Puyo Puyo Tetris

Who thought this was the best multiplayer game for the Switch at release?

In the past I've bought games on hunches, like interesting story, cool concept or better get it now cause later it will be impossible especially with the lacking of internet infrastructure at my current whereabouts. Sometimes I've tried demos, that's how I come to pester my parents to let me buy The Curse of Monkey Island. Others had nice graphics, best example Final Fantasy X, that and I recognised the series from reading about it, but that was pretty much graphics and music. And then you have this game. I dowloaded the demo for this game after recommendation from the local game store just to try it and have for the multiplayer family gathering. It was rather fun. And the demo pretty much had everything you needed, except the reconfirm and reset the choices after every single match. So I ordered this game together with Ever Oasis and you know what? This one had a story mode.

Basically it starts with Ringo who is interrupted by her friends Amitee and Arle after teleporting due to popping puyos. Suddenly Tetris pieces fall from the sky, they pop some more Puyos and end up at the starship Tetra where the captain Tee is trying to figure out how they ended up here. They crash on the planet and try to piece what happened together. Apparently the keeper of Dimensions isn't separating the Tetris dimension with the puyo dimension so they fix Tetra and goes to the edge of dimensions where Ex awaits them, the former captain of Tetra and the ex-king of Tetris. After Tee battles him to remind him why his roll matters everything back to normal, the dimensions gets separated and Ringo and Tee separate.

It's a silly premise and over the top, but I enjoy it. The humour is great at poking fun of the silliness of it as Tetris blocks and puyos fall from the sky. The prince of Darkness walks around being in love with Arle and gets really upset when she accuses him for being behind it since it's something he could do. There's even a singing fish traveling through space. Part of me wonders if some older games have these characters since it appears to be a lot of backstory hinted among them. And it isn't as hard, although I should probably not admit this, but you can skip battles after losing a number of turns to get on with it. And as you can guess, yes, I did it a couple of times, especially on puyo and fusion battles. I can't get the thinking of the puyo portion to work for me. I prefer the mode swap since I'm at least competent on Tetris, having played it a lot on both computers and video games. Best is with 4-multiplayer battles in local mode. And if a console should have a Tetris game, this one covers most bases, even single-player mode.

Metal Slug 2

OH YEAH!!! THE BEST ONE

So they finally released it for the Switch and... it wasn't as fun as I remember. Maybe the slow-down really isn't that great. The moments are still there in the ending level, although it went much worse than it usually does. Could also be due to playing alone since it gets more intense with a friend to tag along. And since I already covered the third game the changes from the first game is that you have 4 character to choose from, you can get fat by picking up to much food, turn into a mummy at a certain stage, more vehicles like a fighter plane, camel and some kind of exoskeleton and a new weapon like the Laser. 

The story, as read from wikipedia (since again, there is no story summery within the game), is that 2 years after the first game the splintered rebel forces are regrouping under a General Morden back from the dead and the old heroes together with two agents from their intelligence agency S.P.A.R.R.O.W must track him down to stop another coup. And in the end it turns out Morden teamed up with aliens who betrays him... for some reason so together with the generals forces you battle the mother ship until it falls down. The ship goes down as one of Morden's pilots flies into the laser conductor or whatever. I think they are homaging the movie Independence Day.

A half-hour game at most. Rather fun, but now I hope they release Metal Slug X to see if it's improves the game or not. Hopefully I can still choose the red blood option.

Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma

Great, 9 new characters to second guess during all the game

I just had to get more of the Zero Escape-series after Virtue's Last Reward and since there was no release for the original game I had to go for the sequel. And they went full 3D so the gore is amplified as well as more explicit than the other game. The music is the same and still creeps me out and beckons my interest in the mystery. Pretty much the same premise, 9 people trapped in an underground facility with bracelets on their wrists. The difference being that they are already assigned teams, Carlos, Akane and Junpei in C-team, Q, Mira and Eric in Q-team and Diane, Phi and Sigma in D-team. They have signed up for some Travel to Mars-excercice and after 5 days being locked up by someone wearing a plaugemask offering them a coin toss option. Guess right and they are free to go or get it wrong and play the Decision games with Zero II. I guess red and... wins the coin toss. Everyones put to sleep and let out and credits roll. That was easy.

Of course to really get it you have to explore all possibilities so lose that coin toss. The three teams are relocated to separate wards and after 90 minutes put to sleep by the bracelets as well as administrated a drug that erase their memory. Meaning you don't play the game linear as before, but jumps between fragments that appears if everything leading up to them are fulfilled. You all remember the first decision game since you are forced to vote for the two other teams and the team that gets two votes are executed. In the last minute you find that the dog from the training centre can go between wards and carries a container that you can send messages with so C-team who gets it first sends out instructions how to spread the votes. Your first choice is to follow the instructions or chose the other team more or less betraying them. And then you are put to sleep and depending on the decision of your current group and the other groups you get 4 separate outcomes. One of the three teams gets executed or the plan works and you are taken to a decontamination chamber where you again have to decide to either press a button that forces the other teams being showered with some acid that turns them to sludge that disappears in the drains. If no one presses it you end up with a [Force Quit Box] where you need passwords you can't access in that timeline so it's time to jump around.

So who are all these people? Carlos is a firefighter that entered the program to get $ 500 000 to cure his sister. Akane is the old woman from the last game that infiltrated the program with Phi and Sigma to stop the outbreak of Radical-6. A younger Junpei from the last game had tracked down Akane and followed her into the program. Diane is a nurse that tried to escape her abusive ex-husband and Mira and Eric are a couple... with problems one might say. Eric is prone to snapping and be very abusive which probably has to do with his abusive alcoholic father that entered some depression after his wife died and Mira... is a serial killer that rips peoples heart outs while they are still beating. And Q is some child with a huge helmet over his head he can't get off. And this is the simple story elements. In actuality Diane is the person Sigma modelled Luna from the last game after and is pretty much his lover. In this game it's also revealed that Sigma and Diane is Phi's parents that sent her back in time through an alien teleporter that was discovered in Germany in 1888. I see they went and threw away all of Knox commandments when doing this game. And she apparently have a twin brother named Delta. Phi is also patient Zero in the Radical-6 outbreak in the timeline following Virtue's Last Reward, but how that works I don't know since she must have been cured or maybe they didn't give her the disease like with everyone else since she was already infected and the reason she volunteered?  Akane is psychotic and bash Carlos to death at one point for killing Junpei in an AB-game. And Junpei doesn't get it better as he is carved up in different pieces and his head is put on a display in a freezer. And the boy Q is a robot without any head behind the helmet that Zero put there and get's the most tearjerking endings in the game, the first when he stays behind with the chained up dog Gab since he couldn't leave him in the shelter and then when he sends his conscious into a virtual reality where he gets to play out the life of the real boy he was modelled after, Sean who died from some incurable disease. And he gets to live in a happy family, go to school and have friends... oh boy, how can I feel so much for a robot AI within a game?

So you might be thinking, who's the mastermind behind this? Obviously it's Delta, but he is not 20 years old like Phi since both travelled through time to the year 1908, but Phi was teleported to 2008 after that so Delta is 124 years old. And he can read peoples minds and for a short while take control of a persons body. He calls it mind hacking. Apparently he was with Q-team all the time if I guess right, but he sits in a wheelchair and is supposed to be both deaf and blind. His reason is to force them to jump between alternative histories so he assure his and Phi's birth with their powers (Phi's being able to SHIFT timelines) and then making them all regain their memories and take the place of those winning the coin toss in order to fight for a better future since the Radical-6 plan was to stop a religious cultist engaging in a nuclear war killing all 8 billion people by leaving 2 billion people alive after the virus take care of the others. I assume they hint that yet another game where you have to take care of that person. Also Alice and Clover tried to get back to their time and K apparently shifted back in time and changed conscious with someone, but we don't know who. Now I really want to play the first game and I wonder if there will be a forth one.

So story is all over the place, but there is some problems with how the game plays. They made it worse. In the last game I could have the notes on the top screen so I didn't have to switch back and forth when writing passwords or such, but now I gotta switch. That annoys me to no end. Same with files so I can read the instructions while trying out a puzzle. Now I must read the files, jump out and open the notes and write them in. It's almost forcing me to pick up pen and paper like in the olden days. The big downside I gotta say. Otherwise a fun game.

Ever Oasis

Finally

As mentioned I waited for the game Ever Oasis to play and now I got my hands on it at Friday, and finished it on Tuesday. A bit under 30 hours, not 100 %, but finished the main story and Oasis on level 23 and my seedling at level 22. I played the demo when that got out for around 30 minutes and found it a rather fun action-rpg. Basically you're Tethu, a seedling and brother to your home oasis chief who teaches you all about being a good chief... well, in this game. I guess there would be some problems if the chief have to bribe the resident as well as being used by the residents to get their things. But all is not well as out of nowhere a black dragon attacks. Your brother stands between you and the monster and he sends you away before the battle. You switch to Esna, the last water spirit living in the desert that feels the destruction of the last oasis and then you land right near her. You form a pact to create the greatest oasis ever and stop the spread of Chaos.

The story doesn't get more engaging than that... well almost, one of the first companions you meet is the Drauk... let's call her M since I can't pronounce or even spell the name. The Drauks are some spear wielding lizards that are either warriors or obsessed with fashion (and I think my auto-correct guessed the origin of the name correct since it want's to spell it drakes). She looks for her little sister that's gone missing but decide to stick around with you. Other people you meet is Lev the Sekhmet (a scorpion person I believe) and Sol (a rabbit person, Langoras I believe they are called which I know is very close to another word for rabbit thanks to Zero Escape). So game is divided in to parts, one part is running around fighting monsters and collecting resources to help in the oasis portion of the game where you let the seedlings build booths to generate dewdrops that work as currency. You stock up their resources and when they profited enough you can do certain quest to level the booth up. You also can take care of a garden where you put in seeds to gather even more resources. Seedlings that doesn't have a booth you can put to work there. So resource grinding is one of the more important gameplay in this game. I should really hate this, but it feels rather good.

It never felt it was in the way of the story in like Xenoblade Chronicles where I need this specific thing that forces me to grind the same monster for hours until it decides to drop it (or you buy it after grinding some other points in X). And fighting the monster are rather fun... one on one... or rather three on one. Is it more monsters the slow camera really doesn't help in avoiding attacks which are fairly telegraphed, but that doesn't help if you can't see the monster as you are focused on someone else in front of you. Then it can go down quickly. Another aspect of the game is that you need to solve puzzles in the world to progress like in Zelda (which probably is helped by that the company behind the game are the same that did the Zelda 3D remakes on the 3DS), but you need certain characters for it so you switch in and out of the oasis to get the right combinations (between all the residents of the oasis). I get why, but it can get a bit annoying and actually takes away some of the difficulty since you heal every time you get to the oasis and yet I understand why it's there since the game would be horrendous if you had to backtrack all the time. Examples are that the spear wielding Drauk can use the spear to activate switches and lift certain objects while the Sekhmet have hammers to activate other types of switches and break rocks while the rabbits can cut open spider webs and yet active other switches and then we have personal skills like digging, mining, pellet, paraflower, flow wall and the likes. Then the seedlings can have weapons like magic staffs that can in certain areas light and darkens room, the crossbows to attack flying enemies and activate switches from afar. Really wish your main seedling could learn or equip some of the skills since it's rather irritating having set up a team to traverse the dungeon and have to stop each room to return and get in the digger which you must switch out since there ain't a combo of characters to match it in since you are limited to 3 characters so you can't even take one of each tribe (so best would be 5 people, one of each race plus an extra seedling). You know this game would be rather fun as a multiplayer game.

So thats the gameplay. The story continues with you growing the oasis until it gets overrun by chaos. To combat this you are guided by the great sage Thoth to find the lumite crystal guarded by a... guardian. You get it and get rid of the chaos for now. Knowing it will return you search for the next lucite crystal and then the next. After that you are confronted by the embodiment of Chaos... who have taken your brothers body as his vessel. He allowed you to gather the lucite crystals in order to create the black lucite to use it to conquer the desert. So you need to get the eye of truth to read the heiroglyphs and get three coloured slabs so you can power up the lumites again, get them to the Sage so you can make White Lucite and in doing so can enter the whole he created in your oasis to confront him, well not until you defeat M's little sister that decided to team up with chaos. At least she is explained, but the other two henchmen isn't explained at all. Well, you defeat him and as he escapes Esna sacrifice herself to call forth rain and sunshine to destroy him and make the desert grow again. Your character sees the spirit of Esna and your brother before they disappear and then it follows with a teaser for  continuing story. IF that implies more story, another game or that you can max out the game with your file I don't know. It felt rather short to be honest, but I don't mind with all the games in my backlog. But what I really wish is that this company would team up with Camelot and make the damn Golden Sun-sequel I want.