Integrity Posted January 23 Author Share Posted January 23 (edited) ORCS MUST DIE! 3 (ROBOT ENTERTAINMENT, 2020) Finished: 23/1/24. Playtime: 35.8 hours. On 10/21/2022 at 1:40 PM, Integrity said: Orcs Must Die! 3 will appear in this thread too, but they added a new DLC with new achievements that I haven't gotten yet. Bastards. Hell, it's about time. After Orcs Must Die! 2, Robot would make the frankly baffling decision to create an Orcs Must Die! MOBA. I played it very, very briefly. It did not translate well to competitive multiplayer. I got the spirit behind the idea, but it just didn't do it for me. Years after that, they'd return to their roots and make Orcs Must Die! 3, which is just the best the franchise has been. It's got all the warts of the previous games, to be sure, and even more interactions to ensure that there are even more janky interactions. It slots firmly into the third-person shooter / tower defense hybrid style, even more so than the previous two games, and there won't be terribly many times that you can actually create a bespoke defense and just watch it work. Besides that, there's not much more to add. It's Orcs Must Die!, but More. There's a set of characters to choose from (eight or so, not the two from 2) with very slight differences in mobility options. Pick your favorite voice lines and aesthetic. Orcs Must Die! 3's main contribution to the formula is Scramble mode, and it's a good addition. You're, simply, put through five increasingly-difficult maps, where you can choose global debuffs and buffs at each stage. It's nothing super fancy, it's nothing that hasn't been done before, but it does the one thing that Orcs Must Die! has consistently failed to do up to and including this game: encourage a little variety in your loadouts. That's all one can ask for, really. The game also adds War Scenarios, which are massively scaled up stages that give you super traps to compensate. They're a mixed bag, but I appreciate them trying something new. As far as achievements go, this one is by far the most straightforward. Gone are the weird challenges of 1 and the bullshit of 2. The game ships with a main campaign and a minicampaign, and there are two additional DLC minicampaigns. Get a perfect clear on each level of all four of these on the top difficulty, get to wave 25 on Endless mode for a vanilla map and one from each DLC, and gather a 5,000,000 point Scramble clear, which basically means the same thing. Going through all this gets you all-but-cleanup all around - you might not have bought every trap, but respeccing is free; I only got about two-thirds of the kills needed in the ice DLC and had to grind a few more stages. Completely straightforward and completely doable (and recommended) in co-op - @Dr. Tarrasquecame back for this one right on the heels of 30XX, after we cleared vanilla together when it was new and cleared the first DLC together when it was new and then didn't do the second DLC for a year and a half for no real reason. So it goes! We'll see where Robot posting goes from here, though. They nearly died between the tepid reception of Unchained and, immediately after shuttering that game, the pandemic sweeping us all. The only thing that saved them was some Google money, discussing contracts with them, learning they were the Orcs Must Die! guys and partially funding 3 as a year-long timed exclusive for the fucking Stadia before it came out on other platforms. They've been radio silent since last July, which was a surprise update to 3 after a year of silence before that, so who knows what's up. I got a bad feeling they might just quietly close and get subsumed into other studios, but who knows. Edited February 8 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 7 Author Share Posted February 7 (edited) SHOTGUN KING: THE FINAL CHECKMATE (PUNKCAKE DELICIEUX, 2022) Finished: 6/2/24. Playtime: 82 hours. PUNKCAKE Delicieux is a weird little studio. Two French guys, with a Spaniard making music for them, who just make little novel games that they want to make for a small audience, cranking several out every year. They're kind of the platonic ideal of "indie" gaming - just two guys making games they want to make because they have ideas nobody else has really explored. One thing I want to impose on you, the reader, is to go check them out on Steam even if Shotgun King doesn't sound like your speed, because I really think they ought to get more exposure beyond this, their one relative hit. Their most recent game (Super Algebrawl) just came out last month! I bought it, but haven't started playing it yet in part to get myself to slug through the last of this one. Shotgun King has an incredibly direct premise. You, the Black King, are alone on a chessboard. Opposite you is the White King, and he has four pawns, a knight, and a bishop in support. You have no allies, but you have a double-barreled break-action twelve-gauge shotgun. You win a round by killing the opposing number, and you lose if any piece captures you according to the rules of actual chess. Killing non-pawn pieces reaps their souls into your inventory, allowing you to move as that piece for a single action rather than as a king. That's just floor 1, though. After each floor you're given a choice of two pairs, one boon and one bane each, to lock in for the rest of the run. Black cards might tighten your firing cone, give you more damage, give you more mobility, add grenades or a sword to your arsenal, or outlandish shit like letting you overload the shotgun with extra shells or putting a mission marker that lets you sabotage the white army. White cards might add health or speed to enemy pieces, add pieces to the enemy laydown, or even add new methods of enemy mobility such as letting knights carry pieces alongside them or letting pawns capture two squares in front of them. Cards can become far nastier in combination, like making the king unkillable while any knights are alive combined with a card that adds a knight to the enemy side every ten moves. Clearing the final boss (a huge king) gives you a pretty standard difficulty scaling system. Thrones 2-15 add enemy pieces to the starting laydown, add health to types of pieces, and debuff you variously as you go up, all stacking. By the time you've made it to Throne 15, White's starting with something to the tune of 4x as many hit points of pieces on the board as when you began, not to mention the actual danger of just having more pieces on the board. The sheer variety in what the game can throw at you is genuinely baffling, with around 54 of each color of card in a deck that the game pulls from, to the point where I was still having weird builds pop off fifty, even seventy hours in. A whole clear, for the record, takes around 5-10 minutes. We're talking hundreds of games later. That's not even touching on the five different shotguns you can take into a run or the entire two other modes that come with the game. Endless is just a run that doesn't go to the final boss in wave 11, but the enemy continues to scale forever until you die. Chase is a fun one where enemies spawn from all sides and your goal is simply to continue killing as long as you're able, gaining and losing powers in a continuous dance with no resets. They're fun, but mostly as extras to the meat of the game. Now let's dig into the specifics of 100%ing this motherfucker. Straightforwardly, there's a whole pile of achievements for beating the game at each Throne difficulty up to 15, and one for beating the game at any difficulty with each shotgun. Throne 15, I cannot stress enough, is an absolute bastard to gut through on its own, let alone the grind of getting good enough to unlock it. I started this game back in September and have been working on it on and off since. There was a complete month in which I was continuing to grind attempts at Throne 15, only, having completed Throne 14, where I just never kept it together quite long enough. I actually got it right before going to bed on Christmas Eve, in fact. It's a festive miracle. The second category of achievement is weird interactions or stacking you make happen any way you can. Some of these are trivial to get, like beating any floor while killing only the enemy king, being in check from four different pieces at once, or beating a floor while only moving on squares of the color you spawned on. Some basically just require having a few of a given set of cards to stack a modifier really high, like getting your fire arc huge, holding an obscene amount of shells, having more shells loaded than you can actually carry, or burning 9 get out of jail free cards in a single run. Pieces fall into this too, with one each requiring you to have 5 queens or 6 rooks on the board at once - a death sentence to stack up, and some of the last ones I got overall. Some require you to do trivial things but with a specific combination of cards, largely involving King's Shoulders. King's Shoulders is a black card that lets you, once per floor, pick up an adjacent white piece and put it onto your kingly shoulders. Your next shot will, instead of firing the shotgun, lob the piece at an enemy for damage to both or lob the piece off the board for an instant kill. Carry the enemy queen to your starting space, kill the enemy king with his heir (from another card), or throw the otherwise-unkillable Iron Queen (from another card) off of the board and into space. These are all kind of just waiting for the right cards to show up and then remembering the thing you have to do with them. Keep that phrasing in mind for a moment, will you. Third up are challenge runs. There's two degrees of speedrun (5 minute and 2 minute clear, where the timer only runs while you can take action) which were pretty easy but very enjoyable for my massive brain to conquer. Complete Throne Mode without ever letting a pawn promote. Complete Throne Mode without ever killing a queen; this one is both pretty difficult and, last I knew, bugged such that if you've killed a queen since booting up the game this session, it invalidates the achievement until you restart the game. One nicety the game provides you is Folly Shields, which prevent you from moving into checkmate twice per turn; beat the game without ever burning one of them. These were, generally, the most fun I had out of the achievement set. Let's go back to that phrasing now. "Waiting for the right cards to show up." Thirty-one of the game's achievements require you to beat Throne Mode with a specific set of three cards in your set of twenty. This is, unfortunately, the meat of getting platinum for Shotgun King. You will go through dozens or hundreds of aborted runs and, worse, runs where you got two of the three you needed in your first two floors and the third didn't show up across the entire rest of the run. On top of that, when you're just getting started, you just have to keep track of what cards count for your remaining achievements yourself, particularly onerous when about 70% of the game's cards end up counting for one or another. On top of that, a good number of cards have mutual exclusivities, or require certain quantities of enemy piece types on the board to even have a chance to spawn. On top of that, a fair number of cards have prerequisite cards, so a handful of these are actually four-card achievements, narrowing the margins for error even more. That's not even getting into the fact that some of the combinations of cards, if you have to take them all, are hard as hell to actually clear - Harem, not counting what your other white cards contribute, at a minimum gives you three invulnerable white queens, with the slight assistance that they're slower than usual and can only move 3 squares per action. Security Service makes the enemy king offload all damage onto any living rooks when shot, be impossible to kill if any knights are alive, and makes knights shrug off all of the first instance of damage they take any floor. Swarm's three cards add a whopping 11 pawns to the field, doubles all of their health, and adds another per 10 turns constantly. Inquisition makes bishops float over all pieces, have bonus health, be faster, and move (but not attack, at least) orthogonally. Even if you get these, you're not at all guaranteed to have a good enough build or large enough brain to overcome them, which makes the hell all the worse - the achievements are to win with the cards, not simply build the set. This all culminates in Builder. Builder, nominally, requires you to clear the game with Cathedral, Highest Dungeon, and Trowel. Cathedral, however, will not be seeded into the deck unless you've already taken Cardinal in a previous floor, and Highest Dungeon similarly unless you've already taken Ramparts. Your third white card will always be the one that adds the queen, so that means that to get Builder you have to have 5/9 white cards be exactly these five, from a pool of 53 possible, and there can never be more than three that you need in the pool. Hell, just to fuck with you, Cardinal and Ramparts can appear multiple times, so selecting them doesn't even dilute the pool! Your reward for getting this is that rook health is doubled, but that bonus health goes away if you kill all enemy pawns, but all enemy pieces have bonus health as long as any rooks are alive, and all enemy pieces adjacent to a rook can only take 1 damage max per turn. Even if you manage to get those five cards out of your first six, setting you up for an ideal run, you might just flop against the resulting horrible brick wall of enemy meat and ivory that you've made for yourself. Shotgun King is a game that deeply, deeply does not want you to fill out its achievement list, but it's a game that I adored enough to shove through and do it anyway. You can't tell me what to do, French dads. Edited February 8 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 8 Author Share Posted February 8 im not gonna go back through the whole backlog and do it but i have no idea how it took me nearly a year and a half to figure out the idea to link the game's steam page in the post, like especially for something like shotgun king where i'm asking people to check out the devs, why don't i make it easy lmao Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 12 Author Share Posted February 12 FINAL FANTASY (SQUARE, 1987) Finished: 12/2/24. Playtime: 15.5 hours. The entire project that is this thread is inherently sisyphean in nature. Half the fun of it is spinning up sub-projects that sound absolutely obscene from the outset, like "a game for each letter" or "all of the Yakuzas", and then grinding through hundreds or thousands of hours of that over real-life years for a series of 128x128 pixel badges on a social media platform and the right to feel extra moral when talking smack about something online. Spite is a hell of a motivator, and I'm good at convincing myself I'm doing something to spite a straw nobody, if nothing else. Let's start a new, horrible chapter. We're not stopping with the first one, oh no. I've purchased, organized, and lined up main numbered games 1 through 13 (skipping 11 of course) for gradual submission here. We're gonna see if I can rekindle that JRPG fire that I haven't had in my heart since sophomore year of college, over a decade ago, and we're gonna start where it all began. I've had a long relationship with the Final Fantasy series, one of the longest consistent involvements of my entire gaming life. I got my start with the Pizza Hut demo disc that had the first bit of Final Fantasy 8 on it, and I thought it was fine, but nothing like the true PSX JRPG, which was obviously Legend of Dragoon. A neighbor kid would lend me disk 1 of Final Fantasy 7 at some point, and I'd slug most of the way through it, but it was no Legend of Dragoon, so I never asked for the second disk. My next involvement would be Final Fantasy 10, and that game completely blew my prepubescent mind. Out of all the Ultimas, all the Wizardries, all the Mights and the Magics, all the Fallouts and Icewinds Dale, and yes, even Legend of Dragoon, that was the first RPG I gutted all the way through, and I loved it. It remains, to this day, the only soundtrack for a game I've ever bought. I know all the words to Otherworld, and if you get me drunk enough, I will karaoke it and I will sound horrible doing it. The PS2 was the era of Final Fantasy that hit at the age where I was perfectly poised to think Final Fantasy is the coolest thing ever. I'd get 10-2 and later 12, and beat both, and those three would remain the core of my Final Fantasy favorites until the present day. Part of this project is actually seeing how they've held up, honestly, but we'll get to that in a long-ass while. The PS2 would also give us Dirge of Cerberus, a game so crappy and edgy that I thought it was lame at like fifteen and quit it forever around the 70% mark, which is a hell of a feat. Still, 3/4 topping the overall list ain't bad at all. My later teens would come with more of an emphasis on handheld gaming for various reasons up to and including college. My venerable GBA SP and then DS would hold many Final Fantasies across the entire quality spectrum. I'd play the 5 and 6 ports on the GBA - I loved 5, and liked 6 but found it gently overrated by the internet of the day - and eventually fail to get far into either of the 1+2 package and get through about half of Tactics Advance before deciding it sucked. The DS carried horror in its bosom, frontloading the 3 and 4 DS ports, both of which I found to be awful games, though I'd actually slug my way through 4 eventually just to say I did it, in probably the first glimmer of what would become the me who would make this thread. I'd eventually play about 35 minutes of Tactics A2, a game I really never gave a fair shot to, and play all the way through the dark horse Revenant Wings, a game I'm positive is nowhere near as good as I remember it being and I'm uninterested in disabusing myself of those delusions. Around this time, my cousin would give me his PSP, and I'd play Dissidia very briefly for the novelty and then 85% of Tactics before deciding it sucked. I've got a contentious relationship with the Final Fantasy Tactics games, to put it gently. Y'all saw the Fell Seal post. Then I'd kind of just... stop. Finishing Final Fantasy 5 in my freshman year of college would be followed by, of all things, my first run of Pokemon SoulSilver to make me realize that I just wasn't feeling JRPGs anymore as a concept. To top that off, I never bought a PS3, and didn't buy a PS4 until Kingdom Hearts 3 came out, so if I had wanted to move on from there my options were crappy PC ports of the day. I'd go into hibernation, having beaten all the SNES and all the PS2 Final Fantasies and no other, and I was content. I got into the alpha and beta tests for Final Fantasy 14's original release, and it was so awful that I literally didn't believe people when they said "the game is good now" until my wife picked it up in Shadowbringers and I joined her just to see. I pretty much just didn't sink my teeth into any Final Fantasy, besides a little romp through 12 where I tried to Vaan solo the game and got bored about halfway through, from about 2011 until I picked up a 14 sub in 2020 after my time with World of Warcraft was finally at its true end. Even then, I played 14 exclusively as an MMORPG and skipped all the cutscenes after level about 15. Love the game; the only cutscene set I've watched in full is the saga of T'laqa Tia, my homie. But, you know, it would always rankle a bit. 13's been sitting in my Steam library for longer than I can remember, to the point where I have no recollection of ever buying it. I'd look at it, occasionally, with this feeling of a love lost. Time once was I could sit down with a GBA Player on a Gamecube and grind shit out in Final Fantasy 6 for hours. That little completionist part of my brain that was starting to take root in my later 20s before going apeshit as I crossed 30 would always grumble about how I'd beaten 4-6 and 10-12, not even a contiguous swathe of games like I have Resident Evil. And Revenant Wings, of course. I accumulated copies of 8, 9, and the 10/10-2 package over time and always intended to get into them and never did. The JRPG ennui extended, too - I own two Tales games for some reason, never touched either, as well as The Last Remnant, which is the most PS3-ass game ever concocted. Etrian Odyssey finally reunlocked that part of my brain, and then the pixel remaster package finally went on sale. It's time. Final Fantasy has aged with absolutely startling grace. With what amounts to quality of life improvements and not terribly much more, it's nowhere near the best RPG I've ever played, but considering all the nothing it had to pull on for reference back in 1987, it's a genuine landmark. There's just something kind of timeless about all of it - the little sprite men walking around, the batshit attempts to translate Amano's concept art onto the Famicom, the bonkers gameworld that is very transparent about being a series of vehicle gates, the unmitigated pettiness of dungeon design, all of it is just so cowboy game design. It rules, even if there are a lot of objective and subjective flaws to it. The game's intended progression is even fairly concisely communicated, intuitive, and easy to follow, without anything like a quest log - until you get to the step where you invent the airship, and then the game flies instantly into fucking Sierra moon logic. I managed to slug my way to promotion after looking up how to get the airship, and from there I just had to guide out the rest of the game. I would never have figured any of it out. By the standards of today, it's actually even a fairly breezy game if you don't mind following a little bit of a guide, with ingame maps and the bestiary able to take a bit of the sting out of the asshole design of the times. The only party wipe SLEEN the Red Mage, GORGE the White Mage, SKORT the Warrior, and REGGIE the Black Mage ever suffered was, when I was filling out the bestiary, a Warmech used Nuke on two turns back to back and killed 3/4 of my party, and then the last one died moments later. It's uncompromising, and the difficulty is all over the fucking place, but it's not a hard game to get into if you've got a certain tolerance for older stuff. It's not hard to 100%, either. You essentially just need to beat the game, get all the treasure, and fill out the bestiary. The pixel remaster includes a chest count for every location in the world, so finding any missing treasure is simple as anything; I missed a single chest in the Cavern of Earth playing organically. Filling out the bestiary is only more involved because there are three rare encounters that only happen in specific places: the Tyrannosaur in the overworld's big desert, the Warmech in B4F of the penultimate dungeon, and the Iron Golem in B4F of the ultimate dungeon. These aren't even obscenely rare by modern RPG sensibilities, just 1/64 encounter chances. Besides those three, I only missed a single monster (the Soldier on B3F of the penultimate dungeon isn't even a rare spawn, I just never saw one) in my entire romp through the game without a mind to fill it out as I went. A single clear, nothing missable, and a short loop around the world to clean up before you go kill Chaos. I'm glad I gave Final Fantasy the time of day. The rest of the project won't necessarily be twelve more Final Fantasies in twelve more posts, but they'll be trickling in as I do them for a long while now, so I hope you'll join me for this long ass project. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imuabicus der Fertige Posted February 12 Share Posted February 12 On 1/23/2024 at 11:29 PM, Integrity said: Hell, it's about time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 12 Author Share Posted February 12 got it on the bookmarks lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ping Posted February 12 Share Posted February 12 3 hours ago, Integrity said: Let's start a new, horrible chapter. We're not stopping with the first one, oh no. I've purchased, organized, and lined up main numbered games 1 through 13 (skipping 11 of course) for gradual submission here. We're gonna see if I can rekindle that JRPG fire that I haven't had in my heart since sophomore year of college, over a decade ago, and we're gonna start where it all began. Oh wow, good look with that. I'm worried that your future might contain more Blitzball than is healthy, if I remember the requirements for Wakka's limit breaks and/or ultimate weapon correctly. Personally, I already gave up any hope of 100%-ing FFX back in the day when I tried and failed at the Chocobo riding minigame. I lacked both the motoric ability and the tolerance for frustration for that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 12 Author Share Posted February 12 (edited) 3 hours ago, ping said: I'm worried that your future might contain more Blitzball than is healthy, i like blitzball, you fool get in e: a fun fact: per steam global achievement metrics, fewer people have Won A Single Game Of Blitzball In FFX-2 than Have 100% Completed FFX Edited February 12 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ping Posted February 13 Share Posted February 13 21 hours ago, Integrity said: e: a fun fact: per steam global achievement metrics, fewer people have Won A Single Game Of Blitzball In FFX-2 than Have 100% Completed FFX Only 4% of players have Complete an Episode in Chapter 5 compared to 19% who beat FFX's final boss, so that's definitely a factor. Still, I'm impressed that almost half of those 19% got the Dodge 200 Lightning Bolts achievement, too. Another feat that I didn't have the endurance to do. I'll be curious to see how long you'll need to get all Blitzball-related achievements and how you feel about it afterwards. I have to admit that I made that game worse for myself by looking up where to get the best players. It gets pretty braindead if your players out-stat the opponents. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 14 Author Share Posted February 14 (edited) FINAL FANTASY II (SQUARE, 1988) Finished: 14/2/24. Playtime: 19.2 hours. It's very difficult to avoid making a "guess it wasn't so final after all!" kinda joke, won't lie. Final Fantasy 2 was not the followup to Final Fantasy I wanted, though I do respect it as a historical relic. While Final Fantasy was very much a JRPG (before that was even a term) in the direct lineage of Dungeons & Dragons and the Wizardry games, Final Fantasy 2 is recognizably Final Fantasy, in the way that later games in the series would shape as an identity. It's got characters and a plot, though neither piqued my interest at any point at all. It's got a bunch of mechanical changes that would stick around variously, like dual-wielding, bows, the front-back row system, MP, flexible spell targeting, the fucking perspective trick secret doors, so many others. Most importantly, though, it's got so many of the trappings of later Final Fantasies - chocobos, dragoons, a shitload of iconic enemy designs like malboros, bombs, Behemoth, the list goes on. Despite debuting the iconic jobs and the perennial focus on crystals, just waiting to be perfected in Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, Final Fantasy is very much a fairly generic RPG. Final Fantasy 2 is the first truly Final Fantasy-type game. It's also just a way worse one. The thing peddled about a lot about Final Fantasy 2 is its weird progression system. It forgoes things like "growths" and "experience" to instead have a kind of prototype Elder Scrolls-style progression, where you get more intellect by casting more black magic, and you get more HP by getting the piss kicked out of you repeatedly. There's certainly elements of this system that I like, honestly. In particular, spending MP to raise your maximum MP did, for quite a while, keep me using magic when I was on my way back to town to get my guys' MP meters bigger. My guys getting stronger via hitting things is reasonably sensible, and getting bulkier by getting whacked the same. The problem, in practice, is twofold. First, that you're really overrewarded for committing hard to a playstyle early and consistently and punished for not doing that. I've always been a strong proponent of setting up The Engine in games like this - magic is nice, sure, but if you can't use it on every fight, you're lugging a little dead weight compared to having an extra fighter. The tradeoff is absolutely that the wizard will show up better in high-stakes combats, like boss fights. The problem with 2 in this regard, then, is that by constantly having my wizard conserve MP in fights, my wizard is not only not gaining more MP to be able to use spells in more fights, but is not gaining the casting stats needed for magic to have an impact when I do need it. On top of that, by autoattacking with the staves alongside my melee guys, my wizard is growing strength at the same rate they are. I had earmarked Maria to be a wizard, but by the time the fourth or so dungeon was done, she was just doing more damage in melee than she was with spells on all targets besides the dedicated magic sinks like flans, and this included bosses. By the final third of the game, she was oneshotting even those with crits in melee. As I continued to unga bunga into things, everyone just kept getting better at unga bungaing into things, and as such why would I change my tactics to grind up intellect? Maria was my highest damage melee fighter for most of the game, and every time she was hitting guys with sticks, she was rolling on a table to gain more strength, to get better at hitting guys with sticks. Second, that every spell and weapon class levels independently, and the system for it stymies progressing badly if you commit hard to a playstyle. Essentially, every character has a proficiency from 1 to 16 with every spell and every type of weapon. Your weapon proficiency determines your accuracy and damage to a punishing degree; when I was rocking, like, 4s and 5s in proficiencies I had to swap weapons on Firion and he went through a period of missing over half his shots until he got to rank 2. Your spell proficiency determines both the efficacy and the cost of the spell; there's no Fira or Firaga in this, Fire simply goes from Fire I (low damage, 1 MP) to Fire XVI (huge damage, 16 MP). There's a few awful holes in this, like the fact that Esuna I only cures blindness, not even poison, and you have to spam cast it to level it up to be able to use it to cure anything worth curing, but that's a separate issue. One problem with this is availability of weapons. Let's say, out the gate, you decide to take Guy out with axes, like I did. You get the starting axe, get a few upgrades, get the mythril ore, get the mythril axe, it's gravy. That's it, though. The next better axe you can get is the Ogrekiller, which is in about five hours of gameplay. Maria got enough staff upgrades that I had a pair of handmedown staves that were still better in every aspect than the best axe Guy had found at any point. Swords went through a similar, but shorter draught. There was a single knife, a main gauche I found in a box, between the starting knife and the endgame knives I was getting in the final two hours. On the flip side, staves were being consistently upgraded all game long - but I only ever found a single copy of the final staff, the Diamond Mace, while I was getting the final axes and swords and spears lamped into me from every angle. Maria ended the game, after dominating all game long, with a Wizard Staff from about five hours ago in her offhand, because nothing better ever arrived. It was still better than training up one of her other proficiencies from rank 1, though. The other big problem with this is how the leveling actually works. The short of it is that, at the end of combat, you gain experience equal to how many times you attacked plus the enemies' average level minus your current rank. The problem is that enemies cap out around rank 7, with a few 8s in the deepest final dungeon. As you gain weapon experience, you gain damage, and you start to oneshot. Maria got to rank 12 in staves in a certain dungeon, and didn't gain a single point of experience outside of boss fights for the next about four dungeons, because she was oneshotting enemies, and the algebra for weapon experience gain started at -4 for her, and no fights were lasting long enough for her to get that positive, so it was just rounding up to 0 every time. This might sound like it's not a big deal, but for me it completely undermines the feeling of the system. It takes a system that's based on usage and consistent gradual progression and makes it so that overperformance is inevitable and grinds your progression to a complete halt. The intent was to make it so that you couldn't grind shitty enemies to raise your skills, but in so doing they created a system where not grinding is the best way to not progress by the midgame. Nobody wins. All the while, too, Maria is gaining strength from attacking every once in a while, and I'm getting new staves, helping her continue to hit oneshot thresholds until the end of the game. Spells work identical to this, incidentally, with the extra caveat that you also need to grind up your MP to be able to spam them for progress. All told, these just combine to make leveling feel like an impossibly smooth progress with absolutely zero ding! moments, an endless series of +12 max HP and +1 strengths that all mean less than nothing, and all combine to feel worse than even 1's monolithic +1 HP levels. Further not helping this is the encounter variety and world design of 2. To put it bluntly, it's garbage. Monsters are recycled, not even recolored, at preposterous rates, including bosses showing up as trash mobs in the very next dungeon all the time. The encounter rate is obscenely high, eating time up for, as said, little progression, but with monsters that I quickly grew to oneshot and, even when they acted, generally did a pittance of damage. This carried forward all the way to the final dungeon, with a majority of enemies inflicting no major debuffs, being oneshot by 3/4 of my party, being outsped by 4/4 of my party, and if they got their action off it was to bite off 43 of Guy's 5,000 HP or to cast Fire XI for 18/12/24/31 across the party. On the other hand, it walked that tightrope of being both plodding tedium and high octane action, as interspersed with these losers that I could autobattle and alt-tab off of were things like coeurls, who caused an instant kill with every single attack they landed on me, or death knights, who would chomp off one to three thousand health off a guy with each attack. About half the dungeons had some random encounter or monster-in-a-box that was just ah, I hit autobattle unthinkingly during the fight intro and now my guest party member has died instantly, and possibly so has Guy. It's the worst of both worlds, where you can ignore 96% of random encounters and let autoattack do its thing, but that 4% might just game over you. Topically, the only game overs I recall taking in the entirety of the game was a chest with a Lamia Queen and six Coeurl. I opened it the first time, focused the lamia down, and four coeurl each landed an autoattack for 0 damage and instantly killed a party member. Reload. The second time, I was ambushed, giving the enemy a free turn, and four coeurl each landed an autoattack for 0 damage and instantly killed a party member. Reload. The third time was identical to the second. The fourth time, my first four actions killed four coeurl before the enemy got to act, and my living three party members finished the fight after the enemy acted. Horrible fight. That brings us to the saving grace of Final Fantasy 2: world and dungeon design. They're both worse than Final Fantasy's. The world is almost completely devoid of any feature to make you want to go exploring, being only a series of key locations that you must go to in order and have no real ability or incentive to go out of that order. Even once you get the boat, you gain the ability to go to about three total new places, and these are the three places you end up having to go in rough order to get to the next step of the quest. It's the most terribly barren linear-pretending-to-be-open world I've seen in a video game, possibly ever. The dungeons, meanwhile, are far bigger than the ones in 1, and they're comprised entirely of space-filling paths, multiple mutually inaccessible sections in a floor, perspective trick walls, doors that go nowhere, damage tiles, warp tiles, and exactly two trapdoors across the whole game. There's genuinely nothing to recommend about the dungeon design of Final Fantasy 2, it's among the worst I've seen in an RPG even before you factor in the insane encounter rate. To cap it off: the plot and characters are complete nothings and the music isn't nearly as good as in the first game, outside of the motifs that the first game already laid out like the generic battle theme. The dungeoneering themes, notably, have this absolutely pounding tension and pressure to them like in Nolan's worst film, Dunkirk, all the time, while you continue to eviscerate legions with no challenge. It's deeply annoying. 100%ing 2 is a lot more annoying than 1 for a simple reason: shit is now missable. The requirements are pretty much exactly the same: get all the treasure, meet all the monsters, learn the new Key Words that function as a prototype dialogue system, beat the game. This has a wrench in it that a handful of dungeons are one-time visits, and those chests are permanently inaccessible after you leave. Keep on your toes. Some of the enemies in these dungeons, but not all, are also inaccessible after leaving, and there's a worldchanging event midway through that changes the encounter tables on the overworld and removes a handful of enemies from the spawn pool. You have to be fairly meticulous and pay attention while going through the game to get it all, as compared to 1's far more vibes-forward approach where you enjoy the game and go back later. Unfortunately, I've got a bad feeling this is going to be the norm going forward. 2 does deserve a special shout for a pair of achievements: maxing out proficiency in a single weapon and a single spell. Maxing out a spell is simple yet tedious: load up on mana restoration items and go into a dungeon with damaging floor tiles. Turn off encounters, take a step, pause, and heal everyone individually. Progression is based entirely on how many times you cast the spell. I had to heal 99 ethers and 1 elixir worth of times (I dunno how many that ends up being, ballpark 2,400 mana of 12-15 cost spells) over the course of like four minutes to top it off. The weapon one is harder because, as said, you have to attack multiple times against your strongest available foes to even gain weapon experience past a certain point, and there's still several hundred experience left to earn after that point. People point to downgrading your gear to tier 1 shit, but I am a genius: enter the Healing Staff. The Healing Staff does no damage, and heals the target... but it's a staff. I found the worst trash I could, grabbed lunch, and set everyone but Maria to defend while Maria autoattacked with the Healing Staff. Start a new battle every six or so minutes because you can only level up once per combat, and Bob's your uncle. All told, I did not enjoy Final Fantasy 2, if that wasn't gently clear from all that. On the one hand, I think that it's quite a bad game with very little, if anything, to recommend it. On the other hand, it's quite a bad game in that uniquely late-80s-early-90s way, where a sequel would take a huge random shot in another direction and, depending on who you ask, flop utterly at it or be the continued-unmatched best game in the series. I'm glad, if nothing else, that I gutted through Final Fantasy 2 as part of the historic record, because it was at least fascinating to see the DNA of Final Fantasy coalescing so suddenly and so recognizably, including a lot of things I just assumed 4 had invented. We'll get there in time, though. Ever onwards... Edited February 14 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlexArtsHere Posted February 14 Share Posted February 14 The speedrun from “it’s cool and I really like it” to “please just stop” happened a lot sooner than I expected. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 14 Author Share Posted February 14 yeah i was expecting to make a post like this for, like, 3 or 4, not "immediately" lol i really expected this one to be more like "ff2 is a weird ass game that has good ideas that ultimately don't quite coalesce" and it was not that basically, i expected it to be sonic cd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imuabicus der Fertige Posted February 16 Share Posted February 16 On 2/14/2024 at 11:22 PM, Integrity said: Maria was my highest damage melee fighter for most of the game, and every time she was hitting guys with sticks, she was rolling on a table to gain more strength, to get better at hitting guys with sticks. You can run, but you can´t escape. Big Stagger, coming to your neighborhood. Spoiler Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 16 Author Share Posted February 16 a shield??? embarrassing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imuabicus der Fertige Posted February 16 Share Posted February 16 2 hours ago, Integrity said: a shield??? embarrassing true not my pic *cough* we twohand up in this bitch did maria twohand her stick? was 1988 advanced enough for BIG STAGGER? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 16 Author Share Posted February 16 no, 1988 was only advanced enough for dual wielding. maria had a wizard staff in each fist and beat legions of men to death with them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 18 Author Share Posted February 18 (edited) MEGA MAN LEGACY COLLECTION 2 (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 17/2/24. Playtime: 43 hours. It's back! While the games themselves were hit-and-miss, I did enjoy the improvement loop of the first collection enough to splash on the later Mega Men and see what opinions I could cook up on them. That's really the final goal of all of this, in the end: concocting capital-O Opinions. I'm finally slugging through Engage for the first time as I write this for exactly the same reason. Let's get cooking. Same caveats as the first post apply. MEGA MAN 7 (1995) I liked Mega Man 7. If 6 was just a kind of neutral good, this was just kind of a neutral good+. The transition to the SNES did wonders for how the game played at a fundamental level, having things like 'buttons' to work with in development, but my most common deaths were still 'jumped when I meant to slide or vice versa'. I wonder if any of these Men will change up the controls to fix that. Besides that, the Man typing was goofy but ultimately pretty memorable, and while a few were kinda shitty (Turbo, Shade), only one truly sucked out loud (Slash Man). The Wily stages were, as usual, a step down from the main game and occasionally super rude, but nowhere near as bad as in the bad games. The true final Wily fight, Wily Capsule 7, blew absolute ass, but if I docked a Mega Man for a crappy final phase of the final boss too hard I'd hate every one of these damn games. He took three E-tanks, which is silly, but he only took four tries to get through. Not that bad in the scheme of things. One point about Mega Man 7's design that I think keeps it below 4 is that I've actually beaten most of the game twice for a simple reason. 7 has a lot more optional collectibles (many of which can be bought in a shop too, so you can ...grind in your Mega Man), and the four letter plates in the first four stages combine to give you the Super Adaptor, without which I just washed out of Wily Castle, put the game down for six months, and ended up restarting. So I'd say I liked 7, but with a pretty non-trivial caveat alongside "liked" there. MEGA MAN 8 (1996) Mega Man 8 was a weird game. I've gathered it's a bit of a black sheep, and kind of killed mainline Mega Man games for like twenty years, and honestly I kinda see why. That's not to say I didn't find things to like about Mega Man 8 - the back half of the robot masters genuinely have some pretty good stages (Sword Man being the standout), and the couple of Gradius stages were always welcome on account of I just really like Gradius. The theming was weird overall, though, and the game suffered from a total lack of cohesion in design and a wild lack of memorability. The Wily stages, Gradius section aside, sucked insanely, though. Worse even than Mega Man 7's. Yeesh. While Mega Man 8 wasn't a bad game overall, if not a particularly good one, there's still an elephant in the room. Mega Man 8 is an unbelievably cringe game. The conversations are longer than any other game's, there's periodic anime cutscenes (and they're baaaaad), and just overall the game leans harder into having A Story than the previous games, and it is far to its detriment. Wily himself suffers the worst, with about a minute of roleplay before every single attempt at his two-phase fight - and worse, it involves Proto Man. MEGA MAN 9 (2008) After Mega Man was kill came Mega Man 9, a deliberate throwback in pretty much every way. And honestly? You all read my thoughts on the 8bit Mega Men - I was not excessively kind to them, and I really only liked a single game. I liked Mega Man 9, though. The stages are more hits than misses (though they have their misses), but the game chokes hard in the Wily stages. It's a Mega Man tradition, I guess. Still, I didn't find myself feeling as bad about them as I did many previous Mega Men on account of they did feel deliberately designed and not particularly slapped together. They were bad, but they were bad with a purpose. They represented an idea that wasn't quite realized, not just a total miss. I can respect that. The outlier to this was the antigravity Wily screens. There's two sections where Mega Man gets inverted and floated upwards, and your only method of movement is to fire the Buster, which imparts velocity on Mega Man left or right opposite to where you shot. I don't know why, given as the concept is simple and the screens are not long, but these two sections were maybe the most fun I've had with Mega Man as a franchise so far. Wild. MEGA MAN 10 (2010) Of all the games in the franchise I've played, I would certainly count Mega Man 10 among them. It wasn't a terrible game, and I definitely liked it more than 8 overall, but it failed to crack the better half of the games it's deliberately aping. It seems silly to mock a late-era Mega Man for the Men theming, but it commits a horrible sin: one of the Men is Strike Man, and his stage is generically sports-themed, not baseball specifically. What the fuck! Besides that, it's just a bit forgettable overall, and the weapons they provide are anemic at best except for Blade Man's, and Blade Man himself might have been my least favorite Man to date. Even the Wily stages just aren't really worth remarking on. There's another Devil, tedious flying blocks and all (why do they keep doing this), there's a take on the antigrav from 9 that's just worse designed and less fun, there's a series of fights against classic era Men but in the laziest way possible, where it's just generic diamonds that use their attack patterns. The Wily fights might or might not be hard, I have no earthly idea, because I had a whopping six E-tanks going into them and just wanted to tank through and end it. None of it is interesting to talk about. I'm shocked I strung together this many words about the game. The ranking now expands: Mega Man 4 > 9 > 7 > 6 > 2 > 10 > 5 > 8 > 1 > 3 THE REPLAYS Unlike the first collection, a clear of each game is insufficient for completion. Mega Men 9 and 10 have alternative characters (Proto Man in both, Bass in 10) who are playable, and there's an achievement for finishing each of those three bonus runs. MEGA MAN 9 [PROTO VER.] Proto Man is intended as a challenge run for 9, and I presume will be for 10 as well. His deal is that he gains back the buster charge and the slide from past Mega Men, but in exchange he has no access to the shop and takes double damage from all sources. It sounds nastier than it is, honestly - most of my deaths in this game are environmental because I'm kinda shit at platforming, so this downside only really killed me on bosses with any regularity. Lacking the shop does mean that he doesn't get access to the Energy Balancer, a nice little quality of life tool that makes weapon energy you pick up automatically siphon into unequipped weapons if it can't fill the one you've got, and I missed that a lot. It also means that he can't stock up on E-tanks to cheese his way through the final boss, which sucks because Wily 9 is a tremendous pain in the ass. I scavenged three of them through the game, though, and needed all three to beat Wily Capsule 9. Still, nothing really held me back, and I pulled off the Proto Man run in a few hours in a single session, and got to play more Mega Man 9 as a treat. MEGA MAN 10 [PROTO VER.] Interestingly, Proto Man's toolkit made large swathes of Mega Man 10 much better. He's the same as he was in 9, but with access to the shop. A lot of the more tedious bits of stage design in 10 ended up papered over significantly with the slide, access to charged shots, or even just the fact that he starts out with Rush Jet rather than only getting it for the back half of the main stages. I'd say I even had a decent amount of fun with Proto Man's attack on the first half of Mega Man 10! The Wily stages were absolute hell, though. Poor checkpointing, it turns out, sucks massively when you're taking double damage from everything. I took more combat and miniboss deaths as Proto Man in 10 as compared to 9 by a huge margin. All together, it just ended up kinda making me sad - there's clearly a decent game in Mega Man 10, just not quite fully realized, and instead it's just forgettable slop. During this run, I also watched a speedrun of Hard Mode just out of curiosity, and it brought to mind a conversation from the Discord from the other day: kinda like with 2D Sonic, Mega Man 10 seems like a game that it feels amazing to be really good at, but with the huge weight on its neck that unless I were predisposed to sink that time in, the first impression isn't good enough to convince me to put in the time to get to the point where the game 'becomes' good. Odd dilemma to have. MEGA MAN 10 [BASS VER.] Bass is a weird guy, kind of a mix of Proto and Mega Men. He's locked to rapid fire, no charge, and actually locked in place while he's shooting, which is hard to get used to. However, he can fire in any direction except straight down, which makes some things a hell of a lot easier. He retains the slide, mechanically, as a dash, but it doesn't squish his hitbox to get through one-tile attacks, but it does maintain momentum if you jump out of it. He doesn't get Jet or Coil, but can instead combine with his dog to go jetpack mode, flying around and firing a spread shot as long as energy remains. It's a nice way to skip whole sections of the game, but doesn't trivialize quite as much as you'd think from the description. The Bass run was, through some combination of experience and Bass' extras, by a good distance the easiest of the three runs. Just having seven-way shot smooths out so much shit on its own, let alone his other stuff. I ended up capped out on energy tanks by the end of the game, which made the Wily fights a little bit silly. Go ahead, hit me. I have more health than your phases combined. THE CHALLENGES They're back! The big change from the NES games is that there are no more cross-game challenges like the first legacy collection had. There's four discrete categories of challenges, one for each game, and you pick any 50 from 74 total to get gold medals in, as well as finishing the unrestricted boss rush for each game, which you'll almost certainly do along the way. Through some combination of no cross-game challenges, the screen mix challenges being limited to three longer runs (rather than the insanity of LC1), and more generous time limits overall, these ended up being worlds easier than the first set. On top of that, Mega Man 9 and 10 had all of their challenges in duplicate and triplicate, respectively, for Mega/Proto and Mega/Proto/Bass. I do want to call a little attention to this, because I think this actually enhanced Mega Man 9 pretty significantly - the loop changed from mastery and moving on in 1-8 to taking Mega Man through the pretty generous time limit, scouting places to change weapons and screens to use Jet, getting my gold over the course of a modest number of runs, and then turning around and fucking obliterating the same challenge as Proto Man. It felt fantastic. It felt so good that I'm genuinely tempted to reverse the 4/9 ranking at the top of the order. I'm sticking by my guns, for now, but I'll probably forget in the future and say that 9 was my favorite Mega Man. Not too big a shame, honestly! 10's generally-worse stages and need to do it three times outstayed the welcome, though. Typical Mega Man 10. Besides that, the list of challenges gives you the leeway to do zero <Buster Only> challenges, though all games have them, and zero Wily challenges if you so desire. I ended up getting golds on Wily 10, because one of the others is to do all nine Weapon Archive re-fights from 10 without dying - while the time limit is generous, time is absolutely not my issue with those. I stuck to bullying Wily a few more times. I'd already beaten him three times, after all - what's twice more? Honestly, there's not too much to say about the challenges compared to the first, and I think that's for the better overall. I definitely preferred this second set of games to the first, and while I wouldn't call any of them among my favorites, I am actually looking forward to starting Mega Man 11. That's obviously going to show up in this thread in time - if the first ten Mega Men and 30XX couldn't stop me, what the hell will? Edited February 20 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 20 Author Share Posted February 20 FINAL FANTASY III (SQUARE, 1990) Finished: 19/2/24. Playtime: 18.2 hours. Here's the upset of the fucking century. I played Final Fantasy 3 DS ages ago and completely bounced off it. It was such a terrible game that I never made it far past the Viking bit. It was, by a distance, the worst Final Fantasy I had ever played, and might even have held that title in the face of spinoff titles like Dirge of Cerberus. Final Fantasy 3 DS is an awful game. Final Fantasy 3 Pixel Remaster is a fucking fantastic game, what the hell? What happened? It's not a game without flaws, to be sure, some of the warts of 1990 Famicom absolutely show through, particularly as the game runs on. But, particularly with the quality of life brought by the Pixel Remaster (quicksaves, no job change penalties, maps, etc.) the sheer quality of game underneath manages to shine through. Final Fantasy 3 is a game with heart, to a genuinely incredible degree. Every ounce of it drips with the joy of kids on an adventure with sticks in the woods behind the house. The dialogue is cheesy as shit in a completely-deliberate way, the story is simple and fun, and the game hardly even distinguishes between which party member is talking at any given point because it honestly does not matter. The jobs aren't guys in outfits, they're completely idealized forms of the class, because it isn't Kid 1 dressing up as a Black Mage, it's Kid 1 imagining himself as the perfect Black Mage. It rules. It's such an amazing vibe. What about the game, though? It's fun! Final Fantasy 3 invents the job system to be carried forward into all of the good Final Fantasies in the future, and while it's rudimentary, it's still a fun time. Jobs in this one are pretty fluid but reward you only for sticking with a single job, not a family of jobs or anything. There's nothing to port over between jobs, and no real reason to poke around. It's definitely the first stab at the system, but it's the first stab at an absolutely legendary system and it does a lot to elevate the game. They do play with it a bit early on, with dungeons that require all your guys to be wizards, but they don't really get too creative with it. Understandable, I think. There's also some fuckularity with job balance, particularly later as everything converges into the Eureka jobs late in the game. I did not succumb to this temptation, and kept my extremely aesthetic Viking - Devout - Knight - Magus to the end of the game. Screw you, Ninja. The dungeons and world are both improved over 2's versions to absolutely bonkers degrees. There's optional dungeons again, and the world is gated in incredibly unexpected ways (you get a fuckin submarine!!) to encourage exploration like how 1 did, rather than how 2 failed to. Dungeons themselves are much more organic in the scheme of 1, rather than the bespoke space-filling paths of 2. It's just a far better put-together game overall... up until the end. The Crystal Tower and World of Darkness are infamous among RPG fans for a reason, being an impressively-long series of dungeons including some awfully hard fights. Legendarily, the Famicom version of 3's Crystal Tower to endgame fiesta tends to last about three hours if you're paying attention and playing well, with no breaks to save and scant breaks to replenish your resources. It's much more palatable in the Pixel Remaster, with quicksaves to fall back on and quicker gameplay, but it's still an insane difficulty spike even after having done all optional content in the game. Still, it's barely a sin. The game looks amazing, with a lot of stupid little animations to enjoy and some absolutely wonderful messed up guys for enemy sprites. The game sounds amazing, with some of the best music I've heard in a Final Fantasy to date, including the modern ones. The game's fun and playing it feels personalized to a degree that 1 nearly landed and 2 never got close to. Scrungler, COOLRANCH, Luneth, and Greg represented a party not quite like how anyone else I know played it, and it brought me sincere joy to slug through. The achievements are in the vein of 2's, with less missable stuff. Get all the treasures (and all the hidden items, not in chests), meet every monster, and a handful of other crimes. Get all the Eureka weapons, get one guy to Job Level 99, stuff like that. Nothing nasty, and as long as you're cognizant of the handful of one-time dungeons, you can vibe through it pretty handily. Honestly shocked by how much I enjoyed Final Fantasy 3, clawing its way out from the bottom of the lists of all the Final Fantasies I've ever played. Miracles happen every day if we know where to look, don't they? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrhesia Posted February 20 Share Posted February 20 feel so vindicated after forcing myself as a child to love ff3 for the ds because it was the first game on the first console i ever had that was concretely, distinctly, Mine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 21 Author Share Posted February 21 DAVE THE DIVER (MINTROCKET, 2023) Finished: 20/2/24. Playtime: 35.3 hours. When it rains, it pours. It's always funny when multiple weeks-long projects converge by accident with a shorter one to produce more posts in a week than some entire months get, isn't it? Dave the Diver is the absolute poster child for scattergun game design. Complete kitchen sink bullshit. Concocted as "a game to represent the essence of fun" by Korean titan Nexon's fresh subsidiary Mintrocket, I'm modestly positive that the developers of Dave the Diver simply took every idea that they thought was good and did their best to make a cohesive product out of all of them. A less-corporate-feeling Resident Evil 6, if one will. Unlike Resident Evil 6, though, it largely comes together well. Your gameplay loops chiefly between a 2D swimming game with a harpoon gun (and, later, other options) to catch fish as you go deep into the ocean, and a Cook, Serve, Delicious! lite serving simulator each night to make money to fund the diving. It's a simple loop, but it absolutely works, and I'm known to be a sucker for anything that can be vaguely compared to the core loop of Recettear. There's not nearly as much variety in the swimming or serving as the game seems to purport early on, but there's just enough to get through the game's story without the tedium setting in. The tedium is, unfortunately, far more a matter of when than if, but you're still getting an easy 20-25 hours out of it by my reckoning. Dave the Diver attempts to spice things up by minigamizing everything. I mean fucking everything. There's three different minigames to serve three different kinds of drinks during the food rush, in addition to grinding wasabi for your head chef. You unlock, hell, four or five different tools to accomplish one- or two-time minigames while exploring the ocean, which are then discarded. There's about two and a half stealth sequences, but nothing at all like that in normal gameplay. There's a casino that you get access to halfway through the story with its own entire set of games. You control other guys a few times. You participate in cooking challenges that drop you completely cold into a Cooking Mama-style food preparation game. I'm not even touching on the phone games (including a complete set of Tamagotchi to collect and raise) or all the different side-objectives you get while diving or any of the actual restaurant management stuff - because not only do you get to manage your restaurant, you also get a second restaurant that's managed exclusively by people you appoint and you have to send them ingredients and personnel to function, and you get three different types of farm to manage as much or as little as you want to on top of those. There's even a free DLC tie-in with Dredge that involves, as you would expect, a complete recreation of the sailing and dredging mechanics from that game and animated renditions of a handful of the aberrations. While all of it is ultimately shallow content, the game equivalent of Val Kilmer's Top Secret!, the sheer unbridled breadth of it all is a little bit staggering. I think a big part of it comes back to a comment I made about The Great War, and many other times besides. Dave the Diver has all the elements of a hundred-hour roguelite fishing experience to it, and I could see someone being taken by those and thinking it's something it's not, but in the end it's a 25 hour game for 20 dollars. It's not a deep game, it's not a forever game, and it never really pretends to be. It's a game that I wholeheartedly recommend pretty much anyone look into, and you'll know within the first hour if you're going to enjoy the game or not. The game doesn't terribly outstay its welcome if you go for 100% achievements, but it does gently outstay it. A game day is divided into three time periods: morning and afternoon are strictly for diving, and last One Dive no matter how long or short that takes. Evening is initially for One Shift at the restaurant, but later you gain the ability to do a nighttime dive (or, occasionally, a Dredging) at the cost of one third of your restaurant hours before you do the One Shift. I saw the game's story through in 43ish days, began to feel the fatigue setting in around 52 days, and finished the achievements on Day 60 exactly. The last three or four days were just wheel-spinning, completely out of achievement-related things to really work on besides passing the time. Completion essentially just relates to playing the game a lot. Get Bancho Sushi to the top rank, see all except one of the sidestories through to their conclusions, take most of the pictures, discover all of the guns, upgrade your farms all the way, and such. Only one thing is missable, and that's during the Metal Gear Solid parody level (which is there, for some reason!) you can eat some food off the ground. Most people get this by accident - it's pretty in your way - but if you miss it, you'll need a whole new file to get back there. Everything else just comes as you go, keeping going into the postgame after beating the story to get more fish and wring all the blood out of the stone. My last two achievements were to evolve five different Tamagotchi, with an arcane system that you pretty much need a guide or a lot of personal grit to get through, and to feed the cat 20 times. I didn't see a single tin of cat food in the last 9 days of diving, until finally finding my 20th on the afternoon of Day 59. Poor little guy. If you don't mind a little tail-end grind for stuff like that, a few hours of tedium to cap off a good game, Dave the Diver is not at all a chore to max out and you'll have a lot of fun most of the time. Keep the food in mind, ignore any guides at all until the end of the game and don't worry even if you fail some things - everything comes back in the postgame except the rations, and you can figure out what's left to do after the credits. I like games like that a lot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 27 Author Share Posted February 27 (edited) FINAL FANTASY IV (SQUARE, 1991) Finished: 26/2/24. Playtime: 23.3 hours. Final Fantasy 4 for the DS is a bad game. I've said it before, I'll say it again, and I meant it very sincerely. What I never really took the time to inspect, though, was why I thought Final Fantasy 4 for the DS to be a bad game. I played it during a fairly uncritically-consumptive phase of my gaming history, years before I started to think more deeply about things. There was something in there about Augments and increased difficulty and something something, but it all really just boiled down to I didn't enjoy it. I played all the way to the final dungeon, restarted, and beat the game on the second time of asking. The consistent line I'd been told was that Final Fantasy 4 for the DS, being made by the same people who made Final Fantasy 3 for the DS, was just an exceptionally bad port of an otherwise-good (or even, some used to say back in the day, the best) Final Fantasy. I was looking forward to the Pixel Remaster for this reason - in some ways, it's finally slaying a demon. Could it answer what I didn't like about Final Fantasy 4 for the DS? Could it assign blame to that port, show me the framework underlying and how it was tortured into a bad game, the way Final Fantasy 3's Pixel Remaster did? Well, I got an answer, and it's a simple one: Final Fantasy 4 is a bad game. To dig into this, let's talk versions. Final Fantasy 4 has been ported a lot, and nobody agrees on how the game really ought to play. The original version, Final Fantasy IV for the Super Famicom, will hereafter be "the baseline" for difficulty and features. Final Fantasy II for the SNES and Final Fantasy IV Easy Type for the Super Famicom would both come out later that year, both decreasing the difficulty from the baseline to various degrees. There's a popular myth that Easy Type was ported back to Japan and based on the American release (some will say it was called "American Version" because we stupid gaijin are bad at vidya), but the opposite is actually true - the American release inherited some changes from Easy Type in addition to a whole host of its own changes. Final Fantasy Chronicles for the Playstation would mark a slightly tweaked international release of the baseline, and Final Fantasy 4 DS took the baseline and made it a lot harder, including several new features (like Augments) among the hefty rebalance. The WonderSwan was a Japan-only competitor to the good old Game Boy, with its own Color variant coming out around the turn of the millennium before the project was squashed with complete ruthlessness by the titanic Game Boy Advance. Final Fantasy 4 had a port for the WonderSwan Color, which was based off of Final Fantasy Chronicles for the Playstation and had a few further tweaks to the difficulty. Following that, Final Fantasy 4 Advance was based off of the WonderSwan Color port, including many of its bugs and idiosyncrasies and increasing the difficulty slightly overall. Final Fantasy 4 Pixel Remaster, finally, is based off of the Advance port, with most of the bugs fixed and with the difficulty further tuned up. There's the lineage of this game. Now to actually talk about my experiences with the game! I didn't like it. The stone on the game's neck is absolutely Active Time Battle. ATB was a system cooked up by an insane person (Hiroyuki Ito kicks fuckin' ass) as a bridge between the turnbased games of the day and his envisioned future of all-real-time JRPG combat. Mr. Ito knew that he wanted to go from Final Fantasy 3 to Dragon's Dogma, but he thought that this kind of transition would be hard to pull off on contemporary hardware and risked alienating gamers of the era, which I get the logic behind. ATB would be a familiar-feeling turn-based-adjacent battle system, but which required some promptness in inputting commands lest you lose action economy to your own indecision. It's a sound idea, and the vision behind it is telling when it comes up that Mr. Ito would go on to invent Final Fantasy 12's absolutely batshit (yet tremendously aesthetic) battle system. The problem with the idea is that it actually sucks tremendously, and similar to Real-Time With Pause (which was invented for similar reasons), it ends up accomplishing nothing of its own compared to either a strict turn-based or an actual real-time alternative. Timers are always running, putting a pressure on you that (in most Final Fantasies) ends up feeling more impactful than it actually is. Actors still act individually, and the ATB timers are paused when any kind of animation is playing out. You can tick an option to pause the timers when you're targeting or in a sub-menu, at least, but any time you're selecting actions or processing who you've taken control of because two timers completed next to each other, you're dropping some amount of action economy to the enemy. To oversimplify a little bit, a little cost/benefit analysis. The primary benefit of a strict turn-based system is that the player is offered significant or infinite time to consider their moves, which hypothetically leads to more creative problem solving or at least more agency over choosing to problem solve less creatively. The typical downside to a strict turn-based system is that thing tend to play out slower, too slowly for many peoples' tastes, or perhaps it's better stated that they're relatively wooden and un-flashy. One can flip these on their heads pretty directly for a proper real-time system: the primary benefit is that things resolve more quickly and require more mastery for the player to keep a handle on, while the primary downside is typically that exercising a more creative solution is significantly harder than a turn-based equivalent, where mechanical skill is far less of a factor. I think this is a generally accurate and fairly uncontroversial summary of the overall reasons behind each, without getting too into the weeds of any specific implementation of either. ATB, taken as a system itself and isolated as best as one can from the games it inhabits, occupies a space where it represents the downsides of both real-time and of turn-based combat. Because the timer is always ticking and actions are assigned on the button press, as opposed to the playcalling form of 1 through 3, there's no take-backsies and the game makes you feel as though there's no real room to think. You're constantly playing whackamole with your little football men, and a deviation from your plan that you didn't concoct between actions or during a pause and enact perfectly will be met with a free smack in the face from someone you're fighting. Creative problemsolving is tremendously disincentivized as compared to good old Route One smashing. I set up the Autobattle Engine in 1 through 3 because I find it satisfying to do so; I set up the Autobattle Engine in 4 because doing so would actually gain me significant action economy as compared to manually inputting commands against the enemy. However, despite not allowing breathing space to concoct and enact a clever strategy, the pace of battles is actually slower on average than if you were inputting commands with the same level of precision in the Famicom game ports, since animations still have to play and all action freezes while they're so doing. Taken to its logical extreme, perfect input immediately every time a character comes up, or autobattle if one prefers, ATB is only capable of playing as fast as an equivalent turn-based system except with mandatory downtime baked in for when nobody's turn is up yet. It's a system that is utterly without its own merit. While it feels more frenetic, and requires far more regular button pressing to accomplish the same things, the actual battles take longer. It's faster, without the benefit of being faster, and in the pursuit of making it faster it's also become less tactically intriguing rather than moreso. This has been all without getting into Final Fantasy 4's peculiarities of implementation. I'm not going to go into tremendous detail, but due probably to the game's wildly rotating cast, enemies and player units have their action timers scaled to how fast/slow they are relative to Cecil, Lord Protagonist. What this means, practically, is that there isn't really a "fast" or a "slow", just a faster or slower than Cecil by varying degrees. This has implications all over the game, but rears its ugly head in two particular points. For a fair chunk of the game, Cecil is your fastest party member. Enemies are scaled to him as well, and this combines to mean that for this whole section of the game, enemies feel sped up and your guys all feel glacial - because they are. The second time this creeps up is in the final boss fight. Due to the calculations, there are values of speed for Cecil where the final boss can act slower than any of your characters act, and values of speed for Cecil where the final boss can get two actions per action you take, causing party wipes without issue or even a real way to respond. None of this is explained in-game, and it's poorly documented online, so you're just kind of left wondering why enemies are suddenly so absurdly fast compared to you. That wildly rotating cast that I mentioned a moment ago also keeps Final Fantasy 4 from ever finding anything like a stride until it's far too late. In Final Fantasy 2, your rotating fourth guy was basically just an afterthought, and bore no real impact on how you played. In Final Fantasy 4, you can be left completely devoid of reliable wizardry or with nobody but Cecil as a frontliner for significant chunks of game. You're always adapting to new challenges, which can be a good thing, but the way Final Fantasy 4 goes about it it feels more like constantly working with fundamental holes in your toolkit as compared to something like 6, where (to memory) it felt more like using new tools to solve familiar problems. It's a bad look, and I can't say as I ever enjoyed the game on large account of it. Anyway, that's a lot of words about the fundaments of Final Fantasy 4 and why I think they're rotten. The rest of the game, unfortunately, doesn't sit much above the combat. There's about a whole guy and a half I actually like in 4's entire cast, maybe roundable to a complete two. The plot is a Saturday morning cartoon, but without the complete breeziness. It needed to be more serious and coherent, like 6's, or not to be taken seriously, like 3's. In a roundabout metaphor for ATB itself, it occupies a liminal space where it takes the wrong lessons from both aesthetics. The dungeon design absolutely does not descend to 2's pits, but the locations end up really samey in a way that the previous games didn't flop at, with about five distinct Dungeon Vibes for about fourteen dungeons. I'm no hand at all at music critique, but the bangers of 3's soundtrack have been replaced by much more generic guff, with a particular shoutout to the Dungeon Theme which sucks the majorest of ass and plays constantly. Woo woo woo WOO WOO WOO woo woo woo woo.... Final Fantasy 4 is the first of this set to have postgame grinds to do, and great news they've been nerfed heavily from what you may have heard. In brief, you have to grind out all of Rydia's optional summon magic as well as the Pink Tail from an encounter in one room in the final dungeon. These five drops used to constitute, by estimates I've seen, thirty to fifty hours of grinding on their own, up to tripling how long the game took from finish to 100%. As it stood, I farmed the lot of them in about two total hours. The previous games' achievements are all there, too - beat the game, fill out the bestiary (with missable entries), get all chests and hidden items (same), and travel everywhere and do every sidequest (same). Last up for me was actually getting everyone to level 70; I beat the game with Cecil at 62 and the rest of the party between 57 and 61. Even after turning on the Pixel Remaster's 4x XP boost as soon as I got to the postgame, Rydia was still lagging back at 67 after everything else was completed, and a single run back through the Lunar Subterrane polished everything off. There goes Final Fantasy 4, a game I sure have played twice now for some reason. Edited February 27 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 1 hour ago, Integrity said: ATB, taken as a system itself and isolated as best as one can from the games it inhabits, occupies a space where it represents the downsides of both real-time and of turn-based combat. Yes. This. I've never played FF4, but this entire write-up of why ATB sucks so much was right on point. I think another part of the problem that I have with it is that you don't have any sort of control over where you spend your time. Compare to something like blitz chess where you only have 3 minutes to play the whole game, but crucially you get to choose how you spend those 3 minutes. If you go fast through the less complicated moves then when you get to a really key tactical moment then you can use up some of the bank of time you've built up to give more thought to an important move. In ATB you don't have anything like that. It's like a metronome. You have the same amount of time to think regardless of the actual complexity of the gamestate, which is sometimes too much and sometimes too little. I also find it deeply unsatisfying. And since I'm here, my own personal history with Final Fantasy: I have played exactly 3 mainline Final Fantasy games (7, 13, and 15), and pretty much hated all of them. But, uniquely, they all managed to make me hate them for completely different reasons. Good job, Final Fantasy, that's actually impressive. As far as I'm concerned, the only good Final Fantasy game is My Life As A King, which sadly has never made it off of Wiiware so basically doesn't exist any more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ping Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 I'll have to wait for the next FF game to be able to say something specific about the game, but I can add another +1 to the ATB write-up. I think it took until X-2 before they managed to do something with it other than speed-menuing, and even then, I don't remember interacting with the chain attack system all that much. I think I found battles too fast-paced and too random to actually time up attacks properly, so chains were just nice when they happened and not something I was working hard to achieve. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlexArtsHere Posted February 27 Share Posted February 27 6 hours ago, Integrity said: ATB, taken as a system itself and isolated as best as one can from the games it inhabits, occupies a space where it represents the downsides of both real-time and of turn-based combat. Because the timer is always ticking and actions are assigned on the button press, as opposed to the playcalling form of 1 through 3, there's no take-backsies and the game makes you feel as though there's no real room to think. Yeah, that pretty much hits the nail on the head for me as far as why I don't like ATB. Even if it's the illusion of pressure, the pressure is still felt and I don't want that kind of pressure in an RPG, it stresses me out. I don't even mind RPG fights being slow and perhaps unflashy, because I think the itch it scratches for me is something approximating resource management. I'd much rather have a slower experience that lets me get stuck into the weeds of planning than something with the facade of speed, but no depth as a result. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted February 27 Author Share Posted February 27 (edited) 7 hours ago, ping said: I'll have to wait for the next FF game to be able to say something specific about the game, but I can add another +1 to the ATB write-up. I think it took until X-2 before they managed to do something with it other than speed-menuing, and even then, I don't remember interacting with the chain attack system all that much. I think I found battles too fast-paced and too random to actually time up attacks properly, so chains were just nice when they happened and not something I was working hard to achieve. x-2 does the "most" with ATB because it's all flash and very little substance. x-2's a notably easy game to memory, and being atb instead of turnbased just means it's all glitz and glamor and i think that's fine overall. nobody has ever actually made productive, deliberate use of chain attacks, and x-2 never demands it. still galls me that ffx's turnbased system exists only in the game, it's genuinely perfect for trad jrpg combat. annoying! E: there wasn't really anywhere to put this in the 4 post but i also want to note that hiroyuki ito was the mind behind the classic final fantasy dudes lined up across from dudes battle window, and he got the idea from one of his favorite pastimes, watching the NFL. your party and the monsters are meant to mimic the offensive and defensive linesmen lined up across the line of scrimmage. the way actions worked in ff1-3 was meant to mimic a coach calling plays rather than four individuals deciding what to do. he'd visit the well of gridiron again for ff12, where he designed gambits (the rule-based party member automation system in, precisely, dragon age origins and final fantasy 12 and bafflingly no other games) as a representation of a playbook that you write down yourself. hiroyuki ito kicks ass lmao Edited February 27 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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