What Games are You Playing 2018?

[Fenrir]

Yunica / Hugo: Having just finished Hugo’s side, I found him overall slightly to vastly superior all the way theough, except during the mantis fight, which was harder than anything in Yunica’s side. Playing on hard.

Mystery third character looks very fun for rushing through the game and then hitting a brick wall against every single boss.

Infinifactory: I watched a video by matthewmatosis mentioning how, while this game looks intimidating, it actually eases you in very competently until you’re building extremely complex structures without even noticing. So I got it, and am now mad addicted, about 10-15 hours in. I can’t stop thinking about it.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Xenoblade Chronicles 2:

This is the most I have ever loved and hated a game within its first 5 hours~

The Good:

I actually really love the dialog. It's got a lot of personality in it. The British VA cast really adds a unique flavor to the work that you don't get in a lot of its contemporaries.

The setting is pretty fantastic, and the characters are really interested in exploring its mysteries. It's highly reminiscent of the world from Skies of Arcadia, but with living continents. The little shoutouts to earlier works in the Xeno franchise, like the Zohar shape, are a nice touch, too.

The Battle System. It's a nice upgrade from the base battle system from XBC1, but somewhat more streamlined in command-selection. The other features of positioning and party interaction are all still there, and somewhere enhanced by the Blade system's own positioning quirks. The Blades themselves are basically like the Djinni system from Golden Sun (but instead of cute critters, you have Anime babes, random monsters, and like 2 fully-clothed dudes).

Exploration is streamlined compared to the previous games. The world still feels pretty huge compared to most games, but areas are a lot more intimate than XBC1/X. Honestly, it's just better and really cuts down on the amount of tedious walking through somewhat empty space. It takes the best bits of exploration/sidequests from XBC1 and cuts out all the cruft.

The Mixed:

The plot is REALLY anime, but mostly the good kind of anime. It's fun and somewhat lighthearted, but there's enough mystery and creativity that it doesn't feel too stale. The dialog and worldbuilding helps this aspect a lot, too. It's just kind of a tonal shift from previous XBC games.

The Characters are all pretty likable so far, but very very cliched. They suit their roles in the story and world well, and seem like there's room for them to be fleshed out, but they all start out as pretty archetypal. The voice acting and dialog REALLY helps this from being too big of a problem. And Gramps is a great trope subversion/blend. Taking the wise mentor character and the annoying mascot character and combining them like this was pretty inspired.

The Bad:

The art is atrocious. It just sucks. I know Monolithsoft prides itself, for some reason, on not having a dedicated character designer, and therefore can have a new look for each of its games. BUT THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE A HEAD CHARACTER DESIGNER FOR A SINGLE GAME. Holy crap, that is a terrible decision. Rex does not fit in the same world as Malos. There's so many clashing art styles that it's actively painful to look at. Especially compared to the unified design ethos of XBC1, it's just unforgivably poor decision-making.

Costume design is even more egregious. Like, I get fanservice. I'm even okay with skimpy costume designs on adult characters. Heck, I prefer it to the fully-armored-style personality-less designs of games like Dark Souls! But... there's a limit. Pyra in particular is just really poorly designed. The shapes of her outfit are nonsensical and don't even make a particularly nice silhouette. I'm just not sure what was going on there. There's also the enormous tits on nearly all the female cast, which are just laughably huge and some of the worst anatomical contortions I've seen outside of Rob Lyefeld. Like, if you want to make a fanservice design, PLEASE learn how to draw/model boobs that don't look like misshapen condoms filled with pudding!

The game just feels rushed. The mishmash of art from too many different artists, the abundance of reused mechanical assets, lots of little things. You can sort of tell this game was thrown together a bit fast than previous installments.

Also, there's Gacha mechanics, somehow. Despite not even being paid content, they imitated gacha mechanics just to induce that same psychological gambling loop in players. WHY? Well, apparently I can get long-winded about this topic, so I'll just leave at that.

Overall, though... I actually really like the game. It just has some VERY big flaws.

[Fenrir]

Might this be The Worst Videogame Of All Time


Chrono trigger iOs: it has been fun to run through CT again, but I have three objections:
- God damn was this easy. People call FF6 easy?
- Come on Sun Stone you got 65000600 years of sunlight. Do you really need 1700 more?
- All optional new stuff is bad. Do not give 300$ to a new team to make them churn new content out of it. Results are predictably terrible

[Sierra]

Costume design is even more egregious. Like, I get fanservice. I'm even okay with skimpy costume designs on adult characters. Heck, I prefer it to the fully-armored-style personality-less designs of games like Dark Souls!

Dusk and her fabulous dress want words with you, Djinn.

[Grefter]

Ain't no party like a Yarnham party.

I have been playing some dumb clicking games of various genres.  Whether it just be legit incremental game clikers.  Path of Exile or Diablo 3.  Clicking is about all I do in my downtime at the moment.  Sometimes I play Fortnite and Vermintide 2 if I want to change to from spamming click to pointing at heads and clicking.

[Cmdr_King]

Might this be The Worst Videogame Of All Time


Chrono trigger iOs: it has been fun to run through CT again, but I have three objections:
- God damn was this easy. People call FF6 easy?
- Come on Sun Stone you got 65000600 years of sunlight. Do you really need 1700 more?
- All optional new stuff is bad. Do not give 300$ to a new team to make them churn new content out of it. Results are predictably terrible

I really like the Dream Devourer fight as I recall but yeah, basically anything else would have been a better investment.  Like... pack in Radical Dreamers!  That’d Be cool!

[Dark Holy Elf]

Might this be The Worst Videogame Of All Time


Chrono trigger iOs: it has been fun to run through CT again, but I have three objections:
- God damn was this easy. People call FF6 easy?
- Come on Sun Stone you got 65000600 years of sunlight. Do you really need 1700 more?
- All optional new stuff is bad. Do not give 300$ to a new team to make them churn new content out of it. Results are predictably terrible

CT's time travel is best not to be thought about too deeply.

CT shows teeth on occasion, especially if you don't know what to do about certain puzzly bosses. The Golem Twins completely destroyed me the first time I played the game and I know I'm not alone. Giga Gaia and Lavos can be pretty tough too. Overall though, yeah, it's easy. (And yeah, certainly easier than FF6.)


Speaking of CT, I've started I Am Setsuna. I believe Snowfire described it as "CT, but not as good as CT, but that's okay since CT is pretty damn good" and that seems a spot-on assessment so far. One obvious way it feels worse than CT is despite having the same system where targeting groups/lines of enemies is important, it doesn't tell you in advance via the cursor which enemies currently count as being in a group or line. Ah well. Still, to be clear, I'm enjoying it.

[DjinnAndTonic]

It's amusing to me, that of all the potential successors to Chrono Trigger, the one that's made by a newbie studio basically ended up winning the honor, beating out Xenogears (started as a CT sequel), FFD2 (literally rehashed the proposed plot of a CT sequel), Radical Dreamers (who even remembered this existed?), and even Chrono Cross itself (widely regarded as being better if it *wasn't* a CT sequel). I guess you could toss Cosmic Star Heroine in there as well, since it apparently just lifts the CT battle system. But CSH isn't exactly a game with a huge pedigree or any relation to actual creators of CT, unlike Setsuna. And amusingly, after my experience with both CSH and Setsuna, the one that's NOT officially endorsed by Square is the better game.

Chrono Trigger, why do you have such strange luck with sequels?

[NotMiki]

Tales of Berseria: beat

Like Tales games? play this one.  Real review later.  Below TotA and ToV to me, solidly above everything else.  And although it's below them it does some things better.  Notably: the plot is coherent from beginning to end, and never loses focus despite the game being quite long.

[Dhyerwolf]

In regards to discordant XB2 character designs, I think some of the characters were designed by Nomura (but just a few?).

[NotMiki]

They used a large number of prominent guest artists for designs - this was a selling point for the game albeit not one that got a lot of attention out west.

[DjinnAndTonic]

In regards to discordant XB2 character designs, I think some of the characters were designed by Nomura (but just a few?).

Heh, now that I'm a little further into the game... It looks like the entire Evil Organization is drawn by Nomura.

Monolith Soft, did you seriously hire Nomura just so you could cash in on that game-starved KH2 Organization XIII fanbase?

[Pyro]

Zelda: BoTW

Whoah. I have never seen such an amazing open world. And the interplay of the game's freedom of movement with the combat can lead to some fun outcomes. Scrambling up a small tower mid fight to rain down bombs for example.

Any good Wii U suggestions?

[SnowFire]

Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

Finished.  I'm sure you have many questions about it, but as this is a prerecorded message, I'm afraid I can't answer them.  There are many things I wish to tell you, but alas, my time is limited.  I have chosen two things of great importance to tell you.

First, I will tell you about termites.  Have you ever seen a termite mound?  They are splendid structures.  Some might even call them works of art.  Termites are natural architects, and their mounds are both structurally sound and make excellent use of space.  So are they following some sort of plan as they build?  Are there termite blueprints, detailing which room goes where?  No.  Of course not.  Each termite is simply an oblivious cog in a tremendous machine programmed by millions of years of termite DNA.  It is doubtful an individual termite has any idea what its contributions are helping to create.  But... a human does.  We can appreciate the elegant forms of their alien cathedrals...  We can see the simple beauty of their perfect functionality...    We can understand the splendid planning of their structure.  In other words, only an intelligence of a higher order can understand the beauty of what the termite builds.  Now, consider humans.  We are oblivious cogs in a tremendous machine programmed by millions of years of human DNA.  No doubt you see now what this analogy is supposed to illustrate.  Yes, I mean to say that humans are no different from termites.  We trudge through our lives with no greater understanding of our ultimate goal.  You might say we don't understand what we're building.  Only an intelligence of a higher order than ours can understand what we're doing.  Imagine how we might look to such an intelligence...  We may be building some structure so perfect and elegant we can't even perceive it.  Whatever it is, we've likely been building it on a dimension just above the ones we know since time immemorial.  If we are like the termites, then what we've created is almost certainly something of tremendous beauty.  And you are about to catch a glimpse of it.

Now, let's move on to the second topic.  The game was pretty awesome and I'm puzzled at why I waited so long to play it.  Oh well, guess it'll be nice & fresh in my head when I go through the third game in the series.  Japan once again has great taste in developers with weird ideas getting funded but no taste in what people buy, as VLR apparently flopped in Japan for whatever reason.  Maybe it needed, like, a dating sim on the side or something to satisfy the audience.  The game is playable enough without having played 999, but it does spoil the hell out of 999 if played first, so.  (Speaking of which, shout outs to reusing some of 999's music in appropriate places for returning characters.  Hosoe did some good work on the music in the series - not always amazing out-of-context, but works very well in-game.)  Some real nice plot twists, some of which I guessed and some of which I didn't, but generally in the good way.  I'm kicking myself for not distrusting a few suspicious omissions as well as being intentional rather than just odd.  The puzzles are still kinda lame? Better than 999 but still.  Definitely a "don't feel bad about FAQing" them if you get stuck deal.  Some of the puzzles very nicely play into the themes the game is going for elsewhere, at least.  But yeah, this is a game you play for the plot, which I thought was very good and reasonably cohesive, with the head-fakes it has being mostly "fair", and the insane conspiracy philosophizing parts making considerably more sense, than, say, Metal Gear Solid.  Compared to Ace Attorney, it's definitely a bit grittier, although ultimately not THAT gritty, but has the advantage of not indulging in AA's tendency to let sympathetic characters who do desperate things for sympathetic reasons "off the hook" narratively.

Have a nice traitor!

[Captain K]

Dragon Project:  Finished my Plague Doctor cosplay.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Any good Wii U suggestions?

Mario Kart 8/Smash 4 are obviously fun games for everyone. Personally, I did all of Mario Kart 8's single player mode and had quite a good time with just that. DLC is quite inexpensive and has some good maps (both the F-zero and the Zelda maps are very cool and cute references).

Super Mario 3D World is probably my favorite Mario platforming game since, I dunno, the NES? It's really fun and has some serious bite (especially compared to the newer Marios which tend to be pretty wussy). The multiplayer mode is fun and cute but not really what the game is about.

New Super Mario Bros Wii U is a classic new-style Mario, has some fun stage design but is overall a little on the easy side. I had a really good time playing the game with two other players, the game is quite hilarious that way, but it can be done single-player as well.

Hyrule Warriors is quite enjoyable. It is very colorful and has a lot of charm. The game pretty much has as much content as you want to do with all of the different modes. The bosses are surprisingly competent, especially at higher levels. I can take or leave the army aspects of the game, but it’s honestly a pretty cool action game.

Bayonetta 2 I haven’t actually played yet, but I watched it and it seems pretty good if you enjoyed the first game.

Splatoon is a silly spin on the shooter / territory grabbing style game. I’m not sure how many people play it now that there is a sequel, but it’s pretty damn fun. I’d definitely check into its playerbase before buying, though.

Captain Toad / Yoshi’s Wooly World are both reasonably enjoyable, but quite easy and seem a little more designed for kiddos than for adults. I think YWW would be a good introduction as a platformer for a kidlet. <3

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is a glorious trainwreck of a game. It has decent gameplay but it’s held back by a few baffling decisions. Plot is hilariously bizarre, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a terrible way. it’s not an all time great game but if you are in the mood for a game that is slightly off-kilter, it’s not a bad choice.

Shovel Knight / Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse / Shantae and the Half-Genie Hero are not WiiU exclusive but are fun old school platformers if you haven’t gotten your hands on them yet.

There’s also a Xenoblade spinoff game on the WiiU. Since I didn’t like the first game I never played this one, but it exists ??

[Cmdr_King]

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology- Fin.

Okay, so the natural point of comparison here is the DS version of Chrono Trigger.  In the main the new content is fairly extraneous and when it even tries to be serious, it's really fan-ficcy.
Except it's handled better and the content itself is better: you can outright choose to turn it off when you start the game, it's distributed throughout the game, it's moreso short vignettes than endless grind, and while I stand by the fan-fic descriptor, some of it is really good at it.

But mostly I feel like I underestimated my appreciation for the game originally.  It cruises through the necessary background and setup parts of the game by constantly anticipating that the player knows what's coming, then having the characters know what's coming and planning appropriately.  The major reveals feel paced so they last just long enough for the characters to get invested, then put out Stocke figuring something out at regular intervals to maintain that appreciation for his smarts.  Not just the major emotional scenes, but the little ones of the cast struggling along the way reliably got to me.

I have a big giant text block talking about the game at a thematic level in a folder to be worked on for some reason.

So now I'm like... do I like this more than FFX?  About as much as Suikoden III?

Yeah... yeah I think I do, and I'm surprised I didn't notice that originally.

[Niu]

But mostly I feel like I underestimated my appreciation for the game originally.  It cruises through the necessary background and setup parts of the game by constantly anticipating that the player knows what's coming, then having the characters know what's coming and planning appropriately.  The major reveals feel paced so they last just long enough for the characters to get invested, then put out Stocke figuring something out at regular intervals to maintain that appreciation for his smarts.  Not just the major emotional scenes, but the little ones of the cast struggling along the way reliably got to me.

This, THIS.
This is what's truly well done about RH.
I remebered how angry I was at Trail series when I replayed RH earlier.

As it really reminds me all the stupid RPG writing flaws that Kiseki has been consatntly making, Trail series is like the polar opposite of what RH did right.

It pains me to see people praise Trail's writing when it is now a load of garbage.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Xenoblade Chronicles 2:

Being on vacation is great for actually finishing games. I started and finished this in less than a week. Quite the record for me. Especially considering I am STILL on my first run through the FE14 games.

Anyway, XBC2 has the distinction of being best 'anime' game I've played in ages. It has a LOT of tropes that are commonly associated with anime - too much focus on romantic subplots, a hotsprings scene, overcomplication of a simple message, Organization XIII, robot goddesses, more cleavage than the Grand Canyon, and the list goes on.

But apart from its MANY MANY visuals flaws, it has a really great story grounded on a good anti-technophobe theme and a solid plot structure. The characters are all well fleshed out, and even Organization XIII (despite their Nomura designs) are compelling villains. It stumbles here and there with some scenes, but overall, it is good where it needs to be.

I'm not sure how much of that is the localization, because it seems quite clear that a lot was smoothed over in the transition. Just the way a lot of scenes are acted gives each of the more 'cringey anime moments' in the game a completely different feel/direction from how it's usually portrayed. There's just a lot of competence on display here, too. The setting is fully realized and explored and internally consistent. Plot points and Chekov's Guns are all interwoven properly into both the comedic and serious aspects of the story. Characters grow and remain relevant throughout the entire narrative. There's no casual sexism or lengthy diatribes about fantasy racism, despite one of the core themes of the game being about 'what is a human/artificial life' (it IS a Xeno-game after all).

The hotspring scene ACTUALLY SERVES A PURPOSE and at no point does anyone attempt to peek on the women's side or start talking about how big someone's breasts are. If nothing else, this is a stand-out achievement.

While the game is overall very lighthearted compared to Takahashi's previous Xeno games, it still has its serious moments. And while Jin is a complete wanker and Rex is a grating optimist, their final confrontation was surprisingly poignant and actually delivered a message that resonated with me. Despite all appearances, this game is ABOUT something, and it's a refreshing change (fuck off FE14).

_{...it still has the worst character design ever, even as I was sobbing towards the end of the game, I kept wanting to throw up in my mouth whenever two characters were in a single closeup shot together...}

[Luther Lansfeld]

Fire Emblem Warriors - Good times, good times. Currently enjoying the increased fanserviceness of Chrom, who seems to get hotter in each new game

[SnowFire]

Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
Well after inexplicably waiting 5-6 years to play Virtue's Last Reward, I decided to plow into the third game right away. 

Side note: The game opens up with the slightly trollish option to, well, basically not play the game.  You can nope your way out to the credits in 10 minutes.  I unironically like this a good deal...  remember chatting in IRC chat about how Far Cry 4 does something similar.  It forces the player to say yup, I'm up for this.  The writer said basically the same thing about a Super Mario Maker level of all things awhile back:
https://www.polygon.com/2016/5/18/11707866/kotaru-uchikoshi-super-mario-maker-level-interview-zero-escape-zero-time-dilemma-devs-make-mario

Short version: you can skip the entire level by warping to the end and back dooring the content, or you can attempt a very challenging Mario course.  The choice is yours.

This makes me think of one of the few redeeming features of Golden Sun, that the game lets you refuse the Heroic Call and just bail at the start in the same way.  This makes me want to do the reverse, some day, though...  some setting where the town elder calls the band of three eager youths to tell them about their Great Destiny or whatever, and if you accept it just rolls the credits and says "And they were known as great heroes and saved the day and stuff, until the next villain thirty years later, and nothing really changed," and declining will get you the rest of the game.  (Maybe everybody is trapped in some fantasy dream land a la FFTA Ivalice and you need to actually break shit rather than fix the pleasant illusion, say.)

Anyway, not TOO much to say about the game...  aside from some of the character designs in 3D looking a bit weird.  The three VLR characters look fine, but the 999 characters in Junpei & Akane look off...  Akane especially, her trademark little flower thingy looks different and more like a hair band.  Maybe due to more distance in time from the original artist's work?  Not sure.  (Also, apropos of nothing, but ZTD basically confirms a rare case of creator-endorsed Ace Attorney Japanamerica...  yes, Junpei / Akane / Aoi / Hongou / etc. are all Japanese who were just chillin' in the United States for Reasons, even in the Japanese version, as best I can tell.)

I guess I can't say too much about the ZTD plot that's accessible, but the one thing I'm a little less into is the tone of the game: it seems the darkest of the series.  Apparently Chunsoft's marketing research in Japan said that 999 looked "too scary" for why it drove some buyers off, so VLR was lightened up a bit.  And...  that is fine by me, honestly.  Uchikoshi has a number of interviews out there, including in English, but it seems like a case of Be Careful What You Wish For...  so as noted, 999/VLR flopped in Japan but did well internationally, which caught the creators by surprise a bit as they thought it'd be a Japan-only game.  Uchikoshi has said that he personally would prefer to do the darker stories, and since he had to do a campaign (complete with English Twitter account) to convince the higher-ups to make a third game for the benefit of us Westeners, and they folded, he clearly "won"...  which means that his auter instincts seem to be able to run wild in Zero Time Dilemma, as this feels closer to a slasher movie so far.  I dunno, "tense" is good a la 999, but while I'm glad he got to finish the series, I wish he'd still had to deal with the studio reining him in a bit.  Well, maybe, it's too soon to say.

[Hunter Sopko]

Pokémon Platinum: Ponyta owned the second gym (and Eterna Forest mostly). I do enjoy the Eterna town music, and I totally dig (har har) the not-Minesweeper game for the underground. So far it is balancing meh grinding with the breezing-no effort feeling I got from Moon. So I'm having fun so far.

[DragonKnight Zero]

Beat Phantasy Star 2: Numan Revolution  Again.  It can go by surprisingly fast as I rarely stop to grind for equipment.  With a source of Deban and a Gires item for everyone, Motherbrain is still a HP sponge.  I can heal infinitely for more than it can damage anyone so it's a foregone conclusion after the second round.

Surprising discoveries:  Some of these apply to the original game as well.
- When deciding how Dezorians and Musk Cats speak, the game only checks if Rolf is alive and which hat he's wearing.  This makes me happy when I'm plodding along with Nei rather than him.  Also, since only Hugh can wear the Magic Cap (changed to Bio Translator), all those dialogue options are inaccessible.  Whether the creator wrote new dialogue and this is an oversight or an intentional choice, I'll never know.  On a similar note, Rolf only needs to be alive to enter Esper mansion the first time; game doesn't look for him in the active party.
- There is a sanity check in that someone in the party must have the Neisword in order to enter Noah.  Just don't be dumb and use character replacement codes to replace the person with the Neisword while in the last dungeon.
- Dark Force's MT attack (as well as Motherbrain's and Blaster's) can miss.  It's extremely rare though such as one can go an entire game without ever seeing that.  Guessing the chance to whiff is something super low like 1 in 256 or 512.
- All damaging enemy specials ignore defense.  I'm guessing the formula is Power * V/100  I don't know the range for V though 84 to 115 makes enough sense and holds up with the draining attacks of the Mosquito family.
  I tried to cast magic with someone who had been cursed by Dark Force's "can't focus to use techniques" curse  to see what would happen.  The character will revert to the attack command.  This attack also bypasses the chance that an attack will fail while cursed.
  If a character is dual-wielding, being cursed can only stop one of the two strikes.  Casual observation suggests about a 1 in 3 chance that a physical will fail.  I've seen the item command fail when a character is cursed but that was only once ever so the chance is something really low.  (Shields don't matter at Dark Force anyways; it's damage ignores defense)
- Decided to see if I could buff Agility enough on someone to outspeed Motherbrain.  Didn't start happening until over 200 Agi before the character would occasionally go first.  Above 210, this would happen more often but still not consistently.  Without looking at the code, I'm guessing Motherbrain has 216 Agility. (which would make it surprisingly dangerous in a duel)

[DjinnAndTonic]

I am just guessing, but I suspect most of those poor coding 'features' in Numan Revolution are also present in vanilla Phantasy Star II. I recall the first time I played PSII was on an emulator, not long after learning how RPGMaker works. So when I got to the set of dungeons for the Nei equipment, I was like "fuck slogging through 4 plotless dungeons" and just used the emulator's built-in game genie to get a Neisword in my inventory. I figured "it took like 2 minutes, might as well see if this works."

And yeah, the game literally just checks to see if you have the item. Apparently PSII was coded before event flags were a thing.

So I would guess that all of the odd checks in Numan Revolution are just leftover amateur coding from the original.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Fire Emblem Fates:

Revelations finished. Finally. God this game is an utter slog towards the end. I can't think of another game that I have gotten so soured on. Like... there's plenty of games that have dropped the ball on their plots (Xenosaga, FFD2 come to mind immediately), but none quite so consistently bad while still showing signs of how easily it could have been good.

Like... at least when XS veered wildly into Bible Fanfiction territory, you could tell it was intentional, even if ill-conceived.

Fates' plot is so bad that it made me feel dirty for any amount of enjoyment I got out of the gameplay or support conversations. It is bad and should feel bad for managing to make the wrong decision at every possible turn.

What started out as something that conceptually could have been a 10/10 game has the honor of being the worst Fire Emblem plot. Ever. Even worse than the likes of FE1.

There's enough good in the gameplay and battle animations that I can't completely give it a 1/10 or anything, but it is painful to even concede that. XS3/10. Fuck this game for ruining such a good premise with the most shit execution.