feotakahari: (Default)
Really, the main question Cassette Beasts, Crystal Project, and Crosscode make me ask is “if you’re gonna make navigating a 3D environment such a big part of your RPG, do you actually need the RPG?” Fighting all these boring trash mobs doesn’t interest me as much as figuring out the convoluted sequence of jumps needed to get to the top of a seemingly unscalable cliff.
feotakahari: (Default)
I was gonna compare and contrast Crosscode and Crystal Project, but I think that needs just one point of variance, and they have two.

One of several things Crosscode discusses is how a good designer creates gameplay, teaching the player to meet each challenge and using it as a springboard for another, harder challenge the player can also meet. “May every step form the path of your growth,” meaning, may you learn from and apply your experiences.

Crystal Project is about how a bad designer fails through an insistence on a single . . . narrative? Path? It’s not exactly “story,” but it’s not exactly challenges like in Crosscode, either. The throughline of the game is to linearly collect each of the crystals, and the Grand Master talks about punishing people for not following his vision. Meanwhile, the world is sprawling and non-linear, and there are a variety of ways to bypass the GM’s obstacles and explore on your own. In effect, the game calls for you to write the narrative yourself. Are you playing as the kind of person who goes after the crystals, or are you playing as the kind of person who sees what’s off the beaten path?

I feel like I could compare and contrast with a game about bad gameplay design or a game about good nonlinear narrative design, but I’m not sure what I would use. I guess Upgrade Complete technically qualifies for the former?
feotakahari: (Default)
I’m playing Crystal Project. After hours of attempts, I almost glitched my way to the top of a seemingly unclimbable tower, but I just couldn’t glitch that last jump and fell to the bottom over and over and over. Turns out you’re supposed to have a golden chocobo before you can climb it. (The game calls them Quintars, but fuck it, they’re chocobos.)

In order to get a golden chocobo, you need to breed an ocean chocobo and a chocobo that hovers when it jumps, and in order to get the ocean chocobo, you need to breed a river chocobo and a desert chocobo, and in order to breed the hovering chocobo . . . Basically, I’m inbreeding my chocobos like they’re the Habsburg dynasty. And a lot of them refuse to fuck any chocobo who hasn’t gotten first place in several chocobo races, so I need to redo the races with various kinds of chocobos, trying to find races that play to their various strengths.

(I still haven’t identified whether the ocean chocobo has a strength.)

And almost all of the races have these jumps where if you fall, you’re off the course completely. The race doesn’t end, but there’s no way for you to get back up without dismounting the chocobo and being disqualified. The other racers will never miss a jump, of course, and you can’t push them off. They can only push you off, because fuck you and your lightweight chocobo. So you have to make every jump perfectly, all in a row, and even when you finally get first place, you have to do it again with the fucking ocean chocobo.

So in order to not have to deal with an infuriating jump that makes me restart whenever I fall, I have to deal with infuriating jumps that make me restart whenever I fall. Whatever’s at the top of the tower cannot be worth this.

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