Update One Hundred and Ninety: 22 June 2018

Discouraged Workers TEEN

40 hours, 14 of 14 achievements
3/10

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

I’m technically working two jobs - I do my full time job during the day, then, for seven nights, I drive a half hour to a client’s house to watch their dog overnight. It’s the last leftover from my dog walking job, and I am so tired. The house is nice and they have an Alexa, though. I bet I could say, ‘Hey Alexa? Could you guess what I’m about to write in this review for this mediocre bundled VN?’ and she could write my review for me.

I’m not appreciating these bundles, you guys <:,c

I’ve watched a few K-dramas, and they’re not that bad. This game? This game is the worst K-drama to ever exist. I was the exact target audience for this game - for a while there I myself was a ‘discouraged worker’ - but it’s just pure, unadulterated bullshit dramas. Add in a ton of slutshaming and unclear writing AND a really aggravating interface and you’ll have an unpleasant experience.

What aggravates me was that, while the sprites looked awkward, the CG art was pretty nice, and there was a good animation of the MC walking. I see you, art team. I’m disappointed in you, writing team.

Next up: Please be good, please be good, please be good - oh are you kidding me???

See you soon!

It’s been a while since my last post here. A lot has happened, but more on that later.
First of all, if you haven’t seen it yet, a few people and I started a Play or Pay group and we would like to invite all of you to join! If you don’t know what it is, here’s a TL;DR: pick 3 games for someone, if they don’t finish at least 1, they will have to create a GA as punishment. (I do recommend reading the rules though!)

I’ve been playing a lot of games since the end of april. I haven’t been taking many screenshots lately, but here are some of my favorite ones (may contain spoilers!):

Games in order: Yooka Laylee, Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC, South Park: The Fractured, but Whole, EARTHLOCK and Dark Souls III

Games in order:Europa Universalis (Conquering Germany as a barbarian tribe from Crimea), Owlboy, Surviving Mars, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight and Perils of Man!

June 2018 - Week 3

Yep, I missed a week again thanks to Animal Crossing New Leaf (damn time-killer games)…

• 
  PRICE
• 
  Schein

When I beat Tales of Phantasia, I thought it was an okay game, so I decided to buy some of the other Tales games. After all, I liked one game in the series, and the others were positively reviewed, so I thought it’d be safe to get more than one before playing them; of course, if you saw my post on Tales of the Abyss a couple months back, you’d know that I found out that wasn’t the case. However, now that I’ve played another Tales game and gotten myself more acquainted with the combat mechanics, I’m starting to think I gave Tales of the Abyss a bit too much credit.

(Speaking of Abyss, to those who saw my post on that game: don’t worry, this one’s shorter)

• Tales of Symphonia
  

  42 hours playtime

  9 of 39 achievements

This is a JRPG, but with real time combat instead of turn-based combat. Even though battles take place in fully 3D environments with allies and enemies positioned in different areas around the arena, you’re stuck moving left/right in the 2D plane between you and the enemy you’re locked onto (there’s no free run in this game). Do you want to reposition yourself, perhaps to lure enemies away from allies or maybe enter a Healing Circle cast by said allies? Tough luck, you can’t. Maybe you got unlucky and the boss cast an AoE spell that takes up the entire space between it, you, and the invisible arena border; you could try to use Tempest to jump over the boss (assuming you have enough TP to use the move), but even if the boss is short enough for that to be possible, you likely wouldn’t have time to pull it off before the spell activates and you get hurt. Of course, due to the dissonance caused by the worst possible blend of 2D and 3D game-play I’ve seen, enemies can easily swarm and stun-lock you before you have a chance to get an attack off (enemies always come in groups except for a few bosses), so you have to wait a few seconds either for them to decide to stop attacking or for your allies to bail you out by attacking the enemies from angles you could only dream of reaching. I know Tales of Phantasia had problems, but this is probably the worst way they could have realized its mechanics in a 3D environment (yes, it’s even a step backward from Tales of the Abyss).

The main difference between this game and Abyss is, without free run, the only hope of fully avoiding an attack (as opposed to blocking it) is to run away immediately after finishing your combo (though you may need to run back to the enemy a bit to tease their attack out). Of course, if you try to reverse your direction, you’ll slide for a bit, causing a delay in your movement that could be critical in whether or not you avoid said attack. Fun fact: this is exactly what your AI partners are programmed to do when attacking: run to an enemy, attack, run away, wait, repeat. No, they’re not actually programmed to react to the enemies or anything; it’s just that pattern on loop, so it isn’t uncommon to see an ally run toward an enemy in the middle of an attack combo and get hit. They aren’t even programmed to react to other enemies, so when running away from one enemy, they’ll often end up running toward another and stay there, taking hits from said enemy. Then again, if they’re bound to the same 2D-plane mechanic as the player (which I doubt), their actions make a bit more sense.

Now that I’ve explained the game’s concept, let’s dive into the combat mechanics. They’re largely the same as in Tales of the Abyss: A is for your regular 3-hit combo, B is for chaining a TP-consuming special attack to the end of your 3-hit combo (of course, the buttons are in different places on an Xbox 360 controller), hold X to guard and press Y to bring up the menu. Yes, once again, there’s no strategy to the combat: you either do a 3-hit combo or a slightly longer combo by chaining a special attack at the end, and you keep doing that until someone dies. Once again, there’s no way to cancel an attack in order to avoid an enemy’s attack (only spells can be cancelled, and your character doesn’t have any spells); you push the button, you sit through the animation. Once again, the enemy variety is really just for show since all melee attacks act like all other melee attacks, all projectile attacks act like all other projectile attacks (too fast to really react to), and all attack spells are nigh unavoidable (except for the small number that are actually unavoidable, like Dark Sphere). Sure, the attacks could theoretically be avoided in one-on-one fights, but when almost every battle is crowd versus crowd (combined with the inability to cancel attacks to dodge or block), no amount of skill will prevent you from getting killed, much less avoid taking damage at all. The only exception to this lack of diversity in attacks was this one wolf enemy that would actually arc a projectile over you, meaning it could only hit you if you followed the “run away” strategy mentioned in the last paragraph. Of course, by this point in the game, you’ll have given up trying to implement any kind of strategy since the combat is designed specifically to punish such rational thought; just set your allies to “Attack Same” and tap that A button. Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and end up having time to react and avoid an attack, or even an AoE spell.

Seriously, if you get killed by a boss in this game, just buy some more healing items (or buy/upgrade your weapons if you haven’t reached late game), then fight the boss again with the same strategy and you’ll be just fine. Example: there’s this one boss that can revive its allies, and on my first attempt, it was really tedious and I ran out of items and got killed. For my second attempt, I bought a better weapon for exactly one character (the player character) and I beat the boss without even having to revive anyone. The only exception are mimics (which are optional) since they can’t be harmed by physical attacks (yet they attack very rapidly, resulting in your allies being unable to have enough time to cast spells if one of them gets targeted).

But that’s not even the worst of it. You see, there’s one particular boss battle I’d like to spotlight since it helps show just what kind of nonsense goes on behind the scenes of the game’s battle system: near the beginning of the game, your character is accused of breaking the law and has to fight a monster as punishment. At this point, you only have one ally, but there’s only one enemy for this fight (the boss), and on top of being fairly slow, it only has two melee attacks with a half-second wind up animation before each (with the possibility of chaining the two attacks together). In other words, this is as fair a fight as you’re going to get in the game: it’s stats are balanced around you not having much help and it actually telegraphs its attacks, giving you the ability to rush in, hit it, and get away before it can attack again. If that sounds too good to be true, don’t worry, it just reveals another problem with the combat mechanics. You see, on top of enemies being able to stun you, you can stun enemies as well; normal enemies usually get stunned after the first attack (as do you), but bosses usually take a few hits to be staggered. However, in this battle, you’ll learn that the number of hits it takes to stagger enemies is variable: even after your ally kills himself, one combo will stagger the boss for all three hits from your combo, but the next combo staggers it only after the first attack, then for the next combo, only the last hit staggers it, and if you dare to try another 3-hit combo, the boss won’t be staggered at all, giving it enough time to attack you before you can run away and avoid the attack. EDIT: I ALMOST FORGOT TO MENTION THE WORST PART: There are even times where the boss will be staggered for the first two hits, then get UN-STAGGERED from the third hit and attack you before you can react!! In other words, the only way to avoid taking damage from this fight is to tease an attack out of it, run to the boss, attack it once, then run away since the inability to cancel attack animations results in you being unable to react if the attack doesn’t stagger the boss. Oh, and don’t forget that it’s random whether it attacks once or twice, so you have to wait long enough to make sure it doesn’t attack a second time, but not too long before it tries to go after you again (needless to say, I turned hard mode off not long after this fight).

EDIT: As a side note, the game’s hardest boss isn’t even the final boss like it was in Abyss, but rather the boss two dungeons before. Then again, I’m using the word “hardest” loosely here due to the aforementioned combat.

Oh, also: once again, hard mode literally just increases enemy stats and that’s it. Then again, what more can be expected from a game that rewards neither skill nor tactics?

I do have a correction to make regarding something I wrote in my post on Abyss: I thought that there was no way to switch characters mid-battle, but it turns out there is; it’s just that the games never tell you how to do this, ever. You do this by bringing up the menu, then pressing Start (or, in Abyss’s case, Select, and you can only do it after reaching a certain point in the game). I only figured that out by accident and I had to look it up to find out how to do it again. This doesn’t change combat as much as you may think, though: there’s a chance it could save you if you forgot to restock on Life Bottles, but it’s still the same combat (I mostly used it to keep one of my healers from wasting TP during regular battles).

With the combat out of the way, let’s look at the rest of the game. Like many other JRPGs, you have an over-world that you’ll run across to reach new towns and dungeons. Town exploration is fine, but actually navigating the over-world is rather annoying: not only does the camera turn slowly just like in Abyss (taking around 2 seconds to rotate 180 degrees), but there are many spots on the world map were the camera tilts into an overhead perspective, and since it’s already zoomed in closely to your character, this makes it really hard to navigate, even with the map on. It’s possible to access a “long mode,” but that requires finding the stone monument first, and even then, it’s only for the small area you’re at; you’ll have to find another for the next area of the map and so on. Plus, whenever you exit an area to the world map, the camera points backward, so you’ll often have to spend a couple seconds rotating the camera every single time you transition to the world map. However, all of that pales in comparison to the ship controls: not only are the sticks reversed (right stick moves and left stick rotates), but you can’t move left or right; you have to move forward, backward, or rely on the slow rotation. What’s worse is that the rotation is physics-based, so it’s slow to start and slow to stop. This is on top of the fact that, whether you’re on land or sea, you can get stuck on walls (this doesn’t happen in combat, thankfully); you think you’ll be moving forward, when suddenly your character stops moving even though there’s nothing in front of you, and then you realize you got too close to the wall and have to over-adjust to get unstuck. Luckily, you get the ability to fly a mere few hours after getting the ship (but not before you have to navigate the ship through narrow, rocky terrain, getting stuck even when the path is wide enough for you to get through), and not only do they provide faster transportation, these let you move in any direction without having to rotate the camera first (sticks are still reversed, though).

I’d also like to mention some moments of the story briefly. Being a JRPG, plot contrivances are to be expected, especially ones that involve characters being impulsive and dumb in order to shoehorn another boss fight in the game. However, this game takes it a step further: for reference, the game starts off by making it clear that your character isn’t The Chosen One; you’re just a sidekick on The Chosen One’s journey, which is a neat subversion of that trope and a decent first impression. However, not long into the game, you learn that there’s an impostor of The Chosen One when your group is accused of being the impostors (this is an early plot point and it gets forgotten about not long afterward), but The Chosen One shows everyone there her wings, thus showing everyone there that she is, in fact, the real Chosen. However, during the other instances where the impostors have fooled people, the group either keeps it a secret or tries to convince the other people by using words. My question: why? Why not just have the Chosen show her wings again? She can do it at will and there’s no reason to keep her identity a secret at this point in the game, or ever.

I will give the game credit for one thing: not all of the dungeons are empty mazes! Quite a few of the dungeons actually have varied gimmicks to them, which is more than most JRPGs can say about their dungeons. Sure, some of them are really annoying, like the abysmal path-finding-AI in the dungeon of darkness (the things will get caught on walls as well, but will also sometimes go backward for no reason!), but some of the gimmicks could potentially have been expanded upon to create actual puzzles, like the light-reflecting segments in the Tower of Mana.

Just like the last Tales game, I don’t recommend this one. It’s too bad, because there’s obviously effort put into the games: the graphics are solid (there are even a few textures in this game that were updated to be more high-res), the soundtrack is good, the animations are serviceable (though there are plenty of stiff ones), the story is passable, and the dungeons have actual level design, but all of that (except the level design, to a small extent) is just window dressing while the window itself (and the rest of the building, i.e. the game-play) is just a small pile of broken glass.

Unforgiving

I am not sure what it is. But the percentage of Horror Games in my library has an unhealthy high value. I actually despise jump scares and I do not really enjoy those horror games. Nonetheless I have recommanded several of them. Als,o there are a lot of Horror Games which i despise or which just don’t interest me like Slenderlike or FNAF-like games. Still, every few months another horror game finds it way to my library. Last weeks addition:

• Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn
  

  8 hours playtime

  16 of 16 achievements

Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn: An interesting one. From the gameplay it is mostly walking/running around and solving simple puzzles while avoiding creatures from the Swedish Mythology. The game itself with you finding yourself of the backseat of a car being kidnapped by your own brother as it is heavily implied that you have some kind of addiction problems (all said in the first five minutes of the game. In your “heroic” attempt to rescue yourself you bring the car to crashing and find yourself in a Swedish Forest with a whole new set of problems. Most of them potentially deadly. Actually, large parts of the game it is impossible to die unless you drown yourself. Point is, you don’t know when those parts are as in irregular intervals you encounter new or old creatures which can actually kill you. So you have a mixture of scripted events, active sequences and cutscenes. The reason you are always on edge is given by the games most brilliant aspect: the sound effects and music. Always you hear something irritating, menacing. Expecting to be jumped at any moment, even if there is nothing (Screw you Skogsrå!!). The eerie atmosphere is supported by disturbing children drawings.
The story itself is interesting enough to follow along with an …. odd ending I will say here. All in all the game is quite interesting if not alone for the view on the darker side of the swedish mythology. Normally, I would have waited with another post but as the sale started today I though I’ll post this one as the game is 75 % off. For this price it is actually fair as the game IS rather short with a first playthrough of 3 hours. You can get 7-8 hours out of it if you go for all achievements WITHOUT looking up a guide. So think about it (unless you despise all horror games). Don’t think it is a bad investion. On a sidenote I bought the game a week ago with a 66 % price of. Technically I could refund and buy anew. But I think it is fair to support an indie developer and the 1,20 € is not really much money. I waste more for Chips. With this said find here the OST and an image:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehrvXNIB8VU

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As I was on buisness trip on Chile recently and read a similar thread on SG I started to wonder a bit. For those of you working already, what is your job? Like, I’m a chemist. No I work neither with drugs nor with explosives. I’m salty most of the time as I work with salts.

Beaten: Demon Hunter 3

I’ve played the previous Demon Hunter games, and while I enjoyed them they weren’t high on my list of HOGs. This one, however? Loved it! The quality of artwork, design, and pacing just seems much better than the previous installments.

As we near the steam sale, I’m going to try my best not to increase the backlog too much - I’m sooo close to getting my unplayed under 25% - but the temptation of bundles and cheap games is strong. The battle continues!

Finished:
A Golden Wake - rather… mundane? Not what I expected - drama is downplayed and you sail along the narrative until it ends
Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth - lovely thing. I wouldn’t call it an adventure game, because the gameplay is quite light, but the story and art are definitely worth it.
The Forest of Doom - nostalgia :P
Last Door Season 2 - Weekly slice of weird
Teslagrad - quite fun (except for that scroll 30 segment. No one needs that in their lives)
Zenith - it’s unpolished, awkward and rather cringe-worthy at times, but I did laugh a few times

Three Pillar Reviews

Naming in progress :P

Test Review #3: Far Cry 5!

Played on PS4. Single-player only

Recommended for Gameplay and Immersion

Wonderful World. Wonderful Characters. Wonderful Graphics. Wonderful Gameplay. Wonderful Cinematics. The story leaves much to be desired however.

Immersion Almost Perfect with some mild annoyances.

Even with the PS4 Pro, this game looked amazing; the acting and voice acting, were very immersive. The characters have deep personalities and charisma.
There are some physics bugs, but nothing too surprising with the history of the franchise and similar games. Nothing game-breaking either.
It really hits all the right marks here. Immersion was so good here, it actually surprised me in a specific cutscene that I would have never expected any game to do, and I believe it was very well done even though it can be considered “risky”

Image below is from a screenshot that’s in the first two minutes of the game

Gameplay The changes here are very welcoming and it is less “chorey” than it’s predecessors.

If you played Far Cry 3 or 4, you will find the exact same base gameplay: liberate outposts, save hostages, kill the oppression, you pretty much have the same weapons, takedowns, etc. But they have added guns-for-hire, these are partners that help you out on your missions and just wrecking some shit up. (Except for story missions, more on that in a bit) You can recruit up to 3 fighters you find in the world, or do some special missions to unlock the 9 specialists that are able to help you. Each of these specialists have their own set of skills and weapons. I’m sure you have seen the dog in the trailers, he can mark the enemies for you. There is another guy who comes in with a fighter plane that is quite helpful when you are pinned down. And a woman that uses a bow and arrow to help you stealthily sneak around and finish off the cultists. Initially, you are allowed to have one gun-for-hire by your side, but after you unlock 3? specialists you will be able to buy a perk that allows you to have two guns-for-hire with you. So you can mix and match! My personal favorite were the dog and the woman with the bow and arrow.

That takes us to the perks. In the previous games you had to liberate outposts, perform takedowns, etc to gain exp and that allows you to get perks. You had to kill and skin a lot of animals just so you can have more bows/ammo on your person. They removed all of that here, now if you want perks you’ll have to get perk points, which you get by getting achievements like killing X number of cultists, or skinning Y of this kind of animal, or having your gun-for-hire kill Z number of people etc. So you could be able to unlock (almost) every perk before going in with the story!

So, if you don’t get exp from liberating outposts, then what are they good for?
Well you don’t get exp but you do get Resistance points. And you require certain amount of resistance points to proceed with the story.
There are only a few of story missions here, but they are also forced. What I mean by that is once you pass that amount of resistance points needed for a story mission you get dragged from wherever you are or whatever you are doing and forced to do a story mission that you are not able get out from. It could be a little frustrating at times if you are in a middle of another mission you are about to complete. But don’t worry there aren’t many of them in this game.

The map is divided into three regions, each led by a lieutenant, and you will have to defeat all three before you could go for the cult’s leader. You don’t have to do it in a certain order and you don’t even have to complete a region before going to the next. You can just jump in and out and do whatever missions or outposts you fancy.
Each of the regions have their own feel to them, own resistance meter, and they also each have three specialists that you can unlock. My best suggestion to start the game is by unlocking all 9 specialists first so you’ll have the chance to take a look at each region/lieutenant and figure out how you would like to proceed with the game.

A small annoying issue I faced a couple of times was that when I’m flying a plane or a helicopter and end up dying I respawn in the middle of the air in the helicopter/plane instead of the ground. Now that’s good and all but the actual problem is that you respawn while the engine is turned off, so more often than not you won’t have enough time to gather your momentum to continue you flying before hitting the ground and damaging your vehicle and/or dying yet again. This might have been solved in a later update or patch however, I have played this on the PS4 and I don’t believe I have updated anything when I started.

Oh I forgot to mention! You don’t have to climb as much radio towers here!

Story Immense potential that is wasted by a lack of character arcs and purpose

Personally, I really love stories that revolve around politics or religion, they have incredible potential that can’t be found in others. And a story that revolves around a cult is just something that can go over the roof! The two endings were very well made and I really loved them both. The father’s personality and aura is powerful and keeps you interested in what he has to say.
Unfortunately, while the characters did have a deep personality in them, Ubisoft did not really fully utilize this potential.

One thing that was missing and needed was the lieutenant arcs, three regions with three lieutenants, you do get to know more about them while you are in their regions but it doesn’t feel enough. Some cutscenes tell you a little about their past but then again they raise more interesting questions. Not being able to feel closure once you have completed a region.

Now, the worst aspect of the game is that you don’t really know what ideals the cult has. The misconception I might have created to fill in the blanks contradict with some elements seen in the game. You might understand why the cult is trying to get more followers, but you couldn’t understand why they try to kill and force non-followers as well.
The question of why would they do this pops up a lot in my mind even towards the end.
This makes it very hard to have any feeling about the cult, which could also have a lingering effect in your ending.

I have watched Inside Eden’s Gate, a prequel 30-minute video that is supposed to tell you more about the cult. Even though it did help emphasize what they are trying to do, it still didn’t answer the questions I have raised when I was playing the games.

Verdict
Far Cry 5 is an amazing installment to the series and to the FPS Genre as a whole. With two very solid pillars and good third, you have a lot on the table to play and enjoy the game. Even if story has an issue or two I still think of it as a nice experience.
It’s not a must play however, because of its wasted potential.
If you loved the earlier Far Cry games and you think you need to play another, then yes you should play this as you will greatly enjoy it.
If you tried the earlier Far Cry games and you didn’t think it was interesting then you can avoid this one as its story doesn’t fully redeem it.
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Have any of you guys played this game? How accurate was I in my review?
What did you guys think of my review in general? Anything I should add or remove for my next one?
Is there any question left unanswered after you read my review?
Do you like the new addition “Recommended for Gameplay and Immersion”? I could do more reviews like that eg “Not Recommended because of Gameplay and Story” etc. What do you think?
I want to write a little more about the story, but I also believe that it’s best to know as little as possible when you start a game. How can I write enough about the story without implicating anything to my audience?

What would you like to hear about next: RiME or Beyond: Two Souls?

It’s been a while but I’m back.

100%

• Batman - The Telltale Series
  

  9 hours playtime

  30 of 30 achievements

• The Walking Dead: A New Frontier
  

  11 hours playtime

  30 of 30 achievements

• To the Moon
  

  11 hours playtime

  1 of 1 achievements

• fault - milestone one
  

  11 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

Batman - The Telltale Series

A decent Telltale entry. If you enjoy the newer Telltale games and like Batman, you’ll probably enjoy this. You also play as Bruce Wayne which was interesting and different from any other batman game I know. A bit heavier on quick-time events. Like that you get to romance catwoman (not sure whether this is really a spoiler).

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier

It wasn’t that bad although maybe not as good as the first two. Not that many likable characters with most of the older ones now dead. As usual, choices don’t really matter. Will still play the final game for Clem.

To The Moon

Really loved this game and recommend it to anyone who has it sitting in their backlog (most of you). It’s not that long with a really good story. I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did and it might be one of my favorite games. Playing Rakuen now and looking forward to the sequal.

fault - milestone one

Really liked this one as well and it’s my first completed visual novel. Recommend it to interested in trying visual novels. Looking forward to the second game and am also now looking for any visual novel recommendations.

Beat

• Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
  

  29 hours playtime

  25 of 59 achievements

• Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)
  

  16 hours playtime

  15 of 19 achievements

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition

A great GTA-style game involving Chinese Triads and American police. Fun gameplay with combat being centered around martial-arts hand-to-hand combat. Also had a fairly decent story. Would love a sequel as I don’t think there are many games like this. Still have a lot to finish in the world.

Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)

Moderately enjoyable platforming game. It was ok the first play-through but got bored going back and getting the missed collectibles (owls). Plan to 100% it soon. Experienced some minor bugs but nothing game-breaking.