Grimbeard - Mystic Nights (PS2) - Review
nah nah i'm saying it's like a trope with game review content like the creator just can't reckon with the fact that he doesn't have any adequate reason to cover a certain game other than i don't know clout lack of imagination so they invent some kind of character that forces them to play a game and then they're like oh no not that game anything but that game referring to this notorious game that everybody knows is probably like bad or something maybe they see it on a desk and put spooky music behind it and then they cut back to their face looking horrified might also make a good still to include in the thumbnail i like to think i've avoided most of these pitfalls in my lifespan isn't that right robot dog that i talk to sometimes jesus nothing nothing nothing nothing just nothing to play literally no games not not a one in here [ __ ] ghost town for real for real for real for real for real for real for real for real for real for i mean i've been meaning to get around to this and i'm doing it of my own free will mind you hello play mystic knights or i will shoot you i'm so sorry i thought i emailed you i changed my mind about the uh the premise thank you for your time though i will never mystic knights is a third-person survival horror ancient vampire parasite cloned by a weapon i think maybe game it was developed by n log software and published by sce korea for the playstation 2 in 2005. there's very little information available about this game but my assumption is that this was meant to be officially translated and published worldwide but due to its poor sales and critic response those plans were cancelled so it remains only available in korea i could barely dig up anything about the developer on top of there being a language barrier there isn't much of a paper trail and it seems like they must have merged or changed names a few times in a short period i believe they began as kittenkid.com a website with a number of children's games that did well enough for them following the success of a platformer based on a popular animated film at the time whose name i won't attempt to pronounce but it has something to do with a white dog they attempted to immediately begin work on a sequel to it but a legal dispute over the ip rights got in the way of that and the series continued without them following a sequence of searches i don't remember i stumbled upon some kind of internal power point used by them i guess to show to potential investors within it says that they took on the name enlog or new leader of games in the year 2000 they make vague reference to their platformer game but i'm guessing since they no longer own it they don't name it which i had initially assumed was because it was something shameful and degenerate the first game using the new name was an mmo arcade edutainment game called bubble shooter a game that is impossible to find due to the over saturation of bubble based mobile games and having reached the limits of my interest in finding it after a cursory google search came up with nothing what i do notice is that the character used in its art looks a little familiar but hey i'll never tell in this presentation there is a section devoted to mystic knights displaying some concept art and screenshots much of which were not featured in the final product or were changed substantially what it does illuminate however is how mystic knights was pitched how they hedged their bets on a defining feature and it is of course the one i have no way of showing or discussing with you aside from being a rather straightforward survival horror game in the vein of resident evil or silent hill mystic knights sought to differentiate itself with its multiplayer component a different kind of game unto itself that would unknowingly tap into a genre that would rise in popularity over a decade later wherein several players would traverse a dungeon crawling with enemies and they'd work together to defeat them the twist one of them is an imposter a monster wearing human skin that attempts to kill off the other players without drawing attention to themselves adding a hint of social deduction to survival horror following mystic knights they made a pivot to online games inspired by the success of microtransaction heavy games like maplestory their first foray into that sort of thing was bout or bots of unlimited transformation an mmo about robots fighting computer viruses which was planned to be released for xbox live in 2004 but it would miss that deadline by a few years and wind up on a much less prestigious platform after the american game publisher acclaim went under in 2004 it was briefly resurrected by an ex-executive who revived it as a free-to-play platform for mmos and other games that utilized online multiplayer gameplay called acclaim games this quickly went under due to game developers not receiving adequate pay and there being a persistent issue with cheating something they tried to remedy with invasive anti-cheat software that people had trouble removing from their pcs anyway bout which was renamed bots also with two exclamation points was handed over to acclaim games in late 2006 making it their responsibility to deal with the upkeep and despite complaints about its premium currency allowing players to buy items and upgrades that gave them a severe advantage over players that did not opt in it wound up being one of the most popular games there that is until 2010 when acclaimed games was bought out by plato which was subsequently swallowed into the gaping maw of disney anything after this point becomes blurry at some point they briefly had an mmo rts called darkness and light that was shut down and all but erased from the internet following some kind of legal battle with a publisher and oh my god i don't give a [ __ ] so i get that none of that was interesting and none of it deals with things i would normally ever talk about but i lay out to ask the question what business did these people have making a survival horror game because mystic knights is a bizarre anomaly that i wound up pursuing because i hadn't heard or seen a single thing about it and i know every game except for whole genres that don't interest me which there are numerous i figured i had survival horror down though but here this thing is like it just slipped through the cracks in reality staring me in the face taunting me calling me a son of a [ __ ] a goddamn [ __ ] it just missed the peak of the ps2's survival horror domination and was released right as home console ownership in south korea was becoming increasingly rare and replaced by home pcs too little too late and hardly given a shot to subsist outside the womb for years it existed as video games space junk a neat piece of debris floating in the spaces between thankfully someone found it interesting enough to translate it for the sake of preservation and to perhaps expose others to this strange artifact from another world a world full of exhausted pop stars and films that relish in tonal whiplash expelled by a studio that had never made anything close to a survival horror game and was left so dejected by the experience they decided to by my definitions never make a real game ever again i tend to think of resident evil as like the rosetta stone of survival horror i know there were predecessors that it likely drew from but to me there's a big enough leap between it and say alone in the dark where i'm fine sidestepping it [ __ ] it i'll rewrite history mystic knights presents a much different tone and doesn't entirely tackle any of the themes that resident evil would slowly expand on imperialism capitalism baffling one-liners this is a story about a group of civilians with mysterious backgrounds that are forced to survive together amidst a sci-fi disaster attempting to foster more human drama instead of relatively straightforward horror with a side of commentary to it i don't think it does that very successfully but i can see it doing that i guess it does make slightly more of an attempt to humanize its cast than resident evil but i'm referring to the original one though which i should make clear was made a decade prior to this game and i honestly still would say it's better in every way but it included more of that so i mean i i guess that's still a dub mystic knights opens with a brief cutscene where our protagonist bruce mckellen that's his name receives a letter from his old friend alan but his words suggest there was some bad blood between the two and he becomes more interested when he makes mention of someone named monica allen and bruce used to work together at something called the misr the military institute of strategic research a shadowy government organization that probably isn't working on some kind of benign thing i don't even know what that would be i was gonna say like a nice pen but like like a really nice pick something happened that made bruce leave and now alan's offering him a job at a new facility attaching to the letter a photo of a whale that has seemingly been chomped to death by something larger than it he takes the bait and heads right on over to this ominous looking seaside fortress in part intrigued by the fate of the whale but clearly more concerned with seeing this monika again bruce enters the front door into an elevator that is immediately rocked by an explosion and it plummets to the bottom spitting him out into a sterile metallic labyrinth of labs and offices full of bizarre machinery and blood-spattered medical instruments clearly some kind of disaster occurred down here and he's soon confronted by strange biomechanical monsters there isn't a ton of internal monologue or anything giving insight to bruce's thoughts so the full extent of his reaction to this situation is his expression upon seeing them for the first time he quickly adjusts and becomes a killing machine taking out dozens of these things despite his background presumably being one of science i mean using anime logic i know he doesn't look like your average lab guy but deep beneath that physique and flawless hair i know what he is he's a little nerd boy he's a little fortnite gamer still ignorant to how deep this maze descends bruce eventually stumbles on a woman named jennifer passed out on the floor he momentarily becomes confused thinking she was monica but stifles that unfortunately she isn't much use in shedding light on what's going on she lost her memory and doesn't have any idea what's going on here or where here is even or why here was allowed to make this an appropriate uniform i bet if you ask the dude that drew this why those are there he has that reason ready to go i mean you got it you got to have your bases covered no no no no see that's like a tactical nipple if any of yous gets in a pinch you can just press them both at the same time and your parachute flies out your back scoots you right into hr's office assuming she must be shaken up or injured bruce instructs jennifer to stay put while he scouts the rest of this floor as we shoot and slice our way through rapidly respawning creatures we find vague diary entries and interoffice communications that hint at what caused all of this experiments with cell regeneration engineered cells that can be introduced to a human body where they will multiply at will in theory making the host immortal some make the shocking observation that this may have adverse effects on human dna which is a chill way of saying it will turn you into a table with a prehensile tongue bruce clears the way for jennifer to hole up in a stairwell that seems safe and there they meet two new characters an misr security guard named jane blair and a scientist named dr john nielsen they had also been wandering around the building thinking themselves the sole survivors of the disaster from their perspective they were working like normal at a lower clearance and following an explosion and power loss everyone seemed to disappear replaced by monsters the explosion triggered an emergency quarantine locking all exits save for a tunnel at the lowest basement level the plot seems to follow this format this repetitive cycle where you move survivors to a new location have a moment where we plan out the next step bruce takes it upon himself to explore the surrounding area unlocking doors booting up power generators and killing monsters until he reaches the next safe area to transfer the survivors there is however this somewhat dissonant jrpg logic where other characters will do things that in reality you would have noticed but since they aren't represented on the screen other than when they're in the safe house it makes it seem like they just teleport places for absurdiological reasons this first happens when bruce sees some more survivors being attacked on i guess the only working monitor in this building and he rushes off to go help them but as soon as he steps foot outside the safe house jane calls him on the watch phone she gave him earlier screaming for help but like what trouble could she have gotten into in the two seconds i've been on the other side of the door oh she's not even in there anymore she's in a room ahead of me you just have to set aside the spatial reasoning of how i could be in the same room with jane step outside and she's already being attacked by monsters in a room ahead of me like would she shove me out of the way to run into a mob of nurses however this happened it results in jane being mortally wounded and requiring some kind of experimental stimulant to survive while trying to hunt it down we find more hints at what these mad scientists were up to and in keeping with just about every survival horror game set in a lab it is you guessed it something to do with a failed super soldier program the weird thing is while i was still rolling my eyes at this development they dropped another wrinkle that is infinitely more interesting but even more vague and less important they've apparently discovered a new kind of metal that they of course used to make a fantasy axe you'd find in some kind of mall gift shop we also learn about something called project ancient where something is implanted into humans but all testing for this found that the implant was rejected to remedy this clones were produced that did not reject the implant i do appreciate the abundance of notes and diary entries defined amongst the exposition just little news articles or epitaphs you know it's coming i can hear it right outside the door ooh yay hey wait a second here now because without those there isn't much in the way of storytelling dialogue is pretty minimal and there isn't any environmental storytelling either because everything looks the god damn same i mean i guess we could break here for spoilers if you want to seek out and experience this game and its plot for yourself this seems like a random spot because there aren't many well-defined story beats it's one of those games where stuff just kind of happens in a linear sequence and you just gotta deal with it i guess bruce gets jane her stimulant and it looks like she's gonna pull through and later finally tracks down the survivors he saw on the monitor thus we add researchers kelly henry and frank to our ranks this is the first scene where they use a term that will be repeated throughout the game that is maybe a translation error or maybe just a strange creative choice but when bruce asks one of them what they were running from this guy says didn't you see the vampire so look i'm trying to like this game i'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt i see them making moves i see them doing stuff and i want to think that there is some deeper reasoning for how muddled it's been why i simply can't keep track of what the point of anything here is but hearing the researchers that work here called the monsters we've been fighting this whole time vampires was disorienting to say the least bruce logically says huh those monsters and he confirms yes they're vampires well actually kelly interjects their mutants the result of human experimentation to which bruce unchanged in his understanding thinks turning human beings into monsters but when i talk to kelly again she [ __ ] tells me those monsters are vampires so can you pick a [ __ ] lane kelly talking to frank reveals that he had planned to retire tomorrow and live a peaceful life which i think most people consuming media immediately read as hello i will be the first to die this scene is also where i learned the importance of talking to every character and exhausting all their dialogue options until they loop if you talk to henry the first thing out of his mouth is kelly knows more than i do she's the head researcher's assistant which i took to mean i don't have much info for you talk to kelly but if you talk to him a few more times he gives you the key for the next area so you could be stuck wandering back and forth trying to find the key because this guy didn't immediately elect to proffer it up to the one guy willing to clear a path to safety after a few more location transfers bruce and the growing group of survivors find an emergency shelter room to take refuge in everyone's a little banged up jane is still injured and now two others are showing symptoms of some kind of illness combined with a report that suggests the vampires infect humans by vampire larva tracking their heat signature and imperceptibly entering them it doesn't bode well for the gang the scientists here have developed a chemical that would make this process easier for the larva a gas called prism that they either unintentionally or intentionally released on their own likely causing nearly everyone here to become monsters jane calls bruce back to the sanctuary because frank has died mysteriously murdered perhaps because everyone was asleep at the time they don't know who to blame for it except for kelly who was the one that found the body in the next area a vampire larva emerges from an air vent and attacks the group but bruce kills it henry explains that these must have been implanted in humans altering their dna and turning them all into tables or motorcycles and likely just covering her ass kelly throws out hey now that you mention it i think i seen one of these things by frank's body yeah that's it this must have been what killed him so even if that was true i'd imagine you'd want to notify the rest of the survivors if a giant alien bug was in the room just something to consider for later kelly while looking for a suitable place to transfer them once again bruce is attacked by a new evolution of the vampires but is saved by two more characters guard captain michael isaac and the very guy that led to bruce coming here at all alan despite seeming pleased to see bruce you can tell there is some animosity between the two one of the first things bruce thinks to grill him about is monica the woman mentioned in the letter but he says that she isn't in the lab but she did leave him a note in it she expresses regret for some kind of wrong she and alan committed and says that she misses him we then get one of a few expository flashbacks we see bruce monica and alan having fun with science together at science school maybe the three were friends but it was clear that bruce and monica had a special more intimate bond and you know this was a long time ago because it was back in sepia tone times alan helps bruce restore power to this level but when they reach the next safe area bruce collapses into another expository memory in this one allen presents the results of a study and is lauded for it garnering fame and success a study that he stole from bruce's thesis as if that wasn't bad enough monica then grew distant with him and started giving her affection to alan he implies that he had every opportunity to expose allen for the fraud he was but he didn't because it would indirectly hurt monica she was all that matter to him so he just grid his teeth and pretended nothing was wrong eddie you went to their wedding bruce that's exactly what i would have done just be a passive-aggressive [ __ ] the whole time when bruce wakes up michael is dead found in much the same state that frank was alan reveals that he knows a lot more about the vampires than he initially led on suggesting that one of them may be infected the vampire larva can embed themselves in someone's spine and after 30 minutes there is no visible sign of infection but the host will begin to act erratically and even become violent there is thankfully a detector a device that can scan them for vampire infection bruce asks alan to watch over the survivors and heads off to find the detector coming across a letter that expands on the vampire's origins 25 years ago this lab was a military radar station that discovered a network of ruins beneath this spot within them they found a creature they dubbed ancient it's this creature's dna that was used in the bioweapon projects allen expands on this bringing up the picture of the whale he sent bruce a guinea pig for a large bio weapon they developed called kaiser created from the larva they discovered while working on project ancient on top of being just a big [ __ ] monster guy its dna has proved capable of curing most human diseases but as the creature continued to grow they lost control of it allen wants to control it and use it to benefit the world but everyone else's priority is just to leave at the detector everyone gets scanned and then waits for the results there is some attempt at a the thing like paranoic atmosphere where everyone is suspicious of the other and nervously trying to appear as non-infected as possible but it's a concept that sorta resolves itself within this one scene the results come in and it looks pretty definitive that henry has been infected by the vampire larva which he does not take well not even willing to humor the idea of finding a cure and guilt-ridden for unknowingly killing two of the other survivors he produces a gun from somewhere and shoots himself morale is low among the survivors but nobody else is infected so they press on towards the exit some more documents suggest that kaiser may have been telepathically linked to the ancient explaining why it began to disobey them and become aggressive after this discovery the ministry of defense to create that project ancient be shut down but since they were having trouble figuring out a way to kill it they pretty much just sealed it away and continued to poke at it in secret deeper into the labs the sterile halls begin to become more bio-organic i i'm not too sure why these lower levels look like this could have something to do with these areas being powered by the larva i guess they figured out that certain strains of them could be used like a powerful battery and now they've just become assimilated with every surface in this place and once again a character has teleported ahead of you blindly wandering into danger jennifer is locked into a room full of monsters and bruce has to shoot down these living doors to get to her after rescuing her she says she was hoping a walk would jog my memory she hasn't really been relevant in a while so i totally forgot that her whole thing was she had amnesia and maybe that's still affecting her because she seems to forget that they are in a demon lab crawling with vampires and that she's an unarmed dumb dumb allen catches up to you to inform you that both jennifer and kelly went missing so kelly is still unaccounted for and bruce runs off to track her down but instead finds monica floating in some kind of chemical tube he's understandably furious with alan that he allowed her to be a part of their experiments allen justifies this by claiming that monica was terminally ill when they all met and even when they married she was not long for this world he stole bruce's research in order to find a cure and save her allen began treating her with the vampire dna which did succeed in prolonging her life but eventually the disease progressed too far so he took more drastic measures injecting her with a larva with almost comedic timing he assures bruce that she's alive and well come take a look go on it say hi monica tell him you're okay okay i swear then it's never happened before this creature makes a dive for bruce but jane jumps in its path sacrificing herself to protect him after bruce defeats the transformed vampire monika there is a surprisingly touching scene where she reverts back to her human form for a moment and they share some words she's glad they got to see each other one last time before dying she says bruce don't ever forget me which is a weird and heavy thing to put on someone actively grieving your death but okay go off dead queen don't ever forget me live with this trauma forever wow it's so sad i mean after all this oh well back to it i guess how about we take five right we can take a five get a little dixie cup full of oh water was easy i'll press start after they get separated for a while everyone meets up again to find that dr nielsen is dead so once again one of them may be infected and again someone immediately blames kelly for being found next to the body this time it's alan at this point i'm not sure how exactly we're meant to feel about alan some of this i'm just guessing while trying to parse through its translation but i think we're supposed to be unsure of his motives on one hand he has somewhat been humanized after revealing his reasoning for stealing bruce's thesis for stealing bruce's thesis for stealing bruce's thesis for stealing bruce's thesis and for testing the vampire dna on monica but he also doesn't seem all that shaken up when she dies in bruce's arms on top of that he expresses a general coldness to everyone around him detached from the severity of it all also some notes suggest that the true reason for monica's testing was to implant her with the ability to control kaiser but that for whatever reason the transplant would only successfully take if the host was void of emotion and had an inhuman tolerance for pain something they seem to easily correct by creating a clone as suspicious as kelly may be if you remember back to when we first met jennifer bruce was momentarily convinced that she was monika it could be something the now drastically cut down group of survivors make their way to the penultimate basement level of the lab kelly becomes frustrated that alan seems to just remember important details about what goes on here showing that he's been playing dumb for much of their time together he reveals some of the cruel unethical things that went down on level b7 experiments using not just corpses but the living prisoners and transients after listening to his explanation kelly once again runs off on her own this time we just sort of find her dead with little fanfare time's passage in this game feels so odd like she just ran off and we walked to this room and she's already like weeks dead reading her diary we learned that she was not really an employee she was a reporter investigating some of the facility's disappearing staff with only two survivors left the options as to who the killer has been have become binary but this is also where the plot decides to become near incomprehensible to me in part because of the wonky sci-fi logic and of course due to the well-done but still slightly suspicious translation yeah actually i'm sure it's fine i'm just like that can't really be what's happening most of the time this can't be the words you meant to write here right so if i understood this correctly which i don't i simply cannot in an attempt to control kaiser ancient vampire dna was given to alan but since the original ancient carried both male and female genes you'd need a male and female human with ancient vampire dna working in tandem by fusing together somehow to control the kaiser i guess they it's kind of like a it's kind of like the way you need to control a jaeger i guess they figured out how to do this but for reasons not explained women don't take well to this process and become sporadic and violent which is i mean okay all right let's write that then sure whatever all this to say that jennifer is alan's female ancient vampire counterpart thus making her the killer this whole time but unknowingly to some degree i guess jennifer made herself forget about this to protect her humanity but upon remembering that she's a female allen the two of them turn into orbs and explode there's a lot suggesting that jennifer is a clone of monica but i don't think they definitively state that and if alan says she is his counterpart would that not make her some kind of female clone based on his dna but bruce does comment on how much she looks like monica but monica is also blonde and jennifer's not her hair looks more like allen's also wouldn't alan need to be a clone as well or is it just enough that he's kind of a sociopath aside from his affinity for monica but what about elsewhere in a boss arena a vampirically transformed allen and jennifer fight each other and bruce is given the option to help one of them if you choose to help jennifer defeat allen this is unfortunately the darker path to go down because jennifer is like feral now and she just turns her wrath on you forcing you to kill both of them and then face kaiser alone if you help alan defeat jennifer he's still mortally wounded but in his last moments he gives bruce an experimental cell division device called tomcat that would weaken kaiser and make it vulnerable i guess now that the person he was trying to save is dead already he has lost interest in establishing cures for all known diseases even in death alan can't help but villainously stroke his chin no helen don't die i bet you'd like that wouldn't you so predictable bruce is able to defeat the bioweapon which triggers more explosions in the institute as he makes his escape while being picked up by the military bruce says he'll never forget this mystic knight which is probably the most confounding title drop i can think of that is far from the phrase i'd use to describe what we just went through i i guess he could be in shock because this is tantamount to him saying wow so that was kind of wild right you know what i mean this guy gets it this guy gets it this guy knows what i'm [ __ ] talking about there's a lot working against my basic understanding of this game's plot but if i've absorbed enough of it correctly i think there's a spark of a neat idea here it's just suffocated under the weight of mediocre choices and a disinterest in explaining itself offering this drip feed of expository documents that are usually less than a paragraph and occasionally contradict each other or just repeat themselves i can't get a good read on its intention but a lot of it comes off so perfunctory as though the game already existed as it does just with no text and then someone was brought in to try and transplant a plot into it and i and i just feel like it doesn't strive for anything it doesn't aspire to be much else than another game in a recognizable genre the thing that i think works is the emotional core to it the fractured friendship between bruce allen and monica the love triangle and the stolen research that's the human part that i understand i've lived enough to empathize with feeling betrayed by someone you once thought a friend or missing out on an opportunity to have something more with another person holding on to that sorrow for an unhealthy span of time i i could have done with that being more prevalent within the moment-to-moment plot and maybe that could mirror things happening within the struggle for survival scenario add more of a psychological element into the mix but the amount of content actually devoted to it is small much of what actually happens in this game is characters yell each other's names at each other as they get picked off one by one please most of the other themes and plot points here are a bunch of bland sci-fi ideas smeared onto a palette until it's become beige and unremarkable there's cloning bio weapons gene manipulation super soldier programs and none of that is presented or repackaged in all that unique a form it's only in recounting it do i realize how repetitive it is how many times it just does the same thing over again and expects you to care you think i actually remember these [ __ ] names no i only know because i'm looking at the footage right now how could i forget such great pseudo-american names as veki kitten buster mack dwayne bernie corbin and vince vaughn on a base level i like the premise of this game guy gets a letter from an estranged friend to visit a clandestine research institute upon entering it you are trapped inside and faced with the results of illegal genetic experiments and he also has to confront this part of his past that's burdened him that's a solid framework on which to do something interesting it's just that they never really got around to that part there was one brief shining moment where i thought the game was going to establish this theme of paranoia where you're constantly doubting the survivor's motives with one of them hiding their dangerous infection and there would be a bunch of infighting between them leading to violence and chaos and darkness and demonstration but then that resolves itself as soon as it's brought up however there are a ton of games that i think still manage to linger in my mind because of some feat of atmosphere or clever subversion of a trope but i wouldn't say this does much of that either there is something to a labyrinthine web of grimy labs abandoned left bloodied and partially consumed by alien flesh but i also don't feel like a substantial effort was made to make the game eerie or unsettling or even to differentiate any part of this place from another part of it i've now been stuck here two hours trying to think of a complimentary note to go out on so for the sake of my own well-being i'm just going to head out gonna walk to the store you want anything what flavor mixed together really you sly devil sounds weird but your funeral all right be right back mystic knights has observed other video games it's watched them from afar binoculars in hand taking mental note of how they operate and it's done its darndest to render what it's witnessed onto a disc if you've played an early survival horror game you should have some idea of how they tend to operate limited supplies sparse puzzles usually of the item-based variety tense if a little awkward combat and tank controls i don't have a thesis written on how accurate that is these are just the things that come to mind when i think about what i would like in my survival horror game i want to feel worried for my safety but not helpless i have a chance if i conserve resources and choose my fights wisely i would say that mystic knights achieves one of those requirements in that you will come across one or two item-based puzzles actually if i could just back up to the first moment you are handed control of bruce the controls are off-putting because you do sort of follow tank control logic but you also can't control him using the d-pad in fact the d-pad is functionally useless i think it only ever had a function in the multiplayer component and was used to emote things but in the main game it is useless and you control bruce with the left analog stick while you control the camera with the right though its range of movement is limited the thing that makes this weird is that even without fixed camera angles and things that some found antiquated about other survival horror games it still feels janky and grants you less mobility and control than those even though you could move the camera around with you it has this odd quirk where it tries to help you out when you turn a corner by automatically taking control of your camera and moving it around so you're looking straight ahead again i guess it is considerate but it's mostly disorienting that you have complete control of it and then suddenly the camera has decided to do its own thing like an extreme form of joy-con drift when you aim your weapon it seems to lock into these set directions as though you were using the d-pad but you can't use the d-pad you also can't aim up or down you're either pointing at the thing in front of you or you're not and sometimes that slim cone of damage feels hard to determine this led to a lot of wasted ammo as i tried to find the way i could position myself to hit an enemy frustrating as this was don't worry about wasting ammo because you're going to get a lot of it healing items as well enemies almost always drop something and they also respawn pretty quickly so nearly every room with enemies in it can provide a generous spread of supplies if you just keep leaving and returning also there is no reload button so you have to reload in the middle of combat and you cannot move while this animation is happening the only saving grace there is that if you're hit while reloading it usually just accepts that you reloaded you also need to kill enemies so your weapons gain experience i don't really know how that's justified in lore but killing enemies gives your equipped weapon xp and eventually it will level up becoming stronger and every three or so levels it will upgrade to a new version of the weapon complete with a makeover it's bizarre you literally just use a gun enough times that it evolves into a different gun i think they may have actually tried to explain this with a document you find about a new kind of metal that was discovered like maybe i'm assigning something interesting to this completely dumb [ __ ] mechanic when that's all it is but i think the guns might be some kind of living metal that actually grows and changes with use like a gun pokemon which i'm surprised they haven't done yet they did a refrigerator and a keyring before they thought about gun if you upgrade the sword enough times it looks like it develops in eyeball or something so i mean maybe maybe this is interesting that's how i feel about most of this game maybe it's interesting this was something i had to work out on my own because i don't have a manual for this game maybe maybe someone has scanned it but then it would still be in korean and i'd have to use a janky app to read it i couldn't find any walkthroughs posted that would explain the basics of how you should be playing mystic knights so if you decide to play this out of morbid curiosity there is a point around the first boss where i think it's just universally understood that you should probably do something really tedious and laborious for a good three maybe four hours not watching a dcu film but grinding just get it out of the way in one go because if if you face the first boss after putting in a normal human amount of effort all your weapons will only take the faintest sliver of health from him and you'll probably wind up like i did exhausting my once infinite seeming supply of bullets barely dropping him to half health dying simply because there was nothing else i could throw at him so yeah just take a few hours killing the same groups of enemies over and over again at least until you have the third evolution of your pistol and sword i thought i was going insane trying to figure out how to get through this area like i had stumbled upon some gamer conspiracy an elaborate cover-up to prevent me from finishing it as every playthrough i could find of this area uniformly edited their gameplay in such a way that they reach this point and then there's suddenly an edit where they without explanation have completely different weaponry that makes short work of the boss there was no explanation for it in the description or the comments what are they trying to hide why are they afraid to answer a few questions eventually i accidentally evolved my sword and put together that the weapons change at higher levels and the edit must have been them cutting out grinding because that would have been boring to watch it's also very boring to play it's really odd how you only ever find yourself starved for items and stuck with cheap weapons when you try to avoid enemies and play it safe but the game is actually much easier if you just kill everything every time you come across it needless to say this kind of [ __ ] with the whole philosophy of survival horror as you're not really struggling to survive you have an infinite font of ammo and medkits so much so that by the time i finished the game i had never even used my stack of 30 plus large med kits i would just use the small ones that drop frequently there isn't really any skill required for combat most enemies are complete bullet sponges that you'll need to empty a full mag into before they go down some of them have an attack pattern that is difficult to avoid and you may get locked into some kind of animation that lasts a little too long where you get your ass kicked but there isn't much danger in that when i can just heal myself with my endless stack of med kits because there isn't much to combat aside from shooting or swinging in the same combo no dodging or strict timing to any of it it created this annoying combination with also just being able to heal yourself endlessly inducing this strange fatalist frustration in me i kept getting to this place where i just let myself get near death he's like what is the [ __ ] matter they're just gonna keep hitting me over and over as i make the same grunt just why even let it go on why do i continue to play their game and then at the last possible minute i'd relent well i guess if i made it this far it's not my time yet and i'll just heal myself it's kind of like that part in true detective season 2 where that dude just turns the lights out on his motorcycle so he can feel something that's how this korean video game for the playstation 2 made me feel the only times i died were because i had sort of zoned out and didn't notice i was dying i have no advice on how to better enjoy the boss fights where they just stand still while you pump light into them so there's very little about the gameplay that works for me everything that could count for a win has something that diminishes it in some way it's got a really well done metroidvania esque map that you can even turn on while playing which is really neat and helpful but the game doesn't often reward you for exploring so really i just use it so i don't have to memorize the maze-like floors of the institute i do like the idea of your weapons getting progressively more badass looking but to get there you have to lose sight of reality move beyond realms leave your body and let it act out this monotonous routine while sparing your sanity for a moment i thought there was going to be some substantial additional content to explore after i finish the game because you can play it as different characters but i think this literally just replaces your character model and the game then plays out identically meaning even though i chose jane's character model i still sound like bruce and everyone calls me bruce they do add the ability to transform into a monster mode that upgrades like your weapons but you know i didn't need it the first time around and i don't think there will be a second time around there is plenty in mystic nights that looks era appropriate i imagine if you saw contextless screenshots of this game it would look like a legit maybe a final fantasy spin-off or something but a proper game this looks like a game you could walk into your local game dispensary and purchase for several gold coins i remember little of the customs of the outside world perhaps one could barter for it exchange a pocket watch or some bobble bearing the king's emblem i think what reveals this game's limitations and reveals how hollow it can be is just seeing any part of it in motion it's hard to ignore how lazy the environmental design is consisting of one or two metal hallway textures just tiled into infinity maybe that will be interrupted by a warning sign or something but it all blurs together this happens to an almost comedic effect when they reuse tiles that have a sort of unique surface that you'd think would only exist on one wall like one that has i don't wanna die scrawled in blood but you find several identical walls just like it as if even in death they just couldn't find an original bone in their body inside the lab rooms you'll find recycled machinery or readouts all of which you cannot interact with or look at they are just static obstacles there to make a room feel less empty which somehow makes them feel cosmically barren i do like what they're going for with creature design it's got a very clear geeker-esque aesthetic it's biological it's sexual and mechanical as well which doesn't make the slightest bit of sense considering they are supposed to be vampires i mean i do have to hand it to them it is pretty original to put a flesh motorcycle in a game and call it a vampire that in this world a man could be minding his own business a giant mosquito monster flies up to him embeds itself in his spine painlessly and imperceptibly and then at some point he becomes a motorcycle there isn't much of a variety to them at a certain point they do that thing a lot of older games did where they denote that an enemy is stronger by changing its color i do find the ones that remain folded up on the ceiling until you walk past them creepy in concept but i think more enemies should be based on vehicles and furniture let's just put some wheels on it why not the other npcs are not bad they're detailed and designed in such a way that reminds me of how i draw characters in my youth just badass and tactical entirely for form and not function during cut scenes each character gets a portrait image while they're talking which would have made this game really easy to localize elsewhere that's probably why it's so playable even fan translated most of the text in the environment is also already in english and also not important or relevant to anything so the main system was broke all right let's hope they fix it everything except for the names of the areas you enter is english that might have been helpful to be honest oh look i'm in the larva zero beep there is nothing about alan or jane's design that makes any kind of sense as a uniform or even just casual lab where i gotta admit i was worried when early on jane was attacked and suddenly her portrait art changed to this i was like oh what have i started playing here is this a game i gotta finish off camera but it was substantially less horny following that i don't know what the deal with that was on second thought because they don't even commit to that chest damage when her outfit is torn on her actual character model they just gave her outfit like a cleavage window and not the claw marks as though it were designed that way but then when you meet up with her later it has just redesigned itself into the first iteration i mean is this interesting i don't really have any issue with the ui or map it's not great but it taps into a design sense that i hold a lot of nostalgia for i have this secret love for chunky item models spinning around endlessly i don't know what it is but it's good and i like when things go spin as far as the sound department there was one game that came to mind a lot while playing this i kept detecting notes of deadly premonition in that i also wouldn't be surprised if this game's sound design was just outsourced to someone with access to some kind of royalty-free sound library there's a lot of sounds that are just a bit too familiar and when they're not they just sound bad like every sound effect is just not the sound it should be but what was available and because enemies are so bullet absorbent you're gonna hear a lot of just a lot of that and it was hard for me not to fixate on the fact that the shooting animation and sound sometimes didn't quite sync up or maybe it's just that the game didn't account for you shooting so quickly and you'd have a few shots that just don't get a sound the music seems to have two modes one of which i like and the other i don't the one i do like is clearly taking inspiration from the silent hill games and by extension twin peaks it's a little jazzy a little spooky in that loungy mysterious kind of way and every now and then it will dig deeper into that well and become more ambient and make a legitimate attempt at being unsettling it's a shame that it hasn't been ripped and posted anywhere yet because it's not bad at all the other soundtrack mode belongs to the tracks used during cutscenes or boss fights that are more reminiscent of pretty generic rpg soundtracks it seems like placeholder exciting fantasy music.wave like somewhere on the internet it is available and named exactly that
there's just such a duality to everything in mystic knights i've been in my liking games arc for so long that the moment i have negative thoughts i fight them so now i gotta either focus on the good or just embrace my dark arc you know what i mean no i'll try to be strictly complementary from here on out and i wouldn't really know how to criticize the voice acting because i have no frame of reference for korean so for all i know the voice acting could be goofy and over the top but i'd have no idea the only thing i can really comment on is that it sounds like they're emoting a lot they got passion for sure so much so that it peaks the mic on occasion oh no the dark arc has begun welcome to the twisted darkness inside my mind are you ready gamers i went into mystic nights assuming it wouldn't be spectacular but willing to have my expectations subverted they were not however i'm glad i got to experience this game it's always neat finding an artifact from an era whence i enjoyed many formative gaming experiences i don't know why i wrote that that way the simple novelty of its existence will have to stand in place for a compelling narrative memorable characters satisfying gameplay or creative game design i can see some distant vision of an interesting game here in its monsters its bleak tone and the feeling of a descent diving deeper and deeper into the depravity of mankind's experimentation with an unruly power but a month from now i know that the only memory that will stick with me is standing in a hallway that looks like every other hallway in the game rhythmically swinging my sword to kill a motorcycle so my sword will grow honestly in looking back i think if this game had come out in the us right on time 2005 the same year as two of my favorite games i doubt i would have been all that interested in it maybe in part because it was billed as a survival horror game but if i had seen some screenshots or some gameplay i'd pretty quickly put together that this does not meet the elusive and hypocritical requirement for what i'd call a good game it's the sad possibility of my fascination with games that have been abandoned games with dead owners or just deadbeat owners there is always that cold possibility that they were left homeless for a reason that it was just a problem child with a soulless look in its eyes it just it just it just doesn't try for anything it doesn't take a swing it kept reminding me of another game i made a video on called ring terrors realm which is not a good game by any stretch of the imagination but after playing this i feel like terra's realm took a swing it tried to do a thing and boy it failed miserably either due to incompetence or just lack of time and resources and i respect that failure more so than a game that just wants to meet some minimum requirement of game and be shuffled among other better games like a vampire imposter in that video i say something to the extent of the ring knows what it's copying well enough to behave like a competent survival horror game it understands the base elements that should be there it just wasn't particularly good at holding them together even with the help of a popular ip to play with mystic knights fails similarly but less spectacularly any enjoyment you could get out of terror's realm would be from the way it goes dumb in a big way it it feels like you're playing a disaster of some kind but mystic knights manages to both fail and remain uninteresting for most of the playthrough it would be like watching an e3 event and they don't do anything horrendously cringe and you're just waiting for them to [ __ ] up in some way and they don't which is i think why at least 70 percent of the people watching it are watching it you ever wonder what the bottom of an avatar shoe looks like well bam there it is i'll never get to experience its multiplayer but i wouldn't be surprised if that was the main focus of development and what made it worth the purchase with its single-player campaign existing as a supplement because that is the golden idea of mystic knights the idea that i don't get to see that's the novel thing that where circumstances different could have given it more recognition if it was good which it probably wasn't based on the rest of it hello now you know what true suffering is you [ __ ] but because of the game i mean it was fine there's just better things i could be doing with my time i guess death to all who oppose me also i thought i made it clear that the deal was off like we're not doing this bit anymore say your prayers are you threatening me yes don't threaten me when i'm in my dark ark or else you'll find out how truly dark and twisted my thoughts are how disturbed you think you've done anything as totally twisted and deranged as me i destroyed the federal government oh [ __ ] well that's kind of based i haven't slept i'm sweating the video is over thank you for watching it if you'd like to support the channel you can subscribe to it you can like it or like the videos on it and comment on them as well you can also become a patron and join my discord and follow me on twitter i also have some merch you can buy i i'm actually drinking coffee out of this new black mug that has the logo on it uh it's not the best printing job in the world i'll tell you that much but it's a mug i just make a doodle and then i ship the doodle off hope you enjoyed the video i just want you to know i'm not like an angry video gamer man sometimes there's a time and place to poke a little fun at a game that's not all the time we're allowed to like games around here hey you know every once in a while there's a game that comes along where the the likelihood that somebody who worked on it seeing this is so uh distant to me that uh i'm just like [ __ ] it anyway thank you for watching the video and an extra special thanks to ayling uncle two password for kids again dean alex alex alex alex alex alex alex alex alex raymond alexander smith andre perkins aparts 89 bayard brown ben carnell benjamin cid perez d sky dalton danny dkp kilpatrick daphne pittentry dark raptor 86 the illuminati diesel dizzle dr beer das days edgy edward avila fart mother game master gaming with clark tarp gamma gm jarrod gotti mcgork gorey mundra i fall asleep to the sound of saturn astral projecting inside the vortex wandering in search of the machine it must be sealed i i don't know what that is there's tool lyric j al amin joseph zanoni carrot kamikaze melon leon hooks lizzitar lore marcus chaney michael schmidt morgan harper neck out the brave octo oysteo phillip wooley rahul kirthi richard gillespie roland salvatortasti snapplefish this deal is getting better all the time turts zack bishop crashpunk daniel streb katherine graven swood operator a hanging chad bang flang brady the sanity tax collector brosuf jones cantankerous dubs high food court i confidently told potential housemates that i paint orc goths if i were to talk about the saddle creek sound no go ishanji madmonte98 di trius nafeez hook ophelia fish wife p dizzle persian air please stop treating player agency as a negative leaning left right manually isn't a [ __ ] cover system it's basic movement robert brandon samuel ward simon daniel sugar wolf technica 10 beat that uninformed guy the brunette girl from abba where am i help 410 billion 757 million eight hundred and sixty four thousand five hundred and thirty gay cops agitated on to anally assault your alistar stewart alexander oldbrick ali g all the nope andrew light atari steed auspicious whiskers beetles guy ben and cara dowling bishi93 biv dub brandon mcfadden red weaver colby cult of leda dan cullen david frommkey david harpstreit dazed clockwork dongs.exe yuelino seven fix my brain garrett garrett squared general clizarro haley bobella hitoshi-san jake desi jake raynor jimmy changa june choi jordan balzano joshua david j raptor captain ketchup leopold gloom m mandalore gaming marauding fraud max cohen
2022-08-09 04:54
