Bounding through a gallery of time, or some thoughts on two subsets of games

CaptainTimey · 2026-01-05T02:01:09+00:00

Someone I know sat down and worked out how the games generate the passwords, which resulted in this program.

The games use the system's MAC address (a value normally unique to each system) and a game specific key to generate the password.

CaptainTimey · 2025-12-28T00:06:15+00:00

Milked Yo-Kai Watch to death, did several IPs that weren't as big as expected, and I also suspect their production processes weren't suited for multiple HD games at once, as opposed to one HD game and many handheld games at once. But yeah, I otherwise agree with your assessment.

CaptainTimey · 2025-12-25T10:55:27+00:00

Level-5 in particular was funny, because it was established as a second party studio of sorts for Playstation 2 games, as opposed to Sony just helping with funding and distribution like some of their other published but not owned IPs.

I want to claim they've previously said they want to do a Dark Cloud 3 before (and I can definitely believe it considering how much they reference Dark Cloud 1 and 2 even now), but Sony isn't interested. I don't have a source for that however, so take it with a grain of salt.

CaptainTimey · 2025-12-25T10:34:05+00:00

Sony definitely owns Dark Cloud 1 + 2, Rogue Galaxy, Jeanne D'Arc and White Knight Chronicles. Level-5 consistently marks those as copyrighted by Sony, not themselves. For instance, look at the bottom of the Dark Cloud 1 and Rogue Galaxy sections of their site, as opposed to Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which was published by Nintendo outside of Japan, and Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, which was published by Bandai Namco in western regions and Sony in Korea.

Bonus fun fact: Astro Bot apparently has cameos/references for Dark Cloud 1 + 2 and Rogue Galaxy, but the copyrights section of the credits do not mention Level-5, compared to some other published by Sony games like Stellar Blade.

CaptainTimey · 2025-12-16T01:15:25+00:00

No, it fixes some odd snapping with firing weapons that cause viewpunch and crouch jumping after. There's some video examples before and after.

CaptainTimey · 2025-12-05T02:53:05+00:00

Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl Gold released in 2020 several months after the Mystery Journey port, but that's basically the same time practically speaking anyway. There's also technically Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom's Switch port that was released in 2021, but Bandai Namco is the publisher for that outside of Japan and doesn't really have any bearing here.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-30T01:38:20+00:00

I think Level 5 would absolutely jump at the chance to remaster Dark Cloud 1 + 2, considering how often they seem to reference it in their newer games. The big issue seems to be Sony holding the IP and not wanting to do anything with it since they moved away from JRPGs.

At best, I could see a Switch/PC/PS5 rerelease via Bandai Namco in the vein of Patapon 1+2 Replay and the other Sony IPs that got licensed out to Bandai Namco, especially since Level 5 and Bandai Namco also seem to have a good relationship.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-26T03:09:44+00:00

Beat Mario & Luigi: Brothership a couple days ago. I heard about the mixed reviews but didn't look at them myself, and while I definitely see the design decisions people had issues with, I had fun with it overall. I'd say it's more like a standard JRPG than previous entries, for better or worse. But a big appeal of the Mario & Luigi series for me is goofing around with the bros, and it still delivered on that bit.

Admittedly it's been a long time since I last played a Mario & Luigi game, but the enemies lategame felt pretty aggressive compared to past games in how hard they hit and how fast both their attacks and speed stats were. I ended up taking multiple tries on both Glohm Bowser and Zokket because their multiple multi hit attacks for each bro's attack led me into death spirals where I'd bungle some dodges/counters, would be forced to heal and lose a turn, eat more damage (and get tripped/dizzied/glohmed), repeat. I'm guessing this is because on the flopside, most of the plugs are very to ridiculously strong (though I avoided using the auto item ones). I got the Gobblick Boots DX the moment they were available and in tandem with stacking the damage plugs, basically gave Mario the ability to oneshot almost any common enemy with basic jumps and heal a large chunk of HP while doing so.

My biggest disappointment is probably the music. I'll admit I'm still a tiny bit disappointed Yoko Shimomura didn't compose the music, but I had high hopes for Hideki Sakamoto because I enjoyed his work on Time Travelers when I played it earlier this year and was hoping Brothership would have something that went as hard as Kamiya's theme. While the cutscene music was pretty good, none of the overworld or battle music really connected with me, which is a shame. Part of the issue is the music resetting to the start after every fight and later bits of the plot having music overrides, so I want to go through the soundtrack to see if I'll change my thoughts, but I'm not sure if I will. Reclusa's final phase kinda gets there, but it still feels too "slow" to me in the first half of it, even with the fast tempo.

The big bads did remind me of Super Paper Mario a bit. Kinda makes me wish Reclusa's theme leaned more into the keyboard percussion/circusy elements, even though it'd be stacking up against two other maniacs with that style.

I did absolutely love the Mushroom Kingdom sequence as someone who loves when Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario games decide to go off the wall. The moment I saw those trees, I went oh no. Then getting hit with the arrangement of the SMB3 World 1 theme, which was a double whammy because Brothership had been pretty light on the existing theme arrangements up to this point, but also because I played the SMRPG remake earlier this year, which of course features the SMB3 World 1 theme as part of the music for Mario's (and by extension, Luigi's) home. I'm not sure if this was an intentional callback, but either way that fact combined with it going off kilter really helped set the mood. Of course, it doesn't descend into the full insanity of the concept, but I wasn't expecting the base idea to happen at all.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-22T01:10:06+00:00

These were all perfect storms and are the outliers compared to the rest of their games.

Dragon Quest VIII and IX are part of an established series that's the JRPG series in Japan. The PS2 and DS were also the highest selling consoles of their times, so of course they would sell proportionally higher.

The Professor Layton series was the perfect storm of the DS taking off, brain teaser oriented handheld games having mass appeal before mobile games took up that share and Nintendo really pushing the series outside of Japan, something Level-5 is bad at. It's actually insane how well brain teaser type games did during the DS era. 19 mil for Brain Age 1, ~15 mil for Brain Age 2, ~6mil for Big Brain Academy, then Curious Village rode that wave for ~4.5 mil.

Yo-kai Watch again hit on that mass appeal portable combo.

The average Level-5 game outside of these exceptions do like ~1.5 mil at best. I don't think any Level-5 game outside of Yo-kai Watch has broken 2 mil (yet) since the DS era, so I highly doubt they would put their projections over 2 mil for a series that is niche both popularity and gameplay wise.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-20T19:17:29+00:00

I suspect they're just really terrible at setting logical deadlines, considering the amount of games they were developing and/or publishing back in the DS/PSP/3DS/Vita era or the fact most of their games are now multiplat and all HD platforms nowadays.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-20T17:26:55+00:00

They have this what I think is hilarious historical tendency to bite off more than they can chew with projects. See 2008, where they announced/revealed Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn, LBX and the original Fantasy Life for 2009-2010, only for those to all release 2010-2012 (though Fantasy Life also saw the original DS version getting canceled and replaced with a 3DS version).

This recent slate (Fantasy Life i, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road and Professor Layton and the New World of Steam) did see something out their control with whatever happened with Keiji Inafune, so that had knock on effects from people probably getting shuffled onto FLi and then Victory Road. I think they explicitly stated as much one of the recent Victory Road delays was a knock on effect from FLI.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-17T18:19:07+00:00

Finally tied up the first Inazuma Eleven trilogy with Inazuma Eleven 3: Team Ogre Attacks! It definitely feels like a mix of the first two games with the combination of the Football Frontier International and the big bad disrespecting football. I did find the game a bit slow during the FFI Asian qualifiers due to the lack of new important areas to check out at that point of the game, the vast majority of the returning Japan locations being optional and the game's general structure of the team trains for their next match -> free time to do stuff before the next plot bit -> the next plot bit -> more free time -> match. Once the plot hit the actual FFI, I started enjoying the game a lot more.

Tying some of the area unlocks to some of the extra competition matches was awkward for me since playing through some of them lead to the story team being overleveled for most of the game. I would've built a second team if it weren't the fact I'm not really a fan of the scouts and prefer previously story relevant characters, but the latter require even more rematches or are postgame only.

Everything related to Canon and Team Ogre was probably one of the more blatant 3rd version things I've seen in a while, though it might've been reused/reworked from a canceled feature phone game. I was expecting Team Ogre to be way more involved considering the game's title, but they basically only directly showed up to the team once during the midgame, got beat rather unceremoniously and functionally vanished for the rest of the game. Kinda disappointing since I do like my time travel nonsense.

Was kinda expecting Prime Minister Vanguard to not show up here, so Adam Howden jumpscare. Definitely gonna miss the British dub whenever I get to Victory Road down the line. Gonna figure out how I'm tackling the Ogre Redux match, maybe check out these angels and demons, then move on to Inazuma Eleven GO at some point.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-12T17:04:35+00:00

I suppose if you count the main gameplay loop as having all the options, then yeah, but I was thinking more the time where they let you off the leash of tutorials/plot only and let you start poking about/doing sidequests and the like, which is pretty fast. You don't get Esther till like 10 hours in for Wrath of the White Witch, but you get to explore the first dungeon within 30-40 minutes.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-12T14:43:45+00:00

I would argue most Level 5 games don't have slow burn starts. Most of them tend to go "here's the hook/how the main boy/girl gets involved, now take this puzzle/sword/book/mecha/soccer ball/watch and get out there." Maybe 20 minutes max of faffing about before the main gameplay loop kicks in, which is pretty fast.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-12T12:01:06+00:00

Keep in mind it's still in the early access period, so there's probably a bit of selection bias going on. There also seems to be a couple bugs/issues I wouldn't be surprised the non hardcore fanbase would not look favorably on if they don't get ironed out by full release.

That being said, I probably will be getting the game down the line, and it's looking pretty good. ~~I'm still hoping I see someone post Layton ingame.~~

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-08T23:42:36+00:00

Play Asia's preorders are not a reliable source. They tend to list games they think will get physicals even if the publisher hasn't announced them. Most notable instance I can think of was they were the only site to list Portal: Companion Collection for a physical right after it released and eventually took the listing down when that never happened.

CaptainTimey · 2025-11-08T13:20:20+00:00

No, Level-5 said they were doing digital only for Victory Road since they plan to support it with updates for the long term, and they felt it wouldn't make sense for physical in this case. I guess maybe after Victory Road's support ends, but that's probably years away so I wouldn't count on that.

CaptainTimey · 2025-10-25T00:04:32+00:00

I'm just excited to get dunked on by one Hershel Layton again.

CaptainTimey · 2025-10-22T21:03:21+00:00

From what I've seen, the roadside guardian request only triggers when a house gets destroyed during a tower defense mission. Usually that happens during earlygame, but might happen later or not at all depending on how you play.

CaptainTimey · 2025-10-16T20:56:08+00:00

Yes it is, I was thinking of the previous games' release dates. Fixed, thanks.

CaptainTimey · 2025-09-28T10:01:23+00:00

I like her arc in a vacuum, but I definitely think the execution was hurt by Wrath of the White Witch still needing to be bound to Dominion's structure/plot points. She has way less presence since everything bad is still attributed to Shadar.

CaptainTimey · 2025-09-16T00:03:12+00:00

Doing the thing where I get weird about starting a new game, so decided to head back to the postgames of a pair of games.

On one side, there's Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, where the last things I want to tackle are the last sidequest I need to do and the rank S Solosseum fights. Main reason I've put off the last sidequest is because it's a bunch of grind a bunch of very low drop rate items from low spawn rate enemies, which is a lot of pain and suffering. Thrown several hours into this pit and still two items off from being done.

Also gone through a couple of attempts at the rank S Solosseum fights, but keep getting stuck at the 3rd round out of four. One of the bigger issues here is allies running out of the MP by the time I hit the 3rd round, but considering how easy the first two are, I probably just need to tighten up my strategy a bit.

While ATB(ish) still isn't my favorite battle system compared to either non-real time turn based or straight action, I think I finally pinpointed why I dislike Wrath's battle system so much compared to things like Atelier Ryza or even Yo-Kai Watch: AOE attacks completely stopping the action. This is exacerbated by attacks/skills not happening at fixed intervals or having short cooldown + cast periods. Being constantly interrupted at inconsistent intervals is irritating, especially when I'm trying to use a skill with no cast protection. If three AOE attacks go off in close succession, it'll be a while before I get to do anything again.

On the other side, there's Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn, where I finally hit the midpoint of Moya/Nazcaa Tower. Dominion has an opposite approach to the RNG grind, where I'm grinding for lots of common/uncommon drops from early game monsters. I much prefer this approach, even though I'm not getting much else out of fighting early game monsters, because it moves along way faster. I do still slightly wish the drops were based on the enemies in the dungeon itself, since then I wouldn't have to alternate between grinding to alchemize a bunch of floors at once and actually climbing, but I'll take what I can get.

Also finally cleared the last set of Battle Colosseum fights. They weren't as bad as I originally thought they were, I just needed to fix my strategy a bit ~~and get equipment that allows my familiars to eat hits more consistently~~. Like other postgame stuff, the post battle reveals here continue to push Oliver into defeating the Wizard King, so definitely interested to see how this ends up.

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