Video Game General

[kirukuni]

Been playing Kowloon Highschool Chronicle while on pain meds. It's a 2004 japanese dungeon crawler that did very poorly financially, but inexplicably got a western translation funded by the creators of guilty gear, purely because they really like it. This gives a very good idea of what to expect from it. God I fucking love Japanese westaboos.

[Image: https://i.imgur.com/NvPfTJU.png]

Structurally, it alternates between visual novel segments and dungeon crawls. These are weakly linked by tying a handful of minor bonuses underground to your relationships with the autists aboveground, so it's basically persona but fun and interesting. It has multiple characters who aren't tiresome, which is very rare for this kind of game. 

[Image: https://i.imgur.com/TzawlyW.png]
[Image: https://i.imgur.com/2JDbIVL.png]

Most dialogue options consist of choosing one of eight moods to express from the autistic japanese cat-person equivalent of a bioware dialogue wheel. Most extreme emotions are chosen by holding the button down for longer. I love it.

[Image: https://i.imgur.com/bVPGgYb.png]

The gameplay elements are fun and lack any tiresome top-down design. There are a lot of cute ways to one-shot bosses or do weird minor exploits because the game is meant to be an experience, and the devs were just making things happen. There's a boss who's extremely weak to grenades because he's a giant pot. The devs' thought didn't go beyond the object level on matters like that. Player statistics are similarly object-level, direct, and undesigned. There aren't 'builds' so much as strategies. When you look at this shit, you aren't engaging with mechanics described by ChatGPT.

[Image: https://i.imgur.com/la8wOhe.png]

Combat takes place on the same grid as exploration, and most weapons function like the weapons in a light-gun shooter. You have to physically move your character to be able to see and shoot enemies, unless you have some weird magic item you found in a hidden room, in which case who knows what it does. Most areas have fairly intricate layouts to play with this.

it also has an extremely cute psuedo-pc-98 minigame that I recommend playing for a little bit. Weirdly, it has higher quality art than the actual game.

[Image: https://i.imgur.com/3N7DTkp.png]

[anthony]

Been playing Kowloon Highschool Chronicle while on pain meds. It's a 2004 japanese dungeon crawler that did very poorly financially, but inexplicably got a western translation funded by the creators of guilty gear, purely because they really like it. This gives a very good idea of what to expect from it. God I fucking love Japanese westaboos.

Fascinating. I don't know Japanese PC gaming anywhere near as well as I'd like to. It really looks like a nearly ideal approach to the possibilities of the medium to me.

Screw it, I was just writing about this on 4chan. Let me grab my own post.

You could accuse me of being a multimedia minimalist and I would agree. I believe that we currently have an out of control problem of overproducing media for relatively limited visions. I'm currently reading Umineko and am blown away by how much it accomplishes with such simple elements.

VNs and Japanese PC games have been in a great spot to experiment as art because there was so little built up in the way of audience expectations and conventional forms. The worst things which emerged were reading lengths (longer is value) and sex scenes (some people just won't buy if they aren't advertised), but these ultimately didn't do too much harm because words and a few pictures of nudity are cheap and don't weigh heavily upon the rest of the thing. A couple of simple obligations out of the way and you then pretty much have a blank slate as a multimedia artist. You can look at all of the possibilities of a computer and ask yourself "what can I do with this?"

It's no chance thing that the man who has historically made the most novel and striking use of console technology and conventions emerged from this field. That man is Hideo Kojima and I will fight you over this if you disagree. He took the unbound multimedia sensibilities into a bigger market and rather than allowing the new conventions, expectations, and sensibilities to bind and restrict him, he made it his business to play with them, use them, incorporate, and break them at his creative pleasure. At no point did "what can I do with this?" become "what do I have to do with this?"

This thing as described by you really sounds like it's doing everything fundamentally right. Like they start blank and incorporate new media forms and tools as they want to do more things.

[Sanae]

Anyone been playing Rance IX recently? The english Mangagamer translation just came out recently and I've been having a lot of fun. Story's top notch, gameplay is decent and even the ero content is extremely good. Can't wait to continue after work. Feels bad that we're probably not getting Rance X for like another decade but it'll be an excuse to learn Japanese or knock some other eroge off my backlog.

Ever since I got into eroge thanks to Sengoku Rance (one of the best games ever made for the record) I've been having much fun playing them. Despite the whole selling point supposedly being lewd contents I find that the big draw for me is the consistently great gameplay and story I find in them. Alicesoft especially keeps knocking it out of the park. A shame many of their titles are untranslated (been really wanting to play Daiakuji and Daiteikoku because they look interesting, and Daibanchou keeps having resolution conniption fits in WINE).

Been playing Kowloon Highschool Chronicle while on pain meds. It's a 2004 japanese dungeon crawler that did very poorly financially, but inexplicably got a western translation funded by the creators of guilty gear, purely because they really like it. This gives a very good idea of what to expect from it. God I fucking love Japanese westaboos.

[Image: https://i.imgur.com/NvPfTJU.png]

Structurally, it alternates between visual novel segments and dungeon crawls. These are weakly linked by tying a handful of minor bonuses underground to your relationships with the autists aboveground, so it's basically persona but fun and interesting. It has multiple characters who aren't tiresome, which is very rare for this kind of game. 
...

Extremely based taste, Kowloon Highschool Chronicle is excellent

[Guest]

Fighting games are spastic dopamine contests that demand very little by way of spacial reasoning, group coordination, anticipation of the enemy position, or high-level strategy.

You couldn't try and tailor a more suitable genre for the twitchy, reflexive nature of the greudengeist.

Fighting games have all of those things - what are you talking about?

[BillyONare]

They do not. It is twitchy Rock Paper Scissors. (I have nothing against fighting games, but he is correct on all counts)

[Guest]

I was originally going to write a post saying that is an overly reductionist analysis, but honestly, I think you might be right: it's Rock, Paper, Scissors with extra steps.

[anthony]

Strictly mechanical fighting games bore the hell out of me. I can only play them for short bursts of novelty and have never learned one. The most conventional fighting games I've enjoyed were Tao Feng on the Xbox and the various Soul Calibre games. I like them to look nice, be a bit more open with room to screw around, lots of visual novelty, etc.

I've never had much interest in games. That is, the part which serves as a contrived challenge so we have something to put ourselves into and win. That alone is not fun. If it's not embedded in something I can care about beyond that I'll get bored quickly. Some fighting games look quite nice, maybe have a touch of novel writing or whatever, but to really get into them you have to start thinking about them like chess, which isn't fun at all.

I really think that the Soul Calibre games are great examples of 3D character modelling and environmental design and realisation. I think they look fantastic and always have. Also cool announcer, and of course plenty of these games have neat music. In any fighting game I've liked the game part is the least interested piece to me.

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/DpYLG4B/image.png]

I love the colours here. And as for the level of fidelity, this came out in 2008. I think it's more than what you need to realise anything you're trying to do. Good amount of detail all over with the background stuff looking appropriately background. Newer games which try to use bleeding edge tech to realise similar blue and green scenes often get it completely wrong. There's a really fine art to this. Extraordinary visual literacy and design sense is 90% of what you need to make something that looks fantastic.