I’ve played through a couple games and wanna take this second to talk about them.
Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus
Senran Kagura is honestly a sort of beloved franchise for me. If you’ve read some of my blog posts before, follow me on Twitter, or have ever looked at my steam library, that’s not a surprising statement in the slightest. I have just about all the SK available on Steam in my Library, and some on my PS4 and Switch to boot, and I’ve even watched the anime. There’s not a particularly deep reason I enjoy this franchise; it’s pretty face-up about what it offers - Dynasty Warriors-esque gameplay and a bunch of hot ninja girls. Very open & shut case here, friends.
This past month I played through Shinovi Versus, which was basically the beginning of Senran Kagura as I currently know it. This is when the series showed up the PS Vita(and later PS4) and transitioned to the Musou-style gameplay that I primarily know it for. This game is pretty fun. Now, having played Burst Renewal before this, I’ve kinda been spoiled. Gameplay-wise, both of the game that release after this game, Estival Versus and Burst Renewal, build upon the gameplay in this title. This is the weakest of the three titles by virtue of having been the first. It’s still plenty fun, but they iterated and improved on this formula, and I quite literally went backwards, gameplay-wise, playing this. The most notable thing is that your big super move is locked to being at low health, a thing you’re actively trying to avoid in a games like these where your final health is part of your score/grade. Not a deal-breaker, but you see what I mean.
Senran Kagura’s story & character work is not the selling point, but they are sticking points. The girls all have their backstories and relationships that give them some depth and stop them from being walking pairs of tits. This is the game that introduced us to the Gessen and New Hebijo girls. Honestly, I do like them all well enough, but the Hanzou & OG Hebijo girls stick take it for me, so I’m glad they’re all still around. Ikaruga & Hikage are still best girls The premise is kinda silly, but there are nice character moments that come from it, and it knows it’s very stupid. I’m willing to meet media where it’s at. SK is a series of silly Shinobi girls doing silly shit and occasionally having hot-blooded fights and getting their clothes ripped. There are real emotional beats there, and they’re done well, but the series is more fun than serious.
Senran Kagura is like Junk Food, and I say that with as much affection as I possibly can. Junk Food for my soul. If I want a dumb smile on my face for a little bit, this series can deliver. I’m glad to have played this series.
Tsukihime
In 2000, a good while before they would drop the nuke that was Fate/Stay Night, Type-Moon released Tsukihime, a visual novel about a crazy young man falling in love with a vampire lady.
I’ve been adjacent to Tsukihime for a pretty long while now. I’ve basically spent the better part of the last 5 years playing Melty Blood and reading Nasuverse-related things. I’ve been introduced to the cast of Tsukihime twice, and have seen them out of the regular context of their home game a decent number of times now, but it wasn’t until recently that I finally started reading the actual VN. As of the time of writing, I’ve complete the Arc, Ciel, and Akiha routes; only Hisui and Kohaku are left, but I didn’t really feel like waiting much longer to start writing this. Also, I feel like it would’ve been weird to start the game here and then wait until like December or something to comment on it. So here we are.
Tsukihime follows Shiki Tohno, a young man burdened with being able to see “the death of things” in the form of lines of everything and every person he sees. If he ever cuts those lines, whatever it belonged to dies(or gets destroyed, in the case of objects). One day, he ends up moving back home to live with his sister in their childhood mansion and ends up cutting a random white lady he saw on street into pieces on the way home. She then shows up the next day seemingly unscathed, asking what hell that was for. Chaos happens.
Tsukihime is pretty solid. I went in pretty blind. Just playing Melty doesn’t give me too much context as to what’s up with these characters aside from the fact that Ciel can fight, so I was able to experience the story mostly spoiler-free. I ended up appreciating all the heroines and even Shiki, in his own way. Shiki is pretty fucked up in the head, but in a different way from Shirou from Fate. Being able to kill things so casually has done a number on his outlook on life, and the story puts him in a lot of stressful situations that really make him question whether he’s a sane person at all, let alone a good one.
Obviously, though, the heroines leave an even bigger impression. Arc’s story isn’t particularly complicated, but I didn’t expect the girl I see do nothing but smile in Melty Blood have such a sad story. With Ciel, I got to appreciate her outside of the context of fighting; even outside of her route, she really does try to do right by Shiki as a friend. She’s a strong person. Akiha was the biggest surprise for me. She’s a real one. That’s all I can say. Changed my view on her completely in the best way possible. I’m not big on the brother-sister thing, but damn she deserves a happy ending.
I fully expect Hisui & Kohaku endings to break my brain.
You can play Tsukihime in your web browser here
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes
I mentioned Travis Strikes Again when I talked about the original No More Heroes a little while ago. Well, by the grace of Krypto the Superdog, I have found my PS4’s power cable and was able to finish my first playthrough of the game.
Now, my playtime has been fragmented by a good year or so because of how often I forget my PS4 exists + me losing the power cable, but I caught myself up to speed pretty quickly. The Individual game worlds being self-contained + the actual plot outside of Travis and Badman trying to bring Bad Girl back to life being told in reports anyway did a lot.
Speaking of that, I should do a small aside to properly introduce the game here. Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is a an action game released in 2019. This game is basically a very important side-story that takes place between NMH2 and 3 that also serves a meta retrospective on Suda51’s time in the game industry. It plays as a top-down hack n slash game with story segments told via VN format.
TSA probably wasn’t the ideal introduction to NMH, but it’s the one I got, and I’m personally pleased with it. The Travis in this game is more chill than in the original NMH, more tired, too. I don’t know the specifics of what happened in NMH2, but He clearly decided that it was time to fuck off somewhere so he could get away from all the killing that’s been filling his life. Honestly, even after playing NMH1, it’s not hard to imagine Travis doing this. But anyway, bad Man, the father of bad Girl, one of the bosses of NMH and therefore, someone that Travis killed, wants revenge, and tracks down Travis to his trailer in Texas. They start fighting and get sucked inside a magical game console. If they collect all 7 death balls for the Death Drive console, they get a wish, so Travis teams up with Bad Man to collect and bring back Bad Girl. There is a pretty wild plot point happening in the background of all this that I will let you read for yourself; I’ve given you the basic outline of the story.
The gameplay is pretty fun. Travis & Bad Man can equip skill chips to give themselves a bunch of special abilities, so you can try out a lot of builds and have some fun with the otherwise very simple combat. Each game world has a different gimmick, and it’s incorporated in different ways. One world has you actively running around trying to solve a puzzle while having to outrun a ghostly head that will one-shot you and another briefly turns the game into a racing game, and yet another basically has you play Asteroids.
The bosses are all pretty sick, and they’re all tragic in their own ways, and it’s through them that we see how different Travis is from the first game. For an Otaku like Travis, these guys were like heroes, so while part of him is clearly hype about getting to have an epic showdown, he’s not particularly happy about having to cut them down. The pre & post-battle dialogue does a lot to let us see Travis’ growth between the first game and now.
The music is also godlike.
I haven’t extensively followed Suda’s career like others. I’m mainly a NMH guy, but I am curious about all his other stuff. Very much so. Suda has proven himself to be my kinda guy. It’s clear that Dr. Juvenile, the creator of the Death Drive and the games for it, is an allegory for Suda himself and his time in game dev. Hell, one of the levels in this game is a sequel to Shadows of The Damned that has npcs talking about budget constraints. This is a personal game for Suda, and while some of it is lost on me, I still get the message in the end, and I appreciate that he put so much of himself into the game. I said it last time and I’ll say it again - It’s so obvious that Suda loves games and that’s my favorite thing about TSA. This game ain’t perfect, but it’s earnest as all hell and I can’t not love that.
Game’s dope. I’m definitely gonna replay it on a harder difficulty and I will absolutely play that Shinobu DLC.
Bloodstained: Ritual of The Night
Released in 2019, Bloodstained: RItual of The Night is Koji Igarashi’s personal spiritual successor to Castlevania, a series he was a leader on until he got fed up with Konami not doing anything with the franchise and left.
Bloodstained is one of those titles I looked at and immediately knew I wanted to play it. I backed it on kickstarter with the quickness and got my PC copy when it launched, and bought it again on PS4 to show more support. Now, while I’ve beaten its Spin-off game Curse of The Moon, before, I took until this year to sit down and properly beat Bloodstained in full, and nowadays, the game’s complete. There’s so much more shit in this game now than when I got it. Collab stuff, randomizer mode, and even some DLC that I recently copped. So maybe it’s a good thing I waited. I haven’t done the DLC yet, but I have beaten the main game’s three endings.
Bloodstained has the very straightforward premise of Miriam, a girl who experimented on by Alchemists and then put to sleep for a decade, waking up to find that her friend has summoned a demonic castle filled with Demons. Determined to smack some sense into him, she heads into the castle backed by her human alchemist homeboy, a big-tiddy Nun, her old teacher, and a Samurai(How the fuck did he get there???).
This is definitely one of metroidvanias to end all metroidvanias. Or should I say IGAvania? This game is great. All-time great. I love it. Traversing the castle with Miriam is so much fun. You can unlock so many abilities and get around in so many different ways. The bosses are pretty sick, too;Special mention goes to IGA himself, a bonus boss that’s available if you either backed the game or bought the $5 DLC. The craziest thing is that I haven’t even done it all. There’s a boss revenge mode where I can play as the bosses to fight the heroes. I can play as Zangetsu & Bloodless instead of Miriam, and there’s a classic mode that makes the game really play like an old Castlevania title. There’s so much to do, and the gameplay is so fun. You can level up, equip different equipment(that changes Miriam’s appearance), and create different builds with different abilities.
These types of games are typically lighter on story, but what we get is very solid. My only actual critique is that the twist needed either a bit more foreshadowing or just some more time with the character involved. Even just having them talk to Miriam more would’ve done a lot to endear us to them more and make what happens have more weight. Otherwise, no complaints. Miriam’s a great protagonist and her allies are all pretty cool.
Obviously, the music is amazing.
IGA/10. Worth every penny and more. If you like Metroidvanias, sit down with this game sometime. You’ll have a lot of fun.
The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-
This game is insane. It is actually the most ambitious thing I’ve touched. I’m like 50 hours deep and I’ve barely scratched the surface and that makes me really excited.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a Visual Novel with some Strategy RPG gameplay that released last year. It is primarily written in collaboration by the creators of Danganronpa and Zero Escape. I say primarily because in their effort to give this game 100 endings, they did work with some other writes, but a lot of the groundwork and endings are those two.
Hundred Line is a game for enthusiasts and sickos. 100 endings is no small task, and these mad lads did it. This premise is so enticing to me because I love characters, and you can’t make a game like this work without a strong cast of characters. The ideal that made me pick up this game is that I’m going to experience a strong cast of characters be put in multiple differing situations where I can see how they react to things. A game like this, you can see characters at their best and their worst and everything in-between, and that’s just an exciting thing to think about when you’re someone like me who likes character interactions a whole lot.
So, you’re in the shoes of Takumi Sumino, Average McAverageMan, you know the drill. One day, the complex he lives in gets attacked by monsters, and he gets unceremoniously drafted into the Special Defense Unit of Last Defense Academy by Totally-Not-Momokun-from-Danganronpa along with 9 other teenagers he’s never met before. They are then tasked with defending the Academy for 100 days for the sake of the human race. A bunch of chaos follows.
The way the game is structured is that your first playthrough will have minimal choices, but every subsequent one after that will allow you to go up and down and make decisions on your way towards one of the endings. This first playthrough is called Route 0 and many half-jokingly refer to it as the game’s prologue. My run through it was about 24-ish hours, so it’s the longest prologue of all time. Eat your heart out, Kingdom Hearts II
Now, we go onto my first round trip. When Route 0 is finished, you’re allowed to run it back and start making more choices. While I initially thought I’d do the game 100% blind, I saw a comment that that alluded to some reveals in the route called 2nd Scenario being best handled there and that made me want to get it out of the way. So I decided to follow a guide on how to reach the 2nd Scenario ending.
2nd Scenario is the “Truth Route”. Not True route, but Truth. While it is the first route they made and offers a framework for other routes, it’s primary function is to answer the questions posed in the Route 0, but not necessarily serve as the “correct” ending of the game. Ya know how games with multiple endings often have a “real” ending somewhere, usually after you beat all the others? This game doesn’t have that. All these endings are things that really could’ve happened depending on choices Takumi made. You quite literally end up in 2nd Scenario if your guiding thought is “I want to know more”. You can have Takumi make different decisions that will change the course of the routes and steer things in a completely different direction and possibly genre altogether.
That said, the Truth Route broke my heart. In the good way, I promise. Speaking on it too much will give too many spoilers, but I just want to say that Hundred’s Line cast is so strong. These characters are great and their interactions are wonderful. And the story has a real meaningful message as well. Mentioning what that specific message is will also be spoilers, so please just play the game yourself. If you’re reading this, you probably know me, so just hit me up, and I’ll shoot you the link for the guide if you want to go for it yourself.
Now that the Truth Route is behind me, I’m so excited to play through the rest of the game blind. I don’t know shit, and I couldn’t be happier.
The combat is very straightforward, but fun. You can kind of break it open, though. Last Yell in particular is very silly. Not all units are created equal; some are awkward to use, but all of them can put in work if you need them to. My personal favorite was Kyoshika; lots of damage. One pro-tip I’ll give is that you should feed your early boss kills to Takumi; he’s the only character you will always have access to, so powering him up goes a long way. Obviously give them to your favorites, too, but the practical thing is to give Takumi like 3 or so since you’ll get the most mileage out of him.
Music is pretty dope.
HOPE & DESPAIR/10. Give the demo a try, at least.