Helloooooooooooooooooooooo!
It’s time for a new Video Game Round-Up, and it’s only a few days late. Yay me! As you’ll see below, I mostly played games on the Switch. Part of that is because I was traveling for a bit, but the real reason is because Felicia and I are writing Lots of Things With Very Near Deadlines, so I don’t have any time to play games at home, where the PS4 is. But there was some news recently about the PS5 (Sony’s being all coy about their next hardware’s name, and they haven’t once used the term ‘PS5’, but really, what the heck else are you gonna call it, Sony?) and it will be at least backwards compatible with PS4 games, so I don’t have play them so fast if I don’t want to :D (I say ‘at least’ because I’m still holding out hope that it will go all the way back and I’ll be able to play PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4 games on this new machine).
Let’s go!
Yakuza 0 (PS4) - At some point this last month, I made a not-so-cryptic post about my hard, steely men who are actually soft, mushy men. I was referring to Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima, the main protagonists of this game. Both like to pretend like they’re hard, steely men, tough yakuza killers who only care about money and brotherhood. But as I play through more of what Yakuza 0 calls substories (optional side-quests, basically), it becomes ridiculously obvious that both Kiryu and Majima are actually soft, mushy men, willing to stop whatever important thing they’re in the middle of (i.e. Kiryu trying to find whoever framed him and save his ex-Yakuza captain, and Majima trying to make as much money as possible and possibly murder somebody so that he can get back into the yakuza that cast him out) to help out random strangers with the most ridiculous and heartwarming tasks. Examples include: pretending to be a woman’s boyfriend so her father will stop trying to set her up, getting a kid’s stolen video game back and inadvertently reuniting him with his father in the process, helping a woman solve a puzzle her boyfriend made for her because she wants to give up but it’s actually his proposal so he really wants her to figure it out, helping a police officer get his confidence back by continually letting him stop-and-search you, etc. You get the gist.
They are soft, mushy men, and I love them.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Switch) - Some unexpected DLC dropped for this, so I got back into the puzzle boxes of Captain Toad and Toadette. I’ve found every star, gem, and crown, and done every bonus objective on every level except two. Both are “endless” mummy mazes in which you have to run around a mini-maze while a mummy chases you and get as many coins as possible and reach the last maze. The mazes aren’t that big or difficult. The challenge comes in avoiding the various enemies as well as the mummy which is always chasing you by doing everything you do. This means you can never stop and plan your next move because the mummy will catch up in one or two seconds, at most (usually less than that). I got to the end of one of the “endless” mazes, but not the other yet, and I haven’t done either bonus objective. I might still, but it’s not a high priority (until more surprise DLC drops).
Picross S (Switch) - I’m constantly amazed by how much these little puzzles actually resemble the image they’re supposed to once you finish them and a little color is added. But while you’re trying to solve them, they’re just a bunch of white and blue squares that look like a bunch of white and blue squares :P I did more puzzles, but I still have a fair amount of puzzles left, including the Mega puzzles, which I haven’t even touched yet. I return to this game whenever I want a simple puzzle game to pass the time. When I eventually finish this game, I will buy the sequel Picross S2, and then take my time with that.
Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition (PS4) - I bought this on the PSN store because it was less than $10 and it’s always been a game I’ve been peripherally interested in. It’s a fighting game featuring DC comics characters made by the Mortal Kombat developers. In an alternate reality, the Joker set nukes off in Metropolis and somehow made Superman kill Lois and their unborn child (yeah, THOSE Mortal Kombat devs, though maybe they talked to Zack Snyder). Superman goes mad, kills the Joker (and then a bunch of other people), and sets up a world dictatorship with him at the head. Because of alternate reality logic, a bunch of other heroes also go bad and follow Superman. The heroes from another reality (not the regular DCU because continuity, but a reasonable facsimile thereof) get thrown into the Dictator Superman world, and team up with the resistance of that world, which of course counts both heroes and villains in its ranks.
I’ve only played through some of the story mode so far, but the fighting is pretty good. It’s basically Mortal Kombat with all the fatalities removed, but it’s still pretty dang vicious. In the story mode, you only get to play as the characters dictated by the story. What I’ve learned so far is that Batman has no issues putting an IED on enemies’ backs, and Green Lantern has no issues machine gunning dudes in their faces with his constructs. So yeah, it’s plenty Mortal Kombat. But it’s fun, and the story is perfect comic book nonsense, which I love.
Katamari Damacy REROLL (Switch) - I can’t control my katamari very well, which is making the later levels quite difficult for me to pass. This makes me sad. I wish I could control my katamari better and get bigger faster so I could roll up more people and cars, which are my favorite things to roll up.
Gris (Switch) - Hey, look. Another game that made me cry.
I will never be able to do this game justice with my often jokey commentary, so let me instead link to this Polygon review from last year that says pretty much everything I wanted to, but much better than I ever could.
If you can’t read the whole review, then just read the below:
//But I realize now that there is another kind of fear. That kind of fear lives inside of you. That kind of fear can become like a poison in the mind and of the spirit. It is self doubt. It is worry. It is remorse and regret. It is so many things that can’t be washed away by standing still and finding calm.
It’s the kind of fear that stops you from simply doing anything.
Gris is a game that wants to teach us something about these fears we hold inside. It does so with a beautiful art style, a moving soundscape, and gameplay that, at times, flashes over into metaphor.
In Gris, you play as a woman (also named Gris) who has lost her voice and, with it, her agency. Her fears and her pain initially take the shape of a flock of birds that works to harass and punish her. She begins the game terribly weak, unable to even put one foot in front of the other. By the end, though, she’s become incredibly mobile and skilled. Hers is a journey to reclaim an intangible, inner kind of power. It is a journey toward rediscovering the self, and toward peace.//
The World Next Door (Switch) - I reviewed this game for GeekCulture, and I said, “The World Next Door is a short game with excellent design, interesting gameplay choices, and questionable narrative decisions. But it never outstays its welcome, and has a great price.” But with more words :) Also, I wrote that review while I was in Myanmar, so more proof I was working very hard and it wasn’t at all a holiday :D
Yoshi’s Crafted World (Switch) - This game is adorable as all heck. It’s a fairly easy platformer set in a world made out of craft materials, like construction paper, Scotch tape, paper cups, etc. It’s really super cute, and while the gameplay is quite simple (run, jump, float, tongue things, throw eggs, etc.), some of the optional tasks can be quite tricky. They basically boil down to finding various things (including flowers, red coins, hearts, Poochy pups, and whatever crafted creatures and things the craft robots tell you to find), but some of them can be quite tough! I’m maybe a quarter through all of the various levels, so this will be a game I’ll be coming back to again and again.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Switch) - The first game of the series is part of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy that came out for every dang thing last month (including MSX, I think). Originally on the DS, you play as Phoenix Wright in this visual novel, a rookie defense attorney trying to prove the innocence of his clients while simultaneously figuring out who the real murderers are. There are five fairly meaty cases in the first game, and I’ve finished four of them. The game is split into two main game mechanics: investigations, in which you talk to witnesses, visit crimes scenes, find clues, etc.; and the court room, in which you cross-examine witnesses on the stand and use clues and their own testimonies to force them to tell you more and/or catch them in lies while trying to stay out of the prosecutor’s cross-hairs.
This game is incredibly smart, and incredibly ridiculous. An example of the former: sometimes, the evidence you find will be obvious in how you can use it, and once you’ve used it once, you kind of forget about it. Then there’s a particularly vague or evasive witness, and you have no idea how to progress until you remember that piece of evidence from before and figure out how it obliquely proves whatever nonsense you’re saying. It is brilliant. An example of the latter: in one of the cases, you put a parrot on the stand. Also, the judge is an idiot.
The Phoenix Wright games take place in some kind of dystopia where every court case has to be done in three days, or the defendant is automatically found guilty. Further, prosecutors often coach witnesses to withhold information that may prove a defendant not guilty, or at least inject the proceedings with some serious reasonable doubt, and this is all totally kosher with literally everyone involved, except poor Phoenix Wright who’s just trying to do right by his clients.
But yeah, this game is damn fun, and I look forward to finishing the first one and continuing on to the second and third. And then hopefully this collection will have done well enough that they’ll do a second collection with the next three games in the series, and then another collection with the two spin-off Investigations games, only the first of which was released in the west.
And that’s it! Next month, expect to see more Phoenix Wright, Yoshi’s Crafted World, and Yakuza 0 (if we finish our writing), as well as the return of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (PS4) as more story DLC drops later this month. Persona 5’s Joker was also introduced earlier today as a fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch), so I’ll revisit that game, if only to try him out and unlock the new Persona 5-themed spirits that came with him. Finally, I will definitely complain a lot about how hard and how pretty Cuphead (Switch) is, as it will finally be on a console I own.
Until next month, play more video games!
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