I often wonder how far out the camera should go. The game is roughly split between townbuilding/RTS segments where a far camera is useful and party RPG segments and I find myself having to consciously remind myself during the party segments to keep the camera close so I can appreciate the scale and the journey. I can’t think of a good way to do it but it’d be nice if there was a ‘journey mode’ camera that operated more like a traditional 3rd-person character-based game for these segments.
A camera zoom snap would definitely be a good. If there was a way to zoom out further I would order that everytime. I’m using the dark UI mod which makes the game more enjoyable for me so there would def be some cascading issues. Honestly, I don’t mind it much. Caveat lector, I will load up this game, pause, see what everyone’s doing, quit, rant about said game on the web.
Apparently I’m feeling sorry for myself because I started playing DQ11. The jump is immediately funny
The free movement during battle is completely cosmetic right?
As far as I know, yeah. just happens to make things look more neat I guess?
I hated it and turned it off immediately!
2 Likes
It is cosmetic and personally I think it’s dumb, much prefer the auto camera
Yeah, same here. I mostly never bother with it, but I think it’s fine that it is there. I am sure someone loves it.
I feel like I maybe found it useful on rare occasions where an enemy’s projectile attack animation took longer than I would have liked, so I just moved everyone closer so they get hit quicker
2 Likes
I didn’t care for the auto camera personally so I just kept free move turned on and didn’t uh, move.
Tetris Effect is so good that I kind of feel bad that I bought it at a discount.
I’d been playing more of the extra modes, but last night I finished the Journey mode. When I say finished, however, I don’t mean that I got through it without using any continues. I’m determined to get an A on all segments at the Normal difficulty.
One thing that I’ve learned is not to always enter the Zone when the meter is full. If I were better at Tetris, that would be a good way to get points. But I’m better off using it during the fast segments to set up some easy lines for when it unfreezes.
I think my favorite theme is the arctic one that starts out with snow and ends up at the top of a mountain. Previously, my favorite was the one (included in the demo) with all the people worshiping Tetris. Well, actually, I think I might like those two equally.
2 Likes
I just got NAtURAL DOCtRINE and it’s the best Japanese tactics game I’ve ever played???
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That sounds interesting. Got any more to say about it? Why is it that good?
I’ll go in-depth once I’m more sure I understand the game myself (I’m like five hours and three battles in on the hardest difficulty, and though it is not very complex, I still am not quite sure I understand half of it), but basically, I only care about Japanese tactics games that have crazy nonsense gimmick combat systems because I find the sensible stuff like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics to be banal and thus wishing I were playing a real tactics game like Jagged Alliance 2, which will never be remade or followed to my satisfaction (or even rendered entirely playable on its own merits for me, doubly frustrating) ANYWAY
(seriously though FFT is so brainless. you jump around and hit me in the back! then I jump around and hit you in the back! then she jumps up and casts her spell! one by one by one! everyone does the thing that they do! yawn)
Like Knights in the Nightmare, which is probably among the most incomprehensible games I’ve ever played, but definitely has some of the best fonts. There’s like 20 different fonts on-screen, in the action, in super low-res on the DS, and yet they all work and they all kick ass. I never got much into it but damn do I respect it.
Anyway NAtURAL DOCtRINE is so ugly, and so cheap, the storyline so thin and terse (and yet just irritating enough), and the stages are so small… with no background at all, just hovering in void, like a diorama, and I’m totally relieved from being expected to care about another dumb generic fantasy world and the characters in it unlike what Square or Nintendo wants to drag me through, and so since it either knows they have nothing to say or they have no budget with which to pretend they can say it, you get to actually play a tactics game that is fuck-your-face-up difficult and uncompromising and strange from the get-go. It’s so concise. It’s a PS2 game, basically.
My last resistance against falling in love with it, fell when I saw that mines could close if you’ve exterminated too much of the local population (i.e. run it a couple times), as an anti-grinding method. Or how you can’t save-scum during a dungeon run, but they have sensibly placed checkpoints coinciding with events, and no you will not be fully healed upon restoring to a checkpoint. Oh, and nobody can get downed or it’s Game Over, and there are enemies in these dungeons (presented as discrete missions, with one of those scoring systems where you can get an “S-”) which you cannot expect to kill until much later. The first two dungeons (mines/missions) demand that you flee from them at some point. I died like 20 times on the final part of the second one, trying to escape from some larvae spitters, until I realized I wasn’t supposed to attack them while they were eating a corpse at the start because otherwise they’re occupied for that one extra turn I need to get out of there alive.
The combat consists of, like, basically weird abstract baton-passing “links” that you exploit to give everyone extra turns, and you basically want to do all this weird shit so that the enemy never gets a single turn ever or they will probably one-shot you. It’s like SMT’s Press Turn but with formation-forming instead of elemental weaknesses (I don’t think there are elements in this game! Hell yes!), and they can and will do all this against you too. It sounds like bad design, and maybe it is, because I still don’t really completely understand it, and none of it makes any intuitive sense (why do my melee attackers get stronger if they are spaced out far apart and one is in the corner of the room furthest from the enemy)… but… it’s so different I can’t completely evaluate it yet. Hopefully I’ll break the game so I can stop caring and go back to talking about normal things people understand and appreciate. I have a feeling it has much more to teach me though.
5 Likes
the interface in natural doctrine gave me a migraine
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Screenshots of this game are always amazing but you’ve managed to capture it rendering almost all text upside down
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I’m not that far; I found that screenshot on Google Images. But oh my god I can’t wait.
Natural Doctrine is such a bizarre game filled with odd directorial decisions, laugh out loud glitches, and truly unique tactical concepts. We had a thread on it a while back and I don’t think the game manages to keep up with the player past a certain point and stops evolving in its stage design, but I really enjoyed exploring what was there. It’s at least made me keep an eye on Kadokawa Games from now on because they have some interesting ideas kicking around up there and they’re willing to throw money away on them.
They followed up with God Wars: Future Past, a tactics RPG, which seemed fairly reserved and traditional from what I played of it but with all the pacing issues Natural Doctrine suffered from. It got some updated re-releases, the most recent of which came to Switch and also got localized, so I’ll probably give it another shot at some point.
1 Like
Well. I was skeptical of What Remains of Edith Finch after Giant Sparrow’s first game, Unfinished Swan, was the worst example of the faux-meaningful Art Game one always enters these projects worried about.
But a year of very positive press put it on the list and tonight I start and
I don’t think I can get over the narrator. Naturalistic, mumbling amateur actor-reads have become a thing in walking sims and when the content is a twee notch up from the standard adventure game descriptions I get itchy all over.
I’d turn the dialogue track off but the subtitles are rendered in 3D and not effective at presenting in front of the camera. I don’t know if I can go back.
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there are multiple narrators (for the record, I agree, the voice directing didn’t work for me)