wateyad posted:

My perception of Tri-Ace is as an extremely creative studio but one with absolutely no filter applied to any of their ideas. They make games that are (mostly mechanically) full of weird poo poo with no attention paid to whether any of it is actually fun or makes any kind of sense. As such the games they make are generally fascinating but more often than not they are bad games. That said, I genuinely and sincerely hope they never stop doing their thing.

Poulpe posted:

- they weren't afraid to spend time developing weird/crappy distractions and mini-games, much like the aforementioned iron chef cook off. More generally, this is something I think really drags down modern RPGs, if you think of the "great classics", Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Trigger, Mario RPG for example, they're all chock full of weird mini games, plot based or otherwise to grab your attention and keep you from getting bored of endless RPG battles. And it works! I don't know why this trend dropped off so hard but RPGs took a hit with it!

D_W posted:

Naw. It's more that now games are much more expensive to make and publishers pressure devs to get them out fast. So a lot of that stuff has to be cut or simplified.

wateyad posted:

HD art assets are unreasonably expensive to produce but for whatever reason, any time someone making an RPG gets a whiff of budget they immediately decide that they have to be producing an immersive high fidelity world even though they inevitably still don't actually have the AAA budget necessary to do that properly and almost anyone who's playing JRPGs not named Final Fantasy or Xenoblade at this point would almost certainly be willing to accept visuals on a par with, say, Tales of Graces and an old school semi-abstracted world map if it meant more complete and fleshed out feeling games. Instead we get worlds that are tiny by virtue of having to be "to scale" and where getting from place to place involves crossing big empty fields surrounded by high cliffs.

As a side note though I should mention in the interests of fairness that Tales of Berseria is going to have a bunch of minigames.

Artix posted:

God help me, but I'm about to defend Star Ocean 4. Yeah, he's only got the one combo/special attack right now, but remember that we are like...an hour into the game, tops. And even then it's only that long because he stopped to fight literally everything he came across. Once(/If) he actually gets things moving and makes some progress we'll start seeing skill books and other goodies drop and we'll get more specials.

goatface posted:

Your spelf is a bit underwhelming.

ProfessorProf posted:

It's like watching a comedy duo act, except one half of the duo has only heard of comedy in passing and the other half was told that this was going to be a serious drama scene.

Pork Lift posted:

This game, however, has managed to make me angrier than anything else we've ever played.

wateyad posted:

The K-On! music is all genuinely good and not just wateyad has broken taste in music good.

For the record the song we were talking about in the video was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LByzXOc6HWA

wateyad posted:

It's all still there, it's just blocked in specifically America for some reason by the music label.

wateyad posted:

I'm sure the last time I checked it was just America but sure enough, it's now also Australia, New Zealand and Mexico.

wateyad posted:

No, the claimant is Pony Canyon, the Japanese record label.

wateyad posted:

I have .avs files for up to episode 33 and an entire other day of recording's footage I haven't touched yet. At the point we're at, Lymle technically has the most attack options with two different cerberus summoning techniques and three attack spells while Wet, SamRaimi and [REDACTED] have three non-spell special attacks each. Honestly though, the variety of attacks available doesn't change very much when the controls and system mechanics encourage you to construct a single combo to spam and do nothing to discourage that from being as many copies of the same attack as you can set.

FillInTheBlank posted:

The BEAT system is just stats. The video you watched the person would have likely set the tactics for the other characters to not be 'all out attack' and to something more useful.

Kurui Reiten posted:

This series has so much promise to be something different in the massively overplayed JRPG catalog, but nope, gotta keep the idea of "Sci-Fi JRPG" as far as loving possible from this.

Seriously, you would think the idea of "JRPG in Outer Space" would have more entries, but there are honestly so loving few it's astounding.

Kurui Reiten posted:

I don't mind the game mechanics so much. gently caress, you can keep most of the mechanics for skills and poo poo from SO4 or whatever, those aren't really important. The "fresh coat of paint" would in many ways be enough. I miss stuff like Wild Arms, too, where the world isn't just castles and forests and caves and the same fantasy poo poo over and over. Sometimes all you want is a new theme and style, and the idea of Star Ocean seemingly being "we take these fuckers from a backwards planet and throw them into the future" should be good, but it generally ends up being "space visits the backwater planet and tries really, really hard to be irrelevant, because gently caress you".

Momomo posted:

To be fair I think most video games have this exact same problem.

90s Cringe Rock posted:

"a FETUS!" yells the fourth-dimensional god-being at the traumatised child

wateyad posted:

AI party members are kinda just inherently bad design on a pure skill testing action game level.

wateyad posted:

The fundamental gameplay of an action game is eliminating enemies while avoiding taking damage. If you introduce AI teammates, how good should they be at avoiding taking damage? If you have them taking damage while getting in there and mixing it up then that's damage the player couldn't skill their way out of. If you make them invincible then they become just a source of damage the player didn't have to earn. This isn't to say that there are absolutely no interesting things that can be done with AI party members but by including them, you are compromising your game as an action game in order to introduce elements of other genres.

wateyad posted:

Not a surprise, no but people seemed to be deciding that the game making the most bare bones of efforts at having interesting action game bosses was a bad thing because the AI couldn't handle them and that seemed kind of backwards to me. The AI isn't dying because it doesn't know how to deal with the boss having a weak point anyway, it's dying because it doesn't know how to dodge and, well, see my last post. If anything, the AI actively shouldn't know about the weak point thing because the whole point is that it's something the player needs to figure out and exploit.

whowhatwhere posted:

filthychimp posted:

Oh god, I'm another person who played this game and forgot Meracle even existed, she's such a lovely character.