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I have Star Ocean The Divine Force in my backlog. Looking forward to getting to it eventually, never Star Ocean’d before so be neat to dive into a totally new IP style
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Feb 27, 2024 00:52
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i think actually the thing that's really killing me with kurohyou is like... the main story is pretty good. tatsuya has good dynamics with the characters he encounters in his main narrative. but as far as side content he has to be the weakest protagonist in the entire series, it's a weird combination of the situations he encounters are largely not weird or entertaining enough and he himself is not particularly charismatic so when the writing is weak it can't really lean into him for anything. he fell into exactly the kind of hole i was worried he would for being a yakuza protagonist, where his own story is decent but he absolutely just can't fill the shoes of any of the other leads as far as how he responds to all the random bullshit around him. this is ironically the strongest sense in which kurohyou is, kind of a yakuza 1 throwback. its substories are as weak as that game's were.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:00
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Xenoblade 2 Chapter 10: I think's an interesting idea to tie skill trees with sidequests and optional conversations. Likewise Poppi being upgraded by playing an arcade game within the game. The problem is that when you get a shiny new Blade sixty hours in you then have to level it up, and only half the time is progress retroactive. The game could have lost a ton of padding while still being traditionally long if they were as convenient as the Yakuza series. Also the fact is that it takes so disportionately long to earn some upgrades, like Ursula and Vess, that the game discourages you from even bothering. No, I'm not getting that girl a record deal. The game has a deceptively large quest list. You'd think 126 quests would be more reasonable over the first game's 455, but then you hit poo poo like "A Secret Cure." This has you look for three tree roots in one area. Then three different items in three separate areas. Then you have to defeat a bonus boss. Finally you have to send a gang of mercenaries away for fifteen minutes. This quest is made longer by the loving doctor who goes "One More Thing" as well the endless skill checks. The dub has only that weak scream in the first chapter, but otherwise works. Xenoblade 3 soared above this game simply by removing all the bullshit. No RNG. No delegating busywork to slaves. Just the traditional paridigm of completing quests and exploring areas. Inspector Gesicht fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 13:15
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The finest quest in chain in Xenoblade 2 is the one required to powerup the ice healer blade which takes an astonishing length of time to pass to complete, during which you cannot use the blade you are investing in at all. Granted IIRC if you do invest the time its by far the best healing blade in the game but like, why.
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Feb 27, 2024 13:32
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it is a reference to the fact that her artist worked on macross frontier, a show where one of the main characters also vanishes for episodes at a time because of her singing career. it is a funny bit but also completely terrible design yes
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Feb 27, 2024 13:39
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I think about the DLC Blades (that aren't cameos), where one has a fairly lengthy sidequest that involves using multiple common Blades, all for a Blade that's just okay. And meanwhile the other two are just given to you, can be obtained as soon as you unlock the Blade gacha, and include one of the best healers and one of the best Blades period.
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Feb 27, 2024 13:47
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Poppi and Tora symbolise the great/garbage dichotomy of the game. Poppi is a legitimately funny character and a highlight, but she's tied to Tora who is both an annoyance and irrelevant to the plot. I poo poo on Riki back in the day but I guess I never saw what people liked about that furry gollum since most of his content was optional. Maybe when I get the 1 remaster. Not every nopon can be Riku.
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Feb 27, 2024 13:50
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Barudak posted:The finest quest in chain in Xenoblade 2 is the one required to powerup the ice healer blade which takes an astonishing length of time to pass to complete, during which you cannot use the blade you are investing in at all. The cherry on top is that dedicated healer blades aren't even very good in XB2 because of how easy it is to sustain a team without one with proper setup, so all of that effort is basically worthless from a gameplay perspective.
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Feb 27, 2024 14:11
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ursula’s still helpful because her bounty missions are very short, which makes them great for getting new blades up to speed
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Feb 27, 2024 14:17
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ok, I'm now 7 hours into Star Ocean 2R - just sailed to another continent, still a 3-person party with Celeste - and I feel like I must be missing some part of this game. both in the random encounters on the overworld here, and in the new area of the Salva mine I just unlocked that has a dragon boss in it, all of the fights are either instant wins with just basic attacks, or I get killed in one hit by an AOE cast. the same casts were an issue in the last dungeon too (the forest attached to the Symbology town), and the fights are so fast it seems impossible to dodge unless you are just constantly running back and forth when you see a caster circle appear. am I missing some way to get new gear or something? I don't really think the IC/BP stuff should feed into this, unless the random buffs section of the skills would help? I can craft new accessories, and I can customize new weapons (I already got Claude a comically overpowered sword that you can just immediately get, very funny), but Rena still has, like, her starting robe, and even Claude is still dying in one hit. I looked up a guide and it was like "oh yeah this was a problem for me too and I just saved a lot" which seems bad! this combat seems like it should be like 20% slower if it really wants me to watch for tells and do dodges, especially since the mistimed dodge punish is basically instant death. hell, the sprites don't even have meaningful tells other than a red flash that shows up for a quarter second. game feels like it's running at the wrong speed or something abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 17:01
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Are you on normal or hard? The balance is fairly slippery until you inevitably break it. Since you hit the second continent you can now freely craft level up medals if you want.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:16
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The second continent is a big difficulty spike for random encounters but you gain so much exp from winning battles that it evens out fairly quickly
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Feb 27, 2024 17:25
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There's also a couple fairly strong AOE enemy spells that your party loves to walk into and murder itself on, and the solution is mainly to just kill those enemies before they can cast them
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Feb 27, 2024 17:27
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abraham linksys posted:ok, I'm now 7 hours into Star Ocean 2R - just sailed to another continent, still a 3-person party with Celeste - and I feel like I must be missing some part of this game. both in the random encounters on the overworld here, and in the new area of the Salva mine I just unlocked that has a dragon boss in it, all of the fights are either instant wins with just basic attacks, or I get killed in one hit by an AOE cast. the same casts were an issue in the last dungeon too (the forest attached to the Symbology town), and the fights are so fast it seems impossible to dodge unless you are just constantly running back and forth when you see a caster circle appear. Magic is going to tear you to pieces for most of the game and the Dodge Mechanic really only exists to make the earlier part of the game where you only have one/two characters feel more engaging.
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Feb 27, 2024 17:36
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robwiggin/bestiario-a-fast-paced-tactical-rpg/ Also another Reynatis trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXtcwGFHAGM
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Feb 27, 2024 18:57
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The character models all have that PS Vita glow seen in Falcom games.
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Feb 27, 2024 19:00
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claw game handjob posted:Honestly right now in the first chunk of [Tales of Zestiria] I'm just going "is this system a mess mechanically or am I just not used to Tales skill systems" and I can't decide which since it's still pulling tutorials here and there. It doesn't seem as terrible as everyone kept saying. I am finally at the point of realizing why everyone kept saying "play literally any other Tales game" because my god, it has become incredibly challenging to ever want to just open this game and play more. It's bland. It's so bland! Nothing mechanical about it is interesting in the combat, the quests are very back and forth with the occasional "do it this way or that way" moment that leads to, as far as I can tell, same result, different cost (time or gold), and I do not give a gently caress about these kids! Even loving around with the Eva costumes for $5 hasn't added any spark.
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Feb 27, 2024 19:57
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Zestiria's fundamental gameplay problem is that Hideo Baba spent a few years trying to inject open-world atmosphere into Tales, and it was always half-assed because it inevitably exceeded either the project's scope or the needs of JRPG structure. Zestiria is the game where this collapsed completely. It has revolutionary wide-open areas that have nothing in them except for encounters that can interact with the local terrain, a feature that never does anything but get in your way. The reason to do those encounters is because several of the game's subsystems are there to support the equipment system. The designed gameplay loop in Zestiria is essentially battling to both collect and refine trash drops. They really wanted you to spend a lot of time loving around temples and dungeons and manipulating Normins and skill loadouts to build your optimal item set in between its big cinematic setpieces. It was never going to make Tales into Dragon's Dogma or Monster Hunter, even if the writing wasn't complete insanity. Caphi fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 20:08
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all I did in Zestria was invoke and spam the same attack over and over and they would be stunlocked somehow forever
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Feb 27, 2024 20:28
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i fell off the Tales series at Zesteria too when they tried to make battles entirely 3d because i'm an old man who hates change also i can freestyle some bullshit with a tech list just fine but i am absolute garbage with static combo routes
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Feb 27, 2024 20:37
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Inspector Gesicht posted:The character models all have that PS Vita glow seen in Falcom games. FuRyu games wish they looked as good as Falcom games
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Feb 27, 2024 20:41
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Xenoblade Chronicles 2 completed. Will hold of on expansion for couple months. The final boss is a fantastic character owing to his voicework, but an absolute stinker to fight. There are no phases or big setpieces, you just fight the big god/robot/monster on a flat field. Occasionally he backs off and summons some minions to fight in his stead. What's terrible is that he fires a death ray that will kill most players unless they initiate a chain attack immediately. He unleashes this with every quarter of his health-bar lost, and it happens so fast you'd need a photo finish camera to even realize it after the fact. If this were FFXIV there'd at least be some kind of telegraph. Since the game is pushing a decade old, I think they'll try their luck with director's cut on the next Nintendo console. Nothing you can do about the story, but there are hours of padding that could be streamlined and cut. Field skills, navigation, quest-markers, collectables, gacha, all can be fixed. I killed the bad guy, got the girl, saved the world, but I still couldn't help Ursula get her loving music career on track. Pretty much every zone in the last four chapters was a straight line. The politics get kind of iffy with how they brush over Mor Ardain's invasion of their neighbours, seeing as you mostly put down anti-imperialists who are secretly funded by an evil executive. The himbo Zeke gets weirdly racist about refugees in one scene and then never again. The issue about the Blades hosed-up life-cycle isn't addressed until you hit the next game where half the cast are weird hybrids but still classed as human. 7/10. Weakest of the Xenoblade trilogy but not meritless. The Blade quests felt weird and random in this game, so I must praise XC3 for integrating their Hero equivalents into the story and setting more effectively. Inspector Gesicht fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 21:18
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xenoblade 2: 0/10 no extensive potato growing
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Feb 27, 2024 21:31
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The potato guy from Xeno 3 later played everyone's favourite vampire in BG3. Also that Nicolas Cage feller in Resident Evil Village.
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Feb 27, 2024 21:33
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if you're in a pinch in star ocean r, you can equip ores to increase your resistance to elements (which is very nice against the aoe spamming assholes, since they tend to stick to just one element)
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Feb 27, 2024 22:11
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Right, I forgot that you can just put a ruby in someone's pocket and that makes them more resistant to fire in that game. 
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Feb 28, 2024 00:49
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You generally have better options, especially if you've been doing a lot of crafting, but in an emergency yes absolutely use the star rock to keep you from getting nuked by starlight
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Feb 28, 2024 01:10
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beat kurohyou. that game has... some kinda neat things? but man it just wasn't very fun or interesting after a point. it's way too long, the gameplay kinda sucks and the story never gets like. bad but. i really just stopped finding even that interesting after a point. the ending was funny i guess
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Feb 28, 2024 02:55
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at the very least it has hammered THERE'S A HOLE IN A BUCKET into my head and i don't know if that's good or bad
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Feb 28, 2024 02:55
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oh yeah i do think it's insanely funny how kurohyou marks its era of yakuza with how even though the entire game is about tatsuya's growth and maturation as a person. his friend who knows multiple martial arts styles and previously directly taught him one offers to help him fight a group of bad guys at the end and he's just like "we don't need a woman getting in the way during a fight..." this boy grew in every sense except becoming less misogynistic
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Feb 28, 2024 04:12
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TurnipFritter posted:Magic is going to tear you to pieces for most of the game and the Dodge Mechanic really only exists to make the earlier part of the game where you only have one/two characters feel more engaging. It's truly miserable. I just retried the first random encounter outside this port city 5 times before giving up because I kept dying to a giant earth AOE and some loving petrification attack, I do not know in what world this would be fun I guess I'll go back to the forest and grind up
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Feb 28, 2024 04:13
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Why do these wolves in the mines instantly murder my party this game is hell
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Feb 28, 2024 04:20
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At least in the earlier versions of the game, you wanted to have your mages throwing out weak but fast spells to knock enemy mages out of casting. (Or at least I wanted that, because enemy casters are bad to leave unchecked.) Got pretty micromanage-y, but it worked. Is that still viable in SO2R, or at least this particular situation?
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Feb 28, 2024 04:23
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Yikes, FF7Re coming out soon, guess have to avoid YouTube for a few weeks cause spoilers will be all over it
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Feb 28, 2024 04:34
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disposablewords posted:At least in the earlier versions of the game, you wanted to have your mages throwing out weak but fast spells to knock enemy mages out of casting. (Or at least I wanted that, because enemy casters are bad to leave unchecked.) Got pretty micromanage-y, but it worked. Is that still viable in SO2R, or at least this particular situation? This sounds doable, I wish spells had any indication how long they take to cast but I'll try to keep track of them. I just went through the mines and every encounter was a cakewalk except for a big lady and her two wolves, who showed up twice and instantly annihilated my party. I managed to get through both encounters with just Claude alive after a few retries, but what the hell 
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Feb 28, 2024 04:40
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People broke street date over a week ago so it's already been all out there. Stay safe gamers.
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Feb 28, 2024 04:40
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GateOfD posted:Yikes, FF7Re coming out soon, guess have to avoid YouTube for a few weeks cause spoilers will be all over it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nhQSqD42pE
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Feb 28, 2024 04:41
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Feb 28, 2024 04:45
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on the plus side, guess I didn't have to fight that dragon boss after all
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Feb 28, 2024 04:52
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abraham linksys posted:on the plus side, guess I didn't have to fight that dragon boss after all you better thank your new best friend for his hard work
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Feb 28, 2024 06:06
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