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Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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I thought it was about time I got into another big RPG and fancied something a bit Persona-y. Kendrick (off off the ugvm Podcast) suggested Raidou, which is a remake of a lesser known Playstation 2 game in the Devil Summoner series. Which itself is, of course, Persona-adjacent.

Set in 1910s Japan (…mostly), you’re Raidou Kuzunoha – a teenage detective who also happens to be the latest in the long line of trained devil summoners. You use both your detective skills, and your ability to catch (Pokémon-style) demons, to try and figure out why a girl who calls your detective agency wants to die, why they are kidnapped by mysterious guys in red, and why there’s been an increase in demon activity. Surprise! It’s all a bad guy using the power of demons to try and destroy the world or something.

I say you use your detective skills, but actually, you do almost no detectiving at all. Don’t be expecting anything Sherlock Holmes or Phoenix Wright here. Most of the time it’s a case of just standing near a Yakuza-lost-locker-key style shiny point, although sometimes you need to make use of your Pokém–uh demons and their special skills to “search more” or “fly up about 30cm” or “convince the pretty lady to part with information”.

Instead, you explore some small town areas and the odd building (and a huge underground submarine base) and talk to people, persuade them to talk more than they might want to, and fight demons in not not exactly time based combat. There’s a word for that sort of combat which I forget, but it’s a bit like Xenoblade or Eternal Sonata where you have skills that have cooldowns and/or power bars that need to be filled rather than have actual turns. You can pull out up to two demons from their Pokéba–Demon Tubes to assist (and swap them out as much as you want), and each demon acts mostly independently, attacking foes, triggering area buffs and traps and healing you as it sees fit. You can issue orders but I did this literally zero times in the entire game so it’s clearly completely unnecessary.

Befriending demons, using them, and levelling them up increases their loyalty with you. Levelling up gives them access to more skills, and loyalty supposedly makes them more powerful maybe? The main thing I found when their loyalty went up was they became more flirty. Which, when half of them are naked, is a bit weird. Especially when they say a sultry “Raidou!” when they level up.

Demons generally only exist in the demon world, which is like a dark shadow of the real world. You have the power to slip into this and often need to in order to rescue people (it’s very Tokyo Xanadu at this point), find items, or reach places you can’t access in the real world. This shadow realm is much like a dungeon, really, and often they have puzzles and a boss.

Boss fights are the only bit of the game which I found even slightly tricky, and even then most of them were very easy if very long. You don’t seem to be able to do much damage, even when you’ve maxed out your sword in the creepy blacksmith-cum-frankenstein basement, so it’s usually a case of chipping away at the boss HP incredibly slowly. Not the most fun bit of the game, I have to say. There are attacks which have elemental affinities, and baddies will, as you’d expect, have weaknesses to some of these, but bosses seemed to mostly be immune to these effects, and even those that were weak to some merely took slightly more damage that way. A few could only be damaged with certain elementals.

Oh yeah – the basement. You can visit a dodgy guy there who can forge new or better weapons for you, but also he can smoosh two of your demons together to make a different one. As they drift off into the smooshing cage, they sometimes tell you they love you. It made me uncomfortable.

The whole game was shorter than I was anticipating too, clocking in at about 25 hours. I wouldn’t ordinarily say that was short for a game, but when it’s in the same category of game as Persona, Tokyo Xanadu, Pokémon and Xenoblade, it certainly seems it.

If I’m picking holes, then I should also mention how PS2 it all feels. Yes, it’s an updated PS2 game, and yes, the graphics are far better than a PS2 can produce. There’s also quality of life things added which I suspect were not in the original (like fast travel from nearly everywhere, being able to buy certain upgrade consumables, etc.). Loading times are almost nil too. But… it still has a clunkiness. A rubbish Original Resident Evil style camera. Invisible walls. Things blocking the way which you clearly would be able to walk around or climb over but mysteriously you can’t so have to pass a series of other events in order to do so (reaching the church being one, if you’ve played the game, you know). Things that modern games deal with better, generally.

These are all small holes though. Despite the jank it’s a great game. The plot, which is just insane – it involves space rockets and Rasputin for God’s sake, even though it is set in 1910s Japan, remember! – ticks along at a nice pace and all comes together in a way that only bizarre Japanese RPGs can. Slight spoiler as proof: there’s a giant warship which is also a transformer late in the game. You can feel bits of Megami Tensei, Persona and related games seeping in here too, not least that they share some enemies like Jack Frost and some events from SMT games are referenced. Yes, they’re set after Raidou.

Now, there’s a PS2 sequel to the original game and I would very much like that to get the same remastered treatment this one did, so fingers crossed.

Hades II (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Remember that other Hades II? The one with turtles in it? That was a great game, wasn’t it? I bought that because it was so much like Hades and there wasn’t really any other Hades-likes around that had good reviews. Oh, except for actual Hades II. Which I finally got round to buying.

Set a number of years after the first game, after Hades himself stopped being a Bad Dad And Husband and Zagreus brought the family back together, Hades II stars new addition to the family – Melinoë. She’s Zagreus’ younger sister, born after the first game and squirrelled away by Hecate, a witch in Hades’ employ, for her own protection when Hades’ own dad Chronos escapes from his prison and enacts revenge on his family.

Hecate has been training Melinoë for years, and the time has come for her to journey (repeatedly) back to Tartarus, defeat Grandad, retake the House of Hades and free everyone. And it plays just like the original game, really. Each run, you might progress a bit further, unlock something new, or gain enough of certain resources to enable permanent upgrades. Or luck might not be on your side and you fail horribly.

You see, like Hades and Teenage Mutant Hades Turtles, you get frequent temporary (for the duration of the run, or for a set number of rooms) upgrades and boons, but they’re generally random. You can stack the cards in your favour a little, to make it more likely certain upgrades will come your way, but it’s very possible you’ll end up with rubbish, a wealth of coin but not power, or several boons which don’t really work well together. But that doesn’t matter! Every failed run nets you something, so there’s always a sense of improving, even when you don’t.

Different to the first Hades is a choice – a few hours in, at least – of two paths. It turns out you’re actually needed to fight the war on two fronts, both on the way to Chronos, but also Mount Olympus is in jeopardy because Chronos has unleashed Typhon on the Gods, and he’s a bit big and nasty. That means you’ve two routes, with different levels, baddies, stories and goals, but the plot of the game explains why you need to do both. And complete both. Multiple times.

Other than that, and some tweaks to how certain rooms “work”, Hades II is “just” more Hades. The slick fighting and the massively varied builds you can create are well crafted. The seemingly endless, and rarely-repeated dialogue between you, your friends, foes, Gods and even mumbling to yourself, is incredible – as it was in the original game. Every character is well fleshed out and the voice acting is fantastic.

So, don’t expect anything too radically different if you’ve played Hades, but if you enjoyed that even just a little bit, Hades II is up your street. It certainly was up mine and I loved it from start to end.

PowerWash Simulator 2 (Steam 2): COMPLETED!

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You’d be hard-pressed, from the screenshots, to see that PowerWash Simulator 2 is actually a different game to PowerWash Simulator 1. And the gameplay too, in fact. After all, there are only so many different ways washing dirty stuff can be presented. Why, then, is this a whole new game and not just another pile of DLC for the original? Money? It’s probably money. Right?

There are differences, if you look closely. Perhaps the biggest, in terms of “gameplay” at least, is how they’ve done away with all the different types of soap. In the first game, different surface types required the purchase and use of specific detergents, so you’d need one for stone and one for metal and one for plastic and so on. Well, not only is there only one soap type now, it’s free and unlimited. Well, you can only have so much splashed on surfaces at any one time, but rinsing it off magically refills it to your washer so it is effectively infinite. This might not sound like much of a change but, in a game with very few possible changes, it’s a game, uh, changer.

I almost completely avoided using soap in the original, because of the cost and fiddly swapping it out and stuff, so cleaning took more “passes” than it could have done. Now, I foamed up everything with gay abandon. Game changer.

Another change is the addition of a new piece of equipment – the swing. You hang it from the top of a flat surface, and sit in it – giving you mostly free movement up, down, left and right to squirt much more easily than you would with ladders or the scaffolding. Both those, and the hilariously useless step-stool, return, but on specific levels the swing is an excellent new bit of kit. Could have really done with that on the tower at the fire station in the original.

There’s also a new plot. The dodgy Mayor is being dodgy, and the gems you recovered in the previous game that were required to keep the volcano in check have been stolen, but ultimately this just manifests as a reason to clean stuff, same as before.

The final change, which may well have been there before but I didn’t make use of it, was single console split screen co-op. I played on the Switch 2 so was disappointed it didn’t support the game share method of giving player 2 a Switch of their own to stream to, but it was still fun and, as you’d expect, halved the time it took to complete levels.

That’s all there is to say, really – it’s more of the same with a few quality of life improvements. Could it have been DLC? Probably. Should it? Well, chances are it’d have been about the same price anyway (I paid £15 for it, but the eShop price is £20) so it doesn’t really matter. It’s more relaxing zen washing, and it’s worth the entry fee, so I don’t actually care. Oh yeah, and there’s a toilet to wash. Winner.

Minishoot’ Adventures (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Half way through the sentence where a reviewer described Minishoot’ Adventures as “The Legend of Zelda, only it’s a twin stick shooter” I’d already slammed the WANT button on the eShop. Yes, I know I could have bought it there and then (or at least pre-ordered it), but paying full price for any game, regardless of how good it is, just feels wrong. Often, I’ll put something on my wishlist and by the time it is in a sale I’ve totally lost all enthusiasm for it or, more frequently, totally forgotten what it was. But not this game. I checked the sales every week.

So I’ve finally managed to play it and it’s everything I wanted. You’re a little spaceship and you have to rescue other little spaceships and explore the world and the dungeons in it and fit baddies and big bosses, and get upgrades which improve your abilities or unlock new areas. There are some mazes, and puzzles, and somehow, somehow, despite the fact you shoot hundreds of bullets a minute and you look like something from Gradius, it’s still Zelda. Zelda with Geometry Wars gameplay. And it works.

The dungeons are fun and varied. The boss battles are a mix of wait-and-strike and bullet-hell. There are various sidequests, like finding engravings to expand the lore or racing a little fairy thing round a number of courses (where you can often cut corners, pleasingly), or collecting red crystals to use as currency to improve your shooting, speed or power. Getting every last item, trinket, and ticking off every last area on the map was addictive and I happily 100%ed the game.

More of this sort of thing, please!

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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While I’m a big fan of 2D Metroid games, and I did enjoy the first Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2 just left me cold and so I never played the third game. Oh, and Hunters was terrible. As a result, I did not rush out and buy Metroid Prime 4 at launch like I did with Metroid Dread. I did, however, get bought it as a present recently.

I was worried it would be incredibly hard (like Prime 1), and concerned the Samus Onna Bike bits would be terrible because those bits certainly looked terrible, but, actually, I was pleasantly surprised. Aside from a few times on some of the bosses, I didn’t die. I remember one of the later bosses on Prime 1 in particular taking about a billion attempts and when I did finally beat it I was down to almost no health, so I’m glad it wasn’t like that at all. No, the real “difficulty” was more in finding where to go than most of the battles, and one of the soldiers you rescue early on (annoyingly, it has to be said) helps with not getting lost most of the time. As for the bike, it’s OK. Completely unnecessary, adds nothing to the game bar making the game a bit longer as there’s a sizable desert to criss-cross hundreds of times which only seems to exist to have somewhere to use the bike. ANYWAY.

The gameplay, the graphics, the performance, the power-ups, the exploration, however, are all excellent. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable adventure from start to finish. It’s just missing a little something. Maybe it’s the rubbish Big Bad, and lack of other Metroid baddies like Ridley or Kraid or Mother Brain. Maybe it’s the slightly soulless desert. Maybe, just maybe, it’s that Metroid is intrinsically better in 2D than in 3D? It’s by no means a bad game at all, it’s just not quite the game Dread is.