#which ill be hopping after to finish this one playthrough

[bill-beauxquais]

Blogging my Bravely Default II Playthrough - Chapter 2

Here we are for a new chapter!

As usual, spoilers for up to chapter 3′s title card below the cut (so all of chapter 2, none of chapter 3), you have been warned.

Overall opinion: The game is still fun to play and while I sometimes laments being so slow, I like that I can play a lot without feeling like I’m goind too fast. On a story standpoint, I’m a bit bummed that this chapter didn’t really make any real progress in its main thematics, but on a gameplay level, it was fun.

Gameplay: I talked about there being more strategy in battle already, but I realise I didn’t mention why. Compared to previous games, it seems like enemies use brave and default a lot more, and they actually go into negative. It happened in previous game, but if my memory serve, it was only certain enemies who had this quirk baked into them. Also, nearly all of them have counters and immunity, preventing you from just braving 4 times and calling it a day (albeit it still works reasonably often).

However, I did notice a flaw as well in the balancing. Some sidequests (most notably, the mushrooms sidequest) only opened to me after I finished the chapter’s story, but they took place in a dungeon where every enemy was WAY underpowered. I’m still getting underdog bonuses in the story, so I’m not overleveled. I don’t know what exactly unlocked the sidequest, but I checked everytime I set food in Wisward. On the other hand, the sidequest boss actually took me some planning, while I basically Yolo’d all the asterisks of the chapter. Weird. In the end, the whole dungeon was simply a long corridor (every enemy fleeing from me), with one tough boss at the end. Jarring.

Speaking of dungeon, this chapter really made them a lot longer than anything the serie had until now. On one hand, they can get a little boring and frustrating after a while, but on the other, I do like that they allow you to really train your new asterisks by putting more time between each of them, so overall I’d say it’s a positive.

Speaking of which, I finally looked into what you get from the boat, and I need to mention the inclusion of JP orbs, to give you JP experience on the go. It makes it easier to level up jobs without having to grind with ill matched teams, which is a good idea, since ill matched teams are sometimes really unforgiving because of the immunities and counters mentioned earlier. You still end up having to train jobs the old fashioned way, but any shortcut is good.

Speaking of grinding, I was surprised that I didn’t need to grind even once, for now. I wouldn’t qualify the asterisk battles of underwhelming, they took me half an hour on average and demanded strategy and quick thinking or risk taking, but I went into most of them with in-training teams full of ill matched underleveled and redundant jobs and still won. For me, that’s just the right difficulty to be interesting without getting frustrating.

My favorite asterisk of this chapter probably was the Shieldbearer for more Gloria Tankness (I also noticed it pairs well with White mage for a tanky healer)  , but Ranger is good as well (but I’m biaised from the previous games. Always liked hunter). I appreciate that they changed red mage to be less of a watered down mix of Black and White, but I’m not sure I’m using it very efficiently. It just doesn’t seems to deal a lot of damage, and I prefered the old one’s design. This one looks a lot more boring. As for Artist, I’m not really using it very well for now either. I feel like there’s already tons of debuffing skills in other classes.

I didn’t really get the point of Wayward Wood, since you know where the correct exit is, there’s not much point in making a looping/”lost wood” kinda dungeon, because it’s not like you will get lost (unless you’re doing it willingly the first time just to see what happens). Maybe it’ll open other paths later, who knows.

Writing: Still good, albeit I think i prefered Savalon. I suppose I expected to see more of Elvis’s backstory and family, why did he come study magic, how did Lady Emma pass away... But nothing of the sort. I don’t think like it really helped see Elvis any more in depth, sure he is a good friend, but that’s something we already could infer. I would’ve liked to see his character broken down more.

I’m always happy to see dead kids stories (don’t get me wrong, I love kids, but I also roll my eyes quite a lot when writers chicken out on having anything bad happen to a kid in their stories) but I don’t know if this was strong enough to be the focus of the entire chapter. I don’t think it had any connection to Musa’s downfall or the crystals. But I could see Wiswald coming back later in the story to tie back into these themes, and maybe that was just the Wiswald introduction chapter.

With the dead kids, crazy people, greenery, hunter & red mage asterisks, and those darn Mushrooms and flower enemies, it’s also hard to shake the feeling of this being Florem.02, and Florem will always be extra special to me.

Writing - Theories: Definitely called it for Edna’s veiled ass, although introducing that silver haired lady just before almost threw me for a loop. I’m assuming she’s the traveler handing out asterisks like candies, and Adelle probably knows (or at least she knows her sister is related to asterisks in some way)

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I had a theory back when playing Default for the first time, that asterisk made people crazy or at least, more extreme, and that’s why they all made the perfect little mascot for theirs each time. And also why Ringabel *and* Artemia in the anthology lost their memories when they lost their asterisk: it plays into their brain and personalities. So, nice to see theory confirmed by the sequel.

As expected of its unredeemable bosses, Folie kicked the bucket, which begs the question: I fully expect them to have another gauntlet like the previous games. So is a timeloop/universe hopping all but confirmed at this point, or will this be something else? Will the characters’ deaths be retconed or explained away? I feel like some of these characters could be redeemed in a timeloop, and stopped an saved before they do much damage. The asterisk are pretty much the ones to blame in nearly every case for the sudden change of heart of their holders.

I’ve got that flimsy theory that Shirley is Emma’s kid, based on a similar hairstyle, the fact the gambler asterisk pairs well with black mage, and that Shirley mentioned her mother leaving her father. Who knows. I liked Shirley.

Adelle is definitely crushing hard on Elvis, but I think he’s pretty much ace. Interesting to see how this develops.

Graphics: Gonna hand it to them, i was impressed that they actually made a unique model for Mona, all to use it for one cutscene. Long gone are the days in which they just reused Yew and Magnolia’s models for Altair and Vega, two majors characters. This is the kind of attention to detail we like to see here. No cutting corners. They even made a model for the paintings, too.

The fog effect was pretty rad as well, and definitely got me running a few laps like a giddy kid. You like to see it.

Elvis’ head looked pretty big compared to his friends, noticeably so. But I suppose Bravely Default 1 and second weren’t that much better, and even worse. The main 4 were DEFINITELY chibised compared to other characters (which made Alternis look like a baby in the Eternian team)

Performance: I noticed a bit less lag, but I also made the battle speed slower, this is probably related. Else, it’s the same things.

Music: Elvis’ theme is pretty good. I remember listening to the first drafts that were datamined from the first demo back in the day, and it was already my favorite.

However, I wasn’t a fan of Wiswald’s overworld theme, and the city’s was forgettable.

#Bravely Default II #Review #Video Game Blogging #Nintendo Switch #JRPG #bravely series

[hilltopsunset]

Parkour Janitors: Dustforce Review

For the past few years, I’ve been listening to a variety of video game music mixes on YouTube when focusing on work or other creative endeavors. Some time last year, I had my usual jams on when suddenly I heard a tune that I REALLY liked, but had no idea what it was from. When I glanced at the screen and saw the charming artwork of janitors posted up, lookin’ about ready to drop a hot new album, the first thought I had was, “…how the heck does this awesome music tie into these goofy janitor folk?”

That’s how I learned about the existence of Dustforce.

This happened right around the time I was also preparing to begin my streaming career, so I figured it was the perfect opportunity to jump into a new game. Right away I was drawn in by the clean visuals and the art style, the core mechanics of parkour-hopping off and up walls, the concept of cleaning rather than killing, and the melodious, ambient tunes gracing my eardrums. When I first conquered the tutorial levels, I felt well-equipped to handle whatever was ahead of me…and boy was I wrong.

In retrospect, I really feel like the tutorials ill-prepare players for the complex combo-driven controls needed to perform many of the game’s more nuanced, hidden mechanics, which are necessary when attempting to achieve an SS score for the more difficult levels.

Speaking of the SS score, I did appreciate the unique scoring system; each level contains a series of severe slaloms, pillars, tricky jumps, and loopty-loops players must navigate—as well as perilous pits, spikes, and attackers one must avoid—on their way to the finish line. There are two factors the game considers when calculating your rating at the end of a course, and neither has anything to do with how quickly you get through the level…technically. Instead, your score is based on two factors: 1. how much of the garbage you clean from the level, and 2. whether or not you were able to maintain your “combo” the entire time—combo is built by cleaning trash, and lost if you fall into a pit, touch spikes, take a hit, or dawdle too long between garbage cleanings. So while you do want to move efficiently through the level, and plan out your path to ensure you have enough time to get to the next heap of debris before the combo is lost, you could theoretically take 20 minutes or 2 minutes to finish a course and get an SS both times. There are 5 possible scores for both junk cleaned and combo maintained: D, C, B, A, or S, where D is a very poor performance and S is a perfect demonstration. Since there are two scores calculated at the end of each course, a perfect run is typically referred to simply as an SS.

One of the first aspects of Dustforce that struck me as surprising was that there is no story involved at all. The dramatic introduction shown when opening the game, pitting janitors against junkies, really had me under the impression that some tomfoolery was afoot and the bad guys were making a mess of things, and it was up to the Dustforce to stop them. This, however, did not appear to be the case—or if it was, it was never explained, described, or demonstrated in any way throughout the entirety of the game. In fact, not one of those “bad guy” characters appears a single time. There are occasionally “trash monsters” that you need to give a good bopping to in order to rid them of their leaf-coat or gunk-shell to pacify them, but the specific characters shown in the opening never make an appearance. Which kinda made me sad, to be honest. It would have been neat to see SOME sort of story, even if only told visually.

When it comes to the playable characters, though, you have four options: Dust Guy, Dust Girl, Dust Kid, and Dustworth. When I first started playing, I assumed the differences between the character were strictly aesthetic, because there is no indication anywhere that they are any different at all. This is deceit—they are VASTLY different in how they play. Without getting into the details, basically: Dust Guy and Dust Girl are similar (the “neutral” characters); Dust Kid has shorter jumps and has a shorter reach with her double-duster swipes, but can air-jump twice instead of just a single time; Dustworth jumps RIDICULOUSLY high and has the longest reach with his vacuum blast, but doesn’t move as quickly as the others. In the early parts of the game, I favored Dust Kid when I learned she could air-jump twice, and she was my comfort-character for most of the game. But when I started getting serious about SSing all the courses, I readjusted to the mop-wielding Dust Girl, because I liked her aesthetic more, and I liked the feel of her movement and developed a strong intuitive sense of it after a while.

The game’s progression works pretty well. When you first start the game, you start in a sort of hub world full of mostly locked doors, and to open them you must complete other levels to obtain the necessary keys: better score means more keys. There are 4 tiers demonstrated by the color of the lock: there’s open, Bronze, Silver, and then Gold, and each tier holds greater challenges than the previous one. The jumps in difficulty were usually tough but fair, with a few exceptions where some silver doors felt like gold ones. I could feel myself getting better at the game as I played, which was great. More often than I not, I felt like failures were my own fault rather than the game being unfair, and that I just needed to improve my skills rather than overcome a design flaw. After some time spent playing the more difficult courses and practicing the mechanics, it was super gratifying going back to older levels and easily SSing them.

I learned after my playthrough that when the game was first released, the open-tier doors didn’t exist—it started with the bronze tier levels, but players were having such a tough time getting into the game, the devs ultimately developed more beginner-friendly courses to help ease players into the game a bit better. I definitely agree with this move—even some of the open doors were tough for me when I was first getting started. But I do think some of this could have been remedied by better explaining how the game works in the tutorials. I forgot to mention that they do not explicitly tell you even how the grading system works; I learned what a combo was only because of stream viewers who knew better than I.

I definitely ran into my fair share of issues when it came to the mechanics of the game; fortunately for me, I streamed the entire playthrough, so I was almost never on my own. I was blessed with several appearances by veteran Dustforce players stopping by and providing their expertise, helping me better understand how the game works and how to better utilize the controller to make my characters do the things I wanted them to do.

One of my biggest pain points was ceiling-sliding/running. This is a mechanic where, if you get enough speed, you’re supposed to be able to run along the ceiling for an impressive distance. For the longest time, I had so much trouble with this. I think it was partially because, in Dustforce, the “up” key on the directional pad is technically used more like a button key than it is a direction key—what I mean by this is that the up button acts as more of an “initiation” key that causes your character to essentially enter a new mode of movement—either running up a wall, or running along a ceiling—that sort of magnetized you to the nearest wall or ceiling. So while using “up” to run up a wall was fairly intuitive for me, because pressing it causes the character to move the direction I was pressing, I was having tremendous trouble going from “attach to ceiling with up button” to “run along the ceiling with left or right button” and often found myself just sticking to the ceiling and not going anywhere. It was very frustrating, and while I knew it was possible to do, I had no idea where to even start correcting the way I was pressing the buttons.

The community, by the way, was incredibly friendly and welcoming. I got the sense that Dustforce players LOVE seeing new people play the game, because everyone who likes Dustforce really loves Dustforce, and wants others to enjoy it and share their excitement for it. Big shoutout to Skyhawk, HolyKau, BrotherMojo, hgtw, and anyone else who stopped by and provided guidance when I was hitting a wall (literally). I really do not believe I could have gotten through without the help.

Once I did start getting comfortable with the game, I started feeling sometimes like I was playing a 2D fighting game rather than a platformer: it really requires very precise and specific button combinations in order to perform a lot of the movements in the game, which made me think of my early days of Killer Instinct for the SNES, trying to input the commands needed for an Ultra Combo. If you know, you know.

The more I got into the game, the more I noticed little things that started bothering me immensely as I encountered them more and more; one such thing is spikes and hitboxes. There were countless times when my character was visibly nowhere near a spike, but the game registered as being hit. Then there were other times when I was visibly going through spikes, and the game was perfectly happy to let me pass as though my body should not have been torn asunder. It was inconsistent, which, in a game that already demands such delicacy and precision, is not great. It was, in fact, infuriating at times.

Beginner players would benefit from more thorough explanations of the mechanics present in the game, which could be better explained during the tutorial: tell us how the characters differ, explain a little more about how momentum works, give a more detailed account of ceiling-running, provide a description of how the grading system and combos work, and help players out a bit more with understanding how to gain speed from a slope! One thing that helped me the most was seeing what’s possible by watching other players; I found that once I knew what I could and should be doing, it was much easier to have the patience in figuring out how to do it. Heck, maybe even have demos during the game’s tutorial where you see a ghost character do the thing, and then you have to do it. Most of the time, even knowing how to get past a particular section in a course is not enough, because you still have to perform. Having to figure out certain mechanics are even possible just presents an unnecessary hurdle for players when the game is difficult enough, even when you have that knowledge.

But its shortcomings were nowhere near enough to give me an overall bad experience. I genuinely enjoyed my Dustforce playthrough. The art style, the music, the concept, and the execution were all masterfully done, and the community is wholesome and encouraging. It’s a challenging platformer with some brutal gauntlets that will test your gaming prowess and your patience, but only if you’re determined to SS each level. It’s entirely possible to just get through each course to see what the game has to offer, which I highly recommend doing if you have any appreciation for 2D platformers. That was my original plan—to just complete each level regardless of the score—but when I found out that the only way to access the final group of levels was to SS every course in the game…my plans changed. I did not SS the extra levels hidden behind the red doors, but I did complete them all, and I’m happy with that, even if they all have a D rating. I’m proud of SSing all the gold doors, and I even snagged myself a world record! I completed one course in under 1 second. No, that is not a joke.

I’ll end this review by saying: most of the music in this game slaps. Hard. That first song I heard set reasonable expectations for the rest of the OST. There were maybe 1 or 2 tracks I wasn’t super big on, but damn. If you don’t plan on playing the game any time soon, at least go listen to that music, because it’s great.

#game review #dustforce #indiegames #hilltop sunset #platformer #2d platformer #vg music #game music #challenge #twichtv #twitch #twitchstreamer #streaming #twitch community