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HTTP/2 301 server: nginx date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:37:18 GMT content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 location: https://reuche.wordpress.com/category/snes/ x-hacker: Want root? Visit join.a8c.com/hacker and mention this header. host-header: WordPress.com link: ; rel="https://api.w.org/" vary: accept, content-type, cookie x-redirect-by: WordPress x-ac: 1.bom _dca MISS alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000 server-timing: a8c-cdn, dc;desc=bom, cache;desc=MISS;dur=355.0 HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:37:19 GMT content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 vary: Accept-Encoding x-hacker: Want root? Visit join.a8c.com/hacker and mention this header. host-header: WordPress.com link: ; rel="https://api.w.org/" vary: accept, content-type, cookie content-encoding: gzip x-ac: 1.bom _dca MISS alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000 server-timing: a8c-cdn, dc;desc=bom, cache;desc=MISS;dur=713.0 snes «The Sky Before Dawn The Sky Before Dawn

japanese pornography is certainly not the ideal soundtrack for life Monday, Aug 25 2008

games and lufia and observation and opinion and otaku and personal and snes dungeon crawling, estpolis, games, lufia, megaten, otaku, persona, shin megami tensei, thoughts reuche 8:39 am

I’m proud of that title. I am exceptionally disappointed by what happens with the characters of every single Shin Megami Tensei game, especially the derivative titles.

Anyway on a whim I was playing the Ancient Cave in Lufia 2 in an extremely hardcore manner today. I managed to get past the 62nd floor before the low levels (in spite of beating almost every enemy) of my characters and my lack of defensive equipment (I found one helmet!) had finally created too great of a gap between me and the random enemies. Also a problem was how many enemies were large ones, it is not possible to get past a dragon in a hallway which meant that I couldn’t just make mad dashes for treasures and stairs. I did however reap quite a few blue chests and blue chest items, notably 3 weapons and 2 twist jewels; one from a random battle, though no Iris treasures. I was using the fire capsule monster and I got lucky and won a charm fruit from an octopus enemy and so was able to turn it into its powerful master class which was somewhat of a boon. Quite a few enemies in the early and middle parts of the ancient cave are weak to fire. Unfortunately as you go deeper many that are strong to fire show up instead.

I have tentatively decided that I do not really give a shit about things like getting all the blue chest items or all the iris treasures. What I want to do is beat the ancient cave with my party of Maxim, Guy, Selan, and Dekar. I can not decide if I want to legitimately beat the slime boss or use the trick of killing my own characters to win. That almost sounds false to me so I might try it. I already cheated to beat Gades earlier in the game anyway so I might as well stay consistent. On the other hand I have 2 Gades blades and I have to think that by the time I got to the bottom of the cave if I had the trick spell then using it twice and having buff Guy and Dekar use octo-strike would do in the boss or anything. However that was not the recommended strategy I saw so perhaps not. I did not track down a Dekar Blade in my long foray though so that is the main reason I was considering the attempt.

After I beat the cave I’ll just go on with the game. I am tempted to then later try and complete the cave with arty in my party but it seems meaningless, I would rather go ahead and try to complete the cave in gift mode if I’m going to bother, but I certainly have better things to do. This is just a sort of… lingering whimsy that I’d like to do away with.

There really is something about games that have optional randomly generated dungeons that really draws me in though. I’m not sure what that says about me. Feel free to let me know what you think about that. On the other hand I very rarely bother with completing such things, especially games that only have random dungeons. That probably says more about me. And ultimately I’m only writing this now because never in the 12 years since Lufia 2 came out did I complete the Ancient Cave.

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nostalgia is better left that way Monday, Aug 11 2008

breath of fire and games and lufia and observation and opinion and otaku and shadow hearts and snes and suikoden and wild arms breath of fire, classic games, lufia, otaku, rpgs, shadow hearts, snes, srt, srw, suikoden, super robot wars, wild arms reuche 7:14 pm

So I dragged out my old super nintendo, breath of fire 2, and lufia 2. I kind of wish I had never started thinking about this. I had never considered games or game play on the super nintendo to be slow and perhaps in a way (sub-polynomial time maybe?) it is not. But compared to other more recent game systems, ps2, DS, even N64, it really is pretty bad.

So saying Lufia 2 fares a little bit better because it had deeper and more diverse game play while also moving a little faster. Lufia 2 might have been developed after BOF2 so that could have something to do with it. As a result of this and the fact that my BoF 2 did not want to run when I started the system up, I think that if I do anything it will be beating the ancient cave in lufia 2, and I will probably not play BoF 2. I didn’t realize it but I actually do not have an endgame save on my SNES cartridge. This is below ideal but considering the way things are set up now, how much other stuff I have, the deterioration of the game and/or system, and that I only have an old RF cable for my SNES that destroys my cable tv signal when hooked up, the chances are good that no one besides me will ever play my game again so it really doesn’t matter. In a way I think that is sad but that is the way these things go. I thought I heard that they had recently brought breath of fire out on the wii virtual console, if it was the first maybe they will bring out the 2nd, or maybe they already have, so people will get a chance to play the game. But there is not a lot of point.

I will say that both Breath of Fire and Lufia 2 seemingly brought a lot to the RPG table. They probably blatantly copied more than they innovated at least 10:1 but that’s how it is. I’m not sure whether or not Lufia 2 innovated it but the IP system in there possibly inspired the likes of Final Fantasy’s limit breaks. That might be a gaming legend though. It is not hard for me to imagine no one associated with FF7 had ever even heard of Lufia. And actually since the IP moves were linked to equipment the game I recall that had a system that was closer to it is Wild Arms with its force system that summoned different… were they guardians? depending on the guardian tablets/whatever you had equipped and some other abilities were reliant upon items. hmm as to breath of fire, having a character transform in battle and stay that way for the rest of it (which you didn’t do in 2 but nonetheless did in 1 and the others) predates the likes of the transforming Yuri from Shadow Hearts. Combining your characters (bof 1, Karn morphing with your jabroni characters) is still moderately unique and being able to power up your characters temporarily with the shamans, thus changing their forms with the right combinations, is something I do not recall seeing since (they didn’t re-use either later on in the series if I remember correctly) . Having a base that you can customize and recruit characters to predated the Suikoden series which is the only other such game I can recall doing that in. Back to Lufia 2, having tools and involved puzzles in the dungeons is something that is not done much anymore. It was the first regular RPG I remember playing that took it to an almost zelda like level but it is hard to imagine that the “puzzle action” (is that an oxymoron?) wasn’t inspired by zelda. Once again Wild Arms is a game series that makes use of tools to get through dungeons. I am starting to wonder if there is some sort of relationship, a programmer, designer, director, or producer between the two series. The Ancient Cave random dungeon might have been the first 99 floor random dungeon tacked on to an RPG as well but the random dungeon crawler genre was already established by that time if I’m not mistaken. Huge bonus dungeons (well there was a big one in the first lufia but it was not random, it just had a level requirement) are not exactly a staple of RPGs but since Lufia 2 they have been in plenty of other rpgs, tales series, star ocean series etc. They show up more in srpgs like nearly all of the nippon ichi games, certainly all the disgaea games, and some Atlus games.

Well with all this said I am going to put my nostalgia back on the shelf and leave it there. You are not going to catch me pulling out my old nintendo or genesis, loading shining force 2 or pokemon… You will catch me grinding away at super robot wars games which in spite of having fast running individual parts probably require 2-4 times the length of play time of even the oldest and slowest console rpgs. yay?

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Dodging sweat bullets Friday, Aug 8 2008

breath of fire and games and observation and opinion and otaku and snes breath of fire, chaos wars, classic gaming, observation, opinion, otaku, ps2, snes, video games reuche 11:36 pm

The other day, also known as yesterday, I was reflecting on how it had turned out that some of my best game purchases turned out to be games I did not purchase at the first opportunity but instead waited on and it was worth it. Today I am reflecting on a game that I simply did not purchase and am not going to purchase and how good of a move that has turned out to be.

The game in question is Chaos Wars for the PS2, in particular I am glad that I passed on getting the US version even though I initially regretted not doing so quite a bit. Since it has come out, and it appears to already be almost totally unavailable, I have not heard a single good thing about it yet that has not stopped me from hearing numerous bad things about it. In theory the game sounded good, a multi-game company, multi-game franchise crossover SRPG not unlike Namco X Capcom (but presumably unlike Super Robot Wars which is probably the original successful franchise crossover srpg but it crosses over anime series almost exclusively and ultimately only has one game company involved), only this time made up of characters from numerous smaller companies. And it was done by Idea Factory who after all has made quite a few games so they had to know what they were doing right? Well apparently the end product is ridiculously removed from whatever qualities, mostly nostalgia and charm coupled with a modest playing experience, Namco X Capcom possessed. This is probably due in large part to how little anybody really cares about the series that were in the game and how bad Idea Factory’s games are in general. I had been excited at the prospect of getting to have Yuri from Shadow Hearts in an SRPG (Aruze really fucked up with the Shadow Hearts 2 ending, they shouldn’t have looped Yuri’s story that way), and I was a little interested that Gungrave was included (avoided the games like the plague, thought the anime was interesting) but beyond that I had been thinking that surely there would be something else to it. And from what I understand, there really is not anything of the sort. Just a bunch of flop, and not even particularly good looking flop.

I could probably include in this list any number of PSP and DS games, especially remakes and sequels, that I successfully avoided, as well as the Nintendo Wii as a whole, but that would just be too easy. Is it worth mentioning that I’ve felt a strong urge to replay the american version of Fire Emblem 2 on the SNES lately? Probably not. I’m reminded of how that (maybe it was the first BOF) was probably the first game I played one-handed because such little intricacy and precision was needed to be successful at it. I suppose that sounds like a demerit but I’m not so sure it wasn’t actually a really great thing. Well maybe I will play it then, and for old times sake it turns out that one of my hands hurts quite a bit so I just might play it one handed indeed.

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Going Back Without Originality Saturday, Oct 20 2007

absurdity and american and chrono trigger and cracked and epica stella and music and nostalgia and observation and otaku and rock and snes and square and youtube classic gaming, female musicians, rock, video games, youtube videos reuche 11:40 am

How can the uninspired still be profound? I have absolutely no idea. Or maybe I’m just not thinking about it. Well, if we’re talking about female rockers, are there any new ones out there now who are worth talking about? I’ve gotta be honest, I don’t pay a lot of attention to “new” or “pop” music though of course I still get plenty of exposure thanks to the recent trend of overusing vocal music in tv and movies. (which I frown on) And so within my limited sphere of notice I’m not thinking of any real rockers out there (of either sex) who are under, let’s say 30. There are some people who really rock doing other kinds of music like say Amy Winehouse but actual rock singers… Well if you think of any then feel free to share.

For something totally unrelated, I recently decided to play a bit of Chrono Trigger, the classic SNES game which is now 12 years old it seems. It has been perhaps a few years since I last played the game at all but I’ve played it so many times that… Anyway, the game has aged better than I expected. I attribute this to a pathological attention to detail which I hadn’t appreciated as such until today. With that said I guess it’s still worthy of being my favorite RPG since I really can’t think of a better total package. Then again, I’m not trying too hard. I do really like Shadow Hearts 2 though. I wouldn’t be uncomfortable calling that the best rpg on PS2. The original playstation though… I’m drawing a blank. I probably played more rpgs on that system than any other, however none of them have called me back or remained in my mind that I feel like calling “best on the system”… FF7 and 9 weren’t bad though. Not that it matters. So kids, if you get the chance give Chrono Trigger a try. Best RPG on the GBA is Mother 3 by default, it’s also the only game I’ve just mentioned which I never beat.

So to continue with old games, it is really really annoying to try and play Epica Stella only using the slash attack. I fubbed on it honestly and somehow I’ve just ended out with weird and barely functional equipment and stat combinations. I now theorize that it might be important to place an emphasis on getting the attack blocking skills as early as feasible. However if you’ve got high enough hp (oddly current and max hp seem to play a large part in the AI’s counter decisions while power is almost a non-factor unless it will be a death blow) and hit rate (just needs to be around 60% or so) the enemy still won’t counter-attack you no matter what you use. As expected the main difficulties of trying to lead a slash only campaign are dealing solid damage, getting the maximum amount of money possible and the actions of the NPCs which are “helping you out” in more than half the game’s missions. This really is why people hated this game, unless you know exactly which stats need to be raised to approximately what levels (16 BAS and 10 AGL = attack twice for Randy, Russel, Andrew, Zeira, Sharon, Grado) in order to get the better attacks and abilities then you are really left with mediocre prospects and frustrating battles. More feasible restriction campaigns would be the highly usable and almost immediately attainable flare bomb (which not all units would be able to use since the special units have fixed elemental stones which are not fire but for one) for single attacks, and the general non-stone reliant attacks as a whole.

Yes children, making things harder for yourself in a video game is pretty much an exercise in futility. Then again, video games are on the whole a waste of time in the first place so do whatever you enjoy. But if you don’t enjoy it, then it’s not worth it eh?

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