Topic: Games you've recently beat

@ralphdibny I agree Lad can get a bit tedious with the battles. But the good thing for me was the autobattle function the moments I felt the battles got to repetitive. I pressed the button and went to read some news in between or something haha. Also the humor in the weapons, the skill names and the skills themselves did make it so it wasn't that bad.

@ralphdibny I’ve already cancelled Game Pass but I currently have PS+, PS Now and NSO plus the expansion pass. And then all the tv streaming subs and Spotify! I’ll just need to see where things stand once we find out anything at all about these new tiers of PS+.

@ralphdibny @Lavalera With Judgment, getting the PS5 upgrade gives you a load of ridiculously overpowered combat items (that I didn’t even realise I had until near the end).

So when I kept running into battles, I could just rain down lightning and wipe the mob out rather than have another tedious fight.

It seems to be a problem they haven’t really addressed in any of their games.

@Thrillho yeah it was the same on the Xbox version, they went a bit overboard with the free elixirs this time. It's fine if they give you like 1 or 2 as a bonus or as a sample of elixirs you can make in the game, but using those in battles made stuff to easy. Luckily it isn't that bad in Lost judgment. I had the ultimate edition which includes the detective essentials pack. That one was mostly cosmetic stuff with only a few elixirs. So they learned from it in Lost judgment at least

Papers, Please (played on PC, but it's also available on PS Vita). The game centres around someone working at the border of a country. They've got to inspect the passports and documents of those trying to enter the country, and either allow them through or deny entry if there's a problem with the paperwork. It takes place in the fictional country of Arstotzka, though it does have a dystopian soviet bloc feel to it.

The gameplay starts simple at first, requiring the player to simply check that the passports are in order. But things gradually get more and more complex as extra rules and paperwork is added. The art is to find the balance between fast and accurate. The player earns more money from serving more people, but is penalised for any mistakes. The first time around I was barely making enough money to survive, but on later playthroughs I'd gotten quite good at it.

Where this game excels is all the little things that make it feel special. It takes place inside the immigration officer's booth, where there's a desk for rearranging all the various papers, but there's also a wall for hanging decorations on. The boss may even get angry if you display things that he hasn't approved. And it also shows outside the booth, visualising the guards along with a very long queue of people waiting to enter. There's some scripted events that happen outside, as well as some oddball characters trying to enter Arstozka. There's different endings depending on what happens.

It's not normally a type of game that I'd consider playing, but I'd seen clips of streamers playing parts of it, and that made me want to try it out for myself. I ended up getting hooked and really enjoying it.

@crimsontadpoles I also enjoyed Papers, please for what it was, which is an innovative and thought provoking indie title. I really appreciate these unique smaller games. They serve as good palate cleansers, but also often go to new places thematically.

I'll stick to last week due to memory loss, The two dlc's from The Outer Worlds are finally done for! Kept ignoring/neglecting it for some reason, but i rediscovered it and it's pretty kewl.. Oh yeah, that free Astrobot game that came with the PS5 still needed finishing. I did that. Again, no clue why i didn't do that earlier.

Tomb Raider II is done and dusted. Quite enjoyed it, even if the increased combat is not all that fun. Standout levels were the Opera House, Main Deck, the one with the snowmobile and the monastery. I could certainly go without playing the Oil Rig or Floating Islands again though! Think I’ll just start Tomb Raider III now.

@nessisonett Nice, glad you enjoyed TR II. That snowmobile section is great, I love the music that plays there. Hope you get on well with TR III, it can be one of the more unforgiving games in the series.

Out of curiosity, are you playing the PC versions of these games, or PS1 versions?

@crimsontadpoles I’m playing the PS1 versions via the PS Vita. So TR2 was perfectly fine using the touchscreen to sidestep and take out flares. However, the controls in TR3 are a bit more complicated as L2 and R2 make you crouch and dash. So I’ve mapped them to the right of the screen so that I can hold it while moving!

@RogerRoger Since my Vita has CFW installed, I’m tempted to use save states. These crystals are a nightmare, I’m so afraid to use them that I haven’t made it past the opening level as I keep dying and getting sent back to the opening cutscene!

@Lavalera nice, yeah I did a couple of auto battles when it was first introduced but I ended up going with the Press A a lot method for most battles lol especially the harder ones. I suppose if you know what you want to do in a battle and can intersperse some ups and downs with bashing A repeatedly then it's kind of like an auto battle but it does more of what you want. Couldn't read the news while I was doing it though 😅

@crimsontadpoles I played Papers please a while back. I just did the one play through though with the intent of returning to it (I bought it for Vita in the bruef time that my PS Plus sub lapsed and allowed me to purchase it. I thought what little I played was really good and effective though!

I actually wrote a mini review of it over in the PS3 thread back when I played it. I think our thoughts on it are largely similar. How many endings did you play through to in the end? I need to give it another go at some point!

@ralphdibny That's a well thought out write-up. Interesting that you got ending 3 of 20 when you played. I made the same mistake by showing the official the secret documents, getting that bad ending the first time around.

I ended up doing all 20 endings. That's a lot easier to do than it sounds, as most of them can be obtained very quickly by warping to a specific day and doing something specific.

@crimsontadpoles ah cheers! Maybe that ending is common for first timers? Some combination of wanting to see where the mystery goes contradicting the desire to get further in the game resulting in a half and half solution that gets the player in front of the firing squad.

That's cool there are warp points, I also never got to or noticed the decoration wall either. Sounds like there is a lot more to the game that I didn't realise. Certainly the warp points may entice me to return sooner rather than later!

Just finished .hack//G.U. Last Recode. Took me 80 hours to finish all 4 volumes. I enjoyed it, but I probably wouldn’t of started it if I knew it was going to take me that long to play through.

Just finished ys 8 :Lacrimosa of Dana. Absolutely loved it. The music is awesome and the combat feels very good. The story starts out slow but picks up after a bit. Not going for the platinum since a difficulty is attached to it, but it was 70 hours well spend. Think im going to get it again when the ps5 version comes.

@Lavalera Backlog and the occasional new release has kept my temptation to play Ys VIII before the PS5 version comes out. Not sure how much better the PS5 version will be, but I'm looking forward to finally playing the game whenever I get to it. I need to play more JRPGs.

Fallen order, It had a lot of problems sure, but I actually really loved it, and it was a star wars game I was looking forward too, I totally didn't play it because its a souls like......ok I did.

@KilloWertz I get the backlog problem. Even though Im still fairly new to playstation I bought a ton of games in sales the last few months to build up a decent library. Ys was one of the game and around the time I decided to play it as next game the news broke of the ps5 version. Glad I decided to go through with it and for me it wouldn't be a punishment to play the ps5 version again in the future, I'm just not getting it at launch.

I decided to differentiate the games I play a bit more basically trying to rotate between jrpg and non jrpg. Before this I played Horizon fw, Ghost of Tsushima DC and Ghostwire Tokyo. And even I love open world games I had to play something else after that. This way I hope I won't get burnt out by certain type of games so fast.

Hope you'll like ys as much as I did when you get around to play it

I just finished Trek to Yomi on PS4. I bought it after watching Digital Foundry’s tech analysis. I enjoyed the game so much that I ended up finishing it in one sitting.

@Lavalera Nothing wrong with that, especially since there's always at least one sale going on with a lot of games in it. Now there's 3 sales going on at once.

Even if I loved a game, I rarely played a game multiple times before this generation except a few times if I played it on Xbox and then PlayStation, but catalog titles getting PS5 versions is giving me an excuse to break that trend. I fully expect Ys VIII to be a game I end up loving, so I can understand being willing to play it all over again.

What is your PSN name, if you don't mind me asking?