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I mostly enjoyed it but visuals and great music go a long way for me, and yeah you really really have to accept that you are super committing to every attack. You have a good dodge and a parry button but not everything can be parried, though you can dash through just about everything. Overall the combat is okay and because you're fighting by summoning spirits that you get to pick and choose from you have a decent amiunt of control over how you approach things. No matter what you do a few bosses are pretty brutal, either from poor or limited design or the fact that everything jits really hard and gathering all the health in the game is the difference between getting killed in two shots versus three. The final boss is especially pissed, so is the entire area leading up to it. So it feels fairly clunky because every action you take has either a ton of weight or a fair amount of nom canceleable animtion time. Fantastic visuals and music though. Much of the challenge will either feel bad and poorly made or really good and tough depending on how much you like the weighty combat.
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May 1, 2023 12:52
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Alot of dev's main takeaway from Souls combat seems to be 'weighty movement and animations = good' but most of them seem to miss that the weightiness works both ways in From games and you can usually bully enemies back and get poise/posture breaks by hitting them good, it's much less fun when nothing reacts to your hits and you have to play bait and punish all of the time because you can't knock them out of any of their moves
No Dignity fucked around with this message at 13:02 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 13:00
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Yeah Ender Lilies if definitely guilty of that. Like you can stagger almost anything but you're probably not going to do it on your first couple of hits unless you're using the biggest slowest regular melee option, so you get a lot of scenarios where you absolutely can not get a full basic three or four hit conbo off without trading with something and you absolutely do not want to trade in that game. I still enoyed the combat after getting use to dashing after an attack or two and parrying where possible, the timing aspect is there and done pretty alright, but it's hard to recommend to anyone if that sort of thing is not extremely your jam. Can't over emphasize how gorgeous the game is though.
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May 1, 2023 13:05
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GrandpaPants posted:Ender Lilies is on sale. How did that end up being? I recall hearing that the combat didn't quite feel right from a few people, but I dunno if that's more of a personal preference vs. a fundamental game design flaw. Also, I found the bludgeoning with Gerrod's hammer to be extremely satisfying, so that might be part of why I liked it.
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May 1, 2023 14:53
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I've never played a Souls game and I thought the combat in Ender Lillies was fine. I guess if you go in expecting something more sophisticated it's going to be a disappointment, but I don't think that's all on the game. The real selling point is the atmosphere, though, and if that doesn't work for you then you're probably not going to be all that wild about it.
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May 1, 2023 15:52
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Cucumbers posted:It's a shame, because there's definitely a good and interesting game in there, behind all the badness. But I think they got way too ambitious with what they were doing, and forgot to prioritize actual quality control. yeah, that was roughly my impression of the demo back in February. Definitely did not feel like a game that was a mere two and a half months from release. well, hopefully it'll get some substantial patches before it leaves Game Pass, and at least I don't have to pay for it that way Barry Convex fucked around with this message at 16:35 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 16:32
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FireWorksWell posted:I saw this in the ps store, any goons that played it yet? Curious to hear more on it. Afterimage? Writing was incoherent, not the best localization. Music wasn't great either. Gameplay-wise, it feels a lot like Symphony of the Night. Graphics are REALLY nice, but it also feels kinda colorful and cheery for the kind of story they are telling. I will keep playing, but after having given it a few hours, there's like 5 games I am more interested in working on at the moment. I'd say wishlist it if you like metroidvanias, a good deal if you see it 50% off but not something you need to jump for.
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May 2, 2023 18:17
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Yeah, I've just had the itch for 2d metroidvania soulslikes after playing Blasphemous and Hollow Knight. Waiting for a sale is probably for the best since I've got enough games to juggle. Thank you!
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May 2, 2023 18:23
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Any word on Benedict Fox? Just dropped on gamepass, currently burning through Jedi Surivior and will most likely hop over to TOTK next week but would it be worth checking out when it gets slow? Metacritic is the usual “ reviewers say meh, users like it”
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May 4, 2023 16:28
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It's apparently quite bug-ridden so I've been waiting on patches.
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May 4, 2023 16:33
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Sgt. Cosgrove posted:Any word on Benedict Fox? Just dropped on gamepass, currently burning through Jedi Surivior and will most likely hop over to TOTK next week but would it be worth checking out when it gets slow? Metacritic is the usual “ reviewers say meh, users like it” Cross-posting this from the X-Box thread: quote:I'm about to wrap up Benedict Fox, and if you were thinking about checking it out, I'm gonna suggest you pass. The artistic direction is fantastic, without question, but the gameplay is abysmal. It's a game that doesn't understand its strengths. Its combat is awful and unresponsive and its controls are imprecise, but it wants you to be in combat almost constantly and its biggest setpieces rely on precision platforming (with, on top of imprecise controls, also feature trial-and-error and extraordinarily poor signposting). Instead of leaning hard into the exploration, which is good, and the mystery, which is solid-to-good, it forces you to engage with the parts of itself that just kinda suck. It's beyond me how a game with such poor combat could lean so hard into that combat and get through testing, but here we are.
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May 6, 2023 14:08
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Just finished Afterimage and really enjoyed it all the way through. Combat starts really simple but gets very crunch when you get a few hours in and continues getting more complex until you get close to the endings of the game. It plateaus for the boss fights that make up the 10 endings. All are complex but you have a huge toolkit by the endgame so many of those fights are easier overall then bosses 15-20 hours in. 35 hours all-in-all for the completion of the game and all endings with me going very quickly in the back half of the game. The world is massive, maybe 4x the size of Bloodstained. The story similarly starts very confusing and I've seen a lot of feedback about poor localization. Most of that seems intentional by the end of the game once everything is revealed. Ends up making about as much sense as Bloodstained. Definitely one of my favorite Metroidvanias. Difficulty early on might be off-putting for some people by once you have your full kit it evens out pretty well. Don't expect the story to make sense until you are close to the end.
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May 7, 2023 18:21
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Jedi Survivor is a really drat good Metroidvania.
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May 7, 2023 21:56
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I started playing Ori and the Blind Forest and got to the first escape sequence and wow that sucked. It'd probably suck less if I weren't greedy about getting those spirit containers, but I feel like the camera needed to pull back a bit or something so that I know where I'm going with these bashes. Edit: Also apparently quick travel wasn't a thing in the original game and was only added for the Definitive? Lol, just lol.
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May 8, 2023 08:22
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Saltpowered posted:Just finished Afterimage and really enjoyed it all the way through. Combat starts really simple but gets very crunch when you get a few hours in and continues getting more complex until you get close to the endings of the game. It plateaus for the boss fights that make up the 10 endings. All are complex but you have a huge toolkit by the endgame so many of those fights are easier overall then bosses 15-20 hours in. Thanks! I'm glad to hear that Afterimage picks up later. Definitely going to make a note to come back to it when I finish with Jedi Survivor and the new Zelda. If we get more mobility powers and the story becomes more coherent, I think it will be a delightful time. If it has a bunch of different endings and different bosses for each, that reminds me very favorably of Timespinner.
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May 8, 2023 23:54
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avoraciopoctules posted:Thanks! I'm glad to hear that Afterimage picks up later. Definitely going to make a note to come back to it when I finish with Jedi Survivor and the new Zelda. If we get more mobility powers and the story becomes more coherent, I think it will be a delightful time. If it has a bunch of different endings and different bosses for each, that reminds me very favorably of Timespinner. All of this is definitely true. For mobility you end up getting Dash, Double Jump, Triple Jump, Slide, Weak down kick that you can bounce on enemies with and reset jumps, Strong down kick that breaks floors, wall climb, A gryphon-wing like ability to fly to the ceiling, swimming, and dash gives you iframes. The last one 100% changes combat. Getting it earlier than you do would trivialize combat. It comes at the perfect time for things to remain a challenge and many late bosses are designed around it. Later weapon skills drastically change combat to. You end up being able to build combos with complimentary skills. An example is… Dual Blades Dash Dual Blades spinning uppercut into the air Throw Dual Blades as Chakrams 3x Scythe downslam into Scythe spin. Lots of variation depending on the boss and what weapons you enjoy. I’ve seen videos of others doing really crazy combos. The story and endings are definitely interesting and varied. Some have hard boss battles, some are just brief cutscenes. They are also all (except one) part of the story and to understand the whole story you have to do all of them. The NG+ is also very different. On other really small thing I appreciated about the game was that not every zone has enemies. There’s a friendly zone you get to later that is large but has no enemies, just some exploration. Another zone is nothing but platforming. It added a lot of depth to the world to have zones without enemies instead of friendly zone having token weird enemies. I think the game did a lot right and will really influence the genre. It may end up being that game that designers play and start borrowing concepts from. I think it did some things wrong too though. The early game is very confusing storywise and combat takes too long to be complex and engaging. Weapon skills should be much earlier in the game. Music is also just not good. A really strong soundtrack would have done a lot to improve it. Saltpowered fucked around with this message at 00:40 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 00:37
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I really appreciate the write ups, definitely grabbing this when I can.
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May 9, 2023 01:07
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Picked Death's Gambit: Afterlife back up (had stopped partway through my first run) and beat it tonight. Not the best game in the genre, but pretty solid overall. The game definitely wears its Souls influences on its sleeve (starting class/item selection, relatively analogous stat/growth mechanics, a NPC that will pick off the other characters in your sanctuary if you let him, etc), but it eventually develops and moves in some unexpected directions. Definitely has some interesting misdirects and wrinkles and plays with the fourth wall pretty well. Also Matthew Mercer has a good time with their portrayal of Death. Not the best game in the genre, but has some neat layers to it and is worth a look if you can handle difficult and weighty combat.
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May 10, 2023 03:24
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Tortolia posted:Picked Death's Gambit: Afterlife back up (had stopped partway through my first run) and beat it tonight. Not the best game in the genre, but pretty solid overall. The game definitely wears its Souls influences on its sleeve (starting class/item selection, relatively analogous stat/growth mechanics, a NPC that will pick off the other characters in your sanctuary if you let him, etc), but it eventually develops and moves in some unexpected directions. Definitely has some interesting misdirects and wrinkles and plays with the fourth wall pretty well. Also Matthew Mercer has a good time with their portrayal of Death. Deaths gambit and Valdis story are two of my favorite janky vania games . I highly recommend them to everyone The hidden deaths gambit boss you fight by "time travel IRL" via changing your computer time and date to hunt for the boss is very janky and right in my wheelhouse LeninVS fucked around with this message at 04:39 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 03:50
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LeninVS posted:Deaths gambit and Valdis story are two of my favorite janky vania games . I highly recommend them to everyone I also discovered just now while looking at the other endings that there's a hidden cutscene for sequence breaking speed runners where the main villain stops you, swears at you for doing it, and boots you backwards progress-wise. Appropriately enough the trigger for this can also be skipped
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May 10, 2023 04:12
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I just finished the oldest game on my backlog, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I would not recommend it unless you are a diehard Castlevania fan or if you have nostalgia like me (it was my pick for a launch game to go with my nice new GBA as a kid and I got stuck on Lucretia.) I don't think it's possible for a game to be grindier than that in concept (yes there are games that have longer grinds in general, but being about 50% pure grinding by gameplay for one standard playthrough is a special form of hell.)
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May 17, 2023 08:16
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That reminds me, I played Aria of Sorrow (on an emulator, shh!) ages ago and really enjoyed it. Steam has an "Advance Collection" with a few other GBA titles, is it worth getting or did I like play the best of the bunch?
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May 17, 2023 09:12
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You definitely did play the best of the GBA Castlevania games, but I had enough fun with the other two to justify the purchase of all three.
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May 17, 2023 09:15
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The Advance pack is Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and Aria of Sorrow. AoS is the best by a wide margin; I had fun with the others, including Circle of the Moon -- I've played through it a few times and I don't recall it being particularly grindy? -- but they are not as good and they are very different, from both Aria and each other. Worth playing if you're bored and looking for something new to play, but not standouts like Aria.
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May 17, 2023 11:54
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Well it also includes Dracula XX/Vampires Kiss lol
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May 17, 2023 12:22
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Circle of the Moon was more enjoyable with the hack that gets rid of the random card drops and just places them in the world to find like any other item.
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May 17, 2023 12:49
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The widget in the Advance Collection made the grind a bit more tolerable at least by telling you if an enemy has a card to drop.
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May 17, 2023 13:08
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Played through Timespinner. Cute game, not amazing. Really did hit the "what if Chrono Trigger had a metroidvania spinoff" vibes though and they nailed the SNES aesthetic. Worth a look if you want a largely simple MV to relax with. Then I started on GRIME, since it seemed interesting and is actually free on Amazon Games now (their replacement for Twitch free games I suppose). Talk about a tonal and aesthetic 180. Very cool so far and creepy as all hell. Digging the character building and how the absorb mechanic plays into combat.
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May 17, 2023 13:59
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Tortolia posted:Played through Timespinner. Cute game, not amazing. Really did hit the "what if Chrono Trigger had a metroidvania spinoff" vibes though and they nailed the SNES aesthetic. Worth a look if you want a largely simple MV to relax with. I just finished Grime. It's extremely good. Story is good and gameplay feels tight. It keeps getting better as it goes on imo and doesn't wear out it's welcome. Also 8 Doors was fantastic and I recommend it for the aesthetic. The gameplay is nothing to write home about, but the game is cheap and on sale often. It's not too long either. Unless you want to 100% the map and get all the cheevos
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May 17, 2023 14:41
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John Murdoch posted:Circle of the Moon was more enjoyable with the hack that gets rid of the random card drops and just places them in the world to find like any other item.
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May 17, 2023 15:05
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NGDBSS posted:The only problem with that patch is that the summon card is gated behind the entire arena, which is easily the grindiest and most tedious area in an already grindy game. (That said, it's nice that the collection is just a bunch of roms with an attached emulator and a wrapper, so applying romhacks is uncomplicated.) True. Also the hack can't really fix the fact that the card system is just not all that balanced or thought out. (Though I think I'm an odd one out for preferring HoD's element + subweapon idea over the Soul system.)
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May 17, 2023 17:01
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John Murdoch posted:True. Also the hack can't really fix the fact that the card system is just not all that balanced or thought out. (Though I think I'm an odd one out for preferring HoD's element + subweapon idea over the Soul system.)
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May 17, 2023 17:20
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Harmony of Dissonance is the only advance / DS era Castlevania I don't like -- as much as I like light world / dark would style gameplay the two versions of the castles aren't really different enough to make it interesting imho All the DS games are great though -- Dawn of Sorrow isn't quite as good as Aria but still enjoyable, Portrait of Ruin is underrated and Ecclesia is a perfect 2D castlevania swan song.
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May 19, 2023 14:57
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HoD was easily the worst of the advance collection when I played yeah. I had to use a guide after a certain point; turned out I was missing mechanics with the warp room, but still didn't make it any less frustrating to go through
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May 19, 2023 15:12
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If I get stuck it's always because I forget that the first warp room takes you somewhere else even though it's the only one you've found, unlike how they work in every other game.
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May 19, 2023 15:28
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Yeah that was where I got stuck, I'm pretty sure.
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May 19, 2023 15:30
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Hot take: I actually kind of like HoD over Aria. Now, to be clear, Aria is unmistakably the all around better game and HoD has issues, but I found Aria just a little too streamlined. And like I said, the magic system in Harmony is more interesting to me than the Soul system. I still need to get around to Portrait and OoE...
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May 19, 2023 15:34
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Sakurazuka posted:If I get stuck it's always because I forget that the first warp room takes you somewhere else even though it's the only one you've found, unlike how they work in every other game. I always liked how HoD does the bait-and-switch thing where you think you're traversing only one castle initially, and then you find out that not only are there two castles but you've actually been making your way through both of them. I do recognize though that it falls flat when you explore the same sections in the "other" castle though as they're generally empty.
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May 19, 2023 15:34
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Like you walk into the room and don't take the warp? Never occurred to me because you're pretty much railroaded into it. I didn't realize you could press down and warp in a different way from the first game.
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May 19, 2023 15:42
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Like you walk into the room and don't take the warp? Never occurred to me because you're pretty much railroaded into it. I was just like 'no point trying to warp if I haven't found another warp point'. If you try that in SotN or CotM it'll just warp you to the same room again.
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May 19, 2023 15:52
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