September Media Post
Featuring BlazBlue Entropy Effect, Class Of '09, Class Of '09 The Flip Side, Class Of '09 The Re-Up, Rayman 3 Hoodlum Havoc, Bubsy 3D In "Furbidden Planet", Bubsy 2 (GameBoy), Bubsy In: Fractured Furry Tales, Bubsy In: The Purrfect Collection, Shantae Advanve "Risky's Revolution", Annalynn, Hi-Fi Rush, StarVaders, and Danganronpa The Animation.
BlazBlue Entropy Effect
My immediate impression of this game was that aside from the character sprites from prior titles, this game doesn't look like BlazBlue. Turns out this game is made by the developers of BlazBlue Revolution Reburning (91 Act Inc), I thought that game felt much more BlazBlue, so I guess this isn't made by people who straight up don't know the series. The story and setting still feel incredibly disconnected though, and I didn't really care for it. My enjoyment outside of the main gameplay was significantly improved when I discovered that you can play as Pakumen instead of one of this game's robots.
Thankfully the main gameplay features prior BlazBlue characters who I already like. I'd never heard of Icey before her inclusion in this game as a guest character, but looking it up, I think this game's aesthetic (and maybe also premise) was probably moreso inspired by that.
The gameplay's fun. Attacks and movement are very fluid, and it's cool seeing how BlazBlue characters had their movesets translated into a different format. As a roguelike it's enjoyable, although a lot of the systems feel very disjointed. Few things synergize outside of the elemental upgrades. I'm not a big fan of meta progression in roguelikes, but this game's Legacy system is cool, you get to save and carry over 2 items from 2 runs each. It's also really cool getting to use character specific attacks and abilities on other characters, although it's a little lame that they're predetermined rather than something you get to pick yourself.
I had this game in my library for a little while, what made me decide to finally try it was the Dead Cells crossover. I don't have any attachment to Dead Cells, I've literally never even played it, I just found the idea of BlazBlue crossing over with Dead Cells randomly funny. I didn't particularly enjoy playing as The Prisoner from Dead Cells though, instead I liked Kokonoe, Jin, and Mai.
Also, the multiplayer is fun (albeit unbalanced in favor of easy feeling).
Class Of '09
This game's pretty edgy, I'd recommend reading the mature content warning on the bottom of either its store pages, it's got a lotta dark stuff. I found it funny for the most part, though sometimes there's not a punchline, things will just turn out bad.
Nicole is the kind of protagonist that I'd hate to be like in real life, but she's pretty fun to be in a video game. I found the dialogue buttons to be stellar, while they don't tell you exactly what Nicole will say, they do an excellent job at portraying how she thinks.
My main issue with this game is that a lot of scenes feel very disjointed. Some scenes don't really tie into anything, they just happen. There were 2 sets of scenes in particular which I found annoyingly common for routes to funnel into (1 involves getting invited to a concert, and 1 involves Jeffery taking a photo).
Class Of '09 The Flip Side
Whoops, turns out I played the 3rd game in the series (this one) before the 2nd. I don't think it really mattered though, I didn't seem to be missing any relevant context. All 3 of these games are short (I have about 5 hours in the first game), but this game's especially short at only about 3 hours. This is the most streamlined game, aside from 1 pair of choices, every choice leads to a different ending, although there's only 5 of them in this game (the first game had 15). The routes in this game are at least relatively long.
The protagonist of the first 2 games, Nicole, way more clearly struck me as a terrible person in this game, despite her acting pretty much the same, since you control Jecka instead. No longer being the one choosing for her really emphasizes just how malicious she is. This game also has some of the most frequently rough scenes to watch in the series, particularly because of Jecka's dad.
Class Of '09 The Re-Up
I couldn't tell you for sure how streamlined the decision tree is in this game. After the first game, I learned my lesson to save at every set of choices, which didn't matter much when The Flip Side was so straightforward anyways, but I think it helped a good bit in this game. This game also has fewer endings than the first game, with only 7, although the routes also longer.
Out of the 3 games, I'd say this one's the funniest. I think it has some of the funniest scenes in general, but it also just focuses on the comedy moreso than the other games. I can't think of any moments off the top of my head in which this game did step back from the comedy.
I played through about half of this game years ago, but couldn't back to it because I lost access to the device I played it on. I finally got around to getting the game for myself, and really enjoyed it as I expected. This game's a pretty good example of what I want out of 3D platformers, linear levels with layouts that still take advantage of the 3rd axis.
I think the combat in this game is a big step up from Rayman 2. The increased amount of enemy types is particularly appreciated.
I've heard one of people's main issues with this game are the gimmick sections, and I remember that being a notable issue when I first played through half the game, but going back to it, I didn't mind them as much. I'd still say those shoe segments were unenjoyable though, and they're still my least favorite part of the game.
This game has a points system, but it doesn't seem like it was really built to support indefinite replayability. Scores are counted as percentages (maxing out at 100%) at the end of level segments, with the game seemingly not counting high scores anywhere. Looking it up though, there are people who have optimized the game far more than I imagine the devs intended. Regardless, I'm not a fan of how power-ups give score multipliers, since the power-ups are oftentimes ahead of a lot of gems, which incentivizes a lot of backtracking.
Bubsy 3D In "Furbidden Planet"
I'm not particularly planning on actually beating this game at the moment, I played about 5 levels then stopped. I'm aware it's considered bad, I don't like what I've played of it, and I don't feel the need to force myself to play it.
I think some of the games issues have been overstated online, although ultimately I agree that it doesn't control very good. I tried out the Refurbished Edition in the new Purrfect Collection, and I don't think that one controls well either. The original version has tank controls, only letting you straife while in the air or not touching the d-pad while on the ground, it's hurt by a lack of camera controls, and it generally feels slow to the point of hurting its pacing.
The Refurbished Edition on the other hand makes Bubsy accelerate too fast for my liking, and for some reason the camera doesn't allow you to point as far down as the original did which I find annoying for platforming.
The Refurbished controls also map all d-pad directions to up for some reason, while the analog controls seem to really favor 8-directional movement anyways (I find it difficult to get angles in-between cardinals and diagonals).
I think it's interesting how this game translated Bubsy's branching pathway design into 3D, to this day I feel like it's not something I feel like I see much at all outside of the Sonic series. Unfortunately due to the game's technical shortcomings, I think the levels fall short in theming.
Bubsy II (GameBoy)
From my experience, this is pretty much just a smaller, even slower running version of Bubsy II. Here's my thoughts on the SNES version (alongside the first Bubsy).
Bubsy In: Fractured Furry Tales
This game combines 2 of my least favorite elements of the first 2 games. Bubsy can only take a single hit like the first game, and the levels are mazelike, even moreso than the second game since you have to find multiple switches around levels before reaching the exits. I also did not care to finish this game (I'm more likely to go back to it than Bubsy 3D though).
Bubsy In: The Purrfect Collection
This collection's a lot more complete than Bubsy Two-Fur, featuring nearly every single version of every Bubsy game from the 90's. Strangely the PC version of the first game, Super Bubsy/Desert Fox Bubsy is absent. I'm not too bummed about that, but its absence makes this collection just a little bit less complete. Unlike Two-Fur, you don't get uncompressed game roms, although I'm not the type to be bothered by that either. The games all play properly from what I've tried, the only technical issue I've encountered is a single crash. The bonuses are cool, I particularly liked the 2 interviews and the design documents.
Shantae Advance "Risky's Revolution"
Shantae is one of my favorite video games series, so I'm not surprised that I like this. I have trouble really pointing out what I like about this game in particular though. This game's main gimmick, the world rotation, is cool as a narrative scenario, it feels satisfying rotating towns back into the right place, but from a gameplay standpoint I found it a little annoying. It was a lot less annoying than I actually expected though, I believe you can simply press each rotation switch once then never again, my main issue was how the foreground level layer obfuscates the background level layer.
I'm glad the non-GBA versions of this game include the GBA version as an opinion, I think everything aesthetically fits together better in the GBA version since everything's noticably pixelated. The magic/item switching was a little cluncky, but I'd say that's because the GBA has so few buttons, I can't think of how that system could've been improved. I imagine some people would be annoyed by this, but I found it charming how this game retains Shantae's modern artstyle for certain things like character renders.
For the first time, I decided to use a guide to beat a Shantae game. The puzzle I got stuck on (the one involving the people trapped in ice) wasted me an hour or so before I looked it up. Once again, I'm glad to no longer be too stubborn to use guides, I probably could've been stuck for half, if not the majority of my total playtime.
Annalynn
I found this game to be a solid arcade style game. Unlike most old-school arcade games, jumping is a decently flexible action in this game, you're not locked into a single jump arc. There's some pretty obvious comparisons that can be made with this game, but ultimately I think it utilizes its inspirations in a unique enough context.
Hi-Fi Rush
This game rocks. It's super stylish, I found the writing charmingly funny, and while it has a pretty standard plot, the characters involved make it fun. The mix of genres made the gameplay uniquely cool, it felt great when I could stay on beat, although it felt clunky when I couldn't, especially when I was outside of battle and just trying to dash around. Shout-out to Korsica for being cool.
StarVaders
Since playing the Mario + Rabbids games, I've been looking for another Tactical-RPG to hook me hard, and this one has. Simply planning out moves feels interesting, and that's what I primarily want outta Tactical-RPG's. It also definitely helps though that I like this game stylistically. I wouldn't have been as attracted to buy this in the first place if I didn't pass the eyeball test, but also I wanna note that this games sound design feels very good. As of writing this I have a Kaia profile picture on the Fediverse because she's my favorite character, and I wanna show it off here because I'm particularly satisfied with the background I made this time around.
Parkour Civilization
This series took a really silly idea, and ran well with it. So much of the humor comes from the worldbuilding, it's a delight to see just how absurd things are. The narrative and characters are pretty shallow though, combined with the frequent recaps that weren't cut from this compilation, and this series got pretty mind-numbing at points. There's one line in particular which I know the series for, but I guess it's in Parkour Civilization 2 because I didn't see it. I tried to watch Parkour Civilization 2, but I got burned out pretty early on.
Danganronpa The Animation
The Hundred Line Last Defense Academy released earlier this year (a game developed by the Danganronpa developers from what I've heard), I've heard that's pretty good, and Danganronpa 2x2 got really funny reactions outta people in a Nintendo Direct recently, both of these finally got me curious as to what's up with Danganronpa. I decided to watch the anime though because it would take me the least time and effort.
For a series I'd been pretty disinterested in for most of its existence, I'm surprised to even like this anime, although I don't love it that much. The concept alone is pretty interesting, although in execution I was mixed on the characters, and the narrative beats felt formulaic. I knew going into it what the big twists at the end were, but I don't I think I would've found them satisfying regardless. I haven't played the game for reference, but it definitely feels to me like a sizable chunk of details were cut for time, I kinda figured that'd be the consequence of watching this over playing the game though. I've warmed up to Danganronpa's general visual style, although I find the execution scenes to look really corny.
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