For this week's Mobile Friday i tried Fishing Fantasy -FishingRPG-, on my iPhone 14 Pro, from TrickStArStudio Games.
Fishing Fantasy -FishingRPG- is one of the simpler games i've played as part of this series but that's not a negative. there is a great tutorial that shows off every aspect of the game which makes Fishing Fantasy -FishingRPG- one of the more accessible games i've played. another aspect of the game that makes it accessible is how most, if not all, of it is playable with just one hand.
As a game centered around fishing, Fishing Fantasy -FishingRPG- hasn't over complicated that aspect of the gameplay. you have a rod, attach bait, and throw out the line. when there's a bite you hit a button and get a fish. if that fish is a higher level than you, you hit that button repeatedly. the fish you catch are recorded and there are quests around this. by catching fish and completing quests you gain exp and level up. as you level up you unlock more locations and equipment to use.
One aspect of the game i would've liked a little more was the story. our character wakes up in this world but in terms of story there was a lot at the start of the game and not much else in this video. there was no clear indication when the next story beat was coming. as the game is centered around the fishing, this isn't that much of a negative. but it's something i missed and maybe a reason why this video is shorter than other Mobile Friday videos.
I do recommend Fishing Fantasy -FishingRPG-. it's not the best but it is satisfying. i'd like more story and a better English translation, but both of these don't detract from what this game sets out to do.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Pilo and the Holobook.
i didn't know anything about this game before i started playing the demo, but on the eShop, i did like the look of the game and that you'd be scanning. i was hoping that this demo would help show off more about the game and what you're doing. I think it did a great job at that.
The demo seems to be taken from the first hour, or so, of Pilo and the Holobook, from the start until our encounter with hints of the big bad of the game. nearly all the game mechanics have a tutorial and we seem able to play the game at our own pace. the biggest frustration was the one time the game required us to do something that wasn't tutorised. in the dessert, there's a moment where we need to corral some electric sheep and i missed it the first time and accidently stumbled upon the solution my second time there. a mechanic the developers don't make use of is our own character quipping or talking to themselves possible solutions to an issue. i can see this being a possible stumbling block to progress.
But on the whole, Pilo and the Holobook looked great, played great, and was really chill. i could've finished it sooner but i genuinely enjoyed walking around and scanning. the music was fine but, as i said in the video, i feel like this would be a good game to play whilst listening to a podcast.
I didn't get the impression that Pilo and the Holobook was purely aimed towards kids, but it did feel like it would be suitable. as an adult, i did enjoy my time with the demo and wouldn't say no to getting it when it comes out. if you're curious about a game where scanning is the main mechanic, then this is a great demo for you to try. but after playing it i'd almost say the game itself is worth getting without playing the demo.
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. The newest game in the Backlog Conquering series is the PlayStation Portable version of Final Fantasy. this is the downloaded version of the game, but it is also available on UMD. To help with this playthrough i'm proudly using a guide from GameFAQS. here's the link, https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/psp/937909-final-fantasy/faqs/55625. i'm not following it exactly, but it's useful to have.
Most of Part 12 took place in the The Sunken Shrines. i initially took most of the right turns and ended up at the boss before half way. the dungeon itself didn't turn out to be too dangerous but the boss was the toughest boss we've come across so far. as i took the correct way to the boss, and the water crystal, i went back in to try out the other way and was reward with more loot, exp, and money.
This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization on PS4 via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
I know of but have never played nor watched anything Sword Art Online. But i do know that the main concept is that it's meant to fake an MMO. so i was curious if that would extend to how it saves. MMO's will keep track of your character, what they're doing, where they are, and their stats their end but would this fake one? If it did, it would mean i would never have to worry about the 20 second warning before being disconnected.
But after this first hour it seems clear that there are only auto saves in Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization and, unless it was somewhere i couldn't find or i haven't unlocked it yet, no manual saves. for some parts of this game, like moving around the main town Aincrad, you trigger the auto save when you exit one area and enter another. this might be doable when a 20 second warning appears. but other than that, it wasn't too clear how and when it auto saves nor what would trigger it.
As is somewhat expected for a game of this type, this first part is full of cutscenes, character introductions, and expositions. this means there are minutes where we aren't able to do anything other than continue the conversation or, by using the L1 and R1 buttons, try and skip through it. skipping isn't ideal as for me, someone not familiar with this series, i'd want to watch them and learn about the past and the present. The auto saves are clear in the top right, but if you're going to get a 20 second warning during one of these cutscenes you're going to either miss out on story tell, assuming it'll autosave when it's done, or have to go back and sit through the same story piece again.
From this first hour, the save system and lengthy cutscenes do make Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization somewhat unsuitable for being streamed from the cloud. We'll see in Part 2 if things improve in regard to this. other than that, and the games odd camera delay, there are positives in regards to it's design and it's suitability. the graphics are simple, big, and colorful, which meant when we had some hiccups with the stream it never got in the way of gameplay. the controls feel responsive and i felt no lag there with the stream either.
For this week's Mobile Friday i tried DDDigger, on my iPhone 14 Pro.
it's another game from developers treeplla that may look simple at first but actually has some fun gameplay. You can check out my videos for Idle Lumbercat - Wood Games, https://youtu.be/j074foqCgrg, and Cat Snack Bar, https://youtu.be/hhqyaTmhXw4, if you want to know more about games from this developer. what's interesting about DDDigger, in comparison to those games, is that it's not really an idle game. there is a small idle mechanic in it, but the point is to play to earn coins, use those coins to upgrade weapons, play and go further and earn more coins, and so on.
The tutorial is barely there, but it's just enough to get the basics across and the game is basic enough to grasp it quickly, and if you don't it's not an issue as failing and trying again is part of this game's genre and ties into it's mechanics. no matter how good or bad you do, you'll earn some coins. the graphics are simple but effective. it's clear which levels of dirt has enemies, which have gold, the helpers are also distinct and each weapon is easy to see. there maybe a lot happening at times but i found it easy to see and follow what was happening.
What i'm not too happy about with DDDigger is it's claim that "Offline Adventure. Enjoy the game anytime, anywhere without an internet connection!" that it has in the app store. sure, there was no data download at the start and that is fantastic. but it does have intrusive ads. at the start of the video i was praising it for giving us the choice whether we wanted to get some in-game reward for watching an ad. it didn't bother me that it was offering different rewards at different points for watching an ad. i even praised DDDigger for be smart with it's in-game store ads as it kept them to items we've used. no, where DDDigger goes wrong is having ads suddenly popup after a run. there was no warning, no asking for permission, and i certainly wasn't expecting it to have them because it claimed that it was an off-line game. it appears the ads come after every 2 games played.
In this video, the ad situation wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. but i can easily envision that as you get further into the game, you'll need to start grinding out games to earn enough coins to level up stuff. this'll mean having to play more and more games, which means more and more ads. these videos use data and it wouldn't take long for the ads to slowly eat into data limits. because of this, i can only really recommend DDDigger to be played over wi-fi. i had a good time playing it, i really enjoyed the music too, but the ad situation completely changes things.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue from developers Lost Pilgrims Studio.
I'll admit that going in i didn't know what type of RPG it was and it ended up being a type of RPG that i don't enjoy playing and haven't played much before. i tried to not let that get in the way of my playthrough of this demo. i didn't get to the end of this demo in this video as by the end i really wasn't enjoying myself.
right from the start, even before i started recording, i was waiting for the game to load. that first load took well over 3 minutes, very often showing very unhelpful tips. Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue is built on Unity, an engine that's notorious for how bad it runs on base model PS4s. This demo had already been patched twice to 1.02 so i went in expecting things to go better than they did because after the load was an introduction video to the story that stuttered both visually and audibly.
So, Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue makes a poor first impression. next was the home screen and i didn't mind the notices on screen but they were tiny in comparison to how much free space there was. i saw the bug reporting and as i had encountered a couple already i was going to submit but then it turned out the report form hadn't been formatted for consoles and i certainly didn't want to type out a report using just a controller. there are more issues going into the options as only the font size option showed what it actually did. i haven't played the game and yet it expects me to know what game specific changes can be made without any examples. And even tho i made the font change, it rarely actually appeared as big as i wanted. as far as i'm concerned that option either doesn't work is mislabeled. Another option that didn't seem to work great was the full screen UI Zoom as it looked slightly blurry and weird.
after about 14 minutes i finally get to the gameplay, and here i'm greeted by a great choice. Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue lets the player choose if they want to play it as envisioned by the developers or if they want an easier more story focused approach. i like that they clearly define what the difficulty levels are. But, it talks about achievements which Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue doesn't have.
We finally get to the story and are greeted by small text, not what we set in the options, but thankfully it's voiced. however, at the time, i wasn't really sure who was talking. the art is static, something i'm not used to in the story telling games i play. i imagined that we would be introduced to our character first, not some random person. But as that person talked, i fully expected the rest of the game to feature voice acting and i was wrong. again, in story games i'm used to playing i'm used to not only seeing who's talking but them either speaking the text on screen of adding sound effects. this style of story telling was something i didn't quite get used to by the end of the video. an issue i had with this style were the options of where the conversation should go. i think i disagreed with nearly all the conversation options throughout Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue.
the tutorials were often useful but quite overwhelming and screen filling. but there were times when the tutorials would use words that aren't used in-game as often symbols are used instead. if they use a symbol, the tutorial should use it too. this meant that when it came to money, i was wrong. i thought the round symbol was money but instead it was the colored balls. i needed the tutorial to point this out and it didn't.
I could go on, but i think i've got the point across that there was a lot about Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue i didn't enjoy. there's more in the video, too. some of it will be due to the style of RPG it is, but poor performance and poor tutorials is down to the developers. i can agree that my issues with the story are probably just down to me.
Does Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue succeed as a Prologue, no. calling it a "Prologue" puts pressure on this to deliver a story that makes us want to continue. i don't think it does this. if it was just called a demo, i think it would've been fine and be in-line with other games i've played recently. but i do think "BETA" would've been more appropriate for the state it's in. with the game launching soon, after playing this i wouldn't recommend getting it not only for my issues with the start of the game but also the state of it, too.
