FaeWife Era 🔞

lots of thoughts!

So I dunno what it is right, I hate Dark Souls I hate it SO much that if you let me get into it, we'll be here for 15 paragraphs. I hate indie games that vandalize themselves with Myizaki's horse shit (in my opinion, smiley face, tee hee) approach to game and boss design and I'll never not bring up Dandara, Death's Door and Tunic as the most tragic examples of games that break their own legs just as they're about to step over the 10/10 threshold just cos of uncritical game worship. HOWEVER then why is that games, AAA and Indie, that just want to copy Dark Souls outright, are so fucking good? Like from Nioh to Blasphemous like they're all so good tho??? Like even if they're too difficult for me to complete or whatever, I still have a really good time with them? And it feels like every single time they are good, like an uncanny strike rate with me, someone who hates Myizaki Fromsoft games with a fiery passion. I don't get it! And here's Bleak Sword another one of those!!! It's so good!!! How!?!?!?!

All your favourites are here, dodge rolling, parrying, a currency you lose when you die that you can reclaim, it's a Souls! It's an arcadey 10 stages a world, where you fight a horde of enemies on a little diorama, it has a satisfying system of momentum: So the long you go without losing your EXP, the more likely you are to pick up temporary stat boosting items. And if you ever die you can start your run again at any point from stages of the past, so your run can be as long or as immediate as you like. It's like the Gradius problem, but very obviously on purpose.

Just a heads up before playing, this is the original Apple Arcade game and it's DLC. But it does the weird thing of not like presenting itself like that? Like it was one big game the whole ttiimmmmeee, but you can kind of tell it's not. So the first 9 stages are the original game and the rest is DLC. I think pace-wise it does the game service for you to view it like this imo!

There is an unspoken narrative with licenced titles with this era of games, of a dev taking on a licence to make an adaptation, but that has absolutely no baring on what kind of game will come out the other end. Like it's different thing entirely, dev Pack-In-Video wanted to make a Zelda II and they got the Rambo licence, but it feels like it could've been any licence! But the former was definitely happening irregardless of the later and that's just beautiful. We get these real exploration of new design philosophies and genre and they could truly be wearing anyone's skin. It's just neat.

Tho with Rambo's subject matter, distilling it to a side scrolling RPG feels very weird! Tho the smallest possible time is spent not fighting either rabid animals from the pit of hell or the US army, which is some good foresight for the time! But aside from some awkward map design, especially with the friggin BOAT, this was surprisingly fun! And it feels like it shows how versatile this flash in the pan genre was for it's small lifespan. You can attach it to friggin Rambo and it turns out okay!

This one is very tied to Current Events the Current Even being CDRomance being shut down (do not narc and correct me in the comments lol) and their last updates was seemingly the entire saga of this Namco dude Wagyan! Who is he!? Namco made a Little Guy and I've never heard of him. He's never showed up in any crossovers, no Namco X Capcom, no Narikiri Dungeon, no Point Blank or Tekken cameo, no nothing! What a mysterious little man. He's like the Metal Sonic of Dig Dug's Fygars and the game's art style feels like a lost Pac-Land sequel it's quite bizzare.

This is the Biomiricle Baby strand of platformer, where your little man has no offensive capability, but he can yell! And yelling makes enemies from Touchy Death Boys to Platform Men. There's also a little Aku Aku system of powering up Himb Yell, after level 4 you get a burst of invincibility before being hit back to level 0. There's multiple paths on a world map so there's replayability, which it deffo needs.

So this game does an Alex Kidd thing with a mini-game in place of true bosses, which since our guy is non-offensive makes sense! There's a match 2 game and there's a word chain game too. Where you pick a word and the last letter of that word, is what the next word choosen needs to start with... SO YEAH, this is fine until the very final boss and then it's not fine! So I dunno who's the culprit here, if the Japanese version is like this or if it's a problem with the English Patch, but like you literally cannot win? The main problem is the English language just fucking loves words ending in "r" and "e" and the game is just not balanced for this reality. There can only be so many R and E words in the world before the final bosses requirements of a 15 word chain before defeating the opponent like... I was at it for 30 minutes, even with using rewinding and cheating, like it can't be done! But that's Englishes fault as a language, Wagyan disproves of reading it and I love that for them.