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Digital Down-Low for 05/03/2024: Gods Above and Seas Below

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Sorry to all the "haters" out there but, uh yeah, this is a week with some new video games.

Starting off with one of the more surprising re-releases of recent days, we have El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, a gussying up of the PS3/360 era Bayonetta-em-up of the same name! It's one of the more visually wild examples of the genre, but the eShop description is not particularly forthcoming with description beyond implying it's a Devil May Cry-kind of deal, but filtered through someone who had English as a second language.

I'm aware it had some narrative connection to The Lost Child, and I did enjoy that very much as an SMT game. So... umm... if you were fortunate enough to snatch that up before it was delisted and wish it was a 3rd person beat-em-up instead of a first person dungeon crawler, I guess... technically... here you go?

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Now what if you don't want to deal with angels fighting for supremacy. You want the opposite of that! Well, let's go step by step; an angel is a guy with wings like a bird. A fish is the opposite of a bird, and a guy who acts all fish-like is a deep sea diver. Therefor; a Scuba diver is the opposite of an angel. Furthermore, fighting stuff is a very active, aggressive action, so the opposite is "looking at a thing"; arguably the most passive activity short of being fully asleep. Therefor, the exact opposite point of El Shaddai is our next game; Endless Ocean: Luminous.
Explore the Briny deep and say "Huh... so that's a fish, eh?" a bunch!

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Speaking of transitioning from break-neck paced action games to slow paced, languid life sims, we have Touhou Mystias Izakaya which is a Touhou game that eschews the series traditional "spirographs worth of bullets to dodge and weave around while blasting a hellaciously massive fusilade of your own" game play in favor of running a shop where you deal in izakaya. The eShop does not specify what that is, I infer "a restaurant".

Order up a small business catering to witches and monsters and the like, why don't you?

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If you're bummed out that there's a Touhou game that isn't at least tangentially a shmup or at least built around creating "colossal arsenal barrage", maybe you could be mollified by knowing that Triggerheart Excelica is out! It, too, got its start in the PS3/360 era and is a regula-ol bullet hell Shmup; but it's more specifically the kind where cute anime girls wear pieces of spaceships in place of clothing; like a bunch of Bikini Iron Mans.

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And wrapping things up, we've got yet another old game re-release, but this one goes back to the Turbo Grafx days of yore with Cyber Citizen Shockman 3, which was never released in English before, so this is BRAND NEW to most people. In any case, it's a side-scroller that appears to be much in the Wonderboy/Valis vein, except more robot-y.

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Taht's everything I know about, so that's all you're getting!
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Speaking of transitioning from break-neck paced action games to slow paced, languid life sims, we have Touhou Mystias Izakaya which is a Touhou game that eschews the series traditional "spirographs worth of bullets to dodge and weave around while blasting a hellaciously massive fusilade of your own" game play in favor of running a shop where you deal in izakaya. The eShop does not specify what that is, I infer "a restaurant".

Order up a small business catering to witches and monsters and the like, why don't you?

This goes highly recommended. Aesthetically beautiful game with tremendously sprawling mechanics and a warm tone to it all. The Switch version comes with all released DLC, of which it has had oodles of during the game's lifetime.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
I still think about El Shaddai almost thirteen years later. Never seen anything else like it, even now. It’s not a very good “game”, yet it will always be one of my favorites.
 

WildcatJF

Let's Pock (Art @szk_tencho)
(he / his / him)
Hey hey Squid Alpha's here to report on the latest Arcade Archive!

Taito returns to the foray with their barbarian movie homage Rastan Saga, full of monsters to slash, mountains to trek, and traps to dodge. Plus vines you can jump up instead of climb for advanced movement tech!

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Til another 7 days pass by in the blink of an eye!
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Rastan Saga is a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. Unreal audiovisual excellence for 1987, and it's one of those "stiff" platformers that feels limiting at first but proves really fun to learn the nuances of exactly because of those qualities.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
My greatest exposure to Rastan Saga was playing the excellent indie game Volgarr the Viking, which explicitly pays homage to Rastan. I've never had the gumption to play its progenitor...
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Huh, I've never heard of Rastan Saga until now. Wishlisted on the store based on what I'm reading here, and also noticed that the Switch version is two players which is cool.
 
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