Games you're playing: The 2009 edition.

[Meeplelard]

GX: Water Dungeon done!  That boss was far less annoying than Mother Crustaceon.

[metroid composite]

VP:CotP

Finally unlocked Seraphic Gate.  (Obnoxious unlock, that).  Looks interesting; you get all the characters, all at level 1 with starting weapons and 0 gold in the bank.

[Hunter Sopko]

MK: Chapter 5. Really enjoying the cast, which is really starting to shine now that there are more people to work off of. Been a while that I can honestly say there's a game with a cast where absolutely no one has annoyed me at all.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

S3 - Crussssssssssssssssh.

[Unoriginal]

WoW:  Might wind up calling it quits in a couple weeks.  Huge dramafest* just fragmented the guild, added to a spike in burnout...  yeah.  Mostly just waiting to see if the GM comes back before making any major decisions.

GM quit a couple days ago, but he's apparently done this before and usually comes back in a couple of weeks.  Temp GM decided that, rather than teaching a couple new recruits the Yogg fight, we'd be better off doing Sarth+3 drakes, and we all need to bring our mains for some inane reason.  Specifically, they're after this one caster cloak with an abysmal drop rate which the GM claims most of the guild wants.  There's grumbling, but we do it.  The cloak actually drops, and all of three people roll on it, a far cry from "most of the guild".  The cloak is then ninja looted to the guy who rolled a *1*.  Drama ensues.  Then the temp GM announces he and a couple other people(including the guy who got the cloak) are transferring off.  Vent *explodes*, followed by a wave of /gquits.  Seeing as I was getting tired of raiding and the group was pretty much the only reason I was sticking around?  Final nail in the coffin sort of thing.  Not much to do but wait and see, at this point.

[Shale]

KH2: Started! Congratulations, Tetsuya Nomura. You have created a cast of characters I care about less than Sora, Kairi, Riku and Ansem. Would you like a medal?

What's that? You just want me to keep watching them do nothing of importance for three hours before you actually start the game? You're the boss.

[DjinnAndTonic]

The beginning of KH2 does indeed drag/suck/waste time/have lame characters. I wish I could tell you that the story gets better.

Well, I can at least promise that the over-the-top visuals in the fight scenes get awesomer and awesomer, which is probably my favorite part of the game.

Hey, I've been playing a game!

Xenogears:
So I wanted to just get some stat testing done on Gears, but that's proving to be difficult using the save files available on GameFAQs, so I started playing XG again.

I've played the beginning of this game something like 6 times now. Bleh. However, the beginning of XG is definitely one of the stronger parts for its storytelling, so it's not all bad. I particularly like the whole Aveh scenario. Characters are still acting logically and following believable motivations, and there's a lot of nice details thrown in to make it immersive. Little things like the random comments from Bart's crew, to Fei's fake name used to enter the tournament, the Nisan Sect nun who acts as Fei & co's contact in Bledavik, things just work together nicely and synergistically.

Too bad the battles in the early parts are pretty bland. And right as they start picking up (Aquvy), the attention to detail starts dropping. And eventually you end up with woefully unfinished/unpolished Disk 2...

Also, there is the lol translation. The concept is pretty solid though, so I enjoy the game's story even despite some lackluster presentation towards the end. At least it all remains coherent.

-Djinn

[Shale]

The beginning of KH2 does indeed drag/suck/waste time/have lame characters. I wish I could tell you that the story gets better.

Kingdom Hearts story is something they put in between the generally engaging gameplay and entertaining-as-hell Disney adaptations because Nomura isn't allowed to make anything without some element that's head-meltingly stupid. Usually he just accomplishes this with zippers and spiky hair, but now he's going for something more concrete.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Huh, Djinn, surprised you'd rag on Xenogears' translation. Having watched the first ~5 hours of the game again recently I was struck by how decent the translation is, considering the massive volume of text, with the writing actually retaining nuance and cleverness. I was actually discussing this with a friend recently - said friend being able to speak Japanese fluently and frequently mocking RPG translations on points too subtle for me to catch, so yeah, the dissenting opinion to the point of using the term "lol" (while allowing for internet hyperbole) isn't really something I expected. Can you elaborate?

(The rest of your assessment of the game I pretty much agree with. I like the overarching story well enough to carry on through to the end but without question it unravels some in the second half.)


MMPU - Have I mentioned Gutsman is weird? Because Gutsman is weird.

Attacking with him is very slow. He can't hit things low to the ground. His attack is a three-part sequence (Create block, pick up block, throw block) and every one takes time. In terms of enemy bosses, Megaman punishes him for this badly, but his ability to create blocks can cheap out Fire, Elec, and to a lesser extent Iceman. He at least tends to do 2-3 damage so his offence doesn't fail horrendously... usually. Some bosses give him lots of openings to make blocks, others don't. Generally I find him very bad at killing randoms, but there are exceptions (the guys carrying shields) and often he makes up for it with platforming. His larger size sucks (makes Yellow Devil and Elecman's stage harder!).

Still think he's better than Oilman!


Wild Arms XF - Up to 1-9, aka just got the second set of classes. Trying out physical Clarissa this time, it's okay. Howling Shot's MP cost hurts though. MP Burst exists in a pinch but that's not the kind of strategy I'm a big fan of. Slowly gathering mechanics notes (why couldn't you get Magnus' sword ;_; ) and generally enjoying the game a lot. Chapter 1's a bit slow plotwise (villains barely exist as of yet) but I appreciate the cute nods towards events later in the game. Also I like how often the townspeople update what they say (kinda ignored this first playthrough), it helps flesh out the world a fair deal. Levin also mocks his own trope even more than I realised, somehow. <3 Opinion of Felius is down though. I guess he's a bit of a "wait and see" character and now that I know what's coming I'm just... not impressed. He's just bland.

Also, holy crap at all the spoilers in the opening FMV. They flash by too quickly to appreciate the first time you see it, but yeah.

The image of Katrina with an evil smirk is probably the most striking example.

[Cmdr_King]

Disgaea 3: Finished.  Final clock 15:27.  If I hadn't picked it up on the cheap I'd feel gyped.
Flawed in a lot of ways.  Retreads  bit much on the standard N1 plot, the whole "demon logic" thing got tiresome and self-contradicting fast, backslides significantly in terms of map design (yeah, fuck  you Enemy Turbo x3) and despire being the shortest N1 game (possibly including Rhapsody here folks) seemed at certain points to just be throwing filler at me.  Probably so that you could reasonably hit normal Disgaea endgame levels despite having less time to do it in.
On the other hand, did an alright job of emphasising the team aspect in plot, had some moments here and there, and in general was more good than bad at the gameplay thing.  The fact that, if I was losing a map, I could go and beef up my characters without level grinding if nothing else helped a lot.

DL notes.  Assumed damage curve (trying to mentally juggle to account for equivelent weaponry, Evilities, and move strength) is along the lines of Bigstar >= Almaz > Champloo > Mao > Beryl > Sapphire > Salvatore.  Like I used Beryl's Minions enough to see where they ended up >.>

Mao- Middle.  Decent at it though, doesn't suffer much in the way of resources (well, relative to previous Disgaea casts anyways, though this is true of basically everyone but Bigstar), can mix up his damage types a bit, that sort of thing.

Almaz- Lowish Heavy.  Probably musters a 2HKO, defensive gimmick can get him out of a pinch, but largely straightforward.

Raspberyl- Light.  Yeah, she's meant as a range-abusing whore, standard Mage defenses and her weapon options are suboptimal.

Sapphire- Middle.  Damage could be better, but heals, resources work, all that.

Mr. Champloo- Heavy.  Evility has the novelty of making a Disgaea counter register on the damage curve, and is a heavy hitter in general.

Master Bigstar- Low Heavy.  2HKOs, not a whole lot else.

Salvatore- wants her boss form.  The damage difference is pronounced, and thanks to her gimmick (halve all damage that isn't a base physical?  Yes!) she doesn't completely fail at durability as a boss.  That said, noticable HP edge even sans gimmick means she's tanky enough to maim her way through Light at the worst, but boss form strikes me as a definite Heavy.

Finale Aurum, Super Hero- Godlike.  'sfunny, he was quite easy in-game because he's a goddamned idiot.  "I could brutally overkill you with my 3000-3500 damage special that hits everyone next to me, ooooorrrr I could hit that out of the way underlevelled bait character with my physical and fail to kill it!  durrrrrrrrrrr I are smrt and RAR PHYSICAL".  Optimal damage moves tend to have weird ranges that kinda cause grouping up, but in general people not named "Almaz" or "Salvatore" (ie cheaters) met shiny death when he used a good move of any sort, and the defensive gimmick would have made sending wave after wave of my own troops again him iffy at best without aforementioned retardation.  Anyway, durability could be worse really (sure, I hit 5000 damage against him... with a sword that doubled my next best weapon on a character with a 20% damage boost), something marginally above PC at any rate, and the defensive gimmick tends to mean he sees multiple turns of "MAIM"-y goodness.  I think.

Definitely feels like a 7/10 game.  Lacked something fundamentally Disgaea-y but was still fun on average.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Huh, Djinn, surprised you'd rag on Xenogears' translation. Having watched the first ~5 hours of the game again recently I was struck by how decent the translation is, considering the massive volume of text, with the writing actually retaining nuance and cleverness. I was actually discussing this with a friend recently - said friend being able to speak Japanese fluently and frequently mocking RPG translations on points too subtle for me to catch, so yeah, the dissenting opinion to the point of using the term "lol" (while allowing for internet hyperbole) isn't really something I expected. Can you elaborate?

(The rest of your assessment of the game I pretty much agree with. I like the overarching story well enough to carry on through to the end but without question it unravels some in the second half.)

Apply everything I said about how the polish degrades to the translation as well and it begins to make sense.

The beginning of the game only has a few spots where it sounds like someone translated the Japanese word-for-word (Citan's dialogue in particular), but as time goes on, we see more and more of this, not to mention numerous dropped words and misspellings. Right around Bishop Stone's fight it gets pretty bad. And Fei has a bad tendency to make 'jokes' that sound completely out-of-character at best, and 'translated by a person who doesn't speak English OR Japanese' at worst.

Admittedly, this translation polish fluctuates from time to time. Particularly in places where a direct translation works (thinking the 'We are! Men! Of the SEA!' part as an example of where the humor worked in both languages).

EDIT: Pulled from the GameFAQs script because I liked it. Ramsus' interrogation of Margie. I noticed as I was playing that depending on whether you think of Margie as an overly-innocent flaky little girl or as a clever politician who is carefully choosing her words, this conversation can come off in two very different ways. I thought this was a good example of early XG dialogue.

Margie:Who are you?

Ramsus:I am Ramsus, she is Miang. We would like to ask you some questions.

Margie:I'm Margie. Actually, it's Marguerite. What do you want to know? My favorite food? I
like cake, Chiffon Nisan is my favorite. I haven't had it in so long...

Ramsus:Marguerite, we want to ask you about the Fatima family treasure... I'm talking about
the 'Fatima Jasper'. You see, I'm keeping the piece you had in a safe place. But I don't know
where the other half is. Do you?

Margie:Nope. The one I had you took from me. You didn't even give me anything for it. Hey, the
next time you come could you bring me some Chiffon Nisan? I used to eat it every day in Nisan.
I don't think they make it in Aveh. Aveh used to have such good bakers, but I guess they must
have all died in the war.

Ramsus:That is too bad. I don't know much about cake, but I'll see if I can find some for you
next time.

Margie:Thank you, Ramsus. I'll be waiting.

Ramsus:Is there anything else you need? If there's something you want I'll bring it next time.

Margie:No. I just want to go back to Nisan. They must be so worried about me.

Ramsus:I'm sorry but please wait a little longer. We want you to stay here until we find the
other half of the 'Fatima Jasper'.

[Cmdr_King]

what I recall of XG's translation is that it's fine for standard dialogue, but the translators clearly struggled with the absolutely dense mythological/etc references and heavy foreshadowing, which compromised any scene with a lot of that.  Boils down to a lot of early Citan and Elly scenes making rather a lot less sense than they were probably meant to.

[Grefter]

Citan's dialogue never really read that bad to me either time I played through.  It translates fairly literally probably, but I guess I just read that as him being a fairly intelligent educated person (Compared to say Bart and Fei where they are more casual and informal).  Billy's dialogue is just like it is because he is a prostitute of course.

What's that? You just want me to keep watching them do nothing of importance for three hours before you actually start the game? You're the boss.

On the off chance that you missed it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IchUU5soSFo
This is actually what tricked me into buying RE4, because I saw it while playing KH2.  Man did it sound good.  First level played!  Game returned.

[DjinnAndTonic]

TVtropes summarizes Fei's character better than I ever could:
Tomato in the Mirror.

Our protagonist is going through a perfectly normal day. Only... something's wrong. The people around him are acting just a bit off. They keep mentioning a string of words, or are trying to herd him to a certain place.

It looks like the town's been taken over by The Puppet Masters, and our hero's the only one left. He attempts to either escape and warn the outside world, or find where the invaders are coming from and shut it down.

But once he gets there, he discovers the horrifying truth: HE'S the fake! Cue screams of "What Have I Become?!" A robot, a clone, a ghost, or some other duplicate that forgot he wasn't the real thing, or was programmed to believe that he was, complete with Fake Memories of a Mining Accident On Troy.

On Fei:
Fei finds out that his father is really the new body of Grahf.  And also that Wiseman is his father as well. Not only that, but he also discovers that he is the omnicidal maniac Id, while his current amnesiac personality was artificially made after he committed a genocide. Then he discovers or should we say remembers that he became crazy because his mother was the Darwinistic manipulator Miang and performed a lot of gruesome and painful experiments on him. Then, we learn that Grahf and Fei are actually the same person, in two different bodies, and that 500 years ago, he was the lover of the game's world equivalant of the pope who made a Heroic Sacrifice for him, causing Lacan (Fei's name at the time) to become the immortal Grahf while his original personality kept reincarnating. If this was not enough, Fei later learns that he is the ancestor of every inhabitant of the world, which he was not supposed to be, that free will exists thanks to him, and that he created his soul mate 10.000 years ago as a child because he felt a need of protection while he was linked to The Wave Existence, which gave him the power to wish his feelings into reality, and that all of it makes him basically the The Antichrist, except that here, the Antichrist is the ''good'' guy.

Fei is not a case of tomato in the mirror, he is The tomato, the mirror, the frame of the mirror, the room in which the tomato and the mirror are, and the architect of all of this actually wants to be killed by him.

^____^

I'm not spoiler-tagging a 10-year-old game...

[Clear Tranquil]

SO4-En II. To find a Wind Ring I go! What do you mean why haven't I finished it yet? This disc is unreadable XBox errors that's why. It's not the game because it does it with other games as well. Actual game freezes didn't show their ugly faces until disc two where one popped up before the Phantom fight. Then three or so in the insect warren after that. Wouldn't bother me so much but combined with the other problem CT has practically been pulling hairs. It's a shame because I really enjoy the game when it actually works~

Picked up a lot of goodies at EnII so far like Berserk for the rest of my fighters (Meracle already had it), Mindflare for the mages, Fast Cast for Lymle and Myuria (why can't Sarah learn it? ;_;), Critical Hit for Arumat, Emergency Repairs and a new cannon for Bacchus, MP Boost for Meracle. Taught them all that and some other random stuff. I was going to buy the Slasher Claws for Meracle but she picked up the Hurricane Claws in the insect warren where as Bacchus hadn't picked up a new weapon for a while. I didn't have enough money for the claws after upgrading his cannon so I'm planning to build up my Fol supply again after that massive shopping spree ^_^

I'm currently using Kitty/Chicken/Scytheboy/Dollie (going to stick Megaman back in I think, maybe -Arumat seems good though) -

Also Big Ant boss -

L45 Berserk/Focus
Land a hit on the enemy's weak point
Deal at least 30'000 points of damage
Deal at least 50'000 points of damage
Deal at least 70'000 points of damage
Deal 99'999 points of damage

lol Meracle.

[NotMiki]

On Fei:

God damn but that IS a good summary!  Almost makes me want to replay the game.

[Yoshiken]

SH2: Complete~! Amazing game, 8/10 overall - 7/10 for Gameplay, 9/10 for Characters, 10/10 for Story/Script. SH difficulty struck towards the end, where I got bored of the battle system and ran from everything in the last two dungeons and still had minimal trouble. Took a second try on the final boss due to Spikes on everyone and a 99-hit combo that hits the whole party. >_<  Fight is wa~ay too easy once the sword, gem & mirror fall. Fifth Key is overpowered and ridiculous. Ending is somewhat crap for someone who's not played SH1. Podcast episode about this game has been uploaded. <3

[Random Consonant]

Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled - Man, this game has problems.

Game essentially plays like Chrono Trigger, except with an obnoxiously high random encounter rate (oh hey guys running into a random encounter every five or six steps is a great idea and won't try the player's patience at all) and a glacial movement rate (unless you hold down the B button to run, in which case it becomes about the same as the walking rate in JRPGs that *aren't* made by complete morons).  WINNAR.  There are some other things there that I don't really feel like commenting on, largely because they don't bother me that much.

Character/Plot wise... uh... main character talks!  And is not a complete idiot apparently!  Unfortunately his sister more than makes up for it, nearing Justin-level stupidity and shall henceforth be referred to as Justina (seriously she is a female Justin).  There are other characters, but one has done nothing aside from hit on Justina and run off with a plot item and the other pretty much just showed up so I got nothing there.  Plot is unremarkable and I don't really feel like summarizing it.

Might and Magic 6 - Started a game using a Archer/Paladin/Druid/Sorcerer party.  Sorcerer is now an Archmage as a result of the Sorcerer promotion quests being way too easy (M&M6 AI needs to learn to recognize walls and monsters that have ranged attacks need to not try to shoot through them), other characters are still unpromoted.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

S3 - Holy -shit- Yuiri is awesomely broken.

[Luther Lansfeld]

I'm rewatching MK's endings and NIKKI'S MAKES ME WANT TO CRY.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

FURRYISM

[Luther Lansfeld]

Gah. This is as bad as Grandia's ending.

Flay's is so wonderful. I want to keep watching it. <_<

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

You need more Muppy in your life, honestly. I don't care if you did his ending, you need more Muppy in your life.

EDIT: Flay's ending is pretty sweet, though.

[superaielman]

Grandia's ending is insanely awesome outside of Leen and you fail for saying otherwise.

L4D- Fuck pistols.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

JUSTIN HAS SEX AND A MILLION MANBABIES IN GRANDIA'S ENDING. You are twisted, aiel.