gulag 2.0 introduces a solidarity mechanic where you can benefit everyone if you team up against your oppressor
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Well shit you just said a sequence of words that lit up a lot of the right parts of my brain
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I’ve also been playing that Tactics Ogre Reborn thing, which I have no extensive past experience with, but it’s so nice to play a Square rpg where the entire plot isn’t basically “The fire kingdom is on the march! we better go talk to the ice kingdom and see if we can cool them off! Oh what!? the ice kingdom is also on the side of the fire kingdom?! We better go talk to the sand kingdom then!”
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Someone telling me about the remake made me pick up Knight of Lodis again. It’s a good game but a lot of the appeal I get out of it is the decorative presentation. I don’t know what this color gradient bar in the bottom right is but I’m glad it’s there when I click a unit
The game even has a screen of tiny colorful icons you can collect on each unit. It’s just as nice as the mask menu in Majora’s Mask
It’s like the equivalent of a collectable card game you never learn to play. I don’t know what these icons mean, I don’t know what they do for me, if I did look up their detials they’re likely not even that impactful, but I like seeing them all lined up
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me and b finished the mercifully short xenosaga episode 2. i’m trying to figure out if its a failure in interesting ways or not.
the battle system goes for sick puzzle combo action (break system has shades of ff13) but mostly just feels like work, building stock and boost and buffing and waiting for the turns to align to unleash a big combo, and hoping that an enemy doesnt just randomly decide at any time in your turn to boost and ruin your plan. when its at its absolute best, in a couple of the bosses, i can see what sort of satisfaction they were going for. but they dont get there. they also pulled out the mechs to build a second, simplified mech battle system. this ones just boring.
the story is kinda interesting, i guess, because as far as i can tell much if not all of it was excised frlm the planned end of episode 1. its playing a lot of catch up with stuff that appears to have been meant to conclude episode 1 so theres a general lack of development/ forward momentum. and then they cut a good 50% of the material & leave whats left to be sketched in by a new creative team who do ok but dont seem particularly interested in whatever ideas backgrounded eppy 1.
episode 1’s chapters basically all relate in some way to eugenics and the figure of the child vis a vis the life recycling act, species preservation act, realians, miltia in some way… episode 2 by contrast each section feels pretty siloed and without followup. which is sometimes pretty weird. things happen and are just never mentioned again.
if there is a theme its sibling relationships and wow does it botch all those relationships and have nothing to say there. and without the thematic backbone of centuries of eugenics to maybe hopefully contextualise it, the casual (shion) thru to abject (albedo) misogyny expressed by various characters is a lot harder to be patient with!!! that said its entirely possible i just had a little too much patience with episode 1 to begin with. hopes and dreams…
i also read the fan translated script for xenosaga pied piper, which was developed from content excised from the first saga and takahashi led draft of the script for 2 (according 2 soraya saga). it’s pretty ghost in the shell, a police procedural about a mysterious brainhacker targetting politicians. it effectively introduces the central conspiracies & players introduced proper in 2, is interested in the political context of the world, and is a fun little episode in its own right.
cautiously optimistic for ep 3 because on the one hand its the fan favourite, but on the other hand its the fan favourite
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I think the color gradient is like a character’s biorhythm ? Very cool mystery stat
I love the emblems too, especially the negative ones.
You attacked an enemy that dealt massive counter damage = Your reward is a Don Quixote emblem (looks like a tiny windmill, comes with a permanent -50 atk, can’t be removed ever)
The game resists the perfectionist mindset since a character with all emblems will be flawed (plus you miss out on the comedy from getting them naturally)
What if getting a platinum trophy……. made your character 2x slower permanently
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the rebalancing in reborn is nice? can’t just melt everything with archers anymore, berserker is ridiculously good and terror knights aren’t dogshit anymore
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Been playing Bayonetta 3. Has anyone been playing this? Have found I’m really struggling to enjoy it between the lack of motor accessibility options and the constant need to throw minigames or diversions at the player. I just want to enjoy playing a combat system.
There’s some pretty unforgivable design problems too like the unskippable(!) cutscene that plays when you activate a 5 piece platforming challenge.
Demon summoning is giving me horrible Astral Chain flashbacks. Bayonetta is kinda simplified DMC but Viola is like simplified Nero that takes forever to secure momentum with.
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afaict the only thing it’s supposed to be able to play that it doesn’t yet play is Rondo. waiting for Rondo
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I’m back into FF14 and have barely started the Stormblood campaign. I want to do the campaign as a DPS since I’ve mostly done the story as a Paladin so far but have that job at level 70 due to starting the character on server with extra XP before transferring over to the current server. This means i have been slowly leveling my lancer/dragoon up from level 15 to 45. I also have leveled all my DRK and WAR up to level 60 with daily roulette. I haven’t touched GBR yet. My WHM is also at level 60 but I haven’t leveled up my other healing classes or gotten Reaper or Sage yet. Safe to say I am hooked on the game again.
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i am playing tactical nexus again. goodbye to the real world.
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I am worried that I might dislike Baingai-O Spirits, and rather strongly at that? First off the tiny player and enemy sprites on the tiny DS screen feels like a sizable problem, my eyesight is pretty okay but this seems like it would benefit immensely from being on a more sizable screen. That said the game seems to trigger my ancient dilemma “if the game rewards playing it in the most boring fashion possible whose fault is it?”
The most recent example was I think stage 19 or so in the Treasure’s Best selection (MIP 2 or something like that) where you start the stage by triggering a chain of explosions that unleash sets of enemies over a few minutes until it opens up the last section where you likely have to kill the ones in there and then push a block onto a trigger, this last bit the only thing that needs to be done. The thing is after triggering the chain of explosions one can just dash to the bottom of the arena and wait three minutes for the explosion to open up said last section and no enemies bother you while you wait. Fighting is perhaps more fun but one would be unlikely to make it to that last section opening up at full health and by the standards of the game this is a longer stage, so the game kinda punishes you for engaging with it and rewards the boring “put the DS down for three minutes while I do something else” approach.
A few before this there was another stage that has you dash through a super long tunnel where it may be possible to do it all in one approach but it seems like it’d be rather hard, so it seems the best tactic is the dash through all the blocks in the tunnel that takes a good 30+ seconds of holding right+A with no enemies or anything else, blow up the thing at the end, dash back to the start, trigger the explosion chain and make a run at the intended goal. This one is actually tricky and has a hard fail state (if you are a step slow blocks will drop and permanently prevent you from blowing up one of the things you need to beat the stage) so starting every run by holding right and A for 30 or so seconds is a drag.
So yeah, IMO not suited for a handheld visually (structure-wise is fine) and it engages my worst impulses, seems like a miss for me.
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I am right there with you. I have never enjoyed bangaioh spirits nor understood why it was such an sb holy grail
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I may be misremembering, but aren’t there hundreds of levels you can pick from at any time? if you don’t like one, simply move on… or better yet, make your own in the generous level designer. and then transfer your level to a friend’s DS with an audio file. I always thought that was a great feature.
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I loved Bangai-O Spirits very much, and that was before I was on SB. I think it appeals to the parts of me that love:
- Tiny graphics
- Lots of things on screen
- Finding really stupid workarounds
- Smorgasbord style design, i.e. Here Are A Bunch Of Things, Take What You Like
- Score-chasing
I don’t have any strong feelings about other people not liking it, as it feels like a very specific thing to me, but I’m happy that a lot of people do seem to like it. It’s a weird game! It has that “more ambitious than could possibly be executed” feeling that I also get from Sonic Adventure.
But yeah, all of @username’s points are 100% accurate, I couldn’t agree more. I just happen to find those things charming and desirable vs. annoying or grating.
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i always wished you could restrict weapon sets on stages you created, since i always played using homing missiles and a sword, so i designed all my stages with that in mind. then i’d upload them and people would be like “i used the baseball bat and finished in 2 seconds”
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Yea, I think Tim’s review mentioned it but the DS seems to just barely be able to handle what’s happening on screen at times, so when you unleash a particularly gnarly charge attack, it feels like the DS is on the brink of exploding lol. A game testing the limit and using a hardware limitation to produce such an intense visceral thrill is cool in my opinion. I love Bangai-O Spirits!
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I had a lot of fun with the DS game but that was a loooong time ago.
The level options made it a treasure game I could hang with.
Anyone know if the original flavor on N64 and Dreamcast is as good?
before earth defence force, the original bangai-o was the pioneer of dramatic slowdown, after all. even on dreamcast, there are times where it’s got so many sprites onscreen that it becomes a slideshow
(note: if you’re going to play the dreamcast version, remember that the default control option sucks and you have to change it to ABXY)
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