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Hwurmp posted:nobody Or buy the hint books, yeah. Sierra got better about it, eventually, but “something you had no reason to think about doing six hours ago just softlocked you” was pretty common.
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Feb 7, 2024 04:06
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Yes, gear set bonuses and modifiers come into play heavily on the extra difficulties, which you need to start working on to do the DLCs. Autoequip works just fine for the main game clear, which in fairness is basically how Team Ninja does that style of game. They’re very cool DLCs.
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Feb 12, 2024 14:48
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Finished up Ender Lillies this evening. Lovely little Metroidvania - plays well, it’s gorgeous, the music is fantastic. Absolutely worth a look if you are fine with the Obviously Souls Inspired with Difficult Combat branch of the genre.
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Feb 18, 2024 04:03
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Ineffiable posted:I beat Blasphemous 2. I'm one trophy away from the plat but I'll do it later. Honestly I feel the same way and talked about it in the Metroidvania thread; there’s a lot to like gameplaywise but I feel there’s some pretty dramatic design missteps that you start to feel in the later game. I would absolutely do another NG+ run of the first game over the second at this time.
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Feb 23, 2024 19:11
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Finished up Raging Loop last night; the base game and some post-game extra sidestories they added in. There's an additional mode toggle where you get additional dialogues/information in some scenes (it shows what characters are thinking, which you wouldn't normally be able to see and/or would be incredibly spoilery on a first run); I'll probably pick and choose a few points to see those but don't expect I'll run through them all since that'd basically amount to most of a full replay. It's a pretty interesting visual novel. The general conceit is that the main character gets lost in the mountains and stumbles into a village that is on the verge of repeating a periodic supernatural tradition, the Feast of the Yomi-Purge. Effectively, several of the villagers become replaced by werewolves and start murdering people each night, and the humans have to figure out who the wolves are and lynch them before everyone dies. It's a Werewolf/Mafia (or Among Us, I suppose) scenario, complicated by the fact that the main character realizes after dying horribly that he's also stuck in a time loop. From there, it's fairly standard visual novel flowcharting, moving through the story, dying and unlocking new route keys from making incorrect (or correct choices), and so forth. It's kind of reminiscent of Virtue's Last Reward, albeit much more linear; it's as much about the social dynamics and political maneuvering as the murders themselves. The game does get very exposition dumpy in the last act, and it doesn't quite stick the landing, but it still works well, with some characters who are much more in-depth than you'd think from their tropes and a main character who's far smarter than he seems at first. Worth a look if you like VNs and horror games.
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Feb 29, 2024 17:06
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Halo was completely massive and a phenomenon because it was a capable and solid set of FPS titles with great multiplayer options available on an inexpensive console that anyone could pick up and play with their buddies in their dorm rooms or whatever. You didn’t need to deal with lan parties or the nonsense that was the early PC graphics card market or anything like that.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:50
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Thanks to the Steam Deck being really good at this, I've continued my visual novel streak by starting over and completing Danganronpa 2 (had tapped out around chapter 4 during a previous attempt, got distracted I imagine) and then running through Danganronpa V3, the latter of which I completed last night. I know the series has a bit of a history here on the SA forums, and to some extent might be a bit played out, but both are excellent titles if you can get onboard with their particular mix of exaggerated anime character tropes and crazy murder setups. 2 has probably the best character in the trilogy, but V3 easily became my favorite due to several factors; a generally solid cast, some twists that lean on the fact that if you're playing the third game in a trilogy you almost assuredly have done the earlier games, and some excellent trial minigames that not only were fun to play and visually interesting, but solved a lot of the problems the earlier games tended to have with characters being weirdly passive in a life-or-death scenario. Great soundtrack too, particularly "Scrum Debate". Very good stuff.
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Mar 24, 2024 17:17
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Morpheus posted:Really liked V3 but was really annoyed by (end of first trial spoiler) the fact that you end up playing as the wimpy Shuichi rather than the far-more-interesting Kaede. The twist of the first trial being that you were the murderer was a cool one, for sure, but I would've rather you start out as the typical boring DR protag, some generic dude, before he's executed and you play as her instead I agree, and the only thing I can really come up with as a rationalization for why they did it was they wanted to lean on the Shuichi/Kaito bros dynamic. It didn't ruin things for me and I appreciated the trial 1 reveal, but it was a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. In other "finishing things" news, I realized I hadn't wrapped it up yet and the game was using almost 100 GB on my PS5, so I sat down and finished the Forspoken DLC, which I'd started over the summer. Now, I might be hot taking this one a bit, but I liked Forspoken quite a bit, and I'm sad that it got universally shat on for reasons. It's a solid B+ title that has a lot of upfront pacing and tone issues but has some of the most satisfying exploration and open world combat I've touched in a good long while, so it ended up being in my favorites of last year. The DLC is...fine. It's short, there's some neat gimmicks tied to the plot setup (it's effectively a prequel story), and it ends with an incredibly blatant "Here's the sequel story hook" reveal that won't amount to anything since the game bombed, but I didn't regret the few hours I put into it either; more Forspoken is fine by me.
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Mar 25, 2024 14:14
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Last night I finished Gnosia, a very cool little title. Gnosia is effectively a Very Weird Sci-Fi take on a Werewolf/Mafia simulator, where you play through a number of loops of the game with a variety of NPC crew members present; the gameplay revolves around debate sessions where the crew decides who is a probable Gnosia (the werewolf analogue) and tries to stop them by voting them into cold sleep. As you go through these loops and various permutations of role assignments for the crew, you see a number of events; some give you background on the crew, some teach you skills you can use during the debates, and some flesh out the broader mystery of why you and another crew member are time looping and how to stop it. There's also the complication of a special non-human/Gnosia role known as the Bug, effectively a walking paradox; if the Bug makes it to the end of the round without being put into cold sleep or scanned by an Engineer, they win by, uh, destroying the entire universe. It's a fun game. The actual debates can get a bit repetitive in terms of dialogue since there's a relatively limited pool of statements each character has, but the devs did a really great job at actually designing the characters and giving them specific strengths/weaknesses and personalities that you have to learn to work with - and around. One character is incredibly adept at spotting lies but is effectively doomed the moment they have to try to tell one. Another character has high overall stats but is basically insane so he doesn't use any of them well. Another character has good logical and analytical capabilities but is so abrasive that they'll often get voted out purely because nobody wants to deal with them. Another plays almost entirely on emotion and if you get on her bad side, regardless of whether or not you're on the same team, look out. Learning the character styles fleshes out the debates, because you have to decide how best to handle each round - who's a threat, who's a potential ally and who's just acting weird. If someone everyone tends to hate suddenly has a bunch of supporters this round, they may well all be Gnosia. This ties into the fact that you get to choose your own stats and build and decide the approach you want to take; I went extremely high in intuition (spotting lies), performance (telling lies) and logic, but was generally weak in terms of keeping below the radar and lost a bunch of sessions because I made too many folks angry even when I was right about something. Definitely worth a look if you're curious how a well handled single player social deduction game would play out, or if you just like weird sci-fi settings. It plays well and each loop is pretty speedy, and the game has a nice feature where you can have it set specific round parameters that can potentially trigger new events for you to help you progress. It is, however, very much not a visual novel at its core and just uses some of the trappings; Raging Loop is the flipside where the focus is the VN and the Werewolf games are more set dressing.
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Apr 2, 2024 16:11
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Morpheus posted:I found the real draw of Gnosia was its narrative. Certain scenes will occur when particular conditions are met (for example, you're a particular special role and another character survives until the end), which trigger scenes and expand the story as a whole, making for some very exciting twists and turns. Kept me glued to it even when the werewolf gameplay was getting a little stale. I completely agree. The narrative is very interesting and the fact that a lot of it is situationally revealed encourages you to take different approaches as you go, or potentially try to force events by setting up certain round conditions and potentially sacrificing a win to keep a certain character or characters around longer. Mixes it up nicely.
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Apr 2, 2024 16:52
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ZCKaiser posted:Did you get the epilogue? If not, create a new file with the same name (and possibly gender) as your original. Sure did, yeah. Clever way to handle it.
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Apr 2, 2024 19:30
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Ineffiable posted:It's really interesting how I keep hearing that dragon's dogma 2 keeps making the same highs and lows, the same mistakes, design decisions. Glad to hear RotR turned out well, I’ve definitely got that on my to-do list.
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Apr 3, 2024 14:00
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I think the only way Nioh surpasses Nioh 2 is in having a character with a defined personality and dialogue, because William is delightful. Both games are great though.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:18
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Morpheus posted:Just beat Forespoken, working my way through postgame stuff now. I agree with you. It's a great game that starts very slowly and the protagonist doesn't come off well at first, which really made it an easy target for mockery, but it gets stronger as it goes. The DLC, if you didn't play it, isn't amazing, but it's got a few neat bits to it and really sets up that sequel hook we'll never get. Spoiler if you're not inclined to buy and play a standalone 3 hour DLC episode: Frey is contacted by one of the Tantas of Rheddig - despite their murderous invasion loving up everything, they also had mystical wise women, apparently, and it's probable that they really didn't support the whole magical apocalypse thing since she sent Frey's consciousness back in time to see the origin of the Break and asks her to come to Rheddig to meet up.
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May 2, 2024 00:47
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. That honestly made me sad because you could tell the little kitty missed her 
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If you liked Golden Idol absolutely get both DLCs and play them in their release order.
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May 6, 2024 18:52
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Mode 7 posted:I just beat Hades, I suppose? I played it back when it hit 1.0 and absolutely loved it, got successful runs a number of times but eventually moved on to other games. How many total victories do you have? There may actually be quite a bit more game ahead of you.
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May 7, 2024 13:10
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:06 |
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Mode 7 posted:10-ish. Enough to trigger Persephone’s return to the Halls and the end credits which is a “clear” as far I’m concerned Entirely fair, just wanted to note that it's one of those games where there's a whole lot more than it might initially seem, since the Heat system means you get to continually keep ramping up the runs as you work on the rest of the content.
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May 7, 2024 14:40
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