I just beat the final boss in Xanadu Next. I found the game quite N-Gaging. Took me almost a month to get through, playing a little every few days. Not sure what my actual play time was, though, since some kind of sound thing sometimes stayed in memory when I exited the game and I saw the next morning that Steam counted time all night while I slept.
The game insults you after you reach the end, giving you “grades” based on the number of times you died, healed, saved, etc. I got mostly Ds.
I think Nier Automata might be a bit too overrated. Yes, the aesthetics are great and the plot revelations, and the existential reflections related to the machines it discloses, are quite engaging.
The soundtrack is also really good and beneficial to the atmosphere.
But the combat is messy, the exploration isn’t great, there is a lot of time spent coming back to the same places, many sub-quests are dull/uninteresting, the variety in weapons is not that interesting either and many of the shooter sections are a bit of a chore.
I remember Father.Torque having given a clever definition of the exploration/combat in Zelda Breath of the wild: lawnmower simulator. I think it applies to Nier Automata for 90% of the game (excluding the few 3-4 hardest bosses, that present severe difficulty spikes over everything else).
The characters are not very relatable either, they are overly dramatic and “adolescential” in an underdeveloped way.
I played it to see what the fuss was about and I cannot say that I am completely disappointed: it manages to be more than the sum of its parts, although most of its parts are not very good. This is thanks to the plot direction and the choice of medium, which feels appropriate to how the director wanted to tell the tale.
Still, the 35/40 hours it took me to experience it was a hefty price to p(l)ay.
I’m going to try Nier Replicant because I am too curious to see how the first game was, and because of its high reputation here.
I have already started it. Despite some random reddit posts describing the combat less interesting than in Automata (because it’s more standard and slow paced) I think it is also less messy and gives better control over movement. It’s less platinum and more souls-like.
The fantasy setting, on the other end, feels less captivating than the pure sci-fi setting of Automata.
Immediately in game the main character makes use of a dark magic book: I’m curious to see how it will be integrated to the overall sci-fi universe of Nier.
I’ll wait to form my own opinion.
I think a lot of the appeal of the Nier games (at least for me) is that while they are rough and janky messes in some ways, the enthusiasm of the creators shines through and overrides most of the shortcomings. I usually find games that struggle to do ambitious things with mechanics or narrative despite technical and budgetary limitations more interesting than finely polished AAA games that just give you what you expect. I think that’s why I enjoyed Sword and Fairy 6 so much despite it being rough to the point it makes you bleed just by touching it
you’re grounded! no more homework until your videogame grades improve!
Looking things from the perspective you mention (genuine enthusiasm despite limited budget), rather than from the expectations built for a game that’s become critical success, certainly helps being a bit less strict in judging the game’s shortcomings. Unfortunately, sometimes, that necessary premise is lost over time and only the “critical success” portion is left when reading about certain games.
You might remember I posted a grueling Puyo Puyo arcade 1CC a month ago. Well, just yesterday I decided to fire it up again to see if I “still got it”.
And…
I got another 1CC… pretty much immediately. *starts dabbing, twerking, planking*
finished Death Stranding
still working on my network, tho
i did some research on all the differences from the base game and i can confidently say you should absolutely play the Director’s Cut if you can - nearly every change is an improvement, there’s a ton of new content and missions, and the loss of branded monster energy is ultimately trivial compared to how much you gain
It’s last-gen only, right? No Director’s cut on PS4?
the director’s cut is PS5/PC-only
i would not deprive yourself of playing the game if you can’t play the director’s cut, just know that it has a ton of extra stuff that is largely extremely cool
based on my research, it doesn’t seem to really change the core experience in a major way, but it does just add a lot of extra toys to the sandbox, and all of the new content is seamlessly integrated into the game’s progression. you don’t, like, select the new missions from the title screen or anything, they are indistinguishable from the vanilla missions. you also start getting access to some of the new tools early on - they didn’t lock all the new stuff behind the postgame or whatnot
you can transfer a PS4 save to PS5, but you do need to make sure you don’t have any active missions currently. i know some people complained about this, but it’s not particularly onerous, i don’t think. you can literally just boot up the PS4 version and cancel your active missions. maybe not if you are in one of those story missions with specific setpieces that lock you in… could be annoying in that case, sure
one extremely important QoL change in the director’s cut (blurred for very mild spoiler):
you can take 1 floating carrier with you on a zip-line now. in vanilla you can only take what’s on your person
One big dsdc update for me as a road-building freak was more roads connecting sections of the map. But it’s probably a much saner use of one’s time to do zip lines considering the huge amount of resources needed
yes, i think it’s an important perspective that none of Yoko Taro’s games were held in much esteem outside of the Select Button-sphere prior to Automata
2023 the “year of no GameFAQs” continues. I’m trying to play through stuff without looking ANYTHING up (though I can ask friends for help). If I get stuck or bored I drop the game and move onto something else.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
I never had an N64 so it’s entire library is basically a huge blindspot for me. Been cooking pretty good through this one though and enjoying it, until I hit Jabu Jabu which almost gave me a stroke.
I figured out that I needed to get into his belly and needed a fish to do so, but the only options I could find to get a fish was either a) buy one from the store for 200 rupees (impossible because my rupee limit is 99) or b) go to a fishing pond. I had no idea where to get a bigger rupee bag so I figured the fishing pond was the way to go specifically because the shopkeep there says I can “keep one fish”. Turns out he’s lying! You can’t keep a fish at all! After banging my head against the wall for about an hour, I reached out to a friend who told me that actually I can scoop a fish in a jar if I can find one. Another 30 minutes of hunting around and I finally found one and scooped it up.
After getting into Jabu Jabu, I was greeted by a dungeon of almost identical hallways that looked like this, which let me tell you on a current gen TV gave me a headache almost immediately:
At one point, you find an NPC that you have to pick up and carry around. I was able to intuit that I needed her to push and hold a button down so I could access part of the dungeon. However, after accessing one of the rooms, there is this thing hanging from the ceiling that you need to hit with a boomerang to proceed. Once you hit it, it retracts into the ceiling, which I took to mean I could move on. BUT! You actually have to wait for it to come back down and hit it several times before it dies, which I couldn’t intuit, meaning I wandered around the dungeon looking for a change that hadn’t happened yet.
If you lose access to the NPC (by accidentally throwing her into an inaccessible spot), they respawn. However, the respawn point changes depending on how far into the dungeon you are, so it’s not always clear where you need to go to find the NPC.
4a) At one point, you lose access to the NPC after she runs away during an enemy encounter. After the enemy encounter, you unlock a new section of the dungeon that has one of those buttons you used the NPC to keep depressed in order to access a door. Figuring I needed to find the NPC again, I wandered around this absolute hellscape trying to find her, but not sure where she could have spawned. Turns out actually there is just a normal wooden box in the room you need to use. D’oh!
After getting through that nightmare I did get a cutscene where Ganondorf gives a great laugh that in turn made me laugh and which I have since listened to and mimicked about 100 times.
I got stuck in Ocarina of Time for several months way back when I played it. After not touching the game for a while, I finally looked up or asked someone about what to do and finished the game.
(It was the part in the water temple where you have to look at the ceiling behind you to figure out where to go next.)
Despite its problems I do like this sequence of the game because I like contextual puzzles that seem to exist within the makeup of the world instead of just being abstract magic stuff. I like feeding a small fish to a big fish to solve a puzzle rather than shooting a magic glowing cube with a sword beam to make another magic glowing cube appear some other place
But it is funny that Nintendo realized with Mario 64 that it’s good to give people alternative stars to pursue so they never get bottlenecked behind one single challenge, but they never thought to maybe allow the player to use more than one single item to solve a crucial overworld puzzle
I should say that even though my post above sounds like I’m griping, overall i’ve been pretty impressed with OoT, the look of this particular dungeon notwithstanding. I find the game really cute! I like all of Link and Navi’s callouts. The chunky 3d is charming. And like you said the solutions to the puzzles have been mostly solved with fun contextual cluse and experimentation. Using the music to navigate the forest was my favorite a-ha moment but all of the areas have been clever in some way.
A lot of times when I’m playing older games without a walkthrough handy and I get stuck it’s almost always because I’ve overthought things and/or am trying to brute force my way through it. In the above case, I’m not totally sure how/if I would have figured out that you can catch fish in jar unless there’s someone somewhere who tells you that I missed, but I did eventually stumble across the 200 rupee wallet (i had the 10 gold skulltulas already and actually knew where to turn them in, but I didn’t know what the reward was). In the other instances, the clues were all there and I just missed them because I thought I was being clever and the look of the dungeon was stressing me out.
I think years of puzzles being diamond-cut have atrophied part of my brain. It’s been fun to work those muscles again.
Did anyone else play the Demonschool demo? We were really impressed by how much of a real game it is. Beautiful graphics! Sweet levels! I even liked some of the writing!
Yeah, OoT often has puzzles as bad as a sierra adventure game and the people who grew up with it don’t notice because every part of the game is just muscle memory at this point
I dunno, I could never beat any Sierra games as a kid (except ones designed for kids) but I managed to finish OoT without any guides back in the day.
