@“bwood”#p147352 a ton of great recommendations in this thread here. That Dragon Quest V port (and translated I believe?) for DS rules. It‘s absolutely gorgeous. I’ve also been digging Giana Sisters, a cute platformer that's a little floaty but the levels are short and sweet.
i more or less finished my time with we love katamari reroll, and wow what a great game. i didn‘t realize it came out in 2023, so i think it might actually be my fav of last year. i think i’ve said this elsewhere, but i did not expect so much delight to be packed into every aspect of the game. i never found it to be saccharine or twee, but it did push the right buttons saccharine and twee things aim to press.
i'm not eager to start anything meaty with LAD coming out at the end of the month. this _would_ be a great time to play something on the retro handheld i bought last year, but when i turned it on for the first time in a few weeks the left joystick and select buttons stopped working 😭 a factory reset did the trick but it left me too discouraged to set everything up again.
i started playing the link's awakening dx gbc edition that's on the nintendo online gameboy emulator thinking i hadn't played it before. about twenty minutes in, i realized i had played it before as a kid, perhaps multiple times. but i'm enjoying it and i really [liked this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65LXFhqtt5k&list=PLDF2556A8C45BF850&index=5) that played in the beginning. i wish it was the overworld theme.
@“DaveedNoo”#p147459 I‘ve expressed to some friends pretty recently that I play the Yakuza games on easy because it really just makes sense narratively, it’s still fun, and because I‘m bad at video games.
I have a tendency to start off on normal but change to easy after the first actual boss.
I usually have some trouble with the last few bosses on easy and I imagine I’d get very frustrated on a higher difficulty, unless the arena is full of couches or something.
I can tell I'm getting very close to the end of Atri: My Dear Moments and while I didn't love how it got >!a little Chobits-y!< I've found myself very attached to the main characters to the point where it doesn't really matter, I also think it's handled in a pretty interesting way.
Regardless, of visual novels I've read I feel like this may have the best way of describing a familiar, yet foreign world almost exclusively through character interactions.
I‘m 45 hours into Berseria and I’m all ready to call it one of my favourite RPGs ever (or rather it‘s a CPG: a Character Playing Game). It’s the party characters. They all carry so much depth to their emotional expression and backstories and dynamics between each other. I‘ve loved watching them grow. Velvet seeing Phi as his own person. Her one-sided rivalry with Eleanor. Eleanor’s budding respect for Velvet. Eizen‘s mentoring of Phi. Rokurou and Eizen’s bromance. I know Magilou has more to her waiting to be revealed, but she has definitely been building into a very intriguing character. There are so many great moments along the way to let these people shine. The game‘s dense with them. I suppose it’s possible the story could still shit the bed before it‘s over but I’m not getting the sense that‘s in store for me from anything I’ve read about the game.
I think maybe I read someone say the game doesn't have a very strong villain. We admittedly don't see much of him throughout the story to this point. Sometimes that's how it is though. You spend all your time plotting and seething over the object of your revenge but they've rarely in the same room with you so the glimpses you get are all you'll see. It's true to life, I dunno!!
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I also started up *Witcher 3* again and kicked off the Evil's Soft First Touches quest from the *Hearts of Stone* expansion. Having an ok time with that. I love returning to this game's medieval not-Poland. The colours and dynamic time of day and **wind** are all so effortlessly beautiful.
@“mtvcribs”#p147550 yeah, it should be Easy for Kiryu to beat up all the thugs. After all he's in a lot of games!
@“Tradegood”#p147506 Heck yeah. Scenes like this are what make good Otome games really cool. It‘s not just about the romance and the kissing. It’s about the in-depth philosophizing and character building.
I‘ve never actually played through the original Final Fantasy VII, but since playing the remake and the small side story I decided to give it a whirl. I’m hoping to have a good bit done by the time Rebirth comes out.
@“RubySunrise”#p147538 I'm tossing up between playing either Metroid Dread, Metroid Prime Remake, or Dragon Quest V on the DS.
I booted up DQV sometime last year and it's a gorgeous looking game.
You‘re all mean to me when I say I like the Ratchet and Clank games, but I just played Rift Apart (2021) to 100% completion on Steam Deck and had the best time. It’s not substantially different to any of the other games in the series (12-ish hours of platforming and blowing things up with tight controls and good graphics) but I‘m happy that there’s another one of them now.
@“billy”#p147653 I would never make fun of you for this! (To be fair I don’t make fun of anyone). R&C games are fun and do exactly what they say on the tin, often with polished art and always with tight controls. The only turnoff about them for me is that they have that ‘Sony vibe’ that so many PlayStation first and pseudo first party games have that I can’t exactly describe adequately.
@“billy”#p147653 isn’t one of the hallmarks of Dragon Quest games—games a lot of people love—that they all play in or around the same, have a very similar set of enemies, and offer simple stories everyone can enjoy?
It’s cool to play games that are familiar to you.
@“Karasu”#p147660 Interesting! I get the ‘Sony Vibe’ from many games but not Ratchet and Clank. For me the Sony Vibe is boring AAA walking simulators gussied up as action games with Important Stories for Adults.
@“thebryanjzx90”#p147477 my impressions of Lufia 1/2 are still way back in the 5th grade in the year 2001 on an emulator on a crappy windows 98 pc at my best friend's dirty poor kid house. Looking forward to finally giving it a shot one day.
@"antillese"#p147515 @"Emily"#902 Sonic 1 and Sonic CD are my absolute favorites. It is the most satisfying to fly around in those games. Sonic 1 would be perfect if it wasn't for those two ruins zones breaking the flow so badly. But I think they have the most fun mechanics and physics and ramps. A couple summers ago I had a huge sonic kick where I played through Sonic 1,CD,2,3+knuckles, mania and Pocket Adventure on hardware with original controllers and got all the emeralds for the first time. I highly recommend it when you think you're ready for Sonic to "click" for you finally. Don't be afraid to use level select or debug cheats that exist in the original games! Be warned though, once sonic "clicks" in that way, you will understand why Sonic Freaks are a thing and you may begin to fear that you have become one.
@"billy"#p147653 I won't be mean to you. I haven't played it since it was new (you just reminded me it was one of three PS2 games I had early on-- KH, spiderman, and R&C) and they're so charming. nothing wrong with having nostalgia for the Post-3D-Platformer-World where they began grafting guns onto our stretchy gumboys.
@“billy”#p147664 I‘m probably the only person, period, who has my particular view of the ’Sony vibe‘ (although the idea is interesting enough that I’m wondering if there‘s enough for its own thread), but it’s a little bit like how you never look at a first party Nintendo game and mistake it for an Xbox game, you know? It‘s not exactly a negative, but it’s usually not a positive either.
Anyway I'm still cooking on my Atelier game! I was up against a boss last night that in retrospect encapsulates a lot of what I find fun when I find a turn based system fun: the boss ate my lunch the first time through, and in a second try, I tried an approach that ended up being intuitively correct, but still lost because I figured it out too late. On the third try, I absolutely wiped the floor with the, using said approach. The only thing I enjoy more is when I can figure out what I'm doing wrong and adjust my strategy inside the first attempt, but in this case the retributive damage I incurred from using what turned out to be the worst possible approach was way too high.
So yeah, close to 30 hours in and it's still fun!
@“treefroggy”#p147675
ill probably find a way to play through the rest of those 2D sonics on my 3DS
maybe play sonic mania on my steam deck too
the 3D sonics seem like a whole other beast that i'll also get to in time, just out of curiosity
I finished Jusant and Hi-fi Rush right as the year was ending, and welcomed this year playing Dragon Quest 11! I‘m liking it although it literally puts me to sleep some times. It’s weird. Maybe it's the battle system?
Atelier discussion:
I just looked, and the Atelier Marie remake has a DLC pack containing an entire game, the first english release of the original Atelier Marie that I‘m aware of, and it looks like a very bad port graphically. There’s also a fan translation of just the PS2 port of Atelier Marie 1 & 2, but that version has different graphics than the original.
@"Emily"#902 I could imagine that circle pad really doing sonic some justice. My favorite 2D sonic is Pocket Adventure, which, on neogeo pocket color, uses that clicky micro switch and it feels so right. So much so that I got that bluetooth neogeo pad that came out last year mainly to try playing sonic with it.
Finally, afters years, I‘ve finished Atri: My Dear Moments.
I regret saying that I didn’t like how it became a romance story.
The romance adds a personal touch to a story that is essentially about hope.
I still don‘t think it needed the romance, but who cares, the story didn’t even have to be written at all.
The true ending made me almost cry and isn‘t that what life’s all about?
A wonderful, emotional journey through a beautiful post-apocalyptic future with a scary lady, a childhood friend, and a robot.
Anyway, immediately afterwards I finally booted up LISA, which I'm pretty sure I've had since literally the day it came out in 2014.
I need to sleep, but man, that was a pretty cool intro.
Looking forward to playing more of it.
i‘ve been finding myself progressively more irritated with mario wonder. most of it is too easy and feels like a theme park ride, and then the difficulty will spike up randomly; i suppose this is because the Hard Stages are supposed to be optional challenges rather than parts of the organic difficulty curve. i do not like this method of setting difficulty because i don’t like the sensation of a game dangling stuff in front of me and saying ‘you don’t need this to finish but don't you want it?’ it feels a little bit condescending; like, i love celeste because it is hard and does not pretend to be otherwise. mario wonder feels like it wants things both ways. i do think i will finish it but i needed a short break from it.
so, i started playing _[wirewalk()↳](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1636700/Wirewalk/)_ after having picked it up last year for less than a dollar. shoutout games for cheapskates thread. i really like it! it's a 2d _zelda_-like, specifically taking after the gameboy ones. it's set in a cyberpunky kind of world ravaged by computer viruses, in which my job is to hack into malfunctioning systems and fix them by finishing dungeons. so sort of _mega man battle network_ vibes too. it's extremely charming - great chunky monocolor gameboy graphics (with different color palettes you can collect hidden throughout the game, which is a fun touch) and a really good chiptune soundtrack. and its dungeons are good! the first one was set in a video game console for a dog, so all the enemies were cats and i got keys by kicking around soccer balls; the second was in a cryptocurrency mining computer (lol) so the special weapon was a pickaxe and i got to ride around in mine carts while fighting moles. the puzzles in the second dungeon are particularly fun, playing with the minecart layouts and pickaxing through walls to open new pathways. it has some of the energy of Insert Credit Official 21st Best Game Of All Time With Metacritic Score Below 80 _anodyne_, just more content to play around within the _zelda_ sandbox instead of subverting it. fun stuff!
Played a couple missions of From Soft‘s 2002 pseudo-on-rails mech shooter Murakumo: Renegade Mech Persuit for the Xbox tonight. Kind of underwhelmed. The cityscape is impressively dense, especially for how fast you’re speeding through it, but movement doesn't feel all that great and all you seem to be doing is giving chase. The gameplay seems exceedingly simple.
Fyi the main draw for me with this game were the vibes. The blue skies and bright colours and gleefully weaving between skyscrapers, not to mention the [Do As Infinty song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMQ26mQqDWk) attached to it. I don't know if the track ever plays in-game though. It would be a shame if it didn't.