Semantic Nonsense: Three in Thebruary Recap

It is with deep regret that I inform you that I fell a game short in this year’s Four in February. And even worse, the victim is once again The Sword of Hope II whose only crime was being last in my play order.

I would be lying if I said I was going to make it up by continuing on and letting it be the first non-stream game I conquer in March; I’m rather anxious to return to Persona 3: FES. Perhaps it might yet be used as a palate-cleanser in between that and Persona 4: Golden.

Still, I can find comfort in the fact that this only failed because I finished Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball a day too early.

---

Gargoyle’s Quest

While the game was as easy to pick up and as engaging as I remembered, I was astonished by how short it was. I knocked it out in 3 hours flat despite remembering very little from when I played it before.

That’s not to say the game was without its dangers. You spend quite a lot of it with very little health to face down a few spongey enemies. But there’s enough 1-ups along the way to keep you healthy so long as you take your time with the tougher or strategically placed enemies. By the end of the game, you’ll be neigh unbeatable as befits a Red Arremer.

The charm of having an action RPG starring everyone’s first rage-quit from Ghosts n’ Goblins remains strong today. As does the notion that the endless demons that Sir Arthur mows down have a society, and also a deeper, more monstrous set of their own demons trying to take over their land.

The good news is is that knocking this out paves the way to mop up one of my four remaining unbeaten NES games, Gargoyle’s Quest II. For the curious, the other three are Castlevania III, Willow and Super Contra

---

Chasm

You (hopefully) saw it all on stream this past month, but I’ll summarize the experience here for those of you who missed out.

Chasm tasks a lowly apprentice knight with marching off solo to an empty mining town, rescue all its denizens from the monster-infested depth and slaying an eldritch horror that had conquered a great many worlds before this one. No pressure.

The twist to this indie Metroidvania is that it’s random by design, with each of its areas being procedurally slapped together from a collection of rooms, scattering around loot and fetch quest items like Easter eggs.

Movement is smooth and tight, even if some of the upgrades tend to make old ones redundant. There’s a good variety of weapons that swing and hit in different ways, which lead me to pick whatever was most satisfying rather than minmaxing my damage.

While the pixel art evoked a low-rez aesthetic, it wasn’t so low as to be ugly. The artists did a solid job across the board, giving expressive character to each of the game’s locations. The audio wasn’t bad, but it did fail to stand out. Or perhaps that’s a consequence of shoving that Final Fantasy symphony in the middle of the experience?

The first time through the game can be a bit rough; there’s a couple of late story beats in which it is not immediately clear where you are supposed to be going after having good flow up until that point. In order to make a February finish, I ended up going 2 hours over my usual 3-hour limit on the third stream of the game.

The only other complaint I have is that the randomized layouts make it so shortcuts opened up by new movement techniques aren’t always placed near the upgrades. Because it breaks the Metroidvania style a bit for that, it can be somewhat jarring.

---

The Longest 5 Minutes

Yet another RPGmaker-looking game found its way to a commercial release through a traditional publisher, so what? I’ll tell you what.

It seems to me, though, that this retro aesthetic was a deliberate juxtaposition with a rather modern structure by having an extremely nonlinear storyline. It’s set up with a similar juxtaposition: The hero who saves the world is an amnesiac… but he doesn’t get amnesia until the final boss encounter starts.

What ensues is a desperate struggle by the rest of the party to hold off the boss and stay alive while the main character struggles to remember his motivations, combat experience and overpowered attack skills as quickly as possible.

The larger half of the game is spent in a more traditional RPG engine, in which the party forms to tackle a small matter that eventually blows up into having to stand against world-ending threats. Most of the time, the flashbacks follow the sequence of the aventure, with at least a third of them either popping up completely out of order to present something relevant to that part of the final boss fight, or to have an interlude to reinforce/introduce character relationships. The focus here is story, with an interesting way to present it. Everything else is secondary or downright perfunctory.

And it’s that perfunction that causes some pain points that could have been smoothed out with more development. Every flashback starts the party with a prescribed set of gear, money and inventory… even when it comes next in sequence after the previous flashback. This was especially egregious during one segment that featured the opportunity to buy a lot of expensive and powerful weapons, armor and accessories only for them to all vanish on you without a trace shortly thereafter as you encounter them right before the end of the flashback.

All that aside, The Longest 5 Minutes is a unique and worthwhile experience that doesn’t really give itself enough room to fully spread its wings. While it seems like the final battle is proceeding slowly, those 5 minutes end up going fairly quickly, and the game ends without really sinking its teeth into its concept. The structure wouldn’t have worn out its welcome had it been The Longest 10 Minutes instead, and that’s a shame.

---

Dear readers, how many of you were attempting a Four in February, and how did it go? Drop a line in the comments or on our Discord and let us know.