Topic: Games you've recently beat

@Th3solution They're sending me to the gulag for upsetting all the Alan Wake fans so my next review is going to be the 100 hour extended version of Life of Black Tiger or something.

@Th3solution @johncalmc Control on PS4 is one of the few games that’s made me feel violently ill. Whatever was going on with the motion blur or frame rate or something just did not sit right with me. It felt like playing a VR game. Then it outright corrupted my save. Still enjoyed it despite all that.

So that’s Metal Gear Solid 2 complete on all difficulties (apart from European Extreme, as it’s not a platinum requirement), with all the dog tags. The Harrier, the sniping section, Metal Gear Rays and Solidus were all a genuine challenge on ‘hard’… on ‘extreme’, well… they were whatever is more than a genuine challenge I suppose! ‘Good’ challenges though… particularly the Harrier and the Rays, they are some of my favourite boss fights ever tbh.

Well, I have a couple of missed trophies on the tanker so I’ll have to do a quick run on that with Snake and then onto the copious side-content.

@colonelkilgore You're a machine.

@RogerRoger cheers buddy but nowhere near @kyleforrester87’s level as this has taken me about 3 weeks rather than just a day or two… but I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone nonetheless. From what I gather now, the only potential block on the plat will be the VR sniper missions and some MGS Classic Snake VR missions… but it’s definitely on.

@colonelkilgore I really do remember those three bosses being really tough on the extreme difficulties, and this was like.. what 20 years ago? 😂 Tbh Vamp and the sniper section were also really hard I recall.

And although I cleared it 3 times in 1 day, those were quick runs through very easy/easy and normal to pick up all the tags.

@Keith_Zissou cheers dude… and I struggle with pictures and gifs too tbh 😉

@kyleforrester87 agreed on the Sniper section… I absolutely dreaded it on ‘hard’ and ‘extreme’… and to make matters worse on ‘extreme’ they only hid a bloody claymore behind a pillar that cost me progression about 3 or 4 times as I couldn’t work out what the hell was going on for a minute.

Urrrrggghhhh I lost my long post I'd written here... 😣

I haven't beaten so much as gave up on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (I'd just done the ship graveyard & cruise ship with Ramses)

In short I was getting bored with the story (which isn't a patch on 2's with some seriously bland antagonists and the mystery is taking FOREVER to be more then just some ancient city) and the gameplay felt a lot more annoying and unforgiving as well in the combat sections.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Oh noes! Hate it when that happens, I've lost a few long posts before. I always, always select all and copy before I hit the "post reply" button nowadays. My sympathies!

Also sorry to hear you haven't gotten along with Uncharted 3 as much as you'd hoped. If it's any consolation, should curiosity get the better of you somewhere down the line, you haven't got much more to play through after the cruise ship. It feels like there's a lot on paper, but the individual chapters are pretty short, and light on endless shooting galleries, as well. But goodness, life's too short, so don't force yourself to play something you're not enjoying!

@Iver Nice. I noticed Yakuza games are going really cheap in the current sale. I think Yakuza 6 is only $5 which seems a great price. Kiwami 2 is like $7, also seems a great deal. It makes me tempted to retry the series but I’ve concluded that I just don’t have the time to invest in all the entries. Seem to be great games though.

Yeah what I'd lost was a reply to you @RogerRoger in regards to Full Burst and a much more detailed write up of Uncharted 3 and I just didn't have the heart to write it all out again on Friday

As I previously (& hastily said) said I'd unfortunately have to agree with the majority and think Uncharted 3 is a bit of a step back in quality regards to Uncharted 2.

Which is a shame as I mentioned ages ago that Uncharted 3 was the only game in the series I'd played before and quite enjoyed it at the time.

But in the context of having finally played 2?

There's the interesting foil to Drake with Harry, Zoran Lazarević was definitely more intimidating and threatening then Talbot and Marlowe (who are as lame as the villain from the first game who I can't remember at all).

I even remember saying to you Rog of how I remembered the cruise ship sequence and how I quite enjoyed it only to play through it Friday for the first time in forever and think "was that it?"

... Also what's with EVERY single british guy in UC3 being a bulky baldy?!?! Even Cutter's bald and built like a fridge/freezer! (The only new character who was actually any good and again a nice foil to Drake with him being more cultured then him)

If I recall it's one of your favourites of the series so apologies I'm really not trying rag on it 😅

As for what I was going to say about Full Burst?

Just that I recalled the whole plot point of Itachi & Sasuke fighting Sage mode Kabuto and thought it was going to happen in the final chapter of the story given Itachi got freed from Kabuto's control before the fight with Nagato and I'd already unlocked that final character.

Makes sense though it wasn't in it originally as it doesn't quite fit in with the alternate ending they came up with for the game...

@Iver Nice. Yakuza 6 is great as it looks fantastic, everything has voice acting, and the story is one of the best. There are much less substories so the pacing works better too.

Clan Creator is back but works better than YK2, hostess clubs are also a little different (for the better), and new side games are fun.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the conclusion to the series!

@Iver I did play Yakuza 0 a couple years ago and just didn’t quite finish it. I liked my time with it though. But for me - it’s length got in the way. Perhaps if I tried to just mainline the story then I could justify trying to go back and wrap it up. But I’m caught in one of those weird spaces where I’ve invested dozens of hours into it so don’t want to start over, yet I think it would be hard to go back a pick up where I left off because I can’t remember the mechanics and what was going on in the story.

I like the sound of other entries being a little more focused and shorter, and so I have kept an open mind of trying the series again one day.

I have a few series that I’ve only played isolated entries, and it works fine for most when the narrative isn’t too interconnected. But when the story is one of the big attractions, I usually like to have it all, if possible, especially if it’s one continuum like Kiryu’s story.

So Judgement or Like a Dragon seem to be where the series goes away from Kiryu and might make sense for me if I did want to dip my toes again. But the price is right for Y1-Y6 which is why it caught my eye.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Absolutely no apology necessary; life would be boring if we all thought the same thoughts and liked the same things! And y'know, you aren't wrong about Uncharted 3. All of your points are valid, and I can totally see where you're coming from.

I think a lot of the reasons I prefer it as an experience come down to intangible stuff like atmosphere, soundtrack, setting and scale. Outside of the story's focus on Sully, of course (which is simply because I love Sully) and liking Marlowe's whole "creepy Helen Mirren" vibe more than Lazarević's "stereotypical angry Eastern European meathead" schtick... but then you're right, Talbot literally is something of nothing, and every Brit in the game does appear to be played by Phil Mitchell.

I'm just sorry you didn't enjoy it as much as we'd hoped you would! Do you think you'll carry on through the series and play its pair of PS4 games at some point?

As for UNS 3: Full Burst, my own recollection of the manga's storyline starts to get a little hazy towards the game's alternate take on things, so I didn't notice the DLC's discrepancy before. I think you're right, I think they shuffled things around to save something meaningful for the DLC, and I'm sure fans would've been clamouring for it to be included. I found it a sweet story, but a really difficult fight!

I cleared Tales of Arise (Steam) the other day, and it was pretty fantastic. It's more an evolution of the series rather than a table upturning revolution, but the many small changes made make it the best Tales game in a long time.

World structure isn't all that much removed from Berseria (in fact, it's probably more linear), so this definitely isn't some sort of open world transformation, however combat is much easier to grasp than the past couple games and your party will be performing fun, slick, & flashy combos of death in no time. That's not to say it's an easier game though, as I found that it was prudent to have cooking buffs active whenever entering new areas/fighting bosses to stay competitive (which isn't something I really had to do in past Tales games), and at the very start (with just 1 or 2 party members) even basic enemies could KO me with 2-3 hits. This MAY be part of a balancing push to get the player to buy the various buff/boost DLCs (of which I didn't partake), but to be honest I never once felt the need to grind for story purposes, and managed to beat bosses 3-4 levels higher than myself without much trouble. I only had one grinding session (maybe an hour long), and it was for the strongest optional boss (strongest before post game anyhow, which I haven't fully explored). The only other slight bugbear in the combat in my mind is that in late game your spellcasters get flashy screen filling attacks that can make it difficult to see the action at times.

There's a lot of other small changes that really add to the experience too (in addition to the lush modern graphical presentation). With the exception of the side quest dialogue nearly everything is fully voice acted, including EVRY skit, which by the way are now fully animated affairs (like living manga panels), and your different costume/weapon choices are reflected in all skits & cutscenes (except for the few anime cutscenes, naturally). The reintroduction of sci-fi elements to the series (in fact, I'd say the most sci-fi premise I've experienced from the series, though it's still full of fantasy too) makes the world building much more interesting than Zestiria or Berseria, and while I could see some coming, there were quite a few twists in the story & lore that were very interesting. I almost want to say it seems Xenoblade inspired (with dual low tech & high tech planets), but it still feels very much it's own thing. Character designs are generally pretty good, and their personalities play off each other nicely. Finally, while it may seem a bit heavier narrative wise than past games (honestly, I think Berseria may be just as heavy, though Arise's updated graphical presentation just makes it hit home a bit more), it still remembers to have a lighter side, in fact, I like to call it Tales of Owl-rise, lol.

For full disclosure, I did buy the Swimsuit DLC for the female party members, which does come with an extra branch to each of their skill trees. I don't believe these offer unique skills though, just further boosts to skills they learn in-game.

That's my third run of Final Fantasy VII Remake finished.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, it was pretty easy going as it was using my old save with my top level characters and high level materia, and I only played on the normal difficulty. As such, I breezed through most of the battles (having Cloud so strong and with materia allowing him to use triple slash straight away saw me through most small encounters almost instantly) but some of the boss fights still took some effort.

Those boss fights really are great though and they're all wonderfully varied so show off the combat mechanics of the game brilliantly. Even with my set up, the fight with (late game "spoiler") Rufus was still pretty tricky.

I also picked up on a few things I missed first time round (my hard difficulty run I pretty much skipped all the cutscenes and flew through dialogue), particularly (end game spoilers) that the Sephiroth seen in the Shinra building was the two cloaked guys you saw in sectors 5 and 7 (as they have the matching number tattoos).

I was also slightly surprised on this run to find (chapter 14 spoilers) Aerith outside her house for a short scene after you go back there to find Marlene after the sector 7 plate drops. On both my other runs I'd spoken to Tifa and apparently it's also possible to have a scene with Barret instead so it's much like the Gold Saucer date from the original game!

The game plays even better in 60fps than when I first played on PS4 and the production of the game really is top drawer!

Now onto INTERmission! (which I thought I'd already purchased but seemingly hadn't so wrote these thoughts while waiting for it to download )

So I finally finished up Psychonauts 2 and this was such a phenomenal game. It just oozes with so much creativity and each level felt so different and refreshing from the previous one. The levels never failed to bring a smile to my face, whether it was due to the different environments or the entertaining dialogues between the characters. Speaking of which, I'm amazed at how many characters there are in this game. I thought the first game had tons of them, but this one brought it to another level. The important thing though is that the developers managed to give each character enough time in the limelight so that you get to know them and care about them. Otherwise you would've gotten all these forgettable characters such as the kids from the first game.

Compared to the previous game, the controls have been much improved and the graphics are obviously much better, which made the levels that more stunning to look at. Combat has also been vastly improved and overall, it felt much more fun to play this game compared to the first one, which could get frustrating to play sometimes. Not to mention that some levels and boss fights in the first game could get rather difficult. Luckily, the developers made sure not to have these frustrating moments in the sequel. I can't remember a single time when I got frustrated, the game just felt great to play. It could still get challenging, but not to a point where you would get frustrated.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time with Psychonauts 2 and it's definitely one of my favourite 3D platformers of all time now. I highly recommend playing it, but do play the previous game first in order for the story to make more sense. Not to mention that it'll be easier to remember the characters when you've already encountered a good amount of them in the first game.

@Iver I enjoyed it but it mostly as an isolated game but it did feel a bit disappointing as the final Yakuza game. It looked and felt great to play, and Clan Creator was better than in Y2. I got quite into the baseball minigame/substories though

And that ending felt a bit of a letdown really. I thought they wouldn’t actually go through with killing Kiryu and was quite surprised when it seemed that he had. But no, they didn’t and it ended up feeling like a worst of all worlds really..

As for myself, I finished off FF7R: INTERmission last night.

About 10hrs overall for gameplay I think it was. The story is reasonably interesting and fun, taking part between the second bombing and the sector 7 plate collapse in the main story.

It throws a whole load of new characters at you who are pretty forgettable really but the lack of side missions means that the pace of the main story is kept up nicely.

The big distraction from the main story in the Fort Condor minigame. Instead of being an actual place like FF7 itself, it has been redesigned as a board game where you both try to destroy one another’s base by deploying units to do so. It’s simple, fun, but frustrating at the higher levels.

The combat is quite unique from the main game though. Yuffie has some fairly standard short and Lange range abilities but the big difference is that you don’t control your partner. You can issue commands to him but he’ll do his own thing otherwise. However, you can “synchronise” and attack enemies simultaneously but also perform synchronised abilities which use an ATB bar from each character to perform more powerful attacks.

It’s lucky that combat feels so good as there is a lot of it, especially in the second chapter which towards the end feels like battle after battle after boss. Scarlet also plays a bigger role than the main game and she’s a fun character to expand on.

The final boss felt something more like a modern Kojima character than an FF7 one but apparently he’s a known character from Dirge of Cerberus which I know nothing about.

Overall, a fun little experience that may have relevance for the second part of the main game (mainly giving Yuffie some reason for joining the party) but I didn’t feel the need to rush and replay it on hard like I did with the main game.