yes please make a krz thread when ready, I'm working through it also
KRZ is on my āto playā list also after enjoying chapter 1 many years agoā¦ currently playing Disaster Report and having a good time. The story has moved in an unexpected direction! I love the weird jankiness of it, having fun watching Keith look increasingly ridiculous as I outfit him in gear of dubious usefulness and his trousers wear out.
@Syzygy#16911 I hadnāt seen this checklist, but found another one that I used to build my own custom one. I already finished the darkmoon blades (mostly grinding in ng), Iām about halfway on the watchdogs and Aldrich (no grinding yet, just getting summoned as I blitz through Ng+ collecting rings), and have barely begun the moundmakers. Thatāll be a pain in the ass.
I did this with DS1 and 2 as well as BB. BBs platinum is very reasonable, whereas DS3 is definitely the most ridiculous.
Iāve been playing the Sega 32X CD version of Corpse Killer now that I finally have both a CRT TV and one of the lightguns thatās compatible with it.
This game is really bad, but it also has as much cheesy charm as a Sega CD FMV can have, so Iām determined to beat it! I never made much progress before because I hated using the controller; a lightgun isnāt much better but I think it improves things enough to be a bit less frustrating. Iāve saved one of my soldier-friends and am slowly making progress in gaining more health/ammo before I attempt to save another. Once you get into the flow of the game, itās generally playable.
I know there's a remastered version of the game I could play on modern platforms that's definitely much better, but IMO experiencing this on 90s hardware is the way to go, even though it's often an ugly stuttering mess of a game.
@CidNight#16948 iām attempting BBās right now. i dont think i could stomach the other ones if theyāre even close you what youāre describing for DSIII
at least you get to rock that nice shade of purple while you grind for those vertebrae
@rarya#16953 I remember BB being both more fun and reasonable than any of the others. It just felt like every trophy was for normal, playing the game things. The only really grindy part for me was getting all the way through the Chalice Dungeons.
All three dark souls have some version of ridiculous grindiness - but nothing as bad as the covenant items in DS3. You need a total of 110 of these items that either need to be earned through challenging PVP (excepting sunlight medals because jolly cooperation is always fun) or really excruciating grinding.
Only a true idiot would do that.
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but yeah, i had some friends playing the game around the same time to knock out all the chalice dungeon stuff so even that felt like a breeze. good luck on your choices!
@Syzygy#16982 I did DaS2 a few months ago and thought it was easier than 3. Since the multiplayer on 2 is all but dead, it did involve a pretty solid bit of grinding. Of course in 2 you also have to consider the enemies disappear after a while so for grinding you end up having to use Bonfire Ascetics and fighting NG+7 versions of the dudes and that can be rough.
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These assholes.
After playing it sparsely for a number of months, I finally reached a point in Breath of the Wild where the game systems āclickedā with me, and suddenly I'm gobbling it up. This game is huge!! How does a game this huge manage to maintain a sense of genuine discovery and not eventually reduce itself to checking a bunch of boxes like 99% of open-world games? Why does this version of Hyrule feel more tangible and real than any other open world map in the genre? (Because virtually every component and object in the world is directly interactive and the level designers thought to make verticality matter for more than just visual scope, thatās why.)
I've been extremely cut off from the gaming commentariat beyond the occasional Tim/Yahtzee/Dunkey video or r/Games drama thread since, like, the mid-2010s (Gamergate and its fallout pretty much killed off the last of my dwindling interest in that space) but I gather a lot has been said/written about this game. I feel like I donāt have a whole ton to add, except that it simultaneously lives up to the hype and still feels on some level a tiny bit disappointing to me. My main issue with the game feels a little bit like a nitpick: it seems to me as though the game's narrative and aesthetic design doesnāt quite live up to the virtuousity of the actual game design. This isnāt exactly a new or surprising issue with large studio-produced video games, but here it particularly stands out. For as much as I loved the 90s/early 00s Zeldas as a kid, this oneās aesthetic trappings feel uniquely childish and uninteresting to me. For once the team has got the right ideas in terms of influences: those older Zeldas, along with Ghibli-esque fantasy media, informing a wistfully sparse high fantasy aesthetic full of dreamy saturated colors and little bits of emotional gristle (the postapocalyptic setting, the omnipresent threat of death, the casual cruelty with which Link kills wildlife and even monsters for survival - wish the game punished you more for being too rapacious actually).
But despite the stated and self-evident intent to achieve a minimalistic presentation, frankly thereās still way too much talking. Supporting characters prattle on and on and they have nothing interesting to say compared with the visuals. The writing goes for those bittersweet notes from the older games, but doesnāt end up with anything as quietly affecting, understated and emotionally astute as the Yoshiaki Koizumi-supervised scripts and world design from _Link's Awakening_ through _Wind Waker_. Itās just a bunch of shonen high fantasy nonsense and eyerolling melodrama about saving the world. There are no vivid and haunting side characters like the fairy-child bully who grudgingly comes to accept you or the pasty misanthrope who only leaves his home to sit in the village square at night in _Ocarina_, or the rancher and her cursed fiancĆ© in _Majoraās Mask_ - just shouty "quirky" toons with cutesy speech affectations. Thereās voice acting now, and itās really boring (even in Japanese). The piano-centric score is schmaltzy. The Western high fantasy fairytale schtick has a broadly generic Japanese flavor slathered all over it, but it fails to distinguish or add depth to the setting in the way it was presumably supposed to. Unlike the rest of the game, itās all still very much post-Koizumi _Zelda_ in the most tiresome way.
I find myself wishing the game had a more "adult" narrative, and wondering if I might find that more appealing or simply more alienating if it were just as bland. People say _Witcher 3_ is the closest equivalent, and has the kind of folkloric richness I want from this kind of high fantasy setting - but idk. I wish I could have the robust skeleton of this game's design, its emphasis on physicality over numbers, the sheer sophistication put into its environment design and traversal, in a more mature, less cookie-cutter body. I guess _Death Stranding_ sorta shoots for this, but I never vibed with that game in the end. idk.
well said, I think the austere narratives are the best aspects of the Zelda games so was also dismayed by the anime-ification in botw. Popular media is being pureed into netflix flavored baby food
I really am grateful that death stranding letās you run around pissing everywhere and even drinking transmogrified piss
I have an entirely separate rant about why I did not like Death Stranding
I wrote like 60% of a long comment about how I tried playing _Deus Ex: Mankind Divided_ after cancelling my _Cyberpunk '77_ preorder, but The System destroyed it. The short version is: every cutscene, NPC conversation and piece of environmental storytelling in that game covers, with the subtlety of a bomb, the _exact same fucking thing_ - a sophomoric, simpleminded "cyborgs as persecuted minorities" analogy - to the extent that it torpedoes the cohesion and (nominal) plausibility of the setting and drags the hodgepodge slew of mechanical systems and serviceable-at-best level designs along with it. I played _Human Revolution_ ~7 years ago and honestly donāt remember if the writing was equally dumb and I just didnāt notice. So I guess my hankering for a decent hard sci-fi RPG/immersive sim that actually plays well on a modern console will continue indefinitely.
@yeso#17113 I got moderate amounts of shade on the Select Button forums back in the day for saying I thought Ocarina was actually good; is it cool again yet to say Ocarina is actually good? Despite its breathless canonization in the Gaming Press I feel like it has a lot of subtleties, particularly in its audiovisual design, narrative, and use of primitive 3D assets to convey physicality and tease the playerās imagination, that arenāt so frequently discussed in favor of simply deferring to its Historical Significance. It has a remarkably understated and holistic emotional texture to it as well, and I seriously think it stands alongside Dragon Quest V and the Mother games as one of the best coming-of-age narratives in the medium - only it mostly communicates the weight of its themes through imagery, audio and ambient environmental/character details, with text and dialogue being necessary but secondary delivery vehicles.
Maybe part of the reason people have forgotten these subtleties is that the _Zelda_ series itself has forgotten them - no game since _Wind Waker_ has even really come close to recapturing this stuff. _BotW_ takes a stab at recapturing the aforementioned austerity and the mythopoeic quality of the Koizumi-era games, which I guess is good - the developers were clearly very, _very_ heavily inspired by all the most promising qualities of _Wind Waker_ - but it loses itself in too many chattering anime characters and nonsense about ninjas and amnesia and giant robots, which maybe is necessary to stretch a simple premise out to 80+ hours of game design but probably is just the dev leads not knowing or caring about the real resonant not-strictly-mechanical qualities in those older games!
The game I just picked up again for a few minutes just now is a MUD by the name of Wikipedia and Iām on a level where Iām engaged in a weeks long passive aggressive cold edit war to keep one sentence in place at the end of the introduction for the entry on Sugiyama Koichi, so that it will contain a brief summary of the third of the article about how heās a far right conspiracy theory believing war crime denier, because thatās what I do with my spare time
@2501#17107
I recently started/tried/gave up on Breath of the Wild. Maybe it just wasnāt my cup of tea. The system of breaking weapons, really spoiled it for me, to the point of not wanting to come back to it. Also never been the biggest fan with crafting in games. I was really looking forward to it but those little things really hold me back. Did really love the art aesthetics and the scale of the world itself. The system around horse riding, really frustrated me too. I kinda feel Shadow of the Colossus did a better job with having an open world, without the baggage of all the extra stuff. Hoping that with the followup to BOTW, they resolve the things I felt were detrimental to the experience. But then this game is for the new generation of game players who donāt mind these things so much. I did really like that Twilight Princess.
I am playing the current beta of Drake Hollow. Testing out the new more Bloodborne-esque combat. Its been real fun to send notes to a developer on an early build while simultaneously feeling the game creek and shake in its unpolished state. I am about to make a run for the end-game as I think the saving system is starting to no longer work. Exciting times!
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@downtonabbey#17210 Iām not the sort of person who goes gaga for a game that has tons of Stuff in it simply to say it has a lot of content - which is the case for a whole lot of the open-world genre - but the weapon durability and crafting systems are important parts of BotW because they create a moving ecosystem that vitally contextualizes the huge diversity of objects in the game world. Plants, animals, mineral deposits, enemy types and placements, etc. all matter because they give every aspect of the hugely complex environments a practical mechanical purpose and they all factor into your continuous acquisition and expenditure of resources. The game is generous but not so generous that you can just rest on your laurels - part of why things like inventory limits and weapon durability are crucial, because they force you to continuously adapt and exploit the resources available to you, which in turn encourages you to always explore and be attentive of the gameās massive, complex, beautiful environments. If you could stock infinite healing items or just equip a weapon and use it for every encounter indefinitely until you pick up a better one, the game would be extremely monotonous.
I think it took a good 15-20 hours for me to really "get" the full scope of what the game is up to and realize what all the stuff around you means. Not to say that the early hours were boring, but it was once I reached that threshold that it really started to grip me. (This seems to be the standard pacing for open world games these days, for better or worse - c.f. _Xenoblade_, _Death Stranding_)
It probably helps to not really think of it as a _Zelda_ game, because it totally ditches most components of the series formula established in _ALttP_/_OoT_ that (imo) had become seriously stagnant and limiting by the 2010s. (Incidentally, I think _Twilight Princess_ kinda sucks!) I would suggest giving it another try, at least up to the first Divine Beast, and seeing if the way all the different resource systems interact with each other eventually starts to become more intuitive.
@2501#17222
Yea I think its just isnāt for me. Gave it a good number of tries, before ultimately feeling my time was better spent elsewhere. I guess the things that were inherently important to the game, weapon durability, crafting, which Iām not entirely against, served more as deterrents for myself. It been nice if weapons could have been repaired, as in other games, and maybe Iām not far enough or used to the systems introduced. It seemed like I was running away from every encounter, either because I didnāt want to waste my weapons, or there really wasnāt anything to be gained. It just never seemed there was an adequate reward for as much as you struggle through the landscape. I am curious to see the actual dungeons with the Divine Beasts, maybe sometime in the future. Everything isnāt for everybody.
I'd agree that a lot/most of the Zeldas have more or less stuck to the formula, and it's not that I don't welcome the change, but that I feel with maybe some fine tuning it could been a little less alienating for me. I think Wind Waker serves as a good example of having a big open world that really feels rewarding while sticking to the formula more or less.
I did have similar feelings about Death Stranding, but did enjoy it for the most part.
I know I'm in a minority with liking Twilight Princess, but I think that game stands out due to having Midna as a partner, compared to a lot of the other forgettable characters in the other games.
So I finished one game and I felt compelled to continue another game. The first is A Short Hike. I donāt have much to say when everythingās said and done, but itās a pretty wholesome game that, while very brief, it gives you plentiful mechanics and a little world to discover. Really a very enjoyable experience that Iād come back to several times more.
The other one is a Chinese cyberpunk game, which is The Heartbeat. Itās a quite unique game in the sense that you have to take decisions while also taking care of yourself, but both mechanics are incredibly annoying in themselves. I wonāt spoil them, but I felt very frustrated and in a good way, since it wants to make you feel you are at the verge of losing your shit. Seems like itās also criticizing the Chinese working (exploitation) system, and if itās that it seems at least they're getting nice ideas well-put together.
Been playing a bit of that new Mario, Bowserās Fury. Itās a good Mario that always has something new for you to discover and something fun to do. But its core loop of going somewhere, doing a task, and collecting a Shine is very short. At least in what Iāve played, you arenāt really working through or towards things as much as just executing tasks. You kind of churn through them in a way that makes my brain feel bad in the way Diablo-type games do where I'm doing the same things over and over. The game is fun, but for me, I think I can only play about 20-30 minutes at a time.
I did play a ton of Breath of the Wild but at some point close to the end, put it down and never went back. I feel like I'm just bad at open world games. I end up wandering off, hoping to find something cool, but usually end up just wasting time walking around, not finding anything, or just checking off unfun side quests, and then burn out without actually experiencing the good stuff.
On the other hand, I loved Death Stranding. I loved planning and executing routes, end adapting them as new opportunities would pop up at delivery points. Plus I hadn't played any Kojima game in about five years, so the ridiculous story was a treat.
@xhekros#17256 I also got The Heartbeat because a tweet I saw from Dominic Tarason, but I have yet to finish it because I'm deep in the STG hole.