COMPLETE: Thanatos Insignia 2
Dec. 22nd, 2017 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoMore for the "Oops, that wasn't intentional" pile. The TI series isn't very long, as it turns out. Still, after officially abandoning the first game, then giving it an award for possibly deserving a second chance, and then going back and beating it the next day, the second game stood as the last thing in the way of me officially being done with this series for real this time. So now here we are.
And yes I did both of them on Hard, limited save crystals and all, because I knew it would come back in next year's Trap Devised by Satan category if I hadn't. This series is tenacious. If there was anything left about it I hadn't done, it probably would have tempted me back for that at some point.
So, compared to the original, TI2 is sort of the same gameplay but with more complex mechanics. There are glyphs (spells/special moves) and powerups and such as you gain experience, introducing strategic RPG elements into what used to be almost pure Operation Logic Bomb in MegaZeux. At first, I wasn't enamored with the change, as the new elements seemed a bit overdone. Sometimes a game doesn't need crafting and fishing minigames and a tech tree and at some point you're just interfering with the player's ability to play, and that point is somewhere around when they introduced charged shots and changed the holding-down-fire-button behavior to charging a shot instead of rapid-firing the basic ones.
Or so I thought. It turned out I was mostly just being stubborn. If you reject all of TI2's new features and try to force it to play like TI1, yeah, you're going to be in for a bad time. Play the game like it wants to be played, though, and it's actually quite good. By the time you near the endboss, you have so many enhancements for charged shots specifically (increased explosion radius, the ability to fire multiples with automatic multi-targeting, etc.) that it doesn't make sense not to use them. That + the Time glyph (protip: invest in the Time glyph) makes the difference between a final battle being perfectly manageable and... I'm actually not sure if it's even literally possible to win without the Time glyph, actually. I mean, you probably can but I sure wouldn't know how.
Oh, and because it's a MegaZeux game, TI2 ends with a splash screen saying that the story will be continued in Thanatos Insignia 3, which (to my knowledge, from what I can see from searching) was never made. So I guess we'll never know what was up with... I'll be honest, the story was kind of weird. However, for a game I initially abandoned because the gameplay didn't really catch me, wow did the gameplay sure grow on me.
So, yeah. Good series. Nothing about it was supposed to happen, but I'm glad it did.
And yes I did both of them on Hard, limited save crystals and all, because I knew it would come back in next year's Trap Devised by Satan category if I hadn't. This series is tenacious. If there was anything left about it I hadn't done, it probably would have tempted me back for that at some point.
So, compared to the original, TI2 is sort of the same gameplay but with more complex mechanics. There are glyphs (spells/special moves) and powerups and such as you gain experience, introducing strategic RPG elements into what used to be almost pure Operation Logic Bomb in MegaZeux. At first, I wasn't enamored with the change, as the new elements seemed a bit overdone. Sometimes a game doesn't need crafting and fishing minigames and a tech tree and at some point you're just interfering with the player's ability to play, and that point is somewhere around when they introduced charged shots and changed the holding-down-fire-button behavior to charging a shot instead of rapid-firing the basic ones.
Or so I thought. It turned out I was mostly just being stubborn. If you reject all of TI2's new features and try to force it to play like TI1, yeah, you're going to be in for a bad time. Play the game like it wants to be played, though, and it's actually quite good. By the time you near the endboss, you have so many enhancements for charged shots specifically (increased explosion radius, the ability to fire multiples with automatic multi-targeting, etc.) that it doesn't make sense not to use them. That + the Time glyph (protip: invest in the Time glyph) makes the difference between a final battle being perfectly manageable and... I'm actually not sure if it's even literally possible to win without the Time glyph, actually. I mean, you probably can but I sure wouldn't know how.
Oh, and because it's a MegaZeux game, TI2 ends with a splash screen saying that the story will be continued in Thanatos Insignia 3, which (to my knowledge, from what I can see from searching) was never made. So I guess we'll never know what was up with... I'll be honest, the story was kind of weird. However, for a game I initially abandoned because the gameplay didn't really catch me, wow did the gameplay sure grow on me.
So, yeah. Good series. Nothing about it was supposed to happen, but I'm glad it did.
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Date: 2017-12-22 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-22 08:10 pm (UTC)