While we here at Operation Rainfall love covering the latest in gaming news and sharing our reviews of titles new and classic, we also just enjoy playing games in our downtime. So with that, sit back, relax, and check out what the oprainfall gaming crew have been up to this week!
After last week’s Rondo of Blood, my sister and I have been making progress in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night — specifically, the the PlayStation 4 Castlevania Requiem version. Even after almost 30 years, the game is immaculately crafted, with gorgeous pixel art, impressive backgrounds and really smooth controls. (As a note, we’re using the built-in and very limited scanline feature in Requiem, which does screenshots of the game no favors but looks fine in action.) Alucard is like a god compared to Richter before him, at least in terms of fluidity of movement and resources at his disposal. The castle exploration is also significantly expanded on here, with a unified location as opposed to the previous stage-based design. Learning the castle’s layout has been a lot of fun, actually, and it’s neat to think back to when we first arrived and had no real idea where we were going to now strategizing the best routes to find new locations we couldn’t reach before gaining some of our new abilities. I’m also really curious as to what little story hooks we’ve gotten so far through our talks with Maria. What happened to Richter a year ago, and why is she so certain he’s in Dracula’s Castle? And why is it back after only four years as opposed to the century it usually takes?
Thanks to the RPG systems in place here, Alucard levels up and naturally gains stat increases, but can also equip better gear and learn an assortment of spells and abilities that let him traverse the castle with ease. So far we’ve unlocked his wolf form, the double jump, and four different spells, which have made things markedly easier than when we started with just our fists. Not to say we’re any better at actually playing Castlevania, though. My sister and I are still pretty bad at timing attacks and avoiding damage, and the chapel/bell tower specifically kicked my ass, especially the staircase. Level ups help to an extent, but there’s more than enough tough enemies to shred through our HP pool with glee, and even carrying around a pot roast can’t save us from everything. Surprisingly, bosses have been the one area we seem to excel. Other than Scylla, who we tried taking on earlier than we really should have, all the bosses have felt challenging but doable, and I don’t think we’ve died to anyone other than Scylla. I’m really liking the level of difficulty and that feeling of getting better that comes with difficult games that I have, admittedly, avoided most of my gaming career. I’m glad we’ve decided to give ourselves a hurdle on our journey to play all the games we missed.
On my own time, I decided to give the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined demo a try on the PlayStation 5, and I’ve been really enjoying it. The game’s aesthetic does not look particularly good in screenshots, but in motion it is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Iterating on the Fantasian diorama style was a stroke of genius here and really captures the storybook feel of the game. It’s also a fun way to bring Toriyama’s designs to life while being accurate to his personal style, though it’s also a bit of an acquired taste. While I find it impossibly charming, I could see how the big heads might be a turn off for some people. After playing the equally beautiful Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, I appreciate that this series can have so many different visual styles while still capturing the whimsy of their storytelling.
In the small fishing village of Pilchard Bay, the hero lives a quiet life dreaming of finding other islands with other people. After all, both him and Prince Kiefer are convinced their tiny island isn’t the only one in the world, and they’re determined to prove it, no matter what the adults say. Maribel, the mayor’s daughter, wants to know what the boys are plotting so she can join in on the adventure, whether they want her to or not (they do not want her). Maribel is … a lot, but I also find her charming in her own way. She’s incredibly tsun, so how much you can tolerate her is very YMMV. The three of them eventually discover a mysterious temple where they’re whisked off on an adventure to another world beset by monsters, though it might be more real than any of them expected.
There’s a lot of little tweaks here I really like. The biggest one is the granularity with which you can choose how difficult you want the game to be. In additional to having standard easy/normal/hard options, you can also individually choose things like enemy aggression, money and experience gained from battles, whether you heal or not after a fight, and how much damage your character and monsters take. It reminds me of The Last of Us II‘s system, and that is one of the best I’ve seen. It’s a style of accessibility I wish more games would engage with, and the fact it can be changed at any times removes my biggest issue with grindy RPGs since I can buff my experience if needed. There are no more random battles and you can see enemies on the screen walking around. Attacking them before a fight can yield benefits like dazing your opponents or whittling down their HP. You can also now completely skip fights with enemies weaker than your party if you attack them, similar to how Star Ocean 2 R‘s bodyguard system worked. I love it. More RPGs need to give this kind of battle skip where you bypass the fight but still reap the rewards. A++ I will beat down weaker enemies again. It’s the little modernizations like this that make remakes of older games a lot more accessible without completely removing the charm of their original versions, since it’s systems you do not have to engage with if you don’t want to.
That’s not to say I like everything going on here. While the writing is fun and bouncy and whimsical, the game continues my most loathed habit of randomly changing names. Making the monster names fun English puns is fine, since it captures the spirit of the series and is keeping in continuity, but I will never understand why character names get changed. At the end of the day, there’s no real difference between a character being named Mathilda or Maeve, but if that’s the case, why change it in the first place? It’s especially jarring to hear someone say Hank and have the text read Hanlon. This was less of a big deal when there was no voice acting, but I always find it really jarring when using Japanese audio and reading Anglicized names. Does Hanlon fit the fantasy aesthetic better? I mean yeah. But it doesn’t make it stand out less.
The DQVIIR demo is only about six or so hours long, but it’s definitely worth checking out. I’m excited for when the full game finally drops in February. In the meantime, be sure to check out Jenae’s impressions piece and try out the demo for yourself. Also, you can pet the animals, and I just think that’s the best. – Leah
You can find links to the DQVII Reimagined demo at the following links for the Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox, and Steam versions.
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
