I’ve slept 4 hours since Wednesday but I still beat at least half of Demon’s Souls today and it’s still the greatest game ever made.
If any of you witnessed me fumbling and losing and not reaching that 50% point please don’t call me out in public, I’m going on the totally unfounded belief that all the x-1 levels are at least twice as long as everything following them.
i’ve been playing the psp version of persona 2 innocent sin and having so much fun. i used to say the fan translation of the psx original was better but i admit i was wrong, this is so good and besides some of the redrawn portraits/ui and the official psp localization rendering seven sisters students calling kasugayama high school “kuso-gayama” as “cuss high” which is clearly inferior to the fan translation’s “kasu-gay-ama” it’s a straight improvement. also i really like the battle system and pace despite what everyone says, it’s relaxed and has good hangoutitude and it’s easy to follow with a guide, it’s cool that there’s so little combat besides the bosses and it’s mostly chatting up demons for cards.
writing-wise they aren’t really that drastically different from later persona games, but the distinctions are significant and those are the elements that make them so much more appealing. the disjunct between player and protag and their relationship to other characters is part of it. everyone feels more distinct and individual and chill and their intention in the game feels less functional/cynical. it’s still often light and humorous and saturday morning cartoon-y, i’ve seen ppl say they’re darker and more “mature” and ig they are to a degree but that’s not really it. if it’s more mature it’s in the sense that everyone is their own person and it’s not really a player fantasy, like tatsuya being super cool and everyone being in love with him feels more like a winking joke and a setup for his narrative than something the player is supposed to feel about themselves (something like he and maya switching places as protags for eternal punishment wouldn’t be possible in the later games for that reason). ig they’re chill fun teen games for adult women rather than grownup games for teen boys. also kaneko has way better taste in girls and there isn’t the constant bigotry
sry if this post is scattered im recovering from vax 2
finished bitterblack isle in dragon’s dogma and am glad i finally have that done and can finally stop thinking about it.
feeling much more lukewarm on the game as a whole than when i first finished it some year or two ago. maybe because i’ve spent too much time now grinding equipment and augments. still fascinated somewhat by what you can do with character customization, altho as far as i can tell you are mostly making different variations of threadmill.
Good writeup, I’ve been curious about that port. What fucks me up though about wanting to play the PSP version of IS is that we don’t have an English version of the PSP port of Eternal Punishment, so going from a more modern PSP game to its sequel from 12 years ago on the PS1 would bug the hell out of me.
i’ve played quite a bit of eternal punishment and personally it doesn’t bug me, it’s not that different and there’s even a nice undub patch to replace the 2000-era english voice acting and another new one which restores the real names of some background characters and spells that were originally carried over from persona 1’s atrocious psx english loc and were rectified in psp p1 & IS (you can find a version prepatched with both easily but i won’t link it). you might want to speed it up in an emulator at times if you’re going that route but it’s by no means “unplayable” (hate that word), and though i’m loving psp IS i will say that EP in particular benefits visually from the glue/crunch of psx compression and the original art and design, despite the inconvenience. iwakura productions is also working on translating the psp version of eternal punishment, but that might not be finished for a while (there are playable builds but a lot left to translate).
Andrew and I have been cooping Bloodborne and yesterday we got invaded. He died right away and then I managed to beat the invader after a very protracted battle during which I was down to a few HP multiple times. Very fun.
Toups.
Andrew is actually way better at all videogames than I am.
Toups!
There’s an interview somewhere where they state the popularity of Persona 1 among females lead to them trying to appeal more to the female fanbase with 2. I think that by doing that it helped the characters stand out a bit more because they explored different archetypes and tried to balance them a bit so they could appeal to a wider group of people. I don’t know how much this matters now, I don’t really touch modern RPGs at this point so I don’t know if archetypes have gotten better and if characters are actually getting more interesting and not falling into the same boring molds, but it doesn’t really seem like it, so Persona 2 still stands out in that regard.
shutoko revival project is so awesome
one day, all computer games will feel like this
once, all computer games felt like this
when did i start consuming the half eaten scone i found on the plate next to the computer? 30 minutes or 2 hours ago?
i wish the Yokohane went on forever
i have been completely sucked into ff11 when not sleeping or working. so that’s where i’m at these days i guess.
here’s a stacked player-controlled sabotender i saw
i got an extremely rare 1 xp from next level WITHOUT it being because i haven’t limit broken yet
almost all the jobs (just missing summoner)
and did a leveling group with the friends i’m playing with, where we did a grind as we ascended delkfutt tower (their screenshot, from twitter, i stupidly didn’t take any)
it’s nice to play an mmo that’s an actual rpg and which is still friendly to solo play (now with trusts to fill out your party and big xp gains). every battle feels like an actual final fantasy battle. i’m in love…
Please post as many FF11 screenshots as you can/want.
Play Online screens too.
I beat Demon’s Souls. It’s amazing in an emulator. Did you know the elevator at the end of 1-4 is hand cranked by ghoulies? I didn’t until tonight, when DaleNixon pointed it out!!
Game is much much easier when it’s running at a stable frame rate and you can actually see shit and load times aren’t 3 minutes long but I still died 60+ times, it rocked, it ruled, Demons souls #1, I love my big dragon bone
Also playing FFXI, really happy there are still servers that are like 2k+ active population, leading to a lot of incidental co-op and “two ships passing in the sea” style multiplayer encounters. I started doing the level 60 limit break quest, which involves getting to the end of 3 dungeons to collect a key item.
Getting to the end of the dungeon I decided to start with, Oztroja Castle, involves finding three passwords that are needed for the very final floor. The dungeon is fairly complex to navigate, with lots of branching paths and misleading open areas. On top of that, the passwords change each in-game day, so you’ve only got around 1 hour to do the entire thing. It’s advised to start the run at midnight just to give yourself breathing room. I was sitting at the first password tablet next to this other guy, waiting for the day to turn over.
The enemies in the password-hunting part of the dungeon are much lower level than anyone doing this quest, so the first half of it is pure routing. Darkxdarkside here had clearly done this before, because the moment midnight hit, that guy was off to the races. I really appreciated his presence, since the walkthrough I read was kind of confusingly worded and I definitely would’ve gotten lost three times over.
The second half of this journey involved mostly just going down a corridor with strong enemies, meaning combat was unavoidable and time-consuming. Darkside and I went down the entire route just leapfrogging mobs, which probably ended up making this part twice as fast as it would’ve been normally. We weren’t in a party together since you can only use Trusts (summonable npc party members) solo, so it was a fun little sequence of two groups of 5 chewing through a bunch of mobs.
The final part is a fairly small but lethal stealth encounter to get to the middle of a courtyard. Most enemies are easily walked around with a combination of sneak and invisibility, but the really high level guy in the middle has true sight. I assume the idea is that you actually have to stealth past him and respect line of sight, but my companion Darkside got spotted immediately, and to make sure we both got the quest item, we had to improvise taking turns with aggro generation, re-raises and kiting.
By the end of the whole thing, it was 15:00 in-game - we went a little more than half-way into our time allowance. It was probably the fastest I’ve ever had to play this game. I’m really curious how long it would’ve taken without knowing exactly where to go, and without having a second group helping with mobs. I know I definitively couldn’t have done this quest without Darkxdarkside’s help, but I’d like to think that my presence at the end secured his success as well. I get why MMOs aren’t designed like this anymore, but man, I really feel like something special was lost in the transition to instanced, queued dungeon content.
i am really glad this exists because it’s cool but also a little bummed because my first thought was “someone is reviving shutokou battle online?!”
i wanna play ff11 but the benchmark chugs like a mf 
all in one lenovo from 2009
I’ve been mostly playing Spelltower on my phone the past two weeks but today I started playing (after owning for years) Fire Emblem: Awakening.
This is my first entry from the series – it’s pretty good, I can see why people like it. Not sure if I’m going to play the whole thing because I dunno if I care super much about the plot but I want to see if the mechanics do anything interesting beyond what I’m seeing here in the first few hours.
playing the Back 4 Blood beta and seeing they nerfed the lowest difficulty into the ground from the tech alpha back in December and being so mad I could puke and pee
hopefully the other difficulties are still “it’s not an action game anymore” and “the Dark Souls of L4D”
Sega Picross having arcade noise as a selectable music option, but calling it “Relaxing Noise” is so good.
Oh yeah I also played Back 4 Blood beta and it stunk. Just what L4D always needed: cards, currency, and being sold 40 dollars worth of DLC before the game is even out. Miserable experience.
