started up splatoon 3. i like how the opening world of the singleplayer mode pretends to be mostly standard “do levels with captin cuttlefish commentary” before you're dropped into alterna.
I apologize in advance for how long I suspect this post will be. I did feel something preventing me from scrolling right to the bottom of the four-digit-post-number thread and have several thoughts banked up.
@"mtvcribs"#p99249 I hecking love that Hobbit Gamecube (and presumably PS2/Xbox) game. I will steal it back from my dad and replay it some day (I know he hasn't touched it)
@"MDS-02"#p98792 Harvest sounds like it has a lot in common with Rymdkapsel. Rymdkapsel has a much simpler combat system, where you simply construct defense rooms that can be manned by two of your workers. Most of the strategy of the defense is simply where you put these rooms and which of them have workers at what time. There is a lot of construction: of gardens which grow raw material, kitchens, that make those materials into food, dormitories where food can be used to make new units/workers, extraction centers which take resources from the environment, and engineering stations which can create some additional resource whose definition escapes me (they are all represented as shapes with differing colors). One of the more interesting challenges as you do better in your runs is optimizing where you construct the various rooms. You can assign each worker to a task - construction, cooking, defense - but cannot directly point them in the direction you want them to go to, sometimes observing your line shaped underlings taking an inefficient route while watching the enemy countdown move forward. Space is an interesting resource, especially as each room and traversal corridor is a tetromino shape which rotates with each new structure built.
@"connrrr"#p98987 I didn't enjoy this game too much either. I think I enjoyed some of the shock moments more than you did, and I didn't read the mental health subject matter as exploitative. I wholeheartedly agree with your perspective, but I didn't get to it on my own; I'm surprised that I didn't, considering my frustration with mental health depictions in other media - Silver Linings Playbook for one (perhaps amplified because I don't think Jennifer Lawrence or Bradley Cooper could act their way out of a short pile of tissue paper). The main story beat of this game was somewhat unceremoniously spoiled by The Escapist's Yahtzee of all people. That, and the final puzzle is kind of ruined by playing on console IMO.
As for what I'm playing, I've had Elden Ring as a background game cadence since about May. I recently picked up BotW for switch in a bizarre Target online order scenario. I'd played it on WiiU but wanted to revisit it without having to fiddle with the tablet (I like the WiiU but holding that thing is unpleasant). This would make it the third big game I've juggled with Elden Ring after AI: The Somnium Files 2 and Yakuza 0.
I am almost done with Danganronpa for the first time, and I love it. I knew I would enjoy it at least a bit after loving the Zero Escape games so much - I know they're a different team under the same publisher, but the premise is fairly similar. I thoroughly enjoy the vibe of walking around the school, the music, the Ace Attorney Lite sections. I am excited to play the sequels and am currently imagining the repercussions of mentally ranking this above 999. The area I've found this game lacking is honestly in the amount of characters; there are segments where you can choose to "hang out" with 1 of the 14 other students there, and most of them I was viscerally disinterested in talking to until I had discovered how to max out everybody.
I, somewhat arrogantly, think I've solved the philosophical dilemma of the game though (big spoilers): >!If all fourteen of the other students murdered the rich kid, Caesar style and didn't point the finger at each other, they would all escape. This hinges on everyone agreeing that daddy's money fueled sociopaths are less human than other people, so maybe it would work better if this was set in the current year.!<
I tried to play LA Noire in anticipation of Action Button S2E2, but I didn't really like it too much. The interrogation mechanic felt somewhat shallow compared to Ace Attorney, which is admittedly a lot more gamified and pulpy. This is my first Rockstar game, and I can sense some of the realism that I saw both disparaged and celebrated during RDR2's press cycle. Maybe I'll pick this up again.
I've plugged about 20 hours into Pokemon Scarlet. I don't like it that much. I played Shield close to when it came out and adored it. I think the open world format doesn't work all that well for Pokemon whereas the wild area in Gen VIII felt pretty novel and interesting. I haven't checked out Legends, and maybe I'd enjoy that more. I'll likely finish this spurred on by some of the cool new mons.
Booted up Neo The World Ends With You around 9:30 this evening, thinking I was at the end.
Then I got to the end.
It is now 3:51.
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@“captain”#p99663
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I think a great companion site to howlongtobeat.com could be howlongistheending.com
@“whatsarobot”#p99596 glad to have Acquired a fan
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@“connrrr”#p99669 I think a great companion site to howlongtobeat.com could be howlongistheending.com
I would pay a subscription fee for such a website to exist (||no i wouldn't but you know what i mean||)
lol I think this was mentioned on the show but how you beat every Kojima game at 4am
@“captain”#p99680 or even just a flag on the game's HLTB page, like “should I set aside a few hours for the ending?”
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Death Stranding: 
@“DavidNoo”#p99681 I was thinking of that, because with a Kojima game this has never happened to me! feelin kinda left out (T n T)
As stated above, I finally finished Neo The World Ends With You.
>!
[size=20]『オーパーツ』 -NEO MIX-[/size]
>!
I started in October of 2021, and estimate I spent about 55 hours on it, which made for an interesting experience: playing it over a long period of real world time made it feel really grand in scope, even though ||the whole game takes place in Shibuya, and you will have gone over most of the map in the first quarter or so of the game.||
>!
Is it a worthy sequel to the original? Idk what that means, it has its issues, but it certainly is a sequel, sometimes in surprising ways. Sounds weird to say but what I mean is, for all the fourteen years since the DS original—covering two generations of new hardware and the attendant wave of game design trends, within RPGs, within Japanese games, within video games generally—the PS4/Switch/PCquel feels so mechanically, aesthetically, and narratively consistent with the first one that you almost believe it when ||the characters tell you the last Game took place 3 years ago (despite there now being smartphones and late 2010s fashions everywhere)||.
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What does this mean? Why does it matter that a sequel should be texturally similar to its predecessor? Who cares?
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It indicates to me that they made the game they wanted to make, with confidence and precision.
>!
I love that nearly every story scene in this game features static character art and giant text bubbles. Voice acting isn‘t plastered all over the whole game, which I point out as an indication of the team’s confidence rather than a dig against its performances. Silly as it may be to go out of my way to praise the acting in an anime soap opera game in 2022, I really like these performances. The Nagi actor deserves some kind of award, she read all those goofy lines with the utmost sincerity and clear understanding of the character. She has only two other credits to her name! (on IMDb) Rindo‘s too gives a surprisingly nuanced performance. More deserving of praise is the script, which among other accomplishments captures teenager talk in a closely observed way. It is still generally an acquired taste—characters with vocabulary gimmicks like the first game’s math-obsessed Minamimoto do show up here and there (and Minamimoto is one of them), and can be loud and obnoxious. ||Beat||'s dialect could be worth talking about.
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The flavor text describing music, clothes, and food are written in the same tone of voice as the DS game. This information speaks for itself.
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Despite being built around the now-standard game controller rather than the DS‘s touch controls and dual screens, combat still gets at some of those multitasking brain muscles that the original was able to stimulate. My early impressions of this system were strong, but that didn’t last forever: the first 40% or so of the game has you playing with 3-4 party members. When playing with 4 it's OK, though still feels like an underrealized concept. At the end of the first week, ||Minamimoto|| leaves your party, and you are left with 3 members for what may in fact be only a few chapters, but they feel long and arduous. When you only have 3 party members combat is either boring (waiting for pins to recharge) or else patience-testing. A digression:
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—Hard mode makes many side quests hair-tearingly difficult, not in an interesting way. Which, first of all, I don‘t know why I forced myself through every side quest I ran into—the rewards were decent but generally just nice bonuses and in no way required, and narratively completely expendable. Maybe I convinced myself that by avoiding them or turning down the difficulty I would miss out on a cool pin. Unlikely! Why I didn’t just switch to Normal is beyond me. The thing is Hard is more suited to ||this series' version of New Game +, where you have a full party to replay the whole story with,|| but I stubbornly persisted (for no good reason) and had myself a frustrating time. The battle music is incredibly repetitive during this portion of the game. In retrospect I may have been my own worst enemy, but my personal failure to play the game correctly has little bearing on the following point:
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——Especially compared to its predecessor, much of Neo is poorly paced. That the narrative is entirely linear, and that it requires little more than walking from one zone to another and initiating dialogue with an NPC is fine, but there are several (possibly many) stretches of this game where you need to walk from one end of town to the other, and at every stop in between (say, 5 or 6 zones) you participate in battle. In other RPGs you‘ll fight a billion random battles on your way from one place to the next, but in those cases the battles start pretty quickly, often without preamble besides a field-battle transition or loading screen. In Neo, you need to stop to talk to guards, which conversations are always total fluff but which I compulsively read every word of; then you (usually) need to manually start a battle, or a chain of battles, yourself; then run back to the guard, talk to them again, and they let you through. This isn’t so bad in itself, but it happens many, many times during play. Other times, in the absence of a guard, on the way to another zone the characters will simply stop in place, exchange several lines of dialogue about “something feeling off……………” and then scream at the somehow surprising enemy ambush coming at them. More fluff dialogue, etc etc. Characters using a million words to express very simple things. For much of the game there aren‘t many interesting decisions to make in terms of which pins you use—you pretty much have these ones here which are clearly the most advantageous to use, with few incentives to change playstyles (unless you’re doing a side quest which is impossible without the correct pin affinity/psych type). It would have been nice if pin decks were available earlier.
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Halfway through the second week, you meet ||Beat||, which is cool for two reasons: your party almost never has fewer than 4 characters past this point, AND it‘s ||Beat! Your buddy! His triumphant return is very cool.|| At the beginning of the third week another new character, ||Shoka||, joins your party. Sure enough, ||halfway through the third week Neku (whom you are given no teasing indication or reason to believe is in the game) shows up and fills out your party||. Controlling six characters at the same time feels great. It’s the full realization of this game‘s combat mechanics. I wish it had been available slightly earlier, but it’s a good thing you're able to go back and play the whole game again with six party members at your disposal.
>!
The final five hours of the story are exactly what I wanted.
>!
The music is good often, great occasionally, irritating other times (repetitive bad battle tracks)… and on the whole not as strong an offering as the original. Espeically evident when the last four days pull out all the stops on the ||original BGM callbacks.|| Hearing ||“Underground”|| again in the middle of yesterday‘s session made me feel something. Wish ||“Déjà vu”|| had gotten the remix treatment but being exclusive to the NTSC version of TWEWY must have made that less than likely. The title screen theme! Many times booting up the game I’d sit at that menu for a while.
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Stray complaint: I do not know how, in the year of our calendar 2021, you can make a multi-phase boss fight with unskippable cutscenes and gimmick/event sections between phases, which sends you back to the beginning if you lose in the final phase (I suffered this penalty three times).
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As with the first game, there is a whole post-game series of missions and unlockable lore that I haven't even done yet!
>! >
“One hundred twenty-six million people in Japan. Seven thousand seven hundred ninety-five million in the world. There are so many different people in the world. What would you do to find the one to trust?”
>!
Somehow there may yet be more to say, but I'm finished.
[TL;DR](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/506-archived-2022-the-thread-in-which-we-talk-about-games-we-are-currently-playing/1023)
I beat Bayonetta 3, and now I am just replaying Bayonetta 3 to get a full Platinum score run.
I didn't like the game much at first, but now it's fun since I'm better at it and have all the moves unlocked. Still, not fun enough for me to attempt a higher difficulty challenge... the one replay will be enough for me.
I started Valkyrie Elysium yesterday and it‘s the best “PlayStation 5 but actually PlayStation 2 (or PlayStation 3 if I was being kinder)” game that has been released that I can recall. Actually, it’s giving me Drakengard 3 vibes without the Yoko Taro weirdness - of the chapters that I‘ve played so far it’s pretty straight laced in its narrative and the cutscenes are satisfyingly janky.
Each chapter or subquest takes place over a linear stage with the occasional side path for secrets and other gubbins. Combat is surprisingly deep as you unlock different weapons, skills, spells, and character assists throughout the game but the fluidity of it is a little clunky because there's no guard-cancelling or dodge-cancelling unless they're locked as a skill. The camera often flails wildly when in smaller rooms, and often I find myself in a corner with the camera half-juddering behind said corner's wall.
Enemies have two meters; a health bar and a stagger meter, and it's fun to manage the latter when you're against a boss or group of tough enemies. Enemy variety is pretty limited too but I imagine that's a matter of both budget and to prevent the player from being in a position of not having tools to stagger enemies and bosses. Minor quibbles.
I've yet to get far enough to fully form an opinion but my overwhelming impression is that there's some cool stuff here, and that it's definitely a Insert Credit game.
I finally went for it and got disco elysium and this so so good! I like that it‘s barely a video game, it’s like 80% The Book That Talks Back and the other 20 is like, 90s DOS point n click adventure. I'm really into it a lot. I wish more books would read themselves to me, my attention span is shot
@“phylaxis”#p99796 this sounds sarcastic but I'm being genuine, this format is REALLY working for me
I don’t usually stay up this late
Dragon Quest builders deleted hours off my life and sleep schedule.
I am late to this game, I would have loved this when it came out too
I’m gonna have a lot to say about this one. But I’m too busy playing.
I have listened to Timothy Rogers review of builders 2 maybe three or five times now. I am playing builders 1 though.
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@“dylanfills”#p99621 I didn’t read the mental health subject matter as exploitative
Yeah I don't know if I feel that way either really, I think I was fuming at how disappointed I was and rushed myself in articulating why. I think those elements were just very basic and edgy, and sometimes unintentionally (?) funny when the game starts blowing up the underlying issues behind the character tropes on display. The game could have veered hard into black comedy instead and pulled it off I think haha.
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I finished Chapter 11 in FFXIII yesterday, but have not moved onto Chapter 12 yet. I take back what I said the other day, about skipping the mission marks: don't!! It's the easiest way to grind to a suitable level to take on the chapter's final boss, and you unlock a lot of stuff in that area too along the way. Some of the mission bosses are real fun too.
@“dylanfills”#p99621 I really liked the Danganronpas. I highly recommend you seek the anime, which is genuinely Danganronpa 3. It is in two parts that are intended to be watched interleaved. Hope ep 1, Despair ep 1, Hope ep 2, etc.
I’m not afraid to admit that I was invested in the story enough that there was _a thing_ that happened at the end of the last episode that made me cry
Gonna dig into those games maybe this year. Is the third one also good?
I like 1, looooooove 2, and was spoiled on v3 so I never actually played it 
but it’s divisive generally though everyone I know personally that played it liked it.
DQ builders is not only what animal crossing looked like in early development when it was a Zelda spinoff but also is probably the reason new horizons added crafting
I have work tomorrow but of course I would get addicted a day before