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pentyne posted:My only awareness of the NNK series is that the games are aggressively mediocre and spoil a ton of amazing art, music, and aesthetic design and one of them you play as the US president isekai'd into a young boy. no, you play as the US president isekai’d into the chief advisor of a young boy he still has his Glock however
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Jan 30, 2023 19:35
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Endorph posted:it was a guy disguised as lloyd. for some reason lloyd never goes 'i didnt do that' and refuses to talk to the other symphonia 1 party members about it you need to beat Lloyd like 3 times and corner him before he ever even begins to explain whats going on too. Like it takes the trope of people refusing to communicate to drive the plot for about 90% of the game for no real reason. and then when you do the rest of the plot completely falls apart because the hook of teaming up against Lloyd was the only remotely interesting thing the game even tried
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Jan 30, 2023 19:39
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pentyne posted:My only awareness of the NNK series is that the games are aggressively mediocre and spoil a ton of amazing art, music, and aesthetic design and one of them you play as the US president isekai'd into a young boy. He's still an adult, just considerably younger than he was. And he gets isekai'd because the city he's in gets nuked. He does end up helping out the actual young boy main character by pulling out his sidearm and gunning down some rat people. The spoiler seems unnecessary this is literally like the first five minutes of the game. Ni No Kuni II is a solid if unspectacular action-rpg apart from the absolutely gonzo opening sequence.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:39
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having one interesting hook it kinda drops is pretty fitting for a symphonia sequel
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Jan 30, 2023 19:39
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The caveat to liking Level 5 is that you have to accept they just throw a million systems at a wall with incredible art design and hope it all sticks together and that is why Dark Cloud is GOAT. I wish Pokemon was allowed to be as weird and open ended as Yokai Watch while still having actual good gameplay.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:41
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My "thanks, Level-5" moment was definitely Fantasy Life, which was a neat little experiment I figured was going to be refined somehow after the DLC proved they'd iterate a little. WELP
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Jan 30, 2023 19:44
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Zore posted:you need to beat Lloyd like 3 times and corner him before he ever even begins to explain whats going on too. Like it takes the trope of people refusing to communicate to drive the plot for about 90% of the game for no real reason. ngl based on how insanely dumb everyone was in Symphonia 1 this makes perfect sense it would happen. The whole hot/cold/hot coffee scene is probably the ur-example of insanely dumb anime writing to trick someone into the truth
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Jan 30, 2023 19:48
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there are lots of overambitious japanese dev studios across the years that put more thought into how big they could make a game than into how they could make the game fun to play and level-5 are just the kings of that. everything makes sense with the context that they were founded by the guy who directed overblood 2, the sequel to a janky low budget survival horror game, that they decided to turn into an open world sci-fi anime ova-style epic, despite barely even having money for decent cg cutscenes or 3d models
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Jan 30, 2023 19:50
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pentyne posted:ngl based on how insanely dumb everyone was in Symphonia 1 this makes perfect sense it would happen. i mean i hate the coffee scene but it's not really for that reason. colette is kind of shaken up because her entire body is being slowly broken down and she can no longer feel anything, it makes sense that she's not really thinking about what she says there.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:51
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SirSamVimes posted:Dragon Age 2 has a fascinating mixture of good and bad decisions. The combat is punchy and fast, that's good! You can't zoom out like you can in the first game, that's bad. More classes have aoes to give a bit of parity with mages, that's good! Every encounter spawns several waves so while your aoes are all on cooldown your backline is getting assassinated, that's bad. the multiple waves thing is really fun, imo. The fact that you'll get overwhelmed by the second wave if you blow all your CDs on wave one means you play a game of using just enough resources, rather than a game of blowing everything up instantly with all your most powerful buttons It's poorly communicated (because it's DA2), and it would absolutely suck if it were just a few fights here and there, but the fact that it's literally every encounter (meaning you can plan around it) made it fun, imo
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Jan 30, 2023 19:53
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the thing i dont like about the coffee scene is that it's pretty symbolic of how colette's whole inner conflict in symphonia isn't really something the story is interested in exploring from her perspective, everything has to be framed through lloyd's, which means every scene with colette has to be focused on how angry lloyd is about what's happening to her, or lloyd tricking her into telling him the truth about things. colette is the one who's experiencing an inner conflict, colette is the one who's having this crushing responsibility pushed on her, colette is the one who's entire body is being broken down to nothing as part of some ritual she has no say in. but symphonia never really looks at colette as a person, it looks at her as a plot device for lloyd to protect and get angry on behalf of, to justify lloyd's emotions and his choices. the coffee scene is, in a way, exploring colette's point of view, but it's exploring it by way of her being tricked into it to inform the protagonist so it can inform his arc around being angry about her choice to hide it, not because the story is interested in colette's fear and anxiety about what's happening to her.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:56
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My issue with the multiple waves in DA2 is that okay, in open areas, sure, people can sneak up on me, I need to watch all sides. In a loving tunnel, waves should not be appearing on both sides of me like clockwork, ganking my back line because they popped up behind my tanks.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:56
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pentyne posted:ngl based on how insanely dumb everyone was in Symphonia 1 this makes perfect sense it would happen.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:58
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I'd jump to a parallel universe where every RPG that is about a Girl With Mysterious Abilities is actually the main character instead of randomly focusing on a sword-using boy who discovers her/is her childhood friend instead.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:58
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cheetah7071 posted:the multiple waves thing is really fun, imo. The fact that you'll get overwhelmed by the second wave if you blow all your CDs on wave one means you play a game of using just enough resources, rather than a game of blowing everything up instantly with all your most powerful buttons
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Jan 30, 2023 19:59
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the hosed up thing is that this is honestly something tales of legendia handles much better. for all its clunk, all its awkward pacing and presentation, legendia deliberately cuts away to shirley and shows her making her own choices and having her own outlook on what's happening. she entrusts things to senel behind his back and senel is angry about her going off alone for that but senel's overprotectiveness is actually framed as his own personal weakness, rather than shirley's choices being inherently bad. i wish symphonia was even capable of presenting things that equally between lloyd and colette
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Jan 30, 2023 20:00
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Junpei posted:I'd jump to a parallel universe where every RPG that is about a Girl With Mysterious Abilities is actually the main character instead of randomly focusing on a sword-using boy who discovers her/is her childhood friend instead. there are plenty that are, even within tales. symphonia is by far one of the more lopsided, graces has its issues but ultimately sophie is framed as an independently strong person who's supported by the people around her, not someone who needs to be protected specifically. xillia can arguably play into it a bit with milla but i'd argue that on the whole milla and ludger's dynamic is a pretty equally supportive one. the entire dramatic arc of ffx is about empowering yuna, it's in some way through her relationship with tidus, but yuna isn't reliant on tidus, she grows strong enough to be her own person by the end and into the sequel. drakengard 3 is kinda about it. in a sense.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:07
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fe10's writing can be a little jank but the dynamic between sothe and micaiah is funny because sothe's protectiveness is very explicitly just like, a thing about him as a person, not really a specific heroic trait or anything that fronts him as the true protagonist. micaiah is far from defenseless and makes a lot of the big choices entirely on her own, while sothe is just someone who is very specifically emotionally attached to her. a lot of the poo poo the group lands in is just because their entire squad is the chump squad and the world just keeps beating them down in the most insane ways
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Jan 30, 2023 20:12
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It was meant as slightly tongue-in-cheek, to be fair.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:36
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The Colonel posted:there are lots of overambitious japanese dev studios across the years that put more thought into how big they could make a game than into how they could make the game fun to play and level-5 are just the kings of that. everything makes sense with the context that they were founded by the guy who directed overblood 2, the sequel to a janky low budget survival horror game, that they decided to turn into an open world sci-fi anime ova-style epic, despite barely even having money for decent cg cutscenes or 3d models Who is love-de-lic and all their offshoots, Alex.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:04
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overblood 2 is pretty incredible, it's true
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Jan 30, 2023 21:34
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i dont think love de lic is that overambitious, most of what's frustrating to play about those games is kinda deliberate or just the result of moon being weird as hell and a very literal mashup of ideas from a ton of disparate artists, and stuff like chulip feels complete enough. if i had a complaint about any of them it'd be that kenichi nishi's games at skip feel more noncommittal to anything, like chibi-robo is the best among them and it's mostly because it's actually a complete game mechanically, narratively it's willing to touch on ideas like divorce and family drama but not actually explore them with much depth. captain rainbow is like negatively ambitious, its ideas are fine and it could easily accomplish them well if it had decent writing but it just doesn't actually present interesting takes on the majority of its characters and its design is very barren. chibi-robo clean sweep is really the weirdest of skip, it didn't have kenichi nishi, it plays way worse than the first one and still has a completely unnecessary final boss fight, but it's at least a bit more committed to the idea of exploring moving on from a tragedy that's traumatized the entire family for years as its core theme in a way that the cast actually have to in some way work to achieve, rather than it all being resolved in one single scene for no particular reason other than one character who was causing problems changed his mind about causing problems.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:37
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in contrast some of the characters in chulip have super obtuse requirements and there's lots of dumb hidden stuff that can kill you, but it's easy to see where the game is trying to go thematically with how fragile you are at the start and how one of these setbacks could immediately pulverize you, versus how you are by the end of the game where you're actively being forced to take hits but you're so strong now that you're fully capable of continuing to move forward unimpeded. it's just that there's also some really extreme adventure game logic in there that doesn't serve an extra purpose beyond giving the game more specifically designated puzzles to do and keep it from feeling like all you do is walk around empty spaces talking to people
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Jan 30, 2023 21:41
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https://twitter.com/NISAmerica/status/1620122295179087872?s=20 legit unexpected but NISA is releasing Little Princess (Rhapsody 2) and Angel's Present (Rhapsody 3) in English (though I assume the musical numbers will not be dubbed)
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Jan 30, 2023 22:08
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The Colonel posted:the thing i dont like about the coffee scene is that it's pretty symbolic of how colette's whole inner conflict in symphonia isn't really something the story is interested in exploring from her perspective, everything has to be framed through lloyd's, which means every scene with colette has to be focused on how angry lloyd is about what's happening to her, or lloyd tricking her into telling him the truth about things. colette is the one who's experiencing an inner conflict, colette is the one who's having this crushing responsibility pushed on her, colette is the one who's entire body is being broken down to nothing as part of some ritual she has no say in. but symphonia never really looks at colette as a person, it looks at her as a plot device for lloyd to protect and get angry on behalf of, to justify lloyd's emotions and his choices. the coffee scene is, in a way, exploring colette's point of view, but it's exploring it by way of her being tricked into it to inform the protagonist so it can inform his arc around being angry about her choice to hide it, not because the story is interested in colette's fear and anxiety about what's happening to her. Yeah even just playing the game for myself the first time I felt like it was weird when the game stuck with Lloyd and Genis waking up in Iselia after everyone left instead of transitioning to Collette's perspective and then having them just catch up to you off screen.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:32
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you could do something interesting by flashing between the two povs for the first leg if you really wanted to keep lloyd as a lead. might even give you an excuse to work sheena into the party earlier, if lloyd and genis bump into her unaware of what her goal is she could have an initial presence among the cast without just being a recurring boss fight a couple times, even if her being a member of the party would be as brief as a single dungeon. generally symphonia just desperately needs something done about the weird like. reverence it has for lloyd. the opening ranch and iselia stuff is the only time it ever feels like the story is willing to acknowledge that a choice lloyd is making could be a mistake or have wider consequences. everything after that is so unwilling to actually allow anything risky to happen as a result of his actions, and while it makes sense given it wants to say that taking action will make a more meaningful difference than sitting and letting people suffer, how cleanly things tend to go and how little true opposition lloyd faces has a serious problem with making it feel like the seas are parting for lloyd alone. since he himself faces relatively little hardship, all of the big speeches towards the end and the inter-party sentiment about how inspiring and brilliant he is falls so flat. lloyd has a bit of a token conflict with his family history but unlike everyone else, lloyd's problem basically resolves itself: he wants to make things better, he wants to know about his dad, and while his dad is pretending to be a traitor, he ultimately possesses the exact same goals as lloyd and is wholly supportive of him. everyone else in symphonia has actual serious personal issues they need to deal with, and none of them are issues that can be dealt with so easily, which makes lloyd serving as the catalyst for resolving them and the way everyone just instantly agrees with all of it and places all of the burden of resolving their issues on him, feel painfully hollow. there's no satisfaction in a story about confronting the pain of your own past where the central character is someone whose past is ultimately the least complicated to confront, and the answer of how he should move forward is as simple as "instead of doing the bad things, we'll do the good things and make everything better" and then they just get to do that and every complication they face to doing the good thing ends up being as simple as beating up a bad guy or telling a bad guy they're wrong.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:44
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the duel between lloyd and kratos is such a like. insane moment. because for about ten seconds the game is pretending that in order to accomplish a goal lloyd is going to have to make some kind of choice, and the choice will be difficult for him to make, he will face a consequence. and then immediately afterwards they just have a ghost appear and go "ahaha... now you dont have to kill your dad... because i am kidnapping YOUR GIRLFRIEND" and somehow, the evil ghost doing this, ends up giving them an entirely consequence-free path forward where nobody has to get hurt at all so the potential consequences they just hung over the story didn't matter and probably didn't need to pretend to exist. which like. honestly would not be opposed to lloyd finding a way to avoid killing his dad if that was like. a serious thing he had to find his own way to. another jrpg that i love the final arc of in contrast is ar tonelico because act 3 of ar tonelico is about, finding a way to resolve things without killing anyone, but symphonia doesn't have lloyd do this it just has the last minute final boss reveal do it for him lol The Colonel fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jan 30, 2023 |
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Jan 30, 2023 22:51
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secretly best girl posted:My "thanks, Level-5" moment was definitely Fantasy Life, which was a neat little experiment I figured was going to be refined somehow after the DLC proved they'd iterate a little. Last time I ever trusted Level 5
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Jan 31, 2023 01:12
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Oxxidation posted:he still has his Glock however Ace Transmuter posted:Ni No Kuni II is a solid if unspectacular action-rpg apart from the absolutely gonzo opening sequence. 
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Jan 31, 2023 01:35
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yeah they split the three close and ranged weapons each so everyone has a unique combo and each individual weapon gets two users each (Pres gets sword and gun, prince gets sword and wand, thief girl has spear and bow, her dad has axe/hammer and bow, a mage dude has spear and wand and an engineer lady has axe/hammer and gun) so he isn't unique for having a gun
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Jan 31, 2023 01:46
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It doesn't matter how bad Level 5 gets. Dark Cloud is still my favourite game of all time.
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Jan 31, 2023 01:48
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I think I didn't play long enough to get the other gun user but it wasn't meaningfully different from, like, the prince's wand once you got into the actual combat mechanics, either.
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Jan 31, 2023 01:49
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Draga posted:It doesn't matter how bad Level 5 gets. Dark Cloud is still my favourite game of all time. The fact that you rank it above Dark Chronicle (or Dark Cloud 2 to you yanks) is confounding.
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Jan 31, 2023 01:50
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SirSamVimes posted:The fact that you rank it above Dark Chronicle (or Dark Cloud 2 to you yanks) is confounding. ikr it doesn't even have a golf minigame
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Jan 31, 2023 01:52
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Look, they still have my respect because of Layton, and Jeanne D'Arc was neat, and I'll even bat for LBX even though it's mostly just appealing to me because I like that kinda anime style for when I wanna turn my brain off.
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Jan 31, 2023 01:52
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a game needs to do the taking photos thing from dark cloud but not stupid and loving annoying
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Jan 31, 2023 01:54
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sorry, the coffee scene is actually good and amazing.
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Jan 31, 2023 01:54
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SirSamVimes posted:The fact that you rank it above Dark Chronicle (or Dark Cloud 2 to you yanks) is confounding. I didn't play Dark Chronicle until the PS4 version years later and it just didn't gel with me. To be honest, DC is only my favourite game at this point due to sheer nostalgia. I've played plenty of better games but it's the first thing my mind goes to when I think of my fave.
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Jan 31, 2023 02:15
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i haven't really tackled JRPGs in like two decades after coming back to them recently and playing through Octopath traveler, Bravely Default II, Crystal Project, Triangle Strategy, and Chained Echoes. I also played all the big Earthbound-inspired rpgs like Omori, Lisa, the Undertales. I love tactics and job systems. What should I play next? My classic games are only really like chrono trigger and FFT and the mario rpgs. Haven't played any FFs other than 6 (its ok.)
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Jan 31, 2023 02:18
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live a live remake OP thank you
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Jan 31, 2023 02:19
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