Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Mar 11, 2022 4:54:34 GMT
So, Imperial Khador, do you recommend the pixel remaster over the original? I'm curious because I'm thinking about finally playing FF 6&7 later this year, and now I don't know if I should go with the SNES original (through emulation) or the remaster. What do you suggest?
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Post by Imperial Khador on Mar 11, 2022 10:06:53 GMT
So, Imperial Khador , do you recommend the pixel remaster over the original? I'm curious because I'm thinking about finally playing FF 6&7 later this year, and now I don't know if I should go with the SNES original (through emulation) or the remaster. What do you suggest? I would say the Pixel remaster is a solid choice (though I'm not done yet), particularly if you don't already have an attachment to the SNES original
Wide-screen is nice, the system requirements are minimal, the reorchestrated soundtrack is great. They've mostly stuck pretty close to the original, extra things like post-game dungeons from the GBA release aren't in there, for example. But, they do use the GBA script, which is generally accepted to be the better ones, and there are some nice little quality of life enhancements.
The SNES does have some glitches, like the DEF score not actually doing anything, so if you go that route, you might want to check out fan-patches for the ROM. Hopefully you'll have a good experience either way.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Mar 12, 2022 8:35:52 GMT
Imperial Khador - Thanks mate, nice to know. Having achievements, a bestiary and other extras tend to be another incentive to fully explore and finish the game, so the pixel remaster seems to be the better choice for me, I'll probably go with it. Meanwhile, I've been playing two sequels that are good, but slightly below previous games in their series: Dead or Alive 4 (X360) is, visually, another improvement for the series, though a small one - it's not a jump as huge as going from DOA 1 to 2, or even vanilla 2 to DOA 3 or 2 Ultimate. The textures are in a higher resolution, the characters have a few more polygons and some arenas have more things going on, especially the dinosaur valley. Besides all the previous characters returning, all with expanded movesets, there are four completely new characters: Kokoro, a girl that fights like Virtua Fighter's Akira, Elliot, who is a younger version and apprentice of Gen Fu, the awesome La Mariposa, a luchadora that mixes wrestling and capoeira moves, and Spartan-458, a guest from Halo that comes with an exclusive arena. Spartan-458 feels tacked on, with a simplified moveset, but the other three characters have distinct fighting styles (even Elliot) and are very fleshed out, all great additions to the series. La Mariposa, like Elena from Street Fighter 3, is the fanservice of the bunch, fighting in a small bikini and too many jumping moves that emphasize the jiggling physics - this is a Team Ninja game, after all. That said, the gameplay has a different feel due to a few changes in the combat system and the setting itself. First of all, DOA 2&3 weren't exactly realistic, but the fighting styles themselves and most of the moves felt very grounded, as if the fighters were really skilled people that trained very hard. They were a bit less realistic than Virtua Fighter, but not completely in the realm of fantasy, besides the final bosses. DOA 4, on the other hand, goes a bit beyond and turns them almost into super heroes: the ninjas have way more teleporting moves (the final boss can be very annoying due to the constant teleporting), every character has new powerful looking charging attacks and the more agile characters have way more gravity-defying moves. Even the cutscenes feel more fantastical, so there's a change in tone and the combat looks even less grounded in real moves and styles - I personally think it went a bit too far, but I understand that's a matter of preference. The physics were also changed accordingly, with the characters floating quite a bit more. As a character can also be hit by any normal attack even after hitting the ground, which didn't feel very fair to me, it means the game now has a focus on longer combos and juggling, which I really dislike - most fights are decided by three or four attacks followed by huge combos, instead of the constant back-and-forth of the previous games and their balance between blows and counters. The combat is still great, but I rank it below DOA 2&3. Another notable change was the AI: on Normal, they made it as aggressive as the previous games on Very Hard, so it feels like cheating when it perfectly counters a variety of moves thrown at it (Bayman in particular, on Time Attack mode, will counter almost everything - I can only defeat him by using grabs and my own counters). It's doable, but the learning curve became much sharper due to how punishing it is when you miss a counter or do not mix your moves enough - the CPU will abuse the juggling system and throw some very long combos. On the unlockables side, it has more clothes than DOA 3 but far less than 2 Ultimate - on DOA 4, Kasumi has 7 clothes; on 2U, she had 20. Most characters only have 3 or 4. It also lacks 2U's collection mode, items that you got from playing on Survival. On the other hand, there are six more fighters than 2U, so it becomes a matter of choosing between more fighters or more customization. I also think 2U had more arenas and they were larger, with more tiers. All things considered, I'm loving DOA 4 (already unlocked every character and most clothes), with La Mariposa obviously being my favourite new fighter, but DOA2U is still by far my favourite in the series. The other game I'm playing is Dark Souls 2 (PC). Let's put out the bad things first: I absolutely love the Souls series, but the combat is pants. Like really terrible. Coming from Platinum Games' and Team Ninja's games, it's obvious that From Software makes very janky combat (although it seems they finally got it right by Sekiro, I haven't played that one yet). The collision boxes correspond badly to the characters and weapons, the timing for parries never feels right (the enemies' attacks go through my shield during the parry animation, it looks bizarre) and in DS2 they even messed up the i-frames from dodges/rolls - for some reason, they decided that an attribute changes how many i-frames you get from rolling, so it's always terrible to get a feeling for when the invincibility starts and ends. To give an idea of the jankiness, yesterday I dodged a sword attack, my character had already rolled far from the enemy, then the game literally teleported my character back to inside the enemy's sword. The jankiness was glorious! Another thing that I qualify as a bad decision is that, unlike Dark Souls 1, dying a few times reduces your maximum health to half of it, unless you turn back to human (with an item that exists in limited quantities). As a first time player that doesn't know how many "human effigies" I'll get, that means I am most of the time playing at half my health, which just feels like artificially dificulting things even more (luckily, later I got a ring that eases on that health loss just a bit). In comparison to DS1, there are many more unpredictable attacks coming from behind (almost every single time!) and more swarms of enemies, which also goes against the already janky combat that is tailored for 1 vs 1 confrontations. All that said... It's still hard to not love Dark Souls 2. The jankiness is a bit frustrating and funny looking, but the interesting setting and characters, the generally great level design which favours careful exploration, the beautiful visual style and the interactions between all its good systems (the souls, the bonfires, the upgrades to the character and weapons) all make it shine. Everytime I say that I'll play just until the next bonfire/checkpoint, but end up playing for hours, it's very addictive. It's not as good as DS1 and the combat is not even close to something like Nioh (to name a similar game), but I'm greatly enjoying it most of the time... Except when the supreme jankiness teleports my character back to an enemy weapon and I scream in agony!
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centipede
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Post by centipede on Mar 14, 2022 20:45:47 GMT
I've been playing the Zerg Brood War campaign in the original Starcraft. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds was a pale imitation, but at least you got to see some Gungans vs Wookies action.
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scipioafricanus
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Post by scipioafricanus on Mar 14, 2022 21:42:09 GMT
I've been playing the Zerg Brood War campaign in the original Starcraft. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds was a pale imitation, but at least you got to see some Gungans vs Wookies action. Classic game; still holds up.
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Post by Imperial Khador on Mar 15, 2022 10:23:02 GMT
Still working at the pixel remaster of Final Fantasy VI (World of Ruin now, but savoring it and slowed down a bit ). But in the meantime, I started Cosmic Star Heroine on the PS Vita. So far, I'm enjoying it. It's by Zeboyd Games and their stuff isn't top-tier retro in my opinion, but I've still enjoyed their older stuff (Cthulhu Saves the World, and the latter two Penny Arcade games). My opinions on the character designs are a bit mixed. I don't like the style their use for character portraits at all, but I really like the sprite work. Battles are sort of Chrono Trigger style, taking place on the map screen as you walk around without transitioning to a different environment. Battle mechanics are bit like their older games, focusing heavily on combat order, interrupts, etc. Music has been nice and atmospheric so far. The world reminds me of...maybe a bit more of a cyberpunkish take on the early Phantasy Star stuff. Travel between a few different worlds in the same star system, etc. It's only supposed to be a 10-12 hour game, so I figured this would be a quick, enjoyable one.
Edit: I think I'm going to stop playing this one, as it's getting a bit boring, and the writing's a bit flat. Unfortunate.
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centipede
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Post by centipede on Mar 15, 2022 22:50:30 GMT
I've been playing the Zerg Brood War campaign in the original Starcraft. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds was a pale imitation, but at least you got to see some Gungans vs Wookies action.
Classic game; still holds up.
They still play it in South Korea. Can you believe it?
Have you played Starcraft 2?
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scipioafricanus
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Post by scipioafricanus on Mar 16, 2022 0:29:12 GMT
Classic game; still holds up.
They still play it in South Korea. Can you believe it?
Have you played Starcraft 2?
Oh yes
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Post by Imperial Khador on Mar 18, 2022 6:57:58 GMT
Played a few hours of the 2019 version of Sakura Wars for the PS4 (on PS5), but it just couldn't hold my interest.
I'd picked it up on sale a while back, because it is one of those venerable Sega franchises I'd never really gotten into, even though I'd heard good things. I vaguely remember watching an anime adaptation some time in the late 90's or early 2000's, so I had a rough idea of the concept: Alternate Steampunk/spirit-powered mecha early-mid 20th century alternate history.
The visual style reminds me of the later Trails of Cold Steel games. I would say it looks a bit nicer, but also ran at 30fps instead of 60. Character designs were appealing, and I liked the voice acting.
I remembered these being tactical RPGs, so I was a bit surprised to find that the action segments in this one were more Musou-lite, but they played well enough.
I just found I couldn't get into the story. Despite the non-action segments featuring characters walking around, etc, it is paced like a Visual Novel, which can be interminably slow if the subject matter doesn't really catch your interest in my experience, and that was the case here. The non-action segments of the older games were in a straight-up Visual Novel style, so this wasn't a surprise.
I also found I couldn't quite suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it. Not the Steampunk or mystic elements, but the world building didn't seem to make much sense internally, and that always takes me out of things.
This entry is a soft reboot of the series, starting with a new a cast in an alternate 1940, about 10 years after the last game. I guess they wanted to adhere to some conventions from the old series, but it ended up not making of ton of sense because of it, at least to me.
A lot of this is background I went and read to try and make sense of things. The mecha teams in the original games were undercover as theater troupes, despite being a top secret military organization fighting demons...but I guess in the time-lapse, this is more openly known because even though it's explained as being a secret, every civilian visiting the theater seems to be aware of its dual purpose...and so the reasoning for this organization (and indeed many others) to still be undercover as a group of actresses baffled me. There was one reference to their job being protecting civilians, and that extended to soothing their woes while on stage, so I thought they might be drawing spiritual energy from their audience to power their abilities for fighting, and that would have made a certain amount of sense. But looking it up for the older games, it appears to be much more vague than that, mentioning song and dance as a way to build confidence. So I could almost understand it as a training regimen, but then they start bringing in outside characters who seem to indicate that the two are just intertwined: ie. if you want to be a famous actress in this world...you have to also pilot a giant mecha...and this is made more confusing because the main male POV character also is very good at piloting a mecha, despite not having done so before, not being a performance artist of some kind, and not having any spiritual powers, etc. They might explain it later, but my brain was just constantly twitching because none of this seemed to make internal sense.
The other one that took me out of it, was the nature of the theater itself. It's technically a military unit, as the POV character is transferred there from a naval command to help...but seems to be funded entirely by the performances of the theater itself, despite demon attacks being a real and constant threat that necessitates the service. So because the performers are inexperienced and the theatre is in disrepair, demon attacks are getting worse...but no extra funding is coming unless they start putting on some really well-received plays...
I could see if this were a gameplay mechanic. Plenty of games where you're working for a government or other organization seem to make the player characters buy their own equipment, but there didn't seem to be any sort of money mechanic in the game. These problems solely exist to drive the plot along, and since they made no sense to me with what I knew about the world of the game, it really took me out of it.
That said, the game does have a fair number of decent reviews, so I don't doubt that someone who was already fond of the series, or enjoys games that are heavier on the Visual Novel aspects might enjoy it.
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dschult3
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Post by dschult3 on Mar 19, 2022 17:53:36 GMT
I started to play Metroid Dread yesterday. I've put a few hours into it, and I have mixed feelings about it. I love the game itself. However, I hate the E.M.M.I. gimmick. Metroid games are usually about exploration and discovery. The E.M.M.I. sectors pretty much kill you automatically (I did parry it a couple of times, but that timing is stupid hard.), and it feels like it is completely out of place. It feels like a Bezerk game with Evil Otto. After dying 5 or 6 times last night, I oddly found myself drawn to playing it again. I guess I will update my feelings as I continue to play the game as time progresses.
With my family, I have been playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Cruisin' Blast, and Mario Party All-Stars on Fridays. The 4 player aspect of the games has been a blast. It feels like the old N64 days, to tell you the truth. I'm loving it.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Apr 11, 2022 22:57:54 GMT
Imperial Khador - I'm always curious about the Sakura Wars series, too bad that this new one and its genre change doesn't look very appealing to me. I got some Valkyria Revolution vibes from the trailers... At least your review says the action scenes play well, so there's that. I wish Sega took a page from Square-Enix's book and was more confident about tactical RPG games, as new Sakura Wars and Shining Force RPGs could rival Triangle Strategy and DioField Chronicle. I finished my Dark Souls 2 playthrough. I liked it, but some problems piled up as it went on. One thing that I must comment on is the online aspect of the game and why I hate when this is present in single-player games: because my internet is working well, it's From Software's servers for all the Dark Souls games that are down for months and I'm suspecting they won't be brought back. First, it takes forever to just start the game as it tries to connect to a server; second, many parts of the game are tailored to online play, and are lost for now; third, they designed the game with many secret walls with no indication, except for other players' messages telling about them - offline, it's impossible to find most of them by yourself. Which takes me to my biggest annoyance with DS2: the game is really stingy with checkpoints/bonfires and some of these are hidden behind those impossible to find secret walls: I was constantly missing some of them, making me repeat very long sections once I died. I wasn't feeling like the game was hard or challenging, I just felt that the game wanted to frustrate me by having no respect for my time. For example, it almost never has a bonfire close to the next boss: the game makes you walk for 5-10 minutes and deal with many enemies before getting to the boss room, getting wrecked by a new unpredictable attack, then losing those 5-10 minutes again. Now, put this together with my previous comment about the combat being pants and picture yourself killed by the janky combat and losing 5-10 minutes repeatedly. The problem weren't the bosses themselves, it was how much time was lost just getting to them until I could learn their attacks (and Dark Souls is based on too much trial and error). For comparison, in Ninja Gaiden games, the bosses are challenging, but once you die, you restart them immediatelly or from a checkpoint right before them - the game wants to challenge you, not make you lose time. I've beaten DS2 after around 60h, including the DLC content, but it felt like the game should really be 40h. I don't remember the previous game being as bad in this regard: it didn't hide its checkpoints, not that I remember, and they were near most bosses. My other grievance was also present in DS1, which is the DLC: it's good and in some ways better than the main game, but it both felt like it was extending the game too much and made my character too powerful for the final areas of the main campaign. I could tank just about anything, including the final bosses, which became a joke. The problem was probably in making the DLC harder than the endgame instead of inserting its content more naturally through the campaign. If you do the DLC before the final bosses (which the game pushes you to do), then the final stretch of the main game feels very anticlimatic by comparison. In conclusion: I liked DS2, but it had so many flaws that I feel completely burned out on the series and lost interest in DS3 and Elden Ring. I'll still play DS3 at some point as I already have it and most reviews say it's much better than DS2, but Elden Ring just looks like more Dark Souls with all the grievances and repetition of large open-worlds, which are already very time consuming. Imagine if it has the same lack of respect for my time as DS2. Some reviews on Steam praising it for 100+ hours of gameplay just scare me away of it. Sekiro still looks really cool, though! For my next game, I'm torn between Valkyria Chronicles 4 and Vagrant Story (played it 12 years ago, had a great time but never finished it). I'll probably go for Vagrant Story first, due to it being shorter.
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stratogustav
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Post by stratogustav on Apr 11, 2022 23:04:46 GMT
Yeah, those sound like good options before Elder Ring, Sekiro, Dark Souls III, and Bloodborne are actually 8th gen, unlike Demon's Souls, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls I, so there will be differences. That said, I would not forget about Nioh and Nioh 2 if cool 100% achievements is what you want.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes on Apr 12, 2022 0:13:20 GMT
Yeah, those sound like good options before Elder Ring, Sekiro, Dark Souls III, and Bloodborne are actually 8th gen, unlike Demon's Souls, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls I, so there will be differences. That said, I would not forget about Nioh and Nioh 2 if cool 100% achievements is what you want. Nioh is very, VERY high in my list of next games to play. I mean, it's a Team Ninja game, and the first few minutes I've played looked really neat, with a snappy, responsive and fun combat. Before including Vagrant Story in this list, it was a toss up between VC4, Nioh and Death Stranding: I'm only thinking about Vagrant Story and VC4 first because, after Dark Souls II, I want to go for a turn-based and more relaxed experience before playing another hard game. There are so many great games that I want to play this year! I'm not even talking about Wonderful 101, Shenmue 3 and Yakuza 0. All of them are sitting unplayed on my PC, and I'm not even counting some Sega Saturn and DS games that I also want to play, like Wachenröder and The World Ends With You. Let's see how many of them I can go through in 2022 - I'll keep this thread updated.
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Post by Imperial Khador on Apr 12, 2022 1:02:29 GMT
Cervantes I will say that, having played it a few years ago (mostly on the Vita), Vagrant Story is much more of a slog than I remembered. If your last experience was a good one though, hopefully this one will be also. It still has an excellent localization, and is one of those games I wish would get a proper remake. VC4 though, I heartily endorse. I had a blast with it.
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scipioafricanus
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Post by scipioafricanus on Apr 12, 2022 1:07:22 GMT
Cervantes I will say that, having played it a few years ago (mostly on the Vita), Vagrant Story is much more of a slog than I remembered. If your last experience was a good one though, hopefully this one will be also. It still has an excellent localization, and is one of those games I wish would get a proper remake. VC4 though, I heartily endorse. I had a blast with it.
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