^I'm trying to finish up Deception 2 before IV arrives [only got around halfway through it last time].
OL wrote:Got Deception IV in the mail yesterday. Only played a little bit, but it was a total blast. You're bound to flub the traps a bit the first time you try them, but once you finally string a few together (pumpkin head>>bear trap>>pendulum), you feel like a fucking boss.
That's the kind of "skill based" gameplay that I love about this series.
OL wrote:And good god, the tone is mean. I love it. The whole point is to kill the enemies in complex, brutal, or humiliating ways, but the thing is that they're coming after you because the main character herself is basically evil. They're the good guys. So when the second enemy popped up and I pressed the button to see her profile, it said how she became a mercenary so she could afford money for her sick, ailing father... and I just laughed at how sadistic that makes the game seem.
This really makes me want to play the rest of them now. Seems like a really great, original series.
Well then, I look forward to the series restrospective/review that this series so justly deserves.
They're criminally underrated and overlooked. And I just found out the other week that the Fatal Frame/Project Zero series development team are the one and the same who made the Deception series of games (same director/lead designer on both series, too).
You're unfortunately playing the most advanced game in the series first, so it will be quite a step back going from that with all of its refinements, to playing the first game in the series, which honestly feels like a game made on King's Field 1's engine. It's clunky as hell, but
that atmosphere. Plus the story is incredibly batshit crazy.
The one recurring theme throughout the series though is that you
are evil. Then again the characters you kill start out being sympathetic and then they have incredibly messed up/evil characters also come after you later on into each game who commit such deeds as rape, mass murder ("ethnic cleansing"), paedophilia, kidnapping, extortion, patricide, killing children; you name it, there's some incredibly messed up villains in these games and it feels good putting those bastards down.
It is interesting that the first Deception remains the only one where you play as a male though. And to be honest, it was pretty ballsy for them to bring out a game in the mid 90s that has the main character devil worship, so that he can be revived and can wreak vengeance on everybody in the game.
And yeah, every game has enemy profiles that you can read up on before each fight.
OL wrote:And this is totally unimportant, but I was shocked at the fact that the game actually came with a full-color manual. It's rare enough that games even come with a manual now, but to have it in full color as well? Crazy.
Not that it's a great manual or anything; it's all just instructional text and whatnot, with little to no artwork anywhere. I was just surprised by the inclusion.
That's cool that they did that in an age where even black and white manuals are a rarity.
I'm still blown away that Tecmo-Koei even greenlit another entry in this series after all of this time (we're talking about a series here that hadn't been seen or heard of since circa 2005), let alone localized it at all, since it is
so niche and unknown. I had literally never heard of the series myself until like a year ago.