Stardew Valley
3 Likes
The Witness - all the reviews talked about how beautiful this island was and i think it’s intensely ugly, but that works so much better for me. i hated braid too.
4 Likes
FFXV I came to late. I remember slightly resenting that the old SB thread was like three times as long as the last guardian thread, which I was playing at the time. When I finally did decide to play it I was quickly drawn in by the open world cardrivin’ and charmed by the boys’ banter.
5 Likes
Final Fantasy XIV
5 Likes
i keep talking about how much DPS is a chore compared to healing or tanking but i’ve been getting back into dragoon in singleplayer and it feels really good actually
3 Likes
I bought soulcalibur vi on a whim some months back because i had played v on a roommates PS3 and had a lot of fun with character creation, and i just wanted to dick around with that some more. I only had a surface-level familiarity with the series — i played sc2 a lot with friends in high school and i played the OG whenever i saw it in an arcade, but i thought of it as kind of a trashy series with funny aesthetic touches like the dramatic announcer guy and characters screaming “WOOOAARRGHHH” when you knock them offstage. I had a whale of a time button mashing my way through fights but that was it.
When i actually got the game, i was shocked to discover it had a full singleplayer quest mode with guided tutorials. I ended up getting really hooked and actually starting to dig into character move lists, more advanced techniques than A,A,A and B,B,B, etc. Now it’s easily the fighting game ive put the most hours into besides Melee and i actually want to get online and fight people, something i never thought i would be interested in. Less that i didn’t expect to like the game, more that i didn’t expect to end up taking it so seriously
3 Likes
I honestly think ffxv will be remembered as a groundbreaking title and turning point for squeenix. so many things that are right about the vii remake are a direct result of lessons learned from xv.
4 Likes
It’s such a clear production disaster, though, and almost everything in the game is broken six ways (combat to narrative structure to quest layout within the world). I think it’s the game that was just successful enough that the trauma of its production may have inspired them to improve – moving to UE4 and making a significant scope cut to FFVII from the get-go are huge steps.
5 Likes
tbh I’ve always thought of Cave Story as being more of a 16-bit jrpg that happens to be an action platformer than a metroid-like. The yarn-like plot progression and the thinly-sketched characterization seem very reminiscent of, say, FF4 and its ilk, and have always felt more crucial to the game’s identity than the fact that one of its songs is a riff on the Metroid upgrade fanfare or the fact that it is technically (but not meaningfully) an open-world platformer.
Anyhow, to answer the topic’s original question: Light Crusader. Its definitely not a stone-cold classic and shows signs of being rushed out the door as the market for Megadrive games was collapsing, but its much better and more interesting than, say, Hardcore Gaming 101 would lead you to believe.
8 Likes
Subnautica was a surprise to me. I got it in some humble bundle and didn’t touch it for years, and then I heard someone talking it up on a podcast so I gave it a go and ended up really loving it. I’d always assumed it was just another Minecraft-like, and that kind of survival-crafting genre rarely appeals to me. The thing that unlocked it for me was realizing that it’s actually more of a first-person search-action exploration game, and the crafting is mainly used as the search-action gating system behind the traversal upgrades you need to advance the plot.
I’m always looking for 70’s-marine-biology-textbook-new-age-science-fictional-edu-horror, and this is one of the few games that pulls off that vibe (along with EVO: The Search for Eden and the Ecco the Dolphin games).
4 Likes
Yeah agreed. I’d love to read a really good write up of the development of the game. Wasn’t it something like ten years overall? Including when it was called VS XIII? The director Hajime Tabata has already left Squenix as well.
2 Likes
FFXV for me too, it feels like a series of accidents that resulted in one of the best realized Final Fantasy games yet. I went into it expecting to hate it within 5 hours and return it. I ended up playing the whole way through without losing interest. There are so many good peripheral details, things the game did right that it should not have by any means.
I still haven’t even played the DLC or revamped later chapters, I’m one of those people that appreciated the limited perspective of the game, where you only really follow the events from the POV of one character, a spoiled prince who has no clue what’s going on until the game is nearly over. Rather than fantasy-babbling a bunch of proper nouns at me as in FFXIII or FFX, the game just let me explore the world from a character’s perspective; with the broader design of the setting being only hinted at on the periphery of what I was doing.
6 Likes
the development was apparently a huge disaster. tabata took over partway through, I guess around when it transformed from a XIII spinoff to a mainline final fantasy sequel, resulting in a very different vision from what nomura originally was trying. but I imagine most of the good things about it are a result of tabata lol.
3 Likes
hahaha 100% I think “this game is good because Nomura was taken off the project and Tabata had to piece together the aimless scraps of nearly a decade of development into something coherent” is what happened.
4 Likes
the same tension is present in vii remake like I feel like everything good about it is despite nomura and all the parts that are terrible are where they gave him the reins
4 Likes
XV’s core premise about the relationships between 4 dude friends is so fucking Nomura it hurts though.
4 Likes
IMO Nomura should be allowed to come up with the ingredients but he shouldn’t be allowed to do the cooking
10 Likes
I have finished more Kingdom Hearts games than I have FFs, so it’s probably obvious that I might feel otherwise.
By the way, that would be my obious answer for this thread. I started playing the Kingdom Hearts games as a joke with a friend I made in high school, only to eventually realize that under all the awkward anime bullshit is a series that has a lot of feelings about the friends a teenage boy makes. So yeah, completely expected to make fun of that shit, kinda ended up loving it in spite of itself.
3 Likes
When I think about games I stan I think of games where I’m in the minority or at least against the tide, is that right?
I don’t like Myst or Braid because they deal in cludgy writing so that The Witness is aggressively neither was a welcome surprise. The tapes are awful, there’s nothing there, but the core of it - being alone with your brain or maybe together with someone else’s - is like nothing else.
Destiny should have been my favorite game in 2014. Titanfall was instead, and was for three years until Destiny 2.
Bungie had a principle for design on Halo called “thirty seconds of fun.” Essentially, moment-to-moment, make encounters out of short actions that feel good. Destiny literally betrays thirty seconds of fun because your melee and grenade abilities have sixty second cooldowns to start. Like Borderlands and Diablo, etc. it was balanced around progression and “loot.” To feel good you have to feel bad first. Next to Titanfall’s buffet of movement through 3D space, Destiny felt punitive. (It didn’t matter that Destiny had excellent art, worldbuilding, etc. because the fundamentals of interaction were so dispiriting.)
Destiny 2 got rid of random rolls and special ammo, etc. to much derision and has since reversed streamlining to reintroduce complexity. But Destiny 2 also returned the basic abilities and modes of interaction (the “neutral game,” I think) to best-in-class game tuning. The additions of mantling and a dodge with i-frames might be the difference between a grudging engagement with D1 and my love for D2.
I still hate seeing the word “loot” in the game but it’s gorgeous and captivating like nothing else. The complaints about the game’s RPG design now bounce off me because it’s fundamentally a high refresh rate chatroom with a body I love to move.
6 Likes
Yeah, the core loop felt pretty good in D1, but D2 has made refining it to feeling just so good. even the individual subclasses offer some nice variations on it.