Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

A World of Snacks

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This morning I am going to talk a bit about Snack World a game that I have been playing on the switch. It showed up in January on the North American store front, but has actually been available in Japan since April of 2017. Not entirely certain why the extremely lag between the two other than maybe because of the recent ARPG renaissance someone decided a localization was financially viable? I am not terribly far into the game but I do feel like I have a general feel for the flow of things. Snack World The Dungeon Crawl Gold is a nonsense title, but honestly at least on some level this is a nonsense game.

It comes from Level-5 which may not be a name you recognize but I am almost certain that you recognize some of the games they have created. They are behind the Yo-Kai Watch series, LBX, Fantasy Life, and the Professor Layton series among others. So the pedigree of the game was solid going into it, and the end product feels like this weird amalgam of Dragon Quest, Gauntlet, and Pokemon or more truthfully Yo-Kai Watch. The game is set in the Kingdom of Tutti-Frutti where almost everything is some sort of a food or animal based pun. Instead of Cinderella you have Ciderella who is apparently the leader of an elite strike force of commandos in this universe.

The kingdom is also apparently addicted to mobile technology and everyone has a Pix-e Pod which serves as the mechanical means of accessing all of the things you collect. Your gear is in theory materialized from your device as are the various summons that you can collect and a lot of the early missions revolve around unlocking specific features. The last thing I unlocked was the Pix-e Tunes app which allows me to play specific tracks from the game that you collect while roaming around. The Pix-e Pedia serves as a sort of PokeDex for the game and as you encounter new things you can then go back and view information about them and see what your familiarity rating is with that creature which influences how likely they are to drop a summon card for you.

The core gameplay loop involves setting forth on missions which come in a bunch of forms, but as of yet largely seem to be more open over world zones or multi floor dungeons. You ultimately stay in a mission until one of two conditions are met, either you fulfill the objectives and reach a warp point allowing you to teleport out or your party is wiped. The good thing is even in the case of a wipe and ultimately a quest failure you are allowed to keep everything you have looted up to that point. This mechanic becomes super important when you realize that you are not going to make it through every mission on the first attempt.

The game has a certain measure of mindless grinding needed to move forward, or at least I need it to be able to succeed. Very quickly into the game you are presented a quest to defeat Medusa in Gorgonzola Ruins. When you get the quest you are likely going to be character level 2 or 3 and the quest itself is ranked as level 7. You probably could in theory be able to progress through the zone and defeat it if you are terribly good at the game. I however am not and am having to grind other content in the attempt to level my character up enough to make it all the way through the multi-tiered dungeon successfully.

In theory you could just take it slow and easy and work your way through the dungeon. However the game has a measure in place to keep you from doing this. Remember me comparing it to Gauntlet? I did so because in gauntlet there was a creature type called Death that would rush towards the player and drain their life and was seemingly invulnerable to attacks. You could in theory use a bomb potion if you had one available, but ultimately it became a race to keep mobs between you and it and to find your way out of the level. Something similar happens here when a grim reaper named Popsicle that shows up if you are taking too long to exit a dungeon floor and will begin tracking its way to your location and effectively one or two shot you. There are supposedly ways to defeat this creature but I have not yet encountered them and as a result this is something constantly making me try and go faster.

If you manage to clear an objective you are showered in loot… or at least given some items. There are a number of situational chests that can be gained for various objectives. You get a chest for your first time doing something, another for not allowing any party members to be KO’d, and even one for not taking a sip of health potion. In a good run you can walk away with four or five chests, but the vast majority of these are probably just going to be crafting materials and not anything terribly exciting. I mean unless you are one item away from crafting a new piece of gear, then I guess they would be fairly exciting.

So when I say I am not terribly far into the game, I have yet to beat the first dungeon. I am in a pattern of running around and grinding the early missions trying to level up and gain crafting materials to get better gear. This is a bit of an old screenshot but as of last night I am level 5 and have crafted a full set of Greenhorn gear. One of the videos I watched on taking down Medusa showed the player at level 12, so I probably have a lot more grinding in front of me which gets into the only negative. Right now I have 2 over world missions, 1 slime specific hunt and then the dungeon itself to grind on. It feels like the lack of content diversity may be a problem because I feel like at this early stage in the game I should not be grinding the same thing over and over. That said maybe that is representative of what the game is like as a whole and it might be good that it is at least showing you that early on.

It is a fun little game filled with charming moments, but I can’t help feeling like maybe this started its life as something targeting Android or iOS and then morphed into a Switch title. Level-5 has released mobile games and it feels like maybe it is itemized in a way to push players to buy a little currency. The items sold in the game are using a currency called Gravies, and to buy any upgrade weapons you need somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 100 Gravies. Having spent NONE so far… I am only sitting at 22, and the “Gashapon” game requires 100 Gravies per attempt at getting the chase weapon. You do occasionally get free draw tickets so I am guessing the way it is itemized they expect no one will actually pay that 100 Gravies cost.

The interaction of running dungeons is enjoyable but I am not sure yet if I am going to gain enough traction to really feel like I am fully engaged with the game yet. However since I have been playing it off and on the last few nights I thought I would at least talk about it this morning. I’m still however on the fence about if I would ultimately suggest it to someone. If you were like me and were looking for an ARPG other than Diablo to play on the Switch, it might be something worth checking out. I think we are all sorta in a holding pattern until the release of Animal Crossing New Horizon.

The Hero Genre

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I should have been doing more productive things last night, but I ended up spending the vast majority of my time playing City of Heroes Homecoming. I’ve had all of this nostalgia creep up on me and attack. I guess in some small way I didn’t realize quite how much I had missed having a Super Hero genre MMO. Champions Online was a massive disappointment and while CoH is not exactly a “modern” MMO, the core functionality is still extremely enjoyable. While I have heckled some of the projects trying to recreate this game in the past, I guess having experienced it once more that I absolutely understand where they are coming from. For me City of Heroes was a weird footnote between playing Horizons and getting into the World of Warcraft Beta. Once I moved on to Azeroth I really didn’t spend any time looking back at this game, but I have a feeling that it was to my own detriment.

While I dabbled a little bit with the City of Villains beta, I never actually played that game when it was live. Additionally I have never played any of the more faction based content that came into the game with Going Rogue. The tweaks that have been made are noticeable and interesting, and even in Atlas Park the “newbie” zone I am seeing the beginnings of a larger story arc against the Arachnos that serve as the larger factional villains of the game. The more time spent in the game the more I am remembering about the finer points of questing and how to build a character. I should be playing other things but for whatever reason this is just deeply compelling to me at the moment.

I ultimately went speed for my travel power tree, but I am wondering if I am going to regret this. Teleport Other was one of my favorite abilities where I could “yoink” a single target out of the pack and use it to both pull and give me a head start on burning that target down. Hasten from the speed tree however is the “correct” choice to make for any sort of a melee character, and I ultimately went down the path of the min-maxer instead of following my heart. I managed to get to seven last night before wandering off and picking back up on the FFXIV Main Story Quest. Tonight I am likely going to be spending my time trying to catch up in Wolcen as the rest of my crew has not been nearly as distracted this week as I have and as a result is probably way ahead of me in the leveling.

Paragon City

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Most of last night I spent working in Final Fantasy XIV on the Main Story Quest. I am taking things rather slow and spent a good chunk of the night actually playing with my kitten Josie instead of rapidly going through the quest line. I am enjoying myself quite a bit and finding the story beats to be interesting. I have no clue how big of a story patch 5.1 is but I have a feeling I am nowhere near closed to the end of it. Then I still have 5.2 sitting in front of me, and I have been fervently avoiding reading much of anything on FFXIV to in theory avoid spoilers. I’m also enjoying what little combat I have done with the Samurai and in theory if I do come back for any extended period of time I will likely just be focusing on that job.

However that is not going to be the focus of this mornings post. Last week I talked about playing SWG Legends a bit because Tam has been back playing it seriously. I talked about how I was not exactly sure how big of a component nostalgia had for me when it comes to playing outdated games. While I have been thoroughly distracted as yesterdays post indicates, I also am not sure if I love Star Wars Galaxies. At the very least I do not love the game in the manner that Tam loves the game. I see in him a bit of myself, every time I tried to convince someone how amazing of a game Everquest II was if they would just give it a chance and forgive its rough edges. He looks at this game like I have looked at so many of my passion projects, and without that love and care behind the en-devour I am not sure if I can really latch onto it. What I see instead is a game that is grossly outdated and requires more of me than I am willing to give it other than at a purely casual level.

This however lead me down a path to explore games that I do have deep feelings about. Namely I have known for awhile that City of Heroes Homecoming existed, but have really made no attempts to engage with it. The process for installing the Everquest Emulators have made me gunshy about going down the road to trying out other similar projects. However I originally messed with the EQ Emulators in the mid 2000s and this is now 2020 and thankfully the projects have evolved. Thankfully in the case of COH you have two steps essentially the first being to sign up for a forum account and then create your game login here. Next create a directory on your hard drive that you want to store City of Heroes in, download the Tequila client and run it as administrator. This downloads the game from scratch and will serve as your patcher while playing.

It was not long at all before I was creating a brand new character and poking my way around Paragon City. The interface is a little kludgier than I remember it, but for the time it was absolutely revolutionary. I created a version of my favorite character from live, the Katana/Regen Scrapper and we will see if it is as broken as it was back then. If nothing else it should serve as a good vehicle for exploring the game since it has both decent damage output and solid survival. Nostalgia helps a lot because I was pretty happy to roam around and complete quests, even eventually remembering how to slot enhancements and all of that fun stuff. I barely got a start last night but I expect to be poking around over the next several days at least.

Since I was clearly not in my right mind… I also went through the process of getting set up to play Everquest 1999. I’ve started a Dark Elf Shadowknight and I plan on setting up a second login server account so I can create a Dark Elf Cleric to run with it. I plan on dual boxing a bit because I have honestly missed doing that. I could of course return to my duo of characters in EQ2 live, but part of me wants to see Everquest again in all its early 2000s glory since I have been poking my head around in the game that came after it. I mean I will be hated by most everyone as a Dark Elf, but I never really played that side of the house on live. The other option would have been to create a pair of Dwarves and I legitimately might do that as well to see my old stomping grounds of Butcherblock. I realize this is just further distractions but I am enjoying myself so I guess that is fine.

Thoroughly Distracted

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Last night I returned to Final Fantasy XIV or at least attempted to. I had not played much since the first or second week after the release of the Eden raid. If my math is right this would have been around the beginning of August, and after doing my traditional FFXIV thing of leveling my tank and a dps class I checked out in a massive way. I’ve more or less purposefully been holding off knowing that if I could come back with a large chunk of MSQ to consume I might be able to stick around long enough to get into the swing of things. As a result I did not return when 5.1 released and since last night was the launch of 5.2 I decided that was a reasonable time to start poking my head back into the game.

I did not make a ton of progress and more or less unlocked the first dungeon and ran it with a trust. I did not at all expect the Crystal Exarch to fill the tank role… but the fact that he was a Paladin makes some measure of sense as far as tank roles go. I am playing my Samurai figuring it will be easier to get back into the game if I am able to do so with limited responsibility. My biggest challenge with FFXIV has been the fact that the game expects everyone to be a DPS, and if that is the case I might as well just play an actual DPS. I am of the mindset that Tanks should be Tanks and Healers should be Healers and if they can throw the occasional damage dealing spell awesome… but FFXIV is a game that has devolved into a state where everyone is expected to have an optimized dps rotation. I can’t say if this trip back into FFXIV is going to stick or not but at a minimum I will probably gobble up the main story quest and we will play it by ear after that.

Also happening yesterday was the launch of a new in game Destiny 2 mini-cinematic showing an a confrontation between Osiris and Rasputin. I guess this means that unlike the rumors of maybe going back to the Prison of Elders we will once again be entangling ourselves in some manner with the Warmind. I am split in a bunch of different directions this week because it is probably the last Iron Banner of Season of the Dawn and I really would like to earn a set of the armor available in its 2.0 variant. It was my favorite of the Iron Banner armor sets and I am sure with the changing of the seasons it will be gone. I am also sitting at level 60 of 100 and would feel sad if I did not manage to grind out all of the season levels.

Then there is Wolcen which I am completely enamored with and want to play more of. I was super happy to find out that cosmetic choices are on a per slot level and not per gear, so if you swap gear your cosmetic choices stay put. The only thing that I have done so far is hide my helmet because quite honestly I usually hate helmets in video games. I’ve not made a ton of progress because of course last night I was distracted by Final Fantasy XIV, so add this to the list of games that are pulling me in different directions.

Finally at some point I really want to finish off Mars: War Logs and see where that story goes… so that is a 4th game to throw on the pile of things fighting for my attention. On top of all of this… something has been going around at work and causing people to drop like flies and yesterday my direct boss as knocked out of commission by it. Last night I did not feel amazing and this morning I am feeling completely awful, so I am wondering if I am about to go on my own roller coaster ride of illness. Basically I have gone from being super single threaded on single player games… to being distracted constantly by the allure of multiplayer games that I am playing in a single player manner. I feel like for the entirety of this decade I have been living in this state of having way too much that I want to be playing.