Interested to hear your thoughts, because it feels to me like a very fun but unhappy marriage between Ninja Gaiden’s quick, decisive combat and Souls’ HUD-watching mania (with extra mania).
The multilayered systems for recovering stamina, switching stance, managing enemy stamina are neat in context but in memory feel like the epicycles added to balance pre-Copernican astronomy.
[on reflection]
I think I don’t feel warm to it as a design, in that it has completely given up elegance for working but complex decisions to solve momentary solutions. But as a toybox full of interesting frictions, I like it more than other Team Ninja games apart from the better Ninja Gaidens.
Apparently some have had success slowing it down a bit, through disabling Vsync or a set frame rate, but neither really made a noticeable change for me.
I had a silly fun time playing the Sea of Thieves beta. It’s a little like the train level from Lost Planet 2 but the characters are floaty like Skyrim so it’s rough around the edges. The quest system seems like you’re doing variations on a handful of templates, so it’s really just about how much fun you can have with it as a goofy chat room.
Logged into Diablo 3 to get the starcraft 20th anniversary stuff and was just going to dick around with a new character for season 13 and whoops, three days later i am almost at level 70.
Do not try to play htoL#NiQ on a PSTV. Trying to play that with the analog sticks substituting for touch input is an absolute misery. Maybe on an actual Vita portable (or in the Steam PC release) it’s more manageable, but otherwise every damn moment is an exercise in frustration.
I revisited that A Boy and His Blob remake the other night on PS4. I think I got it for free at some point. (I will soon find out which of my games were free, as my PS Plus is expiring soon. I hope there’s a discount on it by the time there’s another FromSoftware game that I want to play.)
Because the original is one of my very favorite games, I was probably a little overly-critical of the remake. I still would have liked it to be a single world without hints everywhere, but it’s a charming game.
Okay, I also think Zettai Hero Project is merely okay and I’m not sticking around for dozens of hours of that. NIS is on two strikes! I don’t know out of how many, and if there are any consequences anyway!
By far my favorite of their games. While Disgaea has great mechanics, I found the characters something to be endured rather than entertained by. I was just spoiled by Final Fantasy Tactics, I guess.
I actually liked my two hours with Hero Project and have it in the thousand game deep maybe one day backlog.
My thought was man you are either immediately on board with NIS or why even bother? Like Prinny 2 (which is maybe better than 1 but I ain’t finding out because Prinny 1 is awful) is called Operation Panties d00d. Like that’s as big a stamp as anything on a product. I appreciate NIS developed things are as much as what they are, I can also go woah yeah not for me.
I like ZHP, I think it’s one of NIS’s better games – and certainly one of their better attempts at reconciling the heroism you always do in their comedic games with the, well, being a hero part – but it’s also a game that is not going to change much from the first hour or two. If you aren’t digging it, you don’t need to keep playing.
The Interesting NIS Game List, An Opinionated Selection:
Zettai Hero Project (goofy light Shirenlike, but will probably bore people who actually play many roguelikes)
Soul Nomad (neat mechanics, a more serious story than usual for NIS executed pretty well, hilariously cruel bonus “evil route” which gives you exactly what you should expect)
The Witch’s Coven and the Labyrinth of Refrain (dungeon crawler with some interesting takes on how party compositon/resource blowing works; less absolutely misanthropic than Hundred Knight, but still more in that direction and with some similarly tasteless humor – I still need to finish this)
Any Single Disgaea (they are all basically the same thing)
Everyone says Phantom Brave is cool but I haven’t played it
Rhapsody is probably unbearable but boy, they sure dubbed that
I’ve been trying to get first place on, I believe, 2nd Heat, 1st Stage of Ridge Racer R4 using the Japanese Team (with the Italian manufacturer) for a few days now, but I cannot catch that motherfucker in first place. I’m always just trailing him. If I could just get him at a corner I could drift around him. Fuck! Why isn’t the map on the top right? The view toggle button is a real pain in my ass on the PSP.
They say that if you get on Titanfall 2 late at night and set your matchmaking preferences right you can get a game where the final score is within 5%.
I was watching someone play Fortnite and stewing because the player characters control like WoW toons and had to run some laps on the walls.
