What Games are you playing 2016?

[Grefter]

This makes me want to try and go deep diving to find documentation of Fenrir's first run of SotN but I suspect it was pre-RPGDL era. 

Maybe it has been long enough that his memory will be gone and it is mostly blind again?

[Fenrir]

Wait what do I have to do with anything
You know I have absolutely terrible memory, also I just FAQed the hell out of everything back then

Generosity in obscure weird stuff is what makes SotN arguably superior to the later Castlevanias, which don't share that property. The SotN castle remains impenetrable and mysterious, it has a presence, it's not one giant videogame level.

Anyway you know what the best part of SotN? The catacombs. They rock. The location (Below everything else), the music (Rainbow Cemetary, best track), the lava projecting giant shadows of Alucard and his enemies, the background details, the awesome Ganfaloon, etc. I'd have gushed about the catacombs here, big time.


I just compared anime-gothic Soma (Aria of Sorrow) to anime-anime Soma (Dawn of Sorrow). His hair went from 8/10 to 0/10. He also dropped the cool shoes and bell-bottom trousers. Grefter weeps.



I wonder what SotN Alucard would have looked if he had been drawn by the generic anime guy responsible for DoS and PoR. Would he have a mullet?



I bought Earth Defense Force 4.1. It is definitely pretty cool, though the upgrade system is archaic.
I love the city and the little details. And blasting cars with plasma launchers.
I think every character says "Giant insects" at least once every time they speak. It is weirdly endearing!

[SnowFire]

https://youtu.be/bR2pkPoyepc?t=20m

[Fenrir]

Jesus I guess I forgot everything about DoS, now the most disposable Castlevania
Alucard is not that bad though

[Sierra]

Anyway, recommended as long as you can tolerate an entire cast of moe anime girls that wear skimpy clothing and refer to themselves in the third person.

It's a Moetroidvania piece.

I can cope with this equation since I have no personal familiarity with shame. I can confirm game is fun to play. I started on Normal since I start every game on Normal. This may have been a mistake (though not nearly so much as first playing Catherine on Normal). Prologue bosses were no trouble but most every boss I've found after that took 10-20 attempts for victory. This is much less frustrating than it could be because after failure the game restarts you immediately outside the boss room and also there is sceneskip (there's a surprisingly substantial amount of talking in this game). You don't really lose anything for dying to a boss. After I first had trouble with a couple of them, though, I thought hey, I'll explore more, get some power-ups and come back stronger, start with the lowest-level boss and work up. Well it turns out bosses level up along with you. (Randoms do not appear to do this.) I've never been a fan of level-scaling as a balance mechanic in any context--it makes your upgrades feel pointless--but for better or worse it does mean you have to learn boss movesets here. Which can actually be pretty huge, sometimes I just lucked out and the boss opted not to use the attacks I just couldn't dodge around. So far I've refused to answer yes to the game asking whether I want help after repeated death. I don't know what accepting this offer actually entails.

At first I thought the game spent way too much time railroading you before free exploration was a thing, but I now see that there's a whole stack of trophies for either doing specific things out of order or just not doing some seemingly mandatory things at all, so maybe I just didn't try hard enough to sequence break.

[SnowFire]

Yeah, Alucard's DoS design is actually fine, very respectful to the original.

Also obligatory reminder that Dawn of Sorrow is great.  Just ignore Soma mode and play Julius mode and you're good.

Also Grefter now that I think about it, pretty sure that you swapped it (aside from being generally wrong anyway) - it's the Arena that you can get to from the central Clock Tower once you get double jump.  Olrox's Quarters is what the Arena is called in the Inverse Castle.

El Cid, you played Catherine on Normal?  My condolences.  (Undo!  Undo!  Undo!  Undo!)

Fenrir I realize you'd never read any tiny text you're not supposed to read because you're very trustworthy, but I'm surprised you didn't take the hint from the tiny text you could read on BD (or at least never told us if you did).  I'm disappointed.  (To be more explicit, since you're in C7 and said you want to get spoiled, and sound like your stuck on the Asterisks...  if you're interested in a gameplay option that will give you some sweet gear that may yet help for some of these C7 teamup fights...  as a reminder from the plot scenes you're skipping:
* DeRosso & Yulyana, when they were having some DBZ ultimate battle hundreds of years ago, saw an 'angel' fall from the sky who looked exactly like Agnes.  The angel said her world got blowed up and that she'd trusted 'The Deceiver' whom she shouldn't have.
* The Eternians seem to be portrayed successively more sympathetically as the game goes on.  A rational person might say "These are just alternate universe versions, a new version of them being nice doesn't change the earlier one being a jerk."  But that is thinking too hard about it.  Look, it's bizarro character development.  And Edea's father sure didn't think what the party is doing to the crystals was wise.  Maybe they have a point...?  (even if they inexplicably won't explain why)
* You know, the problems sure haven't seem to have fixed themselves so far...  maybe doing something different would help.)

[Sierra]

I tried Catherine on Normal. I don't think I made it past day two or three before restarting on Easy.

[Fenrir]

Snowfire this is too much exposition!
I don't understand any of it.
It took me some time to realize who Edea was. -And- she's in my team. I only remembered her because her name is a ridiculous pun.
I do wish to get sweet gear though


Among all the IgaVanias I think DoS is the only one that's lacking something special? Still good though (and better than the first two GBA games)


Earth Defense Force 4.1: I did some local co-op multiplayer. Explosions. Explosions everywhere.

I don't think there is voice chat which is good. After every minor victory I have my character hapilly shout "EDF! EDF!!" and there is no warmer feeling  in online gaming that seeing also other players respond with "EDF!!! EDF!!!!" and we're all in unison screaming EDF.

Online progression is not shared with offline progression which sucks a lot.

[SnowFire]

Fenrir I can't teach you independence via telling you what to do.  You'd still be following orders, just a different set of them.  You have to figure it out yourself.

You played Deus Ex Human Revolution, right?  Remember that quest to upgrade your malfunctioning implant over at the clinic with the hot new model?

[AndrewRogue]

I tried Catherine on Normal. I don't think I made it past day two or three before restarting on Easy.

Was it really that hard? I know I didn't one-shot everything, but I don't recall Catherine being THAT hard.

[Cmdr_King]

I gave up around Night.. 5?  even playing on Easy in Catherine.  Admittedly I actually cleared a stage, then lost the next one and hadn't saved and had trouble reclearing the previous one.  Catherine is brutal.  Girl-Djinn will consume your soul.  Om nom nom.

The trouble with the Eternians is two fold:
1) Aside from Eternia itself, which is harvesting sweet crystal mojo to perform healing miracles, the rest of the world is rather horrifically fucked up by the crystals being dimmed.  Stagnant unnavigable oceans and silent winds are things that will very quickly starve out large segments of the world guys.  And the Eternians are using their advanced magi-tech and special forces to... actively worsen those problems.  They can argue against the crystalists all they want, but you can't do that but then say "We're the good guys you teenage RPG heroes are going to destroy everything YOU JUST HAVE TO TRUST US WE ARE ADULTS".  Any rational person would assume you're just supervillains.
2) Seriously guys you haven't put Qada and DeRosa in prison yet and actively let them lead troops?

[Laggy]

I made kappa play all of the stages in Catherine so I could just do the visual novel stuff.

It has a reputation for being p above average difficulty on Normal, most folks I know downgraded to Easy first playthrough.

[Lord Ephraim]

No shame is playing Catherine on Easy.  It's a lot more trial and error on Normal and you need Korean reflexes to play on Hard/Nightmare/whatever.

Xcom 2 - Commander/"Ironman" beaten (I had the Ironman setting off due to bugs, but kept soldiers dead and missions failed)

Mid/lategame is a complete and total joke.  Basically once you get warden armor and mimic beacons, there's almost no risk of being shot due to dumb alien AI.  They'll put themselves in bad positions to flank a mimic beacon, only to get blasted by the one of many grenades that you're packing.  Sectopods? One emp grenade and blue screen rounds puts in down in a turn.  I don't think I've seen a Gatekeeper do anything.

The only time I had guys take damage was collateral damage from exploding cars because I missed a 75%.  Rangers do way too much damage with shotguns, grenadiers shred too much armor, and one trained hacker can just take control off heavy Mec units with ease.  This is totally ignoring how really powerful Psi units are.  Alien psi amps raise Mind Control to 90%?  It works on Gatekeepers as well.

All you need to get going is a perfect first and second mission.  It's damn hard with how much rookies suck and grenades can't one shot.  Even still it's not as bad as Xcom 1 where Thin Men can rout a squad of rookies and there's nothing you can do about it.

[Fenrir]

Those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it, and to not get phat loot

[Grefter]

Is Catherine hard or are the controls just literally the worst thing Atlus have ever made?

Also warning this thing is huge but fucking amazing and I am mostly linking just to link this amazing thing I found, but Snowfire if you look here you can see the little loading rooms that define different "areas" of the SotN map.  You have to go through 2 zone transitions from the Clocks to get to the Colosseum (Arena is the Inverse Colossuem rekt scrub).  The first one takes you in to the section with the big Spectral Sword okay yeah i looked that one up and the section you use the Gravity Boots to jump up to fight Olrox and all that chunk has no load room.

No I have no fucking clue why they put 2 room connector between the two of shuffling things a bit more there to reduce the number of transitions, but I assume its got something to do with the size of the area already connecting the clock tower (it is a really huge chunk of level).

Also could talk BD plot but if Fenrir doesn't care why should I?

Also Fenrir played Deus Ex?  I didn't think that would be his thing.

[Fenrir]

When talking about an RPG you can assume I have played it
I am a monster and have had way too much free time
I did play the new Deus Ex (also the old one) and used Fridge2Win tactics


I found Catherine immensely hard but controls weren't really the problem. It's puzzle solving with a super strict time limit

[Hunter Sopko]

Firewatch - Played this, was sort of looking forward to it. About what I expected? I don't often play games of this genre despite being interested in them, so I enjoyed it. It does a wonderful job of setting up tension but blows it in the reveal. Won't spoil. Short, about 4 hours. All the dialogue trees are fully voiced, so I imagine that's where the budget went. The map isn't as big as I thought it'd be, sadly, but for an indie game it's very pretty.

Not worth the 20 it's going at right now. Wait until it's on sale for like 10? I preferred Unfinished Swan for neat indie titles I've played recently.

[SnowFire]

Catherine gives you 50 moves or so worth of Undo's on Easy, and like 1 Undo on Normal.  And I've wanted to undo more than 50 moves on Easy before.  If you know all the puzzles and solely wanted to be tested on accuracy of execution, fine, Normal+, but for actually solving the puzzles in the first place, I'll take my undos so I can experiment, thanks.

CK: Well, yes and no.  Game's kinda inconsistent on what exactly the crystals being dimmed implies.  C5-C8 worlds don't appear to have any particular problem at all with the crystals being dimmed!  And for that matter the game *acts* like the crystals being dimmed isn't as horrible as it 'should' be; by all rights things like the waters being fouled should be a mass extinction event even if you fixed everything afterward.  It's also possible that there's some "happy medium" setting of the crystals that enables happy life but doesn't tune a world up to be connected via the Great Chasm.  Also Qada & DeRosa in the later chapters go to being more "Silver Age cartoon villains" who are plotting against their bosses and on the outs in political power, notably in C7.

Fenrir: Since you're not into BD plot, I'll phrase this totally in terms of gameplay.  You keep succeeding at the tasks the game has given you, but you haven't seen the credits and been given happy ending music.  What's up with that?  So...   maybe the tasks aren't helping.  Try failing.  Fail hard!  Fail spectacularly!  Fail magnificently!  Fail the worst way you can imagine!  Not in RPG battles of course, that'd obviously be game over, but there must be some other way to subvert the narrative...

[Excal]

To continue on with what Snowfire said, I like Bravely Default because so far as I'm concerned, the best ending isn't getting to the end of Chapter 8 and defeating the final boss.  It's figuring out what's going on, how to stop it, and then defeating the person behind it.  Getting to the end of Chapter 8 is the bad end you do for completion's sake here.

[Cmdr_King]

Snowfire- That's just normal fantasy logic.  It's presumably less "the waters of the earth turned bitter" and "the Oceans are in a sort of stasis".  Still pretty horrible, but it's worth remembering that lakes and rivers are unaffected, so the immediate impact would be lower and it's leaving the matter like it is for serious lengths of time that would do damage.
And we've probably had this conversation before, but note that there's a lot of button mashing between "the gunk surrounding the crystal is removed" and "the crystal glows with brilliant light".  Presumably one interferes with its normal function in the ecosystem, while the other causes it to resonate with other crystals (which I assume to be the villainous plan and how it works in the mechanics of the game world.)

Excal- Kicking the can in a timespan measured in millenia is still kicking the can.  You could certainly argue that the people of the future would be better prepared and equipped to face the threat, but that's a LONG TIME for information on the nature of the threat to be lost to history.  In that sense facing it now, when we know what's going on, may be a worthwhile risk.
Sadly the game doesn't play it that way but logically it SHOULD.

[Sierra]

I found Catherine immensely hard but controls weren't really the problem. It's puzzle solving with a super strict time limit

Pretty much that. I only found myself cursing the controls when climbing behind the wall or something, and if I had to do that then it probably meant that I'd fucked up. Which was the more frequent cause of cursing.

[Excal]

CK - I'll admit, I'd have liked it a lot better if it had played it that way.  Then again, I also really hate plotlines where previously the big bad could only be sealed, but for some reason you can just straight up kill them.  And frankly, if it weren't for the Gary Stu power duo, you wouldn't have been able to here.  Hence, bad end.  Even freaking FE:A, not known for it's super great plot of awesomeness, had that twist of you can either seal the boss at best, or you can kill him by having Robin freely sacrifice themself which makes killing the big bad make sense.

[SnowFire]

Excal: I entirely agree with you.

CK: That's just because they wrote the plotline that way.  There's no reason the writer couldn't have justifiably also written a super-happy B-ending and have the A-ending be "yum yum crunch munch dead."  Or have the B-ending end with invincible baddy ALSO crunch crunch munching your corpses but you having 'succeeded' anyway (which would actually be FINE IMHO).  It's like saying "the characters should have insisted on executing Kefka at the peace conference, that'd have solved the rest of the game!"  Sure, but only because the game was written the way it was, there's no particular reason to think he's going to get out of jail anytime soon with what you know at the time.  And in an alternate-FF6 where you can execute Kefka, then Leo trips and falls and pushes the statues, and Kupok becomes emperor of the World of Ruin or something, so you don't 'really' achieve anything after all.

From a more in-character perspective, the BD characters should be pretty clueless about how exactly either option will play out, so weighing those options as-they-actually-turn-out isn't something they could do.  (Mentioned this before, but I'd like the A-ending more if the characters sold it as "We knew what would happen, but this actually falls into OUR master plan because {insert bullshit}.)  For a far less awesome gameplay moment, if you want to talk about "what the characters could have done with perfect foresight ignoring that they are in a game", there's also stab the deceiver repeatedly with pointy things while it's distracted/asleep and Yulyana/DeRosso are around to defuse invincibility, skip the explosions.  But that'd be a lesser game experience so whatever.

[Fenrir]

Ok I read about it and no way I could have figured that out!

I mean I get the idea but I didn't think I even had the option to continue mashing X?

[Cmdr_King]

Snowfire- Yulana explicitly outlines the two potential ending paths in C6.  The characters should in fact know approximately the outcome of proceeding to C8.  They just don't acknowledge it because

Now... if you wanted to really build up that yeah, the characters cannot actually win that battle, that's a legit choice writing-wise.  But in that scenario it's just JRPG Hero Hubris actually biting them in the ass, since taking that gamble is still reasonable with the information at hand.  Remember also that "Incomplete record of a warning about the nature of the threat" is more or less the cause of most of the problems with the Eternians, and that was with the two people who received that warning still being alive!  The odds that kicking the can would be sustainable over the generations would be pretty low.  And also assumes that the villainous plan would proceed in mostly the same fashion 30 generations hence and the villain couldn't come up with a new plot that was harder to thwart.