I have been desperately trying to return an overdue DVD in Persona 5 for two weeks now. On the days I can escape my predestined course the game refuses to let me walk to the DVD store without triggering a day-ending event.
oh god I’m going to owe fucking thousands of dollars
Guys, thanks for the reminder about why i shouldn’t go back to P5. The dungeoneering is ace but fucksake everything else is so gross. Also, why can i not get crepes? You can’t give me a crepe stand and then just have the cat tell me I don’t like crepes.
The Zubmariner DLC has pulled me back into Sunless Sea with a vengeance. Such good writing. Sad to hear Skies doesn’t have quite as much quality, writing-wise?
Has anyone made a stab at Echo yet?
I think my concerns were more caused by the minimal content present in the alpha. It’s still conceptually more of a stretch than Sunless Sea, which is evocative and mysterious yet still easy to imagine, but with more ports and with the additional regions, I think Sunless Skies should be pretty terrific.
I can’t tell if it was a quirk of translation or intentional commentary, but switching from the first-person voice (“I should go to bed”) for system messages to the cat explaining to you why you can/can’t do something once he’s introduced sure has an impact.
It made me hate Morgana so much. Like seriously I have plenty of time to do some pull-ups!
I really enjoyed playing 35% of the Witness. Once I figured out The Twist, it made me go eeeehhhhhhh no thanks, and the pretty things I had seen and clever puzzles I had solved up til that point satisfied me.
Ultimately I’ve decided puzzles don’t mean much to me in the abstract. I’m not a DROD guy. I’d much rather play Talos Principle than The Witness, even though The Witness is arguably prettier, because Talos Principle has a story to figure out; and I’d rather play The Witness than Picross or something because hey, at least it’s pretty.
but but you’re not required to do any of “The Twist” puzzles! They’re all optional!
Or is the twist that there’s no story to figure out?
So is the entire game!
(this has been a Hot Take™)
I don’t know man Gamers like to tell you the whole game is always manadatory.
And oh god what about my gamer score???
Do gamers still care about gamer score/trophers/chhevs?
If you play until the nominal ending, there’s explicitly no story to figure out, the mysteries are to remain obscure and occluded because you are as yet unworthy/unenlightened. But the postgame content is more explicit about the nature of the world, albeit for sure still in a very sketchy and oblique way by conventional standards. It seemed to me two equally plausible explanations from the world are held in parallel: 1. Some sort of Science-Zen cabal has designed a simulation designed to hold a person indefinitely until they achieve true enlightenment. The enlightenment is to be at once spiritual, by awareness and awe for the recurrence and occludedness of cosmic mysteries, and rational, by teaching universal, scalable, logical laws which might either be the same ones underlying the real universe itself, or a productive metaphor for them. They hope that this project, still at the experimental stage, will create an enlightened class that will lead humanity into a utopian future. (I’m mostly getting this interpretation from implications of recordings found in the deep cave system.) 2. This is a mere videogame, it provides a simulacrum of the experience of spiritual enlightenment and of learning the laws of science but in reality does neither and is like all videogames a complete waste of time in a wider perspective. Its value stops at its edges, and by extension the principle of universal recurrence it teaches is false, just a seductive illusion no different from cheap TV cult despite its sciency trappings, and equally unlikely to bring on a utopia. (Mostly get this from the second ending.) So the story, such as it is, seems to be a reflection of Blow’s alternating conviction for the true greatness of his creation and skepticism that he’s actually achieved anything at all.
Yeah the overly deliberate wording at all times is interesting.
Would you recommend it for any stretch of time?
Sure, but once I figured out that in order to experience what Broco put in his spoiler text I’d need to play “spot the dick” (Tulpa’s phrase) for a few hours I decided I’d rather just read Broco’s spoiler text and get the idea. This isn’t a criticism of the Witness, which I think is an impressive achievement. I have no regrets paying money for it and playing exactly as much as I did play. It was a worthwhile use of my time. The fact that I dropped it when I did is a statement about me, and what I find valuable.
Persona 5 is a very competent game. If you are not tired of the Persona 3 Series yet, and want another one that’s just like that, it’s fine. The dungeons are bad, as they have always been, but now they’re a fixed kind of bad with poorly-designed puzzles and an awful stealth mechanic. S-Links are more important than ever, at least if you want to maximize lots of them to get strong Personas, since several of them unlock abilities that literally save you time blocks so you can spend more time on other S-Links. In exchange, now none of them (IIRC) are possible to “break,” just advance more slowly, and at least one of them is really icky.
Basically I got to around the third or fourth dungeon, I forget which exactly, when I realized that I have played this game before, twice, and I’m done. The presentation is absolutely gorgeous but it turns out that two of these in ~10 years was plenty, especially since the writing is still Persona 3/4 in all the bad ways. It’s apparently not Catherine bad, from what I’ve heard of how that game’s “true” ending went, but yeah. Big issue is just that I know very obviously where the “seams” are in a lot of the Just For Flavor mechanics, and flavor alone isn’t cutting it. Stuff like tripping the alarms in the museum stage just raising your alert level a completely trivial amount, and not like forcing encounters or anything interesting.
These are the same games that abstain from taking any critical stance on homophobes/sexual harassers being in your midst – and: (a) make your avatar complicit by never letting you meaningfully speak/act against that communal dynamic; (b) suggest this stuff is really entertaining by its cross-title reappearances – so yeah, I doubt its criticism elsewhere would be what you’re looking for. Also I don’t think even the soundtrack escapes being animu gabag-o. Persona’s last three soundtracks are some of the few times I’ve felt that the otherwise inapplicable and snobbish criticism of videogame music being embarrassing facsimiles of established genres rang true.
Took another stab at Bloodborne earlier this evening.
I couldn’t make it past the character creation screen.
Oh i meant devil summoner 2. I am basically in the same place as you in P5.
It’s cool, I can’t follow threads.
I was curious where some of the plot threads would go in Raidou 2 but honestly getting through most of the repetitive dialog and not great game mechanics drove me off maybe 6-7 hours in. I appreciate that someone was still doing really neat-looking pre-rendered backgrounds in the PS2 era.
I just picked up Super Hydorah on Steam in tribute to the many hours I spent on the original free version in 2010. I’ve always been fond of shmups but never gotten into them in any hardcore way. Hydorah strokes my brain in this perfect way no other shmup has. And it looks so good. I’ve noticed what I think is one new level so far, but little else is new. I’m sure I’ll see more new stuff as I go, but it’s really icing on what already was a pretty perfect little cake.