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lih posted:i just finished cocoon and wow was that disappointing. extremely style over substance and very short i'm only about an hour in but i am kinda glad i read this since i was on the fence about continuing it but i keep dying on this second boss fight. think i'll go ahead and put it down, too many games more interesting than this out there there's this genre of like... indie top-down puzzle-action game that has cropped up over the past few years and they're just never compelling at all. hob (rip runic) is another example of this. tunic is another one, it had some extra gimmicks that made it more interesting to work through but ultimately didn't connect with me how it did with a lot of other people. just a lot of games in this vein that are "this is really well-crafted and pretty and wow this soundtrack is amazing but wow do i not find any enjoyment out of actually playing it"
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Dec 30, 2023 19:07
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i just beat bomb rush cyberfunk which i had considered a near-perfect game and put on my GOTY list just before finishing, but i'm actually super pissed about one specific thing: i really thought when you beat the game it'd give you the option to disable the heat system (where the cops come after you when you spray stuff), and it does not! and this completely sapped my desire to go back postgame and mop up all the extra collectables and finish spraying all the levels. that'd easily be another 3-5 hours of fun gameplay if i could just disable the loving cops can't believe they dropped the ball like that. maybe i should install cheat engine and figure out if i can do something with it? ugh
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Jan 1, 2024 18:13
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i am going to attempt to beat 52 games this year! i will post about them in this thread as i go i'm thinking about buying a ps5 to play final fantasy 7 rebirth, since i loved remake so much and don't want to wait 1-2 years for a pc version of rebirth. because of this, i'm investigating what the hell else sony has going on that could justify buying that console. i had a base model ps4 that started feeling long in the tooth in like 2017, and haven't touched any of their stuff since then. thankfully, with all the PC ports, I don't need a PS5 (or to pull my now-ancient-seeming ps4 out of storage) to figure out if i'm interested in sony stuff. I played through and beat Spider-Man Miles Morales, since i wanted to see if i'd be interested in spider-man 2. technically i'm at 90% completion but i'm gonna go back and do that last 10% tonight. it is a fun, short open world game. i have not played the first spider-man game, and figured i didn't really want to play that kind of huge open world game. a nice thing about buying this instead was that i was doing Cool Spider Man poo poo within 3 minutes of opening the game, and you're in the full open world within maybe half an hour. i am not really a comic books guy anymore but i did really like the bit of ultimate spider-man i'd read, and it's nice seeing miles morales get this kind of focused treatment. into the spiderverse is cool, but it's got a whole multiverse thing going, whereas this really is just miles and a tiny bit of peter. i was initially annoyed he was getting this "standalone dlc" game instead of a full game treatment, but honestly, the story it tells is better for being a reasonable 6-7 hours instead of an overlong epic. story notes: love this version of aaron/the prowler and i hope he survives the next game instead of being "tragic backstory part 2" like in the original comics and into the spiderverse. seriously was waiting for the shoe to drop on him and instead, no, he fully has a change of heart. even his heroic sacrifice is just going to jail instead of getting himself killed. great, if one-note, main bad guy, but i wish they'd had a more interesting mcguffin than just "mysterious energy source." like i kept expecting them to reveal the energy source was alien in nature or stolen from wakanda or something, because, yknow, marvel comic book stuff? but nope, its just a mysterious fuel that gives you bone cancer. maybe this was revealed in one of the podcasts, which i immediately turned off. i wish those had just had transcripts i could read. mixed feelings on phin. HATED the big last act problem being that she was going to unknowingly blow up the whole neighborhood and miles just couldn't get through to her because he's a massive dumbass. there could have been way more nuance to that conflict and it made me angry in a bad way. that said, they stuck the landing; even the cliched "walk slowly forward because you're injured and then do a very emotional button-mash QTE" sequence worked for me. wish she'd stuck around instead of heroically exploding herself. i liked the combat though it never clicked quite to the extent that i wanted. particularly, i felt like i was constantly missing the "dodge this" indicator due to how busy the screen is. also could not keep track of which moves i was supposed to use to counter which enemies for the life of me. the stealth i had a ton of fun with even though it is hilariously shallow, almost a direct clone of the stuff the arkham games did just with a bit more mobility. don't think that would work at all in a longer game, i dunno. a neat thing about this game, btw, is that it works pretty great on steam deck. mostly-steady 40fps (only a few rooftop combat arenas brought it down to 30), feels good when frame-limited, and even when it's at its lowest dynamic resolution it still looks good on the small screen. was fun to do the big story missions on my desktop and then mop up the side stuff on the deck. i'm not going to truly 100% the game because the achievements go well beyond just doing all the stuff on the map, and you have to do new game plus which i have no interest in, but i'll at least finish the map before uninstalling it, just cuz it's so easy to pull up on the deck and play a bit at a time. snappy loading times too. normally after doing a big AAA extravaganza i'd switch to something small and indie, but i'm still off work this week due to covid, so i'm thinking of continuing my sony investigation and picking up god of war while it's still on sale. or maybe i should just go full sicko mode and buy the first spider-man and go ahead and play through that? probably better to have a game between em, though. abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 04:01
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i have completed super mario rpg on the switch, which i started last year but didn't finish until last night. the last section of the game isn't great, but at that point you're so overpowered it doesn't take long (except for the stupid puzzle/action rooms which are the worst part of the game, goddamn that quiz is stupid). i decided not to do the optional bosses since they don't seem very rewarding. i love the characters and chill vibes and this might be the best fun writing nintendo has ever done. 12 hours is the correct length for an rpg like this, didn't overstay its welcome. i'm not sure i am going to go try other mario rpgs now, i've tried some paper marios in the past but bounced off them. maybe some day they'll rerelease the mario & luigi rpgs on switch (i guess just port the 3ds versions?). did you know they made five of those things? now i'm on to playing spider-man 1. i was going to start on god of war but man after playing through miles i really did want to have more of that game, and this certainly is that. i'm gonna try to play it mainly as a steam deck and podcasts game over the next couple weeks while i work on other games, but i do think i'm gonna beeline through the main story this weekend just because i am so charmed by this peter parker, even if he does appear to be a 30 year old trapped in a 12 year old's body abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jan 4, 2024 |
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Jan 4, 2024 21:24
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War Wizard posted:The post game content is the only actual challenging content in the game. It's only a few boss rematches and doesn't take too much time. i generally hate postgame content in RPGs since i am not usually there for the mechanics, but i might give this a shot just to see how hard it is. hopefully it has some more cute dialogue. Captain Hygiene posted:FYI, the first Mario & Luigi is one of the games you get access to in the Switch's emulated games if you have Nintendo's online expansion pack. I would've played it in a heartbeat if I hadn't literally just played through the 3DS remake when it dropped. The remakes are fine, but I love the pixely art on the originals before they switched to the less interesting art style on the newer ones. good to know! yeah, I've never tried emulating (3)DS games because even though it seems like it's a solved problem on a technical level, the two-screen thing is such a pain in the rear end to deal with, makes sense that that would also make them hard to port
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Jan 5, 2024 19:42
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i finished chants of sennaar today. i started this late last year in the runup to goty and, three hours in, i didn't think it would make my top 10, so i set it down. having now finished, it wouldn't quite make my top 10, but goddamn did it come close. if you haven't seen discussion of this game, it's a deduction puzzle game that draws a lot of comparisons to return of the obra dinn or case of the golden idol. in this one, you're deducing the characters of a language based on written dialog and signage/writing in the environment. unlike a game like case of the golden idol, this game has you in direct control of a character exploring a large environment, and has a bunch of puzzles outside of the core deduction mechanic. my cliched point of comparison here is myst - you have some logic puzzles that sometimes make use of the language, and sometimes don't, which gives it a lot more depth than i was expecting. it also has several stealth sections, which i thought i'd hate, but ended up being solid little puzzles of their own. the timing is a bit strict but it checkpoints every move you make, so there's no tension in these segments, which is good! this is a mostly relaxing game and i did not want that to be ruined. about halfway in i was feeling a little down on the game - the second area is a bit overlong, and i'd kinda ruined a couple deductions for myself by inadvent guess-and-checking. much like in obra dinn, as you go along deducing the different language characters, you place them in a journal which gives you an opportunity to validate your answers - and much like in obra dinn, if you guess wrong, the game will tell you, and from that mistake you can almost certainly figure out the correct answers, which is a bit underwhelming. in particular, i did not get the full experience of figuring out the ordering rules of the 3rd language. but the game really sticks the landing, especially with some smart environmental puzzles in the later stages, and i was glad i stuck with it. i was also shocked when i beat the game and saw this was a six-person dev team, with two credited leads doing the bulk of the design and code. it's a big game in size - in adventure game terms, this thing has a lot of loving screens! - and i'm impressed they made something at this scale.
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Jan 6, 2024 03:03
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i've completed Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, a game that i have spent 13 hours with and yet still have to look up the title every time i want to reference it. anyways i think this game kind of sucked! i saw it come up in the GOTY thread a few times, and wanted some kind of small-scale chill thing to throw in between some of the big AAA heavy hitters I'm working on. and, well, it did suck me in enough to see it through to the credits. and as a $15 game that was a kickstarter bonus and is intended for an ad for a game coming out later this year, i have to grade it somewhat on a curve. but man. i think this game is the definition of squandered potential. to explain what it is for those who haven't seen it: it's a side-scrolling rpg, split up into a handful of separate dungeons, with a theoretical focus on loot and... i guess you could call it "crafting?" it sort of has a town-building core, where you're helping a town rebuild and as you complete side quests you upgrade the town buildings to have better stuff to buy. the various loot you get from monsters is used to craft upgrades to your weapons and gear, and to turn in for other side quests. the problem is none of these systems loving matter. there's three characters you play as, and the one cool gimmick they came up with is that each character has an attack on a face button, so you're swapping between the characters and doing some simple combo-ing as you fight. but each character has one weapon and one armor set, and you upgrade it as you go. there are zero choices in these upgrades, it's just a linear progression gated by the town upgrades and whether or not you've reached the dungeons that contain the later items you need for these upgrade. there's so many systems that just don't loving matter. there's an inn where you can get buffs for stats, but there's no reason to get any buff but luck because you really need to get the drop rate up. same with the accessories; why bother with a strength up when you can get a 15% higher chance of rare ore dropping? there's a whole food system where you can craft recipes for healing and permanent stat upgrades, but the upgrades are loving meaningless and the healing is meaningless because you can only eat in town where you can just go to the inn to sleep for free (yes it wipes your inn buff, but the inn buffs cost less to reapply than the food would). there's a whole system where you can sell items, and the early game everyone's constantly joking about the tax rate, and none of that matters because you'll never sell anything other than the items that don't have any use other than to get money for selling them. it makes way more sense to hoard everything and use the materials exchange to get rid of the early-game materials. the side quests have this stupid system where the quests you can pick up are shown on a bulletin board in town and then you have to go to the NPCs listed there to go pick up quests. why the gently caress wouldn't you just show the NPCs on the minimap? the quests themselves are fine but desperately needed a more likeable cast of townspeople and quests that actually had full arcs (yakuza style). the recurring NPCs tended to be the worst, like the guy who keeps saying creepy things about the town's mayor, a 16 year old girl. rough. actually maybe it's good that guy didn't get an arc. the combat itself is really the biggest wasted potential. THE DODGE AND PARRY IN THIS GAME SUCK, and i have no idea why. all the fights i lost were because i got trapped in a corner and couldn't iframe my way past large enemies and just got hosed up. the main character has a dodge that moves her about 4 pixels, to the point that the first enemy you encounter with a dodge-tell is almost impossible to dodge without dodging into the enemy sprite, which DOES DAMAGE. you can fix almost everything about this game's combat by just making it so colliding with regular enemies doesn't do damage. why the gently caress do some side scrollers do that. the parry, meanwhile, has both a weirdly long wind-up and a weirdly short block time, so timing it is a massive pain in the rear end. the story was fine. it wasn't great. the dialogue had its moments. i don't even have anything interesting to put in spoiler tags, really. it did an okay job of getting me invested in, like, six characters that i assume will be part of the 100 in eiyuden chronicle. it sure as hell didn't get me interested in the broader world, which appears to barely exist. i don't know if that's because they hadn't locked in the lore by the time they were working on this game, or if there's just nothing interesting in that world to pull on. i started this review slightly playing up how heated i am about this game, but by this paragraph i realize i am actually kind of mad about my time spent with this game. it looked really nice, i enjoyed some of the numbers going up, and the music was good, but i really should have played any other JRPG. please avoid this. go play an atelier or something. i've had WitchSpring R on my maybe-play list for a while after a friend's recommendation, and i really wish i'd impulse bought that instead of this. gah. abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 06:16
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also holy gently caress the "town building" was TERRIBLE. the buildings just go from ruined buildings, to identical straw-roofed buildings, to identical straw-roofed buildings with frames. gently caress YOU! if you're going to put "town building" in the description of your game make your town look loving interesting! e: also if anyone's wondering i completed the "platinum" stamp card and will not be touching the black card. also this meant the last few story fights were totally trivial because i was fully outleveled/geared for them. at least that's standard for the genre abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 06:17
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fridge corn posted:I'm sorry you had such a bad time with the game. As someone who has a lot of appreciation for this title I can honestly say the majority of your complaints are completely valid. Everything in the game is very simple and basic to the point where its practically a mobile game. As a big fan of the Suikoden series however i will say where Eiyuden Chronicle Rising succeeds is how well it manages to capture the feel and spirit of a Suikoden game and what that possibly means for the main title coming out in a few months. Yes, I put this game at #10 on my goty list purely because it's given me confidence in an as yet to be released title no to the first question, but "maybe" to the second question, in what i guess is kind of the punchline to my whole screed. i do think the game's art and music are great, and i have been trying to branch out into playing more jrpgs, and the characters and writing are just good enough that i'm interested to see what they can do in the main game. definitely not a day one purchase, but if impressions and reviews are good, i could see myself picking it up close to release. that said, i really wish they'd had a better hook at the end of this game than just "what will happen to these three characters?" (and also, i assume, the town guard who literally does nothing all game what the gently caress, and the sailor scout, and the two antagonists in the final cutscene). i'm really surprised they didn't build up the setting at all; you get these vague notions of a "league of nations" and an "empire" and presumably they're about to go to war setting up the main game, but they give zero context on what those are. really feels like they scrambled to figure out a plot that wouldn't require them to have the broader lore of the world locked in e: oh i just realized Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes is going to be on Game Pass so i absolutely will play it. i feel kind of silly having bought rising instead of using game pass, but otoh i'm glad i could play it on my steam deck. kinda feel like hundred heroes would also be a good steam deck game but i'm not gonna pay an extra $40 for that abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jan 10, 2024 |
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Jan 10, 2024 00:51
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. Fwiw I only ended up playing it because it became available with my ps+ subscription and probably wouldn't have paid money directly for it. Are you a fan of the Suikoden series? Are you planning on playing Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes?
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i beat dragon quest on the game boy color last night. i was gonna play this as my goofy little downtime game during boring meetings and whatever, but then it turned out to be like 4 hours long when you play using fast-forward on an emulator, so i just powered through it while listening to some podcasts. played it on my miyoo mini+, which is a great little device. love to have a lightweight alternate to my big ol' steam deck that i can use for nes/snes/gb(a) games, and even some d-pad based ps1 games. dragon quest is pretty funny because it's one of those legendary "this started a genre" games but also is so barely-formed that it's kind of amazing that people latched on to it like they did. here's the entire combat system in dragon quest: * there's a normal attack command * you can use a healing item, or a flute that puts enemies to sleep * by the end of the game you have six spells you can use in combat. two of these are completely worthless attack spells. two of these are healing spells, which you'll use a lot. you also have one that can sleep enemies, and one that can theoretically stop the enemy from casting spells. i never got this last spell to actually successfully work. that's it, that's the strategic depth of dragon quest 1. you will spend the game attacking and sometimes healing. for like 10 hours, if playing at original speed. it's not exactly engaging! this is a game where you have two accessory slots and exactly two accessories you can find to equip in these slots, there is not a lot of depth to be found. that said, there is something engaging about the actual exploration of the world. dragon quest is nonlinear, you can walk anywhere on the overworld from the jump. i was posting the other day in the switch thread about how, as a child who started with the N64 generation of consoles, i did not understand JRPGs at all as a genre. i particularly did not like the combination of overworlds with a lack of clear direction (given most JRPGs didn't adopt quest logs and map indicators until, like, the mid 2000s) and random battles, since it made me exploring feel like a chore. i think i could see myself enjoying this dragon quest even as an impatient child, though, because of its small size and ease of combat. if you die it's not a huge penalty (hell, you even keep your XP, you just lose half your gold, which you can bank for safe keeping). you definitely can get hosed up early on by venturing out too far, but it's not a long walk back. the dungeons are small enough you wouldn't have trouble navigating back through them. i did end up using save states to avoid some exploration penalties later in the game when i was venturing further out, but early on, i just sucked it up and pressed on when i died. you end up writing down your own quest log in this game, which is kind of fun. my notes for this game are very silly:  i did end up having to use a guide for a couple things i'd missed - the rain shrine in the north i just totally did not see the path to (wonder if the game boy version having a smaller viewport made that harder than intended), the 70/40 puzzle i had to look up because i forgot what item needed to help with that, and i think there were one or two other things that were unclear enough i had to google. but honestly it felt easier to navigate than i was expecting. i was surprised how much i enjoyed the dialogue in this game, given how simple the story is. lots of fun townspeople, and i really liked the part after beating the final boss, where you can explore the world with no fights and can go back to the towns and talk to people. most of the townspeople seemed to share post-game dialog, but there are a few people with unique dialog, like the weird couple standing around on the edge of the one town who finally manage to link back up. i think my only real complaint about this game is the limited inventory means you have to do some backtracking to the bank to get the right key items you need to progress, adding some annoying walking. otherwise this was a fun, breezy time. didn't even really have to grind much outside of the start and the very end. looking forward to playing 2, which sounds like it has more going on. i've been warned i should use a walkthrough for that one, so i've acquired the prima game guide for the GBC version, for an authentic experience
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Jan 10, 2024 17:39
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sirtommygunn posted:Cultic is a pretty good shooter, just shy of great. Just needs a little more enemy variety, a little better pathfinding for enemies, and a way to make a boss fight that doesn't suck rear end. Other than that it's doing pretty much everything right. has anyone made a list of all the good boss fights in first person shooters? because i feel like you could include every shooter ever made and the list would be maybe 15 items long at best
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Jan 12, 2024 18:08
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i beat Marvel's Spider-Man a few days ago. i was going to play the DLC before i wrote this up, but it turns out after 20 hours of web-swinging in the base game (and 16 in Miles Morales) I'm ready to move on. the DLC is not that long (only 6-7 hours if you focus on the story per HLTB) but is also just not that engaging, and it amps up the number of enemies you have to hard-counter and do specific moves on and I just don't have the effort for it. i think i'm gonna leave it installed on my Deck as long as I have room and try to dip back in to play a little bit at a time on the easiest setting whenever I need a break from whatever I'm playing, just so I can see the rest of the story. that said: I really liked this! I was expecting to not like the story but I'll be damned if I don't find this Peter Parker as charming as MJ does. they have some wonderful relationship scenes in this, and it really might be my favorite version of Peter I've ever seen on screen. i feel like every new piece of Marvel media is even more in medias res than the last one - does Uncle Ben even get mentioned in this game, outside of a couple things May says offhand? - and i kinda dig that. no more origin stories! well, except for Miles, but he has a less-defined one (especially in a world where Peter Parker is, uh, alive without any timeline shenanigans). his stuff was the weakest part of this game by far, and i'm 50/50 on whether they should have included him in it at all - it's already a very overstuffed story. but i do like the idea that Miles is now a central part of the Spider-Man franchise and should always be included. maybe the next MCU reboot will get there, or more likely, a lovely 6-episode Disney+ show no one watches, as is the way of things one nice aspect of this is that they can drop in random villains and it doesn't feel cheap. when you establish that Peter's eight years into doing this and is a whole 23 years old (ancient by Spider-Man standards - and the way they treat the Peter/MJ story you'd think he was 35), you can throw a Vulture or Rhino or Electro into the mix without it feeling like they're cluttering up the story. general story spoilers: the main negative is that I thought Martin Li got pretty loving shortchanged; as someone who had never heard of Mister Negative before this game I was kind of excited by a new villain but he barely gets to do anything, and he really doesn't get to display a personality. I could not buy him being as evil as he was, especially since the game really didn't explain the split-personality thing so they never contextualized him working for FEAST. I really thought the Doc Ock reveal was too late into the game, but I did appreciate that he was already going down this path before the final heel turn - I figured the Raft plans and the scorpion stinger blueprints were foreshadowing, but didn't consider that he was already working on them for nefarious reasons at that point, so that was fun. and, well, having the supervillain cause a respiratory illness pandemic in NYC and Aunt May dying of it sure does hit a certain way to me, someone who was living in NYC during Covid lockdowns and had family affected by it (though thankfully didn't lose anyone to it). the least realistic part of this superhero game is the part where people go to the the open world is an open world, and has the problem that Miles Morales didn't: way too many side things. did all the backpacks and photos, but sorry Harry's Mom, I'm not doing these pollution side missions that genuinely feel like they fell out of Spider-Man 2 for the PS2 (right down to half the missions having weird fog effects that kill the draw distance). also the random crimes are just a bad mechanic. I think they had the idea of "people don't like icons on the map, what if some of our stuff was random instances instead" but it turns out when you put a completion counter and gate unlocks behind it, it still just feels like more loving icons on the map except they're more annoying because they appear and disappear randomly. the combat is worse than Miles Morales because the gadgets just aren't fun to use, and you have to use them so much for hard counters. Miles has lots of hard counters but most of them use the Venom Powers, and that feels good as hell. this, not so much. like I said, this is the big reason I'm not doing the DLC; I've gotten the fun I can out of this combat. I'm hoping Spider-Man 2 switches it up more. similarly, the stealth was so tiring that by the end of the game I was just running in and doing the combat (when you have the option), since inevitably even if you do all the stealth takedowns you'll probably have to fight a couple more waves of enemies after. i've avoided posting number ratings so far this year, but i feel like the easiest way to explain this game is that it's like a 3 star open world game with a 4 star superhero story, and good superhero stories are rare enough these days that I was as delighted by it as i was by Miles Morales. if I end up picking up a PS5 for FF7 Rebirth, I'm absolutely going to get the bundle with 2, though I'll probably wait a few months to play it so I don't get burned out on the combat again. very excited to see the outer boroughs
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Jan 14, 2024 02:40
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i finished Momodora: Moonlit Farewell last night, 110% map completion with only an optional boss rush left between me and the last 1%. took about 8 hours. the previous Momodora game really blew me away when i played it in 2017. i've always had a soft spot for the metroidvania genre but i'm terrible at platforming, so having a vaguely dark souls-inspired one (re: there's animation priority and a dodge roll with iframes) with more of a focus on combat was right up my alley. the art and music were beautiful and i liked the world well enough, but i really just enjoyed every moment of gameplay in Momodora 4 in Moonlit Farewell... not so much, unfortunately. i was looking forward to this game because of how much i'd liked 4, but i tried to keep my expectations low since the developer's last few games seemed to go through some rough development cycles. in the end, this game certainly met my low expectations, but also feels like a game that just didn't quite come together like how i (and the developer) wanted it to. the core flaw here is the combat. you still have the dodge roll and animation priority and a "sigil" system where you can equip different perks you find in the world. unfortunately, none of this feels particularly good this time around. the enemy tells are awkward - maybe i got too spoiled by spiderman, where the "spidey sense" tell always just means "press dodge right now," but in momodora, many enemies will emit a "about to do a big move" indicator several seconds before they actually do their attack. with so many enemies having very wide and fast attacks, it almost feels more like timing a counter in super mario rpg than responding to a tell in a normal way - just trying to remember the exact length of time before an enemy attack comes out. you never get an airborne dodge, which keeps things grounded and thus less fun. while most enemies don't hurt you on contact, some of the largest ones do, making it almost impossible to dodge roll through them without being hurt - annoying when you're in tight combat areas and get cornered. the sigils are not transformational enough to be interesting, but also make it trivially easy to skip 90% of the combat. this is one of those "well, if you wanted the game to be more fun, you shouldn't have equipped the item that lets you ignore most of the mechanics" problems - there's a sigil that gives you a one-hit barrier when you use a heal, and many sigils that give you magic regen so you can cast your heal more, and if you combine those together you can literally tank everything through the final boss of the game by just standing on it ignoring mechanics and healing through everything. if i played through this again, i guess i could try equipping something less broken, but none of the sigils are particularly interesting. there's no real logic to when you get the sigils you do, either. the only thing you can use money on in this game is buying some sigils from one npc, and one of the last sigils you get, long after you've bought the last sigil from that npc, is one that will earn you extra money from enemies. what the gently caress? if you told me all the sigil placement in this game was randomized i'd believe you, because it makes no loving sense. so that's combat. for something i'm slightly more positive on, i do think the world is beautiful and great to explore from an aesthetic "what's the next room gonna look like?" perspective. unfortunately, the platforming is trivial, and i think that lets this game down specifically because the combat is so bland. i have a love/hate relationship with tricky platforming: i like it when the stakes are low (i respawn at the start of the room) and hate when the stakes are high (i lose 10 minutes of progress and have to redo a bunch of fights because i fell on a spike). that said, this game absolutely could have used some tricky platforming. it seriously feels like an entire layer of optional challenge is just missing from this game - you unlock a jump power up near the end that you basically never use! the movement in this game feels tight enough it absolutely could have used some rooms where you have to traverse some spikes instead of just fighting more guys. as the first 2024 game i've completed, facing down a big slew of big games in the next couple months, i think this game was fine. it didn't overstay its welcome, it provided a good-enough follow-up to a game i have a soft spot for, and it was certainly an easy play-through. but drat if there isn't a lot of potential here wasted by the bad combat system. i really hope this developer can try to break out of the sidescrolling realm entirely and do something different for their next game, they have made so many beautiful environments but don't seem to have a good read on how to make a game like this cohere (which, to be fair, is loving hard; there are many higher-budget metroidvanias with problems like what i'm describing). which, to leave on one note of optimism: this game has a lot more storytelling than the last momodora game, and really nails the dialogue and characters and cutscenes. i think that stuff totally lands and makes me think this developer could do a lot with a more story-heavy game. gimmie a bombservice adventure game or something, this art would be incredible in a smaller scale, less-action-focused game That Dang Dad posted:Even if you think the puzzles are too easy, the environments are BEAUTIFUL. I loved every second hanging out in the tower. It's got that kind of SABLE artstyle that makes everything feel like a painting or something. i really want to see a behind the scenes on the art and level design of this game, like an editor view showing everything in an area connected. i have to imagine most of the game is developed as independent screens (e.g. i don't think all of the level warrior temple actually exists as a coherent physically modeled space), but think at least the outdoor areas in the first and third sections might have been built up as a single piece of geometry abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 16:30
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i just finished up Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which i played on a whim since infinite wealth is out next week (and also i forgot to cancel game pass this month and felt like i should play something to justify it). like (i think?) a lot of people, i kinda respected the yakuza series from afar from 0-6. i got about halfway into 0 so i had a general idea of who kiryu was though not really where all his story went. i finally got into the series with 7, and thought the old guy cameos were cute, but was glad the game didn't really expect you to know who they were. now, in infinite wealth, they've decided to give kiryu a goodbye, and that's understandable, but it really fucks me up as someone who knows nothing about this guy. so i decided to slam through gaiden to see if it'd help and it does! kind of. i think they could have used a couple-paragraph story explainer with a few details. like, they show flashbacks, they contextualize the orphanage, they... kind of contextualize yumi though certainly not any details there, but i think just giving you a quick rundown of kiryu's life (minus all the yakuza politics that make up the bulk of the wikipedia plot summaries for the games that end up more or less pretty irrelevant here) would have helped. i know you can say "well it's just a weird side story for hardcore fans anyways," but, like, this is a game that had a sponsored wrestling match on american cable tv, clearly they were hoping to pull in more than just the existing fanbase. i think maybe they thought the flashbacks were enough that giving an up-front kiryu summary would have removed some interesting story beats for new players where they get to experience learning about kiryu, but the story doesn't really feel built around that. i do suspect this isn't really needed kiryu lore for Infinite Wealth, though, given how it wraps up. i can imagine in IW they'll contextualize kiryu as "legendary fighter who has accomplished his last goal in life and is now at peace, but has to join back up for One Last Job" and that might be all you need to understand to get a full emotional arc. and just to get the rest of my story thoughts out of the way, with all of that context in mind: i like the pieces they've set up for infinite wealth, with the antagonists becoming daidoji agents. they did way less to set up kiryu in hawaii than i expected, giving him a reason to be there but not really like a "and here's what he's doing next thing," but i guess showing why he joins ichiban's party might be an early reveal in infinite wealth or something rather than something to show in this game. the castle was a cool location, akame was cool, everything was cool. i'm a huge dumbass and was genuinely caught off guard by shishido's last turn and enjoyed that a lot. and of course the kiryu cutscene with the grave camera is a heartbreaker, even as someone who's only gone on a short journey with this character and not a 250 hour one. drat!! so gameplay... man i just don't like yakuza brawling. i watched my sister play all of judgment last year and thought it looked kind of fun, and i do enjoy some aspects of the brawling, but at the end of the day i am just never going to engage with this combat system in a deep way. i did a handful of side quests (hi kaito!! please show up in infinite wealth!!), but i don't think i'll even progress far enough in the coliseum to reach the last tier of akame status which you need to unlock the last few quests. i probably can power through the side quest fights via healing items, at least? i am happy for the people who like the combat system in this game enough to do hell team battle and whatever, but oh man, that is so not me. it felt like something only put in to justify a $50 price tag given the relatively short story i didn't like the agent gadgets. the web shooter is the only one i upgraded and was decent for crowd control, but usually id just slam some heat items and then use the extreme heat mode in agent stance to clear everyone out, then switch to yakuza stance for 1v1 fights. this felt ok but mostly made the agent mode seem like a bad gimmick. and lmao at how loving useless the drones are. i did like the minigames getting intro quests so you do everything at least once. and the story mission where you go out for a night on the town is loving awesome and i loved doing karaoke/pool/golf with the guys, goddamn. the sushi bar scene, which almost hints at shishido's eventual betrayal!! great stuff the final fights of the game were cool, but much like Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intermission, the last fight commits a bad sin of game design: a long fight with unskippable phase change cutscenes. much like in FF7RI, i died to a missed counter near the very end of the fight, and when the game offered me the option to restart on easy, i gladly accepted and just powered through it. i think that, given my experience with this, whenever i get around to playing lost judgment on my own, i will probably just play it on easy and avoid anything combat-focused. and if i ever somehow get truly infinite time and go through 0-6, i will do the same thing. the combat has its moments but it just does not have anything i enjoy engaging with on a "tactical" level, and i just don't enjoy the "execution" of the weaving and dodging and trying to remember a boss's combos so i can time my larger strikes just right. not as fun to me as the JRPG stuff (not that i did the extra-hard stuff in 7 either, but after 60 hours of that combat i was less tired of it than i was after 15 hours of brawling). for a game that basically has no reason to exist and probably could have been, i don't know, an AMV, they managed to make it pretty compelling, so i'm glad i played this. but i'm also glad i burned through it in three days rather than try to savor it, since there's a lotta stuff out to play right now! abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Jan 21, 2024 |
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Jan 21, 2024 19:59
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last night i played through Slave Zero X: Episode Enyo, which is (deep breath) a new Quake 1 mod released this week, which is a prequel to an upcoming 2.5D side-scrolling character action game called Slave Zero X, which is a prequel to a 1999 third-person mech game for the Dreamcast and PC called Slave Zero completely normal and logical statement. anyways, it's about an hour long, and really fun! it's got a cool cyberpunk-ish ("biopunk" per the branding but ugh) setting that looks pretty awesome in this engine. I've never actually played more than 10 minutes of original Quake 1 so I don't know how many of the guns and enemies are just reskins of Quake guns/enemies. it's got five levels and a boss fight, and I would recommend quicksaving pretty heavily (and conserve your ammo a bit more than you might expect, particularly because the double uzis will absolutely blow through your regular bullet ammo), but it was pretty easy to get through. do wish they'd added actual checkpoints into the levels; they seem a bit too long to really expect players to go back to the start after dying. might be something that's just hard to add to that engine, though, or just hard from a design perspective to make sure players don't get checkpointed in unwinnable situations (I feel like the 2024 solution to this is just to respawn players with max health, but I get why that can make the resource conservation aspect of these sorts of games less compelling) I guess I'll give Slave Zero X a shot (there is a demo on Steam I have been meaning to check out). even if i don't like the game i just hope the soundtrack is half as good because goddamn these are some bangers: https://soundcloud.com/poppyworks/sets/slave-zero-x-episode-enyo-ost/s-oaMB2XcEzXy Morpheus posted:Chants was really cool, learning these languages and the respective grammars made me feel pretty good, as well as the story of the tower you're ascending and its people. Neat ending sequence. Wish the languages were more complex though, for the most part it was just replacing words with other words. It makes me want to play Heaven's Vault more, though, since in that game you had to figure out intricacies of symbols and how, when certain symbols were on top of other symbols, it'd change meaning of words in a way that was crucial to understanding. Chants had a smidgen of that, or aspects of languages that, like, would identify differences between verbs, nouns, people etc, but nothing much more than that. Got the plat too, pretty easy to do. oh drat, this has me thinking i should really check out Heaven's Vault! the idea of doing some more "symbol deciphering" puzzles rather than just context puzzles sounds nice On The Internet posted:I beat Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. Much like it's predecessor, TBRaB is a fun and quick little game. I think I beat it in around 3 hours? And for a "Rogue-like" is crazy short. I still have a few side mission things I can go back and complete. i was really worried about this being a "roguelite" until i read that the levels are set and not procedurally generated, and now i'm wondering why the hell they called it a roguelite at all. just call it "run-based" or something!
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Jan 22, 2024 23:58
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i beat Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown last night, and i have some complicated, rambling thoughts for a complicated, rambling game as i posted about a few weeks ago, the first game of 2024 that i completed was momodora 5. that was an 8 hour metroidvania that left me incredibly underwhelmed: it had been smoothed down to the point of being far too easy. no challenge room ever took more than 60 seconds, no boss fight ever took more than a couple tries, your first pass through an area would let you access every room except one or two ones you'd obviously return to later, and by the halfway point you'd unlock equippable items that totally trivialize the combat with options for constant healing and more damage. it looked great, it sounded great, it had atmosphere, but the game was just too easy to walk through without ever putting up a memorable challenge so when ubisoft put out their metroidvania, i figured, hey, i'll play this one on hard to counterbalance my momodora experience. whoops! the problem with prince of persia is, unlike the 7 hour sprint of momodora, it's a 20+ hour marathon through some absolutely fiendish puzzles and fights, both required and optional. early on, hard mode was pretty fun, because it made even the earliest combat require much more effort than momodora requires by the endgame. the early bosses felt reasonable on hard, as well. at a certain point about a third of the way in, i started to hit a wall due to not having health or weapon damage upgrades, which made a couple bosses take a lot of retries, but they were still rewarding to learn and master. once i got some more upgrades i happily cruised through until about 2/3 of the way through (for those who have played: up until you get a quest objective involving constellations). at this point, bosses just became loving mean. the difficulty change between normal and hard in prince of persia is primarily just health and damage scaling (they actually have this broken down into a bunch of different sliders you can tweak, like a lot of AAA games now - if you want to make the parry timing hard as gently caress for no reason, have at it!). so things like attack timing and parry windows were the same between normal and hard, but seemed very tuned for normal difficulty - not quite as tuned as a from software game, but still, very much designed to try to give players on normal a difficult experience. this means that on normal, you were expected to get fairly close to mastering a boss - yes, you could whiff a few parries or fail to dodge some of their larger attacks and still beat the boss, but it'd be close. on hard, you simply have to be perfect. and that was just too much. so, yeah, i finally gave up and dropped the difficulty to normal (specifically on the orod, darius, and both varham fights). i always feel kind of bad doing this - i did this for the final bosses in like a dragon gaiden earlier this year and final fantasy 7 intermission last year - but honestly, the fights are still hard enough on normal that i absolutely feel like i accomplished something. maybe there was more i could have done to make hard mode viable - i know there are lots of amulets i didn't try that changed things around elemental damage/resistance - but what i really needed was a DPS upgrade, and i never found the materials needed to get the +5 sword upgrade. when you get a boss into a punish phase, attack them, and barely see their screen-width life bar move... i feel like that's a sign something has gone wrong on scaling. so, genuinely: i feel like if you want a challenging metroidvania experience, play on lost crown on hard until you reach the quest step i mentioned (maybe dropping it a bit earlier if you get stuck in that health/weapon/potion upgrade valley i mentioned). like, if you really want to micromanage the settings menu, i'd honestly say the way to play is to put it on hard when exploring and drop it to normal for all the bosses. with my review of Hard Mode out of the way, the rest of the game: this game opens strong, and stays strong until about 3/4 in, when it starts feeling like it needs to wrap it up. i kinda thought this was my fault with spending too much time due to playing on hard, but this seems to be an opinion shared by my friends who just played on normal. i will say i absolutely am not going back to wrap up all the optional stuff right now - i'm hoping they end up doing some DLC for this game, and i'll happily revisit some of the harder platforming challenges then, but right now, i never want to see another rolling spike trap again. the story is a disaster, and this is the most Known Shippable-rear end game i've ever seen. it being ubisoft, it's really easy to assume how this came out how it did: they had a massive network of support studios to contribute content to the game, making it massive, but had zero time or budget for polish. i think this is actually not as bad as it sounds on paper: there is something genuinely charming about the number of cutscenes with broken lip syncing and unvoiced dialogue lines in this game. i didn't encounter any progression-breaking bugs (as far as i know; it sounds like some bugs just block the side stuff which i wouldn't know if i encountered without going for a 100%). the game sets up some story concepts that should be very cool, and then wastes them all on text dumps, which is definitely the worst aspect of this. the world I thought was pretty excellent, though. i love a metroidvania where the world is just an absurd combination of different settings for each area. i think this has that good dark souls-y thing where each area has its own sense of character and ambiance that make a game this long still feel like its mixing things up (one late-game area is absolutely the high point for this, which was both a bit disappointing in terms of "drat why couldn't everything be that creative" but also cool in that they still had tricks up their sleeves that far in). the platforming was great, the powers were... ok, there's a couple i have beef with - the stuff-items-in-a-pocket-dimension power is way too hard to use at melee range and i'm mad some boss fights tried to get you to use it, and i also wish fewer late game boss fights relied on the ghost-warp to avoid big attacks. also putting the dimension-swap power on right stick click is insane when you have to do it in the midst of tricky-timing platforming seequences. going for a 100% requires you to do some truly celeste-level poo poo (usually without much of a time investment, at least), and i'm very curious what hour counts would look like for that. i finished at 24 hours and 75% and that felt good enough. in the first five hours of this game, i thought i had my instant GOTY. after beating it, i'm... not ambivalent about it, but not really sure where it lands. my hope is between now and the end of the year they put in some DLC and a bunch of polish (i feel like they'll either do this or completely abandon it and lay off all of ubisoft montpellier and never make a platformer again), and that will give me an excuse to revisit it and try to get closer to 100% and see how i feel after that. if nothing else, i guess i can look forward to this game coming to steam in two years and people picking it up for $15 and going "oh wow, this game is one of the best metroidvanias of the last decade even with its flaws, shame it was such a failure" 
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Feb 7, 2024 16:53
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i also "beat" Granblue Fantasy Relink earlier this week. the quotes are because this is basically two games in one. the first game, the one i beat, is a tight, 15-20 linear single-player action-rpg. you and your AI party go on a quest to save the world. the second game, which i have yet to really start on in earnest, is a 50+ hour co-op character action game with an ever-escalating difficulty level and loot grind. during the main campaign, you do get some downtime to go do quests that intro you to the co-op and endgame system, so it's not quite as literally split as i'd indicate, but i do want to emphasize that you can't meaningfully do co-op in this game until you complete the story anyways, here's a surprising statement: i loving loved this game. this wasn't on my radar in the slightest until about a month ago when the playstation demo came out and a few people were raving about it. i have no familiarity with granblue, i'm not really a huge character action guy, and i feel like action rpgs tend to be games i want to like and end up not vibing with at all this game is basically what i wish tales of arise had been. it's all killer, no filler: for ff14 players, imagine if you made a 15 hour campaign out of just the best dungeons and trials in ff14, and then replaced doing MMO rotations with some light character action combos. the "story" is kind of whatever - i hated all the characters for the first third and liked them all by the end, drat you earnest jrpg storytelling for winning me over - but the linear escalation of stakes and spectacle really works well in this game. i thought this was just going to be a nothing-game in terms of spectacle from the first couple hours - was just like "oh, this is just another game that has a look inspired by botw/genshin/bamco's anime shader technology, zzz" - and about the time that you're doing aerial boardings of enemy airships and blowing them up i started to perk up, and by the end i was in full hooting-and-hollering mode. being inspired by a gacha, this game unsurprisingly has 20 playable characters you can unlock (thankfully not through gacha mechanics - you just get unlock tickets meted out as you do quests, and choose who you want). each character has a different feel, which reminded me, again, of ff14 - you have some melee guys, some ranged guys, and some casters, and they all have both subtle and obvious differences in how you play them. they're similar enough that it avoids being overwhelming to switch between them, though. you pick one character to control in a fight, with AI or co-op buddies acting as the rest of the party, and with AI you don't get any "command" system (other than an option to tell them to hold their limit break equivalent until you use yours). i thought this was a good middle ground of complexity - each character is relatively simple, but the game wants you to experiment with playing a lot of different characters (and, in the endgame, level them all up, at least far enough to see each character's side story). if you have no interest in the endgame, i wouldn't recommend this at full price, but i really think anyone interested in action rpgs should snag this the moment it drops to like $40, because it is just fun as hell to play and not much of a time commitment. at no point playing this game was i having anything less than a good time. i'm gonna try to pick up the endgame in a couple months. oh and one other note - it's loving refreshing to play an "endgame"-y game in 2024 that is both offline-first (you can turn wifi off and play it on a steam deck and progress through the endgame just fine!) and not packed with season passes and bullshit. they are gonna release some dlc and, this being based on a gacha game, i do expect there to be some hilariously expensive cosmetics, but it's not trying to upsell you at every turn
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Feb 7, 2024 17:13
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I beat Etrian Odyssey HD last night. This is yet another game on my surprising adventure into JRPGs over the past few years. I've been on vacation the past couple weeks with my Steam Deck, which has kept me from progressing on the main game I had been playing, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. That game runs on Steam Deck, but it isn't happy about it, and chugs enough that I didn't really want to work through the story on it. My first thought was to try to find some kind of chill grinding game to serve me for a few weeks. I was already playing Great Ace Attorney 2 in addition to LADIW (still two cases left!), so I figured I'd go for something that didn't have a lot of story. I first tried to play WitchSpring R, which a friend recommended to me as an Atelier-style crafting game, but the combat in that is unfortunately brain-dead easy (they're apparently patching in a hard mode this year!). I wanted something chill, but I also didn't really want to spend so much time in turn-based combat that was so simple. So, inspired by my desire for more interesting combat mechanics, I made a hard swerve into EO. This series had always fascinated me from well afar - as someone who never really played JRPGs growing up, I still remember reading about "the weird dungeon mapping game" on websites back in the day. The remasters of 1-3 were on sale on Steam ($20 a pop instead of the normal $40, which is pretty overpriced - pretty sure these games were $35 on DS originally?), so I took the plunge on 1. The thing with EO1 that I discovered was that it's a lot simpler than 2 and 3. There are fewer classes to choose from, and there's two classes (medic and protector) that you more or less have to have in your party, unless you've mastered the mechanics and are doing a challenge run (and love to grind for healing items). I was okay with this because I tend to have a problem of getting overwhelmed in systems-heavy games - it's hard to turn off the part of my brain that wants to go look up the most optimal way to play something, rather than discover it myself. So having a more or less designated "best team" did make it easier on me. What didn't make it easy on me was how the skill trees work in this game. Every time you level a character, you get a skill point you can use on their skill tree. This doesn't just unlock new skills, but also levels skills - all skills have 10 levels. So for example, you've got like a Fire 1 spell that you can level up to 10, or a Fire 2 or Fire 3 skill you can unlock and level up. The MP resource (TP) matters a lot in this game, so often there is a good reason to level up a lower-powered skill that is cheaper. This is a fine and good system on paper. The problem is, the game does not show you the numbers happening behind the scenes. There's a single line of text that will say, for example, "Damage Up" when you upgrade your Fire 1 spell from level 1 to 2, but it won't show you how much. It also won't help you figure out the relative power of Fire 1 vs Fire 2. This makes it impossible to figure out a good build on your own. And the game has a brutal respec penalty - your character loses 5 levels (10 in the original!), and while grinding isn't hard, it certainly takes a long time. So, the solution for this is... to use the screenshot LP of this game (https://lparchive.org/Etrian-Odyssey/), which contains class guides and skill tables. I'm not kidding when I say this LP appears to be the only place you can find these numbers online - if you look it up on Google, you'll see tons of people linking to this Let's Play. You'd think there would have been a GameFAQs guide or a circa-2007 Prima strategy guide or something, but apparently not? The class guides ended up more or less telling me how to build my guys, which did sorta kill the build aspect of this game for me, which was a bummer. I wish this game had free respecs, and unfortunately, this same lack of detail and respec penalty carries into 2 and 3. I'm not sure if the 3DS games (4, 5, Untold, Untold 2, Nexus, Persona Q, Persona Q2, holy poo poo there are like 10 of these games huh??) fix either of these problems. I did end up doing a little bit of build customization to adjust for some of the changes in HD, so it wasn't entirely just following the guides, but this game has so many trap skills even after the HD bugfixes that if I'd tried to do my builds blind I probably would have had to do a respec on a couple characters to beat the last couple dungeons. Now, I did really enjoy the combat in this game. I was really surprised that this game does not have visible turn order - my last two JRPGs being Octopath Traveller II and LADIW, I had gotten used to turn order as a core aspect of combat strategy. And, well, in EO, it absolutely is a core aspect of combat strategy, but you have to more or less memorize the rules around it. Different characters and enemies have different base speeds, but also tons of skills have speed modifiers - for example, party heals and party buffs will almost always be at the end of a turn by default, while items are almost always at the start of a turn. This was a pretty fun thing to learn and practice, and added a lot of character to enemies - "ah, poo poo, these wolves are the fast ones, I gotta pop a heal item on this turn in case this low-HP character gets hit first," etc. I should point out, for those who played the original EO but haven't seen the HD version, there are two key differences with Etrian Odyssey HD versus the original: 1. The game has a persistent quicksave slot you can use at any time in a dungeon. In the original of 1, there was no quick save, while in 2 and 3, there was the quick save that a lot of portable RPGs of the time had: you could quick save at any time, but it would kick you back to the main menu, and loading your quick save would delete it. This prevented you from actually loading a quick save after a game over. In the HD remakes, your quicksave can actually be loaded after a game over. In a game where your dungeon delves can represent 30+ minutes of work, that is a massive change. It also removes the boss run problem. 2. The medic's Healing Touch ability was massively buffed. This is an out-of-combat only healing ability. I swear to god this none of this is a typo: in the original, after leveling up Healing Touch to level 10, you'd spend 6 TP on a 40% party heal. In HD, leveling up Healing Touch to 5 will give you a 100% heal for 1TP. So, combine those two things and you can imagine how I played the back half of this game, after unlocking Healing Touch: quicksave after every fight, do the dumbest/fastest strategy in each fight using the least TP, and then heal up. Doesn't matter if everyone has 30HP leaving every random encounter, it's just 1TP to heal! Much cheaper than if they actually used their 4-8TP skills to do the fight efficiently. Revives are pretty cheap, and even if I totally gently caress up and get a party wipe, I can just load the quicksave. This seems like a pretty massive shift in how I ended up experiencing this game compared to the originals. Like, imagine just adding a quicksave ability to Dark Souls. It's a very different vibe! But hey, the back half of this game gets weird and mean. Now's a good time to get to the third major aspect of this game, the maps. I loved the mapping - it's a little awkward to get used to on a gamepad (you use the right stick and shoulder triggers), but filling in a map in full was a really fun experience. What I did not love was the actual exploring. This game has a lot of hidden walls and shortcuts, so you basically have to strafe along walls and see if it lets you press A on them to find shortcuts. This isn't fun! I don't know if this gets better in future games, or if this is a core mechanic. Some of the maps do have fun mechanics - levels with moving platforms that take you to other parts of the map, or pitfalls that require keeping in mind the floor below to try to figure out how to find the right pit for where you're trying to go - but the hidden passage stuff just objectively sucks. I do love the FOE mechanic, where hard enemies show up patroling the maps. It's fun to have to run away from them and then slowly get powerful enough to defeat them without thinking about it. I also like how different FOEs have different patroling mechanics you have to learn (some just stand between you and some hard bonus area, some patrol on a set pattern, some will drop everything to chase you, etc). Other miscellaneous thoughts: music is great, the graphics are whatever but I do like the character portraits (I really wish they had different variants for e.g. taking damage or casting a big skill or something), the story was fine I guess (weirdly dark). This ended up being about a 40 hour game, ignoring most of the harder side quests and the postgame dungeon. I considered doing the postgame - it does seem to be a very sizable chunk of content, a sixth dungeon plus a lot of bonus areas in earlier dungeons - but oh my god reading about the mechanics it seems deeply unpleasant, so I'm happy to set this down after credits rolled. My plan is to pick up 2 and 3 when they go on sale and keep working on this series. Unfortunately I don't think those games solve my biggest issues with the game (opaque builds, expensive respecs, annoying shortcut discovery), but it sounds like the 3DS games are a lot more polished and slightly friendlier , so hopefully those will also come to Steam soon. Definitely do not regret my time with this game. It seems like if you're only going to play one of these remastered games, EO3 is the one to play, but I think I'm now interested enough to go through both 2 and 3. The quicksaves do make this a much easier game to just grind than I imagine the originals were - it brings it down to "normal JRPG" vibes instead of having the level of stress that a hard run-based game does. I'm also wondering what other systems-heavy JRPGs might be up my alley if I got into this. Maybe like SMT4 or 5? abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Feb 25, 2024 |
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Feb 25, 2024 18:00
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I have completed Star Ocean The Second Story R, last year's HD2D remake of Star Ocean 2. Man, I hated this game. If you've read some of my past posts in this thread, you'll know that I've been on a journey into JRPGs, spurred on initially by playing Yakuza 7 way back in late 2020, and then FF7 and Octopath Traveler 2 last year. This is a genre I always just thought I hated, but now have come to really appreciate in a lot of ways. Having been surprised last month by how much I loved Etrian Odyssey - a series I'd always been fascinated by from afar but never actually touched - I wondered if maybe another recent remake of a well-known franchise would be up my alley. This game is a mess, and not really in a fun way. It has systems on top of systems, but most of those systems end up not actually doing anything. I'm going to start with the worst part, which is the combat. This is an action RPG which originally had random encounters, but now has Persona-style "walk into enemies on the map" encounters. Either way, the encounters are in instanced fights like a turn-based RPG. You've got four party members you can swap between, as well as a menu to cast spells with one of those party members without fully swapping to them. The party members have AI to do the rest, with a few settings for behavior (focus on one target, run around and try to avoid attacks, etc.). When controlling a character, you can attack with B, cast one of two selected special abilities with the shoulder buttons, or use an "Assault Ability" on the D-Pad that will use a skill from a character in your extended party (you can have up to 8 total party members, plus there's some guest characters from other Star Ocean games who can only be used as Assault Abilities). There's a shield-break mechanic on enemies where certain abilities do more shield damage, which leads to a stun/damage phase when fully broken. There's also a dodge on A you can use when an enemy flashes red to avoid their attacks. All of this loving sucks. Most fights are just mashing B on enemies until they die. The dodge sucks rear end because if you mistime it and gets hit, the punish is YOUR CHARACTER GETS STUNNED, which makes it so loving risky I cannot imagine using it. Plus, this was an addition to the remake, so the red flashes aren't tied to animations (since the original game animations weren't built to be "tells"), so it's really hard to see and nail the window. The shield mechanic sucks because enemies regain shields really fast, so if you ever encounter a moving enemy, you probably won't manage to get its shields down at all because by the time you run to catch up it will already have regained some of its shields. There's a point about 1/3 of the way through the game where my characters started to just die seemingly randomly to one hit in fights. Turns out this is from certain enemies casting magic spells way higher level than previous enemies had used, and these spells were one hit kills. You can interrupt their casts, but if there's multiple, you can't really guarantee this, and the spells don't have any kind of tell for where they're going to land. Instead, you just have to constantly run around when you see those enemies casting to try not to die. Of course, you can only do this with your currently controlled character, and the AI does not know how to dodge, so if your healer goes down you're probably hosed. The only way to deal with combat in this game is to comically overlevel/overgear for it. Thankfully, the game is built for that, I guess. This game has an entire layer of what I'm going to call "crafting skills," but has some dumb terms I've already forgotten (I think "ICs" for individuals and "special skills" for party wide things?). You gain SP as you level, and you can invest those in your crafting skills. Crafting lets you do all kinds of poo poo: fishing, create healing items, create new gear, add modifiers to gear, etc. The problem is, this is all super RNG heavy, to the point that guides for how to get the best gear in the game all start with "make a save here, because you'll only get one shot at this, and it has a 30% chance" and poo poo like that. You have very little control over what attributes your gear gets, let alone what gear you're creating in the first place. You may want new shoes for your caster, but too bad, you're going to have to throw away 10 lovely shields you've made on the way. There's a bunch of poo poo in this I never even used. There's a whole cooking system for creating food with healing and buff properties, but you can only use food out of combat, so I completely ignored it. There's a music system which I think lets you create buffs for your party? Also a "familiar" for getting items inside a dungeon that I never once remembered to use? Just a baffling set of poo poo to do. None of it is compelling, none of it is fun. Maybe this game has a really cool endgame/postgame, but I'm very doubtful. My complaints out of the way, I should say there are a few things I liked: the HD2D environments look awesome, the sprites are great, the characters are... extremely 1998 JRPG, but also pretty fun. The English VO is from the 2009 PSP port and is so dreadful that I think they genuinely should have not included it in this release (which actually got new Japanese VO, cmon Square). The story is good enough I wanted to see it through to the end, even if I think this "99 unlockable ending scenes" bit is lame as hell and I'm just going to go watch them all on Youtube. The original music is also awesome, and the arranged version is ok, though it does the thing a lot of arranged soundtracks do of turning a bunch of weird mid-90s synth leads into way-too-fancy orchestral strings that don't sound very good. When this came out, I remember a couple people saying they wished Final Fantasy 7 had gotten this remake treatment - maybe not instead of the new trilogy, but in addition to it. I could easily see it - a high-res real-time version of FF7's overworld and dungeons with new character models, plus a new UI, would be a really cool treatment of the original game. But the difference is that FF7 is fundamentally a good game. You wouldn't really need to change that much about FF7. Like, maybe add a few signposts for some of the more obscure side quests, maybe make a few of the best skills easier to get than from the skill-steal ability (and rebalance a couple of the more broken ones), but that's really it. Star Ocean 2, on the other hand, absolutely seems like a game that could have used a true rethink from the ground up. There are some good ideas in play here that are completely squandered by the lovely combat and crafting. It is easy for me to understand why this would be a compelling game if you played it at the time - there is so much going on here other games of the era didn't touch - but it is just so obviously bad that I don't get why they didn't give it a closer rethink. abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 05:22
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FutureCop posted:I definitely hear you on this as it echoes my experience. As much as I wanted to like Star Ocean 2, multiple times I needed to 'sanity check' with other people as to whether what was happening to me was normal. Ms Adequate posted:That's really interesting to me* because I had a pretty different experience, as someone who played the original way back at release, and the PSP version These are both interesting perspectives! I definitely had the same problem of having to ask people "is this game broken or is this actually intentional" at times, but I also can see the idea of the game being so broken being compelling. The original version having much more opaque crafting actually makes a lot of sense to me. I imagine it's both more frustrating but also more interesting because of the less-clear possibility space - you'd feel more like you're stumbling into breaking the game, rather than it being pretty obvious from the jump that if you just alchemy up some good rocks and get blacksmithing to level 10 ASAP, you'll quickly get armor that will carry you through the rest of the game. FutureCop posted:However, I will say that, once I threw my usual preconceptions behind, the game started to grow on me. I was able to wrangle my party through what seemed like impossible fights by 1) forgoing the usual general-use equipment and instead crafting all manner of hard-counter accessories that I'd swap to on a per-fight basis to make them impervious to whatever element the enemies were abusing 2) swapping characters, picking formations and issuing commands to the party a lot more to keep them alive, such as forcing them to run away if they get aggro instead of leaving them on the dumb suicidal default 3) having them be such high-leveled in the first place by utilizing Training and other leveling boosts, 4) abusing the unbalanced super moves and assault actions such as to keep enemies locked down instead of using whatever is new or that I like, and so on and so forth. Yes, it felt incredibly cheesy and awkward, but in a way it was quite liberating to have an RPG really ask me to master all of its systems to win, instead of the typical RPG where you breeze through the game, never need to grind, and end with 99 elixirs that you were never pressed to use. I think what frustrates me is that I don't really feel like I mastered the systems - mostly I feel like I just outleveled and outgeared stuff. But I suppose considering leveling and gearing up are core systems, and the combat doesn't ultimately have that much depth, outleveling/outgearing fights really is the closest you can get to "mastering" anything. I might go peek at some videos of the endgame stuff to see what that looks like - I'm guessing a lot of elemental counter equipment like you mentioned, as well as more shield break/stun/stun-locking pressure.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:26
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Needed a palette cleanser after a couple long back to back JRPGs, so blew through Turnip Boy Robs a Bank in a couple sittings. Cute game, if you liked the first one you should definitely play this. I'm not a big run-based guy but this is so short and quick to progress through I didn't mind the repetition. Am kind of annoyed a couple side quests are oddly grindy so I probably won't go for 100%, but I don't mind stopping just short.
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Mar 9, 2024 20:10
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I have completed The Great Ace Attorney 2. A great weight has been lifted. I played the first Great Ace Attorney in 2021. I'd never played an Ace Attorney before, but it seemed like it'd be fun. I was, honestly, not really prepared for it to be a visual novel - I guess in my head I'd always envisioned more puzzle solving and more proper conversation trees - but god, I loved the story, and the characters. Yes, even Sholmes, if forced to admit it. I should have just kept playing and done the second game - they're sold as a single compilation, and the first game ends on a cliffhanger - but, for some reason, I didn't. Weirdly, this lead to me experiencing the game the way the Japanese playerbase would have: originally, the games had a two year gap between their releases (2015 and 2017). So, just like those players, I started off the second game trying desperately to remember what the hell was going on. Thankfully, the game caught me back up pretty quick with a brilliant introductory case. I was surprised by just how different every trial in this game is - there's jumps in time and characters that keep the formula fresh through 45 hours (!) of reading. I also appreciated that the meatiest part of the game in terms of investigation length and puzzle difficulty is right in the middle, so in the end when the twists are coming left and right and the narrative is hurtling towards a finish, it doesn't block you from seeing things through by continuing to increase the challenge. Very well-paced game for its length. I should note the length there isn't because I'm a slow reader, it's because the game actually prevents you from just pressing A to tap through the dialogue as fast as you can read. This is the same in the first game, and I continue to both think it's the correct design - the animations the characters have are so good and detailed for a VN, to the point you naturally hear them deliver the dialogue as you read it - and also frustrating, because it makes these games long. I would love to play the first 6(!) games in this series, but goddamn, I don't have (checks How Long To Beat) a combined 150 hours. That said, I walked away from this thinking I'll take all of that you got!, so I bet I'll get to at least the first trilogy sooner rather than later. I have... so many thoughts about this game's story. I played it over the course of a few months, and reviewing my notes, I completely forgot how many weird turns it takes. But ultimately, I'm extremely happy with how it wrapped up, and how all of its mysteries were resolved. I expected it to drop the ball at some point, and it never did. There are a couple deus ex machinas that were a bit too "out-there" - particularly in episode 5 when they just give Sholmes a loving cell phone and a goddamn hologram, though even that leads to some of the best moments in the game - but otherwise nothing felt too cheap or unearned. I might take some more specific thoughts over to the Ace Attorney thread soon because I feel like I need a debrief on what I just experienced, but, goddamn. Great game.
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Mar 22, 2024 22:50
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lordfrikk posted:The Ace Attorney games allow you to skip lines. The 2D ones always, the 3D ones when there isn't an elaborate animation going on (this is not as often as you might think). But I'd swear this was the case for the Great Ace Attorney as well! thanks for the heads up on this! started playing the first Ace Attorney and was happy to see that I can skip lines, yeah. I'm pretty sure GAA doesn't let you skip a line the first time you're hearing it (you can hold B to skip previously heard lines like when there's a branching path in one of the "press" bits), but maybe I missed a setting
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Mar 29, 2024 01:51
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A week ago or so now I beat Felvidek, a really weird little game. A short RPG that looks like nothing else I've ever played:  It's, I guess, kind of like a PS1 JRPG? Prerendered backgrounds, a few lo-fi prerendered cutscenes. Very short, ended up being about 4 and a half hours. Does have a number of different choices you can make and some side quests you can do, though I'm not sure which if any have significant story impact. I'm just going to quote the Steam page for the story, since I'm not sure I could really explain it any better: quote:Find out what unlikely events take place in this alternate history region of Slovak Highlands. This land is ravaged by Hussite pillagers and Ottoman spies while surreal horrors dwell in the dark. It's now up to Pavol, a fair knight with alcohol problems, to gather a party and stop those who oppose our kingdom. Now, I don't know anything about Slovakia or its history, but I found it compelling! It has a pretty bad translation, but it usually stays on the side of charming instead of annoying. The combat was pretty fun. You could fit all of the different items and skills in this game on a business card, but it ends up feeling surprisingly deep when packed into four hours. By the time you reach the final boss, you do feel like you've got a mastery of the systems, as limited as they are, and I think that's pretty impressive in a game this short - normally RPGs need hours and hours to really build up to that feeling. Also, the soundtrack is hard as hell. Listen to this menu music: https://holycrab.bandcamp.com/track/felvid-k Now there's a massive caveat I'm gonna stick on this game. There's a Jewish character in it, who is named "the Jew," and is clearly supposed to be "othered" by everyone else who are medieval Christians. He's not treated badly or anything, but he's never given an actual name, and the game has a couple weird lines that are, in the absolute best read, South Park edgelord jokes. I don't really think this game's author is trying to be particularly antisemitic because I'd expect the character to be way more problematic if so, but I do think they try to make a Goof out of medieval attitudes to Judaism that they absolutely shouldn't have. There's a similar character named "the Turk," so for better or worse it's not limited to one minority, but I think it is fair to say that it Feels Bad. I'd like to think the joke here is "hah, look at these backwards, antiquated attitudes" (especially given the player character is acknowledged to be a lovely person), but it just doesn't do enough to land like that. It sucks because without this issue this would be a glowing recommendation, and instead it's like a "I dunno maybe see if they do a translation/editing patch that also cleans up whatever the hell they were going for here." Just really loving weird.
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Apr 10, 2024 00:43
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I beat Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom last night. It's a collectathon platformer, so in this case "beat" means "saw credits;" I only have 140/250 gears and a handful of the secret bunny collectables. Took about 8 hours. I was really charmed by the demo a few weeks ago and it certainly followed through on the demo's promise. The demo's still up and I highly recommend it if you're a platformer fan. That said, I'm not sure I'll be coming back for all the collectables. Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is a 3D platformer, except instead of running and jumping, you're a taxi driving around. Your only special move is a dash forward, which takes a second to charge. During that charge, you can cancel the dash into a Mario 64-style backflip by pressing reverse, which gives you a big pop of height. As most modern 3D platformers have, there's a little bit of extra movement tech to be found, but nothing game-changing. The thing is, describing the movement as "a taxi driving around" is kind of a misnomer. Yes, you hold RT to accelerate and LT to brake/reverse, but you start/stop almost instantaneously. You also can pivot in place - it is extremely rare in this game to actually turn without coming to a complete stop first. It ends up having a very odd feel I think some people are going to hate, especially if you come in expecting a "driving" feel. It's a lot of lining up very precise angles, doing a dash/flip, stopping on the next platform, and lining up the next move. It's quite finicky and technical, in a way that I think works for 7 hours of game, but doesn't really feel great when you start getting into the hard optional challenges. The level design and music is pretty great. It has a lot of the highs and lows you'd expect of this genre: some tricky and satisfying collection challenges, some gimmicky sections that don't feel very well-thought-out that leave a bad taste in your mouth (why does this taxi driving game have a stealth sequence), and a terrible trial-and-error final boss with unpleasant fixed-perspective camera angles. You know, like you'd expect of a retro collectathon 3D platformer. I'm sure that this game has some wild speedrun tech and will have a community around it, but I do wonder if they could have focused on having "smoother" movement for everyone. It doesn't cohere in the way that, say, a Pseudoregalia does - you don't really ever feel mastery of this game's movement, or at least, I didn't. That said, it is far more approachable and pick-up-and -play than some platformers that focus too hard on trying to reward "smooth movement" - looking at you, Penny's Big Breakaway - and I still had a lot of fun with it.
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Apr 22, 2024 18:35
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