Lurker > Xiahou_Shake

Is this the thread where folks are talking about ZZZ? I got into the beta and this is my first time playing any sort of mobage since FGO (no prior Hoyo experience) so this level of production quality is certainly new to me!

Honestly not sure how I feel about the game beyond the polish, though. Combat feels pretty mashy and simplistic, and I'd say I guess it kinda has to be for the sake of phone players but then I do know there's an actual DMC mobile game with legit combos so I don't know if that's really true.

Also already a big scared off by the community since when I went to see what other folks think about the game's mechanics all I saw was 90% of the discourse dominated by that Nicole censorship stuff. The original animation seems extremely cringey to me so count me in the camp that's glad it changed!

Yeah I also prefer keeping Insight as high as possible since it makes the game more interesting and fun.

Grand_Kirby posted...

Damn, I love it how the youtube front page immediately posted a major new spoiler on day 1. Yeesh

I completely blocked video suggestions from YouTube years ago for this exact reason and it's been an enormous improvement to my life. So frustrating and stupid the things people do for clicks

It's legitimately painful to know that a studio as solid as Rocksteady was locked into this mess of a project for eight years when it's completely doomed to fail entirely because of corporate trend chasing

Ya go my Alan Wake 2

Have to imagine BG3 would be stiff competition but I haven't gotten around to it yet

This is kind of an incredible matchup since (Terrifier spoilers) it feels like Art is slowly turning into a Bob-like entity as the movies continue.

Gotta give this to Bob though, I feel like he's every bit as bad as Art and is further along on his journey of evil to boot.

Alan Wake 1 and 2 are completely different types of games, yes. First is an action horror shooter while the second is legit survival horror.

colliding posted...

like persona 5 tactica, this is a victim of there being too many games right now

Nah, this one actually seems like it deserves to be ignored.

No new playable characters, no new mechanics, no new skills, not even any new artes, and apparently all that is there is entirely rehashed and recycled from the main game. Sounds like all that's really here is some extra story, which was the worst part of the base game. The Graces F Arc completely clowns on this in terms of adding meaningful content to the game. Absolutely bonkers and just bizarre that they're trying to sell this for $30 when it seems like they didn't even try to do anything here.

Yeah the fact that the original creators have pretty much completely disavowed this combined with how long it was stuck in development hell gives me absolutely no desire to watch this. Most I can hope for is it's so bad that I at least get some amusement from other folks getting uproarious about it.

LightningStrikes posted...

Initiation 4.

omg

Legit worth the 13 year wait

2024 here we come - tag!

It's incredibly dumb to me that phones are are expensive as they are but I've happily dropped upwards of $2k on PC parts all at once multiple times and will absolutely do so again. (Though I guess that's not saying much since these days GPUs are creeping up to cost almost that much by themselves X_X)

I had legitimately no idea the world had turned so hard on CAH, this is actually kind of fascinating to discover. For parties with non-gamers it was always easily among the safest bets for tabletop fun in my experience.

Always had lots of fun with it in my group in our college days but it's largely been shelved just because we've pretty much exhausted it at this point and are all big enough nerds to have fun with more complicated stuff like what I'm sure will populate everything from the upper low ranks here.

Cioccolata quite easily

Emet-Selch - 10

Easily the best written Final Fantasy villain and one of the best written villains in gaming period IMO

I feel like some kind of alien on this because I thought GTA5 was incredibly boring. Honestly not sure how people go so crazy about it when it has so many missions that are just commuting across Southern California with nothing interesting happening. I do that every day for work, I don't need to do it in my video games!

KamikazePotato posted...

I disagree. No games that are as long as typical FE games are run to replay numerous times. Three Houses maybe has it worse there with the monastery pacing, but the vast majority of people weren't going for their 6th (?!) replay regardless. You only need one to create a memorable experience. That's the most important thing for me, and for most others, I think.

The average Fire Emblem game isn't particularly long, though. Like, they average below 30 hours which sure, is a good bit longer than your average character action game or survival horror (which I view as the most replayable games out there personally,) but replayability is absolutely a huge and fun draw for longtime series fans.

Three Houses and Radiant Dawn are notable outliers on length and are unsurprisingly seen as the worst games in the series for replays (though both also have additional problems that make them unfun in that aspect - tedium for 3H and runs being too samey for RD.) You're definitely right in saying that for a lot - probably most - people all you need is to make the initial impression a good one, and I think 3H is proof that this approach definitely works with tons of people. I just think it's a bit of a bummer that most of the rest of the series gets better the more you sink your teeth into them and really lose yourself in their intricacies whereas with 3H you only see more cracks in the veneer for trying to doing so.

3H is amazing on the first playthrough but it suffers enormously on a second and becomes mind-numbingly tedious on a third, which is kind of hilarious because that's how many playthroughs you actually need to see all the major story stuff.

Fire Emblems are typically fun to replay and blitz through, but Three Houses is extremely unfun to replay and you can't blitz through it with all the clunky monastery stuff even on NG+, so even if it offered a great initial run I kind of have to look back at it as a poor "Fire Emblem" game. I quit in the middle of my third playthrough to play New Mystery of the Emblem instead and holy hell the comparatively rapid pacing of that game made me feel like a drowning man who finally came up for air.

It seems like the universal consensus on this game (journalists and longtime fans alike) is that the gameplay is fantastic but the story is disappointing, right? Gotta wonder how IS will react to these sales and adjust with that in mind. Ideally I'd hope they'd adjust and turn out a game with both great gameplay and story but they might flee back into the comfort of a Three Houses style game which would... not be great.

I feel like MultiVersus had its moment and they dropped the bag. (While simultaneously also taking the bag and pissing off a lot of people who were actually willing to spend money on it.) I'm sure it'll have some form of resurgence when it does limp back to live service but it'll never be remotely what it could have been.

Part 8 spoilers

I'm sitting here legitimately in shock that they just straight up made an entire Lynchian Finnish short film for this game that you could theoretically just completely ignore and walk by. Remedy is operating on a different level with this game, they've mastered a craft here that I don't think anyone else is even practicing.

Jesus that's really bad

Yes! Actually somewhat surprised to see the amount of dislikes for him. FF15 has lots of problems but Noctis IMO isn't one of them. He felt pretty cleanly like the first decent FF protagonist at the time since Tidus 15 years prior to his game coming out and had zero competition until 7 years later when FF16 came out!

X

5 absolutely blows the others out of the water as an actual game. Progression of confidants alone makes social links in 3 and 4 look archaic and a far cry from the core mechanics they're intended to be.

Yeah I'm also pretty firmly against the idea that not considering or "understanding" that something is evil makes whatever someone is doing less evil. I might even argue it makes them moreso, insofar as evil is something truly reprehensible. Tales of Zestiria uses that logic and that's why it has terribly written stuff like "pure of heart" serial killers.

Anywho, this has been a fun one to consider but I'm pretty comfortable in voting Pennywise now.

I'm not a King expert by any means, but didnt IT also effectively poison Derry and create the shitty, miserable and abusive culture that tormented all the kids before Pennywise even started feeding? That feels like it's worth considering, if Pennywise spreads evil just by existing even when he's not active.

Holding my vote until someone more tuned in can address that point, but leaning Pennywise because as others have noted, Frieza has lost a lot of his edge with Super factored in.

Loved following along with this as I did my own (unchronicled) marathon throughout the month. More than a few things here will no doubt be on my list next year!

Art the Clown is way more twisted, sadistic and just plain evil. Wesker has scale of objective on his side for sure but that's really the only advantage I see for him here, and Art is way more malevolent in his intimacy.

Isn't this game like a year old? Don't know too much about it but people have seemed to be generally positive about it whenever I hear it mentioned, which is quite rare.

Busted out laughing at the line about this story eventually being forgotten since this will inevitably be yanked from service within a couple of years and forgotten.

(In fairness to Squeenix though they've at least preserved the story bits of Union X and Dark Road in an offline version - hope they're prepared to do the same here!)

Damn, ninja'd

Sounds like this was, predictably, an absolute dumpster fire. What a bizarre thing to even try, but the execution of this already bad idea seems to be impressively terrible. One of my favorite bits I've seen is all of the QTEs failing because they're super easy to sabotage and I guess they just... didn't consider people would do that?

Just imagining the board room meetings and slide decks about Twitch Plays Pokemon that no doubt spawned this misguided mess inflicts more psychological horror for me than anything that this project seems likely to do. I do look forward to the post mortem on this entire thing, though.

I'm still getting over the fact that they decided that what this deeply disturbing psychological horror franchise needed to be relevant today is fucking Twitch chat.

MacArrowny posted...

Anyone else feel like AW2's a bit too open? I quite enjoyed how linear AW1 was. Exploration doesn't feel too rewarding for me; I'm more here for the story.

It's very different, to say the least. I'm probably not going to render a verdict on it until I'm further in but it's kind of nuts just how different this game is compared with the first. I definitely get the sense that this is probably more of what they wanted to do with the original game but just couldn't for multiple reasons. Exploration feels reasonably rewarding to me so far between Saga's charms and (more directly/seemingly powerfully) Alan's words of power, plus the lore you get along the way, but it all does lend itself to the pace of this game being enormously drawn out compared to how relatively snappy the first one was.

All of that said I'm really digging it so far. The atmosphere is absolutely nuts and while I'm undecided on the pacing itself, it's really cool how every enemy encounter actually feels significant and threatening versus Alan Wake 1's endless meat grinder of shadow people. (I do feel like it might be a smidge egregious that you maybe fight a total of like, four enemies within the first 5 hours of the game, though!)

I feel like I've completely spoiled myself rotten on amazing horror during my own movie marathon this month. Lots of catchup on amazing releases from the last few years plus some classics I've missed out on.

Top highlights so far have been:
Talk to Me
X
Midsommar
The Invisible Man
Prey

How have the 20s been so damn amazing for horror? Next year's marathon doesn't feel like it has a chance to living up to this, but it's been a while since I've felt such a huge love and sense of excitement for where the genre is currently at.

Been keeping an eye on this game for quite a while. Sounds great and impressions seem really good so I might snag it before the Steam sale ends.

I haven't played Cyberpunk with path tracing actually but as the only other non-tech demo (I count Portal and Quake here) with full implementation I have to imagine that's also at least pretty up there.

I've got a pretty darn capable PC but holy moly maxing everything out on this absolutely brings my system to its knees. Like, we're talking screaming hardware heating my room up about 10 degrees. God damn gorgeous though - this is probably the first game I've seen that legitimately has a "next-gen" feeling to it, the graphics and lighting are truly remarkable. I don't think I can crank the performance I'd want to play through the whole game like this but it's an awesome glimpse of what's to come for games, and replaying this years down the road with better hardware will no doubt be an absolute treat.

Sounds like Willy's Wonderland will remain the definitive FNAF experience

Gotta go with Freddy

Myers feels like a more "pure" evil but as others have said, Freddy is just totally twisted and is loving what he's doing, which is very often far more cruel than The Shape's almost mechanical, completely apathetic slaughter.

It feels totally surreal that this game is not only real after all this time, but seems to be garnering such universal praise on top of apparently being on the cutting edge technologically. So happy with where Remedy is these days and absolutely can't wait for tomorrow.

Yes!

Rising

These games have been datamined already and the findings support previously dug up assets from the official website indicating that Vol 2 will indeed have MGS4 as well as Peace Walker, so that's cool!

Sounds like the community has already uncapped the resolution, so there's that! Definitely would still like to see it addressed in a patch quickly though, because it sure is embarrassing to see an official release capped at 720p in 2023 when emulators have been doing 4k for ages now.

Serves me right for being excited, apparently the PC versions have some real problems. Games are capped internally at 720p, which is even worse than the 1080p they said it would be locked at. Literally no reason to limit resolution in this way unless you're just too lazy to do options at all, which appears to be the case here.

On top of that apparently MGS3's frame limiter can just completely break, putting the game into fast-forward and going faster the stronger your PC is. Supposedly patches are on the way to fix this stuff but honestly this is in a pretty embarrassing state right now.

Honestly I'm over here celebrating that modern Konami managed to do a straight port (with some nice bells and whistles in the graphic novels etc) while somehow not only avoiding fucking anything up but even addressing some bugs and imperfections that the previous HD versions had! Will definitely be picking these up a bit down the line, will be great to have them easily accessible without any emulation fiddling required.

th3l3fty posted...

I liked it but I would not recommend playing it without the tag anywhere mod

I haven't tried it with this mod yet but even before it existed I was swearing up and down that the awful backtracking was the main thing holding the game back. Have to imagine going back to vanilla is damn near impossible once you've tried it!