Serenes Forest's Teehee Thread

[Acacia Sgt]

No, you zerg rush them with Colin.

[BrightBow]

Just now, Acacia Sgt said:

No, you zerg rush them with Colin.

Days of Ruin reigning in some of that nonsense was very much appreciated.

I do also really like Wargroove's approach of simply placing less building structures, since that limits one's ability to just spam cheap fodder units.

[Lightcosmo]

43 minutes ago, BrightBow said:

It wasn't meant to. Low difficulty is not something I said anything about.
What I complained about is that the game's strategic depth begins and ends with powergaming. With all maps being open to all sides and a consistent amount of pressure from all directions until every single enemy is dead, every turn plays the same and any difference between the different maps comes entirely from how your numbers develop relative to the enemies'.

I mean, Advance Wars is more of a strategy series than Fire Emblem ever was. And that game does not even have a level system. But you are not going to win there by letting enemies suicide themselves against your big numbers.

Seth Emblem would like to have a word, then. Lmao

[Acacia Sgt]

Meanwhile SRW be like...

 

 

[Interdimensional Observer]

FE soundtracks? 

I'll generally say that the memorability of video game OSTs are not infrequently dependent upon one's opinion of the product as a whole. Not always, not entirely, I do acknowledge it's possible to separate one's opinion of an entire game from that of its soundtrack.

-Yet I would insist on a not-infrequent linkage of the two, not unlike smell with taste. If you're stuck fighting a super-tedious boss, after nonstop dialogue spewed by terrible characters in a weak plot, after hours of most bothersome grinding and fetch quests, and the graphics are donkey to boot, would it be any surprise if the Platonic Ideal Of A Boss Battle Theme, was interpreted in your skull as utterly forgettable? On the other hand, would not a Generic-Sounding Boss Theme become more memorable than it should be on its own merits if everything else about the game harmonized with one's soul?🤔

With regards to FE, Radiant Dawn's is drilled into my bones (and Path of Radiance's to a slightly lesser extent), because I grew up with it and greatly enjoyed it. By contrast, Fates -which isn't at all bad from my experience of it, but comes from a point where my immersion in FE fell off a cliff (because I was weird), is perhaps the least memorable FE soundtrack for me. Barring Three Houses, where my bizarre anti-immersion practices reached the point that I played through the game three times with the music entirely off. The other soundtracks vary in how much they register, none so little as Fates, none as much as Tellius.

Likewise, I would point to the above posts as evidence. Noooooooo surprise Shrimpy and Arma find forgettable and or bad the FE soundtracks that they do.😛

 

2 hours ago, Shrimpy -Limited Edition- said:

Something light befitting the approach to Takamagahara.🙂

Here's the tweaked in-battle version BTW.

 

[Acacia Sgt]

Oh hey, finally found Heero Yoshino in the VN.

[Armagon]

3 hours ago, GuardianSing said:

The landback movement is about ending that centuries long exploitation and let land be cultivated and taken care of by the communities that live within it and work in service to their land and community. This includes non-natives

So basically just a change in management essentially?

Would that go about integrating the reserves too? Like making them a part of the community as opposed to having them be this weird sectioned-off part of the nation?

3 hours ago, GuardianSing said:

I've seen self-proclaimed leftisft white people on twitter claim that they would be totally fine with Native Americans rising up and killing them because of their imperialist perception of what landback means.

AmericaBad moment.

 

[Acacia Sgt]

Is there really an entry for Cassette Tapes of all things in the Dangopedia!? It's not even about what they are, just a tidbit about the write-protect tabs.

[GuardianSing]

18 minutes ago, Armagon said:

So basically just a change in management essentially?

Would that go about integrating the reserves too? Like making them a part of the community as opposed to having them be this weird sectioned-off part of the nation?

When it comes to specifics it can depend on who you ask but in general the idea is to make reservations less neglected from the rest of the country while still retaining it's autonomy. The hope is to make it so people can have a little bit of a greater say on how their local region is developed and managed.

[Acacia Sgt]

Man, long time it wasn't already dark around this time. Getting out of work with this darkness...

Smh, why can't we only have 40 hour workweeks...

[Codename Shrimp]

That was sure a game of all time

[Acacia Sgt]

Just now, Shrimpy -Limited Edition- said:

That was sure a game of all time

Oh, the Red String of Fate, huh.

[Armagon]

18 minutes ago, Shrimpy -Limited Edition- said:

That was sure a game of all time

So you'd say that this is a game then?

[Acacia Sgt]

Okay, it's the Fujibayashi twins this time.

[Acacia Sgt]

I'm fully starting to see what Kaginado was getting at, heh.

[Acacia Sgt]

Okay, stopping for tonight. I don't think I'm near an ending, but already down the route at least.

... ah, forgot I was going to do the finishing touches of the chapter. Well, I can still do it, but uploading might have to be tomorrow now. Well, that's okay.

[Saint Rubenio]

There may be a slight problem with my brilliant plan to get Mario Wonder second-hand at Cex.

...Nobody's selling the game to Cex. The game's too good and people aren't getting rid of it. Dangit... I'll end up having to pay Nintendo's prices lol

Well, it is 45 at Carrefour Gaming. That's a bit better. Maybe I could trade Mario Maker 2 in at Cex and use the profits to buy some less popular game that comes out. People seem remarkably unfazed at Peach Game, perhaps that'll be easier to catch in this way. We'll see.

8 hours ago, Shrimpy -Limited Edition- said:

That was sure a game of all time

I missed the name of the game.

[Lightcosmo]

1 hour ago, Saint Rubenio said:

The game's too good and people aren't getting rid of it.

This is usually how these things work. Xd

[Acacia Sgt]

Ah, so good to be back in Standard Time.

[Saint Rubenio]

4 hours ago, Lightcosmo said:

This is usually how these things work. Xd

Yeah, but... Sheesh, my brilliant plan in tatters.

[Sidereal Wraith]

14 hours ago, Shrimpy -Limited Edition- said:

That was sure a game of all time

Yes Shrimp-Kuhn, the game is a thing.

[Acacia Sgt]

Hmm, I wonder if I should also make a small tweaks to the previous chapters. There's actually something I got wrong and it only took me until recently to find out. It wouldn't be much to edit, so it'd be fine.

[Interdimensional Observer]

Finished GrimGrimoire OnceMore.😀

Overall, a delightful little Vanillaware experience.😄 It took me only 13 hours, so maybe not exactly a game you'd want to buy at full $50 price, but I don't regret it at all. TBF, the game as I had read the other day was created over 6-12 months, with the budget in Nippon Ichi Software's hands. Compared to the grandiose, ambitious, years-long projects of Odin Sphere at the time and 13 Sentinels later, GrimGrimoire was a quick dollop of passion.

Owing to its short length, I'm not going to talk much about the story of Lillet Blan. Things move fast, with very little filler. Yet nonetheless the story caught my attention was fairly solid I felt, to its very end I enjoyed it. Vanillaware has shown a fondness for multiple perspectives in storytelling, GrimGrimoire doesn't do that. Yet Vanillaware was still able to throw some spice into the plot. The small cast of characters isn't the most developed, again no doubt owing to the reason the plot is succinct- the very limited development time and budget. Nonetheless, nobody was annoying or bad and they all had some significance, Lillet was nice 🙂, and I was amused by Advocat.😈 You could, perhaps, on some level regard GrimGrimoire as a short VisualGrimoire.

...However, that would be incorrect. As GrimGrimoire is a 2D side-scrolling Real-Time Strategy game. Between every two plot scenes is a battle, so the text-to-gameplay ratio is very even. OnceMore edition also adds Trial Maps for some additional challenges. GrimGrimoire gives you four schools of magic, each containing 3 Runes from which you can summon Familiars and Symbols. Each branch of magic gets 4 Familiars and 1 Symbol (think of it as a magical stationary turret), for a total 20 different units you can deploy and may end up fighting against on any map. Victory in every battle is the same- destroy all the enemy's Runes, and don't let all of yours be destroyed. Sometimes you don't have to destroy the Runes and can just survive for a certain time duration.

Since I felt overwhelmed by the entire system early on, I turned the difficulty down to Easy (I could adjust it at any time in any direction). That made things too easy.😆Nonetheless, I enjoyed GrimGrimoire from a gameplay perspective, much more than I did 13 Sentinels. I found it very charming, I liked the general premise of laying down magical Runes and conjuring up my fantasy army. While the backdrops were all the same dusty old stonework, the Familiars themselves oozed classic Vanillaware style. Which is more than can be said for 13 Sentinels's pixelated jumbles. While I very rarely used the Symbols, the 16 Familiars felt fairly balanced. And there was more than one solution for dealing with any specific type of foe whilst still retaining individual unit identity -flexible strategizing. OnceMore adds simple skill trees (and a single use per battle of one of four Grand Magic spells) for strengthening the Familiars and Symbols, and which can provide some of them with new utilities.

-Those new abilities aren't available right from the start of each battle. You have to level up the Runes by spending more Mana on them. Mana is obtained from Crystals on a map once sanctified by one of the four gathering-type Familiars. What the game tells you, but doesn't tell you up front, is that each Crystal contains a finite amount of Mana -and one little fault of the gameplay is that it doesn't tell you how much Mana each Crystal contains. Mana being finite (although more plentiful on Easy, probably less on Hard or unlocked-upon-story-completion Hell difficulty), you have a limit imposed on you every battle as to which Runes/Familiars you want to use and how much you can upgrade the Runes. On the higher two difficulties, this probably forces to think carefully about what to deploy in every fight. Three other things I'll comment on regarding the RTS gameplay- the first being the battle maps, being in a tower, have a great deal of verticality to them. Every battle is also fog of war, which is overwhelming the first time you play any map and don't know where the enemy Runes and familiars are or what they're packing. And lastly, you've three non-auto save slots and you can save any time mid-battle, allowing you to reload from an earlier point if you messed up as much as you want.

For the music, it was forgettable yet satisfactory Basiscape stuff, as expected from Vanillaware. The very small world of GrimGrimoire -the story is entirely contained within Silver Star Tower with nooooooo exploration at all- leaves it devoid of Vanillaware's Most Glorious Scenery. The characters and aforementioned Familiars are all pretty as usual though. The game also comes packed with every bit of artwork from the original PS2 GrimGrimoire's release. And, Vanillaware went well beyond the Call to Dev by cramming the game with brand-new official artwork (each artist responsible individually accredited), which whimsically indirectly help flesh out the snow globe-sized world (quite the contrast from Odin Sphere) of GrimGrimoire.😁

So OnceMore, I'll say I enjoyed this Vanillaware experience.😃 Not exactly a full-five course meal if you aren't played as sloooowly IRL as I did, it's more of an... aperitif.🍾

[Codename Shrimp]

[Interdimensional Observer]

26 minutes ago, Shrimpy -Limited Edition- said:

You mean this?

😛