Hmmm you’re right, the only parts I recognize is the bottom two continents. This is easier to see on the original map or the map ingame in Strangers of Paradise: If you flip them around a bit, they look like
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My favorite ongoing narrative lore/character trait is that the four heroes are all really forgetful. They take it as a quality personality trait that they can’t remember what they even ate last week. The second anyone gets a little worried about this, Jack reframes it as, “good, this way we can focus on KILLING CHAOS” and evegeone laughs and continues on their way. Meanwhile, the background narrative and lore drops hint that their forgetfulness is actually a side effect of using the Save Cubes that reset reality but retain their experience and gear/cool meta narrative for going to a bonfire and resetting the monsters. That and some kinda building foreshadowing that they all experienced everything before over and over but constantly failed, just stuck in a hellish loop, and that their forgetting is the only way they can continue on? I dunno but it’s pretty neat in a very dumb and entertaining way
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I love it when they run out of CG budget and switch to really shitty over the shoulder pseudo-handy cam talking head segments. For all the NPC townspeople convos, the lighting is really off so it looks like their faces are photoshopped onto fantasy bodies. Gives off a real Skyrim or earlier CRPG feel.
Anyway, sorry for posting so much. This game rules, a perfect $25 game
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Keep posting you can see you are having a better time than anyone else in this thread did.
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i should finish this game at some point lol. i have like one or two levels left, i think. the combat gets kind of repetitive once you figure out how to break it open, so i moved on to other games.
that said, every time i fire up FF1 now, my mind is…tainted. with C H A O S
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My favorite ongoing narrative is with the town NPCs. Now normal JRPGs would have a town you could walk around in with villagers to talk, but strangers of paradise is like nah bruh you’re playing co-op souls fuck any downtime. The NPCs are all in a nested submenu at the world map (I love that the world map itself is later revealed as a ludonarrative device as it’s functionally a gameplay map the player used the entire game, but it’s revealed hours and hours later that it’s actually a Sci Fi hologram map on a futuristic space station powered by the Wind Crystal. There’s several cutscenes where the team leaves the decision on where to go next up to Jack, and interacting with that space station map leads you into the ingame world map menu interface again, tying together that what was once a representative abstraction for gsmeplay purposes is actually infact Jack as controlled by you, manipulating his destiny.)
Oh yeah wait so the NPCs
They’re all in a nested submenu, and within their TALK menu, they’re further subdivided into dialogue that happens within Chapters of the story. Chapters that have never been established previously, but spring up after specific story events. So if you did a bunch of missions and realized you missed a bunch of villager talk, you can hit up that menu and see, “oh shoot I missed all the convos they said when I recovered the Wind Crystal and Fire Crystal!” And then tab over to that chapter and select which villager to talk to.
Then the game does this bonkers thing where instead of just giving you a little text box to read the convos, it loads Jack into a scene from the city, just him and the villager you selected, standing awkwardly in front of a fountain as the villager blabs away about how their kids are pretending to be the four warriors of light and making a wreck of the house or whatever. Then if you want to talk to someone else, you back out to a new menu, load back into the scene and see a new villager. Sometimes they don’t even talk to you, they’re talking to each other and Jack isn’t there. Sometimes they’re talking to each other and in the middle of it, turn to you to ask you if you agree??? So it’s ambiguous if you’re actually standing there or not or if you’re an all knowing third person perspective watching???
Also the time of day changes, so in one chapter evegeone is standing in front of the fountain in the evening, or in the morning or the afternoon. They all load into this diorama to do a little gossip or thank you for what you’ve done (or later curse you when they realize freeing previously inactive crystals to unleash the raw fury of nature is more than anyone bargained for) ← (this and the later chaos that ensues is the neat narrative thread that was building up that I was really hoping would happen and they totally paid it off in the end)
Anyway, it’s so wild. It’s like they wanted villager NPC dialogue to enrich the world but didn’t want to actually build a boring little town for Jack to run through so they just cut all the middleman out but still tried to polish it???
Best $25 game, I hear the DLC is longer than the original campaign and costs like 2x more lol
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I think I’m on the last level (the one themed after the world of chaos from FF6) and I’m once again blown away at how god fucking awful the level design is. I got stuck in a pit the size of a swimming pool for five minutes because I couldn’t tell how to get out and had to run around the edges of the map over and over until a UI pop up appeared showing I could climb something? And then it turned out there was a thin 4 pixel chain the exact same color/tone/value/brightness as the rest of the environment that was literally invisible when I wasn’t assdeep into the wall. Why??? Put a light there??? Lay a prop against it to pop it out?? Or a different texture??? Or any kind of fucking eye direction???
All the organic stages are the worst - there no visual differentiation to tell where you’re coming from or where you’re going. They could’ve put a giant plant or giant tree or giant skull to indicate “here is a location, remember it” but instead it’s all just generic bump mapped blob glorb texture with the same lighting and same reused props placed exactly the same boring non-distinct way over and over so I literally run circles in every area like I’m playing Mario kart. If I’m lucky, they’ll put a Different Colored Light to indicate this is a different path, but that doesn’t mean shit when the rest of the path literally looks exactly the same as the last. It’s like getting lost in IKEA except if IKEA only sold the same five things and same three room arrangements
Like you can have shit level design if you give the player a ducking map to read so they don’t get fucking lost. Why did they want to be Souls like so bad that they didn’t include the one quality of life feature that ironically every other FF game has
I spend 50% of the game just lost it’s infuriating
The rest of the game rules tho they should’ve just made it a ducking belt scroller instead bc fuuuuuuuuuuuck these levels
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The level design issues are incomprehensible considering how Niohs excelled at this
Might give this another chance anyway. I remember combat being too combo reliant for me. Are there any classes that avoid this? I just want to use like 4 moves max
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Anything using a Lance is a pretty good time if you want to hit things from far away. I beat the final boss with just the standard Lance 3 hit combo combined with Haste and Blood Weapon skills.
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Yeah this game rules. Enjoyed the ending a lot. The cast is way more likeable and relatable than any of the recent FFs. I’m gonna buy the DLC now
:relax:
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I fear I may have asked this before and simply forgotten the answer but since it was mentioned this is by the Nioh team, is this game as much of an absurd equipment slog as those are as that’s pretty much the main reason I never gave them a shot. In my old age I just write off whole swaths of games based on idiosyncratic criteria (this is how I have time for all the random shit I try), one of them being I don’t want to scroll through dozens of similar looking stuff that drop constantly just to see which one is 2% better than average, so that means yes I would give a worse version of Nioh a shot as long as I didn’t have to deal with that.
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Forget it, it’s Loot Town
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from what i can recall, though, you can always just choose the optimized loadout, right? you get a ton of stuff all the time and very little of it is useful, but i didn’t spend much time wading through most of it and was fine.
also, there’s a weapon upgrade system, but as far as i could tell, there was basically no reason to use this in the main game since you constantly get better stuff with better base stats
Oh yeah, there’s tons of gear that you pick up. I ran the entire game just pressing the Just Equip Whatever For Me button and dismantling everything that was lower level. I kept some gear that had crazy high percentages but never found myself ever using them anyway so it’s probably useless.
I think the idea is that if there’s gear that you like how they look and it has a high class percentage or skills you like, you can buff it until it’s as good as current level gear? But I’ve never actually found myself doing that in practice (though I do wanna take the default STRANGER EQUIPMENT, aka their starting Abercrombie looks, and do that someday.)
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Finally started the DLC today and I was so confused on how to even start it. Eventually I looked it up and found out I can only access it on the hardest difficulty? And I can’t play them out of order - I have to beat them one after the other to unlock the next one???
So to unlock it, I need to play X mission on Hardest, that unlocks the DLC CHAOS Difficulty, play 1 specific mission on CHAOS, that unlocks the DLC BAHAMUT difficulty, then I need to play a bunch of missions on BAHAMUT difficulty which unlocks the DLC Fight with Bahamut, then ??? and that’s still just the first DLC? No idea what the progression is like to get to the other 2? 3? I forget.
I wish they said this anywhere on the Season Pass (can’t buy the DLC separately any more so I couldn’t read up about stuff there either). So inscrutible, what the hell
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I hope Sonic Frontiers DLC is like this
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Omg I’ve been playing the DLC and it’s just a ducking time wasting grindfest I want my money back I’d rather watch the cutscenes on YouTube than play this shit fuuuuuuck
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I truly can’t believe you have to grind on the hardest difficulty to play the DLC. And people thought accessing Dark Souls DLC was hostile.
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