I am really enjoying Final Fantasy III (while reading Fellowship of the Ring for the first time) but I don’t really understand what’s to compel me to play with jobs in this game. I’ve jumped into a random few but when I’m doing good I just don’t see why I would jump into the Black Belt and learn its weaknesses and strengths. Seems like its as system lacking some basic incentive to interact with it in any curious way. Maybe this is part of why people always say that FFIII’s job system just doesn’t stack up to later iterations?
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Meant to post about this in Game Vids You Watched Today, I’ve watched up to part 25! Thank you for your service, I can only take this one vicariously, awful!
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I’d say the biggest incentive to switch jobs in that game is finding hot new sets of equipment for a specific job.
The job put into the spotlight that way will sometimes be very dominant for a while (early examples are red mage when you find the sword in a mimic chest, and ranger when you find a good bow) and even sometimes almost necessary (dark knight and dragoon)
Plus it’s just fun to get a bard once you find a Full Bard Set even though they’re worthless
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I should go by the gear I get then, that’s something I’ve basically been ignoring. My Red Mage is also very unimpressive by the point I’m at, which is just after the Water crystal.
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Yeah, unlike w/ FF5 and Tactics, job usefulness fluctuates a lot, and since there aren’t job skills to learn and transfer, there’s no reason to stay in a class that’s lagging behind
Early on red mage are like the best of Knight + Black Mage + White Mage, then they rapidly falter and never recover
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it’s like original tactics ogre that way in that you can and should switch totally opportunistically, which I like better in tactics ogre but is still interesting at times
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I finished Citizen Sleeper and am almost done with my first life in I Was A Teenage Exocolonist.
I won’t give my whole thoughts on either of these games because my thoughts about them are deeply tied to the fact that I want to, and am capable of, making a narrative life sim like these games. Almost all my thoughts are cast through the lens of me trying to convince my husband to make one of these with me for a game jam, haha.
That said: I’m very glad that two separate sci-fi life-sim storylet-based narrative games came out so close to one another, and I’m very glad that they’re so different. These games share a lot of core pillars–each allows the player to specialize their skills and personality in a way that affects a unique game mechanic that controls event outcomes. Both of these core gameplay experiences are super well-suited to the tone and structure of the game they’re attached to, and they couldn’t be more different.
I’ll say that while I appreciate the wobbly card game at the core of IWATE, it seems very hard to make a game where storylines and quests generate cards themed after the event itself. It feels like cutting a plotline in this game could require rebalancing the card game, and vice versa. That’s wild! It’s ambitious but feels very brittle to develop. The outcome however is a card game that satisfyingly simulates the experience of being a teen who can’t do shit–you can struggle to succeed at anything you want if you have enough stress points to spend, and a lot of the challenges are not beatable without this kind of stress expenditure. You can take advantage of your specialties, but it doesn’t guarantee success at the story challenge. Important moments are appropriately tense and difficult. The whole system feels wobbly and unsure in a very appropriate way, but you still have enough agency to tilt things toward success, if you plan correctly. My one big complaint is that the game is not erally good at explaining HOW to do some of the things characters ask you to do in the plot, and not good at telling you whether you’ve found an objective you could solve, or you’re just experiencing some weird shit that your character will inexplicably never tell anyone else about. I guess I coulda done with a quest log to tell whether this stuff is a mystery I am supposed to solve or not, haha.
CS on the other hand has a much simpler dice mechanic with much more boring progression which nevertheless feels well suited to the content. The dice placement allows you to make a large number of choices per minute of gameplay, and the simplicity helps you keep track of a bunch of different concerns you have going at once. It’s appropriate for this game that a lot of “turns” involve just slamming down a bunch of dice into a bunch of holes and committing and moving on without much fanfare.
I liked them both… storywise neither of them were really in the sweet spot for me but I did appreciate each of them. CS has a little too much laborious corporate espionage description for me, and IWATE is sometimes a very pastel and sometimes cartoony experience which really only makes grasps at emotional realism around moments of family tragedy and teen angst, haha–but I knew I was getting that when I picked the game up, and I think it does a good job of what it’s trying to do. I hope these games help folks convince publishers to fund more and crunchier narrative life sims! I want to play games like these set in dark fantasy cityscapes and in mutant hell sewers. I would love to see something like this crossed with more citybuilding mechanics–really dig into the “depicting a place and the businesses and relationships inside it” angle both of these games have.
Anyway, I recommend em if this stuff sounds good to you!
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after taking ~3 weeks to finish all 8 hours of psx smt1 i’m glacially making my way through the live a live remaster
this is probably the least offensive hd-2d thing yet? i can actually parse what’s going on!!!
if you’re playing PR, they made a bunch more jobs viable later and even endgame, so that’s something. it’s like only game they legit improved
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Yeah I heard that they also shuffled around some of the obscured optional jobs in this version. I have been slightly wowed by the PR of FFIII. Looking at shots of the original version, there’s just a ton of work they did to this remaster. I haven’t played any prior version of it before, but I bet it would even be cool for people who have to check this one out. It seems like a short enough game anyway.
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honestly ive come to the conclusion that live a live 2022 looks better than the original…
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dishonored looks like “assassin’s creed concept art: the game”. god i wish i could play half-life 2 on xbox series s
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Warrior Blade (PS2 - Taito Memories II Gekan)
Dewey probably is the best. Speed is king! After playing slower Sophia I thought maybe I didn’t like Warrior Blade but no, it’s fun again. : D
Bubble Symphony (PS2 - Taito Memories II Gekan)
The homages to other Taito games in the sprites and backgrounds are kind of interesting but the whole thing is maybe a little overdone; the boss battles were a bad idea. : P
The trombone sound in the music kind of gets me. = P
It’s okay. The flashing backgrounds in Computer Land finally gave me an excuse to stop. ‘p’
R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS3 - PS1 Classics)
Of the four “Final GP” races, three had pretty cool tracks, and two turned out to be pretty easy–including the final track, where even in my (maybe? in the first half of Gran Prix, I seemed to qualify for only the weakest upgrades) sub-optimal car, which could now not drift easily (braking while turning would no longer kick into a drift, only letting off gas and then hitting gas again would, which was super-awkward), all I had to do to win, it turned out, was hold down the pedal, shift up to top gear, and steer lazily around the course. Kind of a let-down for the final race!!
And while that unlocks “Garage” mode, where you can change car colors and apply 1 (?) decal, or something, and you also now have all eight tracks available in Time Attack mode, Grand Prix mode is exactly the same if you replay it, and I have no urge to replay with different cars.
So for me, a fun but kind of short game–I guess it may be best to think of it as a longish arcade game. : D Those first seven races are pretty fun!
It’s looking as though Crazy Taxi might be my actual Gran Turismo, though. = o
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if anyone’s curious, though I’m using a lot of shaders (which is obvious if you embiggen those screenshots), only one basic shader is needed to make every screenshot you take sb-appropriate
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Played a bunch of fan remakes of old racing/driving games. F-1 Spirit felt OK, it was overhead and did some neat stuff with screen zoom depending on speed and location. 3d Bump and Jump was a fun enough 20 minutes or so, decent arcade action. Paper Route was a 3d paperboy clone that was impossible to aim papers with. pure frustration
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playing rock band drums is a poor simulation of playing music but it definitely beats the snot out of any other “exercise game,” especially the one where you’re hitting virtual things with virtual sticks. I burned a thousand calories and gave myself a blister below my ring finger where the stick was bouncing, love it
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Oh it’s that short? Huh. Maybe I’ll give it a try. Always assume those old megaten games were also 50+ hour affairs.
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it’s only like 25 hours to finish both storylines (though the snow queen storyline is only for true dungeon murderheads)
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i’ve played the sfc version a bunch and know The Strats, it’s still pretty short though especially if you don’t go the neutral route which seems unlikely without a guide anyway. estoma is really effective in the first smt and completely turns off random battles for huge stretches.
that’s persona 1 right?
(if tulpa says this is for true dungeon murderheads… fuck…)
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oh yeah, I combined persona 1 and smt 1 in my head
snow queen storyline is pretty great, its just pure dungeon crawling
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I beat Blasphemous a few days ago, and it was quite good.
I had a thoroughly comfortable time. I was challenged where I was supposed to be and reaped an appropriate amount of enjoyment from overcoming the knee high hurdles that presented themselves.
Blasphemous didn’t really surprise me on a game play level in the slightest. It was enemies I’ve seen quite a few times before and the three classic varieties of boss: Big head with mischievous hands, weird monster that takes up half the screen, or you but very strong and very stupid.
Here’s a big head, weird monster combo:
The game is technically excellent, but in an attempt to not become the kind of person who looks at a game as a series of 1 to 10 scores corresponding to each of it’s elements, I’d like to say that a complete lack of novelty did nothing to take away from the fun of Blasphemous.
I’ve started to feel similarly about playing decent examples of a genre over a couple of days and reading a decent example of a genre in a few days. I already know so much about action platformers that I hardly ever feel challenged by the information presented, but the ordering and sequencing, what tropes and clichés they choose to use and subvert, can still make each one feel like I’m discovering something even though I’ve walked down this road quite a few times as is.
I could play 7 or 8 games like this a year and be fairly happy with each of them, even if I couldn’t play them all back to back together, and even if each one doesn’t need to be all that novel. It makes me wonder where the enjoyment lies. A lot of the games I call my favorites are focused on the hands, so to speak, whether that’s mastering a build in StarCraft or trying to learn a combo in a fighting game. A lot of that enjoyment is kinetic rather than aesthetic, even though most action platformers are pretty lenient on execution.
I think the enjoyment comes from the slow build up to requiring something execution heavy from you. My fun is playing this game like it’s a sequence that takes 10 hours to learn, no less, and not often that much more. Games like this feel perfect for forgetting I’m even there. There’s no competition here, except with yourself, so speed no longer feels like a necessity. It’s not like I’m giving up some utility by dying at a boss multiple times. I don’t lose a rank, or lose face, I just lose time. I guess losing time is all it ever is.
Recently I haven’t been playing many games that make me feel like I’m thinking in any meaningful way. I feel like I should try something actually novel and challenging. I “played” Dujanah a few weeks ago and I liked it a lot but I wonder if I was really engaging with it. Certainly it made me feel things, but I don’t tend to dwell on those sensations in games like I used to. I wonder if that’s something that I should try to remedy, or if that isn’t a relationship I need to try and maintain with games anymore.
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