@“leah”#p130969 I played the remaster, but from my understanding, the remaster of Lunatea‘s Veil is much closer to the original than the remaster of Door to Phantomile, which is a remaster of the Wii remake of the PS1 game. Maybe some real Klonoa heads know better, but from what I can tell, Lunatea’s Veil is a more straightforward remaster of the PS2 game (looks from here like the biggest change is softening the PS2 quasi-cell-shaded style). Seems like Klonoa 1 just hits harder
Armored Core, the 1st.
@“HyggeState”#p131060 Gaming
just died in what i assume is the last battle in mother 3 and i have this feeling i was like 2 turns away from winning the thing, gah
Just beat Hollow Knight. It's alright! Certainly not the Greatest Metroidvania Ever (imo), nor does it revolutionize the genre, but for the most part I had fun plugging away at it. Makes a good podcast game.
One funny thing to note is when I first played the game as a demo back in 2017, I thought, "this movement sucks!" (which I maintain (sorry)) and dismissed it. Boy did I sure **not** anticipate its overwhelming critical and commercial success!!
been recently playing universal paperclips for the second time (last was abt 3 years ago) and enjoying it immensely
It took a little while, but I managed to clear Ys Origins with all three characters. Honestly, I think I would have been cool with the whole game just being the Toal Fact storyline, but the rest is fun too. I think the thing I like most from this game is what it does narratively; specifically, how it makes the Goddesses and their decisions seem more understandable, more like people. Toal describes them very nicely as being infallible about half the time. The story of Toal as a man who fell in love with one of them I thought was well-told.
I miss our favorite red-haired swordsman whose arrival foretells doom, but it was nice to see what one of these is like without him.
I‘ve spent the last several evenings with Sea of Stars, which has so far been a real good time! It’s always nice to play an extremely polished game by a small team where the play testing and honing really comes through in how it feels! In particular I encountered a boss last night where initially I was concerned that I had my usual problem with games like this, where grinding (and practicing) isn‘t a part of the design, where the rank and file baddies are super easy but are followed by an impenetrable wall boss that eats my lunch and ends up feeling unbeatable. But on the second attempt it just clicked, I had a sense of how to proceed, and it worked. In other words, it doesn’t feel like the boss was designed to be hard for hard's sake, which is nice.
Amusingly, it looks like reviews on this are split between 'this is the best Seiken Densetsu-style game ever, 10 / 10' and 'this is the most mediocre game we've ever reviewed, 6 / 10'. I'm not sure I'd go so far as 10 / 10, but it's handily a 9! I knew I would enjoy it when I played through the demo several times because I found the gameplay to be interesting!
@“Karasu”#p131186 I always knew Sea of Stars as “the game that REALLY wants me to know Yasunori Mitsuda made some music for,” so I always had the feeling it was putting on its best Chrono Trigger impression in an attempt to compensate in presentation what surely lacked in gameplay. Wouldn‘t be the first time indie RPGs have invoked Chrono Trigger‘s legacy in surface value only. That’s nice to know it actually is a decent game, I’ll put more consideration into picking it up
@“Funbil”#p131188 I don‘t want to oversell it, but I think if you go into it thinking less about its slate of influences and more about how they’ve assembled the pieces from those influences, I suspect you‘ll have a good time with it. I mean it’s super hard to truly innovate in the ‘top down, pixel art, turn based battles’ space, and a whole bunch of dev teams feel as though they‘re just making LttP with the serial numbers filed off, so it’s nice when you see something from a team who feels like they‘ve digested the source materials and come at it from what worked, what didn’t work, and feels a thousand years old and put something together from that. One of the drawbacks of the super common marketing plan of ‘Mana + Chrono Trigger + Super Mario RPG’ is that your audience is primed to see your game as nothing but that, which I think lets down games like this just a bit.
I wouldn't have expect something that felt as good as this from the folks who did the Messenger, which felt like the most derivative action platformer I'd played in forever, down to the 8-bit>16-bit progression stuff.
Warpath: Jurassic Park
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Current report:
Katana Kami: the original Way of the Samurai games already had some roguelike elements so this full roguelike spin-off kinda makes sense. But doesn't have all that much in common with the main series so I suspect it was just an excuse to reuse combat/animations. I appreciate the WotS-like tone and goofyness though, like a vending machine which is just a dude in a wooden box.
**Lost Judgment**: pretty ballsy of them to start the game with a string of boring tailing/unlocking/etc minigames, fortunately they are much less prominent in the sequel. Enjoying the plot a lot more too and feels like a very solid entry overall.
**Tales of Arise**: my gaming fast food, very tasty.
**Forspoken**: thought the demo was fine so decided to give it a go now it's cheap-ish. Traversal and magic stuff is pretty fun but not fun enough to carry the whole thing; still enjoyable in a bland way.
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@“Bbtone”#p131157 One funny thing to note is when I first played the game as a demo back in 2017, I thought, “this movement sucks!” (which I maintain (sorry)) and dismissed it. Boy did I sure not anticipate its overwhelming critical and commercial success!!
I was really excited to play the game and was shocked of how bad it felt. I got over it and had fun and all, but really surprising given the success (dear indies, don't make an action/adventure game without a proper min jump height. also don't shake the screen/camera on super common things like every attack collision (ffs), makes your action look flaccid and unconfident)
Playing Sea of Stars, and man, indie love letters to JRPGs need to quit yappin at the start of a game. The game tries to get your feet wet a little bit, but then there‘s an hour of text before the tutorial starts. This is a very easy way to make the player NOT invested in the story you’re trying to tell. Around 45 minutes in when I was evesdropping on the Headmaster, I definitely clicked through “important” information because I wanted to get the show on the road. You have a full 25 hours to explain how the world works, I don‘t need to get it all before I have a chance to leave the first area. iirc this developer’s other game The Messenger was very long winded and it killed my desire to play that one.
But the thing is, the actual battles are pretty fun!! It's got Timed Hits and enemy weaknesses, so there's some strategy and focus needed from the player. I like the upgrade system and the idea of 'relics' that can alter the gameplay to make it harder or easier. The exploration is very nice too.
@“Tradegood”#p131268 I was mildly curious of Sea of Stars, but this all but kills my interest. I have no patience anymore for jrpg stories with too much inane talking and not enough getting on with it. Every modern game that‘s “inspired by classic jrpgs” is a mediocre tropey slog from what I’ve seen. Which brings me to…
I started "Trails from Zero" last night because I love the graphic style. The characters look like little vinyl figures. But there had to of been at least 45 minutes of talking before any gameplay happened. I was _this_ close to giving up when, right outside the first dungeon, the characters stopped to reveal and talk about their weapons, individually. It was the exact opposite of "show don't tell" and I was very frustrated.
Finally they went into the dungeon and I got to play. It feels very retro and falcomy. I'm not sure I care for the setting of the Trails games though. We'll see.
holy shit I just beat mother 3 that was so brutal, I love it so much
>!even though I totally know they were gonna do the "enter your name and please forget you just did it" thing I didn't know how it was gonna come up and it hit me real hard regardless!<
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this fucked me up,
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and when claus did his big final lightning attack I knew it was gonna hit my Franklin badge and if my roommate wasn't here I for sure would have yelled NO out loud very loud
@“Tradegood”#p131268 I was almost disappointed by how good the combat was in the demo because the dialogue was so bad I just knew I would never be able to enjoy the full game. I don‘t use the word “cringe” lightly - there’s a Star Fox reference in an incidental conversation between two NPCs that literally made me cringe
Been playing through Persona 4 Golden recently and having quite a bit of fun. I‘m up to the fourth dungeon, >!Void Quest!<. My first exposure to Megaten was through Persona 5 and since then I’ve gone through –> Tokyo Mirage Sessions –> SMT V –> SMT III: Nocturne –> SMT IV –> SMT IV: Apocalypse. As a converted mainline SMT fan, I‘d like to think I’ve beaten any allegations of being a casual. That being said, I was pretty excited to return to Persona after a few years away and a lot more Megaten experience under my belt. I‘m definitely enjoying my time with it, but I do feel like I’m bouncing off of it kind of weirdly.
The biggest surprise is probably how similar _Persona 4_ and _Persona 5_ are. Obviously, they're part of the same series and they'll share a lot of the same aesthetics, mechanics, quirks, etc., but they're so similar to the point that I feel a little cynical about it. Like, what's the hold-up on _Persona 6_? The jump from 4 to 5 shows they're willing to copy-paste characters, social links, major plot points, etc.
Part of my weird reaction to the game is that so much of the game is reaffirming to me that _Persona_ the series is fun, but at the same time, I don't vibe with a lot of the _Persona 4_-specific aspects. I find the cast a lot weaker than 5's, which had stronger personalities. A lot of 4's social link scenes (except for the ones with Marie, which are notably out of place) are very short and a little simple. I'm not really all that invested in the murder mystery and really just see it as a means to push the plot forward. (To be fair, the worst parts of P5 were the parts when it had to shuffle around over the course of a few days to set up a new arc, but I was way more invested in what was happening there).
The part that's bugging me the most, however, is the combat and dungeon crawling. I knew it'd be a bit of a downgrade coming off of SMT (especially _IV: Apocalypse_, which is truly excellent), but I really didn't expect it to be an actual liability. These dungeons are worse than Mementos (not to mention the P5 palaces). Just not interesting at all. The combat itself suffers from a few different things that compound together:
I find the party member skill sets thrown together in a weird way. Some characters are drowning in good skills. Some characters really don't even have enough to fill eight slots.
There's something off about the damage/damage scaling in this game. I just don't understand it. I've taken to looking up damage constants to try to figure out what is going on under the hood. Sometimes I'll use a physical move and it will do a certain amount of damage, and then I'll try using a magical move (of equivalent power, both moves "neutral" against the target) and one of the moves will do like 5x as much damage. I know there isn't a defense/magic defense split stat, so I don't really get it. I've learned that a bunch of enemies have "hidden" resistances (some enemies are not "weak" to ice but take slightly more damage from it; nearly everything has a hidden resistance to Almighty for no reason) so I don't know, maybe it's more of that.
The level scaling is just bizarre. I don't believe in grinding. I think that whenever someone says "Hard mode in RPGs just means more grinding" we stray further from God's kingdom. One of my favorite mechanics is when an RPG either gives you a finite exp pool (e.g. _Fire Emblem_) or hard caps your exp (e.g. _FFXIII_). I don't want to feel like I can break my toys. I've gone through all these other SMT games on their hardest difficulties and never once grinded, and, you know what? It was a very rewarding experience. This is all preamble to say that I'm being confronted by what might be the first time I ever have felt like I needed to grind in an RPG and it feels like pure crap. I'm playing on Very Hard, which reduces exp, which is a very standard feature of hard modes in RPGs, but it reduces exp down to mere pennies and the dungeon structure just does not help at all. There's a bit of a rhythm to the days when I go inside the TV: go to the previous dungeon to find enemies/items needed for side quests, kill the optional boss in the previous dungeon, kill the mini-boss in the current dungeon, work up to the top floor and kill the boss in the current dungeon. I finished the last dungeon at lv 29, which is under level considering the last boss was lv 35. This month I go inside the TV, do everything on my agenda, and by the time I've reached the top floor I'm only lv 32. The boss is lv 45, and next month that increases to lv 55... Even staying under level I'm coming nowhere close to keeping up with this curve and I'm not even avoiding enemies. To mitigate the unrelenting level curve, I'm trying to kill the golden hands as much as possible but it's crappy to feel like that's necessary. I tried changing the exp modifier to reduce the grinding but I ended up feeling really lame about that and reloaded my save. What also sucks is that it feels as if the game is giving me the middle finger for _not_ wanting to grind. For example, if you haven't grinded to lv 18 in the early game, you can't even get a persona of the Aeon arcana, so that sucks if you're trying to befriend Marie. Same thing with Adachi and the Jester arcana the next month.
The Messenger was the game that had a small controversy over the devs giving their wise merchant character a quotation from Jordan Peterson, so I'm not surprised to hear the writing in Sea of Stars might be lacking