Topic: Games you've recently beat

@colonelkilgore You used a big word and my head almost exploded. Damn you.

Anyways, you do that. I think it'll still be there when you're done though.

Just finished DiRT 3 on Series X. Another fantastic DiRT game, although not as good as DiRT 2. The main thing the third game lacked is presentation. I mean, the campaign of DiRT 2 felt like the Horizon Festival in Forza Horizon as you move around in an actual festival. While in DiRT 3, you just navigated through uninteresting menus.

Moreover, there was a huge lack of freedom and variety in DiRT 3 compared to the previous game. In DiRT 2, you were constantly given the choice of doing a different race or playing a fun mini-game like smashing boards. In DiRT 3, you had to follow a certain path in order to unlock the next race.

On top of this, the experience was bogged down by racing events called "Gymkhana". What you do in them is drive around a course and doing donuts, smashing boards, drifting, getting air time and so on. It sounds fun on paper, but the controls were so hard to figure out when doing e.g. donuts. It wasn't until towards the end of the game when I finally mastered them and at that point, the game was constantly giving me these events and they just got old really fast.

All in all, when looking at this game on its own, it was an enjoyable experience. But comparing it to DiRT 2, it feels like everything was a step back.

@LtSarge awesome. I’m willing to pick this up. Great to see it’s got positive reception.

@Th3solution I found the thread;

https://www.pushsquare.com/forums/ps3/all_1442_playstation_3_...

Good times.

@themcnoisy Ah yes! There it is! Actually ended up ranking 1151 games. Good times indeed.

I hope you’re getting along well, buddy. Living your days in happiness and peace. 😄

@Yousef- It's definitely worth checking out. After having played both DiRT and Grid, Codemasters has become one of my favourite racing games developer. They make excellent racing titles.

I picked up Severed for the Vita a couple of days ago, and now I have beaten it and got the platinum trophy for it. It was such an incredible game, and might just be my favorite game for the Vita, alongside Persona 4 Golden.

@Th3solution doing well my mate. Just 1000g samurai shodown and hopefully starting octopath traveller 2 over the next week. So things are swell!

How are you brother?

@themcnoisy Sounds great. I’m hanging in there, thanks. Always short on time, but I can’t complain. I’ve got a combo of games going all the time and still working my way through Dark Souls 2 and a bit of Immortals of Aveum on the side. Hope I can dust off Immortals this week.

I’m really curious about Octopath Traveler II, so drop some thoughts if you think of it, boss. I’ve been tempted to pick it up for no other reason than it looks beautiful.

@Th3solution will do. I'm playing a strange mix strategy game called merge and blade atm. So once it's done, it's OP2 time.

The world's gone mad close to me. There was a mass stabbing up the road from my work. 3 kids have died so far. Horrendous.

@themcnoisy Jeez… that’s awful! Be safe out there. It is indeed getting crazier by the day!

Agreeable sentiment, although I do agree KZ:SF is indeed one of the prettiest ps4 games along second son, it felt like, graphically speaking, they achieved what they set out to do and create basically those old ps3 demos we couldn’t actually play : D

Just finished Yakuza: Like a Dragon on PS5 after about 50 hours of playtime. I absolutely hated the final boss. As he gets low on health, he'll start using a move that one-hit kills the protagonist if it makes contact. It happened to me twice and when that happens, it's game over. There's also no point right before the battle to save, you have to go through the "dungeon" again if you don't choose to forfeit a vast amount of your money, and going through the dungeon takes about half an hour. Granted, I didn't think to use a move that the protagonist learns which lets him endure one-hit shots. But even so, it's just so cheap to have a move like that at the end of the game when I never had to use it once until then. I even went back and grinded for hours just to make sure I wouldn't lose this time, even though I probably didn't need to do it. It's just so stupid how many difficulty spikes there are towards the end of the game. Why do Japanese developers always have to have difficulty spikes in their JRPGs? If I want to play a challenging game, then I'll pick a game that's difficult or have higher difficulty options. It's completely unreasonable to have a balanced game up until a certain point and then make all enemies 10-20 levels higher than you. It's absolute BS.

I think this game has a great template but it's definitely rough around the edges. The story felt very dragged out, the substories were mostly uninteresting and the mini-games weren't compelling. The best part of the game was the new turn-based combat and I'm glad that it was well-crafted. Hopefully the developer learned from this game and made Infinite Wealth even better. All in all, this was a very enjoyable game and I'm glad to have finally played it.

@LtSarge you’re right about a lot of things. The “money retry” system irked me like hell in LAD8, if LAD7 is already annoying you, 8 will feel ruthless.

You may have also unintentionally misinterpreted how stats work in the game, I definitely did when I first played it. Stat growths works in this game in a way that deeply discourages switching jobs, as the strength of your party will depend on your job rank.

As an example:

Character A: Level 42, Job Rank 42

Will be a lot stronger than

Character B: Level 42, Job Rank 12

So you are discouraged from switching jobs, because you have to commit to maintain strong stars as job exp is hard to come by.

Your perspective is very refreshing to hear, people typically sing this game praises and shut off criticism of it. It makes it hard to discuss it when people pretend there’s no problems in it when it is really rough, and while I don’t wanna get ahead of myself, many issues are amplified in the sequel. The way that final dungeon is set up is kinda more common in 8, it’s harder to gain exp, easier to find difficulty spikes and is overall a drag. Story is also worse than 7 imo despite having higher highs than 7. The lows are a lot lower. Maybe you’ll enjoy the game though. My opinion isn’t absolute.

“ 10-20 levels higher than you. It's absolute BS.”
More common in 8.

“ Hopefully the developer learned from this game and made Infinite Wealth even better. ”
Sadly, not really. But who knows, maybe you’ll like it.

@Yousef- That's a good point about the job class system. I thought at first that you would keep all your stats and skills that you've learned because it seemed logical. But no, your stats with that job get removed and you don't even get to keep your skills. So there's no point in trying out different jobs as you'll just be under-powered if you don't focus on one, which sucks.

It's too bad to hear that the sequel also has the same issues but are amplified. Really don't understand why the developer is designing these games like this and the majority is fine with it. Anyway, thank you for telling me this so I can go into the sequel with proper expectations.

@LtSarge indeed, friend. I normally don’t get ahead of myself, because I like letting people experience things blind. But when I noticed the things that annoyed you in 7, particularly your complaints about the final dungeon and whatnot, it felt appropriate to warn you that they are more frequent in 8. So frequent in fact, you’ll be on your toes a lot. And even as early as you control ichiban. The game will also not only give you a false sense of security, but will likely severely punish you depending on which points you forget to save at, and it will sometimes rob you of certain tools out of complete nowhere with no real rhyme or rythim, making the game feel…. Just random at times. You’ll understand when you get there.

You can grind if you want, that will risk doubling your playtime. Even if you have your guard up, you will still feel either stupid or exhausted. Or both.

And no, the story won’t always make up for it. Trust me.

But, I still look forward to your thoughts on the game.

@Yousef- @LtSarge That’s not true about sticking to one job! You have to level several jobs as some skills carry over and all of your passive stat boosts stack. When I went for the platinum to beat the secret dungeon, I had 3 jobs at max level along with others at a high enough level to get the skills. Then you just change to your highest levelled job that you want all the skills in before fighting a boss. So I had Ichi as a Hero and Saeko as an Idol etc. But they were levelled in other jobs so that they had a diverse moveset. In fact, I would say that sticking to one job makes the game unnecessarily hard! If you struggle with grinding towards the end, just go into the Kamurocho underground and find the homeless guys that act like Metal Slimes from Dragon Quest.

@nessisonett I have the platinum for 7 too, and you’re right, but this wasn’t what I alluded to earlier (although I apologize for the confusion regardless).

When I was getting the plat, I wasn’t aware of how jobs until I begun doing postgame. Not unlike Sarge here, I always thought to myself if I had to do 7 all over again I would’ve stuck with one job most likely. Because of my presumption of how hard it is to get job exp and keep a consistent job rank, since your stats are determined by your job rank, not your a level. A higher job rank is more important than a higher level.

Now, despite my playthrough being similar to Sarge, I struggled very little. However, I could’ve been lucky, which is also what I was alluding to. I didn’t understand how stats are distributed until finishing the game. Because the main game was really easy for me and rarely challenged, but the True Final Millennium Tower was such a tough dungeon, it forced me to understand the system.

This cognitive dissonance has led me to mentally separate mid-to-endgame from postgame and treat them differently. Which is why when new players engage with the job system, I advice them not to switch too frequently and to try to use jobs that get double exp items (and try to beat the hobo with multi hit attacks, like Joon’s guns).

However, I’ve made the error to neglect that some passive skills do carry over. I didn’t feel it was important, due to the context of Sarge not doing postgame. I related that experience to things I didn’t engage with and learn about until I’ve done postgame where I truly learned how the game work.

As a final note, you also don’t need to get every job to rank 99 to beat amon. Just one is enough. In fact one of my jobs was rank 77 and I still beat him.

I hope this clears it up.

@Yousef- I’d still say that the stat increases that you get from every single job are important though, the player level is there to make you not have to start from scratch when changing job, meaning you can grind with enemies where you are in the story due to it being a straight power curve as every single XP point you get is put into your player level. Diversifying your job count to aim for the skills that carry over will still give you enough permanent stat increases to see an improvement in your main job. I honestly think that if you had 3 jobs at level 50 then you’d outperform a single level 70 job. Plus Nanba basically requires the skills from Chef, Host and Fortuneteller to be viable even in the story. Fire, lightning and ice damage on one character is too much to pass up.

@nessisonett what you’re saying is indebatably (why won’t my phone recognize that word…?) the truth. I just felt they didn’t affect me much when I did the plat. I got all jobs to rank 20 to unlock all passive skills, but (and this might be faulty memory) I didn’t notice a substantial growth in stats. I felt only one job was needed to get to rank 99, and that I lost a lot of time grinding jobs I didn’t need to.

The TFMT also only took a few attempts, which adds to my belief. However, you are in your liberty to argue I may have gotten lucky. I did feel there were a lot of close calls. >.>

As for “main story”, sorry, but I’ll call it quits. I don’t believe my perspective is reliable on this one anymore, due to how I engaged with the game and how long ago it was (and my ignorance). I think a replay might be necessary.
(However, you make a valid point about three jobs at rank 50, that one I didn’t try. I should look into it. Maybe on an NG+ run)
Best of wishes.