Here we are again (again): the thread where we discuss the games we are playing in 2025

I’ve been playing Etrian Odyssey becuase it emulates on my phone really well and is a perfect way to goof off at work. It lends itself to little 5 minute sprints; chop some wood, grind a little, map out another corridor. I appreciate how it expects that the player’s primary driver is to get deeper into the dungeon. There’s not a ton of dialogue or exposition and little to no handholding or railroading to push you forward; you’re just expected to want to push on by your own volition.

Funny that Citizen Sleeper 2 just dropped. I’ve been trying to get my wife to play the first one with me cause she’s a huge fan of Disco Elysium. Unfortunately, the presentation is not doing much to bring her in- she needs full voice acting and some animations.

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Played through a bit of the RE7 DLC (Banned Footage and Not a Hero)

Surprised at how mini game feeling the banned footage stuff while still offering decent amount of replay value. It’s been fun revisiting these characters.

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You can add me to the list of people who’ve been influenced to try Citizen Sleeper by this thread, but I’m bucking convention by playing the original. Mostly because it was languishing in my library, largely unplayed and weighing on my financial conscience.

I played it shortly after it came out, but I was going through some (unrecognized by me) burnout and decision fatigue at the time, so the whole “make consequential decisions with finite, semi-random resources” gameplay loop wasn’t really attractive at the time. I’m enjoying it now, though! I think it strikes just the right balance between visual novel and board game to keep me engaged - strip out the story and I wouldn’t have motivation to continue, pull out the mechanics and my attention would wander. It’s a really nice tightrope of design so far!

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Same here, I’ve not played the first one. Why not play something newer and join in on the discussion. This thread is going on a citizen sleeper crusade.

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I’ll say that I really liked the first Citizen Sleeper, but the actual tabletop mechanics didn’t mean much to me and I just wanted to read the story and enjoy the atmosphere/music/writing. I worry that CS2 will be an inferior experience for me because of the extra game-ification.

EDIT: When I read an interview where the dev said they added the stress mechanic to add more tension, I decided to wait for a sale on this one. The last one was such a chill experience, and that’s what I liked it for.

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there is an easy mode that reduces the effects of stress for whenever you decide to pick it up

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Yeah, I basically have to reset the game, and just to clarify I really love this game. It has what I love in games: deep mechanics that require thought, I’m perfectly fine with that. I’ve gotten myself into a real pickle and learned early on about the stress mechanic, using dice resourcefully, and gathering supplies and fuel. However, I’m very unsure what the end-cycle options “gain supplies” or “gain fuel” do. Do I just gain one of the chosen resources when I end a cycle?"

There’s a random chance (I’m not sure if the % is ever surfaced) that your ship’s crew can gather some of whichever you have selected there between cycles. So if you don’t have max fuel and you have them on “gather fuel”, maybe they’ll find some.

For most of the game I left it on cryo, and only changed it in some situations where I was pressed for fuel or supplies and I needed to spend elsewhere

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I appreciate reading your thoughts on Hyper Light Breaker! I liked Hyper Light Drifter and loved Solar Ash. The reviews are pretty discouraging though. Out of curiosity have you felt much desire to return to it in the state that it’s in? Or was it just something you felt like trying out and now waiting until more substantial updates?

I trust that the hoverboarding and hack-and-slashiness will feel good, but hearing that it’s leaning hard into an unfinished abstract story relying heavily on symbols and a grindy loop where you repeat missions over and over for gear doesn’t bode too well for me liking it.

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Been a while, so time for an update on CyberTom in Cyberpunk: A Night’s Tale. Just wanted to mention this post:

I’m loving this game and loving writing about this game so while I said:

I think it’s going to be more than seven parts. There’s just too much in the game and I haven’t even gotten to Phantom Liberty yet! So onto…

Part 4: You’re breathtaking

Yes it’s a Keanu Reeves special! I don’t think you can talk about Cyberpunk without mentioning Johnny Silverhand and his part in the game. I know not everyone likes Keanu - I do, so maybe this will be a bit biased towards him but I’m writing it, so there! This next bit may contain some spoilers, I will try to avoid as many as possible or blur them out, for anyone who’s not played either the game or the same missions that I have.

As I mentioned before, this game is huge. The entire world seems to have something to do around every corner, from finding an NPC that needs help with something to a random encounter with some lowlifes who for some reason don’t take a shine to me and need to be dealt with. One part of the game I have loved doing is exploring the world, having got the boundaries on my motorbike a few times and walking around the heart of the city to see what I can find. It used to be because there’s so much in there and I am excited about finding something new - now I realise it’s because there may be a chance Johnny shows up and makes the experience a whole lot better! Yes you can find someone who wants you to rescue his brother without killing anyone and that’s great as is, but having Johnny narrate his opinions and feelings about what you’re doing and why, makes it even better. The same as a mission which involves creating a new BrainDance from someone who is really taking it to a higher level. My V is not like him personality wise, I think I’m playing more like myself and trying to see the good in every situation and how to resolve it peacefully, but Johnny is the total opposite. I’m not sure if I went with the same mentality of mutually assured destruction as he does, I’d enjoy his quips as much as I do. But that’s my nice story, I’ll tell it to Reader’s Digest.

At this point I think I’m quite close to the end of the game. I’ve finished the story lines for Panam, Takemura and Judy so based on how it’s developing I don’t see much more left to do aside from the specific mission that leads to Phantom Liberty and in turn, the end of the game. However I am taking my time and exploring the world just in case when I do find a random mission, Johnny appears. It’s not my main reason for wanting to do missions outside of following the main storyline, however it is a nice bonus where a lot of open world games get you to go somewhere to do something for someone just because. You do get rewards such as weapons and EuroDollars, but the reward for me is having my imaginary friend make me chuckle as I go. And also arguing with him along the way when I make a choice or say something he wouldn’t have, to then be scolded for doing so but also agreeing with me when I do.

Like most things in life, you can enjoy this game without Keanu Reeves. But like most things in life, it can be made better with Keanu Reeves in it! It’s hard to critique his performance because I really like it and think it’s just what the game needed both from a character and the actor who plays him. I’m sure they could have gotten a different actor to play Johnny Silverhand but we’ll never know and that’s a good thing. Even when he’s not saying anything, some of the actions Johnny performs really add to the mood and emotion of a scene (I’m thinking the Sinnerman mission specifically - one single action he does really made me laugh) and not having that character would be fine, but just makes it a bit better. Or a lot better.

I’m not sure how the ending of the game will effect my relationship with Johnny Silverhand but I am really excited to find out. I don’t want to rush the game to finish it, but I do want to get as much quality time with him as I can. If that means randomly meeting people in hotel rooms, finding BDs on the floor and connecting whatever they are directly into my head, turning against whoever I hold nearest and dearest, or simply making my way downtown, walking fast as faces pass 'til I’m homebound, if I can do with Keanu it’ll be a bit better.

Until next time, stay safe on the streets of Night City everyone!

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Okay, I did it. I played Insert Credit’s #1 Favorite Game of All Time, Earthbound

You can praise me now.

I really enjoyed my time with it! I have some lingering thoughts that are bouncing around which may or may not add up to something. My mind drifted to a lot of different places and comparisons while I was playing so here’s an attempt to reconcile some of those:

I think upon visiting any sort of media as heralded as Earthbound there’s naturally a little bit of distance at first - a sort of feeling that the game belongs to someone else, not you. It can be a little hard to calibrate yourself, especially with a nagging preoccupation of “am I liking this thing as much as I’m supposed to?”.
Luckily, it didn’t take too long for me to like the game. Comparing to a game of similar stature, Chrono Trigger went down a little bit easier when I played it a few years back, but I had some of those same feelings then as well.

I like the 90s Americana-ness (no pun). Even with the current 90s nostalgia oversaturation, I felt very comforted by the aesthetic. Pizza parlors really used to be the third place… It brought to mind a few 90s artifacts like Clarissa Explains it All and The Adventures of Pete and Pete that I haven’t thought about in years and certainly not recently or enough to know if they are apt comparisons.
What’s interesting is that Earthbound often feels like a parody of the 90s made decades later, accentuating simple things (e.g. landlines) that just don’t really exist that way anymore. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with regards to whether there was something satirical going on here or not.
Catherine was a comparison my mind went to because that game has a real bizzaro version of ““Brooklyn”” that kinda raises the same question… maybe the Japanese just think we’re like that. I don’t know. Brooklyn? Without Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, or Shoshanna???
The other place my mind went was The Sims and how Will Wright specifically said somewhere that it is not commenting on consumerism/American suburban life via a 1950s pastiche, which, like… what is this then??

Where I really started loving the game was in the last 10-15% of the runtime. I’d liked the mix of fantastical elements in a grounded setting, but the more surreal and somber places the game goes (e.g. Lumine Hall, Magicant, the Ending) in the final few hours are what really stuck out to me. I particularly liked one of the final moments, when after defeating Giygas the game doesn’t just end but makes you teleport to Onett and walk home.

I mostly enjoyed the story of Earthbound. By the end, I felt as though both Porky and Giygas were too slight and the eight melody macguffins were a little too close to eight Kantonian gym badges to really earn all that much praise. I enjoyed the journey though!
I think the game has been done a disservice by those who lead with “it’s funny!” or “it’s quirky!”. The game has its funny moments but the quality is more consistent on the somber side than the funny side. The elephant in the room is Undertale. There were a number of moments when I felt like Earthbound’s humor veered into too quirky and too winking territory and all of the unpleasantness of Undertale would come rushing in. These were the absolute lowest parts of the experience for me - the few moments when I’d question if I even liked the game. I don’t want to penalize Earthbound for the sins of its sons but Undertale came to mind much more frequently while playing Earthbound than, say, any of the games inspired by Chrono Trigger came to mind while playing Chrono Trigger.

I want to also touch on two other aspects of the game: the item management system and the combat. I see both as imperfect systems that are sometimes enjoyable because of their imperfections, but ultimately grate on the player more than they need to.
With respect to the items, I like that you’re constrained, having a limited number of slots and being forced to use some of those slots on key items. It’s a nice approach to anti-hoarding. But it is way too annoying to move/sell/equip items in this game. And I ran into the issue of the Escargo storage running out of space because there’s just so many key items you don’t need by the end of the game. Compounding this issue is that the game throws so much superfluous crap at you and with very thin item descriptions (the “Monkey’s Love” item says “can be used in battle.” So helpful) it’s hard to know what items do, how many times they can be used, when you can dump them, etc. There’s so much bloat that I ended up not even touching half the stuff. I’m sure “Trout Yogurt” is a joke well worth the punchline but it’s clutter and I don’t want it in my inventory.
As for combat, I’ve never been partial to this style of traditional turn-based (select everyones’ moves and then speed/randomness gives you an order). On the whole though, there’s enough stuff here to make battles interesting and with a full party, the battles have a very nice rhythm to them. It takes much too long to get to a full party, but… whatever.
The much-lauded scrolling HP is cool but kind of a nothingburger for how much everyone talks about it. In the early game when the enemies are doing 30 damage… that stops scrolling before the animation is even over. Up until the endgame it’s only really a factor with the exploding enemies. In the grand scheme of things you get maybe 5 hours out of a 35 hour RPG where that mechanic is present and functional. I like it though - just would tweak the implementation.
I have two main beefs with the combat:
First, kinda like the items, the game throws way too many options at you. There are so many PSI abilities and it’s hard to learn how they work (esp the defensive ones) because the enemies are very squishy and don’t do much to test you. A lot of those abilities sat unused for most/all of the game and without thorough descriptions, it’s hard to know why I should care about them.
Second, the numbers/progression in the game deflate the fun quite a bit. It’s hard to feel accomplished/strategic when most of the time it feels like the game is just making up numbers. The first time you’ll see this is through the every-fourth-level-up thing the game is doing, but there’s little things sprinkled throughout the game all the way until the end. In the final battle Ness took 100 damage from an attack, defended the next turn, and took 150 damage from the same attack (???). Boss HP seems to vary wildly with the only consistency being that none of them have enough. Multi-Bottle Rockets are probably the most egregious example of a made up number, doing 600% of my next strongest attack, essentially killing the need to battle, strategize, or use any of the mechanics at all. There’s a moment toward the end of the game when Ness undergoes character development and the game just starts inflating his stats to astronomical levels (“Sweet! Gained 350 HP!”) - it’s supposed to be heartfelt moment but because of the game’s Whose Line Is It Anyway-esque approach to combat (rules are made up and the points don’t matter), it ended up being the funniest moment of the playthrough
Overall, I see these issues as failed implementations of interesting ideas. While they do damper the RPG-ness of Earthbound, there’s still a good RPG here that understands the strengths of the genre. I did not come away from this feeling how I felt with Undertale - a game whose anti-RPG missteps are due to hating and misunderstanding the genre and thus failing to satirize it.

Okay no one is reading by this point but finally I want to touch on the Persona 3 Reload of it all.
When playing an older game it’s really tempting to try to fix it in your head, to clear up any bit of fuzziness. And in my head, while playing Earthbound, I’d sometimes picture a version of the game with that new Link’s Awakening/Super Mario RPG style that looks like those original Earthbound clay figures. NPCs would have little (…) dialogue bubbles above their head that would grey out when you exhaust all of their dialogue. Escargo Express wouldn’t be the most annoying thing ever. You could buy and sell multiple items at the same time. Ness would be voice acted by Timothee Chalamet.
But… Persona 3 Reload… which is a good game, but even as someone who hadn’t played FES it left me a little cold with how clean it was. Earthbound’s fuzziness provides a lot of charm. Something like the “talk to” command was a little off-putting at first but grew on me. While I’m sure there are ways they could do an updated version that still feels true to the original, I don’t have the knowledge to know which Jenga blocks to pull while keeping the thing intact. So maybe it’s best to only think about the game I did play because, well, I really liked that game

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The structure of Mother 2 makes a lot more sense to me personally (and also to the game’s detriment in a way) when I think of it less as its own game and more as a SNES reimagining of Mother 1. There are enough winks and nods that suggest that this isn’t the case, but it’s still there looming in my mind, and the eight melodies stands out in particular as something that Mother 2 doesn’t need.

I know exactly what the melodies in Mother 1 were for, and it’s hugely emotionally impactful to get them all and find out what they’re used for. Mother 2? I had to look up, just now, what they were for, and that’s probably a testament to how unimportant they were in my mind.

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Had you cared to consult a wiki, you would know that Catherine is set in Neo-Brooklyn

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Heck yeah I rolled credits on Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth tonight after 64 hours! I went from not liking it very much to enjoying it quite a bit! I think I’ll take a break before I go back and tidy up some side quests as some stage.

There is some really solid character work here and my god Barret is just a beautiful man. Keeping it vague but I was tearing up seeing each party member facing their individual trials.

The pacing really worked for me when I decided to ignore a lot of the Chadley content… I really wish there was an option to prevent him from calling you once you’re done scanning a couple of rocks. I also focused on doing Tifa related side quests.

To be negative though this game has cemented the idea that I just do not like Square’s action choreography. Everything is ramped up to 11 - which is fine - but I wish they were a bit more selective with it. I’m not longer that kid watching Advent Children fight scenes in my highschool library (although I wish I was?). People jumping around in the air confuses and scares me now.

An example that comes to mind is the Dyne encounter. The original was real somber and confronting. Almost like hanging with someone you like who ends up drinking too much and their dark passenger takes over and start sharing some psycho shit. Real scary flight or fight kind of stuff. But in this Remake he is shouting and grafting towers to his hand creating tornadoes. It can be a bit cheesy and I think less is more sometimes. And I say this aware that I’m talking about an argument between two dudes with guns for arms.

It will be fascinating too see what the final instalment will be like. Don’t really care too much about what that ending is implying but I’m along for the ride. Will Advent Children still be canon after this? Is there a way I can play Before Crisis in 2025? Will they re-release Dirge of Cerberus? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

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Someone (Kitase, maybe?) has said the intent is for the game to “link up” with Advent Children, so I expect it’ll stay canon at least. I’m definitely awaiting the third installment with some trepidation, though. The entire Remake trilogy sort of hinges on what they do with it now, and I would like for it to be remembered as Square-Enix’s return to form, rather than another addition to a growing list of games falling short of prior titles

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It was the latter for sure. I created a “Waiting for 1.0” category in Steam and stuck it in there until it’s ready. I think you nailed it, the game is fun to play, but it is barebones right now.

I don’t expect much out of the story. reading reviews, there seems to be some rose tinted glasses regarding Heart Machine’s story telling. Drifter was never a narrative master piece and I don’t think it wanted to be. It was a well executed hook to get the player to buy in, but the narrative was hardly present for most of the game. Solar Ash was a little more ambitious but it was clear that the story was never the focus there either. No clue what the plan is for Breaker.

And it’s certainly grindy by its nature of being a rogue-lite. It’s cool how they managed to generate these worlds in such a way that you can explore, but it’ll never be as good to wander as a hand crafted experience. It’s fun to explore the map and I like that it will eventually force you to generate a new one to keep things fresh. It’s a cool loop, but a punishing one.

Sometimes I’ll buy an early access game because it’s obvious the devs aren’t interested in leaving early access anytime soon and the game is good enough right now (IE Valheim or Project Zomboid) and this isn’t one of those.

Knowing they went through some layoffs after publisher issues with Embracer, my guess is they never wanted to go into early access in this early of a state, but they badly need the money.

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I spent a little time with Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake yesterday and today now that I’ve finished Rise of the Ronin—not a great deal of time, mind, but enough to have come to the conclusion that games of this sort are not particularly for me

For one, the HD-2D style isn’t really my jam: I didn’t like it in Octopath Traveler or other similar RPGs, and I don’t think I care for it in remakes either. When it comes to this Dragon Quest, it makes me wish I had the re-release package of the first three games they put on Switch semi-recently instead. There’s something uncanny about the marriage of 2D sprites and 3D environments which detracts from the experience for me, even if many of the individual elements of artistry on display are good in a vacuum. I do not in general place much of a premium on pixel art in the modern era, however (and in fact generally find it to be a negative when it comes to the countless independent pixel art throwback games), so I’m certainly outside the intended audience by default in at least that way

And for two, well…this probably was not the best introduction to Dragon Quest I could have chosen. While I am more of an old-head when it comes to the design ethos of many older games (and RPGs in particular) than I am about their graphics, this game is very plainly a NES-era title despite its HD-2D veneer, and I find it difficult to find such an experience engaging—it is simply too old. That faithfulness can be a strength for someone wanting to revisit an experience from their youth, but I’m not coming to Dragon Quest III in that frame of mind. Even if I were, I’m not sure that would be enough, as I similarly put a short amount of time into the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy before recognizing that I had had enough of that kind of old, Nintendo-era JRPG experience in my life to not particularly desire more

With all of that in mind, this is likely to be one of, if not the last throwback titles of this nature that I purchase. I’d been souring on them (and remakes / remasters) as an enterprise for some time, since just about all of the ones I’ve purchased have sat on my shelves gathering dust. Some of these, I am happy to own as a means of replacing games I’ve lost from my personal collection over the years. For others, though, I’ve come to realize that by and large I want my gaming experiences to be sufficiently new or, when it comes to remakes, to be sufficiently transformative, and Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake is not particularly either of those things despite it being in a franchise that is otherwise new to me

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I had my very first run of Rogue via the Epyx’s Rogue release on Switch, which was recently on sale for a couple bucks. This one has an Atari ST-like graphical interface, and replicates the PC inputs pretty well with various wheels for inputting characters (I say as someone who has never seen the PC Rogue in person). It holds up pretty well, I’d say – neat to see the DNA strands, like throwing items and using scrolls to identify items (Mystery Dungeon), and potions of various colors with unknown effects (Isaac). For its age, I was surprised by the richness of my first little dalliance; I got a whole bunch of floors deep, lucked out with a mystery scroll that teleported me away from a bunch of slimes that endlessly replicated themselves, ran from a giant rattlesnake at 1HP, killed the next rattle snake I saw with a fire spell, and starved to death.

Still feels pretty emergent in all its little systems and vagaries. This one does include some soundtrack options, including a nice synthy vibey one, but I’ve been playing it at night with a tape in the cassette deck to really get that “being there” feeling.

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I’m not a fan at all of the HD-2D thing, but I’ve got to say the other coats of paint that Square have put on their classic titles are equally or more hideous. The sprites either look bad in a 90’s PC edutainment kind of way like the DQ 1-2-3 package, or the graphical style is generic cellphone game bad. Square has proven time and time again they can’t be trusted with remastering their back catalog, they manage to sap a lot of the original games’ charm and insert a lot of soullessness while introducing new issues.

I’m currently playing through the pixel remaster of Final Fantasy VI to check out the changes to the music and it makes me sad that this is the manner in which many people will now be experiencing this game for the first time. They could’ve made a low-effort emulation of the SNES original instead of the pixel remaster and it would be superior in most every way.

Also, yeah DQIII probably isn’t the best introduction, a lot of these games just aren’t approachable for modern audiences. For 99% of people you probably just want to play DQXI and if you like that enough, work your way backwards in some fashion from there.

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:+1: yeah I think should you find yourself giving Mother 3 a shot (which you should, it’s very good) you’ll find it bearing out your reasoning. It’s more concise and pointed than Earthbound, which has its benefits but you lose something in the doing so.

I think the posthumous re-appreciation of the game has something to do with this. For those of us who did play the game around release, it was literally Time For Klax, so there was nothing retrospective about it. In fact I think there’s a fair amount of 1980s Spielberg in there too (Mother is a product of the late 1980s, and fwiw that game is set in the 1900s). But because Earthbound was part of the first wave of emulation-enabled nostalgia-based video game appreciation it got I think a little roughly handled. I think the strength of the setting is that surface level placidity - which is paper thin in many places - but then it’s shot through with really strange characters and events that can be kind of quaint at times but also veer into menace. Some implicit subversion of “the end of history” and both the appeal of and the inadequacies of its aesthetics CC:

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