What Games are you playing 2015?

[Meeplelard]

Ni No Kuni: I'm beating up Undead on a random mountain because we're stuck in the past because plot convenience.  I'd try to question why this is happening but my speculation on what the truth of this game's plot actually is needs to be disproven FIRST, since if I'm right, then the game sort of explains itself that way.  Also resource issues getting a little less annoying now that I can defend at will with everyone thus blue things pop out more!

Super Mario Galaxy 2: Beat Bowser 2.  That was an annoying fight because it felt like so much little stuff could go wrong and nothing that really makes the fight hard, just tedious.  A failed hit means you have to sit through 3 Bowser Actions before you get a chance to hit him again.  41 stars in any event.


Kirby Triple Deluxe: Completed, got all Sun Stones and...that's only 70%? Yeah, I'm not getting all the Keychains because seriously!  NOW TO OVERANALYZE A KIRBY GAME!!!

Had quite a bit of fun with this because it was more KSS/Return to Dreamland style gameplay, which is just giving a fair number of powers (including a large majority of the staple ones like Beam, Sword, Hammer, Fighter, Stone etc.) and skill-sets to all of them as well so none of them feel boring (even Stone and Wheel at least made an attempt at one though Stone always had this since RtDL, can't remember if Wheel did.)  The new powers...well...

Beetle seemed boring until near the end when I found some quirks it has like being the only weapon with Slashing AND Pounding Capabilities, as well as the throw can be used as a legitimate projectile for serious damage, making Beetle out to basically be a total replacement of Suplex that's usable on bosses reasonably enough (Suplex was stylish but not practical.)

Circus was silly, but outside of being Fire, didn't seem all that useful.  Bell seemed a little more straight forward but more novel than actually good; it had some quirks like hitting both sides and bouncing projectile.

The real highlight, though, is Archer.  That's probably the best new power Kirby has seen in...well...I'm not sure how long.  Projectile that's got limited aim-ability, can he charged, has fun little tricks that can be useful, and are just stylish (the dash jump move made me think of the Archery video MC linked to in Miscellaneous links.)

Hyper Nova was a way to incorporate the Super Abilities from RtDL but be different about it; I kind of liked it but yeah, it does dumb the game down for parts, but at least it wasn't overused.  A better used gimmick, though, was the usage of the dual planes, with the foreground and background.  The newer Donkey Kong Country games did dabble in this a bit, but it felt more like a visual gimmick to allow usage of the background, rather than actually gameplay oriented.  Triple Deluxe actually made the 2 planes seem meaningful, doing quite a bit with it; won't get into details, easier to just watch some stages.

One thing that DID annoy me about the game was the insistence on using Gyro Controls for a number of sequences.  Nintendo, I thought we were past the "use system gimmick for the sake of using it!" stage.  Having to tilt the 3DS to basically do random puzzles based on a stupid physics engine was not fun.  Luckily, outside of fuse puzzles, they never got TOO crazy with them, but it still broke up the gameplay and was jarring.

Triple Deluxe further establishes what is needed for a good Kirby game overall, which is basically "emulate Kirby Super Star" as opposed to "Emulate the Dark Matter Trilogy!"  AMazing Mirror was clearly trying something different, and Squeak Squad felt like it sort of got it but limited it.  RtDL is the first game to really go "Oh, right, those things called skillsets exist, and make a bunch of powers a lot more interesting rather than one dimensional."  Also allows flexibility in plot...yes, it is a Kirby Game plot, but the basic premise of "evil entity thing comes and possesses characters and makes them evil!" and it always being the same group gets dull FAST.  Honestly Dark Matter/Zero is also one of the blandest final boss designs in the franchise, being just an Evil Eyeball of DOOM!!!

Speaking of final bosses, I feel like this was probably the most "epic" Kirby final boss ever.  Between fighting two DeDeDe forms, then Tarzana, then fighting a giant Magical Vespiquen, who proceeds to throw a radioactive Audrey 2 at you which Kirby must be fired out of a cannon to defeat, THEN you fight her again with MORE Audrey 2's, then HYPER NOVA DUAL...yeah this is a jRPG Final Boss.  Which is a step down in terms of PLot Overpoweredness from what Kirby normally fights, that being Abstract Cosmic Horrors, so it's kind of strange that one of Kirby's weaker final bosses puts up the most persistent fight.

But hey, I can't complain; she is accompanied by bad ass music in the last real fight, which well, honestly, this game has one of Kirby's better OSTs.

More importantly, back to the KSS thing, pretty much everything that bugs me about the Dark Matter Trilogy doesn't show up in any other games, and feels like they were trying to make a new standard that never caught on, like a bunch of bland forgettable new enemies (those kappas stand out; I only remember them because they were fairly frequent), the usage of Adelei in an attempt to make this arbitrary memorable human character, the lack of Meta KNight (granted, he wasn't big until arguably KSS), and either leaving out a bunch of major powers, or redoing how they work, be it changing Stone's physics entirely, not having Sword/Hammer, making Cutter go from the Rapid Fire Boomerang to slow single shot boomerang that ALSO removes Kirby's fight ability, and even was the series that said "can't fight the real final boss unless you play 100%!"  Granted, RtDL did this as well, which was nice that Triple Deluxe removed that, instead going the Mario route of "get all collectables, open up special bonus stages!"  Though unlock those games, RtDL didn't require specific powers to get items, or if it did, the power was usually right there (usually, it was 'need power with this trait' and usually there were multiple powers that covered that.) 


...really, what I'm saying is the Dark Matter trilogy is the worst thing to happen to Kirby like ever; K64 wasn't too bad to be fair, but still not as good as Amazing Mirror or Squeak Squad, which I'd call "average" Kirby games.  The fact that those games went out of their way to ignore the games that preceded them (KDL2 ignored a lot of what KA did, KDL3/64 ignored Super Star) just further demonstrates they were bad directions to take the series.  I think JSH was right that those who made the Dark Matter trilogy had a very different view of Kirby than like everyone else.

[Captain K.]

MH4U:  So basically this game is Dark Souls, except bosses don't have hp gauges to tell you if you're making any progress and every boss is The Pursuer.  As in, you don't have twitch skills to dodge these attacks in time, you have to know what they're going to do beforehand.  And the only way you learn these tells is getting your face smashed by them repeatedly.

So it's decent, but feels unpolished compared to Dark Souls.  Which is a bit odd considering how much longer it's been around.  It's pretty though for a 3DS game.

Currently on the four star quests.

[Twilkitri]

Ziggurat - played a bunch

Finished beating the game on easy with every character, have since made 1-2 attempts with each character to beat it on Normal but I've failed every run except my second attempt with Kraz. Got to the final floor with Corvus, and the second-last floor with several characters (and failed on the first floor with numerous characters :( ), but oh well, I never claimed to be good at the game.

I've finished unlocking all the weapons/etc now so I probably won't be playing much more unless they add a bunch in an update.



Crystal Caves (the DOS game, not that game with a similar name that came out recentlyish) - played through all episodes

Good, simple, fun. When the somewhat-terrible jump mechanics aren't playing up - it should not be so difficult to jump into a one-tile-high passage. I also recognised a bunch of scenarios from my youth where you need to do things in particular orders otherwise you end up becoming unable to complete the level, which would probably have been otherwise infuriating if I'd fallen into them, so I may not have the purest opinion. Time limits on vital abilities (mostly reversed-gravity) probably not the best design choice.

Also that one level where you had to pick up a second gravity pill while still under the effects of one, which brought you to normal gravity then threw you into permanent reverse gravity once the timer ran out - that is just bizarre. I guess it can't have be too obscure if I was able to figure it out (and it wasn't something that I remembered happened).



Machinarium - played through

Not a fan. I'm having trouble remembering what my problems with it were, unfortunately - I know I hated the UI, I want to say it had some sort of terrible setup where interactable things would only change the mouse cursor on mouse-over if you were near them, but that seems so off-kilter I can't commit to believing that was the case. I can at least remember that using inventory items was endlessly frustrating because half the time the inventory bar wouldn't show up when you waved the mouse at it, and because there was no quick way to cancel out of attempting to use an inventory item - you had to wait for the bar to cooperate so you could manually put it back.

I remember hearing somewhere that they want to make the game such that it used as little written language as possible, but it really doesn't help me if I pick up a random strip of something in the store and have no idea what it's supposed to be. Try using it on a pool of gunk later on during one of my I-have-no-ideas-how-to-proceed periods expecting a result of either nothing or of it being dipped in the gunk for some unknown reason, instead it inexplicably gets waved about in a bunch of insects above said pool and they get collected. A week or so after this I was listening to something which brought up the Zombie Paper from Earthbound and I was like 'Oh, that thing in Machinarium was fly paper' but how the heck the game expected me to figure this out is beyond me.

Another example: the frozen zig-zaggy pipe in the cooling system is made of rubber, apparently. Maybe they are in real life! I don't know how they keep their shape in that case, and I feel like rubber could be too brittle when frozen for that kind of work (although it's not like car tires freeze or anything so I could easily be underselling rubber here), but even if they are I don't know that. Who knows that? Instead I'm trying everything on everything and I try this presumably metal pipe on the saucepan and okay apparently it's actually a rubber hose now that we've warmed it up. Fine, I know what I can do with one of those.

Also several points where the puzzle consisted of 'find some hard-to-see thing', such as the hook hanging on the pipe system. Would say the electric wire also counts, although it could be argued that I should have seen what happened to it after it snapped. The puzzle which caused that is also one that I would probably never have gotten if I hadn't seen a similar puzzle in Botanicula already. Enough complaining about Machinarium!



Citizens of Earth 3DS - Managed to progress from the prologue to chapter 2 in the month since I last reported in. It is the most compelling of games.

Partial list of things to complain about in CoE:

• There is no in-game way to load a saved game and the main menu always defaults to new game.
• It uses that horrible system where there's no grace period between dialogue bringing up a menu and the menu options being selectable, so often I end up selecting menu options while trying to advance dialogue.
• I got stuck in geometry in my last session. Somehow managed to escape eventually.
• It crashed in my last session (in the sense of falling back to Home with 'There has been a system error, restart the console').
• The paging system is terrible, you always start off from the first item and you can typically only advance one item at a time. You can advance a page at a time in the Almanac but pages in the Almanac also take longer to come up so that's kind of a wash.
  Also, it seems like a lot of the more exotic items in the game are terrible, so it may turn out that for most item lists you're going to spend most time at the top anyway? Difficult to tell at this point, but the Almanac (bestiary) is just going to get more and more infuriating to use as the game progresses.
• It's valid for enemies to run into party members other than yourself to start a battle, which would be fine if you didn't take up so much of the screen and if the party members didn't trace out your footsteps. Nothing like attempting to reverse course to get away from an enemy while your party members charge blindly ahead into the spot where you were and end up getting hit by them.
  There's actually a party member whose special ability is to change the zoom level. I don't currently have them so I can only zoom out an almost-negligible amount, but once I get the chance I am so setting things to minimum zoom (and presumably running into some other issue that this will cause).
• The last two boss fights I've attended I had no real idea were about to start, and consequently didn't get the chance to save the game. Possibly could get remedied when I get to zoom out.[/I]
  

I am still somehow getting some sort of enjoyment out of seeing what sort of moves/equipment/etc. everyone is getting and so on, albeit clearly not enough to make me play it with anything approaching regularity.



Jurassic Park: The Game - played episode 1

Died 3 times, got 8 gold medals, 3 silver medals, and 1 no-medal.

I don't want to say it's proto-TWD, because it goes in for QTEs much more than TWD does and doesn't have anywhere near as much dialogue among other things, but it does kinda feel a little like that?

I have no idea how people are supposed to be able to complete some of these non-optional QTEs without knowing what they're going to be ahead of time, but it is mr. garbage-at-rhythm-games talking here so I'm probably just bad at it.

Always possible that things are going to go sharply downhill, but I'd so far I'd say the game is more mediocre-middling than bad. I'm interested in seeing where the story is going, at least. More than I can say for CoE although that may partially be due to CoE not really having gotten around to actually starting its story yet.

[Meeplelard]

Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland: It's Kirby's Adventure with better graphics and some minor tweaks that don't mean a whole lot, so really refer to what I said about that game in the last post.  100% run through, guess I need to complete extra mode to do Meta Knight Mode, the one compelling reason to get this game if you already have Adventure, because otherwise you're just spending money twice on the same game in effect...

...well, no, I guess this version has gamepad support while the version I have, the Anniversary Collection, does not, so there's that convenience, but not worth the price I paid for it.  Not saying the game is overpriced, just not worth the price if you have some version of Kirby's Adventure already.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Bayonetta 2 - Finished. I'm still working out how it compares to the first game. It does some things better and some things worse, but arguably the most important change is keeping things focussed on the solid action gameplay instead of two many gimmicks (the gimmicks still exist, but are spread out enough / fun enough for them to not drag like in the first game). Though, I will say that the final battle felt anticlimactic which is kind of a weird feeling in Bayonetta which is normally so over-the-top.

Played on third climax. I had a lot of trouble with the midgame (Masked Lumen 2, Prophet, Alraune) but much less towards the end, and I'm not sure how much of this is me getting better the game and how much is the game itself. Game took me 9 hours, according to the Wii U tracking thing, which is notably less than the first game. Some of that is the game being legitimately shorter (similar number of stages, but they aren't as long), and some of that is cutting out some of the bullshit (as well as shorter times for climax attacks etc.), probably.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Super Mario Galaxy - I fought the second boss, which was Bowser being goofy, but the much harder fight was some random boss stage where you only have one health against this weird robot thing that throws you into a lightning wall.

Paper Mario - Showing its anti-capitalism tendencies by portraying the bob-ombs as oppressed by their Koopa slavers. I'm currently in the Koopa Ninja dungeon.

[Reiska]

Mmm, before I get to my own plays recently a bit of comment on some of the other plays going on.

Re: Labyrinth of Touhou 2: When LoT2 first came out, my initial impression was "holy shit this is way better than LoT1".  The more I think about this game in retrospect, though, the more I'm inclined to believe it's more of a lateral shift, if not actively worse in some aspects.  PC balance in 2 is notably worse than the first game (especially where any PC with the Maintenance skill is concerned [NITORI]), and I don't think it particularly helps the game either that the developer decided to embrace high enemy defense much more thoroughly than the first game while simultaneously nerfing the fuck out of ITD in general.  Most accounts of the game I've read on the Shrinemaiden forums (I haven't actually bothered to finish it) pretty much indicate that any damage dealer who lacks ITD is essentially useless in the endgame short of massive overleveling or using very specific team setups which abuse synergies.  In short it sounds like party composition - which given that there are fucking 48 playable PCs, should be the most interesting aspect of the game - is a lot less flexible than the first game's.  I feel like the only area in which LoT2 strongly improved is the user interface and allowing respecs.  Oh, and the art, of course.

The first game definitely had its problems with grinding and an uneven as hell difficulty curve, but at the end of the day, you could use pretty much whoever you wanted to a large degree and get through the game without grossly overleveling (while you do need "a tank" and "a healer", there are really 5 or 6 PCs that are some shade of viable as a tank and you have 3 realistic healer options, and that still leaves 10/12 party slots free to play with).  I don't feel like this is quite as true in the second from what I've seen.

Re: Monster Hunter:  [Full disclosure: I would generally consider myself a MH fanboy, so you may want to take what I say with a grain of salt, I won't be offended.]  There are certain definite aspects of Monster Hunter's design that, I think, are kept archaic on purpose, which is something of a weird design choice, but at the same time I kinda sorta understand the logic inherent to them.  The two things I see most frequently brought up in this regard are the lack of true lock-on targeting and the lack of monster health bars, and I'll address these each separately.

The lack of true lock-on targetting is something that is often (if less frequently of late) cited by reviewers who, IMO, are failing to grasp the depth of the game as compared to the titles they typically bring up as counter-examples of why MH should have lock-on (in my experience, typically 3D Zelda titles and Souls games).  The thing they are missing about the other games cited is that for the most part, hit location in a Zelda or Souls game is meaningless - you do the same damage to the big dragon boss regardless of whether you hit it on its nose, its toe, or its tail.  A lock-on feature works in such a game because it doesn't matter _where_ you hit the enemy, it matters only that you hit them somewhere; whereas, in Monster Hunter, understanding the importance of hit locations is one of the biggest factors that defines the difference between a bad/mediocre player and a good player, because in MH, every body part on a given monster has its own unique hitbox, with its own unique defensive stats and elemental/weapon type resistances.  An easy example for me to bring up here is Barroth from Monster Hunter 3; his underbelly is reasonably susceptible to bladed weapons, but you'd have to be an utter fool to attack his head with anything other than a blunt weapon as you'll do almost no damage. 

It would be difficult (though not necessarily impossible) to devise a lock-on system which accounted for all of these nuances in MH's gameplay, and I suspect the result would in some ways be more cumbersome than what exists now (how would you cycle through all the possible hitboxes to lock onto?)  Capcom did make one concession in this regard which I was initially guarded about when I first heard of its inclusion in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, but now that I've actually played with it in 4 I realize it's rather ingenious and doesn't detract from the game at all, by implementing a toggle to change the functionality of the L button from "center camera behind PC" to "center camera towards monster".  It's not a true lock-on (as you have to keep hitting it to keep the monster in frame), but it makes the camera controls SO much less onerous on a handheld sans Circle Pad Pro, and I find myself using it occasionally even though I HAVE a Circle Pad Pro.

As for monster health, I suspect the reasoning behind not displaying it is largely obfuscative and/or psychological.  There's almost certainly an element of trying to minimize the "gamey" aspects of the game, that is, presenting the game as a fantastical monster hunting simulation moreso than as a simple game; this is, IMO, (weakly) reflected in the fact that the game gives you the option of toggling the HUD off completely, so you can't see your own health/stamina either.  I don't know of anyone who actually plays like this, but it does expose a bit of the design mentality in play here, I think.  Really, though, I think the much stronger argument for why this design choice was made is one of subtly manipulating player psychology; the player is going to approach each encounter much differently in the absence of such information.  A player who knows the monster only has 75 HP left is going to take much larger risks to burn that 75 HP off than one who only can see that the monster is limping, and "limping" could mean 75 HP or it could mean several hundred and you have no way of knowing.  (I can speak from definite experience here: Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on the PSP had cheat codes to display boss health on-screen which I used, and I *still* haven't completely "unlearned" the much more risky playstyle I adopted in that game, to the point where every friend I play with constantly points out my general lack of caution in multiplayer.)  MH's design is built all around rewarding caution over speed; there's a reason that they give you 50 minutes to complete each quest, and it isn't because you actually need it, because most of them can be completed in 10 or less.

Now then, on to my own gaming activity:

MH4U: Slow progress generally, I haven't walled on anything yet but I just don't feel like dealing with Nerscylla yet.  Soon.  Definitely the best MH title yet IMO; I note interestingly that while the game is much more newbie-friendly in presentation with seamless tutorials and so forth, the actual difficulty level is much closer to Freedom Unite (commonly regarded as the hardest game in the franchise) than it is to Tri (generally considered middling difficulty) or Portable 3rd on PSP (generally considered the easiest).  I've seen a few people claim on the Reddit that compared to Tri, they buffed monster damage fairly notably but also nerfed monster HP, and I think overall that it works.  (Portable 3rd, from memory, had some of the monster HP nerf already but had very low monster damage by series standards.)

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1: Played (and finished) the PC version, which is a port of the Vita remake.  It's actually a pretty well-done port, certainly the technical quality is higher than say S-E's FF13 PC port which is kind of sad given how small of a studio Idea Factory/Compile Heart are compared to S-E, but I digress.  Game is quite a bit improved from the PS3 original, which I never finished.  I haven't played either HDN2 or Victory on PS3 but I'm told that Re;Birth1's battle system is the system from Victory, only reverted to 3-PC parties instead of Victory's 4.  This leads to an odd quirk (the game gives you a tutorial about combination attacks early in the game because they were a very prominent feature in Victory's 4-PC parties, when there is exactly one such combination attack in Re;Birth1 and it involves two optional characters you can't recruit until literally right before the final dungeon.  Oh well.  Game balance holds up a lot better than the original, although not perfectly; it takes until the lategame at least for balance to start crumbling, in large part because the most gamebreaking PC has fairly low availability.  In general, though, optimal boss strategy in the lategame involves having 2/3 of your party members spamming Rush attacks exclusively to fill the EXE Gauge for your third member to spam EXE Drive attacks.  Noire has the best EXE Drive in the game, so generally you want her to be the one spamming them, but if you lack her, most of the other characters suffice to some extent.

My only real gripes with the game are a mediocre localization (though not, say, FF7 bad; most of the meta jokes translated well provided you get the references - I actually broke down laughing for a solid 30 seconds or so on stream when I got a random grind quest issued by a "Uni soundalike" complaining about how she'd been tricked into accepting a curse as a condition of making a wish for magical power and now she wanted me to kill 5 of the creatures responsible - "Cuberials" - in some random optional dungeon*) [note: small text is a Puella Magi Madoka Magica spoiler, NOT a HDNR1 spoiler!] and the fact that there's a bit of text in the ending (if you unlocked Uni) which makes a meta joke about the fact that you're playing the game on the Vita (which Uni is the personification of) and they didn't change it to account for the game, well, not being on the Vita anymore.  Oops.

(* Uni is voiced by the same VA as Sayaka Miki, in both the Japanese and English versions of both productions; I'm actually rather impressed that they pulled something like this off, because I have a feeling that this one joke probably dictated the casting choice for Uni's VA in the English version.  And yes, naturally, "Cuberial" enemies look like Kyubey.) [see spoiler warning above]

For now, at least, HDNR1 holds the honor(?) of being the only Idea Factory/Compile Heart game I've actually finished, but if they can keep putting out games like it, it probably won't be the last (Re;Birth2 has already been confirmed for PC, as has Fairy Fencer F, and I'll probably end up getting both and hoping that they sell well enough on PC to bring Re;Birth3 and Hyperdevotion Noire over).  Also has the honor of being the first relatively new RPG I've finished in probably over a year, so hey.  The game's a solid 7/10 to me, on the whole; never really rises above being merely good, it is absolutely not a masterpiece, but it held my interest and didn't overstay its welcome either.  (I did quite a lot of optional content, including unlocking two of the CPU Candidates - which is a notable grind - and getting the true ending, and I still finished inside of 33 hours.)  I could see it being a 6/10 if you don't appreciate all the meta jokes though.

[AndrewRogue]

X-Com the Boardgame: Finished the tutorial. Game feels and plays quite differently from Space Alert, which is nice. Game feels hella rough though. We barely cleared the tutorial successfully. The game accurately simulates X-Com's actual RNG. Will be curious to play the game on one of the actual difficulties.

Terra Mystica: Fire and Ice: Just when I was starting to understand the base game. New races are crazy and new boards change the game's dynamic pretty substantially. Still can't score well reliably.

Hansa Teutonica: We seem to be running into a groupthink issue where plates are just too good. The fact that they score bonus points for collecting and work as an endgame condition is really powerful, since it feels like other engines take too long to get going. Might just need to be more obstructive about preventing their collection? Who knows.

[Captain K.]

As for monster health, I suspect the reasoning behind not displaying it is largely obfuscative and/or psychological.  There's almost certainly an element of trying to minimize the "gamey" aspects of the game, that is, presenting the game as a fantastical monster hunting simulation moreso than as a simple game; this is, IMO, (weakly) reflected in the fact that the game gives you the option of toggling the HUD off completely, so you can't see your own health/stamina either.  I don't know of anyone who actually plays like this, but it does expose a bit of the design mentality in play here, I think.  Really, though, I think the much stronger argument for why this design choice was made is one of subtly manipulating player psychology; the player is going to approach each encounter much differently in the absence of such information.  A player who knows the monster only has 75 HP left is going to take much larger risks to burn that 75 HP off than one who only can see that the monster is limping, and "limping" could mean 75 HP or it could mean several hundred and you have no way of knowing.  (I can speak from definite experience here: Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on the PSP had cheat codes to display boss health on-screen which I used, and I *still* haven't completely "unlearned" the much more risky playstyle I adopted in that game, to the point where every friend I play with constantly points out my general lack of caution in multiplayer.)  MH's design is built all around rewarding caution over speed; there's a reason that they give you 50 minutes to complete each quest, and it isn't because you actually need it, because most of them can be completed in 10 or less.

And that's fine, except why exactly is there a timer at all?  If you want to simulate slowly stalking a giant monster to its death, why not let the player slowly stalk it to death?  Like the Edge battle in MGS3?  The timer forces players into a mindset of "gotta go faster"; combined with the huge stamina loss from how much you have to eat in those 50 minutes...

Archaic design principles aside, I am enjoying the game.  Just finished the Tetsucabra armor set, still doing 4 star missions.

[Grefter]

X-Com the Boardgame: Finished the tutorial. Game feels and plays quite differently from Space Alert, which is nice. Game feels hella rough though. We barely cleared the tutorial successfully. The game accurately simulates X-Com's actual RNG. Will be curious to play the game on one of the actual difficulties.

You guys beat the tutorial?  Fuck.  Here I was thinking it was designed to most likely make you lose to teach you how that works...

My brothers and I played a game on Easy and thought we had won, but forgot to progress rough a step before doing the final mission.  So rolled dice and shit and were like woot we won!!1! Then pushed buttons and found out we lost because of panic.

We played 3 player, so my older brother had a ton of shit going on as Commander and Central Officer, I think that would be too stressful for me.  I was happy with Chief Scientist (inthelab) role.  It lets you observe and help without being particularly stressful and probably has the lowest risk:reward situation.  It is pretty cool and some of the mechanics are both super neat and flavourful.  The game can present some pretty rough situations at time though.

Aaaaand I would love to know how much is pure RNG, how much is weighted RNG and how much is the game blatantly making choices in the app.  Regardless of that the dice are volatile as fuck, but winning feels so good.  Edit - oh yeah and the best feeling about Scientist was giving someone something amazingly strong.  Tech is super super effective.

[AndrewRogue]

X-Com the Boardgame: Finished the tutorial. Game feels and plays quite differently from Space Alert, which is nice. Game feels hella rough though. We barely cleared the tutorial successfully. The game accurately simulates X-Com's actual RNG. Will be curious to play the game on one of the actual difficulties.

You guys beat the tutorial?  Fuck.  Here I was thinking it was designed to most likely make you lose to teach you how that works...

My brothers and I played a game on Easy and thought we had won, but forgot to progress rough a step before doing the final mission.  So rolled dice and shit and were like woot we won!!1! Then pushed buttons and found out we lost because of panic.

We played 3 player, so my older brother had a ton of shit going on as Commander and Central Officer, I think that would be too stressful for me.  I was happy with Chief Scientist (inthelab) role.  It lets you observe and help without being particularly stressful and probably has the lowest risk:reward situation.  It is pretty cool and some of the mechanics are both super neat and flavourful.  The game can present some pretty rough situations at time though.

Aaaaand I would love to know how much is pure RNG, how much is weighted RNG and how much is the game blatantly making choices in the app.  Regardless of that the dice are volatile as fuck, but winning feels so good.  Edit - oh yeah and the best feeling about Scientist was giving someone something amazingly strong.  Tech is super super effective.

It was super borderline (Australia full on panicked, everyone else was 2-3 steps in Red) and we allowed some brief resolution fixes because we missed we had assets that could do things and such.

It was really interesting the way disasters drastically alter what you're doing moment to moment. We were struggling with air defense early, so we had to invest a bunch into fixing that and getting things back under control, then we lost like 4-5 soldiers to two INCREDIBLE botches and suddenly was having an impossible time actually replenishing them because l i t t l e  m o n e y. Came down to literally one roll for the actual win.

The dice are... interesting. The 1/3 success on the dice themselves is rough, but actually botching is... interesting. Not too scary until you hit 3-4 on the task, but then you just roll that 4 die fail, 1 on the alien die and lose 4 dudes and cry.

[Grefter]

Yeah it feels like a mess when you like, roll 3 successes and a 1 after 3 rounds of just not getting any successes on that 1 health sectors.  Pyrrhic victory!  For very little. 

I really dig how Floaters only had 1 icon so you could only attack them with 1 dude to emulate their manoeuvrability.  The game is full of stuff like that.

I think from a single play session with mega skewed data, the air game is really really vital and has massive negative impacts, missions on the other hand are way less vital than you would expect.  Shipping dudes out on your Skyranger to handle an incident can have way more effect and be super cost effective compared to a mission which you can look at, decide isn't worth the effort and just churn it next turn at no cost.

I think maybe the game could be a couple of years ahead of the curve on what it could potentially be.  A few more years time you could maybe tie in more QR codes and shit on to the pieces in play and just have player have their device review status of things through the camera and strip out manual inputs and shit.  It would be slick as hell.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

SMT Devil Survivor Overclocked - So, beat, got Gin and Haru's ending. The final day was a nice romp of just unleashing my hilariously overpowered and somewhat haphazard demon builds onto the poor game and watching things explode - so, the usual for endgame SMT. I kinda hiccuped in that there's no 8th day even on the 3DS version for Haru's ending, so I'll probably look at that on a replay or something. Hilariously, once the endgame drew in, I could've picked any of the endings but Kaido's, which is kinda silly considering I was only gunning for Gin's. Final party was Main Character (Mag/Vit build with a few stray points tossed into Agi and Str for a few specific spells like Megido and the Dances), Yoohoo, Izuna (with Atsuro subbed in for the very last map) and Mari. Unsurprisingly, all the strongest characters in the game are girls.

This said, the game honestly exceeded my expectations by quite a few notches. The map designs are kinda simplistic, a few of the systems are kinda annoying (Skill Crack didn't -really- find the right balance between making choices and just inspiring unnecessary resets, I find) and the overall difficulty kinda clocks in at somewhat low (even though the game picked up a few resets from me), but I feel there's a really interesting system overall under the bricks and rubble. The demon fusion and demon auction recruitment systems are great and the game really goes out of its way to hand you the necessary information on what you make and -how- you make it. The fusion search system is simply wonderful, letting you know which demons you can fuse, which demons you'll be able to fuse in a few levels and -how- you fuse them, which is all you need to create hilariously elaborate and powerful fusion chains. The simple map design also works to its advantage more often than not - maps are rarely obtusely crowded, they're not hard to handle fairly quickly and even then the objectives are varied enough within the system constraints. In a sense, there's a quiet elegance in the works there, which I like, and they certainly had their fun with enemy formations, mixing in a bunch of interesting demon teams that often require a monster-by-monster approach that works well with the strategy component.

Transparency on enemy stats and resists/weaknesses are also great within a SMT-style system, and led to interesting possibilities on map-by-map roster shuffles - which can be carried even mid-fight - god knows I've shuffled demons mid-turn in order to achieve a particular skill for range exploitation or mobility matters. Experience scaling is also a great idea in a game like this, and letting your main PCs level up by osmosis without fighting is pretty nice for life quality stuff (I wish this could be done with demons without handing them a skill, but I guess they didn't want the player spending no effort in grabbing level-up skills. I can understand that).

The usual SMT difficulty curve feels less stiff as well: the only real potential brick wall I've seen was the Wendigo fight, and even that isn't really -that- rough (mostly involved me learning to use Bind in order to keep it from reaching my PCs before I cleared the rest of the map. Granted, having that as like your THIRD map in the game is one hell of a wake-up call, since Wendigo's just kinda insane, scoring near-OHKOs with his basic physical on all your demons). From there onwards, it stays on the curve's sweet spot until the late midgame, where you start steamrolling everything. I wonder if they'll ever learn how to buck that trend, but given how they've been going that way for almost three decades now, I doubt it'll ever change. Though I'll also point out how I found the extra turn system the perfect compromise regarding the press turn philosophy for elemental weakness and resistance shuffling. This iteration retains the importance of hitting weaknesses in order to maximize your turn output and minimize the enemies' without the sheer degeneracy of its peers, which feels like the precise sweet spot they've aimed for since the old days of Nocturne.

This said, I also liked the scenario idea and the writing surrounding it. The game does a pretty good job selling you on the tension involved in a metropolis-wide lockdown and how the city and its inhabitants slowly spiral into madness. It also sells you on how scary the whole thing can be pretty decently when it needs to. I guess it doesn't hurt that I liked how the cast was written as well (particularly, I liked Atsuro a lot, he managed to strike a great balance between being a hopeless nerd and a practical, intelligent problem-solver. All bad rap aside, I also like Yoohoo, whose anguish about the whole thing is very believable and makes a -lot- of sense. I honestly found her most annoying BEFORE the lockdown, since she's... uh... kind of a bad human being then). The cast's not without its hiccups, though: Midori is insufferable and Keisuke's a Kresnik-level dumbass, but them's the breaks.

Regardless, this was a lot of fun and I'm definitely down for Record Breaker when it shows up. 7/10, and well worth the US$ 15 I spent on it.

EDIT: I'M ENJOYING SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI GAMES WHAT HAVE I BECOME

[Sierra]

Re: Labyrinth of Touhou 2: When LoT2 first came out, my initial impression was "holy shit this is way better than LoT1".  The more I think about this game in retrospect, though, the more I'm inclined to believe it's more of a lateral shift, if not actively worse in some aspects.  PC balance in 2 is notably worse than the first game (especially where any PC with the Maintenance skill is concerned [NITORI]), and I don't think it particularly helps the game either that the developer decided to embrace high enemy defense much more thoroughly than the first game while simultaneously nerfing the fuck out of ITD in general.  Most accounts of the game I've read on the Shrinemaiden forums (I haven't actually bothered to finish it) pretty much indicate that any damage dealer who lacks ITD is essentially useless in the endgame short of massive overleveling or using very specific team setups which abuse synergies.  In short it sounds like party composition - which given that there are fucking 48 playable PCs, should be the most interesting aspect of the game - is a lot less flexible than the first game's.  I feel like the only area in which LoT2 strongly improved is the user interface and allowing respecs.  Oh, and the art, of course.

The first game definitely had its problems with grinding and an uneven as hell difficulty curve, but at the end of the day, you could use pretty much whoever you wanted to a large degree and get through the game without grossly overleveling (while you do need "a tank" and "a healer", there are really 5 or 6 PCs that are some shade of viable as a tank and you have 3 realistic healer options, and that still leaves 10/12 party slots free to play with).  I don't feel like this is quite as true in the second from what I've seen.

I like the enhanced customization you get from skills. I don't remember if this was as much of a thing in the first one? Been a while, but there are definitely lots of cool and unique abilities that you can invest in to build people in different ways here. Cast balance is definitely not good, though. Bringing dedicated mages with you to a boss fight is almost always a liability, made out of tissue paper + too slow just not a combo you can get much out of even if you constantly switch them in and out of the party. There's also a handful of people that are almost always in my party because replacing them with anyone else would be mechanically suboptimal:

-Remilia: is crazy good. Excellent attack power, not really lacking in any stats, only escalates in effectiveness as a fight drags on because auto-buffs and Gungnir is so ridiculous that it cuts through defense the rest of the party often can't. She tends to sit in the front line for boss fights and just stay there the whole time.
-Reimu: MT heals. Yeah, Rumia does this too, but she's somewhat squishier, and not so good for smashing randoms or buffing the party, acceptable as a backup but not really a substitute.
-Sanae: mostly for randoms because of the TP restoration. Essential grinding component.
-Sakuya: not great on paper, but what paper doesn't tell is that the bonus action skill can trigger repeatedly in the same turn. For boss fights this means suddenly your party's speed is doubled at no extra cost; for randoms this means everything is killed for no extra cost.
-Rin: see above + super fast, it's not uncommon for randoms to die immediately because she snagged five actions in one turn and just obliterated everything. Not great for bosses because damage per hit = not spectacular, but indispensable for grinding.
-Momiji and/or Kasen: generally at least one of them's around. Fast, durable brutes that excel both at massive ST damage and full-screen nukes.
-Wriggle: because POIZN.

So that's like half my party typically spoken for. Komachi sadly isn't the amazing one-trick pony again, just too many bosses resist debuffs this time and I don't use her much as a result. Yuugi might be in there if I'd got her earlier, but I completely overlooked her recruitment until checking a FAQ on the last floor. Otherwise there are too many other characters that just don't bring anything unique to the table or simply don't have the stats to make good on a promising skillset (most mages fall into this latter category, also ATK boosts are easier to find on equipment than are MAG bonuses).

The overreliance on insurmountable defense definitely just gets more aggravating as the game goes on. It was a boring gimmick the first time, guys. ITD is the solution to this obstacle only in theory--it's not very common and what you have of it is usually tied to elemental attacks, which tends to be a fatal inconvenience just when you need ITD offense, so in practice the solution is pretty much always grind more. This isn't entirely a new or surprising thing since there were three distinct points I had no choice but to resort to this in the first game (fundoshi man, Yukari, final boss), but here it happens earlier and repeatedly whenever Tenshi shows up. The game's actually pretty well balanced before that. You could look at the recommended level on a boss icon and generally bet that it'll be tough but manageable if you go in at that level. Midway through this game those recommendations just got totally out of whack and I'd routinely have a very tough time dealing with things I was supposedly more than prepared for.

This is a lot of complaining, but I still enjoyed the game when it wasn't pulling the lol no damage for you bullshit. Past tense because there's a decent chance I'm just done with it, it's obvious I won't stand a chance against the final boss short of grinding out dozens and dozens of levels (and I'm already 21 over the recommended level). Nobody does any damage and he outspeeds everyone and borderline OHKOs most of the party.

~

EP: Sat down to knock out the last couple maps of Thage's story and wait, what's this? I don't have the right attacks to break the plot-critical boss's barrier? I was reasonably aware this was a possibility at some point because the party lacks any earth damage at all, but as it turns out the requirement here is vastly more dickish. So you're going to have the possibility of an actual ending hinge on: A) a mid-game boss I may or may not have even fought; B) and who I may or may not have captured if fought at all; and C) who I definitely would not have kept as a summon even if I had caught it? (Because captured enemies are far more useful being turned into skills or items than as allies.) Fuck you too, game. Beat up the third stratum boss* after that debacle and yup, game's all lol no final boss or ending for you.

(*King Bellion, still hilariously susceptible to fracture and easy to capture because of it.)

So that doesn't leave me in the best of moods. Is there any similar bullshit I should be aware of in advance in the Rondemion/Super Secret Character (who I already spoiled myself on) paths? Anyway, I figure smashing through NG+ shouldn't be any trouble at all because endgame levels vs subtractive defense, so I hack through the first map again to at least get back to town and turn in some majin for goodies. Then I recruit Alexei again and wait, what? Why is he at starting level again with ghetto gear? ...I see. Plot PCs retain levels and equipment, but mercs revert to starting level and any gear/skills equipped on them at the end of the game vanish into the aether. I know mercs will be unnecessary for most of the game because endgame plot PCs, but I expect I'll still need the help for the last maps, so instead of mindlessly smashing everything I still kind of have to babysit some low-level allies and feed them kills all game. Guys, if you're going to implement a stupidly easy NG+ mode, why deliberately half-ass it?

~

FONV: http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/535137718206738031/266BCCD798CF2FFBFDA1DC40384DEECEE844DD38/

The end.

Fighting zombies with Ulysses still more satisfying than actually fighting him, confused as he is. Oddly, through all conversation he acted like I was working for Mr. House, despite the fact that a courier chose to murder Mr. House with a golf club (I never even talked to him). The only thing I can see being responsible for this is NCR rep getting knocked down from idolized to good-natured rascal or whatever after I assassinated McLafferty (an act which no one even witnessed, even Hostetler didn't react to it even though he was in the goddamn room and I didn't use a silenced gun or anything). Courier duster similarly went with Old World Justice. Weird. Still better than NCR flag considering I'd every intention of stabbing them in the back this time around.

Easy mode did prevail for the top-tier GRA trophy. On normal? Even with maxed explosives skill, three ranks of demolitions perk, every crit bonus thingamabobber I know of, Psycho, bug/cazador-specific damage bonuses from combat-acquired perks and OWB, you've only got about even odds of a sneak attack oneshotting a cazador. Long fuse dynamite is just that bad. So to hell with doing that legit.

Caravan is the worst thing. It just makes no damn sense. I read the rules and thought I got it but sometimes matches would just end in someone's victory for no obvious reason at all. I don't know, maybe I shouldn't have played with No-Bark? Probably wouldn't have made a difference. Game would be terrible tedium with anyone.

I oneshotted the final boss without even entering dialogue, sneak attack + YCS 186 just that good. I have no idea where his body landed.

Also at some point this happened: http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/536263437632414436/103FA5466D829182D4D17DC9AFF8DBF0D9894628/

Since motion doesn't carry well into screenshots, you'll just have to take my word for it that this disembodied radscorpion torso is simultaneously vibrating, leaping up and down through the ground, and whirling, whirling towards progress. It's not quite the celebrated Doc Mitchell spinny head glitch, but it's still one of the more elaborate physics clusterfucks the game's perpetrated on me.

Glad to be done with the game this time. I love it and all but it's pretty obvious I never want to touch this engine again (I had to do two complete reinstalls just in the course of this run). Part of why I went all out and did everything even though I initially just set out to power level enough to get those last trophies; might as well close the game out with an ideal ending where no one I like (okay, other than Mr. House, but it was him or the Kings) gets spectacularly screwed (I think indie New Vegas is the only route in which Arcade isn't totally boned as a result of his personal quest?) Also shutting down Oliver's attempt at staging a Big Damn Heroes moment is still immensely satisfying.

Oh yeah, and the gambler suit you get for breaking the bank is totally swank.

~

CT: Schala must be one of the least justifiable kidnappings I've seen in a game. Dalton just walks into a room full of well-armed killing machines and punches her out, no one does anything. Just to make sure no one does anything, he thereafter threatens to kill her, which I have to think is a very unlikely course of action considering the entirety of his boss's plans depend on her. CT definitely one of those games that likely wouldn't be able to make me care about anything if the soundtrack weren't so effective. At any rate, stage is set for the best part of the game.

[The Duck]

I've been going through a number of the SJW Inquisition interactions on youtube, and some of them are quite good. Apparently I missed out on quite a bit of banter because it was bugged and they didn't show up often (which is a fucking terrible thing to be bugged in a Bioware game), but the romance options and some of the additional dialogues are up to par with other Bioware things. It's just kind of a shame that I saw maybe 15% of this even though I did make the effort to rotate party members and talk to everybody after major events. I bothered with Cole in my game, and maybe that was a mistake since I knew nothing about him and there are some interesting things there.

The game does tackle some interesting concepts, especially with regard to faith and trying to find meaning in hopelessness. The scenes after Haven are a period where the Inquisition is broken and needs something to believe in. The Herald is basically a cipher, but you can spend the game in sort of this impostor syndrome, where you don't ever feel like you can ever live up to how other people think of you (but recognizing that there is meaning in the fact that they do believe in you). The singing is a little Magnolia-esque, and it straddles a line between being moving and possibly corny, but it did work on me.

Cassandra's character arc involves a genuine struggle with her faith. It is also interesting when your Herald is an Elf or a Qunari since that doesn't jive with the teachings of the Chantry. The game touches on these things in a way that doesn't happen often since religions in most RPGs are just evil and being brought to the brink of utter despair is usually countered by the power of friendship or similar nonsense. I'm not religious but I thought that these aspects were handled fairly well.

All this doesn't make me want to replay SJW Inquisition, necessarily, but there would be things that I would explore and do differently if and when I do. Thankfully, youtube has most of the major interactions out there if I want to save my time.

[Grefter]

Yeah but does it have a bit where you can make emo Aiel Elves throw wine bottles at the wall repeatedly in dialogue loops? 

I didn't think so.

Hand of Fate - This is a really neat little game that I think I like more because of what it is than how it actually plays.  It is essentially a roguelike that is distinct short 'rounds' where you progress through a randomised set of events laid out like a dungeon from Edge Master Mode in some of the Soul Calibur games.  You find gold/equipment/food or take damage and interact with events other than combat sequences. 

Combat plays out sort of like Assassin's Creed combat goes where it isn't that hard, you can dodge and counter pretty much everything and it is telegraphed from miles away.  It is more about number of enemies and combinations of attacks that really scale up difficulty.    You do a run of that, beat a boss or die, then start again on the next one or trying to beat the same boss.  Each boss has their own curses that they inflict that changes the play (usually making a type of attack harder or sapping one of your resources types). 

Otherwise events are mostly decided by binary dialogue choices and picking one out of four cards represented to you that you can try to follow as they get Shell Gamed around.  They can vary on Huge Success, Success, Failure, Huge Failure.  Combination of which will depend on the scenario.  You can try to follow the card in the shell game but it can be hard at times.  Sometimes it is more optimal to just try and Not Fail rather than always go for best results depending on how good you are at it.  So it is a mix of skill or trying for chance  which you always have 25% chance for success.

You build your own deck of cards of equipment and stuff you will find, but you also build your deck of encounters you can have (some cards are locked and require encountering specific scenarios to progress them).  Beat bosses or meet certain conditions on cards will unlock more cards.  Cards normally unlock other related cards simulating a little story arc.  So as you progress you will unlock more and more possible encounters and cards, as well as getting to pick which ones you will run into.

That is just how it all works though, none of it is why I really like the game.  It is a game put together in Unity that uses probably 6 or so environments that I have seen and I am half way through the story mode.  So far have fought 4 types of enemies, 2 human types, lizard dudes and rat dudes.  The Lizards and Rats share a lot of the same skeleton, so don't have tons of diverse animation.    The majority of the game is you facing one guy who is fully Voice Acted, but has his face covered so they didn't have to animate his face.  he spends the entire time sitting down so they only have to animate his upper body.  He only ever directly interacts with tokens that signify "beating" a card.  Everything else shuffling cards and moving everything around he does with magic so the 3D models don't have to interact with anything else.

It is really trying to get the most out of a small pool of resources and I think it does a really good job.

I also really dig the setting and story.  You are constantly revisiting events that happened to you previously in your life and they are represented by the cards.  So as you slowly progress you are learning more and more about things that happened to the silent protagonist PC through cards, a bit of text and mostly a dude across the table cryptically referencing bits and pieces.  You are supposedly playing for your life, but when you do lose it isn't a big deal.  The dealer makes reference to lots of people have played, but does question how you lose the game overall if you can keep retrying.

I am not expecting a great deal, it is just going to likely be that you are dead or you are him  or some such, but it is a fun little mystery element to just tie everything together and keep a reason for continuing on.  It is fairly light string to tie it together, but it ties together a narrative to the gameplay of a game that is about playing a game.

[Tide]

[Grefter]

Congrats again.

Dark Souls 2 - Cheesed Giant Lord, which involved buffing Hunter's Blackbow a bit and getting a pile of Magic arrows to plink him down, but whatever.  After being one shot by fire and then getting one shot for standing next to a where a rolling statue head stopped I didn't have patience.

I killed Vendrick not realising I didn't need to bother.  4 Giant Souls rather than 5 because lol ancient dragon.

Throne Watcher and Defender got summoned at, then Nashandra did, then First Sinner did as well.  Lots of signs here because I assume that is all that anyone in the community is doing at the moment.  Died between each boss because that is pretty silly as a boss chain.

Edit - Not going to bother with any more DLC.  End game burned up the good will.  I might try it when there is people playing the game again in a few weeks on the DX11 version.

[Sierra]

Hunter's Blackbow cheese is doing it right (he's also pitifully susceptible to poison arrows, like most DS2 bosses).

I always kill the Throne jerks before Giant Lord because this way the fight doesn't chain directly into Nashandra (summoning also totally legit for wonder twins, that is an obnoxious fight and among my least favorite bosses in the game). Killing Vendrick is apparently the trigger for making Scholar of the First Sin appear as the final boss, which is the only reason I will ever waste time slogging through that particular optional tedium again (and even then probably only once to see the new final boss and/or ending?) For what it's worth, Vendrick's soul turns into one of the more broken weapons in the game (DS2 has a lot of broken to go around already, though).

Could maybe have tried warping out between bosses rather than dying. I don't know from experimentation whether DS2 lets you homeward bone away in the middle of a boss fight, but DS1 definitely did. Guess it wouldn't work no matter what if you had summons there, though.

[Grefter]

He was?  Shiit I tried them and it didn't take, but that was when Black Bow was thinking off him before some upgrades and my regular bow was out of range.

Probably could warp if solo.  Always summoned Sunbros because there was plenty of signs of people helping with Scholar.

Asking on reddit if my helpers got 3 medals or just 1 because if it was just 1 that is kind of shitty.

 Edit - turns out it wasn't worth trying to ask

[Niu]

Regardless, this was a lot of fun and I'm definitely down for Record Breaker when it shows up. 7/10, and well worth the US$ 15 I spent on it.

Snow, the writing in Break Record is closer to Persona 4 than that of Overclock. Just a warning.
The basic theme is also pretty different as Break Record is about fighting alien invaders (as if a super robot anime) rather than surviving a lock down.
So writing once, don't think you'll find anything in common.

The battale system is mostly the same. Except they now have really gimmicky bosses.

[Meeplelard]

Ni No Kuni: So the Pirate is a dog, and the dragon is a black kid on the track team.  This statement takes on an entirely different meaning whether you understand NI No Kuni or not, which is exactly why I said it!

Time to say something positive about the game to prove I don't think the game is the worst thing ever:

It's good at keeping you focused on the main story, even when you get diverted into doing a filler quest or something.  Everything you do feels like it has a purpose and even when it's a case of "road block", at least the game tries to make the road block sensible.  You never lose sight that your goal is "Beat Shadar" and that everything you're doing are just steps on the way to becoming strong enough to do so.   When a road block presents itself, it's actually integrated into the story, not just "The kid fell into the well, let's go help them because we're heroes!"  It'd be more like "That kid is the Mayor's son, and he's the only guy in town with a boat we need!  If we save the Mayor's son, he'll be more willing to do us a solid!"  That situation doesn't actually happen to be clear, but you can see where I'm getting at.

It stands out to me because slowly playing through FF4HoL again (...there are horrible reasons for this, yes), Djinn, who had been watching me from the beginning, actually had to question what our goal of the game was, because the entire game from that point has been basically a bunch of independent quests that just get us further away from the home town because...reasons?  The goal of the game, at least initially, is to save your town from a curse, but the game does such a bad job of correlating ANY event you do to having meaning to saving your town, you lose complete focus of your goals.  It becomes "you are the chosen one, go do a bunch of things until something important actually happens."  Ni No Kuni never really strays from it's main goal too far; you know what your goal is and why you're doing everything, and when you do deviate from the path, it lasts maybe a dungeon or two tops.

This feels like the easiest indicator of a game with bad story-telling.  Not necessarily an indicator of GOOD story-telling as plenty of games keep you focused but have crappy stories, but if a game struggles to connect required events to the main story and you can't remember what the purpose of your quest is at all, then the game clearly has failed at telling a story.  Deviating from the main story is not a bad thing but you shouldn't do it too drastically or too long term, because then you lose focus and forget why you're even on the quest to begin with.  This is only doubly so if the story in question has time sensitive elements (whether they effect gameplay or not), as then you need a legit excuse for why characters will waste time on these unrelated quests on top of keeping a coherent narrative.

[Sierra]

CT: Lenny's Ciato's Dalton's reign of terror is at an end. Acquired preferred party (Marle/Ayla/Sentient Widow's Peak), time to go sidequesting.

Probably it says everything you need to know about me that my favorite thing in the entire game is just Magus's cat recognizing him.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Regardless of that the dice are volatile as fuck, but winning feels so good.

Sounds like XCOM to me!


Anyway, I've been playing Sunless Sea.  It's got great writing and the atmosphere is pretty fantastic, but it still needs some polishing, most notably in the base speed of how quickly you move.  Makes getting around a bit more of a chore than it needs to be.  Not sure if the game is supposed to be this eternally punishing but it's hard as fuck to get and keep any kind of substantial wealth since you always seem to be dropping good-sized amounts on fuel, in no small part due to how there's really only a few places that the game dispenses money from and they're all toward the edges of the map.

[Monkeyfinger]

If you play dragon age inquisition by sticking mostly to the critical path and ignoring the big empty map sidequests, what are you missing out on? Any interesting side stories, any powerful material rewards?