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one-armed dwarf

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Posts posted by one-armed dwarf

  1. It's an ok remaster but I thought it looked weird pasting higher res visuals on PSP characters.

     

    Crisis Core is alright, though by modern standards I'd bet it's tedious. A lot of the VII spinoffs are different types of trashy but they can be fun. imo, people are a bit too uptight about not being seeing enjoying some good old trash now and again and exaggerate their badness. For that reason I recommend watching Advent Children. 

     

    The only one I'd really dodge is Dirge of Cerberus. It's just really boring

  2. tbh, my obi wan analogy doesn't even fit into this discussion of minigames cause outside of that one shitty one where you sneak past some guards and that one where you grab a swinging pipe I don't even really regard them as major flaws with the game as such. They are a big part of what gives the game its diverse flavour, the little gimmicks and novel interactions. It makes it feel larger than its runtime. Like a complete adventure in a huge world you hang out in rather than a series of encounters back to back where you innovative in new ways to set as many wolves on fire as possible at the same time with your levelled up materia.

     

    This is actually the part of FFVII that Rebirth quadruples down on btw, so you might want to reconsider if you want to catch up cause it's all about that. Of course there are some bad ones too, and in fact Rebirth surpasses the original game in this regard cause its bad minigames are worse than any of the ones in VII. But like mfnick says, I would say for both games the high points elevate the whole thing. You got to imo look at the whole thing as a complete composition, accepting that some parts of it are doing a lot more heavy lifting than others, rather than fixating on the bits which are not as good

     

    Unless of course there are so many of those bits they distract from the entire thing, which is fair. It's just I don't feel like that about it

  3. imo, people get too hung up on details like this. Flaws can be interesting, especially imo if you bring that historical curiosity to it that HD mentions. My defense for that Obi Wan fight is it offers the most clear inflection point between Star Wars and its classic samurai film influences. I think if you have a historical curiosity of the way these different eras bleed into each other and share influence, it just makes them more interesting to revisit even if the actual fight itself isn't as kinetic as the modern films (eps 1-3, 7-9), or as full of intergenerational torment as its direct sequels. 

     

    It's stuff building off of each other, it's all interesting to me cause you hear the dialogue happening in the background between these different filmmakers, and can feel Lucas' love of them. The first two Star Wars films are the only ones I have time for, cause part 2 is where it emerges more confidently into its own unique creation but the jankness of part 1 is just showing the strain of its craft, and I think that's an undervalued part of it

     

    I do think though that the scene could do with a few more camera cuts when Alec Guinness tries spinning around, a not so good trick for a geriatric. 

  4. Ironically the first time I played FFVII Remake was a demo in German, with German Barret barking orders at me to be a bit more schnell about killing the giant scorpion. 

     

    Still fucked it up despite the language barrier 🕶️

  5. Remake's issue is its all set in Midgar. It's a problematic game for me cause unlike others I really love its combat, and I think it has some cool things. But it's really not FFVII at all. Midgar is only cool as a setting when its this dense pressure cooker of an opening that you eventually leave, VII works cause of the contrasts and context switches of its journey which these new games really can't do at all cause each context switch is its own game entirely. 

     

    Rebirth also is not FFVII, it's more like a Disneyworld version of it. But in its somewhat vapid themepark-ness I still think it's a hugely enjoyable representation of my fondest memories of that era of FF. It's hugely successful at doing that and it's a game I recommend to people on that basis if you miss what those old games had to offer. Nowhere near as anemic and repetitive an experience as Remake, but you have to know not to overindulge on the parts that don't appeal.

     

    But on the topic of VI and IV, I've beaten the GBA version of VI and played a good chunk of GBA IV. I did not like IV, I felt the characters kept getting written out in increasingly uninteresting ways and despite being the first character focused FF it made me wonder if my time would be better spent on the character-unfocused NES games cause I don't think they had it quite worked out yet in IV. I'm sure the remake is a lot better though, I'm really interested in trying that one at some point.

     

    VI I didn't love as much as people online do, because a lot of people online played it in 1994 I guess whereas we didn't even get it in Europe until 2001, when FFX came out and the PSX version of VI had a demo for X with it (the idea being you were buying the demo, not FFVI..). I think though it's where modern FF really begins though, feels like a 16bit blueprint for the things they would do in VII. It has great music, probably close between it and VII for Uematsu's best

  6. I think I've just got a fairly high tolerance of anime-isms. Some of it is annoying. Everyone hates Aerith but it's Jessie and the Avalanche guys who annoy me, and the fact that one character's only contribution is hundreds of very not funny fat jokes. 

     

    But I just don't find that stuff such a dealbreaker really. I've played so many games with stuff like that I've gotten good at compartmentalizing it. XVI has much better character performances, and when I came around on Clive I'd say he's one of the better written FF protagonists. But it's still kinda part of the same tradition with these characters, people battling self doubt and stuff like that. 

     

    But XVI is a game which starts with a strong first impression and then turns into an offline MMO where 5 hours of fetch quests are punctuated by amazing battle sequences. I'm not saying that as a card carrying member of the FFVII defense force so much as trying to say people should adjust expectations if they think that the opening hours of that game come close to representing what the game is actually like. It's a game which does a lot of cool things, which is why I'm still sort of looking forward to replaying on PC with both DLCs (to make the boring bits more palatable). But unless you've played FFXIV Realm Reborn, you might be surprised at what this game actually is like when you get into it.

  7. I really liked this write up on the game

     

    edit perhaps minor spoilers inside, nothing I didn't already know though and I'm very spoilerphobic with this game

     

     

    There's a lot of like, I dunno, weird online drama going on around this atm. Beyond the performance and MTX stuff onto moreso the generally repetitious nature of how it's structured, its putting of systemic stuff over content and backlash to this. Its extremely 'light touch' of a story (this is putting it mildly). To which I'd say having a preference for either over the other is totally understandable. I get that not everyone wants a game about noodling around a weird janky world.

     

    To me though I guess I look at it as a Japanese version of a eurojank game. Or what if Gothic II actually had good fights against dragons, and not the weird shit they put in that game.

     

    Capcom really need to rethink their whole MTX thing though. I still contend that the MTX integration in DMC5 did nothing to change the overall flow of that game, but its actual integration into game over screens is disgusting and egregious (naturally, I never see this screen, har har). Even if within the backlash there's a misunderstanding of how the games themselves are designed, it's really on capcom to just not be doing this shit at all in the first place. Cause whatever way you look at it is clearly meant to take those hard edges of games such as these, character action games and janky bird horse murder simulators and take the part of the audience that doesn't get on with the hostile part of how these games are designed and turn them into an additional income stream. They are doing so well with their RE-engine releases that there's no real reason they need to be doing this as well. 

  8. Team Ninja have had a really impressive throughput these past few years tbh. Nioh 2 is like a benchmark of the action genre. I mean, I don't like it, but I understand its systems well enough and have seen it played at a high enough level to absolutely respect what it's going for. Their issue seems to be trying to turn that type of game into something with a broader appeal, and they are releasing so many 'tuned down' versions of that game. This one is one people seem really positive on, more than Wu Long anyway. But it's not surprising I guess that there's some technical compromise here. But still, it's a dev putting more effort than anyone out there in releasing these types of action games.

  9. I got Trickster to level 10 yesterday. I don't know if it's one I'd stick with. The gimmickry involved in making enemies fight each other is fun though, I had two golems fight a griffon, blowing it the fuck up with their magic eyeball lasers. The griffon flew away, limping, and I fought it again later that day. I don't have enemy HUD turned on so I don't know if the game maintained the state the bird was in during the first fight, but I certainly didn't struggle to kill it the second time.

     

    Other than that, it has this Elder Scrolls style 'detect evil' move where you can see enemy heat signatures through walls. So it's useful in dangerous caves and dungeons, basically a scout. I sort of feel though it is missing one or two really good skills to complete the class fantasy. I know there's these unique skills you can find from specialists, but I've not found one yet for a vocation that I actually play (or intend to play).

     

    I did have a very powerful Squidward mage help me out in that dungeon, but then he got mouthy and I got paranoid and threw him into the pits of mount doom, with scant a rotten apple to return to his arisen. That'll learn ye.

     

    Anyway I had the dragon plague mechanic spoiled for me, cause twitter won't stfu crying about it and considers spoiling its consequences a PSA for some reason 🙄

     

    I'm glad a mechanic like that exists though, it's exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for lol.

  10. Yeah, Epic sucks but in this particular case it's hard to hate them as the game probably would not exist otherwise

     

    Alan Wake II feels like a Bladerunner 2049 situation, unfortunately

  11. It is an extremely heavy game, and not all of that is justified by its game design I'd say. There's stuff going on with NPC state management, their disposition towards you, whether they are alive or in a morgue, their daily routines. But it's not entirely clear that is the main reason the game seems so heavily chocked by CPU. DLSS also appears to not actually work, doesn't improve performance but does make the image quality a lot worse. So I'm playing native 4k, trying to set it to 'progressive' scan but it keeps switching back to interlaced. I don't know why

     

    That said, personally these have been moreso annoyances than severe obstacles, but I'm playing on an ivory tower of a PC so I don't really feel I can give much of a recommendation one way or the other except literally just to maf cause our systems are just so similar. Other than some occasionally super disruptive frame pacing, which has happened maybe twice so far, I'm loving the game. I wish everyone could have a good experience but it's not possible currently cause is scales so poorly. 

     

    I suppose I would say download the character creator on steam, make your arisen and pawn, and then maybe try to see how much of the full game you can see within its 2 hour refund window. Though you're playing a dangerous game there wrt whether a refund will be honoured or not, I suspect many requests are being made with this game in particular

  12. It wasn't part of my plan to have my beastren dress like this, but for whatever reason the armour with the highest stats seems to show off the most amount of boobs and arse, even for the men.

     

    ?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Lett

     

    I've just unlocked the 'trickster' vocation, which is a vocation all about deception but you are unable to directly damage with your weapons. You create illusions of yourself, try to convince the monsters that they are you by hitting them with the incense and you can do things like astral projection and create illusory walls to fuck with the AI

     

    I find this really interesting, as I'd spent a lot of time on mage and was struggling to see what the point of it was. But then I ran into some fights with griffons and cyclops, some taking place at night, and figured out that the way the game works is there's an element of randomness you have to sort of submit to. Nag mentions it with the town attacks, but it's in everything. You have to trust that your warrior pawn is well versed at parrying enemies with its launcher ability*. So you have to manage your stamina a bit, take the cue from your co-mage when they say 'let us cast our spell together and have it come out faster!' that you're good to go for doing just that. The ally AI seems to have a really good knack of knowing how to resolve combat mechanics, usually the deaths that have happened to my pawns are a mea culpa, like not using 'roar' as a warrior to pull aggro off them. They have far poorer survival instinct when it comes to their pathing when exploring, they slip off cliffs. But to me the combat seems like a more impressive and difficult problem that they appear to have solved here. 

     

    The most interesting thing about the game isn't combat however, it's just one piece of the precarious jenga tower of interacting systems and its always enjoyable, never annoying jank. If a griffon happens to dive bomb you in the middle of a minotaur fight and an ox cart comes tearing through and crashes into them and people fly everywhere like physics objects, well lucky you, you're playing Dragon's fucking Dogma II. That's what you're here for. It's a game with stretches of mundanity punctuated by explosions of random and unexpected events. Some of them they want you to see, others are these kinds of random collisions of different things. 

     

    The biggest thing about it I think is you've got to try and sort of not bend it to your will. I found the stuff with the MTX news a bit interesting cause a lot of people looked mainly at the cosmetic MTX, which I do agree are gross (you can change your appearance in this, but it's not a trivial amount of in-game gold/RC to do so). But the bit about the furour of the fast travel systems, it's hard to articulate how important the fast travel systems are in this game but not in the way you might expect unless you've played stuff like Morrowind. Or Death Stranding, maybe. Or Gothic. It's about how it all integrates the world together and with your progression. Time is important, in the sense that things need to happen slowly. Ferry stones are the fast way of getting around, but very expensive (early on anyway). Ox carts are another 'fast' way and much cheaper, but in-game hours pass when on them and you can have random monster encounters on them, and those monsters might be a griffon and minotaur tag team (not happened to me yet, but I heard it can). So there's a potential for massive disruption there.

     

    Time passes and you can fail quests, so do you really want to take that ox cart which might explode in a fiery mess of feathers and gore? Wasting all that time just to save 9000 gold. But this is also the point, it's what the game is about. At one point I fought a griffon and mounted it, and (im going to spoiler this, because I think it's tool cool to say out loud but it's why Dragon's Dogma is an amazing game)

    Spoiler

    the cunt flew me across the map, while I was in the middle of a timed quest to rescue a boy from some wolves in a cave. Flew me to its nest in the middle of nowhere and I had to fight my way back during the night to make sure I was on time, pitch blackness, lantern turned off to avoid detection by ghosts, the eyes of saurians piercing through the darkness. Immersion and danger. Then I bumped into a cyclops, heard only by its roar and the shaking of the earth, its one eye the only thing I could actually see, scarpered from that one.

     

    Now I've made sure that if I expect night combat, I try and bring my mage cause I have a light spell that does holy damage to zombies

    and so the progression comes with the learning how to deal with these curveballs. You want to go to that next city? Take this narrow mountain pass but watch out, beasts be lurking. Sure will be nice when you unlock a FT system to get around it, huh? Or when the story progression might relax getting to this particular area

     

    But that's where the game happens, this organic crashing together of crazy shit. It's not a hard game, but it's a very dynamic game. The fact that time matters, that quests send you off to come back a few days later, the way exploring, questlines, fighting/physics/combat AI and resource/survival systems interlock together in such clever ways. It's why 'janky' shouldn't be a pejoratives, cause polished games don't do half this type of shit. You can't curate the outcomes of a game like this. If you want to buy those FT MTX then go ahead, but man you're not even playing the game at that point

     

    *(actually, I wonder does the player train the pawn to do that, and if it re-uses DMC5's cameo system? The game doesn't say one way or the other, but I know it was something I was learning to do while playing Warrior). 

  13. Play a character with a meterless reversal, find out what the option select is to block on one side and do the reversal on the other, if you block you're good. But if you DP then when the safe jump blocks the reversal, use meter to escape the DP punish with purple RC and then put them back under pressure

     

    Of course, Millia can't do this, lmao.

     

    (actually using RC to undo the DP might require specific timing, I'm not sure tho can't remember)

  14. The thing is, you want some friction and danger with a Resident Evil game. I guess you also want some sense of direction, but frankly I thought Alan Wake 2's sort of more free structure shows that a different approach can work. The thing that's great with Dragon's Dogma is how poorly laid plans can fuck you up, in exactly the same way that a poorly prepared run from one side of the mansion to the other can. Admittedly, a ton of the appeal of these games lies in their intimately laid out hallways and shortcuts. But even a game like DD can do stuff like that, just in a different way.

     

    Perhaps that's all recency bias, but in either case I think it's a mistake to think of all OW games as having a similar approach or being dismissive of such an experiment. There are definitely more games than Ubisoft icon cleanups. There's very different types of OW that can still have pushback and consequence. It's something Resident Evil hasn't really tried either, and I think it's in a bit of a stale position right now, relying on remakes and the Ethan stuff has really sort of petered out. Like, if you're a fan of classic RE, FPS RE, action focused RE or even VR RE, every single one of these tastes has been very well served the past few years so imo there's not much to complain about here

  15. The problem isn't with open world games, it's about games putting content ahead of craft. But there's lots of open worlds which don't do this

     

    You know, I bet Nag would agree with me, but Dragon's Dogma's item box and adventuring mechanics would work really well with a Resident Evil game. The way you have to plan, and can get caught out in night, you can see the Resident Evil DNA in it

  16. I think both of these DLC look really good, the boss fight I saw in the first DLC looked really good. But I'm anxious of about 12 more sequels to Blacksmith's blues

     

    But I'm holding out for the PC release now. I wish they just kinda bit the bullet though and made this a straightforward DMC action game, cause it's already decent at that part anyway. The RPG side didn't seem needed (and Rebirth trounces that side, even if combat isn't as high execution)

  17. I took the day off to play, as mentioned. It's good, but so far it sort of feels like it's just replaying the hits from the first one. It's not clear what makes it a new game tbh

     

    It did stick out that the title screen does just says Dragon's Dogma, so perhaps that's on purpose. The physicality of fights is improved, they are fraught affairs and modern visuals and physics sell that in a much more convincing way. Night is dangerous, your lantern glints in the eyes of monsters. You can chuck an object, enemy or even your own pawn at enemies to damage and stun them. You can play all out offense as a fighter/warrior, or more long distance support and ranged with a mage (no idea what ranger is like). You can create small platforms out of ice spells, and shield your allies with magic.

     

    There are performance issues on PC, but I also doubt there is a better way to play it than that. But so far it has a similar vibe as going from dmc4 to dmc5, in terms of how similar it is (the point being, it's the same dev team on both series sticking to what they know, with a 10 year increment in technology being the main justifying factor here)

     

    Hopefully there's something a bit more surprising later on. It's just the familiarity of it has me feeling bored, at the same time if you've never played the first one that will not be a problem for you at all.

  18. I really liked The Batman, but still find this a bit puzzling. It's such a gimmicky performance by Colin Farrell, a lot of fun in the film but I'm not super into the idea of a long form story about him.

     

    Definitely going to check it out though, Bats and Gotham remain the only comic book-ey thing to pull me in right now

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