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dead gay comedy forums posted:Homeworld This is a drat fine post. E: heck of a snipe
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Oct 2, 2021 20:20
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Great write-up on Homeworld, dead gay comedy forums, man I loved that game. Seems like about the right time to update the list for the OP: A Fisherman's Tale by The 7th Guest A Hat in Time by Zybourne Clock Age of Empires 2 by TheMostFrench Alpha Protocol by theshim Alien Isolation by VinylonUnderground Anachranox by Whybird Analogue: A Hate Story by Reveilled Another World by VinylonUnderground Armored Core 2 by Shine Atelier by cheetah7071 Batman: Arkham Asylum by thrilla in vanilla Black Magic by fridge corn Bloodborne by FrozenGoldfishGod Burnout 3: Takedown by thrilla in vanilla Call of Juarez: Gunslinger by Zenithe Cannon Fodder by GazChap Civilization by Lampsacus Civilization 4 by Erwin the German Commander Blood by Lid Crash Bandicoot 4 by Violen Crusader Kings II by VinylonUnderground Cyberpunk 2077 by Erwin the German Dark Cloud 2 by dracky Dark Cloud 2 (Spheda) by Senerio Dark Messiah of Might and Magic by Jeza Dark Souls by Shine Dark Souls by FrozenGoldfishGod Dark Souls by VideoGames Dark Souls 2 by FrozenGoldfishGod Dark Souls 2 by VideoGames Dark Souls 3 by FrozenGoldfishGod Dark Souls 3 by VideoGames Dark Queen of Krynn by Glare Seethe DEFCON by Sardonik Deus Ex by Erwin the German Diablo 2 by TheMostFrench Disco Elysium by Erwin the German Doom (1993) by CyberPingu Duke Nukem 3D by Heavy Metal Earth Defense Force by Shine Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall by Thothanon Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind by Erwin the German Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind by VinylonUnderground Enderal (Skyrim Total Conversion) by Ice Phisherman Fallout 2 by VinylonUnderground Fallout: New Vegas by Erwin the German Faster Than Light by VinylonUnderground Final Fantasy 4 by Spuzzz Final Fantasy 7 by Erwin the German Final Fantasy 14 (short) by Erwin the German Final Fantasy 14 (expanded) by Erwin the German Freespace/Freespace 2 by theshim Frontier: Elite 2 by GazChap Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy by Reveilled Hades by Jossar Hades by Sab Sabbington Half Life (mods) by TheMostFrench Half Life 2 by Erwin the German Hitman: Contracts by Erwin the German Homeworld by dead gay comedy forums Homeworld: Cataclysm by TheMostFrench Horizon Zero Dawn by sean10mm Hunt: Showdown by Erwin The German IL-2: 1946 by Shine Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy by Erwin the German Kentucky Route Zero by Mode 7 Killer 7 by PNGYAKUZA King of Dragon Pass by Fly Ricky King of Fighters 99: Evolution by Heavy Metal Kirby Mass Attack by Regy Rusty Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords by Erwin the German Knytt Underground by Glare Seethe Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver by Rarity Legend of Grimrock 2 by Polo-Rican Legend of Zelda by Mr. Pickles Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask by Erwin the German Legend of Zela: Majora's Mask by star eater Life is Strange by exquisite tea Life is Strange by parkingtigers LISA the Painful RPG by Mizuti Mafia by Erwin the German Marathon by haveblue Marathon by DAD LOST MY IPOD Marathon 2: Durandal / Marathon: Rubicon by Glare Seethe Marvel Heroes by Shine Master of Orion 2 by VinylonUnderground Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne by Erwin the German Mayhem Triple by Sorting Algorithms Mega Man 2 by Shine Mega Man X by Shine Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes by Heavy Metal Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater by Erwin the German Metroid Prime by Erwin the German Mirror's Edge Catalyst by BeanpolePeckerwood Monster Hunter World by Shine Myth 2: Soulblighter by Pain of Mind Myth: The Fallen Lords by dead gay comedy forums Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition by Erwin the German Nier: Automata by Erwin the German Night in the Woods by VinylonUnderground Night Stalker by Shine Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen by The Zombie Guy Ori and the Will-of-the-Wisps by Canine Blues Arooo Ori and the Will-of-the-Wisps by Lechtansi Out of the Park Baseball by F_Shit_Fitzgerald Out of the Park Baseball by Arms_Akimbo Pathologic 2 by Mizuti Perfect Dark by star eater Perimeter by Sardonik Phantasy Star IV by VinylonUnderground Pirates Gold! by VinylonUnderground Prey by VinylonUnderground Prey by Erwin the German Psychonauts by Jeza Psychonauts by Sab Sabbington Punch Out!! by Shine Rain World by f#a# Ratchet & Clank - Up Your Arsenal by Shine Remember Me by Parkingtigers Resident Evil by BiggerBoat Resident Evil REmake by Electromax Resident Evil 4 by Erwin the German River City Ransom by Zerilan Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves by Shine Rocket League by Shine Rocky's Boots by fridge corn Romancing SaGa by 5-Headed Snake God Runescape by Jossar Sacrifice by Jeza Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin by Xarbala Severance: Blade of Darkness by Mr. Pickles Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri by dead gay comedy forums Sin & Punishment: Star Successor by punk rebel ecks Snoopy Silly Sports Spectacular by Shine Sonic the Hedgehog 3 by VinylonUnderground Space Rangers 2 by Shine SSX 3 by morallyobjected S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl by Erwin the German Star Wars: Racer by Mr. Pickles Star Wars: Squadrons by morallyobjected Stickybear Basket Bounce by fridge corn Suikoden II by Ms Adequate Super Hexagon by Glare Seethe Super Huey by Shine Super Mario 3 by Shine Super Mario 64 by Heavy Metal Super Metroid by Shine Super Punch-Out by Shine Sweet Home by Zerilan Tales of Mal'Eyal by Konstantin Terranigma by theshim Terraria by Helicity The Hunter: Call of the Wild by Zaphod42 The Longest Journey by Erwin the German The Stanley Parable by dead gay comedy forums The Void Rains Upon Her Heart by Sorting Algorithms The World Ends With You by theshim TIE Fighter by Shine Thief: The Dark Project by Mr. Pickles The Dark Mod by Erwin the German Tomb Raider Anniversary by Heavy Metal Tomb Raider Anniversary by VideoGames Total Annihilation by TheMostFrench Towerfall by Polo-Rican Track & Field 2 by Shine Tropico by VinylonUnderground Undertale by Erwin the German Unreal Tournament by Shine Unreal Tournament 2004 by dead gay comedy forums Vagrant Story by Party Boat Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines by Erwin the German Wario Ware: Mega Microgame$ by GoutPatrol Winter Games by fridge corn XCOM: Enemy Unknown by Shine
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Oct 3, 2021 09:14
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Jerusalem posted:Great write-up on Homeworld, dead gay comedy forums, man I loved that game. Bravo goons, you have good taste.
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Oct 3, 2021 09:28
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WTF, no one has written up Red Dead Redemption 2??? OK, I'm taking that as a personal challenge and will post a review before the end of the week.
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Oct 12, 2021 17:58
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I friggin love Streets of Rage 4. I don't have much of a plan for what I'm going to write about so I just wanted to lay out my experience. I don't particularly have a strong connection to beat em ups (or even fighting games, really). My brother and I owned a couple random ones for SNES (Final Fight, Rival Turf), but I don't think I ever beat any. A few years ago I tried to play through Final Fight Guy and while I enjoyed the challenge, I never finished it(Final Fight Guy / Final Fight for SNES, I later learned, are pretty simple and due to system limitations, tend to have far fewer enemies on screen / stuff going on than it's arcade counter parts). Earlier in the winter, I gave Streets of Rage 4 a shot. Pandemic boredom, etc. My partner, who has barely played any vids in her life, played along with me and it was pretty fun! We would load up story mode and beat up some dudes co-op. Story mode runs through about 12 levels - you start each level at 2 lives and can earn extra lives every 7000~ points or so. If you game over, there's all sorts of handicaps you can add - extra lives, bonus damage, etc. - to get through the game. Eventually we cheesed our way through it and that was it. We both kinda lost interest, and after beating Story mode I tested out the Arcade mode - you run through the 12 story mode levels, but there's no handicaps or continues. Game over is game over. Instead of starting at 2 lives every level and getting a new one every 7000 points. You start at 2 for the entire run and only earn new lives every 30,000 points! I basically checked it out and went 'lmao gently caress that' and moved on. A few weeks, maybe months later, toward the summer, I had an itch to play something but couldn't decide what. I decided to load it up and just try out arcade mode, who cares. Suddenly, everything clicked. I could see and feel all the differences in how other characters move, started to become more confident with specials and longer combos, and started just working through it. Since then I have completed Hard and Hardest difficulties on Arcade, and now am slowly working out Mania difficulty.  The gameplay is pretty simple but of course gets tougher and tighter the higher difficulty the game becomes. You have a standard melee combo, a special attack which can drain life that you earn back, a defensive special, a big power star move, and blitz moves that (for most characters) let you travel a good distance horizontally. You get higher score bonuses based on combos and how much damage you can do before getting hit, which as you practice becomes super relevant for arcade mode. I'm getting overwhelmed by enemies and losing a life ... but if I can get a big combo going in the earlier levels, I can earn enough points to get an extra life or two. But then all of a sudden, when you're pulling off the big combos to farm up points, you're doing well enough to not necessarily need extra lives! So simultaneously as you're getting a hold of the onslaught and earning more lives, you're also kicking rear end and getting through the levels and needing to use less lives! The DLC has since added Survival Mode which I didn't love at first but now I think it rocks. You fight increasing difficult floors of enemies with a boss every 4 floors. Every floor you compete you get to pick a perk (toxic/electric/flame effects for your different attacks, extra jumps, movement speed, some interesting trade-off positive/negative perks, etc. They turned the thing into basically a roguelike - beat up some guys, get some power ups, see how high you can get, rinse and repeat.  There are a ton of characters - five 'standard' characters, plus 3 (bosses from the story mode) DLC characters. As well as something like 12-16 extra guys which is all the characters from Streets of Rage 1-3. So you can have Streets of Rage 2 pixel Axel fighting along side SoR4 HD drawing Axel. They all feel super different - I got through Hardest on arcade mode with Cherry and after I was done I literally couldn't play as anyone else, I just go so attached to her movement and attacks. Eventually with Survival I'm getting more used to using everyone. I kinda wish there was a random character option. I don't know exactly to explain my feelings, but this is the most pure 'video game' game I've played in years. You walk up and down, left and right, and you punch the hell out of guys. Simple to learn, hard to master. As you get better you start to learn combos and eventually you learn terms and things like 'air cancelling' and 'cross ups' which were always kinda mystifying fighting game terms to me. Survival mode or Arcade mode runs can take anywhere from 10-90 minutes depending how good you are and how long you can go, but the game is easily pause-able and it's no problem to pick it up and put it down based on what you're doing. Each attempt is very low stakes. I strongly encourage people to check out Streets of Rage 4. Settle in and just beat the heck out of some dudes, and then try to get better at it.
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Oct 19, 2021 15:52
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I have nothing to add other than Streets of Rage 4 is just so good, my favorite beatemup of all time and the best possible version of itself. That feeling of progression from not being able to punch your way out of the first screen on the harder difficulties to effortlessly S-Ranking Mania+ is sublime. Each character feels unique and extraordinarily complex for a game with two attack buttons. And the music! I thought the main game slapped hard enough but then they get Tee Lopes to completely up the ante in Survival Mode. I easily put over 100 hours into the main mode and I'm coming up on 100 more on the Mr. X Nightmare DLC. Everybody play Streets of Rage 4!
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Oct 19, 2021 16:03
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Rabbit Hill posted:WTF, no one has written up Red Dead Redemption 2??? OK, I'm taking that as a personal challenge and will post a review before the end of the week. Well? 
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Oct 19, 2021 23:03
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I'm having post-surgery complications and in my fever I thought of this thread and writing about World of Warcraft and League of Legends.
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Oct 19, 2021 23:21
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wow, lol
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Oct 20, 2021 00:44
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Capital Letdown posted:I strongly encourage people to check out Streets of Rage 4. Settle in and just beat the heck out of some dudes, and then try to get better at it. drat I gotta revisit this one
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Oct 20, 2021 01:53
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Elentor posted:I'm having post-surgery complications and in my fever I thought of this thread and writing about World of Warcraft and League of Legends. also feel better!
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Oct 20, 2021 02:03
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theshim posted:would read To contribute, I’ve thought about doing a write up for Shards of Dalaya, a fever dream mod of 2001 EverQuest made by a Finnish teenager (and goon), before he went on to make Stellaris and other stuff for Paradox. I doubt there’s much interest, and it’s really hard to defend some of the design decisions from that era, but it’s tempting nonetheless Clockwerk fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Oct 20, 2021 |
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Oct 20, 2021 02:24
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Jerusalem posted:Well? I got overwhelmed by the enormity of the task I set before me.  But it's coming!
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Oct 20, 2021 14:16
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Metal Gear Solid is the greatest game ever made. I bought it on a whim after remembering some NES game I had a faint memory of enjoying once, and was absolutely blown away. To this day, I still give this game (and Baldur's Gate II) credit for pushing gaming from just a small hobby i'd likely move away from to my favorite hobby. Metal Gear Solid is a game with almost no flaws that has left a legacy that very few games from that time can match. There are some, but not many. The music and sound design? Absolutely masterful. The voice acting? You already know. You can hear the lines in your head. I bet you rattle them off when an opportunity presents itself. The plot? It's loving bonkers BUT NOT BONKERS ENOUGH to be insultingly stupid. It's campy, it's serious, it's silly, it's emotional, and it's memorable. The gameplay? It manages to be tight, engaging, and innovative despite being limited by the hardware. You like stealth in your 3rd-person action games? Thanks, MGS! The characters? Legendary. Almost to a detriment. The developers would dip into this well over and over again, knowing fully their first at-bat was a grand slam. The legacy? GOAT, or at the very least in the Top 5 of the Top 10. This game turned Kojima into a figure frequently mentioned in the same breath as Miyamoto, Sakaguchi, Miyazaki, etc. The man became a beloved auteur from this game alone. The rest of his work has been a long victory lap. Developers to this day still borrow tropes and concepts from this game and its successors. Also, the drat Psycho Mantis fight. I unfortunately don't have the intricate knowledge necessary to give this game a true Watch Out For Fireballs-esque effort post, but believe me it's worth it. I honestly can't think of a flaw in this game. Maybe the controls? But that's only because the medium has evolved and improved over time. MGS, to me, was extremely easy to play at the time. Hell, I could play it NOW with no issues. Few games have had a more profound effect on me as this game. Sure, objectively there are much better games in the same franchise, but they just didn't hit the same as this one. I love the series as a whole, especially MGS3, but this game just came along and did the right things at the right time. TheHoosier fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Oct 20, 2021 |
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Oct 20, 2021 23:13
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Okay, it's time to write some Words, especially with a new league set to drop in two days. Let me tell y'all about a little game called Path of Exile. Back in the long-forgotten mists of time, there were a few people who really, really enjoyed Diablo 2. They played it, and they played it a lot, and then they played it some more. And like quite a few people, eventually they decided they wanted more. So they set out to make their own, better Diablo 2 only-more-so in the late 2000s, and formed the studio Grinding Gear Games. Eventually Blizzard would release Diablo 3, and like many fans of Diablo 2, they played it and said "hey, this isn't more of what I wanted" and went back to their own project, and somehow produced the most utterly befuddling, impenetrable, misbegotten beautiful son of a bitch of a game I've ever played, and continue to play to this day. To sum up everything I'm going to say as succinctly as possible: Path of Exile is the best game that I would not recommend to almost anyone. The game is a classic loot-ARPG, hewing extremely close to Diablo 2 in gameplay and progression on a surface level. Kill dudes, get drops, level up, open up the passive skill tree and immediately freak the gently caress out. I mean look at this poo poo, what the gently caress.  This is (an outdated version of) the passive skill tree that every one of the 7 classes shares. The different classes start at their own points of the passive tree, corresponding to their archetype. Every node on the tree costs 1 passive point to allocate, and all told you can expect to get in the neighborhood of 100-120 points total. It's extremely easy to get overwhelmed by it. And, of course, this is the passive skill tree. As far as your attacks, spells, auras, summons, etc. all go? That moves over to the game's monstrously arcane skill gem and gear socket systems. Everything your character can do besides a basic attack is granted by jamming the appropriate skill gem into the correctly colored socket on one of your pieces of gear. Want to use the Ground Slam attack, which deals heavy damage in a cone in front of you? It's a red skill gem, associated with Strength, and you'll need to have an open red socket on a piece of gear to put it in. Rather use the cold spell Freezing Pulse? You'll need a blue socket. Where this gets crazy is that sockets on gear can be linked together, up to 6 in one group on armor or two-handed weapons, and for all the various skill gems that go in first, you can then add support gems to empower and sometimes completely change the behavior. Stick a Ruthless support gem in with that Ground Slam and it'll deal massively powerful blows every third strike. Don't feel like casting Freezing Pulse yourself? Add a Spell Totem gem into the links and you'll instead be able to conjure up a stationary totem that will cast the spell for you at nearby foes. The sheer amount of customization and different ways you can make a character function is where I can begin to talk about what makes PoE such an incredible draw for the right kind of person. No game I've ever played has come close to the utterly bugfuck insane depth in PoE. The honestly daunting number of interlocking systems, specific unique items with crazy interactions, modifiable behaviors and archetypes, things that just shouldn't work but do, and level of ability to truly make the game your own is unmatched. I could go on for hours talking about some of my favorite characters from over the years, like my Champion using the unique Facebreaker gloves that give you the ability to become an absolutely monstrous unarmed fighter, or the Necromancer that just hurled walls of skeleton warriors at the hardest fights in the game and took them to the Bone Zone, or my Guardian who ran around with himself on fire all the time incinerating enemies that I got near to. One of the most insanely powerful attackers in the game is a character that stacks the Intelligence attribute as high as they can get it and attacks using a wand...with the right gear. And oh, god, the gear. In addition to hundreds of unique items, many of which have their own particular gamebreaking quirks and interactions and properties, PoE also features a ludicrous amount of items, with thousands of mods that can roll on them, easily overwhelming newer players, and a crafting system that is still completely opaque horseshit for me to this day. The studio called themselves Grinding Gear Games for a reason, as the vast majority of the reason to keep playing is to challenge harder and harder content and reap greater and greater rewards. Crafted gear, especially with some of the content from the more recent league releases, can reach unspeakably powerful levels and enable characters to tackle obscenely difficult content without breaking a sweat. At the center of crafting is currency. Unlike Diablo 2, or many other ARPGs, there's no gold in PoE. There's no one unified currency that people can just spend back and forth. Instead, all currency is in the form of orbs that do something when used. From the simple Orb of Transmutation (turn a white item into a magic item, adding 1 or 2 affixes) to the impossibly rare Mirror of Kalandra (make a non-modifiable copy of a non-unique item), the currency is all in the form of useful items, things you're often more likely to consume for their normal purpose than you are to use them to trade for things. It creates a natural downward pressure on the relative price of any one currency, as the supply is constantly going up from playing the game and acquiring them as drops from enemies and from trades from vendors, but the supply also trends downward as people actually use the currency itself. Which brings me to my next point, the constant rotation of Leagues. Approximately every three months, a new league is released in PoE, providing a new challenge to overcome and a fresh start for everyone who wants to participate. Honestly you could probably write a fascinating economics paper on the relative worth of items across the lifespan of PoE, and how prices stabilize - or don't - in every challenge league. Personally, I really appreciate the constant fresh starts, as after a few weeks or a month and change on a single character I will often grow bored, finding it hard to make significant upgrades without a tremendous amount of effort - though the Standard league exists for people who want to keep playing one character. But the leagues also offer new, fresh content on a reliable schedule, which can vary from okay to intense and demanding, and many of them end up being added into the core game. If anything, the game probably suffers from feature bloat in this arena, with so much stuff going on that it can be impossible for newer players to keep track of it all. Thankfully, in this newest league, they are also starting to retire older content, easing some of the burden of knowledge. What's really cool about PoE is the amount of support it still receives to this day. Fresh content constantly being released, with new challenges, new interactions, and new items that can then be mixed and matched to form new, insane contraptions with existing stuff. There's a ton of work being put into PoE2, a new campaign that will completely revamp around half the stuff I just talked about that will probably not be out for another couple years. The endgame mapping system, where you can constantly tread the line between danger and reward, pushing yourself into more challenging content and terrifying bosses, just got a revamp for the upcoming league to be less of a grind to get started. The devs are constantly in contact with the community, doing Q&As, responding to reddit posts, appearing on podcasts, and more. More than any other game, PoE gives me the feeling that the devs appreciate their community and work really hard to make things they'll enjoy. The game is free to play, with all but a handful of the microtransactions that fund the game being purely cosmetic. I'd honestly say that it effectively has a price tag of around 20-30 bucks for the few items that are really nice to have, like extra stash tabs, a currency and map tab to store all your items, and one or two other things. Other than that, you don't have to spend a dime, and every time that I have over the years, it has felt purely like I was choosing to support the company. Like nearly everything in this dense, impenetrable motherfucker of a game, I'm only skimming the surface. But if there's one thing that keeps me playing, year after year (I've got around 4.5k hours in the game since 2013 just logged on Steam, with a little more on top of that when I was using their standalone client), it's the sheer depth and customization. It's the ability to mix together mechanics, edge cases, interactions and bloody-minded ingenuity to produce something powerful, and above all, yours. Last league I spent most of my time on a character that ran around shouting at enemies to summon spooky clones that would then beat them to death with their shields. It reminds me a lot of Tales of Maj'Eyal in that you can accurately describe any character you make in the game and it will sound glorious. If you're into games where finding ways to make things work together in unexpected ways and leverage power from the strangest of places, and if you have an overabundance of patience, I cannot recommend PoE highly enough. For anyone else, stay far, far away from this game. It has a learning curve like a brick wall and will happily kick your teeth in if you let it. But for me, it's a shining beacon of delicious, crunchy mechanics and diversity that I utterly love to death.
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Oct 21, 2021 00:46
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What's wild about PoE is that I realized years ago that it was one of my favorite games ever, and yet that version of the game is so different in so many nuanced ways from the version of the game I'll be playing on Friday. It evolves at an incredibly rapid pace compared to any other live service game out there but still consistently manages to be "better" than it's previous iteration. It's absolutely a tough recommendation though. Everything that makes it the best at what it does comes down to layers and layers of systems all touching each other in this chaotically elegant way and trying to explain it is both inscrutable and makes you sound like the biggest nerd there ever was.
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Oct 21, 2021 01:54
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PoE is probably the non competitive game I've had the most fun with, both in time played and in fun-per-unit of time. I once said I'm a simple person who only needs a few things in life to be happy and a new poe league every 3 months is fine by me as far as games go.
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Oct 21, 2021 01:57
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edit: nvm I found a way to script it
Fly Ricky fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Oct 21, 2021 |
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Oct 21, 2021 08:41
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I think I fundamentally don't get Diablolikes in terms of the actual gameplay part. I understand that part of the fun is the absolutely crazy power combos you do where you're surrounded by fifty on-hit stormclouds, or you summon skeletons that turn every enemy they kill into another skeleton until the whole screen is your skeletons. I 100% understand that. What I don't understand is: If that's the fun part why not just give out all those combos at the start of the game? No farming, no grinding. Just balance the game about having those nuts combos at the start of the game. Then you'd play through the game once and call it done. Or, if you wanted to try a different playstyle, respec or restart with one of the different crazy combos already given to you. The devs should just hand it all to you from the start instead of wasting time with the levelling and grinding. This is why I felt Diablo 3's ability system was pretty cool except that you had to level to 60 first. Instead you should just start at 60 and be able to shuffle all your runes around as you like.
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Oct 22, 2021 07:59
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People enjoy the cycle of taking a character from scratch and building them up through the exciting and imaginative confluence of skills and gear. That feeling of when a build comes together from a hodgepodge assembly of random items into an intricately arranged and thematically focused powerhouse of BIG NUMBERS is what makes ARPGs so appealing. Once you've already pushed a build as far as it can go, the thrill is gone as you can only then improve upon a few increasingly rare and incremental drops to replace the gear you already have. That's why Diablo and PoE both have seasonal/league play, as people can enjoy the process of building up a character all over again.
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Oct 22, 2021 09:49
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exquisite tea posted:People enjoy the cycle of taking a character from scratch and building them up through the exciting and imaginative confluence of skills and gear. That feeling of when a build comes together from a hodgepodge assembly of random items into an intricately arranged and thematically focused powerhouse of BIG NUMBERS is what makes ARPGs so appealing. Once you've already pushed a build as far as it can go, the thrill is gone as you can only then improve upon a few increasingly rare and incremental drops to replace the gear you already have. That's why Diablo and PoE both have seasonal/league play, as people can enjoy the process of building up a character all over again. This tracks. Why do people assemble jigsaw puzzles instead of just buying a painting and looking at it? The incremental progress is where the brain goes brrrrrr.
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Oct 22, 2021 12:37
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Plus, you don't want new players to be overwhelmed with a massive number of options. Levelling is a good way to increase complexity as players get more familiar with the game.
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Oct 22, 2021 14:56
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If they gave you all the options upfront it would be a different genre. The slow incremental progress of "Help, run, there's a crab" to "I'm a walking nuclear warhead" is what makes it POE. Who am I kidding, POE is really an excel spreadsheet on one monitor and a wiki on the other.
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Oct 22, 2021 16:11
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It is very important as well to be able to go back to those earlier areas when you've basically become the equivalent of a sentient sun in pretty armor and reenact this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54UYWP_92jg
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Oct 23, 2021 01:54
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Jerusalem posted:It is very important as well to be able to go back to those earlier areas when you've basically become the equivalent of a sentient sun in pretty armor and reenact this scene: OTOH, if you don't know what you're doing and you make a build that's fun and just fine for completing the loop the first time Then, on your second go-round you (me) might get loving murdered on the beach and not have any clear path to improving said build for survivability.
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Oct 23, 2021 04:26
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BaldDwarfOnPCP posted:OTOH, if you don't know what you're doing and you make a build that's fun and just fine for completing the loop the first time There are 10 acts now instead of just running the game three times!
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Oct 23, 2021 05:04
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dead gay comedy forums posted:Homeworld I got super hyped to see the review for this game and then I realized it was the one game called Homeworld I didn't enjoy. I'm writing this to remind myself that some time in the near future I should replay the Homeworld be Legend Entertainment and see if it holds up to the fond memories and is worth writing a post about it. (it probably won't)
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Oct 23, 2021 05:15
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Zaphod42 posted:To contribute to the thread, I'm going to post about a game I've been thinking about writing up for awhile. A game I don't see goons talking about much, but I think is fairly special and unique. Almost pulled the trigger on the base game on Steam yesterday based on this post, but decided to wait for a sale. This morning a buddy noticed I had added it to my wishlist, and pointed me at the current Humble Bundle sale... game and ALL DLC for $15!  https://www.humblebundle.com/games/thehunter-call-wild-complete-bundle Now I get to spend the next half hour pasting in Steam codes lol
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Oct 24, 2021 17:26
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bewilderment posted:I think I fundamentally don't get Diablolikes in terms of the actual gameplay part. For a large number of games, gating the cool stuff is pretty much essential to the core of the game. I mean, I've always said of Magic the Gathering - if you could literally just buy the little pieces of cardboard that you want (like without randomization or secondary market price markups) at a reasonable price, most of what makes the game actually exciting for a lot of people would be gone.
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Oct 25, 2021 20:22
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I realize someone already did Killer7 but I will never shut up about it so here's another post about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFO7y15XqNc "Like our chess games. You always seem to win." "Do you know why?" "You tell me." "Because you're a bad player." Killer7 is a game that makes no goddamn sense, but in its dogged devotion to not making any goddamn sense, it somehow wraps back around to being compelling. I don't even remember why I bought it for Gamecube so many years ago (I remember having to wait until I was 18 because it was M rated, a rating it richly deserves), but it was the game that convinced me that games could tell stories that'd be more difficult to tell without the level of investment that comes from playing a character, and I think was the first game I legitimately cried at while playing. The premise kinda starts out simple: you play as the seven members of a league of assassins known as the Smith Syndicate. led by their "cleaner" Garcian Smith. Well, technically there are eight of them: the eighth is Harman, a wheelchair-bound old man who is sometimes shown to be in some sort of ancient rivalry with a loudly-dressed force of chaos named Kun Lan and sometimes shown to be a frail old man living in a room in Garcian's trailer and taken care of by an abusive young woman. Kun Lan is the leader of a group of monsters/cultists named Heaven Smile: the Heaven Smiles are invisible to everyone except the Smiths, and attack by suicide bombing their victims. Running in parallel to this is a political story about the US subjugating Japan and their subsequent relationship, and a series of other seemingly random asides. Most of these do not get resolved. A book, Hand in Killer7, was released after the game to try to explain things, and just made the confusion worse. The climactic chapter of the game resolves Garcian's character arc, but that's about it. You're just along for the ride. The gameplay is more rail-shooter than anything else: you're restricted to set paths through the levels with occasional branches, and when you hear an enemy (each of which makes a distinctive cry) you switch into first-person mode and stand in place to shoot them. In between are a series of fairly tame Resident Evil-esque puzzles where you find a MacGuffin somewhere in a side room, read something in the environment to learn a password, or use one of the Smiths' special abilities. Killer7 is the brainchild of a designer named Suda51. Suda51 is a Japanese man who is evidently obsessed with American culture in general and lucha libre in particular (one of the Smiths is a luchador whose abilities are upgraded by picking up new costumes periodically, and his next game, No More Heroes, gives the main character a selection of wrestling moves). This sometimes manifests in strange ways: one of the side plots (spoilered since it's late in the game, but it doesn't make any more sense in context) has a character reveal that every American president since the founding of the republic has been elected by a shadowy cabal running out of an elementary school in... Seattle?. The levels are populated by "remnant psyches": people the Killer7 previously killed. These include a guy in bondage gear who gives you gameplay hints, a guy with a whole collection of funny phrases written on his T-shirts, a young girl who shows up only as a disembodied head and tells you about how she murdered her family, and several other characters who you killed in previous chapters. It appears that the text for these was translated twice: once very badly for the voice-over, and once again somewhat more clearly for the subtitles. To avoid confusing the poo poo out of English-speaking audiences, the voice over has a thick layer of distortion applied to it, but you can kinda make out that they're talking about similar things in different words (and the Steam port allows you to listen to the "original" audio). This adds to the bizarre aesthetic: you're talking to someone and they say the same thing twice slightly differently. And then there are the cutscenes. I will resist the urge to just put all of them here, but Cam Clarke chewing the scenery is particularly memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEb39GqOqW8 Masafumi Takada did the music here; a couple favorites are a boss theme for a boss that kinda feels like they should have very different boss music, and an oddly placed jam that only plays in a short hallway (which, luckily, shows up in most of the levels for the usual unexplainable reasons). There's a pretty decent Steam port now, so you can experience whatever the hell this game is supposed to be for yourself. Incoherence fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 20:32
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I'm shocked that no other railshooter series has bothered "evolving" the gameplay by copying Killer7's formula. Like imagine a "big budget" House of the Dead game Killer 7 style. Also it's crazy how ahead of it's time the game was. Killer 7 was basically a "prestige indie game" before indie games really existed.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:00
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Hello here is a Wizardry 8 post. I love Wizardry 8, it is my Steam game with the most time spent on it at 387.7 hours. Monster Train is about to overtake it but that doesn't take into account that I also bought Wizardry 8 Back In The Day on actual physical media and played the hell out of it then. I'll start off by talking about Wizardry 8's plot. You get in a spaceship crash or something and there's supposed to be an ascension to godhood, also the Dark Savant is No Good and wants to ascend so you better ascend before he does. With that out of the way, I'll talk about character creation. You choose from the following races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Hobbit, Faerie, Felpurr, (cat furry) Rawulf, (dog furry) Lizardman, Dracon, Mook. (big ape thing.) They are all good at different things: Lizardmen are strong and make good fighters, elves are smart and make good spellcasters, faeries are garbage and should be avoided. (That's a bit harsh, it's just they have reduced carry weight which really kinda screws your party as a whole, and severely limits what they can wear.) (They go kinda OK as ninjas - I've used them as casters a bit in the past but it's just annoying they can't wear anything or carry anything.) And the following classes: Fighter, Lord, Valkyrie, Ranger, Samurai, Ninja, Monk, Rogue, Bard, Gadgeteer, Priest, Bishop, Mage, Psionic, Alchemist. Again, they are all good at different things: fighters are great if you want to kill all your enemies with swords, rangers are great if you can't be bothered actively searching for items, and bishops are great if you want to obsessively collect every possible spell on one character. Go here to see me go slightly deeper in depth about why I love all of the classes: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3473537&pagenumber=53&perpage=40#post423816067 (But especially those three I just namedropped.) Once you've chosen your first hero's race and class, you get to assign attributes. The attributes are as follows: Strength: good for hitting things hard Intelligence: good for casting spells at people Piety: good for having other people's spells not affect you as much (also important for certain spellcasters) Vitality: good for keeping on going after getting hit a lot Speed: good for hitting things lots of times Dexterity: good for hitting things accurately Senses: good for ranged combat and instant kill type of people After that you get skills. There's general skills, combat skills, magic skills, and roguey skills. I dunno if the different sections actually have names, they're represented in game by icons instead. General skills are mostly things like knowing the stats of a monster, knowing things about an item, or a couple of the more generic combat skills which are in that section for some reason. The combat skills are skills in specific weapons, like axe or sword or whatever. In magic we have skills for the 4 different schools of magic: wizardry, divinity, psionics and alchemy, and the 6 different elements, fire, water, air, earth, mental, divine. Generally speaking a caster will only have access to one school, unless you make the objectively correct decision and pick a bishop, who has access to all 4. Roguey skills are things like locks and traps, or stealth which gradually turns you invisible so you won't be targeted but in the meantime makes your armour class better. There's also expert skills, which unlock once you get an attribute to 100. Strength unlocks Power Strike where you hit people harder, Intelligence unlock Power Cast where you Spell people harder, Vitality unlocks Iron Skin where you stop people hitting you, Piety unlocks Iron Will where you stop people spelling you, Dexterity unlocks reflextion for some more armour class, speed unlocks snake speed for going sooner in the turn order, and senses unlocks eagle eye for murdering people from long range. I've talked about character creation a lot because I spend a lot of time in character creation. Levelling up in this game is one of the things I love the most. As you wander around and use your skills, they go up, which means that you want all your spellcasters exhausting all their spell points all the time so they get better at casting spells, but conversely you want all your weapon carriers to be swinging their weapons all the time, and so on. Also you get to assign points to attributes every time you level up so you can get them closer to the max of 100 and start levelling up those expert skills. The other thing I love the most is getting loot. Weapons are all specifically designed items - no random stats like in Diablo or whatever - but you have a random chance of collecting most items in any given battle. (Which can lead to people trying a battle over and over again to see if the enemy will drop the specific item they're after.) (Like a certain cursed weapon that is absurdly good for faerie ninjas and unusable by everyone else.) I love just going around and kitting out my entire team with the best gear and levelling them up to extraordinarily high levels and then starting again with a new team. I think I've finished the game about once in that 378 hours. The rest is all restarts. Combat is turn based (they call it phase based but whatever, it's turn based) with you picking spells and targets at the start of your turn, and your party members automatically switching targets if their target goes down. Here's where probs the only bad thing about this game happens. Sometimes, combat can take a while. Sometimes, while fighting a battle, you'll accidentally wander too close to some other enemies, who'll join the combat, turning the battle into a potential hour long slog. (Quicksave often, and be ready to quickload and run past enemies. I don't know how anyone ever plays Iron Man in this game.) Anyway that's enough rambling.
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Nov 1, 2021 13:26
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Hyper Light Drifter is the best game ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWufEJ1Ava0 Hyper Light Drifter is a game about exploring and healing a dying world filled with violent monsters, ancient magitech, fellow drifters, and people just trying to survive. Its story is abstract and entirely environmental, with "dialogue" taking the form of comic-strip-like illustrations. It gameplay is influenced by 2D Zeldas, Souls-likes, and bullet-hells, but doesn't fit neatly into any one category. It's the first game of indie studio Heart Machine, who has a second game, Solar Ash, coming out on December 2nd. Hyper Light Drifter is simple but challenging, hard but fair.  Its combat boils down to a familiar dodge-and-counterattack style, with elements of bullet hell projectile-dodging in some of the bosses. It's defined by the titular drifter's very low health, but very high mobility, creating combat with a difficulty level just under something like Sekiro, and without the punishing on-death mechanics that define true soulslikes. With a few flexible techniques at your disposal, you truly feel like a master by the end. Hyper Light Drifter is full of secrets.   Each of these locations has a pat to a hidden area. Can you see where? Exploration is a substantial component of the game, and it handles the "secret breakable wall" trope in a unique and elegant way: there's a certain symbol that appears wherever there's a hidden path, subtle enough that it's not obvious but apparent enough that you can find everything just by paying attention, instead of chopping random walls. Not to mention, the world itself is extremely varied and pleasant to explore. Speaking of which... Hyper Light Drifter is loving stylish.  It has a highly saturated pixel art style that I find incredibly refreshing in the often extremely drab environments of other capital-H Hard games like Hollow Knight or Dark Souls. It incorporates plenty of fantastical creatures and humanoid species without falling back on the ubiquitous orc or alien. It also has an extraordinarily masterful soundtrack by Disasterpeace which helps define the tone of the various biomes you explore, supplemented by satisfying sound effects for dodges, hits, and kills. Overall, the combination of sound, visual, and gameplay creates an atmosphere of quiet, contemplative minimalism punctuated by moments of extreme violence, which I find incredibly satisfying. Hyper Light Drifter is hard and beautiful, and you should play it.
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Nov 4, 2021 17:41
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HLD loving OWNS. It's one of the best games I didn't spend more than 20 hours playing because I beat it all and it was great the whole time.
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Nov 4, 2021 18:15
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The map and lack of ingame documentation sucked though. You wont know what the different outfits do or what collectibles you're missing.
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Nov 4, 2021 19:54
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Chairchucker posted:Hello here is a Wizardry 8 post. wizardry 8 is terrific. it doesn't even have anything obviously standout about its premise or gameplay mechanics, it just does everything it does well enough to be super engaging even on your third consecutive roadside ambush. it's a game that really speaks to the power of proper open world rpgs, too. I think there's something genuinely appealing about skulking around areas you know you're not supposed to be at yet and getting pulverized by level 80 bees. Being allowed to learn by experience which areas are and aren't safe to go is much more appealing to me than being guided to each location in order of level, with everything else locked off.
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Nov 18, 2021 01:52
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Hidden and Dangerous 2 The forgotten WW2 shooter of 2003, the OG Call of Duty is the remembered one. However this is the game that I can keep coming back to. Developed by Illusion Softworks (now 2k Czech) of Mafia fame, HD2 is a Special Air Service WW2 squad combat simulator with RPG elements and vehicles. There is no game quite like it and while its execution and design choices are questionable at times the sum of its parts make up for a memorable experience.  fig1. An unwilling participant in dress up It is kind of hard to describe a close analogue to this game. Think old Rainbow 6 with vehicles with elements of Sniper Elite and you are sort of there. The single player game is divided into various small campaigns throughout WW2 where at the beginning of each campaign you pick 4 soldiers and the equipment they have to carry with them. Choosing the right soldier is important since the RPG elements determine if they are a good shot, proficient with first aid or just really strong. If you continue to use the soldiers they get better over the course of the game, so do other soldiers you don't use although more slowly. More importantly if they die they won't be coming back. It has a detailed inventory too, guns have weight and take up equipment slots. Bullets ricochet off walls, guns handle like rear end as the did in WW2, ADS, mouse wheel to control movement speed, verbal communication limited by range, really cool briefings, non-linear level design, castles with Nazi gold, etc. This is for a game released in 2003. There is a mission at an African airport where you have to escape by plane with a prisoner you have to capture that shows how good this game can get when firing on all cylinders. Your squad arrives and manages to slip in undetected since 2 of them were wearing enemy uniforms (yes you can dress up in Nazi uniforms and do subterfuge). Do you send the 2 men around and quietly dispatch the base? You start in the armoury so you could just get some good equipment and blast your way through. There is a tank nearby in the motor pool that you can steal but there are other tanks that are manned there. Maybe you could use one of your disguised men to plant a clam bomb on a manned tank and have your uniformed men steal the tank after the bomb explodes?  fig2. Next mission swapping some gear and still rocking the same outfit If you played the original game you might get some Deja Vu when you place magnetic mines on the Tirpitz and climb aboard the minesweeper in the same Fjord to steal the enigma machine. Or running though a village that doesn't have the same wow factor as the original game's Prague level. The original shipped with co-op play but you need to get the expansion for co-op play in the sequel in one of the most bizarre decisions by a video game developer ever. The RPG element in the game wasn't really implemented right either. Someone who has an 80% shooting ability means they are good with all guns in the game, not just a rifle that includes bazookas, MP40s and tank destroyer cannons. Some RPG elements are hardly used like lockpicking and the stealth stat detmines how quiet you are AND how long you can be in front of a Kraut before he realises that you are an enemy. The interface is rough to use, opening a door requires a minimum of 2 button presses is one common example and closing the same door will use a second different button. The original was notoriously buggy on release, this was less so but the issues have been patched out. AI is only so-so. These sound like major problems but when a game manages to have so much scope (mini submarines, De Lisle Carbine, Burma missions) and depth for a WW2 shooter (it does feel like a WW2 game with how the guns and vehicles behave), you don't really care. Fortunately if you are interested in the game it is available on Steam and GOG for a pittance with its expansion pack included. If you do play it check for a widescreen fix and make sure you set Anisotropic filtering in your drivers to 16X to make the textures look their best. You can get the action pack for 2 dollars more an it will include the original with its expansion but it might be too much of a turn off for most people even though it did a few things better than its sequel. A Let's Play from 2010 is not in the archive site anymore and I had to do some digging. Regrettably the videos are taken down but this artwork remembering one of the funniest bugs (and reactions) to ever happen in a Let's Play survives with it's photobucket watermark.  fig3. Larrrrrrrrrrrrry??????
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Nov 28, 2021 03:05
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CyberPingu posted:The funny thing about the music is a lot of it is actually rock music from the time just synth'd up and changed juuuust enough to avoid copyright. Came up randomly on this song this summer, its instantly recognizable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbjMHisK9cg
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Nov 29, 2021 14:05
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Let's talk about the best JRPG ever made. Dragon Quest XI was released in Japan in 2017, and then worldwide in 2018. An enhanced version, known as Dragon Quest XI S: Definitive Edition was released some time later and is available on basically everything: Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox--it's even on Game Pass! Dragon Quest is a hugely popular and influential RPG franchise in its home country, but it's never quite caught on in the same way in the anglosphere. For a long time, I was like most other western gamers, aware of the existence of the franchise but never actually trying it. In April 2020, locked in my apartment, I downloaded the demo, and then almost immediately bought the game, and played it obsessively all the way through. Recently, stoned and bored and scrolling through Game Pass, I downloaded the game again, expecting to slide right off. Thirty hours of gameplay later, I'm about to cross a major story threshold (if you've played the game, you know the one). The game is that good. A lot of the earliest video game RPGs strove to capture the feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons with your friends. Games like Akalabeth or Wizardry are basically just a dungeon dive from D&D, Ultima is an open world full of adventure, the Gold Box games are complex with shifting narratives and player freedom. Dragon Quest I, a game I have since gone back and played all the way through (seriously, the phone version is the best bathroom game ever made), tried to capture the particular D&D feeling of going on a quest. Dragon Quest XI is that, filtered through thirty years of technological advancement and improvements in game design. It is the best D&D game I have ever played. It is very difficult to capture in words just what makes Dragon Quest XI so great. I could talk about the combat system, simple to learn but complex to master, that continually adds new wrinkles for the entire duration of this monstrous adventure. I could talk about the main cast, characters full of life and personality, who constantly surprise and delight with every new twist and turn of the narrative. I could talk about the world design or the forging system or the episodic nature of the story or the frankly refreshing focus on "there's a bad guy out there, you need to stop him" in the main story. Heck I could even just link you to Tim Rogers's now-classic DQXI review--seriously, go watch it sometime. But I think most of all the thing that makes DQXI is the vibe. Part One: The Vibe Every other Wednesday, four friends and I meet up and play our biweekly game of Blades in the Dark, a tabletop RPG about criminals in a dying Victorian fantasy world. A single session is generally fairly rote: the players figure out something their crew needs. I list a few possible places they might find it, they pick one, and then they go and get it. Over the course of the game, however, they've developed memorable moments, in-jokes among characters, recurring villains, growing story arcs, and more. This, to me, is the core of a good tabletop RPG experience: simple stories that slowly build to something more. Dragon Quest XI is that, but as a video game. You play as the Luminary, a descendant of the hero of old, born to fight back against the Dark One. However, the Luminary himself is extremely roughly-sketched in the narrative. For one, he has no name (I named him Hero, because I have no creativity). Second, he's a silent protagonist throughout the entire game. This is not Final Fantasy where you play as Cloud Strife, the spiky-haired ex-AVALANCHE soldier fighting back against Shinra. You play as, well, you. No, there's no character creation system like Skyrim, but that's ok. The Luminary's design is intentionally bland, just interesting enough to be distinct while still allowing a lot of room for you to project your own ideas of who he is onto him. Your friends, on the other hand, are not that. Erik is a spiky-haired anime protagonist, a thief with a heart of gold, a person thrust into bad situations through no fault of his own. Veronica and Serena are spellcasting sisters, full of faith in the light of the Luminary, there to build you up and support you without ever letting you become full of yourself. Rab and Jade are martial artists with a flair for the arcane, and their relationship to the hero--well, I won't spoil it. And then there's Sylvando. Sylvando is so great that he gets a special shout-out in every review of Dragon Quest XI. It's the law. Sylvando is, in pure RPG terms, the bard of the party. He's an acrobat and entertainer, he gets the buff and debuff spells, and his function in the story is pretty much to remain happy when everyone else is miserable. He is also an extremely catty gay man, leaning into every stereotype just enough to feel believable without ever looping around to offense. Together, you and your six friends travel the world, visiting towns, taking in the local culture, until you get mixed up in some kind of crazy quest. Maybe the Doge's son has gone missing and you have to find him. Maybe you shipwreck and encounter a mermaid, pining over a human she fell in love with. Maybe there's a weird mural that clearly has something else going on beneath the surface, and you need to solve that mystery before more tourists disappear. You finish the adventure, maybe learn a little something else about the world you live in or the Dark One you're hunting or your traveling companions, and then you're on to the next adventure. All of this is then tied together with beautiful art directed by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame, which always helps keep you in this same chill adventuring vibe, even when the story turns dark. Which it absolutely does. Part Two: The Story You'd be forgiven from the artwork, trailers, and early hours of the game for believing that the story of Dragon Quest XI is simple and uninteresting. I would probably agree with the descriptor "simple", although to call the story "uninteresting" is to do it a disservice. Let's dissect that. Note that I'm going to be talking about some spoilers in here: if the game has seemed interesting to you, read as little of this as possible. Don't hesitate to read it some so that you can get a sense that yes, the game is actually going somewhere, but once your interest is piqued, stop reading and go play it. The game opens like so many stereotypical fantasy games with you as a kid from a small town who receives a very Hero With A Thousand Faces-style call to adventure. It is clichéd, but for the sake of efficiency. You're going on an adventure and the "why" isn't super important. Go adventure. Within these opening hours the game throws its first twist at you: on arriving in the city of Heliodor, where you are due to meet the king who will send you on your way, the king instead proclaims you to be the Darkspawn, whose coming heralds the arrival of the Dark One, and you are immediately arrested and thrown in prison and scheduled to be executed. Obviously, you escape, but for the next several dozen hours you are continually pursued by his two loyal knights, Jasper and Hendrik, setting in motion plot threads that won't be fully wrapped up for a very long time. This is, in a word, unexpected. The thing that DQXI presents itself as, a completely unchallenging JRPG with a simple story, simply isn't what the game actually is. Don't get me wrong, it is cozy in the same way your favorite beach-read fantasy novel is cozy, but the heroes of Dragon Quest XI go through just as much turmoil as the heroes of whatever book that is. Nowhere is this as clear as the ending of the first act of the game. This occurs roughly thirty hours in, and this is definitely a major spoiler, but I present it so that someone who does not believe this game goes places can see that no, it actually does. The first act is all about the aforementioned adventure--you travel from place to place, solving minor problems, and slowly acquiring macguffins that will allow you to access Yggdrasil, the world tree, upon whose branches each life in the world is a leaf of the tree. There rests the Sword of Light, the only way you can hope to defeat the Dark One. You acquire all of these orbs, ascend to Yggdrasil, reach the Heart of the World Tree, find the Sword of Light and then immediately get ambushed by the first-ever time you see the villain, who roundly defeats you, corrupts the Sword of Light, and then kills the World Tree, thrusting the world into eternal darkness. The entire second act is the ramifications of this moment, and the postgame third act involves literal time travel to undo it. The story is wild and I highly recommend anyone who likes a good Saturday morning cartoon or lengthy fantasy epic to check it out. Yes the game is long, but the story wouldn't work in a tight twenty hours. Part Three: The Game I've spilled a lot of words here about the story and the tone of the game, but not about the game itself. JRPGs with good stories have come and gone, but on some level a game needs to be fun to play, especially if it's going to be as long as DQXI. Thankfully, the game delivers in spades. At the core of the gameplay is the battle system. It is at once very simple--you've seen a million battle systems exactly like this--but it is so perfectly polished and balanced that it shines. Every one of your party members has a unique role in combat, and every one of them interacts with every other one in interesting ways. Enemy designs are memorable and creative, and the composition of different types of enemies is a masterclass in forcing different strategies for the most efficient wins. And, if you get tired of the battle system for a bit and just want to turn your brain off and grind, there's an extremely simple but effective autobattle system. Seriously, don't feel bad about using it. I use it for almost every random fight and then turn it off for boss fights. It's fine. As characters gain experience and level up, you can unlock new perks on, essentially, the Sphere Grid from FFX or the License Board from FFXII. They're much smaller skill trees, however, meaning that it's much easier to see where you are and how your build is progressing. Additionally, hidden skills become unlocked as you unlock other skills, and new abilities come at a fast clip--especially since a lot of abilities are automatically gained by leveling and aren't just gained through the skill tree! Plus, you can respec for a modest fee at any save point, encouraging experimentation. Wonder what happens if you spec Serena to use spears instead of focusing on healing? You can totally do that, and then bail if you don't like how it feels. Equipment is also great. You'll find some equipment out in the world, and the game constantly drip-feeds you new gear in stores across the world. To get the best gear, however, you'll need to engage with the crafting system. Using materials you'll find throughout the game, you can play a simple strategic minigame to make new gear. Even if you do badly you'll still get the gear, and if you do well you'll get enhancements make the gear even better. Plus, each time you play the minigame you get Perfectionist Pearls, which you can use to attempt to reroll a piece of equipment--and if you fail, you get the equipment back just as it was! And, when you're making something new, if you don't have one of the crafting materials you need? You don't need to go get it. You can buy it right from the crafting screen. The main thing about the game itself though is that there's just so much of it. You can play the main story for upwards of 100 hours, and then if you hit the New Game button, you can enjoy the whole thing all over again and make new decisions the whole way. The narrative of the game might be strictly linear, but the way in which you engage with that narrative is anything but. It is a DM who railroads you on the main story but lets you run wild with everything else. Play the game how you want. It's fine. Part Four: Everything Else I could keep talking about this game forever. I could talk about how the world feels huge but fully hand-made and how every NPC is just so happy to be an NPC and give you new quests to do or pieces of lore to tell you or new loot to guide you towards. Or I could talk about how the game is full of great quality-of-life features: need to heal your team to near-full while on the overworld? Open the menu and hit the, uh, left face button (Y on Switch, X on Xbox, Square on PS) and you'll instantly heal. Need to heal your team all the way? Open the menu and pick Heal All. Need to unlock multiple skills at once with a respec? There's an option for that. Need to fast travel? There's a spell for that, and it doesn't even cost mana. The Definitive Edition in particular is chock-full of this stuff, and I think it's the version you should play. It adds a run button, which is amazing. You can use the forge anywhere, not just at campsites. You can change the battle speed. You can even set the entire game to play in a SNES-style 2d art style, if you want (I don't recommend it but hey, there you go). And there's a huge extra sidequest full of references and nostalgia for the other games in the series, if you're into that. Oh, also the Definitive Edition includes the Draconian Quest options, which are basically modifiers you can apply to your game at the outset. You can turn these off in-game, so feel free to experiment with them, knowing you don't have to rely on them. I personally recommend Townsfolk Talk Tripe, where townspeople will randomly tell you little white lies and then see if they tricked you (and is surprisingly funny!) and also Reduced XP From Easy Fights, which in my opinion significantly decreases my desire to grind. Try them yourself! Part Five: Conclusion DQXI is a masterpiece of game design, of interface design, of story design, of character design, of world design. It is the D&D quest you want, a hero's journey you get to play yourself, a quest in the most literal sense imaginable. If any part of you has ever wanted to travel the world and find new weapons and kill screaming monsters on your way to stop a great evil, well, this is the game for you. Yes it's long, but so is a fantasy saga or a TV show or a movie series. Settle in and let the game work its magic. Trust me on this one. quiggy fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 20:09
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quiggy posted:Let's talk about the best JRPG ever made.  I loving ADORE this game, it was the best thing I played all last year. I have never played any Dragon Quest before this and so I went in a blank slate, and the game is just... it's perfection. It's a "simple" idea refined to a mirror shine, everything about it just works, the story is compelling, the characters are wonderful, the relationships and unity you forge with your party is beautiful, the characters you meet and help along the way feel like an integral part of the broader themes of the story and NOT pointless busywork to pad out playtime numbers. The overall upbeat and inspirational tone doesn't shy away from acknowledging some very dark aspects and horrifying events and I will forever love and cherish the fact that the game gave you the option (and it IS an option) to say,"No, gently caress that, we're saving EVERYBODY!" when the game ends and jump back in time and use your knowledge to prevent the disasters and deaths you were powerless to stop the first time. It is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful game. A love letter to a series I hadn't played that still hit just as strong (the post-credits sequence is lovely, but loving beautiful once you understand the context) for me because the game is just... it's great! I can't wait for the next game in the series, because playing DQ11 made me feel like this: 
Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Dec 4, 2021 |
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Dec 4, 2021 00:33
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