Impossible to talk about this damn game and work out my feelings about the plot.
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Finally finished it myself last night. I really enjoyed that Okino points out how utterly fragile any giant robot with a human pilot would be, and then they just shrug it away with “there were hatches on the completed versions for some reason, so we went ahead and piloted them anyway”.
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my wife tried to watch me play this for 15 minutes and came away saying “this is just Japanese riverdale”
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80% Complete
Fucking shit I knew there was a reason this post got no response now I have to get a driver’s license.
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I dunno what you’re talking about, @Drem was perfectly clear in affirming your bovicidal destiny
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I finished this. I liked it in the end. That Ibaraki cow gets to live. The strategy part was almost perfect for putting something on Spotify and zoning out. Gonna do that with the post-game stuff.
The Ending is draggy in a way the rest of the game isn’t (also my baby was waking up and I couldn’t pause it so I was going “come on come on”).
Reading others spoiler thoughts and that this game is ultimately about goodness is nice. I’ll let it sit with me.
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honestly, it was really cool (and what i needed) to have a game that was just Good and Nice without being pandering wholesomeness.
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finished this up last night and really enjoyed it. it’s my first vanillaware game so i didn’t really know what to expect. i was surprised how much the combat grew on me. the EXP & missile count curves are realllly satisfying.
agreed! i really did not need “they get married and have kids” epilogues for every single character in the game. let it fade to black once they’re out.
i think people were asking about the switch ver in another thread so i guess its worth saying i played that ver entirely in portable and noticed basically zero performance issues
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was this always AU$100
think the ps4 version goes on sale often, the switch port came out like a week ago
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Yeah, I… bought the Switch port at full price after already playing through it on PS4.
Really appreciate that even playing it on a PS5 the final battle still has enough particle effects to cause the game to come to a screeching halt, closest thing I’m getting to a modern Ibara port.
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This game actually does have 13 playable characters and they’re just going ahead and introducing every one of them in the tutorial chapter aren’t they. Along with like 5 more nonplayable characters and 7 initially independent story arcs. And it’s constantly skipping backward and forward in time both with flashbacks/elision and literal time travel
Probably a lot of my disorientation is because I’m playing it in my rather rusty Japanese. Still this is a quite unusual way of structuring a plot isn’t it? Most stories that end up with large casts focus in on a small subset of the cast in the first arc and expand out from there
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They manage to gate it quite well. I think Vanillaware learnt a lot from how open-ended this style of multi-perspective could be in Odin Sphere and Muramasa and then chose to do something more focused but with a huge cast. Every character shares a facet of that focus for something that seems sprawling but knits up in satisfying ways.
Glad to see so many people checking this one out.
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I keep buying Yakisoba Pan because of this game and I think about This Game every time I see Yakisoba Pan.
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I’m a real carbs lover and Yakisoba pan still sounds disgusting
This really is a game that you should play slowly but I couldn’t resist binging that last third. And I got less and less interested as it went on as a result.
I’m kinda left wondering what the purpose of all that was, though I really liked having a big pile of plot twists at the end though
I continued to find Hijiyama’s presentation as a good honorable patriot during Destruction pretty uncomfortable… Poe’s law can’t make me accept that the game views Hijiyama’s patriotism as maybe a little bad in any way.
In general the game seems to be written from a transhumanist - libertarian perspective, the ethics of every tech we see are surprisingly very rarely discussed (only one scene!) and there’s the core belief that while the earth might be fucked, our science will save us in the end
I liked Destruction well enough in the end though that score multiplier per successful battle was a real awful idea, it prevented me from experimenting for the whole game!
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I was similarly ambivalent about the plot twists at the end. I didn’t find them as inspired as some of the earlier revelations but at the same time I liked that they kept piling them on.
Apparently this game did not sell well. That’s a shame, as I’d like to see more good uncovering-the-convoluted-story games like this and Obra Dinn, which I played around the same time.
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…huh. Do you actually lose your multiplier if you fail a mission and have to redo it? I’m pretty sure you don’t. By my recollection, you only lose your multiplier if you use the Recover function.
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The multiplier is called Win Streak so I assumed you’d lose it by losing a battle / retreating, but yeah you’re right!
It actually eventually sold well through word of mouth, hence the switch port
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Yeah I played the battles on Intense difficulty so lost battles all the time and never lost my streak. The system that streaks “soft enforce” where pilots have to sit on the sidelines after 2 battles feels like something that could’ve simply been a mandatory mechanic. It seems the idea behind streaks is a complicated game-design compromise where players are allowed to have “favorite” pilots they use every single battle, but at the cost of score.
By the way, to anyone else planning to play this game on Intense: the game was heavily rebalanced for the Switch port so most of the online protips are completely inapplicable. I wasted so many Meta Chips on the useless Sentry skill because everyone online seemed unanimous that it was OP…
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