ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

[Integrity]

GOLF WITH YOUR FRIENDS (BLACKLIGHT, 2020)

Finished: 21/6/22. Playtime: 51.8 hours.

It is a party minigolf game where you golf. With your friends. It's good, check it out if you need a party game.

Achievements were dead simple, but took a while to plan. For each of the fourteen or so official maps, eighteen holes each, get par or better and play it on each of the goofy hockey and basketball modes. That's all but about five of the 71 achievements, and the remainder are breezy except for 'get 10,000 putts'. I only putted about 7,000 times doing the entire set of everything else + golfing with my friends a few times, so I spent an hour project proposal meeting putting over and over again forever to wrap it up.

[Integrity]

YAKUZA KIWAMI 2 (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2017)

Finished: 30/6/22. Playtime: 79.8 hours.

Here comes the flood.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is the story of two games, both of which I have extremely strong feelings about. One is the Kiwami 2 part: the Dragon Engine fucking rules, brawling in it is chaos incarnate and I don't give a shit that it's less technical than the crap that came before, it's always a stupid party and it owns all the time. The other is the Yakuza 2 part: the plot of Yakuza 2 is abhorrently bad. Ryuji and Kaoru try their hardest to drag it to some kind of respectability before the final chapter just buries all hope it had of any decent legacy. The final chapter of Yakuza 2 is the absolute nadir of the franchise, plot-wise, and I'm about to say some really mean things about 3 and 4, so that's saying something. That's not to say I didn't enjoy Kiwami 2; Osaka Castle was also incredibly dumb but in an obscenely party kind of way, and there's some genuinely good character beats between Kaoru and Kiryu across the game, just enough that I don't look back on the game's plot with actual hatred, just a vague kind of distaste with some big-ticket whiffs. The Dragon Engine carried hard enough that I still held Kiwami 2 as my second-favorite RGG game for quite a while despite that being entirely on gameplay merit, Four Shine, and the Majima Saga.

Completion was familiar. The Log summed it up again: eating, fighting, minigames (including the Requisite Weirdly Horny one, someone just let the Yakuza Guy make a fucking porn game already Jesus), Clan Creator (which I enjoyed quite a lot), Four Shine, substories. The street bosses required hunting piles of themed gang guys all around and were kind of annoying to finish up, and the bouncer missions replaced the challenge fights from 0 and K1 - and both were required for the 'get all skills' achievement, which took even longer than the Completion Log did. The bouncer missions were notable because they were, genuinely, a pretty fun concept which was well implemented - except that completing them required doing every one of the I believe twenty-six missions on each of their three difficulties. The grind to get through this was insane, and will pale in comparison to 5.

Still, I persevered. Three packed down.

[Integrity]

YAKUZA 3 (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2009)

Finished: 10/7/22. Playtime: 93.9 hours.

Yakuza 3 is another tale of two games, but this isn't make versus remake like the last one. You spend about half the game in Okinawa and the other half in Tokyo, weaved back and forth, and my opinion of the game was a nearly clean split. Except for about two parts (the bit where you take Rikiya around and Majima's dump truck), I disliked the entire part of the game that was in Tokyo. Except for anything to do with Joji, I liked the entire part of the game that was in Okinawa. This finally twigged something in my brain: the one part of the Yakuza games that most consistently bores me is the Tojo Clan, which is some kind of a mood, but will have a payoff later. With the gameplay stepping back down from the Dragon Engine to the lowest point in the remade/remastered games, Okinawa ends up being basically the only thing holding up this game as even 'one I enjoyed'. I wouldn't recommend anyone playing the rest of the games skip it, but it's definitely a low point.

The Completion Log existed but wasn't required for this one, so I didn't do it. On the other hand, an achievement required specifically the minigames part of the log to be completed, and that's the part that stonewalls most people, so I guess it was 'required' in an oblique way. Yakuza 3 also had a series of minigame challenge achievements, and most of them sucked. Getting three straight strikes in bowling or a break ace in pool are both things that are pretty doable, if difficult, except for that Yakuza 3's minigame physics suck. I'm not totally sure why or how, but they're just a bit off and not in a consistent enough way that I can adjust myself to a different expectation and sus it out. Things just don't work quite right and it kinda sucks. It took me a full five hours to get the fucking break ace. Fortunately, one of the challenge ones was the exceptionally-named Exposed Dragon - win a hand of mahjong with only one concealed tile. The strategy for this was completely unga bunga - steal everything whenever possible and go for the shittest open tanyao imaginable - but it was stupid and fun.

Finally, picking up trash in front of the orphanage 30 times. This, to put it bluntly, sucked. The deal is that every time the orphanage exterior map is loaded, a single piece of trash or item has a chance to spawn in one of about seven locations. These spawns are fairly difficult, if possible, to see from a distance, and there's a fairly convenient reset point (the fishing rod) in the middle of the beach. Items, which appear as wooden boxes approximately the same color as one of the trash pickups, do not count, except sometimes the box has trash in it, which does count, which means every time you see a box the temptation is there to go check it. Picking up 30 pieces of trash takes mind-numbing hours of just doing essentially nothing.

Momentum, bluntly, carried me through Yakuza 3. I really liked the first third of the game, and thought it might be a surprise favorite despite the clunky gameplay, and it was all downhill from there. Four down.

Edited October 30, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

YAKUZA 4 (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2010)

Finished: 22/7/22. Playtime: 83.3 hours.

Finally closing in on the present, Christ.

I nearly loved Yakuza 4. It starts out on a great note with Akiyama's quarter of the game, which was easily my favorite easily-divisible section of the games either since 0 or possibly to-date. Then the game sine waved into Saejima's part, which sat comfortably below 'the ending of Yakuza 2' in the rankings. Saejima's part bored me to death. I didn't like Saejima, I didn't enjoy the mountains and mountains of talking, I didn't like Hamazaki, his unupgraded gameplay is both insanely shit and your first real brush with it is in a do-or-die dungeon gauntlet with an insanely hard boss, and then he breaks out and Yakuza the Hedgehog fights both of the legendary playable characters to standstills while having a long brush in the city where you have to take roundabout paths everywhere and spend a bunch of time in the sewers. Part 2 of Yakuza 4 fucking sucks. It redeemed itself very quickly after I shoved roughly through it - I really enjoyed Tanimura as a character and I really enjoyed his fighting style - and then Kiryu's part to close it out is fine, mostly, but at least has one of the best boss fights in the franchise. Just taking every part of the game that involved Akiyama and/or Tanimura, Yakuza 4 would probably have vied with 0 for my to-date favorite in the franchise, but everything else dragged it down tremendously.

The Completion Log wasn't required for 4, and unlike 3 not even the minigames section was, but a lot of it ended up being obliquely required. The suite of minigame challenge achievements from 3 returned in tweaked ways, making a small minigame completion log of their own, but nothing in them was particularly difficult. Saejima's quarter of the superboss gauntlet was genuinely the worst, but that's just a fourth of the true final superboss gauntlet. The hostesses were tedious to get cards from every one of, but if I marked Yakuza games down for tedium in individual activities I'd be here for paragraphs and paragraphs. Nothing in Yakuza 4 was really particularly bad.

Five down.

Edited October 30, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

INTO THE BREACH (SUBSET, 2018)

Finished: 8/8/22. Playtime: 74.6 hours.

Blessedly, while grinding through Yakuza 5, Subset dropped an Advanced Edition update to Into the Breach like they had FTL many years ago. And, much like FTL:AA, ItB:AA had that extra Injection of content to make the game feel whole.

Into the Breach is a funky little stripped-down turn-based tactical puzzle game. So Bad North, but turn-based, is what I'm saying. It's a great bite-sized game in a way FTL wasn't always, but that does necessarily mean it has less longevity than its older brother. Still, 'not being a 200+ hour game' isn't exactly an insult, and there's plenty of meat on Into the Breach. Easy recommendation.

The achievements pattern after its big brother, too. Some overarching challenge to pursue, but the real stuff is in a set of 3 challenges for each of the different squads, including Random Squad and Choose Your Own Units Squad. Unlike FTL, none of these felt unfair at all, and I genuinely consider Into the Breach to be a fantastic platinum project for any tactics fan, with a good breadth of abortive-run achievements that you torpedo progression to get, short campaign achievements, and long campaign achievements. Subset still got it.

[Integrity]

YAKUZA 5 (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2012)

Finished: 21/8/22. Playtime: 168.9 hours.

Yakuza 5 is the Most Game. There's a frankly-disgusting amount of shit in it, and don't let the time fool you; this game was vying with the already-gigantic Yakuza 0 for completion time after you factor in me not needing to learn any new rulesets and five games of refining my 100% Yakuza techniques. There's so much Yakuza 5 that it's very difficult to pin down precisely how I feel about the game overall. There's an entire $50 game in Yakuza 5 that I would put down at the bottom with Yakuza 3, and there's an entire $50 game in Yakuza 5 that I would put right up with Yakuza 0. It's hard to not admire the absolute fuckin' reach of the game.

I think I did like it, overall, but I can't say I loved it. I loved parts - hell, entire swathes - of the game; all of Kiryu's, Saejima's (if you, uh, ignore the moral dissonance), and Shinada's big side content was very good and enjoyable. Kiryu's part ends with probably the hypest fight in the entire franchise, and Kiryu's final boss is insanely underwhelming narratively and a kind of shit fight. Saejima, as a character, finally becomes something I actually enjoy playing and seeing on screen; but the first half of his part of the game is another unreasonably long prison sequence that's a pace obliterator. Akiyama and Haruka, Ace Detectives, have a fantastic dynamic together, and that dynamic lasts about two chapters of the game's twenty or so and then is gone forever. It's just such an odd, inconsistent game, except for Shinada. Shinada's part consistently rules and the only bad bit for him is his boss in the finale, and even that's great because Shinada shows up to stop a guy from doing something, the guy independently decides not to do it, and Shinada decides to kick his ass anyway for thinking about doing it in the first place. Shinada rules.

Platinum for Yakuza 5 is the Most Platinum. After a two game absence, the Completion Log is back, and he's back with a vengeance. All five protagonists have their own set of side quests to complete, and four of them have their own longer (eight hour ish) minigames with their own plots and attributes and gameplay to complete. The superboss gauntlet afterwards one-ups 4, with Kiryu's fourth of the gauntlet being genuinely the worst fight in all seven Kiryu games. Every guy has to max our their hostess/es to unlock the final hostess, which Kiryu also has to max. There's a set of collectibles and a set of sightseeing photographs to take in each of the five cities. The minigames are still there, pretty much as expected with 0 (the next game in the series) as a reference, but with an extra few regional specifics for each guy and some expanded things, like there being 4 fishing holes that you have to visit morning and night. Eat everything across all five cities. Finish three training masters for each character, and craft every single one of the hundred or so weapons available in the game, a grind which I'm massively underselling. Use every single special attack in the game.

Then there's the Coliseum. The Coliseum's been required for all the previous games so far, but just in the form of, at worst, 'you gotta grind it for an hour or two to be able to do all the bouts'. Yakuza 5 is not content with that. First, the Victory Road. To unlock all bouts, you need to find specific random fights in each city with each of the four guys and fight them until a miniboss spawns randomly, and then fight him, and repeat that cycle 3 times to get invited to the Victory Road. This unlocks a do-or-die victory bout on Kiryu which you get one shot at, but hard saves are a thing if you blow it. This unlocks the full Coliseum for all four guys, and you have to beat all bouts with every guy.

Problem is, the final bout only unlocks once you're ranked top 3 in the Coliseum. Out of 50. Per guy. So you have to, say, grind up to Rank 3 on Kiryu so that you can do all of the bouts one time, and then you swap to Akiyama, who is unranked. Start from the bottom all over again. Grind up to Breakout GP, play Breakout GP over and over and over again for two hours, then finally have the privilege of attempting the hard bouts. The other problem is that these are all barehanded no-frills street fights, and Shinada's entire kit is based around how well he uses weapons. He legitimately doesn't have a single answer in his kit to Sotaro Komaki - no pressure outlet whatsoever, and his only counter is a grab which loses any efficacy after you use it twice - and any combat with the harder enemies is a straight run uphill. Fighting them was absolutely infuriating, so after I ragequit for the night I came back the next morning and made Tatsuo fucking Shinada the Coliseum's number fucking one ranked fighter for no reason other than to shit dominance on Yakuza 5.

By the way, once you've done all that, you still gotta do the challenge battles and Legend difficulty. Cheers.

Six down, one to go.

[Integrity]

YAKUZA 6: THE SONG OF LIFE (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2016)

Finished: 6/9/22. Playtime: 52.9 hours.

Ironic that the Yakuza game that took the shortest time to ace by a factor of real-life days was also my runaway favorite.

I thought I was kinda over Yakuza. 0 was pretty great and, five games after that, the series hadn't even sniffed that 8-borderline-9-outta-10 height. 5 had so much great about it stuffed into so much chaff. I went into it with expectations set by the Remaster Trilogy of 3-4-5, and I loved Yakuza 6 far more than I think was its due. There's a weird melancholy that pervades so much of the game that affected in me such a way that I struggle to think of any parallel in games before. Kiryu was a fine character before, but was never the best part of his own games, at best constituting part of the best dynamic. In Yakuza 6, I felt Kiryu, and that made a lot of the Yakuza Bullshit that missed me before land like I think it had been supposed to. When I have dreams about games, it's usually because I stayed up too late and drank too much grinding something and it imprinted on my brain. Yakuza 6 gave me a several-times-recurring dream, past when I finished the game, mapping Kiryu and Haruka to me and a daughter I don't have. Fuckin' weird. I guess it played to some really latent paternal fears I have or something. Doesn't hurt that, while Yakuza has always had celebrities cameoing or even acting a main role and they've gone over my little white head, Takeshi's Castle was my childhood. Seeing a fat old Beat Takeshi as a comfortable, happy minor yakuza patriarch gave me such a feeling of happy familiarity that I bought into him just as much as anyone in in-game did, possibly even more.

It's not all gravy, of course. The Hiroshima Reveal is possibly the stupidest moment in interactive fiction I've ever seen, and it doesn't wrap around to being awesome, but it is silly in a pretty party way. There's a good bit of shaky pacing here and there and otherwhere. The penultimate boss is both a better narrative beat and a better boss fight than the actual final boss encounter. Controversially, though, I really liked the ending. Yakuza 6 was the first game RGG made that I would definitively say, under oath, that I loved. In more than a small way, it's punching above its actual weight class, and if anyone told me that 6 wasn't their favorite Yakuza game I'd definitely get it, but it was accidentally exactly what I wanted, exactly when I wanted, right when the franchise was losing steam.

Yakuza 6 was sadly easy to mop up. The Completion Log, basically unnecessary for achievements, isn't particularly hard to complete anyhow. The superboss, weirdly, doesn't require all side quests do be done, though another achievement does. The long minigames, bar chatting and baseball and Clan Creator, are both fairly charming and not long nor difficult. The only 'hurdle', such as it is, is getting 100 wins in Clan Creator, a game mode with about 25 maps. The other hurdle, fortunately, is to level up all stats, a process which takes a shitload of experience, and you can turn money from Clan Creator into experience via the gym. Grinding 70-odd brainless wins in Clan Creator and then menuing to buy several hundred protein powders and snorting them all wasn't exactly engaging gameplay, but it was nowhere near the issues with other games.

And that's the Kiryu saga. Despite everything, I enjoyed it, and I'm glad I slugged through the middle five to get to Yakuza 6, a game I genuinely adored my time with. That's the last you'll see of RGG Studios forever! 🙂

Edited October 30, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

AMID EVIL (INDEFATIGABLE, 2019)

Finished: 17/9/22. Playtime: 12.4 hours.

What could follow up a months-long string of Japanese crime brawlers besides a modern boomer shooter?

Jokes aside, Amid Evil is really quite good. It's got fantastic gunplay and a good, diverse set of weapons with which to practice it on a wide, only occasionally unfair feeling set of enemies. The boss fights are really good, which is a strange highlight for a boomer shooter, and the final level channels what Half-Life really wanted Xen to be except for that it doesn't suck wildly. Which, to be fair, is stripping Xen's singular notable feature, but I think the comparison still holds.

There ain't much to say about the achievements. Beating the game gets you most of the way there, and what's left is mostly individual-level ones - find all secrets in a level, kill all enemies in an episode, destroy everything in a level, finish a level with all full mana, finish a level with no mana, etc. You'll probably gather a good number of these as you do, and finishing up the rest isn't a particular chore.

Big shoutsout to @Tryhard for buying me the game for no reason I can fathom, he just vibed that I'd probably like it and he was right. True ride or die brother.

Edited October 30, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

PAPERS, PLEASE (LUCAS POPE, 2013)

Finished: 19/9/22. Playtime: 15.2 hours.

I played Papers, Please back in the day and, despite liking the atmosphere and enjoying the pattern-recognition gameplay, never actually finished a run. Out of nowhere, I had the wondrance of how much it would talk to put it on the shelf, and then I did it. Papers, Please is a great game if you're in the mood for it, and I hit that mood finally and aced it in about a sitting. Played it blind and got the liberation ending, so I feel pretty good about my level of compliance to a totalitarian regime.

The achievements require two playthroughs at minimum: one loyalist and one liberator. Everything else is actions taken at individual days, and Papers, Please automatically saves at every day of a playthrough. By the time you're done with the two, there's not much actual gameplay left, just tactically loading saves and playing a few days here and there.

[Integrity]

JUDGMENT (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2018)

Finished: 1/10/22. Playtime: 118 hours.

The good news is that I loved Yakuza 6, because it kept me in the loop.

The great news is that there's an outside bet that Judgment is my favorite game I have ever played.

I made a comment in one of the earlier Yakuzas about my least favorite part of the Yakuza games being the yakuza parts of the Yakuza games. Judgment is a Yakuza game in all but name and, crucially, it allows RGG's gamemaking, worldbuilding, and scriptwriting to breathe without the existence of the Tojo Clan. The result, I understand, turned many longtime fans off. It also stripped the only limiter that was handicapping my enjoyment off the formula.

I find it difficult to put to paper how much I loved Judgment. I've said this for various games before - Juarez, most notably - but that was generally from either a nostalgia standpoint, where I knew I couldn't be objective; or a vibes standpoint, where I thought the game was punching well above its weight. I feel that Judgment is one of the finest put-together games I have ever played, from a completely defensible stance, On top of being mechanically solid and an exceptional game, it appealed to me on every subjective level. Judgment's plot, characters, and all the fluffy shit just Worked for me. I loved every bit of Judgment, and I can't even say 'even the parts that wasn't so good' like I did with Yakuza 6, because I don't think any parts of Judgment weren't so good. With Yakuza 6, I feel like I could talk to anyone with a complaint and go 'haha yeah, that was that way.' With Judgment, I feel that my response would be a frank 'you didn't get it, it was this way.' The game was, bluntly, a masterpiece.

The Completion List is back and encompasses everything as one may expect. Minigames, hitting guys, eating things, going places. The Drone Race was new, and getting the cash to crush it came largely through the also-new VR Mario Party gamemode. Otherwise, there wasn't much surprising in the completion list and thus the achievements. It was an old-feeling completion, being as it conjured 0 or Kiwami rather than the recent entries.

Please buy and play Judgment. It's a personal favor to me. Keep the English track on, it's fucking fantastic.

[Integrity]

YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2020)

Finished: 25/10/22. Playtime: 106.1 hours.

We're caught up to the present.

I loved Yakuza 7, but not in the way I loved Judgment. It's a good game, and Ichiban grew on me hugely as the game went on. As JRPGs go, it was fairly fantastic, being very engaging and very deep. The motion and dynamism kept the game interesting for its entire runtime, and the Dragon Engine injected just that bit of bullshit weirdness that can't really be replicated. Ichiban's story is a fairly by-the-numbers hero's journey with a good cast around him, and it was deeply charming to me. I can't say it was my favorite Yakuza game, but only because 6 appealed to me more than things ought to.

100% is a tale of two objectives: completing Ichiban's personality and beating the True Final Millennium Tower. Ichiban's personality is a matter of completing a sufficient spread of side objectives, analogous to the minigame completion of previous games but with some flexibility. True Final Millennium Tower is a matter of doing a proper JRPG grind to max levels and having the spells and gear to handle the highest challenge. Both work well as representatives of a JRPG and of a Yakuza game. I was deeply satisfied by completing Yakuza 7.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Integrity

[lenticular]

On 10/30/2022 at 5:37 PM, Integrity said:

INTO THE BREACH (SUBSET, 2018)

This is the only one of your last batch that I have any experience with. I played it for about eight and a half hours when it first came out, beat it once, and was done with it. It wasn't a bad game, it just didn't grab me in the way that I was expecting it to. Based on the genre, premise, and developer, I had really high hopes for this one; possibly they were too high and that was what left me so underwhelmed. I've been meaning to go back to this and give it another try since I saw the Advanced Edition, but I haven't got around to it yet.

I also want to say that this thread has inspired me to chase some more 100% games myself. I've added two more games since it started, and am now sitting at 30. Including one new beginning letter that I didn't have before.

[Integrity]

8 hours ago, lenticular said:

This is the only one of your last batch that I have any experience with. I played it for about eight and a half hours when it first came out, beat it once, and was done with it.

same, actually - a little more than that, but i cranked out a handful of runs of it and set it down at about ~twenty hours played.

 

8 hours ago, lenticular said:

I've been meaning to go back to this and give it another try since I saw the Advanced Edition, but I haven't got around to it yet.

highly recommended. the advanced edition has just that bit extra content to make the core gameplay a little more diverse and get meat on them bones. it absolutely won't turn into the hundreds-hour epic that FTL was, but you'll get a few more runs of fun out of it for free

 

8 hours ago, lenticular said:

I also want to say that this thread has inspired me to chase some more 100% games myself. I've added two more games since it started, and am now sitting at 30. Including one new beginning letter that I didn't have before.

love to see it, congrats! feel free to post about it here if you like - now that i'm caught up, my posts are gonna be a week or two apart, and i don't mind hearing about it

[lenticular]

22 hours ago, Integrity said:

love to see it, congrats! feel free to post about it here if you like - now that i'm caught up, my posts are gonna be a week or two apart, and i don't mind hearing about it

Let's do this. I'm not going to post about every game I have 100% on, because I just don't have the patience for that, but I'll do the new ones that I've just grabbed, and maybe a handful of others if I have anything interesting to say about any of them. Also, fun fact, as I type this, I have a game open in the background because I just need to do a garbage AFK achievement to finish 100%ing it.

This got long, so I'm going to put it behind a spoiler. Games talked about: Opus Magnum, Growing Up, Forager, Monster Train, Day of the Tentacle Remastered.
 

Spoiler

 

OPUS MAGNUM (ZACHTRONICS, 2017)

Finished: 23/10/2022. Playtime: 31.6 hours.

I mentioned this one already. Zachtronics games are weird. Kinda great, but weird. I think I've played three of them, and while they're all good, this one is my favourite. It's a cool little puzzle game with a steampunk alchemy sort of aesthetic, where you make little machines to perform alchemical reactions for you. The neat thing about Zachtronics games is that you get a decent amount of control over how difficult you want to make things for yourself. If all you care about is finding an answer to each puzzle then it can be a little tricky at times, but you can usually muddle through with a little trial and error. But if you really want to challenge yourself, you can come up with highly optimised solutions (which the game will track and compare with the rest of the world). It's pretty great and very satisfying. Definitely recommended to puzzle game fans.

The achievements are fairly simple, with only 5 in total: one to beat the game, one to beat 10 of the more difficult bonus levels, and three to play a bunch of the peg solitair mini-game that exists for some reason. When I came back to it this month, I'd done all of them except for the bonus levels. Which, on the one hand, meant that I didn't have much to do. But on the other hand meant that I was playing some of the hardest levels while also trying to remember how to play a game that I hadn't touched in almost 5 years. Which wasn't ideal, but it was still a relatively easy 100% for me to knock out quickly.

GROWING UP (VILE MONARCH, 2021)

Finished: 31/10/2022. Playtime: 66.3 hours.

I'm not even sure how best to describe this game. The name that I want to use to describe its genre is "raising sim", but I'm not sure how widely understood that terminology is. And looking on TVTropes, their list of raising sim games lists everything from Dwarf Fortress to Nintendogs, which would make ti the single most useless and nebulous genre in existence, taking the prize away from the reigning champion, the roguelike. It's sort of like a Princess Maker game, except not a princess. Or sort of like the monastery part of Three Houses, except without having a TRPG attached to it. And the character you are controling isn't a fantasy princess, but a teenager growing up in the 90s.

This is the sort of game where 90% of everyone would absolutely hate it, but at least they'd know that they'd hate it and would never buy it. For anyone who looks at the genre and the setting and is thinking "wtf, why would I ever want to play that?" then this sint' going to change their mind. But for anyone who actually thinks that it sounds like a good time, it probably will be.

The achievements, however, are kind of a shitshow, at least for 100%. This was another one where I'd already picked up most of the achievements from regular play, and came back to it last month to finish off. Except finishing it off sucked. Don't get me wrong, I could have 100%ed this much more quickly if that had been my focus from teh start, but getting the last few achievements was still obnoxious. See, many of the achievements are about making friends with specific NPCs. But there are a dozen potential friends in the game, and only three appear in any given run. Some of them only show up about 2/3 of the way through the game. So if you're looking for one last specific achievement, you have to play through most of the game just to see if the RNG is in yoru favour and you even have a shot at the one that you need. It's not too awful, since a run of the game can be done in an hour or two if you rush and don't actually care about doing well, but it's still obnoxious. I got to the point of looking through the saved game data file to see if I could figure out how to just spawn my needed NPC, but it turned out that it was a sufficiently byzantine format that just pushing through was faster.

FORAGER (HOPFROG, 2019)

Finished: 3/11/2022 (hopefully). Playtime: 51.0 hours (and counting).

Yeah, I haven't actually finished this one yet, but I'm literally just AFKing for the last achievement as I type, and I don't think it's going to take too much longer.

In the theme of "lenticular plays a bunch of weird indie games that nobody has heard of", this is another weird indie game that nobody has heard of. Well, probably. Maybe I'll be surprised and everyone will know all of these games. As a name implies, this one is all about foraging and crafting. You know the sort of thing. You start the game thinking "if I foraged from this berry bush, I could use the berries as bait for a fish trap" and end up thinking "if I expand my nuclear industry, then that will help me fight more demon kings at the same time". That sort of thing. This one definitely ranks more on the casual side of the genre, but is a pretty good time if you want something relatively mindless.

This was another one where I'd already done a pretty high percentage of the achievements, so I figured it would be more easy pickings. Except that I'd managed to lose my old save file, so I was basically starting from scratch. Of the 51 hours, that should be read as about 20 hours on my first playthrough, about 25 hours on the second playtrough, and then about 5 more hours (so far) AFKing to finish the last garbage achievement. Other than the last one, the achievements are pretty good, and mostly amount to "do everything that there is in the game". But then there are a few that are obnoxiously grindy and then the last one that's most easily done through the power of AFK.

And damn, that's three games written about and the achievement still hasn't popped. Guess I'll kill some more time writing about some of my older 100%s.

MONSTER TRAIN (SHINY SHOE, 2020)

Finished: 29/9/2022. Playtime: 174.8 hours.

What Slay the Spire is for many people, Monster Train is to me. While I would acknowledge that Slay the Spire is probably the objectively better game, Monster Train is the one that really managed to hold my attention. I think that the big difference is that Monster Train feels less punishing, especially when comparing its covenant progression with Slay the Spire's ascension progression. With Monster Train, I felt that I had a lot more freedom to build based on what I was in the mood for, and still feel that I had a decent chance of success. Even if not everyone will really click with the game the same way I did, it's still an easy recommend for anyone who's into deckbuilders.

The achievements are almost universally great as well. Progress through the covenant system. Beat the hardest covenant with every clan. Get a good score on a daily. Do a few weird challenge runs. Flex on all the game's bosses. It's good stuff. The only obnoxious one is "Thief! Stop!" which requires two specific events to spawn in your game. I'd grabbed all the other achievements and never seen the RNG needed for this one. Happily, doing seeded runs doesn't stop this achievement from triggering, and some good people on the Internet have shared seeds which can get it, and when I did that rather than jsut waiting for the RNG to be in my favour, it took about 20 minutes.

(Checks AFK achievement. Still no, but it's getting close. Let's see what else I have anything to say about.)

DAY OF THE TENTACLE REMASTERED (DOUBLE FINE, 2016)

Finished: 29/3/2016. Playtime: 8.2 hours.

Oh, hey, it's actually not an indie game! I'm not sure what I can say about this that hasn't already been said. It's Day of the Tentacle. It's one of the classic games from the golden age of point and click adventure games. Anyone who is interested in the genre has probably already played this, and if they haven't then they should.

What's really interesting to me here is how this is a classic example of trying to shoehorn achievements into a game that was absolutely not designed for achievements. The majority of them are just to do something that's a part of the main story progression and are impossible to miss. The rest were largely pretty bad. "Do this thing that doesn't actually work" or "do this one thing 100 times for no reason". They're completely just busywork. There's no difficulty to any of them (except having to get to the relevant parts of the game). The only thing that they track is whether you knew the achievement exists and went out of your way to do the thing. This is absolutely a case of a game that would have been better if it had limited itself to only basic progression achievements, or even if it hadn't bothered with achievements at all. And is a sound lesson on how good achievements actually take work and need to be thought about as the game is beign made, because if you just tack them onto a game after it's done, they'll probably suck.

And there we go. The last Forager achievement has finally popped, so I can shut up now.

 

 

[Integrity]

22 minutes ago, lenticular said:

MONSTER TRAIN (SHINY SHOE, 2020)

i'm "only" 35 hours down on monster train but it's also one that i pick up to flurry through a few runs and then put down again about once a month. i agree that it's a lot less tightly-designed than slay the spire, but it's got this weird and shitty charm to it that's irresistible to me, and i'd even tentatively say i like the game more indefensibly. it's one of those games that i was playing and went 'damn, my mate evan would really like this and i'm really confident in that assessment' and then he sunk four hundred hours into it.

one thing i really like about monster train that you didn't really touch on is that. compared to a lot of its contemporaries, i have never felt like i was grinding uphill to an inevitable defeat in the way that (particularly) FTL could be, or slay the spire to a lesser extent. monster train runs tend to just be gravy pouring down like a champagne tower until you hit a brick wall and just fucking splatter all over the place over the course of one or two fights gone bad. i don't know if that's better game design or not, but it's sometime i appreciate - you never linger in monster train, you go fast until you fucking explode. monster train makes me feel exactly like one half of that mobile suit gundam meme at every stage of play, and the spaces between the two halves of the meme are vanishingly thin.

it's one i also want to put on the shelf, so maybe you've inspired me in return! get that shit rumbling on the steam deck!

22 minutes ago, lenticular said:

DAY OF THE TENTACLE REMASTERED (DOUBLE FINE, 2016)

i've never been a lucasarts buff but even i know a bunch of shit about day of the tentacle

i'm actually going to have a game done in the next week or so where i note a lot of the issues you cited with the dott achievements except that the game was designed around them, and it's insanely funny

Edited November 3, 2022 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

I've been inspired to begin my own Great Work.

This may kill me.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

On 10/26/2022 at 10:03 PM, ping said:

Where is even the funni

cellar

On 10/26/2022 at 10:03 PM, ping said:

This is joke-shaped, but what's the funny?

What´s joke-shaped and where do I get it?

Do you hug bears?

[Integrity]

i have made the significant and tremendous mistake of putting my brain onto three different games at once that all require nothing but dumb grinding that i can't sustain for a long session each

 

god help me

[Zapp Branniglenn]

On 10/29/2022 at 11:40 PM, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Thank god you don't have to do all the minigame stuff once each for BOTH characters. I hear that's what you can expect out of 4 and 5.

On 10/30/2022 at 6:03 AM, Integrity said:

i'll get into that (spoilers) in a few more posts but the short of it is no, 4's possibly the single easiest game to plat out of the franchise and 5 is hell on wheels but not for any minigame-related reasons

On 10/30/2022 at 11:16 AM, Integrity said:

YAKUZA 5 (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2012)

Problem is, the final bout only unlocks once you're ranked top 3 in the Coliseum. Out of 50. Per guy. So you have to, say, grind up to Rank 3 on Kiryu so that you can do all of the bouts one time, and then you swap to Akiyama, who is unranked. Start from the bottom all over again.

Yeah that's kind of exactly the sort of thing I was probably warned about.

On 10/30/2022 at 12:41 PM, Integrity said:

YAKUZA 6: THE SONG OF LIFE (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2016)

I thought I was kinda over Yakuza. 0 was pretty great and, five games after that, the series hadn't even sniffed that 8-borderline-9-outta-10 height.

I definitely worry that I'm over Yakuza, or at least over Kiryu's adventure. 3-5 led to quite a bit of burnout, and even the fights felt dull when I was slowly unlocking the same collection of abilities game to game. Thankfully, the next and final RGG game I have in my backlog is Judgment instead of Yakuza 6, so I'll save that for a rainy day. Yakuza 3 was very much an adaptation of The Godfather Part 3, but at least that film followed through on the death of Michael Corleone. Two games and another Death Fake Out later and I just don't care anymore. But one scene stuck out in my mind. In Kiryu's segment of Yakuza 4, he's on the phone with the villain who says "I'm not like other Yakuza bosses Kiryu. Now please ascend my tower of goons and meet me on the roof so we can settle this". I'm going to be wondering for the rest of my life whether this is intentionally self parody. And if it is, at who's expense - me for liking Yakuza games? You already got my money, Sega. It's not my fault Yakuza is the modern day Triple A equivalent of Streets of Rage, River City Ransom, and Shenmue.

Quote

Doesn't hurt that, while Yakuza has always had celebrities cameoing or even acting a main role and they've gone over my little white head, Takeshi's Castle was my childhood. Seeing a fat old Beat Takeshi as a comfortable, happy minor yakuza patriarch gave me such a feeling of happy familiarity that I bought into him just as much as anyone in in-game did, possibly even more.

What, 'Takeshi's Challenge' Takeshi? Man if you ever need proof this series blew up after 0...

14 hours ago, Integrity said:

i have made the significant and tremendous mistake of putting my brain onto three different games at once that all require nothing but dumb grinding that i can't sustain for a long session each

god help me

Hopefully nothing that requires a significant amount of attention. Catch up on whatever those streaming services are offering. Or maybe a nice podcast if you can't take your eyes off the game.

[lenticular]

On 11/3/2022 at 3:13 PM, Integrity said:

one thing i really like about monster train that you didn't really touch on is that. compared to a lot of its contemporaries, i have never felt like i was grinding uphill to an inevitable defeat in the way that (particularly) FTL could be, or slay the spire to a lesser extent. monster train runs tend to just be gravy pouring down like a champagne tower until you hit a brick wall and just fucking splatter all over the place over the course of one or two fights gone bad. i don't know if that's better game design or not, but it's sometime i appreciate - you never linger in monster train, you go fast until you fucking explode. monster train makes me feel exactly like one half of that mobile suit gundam meme at every stage of play, and the spaces between the two halves of the meme are vanishingly thin.

It's funny that you should say that. I mostly agree with you, but I have a friend who's had the complete opposite experience. He's good and experienced at the game (152 hours and 51/53 achievements), but he says that when he dies it's mostly due to the accumulation of chip damage over a long time rather than just having a sudden single dramatic failure. And, honestly, I don't know what he's doing to make that happen. I keep meaning to someday watch him play to find out, because I find it baffling.

But yeah. I mostly have the same experience that you do, and I like it that way. It's fun to have occasional runs which are just constant fights against adversity where you have to struggle through every level and really feel like you earned the win, but if every run is like that then it can get tiring before too long and make a game lose its charm. And I do have occasional runs like that in Monster Train, though not all that often.

In other news, I have been planning out my own personal A-Z of achievements. My completely arbitrary rules for this completely arbitrary challenge is that if a game might reasonably be thought of as starting with more than one letter (eg, including or exclusing an initial "The" or "A" or a subtitle or similar), then it can count as any one of those letters, but no more than one. So, The Binding of Isaac could be T or B, Sid Meier's Civilization V could be S or C, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim could be T, E, or S. I also have a lot of alphabet slots taken up by either crappy games or games with crappy achievements, so I thought about trying to replace them with better games. And maybe I will do that eventually and end up with a full list I can be proud of, but for now, I'm just going to aim for any game for each letter, because it would be silly to make this deliberately harder on myself.

So, here's my list:

Spoiler

• A Bird Story (100%)
• Biped (100%)
• Chrono Trigger? Cult of the Lamb?
• Day of the Tentacle Remastered (100%)
• Eastshade? The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? (0% if I do the special edition which I would)
• Forager (100%)
• Growing Up (100%)
• Hexcells Infinite (100%)
• Impostor Factory (100%)
• Something beginning with J? I only own 3 and 2 are terrible choices. Jotun: Valhalla Edition is the most promising, though I have never played it and don't remember buying it.
• Knights (100%)
• Life Is Strange: True Colors (100%)
• Monster Train (100%)
• Never Alone (78%)
• Opus Magnum (100%)
• Plants vs Zombies (100%)
• Quadrilateral Cowboy?
• Regency Solitaire (100%)
• Sneaky Sneaky (100%)
• Thomas Was Alone (100%)
• Unpacking?
• Vampire Survivors (100%)
• Wildermyth? (21%) Wargroove?
• XCOM: Chimera Squad (72%)
• You Have To Win the Game? (20%) Yorkshire Gubbins?
• Zachtronics Solitaire Collection (33%)

(Bold for games I already have 100% on, italics for games I don't even own but am considering getting, question marks for ones I'm not sure about, percentages are my current progress at the time of writing.)

Suggestions welcome for any of the ones I'm not sure about, especially J since the only other J games I can think of (Just Cause, Jurassic World Evolution, Jackbox Party Pack) don't appeal to me.

Also, while looking through my Steam library for ideas for E and U games, I came across two games with achievements that I want to mention. My most-played game on Steam is Europa Universalis IV. I've played that for a ridiculous and disturbing 1754.8 hours. Which has been enough to get me 52% of its achievements (182/345). The idea of trying to 100% that game is frankly terrifying to me. Then there is a game that I don't really remember and last played in 2013 called Universe Sandbox Legacy. I checked its achievements to see if it might be worth trying for. It includes two of the worst achievements I have ever seen: one is to start the game 10,000 times, the other is to have the game running for a total of a year. Yeah, I'm gonna skip that one.

On 11/6/2022 at 1:57 PM, Integrity said:

i have made the significant and tremendous mistake of putting my brain onto three different games at once that all require nothing but dumb grinding that i can't sustain for a long session each

I do that with books. I start reading one, but if I'm finding it slow going but don't want to drop it entirely, I'll pick u something else to read at the same time. Then if that ends up slow going too, then I'll pick up a third. I normally have the good sense to stop before I get to four at once. Normally.

[Integrity]

14 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Hopefully nothing that requires a significant amount of attention.

all of em require significant attention, alas

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Suggestions welcome for any of the ones I'm not sure about, especially J since the only other J games I can think of (Just Cause, Jurassic World Evolution, Jackbox Party Pack) don't appeal to me.

just cause and judgment are the big ones that come to mind, but browsing my steam library there's also jet set radio if you want to get something a bit more oldschool, or jupiter hell for something really hard (but turn-based)

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

My most-played game on Steam is Europa Universalis IV. I've played that for a ridiculous and disturbing 1754.8 hours. Which has been enough to get me 52% of its achievements (182/345). The idea of trying to 100% that game is frankly terrifying to me.

Fun Fact! when my (eventual) wife moved in with me in 2015, i actually had 100% achievements on crusader kings 2. i didn't keep up with the dlcs after that, though. sometimes i think about getting that number back up...

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Then there is a game that I don't really remember and last played in 2013 called Universe Sandbox Legacy.

'boot up the game 10,000 times' might rival shogun 2 total war's 'be the best in the world in the comp multiplayer leaderboard' for the worst, holy shit lmao

[lenticular]

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

browsing my steam library there's also jet set radio if you want to get something a bit more oldschool, or jupiter hell for something really hard (but turn-based)

They both look neat, if a little bit outside my comfort zone. Definitely better than anything that I'd managed to come up with though, thanks.

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

Fun Fact! when my (eventual) wife moved in with me in 2015, i actually had 100% achievements on crusader kings 2. i didn't keep up with the dlcs after that, though. sometimes i think about getting that number back up...

At least with CK2 you can be reasonably confident that they aren't going to add any more achievements at this point. Yeah, it would still take a frankly daft amount of work, but at least it would be a known and finite daft amount of work.

[Integrity]

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

They both look neat, if a little bit outside my comfort zone. Definitely better than anything that I'd managed to come up with though, thanks.

took a peek at my unredeemed humble bundle keys and i've got a copy of john wick hex, which looks like a pretty cromulent nu-xcom type of tactical game, may be more up your alley and doesn't look to be a chore to plat

if that looks like your speed hit me up, the code is literally just burning a hole in a spreadsheet for me and i'd be happy to give it away

Edited November 8, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

MAJOR\MINOR (KLACE, 2016)

Finished: 12/11/22. Playtime: 19.8 hours.

2017 was a really bad year for me. It was the year I got married, which was an unbelievable set of stresses I'm beyond glad to have behind me (once that was done, being married has owned though). We had a young pup who died before he hit a year old. I started my eventually-doomed PhD. Certain famous Things happened in USPol that you mighta heard of. One great thing came out of 2017, though. In the summer, Parrhesia sent me a Discord message - I had to see this fucking Let's Play.

Reading the Major\Minor LP on the Archive became something of a comfort food for me. In the whole history of LP, from SA to Youtube to here and every stop in between, I have experienced three LPs more than once. I've read Parrhesia's Final Fantasy Tactics run twice. I've watched the legendary 50 Cent Blood on the Sand run thrice. I've read Major\Minor, I believe, five times. Just about once a year, I'll go back to that link and, over the course of a month or so, read the whole thing again. I have it bookmarked. That 19.8 hours is just the time it took me to hold down the skip dialogue button long enough to get all the achievements following a guide because I wanted it on my shelf as a vanity project - my actual investment into experiencing Major\Minor is easily in the hundreds of hours.

Now, don't get me wrong here, I said before I'm not a VN guy and this is not an exception. Major\Minor is a fucking terrible story told poorly which not only does nothing notable with the VN format, but could be argued to be worse for being one. But there's just something magical about the batshit melodrama, the clear episodic breaks with systems and concepts just never coming back again, the absolute sparkledogs, that hits me in that exact dopamine spot in my brain. There is very little artistic or intellectual merit to Major\Minor, but it's bad in exactly the right way that makes me happy. I have never approached self-introspecting this with any analytical earnest and I frankly refuse to. I love Major\Minor, a story which is bad with no gameplay and starring characters who are all bad, for absolutely no reason. I've gotten more joy from this free furry visual novel than I have from a good number of games which I liked, and there's a certain honor in that.

The achievements are, in a word, hilarious.

The short of it is that there's roughly three different branching-choice paths that have various achievements for staying on and breaking off of them. Three playthroughs with tactical reloads is sufficient, and some guy on Steam for whom I want to buy a beer just wrote down a roadmap to getting them all. There's still some amazing things to highlight here, though. First up, the pace of the story-forced achievements is insane. It's not uncommon to get multiple achievements in a single conversation. You meet the Assassins (who not only never kill or plan to kill anyone, but who lose the only fight they're in with one dying) two lines of dialogue apart from each other, and there are separate achievements for meeting each. When you meet the staff and patrons of a tavern a few scenes later, you get three achievements in about fifteen lines for meeting the staff and then a fourth ten lines later for meeting the alternate choice to the Assassins - and then half a scene later, you get another for meeting a fifth character, but you've already met this guy before, you get two achievements for meeting him across the first two chapters. That said, though, this absurd pace means fun calculating how many people dropped the game at any given character - the difference in global achievement rates between the first two bar staff and the third which, I stress, is approximately two minutes of 'gameplay', is a whole 0.3% of players. Nice kills, dudes.

Achievement rates also show off some really funny things. At one point you have to choose one of your, uh, 'stalwart' 'companions' to have killed. Almost twice as many people chose to kill one versus the other. Over twice as many take one of the two choices to the lategame ball compared to the other. All the choices in the game are binary, by the way. The funniest by far, though, is the True Ending. About ten percent of people see the True Ending, a sequence of sparkledogs and words where you finally meet the author's self-insert (who's been dead this whole time) and which awards you four achievements, all of which are sitting at the same global rate on Steam. Then credits roll, and a big Fin. screen sits in place for about fifteen seconds. After the Fin. screen fades, a bonus scene plays to close the story off. This scene has an achievement. One in ten people who made it to the True Ending do not have this achievement.

Finally, there's two more that I want to point to that made me laugh for opposite reasons. The poor one is an achievement for beating the front 85% of the game without saving which, at RPGMaker text skip speeds, takes about three hours of just holding the spacebar. If you were doing it legitimately? Christ. The amazing one is a combination of choices one - you can choose, through a few binary choices, to try to hook one of your 'stalwart' 'companions' back up with his ex. It works. Then you can choose to blow him up instead of the other guy after having invested in his relationship. You're awarded with an achievement for this set of actions, which I think is just the best.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

When all is said and done and I'm thrown before the pearly gates, I think introducing you to Major/Minor is the big hitch I'm gonna be unable to answer for.