izigame.me

It was weird how there was the secondary character thinking he is also a protagonist in the cartoon. Well, turns out the cartoon was a part of the bigger IP.
Once upon a time, before pol pot, before Star Wars, there was an IP called Mazinger Z, i’m not gonna research its release history for a simple mention, so maybe some other time. It was decently popular, but not popular enough to become a part of international culture. Despite syndication and toys it is forgotten by the general public. After that storyline has ended, they launched a new entry Great Mazinger. The third entry was UFO Robot Grendizer and it seems it left as big of an impact with its french, italian, and arabic dubs, as DragonBalls Z in yankeestan twenty years later. For fifty years people cannot calm down and are still fanboying over it. In the mid 90s Grendizer came to russia, but it had no cultural impact on the population as a whole. Soviets had tight relations with nihonese animators and often collaborated, so people were used to weeb cartoons. My dad liked them since youth, it was he who wanted to watch pokemens when they were premiering in mid 00s, not me. But in the moment, Grendizer was extremely popular with my generation of kids. It is dumb and blatantly excessive, it has that many weapons, when each one is exactly as effective as any of them, and we loved it. Anyone older or younger than us have missed it, and even we barely remember it.
I though The Feast of the Wolves is a nihonese game, both because of this IP, and because it’s has a very typical very restrictive nihonese gameplay. But it turns out it is made by a french company. I’ve played it with nihonese sound and english subtitles.
It’s a simple collect-a-thon game with simple beat-em-up combat. But since it’s Grendizer you have a lot of different moves. The combat uses borked Arkham Asylym mechanics with switching between the enemies, but it all is very sticky and unresponsive. It either refuses to switch the target, or switches it when you don’t want to. The combat system also uses asscreed counter-attacks, but at least you are allowed to also be aggressive instead of just waiting. Especially considering that the parry timings are bullcrap, and are not properly indicated. The timings do not match the visuals and all the enemies and bosses have different attacks, with entirely different wind up times, which also are not consistent.
It is yuke yuke, but isn’t very tobe tobe.
There are scroll shooter, and tube shooter mini-games. Most boss-fights happen on separate arenas. The meat of the game is being dropped into a flat-ish open-ish location where you complete some quests before fighting the boss. Each location has some collectibles and containers with resources, which you can spend on linear upgrades for the robot. The movement is a bit awkward and there’s an invisible wall around the perimeter.
The unmarked missions activate by proximity and you can’t leave them, or you’ll have 10 seconds before you die. Failing a mission and restarting it is not an option. There’re no manual saves, the game automatically saves the state into one save and rewrites it. There are no profiles either, you have only one profile, and you can either play it or wipe it.
Just like Cybertron games — by itself this product is not very exciting. It’s a short simple primitive game, which is somewhat below of just okay. But if you care about this IP even in the slightest, it is a good adaptation for the most part. It delivers what you want from it, sometimes being too close to the low-budget source.
There’s the re-created unnecessary opening (i think), all the repetitive voice lines, and the animation padding of the recycled footage. All very faithful to the cartoon. But the intro not having Sasaki vocals is the bluest blue balls i had in my life.
I suspect the devs love all the IP’s fanboys, because the credits showcased all the localization logos. Could’ve as well imported the entire original russian voice cast for arachis.
People claim that the game covers the first 7 episodes. I haven’t seen the soap this millennium, not since i was a little child, but the chapter names match the localized episode names. So, what now? Ten more DLCs with the rest of the episodes? Or nothing, like the modern weeaboo cartoons with no endings?
The game has weak graphics options. There are no binds to mouse and beyond. The default binds are to alpha 1-3, whatever that is. Run and evade are not on the same button, so with limited binds that’s more clutter. The mini-cutscenes are unskippable. The ferry captain in the last mission is missing voice acting, at least in the japanese version.
Since the game is small and easy none of its problems matter if you want to just beat it once.
But if you want all the achievements — this is a pure asshole design. There are two missable achievements, but since you have no save slots, they are missable entirely. Like beat the final boss first try before the scripted death, while it is still OP. You literally have no time to react before dying. You have no option to study its moves. Your only chance for a second try, is to start the whole game from scratch collect all the collectibles again, to level up the robot. If you missed your second chance, go for another whole round. Whose brain dead idea was that?
The game saves the progress in plain text. So i opened the three save files in %appdata% and was deleting the quests completion flags until i triggered the fight again. To get to it you have to go as far back as the ferry quest. The second you see yourself dying just smash + and restart the whole game, watching all the unskippable asshole micro cut-scenes again. I ended up running around like an idiot, spamming the weak ranged attack, and trying to regenerate faster than the scripted boss kills me. I thought that was tough, but the last achievement is pure cancer.
I beat the OP boss in some time, but in a reasonable amount, if we discount the fact that i had to remove the ending flag from my save files. But then i created a new profile to beat the scripted first boss. Fuck me. You would think the last boss should be harder than the first one. But during the last fight you have the counterattack, and with how often you evade you trigger it quite a lot. For the first scripted boss, you have nothing. Most people just cheat and edit save files to have all the unlocks. But i wasted hours to kill it by myself. Unlike the final fight, the nearest checkpoint to this shitface is in the beginning of the level. For each try you will have to replay the entire level. And you have to smash + the moment you lose, or you will have to replay the whole tutorial too.
The last boss have animations you can read. This one can kill you from the full HP without touching your hitbox. You die in two hits max, and it is very hard to not get hit. There’s no time to heal up. The boss does three off-beat slashes, which you must perfectly evade, but usually get caught in at least one of them. It can be firing its lazer which leads you and can annihilate you without actually connecting to your hitbox. If you try to heal during that time, it can shoot a fast slash finishing you off. But the worst of all, the boss just disappears from the screen and kills you as a saucer. It’s extremely hard to evade that lousy invisible crap properly. This fight is pure luck based. If the boss will be just standing with its laser you can beat it up. Or it can decide to do two saucer moves in a row ending the fight instantly. Fuck this achievement. I’ve wasted several hours to get it. It would’ve been a better investment of time to be like everyone else and edit my save.