The way I see it, there could be three things going on: 1) Vanillaware was so done with this game after ten years of development and didn’t want to spend a minute more contributing to their first PC port, 2) they are still ignorant/disbelieving of the recent ascendancy of the PC market despite Sega and Atlus surely pushing otherwise, or 3) someone high up at Vanillaware doesn’t want mods.
We’ve seen the aversion to modding for whatever reason with Japanese developers for a while now. Sometimes they get fiercely protective.
The legality of the emulation itself has long been established, but I’ve been concerned for a while that illegal DRM circumvention of the games themselves has been a viable legal avenue. Under the DMCA, even the process to dump your own legally-licensed games has arguably been in a legal grey area for a while now, with how they are locked down. If any method to playing the games become illegal, any unauthorized emulation of games becomes de facto illegal.
I’d cite legal precedent here, but there’s been a substantial right-wing, pro-corporate shift in American courts over time. Who knows how this will go.
I love the mods and graphical upgrades. For example, the “FFT Complete” hack on PSX is still my preferred way to play Final Fantasy Tactics, and I can get a buttery-smooth 60fps on Link’s Awakening (2019).
Lately I’ve also been dabbling into CRT filters with mixed success. Every now and then I’ll get the nostalgia buzz, but a lot of the time I feel like I’m just looking at a game with visible scanlines. I’ve heard it’s better on 4K displays though, and I don’t have regular access to one.
As a heads up, don’t read the Gamespot review if you’re carefully avoiding spoilers. The review tries to discuss the ending without revealing too much but wasn’t entirely successful.
Last week I went deep into Next Fest and came up with a bunch of demos, to varying success. Tried Synergy (promising), Sword of Convallaria (great, but deeply concerned about the mobile/gacha systems), Guild Saga: Vanished Worlds (not great, borrows shamelessly from Divinity: Original Sin 2), and Balatro (surprisingly interesting).
For now, I’m kind of bouncing around, not being able to settle on anything. Might go back to Atelier Ayesha tonight.
I don’t watch a ton of anime, but it’s certainly the best I’ve seen (or heard of, for that matter). The recent Castlevania is good too, but I don’t even know if that counts?
That’s near the top of the list of what I’ve been working on. I got snagged again by something I remembered hating about the main quest last time, getting stuck in one system working through it. This time was particularly awful because it kept sending me back to the same extreme world to do it, ugh.
Now I’m just trying to find a semi-permanent base location. Finding a comfortable biome that doesn’t look ugly to me has been shockingly diffcult 😅
A terrible loss for the industry, especially after getting a new startup off the ground. Beloved by the Suikoden community. His new game was only a couple months away.
I played a bit of Terranigma this past week for a Discord Game of the Month run. Would love to see this and Illusion of Gaia get remasters with script updates.
Currently playing No Man’s Sky. This is my third attempt with it since it came out, and it’s going a lot better so far this time around. Ironically, it might have been the things missing from Starfield that finally whetted my appetite for what this game has to offer.
This is a meaty demo, taking me a little over 2 hours.
As someone who adored the “City Building” series by Impressions (Caesar, Pharaoh, Emperor) and thought going in that Synergy had similar vibes, it’s about what I expected. It has a lot of similar systems with plenty of different resources, both physical and “well-being,” which is like Desirability. It does away with the really fussy stuff like city walkers and labor availability, and instead gives buildings a range of effect. Travel time for your populace still appears to be important (like Tropico).
It also has its fair share of jank. Building work orders are by far the biggest problem; you can only assign one task, and even when there are available resources for an alternative task, the building will just idle. This is especially bad in the gathering huts because you have to manually select the plants to collect from, and plants have multiple resources (but only one mode is available at a time). I could see this being a recipe for micromanagement hell. There are some other small issues I figure will be resolved for the full release, like missing ambient audio from the settlement itself and untranslated elements, although the translation itself was good (this was developed by a French studio and publisher in case you couldn’t tell; no native English speaker in their right mind would release a video game named Synergy).
Overall, I’m interested. I also got the impression it might be a continuous city campaign, unlike the chapters you’d get in the City Building or Tropico series, which could be a fun change of pace. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a release date.
Finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - Torna: the Golden Country last week. The gameplay was largely the same, and I didn’t find that to be the base game’s strength. I mostly liked the story but the dozens of forced side quests absolutely killed any pacing it had going for it, and there was sidequest-styled filler even before that in the main questline. On top of that, I have a few nits to pick about how the story closed out. Ultimately I was rather disappointed, considering I’d heard a lot of positive word-of-mouth on this over the years.
For now, I’ve got one more year left in Atelier Meruru, so I’m going to see about closing that one out. This is probably going to end up being my favorite in the series so far, but I’m really looking forward to the games with the looser/no time limits.
I also just started the demo for Synergy, an upcoming city builder in the style of Pharaoh and Emperor. Mostly good, but the biggest problem by far is that the buildings need a more developed work-order system. Could see this being a worthy successor in this genre.