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ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


Regulation Size posted:

It is not a 5-hour game, I have no idea where that came from except that maybe the actual missions can be short if you either know exactly what you're doing, or you go in like John Woo through everything (a valid tactic, and one that'll impress your violent rear end in a top hat pals while infuriating allies who value diplomacy or stealth). It is valuable to replay it, though. Not only do the dialogue choices alter the game, so do in-mission decisions, the order you do missions in, the order you meet the characters, and the intel you pay for.

Also, beeline for EMP bombs because the hacking minigames never stop being bad.

My first (stealth-heavy) run was ~12 hours, subsequent runs were 5-6 each (Shotgun Dickhead Recruit and Professional Sniper Veteran). 5 hours sounds about right for replays.

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Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


ToxicFrog posted:

My first (stealth-heavy) run was ~12 hours, subsequent runs were 5-6 each (Shotgun Dickhead Recruit and Professional Sniper Veteran). 5 hours sounds about right for replays.

Yeah I think that's why I got confused. It's one of those games I've played so many times I forget how long the first run takes when you aren't skipping non-important dialogue and you don't already know where everything in the level is.


Kaboom Dragoon posted:

Yeah, pistols are the 'best' option for boss killing, but I went assault rifle and shotgun and had no problems at all. Hell, depending on how you play the game anyway, it's possible to avoid most boss fights entirely.

You definitely don't need pistols by any means, but I think it's important to clarify that when I say "best" I mean "literally cheating." It's not a matter of "you do more damage and make boss fights a lot easier," it's "every boss in the game goes down to between 1 and 3 rounds of chain shot, effectively allowing you to skip boss fights".

It's completely valid to not do that of course, and to actually play the boss fights the way they're meant to be played, but having chain shot in your pocket is nice if you find that a boss fight is particularly unfun and just want to get back to the story.

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


Yeah, if I had to boil down AP to just two recommendations, it would be:

  • There is (unlike, e.g., Mass Effect or DX:HR) no right or wrong answer, no mechanical benefit for "doing the right thing" or even "doing the consistent thing", there is no way to "win" a conversation, and you'll miss a lot of content no matter how you play because this game is designed to be replayed several times. So just do what comes naturally and don't try to minmax your personality or your interactions with other characters.
  • If you're just in it for the conversations and want to skip as much of the combat as possible, investing in Pistols quite literally gives you an "I win" button that works in almost all situations, including boss fights; Stealth (for Awareness) and Technical (for Brilliance) go well with this.

The former because if you've played other, superficially similar RPGs, it's really easy to go in with the assumption that the dialogue is something you should (or have to) "win" and end up sucked down the rabbit hole of trying to optimize that, and the latter because the combat is, honestly, not that great, and would be a shame if someone missed out on the stuff AP does better than anything else because they aren't enjoying the getting-shot-in-the-face parts.

ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Feb 15, 2017

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

ToxicFrog posted:

The former because if you've played other, superficially similar RPGs, it's really easy to go in with the assumption that the dialogue is something you should (or have to) "win" and end up sucked down the rabbit hole of trying to optimize that, and the latter because the combat is, honestly, not that great, and would be a shame if someone missed out on the stuff AP does better than anything else because they aren't enjoying the getting-shot-in-the-face parts.

My advice would be just to slam through and not to expect too much. It's not a bad game, but I get the feeling that it had been scheduled for one last balance/finetuning pass but the CEO cut it so he could afford another round of hookers and blow.

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


Gynovore posted:

My advice would be just to slam through and not to expect too much. It's not a bad game, but I get the feeling that it had been scheduled for one last balance/finetuning pass but the CEO cut it so he could afford another round of hookers and blow.

It was in fact scheduled for several more rounds of balance and fine-tuning, while is why the release was held back for half a year -- Sega wanted "additional QA and marketing" on it before release and Obsidian agreed that was the right call. And, IMO, they were right; the stuff AP does well it was (and, I think, still is) best-of-breed at, but there's a lot of stuff it doesn't do well and more than a few glaring bugs.

Unfortunately, this left it in the hands of Sega's QA department, who sat on it for six months doing jack poo poo in either QA or marketing, resulting in a final release almost indistinguishable from the working-but-still-in-need-of-polish version sent to Sega in fall 2009, while also missing the 2009 holiday season, being beaten to market by Mass Effect 2, and delaying it long enough for people to forget about all the marketing they had done in 2009.

Obsidian has been screwed over harder by other publishers (Bethesda comes to mind), but I think Sega pisses me off the most just because of how much wasted potential there is in AP itself and in the sequels we'll now never get.

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

ToxicFrog posted:

Obsidian has been screwed over harder by other publishers (Bethesda comes to mind), but I think Sega pisses me off the most just because of how much wasted potential there is in AP itself and in the sequels we'll now never get.

It's a matter of opinion as to whether Bethesda "screwed over" Obsidian. But other than that... yeah.

(for the uninitiated: Bethesda promised Obsidian a gold-plated sack of money if New Vegas got at least an 85 on Metacritic. It got an 84. :shepicide: )

GoneRampant
Aug 19, 2016

by FactsAreUseless
Who has the rights to Alpha Protocol right now, actually?

double nine
Aug 8, 2013

GoneRampant posted:

Who has the rights to Alpha Protocol right now, actually?

sega

https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/120945556787970048

that said, there's literally no reason why they can't make another spy game with a new cast & mechanics, other than Obsidian not wanting to.

double nine fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Feb 16, 2017

Nohman
Sep 19, 2007
Never been worse.
Anything for Path of Exile?

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


Nohman posted:

Anything for Path of Exile?

Just read the thread, because that poo poo is complex.

theshim
May 1, 2012

You think you can defeat ME, Ephraimcopter?!?

You couldn't even beat Assassincopter!!!

Nohman posted:

Anything for Path of Exile?
I had a post earlier in the thread, let me find it.

e:

theshim posted:

- Path of Exile really incentivizes knowing what build you're going for from the beginning. Your best bet is to go to the forums, look up a build guide (preferably one described as cheap or good for new leagues), and follow that on your first character as you learn the game. Resolute Technique + Cyclone is a popular one. Flame Totems also works really well, though some people find it boring. I did a Tornado Shot Ranger a while back as my first character and it was pretty damned solid.

- To add to the above, respeccing isn't really a thing except in limited circumstances, so it's really useful to at least have an idea of what you're going for.

- Join the goon guild, tons of helpful people and free poo poo in the guild stash to help you out.

- Currency can be used on nearly everything. Find a strongbox? You can use orbs on it to make it magical and reroll until you like the suffixes. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can do, and for a first character I'd encourage you to experiment with the more common orbs a bunch (alteration, transmutation, augmentation).

- There's no money. Currency is all in the form of different orbs and scrolls that all do different things when used.

- On that note, look up vendor recipes on the wiki. There's a few that are really easy to get a lot of the time. One in particular is that any item that has three linked sockets of all three colors will net you a chromatic orb.

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


double nine posted:


that said, there's literally no reason why they can't make another spy game with a new cast & mechanics, other than Obsidian not wanting to.

Covert action remake :pray:

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Ainsley McTree posted:

Covert action remake :pray:
OH

YES

PLEASE

One time I met Sid Meier and I think he was a little upset when I told him I loved Covert Action so much that my grades definitely suffered as a result.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Fat Samurai posted:

Here's a though one: recently I managed to cajole my computer into running Emperor of the Fading Suns. I remember "playing" the game 15 years ago, choosing my dude, going "nope" at the first screen and running back to Civ 2.

The first thing you should know is that the game is barely playable only if patched and otherwise terribly broken. It's pretty and looks deep but a lot of the functionality either just isn't there or is only half finished. The game was rushed and just doesn't have everything it was intended to. Which is sad; the setting is great and games on its scale don't come out often. It did some things that no other strategy game has really even attempted to do since. So it's worth a play just for how different it is but make sure it's patched. If you can find the patch.

That being said a few things about actually playing the game; early on you want food and metal. Lots of food and metal. That's how you make engineers and they cost 100 of each. Engineers are how you make more buildings and you want more buildings.

Some of the traits and disadvantages literally do nothing. Friend/enemy of the church/league have no actual effect. The traits are also badly balanced. Warrior Ethic is so insanely good you should always have it.

Units have more loyalty if you increase their pay while cities produce more if you increase their loyalty by lowering taxes. This is a big deal as they still consume the same stuff. You want your buildings to be at 100%.

If the church outlaws a particular technology and you aren't strong enough to fight them yet they'll show up and burn your labs down. The manual says the church will trade for maps to labs it doesn't know about, especially for players researching naughty things. This is a lie; the church is omniscient. It knows where your labs are. That being said you can "strike" technology at your labs. If you delete all your naughty tech the church will leave you alone.

Labs cost 500 fire birds a month to maintain each. This is not documented anywhere and the game never tells you this. It doesn't even show up on the financial screen. No money means no research. You also lose some points of research every turn to "maintain" your research. That doesn't matter at all; research is pretty cheap and you can max out everything pretty quickly.

I don't think diplomacy actually works with the church. They've rejected every single thing I've sent them every time I've played. They're supposed to be willing to sometimes give you votes in exchange for a lower game score but I've never seen it happen.

Keep your nobles alive. If you have no nobles you lose.

Spoilers because it gets into exploits that you may or may not learn. It can be kind of fun until you realize these. Then it becomes balls easy to win. Granted the AI is bad enough that it's pretty hard to actually lose.


The game wants you to think that the church will hate you if you crank Tithe Skim all the way up. Essentially if you control a planet's church you take a certain percentage of the money people donate to it rather than letting the church have it. Letting the church have it has no actual effect but keeping it gives you obscene amounts of money with no drawback.

The trait that gives you a bonus to planet wide loyalty if you have a noble in the palace is pretty broken if you learn how to exploit it. Units that retreat can be captured but have very low loyalty so they tend to rebel pretty much immediately. This trait can let you capture some very powerful units that you can't normally build and keep them.

The AI will absolutely never attempt to win. They'll fight you and deal with you and sometimes get elected regent but will never, ever vote themselves emperor, even if they have the votes to.

Supposedly if the league gets enough money they will declare they're in charge, stop trading, declare war on everybody, and try to take over. I've never seen it happen.

The Vau don't do anything. Ever. They don't even get a turn.

The Symbiots are not a real threat as they are totally unable to build ships. The transports they have at the beginning of the game are all they'll ever get. Once they get those killed (which they will absolutely do in short order) they can never leave whatever planets they're already on.

The church is actually hilariously weak and not very competent. They'll typically manage to burn some AI labs early in the game, partly because the AI is also not very competent, but really don't get much more powerful. Before long you can just let them come fight you, break all their stuff, and take over Holy Terra.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I recently caved in and bought The Division and the season pass on sale (on PS4), and while leveling up to 30 was pretty straightforward, it seems that the end game unlocked a hundred gameplay addition and I feel really lost. I still have story missions to complete, I'm supposed to have access to the Underground DLC, there are now World Levels, there's HVTs, Incursions, I haven't been to the dark zone yet, I've encountered a drop surrounded by level 32 enemies which took, like, 30 minutes and literally all of my ammo to fight...

I've seen the info on the wiki, but it seems angled toward leveling up to 30, and also seems to cover an earlier version of the game, which is supposed to have changed a lot since version 1.0.

I'm thinking of going at it with my "Diablo 3" mindset and just do whatever, but is there anything anyone would recommend to maybe make things a bit easier? If it changes anything, I mostly play single player because of my schedule.

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


CordlessPen posted:

I recently caved in and bought The Division and the season pass on sale (on PS4), and while leveling up to 30 was pretty straightforward, it seems that the end game unlocked a hundred gameplay addition and I feel really lost. I still have story missions to complete, I'm supposed to have access to the Underground DLC, there are now World Levels, there's HVTs, Incursions, I haven't been to the dark zone yet, I've encountered a drop surrounded by level 32 enemies which took, like, 30 minutes and literally all of my ammo to fight...

I've seen the info on the wiki, but it seems angled toward leveling up to 30, and also seems to cover an earlier version of the game, which is supposed to have changed a lot since version 1.0.

I'm thinking of going at it with my "Diablo 3" mindset and just do whatever, but is there anything anyone would recommend to maybe make things a bit easier? If it changes anything, I mostly play single player because of my schedule.

This isn't fully up to date, but it should mostly still be accurate:

Finish out the story missions. You'll get dailies that involve hard modes and stuff there, and some of the rewards are content locked for having done everything. They're pretty easy.
Make sure you've unlocked all the parts to your base (which you can mostly do through the resources you get from story missions).
World bosses spawn every 4 hours. Set your world difficulty to whatever the highest you have unlocked is (which is based on your gear score) and go kill the world bosses. There's a map in the thread. The loot is personal loot, nobody can steal your poo poo, though a fair amount of the loot can be traded within a certain time limit to other people who were in your party and present for the kill.
Do your daily instances, they also give free loot.
High Value Targets have a bunch that are easily soloable too, and they also just throw out tons of loot.

The Underground, while fun in premise, is crap for loot and is a ton of grinding that was all made irrelvant by the revamped world systems.

The Dark Zone can be fun, but is generally going to be full of fully geared people and/or hackers, because Ubisoft sucks at balancing anything. Don't be afraid to go in and give it a shot, but if you get frustrated just go do something else, because gently caress it.

Oh, and you get a couple of daily crafting/kill/etc missions a day. They are usually SUPER easy to complete and give you another random loot box, so take the 5 minutes to do them any day you log in.

Youtube videos for a given week let you easily find out what good items vendors are selling each week if you care enough to want the knowledge but not enough to fast travel to every vendor.

Find a set (or two) you like and farm the pieces of that set, D3 style.

PJOmega
May 5, 2009
Emperor of the Fading Suns sounds kind of amazing actually. In a what-the-hell kind of way.

Fat Samurai
Feb 16, 2011

To go quickly is foolish. To go slowly is prudent. Not to go; that is wisdom.
Thanks for the effortpost. It looked so nice :(

Any mods or something that attempts to fix the game?

Foxhound
Sep 5, 2007
Managed to snag Suikoden Tierkreis for the DS. It's gonna be a while until I play it since I'm backed up, but might as well ask for tips in advance.

Fur20
Nov 14, 2007

すご▞い!
君は働か░い
フ▙▓ズなんだね!

double nine posted:

that said, there's literally no reason why they can't make another spy game with a new cast & mechanics, other than Obsidian not wanting to.

And who can blame them? It's one of my favorite games of all time, top ten easily, but god drat plotting out all the cause-and-effect must've been a loving nightmare.

Foxhound posted:

Managed to snag Suikoden Tierkreis for the DS. It's gonna be a while until I play it since I'm backed up, but might as well ask for tips in advance.

#1: unless you're a collector, get a refund

GhostBoy
Aug 7, 2010

Anything for Nioh? I don't want to spoiler the story for myself, so tried to avoid Let's Plays, though I have learned enough that Ki Pulse is important, and preparing for fights pays dividends.

GhostBoy fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Feb 17, 2017

Chernobyl Peace Prize
May 7, 2007

Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

GhostBoy posted:

Anything for Nioh? I don't want to spoiler the story for myself, to tried to avoid Let's Plays, though I have learned enough that Ki Pulse is important, and preparing for fights pays dividends.
Three things from a couple hours of playing, all related to the same point:
Many skill descriptions are misleading-to-only-technically-accurate, and the skill movies show you less than you'd think.
1. The skill directly beneath each weapon's high/med/low stance that says "You may now Ki Pulse while dodging" should actually say "You may now Ki Pulse BY dodging" which is insanely, incredibly powerful.
2. Any skill that says "at the end of a combo press triangle" means "any time you hit triangle after hitting square" so you can Sq-Tr, Sq-Sq-Tr, whatever.
3. The charge-triangle Axe skill that says you slam the ground makes it look/sound like you'd use it to knock someone over. It also looks like it has a tiny lovely range because you hit directly at your phone feet. What it actually does, is hit anyone up to your weapon's reach, and knocks them over (at least, anything human-sized in the first couple areas). This also depletes their Ki. This is good, because they're now out of Ki and on the ground and open to a Final Blow.

Only the most minor of spoilers because it won't make sense until you're out of the tutorial/Tower, but:
Also, SPIRITS: You can see what any Guardian Spirit has as its unlocks (what you get at Spirit 10, 11, etc.) by going a few tabs over on YOUR Status screen, or by going to Change Guardian Spirit at any shrine.
Shark spirit has a suite of super-useful stuff that you can unlock as you get a couple points of Spirit (enemies on radar, life on kill, reduced Ki consumption on strong attacks).

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

PJOmega posted:

Emperor of the Fading Suns sounds kind of amazing actually. In a what-the-hell kind of way.

Yeah it's definitely worth at least one play just because of how insanely different it is. Sadly it was over ambitious and what have you. The setting was great and it did some cool things but it just never got finished.

Fat Samurai posted:

Thanks for the effortpost. It looked so nice :(

Any mods or something that attempts to fix the game?

There are a few mods but the game doesn't really lend itself all that well to modding. Hyperion is the only one whose name I remember. This stuff may also have been lost to the sands of time as the game wasn't even all that popular when it existed (partly due to how broken it was on release). There are also severe limits in just what you can do with modding. Somebody, somewhere modified it in a way that made the game's odd mechanics actually make sense but again the game was still broken in some ways. Still, I'd definitely recommend giving it a play just because of how unique it is.

There was also a mod that fixed the Tithe Skim thing by giving the church control of every church on every planet at the beginning of the game with a ridiculously powerful garrison. That however had its limits and it was only a matter of time before you could overrun it.

I know I'm dumping on it pretty hard but it was a cool game or at least should have been if it got fixed. I'd very much love to see a spiritual successor to it. Keep thinking about doing that myself but that would be insane AI to code.

That being said it can be pretty good times multiplayer.

Foxhound
Sep 5, 2007

The White Dragon posted:

And who can blame them? It's one of my favorite games of all time, top ten easily, but god drat plotting out all the cause-and-effect must've been a loving nightmare.


#1: unless you're a collector, get a refund

From what I could tell it received pretty ok reviews though? Like not stellar or anything but what makes it horrible enough to warrant an instant refund?

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Foxhound posted:

From what I could tell it received pretty ok reviews though? Like not stellar or anything but what makes it horrible enough to warrant an instant refund?

The console ports were really bad which is saying a lot about a game that was already rough on PC.

Mayor McCheese
Sep 20, 2004

Everyone is a mayor... Someday..
Lipstick Apathy

Foxhound posted:

From what I could tell it received pretty ok reviews though? Like not stellar or anything but what makes it horrible enough to warrant an instant refund?

I beat that game but don't ask me anything about it. It's very forgettable and blah.

im cute
Sep 21, 2009

I get that it's a musou game, but is there anything worth knowing before getting into Hyrule Warriors/Legends?

Lakbay
Dec 14, 2006

My eye...MY EYE!!!
Gamefly just shipped me Yakuza 0 I didn't see anything in the last 3 pages so anything for that? Or should I ask in its dedicated thread?

im cute
Sep 21, 2009

Lakbay posted:

Gamefly just shipped me Yakuza 0 I didn't see anything in the last 3 pages so anything for that? Or should I ask in its dedicated thread?

There a wiki entry for it.

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


Gynovore posted:

It's a matter of opinion as to whether Bethesda "screwed over" Obsidian. But other than that... yeah.

(for the uninitiated: Bethesda promised Obsidian a gold-plated sack of money if New Vegas got at least an 85 on Metacritic. It got an 84. :shepicide: )

It's a bit more complicated than that; Bethesda gave Obsidian a choice of either getting guaranteed royalties on NV but funding the bulk of development themselves, or Bethesda funding development but Obsidian getting royalties only if it got at least an 85 on Metacritic.

Obsidian (to the surprise of absolutely no-one) did not have the cash on hand for option #1, so they went with option #2.

FO:NV has since sold over 12 million copies. Obsidian hasn't seen a cent of that.

double nine posted:

sega

https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/120945556787970048

that said, there's literally no reason why they can't make another spy game with a new cast & mechanics, other than Obsidian not wanting to.

Even if they wanted to, they'd need to secure funding for it. They've talked about this before in interviews -- AP was one of their highest-budget projects. The planning needed for the insanely complex branching conversations was only a tiny part of that; consider how much work is involved in planning, directing, motion-capturing, voice-acting, rigging and animating just one of those conversations -- and you need to do that for every alternate path through every conversation in the game. Mass Effect style conversations where everyone stares blankly ahead like zombies or alternates between a few canned animations for most of the conversation are much cheaper, and Pillars of Eternity style text conversations with descriptions of what people are doing and limited voice acting are cheaper still.

Their crowdfunding has done well, but they've stated before that it doesn't come anywhere close to covering the cost of another project like Alpha Protocol.

Chernobyl Peace Prize
May 7, 2007

Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:

Three things from a couple hours of playing, all related to the same point:
Many skill descriptions are misleading-to-only-technically-accurate, and the skill movies show you less than you'd think.
1. The skill directly beneath each weapon's high/med/low stance that says "You may now Ki Pulse while dodging" should actually say "You may now Ki Pulse BY dodging" which is insanely, incredibly powerful.
2. Any skill that says "at the end of a combo press triangle" means "any time you hit triangle after hitting square" so you can Sq-Tr, Sq-Sq-Tr, whatever.
3. The charge-triangle Axe skill that says you slam the ground makes it look/sound like you'd use it to knock someone over. It also looks like it has a tiny lovely range because you hit directly at your phone feet. What it actually does, is hit anyone up to your weapon's reach, and knocks them over (at least, anything human-sized in the first couple areas). This also depletes their Ki. This is good, because they're now out of Ki and on the ground and open to a Final Blow.

Only the most minor of spoilers because it won't make sense until you're out of the tutorial/Tower, but:
Also, SPIRITS: You can see what any Guardian Spirit has as its unlocks (what you get at Spirit 10, 11, etc.) by going a few tabs over on YOUR Status screen, or by going to Change Guardian Spirit at any shrine.
Shark spirit has a suite of super-useful stuff that you can unlock as you get a couple points of Spirit (enemies on radar, life on kill, reduced Ki consumption on strong attacks).

Ok another two:

- Once you unlock the map, go to the Dojo and do the Way of the Ninja tutorial. It will teach you nothing, BUT it unlocks the backstab passive ability (massive damage attack on an unaware target from behind --- lock onto them and then triangle when you see the targeting reticle turn red, while within weapon's reach) in the Ninja skill tree. Which you should get.
- The non-consumable item that says something about consuming "all obtained Amrita" to return to the start of a mission + cancel a mission (basically your "gently caress this I want to leave" button) sounds like it'll eat anything you got from the mission. Literally all it does is 0s our your current possessed Amrita, like dying. So if you're near a level up breakpoint, feel free to get enough Amrita to level up, get your level up, then use the item with your tiny baby amount of Amrita burnt.

Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Feb 17, 2017

Keeshhound
Jan 14, 2010

Mad Duck Swagger

ToxicFrog posted:

Their crowdfunding has done well, but they've stated before that it doesn't come anywhere close to covering the cost of another project like Alpha Protocol.

The thought occurs that a studio could cut some, if not most, of those costs by making all of the conversations text based (some kind of cyberpunk dystopia where your only communications with other people are through emails and text messages, maybe) but it would be taking a risk and I'm not going to blame anyone for not wanting to take a shot at it.

Fat Samurai
Feb 16, 2011

To go quickly is foolish. To go slowly is prudent. Not to go; that is wisdom.

Lakbay posted:

Gamefly just shipped me Yakuza 0 I didn't see anything in the last 3 pages so anything for that? Or should I ask in its dedicated thread?

I have 0 wiki editing skills, so here:

- The game opens up in chapter two, but you may want to beeline the main story until chapter 6, where you get Kiryu's money making minigame. It's based on time spent in game, so you can faff about playing Mahjhong, or pocket cars or whatever and still make money in the meantime. Majima's appears in Chapter 7, but you have to actually spend time playing it, so you can take your time on Majima's earlier chapters and lose nothing.
- Progress in those minigames (cabaret and real state)is how you open up your skill trees, so you should try and do them. At least until you unlock one style completely.
- Speaking of styles, both characters have an AoE style, an one-on-one style and the versatile one. It's pretty obvious which is which.
- You can go to the Collection List on the menu and hit Triangle in order to see a detailed list of Heat Moves used, money won at Baccarat, pieces of gear acquired and what have you.
- The best way to make money is to hunt Mr. Shakedown. You'll need an encounter finder, which you can get from a couple of Substories. Kiryu's is tricky, so you should google it (on the phone here, sorry).
- Speaking of which, there is no combat-related problem (including Mr. Shakedown) that can't be fixed with generous applications of Zap Guns and Stamina Royales, so try to be well supplied with both at all times. Money is very plentiful in the game.
- Related: game is pretty obvious about when you should stock up because a big fight is coming. Don't worry about stumbling into something unprepared.
- While there are no missable things in the game (as the wiki says), there are some missable trophies. This is a good guide for it.

Fat Samurai fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Feb 17, 2017

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Take Invisible Inc and add dialog trees and you get Beta Contract, a game I would enjoy playing as much as interacting. I don't need to play another fully 3D third person over-the-shoulder game from Obsidian.

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


Regarding styles in yakuza 0; is it the kind of game where you really need to make use of (and spend your points in) all three styles evenly, or can you just go all-in on your favorite one and be fine?

Kaboom Dragoon
May 7, 2010

The greatest of feasts

There will be fights or situations where you may want to switch to an individual style (for example, boss fights with Kazuma tend to have a lot of weapons in the area, so you'll want to switch to Beast to wear them down before going in for the kill). But at the very least, all styles include stuff like health increases, so you'll want to, at the very least, venture into unlocking those. You also unlock bonus points for in-game challenges that you can trade in at shrines for stuff like increases in cash earned, sprint duration, etc. so it'll be worth your while unlocking those as well. Aside from that, if you want to spend the majority of your cash and fights in one style over another, go for it. There isn't any one style that's objectively 'better' than another, so just have fun.

Sentient Toaster
May 7, 2007
Not the fork, Master!

Regulation Size posted:

I get that it's a musou game, but is there anything worth knowing before getting into Hyrule Warriors/Legends?
Seconding this. Additionally I'm largely unfamiliar with musou games. I've played a few, but never really got far into them. This game I like. Advice on How to Fairy would be great too.

Fur20
Nov 14, 2007

すご▞い!
君は働か░い
フ▙▓ズなんだね!

Foxhound posted:

From what I could tell it received pretty ok reviews though? Like not stellar or anything but what makes it horrible enough to warrant an instant refund?

It was reviewed in a time when we still hoped Konami could make good games, and in a time when we really wanted more Suikoden, so there was some community incentive to say it wasn't loving horrible. It was so uninspiring and so poorly-balanced that I stopped playing shortly after getting the castle. It's Suikoden in title only.

Vil
Sep 10, 2011

Regulation Size posted:

I get that it's a musou game, but is there anything worth knowing before getting into Hyrule Warriors/Legends?

Sentient Toaster posted:

Seconding this. Additionally I'm largely unfamiliar with musou games. I've played a few, but never really got far into them. This game I like. Advice on How to Fairy would be great too.

If you like playing as a character, maybe give a quick google to look up how they work to make sure you understand all their mechanic/combo quirks. Optimal play isn't anything you need to know, but it helps to know the basics of how a character's mechanics work. For example with Sheik, C1 does different things (most of them cool and good) depending on whether you've most recently done C2, C3, C4, etc. (or none of them: this results in the uncool and ungood C1) since the last time you did C1.

(For musou terminology in general, most characters' attack patterns end with a heavy attack but can have a various number of light attacks before that, and the nature of the heavy attack at the end will change depending on how many light attacks preceded it. So C1 is a heavy attack as the 1st move in the combo, aka a heavy attack by itself, while C4 is a heavy attack as the 4th move, aka three light attacks then the heavy attack.)

Otherwise, the only other thing I'll mention (seeing as it's a musou game and you can repeat stages and nothing's missable) is that if you're playing co-op in story mode, while player 1 has to choose one of the predetermined plot-relevant people for the stage, player 2 can choose any unlocked character they please. Needless to say, this can make things significantly easier if you can just bring in some high-leveled thoroughly-unlocked ringer (who might very well have no motivation to help from a plot perspective) to curbstomp over everything. A corollary of this is that if you want to preserve the challenge, have player 2 stick only to characters player 1 could have chosen from.

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anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
Anything for Total Warhammer? Keep in mind I haven't played a TW game since the original Shogun.

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