Topic: Games you've recently beat

@BlAcK_SwOrDsMaN awesome! Just got to edo myself and did a couple missions. Switched to oxtail blade. I'm enjoying the move set. It is the closest thing to a kirisugama from nioh, which was my weapon of choice. Finally a tough boss fight, enjoyed the challenge. Did you decide what your playing next?

@Elodin Just amended the post above, Thanks! - it feels awesome! definitely Nioh 2, more of the same but mixed with the supernatural. Have you played that one? Thoughts about how it compares to RotR? Especially in terms of difficulty please?

@Elodin Edo was cool, congratulations on your progress, And oxtail blade is nice but as mainly a Souls Strength Build type of guy I stuck with Greatswords as soon as I got 'em!

@BlAcK_SwOrDsMaN nioh 2 is my favorite souls-like! The weapon choice with elemental additions and enemy capture moves make for huge variations. It has some tough fights, but any souls fan should be able to overcome. Good luck!

@Elodin Thanks!

@Malaise Now that I’ve passed my former prejudice against card games (thanks to Inscryption) that Voice of Cards sounds interesting. Yoko Taro is one crazy genius so it’s one I should consider trying

@Malaise The whole trilogy is on sale for $30 right now… Gotta admit, I’m tempted. You can never have enough palate cleansers in the backlog. 😄

@BlAcK_SwOrDsMaN Huge congrats, man! Glad to hear you saw it through. I felt Ryoma was an incredibly well realized character, full of passion, quirks and flaws in equal measure. Good luck with Nioh 2! It’s pretty hardcore but once it gelled, it became an all timer for me personally. Mechanically, it’s simply sublime.

@Jimmer-jammer Thanks, dude! Yeah I thought he was an awesome character Did you manage to keep him alive during your playthrough? And did you go Pro or Anti Shogunate? I was Anti at first, then Pro, briefly ,then returned to Anti for the last missions when it was a last chance type of thing (I think....that's correct!)

And, yeah, I have high hopes for Nioh 2, hopefully learning the parrying in RotR will have been good preparation for the similar system in Nioh 2 and it's DLC.

I just beat Beyond Good and Evil, with what I believe is 100% completion. Great game.

Sly Raccoon/Sly Cooper and the Theivous Raccoonus

Sly was the only one of the PS2 holy trinity of Sony Platformers that I'd never played beyond a demo for this very title.

So it's nice I've finally had the chance to not only play it but beat it.

Shorter then I was expecting and I don't think it was quite as strong of a first outing compared to Ratchet or Jak 1 but it was pretty good.

Fantastic even for a studio's second title who were still learning the ropes of game development and working on entirely new hardware (Their previous title being an N64 game).

I've heard the second is a vast improvement so hopefully that gets ported soon!

@BlAcK_SwOrDsMaN My sincere apologies, man. Been run off my feet as of late. Think things are balancing out a bit again.

While earning the platinum, I ended up going both ways but in my initial play through, I committed to anti shogunate. I also flip flopped around a bit before the final decision. It wasn’t an easy decision!

@Jimmer-jammer It's all good, man, hope the film work is going well. Yeah, I tried to do what I thought Ryoma would have wanted, based on his words and behaviour throughout the game

@BlAcK_SwOrDsMaN Thanks! Yeah, I felt the rpg elements within the narrative didn’t fully come together but it was interesting to see the different ways things played out. Though, for a man who was ready to die for his love of Japan, I suppose his fate could be seen as positive regardless of the outcome.

Stellar Blade, got all the trophies on that too.

Just finished Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PS5 after 15 hours of playtime. Absolutely phenomenal game! It's now my favourite entry in the series just because of how varied and fun the gameplay was. I feel like all the previous games have followed a specific formula but this game wasn't afraid of adding mechanics from modern games. Things like running with L3, wall-running and dodging with circle, it just made the game feel more modern. I also thought the game was going to be short but it had a lot of content. So overall, it's the best game in the series thus far. I really enjoyed it!

Can't forget to mention how gorgeous this game looks on a 4K TV. It was my first 4K experience and it honestly felt like I was playing a game on my PS5 for the first time, even though I've had the console for over a year now. I'm so glad that going forward, I can experience all current-gen games on a 4K TV as it just enhances the experience so much. It actually feels like I'm playing a current-gen game now. I'm really glad I chose this game as my first title on my new TV.

On a side note, the trophies in this game almost soured my experience. I had like 5 left to get and I spent an hour just trying to get a bronze trophy and I couldn't get it. Then I got screwed over by the game's lack of manual saving and lost an hour of progress. After that, I just couldn't be bothered anymore. I bloody hate trophy hunting now. It ruined my experience of Assassin's Creed Mirage last year and it almost ruined my experience of this game as well. I'm never going for the Platinum trophy ever again. Even if there's one trophy left, I'm not going for it. I haven't been that serious about trophy hunting for years now and have only been going for easy Platinums. But now I'm completely done with getting Platinums, period. I'm constantly wasting my time when I could've been playing other games instead. It just stresses the hell out of me considering I don't have as much free time as I used to, so I value my free time a lot and get really annoyed when I have my time wasted. I just don't have the patience for it anymore.

@LtSarge I like trophy hunting when the process is fun and relatively straight-forward. I don't bother when games have terrible trophy lists, though. That's the reason I have the platinum for Persona 5 Royal, but not OG P5.

Also, I'm amazed how many people allow trophies to hijack their ability to enjoy games, period. Like, I've talked to several people who won't play games without system-wide trophies or achievements of some kind. Or who won't play games because they don't want to deal with bad trophy lists.

That said, I'm going through Steam and am trying to get all the achievements for new games I bought, and it's fun. Really pushes me to explore the games more thoroughly than I usually would.

@Ralizah It was fun collecting achievements/trophies back when I didn't have many games to play but now that I have a huge backlog, I'm constantly thinking about what I want to play next. So whenever I collect trophies after having finished a game, it just feels like extra time that I could've spent on another game. So when I don't make progress with collecting trophies and a fair amount of time has been wasted, that's when I start to get stressed.

My problem is that I've always had a completionist mindset ever since I started gaming. I want to do everything in a game, including collecting all trophies/achievements. So now I just need to learn to abandon that mindset and simply focus on the game. When I've beat the story, then I'm done with the game.

@LtSarge I have the same mindset as you when playing games. One issue I struggle with now is playing games for fun rather than for trophies. I have a difficult time playing games on Nintendo Switch because if it’s on PlayStation I’d like to get trophies. I’ve tried getting myself out of that line of thinking but it’s difficult. The only time I can play a Nintendo game for the sheer fun of it is if it’s an exclusive such as Zelda, Mario, and Metroid. I don’t know why my brain won’t let me separate those things.

Hello. Today I managed to beat Ape Escape 3 and will like to try write an extensive User Reviews/Impressions review that I will post in that respective thread, once I’ve done the post game and give myself time to let my thoughts marinate and properly absorb the game. Suffice to say, it’s been one of my favorite ps2 experiences thus and can confidently claim it sits comfortably of my Mount Rushmore of definitive PS2 titles alongside Max Payne, GTA Vice City and Warriors Orochi, dethroning Ratchet & Clank which is still extremely good. Review is coming “soon”-ish.