after the first level they introduce a character that makes you hate playing as the guy who sucks even more. I’m tired of playing as the guy who sucks
the first boss uses the nine inch nails track but only a tiny piece of it?
the writing evokes sunset overdrive and borderlands
the kinesthetics are kingdom hearts’ melee combat, platforming, and “under the sea” rhythm game rolled into one
the weird thing is this doesn’t feel compromised in the way games usually are – the production showing through, rough edges, etc. it’s just bad creative decisions executed competently. I think it looks exactly like it wants to look, sounds how it wants to sound… it’s just dull and unengaging because it needs to excel on taste
the music is so nothing. it could at least be garish and stupid like sonic frontiers’ but no!
to be sure with different music, the sunset overdrive parkour/weapon system and letting me play as the girl with a gun I’d be into it, that’s why I’m playing it at all. I press buttons to music in every game – I should be sold
edit: gdi she’s a helper character in combat that you call in to shoot things for you
I feel like every time I stumble upon a Sekiro description here it puts me off trying the game for an additional year. Hearing that techniques are tied to a limited resource sounds awful, making the parry equivalent in Bloodborne an exhaustible resource in shortish supply (early on at least) is probably the worst gameplay decision From has made in the Souls era and hearing that they double downed on it here is very discouraging.
Next to Dark Souls III, I think Sekiro has the least amount of reasons to recommend it of the the Dark Souls derivatives released in the 2010s. People can say it has depth to its combat, or talk about how amazing certain moments of it are, and they might be right, but it seems to me that when the first play is over and all its novelty has fled there’s very little to compel one to do a second playthrough. It has some extremely interesting twists in its conventions, but I bet we’ll see those twists again in future games from From.
this isn’t wholly accurate, only the prosthetic skills rely on a limited resource. Parrying, being a core mechanic of Sekiro, does not cost any resources and is better implemented than it has been in any other From game.
tried out let us cling together on ppsspp and while reborn is obviously mostly a rebalabced port of this i really do think the aesthetic coheres in low res in a way that falls apart in reborn might go w/ ummm one vision or w/e idk if i think im terribly concerned with… what are the changes from luct to to: reborn exactly anyways
morrowind multiplayer is the best. veronica and i have to throw items on the ground for the other to sell in every town because its a given one of us has pissed off a shopkeep by trying to sweettalk them for conversation points. i cant sell shit in bolmora cuz i winked a little TOO hard at the pawnshop and veronica is banned from the second story shop in seyda neen for trying to compliment the guys outfit too hard
shes playing a dark elf and it just so happens when i type /s hello 69 in the chat thing my character goes DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY DUNMER
when you rest it doesnt make time go forward at all so like, you can kinda cheat and heal with no penalty but ALSO you have to wait for things to happen real time. we had to fuck around and punch mudcrabs for five minutes while waiting for the sun to go down to spy on a guy
everyones probably already talked about this stuff 1000 times but i havent really done anyhting in morrowind except jump 4895738534593475 times when it came out on the xbox okay!!! i like that the tutorial for swimming is the red coin star of jolly rodger bay
every time we leave the store veronicas banned from for getting her snail trails everywhere theres like a fable 2 crowd outside who ALL SPEAK AT ONCE every time i walk here. i tried to herd people around i dont even know if thats how it works, if i can bully them with my collision but we ended up just making a shitty conga line at the bridge cuz i guess its single occupancy or some shit
my acrobatics are 51 i love jumping. im gonna be so sad when i cant get any more jumping points
Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway (PS5) - finished up my two-hour trial. game is decent, just uninspired. physics feel just a bit off, feeling of speed isn’t quite there, progression is unnecessarily slow, music is meh, character quips aren’t funny and repeat way too often, and the AI is really annoying. rubber-banding is way too aggro. most of the crew members are boring, nearly none of them do anything interesting. some are brokenly good, and due to the progression, you’ll have to spend a long time unlocking them before you can unlock your potential. i said the game was derivative previously, and it definitely is, but it does have a few decent ideas. instead of getting coins to get faster like in mario kart, you collect “slime” to unleash your crew chief’s active ability (your other two crew members are passives). there are also “slime slides” where you have to play little hurdle-jumping minigames that can act as shortcuts off the beaten path. these little twists really aren’t enough to elevate the game, though
The reason I have kept away from Sekiro this long (beyond just not liking its aesthetic) is that I have been uniformly awful at parrying in every From game and generally consider the “parrying test” boss in the various games my least favorite part in each one. Glad that it isn’t as harsh as Bloodborne in that specific regard but limiting the non-parrying skills that I could theoretically otherwise lean on severely enough that people are writing “I tried to learn them but kept running out of stuff, they are more for a second playthrough” is still a massive red flag.
Oh I am right there with you on not being able to parry in other fromsoft games. Sekiro feels different, in part because the game doles out the lightest of punishments for a mistimed parry (you still block but you take a little more posture damage, instead of the typical fromsoft severity)
At this point I have accepted that my take on sekiro is way outside the norm, so don’t read this post as me trying to badger you into giving the game a shot
the big one is individual units have levels instead of each class having them, there’s a level cap that goes up periodically (but enemies can still be above it) and random battles are gone but you can train from any of the castles on the world map, levelling up is incredibly quick there - endgame i made a new unit to try out lich and went from 1-50 in one battle
some balance changes like archer nerf, all of the classes that kinda sucked previously are viable now, i had a generic terror knight all the way through to the final boss to put breached+frightened status on everything
they made it very breezy in a way which imo doesn’t compromise the difficulty or anything else, just a pity about the upscale job
Had a good time bouncing around the megadrive and NES library. Had the sound muted and listened to my own music.
Sonic Advance sounds like literal farts. There was an hour long youtube “essay” on the Sonic Advance games and it was just a review of each of them. Don’t know what I expected. Sonic Advance is like a Genesis Sonic game. I enjoyed the level design and want to finish it off (where I force myself to listen to the farts, despite how not enjoyable that would be.)
Maybe I’ll finally play through Clash at Demon Head or Magic of the Scheherazade! Or Ghost Lion! Or…there was some chinese history-based DQ-clone that had an inexplicable NES release. I don’t know shit about Chinese history.
Let It Die (PS4) - wow! one of the most interesting free-to-play games i’ve ever tried. so many cool ideas - i love that recap timeline where it shows you everything you did on a floor. some of the UI design is brilliant, though some other bits of it are shoddy-looking lol (the HP bar font is terrible!). god, i wish more videogames had half the aesthetic verve of this thing. a must-try even if you don’t end up liking it imo - it’s really a very interesting game
Fallout 76 (PS4) - embarrassingly bad. very little to say about this game. it’s terribly boring, everything is laggy, and there is zero potential for anything noteworthy to happen. highlight: another player and i got into a firefight, but we couldn’t hurt each other since i was a “pacifist” according to a tooltip and my attacks wouldn’t do damage. do not recommend lol
Left Alive (PS4) - i like this way more than i should. it is pretty aggressively not-fun to play, but it is also truly bizarre and singular and i’m fascinated by it
I’m assuming you’re on mister for the Advance games but just uh, load up an emulator and skip on over to Sonic Rush and conveniently bypass the elephant of “Cream’s mom is kinda hot” discourse
(ignore that she’s in Rush)
then marvel at how a game running on a handheld with two vertically-aligned screens can still surprise you with bottomless pits
might go w/ ummm one vision or w/e idk if i think im terribly concerned with… what are the changes from luct to to: reborn exactly anyways
