karma @karma@awoo.space

Happy New Year - kicking it off with a playthrough of Sugoro Quest because why not :P

https://twitch.tv/karma_dragoness

I think I was on a mastodon break when I got this from Stratica, so I thought this might be worth posting. :P

Infinity's a game that released like 5 days ago after being in the works since around the year 2000. I never really knew a thing about it until a bit more recently, so I didn't really have any prior thoughts going into it other than "the combat system looks neat."

The manual says that the level cap is 30, and I'm level 13/14 with my party, so I can probably assume I'm a little under halfway in at around 5 hours spent. Might be wrong, but that's my best current estimate.

I'm not particularly fond of the cast - they have their own stories but it's really hard for me to get too invested in any of them because none of them do a great job of making me actually care about them. The entire story's felt... okay? But also pretty exhausting. I'm not the best story analyst so it's hard to exactly pinpoint and put into thoughts *why* I feel this way.

The combat system *is* indeed interesting! It also has some major shortcomings that hold it back. It's kind of a hexagonal grid system that you can move around on and do a lot of turn based tactical stuff, which is exactly my jam. However, the random encounter rate is excessively high which makes everything feel like quite a slog when just going through dungeons and the overworld.

The battles also have a few specific layouts per area on what enemies appear where and where your characters start, so the battles start to feel really stale after a while. It'd be one thing if you had control over your starting formation, and enemies had some more randomness in how they spawned, but it really hits the point where the high encounter rates and small encounter pool turns the cool combat system into more of a chore than anything.

SP (mana) management in fights is also weird - it feels like the game expects you to use a lot of it, but it also feels really rough to actually restore it outside of stopping by inns frequently or leveling up at the right times. When you wind up on a long stretch of overworld exploration (which is really easy with how weirdly the overworld is shaped) or through one of the excessively winding dungeons, it doesn't feel great. Once again throwing out the word "exhausting," rather than some other games that make resource consumption an interesting puzzle. It sucks too, because the spells and techniques that all the characters have are really fun to use - I love the tools the characters get, but I never really feel great about my decisions to use or not use them.

I've also had a lot of moments where I'd read text that a character said, but didn't quite process it fully. The game doesn't really have much of a system for reminding you what you're up to, which further adds to a bunch of aimless exploration (and further compounds with the high encounter rates to add even more to the frustration).

I think the main reason I'm even writing this in the first place is that beneath all of this, I still find the game to be really interesting and compelling. It's just really frustrating that the shortcomings are detracting from things because I want to like this game more. :P

A friend of mine found a copy of Bomb Busters for the holidays. I'd been looking for it in previous board game store outings, but couldn't quite find it (which makes sense considering it won the Spiel die Jahres and all). Turns out she got lucky and stumbled on a store that happened to be putting out a copy right as she visited, haha.

Played a few rounds with folks, and we managed to defuse the first three bombs without any explosions, and it's really fun! We had a couple of close calls, some brilliant plays, and one "I'm a genius! OH NO" moment on my part, lmao.

https://www.twitch.tv/kg28_/clip/AgileGrossYamRaccAttack-Rx6gj1ay588VHf3c

Speaking of, here's a clip of me playing Cyber Owls going for the "defeat hackoon after entering the boss fight with no ammo" square. I'm the upper right player (matt's opponent) so you don't get to hear me.

I get trapped by hackoon's randomly generating walls to start, and then I'm desperately looking for ammo that's supposed to spawn, only to find that it actually *did* spawn... underneath a dead soldier that was blocking the entire sprite lmao.

Matt's scheduling a 2v2 Spicy Bingo league and I'm really excited about it!

I asked someone about being my partner for the league and we're both pretty stoked about playing together, and now the analytical brain is kicking in because of *course* it is. :P

I think we're both pretty well rounded in that we've both at least pushed through all the games for the cherry and could pretty reasonably cherry them again. But I think we both also have different games in the collection that we're pretty good at and I'm hoping that we can put on a good show in the leagues.

One of my favorite aspects about spicy bingo games is that the goals take longer so you take a bit more time to strategize, and then you spend longer actually working towards things so there's just a lot of time to socialize with your partner if you're playing a 2v2. There also winds up being a lot of really fun conversation after the fact where both teams wind up having hilarious stories about weird things that happened while trying to go for the goals, so it's a really fun social setting even with your opponents.

Right. I exist here, lmao.

Brought to you by me watching a bunch of people play Kirby Air Riders and it being the "one game that would potentially make me crack and buy a switch 2" (I still don't plan on it, but now they're actually giving me a challenge :P)

I really wish Star Garden was better. Obviously it wears its inspiration of the original Air Ride's city trial mode on its sleeve, and I think that's great! We need more of that! But it really just does not feel great from the demo.

The controls feel pretty slippery - and that's even on the stars that theoretically should have great handling. You know how Air Ride has a pretty natural feeling boost that aims where you feel like it should? (You know, aside from when you're using a super slippery star and have mega powerups... but even then, you can usually wrangle things) The Star Garden stars all feel like you have to way overcorrect for every single boost to try to hit a box or grab a powerup.

There's also this baffling decision to hit you with a side camera view every time you jump up out of the water. I get that it's cinematic, but I'd *really* like to see where I'm going?? Especially when I have flying power and want to glide away after jumping out.

There's just a bunch of little things like that where it just doesn't feel great to play - I know it's just the demo so there's a chance they could improve on everything, but it all feels so core to the game that it'd kind of take reworking the game from the ground up for it to feel good for me.