WIERD 360 GAMES THAT SANK THEIR STUDIOS QUEST CONTINUES

Yes it eventually got a a sequel but the original studio shut down after the first game failed

(also I haven't played Automata bc I've been meaning to play this one for like eight years so please don't tweet at me about Automata)

so the weirdest thing about this game is it came out of that weird period in the late 00s where Japanese publishers were somehow CONVINCED they needed to "westernize" their games in order for Americans to buy them

Thus, in Japan the PS3 version's protagonist is a hot anime boy, and the 360 version and both localized versions replaced him with thIS GRIZZLED-ASS OLD DAD

there's a girl who's important to the plot, and the protagonist is her brother in the JP version and literally her dad in the 360/English version

(I'm conflating JP 360 with English here bc let's be honest there were like four 360s ever sold in Japan)

Recall this is also the same period in which Guitar Hero/Rock Band were blowing up the sales charts and the only Bemani game you could buy was... Wii DDR with all the DDR music stripped out and replaced with licensed Britney Spears covers

Still mad at Konami about that one lol

(oh yeah this was around the same time Square decided Final Fantasy needed to be more "western" and had GRIN work on it and then chickened out after Bionic Commando failed and thus tanked the whole studio:

late 00s gamedev sure was grim)

A+ 180 animation

there are chickens and they make the rooster stock sound effect from Ocarina of Time

all the voice acting in this is really good so far

Cool fake GI: character's lit from below by sunlight bouncing off the ground

this came out in 2010, which IIRC was right around when various ways of dealing with bounce lighting started to be pretty common

I'm guessing it's probably just a baked probe. Virtually all the lighting in the game is baked, and most levels aren't terribly large; I'd imagine you could scatter a bunch of probes all over the place pretty cheaply

It also does that Extremely 360 Game thing where the lighting's all baked and there's a fairly limited library of environment textures, and then it relies on really aggressive color grading to give different moods to different areas, or suggest different weather/times of day

(I actually kinda hate the way games that relied on this technique ended up looking. Grading is an extremely poor substitute for just actually using color effectively in your environment art. Given the available tech at the time I get why it was used so much though)

HERE WE GOOOOOO

when 🅱Fish is displayed on the screen,

There's some v pretty environment art in this game but man the overall aesthetic is just PEAK X Box Brown and Bloom

the problem with this being an action-rpg is I keep running into optional fights with monsters that can one-shot me at my current level, but then I spend like an hour trying to kill them anyway bc if you're good enough it's possible to dodge/counter all damage

Yo this game is like... *REALLY* good

Combat's great, enemies are super varied and interesting; weird combo of melee and ranged attacks adds this super interesting focus on spatial awareness and positioning even in basic fights....

plot/worldbuilding stuff is really well done; it's like setting up an interesting story while also drip-feeding all this weird conflicting info about the setting such that such that everything's really surreal and foreboding

thus far I honestly have no idea why it was such a commercial failure; usually weird failed games have weird interesting design failings, but this is like... just a really well-made creative action-RPG

also features Laura Bailey essentially reprising her role as the Saint's Row protagonist, which is *amazing*

It does the usual videogame thing of slowly explaining its more complex systems via tutorial text

except in this case tutorials are... drops?

there's a sort of book/language theme running through the game for Plot Reasons. Monsters have a weird thematic association with words and knowledge... If you kill them they drop XP and items like the usual videogame but they can also literally drop *explanations of game systems*

this is kind of incredibly clever?

I turned subtitles off bc the voice acting's good

Now it has introduced a character who speaks a made-up language, and his speech is SUPPOSED to be subtitled but apparently disabling regular dialogue subtitles also disables translation subtitles

>:(

why are games so universally awful at dialogue audio

there's always either horrible problems with volume levels such that dialogue is indecipherable WITHOUT subtitles, or incidental dialogue doesn't HAVE subtitles, or... whatever category of problem this one even falls under

(still thinking about Xenoblade Chronicles 2 having Japanese audio as an option, but only providing subtitles for cutscenes so like 60% of the voice acting doesn't get translated. And like screw anyone who actually needs subtitles due to hearing problems :/ )

lmao this game just spent a solid hour setting up a zelda joke

Second-favorite DoF trick: Sample from higher mip levels based on depth value during post-processing

Dirt cheap, looks surprisingly good, but can't blur across edges. Fun characteristic artifact on tons of 360/PS3 games

(*second*-favorite bc nothing will ever top the sheer audacity of The Witcher 2 just straight-up drawing a point sprite for every pixel in the framebuffer and scaling it by depth: )

tfw u did not set any new Sardine records

efficient means of travel

so there's a slow bit at the end of the dodge animation that makes rolling actually the same speed as running

I have discovered that if you time the followup dodge precisely there's a VERY small window in which it skips the slow part

traveling is now its own entire videogame

i love videogmaes

this game is reigniting my lifelong desire to make a sprawling exploration-centric plot-based action-rpg full of cutscenes and setpiece battles and like.... I haven't finished making my maybe-two-hours-long plotless arcade shmup yet and it's been five years😰

☆.｡.:*SIDE QUESTS.｡.:*☆

yo this game is like... completely self-aware that it's a videogame and does SO MUCH WEIRD STUFF to screw around with game systems in support of the narrative

a character just got really emotional and started auto-advancing his own text boxes to keep up with the voice acting??

and it wasn't even a winking fourth-wall thing either, it was just a scene where the emotion of the line delivery was super important, so it just... stopped waiting for you to push A to advance the dialogue

play Nier yall holy crap

in love with this running-with-a-bomb animation

Nier's take on the "female characters in fantasy settings must wear elaborately revealing bikini armor" is a main character who wears literal actual lingerie for some reason and everyone she meets is super confused/weirded out

Finished the "A" ending last night and immediately diving into the NG+/multiple-ending JRPG nonsense bc this game is genuinely good enough to have me that invested

Joining the church of Yoko Taro and I'm not even playing Automata yet

I think I've.... literally never bothered with NG+ in any game ever before this?

There are characters who speak only in subtitles and sometimes the gigantic un-dismissable ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED icon plasters itself completely across the text

this console was a fractal of jank

Devola/Popola's voice actress also did Estelle from Tails of Vesperia and
A) She is extremely good
B) I can't stop thinking about her yelling THE SIGN OF VICTORY and it's disrupting a lot of dialogue

PUT OUT YOUR HAND

...like... thisYAAAYYYYY

the credits are one single giant list of everyone who contributed to the game in alphabetical order

like everyone from Square's legal team to lead game designer all stacked up by name

Completed second of a reported four endings

Thus far the multi-ending thing feels like more of a chore than a useful narrative device but we'll see

I'm normally *EXTREMELY* averse to multi-ending stuff bc it turns "you beat the game" into "lol sucker u didn't beat the game HARD ENOUGH" and now the thing that I was doing for fun has become A Job

Nier's a bit different though bc it's linear + entirely upfront about what to do

Typically what turns me off instantly is stuff like FFX-2 where it's like do twelve billion tortuous side quests and then push X on some invisible trigger and win six secret dice rolls and make sure you didn't open the chest in the third dungeon etc etc

this isn't that at least

My only real criticism of Nier so far is that it *really* shows the limits of its budget in its world design. The game's very small spatially so it reuses every zone 3+ times and... v much wears out every environment.

Putting special plot stuff behind NG+ exacerbates this badly

This is actually v interesting bc JRPGs are always in some way about efficiency right?

Need epic scale on a limited budget, so they usually make super padded-out labyrinths from prefab kits

Nier instead has a tiny, polished world and relies solely on its writing to convey scale

As a dev I gotta say the focus on NG+ and plot structure to justify constantly reusing environments is some REALLY clever scope management; I'm v impressed

tho I fear other devs attempting the same trick without the *phenomenal* writing to back it up, and thus creating Slog Hell

Alright doing the last Nier: The Original One Not Automata endings tonight

TIME TO GET SAD PROBABLY

observation while I was typing that tweet:

neat attention to detail in making the stone wall slightly wobbly

also the flagstone texture has mipmaps enabled but appears to be set to point filtering?
???

I think it might actually be using different settings for min and mag filters? I'm not sure but it looks weird in ways I can't quite understand

EXCUSE ME

look just don't put ladders in videogames okay

whoof

yeah uh you should probably play Nier

I'm reading a wiki bc I kinda always end up doing this after finishing long plot stuff for some reason

apparently there's a TON of outside-the-game media that like... straight-up explains most of the more confusing "lore" stuff

this is weird

like the game's writing is REALLY good at like, slowly revealing scraps of sometimes-unreliable information from different characters' perspectives and forcing you to piece mysteries together

...and then apparently there's a ton of stuff that was just like like "somebody asked Yoko Taro about this in an interview and he just dumped a paragraph of new lore on us" lmao

Nier addresses this and it's extremely cool