ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

[Integrity]

what do you mean it's not as bad as i'm making it out, the second literally has two booby cups on her boobs lmao

 

it's something that i'd overlook an instance or two of, but this is all four women who are in any kind of armor. parr didn't withhold the good example because it disproves my argument or something, that's all of them in the game

 

E: worth noting, as well, that the armored men of the game are covered tip to toe. this is not an equal opportunity hornzone.

Edited June 16, 2023 by Integrity

[Fabulously Olivier]

I actually like Iris's design a lot. IMO, it's one of the better ones in the game.

 

There's no excusing Vesta though.

[Integrity]

i almost like iris' design, and that makes her the most frustrating of the lot. i said dark deity commits some spectacular own-goals and she's one of them - she's almost a solid design, and they just drop the ball for absolutely no reason

[Integrity]

TANK MECHANIC SIMULATOR (DEGENERALS, 2020)

Finished: 18/6/23. Playtime: 37 hours*.

I'm doing a little bit of a lie, here, and I'll fess to it in a moment.

I love Job Games. I have a bunch of time in House Flipper, I spent a whole sick weekend once in Plane Mechanic Simulator, and I've always had a fondness for the very-adjacent farming sim game, whether it be Stardew Valley or putting way too much time into my panda garden in World of Warcraft. I'm quite sure that if I let myself sink my teeth into Euro Truck Simulator, I would never return. Actually, I'm going to go wishlist that right now. Point is, I love spending time doing menial things and making the world a little prettier. You will be seeing Powerwash Simulator in this thread at some point.

On top of that, one of the first books I ever read when I was about three years old was Arms & Weapons, a 1980s encyclopedia of all of the many ways in which we've tried to kill one another over the millennia and the ways we've invented to stop ourselves from doing that. This spawned a lifelong fascination with all sorts of warfare, persisting to this day, and particularly tanks for whatever reason. I love tanks. Not exclusively, mind, but in the scheme of things tank development and design as a historical (and, hell, contemporary) subject is a source of eternal wonder for me.

Enter Tank Mechanic Simulator. It's simple: you restore WW2 tanks. Fix shit and put it back together. The game speaks to me on levels previously unknown. There's honestly not much more to say about the game. You fix tanks. There's a test drive mode. It's shit. I never completed a course. I just fix 'em.

Achievements involved an assortment of things which were... bizarrely designed. First up is to do everything - take an engine out, put an engine in, sit in the tank, sell something, fix something, recycle something, etc. No issues there. Second up is to do a lot of stuff. Finish fifty contracts, fix fifty tanks. Extract fifty tanks, which is a subset of contract and thus will always get you to fifty contracts. Fail fifty contracts, for some reason. You're given two tools that are generally worse than just taking things apart with your hands, remove 500 elements with each. Dig up a secret in one of the extraction maps.

Then there's the meat of the game: fully fix one of each of the game's thirty-ish tanks and display it in your museum. You can cheat and pay in-game cash money for a fully-fixed copy of any tank, but I'm no coward. I subject myself to the RNG willingly. Each extraction mission gives you a random tank, and between missions some massively fucked up tanks can spawn in your scrapyard for cheap. For the most part, they just seem to spawn at random, though I'm told the Panzer 8 Maus doesn't spawn until you've done fifty contracts, but I got him before that. The KV-2 was the final one, taking me an hour or so of just reset farming contracts to get one to eventually spawn. My takes on the tanks were overall pretty simple - the halftracks, Goliath, and armored cars were pretty trivial; German tanks are massively overengineered and incredible pains in the ass, with a special shoutout to the Panzer 5 Panther for being the game's biggest pain; Soviet tanks were easy to get in and out of, and I suspect slightly undermodeled; the Churchill AVRE is the best. For the Americans, there's a whole DLC with nothing but extra variants of Sherman, and these guys are lovingly detailed, down to having to assemble individual gears within the gearbox. These were fantastic fun to rebuild, and they and the other later-patch American vehicles (the M18, mostly) were the highlight of the game.

Finally, my lie. There's two achievements left. On Halloween and Christmas, the devs run an event which spawns a special contract, and you do it for the achievement. Rather than putting the game down for six months and then posting about it, I'm cheating and posting now, but I won't actually have platinum until late December. Ope.

[Integrity]

FELL SEAL: ARBITER'S MARK (6 EYES, 2019)

Finished: 26/6/23. Playtime: 90.7 hours.

On 6/11/2023 at 10:06 PM, Integrity said:

Advance Wars got Wargroove, Ogre Battle got Symphony of War, Final Fantasy Tactics got Fell Seal, and Fire Emblem got .

Let's chalk another off this list.

 

I think Final Fantasy Tactics is quite a bad game. I find the strategy, such as it is, utterly unenthralling. I find the story to be a child's idea of what political machinations must be like. I don't like most of the characters, doubly since the game has the sheer gall to have Mustadio in it. I think the game controls poorly, plays slowly, and just overall isn't fun. Worst of all, it eats up the lion's share of the Ivalice raid references in Final Fantasy XIV, and those raids are fucking dire. There's very few games where I cannot even see the appeal others find, even if I don't. Final Fantasy Tactics is among them. It sits in an exceptionally rare pantheon of games, I think very possibly alone, where I made it to the eleventh hour of the game and just couldn't bring myself to finish it. The game hadn't gotten too hard, it had gotten too boring for me to want to continue. I've still got a UMD of Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions sitting in a Crown Royal bag on a shelf in my bedroom with a save file midway through Chapter 4 (out of 4, for the uninitiated) that I just stopped and never went back to. Haven't ever wanted to since, either. The sequel's a mixed bag. I think it's a more mechanically interesting game underneath the cutesy GBA aesthetic, but I also don't think it's a good game for most of the same reasons as its father, and in large part due to GBA technical limitations. I haven't played more than five minutes of the third one.

I went into Fell Seal with high hopes. I loved Wargroove, and Dark Deity was a pleasant surprise that I expected to be by far the worst of the four. Wargroove had just enough innovation over its parent franchise to feel like a fresh take on a veteran idea. Dark Deity was, for good and ill, a hellish slaughter of everything we take for given in Fire Emblem, having only nominal similarity. Fell Seal... feels like a romhack of Final Fantasy Tactics. There's more of it, and it's not all particularly better. If Wargroove could have been an outsourced entry in Advance Wars a la Three Houses, and Dark Deity could never have been made by Intelligent Systems, Fell Seal could have been made by the exact team that produced Final Fantasy Tactics and it wouldn't have surprised me one bit. I'm going to wax a bit more philosophical about should-bes and such in this one, because across the nearly four days of Fell Seal over the last few weeks I had a lot of time to reflect on why I wasn't really ever enjoying it.

Plot-wise, there's a tale of two stories here. You've only got about ten characters in the entire thing to keep track of, give or take - up to six plot party members, the Council of Wizards who are all fairly interchangeable until they fracture into 'betrayer' and 'not', a main antagonist for most of the game, and a small roundup of short-lived villains. I don't think this is a negative for the game; far from it, I think a smaller cast is usually the right thing to lean into. The problem is that, with a cast that small, if one doesn't jive with a character that can be crippling. Enter Yates. Yates is a doctor and a necromancer who has some ancient beef with one of your party members, and I found him to be absolutely insufferable for the considerable amount of the game he was in. As one of the six party members with lines, and the fourth one you get, you get plenty of him, and I genuinely never wanted to hear a thing he said. Yates sucked, and I don't think the game realized he did, which made it worse.

Anyway, tale of two stories, small cast. The first side of the story is about Kyrie, Wizard-Cop. The second side of the story is about Kyrie, World-Saver. They have lightly different cast focuses - your apprentice, Anadine (the best character in SRPG history) is primarily involved with the Kyrie, Wizard-Cop plot; while Yates is much more involved with the Kyrie, World-Saver plot. Almost uniformly, I enjoyed the first side of the story quite a lot and was completely disengaged by the other. When Kyrie, Wizard-Cop is taking her marching orders from the mysterious wizard council, it's fantastic. When Kyrie, World-Saver is taking down the rogue wizard councilman and revealing a plot to destroy the world, it's naff. Kyrie and Reiner (Kyrie's brother), your first two characters, are generally the high point through both and are both very involved in both plots, while the others tend to be more involved in one and not the other. Anadine, as said, is the main foil for the Wizard-Cop plot, but she's joined later by Bzaro, a bug man who is an absolute delight and it's a damn shame he didn't have far more screen time. Your primary PC foil to the World-Saver plot, mostly early on, is Yates, though he loses relevance to a collection of NPCs as that goes on. The sixth character is Katja, who I have mixed feelings about. As an enemy, she's an awful character - throws smoke bombs to surprise! get away like four times, all while being smug as shit about it in the most irritating and self-aware-but-that-doesn't-make-it-fun way. Once you finally convince her to join you, she becomes a bit support part in the World-Saver plot and, crucially, becomes a complete gooner. After becoming playable, Katja generally rules. It's not that Fell Seal had an awful or embarrassing story, like Dark Deity did, it's just more complicated and frustrating by dint of having an entire segment of plot I genuinely did like that, ultimately, is the B-plot to the far less interesting one.

Gameplay-wise, the game's a real mixed bag. I'm going to go on a few tangents here, so grab onto something and ride along. I don't usually point this out unless an achievement requires it or some such, but I want to mention that I played the entire game on Veteran difficulty with default settings. All of this is from what, I presume, is the As-Designed intended 'harder' difficulty mode. I did no grinding, including sending any of my combat generics on timed missions, except for sending my crew into the first area (which caps at level 6 enemies) to clear injuries off my bench. I approached the game, essentially, like an offline run of Fates: Conquest. There were optional fights that I saved for strategic times, but those were in limited quantity and did not replace the grind. The difficulty selector has a lot of 'don't do this unless the game is too hard for you' and 'this setting might be too difficult for players' to a degree that I found faintly condescending, particularly since I didn't find the game particularly hard. The silliest is that the game has a warning against turning the injury system off, which is the most nothing system except for tedium - essentially, your death penalty is that the killed unit has a hefty stat penalty until benched for a fight. Grind-fights count as fights, so taking a loss (which I didn't generally) was punished by me just killing six level 7 dudes and then getting my guy back full strength. My experience would have been no more difficult, and probably better, if this just didn't exist. There are about three times in the game that you have two maps back to back with no return to the overworld, but I never found these to be nasty even if I lost a unit or two in the first of the pair and had to deploy with injuries.

Units are defined by three things, loosely speaking. A unit's class determines its primary moveset and two fixed passive abilities. A unit's subclass is determined by what second ability set, from any other class, it has equipped. A unit can have two extra passives and a counter, completely mix-and-matched from any one or three other classes, with nothing stopping you from grabbing the ones from your subclass or any other you have equipped. I don't really have an issue with this system in theory - who doesn't love building units and making stupid combos? - but in practice it makes any strategy in the game almost obsolete. One of the biggest problems with Final Fantasy Tactics, among a disgusting laundry list, is its fucking comical lack of enemy variety. Fell Seal does not have this issue, with it being exceptionally rare for enemies to have three of the same class among any deployment of ~8 enemies, and not particularly common to even have two. Its issue comes from the opposite end; every enemy (after a certain point) has a fully defined skillset, and it's largely randomly generated.

What this means is that knowing an enemy is a Knight doesn't actually tell you much of their capability at all. You know they have Knight skills, are unflankable, and likely have heavy armor. An enemy Knight, though, might be a Knight/Templar, the classic knight; or a Knight/Assassin or Knight/Duelist, which needs to be eliminated immediately; or a Knight/Wizard, and you can ignore them as the AI prioritizes bad AoE damage; or a Knight/Beastmaster, and will never die. Of course, seeing a Knight/Assassin also isn't enough information to plan to deal with an enemy, you fool. The extra passives and counter don't have to come from either equipped class, so this could randomly be a Knight/Assassin with Evade Magic, supplementing their low resistance by being completely unhittable by any standard spells; or it could randomly be a Knight/Assassin with Counter: Weaken, and you don't really care that your wizard is going to get the anti-heal debuff for a turn or two. Is it a Knight/Fellblade with Dual Wield and Sturdy Grip, capable of oneshotting anyone except your proper tanks once it gets into melee? Not all Knight/Fellblades will be able to do that, mind, just the ones that generate with a great skill spread like that. It means that you have to, ideally, fully inspect every unit to get a picture of what they can do, no shortcuts. It's not an insurmountable mental load, particularly with only up to about ten enemies at most, but it's frustrating to me.

To give an idea, Fell Seal forced me to reset probably ...eight or ten times, I'd guess, over the whole campaign including mark hunts (special battles, we'll get into those later). Over half of those were reset, load back in, do the exact same strategy I did last time but <condition>, and win. One large battle had the furthest back guy spawn with Counter: Mute, silencing the attacker whenever hit with a spell. I didn't notice, and the resulting total inability to wield my mapwide damage spells meant I fucked my positioning and got ground down. I reset, redeployed the exact same units, and that guy had Counter: Poison instead. I won in about six turns with zero casualties. The variance with which enemies can generate, even given a fixed class, even given a fixed class/subclass combination, means that there's very rarely a reason to plan to deal with anything in particular. You concoct your strategy and execute it kind of irregardless of enemy composition, checking counters and resistances because - oh, yeah, forgot to mention, enemy kit is randomized too, so the wizard might or might not have the anti-mute amulet, and one of the enemy warriors might be completely immune to fire damage while the rest aren't.

It should be conceded that the system works well for you, the player. Unit progression is satisfying and, honestly, the worst I can say about it is that some archetype progression systems are bonkers. Your ultimate wizard requires leveling Knight to get a hybrid class, leveling that hybrid class, and leveling the weird off-healer Plague Doctor. The path you take for your healer is, uh, you take Mender, and then. All paths for healers are short, abortive, and focus on being worse at healing. My healer ended up in Gadgeteer with Mender skills because there's just really nowhere to go for a healer besides getting passives to augment the base Mender kit. The knight and rogue lines are deeply incestuous, but I think that's fine, honestly. Fell Seal's problem in this is that it tries to pretend the game is fair and everyone is playing by the same rules. Concocting a funny hybrid class synergy that explodes one guy and dies, for instance, is really funny for the player to do, but wildly infuriating when the AI gets it, because the AI's win condition is different to yours.

A point of comparison is the Call of Duty rocket/grenade launcher. They're balanced by being insanely high damage ways to handle enemies, but you have a lot of targets and their ammo count is very low. The AI only has one target, and generally only gets the chance to make two shots, so these are no longer downsides. The post-4 grenade launcher is particularly salient, because it's 'balanced' in multiplayer by the same concerns, but to any given player it's going to mean something different based on their goals. Someone habitually going 10:1 gets completely crippled by the low ammo count and may rather use anything else, while for someone using it to stay even K:D it's not a particular negative. The AI is necessarily that other guy, and you are necessarily the Call of Duty titan i.e. me, in Fell Seal or in Fire Emblem or in any of these games. They're not mirror matches, and they make their worst decisions when they pretend to be.

With all that packed away, let's actually ride that talk about grenade launchers and talk about the actual pacing of combat. Fell Seal moves between three paradigms and none of them are particularly satisfying. In the earlygame, as is kind of tradition for these games, it's a slog. You really have no ability to affect what the enemy can do, you have very few actions to take besides Hit, and occasionally Spell, so it kind of just ends up being you trying to plow damage onto single enemies as best you can to limit incoming DPS flow with your two actions, Hit and Spicy Hit. One change I think Fell Seal makes for the far better is to consumables. Consumables are refilled before every fight, and the crafting system around them focuses on increasing the number of charges and potency of them. Your default Rock is a 25 damage undodgeable 3 range attack anyone can use; fully upgraded, it's a 50 damage undodgeable 3 range attack anyone can use with two charges. Potions and revival items and remedies work the same way, and I found consumables to be useful enough on a fight-by-fight basis that Reiner actually had /Peddler glued to him for most of the game, for the ability to make them a small AoE and doubling their effects. This has the greatest impact in the earlygame, with Rock taking the place of neo-XCOM's frag grenades and doing the job very well.

As you push into midgame, and your builds come together, the game peaks, kind of. There's a sweet spot from level, I dunno, 18 to 30 where you have some ability to influence the enemy, and some of your plans are coming to fruition, but combat hasn't really sped up yet where the game worked at its best. This was the closest part of the game I came to having depth in the squad, briefly flirting with an extra unit on the roster to swap one of my generics (later, Bzaro) for. I never did, but I would say that at this point the game was the closest it came to being fun.

Endgame approaches, though, and it all falls apart, Somewhere north of 30, enemies get the ability to use the top tier classes, most of which I didn't actually have unlocked at that point. Your capabilities are huge at this point - your game plan has probably taken off, whatever it is, and there's enemies you can neutralize practically at will. The problem is, so have the AIs. There's now an incomprehensible breadth of abilities that enemies can spawn bearing, and the right combination can make an enemy who is capable of obliterating one of your units, sometimes in a single action, if you don't recognize it early. Now we go back to the difference of priorities and win conditions - it doesn't matter how many times you kill the AI, they suffer no consequences from it. Oneshotting an enemy because of your clever unitbuilding is one thing; having a unit oneshot from an enemy generated randomly just-so is not, in fact, just the mirror of it. This is compounded because, as the AI's capabilities improve, they gain access to more and better consumables as well - including phoenix downsashes. The AI is happy to kite you, waste your time, and scramble low-HP revivals off in corners even though they'll be killed before their next action, over and over. It creates a peculiar paradigm that's capable of being both rocket tag and tedium, even sometimes in the same fight. It feels like you're coming out barely on top of a hellish DPS race, which is at odds with how the game played before, which was a generally slow and grinding clash.

One through line of the pacing of combat is accuracy. I want you to consider a game you've played with hit rates and think about why they're there, right. I'll go through some varied examples, though. In X-COM: UFO Defense, accuracy is generally low on purpose for both sides. The aliens are a little more accurate than you are, but you're better at keeping to cover and (initially) have more numbers, especially in local superiority, so it enhances the chaos of firefights. For your side, low accuracy is meant to communicate that your conscripts are poorly-armed and badly-trained, panicking at the sight of actual extraterrestrials, and to also add to the chaos of firefights with shit blowing up and wall panels getting destroyed no matter how well you plan. In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, accuracy is very carefully fixed around the 70% level at the beginning, so that you can expect one attack from your starting squad of four to miss in any given engagement. It teaches you to play slower and more carefully, and have contingency plans in case a shot misses - take the high value shots first, so you can adjust to how they hit or miss and can push or adopt a more defensive posture depending on that, or to use your limited-use explosives as RNG-proof damage to make up for a really terrible turn. In XCOM: Chimera Squad, accuracy is higher and there's much more access to RNG-proof damage, but cover and flanking have a higher impact to promote the idea that it's, ultimately, a tactical puzzle game where you're encouraged to always find the angle to sweep the enemy off the board and not get bogged down.

Given those varied examples, consider the instance of Fell Seal. Hit rates, for players and enemies, hover around the 85-95% rate for almost the entire game, with only a few exceptions. What benefit does this provide over perfect accuracy with statuses that, say, make it a coinflip? It's genuinely the worst-case scenario for all outcomes. It's high enough hit that you can never rely on a unit dodging unless you've built them specifically for dodgetanking (and this doesn't take off until deep in the lategame), but it's low enough hit that you're going to be fucked by an unlucky miss once per fight no matter how well you flank unless you dedicate an accessory slot (of which you have 2-3) to the +10 hit glasses. Additionally, there's almost no defensive play whatsoever to adjust for if you're getting unlucky. You essentially have to play Fell Seal as though you have 100% hit all the time, and shake your fist at God when you miss - and it's a level of accuracy where you're not at all surprised if every single attack from both sides lands in a given round. It's remarkable how much this does to make everything just a little bit worse. This fucked me far more times than Dark Deity's (awful, I will not defend it) omnipresent enemy crit chances, but in a much less flashy way that just kind of flies under the radar because we expect hit rates in our video games.

A final thing to harp on here is how Fell Seal handles height, which is to say awfully. Most unit's default vertical movements are around 4, so the standard 'hill' is 4 height per block up. Consequently, regular melee attacks are Range 1 Vert 4. About half of melee skills, but not all melee skills, are Range 1 Vert 3, which means that they can't be used, for instance, while you're holding the high ground. There's two more pieces of evidence to add here: falling damage in the game is absolutely brutal, and having the high ground over an opponent gives you no advantages. No extra range to ranged attacks, no extra damage for missiles, nada. What this means, in practice, is that holding the high ground is often a net negative, and you should generally seek to be attacking uphill or on the flats. This is so intrinsically fucking bonkers that I don't even want to delve further into it. It's completely broken on a fundamental laws-of-warfare level. It's un-fucking-believable.

There's plenty more to say about the gameplay loop, but I have to stop somewhere, so let's move over to the game's presentation. I played with a keyboard and mouse, and I will admit that the game says 'you should use a controller' and I disregarded it. The game controls like piss. It's better than Dark Deity, but I've had hangover shits I could control better than Dark Deity. Menus are deeply nested and poorly laid out, from the absolutely-random layout of classes in the class menu to the barracks representation being like what you'd see in a Final Fantasy Tactics game (i.e. wildly wasteful) to the aforementioned information about enemies being spread out across at minimum 3 and at maximum 5 different data panels, it's just a game that feels like it was cobbled together with restrictions, which a standalone game oughtn't be. It contributes to the romhack feel. It feels like they were trying to make something work within the engine and framework of War of the Lions, instead of thinking about how to lay information out more clearly and more usefully. Status-preventing kit show a tiny pictorial of the status they prevent, with no way to delve it to see what the status is, you've just got to recognize that the little kicking boot with air flowing around it is Slow. The maps suffer from this hugely as well. They're presented as isometric depictions of a very columnized game world, like any Final Fantasy Tactics or Minecraft, and are not rotatable. This isn't a huge issue, but on several maps there are entire tiles that are completely obscured from view even with a unit in them. The devs claim that the maps were designed with this in mind, and that the game is fully accessible even without rotation, but honestly that's just a straight-up lie. Scrolling with the arrows (or, presumably, dpad) can get you to any tile (the system they used for the mouse is... bad.), but that's no excuse for having tiles that aren't even intended to be secret absolutely hidden from view. The secret ones are dumb as shit, too - they use good old Final Fantasy IV perspective tricks to hide chests where Reiner would see a massive trunk the size of him, but you're stuck looking at the foredeck of a ship so you can't see it. It's dumb. It's all dumb.

The spritework, for non-humans, is generally fantastic, and the portraits are all incredible, particularly every single generic with their bizarrely kissable lips. The spritework for the humans is... decent, with jarringly Anime faces, but not bad. My problem with the human spritework is actually a weird complaint I never thought I'd bring to bear before this: there's too much variety. When you recruit a generic, you don't get a mauve-bearing man-at-arms, you get some clown suit motherfucker randomized with a skull head that's on fire and a great Russian overcoat, and the portrait is just literally my sister. Making your generics look like anything except Burning Crusade leveling rejects takes significant actual effort, to the point where I actually found myself wishing there were fewer than the hundreds of options, to have anything of a focused aesthetic for your mercenary guild rather than dumping the entire Sims 3 mod repository on my paperdoll and saying have fun. I've talked about everything else about the presentation, so here: the music is distractingly repetitive.

All in all, if Dark Deity was one of the absolute best bad games I can even imagine, Fell Seal is one of the worst good games I've ever played. Even now, after rants upon rants on Discord, I can't bring myself to say I hated it, or even that I disliked it, but I rarely had fun playing it. Complicated feelings suck, and we still have two more things to talk about that I've been saving. One is the achievements, which are meaty, and one is the DLC, about which I have some Takes.

The achievement set in Fell Seal is not terribly bad, by default. Get both endings, which was another point of frustration because one of the macguffins you need for the Good Ending, and the only one I didn't get, only drops from grind-fights outside of the intro area, and are you serious that you need to grind for the good ending??, bleh. Open all the chests across the game, see all the dialogue, master one copy of every class (not all on the same unit, but a unit can count for as many classes as you like), get some secret encounters, and do a couple of exotic takedown challenges like killing four enemies with a single action. The only bad thing is that you Bzaro himself accounts for nineteen mini-classes that he has to master all of, which can get a little bit tedious if you're not very much on the ball using him and rotating his classes to see what they can all do. On the other hand, if you're not using Bzaro, fuck you.

Let's talk about Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark: Missions & Monsters. Missions & Monsters does nothing besides make the game actively worse. The first half is Missions. Missions are exactly as nothing as Dispatches in Final Fantasy Tactics or whatever equivalent thing was in Tactics Advance. It's advanced menuing, and the missions purport to have extra conditions to make them more likely to succeed but in reality you can just invent new guys for no money and sent them on any mission, there's no level requirement at all. You can specialize the five regions of the world either to better missions, or to better grinding. Neither of these are particularly interesting. Missions last about thirty real minutes, which means that they just amount to a return trip to town to send your boys back out between every single level you beat. It adds nothing at all to the gameplay, and nominally makes grinding units far easier, which could also be solved by not having a game designed where the player feels like they need to grind units.

Missions also adds Mark Hunts and Large-Scale Battles, unlocked via Missions. I'll get one out of the way: while easy, Large-Scale Battles are reasonably fun. The game is terrible at telegraphing when you should do them, because they each have a level band they can scale within, but they're fine. Mark Hunts are targeted battles, usually with a lower deployment limit, against a particularly-tuned enemy and his support crew. That enemy's gimmick is purported to be strong enough that you have to put together a team specifically to counter it. Outside of the guy who had a fucking map-wide sleep spell, I brute forced all of them without issue. Shoutout to the Not A Tonberry one who hit Anadine, then obscenely durable at 600 hit points, for nine hundred and fifty three damage when I was trying to take him down. That was fair and fun.

Monsters, this will shock you, adds playable Monsters. I didn't talk much about them above because I was saving it for here, but only about half of the enemies you fight in the game are humans and beholden to the Laws Of Units I laid down. Monsters work slightly differently - each has a fixed main class which cannot be changed, but can choose two different subclasses alongside their bevy of passives and a counter. All the complaints I had about humans being unpredictable go just as hard for monsters, as any monster can have /Warden and thus have a mapwide heal, and that's not even their only secondary skill set. I believe these subclasses for monsters were added by the DLC, and the base game had them just be fairly fixed normal guys (a Kawa is a Kawa is a Kawa), but I don't know that for sure.

What Monsters also does, though, in addition to seeding these variants onto all monsters in the base game, is add three new human classes and seed them into the base game as well. The Wrangler is the most nothing boy to ever exist. The Samurai has one decent passive that Kyrie used for the entire game, but is otherwise an extremely meh class. The Beastmaster has enormous sustain and passive attacks, and gets added to the enemy pool far before you have the tools to deal with that. The worst map in the entire game, in the early midgame, was a fight into a temple with a generic set of enemies that would have been decently tough, and a Beastmaster who spawned with No Flank as a passive. I worked the enemy team down to just him at one point and then failed to take him down through his passive (and active) healing as he blocked a passage I couldn't jump over and revived, one by one, almost his entire team, because his self-heal was generating the beasts that he could spend on the revive. I eventually took him down because he got distracted healing his allies and I was able to take out the other healer and then him in three rounds of combat. It was the worst. None of the other times Beastmasters show up are any fun at all. Their passives have animations, and take an extra bit of time in combat every single time they do anything. If there was a semblance of balancing in the base game, Monsters fucks it.

Missions & Monsters' other addition is, of course, achievements. There's a few small ones, to kill someone with passive damage from a Beastmaster and to beat a fight using only your own Monsters; and a few medium ones, like doing all the Missions and doing all the Mark Hunts. The big one is, at the end, to catch all 20 kinds of monster and, among them, master all 22 monster subclasses. The one issue with the base game achievements was already the AP grind - mastering all the human classes was reasonably, mastering all of Bzaro on top of it was a bit extra, and now there's a third grind on top of that with totally different units. With Missions, I ended up finishing it at about the same time as I did Bzaro, being extra on top of sending the right guys out at all times and getting started early, and sometimes just idling the game while fishing in FFXIV or waiting a minute to start a new cycle before running off to take a shower. Notably, not a single time in the entire game did I actually use a Monster in a competitive deployment slot.

This leads me to a final point about games, generally, and Fell Seal in specific. I never deployed a monster because, by the time I had my head around the human class system and what my game plan was, I didn't have the brainspace to attack monsters and learn a whole new game system to disrupt and maybe not even improve my plan which was working. Fell Seal has your characters' stats grow based on their class at the time of leveling up, but you also get bonus stats from mastering classes, encouraging you to spread out a bit and get adjacent classes' permanent bonuses to HP or elemental resists. Since you might scattergun your levelups, the game gives you an option to reset character levels to 1 but keep all their mastered classes, so that you can perfectly tailor your characters' stats with a regrind if you so desire. My question is: why? There's no content for completely optimized characters. Out of a max level of 99, the only thing that can possibly challenge characters over level about 60 is the Ancient Path, and that's got nothing for characters over about 70. By the time I got to the second ending, the last thing I did, the final boss was leveling up every single time he chipped Anadine for about eighty of her 954 hit points. The only thing that scales that high is random fights, and why are you optimizing for those? This is kind of emblematic of a lot of design decisions I see in amateur stuff, like romhacks, where there's such a focus on letting people make the Optimal Decisions that there's no content that's actually meant to be challenged with optimal characters. There's no classic Final Fantasy superboss or even, hell, an Apotheosis for you to slam a big squad into. There's just thirty levels of nothing if you're a big enough dork to grind a perfect character out. See you, space forums blog.

[Integrity]

BEAT HAZARD (COLD STREAM, 2010)

Finished: 10/5/14. Playtime: 46.3 hours.

BEAT HAZARD 2 (COLD STREAM, 2019)

Finished: 30/6/23. Playtime: 30 hours.

There's been three guys lingering from the pre-Covid field waiting for me to box up their sequels and talk about the pairs together: Risk of Rain; Cook, Serve, Delicious!; and Beat Hazard. Risk of Rain 2's had new waves of achievements dropped on me, I think, three times since I initially got 100% on it, and I've kept up except for the most recent. Finishing out Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is going to be an ordeal. Beat Hazard 3 is, embarrassingly, out. But hey, here's one of them.

Beat Hazard was concocted to, as Parrhesia lovingly put it, turn your music tracks into Touhou stages. That's all there was to it at first. The first game gave you a ship with unlimited guns and limited bombs, a scoring system, and said go hogwild. The more pumped-up the song is at the moment, the stronger you are, but the more and tougher the enemies that spawn also are. It's elegant, though it had some teething issues at first. Late in the first game, the brave one-man dev team added extra powerups you could select from, and then added ships that played slightly differently and gave them little missions for you to accomplish. This set the groundwork for the sequel, where whatever algorithm he used to digest tracks and create stages was also used to create new, track-specific ships, which could be further customized with modules that you unlocked for completing missions on individual ships and could be equipped to anything in your hanger. If you buy into the core gameplay loop, there's a sickening amount of longevity to optimizing your way through Beat Hazard 2, but it's obscene depth in a very simple loop, so there's not too much to talk about for the actual game.

Most of the achievements for both games just boil down to playing enough. Do a certain number of tracks, do a certain number of ship missions, use various powerups, survive long enough in the survival mode, etc. The wrench in the works comes through 2's Challenges. Every day at midnight UTC, a new Daily Challenge song is picked off Spotify, and the top 10 players in the world in that window for that song get a special ship off of it. Smaller Lightning Challenges follow the same pattern, but every four hours instead. Here's the problem: I'm not actually very good at these games, and one achievement involves winning, as in number-one, any one of these challenges. Optimal play involves not shooting for as long as you can hold it at the beginning of the song, and relistening to the first thirty seconds of random songs to get that down can be rough depending on the song. When the game was hot and fresh, I had basically no hope of doing this. Even now, five years after early access started, there's still a handful of Russians running the leaderboards who are just slightly better than me. Finally, a few days ago, the 4 PM Lightning Challenge rolled over to System of a Down's Chop Suey!, a song I like and can tolerate the intro for several times in a row, right as Moscow ticked into the wee hours of the morning. I ground out my best score and crossed my fingers that the best of the Russians would be in bed - and I was right. That was the final hurdle, and I could grind out the rest of the game in peace.

The takeaway from this franchise is that I owe Serj Tankian a beer.

[Integrity]

OVERCOOKED! 2 (GHOST TOWN, 2018)

Finished: 2/7/23. Playtime: 28.6 hours.

The Overcooked! games may or may not have invented a genre, I'm entirely unsure. The genre is chaotic physics-enabled party game where you work with other people to do menial shit. There's tons of games like it now. I have no idea if Overcooked! invented it, but it's the canonical representation of it in my head. That pretty much sums the game up, anyway. You and up to three other people have to cook things. The kitchen is laid out terribly, you bump into each other, you toss shit at each other, into ovens, into pots, into the trash. Follow the recipes, make what the people want. Bonus points for not taking too long and for doing it FIFO order. That's literally all there is to the game. This is a peculiar one, though, because the game is completely not-designed to be soloed - and I've never done it, but my occasional partner in crime has. His post is imminent. The multiplayer loop is very simple, and he ran through the entire game with me (what a legend, honestly). There's a bit more meat to the singleplayer half.

Achievements have a bit of grit to them. First up, for the main game and all four DLCs, get three stars on every level. Straightforward. This is something I really like, because after beating a given campaign you unlock the ability to get four stars in each level, and these requirements are deranged. They're also not required for anything except for saying that you have four stars in an Overcooked! 2 level. Achievements stop at 3. I think this is fantastic design, essentially having a Completion metric and a Prestige metric for score attack type games.

The DLCs themselves add different mechanics (e.g. using a guillotine instead of knives to cut food, or using a watergun instead of a sink to wash dishes) in addition to just different recipes, and there's achievements for these as well. These are the fucking worst. The base game has a set of achievements for accomplishing basic tasks a shitload of times - catch 250 thrown items, or chop 800 things. These are large numbers of things you'll be doing a lot. The DLCs introduce new actions, but don't scale the numbers down. You're still going to be chopping and throwing across the meaty base game and all the DLCs, but you're only going to guillotine things in a few levels in the horror DLC. The guillotine benchmark is set at 500 items, for a mechanic you might possibly use to chop all of a hundred items across the entire campaign. Throw three hundred wood logs into the fire, or three hundred buckets of coal into the furnace. These things are disgustingly overtuned for how many times they'll be performed in a campaign, and only the primary user gets any credit. If you're going through the game co-op, as intended, you might scrounge a dozen or forty of those three hundred across an entire 3* run of the campaign. There's a good several hours of doing nothing but grinding after everything to finish all these menial tasks, over and over, with no progress bar to guide you.

And that's not where it ends! This actually isn't a knock against the game, but it's why there's an edit_me in the playtime if you're reading this quickly. There's Arcade Mode and Versus Mode if you really need more variety than the game provides, which you really do not. The campaign has far more possible longevity than the game demands. Arcade and Versus require fifteen games each, and all you really have to do is connect a controller to be Player 2 and idle it out. It's three to five minutes a game, depending on the map. I'm still waiting for this to happen, and let's see if I remember to edit the playtime afterwards.

E: i did

Edited July 2, 2023 by Integrity

[Darros]

Hi, it's me, noted Serenes Forest poster Darros, again. Overcooked! 2 rules. I have some things to say about the solo experience and the achievements as well. I've had this game 100%ed as of May two years ago, and went through it again with Ike so that he could do it too. Because it's a fun game to play with others, and because I have the DLC and as long as one person has it, it's accessible to everyone.

 

While I don't think that Overcooked! 2 is necessarily designed for a single player experience, it still functions well enough as one. In multiplayer, all players are present on each map. Simple as that. When you're playing single player, you instead get multiple copies of yourself. This requires more focus, but less communication, so it evens out to about the same amount of brainpower to play single player. There's a designated "swap copy of yourself" button, and if you're doing a task while you swap, the copy of your avatar you just left continues doing the task until it's done. It sounds chaotic, it takes about two or three maps to figure out in practice. All the maps that suck single player suck in multiplayer too. For instance, here's 6-2, a level that essentially requires use of the d-pad:

The gimmick of the level is that the center of the level floats up and down, and if you're on it while it goes under, you drown and lose whatever you're holding. It sucks. It is the worst level in the game. But honestly, that's just me harping a bit on one level which is very unfortunately designed. I can only really think of maybe four or five levels that are outright Bad, most of them contained to the Carnival of Chaos DLC. Most maps are good and end up in one of two flavors:

1) Fully cooperative maps where your two (at minimum) characters are completely separated by a barrier, forcing each player into a particular pre-determined role

2) Open maps where the players have to decide what they're doing, quickly, and stick to those roles to get a good score.

The scoring system for this game is based on point thresholds for one, two, or three stars. You pass the level with a one star minimum, which is usually simple to get. Three starring levels ranges from sort of difficult to braindead easy. Once you complete the game, you unlock "New Game Plus", which isn't actually a New Game Plus at all but rather a fourth star for each map, which is usually unhinged, as Ike said. There are some exceptions, because whenever the game teaches you a new recipe or mechanic, that level doesn't actually start the timer until you hand something in. This makes some of the fourth star scores completely cheesable, but there's no real incentive to get them other than "it's kind of impressive", but other people have already done it and I can just watch them on YouTube instead of bothering to do it myself.

 

The DLCs for this game are largely standard fare. A couple of character packs and four level packs:

1) Surf N' Turf: a summer themed DLC where you make smoothies and kebabs. Introduces the bellows and the squirt gun, a new way to clean dishes and put out fires

2) Night of the Hangry Horde: a spooky themed DLC introducing the guillotine, coal, and horde levels. The guillotine and coal aren't particularly interesting, horde levels have potential but in practice and up being way too long with many waves, many of them lasting nearly 10 minutes (the average level ranges from 2:30-4:00).

3) Carnival of Chaos: a carnival themed DLC introducing cannons and condiments. There are no problems in theory with this DLC, but some of the maps in it are quite bad and require d-pad movement, which is always unpleasant.

4) Campfire Cook-Off: my favorite DLC by a mile, which adds campfires (use wood to cook instead of always-on burners) and backpacks (pull items from another player instead of a tile on the map). If you want One DLC to get, get this one (they're all good though, despite what I say about Carnival of Chaos).

There are also seasonal FreeLC packs, two winter themed, one beach themed which is essentially a free preview of Surf N' Turf, and three for Chinese New Year. They are all fun as well.

 

Ike has already touched on the DLC achievements being completely fucking baloney though. Other than perhaps the condiments achievement, every single one of these has a very high threshold to pop the achievement where it easily becomes an unreasonable grind to do so. I believe the vision is that people who nolife this game and put in a bunch of hours get rewarded, but I've put 79 hours into this game and I can say for certain that if I had not gone out of my way for these achievements, I never would have gotten them organically. I will say that getting them alone was much more irritating than hosting so that Ike could get them. At least there were some cooperative actions to do there, and the company is nice.

 

I do want to fully disclaim though that Overcooked! 2 is an amazing game, and I'm only nitpicking parts of it because I've essentially run the 100% gauntlet twice now and have put so many hours into it. The few poor maps are not enough to distract from the quality of the rest of the game, and if you're not an 100%er yourself, and are just here to read Ike's commentary, the annoying achievements won't really actually matter.

[Integrity]

On 4/19/2023 at 7:34 PM, Punished Dayni said:

Little surprised most aren't as elaborate as Lei Luo's.

i have fantastic news - the new DLC (i won't do another update-recap for gunfire) added two new characters, nona and zi xiao, and both of them have (almost) lei luo-grade 'play around their gimmick like this' profile frames. i haven't done them yet, so i don't know if they're tremendous pains in the ass, but it's heartening to see!

zi xiao, the owl: he can upgrade and downgrade your occult scrolls (the pickup skills) rarity levels variously, beat the game on solo nightmare with all your occult scrolls having the same rarity level

nona, the red panda: you get a pet. beat the game on solo nightmare without the pet ever dying

e: i didn't add their animal types and that's a travesty

ee: one of them is rad and one of them is a pain in the ass

eee: nvm they both own zi xiao is just unintuitive as shit but he kicks ass once you figure him out and the frame forced me to learn how he works

Edited July 3, 2023 by Integrity

[Integrity]

WARHAMMER 40,000: BOLTGUN (AUROCH, 2023)

Finished: 4/7/23. Playtime: 24.3 hours.

Boltgun is exactly what it says, except for the bits that aren't. Many smarter people than me have harped on this - it markets itself as a classic boomer shooter like Doom (1994), but it isn't really, it's more of an arena shooter like Doom (2016). The good news is that it's kind of pedantry; Boltgun is a fantastic game. I'll forgive them a cheeky little marketing tactic here or there. You, John Boltgun, have to kill all the guys that Titus left behind when he, you, rampaged through this planet in the fantastic Space Marine. Your little suite of weapons doesn't have a dud among them, with a particular favorite going to your silly little laser you get as your last proper (non-BFG) weapon. Enemy variety's nice, things die nice and crunchy, and bits of guy have their own stickiness and gravity to let little chunks of dude slide down walls. It's gnarly. In general, the simple feeling of stomping around and shooting things is nearly-immaculate in Boltgun, and if you've read the rest of the thread, you know that it doesn't take much more than nailing the core gameplay loop for me to love something. A special shoutout to the guys who voice John Boltgun and your inquisatrix who orders him around in the precisely three cutscenes in the game. They're both shouting every single line all the time, which is exactly the energy Warhammer 40,000 deserves.

It's not perfect, clearly. There's a real feedback issue going the other way - while shooting things feels amazing, getting hit has terrible feedback. As late as the final boss on the second run I still was having times where I'd lose a third or more of my health to a complete mystery, which isn't great. Some enemies (particularly the plasma renegades) blend far too much into the environment considering how much damage they can pump out. Enemies, in general, have a bad habit of prefiring at you around corners, and there's a lot of damage you cannot feasibly avoid taking. These are all nitpicks to me, but I can easily see how they'd amount to a total dealbreaker for someone else. All told, though, I had a fantastic about 20 or 22 hours with Boltgun, with only one fight that got me to put the game down for a few weeks and a little gritting through at the very end. Easy recommendation.

Achievements are as straightforward as they come. Beating the game on the top difficulty gets you absolutely everything except for three achievements, one each for finding all the secrets in each of the three acts of the game. If you were feeling saucy and attacked the game first go on Exterminatus and pulled up a secrets guide (there's a superb one on Youtube), you could ace the game in a single clear of ten or twelve hours. I did two, one on the next-to-top difficulty and then one on Exterminatus to get all secrets. I'd say two playthroughs is just about the life the game's got in it, though, so it accidentally ended up being the perfect amount of Boltgun. I am sated.

[Integrity]

ETRIAN ODYSSEY (ATLUS, 2007)

Finished: 9/7/23. Playtime: 67.3 hours.

Etrian Odyssey is a franchise very near and dear to my heart. I was weaned on the RPGs of yesteryear, the DOS greats: Wizardry, Might and Magic, Ultima, so on. There's this itch, deep in my soul, that constantly burns for a game that's specifically Might and Magic 3 again, except for that Might and Magic anything pre-6 is kinda unplayable to my tastes nowadays. I've tried and tried to play 3 and even Xeen to absolutely no avail, but I still itch for that specific flavor of guild-builder dungeon-crawler in my life. Even later Mights and Magic, much as I adore 7, follow a far more traditional party-building approach. I want my guys to be replaceable. I want backup warriors with slightly different builds. I want to be coerced into pulling a lower-level guy off the bench because he solves the problem I'm up against better. I want Football Manager with swords, is basically what I'm saying. Etrian Odyssey isn't quite that, but it's the single closest any game or franchise has ever come to this vaunted game in my skull. It's a deeply traditional dungeon crawler where you run a guild, not a party. You're expected to have reserves, you're expected to have conditional deploys, it's all nearly there in the right order. It's close enough, though. It's precisely what I want, even if it isn't exactly what I wished for.

I haven't played Etrian Odyssey itself before. I have 3 and 4, its rather-improved sequels, and never went backwards or forwards in the franchise. I found both to be fantastic games, and I was very curious as to how the games' DNA came about. You all know what series like this can be like, right? You get the weird first entry, where all the ideas are there, the developers just haven't quite figured out how to get them all in a line. All the pistons are there, but they're not all firing. Fire Emblem's a notorious one of these, being from the '80s and all, but there's thousands like it.

Astonishingly, all the bones of Etrian Odyssey are not only there, they're assembled into a recognizable skeleton. The games are assembled into strata of five floors each, and the first through fourth strata of Etrian Odyssey are genuinely a very good dungeon crawler, and not at all hard to go back to after seeing where the franchise goes. It wasn't all gravy - actually getting substitutes up was generally not worth the effort, balance was all over the fuckin' place, and item progression was staggered and inscrutable, just to name a few. But the game never felt unfair, and it never felt like it didn't respect my time. It was hard, it presented me with hard problems, and it said solve 'em, asshole. I had a great time with it.

That means Etrian Odyssey had a hell of a lot of goodwill to flush at the eleventh hour. The reveal of the fifth stratum is absolute aces, and the theme of it is incredible. The actual stratum? Holy shit does it suck. It's tedious, it's space-filling, you're hardly rewarded for exploration. There's no shortcuts and other fun nooks to find. The itemization ranges from poor to terrible. The enemy pods can just decide you die sometimes, very rarely, without much of an answer from you. The final boss is awfully uninspiring, after the previous four had all been interesting things to attack. The postgame sixth stratum is, if anything, worse. I finally, at floor 27 out of 30, gave up and looked up maps.  I'm not going to hold it too hard against the game, given as the front 60% of it was shockingly good, but holy hell does it go downhill.

A big part of that is tied into the postgame superboss design. You have seven classes, rising to nine as you go, from which to cobble together a squad of five. Seems sound, and it is for the entirety of the main game - I'm quite confident just about any setup of five different classes could tackle the final boss, though some would have a terrible time of it. The postgame superbosses consist of three dragons and then Primevil. My problem with these is that the requirements for tackling them are utterly ungeneric; you can't just say you need 'good party defenses' for it. You need to have a Protector with Antivolt for the thunder dragon. There is no other feasible way of surviving his timed AoE attack, including grinding - the fights are designed for the level cap of 70. Among the three dragons, there is absolutely no feasible way to fight them without at least a Protector, and if you're going to do it without a Protector and a Troubadour then you need to have very specific kit loadouts to counter other things, and it's going to be a hell of a lot harder. For one of them, the ice dragon, there's no feasible way to fight it and win without both a Protector and a Troubadour. The final superboss, annoyingly, completely invalidates the concept of having a Troubadour, but you really want one to get to him intact.

The problem there is that I ditched my Protector in the middle of the third stratum. I had no need for one for the rest of the game. There's absolutely no catchup mechanisms in Etrian Odyssey - experience scales pretty linearly, and each member gets their assigned fifth of it even if some party members are level capped and the experience vanishes into ether. You cannot do any form of advanced recruitment, and there is no source of passive experience gain. You just have to take a Protector into the labyrinth, with a high level squad, and grind it out until he's good enough to tackle the dragons. This fucking sucks. Add in the fact that you're not making it through these fights without healing, of which your only reasonable source is the Medic, and your squad of five's capacity for self-expression becomes entirely 'what two ways do you want to deliver damage to the enemy'. It's uninspiring, it sucks, and worst of all, it's random. See, the final superboss has a full-party auto-kill spell, and another that prevents any ability use (a death sentence) that he can just ...decide to use. After a few honest attempts, my crunch through the final superboss involved simply recording what I was doing in Notepad++, recording his responses, and fishing for the RN seed that didn't have him use Necrosis on turn 20. Awful note to end the game on.

 And, after all that, there's nothing to say about the achievements. Beating the game and beating the postgame gets you everything with exactly two caveats. First, that there are three rare mobs you have to kill for one achievement. This took me about ten minutes. Second, that you have to beat the postgame superboss - and only the postgame superboss - on Expert difficulty. Because I'm a dipshit, I just played the entire game on it, instead of turning it up for just that fight, which you could do.

The sequels will be up in due time, don't worry. I grabbed all three. My excitement to play 2 and to replay 3 is undampened by a flaccid ending to a very solid first entry in the series.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

On 7/10/2023 at 2:32 AM, Integrity said:

I want my guys to be replaceable. I want backup warriors with slightly different builds. I want to be coerced into pulling a lower-level guy off the bench because he solves the problem I'm up against better. I want Football Manager with swords, is basically what I'm saying.

Sounds like Darkest Dungeon numero uno may be up your alley?

[Integrity]

7 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

Sounds like Darkest Dungeon numero uno may be up your alley?

i love everything about darkest dungeon 1 (i've got 164 hours in it, somehow) except the actual game. i could write a whole essay about it but the brief of it is that 

On 7/9/2023 at 8:32 PM, Integrity said:

But the game never felt unfair, and it never felt like it didn't respect my time. It was hard, it presented me with hard problems, and it said solve 'em, asshole.

this is absolutely not true about darkest dungeon. darkest dungeon is deeply, colossally unfair, and it has no respect for your time. i've made it all the way up to the titular darkest dungeon (a process which takes a disgusting amount of time compared to what you actually do) and just quit the game in disgust twice.

e: i'll say this much - darkest dungeon does hit a stride in the expert dungeons. leveling guys to meet yours isn't too difficult, you're making good progression, you're really feeling out the mechanics. i mostly feel like it falls completely the hell apart in the champion ones and the darkest dungeon itself.

Edited July 11, 2023 by Integrity

[Original Alear]

The only EO I ever perfected is 3 (on the DS). The only thing I never accomplished was beating the elder dragon (boat world) with only 2 PCs and 3 NPCs. If you do that, please make sure to post what reward you get, I always wanted to know if it was a worthwhile weapon with any particularly interesting bonuses (I think usually the quest reward drops for boat land are mediocre status inflicting weapons?).

I suspect/worry that the best way to beat elder dragon in EO3 is to dedicate your controllable team to bad status and support and very slowly chip him down to nothing with help from the NPCs.

EDIT-My least favorite thing in Etrian Odyssey is curse. Because of 2 things:
-Because EO follows a somewhat common JRPG tendency to have enemies with lower damage and higher HP than allies, if your allies are cursed, they will do massive damage to themselves when they attack, but enemies who are cursed will do almost nothing (compared to their hp totals) to themselves. So there's almost no point to cursing, except
-When you want a curse conditional drop, you have to whittle down enemies pretty close to nothing and let curse do the rest, otherwise they won't possibly finish themselves with the curse, it'll wear off, and then you have to wait some turns because at least some EOs have a system where enemies (and maybe allies?) become rather resistant to statuses for a while after they manage to clear them off.

I was going to beat EOU2 100%, but something happened, and my saves got cleared from right before fighting ur-child and ur-devil and all I had left was a save for fighting Scylla for the first time.

Oh ya also just so you know, EO2 and EO3 also have superbosses with superpowered elemental attacks, and while there might be some other strategy to get around them (binding or boosted skills maybe), mostly you need a protector (or zodiac in EO3) to deal with those attacks as well. Not clear if you beat EO3's postgame already. So if you want to keep one team, it might be a good idea to have protector in EO2 as well. However, I think some people beat the hardest bosses in EO2 by using boost-restoring items to keep bosses locked down or something like that.

Edited July 14, 2023 by Original Alear

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

On 7/11/2023 at 3:31 PM, Integrity said:

darkest dungeon is deeply, colossally unfair, and it has no respect for your time.

dd mission 2 or 3, eh?

Thoughts on DD2? I looked at it but the roguelike element isn´t my thing.

 

I´ve only played EO:V and EO Nexus, kinda bummed they aren´t on Steam. The class variety in Nexus is awesome but the ability to switch things up and actually get started with that new squad in a new area felt non existant. 

I´ve always had trouble keeping things balanced and ended up either overleveling and overgearing for the current strata or just losing my patience with it and getting steamrolled by the new enemy a stratum up.

[Integrity]

21 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

Thoughts on DD2? I looked at it but the roguelike element isn´t my thing.

i haven't played it, but it looks sufficiently different (i don't know if this is a good or a bad thing) to the first that i'm going to get it on sale probably this xmas and give it a whirl. i liked the things the devs were saying during development, but i'm concerned about a lack of longevity to the concept. we'll see!

[Integrity]

LUFTRAUSERS (VLAMBEER, 2014)

Finished: 16/7/23. Playtime: 17.3 hours.

This is the end of a fucking quest, friends. I've had Luftrausers installed on my hard drives, due to its tiny size, since it was new. It's exhausting to play, so I'd poke into it for a half hour here and then, accomplish nothing, burn out, and try again next year. This was finally the year where I grit my teeth and crunched through. This is relieving on levels I haven't experienced in eons.

Here's the context: Luftrausers is as arcade as games get. The stage (singular) is a wraparound two-dimensional space, with heavy clouds above and water below that both damage you if you go into them. You fly your titular Rauser through this stage, killing enemies and racking up combos to make your score number go up, which spawns harder enemies until you inevitably die. A long run of Luftrausers can last an entire minute.

Let that 17 hours sink in, with that context.

The achievements are tied into precisely one system: missions. Missions unlock nothing but cosmetic overlays for the whole stage (vaporwave 'rausin) and achievements. Your Rauser is made out of a weapon, a body, and an engine - five options apiece, plus a random option. Each of the six options for each of the three part types has four missions that you complete sequentially, involving a vast breadth of things like killing enemies, killing specific enemies, maintaining a certain combo, killing a hard enemy while at max combo, attaining a certain score, etc. etc. They get hard as hell; the one that I'd been working on from approximately 2021 to last week is "kill a submarine while at max combo". The combo meter goes away fast if you're not constantly fighting, and the game can absolutely just not spawn enough guys to keep your combo up. On top of that, submarines are modestly durable and resubmerge shortly after emerging to shoot you. On top of that, every submarine has a 1/3 chance to be an acemarine instead, which is both far more difficult to kill and doesn't count as a submarine for kills. It was hell, it was probably the hardest single mission in the base set, and it walled me for years.

Note, there, that I said the base set. Completing all four missions for a part unlocks its SFMT mission. SFMT is the game's hard mode, and it will fuck you instantly if you're not prepared. Remember how I said a long run of Luftrausers could last a minute? A minute in SFMT is borderline-impossible. I was completing missions for killing blimps, the superbosses that spawn very late in regular runs, and subsequently dying within ten seconds of spawning in SFMT. The newest, hardest mission was to kill an enemy ace (modestly tough guys) at max combo in SFMT, and this brings up the newest problem: Luftrausers limits how many enemies can spawn based on a difficulty weighting, which goes up over time. SFMT can spawn anything from the get-go, and the enemy blimps not only take up a massive amount of that real estate, but they (and submarines) also spawn missiles that count as entities against that real estate while chasing you. An instant-spawn blimp is basically just a reset if you're trying to build a full combo. This and the "score 25,000 points" missions were nothing but brute resetting until the RN seed favored me enough to basically just give me twenty boats-and-fighters and an ace attacking towards the end of it. It was hell. There's nothing cheeky to say: Luftrausers demands nothing short of you getting good as fuck to ace it, and I'm damn proud I did.

Luftrausers also contains the second instance of me modding a game (the first being Total Warhammer 1). When you begin SFMT, a seventeen second air raid siren sound plays every single deployment. I went into the files, deleted snd_sfmtsiren.ogg, copied snd_gunshot.ogg, and renamed it to snd_sfmtsiren.ogg after about ten runs. Good God.

All that said, Luftrausers is a very fun little package that I, clearly, enjoyed enough to keep gritting my teeth and trying again and again to grind through for nearly ten years, and I think that says enough on its own.

[lenticular]

14 hours ago, Integrity said:

LUFTRAUSERS (VLAMBEER, 2014)

My memories of Luftrausers can be easily summed up: I played it a bit. It was fun! But it was hard and I was bad, so I stopped playing.

According to Steam, I got 6/12 achievements in 3.8 hours and last played in 2015. That tracks.

I'm tempted to reinstall it and take it for a spin again. I am absolutely not even a little bit tempted to try to 100% it though. Congratulations on beating it.

[Integrity]

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

I played it a bit. It was fun! But it was hard and I was bad, so I stopped playing.

i think this is probably the most cosmically Correct way to experience luftrausers, ngl

[Integrity]

On 5/9/2023 at 10:57 AM, Parrhesia said:

fucking lol ike's on the hook for all of TWW3

god dammit they just confirmed in a dev blog they're keeping the pattern from 2. sixteen new campaigns. fade me.

[Integrity]

CRAZY MACHINES 3 (FAKT, 2016)

Finished: 23/7/23. Playtime: 16.4 hours.

Crazy Machines is, honestly, a flash game. Like, it isn't actually - it's a PC-DVD game made by FAKT Software GmbH for the deeply-liminal German games market - but it is, you know what I mean? You build incredible and stupid machines to accomplish mundane tasks. That's it. It's a silly physics Mousetrap simulator puzzle game. I've been plugging away at it on my Steam Deck in the wind-down before bedtime for the last few months and finally put the last push in to finish it out tonight.

That last push was necessary for two reasons, tied to the achievements. As one might suspect, the achievements in the puzzle game are for solving all the puzzles. Straightforward. The final two campaigns (fischertechnik and Lost Experiments) drag a bit, fischertechnik because it turns ball tracks into some esoteric nonsense in a few levels and Lost Experiments because it's really just not very good moon logic, but most of the game is still quite fun. One complaint is that the game is in 3D and basically never benefits from this - in fact, quite the opposite, as there's a few levels (particularly in the Halloween pack) where a ball will roll towards the screen instead of along a shelf and kill your machine for no gain or interest because some element was a pixel too high or low and applied a little bit of torque for some reason. It adds nothing besides making things more fiddly sometimes.

The other part of the game is the minigames. The minigames are these six little packed-in games that were all made to showcase the editor's capabilities, you have to get a high score on each to get a trio of podium medal achievements, and every one of the six sucks. The silver medal requirements are generally pretty reasonable, and I think I'd find 5/6 of them fine enough if that were it, but the golds are just a stretch too far. The controls are fiddly and the games require a shocking amount of precision to perform on what's essentially a set of proof-of-concept levels. Good news, though! There's an easier way! You can put slowmotion on just like the regular levels you're just watching, and play them in slowmotion. This makes things much more doable, but also means you end up playing a stage that can take 10+ minutes to rack up the score you need on and now you're doing it in half-time. It's a slog.

Fun game, easy to recommend for a few smackers, and not at all one to recommend 100%ing. Whew.

e: i do not own and will not be purchasing crazy machines 1 or 2 btw this is where my involvement with the series begins and ends. i'm not even sure why i own this.

e2: it is on sale for ninety nine red cents as of this post being made

Edited July 24, 2023 by Integrity

[Integrity]

BIOSHOCK 2 (2K, 2010)

Finished: 27/7/23. Playtime: 18.2 hours.

@Florete, this one's out to you.

As I said in my brief Bioshock recap, I never played 2. Liked 1 when it was new, then liked 1 again if a little less when I came back around to it. Hated Infinite. Still have no desire to go finish it.  Still, I was told that Bioshock 2 was good and that I should give it a try irregardless of my feelings on the other two, and it was a fiver this past Steam Summer Sale. What's the harm?

Why the fuck don't people talk about Bioshock 2 more? This game whipped ass. Both of the big pacing issues with the first - the tepid, long intro and the absolute pacebreaker that was Point Prometheus at the eleventh hour - have been fixed, and fixed with aplomb. Bioshock 2 starts good, never really slumps, and ends strongly. All of the complaints that I have about it are generally things it imported from Bioshock, like the weapons being overall kinda flaccid (especially the machine gun) and the great variety of plasmids being superseded by how good electro-bolt is. They're lessened here, at least. The rivet gun and drill feel far better than their original counterparts, and nothing in 1 comes close to the joy of the harpoon gun coming fully online three Powers to the People later. I did, occasionally, swap plasmids around. It's an overall tighter gameplay loop compared to the first, which is what one would hope to get from a sequel.

Complementing this is the story and setting. For however iconic would you kindly ended up being, I never particularly cared about, well, anyone or anything in Bioshock. Crucially, I'm not entirely convinced that Bioshock was entirely convinced that Bioshock was a takedown of libertarian individualism. Bioshock was a fun time, but stripped entirely of the context of the plot, it was kind of the same fun time. Lamb, on the other hand, plus the cadre of smaller support characters, I felt added to my enjoyment of 2 fairly substantially. Eleanor's gambit at the end was pretty pumpin', and I liked Sinclair all the way to the end. Was it a story of the year candidate? Nah. But I do think that it was distinctly better than what the first served up.

The other half of this was the setting. Bioshock, being System Shock 3, genuinely could have simply been in a space station rather than Rapture and almost literally nothing would have changed about it. Bioshock 2 is far fishier than its father. It's damper. There's way more barnacles and shit. You have a few walking on the ocean floor segments, on account of you're in a diving suit. There's a really fucking big squid at one point in the background. Bioshock 2 couldn't have just been set on a space station instead, and does a far better job owning the fact that you're on the ocean floor. I liked that a lot more.

Everything I said about Bioshock's achievements applies to 2's. One top-difficulty campaign run, with respawns off, being meticulous about getting audiologs and stuff, and you get all the non-DLC achievements. I feel like 2 was a fair bit easier and shorter than 1 overall, hence the reduced time taken. There are two DLCs to follow it up. I did Minerva's Den first, which is just a short side-story with its own collectibles, nothing super heady. Took about three or four hours, including getting a high score at Asteroids (Yakuza trained me for this...). Second was Protector Trials, which sets you to defend a Little Sister harvesting session over six arenas, with three scenarios each. Every scenario has a different kit limitation imposed on you, which was nice for me to get to use the shit I didn't in the main game. After doing all eighteen of them with at least an A (90ish% success) and at least one with an A+ (100%), you unlock a bonus round through each map with your entire endgame kit unlocked to sandbox with. These were a trivial victory lap, but the whole DLC didn't take particularly long and had the decency to have some off-the-wall combinations to make you try to keep it fresh.

I would say, overall, that I enjoyed my time with Bioshock. On the other hand, I would say that I liked my time with Bioshock 2. Bioshock is a pretty big game, historically speaking, and I've absolutely recommended it to people on that basis before - I generally think it's both important and cool to see what inspired the stuff we get now. I would recommend Bioshock 2 to someone entirely on its own merit. It's just a very solid game.

e: i can't not mention possibly the single greatest porting fuckup in gaming history

Edited July 27, 2023 by Integrity

[Florete]

Um...what?

I mean, Bioshock 2 is my favorite of the three, but I don't remember this being a thing.

[Integrity]

you recommended it to me in another thread, i want to say late last year?

e: unless this is a very funny and embarrassing case of misremembered identity

Edited July 28, 2023 by Integrity

[Florete]

16 minutes ago, Integrity said:

you recommended it to me in another thread, i want to say late last year?

e: unless this is a very funny and embarrassing case of misremembered identity

Maybe it was this? I mentioned on my own Bioshock 2 being the best one, and you responded saying you'd been meaning to play it. So not misremembered identity, just misremembered...context.

What's funnier to me is that this is not even the first time this year someone has tried something I happened to mention off-hand and misremembered it as me recommending it to them.