Fran I totally forgot about this! When konami gives me Hudson they can keep all this popular stuff and just let me have the extra weird nonsense.
in other news I’m playing guardians of the galaxy as per everyone on the episode’s suggestion and I am finding it to be just alright lol. it’s got a few anti-me devices set up to prevent me from having a smooth time.
[edit:] I may as well say what they are!
1) I do not like games with binary choices where one is definitely right, or better. The first big choice you make is to keep a space llama or some gear. naively I didn’t look it up and there’s a correct choice, which is the gear. If you choose the gear, you still keep the llama(!) and you get homing missiles later. And rather than the llama having chewed through some area you need to access automatically, as would’ve happened if you did the “keep the llama” choice, you have to/get to lure the llama by having the crew sing to it. Very clearly the better choice. There are also things like where one crew member wants to do something and another doesn’t (drax throw rocket) - this choice only has right answers also because the result is just that you disappoint rocket if you choose “wrong” vs a choice where you’d please one of them or the other. Those kinds of choices feel extra pointless because if there’s a right answer, I have to look it up. that’s not a real choice! let both choices have good results. It’s especially frustrating when one choice means more gameplay, as all the big choices seem to.
2) the QTEs are annoying. I feel like they tried to get clever with it which has just meant I die on QTEs sometimes instead of not dying on QTEs like in other games. You have to wait soooo long to hit the button, and if you’re button mashing through cutscenes (even though it doesn’t help) you can fail for that reason too. the visual language is just not clear until you’ve failed once or twice, especially with the “move the sticks” one.
3) don’t map a feature that changes how the screen looks and disables firing to R3, which is very easy to hit accidentally especially in battle when you’re trying to whip the camera around to get a better view.
4) I don’t want to control my squad in battle, I don’t care what they’re doing and I don’t find it fun. That’s just me though!
Also the “let’s sell one of our friends” storyline is annoying. But also my entire interaction with the guardians of the galaxy franchise is watching the first movie ages ago, and 30 minutes of the second movie, and that’s it. There are so many references to things in here that I’m not familiar with or don’t remember that it’s like… alright, cool, the blarfloids battled the snarfrods, I guess this is worth 10 minutes of dialog for somebody!!!
The game is fine, but these little annoyances are really keeping it from being that smooth experience everyone was talking about. I was ready to have a chill time god darn it!!!! I think there’s a certain kind of modern triple-a design that works for me and does feel smooth (tomb raider, uncharted) and there’s another that doesn’t, and I think that’s when they try to get too clever with it.
