Topic: What (Non-PS4) game are you playing??

@Malaise The lack of a HUD would be really cool if it was executed with any sort of competence.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is kinda disappointing. The original was this tight, suspenseful drama with a hilarious rivalry between you and Majima throughout that escalated in absurdity.

Kiwami 2 just feels like it's spinning its wheels for the entire game. Combat was dumbed down. I literally spent an entire chapter just trying to fend off some sketchy manager guy who was weirdly insistent on turning Haruka into an idol against her will. And this is after I fought off a bunch of tigers in a magical Japanese castle that rose from the ground like a LoZ dungeon. I know Yakuza is absurd, but that absurdity is usually grounded in reality. This was all just pretty stupid.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (PS5) - Currently (stuck) on the final boss. I've genuinely loved the game until now in spite of many things to nitpick about, however this final boss has to have the most disrespect of the player's time I've about ever experienced in a modern game. This thing is 10 phases long (with unskippable cutscenes), takes about 2 hours just to get to the end (even if you don't die on an earlier phase), with no option to save between any of it, and then once you get it's health down to about 10% in the last phase you have to finish it off in about 10 seconds before it charges an unavoidable OHKO move (all the while it spews this purple crap all over the place that flings you to the edge of the arena if it hits you).

No matter what I do I just can't deal enough damage in the absurdly short timeframe you have to finish it off (I even tried summoning Odin right before that final bit, but he seemed to be removed from the equation as soon as it started, which is BS. Also remembered that I had Limit Syphon on Cloud, so I was able to fire off two Limit Breaks during one run, however the game interrupted the second Limit Break's animation in order to trigger the OHKO animation which seriously ticked me off).

Sure, as long as you're still playing the game you can retry from that phase as many times as you want, however forgive me for not having the time to do so after spending 2 hours to get there in the first place (I tried about 5 times before having to put the game up). So now next weekend I'll have to start the whole thing over again from the beginning (I'll try doing it on Normal again this weekend with a few strategies I've read up on, but if that fails I'm not too proud to drop it to Easy the time after. If the game is going to BS me, I'll BS it).

Onechanbara Origin (Steam) - Years ago I grabbed a bunch of these low budget fan service games on PC in support after the "Sony Censorship" debacle first really started breaking. I'll pull one up occasionally and admittedly most of them end up being pretty mediocre at best, however as it turns out this one is better than most.

Sure, I probably still wouldn't give it much more than a 6/10, but it's fun. It's not terribly deep (or difficult), but the gameplay loop is fun, it throws new enemy types often enough (including frequent bosses) & only takes about 5 or 6 hours to work through the story mode so it doesn't overstay it's welcome.

Also not quite as pervy as many of the other games in this niche. Sure the leading ladies jiggle & don't wear very much, but it doesn't seem to have any modes that are voyeuristic for the sake of it (no "touching" mini games or the like) that you'd usually see in a release like this. The sexiness is just one element of the schlocky B movie horror vibe it has going on. Enemies dismember easily & pop like pressurized blood fountains dousing your player characters (& is part of a power up mechanic) as well as the screen, and one of the bosses is even a giant demon baby that uses it's umbilical cord like a whip. It's pretty twisted stuff, but fun.

Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door (Switch) - Just retrieved the Sun & Moon stones & am headed to Hooktail's Castle, so I'm not too far in yet, but it's been fun so far. Never played it before, so it's nice to finally be able to experience something considered a classic.

Stellar Blade (PS5) - Started this a couple weeks ago as well, just finished off the 3rd or 4th boss, and it's honestly the most fun I'm having at the moment. If you've played the Star Wars Jedi games, this is pretty much those (now with copious amounts of jiggle), and those were some pretty darn fine games.

It's maybe not quite as ambitious in scope, but it still looks & feels very premium, and at least so far doesn't come with any of the performance hiccups or bugs present in the SW games, so I'd say it's a winner overall.

I was playing Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux on my 3DS until I misplaced the thing the other day, ugh.

I don't like the non-press turn combat (feels very similar to the system in Soul Hackers 2), the music is unpleasant, and the game has WAY too much dialogue in it, but the dungeon-crawling and demon collecting is still good fun.

I'm very much in an SMT mood and won't be sated until SMT V: Vengeance is in my hands. Maybe I'll start one of the older SNES games on my modded Vita.

Picked up the Monster Hunter Stories remake. I really loved the second one and I think that is kind of to the originals detriment?

When Stories 2 came out on PC, I had no access to Stories 1 as at the time I had no DS and I tried it on mobile and that's just not how I want to play my games, so I just gave up and pressed on with stories 2 without an knowledge of the original.

As such, this is the first time I am properly experiencing the original. And now I see that Stories 2 is almost like a remake of the first one, but with just a massive amounts of quality of life, balance adjustments and tweaks. So the whole time I've been playing the original I just can't help but feel like I am replaying a worse version of a game I already played and loved.

That isn't to say I think MHS is bad, but it really needs to be played I think with zero knowledge of the sequel, so you can just appreciate MHS for what it is and does, in a way that's much harder to do when you've already seen it done so much better by playing the sequel first.

Started playing Kirby: Planet Robobot on 3DS. I honestly feel like my summer gaming has been off to a poor start as Far Cry Primal just isn't doing it for me. So I decided to play Kirby as well and it's an absolute blast. Having Kirby pilot mechs is such a cool idea. It feels rather refreshing, which isn't something you say about Kirby games in general as they tend to be very similar. Anyway, really enjoying my time with the game so far.

I don't know why, but I got the feeling earlier that because I started playing this game, that a port might get announced for Switch at tomorrow's Nintendo Direct lol.

I have been playing Fire Emblem Awakening and seem to have sort of unintentionally soft locked myself. I tried to keep a healthy rotation on my units, but naturally some units are just more useful and better than others, so I had a core squad of MVPs and then a backup squad all on the cusp of promotion but not quite there yet.

I am at a point in the campaign where their difficulty design is two things, split your units into small packs and then wear them down with seemingly unlimited reinforcements, to create a slow attrition drain walk to the boss. My MVP squad just isn't deep enough to survive the push to the boss in the campaign any more though.

I figured I just needed then to get my backup squad the next couple of levels they needed to be promotable and then expand the roster, let them soak up some hits while the MVP squad continue their push, but the AI is programmed to ignore all common sense or logic, and just always beeline for your weakest unit. They'll literally run past like ten of your units just to kill the one right at the back and its like... wtf are you meant to do? How tf am I supposed to keep underlevelled units upright long enough to get any XP?

I can't turn the difficulty down any lower so I think I'm just stuck.

Unicorn Overlord solved this problem, cause you could use strong units to farm a material that just gave flat packets of XP to any unit you wanted, so you could just keep applying those to your weakest units until they're strong enough.

Here though, I dunno what to do. You can pair the weaker units with a stronger one, but if the stronger unit is killing everything, the weaker unit doesn't get XP on a participation basis, so they have to actively be involved somehow. You can pair a stronger unit to a weaker one to bump their stats, but it just increases their chance of getting absolutely dogpiled.

Today I’ve decided to pick up and play bowser’s fury. I’d say it’s plenty fun so far.

Started playing The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures on Switch today. The last time I played an Ace Attorney game was back in 2016 when Spirit of Justice came out. It feels great to be back playing this series again. I have to say though that my sense of deduction was terrible back then, so I'm curious to see if I've become better since then. I've only played the first couple of hours (still on the first case but I'm nearing the end of it) but I definitely feel more confident than I did back then. Although I do have to say that there are moments in this game, which are also present in the other games, where you have no idea where it's going with that specific reasoning. But I guess that's just part of the series' charm and I just have to roll with it. Anyway, I feel like this is going to be a great title to play during my vacation as I just love a gripping visual novel.

Still Wakes The Deep is my most recent, jumped in last night for about an hour. Good pacing, incredible character expositions and world building before everything goes to ****. I expect no less from The Chinese Room, they delivered something special in A Machine For Pigs and I’m seeing notes of it here already. Supposed to be a short game, so I’m hoping to finish it before heading to the Lake next week.

I've been re-playing the Sly Cooper series on my PS5, thanks to the PS3 HD Collection still being available thru PS+ Premium.

Just recently beat Sly 2: Band of Thieves, currently on Episode 1 of Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves.

Currently trying to get Lost Odyssey out of my backlog to also stop myself from getting addicted to yet another musou or R* sandbox game. It’s a neat RPG, feels like a spiritual successor to FFX.

With Veilguard seemingly here in the next couple of months, I decided to go back and try to finish Dragon Age Inquisition. I'm one of those guys who has been with Mass Effect from the start, but has little interest in fantasy, so the DI franchise was just something I never explored, despite replaying the ME trilogy more than I have any other game.

During the pandemic for obvious reasons I finally had the time to properly sit down and explore the franchise. I finished 1, a game which is extremely dated and honestly just isn't that fun to play, but the amount of mechanical depth, the complexity of its systems, how dynamic it all was, the vastness of its scope. Its a game I admire so much, I think this is the peak of what BioWare have achieved and seemingly they won't hit these heights ever again. Even with 2 really readjusting expectations by being a major step down from one, Inquisition still felt like a let down all the same, as its just so far removed from the games which came before it. I actually disliked Inquisitions change in direction so much, I never bothered to finish it. It probably would have stayed that way, but since Veilguard is a direct continuation of a game I never finished, and a DLC I never played, I figured it was time to now try to roll credits.

I'm about 30 hours in now, did that over basically two weekends, so as you can tell, I am really enjoying my time with Inquisition this time around. Maybe its feint praise, maybe I'm just a different person four years later, but either way, playing Inquisition without fresh memories of the first two games has absolutely been a better experience for me. It sorta makes me want to go back and replay the first two as well, if it also works in reverse.

My original playthrough I was a Qu'nari Warrior. This was the first time you could pick this race so I was super excited, but unlike say Origins where your race was a really core part of your story, for Inquisition this choice basically just made you a big human with horns. Knowing this, I just went for a human and went for a mage, as its furthest removed from my first go around. Much like with your race choice, the class choice also has remarkably little bearing on things. Mages are a central part of the story, given its a continuation of what happened in 2, which was set up in 1. Like I feel like the game at least addresses me being a mage more than when I was a Qu'nari, but if you are expecting it to have some transformative effect on how the game plays out, you'll be disappointed. Its also especially weird cause you eventually get specialisations, one of them being a necromancer which is what I picked and was shocked it had no bearing on the story whatsoever.

Veilguard is apparently going to be a more linear, more mission based, experience and this is great news to me. Inquisition is designed like some sort of open world MMO but you are the only person playing. It can make the game extremely tedious as the game regularly grinds to a halt, forcing you to grind through mindless, boring, busy work to unlock the next story development. I feel very blessed to be playing this on PC, where there are extensive mods available to speed up, or just remove, a lot of this stuff for a far more focused experience that seemingly Veilguard will deliver without mods.

Combat itself is... fine, I guess? Levelling feels quite slow, and the skill trees are all rather shallow. This is kinda like a summary of combat in general to be honest, it all looks quite nice, but a lot of it is just quite hollow. Its also weird to play an action game where things like a dodge or a parry is a skill to be unlocked in your skill tree, and not just a core part of your kit. I will say it feels a lot better to play on a controller than it does on a keyboard and mouse, although navigating a lot of the menus and stuff on a controller isn't great.

My main issue with Inquisition the first time was how almost all of the depth and tactical nature of the first two games has been removed, and I still think this is a fundamental problem with this game. I never felt like I was fighting in a party, shoulder to shoulder with my allies overcoming challenges in the same way I was in the first two games, which allowed me to truly build and shape my companions in my image. You can technically control your party if you want here, but it sorta feels like its not really designed to be played like that. You can give your AI very limited instructions to follow, but the AI on your companions also isn't really quite good enough to be left alone with those limited instructions, so I dunno, I just feel like fundamentally at the core combat is just sorta broken. It seems like the main solution for this is just to make the game extremely easy so you aren't reliant on your companions, or failing because of them. When I played the first time, it really made me kinda hate this game, now with some distance I still think it kinda sucks, but I'm generally more just apathetic to it. I guess it helps that a mage is absolutely a lot more fun to play than a warrior is.

I know its a ten year old game, so we can't be too harsh on visuals, but I think the actual art style or maybe the way the engine outputs things just isn't very good. Almost every character in this game is so ugly, with these big mouths and tiny eyes. Everyone has unnaturally glossy hair (especially facial hair, which just looks so weird) and seemingly is perpetually sweaty. It is a shame, as I think the game has some excellently written characters and great voice acting (sans all the weird made up vaguely European accents) but I couldn't help but experience a micro jump scare any time a face took up the screen. I feel like every character that has made it to Veilguard under the new art style has had an immeasurable glow up, I guess just by changing the engine.

Outside of the main story thread and the cast, which I think are both genuinely excellent, probably my favourite part of Inquisition is how it makes you feel like you are truly in charge of this sprawling, volatile, organisation. There is a lot of like political machination navigation you are tasked to do, which I appreciate could risk being somewhat dry, but I sort of can't think of another game like this that offers this kind of fantasy in this context. Its like the systems of some sort of dry, text based, RTS or something layered into a proper cinematic action RPG and it just really sings for me. I believe The Veilguard is another organisation you are in charge of in the sequel so I hope a lot of this carries over.

So I just finished case 2 of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and I was rather surprised to see that there was no trial in this case! Very interesting and refreshing, I like that!

Also, while the characters aren't as funny as the Phoenix Wright ones, they're definitely as likeable as those characters. Cannot wait to keep playing this game.

I have been playing a lot of Way of the Hunter on my PC and Pokemon Y on my 2DS XL these couple weeks.

@Pizzamorg It’s interesting to read your comments and experiences returning to DA:I.

Like you, I couldn’t finish the game back when I first played it. My route to the game was a little different though. I never played the first two DA games, outside of some very limited time with the first game, which I found clumsy to play and only spent a couple hours with. But I jumped into Inquisition since it had a design that was more appealing to me. Despite my not knowing the lore and ongoing narrative, I was enjoying the game quite a bit, but the vastness of the game and the resultant tedium was what caused me to eventually lose interest. I think I sank maybe 50 hours into it. It’s always been a regret of mine that I never finished it. It was a weird time in my gaming life and I can’t put my finger on what kept me from completing it other than the overwhelming open world and then I also remember running into an enemy (a dragon, I recall) who I couldn’t beat and so it was all the obstacle I needed to just quit the game.

Around that time I joined Push Square and one of the first articles that I really enjoyed and sold me on the site was Robert’s recounting of his return to DA:I. You might find it an interesting read:
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2017/09/soapbox_open_world_oc...
I was able to search and dig that out of the PS archives. The article really spoke to me and I always thought that if I tried to go back to the game that I’d try to take the golden path and skip all the side content and see how that changed my experience.

Your expanded impressions show that the open world bloat isn’t the only problem with the game, though. So I’m not sure it’s worth my time to find out. If Veilguard comes out to high praise and has firm connections to Inquisition then maybe I’ll try to revisit it before playing the new game. As it stands, I don’t think I have much interest to return to the franchise.

Yeah it is funny @Th3solution cause the open world both has central vital purpose and is also probably the worst thing about it, at the same time. Again, for me, one of the coolest parts about the game is how directly it makes you feel in charge of the Inquisition, not just passively or just in key decisions, but in almost every layer of it.

Sure, like every "choices matter" game, the bulk of your choices are static and you are really just picking bits of flavour, but the Inquisition itself is almost like a cheat code to get around this, as it gives the player a lot of choices to make that can have tangible cause and effect, but can be kept ultimately quite isolated from the core narrative, so the core narrative can just continue along its path unimpeded.

As such, having these mini open worlds you push into, clearing out the monsters and setting up camps, fits with your wider organisational mission of bringing peace, order, control to the land (and what other values you assign to the Inquisition) as you stretch out into the world and quite literally plant your flag on it, in a way you couldn't probably do if each location was just a one mission sequence and then onto the next.

But at the same time, the open world design - like the article you linked to (which was a great read so thank you for that) just isn't that good. There is so much narrative dressing that seems so easy to slap onto your tasks here but they choose to not really do that with so much of it, making it feel more like you are doing Destiny public events without any other players. The maps are also huge, but mostly empty and annoying to navigate. Everyone you speak to adds a new laundry list of MMO busywork tasks into your log. Tasks, which are sorta half mandatory cause of the way you need to complete them to earn power, which is your currency to unlock more story missions.

Like with a lot of Inquisition, I see the vision but the execution just isn't there.

@Pizzamorg Are you a fan of Witcher 3? (apologies if you’ve discussed it in the past, I can’t remember) It’s cited as the standard for which single player narrative open world adventures should aim, but I also ran into open world / icon chasing fatigue with it and so never finished it. Another gaming regret that I have. If I return to an old PS4 open world fantasy then W3 is probably the one to try again. (It has a PS5 patch too, which helps)

I never finished it and this has also been a regret of mine. I have tried to get back into it over the years and just feel like maybe I missed my window, as I usually bounce off with a matter of hours.

The combat is really bad and unless you play it on the highest difficulty, you don't really get to properly engage with its full suite of systems. I don't like when games are designed like this and while Witcher 3's combat is more mechanically interesting on higher difficulties, it becomes even less fun for someone like me who wants a mostly frictionless gaming experience.

Plus, while it does what Inquisition doesn't do in giving lots of narrative dressing to your activities, I feel like Witcher 3 had even less to do and what there was to do was so incredibly boring, that all the narrative dressing in the world could not hide from me the repetition, and tediousness of every task.

@Pizzamorg My issues with Witcher 3 are well documented, but boil down to two main things: I didn’t click with Geralt as a character, and the overwhelming open world, in particular the copious icon/question marks populating the map. The gameplay itself wasn’t too much of an issue, but I don’t know if I even made it far enough into it to really get a good feel for the combat. I think I played it for about 5-ish hours, maybe a little more. Got through the initial town, did some side quests, and some flashback sequences, did a few main storyline arcs, and got to an open area and started chasing question marks and ended up at one point underwater trying to get a chest or something and was attacked by some water creature and I was a little lost as to how to fight in the water, so I got frustrated there. Then I figured if all these icons are so random and get me into scenarios that I don’t know how to handle then I just need to throw in the towel since I wasn’t enjoying it. That’s my recollection, but it’s been several years so I might have the details wrong. 😅