Getting owned by Astral Chain, look at these ranks on the left
I’m not really digging this game much…
Battles do not feel good and are hard to read. The control scheme is convoluted, there are at the same time too many buttons and seemingly not enough actions you can take.
The game’s USP, the chain around your pokemon’s neck that you can use to trap enemies, is not that well implemented; moving around is fun but trapping enemies is never challenging, so it only works a few times against bosses. It’s just more shallow than I’d like.
Using legion team-up attacks is awful… You’re immobile the whole time and enemy attacks take you out of it so in the worst battles it’s a never ending vicious circle of: Legion team up -> camera zooms in -> all enemies zone in on you -> you try to aim -> you get smashed -> camera zooms out -> you move out of the way and quickly team up again -> camera zooms in -> barely try to aim while mashing the attack button -> you get smashed -> camera zooms out etc etc
I swear this happened 15 times in a row once
Plus with the hunter legion, gyro aiming is in, bad, and can’t be turned off lol
Also you’re a cop busting people for spraying graffitis during the end of the world
idk Nier Automata just seems miles better as a loose Platinum game in both fighting and world building / storytelling
i don’t like platinum games to begin with but i will never forgive the astral chain director for being asked about police brutality in the west in an interview and responding that he hopes the game can teach americans to love cops or whatever
Oh, Nier Automata is miles better (but I’d say it’s miles better than most games, so idk).
I was never forced to use gyro aiming, but maybe I never tried to do it when using joycons?–I played the game both with a non-gyro controller and the joycons in handheld mode
The grading system is kiiiiiinda garbage. I complained about it to a friend of mine who 100%ed the game, and apparently it’s because unlike other Platinum games’ grading systems that tend to focus on taking no damage and using no items, Astral Chain is relatively agnostic about these things and rewards things like using a diversity of legions. Getting S-ranks is hard on a first playthrough. I hate this!
Oh I think this is great actually. The game is telling you explicitly that adventuring with someone for a while and having a nice night and a fuck is good and a basis for temporary happiness on its own merits but also does not at all extinguish personal ambition or duty to higher causes. It’s one of the best examples of the way the game represents a more medieval perspective.
In other words yes you can like someone and still have to kill them because of frictional allegiances. That’s grown up life
But also Geralt is an ahistorical wild west gunman in this culture so there’s backdoors to these inevitabilities if you do the dialogue options right. I dunno I think it strikes this balance real well
I was playing handheld; gyro aiming is there not forced per se, but it can’t be turned off. When you try to aim with the joystick the game still considers the gyro sensor’s movements and unless you stand perfectly still this will get in the way
Practice in Splatoon 2 for a few hours and I basically guarantee you’ll be both faster and more accurate with a gyro than with sticks.
My friend Mitch gave up in 15 minutes because it “felt bad” but all my other friends that stuck with it found the gyro controls to be superior. (Although I do think they’re probably less accessible if you have hand/wrist problems of some kind!)
yeah I don’t know if I’d recommend it in anything except for splatoon 2 because I haven’t really tried it elsewhere but gyro aiming in splatoon 2 is the closest to mouse aim in a console shooter I’ve tried
Maybe this is me entering the series with the third entry, but this option in particular felt like it was coming out of nowhere. Metz had been in hiding for quite some time already, enough that she had been in contact with an elf as research buddies and has an enchanted luxury bath pocket universe for when being a grubby wisewoman became too much. Her conversations with Geralt, to me at least, did not explain well enough what she thought of her current way of life. I had to look at the Deep Lore of the journal entry to find that out:It was not at all difficult to tell that she despised every minute of this. That’s where I had, and I get to break this word out, feelings of ludonarrative dissonance.
Geralt and the witcher world being on the whole neutral and opaque in morality has been a nice change of pace! I like that there’s no right answer and there’s an uneasiness to interactions. The Crones are a great example, elemental beings that are in effect protecting the land and the villagers nearby but for purely selfish reasons: an easy food source and slowly incrementing their power through the pacts these people make in order to protect themselves. You’re never sure how to approach them, especially when they blatantly antagonize Geralt by revealing they were planning on eating Ciri.
This probably just sounds like a cop out, but again, in this specific context I see this as a strength. Metz is actively deceiving Geralt (by being truthful about how much she likes him) and you more or less get deceived right along with him. She’s a sorceress, she has how many lifetimes of experience adding up to a complete and complex person and you’re not going to understand her motivations by spending a couple hours with her. I think it’s an important lesson the game is teaching you, and also, in its way a big fuck you to Bioware style “choices & consequences” player-fantasy games.
fwiw I never read a single journal entry so that hasn’t affected my read on the situation. Also I did play Witcher 2 but basically forgot every element of the plot. When I ran into Keira in 3 all I remembered was her name. So I was going into it basically as fresh as you.
Yeah, I still think of it as a copout when it’s explicit in the writing but not in the gameplay. Without the journal entry then yes, absolutely, there’s that space for interpretation and allows for the emergent characterization that you’ve laid out.
I guess the lesson here is games should have less exposition so it can walk that fine line.
So Wheels of Aurelia is… not great. The driving is basically not there. The dialogue choices seem pretty meaningless. It’s neat that some pieces of conversation will throw up a flag that puts a little historical tidbit in one of the menus, so like I guess I learned a few tidbits of Italian history/politics circa 1978? That’s cool, I’d rather just read a book.
Aurelia (the character) makes a lot of references to “fascists” in a way that seems kind of performative. I get it, she’s supposed to be a liberated modern woman, and the game has begun to hint at her having some troubled backstory, and your sidekick is pregnant and grappling with that fact. But like, none of it is well-written enough to make me stick around.
Hate to say it but I’m pretty glad I didn’t spend money on this one.
A Short Hike was as cute as I expected, but also a joy to play! I really wasn’t expecting there to be all that much to do or discover, but this game is a great example of how to pack a short game with lots of points of interest. Even stuff that’s just scenery really manages to add the sense of exploration.
Playing Speed Brawl, i am really liking it so far, going around trying to do fast times is not something i preffer doing in videogames, but maybe because i get better stuff i am trying to go for the golden times, i think i am mastering all except the dodge stuff.
Doing Arma 3 with the waypoint server is really good, glad i bought the game and found the group
Playing Quake 1 with folks on Left Home is going really great, i am bit slow compared to the other lovable people playing but i think i am getting the hang of it.
I shot my feet 2 times in 5 secs in Receiver 2 with the M911 and died, but after a while (and finally noticing that the music with vocals plays when there is tape near) i am doing a litle better.
I feel like absolutely no one talks about Atelier games usually, but the second they made all the female characters short and thicc, no one could stop talking about it
Either that or Switch owners buy literally anything released for it
