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Amppelix posted:Thanks to the questing for glory RPG speedrun marathon I realized that Xanadu Next is not only on PC and in english, but also just, on steam. Where one can easily buy it. So how is it? It looked pretty cool from the bit of stream I saw, but I also understand that it's a dungeon crawler and I do usually have problems getting into those if there's no other hook. Here's some copy/paste from when I played it. tldr, I liked it but there are some issues. It's basically a third-person dungeon-crawler game. There's a hub town where you can talk to npc's and shop, and from there you go into various dungeons. XN is from the Ys guys, but it's not as skill oriented as a Ys game. It's slower-paced and feels more like a monster clicker (aka whatever you want to call a pc action rpg like grim dawn, etc.). Unlike the Ys game of the mid-2000's there is no jump button and you can only attack based on your distance from the target. There aren't any classes or anything, but each weapon in the game has a skill you can permanently learn once you use it for it a bit, and there are spells and they're all offensively oriented. Dungeon design is quite good and there are satisfying shortcuts to unlock and areas are all different from one another. One big caveat though, XN gates a lot of progress by having areas require dozens of keys and you'll need hundreds throughout the game. Unlike other games though, most of your keys will be bought from the shop in town and there's even a mechanic for them. Keys start off costing 20 gold, then slowly increases each time you buy one until they start costing 100+. The thing is, by selling the key guy monster bones (an enemy drop), you'll decrease the gold amount a good bit. It's interesting and different but I'd be lying if I didn't find it quite annoying at times. Like there will be areas where you unlock a door with your last key and then run into another locked door 5 seconds away and you'll be mad as gently caress. That said, the game does allow you to find an infinite use "warp back to hub town" item pretty early. Take the first right once you get to the area called the Eternal Maze and save yourself the pain of walking past it and exploring the rest of the area like I did. There are some problems though. Like the Ys games, equipment and levels mean a whole lot. The max level cap is 30 but you will not go past 20 unless you specifically grind the last area in the game for hours and hours. You'll frequently find yourself in a new area and taking a lot of damage until you level up or get some new equipment. The game is set up in a way that you'll level up pretty quickly if you're under-leveled but there are times, like boss encounters, where you're going to find yourself needing to level or buy/find new equipment and it kind of sucks. There are also a bit too many box puzzles, especially near the end of the game. Some other issues I had with XN are there are not enough skill slots for all the skills you get. You start with 4 slots and never unlock any more. There are probably around 30 or so skills you can unlock and even passive ones need to be equipped for them to work, so you'll find yourself getting some useful skills, but they're not useful enough to change your current set-up. Another thing is you have to equip certain items to use their special effect. For example, you get a gauntlet that lets you break boulders, but instead of builder breaking now being a thing you can do, you have to go into your menu and equip the gauntlet and then break the boulder. It's lame because you get item slots, separate from you skill slots, and you'll have to move your setup around to equip an item for a second. XN seems like a perfect game for the steam controller. It's clearly made to be played with a mouse because the inventory screen really doesn't have full controller support. There's a button you can hold down to make a mouse cursor pop up and then drag across the screen but it's super cumbersome. I played it with a controller while sitting at my desktop, so I could just reach over and use the mouse when doing inventory stuff. The steam controller could probably let you use the trackpad as a mouse and completely cut that out. Also, since it's an old pc game, it does not recognize the LT/RT buttons on an xinput controller natively. I got around this by using the program xinput plus, which is free and useful for this type of stuff. This way I could set camera rotation to LT/RT instead of LB/RB. I'll even post my button set-up because the launcher lists things as button 5, 6, 7 and so on and you may not know what things you need to care about setting up. Use this and save yourself the hassle. Confirm/Attack-Button 1 (A) Cancel/Skill-Button 2 (B) Menu-Button 4 (Y) Use Item-Button 3 (X) Select Next Item-Don't assign anything Select Next Item-Button 5 (LB) Select Next Skill-Don't assign anything Select Next Skill-Button 6 (RB) Map Zoom-Button 10 (right stick click) Reset Camera-Button 9 (left stick click) Rotate Camera-Button 11 (LT) (can only use button 11 & 12 if you use something like xinput plus) Rotate Camera-Button 12 (RT) System-Button 8 (Start) Use Mouse-Button 7 (Select) Okay that's about it on XN. The only other thing I can think of being an issue is that I noticed frame pacing issues while playing early on and I solved these by just making a profile in nvidia inspector and setting the frame rate limiter to 60 and then no more problems. I talked a lot about stuff I didn't like and technical stuff, but I really liked XN and it scratched that dungeon exploring itch for me. It'll be on sale around 50% off and while it may involve a bit of extra work to play it with a controller, I think it's worth it. The gameplay was satisfying and I blew through the game in a weekend. Sivek fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 01:42
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Seems interesting enough. That's definitely going on the list that's actually not so long of things I will buy when they're on sale/ I feel like playing something new.
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Nov 6, 2017 01:55
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^^^ Also, you did see all the posts about Zwei II, right? Amppelix posted:Thanks to the questing for glory RPG speedrun marathon I realized that Xanadu Next is not only on PC and in english, but also just, on steam. Where one can easily buy it. So how is it? It looked pretty cool from the bit of stream I saw, but I also understand that it's a dungeon crawler and I do usually have problems getting into those if there's no other hook. I rather enjoyed collecting the lore tablets, and having the main character's archaeologist buddy decode them, then try to figure out what really happened. Opinions will differ on: block puzzles!
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Nov 6, 2017 02:08
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Oh I know all about Zwei II. I played the Japanese version like ten years ago without knowing a lick of Japanese (this is actually how I became aware of Falcom and their work) for way too long before finally giving up on some part that was just too hard to do without being able to understand the instructions where I just wandered the map for hours looking for something to trigger which never did. I'll definitely get it eventually, but I'm really swamped in games atm.
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Nov 6, 2017 02:13
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Ryuga Death posted:If it's the one I think it is, it's a shop that opened in the forest stage. Spawn at the forest entrance and go backwards. It's kind of in an awkward position. Thanks. I'd have never found that. Where can I get more CDs for my sweet new zPod in Zwei II? Hwurmp fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 02:41
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Really Pants posted:Where can I get more CDs for my sweet new zPod in Zwei II? From the person you exchange food with. Here's a link that should help though it's google translate so just keep that in mind.
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Nov 6, 2017 02:46
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https://www.facebook.com/XSEEDTrails/videos/2181652641860137/ Aurelia, Bardias, and Angelica's uncle.
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Nov 6, 2017 22:26
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honestly i hope this whole mess with nisa makes falcom just stick with XSEED for any future localizations. probably not how that works, but i can dream
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Nov 6, 2017 23:10
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At the very least it might be a wake up call for NISA, and maybe they'll step up their game moving forward! I'm trying to be positive today.
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Nov 6, 2017 23:24
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i don't want to stop you from being positive but i don't think nisa's 83rd terrible translation is going to make their management stop sucking just because they had to work on a fix because they accidentally hosed up their deal with a really small developer who most people outside of japan aren't aware of
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Nov 6, 2017 23:26
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in unrelated news: I am a child
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Nov 6, 2017 23:48
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One could argue that the fact they're putting money into the situation at all indicates that it's somehow important to them. I've never really been a fan of them, mind you, and I'd love to get to work on Ys again someday. But if NISA felt no effect from this at all I doubt they would have done anything.
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Nov 6, 2017 23:49
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they definitely felt an effect but i think this is more of a special case with the series and all the existing, better handled english releases to compare it to and how badly handled this particular release was. i'm not really gonna hold out hope for their future translations to be better unless, well, they turn out to be better
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Nov 6, 2017 23:57
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Isn't the huge delay, despite promising simultaneous release, a bigger wakeup call than the bad translation?
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Nov 7, 2017 00:19
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Really Pants posted:in unrelated news: I am a child Don't feel bad. https://twitter.com/XSEEDGames/status/925534754383917058 Xseed had fun with that too.
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Nov 7, 2017 00:22
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Really Pants posted:in unrelated news: I am a child yeah, there's a decent bit of stuff like this. 
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Nov 7, 2017 01:02
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montblanc is a really really annoying fight
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Nov 7, 2017 01:08
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It was so nice to come back and one-shot her with the Spiral Gear.
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Nov 7, 2017 01:09
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if i have one complaint about anything in zwei 2 it's that the ranking system really just, doesn't work, because it ultimately just means you're going to have a really annoying first run through every dungeon and boss soaking up dozens of hits and then you'll revisit it at the end of the game and cruise through one-shotting everything nayuta made a very, very, very good decision replacing ranks with every level just having a unique objective that you can typically clear on the first go around
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Nov 7, 2017 01:10
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The Colonel posted:if i have one complaint about anything in zwei 2 it's that the ranking system really just, doesn't work, because it ultimately just means you're going to have a really annoying first run through every dungeon and boss soaking up dozens of hits and then you'll revisit it at the end of the game and cruise through one-shotting everything The ranking system is really bad for trying to get platinum. That no hit requirement is really stupid, especially for some of the later bosses.
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Nov 7, 2017 02:29
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i hope falcom makes a new game in the whole zwei/gurumin/nayuta series thing at some point. i'd like another thing set in this world cause i've been having a lot of fun with zwei 2 and i love the setting but i guess i'd be up for literally anything new in this vein cause all of the games have been cool in their own sort of way, even if nayuta is the only one that's quite got a handle on difficulty
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Nov 8, 2017 03:35
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Zwei II's farewell music is lovely  holy poo poo I missed so much by never bothering to walk around between dungeons, though. It's no wonder I couldn't find the fairy shop on my own.
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Nov 8, 2017 12:02
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Really Pants posted:Zwei II's farewell music is lovely I'm really glad Falcom Sound Team jdk's discography is available on Amazon. I don't know if you did them, but the extra dungeons you unlock right before the end of game gets you some nice items too. A new pet, team power, and two armors for Ragna and Alwen that changes their appearance. There's new game+ only content but it's really grindy to get them.
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Nov 8, 2017 12:56
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Got all those, yup. What's that last hidden achievement?
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Nov 8, 2017 14:43
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Really Pants posted:Got all those, yup. What's that last hidden achievement? I don't know. It's called "Getting steamy in here" and has a picture of Ragna in the hot springs. I had thought it was related to getting 50k steps on the pedometer, speaking to the woman at the hot springs twice, then getting past 60k to open up the hot springs again and watch a short cutscene but the achievement didn't pop up for me even after I did all this. Did you manage to fill out all the person notes? I somehow haven't despite talking to everyone and even finishing the Kappa's dumb snowboarding missions. edit: nevermind, found the details for the last hidden achievement: Take hot spring baths with Subaru, Odessa, and Alwen. Ryuga Death fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Nov 8, 2017 |
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Nov 8, 2017 18:09
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 Discuss
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Nov 8, 2017 22:47
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swap Machias and McBurn imhoRyuga Death posted:Did you manage to fill out all the person notes? I somehow haven't despite talking to everyone and even finishing the Kappa's dumb snowboarding missions. I didn't, that'll have to wait for NG+. I didn't go around the map before completing Secundus Mines, I didn't talk to certain people after completing the Mines, and I missed a lot that pop up after completing Gloomgeld Forest and on your first visit to Starfall Hamlet. If you're missing the Kappa's second note, you need to talk to him after clearing any one of his snowboarding levels twice. I don't think it's twice in a row, but have fun with that. Hwurmp fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Nov 8, 2017 |
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Nov 8, 2017 23:01
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Really Pants posted:I didn't, that'll have to wait for NG+. I didn't go around the map before completing Secundus Mines, I didn't talk to certain people after completing the Mines, and I missed a lot that pop up after completing Gloomgeld Forest and on your first visit to Starfall Hamlet. Yeah, I already got all of Kappa's stuff. I'm just glad that after losing a few times in a row, you can pay the Kappa to make each course easier. That was the only way to beat those drat stages.
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Nov 9, 2017 01:00
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I got the zPod and it's playing The Boy's Got Wings. Life is good.
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Nov 9, 2017 05:32
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Cold Steel IV and PS4 ports of Cold Steel I and II announced for September 2018 in Japan Naturally, those who didn't get to play Cold Steel III due to not knowing Japanese will have to treat carefully when Falcom goes all "As you all should know by now...blah, end-game CS3 spoilers, blah" with the marketting campaign.
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Nov 9, 2017 06:54
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it's a good thing nobody will post the giant cs3 spoilers in this thread
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Nov 9, 2017 07:23
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CS3 Spoiler:  HUGE It is an enjoyable experience. Probably. I hope so. HUGE
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Nov 9, 2017 07:32
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The biggest confirmation is that it's cold steel 4 and not legend of calvad 1.
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Nov 9, 2017 12:46
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CS3 is the biggest game changer in the series. Any info about CS4 will end up being a gigantic spoiler for 3. So be aware.
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Nov 9, 2017 13:05
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based on Hatsuu's ongoing assessment of "Musee is a boss bitch" I remain cautiously optimistic
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Nov 9, 2017 13:20
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What are the odds on us getting Cold Steel 3 before 4 comes out in Japan?
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Nov 9, 2017 13:23
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Sakurazuka posted:What are the odds on us getting Cold Steel 3 before 4 comes out in Japan? https://twitter.com/Zaggitz/status/928590324993265664
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Nov 9, 2017 13:36
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It really is a sisyphean and promethean task. After every game, we not only start over with a new game, the new game is a thousand billion hours longer ._.
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Nov 9, 2017 17:24
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It is going to be pretty rough and I think XSEED would need to make some very careful decisions with the future of the series in the west and I think whatever their plans for the series are, they will have to announce it soon i.e. before the holidays or they'll be even further behind in bringing the games over. Releasing CS3 before 4 comes out in Japan would be extremely tight deadline wise. But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the Crossbell problem. While CS3 doesn't focus as much on Crossbell as you might think, it still has one of the villains from that arc be a major villain in CS3 and namedrops the main villain of Ao rather casually, which is supposed to be a huge reveal in Ao. It also will make you wonder who the hell KeA and Arios are as well as what the big deal with Lloyd is. And while it does reintroduce both Randy and Tio that you don't strictly speaking need to play Crossbell to get to know them, you are going to be seeing them post-character development of Zero and Ao if you play CS3. Both are pretty different people by the end of Ao than they are at the beginning of Zero, nevermind CS3. So it creates a really unfortunate situation for the English speaking fans and XSEED. Do they bring CS 3 and 4 over and ignore Crossbell but at which point you'd be spoiled on a good chunk of the major twists of those games? Do they delay in bringing CS3 over to get Crossbell out but that means you more or less have to go into a total media blackout for CS4? Can they allocate enough resources for both Zero and CS3 at the same time, but is it even worth the cost doing that vs how they sell in the west? Even if you take the fantranslation route, Zero is a little over halfway edited and Ao's translation is nearing the end but has undergone no real editing (meaning it's possible the translation will be crap and need heavy editing again). The only real solution I think is to bite the bullet and play the Crossbell games and CS3 in Japanese with a kanji dictionary at hand, or to just give in and spoil yourself I'm afraid.
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Nov 9, 2017 17:32
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The requirements for getting the other zpod cd's in Zwei is ridiculous and it hurts more now since I realize I could be jamming to the Valenstin Castle theme and Beyond the Beginning.
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Nov 9, 2017 17:35
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