What Games are you Playing 2017?

[Niu]

SMT4 being a ret-con would only further my point for that game to not be treated as part of the cannon.

Since it provide no solid official explanation to that ret-con.
And without such an explanation, a ret-con work will just be treated as a parody of the original cannon, or just a work using the original cannon as a motif.

When such a ret-con occurs. It is the responsibility of the game creator to work things out if it is to be in-cooperated into the cosmology.

For example, DHE series. Where there are official publication stating that original cannon of the WSC version Riviera has been scrapped, the cannon has been officially updated when the franchise became a series.

Or Eien Shinken series, where the current series director literally split the franchise in to the old cannon and the new cannon. With proper explanation on why the new cannon has to occur.

Or an in story explanation is shown. Marvel comic does this a lot, despite they are bad writings.
Like OAA walks in to change thing because he owns the comic company. Or some cosmic reset occurs in story so the ret-con can happen.

Or worse, Type-Moon franchise where the writing is even worse than Marvel when it comes ret-con. And the Mushroom does this like every two month and tell his fans to eat it regardless how stupid things are.


But bottom line is, some official action has to be taken if a ret-con has to be worked back into a pre-existing cosmology.
Which SMT4 did none of the above. It is just an asspull that shows up out of no where.
It provides no explanation on which time line this story occurred (which is something that Devil Summoner did). Or any statement from the developer side regarding the ret-con. (From the two SMT4 data book to various Famitsu and Dengeki interview I read, there is not a slight sign of it.)

Just how in the world that SMT4 is going to be treated as in-cosmology work instead of a random asspull?

That's equally silly as saying Langrisser Millennium and the classical Langrisser must be in the same cannon because they all have Langrisser in their title.

[Fenrir]

The Niu-est post

[Dark Holy Elf]

I officially object to any SMT sub-series being called the DHE series.

[Grefter]

Now you make me sad Elf.  That was the perfect point to revive good old bits.

MEGAMI TENSEI PLOT


Tyranny - the deeper I get into this the more excited I get.   This game is really really good you guys.  Probably better than Pillars of Eternity was at release?  I might just be too excited.

[LordDirtyBrit]

Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase (PS1): I decided to revisit one of the first games I had ever played out of morbid curiosity. Jesus Christ, this game is horseshit. The controls are stiff and sluggish, the level designs are dull and the bosses are pathetic apart from the last boss who is too cheap. Not helping things is how I've become biased against Scooby Doo as a whole with age. I will never play this game again unless I was paid to.

Final Fantasy VII: Done the Temple of the Ancients. Permit me to apologise for bashing Aerith for being annoying at the start, she barely exists in the plot from Midgar to the temple. On the topic of annoying, Wutai makes you realise just how much you relied on Materia. At least the consumable Fire 3/Bolt 3 are available to soften the blow. On a brighter note, I've been having a ton of fun with Tifa's Powersoul. This weapon makes quick work of bosses if you set Tifa up properly.

[Ranmilia]

I should probably post here more often; bit behind on stuff I wanted to talk about because it keeps getting hijacked by politics or further news.  But!

NieR: Automata

Wow.  This game is incredible.  Play it.  Highest possible recommendation!  Turns out when you give Yoko Taro a budget and Platinum a concept they love, they outdo themselves.  [ur=http://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/03/03/nier-automata-was-fueled-by-an-unknown-passion/l]Everyone involved in this game clearly loved what they were doing and went the extra mile to make it amazing,[/url] except for whoever decided on the NA release date.

The main gameplay loop is an open world ARPG, blending bits of 3d Zelda, the first NieR, the Elder Scrolls series, Dark Souls/Bloodborne, and more.  Combat is Platinum's bread and butter, a refinement of Bayonetta and Metal Gear Revengeance's fast character action into a smoother, more modular blend.  But those aren't the important bits, not really.

The best real comparison I can make is to another outstanding game: Undertale.  The staff clearly played that, too, and loved it, and this is just about the closest we can get to a AAA-studio Undertale.  Automata is filled with heart and dedicated to surprising, delighting and eliciting reactions from the player at every turn.  I want to give about a hundred different examples of amazing moments, but I won't because this is a game where you really shouldn't spoil anything. 

It's not perfect, there are flaws and quibbles I could make, though none of them are for lack of effort.  There are a lot of moments that will elicit negative reactions and make people very sad, angry, or even disgusted.  The payoffs for some of these come very late - even going into the last few hours of gameplay, I would've said I had some serious qualms about the story and certain character arcs.  But it all does come together in the end. 

No, you don't need to have played the first NieR, or know anything about it.

Just... go play this game. 

[Dark Holy Elf]

Well I guess there is finally something that makes me want to get a PS4.

[MasterLemon]

Castlevania Portrait of Ruin: After DoS put me off my binge on the series for a good year (damn you Magical Seals  ), I finally decided to get back to where I left off. I've currently just beaten that Behemoth boss in the castle's entrance. Right now, I'm really enjoying some of the new ideas which the game is bringing to the table. The idea of going into portraits to access new areas is neat, the sidequests you can do aren't too shabby (although they're currently coming in small quantities), and I'm liking the thought of having two characters to micromanage. I currently prefer maining Jonathan due to the variety of weapons he has access to, even though Charlotte has the better draw in terms of sub-weapons right now. Meaning I believe she's more ideal for the AI to use, considering how you can hot key them to use their sub-weapon.

[hinode]

The caravan is such a half assed mechanic in DQ4/5/6. Either give me 4 or 8 party members. Don't randomly allow me to have 4 or 8 party members. Especially in a game with expensive items. Obviously the 4 left are eventually going to be rubbish.

The Knick Knack museum has yielded no rewards yet but has been massively addicting

The DQ6 version of the caravan is actually different from 4 and 5. You still can't switch the inactive PCs in during most dungeons, but they will get exp/job points, letting you grind up an underlevelled new recruit  or send someone down the Luminary path without having to endure the godawful Gadabout phase in your party. Caravan PCs can also cast healing spells on your active party members out of battle, saving MP on your main team.

[Fenrir]

Nioh: Very much a Dark Souls clone, but it's different enough to be interesting for me. Lots of cool systems in there. The story blows though, you only get to play as the Witcher game and they really dropped the ball on loot vomit. I finished the first two missions in about 4 hours and had literally hundreds of individual equipment pieces. Utter madness.

The weapon choice given after the prologue is between
- Katana
- Twin katanas
- Spear
- Axe
- Kusarigama

OMG. Anyone not picking Kurasigama there is boring. That thing is nuts. Completely awesome.


Night in the woods: more of a cid game probably.
You are a 20 year old female cat who dropped from school and got back to her parents in a small town suffering from an economic crisis. Also, mysteries? Maybe? She keeps a notebook in which she draws people and things she encounters. She's also kind of a jerk? It's the most millenial game. I like it.

[Grefter]

Night in the woods: more of a cid game probably.
You are a 20 year old female cat

Rare pics of Fenrir IRL

Diagnoses then cuts like a knife with precision.


Tyranny - Finished.   None of the ending went the ways I was angling.  I had to kill everyone.  I didn't even get to go back to the library I burned at the start of the game and I hadn't bought the fire signal since I knew I could get it there for free.  So I, a dedicated Grefter type played through a game without Fire spells or the ability to set an area permanently on fire.  It is okay though, my Control Fire skill was really high just on the back of an ability I got to throw a Sunlight Spear that does fire damage on a 2 minute cooldown (it legit straight up does the animation from Dark Souls) and my fire cleave on Melee buffs, of which I cast about 5 on most encounters. 

Overall, yeah this game is up there for me.  I am still too fresh off it to place it in comparison, but the similarities to Planescape Torment are there the whole way through, but with much better combat.

I am going to start up Torment Numenara before I replay this completely (started up a new go already, but didn't get far in chapter 1), but two Torment-esque games in a 6 month period is way too much good for me.

[NotMiki]

OMG. Anyone not picking Kurasigama there is boring. That thing is nuts. Completely awesome.

I'm a lot further along, and I've been doing a ninja build using that thing exclusively. it is goofy and awesome, and probably the only weapon where you're going to get a lot of utility out of switching stances in the middle of combat.  Have you unlocked the moves where you grab a dude and pull him toward you/you toward him?  They are really useful for human enemies.

Also: don't hold your breath for a plot to ever, like, exist.  This is Samurai Warriors: Dark Souls Edition, and we are all about how cool and awesome the Great Men of Old Times Japan are, and not about really anything else.  It's very clear they chose a foreigner protagonist just so they could have someone to dump exposition and history on.  Not that they even do very much of that.

[Shale]

Breath of the Wild: fun! I've only been playing for about an hour, so not long enough to see if it really lives up to the hype, but it's certainly fun so far, and very very pretty.

[Sierra]

Started Horizon: Zero Dawn*. It is the open world game where you hunt robots with spears and arrows. So far this works better than one might expect.

Game has the vibe of one of those 50s/60s short sci-fi stories where some primitive tribesman wanders through some ancient ruin that at the end we're told was once the great city of ASHINGTON, except instead of the shocker ending that's just the starting point here**. This is neat, but it's too early to tell where they're going with it. I feel obliged to question my tribe's policy of exile as punishment for anything and everything out of the ordinary. Surprise, when you banish a schizophrenic dude he does not get any better. Some people are also super keen to forget that they're not supposed to talk to me when they suddenly need a player character to solve their problems (or if they're a merchant they're happy to deal me into the gray market so long as no one's looking). This is basically fine, no taboo really gets 100% support of a populace when people are out of the public eye anyway, and everybody does publicly give me the stink eye if I walk through town.

I really like the protagonist's design, it's very normal person-ish. This extends only to adult character model and not to baby/child character models, because the most youthful faces in this game tend to fall into the uncanny valley, the one area in which the game's graphics, obviously endeavoring to impress in every other regard, do not succeed. You can't mo-cap babies I guess.

Unfortunately there's a long unskippable tutorial where you play as a kid so it's probably not Fenrir compatible.

(*Usually I'd suggest people avoid putting colons in their titles until at least the first sequel. It just doesn't look right.)
(**Like seriously the box summary outright tells you that much, though there's no immediate telling which corner of Earth-in-a-millenium that I'm exploring. One tends to presume Europe based on developer names, though I've encountered NPCs from a variety of ethnicities.)

[Grefter]

Unfortunately there's a long unskippable tutorial where you play as a kid so it's probably not Fenrir compatible.

Ctrl+F 'dino'

No mention of robo T-Rexes.  Write it off that Fen can't play it because of kids.

You are weird.

[Fenrir]

Didn't Wozz have robot t-rexes
i remember making a post about this like 10 years ago


Notmiki: Yes! I like doing grappling hook + switch to lower stance + mash square/triangle.
I beat the bat lady. Since jutsus are tied to my main stat dexterity, I've been using them a lot.  Boss fights feel like the Inspector Gadget Souls-like RPG we all always wanted: I use my ball-and-chain-and-scythe main weapon and spend all the renewable items from the inventory: Pills, goofy cartoon giant bombs, spiky things I throw at the ground, POIZN shurikens, etc.

POIZN is pretty good in this game against large enemies/bosses. There are a lot of ways to apply POIZN, my favourite is  to throw a POIZN cloud and throw a few POIZN shurikens. Applying POIZN to your weapon is an option, but honestly it's too dangerous.

[Captain K]

Fire Emblem Conquest.  I started this last year but never finished it because it sucked.  But FEHeroes put me in the mood for some Fire Emblem so I started a new file.  Well, it still sucks.  But I finished it this time!

Yeah, this is Bad Design Decisions: The Game.  I still can't figure out why higher rank weapons are almost universally worse than E rank ones.

MVP was Velouria.  Tanks everything with Beastrune, full healing almost every turn, 10 damage to anyone she fights (if she doesn't just outright kill them).  Stupidly overpowered.

Oh, and I married Mozu because I am a pedophile.  Also because I thought Aptitude would make Kana good (it didn't).  But mostly the pedophile thing.

[Cotigo]

Fire Emblem
...
Bad ... Game.  I ...'t ...t u... r... n... s.

... u...i...  n...t... ...o... a pedophile.  Also because I thought Aptitude would make Kana good (it didn't).  But mostly the pedophile thing.

decoded

[Captain K]

Implying that I wasn't one before.

[Sierra]

HZD: I stopped for the night after the big arena fight which was actually in an arena, if that word still means anything to people in 3017ish. Streak of keen sniping wipes out half the field, then startling display of incompetence as I miss a shot, alert the entire remaining half of the mob at once, and struggle to make a mad dash to the ammo dump before they can catch up with me. And then in cutscene I'm magically on the other side of the field when it explodes (I guess they expected you to find a more practical vantage point for sniping than right next to it).

I wasn't expecting Batman predator sequences in this game, but they're totally there, even with a couple of the same novelty takedowns. You even have detective mode! So take that, staple it onto a body of Far Cry open world wilderness hunting, add dinobots, and you basically have this game. So maybe no component of that is novel outside possibly setting (it's post-apocalypse, but the atmosphere and tone are distinctly different from what Fallout usually goes for), but the combination is proving highly addicting. It's extremely pretty and there's tons to explore, and unlike a couple other games I've played that aimed for that formula, I don't get the impression that this world will turn out to be a total waste of space.

We're apparently neighbors with the Sun King, so I'm just going to assume that the ring of mountains around me is the Swiss Alps until the game states otherwise.

[Shale]

Put a bunch more hours into Breath of the Wild, still not quite done with the tutorial yet. I'm finished with the "tutorial area," but after that there's a bit of fetch-questing to learn some backstory and get skill/utility upgrades before they turn you lose to do whatever. I'm not as high on the game as the reviews I've read, but it's very easy to dive into and mess around with, and also has a very Witness-y sort of thing going on where the progression of puzzles is about gradually learning the game's design language rather than picking up discrete new tricks. And I know I already said this but even on Wii U this thing is so damn pretty.

[NotMiki]

Hollow Knight: beat the game, 100% completion, in just under 40 hours.  Here is the release trailer for the game.  Go ahead and watch it.  Think of the best-case scenario for the game, based on the trailer.  That's pretty much the game you get.

It makes me immeasurably happy that some 13-year-old kid is gonna play this and it's going to be their first metroidvania.  It is an orthodox, highly polished example of the genre, and whereas I've played a lot of metroidvania type games recently, and they have been good to great in their own ways, this is by far the best at BEING one.  You will explore zones.  You will retrace your steps.  You will get powerups that allow you to poke and prod at the corners of the map.  You will do things in an order of your own choosing.  If metroidvanias are your bag, play this game, period.

Other thoughts:

The game is very large for a metroidvania.  I ran out of leads looking for more stuff to do (other than fight the final boss) only at about hour 35.  That last 5 hours represents sheer stubbornness in not consulting an FAQ for the last few things I was missing.

You get a large number of potential powerups, which you have a maximum capacity to equip at a time.  For the tougher bosses you'll find yourself experimenting with different loadouts to see what works.  Boss fights all allow for flexibility in how you approach them.

Holy shit there are a lot of enemy types.  144 to be exact, including bosses, and none are pallate-swaps.  Production values in this game are through the roof.  Really.

Although the plot does not have a ton of depth, the game has a theme, and executes it beautifully.  By which I mean both that it is elegantly handled, and that the main plot stuff is fucking gorgeous.  The final boss sequence is spectacular.

The game does a Dark Souls-y thing where when you die you lose all your carried money and 1/3 of your magic capacity and need to go to where you died to fight your soul and get it back.  Ok mechanic for a while, but you run out of stuff to buy way too early for it to work very well in the long run.  Thematically, however, it works great.

For anyone who plays: if you quit to title and reload, you will end up back at your last save point.  Do not be bashful about using this to travel.

On that note, the game is huge, and there are a few spots that are just too far from fast-travel points.  No big deal for 90% of the game, but when you're hunting down powerups it can be a bit much.

The game's save points are all benches and I am convinced it is an Ico reference.  The game has a bunch of references, and can be pretty blatant about them.

Nothing in the bestiary is permanently missable.  Thank god.  The game actually goes out of its way to ensure that this is the case.

Your health pool is pretty low, you start with 5 and take 1 or 2 dapage per attack, but you can heal with magic off the bat by focusing in place for a couple seconds.  Additionally, you replenish magic by attacking and killing enemies.  This is balanced very well in practice, both for exploring and for boss fights, which have been clearly designed to make you have to be very careful about when to heal.

I guess saying the game is the best-case scenario implies it but anyway: movement is very fluid, and the wall-jumping and other midair platforming elements are very adaptable and feel great to use.  Which is good because there is a brutal platforming segment late in the game.

The music!  Is good.  Occasionally great.  City of Tears is a standout.  Final boss music, too.

[Meeplelard]

Fire Emblem Fates Birthright: Beat Chapter 23.  I want a refund on those bullcrap 10 damage AoE moves I took every turn!  No, the map wasn't that hard, just annoying!


Assassin's Creed Black Flag: I'm moving around the ocean, apparently having to find 70 things of metal.  I have found 3.

[jsh357]

Breath of the Wild is what I thought Wind Waker was going to be. I am both pleased and surprised Nintendo actually made this game; it has just the right amount of tutorial but otherwise leaves the task of figuring out what to do up to the player. A welcome change from Skyward Sword to say the least. The game feels heavily influenced by Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls, and various open-world games (again, surprised Nintendo made this of all companies), yet still definitively a Zelda experience. I've probably been playing for about 8 hours and have only explored 3 small sections of the world map. (and barely explored 2 of them at all!)

I was looking forward to playing a lot of games that are recently released/coming out/soon, but I have the feeling I'll be stuck with this one a while! Definitely getting Nier 2's OST day one, though.

[Cotigo]

Does anyone know if the switch is region locked?