Guild02
Ugggggggghhhhhhh
TLDR for the last one: 7 games that Level 5 made in collaboration with other developers, first 3 sucked, 4th was alright. Moving on to the last 3.
Attack of the Friday Monsters: A Tokyo Tale
This is a adventure/visual novel/ card game design with the help of Kaz Ayabe. Never heard of him? That’s probably because he’s only worked on 6 other games, and all of them were Japan-exclusives. Apparently “AotFM” is very similar to his “Boko no Natsuyasami” series, in that they primarily involve some kid just… doing something in a rural-ish environment.
So I played it, and my reaction is as follows:
youtu.be
I’m just gonna be blunt here. This is one of the worst non-shovelware video games that I have ever played. The entire game consists of navigating an overworld from point A to point B and talking to a specific individual to progress this story. Its a fetch quest. The entire game is just a long string of fetch quests. There is literally no reason why this should be an open world and not just a visual novel. The only other thing that you can do is collect “glims,” every 10 glims getting you a card to use in the minigame. A minigame which consists of one of the most poorly thought out collectible card games I’ve ever seen.
Each player places 5 cards in any order face down, each matching up against the opponents respective card. You are then told how many matchups result in a win, loss, or draw. Two specific matchups have their results (but not the cards themselves) revealed. The first player must then swap any 2 cards around (regardless of if it’s actually in his or her best interest to do so, which just feels like an oversight). Then 2 more results are revealed, and the second player swaps cards. The cards are then revealed, and you see how many you won or lost. Already you can tell that theres not much in the way of strategy, but it gets worse.
The victor of each matchup is determined by Rock Paper Scissors. Each card has one of those 3 as their attributes. Theres no way of knowing which is which on the opposing side unless you just happen to get lucky when they reveal the result. Draws are determined by each cards “strength” stat, and since you are most likely to get 2 wins, 2 losses, and a draw in each game that means that whether you win or is determined by if your effectively randomly selected card is stronger than your opponents randomly selected card. If both have the same strength its a draw. You lose the entire game if you draw for some reason. Every time you lose you have to watch this damn animation of your opponent pretending to “cast a spell” on you to knock you down. Not that any of this really matters because you literally only need to win one match in the entire game so the entire card mechanic is virtually pointless. See why I hate this game?
If you took out everything card related as well as the pointless overworld then you’d be left with a by the numbers visual novel, but even that would be terrible because the writing is completely incoherent.
Things just happen. You keep getting showered with plot twists that make no sense in any context. I’m just a kid in a world with kaiju monsters attacking every friday, except the monsters are fake, but the aliens are real and they show up with 20 minutes left in the game to tell me I’m an alien. And then my dad is an alien. And then the other alien is apparently a bad guy but the game never says this and my dad just randomly starts attacking his giant robot, and then the robot picks up my mom, and then the robot puts my mom back down, and then I can cast that make believe magic spell on the robot and it works for some reason, and then some kid learns a lesson that nobody taught him, and then etc etc etc.
Literally the only positive thing that I can possibly say about this game is that its art style is… pretty good. Thats it. Just pretty good. I’ve seen it compared to studio Ghibli and I can kinda see it.
Still, the fact that thats the best thing I can say about this damn game is astonishing. This game makes me want to retroactively bump up my score of Liberation Maiden to a 3/10. Hell, it makes me want to bump up Metroid Other M to a 1/10. This is a new definition of bad.
0/10
Bugs vs Tanks
Anyone who saw me talk about this game in the shoutbox will know my thoughts on this game. Its a top-down shoot em up made by… Keiji Inafune? Mr. Mega Man? I guess this was before Comcept was bought out by Level 5 (boy was
that a smart move on their end, look where all the money from Mighty No.9’s digital sales got them) so it still counts as a partner developer of sorts.
There’s a relatively shallow story here, a battalion of tanks fighting in the European theater of WW2 mysterious disappear. It turns out that they shrunk. They now have to fight bugs to survive. Its a pretty fun premise. So how do they **** it up?
Yeah… This is a little bit awkward. I have no issue playing as a Nazi in a game when its something like a multiplayer WW2 shooter or a board game like Axis and Allies, I mean someones gotta be on the Axis team, but in a singleplayer campaign that doesn’t even give you the option to choose between them? I mean its not like they’re completely unaware that its this taboo in the west as they still went out of their way to not include any swastikas or other specifically Nazi imagery, instead falling back one the Iron Cross. Nothing about this premise requires or benefits from the fact that the protagonists are German in any way.
So why is it the best game in this God forsaken series?
Maybe its just the fact that I’m comparing it to the rest of these games, but I really enjoyed myself playing this game. It’s absolutely rough around the edges though. For starters, you don’t really control any of the guns on the tank. Each tank has 2 guns on it (even when these tanks historically had upwards of 6 on them), a machine gun in the front of the Tanks chassis, and the turret cannon. In addition to driving the tank, your job is to aim the turret so that your gunner can fire at will. You
can turn on the ability to fire manually, but the game clearly wants it to feel like you’re commanding a crew here. The biggest problem with this control setup is that the levels are pretty blatantly design with both guns in mind, yet the front facing machine gun is close to worthless. It might help here and there in a boss fight where even the tiniest amount of damage stacking will help, but when you’re being swamped with a massive amounts of bugs (something that this game just loves to do) it just kinda sucks.
The other problem is that this is a top-down shooter with a camera thats
way too zoomed in. This could’ve easily been fixed with a movable camera or maybe even one that’s slightly angled, but the camera will always be centered on the tank, only slightly zooming out if your turret is centered.
Probably the worst thing this game does is the swamp mechanic. One specific map has flooded sections in it, which, being in a 20 ton tank, meant that you can’t cross it. This is all well and good until you realize that one level later
requires you to cross the water, and the only thing that even kinda tells you what to do to cross is a piece of dialogue mentioning an “amphibious tank.” Sound familiar? Yup, its the same crap that was in Crimson Shroud, only this time the internet will never tell you this because I scoured the internet and found nothing on this. Granted, its not nearly as bad as by then you’re almost guaranteed to have access to an amphibious tank, but that specific tank is made out of paper-mâché, and the only other one is in another amphibious level. It’s annoying but not undoable.
The biggest strength of this game are the various tanks you can collect. In certain levels you can find abandoned tanks on the map, if you run into them they’ll become playable. This gets kinda weird because the in-game explanation is “these tanks were shrunk too,” and since there are tanks such as the Pershing or the Tiger II then this game clearly takes place towards the end of the war, yet the tank that you and your battalion start with is the Panzer III, which at this point was completely phased out.
Rant about minor historical inaccuracies in a $7 3DS eShop exclusive aside, the tank collecting is the best part of this game. There are 30 different tanks to collect, and each one of them has a model that’s relatively accurate to their real-world counterparts. This part is totally a me thing, but I always had a soft spot for WW2 era vehicular weaponry, so any singleplayer game that lets me play as them is a win. While everyone else my age said “holy crap Sonic is in Smash,” I would say “holy crap the ME-262 is in Secret Weapons Over Normandy.” This game absolutely delivers in this front, so every variant of the M4 Sherman I saw made me smile. You can also mix and match the various turrets and chassis, even give them a new weird paint job if you want. As funny as it is to see this massive Tiger II turret on a tiny FT17 chassis, I mainly stuck to the basic models. The one issue with the tank collecting is that some of the light tanks aren’t available until they’re pretty much useless, but who cares? I get to play as not one, but two different versions of the Stuart, hell yeah.
This game definitely isn’t for everyone, but I really did enjoy it, faults and all. This doesn’t save the guild series, not by a long shot, but I’d be perfectly happy to see a follow up to this one. As if that will ever happen.
6.5/10
The Starship Damrey
Ok… one more….
The Starship Damrey is a survival horror game with the development partners being 2 men named Kazuya Asano and Takemaru Abiko. The second one is apparently a decently famous mystery novel writer, but the first is… a Japanese body builder? What? You know, when I first started playing these, I was surprised that they got someone as obscure as Yoot Saito to do one, when I SHOULD’VE been surprised that they got someone as big as Keiji Inafune.
So the game starts off with this screen:
Ok… you have my attention. This seems interesting.
You start off inside of a coffin-like cryosleep chamber-thingie. You are given no instructions and have to figure out the controls for yourself. It feels almost experimental, like they’re trying to see what you can figure out. Doing one thing on a computer will unlock another thing that the microphone will do, and you have to figure out what to do next until you eventually get to a remote control robot.
…aaaannnd then all of that goes away as soon as you take control of said robot.
The first 10 minutes of this game are really cool, and then as soon as you hit a certain point it just becomes a generic puzzle-“horror” game, and those quotation marks are there for a reason. Apart from the general “abandoned star ship” theme, there are zero horror elements in this game. Theres like, 2 jump scares and thats it. Luigi’s Mansion is scarier than this. All you do is go from point A to point B, and occasionally solve a puzzle. For the first hour the game feels like it’s building up to a shift in the gameplay, but then it just doesn’t.
That’s literally all I can say about this game. Its cool at first, and then just goes on to disappoint with a main gameplay loop that does nothing interesting. Its not
awful, its
playable, but it just… exists.
4/10
Yeah, this is definitely what put Level 5 out of business for good. A cute idea, one that had potential, ruined by poor quality control, and frankly just baffling design choices.
I guess if you want a ranking, then I’d say something like
7.Attack of the Friday Monsters
6.Liberation Maiden
5.Aeroporter
4.The Starship Damrey
3.Crimson Shroud
2.Weapons Shop de Omasse
1.Bugs vs Tanks
The fact that Crimson Shroud is the third best one says a lot. Of the 7, Bugs vs Tanks and Weapons Shop de Omasse are the only 2 that are even worth a damn, and even then you have to really be into that sort of thing.
Guild 2 is a
4/10, Guild as a whole is probably a
3/10.