A look back at: Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya

Yep, I never thought I'd go back to the Game Gear and its primitive selection of games, but here we are. This is the second of three Gaiden games for Shining Force, and sadly I couldn't play the first one. Unfortunately, all this really offers is a new plot, as the gameplay mechanics are completely intact, with the only real difference is a lack of exploration in between battles as that mechanic isn't here. As a result, this game is obviously not any better than the original Shining Force, and I didn't enjoy much of that.

Heck the only real things that would be interesting are tidbits here and there. At one point Natasha has to command the ground army while Deanna has to command the boat army, which has some flair to it, but not by much. Enemies dropping very important items are also cool, and having a key character be available for the final battle is cool in a way too. This unfortunately is compounded by basically all the rest, the stuff I never did enjoy in Shining Force, and again the issues of certain characters falling behind is quite easy to occur.

A look back at: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

One of the Gamecube's treasures was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Basically, take the original Paper Mario and make it miles better. That's what this is. Still a very easy RPG, chapter-based, action commands to use, and the usual Mario-style humor. The storytelling is a little better, the interludes add Bowser to the mix and make him seem like a fun joke as always being behind, and Luigi even gets to have his own adventures while Mario has his. Fun, isn't it? You get newer abilities, changes to old ones, the always wonderful badge and level up system, riddles and puzzles. The Crystal Stars are basically the Star Sprites from the previous game in function, and their specials are far better so long as you use them properly. I guess the Pit of 100 Trials is something too, although I'm not in the mood for it right now.

The partners are so much better too. In the previous game, I felt Goombario fell out of favor later in the game, while Lakilester didn't have good abilities and was acquired too late. Bow had trouble with enemies with defense, and apart from Tidal Wave Sushie wasn't that good overall. Here, we don't see too much of trouble. The first member, Goombella, when upgraded, can give Mario extra turns. Flurrie is often hated, but has a good niche as a healer and lots of HP. Bobbery has the best overall attack, and the Yoshi is incredibly versatile. Koops is a better Kooper, and Vivian is versatile and can pierce defenses. Ms. Mowz probably falls out of favor, being a bit like Bow and also being an optional recruit, but also having a healing move and can steal too. It's all helpful.

Well, one thing I'll be happy to no longer see are the battle stage mechanics. They're annoying. You've got audience members who are dweebs and like to interfere. Random items just fall on combatants, as well as the stage background. The stupid sprinklers do nothing but annoy, and THAT FOG. I hate it so much. It's no wonder Bobbery is a godsend when you get him because you can remove the fog with a bomb attack. Now that I think of it, what is the deal with having an audience for every battle? It's so strange. All in good fun though, this is far superior than other games in the Paper Mario series and I'm glad to have played it.

Doom Musings: The playability of the IWAD maps

For the seasoned WAD player of the Doom community, they've played all the good stuff, all the stuff that had been inspired by the IWADs and then some more. But then again, it doesn't hurt at all to revisit the old IWADs made by id to get re-acquainted with old nostalgia and design, something that most people either love to criticize yet continue to play or just love and continue to play. This post deals with the overall playability of these original Doom levels.

What exactly do I mean by this? Well, most players actually play Doom in singleplayer. It's more or less made for a single player to go alone and get rid of monsters in each given level. Straight and to the point. Wolfenstein 3D was built on this practice, and it was the only game mode there, so id decided to make it multiplayer compatible. Thus we have co-op and deathmatch, allowing for either players to cooperatively defeat monsters together, or to just kill each other together on maps. Now, taking a look at the individual maps is what this is about, how well they play in regards to all three game modes.

By now we know every single level can be completed in singleplayer and was made for that purpose. Co-op for the most part tends to be the same, just with extra things (monsters, items, weapons) around to assist or hinder the journey. I can't recall if a few of the maps are not playable in co-op (some examples would be those with one-time-only doors or switches, but I can't name any off the top of my head). But then we get to the deathmatch part of things. In my opinion, id did a good job ensuring that most of the maps in Doom and Doom II work well for deathmatch. MAP01 Entryway is quite a classic, despite its cramped inner hallway the map is still the most played map for deathmatch. MAP07 Dead Simple is a simple arena and is almost perfectly made for deathmatch gameplay. Almost all the city levels in the second third of Doom II have the sandbox quality for wide-open deathmatch. And Ultimate Doom? I'd say these maps fare pretty well too, even a few gimmick maps like Fortress of Mystery seem pretty fun for deathmatch for some.

I've made a few maps for 32in24 projects, and having to figure out what makes what tic with deathmatch basically amounts to overall movement flow (am I gonna run into a dead-end or is the hallway too tight), weapon availability, hot spots (well these can be anything but usually pertain to chaotic centers of the maps), but overall the flow of how a player can go through a deathmatch session without getting stuck or dying far too often is without a doubt the single most important. I would say that the two maps that are outright terrible to deathmatch with would be E3M1 Hell Keep and E3M9 Warrens, owing to the complete linearity of both and that stupid corridor that would have demons in it. Basically if a map requires you to go through small corridors it's gonna be much worse for deathmatch than the others. Most of the maps are fairly okay, as either they have at least two corridors going through two rooms, or just big hallways. Both do fine, and the best part is that id seemed to know what they were doing overall with making the maps friendly for all game modes.

As for Final Doom? Well that's quite a mixed bag. Quite a few maps probably work out less for deathmatch, particularly in Evilution. MAP05 Hanger has all these corridors that suck, as does MAP08 in a way. The huge expanses in Drake O'Brien's map mean just finding players is a chore. Plutonia does way better in the three modes, and I can't really pinpoint a sore loser out of them deathmatch-wise, even Hunted fairs fairly well for a mazey situation.

A look back at: Pokemon Victory Fire

Well, I gotta say, I think this is a fairly underrated rom hack. I can see why it's hated, the selection in the beginning definitely has problems, and the difficulty curve is actually quite high, even going as far as to make the Elite Four have level 80+ mons right away. And then there's just more and more challenges. A total of 505 battles is what it took for me to plunge through this one, I did lots of backtracking, trying to get everything because I personally am writing the detailed walkthrough for this very hack, and hopefully I got it all. At many points this hack is finished, and yet I still think there's plenty of room for improvement.

I mean, ease up on the rivals please, there's one too many, and there's always at least one encounter, sometimes two, with them. The scale of certain areas is eschewed as well, this is notable between Marble City and Volcano Town. Navel Path is way bigger than its size dictates, and then you go through Heat Passage and Jade Pass before it. It's ridiculous. The lack of Water types besides Buizel is another issue, you don't get a Good Rod until you get Surf, and there's no Old Rod or such. And for god's sake, fix the spelling, it's hilariously bad especially with every instance of canyon being "cayon".

But it does the freebies better than Light Platinum did, and making a black market where you can buy evolution stones and held items is also a plus, alleviating the challenge. Some might say it's not a good thing but for those that have been on the grind it helps a bit. Then you can buy every single TM at Halfleaf City, which is also good. Mega evolutions are neat to experiment with, and the Alolan forms of Vulpix and Ninetales ended up being top notch mons for my team. I can definitely see some room for improvement, in the meantime, have a detailed walkthrough to look over.

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.