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| |  "Re(1):UNDEAD THREAD 2016" , posted Sat 15 Oct 21:05  
quote:
WHAT’S GOING ON IN THIS TOWN
That’s right, kids, it’s time for this year’s Undead Thread! Offer your scary gaming experiences/music/tales of missing posters as unholy sacrifice to revive the ghost of Undead Fred.* (*JJJ says Fred is doing just fine in his post-game life, but that's not scary, so whatever.)
For my part, I will report on my playthrough of brilliant Akumajou Dracula clone Rusty for the PC-98 now that GRAVE SAVED HALLOWEEN and helped me get it running.
Or I could reminisce about how it’s still great to play the PSX Dracula X~Nocturne in the Moonlight with the lights out when you reach the basement, or how the Dark Lord’s Castle in Chrono Trigger is the finest spooky dungeon in any RPG with its eerie townsfolk impersonators.
Or inevitably, we'll just talk about CV/Dracula, which is now tragicomically deader than the Grim Reaper boss.
I saw the ghost of ShyGuy appear in NSMB2, trying to sneak into mainline Mario games. Poor guy must be stuck in development void. Does that count?
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| | "Re(3):UNDEAD THREAD 2016" , posted Sun 16 Oct 05:43:
By some strange coincidence, just as you posted this thread, Steam decided to update Sunless Sea, a game I had tried a little when it was in early access over a year ago. I had never played the finished version, and the update gave me some DLC for free, so I decided to give it another go.
The setting was simple, almost mundane: 30 years ago, during the reign of good Queen Victoria, the city of London was stolen by bats.
Its ruins now go to waste a mile below the surface, in a gigantic cave, deprived of light forever, surrounded by a seemingly infinite and bottomless ocean called the zee.
In that bleak setting, Eleonora Pavlovna (probably a fake name) decided to reinvent herself. She used her last pennies to buy a boat, hire some dubious types as a makeshift crew who were forced to call her "my lady" like she was born in a noble family (she wasn't), and embrace the dangerous life at large.
After stopping in a couple of ports, listening to stories of ancient glories rotting away and baseless rumours about ominous gods slumbering under the zee, she sold her reports to the Fallen London admiralty for some cash, but mostly for fame. One day, she was welcomed on land by a charming one-eyed fellow with a switch-blade, who offered her some suspiciously generous presents if she were to do some menial jobs for his boss; being well versed in the ways of this world, she gleefully accepted without asking questions.
Her adventures brought her deeper and deeper into the zee, visiting stranger and stranger places: a mushroom mine, a colony funded by rats, the decaying manor of oddly welcoming sisters, some mummified elders waiting to be brought to a sanatorium where they could finally rot in peace...
Each trip back to London, she would lay in her bed, in some cheap hotel, trying to fend off the nightmares while her crew was drowning theirs in cheap mushroom wine (and sometimes in the harbour). She had become affluent enough to hire some specialists on her crew along the way: some shady self-proclaimed doctor she would barely trust to not cut the wrong limb, a charming magician reconverted mechanist after a terrible incident robbed him of his hand and his career (she never dared to ask why losing a hand prevented him from being a magician, but not a mechanist) and a navigator with a strange tattoo on the forehead, the kind you would wake up with if you had fallen asleep in a pyjama party of naughty kids with an interest in the occult. She tried to ask him about it some time, but questions appeared to give him formidable headaches; it even looked like the tattoo grew larger the day after each conversation... probably an hallucination caused by the darkness at zee. She let him do his work without bothering him anymore.
She had bought a better ship too, with better canons to ward off the pirates and monstrosities one is always at risk to encounter out there (she would never laugh to a joke about giant enemy crab ever again). The irony of spending all your money in order to earn more money was not lost on her. It had become more and more difficult to please the admiralty while doing contraband on the side; she knew one day she would have to chose a side, or the choice would be done on her behalf in the most unpleasant way.
One day, she decided to embark with the smuggler's freight and go north, where dust falls like hail. Her crew was getting worried. They were a superstitious bunch, looking for omen in the sound of the wave or the flickering lights of a lighthouse. In order to shield herself from that nonsense, she started taking meals in her cabin with the one-handed mechanist. He would entertain her doing little tricks with his valid hand, and soon he spent the night in her cabin too.
For days they kept sailing through the frigid waters, with no sound other than the humming of the engines. Finally, the food reserves were gone. The crew had been eating sea monsters for a while (the giant jellyfleur's tentacles taste delicious the first time, when you still have taste buds)(or a tongue), but not a single angler crab was to be seen. The situation was growing desperate; angry rumours amongst the crew mixed with imaginary voices from below deck (what was in the smuggler's crates, in the end?). One of the voices did murmur something that gave her pause: "lose your mind, eat your crew".
A poor fellow fell down the mast that day, and after a moving elegy (one of her past lives was as poet, after all), she explained there was no other choice but to eat their former comrade. She was prepared to fight some resistance, but the crew accepted with a suspicious enthusiasm that made her worried. After dinner, she avoided to look them in the eyes and retreated in her cabin, alone. She was awaken by a sudden shout:
"Iceberg!"
She looked to the port side, and indeed, a pale silhouette could be seen in the distance. She ordered to stray away: being lost at sea was still preferable to being shipwrecked on a block of ice.
The following day, they found another body on the deck. "At least I didn't have to do anything this time", she said, wondering how she could face her crew during dinner that night.
"Iceberg!"
She looked again, and a similar silhouette was there, maybe bigger than the day before.
"It followed us! This is not ordinary rock! We are doomed!" shrieked one of the dimwits behind her. She made a mental note in case they still needed someone to eat the next day, and ordered to push the engines south. Hopefully warmer waters would allow more edible encounters.
"Iceberg straight ahead!"
How was that possible? It wasn't there a moment ago! She turned her head: the previous one had grown bigger behind them.
"Everyone, stay calm and..."
A loud noise covered the end of her sentence, and a violent vibration (a seaquake?) shook her to her bones.
"Engine dead!"
"Iceberg to starboard!"
A third pale shape had materialized there out of nowhere. Finally understanding the situation was desperate, she turned front ahead to the closer ice mountain and couldn't believe what she saw.
"Why would an iceberg need a mouth?" were her last words.
[this message was edited by Iggy on Sun 16 Oct 05:49] |
| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(5):UNDEAD PLAYTHROUGH" , posted Sun 16 Oct 15:40
quote:
Iggy's dreadful voyage
At first I thought that you had made a comic-horror story out of mishaps in a ship exploration game, but then I realized it really is a HAUNTED ship exploration game!
Play through your other scary favorites here, if you want...and leave a journal with your last words.
Here's mine for Rusty, the finest of all Dracula clones. The real ghost story here is how the game really did come out slightly before Dracula X~Rondo of Blood, yet has serious resemblances from item crash down to certain new enemies like the walking Legion. Did a demonic séance in Dracula’s castle give obscure C-Lab the insight to clone a game which had not yet been released? Did C-Lab kill a man and take the plans for Rondo? We will never knowwww
So as whip-wielding demon hunter Rusty works her way through Transylvania towards Count Dracula's, ah, Count Montecarlo's Castle, punctuated by delightful Phantasy Star-esque still-screen animations, it's important to note that she does so in heels with an ass that is superior even to Simon’s. Better still, even though she inherited the Belmonts’ clumsy jumps, she also learned how to strut behind backgrounds like SFC (“IV”) Simon, because it’s important to be stylish when you’re facing any number of hellish bosses who might be hotter than you. And speaking of attractive but functional, those Game Boy Dracula Legend ropes aren’t just for Rusty to wiggle playfully up, she’s also learned how to whip while climbing, unlike her idiot Belmont cousins.
And despite coming out shortly before the Dracula X series, Rusty had already learned to train a flying bird familiar like her distant cousin Maria AND to do that floaty shadow bunshin running thing that Alucard and later Belmonts did.
Whaaaaat? What’s that, you say? The post-boss glowing orb is just a little TOO similar to Dracula? Maybe, but did the Belmonts ever do a cute pose while yelling “I did it!” afterwards? Or give you a bromide of the girl you just rescued from becoming a vampire? I don’t think so. And frankly, the map of the countryside between levels looks a lot better than Dracula’s ever done.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| | "Re(7):UNDEAD PLAYTHROUGH" , posted Mon 17 Oct 03:24
Horror is a weird genre for me, though horror is a weird genre in the first place.
I think horror for me is like RPG for many other people: it's really good as an ingredient in some other mix, but taking the stuff straight is a little too pungent.
The example, dated as it is, is that while I really liked the first Dead Space, I totally cannot handle slasher movies, and Dead Space features more blood and gore and mutilation than most moves would even dare have!
I quite like Berserk, Dorohedoro, pretty much anything by Dowman Sayman, Dark Souls, Aliens, etc. and those often have very strong horror vibes... but that can't be called straight horror pieces. While it is true that Berserk, Dorohedoro, and Dead Space all have the common feature of protagonists that are powerful enough to contend with the horror elements on their own terms, this is very much not the case of many Dowman pieces. Junji Ito's fall more into the category of horror being a force that others get caught up in and are largely incapable of resisting though they may struggle against it, which is more common with pure horror works.
There's been an argument laid forth out there on the internet that horror games are improved by having combat, because it mechanically enables the players to deal with a bigger variety of problems, and mechanically conveys how unstoppable a true big bad can be. I think that it's not necessarily combat that needs to be there, but rather having mechanics that enable a larger variety of responses to danger. If it is the case that you want the game to principally be about fleeing and staying out of sight, it's good to be able to have a variety of ways to go about doing that. When that isn't there, the "game" element of the game might stick out as a detriment to the experience.
SIREN had the hold tuning mechanic for intelligence gathering, which had an excellent horror vibe, althoguh the instant failure of being found was off-putting to many. The more recent Dead By Daylight multiplayer game allows the team of victims to interact with scripted environmental pieces that create obstacles for the villain player, obstacles which may or may not significantly slow down the victim team, but always slow down the villain. They have no means of actually fighting the villain, but they have a variety of means of evading him. But being able to truly fight off the villain or sinister force has the potential to be too empowering and detract from the horror that the scenario wishes to convey.
Of course, you could also have a game that contains no combat whatsoever, has extremely straightforward evasion or none at all, and still be an effective horror experience. PT feels very much modelled after those guided "house of horror" experiences you might find at a fair, where you are given constant little nudges to look at the environment and have a very linear path to follow. By guiding the player's attention in a directed fashion, you have a lot of power to set up jump scares or corner-of-the-eye elements. The Condemned series used the investigation conceit as a way of forcing the player to pay attention to and engage directly with gory aftermaths, and I think that in general the notion of investigation plays to how we as players engage with horror things : in our heads we're actively trying to piece together what's going on.
In conclusion, the best horror game of recent times is the 2016 US presidential election.
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| PSN: robotchris
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| "Re(1):incantation" , posted Thu 20 Oct 01:37
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Returning to the subject of undead playthroughs, Rusty continues to out-Dracula Konami even with a minimal budget by:
Now that you've convinced me to WISE FROM MY GRABE I can report that yes, I agree wholeheartedly about Rusty! I'm so glad you managed to get it going and are playing it! I started writing out a whole thing about how it's too bad that there wasn't a followup, and that it didn't get ported to anything else, and that its lineage basically ended at this one game, but then I realized that it almost certainly did have a heavy influence on subsequent Castlevania titles. One that feels especially influenced is Bloodlines, but who can ever really say if there was even an awareness on the part of the folks at Konami? In any event, the only thing that makes Rusty less than perfect for me is the control system-- it doesn't feel as good as it should, it doesn't behave the way you'd think it should, and it just has a sense of old-fashionedness in a bad way.
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Are you playing through a spooky game for October? I know you are. Chronicle it here. I'll know if you don't!
So that's what that chill creeping over my spine is. Does Killer7 count? I bet it does! If so, I can recount the epic task of getting it working earlier this week:
1) Unbox GameCube proudly. It's been boxed since 2006 or so.
2) Discover there's no controller in the box. Ransack house looking for it. Find Wavebird, but no wired controller.
3) Go to connect GameCube to new TV and discover it only has RGB cable. TV only have HDMI and Component connectors.
4) Look on Internet and see that GameCube Component is proprietary and sells used for approximately $1,000,000.
5) Go to basement and find the box the Wii is stashed in. Discover cables and power supply aren't packed with it.
6) Spend an hour looking through random boxes and finally find Wii cables. Hook it up.
7) Discover that Wavebird has no batteries, and that I have no spare batteries. Spend time ransacking unused devices for batteries.
8) Power Wii on, insert game, find that batteries are dead in Wii controller. Go to store and buy batteries.
9) Return home, power on Wii, launch game, discover that Wavebird won't work. Unplug it, plug it back in. Mysteriously works.
10) Play game for half an hour before bedtime.
You have to carefully reproduce the world of "Castlevania" in the solemn atmosphere.
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "real ghost stories" , posted Fri 21 Oct 12:31
Gather 'round the campfire, children, and uncle Maou will tell you a scary Halloween story. Shut up, no, it's not about Rusty, at least until I can beat level 4. This is a very scary true story that just happened this very week.
The other evening, perhaps at midnight, after playing a lot of Rusty (shut up, kids!) with my Saturn pad, I decided to play some SFV. After a few rounds in the lounge, I encountered a terrible sight: Necalli, the worst character in a mainline Street Fighter since at least SFIV, and possibly even since SFIII. I approached him warily, knowing that my hated enemy would be fearsome, if unstylish, even in his samurai outfit.
That's when something dreadful happened.
It was like the kanashibari paralysis nightmare effect. I moved to trip him, but instead Chun-Li’s standing roundhouse came out. "That’s odd," I thought. "I never do her standing roundhouse since the standing short kick is quicker anti-air. I must have just been flustered because I dislike him so much…it's probably nothing."
But then...her standing roundhouse kept coming out, even when I was pressing down. I broke into a cold sweat. Maybe my trusty Saturn pad was giving out after 10 years, and too much Rusty finished it off. Necalli started closing in, and, unthinkably, started winning. The classic loser's excuse had come true: my controller really was broken. I could no longer crouch. I could no longer block low. I frantically tried to get the down button to work.
The last thing I saw was Necalli coming nearer, glowing in his stupid V-trigger mode where he looks like a Troll.
Only the internet could hear my screams.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "your favorite grim reaper" , posted Sun 23 Oct 09:43:
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it also gives this sense of being boxed in against your will in danger situations after years of having greater camera freedom.
This is a pretty great way of using technological limits/director preferences to improve the atmosphere!
For this week's undead celebrations, talk about your favorite battle with Death from any game!
The Dracula series is the most obvious, of course, and I adore the battle with Death atop the mast of the ghost ship in Dracula X because it feels the most duel-like of any Death battle in the series...it's not only more personal since you already ran into him during the brilliant stagecoach opening sequence, it's also got that great, grim little twist of him getting finished off with his own scythe at the end! That doesn't happen in Dracula XX, one of the countless reasons the SFC version is intolerable.
BUT: lately, it's the Wraith in Dragon's Crown who's stolen my (invincible undead) heart. The best boss theme in a game full of great boss themes, plus the sense of excitement and dread as he's chasing you invincibly through the catacombs until you can light a candle on a holy statue so you can damage him, until the candle burns out and you have to keep running...
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Sun 23 Oct 09:56] |
| | "Re(5):your favorite grim reaper" , posted Mon 24 Oct 08:50
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I know, right? It feels like at that time, finally videogame cut scenes left the realm of a school play and entered the realm of an university circle's production. The previous scene with Ritcher was also pretty cheezy and had that extra little something if you come into it right after Rondo of Blood's ending.
True, the Shinigami scene wouldn't work so well if it didn't happen just after that Richer one. All in all, you could almost switch Richter and Alucard in these scenes: they are both random heroic main characters who despise their opponent, except one shouts about JUSTICE and the other is slightly annoyed to have to explain himself to the butler.
The big contrast comes from the way the other speaks to them: Dracula is his arrogant self mostly talking to himself and barely acknowledging Richter, while Shinigami speaks with all the precaution necessary to address his master's son. The whole introduction is really well done to tell you "for the first time, the main character is not a Belmont, and here is how he's different". After the gameplay difference you felt by going through the entrance of the castle, the cut scene shows the background difference, and the social status, upbringing and power of Alucard is entirely presented not through him, as Richter was with his own speech, but through Shinigami because a lord's son doesn't introduce himself, that's what servants are for.
I love that he is only barely more polite when he talks to these commoners Maria and Richter. Less rude than with Shinigami or Shaft, but not by a huge margin.
(Yes, I am slightly too invested in this cutscene compared to its actual quality, but it's a MMC thread so there's no reason not to).
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| | "Re(4):your favorite grim reaper" , posted Mon 24 Oct 22:19
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My favourite videogaming experience of Death remains Symphony of the Night.
No, not the fight: the initial banter at the beginning. Probably not very good in English, but the Japanese version has Death using all the possible servile keigo do humbly ask Alucard to not interfere, to which Alucard, as a spoiled son of the castle lord telling off a misbehaved servant who forgot his place, replies "piss off".
Death needs 3 or 4 super long ultra polite sentences to say "please don't go further" and Alucard's pompous answer is something like 知れたことだ。ここを通してもらう。
This is probably amongst my favourite videogame cutscenes.
Here is the scene in question, with the Japanese voiced dialogue superposed on an English translation, to demonstrate Iggy's point. I was puzzled at the faithfulness of the translation but I finally realized it's a new fan translation patched on the Japanese version (unless they took the Xbox360 version's script?). The famously cheezy original translation conveys the right information about what is being spoken, but loses the entire subtlety of their relationship as described above by Iggy.
I am not really playing any ghastly game right now, unless you count all those deceased and spirits coming back to testify in the interminable Gyakuten Saiban 6. But when it comes to memorable encounters with Death, mine would be that ol' friend you meet pretty much at every corner of Shadowgate. Also, shout out to Specter Knight!
On the same topic, that pretty cool Youtube critic Lindsay had a good Loose Canon episode on Death as a character in Western fiction. Unfortunately it doesn't tackle video games (even Western ones) but she never does so I just assume she doesn't feel comfortable analyzing a medium she knows less about.
Même Narumi est épatée !
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| PSN: robotchris
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| "Re(5):your favorite grim reaper" , posted Tue 25 Oct 08:49
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My favourite videogaming experience of Death remains Symphony of the Night.
No, not the fight: the initial banter at the beginning. Probably not very good in English, but the Japanese version has Death using all the possible servile keigo do humbly ask Alucard to not interfere, to which Alucard, as a spoiled son of the castle lord telling off a misbehaved servant who forgot his place, replies "piss off".
Death needs 3 or 4 super long ultra polite sentences to say "please don't go further" and Alucard's pompous answer is something like 知れたことだ。ここを通してもらう。
This is probably amongst my favourite videogame cutscenes.
Hah, I was never aware of the difference between the JP and US versions! It certainly makes a lot more sense now that I know about it!
I was tempted to suggest that Symphony of the Night's Death battle is my favorite, and I do really like the depiction of Death in that game, with its close accuracy to 17th and 18th century religion depictions of Death, but really my favorite has to be the one in the PS1 remaster of the X68000 remaster of the very first game.
From the weird-ass effects in the stage, to the incredible music I think Castlevania Chronicle had an excellent and underappreciated Death battle!
I also have a candidate for the most irritating Death battle-- the one from Bloodlines, which I will be happy to never attempt again, which is a shame, because otherwise it's a pretty great game!
You have to carefully reproduce the world of "Castlevania" in the solemn atmosphere.
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| | "Re(6):your favorite grim reaper" , posted Tue 25 Oct 19:32
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The big contrast comes from the way the other speaks to them: Dracula is his arrogant self mostly talking to himself and barely acknowledging Richter, while Shinigami speaks with all the precaution necessary to address his master's son. The whole introduction is really well done to tell you "for the first time, the main character is not a Belmont, and here is how he's different". After the gameplay difference you felt by going through the entrance of the castle, the cut scene shows the background difference, and the social status, upbringing and power of Alucard is entirely presented not through him, as Richter was with his own speech, but through Shinigami because a lord's son doesn't introduce himself, that's what servants are for.
I love that he is only barely more polite when he talks to these commo
-- Message too long, Autoquote has been Snipped --
Wow you've made me realise that although I've logged hundreds of hours into that game, I've never truly experienced it as it was meant to be.
That exchange sounds amazing. It was 100% lost in the US translation. In general, Americans aren't great at understanding class distinctions and the nuances of formal hierarchical communication (though they are very real and impact everyday life for everyone).
quote:
favourite death
Wizardr: Tale of the Foresaken Land and Dragon's Dogma have particularly great, intense encounters with the grim reaper. I've spent much more time observing those games than actually playing them though, so I'm sure someone else can better explain why they were so good.
www.art-eater.com
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| | "Re(7):your favorite grim reaper" , posted Wed 26 Oct 05:42
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In general, Americans aren't great at understanding class distinctions and the nuances of formal hierarchical communication (though they are very real and impact everyday life for everyone).
Keep in mind that this is a nation that explicitly sought to eliminate aristocracy as a feature of government, even though in practical terms it remains here and there. There do exist titles which are either related to role or to respect (e.g. Mister President, Dr., Sir, Ma'am, etc.), but you can see that the deference doesn't come with a wide variety of formal language constructs. An inferior will address a superior as "Sir" or by their title in the military, but the form of address doesn't change whether the person is one or two or however many ranks above them.
I get the feeling that trying to address practical aristocrats in the USA with language that would reflect the servility expressed in other cultures would come across as artificial and obsequious. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. The same would be true in Canada, and I think Canadians would like to keep it that way.
The absence of granularity sometimes feels very weird, though. I remember that while in the university in Philadelphia as a student that a number of the cleaning staff would address me as "sir", and it made me feel a little uncomfortable: after all, I have done nothing to command this title of respect from that person, nor am I in any position to do so. It's not like I was older than those staff, either!
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "Re(9):your favorite grim reaper" , posted Wed 26 Oct 12:38
Yes, yessss, these Death stories are splendid! Soon I will have collected enough of them to revive my dark master thoroughly entertain myself for the season. And thanks to Gieflos, I now realize there was an official Dracula x Death pairing! 
Spoon's right about the profound difficulty of Death in the first game just because of that impossible corridor before him. This sort of set the stage for Dracula being easier to beat than Death in later games, too, or at least in X68000/Chronicle, which features the same stage and the same insane Medusa/Axe Knight gauntlet as I recall.
Iggy, you've reminded me of the unobtrusive story touches that add so much to Nocturne in the Moonlight’s atmosphere. I was barely even paying attention when I was a kid ("huh, Death's speech sure is old-fashioned...ah, whatever, must be because he's old"), other than to think that Maria's dialogue was anachronistically modern. Note too how that same scene in the courtyard features impaled bodies in the background that were the real-life Dracula's trademark.
You'll recall there's a similarly revealing dialogue with Death in the inverse castle's catacombs, where he's wearing a lame puffier purple robe (maybe it's a parka and he's cold down there) rather than the great look that Karasu noted. Similar vibe, along these lines. Death: "I beseech you once more, for your honored father's sake, withdraw from here." Alucard: "Sod off." Death: "Then there is no choice. For the sake of my master, I shall claim your soul."
More thongs, less Death: Back to your seasonal Rusty programming
Returning to the Belmonts' secret cousin, Rusty continues to impresse with grade-A Valis-style peppy tunes for ascending the expected chapel level.
While on one hand, I'm almost positive I've seen that castle somewhere before, and while Rusty seems to share Simon's bad luck with collapsing floors, no pre-Richter Belmonts ever got their own attractive cinema for it, let alone a unique one-shot falling sprite. While Simon had the wisdom not to fall head-first on his way to the inevitable cavern level, at least Rusty still looks great when she gets to her feet. Plus the Belmonts never learned how to ride a haunted mine cart with insanely catchy music.
Occasional cuts back to the besieged villagers wondering how you're doing at rescuing their women from the Count provide a sense of progress and setting, and the cool transforming female water sprites in the aqueduct maze attack you to seriously cool music .
To top it off, there's even a corrupted vampire hunter you face periodically, once again predating Dracula X and Richter's brainwashing in Nocturne in the Moonlight somehow?!
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| PSN: zonepharaoh
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| "MMCafe X: Rusty in the Moonlight" , posted Sat 29 Oct 15:00
Now that Halloween is upon us, and because the Cafe is so classy nowadays, it’s time to join Count Orlok in listening to the Dance of Pearls, the most refined piece out of the Nocturne in the Moonlight soundtrack.
In the spirit of the season, Rusty soldiers onto the clock tower, regrettably designed for a more evolved Belmont rather than someone with terrible jump detection and rope climbing physics. Horrifying sacrifices (and save states) later, Rusty at least gets to advance to a beautiful moonlit bridge at the top, complete with a terrifying giant gashadokuro super-skeleton to fight, straight out the Kuniyoshi painting, who attacks you while Legions come streaming out of the crypt beneath him. I don’t think that any pre-Metroidvania games had a boss this big.
Rusty squares off again against the corrupted vampire hunter, who suggests that he quit the job after his family was persecuted for his hunter abilities. If you use your imagination, you can assume he’s a Belmont since persecution for their strange powers goes back to at least Ralph C. Belmont…and this is already a high-end Dracula doujin game, so why not! The best music in the game plays while he very sportingly gives you the key to free the rest of the Count’s captives.
Rusty goes on to fight Bloody Mary, queen of the monster clan attempting to revive the Count. Rusty promptly steamrolls her after concluding that she is not nearly hot enough to pose a true threat to Rusty’s superior leather.
After heading up a highly familiar staircase, Rusty gets to face the Count, who tries the SFC (“IV”) variation of Dracula’s first form, then ditches it for full-on Makaimura jump-on-the-hands/platform mode. He gets wasted anyway, but at least there’s really cool music while he does. Chronologically, he officially beat Dracula to giving actual speeches rather than simply hopping out of his throne/casket to fight.
After rescuing the last girl in a reunion sequence that’s happier and more elaborate than the usual crumbling castle scene, Rusty and her heroic thong decide it’s time to hit the road again, but not before waving goodbye using Richter’s exact pose, several months before he did. What’s the truth behind Rusty’s predictive powers? It is a TRUE HALLOWEEN MYSTERY
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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"Re(1):UNDEAD THREAD 2016" , posted Sat 15 Oct 12:57
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who follow the path of a warrior
