we have very different definitions of ‘nice colors’
this is hideous to me
blech. even without the ai texture I would not want to look at this for more than ten minutes. my eyes are very picky
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o this sounds extremely my shit
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i fucking lost it when this happened, like, i didn’t believe you that she was so fast but she might as well say “meep-meep” after her dialogue and then disappear in a cloud of dust
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should I split things out into a Clair Obscur thread @Felix @OneSecondBefore @captainlove
I’m playing with French audio and English subtitles (hopefully I will advance to all french someday) Currently about 2 hours in, taking my time talking to all the NPCs, I am en train de boire du vin avec mes camarades in Lumière and I expect we will set off from le vieux-port in the morning. pretty impressed with the world-building so far, the theme of thirty-somethings fighting for revolution in a dying world would of course appeal to me, I guess I understand how all the gamedev dads must have felt when the dadgame boom was hitting in the 2010s - target demo
loving the art direction so far, and the facial expressions are really good as well. it feels very disco elysium-y in a way, the light blooms and strong contrasts, very uh… chiaroscuro… or should i say… clair obscur… yeah yeah… obviously the thematic resonances with DE are also there.
(not the greatest example but i can’t load up to take a screenshot of the day scenes)
definitely feeling that it’s a game which is not very interested in holding your hand, which is impressive in a sense because it doesn’t feel intentionally vague like fromsoft games, moreso, this is just not what they thought needed to be focused on. i respect it. but i expect to be a little confused as we proceed.
i appreciate that there are some standard-fare jrpg tropes so far like the festival tokens, the materia sorry lumina, limit breaks, stun moves, status effects, etc… the only such game i’ve played is chrono trigger (never finished) but it feels familiar enough, albeit, with a very different setting
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it’s about time
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do it
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I just got Esquie and I’m still really enjoying this. Challenge level is good… 4th party member is different enough from the others though her skillset is a bit fiddly… pacing is surprisingly good in that it’s getting very Nier-esque with the weird post-civilization NPC side quests and feels like it should be too meandering but manages not to be…
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Am enjoying the lack of map/quest tracking. Feels refreshing in the current era. Encountering several sidebosses that wrecked my shit.
Enjoying figuring out Maelle’s stances a lot. Would it kill them to make the stance icons slightly larger? Virtuous stance combos are very fun. I like the themeing of Maelle as the reckless youngster who sets herself up to have lower defense most of the time. Gels well with incentivising you to dodge well.
The music definitely owes something to Nier but am appreciating some of the more subtle themes. The Water area has a track that almost sounds like Eraserhead at times. Gonna have to dig through the OST at some point
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this one isn’t grabbing me. I like how french it is, it’s so french that it feels like it was made by a bunch of francophile shut ins instead of actual french people. but like this setting and premise is so contrived that I just cannot take anything seriously at all. and it very much wants to be taken seriously. the music is knockoff nier, which is nice enough, but like it’s still knock off nier. the mood is knock off nier; instead of the slowly unraveling quiet desperation of nier, the characters are just like ‘man, we’re pretty desperate right here, you know? all those people are dead. we’re probably dead. here we are, just desperate-ing around.’ the battle system is probably pretty good, but it’s just a bunch of gobbledygook to me right now, I don’t really know how any of these characters work and I can’t be assed to figure it out since everything dies in two hits anyway. the no map kind of sucks since everything in any given area looks the exact same and the camera feels too zoomed in. you walk too slow and run too fast. the character’s heads are too big.
I really enjoy the lack of teenagers and gruff idiots that these games tend to traffic in, though.
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Thanks for making this a thread, @stylo! Good idea.
I’ve seen people compare this game to Chrono Trigger and I see it. It’s an extremely well-tuned synthesis of mechanics and tropes from across the history of JRPGs, in a tight and breezy package. I especially appreciate the retro throwbacks like the world map and lack of minimap.
The way the game does secrets also feels like it’s reviving a very SNES-era design mode that I appreciate. In the starting area, every trash can is interactable and they all give you the same “nothing here!” message… Except one glowing one that gives you a very slightly reworded “nothing here” message, and if you keep interacting with it you get a little goofy scene. Later on in the game, you can find little side paths on the world map that lead you to tough optional bosses. I wonder whether we’ll get totally obscure side quests later on too.
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So i’m out into the game proper and didn’t expect how they hit you with that cutscene right at the start… still not getting the hang of the combat timing but i’m really taking my time wandering around taking in the sights. on my way to the indigo tree and yeah I encountered some of those tougher minibosses that wrecked my shit.
really just thinking about this game a lot, to no great ends. i like how confident in itself it is. still dont love rpg game mechanics but i’m trying to avoid the urge to look stuff up.
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got to the gestral town and dooood this game has the stuff. i can’t believe this game is [so] good. i fuckn cried at that one dancing npc.
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I really enjoyed the hidden side arena right after the gestral village where you can 1v1 various increasingly difficult gestrals, and after each one you get a pictos that buffs you in 1v1 fights. I used Gustave for all of them. I feel like his simple and largely self-sufficient playstyle suits this kind of fight. I’m currently running a three-woman party, so I like building him up as the odd man out who just exists to beat up merchants in solo combat.
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QTEs in a turnbased battle system? Give me realtime with pause even, this feels like the worst of both worlds to me. I do like golf games though, maybe I should finally sit down with a Mario RPG and reconsider my trash taste.
After playing Baldur’s Gate 3 I was really hoping for a new wave of CRPGs. That didn’t happen. A European JRPG is not exactly what I’m after, but I do find it cool that it got made and that it is successful.
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This is what’s making me hesitate even as people keep talking about how great this game is. (Though I guess I’d probably wait for a price drop regardless.)
I didn’t really mind that sort of thing in Super Mario RPG (assuming it’s comparable here) but even in that game I didn’t like the way it kind of felt bad if I ever missed it. It became more of an obligation than a fun gimmick.
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this game is balanced in a way that you only have to get your dodges and parries right about half the time to succeed at normal levels on the default difficulty and that seems to work pretty well psychologically for me
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I bought a key from a gray market seller so I’m all in with no refunds!
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i mean, they’re not really QTEs, at least not as i think of them. you’re just tasked with pressing the A-button at consistent times during your abilities – no randomness, no surprise about which button to press. if you fail then the ability still executes, just less effective. more importantly: there is an option to have them done for you automatically.
the real realtime stuff is all the defensive actions: dodging, parrying, jumping, countering. and these u just work out with time like a regular action game.
idk, don’t take my advice: i think asura’s wrath is awesome.
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this is good to know, I might actually play this game now
1 Like