Game Reviews: Tales of Berseria and Megami Tensei

Tales of Berseria (2016)

I'm at war with myself on this one. I just slammed out several paragraphs of impassioned complaints (the god-awful fighting, the void of a soundtrack, the interminable length). But, reading it over, it doesn't feel representative of my experience with the game. I was irked constantly playing Tales of Berseria, but the fact is: they got me.

I loved the characters. The size of the script may have ballooned the game length to the point that it took my partner and I five tortured months to get through the game. But it also gave me time to fall in love with everyone. It's a tight cast, with only six playable characters and an economical stock of villains and supporting roles. Everyone gets a big moment, gets their time to shine. Ys VIII came out the same year as Berseria. That game has a more concise script (and infinitely better combat), and as a result it's a more propulsive and overall delightful play experience. But I don't feel anything about Hummel, Laxia, Ricotta. That game is purely Dana's story, whereas I love just about everyone in Berseria.

I loved Tales of Vesperia's cast too though, and while I enjoyed that game in the moment, I cooled on it as time went on. A big difference with Berseria are the stakes. Characters die constantly in Berseria, and (for the most part, sort of, it's complicated) they stay dead. The characters left behind have to process their grief and work to find a way forward from it, and it's all dramatized, all on-screen. It's a story full of loss, and they don't flinch away from that. It's still a firmly PG-13 anime RPG — I wish I could play an R-rated version that leaned into the earned edge even further. But I went into this expecting a Tales game, and for a Tales game this all surprised and satisfied me.

The other thing that worked for me: Berseria stays committed to the scenario it lays out in its impeccable prologue. After the initial episode with the lost water blastia, Vesperia's story wibble-wobbled around incomprehensibly for dozens of hours before arriving at its charming and dramatically limp conclusion. I couldn't tell you what any of the villains wanted, what incompatibility in ideals set the heroes against them. Berseria is extremely precise in comparison (as precise as an RPG this long is capable of being anyway). It's a story about revenge and tearing down a corrupt status quo. Even as the scenario ascends to the god-battling stakes you'd expect from a Tales game, it never loses track of what it's actually about. I think that's commendable.

For a variety of reasons, I don't think Berseria works as an RPG. My brain would dissolve and leak out my ears if I tried to play more than one game like this in a year. But the fighting is over quickly, and it was easy enough for me to enjoy it as a genre-confused visual novel. If you're up for that kind of experience, I think this is a real good one.

Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (1987/1995)

Played the Super Famicom version, which is good because I’m pretty sure the Famicom original would’ve killed me.

I enjoyed this! I played through Shin Megami Tensei years ago, so this is my second exposure to classic MegaTen. Unlike SMT, Megami Tensei is a pure strain dungeon crawler — no overworld here — and pleasingly open-ended. When I first reached the Minotaur and Medusa, I wasn’t strong enough to beat them (even after finding Tabasa’s Statue for Medusa), so I just kept exploring the next area. I back-tracked to defeat them later. The only hard check that you’ve beat the Tyrants is once at the very end (at least I think it’s a hard check), so until then you’re free to approach the major obstacles however you want. This meant I never needed to grind.

Of course, “I never needed to grind” is misleading when the exploration is as bone-dry as it is here. The map designs (which are different from the Famicom version for the record, I don’t know how they compare) are massive, sprawling, and largely empty. I would’ve welcomed more Wizardry tricks honestly. Pits, damage floors, teleporters, and spinners are few and far between, at least until the last area. Outside of combat threats, exploring the maze is mostly mindless. I remember Shin Megami Tensei being denser with interesting encounters and dungeon shapes.

The saving grace is that the combat encounters stay scary the whole game. Every boss is a monumental event — I actually screamed when Lucifer finally gave up the ghost. You can never fully relax against regular enemies either. Just when my characters were getting beefy enough that party wipes were no longer a real concern, they start throwing level draining enemies at you. It’s cruel, but I appreciated that the tension never let up all the way to the end.

The maps are barren, demon fusion and character progression are dirt simple, and combat isn’t tactical enough to sustain the game’s ballooned run-time. The game is a historical artifact in a way Shin Megami Tensei definitely isn’t. But the central arc of it is still solid. The core journey of exploring the first dungeon and getting strong enough to beat the minotaur is as powerful here as it was in SMTIV. Somehow they’d nailed down all those same fundamentals in the very first game. I’d rather play a game that’s all bones and no sauce than one that’s all sauce and no bones. 

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Game Reviews: Lunar: Silver Star Story and Last Bible

Lunar: Silver Star Story (1996)

Games like Lunar: Silver Star Story consistently knock me on my ass with their modest precision. I adore how Funbil put it in their review: "A quiet, unassuming first act gingerly constructs an expertly-arranged cavalcade of narrative dominos which cascades forward with an unrelenting momentum all the way to the end of the game." That's exactly it — Lunar takes its time quietly putting its pieces on the board, without feeling the need to dangle keys in front of your face to keep you invested. Then it plows forward inexorably towards its insane climax. It feels ahead of its time for 1996, and even more ahead of its time for 1992.

Lunar excels in ways that are mostly invisible, and if you haven't played a lot of RPGs they might not be super-obvious. But that storytelling care is always there, carefully weaving its magic under the surface. The difference between an RPG that nails this stuff and an RPG that doesn't is night and day, and it's something mainstream games crit has always been unequipped to discuss. I don't know if Lunar will hit you quite the way it hit me — its particular cocktail of over-the-top romance and "we have to choose our own destiny!" theming was concocted in a lab to make me cry. But it builds that theming with exact care, with gorgeous presentation and long meaty dungeons and chunky boss fights, and I think that's something any RPG fan should be able to appreciate.

Some practical matters: I had a nearly ideal play experience thanks to all extra options on the iOS version. I doubled the battle speed and set the difficulty balancing to match the original JP release (versus the jacked up NA difficulty). The pacing and battle balancing felt perfect to me; I never really struggled, but I always felt like I was just scraping by the big story fights. I don't think this story calls for the merciless, grindy challenge the NA version seemed intent on providing. I played with the JP dub as well. The actual translation (which is still based on the original Working Designs script) landed fine for me. The dumb pop culture jokes were mostly constrained to incidental NPC dialogue, and the big story and character moments had all the gravitas they called for.

The upcoming remasters seem to offer all the same QOL and authenticity options as the iOS version. If those are done well, they'll likely be a definitive way to play these games that isn't constrained to Apple platforms (and includes Eternal Blue, which I'm now very excited to play).

I've been in a bit of an RPG funk the last five months or so. It's very nice to play a game that reignites my passion for my favorite game genre. Excited for whatever's next!

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible (1992)

Pleasantly mediocre Megaten-flavored Dragon Quest riff; I can't complain because that's exactly what I signed up for booting the game up. Played the GameBoy Color version, localized as Revelations: The Demon Slayer.

Good: it has teeth for the whole game, the big fights never stop being scary and the random encounters ramp up fast enough that you never get comfortable. Bad: the dungeons are all really short! You spend maybe 10-20% of the game's runtime in capital-d Dungeons. Weirdly enough the towns are all really big and mazey, which makes it extra-taxing when you're sloooooowly walking in and out of them to stop by the inn, the bank, the stores over and over and over.

The basic Dragon Quest loop worked enough to keep me entertained for most of the runtime, but it started losing me near the end. Meaty dungeons are important for an rpg like this. Without them it all just feels too bare, especially when the overall structure is really linear. It has a decent finale at least (I like all the little optional endgame quests after you get the ark), although the actual last dungeon is as brief and spare as the rest of them.

There's a little bit of a haunting Final Fantasy Legend feeling of "a story is happening around you that you're mostly not privy too" where the half-bakedness almost adds to it. That's the main appeal of the package to me honestly. FFLegend/SaGa 1 is one of my favorite games; Last Bible is nowhere near as cursed or interesting as that game, but I still enjoyed getting a taste of that flavor again. I'm still on-board for playing the other two Last Bible games, but I definitely need something with real dungeons first.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Kit's Cookies & Kat's Cookies

New game! It's a Puzzlescript release called Kit's Cookies. I got inspired last week and slammed it out, then spent a few days polishing it. Thanks to Narf, Zeloz, and Rhete for playtesting; I really appreciate it!

My last Puzzlescript game blew up; this one's a lot easier, so I'm not expecting it to resonate with genre enthusiasts to the same extent. I'm certain you can make complex puzzles with this ruleset, but it's harder with the free-form nature of the match-3 win condition. There's just way more room for solutions I didn't anticipate, since you can line up the cookies in multiple places on the board. I tightened it up as much as I could though, and I still think the final game is a cute challenge.

I'm only a dabbler in puzzle design, but I've gotten a lot of joy out of making my puzzlescript games. I can see the path to being a real pervert for this kind of gamedev. I'd like to get there someday, but it'd definitely require making more than a handful of puzzles every few years.

I wrote the above paragraphs the day after putting out Kit's Cookies, but I held off on posting them because something neat was happening. Vextro friend Zeigfreid loaded up the project source in Puzzlescript's web editor, made a few cool levels, and shared them in our discord. After that, sraëka, sylvie, and wasnotwhynot joined in. I had a ton of fun playing their levels, and before too long we had enough to make a whole new game!

I'm really happy with how Kat's Cookies turned out. Kit's Cookies was a gentle game. Like I said above, I struggled to come up with challenging puzzles using the ruleset, and I was ultimately content to release it as a short, easy thing. My genius friends came up with some delightful and fiendish puzzles though, and I think together the two games form a satisfying, substantive package. Go give them a whirl!

My puzzle dev brain's leveled up through this whole process. I released a little game and was only somewhat satisfied with it. Then, unprompted, friends filled in exactly the gaps in the original release I'd struggled to fill. I like making tiny, single-screen puzzlers with simple rulesets — I don't feel any urge to make the next Baba Is You or what not. But next time I make a puzzle game, I want to sit with the ruleset longer, draft and discard more puzzles, and hold off on release until I'm confident I've made the best puzzles I can.

Oh, and for the record: puzzles 1, 4, and 7 are by sraëka, 2 and 6 are by sylvie, 3 and 5 are by Zeigfreid, 9 is by wasnotwhynot, and 8 is by me! Thanks so much again to everyone who contributed; this was the most spontaneous collab I've been a part of and it made me happy.

And thanks to Bart Bonte for plugging the original release on his excellent puzzle blog! He linked Gorgons' Gaze too a few years back. I'm still a puzzle dev amateur obviously, so I'm delighted any time actual genre connoisseurs enjoy my work. I hope to continue improving!

Tunnels of Vextro

 

It's the end of another year (or it was like two weeks ago), which means it's time for a new Vextro release: Tunnels of Vextro! This one's another chain game like Gardens, meaning the games were made sequentially, with each game responding to all previous entries. Give it a play — my Vextro friends brought their A-game as always, and the player responses so far have been really warm and nice.

My friend Narf took the lead on this one, so it has a different flavor from Gardens in a way I'm really happy with. There's more in the way of overarching narrative and lore. It's still a chain game, so it's all loose and free-form, but it feels more like we were working together to build a larger story than usual. I wouldn't want to approach the anthologies like this every time, but I enjoyed it a lot. It's also our largest collection by a mile, with wuzzy and sraëka both turning in massive RPGMaker games. Even my game is 20-30 minutes, way longer than my previous entries. 

I made the fourth game in the collection, Worms: A Love Story. I wrote about my process making it in a blog post last October. The short version is that, thanks to the tireless efforts of its community (and asie's dev work in particular), ZZT's become a legitimately excellent and fully FOSS tool for making and sharing a certain flavor of freeware games online. I think it deserves a spot among the echelons of other robust high-level tools for making top-down games like Bitsy, Puzzlescript, and RPGMaker. 

I really like how my game turned out. It's a purely cute wlw story game, one of my favorite kinds of game to make. I made it shortly after finishing the extremely delightful Anthology of the Killer collection, and it consequently wound up being the most "walk around and read fun flavor text" game I've made. I want to play with that form more, I like it a lot. Fair warning that it's less stand-alone than my previous Vextro entries; it calls back to the first three games quite a bit. Some friends have played it on its own and had a good time, so go about it however you like.

I'm planning to do some general upkeep and catch-up on my itch/blog/website over the next few weeks. (Did you notice I have a website again? I'll write about it properly once I've implemented a few more sections.) Once I've got my ducks in a row, I'll do a proper End of 2024 wrap-up post. Thanks as always for reading. 

And remember: Keep! On! Digging!

Cramped

New game! It's an itty bitty sub-1000 word linear text game. It's also a horror game — I've been making lots of cute nice stuff lately, so making something that's a big ol' bummer felt refreshing.

I used the Videotome engine, the first in a series of homebrew text game engines by Freya. I love Freya's games to bits, so when she hosted a game jam based around using using her nifty tools, I jumped at the opportunity. I had a lot of fun!

The actual story was a piece of flash fiction I wrote for a Writer's Club meetup a few months ago. I got an aesthetic I liked together in Videotome, gave the story an edit pass, and it all came together pretty quickly. There are several pieces of flash fiction I've written in the last year I've gone "I should make a little game out of this" for, but this is the first time I actually did it. Maybe I'll do it more in the future!

Making Games in ZZT

For the first time since 2017, I made a little game in ZZT! It's part of the upcoming 2024 Vextro anthology release, so I'll be publishing it in December as always. I was honestly surprised by how much of a delight ZZT was to work with; thanks to advances in tooling and my own knowledge of the scene, I had a better time with it than I did the first go around. I wanted to share a little primer on it in case other folks want to try it out.

Here are the main assets, in my mind, of using ZZT as a dev tool in 2024. 

• Simple top-down "walk around and interact with things to make text boxes pop up" language is cozy, familiar, and endlessly flexible. I'll be comparing ZZT a lot with Bitsy and RPGMaker since I think the three engines offer a similar language with interesting differences in their approach.
• The built-in object programming language is shockingly flexible, giving you much more power over your game logic and world than Bitsy (while still not as much as RPGMaker event scripting, which I'd argue isn't entirely a negative). 
• ASCII art style is attractive without forcing you to make custom assets, and without having the "stock" look you get from using more detailed default assets.
• Light-weight and extremely easy to deploy: thanks to asie's open source Zeta emulator, ZZT runs on all major desktop environments, AND in browser (albeit not on phones like Bitsy or Puzzlescript). All in under a megabyte for each version! And thanks to asie's Reconstruction of ZZT, the core engine is open source as well!

All in all, ZZT has a legitimate niche if you can get a handle on its quirks. It's completely FOSS now and it has a microscopic footprint. It runs in the browser but doesn't require a browser. It's a great tool for making top-down walking sim story games (a genre I really like) that also has the flexibility to incorporate action game setpieces, dungeon crawls, and puzzles. That opens up a ton of possibilities for interesting storytelling.

When I made Atop the Witch's Tower, I did everything in DOSBox with the default ZZT editor. For non-standard colors, this meant importing hex-edited boards into my game and manually copying tiles from them. The ZZT editor also had the nasty habit of wiping object code when I had too many objects on the board at once. Most of the magic of ZZT's language was still present in the original level editor — but it was undeniably a pain in the ass. 

This time I used KevEdit, a tool originally made in the early 2000's to streamline ZZT dev. KevEdit's great! The biggest hurdle for most folks I suspect is that it's keyboard-only, but I enjoyed painting boards with the arrow keys. Beyond that it adds a ton of conveniences that weren't present in the original editor: easily building palettes of non-standard colors, removing boards, the random fill tool, importing and exporting object code for editing in a text editor, and a ton of other niceties. I was intimidated by all the options it offers up front, but I followed along with Dr. Dos's guide on the Museum of ZZT and got a handle on the essentials pretty quick.

I talked about how ZZT's object scripting is powerful, but there's one very interesting, irritating wrinkle to it. You can't take direct control of the player object, the way you can in RPGMaker. You can't move them, and you can't teleport them to a new board programmatically. There are ways around this: the big one is putting the actual player object in a corner and having them "pilot" a fake player object that actually interacts with the game (and CAN be controlled by object code). You can also spawn boulders on top of the player to move them, or something?? Basically the alternatives are weird and annoying, they add extra friction to both dev and to play. (There are tons of great games that make use of these approaches, I'm just relaying my own experiences here.)

Every time I've engaged with ZZT, I bump up against this limitation and grind my teeth. But I vibe with it more when I think of it as a creative challenge. ZZT wants me to make the player an active participant in the story. When I can't pause input and take control of the player, I have to completely rethink how I approach "cutscenes". I think both Atop the Witch's Tower and my new ZZT's story scenes would've been less impactful if ZZT let me take control of the player avatar, because I would've instinctively gone for lazier, less interesting solutions.

Those are my immediate thoughts after slamming out a short game in ZZT for the first time in ages. I'd like to spend more time making games in the tool, as well as more time playing other people's ZZTs. I love the original Town of ZZT and rabbitboots's Faux Amis (pictured below). I'd also like to play more of the classics Dr. Dos has celebrated over the years. I think other dev friends should give it a look — if you enjoy working in high-level tools with cool limitations, tools like Bitsy, RPGMaker, or Puzzlescript, I think you'll find something to connect with with ZZT.

Lockirby2's RPG Challenge Runs

Lockirby2 is one of my favorite youtubers I've kept up with over the last few years. I first found the channel through their excellent and instructive walkthrough of the original Kaizo Mario World. But the real fun has been keeping up with the Final Fantasy challenge run videos. I got a lot of joy from watching and reading along with the two most recent series, the FF6 0 EXP Solo Rotating Character Challenge and the FF7 Strahl Community Challenge, as they came out.

Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII are pretty gentle games for the most part. But they have a ton of hidden depth that I never picked up on playing the games casually. These challenge runs and their strict rulesets highlight their innumerable mechanical subtleties. Did you know Atma is vulnerable to Slow? Did you know JENOVA Life has a 1/N chance of using Aqualung every fourth turn, and N starts at 5 and gets lower as her HP decreases? Did you know, did you know, did you know—

I love these games. Getting to learn all these weird details and seeing the creative ways Lockirby2 exploits them is delightful. The videos push me hard to think critically about RPG systems; sraëka's games and criticism are the only works I can think of that make me feel similarly. 

I absolutely had to write a post after seeing them bring that same level of attention to detail to Facets (after I tactfully and humbly pointed them at it during a convo on discord). I really can't overstate how gratifying it was to watch the playthrough and read the commentary. It's a level of intense formal close reading I've never experienced for any of my games before. It feels incredible to get that kind of scrutiny specifically from someone I already really respected for their RPG design thoughts.

I want to make more turn-based games with hard, chunky boss fights someday. I want to make them enjoyable for casual play, but reward deeper engagement from knowledgeable players as well. Thoughtful criticism like this is gonna help me get there.