One underlying missing piece that makes it easy to fall for a lie in FFIV is there’s no scan ability to tell you how much health bosses have. So it’s hard to answer “should I revive my dead character or is the boss low enough I should just focus on offense with my remaining guys?”.
Assuming they might have a gigantic health pool left, the safe choice seems to be to focus on healing as much as possible to try to maintain a indefinite steady state of damage. But in FFIV hardtype it turns out you just lose by running out of MP against certain bosses that way
I was in the middle of the zombie mission in Blops 6 but the update today fucked my save and it restarted me at the beginning and now I’m debating on whether I want to replay it or just delete the game and never think about it again.
either flare or bahamut is legit fast and single handedly usable, but I forget which
Kain is less useful in the late game than Cecil iirc because Cecil’s passive cover ability will keep Rosa and Rydia alive at clutch moments, whereas jump takes longer, makes Kain avoid hits that he could have tanked anyway, and doesn’t do nearly as much damage as throw or whichever of flare or bahamut is the one you’re actually supposed to use
Cecil loves strong women, he loves giving them elixirs and Phoenix downs and hi ethers and x potions and getting hit in the face for them. Kain is too sigma to help
FF4 is weirdly the only final fantasy game where your tanks and your DPS are fully separate by the late game the way that they are in other RPGs
Rydia is my favorite FFIV character and every time ive played the game i got all the summons & even gave her all the silver/gold apples & tried to make her the most powerful. Ive never known what the fuck the game wants me to do with her by the end Zeromus straight up has if->then punishment routines for Flare
I feel like my route of playing FFIV on the subway on GBA on a PSP where it was just busted every few turns was the best way compared to all of y’alls headaches.
I know the SNES version is supposed to be easier, but the only time I remember having trouble with FFIV when I was 11 or whatever was the three sisters fight because of the Wall thing, but we all know the work around for that.
There’s an item for Edge that can make the Zeromus fight very easy.
I got an ending in Eldrum: Red Tides that was mostly satisfying but now I want to try a different play style.
So your protagonist wakes up in a field hospital 9 months after being seriously wounded in battle and is honorably discharged from the city militia. First time out I leveled him up mostly in Charisma and Agility. I figured Strength would come more slowly given recovery from those wounds, you know, a bit of roleplay. So I got through a lot of situations the first time around through smooth talk, stealth, and very strategic combat, punctuated with moments of utter cowardice. Sometimes I had to exploit a few weaknesses in the enemy AI to get them to fight sub-optimally and cheese my way through some fights.
This time, all aboard the Strength train, baby, I’m kicking in doors and brutally murdering all my problems. Stopping just short of shaking down the innocent for gold. Mostly. Interested to see how else I can get this game to end via different choices and what secrets I can uncover.
In my previous playthrough there was a total non sequitur vampire or whatever optional fight and boy howdy he killed my sorry ass, and I want a rematch.
I think of the dead in JRPGs as taking a needed rest. Like how rested are you from being temporarily dead?
I feel like your soul would be rested and chill but your body would be really rough.
I like UFO 50’s Grimstone’s lack of revival potions. Makes the adventuring really tense.
about halfway done with slitterhead but it has already surpassed my expectations in so many ways. I get why it got the scores it did, they did whatever they could to work around the production values and they are still so obviously lacking, I mean the voice acting is so sparse and random it feels they had two recording sessions and ran out of money. but who cares. damn if it doesn’t have a real vision.
it is all about how weird it is to inhabit a videogame. you’re essentially a sentient spectator camera exploring 3D spaces and manipulating them however you see fit. you’re constantly jumping between characters both named (and thus conscious, able to feel conflicted about being manipulated by you, able to give you objectives you might disagree with) and unnamed (completely dependent on your will, the game tutorializes jumping from a skyscraper and switching bodies right before your host hits the floor, you keep running as you hear a splat and screams behind you). you’re not pretending to be a character, you’re thinking like someone toying with odd software, always in this in-between state between bodies, trying to manipulate the entire situation to your advantage. sightjacking from siren returns except you’re a hunter now, trying to decipher where to go based on what your future victim sees, making you process the streets and alleys in a completely different way. you’re stuck in this weird looping timeframe of three days where replaying levels makes each character conscious of what you’re going to do later, and since your interaction is usually chaotic violence it usually just makes things worse. it all constantly draws attention to the absurdity of telling a narrative through a videogame form and attempts to find storytelling ideas that toy with the artifice instead of pretending it’s not there. love how every mission you end as a civilian NPC ends with a zoom on their face as you stop possessing them, futilely trying to process the slaughter.
additionally, it just feels so… aware of the unspoken contexts of the story it’s telling. the incredible attention to detail in terms of what makes hong kong hong kong. the environment design is soooo good. kowloon, kai tak airport, recognizable taxicabs and buses, all the little things about the architecture, multilayered pre-1997 british presence. the image of demonic slitterheads infiltrating the 90s HK society is so loaded, mirroring paranoias about who the -real- citizens here are and who are the invaders, and toyama just keeps building on it. you do some real depressing stuff in this game, they said it would be like wkw and fruit chan meets seinen comics and that’s what it is (the fallen angels homage in the intro is so in your face I groaned but everything else is excellent). at the same time, for all the gantz-adjacent vibes, the core here is love for the people who make places like this what they are. I adore how the playable characters range from a fanservicey sex worker in a red wig wielding a giant blood mascara and manipulative superpowers to a cheery indonesian domestic helper wearing a jilbab who just pummels everything in her way.
supremely depressing to see this kind of ambitious late style thing eviscerated by reviews while sh2r is getting nothing but raves. “cronenberg is begging for scraps while his copycats get all the festival awards” vibes. hope it sticks the landing, it honestly could be my GOTY if it did.
playing de la jet set radio on dreamcast. been in a real sega mood, and wanted to play a version of jsr where i don’t have to open up the exe in a hex editor and play the tutorial multiple times just to make sure the game fucking saves, sega!!!
anyways this game still owns and hideki naganuma can be very talented when he isn’t on x dot com the everything app posting “big chungus catgirl peter griffin” or whatever the fuck.
EDIT: the japanese rerelease is lacking in most of the really dogshit songs from the american game, like cold’s “just got wicked” and rob zombie’s dissociative nightmare remix of “dragula”
i had no idea that even came out, looks dope from the few things i saw and your description, gonna see if i can pick up the ps4 version next time i’m at a store… i can’t seem to find much online about it but is the ps4 version ok, compared to the others?
i finally stopped procrastinating and finished totk after months of picking up the game again, exploring a bit and grabbing some more items of clothing, and then putting it back down for a couple months. i think i was putting it off bc i knew i likely wouldn’t come back to the game once i was done with the final fight. like with botw there’s nothing after the big ending, you just pick up your last save before you beat the final boss and that’s it. it’s not surprising in the slightest but it was still disappointing to me, even having the world accessible after without any enemies would’ve been fun, if only to check dialogue and things like that. stephanie sterling had a video recently where they mentioned that a game being “addictive” is not the same as it being good, and i don’t think i’ve felt that as strongly as i did with totk. i think my final tally is around 170 hours and change, and yet looking back on it it’s probably one of the emptiest game experiences i can remember having.
in more positive experiences i nabbed a secondhand copy of tunic on ps4, after a friend of mine who was obsessed with the game recommended it to me a few times, and so far have been really into it. the whole gimmick with the manual that you grab page by page and try to decipher is a really good way to set the game apart from its peers, although i honestly wished that the few remaining english words would have instead been replaced by icons or glyphs, as it stands it feels more like a halfway house, but the concept is still welcome. found myself thinking of fez on more than a few occasions which is always a good sign. i was surprised to see people say that the fights can be hard, i haven’t had too much trouble with that, i just got past the garden knight and continuing to explore the map at the moment, looking forward to keep playing. i haven’t read or seen any spoilers for the overarching story but i just stumbled into the area called the quarry and i have a lot of little theories forming in my head which i enjoy. good times all around
no idea how the ps4 version of slitterhead is but the pc one runs quite well on my crappy laptop and I very much appreciate how it takes like 15 seconds to turn on the game and skip all the logos and menus. the repetitive time loop structure is perfect for pick up and play when getting the thing to start up is not an ordeal.
Listen, if Cold wanted me to listen to their incredibly mild take on gothic rock music, at least on an ironic scale, they shouldn’t have given their album the worst title of all time: 13 Ways To Bleed On Stage. Why is “On Stage” included!? It’s completely unnecessary and it annoys the fuck out of me! They may have just gotten wicked, but I’ve been wicked since birth, you FRAUDS!!! Fake fucking goths I hate them!
EDIT: was just reminded that around the time I was playing JSR, Cold had released a song called “Stupid Girl.” The lyrics to “Stupid Girl” were written by Rivers Cuomo which, holy fuck, could have fooled me!!! I really do not like this band at all.
