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I think they must have made this whole opening as a proof-of-concept sales pitch or something, because a lot of what happens here just doesn't line up with the overall mood and style of the actual game. Of course it's certainly good for getting the player to pay attention out of the gate, so that's useful. Ah well. Immortal Bum vs Crusty White Dude, the most eternal of struggles, let's rock.
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Jun 21, 2018 03:00
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 11:25 |
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Being the unquestioned best PC in a game will do wonders. (There's generally a method to Citan's dickery mind, which between that and his snark is probably what really draws people in, but the Soylent thing is more than a little out of whack even by that logic.)
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Jun 29, 2018 01:21
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Also hurts that, well, Yuri keeps being Yuri and Alice gets better and better through the game. He's the normal dude by comparison.
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Jul 1, 2018 00:09
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Shadow Hearts II is a master class in how to write protagonist snark. The exchange in Idar Flamme is something I can quote from memory.
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Jul 5, 2018 23:15
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Common logic flaw in most RPGs... or really SFF stories in general come to think of it. I think the assumed logic is that "well, he's the Evil Wizard, he'll probably figure it out eventually except we won't know for SURE and that's even worse than him having it surely". You could also speculate that with any of the Four Gods in place Japan wouldn't be able to complete their takeover either, but it's way more likely to be the first one (which isn't a good excuse, but people don't logic good most of the time.)
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Aug 5, 2018 10:48
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My memory is that Yuri only gets the pass on Game of Death if he's currently Dark elemental; so before he transforms or if you go with Death Emperor. Wugui also has a minor ID chance on one of his other moves, so that can screw you over if you do decide to solo the thing (which... it's Yuri, he totally can otherwise). Point being Wugui triples down on the whole Death thing because they really, REALLY want you to pick up on the idea of "bosses will spam one status and that is their thing, pack the right blockers or die" at this point.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:12
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quote:Oh, he and Roger Bacon hosed off to Kowloon. Welp, guess we'll have to go chase after them to Hong Kong! Heck, you could even stick the stuff with the Japanese military invasion in Shanghai afterward, so it looks like that went down while we were away, instead of an invasion and full retreat that took place entirely over the course of about eighteen minutes. Really, I think the flow of the game makes more sense if you assume that was the original plan in fact. But then they realized that'd be letting Wugui get more story-driving villain screentime than Dehuai and... I mean, Dehuai is already kinda a joke to the party at this point, cementing it like that would risk this entire part of the game falling flat.
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Aug 29, 2018 22:57
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The Dark Id posted:
Y'know what, maybe Olga has things figured out. ... or she's just really into Keto.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:51
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Bacon is my only Lord. Jesus can eat my rear end.
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It is wild to me that Yakuza didn't come out for another 4 years after this, because just... look at Jack! It is stunning he's not a deliberate Kiryu/Majima mashup.
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Oct 20, 2018 23:12
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I can kinda see someone designing him with Jack the Ripper in mind, then the history nut on the team going "guys we're set like 50 years after that, that's dumb". But they already had the whole dungeon and creepy orphan murder coded so hell with it, put him in anyway and just change a proper name or two. Granted they also seem to have gone forward to 2005 and seen Majima's design so maybe they just don't operate in linear time. CmdrKing fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Oct 28, 2018 |
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Oct 28, 2018 18:40
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Really Pants posted:I want to see an RPG where the villain or secondary villain plans to destroy the universe so that no one will ever be sad again If I'm not mistaken Seymour's line in FFX was "free Spira from its Sorrow" so...
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Dec 1, 2018 23:33
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I found this one day months ago, and I can't not think of it when talking about the jRPG gods. This one far more than most.
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Dec 3, 2018 21:29
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InfiniteDreamer posted:Honestly,while i doubt this will happen, I hope Id or somebody else does FtNW. That's the only game in the series that hasn't had any LP and very little attention is paid to it.(on YT I could only find 1 LP) While kethryveris already did SA LPs for SH and Covenant,they never did FtNW for some reason. A friend of mine speedruns FtNW and I am stunned to this day that he didn't get the record by default on the silly thing. Then again I think I personally know every huge fan of that game and WA4, like the 30 person target audience for XSeed's first releases were one weird internet forum I was on. The trouble with FtNW as an LP is that the main appeal is "it's Covenant's battle system but actually kinda hard", so the LPer has to put in effort or really know the game well, but the plotty bits are... a step back shall we say. The music is easily the best in the series though!
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Dec 15, 2018 21:34
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Oh, god yeah. All the SH games are super broken if you start using all the crap the games give you, FtNW having easily the most of it. It requires knowing the game's little systems well and getting real good at your judgement rings, but you can totally do complete nonsense like combo buff your main attacker then straight up OHKO most bosses with a physical. SH1 isn't THAT broken, but that Mind's Eye that's not getting used is real dumb under the right setups.
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Dec 16, 2018 01:27
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Welcome to Shadow Hearts Endgame, where the strategy of "Yuri spams lasers, Alice calls in heavenly favors to keep him upright, and whoever you like most of the rest tosses around Mana Roots" will play on loop until there's no demons left to do it to.
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Dec 21, 2018 02:31
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Day made.
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Jan 1, 2019 22:14
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:Such a shame because Silver Star and Eternal Blue are awesome, and that series has so much potential, plot-wise. I really hate that they just keep remaking those two games. Curse of the Sinistrals is a bit tragic really. The technical issues are... very noticeable, to a degree I can't fault people for mostly rejecting it. But aside from that it's almost a perfect remake? It captures the bits and pieces of each character and expands them in logical ways that, while still on the cliche way, mesh together pretty well. Never mind that the original plot wrinkle that made Lufia II stand out, that the hero and heroine got married in the middle, is STILL nearly unique to this one game. It kept the puzzle element, but adapted it in a way that made sense in the ARPG direction they went. The more pointless jaunts that made sense in a turn-based game for padding were excised to keep the plot moving smoothly. Probably the only non-technical letdown was most of the bosses aren't really very interesting, but then again the Sinistrals were one-dimensional bruisers in Rise of the Sinistrals too so... *shrug* I am pretty sure I would think long and hard about blood sacrifices if it guaranteed me an honest to god Suikoden VI. ... or a new Shadow Hearts game for that matter.
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Jan 7, 2019 23:05
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It's the other thing Dekar is best at: stealing Tia's weapon and making it look better than she ever could.
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Jan 7, 2019 23:15
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Tierkreis is definitely a step back for the Suikoden series in a vacuum. Put it side-by-side with Suikoden II, despite the translation Suikoden II has a more nuanced use of theme, more complex internal politics, better driving conflict, more interesting gameplay (just by adding more ways to tweak your party, and thus giving you more stuff to DO with your cast of dozens), stronger main-cast writing, and waaaay stronger villain writing. Not to say Tierkreis is bad, the "it'd be a solid 6-7/10 in most people's books if they hadn't slapped the Suikoden name on it" take is pretty hard to dispute, but it's just not as good a game as most of the actual Suikoden games. And that's before factoring in the slowly expanding integrated world of the original series, which is the main reason I always specify "Suikoden VI" and not "more Suikoden".
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Jan 7, 2019 23:41
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Even that can be run around once you have the L3 Light Fusion (making is the only L3 fusion with a meaningful niche really). I'm pretty sure Arc is still cheaper than Yuri's heal-all so it's better to just, y'know, use Alice, but it's an option if somehow she ended up badly underlevelled.
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Jan 14, 2019 22:31
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I uh. Wow. I usually kinda think of SH1 as the pretty-solid lead-in that enhances the playing experience of the utterly amazing SH2, but I gotta admit I am really feeling this entire sequence. Which is the long version of: Ratoslov posted:Yuri is the best protagonist.
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Jan 18, 2019 22:21
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In summary: Bang! Zoom!
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Jan 24, 2019 20:27
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So if memory serves, For the Children actually does more damage than it says it does. There's some enemies in the final dungeon with more than 999 HP, and FtC still kills them. That Shadow Hearts created a visual damage display lower than the amount of damage it would actually let you deal is... very Shadow Hearts.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:40
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In 2003, without knowing how the series would turn out, all you could really read into Xenosaga 1 was the amount of detail put into the setting, how meticulously they'd plotted out the background, and the tantalizing possibilities of the story hooks they were laying out. So unto itself it's hard to call it a bad plot, although if you want to mark it down for pacing and not having a better sense of how to weave plot and gameplay together that's absolutely fair. The larger problem is that the plot they were putting together was always going to be very, very difficult to do well, and the ever decreasing sales and attendant lack of freedom and budget for the series killed their ability to set up the ultimate endgame in a remotely satisfying manner. (Although I question if ANYTHING could have contextualized Kevin loving Winnicot in a way that wasn't goddamned awful.)
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Feb 16, 2019 17:22
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FtNW is a bit half-baked generally. They clearly understood "hey maybe we should try some American myths and settings to change things up" was a natural move to take the franchise, but didn't really have any specific story ideas to do once they got there. There wasn't really a core conceit or plot kernel they wanted to explore, and they badly underutilized the historical period they chose, so between that and the weaker secondary cast, criticizing the game is perfectly fair. It's also the hardest, best mechanically fleshed out game in the series, utilizes a variety of boss concepts, and does a much better job of specializing the PCs than the other games. While Yuri punching his way through gods effortlessly has its own charm, by most metrics it's probably the most fun to play and offers players the most fleshed out options to approach it. So like... a lot of people don't really jive with jRPG gameplay, even folks who play lots of jRPGs, and for them it's obviously going to be a big ol' disappointment, especially for series fans because Shadow Hearts Covenant is among the best games ever made, particularly for folks who aren't huge on the core gameplay of the genre but who do like the anime-influenced, character-driven NONSENSE they get up to. But there's a big-rear end leap between a game being disappointing or half-baked and being a Bad Game. Xenosaga 3 is a game in which Mary of Magdala's soul and cybernetically resurrected corpse have a beam struggle with boob cannons, because they have control over the powers of chaos, who did you know was ACTUALLY the power behind Jesus of Nazareth's miracles because he was just a dude with some revolutionary ideals, after which the main character chooses her abusive ex-boyfriend, whomst literally killed himself to distress her enough to finish building the Mary-robot and get emotionally attached to same, then five minutes later decides actually, wait, all that stuff you said was abuse which all my friends told me ten minutes ago, and stops. Then you fight some sort of robot that will reset the universe built by the devil, because it turns out humans suck SO BADLY that it's killing the universe because even after they die they hate other people so much they become ghosts (that's what gnosis are! Ghosts. Literally the souls of the dead refusing to move on.) it's causing the soul-death of the universe. Xenosaga 3 is half of a good game and half of two other games smooshed together with so little breathing room it amounts to a plot summary, and the underlying plot is so loving dumb that it would take a lot of nuance and execution to give it emotional weight or resonance but... nope, all that happens in the span of 2-3 hours of gameplay, during which you have multiple long boss fights. CmdrKing fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Feb 16, 2019 |
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Feb 16, 2019 23:48
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 11:25 |
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Honestly I feel like Legaia 2 would be right up TDI's alley, it's a cheesy as gently caress kung-fu flick and goes all in on that.
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Feb 26, 2019 22:38
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