Doesn’t DBFZ fall pretty cleanly into the subgenre of “anime fighting game” (highly bufferable autocombos + over the top meter management and supers)? I’m no fighting game expert, but if you don’t dig something like Marvel vs Capcom 3 and how you approach that, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t vibe with DBFZ.
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i like the level structures that lean on having separate little dungeon biomes with connecting tissue between (like marrakesh) and i think chongqing committing to an unprecedented level of contrast between its major sections is fun and that the connecting bit is gorgeous. and it’s really not very big, you can get to both targets very quickly from the middle!
i’d admit it’s sandwiched between probably the two best levels in the set, but i like it more than dubai (and i like dubai a lot)
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What are you finding confusing? What does “not very controllable” mean to you?
I think DBFZ generally does a good job of keeping lower-skill players engaged with it just because low-skill play still reads as extremely visually stimulating and cool, whereas pressing random shit in Street Fighter doesn’t really look like anything coherent.
I know I stuck with that never-ending story mode way longer than I should have just because it felt good to be doing cool-looking stuff in an anime fighter without a time investment I couldn’t commit to at the time.
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@Rudie your description of Ys VIII side quests is spot on. That’s exactly how they play out.
But there’s like maybe 2–3 quests available every few story beats, so those formulaic scenes have taken maybe 20 minutes of my 15 hour playtime so far.
Most of the rest of that time has been blue skies arcadey adventuring, like how @GherkinForce compared it to Outrun but as an action RPG. So that’s why I think it’s a blast to play.
The heart is… well, I find the cast more endearing than I ever would have expected. And I think the treatment of the deserted island premise is pretty compelling for a JRPG.
What I don’t like is the frequency in which old-fashioned attitudes about gender roles pop up in dialogue.
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@Felix curious if you like the wheel stand. My wheel setup has never felt right at a desk but there’s no way I’m going to sling myself low these days.
my wheel feels great when I raise my desk up to regular standing height, I have to use the regular brake rather than the load cell and clutch in that case though since I can’t possibly apply good pressure while standing
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Rolling down the street sipping on bone hurting juice
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pulled the trigger and pre-ordered R-TYPE® FINAL 2, and will not touch the demo for the time being. Kinda getting a bit hyped already, since i have spent so many hours on the first one… kinda wondering though whether they go to the lenghts of fxxking with the soundtrack again for the western releases, hence me having bought both the PAL and J-NTSC version of RTF1.
And yes, i am totally fine with the cinematic slo-mo action.The first one celebrated this in stage 3. 0 (and 3.5) and i kinda wanna see whether they manage to at least match that athmo in the second one.
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Played and finished Say No More! since it just came out, is very short, and is RSI friendly. I really liked the premise when it was first shown off but wondered how far they could take the idea. Turns out the game is very short but just about gets all of its ideas in before the final act.
I remember the developers saying that they built it based on the desire to interrupt during cut scenes in games or any situation where the game stops you from acting and it half fulfils this promise. Talking in the background during a cut scene is fun but then the game arbitrarily prevents you from being able to say no. This makes sense for contextual reasons and some scenes but in later parts of the game there doesn’t seem to be any reason why you couldn’t just say ‘no’ randomly in the background. The fact that you’re prevented from doing so kind of mitigates the fun of the game a little bit towards the end.
The short length also helps make sure the game ends well before everyone is sick of the joke. The voice acting has kind of an amateurish quality to it which feels intentional and has mixed results. The world is a mishmash of 21st-century employment anxiety and surface level anticapitalist sentiment and its a cute message. You can tell the design quickly had to accommodate for contextual instances where the player should actually say nothing (if the PC said no to everything then the premise of the game becomes cynically absolutist) and so there are little bits to incentivise you to stop and listen to what people are actually saying. Even a short game like this needs to provide some variety in the possibility space since you effectively have only six inputs (seven if you count inaction), two of which are actually required for general progression.
The enjoyment you have of it depends on how much you like experimenting with contextually inappropriate actions in games. However, because the game frames the contextually inappropriate action as contextually appropriate, the most fun I had with the game was still trying to push at the edges for contextually inappropriate interjections which the game still clamped down on.
A range of language options is neat and the character creator is okay. I really like what I ended up with:
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Making some more incremental progress in Assault Android Cactus, I dunno if I’m ever going to be “good” at this game but I’m enjoying it nonetheless. I can see this being a game I pick away at bit-by-bit for a long while.
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I never played any anime fighting game but this description makes me think Puyo Puyo Fever is an anime puzzle game
(I prefer Puyo Puyo Fever because I get too muddled to plan anything longer than a 4-chain in vanilla Puyo Puyo so the experience is dry and underwhelming)
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yeah, DBFZ goes out of its way to be a modern anime fighting game that’s still basically playable if you haven’t touched that subgenre since mvc2. it’s not my favourite of the recent releases in part because so many of those have been so good and because I find it hard to advance beyond low-intermediate performance in DBFZ while muddling through, but it’s obviously great.
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FF9 is really growing on me. I’m gradually investing my emotions into these characters and goofy high-concept plot contrivances at the same pace that I’m being drip-fed spells and abilities and battles that just barely encroach into my interest zone. The dungeons are basically straight lines that force you to walk back and forth until the next door opens, using random battles as padding. Everything in this game between its narrative elements and gameplay mechanics exists to spend more of your time. At no point in any dungeon or world map is there more to do than go from point A to B, with the occasional point C in the middle to make you think you’re reaching point B. People complain about FFXIII being linear and this feels like the root of that dynamic. The game basically plays itself, but it’s so linear that it’s very finely tuned to allow every boss to just barely wipe your party, or to make you pay enough attention so that you make every character use more than two commands. It hits that sweet spot between dull meaningless grinding and thoughtful combat encounters. Like, I’ll complain about the encounter rate and how slow it feels to simply walk down a hallway to the next story flag, but by the time I get to the area boss I realize I’ve only been through like 10 random encounters, and they were just plentiful enough to help me decide which items and abilities I’d rather have equipped for the area.
Anyway the point that made me accept that I like this game was when the rat furry village was being sieged, and I had to guide the survivors to safety, which was a multiple choice game of “which way should you guide them to safety”. I told one of them “go this way!” and then went that way, and were immediately disintegrated by black mages, which was both hilarious and gutwrenching. I guessed correctly for the other remaining survivors, and realizing I had played a hand in getting these characters killed, I started crying like an idiot. And then the queen summoned Odin to completely nuke the entire village, so everyone died anyway.
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DBFZ bugs the shit out of me for combos and blockstrings being excruciatingly long even at the most basic level. like at least in MVC you have to seriously lab shit to be able to do the 30 second combos that are the standard in DBFZ
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My first RPG was DRAGON.BAS running in GWBASIC
This appears to have been someone’s abortive attempt to clone dragon quest but they didn’t get much further than a prototype. It was literally two rooms, one of them a castle room with an inn and shop, and the other room was a totally empty room of the same style of castle tiles with random encounters whose strength scaled to your current level. This was enough to be addictive
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the extreme ease of maintaining one-button dial-a-combos – something that no other fighting game has ever thought to do because it seems much too effortless – is probably its most obvious innovation, because it a) keeps the game flowing at all times, at the very worst, like a dragon ball z fight, during which characters will get airborne and have some natural push and pull, b) by implication establishes that you could almost certainly be doing something more interesting than one-button dial-a-combos, so you’ll start experimenting with how to cancel out of those combo strings or change them up midway through, and c) likewise establishes a baseline for defensive play where you know that you’re going to very reliably eat (a small amount of) shit if you can’t avoid those openings.
my biggest complaint with a lot of fighting games is that they feel bad below intermediate-level play (and sometimes look equally bad at very high-level play; here’s looking at you, SFV and samurai shodown) because there’s no rhythm to basic chip damage if that’s all you’re managing. DBFZ avoids that above all else and I like that it’s so focused in that regard.
MK11 makes slightly different tradeoffs in that it also feels pretty bad to pick up and play, but it feels great from low intermediate skill onward, and has the best tutorial since VF4, which makes up for that.
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this is the main thing that separates a lot of fighting games in my mind because the accessibility : depth curve makes such a big difference to how willing I am to put time into them. taking aside dbfz and mk11’s good but slightly eccentric curves, you also have tekken, which is uniquely linear in this regard for a fighting game, starts feeling ok and gets as much better as you put into it, soul calibur, which has always felt phenomenal starting out but can never make up its mind as to what the route to higher level play is supposed to look like, and so on.
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For me the main determinant of the time I’m willing to invest seems to be ultimately the quality of the art. I played a lot of Garou Mark of the Wolves because it has spectacular pixel art in a genre with already high standards, like the crunchiness of even basic punches is so satisfying. Then I played Guilty Gear XX because the level of visual creativity in the character designs and attacks was off the charts. (The early 2000s were kind of a “silver age” of fighter games in my mind.)
I’ve been comparatively reluctant to spend time on any 3d fighter or on any of the lower-budget 2d fighters that came along during the genre’s “hibernating” period, in part because there’s less eye candy to appreciate while you’re practicing.
Lately though they’re starting to figure out how to make 3d art with a 2d look and there’s enough revived demand to justify higher budgets again, so like Tony I’m thinking of dipping back in
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This sucked ass but I kept seeing folks say season 3 is a big improvement. I’ll never know if that’s the case because jumping back into a modern fighting game after a break is fucking expensive cuz season passes rarely go on much of sale!!
I don’t think Master Roshi has a nosebleed attack so I am probably not missing much.
Also they haven’t added Bulma.
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