Lurker > Evillordexdeath

Glad to see my nomination (Sharks) doing so well. Also kind of glad it lost here since it leaves me with a decent shot at the prize.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

ZenOfThunder posted...

AND YOU CAN VOTE FOR THEM NOW IN THE BEST FEMALE VILLAINS QUOTE CONTEST, RIGHT HERE ON BOARD 8

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/78753864

Hey, no fair! I need them to lose for my bracket!

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Here was my full list:

+10 Mother 3
+9 Final Fantasy Tactics
+8 Dark Souls
+7 Shadow of the Colossus
+6 Silent Hill 2
+5 Xenogears
+4 EarthBound
+3 Portal 2
+2 Professor Layton and the Unwound Future
+1 Fallout 2

I'd say I was overall satisfied with how many of my choices made it. I've never been super close to the rest of Board 8 in terms of taste.

Life is Strange, Undertale, and FFX are the games I feel really don't deserve their positions.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

I got roped into an overtime shift tonight, which turned a weekend where I was hoping to finish ME1 and make some headway in the second game into one where I'll be lucky to complete the Virmire section.

Finished off Noveria today. After the build-up for Matriarch Benezia, the fight itself can't help but feel like a case of story-gameplay disconnect (or 'ludonarrative dissonance if you insist.) An Asari Matriarch is one of the wisest and most powerful creatures in the galaxy, or so Shepard says, but once she became vulnerable (you have to take down some minions before you're allowed to hurt her) I killed her in one Assassinate-empowered shot.

If there are any ME veterans reading this, is the Sniper Rifle this OP in the later games? I feel like I should change classes in ME2 for the sake of more challenge. For what it's worth, if the AI would just move around a little more I imagine I'd be ham-handed enough with the aim that it wouldn't feel so strong.

More interesting than Benezia was the encounter with the Rachni Queen. Of course I chose to free her. Besides the Paragon points, it's just more interesting story-wise to have her still roaming around.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Sharks" -GLaDOS

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Okay, with yesterday's sidequests out of the way, I can finally get around to the main story. Ooh, but there's a mission to help some embattled soldiers, wouldn't it be nice to save them...

NO. I'll just arrive to find their corpses anyway, and I don't want to waste any more time on this game's half-baked sidequests.

So we set off for Noveria and arrive to learn that matriarch Benezia is on the planet. I've been using Garrus and Wrex as my squad-mates lately, but had Wrex hit the bench so Liara can be around when we confront her mum.

The opening social section on Noveria is deliberately set up to give you a little sense of catharsis by having a Salarian businessman be a complete dick to you and then letting you help take him down. There are also a few optional missions involving helping some corporations with illegal espionage, but you can get paragon points for turning them down, which I call a win/win!

During this section we also fight an Asari biotic who functions as a sort of miniboss, but after she cast her initial spells she just stood still firing a pistol at Garrus, allowing me to easily activate my Assassination ability and then kill her with a single sniper rifle shot. Hard mode, ladies and gentlemen!

The vehicle section in the blizzard was the first one to escalate from annoying to straight-up broken. Twice in a row I hit a tiny bump in the road and this caused the game to stall for a moment and then the Mako would spontaneously combust and send me to the game over screen. That was a treat. I went into full drive past all the enemies mode to try and get out of there as soon as possible. It worked. I had to repair the mako twice, but I have tons of omni-gel from getting rid of all the useless items the game loads you with, so the cost was irrelevant. I'm at the point where I actively avoid picking items out of crates so that I don't have to bother with the tedious inventory management as often, incidentally.

The enemy groups here mostly consist of Geth and Rachni. The second are new and usually throw a wave of suicide-bomber drones at you followed by some stronger soldiers. The little drones are troublesome for a sniper-rifle class, so for the first time in a while I took out my pistol to deal with them.

At this point I'm about 80% of the way to the full Paragon meter and have the maximum 12 points in Charm, so although I'm not 100% sure this is how it works, I don't think there's much point to farming any more, at least for dialog checks. That's a relief.

I have the sniper rifle and spectre training skills maxed too, and I'm working on the Commando skill for decreased cooldown on Assassinate. I think Sniper Rifles might be overpowered in this game, and never really bother using my Tech skills any more because the damage they deal is so paltry in comparison. I'll have nothing else I actually want to spend points on once Commando is maxed out.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

+10 Mother 3
+9 Final Fantasy Tactics
+8 Dark Souls
+7
+6
+5 Xenogears
+4
+3 Portal 2
+2
+1

Pleasantly surprised to see Xenogears and Portal 2 wind up so high on the list.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Bullet" - Sniper Wolf

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Persona 4 Golden

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Heart" -GLaDOS

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

ZenOfThunder posted...

do you feel the vehicle sections significantly hinder your experience?

Yes, but it's mostly my fault for doing too many sidequests and subjecting myself to a lot of them. If you mostly stick to the main path, which is what I would recommend, they are no big deal. You can usually drive past all the enemies that appear and get out of the Mako quickly.

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Barely had any time to play today. I cleaned up a couple more sidequests, one involving an Asari diplomat's missing sister, who turned out to be a bandit leader, and one small obscure sidequest that I remembered and wanted to revist because, as far as I know, it's the only mention of the Cerberus corporation that occurs in this game. Cerberus, of course, will be very important later.

I've increased the difficulty to Veteran for now. I was mostly hoping to get more complicated enemy AI out of that, but for the most part that doesn't really seem to have happened. It's mainly a health boost for most enemy characters.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I suppose I should also mention that I do really like the presentation of the N. Sane Trilogy!

That's one thing I can definitely attest to. They put a lot of effort into the animation and the sense of character it conveys.

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After clearing out Ferros, we get to go back to my unironic favorite part of Mass Effect: talking to all our crew members. The theme this time around was family: Ashley, Wrex, and Tali all fill us in on their relationships with their dads. I think I liked Ashley's dialog especially, because hers was the one that gets away from the general single theme of her previous conversations, which was distrust of non-humans. Tali's and Wrex's dialog was nice, but still tied into the concepts of Quarian Pilgrimage and the need for reform among Krogan, which makes them come off as a little bit less multifaceted than Ashley in this particular case.

Kaidan and Liara both made it very clear that they have the hots for Shepard, and I made her flirt with them both because I thought that was funnier. Wrex and Garrus also gave out sidequests that are tied into their characters.

I must have some kind of crippling video game sidequest addiction, because I spent most of today on optional stuff. I did the mission where you disable a rogue VI on the moon. It gives you an important in-game reward in your secondary class specialization, but it's pretty lame: three copy-pasted room where you fight drones and then spend way too long breaking down a total of 24 unmoving AI clusters. I picked the weapons specialization because I'm finding that my spell damage isn't really useful and sniper rifle shots are much more important. I also took the time to do the quests Garrus and Wrex gave me, which were short and sweet enough that I didn't mind.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

L-Block

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Immortal Machine" -SHODAN
"Sharks" -GLaDOS
"Scar" -Boss
"Friends" -GLaDOS

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

+10 Mother 3
+9 Final Fantasy Tactics
+8 Dark Souls
+7
+6
+5
+4
+3
+2
+1

Only one other game on my list will make it, so it's nice that my top 3 managed at least.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Heart" -GLaDOS
"Clothes" -Sylvia
"Bullet" -Sniper Wolf
"Monster" -Athena

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Completed the Feros section of the game today. We shuttle down to help a human colony under Geth attack, only to eventually learn that it was the base of operations for a corporation called Exogeni who take some cues from Weyland-Utani of the Alien franchise, and are deliberately infecting the colonists with spores from a giant mind-controlling plant called the Thorian for the purpose of study. Along with a lot of riding around in the mako, this meant fighting some zombies that slowly walk toward you while you pop them off with no threat and incapacitating mentally enslaved humans with grenades, which was kind of annoying since you can only carry 6 at a time, but with a couple of reloads I managed to get the full +32 Paragon points for that section. I feel jealous of people playing renegade, since slaughtering all the colonists would've been much easier and more enjoyable from a gameplay perspective.

After all that, we deal with a long "boss fight" where you run around a room shooting wall-mounted plant tendrils in between rounds against the same Asari clone and a bunch of useless Thorian Creepers, and finally we learn that Saren contacted the Thorian to gain Prothean ancestral memories and then tried to destroy it so we couldn't do the same, but a released Asari sister of Liara's shares those memories with us and Saren's plans for this area are (somewhat) foiled.

On the whole, this part has a lot of missteps gameplay wise but was intriguing enough as part of the story.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

pezzicle posted...

If the average game is 30 hours it comes out to about 4000 hours lol

Sounds about right. I think the median would be below 30 but the mean might be above that due to some of those Persona 5s and Witcher 3s bringing it up. That puts me at about 0.1% of the way there so far!

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Since Bioware's games are so heavily character-focused, let's go over some of the major characters in Mass Effect 1:

- Commander Shepard: An RPG-style player-insert character, at least in theory. Many parts of her identity and broad personality are up to the player, but most of her actions are essentially set in stone by the game. In a lot of WRPGs the ultimate course of the narrative and main character's journey can be decided by the player, but Mass Effect is an exception. Shepard always hunts down Saren and wages war upon the reapers, and she's always a strong-willed commanding war veteran. Bear in mind that this isn't necessarily a fault of the game's. Bioware had a more linear story that they wanted to tell and chose to make an RPG with more restrictive player choice in service of that goal. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of perspective.

- Saren: Probably the main antagonist with the most presence out of any in this trilogy. Like Darth Malak in KotOR, we don't learn much about him early on, except that he's menacing and temperamental, which kind of feel like standard bad guy traits. He apparently has a hate-on for humans. If this character reveals more dimensions later on, I certainly can't remember them. More on this guy later.

- Kaidan Alenko: Shepard's first party member, and a potential love interest for our female Commander. Most people find this guy bland. Most of his backstory involves being a '2nd generation' biotic who gets migraines as a side-effect of his implants, as well as his general mistreatment as a child by a biotics company called Conatix Industries. I don't mind that backstory itself - it ties into some interesting-enough lore for the rest of the series - but I think the problem with Kaidan is that his moment-to-moment dialog doesn't convey much personality. It's never very compelling to bring Kaidan along on a mission and find out what he'll think of the things you see along the way, because his commentary is just kind of dull.

- Ashley Willaims: Our second human companion, who helps us narrow down this game's general rule for character classes: girls are specialized, boys are multi-talented. Her main thing is that she's racist against aliens - for this reason, she's one of the most hated Mass Effect characters. To both her credit and the game's, she isn't some ranting, uncontrollable xenophobe. She distrusts your alien allies because she thinks they will always place their species' interests above any alliance with humanity. That idea is in contradiction to the series' main themes, and Shepard can argue about it with her in most of their dialog.

This game gives you the "Sophie's Choice," of whether to save Kaidan or Ashley near the end. I picked Ashley the first time around, after which she had almost no impact on the rest of the series. You briefly meet her at one point in Mass Effect 2 and talk for a minute, and then she rejoins as a squad member in the third game. At some point she asks to transfer to a completely different unit, which I allowed, and then I never saw her again and didn't care.

- Garrus Vakarian: A Turian, and our first alien friend. Garrus is easily the squad member I feel the most attached to from my previous playthrough of the trilogy, and I like to include him on every mission. It felt kind of strange running into him again for the first time and having him react to Shepard as a stranger. He's a party member in all three games, so you really build a relationship with him by the end.

At this point in his life Garrus is just a high-ranking C-Sec (essentially the Citadel's police force) officer who is fed up with the red tape. He has a sense of liberation - almost of fun - when he's working with Shepard for this reason, and generally his situational dialog is more enjoyable than that of someone like Kaidan. When I first found out about the monkey quest, for example, he sarcastically said "This will be fun," which neatly mirrored my own thoughts. Then when I accidentally ran one of the monkeys over in the Mako he remarked "Guess the little beast had it coming."

Urdnot Wrex: A member of the dying Krogan race. He has a major role in the overarching story, but only actually accompanies Shepard in the first game. The whole narrative of the Krogan being uplifted by the Salarians, used to fight in the Rachni wars, rebelling, and then being crippled with the Genophage might be the most interesting part of Mass Effect's lore, so it's nice that Wrex gives us his perspective on it. As a character, though, I'm not in love with him. He's okay, don't get me wrong, but his brand of honor-focused militarism is just kind of overdone in sci-fi.

Tali'Zorah nar Rayya: Quarian and dedicated tech caster, and only character besides Garrus who comes along on the ride for all three games. Tali is probably my second-favorite member of the ME1 squad, but there's a significant gap between her and Garrus. I admit I have a hard time remembering what I like about her. I remember her loyalty mission in ME2 pretty well and found it interesting, and I guess I like the sort of youthful enthusiasm that she brings to the crew in this game. She's the techie type and spends most of her time hanging around in the engine room studying the Normandy. She's also our introduction to the Quarian/Geth dispute, which is another of the cooler storylines in the series.

Liara T'Soni: Asari, biotic caster counterpart to Tali as well as scientist in a different field - mostly a historian and archeologist. Liara has a personal investment in the plot of the first game because her mum is one of the primary antagonists, which gives a narrative incentive to bring her along on certain missions. She's also a love interest for both male and female Shepard due Asari being a mono-sex species. In fact, I romanced her the first time around, mostly because my only other option was Ashley.

Like Tali, I remember feeling pretty attached to Liara by the end of the third game but I can't remember what I liked about her character very clearly. I know that she's important to one of the more popular DLCs in the second game, which I played and remember thinking was alright. Maybe it's just that she was one of my first romantic partners in a video game, and you don't forget that kind of young love.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Mother/Earthbound

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Scar" -Boss
"Speck" -SHODAN
"Belly" -Gruntilda
"Friends" -GLaDOS

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Okay, I stayed up all night playing ME1. Now that I don't feel so rushed, I'll talk about the game, and what I'm doing in it, with a little more detail.

I'm playing on Normal difficulty with the aim-assist off. I initially picked this because I'm really not confident about my skill in shooters. It is definitely a baby difficulty where a lot of the enemies will just stand still and fire, making themselves almost brain-dead easy to hit. I thought about bumping it up to hard, but have refrained so far because the long load times and need to repeat dialog makes the times I do lose really annoying, so I don't want it to happen any more often than it needs to.

I remember the second and third Mass Effect games having really simplistic level-up systems, but the first one isn't so bad and does give you some ability to make meaningful choices. I would rather struggle a bit more with the combat than be locked out of story content, so I made sure to level electronics and decryption to the point where I can do the hard difficulty skill checks, and then put as many points into Charm as I could, before leveling up my combat skills. I've managed to max out Shepard's Sniper Rifle skill despite that, as of now.

There's not much reason to vary up your party members. Most of the time I've gone with Garrus and Liara. I've built Garrus to be kind of tanky and maxed out his Assault Rifles, and as for Liara, I've focused on her offensive biotic skills. I haven't taught her Stasis or put many points into Barrier. This is one of two possible teams you can have with Infiltrator Shepard that's completely balanced. The other is Kaiden and Wrex. I don't think there's any special reason to go for high balance, though. There aren't any enemies I know of that badly need to be countered by tech or biotic skills specifically. Sometimes I bring Tali if I expect to fight a lot of Geth, because she has an AI Hacking ability that makes them attack each other.

I don't really like how the game makes you pick a class at the start and binds you to it. I think a system like Fallout's where you can freely select skills would be better. This system is unnecessarily restrictive. It would be nice to be able to play as a tech/weapons character but train in assault rifles and shotguns instead of sniper rifles, but there's no way to do that in this game.

I finished up what there was to do on the Citadel and then hurried to the story mission where you recruit Liara, and otherwise spent a really long time doing side quests. God knows why - at this point I feel qualified to report that ME1's side quests are almost all pretty lame. This is partially due to the heavy presence of the Mako, Shepard's seemingly weightless tank. The Mako is pretty widely reviled by Mass Effect fans, and after spending some more time with it I remember why. It's a huge part of the game, but nothing about it really works from a gameplay standpoint. Most of the non-essential planets you can go to are just 1 square kilometer of empty terrain with a couple points of interest scattered at the edges. You have to ride the Mako around lots of steep hills and cliffs to reach them. The Mako can scale most cliffs but if they're too steep it doesn't really work out, and there's no clear visual indication of which cliffs aren't worth the effort. So a lot of the time the mere act of traversal between these points of interest is kind of annoying, and the reward is usually playing a crappy version of Simon for a few seconds and then getting some useless gear dumped into your inventory. Mako combat doesn't really make sense either. Most enemies on these little planets stay in a single area and won't pursue you if you leave it, and the Mako's shields are powerful but slow to regenerate, so the most effective way to clear them is to fight until you're out of shields, kill a few enemies, and then back off and wait for several minutes on end until your shields recover, then rinse and repeat until all enemies are dead. I've only really needed this technique the once, so far, but in principle the Mako's design makes it impossible for the vehicle combat to be challenging, really. It can only be tedious.

A lot of the optional stuff is as dull as surveying minerals or picking up identical medals or old books that you can't even read. It definitely gave me the feeling of "why am I spending some of my finite hours on this Earth doing this inane bullshit?" The worst one yet was about retrieving a data cache from some monkeys. You have to drive around to multiple different monkey colonies and check each individual monkey one by one for the damn thing. Whoever designed that should have been fired.

One sidequest that I did like involved getting an old artifact from the Asari Consort on the Citadel and using it to unlock ancestral memories in a Prothean relic, about the Protheans messing with mankind's ancestors. That lore was interesting enough to justify the car ride. I also did a longer quest-line on an asteroid nearby a major human colony called Terra Nova, which had a decent payoff with some info about an old war between humans and a minor species called Batarians and an interesting choice between bringing down a terrorist and letting him go to save hostages. Naturally, I picked the latter option and raked in a nice windfall of sweet, sweet Paragon points. I'm almost halfway to the max value by now!

I notice that a lot of the time the dialog options you're given are just three different "flavors" of the same response, and likewise, although there are definitely times when this isn't the case, sometimes being a renegade means doing the same things as a Paragon, but just being a bit of a dick about it. Also, after having to re-try the fight against the Krogan Battlemaster when you first rescue Liara, I learned that sometimes you're presented with two dialog options that lead to Shepard saying the exact same thing!

This is something I never really realized until now, but when you're asked to look for a missing person in Bioware games, you almost invariably find his corpse instead of being able to rescue him alive. A weird amount of their storytelling is accomplished through data files found on dead bodies. I think that's too bad, really, because encountering a living person is usually both more interesting and more rewarding. Getting to meet and talk to a character I helped is somehow much more special to me than the millions of off-screen lives the game tells me I've saved.

The game's lore is definitely interesting and I found myself spending a while just reading through the journal entries about the major species and their history. That and talking to my crew members between missions are probably my favorite parts of the game.

This post has been mostly grousing, but I just sat down and played the game for like ten hours straight without really wanting to stop, so it's definitely doing something right. I think I'm side-quested out for now though. Mass Effect fans: Are there any sidequests in the first game that you think are particularly good, or that lead to interesting payoff in the later games?

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

pezzicle posted...

Do you have an estimate on how many hours this will be?

Nothing more precise than "way too many." I haven't taken the time to add up the average length for the games like Tangy suggests, just because for 129 games it would take a while and that's time I could spend playing them instead. VVVVVV was only 2 hours and a lot of the other indies should be short, but on the other hand there are tons of very long RPGs including Persona 5 which took me 100 hours on its own last time I played it.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Thinking of getting the Crash Bandicoot Trilogy on Switch.

Cool! Tell me what you think of it. I've never played much Crash but I did like the Jak and Daxter trilogy.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

UltimaterializerX posted...

Wait, you're playing games you've already played?

That's crazy.

Yeah! If I skipped almost half the games I'd feel like I was only doing this half-way. I'm interested to see how my opinion might have changed over the years on some games, too.

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Currently playing more ME. I'm mostly just posting now because it's almost midnight and I want to be able to say I updated every day. Expect a more substantial update later on.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Undertale

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

First thing that came to mind was Xenoblade Chronicles 2 having a gacha system when it's not even trying to wring money out of you with it. The point of that system is explicitly not to make games more fun, so that never made sense to me.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Immortal machine" -SHODAN
"Beyond death" -Ultimecia
"Sharks" -GLaDOS
"Died" -Dahlia

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Before leaving the Citadel, we go through a short story-arc that introduces us to three new party members: Garrus, Wrex, and Tail, all of whom will end up being series staples and are among the more beloved characters. I like how elegant this section is story-wise. It manages to wrap up all three characters in one short plot that still feels natural. We also now have access to some of the best dialog in the series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Fjc1hBwuE

Our last party member, Liara, will be joining us shortly, and for the record I'll probably use her and Garrus most of the time.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Final Fantasy

Based on the assumption that we mean inconsistent strength between individual games.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Furnace" -Irene
"Bullet" -Sniper Wolf
"Insects" -Beatrix
"Fall" -Traya

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Legend of the Galactic Heroes

08th MS Team is the best Gundam series.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

BetrayedTangy posted...

The coolest thing about ME1 is how fast and easy it is to jump into the lore. I think it's the only game where I was eager to learn about all the different aliens and events.

It's just a shame that tutorial is pretty slow paced and it's easy to soft lock yourself if you don't think to save before the first Bypass and fail.

That happened to me! I failed at the little simon minigame. You can get out of it by converting some of the weapons you've found up to then into omni-gel and 'paying' 25 to get through the door.

I think Mass Effect was the first, maybe even the only, game where I actually spent time reading the in-game glossary. The idea that Solarians think at a much faster rate than humans is one little tidbit that stuck with me. I almost found the idea intimidating, when I was younger. Dealing with someone who can brute-force through you is one thing, but someone who can easily outpredict and out-think you like that can be really dangerous.

Probably the highlight of my replay so far was getting re-introduced to the Elcor. They are mostly a one-joke species but they still make me smile.

What always bothered me a little, and is now becoming apparent again as I explore the citadel, is that a lot of the side-quests feel kind of dull. I have one where the goal is to purchase a permit for public speaking! I don't know if I could come up with a more boring sidequest if I tried.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Played the first two hours of ME1 today, stopping at the part where we go to a bar on the citadel to track down Garrus.

I choose the Space and War hero backstories and Infiltrator for my class, because last time around I was an adept so it felt natural to go from specialized biotics to joint tech and weapons. I put max points into Charm right away and then focused on pistols to unlock the Sniper Rifle specialization and the lockpick equivalent skill, whose name escapes me at the moment.

By navigating through the game's slightly stilted dialog system (making sure to diligently pick the top option every time for those juicy paragon points,) we learn that humans are the new kids on the intergalactic block trying to make a name for themselves, much to the annoyance of some of the older species, and that Grushenka (aka Commander Shepard) is being considered for a position on a para-legal peacekeeping organization called the Spectres, which would make her the first human to join and help to legitimize the status of humanity. A guy named Saren screws it all up for us and we tattle on him to the intergalactic powers that be, rather pitifully. It's to the point where we resort to using a dream Grushenka had as evidence, which unsurprisingly gets dismissed. We also meet two party members in Kaidan and Ashley, both of whom no one likes.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Kefka

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Mass Effect
Release Date: November 20, 2007
I Will be Playing On: Playstation 3

Previous Experience with Mass Effect: Played the whole trilogy
What I Expect from Mass Effect: A shooter with good dialog.

Mass Effect was a favorite of my little brother's back in the day, so I was honor-bound to hate it. You can't imagine the sadistic glee I felt upon finding out that Mass Effect 3 had a reviled ending among fans - and then hearing him scream in dismay about it from two rooms over. Come to think of it, that might be my fondest memory of the entire franchise.

I kept maturing, and eventually became ready to give Mass Effect a shot on its own merits. Unsurprisingly for a kid who had loved KotOR growing up, I found a lot to like about Bioware's galaxy-spanning sci-fi trilogy, and I still have fond memories of characters like Garrus, Mordin, and EDI. It was one of my first experiences with the existential questions that more thoughtful science fiction can raise.

For all that history, though, I have my qualms about revisiting it. I have a little bit of beef with Mass Effect for being part of the process of 'dumbing down' the AAA Western RPG. I especially remember the customization choices you make upon level-up not having much impact. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole Paragon/Renegade dichotomy either, because I'm concerned that I'll be tempted to pick whatever dialog options give me paragon points instead of what makes sense for my character - particularly given that important rewards, including the lives of your party members, are wrapped up in that system. Of course, it's not as though ME invented moral choice systems. Even KotOR did the same things!

But really, that's a lot of grousing over the minutia of an otherwise-great series - and God knows there's been enough of that around Mass Effect since ME3 released. Of course I'm being flippant calling the game a shooter up above. Mass Effect is an RPG, even if some of its trappings could use fleshing out.

My goal for this playthrough is to do as many things as differently to last time as possible. I played as a man and went renegade before, so I'll begin by reversing those two choices - as worried as I am that playing Paragon will be a lot less fun. Look forward to the adventures of Agrafena "Grushenka" Shepard, starting this evening.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

Final Analysis: VVVVVV

What I thought of VVVVVV: Short and sweet, if a little frustrating
Would I play VVVVVV again? Maybe, if only because it's so short.
Did it deserve to lose in Round 1? I'm okay with this.

The release of Cave Story in 2004 makes a decent marker for when indie games started to become legit. That game had a full-scale main quest, powerups, unlockable content, a secret ending, and a story with flawed characters and dramatic events. I didn't play Cave Story until 2017, but even then I found it attention-grabbing enough to quickly play to completion.

Six years later, VVVVVV feels almost retrograde in comparison to Cave Story. It doesn't really match the depth or scope of that game. Though there is something to be said for its succinct method of storytelling, given that gaming is a visual medium, it doesn't use it to go anywhere terribly interesting, and the gameplay is mostly limited to a few simple mechanics.

But that's a strength too: the immediacy and simplicity are what make VVVVVV. Despite a couple of difficulty spikes, it really is a well designed game. It's one of the pioneering titles in how to manage high difficulty without causing rage-quits: there's no delay between death and restarts and it ditches most of the dick moves that defined its predecessor I Wanna be the Guy, a game that would have spikes shoot from the floor just before a checkpoint, with no visual warning, and then laugh as you fought the urge to hurl your keyboard against the wall.

It wasn't the game's capriciousness that made me quit IWbtG, though. I gave up during the Castlevania section, when I had to navigate a narrow passageway through rapidly-shifting spikes. At times, VVVVVV indulges this same tendency to overdo its difficulty and becomes obnoxious.

2010 was close to the time when indie games really started to shift into the relative mainstream. I don't think our first two games contests had a single indie game, or if it did they didn't last long. For one of them to go toe-to-toe with a mainline Final Fantasy game, on this of all sites, says a lot about their success in this decade, after that history.

VVVVVV is a relic of a more innocent age for indies, before The Binding of Isaac popularized procedural level generation. Its carefully tuned challenges and deliberately laid-out non-linear overworld are far more satisfying than the randomized levels - and prizes - of a game like Eagle Island. I wasn't blown away by the game by any means, but I respect it. This is a good format for a one-man project to follow. A small scale and iteration upon a simple idea and a handful of mechanics keeps the scope manageable. A lot more would-be indie developers would actually finish their games if they took lessons from VVVVVV. Just don't copy the naming system.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect

"Heart" -GLaDOS
"Carmen Sandiego" -Carmen Sandiego
"My Life" -Boss
"Clothes" -Sylvia

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

LinkMarioSamus posted...

VVVVVV is actually the last game I beat, in early 2017, and while I liked the game I wasn't super crazy about it and it wasn't exactly a standout memory for me. Last year I tried playing Final Fantasy VII, got stuck on this boss you fight right outside Midgar on Disc 2, and then never came back. Haven't felt particularly keen on Final Fantasy since then either. I guess part of the problem is that I was hoping for my FFVII playthrough to be momentous, and instead it just felt like business as usual.

That's kind of similar to how I feel about VVVVVV. FFVII is a game where you "had to be there" to a certain extent. The story and gameplay hold up pretty well I would say, but there's no denying that a big part of its cultural impact came from how impressive the technology behind it was at the time.

Oh yeah, I remember you posting in another topic that you struggled with Diamond Weapon and being really surprised by that, because last time I played it with a friend both of our responses to him were "wow, what an under-powered boss!" I guess it's an example of how much easier a game can get once you know the tricks. Diamond Weapon goes down really quickly to Bolt3 and has no area-of-effect attacks, so even if he's one-shotting your guys you can get through by using a phoenix down after each of his attacks.

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Final stats for VVVVVV

Play Time: 2:17:43
Crewmates Rescued: 6/6
Trinkets Found: 14/20
Deaths: 843

Appropriately for a final section, the last area of the game brings back all the mechanics we learned in the previous sections. The tripwires that make you reverse direction mid-air, the screens looping into themselves, even the auto-scrolling sections come back for a final visit. After a non-linear game with a consequently 'flat' difficulty curve, this last area is a bit of a step up, though nothing came close to my previously-mentioned hardest room. There are a lot of pixel-perfect narrow gaps in this section, which is where the difficulty finally started to really annoy me, and before it was over I found myself hoping that each screen would be the last.

The ending was short and kind of cute. I admit I like the optimism that the characters have about them. They see the universe collapsing around them and say "We'll find a way to save our dimension!" We're also treated to some artwork of the 6 crewmates as a rock band, which makes them look like mutli-coloured versions of Isaac (BOI) rather than teletubbies - though this game was actually first!

You're still allowed back into the overworld after the game is done, and I took the time to find one last trinket on the map. I didn't feel dedicated enough to get the ones that would require me to go back into the levels themselves.

Final Thoughts on VVVVVV coming soon.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

Since it's so close now, I'd like to solicit opinions on what I should do with Mass Effect. My inclination is to play the first one for this topic as well as the other two. I think it will be best if people can follow my Shepard through the whole trilogy instead of just reading a quick summary of the "comic book" DLC when I start 2. So if any of you are really against the idea of me playing a game that wasn't in any way in the bracket, speak up now.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

5-- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
0-- Tetris Effect

5-- Cuphead
0-- Baba is You

0-- Kirby's Epic Yarn
5-- Bayonetta

5-- Sid Meier's Civilization V
0-- Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

0-- VVVVVV
5-- Persona 5

0-- Dragon's Dogma
5-- Rayman Legends

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

BetrayedTangy posted...

Just beat it, and yeah that screen was by far the hardest one for me as well.

Also nice touch starting each of the six paragraphs with a V-word.

Thanks. I wish I could've done it using better words than "very" and "verily," but by the time I finished that post I had to bolt out the door, practically carrying a slice of toast in my mouth like a high school anime girl.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Both of those are true for me. I do indeed play mostly older games, and I've found it hard to fully commit to a game since like 2015 or so. I typically get stuck somewhere and then never return out of disinterest.

I'm kind of the same way. Before I started this project, I had played almost 50 of these games, but only finished 11: Mass Effect 2 & 3, Dark Souls, Telltale's Walking Dead, Fire Emblem Awakening, Stick of Truth, Life is Strange, Undertale, Persona 5, Cuphead, and Three Houses. Also played a lot of Civ V, but you don't really complete that game.

One of my hopes for the project is that it will help me learn to finish the things I start.

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Yesterday was the closest I've come to going a day without actually playing any games for this project. A 10-minute session with VVVVVV on the bus was my only saving grace. After playing both ways and on my lunch break:

Play Time: 1:55:50
Crewmates Rescued: 5/6
Trinkets Found 12/20
Deaths: 659

I found some trinkets outside the levels proper, including one where you go around the outside of a previous level and find it past a giant glowing elephant. I'm not sure what significance the elephant has, if any, but walking around nearby it made Viridian look sad for a while.

Past a maze of teleporters I found what I assume is the last full-fledged level, where all the screens loop into each other, like in Pac-Man. Most of the level is based around the disorientation that comes from quickly falling off the level and re-appearing at the top. It's not as hard as my death count seems to imply, really. I think most of my lives were spent trying to get a trinket in a room full of killer fish, which I eventually gave up on.

We successfully rescue Verdigris, but Veridian gets stuck in an alternate dimension from the rest of the crew, so that our only missing person now is the captain himself. That's where I stopped for now. I think this is the very last section of the game, so I should get up in the afternoon and quickly finish it off.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

Okay guys, I have a confession to make: I started VVVVVV last Friday. Thanks to COVID-19, my bus ride is especially long on Saturday mornings, so I brought it with me as a way to make use of the time. I delayed posting about it because I thought doing one game at a time would make the thread easier to follow.

So here's where we're picking up:

Play time: 1:21:26
Crewmates Rescued 5/6
Trinkets Found: 9/20
Deaths: 530 (It's that kind of game.)

VVVVVV is about 6 astronauts whose names all start with V. That's the reasoning behind the title, but I still don't call it a sufficient justification. Their spaceship crashes due to some kind of interference with its systems and they find themselves separated, and it's up to Captain Viridian, our intrepid player character, to reunite the crew and find out what went wrong.

Visually, the crew-mates make me think of the Teletubbies. They're a group of vaguely-humanoid ever-grinning creatures only differentiated by colour. The story and characterization are almost equally light, but I did think it was cute when I rescued Vermilion then the teleporter malfunctioned, throwing Viridian and Vermillion into a strange and dangerous dimension, and their response was a cheery "let's go exploring!" Their happy-go-lucky attitudes make a funny contrast against how dangerous the gameplay makes their situation look. Both characters died an embarrassing number of times on that happy little journey.

'Vicious' is the best word to describe the gameplay. It takes after games like I Wanna be the Guy where you need to position very carefully to avoid damage, and absolutely everything kills you in one hit, but it lacks the deceitful nature of that game. The things that can kill you are clearly sign-posted. The game is well-optimized to reduce the frustration factor of its difficulty, since checkpoints are extremely frequent and there's no downtime between death and respawn. The unusual 'gimmick' is that you can't jump but can reverse gravity if you're on the ground. One interesting effect of this is that you can freely explore the vertical limits of the game's overworld right from the start, while in any other game you would be heavily restricted in that way.

Very often there are sudden difficulty spikes. I think around 10% of the rooms have been responsible for like 90% of my deaths - the so-called Pareto distribution of video game deaths. For example, there's an area in the first level where you need to drop down multiple screens into a narrow chute full of spikes, bounce back up, travel the same screens again with the hazards on the opposite side, and emerge about ten pixels to the right of where you were when you began. There's a similar one shortly afterward where you have to cross multiple screens horizontally as they bounce you up and down, until you reach a very narrow spike-covered gap at the top of the whole structure. A lot of the time I would have the feeling of "I'll never manage this," and then try a little longer and manage it. The backtracking I was afraid of hasn't manifested too much. There's one 'auto-scroller' area where you can accidentally hit checkpoints and prevent yourself from going back for trinkets. I did that and thus had to go back through the whole level (which spans the entire vertical length of the map) to pick them back up.

Vermilion, the little bastard, caused a terrible number of deaths. He doesn't reverse gravity with you, but follows along whenever you're on the ground, just behind you. It can be hard to judge the distance away from you that he'll stop at, and the spacing is so precise that this led to a number of deaths. His section features by far the hardest screen so far, where you have to carefully and quickly navigate three platforms upside down, before they lower you into spikes, make it to a crevice, time your drops to lead Vermilion across, and then make your way back across the level twice to meet him. The length of time you have to go without making a mistake there made losing near the end really discouraging, but after a ton of tries I made it through.

Verily, the game is fast-paced fun so far, and I feel encouraged to keep going.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

MetalmindStats posted...

Love your pace and write-ups so far! I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about VVVVVV.

Thanks! That's very kind. I imagine most people skim heavily over the write-ups, so maybe I could make them a little more succinct. I'd also like to go even faster.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

One of only three games in the entire bracket I've beaten, the others being Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Portal 2.

All from 2010 or 11, interestingly. That implies that you're either a really retro gamer or that you stopped playing games very much around 2012.

BetrayedTangy posted...

Yeah that pretty much sums up my thoughts on Bayo as well. It was a fun time, but I'd be hard pressed to say it left an impact on me.

I imagine it's that way for a lot of people, unless they get really into the gameplay. Still, it's good enough for me. I think it's really hard to make a real impact on someone with a tone like Bayonetta's. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann managed that for me to a certain extent, but I think it helped that I was a 16 when I first saw it.

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VVVVVV
Release Date: January 11, 2010
I Will Be Playing On: Nintendo 3DS

Previous Experience With VVVVVV: None
My Expectations for VVVVVV: High difficulty + backtracking = frustration

If the contest had been "Best-Named Game of the Decade," VVVVVV would deserve last place in the X-Stats. You can tell it's an indie game, because that titling choice would never be approved by anyone trained in marketing. At least it's fun to come up with mocking variations, like "VVVVVV's Company." The best one I've thought of so far is "VVVVVV for Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta Vendetta."

Indie platformers are my favorite "Buy, but don't play" genre. Meat Boy, Shovel Knight, and Celeste are among the games I won't have to buy to complete this project, and I've never touched any of them. I only played about 2 hours of Hollow Knight. I have high expectations for all of them, don't get me wrong, I just never sat down and actually started them.

VVVVVV I did have to buy for this project. I'd say I'm looking forward to it but with a certain degree of trepidation. The game is apparently really hard and has a lot of back-tracking, which I think could become a potent rage-quit inducing combination.

When I initially sorted all the games by release date, using Wikipedia, I also took the time to glance at which platforms the games are available on, and I realized this project would help me finally get some extensive use out of my PS4. My goal, however, is to play as many games as possible on the 3DS, if only so I can take them with me on the bus. With its 8-bit graphics and fast-paced gameplay, VVVVVV seemed like an ideal place to start.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

"Nothing" -Zhael
"Belly" -Gruntilda
"Trade agreement" -Liz
"Friends" -GLaDOS

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

Final Analysis: Bayonetta
What I thought of Bayonetta: Amusingly absurd and impressively polished.
Would I play Bayonetta again? Yes, if only to satisfy my perfectionist instincts
Did it deserve to lose in round 1? No, it's probably in the top half of the bracket in terms of quality.

Restraint is generally an important concept in art. A lot of audiences might argue, for example, that the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky could've been more restrained in his use of overly long takes of people sitting around looking sad. A lot of anime gets criticized for lacking restraint in its sexualization. Bayonetta takes the concept of restraint, throws it out the window, then leaps forward in slow motion to riddle it with bullet holes as it descends into a swirling vortex that leads directly to the pits of Hell.

This is ironic for a game whose protagonist is a dominatrix, but at this level of consistency and exaggeration, it works. Most of the game's best moments come from its dizzy heights of high-octane exaggeration: fighting a rival on a flying missile, having dance-competitions with a clone of yourself, or flinging a newly awakened God across the entire solar system and into the sun. It manages a balance where it can have all this absurdity but its few more poignant scenes still have an impact, and that's in part because we become invested in the characters as we share in their fun. Bayonetta herself is endearingly self-assured: one of her sidekicks complains about her battling angels in a nun's habit, and she cooly responds "I can't help it if I like the little outfits."

The game's greatest sin is its tendency to use cutscenes for things it could show in gameplay. There are loads of long scenes where Bayonetta acrobatically annihilates mooks, and they are well-choreographed and often funny, but they can leave the player uselessly clutching his controller and feeling a little left out. Perhaps some restraint would have been useful after all, in this particular area. The cutscenes are so prevalent throughout the levels that they can disrupt the flow of replays, where the player will skip them and suddenly find Bayonetta in a completely different area. The elaborate intro scenes for every single enemy type, in particular, are one thing I could've done without.

Hideki Kamiya is a veteran of the hack and slash genre, and Platinum Games have become its most prominent developer. It's no surprise, then, that Bayonetta's combat mechanics are exceptionally well-done. There are a staggering number of options between the lengthy combo list, multiple weapons that can be attached to both hands and feet for different results, temporary weapons, and additional mechanics like the magic meter and witch time. All that complexity serves exhilarating fast-paced brawling that's especially rewarding to gradually master. Even after finishing the game, I feel like I've only scratched its surface in this regard: I'd like to go back through on normal difficulty for higher rankings, try out the harder modes, and experiment more with weapon options and unlockable skills.

But almost everything else about the gameplay is kind of shallow. The adventure game segments are mostly a series of boring puzzles based around the same two mechanics, and the more unusual motorbike and shoot-em-up sections lack the same polish and made me long to go back to the combat.

When I started playing this game, a few of you guys mentioned that it's not really your type of game. I've said a lot of nice things about it, so it might surprise you to know that it's not entirely my cup of tea either. To explain why, I'll use a contrast. Bayonetta is a Japanese story about fighting angels that extensively re-uses a cover of Bart Howard's Fly me to the Moon, and I happen to be a huge fan of something else that fits that same curiously specific description: Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Apart from the similarities I just mentioned, Bayonetta and Evangelion are about as different as can be. Their protagonists in particular are near polar opposites. While I enjoyed my time with the cocksure, unshakeable, and joyously energetic Bayonetta, I can't see her occupying a position among my favorite fictional characters like Evangelion's akward, self-doubting, frequently reprehensible Shinji Ikari does. Bayonetta can face down angels or even gods without batting an eye, constantly revealing new superpowers to counter them, and that's hilarious, but it deprives these entities of their conceptual force, by which I mean the angels in Bayonetta are as interesting and impressive as orcs in a standard fantasy story, or uncharacterized human mooks in something like Call of Duty. In contrast, Shinji's battles with his angels are traumatic, brooding, and usually narrowly won. He often sees his friends beaten down and in mortal danger, and some of Evangelion's most powerful moments are when his heroic efforts amount to nothing and he's helpless to do anything except wait for death.

In general, at least for me, the more flawed a character is, the better. This hurts the case of a character like Bayonetta, but it's great news for someone like Shinji. I'm not entirely sure why it is, but part of it comes from those previously-raised concepts of subtlety and restraint. At one point in Evangelion, Shinji claims that his primary motive is to win his father's approval, but that's not what we see in his actions. He refuses to take the first step forward on his journey (piloting a giant robot, in this case,) when his dad commands him to. What convinces him to do it is that when he refuses, he sees an injured girl being brought in to do that job in his place. My contention is that while Bayonetta would be a more enjoyable person to spend time with, Shinji is the more interesting character to observe in a work of fiction, and I guess that's part of it - Bayonetta makes her motives perfectly plain, but guessing at his gives us something to think about.

Like its main character, I had fun with Bayonetta, but I wonder if it's something I'll still think about a long time from now. I consider that the test it has to pass if it's a truly great game.

Next Game: VVVVVV

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

Chapter 16 (Boss)
Rank: Bronze

This entire chapter is dedicated to the boss fight against Balder, Bayonetta's dad. The guy is kind of a smug, foppish sort of villain, but I thought he was fun enough now that we finally got to meet him. As a boss he's more akin to Jeanne than one of the giant multi-stage battles against the Cardinal Virtues, and I think I prefer this model of boss fights for this game on the whole. Balder seems a bit more vulnerable to long combos than did Jeanne, but his attack speed becomes absolutely relentless later in the fight. It was cool seeing someone resist Bayonetta's "climax" attacks for the first time, and the way she finishes him off in the end was amusing. "Don't fuck with a witch."

Epilogue
Rank: Stone

After a short but hysterical section of riding up a rocket on a motorbike as it exits Earth's atmosphere, playing as Jeanne, we fight the final boss in Jubileus, who I was surprised to learn (though I shouldn't have been,) was a sexy woman-shaped diety. I'd say the first phase of the boss is the trickiest, where he has a variety of attacks that can come out all at once, with these Bullet-bill things that hound you even as you try to dodge attacks from the boss herself. After a little while she transitions into this more environmental boss fight with fire, ice, and lightning stages which are all pretty easy to get around. In some stages, she has a crazy instant kill attack that turns half the arena into a black hole, which was responsible for all my deaths.

Just before you finish her off, the music changes from her boss theme to Bayonetta's cover of Fly Me to the Moon, which I thought was a nice touch. I also liked the degree of absurdity that the fight manages, with things like the player maneuvering the boss' flailing body around every planet in the solar system to dunk her in the sun.

There are a couple little fights during the credits as a kind of relaxing way to wind down, which I thought was a great idea.

I would say I was satisfied with how the story ended. It's suitably light-hearted and silly as a conclusion, and I like how the whole cast of characters we've gotten to know throughout the game was together kicking ass in the end. Bayonetta's final goodbye to Cereza was cute too.

Final thoughts on Bayonetta coming soon. Possibly tomorrow.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 2/129
Currently Playing: VVVVVV

"Scar" -Boss
"Nudge" -Flemeth
"Potato" -GLaDOS
"Speck" -SHODAN

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 1/129
Currently Playing: Bayonetta

Final Fantasy XIII

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 1/129
Currently Playing: Bayonetta

Shovel Knight

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 1/129
Currently Playing: Bayonetta

"Sharks" -GLaDOS
"Face" -Wendy
"Cocky" -Katherine
"Died" -Dahlia

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 1/129
Currently Playing: Bayonetta

Chapter 13 (Boss)
Rank: Gold

First level I beat with 0 deaths. This is partially because of the health upgrades I've gathered throughout the game. This boss is definitely straight-foward but also drawn-out. He has a diving attack that is really easy to avoid but prevents you from attacking him for a while, and he uses it frequently. I even saw him do it twice in a row at one point. It started to give me trauma flashbacks of the fight against Ansem in the first Kingdom Hearts, where he had a spammable attack that surrounded him in a damage-proof aura for the duration, but at least it wasn't nearly that bad.

Chapter 14
Rank: Stone

A shoot-em-up section combined with the last fight against Jeanne. I remember when I started this game I was worried that I would think less of it for having very little apart from the combat. It's turned out to be the opposite, where the alternate gameplay styles feel much less interesting or well-developed than the combat and I almost resent the game for pulling me away from fighting to indulge them. What's interesting about this shmup section is that it still includes the evasion and Witch Time mechanics, which turn out to be pretty overpowered in this context. The section is quite long, and far less generous with its checkpoints, so after two deaths I was tired of it before it ended.

I would say it was a design error to include that section and the last Jeanne fight in the same chapter, because I can see myself wanting to replay the Jeanne fight but would rather not go back through the shoot-em-up section beforehand. It's quite an intensive and challenging battle - I died an absurd number of times trying to get through it. Jeanne only has a few attacks that let you activate Witch Time, and it's nigh impossible to get off your longer combos on her without it. I found the best option without Witch Time was the grounded Punch -> Punch -> Kick -> Kick combo. Jeanne's AI seemed to have trouble avoiding the final downward "wicked weave" hit from that option, which made it the most reliable such attack to try and hit her with. Not that I know what I'm talking about.

Chapter 15
Rank: Stone

The only 'standard' level I completed today. Unless I'm mistaken, the end of the game is in sight now, and this level did have the feeling of a final challenge to test what you've learned throughout the game, including more miniaturized versions of the earlier bosses. It was definitely nice to have a late level focused on the standard combat, though there was also a turret section that annoyed me a little.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 1/129
Currently Playing: Bayonetta