Mento's Month: November '24 - General Discussion - Giant Bomb (2025)

Game of the Month: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Grezzo/Nintendo, 2024)

Wasn't quite my intention to play through two Zeldas in one year (not that it's something to complain about) but I figured I should end 2024 having played at least one game that came out in 2024. You know, it being the style around here. I'm not the most zeitgeist-affected duder out there, as most newly released games are about as good as those from the past ten years albeit a whole lot more expensive, but I was tickled by the idea of playing the first Legend of Zelda game that actually has Zelda in the lead, provided we pretend the CD-i games don't exist and I think most would be amenable to that accord. A while back now I wrote a list that chronicled all the appearances of the Hylian princess in her namesake series and her role in those games, mostly as a way of tracking how her characterization as an elfin Princess Peach had grown from an endgame prize to be won to someone who occasionally gets to have some agency in her life before inevitably getting kidnapped by a burly bipedal beast with anger issues. This game, I feel, is the culmination of that long journey for validity.

Echoes of Wisdom has Zelda narrowly escape a series of weird purple rifts and meet with a fairy-adjacent being called Tri who lends her a wand capable of creating echoes of various objects and monsters, called "echoes". Given Zelda's relative pacifist nature (though she's been handy with bows and swords in past games) creating monsters to fight for you is an interesting new dynamic for the series, one that has you considering what best matches up with what as you clear out the foes harassing you or standing in the way of progress in the current dungeon. Most of the echo system is geared towards this collectible monster aspect, with the inanimate objects in the echo library being somewhat muted in comparison. Really, beyond a few useful traversal items like the trampoline or the double-utility of healing and bridge-building afforded by the various beds, it's likely any echo you create will be intended as a burly protector. In case you do want to go in swords swinging though, you eventually acquire a limited-duration power-up that has you adopt Link's weapon set, including his sword, shield, bow, and bombs (though the bombs come way too late, honestly): this Link buff (or bufflinks, as I probably won't call it again) is best used to apply a lot of damage to bosses, since they all do that thing where they're only vulnerable for a short period before going back to their usual pattern.

I quite like the echoes system, and not just because it doubles as a set of collectibles (since I'm real weird about those). As I said, it forces you to think about problems like enemies and some environmental puzzles from a direction the series hasn't really explored before, utilizing the various monster properties of aerial, aquatic, ranged, melee, elemental (fire/ice/lightning), damage immunities, and so on in a way that feels like a very trimmed-down version of what other "monster friend" series like Pokémon and MegaTen have done for years. I say that, but most of my strategies involve spawning a Darknut and letting it tank everything, only bringing out a shark or a bird for those foes the Darknut can't reach (yeah, yeah, I failed No Darknut November). Still, it's when you encounter a unique obstacle and spend some time experimenting with all the echoes that might work are where the game shines brightest; there are certainly stretches where you can proceed on auto-pilot, but the lateral thinking types are my favorite. In addition to echoes, the game also makes ample use (or expects you to) out of two less celebrated commands: one has you telekinetically moving objects around through an object "bond" formed with Tri, necessary for a lot of pressure plate puzzles, while the other has you revert control back to the creature or object you've targeted with a "reverse bond" and simply let it move you around instead. The latter's very useful for getting over gaps or tall walls with the right wall-climbing echo, so I made sure to always keep that function in the back of my mind.

What I didn't care for as much is how many features were carried over from the two big open-world games, and don't fit nearly as well here. Like how there's a whole bunch of ingredients you can find for making smoothies (damn, Jamba Juice has gotten as far as Hyrule?) that take up the bulk of the items you earn from finding caves off the beaten path or from completing mini-games, rather than stuff you might actually be excited about like heart pieces and upgrades. Though, you still get plenty of both of those: the latter take the form of "might gems", used to power up Link's gear, and finding them all with the help of a certain accessory becomes a late-game scavenger hunt to enjoy.

Last, I want to give a special shout-out to something Echoes—and the Zelda series more broadly—does oh so right, but maybe isn't praised for as much as it should be. That is, the preponderance of W.L.G., a.k.a. Weird Little Guys. Echoes has a doozy of a W.L.G. in the form of Stamp Guy, an otherwise anonymous twerp who went to the trouble of setting up stamp podia in the most inhospitable and inaccessible parts of Hyrule all in the hope that some magically-enhanced OCD traveler would be able to find them all and humor his long-winded stories about the origin for his love of stamps while also showing off his Tom of Finland-esque fanart of... himself. Functionally as a gameplay mechanic, this is just a way of rewarding players who use the game's traversal tools to get to all the remote, out-of-bounds areas the developers didn't really have a solid plan for when creating the world (and by "create" I mean "mostly just lifted wholesale from A Link to the Past"), but that the devs went the extra mile to center this off-piste exploration around a strange man in his special, custom-made Stamp Guy uniform is but one example of the Nintendo Touch™ that almost makes their games deserving of their permanently high price tags. (Rating: 5 Stars.)

Oh, and just for funzies, here's my deeply unimaginative list of Ten Most Used Echoes:

  • Block o' Water. So damn useful to get anywhere. You can also create a big column and entice an annoying aerial enemy like a bird or bat to fly into it and they'll just instantly drown. Hours of fun.

  • Darknut Lv. 3. Darknut supremacy! Kills anything in seconds, immune to most forms of damage. My heaviest hitter until I got the Lynel at the eleventh hour.

  • Spark. The zappy ball things. Useful for a few electricity puzzles, but even more useful for getting past water currents and other obstacles of that nature using the "follow" command.

  • Flying Tile. As long as where you're going to is level with where you are and there's nothing in the way, it's the quickest means of crossing wide gaps or lava lakes.

  • Holmill. The mole. Kinda indispensable for a lot of buried treasure.

  • Ignizol. An early source of fire, useful for so many situations.

  • Trampoline. Best way of getting high up before the water block was available.

  • Bombfish. Takes most of the game before you get bombs of your own so this little guy is invaluable for busting open blocked caves and such.

  • Chompfin. Nothing beats ol' George in the water. (For my main aerial fighter, I cycled between various birds until I got the elemental Keese.)

  • Zelda's Bed. Sometimes a gal just wants a nap in the middle of a dungeon. Honestly, this game makes it ridiculously easy to heal yourself.

Darling Indies and Other Gaming Tomfoolery

Ghostwire: Tokyo (Tango Gameworks, 2022)

I'd meant for this to be an October spookfest sort of occasion but Umineko sucked up that entire month, almost. Anyway, November's a scary enough time with the lack of daylight and everything, so here we are: my new favorite Tango Gameworks game. Now that's a company that has a bright future ahead of it with this kind of potential on display. Ghostwire: Tokyo sees a young man, Akito Izuki, crash his motorbike at the famously turbulent Shibuya Scramble Crossing while attempting to visit his comatose younger sister at the hospital. However, even though he suffered an apparently fatal collision, he's still having a better day than the rest of Shibuya's citizens after their souls are forcibly removed from their bodies by a massive paranormal event, leaving only piles of clothes behind. Akito is saved from this fate due to joining forces (though with some amount of initial conflict) with a spiritual medium and yokai hunter calling himself KK, who has since died and now wanders around as a spirit that possesses and heals Akito's damaged body. The two eventually decide to work together to save whomever they can, including Akito's sister, and defeat the twisted mastermind behind the event along with the hordes of hostile "Visitors" (each born from distinct negative emotions) that have appeared.

Ghostwire puts to mind something like Sunset Overdrive, in that it's taking a tried-and-true urban open-world blueprint and trying to find a new angle to it, long after most developers (besides maybe Ubisoft, Insomniac, and Sucker Punch) has abandoned the format for new horizons. In that respect, it feels both old and new: running around the empty Shibuya streets eliminating (or ideally assassinating) spirits while hunting for however many map icon targets are in the area, using a combination of stealth, first-person combat, and fast-paced movement. The vast majority of the time, if you're a completionist like me at least, you're hopping around the place with the game's excellent aerial traversal looking for loose Shibuyan spirits, tricky but not necessarily hostile yokai like the shapeshifting Tanuki or the quick-moving Kamaitachi, finding KK's old case notes for a boost in skill points, or some kind of relic packed with backstories or historical lore about Shibuya and Japanese culture that some floating cat yokai merchant somewhere will pay out the nose for. And then occasionally moving the story along or dropping into a spooky little side-quest instance like a haunted love hotel or the garbage-strewn home of a dead hoarder whose greediness turned him into an evil spirit (hey, what are they trying to say about their collectathon-loving audience?). Those instances are great fun too, hitting all the survival horror beats as you get startled by an errant can falling over or the entire world turning upside down, depending on how serious the local ghoulies are feeling that day.

What I will say about Ghostwire is that the combat isn't always amazing. You mostly rely on KK's elemental spirit wizardry which tends to resemble quick pistol fire (green/wind), wide shotgun blasts (blue/water), and penetrating rifles (red/fire). Each can be charged for a stronger type of shot—green gives you multiple homing shots, blue gives you larger spreads, red lets you drop AoE explosions to catch multiple foes at once—and you also have a bow, which functions like a quiet sniper rifle in much the same way it does in the Elder Scrolls series but has limited usage due to the relative scarcity of its arrows. In most cases, if you can catch enemies unawares and destroy them in one move, it's best to do so if only to avoid a drawn out fight with multiple opponents warping around and behind you while you're trying to line up shots. Fortunately, the game keeps throwing in new ways for you to do this: early on, you have to do the conventional sneaky, crouchy, "get behind while hoping they don't suddenly turn around while patrolling" approach, but later on you can use talismans to stun them for quick kills or get the drop on them from above. Using height to your advantage is a regular aspect of moving around the game's "overworld", as you soon learn the trick to grapple up to where Tengu are hanging out on the roofs of buildings and from there can glide around and target isolated enemies down on street level. I love an open-world game that has fast and convenient traversal as well as a means of quickly stealth eliminating foes, so Ghostwire really scratched an itch I'd been searching for.

Ghostwire's also a very attractive game, with a similar noir urban aesthetic to the rain-slick streets and kanji-filled neon signage found all across the Hong Kong-set world of Sleeping Dogs, and its faceless Visitor monster designs are suitably creepy in both the uncanny way they look and the way they move. The playful highschoolers without heads, for instance, or the near-invisible blobs that psychically throw garbage at you, or the truly terrifying kuchisake with their split mouths and giant scissors. It's a good menagerie that offer a fair variety of challenges and strategies in addition to scary ambushes, even if most of the time you only want to avoid a fight because it's too much of a hassle rather than being paralyzed by fear. I loved hunting around for relics—if you meet the right merchant that wants them, they'll conveniently add their approximate locations on the world map—and then reading their descriptions afterwards, and despite being the sort of game where you'd think there'd be a suspenseful ticking clock aspect I spent the majority of its runtime, as stated, just searching around for stuff to find across its massive cityscape. The highlight of the game is one I believe they added some months after its release: a sojourn through a middle school that is plagued by the spirit of Hanako-chan, a real-life (insofar it's a ghost story that people tell outside of just this game) murdering ghost that lives in school bathrooms. There's a particular anatomically-educational creature in that school that gave me no end of jumpscares.

I'll also give a brief shout out to another late free DLC addition: the "Spider's Thread" run-based mode which, despite not having much fondness for run-based games in general nor this game's combat challenges, actually proved compelling enough to finish in full for its associated achievements. What helps is a progression aspect that lets you visit a hub area to power up between failed runs and in intervals after every three floors. The challenges for these floors aren't all combat-oriented either: some might be stealthy, or have you quickly move through a series of torii gates, or navigate an obstacle course, or else take part in a money-making mini-game if you're fortunate enough to encounter those special floors. Money and XP goes a long way when powering up your character, and you'll eventually unlock an accessory that turns the game into iron man mode: you can only take a single hit, but that's true of enemies as well. Despite what sounds like a harsh penalty (you generally have way more health than your enemies) the one-hit, one-kill mode really speeds things along and trivializes boss fights—though it doesn't trivialize those annoying ghost monsters that float around taking potshots at you when you least expect it. One of the rare cases where a bonus free run-based mode actually made for a decent value add. (Rating: 4 Stars.)

Kirby and the Forgotten Land (HAL Laboratory, 2022)

Since I'd already dusted off my Switch for Echoes of Wisdom, I thought I'd spend Thanksgiving week joining my American friends in consuming everything in sight with Kirby's newest adventure, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I explicitly remember playing Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards for 64 in 64 in early 2022 and getting stoked because it was the first ever 3D Kirby game, joining his pals Mario and Star Fox in entering a scary but exciting new dimension, only to discover that the game just has a few 3D flourishes but is otherwise a fairly standard 2D platformer, which was something I'd somehow never picked up on during the game's two decades and change of existing; I believe it was shortly after that the promotional press for Kirby and the Forgotten Land starting amping up, including the paraphrased tagline of "it's Kirby's first real 3D game". Now, I don't usually put a whole lot of stock in the concept of solipsism, except for those times where the rest of the universe seemingly only exists to make me feel like an idiot.

Anyway, that's no fault in our Hoshi no Kirby, who carries himself well in this for-real 3D game that sees him take his copy abilities and menagerie of bizarre opponents to a world eerily like our own, only absent any living humans who presumably built this entire civilization. Instead, all that remain are feral beasts, turning the game into the Kirby X Tokyo Jungle crossover we never knew we wanted. In addition to a small collection of copy abilities—twelve in total, including the single-use Crash and Sleep—there's also the much-advertised "Mouthful Mode", where Kirby is able to find a compatibility with ancient machines and props by holding them in his enormous gullet as opposed to absorbing them entirely. This could include a VW Beetle, a vending machine, a traffic cone, or any number of surprising fixtures. Parts of the level are usually designed with either the usual copy abilities (if there's a Fire guy early on, expect there to be a lot of things to set aflame) or the Mouthful Mode, creating a more linear and curated sort of approach to 3D platforming that the Super Mario Galaxy subseries was best known for. Fortunately, Forgotten Land is every bit as inventive as those Mario games, providing many innovative challenges for you as well as an expert overall level of competent platformer gameplay.

However, there are aspects to Forgotten Land that are mystifying to me, especially from a well-experienced Nintendo subsidiary like HAL Labs. For one, each stage has optional challenges which contribute to saving the Waddle Dees (there are no Waddle Doos sadly; Beam did not make the copy ability cut) (though, ironically, Cutter did) and these might range from avoiding damage in a boss fight (always the worst) or completing a sequence of collectibles like a certain food item or destroying a set of crude wanted posters for Kirby, in addition to a group of Waddle Dees found in bonus areas or otherwise off the beaten path. However, those that involve a specific challenge are left hidden to you: the only way to find out what they are is to either complete them inadvertently (if you get one item from a set of objects to find, the game reveals it then too) or finish the level and have one (but not all) of these bonus objectives revealed. It's a real transparent way to pad out the game's runtime, preying on the OCD collectathon types like myself to keep replaying these moderately long levels over and over to rescue all of Kirby's friends. You don't even have to be Dees nuts to want to recover them all too: there are explicit rewards back in the hub Waddle Dee village for rescuing so many, including useful services like healing and prize-offering mini-games and temporary power-ups (very useful for specific combat challenges). To add to this already anti-player practice (already bizarre in such a friendly series as Kirby) you cannot go back into a level to complete one of these rescue missions and then bug out with the "back to world map" option on the menu once you've earned it, because it refuses to save any of your progress unless you reach the end again. It also won't let you revert to a checkpoint if you're at the end of a stage and, say, take damage on a mini-boss fight that would void its related challenge. You have to either finish the stage and start over or abandon it and start over. It's made the last few hours I've spent with this game obnoxiously inflexible.

There are other aspects that have rubbed me the wrong way too. The wording on the temporary power-ups suggest they can be stacked, but what this actually means is that you can consume them all in town one after the other to stack up the timer rather than carry additional items with you, since the game forces you to only hold one at a time. Then, every world's boss fight starts with this slow, pointless walk to the boss arena to shave off a good half a minute of these precious power-up timers. There's a cute figurine collectible aspect—unlike the Dees and the cash you find everywhere, they don't serve a purpose beyond being something to waste surplus cash on—but if you intend to complete your collection be prepared to spend way too much money on gacha machines that regularly spit out dupes for the hell of it, which strikes me as entirely unnecessary if I'm not paying real money for them; what does it add to the overall experience to waste hundreds of coins on repeats?. As I said, some real boneheaded decisions went into this game and they're completely at odds with both the parts of the game that are ingeniously fun and unexpected and the franchise's whole overall gregarious and relaxed vibe of spending time with Kirby sucking up equally cute critters.

But yeah, beyond those annoyances it's a very respectable 3D platformer debut and a case where I'm glad Kirby decided to finally join the rest of us in the third dimension. That's not to say that I hope his 2D adventures suddenly cease: he's capable enough to support both varieties from here on out, as this game confirmed. I particularly appreciate the game's level design, its copious well-placed secrets and surprises, and the way it finds this bizarre tonal equilibrium in its aesthetic of a forlorn post-apocalyptic world juxtaposed against the sense of lightness and frivolity for which the series is celebrated. You wouldn't think picking through the desiccated ruins of a city block or a theme park could be so cheerful. The copy abilities and Mouthful Mode objects are very enjoyable to tinker around with and there's not a single case where I groaned at the prospect of having to work through another segment with any one of them: they all offered their unique charms and some creative challenges built around them with no exceptions. Well, except Sleep, but what are you gonna do? Kirby's gotta find time for a nap after eating several tons of snacks and beasts, as all my recently tryptophan-glutted peers can surely attest. (Rating: 4 Stars.)

The Rest

All right, enough of all these legitimate games, let's get down to brass hacks: the Super Mario 64: Randomizer is something I discussed in short last month but it's essentially exactly how it sounds. That is, a ROM hack that conveniently has built-in randomizer seed generation rather than the old conventional way to make randomizer hacks which had you upload a valid Mario 64 ROM to some website and download whatever it spits back at you (while making sure the place is authentic: don't fall for the same "put in your social security # and you'll get a unique Zelda seed that's tailor-made for you!" scam that I did... not fall for, I swear). There's some variations besides just "churn that sucka up" too, which this RetroAchievements set takes full advantage of for a distinct combination of different approaches and concomitant challenges. Most of the set has you getting the full 120 Stars on the "Extreme" setting, which didn't really come off as particularly extreme barring the occasional red coin or Star floating over lava. Others include speedrunning the game on "Sprint" mode (which eliminates the mechanic that kicks you out of a course once you have a Star) and my favorite, trying to earn 10 Stars (including at least one Red Coin Star) on "Green Demon" mode: a setting where a 1Up spawns as you start a course and chases you down, killing you instantly if it reaches you. That was fun but I don't imagine a full playthrough's going to be all that feasible, especially since you can't hope to outswim the thing. Other achievements involve tricks you can only do in a randomizer, like getting a Star ten seconds after entering a course (doable, but only if you're lucky with the spawn placements) or getting the 100-Coin Star in Tick-Tock Clock when the course is set on its 6 o'clock random speed setting (hence, a randomizer in a randomizer). Much easier set than I was dreading, honestly, and another super fun hack that RA helped me discover.

Since I'm all Mario'd out for the time being, I've spent the rest of my RA time in November working to convert some of my softcore achievements to hardcore ones. A minor distinction to those with any semblance of sanity, but hardcore achievements are those earned without save states or cheats: the RA site tracks those separately, so you can "cheat" all you want if you're just looking for a more relaxed achievement-hunting time but those weirdos (like me) who are sticklers for the rules can lord their "real" hardcore achievement sets over the rest of the plebes. Anyway, it's really just an excuse to replay some of the Picross NP series: a Jupiter-developed downloadable picross game released periodically via Nintendo Power, the SFC cart-writing kiosk service that was briefly a thing in game stores in Japan. There's eight episodes total and I switched to hardcore-only at some point around finishing the third of them, so now I've decided I want those first three to have the same fancy golden border around their icons that their siblings do because I have the brain worms.

Speaking of my debilitating addiction to picross, we should drop the newest Pictlogica: Final Fantasy check-in here. Oerba Dia Vanille (FFXIII), Umaro (FFVI), Kimahri (FFX), and Seifer Almasy (FFVIII) round out the latest additions to my menagerie, though the Memoria challenges to earn them are getting real taxing on this team I assembled. I might have to look into some alternative party builds if I want to survive the tougher challenges ahead, let alone the special EX battles that lets me recruit villain characters (FFXII's Vayne and FFVII's Sephiroth are the most recent two, and trying to complete their challenges has been rough going). Sticking with 3DS games, I'm finally done with BoxBoxBoy!'s long tail. The post-game content is about as long as the main game, or at least it felt that way given the challenge level, but after who knows how many months of chipping away at it across many five-minute breaks I've seen the end and earned myself an Empress costume for my trouble. Very interesting that the best reward for completing everything the game has to throw at you is some Queen Victoria drag cosplay.

WonderSwanning, Mega Driving, and Sixty-Forging Ahead

Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Ten) is the first of three finales this month, checking out another five WonderSwan games that caught my interest. I still have a few WS games left over that I might have to look at in some distant AHW revisit but I'll probably move onto something else next year. The Neo Geo Pocket perhaps, which was sort of a contemporaneous cousin to the WonderSwan given its similarly JP-heavy library of obscure oddities and alternative monochrome/color models. My favorite of this batch was the simple but addictive run-based action-RPG Dicing Knight Period (or just Dicing Knight.) that gives luck and RNG an even more central role than in its other run-based peers. Speaking of which, I also checked out Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon—part of the system's four launch game line-up, and easily the one that would eat up the most of your free time—as well as NanaOn-Sha's Vib Ribbon-adjacent Rhyme Rider Kerorican, the mobile Devil Dice port that is XI Little, and Namco Super Wars: the Namco IP crossover SRPG that would later inspire Namco X Capcom on PS2 and the Project X Zone games for 3DS. That feature really became so much more palatable once I'd eliminated the random selection process from the equation (though I'm sure that app will get its revenge in due course).

Mega Archive CD: Part XI has us process the last of the Sega CD/Mega-CD games released in 1993 and with it, puts a button on all the 16-bit Sega games from that year. I won't be jumping into 1994 right away, not without some further feature retooling, but I do plan on eventually discovering everything the system had to offer for as long as it was around. Trouble is, of the ~200 games released in 1994 only 40 of them were from Japan: I realize I come off as the weebiest weeb that ever weebed (see the anime section below for more evidence that'll build a case for an eventual intervention) by saying this but JP games are far more fascinating to me than whatever the west was producing on consoles at the time, which was predominantly sports games, racing games, and terrible licensed platformers and shooters based on cartoons or movies. A lack of quality and a lack of variety make them far less interesting to play, let alone read about, and the sheer apathy they inspired threatened to derail the 1993 output of Mega Archive more than once. Until I figure out an equitable way where I can just fast-forward through them to get to the next Sonic Team, Sega Falcom, or Treasure game faster I'll be sticking the series on hiatus. The Sega tapes will return someday though, I swear on this Sonic the Hedgehog-themed bible. (Tails 13:22 "And lo, the Hebrews implored upon their bespikéd prophet, "How are we to observe Yom Kippur, this most solemn of holy days?". "Gotta go fast," Sonic proclaimed in response, before moving at such mighty velocity that He parted the Red Sea.")

64 in 64: Episode 48 is, in a similar conclusiveness as the others this month, sees us bring down the curtains on its Nintendo 64-themed shenanigans. As much as I would... OK, no, as much as I would believe people might find it funny for me to cover and rank all 400-ish games on the system, I was running dry on those I had any enthusiasm about trying out (though I did include a small list of ten games that might potentially provide enough cause for a revival) and the feature would no doubt suffer if my verve for foggy and low-poly gaming dried up completely. 48 is a number linked to the series' pivotal "third act revelation" but more than that was how this last episode brought us up to 100 ranked games exactly, which struck me as a better moment than any to bring things to a close. Be sure to check Episode 48 out: Not only do we finally cover a Tony Hawk game (THPS3 to be exact, also the last official game to be released on the platform) and EA's Nuclear Strike but there's a few additional surprises to be found in the post-script. Your hint for the two games featured in the next episode is... oh, right, I forgot already.

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Pepper Grinder (Ahr Ech, 2024)

Fresh batch of Indies, comin' through. Even though November's a shorter month, I managed to squeeze in five episodes of IGotW and they were, once again, a hard group from which to pick a single winner. I'll give it to Pepper Grinder (#398), which I just covered, due to its combination of enjoyably rapid dig-platforming and some inventive ideas for little set-pieces, as well as an aggressively cool personality. I recall the trailers really selling the idea of just speeding through the world one pile of dirt at a time and it really hearkens to earlier fast-paced platformers like Specter of Torment and The Messenger where they're able to move at a clip and feel great while doing so. I'll be giving those time trials a wide berth, however.

Rounding out the runners up, we have the Zeboyd mini-RPG Cthulhu Saves Christmas (#394) that riffs on their earlier Cthulhu Saves the World only with an apropos holiday theme. I chose to publish that review on November 1st because I'm a monster too. As with Zeboyd's other RPGs, it's a compact 16-bit throwback that maintains a "all killer, no filler" philosophy with its rapid character advancement and steady influx of new items and abilities to keep your strategies ever in flux. Prodigal (#395) is a Zeldersatz from Colorgrave that rubbed me the wrong way with its narrative choices but is otherwise a very serviceable Link's Awakening homage that has a much stronger focus on characters and story, to the extent that it gives you multiple romantic partners to pursue and a whole town of NPCs to befriend and assist. Just don't try to play your guy as someone happy to leave a childhood hometown full of bad memories and ornery jerks once his business there was concluded: the game evidently doesn't like that interpretation.

Next, we have Sheepo (#396) from Kyle Thompson. This anthro explormer anticipated his later and more ambitious game Islets (which I also reviewed recently), though its use of temporary shapeshifting as a factor in several instance puzzles certainly gives it a personality all of its own. Worth noting is the Eric Thompson soundtrack, which hits the right relaxed vibe for an explormer that explicitly avoids using violence against your enemies (especially as you're supposed to be a xenobiologist looking to preserve these species). Last, we have stellarNull's Anuchard (#397), an IRPG (that would be an Indonesian RPG) that's actually more like an action-adventure game that splits its time between dungeon-crawling and socializing, in a style structurally reminiscent of the Persona games. In practice though, it's another top-down Zeldersatz with its focus on environmental puzzles and real-time combat in its dungeons. Some imaginative worldbuilding and strong character work, which I suspect was influenced by Moon: Remix RPG Adventure and Mother 3, help prop up some occasionally satisfying if mostly unexceptional gameplay.

The Bonus Indie: Soul of Darkness (Gameloft, 2010)

Just a short one of these this month because the previous game sections got super long this time. Soul of Darkness is a platformer for Nintendo DS (originally for mobile) that, well, to say they took a leaf from Castlevania would be an understatement: it's more they took the whole dang tree. As Kale, professional vampire hunter and occasional garnish, the player must track down his missing paramour Lydia after she is abducted by the vampire Lord Ritter. This involves traipsing through a series of linear levels (so we're talking classic Castlevania here, not the later explormers) in pursuit, using a combination of a fire-enchanted sword and an ice-enchanted spear as well as a few shapeshift-enabling gemstones to progress through stages. It's a super streamlined version of the modern Castlevania experience, though graphically and musically you'd almost assume it was some spin-off that Konami left unattended on a USB in a Haunted House amusement park ride. A Castlevania with the numbers filed off, as it were.

Despite the general bootleg feeling to the game, though, it's not half bad. Controls well, the shapeshifting forms have some unique properties that makes them compelling to use in the short bursts you have them, and there's enough reason to go poking around for secrets and dead ends between health/mana gauge upgrades and some extra XP caches. To that effect, the game's pretty much like DMC insofar as its character development is concerned: you have health (green), mana (blue, which also regens on its own), and XP (purple) orbs and the last of those can be spent on making one of your two weapons stronger, either by enhancing its damage, extending its combo chain, or increasing its chance to crit which in addition to killing most enemies in one hit also boosts their drops. These purple orbs are everywhere: mostly inside breakable walls, another Castlevania touch, but also in large crystal formations and chests that you frequently have to go out of your way to find. One fun little idea is that you can visit these gothic shrines and it switches the game over to the DS camera, and then prompts you to take a picture of something. It then registers the RGB value of whatever was in the viewfinder: if the image is predominantly red that gets you XP, and likewise mana and health for blue and green respectively.

If you played those brief NES throwback spin-offs for Bloodstained you should already have some idea of what it's like to play Soul of Darkness. It's neat, but not particularly substantial or challenging (it has infinite continues, usually dropping you back at the start of the current room) and lasts about two hours even if you're scouring each level for upgrades and XP. There's only three bosses but they're all reasonably challenging, at least, with the centipede "earth dragon" being a highlight due to how it switches the arena back and forth from fire- to ice-based, necessitating a weapon switch. If you weren't looking for a 20-hour IGAvania but something more bite-sized and manageable and old-school, it's not a bad substitute. (Damn, I never found a natural way to fit a "Gameloft more like Ravenloft" goof in here. Maybe next time.)

The Weeb Weeview

Another trio of highlights, all discovered once the new anime season started mostly just from poking around to see what else seemed sufficiently engaging. So, if you're new to how I tend to pick out anime to watch, I'll go for the one or two super-hyped series from established studios that have a lot of buzz surrounding them on anitwitter (or anime skeeting, or whatever the Bluesky equivalent is) and then about ten trashy but enjoyably dumb shows (which frequently later appear on Mother's Basement's seasonal "Hottest Trash" rundowns) that I can stick on in the background while I eat meals. My palate, neither of them really, is not all that discerning. Even so, I like these three shows enough to give them some good word of mouth in addition to the good food of mouth that I've been chomping away at while watching them.

365 Days to the Wedding: Every anime season is lousy with romcoms—can you believe women watch anime too?—but I've found myself drawn more to the adult ones over the schoolyard ones, for hopefully obvious enough reasons. There's a lot more nuance and goal specificity to the romantic relationships between working adults and more factors that need to line up just right, euphemistically and otherwise, for that coupling to work. In this anime, two introverts with nerdy hobbies that provide all the satisfaction they need in their free time find themselves in a predicament when the travel agency they both work for has a dire need for an employee to relocate to its freezing and language-barrier-y Alaskan branch and will randomly pick from its unmarried staff to head there if a volunteer doesn't step forward within a year. So, being unmarried and at risk themselves, the female lead Rika Honjoji suggests to the male lead Takuya Ohara that they should fake an engagement and the romantic entanglement that led up to it.

You could probably guess how the rest of the season goes without much difficulty; or so I thought, but the show's going a little out of its way to present both the positives and negatives of marriage with its ancillary cast that has a sort of knowing, empathetic direction that hints towards that extra layer of nuance I mentioned before. For instance, they just had an episode where the pair's gentle giant coworker finally meets a woman he's serious about through their mutual appreciation of an idol group. However, it turns out she's a single mother and the guy's moment of hesitation about whether he's prepared for that level of responsibility is enough to douse that nascent flame, though as the episode ends with the single mom hovering over the "delete contact" button before changing her mind there's a suggestion that the flame is not necessarily out for good. It's a cute, wholesome show with no small amount of relationship drama and angst but largely works by focusing on adults working through this tricky romance stuff in an adult fashion, adultly. And nothing beyond PG-13, in case me saying "adult" all those times gave you other ideas.

Let This Grieving Soul Retire: Every so often, you get an anime which can be categorized as "lucky idiot" or "average joe is out of his depth". I reviewed one around this time last year called Tearmoon Empire, about a Marie Antoinette figure who loops back to several years before her inevitable execution and manages to convince everyone she's some genius-level statesman when she's just slightly less awful than she used to be and is working with a small amount of knowledge of what's to come. In Let This Grieving Soul Retire, the protagonist Krai Andrey is part of a group of daydreamer small town teens who all decide to seek their fortunes together in an adventurer party. Fast-forward a decade or so, and every member of that group is an absolute monster of their chosen class with Krai, who took on the leader role, now widely seen as a peerless strategist and charismatic commander of the original group and several other high-level parties that have since joined its growing clan, First Steps. Trouble is, he has no actual talent whatsoever and fully realizes it: he's been coasting on luck and a collection of "relic" gadgets with very conditional utility, and he knows it's only a matter of time until either everyone figures out he's a fraud and publicly tar-and-feather him or else put him up against cataclysmic monsters that only he and his absurdly high "tier" rating—assigned by the explorer guild, and largely built on the labor of others—is capable of defeating. Hence, he's looking to retire before any of that comes to pass.

Definite shades of the early seasons of Overlord here, as a normal dude is surrounded by highly competent (and highly dangerous, for various reasons) subordinates that regularly seek his guidance and prowess, though unlike everyone's favorite flustered lich Ainz Ooal Gown (which always sounded to me like something you sing at New Year's) the hero here can absolutely not walk the walk as well as he can talk the talk. Much of the show's humor naturally revolves around this inexplicable ability to keep the wool over everyone's eyes and the string of coincidences that serve to effectively prop up this veneer of being omniscient, even if he isn't trying all that hard to hide how unsuitable he is to lead the Grieving Souls—in fact, the name of the party and its creepy (and eyeless) demon masks were his attempt to invent something so edgy and cringeworthy that everyone in the party would veto both it and his leader role, only for them to love it instead—and the rest of its appeal falls on the shapely fanservice of Krai's thighsome thief disciple Tino and his many other admirers. Yes, it is a harem show too, but of the type where every love interest is borderline psychotic and a likely threat to his wellbeing if they ever find out he's been lying to them so it's not quite going for the usual wish fulfilment angle. It's not a smart show, but it is a fun show if farces are your thing.

You Are Ms. Servant: A woman seeks employment as a maid at a moderately well-off suburban home that presently just has the one occupant, a highschooler who is currently staying at his parents' previous house while he completes his education. Trouble is, the woman is a former assassin who is hopelessly naive about the normal world and household chores alike, though the dude is chill enough to hire her anyway seeing as she's in something of a bind. So begins a curious relationship, both romantic and maternal in parts, between an emotionless killer learning what it means to be human and a gregarious and infinitely patient everyteen who has no clue how he ended up in this situation.

I feel like I've seen this particular set-up before but I cannot for the life of me remember where. My best guess is that Yuki vaguely resembles, both physically and with her unusual combination of oblivious wholesomeness and bladed lethality, Spy X Family's Yor Forger. That she's equally lousy in the kitchen is just one of several other parallels also. I dunno, I think much of this anime is pretty contrived and kind of suggests (but also doesn't suggest, because this show is too nice) that the dude only said yes to all of this so he could have a hot onee-san around the house who habitually wears a maid uniform and calls him "master". And also that she might go back to killing people if he refused her. At least the animation's good? And as I said, it is a real cute show without being all bubbly and sugary about it.

Also, another monthly reminder to watch Dandadan. You wouldn't guess it from the elevator pitch of "a supernatural romcom where a dude has his dick and balls stolen by a ghost" but it's really turned out to have a whole range of comedic and emotional depth to what it's doing in addition to some darn fine animation. Darn da darn fine. Definite frontrunner for anime of the year (which is a list I could well be putting together for next month, even if I did skip most of 2024's prestige stuff for even more unchallenging single-cour isekai dreck).

Anyway, that's going to do it for another month. December's going to be a bit special, seeing as all my usual features have concluded and given what's on the horizon vis a vis a whole bunch of GOTY nonsense, so expect a bunch of quickfire review blogs as I feverishly catch up with as many games (that aren't 100+ hour RPGs) from this year as I can. Since we're still in weeb territory here, I also want to give a shout out to one of my favorite Vtubers who sadly just announced that she is graduating in a month or so: Hololive's Ceres Fauna. The happiest of trails to you, Funny Green Woman.

Too Long, Do Relinks

  • Indie Game of the Week 394: Cthulhu Saves Christmas
  • Indie Game of the Week 395: Prodigal
  • Indie Game of the Week 396: Sheepo
  • Indie Game of the Week 397: Anuchard
  • Indie Game of the Week 398: Pepper Grinder
  • Mega Archive CD: Part XI
  • Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Ten)
  • 64 in 64: Episode 48
Mento's Month: November '24 - General Discussion - Giant Bomb (2025)

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