- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Switch)
- Joe and Mac 2 (SNES via Switch Online)
- Stardew Valley (Switch) - New
- Cosmic Star Heroine (Switch) - New
- Grandia HD (Switch)
- Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Switch)
- Kotodama (Switch)
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - Switch
I actually beat this game right before starting Grandia, but kind of forgot about it, because I was really just resuming playing from about a year or so before. My feelings on this game are complicated. On the one hand, the graphics, animation, and audio experience are great, and it's clear that Inti Creates took great care to craft this game in loving homage to games of old but without feeling completely tethered, just as with Blaster Master Returns. And just like Blaster Master Returns, I find it frustrating in places due to an insistence upon making the game feel NES-hard in many places. Basically, this is an 8-bit-inspired game that mimics many elements of Castlevania III, including rescuing characters who join your party to whom you can switch mid-play. Each character has different movement and jump characteristics, a different attack, and different sub-weapon attacks. You can use this team to advance through the game. Unlike CV3, you can have all your partners with you and not just 1. You don't lose a "life" until all your characters are dispatched. There is an "easy" mode which reduces knockback and allows infinite continues. But everything else is still really hard.
Many have hailed this game as a successor to Castlevania III, and while it's clearly inspired, I'm not feeling it. In discussion with MrPopo on the Racketboy Slack channel he noted that his experience with Castlevania III is through speedrunners and playing in a manner similar to how speedrunners play. Whereas my approach to the game is much slower and more thorough. I think that's where the disconnect is. Perhaps if you play both games with a mind for speed they do start to feel very similar, but for someone who plays the games the way I do, they feel quite disparate, despite obvious similarities. As a cautious player, I felt like Curse of the Moon was looking to punish me for playing the way I wanted to, whereas I didn't get that feeling from Castlevania III.
I really wanted to like this game, and from what I've read I didn't unlock the "true" ending or anything, which is fine. I'm not going back to try again. It is a well-crafted game that many do love, but for me, I just am not down with the challenge level. If you have more tolerance for frustration and NES-hard you'll likely have a great time.
Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa - Switch
This is a VN and puzzle game that was on big sale not a long time back. I picked it up because Bone speaks so highly of the Visual Novel experience (generally, not Kotodama specifically) and I wanted to know what's up with that. Well, I'm both impressed and depressed by Kotodama. Production values are strong, with more voice acting than expected, good art, and an excellent localization. This is also one of those VNs you have to replay for multiple endings, which is to say it is like most VNs out these days. For those who haven't played a VN, it's basically a bunch of still backdrops and character portraits with some minimal animation that play out like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, but with far fewer branches. You often have the choice of which order to visit certain places and on rare occasions that will affect the outcome of the story. Unlike CYOA stories (and point and click adventure titles) there aren't a billion different ways to die or prematurely end the story. So basically you read (and listen, thanks to lots of voice work) the story while looking at characters and backdrops. So maybe an illustrated light novel (to use a Japanese genre term) with lots of choice points, of which only a few are critical, is a better descriptor. Kotodama has reviewed moderately well in most outlets, getting a 62 score on Metacritic, but there are a couple truly scathing reviews, including from NintendoLife. I will address the reason for those scathing reviews below, because I don't disagree with their rationale at all.
What makes Kotodama different from many other VNs is the inclusion of puzzle elements. Your main character is a transfer student to a new high school, and he just happens to have a pact with a little cat-demon. That pact allows him to use a special power to reach into people's minds and compel them to, if briefly, tell the truth. You do this through a match-3 type game where, instead of swapping pairs of tiles, you select (or tap: this game can be played completely with the touch screen, which is kind of cool) a tile and it jumps up to the top row, allowing all the tiles above it's old spot to fall into place, triggering matches and cascades. You get special tiles for doing long cascades. As you advance through the puzzle match, you slowly strip the defenses away from the character's mind by hitting specific spots on a match meter, stripping off their clothes until they are left in their undies (there is no actual nudity, thankfully) and you win. You have a set number of moves, which increase every time you strip off part of their outfit, and which can also be increased by using special "tease" items like a feather, ice, etc..., uses of which you also get via matches. Different "tease" items have a different risk/reward balance, e.g. the feather gives you 2 moves if successful, and has a 60% chance of success. When it doesn't succeed, the result can either be neutral (waste of a tease action) or negative. Each character has a different negative response, from locking tiles to shuffling the board. As you go through the game you investigate several mysteries at the school, talk to teachers and classmates, both named and generic, visit different locales within the school, and attempt to unlock the truths the characters wish to hide.
Where Kotodama excels is production quality. The voice work is great. The art is great. And the localization actually flows really smoothly and doesn't feel awkward at all. There are only a couple minor editing errors that were clearly typos. And the story has some really interesting twists which you may not expect. While the characters are in some ways kind of generic manga/anime tropes, they do have enough detail and interactions that they start to stand out a bit from their tropes. Some of that standout personality, however, comes from unlocking their secrets and revealing the person under the facade, which is a neat narrative device. The game also has lots of quality of life features, like quick save and quick load, and to facilitate multiple playthroughs, it remembers which choices you've made and will remind you at key points which choices were ones which advanced the story or ran it aground. It also has an auto-text-advance option, which you can set to only advance text you've read before, so when you go through again you can have it fast-forward through the sections you've already been through and stop for input at either a decision point or where it hits dialogue that's new or changed.
Kotodama falls down in a couple areas, though. One is repetition. If you fail a match game you go to the load screen, from which you can only load regular game saves, not quick saves (so you have to restore a regular save and then quick load back to your quick save). When you replay you do have to play all the match games again, and the match-3 gameplay just isn't strong enough to carry as many times as you have to play if you want to see all the game has to offer. So you need to develop strategies quickly to make sure you can get through those match games with minimal fuss. So yeah, a strong variety element in the early game that becomes annoying in the late-game. The other area this game falls down is also in the match games: the stripping of the characters. Yes, it's a very nice metaphor - their clothes are their defenses, and you must bare the truth. But here's the thing... As you make matches and strip their clothes they make moans and squeals and flinch in pleasure and pain. These high school students who are, for legal purposes, all 18. And even though this only takes place in a magical shared mind-space, it is kind of creepy and out of place, because the VN sections of the game don't sexualize the characters at all. So you have these platonic story interactions with characters and suddenly, "STRIP GAME!" And as the NintendoLife reviewer pointed out and was so offended by, this is also rather non-consentual. You basically violate their emotional privacy in a way that is highly sexualized, in a game that is otherwise not at all sexualizing. While almost all the characters are female, there is one male character you also have to find out the truth from. That token inclusion doesn't blunt the real problems with this.
Now, that didn't ruin the game for me as it might for some. I find it cringe-worthy, but also not inconsistent with other Japanese games of this type. This is just how Japan often makes these kinds of games, for good or for ill. By talking about it I hope to make people aware, and maybe over time more Japanese developers will get away from including pointless sexualization in games which otherwise don't have any sexual elements (and avoid non-consentual scenarios altogether). On the whole, I enjoyed Kotodama and would encourage people to give it a try as long as they can cope with the inappropriate, non-consentual sexualization of the characters (if you are downright OK with it, that's another conversation altogether, one I don't want to have). The actual game story and characters are pretty compelling. So play it for the great story, enjoy a few brief puzzle breaks, and try to not get grossed out by the out-of-place non-consentual sexualization.
