I think I just found a piece of Mithril in Shining Force 2 that I had never knew was there before, that’s a bit like living somewhere for 20 years and suddenly finding a new secret room or something.
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In a mood for a GTA or thereabouts so I’m revisiting Vice City, having had it sitting in my Steam Library via a sale from God knows when and the fact that I recall it doesn’t gate shit off nearly as bad as San Andreas, even if the latter has more shit overall relatively. I’d say it’s mostly aged pretty well (Holy shit these KB+M helicopter controls suck, I’ve also realized about the same amount of time has passed between its release and now and its release and 1986 when it takes place) but then the most recent of this sort of thing I’ve played is Saint’s Row 3 so I’m a bit behind.
The latter has definitely spoiled me on one thing, here I am having taken a drug lord’s mansion for myself with my own goons hanging around, I come tearing in with cops on my ass and shooting at me and those fuckers just stand there. SR3 once you start gaining some ground anybody gives you shit and half the time your dudes gun them down before you even get the chance. Meanwhile in Little Haiti a cop gives one the gang members from there guff and all his buddies jump in and beat/gun the cop down. How do I hire these guys?
Also having been able to catch reruns of Miami Vice over the past few years for the first time in ages gives me a renewed appreciation of them having Philip Michael Thomas shouting “THE MAN KILLED MY BROTHER!!”
Been playing Mortal Kombat 11. The d-pad on my controller seems to be worse for this than I expected, and I’m dropping a lot of inputs. That or I’m getting old!
Anyway, it’s alright. It’s crazy to think this is on the same generation of hardware as MKX, given how good it looks.
The story is kinda dumb but fun so far. Ronda Rousey is terrible as Sonya Blade but I think we all knew it was gonna turn out that way.
I dunno how I feel about how the new fatalities play out (with Injustice 2 style slow-mo). Where MKX was all about characters getting neatly cut in half, this one is all about poppin’ eyeballs out.
Now I’m just waiting for the word that it’s safe to try to unlock shit in the Krypt mode, since it seems this game got hit with the Warner Bros. microtransaction hammer about as hard as any WB game has, and the dev team seems to be scrambling hard to save face.
it’s also still on UE3! and unlike a lot of the UE3 releases earlier this generation, it’s not sagging under its own weight, which is good for them
A lot of people recommend turning off “Release Check” in the control options (Negative Edge in most games) if you’re having trouble with combos.
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I’ll have to give that a shot!
And yeah, it seems like between Netherrealm and Rocksteady, there’s still a lot of impressive results to be pulled out of (extremely heavily modified) Unreal 3.
Anyway, being a voice actor nerd I’m actually OK with some of the voice actor changes they put into 11. I liked Ashly Burch as Cassie in MKX, but her replacement does a fine job. Feels like they kept the most distinctive (or at least in-house) actors for most of the roles and got pretty good performances from the rest.
Well, with one exception.
Are you playing on PC or console? I heard many people are having issues with the PC version including dropped inputs. My PC version has been mostly fine so far though. I was getting some random framerate drops that didn’t seem to go away even when dropping down graphic preset levels but some tweaking of the options fixed that. Haven’t run into any other issues except a couple of times the Customization mode crashed.
Replaying Final Fantasy IV because it is the most comforting of all foods. Playing the Namingway Edition which by most accounts is the most reliable retranslation currently available. It still holds up, except for the one section where Golbez ransoms Rosa for the Earth crystal and everyone just uncritically goes along with it for some reason?
I really feel like this game is still underrated. The pacing is perfect, you’re barely if ever left wondering what to do next, no part of the game is boring or torturously long. I think this is my first time playing the original Japanese difficulty and I am finding that it’s incredibly well balanced for an early SNES JRPG, much more so than VI, VII, or VIII. The difficulty curve is pretty much perfect and even random encounters have a satisfying amount of strategy to them. I really appreciate how much the early game forces you to adapt to relying on characters with strict limitations, like Tellah’s MP cap or dealing with your protagonist suddenly being weak offensively and defensively a third of the way through the game, or just figuring out what the heck to do with Cid. Every new party configuration the game throws at you is like a little puzzle to optimize damage output and defense and pretty much as soon as you figure it out some dramatic plot event happens and you’re dealing with a different party with new strengths and weaknesses. This dynamic is kind of lost in the US version and to some extent the DS remake and I feel like that’s a shame.
I still wish there will someday be a high-budget remake of this game in the style of the DS’s FMV intro, which pretty much perfectly captures how the game felt to my childhood imagination.
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oh is that
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I will always adore how the best role for Paladin Cecil, Your Main Dude in the final boss fight is as a patient and generous supplier of hi-ethers and phoenix downs to the rest of the party, because none of his innate abilities are any better at that point than Lydia or Edge’s damage and if Rosa stops casting Cure 4 on the whole party you’ll beef it immediately
I like the DS version a whole lot for what it is though, it’s a lovely remake
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Yeah the DS remake is really good. I wish it had happened one hardware generation later but the team who did it did a pretty much perfect job of adapting the game in the best possible light.
PS4. Disabling negative edge/release check like Ymer suggested has a made a world of difference.
it has such weird fixed MMORPG-ish roles for your party for an jRPG from 1991 but only in the late late game, and that’s on top of all of the adapting to different characters’ limitations you get to do before that
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also the lead in to the final battle with the Uematsu theme swelling while fusoya and yang and everyone else are astral projected to heal you back to max and are like “now go get the bastard” absolutely rips
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me: this game is bad
also me: why am I still playing this game and hurting myself
I am become the big sister
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It is one hundred percent Cool And Fine so don’t sweat it.
37 posts were split to a new topic: babality
I started this again last year, original JP version and tried to power through with the most basic of reading skills. Got just outside of Baron in a couple battles, mentally exhausted and haven’t gone back (though I could/should).
FFIV changed my life. Can’t really gush much of my childhood energy spun out from this atm but I first caught most of FFI played through at my friend’s house (his much older brother). So I’d only started understanding how to play and got halfway through, when Final Fantasy II SNES showed up and was mindblowing as the most touchable form of “epic”, well for an 8-9 year old Spherekid. VII gets its praise for slingshotting cinematics and all that but IV’s the preceeding milestone-mould for music, emotional storytelling writing, presentation. That opened the door for the series legacy, and imo…well arguably the definitive “classic” quality JRPG experience.
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watch yourself counselor
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