Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Video games get delayed all the time, whether because they need a little more time in the oven, or because Nintendo knows that expectations are extremely high and it can’t just slap the Metroid name on something and call it a day. Final Fantasy XV is a game that Square Enix delayed a lot. The backstory of the game’s development is far too complex to really get into here, but it started life all the way back in 2006 as a spin-off of Final Fantasy XIII called Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Almost all of that material was eventually scrapped—with some of the bones ending up in Kingdom Hearts III (again, we cannot get into it)—and Final Fantasy XV didn’t come out until a decade later. Even then, Square spent years continuously patching and updating it after the fact to fix, add, and change certain things that were either incomplete or were received poorly on the initial launch.
Playing the game in 2020, long after the downloadable expansions that fill in some plot holes, and the game-changing updates, have stopped, it’s hard not to get the feeling that—despite the years and years in development—Final Fantasy XV was never really finished. Major story beats don’t get enough room to breathe, mechanics are introduced that seem barely necessary, and seemingly important characters are dispatched off-screen, or only ever acknowledged in optional lore collectibles. It’s the kind of weird disconnect between the story it wants to tell, and the story it’s actually telling, that you never really see in big movies or TV shows. But I kind of love it for that.
The gaps in Final Fantasy XV aren’t as egregious as they were in, say, Metal Gear Solid V (which, for various reasons, left its entire final chapter, and the actual resolution of its plot, as an animatic that you could only get with the game’s special edition), but there’s something really cool about being able to see the strings in something massive like a Final Fantasy game. Every time something interesting is about to happen and the game cuts to black so it doesn’t have to animate the characters doing it, it’s a reminder that FFXV was actually made by people who did their best to get this thing out the door without sacrificing their (somewhat) unnecessarily elaborate vision.
In FFXV, you play as a magic prince named Noctis who is tasked with going on a cross-country road trip with his bros in his dad’s giant car, and for most of the game you’re free to drive around its big open world, taking on quests to kill monsters or cater to the whims of your friends. One guy likes to take photos, and will ask if you can stop the car to get a cool shot of a waterfall. Another guy likes to cook and needs you to consistently buy ingredients or books so he can learn new recipes. Noctis himself likes fishing, and there are whole dedicated quest lines about getting new reels or challenging the old fishermen of this cool modern/fantasy world to fishing competitions.
Food gives you stat boosts, and you can check out your photos at the end of every in-game day for a nice look back at some fun moments. But fishing is mostly pointless (unless you like fishing, but this is a game where you can summon swords from thin air and throw them at monsters, so why would you waste time fishing?). Still, the developers at Square Enix spent time making the fishing work, rather than fleshing out some cool late-game twists. It’s a very human design decision. A soulless game development machine would ensure that the important things work perfectly at the expense of the art of it (see: the entire Call Of Duty franchise), but people chose to prioritize the fishing stuff in FFXV because it was important to Noctis as a character. And even though it’s really not, they thought it was, which is endearing.
I’ve gone on record saying I prefer games that try over games that don’t, and more than anything, Final Fantasy XV is a game that tries its little emo bro heart out. It reaches for a lot of weird or interesting stuff, and while it fails to actually grab that stuff pretty often, the fact that you can see it reaching is appealing in its own little way. You can see the incredible game that it would’ve been if it hadn’t been constrained by time or money. And the fact that the developers chose to stick to that vision, even if it meant leaving some cracks exposed, is the kind of dedication that deserves to be celebrated more often.
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So did I overpraise the new AVC layout too soon? Where does Games coverage—mostly this column, I suppose—fall in this new order?I’m more or less done with Fallout 4, so I’m moving on to my big games project: Retropie on Raspberry Pi 3. My brief fling with the Genesis Mini really whetted my appetite for retro game archival. So I went and got myself a kit and nervously—it feels like I’m a giant trying to build a dollhouse—assembled it.So far, it seems to be working, though there was a moment when I feared I might have screwed up the whole enterprise by messing with some optional installs, but I was thankfully able to restore my original install. I’ve been able to get numerous systems—Sega CD, Neo Geo, Atari Lynx, several other Atari systems—up and running. Now, my next challenge is to get a workable wireless controller setup for these emulators.And that brings me to my prompt for the commentariat: I am looking for recommends for games/systems to try out. I’m not necessarily interested in the well-known classics; I want to hear about the uniquely weird/weirdly unique, sleeper hits, hidden gems, and the ambitious oddballs. Generally, I’m looking at consoles up to the fourth generation (and maybe the first stirrings of the fifth generation), though the definition of what a “console” is can be somewhat fungible; to me, the Commodore 64 is a console, because I played a bunch of (often pirated) games on it.
Don’t overlook handhelds, there’s some real gems on the GBA.
Not a chance. I wouldn’t miss A Sound of Thunder or Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars for the world![I kid, but those titles actually do sound intriguing, knowing nothing about them but the title (I assume the former is related to the Ray Bradbury short story and the former is part of the long-running mecha series) ]
“Ooooo, new layout reminiscent of the old AV Club!! Cool! Where’s the Games section? Where’s… where’s the Games section? Ruh roh…”Salutations~!Hey, I actually had time to delve into a bunch of somewhat new games! Yaaay!Visitor 来访者:I’m glad I checked out some vids on this first, because while it has a solid premise and stellar video presentation, its English subtitle translation leaves MUCH to be desired. It’s exceedingly literal-minded and frequently mixes up key facts about dates, times, and pronouns in key areas (especially daunting for an investigation game where all the preceding is integral to player progress). Example: Instead of calling a victim, “the deceased,” Visitor 来访者 continuously refers to them as “the death person.” In the grandest scheme of things, this isn’t entirely egregious; it’s highly reminiscent of late ‘80s/early ‘90s JRPG translation woes of a similar nature, after all, and we survived that era just fine. It just reminds me how far we’ve come in 30+ years. ALLLLLL that aside, did I like what I saw in those vids from everything else? Yes. Yes I did. It’s a Chinese FMV detective story with extremely, deliberately stilted acting and mannerisms. Gave me huge Phoenix Wright vibes in a good way. But there’s not much to the gameplay itself and the translation woes are a big hurdle, so I’ll have to pass.Final Verdict: Didn’t purchase. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales:I finally got around to playing this, woooooo! And I bounced off it after 6 hours!Less woooooo! ^^ Seriously though, this is a very solid game on several levels. It just doesn’t mesh well with what I want right now as a player. Inadvertent dissonance felt, akin to what transpired with Bloodborne. But you really wanted more Witcher world stuff, right? Oh, yep yep yep! And this HAS that… but… hmm… how best to describe the difference in execution…If Gwent in Witcher 3 is equatable to Final Fantasy VIII’s Triple Triad (one of the best mini-games and card games in all of gaming), than the Gwent system in Thronebreaker is the equivalent of Final Fantasy IX’s Tetra Master. Similarly so to that scenario, you’d THINK both card games would feel and play the same way… but they don’t. Triple Triad is all about hunting down the best cards and theorycrafting your entire deck around some crazy scheme to defeat your opponent near instantly with grand devastation. And it frequently gave me more emotional investment and chills compared to the actual main storyline in the game (having to fix that sacrifice I needed to acquire Rinoa’s Card from her dad, battling Quistis at the end of that huge tournament and hearing her story). It’s not remotely balanced in how its cards all play out, but it’s immersive and engaging all the same. It embraces the crazy and thrives off of it with its ever changing rulesets and worldly presentation. Every battle is a massacre but I feel wholly invested.Tetra Master, however, was built from the ground up to be seamlessly integrated into PlayOnline (remember that old Squaresoft/Square-Enix staple?). Balanced entirely for effective and efficient multiplayer content. And it’s… fine. Every battle can turn out roughly the same way based on the relatively variant strategy possible in each deck you wield. Always perfectly cromulent results to any given encounter. And slowly, over time you can shift how your deck operates between one opponent and another. But as a mini-game in FFIX, it pays the bills. I’m no longer scouring the earth looking for special cards the way I did in FFIV or FFVI looking for special summons and bosses. Every encounter here I make due but it just isn’t grabbing me in the same way. Along those lines, I STILL love playing Gwent in Thronebreaker, but no matter the card I get nor the difficulty level I set, the enemy has a bazillion counters against every approach now. Still wholly predictable and defeatable. But every fight WILL take quite a bit of time and focus now beyond the Theorycrafting stage. And that stringent re-balancing is TOTALLY understandable since, much akin to say, Neverwinter Nights, this whole setup’s a single player module designed to help teach people the ins and outs of Gwent for the multiplayer aspects of the product. But that also means the magic and insanity of Witcher 3’s Gwent got capsized a tad. Oh sure, you can still acquire rare cards and come up with insane strats, but you need to utilize a ton of resources first to mold your units to that effect, and the game doesn’t let you manually save/reload. So it’s a veritable gamble if you want to go wild with a mad idea. But once again, that minor gripe of mine aside, what about the storytelling and moral ambiguity of several choices? All still superb in Witcher 3 fashion, but again… there’s something missing for me due to the specific execution of it all in Thronebreaker. Everything about the original Witcher 3 experience is SO streamlined and simplified here that it dilutes the magic. Sure, I can fret about the narrative consequences of my actions with each choice… but I mean… even if morale goes down I can just go to a shrine and boost it back up 2 seconds later. Troop Morale is pretty fickle. And I’m not saying some key consequences aren’t harrowing. It’s just there’s this barrier now to the nuance and intimacy I felt in Witcher 3. In that older title, you were NECK DEEP in the thick of things. It was veritable Law & Order: Witcher Unit. Every step of the way, from corpse to culprit, you were painstakingly collecting evidence and testimony to try to reach the best outcome for your character. In Thronebreaker, those similar scenarios and choices therein are presented and doled out in mere seconds. Makes perfect sense for how the royalty operates. But again… magic lost. Even compared to being a ruler in the expansion for Dragon Age or DA: Inquisition and the war table/throne room scenes, this doesn’t hold a candle to those moments. And finally, Final Fantasy Record Keeper scratches my long term strategy itch pretty darn well, even now as I slowly accumulate better gear in this personal doldrums period to take on that harsh 6* magicite end game content. So my headspace just didn’t match what was needed to combat so many trash mobs again and again and again. Sure, on Adventurer Mode, I could just skip battles… but isn’t that the POINT of this game? To be thrilled by card battles AND story?So, long story short as always for me: I loved everything I saw on principle, but didn’t click with any of it practically. Other than the still amazing soundtrack and the puzzle Gwent battles. Those were all with custom decks and trials and a ton of fun (reminiscent of my favorite part of Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls’s gameplay). Final Verdict: Didn’t finish. Might come back to this later and/or piecemeal it.Simulacra 2: Also known (by me) as…Murdered by Goop, #M for Murder, Followers /w Sacrifice? SNF!, and…Remember to Like/Subscribe/Smash that Notification… for MURDER©!This one I finished. “REALLY, Shinigami? THIS and not Thronebreaker?!?” I know… I know… What can I say. I love me some FMV cheesiness. So how was it? Final Verdict: [Regular B] Biggest praise first: I really liked the presentation here. The vid quality, the phony websites and Facebook/Twitter/Instagram analogs. This wasn’t top tier Hypnospace Outlaw levels of dedication to detail, but it was closer than you’d think given the subject matter (suspense mystery thriller in which a popular internet influencer has been mystically slain in some bizarre ritual to attract more followers to her social network’s hub of extremely self absorbed associates). The actual mystery and storytelling beyond that presentation was entirely on rails and rote though. Nothing terrible but nothing super duper special either. You can pretty much gather what everyone’s angle is in this mystery from the first time you converse with them. Greedy pyramid scam guy is greedy pyramid scam guy, grief-hound is grief-hound, etc. etc. There IS depth to be found in these performances, but it’s at the end of a very long road of very well honed superficiality and vapidness. In short: This game does SUCH a superb job selling you on how shortsighted and single minded this victim and these suspects were/are in doing whatever it takes to get subscribers and followers that it undermines any attempts to really care about the outcome. Law & Order episodes about EVIL TEENS and the HORRORS of MODERN TECHNOLOGY aren’t this stilted and sledgehammer-y against their targets. Again, the conclusive moral for the best ending is that these are all still real people, but the game skips too many steps in regards to highlighting and breathing life into that thesis statement. They NAILED making these people obnoxious, mostly in a humorous way, but the landing was not stuck. Not for me. So in the end: This either needed more depth to its investigation, Return of the Obra Dinn meets Her Story style, or it needed more nuance to the characterizations over time. As is, it was decent but nothing amazing. So… is that it? Any more FMV gems on the horizon?May…be…. we’ll see… (That’s a really awful nickname for a friend, developers! And the voice acting actually says “Bitch-u” too. This isn’t some translation issue. Booo, Aya Fumino who’s probably still alive since she sounds like Belldandy [the always amazing Kikuko Inoue] doing a young voice and there’s a mysterious older character with the same voice. You have terrible nicknames for your friends, Aya!)Take care and have a fantastic weekend, anyone who actually sees this. And if you backlog this days/weeks/months later, I hope you will have had a great weekend too! ^^ Be safe.
I really need to start throwing some money at these FMV games; I have a soft spot for them and I wish to see this gaming mini-trend continue. Mind you, I don’t want a return to the lackluster Digital Pictures lineup (Sewer Shark, Night Trap, Ground Zero: Texas) or American Laser Games’s light-gun shooting galleries (Mad Dog McCree, Crime Patrol, Who Shot Johnny Rock?), even if they were occasionally amusing in a “so bad it’s good” way. The important lesson to learn from those crap-fests is that FMV alone isn’t enough to prop up an otherwise just-OK game…and that the technology wasn’t quite there to support a full-screen, uncompressed home console port.
Agreed! Just as with other genres and storytelling devices, FMV isn’t inherently bad. There’s good executions of FMV storytelling (Tex Murphy, Wing Commander III, Gabriel Knight II, Contradiction!, Her Story), and there’s the lesser grade stuff that’s trying to ride a gimmick rather than flesh anything out with substance and nuance. As you say, if ALL you have are the FMV cutscenes, it’s an empty void of an experience. But thankfully most modern attempts at these games seem to always try to instill something else into the formula. I’ve not seen one that’s coasted on the cutscenes and nothing else.
I remember MAd Dog McCree being sort of… good? I’m guessing it probably doesn’t hold up though.
It’s a light-gun shooter, so I guess it’s probably got a halfway-decent gameplay loop. I can just think of a lot of other better light-gun shooters: House of the Dead series, Time Crisis series. But yeah, I suppose if someone’s got a good port of it and the peripherals to go with it, it’s probably a fun time.
Last time I checked on, I mentioned having started Nioh and actually progressing in it. And I continued to do that, until I beat the game! Definitely one of the more satisfying ends to a game I’ve had. Not in terms of story and arc (cause let’s face it, that part was pretty bland) but having conquered all the bosses, honing my skill and figuring out my playstyle was very fun. Really thinking of buying Nioh 2 at launch.
After that, the Soulsborne bug got me and I jumped back into Bloodborne. Tried and tried again to defeat Father Gascoigne but still couldn’t get him. His third form just got me every time. Dunno what it is about that game but it feels cursed.
So I bought Dark Souls 3 to see if that series was more up my alley and it seems it is. I’m in a swamp now terrified of crabs and getting my ass whooped by some knight in a hallway. The Big Tree Boss I beat before this level was one of the funnest bosses I fought in a while. Took me a couple of tries but figuring him out was a lot of fun. But then life got in the way (new job, finding an apartment,…) and DS3 got waylaid. So for a more snacky game, I picked up Greedfall. Not that far in yet. Love the setting and monster design, but people weren’t kidding about the AA-stamp. I don’t mind reused assets like paintings and room layouts but hearing sailor-specific lines spoken by a pick-axing worker in the quarry is just lazy and immersion-breaking.
The melee-combat feels a bit rubbery and light (not very tactile) so I’m sticking to guns and traps (guns seem to do way more damage anyhoo). Should have gone for mage perhaps but the game doesn’t lock you out so will explore that avenue too.
Why would you start a trilogy with its third entry?
Because:
– They’re not story-heavy games where a single maincharacter goes through several arcs and storylines.
– The third one the fastest one is in the trilogy and the one time I tried Dark Souls 2, it felt really slow and tedious.
– It was recommended to me by a friend who played all three, Nioh and Bloodborne and told me this one seemed it would fit me best.
– It’s the newest so the QoL-changes, the graphics,… give this game the best chance to win me over.
– That’s because the main character is the world itself. There’s a lot of story, it just isn’t exposited in lengthy cutscenes.
– DS2 has a stat that affects dodging, it’s easy to miss that and have a worse experience.
– DS1 recently got a remaster with improved graphics and QOL tweaks.All three games are great, but there’s a lot you miss out on if you play them out of order.
I know there’s tons of lore and worldbuilding but it never seemed necessary to experience it chronologically. You’re the first person to make that comment.
The DS1 remaster was also an option I considered but I went with my friends recommendation in the end.
Good to know about the DS2 roll stat. I found the beginning of that game way too hard and vague, couldn’t get into it.
Thanks for the tips, I’ll keep them in mind.
It’s mostly ‘cos 3 is full of references to the first two games, that have a bit of resonance.You’ll catch them on a replay I’m sure 😛
Everyone has their own pattern of enjoyment. I’m far too completionist to jump in in the middle (which is why I’m trying Arena and not Skyrim below), but RespectableishC gives their reasons and they make sense. Why yuck somebody’s yum?
literally nobody gets interested in dark souls because of the lore, nobody playing ds3 before playing ds1 is all like “wow anor londo? i wanna learn more about that place!”
Dark Souls 2 is a pile of garbage and outside of a couple armor sets, completely unrelated to the rest of them. I have a boss or 2 left and no interest in completing it.
I started it with DS3! I actually played BB first like RespectableishC, then moved on to DS3 when I finished, because a) No DS1 remaster yet, but knew it was coming, andb) Souls games are pretty separate story wise, there is tonnes of lore, but you don’t *need* to play one to get the others. I did get and beat DS1 and its expansion when remastered came out. It’s amazing, but the bosses are almost a joke compared to DS3 and BB (nothing even close to the rage inducing bosses of BB’s expansion…maybe that’s a good thing, lol…)
Man, I just could not crack Nioh’s combat style. I would end up forgetting the Ki refresh most of the time. To be honest, it doesn’t matter for the game’s many small-fry enemies—you can just snipe them or use the hit them/back up combo to take them out with minimal damage—but the bigger demon types and the bosses take a good deal more work. That’s usually when I would unleash the spirit-animal supermove (they call it something different in the game, I’m sure) to help me out, but that takes a lot of grinding smaller enemies to build up that meter. I got to the vampire boss lady and after one too many restarts due to paralyzing attack, I gave up.But I can’t truly hate a game that could make me jump out of my seat/yelp in amazement by bringing a wall to life.So, in summation, kudos to you!Bloodborne may be one of my favorite games of this console generation; it certainly is my favorite of the From Software action-RPGs (I still don’t quite know how I feel about Sekiro). How could I not love a game with a boss called “Rom the Vacuous Spider” or a very Innsmouth-like fishing hamlet (in the DLC)? I could never quite get the parry timing down in the Dark Souls games, but I could do gun parries against most common enemies pretty reliably. Gascoigne is a bit of a pain; he functions as both the gatekeeper to harder areas and a preview of the hunter-type minibosses that are scattered throughout the game. Really, the best advice for the first phase of his fight is to stay mobile and strike fast, unless you get really good at gun-parrying him. The second phase I have less advice on him, since I managed to glitch-kill him; his dumb ass got stuck in the tomb at the center of the graveyard and I just chucked a bunch of molotovs at him until I ran out and had to actually risk some cautious strikes.
Thanks. The Ki-refresh by pressing R1 itself is a bit tedious. The real genius of the system comes when you can unlock the skills where dodging functions the same as the dedicated button, so you can attack and then dodge at the right moment for a Ki-pulse. That way, the combat flows much better. It made such a difference that I think it should have been embedded from the start.
Those bosses do require a good grasp of the mechanics and skills. I didn’t switch stances that much. I was low stance dual katanas + high stance spear guy. I could tackle most enemies and situations with those two.
The Vampire Lady Boss took me 15 tries but it was a thrilling fight. I was also lucky that during my exploration I found all parts of the Archer Garbs set that reduces the paralysis drastically. The fight itself teaches you to not be greedy and stay on the move. The first Oni boss in the ship took me 32 tries, I really struggled with that one. But as the game progressed, no boss took me more than 15 tries. Bloodborne is objectively great but I also don’t vibe well with the aesthetics. Never been a big horror game fan and it’s all so drab and dreary. I found Nioh’s bright colours and setting itself much more pleasing and interesting. Purely personal preference so no criticism intended.
One big difference between Nioh and Bloodborne and why I end up bouncing from the latter every time is those damn check points too. Nioh’s checkpoint are at most a ten-second sprint to the boss but Bloodborne’s run to Gascoigne was too much of a slog. Your post reminds me of a few other thoughts I had on Nioh so here is a mini-continuation of my review:
The loot-system is its biggest drawback. I spent way too much time in the menus going through it all.
The crafting system is pointless too with all of the extra loot you get unless you reach end game and really get into the nitty gritty maxing.
The separate levels as opposed to From’s open world take some of the worldbuilding charm out of it but they are well-suited for an hour or two every night. The level-design in the From-games is also far better and more interesting. I might not like the look of them visually but they’re more satisfying to explore and figure out. Nioh at best loops back around.
Yeah, the loot system had me in my menus way too often…but I loved it all the same. My 2nd favorite PS+ free game, right after…BLOODBORNE! lol, this one was right up my alley, as long as the alley was brightly lit so I didn’t get freaked out (damn those baby noises…)
Bloodborne is objectively great but I also don’t vibe well with the aesthetics.No problem. We’re ships travelling to the same place, just along different routes. My (gaming) friends don’t seem to get why I enjoy these types of games; I try and explain but it just goes right over their thick skulls. If I’m going to invest time in a game, I don’t want to feel like I’m just killing time slowly plodding through the game. I want just enough challenge to fuel that sense of accomplishment: too little and I just feel like a rat in a Skinner box; too much and my endless patience starts to reach an end (this is the main reason I stopped playing Sekiro, despite loving the world design and movement options). Bloodborne’s run to Gascoigne was too much of a slog.There are plenty of DS-style shortcuts throughout the game, sometimes several in particularly big areas. Once you unlock the elevator in Central Yharnum, it becomes a LOT shorter. And I’ll always love the flaming-boulder trap:I do agree with your complaints about Nioh. It feels like they had too many ideas and they tried to stuff them all in one game, honestly. Still, I’m more likely to come back to it one day than…say…The Surge.And this year might just turn out to be a banner year for samurai-sim/ronin-’em-ups, with both Ghost of Tsushima and Nioh 2 (I think there’s one more but I can’t recall the name) coming out.
For Father Gascoigne, his third phase can get easier if you thoroughly explore Central Yharnam and exhaust dialogue with a particular NPC. I don’t know how much you want me to spoil. If you don’t want to use that in-game trick, oil pots and molotovs can work wonders if you time them right; I would also say that you should try to fight him on the stairs so you don’t get stuck on gravestones. He is pretty tough- don’t hesitate to grind blood echoes for levels and blood vials.
I think I do need to put in more time and just grind a bit to level up. I did find that music box already which I’ve used but it’s not enough to offset how bad I am at the game. 😀
If you think Gascoigne is hard…never play the DLC (i was stuck on one boss for literal months. Had to take breaks to beat other games, come back, try again, fail miserably for a few weeks, go to a new game, etc. Still haven’t beaten the final DLC boss, or an optional DLC Boss. One day…)
I’m in the same boat. All of the SoulsBorne games have some point that comes really close to being objectively unfair, but never quite crosses that line (for me, anyway). Bloodborne manages to get a lot of that out of the way pretty early with Old Yharnum (fucking Djura!) and later with…well..everything in Yahar’gul (Reanimating Villagers! Laser-Shooting Cthulhus! Those often-hidden bell-ringers!). Still, the DLC does make quite a go of one-upping the main game, though. I wouldn’t have even beat Lady Maria, if not for a little help from one of the commenters here.
Strangely Lady Maria was dirt easy for me, not even half a dozen tries. Ludwig was the worst. I barely even attempted Lawrence, who I suspect would bother me more than Kos.
Maria had the clearest progression of any Souls boss for me from “I didn’t even hit her, I will never get past this point” to “oh, now I can beat her without getting hit”
Take heart- I got through Dark Souls by hiding behind a shield, but even I have beaten the base game in Bloodborne. If I can do it, so can you!
Gascoigne was, for me, the hardest goddamn boss in that game. I must have tried thirty times before I finally beat him. My latest trips through the game I’ve just rang the beckoning bell to get past him as painlessly as possible. Nothing else gave me as much trouble as him – I even one-shot several later bosses. Gascoigne is a mean bastard.
Nioh was just straight up too hard for me. I kept hoping it would get a little easier to handle but it never did. I liked the combat system though.
I found Nioh kinder in the way that levelling up is more noticeable, better placed checkpoints and most importantly, good tutorials. It teaches you everything and made it easier to digest for me.
Also, thank you for the Gascoigne comment. It helps to ease the pain. Some day…. I swear….
I still haven’t gotten around to ever playing FF15, and I’ve seen such a mixed response to it over the years… I was a huge FF fan from around 7-10 (with a touch of 12), and 13 felt pretty shallow to me, but this definitely makes me interested again to give 15 a crack!
Anyway, for this weekend I’m currently on my 217th game of a huge Top 500 Video Game List writing project (why oh why did I think this was a good idea), and after a whole bunch of bland or irritating 6/10 titles, I’ve finally found another gem: Forza Horizon 3 is a HUGE surprise and a total blast.It’s an open-world driving game, a genre I always found pointless and time-consuming, just adding unnecessary padding between actual races. But for once, the sandbox actually feels ESSENTIAL here; rather than a fenced-off set of roads, you can plow straight into the rainforest or across the desert, ignoring the anxious instructions of your GPS and just making your own shortcut, finding secret cars and bonus points everywhere you go.With the ‘Forza’ name I was expecting a pretty dry simulation, but I was very wrong. It’s fun as hell, starting you off with a series of ridiculous events, rushing across Australian beaches and through caves in dune-buggies, racing against a helicopter with a jeep chained beneath it, driving super-cars along beautiful wide open roads… it reminds me more of GTA5 than anything else. There’s also a beautiful sense of progression, introducing mechanics slowly and carefully, even requiring you to unlock the radio stations you listen to. I’m not a huge driving-game fan, but this has hooked me in completely, and I expect to be playing a whole lot more of it over this weekend. After that, I have the 1980’s Gauntlet and Super Mario Sunshine waiting for me, and I’m especially excited to finally try and beat Sunshine! Have a great weekend 🙂
Convenient article; I’m building a new computer tonight or tomorrow (just waiting on the power supply to arrive today). I haven’t had a new gaming PC since 2013 so I’m looking to play some games that are newish and pretty, so I’ll either be playing Final Fantasy XV or Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Ooh, what did you build? My own computers are always mid-range, but most recently I built a mini-ITX that’s… marginally smaller than another computer? It’s still an AMD – the price point is just so much better, even if they don’t age really well. But I went with a solid state hard drive this time, which has been really nice in terms of startup times.
I love Final Fantasy, but this one I lost interest in after about 15-20 hours in. FF X was by far the best in the series, IMHO. And one of the only ones I finished, along with the OG Final Fantasy. FF III on Super Nintendo is awesome too. Wish I still had the copy I rented from King Soopers back in 1998, and conveniently “forgot” to return.
I finally finished off my KOTOR reply last weekend. As always, I love that section at the end where you’re invading the Star Forge and face seemingly endless waves of enemies, but one of the interesting things while playing a Consular in that section was that I barely touched any of them. I’d put some area stuns down and by the time I’d closed to melee distance, Juhani and Mission would have already murdered everything. And it’s just as well for Malak that he was fighting me and not Juhani, otherwise he wouldn’t have lasted long enough to deliver his “mu ha ha ha” dialogue.(On a related note, shame that there’s no option to ask HK47 if you too used to deliver “mu ha ha ha” dialogue back in the day).Anyway so next up… I did the very, very start of Dragon Age Origins a few weeks back, but it’s too soon to play that one after KOTOR, bearing in mind they’re the exact same game (god, Malak even talks about your “dark taint”). So instead, and still maintaining a theme of over-ripe villainous dialogue, I’m going to play (for the first time) Metal Gear Solid 4. Is there a giant ladder in this one? I do hope so.
“Everytime something interesting is about to happen and the game cuts to black so it doesn’t have to animate the characters doing it” This is a staple of budget JRPGs and as someone who plays a lot of those, it’s insanely frustrating to me that Final Fantasy, the AAA blockbuster of JRPGs, did this. XV is such a clusterfuck of mismanagement and disappoinment. Anyway, I’m still on my “no buying new games until Animal Crossing comes out” rule. It’s been tough but I finally almost caught up with my friends in Borderlands 3. The game definitely isn’t as good as 2 but now that I’m 5 hours in or so it’s starting to get that charm back. I really hate jumping between planets so much but it almost works within the story. I’ll try to get through another chunk of that this weekend…
Yeah, I’m with you on this one about FFXV. This article’s basic thesis is bizarre and kind of… terrible to me? “You can tell people made this because of how they fucked it up completely and made an enormous amount of process management errors. That’s charming!” No, it’s not charming at all! They wasted MILLIONS on this stupidity! That’s like watching Pentagon Wars and saying “Wow, the Bradley personnel carrier is such a charming and fun project!”
I’ve long been getting the feeling that something is very off at SquareEnix. They’re a hugely successful AAA publisher but FFXIII was a famously jumbled development where people were working on various elements of the game with no idea how they would interact with anything else. FFXIV apparently took many updates to become something people like, and then FFXV has this weird tortured lineage. And they published The Quiet Man. Don’t think they were the dev studio for it but still.And yet Dragon Quest XI is a solid fun RPG experience with no obvious signs of bad development, so they pulled that off at least.
They probably succeeded making Dragon Quest because the basic verbs of the gameplay experience are always the same as they were, while FF15 was trying to do something different. Square-Enix tends to have a lot of trouble with “different.”
Yeah but FFXV’s problems are at least as much in the story department as mechanically.
I think the narrative shortcomings are a product of the game’s ridiculous dev cycle pulling it in so many directions. When you’re pulling story elements because you can’t get whatever mechanic it was going to rely on working, you get weird stubs sticking out all over. FF13 also had this problem, where story was being dictated by pre-rendered stuff they finished when the game’s story was different. But by god, they made them and are going to use them, so we need to figure out how to keep in a scene with anti-gravity shoes!
Squeenix has this weird split personality where they’ll let their Japanese developers throw millions of dollars and many years at a project, but their overseas developers (both in-house and contract) are expected to churn out a new game every other year and sell, like, ten million copies.
I liked MGSV much more than FFXV, so i forgave the incompleteness much more, but overall I enjoyed both games a lot. It’s just in FFXV when I got to that new location finally and thought “cool, new area to explore”, and realized “nope, the exploration is done, this section is crazy incomplete”, I felt let down. The gameplay wasn’t enough to gloss over the rough edges, whereas in MGSV, that aspect, the gameplay, was so fun I forgave redoing missions and the abrupt non-ending. I’ll still take pictures of storage tankers and send them to my brother “should I fulton this one out?”
This week, I bizarrely had time to play games for once. First up was, of course, Star Wars: The Old Republic. This particular iteration of the Imperial Agent class story led to my female Zabrak essentially being the lead of a heist movie. I broke out a bunch of prisoners to be the crew on one last job, one of them tried to rebel against me, so took a blaster bolt between the eyes. After that, we had to break into a medical center to steal the equipment we needed for the actual heist of the vault of a maximum security ward. Since the medical center job went a bit messy thanks to a combination of rogue AI and mind control gas, I had to temporarily incapacitate my crew and blow up the ventilation system. This meant tossing a whole shipload of grenades everywhere (such stealth! much spy!). We have most of the parts needed, but it looks like I’m going to have to infiltrate another ward to get the remaining pieces…After that, I decided to fire up a Bethesda game for the first time and try some Elder Scrolls action. No, not Skyrim, I have my weird completionist thing going, so it was time to say welcome to the Arena!Unfortunately, I’m extraordinarily crap at Arena, or at least I’m having a lot of trouble with the combat controls of holding down the right mouse button and swiping or poking in the vague direction of the enemy. I can slaughter rats and goblins okay, but can’t get out of the opening dungeon without dying. I need to find both safe resting points and figure out a way to kill goblins the second I get out of water, since water stops attacking and the little bastards keep popping up on shorelines. I need a ranged weapon so badly….
I switched to a game I can practically play in my sleep at this point, good old Baldur’s Gate, and….Yeah, I finished it yet again. Really should replay Baldur’s Gate II before BG3 comes out.
I was also watching our local gaming group (I’ve mentioned playing in their D&D games before) play on their Twitch stream. First up was some Minecraft, which inspired me to reinstall and boot up and reinstall some vanilla Minecraft of my own. Haven’t played long, and don’t yet have my own house, merely two cobblestone walls. I have dug a massive chasm to mine through, with a nicely carved set of stone stairs down. I think I need to dig yet deeper to find some coal and oars, as well as explore for some animals since I definitely am going to need food soon.
The other games they played were some more of the various Jackbox Party Packs, including some Fibbage, Quiplash, Civic Doodle, and finally Bracketeering, where we had things like this happen.Always nice when you have sixteen players on…That local gaming group are going to be running some tabletop games at Galaxycon here in Richmond, VA this weekend and I’ll be attending my first ever con to both play those games, see some Transformers voice actors, and Star Trek TNG actors…
What sort of version of Baldur’s Gate are you playing? I think a version came out on iPad a while back, but I didn’t get very far into it. (Also, at a guess, how long might it take a first time player to get through it?)
I have it on the old D&D Classics Anthology which was two DVD-ROMS, so I’ve had it for a while…And for a first time player, it depends how familiar they are with 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I’d hazard 10 – 15 hours, less if you get lucky in combats.
Also, I’ve seen people stream the enhanced edition, and the QoL adjustments look like they’d make an enormous difference. I think that’s on Switch if you have one and want portability.
I just finished both 1 and 2 for the first time, and the first game took around 40 hours for me to finish. That’s not including failed characters, which you might experience a few of those. I played the Enhanced Edition. I think that’s the version to get for new players. If it’s a game you grew up with, you might want to stick with the original version, but I don’t know how far I’d have gotten without the QoL improvements in EE. Especially the loot bar and holding down TAB to highlight interact-able objects.
Thanks, that’s helpful. I suspect I’d be in the 40 hours range.
Completely agree with this FFXV take. I’ve put about 30 hours into it on the PC game pass version in the last few weeks, and it is just so, so flawed. And yet, I love it. Another example: the car controls are INSANE. Nothing remotely resembling a real car. I’m in the off roader now and sometimes you hit a tree and just can’t reverse. So you have to jump or get out of the car to reset it’s position.It would be insane to make a racing mini-game in this context, but they did it anyway. And it was…fun?
I just finished Final Fantasy XV and honestly it was rough. I enjoyed the open world parts of the game but was super disappointed that once you leave Lucis it becomes less of an RPG and more of a straightforward action/adventure game, with waaaayyyy too many cut-scenes. The character choices were also often odd – I was particularly irritated with Ardyn inexplicably having new powers every time you encounter him and Luna having no real personality or character arc.
I played FFXV when it first came out and enjoyed it enough that I also played it after the Royal Pack and have played all the DLCs. I know I’m in the minority on this but I actually think it functioned better in the bare bones state it released in. Does it make sense? Nope, but guess what? It wouldn’t have made sense to Noctis either, and I think it unintentionally mirrors the headspace that the main character would have been in as he is being pushed and pulled by various other people in order to fulfill his destiny, and by focusing almost solely on his relationship with the chocobros it backed into giving a ton of meaning to his decision to sacrifice himself and, at least to this guy, made the ending hit like a ton of fucking bricks. Fleshing out the story actually kind of cut the legs out from a lot of that. To me, anyway.
Mario Maker 2 has been taking up a lot of my time. I’ve uploaded a couple of courses and Endless mode is actually working out pretty well for me. There are still plenty of “do this one move flawlessly 80 times in a row” courses and mandatory boss fights (Tip: Never Do This), but I feel like I’m running across more actual Mario-esque courses than I was with the first. And I’ve taken advantage of the Switch membership classic games thing to really delve back into the original Legend of Zelda. This game really holds up, surprisingly- there’s some grind when you need enough rupees for something, but even when you know where things are there’s this great feeling of exploration.I’m finishing up a long YT tutorial for Gamemaker and have managed to pinch a few bits of code, but there’s some stuff I still wanna learn for my initial project (and I’m still working on some fundamentals.)
Final Fantasy XV tried hard and it shows. It may not have been as successful as it could have been (hello joys of project and scope management), but it tells an enjoyable story of four guys on a roadtrip. Adding in the DLC stories really fleshes out the story, but I wish those moments hadn’t been DLC. Especially Ignis. That part of the game would benefit a lot more from laying out what exactly happened. But instead it was separated from the game, released behind a paywall more than a year after the initial release. I get the idea of wanting to tell an evolving story, but there’s a lot of key character moments that come out of that scene that would have been really useful to know. Side note: If you’re playing it on Gamepass both for console and PC, the DLC is all free. Even Episode Ardyn, which isn’t included in the Royal Pack DLC you’d normally buy on disc. Also, your saves are playable between Xbox and PC.As for me right now, after finishing all eight of the gyms, I made it through the championship run on Pokemon Sword. I appreciate the fact they re-used some of the gym leaders and even threw in a surprise fight or two to keep you on your toes. The first two fights I didn’t know who I was going to face, so I brought a pretty balanced team and boy I’m glad I thought smart on that. The story isn’t what I come for, but boy it seemed to drag oddly. I never want to see another extended reaction shot of someone’s mouth moving and unskippable text and no voice acting. Especially Hop. I’m starting the post-championship content and thought I was done with him … and out of the shadows HE’S BACK!Aside from that, I’ve been enjoying the PUBG Deathmatch mode. Haven’t had a lot of the technical issues people have been complaining about, and I’ve been able to improve my sharpshooting a bit. It’s been that sort of shooting range I’ve needed in that game, which has been nice. Eventually my K+A/D will reach 1:1.
Hop was annoying as hell to me. Actually all rivals in Pokemon games are. Like why are these guys talking like they’re such hot shit when my guy just wipes the floor with them in 4-5 total turns every time? I know Pokemon isn’t meant to be hard, but it feels like they should bake in losses for the player so that recurring foes like your rival are actually fun to beat.
I mean it’s one thing for them to be non-competitive, it’s a whole other thing for him to be this annoying shit living in his brother’s shadow who’s easily broken by one gym loss.
I’ve thought about picking up Final Fantasy XV again. I haven’t played since its original release. I have a platinum trophy for it, but I never felt the need to go back after all the changes and DLC. I liked it enough, but it’s probably the Final Fantasy entry I feel least connected to. I think some of this has to do the absence of playable women, since what I remember most is the time I spent with Iris. I just never really felt any connection to Noctis and crew, even though the game itself was fun, if flawed.As for me, I can finally say I’ve completed the essential journey through Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2. I don’t think I’ve ever had the feeling of truly going on an adventure and growing with my characters as much as I’ve felt it throughout my adventures on the Sword Coast. In the final moments, I actually reminisced on my my “early days” of getting knocked around by wolves and finding amulets for widows. I can’t really describe it without diction that’s way too elevated for a video game, but it’s actually an emotional and exhausting journey. Even The Witcher and Mass Effect games didn’t make me feel this way. Maybe it’s because I played those games as they were released and I played through the Baldur’s Gate one after the other, but it was beautiful in its finality. I loved experiencing game systems that are probably gone forever, for better (Time Stop) or worse (interactions that only serve to add color rather than advance plot). Spoilers follow if you’re planning on playing through yourself. I have to admit that I played through a lot of the Throne of Bhaal expansion on Story Mode. The quest to find Imoen and defeat Irenicus was long, and there was a small amount of time after Spellhold that I started to get frustrated, since it seemed like there was a lot of plot developments that only served to extend game time (Bodhi’s maze, comes to mind – not the Slayer revelation, but the dungeon itself), and I thought I might stop when I ended up in the Underdark. But instead I fell back in love. The Underdark was nigh perfect, only sullied somewhat when I realized that all the stringent time limits the quest-givers gave me were not real. The real fatigue set in when the game didn’t really give me any time to revel in my victory over Irenicus, and instead threw me right into the expansion. I’m somewhat ambivalent about my choice to switch over to story mode for a lot of Throne of Bhaal. I decided to do this after the third or fourth fight in a row that featured a mage using the Time Stop spell. There is nothing fun about sitting around for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, waiting to gain control again. It’s even worse when I might have to do it again if I end up dying, which happens often in the difficult fights of the expansion. So when I was able to simply win fights I knew would take a while of figuring out the right spells through trial-and-error and hoping luck was on my side in normal mode, I was very happy with my decision. The final confrontation I imagine would be a nightmare, which features several stages and no opportunity to rest. But I also noticed how powerful my characters became throughout the expansion, and I missed out on truly feeling that power. Maybe I’ll go back someday, but either way, I couldn’t be happier with finally being able to play through these massively important (at least as far as video games are concerned) games. End spoilers.Next, it’s on to Divinity: Original Sin. I played through a lot of it years ago on Playstation 4, but never finished. I started a new playthrough on PC recently, and hopefully I can make it through to end. I know there are other games in the CRPG experience that I should play first, but I kind of want to finish a game before Chris Davis talks about it. His video series on isometric RPGs was a major impetus to my finally playing through Baldur’s Gate, and I’d like to finish a game before he makes a video on it for once.
I just started playing Baldur’s Gate (EE) for the first time and hot damn am I struggling. I’m still pretty early on – just venturing north of Friendly Arm Inn – but nearly every encounter leaves me with a dead companion. The save slot has been my only reliable companion so far…
I definitely haven’t wrapped my head around the combat style yet. It’s just completely new to me I guess. I’m having a similar issue with Pillars of Eternity. I want to get through both, especially since BG inspired so many of the games I’m a fan of now, but the early game has been rough for me so far. Pillars has been a bit more forgiving but both feel overwhelming at first.
If the party member that keeps dying is your mage (Montaron?), start every fight with Larloch’s Minor Drain. Figuring that out is what I think finally helped me to push past the first few hours at level 1.
I haven’t memorized the names yet but that sounds right. All I know is he has 4 HP so a dry fart is enough to take him out.
That’s him. Starting fights with Larloch’s Minor Drain will give him more HP, and kill your enemies quicker to boot. It’s a good way to relieve the frustration of always dying in the early game.
Awesome. Thanks for the tips! Definitely enjoying the game so far. It’s more complex than I anticipated so I appreciate the advice.
I’m all for romanticizing the ambitious works of studios that just couldn’t pull it off. There are plenty of examples of games that are wonderful experiences that just don’t have nearly the polish and fine-tuning they really need. Passion/niche projects built by smaller teams (to keep with the JRPG example I’d place Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler in this category).Final Fantasy in NOT this. It’s a goddamn JRPG institution whose main entries have numerous resources that other developers could only dream of. Final Fantasy isn’t some plucky underdog, there’s no excuse other than poor management and vision for turning out anything other than a spectacle.It’s wonderful that you enjoyed it, despite its flaws, but let’s be honest about what we are and are not talking about here.
Final Fantasy XV has been on my “eventually” list for a while. It’s gone on and come off my Steam wishlist as I realized my laptop didn’t have the specs for it, and despite some fairly mixed reviews, it’s one I’ll (eventually) be excited to get my mitts on. I watched someone stream the game shortly after it came out. He categorized his stream under something other than Final Fantasy XV, banned the names of the four main characters in chat to prevent spoilers from random droppers-in, and made nicknames for them (Noctis was Corn Dog) so his regulars could discuss the game as it happened in their own chat-filter-friendly code language.And man, he really enjoyed fishing. I ducked out anytime it looked like something plot-heavy was about to happen, like a big boss that would likely have some important cut scenes after it, so I still know very little about the plot that stitched together fishing, driving around with the soundtracks to earlier FF games playing, hunting down a collage of bosses from earlier in the series, camera angles that linger a little long on Cindy, dining at cafes, and reviewing poorly taken photos of the day’s events. But, for however well the main story came together (which I’ll find out… eventually), the world felt lived in. It looked like a game where I could dick around under a bridge with a fishing rod for 5 hours and not feel like the world was impatiently reminding me that there’s a battle with Chupon waiting for me in a distant temple.With $1400 in car repairs this week, my plans to upgrade to a proper desktop are being pushed back by several months, but I trust that FFXV will be there in its still-incomplete glory when I’m ready for it.Video GamesI finished Sanitarium over the weekend, mostly stumbling over pixel hunts for important items that I swore I’d noticed and tried to highlight. And once the game seemed to confirm that those implements next to the sink were nothing important, there were dozens more small anomalies throughout the detailed environments to try and fail to click on for more progress. This became a common enough theme early on in the game that I started leaving a guide on in the background to make sure I didn’t waste an eternity clicking on things blindly when I could get some help collecting all the tools I needed to solve the game’s puzzles.That’s not an insignificant complaint, but I will say that once I recognized that this was going to be an ongoing issues and pulled up that guide, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. The plot, characters, and voice acting were nothing special, but it all seemed to be in the service of finding excuses to set chapters in unnerving mindscapes distinct enough from one another that each chapter’s puzzles had a new flavor.I’m probably playing this game a little late. High school me would’ve loved the shit out of it, and then adult me would remember too much about which insignificant-looking clutters were actually key items to recognize the game’s biggest flaw, and I’d probably be more attached to the story because it would’ve taken me a month to work my way through rather than a weekend. I just don’t have the patience for pixel hunts anymore, and I appreciate modern games that include a button to highlight hotspots to avoid just this issue.After much deliberation over several types of games my shrinking Steam backlog, I hopped into Final Fantasy X. This is the first time I’ve played the game’s international edition, with the expert sphere grid and added extract ability to force enemies to drop the mana/power/speed/ability spheres you need. I only just got to Luca, which always felt like the last leg of the tutorial for me, so I’m not sure I’ve fully absorbed the differences in the grid and the importance of Extract in powering through ability orb scarcity just yet, but I’ve had a chill journey through Besaid and Kilika, and I look forward to the difficulty ramping up.Board GamesNow that I’ve expanded Pandemic with On the Brink, I’ve taken to playing 3-character solitaire with it. People don’t really question my decisions anyway, so sometime it feels like I’m just inviting people to move one of my pawns apiece while I call the shots. I appreciate that there are so many ways to augment the difficulty in the expansion, either by incorporating new mechanics or just making epidemics happen more frequently. I haven’t fully explored the new challenges yet, but I am loving the new characters. The field operative is my favorite new character, with his ability to collect “samples” by choosing one cube to put on his card per turn, then being able to turn three of those in in place of cards. It takes more planning, but it lets you get around issues with card color scarcity and wasting time coordinating trades.More than anything, I’m looking forward to playing with the bio-terrorist, who works with the diseases to end human civilization, moving secretly from city to city, tracking his movements on a notepad, only placing his pawn when discovered, basically morphing the game into a faster version of The Fury of Dracula. I don’t have a handle on all of the new mechanics for that yet, but if we do play it this weekend, I have a feeling I’m going to be nominated to play the villain.Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 is on hold this weekend, as our third is out of town. We lost our first game in May last week but managed to find a huge, huge player advantage before we had to place our last plague cube – and we’re fairly certain it was intended that we’d get that before the huge punch in the face we got last week. It feels more balanced now, rather than an escalating series of disasters that continually make life more difficult. Even so, the previous week’s major bummer does take some control away from us, and we’ve had a few cities reach 0 population and had to learn the consequences of failure.Up until now, we’ve played with the same three characters each game, and done well enough and gotten lucky enough that only one character’s been scarred – mine. We opened up the ability to sticker over a scar, which every agreed I should take, so I now have three special abilities on top of my base job, and no scars. My character is absolutely a machine; I can accomplish one of our missions on turn 1 of our next game, and will be able to continue doing that for as long as that mission is active. With the huge advantage earned in our first game and my scar stickered over, we easily won our second game in May. We all hope we never have to see what happens if we fail 4 consecutive games.In the same night, Andrew left early, and the people remaining at the table were the T.I.M.E. Stories: A Prophecy of Dragons group. We finished our recon of all known areas in the game and at this point have found (we believe) four pathways to the end of the game. It’s a much more robust choose-your-own-adventure flowchart than the pack-in campaign, and there’s still an argument for peeking down the two paths we have not yet explored to both see all the content and get the most out of the purchase and to know for sure which pathway we think would be the most attainable – and Jose was interested in doing just that. But I think we know enough to put the right combination of characters to fill in each other’s weaknesses and push our way through. I think if I remind everyone that we still have a still-shrink-wrapped deck marked Mystery waiting for us in the endgame, everyone will be more inclined to push forward. But I’m a little tired of feeling like people will agree to anything I suggest. I think I’ll just leave it up to a vote at the beginning of the next session.And I’m still waiting for my Everdell box to arrive, with a collector’s edition of the base game and all three expansions. The release date was last Thursday, but I don’t know how involved China was in the production, and how much quarantines and travel restrictions may have delayed things. I’m unreasonably hopeful, as I have been every day for the past two weeks, that when I get home, the box will be there, and I will have shrink-wrap to peel off and manuals to read and cards to scrutinize and saddles to play with, mounting tiny miniatures atop giant miniatures without any concern for the gameplay implications of whatever combinations I put together. It’s a purchase I would not have made if I knew to expect $1400 in car repairs this week, which makes me all the happier that I didn’t know. It’s one last box of joy ahead of what will be a much leaner fun budget in the coming months.
I feel energized by the Borderlands 3 announcement and will roll a Zane to possibly replace my Moze main. Moze was fun, but at the endgame I kinda pigeonholed her into Deathless and she doesn’t do enough damage. Plus Iron Bear got reduced to an Oh Shit button and his long cooldown makes it hard to really care about anointments. I think I’ll have a lot of fun with Zane’s more active skills. Plus the death of Mayhem Mode as we know it is a dream come true for me.Still going strong on Elder Scrolls Online. The amount of stuff to do if you’re a new player is staggering. As a lifelong alt-aholic, it’s a struggle for me to focus on just one character, and I’m loving it. ESO Plus is totally worth it, especially to fill a new release drought.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: FF XV is one of the best in the series. Not because it is perfect, or epic or anything like that. When you play the game, it’s almost like the game speaks to you with a very peculiar personality. It is not a game that was put into a cast to come out perfectly, it’s a game that really tries to be something unique and fun. And, in most cases, it works.
That’s pretty vague. What does it mean?
Final Fantasy XV will change no one’s mind about video games. It may change a few minds about Final Fantasy games though. With a real time combat a large and colorful open world and a K-pop band as your main characters, this isn’t your father’s Final Fantasy game. And that is a good thing. What do I think? It is purty. I am not yet sold on spending forty hours with these lads, however. I watched the companion movie Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV which I enjoyed but again it really didn’t make me want to immediately pick up a controller and continue the story. Obvious bad guys doing bad guy things and Sean Bean dying are not exactly plot twists that will set the world on fire.
Still winding my way through Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, which gameplay-wise I’m preferring to KH2. I like that the game gives me most of the relevant combat abilities from the get-go instead of burying them under Drive Form upgrades. Terra’s kinda boring as a character, but he’s not totally unappealing.Got rekt by the boss in Barry’s dungeon in Tokyo Mirage Sessions. I know I’m going to need to grind a few levels, but I find the boss’s shielding ability utterly irritating regardless.I’ve also made substantial progress in Lair of the Clockwork God. Not much to say about it at the moment, but it doesn’t feel like the platform and adventure elements interact all that much. I’m sure that’ll change once I get further. So far I’ve only completed the JOY module.Started Parkitect. Probably shouldn’t keep playing Parkitect if I want to stave off addiction.
I tend to be more forgiving of XV’s weirdness and/or issues perhaps just because I hadn’t touched a new FF since XII, and it felt kind of depressing that between factoring the MMO entries into the numbered series and then latching on to XIII and not seeming to want to ever move past that (which I still need to check out, as I guess it wasn’t all THAT bad, but something about it just kept me away), it felt like an eternity passed before I had a reason to perk up for a new entry.Although, the more I think about where it would go wrong, it does seem like it had a knack for that. Also the part of a number of plot points being better set up in that animated movie that came out alongside it (or before it?) that, ya know, probably should’ve just been in the game. But hey, I finished that one chapter of the story I think a lot of people hated (I believe the one with Noctis running around solo that was nearish the end?) before they patched it into some new form! And due to how the game was handled, I might have an interesting experience replaying it now with whatever new content they added in over time, on top of grabbing all of the DLC.
After finally giving up on the glitche unbalanced mess Phoenix Point is, I reinstall XCom 2 on a whim, grabbed a bunch of random new mods and started a new campaign. It’s been a while since I played and I forgot the large number of custom characters I created. When my starting first squad was my wife, B.A.Baccarus, Abraham Lincoln and Deadpool it made me giggle.
I know a lot of people didn’t like FFXV but I had a good time with it. Driving around with a group of four friends cracking jokes while blasting the FFVII soundtrack and stopping occasionally to take on monsters and camp was a lot of fun.
So, here’s an apparently unpopular opinion I’ve had since the first MGS game:Hideo Kijima is WAY overrated. Other than P.T., his output has been meh to boderline awful.Anyhoo, I’m really enjoying Octopath Traveller and I’m seriously considering picking up Rune Factory. I’ll also be returning to FFXII on my switch.
With the exception of Final Fantasy 7 (with 6 following close behind), all of my favorite Final Fantasy installments tend to be fairly divisive. Final Fantasy 8, 15 and 10-2 round out my top five, with 13 kicking off the remaining top ten. (The others being World of, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, and Ehrgeiz. (Yes, I count the offshoots.))
Final Fantasy X-2 is an excellent game. Given its look, the most unexpected superior aspect of it is that it might have the most mature, “grown-up” plot of the entire series, about what happens after the hero of the day tries to start living their life again in the world they saved.
I’m probably in the greys, so I’ll probably not get a response here, but am I experiencing the Mandela effect now? I watched that YouTube and I don’t recall 90% of that happening in the game. I mean, I remember fighting Leviathan and such, but crystals, etc? There is so much cool shit that I am now yearning to see and I’m saddened by the fact that we’ll never see it taken to completion. I’m that guy that actually loved the game and filled in the blanks, but now I feel teased with more storyline and am left wanting to see it all come together..
I’m not very big on Star Wars stuff, but I finished Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
and it’s quite excellent. The one aspect of SW I like are the light
sabers, and its the one thing you’ll be doing in this game, so that,
along with it being a single-player, Uncharted-like experience
made it right up my alley. Awesome combat, and story, and there are even
ancient puzzles that make it feel like Tomb Raider at times. I’d
only ding it for technical issues; Collision detection while sliding,
frequent texture pop-in (on my standard PS4), and even a cutscene out of
sync, that could break the immersion. But overall, the production
values are *chef’s kiss.* It isn’t lost on me the
attention to detail that went into crafting these worlds, so the sound
design and music go a long way to making it feel like you’re in one of
the films.