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Flock: a different type of bird watching

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In many ways, Flock reminds me of Flower, the relaxing1 and peaceful game on the PS3 (and other Sony consoles) where you gently guide the wind and petals to find new blooms. Guiding your character – someone riding a giant bird – is really easy, with the vertical component automatically taken care of and only the horizontal direction left for your input. This means you can spend time looking in the distance for where you want to go, and also for signs of creatures.

You have to find the creatures, you see. Your aunt is a zoological expert but she can’t be bothered to move from her water tower perch, so instead you have to go out into the world and search for them. When you find a creature, you can observe it for a little while before having to identify it. Is it a bewl (bean-like creatures with no legs), a gleeb (generally those with wings), or a drupe (a bit of a catch-all category)? Once you’ve identified the family, you get more accurate descriptions to compare against the creature on the screen. Why we need to identify the creatures is unclear, since Aunt Jane tells us if we get them right or wrong. Really she should just get down and do it herself.

That would be a bit more of a boring game, though.

Creature hunting isn’t the only aspect though. Evil robber creatures have stolen flutes and knitting patterns and are buried in mounds of grass. You have to find these mounds, and get the flying sheep that follow you around to graze there. Once they’ve eaten all the grass you can see the tail of the awful evil baddie, and you can pull them out of the hole. This is needed if you want to get the whistles for each family of creatures, and once you have the whistle you can get any creature to join your flock, following you around. You can also increase the number of sheep by finding them around, and increase the number of creatures in your flock, and (most importantly) get new clothes to wear.

It’s really difficult to get a decent picture of how the flock follows you around.

To start with there’s not much of the world uncovered, and you can see creatures relatively easily. After a while the Emperor Cosmet appears, and when it’s been identified the fog or clouds or mist or … whatever it is clears a bit, and new areas are revealed. Some of the creatures require more of a stealthy approach. Some are really fast and you have to be lucky to see them. Some are just rare. As well as the requirement to find the creatures, some of your Aunt’s friends are dotted around the levels on perches, and you have to find them and carry out other tasks.

The game has an amazing and consistent art style, and charm by the bucketful. The day/night cycle is quite affecting, and I suspect that the reason that some of the spaces in my catalogue are still unfilled is because I need to look at certain times of the day. I think I’ve unlocked most of the map now, but there are still entire families which are undiscovered.

  1. Until the horrendous and depressing last level. ↩︎

Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna – The Golden Country (Switch): COMPLETED!

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If the $hlmun of hours on the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 main game and DLC wasn’t enough, then thank $deity for this prequel spin-off! Yes, more Xenoblade! Amazing.

To be cynical for a moment, it’s clear that this was likely originally supposed to be integrated in the main game. There’s a number of flashbacks to events 500 years ago, and it’s those events that are retold in full here. You could complain about it being money-grabbing to ask you to buy two things, but when you get so much damn game for your money it’s hard to. Besides, despite being much smaller than the main game (both in terms of size and length) it’s still bigger than many other full price releases and did come with all the extra stuff for the XC2 itself.

Anyway. To the game itself!

It’s the same in many ways as Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and they’ve not drastically tweaked the gameplay. You still have blades (although each character only has two and you can’t awaken an army of them), battles are pretty similar, and even one area of the game – Gormott – is here as it was before (albeit 500 years younger with no town to speak of yet). A few things have gone, like the cloud sea “tides”, which was silly and underused anyway, and salvaging. Your main character and blades now fight directly, rather than you “channelling” your blade, but this doesn’t really change the gameplay. Crafting items is now a big thing, expanding on the cooking you could do before. Finally, there’s a new addition called “Community”, where things you do for people you meet builds your reputation. It doesn’t seem to do much, though, aside from allow access to a few more missions or skills.

The plot follows Lora, who is Jin’s driver, who joins up with Addam (Mythra’s original driver) and one of Mòrag’s ancestors Hugo, driver of Brigid and Aegaeon as they try to put down Malos before he destroys the world. You know, much like in the main game. Although it’s set 500 years in the past, there are a surprising number of recurring characters, including Mikhail (as a kid). It’s interesting to see how Jin is a good guy here, before he becomes one of the Big Bads in XC2. In fact, it’s a shame that it isn’t really fully explained why Jin and Mikhail swap sides, although both are redeemed in XC2.

So really, it’s more of the (almost) same. A few changes, some new locations, and a power where you can halve your HP in return for vastly reducing the cooldown of your skills which speeds up fighting lower-level enemies greatly – a really issue in the main game and I’m thankful for here. Probably essential playing if you liked Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and probably useless to play if you haven’t played (or at least, intend on playing) that as there’d be a load of missing context. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 before X comes out now? Why not?

Pokémon Blue: settling to a team

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I have a feeling I am now at the point where I lost interest in Pokémon Yellow, and I recall feeling a little uncertain when I reached this point in Pokémon LeafGreen. When I last wrote, Pikachu was several levels higher than my other pokémon due to him fighting and defeating every enemy in the caves; I now have a similar problem with Dugtrio whose Dig (and now Earthquake) moves proved invaluable when scaling Pokémon Tower, and fighting the electrical enemies. I have progressed through the underground passages, obtained a silph scope (which allowed me to identify the ghosts in Lavender Town), fought Giovanni – the boss of Team Rocket, routed the inept baddies from Silph Co, woken Snorlax1 with a poké flute and then captured him, and found a mansion containing the programmers of the game.

My team is all around the high 30s, other than Dugtrio who is at 47, and I am having to resist the urge to just use him over and over again. I am fairly settled with a team of Dugtrio, Charizard, Weepingbell, Vaporeon, Haunter and Pikachu – waiting for a couple of them to evolve – but I’m aware that others may come along to replace them at some point.

I am varying the colour scheme I play with to suit my location, the time of day, and the strain on my eyes.

Indeed, I’m not sure where I’m off to now. I have just obtained the SURF and FLY moves, but currently there’s no pokémon in my party who can learn FLY so I’m taking the opportunity to journey by foot and level up my companions some more. There are large areas to the south with oceans which were previously unreachable, so I’m heading home to see my mother and then onwards to the southern islands.

  1. My previous style guide continues. Since I don’t rename my pokémon, one that I have caught and am holding is capitalised as a proper noun. The generic name for that type of pokémon is not capitalised. I caught Snorlax when I woke him up, but then when I woke the second snorlax I was unable to catch it despite the fact I threw multiple balls at him when he was at virtually zero health and also asleep. ↩︎

Rain On Your Parade (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Rain On Your Parade is one of those silly arcade games that things like Donut County and Pool Panic. In this, you’re a sentient cloud who – initially – is mainly tasked with raining on things. After all, what else can a cloud do? You have to soak so many people or rust so many vehicles, that sort of thing.

Quickly things take a bit of a turn when you’re encouraged to cause chaos, set fire to stuff (you can hover over oil leaks and then rain oil), learn how to cause lightning, and so on. The game is framed within a Princess Bride style man telling a kid a bedtime story about this cloud, and he keeps adding to it to keep it interesting, so there’s the introduction of a baddie – Dr Dryspell – who wants nothing more than make everything dry.

Levels are varied, some short, some mere time or score attacks, and some pretty huge and complex. There’s quite some imagination going on (“rain” coffee into cups, get everyone covered in bird poo) but a special mention is needed to the first person shooter level, and the Legend of Zelda one for really stretching the formula. It’s also fun finding the references to other games, like Katamari, Metal Gear, and Power Wash Simulator.

Most of the levels have a number of “missions”, which usually require you to wet a certain number of things or complete the level without running out of water, and there are optional tasks, and even some optional hidden tasks, if you really want to go down the 100% complete route. There’s also a load of unlockable “costumes” for your cloud, like a frog hat and a chainsaw, and some minigames too.

Rain On Your Parade is quirky and funny, although a bit janky when it comes to things like collision detection and it even crashed on me a couple of times, but don’t let that put you off. A bit more polish would have been nice but it doesn’t detract from the ridiculous gameplay. Oh yes, and it has toilets. Five stars, would play again. Etc.