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13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PS5) by dkirschner (Mar 10th, 2025 at 17:15:54) |
This is a visual novel/RTS hybrid for the PS4 that I'd never heard of until I was looking for PS5 games. It's really well reviewed and caught my eye since it's from Vanillaware, who has made some great RPGs.
One thing to note is that although it’s a genre hybrid, its constituent genres are presented in unique ways. I haven’t played too many visual novels, but this one has more interactivity than what I have played. You control characters (13 of them) in wonderfully drawn 2.5d locales. Each scene looks hand-painted. The game is beautiful. But, you run around and talk to other characters like an RPG, exploring different story branches for each character, all of which contribute to telling the whole complex narrative. As you talk to characters, you discover “thoughts” and consider them in your “thought cloud.” Having more thoughts opens new interactions and branching pathways.
On the RTS side, battles involve your squad of up to 6 characters defending a node in the center of the screen. It’s not tower defense, not that kind of defending. It’s also not really MOBA-esque. It’s more like a horde mode, except it’s an RTS instead of a shooter. Hordes of kaiju are encroaching on all sides, gunning for the central node, and you need to prevent them from destroying it.
So, those are the two halves of the game. Do the “Japanese high school” sim thing, then do the “kaiju mech combat” thing.
I found the visual novel portion to be far more compelling than the RTS portion. The story is very complicated, which made it fun to try and follow. It’s also well-written, with a useful encyclopedia of people, places, and things, as well as the option to rewatch any scene you want to. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with something like this (nor cared to), but it was so creative, and they throw a lot of twists and turns at you, so it was consistently exciting. There are 13 protagonists, numerous other characters, and like 5 time periods (yes, time travel). And the story is told in a completely nonlinear way, as you bounce around from character to character, with scenes unfolding anywhere across the span of the like 200 years that the game takes place in. This means that some of the protagonists are different people in different times or timelines. This was confusing at first, but once you realize this is happening, you just need to learn who is who when. To make it even crazier, you learn that some characters are androids, others have implanted memories, some characters are figments of imagination, and others appear to be cats. And since they’re in high school and this is a visual novel, they are all romantically attracted to someone.
The RTS part didn’t engage me as much because it was simple compared to the thought-provoking story. It’s connected, of course, but you basically earn upgrade points (can’t recall the actual name) throughout the story and by racking up high scores in combat. Spend those on unlocking and upgrading special attacks. Deploy your forces, and on normal at least, you will easily win all battles until the very end on normal by using basic tactics. There are four classes of sentinel (the giant mechs that the teens pilot to fight the kaiju): a brawler, a long-range one, an “all-rounder,” and one that flies. They’ve all got their strengths. Brawlers do big damage up close to ground enemies. Long-range sentinels get some powerful missile barrage attacks. Some characters are geared toward support. It didn’t seem to really matter what I upgraded. I actually just applied upgrade points completely evenly across all equipped skills for all characters (get everyone’s skills to level 2, then all to level 3, then all to level 4, etc.). And I totally ignored putting upgrade points into base stats. I am sure this is all more important on higher difficulties. Like I said though, it did get hard on normal at the very end. I turned the difficulty down to easy for the last two battles because I kept dying to a boss. Easy is easy.
So yeah, that’s 13 Sentinels. The visual novel part was great and the RTS part was fun enough to carry me to the next visual novel part. It also took me quite a bit longer to play than I thought it would, and I’m not sure why. On the plus side, I got a lot of exercise done while playing since it was so much reading! Step, step, step.
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Call Of Duty Mobile (Other) by Mercy (Feb 26th, 2025 at 16:16:40) |
Hey,hello I've just created a gamelog today on Call of dutyobile.
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Fez (PS3) by jp (Feb 23rd, 2025 at 18:22:49) |
Oh wait, I did post!
lol.
Ok, so here's what I recall from the first time I played - over ten years ago now. I remembered it was fun and interesting and not too difficult and that I started to get overwhelmed with secret stuff and not knowing where I was in the game. It's the sort of game that, now that I started it over again (and I'm 5 hours in, and about 85% complete according to the menu), doesn't go down well if you stop playing for too long. This is mostly because it's not easy to move around the different areas of the game - even with the map - so you have to kind of remember everything... Right now I'm trying to get to 32 cubes - I've picked up a few blue ones (I think it's nice that these also count towards the number you need) - and once I get them, I go through a special door and that should be the end.
The game does "hold up" really well - it still feels fun and reasonably fresh. It doesn't help much that I finished Tunic not too long ago, and both games rely a lot on secrets and discovery. Here the secrets feel a bit more awkward - especially the "do this input on the controller" ones...not a big fan of those, and while Tunic and Fez both have them, they seem better in Tunic than here...
Now that I'm on the "get the last cubes I need" run - and stuck on an annoying rising-lava level - I'm starting to get more annoyed with the navigation across the world. The map does help - once you figure out how to navigate it, but it's annoying to have to figure out (again) which doors go to where so chart a path back to the beginning. It's not quite "metroidvania backtracking" but worse in many ways...because there's puzzling involved...
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Fez (PS3) by jp (Feb 23rd, 2025 at 18:15:47) |
Huh.
So, I knew I had played Fez for maybe an hour or so. I must have created the GameLog but never actually wrote anything. And here I am today, 2 PS generations later playing it on PS5 and NOT bouncing off the game as I did before.
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Persona 5 Strikers (PS4) by jp (Feb 18th, 2025 at 11:58:55) |
I've decided to bounce off this game - which is a weird thing to say. I haven't played it in a few weeks and I'm worried that I'll have forgotten everything about it. So, I'm sort of admitting to a bit of laziness. I don't feel up to remembering, learning, figuring things out in this game when, from the few hours I played, I wasn't terribly engaged or interested. It was pretty overwhelming and...fiddly. Like, I didn't understand what the point of a lot of it was. To be fair, I did not play Persona 5, and I'm guessing for people who are old hands at this series...they probably either slipped right in or bemoaned how much tutorializing there was and how annoying and so on. So, the game's creators are both damned if they do and damned if they don't...
The game also seemed very overwhelming in action - I'm supposed to assign orders to teammates, see what they're doing, plan my own attacks and combos...and I felt like button mashing just seemed more efficient (and effective). Which isn't really a good sign, no? As in, it really deflates any interest in figuring out systems and attacks and all the rest.
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
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2282 registered gamers and 3246 games. 7777 GameLogs with 13258 journal entries. 5108 games are currently being played.
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The Last Guardian (PS4) by Chimes |
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most recent entry: Thursday 23 February, 2017
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An interesting mechanic in The Last Guardian is the use of the “Call Trico” button. Essentially, you should be able to call or direct Trico with this button, but it rarely works unless you’re going the right way. This was interesting to me primarily because of the dog/human relationship. Usually, the human would be in control of instructing the dog, but instead, Trico directs you everywhere, in a sense. Trico primarily goes where you are supposed to go next, and the button seems to function more as a “Trico’ll do what you say if it’s what it wants to do, anyway.” I liked how the boy and Trico were essentially partners in this way. Most games have dogs that merely function as a sidekick, yet here you’re equals.
I think it therefore must have been a conscious choice to make the Protagonist a small boy, and Trico dog-like. In our society, we consider children and pets to be vulnerable, and dependent. Of course, Trico is a large beast, but his mannerisms are similar to a pet’s (from playing in the water to being enthralled by the smell of treats). It evokes empathy for something we have seen before. Similarly, the young boy, while enduring feats many adults could not, still has mannerisms like a child. When he pets Trico or runs, it is childishly clumsy. By putting these two archetypes together, we feel a need to protect them against danger.
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