I love that part of FF9!
I remember feeling powerful ambivalence toward the events of IX as they played out. Final Fantasy games have long been prone to interspersing revelations about their worldsâ unusual cosmology into the progression of the narrative; when this is handled poorly, itâs one of my main complaints about the series. (XIII and X being some of the biggest offenders in this regard.) IX felt very borderline: stuff like the mortality of the black mages and progression of souls was fine enough to complement the antagonistsâ schemes, but the world in which these schemes played out too often came across as the invention of an unprepared DM who had a couple specific scenes he wanted to bring about and wasnât too particular how implausible his setting needed to be to make those scenes happen.
2 Likes
I remembered that I bought Mario Odyssey when it came and played until the Wooded Kingdom and then stopped after that because I realized the game that I saw was perfect and I shouldnât sully that surf music with the rest of the game
now that Iâve beaten it, I was probably wrong and I should have kept playing
as I work my way towards enough moons to unlock the True Mario Odyssey, Iâm kind of confused by what Iâve heard w/r/t getting enough moons to do so is tedious; I beat the game with 350+ moons in the bank and the post-game is still just giving the things away and Iâm probably another 15-20 minutes of fooling around before getting to Real Darkside. did I screw something up by actually wanting to pick levels clean before moving on or am I brain broke or what
speaking of being brain broken, I also messed around with the competitive free-for-all 8-player Overwatch playlist and I had fun with this dumb, broken, deeply unbalanced mode and it felt good to be running up against pro players by the end of my placement matches, which only means my ability to steal kills is as good as their raw mechanical skill
2 Likes
eh, yes, probably, you learn to embrace the chaos/get a feel for the flow (getting amazon parries feels good), FUCK YES YOU NEED THAT LETTER GRADE ON SCREEN HOW ELSE WOULD KNOW HOW GOOD IT IS
Thank you for this, it explains it very well.
1 Like
I am called out
5 Likes
Joseph Anderson recorded a 2+ hour video to complain that moons are a broken pacing element because they are awarded far too inconsistently. Or at least, thatâs what I took away from his arguments; he spent a lot of time picking the game apart, but it seemed like his main issues were that the difficulty is too low for way too much of the game, and the removal of the 1-Up as a game element meant that moons were being used interchangeably as stage objectives and minor bonuses, but since the game treats nearly every moon with the same pomp and ceremony, it didnât respect your time. It was celebrating and animating something that should have only merited a sound effect and maybe a sparkle animation, not actually arresting the playerâs progress and to fill the screen with a card while Mario flips his hat or whatever. Basically saying that the game is fine, but its priorities make it inferior in his estimation to something like Mario Galaxy 2.
except the game only goes out of its way to do a full âholy shit you got a moonâ nonsense with maybe the 20 or so main/story objectives and 99% of the moons are âhey, you got a moon, hereâs its name, get back to workâ
also, letâs be honest: in a modern Mario game, lives are meaningless. there is a time and a place for those kind of mechanics, born in the arcade, and a game implicitly about puzzle solving and exploration and explicitly about movement stemming from those elements is not one of them and they were a albatross in the last few 3D Marios, especially when they are given out like candy anyway (both of the times I played through 3D World, I had 100+ lives by the time the main game was beaten and the only time they were an issue was on fucking Championâs Road, like god intended). the idea that your coin reserve is persistent and tied to your ability to not die is a positive change, though I can agree that the penalty is too small and the coins too plentiful.
also also, Iâm totally over the idea that the story portion of Mario has to be hard and am okay that some of the more esoteric objectives and getting to and completing the post-game is most of the difficulty now
4 Likes
The pacing of the moons is one of the most impressive things about Odyssey; like Breath of the Wild, theyâve managed to create meaningful goals in a 5-minute time window (important for a mobile game), without overly damaging the feeling when sitting down to play the game on a TV. And on their first shot!
1 Like
Yeah, to be clear, Iâm not sure how much I agree with this argument. I am curious how you will feel about the endgame once youâve played it; he felt that there werenât enough ârealâ challenges, I think, and possibly also that those challenges were interspersed arbitrarily with more rote activities, making it impossible to specifically seek those out without also slogging through all the unchallenging objectives. I donât really feel like itâs something I can complain about because thereâs at least one level I havenât finished, but I think I understand the overall shape of the game, at this point.
Re: @BustedAstromechâs point, yes, the pacing argument is ridiculous. I only bring it up because he memorably recorded a video which was every single âYou Got A Moon!â segment pasted end-to-end in service of his point about how much of Odyssey wastes your time. I agree that itâs egregious in e.g. Toadetteâs achievement moon sequence, but the argument as a whole feels like whining about how youâll probably spend 25+ years of your life asleep so clearly youâre really a sloth
it feels like a natural progression from a lot of the stuff theyâve already done; mainline 3D Marios know how to do big, meaningful objectives, whereas DK 94 understands that you need to be able to make progress quickly while also rewarding that completionist mindset and mastering a moveset that is far too varied for the most basic goals put in the game
my issue with his critique simply is Iâm an asshole who doesnât conflate difficulty or challenge with fun. which isnât to say difficulty and challenge arenât or canât be fun, but that the act of doing something in of itself can be joyful (I would likely describe most recent Mario games as âexuberantâ).
now, a game can very well be undone when there is so little challenge as to make the act of playing mindless, but just because something is easy (or not hard, which isnât the same as ease) doesnât mean it canât be thoughtful.
2 Likes
That and playing with another person in the same room enhances everything. You can bap each other in the town, doing silly things like slamming them across the length of the screen.
You can do the same thing with the random townspeople but they get huffy about it after a while and have you thrown in jail briefly (for a gold penalty).
Yeah, this is the issue. Where do you personally draw the line at thoughtful content? Does it matter that youâre doing materially the same challenge in several contexts? How much does the circumstance need to change for that challenge to not feel like a repetition of the earlier version?
I play a chunk of multiplayer games. I accept that I will be running around, doing the same thing in the same 10 or so maps until I want to bash my head in and do something else
itâs usually not even that show-y, itâs usually just a total numbness and a âfuck it, Iâm outâ
I would argue that even though youâre doing more or less the same thing a lot, the combination of the environments and the captures and the mechanical interactions thereof make things fresh and do quite a bit to mask that youâre still jumping/climbing/going fast to get a moon
like, I fucking love that poke bird in the Bowser Kingdom and how you can scale walls with it, but itâs like, wall jumping but with one wall face
So Iâm playing my annual Real Game and I have chosen Witcher 3 and boy, why the fuck does Bethesda even bother any more
9 Likes
They donât, they just port Skyrim to it.
4 Likes
does he spend any time recognizing the irony of that
4 Likes
.
2 Likes