fozzy fosbourne posted:

Yep

Wormskull posted:

Probably easy but I liked it.

Wormskull posted:

Probably easy but I liked it.

Wormskull posted:

Wormskull posted:

In Training posted:

Lol. Are you crying because of the cows dude?

Wormskull posted:

Wormskull posted:

In Training posted:

Lol. Are you crying because of the cows dude?

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

holy gently caress this is out of those truck pumps from barkley


First off, I love RPGs and I was once near-fluent in Japanese and lived in Nagoya for a year. I studied the culture and was at a time really into anime, so I understand a lot of the pitfalls that typical Americans don't really get when it comes to entertainment from Japan. I played the demo and while it was pretty short, it seemed fun and light-hearted. I didn't want to try to play the game in Japanese because I'm a bit rusty, so I bought the English version. And I want to be real clear: this game just sucks. I'm about to get mean.

There's a lot of the prototypical childishness that's present in almost all anime. However, this isn't Studio Gibli quality "wonderment from a child's perspective" kind of childishness. No, it's the "a 5 year old came up with this story" kind. These characters are cardboard cutouts borrowed from the infamous one-dimensional list of archetypes that constitute most anime casts. The characters are trite and hackneyed and make the game feel like it was intended for very, very young children who can't appreciate deeper characterizations. And they're not helped by the dialog, which is poorly translated from Japanese. If you happen to speak the language, the game plays with a constant and ever-gnawing sense of "I could have done better." If you don't, I have a feeling that it plays with little more than a sense of "What? The? Eff?". I can always tell exactly where the errors are and how they were made. It's like someone attacked the original text with a first-year dictionary, picked the first possible translation on a word-by-word basis instead of translating the whole sentence and picking the best ones, and then didn't bother going back and trying to actually make the story make sense in English. And the idioms are horrible. A lot of Japanese idioms are culturally ingrained and just do not work in English, but, in true first-year fashion, the translator tried to force it, which results in this constant flurry of "why did they just say that?". And then I have to remember that this wasn't originally in English. On top of that, most of the script is barely even grammatically correct. I don't understand how the voice actors said most of this stuff. Do they have no self-respect? Did nobody question the translation? Do they turn their brains off when they read their scripts? This seems the most likely, as most of the dialog is delivered extremely stiffly, which makes me question the reviewers who said it was good. Were they reviewing the original Japanese voice cast? Because the English is terrible. Just. Terrible.

There's almost as little feeling in the speech as there is in the characters' faces. The character models just run around the screen like vaudeville idiots, with more lanky-armed slapstick humor than actual witty dialog. It might be that the wit was consumed by the horrendous translation, I don't know. Either way, it wouldn't annoy me so much if there was some expression, but the faces on the models Never. Change. They just blink with this wide-eyed, blank-faced stare that's pure, unadulterated creepy. The only time there's ever any expression is when you get to watch the pop-up cut scenes that randomly trigger throughout the game. And even then, it's not animated. It's very detached with individual pictures for the characters that are involved. Whenever a character "reacts" to what another one is saying, their picture might change, or move around the screen or shake. But it's never *animated*. For me, that just creates a big disconnect. If I wanted unanimated character stills, I'd be reading a manga, not holding a controller.

White-knuckled holding a controller, I should say. I'm not a controller-chucker, but I have to fight the urge for most of the game. In typical JRPG fashion, the bulk of the game is extruded through near-constant combat encounters. You can pick and choose what you fight just by avoiding touching enemies (except on the world map, where monsters can just appear in front of you before you can dodge). However, once you're in the combat cloud you'll find pretty quickly that it's atrocious. Your role in battle is very much active, and you have to constantly perform combos. Most of your combat will involve using basic attacks so that you can charge your TP meter and perform special moves. However, the character can only perform a maximum of 3 strikes in a row. And no matter how many strikes you choose to use, wheter it be 1, 2, or the "full" (pathetic) 3, once you're done he does this incredibly idiotic dance where he tosses his sword around his body. During this time you cannot do ANYTHING. You cannot move, block, use items, or use abilities. Not that blocking is ever really useful, but this means that you're left defenseless EVERY SINGLE TIME you use a basic attack without leading into a special move combo. And even then, I think he still does his sword dance after special moves. Either way, you're defenseless for a hugely asinine amount of your time in combat. I cannot get over how @#$()@#)$%(&* stupid this is.

During the opening hours of the game, it's not a problem because enemies generally drop quickly and are very weak. Within a few short hours they'll drop with just two or three hits, making these short combos useful. However, once you get up to the first real boss fight, it starts to get very annoying. Like a lot of games that have come out in the past decade, this one makes bosses several times more powerful than the surrounding area's enemies (something that annoys the hell out of me: make the normal enemies harder or the bosses weaker, but don't surprise me with a random pounding... that's not what I'm paying for when I buy a game). So you may think you're doing pretty daggum well, kicking butt and not bothering to take names, and then you turn a corner and find your own familiar seat-warmer sitting cheeks-side-up on a platter being served back to you for lunch with a side of whoopass. During boss fights, your TP meter runs out in a hurry because you're trying to use as mnany combos as you can while ineffectually dealing damage. Meanwhile, your party members are dropping like flies because they're utterly useless AI-controlled trash. So once you run out of allies, any means to revive or heal them, and finally out of TP, you're stuck trying to recharge with ultra-short combos that render you defenseless. If you attack and get blocked, you're doubly screwed because not only have you not dealt any measurable damage, but then you go and do the "I'm @#$%@#$% Stupid" sword-toss dance. This is the exact moment that the boss opens up with a much-more-than-3-hit combo that punishes you for spending any amount of money on this crappy game.

Once you're done surgically reattaching your rump, you're free to try to level up. But most areas just don't have powerful enough enemies, and the game will concoct some bizarre reason why you can't leave the area to go find stronger enemies. After scrounging for 20, 30, 60 minutes to get a single level, you go up against the boss for a rematch and last all of an extra 10 seconds - maybe taking an additional 5% of the boss' health - before the same thing happens. I squeaked by the 1st boss on the first try, had to retry the second boss (some kind of golem) 2 or 3 times before I got him, and finally got to the 3rd boss (some kind of cokatrice-looking mofo). Once you get stuck on the route to this SOB, there are all of 5 enemeis that will not respawn unless you run to the save point, save, and reload the game. This makes grinding out that level extra-stupid-annoying. I spent some insane number of eye-clawingly boring hours trying to get a level that ultimately didn't matter, and I saved, turned off the Xbox and haven't picked the game back up since.

I hate games that force level grinding, and this one is pretty bad about it. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that for however many hours I've forced into this pile of garbage, there are only about 8 enemy models that come in 2-3 flavors each. It's bland. Just bland. The only thing good about fighting so many monsters is all the little prizes they drop.

There's a neat little equipment management system that lets you upgrade your weapons and armor, and if you're out in the wild you can 'cook' meals with ingredients dropped by monsters that heal or lend certain effects to your party. However, there's not a whole lot of reward to it and the system gets bogged down in the minutia pretty quickly. It's not quite as bad as Dragon's Dogma in terms of sheer bredth of available items, but I don't remember it being as simple or straight-forward, either. In Dragon's Dogma, you can upgrade any item at any time so long as you have the proper materials (which the blacksmith will identify for you, even if you've never seen it) and the right amount of gold, and "learning" combinable item recipes just involves finding the components (having owned both at some point will tell that you can make something, the first attempt to do combine them will tell you what it makes). In Tales, it seems like upgrades are unlocked as you progress through the game, and figuring out what does what and whether or not it's worth it is a die roll. And the 'cooking' skill is just crap. Even if you manage to learn a recipe, the characters are apparently all inept and almost never get it right. Leveling has a neglible (if any) effect on this, so you just burn through materials. And it doens't seem to matter if a character claims to be a good cook, they still suck. If you're caught with your pants down by a SURPRISE! (super) boss and don't have a lot of useful combat-worthy items, the 'cooking' option will NOT save you.

I'm not really looking forward to finishing the game, either, because even if I do the rest of it perfectly I won't get all the achievements. I have to play through at least twice, maybe even three times. I just don't like games that force multiple playthroughs to get all the achievements. A game should stand on its own merits to warrant a second visit (like any of the Halos), not numb players' minds with a full lather-rinse-repeat that lacks any difference, takes just as long to complete, and yields some arbitrary and insulting paltry amount of "gamer score" for your effort (like Mass Effect 1 & 3). This just compounds my annoyance with the game, because I can't be one-and-out if I ever DO bother to pick this turd back up.

There's very little here to be enjoyed. In my opinion, save your money. Play something else.

GorfZaplen posted:

I'm going to guess one of the tales games, not sure which one

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

Vesperia

quote:

For years, I've gone back and forth with myself about whether this is a good game. The conclusion I've come to is that it's partly responsible for making games too casual these days. There are some interesting things happening in the combat, but the game has thick layers of story for you to go through, and while it follows a structure, and has fleshed out characters with reasonable motivations, story in video games is a mistake. Part of this is because despite that it's allegedly an RPG you don't get to make a lot of meaningful choices. In fact, you get to make very few choices about what the hero does outside of combat, and most of them don't really matter. And if we're going to try elevating videogames beyond mere combat, it would behoove JRPG fans to demand more choices so they can truly role-play their own "anime hero". Personally, I'd recommend giving players choices in story that let them end up a pathetic failure or butt of the joke in their own story. Fail states are important.

But of course that would take a master stroke in storytelling, something videogames aren't known for. Yes, yes, many people say there are great stories to be told in videogames, but videogames are not literature. For every decent videogame story, there are 10 wonderful books rich with various ways you can interpret them, as satisfying as eating a savory meal with a delicious soda. They are intentional experiences that are supposed to happen in a very specific way. If they don't happen that way, then the programmer has to account for that, or face an apparently endless web of possibilities. Until we develop a way of truly doing that, games are dumb at telling stories you can interact with. Even games that give you plenty of dialog options are bogus because the end result is the same, story wise, regardless of what you do. At the end of tbis, the story remains the same. It simply doesn't matter how well you understand the game itself. There is only one outcome. This is a role-FORCING game.

I'm fine with games having cutscenes per se. If this game was combat, anime, combat, anime, combat anime without any illusions of choice, I'd be perfectly happy with that.

I should've got an N64.

GorfZaplen posted:

These are for the same game

Wormskull posted:

GorfZaplen posted:

These are for the same game

Wormskull posted:

In Training posted:

FF7?

rediscover posted:

I really wanna kick the quote guys rear end so bad

elf help book posted:

I'm a Kiss fan. Actually, for Kiss fans, this game may be a little bit of a letdown. You don't ever get to "see" Kiss in the game.

klapman posted:

KISS Pinball

trying to jack off posted:

as satisfying as eating a savory meal with a delicious soda

elf help book posted:

theres only 2 kiss games and you picked the wrong one

Wormskull posted:

Pablo Gigante posted:

I own 2 small tech companies and spend 12 or more hours/day working on PCs and the web and am not sloppy, forgetful, or senile.