Again, random thoughts since I played this some time ago.
Instead of a straightforward platformer relying on skill, in Castlevania II you level up and explore an “open” world with lots of secrets before confronting Dracula when you feel appropriately powered up. There’s an added soft time limit, where you have to navigate the overworld efficiently lest you take too long to kill Dracula and die immediately afterwards in the ending. (I think the biggest obstacle to this is the grinding at the beginning, honestly: you need enough money to get the items to access the first mansion, and I took a really long time to do that.) As usual I hate stairs.
I had fun looking for the secrets and dropping garlic in graveyards and the like, though I must note I was playing with a patch that fixed the poor English translation, so the hints were far less confusing. Also, even though there is a time limit, it freezes in the mansions, so you can grind the infinitely respawning enemies there…the developers did stop you from leveling up on weak enemies, though, which was kind of sad XD. The correct strategy for the boss battles is “toss sacred flame at them so they stop moving repeatedly”. If you have enough hearts, guaranteed to work.
I suppose the game was meant to be replayed several times — the first time, you take a really long time trying to figure out where everything is, and on later iterations you can immediately perform some steps while figuring out how to optimize your route or discovering more secrets.
I played the Playstation 2 remake (Phantasy Star Generation 1). Random thoughts, since this was also some time ago:
Played this a while ago so this is more a collection of scattered thoughts.
We've evolved from the one-man party to a three-man party that are distant descendants of the DQI protagonist. We also encounter the descendant of the DQI villain and can later visit Alefgard, the DQI continent. The gameplay has also evolved! With more allies and monster groups, there's more flexibility in battle. We get to sail around the whole map and teleport.
My main memory of the game is when your team gets to Rhone, the last area of the game, the difficulty spikes tremendously. That's mitigated by a couple hours of grinding, but it was kind of demoralizing XD
In 2018, Cygames and Nintendo released the mobile gacha game Dragalia Lost. At the time, I had no interest in playing because I had heard that it was a clone of Shironeko Project and Nintendo had sued Colopl over some aspect of the movement and attack system in the game. Dragalia Lost's servers shut down in 2022, a pretty average lifetime for a gacha game. But I recently discovered that the game has a thriving fan-maintained private server (actually, two of them). Playing Dragalia Lost through its private servers has helped me reflect on how 1) Dragalia Lost is actually good and 2) getting to play it in its end-of-service state is probably how I would love to experience a lot of gacha games.
I ordered a Paper Pro because reMarkable said their prices would increase in May (so I guess that marketing email worked) with the assumption that I could return it within the 100-day mark if I didn't like it.
Documenting this for my future attempts to map controller inputs in Mednafen and change hotkeys.
My attempt at explaining what I do to a non-mathematician:
I played the NES version. Another Falcom game, though this one is an adventure game set in Chichen Itza. (The map of the game actually, uh, looks like Chichen Itza!! I was so impressed.)
I played the Falcom Classics version for Sega Saturn. Well so…it’s a strange game. You do contact damage, like Ys, and it’s like, whoever is moving towards the enemy (has right of way?) strikes first, and then can move out of the way to avoid doing more damage, and oblique attacks are good like in Ys? To get stronger, you 1) bring power stones back to your house, +5000 strength per 2) get more XP and go back to your house, which brings your HP to your XP 3) trade in coins for HP (not as effective). Did I mention the numbers are really big? The max HP and XP are 999999. I think damage is based on your strength and opponent’s experience, so XP also acts as defense for you. You can only carry one item at a time. So you use your key to open chests. Then you drop your key to pick up coins and jars (to use magic). Then you pick up one power stone at a time and bring it back to your house (or teleport back to your house). Somewhere along the way when you're empty-handed, you pick up your key again. lol. Also, the positions of the items change over time because there are random ghosts flying around that sometimes pick up items and drop them in a random location. Enemies spawn from graves (there’s at most one enemy per grave at a time, I think). Annoyingly, some enemies take your money/magic jars/sword.
Dungeon Master – turns out playing a first-person dungeon crawler without an automapper = I get lost on the first level and can't even find the exit.