kuraine

a pixelated entity

  • she/her

idk some girl or cat or panda that does music


πŸ₯ twitter
twitter.com/kuraine
🎹 radical dreamland (studio)
radicaldream.land/
πŸ•οΈ bandcamp
radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/
☁️ soundcloud
soundcloud.com/lena-raine
πŸ˜‡ ANOTHEREAL (new dev blog home)
blog.radicaldream.land/blog/?q=ANOTHEREAL
πŸ”Έ Dispatch from the Radical Dreamland
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i think the main thing i could say after completing meg's monster, a bite-sized jrpg by small indie studio Odencat, is that it's a masterclass in brevity. in a lot of ways!

from the outset, the premise is that you, a big beefy monster named Roy, find a small girl named Meg & are determined to protect her and see her safely back home. the general twist on the jrpg formula is that you're immense, have 9999 HP to start, but any time you take damage, it 'hurts' the heart of Meg, and if it drops to 0 she cries, and then the world ends.

every battle is bespoke. every area is usually a single screen that scrolls vertically, selected from a compact world map. items are one-time-use but refresh every battle. it is a jrpg so condensed that i felt the essence of turn-based combat design distilled down to the puzzle-like nature of action choice that good rpgs have, but without a constant number-go-up pressure that is relieved with such a concise scope.

even the music chooses to be simple (but certainly not lacking in complexity), with a pared-down palette of piano & string quartet, and a little percussion and synth thrown in every now and again. it's a beautiful live-recorded accompaniment to pixel art lovingly inspired by games like mother 3 & the lineage of indie rpgs that have come after.

it's a small, perfectly sized story at about 5-6 hours of playtime, and just enough space to get attached to the characters so it can break your heart when it needs to.

super super recommended ✨


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in reply to @kuraine's post:

I hadn't heard of this, but watching that trailer, it's definitely going on the to-do list! Thanks for showcasing it! c:

That combination of deliberately OP protagonist and RPG mechanics so distilled that it turns the game into a secret puzzle game reminds me of a game called Hero Must Die that I suspect you'd like, as well. (Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054050/Hero_must_die_again/ But it's on Switch and PS4, as well.) You basically play as a hero who dies against the big bad and are brought back to life at full strength, but with the caveat that it's only for five in-game days and your character's strength and overall stats diminish over the course of that period. Each run only lasts a couple hours a pop at the most, so eventually as you internalize the progression of events and when they trigger, it becomes this fascinating mix of party member and calendar optimization (eg: "who's best equipped to handle this part and when should they be recruited?", "what shortcuts can I take to activate this flag faster?", etc.), along with maintaining this mad dash to keep upgrading your character's equipment to compensate for his dwindling stats. I've talked about it occasionally on Twitter before, but I have a really big soft spot for it. Just a super inventive game by one of my favorite designers and writers in Japanese games, Shouji Masuda (also behind Linda Cube, the Oreshika games, etc.), and one of the very few readily available in English.

I wouldn't necessarily say there's quite enough meat to it to justify the $40 that localized edition asks for when it's on sale, but if all that sounds appealing to you, I'd say jump on it when it goes down to $20 or less, which does happen.

I apologize for rambling on about another game, the premise of playing as such a souped up character just immediately reminded me of that, ahaha.