I’ve been playing a lot of Yakuza Zero recently. Having been a fan of the series since its original PS2 incarnations, but also being very, very behind on it, I figured it was time I started playing through the whole shebang — starting with one of its most well-liked installments.
And while I feel like people have a much better handle on what Yakuza really is these days thanks to it successfully moving into a more “mainstream” space than on its earlier releases, there are still some fundamental misunderstandings that seem to persist to this day.
Yakuza: Like A Dragon, the entry that bridged the gap between the western and eastern names of the series (and which marked the last time the Yakuza title would be used) certainly helped address some of these things through its fundamental changes to the core game formula, but looking back on reviews and other articles about Yakuza Zero, there are definitely some people labouring under some significant misapprehensions. Most notably, the assumption that Yakuza games are “beat ’em ups”.
Yakuza games are not beat ’em ups. And they never have been. Let’s look at why.
For the unfamiliar, a typical Yakuza game — and I’m talking Yakuza Zero-6 here, not Like A Dragon — unfolds like a console-style RPG. By that I mean you take control of one or more predefined characters with established personalities and backstories, and take them through a resolutely linear plot in which you don’t really have much choice in what unfolds — you’re just along to enjoy the tale being told, rather than sculpting it to your own preferences through the decisions you make.
Along the way, you have ample opportunity to become distracted from the main plot with a variety of optional side activities, ranging from quests for the locals to a series of extremely well-realised minigames. To attain 100% completion in a Yakuza game is a badge of honour (or at the very least, endurance), because it takes a significant amount of time, effort and, sometimes, luck to accomplish.
The key thing is that you don’t have to do this; if you just want to power through the main story, you can do so in about 10 hours or so, at which point you will unlock what the game calls “Premium Adventure” mode, where you can indulge in any of the game’s side activities and quests at your leisure without the main character nagging you to get back on track if you leave him idling for a moment or two.
Compare and contrast with the beat ’em up formula, in which you proceed through a linear series of levels in a linear fashion (usually, though not exclusively, from left to right), stopping to defeat set “encounters” of enemies along the way before you are allowed to proceed. There are generally no deviations from the path forward — although there are exceptions to this, particularly in more recent takes on the genre — and the focus is very much on straightforward, arcade-style action in which the depth comes from the implementation of the core mechanics.
Now, bearing these two descriptions in mind, it should already be abundantly clear that a Yakuza game is not a beat ’em up. And yet, take a look at this quote from EGM’s 2017 review of Yakuza Zero on its western release:
Dating back to the PlayStation 2, the Japanese-developed Yakuza series managed to muster a cult following of players worldwide. The series’ popularity began to slip off in the West over the years, but those most passionate about the 3D beat ‘em up fought to keep the games coming to the States. Despite tenuous confidence in how the series would be continually received here, publisher SEGA is taking another crack at American audiences with the prequel installment Yakuza 0, which is pitched as an ideal jumping-in point. As a fan of beat ’em up games but a newcomer to the Yakuza series, this invitation seemed the optimal chance to observe everything the games have learned thus far through a fresh pair of eyes.
Plessas is right about a couple of things: Yakuza very much was a cult classic pretty much up until the release of Yakuza Zero, which is commonly cited as the moment the series finally broke through into more mainstream success. While its initial PlayStation 2 installment was well-received, its sequel passed by almost unnoticed, and its three PS3 games were very much titles that you would have only known existed if you were already an established fan.
However, the series is not, and never has been, a “3D beat ’em up”.
Plessas isn’t the only one to have made this mistake with Yakuza Zero specifically. Here’s an excerpt from PC Mag’s clickbaiting “The Best PC Beat ‘Em Ups for 2023” listicle:
Sega’s Yakuza is the rare polygonal series that adheres to the beat ’em up ethos. In Yakuza 0—the prequel story that shows how series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu rose through the ranks to become the big boss of a Japanese crime syndicate— you brawl through small, semi-open world regions with knuckles, guns, swords, and other weapons.
Almost everything about this is wrong. The game does not “adhere to the beat ’em up ethos” in the slightest, for reasons that should be obvious from the prior descriptions. Yakuza Zero does not chart Kiryu’s “rise through the ranks to become the boss of a Japanese crime syndicate” — indeed, for most of the game, he’s not a member of the yakuza at all. And you do not progress through the game by “brawling through small, semi-open world regions”.
I could find many more examples, such as this news post from PC Gamer that announces “Yakuza 7 is replacing beat ’em up action with turn-based combat”, but I think you probably get the idea by this point. And that’s not even getting into the message board posts and Steam reviews that also describe it as a “beat ’em up” or, worse, a “fighting game”.
So where has this misconception come from? Simple: combat in Yakuza games prior to Like a Dragon definitely drew inspiration from the conventions of beat ’em ups. Indeed, a lot of the skills that are important to success in beat ’em ups apply in Yakuza’s combat — most notably controlling space, understanding the reach of all your attacks and taking advantage of hitstun to dish out as much damage as possible while accruing as little of your own as you can.
In these Yakuza games, there is a distinct transition between “adventure mode”, where you’re wandering the streets and interacting with people, places and things, and “combat mode”, where you’re fighting. The most notable distinction is that when you’re in “combat mode”, you’re constrained to a specific arena — usually, rather charmingly, by bystanders gathering around the confrontation and cheering you on. Indeed, this distinction exists in Yakuza: Like A Dragon also, only in that instance the “combat mode” is turn-based.
In other words, Yakuza isn’t a game like Grand Theft Auto where your attack buttons are always active, and you can just punch anyone in the street in the face. You can bump into people — and even knock them over in some cases — but your average Yakuza protagonist, be it Kiryu, Majima or any of the other characters who have temporarily stepped into a leading role in various installments, is not the sort of person to inflict violence indiscriminately. In fact, it’s extremely rare for a Yakuza protagonist to be the one to initiate a combat encounter — more often than not, they are defending themselves.
Does this sound familiar? That’s right, it’s because it’s the typical structure of a console-based RPG, in which random combat encounters often play a significant role, but where they are not the primary focus of the experience. Random combat encounters are obstacles on the way to doing more interesting things such as revealing more plot, getting to know characters or engaging in activities that help to build the context of the world. Indeed, in Yakuza Zero specifically, you get an ability partway through the game where you can actually distract potential random combat encounters from attacking you by flinging a wad of cash up in the air, leaving them to greedily pick up your discarded notes while you pass by unmolested.
Now yes, let’s not deny that the major story beats of Yakuza games are often accompanied by combat sequences. These are stories that, to varying degrees, explore the violent, criminal underbelly of Japanese society, after all, and as such it’s natural that the protagonists be caught up in numerous violent confrontations over the course of those narratives. But the key point here is that those violent confrontations aren’t the only thing you are doing in a Yakuza game. Indeed, it’s possible to go for long periods without getting into any combat in a Yakuza game — particularly Zero, with the aforementioned “cash confetti” ability making it second nature to avoid encounters you don’t want to deal with.
If Yakuza games really were beat ’em ups, then they would ditch all the side activities and focus entirely on the main story, moving from violent story beat to violent story beat, placing the player in a cycle of cutscenes and combat sequences. They’d still be very solid games if they did that — and, indeed, if you so choose, you can pretty much play them in that way if you see fit — but that would also be fairly critically missing the point of the Yakuza series as a whole.
Why does this matter? Why have I written so many words about something the Yakuza series is not, and why do I care? Well, it’s simple, really: the series deserves better, and always has done. To refer to the games in the Yakuza series as “beat ’em ups” is to do them a disservice — not because the beat ’em up genre is in any way objectionable (it’s one of my personal favourites, in fact), but because it’s a complete misrepresentation of what a Yakuza game really is.
A Yakuza game is a narrative-centric, console-style RPG set in the modern world. More than that, though, it’s an interactive representation of modern-day Japan at various points in recent history, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in both relatively mainstream Japanese culture and the somewhat seedier underbelly of the nightlife scene.
Aside: this site used to have a regular troll who always used to whinge about anime-style games (which he referred to as “panty quests”) preventing Yakuza games from being localised. Besides this being a stupid argument, since we now havepretty much every game in the series over here, I find this doubly hilarious because of Yakuza Zero’s collectible telephone cards featuring JAV stars in varying degrees of undress, and your in-game relationship with one character being dependent on how many gravure bikini videos of said JAV stars you’ve watched. Oddly enough, said troll hasn’t been around for quite some time. But I digress.
Anyway, as I was saying, the series has always succeeded amazingly with its immersive recreation of Japanese society and nightlife, providing wonderful opportunities to step into someone else’s shoes and just enjoy a variety of experiences that may well be completely new to you, particularly if you live outside of Japan. It’s been successfully accomplishing this since the original PS2 game — and it’s only gotten better over time as technology has improved, allowing more and more detail to be packed into each subsequent title.
To diminish the series’ achievements in that regard by describing it as a “beat ’em up” is to do it a great disservice. And so consider this me setting the record straight. Or at least attempting to, anyway.
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Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always enjoyed adventure games — mostly those of the point-and-click variety, but I’m certainly not averse to those with text parsers, or which are entirely text.
Trouble is, these days it’s actually surprisingly (and annoyingly) difficult to track down genuine examples of these without also being confronted with a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. I made the mistake of clicking on a GamesRadar piece about “the 25 best adventure games to get swept up in right now” earlier — obvious SEO-optimised clickbait, in retrospect — and literally three out of the 25 games were actual adventure games.
The rest? Far Cry. Hogwarts Legacy. Batman: Arkham Asylum. Fucking Skyrim. Not only did the list completely lack any established classics of the adventure game genre that are easily accessible today — such as any of the old Sierra and LucasArts titles that are on Steam and/or GOG.com — but it also seemingly completely misunderstood what the term “adventure game” actually means.
Rise of the Dragon, an adventure game, yesterday.
This is, sadly, not an unusual situation, because even the digital storefronts are completely unable to distinguish “adventure game” (mechanical genre) from “adventure game” (thematic genre) for reasons that are probably obvious.
Why did this happen, though? I suspect it’s because for a significant number of years, the adventure game genre — and specifically, the point-and-click variety of adventure game — was considered to be “dead”. Both Sierra and LucasArts, the two biggest names in the sector, had moved on to more action-based games, including with franchises that had been historically associated with pointing and clicking; in Sierra’s case, King’s Quest VIII made the ill-advised decision to become a 3D polygonal action adventure, while LucasArts took the Indiana Jones series firmly into Tomb Raider territory for reasons that, once again, are probably obvious.
In other words, the assumption was that no adventure games were being made, so the term “adventure game” fizzled out for a lot of folks — particularly a new generation of gamers who had never grown up with them. To them, “adventure game” simply meant “game in which you go on an adventure”, and thus to them it’s natural to include stuff like Skyrim, Horizon: Zero Dawn and all manner of other titles that clearly are not adventure games.
The thing is, though, that the adventure game was not dead. New point-and-click adventure titles continued to be released throughout the early 21st century, and as we get closer to today the genre as a whole has seen something of a renaissance in the indie sector. And it’s now quite difficult to find some of these “adventure game” (mechanical genre) games because they all get lost amid the myriad “adventure game” (thematic genre) titles.
Here’s a sample of what you get if you search for “Genre: Adventure” on GOG.com as of the time of writing, for example:
Not a single one of those is an “adventure game” by the traditional definition. The one that comes closest is Treasure of Nadia, but even that’s more a combination of visual novel and simulation than a straightforward adventure game — and as an 18+ adults-only title that’s always going to have limited visibility and appeal anyway.
Admittedly, just below the titles pictured we have Day of the Tentacle Remastered and Stasis, both of which are actual adventure games — but then it’s right back to other entries in the Tomb Raider, King’s Bounty, Rayman and Pathfinder series.
This is a problem. Because as much as I’m an advocate for talking about narrative-centric games in terms of thematic genre instead of mechanical genre, there are times when it’s useful to make those mechanical distinctions. And in this instance, I’d argue that “adventure game” as a mechanical descriptor is more useful than “adventure game” as a thematic descriptor, because in the former case it’s more specific.
Eric the Unready, an adventure game, yesterday.
When you talk about “adventure game” as a mechanical genre, you lead someone to expect something specific: a narrative-focused game, usually focused on a single protagonist (or perhaps a small group of protagonists), with a strong emphasis on problem-solving rather than action. In some instances there may be action sequences, but for the majority of the time, problems will be solved either through dialogue or by using objects both in the environment and in one’s inventory. These are games designed to tax the brain and the imagination, not dexterity and accuracy.
When you talk about “adventure game” as a thematic genre, meanwhile, you could mean pretty much anything. Guy with a gun shooting a lot of people on an island is an “adventure”. Woman with tight shorts clambering up rocky platforms is an “adventure”. Cowled superhero beating up criminals is an “adventure”. Custom character running through drab, boring open world is an “adventure”. Meaningless. Unhelpful.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that the term “adventure game” has had a somewhat nebulous, unhelpful definition. The first time was when it was originally being figured out as a genre, and the computer and video game press of the era was inclined towards using the term “adventure game” to describe any game with an exploratory element that wasn’t an arcade-style game.
That meant that, for some, role-playing games such as the Ultima series were considered as much “adventure games” as Colossal Cave and the classic Scott Adams adventures.
The Shivah, an adventure game, yest– all right, I’ll stop.
There was a bit of a difference there, though; the use of the term “adventure” for these types of game at that point in time carried the not-so-subtle implications that “these are games for intelligent people and/or grown-ups”. And indeed, these games were considered to stand apart from others available at the time; it was not at all unusual to see computer and video game magazines throughout the ’80s in particular have a specific “adventures” column every issue, during which they’d talk about new releases and provide tips on existing titles.
And then just to confuse matters, the Japanese have been referring to some visual novels (specifically those with a text box at the bottom of the screen, rather than text overlaying the entire screen) as “ADV” for years now — with “ADV”, of course, being short for “adventure”. This is even the case for kinetic novels which do nothing but tell a story and provide no opportunities for the player to make choices or otherwise interact with things.
This terminology has stuck with Japanese games, too; if you look at a modern-day Japanese RPG which features visual novel-style storytelling sequences, it’s not at all unusual for those games to describe said sequences as “ADV mode” or “Adventure Mode”, even though you’re actually going on the “adventures” in the more interactive exploration and battle components.
You can probably see why this is all a bit confusing.
Brok: The InvestiGator
So what do we do? Well, I can’t help but feel it’s probably too late for the term “adventure game” at this point. The use of it to mean “game in which you go on adventures” appears to have stuck far too firmly for it to be redefined — although I guess one could also make the argument that it’s already been redefined several times to date, so why couldn’t it happen again?
But no. Rather than hoping for a reversal of how the language of our media has evolved, my recommendation is instead that we should probably just be more specific in the way we refer to things. Here’s what happens to that GOG bestsellers list if you add the tag “Point&Click” to the “Genre:Adventure” filter:
As if by magic, we go from no “adventure games” (by the classic definition) to all adventure games (with the possible exception of Treasure of Nadia, again, but I’ll give it a pass for now). Much better. And so I guess we need to re-up our use of a term that we were already using anyway: “point and click adventure game”. That takes care of that, right?
Well, almost. It leaves the poor old text-based adventures (those which aren’t visual novels) out in the cold. But we have a suitable term for those, too: “interactive fiction”. While you may consider this to be a fairly modern term, Infocom, once regarded as the absolute masters of the art form at their peak, were happily using it back in the ’80s.
Some actually make the distinction between “interactive fiction” (text-based game that focuses on story) and “text adventure” (text-based game that focuses on puzzle-solving) and honestly, that’s kind of fine, too. “Illustrated text adventure” and “illustrated interactive fiction” are also fine for games such as Magnetic Scrolls’ work, which focused primarily on text but which also included graphics.
Kathy Rain: Director’s Cut
As we’ve seen with other mechanical genres, we’ve very much reached a point where it pays to be more specific in the way we talk about things than less. Look at the mess “roguelike” and “Metroidvania” are in now, for example — both have become terms that are less than optimal in their descriptiveness due to what a broad range of things they can be used to talk about today. Just like “adventure game”.
So the answer? Be specific about what you’re talking about. Don’t assume knowledge. Explain the appeal elements. And, if possible, stop putting games with guns in the “adventure game” section of digital storefronts.
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For a lot of the time these days, these are Japanese in origin (though the western-developed eroge and nukige scene has grown considerably since several large digital platforms opened themselves up to 18+ content), and people have become a lot more willing to openly talk about them. “Back in the day”, though, erotic games were a relatively unusual sight — and when they did come up, they often tended to be talked about in a rather dismissive way by the press of the period, particularly here in the UK. Some things never change, eh?
They did exist, though, and one that I’ve only recently got around to trying for the first time is Artworx’s Centerfold Squares (aka Centrefold Squares in Europe, because British English), a 1988 release for Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS PC. Because I am an Atari boy, today’s exploration will be focusing on the ST version, but all three versions are broadly pretty similar.
If the name Artworx is familiar to fellow retro home computer gaming enthusiasts out there, it’s because they were no strangers to making naughty games for various platforms. Probably their most famous was simply called Strip Poker, and was available for all manner of classic home computers, including both Atari 8-bit and ST.
This was by no means the only string to their bow, mind — on the Atari 8-bit in particular, they put out a wide variety of games, many of which were suitable for all ages. But they were noteworthy for being one of the few developers quite happy to put out “adult” games without any sort of shame; titles like Strip Poker and Centerfold Squares were treated just like any other entry in their catalogue. They just happened to have naked ladies in them.
In Centerfold Squares, there’s no narrative setup or anything — it’s just a game designed for you to boot up and play when you fancy a bit of simple, straightforward entertainment that happens to include some sexy pics.
Upon loading the game, you’re prompted to pick from 11 different female opponents, broadly arranged into “below average”, “average” and “above average” ability. Unfortunately you can’t preview your opponents from this screen; getting a taste of who they are requires clicking on them and, on platforms where you’re playing from floppy disk, a short loading break before you get a small preview image of their face and their three measurements. No attempt is made to give them any sort of text-based “personality” through dialogue or anything.
Clicking on your prospective opponent’s face from this screen starts the game proper, and clicking anywhere else on the screen returns to the opponent’s selection menu. Both of these things prompt a short load from disk — slightly cumbersome by modern standards, but nothing unusual for a game of the era.
Once the game begins, you’re presented with a grid of rectangles of various shapes and sizes, each bearing a number. A selection of these are randomly eliminated to reveal part of the full image of your opponent, and then one begins flashing. From here, the overall match begins, with your ultimate aim being to remove all the rectangles and reveal the full image, while your opponent attempts to return rectangles to the board and completely cover the image.
The number of rectangles and their numerical values is partly determined by the “strength” of your opponent that you pick from the initial menu; “average” and “above average” opponents have more rectangles with higher numbers than the “below average” opponents, and within the three categories there are further subdivisions of difficulty such as “poor” and “excellent”. It’s a shame there’s no means of selecting opponent and difficulty level independently, but this is a fairly small nitpick in the grand scheme of things.
Once a rectangle has been selected automatically — you can’t pick and choose which bits of the image will be revealed first, and you can bet your bippy that nipples and ’80s hairy muffs will be left for last — you’re thrown into the “game” part of Centerfold Squares, which is known as “Double-Up”.
Double-Up is actually a variation on the classic game Reversi, Othello, Renegadeor whatever you care to call it. (Yes, I know there are technically some minor distinctions between them, but they’re basically the same game at heart.)
For the unfamiliar, this is an abstract board game in which players take it in turns to place chips of their colour on a grid-based board. Each player must place their chip somewhere that creates a flanking arrangement horizontally, vertically or diagonally; in other words, there must be one piece of the current player’s colour on either side of one or more of the opponent’s pieces. Assuming this is a legal move, the opponent’s pieces are then “flipped” to the current player’s colour, and play continues back and forth in this way.
The difference between Double-Up and regular Reverthellogade is that you don’t play until the board is full or neither player can make any more moves. Instead, each game plays to a target number of chips: once a complete round of play has completed and one player has the target number of chips or more, scores are calculated and whoever has the highest score wins the game. If that’s you, you reveal what lies beneath the rectangle on the picture screen; if it’s your opponent, a rectangle gets covered up.
You’ll note that “score” is a distinct concept from “number of chips on the board”. Unlike in regular Renothversi, victory isn’t attained simply by having the most chips on the board at the end of the game. Rather, you score and lose points in various ways over the course of the game: additional points are scored by capturing randomly positioned green squares on the board, while points are lost for capturing red squares. On top of that, you lose a single point from your total any time you attempt to make an illegal move, and you can move twice if you capture a randomly occurring yellow square on your turn.
What this means in practice is that you need to keep an eye on your opponent’s moves and the exact squares they’re in control of, because it’s entirely possible that you can bring about the end of the game by capturing enough chips, but your opponent will win on points. This is, as you can probably imagine, inordinately frustrating when it happens, but paying attention to the state of the board allows you to mitigate the possibility of it happening somewhat. It’s an interesting twist on the usual formula and, when combined with the “play to a goal” structure, means that individual games in the complete match are quick and snappy, rarely getting bogged down with strategic analysis paralysis.
There’s another little twist, too: at any point during the game, either you or your opponent can choose to forego your turn in favour of taking a Chance. When you do this, you’ll draw one of several different possibilities that include gaining or losing 20 points or even immediately winning or losing the game. Thus a player who is very far behind and believes themselves unlikely to win may feel it worth taking a gamble on a Chance draw — there’s always a 5% chance that they will immediately win the game, regardless of score, but a considerably greater chance that nothing will happen at all and they will have effectively wasted a turn.
It’s a simple concept, but an effective and well-implemented one, with the various opponents varying quite wildly in their skill level. The fact it’s a competitive affair makes it feel like you’re playing “against” your chosen girl, too, which gives the game as a whole slightly more of a feeling of personality as opposed to some sort of solo puzzle that gradually reveals a nudey pic as a reward.
Reviews of the game on its original release — those that have been preserved, anyway — were actually surprisingly positive for the most part. American Commodore magazine Ahoy!’s AmigaUser dubbed it “a spicy blend of serious strategising and lighthearted titillation” in its review, noting that “the drawings, though undeniably explicit, are certainly not gross; the subject matter is similar to what readers of Playboy and other leading men’s magazines see each month.”
Reviewer Arnie Katz went on to compare the game favourably to Artworx’s previous adult game, the aforementioned Strip Poker, and noted that the tasteful nudes of the game were a stark contrast to “past affronts to common decency like Custer’s Revenge“. He also said that “Centerfold Squares is everything one could expect from an adult computer game. It is pretty, sexy, and fun to play.”
Elsewhere, in a 1991 article chronicling the history of adult computer games, again penned by Arnie Katz but this time in the magazine VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, Centerfold Squares was singled out as an example of home computers being “finally [able to] generate the complex images needed to depict romance and sexuality”.
Conversely, German publication Power Play gave the PC version of Centerfold Squares a score of 6%, describing it as (paraphrased from the German) “naked nonsense” and “as exciting as a Bundestag debate” — though they did only expend approximately 50 words on their review, so perhaps take that with a pinch of salt. And you thought low-effort reviews were exclusively a product of the Internet age!
It’s Katz’s comments on Centerfold Squares and the surrounding culture of adult games in the late ’80s that are probably the most interesting to read today, because it’s obvious he had a certain amount of faith that it was possible for computer and video games to provide meaningful, worthwhile experiences for adults, though he also realistically noted that prior attempts at adults-only material — such as the aforementioned Custer’s Revenge and its equally bad taste stablemates on Mystique’s “Swedish Erotica” label for Atari 2600 — had encountered problems both with distribution and poor sales figures.
He did attribute this partly to hardware limitations, however, noting that while the Atari 2600 was incapable of creating something truly “sexy”, the 16-bit machines, with their ability to display relatively high-resolution graphics (by the standards of the time) with decent colour depth allowed for a much greater feeling of involvement in the whole scenario. Certainly a far cry from Mystique’s games, which felt childish at best, brashly and deliberately offensive at worst.
“By all means, let games have sex and violence appropriate to theme and interpretation,” Katz wrote. “Both are part of life and, therefore, have a legitimate place in electronic gaming. But it would be a mistake for electronic gaming to wallow in so-called adult content while neglecting to upgrade the sophistication, depth and intellectual content of those games. It is such games, adult in the sweeping meaning of the term, that have the power to enthral mature participants in the hobby.”
Katz’s ultimate conclusion was that “adult” games didn’t necessarily need to be hyper-violent or overtly sexual — he specifically cites Maxis’ SimCity and HAL Laboratory’s Vegas Dream as good examples of genuinely adult games that don’t include either element — but rather that they need to provide an experience that is meaningful and somewhat cerebral for the more mature gamer. Violence and/or sex can be layered atop that, of course, but essentially, if you want to capture the hearts of adults, you need to capture their minds too.
You can probably argue either way as to whether Centerfold Squares achieves that or not — for my money, the “Double-Up” side of things provides a surprisingly compelling and mentally stimulating experience, with the decent quality digitised pictures acting as a solid reward — but it should be plain to see that, while largely forgotten today, the game was a noteworthy step forward in interactive adult entertainment that took things well beyond giggling at pixelated penises and puerile, offensive gameplay concepts.
I won’t lie, I primarily booted up Centerfold Squares because I was just curious to see what a pervy game from 1988 looked like. But I came away genuinely quite impressed — and definitely likely to return for further play sessions in the future.
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One of the nice things about having your own website is that you can take your time over things you want to write about rather than rushing through them in order to meet a deadline. And I knew as soon as I started Mary Skelter 2 that I wanted to take my time over it.
100 hours of gameplay later, and I’ve finally beaten it. So I think it’s time that we talked about it in great detail. Because whew, there is a lot to talk about, and I’m certain that I’m going to miss at least a few things that struck me along the way. (I reserve the right to add to this piece as I think of things!)
I know I’ve written a few pieces about this game already, but I intend this piece to be a full, summative roundup of my experiences with the game and my overall thoughts on it. So let us begin.
The basics
For the benefit of the unfamiliar, Mary Skelter 2 is a dungeon-crawling RPG in the “gridder” style. It was originally released for PS4 in Japan in 2018, but was subsequently ported to Nintendo Switch and PC for worldwide release; the PS4 version remained confined to Japan, presumably due to publisher Idea Factory quite understandably not wanting to have to deal with Sony of America’s increasingly opaque policies with regard to nudity.
Despite the “2” in the title, narratively most Mary Skelter fans recommend that you play Mary Skelter 2 before the first game in the series, Mary Skelter Nightmares. To that end, Mary Skelter 2 actually includes a full remake of the original Mary Skelter Nightmares as an unlockable extra once you beat Mary Skelter 2, effectively doubling the length of the game package as a whole.
For those who previously played Mary Skelter Nightmares on its original host platform, the PlayStation Vita, it’s worth noting that the remake included with Mary Skelter 2 features a number of differences from the original, such as redesigned dungeon maps and tweaked mechanics, but the narrative is broadly the same.
If you’re wondering exactly why you should play Mary Skelter 2 first, it’s hard to explain without spoiling things to at least a certain degree; we may well get into this a little more deeply later in this article, but for now let’s just say that Mary Skelter 2 is effectively an alternate story in the Mary Skelter universe that kind of acts as a 100-hour long “bad ending” to the original.
This is an admirably gutsy approach for a sequel to take, but it explains why it’s good to play Mary Skelter 2 first: through Mary Skelter 2’s narrative, you get to see quite how disastrously wrong things can go, then have the opportunity to “fix” things to at least a certain extent in Mary Skelter Nightmares.
For today, we won’t be talking about Mary Skelter Nightmares because I haven’t played it at all yet; we’ll focus entirely on Mary Skelter 2.
The darkness within and without
Some spoilers ahead.
Mary Skelter 2 places you in the role of Otsuu, a young woman who habitually dresses as a man and positions herself as the “prince” to her beloved “princess”, Little Mermaid. As we join the story, it’s clear that there’s a pre-existing relationship between the two of them; this is alluded to throughout the story, and made explicit in a companion novella that is available digitally or in hardcopy form as part of the Mary Skelter Finale limited edition box set. (The latter also includes some bonus reading material that explains the “Crane Wife” or “Tsuru Nyoubou” legend on which Otsuu is based, as well as some further background material that makes a lot more sense once you’ve beaten Mary Skelter 2.)
While Otsuu and Little Mermaid’s relationship is unconventional in many respects, it’s clear that at its core is a genuine bond. Little Mermaid herself admits that despite stumbling somewhat blindly into “matrimony” of sorts with Otsuu, it took time for her to truly warm up to her new spouse. Understandable, since in many respects it was almost an “arranged marriage” — one that both parties felt compelled into accepting despite neither feeling like they had complete control over the situation.
Otsuu’s love for Little Mermaid is one of several examples of a phenomenon explored throughout the game’s narrative known as “Blood Libido”. And to understand this, it’s necessary to look more broadly at the setup for the Mary Skelter series in general.
At some indeterminate point in the near future, something horrible happened to the world — or, at the very least, the part of the world with which we’re concerned, which is strongly implied to be Tokyo (despite the presence of what appears to be the Palace of Westminster in one of its areas) — that plunged everything into a horrible hellscape controlled by the sentient “Jail”. With a huge tower at its centre, and terrible beasts known as Marchens and Nightmares rampaging around the various areas of what was once a lively city, humanity is forced to retreat to a “Liberated District” in an attempt to stay safe… or as safe as possible, under the circumstances, at least.
Amid the chaos, a curious phenomenon arises: that of the Blood Maiden. These are young women who are blessed with extraordinary strength and abilities, able to fight back against the Marchens and even make use of the strength in Marchen blood. By splashing blood upon themselves, they are able to grow in strength and power, “awakening” into a form known as “Massacre” after a certain point of exposure, during which they are temporarily even more powerful.
But that’s not all. Should a Blood Maiden become too corrupted with the darkness of this hellscape in which they live, their “awakening” from exposure to Marchen blood will escalate even beyond Massacre into a form known as “Blood Skelter”, during which they lose all control of themselves, lashing out at friend and foe alike. At the outset of Mary Skelter and Mary Skelter Nightmares, there is no known cure to Blood Skelter, meaning falling into this state effectively turns a Blood Maiden into a monster. It is due to falling into Blood Skelter that Little Mermaid is killed in the “true” timeline.
Blood Maidens are also subject to the aforementioned Blood Libido, which is an uncontrollable urge to do… something. The exact form of Blood Libido varies enormously from individual to individual, and usually relates to the fairy tale or mythological character after which the Blood Maiden is named.
Across Mary Skelter 2 we see a wide variety of different examples. Otsuu, as previously noted, is obsessed with Little Mermaid to a fault, along with having a compulsion to track things that people “owe” her, and repay the debts she believes she “owes”. Little Mermaid needs to sing in order to express herself. Gretel is addicted to sweet things. Cinderella feels a compulsion to dress herself in finery, otherwise she won’t be “beautiful”. Red Riding Hood cannot feel comfortable without wearing some sort of hooded garment. Rapunzel is obsessed with the idea of “making babies”, despite being a child, and, of course, won’t let anyone do anything to her hair.
The list goes on. Snow White cannot look in mirrors. Sleeping Beauty is borderline narcoleptic. Thumbelina prefers to hide in cramped spaces. Kaguya (based on the Japanese Tale of the Bamboo Cutter) is obsessed with finding five “treasures”, and is exceedingly lazy. Alice has an uncontrollable urge to host tea parties, and a strong attachment to the accoutrements required to host such an event. And Hameln (after The Pied Piper of Hamelin) is obsessive-compulsive with regard to the formation of the party and her self-perception as a “hero”.
It should be abundantly clear by this point that all the Blood Maidens are “damaged” to one degree or another, and over the course of Mary Skelter 2 this only escalates as a result of various happenings in the narrative. Red Riding Hood, for example, develops some serious anger issues over the course of Mary Skelter 2, to the extent that she becomes a danger to both herself and others on several occasions. And probably the most potent example of this forms the basis for the game’s final confrontation — and one of the reasons why everything goes so disastrously wrong in Mary Skelter 2 compared to the supposedly “true” fate of Mary Skelter Nightmares.
Part of the point of Mary Skelter 2’s narrative, then, is showing how it is possible to live with varying degrees of mental “damage”, and how it is important to seek and accept help from others when the opportunity arises. At numerous points throughout the main story of Mary Skelter 2, it’s abundantly clear that many of the characters simply would not be able to survive by themselves — indeed, this is literally the case when it comes to characters who have fallen into Blood Skelter in the absence of anyone else to protect them, since the only means of breaking them out of this state is through the blood of a character named Jack.
Jack requires a bit of explanation, too. While he’s the main hero of Mary Skelter Nightmares, in Mary Skelter 2, towards the opening of the game as a whole he is grievously injured and then, in an utterly horrifying scene, transformed into a Nightmare. Unlike other Nightmares, however, he manages to maintain something of a grip on his sanity, and cooperates with the Blood Maidens in an attempt to protect them — and perhaps, ultimately, to reunite with his one true love, Alice.
Jack is an utterly tragic figure throughout Mary Skelter 2, but he’s also a prime example of someone attempting to make the best of a terrible situation. His transformation into a Nightmare left him with terrible mental damage, leaving him almost completely incapable of communicating with anyone other than Otsuu, and his horrifying visage is a constant reminder that where once stood a human being is now a barely recognisable monster.
But at the same time, Jack’s kindness continually shines through. His selfless willingness to donate his own blood to those who need it to cleanse their corruption or break out of Blood Skelter shows that he only has the best interests of those around him at heart, and he regularly places himself in harm’s way to protect those who have shown him kindness and understanding. He’s a potent reminder that even those who have suffered a fate that left them disfigured both physically and mentally are still people within, and deserve to be treated with both respect and dignity.
Core to Mary Skelter 2’s narrative is a mysterious, bloodthirsty Nightmare who continually shows up, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Mysteriously, the Nightmare appears to show fear whenever it encounters the Blood Maidens, despite clearly being powerful enough to splatter them all across the nearest wall with a single stroke of its arm. This Nightmare appears to show some sort of awareness and intelligence rather than acting purely on instinct like most of the other Nightmares in the game, but it’s not until the final moments of Mary Skelter 2 that we learn the horrifying truth.
Towards the opening of Mary Skelter 2, we’re introduced to both the aforementioned Jack and Alice in their human forms as Otsuu and Little Mermaid rescue them and some other survivors from being locked in jail cells. When Alice uncontrollably falls into Blood Skelter during the group’s escape attempt, she knocks Jack, Otsuu and Little Mermaid down a pit and believes herself to have killed them. This, in turn, causes her to transform into a Nightmare filled with rage and guilt at having murdered the one she loves, her only desire being to destroy everything and everyone in her fury at being left alone. We don’t see these latter events at the time they happen.
Recognising that this rage-filled Nightmare is Alice leads to Mary Skelter 2’s tragic True Ending, where Jack splits his being into two to reflect his shared desires to both be with Alice, regardless of what form she takes, and his desire to protect everyone who has become so important to him over the course of their adventure. The group of Blood Maidens — including a mimicked copy of Alice, created by one of the Jail Tower’s cores — are left with no choice but to fight the “True Love Nightmare”, an amalgamation of Jack and Alice’s desire to be together, and their rage at the sheer unfairness of the world in which they live.
This all leads back to how Mary Skelter 2 is a “bad ending” to the original game. Everything that transpires in Mary Skelter 2 is a result of Otsuu’s interference. Otsuu is actually a Nightmare herself, you see, and her own grief at the death of Little Mermaid in the narrative setup to Mary Skelter Nightmares caused her to wish upon the Jail Tower in order to change the past. Ultimately, while Otsuu’s wish to save Little Mermaid brought herself some degree of happiness, it brought pain, misery and death to everyone else around her, with no means of repaying this “debt” she owes other than to return fate to the way it is “supposed” to be.
At its core, then, Mary Skelter 2 is a story about grief, death and how we cope with such things. While it is indeed possible to delude oneself and live in a pure fantasy world where you believe everything can and will turn out okay, the healthiest approach for everyone — including both you and the people around you — is to accept that while your loss may be painful and leave you feeling utterly inconsolable, it’s not something that you can change. Instead, you should do your best to move forward with your life, honouring the fallen in your own way as you can, but not destroying your own life — and potentially the lives of others — in the process.
Not quite lost in translation
Mary Skelter 2 is an attractive game with a distinct audio-visual aesthetic. The character and background art has a rather “painterly” aspect to it, with soft outlines and smudgy brush strokes, and the the dungeons that you spend the majority of your time exploring are designed to blend elements of reality with the horrifyingly uncanny. There’s a fair bit of “body horror” to Mary Skelter 2’s environments, with walls and floors often sporting blinking eyes, gibbering mouths and throbbing pustules.
Like most Idea Factory games, Mary Skelter 2’s narrative is primarily delivered in a visual novel style through character sprites and dialogue. In many instances, things that are happening are not depicted literally, instead effectively being “narrated” by the characters and leaving things up to the imagination of the player. This is actually quite an effective approach for a game such as Mary Skelter 2, where a lot of the horror comes from picturing what the characters might be seeing rather than being presented with an explicit depiction of it.
Various important moments in the narrative and your developing relationships with the various Blood Maidens are accompanied by event scenes, including occasional “sexy” scenes. This isn’t a super-fanservicey game by any means, but it is worth noting that there are a few mildly ecchi scenes in there — particularly during the optional “Purge” minigame, whereby you can remove corruption from various blood maidens by “rubbing” Jack’s blood into their swimsuit-clad form.
Music throughout the game is excellent, featuring elements of Gothic rock and a strong focus on violin-based lead lines. There’s a great contrast between the event music, the dungeon themes and the various battle themes — and, to keep things interesting, the latter changes every couple of dungeons to keep things fresh.
In fact, the music is probably the single biggest contributing factor in occasionally, temporarily lifting the darkness that swathes the entire Mary Skelter 2 experience. Despite the bleakness of the overall narrative and the characters’ setups, there are plenty of opportunities for light-hearted moments — and these are accompanied by some delightful tunes that really help to raise the mood a little.
By contrast, a notable weak point in the game’s overall presentation is the translation to English. While not unreadable by any means, it’s clear that it could have done with a bit more naturalisation, because as it stands a lot of it comes across as very literal. Since Japanese and English have quite different grammar and sentence structure, translating literally can lead to some rather odd turns of phrase now and then — and even some non-existent words and idioms being used on multiple occasions.
The issue with the translation as a whole isn’t one of technical proficiency as such — there aren’t that many outright errors in terms of spelling and punctuation — but more one of style. It would have probably been to the whole project’s benefit if there had been a second, thorough editing pass by a native English speaker, which doesn’t appear to have occurred, judging by the credits.
The result is a translation that lacks a certain amount of punch to it in English, and which reads rather oddly on a frequent enough basis for it to be actively noticeable. There are even cases where homophones have been confused and not caught in editing; in character abilities, for example, the word “law” and “lore” are often used interchangeably, when it’s clear that it should have been one or the other consistently.
This will doubtless be a familiar situation to many fans of localised Japanese games from over the years, but in a game with lore as well-crafted as that seen in Mary Skelter 2, it’s a tad jarring when the in-game English writing just doesn’t quite seem to match up to the quality of the material it’s working with, particularly when said material (in the form of the novella) has been translated to a much higher quality. As noted, it’s by no means a deal-breaker — the translation is readable; it could have just been a lot better.
Dungeon-crawlin’ fools
The core of Mary Skelter 2 is relatively conventional for the modern Japanese grid-based dungeon crawler. You form a party of up to six combatants (who, if you have enough members in your total squad, can be supported by rear-line members) and enter a series of labyrinthine dungeons.
As you explore the dungeons, battles occur at semi-randomised intervals and unfold as turn-based encounters. Successfully clearing a battle rewards the participating members with experience points, gold and loot, and inactive or supporting members receive lesser experience point rewards.
Dungeons often contain traps and gimmicks that aim to make exploration more challenging. Many of these have a real-time element where damage can be avoided with the appropriate timing: for example, spike traps can be avoided if moving through when the spikes are retracted, while animatronic statues that strike at the party can be dodged if you move out of their square immediately after passing by them.
There are often locked doors to contend with; some of these require keys to open, some require special items to be inserted into slots and others are triggered by switches. Some switches remain in effect permanently, while others are timed, requiring that you pass through the door triggered by the switch before it closes automatically.
One distinctive feature that Mary Skelter 2 adds atop the usual formula is the fact that every Blood Maiden has her own special exploration ability. Some of these are more obviously useful than others, but all are used at least once over the course of the entire game to “gate” progress in various ways. The abilities cover a wide range of possible uses, with some aiding in traversal, while others manipulate objects to aid progression and others still provide a means of avoiding or mitigating dangerous dungeon elements.
Use of these exploration abilities is the main source of “puzzles” in Mary Skelter 2; unlike some other grid-based dungeon crawlers (Sting and Aquaplus’ Dungeon Travelers 2being a good example), the dungeon designs in Mary Skelter 2 are not super-intricate, eschewing complicated multi-level traversal puzzles in favour of mostly self-contained floors. The emphasis is on thorough exploration with occasional “roadblocks” which can be passed either with key items or exploration abilities, and the result is a game where it always feels like you’re making forward progress.
Later in the game, the environmental puzzles sometimes demand the use of multiple abilities in concert to achieve particular effects. For example, clearing large pits sometimes requires you to combine Cinderella’s speed-enhancing “Twelve Dash” ability with Alice’s “Rabbit Jump” in order to make a longer leap than usual; elsewhere, clever use of Gretel’s “Bread Portal” teleportation ability allows you to outwit some of the switch puzzles that have rather unforgiving timing.
Each dungeon does have a distinct feel, but most have some shared elements that become a comforting sight after a while. Notably, the fact that most dungeons have a “shortcut staircase”, allowing you to quickly and easily reach the upper floors when exploring over the course of multiple expeditions, is very welcome indeed — though a couple of later dungeons do subvert this expectation somewhat.
Likewise, the fact that you can almost universally rely on each dungeon’s main objective being on its 5th floor (with a couple of exceptions — most notably in the 11-floor final dungeon) helps bring a sense of structure and direction to your exploration, giving you an idea of how much progress you’ve made in a session and how much further you have to go.
Most dungeons also have an optional “secret” floor that is unlocked via use of the “Jail Roulette” system. This is a mechanic whereby the sentient Jail has three “desires”, indicated by coloured meters in the corner of the screen. Hunger is satisfied by spilling Marchen blood, Libido by collecting items or licking one another in combat (more on that in a moment) and Sleep by performing actions without taking damage while the Jail is specifically indicated to be asleep.
Upon filling one of the three “desire” meters (which can occur both inside and outside of combat) you’re presented with a roulette wheel with various benefits. Sometimes these allow you to immediately acquire items, sometimes they provide temporary buffs — one marked “Unknown Effect” even immediately causes your entire party to immediately level up and fully heal, making it a godsend during difficult fights. And, if you trigger one of these roulette wheels after defeating the dungeon’s main Nightmare boss, it brings down a wall somewhere in the dungeon, allowing access to the optional secret floor.
Interestingly, the Jail Roulette can be manipulated by acquiring “pieces” throughout your explorations. Prior to beginning a new expedition, you’re given the option to load up both the exploration and battle roulettes with various pieces, making it more likely that certain benefits will appear. There’s a limit on how many pieces (and how “valuable” those pieces are) you can apply to a single dungeon, though, so you can’t simply stack the deck completely in your favour — though it is worth noting that outside of a rarely seen result that temporarily swaps all characters ATK (physical attack) and TEC (magical attack) statistics, which generally makes everyone absolutely terrible at their “job” in battle, most roulette results are positive for you and your party.
Loot in Mary Skelter 2 is unusually handled. Consumable items and equipment can be found in non-respawning treasure chests and respawning collection points, but can also be “farmed” by planting Blood Flowers in dungeons. These can be planted anywhere, but tend to yield better results if planted in specifically marked locations and covered in blood, a resource which is gradually collected following successful battles.
Blood Flowers take several battles to bloom, at which point they can either be harvested individually, or harvested as a group using Hameln’s Magnetic Piccolo ability, which not only harvests all Blood Flowers within Hameln’s line of sight, but also has a chance at “updating” acquired loot to more powerful versions of itself. These “updates” can either take the form of a numerical modifier, which reflects the number of additional stat points over and above the type of equipment’s baseline statistics that the particular item provides, or a syllabic prefix that denotes added special abilities or bonuses. The best equipment has both, potentially boosting an item far beyond its usual capabilities.
By contrast, loot found from battle drops and in dungeons is always in its base-level, unmodified form. At home base between dungeon expeditions, it’s possible to upgrade an item to a maximum of +20 with the appropriate resources, but given that the “updated” items from Blood Flowers can go up to +99 and have even further increased capabilities, it’s fairly rare that you’ll be relying on regular drops for your characters’ equipment — to such a degree that much of the loot you find can feel a bit useless at times.
That is, until you realise that at least part of the reason you get so much loot is that it is a primary means of acquiring money. Gold drops from battles are fairly stingy, so bringing an armful of equipment back to base and then selling it for a tidy profit is generally a much more reliable means of securing an income. And, given that it’s helpful to have a backpack full of consumable items on hand to make longer expeditions self-sufficient, it’s always good to have a pocket full of gold ready to spend.
Risk, reward and licking ladies
A core element of Mary Skelter 2, as you may have surmised from the mention of the “Jail Roulette” above, is risk versus reward. And this is most apparent during the game’s battle sequences, which demand that you strike a good balance between taking significant risks and reaping big rewards for doing so.
At heart, Mary Skelter 2’s combat system is straightforward turn-based. Characters line up in the turn order according to their agility stat and a semi-randomised initiative value, then their next move occurs based on the hidden “speed” value of whatever action they choose to take. At its most basic level, this exhibits some elements of risk versus reward: you can see an enemy’s turn is coming up, so do you risk unleashing your most powerful skills in an attempt to defeat them before they get their turn, or do you hunker down and get defensive?
But it doesn’t stop there. As the narrative shows, Blood Maidens are uncommonly sensitive to the blood of their enemies, and during combat they will get covered in the stuff. This is represented by each character having a five-step meter that gradually fills as enemies bleed, and enemies bleed more when hit hard, are hit with abilities specifically designed to induce bleeding, are hit in their weak points or are killed with a significant degree more damage than was necessary to defeat them.
When the blood meter fills, the Blood Maiden’s next turn will see one of two things happen. If you’re lucky, they’ll enter Massacre mode, which makes them stronger and provides access to some new abilities, usually elemental-based area-effect skills good for clearing out a full party of enemies. If you’re unlucky, they’ll enter Blood Skelter, which makes them even stronger and completely uncontrollable; in this state, they’re just as likely to attack friend as foe (or even themselves) and generally get more actions per turn than they usually would have.
Whether a Blood Maiden enters Massacre or Blood Skelter is determined by the corruption they have built up, indicated by the darkness of the blood in their meter. The darker the meter, the higher the corruption and the higher the risk of Blood Skelter.
You’re not left to the whims of fate to deal with this, though; the blood meters and corruption can be managed and mitigated in various ways.
Firstly, if a Blood Maiden has three or more blood splashes in her meter, she can be “licked” by another Blood Maiden, which empties the meter and triggers a character-specific Blood Soul ability — as well as filling the Jail’s Libido meter to a certain extent. Pervert.
Blood Soul skills benefit the whole party in some way and include things like a full-party heal, restoration of skill points, cleansing of debuffs or completely blocking the next attack. Very useful — but, of course, if you do this, you can’t take advantage of Massacre’s benefits.
Secondly, on Otsuu’s turn, she can ask Jack to “Purge” either an individual Blood Maiden completely or the entire party partially by making use of his blood. This can mitigate the risk of Blood Skelter entirely, but carries its own risk: the more of his blood he uses without having the opportunity to take a rest or be soothed by Otsuu, the greater the strain on Jack’s mind. And the more strained Jack’s mind is, the more likely he will become Ripper Jack temporarily, becoming uncontrollable and unleashing his own abilities at random. Not only that, but this immediately maximises Otsuu’s Corruption, making her likely to hit Blood Skelter on her next turn.
To make matters even worse, if Jack becomes Ripper Jack three times in one combat, it’s an immediate Game Over; most battles are resolved quickly enough for this to never be an issue, but in boss battles and on harder difficulties it becomes a consideration.
Once combat is over, all Massacre and Blood Skelter states end immediately, and full blood meters that would have triggered one of these states on the character’s next turn drop back a level. This means you’ll never enter a battle with the possibility of all your characters immediately entering Blood Skelter and getting you killed, which is blessed relief.
There are a couple of other risk versus reward mechanics to consider alongside all this. As well as the aforementioned Jail Roulette, you can also trigger various Jail Trials prior to kicking off an expedition. These allow you to exchange various drawbacks for benefits; for example, disabling your ability to save in the dungeon rewards you with 30% more experience points, while deliberately choosing to take more damage can boost your stats somewhat. In this way, you can tinker with the game’s difficulty somewhat — and it can be especially useful to boost item drop rates for certain sidequests — but can also be freely ignored if you see fit.
Finally, the longer you hang out in the dungeon, the worse the Jail’s mood gets, indicated by a percentage meter in the corner of your exploration view. As this rises, the dungeon takes on more of a red tint and the enemies become stronger, potentially leading to greater rewards — but also significantly increasing the risk to your party. Do you press your luck and continue exploring, or head for home base and take a rest before continuing?
Bloody Nightmare
One of the core features of both Mary Skelter 2’s narrative and mechanics is the presence of Nightmares. These are extremely powerful enemies that guard each of the main dungeons. Some liken these to the F.O.E. enemies in the Etrian Odyssey series, but the comparison isn’t particularly apt; F.O.E.s move as you move, allowing you to tactically manoeuvre around them, while Mary Skelter 2’s Nightmares are a real-time component.
If a Nightmare spots you — which can occur either randomly or by you stumbling into their line of sight if they’re actively wandering your current dungeon level — a Chase sequence begins, during which your main goal is to get as far away from the Nightmare as possible: specifically, to get a reasonable distance outside the large white “aura” they have around their current position.
Here’s the twist, though: on all difficulties other than Easy, while being chased you have no access to your minimap, meaning you have to run in a panic based on only your own memories and sometimes blind luck. And if you find yourself forced into a dead end, you have only one choice: fight, even though Nightmares are a foe you can’t defeat until you’ve beaten the current dungeon’s Guardian and destroyed its Core.
You can, however, break parts off them, which causes them to be stunned for a moment, letting you slip past them and make your escape. At the conclusion of each dungeon, you’ll have to break all the parts off the dungeon’s Nightmare before defeating them once and for all — always a satisfying moment.
In the early game, the Nightmares honestly don’t feel like a super-significant threat because the dungeon designs make them relatively easy to escape from. As the game progresses, though, the dungeon layouts become more complex and the Nightmares get faster, making it harder to get away. The final dungeon in particular has an exceedingly tenacious Nightmare that it feels really good to finally get the better of – particularly as this leaves the last few floors relatively quiet as you approach the final confrontation.
Build a better Blood Maiden
Dungeon crawlers often live or die on their character progression and customisation systems, and Mary Skelter 2 thankfully provides plenty of options for building a team that functions in a way you find enjoyable and efficient, with your choices expanding considerably as the playable cast expands with each new dungeon.
Each individual character begins with a base job, which determines what weapons they are able to use, their base statistics and what skills they are able to learn with points acquired via levelling up. Every 10 levels, they earn “Job Unlock Rights”, which allows them to unlock one of the other four jobs (and costumes!) they have available to them; again, each of these has a specific range of usable weapons, base stats and skills.
All characters are able to cross-class their skills once learned, though skills are generally more effective if used by their original host job, indicated by them being marked as “Specialty” in the game’s menus. It’s helpful to learn at least a few skills from each job available to a character, though, particularly when it comes to passive bonuses, resistances and automatic counterattacks.
Equipment is a consistently interesting consideration, because it’s never as simple as just picking the item with the higher numbers. This is because pretty much every item of equipment provides bonuses to some statistics and penalties to others; many also affect the characters’ resistances to various elements, too, meaning there are always very enjoyable decisions to make on how to outfit your characters.
Risk versus reward enters the picture here too, of course; for powerful physical attackers, do you eschew their defensive capabilities in favour of getting that ATK stat as high as possible? Can mages get away with a low DEF if they’re sitting in the back row? Is it worth setting aside someone as a “tank” and, if so, how are you going to ensure the enemies provide them with the majority of the attention?
Given the strongly randomised nature of the loot, particularly that acquired from Blood Flowers, it’s highly likely that no two playthroughs of Mary Skelter 2 will be quite alike, providing plenty of replay value. And while the normal difficulty doesn’t really provide any real incentive to make use of the level-resetting “Blood Devolution” system, which provides bonuses to base stats and the ability to respec characters’ learned skills, it’s clear that the increased difficulty of the Fear level will make that something of a necessity — so those who enjoy a good grind will doubtless have plenty to enjoy there.
Conclusions
Mary Skelter 2 is an excellent game, and ranks high among the dungeon crawlers I have enjoyed to date thanks to its interesting risk-versus-reward mechanics and its extensive, fascinating lore. It’s a shame that the English translation lets things down a bit, but as previously noted, it’s thankfully not enough to ruin the experience; it’s just a little bit of a cumbersome read at times, and I feel just a simple editing pass and a touch of naturalisation by another pair of eyes after the initial translation would have probably helped that enormously.
It’s a super-long game, which will doubtless put some people off, but it’s actually designed in quite a considerate manner whereby the individual “chunks” of things you have to do are easily digestible, meaning you can set aside an hour or two to play and feel like you’re making some meaningful progress. At very few points will you feel like you’re at a standstill; there’s constant forward momentum and a pleasant feeling of discovery pretty much the entire time you’re playing.
There are a couple of exceptions to this — if playing on the harder difficulties and using Blood Devolution, a certain amount of grinding is unavoidable, and some of the sidequests that require you to defeat rarely spawning monsters or acquire rare item drops can be a bit annoying. But it’s worth noting that anything which could become annoying in Mary Skelter 2 is pretty much always on the optional side of things. There’s no reason to do all the sidequests other than to say you’ve done them all, for example (I did!) — so if you find them tedious, just skip them.
With lovely art, an excellent soundtrack and an incredibly likeable (and constantly fascinating) cast of very, very troubled characters, Mary Skelter 2 strikes a great balance between solid dungeon crawler mechanics and compelling lore. All this makes for a real “best of both worlds” experience, whether you’re a narrative junkie or someone who likes to dive deep into the intricacies of game systems.
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I have mixed feelings about the open-world approach a lot of games take these days, but one genre where I feel it almost always works well is the racing game.
When you have a game whose main purpose for existence is to allow you to take yourself on a thrill ride (or, in the case of more sedate simulators, a comfortable excursion) it makes perfect sense to provide the player with as much freedom as possible. After all, what’s the point of giving you access to interesting, exotic and, more often than not, downright dangerous vehicles if you can’t really put them to the test?
Such, seemingly, is the thinking behind 2009’s Fuel from Codemasters and Asobo Studio (yes, them what done made Microsoft Flight Simulator more recently) — a PS3/360-era open world racer that, for quite some time, held a world record for the largest playable area in any video game thanks to its 5,560 square mile landscape. For context, that is supposedly a similar size to the real-life state of Connecticut in the States, if that means anything to anyone. (The UK, for context, is apparently about 94,058 square miles in total, meaning the world of Fuel could fit just shy of 17 times into it. Still pretty big.)
Anyway, yes. Fuel is a game in which the open world is the star. The narrative setup is supposedly that humanity, having fucked the planet beyond all recognition, has moved itself into idyllic little bubble cities in an attempt to forget all about the environmental devastation they have caused, but this caused there to be a large amount of leftover petrol and diesel to have been left just lying around for the taking. Rather than doing the responsible thing, it seems thrillseekers — including you, the player, you monster, you — have taken to making use of this fuel to drive a variety of vehicles around the landscape, presumably in an attempt to finish off the natural world once and for all.
All that doesn’t matter, of course; all it really means is that there’s not a lot of “civilian” traffic in the world of Fuel because supposedly no-one but the most extreme thrillseekers would bother setting foot in the wilderness these days. There are the odd vehicles you’ll find pootling around — and of course there are your opponents in the organised race events — but for the most part, driving around Fuel’s world is a fairly solitary experience. And it’s a rather pleasant, relaxing experience as a result.
Fuel’s complete world is split up into several distinct zones, each of which has a main campsite from which you can trigger various race events and get a rundown of what there is available to do in each region. There’s nothing stopping you driving across the entire map right from the beginning of the game if you so desire, but if you actually want to do anything in zones outside of the one you start in, you’ll need to earn some career stars by completing races.
Each race has three difficulty levels available and thus three stars available to acquire. As such, you can progress through the game by concentrating on clearing the easier races first in order to gradually unlock new areas and more variety, or you can more quickly power through the game by taking on tougher events. It’s generally advisable to have acquired some of the better vehicles in a particular class before taking on the harder levels, but not essential by any means.
Part of the beauty of the more structured side of Fuel is that there’s a wide variety of different event types. Sometimes you’ll be challenging lap-based races on a small circuit. Sometimes you’ll have checkpoint races where the checkpoints are a long distance apart, leaving you to determine the optimal route. Sometimes you’ll have race where you just have a finish line, leaving you to figure out the entire route to yourself. And then there are variations such as elimination races, where back-markers are disqualified at each checkpoint, and “tag” races, where all you have to do is catch up with and bump into a couple of other cars.
The more unusual types of race tend to take the form of “Challenges” rather than career races, which means you don’t earn stars for them; you do, however, earn a lot more of the titular Fuel from them, though, which in turn allows you to unlock more vehicles. And the more vehicles you have, the more choices you’ll have when attempting to pick something suitable for a specific event — it really pays to have a wide selection, even within a single class, as handling and suitability for various surface types can vary quite wildly.
Outside of races, you can just explore the open world as you see fit. A GPS system allows you to plot a route to anywhere on the map, complete with an optional floating 3D path of arrows to guide you, or you can just drive around freely, either on the roads or off them. You can switch vehicles at any time, too, so if you’ve been sticking to the roads but spot something interesting that requires a ride with better off-road handling, you can just whip it out whenever you need it. So to speak.
As you explore the open world, you will occasionally “spot” things such as vista points and liveries. These are collectibles present in each zone; the former simply challenge you to reach a particular location and touch a tower, while the latter provide alternative paint jobs for the various rides in the game. You can either attempt to track these down yourself, or hunt down the “Doppler Trucks” present in each zone, which reveal all the hidden collectibles in that zone after you give them a good crashing-into.
Your ultimate aim, presumably, is to unlock all the zones, collect all the collectibles, achieve all the career stars, complete all the challenges, bang into all the Doppler Trucks, retrieve all the secret vehicles and purchase all the non-secret vehicles. This will take a very long time indeed, and thus it’s best to approach Fuel as a more free-form sort of game that doesn’t really have an “end goal” as such; it’s just a game that is worth booting up when you feel like pootling around on a quadbike in the Great Outdoors would be something that appeals.
The game is starting to show its age a bit, with 720p visuals and sub-30fps frame rates on consoles, but that doesn’t stop it from still being very appealing to look at, particularly when you reach some of the more picturesque parts of the enormous map. The highlight here is the gameplay, though; this is exactly what an open-world driving game should be. It provides the freedom to explore and just enjoy driving various vehicles if that’s what you feel like, and the structure to challenge you with specific tasks if you want something a bit more focused to occupy your time.
At this point you may well ask why I’m not playing one of the more recent Forza Horizon games, which offer many of the same things that I’m describing above but with more up-to-date visuals. And the answer to that is that although I do enjoy what I’ve played of Forza Horizon 4 specifically, I found myself bouncing off a bit due the fact that none of the “structured” stuff in it seemed to matter.
For example, I could comfortably come last place in a complete tournament, wrecking my car with every event, and I’d still get a phone call from some Gen Z “influencer” type immediately afterwards telling me how “hype” they are about my “mad driving skills” and how they’ve managed to get me an exclusive seat in the most prestigious tournament in town, even though I clearly don’t deserve such a thing in the slightest.
In some respects, it’s nice that the game doesn’t roadblock your progress and lets you see everything it has to offer; in others, it just feels a bit patronising, like the video game equivalent of a Participation Trophy.
Fuel doesn’t do any of that. Your experience is up to you — and at certain points in that experience, you’ll need to prove your worth to a certain degree. I like that; it strikes a great balance between completely freeform simulation and structured game, and that, it seems, is something of a sweet spot for me in a game like this.
Fuel is a game that I enjoy just firing up and tuning out with for hours at a time. It has been ever since I picked it up for PS3 a few years back — and I suspect it will continue to be just that for years to come, also.
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I must confess, I never played Hang-On or Super Hang-On a great deal back in the day; I always found motorcycles a little less interesting than cars, and the games always struck me as “the Sega racers that weren’t quite as good as OutRun”.
I recently picked up Super Hang-On for Mega Drive, though, and after an evening of playing pretty solidly, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that I’ve been missing out for all these years. This is an excellent 16-bit racer, particularly in its home console incarnation, and I’m very glad I’ve finally added it to my collection.
For the unfamiliar, Super Hang-On is a “vanishing point”-style racer in which you ride a motorcycle towards the distant horizon. The original arcade game featured a conventional timers-and-checkpoints structure, tasking you with completing a long point-to-point race across a series of stages against the clock, gaining bonus time at each checkpoint.
Like many other Sega racers, the aim was as much to get a high score as it was to successfully finish the race; while driving, you earn points for the distance you cover and the vehicles you overtake, with your score income increasing considerably the faster you race. Conversely, leave the road or race too slowly and you won’t earn points until you get back on track. This scoring system meant that even those who couldn’t make it through all the stages before time expiring could see themselves improving and compete against other players on the leaderboard.
There are four different routes to challenge in Super Hang-On, with each being tougher and having a longer series of stages to complete. The Africa course is the shortest and easiest, consisting of just six stages; then comes Asia with ten stages, America with 14 stages and finally Europe with 18 stages. Each route has its own independent high score table.
The Mega Drive version of Super Hang-On features a solid recreation of the arcade game, albeit without the smoothly scaling sprites of the original hardware. It’s still a decent racer, though, and actually presents some notably distinct mechanics from other similar titles of the time, helping make it stand out and feel worth playing even if you’re intimately familiar with the “vanishing point” subgenre and Super Hang-On’s more well-loved stablemates.
Of particular note is the way that skidding works, whereby it’s possible to take corners at a pretty high speed, but the longer you hold the bike to one side, the more likely it is that the back end will slip out and send you sliding quickly across towards the outside of the bend you’re on. This necessitates actually slowing down for corners — and even using the brake at times rather than simply letting go of the accelerator — which is a notable difference from many other racers of the period, particularly those focusing on cars.
Super Hang-On also features a turbo mechanic, whereby once you get your bike up to its “base” top speed, the speedo will turn red, indicating that you can hold down the turbo button as well as the accelerator to gain even more speed. There’s no limit on how much the turbo can be used aside from the requirement you be going fast enough to trigger it, either, meaning if handled skilfully you can whizz through simpler sections of the course at an absolutely terrifying velocity.
These two mechanics make Super Hang-On feel very much like its own distinct beast — in some respects, a rather more technical-feeling racer than something like OutRun which, for the most part, was about foot-to-the-floor thrills.
But the Mega Drive version of Super Hang-On doesn’t stop there. Not by a long shot. In keeping with some of Sega’s other arcade conversions of the period — notably the slightly later Super Monaco GP — the Mega Drive version of Super Hang-On includes not only a full conversion of the arcade game, but also an all-new “Original” mode with its own mechanics and structure, specifically designed for more longevity in the home.
This is an extraordinarily generous inclusion, considering that Super Hang-On‘s arcade mode is already pretty substantial, but it’s also thoroughly interesting to take a look at. Because in many ways, in Super Hang-On’s Original mode we can see the genesis (no pun intended) of today’s in-depth racing sims such as the Gran Turismo and Forza series, and their numerous imitators.
In Super Hang-On’s Original mode, you take on the role of a rookie biker with a rookie mechanic and a sponsorship deal with a local pharmacist. Your rival is a cute girl named Mia Ferraru, and it’s up to you to defeat her five times in order to ascend to the next tier of competition. Unfortunately, you start out with a bike that handles and performs worse than the Rover Metro I learned to drive in, and thus you’ll need to take some time to gather some winnings, maintain your ride and perhaps shell out for some better parts.
It’s a slow process. While you’re competing against Mia, you race the same course repeatedly, and it’s a simple lap-based course rather than the point-to-point races of the arcade mode. It might initially seem a bit frustrating to race the same course over and over again as you “grind” enough money to improve your bike — but after a couple of sessions and upgrades to your ride, you’ll come to realise that this structure is both intentional and actually quite a good idea.
Racing the same track multiple times allows you to improve your skills without constantly having to learn new things, meaning that even without new parts on your bike, you’ll improve your lap times and thus the likelihood that you will beat Mia. Not only that, but when you do scrape together enough cash to buy an upgrade or two, you can easily and directly compare the different it has made to your bike’s overall performance by looking at your lap times.
You do have to be careful, though. Your bike suffers wear and tear simply through use, meaning you’ll need to replace components and things like tyres and oil every few races. And, as you might expect, crashing into things causes damage; you can ruin your engine or the bike frame altogether with too many collisions, leaving you in a position where you’re completely unable to race. Thankfully, as the manual suggests, you earn a small amount of “prize” money simply for entering a race, so even if your bike is completely knackered, you can start an event, immediately retire and still get paid, then repeat this process until you can afford the parts you need.
You do have to bear in mind, though, that every retirement from a race counts as a loss, and if you’re racing rivals after Mia or working with sponsors beyond the initial pharmacist, scoring five losses will cause you to drop back down to a previous level of competition. There’s no way of actually getting a complete “Game Over” in Super Hang-On’s Original mode, but you can effectively undo all your hard work and end up having to pretty much start over!
Super Hang-On’s Original mode won’t be to everyone’s taste. Your bike is, let’s not beat around the bush here, absolute garbage at the start of the game, making the game feel considerably less responsive and enjoyable to race than the arcade mode. Original mode is all about gradual improvements — to that end, it incorporates a password system so it can be played over multiple sessions — and thus perhaps lacks the immediacy of the arcade mode. But it’s definitely satisfying when you start to get somewhere.
And that’s part of the beauty of the Super Hang-On package for Mega Drive: you can choose how you want to enjoy it. If you prefer the immediacy of the arcade mode, you can just jump right into that, and its four courses provide plenty of longevity by themselves, since there’s no way you’ll beat them right away. If you prefer the gradual process of improving your skills and your bike in Original mode, that’s there too — and if you like a bit of both… well, they’re both there for you to enjoy.
While dated in many respects, Super Hang-On for Mega Drive remains a great example of Sega on top of their game. It’s a great value package designed to combine arcadey immediacy and more in-depth longevity, and it succeeds admirably at what it does. It’s a game I feel like I’m going to come back to very often indeed, and I’m very glad I decided to finally add it to my collection.
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For those following the ongoing saga of my gaming schedule, yesterday saw me break said schedule to go to Ikea with my wife.
I bought a new chair to go in my study, which contains all my retro consoles and computers, because I came to the conclusion that the “gamer chair” I picked up a while back (actually, my workplace at the time paid for it as part of working from home arrangements) actually wasn’t all that comfortable. And thus, given my renewed desire to enjoy my retro consoles, I thought it worthwhile to have something comfortable to sit on.
Naturally, having acquired a new chair in which to enjoy retro gaming action, it made sense to enjoy the remainder of the evening sitting in said chair enjoying retro gaming action. And I am happy to confirm that it is indeed very comfortable. So I call that a win. I also had a thoroughly pleasant couple of hours playing Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse on the Mega Drive in my new chair, so I also call that a win.
Anyway, enough talk of furniture; this is a site about video games, so let’s talk a bit more about Castle of Illusion (as we shall refer to it hereafter), a game that I had a passing familiarity with from back in the day, but never really played; a pal of mine had its 16-bit follow-up World of Illusion and we used to enjoy playing that in its two-player mode, but Castle of Illusion is not a game I owned back in the day, and thus it was mostly new to me.
For the unfamiliar, Castle of Illusion is a Sega-developed, Disney-themed platformer starring Mickey Mouse. It first released for the 16-bit Mega Drive in 1990 and was subsequently ported to Master System and Game Gear — though it’s worth noting that those 8-bit versions are substantially different from the Mega Drive version and well worth playing in their own right.
In Castle of Illusion, Minnie Mouse has been kidnapped by the witch Mizrabel (see what they did there), who wants to steal her youth and beauty. Mickey, in hot pursuit, is told that in order to confront Mizrabel, he will need to collect seven gems in order to create a rainbow bridge that leads to Mizrabel’s lair. Unfortunately, said gems are scattered throughout the Castle of Illusion, guarded by Mizrabel’s henchmen, the Masters of Illusion.
Thus begins a platform adventure through five (yes, five, not seven) stages, in which Mickey must make his way through three substages on a common theme, then defeat a boss. In the first three stages, Mickey receives one of the seven gems for defeating the boss; in the latter two, Mickey also receives a gem at the midpoint of the level. One wonders if the game was originally supposed to be bigger, but Sega either ran out of time or cartridge capacity.
Being a Castle of Illusion, each room Mickey enters in the castle presents him with a stage that is very different from the last. The first sees Mickey making his way through a forest; the second sees him battling against toys that have come to life; the third takes him through a stormy canyon and into an underground passage; the fourth shrinks him to a tiny size and sees him leaping across library shelves, swimming through cups of tea and hopping across biscuit platforms inside milk bottles; and the final stage is, I guess, the castle’s “true form”.
Mechanically, Castle of Illusion is quite simple, but has a few interesting quirks on the usual platform game formula from the era. Perhaps most notable is the fact that while Mickey most commonly defeats enemies by jumping on them Super Mario-style, it’s not enough to simply land on them from above; Mickey must be performing a “bum-bounce” manoeuvre, which requires a second tap of the jump button in mid-air to perform, otherwise he will take damage upon contact with an enemy. When you first start playing, it’s very easy to forget this, but it’s easy enough to form a habit.
Mickey can also acquire items of various descriptions — themed per stage — that he can fling at enemies. It’s a good idea to try and hold on to these, because while they’re not essential to defeating bosses, there are a couple of encounters in the game that are significantly easier if you can eschew bum-bouncing in favour of flinging items from afar.
What really struck me about Castle of Illusion while playing is how… straightforward the levels are. This isn’t a criticism, either; there are secrets to discover in each level, so exploration is a possibility, but the important thing is that in each one you have a clear goal, and the game isn’t just a sprawling, vast map to uncover a bit at a time. Instead, each stage is completely self-contained and, in most cases, quite different in feel from the last.
This got me thinking: we don’t really get platformers like this very often any more. By far the most common type of platformer we see in 2023 is the open-structure exploratory platformer, often with procedurally generated elements, designed to take anywhere between 10 and 40 hours to beat. By contrast, the short-form, linear platformer with self-contained, hand-crafted levels is a bit of a dying breed; it’s not dead by any means, but it’s by no means anywhere near as common as it was back in its 16-bit glory days.
That’s a shame, but I also completely understand why: it’s all to do with perceived value. Castle of Illusion has five levels and can easily be breezed through in less than an hour if you know what you’re doing. That sort of thing is absolute anathema to today’s gamers, who are obsessed with how much “content” a game has — and, in the case of PC games, whether the developer provides regular “updates”, lest the game be declared “abandoned” or “dead”. I mean, heaven forbid a creative project be finished at some point.
Bear in mind that Castle of Illusion would have been somewhere in the region of £40 (in 1990’s money — around £94 today accounting for inflation!) when it originally released and it becomes all the more remarkable by today’s standards that it was pretty much universally praised by press and public alike, and regarded as a near-essential part of many players’ Mega Drive libraries. It just goes to show how times change.
Of course the fact that Castle of Illusion is technically less than an hour long doesn’t mean that you’ll only spend less than an hour playing it. For starters, unless you’re supremely skilled at platform games, you’re unlikely to clear it on your first run through — with no save system and only two continues, you can easily hit a hard Game Over and have to go back to the start. Granted, it’s not a super-difficult platform game by any means, but it’ll still likely take most players at least a few attempts to be able to clear it reliably.
And then after that, replay value is added through a scoring system that rewards you for various things, including defeating enemies, collecting items, discovering secrets and finishing the level with more than a sliver of health (confusingly referred to as a “Technical Bonus”). Plus, you know, it’s just a fun, beautifully presented little game that is enjoyable to play through, even if you’ve beaten it before. Sometimes it’s nice to just revisit things you’re already familiar with, even if you know them inside out.
And, of course, with the fact that Castle of Illusion is no longer £40 to pick up today — I got mine for £12 boxed (albeit with no manual) — its short length stings a little less. Hell, I actually like the fact it’s a game you can beat in the space of an evening; amid the 100+ hour RPGs and potentially endless games that are around today, it’s thoroughly nice to have something you can roll credits on pretty easily, assuming your skills are up to the job.
So you know what? I’d actually like to see more stuff like this make a comeback. And if today’s devs are too afraid of the gamers whining about “not enough content” to do that — well, I have a ton of short-form platformers I missed out on from back in the day to catch up on, I guess!
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Today, according to my self-imposed schedule of video gaming fun times, was a “free choice”. I spent most of it playing more Mary Skelter 2, so rather than bang on about that some more for now, I thought I’d reflect a bit on the week that has just gone by.
On the whole, I think this experiment has mostly been a success. I still have some lingering concerns about whether it is practical to apply this model when you’re playing very long games such as Mary Skelter 2, but I’ve managed to squeeze somewhere in the region of 15 hours of that game in this week across three days (one of which was just an evening) so I’m starting to think it might not be a problem.
One question I have is whether putting Final Fantasy XIV midweek is the correct choice. On the one hand, it’s a good game to chill out with of an evening. On the other, it’s a game that rewards having a large amount of time to burn, particularly once you start getting into a position where you have to queue for multiplayer instances, making me wonder if it’s worth swapping the Thursday night Final Fantasy XIV session with the Saturday “Big Game” session.
At the same time, I’m pleased with how much progress I’ve successfully made with Mary Skelter 2 this week, and without any sense of “guilt” that I’m leaving behind other experiences that I want to be enjoying. Not only that, but even with all those hours of gameplay, I’ve still managed to get myself out the door to go and have a swim a couple of times, so it’s not just been about staring at a screen all week!
It may be of benefit long-term for me to start scheduling in the swimming sessions as well as the gaming time — and, as I start figuring things out more and more, to schedule in some other things I might want to do, too, such as making music, dabbling with game development and perhaps getting back to learning Japanese. Once we get to that point, though, we’re past the point of saying “Monday is for x, Tuesday is for y” and starting to get a bit more specific, and I’m not as yet sure if that’s the right thing for me.
Perhaps it is, though, and thus it probably behooves me to continue with this experiment a while longer. So I’m going to stick with it “as is” for another week, then review again at the end of next weekend and decide if I need to change anything around in one way or another. And, as a means of both helping me reflect on what I’ve experienced in the week and giving you kind readers something to read about the games I’ve been playing, I’ll continue to blog the process.
That sounds like a plan, doesn’t it? How about that?
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And so, we return to my current “Big Game”: Idea Factory and Compile Heart’s excellent Mary Skelter 2, which I’ve been gradually ploughing through for quite some time now.
I really love dungeon crawlers. Something about the way they work just speaks to my brain. I think it’s the inherent satisfaction of gradually uncovering a map and discovering things. In a good dungeon crawler, you’re always moving forwards and finding something new, and it’s satisfying to uncover a chunk of map even if all you discover is a complete dead-end.
As an aside, this is the exact same reason that I enjoy Rise of the Triad, since Rise of the Triad, like its spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3-D, is essentially a high-speed, real-time dungeon crawler in which RPG mechanics are swapped for arcade-style action. The block-based nature of the maps allows for a very similar maze-like feel to your typical dungeon crawler, while the speedy mechanics give it a markedly different overall feel.
In yesterday’s play session, I managed a good 6 hours of progress through Mary Skelter 2, which took me all the way through Chapter 9 out of 11 — the only thing I didn’t complete during the session was an ongoing sidequest to recover 10 of a rare drop from monsters throughout the dungeon that I was exploring over the course of the chapter. I got 6, though, so hopefully it won’t take too long to get the rest, particularly as I know exactly which monsters I need to concentrate on in order to acquire said drop.
As noted last time we looked at Mary Skelter 2, one of the nice things about the game is that things like these sidequests are completely optional. There aren’t any really significant parts of the game that are locked off behind them — the game’s true ending is simply dependent on answering some questions during the finale correctly, for example (yes, I looked it up) — and so if you find them annoying, you can skip them.
I won’t lie, I’ve been tempted to skip over at least a few of these sidequests when they demand that I defeat particularly rare monsters or acquire rare drops — but I’ve stuck with them. The reason for this is that these things are not, as they might first appear, entirely luck-based. I mean, yes, there is a heavy luck element involved — but there are also ways in which you can prepare yourself in order to improve your odds of success.
For example, towards the start of my play session this evening, I had a sidequest to defeat 10 of a rare monster from a previous dungeon. I could have just wandered around getting into random encounters in the hope that said monster would show up — and indeed, I did that for a similar quest earlier in the game. But instead, I discovered that the “predefined” encounters in the dungeon, of which there are several on each floor, appear to be significantly more likely to spawn these rare monsters. And thus, all I needed to do was hop into the dungeon, clear out these predefined encounters, run away from them and re-trigger them if the rare monster didn’t appear, and things were much easier.
The quests that involve rare drops are a little trickier, but again, there are things you can do to improve your odds. Besides making use of the characters Gretel and Snow White, both of whom are able to learn abilities that improve item drop rates and quantities, Mary Skelter 2 also includes a feature called “Jail Trial” in which you can tweak the difficulty of each dungeon in various ways, generally exchanging a drawback of some sort for a notable benefit.
There are a wide variety of these “Trials” to choose from, and you can have multiple active at the same time in order to stack their benefits. Not only that, there are multiple Trials that have the same benefit, allowing you to increase the likelihood of something good happening for you significantly. And, yes, you guessed it: item drop rates and quantities are some of those benefits you can acquire.
Thus, through a combination of using Gretel and Snow White in the active party plus triggering suitable Jail Trials in order to improve the item drop rates, I’m significantly more likely to get the drops I need, should I encounter the appropriate monsters. The only thing that I’m not able to manipulate in this scenario is the exact monsters that I encounter with each new battle in the dungeon, but that’s not the end of the world; each successful battle is a little more experience, making my girls even more powerful and more likely to survive the challenges ahead of them.
The dungeon I completed in this session, the City Streets, felt like a significant step up in difficulty from the previous one. This was a fun thing to see, because the City Streets are actually also the first location you visit in the game, so the first couple of floors are filled with very low-level enemies that, by the time you return to them, you can absolutely flatten very easily.
When you get past the areas you’ve been able to access since the outset, though, things get much harder. You encounter similar types of enemies to on the lower floors, but they’re much stronger. They have hard-hitting abilities — many of which can damage the whole party at once — and it becomes important to whittle their numbers down as quickly as possible by exploiting weaknesses. And, because their weaknesses are different to the monsters that inhabited the previous dungeon, in some cases I’ve had to review characters’ equipment to ensure that they’re in a good position to deal the most possible damage.
This is what I meant when I said last time that Mary Skelter 2, like many other modern dungeon crawlers, is all about proper preparation rather than each individual battle necessarily being a strategic challenge. Once your party is set up properly, you can pretty much make use of a “rotation” of abilities between your party members to reliably take down the foes that stand before you — although it is worth noting that the game’s significant “risk versus reward” elements mean that you really do need to keep on your toes a bit.
Probably the most significant of these is the “blood splatter” system, whereby as you damage and defeat enemies, your characters get blood on them, adding to a meter that runs alongside their HP and SP bars. When this meter fills, one of two things happens on their next turn: either they enter Massacre mode, whereby they become more powerful and gain access to some additional, very strong abilities; or they enter Blood Skelter mode, at which point they become even stronger but go berserk, as likely to attack allies as enemies.
The more “corruption” they have acquired, the more likely they are to enter Blood Skelter rather than Massacre. Corruption builds up over time in various ways, and is indicated by how dark their blood splatter meter is. Protagonist Otsuu is able to, with the assistance of Nightmare Jack, “Purge” one or two party members during her turn, though obviously this negates her damage output while she is doing so. On top of that, characters are able to “Lick” another character who has 3/5 blood splatters or more in their meter, which not only empties the meter, it also triggers a character-specific special ability that usually benefits the entire party in some way.
Part of the challenge I was finding with this dungeon was that because I had so many Jail Trials active to manipulate the item drop rate, I wasn’t able to add any that lowered the amount of blood that was being flung around in battle, making Massacre and Blood Skelter significantly more likely to occur. Thus, surviving this dungeon became as much about managing the various characters’ blood splatter meters as it was about defeating enemies quickly and simply surviving their attacks. It certainly kept me on my toes.
At the time of writing, as I say, I still have to finish that sidequest despite having technically “beaten” the dungeon in question now — and, of course, beating said dungeon also means that I’ve unlocked the next tier of sidequests, too, which will inevitably mean more skulking around looking for various things.
I’m having a great time, though. After more than 70 hours with this game, I’m very much attached to the characters, both in terms of their personalities and the role they play in the battle party. I’m looking forward to taking them through their most significant challenges yet in the last two chapters of the game — and I can already feel that beating this game as a whole is going to feel immensely satisfying.
That’s still a way off yet, though, so I guess I need to decide whether Sunday’s “free choice” gaming is going to be spent making more Mary Skelter 2 progress, or on something else…?
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Let me tell you a couple of things about myself — the me that exists as of 23:35, July 27, 2023.
Firstly, I have a brain that, when presented with a sufficient number of options to freely choose between, refuses to make any sort of decision whatsoever and simply shuts down, melting into an unproductive goop and causing me to stare at a wall for a good half hour at least before finally being able to achieve anything. This situation, which is not uncommon, is colloquially referred to as “analysis paralysis”.
Secondly, by extension, this means that if I have clearly demarcated Things To Do At Specific Times, I can generally get on with them without issue. There doesn’t even need to be a hard deadline in place; just a small but manageable list, preferably in rough order of priority, of things to do. I don’t have a problem at work, for example, because a good 95% of the time I have that list to hand, meaning that I have something I can focus on at all times without having to make any sorts of difficult decisions.
Thirdly, there are a lot of video games that I want to play. I mean, technically I want to play everything on my shelves, but at present for the sake of simplicity I’m keeping it to things that I am either actively playing right now, or feel a strong compulsion to play sooner rather than later. Here’s the list:
I want to finish Mary Skelter 2 on Nintendo Switch, and subsequently move on to the remake of Mary Skelter Nightmares that unlocks when you complete that game, and then Mary Skelter Finale. Each of those games are in the region of 100 hours each. I am presently 62 hours into Mary Skelter 2.
I want to start playing Final Fantasy XIV again. When I last left the game, I had finished the Shadowbringers campaign, and was about halfway through the two raid cycles that came between the end of base Shadowbringers and the beginning of Endwalker. At the very least, I want to play to the end of the Endwalker story, but I would also like to be more actively involved in the game as a social event.
I want to play through the entire Trails series. I recently started a replay of Trails in the Sky (I played it a good few years back on PSP) and was having a great time, but also became conscious of my not having finished Mary Skelter 2. For the unfamiliar, the Trails series, to date, consists of three Trails in the Sky games, four Trails of Cold Steel games, Trails to Azure and Trails from Zero as a duology, and most recently, Trails into Reverie. Each game is somewhere in the region of 100 hours apiece. I am presently 5 hours into Trails in the Sky.
I want to spend some time playing the various “simulator” games that I own, as I enjoy them a great deal. There are no specific ones that I want to focus on, but I want to make more time for them generally. Most of these have no real “end” and can be enjoyed fairly casually.
I want to spend some time playing the various retro games I own for classic platforms, as I have a lovely, well-equipped room full of authentic retro hardware that I want to make more use of. Again, I have no specific priorities here; I simply want to make more time for retro gaming generally.
I want to spend some time playing the “smaller-scale” games I have on my shelves, such as indie titles, arcade-style games or games that simply have a deliberately more limited scope or runtime. Yet again, I have no specific priorities here, but I do want to make time for these without feeling like I have to sacrifice something else.
There are other things I could add to the list, but I think that’s probably plenty for now. Hopefully you can see my issue, though. When it comes to the end of the working day or time to get up on a weekend, I am confronted with the question “so what do you want to play?” — and things tend to unfold predictably from here.
I get stricken with the aforementioned analysis paralysis before, after a delay of anywhere from ten minutes to three hours depending on my overall mental state, defaulting to what I deem the “highest priority” of the list above, which is Mary Skelter 2. This is never a bad choice, as I enjoy Mary Skelter 2 a great deal, but occasionally while playing it I feel “guilt” that I’m not spending some time with something else.
So that got me pondering. Would there be value in specifically making time for as many things on the above list as possible? Would there be value in establishing an actual “schedule” for my hobby? It seems ridiculous, right? Video games are a silly, throwaway hobby that you just do if there’s nothing better to do, right? No need to take them seriously enough to make a schedule!
Perhaps once that might have been true — but today, gaming is an all-encompassing hobby in its own right, like film, theatre, music or any of the other arts — or, indeed, any other hobby. And that means that I think there absolutely could be value in organising one’s time a little better… or at all.
If you think about other hobbies, particularly sports, then those often run to a schedule, after all, don’t they? If you’re really into playing football, for example, then you don’t just spend all your time playing football aimlessly — you spend time training specific disciplines, having practice games, bonding with your teammates, playing competitive matches and, just as importantly, having some time off when you need to.
So why shouldn’t one enjoy their gaming time to some sort of schedule? Well, I don’t know. At this exact moment in time, as I type this, I don’t know whether or not one should enjoy their gaming time to some sort of schedule. But that’s what I’m going to attempt to find out over the course of the next week or so.
I’ve devised a “focus” for myself for every day of the week, so that I can concentrate on something specific without feeling guilty that I’m not doing one of the other things on my list. I’ve kept each day’s focus only semi-specific (i.e. I’m not prescribing a specific game) so that there’s some flexibility in there — and, of course, the rest of my life will be fitting around this schedule, too.
I’m starting to go swimming more frequently, for example, so many evenings there will be at least a couple of hours taken up by getting to and from the pool and incompetently performing a rough approximation of breast stroke for an indeterminate period of time. I haven’t specifically scheduled this as yet, though the pool itself has its own schedule that I’m beholden to. That can’t change, so I have to work with that.
So here’s the plan.
On Monday, I play a smaller-scope game or a visual novel. If the game or visual novel in question is longer than can be beaten or appreciated in a single session, I will commit to it and attempt to beat it over the long term, on the condition that I am enjoying it. If I am not enjoying it, I am under no obligation to drag myself through its entirety just to say I’ve done it.
On Tuesday, I will concentrate on simming. Ideally I will pick a single sim and spend a protracted session with it, but I recognise that sometimes I might not know exactly what I’m in the mood for. Again, if I start something and decide I’m not actually in the mood for that after all, I am under no obligation to stick with it and can feel free to switch at any point, within the “simming” group.
On Wednesday, I settle down to make some progress on a “Big Game” — likely Mary Skelter 2, but possibly Trails depending on mood. I am to pick the Big Game to focus on and stick with it for the evening. These are games that I want to make progress with and eventually beat, so this is focused time for working towards that.
On Thursday, I will start playing Final Fantasy XIV again. The game will ideally become as much a weekly social activity as it is a gaming experience to enjoy, but my priority initially is to work through all the story-related stuff I haven’t yet seen.
On Friday, I will devote my time to retro-related pursuits, either retro rereleases on modern platforms (primarily Switch and Evercade) or on the “real hardware” in the dedicated room. Since retro games are often designed to be enjoyed in smaller bursts, I am to feel no guilt at enjoying a number of different games over the course of Friday’s gaming.
On Saturday, I will dedicate some more time to progress on a “Big Game”. Since we rarely do much on Saturdays, this is a good opportunity to make a significant amount of progress with some focused time.
On Sunday, if I have the energy, inclination and inspiration to do so, I will make a video or two, and then leave the remainder of my time as completely “free choice” to close out the week — be it taking the opportunity to make some more progress on a “Big Game”, or winding down with some simple retro stuff.
This may seem strict, particularly to those of you with good self-control and who are not prone to analysis paralysis. And perhaps it is — but that’s partly what this experiment is about. Something’s not quite working for me right now, so I feel like I need to change things up a bit — and I think this will be an interesting approach to try.
I hasten to add that I am not advocating this as an ideal solution to the situation, nor am I suggesting that everyone absolutely must do things the same way I do. Everyone enjoys their hobbies in different ways, after all, and the way you enjoy gaming may well be working for you just fine the way it is.
For me, though, I want to make sure that I take the time to enjoy all the things that I want to enjoy — and I want to be able to do so without feeling misplaced, misguided “guilt” at any point.
So let’s see how this goes for a week, staring Monday. I will chronicle my experiences here on MoeGamer for those curious!
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