The music alone already makes it meet the bar for worth playing
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It is fantastic but also frontloaded; it makes promises it doesnāt deliver on. Still a must play imo
4 Likes
beat that fucking forest level in panzer dragoon zwei
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Iām actually surprised by how little of Hyper Light Drifter I remember. Like, Iām left with the impression that it was good. But very little stands out in my memory as I try to summon it to the front of my brain.
6 Likes
Last night I finished the new Sakura Wars. I never played any of the other games so I canāt really compare but I think I liked it despite the plot being kinda silly and it feeling pretty sparse in actual content. Also a lot of the gameplay mechanics felt a bit superfluous. Like the bulk of the game is really just cutscenes with occasional dialogue choices, with the point being that these affect your romance options and the morale of your allies in the combat sections. But the combat is so easy and infrequent that the affect is negligible, and you can just choose whichever girl you like best at the end anyway as long as you werenāt intentionally being a dick the whole time (I chose the girl with the best theme song). It definitely feels like they ran out of time and had to cut a lot of content as well.
The theatre setting was pretty cool, but I wish there was more actual ātheatreā going on in the plot. Mostly you just see a few snippets here and there of rehearsals or performances. The music was also good and makes me want to rewatch Utena.
I also thought it was weird that Koi Koi was sectioned off into itās own thing, separate from the main game. Feels like it would have been better if it was integrated into the game proper and you could invite the various characters to play to boost morale etc. The game could really have used a few more minigames in general too. Basically just remove combat entirely and just beef up the dialogue system and side content.
3 Likes
worth it for the soundtrack alone really
just a really polished light search action
This is relevant! Thanks for the insight. As the game is /actually/ about romancing the girls did you like your time with them? Were they fun to get to know?
My playthrough of Tokimeki and now helping Bachelor play it I am really focusing on that even with my grievances about it that Tokimeki is so G-rated and it is legitmately fun to get to know the girls which is the whole point of that game.
So we asked about Sakura Wars and just the upped anime horny and SHINJI BAKA seemed like a whole thing.
To put it another way was the cast an interesting set of characters with problems or was it ~an_*_me stereotypes~ designed for your fetish?
Also, it spawned a minor subgenre of drifterlikes, such as Kamiko, Lucah and Titan Souls. Anything that creates its own genre canāt be bad
(ofc Hyper Light Drifter is a kind of zelda/souls derivative in the first place, so calling it a new genre is a bit weird since itās hard to pin down precisely what is truly new. but I would say 40 years after videogames were invented this is what new genres are like now, recombinations)
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Okay, but didnāt Bastion do all that too? My issue with HLD was, besides looking and sounding cool, I thought I had already experienced everything in it already and very recently as well. It all felt very serviceable, but ultimately kind of mediocre, and really forgettable or at least easily iterated on that people just think of things that came after it instead of it. I actually have felt a little vindicated by history seeing its hype die off because when it came out I felt really outside of the sensibilities which allowed people to be so excited about it. Surprised to see this enthusiasm here, actually!
3 Likes
Curious, because for me itās Bastion thatās utterly mediocre and whose popularity is a bit baffling.
In Bastion the aesthetic is all off with the cardboard cutouts, no crunch in the animations and some man talking your ear off the whole time, whereas itās chefās kiss in Hyper Light Drifter.
I think looking and sounding cool isnāt trivial, it kind of introduced a new vibe with its high-dynamic-range soundtrack, complex-yet-carefully-limited color palette and its alternation between understatement and sudden shocking violence.
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Oh I donāt like Bastion at all either. I just meant that it is maybe the more significant example to pick, though HLD is a more successful game because of the things you point out.
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Titan Souls (and probably a bunch of other examples) came out before HLD so while it was certainly one of the bigger-impact āZelda with a rollā* games at the time I donāt think it can be credited for spawning the entire subgenre.
*(Iām being facetious)
5 Likes
I think it definitely errs more on the side of anime tropes and āpick your fetishā, although I think the girls were sufficiently likeable and entertaining enough for me to enjoy my time with them despite being a tad one dimensional.
Most of the girls with the exception of main girl Sakura had problems that got raised and resolved within one chapter, and almost never mentioned again. Hatsuho in particular got a bit shafted, since her chapter mostly revolved around Sakura having a crisis of faith and Hatsuho being her bestie who has to literally punch some sense into her.
I guess the fact I picked based on music shows how invested I was in them as personalities. Sakura was the most well developed as a character, and I probably would have picked her instead if she wasnāt easy mode (if you intentionally do as poorly as possible and piss off all the girls, youāll still end up with her by default).
The first person romance scenes that pop up occasionally were a bit on the creepy side, like going into their bedroom to cheer them up by getting right up close to their face and getting all touchy feely while they stare you in the eyes and blush. One of the dateable girls is 13 years old, but from what I could see she was mostly free from creepy pervert stuff and treated more like a āyounger sisterā type.
2 Likes
I will give HLD a spin! Letās see if it is for me.
In the meanwhile, I decided to go on with Paradise Killer and I am half way in the trial. In the end, I enjoyed it quite a lot, especially because of the dialogues and music. I cut the collectathon to what I found essential.
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Playing more Nioh 2, the gameās writing has this fascinating effect of feeling like Iām playing through it for the second time, skipping around 2/3 of the cutscenes and catching up on what happened by reading a fan wiki (or in this case the in-game codex). Itās not necessarily a great feeling, but it is uhā¦ interesting to feel this way? Anyway the game itself continues to be really good, Iām alternating between the slow, far-sweeping odachi and the agile rushdown moveset of fists.
Though Iām having problems with the storytelling, I did get really excited when I noticed Nobunaga is slowly growing into his Ambition hairstyle, and revealing that the player character, named Hide, had an evil twin sibling named Tatsu, and also that their dad was named Hidetatsu and that Hide goes on to become the historical Toyotomi Hideyoshi within the span of two cutscenes is just incredible writing.
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Iām alternating between the slow, far-sweeping odachi and the agile rushdown moveset of fists
Snap!
Iāve only put a few hours into this so far but I keep using the Demon Counter as a parry instead of its intended purpose and getting whacked more often than not. Everything else about it is Nioh But With More Wrinkles and I am happy with that
Also that spirit pusscat whoās all eyes and guts and just rolls around and around you is both baffling and the most winning thing ever
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i hated the demo i played of Nioh, but something about the second game always grabs me. maybe just having a character creatorā¦ i should pick it up soon
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also hated the demo and betas of nioh but ended up loving the full game somehow
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play with winker on ps4
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