What games are you playing 2014?

[Scar]

ToX2

It's like Xillia, but is it better?

First off. Silent main in a Tales game is really awkward. Ludger talks, sometimes, but he feels like the guy from Waiting who was always getting interrupted. Minor complaint I guess. He is freaking awesome in fights. I can't recall a main Tales character this overpowered before. Three different weapons that he can swap on the fly, has a super saiyin mode, and does everything else good too.

And the rest of the X1 cast is back too.

Jude's new look reminds me of Bowman Jean. I dig it more then his X1 attire.

Just got Rowen back. He's old and has that old man charm.

Can Leia ever buy a normal looking outfit? First she had that nightgown gone wrong in 1, now she is all sorts of tacky looking. At least you can take off her hat? I dunno. She's still fun to play with, so I can ignore that for now.

Elize is whatever. Her character seems much less annoying, but then you have Teepo. Fucking Teepo. I don't get what they were trying to create with him, but he just annoys me. Nothing about him makes much sense. But he does love dem titties. I guess that's a plus.

Poor Ivar, he got shot and squished by Ludger. He gets no respect. I hope they make him playable. He at least deserves that after Milla pretty much tosses him to the side for her boy toy Jude.

Still not sure what's going on in the story. Lots of crazy time altering, warp things I guess. Who knows. I don't!

The debt system sucks, the rewards suck...I do a significant amount of grinding in these games since fighting is so rewarding and you get stuff for killing monsters repeatedly in this one.

I dunno if any of you guys are playing this game, but it seems like it has improved on most things the first game did. The leveling system is gone and now there's this Materia-like system in its place.

Oh, and my girlfriend does not agree, but Rollo is by far the most bad ass Tales character ever created.

[Fudozukushi]

Tales of Xillia 2: Finally got the full party.  So many things anger me about this game.  I don't even give a shit about the debt system.  But so much shit has been changed into complete annoyances.  Can only change parties in town!  Shops are now back to set inventories!  Custom orders where you need materials from the start of the game to complete!  Along with the equipment from the start of the game!  Restoratives are stupid scare.  Trying to get the Large food dishes involves waiting 15 minutes and hoping the cat army brings back the required ingredient.  The Power Hit system in battle is just an excuse to crank up boss HP to absurd levels and make it utterly baffling to you when the Power Hit meter just suddenly goes away when it's halfway through it's timer.  Or when you hop into Chromatus and it just poofs away despite you laying into the dude endlessly.  Allium Orb development is utterly tedious holy crap.

The Xillia 1 casts non reaction to the fractured dimension situation is also ludicrous.

Good things?  Well Elle and Nova are pretty neat.  The idea of the fractured dimensions themselves are fine if the circumstances surrounding them weren't so idiotic.  When the Power Hits actually work correctly they're spiffy.  But that's only like a 1 in 50 chance though.

[Sierra]

On the plus side, cat army?

[Clear Tranquil]

Yis. Xillia 2 has cat army. Xillia 2 auto wins~

I really like the Cross Costume feature. Currently have Leia in her Santa outfit (yes it's not Christmas and I am using this since I didn't have time to use it in the first game before >_>) with Soccer hairstyle (I like the yellow ribbon), two huge mittens on her hands, and a Christmas pin ^_^ Jude is digging the Yuri costume currently and Ludger pulls off Emil's outfit well especially since I have him with a beret, bow and arrows too. Niice. Rowen is rocking his default with his spectacles, a lion cloth and a beret (Elle's cap)

Kitty Dispatch. You can view kitties with R3. It's great.

[Fudozukushi]

Cat Army is great(some of the cats even look like their namesake) but requiring it just to make stuff is crap.

[Lord Ephraim]

ToX2 proves how incompetent cats are.  Even with 72/100 cats, they can't be bothered to collect at least one rare item from an area after 5 or 6 tries.  Probably being lazy and fat instead.

[Fudozukushi]

Is it Gaius Dumplings?  I bet it's Gaius Dumplings.

It took me like 30 tries to get enough for that job...

[Niji]

Hey all, been...a long while my life has been.....very entertaining the past year or so! My gaming has been steadily declining lately, but has been partially salvaged thanks to a few gems I just found a few days ago! ONTO THEM!

Currently playing

7th Dragon
Nintendo DS title I stumbled across today. OH MAN. I love the "it's to hard for Americans" games that don't get brought over. (still waiting on that magical vacation english patch tho!). A PITY I CAN ONLY COMPREHEND KANJI. Playing a bugged english patch version . Excited for the game crash or if I will quit out of difficulty level frustration before then!

Fortuna Magus
Has a bromantic overtone at the beginning between the drive of the story's main characters (whom you do not play as! (yet?! im not far into it!)
I'll have a review forth coming in my topic once I am a bit deeper in the game

Band of Monsters
LOL this is pretty awesome, another i'm only 10 minutes into it and hooked and I haven't even seen the combat system yet!

ITARUS
WOW been waiting for a 2D(2.5D) MMORPG style game for awhile that does it well. Shockingly good story. Gonna be getting same treatment as Fortuna Magus. Its "hard" in the "MMORPG" sense in that you will die a LOT to monsters all the time and it will cost you xp and gold(which you need a lot of often).

EpicHearts PLUS
This...This has been the game I have been waiting to exist since I first played through Secret of Mana with my brother when it first came out. Its getting big slow treatment by me, looks like there will be at least 3 play through (1 of which i will skip entirely probably since I don't like that character's player style or archtype), has an online auction house between players so it shirks normal freemium "pay for it too" games. THIS brought me back into gaming. And I am only about 20 minutes in. SOOO fun though the characters move around a bit TOO speedily, pretty shocking for a mana style action-rpg. One of the characters moves twice as fast as the one I'm playing so its CRAZY fast. Perfect and ideal graphics for me as well. At most I am gonna need 300 or the 500 "coin" they gave me for starting the game to "complete" it ;) (bought the "plus" version so I wouldn't be inundated with adverts).

It am engendered in me the old feelings of wanting to design my own game, now I know its feasible since this has all the features I wanted with the ultra high quality 2D/isometric mix (think Legend of Mana if it was sized for mobile) and the financial feasibility to both give it away free WHILE making an income off it when I succeed. Just have to "acquire" the engine they used to build it and slow down the movement a bit... pretty excited, I haven't worked on much video game design since...I went to school for it...so this will be fun now that tech and platforms are "at that point" ! LAZINESS ALWAYS PAYING OFF OH MAN. Hahah!


Recently finished playing "World of Warcraft" Finally beat the game forever!
Thinking about Starting up Super Mario RPG: Lotss
Thinking about picking up Super Smash 3DS and Kirby Triple Deluxe.


Has it...occurred to anyone that Kirby is basically an organic Vacuum machine and one of/the most famous vacuum company of history was "Kirby" as well. COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS MAN, break free of that hive mind.





DAT PS4 though...Nickola Tesla as a steampunk Order associate?! Humina Humina!

GRAPHICS SUPERIOR TO REAL LIFE? yes please! Oh...that price tag tho.... pass!

[Luther Lansfeld]

Xenoblade Chronicles - Just fought a plot fight with Jade Face in Mechonis Field; damn, that was quite a long dungeon. New PC is a bit damselly for my liking and Shulk has continued to disappoint me by being a moron. At least there's still Reyn Time.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Dragon's Crowns - THAT ISN'T HOW BREASTS WORK, VANILLAWARE.

[NotMiki]

Dragon's Crowns - THAT ISN'T HOW BREASTS WORK, VANILLAWARE.

roll dorf.

seriously dwarf picks dudes up and chucks them at other dudes all day long and it NEVER GETS OLD.  DO EEEEEEEEEET.

[Twilkitri]

Mega Man III GB VC - played through

Much more precision jumping required than I prefer.



Stick It To The Man - played through

Pretty entertaining, but the controls let it down somewhat. The main issue is that the game flips into scanning mode if the GamePad is tilted more than 30 degrees or so from the horizontal, AKA at less of an angle on which it's typically held, and scanning mode disables all your other controls. And enemies aren't paused during this mode! So many times I'm trying to evade someone and the pad creeps up over the point in question and I die before I get back out of scanning mode.

To be fair, you can disable using the gamepad for scanning, but I'm not sure what it would actually replace it with. If enemies had been paused while in scanning mode, it would have been annoying but not especially so - there's not really any reason why that couldn't have been the case. There are some enemies you can scan in order to make a temporary distraction available, but as far as I recall you can always scan the enemy from outside their line of sight for that, you never need to do it while they're chasing you.

With regards to controls, you also aim with the right stick and jump with one of the right buttons, which makes it impossible to aim and jump at the same time. This isn't ever required, but would have been helpful in some of the chase sequences. Feels like it would have been nice to have been able to jump with L.

I did find the parts of the game that weren't chase sequences to be fairly amusing, so I think it was still worth my time. Almost feels like the chase sequences could have been dropped altogether.



Mega Man IV GB VC - played through

Still great. Ring & Crystal levels gave me more trouble than I was expecting so I guess I haven't played it recently enough. Hopefully the current trend continues and MMVGBVC comes out next week rather than either of the Xtreme games, as I have no interest in replaying either of those.



Anodyne - played through

Fairly entertaining gameplay-wise, outside of the fact that the jump mechanics are fairly mediocre. The storyline feels somewhat non-existant.

On-hit invincibility seems to either last for much less time than I expect, or there are at lot of things which pierce it, because I died a lot while thinking I was invincible. Oh well.

I do have to say that I'm seriously not feeling the postgame. It doesn't help that there are conspicuously blocked passages at the end of the final three dungeons which each only open up into small empty purposeless rooms. There are some conspicuous locations earlier in the game, but I played most of the game last week and I don't remember any of them now, and postgame things aren't only in conspicuous locations. It really doesn't help that most of the things I've found so far have been fairly uninspiring.



[EDIT]
Detective Grimoire - played through

I somehow forgot that I also played this. It was pretty entertaining, but didn't have much in the way of gameplay. Fairly nice graphics.

The game never explains the suspicion meters and they end up not mattering in the slightest outside of an achievement related to them.

[Niu]

Yes! People are complaining about ToX2's lack of party member change in battle and the stupid shop inventory.
More! I need to hear more people flame it.

Gunvolt - Game beaten. So odd the the last bosses are like the second easiest bosses in game and it is their stage I got my first SS grade. Har.
They also need to give the Gluttony dude a bit more HP. There is something wrong when a boss in a side-scroll ACT game can be OHKOed.
The game was fun, but only the zombie horror stage left an impression, and that is mostly because of the shock value.

[Fudozukushi]

If I can't change party members in battle I'm screwed if I forgot to unequip Minimum damage.  If I run into something guard heavy I can't bring in Alvin to break it.  If something's resistant to an ally's elements, I can't replace them.

I spent over hours over a debt repayment time grinding out materials for armor that was invalidated in the character stories themselves.  I had to scour the shops to find a weapon to make another weapon.  I had to find and armor to make an armor to make another armor.  I spend almost hundred of thousands of gald a chapter to buy the Jewels that are needed in almost every single piece of equipment that'll be invalidated next chapter.

Also the equipment inventory is all sorts of nonsense and messed up.  Shit is just thrown about randomly or trying to follow Xillia 1's order so as a result the strongest weapons and armor end up being wherever instead of the bottom of the list.  Best Equipment doesn't account for STAT bonuses so it'll sometimes equip you with actually worse gear because it doesn't account for a DEF boost from stats.

If I want to use a Large food item, I have to buy the Small and Medium, Custom order the large.  Leave the shop, eat the Large, go back in, buy the Small and Medium, make a second Large, then buy the Small and Medium again.

I am almost entirely going through the game to get my sweet sweet Bonus Dungeon rewards at this point.

[Grefter]

So you are saying ToX2 is a Nippon Ichi game?

okay.

[Clear Tranquil]

ToX2 likes to play hardball with you ^_^~

[Niu]

No, it is an unforgivable lack of polish and Namco deserve to get smashed in the face.
It is like they look at everything that made ToX gameplay fluent and then toss them out in ToX2.

[Fudozukushi]

I can't even change my Display Character in towns!

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Dragon's Crown - Breasts still don't work that way. On the other hand, Sorceress skillset is pretty fun and I like the mobility on the class (jump cancelling shenanigans on a character with an air dash and a bunch of cancellable aerial projectile moves - one of which is homing? Whoa, sign me in. And I hardly even touch the teleport, which is a nice dodge as well. It's all about speed). MP recharge woes are a bit of a doozy, but that's a lot of damage and crowd control. I should try out the status, too.

[Cmdr_King]

Fate/Extra- Goshujin-sama, GETTO DESU!!


What really makes this game is the small touches of presentation and little story decisions.  Dan and Archer are basically the same person, but at different stages of their lives, and their show of respect at the end sees them finally figuring this out.  Alice is just fantastic.  The way that week 5 is really about Assassin and Julius comes later works well.  And I really like the way Caster presents her backstory, being herself while Ms. PC fills in all the real emotions?  Strange and very effective.

Anyway so the nature of the game does mean that there are times where it's just so much bullshit, and yeah I did use Caster but I also set the game on Easy.  If it was more selective about the bullshit, I  could see it.  Like, Lancer's ability to use Gae Bolg on different actions from the start of the fight is pretty mean since y'know, the nature of the system means you dump statted Luck.  But if he was the only fight where he had reasonable odds to straight up OHKO you it'd kinda make sense: Rin is SUPPOSED to be basically the strongest Master in the war, Lancer's ability to spam Gae Bolg is his defining strength in context of the series, and it's supposed to be more or less the emotional climax of the story (the path not taken, etc) so it being different and lethal would be okay.  except MOST of the boss fights to that point were basically the same except slightly less so.  Kinda loses something.  But no mistake for all that the game is still really effective and the bullshit doesn't offset what it does right.  8/10.

[Grefter]

Suiko Dan - Finished again.  15ish hours.  I am sure you can comfortably finish it (ie not speed runanz) with 108 stars and level 16 weapons on the transfer characters in 12 hours if your memory works and you get Prosperity Rune at the start.

Other things I only really noticed this time.  Tuber and Pesmerga literally have no interaction in this game.  I need to watch for this in 2, because if they don't then that makes the "omg epic rivalry needs to be completed!!!!" section of the fan base really hyped for something that had less setup than the pay off tha was Schtoltheim Reinbach in Suiko 4.

Also I apparently completely space out by the end of he game normally when it comes to the audio.  Those crazy loud fountains aren't making their crazy loud sound on the return to Gregminster and the mix of the sound of wind blowing through the empty city with the normal town music mixed really soft in the background is a little more evocative than I expected.  Probably the best bit of sound design in the game really.

Something else really dumb though that gets noted a lot, but is more dumb than I had thought of.  When you beat Emperor Elfbooties and he is a load bearing boss the castle starts glowing bright red and screen shakes in RPG standard communication for "this place is collapsing".  When you go to Toran Republic in Suikoden 2 the castle is exactly the same.  What happened there?  Did they replicate the former Emperor's palace room by room?  That seems incredibly wasteful for a new Nation State economy.

Edits to fix some phone typing.  Deliberately leaving Autocorrect of Yuber => Tuber in place.

[Fenrir]

Dude Pesmerga and Suik1-2 Yuber
- are really the most generic badass dudes when you're a 10 year old. Super dark armor, immortality, max brood (you can barely see their face), either long hair or a cape, swords. Including one sword being called crimson sword despite not being crimson, because crimson is the most badass color, but come on a crimson sword would just look weird.
- hint at the true end of the series that will never happen, with the epic battlez and all the true runes together. Final boss is Killey + Lorelai after they have murdered the super pope at Harmonia Castle.

Only one guy mentioning the other would have been enough for everybody to go crazy.

Anyway did you use Blackman?


La mulana: I'm at the point where I'm just playing with a playthrough next to me since all the puzzles go right above my head. "Use a statue there? Face left, attack three time, face right, attack three times, jump there? ... Sure"

I like games that respect my intelligence and all but there's one problem: Nobody is intelligent enough for La Mulana.
This would be a good game to play if you only had one game to play. This is game that could take years to complete and analyze the lore and it might actually be gratifying and not just soul crushing. La Mulana does not feel like a dumb faq bait adventure game, it feels like solving the Rosetta Stone.
I understand why the Kickstarter for La Mulana 2 did not do that amazingly well despite La Mulana 1 being so brilliant.

[Fudozukushi]

Tales of Xillia 2: Beaten.  Bad, Normal and Good ends all get.  Bad End is my favorite because I can take out all my frustrations on the game in a giant mountain of corpses and yet it's still the least reprehensible option.

[VySaika]

Bit.Trip Runner 2 - Playing a pirouetting pugilist pickle pursuing perfect pluses. Perfect Perfectionist obtained. There is nothing left for me here.

Should prolly get back to playing one of the...what, five Vita RPGs I have and got distracted from?

[Clear Tranquil]

ToX2- Poker solves so many things it isn't even funny~