My guild is making me switch from prot to ret after like half gemming and enchanting up, this is bullshit. At least I didn’t spend my heroic badges yet
what the fuck does this mean
6 Likes
kind of feel like i’m hitting a wall with Dragon Quest XI S and…idk, maybe i’m just going to quit it and watch a video of the ending. i’ll hide my thoughts, because spoilers, but mostly a mix of complaining and possibly seeking advice
Summary
so i was obviously wrong about being at the end; it feels like every time the game is winding down, they find an excuse to give you a half dozen new tasks to go do, which like, sure fine, but now i am literally just retreading through dungeons i’ve already completed, except all the enemies are harder than anything else in 95% of the rest of the game.
as it is, i feel like the idea of going back in time to change everything already made me feel like i wasted 20 hours. why have me go through all of that just to say “lol whoopsie, you can go back and do it better this time.” then it makes you go back through all these places you’ve already been (better get the most out of those assets, i guess?), and culminates in Drustan’s Trials, which are asking me to perform in a way i haven’t had to the entire game. the game even tells the player, literally, to go out and grind if the game is too hard lmao. like, give me a break.
it really feels like the game was made, it turned out to be 40 hours long, and then they were desperately scrambling to find ways to pad out the time to over 60.
all of the plot and character development from earlier in the game is just totally gone after the time skip, i.e., everything i found charming about the game. now it may as well be any characters, just generic archetypes, traipsing about a Dragon-Quest-themed world.
i get that it all ties into other titles in the series and maybe that’s supposed to make me feel tickled, but honestly, i don’t care.
so yeah, on the last trial of Drustan’s now, and while i can kill 1 out of 2 bosses, i eventually wipe. the guides i’ve read basically tell me i need to go do the “optional” quests to gain skills i don’t have to beat them, but also i need to be at least level 60 for a few, and guess what, i’m not.
i also feel like the game very clearly wanted me to learn certain skills and weapon types, but i didn’t learn the ones it wanted me to, and now i’m stuck with some advanced skills that aren’t really able to keep up with what the game is asking me to do. i guess i could reorganize all the skills via that option at the save point, but like…why give me a choice of how to develop a character at all if in the end there is a build that’s better than another?
maybe no one else has had this problem and i’m just dumb or bad at Dragon Quest, but like, even playing Persona 5, a game that took me over 100 hours, didn’t feel like this much of a slog in its end game, to me. at least in that one, i had new dungeons and enemies and plot developments that intrigued me, i guess?
so, clearly the game’s optional content is not really all that optional and i need to go do it, but i think i may need to just take a break and play something else for a while and do these other side quests once or twice a week or something. just frustrating that the strategies i’ve used throughout the entirety of the game are no longer applicable in what feels like the last 2% of the game.
7 Likes
oh gosh I couldn’t disagree more
I found all the game’s retreads to be exceptionally elegaic, the tone meant that it never ever dragged for me, they ask you to follow them on some exceptionally long tangents and I felt that all of them were as rewarding as they possibly could be
and you have to respec on a pretty regular basis! it’s great that the game makes you do that!
maybe this is related to you not liking FFIX at all and me thinking it’s like, the best by miles
4 Likes
yeah i dig this a lot! might have some thoughts after i play more but the tone/setting/vibe is really nice.
i on the other hand had to restart a save because i was doing some really risky driving at the beginning to try to dive as deep as i could go on the fuel i had, burned through all my insurance money and then was too poor to pay my crew. i’m definitely going too fast and using too much manual control for my skill level right now.
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well, with FFIX, i just don’t care about or like the characters very much, and always found its aesthetics to be kind of cloying. the game was built with this idea of “going back to Final Fantasy’s roots,” but it always felt sort of forced and artificial, to me, and not like it was back to the roots of what i personally enjoyed about early FF games. i haven’t played it in a loooong time, so i can’t say how it would compare to DQXI in terms of the things i’m complaining about, but i think it’s not entirely related.
to me, what XI is doing is like, my literal worst nightmare for a jrpg lol. there are even certain weapons i can’t build now because i sold off weapons for money. it’s like how a lot of us used to play these games, never using or selling items because you thought you might need them, but how that never was true. except this time it is.
in reality, i will probably play it again tomorrow:
16 Likes
iirc XI usually telegraphs when a given weapon is upgradeable and probably shouldn’t be sold, and even if you sell them, there are roughly-as-good equivalents you can buy for the late game, it’s the builds that matter more by then
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yeah but again, a lot of games make it seem like you need to keep stuff you never end up needing.
like i said, i will probably keep going, but yeah…i’m not saying i think that no one should like this game, but it is definitely doing things i don’t personally like in this kind of game.
i do think once i go through the optional stuff, i’ll be fine, i just feel like kind of drained right now.
time to play the Nocturne remaster
2 Likes
Have you tried that one specific metal slime farming trick? It’s annoying and still takes a bit to set up, but might speed up the grind somewhat
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yeah, so, i know in all DQ games, the key to the grind is to farm metal slimes, so that is an option i may have to strategize and research. one thing that isn’t helping is that Sylvando is my regular sword user and i haven’t ever found him useful as a character/his metal slash does so little damage. i figure there are ways, though.
but, alternatively, i think if i do more of the optional town quests and gain the extra skills, etc., from those, i will probably wind up being at whatever level is optimal
I was very confused about what to do with sylvando’s skill points after getting hustle dance and the charm buffs (I’m pretty sure this makes him the best healer in the game by miles.) he’s a buffbot I think and not much else
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different characters peak at different points in the game – sylvando is by far your best healer early on but becomes less good over time, jade is very powerful in the midgame but can’t hit as hard as erik by the end, etc.
I also did virtually no random battles in the game’s third major act (which you’re in) because you can get like 7 levels at a time from specific metal slime encounters and judicious use of pep pops at that point, though I was pretty healthily underleveled up to then and was consistently able to roll with it except for the early game battle arena and briefly getting stuck at the squid (I was on tougher monsters)
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Oh god, now I have beaten the second Xenoblade Chronicles. Something is very wrong with me.
but man the plot goes weird places
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I took my medicine and save stated through Castlevania Adventure. With states the deathtrap jumps were really funny.
There are two stand out moments:
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Stage 2 has you going through a hole maze. At what is the bottom you climb back up and have to travel left across a long bridge. The bridge is lined with Castelvania Gameboy’s Iconic Exploding Eyeballs that if you aren’t careful create an unjumpable gap. Upon getting to the end of the bridge you are confronted with a wall. Maybe one of the parts of the bridge isn’t a death pit? No. You go back across the bridge and down the rope you climbed up. This contradictatory nonsense geography is so rarely used in games and pares so well with how slow and deliberate you move.
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Stage 3 has a gruelling forced scroll climb as you outrun a spike floor. It goes on for a long time and save states just let me notice how clever it was without the heartbreak of failure. When you finally get to the top you are again travelling left and then have to snake around the screen as a spike wall again chases you.
None of the bosses are interesting, it does drop inputs all the time, the dropping platforms are far too strict, and the downgrade on hit weapon system hurts.
It’s a hard hard game. With the single save state probably spent 40 minutes on Dracula. With save states think it is definitely worth a playthrough.
5 Likes
are the bumper buttons on all xbox controllers trash like they are on this elite luxury deluxe series 2 one I got. trying to cycle through menus and I’ll be smashing the button and it’ll register one out of 4 or 5 button presses. got to have my entire finger covering the thing and pressing down hard if I want to maintain my stance in a fight in yakuza
the only thing i used jade for was her multi-hitting spear skills for getting crits on metal slimes, otherwise she took a backseat to erik
I got to play a bunch of games recently which was neat. I’m also halfway through mario and luigi superstar saga but I don’t have any thoughts on it other than I kinda like it a lot.
Ruiner:
it feels more fun to think about it than to play it. Well worth enjoying the soundtrack on youtube and maybe watching a speedrun if I see one swim along.
I’m still really excited for final form, the dev’s next game, which so far is just a trailer with 8 seconds of gameplay. I think playing a game like this for a few minutes is fine since I was more hoping to import its ambiance into my brain. To be fair I don’t really like isometric hack and slash games like this, so maybe I should start off in a classic of the genre to try and appreciate it properly. More likely I’ll just enjoy this game from afar, having put in my 3 hours as to not be a total poser.
Crying suns:
Really slow FTL like with a cool artstyle and initial gameplay premise that’s held back by its writing and its pacing. I spent 2 hours on the first “chapter” after which I’d have to start at square one for the next chapter, the idea being that it’s a rogue lite with a seven chapter story structure, with each chapter being a set of maps to do a run through. The fighting is on this grid map and looks like it could be neat but ends up being tug of war rock paper scissors at the early level I was playing at. A lot of the strategy is supposed to happen in the officers you choose and the passives of the units, but they for the most part seem secondary to the raw health and damage. A lot of it was stuff like +15% to fighters which didn’t exactly get my heart rate going. The old RTS adage of more stuff beats less stuff applied and I managed to crush the bosses by spawning a bunch of dudes on them without straining any braincells.
I kind of just wish it was a normal game, the rogue lite method of giving information slowly and having huge power spikes based on random items dropping got in the way of what could have been a really well paced slower space tactics game. Encountering an event where you choose an option that results in you losing a bunch of stuff kinda sucks. Sure, next playthrough I won’t make the choice that got me the negative outcome but why would I play another run if the first one felt like it was punishing me for no reason? The game labels which options are based on chance, which makes me believe that some options are just straight up bad and the game expects you to choose the wrong choice once to learn your lesson
It also seemed really worldbuild-y in its writing, which I’m not really a fan of. A lot of games like this feel like I’m half playing a game and half reading a wiki. I was on the fence about stopping with it but I could easily imagine myself playing the remaining 10 hours of game and then wishing I’d played something else at the end of it.
Guilty Gear Accent Core +R:
Slayer is the coolest but he’s so hard to play oh god I’m gonna have to spend 20 hours in practice to get his simplest links down aaaaa
6 Likes
yes tho xs pads are better at least
1 Like
Playing this 2016 Source game INFRA. It has a neat premise (play a structural analyst documenting infrastructure in disrepair) but it keeps falling flat on its face. The game is at its core a walking simulator through decrepit industrial warehouses, tunnels, hydroelectric plants, etc but for some reason they chose to open with you sitting in a conference room watching an NPC give a PowerPoint. You then have a 20 minute tutorial where you have to figure out how to leave your office building (as each exit you encounter is blocked by non jumpable 3 foot tall boxes).
Anyways the game then releases you to an abandoned dam. I do like the photography mechanic. You need to pay close attention to the environment to detect some of the more subtle issues, it incentives slow play, and its treated organically (there is no artificial HUD checklist of how many issues left to detect in an area, you can miss everything and the game will let you continue to the next map).
Unfortunately, the rest of the game is a bit of a mess.
There is a ridiculous “survival mechanic” - your camera and flashlight run on different battery types that need to be collected. Both run out of battery incredibly fast (flashlight lasts about 30-60 seconds cumulative, camera can take 10 photos before dying). There are just enough batteries that you always have 1-3 spares, but it’s a pointless mechanic that brings tension for no reason.
Every other room grinds the game to halt with a puzzle, nearly all of which amount to “find the code and input into the appropriate terminal the hall” or “pull levers in the right order”. They seemed committed to realism (the puzzles can’t be too obtuse as why would the buildings’ original engineers make things too complicated) but the puzzles themselves are artifice (why would engineers from the 1970s lock door after door behind different lever puzzles?). If they want this to be a puzzle game they should have just gone all in with being a “Myst-alike”.
I think the gravest sin is the game is just boring. There’s an underlying conspiracy story played out in documents scattered across the game, but I don’t play games for the hidden lore, especially walking simulator/puzzle games. The game lives and dies by the decrepit infrastructure environments but they don’t go far enough to impress. The Source environments look good for 2010 or so, but for 2016 (let alone 2021) they are just bland. Again, they probably limited themselves by being committed to realism when a bit more creative and less realistic art direction would have made a bigger impression.
I’ve played about 6 hours and didn’t seem close to any sort of end point. I then looked up the playtime and saw this is a “three act” 25 hour game (I was still in Act 1). Shelved it at that point.
8 Likes
I went on a tear when I had some time off a month ago playing through 1, 2, and getting halfway through X. They’re the perfect lazy holiday weekend type games; huge areas to explore, no rush to do anything. It took years for 1 to click for me but when it finally did that brought on the rest of the series.
I really appreciated in 2 how you weren’t given a dotted line showing the way to what you were looking for. Finding Secret Areas (which often wasn’t more than just a nice view and your characters remarking on it) always felt great to me. Sometimes the ways to get to these areas felt like they were unintended but I guess they weren’t! Case in point; one area I had to wait until the tide was down then climb under the supports of a bridge; make an awkward jump to a piece of rock jutting out of a cliff, and then keep falling just far enough to not die until I reached an obscure cave entrance which led to it’s own island.
You can definitely see how they helped out Nintendo with Breath of the Wild’s world design; they really know how to make these environments fun and interesting to traverse. FWIW, if you aren’t totally fried I recommend the Torna prequel too. They really tighten up the battle system to this weird Marvel vs Capcom tagging thing that works a lot better than anything else in the series so far.
8 Likes