Monster Hunter, Cards and Waifus.

Monster Hunter is an amazing franchise, how its weapons are made to suit the fans of different genres  gameplay styles and, and even with hundreds of interesting creatures and a compelling world, the games center only around its core gameplay (and menues), leaving dialogue and story way to the side.

But by far its most interesting achievement is how it resolves problems that arrived with RNG and monetization.

But first, some backstory.

The very first real Trading Card Game (TCG) ever was Magic: The Gathering, It, like subsequent TCGs like the Pokemon TCG and Yu-Gi-Oh! among many others, give the players unique and custom made battles that could not be made with regular, set decks of playing cards.

The players had to build their own decks, with cards they had to collect from starter packs, booster packs and other packages, that meant the players had to mix and match cards to their own judgement to create strategies of their own.

While I do enjoy playing TCGs, the concept is broken nonetheless, making your own strategies is satisfying, but the internet exist, and better strategies are uploaded there, so your opponents may use those, and set strategies require set cards, from which you have to pay more money to get, buying them from people, trading them for extra cards and getting more cards from retail packs.

And this leads us to similar scenarios, Gacha games has you trying your luck to get characters that have rarity and stats, playing more usually means more tries to roll the characters you want...but you can also pay to get them, and better characters mean advantages.

Im not well versed in them, but Massive Multiplayer Online games usually have paid services, even if you already paid the game, which means some players can advance at a much faster rate, which can be disencouraging to players that don't want to spend more money (or any money), I'm not saying every MMO has to be like this however, just a thought.

And then come the more common RPG videogames that have a thing called "Drop rates", the game may give you different items based on a random number generator, which means luck basically, If you kill an enemy for example, you may have 70% chance to get a healing herb, but you could also have 2%, 1% and even 0.001% chance of getting a legendary sword.

Players can usually live without those extra rare items, but it can get very frustrating for collectionists, which leads to grinding, the repetitive action of repeating something to get something, be rare drops, leveling up or just stocking up in money, grinding can be fun for some, but its usually very tiresome for most people since it doesn't really add to the game. Some RPGs can have paid downloadable content for rare items for people that doesn't want to grind or give exclusive items, but since a lot of RPGs tend to be single player, these games usually affect the players the less in this regard.

Some games, like the Pokemon TCG for the gameboy color and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 take from the TCG and Gacha type of games respectively, you don't have to spend money on cards or characters, but there's a random aspect to how you get them. They are easier on the player since you don't have to spend money for extremely better odds, but the fact that it still doesn't proceed as a regular RPG leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth.

Then we're finally back to Monster Hunter, MH is not free of the sins of the RNG, but it handles it extremely different.

First of All, the mainline MH so far has no paid DLCs or anything to you to buy outside the actual game, so there's no abusing the system in that regard, next, comes the fact that MH is a very skill based game, mechanical skill to be precise. For example, to get the helmet of an armor, you may need the scalp of a monster, which may mean that, aside from killing the monster (which can be a feat of its own), you also have to hit its head repeatedly until it breaks, and MH Monster move and are aggressive, so the player has to engage the monster in specific ways and attack in specific moments to have better odds at getting what they want.

This leads us to the "grind", and it may be a grind, but its a different type of grind, You want that helmet, you need that scalp, you may have gotten one but you need more, so you fight that monster again and again, and here is where the true glory of Monster Hunter reveals itself, it can make the game for you, or it can make it worthless, but in MH your character doesn't level up, you do, you learn how the monster attacks, when it attacks, what it does before it attacks, how your attacks land, and where to land them, you start hitting the head more consistently, because you as a player are improving your skills as hunter, and as a hunter you learn how to capture your prey.

But the RNG is still there, you may also get bad luck, you may have killed that monster dozens of times and still not get what you want, but you are still actively hunting, you can't just mash buttons, you have to fight, you have to hit the head, you have to run and to dodge attacks, the RNG is still there, but you have to fight it face to face until it gives you what you want.

The armor and weapon in monster hunter are important, but they aren't everything, the better you are and the faster you learn the more you survive, equipment aids you, but more than aid, they are a trophy, a trophy or your success over odds, because even the skills that aid you come with equipment that need monster materials.

And then comes the multiplayer, because in monster hunter you don't have to hunt alone, you should learn the monsters and the combat by yourself, but you don't have to grind by yourself, the weapons complement each other, the gameplay is purely cooperative, the enemies are the monsters, not the ranks of your fellow hunters, and its a very fun experience to share with someone else, be friends or strangers, and more opportunities to improve yourself, and you kill monsters to improve, and you improve by killing monsters, because its not about the grind, the weapons or the fancy equipment, its about how damn fun the game is, and how those systems make that effort and fun rewarding.

Killer7

What even is Killer7, is it a first person shooter? an adventure game? survival horror? interactive movie? it even has light rpg elements, needless to say, Killer7 is a videogame, there's no doubt about that.

A high fantasy videogame, filled with magic and fiction, like terrorism, human trafficking, rape, pedophilia, political corruption, religious cults, hitmen, child soldiers, abuse of power, the endless cycle of destruction and construction perpetuated by the human being on it's search for meaning. 

Killer7 is as human as a game can be, our own mistakes, forever embedded into 2 mini dvds or a normal one if you play the ps2 version, it is ridiculous, it is gruesome, silly, funny, disturbing, majestic, outrageous, violent, very violent.

After the earth has decided to end all internet communication, stop every single war, destroy every nuclear weapon and bridge every continent together, forming some sort of world peace, a certain someone, named Kun Lan, using his god hand, is transforming people into Heaven Smile, invisible zombies who kamikaze everyone in sight, this newly former and seemingly unstoppable "terrorist" group kill the head of the new united nations, and the world call the only ones who might be able to restore peace once again, the Killer7, 7 highly skilled assassins under the mantle of Harman Smith, Kun Lan's greatest enemy.

Dan Smith, our white boy, he's unstoppable with a revolver, he lusts for violence.

Coyote Smith, a thief from south america, he can jump real high and unlock almost anything, he got a modified revolver too, and a rivalry with Dan.

KAEDE Smith, japanese-american girl, her blood can destroy barriers, and she can absorb blood onto herself too, she'll snipe you from afar with a scoped pistol.

Con Smith, a blind chinese boy, the youngest of the team, he runs extremely fast and dual wields automatic pistols, has a potty mouth.

MASK de Smith, a mexican wrestler, the favorite of the kids, he never takes his mask off, and will blow anything up with his twin granade launchers, and anything that survives will have to deal with his arms.

Kevin Smith, a british albino who never speaks, you wont see him when he stabs your from the back, because he can turn himself invisible, he never runs out of knives. he may be gay.

and Garcian Smith, an afroamerican whose job is to clean the messes who the others leave, he uses a silenced pistol, and is the link to the boss, Harman Smith, an old, Wheelchair bound man, who uses an anti tank armor piercing rifle, when the old man awakens, he's unstoppable.

Now this is a real team, no agendas or forced diversity, this was the crazy world of 2005, assassins come in all shapes, they won't look at you twice before they gut you either.

The enemy is no less charismatic, The heaven smile, awful beings with a perpetual, grotesque smile, they come in all shapes and colors, they're invisible, but you know there's one near when you hear Kun Lan's disturbing laugh, they all have his voice. How to fight them? easy, Garcian's got a ring who can turn then visible, all there's to it is to aim and shot them until no more blood remains in their bodies, if you hit their weak spot, you can get all that delicious thick blood and use it to upgrade your abilities in a nearby TV, if you shot them anywhere else until they die, they will yield no thick blood, but thin blood instead, that powers your special attacks and can heal you when needed.

Between the abnormal amounts of paranoia an invisible enemy causes, the awkward control scheme and the both incoherent and completely understandable mess of a story, there's a lot of fun to be had with Killer7's shooting, logic based puzzles and moments, it remains as one of my favorite games, there will never be something quite like it.

"Harman, the world won't change. All it does is turn. Now, let's dance."

Touhou Project

The Touhou Project is a shoot-em-up video game series developed by ZUN, who does all the graphics, music, art, plot and coding.

The series has a long story, the games have been released almost yearly since the first installment for the pc in 1996 and the fanbase is very dedicated to it, creating massive quantities of art, manga/comics, music remixes and fangames for the relatively obscure status of the series

The games have something that make them incredibly unique from the classic Shmup genre and even other "bullet hell" shmups, from the big all female cast to the immediately recognizable music style and enjoyable story lines, the touhou games combine gameplay with elegance due to how it handles bosses and level design.

Levels for the most party are your typical shmup, they start easy and become increasingly difficult, the enemies can be quite uninspired but do their job when pacing the game.

The bosses however, are a completely different beast, not only they pose a big challenge, they are actual duels, since the 6th game of the series "Spell cards" have become a recurring concept, where the boss unleashes a intricate, beautiful, and mortal attack, that while being difficult, are completely fair (most of the time) and designed to be beatable, without pure randomization, making the tough battles have a sport-like feel, and challenging the player to do better and learn from their mistakes.

Spell cards can be beaten in two ways, emptying the boss current HP meter or just waiting until the timer ends, there can be more than 1 spell card per battle, usually incresing the further you get in the game, and beating them without losing a live or using a bomb (which are actually spell cards of your own), nets you a score bonus and other benefits for playing fair and square.

Spell cards are brutal, mesmerizing, and most importantly, fun, not only they put the games to a league of its own, but combined with the interesting playstyles and gimmicks of each game, they are of the most interesting and fun games of their class

The main games usually stay similar, with unique tricks, like having dual characters, bewitched weapons that have fun effects, tying your bombs to your strength meter, and other stuff.

Some spin off really take the genre for a "spin", for example:

-Fairy Wars, where you can freeze enemy bullets in place and freeze any that touch the aready frozen bullet, creating screen wiping chain reaction that also give you experience and level up your normal shooting power.

-Shoot The Bullet, a pokemon snap-esque take, where you must take pictures of the enemy and the range of the picture also erases bullets for protection, this one comes in bite sized challenge battles with no regular stages, just set spell cards from which you have to dodge and take good shots

-Impossible Spell Card, where the bosses ditch the fairness in their attacks due to the misdoings of the main character, short battle based like Shoot the Bullet, you have a set of cheating items you can use to overcome the unfairness of the almost unbeatable spell cards (they aren't actually impossible).

All in all, extremely fun series, worth checking out, but be prepared to play on easy mode and run out of continues many times.

Fire Emblem Echoes

You see, Fire Emblem is a tricky series. I have a love/hate relationship with tactic rpgs, I really enjoy moving my characters across a board and watch them unleash their power in a seemingly realistic scene, where everyone else is there too, like a turn based rpg but way more dynamic where positioning and a lot of other stuff like terrain and orientation matter too, the problem is that usually the rest of the usual jrpg experience is partially lost, as the whole dungeon exploring or walking around the world and visiting towns is missing, usually having more of a hub world or menu, were you can do some cool stuff like take sidequests and customize your party.

The thing is, Fire Emblem doesn't have much of that either, it's way more similar to more pure tactics/strategy games like advance wars (made by the same people woah), than other staple tactic rpgs like Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea/Nippon Ichi games.

You see, your army in FE is disposable, and the game is balanced so keeping everyone alive is a challenge, yet makes the characters more than generic units so you grow attached to them, that's a cool thing I guess, but it still functions pretty similar to advance wars, where your army is both disposable and renewable, but the units have set dynamics instead of the rpg element in FE; good units in Advance Wars are always good, in FE you have to level up and good units may not be good forever, and bad ones can rise above with proper care, so the style of managing your army is very different, the way the game actually proceeds, however, is very similar; use your units strengths against the weakness of the enemy while keeping them safe (also take advantage of terrain), archers kill Pegasus knights, anti air tanks kill planes, its basically the same thing.

Its not like that's bad, it's that that's all there is to it, like in advance wars, you press forward, map after map, there's dialogue yes, but its usually like just a simple visual novel where the story is just basic war stuff, FE is all about its characters, and if you don't like them (and you may well not like them, they are not really writing landmarks) there is almost nothing to enjoy aside from playing map after map, and if you actually expect something more like Disgaea or FFT, you will be disappointed (like me).

That's why FE Echoes, Shadows of Valentia (and Gaiden to an extent) is so nice and refreshing to me, even more after playing both Awakening and Birthright, it's a very different experience, it has a very different flavor, and it's definitely more of my taste.

It's not that hard to explain, SoV just has more to do than just do map after map, and more to the story than just the characters.

First of all, this is a remake, of a very old game, one that didn't age really well, and the map design and battles are simple, limited and repetitive compared to newer iterations in the franchise, this remake upgrades the most in the presentation side, graphics, the music, the characters, even the world are heavily revamped and the production values are incredible, yet the gameplay is mostly the same as it was before, so this makes for a very new yet very nostalgic experience, you have to be prepared to play something that is still a famicom game at its core.

The battles is nothing to write home about, its just very basic Fire Emblem, the speed of gaiden was pretty slow so the modern upgrades really make it go way smoother and the game is a bit rebalanced to make for a better experience, its not great, but it does the job very well. The game also has new support conversations between specific characters, you wont be marrying anyone with everyone but you get to know every character well enough, way better than in the original (and fully voiced too!).

What I want to talk about is everything else! and I can talk about it, because there's actually things to do other than to do map after map, there's villages!, there's dungeons!, there's world building! side quests! deeper forging! a-and grinding...

And that sort of stuff matters to me, a lot, it may not be what Fire Emblem really is about, but I feel like it is what jrpgs are about, the villages have people with things to say and needs to fulfill, they make the world feel real, the dungeons don't have much to do aside from running around, breaking stuff and fighting, but they all feel different, and help the world get richer too (if you pay attention).

It may seem like it's just generic stuff to some people, but I feel like its truly great, actually getting to know what the people in each country thinks of the other outside of "we are at warrrr", and there's really subtle details in the dungeons too, like seeing the bodies hanged in the cells in a creepy prison dungeon, watching the decay of the tombs in an underground graveyard, every dungeon has this tiny love for detail, it makes me smile.

The equipment system is really interesting too, because everyone can only have one item at the time (but it wont break, ever), and weapons can be upgraded at the cost of the valuable silver and golden marks (coins), you need to upgrade your weapons, but if you don't want to grind for hours you have to think wisely and ration what you get more naturally, and you have to really think what to give everybody, and even how to move around and swap items if needed, because sometimes you can't afford to have two of the same item, or there's only one in the game, period.

But this really isn't me rambling about "problems" in the Fire Emblem franchise, it's more about me wishing for a game franchise to be something it isn't, then it magically becomes true, it's almost surreal

Maybe I should just play Shining Force already...

Shantae

Yay Shantae! Shantae is great! right ? like, wait, for reals, is it great? is it good even? I mean, there are some terrible stuff in some of them and well...

you see, this is a weird topic, because I have all three Shantae games (fuck off, half genie hero) and I really love them, they are some really charming and interesting platformers, but at the same time there's a lot of dumb stuff and shortcomings, and they do keep the games from greatness, and conflict with makes the games special at the same time

Shantae can transform in different animals, this is the main exploration device because she's basically link from zelda 2 if not more useless, these animals are nice and mix well with the arabic tones but they totally break with the "metroidvania exploration" flow, you have to stop, do sexxxxy dance, and then you can overcome your obstacles

Let's also mention that the aspect ratio cripples the first game a lot and the second game is over so fast it feels almost like a demo thet let you play way(forward) more that it originally intended.

But then comes the third game, oh boy this game is beautiful, the music is the best from Virt ever (and I just love this man, damn), the graphics are like the second but a bit better and the flow is just great and and...., Shantae can't transform.

They ditched her most curious ability, and gave her generic metroidvania progression elements, like more jumps, shooting, dashing, its great and all, but its nothing special, but all this made the game better, the levels are now segmented in different islands but you can explore them freely so its less confusing, the game is longer than ever, the locales and moments are more, well, memorable, and the visual charm is intact and pumped up a notch, its still amazing.

what does this mean to the series as a whole though? were the dances and transformations useless? was it worth it to sell part of her character for gameplay?

the fact is that the Shantae games are good (Pirate's curse being the best one), but they're pretty much the top of that developer, I feel like Wayforward isn't as great as they may have make you believe. Talent was there obviously, some guys from there made shovel knight and its better than anything Wayforward has ever done.

Another game I've played form WF for example, is Alien Infestation for the ds, and its very similar to Shantae, its a 'good' flawed platformer, but even when Alien is a cool franchise it doesn't elevate the game to something it isn't like the charisma from Shantae does, so I'm relucant on how good can The Mummy Demastered truly be, but I'll see eventually I guess.

Maybe one day Shantae will receive the truly great game she deserves, in the meantime we can just watch her dance.

Gotcha Force

This one here is pretty sad, because its an amazing game hold back by its shortcomings 

This is one of many robot games, some have them big, like Armored Core or Zone of the Enders, some have then small like Medabots or Little Battlers eXperience, some are piloted, some are not, but all of them have in common that you usually have a nice deal of customization.

Gotcha force does something really different, you cant modify your "Borgs" at all, but you can collect them, there's like 200 of them, many are clones but there's a very big diversity of cool designs AND movesets, not all of them play the same, there's a plethora of different borg fighting styles, and damn do they play good, the game is extremely satisfying, the movements and attacks feel incredible and its just a blast to play

By that alone I could say that by sheer gameplay this game could be a solid 10/10, but from here on it only gets worse and worse.

This game takes a lot from pokemon, mostly the "gotta catch em all" mentality, but in practice, it does none of the best parts, there's no exploration or real rpg elements, the plot is terribly dull (even for a kiddie plot), and in the end, all you do is battle, and even when the combat and controls are that tight, it gets old fast with nothing else to look for in between, the music gets REALLY repetitive too, the voice acting is god awful and you can't turn it off.

So the story mode is a no-no, so lets have a blast playing multiplayer with friends, right ? too bad you have to play the story to get new Borgs to use (and getting them mostly at random), just great.

It could have been a masterpiece, and its one of the most important games of one of the many geniuses at Capcom, Atsuhi Tomita, and even when it has many problems, its well worth a play, just leave it when it starts to get tedious, don't let the bad parts ruin an extremely fun game.

(If you manage to find it because boy this game is rare and it has one heck of a cult following)

Secret of Mana

I do not like secret of mana.

The graphics are charming, the music is great, the game has a very cool and unique ring menu system and an upgradeable selection of cool weapons, this could make for one of the defining rpgs of the era, and some think it is, but I don't think so.

The problems start with the % bar, once you attack, you have to wait until your power goes back from 0 to 100% to be able to attack again, you can do anyway, but the damage will be pathetic, this makes for a tedious waiting in an action rpg, i have heard of people saying its "strategic", so you just don't "slash away everything", but its simply not fun, and the whole game contradicts those statements, its fundamentally flawed, why ? because of the magic system.

When you cast magic, the whole game freezes, you can basically pause the game to heal, or enchant your weapons, or just do damage, nothing is stopping your, and nothing is stopping the enemies or bosses for doing the same (and then they will spam you with unavoidable magic, talk about strategy..., just hit them when you can)

The combat is bland, in TloZ ALttP, Link encounters a variety of enemies who require different approaches and you power is never hindered, you just have to defeat the enemies, it feels natural and fun, The waiting adds nothing to the game, it waters it down, more when you realize most of your attacks make the enemies flinch, which in turn gives them invincibility time, and when you have 2 other party members (who btw, are useless and dumb unless you have friends controlling them) try to attack them too, only one can hit them, because they'll flinch when hit, so even with more people fighting is just as obtuse.

Maybe I'm being to hard with an old game, maybe it somehow gets better the more you progress (I just cant force myself to press on), but compared to other snes games that have aged like wine, like Chrono Trigger, Zelda and FFVI, its best to leave this one for the record, it just isn't that good.

And what a shame, I love that art with the tree, its just precious.