What Games Are You Playing 2025: Leaving a digital footprint in the ether

[Cmdr_King]

So let's go ahead and put up the annual topic on the appointed day!  Nothing fancy here at the moment, just thought I'd start the topic.

[Cmdr_King]

Shadow Generations- I thought I might get this done before 2024 ended, but I just didn't make enough time for it yesterday and didn't play enough the day before to make it.  Ah well, nothing wrong with that.

So this is mostly really good, perhaps not quite as compulsively playable as as Sonic Generations but they do a good job balancing "the people love Sonic Generations and want more Sonic Generations levels" with "Shadow should feel distinct and have his own quirks relative to Sonic".  I mean I'd have been perfectly content with just literally Sonic gameplay but I can't fault them wanting to add some things Sonic doesn't get.  These stages also definitely feel scaled for someone who played Sonic's game and has their skills up to snuff, although it SHOULD really be said that the game is much more forgiving if you fuck it up a bunch so on balance it's not actually harder.  It'd just take a lot more work to start S Rank running the stages starting from "I played Sonic Generations in 2011 when it came out" like I would be is all.

But yeah!  No, this is pretty good.  The last zone is probably a little stressful even if we treat this as an advanced campaign for people who played the original, but not that much so.  And it's really balanced out by the bosses having checkpoints now, so you don't have to relearn the same parts of those over and over just to get to the parts you struggled with, so it's really just the stages that are mean.  And I also gotta say that the final boss, despite being formatted like a traditional Super Sonic sequence, is much smoother and feel so, so much better to play than any of those ever have.  Kinda easy as hell of course, but nice and smooth to play.

So yeah, good stuff.

[DragonKnight Zero]

  I was in the market to scratch that srpg itch with something that isn't FFT and happened to be able to obtain Disgaea 4 at a good price.  It's looking like it's going to be another timesink.  Of course I'm going to consciously or unconsciously compare it to the first.  It has delivered on scratching that itch.  Looking at the various class unique passives and experimenting with which ones fit the best into my playstyle feeds that same appetite that mucking around with my units on FFT's formation screen provides.  Even theorycrafting usage for the ones that might not appeal to me just yet is enjoyable.

Various impressions, observations, and subjective thoughts

- The overall narrative gets my attention but I'm not feeling the individual cast members.  Part of it is unconscious comparison to the Laharl/Etna/Flonne trio but even setting that aside, the cast members do come off as one-note and my usual reaction to them is irritation or apathy.
  Expanded item capacity in both the bag and the warehouse is a very welcome change.  Inventory space fills up fast in this type of game and it was at a premium in the first Disgaea.
- Collection Record feeds right into my personal preferences.  I just get this urge to fill in all the blank spaces though no idea how far I'll go.
- So many functions tied to Mana.  Not just creating characters and submitting proposals but it's the fuel for skill growth and acquisition.  And passives.  It's a scarce resource calling for some tough choices on where to allocate it.  I've barely purchased Evilities save for when someone is just about to reincarnate since reincarnation resets Mana to zero so use it or lose it.
- Enemy strength ramps up a lot quicker than the first Disgaea.
- More options for getting EXP and Mana on units that have trouble getting kills.  EXP and Mana Potions exist to give some directly.  Team attacks share Mana among participants rather than one random unit (which was usually the strongest and not the one who needed it most).  The starting Evil Symbols also provide means of getting EXP and Mana onto units without needing to hassle with feeding them kills.
- I do miss being able to pop geo symbols by throwing them on enemies or enemies on them.

  More some other time.  Or not, depending on my willingness to pull away from the game during my free time.

[superaielman]

DQ3- Played the remake on the Switch.

The good: Exploration, a ton of quality of life improvements, very pretty package overall. I enjoyed the game but I'm going to be a boor and write a little more about where I found it's shortcomings to be.

The bad: Gameplay balance. It's not as big a hit as FF1NES to FF1 GBA for challenge, but it's a massive step down. The developers did not scale things up to balance the increased levels and resources from shiny spots. Fight Baramos in the original switch version and this one- you just have so many more resources (including durability from higher levels) and skills that it does not feel like the same fight at all.  Things like the Merchant's Service Call make you have effectively infinite resources in most early dungeons and always on the world map.


Monster wrangler class is totally busted in two hilariously different ways:

A: Monster pile on is *by far* the best damage skill in the game and you learn it at level 1. Just a dumb amount of damage not tied to your stats and super cheap; you can use it on classes that are terrible at ST offense like Thief and watch them just churn through things.  You basically always want a thief and monster wrangler at all points (Switch them once you get to Alltrades abbey). Martial artist is fairly useless outside their final skill, merchant is useless outside of service call and the merchant army skill in the post game, gadabout is gadabout. Even Cleric/Mage/Warrior felt just like inferior options- early on you want boomerang and whip spam off high speed and later on you can nab a Sage if you want magic. For that matter, I almost never worried about weapons- why use physical skills or your attack command when monster pile on is there? Whips and Boomerangs are great early but that's it.

B: Wild side. Buff that lets you double act for 3-4 turns or so and it's cheap; accessed through monster wrangler. Yes this is as dumb as it sounds. I never bothered to use it until the end of the post-game though as just regular monster pile on did the job more than well enough.

I never actually used Kabuff or the various other buff skills- no point when monster pile on is game best damage and is so cheap/easy to access.  For that matter, I don't see the point of using anything besides a Sage/Monster Wrangler/Thief combo of some type outside of a few very specific merchant skills.  Shoutout to the Martial Artist for getting an 100% auto crit skill in the 40's that is hilariously inferior to monster pile on outside of killing liquid metal babbles.

The ugly: The postgame. Like everyone else I've read talk about it I find it to be very poorly balanced and not especially interesting. I went through it just to say I did, but I don't feel a need to do that again. Also what the hell to the Luck stat being used in physical damage. As if fighters did not have enough problems as is.

It's a very fun game overall, but the gameplay has a lot of balance problems. I really enjoyed the experience but the developers did not think through the new monster wrangler class at all. DQ3 has always been a game that's extremely exploitable if you want to min max and this remake holds to that.

[Cmdr_King]

Dragon Quest XI- WElp the credits are rolling, so while I think I'll poke a little bit at the remainder of the game I still feel confident talking about it now.

So... okay.
Like most DQ games a lot of its best stuff happens in the middle, because of how these are written.  But honestly while those modular plots are present here, and I do give the most props to the Lonalulu arc in several ways, there's also a lot of good stuff just in the main narrative which is only the second time I can truly say that about a Dragon Quest.  And unlike DQV, DQXI has a stable and extensive supporting cast throughout so the fact that our lad the Luminary doesn't get to really emote doesn't matter as much.
Now granted part of the way they managed all that is that the entire world of Erdrea fucking sucks and has sucked since before the Luminary was even born, so there's tragic backstories for everyone!  Just fully onboard the "and then they died too" train.  But like, that's not actually that far outside the norm for the series!  The less common part is how prolonged all the tragedy has been, normally it's sorta everything going to shit all at once as a portent, y'know?

Anyway stepping back, the game does lose a lot of steam coming off the end of act 1 I think, there's certainly good moments when you're rounding up the team again but despite the fact most of them are only completing their arcs now there's something about the way the game works where seeing their personal stories play out isn't as compelling as deducing the edges of those stories through how they respond to the various tragedies around them.  That's like... a good problem to have mind.  But it does mean you hit a point in the game where, despite being deeply story driven in most ways that matter before then, you're kinda just doing the things that finish the game.

I have to think that the postgame has a similar problem, by dint of just knowing how much the level scaling escalates past the end of act 2.  But knowing the shape of it it's also very much the natural conclusion of the story, which makes sense because when you slow down a bit like.  Half the world just fuckin' died in this game and despite the aforementioned ongoing 30 years of tragic backstories that's really kinda at odds with what Dragon Quest is.  Like, yeah, there's suffering, but not usually on that scale, not without things being made aright. 

But also like there's that stretch being the ruins of Dundrasil and Shell's arc, y'know?  Great game.

[Reiska]

DQ3- Played the remake on the Switch.

The good: Exploration, a ton of quality of life improvements, very pretty package overall. I enjoyed the game but I'm going to be a boor and write a little more about where I found it's shortcomings to be.

The bad: Gameplay balance. It's not as big a hit as FF1NES to FF1 GBA for challenge, but it's a massive step down. The developers did not scale things up to balance the increased levels and resources from shiny spots. Fight Baramos in the original switch version and this one- you just have so many more resources (including durability from higher levels) and skills that it does not feel like the same fight at all.  Things like the Merchant's Service Call make you have effectively infinite resources in most early dungeons and always on the world map.


Monster wrangler class is totally busted in two hilariously different ways:

A: Monster pile on is *by far* the best damage skill in the game and you learn it at level 1. Just a dumb amount of damage not tied to your stats and super cheap; you can use it on classes that are terrible at ST offense like Thief and watch them just churn through things.  You basically always want a thief and monster wrangler at all points (Switch them once you get to Alltrades abbey). Martial artist is fairly useless outside their final skill, merchant is useless outside of service call and the merchant army skill in the post game, gadabout is gadabout. Even Cleric/Mage/Warrior felt just like inferior options- early on you want boomerang and whip spam off high speed and later on you can nab a Sage if you want magic. For that matter, I almost never worried about weapons- why use physical skills or your attack command when monster pile on is there? Whips and Boomerangs are great early but that's it.

B: Wild side. Buff that lets you double act for 3-4 turns or so and it's cheap; accessed through monster wrangler. Yes this is as dumb as it sounds. I never bothered to use it until the end of the post-game though as just regular monster pile on did the job more than well enough.

I never actually used Kabuff or the various other buff skills- no point when monster pile on is game best damage and is so cheap/easy to access.  For that matter, I don't see the point of using anything besides a Sage/Monster Wrangler/Thief combo of some type outside of a few very specific merchant skills.  Shoutout to the Martial Artist for getting an 100% auto crit skill in the 40's that is hilariously inferior to monster pile on outside of killing liquid metal babbles.

The ugly: The postgame. Like everyone else I've read talk about it I find it to be very poorly balanced and not especially interesting. I went through it just to say I did, but I don't feel a need to do that again. Also what the hell to the Luck stat being used in physical damage. As if fighters did not have enough problems as is.

It's a very fun game overall, but the gameplay has a lot of balance problems. I really enjoyed the experience but the developers did not think through the new monster wrangler class at all. DQ3 has always been a game that's extremely exploitable if you want to min max and this remake holds to that.

The particularly bizarre thing about this remake is that if you don't use monster wrangler, it's actually quite a bit harder than the previous remake and arguably harder than the NES version, in mostly not-great ways!  Which just reinforces how much of a Problem monster wrangler is.

[superaielman]

Ooc: Reiska, how so? The extra levels, stats and gear from shiny spots seems like it helps as much as monster wrangler. I easily had full heal for baramos in this version and a ton more mp due to the stat rebalancing as a just an off the cuff thing. You also have the merchants rest skill to avoid resource grinds until late game dungeons. Also the monster arena helps a ton with money but doing that without wranglers to track them down sounds unfun on a first play through.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Mega Man 9, 10, 11, X1, X8 - Finished up the revisit to the series (which previously included MM1-5 and 8). Was fun! This series of replays had convinced me I was underrating Mega Man 10 a bit; in my old ratings I had it below 1/4/5 but now I'm not so sure! The design sensibility is pretty good. By comparison, I kinda feel Mega Man X1 really hasn't aged very well; some things take ludicrous numbers of hits to defeat with the buster and the stage design is bad (though I've always been strongly of the opinion on that one). Still has some fun bosses to be sure, but it was enough to make us skip straight to X8 (which is still pretty great, on the other hand).

Kitsune Tails - Beat the maingame. Basically "what if SMB3 had an actual story with strong LGBTQ+ themes", which is to say it's been a great time.

Final Fantasy 6 Pixel Remaster - About an hour in (right before reaching Vargas) I discovered the "boost" options which let you set exp/AP/gil gains to whatever multiplier you want. So I immediately set things to 0.5x exp, which meant I still had the earlygame levels to not make FF6's shockingly competent earlygame bosses even better, but the game should maintain challenge better in the face of someone who knows the game well. I got the Falcon at Level 20, so mission accomplished I guess. Having a good time, have done Mt. Zozo / Veldt Cave / Jidoor so far in the World of Ruin.

Baldur's Gate 3 - Got to Moonrise Towers. Feels like I'm getting steadily more into this game. It's obviously doing something right in that I'm over 40 hours in now but I'm not yet feeling the "are we done yet" feel I usually get with games of this length.

[DragonKnight Zero]

More Disgaea 4 impressions

- Skill transferal works different and I'm not seeing how to permanently teach magic to story characters if they don't already have access to it.  I'm hoping a way will reveal itself later on but healing is at much more of a premium not being able to pass it down a master-pupil chain.  Especially when combined with needing to spend scarce Mana to upgrade heal spells to hit more targets per cast.
- Comprehensive scene skip is awesome.  I've stumbled onto some endings that come from losing fights and even though those require a new cycle to log in the Ending Record, bashing my way back goes by quickly due to not having to rewatch story scenes.
- Bonus gauge fills faster.  At a guess, I think it fills twice as fast as the first Disgaea so easier to get loot out of it.
- I have mixed feelings about the Item World expansion.  On one hand, the increased variety does mix things up and there can be some handy finds in the various Mystery Room.  On the other end, each 10 floor dive takes longer than before.  It can sometimes feel like bloat.  I've yet to see the game be polite enough to place the dimensional portal (next floor without fighting everything) closer than 10 panels or so.  Thus requiring chain throwing to get someone there in one turn if I've chosen to skip the floor.  Though on the flipside, I've yet to see Gatekeeper on some rude geo panel combo such as No Lifting and Invincibility.  So force remains an option and I'm not as ticked that Gatekkepers tend to be in corners where Triple Strike doesn't work.
- Episode 4 is when I feel the narrative kicks into gear and I become interested in the plot.
- Haven't really gotten good mileage out of monster Fusion yet.  Being unable to throw them for positioning purposes and being more restricted on when they can take back movement are notable downsides.  If there are profitable uses of Fusion, I haven't found them yet.