Maf

This is a 2021 JRPG by Mistwalker exclusive on Apple Arcade and I'm about 3 hours in to it. My understanding is the Mistwalker team worked on Final Fantasy. I don't know which ones, but I assume FF7. Because this, at least to start with, is the most on the nose FF7 clone I've ever played. It literally starts with the guy in the thumbnail^. Yep, I know you see the hair and the headband and the earrings. It's a guy. He's name is Leo. He has AMNESIA and WEIRD HEADACHES THAT GIVE HIM FLASHBACKS. Leo starts in a FACTORY/REACTOR that is EXPLODING. SO HE MUST ESCAPE while being chased by the FIRST BOSS who is a BIG ROBOT that takes time to CHARGE UP A BIG LASER BEAM and shoot Leo with it. Leo then has a flashback to a CAFE WITH A SECRET BASE and a HOT ANIME GIRL WHO HE MET BECAUSE OF SOME FLOWERS. Stop me when you've heard this one before. The big difference between this and FF7 is this game is kinda dumb and a lot slower. Not that I mind too much, I've played it for 3 hours. I do like the game. It just does the default JRPG stuff and I enjoy the default JRPG stuff so by default I enjoy this. If you're going to copy a game, FF7's not a bad game to copy. After about an hour or so it does start to break away from the FF7 template and there are some cool moments and story beats that happen. It's just the beginning was so on the nose I couldn't quite believe what I was looking at. From a purely cynical perspective I guess they know FF7 is beloved and know that people playing JRPG's on Apple devices probably are a lot younger and not familiar with it. So for them it's all new. But if you've played FF7 it's like wow. Mechanically it's got some neat gimmicks. The battle system is turn and "row" based (?) system. Basically you can't hit enemies in the back row. But the 2nd party member who can use magic can fling her magic in a boomerang style arc around the front row, or hit multiple enemies at once. You do it by touching the screen and bending the line. It's neat. It's a cool thing. The other gimmick is the main character has a Ghost Busters style ghost trap which collects enemies as you wander through areas and then you can fight them all at once. There's barely any narrative reason for why you can do this (So far). But it's clever because instead of constantly stopping for turn based battles you can collect a whole area at once and fight them at the end. There's a little bit of risk/reward as you don't want to fight too many high level enemies at once. But the game is very easy so far so being able to fight 30 guys at once instead of 10 sets of 3 is good. It works well with the bending magic thing too because for one spell you can pop a lot of monsters at once. Another thing it does is the areas are like dioramas. So walking through the forest area can look really quite stunning with how 3D the presentation is. Some of it doesn't work and looks rough, some of it I didn't even notice, and some of it looks great. Really eye catching. Yeah. Now it's stopped being quite a FF7 clone I'm not entirely sure where it's going. The game is sometimes so dumb it made me eye roll. Just some contrivances and the girl talking about how she grew up in the forest and then came to the city to learn about human beings, human lives, human emotions. That bit was killing me. But overall I'm actually really liking it and will probably play more. I'd give it a mild 7/10 so far. It's pretty ok.

😆 Ridiculous this has become my disappointment game of the year. I wasn’t even looking forward to it or paying attention to it, only tried it on a whim. It immediately got it’s hooks in me and I was blown away by how good it is. But the more I learn about it, watched some YT videos on it, and now that article above. Wow. I went from no interest, to really liking it, to man fuck this shit. I think I’ll just start D3 next week instead. According to what I saw it has all the same character classes and pretty much all the same moves and powers and such. Separate all the MTX and shit and just talking about the part where you play the game, this would have cruised on to my GotY list. But all the shit that comes with it. Hopefully when MS buy Activision they can readjust the game or make a Gamepass version and strip the bullshit out of it. But for now I think fuck this game. What a shame

I've been reading Marauders #1 & #2 today and it has a really interesting anime/kids cartoon art style. It's actually a bit overwhelming on certain pages and I can't tell what's happening but I do like the look of it all the same. Now as for the story 😄 There are retcons and liberties taken all over the place but it's fine. I'm actually enjoying it but some of it you just have to accept and be like "uh-huh".

Refer to my previous screenshot in this thread. It's these bars that drive me mad. Same on Playstation as well. Can't stand not seeing this shit at 100%. If I hate the game, or the game is too hard, or whatever then so be it but if I can do it I always try.

I sat down today and powered through the 2 DLC levels. They're both pretty well done, I'd say the second is better than the first. But I've played so much Alan Wake I don't think I liked either as much as they deserve to be liked. If that makes sense. It's a 'It's not you, it's me' situation. Both levels have an achievement for not dying through the entire thing. In theory not so bad. Each level is less than an hour long and stick it on Easy mode not bad. At least for the first level. I got the no death run first try but had to play it almost through twice for the collectibles I missed. The second level had me raging at this game. There's two achievements. One for not dying, the other for getting past a jumping section in 60 seconds. ... I was so mad. Alan Wake has one of the most spiteful jumps I've seen in a long time. That shit's fucking mean and unpredictable. You have to jump off this flying bed off on to this platform and if you miss you die. I messed it up 5 times which meant I had to play the opening 10 minutes up to it that amount of times. +1 Because I already did the DLC once before the no death run attempt. But once I did that part the rest was no sweat but damn I was fucking pissed. 1500/1500g thank you and delete. Gotta save that hard drive space.

I started exploring Apple Arcade and there's a tonne of great titles on here for £5 p/m (but this first month is free). Pathless (The PS5 game?!), Valiant Hearts, Monument Valley 2, Creaks, The Last Campfire, Manifold Garden, Rayman Mini and a few more too. I don't know how they all control on tablet but it's still a great selection of games right off the bat. Googling it though this service has no marketing. There's a few independent YT channels getting 20-150 views per video going through new releases, but no one is really talking about it. Even Apple doesn't feature Arcade on their main channel and seemingly have no second channel dedicated to it like they do for Apple TV. Seems weird how mobile gaming is the biggest market, Apple has it's own service, and no one cares at all? Looks cool to me. More first world problems but it does introduce another complication in modern gaming and that's another place to get "free" games. It's like before buying anything anymore you really have to Google and search the game everywhere first because there's a decent chance you can always get it for free, discounted or part of a service. Some of the game's mentioned I've already bought on Xbox and Switch. I'm not going to start a thread for every game and I don't know how much I will use it so I thought a general summary thread for games on there might be good enough? First games I've played is Monument Valley 2 which just like the first one is brilliant. This morning I've played Rayman Mini which despite being an auto runner is pretty fucking fantastic and a great Rayman Origins/Legends spin-off. It's not as good as the main games but not miles away. It's really good. I played about an hour of Oceanhorn 2 yesterday which is a decidedly meh 3D Zelda clone. Like it's not truly terrible, but it's no way near good enough to spend time on.

Finally finished this. I both like this game, don’t like this game. Glad I played it, gladder to see the back of it. There was one final 5g achievement for reviving a co-op buddy and of course the game is dead. So I had to create a whole new email account, a new gamer tag, sign in on the Xbox, join my PC game run in to a bad guy and revive myself. Mr Popular ☹️ But done it and it’s complete

04/06/2022 - The Ascent (PC) 1000/1000g

Ok, so some quick hits and then on to more in depth thoughts about the game. I managed to get a 256GB king size iPad so I could play the game. Total memory required (as of now) is 12.9Gbs...Good luck playing it on your phone This is my first real dive in to phone games so if I say things about quality or MTX's that sound dumb or obvious it's because I've never dealt with it I've played the opening of the game 3 times now. First on the iPad until I hit what is basically level 2, which the game kept prompting me to create space and install but I couldn't make it work or create the space. So I jumped on the PC and tried to pick up from there but had to start from the beginning and do the tutorial bit again (I think the PC version is rubbish but more in a sec). Then I got hold of a new iPad and despite logging in with my Battle.net account neither of my previous 2 characters were selectable. It says on the website you can pick up your game, transfer stuff across from PC to mobile. But I couldn't work it out and said fuck it and played through it again. After putting the game down I messed with some options and thought I lost my 3rd character and was like oh FFS. It took some clicking around but I found out that the characters are tied to servers. So I now have all 3 but they could have made that more obvious (Or maybe it is obvious and I'm new to these games) So you might think " Maf, why would you jump through so many hoops and play the beginning of the game 3 times over? Are you that stupid?" Well 1) shut up and 2) because it's really fucking good. The start of this game all the way up to the first real dungeon where the ability to play with others opens up is excellent. On my 3rd time I got it down to about an hour. I've played 3 character classes. Necromancer first, Monk second, Mage third. The first one is a nice balance of magic and melee and great fun. Second is all melee and I really didn't like this class. The moves weren't fun to use. Last is the Mage who has some pretty standard style but satisfying magic spells that do so much damage, the heaviest hitter of the 3. But she also takes the most damage for balance. What I like about this game is the pace. This game is a mover. The action is very quick, hectic and satisfying. The cutscenes are fun and cheesy but never longer than a minute. The level ups, loot, unlocks, spell upgrades come thick and fast. My 3rd character is now level 20 with 6 spells, two bits of gold gear and that took an hour. In the beginning they just throw shit at you and it's really fun and compelling. The maps seem a bit on the small side. I've never played real Diablo so don't know comparisons, but I would guess these are much smaller maps. The only negative for me is there's really nothing that could be called 'exploring' yet in the game. Just follow the gold foot prints from point to point and there seems very little reason to not follow it. But that works for the tablet and the game's gotta go fast attitude. Just zipping all over the place getting things done very quickly. I actually like it. Also who knows, maybe the maps get bigger after level 2. The combat is super simple and really fun. Just hold down one button to do standard attack and constantly click through whatever cooldown is ready to go. It's brainless, but it's good. Great animations, sound, feedback. It's just a fun thing to do. Some of the bosses maybe will call for running around and avoiding attacks. But so far you can kind of stand there and wail on fuckers and it works. Another thing I like is the look of the game. It looks really good. I'd say somewhere between a X360 and PS4 game. Tonnes of action can happen on screen and it performs excellently. What made me laugh is on the iPad it has a bunch of visual options. A 30fps/60fps toggle which seems to really work! 3 levels of graphics setting for shadows, effects, all this stuff. You get more options here than on most console games which is funny. It's also partly why the PC version is rubbish. Firstly because this game just plays and controls way better on tablet, that's no question for me, the touch controls are better than the M&KB controls. But also the PC version is just the mobile version with seemingly no extras or options or anything. It looks worse simply by being on a bigger monitor. Never thought I'd say this but the Apple device is the way to go if someone wanted to play this. The 3rd thing I like is the co-op party stuff. Very easy to get in to a party with randoms and do 4 player dungeons. The screen gets so busy, things popping off everywhere, and you get to watch these boss's health bars melt which is very fun. I really like this aspect of the game and want to do more with it. But This game is MTX'd out the ass. Even though the opening bit is really slick, fast paced and fun. Just after that all these icons appear on all these menus (Or were gradually appearing everywhere until I noticed them). This is where the game starts to feel like a scam. I'm not against paying for stuff in F2P games. They have to make their money, you didn't pay for the game direct, so I understand it and despite never actually buying a MTX in any game ever - I understand it. But the amount of fucking menus, meters, unlocks, things to be bought with currencies. I just look at it and say oh my god. What a come down. One of the things they have is a premium battle pass for a £5. See that I'm tempted to get because I like competing the missions in this game, and doing these extra meta objectives are fun. But then you can also buy a single costume for "1600 purple blobs" which according to the store = £21 😵 Are you out of your mind? That's half an actual game. For a costume. It just goes on and on too. I don't know how much of this is essential. But you can pay for gems, crafting materials, buy all your free daily rewards for a month upfront for £8.99. That's almost a tenner. For fucking crests and materials and coins and shit. Going by some Google searches the grind kicks in pretty hard at around level 30 if not paying for some of the key MTX's. Honestly I find that so disappointing because this game is so much fun. I almost wish it were just a normal £50 game that I could play without all the F2P, MTX bullshit because I think the part where you play the video game is really good. The part where the video game tries to squeeze all these fucking £1's out of the player. Not so good and really undermines the whole thing. Like I said I'm tempted to buy the battle pass, but am then put off when reading just how much of a blood sucking scam this whole thing is. I am going to play more, to see how bad it gets for myself. Because I'm seriously enjoying playing this. MTX aside, this is a class video game. But if it really ruins itself like all the articles suggest I think I'll just start Diablo 3 on Switch instead.

Can we start a E3-like thread and put all the updates and shows in there? I'd be interested in watching a lot of it and it'd be nice to have a central thread for the info and times etc

I'm sure he is as bad as people say but I've literally not looked at the details of a single move he does. Everything I know is what I've got from playing against him. Which is don't jump. S2 I will be looking, labbing and understanding characters better. But I really don't know anything about Anji or how his moves work so for me he's very hard to fight against.

I went mad in May and bought so much stuff but I can't remember what most of it was now. I did get 3 cool Switch games, though

He has a great counter that looks like 3 other moves, his jump attack is unbeatable, an inescapable super reversal and a combo string where right at the end can be a low or a overhead. He’s the only character in the game I have to force myself to not jump against #anjitoolow

Anji too low.

I’ve played about 1-2 hours of Diablo Immortal on my iPad and love it. It’s so good. I’ve never played a Diablo game before so have no idea how it stacks up to “real” Diablo games but I really like this. However the thing that’s stopping me from playing is storage of all things. It seems like it needs 10gb of storage on my device and no matter how or what I try I can’t make that much so the game has basically stopped. I’ll try move it to PC because there’s a version there but I actually really liked playing this on the tablet 🙁 First world problems I know but what a dumb roadblock

They do that in Smash for some characters where the motion inputs get more damage Bit more gameplay here + showing off a new fake, live commentary feature. They really are going for the eSports angle with this game. I’d turn the commentary off but the gameplay looks good.

Wow. So I heard this game was not good but I’m thoroughly impressed so far. Maybe it’s because my expectations were lowered, but this campaign has some really cool stuff. Easily more than any CoD before this is a character driven story. A special team of 6 have been captured by Nazi’s and being tortured one by one, and in between the torture/interrogation cutscenes they do flash back levels about each character and what they did to get a spot on this special unit. CoD usually jumps violently and wildly from level to level, big action to big action, and it all feels really distant and emotionless. Like a series of set pieces with some background noise narrative stringing it together. But with this context and the set up it really works much better. It’s not The Last of Us or whatever, but compared to previous games, leaps and bounds in the narrative department. Speaking of TLoU perhaps the coolest character is Polina played by Laura Bailey. I just finished her level and it’s really great. She plays a Russian girl who lost her family to the war and is only fuelled by revenge. Her level is excellent with a good mix of big set piece, stealth sections, sniper sections. What makes it different as well as these levels feel much bigger and longer than past CoD’s. So far each level has different sections and each section has it’s own style of action or objective. The other thing with them going so hard on story is the cutscenes are really long. There’s one cutscene where they first get captured and introduce the Nazi interrogator* which goes on for nearly 10 minutes *(played by one of the Lord of the Rings’ Hobbits of all people, the likeness is really good) The gameplay is the gameplay. Shooting is the shooting. So not much different there. Although I will say it’s nice to play a WW2 shooter again. The last one I played was, well, CoD WW2 from about 5 years ago but that game was lame so it’s refreshing to play a good WW2 shooter. The only downside is graphically there’s lots of glitches and weirdness. Also no HDR support on Xbox. Google says it exists but not according to my TV. I’m really surprised how hard they went on story and how much it’s working for me. Again not some boundary breaking innovation in game stories, but really surprising for CoD. I like this a lot so far.

Not a bad show. Nothing really excited me proper but most of it looks good and stuff I wanted to play. I wonder what Spider-Man will be like on PC. They’ll be fun fan mod costumes and stuff I’m sure but in terms of features, it’ll have to be a really big improvement for me to buy it again. I already completed that game 5 times

Looks like the VR release going to be 2023. But all these games look good.

Playstation showcase in 30 let’s go

I ended up looking at a YT build Even though I wouldn't call it 'easy' it's certainly a lot more manageable than where I was at. Cleared that boss I was stuck at and on to the end game now. Basically put everything in to DPS and vitality. So I had to respec and take all my points out of MP and instead put them in to Crit chance and tactical weapon. Still dying here and there but no way near as bad as before Besides that, it's taken me a while to really appreciate it but the RT in this game is sick. It's pretty much everywhere but the thing that got me is there are NPC civilians walking around with plastic, transparent umbrellas and even on those you can see the neon signs and lights and such reflect in them perfectly. It's really impressive.

This game is going to make me cry. I'm at a main mission, which is supposed to be - how do you say it. I can't even think I'm so mad. The mission is character level 17, my character is 20 and I am getting fucking annihilated. I don't even see the point of doing side missions because they're all character level 21-28. So if I can't do the lowest one. It's basically a horde boss fight in a lab with a big metal robot boss and literally infinite bad guys. I just don't know what to do. I've tried every combination of things I have and none of it is getting me through this. I'm going to try get back to a weapon shop and upgrade a heavy weapon like a rocket launcher or something. Maybe that'll help with the crowd But it's not really damage it's just survivability. I can watch the boss's health drain at a reasonable rate, it's the billion bullets coming from every direction around the boss I can't get through. Survivability has been a constant pain in the cunt the entire way through this game. Even skirmishes on the way to missions can get me killed just trying to get to a place. I already on the way to this mission had to leave a house full of chests behind because it was filled with enemies too high level. This will sound stupid but this game would be better if it were better, you know what I mean? There's nothing wrong with the core part of the game. But there are so many bad decisions around it. Traversal is so long and boring and confusing. They need a better fast travel system and a Dead Space style light on the ground that shows you where to go. For this boss I'm stuck at all the machines that give health don't refill on death - but the enemies do. So even the 3 rooms that lead to the boss can cost 50% health before I even get there and I can't refill. Like what is that shit. What is the harm in having health packs respawn if the enemies also respawn. You put them there for a reason when reaching the area the first time. If you're reloading the area reload those too. I tried messing around with the mods and augmentations that are supposed to increase survivability like one that gives a % of health back on enemy damage, there's one that 'restores life vitals' but I have no idea what it's doing. The powers in this game fucking suck. One of the things that is really pissing me off is the powers are tied to both MP and cooldowns. Like one or the other c'mon. I dunno. I'm either going to try find a online rando to co-op my way through this or drop it down to easy. But both options sound like such a cop-out. The PC version is bugged as fuck too. I've fallen through the world at least 20 times. Most of the time on respawn. It's like the character loads to quick for the floor or some shit. I've had a bug where I can't pick shit up. A Bug where I couldn't use the map. I've had a bug where interiors go blurry for some reason. What a fucking terrible time I've had with this game today. Just let me get through it, c'mon.

Yo Years ago I said one of things I want from Pokemon is to be able to go any where you want in no set order, and to balance it the game scales with you. Maybe this is it? Or maybe it’ll be somewhat forced like you can go to the level 60 gym straight away, but good luck with that. In SS they have a bad system wear gym badges lock you out of catching Pokemon of a certain level. For example you can only catch Pokemon above level 35 when you get the 3rd badge or whatever. So possibility that this comes with restraints but…still sounds cool. Also since it’s the meme of the day

I still don’t understand Millia’s safe jump. I do the actions so it looks like a safe jump but it definitely isn’t. I saw a different version of it I need to try. If Millia gets really good buffs in S2 I’m really going to actually lab stuff and try to learn it. Because I never did any of that really. I only went as far as setting Ky to jab on hit to test out jH combos. I still love this game though and actually want to get better at it still. If I don’t get to Celestial fair enough, I’m happy having fun on floor 10. But I still want to understand how to play the game better. There are still a lot of fighting game “things” I just don’t understand and want to learn

I’m not as harsh on it as you lot are but it does look boring. For me it’s the wrong vibe, wrong look, wrong atmosphere. Everything looks wrong. In this instance they probably should have resorted to tried and true bright green, bright blue, orange and brown checkerboard pattern everywhere. I sort of agree about the animations and physics, but to me it’s not that they don’t look good as they don’t look right. In previous games they’re basically racing games with a jump button so there having physics and stuff would get in the way. Sonic needs to ping pong off stuff really fast and snappy. But this not a race track this is a open world and so they needed to change the movement to fit the challenges, which it doesn’t look like they’ve done at all. So to me the movement doesn’t look bad, because this works, but it doesn’t suit what’s going on here from the look of it. Correct me if I’m wrong but has Sonic Team not had a new, good idea for Sonic since Adventure 2 when they put grinding in the game? Because the boost meter was in Sonic Rush which was made by Dimps. The drop dash was made by the Sonic Mania team. Someone on this forum once told me “it doesn’t work like that” and I know they’re right but gut Sonic Team and restaff it or shut it down proper. I’ve been saying this for so long. EDIT: I guess Sonic Team did the drift cornering in Sonic Unleashed but still that was in 2008