Dragon ruins 2 kicks ass. Everything I loved about the first game tuned up and expanded.
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Have you played Demon Lord Reincarnation? I recall itās the devās first game, if Iām not mistaken.
I second this. Thereās a lot of unnecessary horniness in that game. Like the little bug guy that hides in ladies clothes, how Sakuya gets mostly naked after you help her, etc.
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I think Iām on the home stretch of Nine Sols. Iāve won against Ji, Fuxi, and Nuwa, leading me to the research area which will presumably end with a confrontation with Eigong.
The Ji fight was surprisingly easy. It wasnāt very difficult at all to get him to drop health every time, and his attacks werenāt so tricky either. I was surprised given who the character is, but, as they say, we take those.
Now this was a boss fight! Getting smacked across the screen by Fuxi, even while youāre parrying, is pretty nuts. Fuxi could also one-shot me with that running attack, adding to the tension. It took me quite a few tries to get his moveset down, but once I did, it wasnāt super difficult to get through him without taking a hit. When Nuwa gets involved, the fight becomes super cool, adding this new dimension to all of Fuxiās attack patterns.
After that, I decided it was time to clear out the map. I got all the data chips and started making my way through each section. Iāve now gotten everything everywhere except: 1) the research lab, and 2) the bell door in the Empyrean District. I feel like I may have to look up the latter because Iām not sure how Iām supposed to solve that one. Oh actually Iām waiting for that tree in the pavilion to grow more also.
The story is really coming together. I donāt have full coherent adult thoughts about it yet, but Iāve enjoyed getting a clearer picture of what happened and what Yiās role in it was. And the character stuff at the pavilion has all been great. Big fan of Chiyou.
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finished resident evil 4. good game. i enjoyed it. i missed ONE request somewhere and that kinda ticked me off, but i had a good time.
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I played a couple hours of this and itās very very drakengard 3. I happen to love drakengard 3 but itās not a game known for feeling good in the hands right away
I have to argue abt the tuning. Iām speaking from a solo perspective here so YMMV based on whether you have friends or not. but the time/health economy is so wack that I have to wonder what exactly designers had in mind. for one, death is unbelievably temporally punishing: a long load screen, durability penalties on all your equipment, a hub visit, and then another long load screen, like a full five minutes minimum of lost time. starting out, you have a pretty short health bar (90hp, up from 75 before the first hotfix) that can evaporate in a handful of mistakes, and your only recovery options are pickups that either have a chance to restore a whole 5 health, or executing a parry to restore 10 red health. 10 health is still lower than the average mob does in a single attack, and red health for some frankly incomprehensible reason decays over time. your parry is on a cooldown, your flash step is on a cooldown, your nova is on a cooldown. there is no block button, and your dash is limited by a stamina bar. at base, you have no reasonable way of recovering from mistakes or leaving an encounter with more than you came into it with. to add onto this, defeating enemies ticks up the event timer more quickly than gathering resources, which will end up spawning more adds, and you get mobbed from all directions in this game. the risk/reward on this doesnāt work on paper to begin with, and you donāt have access to a single medkit for at least one full set of runs: thatās eight (nine if you count the world reset) loading screens! even more, your medkits consume resources that come seemingly at random from the same source as your barely consequential heals.
this leads to a opening set of runs where youāre actively encouraged by game mechanics to engage as little as you possibly can in order to save health for the extraction gauntlet which will almost certainly kill you if youāre not ready for it. i donāt mind a hard game or a punishing game, i play STGs. But here they really give you nothing to work with out the gate and spending more time in loading screens than ingame at the outset doesnāt make a good first impression. since the level design is procedural you donāt even get the benefit of memorization or routing information out of a failed set of runs. the acclimation curve is a slot machine and if youāre not lucky youāll be waiting hours before you have a reasonable health pool to work with.
i expect things like auto orbit-lock, a camera reset button, and an appreciable onboarding suite will come with time, but the health/time economy really needs a second pass BC as it is this is one of the most deeply punishing games I have laid hands in in a long time. itās kind of a mess!
edit: collecting prisms does restore your health, which I did not know, and given that itās your primary goal the rhythm of play makes more sense to me now. also, to be fair, the first hotfix made a lot of things abt the game more bearable pretty much immediately, so I have a lot of hope for the future. thereās a solid and fun foundation here and heart machine is good at what they do
3 Likes
I been playing through burning rangers on sega saturn, Dragon Quest XI on switch while doing morning excercise bike runs, and also strangely Star Wars Bounty Hunter remaster on steam!? I have this on gamecube and never got around to finishing it, the steam remaster runs pretty smooth. After watching skeleton crew I wanted to do some star wars stuff.
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Yeah I donāt disagree with most of what you said there but I guess my interaction was a bit more positive. I liked the tension, and having to be cautious with resources, but some balancing is needed. I found stamina recovers fast so you can avoid damage easily if youāre able to keep track of all enemies, and their telegraphs were very visible to facilitate that. If youāre overwhelmed, you can hop on your hoverboard and skeddadle.
It all follows the same design philosophy of Hyper Light Drifter where all actions need to be made with intention or it punishes hesitation and panic.
I think the biggest issue right now is that the new player onboarding comes with an unreasonable amount of friction. This doesnāt follow the same rules as other rogue-lites or action games where you can carry over a lot more knowledge, but itās hard to figure it out if you donāt have time to experiment and fail safely. People bounce off Fromsoft games for the same reason.
They really should fill your heal by default at the start of runs however.
Also the extraction point heals you btw.
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neat! Iāll be honest I didnāt make it to the extraction point enough times to notice it. Iāve played enough now to understand the extraction point is usually accessible by waterway so thereās no reason you canāt make a run for it if things start to get dire
yāknow ever tho I have Complaints I still find the game really fun to play. its very pretty and hooks me for hours and has pso energy. just wish I could skip the hub visit on death or something
I got back into Humankind after the 2 hour try I gave it years ago, itās a neat twist on Civ where you can turn around your strategy every era.
Later game turns are real slow with everything you have to manage, just like civ, and not having a stable civ identiy feels odd; but the resourse system being imported from Endless Space and Endless Legends makes it easy to pick up and the narrator has just the right amount of snark.
tried to land one of the Nomai shuttles in Outer Wilds at Giantās Deep, the water planet with the hurricanes, but somehow the shuttle hit the probe that orbits the planet and sent me into an infernal eternal spin where i couldnāt move. i barely managed to grab the controls again and slid the ball into the rightmost slot, only for the impact to finally kill me lol
iām also now playing Formula One 04 in short bursts getting through the career mode. so far my results are DNF-P1-P2 driving a Toyota
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I hadnāt realized the waterway thing! Thatās such clever design!
Yeah those screens need to be faster. On the other hand, I donāt mind being forced to chill for a second or my ADHD brain is likely to go āOKAY ANOTHER RUN BYEā and not take the time to reflect and learn.
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Itās one of the things Iām most wary of in Civ 7 coming up! I bounced off of Humankind for largely the same reasonāthereās something to me that I really dig and that helps lock me into a Civ game is the stable identity
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I finished MOTHER 3 recently, putting a cap on my time with the MOTHER series. I loved so much about itāI canāt decide if I like it more than MOTHER 1 or not, probably about equallyābut itās an exceptionally hard game to play when going through your own personal grief.
I want to shout out the playable characters for MOTHER 3 though, because what an interesting and diverse crew. Genuinely had me excited throughout that we had a group of characters that wasnāt just a bunch of kids/teens.
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Iām not exactly looking forward to that feature myself, although I understand the interest in wanting to solve the problem of diminishing returns once the more fluid initial stages of the game are complete. Itās been an issue for like 40 years at this point. I think Alpha Centauri and Civ IV probably handled this the best by becoming somewhat different games in the later stages. Not sure how VII reshuffling 3 times a game will help without harming that long-term continuity but weāll see.
Plus, I assume thereāll be an option to pin leaders and civs together in the traditional style. Unless Firaxis has said otherwise that is
2 Likes
Finished Season and been playing quite a chunk of Alan Wake remastered this weekend.
Season, on one side, has a great premise. The idea of an evocative adventure and the tone of impending nostalgia coming up is a great combination to have a more complex experience. The game has immaculate vibes even when the content itself begins to falter, and I think even then Scavengers tried to do their best to correct their mistakes. My issues come down to gameplay: I played it in one sitting (not recommended), and I felt that, while the recorder and the camera are pretty enticing things and original as a concept into the game, the āinspirationsā are really horrid. I donāt feel compelled to order things into a sketchbook because, by doing so, you flatten the idea of the recording itself and it gives you a cheap reward in exchange. I think this and the whole structure are huge caveats to the game experience, but I can excuse the latter due to the issues the studio had towards the sexual scandal accusations. The game, sadly, feels much bigger considering the main area. Luckily, though, the game doesnāt go through much big plot twists and makes everything more āhumaneā: there are no big heroes here, everyone is honest and well-inteded, and I think the game quite benefits itself by talking to several people (I believe they could make a road game in which you are a observer and look around at different people -and well, folk singers used to record through towns in order to then interpret their songs, which itās even showcased through dialogue in the game).
As for Alan Wake, oh, boy. I played the remastered version, and I donāt know whether the original had it or not, but: 1.-I found several QR codes that linked through several overimpressed, onirical, weird videos like those weād see in Control, 2.-I hate that I canāt play the game fully with English voices and had to hear Spanish actors through the main scenes (sorry, but I prefer the original version). That said, the game has surprised me in a good way. Itās very conventional, to the point that it reminds me of 2000s series (hello, Heroes), but, at the same time, I feel this is just a gimmick that they use to do something weirder and less conventional, twisting the idea of a āthriller/horror TV showā. Where the idea begins and when the real does? I think they narratively played that pretty well considering the possible issues with budget they had, and I know Sam Lake was an expert at blending several aesthetics into a game (in this case, I feel this is the first at blending real image with videogame animations, or am I wrong). As for the action, I think itās quite annoying to point out the camera and enemies to weaken and then kill them with guns, but I like it! I like that this is annoying and frustrating and there are several moments when I want to kill Remedyās creators because my lantern consumes its energy way too fast, and the dodge is weird and the AI is always trying to pin you from the sides or even from behind. There are several things that are very old and others that are more actual and are frustrating and enjoyable as a survival horror should be. While Control was better at combat and also more innovative in its approach with showing things, I feel Alan Wake feels more conventional, but also more controlled and self-conscious, and I feel itās a good game so far (Iām at chapter 4).
3 Likes
I finished Nine Sols. Overall, pretty incredible game. Enjoyed the story, music was incredible, and it feels very good in the hand. One of the best metroidvanias Iāve played in a real long time.
Final boss and ending stuff spoilers:
Eigong was a super fun fight to do. You really have to fight for your openings to do any damage at all. I had the jade that did internal damage for perfect parries and I would watch her red health go up and up before I could have an opportunity to counter. In a game that really embodies the fighting game principle of turn taking, she is the most āwait your turnā boss.
The second form is even better. Now sheās got that huge attack and some really interesting actual mix ups. My reactions never got good enough to deal with the dash attack mixup in the big attack and I ended up interrupting the attack with arrows if I could just because I kept getting tagged by that. The dragon punch follow-up she can do after her talisman is so good also, and feels great to parry. Great fight to end it on.
After the credits, I saw that thereās a feature to refight bosses. So, still wanting to do more Nine Sols combat after having just defeated the final boss, I fought Kuafuās boss because I couldnāt remember what it was. Then I decided I would do the Eigong fight again, because it was cool and to prove I could. And Iāll be damned sheās got a new third form. I donāt know if I have it in me to tackle that challenge. Maybe. I dunno. She did some anime stuff immediately that completely rocked me. I feel ready to close the book on Nine Sols, but weāll see how I feel tomorrow.
4 Likes
Glad you liked it!
FYI, if Eigong only had 2 phases, you did not get the good ending.
Oh I see! Do I have to save the humans instead? Or is it something else?
Yes, you have to save the Ape-Men
1 Like