But I think everything else is more important: it’s constantly pushing you through different ideas, within its levels, between its levels, through its minigames, through its characters and campaigns. And while something this broad is always going to have a lot of things that don’t land for everyone, I’m still impressed how well-considered some of them are – I grinned when I realised the bumper cars just have Ridge Racer Type 4 grip steering! It’s determined to put on a show, and to do so by bringing together so many different ideas takes an immense show of confidence. And I can’t help but feel some level of adoration towards a game that’s so self-assured despite its warts being on full display.
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Thanks for reading as always :) I think May's gonna be a really interesting month! As well as this oncoming 3D platformer splurge I feel coming on, I've also started to make a more concerted effort to get through some newer releases in my Steam library (after making fun of myself one too many times for only playing 30 year-old games...). As usual, feel free to drop something in this box if I said something interesting or if you want to know what platformers I've played in the past that I don't really like. See you next month!