Playin' any games today, Flying Nun? (WGAYP - 2011 Edition)

[Shale]

SRWZ2: Stage 9, the first unified level (albeit with different PCs depending on your path) since the second stage. And it's a bastard, too. The first real boss of the game, another three-turn SR point, lots of Dimensional Beasts, staggered reinforcements - I like it.

The Gundam 00 battleship is hilarious, incidentally.

Edit: And how could I forget? Getter is AWESOME. Good stats, loads of damage, and so very well animated. Need to pick up Blocking for Ryouma. He'll be getting most of the kills because his ace bonus is brutal too, even if it takes 150 will to kick in.

[Grefter]

ME2 - Okay, so fuck Horizon, that mission is just shitty.  I have no idea how you are meant to handle the 2 Scions with the Husks at all.  I just cheese it by sniping the Scions from the doorway with powers where they wouldn't wake up, then the husks don't spawn.  The fight after that I turtled through after a couple of tries.  Allies died.  I could shuffle around in cover picking guys off pretty much at my leisure then piss bolt around to restock ammo between waves, this was fine.  Fuck Collector Guardians.  One was behind cover and would drop a shield straight after the other one dropped.  Had no chance to even shoot him.  It was easier to just wait it out and let him be possessed by the Harbinger and kill him that way.  The Praetorian can go get fucked, but it always can.  Honestly not much change between Normal and Insanity for those shits though.

Contemplating training Grunt up to have Squad Inferno ammo specifically just to fight Husks with.  This whole mission probably would have been easier if I had built up to Squad Warp Ammo instead of picking a third point in Tactical Cloak.  It also would have been easier if I was playing Paragon and had the third Heavy Weapons upgrade from Zaeed's mission, would have given me the Cain then.  Not sure what I would have used it on (probably the Scions which turns out to be a waste if you don't mind cheese), but having it there is always a huge help.

[DjinnAndTonic]

The first game is... alright. It's really easy to break, which is bad when the combat is as boring as it is. Also, the last phase of the game has way too much backtracking. There were also some systems I barely touched (enhancing your songs, outside of, like, putting reduced MP cost on everything), I'm sure there are some effective things you can do with it, but getting Lyner ridiculous ATK pretty much wrecked the game. Some parts were enjoyable, though! Aurica Route.

Misha route is where all the likable characters ended up. In addition, besides Misha's appearance, she's generally considered the better-written heroine.

Also, no Scene of Fail where you learn that you can set your calendar by Aurica's Rape Schedule... and then the joyous scene where Lyner gets to become her new regular friendly neighborhood Rapist. ...uh... Spoiler.

[Fenrir]

Horizon is the hardest part of ME2 insanity by far, but it's not like the rest of the game is a joke afterwards..

Cool. Now go play Cthulu Saves The World. $3 and more awesome RPG gameplay.

Actually, I just recruited Santa Claus.
The game's pretty much Breath of Death 7 + as expected. I really do love the new insanity status in this game (drops enemy defense, change their character sprite, may make them a lot stronger). And poison is actually useful!
The main problem is that it's tiring to see Cthulu get trivialized again and again everywhere, and the whole game is that.

Character ratings (with my builds)
Cthulu: Worst character in the game, and he's forced. He has some alright ST damage.
Sharpe: Best ST damage. His magic could have been good, but I don't think he could ever compete with October. Good against bosses.
Dacre: Pure healing battery, worthless against random monsters, probably great against bosses.
October: Pure mage; Great MPs, uber strong magic, and she could have been even better. MVP.
Umi: Umi's a hybrid, she has a little bit of everything. Right now she has all the water boosting equipment stacked on her and she spams Flood. Works.
Paws: Useless, except for that skill which makes every enemy insane.

My main team is Cthulu + Umi + October + Paws, but every character, even those dead or not in the party, get full exp, so there's a lot of freedom. More games should do that.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Horizon is the hardest part of ME2 insanity by far, but it's not like the rest of the game is a joke afterwards..

The fight at the end of the derelict reaper is pretty tough too.

But really, I have a lot of praise for the raised difficulty in ME2. It's none of this usual bullshit you see in RPGs where everything is the same but numbers are bigger (fuck you Star Ocean). They gave enemies actual new abilities and immunities and such.

[Fenrir]

"The fight at the end of the derelict reaper is pretty tough too."
Yeah. + The Overlord final boss, and that bitch in LotSB. But really I had something like 50 resets in that one battle on Horizon.
The difficulty is great. But while making every enemy a threat by giving them protection is not necesserily a problem, it does make adepts really shitty.

[Dark Holy Elf]

every character, even those dead or not in the party, get full exp, so there's a lot of freedom. More games should do that.

Definitely agree with this. It always seemed ridiculous that a character could live for 99% of a boss battle, then OMG DEATH COUNTERATTACK KILLS SOMEONE and they don't get experience? What the hell? (Especially WTF-worthy since someone who spent the entire battle dead then was revived right before the killing blow apparently does remember the battle).

I read about the mechanic where enemies get stronger with time and I was kinda curious how it worked out in practice. I know the game's lead designer claimed that he implemented that to torpedo the strategy of "just heal off whatever they do" which can be a bit of a degenerate strategy... but I'm kinda concerned it will create a "just blow them up with as much damage as possible, anything else is suboptimal" which... could be seen as more degenerate. Really depends how it's implemented! Still something I'll probably play if I get a 360.


Tactics Ogre - Chapter 2 Law. The early battle against the necromancer dude was pretty nasty but nothing has been especially tough since. Still quite fun, I am a sucker for FFT-likes for obvious reasons.

[Meeplelard]

Pokemon Affirmative Action Version: 3rd Gym Beaten! 

Game seems to go out of its way to try and make Gym leaders have some plot relevance, rather than just kind of sit in the corner and be all "I'm a boss!" and do nothing else <_<

[Captain K.]

Last Remnant:  Wow.  Emma and Conqueror cutscene was amazing.  It's rare that you see that kind of quality in a videogame.

[Hunter Sopko]

Pokemon Affirmative Action Version: 3rd Gym Beaten! 

Game seems to go out of its way to try and make Gym leaders have some plot relevance, rather than just kind of sit in the corner and be all "I'm a boss!" and do nothing else <_<

Some are pretty amusing though.

[Pyro]

Trails in the Sky:

Continues to be a generic RPG, but I really don't care and am thoroughly loving it. Character interaction? Check. Humor with a well-written/translated script? Check. Combat system that is engaging enough to keep your focus and allows for interesting customization? Check. Encounter control? Check. It doesn't break any new ground but by god does it do things right.

Lacks sceneskip and has too many damn missable things (more games need to mimic RS for a solution to this), but damn if this isn't an enjoyable RPG. Kind of like a Tales game but with a traditional RPG system. Also the way it builds NPC characters is really cool. Every villager has their own personality and many lines that reflect it. For example if you talk to a shopowner in Bose you can learn over the course of your stay in that town how she feels about her husband basically abandoning her in the city to keep up a shop while he tries to help solve some of their former home's issues. Then there are vacationing old people reliving their more glorious days, young lovers who start up a relationship, and so on and so forth. All the NPC lines get changed whenever you trigger a plot point, and the number of lines allows for them to actually have memorable stories and characters. It's quite neat.

Not that the main cast doesn't get any loving. They really, really do. The game does characterization and interaction like a champ.

Combat could stand to be faster, but if you don't feel like fighting randoms you can abuse Joshua's great speed and the 100% perfect flee command to avoid them. There are also "Orbments" (i.e. materia) that allow for encounter control. The game allows you to ambush enemies in the field for full party CTB initiative, too. Game is a bit easy but there are several fights that can challenge you and I've had a few gameovers to various powerful encounters. The game is extremely forgiving with retrying and will let you do so WA4 style. It has an option to lower the difficulty after multiple retries, should you so desire to use it (doesn't really need it though).

[Dhyerwolf]

RH- Beaten and finally bothering to post something of a game summary (Still need to do that for FF 13 and ToV). Game overall probably a 6/10. I liked it, but it didn't resonate as much as I would have hoped.

Plot: It really, really coalesced well near the end (And ended up answering enough questions that it covered what seemed to be some of the previous glaring plotholes, although there were still a good number at the end). Something definitely didn't fall into place with the main villain. I would have loved to have seen some of the other dead-end pathways explored a little, but see how that would have been a logistical nightmare in terms of setup. Still, very good job taking a quirky concept and making it work. Might have been a bit better if I felt the core 3 characters (in terms of screen time) really had any depth to them.

Battle System: Not much to say here, other than this was pretty solidly outlayed. I would have really, really loved to have a few more PCs to play around with, but I just half expected that because same team as RS and because a game about teamline jumping generally has great reasoning to throw more PCs at you. And hell, they didn't even bother to make Gafka relevant, so they wouldn't really need to do much with other PCs.

Sidequests: I normally hate this sidequest style, but unlike XS 2 and ToV, it at least makes enough sense here to be excusable. Using time-traveling to fix various people's issues makes a lot of sense even if the execution was off. The game really, really needed you to be able to jump to any particular node.

Music: Only mentioning this because it gets a lot of love. The soundtrack is good. The soundtrack is about 10 songs. Narrow down any RPG to it's best 10 songs, and the soundtrack will look a lot better!

End thoughts is overall very solid game, but I just would have liked to seen it expanded a bit more.

[Rozalia]

My brother ruined one of my Ps3 controllers so I had to get a new one, meh I can afford it even though I just lost my job. After playing co-op DW7 for a couple of hours the game freezes, well it happens I'll just turn the system off and put it back on. Wait a sec why isn't it reading the game? Could be the system files so I check them and they are corrupted so I restore them and still nothing. Guess I'll be buying a lens cleaner but considering the bad luck I've had lately I doubt it'll work.

*Signs* Maybe I should trade the thing in considering all the problems its had and I've had to fix. Annoying s I wanted to use the money to get the currently lackluster 3ds.

[Tide]

TOPSP: Chapter 4 now. Man, if Archers were even more broken in the original TO, I don't think I want to know how overpowered they were. Considering the fact they are by far the MPV class of the game for the first three chapters.  Maybe that's why FFT archers got nuked or something. As is, you could run a party with nothing but archers and it probably wouldn't give you any issues.

[metroid composite]

Desktop dungeons:

Various stuff I haven't reported, like unlocking and beating the story mode; beating up through Gauntlett level 16.  But mostly the folloing hilarious situation happened:

In DD you learn pretty quickly not to anger the gods; if piety goes below 0...you're pretty much dead, most of the time.  I managed to get -1160 piety (yes, negative.  Yes, four digits) and still won.  (Transmuter, Earthmother, Factory.  I got stoneskin at level 1, too.  And the funny thing is?  It kept triggering after I went negative).

[Niu]

TOPSP: Chapter 4 now. Man, if Archers were even more broken in the original TO, I don't think I want to know how overpowered they were. Considering the fact they are by far the MPV class of the game for the first three chapters.  Maybe that's why FFT archers got nuked or something. As is, you could run a party with nothing but archers and it probably wouldn't give you any issues.

They nerfed the Ninjas so they can't carry bows for a reason.
It was really fucked up when we had bow using Ninjas running everywhere over the map.

They really should take out the cross bow from the winglings too.

[Shale]

SRWZ2:

I'ma just leave this here.

http://i56.tinypic.com/fp79mr.jpg

[Scar]

I wish I knew who that was or what that references. =(

[Shale]

It's a character from the the first SRWZ, and provides hope that the awesomest original ever will be back in Z2 part 2.

[Rozalia]

I cracked open the ps3 and sorted the misaligned drive but still nothing on disc reading. Ps1 games don't seem to work either meaning its looking like the laser has up and died on me which is just frustrating. I've had half a dozen problems with Sony's black monolith but as they were mostly software problems and I have backed up data they have been easy to fix and a mere annoyance. A laser failure is very annoying and it means I'll have to open the thing up again which is never a nice thing for me to do.

Think I'll go play some SMT1 and hope I don't screw myself out of an ending.

[Fenrir]

I read about the mechanic where enemies get stronger with time and I was kinda curious how it worked out in practice. I know the game's lead designer claimed that he implemented that to torpedo the strategy of "just heal off whatever they do" which can be a bit of a degenerate strategy... but I'm kinda concerned it will create a "just blow them up with as much damage as possible, anything else is suboptimal" which... could be seen as more degenerate. Really depends how it's implemented! Still something I'll probably play if I get a 360.

As far as random battles go, ressource management makes the system pretty interesting. I died a few times by being too careful with MPs (Running low on MPs -> You only spend a few MPs on a particular battle -> Enemies get progressively stronger and end up owning your team)
You could just fight 30 random battles at the beginning of every dungeon then not care about ressource management, but that's like owning Pokemon by soloing with your starter then finishing the game with a Master Ball'd Legendary.

You don't need to hold back against bosses so they don't really get interesting, yeah. There are still a few tactical choices involved:
- Heal or damage? If you heal too much, you die, if you don't heal enough, you die too.
- Buff or damage?
Roughly in the middle of Cthulhu however, you get a pure healer + stat buffer who solves both of those questions, and every boss afterwards gets steamrolled. This fortunately does not happen in BoD7.

Edit: That mechanic has another positive effect I forgot: There's no random variation whatsoever. That could get boring in other gamesbut here thanks to this mechanic, it's perfect.


So yeah anyway, I did finish the game and the "superboss" (what a joke)
I'll probably try Highlander mode soon (You're only able to use one character, but you get a ton more exp points)

[Captain K.]

Desktop Dungeons:  What have you introduced me to, MC?  I've been on this thing all damn day.

Happiness is a Halfling Berserker in the Library spawning next to a Taurog altar.

[Scar]

It's a character from the the first SRWZ, and provides hope that the awesomest original ever will be back in Z2 part 2.

Ok, yeah that original is pretty boss, but I don't get what that old man has to do with it.

[Shale]

He mentored Rand, the Gunleon's pilot. Everybody thought he was dead in the first game, but apparently not so much.

[superaielman]

FF4 TAY- In Yang's chapters. It's been pretty good so far. They've tweaked FF4's system a bit (Bands, moons) but by and large it's the same gameplay engine. The story's about what you would expect from more FF4, though it's amused me at points. I definitely dug Calco and Brina as PC's in Rydia's story, for example.