What are you currently playing?

Drathnoxis

I love the smell of card games in the morning
Legacy
Sep 23, 2010
5,733
2,094
118
Just off-screen
Country
Canada
Gender
Male
Fuck the business man boss in Persona 5, fucker and his army of bullshit minions and their blow themselves up attack. Such bullshit.
I felt the same way.
Still Persona 5 Royale. The Okamura boss fight SUUUUUUCKS! It's just awful and I have no idea what they were thinking when they designed it. The idea is that he sends in four of his henchmen and then you kill them all and he sends in four of the next higher rank. It's all well and good until you get to the big green guys that have a huge amount of health, a ton of resistances, and few weaknesses. It's about that time that you learn that if you don't kill them all quickly and close together they have a tendency (read: certainty) to all run away, upon which Okamura sends in four more with full health and nothing you did previously counts. This happens forever until you turn the game off. There's also a 30 minute time limit on the fight. I understand that the game up until now has been pretty trivial in terms of difficulty and I've toyed with the idea of increasing it myself, but then I remember that difficulty and JRPGs don't mix and just end up being "oh, well I got a string of bad rolls, there goes an hour of progress. Oops."

Oh well, I'm sure I'll beat it tomorrow after I take stock of my options and actually make a strategy, but it's still a bad fight. I honestly considered that the game might be bugged after they all ran away for the third time and the fight kept spinning it's wheels.
It was ok once I actually went back and re-equipped my party for the fight, but it just sucks.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

Worgen

Follower of the Glorious Sun Butt.
Legacy
Apr 1, 2009
14,956
3,831
118
Gender
Whatever, just wash your hands.
I felt the same way.

It was ok once I actually went back and re-equipped my party for the fight, but it just sucks.
Doesn't help that I'm playing on hard mode.
 

Worgen

Follower of the Glorious Sun Butt.
Legacy
Apr 1, 2009
14,956
3,831
118
Gender
Whatever, just wash your hands.
I felt the same way.

It was ok once I actually went back and re-equipped my party for the fight, but it just sucks.
Beat him, doing laundry and using attack down when I was on the single bosses did it. Plus just blocking when the final one blows up since that wiped me before. I don't know why I forgot about attack down.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Drathnoxis

Xprimentyl

Made you look...
Legacy
Aug 13, 2011
6,636
4,933
118
Plano, TX
Country
United States
Gender
Male
EDIT: Oh, and the achievements are janky as hell. Most are delayed, and I still haven't gotten the one for beating the last chapter. Did some research online, and some people are saying their achievements didn't pop until HOURS later. :confused:
The achievement for beating the game popped last night, like 12 hours after I beat the game.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Drathnoxis

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
Legacy
Jul 18, 2009
20,115
4,885
118
Finished Astro Bot, and I did not expect that post-game challenge level. Fucking kicked my ass! Untill I finally kicked its.
 

Chimpzy

Simian Abomination
Legacy
Escapist +
Apr 3, 2020
12,825
9,256
118
So I'm playing Sin & Punishment Star Successor. I kinda like it, but fuck me, it's hard. First proper level is nothing to worry about, but the second level ramps things up significantly and third even more. A thing that always trips me up is that tapping a button does melee but holding that same button shoots, and it's not responsive enough to quickly switch between the two, leading to taking a hit. I wonder if you can remap them.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
Legacy
Mar 10, 2016
29,296
12,215
118
Detroit, Michigan
Country
United States of America
Gender
Male
So I'm playing Sin & Punishment Star Successor. I kinda like it, but fuck me, it's hard. First proper level is nothing to worry about, but the second level ramps things up significantly and third even more. A thing that always trips me up is that tapping a button does melee but holding that same button shoots, and it's not responsive enough to quickly switch between the two, leading to taking a hit. I wonder if you can remap them.
Yeah, this game is played best with the Wii Mote and Nun-chuck. With the GC controller being the next best option. If I remember correctly, you can remap the controls, but I never did and got used to it.
 

Ezekiel

Elite Member
May 29, 2007
1,301
615
118
Country
United States
Three of four divine beasts now abandoned on this replay. I keep quitting them to go exploring again, thinking I'll go back later, because they're just that crappy. Nothing like the old dungeons.
 

NerfedFalcon

Level i Flare!
Mar 23, 2011
7,197
931
118
Gender
Male
Beat him, doing laundry and using attack down when I was on the single bosses did it. Plus just blocking when the final one blows up since that wiped me before. I don't know why I forgot about attack down.
The best advice I can give anyone playing a Shin Megami Tensei or Persona game, or anything in that vein by Atlus, is that status spells are actually very useful. Don't ignore them, either for your own use or from the enemy.
 

Worgen

Follower of the Glorious Sun Butt.
Legacy
Apr 1, 2009
14,956
3,831
118
Gender
Whatever, just wash your hands.
The best advice I can give anyone playing a Shin Megami Tensei or Persona game, or anything in that vein by Atlus, is that status spells are actually very useful. Don't ignore them, either for your own use or from the enemy.
I tend not too, but for some reason I just forgot about attack down, or didn't think it would effect the bomb or something, I don't know.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
Legacy
Mar 10, 2016
29,296
12,215
118
Detroit, Michigan
Country
United States of America
Gender
Male
Did another playthrough of Haunted Castle Revisited. Almost had a 1CC run. I am playing Shadow of the Ninja Reborn. Tough game, but I am getting the hang of the movement controls. It's a much slower paced action platformer. Still faster than Classicvania games, but slower than 2D Ninja Gaiden or Shinobi III. Heads up, if you want save where you last left off on the most recent stage, you have to get a game over, and then quit. Otherwise, if you quit without dying, it does not work. Why would Tengo Project program it this way? That's really dumb. They have some of the weirdest and nonsensical game design decisions.
 

NerfedFalcon

Level i Flare!
Mar 23, 2011
7,197
931
118
Gender
Male
Merciless difficulty makes most of your attacks deal significantly less damage, but Weakness and Technical hits deal significantly more than usual. If you set it up properly, it's possible to kill enemies even faster than on Normal difficulty, meaning that despite them dealing more damage to you, you're actually going to take less damage overall per fight.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend trying it without a guide, though, since you have to know all the enemy weaknesses, Technical combos, and that sort of thing all well ahead of time.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Drathnoxis

Worgen

Follower of the Glorious Sun Butt.
Legacy
Apr 1, 2009
14,956
3,831
118
Gender
Whatever, just wash your hands.
Merciless difficulty makes most of your attacks deal significantly less damage, but Weakness and Technical hits deal significantly more than usual. If you set it up properly, it's possible to kill enemies even faster than on Normal difficulty, meaning that despite them dealing more damage to you, you're actually going to take less damage overall per fight.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend trying it without a guide, though, since you have to know all the enemy weaknesses, Technical combos, and that sort of thing all well ahead of time.
Ahh, during some of my attempts I used stagnant breath to try and reliably do status effects and technicals helped, but it still wasn't reliable against those things.
 

Drathnoxis

I love the smell of card games in the morning
Legacy
Sep 23, 2010
5,733
2,094
118
Just off-screen
Country
Canada
Gender
Male
Finished Subnautica: Below Zero. It was alright. Again it was fun exploring weird underwater locations, and some were really great to look at. It's still fun to go from starting with nothing to zooming around in mobile bases, though I feel that the progression wasn't as well laid out this time. I actually missed a couple important upgrades for a really long time so that I spent probably 90% of the game using the standard air tank and didn't find the horsepower or afterburner upgrades until around the same time, so that made the playthrough a lot slower than it needed to be overall. Also, why did the hitbox for entering the seatruck need to be so small? I can't count the number of times I accidentally disconnected the rest of the modules instead of just going inside like I wanted to do.

The story is not as good of a fit as the first game was. The original fit the mechanics perfectly, you crashland, you want to escape but you are infected so you need to cure that first. Simple, effective. In Below Zero, she's looking for her sister who is dead or something and is so determined that she's willing to strand herself on a remote and hostile planet to find her, but then she gets an alien in her head and he offers to take her to his homeworld and she goes, and her sister blew herself up or something, who cares. There was also another bacteria that you can cure if you want, but it's not a big deal, I don't know I never found it.

I only have 3 achievements left for platinum, but I don't feel like bothering. First is to use the cure for the bacteria, but after reading the PDA that Margeurit had, I didn't feel like I got much direction on where the next step was, and I didn't actually have any investment in the plotline anyway. The other two were to ride the Snowfox (I only found 2/3 fragments and I'm not sure why I needed a hoverbike anyway when 90% of the game is underwater) and to build a cold suit. Apparently you get snowstalker fur by stealing it with the pengling spybot rather than punching it out with the prawn suit and taking all the fur you want. Actually, again why do I need a cold suit when the prawn suit is both a cold suit and a suit of armor, freeing up the body slot for the suit that lets me drink my own urine.
 
Last edited:

Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
Legacy
Feb 9, 2012
18,898
3,459
118
Relationship Killer Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

You and and a partner (or bot) pilot a 2D spaceship consisting of a thruster, a cannon, four turrets and a rotating shield, navigating through space bullet hell while liberating bunnies. Liberate enough and you can exit the level via heart-shaped portal.

The game is designed to be cumbersome and overwhelming, and I don't think is as inviting as something like Overcooked where each player naturally falls into place as designated whatever. Here typically one of you steers the ship while the other mans the shield, but sooner or later the game wants you to panic and run from station to station as you become outflanked, outgunned and outnumbered while a lovely chorus of screams, alarms and flashing lights escalating the situation.

GrimGrimoire OnceMore

I love Vanillaware games and I never did finish this on PS2. It's a 2D RTS set in an off brand Hogwarts, with the usual character portraits posing for storybook cutscenes. In typical Vanillaware fashion the story is structured ala Groundhog Day - same as Odin Sphere: 5 goes over 5 chapters - but this time around the POV is exclusively Lillet's.

The remake looks basically the same, as far as I can tell, with the added convenience of some QoL stuff like the ability to save in the middle of a campaign and to speed up the clock whenever you're playing the waiting game (there's a lot of downtime while you harvest mana or create and move units, in between enemy waves). I don't think the original had a skill tree? Could be wrong. I do love the addition of an art gallery, since that's always the studio's main draw.

I think there's always a kind of divorce between the story and the actual gameplay in these games, but here the gameplay part is as detached from everything else as the baby at the end of 2001. You don't actually control the protagonist and the gameplay suggests there are legions of magical creatures - fairies, demons, ghosts, gigantic dragons - being marshalled over several floors of a Babel-like tower even when each chapter opens and closes on a mere 2 or 3 characters chatting dramatically in a closed room. Fine by me but the disconnect means the gameplay part, fun as it is, feels like it's hindering the story, and the story part is a glorified preamble to the actual game.