Design-Notes on thinking (of) video games

Mother 3's spin on turn-based combat

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Something I find fascinating about Mother 3’s combat is how the player’s health gets displayed. For the un-initiated: Damage and healing don’t happen instantly but instead count up or down gradually. In a typical turn-based RPG it doesn’t matter how fast you decide your next action. In the mother series it does. This gives the round-based combat a faster pace since you can negate the damage of even the strongest attacks, if you beat the enemy before the damage subtracts.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 makes me feel like a NPC

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Even as someone who didn’t have any experience playing Dragon’s Dogma before booting up the sequel last week, one thing I knew about it were the ludicrous screen filling special attacks. Meteor showers or small earthquakes that would wipe out half a dozen enemies at once. What I didn’t expect was that I would experience them only one hour into the game. The other surprising thing was that I actually wasn’t the one doing the cool thing. Whilst I trade blows with a single goblin for probably 20 seconds, one of my pawn companions decides to end my miserable display of power by summoning a tornado that immediately disposes of my nemesis and five others like him.

Demon's Souls and iteration

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After having experienced all of the modern FromSoftware Soulslikes, I finally got around to playing the original Demon’s Souls for the first time. Going back to the first game in this From Software lineage made me realize just how much of the Dark Souls, Bloodborne and also Elden Ring DNA was already there in this game. The team iterated on many of those ideas throughout the years in small and big ways. One example of this is the use of the Stormruler. The Stormruler is a gimmick weapon that allows the player in one specific boss fight to shoot a storm beam. A variation of this re-occurs from time to time in their games but the origin of it was in Demon’s Souls. Of course there are other traditions like the moonlight sword as well. I could talk about the clear counterparts that many Demon’s Souls levels have in Dark Souls and how their level design evolved.