Sunday, December 11, 2016

Breath of Death VII and Cthulu Saves the World - Initial Thoughts

Once more, I am going to count two games as one for the purposes of the blog. It's not (purely) a cynical move on my part. I've played both of these games before and they are practically identical in gameplay. And since I bought both as part of the same 99 cent bundle (and, in fact, there's no option to buy them separately) I don't regard it as particularly illegitimate.

Both of these games are "old-school" rpgs. That means that they're heavily story-driven. Combat is turned-based and involves selecting items from menus. And the structure is broken down into a town-overmap-dungeon pattern, where you collect a party of characters to face random encounters and earn experience points to level up in a more or less linear fashion (though, if I recall, these games have an interesting twist on the leveling process that I can't quite remember at the moment).

I think, if I wanted to, I could get 20 hours out of each of these games separately. It would only involve playing through them 2-3 times each, and they do have multiple difficulty levels and alternate game modes. However, I am not doing that because I only paid one dollar for these games, and even for my frugal nature, attempting to get 40 hours of entertainment out of a one-dollar investment feels a little cheap.

My expectation for the coming 20 hours is that the games will be funny and easy to play, but that they won't fit neatly into my allotted time, and thus, at some point, I'm going to have a decision to make. If I come up short, which game will I replay? If I'm over the line, do I bother finishing? It's probably not worth worrying about now, but it's something that will definitely come up.

Other than that, I don't anticipate any specific problems. Maybe the late game will be on the hard side, as sometimes happens in old-school rpgs, but since it should be possible to grind past any difficulty humps, I'm not too concerned.

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