kjorteo | Entries tagged with 2018 abandoned

THIS IS A BLATANT AND DELIBERATE PORN GAME. THIS IS VERY NSFW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The last two parasite porn games I played were on this tfgames.site place, so I did a quick search to see what else they had. I swear I don't normally spam this many porn games (there weren't any at all last year, you know,) but I was on a kick and was curious.

My master, the Parasite (sic re: capitalization) is a seemingly abandoned CYOA. The download link works as of when I'm writing this, despite what that page says. However, I'm just going to take the ambiguity as a warning that I probably shouldn't hold my breath waiting for the next update.

I don't have a lot to say for this one, because there's almost nothing here. No graphics/sound/anything but a rudimentary save system, which you will not need, because any route you try will hit an "Oops, this section not written yet, sorry, click here to go back" wall about four or five choices in. Maybe if this game is finished, I might come back? But I somehow doubt it ever will be.

I want to channel my inner RoahmMythril and conclude this review with a noncommittal "So, that was a thing." However, in this case, it really wasn't.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/66335.html

Much like Escape the Game, I'm giving myself COMPLETE credit for this because it's an episodic game and I finished chapter 1, and ABANDONED credit because I opted not to play the rest.

Varenje is an adventure/sort of Hidden Object game. The presentation is cute and charming, the art style is gorgeous, and the music is fine if not repetitive by the tenth time it loops. However, the actual puzzles are grating to the point of frustration. Expect lots of wandering back and forth around the same three screens of untidy clutter because this next goal wants you to collect nine ribbons, nine tiny metal bars, four light bulbs, three transistors, two crystal balls, and presumably the partridge in a pear tree is the final puzzle you do once you've gathered all the ingredients.

My heart kind of sank every time I went through an actual literal junk drawer, because I knew I'd be back on this screen at least four more times. (You can't pick up any of this stuff until you get the event flag and are supposed to know you need it, naturally.) It's not a pixel hunt in the way the reviewers are describing it, though some of the junk drawers are a bit too tiny and missable. However, it's an Easter egg hunt, for sure. I ended up using a lot of hints not because I couldn't figure out a puzzle, but because "oh for heaven's sake I have 8/9 ribbons and I know the last one's somewhere but I don't have time for this," which kind of felt like the adventure game version of Fake Difficulty.

All in all, this game actually isn't horrible. I love the aesthetic. The "big" puzzles after gathering everything are mostly fine. I'm interested in the plot enough to regret the not-knowing-how-it-goes that comes with opting not to continue. I just... those scavenger hunts, man.

I may come back to this later, because I honestly did enjoy this enough while I was playing it, frustrations aside. It's just that I've hit the point of game saturation, such that I really have to stop and question why I'm playing "I could maybe get into this, frustrations aside"-tier roughness when I have an immense backlog of outstanding near-flawless games in the same genre that I could (and probably should) be playing instead.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/61558.html

God.

Okay, so.

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is an old SNES RPG aimed at entry-level players. It is widely known as either a bad game or a so-bad-it's-good kitsch-appeal game, with phenomenal music. (Whether you like MQ or not, even the haters admit the music is good.) It is easy. It is ridiculous. The plot is a desiccated skeleton. I've seen outlines of stories (let alone the actual thing) that are more fleshed out. Here is, word for word, unedited and unabridged, the first ten minutes or so of the game:

(Starts off on the Hill of Destiny, were an earthquake just happened)

Benjamin: My village is gone!! What is going on?
Old Man: This place is going to sink any second! Let's climb up quick!
(Benjamin walks north a screen or two to the top of some stairs)
Old Man: Press the "B" Button, and jump across!

(Benjamin jumps across, and the side of the mountain he was just on sinks. Benjamin and the old man then turn and look north, at a tower)

Old Man: Look over there. That's the Focus Tower, once the heart of the World. An old Prophecy says, "The vile 4 will steal the Power, and divide the World behind 4 doors. At that time the Knight will appear!" The Prophecy has now come true. 4 monsters have locked the doors of the Focus Tower and escaped with the keys. They're draining the light from the 4 Crystals of the Earth, and the World is in Chaos. The people are in desperate need of help. Benjamin, only you can save the Crystals and the world.
Benjamin: Me?
Old Man: Yes, you Benjamin! Only you could be the Knight spoken in the Prophecy...
(Monster appears)
Man: Look out! A monster!
(Battle)

(After battle)
Old Man: Seems I was right! At last I've found a true knight!
Benjamin: But you said you were SURE I was the one!
Old Man: Well, actually it was more of a guess...
(Benjamin SHRUGS)
Benjamin: Forget it. Just tell me where I can find the Crystals.
Old Man: It's up to you to find them.
(Mountain shakes)
Old Man: This place is becoming dangerous! Follow me to the Level Forest!
(Old Man flies away)
Benjamin: Got to get out of here. Who is that guy, any way?

(Benjamin walks south, to the world map, and then to the first accessible area from it, Level Forest. The old man is there waiting for him)

Benjamin: There you are! What do you think I should do first?
Old Man: Save the Crystal of Earth. See you!
(Old Man flies away)
(Benjamin SHRUGS)

Benjamin's village is, of course, never mentioned again.

Characters zip through plot points as if they were being charged by the word. The entire script was written hastily on a cocktail napkin by an Artifex Mundi employee, spiced up by Ted Woolsey taking liberties to make it entertaining, because God knows this wasn't great writing anyway.

Unsurprisingly, young me loathed this game, and gleefully vengefully riffed it to shreds with all the fury of the 90s Barney anti-fandom, because it was dumb as fuck.

Older me has come to appreciate its goofy charm. It is dumb as fuck, but it's fluffy and fun. It's... not even a popcorn game (cotton candy at most) but if you just want to RP some Gs without having to take anything too seriously, you could do a lot worse.

Not kidding about the music, either.

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest Remastered is a scam. No, really. Someone remade Mystic Quest in RPGMaker, and boy oh boy does "farted out in RPGMaker" show (more on this later,) but this person then had the cheek to claim it was an officially licensed and Square Enix approved and supported remake. This person then tried to sell it. That was around when Square Enix was like "ahahaha no" and blasted them into a crater.

I played it anyway, because I am a bad person and I make bad choices. I hadn't replayed Mystic Quest in a while, and I was feeling oddly nostalgic. I could just replay it again, but... I mean... I have done that. Even in my "I hate this game" phase I explored every single thing there was to explore in it. (I wanted to make an MST but I couldn't find a script anywhere, so I played the entire game to 100% completion and carefully wrote down every word just so I could compile the script myself. Because that'll show how much I totally hate this game, all right. Take that, Square Enix.) By now, I'm at the point where I could scratch an old itch, but there's really nothing left that would be new about it.

MQR, for all its scammy shadiness and "cobbled together in RPGMaker" jank, at least offered something new. Revised and rewritten plot points here and there! A full party instead of one-partner-at-a-time switches for the endboss! Etc! I figured it was about the best chance I'd have to play Mystic Quest again and be in any way curious what's coming. With certain clanmates helping me find a cracked version with the "please enter the serial number you got from your purchase" checks removed (sorry, but this is one "official" release you shouldn't support) I set off.

MQR, for as far as I got into it, is... uh. Well. It's certainly Mystic Quest in RPGMaker, all right. The graphics certainly are bigger and have more colors and detail and all, though the new ones do look a bit... I'm not quite going to say "RPGMaker default assets" but it certainly has that aura about it. Corners were cut and entire gameplay mechanics (such as using any weapon outside of battle except the sword and jumping) were removed entirely every time the author ran into something RPGMaker couldn't do. Instead, we got clumsy workarounds, unstable code (supposedly there's a chocobo forest in Foresta now, but every time I went to activate the well that took me there, the game crashed,) and, uh... let's just say bold and uniquely original ideas of what is and is not a solid tile whenever there's water.

I was enjoying this game despite myself, though! Everything it did was Like Mystic Quest But Worse, but at the same time it was interesting, and I still had that "I could just go back and play the original instead but I mean I've done that" feeling weighing on the back of my mind. If nothing else, it was an entertaining trainwreck, something that generated a lot of fun discussion and mutual bonding over the "lol what even" factor whenever I experienced and subsequently posted something like that gif.

Unfortunately, jank and instability are powerful forces that not even the most high-level player can overcome sometimes. Even getting my bootleg cracked version of a bootleg unauthorized game to run at all involved a very fiddly and finnicky setup where (among other eccentricities) it only seemed to launch if the shortcut was run from my desktop (I couldn't move the shortcut anywhere else or the whole thing would collapse,) the odds of it actually launching are slightly improved if I run it in Administrator mode, etc. I had a held-together-with-bubblegum arrangement that got me through Aquaria and just starting the Fireburg portion of the game....

And now it just won't work anymore. Like, at all. Even the workarounds I tried to get it to even launch last time it did this aren't doing anything anymore, and at this point I give up. Look, I'm sorry, but even though I actually was enjoying this and would have beaten it if it had let me, there are only so many layers of this game refusing to open that I can take before I have to wonder if this is my PC and my own survival instinct trying to tell me something.

A disappointing anticlimactic end to what at least sure was a trip, and I'm not really happy with that, but... bleh. What can you do? I mean I do have other games that aren't a steaming mess, I suppose.

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is goofy silly charming fun if you haven't played it before, or maybe even if you have and you're not tired of it yet. This picture of Kaeli is the official icon for our group chat, even, because it's such a perfect mixture of "fluffy and adorable axe-wielding murder muffin" and "reference to certain old games we like because we have no taste" that it really is the perfect symbol for us on several levels. The game itself is a classic (by my standards) too. I highly recommend it!

But please, please don't play the Remastered version. Don't make my mistakes.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/58891.html

I want to like this game.

As you can guess from the fact that this is an ABANDONED entry, I tried playing it and it didn't work out. I suppose this is where I should rail against some Heinous Bullshit, or perhaps even say that I wanted (past tense) to like this game buuuut there was just all that Heinous Bullshit.

But no. I still do want to like this game. I still love what it was trying to do. I write this after slinking away in defeat after bouncing off how it actually turned out, and I feel kind of bad about that. But it still appeals at its core, even now.

Reflection of a Fallen Feather is a freeware indie RPG that was this studio's first of so far two releases, with Mixed reviews, and everything you would expect from that. It is incredibly rough around the edges. It is punishing and unforgiving. It is primitive. Except no, wait, no it's not. Underneath all the crudeness, ForepawSoft (yes, I did get this game because the studio name + "be the monsters" aesthetic made me suspicious) designed a ridiculous yet brilliant system for an RPG that rethinks a lot of How RPGs Even Work rules you take for granted, tosses out a lot of them, and replaces them with something that straddles the line between why-don't-more-games-do-this genius and how-do-you-even-play-this madness.

Reflection of a Fallen Feather is Akitoshi Kawazu's Hello World.

In the 45 minutes or so I spent in the very first area of this game, I discovered:

You are a party of three lost imprisoned souls wandering through Hell or... something. I didn't get farther plotwise than the title screen, but what I saw so far reads like Atomos's QBasic games: pure angels, demons, and Final Fantasy teen phase edge.
Two of your party are up front and participating in the battle but either of them can tag in the third at any time, sort of like Breath of Fire IV. This is the first taste of "Wow, that's kind of a complex touch for a game like this." It is not the last.
No random encounters; instead enemies are stationary overworld sprites that block your way a la Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. I like this.
The party's HP/status is fully recovered after every fight. Even if you lose; a wipe just means returning to where you were standing at full health with the obstacle still there for you to try again, sort of like Princess Remedy. I like this too.
Their MP isn't restored because there is no MP in this game. Instead, you have a list of moves with turn cooldowns. You can spam your basic attack every round, but your bigger attacks might not come back for another three or four rounds. This does not reset between battles. I... think I like this? It does provide that critical balance for why not just spam your biggest nukes every round if you get a full restore anyway.
Put together, this means that this game subverts the traditional RPG feel of dungeons being an endurance marathon. You can wander around freely and not get worn down with random encounters, or with any encounters because any fight you enter may as well be your first. Also gone is the sense of mashing Fight because you need to conserve your resources. Instead, the challenge comes from the difficulty of the fights themselves (every enemy may as well be a boss) with a need to strategize and employ the right combination of moves in the right rounds to carry you through this battle and still be available at the start of the next. I really like this, in theory. (In practice I'm not sure I'm any good at it--see below.)
Oh, no Experience Points, either. Instead, you get one BP per enemy, and every 7 BP you get the chance to transform any one of your party members into the last enemy you just beat. This is the meat of this system, and clearly the entire point of this game. Different monsters have different stats, as you might expect. The cat furries are quick but physically weak, ogres are big and slow, etc. Whenever you transform, you can also port two of your current moves over to the new monster; if you really like that 3Heads move that your starting Cerberus comes with, keep it.
Not only does the move pool make for a uniquely customized party, but each move comes with stat bonuses and penalties, too. Like that 3Heads move? Keep it and enjoy the +2 Strength and +3 Agility that having it will add to your newly transformed monster, but do be careful about suddenly being 25% weak to fire.

In theory, this game should be revolutionary, and one of my favorite RPG experiences ever. There are some goddamn ideas here, and they managed to completely shake up the dungeon slog experience in ways I really appreciate. The problem is that it's a bit too much, and I don't think I can keep up. You need to learn the game's language to keep up with what all these customization options even mean. You need to be very careful, thorough, and knowledgable in minmaxing your team to get through. There's no apparent grinding or leveling to speak of, since all you get from battles is BP, and those stat modifications from inheriting post-transformation moves don't stack. I transformed my main character twice and I swear he ended up weaker than when I first started the game just because I have no idea what I'm doing. There are monsters that seem just about impossible to beat until I get stronger, but I have no idea what "getting stronger" means under this system.

After 45 minutes of not getting past the first screen, I reluctantly decided I'm not cut out for this. I like where this is going, and if I had more hours in the day, I might spend a few dozen of them learning how to play Reflection of a Fallen Feather. If it sounds interesting to any of you, I still recommend that you try it out. If you do so and you like it, your infectious enthusiasm may even get me to give it another chance myself. But for now? I just do not have 50 hours to spend learning what will probably end up being a 3-hour indie RPG by the time you know it. I have other games.

But man. Good try, though.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/57647.html

This one gets a COMPLETE for the fact that I did beat the prologue episode, and an ABANDONED for the fact that I opted not to continue with the rest of the series after that. I don't want to spend a lot of time on the writeup, because I don't feel it deserves any more time than I already spent playing the game, even though that really was not a lot.

Escape the Game is a basic platformer starring an irritating smartass cube who thinks the fourth wall meta writing means it's okay to directly insult you-the-player whenever you fail a jump. It's free, and the trailer makes it look like a bad platformer on the surface that turns into a glitchy creepypasta a la Pony Island when you actually Escape the Game, which is why it grabbed my attention and I installed it. It turns out it's actually just a bad platformer with some glitch-aesthetic levels near the end, like a less competent version of level -0 in Stinkoman 20X6.

It also turns out that it's free because it's ten minutes long and the whole thing is a prologue/teaser/Episode 0 type To Be Continued hook, and Episode 1 isn't even out yet as of this writing.

That's fine. I probably won't get it when it is.