Finished Another Code: Recollection!

Early impressions in my previous post.

The first game is quite decent despite it's age. It's short and focused, and that works really well in its favor - there's little downtime and filler, you're almost all the time with just Ashley and "D" so it' easier to get attached to them, the plot is simple but moves fast, you're constantly finding new puzzles so you never get bored.

Now, the second game... well, that one is a mess. Too many characters for something this short, too much running around doing nothing, and too many irrelevant side-plots that keep messing the pace of the game. Also, I didn't count them but I have a distinct impression that it has less puzzles than the first game despite being 1h longer - even if you're nice enough to count the endless "door hacking" QTEs as "puzzles".

It's kinda weird how disconnected the first and second halves of the game feel, almost like completely different games. The first half starts with you running around getting involved into minor issues until settling into helping a boy called Matthew find out what happened with his father who disappeared 5 years ago. They clearly tried to give him an equivalent role to "D" in this game, but I don't think it works very well because you simply don't spend enough time with him to get equally attached.

Then on the second half Matthew leaves and the story becomes completely focused on Ashley's family. Story-wise I like this part a lot more, but the gameplay takes a nosedive with the areas being increadibly boring, almost no puzzles and exploration - you're pretty much just running forward doing QTEs and watching story sections with some rare breaks. All of this section feels rushed and unfinished.

Overall it took me around 5h for the first game and 6h for the second one.

Playing Crystar!

I enjoyed its "spiritual sequel" Crymachina quite a bit, so I decided to give this one a shot. And it's kinda neat how different the two games play despite being games from the same developer with the same base idea for the gameplay loop.

Crymachina had faster-paced combat, and focused on smaller stages with less enemies on screen - but you had to be careful because enemies hit really hard and healing was quite limited. Crystar on the other hand has much slower-paced combat, bigger stages with a lot of enemies, but they are all individually weak mobs and only gets somewhat scary if you're surrounded.

So far I'd say that I enjoyed Crymachina's approach a lot more. The combat was more fun, and the shorter dungeons are (oddly enough) a positive - the long dungeons used in Crystar exacerbate a lot how repetitive the action sections are, and make the game kinda of a slog to go through.

I'm currently on Chapter 7, maybe I'll be able to finish this one next week.