I had a huge amount of fun with this game until I walked into the first boss and it was like “you’re underleveled, go grind.” Nope.
for anyone who’s played both new wolfenstein and metro 2033/redux, which did you prefer? I quite enjoyed the latter in spite of myself and most of the praise I’ve heard for the former sound familiar…
Hm! It’s been a while since I played 2033 and Neufenstein is fresh, but: Metro emphasizes stealth and resource collection relatively more, Wolf has a more traditional campaign structure and better writing & acting. But they both emphasize body presence, have fluid stealth-to-action flow, small amounts of character persistence, “back at base” walking sim segments, and slightly nontraditional/subversive stories. I probably never would have compared them if you hadn’t brought it up, thanks for that.
Nuwolf is more fun but I adore the Metro series so idk
I try not to check what the achievements are when I’m playing a game for the first time, but I took a quick peek and there’s one for dying at the same boss ten times in a row. It’s called “Consult An FAQ Already”. 
in fairness, isn’t the first dungeon that’s structured as such in wind waker the dragon roost place, and isn’t that also several hours in? clearly they were trying to diminish this as a pacing marker in those days, though that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
I know. I got it.
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for what it’s worth don’t be tempted to get last light now that you have a PS4. I did and it’s just way less interesting and the level design isn’t any fun.
2033 redux on the other hand is totally worth it purely for how much it improves the enemy animation (my biggest problem with the game other than the weird pacing in the last third was that the recoil on the nosalises never felt right and they fixed both of those things), but I’m hesitant to recommend the PS4 version because they actually removed a lot of the nice specular effects to hit 60fps and they look so much nicer on PC.
As someone who has earned all the cheevos for 2033 and Last Light, I can tell you that Last Light is embarrassing. Sacrifices a lot of interesting gameplay for cinematicism. There’s a segment where you can’t not take damage because the damage isn’t coming from enemies, but just the game forcing you to spam health syringes, and there’s a Big Deal climactic segment that lasts quite a while where you can’t actually die, and can just chill out for like ten minutes while bullets whiz around you and explosions go off.
I love 2033 so much, but man… 
re: A Link to the Past
I haven’t played this game in over ten years. Now, I’m not sure if I’ve just been spoiled by the sequel or if it’s the emulator (snes9x), but the audio sounds a bit lightweight. I’ve been playing some throwback games and Genesis roms on Steam with a pair of studio-quality headphones so I was expecting better. There’s no bass and I remember the sword hits sounding meatier. Also, Aderack used to say that this game feels too Fischer Price and while I refuted that when I read it, I get what he’s saying now. W/r/t walking speed, maybe going directly from Ys to LttP was a bad idea.
On the plus side, I forgot how gonzo some of the music is. The shop theme, gambling theme, town encounter theme, and Lost Woods all use some odd instruments. The placement of heart pieces and other secrets still feels enough like the first Zelda where anything could be anywhere; I erroneously expected/remembered it being closer to Ocarina (idiot-proof).
Then I started LISA which give me a bit of a SaGa feel…in a good way!
Turns out I wasn’t able to get to Blighttown from valley of drakes yet because that big ass door down there was closed. I looked it up and I needed to finish exploring undead burg, get a key from capra demon to reach the depths and access Blighttown from there. So I went and did all that after killing that hydra thing in the lake in darkroot basin.
Now I’m at the bonfire in the depths which was hidden down a hallway behind a door I had to open with the master key. I’m beginning to think the smartest decision I’ve made so far was picking the master key as my starting item.
You are not thinking of Blighttown re: big ass door. You could have gotten there without a key. But skipping the Depths and Blighttown is a chump move anyway, those levels are great.
Yeah I don’t want to skip anything really! I’m just kind of eager to ring that second bell you know? Also really curious to see if Blighttown destroys my computers performance or not.
Yeah, Last Light was for sure a spectacular case of not understanding why your previous game was great
LttP is a game that has not aged well with me. It seemed a lot more grandiose and fascinating when I was 13, but not so much now. And no, it really didn’t have serious bass on it. You can check a GDQ speedrun of the game if you want to confirm audio quality, it honestly doesn’t sound all that great.
toups’ abdn review on LTTP is still really good. it’s both not as bad and not as good as you remember. if you want to play an old zelda for kicks you should probably play LA, but LTTP still has consistently interesting level design for the most part.
I don’t think the game expects you to grind, it just wants the bosses to kick you in the teeth really hard.
That and if I recall correctly the first one, even by those standards, is rough.
Shoot the fireballs, forever, and don’t mess up once or die. No thanks. It’s not even really linked to the normal game’s (very cool) combat system. I loved Ys 1 and 2 but I just don’t have time for that nonsense.
It’s the only starting item that’s really worth anything, and it’s worth tons. Actually I wouldn’t recommend it for a first-timer because it makes the game too open. Part of the joy of DkS is being in conversation with its designers and following its contextual clues to go to the right places in the right order. The master key lets you skip a decent chunk of that, which is great for a second playthrough but sort of muddies that sense of discovery. Not that you should restart or anything - another part of the joy of DkS is coming to it your own way and making things work without taking a whole lot of advice from other people.
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I played through the Chronicles+ version of Ys I on steam a couple days ago, and I’m almost done with Ys II. It definitely felt like they want you to grind at times. There are points where you can’t do anything but plow an enemy into a wall for a straight minute to make a measly ten exp if you don’t have more expensive equipment, and bosses that will take zero damage if you aren’t past a number threshold.
That said, grinding took maybe ten minutes at most, the game is so fast. Also, I’m willing to entertain the idea that the sheer brevity of boss encounters (probably one of the game’s most interesting things to me) has me trained to think that if a fight takes more than a minute, I’m Doing It Wrong. Maybe my brain skewed some of those numbers in the heat of the moment?
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