This post was last modified: Jun 16, 2022 at 12:30 AM by Reeb.

I'll have to give that a try. I'm still getting accustomed to the various systems and navigation in general.

If I could just pull the camera back a little I think this wouldn't be nearly as inconvenient.

beat ys 9 yesterday
good ass game and some parts were series peak but overall it's a mediocre showing for a 9th game in a series
i think making HD assets is really fucking these dudes over. they've become an ys and trails factory which is not bad but they do best when they get to experiment.
running up walls and grappling onto shit was a lot of fun but there's like no combat applications for either of them. also i'm officially bored of this combat style and i think the devs are too
story was not that shit hot. feels like the plot doesn't start until like the second to last chapter. level design was a lot of repetitive gray brick. all the weird mechanics they took from 8 really do not fit in this new setting.
all i can say is YS X better make me cum buckets

please give turned based games a chance, there's a wide variety and once you get into the groove its way better than a lot of ~action rpg~ systems out there

i'm considering it! maybe when we finish! its such a cool game and i love cloud & aeris! the boss fights are kind of tough but im getting the hang of it!

sorry for the bump i wanted to say me and my brother have been playing the final fantasy 7 remake and its so fun lol. its like playing a movie! He told me i should play the original after but i'm not too into turn based games...i might make an exception for this though! ok thats all byeeee

I really don't think you need to worry about bumping so much on this forum unless you're filching out something from years ago, and that still didn't get Aidan in trouble. This thread's pretty recent and meant to be posted in.

thank you! im just naturally a cautious person so i apologize!

Guilty Gear

ramlethal valentine and baiken are my mains they are very cool i wish i knew why ram has dogs though. i also watched the story mode and it was very cool i wish Goldlewis Dickinson was my husband

Guilty Gear

ramlethal valentine and baiken are my mains they are very cool i wish i knew why ram has dogs though. i also watched the story mode and it was very cool i wish Goldlewis Dickinson was my husband

I was with you until "ramlethal"

Jokes aside I've been playing a lotta Strive and fighters in general lately after a few months hiatus. Kinda sucks having to relearn a bunch of stuff on Anji after the patch, and I think he needed a lot more help than he got. His buffs were substantial and he's definitely "better" overall but the nerfs they slapped him with hurt pretty bad and top tier characters also got buffs so the gulf between him and the rest of the cast didn't get any narrower. Oh well, that's low tier life

i mean hey if you enjoy Anji still stick him fr. better to have fun as a low tier character you like instead of constricting yourself to not having fun by only worshipping whatever esport bros are currently obsessed with

This post was last modified: Jun 19, 2022 at 6:38 AM by Reeb.

whoever doesn't main robo-ky I am afraid I am no longer friends with
he's the only person I can actually have a fair match against in guilty gear

This post was last modified: Jun 19, 2022 at 5:47 PM by Reeb.

Currently trying to speedrun Three Houses. I never did the Silver Snow route. For those not in the know:

Three Houses Spoilers If Anyone Cares: Show

Three Houses, despite being billed with three paths, has four. There's the path where you follow each Lord, typical Fire Emblem stuff, and there's the path where when the Lord you're allied to betrays the organization you've technically sworn yourself to uphold, you stick with the original organization.
Silver Snow is that path, and it's also the framework that the game's built on, the "first" route. Some people call it the Church Route.

Generally, Silver Snow is recognized as the most flawed path. You have no proper Lord character, you skip an entire chapter but enemies level as if that chapter was there, most of the main cast dies offscreen, and it features the most polarizing figure in the entire game (well, arguably the most polarizing depending on whether you think Rhea or Edelgard is worse...in which case, good news! It features both!)

So why am I doing it anyway? Completion's sake and to give myself a refresher on the world before Three Hopes (the musou game) hits. Also, I kind of just want to know how bad it really is.

bringing this thread back to say play the yakuza series

i played elden ring for an hour and holy fuck was it bad so i got a refund

i played elden ring for an hour and holy fuck was it bad so i got a refund

filtered

just started promoting my drg driller to legendary 1.

bayonetta 3 is the best game released in 10 years but it still sucks compared to the first one

im really enjoying tunic and finally got to the point where translating the language might be manageable

just promoted all 4 dwarves to legendary 1.

I should post about the random shit I play more often, I play a lot but usually forget it pretty quickly

during the last steam next fest, where I will typically attempt to play 30+ of the different demos if anything catches my eye or looks funny, I played the demo for Lunistice, a retro styled 3d linear platformer. the demo featured 3 I think levels, which is a not small portion of the game, and I enjoyed the tight controls and simple flow of collecting trinkets and not dying in the mostly linear levels. enjoyed it enough that when I got some money to use on steam it was the first thing on my list to pick up, being only around five bucks.

full game was more of the same, though some of the later levels felt very sonic inspired specifically with all the rail riding and running forwards on boost pads you end up doing. game was not very difficult overall but the optional collect all trinkets challenges for each level sometimes required going down alternate paths with some tighter platforming or quicker reaction times.

each level has two things ranked on completion, amount of collectibles obtained and amount of deaths taken. you can S rank each thing independently so it's fairly simple to just run through the level only focusing on one then go through it again ignoring the it to get the other. if you don't care about how much you're dying a lot of collectibles are a bit easier as you only need to collect em again on total level restart, the collection state persists through deaths and you can just pop open the menu and hit back to checkpoint to get back somewhere quickly. on the other hand, you can employ the movement mechanics to their fullest and just speed through the level ignoring the beaten path that is the collectibles if you're just trying to get through without a death. I tried to do both on the first run throughs for the most part.
the game has a timer going while playing through levels and compares it to your PB for that level at the end when it gives you your ranks, but the actual time isn't factored into anything at all so it's just there for if you want to challenge yourself

after completing the game you unlock the ability to play with two new guest characters, they have different quirks but it's mostly the same as playing as normal. all three characters share the first 6 worlds, with two levels each. each character has it's own unique 7th world, with the two guest characters' being single levels tailored around them. the initial character's world 7 has a bit more going on and concludes the thin plot of the game.

I apparently liked the game enough to 100% it, including getting all achievements which involved S ranking every level with every character and some light secret hunting. took about 13 hours blind. if you were to not care about achievements but still want to play as the other characters or just get all S ranks with the first you could knock a few hours off of that, and if you just wanted to see the game through to the last level with the first character without caring about any S ranks it'd only take you a few hours at most casually probably.

I didn't expect to type up this much but whatever. game was okay I guess, as are most I play

wait fuck there were a few other things I wanted to mention
the game is targeting the "retro 3d game" demographic so of course it has a low res filter and a 20fps cap as options, I didn't use either as 20fps is way too fucking low for how fast you move in this sometimes. speaking of speed, you move so fast and the controls are so tight that sometimes you have TOO MUCH control making some of the platforming awkward, the game mitigates this some by offering both a "slow down dummy" button AND an option that makes you control "smoothly" and less tightly. I personally never remembered to hit the button and the smooth control was just slightly not tight enough for me so I didn't use it, but it works entirely fine with all of the level design. also I spent the entire game thinking "man if this game had a drop shadow it'd feel a tiny bit better" and then like an hour before finishing off the 100% I realized that there is one you can enable in the options. usually I wouldn't have missed that lol, also it's a really good drop shadow functionally.

i got all 4 dwarves to legendary 2 btw

I've gotten back into Team Fortress 2 in a major way, I recently played in a competitive cup for newbies and my team did pretty alright, 16th out of 24. It's been really fun learning how to actually improve at something I've already played for so much time, but never gotten much better at.

I finished Pokemon Scarlet. Technically I still have some post-game stuff to do and a few lil tasks to tie up here and there but I've done enough to give my thoughts. There will be some spoilers I guess

Solid Pokemon game; not the best of all time but much better than Sword and Shield were. Obviously the open world aspect is the biggest change so I'll talk about that first. It was implemented...fine? Being able to do objectives in any order was genuinely cool, though their locations and the levels of pokemon in different areas made it so that some orders made more sense than others. IMO, the shape of the map wasn't ideal for what they were going for either. As a large donut where you start at the bottom, your options are essentially limited to "start left" or "start right", and continuing too far up one side without circling back to the other would eventually mean having to return to low level baby shit. Still, having some options to freestyle your route helps the main storyline feel less linear. Personally, I went west and stayed west until the titan in the desert kicked my ass.

A utopian future in which France has ceased to exist

Exploration is encouraged, but it's not really mandatory. The map holds few secrets outside of the towns and other objective areas; you can find various items and TMs strewn about, but there's not much that you can't just buy or craft. Most wild pokemon have fairly large habitats, so you don't have to check every clearing or ledge to find rare ones. There aren't really any collectibles, either. The only thing to satisfy the explorer/collector's urge are a bunch of ominous stakes you need to find and pull out of the ground to catch a set of optional legendaries. Those can be hidden in somewhat obnoxious places all over the map, some of which require your magical reptilian motorcycle to have unlocked specific exploration abilities. It's enough to offer an incentive to cover the map, but realistically it won't take very long for even the most topographically challenged players. Fans of open world games who enjoy spending countless hours traversing environments and looking under every rock for 999 pieces of lint may be disappointed, but personally I appreciated the lack of chores hidden in overly specific places. Maybe I've just gotten burned out by Genshin.

The last aspect of the open world gameplay that I want to mention is the wild pokemon. Similar to Legends Arceus, you can see wild pokemon roaming around, and choose to battle them by running into them. This lets you avoid encounters when you're just exploring, identify specific mons you want to fight or catch, and even spot shinies from afar. Overall it's a great feature that makes the world feel more "alive", but there are still a few things I'd change. First, there are just way too many mons sometimes, to the point that I felt like I had to jump and glide everywhere to avoid bumping into them. Second, they can still move around while you're in combat or a menu, which can lead to situations where you get chain-jumped by multiple pokemon that keep popping up next to you after the previous encounter ends. Lastly, some of them are nearly impossible to see until you're stepping on them, like the infamous Greavards that hide in the ground or my personal nemesis, Nymble. Fuck Nymble.

War criminal

As for other new features, there's honestly not much to say so I'll make it brief. Terastallizing is this gen's one-off gimmick that the characters will make a big deal of in-universe only for it to be forgotten in the next game. It's not as cool as Mega Evolutions, but not as forgettable as Z-moves or as prone to questionable fanart as Gigantamaxing. I don't play competitive so I don't care about what it means for the meta. Auto-battling is a convenient way to get some passive exp and clear out excessively grouped wild mons blocking your path. Character customization returns, with the caveat that your shirt and pants are limited to 4 options of lame ass school uniforms, which means that any fun or wacky clothing options will clash horribly. I didn't use the camera/selfie feature until 40 hours into the game, and all I did was make my trainer ID photo a close-up of my Glimmora's face. Picnics, sandwiches, and washing are entirely ignorable; I only used the picnic feature once just to try it, and even then it took me a while to find a place where I was allowed to actually set it up for some reason. My poor squad only took a bath once on my entire journey.

Don't let your team smell like a poison type gym. Or do, there's literally no consequence

Finally, there's the story, or stories since there are three separate objectives you can complete independently. The pokemon league challenge is what it always is, aside from the order you challenge the gyms being up to your own discretion. The "gym challenges" you had to do before fighting each gym leader were mostly a joke and could've been fleshed out more, but I guess it would be too much to expect a billion dollar company to add obstacles to their snowboarding minigame. Larry is the best gym leader no contest, Iono is a pandering character but I can't pretend it didn't work on me, and Ryme isn't anywhere near as cringe as people told me she was, fuck you haters. The champion herself is lame though, she barely has a personality or any presence in the story, and she stole one of my favorite new pokemon as her signature trump card and used it last even though it's a setup pokemon you're supposed to send out first you IDIOT. You have a fucking Kingambit with an ability that buffs its damage for each fainted party member and you send it out third? An actual toddler was a bigger threat than you.

@thegreyzen

The Team Star storyline was a bit wonky in terms of gameplay - auto battling my way through the Team Star hideouts felt like a formality that was impossible to actually fail - but I actually kinda enjoyed the plot for a Pokemon game. The twist about Cassiopeia's identity was obvious to anyone with two neurons to fire between each other, but Clive truly caught me off guard. SV continues the trend of Team Bad not actually being an evil world-ending threat (that role's already taken), just kind of dorky and misguided.

Then there's the Titan Pokemon storyline, featuring everyone's favorite sandwich guy Arven - everyone but fate, really. When I was first introduced to him, I thought he was kind of a douchebag (and he was), and I even became suspicious of him as the story progressed and he began speaking to some mysterious figure off-screen. Then he showed me his sick dying dog and told me about his mommy issues and god I felt like such an asshole. The Titan Pokemon were kinda cool too I guess, kinda reminiscient of Legends Arceus' nobles.

I would die for this orphaned douchebag and his ugly dog

Finally, after completing the previous three objectives, you reach the true conclusion to the story: Area Zero. This is where the story went from "decent for a Pokemon game, I guess" to "actually just decent in general?" IMO. The professor being dead all along and replaced by an AI version of themselves was a twist I genuinely didn't see coming, and I enjoyed how the game flipped the evil AI trope around by having AI Sada actually be the more levelheaded and compassionate of the two. The real Sada's ambitions had gone off the deep end to the point of threatening the stability of the region, and she even implemented a failsafe that threatened the lives of children (including her own son) for trying to stop her, prompting even an AI that shared her mind to comment on how fucked up that is. Her battle theme goes hard tho.

That's about it. Despite much of what I've said being negative, I really did enjoy the game; it's hard to truly fuck up Pokemon, and the new features added to the experience despite being imperfectly implemented. It's a step in a good direction for the series IMO, though hopefully I'll be less burned out by open world shit if they take another shot at a similar format. I didn't experience any of the supposed game-breaking glitches while playing, either, and while the game definitely lacked visual polish in some places, I don't expect perfect graphical fidelity from my children's monster collecting game. Does that make me part of the consoomer problem? Iono.

In conclusion, sandwiches. @Ropnolc

It felt to me like most of the issues with the game were from a lack of time rather than a lack of trying, which is much much better than shit like Sword and Shield where everything was legendarily half-assed or just outright bizarre. Team Star's story was a bit wonky and far too predictable (Team Skull was a much, much better take on that sort of idea) but other than that the Gym Leaders had actual roles and the Arven/Professor story stuff was genuinely good, I'll agree. Now that I'm thinking about it Sun and Moon were pretty solid too but I think this was my favorite game since Black/White either way. The open world was fun to traverse and I feel like you got pretty hefty rewards for exploring, contrary to what you said -- you could find some really strong TMs for checking around, and fighting trainers (many of which were spread out and hidden away) tended to give you amazing hold items and TMs itself from the suit guys.

The biggest issue by far was the level scaling, which is arguably the best of any Pokemon game at first if you simply go around one side... and then you immediately realize how much it sucks when nothing else is balanced around having done that. I think if I were to replay the game I'd throw out my entire team and start from scratch when going out the other gate. I wish it was possible to get materials for crafting TMs without inadvertently overleveling yourself via the autobattles, too. It soooooort of evens out at the very ass end of the game where everything is leveled to assume a party that's done it all... but even then it felt a bit off. The very last battle was balanced well though, having gone in completely blind on everything the amount of times the game curveballed me on new mon typings was great.

The mon designs they showed prerelease were all the weakest of the bunch and the game itself had a lot of pleasant surprises there, the ones that are misses are HUGE misses I can't believe got past any level of QC but the hits are fucking great in exchange, so I'll take it.