I just finished Misericorde part one and I am SO here for part 2 when it is released.
Finding the secret chapter made me actually exclaim “what the fuck !?”
Absolutely brilliant visual novel.
@“Mnemogenic”#p131298 I thought the Messenger was an amusing enough game initially until it turned into a Metroidvania. What that really means is that I actually really like Ninja Gaiden games.
I had 0 clue about the JP controversy so I found it on YouTube. I thought it would be a quick dumb quote but it's actually some 3min rant inspired by "Jordan The Wise". Now that's embarrassing.
@“Lunar”#p131299 A secret chapter?? I played this back when it came out and thought it was a completely linear game. I'll have to look into this – I loved the game too, so being able to play more would be great
@“Funbil”#p131304
It’s just a whisper of an extra side story, only a few minutes. No way I would have found it myself if I hadn’t looked up the game after playing (will spoiler a clue below).
>!Have a look through the menus after finishing the game and you’ll find something you didn’t encounter in the normal story.!<
Extra clue:
>!It’s in the gallery!<
A new DLC came out for Case of the Golden Idol, so once again I played Case of the Golden Idol. Fairly quick to get through, and like the previous DLC it fills in the backstory leading up to the events of the main game.
Another enjoyable time.
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[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/UlJDWzU.png[/IMG][/URL]
@“Andy B”#p131276 Yeah, the Trails games are very long-winded and I think the prologues are extra long to have recap + reintroduction from the previous games. I think every chapter starts with 30 minutes of setup, but those games came from a lineage of visual novels and that it‘s an intentional part of the experience. The games often have about as much text as 10 novels but they justify it by having very complex and satisfying narrative twists that unfold over 9 60-hour games. They do spend too much time talking about orbments or the bureaucratic regulations for Bracers or how the magic works, but the sheer length of the series does result in a lot of that stuff paying off later on. You kind of have to know what you’re getting into with Trails.
But Sea of Stars doesn't have that kind of ambition. They are taking a lot of inspiration from Chrono Trigger, a game that immediately gives you the freedom to figure things out yourself. This one kind of felt like it put you in training wheels for a long time while the characters are babies and getting spoonfed the worldbuilding. I'm a bit further in now and the game has laid off the dialogue a bit, but that first hour did not leave a good impression.
I haven't seen any writing that's horribly cringeworthy yet in Sea of Stars, it just feels like they didn't spend time editing or refining it at all. It's not trying tell anything very complex, it just takes a long time to spit it out.
I can definitely see why a lot of people are impressed by this game and why it is getting such a high critical praise, because it tries to convey the idea that it's streamlining things. The exploration is based around unlocking shortcuts on the map, upgrades happen to the whole party at the same time including fainted characters, and the game has party members resuscitate themselves without having to use an item. But while these are all 'convenient', none of these are real problems with JRPGs, but I think people might look at those things as a bigger improvement then it actually is.
One annoyance, there's no ability to escape from battles. There's an Ant enemy that can infinitely summon more ants, and they aren't the simplest to take down as a group, so twice they gave me a game over in an unwinnable situation. It's kind of a weird choice in a game where you have a finite amount of held items.
@"Mnemogenic"#p131298 Ugh, I did not know this or if I did back then I didn't remember the specifics and just concluded the writing sucked. That blows. I found [this explainer](https://astrolabe.aidanmoher.com/p/sea-of-stars-jordan-peterson). To the dev's credit, he now disavows Peterson and claims he read his books in 2004 and was being sarcastic, which I don't know that I totally buy that especially since the game was in development in like 2016-2018 was when Peterson was becoming popular and that whole embarrassing 'Intellectual Dark Web' bullshit was happening. It should have been very obvious to anyone at that time that those people were bad actors.
Based on the quality of the writing, I have a feeling we have a Jonathan Blow situation where the author is an engineer and not a writer and tried to engineer their way into incorporating philosophy when they don't actually have anything to say. It's bad workmanship but I don't know that it's malicious. I think it's worth giving the author the benefit of the doubt unless it's part of a larger a pattern of behavior or if the game itself is espousing nonsense.
@“rejj”#p131307 heck of a game, and now the devs are offering a browser-based demo
https://www.thegoldenidol.com/trial
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@“Andy B”#p131276 Every modern game that’s “inspired by classic jrpgs” is a mediocre tropey slog from what I’ve seen
yeah it's dire lol
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@“Tradegood”#p131311 The games often have about as much text as 10 novels but they justify it by having very complex and satisfying narrative twists that unfold over 9 60-hour games.
Thank you for the context. I’ve also tried trails of cold steel and it was a very similar experience. If the games get weird and twisty later on I wish they would somehow broadcast that in the early game. Because from my perspective it’s all just bog standard jrpg stuff.
But it sounds like these games just aren’t for me, unfortunately.
@“Andy B”#p131313 Yeah, the twists are very grounded in the world they create, so you get out what you put in when it comes to following the story. I love the games but they definitely aren‘t for everyone. But if you do like something like Grandia I think there’s a lot you can get out of the gameplay still so it's worth sticking with. But it might take some work.
I've been thinking of making a thread about 'slow games' as an idea similar to 'slow cinema'. It's not quite the same because Trails has tons of narrative, but it still intentionally slows down the viewer and emphasizes long takes.
@“Andy B”#p131313 Trails is a frustrating series for me because when I first started playing them I loved what they were doing and I really enjoyed even the most standard of dialogue because I just liked being in the world. It did start to shift when I played my…I think it was fourth game in the series (I didn’t play them in release order because of the weird way they came out in English) where it started to lose me in a big way. I just started to notice more and more conversations essentially beginning and ending with nothing accomplished, not ending until every character had at least one completely perfunctory line, the twists started mattering less, Falcom’s structure for these games is used repeatedly in the exact same way across hundreds of hours of games, it just stopped working for me very suddenly. Now I’m 4 games behind and the thought of actually sitting down to play them sounds like the opposite of fun which is a bummer because 5-6 years ago I was so excited about this series.
It’s ultimately one of the most frustrating turns I’ve ever had with video games.
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@“Tradegood”#p131268 need to quit yappin
I have this issue with just about every modern game i swear
I started playing Final Fantasy 7 for the first time a couple of days ago. My reluctance to play it thus far has been down to knowing the key, and not so key, plotlines and events inside out. I‘ve left Midgar and the only thing I didn’t really know about was the seaside town you reach after crossing the sea and the egregious section involving a bunch of dumb mini games whilst Cloud is disguised as a soldier at the port.
My only real criticism, other than Barrett using the line "quit acting like a retard", is that it's hard to parse where exactly you can interact with the prerendered environment to jump from platforms or to climb things. I know this is a relic of the design ambitions of the time but I've ended up in half a dozen random battles trying to figure out which bit of a path I need to interact with to progress.
I'm enjoying it though, it's a good romp, but a diluted experience knowing most of the plot so far.
@“LeFish”#p131406 If I recall on the PlayStation 1 you hit either select or the start button to see cursors or interactable ladders and the like. That might be slightly helpful.
@“Andy B”#p131276 I think it's best for you to try Chained Echoes. I was surprised because it was not hurting in that aspect and it tries good worldbuilding. I think it was the most striking out of all the turn-based JRPGs that have come out recently.
@"Tradegood"#p131268 Yeah, the tutorial is really bad. I want to try because the demo was truly satisfying in terms of combat but I feel the lore so far has been bland.
Also, I'm about to finish Lost Judgment. I also bought the school expanded stories, so I've got a good idea of what to expect. So far:
All in all, I think it's a really great game, even better than Like a Dragon, and maybe imo the best RGG I've played (but no so far from Yakuza 0, which I'm growing fond of, curiously).
Been exploring the Neo Geo Pocket Color library by scrolling a ROM set and playing anything with an interesting name. Today I landed on Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999, a top-down, arcade-y action RPG with a convoluted weapon upgrade system that requires you catch monsters with a net and feed them to your guns. Certain monsters can even change the elemental alignment of a weapon, sorta like Linkle Liver Story.
So far I enjoy it, but mostly cuz this guy employs me:
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[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/wxt9WA5.png[/IMG][/URL]
He lets me sleep in a spare bed in his crypt :-)
The game itself can be confounding at times. For the first half hour I took five times longer to kill basic enemies than I should have because I failed to equip the first real weapon in the game---one of few instances I can recall where I _wish_ an NPC stopped me to say "don't forget!" I would've also loved to know earlier in the game that the day-night cycle (advanced by sleeping in the aforementioned bed) determines whether you can progress in certain stages. If you come at the wrong time, you gotta take a nap and come back. Weird stuff.
After playing Armored Core (1997) for the past week, I decided to give Titanfall 2 a go. I know nothing about this game, or what it even looks like beyond what is on the cover.
Sea of Stars gets substantially better after the tutorial ended. There‘s really not that much mandatory dialogue afterward, and the stuff that exists strikes a lighthearted tone that works well. I think the main characters are pretty darn boring but the world they exist in seems to have some personality. There’s a weird moment of writing (where they talk about ‘coping’ like someone who is too online for their own good) but it actually ends very quickly.
The combat was getting a little bit stale for me at the exact point when a new party member became available and new spells were unlocked that changed things up. I think the combat system really needed another layer but they seem to have added it. I still don't think that the whole stance break stuff is implemented all that well, but having new characters and more spells definitely helps. I want to break this game's systems wide open, but it feels like the game wants me to take it slowly so I'm trying to match its pace. Hopefully it picks up a little faster because I think it will be a lot of fun.
It's not an 'instant classic' like some are saying, but it's undeniably well made and you can see the passion for it on the screen. I think if you try to go into it with very little expectations you will come away enjoying it more than if you were to go in with people hyping it up.
R-Type Update: After several days of basically no progress, I got to level three tonight!
I’m playing Titanfall 2 with a bit of a furrowed brow.
There is a tutorial, which was easy enough. I’m not going be too down on that, though I would have appreciated if it was optional.
The first proper level, however, is just *another* tutorial going through the same information. Even going so far as to withhold some of your abilities that you just utilized in the first. No profound scrawlings about the game yet. I found this decision *baffling*.
I‘ve been playing the 2009 From Soft classic Ninja Blade.
Man, I love this game.
I bought it on steam back in the day and played a little but not very much.
It’s kind of a silly little joke to myself that when a new From Soft game comes out I instead play an older one that I haven‘t played before jumping into the new game.
It’s super qte-heavy and I‘ve always though qte’s were kinda cool tbh.
Combat‘s just kind of alright and some bosses and can be kind of annoying, but all the weird, janky stuff added together equals something really special to me.
I believe I’m also not playing in the most ideal way, but I can‘t change any settings or else it crashes.
Awhile ago I considered getting an Xbox 360 for some kinect games and non-backwards compatible games I own, and I feel like Ninja Blade would play a little bit better on there, but oh well. Not hindering my enjoyment too much.
The action is very silly and ridiculous, I highly suggest watching some of the cutscenes on YouTube.
There’s missile surfing.