Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Corpse Party: Sweet Sachiko’s Hysteric Birthday Bash

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  12 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 162024
 

Three years ago, we discussed the Corpse Party remake.

Last year, we moved on to Book of Shadows.

And so for this October, I played the next game in the series. Which, as I mentioned near the end of my Book of Shadows review, is not Blood Drive but rather the comedy midquel Corpse Party: Sweet Sachiko’s Hysteric Birthday Bash.

The usual Corpse Party horrors are temporarily put on hold as the cast is gathered together in one place to celebrate Sachiko’s birthday (whether they want to or not)! Now they have to put on a cultural festival, with a variety of strange and sometimes deadly activities on the schedule.

While Book of Shadows combined adventure game elements with a visual novel presentation, this one is a pure visual novel. Occasional choices will determine if you clear a given chapter or get one of its numerous, often hilarious bad endings, but most of your time will be spent reading.

It’s definitely a dramatic change in tone, albeit still with a Corpse Party flair. You might get a bad ending where a character gets a kidney cut out, for example, except it’s played for laughs. Or maybe a character will go insane and fall into despair, but for ridiculous reasons.

Oh, and the lighter tone means the fanservice is also cranked up way past its usual levels, with some very awkward moments.

I found it to be a pretty funny game. I wasn’t sure about it when I started, but I ended up being happy I played it, even if it’s not quite the usual Corpse Party fare.

Click for Sweet Sachiko's Hysteric Birthday Bash spoilers
Honestly, I felt sad at the end when everyone was crying and Sachiko started to have second thoughts, only for everything to reset. It felt like a glimpse of what could have been a happy ending before it was torn away.

The only thing that bugged me was that there didn’t always seem to be a natural narrative flow from one chapter to the next, but that can probably be excused as Corpse Party weirdness.

A bonus chapter at the end takes on a more serious atmosphere, potentially setting up more things for Blood Drive. I remember reading that the reason this entry is important is because it introduces characters who appear in later games, although I’d also add that there’s also just something nice about seeing these characters together in a less intense situation.

At the end of the game, you also unlock messages from the voice actors again, and I love hearing their thoughts on the script, the series, the recording sessions, etc. I wish more games did that.

Overall, Corpse Party: Sweet Sachiko’s Hysteric Birthday Bash is not a scary game, and it doesn’t really advance the Corpse Party storyline, but it fits the bill for spooky comedy. So if you’re just here for the horror, this probably isn’t the game for you. But if you like the characters, enjoy (or at least don’t mind) the fanservice, and want to see some wacky comedy antics, it’s worth taking a look.

Meanwhile, the upcoming Corpse Party II: Darkness Distortion has been delayed to 2025. I’d been wondering why we didn’t have a release date yet, and now we know. At least this will give me more time to catch up on the series with Blood Drive before it comes out!

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 142024
 

For our next spooky game, let’s face off against more yokai – excuse me, Yoki – this time in a survival horror game.

Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ is inspired by the classics, complete with fixed camera angles and the option to play with either tank controls or modern controls.

I played the Switch version, although it’s on PS4 and PC as well.

You play a young woman training to be a Hoshoshi, someone who drives off evil spirits. When she and her mentor learn Azuma Manor has been overtaken by Yoki (why they didn’t call them yokai remains a mystery to me), they head in to handle the problem.

Now, Kwaidan has one weird quirk, which is its inclusion of point-and-click adventure controls. For the most part, you run around and fight enemies like you would in any game with 3D exploration, but when you want to interact with something in the environment or your inventory, you have to hover over it with a cursor first instead of just pressing a button. This is unnecessarily awkward, particularly since you need to be right by an object to interact with it anyway.

Your inventory also remains on-screen at all times, and you use the cursor to interact with it as well. While you have a limited inventory, resource management never really comes into play.

Combat in Kwaidan is a bit unusual for the genre. You have three weapons, one to attack right in front of you, one to attack enemies low to the ground, and one to attack enemies in the air. The latter two consume energy, which you can build up again by defeating enemies or defending against attacks. This makes it tilt slightly more toward action, a bit closer to Onimusha than Resident Evil.

Enemies respawn, which I found annoying at first, until I realized it’s almost a necessity because of the small game world. While it has the usual sorts of item-based puzzles I love from this genre, with backtracking requires to unlock doors and solve puzzles once you find the key items, it’s pretty small-scale. If enemies didn’t respawn, you’d soon spend most of your time in safety.

Most of the puzzles are straightforward, although one requires you to run around the manor to to look at spots in a first-person view to work out a code told to you in a document in a completely different location, which felt tedious. I would have preferred to have that information recorded in memos.

But my bigger criticism is that you only have one save slot. As such, if you save yourself into a situation where you really could use more healing items, you’d need to either start over or try repeatedly until you manage to scrape through.

Overall, the occasional frustrations in Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ weren’t enough to stop me from enjoying the game. The developer’s next game is about luring devils up a railway to seal them away, which sounds significantly different, but I’ll be interested in seeing what it’s like.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: 99 Spirits

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 112024
 

Now for something completely different, let’s talk about 99 Spirits.

I’ve had this one in my backlog for a long time, probably since around the time of my yokai craze, and I decided the emphasis on spirits and demons made it a good choice to finally play this October.

And what an unusual experience it was.

99 Spirits is part JRPG, part… vocabulary game?

You play a young woman who wields a sacred sword in order to defeat Tsukumogami, inanimate objects that have become yokai or spirits. It has a simple presentation, with a grid-like screen used to explore the hub city and dungeons. Markers on the green indicate shops, conversations, items to pick up, etc., and enemies are marked as well. When you come into contact with an enemy, a battle begins.

Combat controls are fairly simple. On your turn, you choose whether to attack or defend. However, when the enemy attacks, you have a brief window in which you can press the defend button to shield yourself and counterattack. The result is a system that feels a step more active than turn-based combat.

But Tsukumogami can’t be defeated unless you know their true forms, and that’s where the twist to combat comes in. As you attack, you build a gauge that lets you use a special skill to gain clues about the spirit’s identity. Defending, meanwhile, builds a gauge that lets you call out its name – by typing the name of the object it used to be.

For example, you might give you the clues “OO” and “eating.” Using the gauge again might get you “S” and “food.” Then you use the other skill, type in “spoon,” and the spirit takes on its spoon form and can be fought normally.

It’s such a strange combination of ideas… and I love it.

Throughout the game, you can buy or find spirit indexes, which give you a list of Tsukumogami. That simplifies things, since instead of wracking your brain to figure out what word fits the description, there’s a chance you have it on the list. (The spirit index also lets you click the name instead of typing it every time.)

As you progress, you’ll unlock new skills for your sword. Did I mention this game is also partly a monster collecting RPG?

Once you unlock the third skill, you can capture Tsukumogami while fighting them in order to use special skills. These are both field skills, such as using a weapon-type Tsukumogami to cut down a tree blocking you from a bonus area, and combat skills that serve as special abilities in battle.

I would not say the story is especially in-depth, but it’s a fine story about fighting yokai with some cute/funny character interactions alongside more serious moments. It’s not especially spooky despite its subject matter, so we’ll mark this down as one of the more lighthearted games for this year’s celebration.

Overall, it’s a unique blend of ideas that ends up being a lot of fun. My only real criticism is that it’s buggy – the game crashed enough times that I started saving after every few battles, just in case.

There are some secrets I didn’t get on my playthrough, including an alternate ending, but I don’t think I’ll go back through it to try to get everything. I probably won’t get the DLC, either. Nevertheless, I’m happy I finally got around to playing 99 Spirits.

(On a side note, email subscriptions have halted again, so here’s hoping I find a lasting solution.)

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