Blueflower's Gaming Blog and Reviews

[blueflower999]

I still say this series needs a discussion thread. 

Great job Firearrow! Just post if you need help!

[blueflower999]

Olimar doesn't really seem to want to have much to do with me right now, but that's not going to make me talk trash about this amazing game!

Cave Story

Gameplay: 8/10 Keep in mind that I'm reviewing the 3DS version of Cave Story. (Meaning the one that's downloaded from the eShop, NOT Cave Story 3D.) However, I have gotten the PC version of it, and I have to say, while the bigger screen does make this game a bit more appealing, the control scheme is a little awkward and the 3DS version is much easier to adjust to in my opinion. Also, the 3DS version has a better translation. This game is sort of a homage to certain NES classics, if I'm not mistaken. The most obvious influence on the developer was probably Metroid because you need to gather health extensions to increase your maximum life and can collect rockets from fallen enemies to be used, both being mechanics in the two games. For the most part, the mechanics in this side scrolling platformer are fairly standard, but there are a few RPG elements mixed in here and there. You do have objectives in some of the stages, not just making it to the end of the level. Boss fights are frequent and fun, and the weapons are varied and most are fun to use and come in handy. This game has plenty of levels to explore and a few bonus quests to do as well. While the gameplay is my least favorite part about the game, it's still solid despite being almost 10 years old.

Addictiveness: 9/10 You know that when you've played through a game 3 or 4 times to get the best ending that it's pretty addicting, and that's what I've been doing. It is fairly challenging, but not so much that it'll make you quit and never come back to it again. I would argue that the story is fairly engrossing too.

Story: 9/10 Speaking of the story, this game's is fantastic. While there are no super duper amazing plot twists, this game's plot tugs at my heart strings quite a bit and I was actually close to tears at a point or two. Basically you're an amnesiac Robot trapped on a floating island, and The Doctor is trying to force bunnies (Mimigas) to eat red flowers and become rabid, and then he plans to use them to attack the earth. With numerous quirky bosses and characters along the way, this game is quite epic in its own right, especially for a game that intends to pay homage to the NES. If this actually was an NES game, I would argue that it has by far the greatest story on the console.

Music: 10/10 Seriously, do I even need to comment on this? Such complexity! Such variety! The music in Cave Story combines the complexity of orchestral pieces with the sound and the feel of catchy 8-bit classics! It's freaking genius! Oh, and did I mention that this entire game and soundtrack was all made by ONE PERSON?! That's incredible! Seriously, just listen to some of these songs.

First Cave

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Mimiga Village

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Egg Corridor

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Bushlands

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Sand Zone

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Egg Corridor?

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Outer Wall

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Running Hell

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Balrog's Theme

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Plantation/Main Theme

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Character Design: 10/10 Once again, I can't ask for more character design than this. Lovable characters, hatable villains, great backstories to figure out. It's all just so genius! Balrog has to be my favorite character in the game just because of how wacky he is. Seriously, what is this guy? A bar of soap? A suitcase? I have no idea! Besides, he Quotes the Kool Aid man every time he enters the screen, and he has is own amazing theme song which plays every time too, reminding me of Porky's theme in Mother 3. And THAT is not a bad thing. King and Toroko are also close seconds for my favorite character, but really everyone in this game is ingeniously designed and it's just amazing how one person could make such fantastic characters.

Humor: 9/10 This game does have that wacky sense of humor that I love so dearly. I mean, my favorite enemies in the game are ghost cats that shoot sperm at you.

Wait, what? Yeah, I'm not making this up! This game has an incredibly awesome translation that left much of the charm and humor intact in the dialogue. It's really such a joy to read these lines over and over again.

Difficulty: 9/10 This is another game that comes with a difficulty setting, but I found that even on easy mode, the game is still quite a challenge. Hell at the end of the good ending can give even the most experienced Cave Story players trouble sometimes, and I have yet to beat it. However, don't let the difficulty get you down. This is another game that's a master at teaching you how to play it before giving you a really challenging obstacle, just like the NES library before it. It's difficult, but it's the fair type of difficult.

Other Memorable Features: This game is just full of such care and charm! It truly is a one of a kind masterpiece and is worth the ten dollars on eShop. Seriously, how was a game this good made by ONE PERSON?!

Overall: 9.6/10 I have to say, all of my favorite games have at least one sequel, but this one doesn't really need one. (I still would want one, but it doesn't beg for one. It's more of a singular experience.) That being said, this is probably my favorite stand alone game that I've played. Yeah, it's that good. This ties Mega Man 9 for the best eShop/Wii Ware game that I've played.

[Yugi]

But everyone voted for MM6!

[SlowPokemon]

A+++++++++. I love this game too, and I knew you'd appreciate the NES-era nostalgia that went into creating it.

[blueflower999]

So far, Unwound Future is one of the weirdest games I've ever played.

[blueflower999]

I need to get some of these out of the way before I forget more things that I want to say.

I'll keep this disclaimer shorter this time. This game is far less disturbing than 999 was, but it still has bloody scenes, lots of swearing, and some extremely attractive partially naked females. Don't play it if you don't like this sort of stuff.

Virtue's Last Reward

Gameplay: 9/10 This section is a bit difficult to write about just because I love this game so much, but I need to not be a complete babbling fanboy and actually get my thoughts across. The gameplay in this game was still very good and well thought out. However, a few things prevented it from being better than it's predecessor 999. For one thing, and let's just get this out of the way first so I don't have to keep bringing this up, there is a pretty game breaking glitch. Not the sort of thing that you benefit from either. There are a few escape rooms in the game where if you save in them, you may lose your entire file. Thankfully, this didn't happen to me, but I did get a crash in one of the escapes and I had to restart. If you play the game, do not save during the escapes. Now that that's out of the way, the puzzles in this game were far more difficult than 999's were. Many puzzles in 999 are perfectly easy to figure out on your own, but I think that Virtue's Last Reward takes it a little to far at some spots. There are some points in this game where you really need a walkthrough, almost to the point where I would actually recommend using one. One change that I do like is that you have to figure out a code for a safe in every single escape room in the entire game. Not find a key, not put in a password to the door, not solving some puzzle. The last thing you do in every room in the game is always a password. And they're not that complicated either. Just three symbols in a 3 by 3 grid and it only uses 3 of the spots per password. However, that wasn't good enough. If you do the escape a different way (usually requiring you to go a step beyond the normal requirements), you'll get a different password that unlocks a golden file for you to read, and you need all of them to get the final "Secret" ending. Some of these blue passwords are just ridiculous to find, and I think one or two of them were a bit misleading in what you had to do. The password system overall is a nice change and I do appreciate it, but the puzzles were pretty difficult because your companions wouldn't give you hints unless you changed the difficulty over to Easy Mode. However, once you change to Easy, you can't get the Gold File and you can't change back to Hard until you do the escape again, so it's really in your best interest to either figure it out on your own or use a walkthrough to help you. Now, I get to the biggest and best change that this game made: the flowchart. Remember how annoying it was to start over every time? No more! In this game, you NEVER have to do the same escape twice because you can jump to any point on the flowchart at any time, including decision making points. If you get an ending, all you have to do is jump somewhere else and chose the other option(s) to see the other possibilities. It's GENIUS and it really helps because there are 24 unique endings in this game, and you really need to see them all. Overall, this game was intuitive in its gameplay and is still fun to play, and I could imagine that there are some people who found 999 to be too easy. If that's you, then this game hopefully offers the challenge that you want in the escapes.
 
Addictiveness: 10/10 Once again, and just as you could expect, I could not put this game down. It took me only a few days to finish the game, and yet I have over 30 hours on it. I played the game for so many hour straight that it got kind of insane. This game does a much better job of teasing you than 999 does. In 999, you're pretty much in the dark for the vast majority of the game, which is one approach to creating a suspenseful story. The other is pulled off fantastically by VLR, where it waves bits of information across your face through all the endings and tries to make you piece them together. 999 had a little of this as well, but in VLR it was obviously important whereas in 999 you didn't really realize why people were telling you the information until it came together. Don't start this game until you have a few days in a row that you can spend playing it for extensive periods of time.

Story: 10/10 Here's the big sucker. For those of you who don't want ANY story details, just don't read the spoiler section below. Just like with other reviews of this nature, I'm not going to actually tell the story, this is just in case you don't want anything about it.

My Thoughts on VLR's Plot

One day I'm going to do a comparison between 999 and VLR side by side, because they're really both very different and successful in different areas. One of those areas is the story. 999's story was incredibly scary and gripping for me, whereas VLR accomplished the same thing without scaring me at all. True, there were a few creepy parts, but I only lost sleep over trying to contemplate the events rather than being freaked out at one of the endings. 999's endings are all named after objects that are important in those endings, whereas Virtue's Last Reward's endings are named after characters. The whole setup is fairly similar to 999, but with a few twists that you sort of have to discover as you play the game. In short though, this game places a LOT of emphasis on trust and it can be very difficult to get all the endings because you need to betray people. I felt like a complete jerk playing this game, to be honest! This time, the participants of the Nonary Game are Sigma (you), Phi, Clover (who returns), K (not his real name, he is an amnesiac who wears a suit of armor that cannot be removed), Dio, Quark, Tenmyouji, Luna, and Alice. A few of the plot twists in this game are fairly obvious and I did figure some out on my own, but most are pretty genius and you would be crazy to not be shocked by most of them.

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Music: 9/10 Once again, the music in this game is outstanding, if not better, than 999. However, just like what I did with 999, I find most of the songs to be very situational. You sort of need to hear the song in context to appreciate the true meaning of it, and knowing that, I'm not going to post any songs, nor will I name any for fear of minor spoilers in their titles. However, if you liked the music in 999, you will be pleased to know that many songs actually come back in their original forms to be used in similar ways.

Character Design: 10/10 Seriously, what can I say here? Clover is my new favorite character in the series, even though I don't really want to get into why.  A few of the characters do annoy me, but all in all the game portrays some awesome people that I sure hope will return in the third. Most of them have some great backstories, but I couldn't post any of those here, now could I?

Humor: 10/10 Oh my frick, if there's one this that this game IMPROVED on from 999, it's the comedy. Seriously, I laughed so hard while playing this game. There's a rabbit A.I. named Zero 3 who basically introduces the rules of this game, and he is one of the funniest characters I have ever seen in a video game. In fact, he kind of reminds me of GLaDOS if she was an adorable furry mammal and much more blunt with the jokes. Some of the character dialogue is really funny too, so expect to laugh quite a bit.

Difficulty: 9/10 Like I mentioned in the Gameplay section, many of the escapes are nearly impossible for me to solve without a walkthrough. While the flowchart makes getting endings less frustrating, the escapes sort of slow the game down a little too far for me.

Other Memorable Features: The voice acting in this game is EXCELLENT. Fans of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya will be pleased that Clover () is voiced by the same actor that voices Haruhi in the English dub. The 3D effects are pretty shallow, as unfortunate as that is, but the animation on the characters sprites is much more pronounced than it was in 999 where basically people were flat images for most of the game.There actually are quite a few cutscenes in this game as well aside from doors opening and closing, so that in and of itself is a vast improvement of 999. While not quite as beautiful as Layton's cutscenes, they are pretty well done and I would love to see more in Zero Escape 3.

Overall: 10/10 I think IGN put it best: "The only things bad about this game is that you'll lose sleep and probably kill yourself waiting for the 3rd. Get into this series. Now."

[SlowPokemon]

"In 999, you're pretty much in the dark for the vast majority of the game, which is one approach to creating a suspenseful story. The other is pulled off fantastically by VLR, where it waves bits of information across your face through all the endings and tries to make you piece them together."

That's a good observation. Also "oh my frick" is a new favorite saying

I really liked your review, excellent restraint on not showing spoilers. Your review is 10/10

[blueflower999]

Got two big things to post today regarding this thread. I've been throwing several ideas about what my first Special post should be about, and I think I've come to the conclusion that it should be something pretty big.

My top 100 video game songs of all time. Yeah. (And essentially top 100 songs of all time because I don't listen to anything except for video game music)

This is going to be hard. To make it even more difficult, I'm going to be placing a limit of only five songs per franchise on the list. This is to ensure that all my favorite games get a few songs on the list and it's not totally dominated by one or two series that I think have particularly outstanding music. Nonetheless, deciding what my favorite Mother series, Cave Story, and Mega Man songs are and narrowing it down to only five is going to be a monumental task for me, and this list could change at any point in the future, so this will just be accurate the moment I post it.

I'm planning on making the posts in groups of ten and in this format:

Spoiler Tag with the number of the song and a warning if it contains spoilers or not to a game

YouTube link
Name of the song
Game(s) the song is from
Why I like the song
My favorite part(s) of the song (given in seconds for the video above)

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This might take a little while for me to make, so please be patient and hopefully I'll post the first batch of ten in a few days!

[SlowPokemon]

This is just a suggestion, but I think you ought to not limit yourself to five pieces per franchise. Just pick the ones you like and slowly narrow it down. It seems almost foolish to forget about all the music you love from Mother 3 and just list five from the whole series.

I'll try to get on skype tonight to talk to you about this and some other stuff

[blueflower999]

Now onto the second matter of business.  I decided to make this a new post just for easier reference.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future
Gameplay: 9/10 Oh boy, I've heard so many fantastic things about this game. Where to begin? Well, I suppose with gameplay because it's the first section in my rubric. Yes, the formula is pretty much the same. Similarly to Diabolical Box, the puzzles are integrated nicely into the story and aren't thrown randomly at you like in Curious Village. I found the "You must have completed X amount of puzzles to continue!" moments to be a bit more forgiving in this game as well. The most obvious innovation in the puzzles in this game is the addition of a "Super Hint", which costs two Hint Coins but essentially tells you how to get the answer to the problem in a clear and simple way, which I really like. It's always nice to have that just in case you really can't figure out what to do next. While I only used it once or twice because most of the really difficult puzzles in this game are the sliding ones that it couldn't have helped much in, it's still a great addition and I would love to see it return. Layton never fails to come up with original puzzles that boggle the mind and trick you when you're least expecting it all while entertaining you with the story as well. While I don't play the games to work my mind, anyone who likes this sort of stuff would absolutely adore these games. One thing slightly different about this game than previous ones is the areas. Curious Village like, as I already mentioned in my Diabolical Box review, takes place solely in one town. Diabolical Box, in contrast, is a linear progression from area to area without an ability to go back to previous ones. Unwound Future is different in the sense that the game alternates between a few areas and you do eventually go back to previous ones to continue the story, which I like.

Addictiveness: 9/10 Once again, this game was pretty difficult to put down. Because I played this one in the summer where I really didn't have anything better to do, this was by far my fasted completed Layton game yet. It only took me about two days, and it currently holds the record for the longest average time a game has been played on my 3DS, at over five hours.  If that's not proof that this game is a lot of fun, I don't know what is.

Story: 10/10 Going to avoid discussing the story in depth too far, but this one's a shocker just like the two before it. I don't know if I'd agree that it was "BY FAR THE BEST GAME IN THE SERIES OAIWHYFOIAWHF" like many of you have been saying, though. I would say it's about tied with Diabolical Box for my favorite so far. This game probably had a better story and definitely had a larger emotional impact on me, but I liked Diabolical Box's atmosphere a lot more and the story was nearly as good.

Music: 8/10 I have to say, the music in these games is starting to grow on me a little. Still wish it had a little more variety, but it's definitely some good stuff. I'll post a few of my favorites below.

An area theme (Spoilers?)

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London's theme

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Don Paolo's theme

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I don't really need to post Layton's theme again, but it's still one of my favorites regardless!

Character Design: 10/10 This game has the weirdest NPCs in the entire series so far. Seriously, I burst out laughing at the weirdness so many times that I lost count. After playing this, Don Paolo has been cemented as my favorite Layton character, and he'll probably remain that way unless someone in the prequel trilogy really impresses me.

Humor: 9/10 Now this is what I'm talking about! Diabolical Box had a fantastic story, but it lacked the "what the heck" kind of moments that this game has in abundance. Probably the biggest improvement that this game makes as a whole, in my opinion of course, is having some comic relief moments. Whether it's Belle flirting with Luke or a character that literally grabs the edges of the DS screen to shuffle away, this game definitely has some lol-worthy moments.

Difficulty: 8/10 OK, I'll admit it. I used a walkthrough for a handful of the puzzles in this game. But that's actually more of a compliment to the game: I was so hooked on the story that I didn't want to take 15 minutes to figure out that dang sliding puzzle! I just wanted to see what happened next in the plot! These games are probably better experienced if you solve all the puzzles yourself so that you get the "Wow, that was great! Maybe I'm not that stupid after all!" kind of feeling after you beat each one. Most of the normal puzzles are on par with the rest of the series, it's just I remember some of those sliding puzzles giving me problems towards the end. Besides, the addition of the Super Hint makes this game pretty doable, especially since the hint coins are fairly abundant.

Other Memorable Features: The minigames are as fantastic as always, but unfortunately, I didn't get very much time to play around with them this time through. I'll probably have to go back and play them again someday, but that will ruin my 5 hours average playtime!

Overall: 9.8/10 Tied with Diabolical Box for my favorite Layton game so far for reasons explained above and only second behind Zero Escape for my favorite puzzle series. I want more!

[SlowPokemon]

A+++++++++ Don Paolo is awesome

[blueflower999]

Think I might finally have selected an adequate Top 100 songs. Now I just need to arrange them in the order. That was really difficult, I hope I didn't forget any.

In all, they span about 33 or so franchises. Not bad.

[blueflower999]

Off

Yep, that's it. Just "Off". Probably the shortest video game title I'll ever have to review. (And the reason it needs bigger font than the others)

What, you've never heard of Off? Well, I can't really blame you. I hadn't heard of it either a few months ago. Nebbles recommended it to me, and here I am. For those of you that are curious, Off is an RPG Maker title that was originally made in French and translated recently by folks over at one of my favorite websites: Starmen.net. It's available for free here.

Gameplay: 7/10 I'll be honest here, the gameplay wasn't really all that spectacular. It was fun to play mostly to laugh when the enemies are encountered because they all look so weird! The gameplay is standard for RPGs, no real interesting twists are added that I can tell. The only real "character" that you can play as is the protagonist, The Batter. As the game progresses, you do get other party members, but they're not exactly people. Rather, they're rings called Add-Ons which fight, but don't show up in the overworld following you or have any effect on the story. One thing that I found pretty annoying is always waiting for this bar to fill up before you can attack. It gets better once you get all three Add-Ons because then you're not waiting as long between strikes, but with only one or two characters it can be a good three second wait every so often when you can't do anything. I prefer the whole "I go first, then you go, then I go" formula. This game doesn't really bother to tell you which stats increase when you level up either, which is fine I guess. At least it tells you when you learn a new special move, which are referred to as "competence". Just like with any RPG, there are offensive, defensive, and supportive competence moves, and while they're not really necessary in the beginning of the game, as it progresses and the enemies and, most especially, bosses get more and more health, the competence moves will really save you a lot of time. Often when traveling around the four "Zones" of the game, which sort of act like Worlds, you'll often encounter puzzles to solve and riddles. Characters will sometimes tell you stories and there will often be a boss or two per zone. The graphics are fairly basic in the overworld, but often when being told a story, it changes to a black and white photo montage, which I kind of like. If I could describe this game in one phrase, it would be "simple, yet effective". I can't really describe it any other way. It's not low quality to the point of being lazy, though. What more could you expect from an RPG Maker game? There's just something endearing to me about people who put so much time into their fan projects for little to no profit.

Addictiveness: 7/10 One of the problems that I had with this game plot wise is that there really aren't any hooks that keep you going. There aren't questions that really beg an explanation or anything similar. I was promised a good plot and I most certainly got one, but it took a long time to pick up. I did enjoy the game quite a bit, but I never really felt that strong incentive to play it.

Story: 9/10 Puzzle games. RPG games. The two genres that seem to impress me the most plot wise. Put them together. What do you get? A game with a great plot! Remember my key phrase "simple, but effective"? That applies here too. Not going to delve into the plot cuz spoilers, but it doesn't need to be incredibly complex to have an effect on you. Cave Story sort of accomplished a similar thing, but this game even more so. Bottom line, the story's simple yet moving.

Music: 8/10 There were some really fantastic songs in this game. While some areas I feel could have better composed music, the regular enemy battle theme ("Pepper Steak") is one of my favorites in video game history. It's just... so... I can't even describe it. Even listening to it on YouTube wouldn't quite give the same feeling that you get when encountering a giant floating head and hearing it play. Some other fantastic songs include the first boss battle theme and an area theme. I'll post them below as always for convenience sake.

Battle Theme "Pepper Steak"

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First Boss Theme "Fake Orchestra" (Spoilers?)

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"Unreasonable Behavior"

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Character Design: 9/10 For whatever reason, the characters stuck with me quite a lot in this game. Because of spoilers I can't really discuss very much, but The Judge and Zacharie are my two favorite characters, though I really love all of them. Not very many are given a whole ton of development, but somehow I'm endeared to them by the appeal of this game.

Humor: 9/10 I have to admit, I got a ton of laughs out of this game. A lot of it was because of situations like "wait what the heck is that that I'm fighting lololol" sort of stuff, but there are also quite a few really witty lines of dialogue that deserve a laugh or two. Overall, this game has its disturbing and serious moments, but it also has some room for laughs. Nice job, Off.

Difficulty: 7/10 The puzzles are all fairly simple, and the answers are found in the Readme anyway, so it's not like you'll get stuck forever if you don't want to use a walkthrough. The boss battles are definitely the most challenging part of this game for me, and mostly it's just pressing enter over and over to attack when your bar fills up while using competence when needed. The bosses have too much HP, the first one in particular, and the battles seem drawn out and longer than necessary. You shouldn't have too much difficulty if you stock up on healing items beforehand, though.

Other Memorable Features: One thing that sucks is that you need to download font files to read the text, which I was never able to accomplish. Therefore, I taught myself to read this crappy default font that it resorts to when you haven't installed the files, which was surprisingly a lot easier than I expected, although it did take away a bit from the first few parts of the game when I was still learning.

Overall: 8/10 I never like to complain about free games, but I certainly can praise them. Go out and give it a try if you're bored and want a game to play, especially if you don't feel like spending money.

[Yugi]

HELP

[blueflower999]

...Please don't. That scene was freaking scary. XD