@Werehog I do sort of get what it’s going for and it’s more of a step forwards in a lot of areas than I think the first few levels really show off. I’m pretty amazed that the PS1 could pull it off, it feels more like a Dreamcast game in terms of being between the PS1 and PS2.
@nessisonett Funny you should say that, because The Last Revelation was the first Tomb Raider game developed outside of PlayStation's home console exclusivity deal, so it actually was a Dreamcast game! It's got some fancier lighting but otherwise, it's the exact same game. You're right, I reckon it's one of the most impressive PS1 games ever released, and is often overlooked as such.
"If I let not knowing anything stop me from doing something, I'd never do everything!"
Wanted to do like a 20 hour check in on AC Shadows, cause I have access to Yasuke and Naoe now and honestly I am absolutely loving this game. I have a tendency to fall off of open world games hard (I loved Valhalla at the start, despised it by the end for having some ridiculous like 90 hour long story and recently despite loving it at the beginning fell of Yotei around 25ish hours in) and so I don't know whether this will hold, but all I can say right now, is I am loving this game.
Some of the most common complaints I have seen for this game, I just don't agree with honestly like even a little bit. I thought the moment of Naoe forgiving Yasuke was really well handled, binding all the characters and themes together, before propelling the story forwards. I really like Naoe and Yasuke as individual characters, and enjoy their chemistry a lot. Maybe this isn't present in the English dub, but in the Japanese performances there remains a subtle tension between their interactions, showing Yasuke hasn't just immediately let go of his guilt, nor has Naoe just forgiven him utterly, and I like the way that energy crackles through what are otherwise surface level banal interactions.
I also think Yasuke is wonderful to play as. Naoe is really fun too, don't get me wrong. But you play as her exclusively for a good 15ish hours, and get used to a slow, methodical, carefully planned pace to every encounter. She is fragile, doesn't hit very hard, has to pick her spots. This forces you to really engage with her full kit, and engage with the full suite of mechanics here, but it can be frustrating when one mistake sends things sideways and you just can't fight your way out.
Then suddenly having Yasuke dropped into the middle of this sandbox, and you can just charge right down the middle of encounters that were real nailbiters hours earlier as Naoe was just a treat to me. He is an unstoppable force of nature, encouraging as many guys to come at him at once. The contrast between him and Naoe is so striking, and so wonderful, she the lightning, he the thunder, it is just inspired. The animations on his moves and abilities too, oh man. When you get that big bat thing, man, I was cackling from ear to ear at the sheer joy of it.
I also really love the world, the reason I am scared of the burnout is because you can just plonk a pin on the map and get lost for hours here. But right now that is a positive, not a negative, I am always excited to see what I find, and I feel like I am always rewarded by what I find, too. Sometimes, that might just be a bit of scenery, and that is enough. The game is gorgeous, and I think the eight stage seasonal system is such an elegant solution to set this feudal Japan from the likes of ROTR, GOT etc Transforming the map, bringing new weather events and details to space with each new cycle.
And speaking of those games, I was worried that Shadows coming last would be to it's detriment, but I think whether intentional or not, it has actually worked out really well for them, as they kinda "borrow" all the best parts of those two games, and smoosh them together into this one package, doing away with a lot of the stuff in the process I didn't like in either of those games. I understand that the very things you may have liked about those games may not have survived the transition, but I feel like they are speaking to me directly with the stuff they chose to "borrow" from each game.
@Pizzamorg Thank you for leaving those thoughts about AC: Shadows (and not just because they make such a positive change from the usual stuff you find left online about the game). It really sounds like, for you at least, everything the developers deliberately set out to achieve is working. I sincerely hope that burnout you fear never comes, and that you continue to enjoy!
"If I let not knowing anything stop me from doing something, I'd never do everything!"
Dunno why it took me so long to get to it, but I'm 23+ hours deep in The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy now after starting it last week, and I regret sleeping on it for so long (day one buy, because I love the developers, but yeah, took me a minute to actually get around to it). I've only scratched the surface of the full experience, but I can already say with confidence that this is the game I've been waiting for since I first heard many years ago that Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaru Uchikoshi were forming their own development studio. Many misfires ensued (Tribe Nine, World's End Club, arguably Rain Code as well), but this game really has its claws in me in a way I haven't experienced since I first played Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. The shift to the SRPG genre was smart, and even though it's probably 75/25 in favor of visual novel/adventure game sequences, the story battles are fun and varied enough that I really look forward to what interesting new mechanics or challenges the game will introduce next.
It remains to be seen if this can settle into an experience as cohesive and wholly gripping as Danganronpa 2 and Danganronpa V3 (or 999 and Virtue's Last Reward, for that matter, since Uchikoshi is heavily involved with this project as well), but I'm really enjoying it so far. Hopefully they do a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition patch for the game, as this deserves to be enjoyed at its absolute best on console. I can confirm it runs brilliantly on PC and Steam Deck, at least.
While my last post on AC Shadows was mostly positive, as I approach hour 40, I wanted to do a bit of a "gripe dumping" - wanna be clear, still super enjoying this game. I played it all day today, will probably do that tomorrow as well. But a lot of kinda small things often grow into larger issues when a game is this long, and I just wanted to get some of them out of me rather than sitting on them. Also apologies if this ends up super long, once I start, I find it hard to stop.
In no particular order.
1. Difficulty balance / Yasuke's place in this game - outside of some really lazy side bosses which are cartoonishly overtuned in the most tedious ways possible, this game is very easy on the base normal difficulty and it kind of makes Yasuke feel sorta invalid in the overall paradigm of the package.
During your early hours, Naoe is very fragile, you want to avoid open combat as much as possible, and especially when there are multiple foes, you just got no shot. Run away, wait for the heat to die down, try again. That is why getting your hands on Yasuke feels so refreshing, cause you've spent the best part of 15 hours avoiding combat and now it is being actively encouraged and it is just great. At least for my tastes.
However, and I don't really remember the moment I crossed the event horizon, somewhere along the way, this just ended up stopping being true. Yes, Naoe is still more fragile than Yasuke, and yes she can still get overwhelmed if there are too many enemies, but weapons like Kusarigama kinda break the entire difficulty equation, since it can hit multiple targets at once, it attacks at range so Naoe is never in any direct danger, and if you have one that applies a status effect like bleed, time will finish the job off for you.
I went from being terrified of open engagements, to facing down entire camps on my own, twirling that thing around above my head like Wonder Woman, to the point where honestly Naoe might now just be better at open engagements than Yasuke is for me. And Yasuke's kinda entire kit is just open engagements and nothing else. So if he is outclassed at that, and Naoe has access to all the other mechanics, then what exactly Yasuke is for.
Especially as, additionally, a lot of the time you're either forced to play as Naoe, or her ability to access the game's full suite of mechanics, just make her the better choice. Even times when Yasuke seems like the best option, there is usually weird counter balancing to still make Naoe the best option.
An example of this, is the game has these Castles. If you clear these key figures from the Castles, you can access a chest with a piece of Legendary gear in. Early on, I found these brutally hard, for the reasons explained above. And as explained above, getting my hands on Yasuke I was like "hell yeah!" time to kick down the door, go on a rampage, get me some Legendary loot!
But it actually doesn't work this way, because if you approach the castles this way, you become Wanted. And this creates these things called Guardians, which spawn in out of nowhere, seemingly spawn in endlessly, and are just these massive bullet sponges which can two tap Yasuke no matter what his level, gear or whatever else is. It basically creates a scenario where you cannot win.
So actually the only real way to clear these castles is to play as Naoe, use your X-Ray vision, tag targets that get you access to the chest. Assassinate one. Run away, wait for them to forget you. Rinse and repeat until they are all done. Get your Loot and leave. Like there are all these locations, and enemies, within these Castles you just ignore entirely, because they are actively detrimental. Just making the whole thing feel kinda pointless and boring.
2. World / progression systems. The world is gorgeous, I love the weather system, but it is also boring, annoying to navigate and lacks evolution as you progress.
Let us tackle the navigation point first, since the other two points are kind of two sides of one point. Like it seems with almost every open world game for some reason, there is always some kind of mountain between you and where you want to go, and no matter where you fast travel into, you're always having to find the long way around.
Early on, this is fine, because it pushes you out into the map to discover new things, but at the point I am at in the game, I just want to get to my objective, and making the path to the objective always the longest one available is just frustrating. And I feel like all open world games are kinda designed like that these days. Please open world designers, you can have elevation into your titles, but please create worlds where any obstacle you can either go over or through, please!
The second two headed point, which feeds into a wider point about progression, is that within the first zone of the game, you've basically seen everything this game has to offer already. And I recognise this is more of an issue of open world games in general, and not unique to this title specifically, but it is still disappointing to me that Shadows has so few open world activities, almost all of them are boring (and you can even select options for a lot of them that just automates them, so you can hit go and go for a wee or get a drink, like they know this stuff sucks to the point where they basically offer a skip content option then why include it in the first place?) and no new activities appear, as you enter into new regions of the map.
The same goes for gear too, during those early hours, the loot seems really exciting because you're thinking. Wow, I am getting gear with perks this strong already, I can already start forming real builds with this pieces out of the gate? This is awesome!
Well the reason you can do that, is because you're kinda starting with end game gear from the rip. The rarities go up, but they just balloon the stat rolls, not the shape the gear takes. The gear has only a small possible number of stats and perks that can roll onto them, so within the first few levels, you've kinda seen how far this gear game can go already, and from there it is just a case of getting effectively higher level, bigger stated, copies of your favourite items to drop.
You would think Legendary gear addresses this issue, but at least at my point in the game, the Legendary gear is rarely transformative in the way the best Legendary gear is in other ARPGs, its just another stat bump but maybe slightly obfuscated like "x percent chance to do bonus damage below x health segments", you could basically just slap a x percent damage roll on this and it basically does the same thing, but I guess because that can roll on regular gear, they can't, so they do this around the houses roll to the same destination and call it Legendary.
And I get there is this vague strive for realism here (although there is a lot here which kinda betrays that so...) so maybe they couldn't go all Borderlands with it and have Yasuke firing a teppo that can chain lightning or something but I dunno. The loot is boring, and you will quickly stop caring about it.
I miss the system we had in Odyssey. And I know some people hated that because they went full looter on us basically, but we have had two games now that have attempted to address those complaints and both created more boring progression systems as a result of trying to appease to that section of the fanbase and I think that sucks personally. I mean sure it is better than Valhalla, but I still don't think Shadow's go at this is right.
Talking of Valhalla and sticking with progression, Valhalla's skill tree was problematic because it was bloated with filler nodes, and didn't allow the player to make informed choices, with you just stumbling blindly down branches and if the payoff nodes sucked then too bad. Shadows has tried to address this with smaller, more focused, more meaningful, set of trees for Yasuke and Naoe, but the way you progress through these trees just sucks?
You get points to spend in the tree when you level up, but then you also need to source Knowledge Points from open world activities to access higher areas of the trees. Maybe it is just because of how I am playing, but these two sources are not correctly tuned or aligned whatsoever for me, rendering levelling up largely meaningless. I seem to often end up pooling 20 to 30 mastery points, waiting to get enough Knowledge Points to unlock higher parts of the tree, so I can spend some of them.
Like I say, outside of the first few hours of play, I didn't care about levelling up whatsoever, and levelling became just a function for me in working on what my next quest or not would be, as I tried to arc through the quests at the appropriate level to follow some sort of intended canon path. If you want to make AC a true RPG franchise, you can't make levelling up seem meaningless like this.
MyFaction in WWE 2K25 for my playstation 4
Dragon Quest III HD Remaster and Dragon Quest I and II HD Remakes for my Switch Lite
Mega Man Battle Network 1. about done with the tail end of the game
Super Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars remake for my Switch Lite
might buy and install digitally Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection for my Playstation 4 since im an old school fan of the original mortal komba stuff. plus i missed out on Mortal Kombat Special Forces back then and never got to play much of the Mythologies Subzero game back then when it first came out
78 hours and four endings deep into The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy now. This game is unbelievably narratively ambitious. It's no wonder this mammoth game almost bankrupted the developers.
The sacrifice to achieve this kind of scale is obvious: unlike the tightly-woven narratives one is used to from these creators, LDA is a lumbering mess of a game. Which doesn't take away from how much great material there is here, and this might very well be my favorite game from either of these creators, given how utterly unique it is, but it's a little wild how one can ruin late-game twists (of which there are many) for oneself when they're casually referenced in some of the game's stranger routes. LDA does try to kind of lead the player in the direction of the closest thing a game like this can have to a true ending, but if one's curiosity takes one off of it, that's tens of hours of gameplay in the wrong direction if one isn't using a guide to make sure they're staying on the narrative route they should probably take to maximize their experience with the game.
There's nothing else out there really like this in the industry, and I think it'll be a long time before we see anything like this again. And, to be honest, I don't want other games to copy this format, because it's a lot.
But I am impressed, as well as enthralled.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
Just finished another playthrough of Diablo IV's campaign. Wasn't really sure where to post this, it isn't really a review or a sharing of my thoughts based on a game fully beaten, so I guess the general playing thread it is.
I think I last played in 2024 with the Spiritborn expansion. I returned this time as I found out you could access the new Paladin class if you preorder the expansion, you didn't need to wait until the end of April.
When the game launched, it was an odd experience, because it felt like an ARPG made for primarily a casual audience. It hit this sort of weird hard reset on all the learns from Diablo 3, and bizarrely seemed to bumble its way into the same mistakes over, like a person returning from a Thanos snap, not knowing over a decade hade gone by. I still stand by the fact that even with all the years of work on it, Diablo 4 is a significantly worse game than Diablo 3, in maybe all regards except maybe visuals and core game feel.
I tend to hate using the word “casual” because I think the true intent of the word has been lost over the years, but in this context I mean that it launched with functional, but fairly mundane, itemisation, progression and long term aspiration, but with an absurdly massive and polished, singleplayer campaign.
For a Diablo game, this was just weird. The assumed target audience would be those who blast through the campaign in an evening before spending the next thousand hours of their life in the end game, but at launch, you basically just couldn’t do this even if you wanted to.
Skip ahead like three years later, I feel like the vision for Diablo 4 is almost less clear than ever. The end game has been substantially expanded, and itemisation has had it’s focus entirely shifted to effectively remove loot drop excitement entirely, and instead it is now more of a crafting game? They sell this as a good thing because it gives you more control over your loot allegedly, but to me it is a Diablo game where the loot feels meaningless, because each drop is just a skin for me to roll the same stuff on it over and over again as the numbers go up, I’m not chasing that God roll or even experiencing much transformation cause you build your library of legendary effects and then just roll them on everything, they have no anchoring to any specific item found in a specific place.
But again, this loops back around the audience question. Cause who were these changes for exactly? Who is Diablo 4 meant to be for in the first place? If the launch Diablo 4 was designed specifically to pry people away from Madden and COD to play through their first ARPG, they ain’t gonna care about expanded end game, they’ll probably never see that. In fact, that audience probably hasn’t booted up the game in 2+ years. If the expanded end game was to try and welcome the more “hardcore” audience back into the fold again, then who are the loot changes for? Because if they can roll the perfect item whenever they want, what is the chase to make you keep playing the end game?
And like I cannot stress enough, maybe it is just overtuned to sell expansions, but the Paladin is easily one of the most fun to play characters in the game. I had an absolute blast playing through the campaign again as this new class, unleashing holy judgment down on my enemies, exploding demons as far as the eye could see, and there being such a tangible weight, and feedback, to every Divine Spear, Holy Hammer or Blessed Shield I launch into my enemies in a dazzling explosion.
But after around 20 hours, you've seen basically everything the game has to offer, and the long term progression loops are just simply not interesting or robust to sustain a long term growth plan for your character, so rather than burning yourself out and losing the good times, you are probably best off just finishing your 20 or so hour long campaign run (if you skip every cutscene like I did) and dip, and maybe in other genres that would be fine, but in an ARPG it is just... weird.
Been playing an Archipelago multi world for a RetroAchievements event. Basically a randomiser where you can find items across more than one game and send them to each other, designed for multiplayer as it’s over a server. Some of the other players are doing a game each and playing together but I’m playing Super Metroid, A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time solo, which is borderline masochistic. I’m learning a lot, such as A Link to the Past locking out like 90% of the game without the lantern. I know OOT the most since I’ve done several randos before on it but it’s been crazy finding things in other games. Especially since I put off the race game in ALTTP for ages and then finally did it as it was the last thing I had left to do… only for it to be my bomb bag for OOT. It’s been there since the start. I could have done that first. C’est la vie 😂
Been playing Professor Layton and the Lost Future on DS the past few weeks. I'm 7 hours into the game and I'm apparently already halfway through it. I'm unused to playing short games after having played so many long ones recently.
I can already tell that this is going to be my favourite one so far out of the first three games. The puzzles are so much better than in the first game, where most puzzles were just plain dumb. If you think you figured out the solution to a puzzle in the first game, then that solution is most likely wrong. For example, let's say there's a puzzle with subtraction, say 10 - 7. You'd think the answer is 3, but the real answer is actually 0 because of one detail in the puzzle description that makes all the other circumstances obsolete.
I still can't get over how dumb the puzzles were in the first game. Granted, there are a few of those in the third game as well but at least the vast majority are straightforward and logical.
That aside, I'm really enjoying Lost Future. It's hard for me to put the game down as both the puzzles as well as the story are engrossing. Can't wait to play more!
@LtSarge Glad to hear you've been enjoying Professor Layton! It's a franchise that is dear to me, because they was the only games (aside from FIFA) I could get my father to play along with on the DS. And when I say play along with, he mostly did the puzzles because I was only eight years old and not smart enough to get it! I mostly loved them for the shared experience with my dad as well as the aesthetics and storylines, which I was highly intrigued by as a kid. I wonder how these games would hold up for me if I ever want back to the originals now. I'm not so sure I would have as good a time as you with them this time around, because nothing gets me more impatient than being stuck on a puzzle nowadays. I keep waiting to hear news on the new Professor Layton game LEVEL-5 is supposed to be doing, but it seems like that one is never coming out. At least it'll give you enough time to catch up on the series proper beforehand!
@Tjuz It's really cool that you got to play them together with your father! I never played anything with my parents as they were simply not interested in video games.
I do have to say though that even though the aesthetics of the games makes it seem like they're aimed towards kids, the puzzles are anything but for kids. I'm almost 30 years old and I can still get stumped by these puzzles. I have no idea how kids were expected to solve them.
You'd probably get frustrated by the first game if you played it today, but the second and third games have much more straightforward puzzles. Most of them honestly don't take that long to figure out and some are even fun "mini-games", like moving a character across the screen. I think you'd appreciate these games more as an adult.
If you do check out these games again, I'd love to hear about your experience now compared to when you were a kid.
@LtSarge Oh, I can answer that one for you. Kids didn't solve them in the slightest. Or at least, I had to entirely rely on my father to be able to get through those games at all! Luckily, he happily did the puzzle parts while letting me take control whenever it came to the exploration. As well as throw my two cents in for the puzzles as a kid, which almost never actually helped him in any way, haha. I've had to Google when the last game in the series was even released... and it seems to be a 2017 mobile title that was later ported to consoles. It sounds like one of the main criticisms from fans was regarding how easy it was comparatively and how it seemed more aimed at kids. That might be my best chance for getting my feet wet again in that pool of nostalgia! I wonder if and when LEVEL-5 will be releasing the new game at all, since it was announced quite a while ago. Especially with how long they seem to have been working on Decapolice as well... with that one having originally been slated for 2023. I'll definitely keep you up to date when I get around to a new Professor Layton, whether it's with the imminent new game or going back to an existing title.
@Tjuz I actually enjoyed the recent Layton game even though most people didn't. The puzzles were much more enjoyable in general, because they were easier! The further you get into Lost Future, the trickier the puzzles get and I'm actually starting to lose my patience with some of them. I should probably take a break from the game whenever I feel like that. It's definitely that kind of game that you should avoid playing too often if you want to have a somewhat enjoyable experience.
I ended up picking it up MH Stories 3 on PC, cause there were a lot of really conflicting reports out there on the Switch 2 performance, some acting like it was a miracle and some saying it was really rough. It runs flawlessly on PC, not sure about PS5, it seems like the reporting says it runs great.
The game itself is absolutely wonderful. Capturing all of the magic of the mainline games. Filled to the brim with QOL, meaningful additions and changes over previous story games. My only criticism and it isn't really a "criticism" I guess so much as an observation, is the game is surprisingly hard.
Previous Stories games had spikes, but when you overcame those big wall bosses, you tended to get a bit of a rollercoaster effect of a chain of much easier bosses to face after that point. 3 seems to have tried to sand off the peaks at both ends to try and smooth out the experience, and they have been mostly successful at this goal. However, while you now don't get those crazy spikes any more, you also lose that rollercoaster effect in the process, which just makes everything feel so much harder overall.
But again, I want to stress, this isn't really a criticism here in this context exactly, part of the core charm of the entire series is "mastering a monster" and overcoming them, and since the turn based combat is so expertly designed and captures the main series combat so well, you get that same incredible feeling of dodging and countering every move you will get in a mainline game, when you learn the patterns here too. I guess my point is though is that just sometimes it is nice to face a boss once and then get to move onto the next thing, but that happens very rarely here as each one takes a good few tries to finally nail down, and it did create a bit of player exhaustion for me.
@nessisonett Thank you for the tag on the front page story about the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Challenge Mode update. You do seem to be reverse-manifesting a lot lately!
Unfortunately, the update is not good news. I don't like making negative posts, but Aspyr have done the worst, most upsetting thing to the remastered collection, taking a finished game which worked perfectly well and recklessly breaking it with a bunch of vibe coding and AI slop from an outsourced blockchain developer, all in order to cram in a randomiser challenge mode which nobody asked for and which doesn't even suit the gameplay of the classics to begin with. Old bugs and glitches, fixed in prior patches, have made a comeback alongside all new ones that impact the entire collection, not just the challenge mode. Cutscenes are missing, animations are broken, textures are going bonkers, saves are being corrupted and crashes are frequent.
It's a modern horror story of everything wrong with gaming right now, and it's all Aspyr's fault. I used to defend them when they were busy resurrecting old Star Wars games, but considering the awful state they left most of those in (not just Battlefront Classic Collection, they royally screwed Jedi Power Battles... and honestly, Bounty Hunter didn't fare much better, either) this shouldn't have been a surprise. There are petitions to roll back the update and re-hire Saber Interactive (which won't happen, but it's nice to make some noise on their behalf, they're awesome).
Anyway, whatever happens, I'm just praying they don't go after IV-VI Remastered next. If I were you, I'd finish Angel of Darkness as quickly as you can, just to be safe.
"If I let not knowing anything stop me from doing something, I'd never do everything!"
@Werehog I’ve seen nothing but horror stories about these devs that Aspyr have shipped in to bastardise the game. AI slop galore. Saber did a great job with these remasters too, it feels a real shame that their work is being undermined. I’ll try to play through Angel of Darkness as soon as I can, I’m at the Louvre so I’m still early on!
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