Played through Earthbound for the first time this week. What a charming game. Lots of memorable settings and adorable characters.
I didn’t realize “homesickness” was a thing until like 3/4ths of the way through the game because I had already been calling mom so much.
My other fun anecdote: had a near-party wipe where only Paula was left. She was crying so she couldn’t hit anything, and the enemies were calling reinforcements faster than I could kill them. I looked over my options and noticed the “pray” action. I thought, why not, pressed it, and white light caused all the enemies to start crying too. Since we were in a sort of a stalemate I just kept mashing pray, and finally my whole party revived (and all the enemies as well) which I dispatched with some liberal use of PK Rockin’. I fully expected “pray” to do nothing, but it completely saved me. Little did I know!
There’s definitely some JRPG slog at first (you spend a little too much time just pressing attack and healing) but otherwise I can’t think of many bad things to say about it!
Just gotten around to this though I haven’t finished, and while I get what you’re saying in regards to both the length and the boss issues I think they both still work pretty good in relation to each other. Bosses aren’t quite the gatekeepers they are in most metrovanias, so if you run into one that you find a real pain you can just explore other places as you can cover a fairly large portion of the map without special abilities, cat form being the major “key” I’ve noticed, but you get a round 1 against Lubella so you already have the gist of how to fight her anyway to get it.
The small map in turn keeps this ability to wander about from being too overwhelming, both in where to go and the fact that unlike most other games of it’s ilk RuTM doesn’t have XP or levels or a steady stream of new weapons that keeps moving your damage up, just a few upgrades here and there, so you don’t get super strong enemies that effectively bar you from an area and things keep more balanced.
I’m also rather impressed at how damn moody the game can be despite the more cute elements in so much of the visual design.
Playing SMT4 for the first time:
Not too far in, im doing the first (mandatory) sequence of challenge quests. Keep hitting my head against Cerberus and dying – i feel like im even more fragile than usual in this one, though its balanced by save anywhere + no game over when the PC dies + Charon’s Dragon Quest-style game over deal (though i usually just savescum because lol why not). Probably just going to get bufu on everyone and spammajam him fresh to death. O Press Turn, how i missed you so!
This feels like a really smart mashup (perhaps you could call it a… fusion??! /waggles eyebrows) of the best parts of Nocturne & Strange Journey. Probably the best entry point for a casual fan of the series – it feels like they were designing around the handheld, and perhaps trying to reel Persona 3/4 fans into a mainline SMT. The many quality of life improvements to fusion and negotiation are giving me continual fan-spasms.
Don’t mind the more Persona-esque character designs as much as i thought i would. i like that the samurai are a bunch of handsome boys. (and a handsome girl.) i really like that the bartender is Snake Plissken.
This is the first handheld game ive ever played with voice acting. It doesnt seem half bad, though i shut it off almost immediately because im an rpg speed-reading champ.
Since it’s been proper released and updated for a bit now, thought I’d try Darkest Dungeon again
Still can’t really work out how to start effectively, even with the expectation of disposable mercs (who don’t really seem disposable in any way) and that the key thing is to have money money money. Still feels like a very well decorated spreadsheeting ballache
if it’s any consolation I beat my friend who’s on the dev team at 1830 last night
but I agree, it’s like an overly well-considered approach to a genre that doesn’t really lend itself that well to exactitude, like a lot of post-new-XCom turn based stuff.
having been playing it lately myself and made it into the endgamey stuff, i have decided that the genre of darkest dungeon is ‘heroic pyramid scheme management simulator.’ my heroes need other heroes to support them so that they can do their heroism, also those other heroes also need heroes to support them. basically, yeah, just grind stuff for money and town upgrade items until you can meet the stat checks.
i appreciate that areas are diversified and generally require different party combinations, but largely you are more playing the dice each run than having any particular tactical game; there does not appear to be a way to outsmart anything, just meet the requirements to not get horribly destroyed.
still will probably keep going but i ran out of momentum to keep going hard.
according to steam achievements where i am i around 9% of players. clear rate is 1.3%. i am not surprised.
i’ve been continuing to go through the klei bundle i picked up on sale, here’s some impressions
mark of the ninja - i actually unashamedly really like this game. it knows what it is and what it’s trying to do and is super confident about it. feels somewhere closer to a puzzle platformer than a stealth game and doesn’t try to hide information to the point where it’s all trial and error. fun to move around in, consistently good level design. the fake asian accents are a bit much though. the special edition had developer commentary bits and they were genuinely really interesting to read and mirrored a lot of my own experiences.
don’t starve - gathering-and-crafting simulator. make more progress each time but still not really sure what any particular goals are still. trying to resist looking up spoilers has led to a learn-by-dying game, where i’m not entirely sure how to deal with situations until probably a couple hours after they have killed or crippled me. dig the art style. kind of not really my thing. bundle also came with don’t starve together so i can totally go mine for fish with anyone else.
invisible inc - this… this may be the xcom successor i was looking for that isn’t the new xcom which i hate. high-stress turn based strategy game on a flat isometric map with a stealth focus. no rng rolls, completely predictable everything. randomly generated maps that encourage efficiency to prevent situations from getting out of hand. limited resources, heavy focus on choosing missions for their potential resource gain, overall. campaign sans-expansion is kind of short but the higher difficulty levels ramp up so quickly it makes it clear that you need to play consistently well over that short period. really liking this one.
I actually knew very little about it going into it but was a little worried because I wasn’t a huge Shank fan. Pleasantly surprised! Wouldn’t have grabbed it outside of the bundle personally.
Linux port still could use an update to not capture the mouse cursor for all eternity though.
honestly my experience of playing invis inc for the first time was basically “I can’t believe they definitively solved this design problem… and this one… and this one too!”
Klei ending up being one of the stronger indie-level development houses seems almost impossible given that they made their name with Shank, yet here we are. I guess everyone has to start somewhere.
The eighth world in Spacechem is a cruel thing with my last passed contraption being one of the worst things I’ve built in my life (check my Steam profile for pics~). I’m currently paused half way through a two-plant one as getting the first part to work the way I wanted was a hassle and I’m terrified to see if the second one might run slow enough to break it and make me start over.
You… are not the first person to say something along those lines to me.
But! In rare good news from the game the way I set up that first pseudoethyne reactor put me in solid enough position that I ended up crafting one of the more elegant reactors I’ve managed to put together in the second. Average symbol use and less than typical cycles is more or less a massive victory for me in these later levels.
So after three games and even a dang Circle Pad Pro XL purchase I finally got into Monster Hunter when I picked up a New 3DS over Thanksgiving and we could play together. She fell for it hard and has been pushing me every day and it’s gotten me over the barren hump of fetch quests at the beginning; I had played enough to suck the juicy marrow of designs but the systems don’t make me need it. Now I have reason to return and enjoy the content atop the systems!
There aren’t any goals. The title is literally the only goal. Game sucks worse than Shank, IMO. Playing it with other people just highlights who read the wiki and who didn’t.
