Topic: Games you've recently beat

@Th3solution +1 to the good write up vibes

I admit I don’t often read the long reviews by people on here but was interested in what you thought of the game as it’s been on my radar but not one I’ve ever taken the plunge on. I may well now pick it up though based on what you’ve said.

Did you play with headphones though?

@RogerRoger I appreciate your kind words. Yeah, I know you have a particular aversion to things horror and zombie related so I’m glad you picked up on my very conditional recommendation. In my opinion, Hellblade is more disturbing than The Last of Us, and I know you’ve never felt inclined to play that. And I really don’t care for grim and scary games usually. I’m with you— I play games to escape the anxieties of life, not to add to them! But I just love what the game was able to accomplish. But believe me, I’ve had my fill of corpses and screaming for a while.

It is interesting to note, though, in the “making of” video that they show the consultants watching the playthrough of the game prior to its release and how they were interviewed and confirmed, “Yup, that’s pretty accurate with how that looks and feels.” Without spoiling too much, I will say the portrayal of mental health issues and psychosis in the game is not presented solely as a curiosity to gawk at and vilify as it is in other media, rather it seems to want to promote awareness of these disorders. And to actual champion the ways that each of our minds work differently. The psychosis is not the villain. In fact, quite the opposite. Senua is uniquely capable to accomplish things in the game because of the way her perception differs, despite her also being the victim in some ways as well.
But yes, I agree you should probably avoid it. I was amazed at my mood about 2/3 of the way through. I was feeling despair and frustration and had to tell myself, “it’s okay, we’ll get through this.” There is a short section in the game when the voices go away for a time in one part and when they come back I felt a strange sense of relief as well to have them back as my companions. It’s very complex stuff which plays with your emotions like that.

@Ralizah Thanks! I believe you would really appreciate the technical achievement. Also the narrative is something rather deep, with a lot of layers, which I know you also like. If you can muster the interest, I would be interested to hear your take on it if/when you play it.

@Thrillho Absolutely. I play most of my games in my Audio Technica headphones anyways, and for sure that’s how I played this one. The splash screen at the beginning when you boot the game advises you to play with headphones. I think a really high quality surround sound system would suffice, but it would still be so much better to use the headphones and cancel out all outside noise to feel the full effect.
If you end up trying it I’d be interested in your thoughts.

@Tasuki, the only other one I've played was the first one, and that was over 10 years ago, so I can't say.

@RR529 Hmmm. Ok guess I will pass on it then.

@Kidfried I think it sounds like you’ll really like it, especially given your love for The Witness and Bloodborne. Again, I haven’t played The Witness, but my understanding is a lot of the puzzles are kind of similar. And the game’s not too expensive — $30 is the base price and I got it on a sale somewhere along the way for $20, I believe. I beat it over a weekend, glued to the TV over just a handful of play sessions (probably 8-10 hours - I lost track of time. And factor in some mucking around in photo mode), which is a nice diversion from all the longer games and the length felt just about right, not too long and also not too short. There is no ramp up time to have to “git gud,” or wander through hours of intro or exposition setting up some kind of epic narrative in order to experience a pay off. No, it has you from the start.

Incidentally, if you really want to delve into mental illness themed content, the little indie title Actual Sunlight takes on depression full bore. It’s also a really short little game (no platinum) like maybe a couple hours tops, but is less creative in its approach of playing as someone who suffers with depression. It’s a quirky game with a pretty low production value, but serves as the only other game to so openly tackle the subject matter in recent memory. It was free on PS Plus a while back. I can’t particularly recommend it as a good game, it’s pretty basic, but if the idea of playing a game which deals with mental health interests you and you have it sitting in your library from PS Plus, then it may be worth an hour of two of your time.

@RogerRoger Yes, it sure has had an impact on me, more so than most other games. And I might have given the wrong impression that Senua’s mental illness is glorified or misrepresented as some kind of super-power or something to be grateful for. There is very clear anguish and suffering associated with and brought on by her condition. But, and I’ll spoiler tag it for other readers who may be passing by, but since you’re not going to play it, it will be fine - the puzzles largely involve looking for patterns in the environment to match up with runes on doors in order to unlock them and proceed. Also, looking at obstacles—say, a broken bridge, from certain perspectives will mend the bridge so she can pass. Apparently one of the aspects of psychosis and delusional disorders is that these individuals find patterns in everyday items and in their surroundings that they perceive to be significant, even when they aren’t. If you’ve ever known someone with schizophrenia or bipolar with psychosis you might have observed this. The voices and other auditory hallucinations will tell you “that’s not the way!” Or “look out behind you!” And other clues. In this way, her delusions and the way her mind works are actually helping her progress. Now, obviously this is all a world created in her own mind to begin with (at least that’s the implication) but these symptoms of persons with psychosis (hearing voices which instruct them, seeing patterns in everyday items, etc.) are utilized as gameplay mechanics to progress. It’s also implied that Senua is a good fighter because of her keen observation skills and recognition of patterns in swordplay. So, I guess it’s not the insanity which is her ally, but it is that the fabricated world in her mind is only successfully traversed and conquered through abilities inherent to her own delusional disorder
Anyways, I don’t want to belabor it, nor do I wish to make you or anyone else uncomfortable, but I felt the need to qualify my earlier remarks. 🙂

@Th3solution Thank you for the write up sir, of a high standard as always.

I'm kinda of feeling the same as @RogerRoger, Hellblade sounds like it plays a little to close to home for me personally. Just reading about the voices made me feel a bit anxious!

I finished Blood and Truth on PSVR this week. Again, it is a shame that the PSVR is still niche purely because Sony's studios have kicked it out of the park in the last year with some of their VR games. While not topping Astrobot, Blood and Truth was pure fun to play. I had a couple of quibbles, the Move controllers were on the whole, solid, but I found the application of two handed weapons, particularly the pump action shotgun too hard to use and also some aiming a little bit floaty. That said, the voice acting was good, the story was better than I expected and some of the set pieces were just great fun.

Also, the ability to spin pistols on your fingers, flick to reload and then put into your holster was the most fun mechanic since throwing the axe in God of War. Sooo much fun.

@LN78 Agree about the climbing in particular - I died a few times just because of not correctly gripping and I have to game in a more limited space so leaning etc. can be troublesome. I did the same and went single handed on the larger weapons but I also did a lot of dual wielding ,particularly with the revolvers because I loved the gunslinging feeling.

The move controllers (and their lack of availbility at retail) are the achilles heel for PSVR in my opinion. They do get the job done but not always very well.

Bit late but real nice write up on Hellblade @Th3solution Just not my cup of tea unfortunately !

Also totally not jealous at all the comments and discussion you've got for just this one review/impression compared to the five or so that I've done 😂

Very short and sweet review @Rudy_Manchego!

Wish I had a VR set to try it out!... And not spend over an hour crafting a 1000+ word review like I usally do 😅

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Ha ha - thanks! Don't worry, I enjoy your reviews but I tend to write on here at work so I am slightly sneaky and have to limit it. Besides, Blood and Truth is a shorter game!

VR is a weird one - it is great fun but the price to entry is high. It is very different to traditional console gaming and takes more effort in a lot of ways. My advice would be to see if you can borrow or beg for a VR for a week or so and try some of the highlights, like Blood and Truth. U

Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition (PS4)

So I finally finished this one up tonight and it was ever enjoyable as I remembered. Playing it again reminded me why Borderlands has become one of my favorite I.Ps. If you have never played this one, then I highly suggest it yeah in many ways it's not as polished as the second one, the story is mostly told through text and exploration and the villian isn't as memorable as Handsome Jack is but it's still a great game. In many ways I found it alot better then BL2, weapon proficiencies for one thing and some were not quite as good as BL2, such as being unable to move during fight for your life. But overall it's a great game. If you are a Borderlands fan and have never played this then obviously this is the best version to play and I highly suggest it if your are a fan of BL2 or it's been awhile since you have played it.

I recently finished Dragon Quest XI with a nice shiny platinum trophy to boot. I really loved this game and was surprised to see I'd spent a whopping 200 hours on it. That's some serious grinding.

@Kidfried The theme of the cycle of abuse was very interesting and quite thought provoking. In all I actually think they handled it very well. As it is a theme not often broached in games, it was quite bold that the developer even went there. Each of the antagonists had extremely deep scars inflicted by various forms of abuse, which was sad to see and certainly added more depth. Where it is typical in many other games for bosses or antagonists to simply "be the bad guys", it's not that simple here.
For me one of the most shocking parts of the story was when it was revealed that the person you thought was a "good guy" is actually a paedophile. Whilst the children had to be stopped, this alone lent weight to the central theme.

Unfortunately the game is full of "fan service" and characters are inappropriately sexualised. At its worst, during an encounter with Monaca where each hit strips her of an item of clothing until she runs off red-faced in her underwear , it even undermined what the developer was trying to say and inappropriately poked fun at how she had been sexually abused.

Oh wow. Someone actually likes it more than I do! Glad you took to it. It's an extremely cool spin-off, I think, and, aside from the VERY troubling sex stuff and fanservice (it's not as bad when it's Mikan and mostly treated as a joke, or when it's Junko and used to add to the disturbing atmosphere, but a bunch of emotionally traumatized children is probably the right time to maybe start showing restraint with the fanservice; also, I'll never not be shocked that the molestation machine bit wasn't cut, lol), a great addition to the franchise in terms of the depth it adds to Toko, the interesting setting it explores, and the new characters it introduces. It's also nice to get some worldbuilding that doesn't (primarily) revolve around You-Know-Who. That Hit List, in particular, is great in this regard.

I loved the music, too, even if it was a bit limited in this entry. Each track adds something unique to the game (even the horrible, carnival-esque music whenever the WoH are on-screen).

The person you didn't like... Haiji Towa?

Glad I'm not the only one who didn't mind the shooting gameplay. It's fine. It's not meant to be Gears of War, and works for the pace of the game. I liked the puzzle rooms a lot, though, since they felt fairly unique for what you could typically do in a shooter and broke up the gameplay a bit.

@Kidfried Great write up. I only had a quick skim read of it since the game is on my to do list, but looks like I've got plenty to look forward to.

Excellent write up @Kidfried ! I know this is only a side story and not what the gameplay of the main series is usually like but...

--Proceeds to put the Danganronpa series onto my list of games to buy--

It sounds like a treat barring the sexual themes... Hopefully it won't be too uncomfortable

You mean it wasn't already?!

It wasn't no @Ralizah

All I knew about it was your and Kidfried's adorable avatars were from it.

But the following review piqued my interest and reading up on it as unspoilery as I could... They are now

Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga

Platform: Playstation 2

Level of Completion: Fully beat the story, and have seen a decent amount of side-content. 55 hours total if you include the lost time from my corrupted save file.

What is it? An SMT spinoff developed for the PS2. Features the press-turn combat and demon encounters of mainline SMT, but the game itself is designed more like a linear, story-focused JRPG ala Final Fantasy.

In the apocalyptic world of The Junkyard, various tribes vie for dominion over eachother so that they can be granted access to Nirvana by the mysterious intelligence communicating from the Karma Temple at the center of The Junkyard. The tribes are cursed with a virus that transforms them into demons and trives to cannibalize one-another. The main tribe the player follows, The Embryon, eventually takes in a mysterious young woman named Sera, who possesses the mysterious ability to quell their demonic rage.

What I Liked:

Press-turn combat. The brilliant, strategic, Pokemon-esque combat system Atlus created for SMT: Nocturne returns almost unchanged for this spinoff, and it works as well as it ever has.
Fascinating themes and symbolism relating to Hinduism. While it's probably mostly window-dressing, ideas surrounding reincarnation, karmic imbalance, etc. weave their way into this narrative and add an interesting flavor to the proceedings.
Evocative setting. The world of The Junkyard is very cool: equal parts Silent Hill and what you might expect a big city to look like after a nuclear war, the setting does a great job of conveying a sense of despair that helps to explain why these characters want so desperately to leave this place. In many ways, it's reminiscent of depictions of Purgatory I've seen in popular fiction.
Elaborate dungeon design. Many of the dungeons in this game are particularly well-designed, with puzzles, secrets, complex designs with non-linear progression cycles that take the player out of their comfort zones and force them to explore and often engage in light mental gymnastics in order to proceed. They're also nicely varied, and you explore everything from the blasted remains of a seemingly ancient ruined cruise ship to labyrinthine waterways and illusory mansions.
Well-paced story. While the game is a bit on the short side for my liking, one thing I can't dock it for is the pacing of the story itself. This is one of the few JRPGs I've played that ticked along with a ruthless, mechanical potency from beginning to end. There are certainly spots where you can slow down and deviate a little bit from the main plot, especially right near the end, but the game never forces the player to slow down, and you're always doing something different.
Loads of side-content. While the majority of the game is strictly structured, a ton of side content opens up near the end, primarily taking the form of challenging optional bosses who you have to beat to obtain various items that unlock new mantras and/or improve your selection of equipment or available macca in the sequel. To be honest, if you include grinding to level up enough to beat all of these enemies, you could probably spend as much time doing this as you would completing the actual story content of the game.
Great voice acting for the PS2 era. While the voice acting is mainly found in cutscenes, the quality of the acting itself is surprisingly high, considering the generation this game released in (consider Tidus and his terrifying crow-like "laughing" scarred the minds of a generation of youths just three years prior).

What I Didn't Like/Was Disappointed By:

Humor and ethnic stereotypes conflict with the vibe of the game. The game has a prominent funny streak throughout, which I'm usually a big fan of, but I feel like one series that usually does better to stick with a straight face is Shin Megami Tensei. In this case, it's a spinoff, but it still has a similarly uncompromising vibe. Now, don't get me wrong: Atlus games are never humorless, and the mainline SMT entries are filled with a lot of wry and black humor, but the comic relief here strays uncomfortably close to what I'd term "slapstick." On that note, I'm not sure how I feel about Cielo, the sole Jamaican-coded character, being the primary source of bumbling comic relief in this game. If Atlus wanted to make this game more light-hearted, I wouldn't mind terribly, the aesthetics have to match up. The goofy anime antics in SMT IV: Apocalypse were fine because all of the characters involved looked like young people you might find in a Persona game. Not true here, and the subject matter is a bit too grisly for it to jive well with the vibe.
The way you're depicted consuming your enemies is a bit of a cop-out. Now, look, I get it: no game that doesn't want to immediately be horrifying and alienating is going to feature anything close to an actual realistic depiction of someone eating another person. But... there is supposed to be a carnal and grisly element to the cannibalism element here, and turning enemies into balls of light that you absorb just doesn't do it for me. I will say, though, it is very creepy and very cool that the best way to prime your enemies for consumption is to terrify them first.
Lack of demon negotiation and fusion hurts the game, and the Mantra Grid isn't a great replacement. The conversations and bargaining with demons, fusions, gradual learning of new skills via careful combinations of demons, etc. are a huge part of SMT games, and, just as PS2-era Persona games suffered from a lack of these elements, so do these games. The replacement of these various complex systems with a skill grid where you grind and buy all of your skills with macca isn't nearly as satisfying or engaging.
Human form, and guns, are mostly pointless. Aside from having to take a turn to transform when enemies get the jump on you or de-transitioning to hunt Omoikane (more on that in a sec), there's almost no point to becoming human, and, as such, no reason to invest in bullets either. It's pointless. You ALWAYS want to fight in demon form. It's just needless fluff.
Omoikane. These enemies are needlessly annoying. They're sort of like the Wealth Hands from Persona 4, but INFINITELY more annoying because of how quickly they flee and how absurdly difficult it is to find a way to damage them before they do have a chance to flee. Until you get to the point, late, late game where you might actually stand a chance of killing one (if it doesn't IMMEDIATELY run off, which it usually does), they're just an obnoxious waste of time whenever you happen to encounter them.
Field Hunts. So, I made these way worse for myself than they needed to be, because I didn't realize until near the end of the game that they would reset automatically if you failed them, so I kept restarting my PS2 to try them over again (more on that in a moment). Even putting aside my own idiocy, though, these mini-games just suck. You're given a super strict time limit to run around a series of rooms and... slash at orbs with your arms. You almost never succeed at these the first time because you have almost no room for error, and the orbs appear in specific patterns every time. At the end of these, if you're fast enough, you can fight enemies that, when consumed, give you a time of macca and experience with which to level up your currently equipped mantra (the set of skills you're learning at a given time). But the activity itself is mind-numbing. There's no skill to it, it's just pure tedium.
Lack of a soft reset function/the ability to quit to the title screen. So, I obviously blame myself for making the field hunts worse than they needed to be, but, even if I hadn't done that, it was still annoying that, if I did something and wanted to quickly reset the game, I'd have to restart the console because Atlus didn't see fit to add something as basic and helpful as a "back to title screen" option to the menu in this game. What a weird oversight, and one that probably added up to me losing hours of my life waiting for the stupid PS2 to reboot back to the point where I could pick back up from my last save.
Side-content is unnecessarily hidden. While I dig all the optional content near the end of the game, I don't like how hard it is to even know it exists in the first place. I hope you like randomly trawling large dungeons you've already visited in the past for minor changes that'll lead you to new bosses, because that's the only way you're ever going to learn about their existence without just looking up the info online.
Towns are very streamlined. Without any real equipment or quests to speak of (outside of the forementioned endgame content), there's just not a lot to do in most of the game's towns and hub areas.
Aside from optional bosses, the game is excessively easy. Like, really, really easy. So easy, in fact, that Persona 5 on hard mode gave me a good deal more trouble than all but the hardest optional bosses in this game. Pretty much the only times I died was when the RNG of random battles decided I needed to be kicked in the stomach and a bunch of rando demons spammed Mudoon before I had a chance to react. Some of this might be down to how streamlined skill acquisition is in this game, combined with the ease of obtaining stat boosting items. But the bosses in these games just aren't ferocious at all.
Bland music. I do sort of like the random battle theme in this game (although not enough to keep listening to it when I'm grinding; I'll just mute the game and put on good music instead), but the majority of the music in this game is really bland guitar-based alternative rock. It's weird, because I usually love Meguro's soundtracks for these games.
Unnecessarily ambiguous ending. I have NO idea what happened at the end of the game. Some random evil lady shows up as the final boss. I easily defeat her. And suddenly The Junkyard is blowing up, and everyone is comically floating around. At the end, we see the main character trudge into what looks to be the wasteland of a city. Is that the Junkyard, or did DDS1 take place in something like The Matrix? The latter is my guess, because there's a lot of computery jargon thrown around in this game. The Junkyard is probably a digital world of some sort, and the visions characters keep having, and references to previous lives, are actually memories they're having of when they were living in the real world. So I'm guessing defeating the last boss crashes The Matrix and wakes up our intrepid heroes This is all pure stabbing at the darkness, because the game doesn't care to explain what's happening at the very end.

Conclusion: Wow, that's a lot of complaining! I did quite enjoy this game, though. If it seems like there was a lot more criticism than praise, it's because a lot of the praise-worthy stuff... there's just not a lot to say about it. And, as usual with me, most of the complaints are more nit-picky than stuff that actually ruins the experience. Digital Devil Saga is, ultimately, a compelling and very fun experience. One I'd gladly play again at some point in the future. I'll absolutely be playing the sequel sooner than later, as I want to find out what happened at the end of the game.

Verdict: 7.5/10

Misc: The world of DDS is apparently quite deep, and extends to various forms of media. Not only is there a direct continuation of the story in the form of a sequel, but there was also a five-novel series adaptation of the mythology, translated into English as "Quantum Devil Saga." These were written by author Yu Godai, who originally created the concept and story for these games but eventually withdrew from the role for health reasons and was replaced by someone else. She chose to adapt her original vision for the story into these novels instead. Only the first two novels have been published in English so far. I'm INCREDIBLY tempted to pick these up once I finish the sequel.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy It's up.