how many people are playing hades? everyone that talks about it makes it sound like shiren with hot dads is this true
i think i saw tuxedo posting about it but not much else? is there a thread? there have been a lot of new threads and i havent been keeping up as much
Yeah Shadow Hearts is great. Unique mood and setting for the genre with an interesting turn-based battle device that involves timing an arrow in a spinning dial to either hit, miss, or crit if youāre willing to risk it. The sequel lets you customize the dial even more to suit your taste, it works pretty well and Iām surprised I havenāt seen it copied.
Tonally, 1 skews more towards the horror side (although not as far as something like Koudelka, its spiritual predecessor) and is a little shorter. 2 has much more of an offbeat sense of humor like a party member thatās a vampire pro wrestler who attacks with folding chairs. I havenāt played the 3rd but even though I hear itās weaker in comparison, it takes place in America which I always find amusing to see Japan depict. Strongly recommend checking this series out if you like PS2 JRPGs.
Itās pretty fun, maybe Shiren with Bastionās combat? No turn-based going on, lots of dashing around while hoping for good drops (aka Boons from the Greek pantheon). Thereās a surprising amount of story/lore but itās dripped slowly out over multiple runs. Iām enjoying it. A full run looks to be about around the half hour range which isnāt too terrible although youāll still find yourself sleepwalking through the first big area.
Shadow Hearts from the New World is very frontloaded with its best content. Once you leave the US halfway through the game areas start looking more like typical JRPGs when they go to the fantasy steppes.
OH GOD SHADOW HEARTS IS MY FAVORITE JRPG BY FAR its so self aware and almost every character has a different mechanical gimmick that doesnāt make random battles slog as much (but i have a high tolerance for rando battles)
the first ps2 one isnt funny yet but ut really takes advantage of ugly muddy textures to make monsters grotesque in a uniquely early ps2 way
Is there a thread to talk about peopleās individual collections of physical games? Having just received a copy of Grabbed by the Ghoulies in the mail, Iām reflecting on how small, odd and not so representative my own collection of cartridges and discs has become. Curious about others.
Is Windlands good or worth it if you donāt have VR?
I want to, but my game commitments for the next couple months are already pretty set. Some folks on Twitter were lauding the way the game narratively affirmed your losses as much as your wins, which was one of my favorite parts of Pyre, as well. My ranking for their other games has to be Pyre > Transistor > Bastion, so Iām curious how Hades is going to land in that hierarchy.
i havenāt liked any of their games yet but the theming and shirenness of this one is making me so curious
The judgement wheel got pretty tedious real quick, but otherwise, itās probably better than most JRPGs out there just by virtue of having a personality.
is gran turismo sport worth looking at? or should i stick to any other racer i can get my dirty little hands on? i passed on it initially because of the lack of cars, but i guess a few hundred got added in subsequent updates?
It looks gorgeous, it plays great, but it doesnāt really have a hook
The online esports events are kinda forgettable and the attempt at making up for the lack of meaningful single player content at launch feels hollow. Itās Gran Turismo 7 Prologue in so many ways.
VR is fantastic, though limited.
i grabbed it for like Ā£10 recently. definitely worth that price. there seems to be a lot of content now, and it plays well. if you are after a game that cares deeply about cars, this is probably the one.
Can someone who has chilled with Trails in the Sky tell me about it. It looks super dense and novelistic in scope and tone. Is that why SB likes it or are there other aspects Iām missing?
I donāt know that Iād say āSB likes itā because I donāt think that many people here have actually played it. It is very much tried and true JRPG writing, it just has a lot of it. Your character will often have conversations with NPCs instead of it just being the NPC delivering a couple of lines by themselves, and most NPCs in the world will get new dialogue after every story event. It gives opportunities to develop the sense of the characters existing in the world and having histories and relationships with the people in it. So if you want to eat some JRPG junk food it gives you a lot to chew on.
I think the main reason for the density is that amount of text, but also that the games within a sub-series (Sky, Cold Steel, etc.) are direct sequels to each other so you do have the potential for longer story arcs. But that doesnāt always necessarily mean for the better. You can see a lot of plot points in Sky coming just by knowing common tropes and the gameās own foreshadowing, but then youāre left waiting even longer to see certain stories play out.
Another appeal of the Trails series is that in these games you never beat the True Bad Guys; you do fight them (or rather members of them) but that story is continuing one. Each game has its own arcs that play to completion but youāre also progressively learning more about powerful people behind the scenes over the course of the Trails franchise. So the games have some consistent world building across a lot of games at this point, and if you can get into Trails then thatās something that bridges you from game to game.
But again, itās all in service of fairly normal JRPG stuff.
They are also like 80 hours each feels like your new multi-year hobby is playing Trails of games.
I think it can vary a lot depending on how committed you are to talking to NPCs. It looks like I have 69 hours of playtime on Sky FC, which included reloading saves and re-playing stuff for whatever reason. I was talking to every NPC up until the last fourth when I started to burn out. Who knew that walking the entire worldmap to talk to every NPC in the game after ever story event would eventually wear you out? So I stopped talking to NPCs during the gameās climax of all times (I read on the internet that apparently some random NPC is probably thousands of years old? I wish I didnāt miss that conversation!), and I was also using Cheat Engine to move around the map at 4X speed just so I could close out the game quicker.
if I want to check out the new NMS update, but Iām unlikely to play it for more than 5-10 hours and was very unimpressed by the systems in the original release, should I just go with the tourism mode?
Probably, if anything the systems are even system-ier. Itās one of my major complaints about NMS, even though I dig some of the stupid material gathering shit.
Like, they did a lot of work in service of balancing a bunch of systems that kinda suck, so theyāre more pleasant and interesting to engage with but still suck deep down
