Dark Holy Elf, re Cthulhu: Mentioned it in chat, but there's still another set of optional superbosses. There's also one other optional dungeon which it sounds like you missed, the Astral Cave... but it's balanced for before Ryleh, it felt like, so maybe not much point in doing it. It does have one of the more awesome rando-bosses on style points, possibly better than the Fire Whale:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=209WscWjcPoI also agree that the game seriously stopped trying in the script for Dacre / Ember's plot arcs, but I will give credit to one of Ember's lines. Something along the lines of:
Villager: "Thanks for saving us from that monstrous red Dragon, Mister! ...uh.... who's that?"
Ember: "Just a big, pink dinosaur here."
Otherwise, yeah,
at becoming a Dragon Quest rather than parodying one (or better, parodying Lovecraft).
I don't believe any glitch was used, it's 100% legit and ridiculous:
It's Normal Mode Albus at lvl. 255. And I bet it's a TAS from that perfect a teleport / dash. The creator can have a sticker for teleporting through the game quickly, but not really that impressive an achievement.
With that said, the combat is too much on the simple side really, with almost every fight boiling down to "get behind cover, pop up to headshot things whenever you can". It is surprisingly easy to die in the game, as a few seconds of concentrated fire has you down even if you built up durability buffs and so on. But being behind any cover makes you... pretty much invulnerable as long as you aren't being hit from the sides or behind, and it is very rare that you will find yourself under crossfire. Enemies don't use tactics like flanking and so on, so I found that the most pressing fights were against the mindless zombie-like enemies that came at you to perform physical attacks. With that said, the actual enemy variety was sufficient, just not the enemy tactics.
This. I mean... the supremacy of using cover and quickly moving from cover to cover is "realistic", where realistic = realistic for WWII infantry tactics, and as we know all future combat is frozen in time and some echo of WWII combat. And... I don't know about "very rare" that enemies would flank and get crossfires; it happened occasionally, which was great. "Crud I'm tied down by these guys in front holy crap I am taking damage from where noooooooooo." Nicely done reflection of how suppression fire can work, and your team can do the same thing to the enemies. So yeah, good intentions here, but the real problem is that cover is just too damn godly. I guess that was intentional considering how even one hit can interrupt shield regeneration, but... meh. This is the future, right? A lot more of the cover should have been destroyable, or had durability ratings, considering you're shooting future weaponry at what is in general improvised cover and not future bunkers. (As a side note, dropping the waist-high walls everywhere in wildly inappropriate situations? I realize your game works better with cover, but I'd like for it to TRY and have some more realistic settings.) Failing that... assuming as a gameplay thing they wanted to make cover invincibility to normal fire so you can regen shields, have GRENADES and Grenade launchers all over the place, then. Yeah, another blast from WWII, but how awesome would it be to see the grenade bouncing in and you realizing that it's time to find new Cover, NOW? A very few enemies use something like this, but not enough. There aren't very many proper open-air areas; sure, the sniper rifle is already good, but some big wide open fields with restricted visibility but no cover would be interesting. (I really liked one of the random screw-with-the-Blood-Pack missions where you DO actually get to see some distance off and fight enemies far away, but that's not common.)
Choices have nearly no gameplay consequences!
Yeah, this annoys me a bit. Choices that have no impact only go so far. I thought that ME2 had manned up and just imposed an ME1 storyline when I played it and they didn't prompt me for too much backstory about my actions in the not-played ME1... but... nope. If Ashley / Kaiden have identical roles in the plot, and the Council is going to ignore you and stick their head in the sand no matter whether it's human dominated or not... then... how much influence did you have? Like, it's cool that they're porting those decisions over, but it's also not cool for telling a coherent story, because that requires that all those decisions didn't really change things TOO much.
