What Games ya Playin' 2012 - Suplex a Train Edition

[Fenrir]

Dragon Quest 9 Yattaf solo: Beat the final boss, as a level 45-ish Ranger.
He got me one time but then I equipped green trousers. Green trousers protect against paralysis, you see.

Dragon Quest 9 is Dragon Quest. Nothing more, nothing less. (ok, maybe less ambition) It's better than a few other DQs because soloing is very fun, as is playing Barbie with your character.

Passive skills made Yattaf one hell of a monster. More than half of most of her stats (including HP) came from passive skills, actually. All the strength bonuses made the boomerang the obvious best weapon, most random battles were over in 2 or 3 rounds and low defense bosses like the final ate 400 damage against Firebird Throw's 7 hits.

Ranger was the best class overall, since it has the best healing spells without being a priest with priest stats.
I almost never used any of the active skills, except those from the gladiator tree. There's Feel the burn (-> getting attacked sometimes raises tension. In a solo game. Against bosses that multi-act) and Clap Trap (Bitchslap a dragon for 1TP. Useful against high defense enemies)

The best part of the game was that mage general at the end of the game. I used the spell that casts Reflect...The only thing he could do was hitting for a 0/1 damage physical and using a special skill that lowers MDef.

Post game? Eh... I still haven't finished the DQ Caravan Hearts post game.



Etrian Odyssey 3: Either the first stratum is way harder than in EO1/2, or I'm terrible at picking up characters/skills. The first boss just destroyed me for a good while.

Etrian Odyssey is still fun, the shop upgrade mechanics and the sense of mystery are wonderful. The ship is the best addition that could be done to this game. The battle system could stand to be a little less random, and the game is still too ANIME, but I managed to get a 100% loli-free team with one UOM, so whatever.

I went with a Buccaneer/Hoplite/Monk /Zodiac/Arbalist team.

On the third floor I ditched the hoplite (All those defensive skills are too situational and random) and Buccaneer. (Chase skills sounded fun: Everytime someone uses a *insert element* attack, the buccaneer automatically does one attack of his own. BUT: I'm not getting all my team to focus on cheese elemental attacks, just to run into a cheese immune boss later on)

So I got a Gladiator and a Wildling instead. The Gladiator is boring but does his front line attacking role well, and the Wilding summons a mad cow that paralyses dragons by stomping on them. It doesn't get any better than this.

[Shale]

Diablo 3: Nightmare Act 2 with my barbarian. Still having fun. Elites are kind of threatening now! Haven't been able to play co-op much because when battle.net isn't lagging me to death, my own connection does, and being in a game with just one other player, never mind three, makes it worse to the point of unplayability (as Tal can testify). This is shitty, especially since it seems that playing co-op changes D3 a lot more than it did for D2, but for me it just means I watch other people kill things while I run in slow motion and get to everything after it's already dead.

Also running a hardcore monk who is in Act 2 normal. Liking it a lot. The risk of permadeath makes even earlygame Normal pretty fun, and the monk has a good skillset for survival-first play.

Limbo: Bought the Humble Indie Bundle mainly for this. It's interesting. Currently about halfway through, at the bit with the rotating saw on the floor.

[OblivionKnight]

Diablo 3:

Finished.  Normal and (as of 0100 today) Nightmare. 

I have a lot of great stuff to say about this game.  It really, really improves on a lot of the issues D2 had.  Granted, there are some issues, but all things considered, they're pretty minor. 

I love the secret level.  Blizzard, you are an awesome pack of troll game developers, and I salute you.

Game is a very fun romp, even better with multiple players.  There seem to be a bunch of different skill set-ups, and I find myself changing often for the situation, even using skills I don't think are very good (like, Hex...I undersold that by a lot, especially with the healing rune) at first glance. 

Some of the features (like advanced tooltips and elective mode) should be standard, but again, minor. 

I totally called the story twist!  Very good overall, though, and clearly leaves it open for expansions.  Game has good challenge, but doesn't get tedious the way D2 did.  Very, very satisfied with it.  Will get my WD up to 60, then probably work on a Wizard and DH next.

[OblivionKnight]

HERE BE SPOILERS FOR DIABLO 3.  YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.




General Act and Gameplay Thoughts:

Act I is very well set-up.  I like how you're put into combat, instead of starting in a town and then going out.  Generally good challenge balance.  Two main bosses, Leoric and the Butcher, are great.  Leoric is definitely a wake-up call, and killed me once (surrounded by skeletons, he teleported on me, killed me).  Butcher was by far the hardest boss fight in the game (3 deaths) - the terrain effects are nasty, and there is so much lag there.  Haaaate his mimic Scorpion move so much - the range on that is so much greater than it looks.  Randoms are generally pretty standard - lots of melee enemies that are pretty easy to clump up and kill.  Nothing crazy.  Good dungeon length - I am happy there is nothing much longer than 3-4 floors, and even then, they're broken up very well.  Story-wise...very solid.  Nothing bad to say about it.  I love how throughout the game they're adding background and story elements which helps so much (and D1/D2 needed it so badly).   

Positioning is so, so big in Diablo 3 vs. D2's spell spam.  This also is further impacted by the fact that stats affect mages now.  In D2, stats were there mostly for using equipment, as mage damage came from skills (Frozen Orb, Bone Spirit, etc.).  I like that I care about equipment, particularly weapons now - I remember using a magic tier 1 wand on my necro for ages simply because of the skill bonuses.  With the way skills and stats are handled, I actually have to make a choice between bonus stats or skill boosts (which are...rare, but more on that later).  Mana regen is good (although, for the WD, it could stand to be a bit faster/bigger pool), and makes it so you use skills intelligently, but not limitedly.


Act II is a big step up in difficulty.  The damn Huntresses are back, and they are frustrating.  Oh, and the swarms...ugh.  Hate all of them.  It's a desert again, though not bad (at least there's room to move around a lot).  Bosses are fair - Maghda is awful, Zoltun Kulle is...ok.  Belial is decent - got me once (damn poison bursts), but he was definitely easier than the Butcher.  Lack of terrain effects and a load more telegraphy (and less lag) help there.  Loot wasn't too much better than Act I, but still nice.  This is where I found that Zombie Dogs are best for blowing up in peoples' faces.  It's surprisingly effective. 

Act III is excellent.  The randoms are about 100x worse than the bosses - I didn't lose to any of the bosses at all, but randoms are nasty.  Unlike Act V of D2, you actually get the impression of a battle that's going badly here.  It feels epic, which is refreshing.  There are lots of soldiers fighting, dead bodies, lots of random effects that really hit the mark.  Excellent.  I like it a lot.  Azmodan is awful, as are his lieutenants.  And thank god Tyrael finally got off his ass and fought - seriously man,  Also, completely called the Adria betrayal.  Bet she's the villain in the next expansion.

Act IV is great.  It actually climaxes the game well, and builds on what happened in Act III.  There is a sense of urgency, and the bosses and randoms are...fairly balanced.  Terror Demons are nasty, and the first 2 bosses are hellishly tough (Iskatuu...fuck you and your surrounding me).  Though...why is there no Izual achievement and WHY is there no extra dialogue with Tyrael?  That seems like a huge missed opportunity (how is he back...etc.).  Diablo killed me once in the first part of the battle with his teleporting. 

Yeah, thought I could say more, but really well-done.  Act III is probably my favourite act overall, but they're all good.  No Act III D2 again, which is a huge plus. 

[Luther Lansfeld]

Super Mario Bros. 3 - Playing this on the Virtual Console. Great game but man does it get challenging later. I'm currently in World 7, getting wailed on by 7-7/7-8.

Celdia's Complete Patch, an FFT hack - Got to Altima. The hack definitely improves the Zodiacs a lot, Zalera in particular is borderline impossible, but the other encounters aren't too dramatically different. The HP is in general on a lower scale and the game does feel like a bit of rocket tag, but it's pretty fun. Love the spriting, and any game with a Red Mage will suit my fancy.

Fire Emblem 12 - A classic case of a remake that should have been less faithful to the original. A little tweaking of the generally poor map design and antiquated mechanics like only the lord can get the villages would have done the game a lot of favors. The game seems to really favor female characters to an absurd degree since this was way before they got the memo that speed is really good. Current death count: Radd, Mattias, Rody, Luke, wanky anime rival of Merrick, Samto, Warren. Warren was sad because he was good but I was lazy.

[Cmdr_King]

Trial by Devil Axe is in full force I see.

Also wait, they gave Merrick a WANKY ANIME RIVAL?  That's... so stupid it's kinda awesome.

[Dark Holy Elf]

FE12 - Flying is so broken in this game. Swarm (Bolting) mages who sit just across rivers. Forest everywhere. Enemies carrying really good items who escape from maps, usually on the aforementioned forest maps. Two desert maps in just the first eleven chapters.

That's before any consideration for fliers with good stats or Wing Spears.

[Cotigo]

The randoms are about 100x worse than the bosses

This pretty much sums up all of Nightmare and Hell difficulty.  Even the Butcher is a cakewalk compared to some of the elite enemies that pop up in Hell mode and the end of Nightmare.  As for your comment about it not getting tedious... it does.  You just have to get to hell mode, then it's "oh I died oh I died oh I died oh I died FUCK THIS GAME".  It's pretty much a cake walk up until then though.

[Otter]

I had a couple weeks between school ending and summer Calc III starting up, so I played some flippin' games.

Castlevania DoS: Finished a normal game.  Tentatively want to say I like it a bit better than AoS because I think it has somewhat harder bosses, but otherwise it's just such a retread.
Castlevania PoR: Finished a normal game, then Richter/Maria mode, then Old Axe Armor, then Sisters.  Beat Dracula with Richter and OAA at sub-level 30, reloaded my Richter save and did the secret dungeon with Abaddon.  Lots of fun killing Dracula with OAA.  The main game is pretty easy, but I like having all these bonus modes.  The game feels small, though, because the castle itself is tiny and there's technically eight portraits but four of them are styled after the other four.  Probably liked it better than DoS.
Castlevania OoE: Finished a normal game, then NG+ on Hard, then NG+ Hard with a level 1 cap.  Then finished Albus mode sub-level 30.  This is more like it.  I had fun with all the stuff I did afterwards, but the main game on normal has solid difficulty on its own, at least if you're me and refuse to use healing items on bosses out of spite.  Level 1 Hard Mode turned out to be a huge snoozefest because by that time I had two death rings and knew how to fight the bosses without getting hit; death rings contribute way more to your offense than all the level-up stats.  Definitely my favorite DS Castlevania, although I don't think I'll keep spending time with it the way I do with Super Castlevania IV.  Speaking of which!
Super Castlevania IV: Ran it a few times and failed, ran it a few more times and 1cc'd, then 1cc'd a few more times just to make sure.  Mostly ending up with five or six spare lives at the end lately.  Ironing out Stage IX helped a lot and I've finally gotten the hang of the Death fight, I think.  Could manage a deathless run sometime.

I also replayed FF7 with no items, summons, or HP Up.  That's a challenge run in name only but eh, I was really just playing the game and didn't want to wait through summon animations or make all boss damage a joke with HP Up.  I think my final time was just under 24 hours.

Not sure what's next.  Are there any good DS RPGs?  I'm basically trying to keep myself out of the Diablo III Skinner box by locking myself up in a smaller, safer Skinner box.  Might not matter now that class is starting, though.

[Grefter]

Flipping them what?  The bird?  Make those games ur bitch

[AndrewRogue]

Otter: I hear Radiant Historia is pretty good, but haven't played it myself.

[Shale]

RH is in fact pretty great. You can do a quick run or tool around the timestream optimizing everything, so it'll work for a short timewaster or an extended play.

[Fenrir]

FE12? Isn't that the second one for the DS? Is there a translation patch or something?


Otter: Yeah, Castlevania doesn't get any better than Super Castlevania 4 and Order of Ecclesia. (and that final battle in PoR)
Level 1 hard mode on a fresh file is pretty intense/stupid. I liked it.

"I'm basically trying to keep myself out of the Diablo III Skinner box by locking myself up in a smaller, safer Skinner box." There's
- SMT Strange Journey. You have about 300 demons to go talk to / recruit / kill / fuse / minmax. The story is Alien, and it's 1st person like Persona or Wizardry.
- Etrian Odyssey 1/2/3... If what you want is drawing a map on your lower screen and having perfect maps. Same 1st person dungeon crawling.
- Radiant Historia. The story itself is a checklist.
- Mario & Luigi Bowser's Inside Story: No skinner box here, just great fluff. As expected, Bowser is a great main character.
I wouldn't really strongly recommend any other regular DS RPG.




Inindo: Finished. Nobunaga kicked my ass. I came back with 20 Elixirs.
I don't know how you're supposed to do those war battles properly. The army I sided with kept 235 generals and 1439834 soldiers in their remote provinces, and 2 generals and 60 soldiers in the provinces that were right next to Nobunaga's monster army.
What I did was just sabotage every enemy province multiple times, until they were even weaker than my army. Then I just used magic in army battles. It's more broken than Yuber in Suikoden 2.
Sabotaging was like drawing in FF8. It's easy and rewarding, you need to do it, you need to stop at one point but you don't know when.

The game is an obscure Snes RPG with a small budget. Immense flaws, still playable and a bit fun with some frameskip abuse. Would get a metacritic score of 12 if it were released nowadays.


Etrian Odyssey 3: Got down to the third stratum. Plot twist: A second, worthless city!? Dual classing feels... mostly worthless but I'm probably completely wrong. I got a Wildling/Hoplite, Gladiator/Hoplite, Zodiac/Ninja, Arbalist/Princess and an Ugly Old Monk/Ugly Old Prince. The idea is to get more defense.
Zodiac is on a downward slope from MVP to LVP and it doesn't look like things will change anytime soon.

[Dark Holy Elf]

FE12? Isn't that the second one for the DS? Is there a translation patch or something?

Just menus, though they're apparently pretty close to being done the full plot translation. Your milage may vary as to if that's worth caring about. I actually care about the lack of portability more (I guess I could invest in a flash card or something, while cursing Nintendo of America all the while); helps that there is at least an FE3 translation on Serenes Forest to refer to.


FF13 - Defeated Gaul's finest warrior with the mighty of POIZN. Extremely hard battle, but then, I didn't grind (never killed a single Adamantoise outside the one in Mission 63), so I knew what I was getting into. I eventually won with a party of Vanille (leader)/Fang/Hope, after playing around with both Snow and Sazh as possibilities for a while (still not certain Hope over Sazh was the right choice, but I -think- the better healing offset Hope's awful HP). Paradigms were SABx2/SYN, SABx2/MED, MED/SEN/SYN, MEDx2/SEN, RAV/COM/RAV (hey sometimes I have openings for offence!), and SENx3. Mostly below 2/3 HP it was all about keeping HP high, poison as the highest priority, scream like a child and switch to Tortoise the moment the words Wicked Whirl appear then switch to Combat Clinic immediately after. For a while I also got Deprotect out then occasionally launched offence but when he upgraded to the final form I couldn't even afford to do that. Only four stars, oh well... maybe could have gotten 5 if I'd sandbagged Fang's weapon but the fight would have taken longer so whatevs.

I think I'd really like the challenge of five-starring the missions if you could restart a battle upon seeing the score you got; as is the walking back and forth is unacceptable for such an endeavour. Of course I still tried as much as possible and did get a large majority.


That was pretty fun. No real intention to beat the super turtles; I have beaten all the missions and claimed by Galuf-themed achievement so life is good. Done with the game for now (just in time for Grefter to visit!).


FE12 - Beat Chapter 12. Marth has decided to screw dealing with puny humans and chase into some dragon countries or something. Fights are quite a bit harder here which is welcome.

[TranceHime]

Pokemon Sacred Gold: At the Radio Tower, and holy hell Archer you're suddenly competent now! That teaches me for just raising Farfetch'd to absurd levels, seriously this is silly. Need to bank on slightly underlevelled Pikachu getting the OHKO and have to devise a strategy to take out Scizor. Gahhh. So far I have never needed a Fire-type, and now I do :[

[Captain K.]

Virtua Fighter 5 FS:  It's Virtua Fighter, you either love it or hate it.  Seems to be lacking in offline content compared to VF4 Evolution, but the game itself is still solid as it ever was.  Throw Breaks are more lenient on timing, which is nice.  Played through everything with Taka, who is pretty fun.  Also tried out El Blaze, but did not like his move commands.  Online seems pretty good so far netcode wise.

Witcher 2:  Guess I should go ahead and post my thoughts on this since I've lost all enthusiasm to play it.  Got halfway through Chapter 2 and there's just other things I would rather be playing than this.  It's not bad per se, it just gets outclassed in every area by some other game that came out last year:

Dark Souls had better graphics and combat.
Deus Ex HR had a better upgrade system and storyline.
Skyrim did the living town thing (1) and exploration better.
Bastion had better music and atmosphere.

So yeah, game of the year 2011 it's not.  Honestly this whole thing feels like some teenage boy's D&D campaign that got turned into books/tv series/video games.

DM:  You arrive in town.
Bobby (as the Witcher):  I go to the inn.
DM:  There are some fistfights going on, and gambling, and there are whores everywhere.
Bobby:  I'll be doing all three of those!  But first I look for that mage chick.
DM:  You find her in her room.  She looks at you longingly.
Bobby:  I have sex with her.
DM:  You rock her world for an hour straight.  Afterwards she reminds you that you're supposed to be looking for a Ring of Power.
Bobby:  "One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them!" (2)
DM:  Yeah hahaha totally dude.

Plotwise I don't get the two swords thing.  Okay monsters can only be harmed by silver, I get that.  But wouldn't the silver sword work just as well on a human?  Gameplaywise this doesn't matter as it gives you the opportunity to play around with different weapons.

(1)  You know how people complain about Skyrim characters repeating themselves?  This is much, much worse.  Each person in town has exactly one line of voice acting, and they say it every single time you pass by.  "Oh a Witcher."  "Oh a Witcher".  Yes you moron, I just passed by you 10 seconds ago, I'm still a Witcher.  And god forbid there's more than one townsperson standing next to you.  They'll all start saying their stock line at the same time over and over and it's a cacophony of annoyance.

(2)  The characters actually quote Lord of the Rings to each other.  Seriously.  I wouldn't be surprised if they start quoting Monty Python in later chapters.

[Bobbin Cranbud]

Bastion

Oh my fuck this game is gorgeous.

I mean, the weapon options are interesting and the narration is brilliant, but the graphics are what really stand out. Everything I thought looked spectacular in Wakfu looks at least eight times better here. What you can do with high-quality sprites and a PC's resolution in this day and age is just breathtaking.

I don't actually like the gameplay, alas. Again, the weapon options are interesting, I like the way block and lock-on work, and the difficulty is nicely curved, but the controls suck. They're not so much unresponsive as ever so slightly laggy, and keyboard and mouse for something like this is just begging for discomfort. I wonder if I can play it with a gamepad.

Dragon's Dogma

For what it is, also very good looking. Big monsters are spectacular, character customization is very good and, unlike in most such games, results in characters who look in play much like they do in character creation. Still, everything looks kind of crap next to Bastion.

Fortunately, the gameplay has not stopped being really, really good. I've played most of the fighting classes in the course of leveling up my character, and it's amazing how different they play. I'd expect the DMC team to nail Assassin (and to a lesser extent Strider), which basically plays like Dante in an RPG. What I wouldn't have expected is that they nail the other styles of action game protagonist pretty well, too. Of course, I don't especially like playing War or Kratos, especially when Dante is available, so I'll go back to Assassin at the first opportunity.

The pawn system is more fun than it has any right to be. It's more gratifying than useful when someone uses your pawn, or when you're browsing a forum and see your pawn in a screenshot, but gratifying it remains. Pawn AI is surprisingly good, provided you train/drug them up right, and it actually matters.

Enemy AI is also surprisingly good, both at being decently smart (archers do a passable job staying away, most of the enemies time their attacks well) and at being distinctive. Each enemy type is as different because of how they fight as because of how they look, again very much more DMC than ARPG.

Also, it does have fast travel, it's just limited and locked behind some of the storyline quests. Now that I have it, even in limited form, any question I had about this being the best of the open world RPGs is gone.

[Otter]

Decided to try SMT Strange Journey.  Just beat Morax.  Some features I like so far:

- Automatically scanning demons so that I see a list of their strengths/weaknesses on screen during combat after fighting them a few times
- Saving demons in the Compendium so that there doesn't have to be any real penalty for experimenting with demon fusion
- No multiple-hour highschool plot intro to the game, seriously, I gave up on Personas 3 and 4 before they really started because that part was so boring

There's also no paralysis about how to build my main character, since stat growths seem to be completely out of my control.  That might turn out frustrating if I get gimped hard enough, but customized growths are the kind of thing that would have me reaching for an FAQ, trying to figure out what I want my endgame stats to look like when I'm level 2.  Right now I actually prefer not having to think about it.

I also liked fully completing my map for that first dungeon, although my only healing came from my Angel's Dia and so I took a lot of trips back to the previous heal station just because I didn't know how far away the next one was and I wanted to be cautious.  Exploring might be more fun when I have some more sustain.

Oh yeah, so Morax owned me because I was rocking some Weak: Fire, and then I went back to the ship for upgrades and found an ever-so-convenient piece of Strong: Fire armor.  So then I outslugged him with my sword and some healing from Angel while my other demons died to Maragi.

[Pyro]

Atelier Meruru:

It is a mainline Atelier game. There is a cute (very cute, actually) plucky heroine who makes things in her workshop and makes things blow up with bombs when searching for ingredients.

Meruru's combat system is a step above Totori's, which was 10 steps above Rorona's. The synthing is more intensive this time around as I find myself spending a great deal of time making stuff for the actual plot, which is cool. The game is less compelling than Totori because the character interactions don't have the pull that Totori and her sister Ceci did.

Currently in Year 1 Month 2. Population is verging on 10000, so I'm way ahead of the minimum schedule of 5k and accelerating nicely.

The game is pretty as all get-out, which is to be expected since Atelier character designs are generally gorgeous. The music is okay but not as enjoyable as Totori's was. Fortunately you can totally change the battle music to be all kinds of awesome vocal tracks via DLC. The combat has been decently challenging but two alchemists = things that would otherwise own your face off don't get turns, if you invest time/money in combat items and prepare appropriately.

I am dissapointed that they gave you Totori at such a low level. Her kicking massive amounts of all-powerful monster ass was her schtick in Atelier Totori... She cannonically murderized giant dragon monstrosities and ancient continent-ravaging demons. Then again she is only using Meruru's combat items and it can be assumed she's 'holding back' some to give her apprentice a better learning experience. Same problem exists with Mimi..

[Captain K.]

PWI:  Finished my 101 armor set.  I am now as grossly incandescent as the very sun itself.  And yes, I am compensating for something.

[superaielman]

Compensating for your shameful lack of a beard, clearly.

[Fenrir]

Good man, Otter.
I believe stat growth for the main charcter is fixed, and depends entirely on the questions you answered at the beginning of the game.

You should probably stick with the same alignment for the whole team. Extra attacks get really useful, and there are always enough available monsters for each path, honestly. (Neutral sounds a bit more rough than the others though)
I don't suggest always answering in a certain way to make sure the main character always sticks with the same alignment. It's boring, and you can go from an all neutral team to an all lawful team pretty quickly via demon fusion anyway.


"They're not so much unresponsive as ever so slightly laggy, and keyboard and mouse for something like this is just begging for discomfort. I wonder if I can play it with a gamepad."

I found Bastion's gameplay excellent on the Xbox, with a gamepad, for what it's worth. Very crunchy with a machete and a shotgun.



Dragon's Dogma: Started. I'm liking this a lot. I expected a huge world similar to Fallout/Oblivion, but it's more of a smaller Zelda/Nier like world. I approve, this means that the game has level design! Unlike a lot of similar games, Dragon's Dogma is not really reaching for verisimilitude, it's trying to be a videogame first and foremost. There are secret places filled with treasure chests everywhere. I approve.

The main character is Yattaf, some giant woman. She plans to try all the classes and eventually become overpowered as hell, right now she's a mage.
The main pawn is Helmout the dwarf. Yattaf likes throwing him off cliffs.
I decided to go with only my main pawn and not use any other. Games always get too messy and boring when there are too many AI controlled allies running around. (and the scripted beginning of the game makes me believe this one isn't any different)
Having two characters instead of four means a notable difficulty jump though, so I'm doing a lot of sidequests. Not complaining, though.

Helmout doesn't ever shut up. So far, I like this enthusiasm. He's happy to be with Yattaf, and he wants to help her, even though she's way beyond his league and he knows it. It's as cute as embarassing.
I'm sure I'll eventually turn off every voice in the game at some point, just so he can shut the hell up.


Etrian Odyssey: In the third stratum, dying a lot, having to choose one extremely important choice!
It's funny how both sides are extremely similar. They're full of greedy people that only ever see the main team as useful pawns. That split path doesn't ask any meaningful questions to the team. It's "Blue haired asshole or blond haired asshole?"


The Nameless Game:



If you don't complete this Dragon Quest 1 / Final Fantasy 1 clone within 7 days, YOU DIE IN THE REAL WORLD!
That's the background for a weird DS horror game.
The developers nailed the small RPG parts (the theme song is perfect), but definitely not the rest of the game. Survival horror games love having clunky controls (to make the main character feel powerless), but this is taking it way too far. At no point can you ever feel like a human being. You're a robot with tunnel vision who slooooowly turns around to escape running walking slowly crawling ghosts. The plot is fairly standard, and there are really only two genuinely good scares in all. Good gimmicks, bad game.

[Glen Veil]

Diablo 3: Reached Inferno on my DH and OHGODITHURTSWHATISGOINGON pretty much sums up the experience so far.

The general facetank spec on the squishiest class plan is starting to show serious faults, which is somewhat to be expected.  The biggest problem so far has mostly come from the retardedness of having to deal with Invuln minions/Shielding type mobs which pretty much equates to: "Skip this set of mobs, or if you can't, be prepared to restart game or die 10 times in the process of killing them"  Honestly, those two monster affixes are probably my biggest beef with the game as a whole, slightly annoying on lower levels since they mostly just equate to a "takes 4 times longer to kill while mobs fail around" whereas in inferno it changes to: "watch hopelessly as anything you do fails to do anything while this group of 4 mobs wails on you for 30% health a hit"

So yeah, it's mostly just a frustrating mechanic that does nothing but slow down the overall pace of the game (Oh hey look League of Legends used to have a similar thing where objectives could be made temporarily invulnerable and they took it out because that shit just wasn't fun to play with!!)

Incoming damage so far however is fine, it's pretty ridiculous for now, but hey, my gear generally sucks at this point for this difficulty level so honestly feels right.  No worse then when you go into Hell on d2 for the first time and cry out as a quill rat just took out half your health.  Apparently the Acts past Act 1 are like 10x's worse, but honestly I think the people who complain about that have never played d2 in an initial blind playthrough and dealt with nightmare/hell fire enchanted mobs or burning soul packs, which would literally oneshot you also if you did not damn near max out resists and have a huge healthpool.  So yeah, totally looking forward to getting my ass handed to me in Act 2 if it's anything like what people say I will enjoy actually having to put work into keeping my 5 stacks of NV up.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Trails in the Sky - So I started this. The writing/characters aren't really my cup of tea and the game spends a bit too much time on them (also, you can't speed up the text! At least it's faster than DQ9). Plot could be interesting, we'll see, but it's a slow starter. Combat hasn't done much to really distinguish itself yet but it's enjoyable enough fluff. I at least expect I will be able to maintain momentum in this unlike Lost Odyssey.


FE12 - Finished this. I got the bad ending because I derped and completely missed a village that ended up having an essential item for the good ending. Only village or treasure of note I missed in the entire game; kinda sucks. Oh well.

Anyway, this game reminds me a lot of Shadow Dragon. It has its ups (lack of silly sidequest requirements, fewer maps with out of the way villages past the earlygame, no more hidden-stat manaketes) and downs (worse map design otherwise, ending nonsense). Overall it probably balances out to be a better game but it's really not the improvment I was hoping for. Still fun enough of course. I did like seeing Shadow Dragon's good features again (animation skip button, enemy phase skip, dead PC inventories being saved, reclassing, weapon level stuff, lots of varied difficulty levels) and it was fun to be able to destroy the world with flyers even if I cringe at it from a game balance decision.

The game had some decent challenge midgame, the maps from Chapters 11 through 16 were pretty tough. The beginning and end were both pretty easy though. I assume the good ending chapters would step things up again.

Team notes, with kill counts:

Chris (80) - Oh look, an overpowered PC and it is yoouuuu. Self-insert silliness aside, Chris is extremely good. Mine was a pegknight because you can never have too many flyers.

Caeda (68) - Wing Spear is much less valuable in this game (still good), so she no longer challenges to be the MVP. But hey, she has 95% speed growth and is another capable flyer.

Catria (65) - You get one Elysian Whip in time for promotions (more if you want to hold off). Falconknights feel a little less statistically impressive than Dracos but they do have a higher speed cap, and E swords is way better than E axes due to the Lady Sword's existence (E-rank Silver Sword for women only). Anyway, Catria needed the least help with one of str/def at the time I promoted her so I made her the falcon. Not much to say, another great PC etc.

Palla (23, died in C12) - Borderline jeigan type with her monstrous start (B lances and 16 spd in Chapter 3, then only 30% speed growth). Still, her speed was quite high enough for Normal. Died right at the end of a tough chapter 12 (the map I found the highest in the game) but certainly excellent.

Minerva (30) - Starts very overlevelled with meh stats for her level but great for the time, maintains use well as a flyer with A in axes, so she can use the Hauteclaire, Hammer, Poleaxe, Brave Axe, etc. which nobody else on my team could because I was underwhelmed by the class circuit which included the axe classes in this game.

Luke (64) - Sword Cav/Myrmidon. It's a pretty good set to alternate between, he swung swords around, could get enough speed/move to be effective, and he gained some excellent Def so he was one of my main tanks. Couldn't fly while maintaining his weapon ranks but otherwise very good.

Maris (49) - The other sworduser, had the benefit of Lady Sword for when she hadn't hit B in them yet which was a nice boon. Defence was much lower though (good base, but 5% growth eww). She's not objectively a wonderful PC but she's workable and I got decent milage out of her, and she was a must-use because she looks like Nailah.

Cecile (18) - Original Lady Sword Cav/Myrmidon earlygame, died in C6 mostly because she had gained no defence ever. Oh well.

Marth (35) - I guess Marth is better than last game, but he's still basically a Mercenary who can't promote or change classes or gets a second weapon type. And his player phase action is limited by the fact he has to be constantly advancing towards the seize point (and sometimes villages), so some caution is needed to avoid him being underlevelled. Kinda scrubby again, just less so.

Linde (51) - Starts with Aura (strongest tome in the game) and Nosferatu which is great, and weapon weight no longer mattering combined with her great speed growth let her be a great offensive force AND tank in a pinch. Pretty solid outside her horrendous durability when Nosferatu isn't considered (see also: ballistas) and crappy move, especially late (mages don't get move on promotion which is dumb).

Malliesia (3) - Staff user. Can use Hammerne which nobody else can so a total no-brainer to use, and had far better staff rank than the other early staff users anyway. After promotion she could toss out forged Fires and Nosferatu-tank (although wasn't fast enough to double, so she wasn't very good at it), but mostly remained a staff user. This game does have some of the best staves ever past their crappy raw healing: infinite-ranged Physic, Warp/Rescue, Thief, Again, etc.

Katarina, Etzel - Filler staff users mostly, not much to say. Katarina could also kinda fight maybe.

Tiki - I found her harder to use in this game than in FESD, game more dominated than ever by high move and fewer manaketes for her to hunt after she joins, although at least she doesn't force Bantu use this time and she's still well above par for series manaketes.

Feena - Dancer. Lower-move than some but still great of course. Could actually attack/counter with some effectiveness if a spare Lady Sword was handy (E rank killed her offence otherwise) but you'd never use her for that on the player phase and her durability was too poor to rely on it much on the enemy phase.

Julian - Is a thief with crappy combat.

Rickard - Is a thief with crappier combat.

Sirius, Arran - Got some jeigan use.

Xane - Obviously worse than Feena (doesn't duplicate weapons, wastes exp) and I didn't feel like using both, though from past experience I know he is fine.


Game time was a bit under 17 hours, pretty short for me and FE. Would have been a bit longer with the good ending chapters, but still not a long game, which is fine. Game is a 5 or 6/10 depending on my mood, but it will certainly end up being replayed at some point because Fire Emblem.

[Cotigo]

D3 Hell Mode - Up to Act 3.  You know, I really didn't mind the always online thing with this game, EXCEPT when I get LAG playing BY MYSELF.  And LOSE a battle I was winning because of it.  Had to redo Belial 3 times because I kept lagging, and after the second time just restarted to connect to a different server that didn't lag.  Bull. Shit.