As I mentioned before, the first game I finished in May 2017 was Dragon Quest V, which prompted me to write a mini-summary of the games I'd played up until that point in the series. Pretty much right afterward, I finished Cosmic Star Heroine for PS4, a retro RPG that plays like a hybrid between Phantasy Star and Chrono Trigger. Just that description sounds incredible, but it doesn't quite live up to the lofty expectations one might have considering that pairing. Still, it's a really good game that totally eclipses the quality of the developer's other titles like Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World, which were a couple of old-school turn-based RPGs more in the vein of Dragon Quest than anything else. Cosmic Star Heroine amps up the graphical style to the 16-bit era and features a much more creative battle system.
I really enjoyed several aspects of the game. The sci-fi setting is interesting, it features a lot of distinct characters with different stories and gameplay patterns, and the combat itself is pretty engaging and strategic. The game is turn-based, but the order in which characters use their abilities is important for a couple of reasons. There is no resource management for casting spells because all skills are gated by cooldowns. In fact, each ability in the game must be recharged by guarding. This creates a situation where the player must decide whether to wait until all available abilities are exhausted before refreshing cooldowns or to refresh at more key intervals. The other decision point comes from the use of Hyper Mode, which activates automatically on, say, every third turn of a given character. The pattern in which this mode is activated is totally dependent on the character in question. In Hyper Mode, any ability is drastically stronger than usual, which means you'll want to plan ahead to make sure the ability you plan on using is off cooldown when Hyper Mode comes into play.
In practice, this is a really interesting mechanic to build an RPG combat system around and I had a lot of fun experimenting with it and finding unique builds to explore. It's also a game in which each encounter you come across is meaningful and requires strategy to conquer. This is really fun in boss battles, but maybe less so in general encounters along the way. Although the game itself is not long at all, spending as much time as I did on individual encounters got to be a little exhausting from time to time. Still, the combat is fun enough that I didn't mind so much and it was a lot of fun to experiment with different characters and abilities. I'd love if the devs would reuse the same system with an even more fleshed-out title at some point in the future but based on their tweets it doesn't seem this is very likely. It's a game I'd recommend if you're into retro RPGs at all, though!
I was really glad to come back to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice because it is a series that I care a lot about and it'd been a really long time since I'd played a game in that series. I really enjoyed Dual Destinies a couple years back and felt Spirit of Justice was a step up from that title. The Ace Attorney series is of course a series of investigative adventure games in which you assume the role of Phoenix Wright and other supporting characters like Athena Cykes and Apollo Justice to not only investigate crimes, but to represent a defendant in court cases. Sure, lawyers don't do their own investigative work in real life, but in video game form it somehow seems to make a lot of sense. Ace Attorney is wildly implausible and wacky in a lot of ways, but the characters are generally super charming, the dialogue is fun and interesting, and when things go well, the story (and mystery) ends up being incredibly gripping.
I keep hoping we'll hear about a new Ace Attorney title for Switch, but so far, it's an no-go aside from an announcement that the Ace Attorney trilogy is being ported to the platform. Here's hoping we'll hear more in the future!
The very last game I finished in May 2017 was a weird little PC game called Emily is Away. It is a game that could best be described as interactive fiction and takes place within the confines of what is AOL Instant Messenger in all but name. It even uses the same sound effects and UI elements, even though the name of the messenger is changed. It follows instant message conversations the player has with the titular Emily and a few other supporting characters over the course of a few years. You have the ability to make some minor choices along the way and the way in which these are structured is interesting. However, after playing through it for a bit, I found that the game was pretty lacking in depth even if the concept itself is pretty intriguing. It did fill me with some pretty intense nostalgia but at the end of the day it's not a game I can find myself wholeheartedly recommending.
Looking ahead, I can see that I played a lot more games in June, including the last game I ever wrote about on this blog before a lengthy break. I'll decide later on whether or not I break that into more than one entry!
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