Let's Play Some Motherf*$&ing Games: 2010!!!!!!

[Dark Holy Elf]

Levels really don't matter much at all in XF. If something isn't working, question your skill setup, not levels.

In particular, for 1-14, some things which may help are Sentinel's Zone of Control skill, and their Heavy Strike to push enemies down holes; Geomancer's Shut Out, especially with Widespread, note that it lasts 20 turns regardless of who gets those turns

[Feldschlacht IV]

I need some Wild Arms in my life. Is the 5th one any good?

[Bobbin Cranbud]

Just finished Wild ARMs 5.

I consider it the best overall in the series and, yeah, after the finale I'm inclined to leave it as "best game of the PS2 era, wouldn't quite make Top 5 in the PS1 era but would at least be in the conversation."

The Downside

Battle gameplay is slightly weaker than WA3 or 4, story is weaker than WA2, and puzzles are weaker than WA1, 2 or 3.  The voice acting has enough bad performances to spoil it and shutting it off turns off the music and SFX in certain scenes, apparently due to a bug.  The pacing goes south toward the end of the game.  The last two PCs to join aren't as well developed as the first four.

The Upside

It's polished to a sparkling jewel.

The story is superbly TOLD, even at its weakest points (contrast WA2 where the story itself was excellent but the translation and/or script did it terrible disservice).  Scenes that have never worked for me in any game or anime, WA5 absolutely knocks out of the park.

I had a series of complaints about various aspects of the gameplay.  EVERY SINGLE ONE was addressed within one dungeon of my first raising it.  That bit about pacing up above?  Until the very end of the game, the pacing is the best I've ever seen, introducing solutions to every problem as it arises, pulling the story along without sacrificing gameplay or characterization, giving you time to explore and making it both rewarding and fun to do so.

The gameplay is the only area that's good, rather than great.  Bosses generally lack the fascinating gimmicks WA4 bosses boasted, being more like WA1-3 bosses on a hex grid.  The challenge is well paced (shutting off randoms ASAP and judiciously running makes bosses hard and randoms in the next area interesting) and the character customization options are interesting, if maybe a bit underused.

Despite not being done by Michiko Naruke, the soundtrack manages to capture everything she did so, so right in the Wild ARMs series.  It seriously threatens for a "best WA music" crown, which is basically synonymous with "best music" (my most-listened-to track ever is the extended version of the WA2 opener).

The graphics are contenders for PS2-best.  I'm retroactively less impressed by the PS3 game(!) Valkyria Chronicles because Wild ARMs 5 nailed the "3D anime you can play" look a full generation earlier.

9/10 and near the top of the 9s.


(In other news, finished Devil May Cry 4 on the PS3.  Devil May Cry game I can actually complete!  Easy mode that makes enemies weaker rather than gimping the controls!  Woo!  Probably an 8/10?  Not graphically impressive by PS3 standards, the music gets repetitive, and a few of the jumping puzzles were aggravating, but those were my only knocks.)

[Feldschlacht IV]

after the finale I'm inclined to leave it as "best game of the PS2 era

Damn. That's saying a lot, you know that, right? I'll definitely have to pick this up.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

after the finale I'm inclined to leave it as "best game of the PS2 era

Damn. That's saying a lot, you know that, right? I'll definitely have to pick this up.

I've mentioned (in a pre-finish review of WA5) that I consider the PS2 the weakest of the three Playstation consoles for quality (though not, obviously, quantity!), so understand that it's not saying as much FOR ME as it would be for some people.

WA5 would be somewhere in my top 50 games and possibly - probably? - my top 10 RPGs.  But if it were a PS3 game I'm not sure it would Top 5, and know it wouldn't on the PS1.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Different strokes, I guess. I (and a few others) felt the totally unnecessary Volsung twist at the end ruins the game with its total retardedness. Also, I can't in good conscience give a game with coatrack characters above a 7, but that's just me.

[Random Consonant]

EF2 - Crystal-destroying punchy glove get, time for backtracking for shinies.

[Hunter Sopko]

Different strokes, I guess. I (and a few others) felt the totally unnecessary Volsung twist at the end ruins the game with its total retardedness. Also, I can't in good conscience give a game with coatrack characters above a 7, but that's just me.

It does. Again, as I said before, I really liked WA5 and agree with most of BCB's points, but while it has a good setup, good ideas and good pacing, it's overall execution is botched. They never really go into most of the things that are very apparantly there in the writing, leaving either wasted potential or just completely awkward scenes. It feels like they took the script they got from the novelist and dumbed it down, troped it up and called it a day. Great foundation for a story and characters, but just... blargh to that ending.

I hate the ending with the level of hate only someone who loved the rest of the game could have.

[Sierra]

Different strokes, I guess. I (and a few others) felt the totally unnecessary Volsung twist at the end ruins the game with its total retardedness. Also, I can't in good conscience give a game with coatrack characters above a 7, but that's just me.

This.

I hate the ending with the level of hate only someone who loved the rest of the game could have.

Also this.

I enjoyed WA5 quite a bit but also think BCB overrates it. The endgame plot/scenes were utterly dreadful, in my opinion. Dean being an idiot also dulls much of the maingame's impact, for me. Music hype I can get behind, though I'd put WA3's before it.

~

Bioshock 2: Finished. Middling successor to a good game. Felt as much ten minutes or so in and it never did anything to change that impression. Diverting enough a time-waster but you don't really need to bother with it unless you really, really liked the first or just shooters in general. It doesn't have anything to offer that's as intriguing as watching Rapture fall apart in the first place and there's no standout NPC to stick in your memory like Ryan or Cohen. Thematically it seems to be aiming for a whole "rediscovering your humanity" angle but this is hard to pull off when the gameplay consists of mindlessly slaughtering every faceless goon you encounter. Sure, you can spare a few plot NPCs, but it's hard to feel like it matters when you're so numb from boring through waves of people with a drill.

Got the good ending, which is meh but at least not as cloying as it was in Bioshock 1 (not that that says much). Wasn't expecting a whole lot there, really. Final battle was a mookswarm, which I guess is a bummer but it's not like they gave us a competent final boss in the first game. At least you have the Terminator on your side here and can watch her wreck everyone's shit? It's something.

That could be spoilerish I guess? But eh. There's not a helluva lot to care about here in that regard, trust me.

Game is pretty much piss easy. No surprise there, right. I rescued every little sister and was still swimming in ADAM by the end. I died maybe four or five times? Mostly to being careless while running around at low health and getting fragged by someone I didn't see in time. Weapon balance is a little better, at least.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Generally with El Cid on matters WA5-related. Also "huh, weird, but I can see it" to PS2 < PS1 hype and "... zuh?" to PS2 < PS3 hype. There is a grand total of one PS3-unique RPG I am remotely interested in, and I don't feel like my taste is freakishly unusual in this regard.

FE Shadow Dragon - Chapter 7 'n' stuff. Not too much to say. Bosses get so much less brutal after the first three. Forging and reclassing are awesome. Using mostly different people this time, but Caeda and Merric are an overlap so far even if I need to watch out for Merric being one-rounded. Athena may be one too, we'll see. Still a reasonably hard game of course. Also boooo FE6 style reinforcements.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Different strokes, I guess. I (and a few others) felt the totally unnecessary Volsung twist at the end ruins the game with its total retardedness. Also, I can't in good conscience give a game with coatrack characters above a 7, but that's just me.

This.

I hate the ending with the level of hate only someone who loved the rest of the game could have.

Also this.

I enjoyed WA5 quite a bit but also think BCB overrates it. The endgame plot/scenes were utterly dreadful, in my opinion. Dean being an idiot also dulls much of the maingame's impact, for me. Music hype I can get behind, though I'd put WA3's before it.

The endgame's best part is random chatter from NPCs in towns. Also Nightburn being like "Hey I'm alive" because it makes no sense and is totally unnecessary, but Nightburn is the best character in WA5, and he looks like Xanatos with a machine gun, so having him be dead at the end and the stupid little girl getting to live is a disservice and a half.

[Cotigo]

KotOR2 - Went from an amazing 10/10 game to something that completely fell apart at the end.  Somewhere between the end of Onderon and the start of Dantooine again everything went to shit, since a lot of what happens at the end kinda relies on some of the scenes that were deleted.

Want to play the end with the restored content so badly.  Are they even working on the patch anymore?

EDIT:  Some googling shows that... they're done?  Hell yeah.  That's getting played at some point.

[Meeplelard]

Onimusha Dawn of Dreams: Tenkai returns, and is even more awesome than I remember!  Ok, his Super Form isn't too special though I guess LONG RANGE CHARGE STAB OF IMPALTION DOOM has its merits.  His Purification is pretty damn strong though, one shotting things it really shouldn't.  Also some of his newer techniques seem pretty brutal.  Whee, fun to have all 5 PCs back!

Yodo, meanwhile, needs to die.  Maybe it was cause my ally was Tenkai, and had I gone in with Ohatsu, it would have been so much easier, but mrf.  Go figure, I finally had her figured out and beat her without any items.
What kept getting me was when after doing big damage, she'd go into Absorb Esscence mode, which I expected...close up, which then she'da ttack without warning when I'm at low health and...ugh, no way to defend yourself.  Alternatively, the ally would get possessed like instantly without warning and that sort of makes the fight explode from there.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

KotOR2 - Went from an amazing 10/10 game to something that completely fell apart at the end.  Somewhere between the end of Onderon and the start of Dantooine again everything went to shit, since a lot of what happens at the end kinda relies on some of the scenes that were deleted.

Want to play the end with the restored content so badly.  Are they even working on the patch anymore?

EDIT:  Some googling shows that... they're done?  Hell yeah.  That's getting played at some point.

The Team Gizka guys are not done. Someone else picked up the ball and did it because the Gizka guys are a bunch of fucks. I'm pretty sure I linked the patch to you at one point in this topic, before you started KotOR1.

But yes, you can tell where the point was where LucasArts said "GET IT OUT BY CHRISTMAS." They cut out possibly the most important moment of the entire game: where HK-47 makes the greatest achievement of droidkind.

[Grefter]

The thing that honestly shocked me the most with KotOR 2 is the fact that they seemed to be working on it from start to finish in that order, none of the patchwork kind of all over the place stuff I tend to associate with development (which is probably more being a bit more familiar with how movies end up being shot than games get made kind of thing), so the game starts off at well I won't say starts off strong because that first area is kind of boring, but it peaks really early and the flaws don't show until BAM suddenly you are invading a space hulk with a squad of mandalorians and you aren't quite sure how that happened.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

Generally with El Cid on matters WA5-related. Also "huh, weird, but I can see it" to PS2 < PS1 hype and "... zuh?" to PS2 < PS3 hype. There is a grand total of one PS3-unique RPG I am remotely interested in, and I don't feel like my taste is freakishly unusual in this regard.

Quick clarification: I don't mean PS3 RPGs > PS2 by any stretch of the imagination.  PS3 RPGs to this point don't > Dreamcast, and there were only, what, four RPGs on the Dreamcast and two of those were Evolution 1 & 2?  I just mean that PS3 games overall have been extremely impressive to me - Uncharted 2 is almost a 10, a ranking I've only ever given twice, I have a much, much higher opinion of MGS4 than most here, Valkyria Chronicles is very good, Infamous, Uncharted 1 and Batman: Arkham Asylum were a lot of fun, and so on.  For a young system with a small library, it's impressed the hell out of me despite having almost no games in genres I normally like.  And now a flood of those is coming, so I'm stoked.

As to WA5, I agree the Volsung twist was bad, but it didn't seem... I don't know, aggressively bad.  At least it was foreshadowed, which puts it above half the final boss ass-pulls in RPGs.  Albeit the NATURE of what was foreshadowed was especially stupid.  Other than that, I thought the resolution of the plot and the character arcs were well done.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I'd rather have an asspull final boss that comes out of nowhere like Zeromus than some attempt to whitewash the villain because he's possessed by a ghost. It's like he's not capable of saying "You know what? I tried to be nice, but you're all douchebags so fuck you" like a normal person, he needs a goddamn ghost to make him sad. At least Zeromus didn't make me say "Okay, so not only am I supposed to now feel bad for killing someone right back for trying to kill me, they're insinuating that he's not capable of snapping like a normal person, so he's somehow better than me."

The thing that honestly shocked me the most with KotOR 2 is the fact that they seemed to be working on it from start to finish in that order, none of the patchwork kind of all over the place stuff I tend to associate with development (which is probably more being a bit more familiar with how movies end up being shot than games get made kind of thing), so the game starts off at well I won't say starts off strong because that first area is kind of boring, but it peaks really early and the flaws don't show until BAM suddenly you are invading a space hulk with a squad of mandalorians and you aren't quite sure how that happened.

It's my understanding that games are basically made in layers, rather than sequentially like KotOR2 seemed to be. Get all the world geometry, all the mobs, all the text/voice, program the combat encounters, do all the event flags, and so on. Van Buren's design documents, which are basically the only design docs I've ever bothered to read, seemed to suggest that, anyway.

[Hunter Sopko]

I'd rather have an asspull final boss that comes out of nowhere like Zeromus than some attempt to whitewash the villain because he's possessed by a ghost. It's like he's not capable of saying "You know what? I tried to be nice, but you're all douchebags so fuck you" like a normal person, he needs a goddamn ghost to make him sad. At least Zeromus didn't make me say "Okay, so not only am I supposed to now feel bad for killing someone right back for trying to kill me, they're insinuating that he's not capable of snapping like a normal person, so he's somehow better than me."

This. It really does cheapen the rest of the game.

[Niu]

Breast Bounce Saga EXCEED-

Alice is a beast to the point of not funny. I thought no one can more broken than Aldy, how wrong I was.......
On the other hand, the newly wed Dark Knight and Alchemist turn out to be terrible hit box too small, duration is short, and hits enemy way too high. How am I going to conect anything liek that?

And poor milk cow, she has become total air and only got mentioned when the rest of the cast needs cow jokes against her will.

[DomaDragoon]

WAXF - 1.14, In Which Levin Singlehandedly Kills Four People And Saves Me From Yet Another Reset. Yeah, adding Widespread to my Shut Out tactics worked - I was previously just using it on single units. Upgraded my equipment, too, which just gave me the 1HKO with the elementalist. Levin and my Elementalist  basically wiped out the right side, and Labby held the line long enough to let the others clear the left.

1.15, In Which Aah!Zombies Meet Widespread Sanctify And Cry.

1.16, In Which Aah!Zombies Meet Sanctify and Cry Some More.

Interlude, In Which I Can No Longer Tell If The Percy Weasley Cosplayer Is A Man.


Bioshock 2: Got the drill dash, Level 17 multiplayer.

[Grefter]

It's my understanding that games are basically made in layers, rather than sequentially like KotOR2 seemed to be. Get all the world geometry, all the mobs, all the text/voice, program the combat encounters, do all the event flags, and so on. Van Buren's design documents, which are basically the only design docs I've ever bothered to read, seemed to suggest that, anyway.

Well yeah you get the engine down working first of course and implement some of the key maps and whatnot, but yeah KotOR2 really does feel like they started at the beginning and went until they ran out.  Might have somethign to do with already having the engine I guess, but I still think it is really weird.

[SageAcrin]

Well, they clearly got the voice first. They had the engine.

World geometry...is there, I think, for the removed content, isn't it? Or did the restored content just remake the entire Droid Factory? IIRC I thought that was there but not the weird droid planet that barely had any info about it. So...they probably did the last few steps like combat/event/etc simultaneously, since there wasn't really anything to work on and I'd think those would be done by other people.

Then they didn't have time to finish or to go back over their work at all, so...yeah, actually, linear issues makes some sense. To boot, if say your models aren't done, but were prioritized right, everyone important got a model and you can just use less generic models, if that's incomplete. Maps....could be incomplete, at that, there's less feeling of optional areas then there was on, say, Taris.

The part that doesn't make sense is "Jesus Christ did they scrap an earlier build entirely, or did they just get like six months to do the build cycle?". Someone should be set on fire for that either way.

[Grefter]

I think they had either a 12 or 18 month dev cycle one of which is almost criminally short even with an engine already in place, the other just much to short for something as expansive as an RPG trying to fill the shoes of a Bioware sequel.

[Scar]

Chrono Trigger DS - Just about complete! I think all I have left is to kill Spekkio one more time for his magic tab reward. Other then that I finished every side quest in the end, but I haven't found any of the new content. Is that new game plus only? granted, I'm not using a guide anyways, so I won't prolly find anything until I start up a new game.

I'm in the Blue Omen or whatever it's called nowadays with Magus, Marle, and Crono. Magus and Marle are the only teammates left with abilities to learn. Crono has his Luminare with Golden stud for spam abuse. Dungeon seems easier then before, meh.

[Yoshiken]

I'm in the Blue Omen or whatever it's called nowadays with Magus, Marle, and Crono. Magus and Marle are the only teammates left with abilities to learn. Crono has his Luminare with Golden stud for spam abuse. Dungeon seems easier then before, meh.

Assuming you're near the start of Black Omen? Yeah, it would be pretty easy if you have Luminaire then, but I know I didn't get that until pretty near the end of the final dungeon.