@Gaagaagiins#13049 The original AM2 Shen Mue release plan
@Fishie#13069 IS this Suzuki's official notes
ES Skyrim is (I believe) a good game, but I have bounced off of it every time I have tried to enjoy it.
@Gaagaagiins#13076 from 18 years ago, pretty sure things have changed since then
Remembered one yesterday: Stardew Valley.
I‘ve yet to finish my plays of HM: More Friends of Mineral Town and it’s connectivity with HM: Another Wonderful Life. Also the Rune Factory series. So until I complete those ones, I don‘t need another, US made farming sim not on legacy hardware. I see people getting hella addicted to it and raving about it, some people telling me I HAVE to play it…. That’s alright… I see that one major draw is that it‘s more user friendly than anything that came before, so that remedies a lot of frustration for players. Well, I play old ass games that no one else does every day and enjoy it, so I don’t really need a more user-friendly, addicting experience. I'll stick with my antiquated reward systems. I find the gba-gcn link benefits of AWL and MFoMT to be highly rewarding. Unlocking music from HM1 and HM64 is really cool.
I respect that, but Stardew is genuinely great. And its like 1 degree away from a live game with the amount of post release support it has received. I admit, I haven‘t played it, but my partner does obsessively so I’m pretty familiar with it. I think you might end up appreciating it more than you'd think. But I 1000% understand just having too many games to play not even being able to get to the ones you actually want to, let alone some odorous recommendation from the internet at large.
Stardew rules because it’s an actual modern take on the genre which Story of Seasons has been struggling greatly to be. I absolutely love the old HM games and revisit them often. But Stardew is the first time I’ve played a farming game since back in the day that legitimately felt like I was experiencing new, and genuinely good, stuff from these kinds of games. I do get not being interested in it though! Nothing wrong with wanting to stick to the classics because honestly they still have tons of value. I revisit HM64 very often just because it gives me something very specific that I love.
fwiw I don’t actually think it’s the user friendliness of Stardew that's the major draw. It’s the characters! The events! All the great stuff to experience. Better QOL is nice and all but it’s not the Big Reason to play it.
don‘t know if this makes sense and I like stardew, but found its eagerness to please kind of wearying and worked against the game’s ability to project its own identity to the point of graying into like a facebook game kind of thing
@yeso#14390 Not really sure what you mean by eagerness to please. And honestly comparing it to Farmville is brutal lol
I mean it gives you so much “niceness” all the time to the point that I started to feel catered to, and the material farm experience started to feel more and more abstracted. That's what I meant by the farmville comparison, not that it was bad or exploitative, just that it started to feel like going through procedural motions
I do like stardew and it‘s great that that fella was so successful. It’s really an impressive achievement. Just reporting a drawback to the possibly “in my view” overgenerous posture by the developer
Would say that smash bros has a similar dilemma at least to my tastes
@yeso#14396 So does it kind of boil down to a lack of focus? I can definitely see that, it‘s a kitchen sink game. To me the way it lets you tackle your farm with the kind of freedom it does, after literally my entire life w/these games being pretty opposite lol, was a flavor of the genre that I had been really wanting to see. But yeah I see where you’re coming from!
I looooooooove Stardew Valley, but I would be hard pressed to say that it was good in any way that the better Harvest Moon games are, which is not an indictment of it so much as it is an accurate description I feel is undeniable.
It's like someone took a _Harvest Moon_ colouring book and they coloured it exquisitely but did not go a smidge outside of the lines. Like, I despise the concept of copyrighting gameplay mechanics genre conventions but like... its origin as a conscious recreation of _Harvest Moon_ makes sense, because this **is** a _Harvest Moon_ game. It's downright plagiaristic.
And I love it. I know I'm being pandered to, but I don't care, the new _Harvest Moon_ games are totally irrelevant now even if they're secretly good or whatever, and really, I just wanna brush my cow and then have her give more milk in a year because she knows how much I love her.
To boil it down, just the fact that I love Hm: A Wonderful Life says it all. That game simplifies the design and uses extremely slow animations for often very little output, but tons of atmosphere. It‘s almost like it was made to be played in conjunction in the extremely fast paced gameplay of Mineral Town, which is more like what Stardew Valley is I guess. It also probably doesn’t hurt that I played both a lot as a kid, and I want to replay them and get good endings.
this is all compounded by my enjoyment of the river king games which share assets with harvest moon..
and I love those because they are Pokémon but if fishing was the main mechanic.
Is Wonderful Life more of a Hang Out Game with A Hang Out Place, perhaps?
It probably says something that I think Back to Nature is at least tied as best HM game with the also excellent Harvest Moon 64, which is generally the game people seem to talk about and remember the most.
@sabertoothalex#14403 no it‘s more like too much frictionless amiability causes me to become conscious that I’m using software designed to be the ideal harvest moon experience rather than making an approach at and through an art/media object
Went back and forth thinking about this for a while because I had to eliminate games I really like but hate certain aspects of, games everyone likes but I think are bad, etc etc.
I settled on Undertale, as a game that I think is very obviously well designed, knocks it out of the park in terms of visuals, music, everything. And the writing is totally fine. But something about it, whether it's the "big twist" being a little too telegraphed for me, or the general discourse surrounding it and the fandom, or maybe just being old has led to a sort of emotional distance between me and the game. Outside of listening to a few of the songs every now and again, I have no desire to ever talk about it or replay it again.
Another reason for picking it is that, similar the Doki Doki Literature Club, the whole "indie game that's secretly evil" schtick wore thin in flash games 15 years ago so even though it's really only the Genocide route that touches on that, it does feel like the only story beat in the game that's actually poorly executed.
Mine is Nier: Automata…I got all the way to ||the beginning of the last ending|| and just watched a let's play for the rest cause I was so tired of playing it.
My memory of it isn't very fresh so sorry if some of this is vague/possibly not correct but I didn't really like the combat. Everything was too much of a damage sponge if I remember correctly, and using different weapons and doing upgrades felt a little inconsequential. I personally found the city setting to be kinda depressing (in an unappealing way) and not very interesting/fun to hang out in but I can understand people liking it.
There were definitely some cool moments and I did enjoy the story to enough to watch the rest of it, but it was overshadowed by some of the stuff that really frustrated me. For example ||the section where 2b is very injured and is about to die and you had to drag yourself all the way across the map was one of the most annoying things I feel like I've ever done in a video game. I don't know if I was going the wrong way or what but I kept getting trapped by enemies and not able to get away cause she can't move correctly, and her movements were restricted in a way that I found to be kind of arbitrary which made it more frustrating. Like you could run and jump totally normally for a certain amount of time, then you're all of a sudden limping at a snail's pace and can't jump. Any storytelling value was ruined in that part for me by how how frustrating it was.||
I had heard that the ||last playthrough was the best part so I held out till then. I was pretty disappointed that 2a basically had the same moveset as 2b which I was already sick of, and that I had to do a bunch of mandatory fetch quests a short time into this ending that my expectations were so high for.|| I was just ready to finish the game, At that point I was done and just watched the rest on Youtube
I will probably give the game another shot a few years down the road, and will probably play the first nier beforehand cause I hear that enhances your enjoyment of it. I wish I liked it more!
(also I wasn't really gushing over the music like I was expecting to based on what I'd heard)
@treefroggy#14464 Dude, River King sounds great. Going to check one of those out, have never heard of that series before.