Ahem ahem ahem, PercEval. He was the one I hadn’t played as yet. It sucked. I think Knights of the Round isn’t my thing.
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Out of all the problems with Deathverse:Let It Die calling the in-game game Death Jamboree and not Deathverse and saying Death Jamboree 9000 times so you don’t even get the name of the game right is at the top.
Also it is bad.
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I replayed superstar a few months back fully expecting to come away thinking once again that it’s kinda overrated but
Yeah it’s kinda incredible? It also feels like a roadmap for all of the design decisions they have made in every Kirby game after it.
Impressed by how much it feels like iterations on different ideas rather than a bunch of half finished games. Also every one having its own characterful GUI is actually phenomenal
Also the sprites in that final bit of Milky Way Wishes are so good
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It’s interesting how this is such a good decision in Kirby and such a gloriously bad decision in Resident Evil 6. But what the interface asks of the player is very different, and at least HAL had the good sense not to invent new geometries to wrap buttons around.
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Played several hours of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (FFTA) this weekend - spending most of the time frowning at missed shots, characters getting red and yellow cards, and scratching my head at the job system. It takes forever to level up any character and I’m currently stuck at a mission where your party is very outnumbered by level 10 units, and I will possibly be stuck here for many more days.
I’m not sure what gear is compatible with what job or character. Sometimes in the shop I’ll see what moves it unlocks. I gave an earth bell to my nue-moe beastmaster and it unlocked a “dragon” summon, except the ability doesn’t do anything no matter which square I select. Worse, you don’t know what an ability actually does until you’re in battle and select an unit with it.
I have a feeling I will track down a strategy guide and map out every last ability, item, and job. Then set out on an epic quest to gain several levels for a few people. I think if I can get past this dead zone, I’ll start to really become a TTRPG Freak.
I think I’ve had this kart and this save file for over a decade? I don’t remember if I bought this cartridge new or not. Perhaps??? That would make this nearly a 20 year old save file that I’m now 15 hours into.
update: guide acquired
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Yeah the FFT series is pretty notorious for making a lot of systems really obtuse and unclear. Once I found out how the hell the zodiac system worked in the original the game was way easier. Couldn’t they have explained that right at the beginning?!
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yeah it seems very straightforward now. Gain abilities by getting an item and a character with a certain job, then master several of those to change jobs to something else. Something like this tells me which items pair well with what character and job they have and also what they do. Not sure why this isn’t in the game, but my job is easier
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Interesting because FFTA was my first and one of my only SRPGs. I made an entire party of only Bangaa and managed to get through to the endgame being stubborn and refusing to learn anything.
Wow memories of playing it at a friends house on christmas just hit my brain like a truck. The Holidays!
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dale mentioned getting through the game without doing any strategy, maybe im thinking too hard
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I needed something mindless to play for a while so I got Dusk Diver, which was around 10 bucks on Switch recently. It’s basically a kind of musou-like set in Taipei’s Ximending district and it’s interdimensional shadow ‘Youshanding’. With the setting it also seems to be trying to go for a sort of Yakuza type of thing, although due to the budget it’s a bit limited in that respect.
It’s pretty solidly a 6/10 type of game. You can tell it’s straining at both the technical limitations of the Switch and constraints of budget / manpower etc, but it still managed to keep my interest for the 15 or so hours it took to complete. The story is nothing special but the characters were entertaining enough and I liked the idea of a bunch of people working in a Taipei convenience store who travel between dimensions to fight monsters in their spare time.
The main problem with the game is probably the lack of variety. It feels more like a proof of concept sometimes rather than a complete game. There’s like 5 different types of enemy and they are all damage sponges and there’s always like 6 waves of them before you can move on. The entire game is basically just the two maps as well, with Youshanding just recycled for every chapter with different barriers set up to change things around a bit.
It’s also kinda lacking it’s own personality, it sort of feels like it’s cribbing it’s whole sense of style from Persona and other anime. Also really weird that Japanese is the default audio language, it’s like Mad Max being dubbed into American.
I think they also don’t really do justice to the real life location either. It’s been years since I’ve been there but I remember Ximending being a lot flashier IRL. Still, it’s kinda cool to just wander around and do side quests etc.
Apparently the second game fixes most of the issues this one has so I may pick that one up at some point. I kinda hope if they do a 3rd one they get enough budget to just straight up rip off Yakuza. Just give this game the same combat, a tonne of minigames and Taiwan atmosphere and you got yourself a GOTY right there pal
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Still chipping away at Metro Exodus old-person style, a few hours a week. It’s one of those things where it’s like, sure, this game is not Stalker but, let’s be honest with ourselves, ‘Stalker’ is more of a shared dream than anything. Unmodded Stalker isn’t Stalker, but I’m not convinced you can pile enough mods on it to make it Stalker either.
I just want to creep around Eastern European ruins and bully bandits. Every time I’m on the main menu screen and it reminds me that there’s DLC where you go to America, I’m reminded of the lady who visited us in my high school Russian class during her skip year. She told her friends she was going to travel, and they all got excited and asked where she was going. Her imitation of their reply, ‘America? awwwwwwwwww’ plays in my head every time.
Getting a little fed up with the non-wife motherfuckers in my little train crew. I came back from a mission and MULTIPLE characters gave me some variation of ‘I missed you so much… not as much as your wife, though!’ BITCH DO YOU THINK FOR ONE SECOND THAT I BELIEVED YOU MISSED ME MORE THAN MY WIFE??? HAVE YOU HELD MY HAND OR GOT SHOULDER TOUCHES OR HELPED ME CLIMB OVER RUBBLE? NO? SHUT THE FUCK UP
I forgot how funny it is that Metro has a silent protagonist but he does voice overs on loadings screens. Maybe he’s just really shy
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during the loading screens, he should say all the witty comebacks he only thought of hours after each conversation was over
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Everyone and The Internet is going to lose their mind at Like A Dragon Isshin Remake since the original features a naked bathhouse brawl between Ryuji Goda (character name here) and Kazuma Kiryu (historical name here).
Surprised the game has already had 3 overworld locations. All pretty limited by Yakuza standards. It is supposedly shorter than normal but even focusing on just the story it took me 2 hours to beat chapter 2 and I’d say an hour of that was cutscenes.
So many proper nouns and period terminalogy. Maybe I should read a children’s book on Japanese history to learn myself about this period.
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Reading an english book or internet page would be cheating myself of learning history in the country I live in and theoritically know.
But like…all the proper nouns get filed in my brain as “New Words” so I throw them out immediately.
Been trying to remember the bassist of DCT’s first name for a month.
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Try this game, it will give a whole picture about what happened just costs less 2 hours, better than any books. It’s easy to get in Japan.
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Yeah I allowed my Japanese to rust for a decade in large part because my experience of the language was increasingly filled with that uneasy Sisyphean feeling (also because I decided to live in the US so, like a videogame, the language had to feel fun to feel worth continuing at all).
I found out last year that daily Anki routine is one solution to this (also the old news that Anki is a method that exists at all…). Now, if I decide to learn a word then I put it at the front of my “New” queue and then it doesn’t matter how much my brain is determined to forget it, a week later it will definitely feel like a normally memorable word for me.
So Anki sounded tedious in theory but it’s proved to one of the key things that has made Japanese fun for me again, because it gives me that sense of forward progress instead of feeling my brain is a sieve.
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For years I’ve heard Anki is easy to use and it has always looked like actual programming to me.
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Yeah it’s definitely in the realm of software like Obsidian where it’s technically not for programmers, but a majority of its users seem to be programmers (including me…)
There’s a lot of competing Spaced Repetition System apps that came out since Anki invented the category in 2006, all supposed to be easier to use. But they’re mostly paid services that also have less features, plugins and premade decks than Anki so the original still has a lot of inertia keeping it the most popular.
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