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

[Sierra]

I'm not talking about it wearing off, I'm talking about it just not working. I select the jammer, hold LT and RT, and Batman just stands there while mooks shoot automatic weapons at him.

I never actually tried using it while dudes were already shooting at me. Blame the long wind-up time. It's really only good for goons you're about to attack, not goons who are already attacking you.

[VySaika]

SRWJ

* Gatewalker EYES G. Gracodeus

Well, uh, not entirely sure what the game plans on having me fight to justify getting THAT but the last few maps have been such cakewalks that I'd welcome the change.

Granteed/Arbalest/Tekkamen Blade, Layzner team/God Gundam, Kaiser/Great/Borot and the Aestivalis squad(the girls and Akito anyway) are the four "teams" I usually split my forces into to handle maps. Actually really likeing how well the first three support eachother, especially after I slapped Hit and Away on D-Boy. I did get Bonta-kun, but it's hard to say no to Lamda Driver so I used it a bit for the lulz and went back to the Arbalest.

Oh, and the Granteed(now the G. Dracodeus) and the Layzner Mk2 have both been full upgraded. Picked the S ranks on all terrains bonuses for both, of course. That predictably took them both from merely dominating to just plain silly(at least once V-MAX kicks in for the Layzner).

[Shale]

SRWJ

* Gatewalker EYES G. Gracodeus

Well, uh, not entirely sure what the game plans on having me fight to justify getting THAT but the last few maps have been such cakewalks that I'd welcome the change.

Yeah, it's pretty much like that the whole way through.

[Fenrir]

Yeah, see Grefter.



Ouch.

So yeah this was the original FFL with good graphics, there's nothing changed. All the BS is kept, but at least God isn't turned into Gackt.
I like it because it's very fast paced (I finished it under 5 hours. It felt like Half Minute Hero at times), the world is great and fun to see, and in general the game doesn't care about making sense or adhering to the usual RPG rules. It has that weirdness only older games can pull off. There is no balance in this game ever, but I guess that's part of the charm.

I might try a human SCC. I like buying my stats instead of earning them from battle.


Oh yeah I also finished earlier:

Orc & Elves (DS):
It's a first person game, but because it's turn based, combat feels a lot like a roguelike, believe it or not. It's fast paced, pretty fun and very short. Battles are "Mash A" but you have a lot of different long range options, and you're expected to gobble tons of potions all the time to survive. Health potions, stat boost potions, regen potions, invisibility potions, doubleturning potions, etc etc.
I do not believe this is very healthy. The main character probably dies soon after the end of the game.

I think the Doom team made this game. If you press A against suspicious walls you'll find secret rooms with ammo and like ten potions.

[Meeplelard]

Okamiden: Just a beat giant statue!  That fight was cool outside of one factor:

No way to heal Ink outside of abusing items, which I've been trying to avoid.  It really stood out as a fight that they forgot to accommodate the differences between Okami and Okamiden.  In Okami?  That'd have not been a problem due to Ink Regeneration.  Here, you don't have that.  Bosses before this would often have occasionally spawning goons you can trash for a Ink power up, which was a good compensation factor, and you could argue Resource Management except you're using a lot of resources due to the nature of the game, and this is not a short fight.

Dead Rising 2: Just got Katey her 3rd Zombrex.  I literally got it to her last second, cause I tried to be ambitious and save 4 people just before giving it to her.  I managed to succeed though due to some screw ups, it was damned close.  In fairness, only one of the 4 were saved initially since I was that rushed, but...DR2 is a lot more forgiving about this, so simply "turn around after plot scene", and the 3 I missed came within range.


I also discovered PROPELLER SERVBOT HEAD.  This is a freaking awesome weapon just on style merits alone.

[Clear Tranquil]

FFTA2- L38 Luso, 42~ hrs logged, 93 Quests Completed, 20 Clan Members, 18 Areas Controlled, 17 Clan Privileges including Bonus AP 3, Speed ^5, Power, Agility and Luck ^4, Regenga, Debuff Resistance 3 ...  I have a Ranger w/th Mirror Items + Item Lore, my three Viera have all just mastered Blood Price ... Plot? What plot? Oh yeah "Seeking the Stone" was the latest there~

[VySaika]

One of the best clan privilages, and one I bot got early and used often, is one that doubles your MP regen. Can't remember exactly what it's called or how to get it, but it lets non-viera casters actually, you know, do stuff. Though having 3 BP Vieras, you're prolly past the point where it would be useful.

[Clear Tranquil]

Thanks Gate. Worth keeping in mind for future reference =)

Yeah not sure if Tai mentioned it. He might have though. He's given me a lot of information/help/advice on the game in general. Like the way to obtain Bonus AP 3 which I've mainly been rolling with~

Have mainly been using physicals/items with most of my team until recently although I do have one Nu Mou dedicated to Black/Time with Turbo MP. He's been fairly useful and used quite a bit so MP Regen might have came in handy there =)

**

Meant to comment more on my team/characters. Luso after spending some time in Fighter and Thief/Ninja for stats is back in Hunter currently w/th Precision as a secondary. Not sure which secondary I'll stick to yet for his final set up though. Adelle did some stat work in Fighter and Thief earlier and is now settling into her Ninja + Fighter/Blue set up. Cid is a Master+White Monk, Hurdy is going to go Juggler/Bard (working on Thief abilities for Tinker > Juggler), my main Nu Mou and my Seeq has been mentioned, my three Viera are going Assassin/Fencer w/th Green Magic, Summoner w/th Red and Sniper w/th Spellblade respectively. I also have two Grias, both with solid speed and strength who are working on their Raptor stuffs until I obtain the Ravager class. I have a bunch of random moogles, Nu Mou, bangaa and humes as extra (they all have a decent amount of abilities mastered each although I haven't really used any of these units in battle except for one moogle I used quite a lot before Hurdy joined)~

[superaielman]

Mirror item Rangers are more than enough to completely shatter the game. Rangers are *dumb*

[AndrewRogue]

Fate/Extra

Lil Ronnie: 4 Resets. Had to utterly memorize the pattern.
Julius: 2 Resets. Fairly easy.

[Dark Holy Elf]

OoE hard mode - This mode has caused me lots of deaths, but of late (since beating the second spoiler boss) there has been less death. Then I got to Death, and he killed me with death, a lot. So I equipped the death ring so I could bring death to him faster but that only meant even more death for me. I have seen to his death, mind, but I wanted to get the Death medal, which involves seeing his death without being hit, so of course there's no downside to using the death ring. Aside from a seeing my own death even more often.

Yo dawg.

[Cmdr_King]

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword- I... don't really know what to feel about this game.

So the zelda series since about OoT has been mostly about playing with new tech, and thusly Skyward Sword is the wii-motiest thing ever.  And really, this is the game Nintendo wanted to release like 5 years ago.  You use the wii features for everything, and they really let you do more than just be a party game.  Love was poured into making this game THE Wii game.

Unfortunately, they also got so caught up in that that the actual design of the game started to bow to making up stuff that was all wii-happy.  One of the things you can make your sword do is be a dousing rod, and wave around in Look mode to point you in the direction of your current objective.  So what they did was, before every temple up to where I am, stick in a bunch of fetch quests in the immediate vicinity to detect and chase after with your dousing sword.  Has it just been too long since I played a Zelda game?  I really don't remember the fetch quests being this intrusive before.  In between dungeons and the finding of dungeons, you do a lot of flying around to collect treasures and sidequests.  controlling your bird is pretty fun, until you have to start climbing again because at that you point you have to wave the wiimote up and down like a madman to flap up.  It makes a weird kind of sense, but it's fucking exhausting crossing from one end of the map to the other.

The combat actually works pretty well.  Swordplay is fairly responsive (although crossing from one side of your body to the other confuses the thing, which is bad since several enemy types read your sword position and block based on that) and using the nunchuck to shield block is pretty intuitive.  unfortunately, and completely unrelated to the wii thing, shields have durability in this game.  If you don't perfectly time a shield block, it takes damage, and it don't take much to break the things.  You can upgrade them, but in the interim I got so paranoid about shattering a shield I just stopped using it.  This exacerbates the real frustration I've been having with the game; basic mooks are disproportionately hard.  Like, to kill a basic skulltula, you have to charge up an energy shot, do a horizontal slash, stab it's weakpoint to knock it off the web, hit it precisely in the head during a charge to knock it down, then quickly lock on and do a fatal attack (downward stabbing motion with wiimote/nunchuck).  At the point in the game where I'm at now, basic goblins have started using electric swords, meaning that if I attack and am in any way blocked, I take a full heart of damage.

Yeah, this game starts you off with 6 hearts... because it'd be borderline impossible with just 3.

For all that, I think this game more than any of the others (that I've played) really sells itself on style.  This world just... is.  It works on its own rules and I really enjoy being in it.  But actually playing the game is goddamned exhausting.

I dunno if I'm gonna stick with it or not.

[Shale]

Arkham City: I am happily paying five bucks for purely cosmetic costumes because fuck yes Neal Adams Batman.

Edit: And you can't use the costumes until you're on a second run. Noooooooooooooo

[Grefter]

Money well spent.

DQ9 - I am trying to do the level 15 Warrior quest.  THis is fucking stupid.

[Fenrir]

SaGa remake Human Solo: The beginning was MUCH harder than Mutant almostsolo.
Then I realized in the second world that humans have a cap of 99 in every stat instead of 255 in this game (I guess this was a bug, as it was still shown as "99" in the menu) so my human would have turned very crappy very fast, and not in a fun way.

So I dropped this to do a Tactics Ogre Single Class Challenge.
The vanilla game is already pretty difficult, how tough can this challenge be?



.... Not very...
I've just finished the first Chapter 2 battle, and gave everybody a great bow.
Oh, and the main character is a ninja with a bow.
I remember Chapter 1 being difficult, but I just stormed everything with no resets and no deaths here. It's like that arrow rain scene from the movie 300 except enemies don't use shields to protect themselves. I didn't get hit once during the Chapter 1 Final Battle because I could shoot from one end of the battlefield to the other no problem.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Haha. Amazing.

[VySaika]

Clerics/Exorcists SCC. Do it.

[Sierra]

Arkham City: I am happily paying five bucks for purely cosmetic costumes because fuck yes Neal Adams Batman.

Edit: And you can't use the costumes until you're on a second run. Noooooooooooooo

Dunno about whichever ones you got, but I was able to use the Batman Beyond outfit during free roaming after beating the final boss (load up endgame save, wander Arkham at will to clear up whatever sidequests you didn't knock out before the point of no return, basically). So not quite second run...but close.

[Shale]

It's "after clearing the game" so yeah that's probably right. I didn't realize there was a postgame mode.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

So I dropped this to do a Tactics Ogre Single Class Challenge.
The vanilla game is already pretty difficult, how tough can this challenge be?



.... Not very...

Don't ever change, you rascal.

[Pyro]

Finished Atelier Totori.

Atelier Totori is not a game that captures you with a deep plot or combat system. The music is decent but not memorable outside of one or two tracks. The game is fairly mediocre outside of two aspects: The gorgeous character designs and the constant barrage of new stuff to make.

Because lets face it: You don't play a main series Atelier game looking for an epic RPG story and combat, you play it because KEKEKE NEW STUFF TO MAKE. "Now I can make a Dimension Egg with so many aspects it will let me quinta-turn things!" and so on. From the beginning of the game to the end of the game you aren't often without some new toys to make or improve with additional skills. This is the draw of the game.

Atelier Totori isn't completely incompetent when it comes to plot, it's just obviously secondary. The story of Totori's search for her mother, the effect said search has on her family, and the growth she undergoes over the 5 years of the game... these plots are worth paying attention to. It's just not quite meaty enough to serve as a driving force for playing the game. The characters are entertaining in a shallow way but for the most part don't have any significant depth to them outside of Totori and her sister themselves. Gino is the carefree young swordsman who 'wants to become a great adventurer!', Mimi is the arrogant tsundere aristocrat, etc... The fact that these characters look great due to the wonderful character designs doesn't do much for the character depth. Fortunately the game isn't too ambitious with it's less interesting characters due to being an Atelier game and not having a main plot!

The combat system is simple enough. Totori is the PC with the skillset, other characters can hit things and take hits for her. When Rorona joins she adds another PC with a skillset, which is probably overkill given just how good that skillset is. Alchemy items can do everything from healing and doing damage to debuffing enemies and making you invincible to god turning you into a god damn quinta-turning monster. It isn't quite as nuts as Atelier Rorona, where you could easily mass produce an item midgame that would MT kill everything you would encounter, but it's still pretty damn awesome. Atelier Totori bosses are more impressive both visually and gameplaywise than Rorona's bosses, and at least one or two managed to catch me off guard and give me a game-over (or at least send me back to the home base). Not to say that Atelier Totori is a difficult game by any means, but at least it tries SOMETIMES.

The item creation in Atelier Totori is addictive, really. You explore and gather items to serve as base ingredients, all of which have certain traits to them. Then you get to go about synthesizing new items with those ingredients. Each of those mentioned traits has a 'cost' associated with it, and every ingredient you use has a 'level' associated with it. When you finish the synth you get to decide on what traits to pass to the finished item, and you pay for this with the sum of the 'level' of the ingredients you used. There are some other complications, but this system works rather well to make you think about HOW you are going to synth things instead of just WHAT you are going to synth. It is a fun system for having you make decisions about what you are making. The Item Creation in Totori is probably the most fun I've had in any Atelier or Mana games.

Which really is all I have to say in recommending this game to people! Do you like Atelier series item creation? If you do then you have already played this game and I have nothing further to say.

[hinode]

Fate/Extra: Beaten. I had one reset on Gawain purely because I got Gil-level cocky and tried to get away with using storebought healing items only, even though I had plenty of full healing ones. The final boss was surprisingly wussy, in large part because the game gives you 3-4 of his moves every turn for absolutely no effort instead of the 2-3 you get with Matrix E. Needless to say I steamrolled that fight on the first try.

Overall, I'd say the game's plot is ... decent. I never got bored or wanted to bang my head against a wall over plot stupidity, but nothing really impressed either. Definately a game where the characterization was more interesting than the main plot.

Planet Puzzle League [aka Tetris Attack DS, minus the Yoshi chars]: Oh dear god stylus control is just ridiculously superior to the d-pad in a game like this, it's like the difference in playing an RTS between mouse+keyboard vs a controller. I tried it out for one moment and now the old-fashioned method just feels hopelessly sluggesh by comparison.

I do miss the old music/sfx though, the game's not quite the same without Raphael the Raven's constant cawwing.

[Talaysen]

The music is decent but not memorable outside of one or two tracks.

The music is amazing you get the hell out.  :(

[Grefter]

DQ9 - Did Bowhole.  Accidentally ejected cartridge while carrying around bunch of stuff in pocket.  Last save at Swinedimples.  The fuck is wrong with me.

So starting something else.

[VySaika]

FFT - Celdia's Complete Patch

Downloaded this, played through chapter 1 and Dorter 2. Don't know if I'll play any more. I enjoy the classes, I like alot of the concepts, but so many of the design decisions make me want to rip my hair out. The last few fights have felt more "rocket tag" based then even vanilla FFT(which is not my prefered style of play), the lack of univeresal access to gained JP up so job building(to unlock and play with the new classes) is horribly slow, and now I get to the next set of equipment to find that the clothes upgrade gives innate Gained Exp Up. Which...is exactly the opposite of what I want. My clothes units are already surpassing my armor units becuase of Gained JP Up from Training Vest, I don't want them to end up higher leveled as well. Especially since from what I've heard enemy levels scale to yours(I would assume based on your highest level people? Dunno exact mechanics here), and my team is already getting high 2HKOd by basically every enemy, so I don't want to put an even BIGGER gap between the enemies and the armor units that are supposed to be my frontliners.

Mostly it's just that the playstyle the patch encourages and the playstyle I want to use are two ENTIRELY different things. It's like my gripe about the TO remake. Don't give me a ton of interesting classes that I want to mess around with to see which ones I want to use and then punish me for doing that.

Short version: I have been SO fucking spoiled by LFT. <_<;