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Mary Skelter: Nightmares

Suicidal

Arcane
Joined
Apr 29, 2007
Messages
2,208
Beat it on hardest difficulty including the post game area. I stand by my initial assessment that the game is pretty good but it suffers greatly from having many good ideas but poor execution or lack of depth and the more I played the more these flaws started pissing me off. Nearly every single positive thing I can say about the game can be appended with a big BUT.

Thoughts:

-I liked the exploration aspect. Every area is sprinkled with interactible objects, gimmicks, traps, puzzles and treasure and their variety is quite large - destructible walls, jump pads, tightropes, teleporters, pitfalls, fans, etc. As a result of this exploring was fun and I kept seeing new things the further I went. The visual design of the dungeons is great and I was always looking forward to seeing how fucked up the next area will look. My personal favorites where the abandoned schoolhouse with flesh-covered ceilings and the post game dungeon that had a wide variety of weird faces on the walls to marvel at.

-I liked that every character you recruit gives you exploration skills, like breaking walls or grabbing items from afar, which opens the opportunity to go back to old areas and reach previously unexplored places.

-Even though exploring is fun, there isn't much reason to stray from the story path. There aren't many unique secrets you can uncover and your only reward for exploration is finding more loot you can find elsewhere. AFAIK, the only truly unique exploration reward are upgrades for Jack's gun and if you find all of them you gain a new travel skill that lets you bypass an obstacle in a low level dungeon, fight a secret boss and recruit her to the party. That was cool. The game should have had more such things.

-Nightmares are a cool idea that, unfortunately, falls apart after the 2nd dungeon. The first few nightmares are actually a big threat to your party and as a result make for some tense encounters. But after that your party becomes strong enough to not get one-shotted and destroy the nightmare's parts before it gets another turn, so a tense, potentially game-ending encounter turns into a minor annoyance and a way to farm loot. At this point the only way a nightmare can kill you is if you get a random encounter during the chase sequence, but you can avoid that by just standing still, waiting for the nightmare to come to you, whacking it and then running away to get your free loot. Another thing I dislike is that every single nightmare in the game behaves the same way. It would have been so much interesting if each one had some sort of unique map gimmick, for example going through walls, moving very fast if you're not looking at it or making you hallucinate or some shit like that.

I though the class system was pretty interesting because it allows you to do weird shit with your characters. Red Riding Hood is a good example of this - depending on how you gear and build her, she can function as a front line tank mage, a back line offensive mage, a healer/support or some sort of combination of the above. I always appreciate when an RPG gives you more options that the standard brawny fighter, nimble rogue and frail wizard. It's a shame that the game has only 5 main classes and 10 characters, so once you get the 6th character she can do the same things that one of your characters already can, so I never found a reason to replace my starting 5 with any of the newer ones. Another thing I dislike is that some sub-classes have too few skills, or in some cases, exactly identical skills to another subclass but with a different name.

-Item system is decent. There is quite a lot of different gear that can also come with random modifiers and can be upgraded. Some items also appear to have some sort of hidden skill that I only discovered about at the end. For example I noticed how one of my characters suddenly had the mana costs of her spells halved for some reason and I couldn't figure out why. Then when I swapped her weapon for another, the mana costs returned to normal. Apparently the weapon made all her spells cheap even though it was written nowhere in the description. I also remember giving another character a magic book weapon that tripled the strength of her healing spells and the buff disappeared when I changed her weapon.

-The story and setting were intriguing (after all, exploring the insides of giant shapeshifting creature is a lot more interesting story-wise than generic forests and caves) but the dialogue is terrible and consists mainly of characters reiterating the same points over and over and telling each other how they're "gonna do their best". I was ultra speed-reading/skipping most of the stuff not directly related with the plot and it still felt like torture at times. Also most of the characters are unlikable and annoying.

-Combat is, in my opinion, the game's worst feature. It's pretty bad, and it's a shame because it has the potential to be better. The core combat mechanics are decent - you have your different damage types, elemental resistances and weaknesses, buffs/debuffs, status effects. The blood mechanic is pretty cool and makes the fights a little bit more unpredictable and gives you some interesting tactical decisions to make from time to time. So why does it suck? I think there are 2 main reasons:

1. Poor skill balance. In this game damage is king. You beat random encounters by spamming AoE damage skills (preferably ones that target the enemy's weaknesses so you can stack blood and make your characters go berserk and thus deal more damage) and healing after the fight. You beat bosses by debuffing their damage, spamming single target attacks and occasionally healing. I don't think I've ever used a single status effect in my entire playthrough. I never seen any status effect used on me other than sleep. I never used any buffs except for elemental damage reduction during bosses. I never used any debuffs except for damage reduction on bosses.

The same applies to the enemies. The most dangerous enemies in the game were those that could do the most damage per turn. Enemies that spent their turns on anything other than direct damage were just wasting them.

Believe it or not, the most interesting tactical decisions I had to make were with Jack because sometimes I had to make a choice between curing one of my combat characters who was about to go insane and risking a 40% stun chance, guarding another character who was about to die or using a potion to heal everyone. On any of the combat characters the decision making was much more primitive - do damage, if HP is low and healing spell is available - heal.

2. The enemy design is absolute dogshit. Each area in the game has about 5-6 enemies. Every enemy also has several reskins that do not differ much from the original. Each dungeon usually has 3-4 non-optional floors. So on floor 1 you will be fighting, for example, blue bats that are weak to fire, resistant to water and hit you for some damage. On floor 2 they are replaced with red bats that are also weak to fire and resistant to water and have slightly higher stats. On floor 3 there will be yellow bats with the same shit, slightly higher stats and maybe a new skills that deals slightly more damage than their normal attack. The same thing happens with the other 5 or so enemies of that dungeon. This means that while you are exploring one dungeon, you will be fighting the same shit over and over again.

The enemies themselves are not interesting in the slightest - they're just balls of stats of roughly the same distribution that sometimes possess a single combat ability, which more often than not deals damage, or does something else and in that case can be safely disregarded. Each enemy is always weak to one element and resistant to another and the strength of the weakness/resistance is always the same.

The bosses are not much better. Which was your favorite boss, guys? The big monster that deals a lot of damage and sometimes acts twice in one turn? The big monster that deals a lot of damage and sometimes acts twice in one turn? Or maybe the big monster that deals a lot of damage and sometimes acts twice in one turn? Well there is the temple boss. That was quite cool and unique. It wasn't really a combat boss and more of an environmental puzzle but I enjoyed it more than any other boss in the game (even though it was kinda annoying with the real-time turns). And the devs liked that concept so much they copied it completely for the final boss and called it a day.

Apart from being utterly generic and samey, most of the bosses and enemies also pose no challenge to your party. Trash enemies are swiftly dispatched with aoe damage and even if they manage to kill someone before they die, resurrection spells and items are plentiful. Bosses are a joke. Casting 3 attack debuffs with different names completely nullifies their damage. If the boss likes to spam an aoe elemental attack, cast a protection buff from that element or debuff its magic stat. This is what a typical boss battle looked like for me:

y4iPNbK.jpg


I was also very disappointed with the fact that there aren't any enemies that could mess with the blood mechanic. The devs could have added enemies that, instead of doing damage, would severely increase your characters' corruptions levels (kinda like stress dealers in Darkest Dungeon). Or how about enemies that increase your characters' corruption and then explode on the next turn, covering your characters in blood and making them go insane. How about enemies that prevent Jack from using the blood gun? Or enemies that could eat your characters' blood stacks and gain huge buffs? They could have added so much shit like this and made the combat more interesting.

Before this game I played Genius of Sappheiros, a very combat-heavy indie JRPG and it had random encounter trash fodder that was more complicated and interesting to fight than the vast majority of enemies in MST, including the bosses. A few examples: an undead enemy that attacks your party several times per turn and if your character dies it will immediately cast revive on them followed by an unresistable mind control (which can be dispelled) on its next turn; a wizard enemy that attacks with a variety of elemental spells and randomizes its elemental immunities and weaknesses at the beginning of each turn; a death knight enemy that deals a lot of damage and heals himself depending on the damage done that can be quite difficult to kill if you allow him to keep hitting you. These are not special enemies or mini-bosses, but just your regular old trash mobs you fight in random battles. Sometimes you can even encounter more than one. Yet they are more interesting to fight and pose a bigger threat to the player than MST's bosses and nightmares.

-Even though the combat sucks, the game tries to make it as painless as possible. The animation skip button saves you a lot of time, random encounters are actually quite rare so I didn't feel bogged down by them, escaping from battles is easy so in the late game I was running from pretty much every fight save for the stationary ones blocking my way. There's also autocombat, but honestly, on the hardest difficulty it wasn't very useful past the 1st dungeon cause enemies tend to oneshot you unless you oneshot them first and the only way to oneshot them first is to use AoE damage skills.

-Even on horror, the game felt too easy. The only challenging parts were the beginning of the graveyard area when the game took my frontline away from me for plot reasons and the post-game dungeon, where enemies suddenly became really fast and could sometimes kill my entire party before they could act and the nightmare didn't get stunned from a few attacks and actually killed me a couple of times.

-I feel the game was too long for how little content variety it had. Towards the end, everything started feeling the same, not just the combat. I could have done without a few of the dungeons and the final tower was twice longer than it needed to be.

But overall, despite these issues, I had fun with it. At the end of the day, the dungeon crawler gameplay loop of party building-exploring-looting-killing I like so much is there and the game does try a lot of weird unique things I've never seen before. If you like dungeon crawlers and see this game on sale, I'd say it's worth it. 10-15$ is a good price for it.
 
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BrotherFrank

Nouveau Riche
Patron
Joined
Apr 19, 2012
Messages
1,573
All right gave this a little spin and... 6-7/10 for me. Keep in mind i'm a blobber neophyte compared to the rest of ya all.

I like the esthetics and as was said earlier in this thread, even an ok blobber is better then nothing. It has a character progression system that's satisfying enough to hook me in and any annoyance i'd have at the frequent battles every few steps is countered by there being fast auto battles (i have no qualm about lowering difficulty down to easy, i wanna OCD fill out my map and it is just too annoying to do when every step can trigger enemies, i'll put difficulty back up for new areas or bosses ty vm).
Also our battle waifus going super saiyan is fun imo.
The setting in general has promise, japs have a talent for portraying fucked up hell dimensions.
That's the good.

The bad? Fighting the same enemies, over, and over... I expected so much creativity from this game when seeing the details they put into the levels, and was disappointed how each area only has a few limited monster types with recolors as you go through higher floors.
Found the whole jail system kinda pointless (every now and then i'd get some random inconsequential bonus, woohoo...).

The dialogue, oh gods the dialogue!
Pop quizz! From when in the game is there the following conversation?

"I feel like im such a burden, you're all so great and i'm so sucky!"
"that's not true, you are not a burden, you just gotta try your best, also i feel like a burden too!"
"what? you thought you were a burden? but how, i respect you too much"
"well it's because i also respect you so much that i feel like i'm a burden, maybe we should do our best for each other!"
"you're right, we should all do our best!"

Answer: it can be from pretty much any dialogue exchange in this game. Just wow... The collectivist mentality is strong in this one. I thought I was insecure in my teens but characters in this game take it to the next level. Why the hell do they constantly need to apologize for everything, do japs really not find this annoying?
It made me lol that even the "tough" looking weaponsmith dude whose look suggest he is a bit of a maverick, is all in on this too "you just gotta do your best for the good of everyone!".

And the protag is the worst at this. I want to kill this dousche so bad just so I won't have to sit through another "i'm such a burden" cutscene.
Yet I found myself in same situation as another poster here described, being unwilling to skip dialogue and clicking on every event in town just in case I missed something important...Only to be confronted with more drivel. Ok i get it, everyone is a fucking burden and you all suck! There, let us move on with our lives!

This is why Sleeping Beauty is best waifu in this game. The ONLY character who doesn't act like that and just goes "yup, yup" over and over cuz she gives no fucks.
Also she isn't a loli and has full breasts to boot. Clearly best girl.
 
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KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,863
:necro:
I went and picked up Skelter 2 because many heard censoring and said fuck it. I was mostly curious if there was a separate download for their other version of nightmares. Uh... just looking at the download looks like it must install both games unless I got borked.

Here is the GOG Mary Skelter Nightmares downloads:
wzXC3JI.png

and here is the GOG Skelter 2 downloads:
gixJY2E.png


Not seeing the other Skelter 1 version anywhere.
 
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dacencora

Guest
:necro:
I went and picked up Skelter 2 because many heard censoring and said fuck it. I was mostly curious if there was a separate download for their other version of nightmares. Uh... just looking at the download looks like it must install both games unless I got borked.

Here is the GOG Mary Skelter Nightmares downloads:
wzXC3JI.png

and here is the GOG Skelter 2 downloads:
gixJY2E.png


Not seeing the other Skelter 1 version anywhere.
AFAIK, it’s in the game. Not sure if that’s just the Switch version, but basically on the Switch you launch MS2 and then you can choose to do MS1 from inside MS2. I would assume it’s the same for the PC port.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,863
Ah. Ok.

I don't own a switch and probably never will. I'd never know there was a censor if I didn't read the forums. Probably will buy the last one if it hits GOG. If i start a series I try to finish it.
 

BrotherFrank

Nouveau Riche
Patron
Joined
Apr 19, 2012
Messages
1,573
Always fun to read rants one did years ago and not remember any of it.

So as someone who might be interested in mary skelter 2, what was censored and is there any way to get an untainted version if i don’t nave a switch?

Don’t remember mary skelter being particularly lewd which is why im scratching my head.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,863
I'll link the post in the what jrpg you're playing thread. You are erasing red goo i guess and some clothing (or was that thr first one)
 

Rean

Head Codexian Weeb
Patron
Joined
Nov 14, 2020
Messages
1,910
Strap Yourselves In
You ain't getting it though, scumbag.
 

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