What are you currently playing?

[meiam]

No I'm gonna get the ring!
I already ate up all my noble flowers trying to do it normal.
I wanna platinum. That means I need all the rings anyway, I think. So I'm gonna start screwing with the world tendencies, following guides to get weird artifacts and whatever. I know I won't get everything but there is NG+ for whatever I miss.
Running "errands" in a game like this while listening to tunes between chores will be the perfect weekend in a rainy New England leisure activity.

Tendency is a lot easier to play with on NG+ (assuming it work the same as OG demon's soul). Focus on light tendency first (ie just kill boss without dying in your real body, you can suicide in the hub world after every boss kill to avoid decreasing tendency). Once you get to pure light just grab everything and then repeatedly kill yourself with your real body to drop to pure black.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Tendency is a lot easier to play with on NG+ (assuming it work the same as OG demon's soul). Focus on light tendency first (ie just kill boss without dying in your real body, you can suicide in the hub world after every boss kill to avoid decreasing tendency). Once you get to pure light just grab everything and then repeatedly kill yourself with your real body to drop to pure black.

Yeah that's pretty much what I was gonna do (probably tomorrow). Just go through worlds 2,3,4 which are in White, get whatever I can, turn them to black, get whatever I can including the swamp ring, then go back to the swamp with it.

 

[Chimpzy]

Got my hands on all the handheld metroidvania style Castlevania games early this year. Well, probably repros considering what I paid, but whatever, if you don't like it, remember those famous words from known French bastard whoops, tautology François Mitterand: "Et alors?". Kind of weird how I make no secret of my love for metroidvanias, but have somehow never played any of the Castlevania side of that portmanteau, unless Bloodstained counts. Tho now I'm actually already up to Order of Ecclesia. Helped that I spent a not so insignificant amount of time in hospital waiting rooms this year.

Anyway, about Order of Ecclessia.

It's pretty good. First thing I noticed is the art is much nicer that the previous DS games. Not the general spritework, that fine. The dialogue portraits. It's notably different from the usual post-Symphony style (apparently all by an artist called Ayami Kojima), but so much better than the cheap looking generic anime portraits of Dawn of Sorrow and Portait of Ruin. As for the gameplay itself, does feel like a big uptick in difficulty compared to the previous ones. I usually lose to a boss a couple times before I figure out their pattern, but here I still regularly get my ass kicked. Non-boss encounters also seem tricker than usual.

I do like how the game switches things up in some key ways. For once you don't just start out in Dracula's castle. You actually get to go to other places, incuding outside into a forest and stuff. You get to play as a lady as sole the protagonist, no playable sausage fest this time. There's the glyph system of course, which lets you absord weapons and abilities, which you can then make loadouts with. But also a sort of stamina bar for your attacks, which combined with the generally higher difficulty and seemingly more sparse save points gives it a bit of a soulslike vibe, tho it actually predates Demon's Souls. Probably also just a coincidence.

edit: funny thing is, I once had a real legit copy of Ecclesia. I had lent it to a friend, who lent me Elite Beat Agents in turn. But stuff happened and we're no longer in touch.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

WitchSpring3 Re:Fine

A crafting RPG (Think similar to the Atelier series) about a witch that lives in a forest alone with her animated dolls. It's not a mechanically challenging game, nor revolutionary, but I find myself greatly enjoying it. The characters and story feel surprisingly heartfelt given the easy going tone of the game. I particularly like the dynamic between Adri and Eirudy with Adri being weak (combat wise and in terms of his knowledge of things) but he keeps trying to do the right thing while Eirudy is very competent and powerful but is emotionally subdued and lacks communication skills. Eirudy is blunt about how she thinks Adri is weak, but despite his attempts to help her being mostly ineffective, and his interactions with her have probably caused more conflict for Eirudy than if she had otherwise never met him, she sees him as a friend and wants to help him achieve his goals.

It's nice. I like the crafting and story in spite of them not being super grand or complicated. It has a nostalgic and comfy feeling to it for me.

 

[meiam]

Got my hands on all the handheld metroidvania style Castlevania games early this year. Well, probably repros considering what I paid, but whatever, if you don't like it, remember those famous words from known French bastard whoops, tautology François Mitterand: "Et alors?". Kind of weird how I make no secret of my love for metroidvanias, but have somehow never played any of the Castlevania side of that portmanteau, unless Bloodstained counts. Tho now I'm actually already up to Order of Ecclesia. Helped that I spent a not so insignificant amount of time in hospital waiting rooms this year.

Anyway, about Order of Ecclessia.

It's pretty good. First thing I noticed is the art is much nicer that the previous DS games. Not the general spritework, that fine. The dialogue portraits. It's notably different from the usual post-Symphony style (apparently all by an artist called Ayami Kojima), but so much better than the cheap looking generic anime portraits of Dawn of Sorrow and Portait of Ruin. As for the gameplay itself, does feel like a big uptick in difficulty compared to the previous ones. I usually lose to a boss a couple times before I figure out their pattern, but here I still regularly get my ass kicked. Non-boss encounters also seem tricker than usual.

I do like how the game switches things up in some key ways. For once you don't just start out in Dracula's castle. You actually get to go to other places, incuding outside into a forest and stuff. You get to play as a lady as sole the protagonist, no playable sausage fest this time. There's the glyph system of course, which lets you absord weapons and abilities, which you can then make loadouts with. But also a sort of stamina bar for your attacks, which combined with the generally higher difficulty and seemingly more sparse save points gives it a bit of a soulslike vibe, tho it actually predates Demon's Souls. Probably also just a coincidence.

edit: funny thing is, I once had a real legit copy of Ecclesia. I had lent it to a friend, who lent me Elite Beat Agents in turn. But stuff happened and we're no longer in touch.

Most of the metroidvenia Castlevenia are pretty good, order of ecclesia included, although few of them really shake up the formula. You could try the PS2 curse of darnkness which is in 3D so that's a bit of a twist, but otherwise it's a situation where any of them will work just fine.

 

[Drathnoxis]

As I'm in (I think) the last chapter of Eastward about 1000 salt on tokens, completed my pixball collection and beat Earth Born. With pixballs the game is pretty trivial. I didn't even use a fraction of them. The game is definitely beatable without any pixballs, but it just requires too much resetting. A Knight with mirror shield and a zeal pendant and wolf claw makes the true final boss a joke anyway. You basically reflect all damage every turn unless you get unlucky and don't counter enough. He didn't even hit me once, but I did use two stun items on him to be safe. I also had the multishot hunter with shiny gloves which has a good chance of stunning an enemy as well. The shield priest would also have been good as another safety net, I had the heal priest which was pretty useless. The two big problems with the game are that it's slow, and too reliant on randomness. I know what skills I want and what items I need to make the build work, but it's just down to luck whether I get them or need to restart. Adding gatcha mechanics is a crutch and doesn't make the game more fun, but just cheapens the experience. Also it's pretty buggy. Some item descriptions are also really vague. Stuff like amplify potion "enhances magic attacks." Yeah, how much? Is it better than a wisdom amulet? Also the item that is supposed to make a skill attack twice never procced. Not once. Useless.

However, I can't say I didn't have fun with it. Actually, I enjoyed it far more than the main game, and think if they had put more of their focus into Earth Born, the game would have been better for it.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Finished Eastward. I hated it. Just nonsense. *Full Spoilers for the rest of post* (sorry if the following isn't the most well written, I'm switching to nights and have been awake for 19 hours)

It introduces waves and waves of meaningless uninteresting characters and then abandons or kills them. Even the main characters were pretty bad. You play as John a hyper competent bum, who has lost all ability to think or speak for himself through prolonged alcohol abuse, who is lead around by the nose by Sam a mysterious hyperactive test tube child. Then there were Alva and Isabel who don't really accomplish much of anything. And William and Daniel who have the goal of getting to Ester City so Daniel can get an operation he desperately needs to... make him not super strong? What? The whole story is borderline incoherent and really reads like a new writer trying their hardest to make an edgy story that really proves they know how to symbolism. But really, as all stories of it's kind, is actually just a poorly told story. There are a billion characters each with a name and nothing to say. Their dialogue will update constantly, and I went around talking to everybody every time, but it never felt worth reading. Just blah blah blah, something related to current objective, blah. Nothing funny, or charming, or that established much character at all. Beyond that most of the characters look really weird and deformed, and I'm not really sure why. Is this because of the Miasma, are they mutants, or what?

The game taught me early on not to care about anybody when the second town was swiftly destroyed right after trying to rush a terrible romance between John and some woman he just met. Not that there was really a reason to care about anybody in the first place "Oh John, I love you because you look like a hobo and don't talk. Make love to me now." I was actually surprised that the people of New Dam City weren't all killed by the Miasma or something.

The world is incredibly poorly sketched out. You barely get an understanding of how much world is left, or what kind of threat the people are under, or why there is stuff like a living whale on top of a train station. It's just edgy or wacky according to the writers whims. Very tonally inconsistent. Oh, the main characters weapon is a frying pan, how droll. Now we're throwing you out of town for incredibly shaky reason. Now here's a bit of pseudo philosophic poetry followed by a "to be continued" message with no prompt to save. Oh now everybody you just met is DEAD, including the morbidly obese mayor with dementia! There is a railway directly linking New Dam City and Potrock, but there is seemingly no communication between them, except for the railcar that randomly shows up to transport our heroes to the next destination whenever it's time to move on. It just feels like a poorly thought out world.

The structure of the game is mostly just screwing around with slice of life nonsense until the writer throws in the next tragedy to move the characters along. It's not even very clear what's going on sometimes. Like when Alva somehow goes into a room in the dam you couldn't get into and is injured... somehow. Why were there three different Solomons in different ages. Were they the same person aged differently because of time fields or were there just three of him. What was he actually trying to accomplish? Why did it take so long for the game to finally reveal that William was the same man as the kid's dad from Potrock, when it was completely and blatantly obvious from the second you meet him? Why did we screw around so long having bets with a casino owner for no reason. We never got anything out of that bet, ever. It's all just stuff happening. I'm not even going to talk about the ending. I saw it coming a mile away that the game was going to give us a star babby ending, and wasn't going to make an attempt at being coherent. Nothing the game set up merited an ending like that, and 9 times out of 10 it doesn't work and is just a smokescreen to cover that the author doesn't actually have anything insightful to say so they leave it to you to create your own meaning.

The combat was awful. It was slow, you had barely any options and it felt bad to play. Luckily it was also really easy and I just spent most of the game spamming the attack button soaking up damage and healing up when necessary. Sometimes I'd stun the monster first with Sam, but most of them got stunlocked with the frying pan. The only other gameplay is solving trivially easy puzzles or constantly walking back and forth through towns. There is also a completely separate, and much superior, minigame, Earth Born, that you can play, but I've already summed up my thoughts on that previously.

The pixel art was gorgeous, though. The artist should be proud. Too bad the rest of the team let them down.

 

[laggyteabag]

Still chugging along in XCOM 2, and I am suitably steamrolling my way through most encounters. Im on tier 4 of 5 for the weapons (mods), and I have just unlocked the final armour upgrade.

I have taken out two of the three Chosen enemies, and I am ready to kill the final one. I have also discovered the power of Bluescreen Rounds combo'd with Gunslingers, and it is utterly hilarious.

I guess I kind of feel a bit underwhelmed, though. I do love this game, but because I chose to play it on Normal mode, it kind of feels like I am missing out on the challenge that I would usually expect from XCOM games. As it stands, I have only lost one soldier, and that was some random Rank 1 dude who I bought to fill a gap in the squad.

Maybe next time I play it, I will remind myself to do it on Hard, so I can hate the game again.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

@Draxnosis you made it through that whole game hating on it so much, lol. Almost to be admired.
Critic/Steam reviews seem really positive though, maybe it's just not on a vibe you were on it. Screwing around with slice of life stuff kind of games do have an audience.

I'm still on Demon Souls of course because I'm trophy hunting at the end of NG, and I've gotten to the part where I'm on a Discord thing I found on a subreddit to have people help me futz with the world tendency system. Of all the FromSoftware nonsense that went away, this is the top.
It's actually a cool idea- a basic video game morality system tied into the combat, stats, enemies and NPCs you encounter. But as with so many things in the early Souls games, the actual implementation becomes a confusing mess.

 

[Dalisclock]

Finished Eastward. I hated it. Just nonsense. *Full Spoilers for the rest of post* (sorry if the following isn't the most well written, I'm switching to nights and have been awake for 19 hours)

Eastward I think really depends on how much you dig the whole quirkly vibe it's got going on. Clearly it's influenced by the Mother games, notably Mother 3 which is super quirky at times but I feel the last section of the game with the time fuckery and the nightmarish nature of Cerberus was supposed to be an homage to the last bit of Eartbound. And if you don't dig that wierd vibe, you really aren't gonna enjoy the game. I worked for me, though I admit I kinda gave up trying to understand half the shit that was happening by the time the time fuckery stuff started because very little of it ever explained and the monkey train thing is just kinda there. OTOH, the last dungeon really creeped me out in how OFF It felt, like some Eldritch location that isn't even hinted at before then.

I think we're definately on different sides of that divide because while you really got into the EarthBorn RPG game, I played it like once and stopped caring about it once I stopped my first play session in like chapter 1. It's like "Oh, this is dragon quest" and then realized I didn't care about dragon quest enough to want to play it inside the main game which I was much more into. Glad you enjoyed it though.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Eastward I think really depends on how much you dig the whole quirkly vibe it's got going on. Clearly it's influenced by the Mother games, notably Mother 3 which is super quirky at times but I feel the last section of the game with the time fuckery and the nightmarish nature of Cerberus was supposed to be an homage to the last bit of Eartbound. And if you don't dig that wierd vibe, you really aren't gonna enjoy the game. I worked for me, though I admit I kinda gave up trying to understand half the shit that was happening by the time the time fuckery stuff started because very little of it ever explained and the monkey train thing is just kinda there. OTOH, the last dungeon really creeped me out in how OFF It felt, like some Eldritch location that isn't even hinted at before then.

I think we're definately on different sides of that divide because while you really got into the EarthBorn RPG game, I played it like once and stopped caring about it once I stopped my first play session in like chapter 1. It's like "Oh, this is dragon quest" and then realized I didn't care about dragon quest enough to want to play it inside the main game which I was much more into. Glad you enjoyed it though.

I would count Mother 3 among the best JRPGs ever made (although I haven't played it in a decade), but I didn't feel that this game was nearly as well written. I'm not against quirky, I thought that LISA was a fantastic game, and it very much goes in the same blend of quirk and horror that Eastward wants to have. Actually, one could probably write a pretty good comparison between the two games. Both Earthbound inspired games where you play a father figure trying to protect their adoptive daughter where the tone switches between wacky and horrific. However, Brad is a much more developed character, not being a silent protagonist and actually having backstory and stuff. Also I want to say that LISA is significantly shorter, and the story is much more to the point, while also developing it's main characters and world better. Most of Eastward is characters talking endlessly, but not saying much that you didn't already know. Sam everyone loves Earth Born and will take every opportunity to obsess over it. Alva wants to have fun and also protect the people of the city. Isabel wants to protect Alva and doesn't care about anything else. William wants to get money for Daniel's operation, and has no scruples. This is almost the entirety of their characters and it forms nearly the entirety of their dialogue, repeated time and again. The characters don't grow or change at all through the game. Sam is the same in chapter 1 as she is in chapter 7. As is John, and William, and Daniel. Isabel is also static until she fights you for no discernible reason, but even that is sticking to her one character trait.

I would say that, yeah, Eastward is very much more in the vein of OFF, which I also didn't like.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

I haven't been posting much because I've spent the last week and a half playing Lost Judgment, the sequel to the Yakuza spinoff about the detective.

Honestly, there's a lot that I really don't like about it that much. The characters are great, but I feel like the original game had a stronger plot and mystery. The combat is frequently frustrating between the nerfs to items and the fact that most bosses are exactly the same, just packing a lot of combo-breakers and command grabs without much variance in strategy whether they have a knife, a bat, a gun or their bare hands. And the side content is badly paced and spaced out, leaving a lot of it not just undone but inaccessible by the end of the game unless you really focus on it, and with most of it put in Yokohama with almost nothing to do in Kamurocho. The previous games aren't required to understand the plot, but I'd still recommend playing one of those over this one if it's your first time.

Still, it's Ryu ga Gotoku, and those have always been great games at their core. If you like the series, you'll probably like Lost Judgment too, but I wouldn't say it's up there with the best of the best like 0, 7 or the first Judgment. If you're curious about the story, it's at least worth watching on Youtube like a drama series.

Finished with a 26.0% completion rating. Don't plan to work on that through Premium Adventure; I'm just gonna move on to the next thing.

 

[BrawlMan]

@NerfedFalcon, I could never get in to any of the Yakuza style games, because of the combat. I tried, man. I tried.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All Stars (Wii) - I have not touched this fighting game in years! This was 8ing's first foray in to the Capcom VS. series. The first 3D venture in to the franchise. A lot of what you see here, is later brought on in to MvC: 3 & Infinite. Though you don't get cool mechanic that is Baroque cancel. Slicing off your red health (negating your ability to heal) to extend your combo and juggles. An expert player can murder their opponents with care uses and exploits. They did bring Mega Crash back to the later MvC games. This games goes back to the 2 vs. 2 Tag Team of MvC1 and X-Men vs. Street Fighter.

For those that don't know Tatsunoko: It's Japan equivalent of Marvel, in a way. All Japanese or Japanese style super heroes and characters from different genres and decades of anime. Mainly super hero and sentai anime from the 70s and 80s. This game is a copyright nightmare is stuck on the Wii forever. In Japan, this game getting re-released would not be an issue. In America or the UK, copyrights is a huge issue, as their so many anime distributors and licensees that own publication or distribution of specific anime/manga IP and its respective characters. Cassharn for example, has so many various owners for the past three decades on the Western side, that it's crazy to try to settle who gets the approval and where does the money go.

The game is always fun, and I never regretted getting it day one. The online is dead, outside of hacked WiiWare and emualtion, but the game is fun to just play with friends or trying the various bonus modes and characters.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

@NerfedFalcon, I could never get in to any of the Yakuza style games, because of the combat. I tried, man. I tried.

Have you tried 7/Like A Dragon? It's turn-based, so if you didn't like the action combat of the other games, maybe that'll be different enough to work for you.

 

[BrawlMan]

Have you tried 7/Like A Dragon? It's turn-based, so if you didn't like the action combat of the other games, maybe that'll be different enough to work for you.

I stopped doing turned bases games after FFXIII. I appreciate the effort, but LAD does nothing for me. I respect the series for its absurd humor, characters, and storytelling, but that is it. My older brother does have the game though. He loves LAD.

 

[Ezekiel]

Vane. One of the most pretentious games I've ever played. You fly around pretty but empty desert as a crow and occasionally turn into a boy who has the most basic platforming. A 2.4:1 aspect ratio is forced, but it's not used as an excuse for performance, as in something like Evil Within or that early PS4 game everybody made fun of. At least I hardly notice it with the black bed sheet hanging behind my decently sized TV. Would bother me more if I was playing on my monitor. So many indie devs wish they were early Team Ico.

 

[Dalisclock]

Vane. One of the most pretentious games I've ever played. You fly around pretty but empty desert as a crow and occasionally turn into a boy who has the most basic platforming. A 2.4:1 aspect ratio is forced, but it's not used as an excuse for performance, as in something like Evil Within or that early PS4 game everybody made fun of. At least I hardly notice it with the black bed sheet hanging behind my decently sized TV. Would bother me more if I was playing on my monitor. So many indie devs wish they were early Team Ico.

I tried that game hoping it would be like Journey or something. I played it for like 2 hours and Vane, you sir are no Journey.

 

[Ezekiel]

I tried that game hoping it would be like Journey or something. I played it for like 2 hours and Vane, you sir are no Journey.

Abzu was okay.

This is what Vane looks like in dark places. Very grainy. But the grain is frozen. They can't even imitate movies well. Film lovers hate frozen grain.

If the idea is the murkiness of seeing in the dark, that's a lot finer.

 

[Ezekiel]

Working on the remaining Arkham City Riddler challenge maps and campaigns years later. I have to do Robin's campaigns and Nightwings maps and campaigns. Controls are for stupids and kind of trash. Especially hate accidentally using my only smoke grenade that I need to use on an enemy. It is activated with right click when the enemies are alerted, but there are so many other context sensitive actions that use the right click. You also need it to aim/ready weapons.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Started playing XCOM 2 because I really enjoyed Enemy Unknown, but I'm not really sure if I'm going to continue the game. First point, I thought I kicked the aliens butts in the first game, how did they manage to just take over the world anyway? Kind of kills my motivation from a story perspective. Second, this game has all the same problems as the first from a gameplay perspective. The game is really slow, as you slowly inch your overwatch ball forward turn by slow turn, going through twice as many clicks as are necessary for every action. Then you might get unlucky and trigger several enemy clusters at once who all decide to aim at your high ranked soldier, get lucky, and take them out. And because of the RNG it never really feels like your fault. The penalty of losing a high ranked soldier is also far too high for something that is based on luck, because now you need to spend several missions slowly training up a rookie and it's such a chore. Or you could just cheat and reload every time someone dies which sucks the fun out of the game anyway.

It really doesn't feel like the sort of refinement of the formula you might hope for from a sequel, and I'm not really sure I feel like going through 40 hours or whatever of the same game again.