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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.

Club Drive: hardly drivin’

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For Christmas I received the Atari 50 compilation, which collects a large number of Atari’s most celebrated games together and presents them alongside a museum of stories, videos, and artwork spanning the fifty years of the company. It is a fabulous resource, including a lot of arcade and 2600 classics, which I will no doubt talk about in future posts.

As well as games from the early years, there are some titles from the Lynx and the Jaguar. There are some high profile games missing, I presume because of licensing issues or because they weren’t developed by Atari – Aliens v Predator on the Jaguar, and Blue Lightning on the Lynx, are two that stand out. The Jaguar titles therefore seem a little scattergun, but it’s a good opportunity to play some I don’t own the cartridges for.

If you have seen my my to do list over the last decade or so, you’ll have seen I aspired to own Club Drive for the Jaguar. That wish has finally come true, in an approximate way, and I’m glad I didn’t spend more time chasing it. Because Club Drive is pants.

The key problem is that it’s largely uncontrollable. You accelerate with the right trigger, and turn with the d-pad (or left analogue). But to turn more sharply if a corner requires it, you pull back on the d-pad (or stick) as well as holding the direction. No need to slow down, your car suddenly just develops a smaller turning circle.

Get too near to the side of a cliff and the car will often decide to jump off itself. If it does, the game rewinds itself to a point just before you fell, and then the car invariably falls off again. Often this is accompanied with an unexpected change in viewing angle, so you have little hope of recovery, unless you rewind a lot further.

There are three modes: collect ten sphere things dotted around the level; race from one end of the level to the other (and back again); and a tag game for two players only. The collection game is painfully slow and dull. Racing is against the clock only, and I was doing well at this on the Wild West stage until I hit a hidden flashing wall which bizarrely transported me to the front of the Atari office building. It’s just all really janky.

Imagine this moving at 2 frames per second and you’re pretty much there.

I have raced on all four of the levels, plus the super secret course (which isn’t so secret on Atari 50 since there’s a message to press X to select it, I presume because it previously required a combination on the Jaguar keypad) – the latter was absolutely no fun at all since I couldn’t see where to go or control the car on the ramps. I don’t think I’ll persist with it.