Welcome to one of the final Puzzle & Dragons Tuesday videos!
With the series being retired on YouTube and finishing over on Ko-Fi, https://ko-fi.com/qtegamers, i'm celebrating by showing off the Quest Mode.
This video is part 1 and it shows the first 5 dungeons in Quest Mode. these are dungeons i have finished a long time ago, but it was nice to come back and try out some of the new teams i have unlocked since i've been playing Puzzle & Dragons: Nintendo Switch Edition.
Come back next week for what should be the final part.
This week's Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing Square Enix's Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PS4.
With Part 1, https://youtu.be/2O-V6qgzcrw, i began to understand the game's quirks so in this part, i was able to focus more on the experience of playing this game in the cloud. We had already seen in Part 1 that the game does a lot of auto saving in the background which is great. it means if we're going to be disconnected from the PlayStation Plus Cloud Game Streaming Service then we won't have lost too much progress in the game. With Part 2 it also became clear that the manual save points at this point in the game are also strategically placed before big, story moments or significant points in your progress through a section. this once more highlights that if you are kicked off the service, the amount of progress loss shouldn't be too significant.
Playing this on PlayStation 4 is both good and bad. the obvious bad part is the graphical quality. there were more than a few points where i could see how low resolution or how little detail elements of the levels were. from that point of view, it would be easy to recommend that Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin should be played on a PS5. but this helps with the game being streamed via the cloud because it means the impact to the game from things such as macro blocking isn't too significant. it'll be somewhat easy to see, but it shouldn't detract too much from the overall gameplay experience as there isn't always too much finer detail on PS4 anyway.
Ultimately, a game being decently well designed to be played via the cloud won't be enough for some players. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has it's fair share of quirks and frustrations as a game itself. thankfully, with streaming being an option, it can act as a decent demo of the game and what to expect. but i would recommend giving it a couple of hours like i did to play through what felt like a tutorial heavy introduction to the game.
For Switch Funday i'm trying out TemTem for the first time. it's a game i've been aware of, but not one i've tried. i bought it in an Amazon sale here in Japan and was eager to give it a try. I am a big Pokémon fan and have been playing those games since Pokémon Blue. I Knew this isn't going to be exactly like Pokémon, but i was wondering if my past experiences would help of hinder my enjoyment of TemTem.
I'm going to say it helped. TemTem doesn't have an introduction to the game, it just starts at the character creator. i think this is a missed opportunity. i went in knowing nothing and started knowing nothing of the world nor of it's online stuff. lacking soo much information really doesn't make this game that approachable, especially for a younger audience. I don't know who the character in my house was as there was a name but no label, or anything in our conversation, about if or how we're related. the game rushed to the character creator and then to start, it forgot the why. but as i knew Pokémon, a beginning like this is something i've experienced before so i wasn't too lost.
Not having any TemTem in the intro meant when it came to choosing mine, i could only really go on looks. the game doesn't say if they evolve, just their name and their strengths and weaknesses, something which isn't explained until much later in this video.
So whilst the opening isn't great, there is much to like about the game. graphically it's good and it isn't plagued by technical issues the recent Pokémon games have had. there are more loads and they do tend to last just a little longer than i would want. but i think i would take that over a buggy mess. the battle mechanics are different to Pokémon as TemTem introduces a stamina mechanic. it didn't introduce it that well as an opponent showed the negatives of it before the tutorial did. but it is a mechanic that works well so far and helps push the player to rotate the TemTem's used in a battle. a secondary benefit of all this rotation is that TemTem's, so far, only gain experience by actually being in the battle and not just being in your party. This is something older Pokémon games did before Experience Share is obtained. so i don't mind this mechanic as it balances with stamina. but i could see how modern Pokémon players might find it a bit old fashioned or that the battles might be a bit slower.
Stamina is one way TemTem differentiates itself from Pokémon, but another is of course the TemTem themselves. so far the designs have been fun and very different. the type chart is much more difficult. it would've been nice to have it on L3 or R3. but the game could also do a better job of showing us not only the type of each TemTem but also how effective the moves are. i got confused because i thought i read a tutorial that said once a TemTem is caught i'd know what moves are effective against it. and then when i faced it in battle i couldn't see that information.
The final confusing thing about this game is the online part. so far, the game has done nothing to justify why there is one. it's been on since i got my first TemTem and there's been no tutorials as to why there's online, what i can do with online, or if i can turn it off and play solo. but it's possible it'll be explained a little further into the story. a game like TemTem could have a very long story and i could still be in the basic tutorial.
So there's a lot about TemTem that feels like the first game in a series. some simple mistakes, basic things i'd expect to be fixed and/or improved upon in a sequel. but critically there is enough here for me, an older Pokémon Fan with decades of experience, to enjoy. in a way, i came away from this first hour thinking this is a game designed for someone like me rather than someone coming across this style of game for the first time. i'm currently thinking of playing more with this game, maybe even with videos on here!
Today's Online Saturday video is on Pokémon Unite. My goal in Panic Parade is to beat it. I have done 14 matches so far and not come close. But in today's 7 matches my team mates and I did it. in the 5th match, with Alolan Ninetails, we beat all 15 waves of Pokémon!
I did record a commentary track but it got corrupted. So enjoy 7 matches without commentary.
For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out Fake Future on my iPhone 14 Pro. This game from Sentai Inc is also out on Android.
From the Store page, i couldn't work out what this game was. But i could see that it had some great pixel art and that was enough for me to give it a go. But it will download extra data when it starts with no warning. be careful, do not play this game for the first time on mobile networks. start it on wifi! thankfully it's not the GB's the last few games have needed. but 67.86 MB is still a chunk of data.
The next weird thing is the song that plays. it seems to have no connection to the game. the lyrics don't seem to match the gameplay and it's weirdly upbeat and long for a screen that's not around for long. The music in the game is generally all over the place. none of it is bad, but it feels out of place more often than not.
Next is a section where the translation wasn't finished. something that also happens a few times in the video. i think the lack of a translation here, especially, was one reason why i never quite grasped the story. here and there issues weren't really a problem, but right here in the beginning when the game is trying to establish the story was. the game moves onto it's goals and this was another example where the game never explained the "why." I'll do what it asks, but the "why" typically is the story element. Why was i creating a character, why do i have to do these things. After an hour i'm not sure i have a decent answer for that.
Then we're on the main game screen. we have a character called Victor and not the character we created. it's confusing as we don't end up using our character for a little while, instead we have Victor. Again, there's no why, no story element. we just go and do stuff.
This lack of why, the disconnection between the music, story, gacha, game mechanics, and game story really detract from what good there is with the game. I did like the pixel art, i liked the story from the past, i liked the intrigued set up by what happens to Victor, i liked the world i saw. but it didn't seem to have any relevance to anything i did in the game.
I only played an hour and it could be this is actually part of the game. right at the beginning, "Discover the truth of this world" is teased. it's possible the whole disjointedness of this game is part of it and something we uncover as we play. but after the first hour i spent with it, i'm not willing to put in the extra time needed to find out. Fake Future isn't a mobile game i would recommend.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch game Another Code: Recollection. This game, from developers Cing is set to come out in January.
I was interested in this demo because i didn't play the original game on Nintendo DS and i was curious which of the two games included in this collection we would get to try. on the eShop page, it doesn't provide information about the demo, it seems to be for the main game itself. so going in there were a few questions.
right from the beginning one big question was answered immediately as the game informed us that our save will be carried over from the demo to the full version of the game. Tho, what it didn't say was that we have to do a manual save ourself as the game only has an autosave. On the demo home screen we're also welcomed with a link to buy the game from it's eShop page which is a great thing that not enough games do. it makes me feel like some effort and attention was put into this demo, even if it's just the start of the first game.
the final big question left is, after playing it for over an hour, do i want to buy it and continue the story. Honestly, no. what i played in this first hour probably did more to turn me away from the game rather than hook me. I wasn't that keen on how the story was told, especially with a flash back we had to play through, and a conversation on the boat that felt weird to have when surely we would've had it before in the past. The gameplay was also a little frustrating. i mention a few times in the video that i didn't like how slow the camera was, but i could just about deal with it. despite how good the game looks, the thing that took me out of the experience the most was how emotionless the character's faces and body language was. the main character looks great, but her face shows little emotion. the same with the character we meet near the end of the video. the emotions i imagined they'd be feeling were replaced with that person starring blankly straight faced.
It's possible i might've enjoyed the Nintendo DS original more than this Switch version because the DS is a portable handheld that was, at times, used as a book. it's limited graphical abilities, when compared to the Switch, might've helped hide the emotionless characters. This demo did a good job at showing me that this game, or this version at least, isn't for me.
CounterSpy is the current Backlog Conquering Wednesday game. i'm playing this version of the game on PlayStation 3. It came out across the PS4, PSV and even mobile in 2014 from developers Dynamighty. This video has no commentary.
I needed a bit of time off after the disaster that was Part 4, https://youtu.be/4tOIs8tdQFI. loosing all my progress was heart breaking. the upside about having to start over is that whilst i lost progress in the game's story, all the weapons and formulas i had unlocked in my first attempt were still unlocked.
So i sat down with one goal, beat CounterSpy in one sitting. i was making good progress. As i didn't need to commentate as i went, i was able to focus more on what was happening and i felt like i was making good progress. As the levels are randomly generated, there's an element of luck and having some stuff unlocked already certainly helped too. i genuinely thought i could do it, or at the very least make it to the final section of the game like in Part 4.
But the game broke. i don't mean in terms of poor level design. i fell through the floor into a void of white. i cut the video there, but i tried every button and even waited to see if i would die and be put back. but nothing happened. i had to manually quit the game. so that final stage in this video, all the progress i made, it's gone and i'll have to continue in the next, and hopefully final, part of playing through the PlayStation 3 version of CounterSpy.
