What games are you playing 2014?

[Cotigo]

No playtime for the weekend, out being social. Small update from yesterday.

The crystal cave is a dungeon with invisible floor paths that you can't really check in any way except for the absolutely most vague indication ever plus trial and error. On the plus side, all but one path is linear and the non linear path is optional.

I spent two hours trying to navigate that optional path only to find a Blue Titanite Slab I have no use for on this character. At this point, I figured out that it was optional and ragequit to go be a productive adult.

I did not find out it was the ONLY FUCKING PATH that pulled that bullshit until well after it was too late to keep playing.

you win, dark souls. you fucking win. You made me rage quit for no reason whatsoever. Fuck this game.

I can't wait until I can get home in a couple days and play more.

[Fenrir]

^_^

No playtime for the weekend, out being social. Small update from yesterday.

The crystal cave is a dungeon with invisible floor paths that you can't really check in any way except for the absolutely most vague indication ever plus trial and error.

And prism stones.

[Cotigo]

Yeah ok you can use prism stones but not really to check if you are about to walk off the cliff in three steps instead of two.

[Clear Tranquil]

Murdered Soul Suspect - I am now a kitty~ This is interesting.

Been reading some comments about the game, and people saying they couldn't really care or feel empathy for Ronan, and so didn't really care who killed him but I'm not really finding that to be the case. Julia's thoughts and My Life stuff helps with that I think, plus I will be shocked if it's the douche cop guy that is really the killer.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Fire Emblem Awakening - Nearing the end now! Chapter 21 was really evil, 22 was pretty easy even if the enemy stats are beyond ridiculous.

[superaielman]

Civ 5 BNW- I've come around on this. The caravan system is annoying but it has a place. Striking a balance between internal food and hammer trades and external gold trades is an interesting one, and I kind of dig it because I tend to play tall. The nerfing of sea tiles makes sense when you see how dumb sea caravans are as well. 
I still really, really don't like the diplo system. The world's fair is cool enough, as are all the group projects. Everything else varies from annoying to actively pissing you off- hi, banning luxuries! There's just not a lot of depth to the system. You collect CS if you want to pass something other than generically popular things like the world fair.

[SnowFire]

Bravely Default (Hard): Still working on, uh, the "postgame" I guess (C7).  I'm even more convinced now with how they did C6 & C7 then before that it was at least someone's intent that this is a game where you can control when you kick the pail and go fight Lavos, and that's the real ending, and then we'll toss in some wacky postgame sidequests afterward.  Dang good thing no-encounters exists, BD is a game I'd never have ever finished if you couldn't turn off randoms.

Everyone else seemed to say that Dark Knights kill the challenge of the game, but lacking Dark Shields for everyone and that seeming kind of lame, I decided to pass.  (Also Dark Nebula doesn't show up before L9, and that was the extent of cheaply grabbing DK.)  Instead I used a different cheesy strat mentioned in the stat topic: Dual Shields is busted.  Templar or Knight Edea with Dual Shields + P. Def +30% + Default Guard, and equipped with 2x Bloody Shield, Ribbon, Heike Armor, & Heike Gloves = lol 1 damage from practically everything.  Nice & slow so spamming Desperation every turn rarely makes the Defense loss notable.  Only mages can really threaten her.  Kinda funny, vs. C6 Rusalka it wiped my entire team except her, but as she lacks magic damage entirely, Edea could effortlessly solo (uh oh watch out for that 4600HKO or whatever).  But yeah, defense is insanely potent in BD, and there are offensive skills that run off defense, so put 'em together and bam.  Of course the other side of this is that Tiz, who was my generic "light warrior" guy with Two-Handed, started dying to absolutely everything.  Time to give up on that and grab a Shield and admit his sole purpose in life is to debuff dudes with Piracy, not to really deal damage.  (and heck, even with a Shield, he's still pretty fragile.)  But yeah...  strictly speaking, he'd be better off as a dual-shield dude with Piracy.  Although I guess there are merits to being super-fast with a Fox Tail at least.

For whatever it's worth, since I already mentioned Edea's default skill load out...  Tiz has a bunch of boring stat buffs (P. Atk +20%, HP +10%, etc.)  Agnes has Default Guard, Angelic Ward, Holy One, & 1 free slot (currently +10% Speed).  The defensive skills are obvious, your healer dying is bad times.  For Holy One... it's too bad, I liked the old Buff Up / Support Amp package from Performer I ran in C4 & early C5, but Holy One really is needed to save MP, since with Holy One Cura / Curada is sufficient MT healing, while without the MP-slurping Curaga is required.  Ringabel, and any offensive caster, is even more constrained in build: casters absolutely *must* equip Pierce M. Def, without which they are bad, with which they are quite good.  MP concerns means the other 2 slots are on either Save BM MP or Save TM MP.  There isn't even room for Gloom or the like.  Still, once fighters start having trouble dealing damage, Pierce M. Def TM gives an EZ 9999 damage to single targets on the cheap, and BM, while less impressive, can still throw 5000 to a Single Target (nice in team fights) and also has Aspir.

C7 teamup fights are a ton of fun so far.  Two in particular gave me some trouble:
* Eternian Board of Girl Power, the first one I attempted.  So...  Kikyo is actually amazing support in a team fight, she'll go hunt the weakest members of your party.  Artemia is still shit (I have still NEVER seen 2x Multiburst ever, I think Pyro's making stuff up), but Multiburst is hard to plan around and can surprise kill a party member, sure, and Tiz & Ringabel are still made of paper and get OHKO'd by her physical sans Default.  But Victoria is much more at home with this support; Corpse is useful for setting up badly-timed deaths, she's a mage so she can kill Edea, and her MT poison is actually quite accurate, and it's hard to afford an accessory to block it anymore.  Oh and Dark is like a OHKO now or something if you're not Defaulting.  Anyway, it's mostly Kikyo hype; I can roughly stay alive okay, but the initiative breaks the wrong way or Multiburst gets lucky and Agnes dies, and hooooly shit, I'm in deep, how do I get her back up (without blowing Elixirs?).  For extra fun, I forgot to stock up on P. Downs, and only had ~18 or so, something I didn't notice on my first few deaths.  Anyway...  I figured it out, mwahaha.  The secret is to exploit Kikyo's good AI - let Edea die, then revive her with a P. Down at 200 HP.  Watch as Shipujinrai bounces off for 1 damage repeatedly, cackle.  Definitely much safer than the "everyone else goes to critical and use Knight cover" strat which gets owned by Poison.  Ribbon doesn't block Corpse, so as I ran out of P. Downs it was quite important to spam the Spiritmaster status immunity spell to save Agnes & Edea.  Murdered Artemia first thanks to that nice Fire weakness - Shield Magic infused Firey Desperations + Firagas (well when Ringabel could stay alive) meant she was the easiest to take down first, and while she's not great, removing the threat of suprise Multibursts was still useful.  Close fight!
* Braev/Alternis/Kamiizumi.  A bit frustrating, but still awesome.  Kamiizuimi can ACTUALLY BREAK 2x SHIELD TEMPLAR EDEA DEFENSE wat with his physical for like 300 damage, which is amazing and says something about how much you will be hurting if he hits someone else and hasn't been Defanged (answer: a lot).  Braev will throw erratic surges of offense your direction, but the true threat is Alternis, who provides nasty MT damage AND will start Minus Striking out key figures like Edea & Agnes right through Default Guard & Angelic Ward.  This is where things get frustrating: despite learning I needed to set Speed +10% on Agnes (she already had the +20 Speed Hermes Shoes but she needs even MORE), Spiritmaster Agnes with 73 Speed would still go after 60 speed Alternis sometimes such that she couldn't fix the damage first.  And so now with Agnes dead, okay fine Edea will do an intentionally slow revive so that she doesn't die in the revival round, oh wait Minus Strike lol.  Variants of this happened a LOT.  Apparently you need 80 Speed off Fox Tail or something to reliably go first, argh.  Anyway, no particular trick here aside from definitely neededing Fox Tail / Bloody Shield Pirate Tiz, but Tiz applies Defang as much as he dares when not dead, Edea keeps the Holy Shield Desperation offense rolling at Alternis and provides slow revival if desired, and Agnes Defaults & heals a lot.  Ringabel throws Firagas as usual.  Finally, as the trio got the drop on me once again murdering Edea & Agnes, I #YOLO'd Ringabel into -4 BP at Alternis, and...  killed him?!  Amazing.  Speedy Tiz revived the girls before dying, and I stabilized.  Fun times, didn't even use SP.  Reminds me of the Orthos battle of requiring some good luck, except the Orthos battle was much faster than this one when I failed at it 3-4 times.

Praline / Jackal was easy, Yulyana & goons weren't bad either ('sup I heard you like Dispel), Einheria's crew gets basically solo'd by Edea (only Holly's Aero is a threat).  DeRosso & Victor actually wiped me but that was more due to not respecting Energy Burst as much as I should, if you keep DeRosso Defang'd and always Default if he has BP the fight is not so bad.

Maybe some day I'll finish this long long looong game and move on to the rest of my giant mobile backlog.  Or books.  Books are good too.

[Dark Holy Elf]

The final bosses are really fun and I definitely recommend getting to them however much optional stuff you end up doing. (Though as you're discovering, plenty of that optional stuff is pretty fun too!) I actually wasn't too enamoured of the C7 optional fights I did but maybe I wasn't in the mood. The final C8 ones are pretty fun though.

Double Multiburst can certainly happen for what it's worth.

[SnowFire]

Well, the fights are indeed fun, but I was also ready to be finished with the game and move on sometime around C5, so make of that what you will.

[Grefter]

Bravely Default - I suppose since SF is talking about it I should chime in that I finished it the other week.  I didn't have much more to add after Chapter 4 stuff.  Game is good.  Normal mode doesn't throw too much at you (did the optional ending in C6, enjoyed Ribbon for the rest of the game).  I did pretty much all the optional stuff but half the C8 boss fights (and a few world's dragon fights, I redid those a couple of times as easy things to do of a morning with no play time though).  Over levelled and a flood of JP made for diverse builds.  I opted to use Dark Shields but no Dark Knights.  I really dig a lot of the uses you can eke out of the various Jobs, there is only a few that I think are of very little value in terms of what they bring to the game.  If I had to pick like 3 worst jobs even some of those are viable, just boring (Hi Monk).

Something I do agree with is the game is hella long and doing optional stuff I was pretty ready to be finished with the game before I did everything (thus giving up on C8 boss fights).  I do disagree with the general sentiment that seemed to come up that Chapter 5-7 were bad and don't do anything.  I think they are a contributing part of the meta discussion of the game (doing the same thing over and over again with very little change in your long spanning JRPG series that is all about saving the Crystals) and the biggest crime they have is not that doing the same boss fights over and over is bad pacing, it is that they are the only mandatory things to do.  If you do some (doesn't need to be all!) the optional fights you get a much better feel for the minor differences in the various travels and it really breaks up the monotony of the whole thing.  I was never sick of the cycle while I was playing.  I was just worn out from playing like 70 hours of the same game for a month.

Also Super's hate on Airy is dumb and stupid.  It is forewarned from a mile away and built up.  It is a fine serviceable plot point.

It isn't a good plot, but it certainly isn't a bad plot.  It does some interesting things and has a bland boring lead.  It is a JRPG from Square that is commenting on JRPGs that Square makes and rightfully completely embraces that is what it is.  Solid game. Highly recommend to fans of the genre (which everyone here is) even if you have lapsed.  It is quality and if you haven't played a JRPG for a while it will scratch that itch while reminding you why you liked them at some point but probably also informing you of why you stopped.

Edit - Meant to comment on the boss that made me just stop Qada, Mephilia, Ominas and whoever else it is (Yulyana?) I just couldn't ever survive the Round 1 Fire Weakness -> Promethean Fire -> Firaga combo.  Speed variation doesn't let me get any healing in between.  I don't have people with nearly enough M.Def builds.  I didn't feel like grinding to get a solid M.Def setup for everyone.  It shouldn't be too hard if you shell out for Silver Lances for people and grab Auto-Shell, some time in Spirit Master for everyone will get you M.Def passives and Auto-Shell, but I was so ready to check out that I just went and did the final boss instead.   I will be interested in how you handle it on Hard.

[Fenrir]

Can't imagine getting the blue slab without prism stones. Did you at least try thousands of times from the boss bonfire near the clams and not the Archive bonfire?

Nothing to do with your post Gref, but your encyclopedic knowledge of Dark Souls is incredible.

BTW I died again. Against the gargoyles. Hurray. Should have grabbed the Wolf Ring before attempting them!
In general, I think the best setup for this is <50% equip weight instead of <25%, just for the poise. I went pretty far with Great Club + Wolf Ring + Elite Knight Set, without really being in danger past the beginning, last time.

[Grefter]

That is what happens when I don't understand something that people I like find interesting.  I needed to understand Dark Souls so I have read, watched and listened to a lot of things about it.  You succeeded in getting me really interested in it as a thing.  One of these days I might even get around to playing it.

I suppose I could actually read a walkthrough too.

[Cotigo]

Can't imagine getting the blue slab without prism stones. Did you at least try thousands of times from the boss bonfire near the clams and not the Archive bonfire?

Nothing to do with your post Gref, but your encyclopedic knowledge of Dark Souls is incredible.

BTW I died again. Against the gargoyles. Hurray. Should have grabbed the Wolf Ring before attempting them!
In general, I think the best setup for this is <50% equip weight instead of <25%, just for the poise. I went pretty far with Great Club + Wolf Ring + Elite Knight Set, without really being in danger past the beginning, last time.

Nope. Went from the archives each time.

Yeah, the ragequit felt justified at the time. 

To be clear I used prism stones but I only had 20 so I ran out near the end, and they reset when you die.

[Sierra]

At least it's super easy to run past all the enemies en route.

Zenny, if this hasn't already been thrown at you, it's pretty handy for sorting out what your final attack power will be with specific weapons/builds without needing to invest a whole game's worth of levels and ore: https://mugenmonkey.com/darksouls/

Doesn't tell you anything about spell power but you can always assume that >>> melee anyway.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Grefter:

Super hates on Airy because he hates on fairies; it is what he does. I'm pretty certain he likes the actual plot point there. Finally a game which reveals fairies for the demonic creatures they are!

Regarding the C8 boss fight you asked about, how I did it was to slow down Qada so that Fire Bane always went after the actual fire spells. Meanwhile my Spiritmaster was super-speed twinked so always went first next round to patch it up. Still a decent fight on Hard, certainly!

[Grefter]

Hasten World also useful in the strat there I assume?  It seems neat but I never did use it much.  It chews through your damage on a caster to use it.  I suppose I should just bite the bullet and throw Time on a Vampire.  Vampire seems to be my solution to many things.

Actually that is something to talk about.  You guys generally seem to not be partying hard about Vampire.  If you get over the Blue Mage World Tour syndrome  (Because you are going to do that world tour anyway!) you end up with a pretty boss and super flexible skill set (even barring Norende only Magic stat based skills and White Wind, but those are great too!).  Having a bevy of Physical skills that are MT and can hit weakness makes them mince trash like nobodies business.  Shifting the gaps in Weakness hitting on elementally diverse class (other than Summoner) to Lightning and Earth is pretty cool (and can be leveraged with Thundaja).  Throw in ST stat down/self buffer, MP draining (though a bit unnecessary), Defense Ignoring attack, Default ignoring attack (Both elemental to play nice with your Salve Maker!) and HP Draining in a pinch (not your best skill, but saw use even on normal from me).  Vampire with the full skill list seriously impressed me.  There is stuff in there that I know I would use in Hard mode that I didn't here (75% hit rate Status effects, slap on Status Amp for 1 SP? Yessssssss).  It is a strong diverse skill set that both avoids the outright broken of FF5 Blue Mage and simultaneously avoids some of the pitfalls of FF5 Blue Mage of having a small pool of actually useful skills and skills that don't scale (I like Flamethrower.  Flamethrower has a shelf life). 

Some of the skills are redundant chaff that should be culled (I could do MT 1.25x Physical based Fire damage and lower enemy defense by 25% for 3 turns for 24MP or I could do MT 1.25x Physical based Fire damage for 30MP woooo!), but ultimately it makes for a pretty neat skill set that I highly suggest checking out.  I ran 2 of them at end game and don't regret it in the slightest.  They could use a little bit of love in the cleaner design space (they support Magic builds!  But only get Magic from Norende boss fights...) but they are super flexible even still.

Edit - That said, I totally get the down side of the Blue Mage Would Tour.  Blue Mages as second last job you learn is pretty shitty.  Cutting out chunks of skills from easy access right after you can unlock them is also shitty.

[Meeplelard]

Mario Kart 8: Unlocked all characters, got a silver in the Leaf Cup because the AI just kept nailing me with crap all over the place! Red Shell -> Get hit by guy who is surrounded by Green shells -> get pushed while still spinning.  That kind of a dickery!  Gotta replay that course and such.

Metroid Fusion: Looking for the security robot.  Nightmare was pissing me off until I remembered "oh, that ladder on the side is there for a reason" then just aggro'd him.

[SnowFire]

Oh, I did the Blue Mage World tour all right.  Vampire's good but not amazing.  The problem is, the aggro builds want you to be two-handing a sword ideally, and that is vastly shortening your life expectancy on Hard (at least while underleveled).  I ran Templar Armor Lore and Heike Armor and P. Def + 20% to go with it, but it only goes so far.  There's the status option too, I guess, but BM/TM generally covers that niche already if I care, although I guess Vamp is faster & tankier than those skillsets.  For bosses, eh, I'd rather have a full tank who takes 1 damage from everything, or a Dark Knight spamming Dark Nebula for ludicrous damage.

If I slotted in Vampire as anything, it'd be a Piracy replacement on Tiz, as he could theoretically use Curse rather than Defang / Shell Split at the cost of giving up the attached damage, but gaining the Vampirism skill set if there's an elemental weakness in play or something.  Pretty much a sidegrade.  Okay, Fireball sounds rad due to being ITD, but it's also C4 / Dimension's Hasp only, like White Wind.  In conclusion, Vampirism is "good" and certainly better than lategame trash like Acrobatics, but it isn't dominating.  (However, I leveled up Edea as a vamp in her spare time, which while looking neat - yay vampiric cat ears - doesn't play well with double-shields, which require Holy Arts basically.)

[Grefter]

And yeah that touches on part of my point that I like.  Without Dark Knight lots of Job skill sets are pretty viable.  Vampire doesn't dominate, but it is solid and if you get everything it does a lot of things pretty well.  The base job having an A in Shields is a nice bonus too.

Dark Knight is broken though and is dumb.  They should feel bad for making it.  I am glad I skipped it.

Edit - FFX - I told myself I would give Blitzball a real try this time.  It can suck a bucket of second hand dicks.  Slow and boring with no control lots of the time.  Introducing you to it with a massive disadvantage is amazingly stupid and kills all good sentiment I tried to go into it with.  Boring and shitty.

[hinode]

Personally I thought Vampire was a clear #2 for physical skillset, just behind Dark Knight. Fireball being ITD made it insanely powerful for solo bosses, especially with a Salvemaker to apply Fire Bane. Meanwhile the various MT skills combined pretty much obsolete everything except for DK for randomsmashing: Energy Burst flat out obsoletes Crescent Moon for a zero-MP MT attack, Gastric Juices lets you apply def down on every enemy in group boss fights 100% of the time, Sandstorm lets you try to apply blind while still doing heavy damage, Hellfire and Deep Freeze maximize your damage output when you need that. Throwing in the draining and debufing and White Wind on top of that was just gravy. Oh, and there's a 1 SP skill to make all these Vampire attacks stronger, too!

The only caveat to Vampire is that its stat build is too well-rounded to stand out, so it works better overall as a secondary for a class like Ninja or Pirate. White Wind in particular is much more useful with Fox Tail/Falcon Knife-boosted speed. It still felt kinda degenerate overall and I used it heavily any time I didn't feel like resorting to all-Dark Shield Dark Nebula spam.

[SnowFire]

Well the last solo boss that was a vague threat was the C5 Finale boss, so owning them harder isn't a huge concern.  Also, dual-shield Desperation seems to do *more* damage than double-handed Hellfire or Deep Freeze, albeit ST.  (Which even in boss team fights is fine, since those are all about killing one boss first.)  Granted that's a very specific build so I'm not going to hold that too harshly against Vamp.

Fireball & White Wind would help a lot (especially off Fox Tail speed, which makes WW more reliable), just you get locked out of 'em for awhile if you pick up Vamp in C5.  Ah well.  That said, I disagree with Grefter that it's a bad move by the designers to have Blue Mage be the second-to-last class to pick up; if you had it earlier, it'd have felt semi-obligatory to have around all the time in your party, which would be over-centralizing.  Giving it to you late and then saying "by the way check out the encyclopedia for <Attacks like this> if you want to use" is fine by me.

[superaielman]

I liked the Airy plot twist, it was hilarious and the game shaded it well. I just hate all Fairies. The repetition of C5 and onwards was a terrible design choice. I get the concept behind it, but it was really  unfun to break the crystals all those times. While I liked parts of the plot (Did not like the true final plot at all, but that's an aside), the repetition of it completely killed my love for the game. It started as a 9/10 and ended as a 5 or 6, depending on my mood. I twitch at the idea of replaying the game and completiting it, which is a shame as there is a damn good job system buried there. FF5 bores me to tears, but it did one thing right. It doesn't bog you down with a lot of plot, so it's easy to pick it up and burn through it. BD was a few minor design tweaks away from being great, augh.  Giving you a way to skip (at least) the crystal breaking/restoring thing after breaking one the first time and seeing Airy change would've helped a bunch!

Also vampire is shit. I am not going to do a giant sidequest for an inferior to DK class that also requires chasing down skills. Whenever the game comes up for in game use, I'm slapping the class with a 1/10. Same problem Meliadoul has in FFT, it is completely obsoleted by a class that comes before it.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Never got Hasten World myself. The one battle it features in on the enemy side was a bit of a mindfuck which gave me some difficulty just for that.


Vampire is good once it gets going but the effort spent in getting it running is rather colossal. I still did it but I can't look the other way about that. Even the likes of Gau take less effort. It should also be noted that while its random-bashing is ridiculously good on paper (although #2 to dark knight), you get it after a point where you may not be fighting many randoms any more, depending on playstyle. At best randoms are much easier by then than they were earlier.

For bosses... while it's very versatile it still had a bit of trouble finding place on my final list of skillsets. It was sometimes there, sometimes not, depending on what I needed: Dark Knight, Spiritmaster, White Mage, and Performer were all ensured a skillset spot all the time, and while I'd pretty much always use at least one of Vampire or Pirate for debuffing, I often didn't have space for both.

Washes out as a below average class overall to me, although not the 1/10 material Super claims - that is reserved for Conjurer, which also requires considerable effort and the reward package is puny by comparison.

[Tide]

Wild ARMS 3 - Finished in 9:26:55 real time (H/M/S). Time to go back to ACF.

[Meeplelard]

Metroid Fusion: Finished, 4:02 time and 52% completion.  Game is definitely more playable on a Wii U Gamepad than a keyboard, so glad I played it closer to how it was intended.

Probably go with Kirby and the Amazing Mirror next because...Kirby.