It’s too basic, everything gets dull pretty fast and no part of the game stands out or gets surprising ever.
Combat doesn’t stand up to basically any other action roguelike I’ve ever played, and shopkeeping becomes pure busywork way before the end of the first dungeon
Top 4 games I played this year:
2020 is when I realized my true love is a fighting game that has one character occupy two separate spaces on the character select screen with the exact same name
niice, what did you think
re things that came out in some form this year i think i only played switch ports and remakes: i stopped playing moon for 3 days, forgot what i was doing and never returned. it was cool if arcane but tim rogers needs to chill the fuck out on the brand. no more heroes has one of my fav open worlds but revisiting it i just cleared that out and ghosted halfway through the story. i bounced off kentucky route zero back in 2014 in act 2, this time i bounced off act 4. ys origins is good but i dont have anything interesting to say about it. dandara was better than anticipated tho be mindful that the dark world shit that opens midgame is all optional expansion content, just skip it unless yre hungry. even the ocean is Extremely transitional in its politics but i had a nice few days with it, a real 2015 flashback. a short hike was too twee for me but i was ok with it till i had to collect more feathers to progress.
mostly the stuff that mattered with me was older stuff i revisited. i played a lot of smt games i had lying around uncompleted. digital devil saga 1 and 2 were great, strange journey was v good, devil survivor 2 overlong and ultimately bad, and finally nocturne is of course very good but i got a little burnt out at this point and didn’t finish it.
i revisited mgs2 after reading a bunch of astute posts in the top 64 thread. i feel a lot more confident extracting the bits i care about from the bits i do not now that im not 18. for posterity the bits i care about are the ost, dead cell, the swimming, and getting gaslit and emasculated for an extended period of time.
my goty was getting emotionally over-invested in the fantasy of ff13, culminating in grinding a single end-dungeon encounter for 10+ hrs to get every characters’ ultimate wep. it was golden.
I think it’s brilliant, and I definitely liked it way more than I liked DQ5. It feels more welcoming to people who aren’t already familiar with DQ’s combat style, because the first half of the game is a stealth tutorial that teaches you how to deal with different party compositions and how to play with more or less all the classes in the game. Having the chapters be self-contained stories that share a common world is great, and more RPGs would benefit from this kind of approach. It makes it way less daunting to have clean cutoff points where you can put the game down and go play something else for a while and not have to worry that you’ll lose the thread of what you were doing or pursuing. It’s salaryman friendly and I value that a lot these days.
What did he say about it?
Tim translated the game.
Ohh, I see
And, specifically, he translated the game in exactly his personal voice, so every character says “heck” constantly and calls you buddy.
Like, I dunno, maybe the writing really does have that vibe in the original Japanese, but it just feels like Tim walked right out of the Insert Credit podcast and into this RPG… as every single character.
I haven’t played it but I remember this tweet:
Haha well, sounds terrible and awesome at the same time. Maybe I’ll actually check it out someday and find out which it is for me
I did like the game, for what it’s worth. Though I also completely dropped it the first time I took a day off playing it.
That happens to me with almost everything I play. Can’t drop the combo
Not particularly!
But that particular character yeah.
hades is being overpraised but specifically because it’s an impeccably produced midbuget indie
I don’t like or trust a word like “overpraised” because I can’t help but read in it an underlying allegation of disingenuousness.
If you listen to the Hades devs talk, their goal was to make the feelings they have playing roguelikes accessible to a wider audience, and they did exactly that.
Like, for me personally, I don’t find that goal very compelling (although somewhat paradoxically I do like Hades despite that), but the recognition they got is kind of proof they achieved that goal on some level.
If “overpraised” means that my values don’t align with video game journalists or most people on twitter, then absolutely, it’s overpraised the same way most media targeted for a wide audience is.
I mean, the person in the tweet is clearly using that definition – superficially hide your preference via criticism of others – but I think the only meaningful discussion on the topic would be around like marketing and how things go viral in the first place. Like, if one thought there are other comparable games with this level of wide appeal that are going unnoticed because their marketing team isn’t as savvy.
