|
Post by Jay on Feb 4, 2019 13:33:19 GMT -8
So, Persona 5? + The plot was a refreshing change after the overall trajectory within Persona 4. For reference, there's much to like about P4 in its setting and characters, but the general arcs of the characters were fairly unsatisfying: They experienced issues or were uncomfortable about their places in the world, and landed on a sort of quietism of accepting their lot. P5 is more centered on rebellion and tricksters and REFORMING SOCIETY and sticking it to CORRUPT ADULTS, so it feels a bit more engaging even if there's less... murder than the previous game (STILL A FAIR AMOUNT OF MURDER THOUGH). + The game mechanics in P4 felt like an intermediary step, solving the problems of not having player-controlled teammates but in turn creating others of scheduling within. Scheduling is a bit more lenient in P5 by virtue of time being further broken up, but not without some issues (see later), and you still don't have the wildness of P3's Tartarus setup where you only dungeon-crawled in the middle of the night when you COULDN'T do anything else. P5 nevertheless seems like a fuller correction of the various elements that didn't work in previous entries.
+ Social links, or "confidants" as they're called now, actually do htings and unlock abilities for characters in or out of combat. Before your main incentive was "I am a good person / I want better persona fusions" but the added bonuses help and some of them are very useful (Fortune, Temperance, Tower). I thought about adding one minus because the Devil Arcana's ability is almost useless unless you're just really bad at the game, but perhaps that's not a major issue if the others fit so nicely. Also I guess Judgment does jack.
+ Apparently this falls under a "return to form," but both P3 and P4 had rather odd enemies that were mostly abstract objects wearing masks and so some time late in the game it was pretty likely that you would lose horribly to a large and irate pair of dice. Now the quotidian enemies encountered are the personae that you can deploy in battle and you often have to negotiate with them early on and figure out their likes and dislikes before they'll join you. This fits with the general mode of the series (and its earlier iterations) and adds to the engagement within gameplay. There's always just enough going on so that no part of gameplay feels totally routine (and as a bonus, two added elemental types, Nuclear and Psychic, added to the previous array)
+ Yusuke is... not the type of personality that should be a core member of the team and yet he is and it's great to have an art-obsessed ponce who likely learned human interaction from staring at paintings as a core team member.
+ Style. Game oozes it. Music good too. Tasty. + Morgana is a cat. It's CANON. + President Tanaka returns.
- For the third game in a row, your best bro is kind of a moron, affable, but stupid comic relief. Added to this, your first female team member is a dumb bunny. Morgana can be kind of annoying too at times. - The character arcs feel slightly clipped relative to before. What I mean by this is that every playable character in the series tends to have an Initial Persona and an Ultimate Persona which arises from them making major changes in their lives. In P3 for example, ultimates were brought on specifically by set events within the plot and so you felt as if it was really a big deal when it was happening. In P5 it's just leveling the social link, and anything or everything could be happening in the main quest arc of the game and it wouldn't make a dent, with the exception of the Hierophant link which is not even playable. The better summons felt like triumphant back in the day but now they're just sort of cool added texture. Nothing about it bespeaks a necessity. - There's a weird line where it can simultaneously feel like too much and not enough is happening. Your dungeon crawling over the course of the game comes in pretty set intervals, although none of it is as dire as "SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE" as it was in the previous two game. Some dungeons have more of an emotional charge to them due to the surrounding circumstances (1 and 2! 4!), some less (3rd and 5th were kind of weak, though 5th tries to redeem itself later). Sometimes it feels as if the later added characters, Haru in particular, are just kind of... there... even though they should have more going on than just that. You could argue the shogi player has more going on than Haru ultimately does, and the shogi player is an NPC though originally drafted as a possible PC.... - As for the "too much" / "not enough" dynamic on gameplay, the game feels arbitrarily constricted. Frequently, quite frequently, you'll have nothing going on in the evening and thus conceivably have time to raise a stat or do a minor task like crafting, but then Morgana, ever the voice of reason, will intercede and say "Let's not do that tonight." Thus, it seems like there's more than enough time to do everything, but you're blocked at various intervals either by your magic talking cat telling you it's getting late and maybe you shouldn't or the social link not being unlocked until far later, like the Hanged Man Arcana in P4. Tower and Fortune don't take forever to get there, but it's late enough and you feel like you could have gotten better bang for the buck earlier. I suppose it's fine. - This is a weird gripe to make in the vein of things feeling "rushed," but one of the things that I truly appreciated about P3 is that as you approached the end game it really felt as if the apocalypse was soon to arrive and daily life was ever afflicted with the eerie. P4 tried to do the same with THE FOG, but had diminishing returns and the doom + gloom aspect of P5 is almost exclusive to the final dungeon. I kind of miss it.
- The game's set in Tokyo, which is neat, and gives you a few real-life places to visit, but most locations you can travel to are superfluous with the action centering almost entirely on Shibuya. It's not bad, it just seems that they failed to make it distinctive despite ample source material.
Overall, good game, but I feel my enthusiasm tempered by the sense that this is what P4 should have been, which leaves me confused as to what P5 ought to have been as a full step forward instead of the completion of two half-steps.
|
|
|
Post by ThirdMan on Feb 4, 2019 17:25:32 GMT -8
I've been playing that game a bit as of late, but I find the endless streams of text a bit exhausting after a while. Plus, when you're in combat, you COULD use a strategy to exploit an enemy's weakness, but thus far, when I try to check their supposed weaknesses, nothing is listed. And I'll admit it: I prefer real-time combat in video games.
But, yeah, the game's definitely got a lot of visual style, but given the restrictions you mentioned earlier, it feels VERY linear to me.
|
|
|
Post by Jay on Feb 4, 2019 19:50:46 GMT -8
It's super linear and as the game goes on your enemies have fewer weaknesses if at all. ALSO SO MUCH TEXT. It's probably the main reason why the games take 100+ hours.
If you don't see weaknesses it's because you usually have to work through trial and error via spells and it will subsequently retain the info but not before, it's all question marks prior.
|
|
|
Post by ThirdMan on Feb 5, 2019 5:26:37 GMT -8
Ah, OK.
I'm back playing Red Dead 2 right now anyways. I originally stepped away from Red Dead to play P5 because it was taking FOREVER to get anywhere on horse in RDR2, but now my camp has moved to a more centralized location by a lake, so it's moving more quickly now.
|
|
|
Post by Jay on Feb 5, 2019 17:39:05 GMT -8
As a much, much faster game, I can report back now on the Resident Evil 2 remake.... With the caveat that this was a game that I was hyped up for years before release...
The review reactions are almost all glowing, such that they have been calling this GotY material in January. Tempered by this has been the fan response which honestly has been weird for me to observe. Among the complaints I've seen, outrage that items like grenades and wooden boards and gunpowder which were taken out of RE 1.5 had the audacity to show themselves in this version (what?). Another common complaint is that Mr. X is too hard, which I am loathe to respond to with just a dismissive "git gud" but I see no reason to otherwise dignify it with a response. He shows up around the time you're starting to feel safe in your surroundings so I have no problem with amping up the discomfort at a key moment. This is not at all to say that the game is lacking flaws it's just that people seem to be missing out on the big ones.
One of the main reasons you couldn't get grenades and boards in the original was simple technical limitations. The PS wasn't designed for that. Similarly, it led to some of the institutional issues with how the game was set up: There were about three or four things total from your A-game that would affect your second B-game, so you had where you chose to use the lockdown screens and whether you wanted a backpack or a SMG and that was it as far as what could affect the B-game. Otherwise you were running essentially the same campaign, same puzzles, with slightly varied item placement. The end effect coming out of it was "huh, why was this two different scenarios again if I'm just doing the same shit in both?"
There's a substantial difference in content between the PS version and the current gen game. The PS version, if you were sprinting, you could get through in an hour and forty-five. My first run of the new version was six hours, my second, five. But that issue of doing redundant puzzles and fetch quests is arguably worse in the new version than it was in the original. The solutions are different, but you still have to find all three medallions and go through the tunnel and fight the big bad for the first time, which ties into another point of frustration. In the A/B format of the original, you would never be required to fight the same boss twice. If you beat G2 in one version, you'd be put up against G3 in the B game. In the new iteration of the game, it doesn't matter who you choose first or second, you're still fighting G1 with both characters, still fighting G2 with both characters, still fighting G3 with both characters. Only the "final" bosses vary. To boot, they make the bizarre move of acting as if none of the other fights happened, you literally do them in the same spot, and it results in two mutually exclusive deaths for a secondary character which don't fit together with each other or the "two halves of a whole" motif the game is trying to present. There's no excuse of technical limitations, and even if they didn't want to rely on loading the earlier saved data, they could have still found some way around it, but instead what makes the 1st/2nd campaigns distinct from one another is arguably less substantial than it was even in the 1999 version of the game, given how scaled back the laboratory layout is. The only major differences then are that Leon spends a little extra time in the sewers and on the streets and Claire explores a newly installed orphanage for a few minutes.
Playing through my first run, I was hyped and excited. Everything about the game felt right and the challenge was persistent. After absorbing a mostly redundant second campaign (I HAVE TWO OTHER VERSIONS TO GO GUYS), I'm left feeling like they had a very polished quarter of a game and copied and pasted it with slight variation three additional times. In other words, the same problem this entry had twenty years and three generations of console gaming ago.
|
|
|
Post by Jay on Feb 9, 2019 14:32:24 GMT -8
I'm probably just talking to myself on the subject, but I just pulled off a no-save S+-rank Claire-first run in the RE2 Remake, three hours, twenty minutes. This would be my third run in total. This basically confirms to me that this has the game set at a "good" difficulty level as the first repeat run of a campaign should be an opportunity to clean house if done right. I basically know the enemy and boss behaviour now and the infinite use knife is invaluable because UNLIKE RE6 if you suspect that the slouched figure over yonder just hasn't arisen yet, you can stab 'em a few times to confirm before going on your way. Simple but effective fix right there. I'll be interested in eventually taking a stab at Hardcore mode too.
The lame news is that with the success of this run I've all but confirmed what I'd previously feared, which is that there's even more overlapping content in the remake than there was in the original. I suppose that they were trying to avoid the plot confusion of "oh god, which version of the story is canon" that we ended up with in the original (Claire A / Leon B, FWIW), but the first routes are identical outside of the character specific stuff so it ends up boiling down to "do you want Claire or Leon to talk with Marvin? all right, cool." I'd feel much better about this game if instead of going through a perfunctory imitation of the original format, they had actually worked to make the campaigns more distinctive. Otherwise I can't say that I care who I get to play as first.
|
|
|
Post by ThirdMan on Feb 15, 2019 0:46:29 GMT -8
Super Mario Maker 2 for the Switch.
With slopes.
That is all.
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on Feb 16, 2019 20:34:27 GMT -8
I'm excited not just for the slopes, but for the much larger user base the Switch has compared to the Wii U, which should mean both more levels and more exposure for your own levels.
The Link's Awakening remake looks pretty good too, though I'm not sure I'll get it right at launch since I played the Gameboy Color version just a couple years ago and I have a big backlog of games and TV shows I want to get to already. (Plus, hopefully it won't be a full $60 price considering the Gameboy Color version is on the 3DS eshop for $6.)
|
|
|
Post by ThirdMan on Feb 17, 2019 18:38:44 GMT -8
I haven't made a level since May of 2017, but I'm curious if we'll be able to carry over our courses from the old server or our Nintendo Network profile to the new one. I'm also curious if we'll be able to build co-op stages, that can only be beaten with the teamwork of two players, because you can see Luigi and Toad in some of the promotional artwork.
I'm thinking I might design a new scrolling mechanical level with shifting speed and direction (especially diagonal). Hopefully the tile limit is significantly higher, too, especially for those who like to design music levels with the pink note blocks.
At any rate, if our old courses are going to disappear into the ether, I'm glad I only made a dozen or so.
|
|
|
Post by Zarnium on Mar 16, 2019 11:08:06 GMT -8
Anyone played Dragon's Dogma? I'm thinking of getting it when it comes out for the Switch.
|
|
|
Post by Jay on Apr 11, 2019 22:13:55 GMT -8
Okay, so I'm playing NieR: Automata now as I was told it could potentially wreck my psyche and conception of self. Little did I know that it was Gradius! Actually, it just.... starts out as Gradius and then starts being Bayonetta but the idea of a plot-heavy, robot opera version of Gradius delights me. I'm only through the prologue right now and, as is my custom in open-world games, have spent a lot of time jumping around and trying to cram myself into places that are clipped off despite having little practical reason to be clipped off. The combat style feels familiar enough even though I've almost certainly only ever played derivatives and not the progenitor. It could be partially my playing on a no-longer-top-of-the-line laptop, but some of the slowdowns frustrate me, like when you take too much damage and auto-heal, the switch to B+W and deliberate pause in action run a bit too long for my tastes, and I complained about it Hollow Knight where it was much briefer by comparison.
|
|
|
Post by ThirdMan on Apr 12, 2019 13:07:39 GMT -8
That's one of the many PS4 games I bought during the Black Friday sale a few months ago (I've bought a total of 21 in disc and digital form since November). Of those games, I've only played through the stories of Batman: Arkham Knight, Spider-Man, and 90% of Red Dead Redemption 2. At the rate I'm going (playing games once every four or five days), I'll probably get to NieR Automata some time in 2020. Heh.
I suppose God of War (2018) is up next in the queue.
|
|