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Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


I never had a ps3 so never played drakengard 3, but i watched a lets play and yeah i was surprised at how fun it actually looked to play, at least compared to drakengard 1. definitely would play it if they remastered it

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Hikaki
Oct 11, 2005
Motherfucking Fujitsu Heavy Industries
I think Drakengard 3 is an objectively "bad" game but I also enjoyed it much more than some other actual good games, which is an amazing achievement.

Momomo
Dec 26, 2009

Dont judge me, I design your manhole
Drakengard 1 and 2 are more like musou games, wheras 3 is just a basic level based action RPG. They really don't share much gameplay design between them, you don't even get to ride the dragon during ground combat. It's not particularly good combat, but it at least has the decency to not have its core design be based on tedium.

Haystack
Jan 23, 2005





Drakengard 2 is mostly notable for having the MC from the first game Kramer in, kick the poo poo out of all the terrible bad characters that make up the main cast, then literally self imolate in protest of how much much he hates everything and everyone in that stupid game. It is a weird island of good writing in a sea of boring dross.

Flytrap
Apr 30, 2013
Of the three, Drakengard 2 is the closest any of the 3 gets to being an actually good and functional game. It's also the one that missed the point that the others are going for. 1 and 3 are trying to say something, 2 they just said "Make a Musou" and then they did. It's a dang good one too honestly. 4 characters and all of them are tightly made with satisfying kits that reflect the character.

1 from a gameplay perspective is just a total mess but a lot of fun to experience as a narrative. 3 tries to be a good game and there was clearly some ambition in there but falls apart because of a lack of technical competency and because you're eventually realize that dodge-cancelling with the fist weapons is the fastest possible way to kill everything and it's to the point that it makes every other possible weapon or character feel completely worthless.


I say all of this as someone who still actively plays all three games for fun.

Blaziken386
Jun 27, 2013

I'm what the kids call: a big nerd

Haystack posted:

Drakengard 2 is mostly notable for having the MC from the first game Kramer in, kick the poo poo out of all the terrible bad characters that make up the main cast, then literally self imolate in protest of how much much he hates everything and everyone in that stupid game. It is a weird island of good writing in a sea of boring dross.

its an interesting paradox: drakengard 2 is very bad, but if it wasn't bad, it wouldnt feel nearly as satisfying for Caim to come in and go "gently caress this, gently caress you, gently caress me, gently caress it all, burn."

Momomo
Dec 26, 2009

Dont judge me, I design your manhole

Flytrap posted:

Of the three, Drakengard 2 is the closest any of the 3 gets to being an actually good and functional game. It's also the one that missed the point that the others are going for. 1 and 3 are trying to say something, 2 they just said "Make a Musou" and then they did. It's a dang good one too honestly. 4 characters and all of them are tightly made with satisfying kits that reflect the character.

I've never actually played a musou but if this is the case, that is pretty dire for that genre.

Sakurazuka
Jan 24, 2004

NANI?

Momomo posted:

I've never actually played a musou but if this is the case, that is pretty dire for that genre.

Yeah that guys nuts it's a loving awful Musou game, like it's better than the first Drakengard but that's it.

Flytrap
Apr 30, 2013
It's hardly the best showing in the genre--Hyrule Warriors took that crown and still hasn't given it back, though Sengoku Basara 3 gets drat close to being the top spot--but it's perfectly fine on its own.

Flytrap fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jul 30, 2022

Bleck
Jan 7, 2014

No matter how one loves, there are always different aims. Love can take a great many forms, whatever the era.

Flytrap posted:

Of the three, Drakengard 2 is the closest any of the 3 gets to being an actually good and functional game. It's also the one that missed the point that the others are going for. 1 and 3 are trying to say something, 2 they just said "Make a Musou" and then they did. It's a dang good one too honestly. 4 characters and all of them are tightly made with satisfying kits that reflect the character.

An over-arching thematic thrust of this series is that it probably shouldn't be fun to kill people. 2 tried to make it more fun because the director didn't understand that.

Even Automata is, to be frank, kind of mediocre as far as action games go. But after twenty years of this series I'm not really heading in expecting to enjoy the gameplay.

The Saddest Rhino
Apr 29, 2009

Put it all together.
Solve the world.
One conversation at a time.



D 2 having an actually good soundtrack was a bit of a surprise

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Bleck posted:

An over-arching thematic thrust of this series is that it probably shouldn't be fun to kill people. 2 tried to make it more fun because the director didn't understand that.

Even Automata is, to be frank, kind of mediocre as far as action games go. But after twenty years of this series I'm not really heading in expecting to enjoy the gameplay.

Automata has really fun, smooth action with staggering amounts of depth. It just doesn't have a combo meter to tell you how well you did, or much demand for the highest levels of play, so it's easy to ignore most of the time.

WaltherFeng
May 15, 2013

50 thousand people used to live here. Now, it's the Mushroom Kingdom.
Automata has a lot of elegant design like putting dash, dodge and sprint all in one button and it works flawlessly.

Hikaki
Oct 11, 2005
Motherfucking Fujitsu Heavy Industries
Automata apes most of its combat feel from one of the greatest action games of all time, Bayonetta, so it was always going to be good if not great, especially when compared to other JRPGs.

BisbyWorl
Jan 12, 2019

Knowledge is pain plus observation.


Hikaki posted:

Automata apes most of its combat feel from one of the greatest action games of all time, Bayonetta, so it was always going to be good if not great, especially when compared to other JRPGs.

Can you really call it 'aping' the combat feel when it's made by the same devs?

Hikaki
Oct 11, 2005
Motherfucking Fujitsu Heavy Industries

BisbyWorl posted:

Can you really call it 'aping' the combat feel when it's made by the same devs?

Yeah I realize that but I dunno what else to call it.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Hikaki posted:

Yeah I realize that but I dunno what else to call it.

I'd say "takes" in this context, but that's me.

i am tim!
Jan 5, 2005

God damn it, where are my ant keys?! I'm gonna miss my flight!
Another thing to note about why Drakengard 2 is particularly awful is that it forces you to play the entire game from start to finish for each ending. Part of the appeal of the Drakengard series at this point is the various and increasingly insane endings, with Drakengard 1 and 3 letting you skip straight to the part of the story where things diverge from what you’ve already seen. The last ending for those games also require grinding to unlock and/or upgrade all of the weapons, which is obnoxious, but at least you can pick a particular stage that you are comfortable with, or the least painful, and grind it out.

Drakengard 2 makes you play the entire game from start to finish for each ending, and if I remember correctly, the “difficulty” is upped each time by wildly inflating the health pools of everything you fight. Like, 1 and 3 force you through a tedious grind in a deliberate effort to run the player’s nose in all the killing, but 2 takes the cake in the worst way.

Larryb
Oct 5, 2010

I forget, does the Nier series also force you to play the game from start to finish in order to get all the endings or can you skip straight to the relevant parts?

Flytrap
Apr 30, 2013

Larryb posted:

I forget, does the Nier series also force you to play the game from start to finish in order to get all the endings or can you skip straight to the relevant parts?

NieR starts you off from the midway point when you release Kaine (since all of the new stuff revolves around her being able to understand Shades).

NieR Automata makes you replay the game completely once as 9s, but it's way quicker since it has mostly the same sidquests so they can be safely skipped. After that you play the second half of the game as 9s and 2b switching off. There's 5 "real" endings and all of the others are you just doing really weird poo poo that gives you a quick epilogue, a fast-forward credit sequence, and then you load your save.

AngryRobotsInc
Aug 2, 2011

I managed to accidentally get the 'remove your OS chip' ending while...selling stuff I think. Wasn't paying attention and whoops. That was about when I was "Ah yes, this is the game for me." because I found that hilarious.

i am tim!
Jan 5, 2005

God damn it, where are my ant keys?! I'm gonna miss my flight!
NieR almost does the opposite of Drakengard where it makes you play through mostly the same thing, but with new plot insights that pretty drastically recontextualizes a lot of this repeated content.

Drakengard 2 adds a couple of cutscenes, but they’re usually just small character moments that does tell you new information, it just isn’t impactful. With Nier you learn that the main character’s heroic stoicism depends on him remaining willfully ignorant to the fact that the shades he’s killing are sentient, feeling beings intricately connected to the livelihood of his fellow people.

In Drakengard 2, you find out the bad guys wallow in despair after being defeated, and that the main character’s best friend hates being a girl, a trait that won’t be mentioned ever again.

Momomo
Dec 26, 2009

Dont judge me, I design your manhole

chiasaur11 posted:

Automata has really fun, smooth action with staggering amounts of depth. It just doesn't have a combo meter to tell you how well you did, or much demand for the highest levels of play, so it's easy to ignore most of the time.

You can't see any of that depth because the enemies die before you get to do anything. I felt pretty unsatisfied with Automata's combat since there were puzzle pieces to a puzzle that didn't actually exist. I actually prefer Drakengard 3's combat because it knew what it was, just some nice animations and simple enemies.

AlternateNu
May 5, 2005

ドーナツダメ!

Momomo posted:

You can't see any of that depth because the enemies die before you get to do anything. I felt pretty unsatisfied with Automata's combat since there were puzzle pieces to a puzzle that didn't actually exist

This was my only issue with Automata. The combat was deep, but completely superfluous if you were more engaged with the story than anything else. You had to crank it to the highest difficulty to even get a glimpse of it. I put a poo poo ton of hours into the game, getting a true Platinum and crying a bunch of times before watching a speedrun where the runner was like “And here we do the standard quadruple air jump-dash-monkey bar combo and get over this invisible wall” before I knew the devs expected you to be able to air hang for 20 seconds without actually having to attack anything. :psyduck:

GOAT soundtrack, though.

AlternateNu
May 5, 2005

ドーナツダメ!
That said, I’m itching to play the remake of Replicant. Is the current summer sale on the PSN worth it?

History Comes Inside!
Nov 20, 2004




Yeah do it it’s a great remake

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


It's a fantastic remake yeah. They actually put the work in to make the combat good.

Larryb
Oct 5, 2010

Is Replicant basically just the Young Nier game Japan got back in the day or did they add some new stuff to it?

History Comes Inside!
Nov 20, 2004




Larryb posted:

Is Replicant basically just the Young Nier game Japan got back in the day or did they add some new stuff to it?

It has some new main story stuff, a new extra ending and the combat is much better.

AngryRobotsInc
Aug 2, 2011

The remaster has enough stuff added and tweaked, both major and minor, it's basically a director's cut more than a straight remaster.

AlternateNu
May 5, 2005

ドーナツダメ!
Also, best crossover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P83MiJMmjtk

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



AlternateNu posted:

This was my only issue with Automata. The combat was deep, but completely superfluous if you were more engaged with the story than anything else. You had to crank it to the highest difficulty to even get a glimpse of it. I put a poo poo ton of hours into the game, getting a true Platinum and crying a bunch of times before watching a speedrun where the runner was like “And here we do the standard quadruple air jump-dash-monkey bar combo and get over this invisible wall” before I knew the devs expected you to be able to air hang for 20 seconds without actually having to attack anything. :psyduck:

GOAT soundtrack, though.

The 20 seconds of airtime thing comes up naturally in the game to pick up some treasure chests.

The game has a way to set your level to what you'd like to keep the game challenging, but it's hidden in the DLC behind winning the game's most absurd fights, so most fights either take forever to chip down or are quick and easy. Kind of a cost of the action RPG format.

AlternateNu
May 5, 2005

ドーナツダメ!

chiasaur11 posted:

The 20 seconds of airtime thing comes up naturally in the game to pick up some treasure chests.

The game has a way to set your level to what you'd like to keep the game challenging, but it's hidden in the DLC behind winning the game's most absurd fights, so most fights either take forever to chip down or are quick and easy. Kind of a cost of the action RPG format.

It's been a while, but the only chest I remember that requires "flying" to get to it is on that one building in the flooded/shore area, and though it was tight, I was able to get there using just the basic glide, double jump, and an upper cut attack. Not the insane poo poo I see real gamers pull off. :v:

beep by grandpa
May 5, 2004

I had an awesome time spending something like 60hrs 100%ing NeiR Repicant 1.22... and posting with everyone else doing the same in this thread, I'd encourage anyone to do the same (don't because the weapon upgrade achievement is >12hrs of grinding. I used cheatengine to give me 100x of every material :c00l:)

Organza Quiz
Nov 7, 2009


AlternateNu posted:

It's been a while, but the only chest I remember that requires "flying" to get to it is on that one building in the flooded/shore area, and though it was tight, I was able to get there using just the basic glide, double jump, and an upper cut attack. Not the insane poo poo I see real gamers pull off. :v:

If it makes you feel better the devs absolutely didn't expect people to perform speedrunner stuff, that's why it lets you skip things.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

beep by grandpa posted:

I had an awesome time spending something like 60hrs 100%ing NeiR Repicant 1.22... and posting with everyone else doing the same in this thread, I'd encourage anyone to do the same (don't because the weapon upgrade achievement is >12hrs of grinding. I used cheatengine to give me 100x of every material :c00l:)

That weapon upgrade achievement was literally made to take more time then all the other achievements put together as a middle finger to the idea of a gamerscore. The company that made it, Cavia, has a history of doing that by including one insanely hard achievement for like the smallest reward possible in some games.

Happy Landfill
Feb 26, 2011

I don't understand but I've also heard much worse
Has anyone read any of the Nier/Yorha novels? Are they worth picking up?

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012
I went ahead and installed Nier Reincarnation to check it out. I've never gotten into mobile games, much less gatcha, so everything is completely new to me.

Overall, the main story is interesting, as are the side stories, and it says there's technically no connection to Drakengard/Nier but it definitely feels like some things are a reference to some of it. There's decent VA and the story bits are just moving the character in one direction on the screen and pressing the icons to trigger the next scene or dialogue. It's very Yoko Taro in that it's a weird mix of misery and joy for people in pretty bad situations.

It's a gatcha mobile game, so the base energy system is stamina, and everything has X cost or whatever and you're encouraged to do some minor side quests that boost stamina. It's definitely front loaded with a ton of stamina buffs to encourage to get really into it playing non-stop until that intro period wears off. Everything has half stamina cost, you get hundreds of free stamina potions with a 7 day timer, enough that if you let it auto-run missions you'd probably never run out. It looks like the basic daily quests stuff will net you ~50 potions per day for essentially no cost as well.

The gatcha stuff is manageable so far. You will have to engage with the pull system early as the difficulty quickly ramps up in the story mode. There's entire strategies dedicated to re-rolling within the first hour if you don't get an optimal pull. I was seemingly incredibly lucky in that my 2-3rd pull using the gems from quests got me a 4 star dps character very early and was able to breeze through a lot of content very quickly. For example, the 2* characters sort of level off at power level ~5k, and a 4* is double that before getting into all the ascension/ascended/skills etc.

If you're just looking to play, you want to be pulling from the monthly step summons, as you get 10x free, then 50% discounted 10x as you go through the process. You also earn pity medals that eventually let you pick a specific 4*. I held off on any summons after getting the first 4* besides the various "tickets" I'd win via side content and eventually hit a point in chapter 9 where I only had a couple of 3* and there just wasn't any effective way to keep up with the difficulty. Once I started spending all the gems on that monthly step, I basically filled out the 4* roster and doubled my "force" level in 5 minutes (30k to well over 60k).

It's easy to get all the story characters and build around them to beat the game, but the real $$$ stuff is the crossover cast, who are objectively superior stat/growth wise. If you end up trying to chase them down that might be what ends up costing $100s in gatcha pulls. By the time I finally relented and started pulling characters, I had collected 42k gems from playing the game, which based on cash price was around $240 worth. A single 10x pull is about $24. Those costs seem insane to me.

I think its set up so that it's easy enough to engage to see the story content with a minimum amount of grind. For the major subquests the jump from very hard to EX Hard is 50k to 120-180k, at which point you need to be dumping dozens of currencies into upgrading characters plus tons of gold to pay for every upgrade as well.

I'm still not 100% clear on if there is any point in upgrading the 2* and 3* versions, like they have an overall buff to the character. There's a system that lets you make permanent upgrades to the character across all * ranks called slabs, and early on I just dumped a lot of resources into that for the only 4* character I had and that worked for me. There's not a lot of clear info online explaining anything.

Redezga
Dec 14, 2006

pentyne posted:

That weapon upgrade achievement was literally made to take more time then all the other achievements put together as a middle finger to the idea of a gamerscore. The company that made it, Cavia, has a history of doing that by including one insanely hard achievement for like the smallest reward possible in some games.

There's little tidbits of stuff like this through the game but there is some reward to it outside of the gamerscore so it doesn't feel totally cynical a task. I've been actively working on the weapon upgrades in my current playthrough, but mostly because I'm a lore pig and some of the stories attached to the weapons flesh out the world in some easy to miss kinds of ways like explaining why Facade came to become so strict about rules. I know I could just look them up in a wiki or whatever, but I think part of the fun of doing them is gradually seeing how the stories play out through their four parts. I'd probably gloss over them completely otherwise.

From what I've been able to gleam from Taro interviews and panels trying to look into his creative process it seems he mostly would prefer the player find the game fun and interesting rather than a crushing chore however one chooses to play it, so I suspect at the the least that was just him throwing those particular players a bone.

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BisbyWorl
Jan 12, 2019

Knowledge is pain plus observation.


Redezga posted:

There's little tidbits of stuff like this through the game but there is some reward to it outside of the gamerscore so it doesn't feel totally cynical a task. I've been actively working on the weapon upgrades in my current playthrough, but mostly because I'm a lore pig and some of the stories attached to the weapons flesh out the world in some easy to miss kinds of ways like explaining why Facade came to become so strict about rules. I know I could just look them up in a wiki or whatever, but I think part of the fun of doing them is gradually seeing how the stories play out through their four parts. I'd probably gloss over them completely otherwise.

From what I've been able to gleam from Taro interviews and panels trying to look into his creative process it seems he mostly would prefer the player find the game fun and interesting rather than a crushing chore however one chooses to play it, so I suspect at the the least that was just him throwing those particular players a bone.

Keep in mind that the weapon stories were added to the remaster and were originally exclusive to a lorebook. OG Nier had nothing for upgrading weapons other than number go up, so you were grinding for the sake of grinding if you went for the all upgrades achievement

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