Game Reviews: Tales of Berseria and Megami Tensei

Tales of Berseria (2016)

I'm at war with myself on this one. I just slammed out several paragraphs of impassioned complaints (the god-awful fighting, the void of a soundtrack, the interminable length). But, reading it over, it doesn't feel representative of my experience with the game. I was irked constantly playing Tales of Berseria, but the fact is: they got me.

I loved the characters. The size of the script may have ballooned the game length to the point that it took my partner and I five tortured months to get through the game. But it also gave me time to fall in love with everyone. It's a tight cast, with only six playable characters and an economical stock of villains and supporting roles. Everyone gets a big moment, gets their time to shine. Ys VIII came out the same year as Berseria. That game has a more concise script (and infinitely better combat), and as a result it's a more propulsive and overall delightful play experience. But I don't feel anything about Hummel, Laxia, Ricotta. That game is purely Dana's story, whereas I love just about everyone in Berseria.

I loved Tales of Vesperia's cast too though, and while I enjoyed that game in the moment, I cooled on it as time went on. A big difference with Berseria are the stakes. Characters die constantly in Berseria, and (for the most part, sort of, it's complicated) they stay dead. The characters left behind have to process their grief and work to find a way forward from it, and it's all dramatized, all on-screen. It's a story full of loss, and they don't flinch away from that. It's still a firmly PG-13 anime RPG — I wish I could play an R-rated version that leaned into the earned edge even further. But I went into this expecting a Tales game, and for a Tales game this all surprised and satisfied me.

The other thing that worked for me: Berseria stays committed to the scenario it lays out in its impeccable prologue. After the initial episode with the lost water blastia, Vesperia's story wibble-wobbled around incomprehensibly for dozens of hours before arriving at its charming and dramatically limp conclusion. I couldn't tell you what any of the villains wanted, what incompatibility in ideals set the heroes against them. Berseria is extremely precise in comparison (as precise as an RPG this long is capable of being anyway). It's a story about revenge and tearing down a corrupt status quo. Even as the scenario ascends to the god-battling stakes you'd expect from a Tales game, it never loses track of what it's actually about. I think that's commendable.

For a variety of reasons, I don't think Berseria works as an RPG. My brain would dissolve and leak out my ears if I tried to play more than one game like this in a year. But the fighting is over quickly, and it was easy enough for me to enjoy it as a genre-confused visual novel. If you're up for that kind of experience, I think this is a real good one.

Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (1987/1995)

Played the Super Famicom version, which is good because I’m pretty sure the Famicom original would’ve killed me.

I enjoyed this! I played through Shin Megami Tensei years ago, so this is my second exposure to classic MegaTen. Unlike SMT, Megami Tensei is a pure strain dungeon crawler — no overworld here — and pleasingly open-ended. When I first reached the Minotaur and Medusa, I wasn’t strong enough to beat them (even after finding Tabasa’s Statue for Medusa), so I just kept exploring the next area. I back-tracked to defeat them later. The only hard check that you’ve beat the Tyrants is once at the very end (at least I think it’s a hard check), so until then you’re free to approach the major obstacles however you want. This meant I never needed to grind.

Of course, “I never needed to grind” is misleading when the exploration is as bone-dry as it is here. The map designs (which are different from the Famicom version for the record, I don’t know how they compare) are massive, sprawling, and largely empty. I would’ve welcomed more Wizardry tricks honestly. Pits, damage floors, teleporters, and spinners are few and far between, at least until the last area. Outside of combat threats, exploring the maze is mostly mindless. I remember Shin Megami Tensei being denser with interesting encounters and dungeon shapes.

The saving grace is that the combat encounters stay scary the whole game. Every boss is a monumental event — I actually screamed when Lucifer finally gave up the ghost. You can never fully relax against regular enemies either. Just when my characters were getting beefy enough that party wipes were no longer a real concern, they start throwing level draining enemies at you. It’s cruel, but I appreciated that the tension never let up all the way to the end.

The maps are barren, demon fusion and character progression are dirt simple, and combat isn’t tactical enough to sustain the game’s ballooned run-time. The game is a historical artifact in a way Shin Megami Tensei definitely isn’t. But the central arc of it is still solid. The core journey of exploring the first dungeon and getting strong enough to beat the minotaur is as powerful here as it was in SMTIV. Somehow they’d nailed down all those same fundamentals in the very first game. I’d rather play a game that’s all bones and no sauce than one that’s all sauce and no bones. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Lunar: Silver Star Story and Last Bible

Lunar: Silver Star Story (1996)

Games like Lunar: Silver Star Story consistently knock me on my ass with their modest precision. I adore how Funbil put it in their review: "A quiet, unassuming first act gingerly constructs an expertly-arranged cavalcade of narrative dominos which cascades forward with an unrelenting momentum all the way to the end of the game." That's exactly it — Lunar takes its time quietly putting its pieces on the board, without feeling the need to dangle keys in front of your face to keep you invested. Then it plows forward inexorably towards its insane climax. It feels ahead of its time for 1996, and even more ahead of its time for 1992.

Lunar excels in ways that are mostly invisible, and if you haven't played a lot of RPGs they might not be super-obvious. But that storytelling care is always there, carefully weaving its magic under the surface. The difference between an RPG that nails this stuff and an RPG that doesn't is night and day, and it's something mainstream games crit has always been unequipped to discuss. I don't know if Lunar will hit you quite the way it hit me — its particular cocktail of over-the-top romance and "we have to choose our own destiny!" theming was concocted in a lab to make me cry. But it builds that theming with exact care, with gorgeous presentation and long meaty dungeons and chunky boss fights, and I think that's something any RPG fan should be able to appreciate.

Some practical matters: I had a nearly ideal play experience thanks to all extra options on the iOS version. I doubled the battle speed and set the difficulty balancing to match the original JP release (versus the jacked up NA difficulty). The pacing and battle balancing felt perfect to me; I never really struggled, but I always felt like I was just scraping by the big story fights. I don't think this story calls for the merciless, grindy challenge the NA version seemed intent on providing. I played with the JP dub as well. The actual translation (which is still based on the original Working Designs script) landed fine for me. The dumb pop culture jokes were mostly constrained to incidental NPC dialogue, and the big story and character moments had all the gravitas they called for.

The upcoming remasters seem to offer all the same QOL and authenticity options as the iOS version. If those are done well, they'll likely be a definitive way to play these games that isn't constrained to Apple platforms (and includes Eternal Blue, which I'm now very excited to play).

I've been in a bit of an RPG funk the last five months or so. It's very nice to play a game that reignites my passion for my favorite game genre. Excited for whatever's next!

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible (1992)

Pleasantly mediocre Megaten-flavored Dragon Quest riff; I can't complain because that's exactly what I signed up for booting the game up. Played the GameBoy Color version, localized as Revelations: The Demon Slayer.

Good: it has teeth for the whole game, the big fights never stop being scary and the random encounters ramp up fast enough that you never get comfortable. Bad: the dungeons are all really short! You spend maybe 10-20% of the game's runtime in capital-d Dungeons. Weirdly enough the towns are all really big and mazey, which makes it extra-taxing when you're sloooooowly walking in and out of them to stop by the inn, the bank, the stores over and over and over.

The basic Dragon Quest loop worked enough to keep me entertained for most of the runtime, but it started losing me near the end. Meaty dungeons are important for an rpg like this. Without them it all just feels too bare, especially when the overall structure is really linear. It has a decent finale at least (I like all the little optional endgame quests after you get the ark), although the actual last dungeon is as brief and spare as the rest of them.

There's a little bit of a haunting Final Fantasy Legend feeling of "a story is happening around you that you're mostly not privy too" where the half-bakedness almost adds to it. That's the main appeal of the package to me honestly. FFLegend/SaGa 1 is one of my favorite games; Last Bible is nowhere near as cursed or interesting as that game, but I still enjoyed getting a taste of that flavor again. I'm still on-board for playing the other two Last Bible games, but I definitely need something with real dungeons first.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Kit's Cookies & Kat's Cookies

New game! It's a Puzzlescript release called Kit's Cookies. I got inspired last week and slammed it out, then spent a few days polishing it. Thanks to Narf, Zeloz, and Rhete for playtesting; I really appreciate it!

My last Puzzlescript game blew up; this one's a lot easier, so I'm not expecting it to resonate with genre enthusiasts to the same extent. I'm certain you can make complex puzzles with this ruleset, but it's harder with the free-form nature of the match-3 win condition. There's just way more room for solutions I didn't anticipate, since you can line up the cookies in multiple places on the board. I tightened it up as much as I could though, and I still think the final game is a cute challenge.

I'm only a dabbler in puzzle design, but I've gotten a lot of joy out of making my puzzlescript games. I can see the path to being a real pervert for this kind of gamedev. I'd like to get there someday, but it'd definitely require making more than a handful of puzzles every few years.

I wrote the above paragraphs the day after putting out Kit's Cookies, but I held off on posting them because something neat was happening. Vextro friend Zeigfreid loaded up the project source in Puzzlescript's web editor, made a few cool levels, and shared them in our discord. After that, sraëka, sylvie, and wasnotwhynot joined in. I had a ton of fun playing their levels, and before too long we had enough to make a whole new game!

I'm really happy with how Kat's Cookies turned out. Kit's Cookies was a gentle game. Like I said above, I struggled to come up with challenging puzzles using the ruleset, and I was ultimately content to release it as a short, easy thing. My genius friends came up with some delightful and fiendish puzzles though, and I think together the two games form a satisfying, substantive package. Go give them a whirl!

My puzzle dev brain's leveled up through this whole process. I released a little game and was only somewhat satisfied with it. Then, unprompted, friends filled in exactly the gaps in the original release I'd struggled to fill. I like making tiny, single-screen puzzlers with simple rulesets — I don't feel any urge to make the next Baba Is You or what not. But next time I make a puzzle game, I want to sit with the ruleset longer, draft and discard more puzzles, and hold off on release until I'm confident I've made the best puzzles I can.

Oh, and for the record: puzzles 1, 4, and 7 are by sraëka, 2 and 6 are by sylvie, 3 and 5 are by Zeigfreid, 9 is by wasnotwhynot, and 8 is by me! Thanks so much again to everyone who contributed; this was the most spontaneous collab I've been a part of and it made me happy.

And thanks to Bart Bonte for plugging the original release on his excellent puzzle blog! He linked Gorgons' Gaze too a few years back. I'm still a puzzle dev amateur obviously, so I'm delighted any time actual genre connoisseurs enjoy my work. I hope to continue improving!

Tunnels of Vextro

 

It's the end of another year (or it was like two weeks ago), which means it's time for a new Vextro release: Tunnels of Vextro! This one's another chain game like Gardens, meaning the games were made sequentially, with each game responding to all previous entries. Give it a play — my Vextro friends brought their A-game as always, and the player responses so far have been really warm and nice.

My friend Narf took the lead on this one, so it has a different flavor from Gardens in a way I'm really happy with. There's more in the way of overarching narrative and lore. It's still a chain game, so it's all loose and free-form, but it feels more like we were working together to build a larger story than usual. I wouldn't want to approach the anthologies like this every time, but I enjoyed it a lot. It's also our largest collection by a mile, with wuzzy and sraëka both turning in massive RPGMaker games. Even my game is 20-30 minutes, way longer than my previous entries. 

I made the fourth game in the collection, Worms: A Love Story. I wrote about my process making it in a blog post last October. The short version is that, thanks to the tireless efforts of its community (and asie's dev work in particular), ZZT's become a legitimately excellent and fully FOSS tool for making and sharing a certain flavor of freeware games online. I think it deserves a spot among the echelons of other robust high-level tools for making top-down games like Bitsy, Puzzlescript, and RPGMaker. 

I really like how my game turned out. It's a purely cute wlw story game, one of my favorite kinds of game to make. I made it shortly after finishing the extremely delightful Anthology of the Killer collection, and it consequently wound up being the most "walk around and read fun flavor text" game I've made. I want to play with that form more, I like it a lot. Fair warning that it's less stand-alone than my previous Vextro entries; it calls back to the first three games quite a bit. Some friends have played it on its own and had a good time, so go about it however you like.

I'm planning to do some general upkeep and catch-up on my itch/blog/website over the next few weeks. (Did you notice I have a website again? I'll write about it properly once I've implemented a few more sections.) Once I've got my ducks in a row, I'll do a proper End of 2024 wrap-up post. Thanks as always for reading. 

And remember: Keep! On! Digging!