Humble Bundle – Made in Japan All-Stars
Apr. 30th, 2020 07:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI bought this bundle years ago and briefly tried a bunch of the games, but nothing jumped out as super-interesting. I put it to the side to revisit later, and over the last couple of months I got around to finally revisiting it.
Vanguard Princess - 2D fighter starring fetishy-clad anime girls. I'm not really big into either of these things.
Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae - A katana-fighting game that features a Japanese schoolgirl fighting ninjas and robots summoned by another schoolgirl with a demon sword. The enemies come in waves and each stage is a new (small, round) arena to kick them around. I rather like the system and the way you fight (you need to use normal attacks to fill the katana gauge, then you can really kill things with your sword and special attacks), but it needs more--plot, missions, bigger maps, something.
Unholy Heights – Managing an evil apartment block! You need to set rent and fancy up your rooms so that monsters move into them, then put up quests on the board so heroes come by and your tenants need to defend their homes. You too can be the worst landlord ever! (Except that it’s honestly slow to the point of being boring. Somebody could and should build a much better clicky game around this concept.)
REVOLVER 360 Re:Actor – A 2D shoot-em-up with the addition gimmick that you can rotate the visual plane, making it possible to dodge screen-filling attacks and make enemy formations more manageable. Of course, this also means that threats can come from a plane you aren’t looking at, and you can get a game over when a meteor comes seemingly from nowhere. I like the concept and it feels fun, but I’m not actually any good at it.
Astebreed - Also a 2D shoot-em-up, though this one has an actual plot and will rotate the plane of action for you at regular intervals, mostly for dramatic effect. The control scheme is weird and the loading times were long enough that, being impatient, I didn’t want to deal with trying to get all the way to the settings menu to try to re-set them. Also, it is really, really hard to pay attention to plot commentary scrolling across the bottom of the screen when you’re in bullet hell.
One Way Heroics - A roguelike with a similar approach to Half-Minute Hero, in that you’re trying to cross the landscape, level up and defeat the final boss in a comparatively short period of time. In this case, the screen is constantly scrolling and the infinite blackness on the left with kill you. There’s randomly-generated equipment, towns, townspeople with mini-quests, etc. I want to watch someone who knows what they’re doing beat this game and explain how they did it.
Gurumin: A Monsterous Adventure – A little girl moves to a new town to live with her absent-minded grandfather, but it’s a mining town with no other children, so she makes friends with the local invisible-to-adults monster population instead. This is a 3D action rpg with a weird control scheme (which is always concerning) and the first NPC you talk to in town is a grown man who hits on you. Ugh. It took half an hour to reach something resembling a dungeon, and between the iffy controls, likelihood to there being 3D platforming and asking-for-trouble story material (apparently you need to interact with the pedophile for weapon upgrades?) I’m stopping there.
Overall: I got a few hours of entertainment out of this bundle, four years apart, but nothing in it had staying power for me. I think there’s also the vague feeling in most of these games that I missed something vital to the experience and it should have been more fun. Oh, well.
Vanguard Princess - 2D fighter starring fetishy-clad anime girls. I'm not really big into either of these things.
Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae - A katana-fighting game that features a Japanese schoolgirl fighting ninjas and robots summoned by another schoolgirl with a demon sword. The enemies come in waves and each stage is a new (small, round) arena to kick them around. I rather like the system and the way you fight (you need to use normal attacks to fill the katana gauge, then you can really kill things with your sword and special attacks), but it needs more--plot, missions, bigger maps, something.
Unholy Heights – Managing an evil apartment block! You need to set rent and fancy up your rooms so that monsters move into them, then put up quests on the board so heroes come by and your tenants need to defend their homes. You too can be the worst landlord ever! (Except that it’s honestly slow to the point of being boring. Somebody could and should build a much better clicky game around this concept.)
REVOLVER 360 Re:Actor – A 2D shoot-em-up with the addition gimmick that you can rotate the visual plane, making it possible to dodge screen-filling attacks and make enemy formations more manageable. Of course, this also means that threats can come from a plane you aren’t looking at, and you can get a game over when a meteor comes seemingly from nowhere. I like the concept and it feels fun, but I’m not actually any good at it.
Astebreed - Also a 2D shoot-em-up, though this one has an actual plot and will rotate the plane of action for you at regular intervals, mostly for dramatic effect. The control scheme is weird and the loading times were long enough that, being impatient, I didn’t want to deal with trying to get all the way to the settings menu to try to re-set them. Also, it is really, really hard to pay attention to plot commentary scrolling across the bottom of the screen when you’re in bullet hell.
One Way Heroics - A roguelike with a similar approach to Half-Minute Hero, in that you’re trying to cross the landscape, level up and defeat the final boss in a comparatively short period of time. In this case, the screen is constantly scrolling and the infinite blackness on the left with kill you. There’s randomly-generated equipment, towns, townspeople with mini-quests, etc. I want to watch someone who knows what they’re doing beat this game and explain how they did it.
Gurumin: A Monsterous Adventure – A little girl moves to a new town to live with her absent-minded grandfather, but it’s a mining town with no other children, so she makes friends with the local invisible-to-adults monster population instead. This is a 3D action rpg with a weird control scheme (which is always concerning) and the first NPC you talk to in town is a grown man who hits on you. Ugh. It took half an hour to reach something resembling a dungeon, and between the iffy controls, likelihood to there being 3D platforming and asking-for-trouble story material (apparently you need to interact with the pedophile for weapon upgrades?) I’m stopping there.
Overall: I got a few hours of entertainment out of this bundle, four years apart, but nothing in it had staying power for me. I think there’s also the vague feeling in most of these games that I missed something vital to the experience and it should have been more fun. Oh, well.
