I hope everyone had a wonderful and relaxing weekend. I finished Borderlands 3, and i have to say that I found it mostly tolerable, which is a massive step up from BL2 (which i hated). I have also been playing minecraft for the first time since before COVID
The intro animation is easily the most memorable and well-made part of the entire game but it does set up expectations that the actual game just can't live up to. The game's beady-eyed chubby-looking little chibi sprites and the cutesy world they inhabit just don't match the atmosphere and mood of the intro.
The studio behind the game, Media.Vision, had only made two games prior to Wild Arms, Crime Crackers and Gunners Heaven/Rapid Reload, both of which were early PS1 games. When I say early PS1, I mean early. Crime Crackers came out in 1994 and looked like this:
(It's incredible how different stuff from the early years of the PS1 is from the later games I grew up with. It barely feels like it's the same console- I recently flipped through a PS1 mag from 1996 and recognised basically none of the games being shown)
With that pedigree it makes sense Wild Arms didn't quite measure up to RPGs from Square. I looked up what Media.Vision is up to these days and discovered they've been active ever since and actually worked on the Valkyria Chronicles series which I recently made a post about. Not the VC game I played but still, small world
Yeah it's crazy how some very very early PS1 games look so similar to 16bit outings. I swear some of the games used the super famicom soundfont too.
Worse, many of them look like 3DO games. Actually, 2D games on the PS1 do typically look a lot better than SNES and Genesis games. Pretty sure Rayman would look and sound much worse on either