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!
You ever play a game that just leaves you utterly speechless? You ever play a game where your jaw is still on the floor as the credits are rolling? That’s me with Metal Slader Glory. I played this game on a whim based on a recommendation and since the title just reached its 34th anniversary. Since it’s been fan translated, I was able to experience and understand what director Yoshimiru Hoshi considers his “life’s work.”
The game takes place in 2062 where the world is finally at peace after recovering from a war several years prior. You play as a boy named Tadashi who just purchased a giant worker robot. After powering it on, the robot’s armor falls apart, revealing its true form. As it turns out this robot was actually one of many “Metal Sladers” was used during the war. Inside the cockpit, Tadashi receives an ominous message telling him “Earth is in grave danger.” Confused by this message, Tadashi – along with his younger sister Azusa and girlfriend Elina – sets out to figure out what this message means, the origins of this robot and the truth behind the war.
Metal Slader Glory plays like an old menu-based adventure game. You can typically talk to an onscreen character, look at or interact with something in the environment or move to another location. However, what sets the game apart from the many other adventure games of its era are the production values here and Metal Slader Glory wastes no time in flaunting that. Right from the very beginning of the game you’ll know this is going to be something special. Seriously, the entire playthrough had me wondering how they even pulled off some of the effects and animations they did on a Famicom. There are fantastic looking 8-bit games out there for sure, but this one is leagues ahead of most of them. Sure, I’m posting screenshots here but none of them truly do this game justice, you have to actually experience it in motion to see what I mean. Each scene is meticulously crafted with some of the most detail I’ve ever seen, even when compared to modern adventure games. And it’s one thing for a game to have detailed backgrounds like this, it’s another for them to be animated as well, with proper lighting and shadow effects conveying the intended mood, atmosphere and vibe of each scene with perfection. This is all complimented by some clever sound design, too. Whether it be the crashing waves at the beginning of the game, the distinct text “voices” for many of the characters, or even the beeps and boops of the machinery, everything feels convincing to a degree few games of that era can accomplish. The cherry on top is you’ll even find the characters interacting with the backgrounds in real time, making everything feel all the more dynamic. And yes, both characters in the background and in the portraits on the bottom of the screen will react and have a wide range of facial expressions that will change in sync with the dialogue, making Metal Slader Glory truly feel like an 80’s sci-fi manga come to life.
Where the gameplay truly gets interesting is the way it continuously evolves and builds on itself throughout the journey, providing you with new ways to engage with the world. The functions of your commands can and will change based on the context of the story and sometimes real time elements are incorporated. For example, at one point the characters are at a restaurant and to progress you need to speak to some of the staff. You are given a “Call” command and you might think “Okay, I select that and the person I want to talk to.” That would make sense except it won’t work if there is no one in the background. Instead you have to pay attention and wait until you see someone walk by, then you can “Call” them over. There are far more involved instances of this sort of thing later on, but I think it’s best experienced by the player. Heck, even the password system is unique. At various moments Tadashi and Elina will have the option to “Rest;” if you select that, Elina will tell you a phrase to say out loud to wake her up. THAT is your password and it usually has something to do with what the two of you were trying to accomplish in the plot. And if that wasn’t enough, of course the game does have some branching paths, too. The instruction booklet even makes a comment about how they want you to experience the game more than once so you can find and discover as much of the world as you can. I do also recommend reading that instruction booklet because it features a prequel manga which does provide some more backstory to the characters. Like the game itself, it was thankfully fan-translated.
Metal Slader Glory has aged shockingly well with some surprising twists and a story that actually had me hooked right from the get-go. The characters were incredibly memorable with a fast moving story that still manages to hit all the right notes, culminating in quite the epic finale. Not a lot of people seem to talk about HAL Laboratory’s games outside of Kirby or Smash Bros. and that’s a darn shame, considering they worked on this one too. Metal Slader Glory is an amazing sci-fi adventure game that can even stand up to modern games in some ways. There is a Super Famicom version as well, which is said to have even more side stories, and it recently got a fan translation as well. – Justin
(Author’s NOTE: My experiences and screenshots here are from the 1.2 version of the fan translation. A new 1.3 version was just released a couple days ago and that’s what I linked to)
I haven’t been doing a ton of gaming lately. This past week, I pretty much continued making progress in STORY OF SEASONS: Grand Bazaar and I played some more Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition. In Grand Bazaar, I’m currently still working on upgrading my hatchet. I just need one more piece of the ultimate lumber and then I can finally upgrade it. I also have collected the ten diamonds that each of the seasonal stones require, well only enough for one, but I haven’t found any pink diamonds yet. I’ve been upgrading my hatchet hoping it would lead to getting some out of the better ore rocks, but the better ore rocks which my hatchet doesn’t work on yet, seem to be an extremely rare spawn. Now that the game has officially been out for a couple weeks though, I’m starting to be able to find info online about stuff I need this late in the game which I haven’t stumbled upon myself yet. So now I’m beginning to wonder, if upgrading my hoe will pull better stuff out of the ground. Either way, it seems I have to keep collecting a ton of wood and continue putting the windmills to work on crafting lumber. Oh and I realized something else this week. I misinterpreted the final bazaar rank goals and there is no ranking up stalls. The game was telling me that to rank up the bazaar again, I still need more stalls. I feel kind of stupid for inaccurately interpreting that one. I think they phrased it differently than the other rank goals and that’s what confused me. What that means however, is I need even more ultimate lumber and more regular coins to unlock what I believe is the final bazaar stall I can get. I’m not positive if it’s the last one though. There could be another run by someone whose relationship I simply haven’t raised high enough yet.
In XCX, I haven’t been making any major progress, I’m still just after Chapter 9. Back when I got the game, I was making regular progress and was soon reminded of how quickly the story seems to move on. I really do wish, they had fleshed things out more in between the old chapters. Anyway, despite having previously been making regular progress, right now I find myself simply doing lots of random quests and wanting to grind by fighting enemies. Back when I played the original version on Wii U, I remember being stuck at a particularly tough battle in Chapter 10. So this time, before even starting Chapter 10, I figured I should grind a lot more and do various sidequests before I even think of moving on. Over the weekend, I was specifically doing sidequests that I thought might unlock some cool fashion armor I’m still missing. Pretty soon though, I really should find some decent smaller enemies, a few levels or so above mine and do some real grinding. – Jenae
I haven’t had the time to play too much this week outside some Death Stranding, but I did sneak in demo session for Lost Soul Aside. This is a game I was really looking forward to checking out, and I’m glad I played the demo before jumping into the game proper, because it’s now a title I might get around to when I have time, but am in no hurry to play.
The demo dropped the same day as the full game (which, while not necessarily a sign of quality, is at least a red flag), but progress does not carry over. It’s just a roughly hour-long slice of gameplay with a couple story beats, a challenge fight, and a boss gauntlet option. You can also play through a tutorial but I figured I’d just jump in and be fine. This was mostly true but I definitely feel like I was missing aspects of the combat that weren’t immediately obvious. You play as Kaser, a standoffish man in a suave black suit who is possessed? haunted? by a monster named Arena, who also becomes your weapons. Kaser and a woman named Gethya land on an uninhabited location, where you’re tasked with scouting ahead while she does something near the boat. There’s some minor cutscenes about a militaristic force that’s fighting the monsters and therefore you, since you’re apparently attached to one, but most of this demo is strictly combat.
So let’s start there. You have two weapons you can swap between using R1 – a short sword for quick attacks and a heavy claymore for powerful ones. You have your standard light and heavy attacks – square and triangle respectively – plus a dodge by pressing L1. You can build up special attacks that you unleash using L2 plus square or triangle, and a super special one by pressing both face buttons at the same time. Kaser can also unleash a combined attack with his monster pal Arena by pressing L2 and R2 together. You can combo your light and heavy attacks, as well as perform some long-distance moves, but from the limited amount of interactions the demo throws at you, I never really found a need to do more than smash square using the claymore. The short sword will launch Kaser and lighter enemies into the air, but more often than not it just had me flying over their heads and it felt ineffective against bosses. Dodge times felt finicky as well, and I could never get the timing down to consistently avoid being hit. (This is not necessarily an indictment on the game design, but it does show the limitations of such a short demo.)
There is a sequence in the demo that wrests control from the player for an on-rails spectacle set piece, but the way it transitions was incredibly jarring. You have limited options during it, including a clunky spin attack for the couple enemies that show up randomly, but it overall felt superfluous and disorienting, especially since the sequence would have been cooler with more player input. It leaned heavily into the idea of “Rule of Cool” but left me feeling underwhelmed and annoyed when it ended almost as abruptly as it began. If you’re going to have a set piece, at least make it long enough to feel relevant. The demo had a lot of sequences where Kaser flips around, slides through rubble, and overall performs his most extra anime moves, and while I generally like stuff in this vein, it just did not hit for me here.
The demo sets up nothing about Kaser, Arena, or his two lady friends Gethya and Liana. Since this is just a gameplay slice, there’s no story to pull you in or help ground you in a world where you expect the crazy anime bullshit, and I had no investment in what was going on at all. Lost Soul Aside is pretty to look at but substance less, and I feel like this was a missed opportunity for the demo. It gives the impression the team was never intending to release one but scrambled at the last second to put out something, and all it ended up doing was sort of turning me off playing the main game. To be fair, the combat is completely serviceable, the locations are pretty but unmemorable, and the character models are janky but decently designed. I have no idea what they did when they created Liana, for instance, but she looks like plastic and her face contorts in what I think are meant to be cutesy expressions but had me actively wondering what broke in her rigging, which is a shame because her design is super adorable. The demo also locks down everything except the map, and opening that or the useless menu is laggy as hell. Lost Soul Aside clearly has more going for it than just the combat, but that’s all this demo gives you a taste of, and it’s unfortunate. I love me an anime spectacle action game, but I think I’ll look to other pastures until this one is heavily discounted and I have more free time. – Leah
(Editor’s Note: You can check out the demo on Steam or PlayStation. I’ve included links to both.)
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
