It is definitely a lot more wordy than I was expecting.
3 Likes
been playing Dragon Quest Treasures again, phenomenal game if you grew up on collectathons and want something that won’t insult your intelligence, or even really comment on it at all. It’s really just a checklist of things to do but plotting out paths and collecting treasure along the way are really enjoyable activities, and the risk of losing everything (especially early in the game) is very palpable. The levels are also huge and occasionally very confusing, despite being very open. There’s just so much in this game, it’s a generous game in a lot of ways.
Also playing Slay the Spire 2, mostly in co-op. It’s extremely good in co-op. We’re up to Ascension 9 and we keep dying on act 1 now, absolutely wild. I’m feeling a bit fatigued from it and starting to feel like I just need to Get The Right Cards Or Quit but we’ll see how I feel later. I have not looked up any strategies for this game whatsoever, and I don’t think I’ll change that.
And also playing Kitaria Fables with someone named Fable, very cute synchronicity there. We’re only like 3 hours in and it’s fine, I have no problem with it. It’s basically a less charming Fantasy Life, and I would not play it solo except under extreme duress. But as a co-op activity it’s cute and pleasing. I will always play a game with farming for at least a while.
Also, despite definitely being a game for children, it’s hinting that the empire you work for is evil. I made a bet with Fable that the emperor is causing the (extremely generic) calamity as an excuse to station soldiers all over the place and strengthen his rule. They think the game is too childish to go that far. We’ll see how it goes. I’m prepared to be disappointed hahaha
honestly though i wish i could just set up splitscreen fantasy life. maybe i’ll get us copies of the switch version, i haven’t played it but i fucking loved the 3DS one. how hard is hacking a switch nowadays i don’t wanna pay for 2-3 copies of a game
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Fallout: New Vegas (360)
perhaps i’m just being me, but for all i care Mr. Cowboy™ could’ve left me in that hole
this is the post-apocalyptic Western i’ve heard so much about?
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Ringing the forum town bell. Good News Everyone! Did you miss Dark Souls? Are you thinkin’ bout them Dark Souls? Enotria The Last Song is here for you.
It is Italian Made Dark Souls Fan Game. I’ve got a +3 Stage Greatsword and I refuse to read the lore. It’s got some snakey level design. There is little glowy items tantalizing you everywhere. I want to play more.
It is real tastey to have Dark Souls I haven’t played before. Thanks the Italians, and PS Plus because I wouldn’t have spent money on this, but will buy it if I don’t finish before it lapses.
I assure you it’s Dark Souls.
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Get their asses hater
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New Vegas is a noble attempt to bring actual writing and quest design to a dead franchise but nothing can save the Gamebryo engine I’m sorry to say.
As a hater of remakes in general, we would really have something if someone remade New Vegas in Fallout 1’s engine.
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New Vegas is best understood in the context of its release: in 2010, the classic crpg was a dead genre, bioware was on top of the world, bethesda games were celebrated, and even shit like fable was a major release
FNV was one of the few decent things during the rpg dark age
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playing it multiple times to get all the achievements and then doing a final playthrough with the mod that combines it with Fallout 3 killed Bethesda style games for me I think lmao
When you’re in that deep and it still sucks you know that no amount of good writing can save the foundation it’s built on. We all spent our time trying to mod the parts that are shit out of existence. People are still trying to reanimate the weapons into feeling good to use to this very day.
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just had my fourth attempt at creating a character and had to abandon it when it was time to allocate stats
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Playing through all the arcade modes in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. I used save states against Gill in SF3: New Generation and it’s like he knew I was doing it and would switch up his moves on me. Toby Fox’s Street Fighter.
Ken’s ending is he gets punched in the nuts.
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You’re right! Theres a card option on the overworld map screen that ain’t it, but you can access the special card maps from the title screen’s save menu.
The Mario 1 levels are kinda hard just because muscle memory doesn’t work with Mario’s slightly different acceleration, although I love how it’s easier to get air off stomping an enemy. I kept missing the first jump on 1-3 over and over.
I’ve never played any Mario Maker, but this had me wondering if I should finally give it a go.
3 Likes
10 posts were split to a new topic: 868-BACK
Thanks PS+ I played through Indika tonight. The trailer miss-sells it, but then again the first thing you do is fill a bucket with well water 5 times, so the game I telling you pretty quickly what the game is.
It is equally funny and distressing and I must now wrestle with my “faith” that I only played it because of a Buffet service.
The stepping on snow sounds are some of the best I’ve ever heard. Really enjoyed that.
It’s one of those that you want to go in blind and be surprised by.
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Finished Tales of Rebirth with my buddy via Parsec, on hard mode!
There’s a really great 10 hour game in this, a project that took us literally 100 hours to complete. We’re glad that we finished it because we have brainworms, but it’s very true that you can just stop playing the game after the Geyorkias fight at hour 10 and you will miss essentially nothing of import.
This is my second-ever Tales game and my impressions are that the combat is absolutely killer, I fucking love the multiplayer JRPG brawler arena thing they have going on here, it’s like playing through Turtles in Time and gaining abilities for it. I have some gripes about the way its executed (summoning interrupts, very low and very high placed enemies) but honestly, this was more than good enough to make the random encounters great. Battles in a JRPG can very often be the most brain-dead, dull-as-dishwater, tedious part of the game, and here we would look forward to them, we’d be excited during them, we’d be hooting and hollering!
Story-wise, man, this has very little to it. The promise of those early chapters is never realized, many plot threads abandoned completely in favor of circuitous plot buffoonery, empty platitudes about equality or duty, and characters that are never allowed to change. This is probably what other Tales games are like, which is damning, because the main thing one tends to come to JRPGs for are the story and the characters.
Visually, this game is a feast, every location is vibrant and colorful and alive, the game just looks great all the way through, the places feel lived-in and historied, it’s a world you enjoy poking around. We were surprised to find the world map was fully 3D, including unique 3D models for every character, which are not used anywhere else in the game, and look excellent. A lot of this game speaks to a tumultuous development, and this is one example: Maybe they didn’t like how the 3D models moved? Something like that? Whatever the reason, there’s a lot going on here visually and all of it is done extremely well. The beast design is often horrifying too! They are fucked up demons called “
iruses” that often have organic growths akin to, like, nails having grown out too long, or deformed tusks, just really unique shit. Loved it.
Overall I don’t think I can fully recommend the game, it’s just too long and pointless and aimless, but I can suggest one plays through the first 10 hours and calls it there. That much makes for a fun multiplayer experience!
Previously on Tales of Rebirth
games you played today: winning eleven - #1756 by Mothra
games you played today 12 times the fun and the excitement! - #280 by Mothra
Final Thoughts on Tales of Rebirth
Story, Characters, and Progression
As I’ve griped about before, this is clearly a game where they finished up the story and realized, to their horror, that the game only had 10 hours of content in it. So, the story starts doing loops, you start re-doing character arcs, you start going on completely pointless quests that end up being “tricks” by random villains, and brother, you do sidequests. You do an absolutely ridiculous number of tedious sidequests, like delivering individual library books to each end of the world or cataloging rivers or navigating a floaty island that controls like dawgshite, it’s bad. But you do it because these give permanent stat buffs to various characters (+3 defense, for example) and it turns out you absolutely 100% need this to survive and succeed in the late game dungeons.
I’m honestly stunned by how, for 90 hours of this 100 hour game, every single soul in this game said some variation of “I don’t trust the huma, they’re bad” or “The gajuma are evil! We shouldn’t suffer them any longer!” because of the effects of the Racism Dragon. THAT’S IT. Everyone in the game suffers under the specter of racism but it turns out this is due to some big horrible defeatable space dragon, not because people’s fears and insecurities and ignorance. You guys made 100 hours of story about racism and did not actually write anything about racism!! What the fuck!!!
We both agreed that Mao and Tyree were the standout characters in the cast. We could not believe Mao was not the main character, it defies all reason. He is revealed to be the amalgam of all saint beasts, constructing him as a way to experience the world of the mortal races and understand them. That’s a great concept for the protagonist of a game like this! Why stick him in the side-character role??
Tytree was mainly just a fun personality, he didn’t have much going on character-wise. We came to appreciate his energy, often paired with the black void of personality that is Vaigue. He does a lot of heavy lifting there.
Anne and Eugene were pretty good in concept. I did not think they succeeded much at all (their drama is all caused by mind control misunderstandings, so, ugh) but I liked them both and I liked the concept that Anne wanted to literally murder Eugene for a good portion of the game until they had their falling out, that was good. It really really really strained credulity that Anne would continue to suffer her father’s literal murderer on the team for as long as she did, but, whatever.
Also! The Dark Wings! There’s a Team Rocket-like trio of bumbling villains we were quite charmed by. We kept hoping the game would just let us do a sidequest as them, with a graphic-swap for a few of our characters in combat, but alas, like many ideas here, they don’t really go anywhere or do anything notable.
Combat
As I mentioned before, the combat never stops being immensely fun. I absolutely love Tales’ multiplayer brawler arena thing with JRPG elements dashed in, it makes combat - often the worst part of a JRPG - something you’re very happy to do again and again. My MVP was Tytree, a close-quarters pugilist that did uppercuts and flurries-of-fists and sliding kicks, all that good shit, focusing on many many small strikes over big or multi-enemy damaging attacks of the other melee characters. My friend mained Mao, a spellcaster, which tended to be our biggest damage-dealer.
I have gripes! Spellcasting is absurd in how, even if you don’t get interrupted in casting the spell, you then cannot take damage or the spell cancels. This is absolutely not a game balanced well enough that you are not beset by beasts often that peck at your spellcasts with annoying burrow strikes and the like, making your role in battle nothing much but an infinite string of stun-cancelled attacks. Pretty frustrating.
You also simply are required to bring Vaigue, he’s way too powerful and useful to afford not to, which sucks because he’s such a braindead sword-striker. Ugh. We also were pretty irritated by the host of iruses that would be very short or flying, meaning we could not resister more than the occasional hit on them with an uppercut or a sliding kick, really irritating. Famously, we got our asses handed to us a few times by a boat deck of 10 limp fish, simply because it was almost impossible to hit an enemy that low to the ground.
Music
Not great unfortunately! A whole lot of this sounded like placeholder music:
https://youtu.be/nqO70Y3Jw0w?si=ZOZmm0I3h9rktV7p
https://youtu.be/Q0R4qces-zY?si=vRktgvlDKAwbpaba
https://youtu.be/GtwysBcLvr4?si=x9wjXhetUxgVznhE
But there were some exceptions. It definitely got the job done, but it’s very forgettable.
Art Direction
Gorgeous game, the environments, the monsters, the sprites, the visual effects in combat, all done very well. One of the things that made me shocked this game wasn’t more well-known was how good it all looked, you’d think there have been more frothing for it in the west, more clamoring to bring it over.
The Final Stretch
The last boss, particularly on hard mode, was a complete and utter slog, indicative of how poorly-implemented the difficulty is in this game. We settled on a strategy of simply focusing on the spawns, killing them while our occasional hit whittled down the main boss, and this ultimately worked, but only after many, many, many, many instant-wipes from the boss deploying three screen-spanning magic attacks at the same time. It feels a lot like these were meant to be spaced out, but the AI didn’t know how to handle them properly. A whole lot about the boss design in this game gives the sense it is not acting as intended.
The Ending
Pretty strange ending! There is a body-swap storyline between Claire and Queen Agarte that truly does not impact the overall story at all, they are just body-swapped for the entire duration of the game to very little effect. WHY? WHY AS THERE BODY-SWAPPING AT ALL?
After killing the final boss, Claire and Queen Agarty swap souls back to normal, but then Agarte dies from this??? It is not explained why, it is just to give some kind of drama to the ending I guess. Very bizarre. Claire is right there unharmed at all from the body swap! What??
There is a final cutscene that shows all the female characters in domestic roles, then showing Tytree working a field shirtless (?), then shows us that the mascot character Zee - a thing that the game forgot about for 20 hour stretches at a time - pairs off with an identical pink girl version of itself. THAT’S IT THAT’S THE END
20 Likes
still to this day i recall the small, compressed jpeg images of enlarged magazine scans of screen captures from Tales of Rebirth posted to the-magicbox dot com in 2004 as being memorable and beautiful
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yeah i started that game 4 times across 10 years and never made it out of the first town
it just looked and felt like shit. and i knew if i got into i would waste hundreds of hours on it
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Played through Hero Core. Took 1:42 to get 100% in normal mode, but now I definitely want to do hard mode. Played the first two bosses but I should wrap it up for the night. Might check out Annihilator when I finish hard too, if I’m not in too much trouble.
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stuck again
ten minutes i’ve been sitting here, trying to settle on the numbers that are meant to define my character’s ability to interact with the game, and i’m utterly stumped because- well, because i can never decide on anything, but also because “affects [vague, one-word description of an entire mechanic and/or skill tree]” is just 
1 Like
I’d suggest just picking whatever (and put more points in Perception than you put in Strength), and then start playing the game, and if it feels like something you want to do isn’t working like you want it to then edit your save file and boost a related stat.
It is extremely rare for RPGs to have meaningful experiences locked behind not having adequate stats for a task.
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Holy. The demo for About Fishing was awesome. I was a bit apprehensive about this game because I didn’t think Arctic Eggs was all that interesting, but they’ve made a game with some real in-depth mechanics this time around. The core mechanic of fishing is solid, and there’s the economy aspect of selling the fish you catch to buy better gear. There’s a neat physics thing this game does where your line can wrap around things which adds a bit of diffuculty to catching aggresive fish, because they’ll struggle and get wrapped around tree branches in the water. There’s also a bit of exploration with the fishing rod, somehow?! The coolest part of the demo is when you realise you don’t necessarily have to cast your line into the water. There’s also a mechanic of adding caught fish to your hook and like, possessing them? The end of the demo has a really cool bit utilising it which I won’t spoil, but I’m really interested to see how it’s developed further in the full game.
The demo was pretty long, too! It took me 3 hours to clear it.
16 Likes