Pokemon Kanto Hit or Miss? (Part 1: The set-up)

I'm going to be straight with this one. I am SEVERELY biased in my opinion on these games. Pokemon Yellow was the first video game I ever beat. Pokemon Gold (and later on Crystal) took the majority of my playtime when I was a kid. Pokemon in general IS my favorite video game franchise. I will do my best however to put that bias aside while writing this review as often as i can.

Pocket Monsters Red, Green, and Blue
Japanese Box art

For this review i will be covering all of the first gen games AND the remakes from gen 3 and what differences the versions have. Yes, that's 6 games in one review (Pokemon Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Fire Red, and Leaf Green.) For this review I played both Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Fire red. I played Blue through BGB and Fire Red through VBA.

Pokemon Red, Blue, Yellow English Box art

Now before anyone yells at me for using emulators I would like to point out that I do own both Blue and Fire red. I own a Virtual console version of Blue on the 3DS and I still have a original cartridge of Fire red on the GBA but, the save battery of my Fire red cart is dead so it doesn't save and I wanted to start fresh in Blue rather than continue the save i already had started on the virtual console and didn't want to reset it.

Pokemon Fire red and Leaf green English box art

For reviews i generally like to avoid using emulators and play them on the hardware I remember them on but, for those reasons I used emulators instead for this one. I will point out in the future if something like this ends up happening again (which i can already think of one or two occurrences.) That being said I have a lot to cover for this so we'll move on.

There really isn't much story to Pokemon games in general. You basically go through the same motions in most games. You start you're Pokemon journey with your best friend(s) or rival as the Pokemon professor of the region gives you a choice of 3 starters in your quest to travel the region, see the sights, capture some more Pokemon, and build a team of Pokemon to take on the gyms and the Pokemon league of the region. Some time during your travels you will run into a crime syndicate that will impede your progress until you deal with them. This will happen multiple times until you fully defeat their leader and you, a ten year old (or in later games a teenager), thwart their plans and they disband.

This is true of all of the Gen 1 games and the remakes. They were the first games after all and they set this standard for the main series games. There are some small differences however for Pokemon Yellow. Pokemon Yellow follows the Pokemon anime including having Pikachu be your only starter and having Ash and Gary in the default names section of the player character and rival respectively. Jesse and James from team rocket even make a cameo in Yellow.

For those who didn't know when Pokemon released in Japan its first two versions were Pocket Monsters Red and Green. Pocket monsters Blue was an updated version of the original two versions and then Blue was the template that was used when translating them to English to be released else where as Pokemon Red and Blue (which explains why the remakes were Fire red and Leaf Green instead of Fire red and Water blue or some other such title.).

So before picking which version I played I looked through the exclusives for each version. Pokemon was made essentially to be a more social video game back then to justify the link cables that were used at the time to connect game boys for various features (in Pokemon's case to trade and battle other people) so they took the 150 Pokemon and made some of them only appear in the wild to be captured in one version but not the other. This made you , if you wanted a Pokemon that was an exclusive for one version and you had a different version, either have to buy that version, another game boy, and link cable to trade from one to the other or have a friend who had that version and one of you has a link cable to trade with each other. I ended up picking Blue version for the originals and Fire Red for the remakes for one exclusive in each. Pokemon gen 1's exclusives can be found here and the exclusives for the gen 3 remakes can be found here.  I picked Blue for Ninetales and I picked Fire Red for Arcanine.

Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance Hit or Miss?

So after having a awful time playing Castlevania Circle of the moon. which led me to start this whole blog, I decided that after writing the Payday 2 review I would go back and play the other gba Castlevanias to see how they compared. This review will be the next gba Castlevania released which was Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance. (Also i may have taken the time to be less lazy with this one and learned more about blogger to add images and such to make shit look less barren.)

Box Art

Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance (which past here i will refer to as HoD) released on June 6, 2002 for the gba. HoD was developed and published by Konami and released to positive reviews and currently holds a 87 on metacritic. HoD was the second Castlevania game released for the gba.

The Story

HoD stars Juste Belmont and his friend Maxim who are looking for their childhood friend Lydie who was captured and taken to a castle. As soon as they get to the front gates however, Maxim remarks that the castle feels familiar and he and Juste split up to cover more ground faster. Juste runs into Death in the castle and he confirms that the castle is indeed Dracula's castle. Juste finds portals in the castle that seem to teleport him to other area's of the castle but, Juste notes that the atmosphere seems to change when he goes through the portals. Juste runs into Maxim again after his first trip through the portal and Maxim's entire personality seems to have changed as he seems openly antagonistic towards Juste before the two split up once again to continue their search.

Juste finds Death again in the top room of the clock tower in front of a different looking portal and Death reveals that he has been switching between two layers of the castle. The castle split into layers because when Maxim had gone on a quest to destroy the remains of Dracula but, when Maxim collected the final piece he lost all memory of the time between when he collected that piece and when he returned from his journey and told Juste of Lyie's capture. Juste meets up with Maxim who seems to be his old self again but, Maxim warns Juste that he can feel his second persona gnawing at his mid trying to take control and that Maxim was who kidnapped Lydie but, he wiped his memory to stop his second persona from knowing where she was. Maxim gives Juste his bracelet that gives him access to Lydie's location in the top floor of the castle and tells Juste to hurry. Juste reaches her only to have her stolen away by Death who plans to use here blood to untie the two layers of the castle by destroying Maxim's spirit leaving only the spirits of Dracula's remains in him. Juste tracks down Death and finishes him but, Maxim's Dracula persona has tracked Lydie to the center of the castle. Juste rushes there to confront him to see if he can save his friends from Dracula.

(From left to right) top row: Juste, Lydie, Maxim

Bottom row: Merchant, Dracula, Death

The Gameplay

HoD is a metriodvania title with all the bells and whistles you would expect from the genre. 2D side-scrolling platforming with progressive unlocks to movement options to access more of the castle. Armor and whip tips scattered though out the castle and a roaming merchant who appears in some room  if you meet the requirement. Some sub-weapons return to be used with hearts to give Juste some projectile attacks and HoD adds is spell books to the mix which can be combined with sub-weapons to cast spells with magic points.

Juste fusing the fire spell book and axe to cast a magic spell.

The good

I played HoD twice for this review, one Juste mode and one Juste hard mode, and got the best ending for both with 200% map completion. Now to answer the main question. Did I Like HoD or was it a painful slog and grind fest like Circle of the moon?  I ended up really enjoying  HoD actually. I only really intended to play it once in Juste mode and write my review with that but, after finishing it the first time and starting to write this review I ended up picking it up again and played it on hard mode.  I really liked that you started off with the dash which made movement much faster and dodging attacks easier.

Having armor and medicine static drops through the castle cuts the need to rely on farming enemies for HOURS to get a couple drops to have healing items in stock or have armor that doesn't suck. Spell books are also static items that are always in the same spot instead of farming one enemy for HOURS to get the enemy to drop the card for your spells. Having a merchant in the castle also means that you can just buy potions an armor instead of having to grind  for HOURS to get a few item drops off enemies to stock up on potions or get armor that doesn't suck.

What I'm saying is that HoD fixes pretty much every problem I had with Circle of the moon and thus made it a much more enjoyable experience for me. There is however, some problems that HoD has that subtracts from its experience.

The bad

HoD's magic is way too powerful for one. Specifically the axe fire combo, the lighting cross combo, and the wind cross combo. The fire axe combo has Juste create two flaming wyrms that seek out enemies and crawl around them dealing multiple high damage hits which easily cut down bosses health substantially.The lightning cross combo is basically a 2D grand cross, if you don't know what that means it's a move where you character with float in the air and have crosses come up from the ground circling you and the crosses deal massive damage to enemies that get hit by them, and the wind cross combo is a protective circle of crosses that deal moderate damage to enemies that come in contact with them and is great for traversing the castle with little effort. You can even cast the wind cross combo and then save to regen all of your magic and have the full cross circle up.

The second problem I have with HoD kind of stems from the overpowered magic. HoD is too easy in my opinion. I died once in the normal playthrough and only died 5 times on hard mode and only ONE of those deaths was too a boss. That one death was to the cyclops in hard mode which if he hits you with his hammer dealt like 1/4 of my max health. This ease I believe is from magic being way to powerful. The only thing hard mode does, if you're curious, is that enemies take less damage and you take more damage.

There is third small problem but, its so minor that it didn't really mean to much to me in terms of this review. Some of the bosses are really uninspired. There a a few bosses tat are just big versions of regular enemies and they even used the Minotaur TWICE. This idn't really mean too much to me however other than the fact that its obviously quite a bit lazy.

The Verdict

These problems however didn't end up souring the experience of playing HoD and there are even more modes you can play. Maxim mode puts you in control of Maxim instead of Juste. Maxim has all of the movement required to access all of the castle at the very start but, in exchange for that Maxim doesn't level up and can't use potions. No magic mode is exactly as it sounds, the spell books are removed from their locations meaning no spells for Juste to use, making Juste rely on his whip and sub-weapons. Lastly there is the standard boss rush mode and sound test mode which are what they sound like. All of those modes including hard mode are locked until you beat the game once on normal Juste mode. Sound test requires getting the best ending however.

Like other Metriodvania games HoD has multiple endings depending on how much of the game you played and how you fight the final boss. There are 3 (technically 4) endings to HoD:

Bad Ending: Collect all 6 pieces of Dracuala's remains and defeat Maxim in the castle B center.

Okay Ending: Using the crush boots open up the highest room in the castle A and destroy the hand statue, then go too the castle center in castle A  and defeat Maxim.

Best Ending:  Collect all 6 pieces of Dracula's remains equip JB's and Mk's bracelet before entering the castle center in castle B and confront Maxim (there is an alternate scene in this ending if you collected and put down all of the furniture in Juste;s room in the castle treasury.)

I really enjoyed playing HoD for this review. As i said i had only intended only laying it once for this review and ended up playing it twice instead. Sure it has it's issues but, at least in my opinion it FAR outclasses Circle of the Moon. For me it is indeed a Hit.

Harmony of Dissonance is currently available on the Wii U virtual Console or on game boy advance as a cartridge or a a dual pack cartridge packed together with Catlevania Aria of Sorrow.

Thanks for reading! See you next month for my next review.

Payday 2 Hit or miss?

I wanted to start with a review of a more recent game before going into some of my childhood favorites later down the line. Payday 2 is the most recent addition to my list of favorites.

Payday 2 is a four-player co-op shooter based on the heist movies of old (ex: Heat, Scarface etc) where you and up to 3 other players worldwide play as 4 of a cast of 17 heisters who will be committing crimes to make as much bank as possible. You do this by taking contracts through the Crime.net system where you can either join a lobby with other players or create your own lobby through the random contracts popping up or using some in game money to buy a contract that you want.

There are currently 5 currencies in-game; spending cash, offshore money, continental coins, skill points and xp. When you and your team complete a contract the whole team will get xp and money for doing so. All players get the same amount of  xp and money (Its not split among players all players get the full amount of money for completion.) Money you get from completing a contract will be split between spending cash and offshore money. Spending cash will be used for buying weapons and equipping them with mods to affect their stats. Offshore money is used for buying contracts you want to play when the random ones appearing on crime.net don't appeal to you and as benchmarks for raising your status among thieves. Continental coins are a bonus for completing cretin challenges and can be used to either buy weapon mods or upgrading your safe house.

Payday 2 has a leveling system where you gain xp to gain levels so you get more skillpoints to go further down the skill trees. This is where we come into the replayability of Payday 2. Max level is 100 but, once you reach 100 you can Infamy to reset your level and gain a level of infamy which goes up to 25. Raising infamy also nets you an infamy point to use on a web of rewards. Playing with many different players around the world

The skill trees are broken into 5 main trees with 3 sub trees in each main tree. Finding what skills best suit your weapons, perks, and armor is what separates good players from bad ones. Teamwork is key however for harder difficulties. Difficulties go from normal to hard to very hard to overkill to mayhem to deathwish to one down. Once you learn the game mechanics however all difficulties below mayhem will become super easy and ypou will probably never even play normal, hard and very hard after you have learned the games mechanics enough.

Now to the elephant in the room.the almost $180 of dlc. This may sound off putting at first but, I would only suggesting getting dlc once you know you like the game enough to play it on a regular basis and even then i would only recommended a few of the dlcs. See overkill had a great idea on how the contracts work. Any player can join any lobby even if a player is joining a dlc contract that they don't have they can still play it. So right off the bat if you aren't going to be hosting a lot of lobbies the dlcs that add contracts are less valuable. Further there are a great number of variety packs that add a good amout of varied content. For those who end up liking the game enough to want to play regularly I would point you towards Connor Shaw's video What DLC to get as i agree with his list of what dlc you should get once you are committed to playing Payday 2 regularly.

Now to the other major problem a lot of people have with Payday 2. the gun skins. Payday 2 has the same skins system as CS GO with skins that have variable rarity and conditions. They went a step further and skins can have stat boost on them that can be as minuscule as 4 stability or accuracy to as good as 3 extra concealment points. A lot of the community blew up when this hit but, in all honesty I don;t think that this system was a bad addition but, the way the large minority self destructed over this was embarrassing to watch.

Payday 2 features 2 styles of play Loud ans Stealth but, some contracts can only be done stealth and some can only be done loud. Stealth is as it sounds you sneak around avoiding detection to complete your objectives. To me stealth is boring and deeply outdated compaired to loud so i won't go deep into it (Jamesblack47's video pretty much sums up my thoughts on stealth.) Loud is more what you would expect from a co-op shooter. You're committing crime after all so the police come in waves to try and stop you. You and your team have to fight off waves of cops while trying to finish your contracts objectives so you can escape into the distance and reap in your rewards.

There really isn't a main story to Payday 2 each contract has pretty much just has a reason for you to be doing it and that's about all for story aside from a few exceptions.  Overall, I really enjoy Payday 2. It's endless replayability means i rarely go a couple days without playing it for a good couple hours. The modding scene adds even more to the game to the point where I've put in 1767 hours into it at the time of writing and still will probably be playing it for years to come.

About What I do.

I'm just an average gamer who has decided that I wanted to leave a mark on the internet with my opinions about some of the games I've played through out my time as a gamer. A lot of the games i will be posting my thoughts on will be either childhood favorites or older games I played later in life.

I'll attempt to update this blog at least 1 to 3 times a month with my thoughts on the games I'm playing now and/or will be replaying for a renewed perspective of a favorite.

What triggered this blog?:

I'm creating this blog as an attempt to mitigate the occurrence of long posts in the youtube comments (like my comments on Ggamesoup's GBA castlevania video that occurred on 2/22/17 and a few days later on 2/24/17 where i recounted my experiences with Castlevania Circle of the Moon.) I intend this to be an outlet for avoiding future occurrences of essay long comments.

First comment:
I gonna be that guy and say that I actually really like Harmony of dissonance (HoD), never got lost once (without using any guides/maps), and really didn't mind the two castle system they used in it. But, I'm more than willing to admit bias in that HoD is probably the gbavania that i played the most to the point where I'm pretty sure I've played it at least 6 times (3 normal playthroughs 1 on Maxim mode, 1 on Hard mode, and 1 on no spell mode.) I pretty much entirely dislike Circle of the moon (CotM.) I had a recent playthrough where I was having a hell of a time getting through it. I think it's generally because i approached the game like other metroidvanias. I went through each area no grinding from entrance of the area to the boss. Problem was you NEED the cards for the DSS system to get through the game reasonably. Items like potions and other curatives don't heal for shit, the only thing getting me through bosses was face tanking bosses and just out damaging them using the cards but, it got to a point where i was going through the underground waterway where the enemies did around 1/10 of my health with their attacks and i would die about halfway through the area between the two save points in the waterway because i used all of my healing items getting to the first save point. Couldn't get deeper in and couldn't get out to go get healing items. As an additional annoyance I hadn't gotten any card drops outside of the ones at the beginning that i think are scripted. I just gave up at that point because before i left for the waterway I had grinded for healing item drops for at least 3 hours only to use all of them halfway in because they don't heal for shit. Potions heal ONLY 20 hp, meat heals 50 hp, spicy meat is rare drop only and heals a measly 100 hp, high potions are they only reasonable healing item at 250 hp but, its common drops are in the battle arena (a post Dracula area) and the rare drop is wind armor (which is only available after the waterway) and legion which are placed in area's where you need the roc's wing which is guarded by Camilla the boss of the waterway. As for perspective as to how much hp you have at that point of the game at lv 50 without hp max ups is 570 and I was around Lv 30-35 and had probably a good amount of the max hp ups. Aria of sorrow is by far my favorite of the three. The soul system was interesting and added a lot of variety to the game. Soma himself is a really well developed character and his struggle with his true self are a really neat way for the story to go. TL;DR Screw Cotm, HoD was pretty fun for me, and AoS was unquestionably the best of the 3 for me, and i spent over 30 minutes thinking and typing all of this shit.

Second Comment:

Figured i would do a part 2 to this seeing as how after my tirade against CotM I decided instead of trying to continue the playthrough i mentioned i would just restart from the beginning and instead of being almost entirely blind I researched EVERYTHING plus i wanted to mention a few other gripes i have with CotM.

First i want to start with some complaints i have that i left out of the previous part. There is no shop or gold in CotM. I don't know why this omission was made for CotM but, the game could desperately use one. No shop means all curatives need to be dropped from an enemy which means if you want them you need to farm enemy drops. This means either knowing from experience which enemies drops the curative you want or using google which back in 2001 probably wasn't very effective. The next thing is there are no static armor drops (outside of the armor rewarded for beating the battle arena.) Which again means getting any armor requires knowing and grinding monster drops... again. Props to the strategywiki though, wouldn't have beaten the game without it.

Now for the new complaints from playing through it WITH researching everything. TOO MUCH GRINDING. I could just end it there by mentioning the above points about monster drops again but, I have a great example of this point that happened the day I posted this. I was in the observatory tower (the last area) and started to notice that the enemies damage had ramped up immensely from the underground waterway (the area before the tower.) So i took a look at the armor i was using which was the platinum armor (which i had farmed for a rare drop of a holy armor in the Warehouse.) The platinum armor was out of date and no longer enough protection from incoming damage so i looked to see what other options I had. The rest of the armors better than the platinum armor were all dropped by monster either on par or stronger than the enemies in the tower and all of them (except for the magic robe) were rare drops ONLY.  

So since they were all rare drops instead of going from 1 slight upgrade to another i decided to just go for the objectively best armor from the drops. I had no idea what i had gotten myself into. The best armor from a monster drop is the dark armor which is dropped from a Lilim which is a monster that just randomly appears in a hidden wall area of the machine tower after beating Death (who by the way HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE IN COTM. You just kind of walk into the boss room get a few seconds of dialog and then you fight.) Small edit: If it wasn't obvious I didn't really like this game despite loving the rest of the GBA and DS metriodvanias. To just add another nail to the coffin i confused Death with the necromancer in a section down below. Death has ZERO dialog or build up he just kind of shows up you kill him and that's it. So i went there and It took like 9 whip lashes to kill her with my best equipment on. Meanwhile its flying through the air surrounded by orbs that it can shoot at you and she did so much damage that I would die to her in 10 hits. So after fighting her just once she had almost killed me so, i had to sit there and use the card combo that gives a small regen hp effect overtime for standing still. 

So i looked up some advice for killing her without spending almost 2 minutes fighting her once and almost dying. So i read on strategywiki that they recommended using a specific card combo that lets you summon a thunder bird to do a thunder element screen wide AoE. I had the thunderbird card but i didn't have the summon card so, as you can probably guessed I went to go get the summon card which is a rare drop from a scary candle which is another case of an enemy randomly appears after getting past a certain point(thankfully it is also in the machine tower so it wan't to far from the Lilim). So after grinding for that card (which took roughly about a hour) I ran back to the Lilim to use the combo to beat grind her. EXCEPT that for whatever reason I couldn't figure out how to use the summon. So back to google and i found out that to use the summon you have to input from down a half circle( down, down forward, forward, up forward, up) and then hit the attack button.

Summoning the thunderbird killed the Lilim in 1 cast so that was great but, summoning the thunderbird cost about 1/4 of my magic and there is only 1 Lilim in the room which is the only place where Lilim spawns. This created my grinding cycle for the next 4 HOURS. Enter the room, get to Lilim, summon, kill Lilim, wait for the rest of the summon animation to finish (because it usually killed Lilim about halfway through), exit the room, repeat until running out of mp, then stand there at the exit of the room to refill mp. If i was lucky every once in a while Lilim would drop a mind high which restores 50% of mp which alleviated some waiting for mp regen.

The final nails in the coffin for this is that while I grinded for 4 hours to get the damn armor upgrade. I went from level 42 to level 58. Want to guess how that affected the rest of the game? Well the high level plus the thunderbird summon combo BROKE the rest of the game. I beat Hugh and both forms of dracula without even taking a quarter of my health in damage. There was ZERO effort left for me to put in, all i had to do was just chain summons and win. I felt empty. I felt that i had beat the game because i had spent an arbitrary number of hours grinding to get the items and stats necessary to beat the game instead of just playing smarter. 

The only thing unlocked from beating the game by the way is using a password to play as a different class (not even another character you still play as nathan he just has different stats.) Beating that playthrough would unlock another, and beating that would unlock another etc. Oh and 1 last thing... The playtime i had at the underground waterway for the first playthrough with no grinding (outside of the 3 hours of potion grinding) was about 5-6 hours. They playthrough where i grinded to make sure i got enough card drops and armor to make sure i got through the game. At Dracula's door-step i was at 15 HOURS and at least 8 of them was grinding for drops. FUCK COTM.


TL;DR Even going through CotM with researching and a wiki in a tab at all times, the constant grinding for card/equipment/curative drops, the lacking of a store/static item drops, the almost non-existent story, and clear spike of power from getting that damn summon card i walked away from CotM completely unsatisfied, annoyed, and just overall pissed off that i spent another 15 hours on this waste of time.