You can get new ships to swap in by clearing planet levels.Īnyway, the arkanoid/breakout aspects: since you can equip permanent power ups, you can still be consistently breaking bricks with missiles, lasers, etc. Your extra lives are actually different ships with varying properties and equipment slots. If there's an item marker on a square, when you clear that level the item is added to your inventory, and is basically a permanent power-up that you can equip to one of your ships' (they call them “envelopes”) slots. There are meant to be over 25 million levels (at least a 5000 x 5000 grid, then). There's this grid that's supposed to be a map of the universe, where each square marks a level. Probaby fine: Alphabounce is kind of fantastic. The last time they tried to appeal to this base, we ended up with Final Fantasy IX, which announced loud and clear (regardless of your opinion of that game) that Squaresoft no longer understood that fanbase. The game is so clearly pandering to a fanbase, but 1) I am part of that fanbase, and 2) Squaresoft actually got it right this time. The music attempts to simulate old NES sounds. Specifically: The battles are extremely fast (notably, the game doesn't waste our time with a silly individualized victory dance after every single battle) characters have limited item capacity there is an item to warp you back to town the game jumps right into the first quest and wastes no more time with exposition than did DQIII. The second thing to notice: Final Fantasy has, at long last, learned some (more) things from Dragon Quest. The first dungeon, a witch's castle, is, instead of a bunch of boring cement blocks (like the older games would have had), kind of gothic and filled with rose vines and candles. It has a totally charming cell-shaded look, and the art design takes advantage of it thoroughly. As it is… yeah I'd rather just listen to the soundtrack. I think if it was just rebalanced to be an 8-10 hour long game instead, it would be a really great game. Either way, the difficulty ends up making the game less rather than more fun. The alternative is to play boringly and conservatively. In EO, if you try to rush to a harder area to make progress faster but you die instead, you lose literally hours (I gave up on EO after just such an attempt).
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In Dark Souls, you die a lot, but you just wasted 5-10 minutes of play at most, so it's not frustrating.
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The length creates another problem in that individual sessions are very long between savepoints. But the battle system isn't interesting enough to sustain that length after your initial skill choices are nailed down, you just select the same things out of a menu over and over. But my main problem with it is that its numbers curves (experience growth/health/damage output/money) are balanced in such a way that the game has to take dozens of hours and there's no way to significantly accelerate that. I guess you could say that my critique of the pacing is not the fastness itself, but the context of that fastness in the atmosphere and structure of the surrounding world.īroco: You know, I like a lot of things about EO. Soma is also less smooth in his movement compared to Portrait's duo, which I think makes for more friction in navigation and fights. To me, Portrait has the most unimaginative and ugliest castle of KCET's Metrovanias.
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I don't mind Aria's pacing because the level design is almost without fail better, in terms of large-scale layout and micro-detail, than Portrait's, as are the sectors' themes and expressions. More than any other Castlevania I've played it feels like the gaming equivalent of a Reader's Digest magazine: an aesthetically barren shuttle through easy-going vacuity. It just hits me the wrong way deep inside. The whole game seems to have been built for the most manageable consumption possible. There's no savoring, and little to no reason to savor.