May Mini Review Roundup
Pseudoregalia
I don't have a lot to say about this one - to be honest, I wasn't even sure if I was going to finish it. And to be clear, there's a lot to like about pseudoregalia! As an N64 platformer tribute, it does a great job recreating the era's visuals (although I had to turn off the retro texture scaling) and it plays great, considering how closely it adheres to how big and blocky N64 platformers were; Castlevania 64 is an especially obvious influence. The world is just big enough that it takes some wandering around to find your footing, but also small enough that the bare-bones map is more than enough to keep you on the right track. It'd be nice if you had the option of placing your own markers for backtracking/100% purposes (by default it does not show you anything aside from what room you're currently in and how the rooms connect), but what's there gets the job done.
As far as metroidvanias go, psuedoregalia is a lot like the new Prince of Persia - the actual list of powerups is pretty underwhelming, but the underlying execution is so good that it doesn't matter. The list isn't very lengthy (the game is only about 6 hours long), nor will you find many surprises: a slide/long jump combo, a ground pound/high jump combo, a wall jump, a wall run, and a charge attack/projectile. But they way they flow together is so fluid, it's hard to fault this. Each area has a small handful of time trial challenges (usually for new outfits), and they're a lot of fun to try and clear. Much like, say, Ori and the Blind Forest, this is a game that feels balanced around you having your entire kit and going fast at all times.
If I do have any complaints, it's that the game's open structure can be a little frustrating to work with, especially in the midgame. You can go to pretty much any of the major areas once you get the high jump, but it's very easy to get yourself stuck in a situation where you can progress with your current kit, but you really should have a powerup from another area. I spent way too much time in the theater being frustrated by the finnicky wall jump mechanics, when the actual solution was that I needed to go to the tower and get the wall run ability, which then trivialized all the sections I was getting mad at. I'm also still not entirely sure how the wall jump mechanic is actually supposed to work. It can trigger for an absurdly long time after you press the jump button, and I missed far more ledges because of accidentally bouncing away from them than I ever reached with its help.
In the grand scheme of things? For $5, it rules and it's absolutely worth picking up if you like this style of game.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center
On paper, this looks like it should be right up my alley: a detective game where you investigate supernatural incidents and have to piece together which cryptid or other paranormal entity is responsible. And, for the first hour or so of each case, that's exactly what it provides. You spend a little while talking to your client and investigating the nearby area, then your boss calls you and is like "Ah, this must be BLOODY MARY!" Azami (the main character) has a short freak-out, then spends most of the rest of the case trying to figure out how this particular cryptid relates to what's going on and how they might be able to stop it. And this mostly works! What I wasn't prepared for was the game's big twist - it's secretly a Scooby Doo Simulator™. Much like how The Creeper is simply Old Man Jenkins underneath the mask, the "twist" to each of these cases is that they're being performed by good ol' boring humans. And this feels...weird? Or at least like it's wasting the game's premise. If it were played straight, something closer to...I dunno, Home Safety Hotline, I think I would have liked it more.
Mechanically, the game is divided into two phases. There's a social media component where you read through fake-Twitter to find keywords and try and learn more about the case and situations, then a point-and-click investigation phase where you wander around, examine stuff, and talk to people. As a slight complication to the latter, Azami has the power of "Clairvoyance," although not the way you're probably thinking - rather, she can see echoes of stuff in the world by wearing a special pair of glasses. There's a ghost near the entrance to an apartment, but whose? Is it THE MAN UNDER THE BED? Or the girl who lives in the apartment fleeing from him? The less Azami knows about the situation, the more abstract these ghosts appear, so it's kinda neat to see like, a centipede-dude crawling on the wall, but it's kind of inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The game is pretty easy as a whole, and while I wouldn't outright call it a visual novel, it definitely leans closer to that side of the scale than a detective or adventure game. Either way, the investigation portions are generally very linear and easy to follow.
The game is also pretty short. Each of the game's six cases take place a small handful of distinct locations, and can be cleared in an hour or two each, tops. Some of them also feel pretty rushed; you can see roughly where you are in each case by pulling up the summary in Azami's notebook, and there were multiple times where it felt like the game just got bored of the current setting. You'll discover a clue and the game will be like "That's it, Azami! You've cracked the case!" while I'm sitting there thinking that it doesn't answer any of the core questions about the mystery. At least the game's aesthetic is really good - the sprite art looks great and is well-animated, although I really wish everything had more splashes of color. The washed-out blue gets old pretty quickly.
For the $17 the game asks for, it's a pretty solid adventure game. It's not particularly long (about 10 hours, if you include the demo time), but it's mostly a good time, even if it struggles to stick the landing a little bit. Just lower your expectations a little - it's not a detective game and don't treat it as one.
Nocturne Demo
I don't remember what exactly caught my eye about Nocturne, but I was extremely interested to see how they were going to make a rhythm game-RPG hybrid work. And the answer is...better than I expected, I guess? On a basic level, it's a JRPG except combat takes the form of a short rhythm track (about a minute, maybe?). During combat, enemies will automatically attack you as their gauge fills up, and you'll passively regenerate HP at a slightly lower rate. However, you also have an attack meter that charges up (provided you don't miss notes, which pauses your attack meter), and you can unleash that attack with space to do damage to the enemy - doing bonus damage and stunning them if you hit them right before they unleash their own attack. Either kill the enemy by depleting their HP, or finish the entire track to win the fight. This works great for boss fights, where you have to survive the entire track length and it comes with neat phase gimmicks - the one in the demo causes your four tracks to get spread apart by a big flame wall, making it harder to follow notes. Against regular enemies, it's...okay. The first time you fight a new foe, you get a new battle track, have to learn a new foe's attack timing, etc, and it's not so bad. Once you've fought an encounter a couple times, however, it gets pretty sloggy. You can level up enough to dispatch weaker enemies halfway through the song, but it takes a while (level up bonuses are pretty small), and you'll never really get to that point against the stronger mobs. Spending a minute+ every single time you get spotted by a scorpion or a pillbug sucks, and I kinda hope they improve the damage scaling in the final game.
The music itself is pretty good, with battle music mostly being upbeat, JRPG-y battle themes and the boss theme being appropriately chant-y and epic. The pixel art is Fine, the overworld exploration is good enough, but the menus feel really unfinished. Everything uses a very blocky format that screams "default Unity menus," and I really hope they get something more interesting because it feels very out of place compared to the rest of the game's art.
The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy Demo
Is that right? It's some combination of those words, fuck if I remember which one.
Anyway, this is the real Kodaka/Uchikoshi collab that we've been promised for years: the best parts of Danganronpa and Zero Escape, combined with a vaguely Persona-esque social stat system and a perfunctory SRPG. And as good as the reviews have been, this is not a small undertaking by any means - multiple reviews have stated to get all 100 endings, you're easily looking at 100-120+ hours of game time, which...man, that's a lot of fucking game. Certainly more than I'm interested in committing to right now, regardless of how I feel about the demo.
The actual plot is fairly straightforward (at least to start), and I strongly suspect that Kodaka wrote this part of it - Humanity lives in artificial domes, and we join our normie MC, Takumi, in the Tokyo Residential Center. He and his girlfriend are on the way to school when aliens attack, a weird mascot character gives him a dagger to stab himself with, he gets an anime power up, and then he's swiftly taken to the titular Last Defense Academy. There, he and his other classmates are told that they need to defend the school from the previously mentioned aliens for 100 days, lest they get their hands on something inside the building which will subsequently result in the death of humanity. Apparently, this branch takes about 30 hours to clear, at which point you unlock the flowchart and can begin to track down the other 99 endings - seems a little excessive to me, frankly, but if this is the game that Kodaka and Uchikoshi wanted so badly, then who am I to judge?
Ultimately, a game like this lives or dies with its characters, and they are...okay, I guess. It's hard to get too much of a read on anyone in hour 3 of 120, but it's certainly not a good sign that my immediate reaction was "Wow, I hate at least half of you!" Some characters, like Hiroka and Eito are pretty good! They quickly take in the circumstances and have fairly sensible reactions to what's going on. Some would be fine if not for their gimmick, Tsubasa chief among them (she is constantly just about to throw up), and most of the rest are just hot garbage. Do you love characters that complain about everything and just want to get back to normal? How about that guy who worships his sister to a fetishistic degree? The guy with no self-esteem? No, no, less that that. Keep going. Even lower. These are some real winners, you need to set your expectations accordingly.
When you aren't reading about everyone's favorite set of caricatures, the actual "game" part of it is divided into two halves. The SRPG half is...fine, I guess. The main gimmick is the "desperation" attack that each character can use, allowing them to use what's functionally their limit break for free when they're at critical HP, but removing them from the battlefield for the rest of the wave. When to make a tactical retreat vs. when to go out in a blaze of glory seems to be the core of the strategy, and it works well enough. No one will ever confuse it for Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, but it gets the job done and I'd rather play this than the combat parts of, say, 13 Sentinels. Outside of battle, you can spend your free time hanging out with friends to increase your social stats (which you need to power up your weapons and characters), or do mock battles to get extra experience.
On the whole, I didn't hate the demo, but it didn't really convince me to take the plunge, either. Knowing that it's so long and with so many routes, the plot is almost a non-entity - outside of the general premise, I expect that most of the routes will feature at least one major divergence (and possibly many more), so even if you hate what's currently happening, there'll be another one coming up soon enough. What it means, though, is that the game will really be leaning on those characters and I don't know if I have it in me for that.