Switch Funday - The New Denpa Men - My Second Hour

Welcome to Switch Funday!

Last week i checked out the free to play game The New Denpa Men, https://youtu.be/8VjQxmvSxrY, but after my first hour with it i wasn't sure the game had showed me enough of what it is. The New Denpa Men is a slow game and it's mechanics and design feel old so i came back for a second hour thinking this would be enough time for the game to fully show me what it is.

My second hour with The New Denpa Men added little, if anything, to the overall game. it continues to not detail how to do things, i guess how to do the fishing after some annoying tries, and the big new addition of decorating felt poor, more so when you compare it to other games that came out on the 3DS. I tried out a couple of special events towards the end of the video and whilst it was nice to have something different to do, i got jewel pieces and there's meant to be someone on my island to give them to, but there wasn't. 

Whether it's the jewel pieces or the fishing, it's frustrating that the game hasn't cornered off these aspects of gameplay until it's ready for us to deal with it. Many games will curate the start of the game in such a way that it feels random but in fact it's been designed so we're introduced to each gameplay mechanic. in The New Denpa Men, it feels like the start of the game hasn't been curated, it feels like it's been left as open as possible for all players to engage with. so i've been put into a scenario where there's a fishing mechanic that's not been explained and i have items to give someone on my island, but they're not on my island.

It was nice to get access to more Denpa Men in my party and i felt that it made the combat a little more easier. but it's still frustrating that the game doesn't specify what each of their abilities until they're used in combat. You can only do combat whilst on a mission. so if there's someone in your party that's not needed, you have to either finish the mission or quit. 

The New Denpa Men continues to not be very accessible to new players and this second hour reinforces my statement that this is perhaps designed more for fans of the series rather than new ones. It's design feels like it was initially made for phones and was ported to the Switch, maybe Nintendo changed their mind. when starting the game i had to download additional game data which updated the game and it restarted. i had, earlier in the week, updated the game from the Switch home menu. this behaviour of downloading data to update itself is again something more common on mobile games than consoles and not a pleasant experience.

Version 2.1.12 played

Online Saturday - Disney Speedstorm - Season 10's First Weekend - Nightmare Before Christmas

Welcome to Online Saturday.

For today's video i'm back on Switch. It's been about a year since i last checked out the Switch version of Disney Speedstorm. https://youtu.be/8az0B7vEXGs. This weekend is the first weekend with Season 10. this season is themed after The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

Mobile Friday - Disney Pixel RPG - A Basic Gacha RPG That Needs A Little Work

For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out Disney Pixel RPG, from GungHo Online Entertainment, on my iPhone 14 Pro.

There was a lot of excitement surrounding this game when it was announced so i took a step back from it and didn't learn what it was. so i go into this not knowing much more than what the screenshots in the app store show.

Unfortunately, Disney Pixel RPG starts with a bad first impression as i had to download extra data. it wasn't as much as some other games, but it was more than i would want to download over a mobile network. it did warn that the game was going to do this download, but it didn't warn about this eating into mobile data, some games have started to provide that warning and recommend that such a download be done over wi-fi.

Next is a basic avatar creator and then we're thrown into gameplay. it's here that the game tells us what it's story is and i think it does this fairly well. once we're told about it we're put into a combat scenario and shown how to fight in Disney Pixel RPG. the controls can be set to auto or each character can be given instructions. a cool feature is that we're shown is that you don't need to go into a menu to set a command, you can flick the screen in a certain direction to command a character. But it also shows how basic some parts of the game are. there's no "battle music" or "victory theme", it all just feels generic music when you're in a world.

After this the tutorial mostly stops. it's weird that Disney Pixel RPG's tutorial had been great up to this point but then just drops us in the home world. other than some basic party stuff, there's a lot of the menus not talked about. an example is how i was completing missions throughout this video but had no idea where that section was. things were happening in combat that weren't being explained, mainly status conditions. things like this were making the game feel old, like it should've come out a few years ago.

The Gacha mechanic is another example of this. games still have it, but some of the better games find a way to incorporate it into the game world. In Disney Pixel RPG, it feels like a separate thing from the game's story, just like how games used to have such a feature. It's also not as flashy as most modern mobiles games.

a weird thing about Disney Pixel RPG is how it uses abbreviations. none of them are detailed. some can be worked out or at the very least guessed, like i did with LBrk Eff guessing it was Level Break Effect. but next to it is a "i" button that doesn't show what the abbreviation meant. There were some others i had no idea what was being abbreviated. 

In it's current state, Disney Pixel RPG is playable and fine. but it's not hard to see issues. i found the High Graphic mode seemingly broken, what looked like place holder text behind final text, and sounds far to loud and annoying. i highly recommend tuning the sounds as Disney Pixel RPG has some basic sounds that can be piercing and annoying. there are aspects of it's design that are also frustrating, like it never shows in numbers how much health we have left. Or that our team has a power level but the enemy doesn't so we don't know if we're about to waste energy fighting an enemy we can't win.

Version 1.0.3 Played.

Demo Play Thursday - Card-en-Ciel On Switch

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Card-en-Ciel, from the developers Inti Creates.

Reading the eShop listing for the game, i was interested in the game. i thought the story idea was different and i was curious how the card mechanics would work. this demo seems to be from the start of the game and i think it's a great start. the tutorial, the story, the mechanics are all introduced smartly and in a way that feels right for the universe.

After playing an hour, the only thing that felt off was that the text on screen didn't auto scroll and that there didn't seem to be an option to turn it on. This is an older demo but it felt quite polished, which leads me to think that perhaps the Japanese release of the game has already happened.

One great feature of this demo is how it does the tutorials. it doesn't just put up a block of text, there's a video showing it in action. the text could have multiple pages, each with their own video. but what i thought was really cool and something i don't remember seeing else where was how the videos could be made full screen. i've played plenty of games where the picture/gif/video used in the tutorial is small, but here, the ability to make it full screen really felt modern and something that other developers should be looking at implementing. 

This first hour is basically the tutorial for the game and each point seems to add a new mechanic to the game. each one isn't huge, but by the end it did feel like there were quite a few things to think about each turn. i don't know if it's a case of too much too soon or just too much in general. i enjoyed the simple mechanics at the start where each card could either do an action or move your character. i thought this was an interesting twist but then the game adds cards which, for example, can be used to avoid an enemies attack and counter them.

After my hour with Card-en-Ciel, i'm genuinely impressed with it. this demo is the start of the game and it shows that Card-en-Ciel is an approachable game that has a good first hour. i would recommend people trying out the demo first. this is a game that ties together a few different genres like card battling, visual novels, and rpgs. fans of each of those may like Card-en-Ciel and this demo is a great place to start.

Backlog Conquering - Poison Control On PS4 - Part 2 – The Third and Fourth "Belles' Hells"

Welcome to Backlog Conquering. This is a series were i play a game from my backlog that i may or may not have played before. the goal isn't necessarily to finish the game, the goal is to play it. that way, i can have an opinion about it.

Part 2 continues on with the story. we previously did the first two Belles' Hells and they weren't too difficult, nor were the stories behind them that bad. the two I did today, they were much harder. not just in difficulty of playing them but also the stories behind them. There will be a Part 3 as i expect there to be more twists and turns in the story as we progress further deeper into hell.

Part 1 - https://youtu.be/zYr-gRR3IOc

Switch Funday - The New Denpa Men - My First Hour

Welcome to Switch Funday!

This week i checked out the free to play game The New Denpa Men, from  Genius Sonority. The Denpa Men series is something i'm vaguely aware of from the 3DS but i've never played any of the games. going into this Nintendo Switch version i didn't know what to expect so i was surprised when it revealed itself as a free to play game.

After playing it i looked it up and my thoughts whilst playing the game make sense. something i say a few times is how the game feels old. graphically it's fine, but for a free to play game the tutorial is surprisingly light and very little of what the game is is explained to us. the way the game works and why is not explained to us in a way that makes me think it's a console game and part of a series, whilst the free to play mechanics and microtransactions make it feel like a mobile game.

It's also slow, with an introduction that does little to get across what the world is. all i know is that there is legendary loot, which appears to be from the earlier games, and we're after it so we won't be bullied any more. 

The gameplay aspect is more similar to a dungeon crawler. the two locations we've been to so far are varied and give the game a more casual feel. But the game makes it very clear, repeatedly, that if you are wiped out in the dungeon you loose all the loot. if you teleport out of the dungeon you can keep your loot but as you haven't finished it you can't continue the story. 

Combat is not explained, but thankfully it's not too difficult except that resources at the start are scarce. so i immediately ran into issues of health and AP (magic abilities). this is kinda compounded by the choice of Denpa Men in my party, but seeing as it wasn't explained to me who i should bring with, let alone which ones i should catch, i imagine this is a situation that many may find themselves in. most modern mobile games rarely leave the start of the game to such luck

After an hour, i've come away feeling like i've not really even started the game. so i may come back next week to see if things improve with an extra hour of play time. but if i was to judge the game after this hour, i wouldn't recommend The New Denpa Men. it doesn't bring anything new whilst also feeling old and unwelcoming, designed for those who played the 3DS games. The Denpa Men's celebrations, or lack there off, when winning a battle sums up my feelings after playing this.

Version 2.0.10 played

Online Saturday - Foamstars - Now Free To Play, No PlayStation Plus Needed!

For Online Saturday i'm back with Foamstars, from SquareEnix and Toylogic. Foamstars is out across PS5 and PS4. I'll be playing the PlayStation 4 version of it. 

The game is now Free to Play. not only is the game free to download, it doesn't require PlayStation Plus to play it. the game has been updated a few times since i last played it back in May, https://youtu.be/SCjUS_FTOKk, so i also found the recent changes beneficial. the biggest change i appreciated were the regular game modes being grouped together so when you're looking for a game it can be any of those modes.