What Games are You Playing 2018?

[Cmdr_King]

Broadly:

- FATE is the super computer running the future city from a Lavos-free 2300.  They invented time travel, but also sent themselves back in time.  Their primary motivation is making sure their future comes to past, which involves manipulating the surviving citizens to not affect the outside world with low-grade predestination gibberish.  Also they had to make their own mini-continent to do it.
- The Dragons are a ruling intelligence form the future city of a Reptite-dominated 2300.  The Planet pulled them back in time to prevent FATE from destroying the environment, because it realized the Frozen Flame was there and assumed they were teh lavos.
- But actually BOTH factions had become manipulated by the Frozen Flame and were taken over by the Time Devourer, which was half lavos(spawn?) and half Schala.

- Babby Serge was attacked by a panther, so his father and Miguel tried to sail to the mainland to find treatment.  Instead they landed in Chronopolis.  OOoookay so here's the ACTUAL wonkiness, so subsection
--A TIME STORM happens, and the baby Serge's cries of pain manage to be heard by Schala.  Her attempts to help him:
--- disable the Frozen Flame's security, which is what allows him to be registered as the owner and locks out FATE
--- causes the creation of Kid, a clone/daughter/avatar for Schala to help him
--- allow Lavos to take control of their merged form, properly creating the Time Devourer.
-- Realizing it's locked out from its power source, FATE takes over Serge's father's mind, and turns him into a panther since that's now a phobia of Serge's.
-- FATE tried to correct the timeline later on by drowning Serge as a child, but because he was now the sole link between Schala and her humanity, which is the only reason time hadn't been devoured, killing him just split the timeline, creating the Home and Another worlds.  FATE then locked Serge out of the Frozen Flame by turning Home world's Chronopolis into the Dead Sea, and set Miguel there to guard it.

- Seemingly, the only reason Lynx didn't do anything with Serge's body is that it didn't especially need the Frozen Flame?  Until the Dragons remerged, there was nothing special it needed to do with it, but y'know, gotta be able to get your nuclear access codes when you need them.  But oops, they were forced apart because they didn't have control of the Frozen Flame ANYWAY.  MAD doesn't work kids.

- EXCEPT

- Actually all of the above was manipulated into happening by Balthazar, to give Serge a specific set of experiences so he'd be able to connect with the Planet and form the Chrono Cross, which would dissolve the link between Lavos and Schala and end the threat of the Time Devourer.
- The lesson being that anyone* can be the one that creates a new world!
* As long as that anyone is the chosen empathy vessel of a magical princess, forms a unique bond with the Planet itself, and a time traveling wizard arranges his entire adventure to enable the latter due to the former.

[SnowFire]

Dragon Quest XI

Beat, got the "normal" ending (aka finished Part II).

It was pretty fun!  I agree with Captain K that the second half is much better than the first half.  Nice that the game finishes strong, at least.  DQ11 has a lot of elements that are easy to rag on, so I suppose I should mention the good for why I kept at it:
* Gameplay is probably the best of any Dragon Quest, at least on Stronger Enemies Draconian?  You have a lot of party formations, a lot of strategies can work, the spells & abilities tend to be "balanced"ish without just making everything the same.  Bosses were all memorable-but-beatable, and the game let you nicely pick up from an autosave and skip the pre-boss cutscenes/chatter if you do lose.
* Enemy encounter control!  Much like Bravely Default, the ability to avoid most enemies is great.  You can grind as much or as little as you want.  Makes exploration & backtracking much less sloggy than they could be.  There's the occasional unavoidable enemy or trapped chest to keep you on your toes, but that's fine.
* Graphics are very nice.  Spell effects are cool, lots of alternate costumes, lovingly detailed towns, and so on.
* Localization of the script was also pretty spot-on.  Obviously it can't change the plot very much, which had more issues, but the translators did a good job of making everybody sound distinctive, and selling the plot points as best they could.
* Sylvando, Rab, Jade, & the 8th character were all pretty cool.  Veronica / Serena took awhile, since they started off with just "hey we're twins swearing ourselves to the prophesized hero like in DQ4 but without really any setup", but eventually worked out.  (Erik was boring, Luminary was Silent Main #348, but this is the good section, so we'll leave it at that.)
* The sheer size of the world was refreshing, and gives it some (undeserved?) depth.  Modern AAA game budget makes it such that you can't just cheaply drop random sprite-based towns across the map anymore.  The result can be weirdly smallish worlds…  like, does the world of Bravely Default really only have 5 countries/cities in it?  DQ11 has Big City England, rural-countryside-England, Japan, Turkey/Arabia, Venice, Spain, Holland, Texas, Scotland, Hawaii, Atlantis, France if it consisted entirely of an all-girl's academy, Cambodia, Norway, Greece, and Tibet.  To be clear, DQ11 still isn't a remotely cohesive combined world, but it's CLOSER to feeling like a proper world map at least just from scale.

The plot ends up recovering to a mixed bag, which is better than it started.  Way too much of the early part of the game had the Luminary's silence + idiotic subplots resulting in "throw controller against wall" frustration, but the later part of the game where the shit goes down tends to be better, and have its rando old-DQ plotline references be less out of place.  It's still ultimately a sunny, optimistic shit goes down where anything REALLY bad happened already off-screen ("sorry bar owner dead, go somewhere else," etc.), and anything on-screen is likely fixable, but still, it helps.  More to the point, a few of the plot points ended up surprisingly well-done, and I think that helps salve some of the dumber subplots earlier.  (I'd pick the Last Bastion plotline, Sylvando's plotline surprisingly enough, the Erdwin's Lantern setup, and the final Arboria reveal for good stuff in Part II.  Also, I mostly like the Part III setup, despite getting NotMiki's complaint - I dunno, I can write this stuff off as "we need to show the dark spirit is on your side", while the Luminary's silence in Part I just had no excuse too often.)

I will say - and this is only a mild criticism, because it's a respectable style, even if it isn't SnowFire's by default - this is very, very blatantly a case of a game where the writer's whim for the next plot point rules over the "setting."  In other words, there are some pieces of fiction that start with some setting-specific facts of science/magic/politics, and try to figure out what happens from there; and there are other fiction that starts with what the writer wants to happen, and then writes a setting such that it does happen.  Of course, it's usually a mix of both, and sometimes (especially in sequels!) what starts as a "because we need it" plot point can become an authentic setting prompt for later writers, e.g. Star Wars authors attempting to make sense of all the random stuff going on in the movies.  (Example: We need some obstruction so that Cloud doesn't follow Sephiroth immediately, and has an excuse to stop by the Chocobo Ranch.  Okay, sure, there's a swamp monster on the way to the Mithril Mines, and for bonus points, we'll show Sephiroth taking the awesome way through of killing one to prove what a threat he is.  Nobody thinks that "swamp next to Kalm" was a core setting idea the game started with, they obviously wrote it in.  But if some FF7 sequel had, I dunno, the PCs knowing about this and luring an invading army into the swamp in the hopes that the bad guys & Midgar Zoloms would fight each other, then we have some authentic setting-driven plot.)  Getting back to DQ11 itself, the game just isn't that interested in being consistent or explaining itself.  A character has amnesia!  Why?  Never explained.  (And as usual is fixed by "here's a memento from your past".)  Sometimes people get turned into monsters!  Sometimes they forget everything about what they did as a monster, sometimes they remember a bit and can still access monster powers, sometimes they revert to human form then finish dying, and certainly nobody is going to freak out and wonder if any of all the other hordes of monsters we fought used to be human.  Sometimes bad things happen by magic and people die, sometimes bad things happen by magic and everybody is fixed up.  There's a character called the "Seer" whose entire purpose seems to be to fix the plot whenever it would go awry.  Anyway, if you're okay with this, the second half's plotlines are mostly fine, and a few are authentically good.  It's just definitely something that stands out here much more than some other games.

Also, uploaded my final battles for fun (spoilers, etc.):

https://youtu.be/xGBhwXtxAsY
( If you want to see a sample of some of the BS, check out 47:00 or so.  Just the thing to keep you on your feet.)

[Niu]

Broadly:

- FATE is the super computer running the future city from a Lavos-free 2300.  They invented time travel, but also sent themselves back in time.  Their primary motivation is making sure their future comes to past, which involves manipulating the surviving citizens to not affect the outside world with low-grade predestination gibberish.  Also they had to make their own mini-continent to do it.
- The Dragons are a ruling intelligence form the future city of a Reptite-dominated 2300.  The Planet pulled them back in time to prevent FATE from destroying the environment, because it realized the Frozen Flame was there and assumed they were teh lavos.
- But actually BOTH factions had become manipulated by the Frozen Flame and were taken over by the Time Devourer, which was half lavos(spawn?) and half Schala.

- Babby Serge was attacked by a panther, so his father and Miguel tried to sail to the mainland to find treatment.  Instead they landed in Chronopolis.  OOoookay so here's the ACTUAL wonkiness, so subsection
--A TIME STORM happens, and the baby Serge's cries of pain manage to be heard by Schala.  Her attempts to help him:
--- disable the Frozen Flame's security, which is what allows him to be registered as the owner and locks out FATE
--- causes the creation of Kid, a clone/daughter/avatar for Schala to help him
--- allow Lavos to take control of their merged form, properly creating the Time Devourer.
-- Realizing it's locked out from its power source, FATE takes over Serge's father's mind, and turns him into a panther since that's now a phobia of Serge's.
-- FATE tried to correct the timeline later on by drowning Serge as a child, but because he was now the sole link between Schala and her humanity, which is the only reason time hadn't been devoured, killing him just split the timeline, creating the Home and Another worlds.  FATE then locked Serge out of the Frozen Flame by turning Home world's Chronopolis into the Dead Sea, and set Miguel there to guard it.

- Seemingly, the only reason Lynx didn't do anything with Serge's body is that it didn't especially need the Frozen Flame?  Until the Dragons remerged, there was nothing special it needed to do with it, but y'know, gotta be able to get your nuclear access codes when you need them.  But oops, they were forced apart because they didn't have control of the Frozen Flame ANYWAY.  MAD doesn't work kids.

- EXCEPT

- Actually all of the above was manipulated into happening by Balthazar, to give Serge a specific set of experiences so he'd be able to connect with the Planet and form the Chrono Cross, which would dissolve the link between Lavos and Schala and end the threat of the Time Devourer.
- The lesson being that anyone* can be the one that creates a new world!
* As long as that anyone is the chosen empathy vessel of a magical princess, forms a unique bond with the Planet itself, and a time traveling wizard arranges his entire adventure to enable the latter due to the former.

And let me address why this is so stupid:
Balthazar's top objective in Project Kid is to create the Chrono Cross. Thus he does it by intentionally causing the Time Crush which ultimately lead to the whole Chronopolis vs. Dianopolis.
I repeat, of all possible means to obtain Chrono Cross, Balthazar choose TIME CRUSH and make FATE and Dragon God go to war.
Serious, why choose the method that ends in massive destruction to both life and time line?
I mean Balthazar, if you prefer in destroying the time line so much, then why not just TIME CRUSH your way to the Under Sea Palace when Zeal is summing Lavos and blow everything away with the Paradox before it even happens?

It gets even dumber if consider the fact that Lucca did nothing. She's the one who found Kid after she was created from Schala, and she roughly calculated whatever is going to happen eventually from Kid's creation. Then Balthazar in distant future drafted his Project Kid base on Lucca's prediction of future. So Balthazar's Project Kid and Lucca discovering Kid has this loop like relationship where one leads to another. And, well, as we see in game, Lucca is perfectly aware what Balthazar was doing, is doing right now, is going to do eventually, and even place the blame on him.
So plot, are you telling me Lucca is completely fine with Balthazar crushing the time line which eventually turned her into a ghost? Or Lynx after her life, etc?
I am sorry, but I don't remember Lucca being this type of character back in CT.

Also, Dead Sea is a natural phenomenon, not FATE's doing. FATE is responsible for locking it in a specific state, though.
Time Devour assimilates being drawned in negative emotion to become one with itself. (This is also how the Dragon God was taken over by Time Devourer. Dragon God's hatred of humanity after getting beaten by FATE let Time Devoruer took control of him.)
And FATE didn't get taken over, and she has been trying to erase Lavos' influence the best as she can, including destroying Serge,

So... Frozen Flame=Lavos=Time Devourer, and Serge is the arbitrator under Frozen Flame's influence.
If Serge performs the arbitration in Lavos' favor, all existence will be assimilated by Time Devourer, ultimately leads to creature to devour the dreams of all time.
When the time line split due to Serge's death, Home World's future is undermined. Thus where the Chronopolis is becomes dead sea. The dead sea reflects possible futures that Serge can lead to, including possible future where the time line is destroyed if Serge acts in Lavos' favor.
This is also the core reason that FATE is locking the Dead Sea and so obsessed with eliminating Serge.

[NotMiki]

It's pretty, um, amazing to hear all that laid out.

[Captain K]

DQXI postgame: Wow this is like an entirely new game. And fixes most of the problems I had with the earlier parts, namely that it is now completely nonlinear. They should have just made this the game and not done the first part.

Not quite finished with everything but I'm getting close to done with it.

[Cmdr_King]

Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight- I got a couple Akihiko and the last Ken left for SLinks, but finishing Elizabeth's rolled the credits so it's more cleaning up at this point.

So what did I say about DAN's gameplay?  *digs through the archives*

"Looking back at the game I definitely feel my initial impression was too positive: I have it lined up with the other games I played this year and it feels cleanly like the one I remember with least fondness, despite the next entry getting a lower score in my post-completion summary.  I think in part playing more of the game sans story mode’s easiness made the inherent flaws more glaring, and partly just that it’s a very popcorn game that didn’t leave a lasting impression.  The overall song selection also left me a bit cold in the end I think.  Nothing especially wrong with the game overall, just… lots of small flaws without major successes to hang your hat on.  "

Huh, I remembered being meaner.  Okay so Moonlight/Starlight don't have full story modes, you have some vignettes in the vein of SLinks to unlock for all the PCs so that's neat, and they do place this definitively in the timeline!  So like there's background and all, just not any real meat.  And seeing as that was the part of DAN I liked...
Okay so I don't want to hate this game, but the gameplay does not hold together very well: the grid has a ton of visual noise due to the scratches, and I kinda hate them.  It's tricky to really learn any songs since there's very little music preserved from the original games in favor of dance remixes, and while there's a couple winners a few are truly dreadful.  I mean there's a mix of Burn My Dread that's clearly sub-Mass Destruction, why would you do this thing.
It's a nice enough looking game and the costumes and gimmicks are fun until you realize you have to do all of them to get your SLinks.  Uh anyways less bitching.

There's a certain cowardice in how Atlus has approached these spinoffs, barring the first Arena.  The conceit in this game is that Elizabeth and her sister from P5 whose name escapes me because I haven't played P5 are having their guests compete in a dance-off, inspired by DAN's events.  Elizabeth makes some mention that the Velvet Room can transcend space and time... which you can piece together to mean that while the P3 cast are taken from January 2010, Elizabeth is clearly from sometime after 2015 when P5 takes place.
The game is aware of this.  Elizabeth has a single SLink where she's clearly struggling with foreknowledge; she's from a time after Makoto's sacrifice, she's a few years into her quest to free him, and she's visibly wrestling with saying something.
And then she's back to wacky elizabeth dancing funtimes the entire rest of the link.
ANd like... okay, writers.  I know you're making silly dancing game that makes no goddamned sense.  I get it.  But you know what you've done here and what the implications of it are, and someone on your staff really wanted to tackle it head on.  And it would have been so much better if you did!  The entire thematic thrust of the original Persona 3 was Makoto's impending mortality, you made an entire aftergame expansion to dig into the rest of the cast dealing with it... but in your fanservice dance pack you make one passing mention rather than really digging into it?  Especially with Elizabeth, the one who didn't get that chance?  Why hamstring yourself like that?

I found myself unduly digging Aigis in this game.  Fuuka gets into it more via internet shenanigans and directly talking to Futaba, but Aigis is the one that gives it punch: if there's others out there like us, then what we do is part of a long line of those making the world better.  I dunno, something about the way Aigis manifests optimism in this game strikes me right now.

I mean this is still 5/10 fare, it is not a very good rhythm game and... well, P3 is the weakest Persona game and part of that is the cast is mostly eh, but it got me a couple times and that's worth something.

[Captain K]

well, P3 is the weakest Persona game

No offense, but drink my blood.

[SnowFire]

Dragon Quest XI
Finished Part III, got the True Ending.  Knew from NotMiki / Internet reputation the final final boss was a badass, and he did indeed live up to his reputation.  I won on the first attempt, but it was a near thing, and that was also only due to a somewhat cheaty strat.  I might be up for a rematch one day without abusing that strategy ( using Elfin Elixirs from some lame-o casino grinding to restore all MP and refuel Magic Burst a lot), but I suspect would require some more levels to be remotely sane.  Video if anyone is curious / bored:

https://youtu.be/tI-uWLIO_KU

The postgame was pretty good!  While a lot of it is, for obvious budgetary reasons, "walk through this dungeon you went through already for reasons", it succeeds pretty darn well at being an excuse for some nasty & terrifying reskinned boss fights yet still generally being a happy victory lap.  Also is mostly nonlinear per Captain K, which is cool.  Incidentally, re Djinn's comment earlier, it's kinda tricky...  on one hand, plot points with bitterweetness and sadness are good because they resonate, because they're true to life.  That said, in-character, it makes perfect sense to want to stop/prevent them, and that's good too - it'd be crazy and cruel to not want to stop or prevent badness.  DQ11 kinda has its cake & eats it too by offering both a bittersweet ending where characters were tempered by failure and trial, and a blandly happy one, take which one you like more. 

(Incidentally, Djinn, you should check out Zero Time Dilemma, which is very interested in the "good ending people want" vs. "ending where bad things happen but people have to deal with it and fight through anyway" issue.  As one random example, there's a scene where a character offers one of the viewpoint PCs if he wants to...  well, basically be uploaded into a simulation computer.  In it, the simulated him will perceive a reality indistinguishable from normal reality that is totally awesome.  If you accept, there's a brief ending where !him is told that his disease is going into remission, ice cream for his birthday, his parents love him, etc.  Pure saccharine music plays in the background.  There's ANOTHER ending that follows from this decision, which is for the PC who is still sitting in a big empty quantum supercomputer room.  He's still there, of course; the one who was left behind while another him lives in a simulated heaven.  The lonely ending has a good twice the length of time put into it.)

Anyway, in the realm of whining, a few of the actual overplot developments in Part III still make no damn sense.  But I've already accepted that you have to presume large amounts of DQ11's plot need to be interpreted assuming they're coming from a 13-year old Dungeons & Dragons dungeonmaster (dragonmaster?) - where making it so that Villain A was actually working for Villain B, and Random Guy X and Famous Guy Y were ACTUALLY THE SAME PERSON whoa zomg, and so on without spending a thought on the implications and so is no big deal, just lap in the awesomeness of my plot twist.  And on that level, those plot points are okay, good even!  Just, as said before, don't attempt to think too hard about what these villains were up to before the events of the game, or how mysterious helpers knew things they should damn well shouldn't know while other mysterious helpers weren't even asked about issues they should be a complete expert at.

The actual True Ending post-boss scenes also feature some truly nonsensical Dragon Quest series fanservice.  It also makes no damn sense, but adds the bonus of going against the (weak) themes established, but I highly doubt they thought deeply enough about this to notice.  (SPOILERZ: So in the first part of the game, there's a bit of a clash going on between people who say that the coming of the Luminary is something to be feared, because with the Light comes Darkness etc., vs. those who celebrate the Luminary as unconnected and humanity's champion.  It doesn't really work because the character pushing this line the most is insincere, but whatever: the point is, it's the heroes who stand up for light-without-darkness, while it's the bad guys who spout some Manichean both-sides bring conflict deal.  In the ending, we're told by the good dragon god...   well, pretty much the happy version of the bad guy's line, that there's some eternally destined conflict and isn't it awesome that the light keeps rising to fight the darkness!  Not even in a mournful or melancholy way, i.e. "sorry, but the final boss was right, the darkness will hang around and draw forth an endless cycle of conflict."  Of course, this is because it's talking about other Dragon Quest games, which it considers totally awesome.  Maybe true for the PLAYERS, sure, but in-character, the idea that sorry light & darkness are gonna have to clash 10 times more should come across as pretty depressing, not as awesome.  Finally, the game claims that this was all a giant prequel to Dragon Quest III, but...  no it wasn't?  There's some cute costume fanservice where the original 4 legendary heroes were clearly, based on costumes, DQ3 Hero / DQ3 Female Sage / DQ3 Soldier / DQ3 Wizard, and there's an outfit that's also DQ3 female Monk/Fighter not that they were part of the legendary team.  But, the alternate timeline created shouldn't be anything even remotely like DQ3's, and nothing comes close to justifying WTF.  Different world map, different characters, different villains, different everything?  It'd be like claiming Final Fantasy 15 was a prequel to FF1.  Oh well, play triumphant music and expect us to be inspired, I guess.)

[DjinnAndTonic]

Zero Time Dilemma sounds awesome.

Re: DQ11 and DQ3 - where was that hinted at now? Maybe I just don't remember DQ3 well enough, but... whut?

[Tide]

Shadow Hearts Covenant RTA done in 5:58:36. Sub 6 finally with some route revisions. Finally. This run wasn't very good overall. Lots of stupid time losses across the entire run, but to name the most glaring ones:

1) Lost like 2 minutes to missing lottery rings (on Bathin, Mind's Eye and Warning Device)
2) Related to the above, 4 Safety saves across the run. Each one being about 15 seconds (so a minute overall)
3) 1 minute on retriggering a fight with Great Gama.
4) 90 seconds on getting lost in Immortal Mountain
5) Getting owned by Prison guards and layout. Probably about 90 seconds
6) Getting semi-lost on Battleship. Probably about 30 seconds.
7) Taking a really long route to get to Rasputin. About 2 mins. Maybe less.

Most of the major time losses occurred in Disc 2 because I haven't really practiced much for it. In short, if someone was to actually use my route revisions along with LCCs notes and really tried, you'll probably have a free 5:50. But for that to happen you'll actually need to grind Covenant even more, and bleh to that idea. Covenant isn't a really good speedgame.

[VySaika]

Games can include tabletop rpgs, right? Right.

So anyway, here's my report of a Maid game I played last night.

<VySaika> playing a Maid game with some peeps fomr a gamedev site I hang out on
<VySaika> our maids are: my runnaway nun, a soul reaper forced into being a maid by a magic slave collar, a BDSM chef princess with a bazooka, a heavy drinking elf loli, a sickly little girl serial murderer, and a tomboy in really lacksidaisical bridal training but mostly just there to spend the master's money

the session started out as "Die Hard, but with maids" and we had to stop weird anime terrorists from kidnapping the master. We safely got him out of the building, but then had to figure out how to save the rest of teh guests. My former nun went to go get on the intercom and preach at the terrorists to make them change thier ways, and I spent favor points to induce a random event at the same time

the random event rolled was "a giant monster erupts from the depths of the earth!" so I rolled with it as her accidentally animating a golem from the water sprayed out by the sprinkler system by reading from her stolen super bible in bad hebrew. The GM then rolled a bunch of dice and the water golem massacred the terrorists en masse before finally getting destroyed by the last mook

my nun meanwhile had NO IDEA she did that because she was not watching the security cameras, she was just reading from her bible to preach at the terrorists over the PA. The sickly child serial killer got the whole thing recorded on the security tapes and stole the tapes to show the others later. She opted not to tell my nun what actually happened because she felt it wouldn't go over well. I was, after all, the only character who did not try and fight the terrorists the entire game previous to that point, being a non-violent nun and all.

In other bits:
the tomboy bride wannabe was trying to make molotov cocktails to fight with, but the elf loli kept drinking all the booze we could find first

and our sickly child murderer did in fact manage to murder the terrorists' hacker(gaining us access to teh security room), the reaper helping hide the body before my nun got there, so I continued to have no idea in character that the little girl was a serial killer

she was just a sickly girl, so I was constantly being overprotective of her :V

my nun's backstory is that she was in training at a convent and was trying to read the Super Ancient Holy Book they had, got stressed out and ran away...with the book. Her Stress Explosion, an actual game mechanic, was Running Away so I worked that into her backstory. She's convinced that since she accidentally stole the book if they catch her they'll either put her in jail forever or send her straight to hell somehow, so she's hiding from her church by being a maid(Dark Past: Wanted, was one of her special qualities, and Book was her maid weapon. Gotta tie all that shit together ofc~)

All traits were randomly rolled, except for the tomboy bride being a pyromaniac, that was just the player.

There was other weird shit too, but this hits the highlights.