What Games are you playing 2016?

[Dark Holy Elf]

Like every student at the school is playing Pokemon Go.  And I'm not. 

I feel old.

What I am playing is Bravely Second. Up to chapter 5! Mostly gotten a handle on the game now and it isn't putting up too much of a fight any more, though the final boss of Chapter 4 was decent enough, very obviously a spin on her BD predecessor and not as good overall although the new tricks were neat. Currently picking up the jobs I didn't get before, which will derail the plot a while. Time manipulator with a slasher smile will have to wait.

I'm also playing Ori and the Blind Forest on the recommendation of Snowfire + non-DL sources, seems solid so far outside of combat which is... kinda weird, your attacks basically always hit so you just focus on dodging. Not very deep so far but it's different at least.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

MGS5 - This game keeps being perplexing, good when it is good and then amazingly terrible when it is terrible.

On one hand it is cool that Quiet lies down on her bed, undoes her top and just chills to She Blinded Me With Science.

On the other hand she does it in a prison cell in the middle of an otherwise empty room on an oil tanker in the middle of nowhere so the player can just sit there and watch her.

Edit - But as a plus I unlocked a different look for my dog so it doesn't have an eye patch just like Snake.  The spoilers at the end of the game make so much of this stuff super eye rolly.  Like I think if I didn't know it then it would still be eye rolly because of how thick they lay it on, but holy shit is it fucking ridiculous.  Kojima isn't an artful storyteller.  He just drives dump truck and empties load after load of ITS THE THEME in your front yard.

MGS5 does a lot of things that are perplexing. It opens with half an hour of "war really fucks people up, look how fucked up you are crawling around with your atrophied muscles and half an arm" but it intersperses it with Jean Grey and a man on fire who is immune to bullets. Then you get past that and for a while it's a fairly grounded sandbox about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or brush fires in central Africa. But every once in a while it has to go back to those other two wells when the game would be much better without them.

If the actual gameplay wasn't so good and so good at making tons of viable approaches I would have dropped it long ago.

[Fenrir]

I'm glad to hear it's good.  It LOOKS good, but I saw a couple in-game messages about how it's sooooooo~ hard and how you need to git gud and if you don't, REALLY why are u even playing, and that was, y'know. A turn-off.

Yeah I think the difficulty setting menu is condescending to people who'd pick easy, but probably not on purpose (it's like "plz don't pick this difficulty it's boring" not bullying for picking easy like Doom did)
Difficult games often convey their difficulty obnoxiously, even Souls (praise Souls) Ah well.

Game overs were frustrating. On the other hand, it becomes relatively easy and still fun to blaze through a boss' first phases to go back to where you lost. I had between 0 and 3 game overs per boss, probably around 10 in all, so it never got too crazy difficult for me in a way a Souls boss can get. If you are having too much trouble with one phase, you might just need to change your strategy (it's easy to forget about charged attacks but they are sometimes very effective)

 There was one 100% BS boss phase IMO (Sniper last phase) but otherwise I have no complaints.

My favourite boss was the sixth one, the song
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BINJWMRJLb8

[Grefter]

A reminder of just how much like Drakengard and how much you confuse me.  It does look very much like a Jim kind of game though.  I think its free this month on PS+ too right?

Fallen London - I keep forgetting CK still plays this and I should be sending him things.  I am a Level 20 fixer now.  Guess I spend excess election items on material things.  Currently my main goal is to get myself a gang of thieves.  I got the items I need other than 1 more Favours: Criminals. I had the 5 banked then forgot what I needed them for and spent one.  THat was 2 days ago and the Opportunity deck is not being nice.

I might get myself sent to Prison in a way without getting a criminal record.  That should let me get favours easily, get an acquaintance who apparently makes getting them easier and then I will get my gang of thieves who will let me get favours easier.

Goddammit why did I spend that one favour by mistake.

[Fenrir]

I actually like the occasional ultra tight action game: God Hand, Revengeance, Hyper Light Drifter, Nuclear Throne, Hotline Miami 1, and now Furi. They are susprisingly rare!
Furi's synthwave music is also straight up my dope, it could be in Hotline Miami and no one would notice

My love for Drakengard is more like my love for 999 or Illbleed: everything is objectively not very good (music aside), yet I can't look away

[Fenrir]

Hey Grefter do you know about Illbleed

If not

Oh boy

[Hunter Sopko]

I think its free this month on PS+ too right?

It is? Huh. Might as well grab it too...

[Niu]

Second!

Why is it bad. So far I like it. Balance seemd fucked but the rest is fine

This game boils down how the writer of game fangasming over his own character in obnoxious ways.

Edit: I should rephrase this. The second game was made with the sole purpose to let the writer can fangasm over the said character. Original there wasn't any plan for the second game. The game was only made because the writer wants to fangasm that much.

[Captain K]

Fallen London:  mostly concentrating on the campaign, I am up to level 15 Fixer.

[Captain K]

I BEAT A GYM. 

Was trying the dodge technique to avoid damage.  When the enemy pokemon attacks, there is a flash around the edge of the screen, wait half a second and then swipe to dodge.  So mixed results with this.

Attempt 1:  Was getting used to the dodge timing, died.
Attempt 2:  I'm dodging everything!  Oh, there's a time limit.  Whoops.
Attempt 3:  Okay, so if I dodge everything I run out of time.  So I make a mixed strategy of only dodging super attacks and spamming normals otherwise.  It works!  Except I get the bug where the enemy survives with 1 hp infinitely.
Attempt 4:  No bug this time, and I beat the gym.  Oh, gym still has 350 prestige left, guess I have to knock it down to zero to take it over.
Attempt 5:  Finally take over the gym.  I leave a CP 119 Krabby to defend it.  TEAM MYSTIC

Somehow my Krabby was beaten less than an hour later.  What are the odds?

[SnowFire]

After seeing a wave of blue & red in my area (unsurprisingly), I pity joined Team Yellow.  Consider it the equivalent of Hard Mode.  I have no idea what I'm doing in the fights however and got destroyed without doing anything in the one gym I challenged.  Alas.

Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition: Finished.  Okay, the HM skill cost increase isn't *so* bad with the larger map meaning more ability point cells + me knowing where a bunch of them were from the start, I suppose.  I almost finished the final section on the first try, but the very last part cost me several deaths.  Argh.

The new area (Black Root Burrows + Lost Grove) was cool enough, although definitely balanced around coming there later in the game rather than earlier.   Guess going there early is something to do to show off, basically, since they'll let you in early.  Not sure why they tried to hype up some of the "plot" aspects in the DE trailer, though...  not saying there's anything *wrong* with the choice they did, but they didn't include any crazy plot twists or anything.  You pretty much visit where Naru grew up.  That's it.  No shocking revelation or anything.

Glad to see Elf is giving this a shot, though!  I love the game, personally, and was pretty happy doing a 2nd playthrough.  Steam Leaderboards seem infiltrated by cheaters as usual, although one of the names up there is the name of a tester + speedrunner of the game, so who knows.  I'm highly skeptical of completing the game in 2 minutes.

Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation: Not that I'm complaining about small deploy count maps - I think FE goes a lot faster if you're not constantly doing "okay, now drag all 16 characters around" - but if there's one scenario where they should rig things to have huge deploy count maps constantly, it's the one where you have access to nearly every character!  (Sorry, Yukimura / Scarlet / Izana.)  I feel like I barely have any room in my party for characters I just personally want to favor.  Anyway, last map had ~7-8 or so deploys, and this map has a mere 12.  I'm doing an Awakening-friendly run, so Selena/Laslow/Odin/Caeldori, Corrin (actually required) + Azura (soft required), 2x healers (uh, sure, Sakura + Elise, although Felicia is probably better than Elise without some XP favoritism + grinding I threw her way), 1 Locktouch unit (uh, Kagero I guess?  Kagero you suck, the enemy master ninjas double you), and....  that's 9/12 already.  Throw in Anna / Rhajat / Asugi and there'd be no room for royals / map-appropriate deploys!  (But we're not, of course.)  And heck, even solely among royals, 3 open slots means 3/6 remaining still ride the bench.  (Ended up grabbing Hinoka / Takumi / Leo / Camilla and just temporarily benching Laslow, since no Xander.)  But yeah, ugh, I have like 20 units I'd *like* to use, and it's harder than usual to rotate 'em with such small deploy counts.

Fire Emblem (the GBA one): I dug up my old VisualBoyAdvance saves, so hey, Hard Mode is unlocked!  On C8 of Lyn Hard Mode so far.  Lundgren has a fairly simple plot, but it's perfectly understandable and line-of-inheritance issues are pretty classically reasons for noble conflict.  This is more than can be said for some of the more ludicrous villains in other FEs.   I also liked the touch with the ruler of the other city who doesn't mind Rath, but is annoyed at Lyn.  There's not a lot of dialogue but dang if it doesn't work better than some of the more heavy-handed RACISM BAD plotlines in video games.

[Fenrir]

Oreshika: I had my healer have sex with a giant fish god to ensure the next generations would still get MT healing
Their offspring is an abomination of nature

I feel kinda bad looking at the list of mostly SUPERHOT GODS and selecting the one that looks like a disgusting catfish so he can have sex with my super cool reliable awesome clan member that's been helping me all these years
But, you know. Min/maxing! EUGENICS!

I looked up what the hell Niu was talked about and it's just needing a forced Gremio for a few battles? Kinda annoying but not a huge deal.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Yeah I always feel Lyn Mode has quite an effective storyline and I really wish the whole game had been about more down-to-earth issues like noble conflict and realistic takes of racism instead of a band of hundreds of "noble assassins" and their insane-due-to-dark-magic patron.

Bravely Second - Done all the sidequests in early Chapter 5 and beat Geist/Revenant. I appreciate that Geist had a meaningful reason for buying into the emperor's crazy-stupid plan, unlike most of the rest of his underlings who seem to be some variation on "the emperor was nice to me so sure let's go along with this insanity why the fuck not", ugh. There are certainly glimmers of potential and good ideas in the plot here and there but the writing that strings it together is so bad overall. I'll have more to say about it later, maybe.

The gameplay remains generally a joy. The extra polish improvements over Bravely Default (chiefly the easy ability to repeat an action 2-4 times), some of the new toys like Spellcraft, etc., are all fun, and as usual I loves me a good job system game. The game's not so challenging any more but it's enough to keep me awake and honest and with a relatively strong setup, currently:

Edea: Ninja with Dark Arts, Triple Wield/Katana Lore/Phys+20/Hawkeye. Responsible for dealing the damage. Blow things up with Dark Bane, as usual. The lack of Dark Shields and Drain Spellblade means this isn't as degenerate as BD, but it's still strong! However, I've now reached the point where I can do more ST damage when fully buffed with regular physicals, which is interesting. Ninja is great because it + Hermes Sandals actually outspeeds most enemies which isn't easy to do in this game.

Yew: For a long time was Wizard with Bishop magic, but now that I've mastered Wizard I'm trying out Summon since I have the MP and it seems to work pretty well with Spellcraft. Anyway, Spellcraft/magic-focused character with MP Regen/Angelic Ward/Stand Ground for more durability, there are lots of good healing tricks that Bishop/Spellcraft can pull off using Dart/Mist/Blast/even Wall is interesting for enabling more Black Banes. He also functions as a secondary attacker, especially if I run into things with high defence, with Dart/Needle/Blast spells.

Magnolia: Pirate/Swordmaster with Revenge/Angelic Ward/Armour Lore. Possibly the MVP, which is a surprise. As in BD most enemies are physical, so draw their fire with Nothing Ventured and counter them, Revenge ensures she gets turns besides this. Pirate debuffing is unchanged from BD and remains nice, though Pirate itself is weaker because axes aren't as uber and they get a terrible hit count compared to other classes. Almost to Amped Strike/Free Lunch which should be fun.

Tiz: Astral Magic, the other skillset varies, various passives which buff Astral Magic. For a while I had Curaga + the WM support which allows MT spells at full power, since that was full healing, but recently I've found two healers redundant and am sending him through Black Mage (which sucks) in the hope that he can get the passive which makes ST spells MT. Anyway Astral Magic is great (all the stat buffs but also some spiritmaster stuff like strengthening/nulling elements), especially now that I've gotten the passives which double their duration AND allows buffing up to 200%, in addition to Prescience which makes them initiative.

[Cotigo]

Yeah I always feel Lyn Mode has quite an effective storyline and I really wish the whole game had been Suikoden instead of being an FE game.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Stories about power struggle between groups over something concrete like land or resources tend to be stronger in general, because those tend to be driven by character motivations and seldom resort to "magic made it happen."

[jsh357]

Zero Time Dilemma - What a tweest

[Fenrir]

Which one?

Hey this reminds me that I haven't talked about Zero's identity!

It is fucking stupid and the worst twist ever

[jsh357]

Which one?

Hey this reminds me that I haven't talked about Zero's identity!

It is fucking stupid and the worst twist ever

That was the one I meant. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I haven't finished the game.

[Fenrir]

The rest of the game does not put what is wrong with this twist into perspective

Honestly the hilarious reveal about the Killerman murder mystery  in Illbleed was less stupid than this, and it was a parody

[Fenrir]

I'll spoil it for everybody.

So Zero is a member of the cast.

 Here are the 9 characters:
- Junpei from 999
- Akane from 999
- Phi from VLR
- Sigma from VLR
- Diana, a surprisingly familiar red haired woman who looks fairly normal
- Carlos, probably the new main character, a firefighter
- Mira, the fanservice character
- Eric, the loser who's in love with the fanservice character
- Q, a little boy with a giant metallic round head thing stuck on its head
- There's a dog too I guess I should mention it.

Which one is Zero? Who is behind all of it? Take a guess.

The answer is
A SECRET character who's an old man in a wheelchair and who has been secretly tagging along with the other characters, but has never been shown by the game for some reason? He apparently told them somehow that he's deaf and blind and mute, so they've been ignoring him for the whole game, we just haven't seen it.. The characters always suspect each other but never the guy in the wheelchair too.

[Lord Ephraim]

ZTD spoilars:

There was subtle hints that there might have been another person hanging around Q team.  When Eric mentions "old man" the camera pans to the dog who you think he talking to.  Also when Q team is knocked out by drugs you hear 4 body thumps, one for the old man in the chair.  In the 3 man standoff ending in the study, if you enter Q the game asks for his real name.  Entering Sean results in an error.  There's a bunch of little things you can spot out during a replay I thought was clever, but goddamn the whole thing about MIND HACKING just made Delta a stupid cartoon villain.  He killed the dog for no goddamn reason.

[Twilkitri]

Tokyo Mirage Sessions: ♯FE - played through

It's good.

I find myself in the unusual position of wanting to get a soundtrack and it being too early for it to have been released yet.

Sessioning is great, until you get closish to the end of the game and are doing seven-attack combos against generic enemies and failing to kill them, and everyone's picked up their advanced session moves which take twice the time to animate as their regular session moves, and you start to get entirely sick of it. But it's great while it's great.

There should totally have been skills available to up the chances of duo arts being triggerable, and I am aware that this would make the sessions even longer more often, but at least they'd be killing enemies more often.

Radiant skill unlocking is far, far too backloaded. Nothing like finally picking up some 6-star prestige and the skill notification app dropping 30 messages on you, and even that only because it caps out at 30 messages. Pretty much everyone has a skill which gives them negligible walking-based regen of either HP or EP which is locked behind 6-star prestige that is completely useless, everyone has a skill which unlocks an additional passive slot locked behind 6-star prestige, everyone has a skill which unlocks an additional session slot locked behind 6-star prestige... you couldn't have handed any of these out any earlier, game?

Of course on top of this the weapon/radiant skill unlocking ends up being highly aggravating on top of that, as there's an extended animation which happens for each that you can skip mid-animation but can't disable completely, and the animations take time to load in, so it takes way longer than it should to go in and create a bunch of them. This on top of Tiki being way too far away from the entrance to the area she hangs out in. Worse than the 6-star prestige problem is when you finally get access to strengthening weapons, and you're probably going to want to strengthen each of your weapons at least once, so you get to deal with that animation essentially once more for each of the weapons you've acquired so far at that point.

There are way too many achievements in the game and they don't count them for you, and I'm not going to bother counting up how many I got. I can say I got at least half of them because I got a trophy for doing so. Literally no point in trying to get all of them because some of them are locked behind doing multiple playthroughs or doing playthroughs on high difficulties.

Dungeon gimmicks were generally decent.

There are some strikingly odd omissions from the chapter-end bosses, given the general trend of them. I think there are supposed to be some superbosses available in repeat playthroughs so maybe they show up there. And, I guess, some strikingly odd inclusions, given that I didn't realise who two of them actually were until I checked just now. (Garrick and Pheros, for all that the latter arguably hardly counts given they don't get a unique design; the former is also on shaky ground here, but much less so.)

[Lord Ephraim]

Kirby: Planet Robobot

They finally did it: POIZN Kirby.  It kind sucks, but it's a Kirby game so you're never in danger even with terrible abilities.

Anyways it's a reskinned Triple Deluxe with Mecha powers but the level design and music is top notch.  Very chill and relaxing game after all the crazy dumb anime games I've been playing on the 3DS.  One of the abilites is literally Smash Ness, which is probably the last thing you'll see from Earthbound until Smash 5 is released in 2025.

[Fenrir]

ZTD spoilars:

There was subtle hints that there might have been another person hanging around Q team.  When Eric mentions "old man" the camera pans to the dog who you think he talking to.  Also when Q team is knocked out by drugs you hear 4 body thumps, one for the old man in the chair.  In the 3 man standoff ending in the study, if you enter Q the game asks for his real name.  Entering Sean results in an error.  There's a bunch of little things you can spot out during a replay I thought was clever, but goddamn the whole thing about MIND HACKING just made Delta a stupid cartoon villain.  He killed the dog for no goddamn reason.

I think the subtle clues hinting at a hidden villain are clever when you're Wild Arms 3 and your villain is Beatrice, but not when the murder mystery element is a huge part of the game. It's like WHAT IF the culprit in the Hound of Baskerville was Mr Peters, a dude who has been hanging and talking with Holmes and Watson for the whole case but has never been mentioned by the book, only subtly hinted. (Like Watson and Holmes go to the restaurant but there are 3 plates on the table)
The fuck?
Also this is the last time I'll ever praise Wild Arms 3 for something

[Magic Fanatic]

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius

The BGN Arena Boss of A-3 was a nightmare.  Beaten with a combination of two characters spamming Sleep, one spamming Blind, and two spamming Bio.  Using this strategy, the boss of A-4 died as well, and was much less threatening besides.

Still wondering who my best team should be.  Got Kuja to 5*, and working on Vaan/Rain/Lasswell/Fina.  Maria's a good holdover for Explorations due to a MT Healing Limit Burst, and I'm trying to see if Rydia/Kain/Core Gladiator pan out at all.  Sabin's another option, but I haven't paid him much attention.