A look back at: Dragon Warrior VII

A game that has been repeatedly said to last over a hundred hours for just its main story alone took me about 80 of those hours to beat. Hmm, I'm getting to be an expert if I can finish this game at such a time. Regardless this still clocks as one of the ones that took me the overall longest time, next to Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden III (this one is long due to the multiple paths I took) and Lufia: The Legend Returns. Dragon Quest VI is already long too, but this one takes it and then some.

Arguably the series is getting better still, as well as much more refined. No longer do I need to worry about incessant grinding despite the level gaps being huge, thanks to the class system from VI making a return, the one thing I must worry about are the battles I fight and the level threshold that prevents me from getting more job levels. Not to mention the hybrid skills, cause there's specific skills that outshine the rest (a lot of these are redundant as hell). Basically, I'll grind job classes until I get the threshold level for one character then continue with the plot, eventually I'll get to the top classes and then get their epic skills. I never really bothered with the monster classes though.

But before any class changing can be done I'd say Dragon Quest VII suffers from early game hell. The entire first half of the game can be miles tougher than the rest, because once you get those good skills like SwordDanc and Lightning and Vacuum and such, most random encounters are cake. But before that your characters will gain only a select few skills then stop after certain levels are gained altogether, which sucks. Even worse as Kiefer is the main fighter, he leaves just before the games HARDEST segment, the Dharma Temple part where you actually LOSE your skills, are forced into a prison with delusionals, and actually have to fight your way out old-school style, with two hopeless fights thrown in as well as a stupid arena. For this I was rather low-level, but this was to my advantage later as the level threshold around the temple was 24 and I could grind until I got plenty of desirable classes and as a result my characters were much stronger.

So, plot. Lots and lots of it, time-traveling from present to past, unlocking the mysteries and all for the lost continents, some crazy moments where despaired citizens either don't last or grow crazy. The demon lord, basic equivalent of Satan as far as Dragon Quest villains go, is perhaps the best villain to date, not only sealing off continents once, but twice, the second time portraying himself as a god and trying to get the world to worship him alone and taking their weapons. Freedom isn't to limit everything, which is a nice philosophy this game portrays.

Doom Musings: Sunder's new direction

Well if you don't know the megawad Sunder, it's a Doom 2 megawad built around two things, impressive architecture and slaughterfest gameplay. I've watched both of these concepts evolve quite well in many other wads, and Sunder, despite still being unfinished, is a wad that takes both of these out of the ballpark. There are large pieces of macro-architecture strewn throughout Sunder, immaculately made to give not only a sense of design but also an impressive sense of scale. Many a time while playing you wonder if, and also when, you'll be entering those new bits of archtecture. At the same time, Sunder implements slaughterfest-style gameplay, some of it in Ribbiks-like setpieces where you're more or less in cramped locations against tough battles, usually a cyberdemon or what not in close quarters. The author does in fact manage the difficulty to be as hard as possible on each map, despite there not being any difficulty settings whatsoever.

And for years, Sunder has impressed many, until they found out that it stopped after MAP14. You know what they say, they wanted more. They thought the crazed platforming segments, macro-architecture, hexagon-hallways, and grandiose battles were satisfying, but of course they wanted more and more, and it didn't take until 2019 to see a resurgence of Insane_Gazebo, the author of Sunder, to finally make a return in an attempt to finish the megawad. Of course, his style is to map each new map one at a time, and universally the screenshots are impressive. But that leads matters to the gameplay.

One of the main drawbacks to such impressive architecture-centric megawads is "will this properly run on my computer?" Yeah, I'm talking about how much something can lag, either due to the amount of lines drawn in, or perhaps the amount of things in the map. When MAP15 came, it was unplayable for me until I tinkered with the settings quite a bit, putting the rendering down to software mode and scaling a few other nuances so that the map can actually be playable in some way. Lag and slaughterfest just will not mix, no matter how you go through it. MAP31 proved to not lag, thankfully, and neither did MAP18 when it came out. MAP16 and MAP17 both were mostly decent grand-scale levels that had minimal lags, while MAP15, apart from a few notable areas, was manageable. This left MAP32 and the newest map, MAP19, as a few troubling parts where no matter what I was destined for death by lag and slaughter, and to me that will definitely limit the playability.

These maps are much larger than any of the other ones, with MAP19 of the two hitting the linedef limit, clearly going overboard with the design worked nicely but factoring in gameplay and you gotta make sure what we have to go through can chug through it. I also have to wonder if ZDoom-compatible ports just have problems with these maps, because the most recommended port is GLBoom, and I for one would absolutely love for Sunder, a Boom-compatible wad, to be playable in all Boom-compatible ports including the ZDoom ones. The main trouble spots where gameplay nearly halted were at the big outside fountain area and the hedge maze in MAP32, and the end battles after getting the BFG9000 in MAP19. These not only are the hardest and largest fights in their respective levels, they are the ones where I need the most strategy, but that is next to impossible if I can barely even move. In my opinion, I'm hoping that future Sunder maps don't suffer as much as this, so they should lower the linedef limit and maybe the number of things as well. MAP05 was a map that not only doesn't break even 200 monsters for its kill count, but also manages to still make it tough, so a map like that would be quite welcome.

This brings me to my other point about Sunder's new direction I'm not a fan of, level length. Ever since MAP15 started showing up, many of the maps took well over 40 minutes, to an hour for the much later maps, with MAP19 an expected time of perhaps 2 to 3 hours to finish properly. Sunder is already made to be a marathon megawad due to its slaughter gameplay prevalent in almost every map, especially with many different themes tackled. To make the maps themselves 3-hour marathons will not only heavily limit those without the patience, but make all those fancy demos so much harder to do. Only recently did I see a non-TAS demo of MAP15, I must imagine just how painstaking it was, especially if a fall in an inescapable pit ruins a run, and Sunder is rife with them. On the much longer maps, without a single save on a demo attempt, I can only imagine the extreme frustration someone has for falling in, wasting hours of gameplay. So yeah, Sunder needs to pipe down with level length, a median of at least an hour per level works fine enough.

That's just my take on Sunder's new direction and I'm happy for the new maps, but criticism has to be made about them.

A look back at: Pokemon Flora Sky

With big pandemic comes the leisure to play Dragon Quest VII as much as I can. I am fully expected to take a really long time with it. But at the same time, I have made the decision to continue running through Pokemon ROM hacks, of course, always checking for quality and everything. Of course, quality can be hard to come by in some hacks, and well Flora Sky at least tries...

Glazed and Light Platinum had pretty good art styles and both made some mostly solid attempts at decent plots. Flora Sky makes it seem like Shaymin is the central mon for the plot, giving it the title backdrop as well as several story scenes with you and the Elite Four member Flash witnessing Shaymin, along with other legendaries Dialga and Giratina fighting. Wait, why are those two fighting? There's not much to go by. The sad thing is this is probably the most original thing about this hack, and there's only about three scenes to deal with, and even moreso when you actually get the chance to catch Shaymin early on.

For the rest of Flora Sky, it feels like a very strange crossover. Sprites are the same as the R/S/E games, both Team Magma and Team Aqua are fought, and of course the storyline of Groudon vs. Kyogre will play out. Wally will help, along with a new trainer named Sky as well as Steven and the region's champion, for some reason it's Cynthia. Even moreso there's even more fanservice with characters like Bertha and Alder, Elite Four members of different gens who are in the Elite Four here (Alder was Gen-5's champion). Wattson is a gym leader, Gima/Grimsley is a demoted Elite Four member who is the eighth gym leader, Pryce is a gym leader, and Iris is a gym leader. Bits and pieces of Hoenn locales are scattered throughout this world, but many actually remain unchanged aside from the mons you could encounter. Shoal Cave, Victory Road, the Abandoned Ship, Altering Cave, Meteor Falls, Battle Frontier, all get recycled, and even some Pokemon Gyms are either completely reused in some way, or uniquely used (Lavaridge and Mossdeep gyms for example are rerun as Magma and Aqua hideout areas). Oh yeah, and this ROM hack honestly has TOO MUCH WATER. Yep, I'm unloading that silly meme for this hack, because there really is too much water.

I could forgive these crossover-like things if and only if the game wouldn't of course corrupt my save file. As is the case, this was a problem I dealt with, meaning I had to rely on savestates for the most part. While a corrupted save file is something I can bypass, the issue arises upon beating the League, having to be forced to the title screen, attempt to load and oh god did my save just die? And it happened at a very inopportune moment, after the second time I beat the League in other words, making it worse is that I had to beat the League a second time in order to use the final HM, Rock Climb. As was the case, in order to see the rest of the legendaries, I went with the walk through walls code to bypass this, see what I miss, and find out the diving spot to get Kyogre is missing, so I miss out on that as well as Arceus. God damnit.

I did say Flora Sky tried though, and it didn't do too bad with some notable things, such as the intercom system near the PokeCenters, the interconnectivity of the main region, and even the mechanics for obtaining some mons. The honey trees from Gen-4 require a bit of time, but are actually save-scummable, something the ones from D/P weren't. Headbutting trees is also here, and there's some legendaries that show up as wild encounters. It's all neat and I do give it some credit for this kind of stuff. Very even despite the odd crossover-like appeal I saw.

Doom Musings: The Community Chest Dilemma

The Doom community as a whole is responsible for all the great creations out there, but of course all are different. Lone authors can author single maps or full megawads, or do crazy stuff with dehacked and other such nonsense. But for the most part, a great, great chunk of user-made levels tend to be in the form of a community project. There were projects that were made with limitations and gimmicks being center-stage for just about all the maps, but what about the Community Chest series? A series of megawads themed after Monopoly perhaps? No, not really.

All I know, and all anyone else really knows, about Community Chest is that it is 32 maps delivered by the Doomworld community. This is of course according to the wiki. Now, what's interesting is that this is only the Doomworld community providing these maps, no other community does this thing with Community Chest.  Of course, other Doom communities have their own Community Chest variants. Newdoom managed to create two community projects, one being at the tail end of the website's time, while the newly created Doomer Boards has been churning out community projects, albeit not being of megawad status. Then there's the communities in the Czech and Russian scenes, both offering their own megawads like Zones of Fear and A.L.T. You then got all the speedmapping sessions, the NOVA wads, the Plutonia and TNT sequels, the DTWID wads, the Mayhem wads, Doomworld Mega Projects, and even the timeless classics like the Memento Moris, Requiem, and Alien Vendetta (well these were select teams, but they have some sort of community at least), and what's interesting is that ALL of these megawads were made with some sort of community backing them up and multiple mappers participating. So long as you're a member of Doomworld during the time these were in development, then you can make a map for a hypothetical Community Chest though, even if you're a member of another community.

So what exactly happened with Community Chest after the fourth release? Did people nowadays just go for all those gimmicks and Doomworld Mega Projects, basically making the veins for a fifth Community Chest moot? Do I have to look back on each of the four wads to see where they failed?  There's perhaps not a lot of motivation to make another Community Chest wad. But what could have caused it? Is it because newer mappers aren't of the highest quality that Community Chest offered? Was it because of preferred source ports or mapping styles. Is it because Andy Leaver had to make MAP17?* Even I'm not sure what it could be. The community has evolved significantly since Community Chest 4 hit the idgames database shelf. More gimmicks are introduced, more partnerships are formed, but collectively the community gets together for newer limitations and more fun stuff. Might as well look back at the Community Chest wads.

Community Chest:

What's interesting about the first Community Chest is that it's the only one in the series to be made for limit-removing ports. Other than that though, we've got 32 mostly fine maps. Not a whole lot to be remember by the community, with the exception of Magikal's maps. Now Magikal actually died before the release, and his two maps were kept in, yet they are also the biggest puzzlers, and in particular, MAP29, a map so bloody infamous with its twists and turns, not to mention requiring wallrunning. Several other authors had generally high profiles, such as Kaiser, but even their maps aren't as memorable here.

Community Chest 2:

Here we have the first Boom-requiring Community Chest, and arguably the buggiest, despite having much more memorable maps. MAP15's crazy city with timed encounters, MAP22's extremely difficult combat, MAP23's ode to Legend of Zelda, the god damn Mucus Flow level, what's not to like? Well for starters, I notice a number of reviews were not fans of Gene Bird's maps. They're okay, and the mapper was in the last set as well, but they're just not as memorable. The issue lies in a number of bugs, like MAP20's secret that requires an arch-vile jump, but cannot actually be reached in certain ports, plus issues with MAP32 and MAP24 not being compatible for Boom. Regardless, the quality is a little better overall and the gems stick out easily.

Community Chest 3:

This had an interesting origin as a ZDoom project, before Andy Leaver revived it and became the third Community Chest and the second Boom-compatible one. A lot of the more modern mappers nowadays have made levels for this, like Dutch Devil, Green Herring, lupinx-kassman, and Rottking, and they tend to have fairly notable levels. In fact, the quality once again got much better, more custom music was used, a few new textures were also in place, and Rottking's MAP12 is a very sizable adventure. MAP29 is a very precedent map basically providing a penultimate map that is a slaughterfest in some form, actually quite annoying for a map too.

Community Chest 4:

Starting development after the previous one was finished, it took five whole years to basically finalize, giving players the experience of a brand new texture set which will find use in lots of other projects, testing up the ass on every level to ensure every bug is eradicated, with more and more hotfixes to consider. This isn't taking into account the drama that nearly killed the development, as the original project leader left the community after something happened with a different project, and many enthusiastic mappers somehow lost their hopes and didn't finish their own maps or failed to reach a deadline. That being said though, 2012 saw this thing released with the highest caliber of quality a Community Chest wad should have, high-profile maps that were fairly large, but gave as much entertainment as they needed, modernized design styles that conformed to neat Boom tricks, it was all there and it worked wonders, giving many players the experiences that they were glad to have. The showstealers that are lupinx's maps are fresh in our heads, yet they don't detract the attention away from all the other maps, as even CC4's weakest maps aren't that bad by comparison to other bad maps in the franchise.

So perhaps the biggest issue with Community Chest wads is lack of motivation and problems with project leads disappearing from the Community. The latter only really applies to CC4, but then again, the more modern something is the more likely it is relevant, and Death-Destiny's leave of the community is still talked about in small spades. Lack of motivation is something I can relate too, as I've failed to either meet a deadline or didn't feel motivated to making maps anymore, which is basically why I stopped completely. Of course, this could be a problem with many mappers, for multiple reasons. Regardless, I don't think the Community Chest dilemma is something to be concerned about. I don't necessarily have hopes for a fifth Community Chest, as we have plenty of other great community projects to play in that could very well be considered Community Chest-lite. I hear about NOVA 2, a project I made a map for, as one for instance, and strange as that may sound I can perhaps understand that sentiment a bit.

*Made that joke a while back, but what's interesting as far as Community Chest goes is that in all four iterations Andy Leaver made a map that managed to be in the MAP17 slot, every single Community Chest has one. Since Andy has basically left mapping the joke is that there wouldn't be another Community Chest without him making the MAP17. 

A look back at: Princess Crown

Yikes, nine RPGs in a row and all of them never made it out of Japan, in other words from Minelvaton Saga up to now I've been playing those games that basically got lots of fans to translate them and then play their fan translations. But Princess Crown's translation is still apparently in development hell or something, so taking the chances I went with the non-translated version and used a guide to figure out the story.

It's basically Odin Sphere-lite. Combat is the tough beat-em-up style but you fortunately fight one enemy at a time, even if there are multiple opponents they do the tag team thing or something like that. It really does feel like a hybrid of a beat-em-up and an action RPG, and given this came out before Odin Sphere that makes it a bit more unique. Further compounding that Odin Sphere stuff, the stories are of course told in books, where your real world character basically reads them (or has them read by grandma) but you control each character in their scenarios. Too bad Gradriel is the one who gets almost all the credit, and most of the sidequesting too. The random encountering here is much better than Odin Sphere as well.

I couldn't help but notice all sorts of cliches and similarities overall. Having played La Pucelle Tactics, Gradriel here is very, very similar to Eclair in that game, with a long triangular sword, a small shield, a battle dress, and even the superpowered evil side. Looks like Nippon Ichi took some cues there. Edward frankly doesn't have all the Oswald vibes, but he seems like a remorseful enough guy. I'd imagine Proserpina would definitely have that mini-witch thing going but her scenario was too short to really make much of it, and it was completely intended for comic relief in the end. Hindel was pretty much reused for Odin Sphere, although I don't recall if he was a boss there or not.

I'd imagine this game to be some sort of treasure in some way, especially considering the forming of Vanillaware following it.

Doom Musings: "Gimmick" maps

You see it time and time again, the mapper in question gets inspiration from an original IWAD level from the original Doom games. Or perhaps gets the inspiration from an inspirational PWAD like Scythe. And then you have WADs that are completely out of the ordinary and make you think outside the box in order to beat them. Or think both inside and outside the box and then some more. So that's what gimmick maps do. And frankly a lot more of them are coming into place, either taking the limitations of whatever community project they are in and trying to make them seem interesting in some ways. Again, having played so many WADs I'm so accustomed to seeing these gimmicks more or less. So what do we have gimmicks-wise that I see so often?

Sasha maps

I implore you to look up the author Sasha for this one. Sasha is a mapper who has made the "Tarakannik" series, but also Dance. These WADs all vary but you're gonna be doing some incredible outside-the-box thinking in order to even come close to surviving. This is quite blatant in Dance, which often features monster-less maps that do completely weird things like platforming (although this does take advantage of ZDoom stuff, so it's better than any sort of Doom platforming somehow). Some of his monster placements will exemplify slaughter, which I won't count as a gimmick, while others basically involve staying out of harms way from projectiles that fly and other such weird gimmicks. It's all full of puzzles. Having recently played Doomworld Mega Project 2017, I have noticed that his submission involves collecting all the rockets and then going through some trials. Now I'm not sure if Sasha's mapping actually does have some inspiration (I'm gonna guess no) but damn if I ever found anything as unique as this.

Timed maps

There's actually quite a few good examples of this, the simplest of these basically involves a voodoo doll getting crushed or otherwise killed after a preset time passes. Batman Doom MAP11, Fragport MAP30, Perdition's Gate MAP30, Community Chest MAP20, the entirety of Skulldash. These are all great examples of this kind of gimmick, and you'll be forced to go through several areas in a speedrun-ish fashion. This basically means that the level layouts need to be speedrun friendly as well. A different example is Doom 2 Reloaded MAP09, where you have to speedrun that level, then head to the middle area, after locking the room in, then using the big crusher to crush this normally-impossible invasion force. It's quite snazzy, but there was an issue with the ghost monsters on some source ports.

Stealth maps

Stealth isn't really Doom's thing. You're more likely to run and gun trying to kill everything in sight in Doom. Nevertheless, some maps exemplify stealth in ways. The aforementioned Doom 2 Reloaded has one in MAP18, a warehouse where if you make a noise, a bunch of arch-viles teleport everywhere and the map won't be beatable. Basically you have to run through places, avoid areas where dead marines are, and trap some enemies that could block the way and all. I'm pretty sure there are other examples in this surprisingly uncommon gimmick, the most recent of which I can think of being Entropy with its BFG segment and areas where you can shoot and area's you shouldn't. Not shooting your weapon is generally used even in the original gimmick level Tricks and Traps with the cyberdemon killing all his baron lackeys for you, although in this case it's a lesser example.

Progressive challenge maps

One of my favorite things about certain levels is that the exit is available early. As a completionist, I tend to go for just about everything in a map, but having an exit available early is a great thing for many other players who get tired of a level (especially a long one) and just want to end it. Reverie's secret level Metal Mansion is a good example, the only issue with it is you miss out on the super secret exit of the map. But there's not much effort to get to the normal exit. Solving the metal mansion naturally is a progressively harder challenge, you go around, killing the occasional monster or group, then the outdoor and caged areas are murder-fests. The once-again aforementioned Doom 2 Reloaded has a blatant example in its super secret level itself, giving ways to multiple ways to get certain secrets, plus each enemy is basically progressively tougher. However, each area has a normal exit should you decide you can't make your way to the grand prize at the end. Another completely blatant example is at Deus Vult II MAP29, you can choose to go through the original Deus Vult or you can just leave right away.

"Wormhole" levels

Everyone remembers TNT: Evilution's Wormhole, a map that is the same on two different sides except what's encountered. The levels inspired by it are pretty cool in their paralleling of things, and of course TNT projects like THT Threnody and Revilution love this gimmick. Going Down's Time Warp level also utilizes it to some way. I don't get tired of this one.

Speaking of Going Down, one of my favorite megawads ever, it is built entirely on good gimmicks. As far as I can tell though, gimmick maps are almost always memorable, either using common gimmicks like the above, or other gimmicks like using crushers or damaging floors or starvation or other such things (which are way too common anyways). However, these maps for the most part are both memorable and good. A select few can honestly be crappy.