Ashtear @ Ashtear @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Yeah, I had to poke at Sky FC for a couple of years, and it took pandemic lockdown for me to get through it. I didn't get grabbed by the series until Sky 3rd. So glad I did, though. Zero and Azure are some of my favorite games ever.

I like what I'm seeing with the scenes in the upcoming remake, but my replay of FC/SC wasn't long ago so I'll certainly be patient on that.

It's a lot of fun. Round-less has always been my favorite way to do turn-based. I wish they'd do more with field positioning too (like the final boss of Zero), but the character kits are almost always cool and I like that they are always throwing in a tweak or two for the battle system.

This is how I ended up almost exclusively patient gaming for years starting in 2013. I'd been locked into World of Warcraft for since its first release and Pandaria era was really the first time I started looking at other games to play. I had plenty to catch up on!

I've made a conscious effort to start doing this in conversations in general instead of opening up a browser tab. Yeah, "just google it" is a thing, but asking is often enough if you're not in a hurry, so why not?

They overhauled the skill system in 2.0, and the major bugs like police spawning were fixed a while back. There might be some stuff from early marketing that still never made it in. I know the rail transit system was one of the common talking points, and it's in there now, but I wouldn't call it an essential part of the game or anything.

That said, I first played it after 1.3 and I can't say I ever felt like it was outright incomplete. It's probably still the most technically impressive game I've played and it's a fun sandbox. Solid writing and voice acting, too.

I lived out this way once upon a time and miss it dearly. I never did get as far north as Tillamook Bay, but I have great memories of Lincoln City and Newport. Imagine my reaction when this game was announced, hah.

The photo in Chloe's house of Arcadia Bay is one of Garibaldi, just mirrored. For plausible deniability, of course!

Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that's one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn't have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.

And that's what I don't get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you're not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you're not doing better than Freelancer--a 20+ year old game--for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the "Bethesda magic" their worlds are known for. It's like someone said "let's do Daggerfall in space" and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.

Yeah, goes back a ways! I feel like it has a knack for resurfacing after I've completely forgotten about it. I like what I'm seeing here with the gameplay.

Something of mild historical interest is that Magna Cum Laude had some genuinely brilliant dialogue here and there. The abusive arcade machine and tabletop RPG scene still stick firmly in my memory all these years later, and there was solid comedic timing as well ("Are those my Funyuns?"). Unfortunately, more good lines are cut up into the minigames, which act out scenes with gamified dialogue selection. Many of the games probably have to be re-attempted to clear, too, and no matter how funny a line is, it's not gonna be great the fourth time because you hit too many beers and can't control the cursor. The game's also very much a product of the irreverent college movie genre, which has aged in the worst way. Consent issues and all.

Al Lowe's games were more highbrow, for lack of a better term, so they didn't go quite as far off the rails. They seemed to be the kind of thing aimed at a Playboy Magazine reader. One of these, Love for Sail, remains my favorite of the bunch. I think they really hit their stride with the gameplay in that one, and the writing and the visuals were solid, though I've seen better in this genre since.

I didn't see great reviews for Wet Dreams so that was an easy skip--I've been ignoring the series since MCL--but it's interesting to see a high opinion of those games. I almost never see anyone talking about them, much less in a glowing way.

The Great Ace Attorney! Just finished the third adventure. I'm a huge fan of the original trilogy and was skeptical this would measure up, but it's been a brilliant evolution of the series so far.

It's fairly one-note at first, but you will get options later that will allow you to soak some hits. Make sure you're keeping your pictos updated.

That said, yeah, in a game with a fully developed dodge and parry system, you're going to be expected to at least dodge almost everything when playing on high difficulty.

LT: I knew pretty early the scope of the universe, the level, and the script, so I made my dream soundtrack. For example, I would take a level and would want to write three environment tracks, two battle themes, and one boss theme. I do that for the whole game and — one by one — I’d write the track for five years until the end.

This is what's so nuts to me about this soundtrack. It's not only quality; it's quantity too. Those who have played the JRPGs that inspired this game know: for the entire game, you get a few regular battle themes, a few boss themes, and a final boss theme. Some of the consensus top soundtracks in the genre aren't this big. Yet this single composer did multiples for each level. Only the biggest projects in the genre get this kind of treatment.

I'm glad Broche gave Testard so much run for this game, and gave him the tools to make it sound great, too.

Mine does, yes, and it has a great inter-library loan system, too. As long as it hasn't come out recently, I have access to a big chunk of the Switch library.

Unfortunately, it looks like going forward that it's not software costs that are going to be the biggest problem, it's hardware. Adjusting for inflation, hardware has never been this expensive this late in a generation in my country. Not even the PS3.

For me, FTL: Faster than Light still hasn't been topped. Hades II might get there, though. Disco Elysium, Ikaruga, and Papers, Please are also high on the list.

Per Gematsu (and others by now, I'm sure).

The irony is outlets have never been more transparent about review process, embargoes, disclosures, etc. because of all that, and yet....

Can only lead a horse to water, though. A staggering amount of people can't tell the difference between independent reviewers and paid influencers.

Like you said yourself, it's risky.

That said, I think SQEX is one of the better large publishers out there about giving ideas some leeway. Hell, they let Yoko Taro make really fucking weird shit for far longer than was reasonable until it finally paid off with NieR: Automata.

If by capital "R" Remake you mean the full three-game treatment FF7 received, Kitase's already said they're not planning on doing that again. Future remake projects, should they happen, will be smaller in scope. An FF9 project was leaked twice and is heavily rumored, so it's most likely next (if it wasn't quietly cancelled, anyway). We also don't know exactly where it would fall on the spectrum between remaster and remake, but the Epic leak suggests it's more of a remake.

FFT is the one I'd like to see the most, and it has even more rumors around it. But, I would expect that would look something like Tactics Ogre Reborn, mostly a remaster. It could really use some modern features, like a move undo and some UI enhancements, like a helper for zodiac signs. What I want the most from it is an orchestrated soundtrack. It's a gorgeous work that deserves the full treatment. I'd also love to see more content, like extra side quests, but I'm not holding my breath on that.

FF6 is the most logical next step after those in terms of enduring popularity, especially if they want to target the Western market. It would probably be super controversial in the fandom, though.

I've actively tried not to be a Blizzard doomer, but Nexon? I guess wealth extraction is where these IPs are now. Bleh.

Pains me to hear it called a failure, it's such a delightful game. While the Western release years after was not part of initial development, it's also a landmark game in English localization history. The script brilliantly handles the puns and other specific quirks of the original Japanese while also setting a standard tone for this series and similar games that followed. For example, I don't know if Kansai-ben was translated into a US Southern dialect in a video game before this one.