I’m still very much at the beginning of this game, just doing mondo sidequests and loving it. I already feel like this game is significantly more enjoyable to play than the first one. I hope it gets just as existentially wacky at the end as the first one does.
3 Likes
The release timing of this thing dovetailing with my rapid apathy towards TOTK after maxing-out the stamina wheel has been a (Cap)godsend
3 Likes
This game is a nice midpoint between ToTK and Elden Ring in that it has a significant amount of friction but it’s still pretty forgiving even if you fuck up completely
7 Likes
Deeply disappointed that I can’t entirely ignore this console gen anymore because of this game
10 Likes
One of the Sphinx riddles is to bring who gave rise to the sphinx, and the solution is to bring it one of the 3 Capcom-created pawns called SphinxParent, SphinxMother and SphinxFather. Certain riftstones only show one pawn with that name if you’re offline, to make sure you see it at some point and can go back to get it again in reaction to the riddle.
Unclear whether this is a bug or intentional, but if players create a pawn with one of those names, then they’ll also show up at those special riftstones. These pawns have a huge amount of thumbs-up on them, presumably because they have a oligopoly on certain riftstones, so I think this quirk is being exploited to harvest a lot of R.
4 Likes
lol I am glad I spoilered myself
2 Likes
Why I bought a
PS3: The Last Guardian
PS4: The Last Guardian
PS5: Dragon’s Dogma 2
And the reason I bought a PS5 a few months ago was so that while waiting for Dragon’s Dogma 2 I could play SnowRunner with no load times.
13 Likes
Grateful to my gf who sits next to me doing her things as I play DD1 on the TV, and admits that this may be the least pleasant game to listen to that I’ve played around her, but is glad I’m having fun.
Slashing at giant knees for 20 seconds at a time. So much talk about weakness to flame or gifts of fire and how it seems all roads lead to gran Soren.
Something else… For as chaotic and sometimes silly the presentation of the game is at times, because of the low level of control it exudes over NPC interactions and combat encounters, I still think the cutscene directing in this game is surprisingly good. Development must have mooched off whatever equipment and tech was available for RE5. There’s vision and spectacle here to enjoy
6 Likes
My favorite thing about the DD1 cutscenes is how your silent protagonist Arisen reacts to everything with Dull Surprise
like everything with the Salvation plot is Mason or the creepy cult leader guy smugly rambling plot points at you while you just stare at them mouth slightly agape its delightful
6 Likes
While I was vaguely aware that there are multiple endings, I didn’t read anything about them to try to get them all in one shot (the way i did with Elden Ring) and as far as I can tell I got the “true” ending. But I don’t think I got the best version of it, maybe, as I ran out of time and some bad things happened that I probably could have prevented had I acted more efficiently.
Not realizing how time-sensitive the last part is, I thought I might go exploring to work on my pawn badges a little and collect more of a particular item. But after a while I got a time-based game over and lost all of that progress. So I just went ahead and did the thing that was obviously going to trigger the final ending rather than take another option that sounded like it was going to rewind things even more.
Anyway, I like how hostile and convoluted the last part of the game is. I was kind of hoping for one last big, difficult dungeon like the Everfall. In a way I got something better, but I still wouldn’t mind having a particularly difficult area to explore without a time limit. I couldn’t help wondering whether they’d planned for there to me more to Moonglint Tower but ran out of time. Maybe this game’s Bitterblack Isle will appear in a few months.
3 Likes
Apparently the final time limit is based on how many times you rest. I saw some advice online that you can extend the endgame indefinitely by restoring your max health with blue potions, wakestones and resummoning pawns instead. I’ve been trying to do that.
2 Likes
I’ve been playing it in Japanese and looking up online tips on the English internet and I’m constantly thrown off by how different all the items and quests are named. The English script is routinely largely ignoring the exact Japanese words and coming up with something else that fits from first principles. That’s a common enough workaround when there’s no good way to be anywhere close to literal but it seems to be closer to the core of the translation approach here.
In the version I’m playing, most characters speak pretty everyday Japanese except when they invoke in-universe concepts like “Arisen” or “elf”. And there are also a few specific characters like the Dragon who speak in an affected ancient style. Whereas in English much of script seems to be closer to the Dragon’s style, filled with “fantasy words”.
To make things easier I temporarily had English subtitles active when doing the sphinx riddles. The Sphinx, despite being an ancient god, still doesn’t speak as fancy as the Dragon in the original script. When I attacked her, she exclaimed in Japanese something that might be straightforwardly translated as “Ah, you want battle! Sounds like some good exercise for me!” whereas the English subtitle said something like “Combat will avail you not, but I shall find it good sport.”
This particular line caught my eye as humorless and I’m indeed complaining about it, but every translation of something this long will include a few duds and maybe it’s just an outlier. It’s certainly higher-effort to translate this way and seems like a well-considered philosophy, and a similar approach in Dark Souls 1 had iconic results. But it’s also pretty similar to what people were just complaining about in Unicorn Overlord.
11 Likes
Man that reminds me, how many fuckin definitions does “aught” have in this universe anyway
Ought aught naught
Was for naught that my aught was ought
I swear it’s in every sentence
9 Likes
I would die if the whole thing was building up to a single “why I oughta…” three stooges gag at the end
9 Likes
sounds quite droll to me as written, but let me check the delivery
3 Likes
The Japanese delivery was enthusiastic, making it sound like she’s gearing up for a high-energy fight. Droll fits her overall personality but it didn’t fit the moment as well
3 Likes
imo she should sound droll until you attack and then she should absolutely go unhinged feral. better fits a sphinx as a monster that’s happy to disembowel you but has to play by its own rules
5 Likes
very dry, she is basically calling the Arisen a complete fuckwit tho
5 Likes
Yeah this is good. It’s really the mismatch itself that bothered me then. I guess there’s a similar phenomenon with anime sub vs dub scripts, where the dub script is more likely to go off in a new direction that’s a better fit for the actor they cast.
2 Likes
woah look at that cool sphinx
about time there were some sphinxes in contemporary vidcons
7 Likes