okay I got astral chain time for action fantasies about being a cop+slaveowner(?)

between this and fire emblem starting a literal world war for the sake of my badass anime wife it's a good thing games aren't political

opening exposition dump is a dude going "As you know..." and then literally telling the protagonist what country they live in lmao

LARGER
BURGER

man I love made-up videogame vending machine brands so much

extremely into these shops that are just like, some jpegs of some shops on a quad

this game has *powerful* PS2 energy

we've got Witch Time bc it's a platinum game but enemy tells seem really hard to read?

dodges feel kinda slow/heavy and don't seem to immediately cancel out of combos

seems probable the design's trying to deprioritize dodging to be less of The Fundamental Thing compared to Bayonetta/Nier etc

not sure where it's going with that yet tho

respect to Astral Chain for having a reward for "pick up one junk item" followed by a second reward for "pick up EVERY JUNK ITEM IN THE ENTIRE GAME (152)"

Feels like half the enemy attacks in this game are fakeouts? Tells are already pretty hard to read, and then even really basic enemies will telegraph moves and then delay them so you blow your dodge early

not uncommon for character-action games obv, but also not something I'm expecting from basic, early enemies before I've even had time to get used to the combat system D:

Videogame: *spawns miniboss with weird puzzle to expose weak point*

Me: *figures it out and kills the miniboss*

Videogame: YOU GOT A D MINUS

I mean yes I get that letter grades are a genre staple and are also specifically intended for multiple playthroughs and that playing for grades is often really fun, but man letter grades are an asshole system lol

okay dang in addition to weird fakeout enemy tells this game also REALLY likes combos where if you dodge the first hit you get immediately wrecked by the followup attack that lands the instant your dodge ends

I'm still not really sure how the designers intend this game to be played

You have an ABSURDLY complex arsenal available, but it's v unclear what you're supposed to do with most of it, and enemies don't actually hit that hard so it doesn't really punish you for being confused

it seems to deliberately punish what I would consider the "normal" platinum style, i.e. get in the enemy's face and attack constantly while dodging everything to maintain pressure

I SUSPECT the intended style is to figure out which combination of weapon+legion+moves is most effective against each individual enemy type, but there's VERY little feedback to indicated what works well and what doesn't

there's a hacker dude who talks to you a lot and it's the same voice actor as 9S and it's severely messing with my brain

wow dude good eye noticing that

astral chain has a part where your commander is upset with you and assigns you to do a bunch of busywork as punishment and the result is a level consisting of over an hour minigames

update: one of them is an instant-fail stealth mission

protagonist's booty shorts wrinkle in real time

Platinum Games continue to advance the state of our industry

Notably this appears to be done with actual geometry, rather than blending a normal map, which suggests there isn't any particular tech-art work involved? Like I think an animator just literally rigged up some Butt Wrinkle Bones of their own volition

It's really hard to get a good screenshot but that pattern of red dots and horizontal lines along the upper edges of objects is a pretty neat trick

Pretty sure it's basically it's a 2D animated shadery thing in screenspace, masked by the fragment's distance from any sufficiently sharp edge in the Z buffer

So like, every fragment evaluates the lines/dots pattern, then does a short march downwards checking Z deltas along the way, and if it finds a sufficiently sharp change it sets the mask opacity based on the distance it had to search

Breath of the Wild does this for rain splashes, and I'm fairly sure AC Origins used it for setting objects on fire (although in that case they were masking a particle system instead of a screenspace animation)

It's a v cool way to make effects that appear to rise off of surfaces

Here's maybe a slightly better example

Can at least see how the red stuff is only visible above the upper edges of objects

Videogame: Here's an unwinnable fight you're supposed to die in repeatedly for cinematic reasons

Me: *dies a bunch of times*

Videogame: YOUR RANK IS D

this is a pretty neat vista

tfw

The lights for the characters are just parented to the camera so you always have nicely composed shadows and highlights regardless of view angle

I would have thought this'd be kind of distracting but it's honestly hard to notice unless you're looking for it

lmao the villian's evil plot is literally just Instrumentality

So I beat Astral Chain, and it unlocks an entire postgame where you can just fight through a ton of tightly-designed combat encounters? So like... the part of the game that's good minus the other 70% of the game that's super boring?

Now I actually want to play more lol

Game's very odd. It wants really badly to be this police procedural/detective game, but all the investigation stuff is INCREDIBLY boring and tedious, and the other like 50% of the design is PS2-ass block-sliding switch-flipping elevator-cycling navigation puzzles

Combat's extremely rad and interesting but it's like... not actually the focus of the game. It's mostly about the investigation and traversal stuff but the level design is honestly just kinda bad so most of that stuff gets really tiresome really quickly

It really does have *powerful* PS2 energy, like all those games where your friends were talking about how sick the combat system was and then you played it only to discover the actual gameplay was 90% inserting colored gems into doors and dying to camera angles or whatever

It's got all the strange ideas and mid-budget jank you could ask for; I got pretty annoyed playing a lot of it but seriously in 15 years there's gonna be like eight people who swear it's the best game of its generation

(I won't be one of them but I will be rooting for them lol)

yo the post-game combat missions are so much more fun than the preceding 30 hours of the actual game wtf