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#4726 klop422

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Posted 31 March 2020 - 07:09 PM

Ok, so I beat it. Had more fun than I was expecting with the last couple bosses - I think that stupid autosave problem put me in a bad mood.

Even so, I didn't love the game. I stand by most of what I said. Even though there's a New Game+, I'm not going to do it. I did enjoy the game for about half of it, but, frankly, it began to get tedious to go through. I'd hoped that, like Mt. Gagazet/Zanarkand in FF10, the game would get fun again, but it just... didn't. I'll probably watch the better ending on YouTube. And honestly, I've no interest in Last Mission at the moment.

 

Rayman Legends will keep me company. Maybe I'll start on FF8 as well.



#4727 Nicholas Steel

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Posted 01 April 2020 - 03:36 AM

So the game auto-saved on the "Game Over" cutscene during the final phase of the boss fight, necessitating you to start from the manual save that was created at the start of the first phase of the final boss fight?


Edited by Nicholas Steel, 01 April 2020 - 03:39 AM.


#4728 klop422

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Posted 01 April 2020 - 06:45 AM

So the game auto-saved on the "Game Over" cutscene during the final phase of the boss fight, necessitating you to start from the manual save that was created at the start of the first phase of the final boss fight?


Yeah. It was frustrating.
I did cheat slightly by copying the autosave data just before the last phase when I went back, but even so, it's annoying that I had to play around in the files. Doesn't help that none of the cutscenes for that bit of the game are skippable.

#4729 kurt91

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Posted 02 April 2020 - 06:41 PM

I love the Paper Mario games, or at least the first two, so I downloaded and started playing something called "Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling". This is pretty much Paper Mario with the copyright painted over. Same art style, even though it isn't necessary or makes sense thematically. Uses Thousand Year Door's battle system, but without Crystal Star-powered attacks or the features that came with the theater presentation. You do have three characters instead of two to use, but it's essentially splitting Mario's Hammer and Jump abilities between two characters, and then giving you a third that specializes in Ice magic and is able to force burrowing enemies out of the ground with his basic attack.

 

The leveling system is a little different as well. You gain EXP identically to Paper Mario's Star Points, but the game distributes them a little oddly. When you start a new chapter, enemies will start dropping EXP 10 at a time or so. I was really surprised at first that I was gaining 20 to 30 EXP per battle when the amount needed to level up is still around 100, just adding 1 to the amount for each level you've gone up throughout the game. I thought I was somehow incredibly underleveled, although the battles weren't too difficult. (Little more difficult than Paper Mario, though. I've been lurking around town or healing Save Points to stockpile money with easy healing, and then making the full journey to where I need to go after stocking up fully on healing items, though I usually end up with a ton left over anyways.) A single level up will cut the gain in half, and continue to do so until you're getting 1 per battle.

 

You still have Badges and Badge Points. They work the same except that you have to choose who wears which Badge, while still using a communal pool of available Badge Points instead of each character having their own amount. You could choose to just completely kit out one character into an insect Terminator, but you'll still have to keep the others alive to make up for enemies that your bug God can't hit.

 

The biggest change, mechanically speaking, is when you actually do level up. In Paper Mario, you either gain 3 HP, 3 FP, or 3 BP. Here, since you have 3 characters, you pick from 3 FP, 3 BP, or 1 HP added to each of your three fighters. In Paper Mario, there were Badges to essentially undo your choices, spending 3 BP to gain 3 HP or FP. Here, the equivalent FP badge works the same, but the HP badge will give one character 2 additional HP, so unless there's a later way to re-allocate your decisions, you're not going to just swap things back and forth as easily. I'm only at Chapter 2, and just barely starting the "dungeon" section of the Chapter.

 

Honestly, my only real gripe with the game is that you don't have the option in Settings to turn off Menu memory. You know, when you pick something in the Combat Menu, and then the next time the menu comes up, it starts at the one you selected. Personally, I'd like the menu to start on Attack, but I'm constantly having to move back and forth through Strategies (where the "Tattle" equivalent is. Oh yeah, each of the three characters have unique dialogue if you use them to Tattle each enemy!) and Attack. It sounds petty, but the way that the menu is arranged, the inconvenience starts getting to you rather quickly.

 

Other than that, I had some serious PC issues a few weeks ago, and had to completely reset my PC. Somehow, the drivers got so corrupted that I couldn't update anything, repair the existing ones, or even delete them and reinstall them from scratch. (Yes, I even used the third-party driver-removal tool that everybody recommends to scrub the PC clean when deleting them.) The process did fix installing the drivers for my Oculus, so I can use it again. Also, since I use a different folder than "Program Files" for my games, they were kept safe as well! However, it somehow deleted all of my downloaded and installed mods for Fallout: New Vegas, so I'm having to restart that game AGAIN. Someday, I'm going to actually get to finish a modded game. Something always seems to happen when I actually get to Vegas itself.

 

I'm watching Gopher's new set of videos on modding Vegas, since they're the most up-to-date on what bug-fixing mods and patches to use, and even though the videos are meant for beginners, I'm still learning a little bit about how the game works as far as things to consider when picking things like texture packs and which sizes to use. Unfortunately, his videos come out a few days apart from each other, so it's taking a while to get the basics set up. I'm hoping to do a playthrough built around sniping and the "RobCo Certified" mod (build robot followers from things in the Mojave, or repair robot enemies, and build a mechanical army with purpose-built individual units). That way, I can play it easily in VR, since iron-sights don't work particularly well in VR. Once I finish a playthrough this way, I can finally start trying the built-for-VR games! I just wanted to do New Vegas first, since games you have to force into VR don't feel as natural as built-for-VR ones, and I'd like to enjoy it before getting spoiled on the better experiences later on. Kind of like if you play a sequel first, the original feels clunkier and less enjoyable, but if you play the original first, you don't notice the drawbacks as much because you don't know better yet.



#4730 klop422

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Posted 05 April 2020 - 08:07 PM

Much shorter post this time:

 

I started FF8. So far it's fun, not much to say though. Did the first mission, became a SeeD, have done very little else.

 

 

The other thing I did was start OoT for the first time in maybe five or six years? Definitely since at some point in high school. I got ahold of the Collector's Edition Wind Waker, but I was in much more of an OoT mood, so I booted up Master Quest (no fun doing the same dungeons again, right?).

 

What can I say? It's as fun as I remember. I feel like it's one of those games that you play, and years later if you've not played it you speak about it in theoretical terms and all that, for all the issues it has, but overall I'm loving it. Sure, I already know what to do most of the time (I've gotten two of the Spiritual Stones by this point), so I can't speak for how confusing or not the game is (outside dungeons), but even so, it's a much better game than a lot of people have given it credit for in recent years. I've even actually done some exploring in Hyrule Field! (though I don't deny there's still not much there :P)

 

It's also nice to actually have to work out the dungeons again. I don't remember how much trouble I had the first time (when was that, like a decade ago? More? Pretty sure we also used a guide) but the Master Quest dungeons use a good amount of thought sometimes. As well as some just kind of cheap stuff too, tbf. A trio of torches I had to light and I thought I did but one went out while I was lighting the third, causing me to waste about ten minutes working on other solutions. You know the stuff.

 

Also, the graphics look really nice on the Gamecube disk. I'm playing it on the Wii, which I'm sure doesn't hurt, but it looks real nice.

 

In any case, I forgot how much I love this game. I've been doing more sidequesting than usual for games and everything. Just happy to be playing some Zelda for a bit.

 

(I'll probably play Wind Waker at some point too. Never played it before, just wasn't in the mood now)



#4731 Lordkronos

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Posted 21 April 2020 - 12:18 AM

Well Curently i Play Various Smw Hacks/Zelda Classic Quests sometimes Terraria or Ta Kingdoms and Latly i Played Cooking Academy :D Its always Good to Have a Huge Varity :D



#4732 Titanium Justice

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Posted 22 April 2020 - 10:33 AM

Replaying Lemmings 2 for nostalgia's sake. The music in this is especially nostalgic.



#4733 klop422

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Posted 22 May 2020 - 11:20 AM

So I beat FF8 a couple nights ago. It's a pretty good game, and I enjoyed it. I will complain a tiny bit, though :P
 
As with pretty much all of them, there are a couple plot issues (and spoiler warning right here):

Spoiler

 
I'll try to keep away from major plot spoilers from here on out, though I'm mentioning some minor stuff for gameplay:
I suppose any conversation (review? I guess this is kind of a review) on FF8 has to cover the Junction system too. Honestly, I do like the idea of it, and once you get to know it, it works decently well. The problem is, there's no real incentive to learn how it works for the first three discs. There's no downside to just spamming summons, except wasted time for the cutscenes, and, in fact, if you didn't get the system more or less out of the gate, your attacking stats are probably lacking enough that that's the most effective way to win, early on.
The problem is that Disc 4 starts with a kind of hostage-situation battle, where one of your party members is stuck on the same side as the boss and if they die it's game over. That means that summoning a GF will damage both of them (which is a major issue if you want to keep your party member alive). Additionally, this boss has a bunch of very powerful spells that'll probably kill you if you don't defend yourself well. Unless you know how junctioning works, the boss is pretty much impossible, and even if you do, you can't leave the dungeon before beating that boss in Disc 4, and there aren't that many great spells to draw in the dungeon either. (I mean, you can do it - you can win the game without junctions - but it's seriously difficult. I think, if I hadn't had a save file from before the end of disc 3, I'd probably have just quit at this point.)

(Similarly, the last dungeon seals all your abilities except 'attack', meaning you have to have good stats for at least the beginning, so you can unseal your summoning, which pretty much means junctioning. The difference is, by this point, the game has forced you to learn its system, so any issues are your fault.)

It doesn't help that, in order to junction, you need to draw lots of spells from enemies, or else find a spot in the game to draw that spell from. Each draw gives you between 1 and 9 copies/charges of the spell, and the more you have, the more it affects your stat. What this means is that, in order for you to get good stats, the game outright forces you to grind.

 

On a positive note, though, I do like how limit breaks work in this game. I like that you can pick whether you want to use them, and that their use is tied to your characters having low HP (making it a risk-reward kind of thing). And the fact that every limit break is different, and as far as I can tell, useful, is nice.

 

Also, the two bonus bosses are pretty great, though going through everything to beat them makes the final boss really easy. Seriously, I accidentally ended up with only two characters (the final boss enacts permadeath) and still had no issues.

 

Overall, though, good game, decent gameplay, would absolutely recommend. I don't think the junction system is bad enough to call the game as a whole bad, certainly (though as I say, it could absolutely have done a better job to make you learn it earlier). I'd personally put it about level with VII, in third place in my rankings of Final Fantasy games.

 

 

I do have to go back and actually beat V at some point, rather than just having watched through it. I'll see if I end up doing that. But for now, unless XII goes on sale, or I work out a way to play XIII (60GB game) on my computer (with 128GB storage, total, that I use for all sorts of stuff), I might be done with Final Fantasy for a bit.



#4734 klop422

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Posted 17 January 2021 - 06:17 PM

Back to this? It'll be shorter, don't worry. Guess not :P

Beat FF12 (the Zodiac version, on Switch) about an hour ago.

Verdict? Good. Fantastic. Gameplay-wise, it might even be my favourite in the series (having missed only the NES games, the MMOs, and XV). I like the battle system, and I like the insane amount side stuff there is to do. I thought I was gonna be done the game last week, but then realised how much other stuff I could do and couldn't stop myself from playing it.

 

Story? Spoilers ahead: yeah, it's decent. Very political, which is fun. I appreciate the lack of a romance plotline (I spent the first few hours trying to predict whether Penelo or Ashe would be the main love interest, only to be pleasantly surprised at the lack of one), given that they were kind of present in pretty much all of them from 4 to 10 (though less obvious in some cases).

That said, the individual characters were slightly less interesting to me here than in other games. It's been said before, but Vaan is very clearly not the main character, but the game presents him as such and it weakens the plot imo. I heard that Basche was originally supposed to be the MC too, but that doesn't really work for me either, given the fact that the plot isn't really about him either. Ashe is clearly the MC and she doesn't show up until a bit in. Anyway, the point of this rant is that there are a good number of characters who are kind-of sort-of presented as much more important than they are but not given the right amount of emphasis by the plot of the game, which messes with my ability to be interested with individuals.

Similarly, all the political goings-on were interesting and all, but pretty much none of it had anything to do with the main characters. We were trying to stop an all-out war by destroying the McGuffins, sure, but all the actually interesting politics involved a villain who we only really got to see being evil to other villains, a bunch of Judges who we never met (with a couple exceptions, but generally when we met them we killed them), and Larsa, a friendly Lord-kid (with whom I also kind of ship Penelo, for what it's worth) who, sure, I'm sort of invested in, but not entirely within the capacity of politics. I do like the feeling of only being one cog (albeit an important one) in the workings of the world, but I'd like to be properly invested in the characters who are going on in the background.

 

Music was good, and very nice during, but also... generic? idk, a lot of it was good, but some of it was just fairly forgettable. Definitely not helped by the amount of tunes which are kind of remixes of others but not really - which, musically, I'd usually applaud, except that here it's in the weird middle-ground where you might as well have used the original tune, because the new one doesn't really have its own identity. And stylistically (which I admit is very subjective) I think I do prefer the Uematsu-FF sound to what we have here, which is... Star Wars-y? Still, the boss tune and the Esper battle tune are great, as well as many others. On the other hand, this theme, which is very impressive at first, but gets very tedious when you spend hours in a dungeon when it's playing. I rarely get frustrated with game music (I can listen to the SMB Castle theme in a ZC dungeon for a good while, for example :P) but that tune started to be very annoying. And then hearing the melody elsewhere... impressed me musically, but annoyed me because I remembered the dungeon with the theme.

 

As with FF13 (which I guess I didn't do a write-up for, but whatever. In case you want one: I liked it, didn't mind the linearity, though I understand if people wanted a less linear FF; characters are good fun, story is good, though depends a bit on reading the lore stuff to understand everything, music is good; I'm about to complain about something in FF12 that applies here too), a few of the cutscenes are a bit long, which leave me with the feeling "when do I get to play?". The opening cutscene especially, as well as the one into the final dungeon. Star Wars comparisons are apt here too - despite being a 'Mediaeval' setting, in true Final Fantasy fashion, we've got futuristic airships here too, but also ones with laser guns? A couple Star Wars spaceship battles, especially at the end.

 

Gameplay-wise (a bit more specific now) the battle system is awesome. I love the gambits (where I can pretty much tell my characters what to do in what circumstances), though I slightly wish I could have had just a touch more control (you pick a target, what state they're in, and what to do with them, which works great, except that there's one attack which is only useful when the user is in danger, and I can't really use gambits to tell the characters when the best time is to use that and attack a foe). Still, that's maybe a bit complex. I love the hunts - random bosses/enemies you can fight as a sidequest. Every one of them is great fun, except the last one, which is a marathon grind. Speaking of marathon grinds, the penultimate dungeon is a massive tower which is so long that it also borders on unfun. It's a bit like Mt. Gagazet in FF10 in that respect. Still, both games got fun again.

 

Anyway, I loved it. I lost a little steam at the end, grinding for Yiazmat (the last hunt/superboss), but overall it was a good game and I'd definitely recommend it.

 

What next, then? idk, I've got Octopath Traveler and DQ11 on Switch, and a bunch of SNES and PS1 roms on my laptop. Will likely be taking a tiny bit of a break from games (or at least not playing as much) since my semester started last week (which is why I was planning to finish this last week), but I may be posting here again.


Edited by klop422, 17 January 2021 - 06:18 PM.


#4735 Magi_Hero

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Posted 17 January 2021 - 08:15 PM

I think I'm almost done with Tales of Vesperia. I took some time off that to play A Link to a Different Dimension. Next I'll be playing A Link to the Islands... Then possibly back to a 1.84 quest.

#4736 klop422

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Posted 20 January 2021 - 02:35 PM

I played something completely different to what I said I would: Super Mario Bros. Not that novel, but I'd never actually played it all the way through.

 

Does it hold up? Absolutely. Some of the physics are a touch awkward, but honestly the game is great to this day. Would recommend.

 

Also, remember: if you game over, you can hold A while you press start to go back to the start of the world you lost on. Your score will have reset, but, uh, I think you can handle the loss.

 

Also been playing Super Mario 35. I've won a couple rounds. Great fun.



#4737 klop422

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Posted 24 January 2021 - 03:28 PM

So I can reconfirm: Yoshi's Island is quality. Favourite 2D Mario, if it qualifies as one.

 

Have been playing DKC too, and I am enjoying it. Is it weird I feel like I preferred it on Game Boy Colour than SNES (emulated on Switch)?



#4738 Titanium Justice

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Posted 24 January 2021 - 09:16 PM

Quality indeed. Yoshi's Island and the DKC games are probably some of my favorite platformers on SNES.

On my last weekend off, I beat FF7 remake and Doom Eternal. Quite the weekend.
I'm currently in the process of going through Bayonetta 2 and Crash 4, the latter of which I suspect will be frustrating in a satisfying sort of way.
I've also been meaning to start Bioshock 2 and work my way up to Bioshock Infinite, since I've only played the first one so far.

#4739 NoeL

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Posted 25 January 2021 - 04:50 AM

I'm playing Oracle of Seasons (never really got into the oracles before). Good game, kinda hard. Gotten stuck a few times - not always straightforward.

#4740 Eddy

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Posted 25 January 2021 - 08:39 AM

Oracle of Seasons is pretty damn good IMO (I'd say it's better than Ages personally). It certainly does trip you up at times, especially with how the seasons mechanics work, but it feels rewarding to me when you finally figure stuff out.

 

As for me, I've spent the last 2-3 months or so revisiting childhood by playing through most of the main Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move games. Some certainly hold up very well while others... are pretty shitty. But man a lot of them are still as fun as ever and I'm probably gonna have a shot at speedrunning one of the earlier entries that I used to play a lot as a kid since it seems easy enough to do. I also picked up Puyo Puyo Tetris for the first time and that was an absolutely amazing experience. I was expecting the whole game to be one cringefest from the first cutscene, but somehow I ended up really enjoying it. It's got plenty of charm to it and ngl I wasn't expecting things to get deep near the end (looking at the backstories of one of the characters specifically). The game itself is extremely fun and I got far too addicted to it (sitting at almost 150 hours rn). I'm gonna hold off the second game until it goes on Steam, though, so perhaps I'll just play the older Puyo games in the meantime so I get a bit more context as to what the fuck is happening lmao (I've only ever played Mean Bean Machine and that's a spinoff so lol).


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