Alphadia Genesis, Amnesia: Memories, Analogue: A Hate Story, Anodyne

According to Steam, I have 69 hours of playtime in Alphadia Genesis.  According to the game itself, I finished the true ending at 46 hours.  I think the discrepancy is due, in part, to reloading after deaths, but mostly due to leaving the game on in the background while I did other things.  Since I bought the game for £6.99 in the first place, that's 10-15p per hour of entertainment, which is a pretty good deal considering I buy kindle books for 99p and up, and they generally only take 1-3 hours to read.

The game plays like a classic RPG.  I liked that nothing was truly missable (as far as I can tell), I liked the side quests, the dungeons were fun to explore, all that good stuff.  The biggest weakness was that the story appeared to be written both by and for twelve-year-olds, and the localisation was done by someone with absolutely terrible grammar.  It's really, really badly written, with ridiculous characters, but, while I do list it as a negative, it didn't really ruin the experience for me.  Sure, this isn't a game that really touched me, like Final Fantasies or Shadow Hearts (but, full disclosure, I was a teenager back then, and I might have reacted to this game differently if I'd been a teenager when I first played it), but it was still fun.  It felt really light and fluffy, which surprises me because the first Shadow Hearts game took about the same amount of time to play, and that felt incredibly intense and emotional.

I didn't like that the game window couldn't be resized.  You can play it on mobile, it really didn't need to be taking up 75% of my screen, and looked really weird at that size.  I liked that it had steam achievements, and that they were feasible - as opposed to say, killing 10,000 enemies in Final Fantasy Games, when you'd have to push to hit 2000 in a single play through - but I'd have liked it better if they'd linked more into the post-game content rather than just numerical values.  All of the achievements are based on chests opened, or enemies killed, or steps moved, or gold spent.  How about an achievement to reaching the normal ending and the true ending, or for defeating every battle at the arena, or finishing every quest, or collecting the Nall arena weapons?  You know, something to prompt you into exploring the world more and seeing everything in the game.  On that note, I don't like that there wasn't any kind of hint as to whether the four AGP giving battles actually existed in this edition, or where they could be found.  While I didn't actively search for them, I fought at least 100 battles on the island where the Arch Dragon was supposed to show up (I counted some and estimated) for levelling purposes and didn't see hide nor hair of them.  An achievement for, say, finding all the AGP, or defeating these enemies would have been really helpful there.  I did like that the screen could be zoomed out so you could get a better idea of where things were when exploring dungeons, though I didn't like having to zoom in to spot the AGP.

Now I've finished Alphadia Genesis - see my last few posts - I'm moving down my list of steam games alphabetically, as part of my new year's resolution to actually play the games I own.  The next on the list is Amnesia: Memories, which I played and finished last March.  I enjoyed it, but it was also very intense and emotional, and I'm not sure I'm ready to go through that again.  Since I have already played and completed it, I'm not obligated to do so again, so I'm going to skip it for now.  The same goes for the next game on the list, Analogue: A Hate Story.  I completed it with all achievements back in January 2017, it put me through the emotional wringer, and I'm not ready to have that experience again right now.  That brings us down to Anodyne, a game I bought in the last Steam winter sale.  I think I got it because it was cheap (69p) and on my wishlist, but I honestly can't remember when or why I put it on my wishlist in the first place.  The description on the Steam store page reads; in this unique Zelda-lite game, explore and fight your way through surreal and creepy, nature, urban and abstract themed areas in the human Young's subconscious, evoked by a 16-bit-era visual style and a moody, dream-like soundtrack.  I was never a fan of the Zelda games - nothing against them, it's just the first one I played was 3d and made me motion sick and I never felt like going back and playing the other ones since I'm not a fan of the battle style - but I do like abstract games about the subconscious, so that might be why.  I nearly returned this game because, when I downloaded it about a week ago - knowing it would be the next game to focus on - it got stuck.  It was at 100% and said "finishing download", but never did that.  Trying to delete the game just made steam crash, and it wouldn't let anything else download.  I asked Steam if I could just return it based on that, and they refused because I was a 2 weeks outside of the 2 week return window.  I think that was a bit rough - at the very least, having read about the problem, they could have sent instructions to fix it, even if they weren't willing to remove the game from my account and refund my 69p.  Luckily, in the gap between sending the email and getting the reply, it finished downloading properly.