Parrhesia Posted March 12, 2023 Share Posted March 12, 2023 I'm glad you were, in fact, the Only Man Hard Enough to make the Hard Decision to 100% MW19. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted March 19, 2023 Author Share Posted March 19, 2023 (edited) I decided that, since the two games took up seven hundred and a half hours of time, and they're very discrete and memorable events, that I'd dedicate a bonus post to all the Total Warhammer campaigns up to 3, so that I can then go through the 3 ones one-by-one in that inevitable recap. TOTAL WARHAMMER Total Warhammer 1 had a grand total of nine grand, and two mini, campaigns. It's the only game that had unique minicampaigns for individual races, and there wasn't a campaign - empires split like in 2 and 3. The main campaign was fairly simple: you're on a map with guys. Chaos will invade from the northeast eventually. Accomplish your objectives and beat off Archaeon the Everchosen to win. I'll go over the minicampaigns as I get to them. Beastmen - Minicampaign, Very Hard, Khazrak the One-Eye I think that the Beastmen minicampaign is, up to Total Warhammer's release, the single best piece of Total War content ever made. It takes place in a far-zoomed-in version of the human lands, with you as the titular Beastman, and you just wreak havoc. Taking out imperial counts will strengthen the others. Wipe a sufficient number off the map to win. It's not a very difficult campaign, but it's fun, and the smaller scale plays into Beastmen hands perfectly. Having a swarm of fast melee guys who counter the Men makes it a great introduction to the faction, which I think is the best aesthetic that a minicampaign can aspire to. This will come up later. Warriors of Chaos - Very Hard, Archaeon the Everchosen The Warriors of Chaos and the Beastmen both play uniquely in Total Warhammer in that they cannot occupy anything. Instead, they fuel their economies by sacking and razing settlements and funnel that money back into their armies directly, making buildings into the armies via the horde mechanic. It's interesting, honestly, if a bit misguidedly balanced in 1. I primarily took stacks of classic Chaos Warriors and then, later, Chosen in to do my dirty work, burned my way through the Empire, and had a fairly good time. Wood Elves - Minicampaign, Very Hard, Orion It's later. The Wood Elves minicampaign, in stark contrast to the Beastmen one, sucks massive ass. Fighting Wood Elves is already a fucking chore, and doing that as Wood Elves is no better. A strong yet expensive army that requires a decent bit of micro at range is something that the AI (no income considerations, infinite micro) can beat you at in only the most annoying ways. Building up against only Wood Elves and Beastmen, collectively the worst factions to fight in Total Warhammer, just makes the entire thing a terrible slog. You're supposed to be able to cozy up to your fellow elves, I think, but higher campaign difficulties put penalties on your diplomatic relations, so you end up at war with both the Beastmen and the other elves. It's just a shit time and, if you're specializing in ranged units as the game well pushes you to, you'll be completely hosed by the final battle that you need to win to beat the thing. Big thanks to @Ironthunder for spotting me on that one before I tilted too hard at it. Get a lot of Wardancers and some trees and dragons. Vampire Counts - Very Hard, Mannfred von Carstein Fun fact: the skeletons animated by the Vampire Counts in Total Warhammer were deliberately animated to look like Ray Harryhausen claymation skeletons. They kick ass. The Vampire Count roster kicks ass, generally. No ranged support, but in the context of Total Warhammer's sticky and shitty melee, enough guys to make things fun. Crunching through the Empire was tough, but in a good way. This was one of the more fun campaigns of the original game, honestly. Being the bulwark against Chaos with my unlimited dead boys was a unique aesthetic that was fun to play out. Hey, bring your demons! I just have more dead dudes to toss at you. Dwarves - Legendary, Thorgrim Grudgebearer I picked Dwarves for the Legendary campaign because they're simple, nestled in, and - as I assumed - most resilient to mistakes. I wasn't wrong, but I also wasn't right. Taking a very slow and turtly run through the first hundred turns ensured that I had an unapproachable economic base, but it also ensured that the Empire imploded, because that was inevitable in Total Warhammer. When Chaos arrived, they made it all the way to my borders, so it took another hundred turns to shove them back and find Archaeon and kill him. This was like a two hundred and fifty turn marathon campaign. Dwarves are fun to play, though I still don't understand gyrocopters, and the things that Irondrakes were made to kill weren't in the game, but I still had enough fun to not hate my time with Karaz-a-Karak. Bretonnia - Very Hard, Louen Leoncoeur France was a fun fucking campaign, through and through. They were defined by a Chivalry mechanic, that built when you did good things and sapped when you fought other humans. There was research to confederate the other Frenchmen. You just made a killer stack of knights and kings and maiden-wizards and sent them to fight. The final quest was the Errantry Quest to kill either Orcs or Chaos in their heart - I chose Orcs. It was a fun fight. Everything about the Bretonnian campaign ruled. Greenskins - Very Hard, Grimgor Ironhide An entire campaign of fucking around and finding out. I spent so many turns eating everything in the Badlands, dwarves and other orcs and whatever the fuck. It was just a party. Then Chaos arrived. Turns out, Grimgor also needs to kill Chaos, and my destabilization of the northern empires, similar to my Dwarven campaign, left nothing to hold them off. It also turns out that they'll just spawn squads of Norsemen to sail down the coast and eat your ports. This was far more annoying than hard, but a fun one nonetheless. Empire - Very Hard, Karl Franz I thought the Empire in 1 sucked until I played the Empire in 2. In 1, it was... serviceable. A nasty starting place, where I had to surge hard and hope Bretonnia both consolidated and stayed friendly (they did), and then I was the first port for Chaos to stop in. Turned out it wasn't too bad outside of a terrible start, but Imperial armies really just don't have a good sense of scaling up. This is something that's really underrated in Total War - over the course of a campaign, for instance, dwarves replace Warriors with Longbeards with Ironbreakers. The Empire replaces swordsmen with ...well, nothing, because greatswords don't have shields, they're not a 1:1 upgrade. They get a good chunk of siege and cavalry and, eventually, tanks and shit, but you don't ever have a "ah, I should replace this unit with <better unit>" feeling in the Empire. I think that's a bad thing. Beastmen - Very Hard, Khazrak the One-Eye The real version of the minicampaign. It's not as good as the minicampaign, although Beastmen are still very fun to play. This was one of the more cursory Total Warhammer campaigns. There's really nothing to say beyond the minicampaign bit. You just burn down stuff until the game tells you you beat it. Wood Elves - Very Hard, Orion The proper Wood Elves campaign ended up being weird as hell. Your goal is to heal your tree, but you still need to ensure Archaeon is wounded, so isolationism doesn't work. Total Warhammer's diplomacy is completely busted, so the only way to really ensure you fight Chaos is to expand through the Empire, but Wood Elves don't get any real benefits from conquering outside their woods, so it's just kind of a weird and shitty campaign where you peak in power around turn 50 and don't win until turn 135. Total Warhammer 2 would fix the Wood Elf issue hugely, and God bless for it. Norsca - Very Hard, Wulfrik the Wanderer Capping off Total Warhammer, Norsca. Outside of having to attune myself fully to all four Chaos gods, which took an inordinate amount of raiding, this was a pretty trivially fun campaign against not terribly hard opposition with good units. A good victory lap to end the game. I'll do the sequel tomorrow. Edited March 19, 2023 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted March 20, 2023 Author Share Posted March 20, 2023 TOTAL WARHAMMER 2 Total Warhammer 2 clocks in at fifteen campaigns and a few minicampaigns, which I'll also enumerate for shits and giggles. On top of that, some were on the Vortex campaign and some were on the larger Mortal Empires campaign. These were also, generally, more interesting than the original game's. The Vortex campaign focuses on the Americas and Africa, and each guy can do a series of rituals that spawn between 'some' and 'too many' stacks of enemies across your heartland to stop you. If you finish them all, you can do a quick and breezy quest battle to win the campaign. If one of the AI factions finishes them all, you can do an interference quest battle to not only stop them, but lock them out of ever trying again. It's an alternative win condition that's only really meaningful in that Domination (the other campaign objective) is obscenely shitty to do, requiring wiping out all of the other ritual-capable factions, who will freely inherit other same-race factions even when they're deeply on the ropes and the target hates them, thanks to AI bullshit. The Immortal Empires campaign combines and compresses the 1 and 2 maps and has, optionally, a chaos invasion happen like in 1; I always turned it off. It's just a standard Total War campaign map. Lizardmen - Vortex, Very Hard, Lord Mazdamundi Here's the first tragedy of the post. A hundred and thirty-five turns of this campaign, and I washed out. I couldn't get the momentum going to maintain my stacks, I was spread out too much to be able to defend if I did the rituals, and the dark elves (fucking obscene in TWW2) were breathing down my neck. Hours and hours to come to the horrible conclusion that I was screwed. Lizards are very fun, but the dinosaurs they're built around are hard to replace if they fall, and they're chronically undervalued in autobattle calculations, forcing things to slow down a load while I manually fight things with my cool stacks of lizards. If only there were a way to not care about that... Lizardmen - Vortex, Very Hard, Kroq-Gar There was a way. Kroq-Gar starts in a differently precarious position, in Ethiopia instead of Mexico, but crucially with a back to the sea. Consolidating was a bit easier, crunching da rats was a lot easier than immediately fighting vampires and dark elves, and it all gave me the time to realize the plan. The real plan. Kroxigor. Kroxigor recruitment buildings can be created at any settlement, not just the good ones, and they're solid units. In addition, the chain allows for a good ranged/melee mix of the smaller Skinks to be added to an army almost free of charge. I simply flooded the world in lizards. I ignored the higher tier dinosaurs. Kroxigor and Skinks. I hardly recruited proper lizardmen. I took all of Africa, hunkered down, did the rituals, and saw it through. Bretonnia - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Alberic de Bordeleaux Fittingly, to follow up the lizardmen debacle, Bretonnia was simple as anything. I consolidated, I built some stacks, I confederated the other Frenchmen. The ultimate campaign goal of doing the Errantry Battle was the same, so a thrust through Spain killing da rats got me all the chivalry I needed to do the orcs battle again. Still fun. 10/10. Norsca - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Throgg This was the worst campaign of all three games so far. This fucking sucked. This overwhelmingly sucked. The idea of Norsca is that you can only really occupy Scandinavia (and some other frozen bits), and have to rely on burning down the rest of the world. This isn't a terrible conceit - Chaos and Beastmen both have it to some degree - but the preceding qualification puts a massive handicap on it all. See, the problem is that Norsca plays mostly like a normal faction, where you build an economic engine through conquest and field more armies that way. This is as opposed to Chaos or Beastmen, who have huge upkeep reduction and raiding income boosts baked into their armies so you bake all of your gains straight into your armies. This is a huge issue, because you not only don't grow, but you always have a relatively-fragile economic base that the AI can strike and cripple you if they choose to. This wasn't a problem in Total Warhammer, but a simple change fucked everything: the map stretches to the west. The Very Hard AI desiring to pile onto the player means that the dark and/or high elves will, inevitably, declare war on you, and now your entire coast is a very vulnerable invasion point. You do not have the stacks to prevent an invasion, but an invasion will mean losing income that means you can't field stacks to invade the Empire. And the problem then sets in: you have to annihilate the Empire. Total Warhammer 2 fucks with the confederation math such that a so-called Main Faction holding a single city and zero armies can successfully confederate a several-province Minor Faction of the same type. Killing Reikland isn't enough, even though that's the objective. When Reikland is down to one or two provinces, it will confederate Middenland, or Wissenland, or - God forbid - Stirland. Now those are Reikland armies, and can inherit their broken Legendary Lords, and you have to wipe all those provinces out to kill Reikland. Except that you don't, because a single unit of Reiklanders snuck north and reinstated Middenland, not only giving them a settlement but giving them a stack of units recruiting outside of Reikland's limitations. Declare war on them if you will! Reikland will simply confederate them, cheating even the AI's own cheats. It fucking sucks. There aren't two ways about it. The Norsca campaign of TWW2 is the worst. Tomb Kings - Vortex, Very Hard, Grand Hierophant Khatep The Tomb Kings are the most imaginative and cool faction in Total War history, straight up. Great army design, unique campaign, and different objectives from the base factions. I was surprised by all of it. The deal is that your armies are free, but limited by tech and buildings, so you have to expand to be able to field more units directly. It creates a spin on the usual formula that isn't different so much as how it plays out takes some getting used to. It's fantastic. The actual campaign involves hunting down the Books of Nagash, scattered over the whole map, and then assaulting the Black Pyramid, rather than doing the Vortex rituals. It's a very fun campaign with a very fun faction. The Exiles of Nehek had a side objective to make everything in their forge, which is something that will disseminate down to all of the Tomb Kings and Vampire Coasts factions later and cause a bunch of extra shorter runs. Wood Elves - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Sisters of Twilight Cursory, honestly. I do very much like the changes made to the wood elves in TWW2, though. They made it so that the many trees across the world each have their own healths and can be traveled between, and the wood elf victory condition is tied to occupying, healing, and awakening the trees across the world. It's very thematic and far better than either of the TWW1 campaigns for wood elves. The Sisters of Twilight are kind of boring broken, but that's a problem we'll deal with in the Total Warhammer 3 recap. Tomb Kings - Mortal Empires, Easy, High Queen Khalida Interspersed between the real runs are these side runs. Khalida's goal was to have four serpent knights, which just takes occupying three provinces and ending turn a bunch. I did. Vampire Coast - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Cylostra Direfin This was, by far, my runaway surprise favorite. Cylostra Direfin, the Ultimate Songstress, just wants to sing the greatest song. This was the first campaign where I could choose between the Vortex and Mortal Empire campaigns, and Cylostra herself has an objective to occupy Atlantis and build a thing, so I chose the consolidated map to make that easier. This was a good decision, and also turned out that the vampire pirates were lowkey one of my favorite factions to play. Nothing but monsters and guns. Cylostra herself could summon a ghostly Bretonnian knight to tank for her - or, relevantly, to tank for her guns. The Vampire Coast was so tremendously fun to play that I didn't even mind that I fought basically nothing but the high and dark elves, the worst to fight in this whole game, for the whole campaign. Big stan, me. Tomb Kings - Vortex, Easy, Arkhan the Black Arkahn's task is to secure the evil part of Africa. It's attainable with a single stack making a hellpush through hostile territory, which I did, and then you just sit down and wait for it to develop enough to build the tower you need. That's it. Easy. High Elves - Vortex, Legendary, Tyrion Legendary. This was one of the worst runs I've done for the same reason as the Norsca one. One of the big problems of the Vortex campaign is that, whenever you do a ritual, the stacks that spawn to stop you spawn randomly. You can reload to put armies closer to them or whatever, but in general it's just a wild pain in the ass to deal with. So I resolved to clear this one via the alternative condition: domination. Kill all the other ritual-capable civilizations, and own the world. So begins the biggest slog of my Total War life. I began with stacks of Lothern Sea Guard, who certifiably have that dog in them. I conquered all of Canada assuming, correctly, that Malekith of the dark elves would be my biggest threat. He was! What followed was a three hundred turn extravaganza of Malekith confederating every single fucking dark elf on the planet, moving his capital from Canada to Mexico to Argentina to the fucking Seychelles. I killed literally every other faction in the map before finishing off Malekith, the first guy I targeted. I literally owned the entire world. This is the only world conquest I've done in Total War history, because I usually get bored long before painting the map. I did get bored long before painting the map here, but Malekith made it so that painting the map was my win condition. This is the second and will not be the last time Malekith is the source of all of my ills. Tomb Kings - Vortex, Easy, Settra the Imperishable Settra has to secure all of supersaharan Africa. That's it. Easy breezy. Chaos - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Prince Sigvald the Magnificent Sigvald differs from the standard Chaos in that he's really pretty, and focuses on awakening Norscan tribes to your cause. I didn't do that. Chaos is just fun to play. Get some Chaos Warriors, get some monsters, who cares. Burn it all down. God damn I love playing Chaos. Vampire Coast - Vortex, Easy, Count Noctilus You literally just have to sit on your home base until you get to the top tier. That's it. Dwarves - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Belegar Ironhammer Did the exiled hyperconservative dwarves as a change of pace and, honestly, it wasn't that much different. The dwarf ghosts are neat, but the massive upkeep penalties you take before returning to Karak Eight Peaks are crippling enough to just make things unfun until you manage to do that, and then they don't make enough of a splash to make things play any different after you get the homeland. A bit disappointing, but not bad, at least. Vampire Coast - Vortex, Easy, Aranessa Saltspite Recruit ten units of Sartosan Free Company. This takes like three turns. Dark Elves - Vortex, Very Hard, Malekith I fucking hate dark elves in basically everything, and Warhammer does not buck the trend. The dark elf mechanics in TWW2 are completely fucking broken and I won't enumerate them here. They suck. Malekith sucks. Dark elves suck. I did this and I hated it. Vampire Coast - Vortex, Easy, Luthor Harkon Same deal as Noctilus, except you're under any threat. Wait for population to tick up, click the button. I got japed by a guide into thinking I had to do a real quest and put a ton of effort into this but no, you don't have to beat the quest to restore Harkon's mind, you just have to make the building that makes it possible. Empire - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Balthazar Gelt The Empire was completely overhauled in TWW2 for the ... I don't want to say 'worse', but it specifically fucked with me here. The deal is that now you have to curry favor with the other Imperial guys, not just play nice with them and hit the Confederate Button, and it makes the Norscan campaign seem all the fucking worse, because there isn't a fucking confederate button. Still, playing the politics game was annoying but not the worst, and the Empire's unit list wasn't significantly shaken up. My complaints about the unit roster stay intact. Beastmen - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Taurox Holy fuck. Taurox rules. They overhauled Beastmen, my favorite faction, for the sequel, and they improved everything. The roster has a hole or two patched, the tech tree is far more interesting, the units are limited by buildings like Tomb Kings and, crucially, unlike Norsca in this very game, the horde faction that has no way to occupy territory has a way to prevent other factions from resettling it. I'm absolutely floored that the thing that made the Norsca campaign suck wildly was fixed by another similar faction in the same game, Vampire Counts - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Heinrich Kemmler Back down to earth. This sucked. The Vampire Count unit roster is limited in a fun way, but the level of conquest that a Very Hard campaign requires mucks it up a good bit. It didn't even suck in an interesting way - it was just reloading endlessly to find the ways that I could conquer to blob up a little bit before the offshore enemies decided I needed to die. Malekith strikes again. Fucking hell. Greenskins - Mortal Empires, Very Hard, Wurrzag da Great Green Prophet Da Pope. This was nothing but fun. Kill the dwarves, make sure all other orcs work for you. It's so simple. Wurrzag played sufficiently different from the core greenskins to justify his existence. Savage orcs are already fun to use, so giving me an excuse to do it is far past enough to justify a faction. Long live the Pope. Skaven - Vortex, Very Hard, Ikit Claw Da rats. It's time, finally. I saved this for last because da rats are so fucking fun to play. Ratling guns, jezails, all sorts of wild machines. I never even figured out what the difference between doomwheels and doomflayers are, and I still don't know, and it doesn't matter. I fucking love playing da rats. Did the ritual, walled out all the random squads, mowed down thousands of elves with warpfire bullets, God. It was a victory lap. It was always intended as victory lap and that's how it shook out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted March 29, 2023 Author Share Posted March 29, 2023 LIKE A DRAGON: ISHIN! (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2023) Finished: 29/3/23. Playtime: 112 hours. THIS POST IS 100% SPOILER ZONE. CLICK AWAY IF YOU ARE WORRIED ABOUT GAMEPLAY OR STORY SPOILERS. I'm doing something different for this review and pre-typing it as an essay, currently 64 hours into the game as I begin, because I want to present a simple angle on Like a Dragon: Ishin!. I've gone through well-designed games that I enjoyed, like many on this list, poorly-designed games that I loved anyway, such as Empire: Total War, and well-designed games that I didn't like, like Duke Nukem 3D. I've even gone through bad games that I didn't enjoy just to prove a point, in the case of Age of Empires. I've got hot takes abound in both directions, but I like to think that I can at least back up my opinions with some semblance of facts and/or reasoning. Like a Dragon: Ishin! is not a well-designed game that I didn't enjoy as much as I thought I should have. Like a Dragon: Ishin! is a bad game. It is actively poorly-designed and shoddily put together, and its reception utterly baffles me. It's not a complete shitshow, at least, and I'll have unreservedly positive things to say about a single facet of the game, but I'm going to go right in, elbow-deep, and scrub out exactly why I think Ishin! is not just disappointing after the largely-masterful run of the Dragon Engine, but is, simply put, bad. CONTEXT Ryu ga Gotoku: Ishin! was a historical spinoff game that was meant to fill the significant gap between Yakuza 5 and Yakuza 0, which came out back in 2014. I bring this information up for two reasons. First, that I'm going to make a lot of systematic criticism of what I feel is the intent behind how the game plays, for which the year really matters if I'm going to be nice and good-faith about it - I'm very critical of Yakuza 3, and think it's largely a pretty bad game, but the aughts were an absolute wasteland of design and Yakuza 3 is just a casualty of its time in many regards. Ishin! came out in 2014. Its contemporaries aren't the Empires: Total War and Residents Evil 5 of the late-aughts - 2014 was the year of Grand Theft Auto 5. Bloodborne is right around the corner, and Metal Gear Solid 5's prologue is out. The second reason is that I have not played Ryu ga Gotoku: Ishin!. I knew next to nothing about the game before playing the remake, and I'll try to refrain from assuming that something in LAD: Ishin! is necessarily the same as something in RGG: Ishin! was nine years ago. Through reading guides to try to wrangle my way through this game, I know some things are the same and some are direct improvements, and I know of some questionable decisions that LAD: Ishin! made independent of the original that I'll knock down as I get to them. This is an independent review of Like a Dragon: Ishin!, Ryu ga Gotoku Studios, 2023. STORY We'll dive into one of the easier things to tackle for me first. Ishin!'s story didn't appeal to me, but that doesn't mean I don't see the appeal. The biggest issue for me for pretty much every Yakuza game is that, outside of two or three outliers across the franchise, I never enjoy the bits of the story where yakuza guys talk stoically over a table about the yakuza. One could easily conclude that I don't enjoy the parts of Yakuza which are about the yakuza and that's, honestly, fairly true. Ishin! involves a lot of stoic shinsengumi talking around an open wooden floor about the shinsengumi and, even if I like a good number of the characters individually, it bores the shit out of me. I understand that other people absolutely live for this shit, and I won't say that this is bad storytelling at all, but it's something that I've never enjoyed in the Yakuza games and it's rampant in Ishin!. The worst came at the end of the game. The emotional climax hit over an hour before the end of the game - Ryoma delivering the manifesto to the shogun put a pretty clear moratorium on the end of the game, and the remaining game absolutely did not respect it. Delivering that manifesto was a representation of Ryoma's lifelong accomplishment in real life, and it's basically a footnote in Ishin! comparatively. You could make a solid argument that hunting down 'the other Ryoma' was the intended climax of the game, and I would disagree, but understand it. Ishin! disagrees with both. You go through an insane gauntlet which I'll bitch about later, and then you fight and win against the other Ryoma. You're rewarded with interminable cutscenes. You're rewarded with cutscenes that lead into other cutscenes. You're rewarded with the Real Actual Bad Guy showing up just to be owned epically by Ryoma and his friends, in a completely hollow victory. The game ends on this epic ownage as though it serves as a perfect surrogate for everything you've done - you just wanted to watch Ryoma and co own this dude you've never seen without your input, right? Fuck off. It's not all bad. Despite the tepid ending and bits I didn't enjoy in between, there was at least a good chunk of story I did like. Most of the setup to, and payoff of, Ryoma setting up the SatCho Alliance was interesting, good, and fun - Ryoma getting blackout drunk and mad and making it happen was a very fun take on an actual historical event. Individually, at least, I did enjoy a good number of the characters. Ryoma was hit and miss, but Shinpachi (née Saejima) and Heisuke (née Zhao) were massive standouts, and the interplay between Ryoma, Katsura (née Akiyama), and the guy who Ryuji plays I can't remember the name of was pretty great throughout. The final dynamic of Ryoma, Shinpachi, Okita, Heisuke (RIP), and Hijikata would have made for an insanely good game if cut down to just those five blokes. For a whole chapter here and there, Ishin! kept my attention well. It did not for the runtime. I feel compelled to point out that late-shogunate-early-reform Japan is a fucking fascinating time of history, and I am absolutely inclined towards stories painted in that mural. This game did not fail because I was not interested. It wasn't even the worst of the Yakuza stories, despite everything I've bitched about here - I'd put it above nearly half of them - I'm just being more critical of it because it was set in a time I was genuinely interested in and then committed a ton of unforced errors. SIDE STORIES The side stories in Ishin! suck. They're just bad. They're not even up to the shitty standards of the average of Yakuza 5. Most of the substories fall into a few categories: a one-note story to meet a [Friend], a one-note story to unlock a [Minigame], sometimes both, or one of a few substories that just function as [Friend]ships while pretending to be outside the system, like Sumi Bozu or the memoirs guy. Straight-up, the only good substory in Ishin! is Ryoma helping a famous author pen books, and that's basically hitting the WAR level of other game substories. Maybe, at best, the Tom substory and the one with the kids who miss each other beat the WAR. It's not only poor, it's abysmal. This dovetails into the [Friend]ships, which are somehow even worse. Every single one, including the pets, and I want to point out how horrible it is that Ishin! managed to make me not enjoy befriending dogs, is the same gameplay loop, which answers a very simple question. You, reader, are provably at least a medium Fire Emblem fan, and have, statistically, made a joke on the internet about how your chess pieces talked 3 times and then got married. Ishin! answers why that happens: because when that doesn't happen it sucks hugely. Half of all [Friend]ships require you to deliver the same kind of item, usually vegetable, to the target many times with zero changes to dialogue as you go except for a bar which becomes slightly larger. I'm a huge connoisseur of Bars Going Up, and this game was the one that finally showed me a bar I didn't care about going up. Repeatedly. You might think, as a person who has not played Ishin!, that I'm exaggerating. Let's clear that up. Here's a complete breakdown of all friends you can make by the thing you have to do with them, and remember: these aren't three or four type things. These are usually five, but up to ten or fifteen interactions, doing the same thing, each. Just keep visiting the shop/talking to: karaoke, udon, dance, priest, miko, other udon, shogi, chicken racer, ichikuraya, sushi zanmai, fukufukuya, teahouse, don quijote, ebisu, kasuga, aoba, greengrocer, weapon shop, taxi, shikoku, cat, cat (22). Just keep giving [Food] repeatedly: beggar, sumo boy, chef, love-starved boy, bethieved wife, veggie boy, fisherman, sexy lady, garbage man, dog, dog, cat (12). Heal him a bunch: public defender, concussed man, dog (3). Something slightly more: mahjong (have to play rounds and then leave between), cho-han (gotta do some special rounds of cho-han), pharmacy (you die every time you raise his friendship) (3). Unique friendships: sword boy (show him some swords), injured grandma (real errands), mysterious merchant (off the cuff trades), woodcutter (I'll get to this), courier (same) (5). The woodcutter and courier are the subjects of a later section and shouldn't be counted as Content, frankly, so out of this whole 45 motherfuckers only 3 of them are really any more than 'talk to them when you're around and maybe give them a radish'. It's the absolute apex of fake content. Your reward for participating is, at best, a short gameplay scene and, at worst, not even a cutscene with some narrative. These are the laziest possible content that could be defined as 'side content' in an RGG game. They're genuinely terrible. ANOTHER LIFE Another Life is at least conceptually interesting. Ryoma takes on some debt for Haruka (who is here, for some reason, just as Haruka) and you get a side game of farming, cooking, and delivering food to people for money to pay off Haruka's debt. Adopt pets and very slightly decorate your home. The storyline is a whole nothing burger - you give the guy money and he says 'give me the money' - and the Haruka scenes are fine, but nothing we haven't seen before. It's shallow fanservice, but that still bats around average for Ishin!. The problem is that, until we get to the completion metrics later, I'm out of things to talk about for this whole facet of the game. You unlock the story, such as it is, by delivering food. Delivering food is the same cycle, which doesn't even really involve cooking, and is done long before it's complete. GAMEPLAY The primary draw of the Yakuza games has only rarely been the gameplay. Outside of the Dragon Engine, they've ranged from actively shit (3) to serviceable brawlers (0, 1, 4, and 5). They're not bad as a rule, except for 3, and have good and bad parts that average out to, again, serviceable. The Dragon Engine helped a lot, at least, and except for chunks of 2 and, to a lesser extent, Lost Judgment, the four Dragon Engine brawlers were all very good times. This is pre-Dragon Engine, though, so I'd expect something around the tune of the aforementioned five. Ishin!'s combat sucks ass. There's a good amount of superficial style to it but, when you do anything more than scratch the systems with your nails, every imaginable problem rears its ugly head. I'd probably say it's better than 3's, but not by much - and the progression systems do their best to make it worse all along. I'll do my best to break it down here. COMBAT Ryoma has four styles - Brawler, Swordsman, Gunman, and Wild Dancer. In principle they're relatively well-defined; Brawler is your defensive stance, Swordsman is your balanced-offensive stance, Gunman is your DPS stance, and Wild Dancer is your balanced-defensive stance. In practice, these four stances combine to be used based on how much effort you want to put in. Wild Dancer is the slow but boring guaranteed way to win almost any fight. Gunman is faster for killing things but it's got some ...issues. Swordsman is the balanced stance, being necessary for breaking armor so you can use Gunman or for its better defense and heat actions against some of the faster bosses. Brawler is dogshit unless you invest totally into it. Swapping to other stances is not only rarely necessary - the only exception being breaking armor on Swordsman or Wild Dancer so that you can use Gunner - but is systemically discouraged, because: PROGRESSION Ishin! has the worst progression system of all eleven Ryu ga Gotoku games I've played, and it isn't close. A good progression system in a brawler, in my opinion, should hit a few major notes. It should reward you with progress for doing the brawling, it should be relatively free of filler, and it should telegraph what you'll get in the future to some degree. I think all of the RGG games have had their own issues in progression, usually pretty crippling but the games kinda glide by on not being very difficult. A pet peeve of mine is when there's a skill that takes experience that does nothing but give you more experience - these are the absolute worst. Weirdly, of all the games, Yakuza 4 managed to sidestep all my progression complaints and has easily my favorite of the RGG systems. For all of the good game it was, Yakuza 0 had a really very poor progression system - it was far too deep, it was far too full of chaff, and since 'experience' was money you were encouraged to spend money to make money via the side hustles, which was even worse than a skill to get more experience. It was spending experience on not-leveling to get more experience to eventually level. Ishin! falls into almost every single trap that 0 does, and does all of them even worse. Ishin!'s skill trees are titanic. As you fight, you're leveling two tracks: every hit you do (this is the only metric, insanely) give a little bit of Style XP, and combats give Level XP. Style XP gives you colored orbs that can be slotted into the sphere grid corresponding to the style; Level XP gives you grey orbs that can be slotted into any style freely. There are 200 spheres across the four grids, and filling a grid out lets you reset it and fill everything out. Getting to level 98 overall lets you limit break your actual level to finish filling out all of the grids a second time. There are so, so many 'ability you'll never use' 'heat action + upgrade to that heat action + sidegrade to that upgrade to that heat action' 'health boost' etc. type abilities in these. I cannot stress how underwhelming getting an orb usually is - and that's before the prestige. Once you reset the skill tree, every single node is a passive upgrade to something or adding a QTE to a single heat action. And when I say titanic, I don't just mean size. I mean time invested. Having finished every single other piece of content in the game except Amon, at a hundred hours in, as I began to farm money for the equipment grind (we'll get there.), I was level 94. This is after I stopped to exp-grind from 80 to 90 so I could prestige Wild Dancer so I could at least have something to level up while I grinded materials. If I hadn't stopped to do that, we're talking every single piece of game content experienced and completed in the late 80s out of 99. After accomplishing literally everything else in the game, including that grind and a few more, I was about five thousand experience from the limit break. It's genunely absurd. MASTERS & REVELATIONS The progression system is so intrinsically awful that it even tanks the various masters you can learn from - three in total, with Swordsman and Wild Dancer sharing the same guy. They're nothing special if you've played any of the other games, though I'll happily complain that the unlock requirements for the training is baffling: Komaki forces you to get into varying numbers of random battles between each of his, but otherwise can all be done in a session. Ginryu requires you to bring him swords of increasing rarity, which means interacting with the crafting system - we'll get to that. Will's training can all just be done back to back as soon as you meet him, you don't even need to do some token 'walk around the block' type reset. You only have to leave the room he's in one time. Your rewards for doing the training are, of course, skills. You get to trial them in a fight, they're usually pretty useful, and the fights are cursory. Problem is that you actually only get the right to buy the skill, after getting to use it. This ends up sucking no matter what you think about the skills - if you like the skill and want to use it, chances are it's significantly deeper down the skill tree and it will be a while before you can get it; if you didn't like the skill and don't care about it, there's a later node you get to grumpily bypass. Nobody wins. This spills over, unfortunately, into the revelations. I'll show my whole ass here: I don't think the Yakuza revelations are particularly interesting or funny. I know they're fan-favorites, but I really just don't get the appeal. You have to sleuth out a (usually) silly vignette for the payoff of getting a single new heat action. Ishin! makes sure you don't get either of those. The revelations are purely grind-RNG based, giving you a chance to revolute each time you use certain other actions (two per stance) after you get a book that lets the revelation happen. When you have the revelation, Ryoma does the associated heat action which - you guessed it! - give you the ability to buy that heat action later. There's no verve to it whatsoever, it's something you obligingly grind out because you have to. They even come with the easiest QTE in the world, on the off chance you mess it up. They're so completely pointless. ENEMIES Any combat system is pointless in a vacuum. It only exists meaningfully when there's an opponent to measure it up against. It seems odd to put a specific section in an RGG brawler for the enemy variety, given as Kiryu and Yagami's entire sagas consisted entirely of four personalities of thug, a type or two of bigger thug, Couch Guy, and bosses, but Ishin! has proper enemy variety. Regrettably. Since the game is so heavily weapon-based, most enemies you'll fight will also be packing something. Let's go through them. BRAWLERS: They're worthless. Slow, telegraphed hits with no damage behind them. GUNNERS: Bizarrely, see above. Enemies with pistols and rifles are arguably the single least threatening thing to run into in Ishin!, and this includes the few pistol bosses. SWORDSMEN: The bread and butter of the enemy ranks. About half of what you fight across the course of the game will be guys with swords, and fortunately they're pretty forgettable. There's various stances they can adopt (on a per-guy basis, they don't appear to swap) and the only particularly nasty trick any of them have is the ability to sheathe the katana for a rad Kurosawa unsheathe counter if you dare to attack near them. This sucks because 1) it does an inordinate amount of damage 2) it's a guaranteed very slow knockdown animation for Ryoma 3) your reward for provoking the counterattack is typically that they just resheathe the katana and do it again. You can just shoot the bastards, though. Sort of. That's up next. SPEARMEN: Spearmen fucking suck, and they aren't the worst. They have a rush attack with zero wind-up that looks almost identical to their combat walking animation but has incredibly generous hitboxes, and some kinds have to the tune of a six-second uninterrupted fast combo that you either have to wait out or try to stagger parry. A room full of spearmen is unlikely to kill you, but will probably make you rip your hair out. There's a spearman boss late in the game and he's just the absolute fucking worst, though. VARIOUS BIG DUDES WITH ODACHIS AND SHIT: It's a big guy. Having an odachi or a hammer doesn't make them fundamentally any different from the big dudes in a Kiryu game. The only thing that makes them obnoxious is that they occasionally hyperarmor through things with no rhyme or reason. NINJA: Whoever designed the ninja needs to be given a swirlie. They throw stun darts and their general movement pattern is away from you, and their general movement cycle is a series of flips and tumbles that have insane amounts of invincibility frames. Lategame ninjas are also always armored, so you can't just shoot them, as the gun does piddly damage to armor despite being the hugest anti-flesh DPS. The ninja adds nothing to the game, and inspires no feeling but bleak hatred. MINIBOSSES: Ishin! denotes its minibosses, generally, by making them very large (like eight or ten feet tall large) and move around really slowly. They also tend to no-sell all attacks, hit like fucking trucks, and throw elementally-charged darts if they're not getting to you fast enough. These darts do credible damage and stun, and are often thrown in a fan in case you're running around too much. They're the absolute pits. The miniboss shortly before the final boss killed me more, with his small pack of dudes, than the final boss did. What's notable about the enemy variety of Ishin! is that none of these lend themselves to being dealt with using any particular style. The stances were designed, and the enemies were designed, but the two design teams never said a word to each other. You can gun any of these guys down, and the only thing that changes is whether gunman is your best-geared stance and whether they're armored or not. Same generally goes for the other two. You don't brawl. It's completely frictionless in a way that even Yakuza 0, the next game, wouldn't be. Fightin's bad, is what I'm saying. THE BOSSES It doesn't improve with the boss fights, either. Skyrim-style matador fighting and then shooting with a gun works for most of them, annoyingly, but if you get into melee the problems with RGG bosses manifest really fast. Let's go through using the various styles against a swordsman boss, which is about 85% of the guys you'll deal with over the course of the game: BRAWLER: Brawler does no damage. SWORDSMAN: Once you get the counterattack, the window on it is obscenely generous and you can go through whole bosses just baiting and using a worse Tiger Drop (the Tiger Drop window in this game is unbelievably tight, meanwhile). Besides that, you're limited to rush combo and block, because Swordsman has a gutted evade that, even if you evade and the boss doesn't pivot back to you mid-combo, still has you getting up before you get a back hit in. GUNMAN: Matador fighting works for a lot of bosses. You usually get generous arenas and they'll commit to long combos if you can bait them out. Problem is that if they're not doing anything, they'll just passively block bullets - not by blocking, but just by existing. They'll always auto-block when moving towards you as well. It's a good way to opt-out of fighting most bosses, at least. On the other hand, if you get hit, you can neither evade nor block mid-combo, so you're eating all thoes hits. WILD DANCER: You have an eventually-infinite rush combo, multiple neutral heat actions, and a frictionless dodge you can use in the middle of your rush combo. It's lower damage than others but if you have a reasonable head for dodging, you're invincible and never have to stop attacking. I hope it's fairly clear here that there's Wild Dancer and Challenge Modes here. I rarely Wild Danced for bosses just on account of it was so brainless - you hit square until you think they're gonna attack, and then you hit x one or three times to spin behind the guy, and then you keep going. Forever. It's dull as hell and, sometimes, it's even better, but for that we gotta talk about: THE BOSSES SUBTOPIC: HYPER ARMOR Hyperarmor is a pretty common concept in action games and refers to when your guy no-sells attacks, typically but not always because he's in some kind of animation lock. This is distinct from invincibility frames because you take damage, usually normal but sometimes reduced somewhat, when hyperarmoring through an attack. This can be absolutely debilitating in, say, Monster Hunter Rise, if you use a wirebug skill at the wrong time and eat a combo - instead of getting knocked down by the first hit of the combo and the rest of the hits missing you thanks to invincibility frames, you can hyperarmor through an entire combo and just die outright instead. Dark Souls 3's changes to poise make it work like animation hyperarmor - while swinging a greatsword, you'll shrug off X hits of damage rather than stagger out of your animation. You get the picture. Ryoma has pretty limited hyperarmor in Ishin!. Off the top of my head, the only time he gets any reliable amount is while charging finishing blows in Swordsman stance. That's fine, honestly, I'm not going to complain either about limited hyperarmor during charge blows or about Ryoma not having very much. The problem is that the bosses have a lot of it, but they don't have it reliably. You can bait Shinpachi's lunge and stab him in the back in Swordsman and one of three things will happen: he'll either be staggered through your combo and hyperarmor through the next one if you try to push your luck, he'll just turn around and hit you with no reaction to the sword going through him, or (worst) he'll stagger to the first hit or two and then decide he has hyperarmor and begin to attack mid-combo. Problems arise when you can do these things, seemingly-identically, and get different results each time. It means that boss fights build no strategies nor confidence - it's a perpetual slog through 'is this gonna work this time' and it does or doesn't, or you just shoot the fuckers. Either way. It means the bosses are no longer pattern recognition and reaction, as they were in all the other brawlers and a lot of pretty good action games, because the boss's response to your reaction cannot be known in advance, so you just heal through everything, the hallmark of the worst Yakuza bosses. My suspicion is that enemies build up some kind of tolerance to being hit and can activate hyperarmor to get out of being infinite comboed, though I have no idea how it works in principle. Ryoma's combos could, against the rudimentary AI, easily become infinite, so in addition to accounting for that via things like knockback and blocking, bosses have an Omega Solution to just not stagger if they're getting wombo comboed and it's not very well tuned. I have no idea if this is a conspiracy theory or not. The pistol boss in the late midgame shows what happens with Wild Dancer without something like this system. His only pressure release valve is to kick you for some damage and follow up with a pistol shot, and while the kick is unstoppable, the gap between those two things is longer than Ryoma's stagger from the kick. You can kill this guy in Wild Dancer without ever healing or evading, simply hammering the square button while locked onto him until he dies. All he can do is try to back up, get staggered out of shooting, and dive various directions to no avail while this maniac cuts him to ribbons. There's nothing even approaching gameplay to it. I'd say he was in my upper half of favorite bosses to fight in the game. TARGETING AND THE CAMERA Let me get something out of the way: Ishin!'s camera is laughably awful. I wanted to dedicated a whole section to it alone because it's distractingly bad all the time, but I'll leave it to a few bullet points and get to the other half of this. * Ishin!'s camera is a physical entity which interfaces with all other physical substances, except for when it doesn't. * Ishin!'s camera tries to maintain the same distance from Ryoma at all times, except for when it doesn't. * Ishin!'s camera requires no more than a maximum angle to a surface to slide along it, except for when it doesn't. These three properties mean that, for instance, while running down certain alleys (I'm talking, like, streets five people wide, not squeeze channels), the camera is stuck on whatever side of Ryoma you've put it on. It will refuse staunchly to move to his other side, because the walls are in the way. Add onto this that a lot of story and optional fights are in fairly cramped rooms and you have a recipe for disaster. I genuinely cannot think of a worse camera in a third-person game than Ishin!'s from the last, fuck, like fifteen years. I have to think back to the PS2 or Gamecube to get any traction, and even then original Resident Evil 4's camera is still better. Morrowind's third-person camera was better. This leads me flawlessly to the targeting system in combat, which is to say that there isn't one. Previous RGG games had occasional headass moments where Yagami would be beating a guy half to death and then just redirect a finisher to some other dude in the half distance or what have you, but in Ishin! this is an every fight occurrence. Even using the fighting stance (R1) to lock Ryoma onto a guy doesn't guarantee that he hits that guy, or even particularly add to the chances he will. It's bizarrely bad with melee, but it reaches a head with gunning. You cannot aim the gun, period. Ryoma will put fifteen shots into a guy and then decide to spread the next six to six different guys in a 160 degree arc around him. Bullets will exit the gun at up to 30 degree angles to hit guys you're not pointing at, even if they're off camera. Ryoma will ignore a man rushing him with a sword, who you are fighting stanced onto, and put every bullet into a guy 25 feet away. It doesn't even reliably target enemies, even; gunning will happily occasionally lock onto guys in their dying animation and put a few shots into the aether for no good reason. The R2 skills each stance has really show how little input targeting has on anything. Brawler just gets Star Platinum - obviously, given as the game before Ishin! was Fist of the North Star, and Star Platinum is just Fist of the North Star, so they just gave it to Ryoma for fun - and Swordsman gets some bullshit I never got to work better than rush combos. Wild Dancer gets a whirlwind of sword and gun that does obscene damage if you can pin a miniboss with it. Problem is, if there's anyone else on camera, odds are just as good that Ryoma will start spinning and home in on that guy instead, no way to know til you hit the button. Gunman literally gets High Noon from Overwatch, weirdly, given as Ishin! predates Overwatch by two years, and it tells you to 'move the camera to get more targets in'. This is a complete fabrication. High Noon just picks a target anywhere in a sphere from Ryoma, on camera off camera blocked by walls who cares, every tick. Even the ability that tells you explicitly to use the camera to target it more efficiently is incapable of any kind of targeting. THE PRESENTATION Let's take a breather from all that and go over the leftover stuff before the completion metrics: graphics and music and shit. Game runs fine. Game looks like a remaster of a PS4 launch title - and that's what it is, at best: a remaster, not a remake. It's occasionally very pretty, generally looks fine, and occasionally shows its warts, like a Normal curve. The animations are fine, adjusting for the crappy canned-animation look of 2014. Voice acting's solid. Sound effects are pretty flat. The UI is quietly dogshit. It's fully navigable, and nothing is especially out of place, but it suffers from a lot of quiet problems. It's impossible to predict whether a piece of UI is instantly responsive to button presses or not, and some - like the skill trees - are weirdly sluggish. Everything, however, audibly responds to button presses no matter whether it's accepting input or not, which leads to a lot of hitting the d-pad too early, getting the sound effect of the selector moving, and then hitting x to find out that it didn't move at all. There's also the more-comical 'mashing circle to get out of nested menus' where every press as things close, piece by piece, is producing the backing-out noise. It's a bad presentation, on weirdly slow, deeply nested, and poorly organized menus that all combine to make a huge step back, but not in a dealbreaking way. In a better game, I'd probably just overlook it or have a little comment. THE MUSIC Let me make something crystal clear ahead of time: I generally don't notice, and often disdain when I do notice, video game music. There's a few pieces here and there I'll go to bat for, like To Zanarkand, but by and large stuff without vocals (not limited to VGM) very quickly becomes white noise to enter and exit my brain. It's absolutely a Me Condition. I only tend to notice VGM when it's notably bad or repetitive, such as the Toy Story world theme in Kingdom Hearts 3 or the vocal tracks that some bastard decided to make background music in Final Fantasy 14's newer content. Topically for this site, and most tellingly, I have basically zero opinion on Fire Emblem's music. It's there, I'm sure, but essentially meaningless to me. Ishin!'s soundtrack fucking rules. I do not say this lightly. For some insane reason, some guy decided to compose a soundtrack for an early modern era Japanese historical fiction game with a heavy dose of growling metal guitars and sick industrial riffs. I don't know what possessed this, all I can do is thank God for it. This is the one unreservedly positive thing I alluded to many paragraphs ago. THE CENSORSHIP If you're going to bring up the extra steam in the bathhouse as a negative against Ishin!, don't post instead. I'm tired of hearing it. Go look at some porn. COMPLETION PART 1: THE DILIGENCE RECORDS Ishin! divided the completion log into two logs, for some reason. Loosely, the Diligence Records cover the number go up style of progress, and the Completion List covers the more discrete checklist style of progress. This is very loose, but works well enough. I'm going to go through these by category because, honestly, over half of these have Some Bullshit or Some Weird Redundancy in them. I want to point out that a lot of these completion metrics were cut down hugely from the original, including ones I'll call obscene in this release. It's been worse. ADVENTURE The defining feature of the Adventure tab is too much bullshit. Some are inevitable, like talking to people 500 times or spending 500 ryo or just walking / sprinting / taxiing around a bunch. Some are things you're going to do but with insane metrics. I ate everything in the game and even took special care to top off my health as I was going to keep the numbers going up and ended the rest of the Diligence Records having eaten at restaurants 110 times out of 200. You have to take 200 medicines and eat 400 food items out of your inventory - again, things you'll probably do, but hundreds of times fewer than the metric even on a long completion file. Then there's the busywork. Chop 500 logs of wood. Deliver 20 parcels for the courier. Pray at shrines and pick up ambient items from pots 100 times each. These are all just time sinks but at least they get you things that are, hypothetically, useful. Then there's drawing water from the well. There's a well in the back of the Shinsengumi headquarters and you can interact with it once per trip to draw water, a food you can consume for about 3% of your health, and sometimes you get a low to mid-tier crafting ingredient. You have to do this fifty times, cut down from 2014's 100, to almost literally no benefit besides making the completion metric go up. It is the most baldfaced and astonishingly naked busywork I've seen in a video game, to the point where I have to respect it begrudgingly. There's a second well just sort of There in Rakugai but I straight-up didn't find it until after I was done pulling water. Hell, there might be more. Each district (of five) in Ishin! also tracks your reputation, which goes up by doing more things there. Straightforward. Where it falls apart is that every district has the same reputation cap (10) with the same amount of Stuff-Doing to get there, and not every district is built equally. Fushimi, where you start, has a wealth of friendships, one of your hubs, several minigames, and a good third of the substories in the game at 22; and it has the same reputation requirements as Gion, which has five friends, four substories, two restaurants, and the brothel. My Gion reputation, after having done literally everything to do in Gion, was just the other end of 3; my Fushimi reputation maxed out before I ran out of things to do. Rakunai and Rakugai are more like Fushimi, while Mukurogai is more like Gion. For Mukurogai, at least, you can spend money to raise reputation really easily; for Gion you just have to get Virtue through the Diligence Logs (or other ways) and go mash the Rep Up++ button dozens of times. FRIENDSHIPS I went over this a long time ago now, but this now intersects with some of the other metrics in strange ways. The taxi brothers have a friendship that goes up as you use their taxi, but you max the bar after six or so taxis and unlock the final taxi destination. 24 to go! The woodcutter and the courier are back now, though. See, they follow the same pattern: do a substory to be introduced to their thing (cut wood, deliver mail), then do their thing to raise the bar, until you're friends. Where this gets weird is that the only interaction with them is to do their thing, and their thing only exists as a way to interact with them, and the completion metrics for doing their thing necessarily eclipse the friendship requirements. Nothing changes about cutting wood for the woodcutter after you befriend him, but you're at 320/500 wood cut in the Diligence Records. Nothing changes about delivering parcels for the parcel deliverer after you befriend him, but you're at 8/20 parcels delivered in the Diligence Records. The friendships aren't even worth talking about because they don't change anything about how you interact with them for another metric entirely, and you're not doing their thing anywhere else in the whole game except for them. BATTLE Nothing here is ridiculous. It's almost inconceivable to finish the rest of the game and have anything at all remaining to do in this whole section of the log. The only odd man out is destroying 50 ambient weapons in battle, because 1) Brawler sucks ass and 2) they nerfed the hell out of most ambient weapon damage compared to the Kiryu games. On the other hand, this makes it easier because in the deep endgame you can fight 3 guys outside of a bar and break like 15 chairs and tables on them without killing them, so it goes by fast if you focus on it. Notable here is a metric that falls into something I've bitched about before but is irrelevant here: there's one for completing 100 dungeon runs. There's only 40 dungeons in the game. That sounds like a dumb requirement to redo content repeatedly, but because of a later Completion List category you end up blowing through that number with ease. COMPLETION PART 1.8X: REVERSE REBIRTH: ANOTHER LIFE Another Life is in both logs, for some reason, so it's between them, for that reason. Per the Diligence Records, collect a certain number of vegetables and cook/fish/play with both of your animal types/collect eggs a certain large number of times. Per the Completion List, harvest every vegetable, cook every meal, catch every fish, and adopt every pet. For the most part, these are informed by each other but in odd ways - it's almost certain you'll catch 100 fish for the Diligence Records before catching every fish for the Completion List, but then the Diligence Records require a gold star tuna, which isn't included in the Completion List. You'll either harvest every vegetable or harvest 1,500 vegetables long before you do the other, entirely dependent on what you spend your Virtue on for house upgrades - but you need to collect a certain number of precisely five different vegetables for the Diligence Records, so why also need to collect one of every vegetable for the Completion List? It's weirdly set up. One or the other, guys. The nasty ones among these come from the Diligence Records. There's about twenty different recipes in the game - cook one of each for the Completion List - and the Diligence Records require you to cook one hundred times. The trade system provides a permanently-rotating list of things you can tell Haruka to sell for you for money, and the Completion List requires you to sell 100 ryo of goods to finish the storyline, but the Diligence Records require you to complete 200 trade orders, which will take you well over the 100 ryo mark even if you do only the shittiest carrot orders. It's a grind to get through them, nothing more. No brain usage needed. COMPLETION PART 2: THE COMPLETION LIST Most of the Diligence Records will get filled out while filling out the Completion List, save for some off ones I pointed out earlier. Here's the beef of why people say not to plat Ishin!. Unlike the Diligence Records, I'm going to use some of these spaces to talk about entire systems I didn't get to earlier, because there's no real reason to untie them from their Completion List metrics. SUBSTORIES Gonna blow your mind here: complete all the substories. Already addressed this adequately. Since Amon is the final substory, I'll slap this in here: the last few substories are based on finding a shitload of memoirs and presenting them to the memoirs guy - these are actually pretty cool, and he and Ryoma talk about some element of Japanese history or culture. I enjoyed them a lot. MINIGAMES The minigames have been the largest sufferer from the UI being quietly dogshit. We've got poker, the traditional games, shogi, mahjong, chicken racing, the noodle shop, two rhythm games, and the obligatory horny minigame for me to whine about. Poker: It's poker. They didn't fuck it up, and that's fairly notable given what's coming. The worst thing to say about poker is that the UI has zero friction or load times whatsoever, so it's easy to input a command before registering that the menu is open for command registration sometimes. Completion is not a lot of points all told. Cho-han: Cho-han is really three elements: how does the UI play out, how does the lady sound, and how do the dice work. The UI's the same as always with the annoying addition that you have to wait for every other participant to declare before you can place your bid, slowing things down a good bit. The lady doesn't have nearly the raw vigor and verve she had in, say, Yakuza 5. The dice are... well, get to the next game. Completion is basically just playing until you get the high stakes bets and then making those until a few pay off. One nice thing I'll say about cho-han is that your buddies join you in the postgame at the table, which is fun. Cee-lo: Ishin!'s random number generator is completely fucked. People are bad at intuiting probability, this is objective fact - I've got a degree and a half in applied statistics, depending on how you interpret that field. I know my fallacies, and I know I also fall into the '90% is 100%' trap a lot. Fire Emblem fans are very familiar with this, and usually don't think they are, annoyingly. Ishin!'s random number generator is not working with the listed probabilities (we'll get to this.), and, in the dice games, is streaky as shit. Over the entire course of finishing cee-lo, I never rolled a single Unique Combination except the losing 1-2-3; the AI would get these every round or two. I never won, on aggregate, a round as dealer except by pennies. These are normal things to happen and streaks to go on for, you figure, five or even ten rounds of the game, but we're talking thirty+. We get into a statistically significant sample size of what should be a reasonably-common occurrence never happening when it benefits the player. I am fully convinced that Ishin!'s launch RNG, at least, is fucked. Maybe it's been patched. Completion is way too many points given as you can only bet a fraction of what the AI does and your winnings, unless you're the dealer, are based on what you can bet. I never managed to get my bet limit to go up before completing it. Fuck cee-lo. Oicho-kabu: I've never enjoyed oicho-kabu. It's baccarat with extra steps, and the showdown phase takes ages. Let's lamp some praise on Ishin! then: they sped up the showdown phase significantly. Outside of cards dealing at wildly differing speeds sometimes at random, looking amateurish, I have nothing bad to say about Ishin!'s oicho-kabu. Completion isn't even that bad. Koi-koi: Speaking of looking amateurish. Koi-koi is one of my favorite of the recurring minigames, second only to mahjong, and I actively look forward to finishing it on any given game. I enjoyed learning koi-koi so much for Yakuza 0 that I bought a set of Nintendo hanafuda cards so I could teach the folks I live with how to play. Koi-koi in Ishin! is insanely bad, like, to a laughable degree. Cards come out at random speeds, sometimes instantly, making matches chaotic as hell to follow compared to the measured pace of all previous iterations. Sounds desync all over the place and play late. You have to leave between games to get your betting limit to go up to clear it in any reasonable time, but backing out resets all of your settings, defaulting you to the lowest bet limit. The sake cup is straight up coded wrong - it can count as a junk card or a variety card for the purposes of making those hands, but if you make a junk hand with it, you don't get the win until your next draw. It's still koi-koi, it's still fun, but this is full-on the worst implementation of koi-koi in any RGG game without even a caveat. It's not even the worst they did me. Completion is breezy once you unlock higher betting levels and a slog until you do. Shogi: There's nothing to say about shogi. They didn't flub the UI for this one, it feels just about like it did in just about every previous game, which is a relief. Mahjong: Good Lord. I played the entire mahjong tournament for fun, because I'm a mahjong fiend, and two things are specific to that implementation. First, if you're talking to the guy to play a tournament match, you have to go through three text boxes and a menu choice (yeah/nah). These three text boxes open with 'Hey there,' 'Hey there,' and 'Hey there,' all in a row. I'm not above pointing out shitty localization on a minigame, no sir. Second, I'm absolutely positive the last few tournament rounds have rubberband AI - I held the lead too many times going for the last win only to have one AI discard repeatedly into the same guy to have him outstrip me and win to believe that it's fairly done, particularly in the context of Yakuza 5's mahjong AI and the rest of Ishin!'s bullshit. For the general game, the implementation is just bad. There's multiple string flags that are set wrong, including for if you're the dealer and in the lead on the last round - instead of asking you if you want to end the game or not, it asks if you want to discard nine terminals or honors and mulligan the hand. Speaking of, if you actually draw nine terminals or honors and get the option to mulligan the hand, it asks you that before you see the hand - getting into why this is fucking criminal would take a paragraph or two, but in brief imagine you rolled a D20 for a roleplaying game and were told you rolled 'uniquely' and it was either a 1 or a 20 and you couldn't see it, but had to declare whether you kept the outcome blind or not. There's little UI fuckups here and there - if you discard a riichi tile and it's called ron, the riichi overlay sticks around until the next hand begins; call sounds always work right but the graphics pop up late, randomly, and sometimes together if multiple calls happen in close proximity. If the guy before you discards a tile you can call three-in-a-row or win-the-game on, sometimes the cursor defaults to three-in-a-row instead. It sucks tremendously, which is particularly bad given as mahjong has been relatively-flawless (outside of 5's luck mechanics) in every game from 3 on. It's ridiculous. Completion can be done in a single good game. Chicken racing: Back by no demand from Yakuza 5, it's chicken racing. Fortunately, it's just betting, not raising your chickens and all that crap Shinada had to do. Unfortunately, it's also the recipient of an infinite money exploit that, considering an upcoming section, means you'll be playing a lot of chicken race. To give you an idea, as of what should be my final thrust to completion, I have amassed three million seventy-one thousand four hundred and thirty-two out of the required ten thousand gambling tags. Udon shop: The ramen shop in Yakuza 5 was shockingly quite a fun minigame and I thought it ended too fast. The udon shop in Ishin! is a shitty Simon Says, and the completion metric for it is obscenely high if you're not pausing to write down the sequences. They had a good noodle minigame! Where is it!! Karaoke: Great songs, falls prey to the worst problems of the RGG karaoke systems. Multiple lines with inconsistent pacing for the button marker, plus buttons early or even immediately on lines, are at best something you zen and at worst incredibly frustrating. Get 90+ on every song, same as every non-Yagami game. Buyo: Traditional Japanese dance. It's two circles of a rhythm game where button presses float outwards and you have to hit the appropriate UDLR or ABXY as they get to the edge of the circle. It's reasonably difficult but quite fun, honestly. The only problem I have with it is the same as Yakuza 0 disco - completion requires doing Really Well at All Levels of each of the three songs, and the songs aren't good enough to handle a minimum of four clears of each plus any retakes you have to do. Still, won't complain. Courtesan games: Sigh. The Kiryu games all had weirdly horny minigames and, with the exception of 6's chatroom, which was funny as hell, they all sucked. This is one of the worst and, worst of all, it pretends to be a real game, so there's difficulty levels. First you have a drinking game where you just have to hammer buttons to keep the thing in the sweet spot - like the earlier massage game. There's nothing to this one. Higher difficulty means you have to drink more while she sobers up, making the game longer but not harder. Second is literally just playing rock-paper scissors while you / Anna get nakeder as you lose. Best of nine. You get a slow down time button to read her hands three times per round, so you just have to win twice randomly (always bet on rock) and then use your time button to counter her three times. The top difficulty lets her change her hand during the brief period you can't see it, which only punishes you if you hit your time button really early. The third is Sensual Healing. You, Ryoma, are a bullet hell ship, and you must shoot her heart until it explodes to cum instantly. You have to do this three times per difficulty level, and they get fucking rough for the amount of bullet hell you need to do in the rest of Ishin! (none). I've 1CCd most of a Touhou game (you could say I'm pretty legit) and I wiped to this one for a few hours. Worst of all, you're charged a ryo every time you go in and go through about a minute of menu tax from the time you lose to the time you start again, and a horny softcore cutscene plays in between every single round, unskippable. Sensual healing fucking sucks. The horny minigames fucking suck. Fuck whoever at RGG who puts them in all these stupid games. MEALS Eat everything at every restaurant. It's even more trivial than this in every other game because you don't even need to find / buy bottomless stomach, Ryoma can just eat at full health from the start. HEAT ACTIONS Do all the heat actions. This doesn't require limit breaking per se, but it does require mostly filling out all of your trees, doing all the master trainings, and getting all the revelation books. MASTERS Went over this earlier and you gotta do it to do the above. There are two masters I didn't go over: the scarecrow chateau is actually one of the more fun pieces of content in Ishin!, challenging you to go through little combat puzzles in certain stances, and while it doesn't reward you any abilities, it's a great early source of style experience; the cannon training is just baseball, weirdly, and both isn't very fun and rewards either nothing or the ability to use cannons, which I never used. I genuinely can't remember. WANTED MEN The Tachibanagumi set themselves up in the mid-part of the story and function like a kinda shittier version of the hitman missions in Yakuza 3. It's samey, it's not very interesting, and it gates both the heat actions and the later arena sections from completion - you have to do half of the Tachibanagumi missions to get a Swordsman revelation book, and you have to clear it to unlock the final arena bout. BATTLE DUNGEONS The Shinsengumi set themselves up early in and throughout the story. Recruit people and set up your squads and yada yada all this to say you have to beat each of 40 mini-dungeons. Between leveling and the Diligence Records and the equipment grind, this has no reason to exist. ARENA Fight all 35 enemies, which is to say beat each of the eight arena bouts. COMPLETION PART 3: EQUIPMENT This is part of the Completion List but I'm separating it because it's fucking colossal. There's an easy 40 or 50 hours of gameplay that goes solely into finishing this list - between a fourth and a third of the time spent platting Ishin! depending on the player. None of that is interesting gameplay, either. There's a massive pre-grind startup, the UI for forging is unforgiveably bad, the money costs are fucking obscene, and the materials are sourced from grinding various dungeon stages over and over again. On top of that, completion means forging 161 different types of kit and attaching 45 seals. I'll break that down bit by bit. STARTUP One may note that crafting seems like a pretty core system to the game, and I've saved it for here of all places. Here's the problem: as an actual progression system, to be poked by small degrees to improve your kit while you go through the story, the forge is completely worthless. I'm not being hyperbolic. Splashing gently into the forge returns absolutely nothing for the time you spend. The money and materials are one thing that I'll address later, but the forge itself has a huge initial investment. You see, the forge itself has a Level that goes up to 20. Leveling the forge unlocks perks, such as cheaper forging, more items, and more likely seal transfer. Crafting barely levels the forge at all. You level the forge by donating gear, which gets you nothing but forge experience. Getting to where you can craft everything requires donating somewhere around a thousand base-grade weapons, and that's only level 15 out of 20. Not only is this an insane UI tax (you select individual weapons to donate), but it requires an amount of cash that you could just spend buying a better pre-made sword from the dude in Mukurogai, or buying a shitload of medicine and waiting for the story to drop you a better sword. Without foreknowledge and planning, you'll never forge better weapons than the game hands you until the endgame - and if you have those, you don't need the forge to help you beat the game. It's a deep system for nobody at all. THE UI The forging trees are laid out in, well, trees. Every time you forge something, after going through the nested menus to make it, you're treated to an animation, a lingering debrief screen, and then you're kicked back to the base menu. Not the tree. If you're, say, forging an endgame breastplate, this means that you have to reopen the forging trees (default topleft katana), renavigated to the breastplates tab, renavigate to where you were, and make the next thing. This is already annoying when trying to flesh out a single line of kit - when you have to do it 161 times? Sheesh. MUKUROGAI Sorry, I lied. You only have to do it like 156ish times. At seemingly-random, you'll go to make the next thing in line and be told that the forge cannot make magical items. I feel like that carries a lot more weight than the game implies, but whatever. This unremarkable guy by the river in Mukurogai has no response if you talk to him - unless you have one of those five items in your backpack, and then he offers to enchant it for you. He won't actually do it unless you equip the item, though, so don't go hoping to batch forge enchanted kit. CASH A ryo is one thousand mon. A mon is roughly a yen. Over the course of the entire game, you will amass several hundred ryo, up to a thousand or so for doing everything. Haruka's huge debt that you take on is a hundred ryo. Clearing the hundred-man melee in the arena gives you six ryo. Clearing the final boss level of the third dungeon gives twenty ryo per clear. Forging everything takes approximately five thousand ryo. Individual top tier forges take 375 each. Looking at a guide for original Ishin!, the forging costs for basically everything seem to have been multiplied by about 20x, for no discernible reason. I desperately want to sit the game director down and ask where the money is intended to come from, because without the chicken racing infinite money glitch, five thousand ryo would represent dozens of hours of absolutely nothing work, either grinding the final dungeon hundreds of times and selling everything you get or growing vegetables for days on end. MATERIALS Herein lies the grind. You need thousands of various bits of shit from the dungeon, from the arena, from the Shinto temple, from merchants, from everywhere. It's completely unapproachable without a spreadsheet, and the only ingame indicator of where to get anything is, if you're in the dungeon menu, you can see what materials drop in a single stage at a time. Otherwise, go write that shit down. The dragon materials are particularly shitty, dropping only from the last handful of stages (one of the three each from 3-4 through 3-6 and 3-17 through 3-19, and all from 3-20) in low numbers - and you need 24 of each. You're lucky to get one or two on a floor clear. Keep on grinding, baby. SEALS You did it. You forged it all. You're not done. There are 45 seals in the game, and you have to not only gather, but successfully attach, each one. Some of them drop in the wild, and some only drop in the wild, but the meat of the system is back to the forge. See, each time you forge an item, it has a chance to spawn with a seal. This seal comes from a table of seals that can spawn on the item. Disassembling the item returns the seal. Reattaching the seal to a new item has a chance to fail. When not just grinding, we're already on three different levels of RNG to get a single seal, and the RNG is, as aforementioned, fucked. Over the course of dozens of attachments (again, a reasonably statistical sample), I've gone on multiple runs of three or four 98%s failing in a row - in one case, failing five from six consecutive attachments at 95+%. This isn't inconceivable - again, like with the cee-lo example, outliers happen - but considering everything else, it seems far more likely to me that either the RNG is fucked or the probabilities are lying. In the end, though, this little lie is among the less-egregious of Ishin!'s sins. Forgot to mention! After you attach the 45 different seals to 45 pieces of kit, there's also a Steam achievement to enhance equipment with seals 100 times. Enjoy the grind. COMPLETION PART 4: ULTIMATE BATTLE Climax battles are still here. They're not bad, honestly. Two of them are absolute shit - an early one requires you to kill a bunch of guys in Brawler stance (which, as noted, doesn't do damage) and I'm not sure it's possible if you don't tiger drop the medium guys and notice that you can heat action throw the big guy into the river, and the final one has you go through seven consecutive bosses without any healing whatsoever. Still, these didn't take me longer than a few hours. CONCLUSION I didn't go over a few aspects of the game that, frankly, weren't worth talking about, so here they are in brief. * Trooper Cards are a huge nothing burger that made a lot of idiots on Reddit really mad for no reason in the pre-release hype. * The DLC is nothing short of fucking predatory, and I'm not one to whine about microtransactions on the internet - each DLC purchase is redeemable only to a single save file. In a singleplayer game. On top of that, a whole difficulty level is gated behind paid DLC. This would bother me a lot more if playing Ishin! on an even harder difficulty sounded like anything short of complete bullshit, I think. * There are shinies littered all over the world that give lottery tickets for a lottery that gives nothing of worth and takes forever to play, and the shinies look exactly like the memoirs that you need for completion. * The game cleaves heavily to the Gravitas of Taking a Life; a Line which Ryoma Will Not Cross, which is already a little farcical in the Kiryu games but becomes utterly laughable when every one of Ryoma's heat actions involve explicitly putting bullets in skulls and severing spines (non-lethally). * Gunman realistically requires you to craft and keep track of your advanced ammos, obviously, since you shoot them, but you have infinite regular bullets in your six-shooter and can simply fire several hundred rounds without pausing. * Getting to Mukurogai sucks ass. Hell, the taxi locations are placed with no other reason than to be as useless as possible, except for the Rakunai taxi. There's one in fucking Gion, and I went on a tangent earlier about what a worthless zone Gion is. * All the other Yakuza games have this black magic fuckery going on where your camera goes into fixed mode when you get close to a zone transition, or goes back behind Kiryu when you leave one, but you keep running the way you think you should be running even though the stick isn't being held that way necessarily. I have no idea how it works. Ishin! doesn't. Ryoma takes 180 degree turns instantly as you try to run into Shinsengumi HQ without adjusting the camera. * Some menus autoscroll when you hold the button, some don't, and some autoscroll when you hold the left stick but not when you hold the dpad. * You have the same awful sprint capacity to start out as contemporary games, and unlock longer sprinting via the virtue system, and never unlock unlimited sprint. I could go on. I won't. Ishin! sucks, and I'm fucking glad it's done. Maybe it's unhealthy to play things all the way through only so I feel like I can speak with authority on them, whether I like them or not, but that's the idiot I've become. I'll be happier next time, believe me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrhesia Posted March 29, 2023 Share Posted March 29, 2023 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 4, 2023 Author Share Posted April 4, 2023 PENTIMENT (OBSIDIAN, 2022) Finished: 3/4/23. Playtime: 21.2 hours. I don't have a superb relationship with Obsidian. Not that they're necessarily a bad studio, but their games tend to follow a distinct pattern - solid concept, wild overreach, completely fall apart at some point. As far back as when they were Black Isle this held true - I didn't really enjoy either of the classic Fallouts, and Icewind Dale is very good (comparative to other RTWP CRPGs) until it very abruptly isn't about two-thirds of the way through the game. The exodus and refocus as Obsidian didn't change anything, either. Knights of the Old Republic 2 was legendarily completely unfinished, Neverwinter Nights 2 was actually just really bad (except the courtroom scene, that's a stone cold classic) but became way worse in the final act, and Fallout: New Vegas is easily my favorite Fallout game but it's a deeply flawed 8/10 game at best, not the masterpiece people often stack it up to be. I bounced off the first few hours of Pillars of Eternity and, judging sight-unseeing through Let's Plays, Tyranny looks wildly tedious. It all sounds harsh, but I really want to establish my angle here. I'm not batting for this team, not in general. Pentiment is a masterpiece. Pentiment is an exceptional argument for games as art. Pentiment is not only the best thing Obsidian has ever produced, it's a deeply heartfelt and sincere story that at no point fell into any of their typical vices. Pentiment lasts as long as it should, ends when it ought, and shows what it means to. The less you know going in, the better. Pentiment has my highest recommendation. Achievements are precisely what you'd expect from what's essentially a visual novel. Few mutually exclusive ones, not enough to concern oneself over, trivial to reload autosaves to get all of the ones you missed in a second playthrough. Honestly, though, getting the last ~30% of the achievements didn't really give me anything more than the once-through did. It was just for the vanity of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrhesia Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 Pentiment's also one of those games that looks kind of odd and jank in screenshots. You really need to play it to get the full impact of the visuals, how it clicks together. I really loved Pentiment. Can't believe Obsidian put together something genuinely and unambiguously great for the first time, but ultimately Pentiment is far, far stronger than my vendetta. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hawkwing Posted April 7, 2023 Share Posted April 7, 2023 On 3/18/2023 at 11:00 PM, Integrity said: TOTAL WARHAMMER On 3/19/2023 at 9:51 PM, Integrity said: TOTAL WARHAMMER 2 I'm a big fan of Mandaloregaming, and his Total Warhammer reviews are some of his largest videos, as he covers not only the general gameplay and presentation, but each faction individually. Needless to say, it was very interesting to read though your summaries and see were your opinions lined up nearly word-for-word, and were they differed so sharply I almost wondered if you two were playing entirely different games. I suppose that's the joy of a game with so many asymmetric components. Speaking of Mandaloregaming, I've enjoyed almost every game he's recommended (and even the ones I didn't, I'm still glad I played) and I've had my eye on Total Warhammer 2 and 3 for a while now (The Lizardman faction having playable dinosaurs were enough to sell me on the games. The Skaven also sound incredibly fun, and the Tomb Kings are pretty much Necrons and I fucking love the Mechanicus game so of course I'm interested in them). How "RTS-Noob" friendly would you say they are? I've played and enjoyed a handful of RTS games in the past, but it's not my go-to genre and I make no claims to be good at them. Is Total Warhammer fine for a newcomer to jump into or does it expect that you already know what you're doing? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 8, 2023 Author Share Posted April 8, 2023 (edited) 2 hours ago, Hawkwing said: I'm a big fan of Mandaloregaming, and i've actually noted how we differ a lot too, especially in regards to total warhammer 3 - i haven't done a big writeup on it here, since i'm still plugging through campaign 3/9, but there's a lot i disagree with him on even with regards to the basic presentation of the interface to a degree i find fascinating, because i think he's a rational guy with his head screwed on correctly. like you said about games with asymmetric components, but also just in general, it's worth remembering that all these things are to some degree deeply subjective, and someone you agree with about a lot of things can take them a completely different way. an old fogie from this site, lumi, has been playing through the RGG games alongside me, and she agrees with just about all of my complaints in the massive ishin! takedown - but she still liked the game a lot, because they didn't impact what she enjoyed about the game nearly as much as they did me. it's fascinating. 2 hours ago, Hawkwing said: Is Total Warhammer fine for a newcomer to jump into or does it expect that you already know what you're doing? total warhammer specifically 3 has a tutorial that i think eases you into total war's particular schtick pretty well. mandalore's preview video on tww3 covers it briefly and they've done some tweaks since. on the flip side, i think tww3's grand campaign is the worst for newcomers of the three and possibly of all the total war games ever put out. on the double-flip-reverse side, immortal empires is free and is very straightforward. it's a weird set of conditions. all this to say that i would recommend getting total warhammer 3 on the next steam sale and playing the tutorial campaign. if you like it, grab a DLC or two for factions you're particularly interested in (skaven are incredibly fucking fun to play and you also listed tomb kings, one of my favorites to play) and poke immortal empires with them. it's not the easiest rts to jump feet first into but i think you've got the brain to wrap around it without too much difficulty. E: it's also worth noting that total warhammer and 2's races are both dlc for 3 now so you don't have to buy the entire suite of games to play who you want. buy 3 and then pick up who you want to play a la carte Edited April 8, 2023 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hawkwing Posted April 13, 2023 Share Posted April 13, 2023 On 4/7/2023 at 9:55 PM, Integrity said: total warhammer specifically 3 has a tutorial that i think eases you into total war's particular schtick pretty well. mandalore's preview video on tww3 covers it briefly and they've done some tweaks since. on the flip side, i think tww3's grand campaign is the worst for newcomers of the three and possibly of all the total war games ever put out. on the double-flip-reverse side, immortal empires is free and is very straightforward. it's a weird set of conditions. all this to say that i would recommend getting total warhammer 3 on the next steam sale and playing the tutorial campaign. if you like it, grab a DLC or two for factions you're particularly interested in (skaven are incredibly fucking fun to play and you also listed tomb kings, one of my favorites to play) and poke immortal empires with them. it's not the easiest rts to jump feet first into but i think you've got the brain to wrap around it without too much difficulty. E: it's also worth noting that total warhammer and 2's races are both dlc for 3 now so you don't have to buy the entire suite of games to play who you want. buy 3 and then pick up who you want to play a la carte Thank you. I'll keep this in mind the next time I see the game on sale. Looking forward to the Total Warhammer 3 writeup, however long that will be. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 16, 2023 Author Share Posted April 16, 2023 (edited) SONIC LOST WORLD (SONIC TEAM, 2013) Finished: 16/4/23. Playtime: 16.2 hours. The brain is a fascinating thing. I was very scathing towards Generations and still hold to all the crap I spouted about it months ago, and nothing about The Discourse around Sonic has changed my mind at all, except to just slide me a little bit towards 'I just didn't get it, but maybe it has some merit'. Clearly, the solution was for me to just play a fairly-maligned entry in the franchise to understand the quality gap between it and a modern classic like Generations, right? Nah, I'm just fucked up, turns out. I actually enjoyed Lost World perfectly well. It wasn't all gravy, for sure. Sonic's controls were something to wrangle with, particularly whenever wallrunning was involved, and there were a handful of really bad stages. Crucially, though, the final two worlds were by a margin my favorite two - completely the opposite of Generations' Planet Wisp and final boss fight, leaving a far better taste in my mouth when the credits rolled. So what was different about it? Why this, and not Generations? I genuinely don't have an answer. The fine folks on the Discord, baffled as they are by me, are heroically trying to figure it out, and I salute them for it. The best conclusion I've gotten to with their help is, for all its tighter controls, actual mastery of Sonic the man himself in Generations is fairly simplistic. The enjoyment (such as it might be, I'm unconvinced) comes instead from rerunning stages, memorizing hazard patterns, discovering new routes, etc. On the other hand, despite (and in no small part on account of) Sonic the man's gently-janky controls in Lost World, I felt like my gameplay loop was continually tightening all the way to the end as I figured out new (sometimes stupid, sometimes helpful) interactions in Sonic's kit. Compare this to Generations, where I felt like my mastery of Sonic the man himself peaked somewhere in the second or third stage of the game, outside of the arduous and gradual process of triangulating Modern Sonic in the 3D space (a process I found infinitely more intuitive in Lost World's 3D spaces). Maybe that speaks more to what I value in a platformer - learning a toolkit of tricks as opposed to learning a rogues' gallery of course hazards. Who knows - after all, these two Sonic games are the only platformers I've played for the first time after turning 20. I'll have to try more Sonic games and hone in on this facet of my tastes, eh? One absolute flaw of the game that I want to highlight is the bugfuck control scheme. In a standard controller with eight easy buttons and two to four more besides, why in the lost world does Lost World have all of unused buttons, buttons that perform double duty, and duties redundantly mapped to multiple buttons? Most of the reason I never interacted with the powerup system for the first 14 or so hours of gameplay is that it took four or five to figure out that you accessed it by clicking the left stick and then scrolling your inventory with the left stick (with control stolen from Sonic), while the d-pad is tied up with all four buttons bringing up your Missions (which exist solely to grant powerups, so they're necessarily not more important than the inventory) and the right stick is completely unused? You'd have to workshop a control scheme this fundamentally terrible, and it's a strange sort of commendation on Lost World that it didn't bother me a lost hell of a lot more. The achievements are completely tied up in the aforementioned missions system, and boy is there a lot to talk about there. There's a hundred missions (each one an achievement) and, ignoring the system around the missions, they've already got some annoying stuff in them, but not terribly so. To go through the list categorically - Fine except for problems innate to Lost World's mission system (64 missions): Pick up X cumulative rings (13 missions), pick up X cumulative 1-Ups (3 missions), finish a stage with X rings in the bank (9 missions), do various elements of Sonic's movement kit (14 missions), kill enemies in various ways (15 missions), get various amount of bonus points on the capsule jump at the end of a stage (3 missions), challenge mode clear zones (7 missions). Got their own issues (11 missions): Do 20 walljumps in a row - nowhere in the game that I found is actually tall enough for more than ~11 consecutive walljumps. You have to just slide down repeatedly and walljump as in-place as you can make it for this. Take out 10, 20, then 30 enemies (total 60) with bouncing - these three missions kinda suck on account of Lost World's batshit controls. Bouncing is one of the buttons that's doing double duty (triple, actually) and the double duty is a different aerial attack. You usually have to deliberately rig killing an enemy with a bounce rather than a kick. Perfect no-damage each boss (for 7 of em) - these are only crappy because taking damage and dying to the boss does Not reset the criterion. You have to redo the entire stage if you eat an errant hit, noting that all but the final boss are integrated into the end of a whole stage rather than being their own arenas. On the other hand, the boss fights are really quite easy, so it's not a horrible chore if you know what you're doing. Powerups (25 missions): These are tied far more deeply in with the mission system problems, so I'm just noting that they're here to be counted before moving on. At the onset, 11% of the achievements being gentle pains of the ass is actually completely decent. That's where the mission system comes in. So you see, this little bastard Omochao shows up to give you these missions. You can have three active at a time, they're randomly given, and he replenishes them up to three after you clear (no quitting!) a stage where you finished one. For tracked ones (e.g. the bouncing kills one) you'll get assigned the next in the track, but you can have multiple consecutive ones in the same track active. What this means, in practice, is that you aren't progressing the grindy ones all the time like, say, a Yakuza completion list. You'll get your 10 bouncing kills, finish a stage, and Omochao will randomly up and give you a fucking powerup mission. Here's where the powerup missions come in! There's 25 of them total, spread out across 6 stage powerups and 1 inventory one. The problem there is that each powerup is only available in maybe two to three of the game's 28 main stages, which puts you at a deadlock. Do you go back to 2-4 to do the drill mission Omochao just gave you so he can give you a new mission, which could possibly be another drill mission that would compel you to just replay 2-4 again, or do you continue in World 4 not knowing when or if the drill will ever come back, sighing at the lost mission slot? When the system works, it's fine, even if it adds literally nothing to the game compared to, again, something like a completion list. As soon as Omochao does that once or, God forbid, fills your log with those, it becomes a choice to stop progressing the mission system at all to continue to progress the game, or double back to free up mission slots. It's horrible design. They're not even hard missions, even at the worst. To give you an idea, I completed thirteen missions the entire way through the game. By the end of World 4, Omochao had filled 2/3 of my log with powerup missions from stages I'd cleared, and I didn't want to break momentum to go back. I did eleven of the remaining yesterday, the day I finished the campaign, in a few-hour session waiting for people to wake up so we could go out on the town. I did the remaining 76 today. The only reason it even took so long to grind through them all is that there's a ~20 second minimum menu tax for each one you clear, ignoring the time it takes to find Omochao (he spawns in a random nearby space on the overworld) and talk to him. It just sucks for basically no good reason. It's baffling. Still, despite the mission system being objectively really shit, clearing Lost World was breezy and it didn't color my final perception of the game too badly. I had fun with Lost World and, while I doubt another Sonic game will be next, the next Sonic game is Forces. Oh boy. Edited April 16, 2023 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armchair General Posted April 17, 2023 Share Posted April 17, 2023 16 hours ago, Integrity said: I had fun with Lost World and, while I doubt another Sonic game will be next, the next Sonic game is Forces. Oh boy For an minute there, I actually thought you were talking about Frontiers. But I actually played through the 3DS version of Lost World and it more or less cut the stuff that you hated about the Wii U version. Only bad part is how the special stages work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted April 17, 2023 Share Posted April 17, 2023 18 hours ago, Integrity said: SONIC I'm so glad that I've never been a Sonic fan. I played a bit of the first one on a friend's Master System and I didn't think it was very good. Then the same friend upgraded to a Mega Drive, and I played a bit of the first one on that as well, and still didn't think it was very good. And I haven't played a Sonic game since. And this isn't meant as a slight against Sonic fans. You have my great admiration for the fortitude it must have taken to get through some of the lowers and the even lowers that the series has had over the years (and some occasional highs too, I guess). The only Sonic game I've even been tempted to play since the early 90s is Sonic Mania, which looks pretty sick. But then I realised that if I liked it then I might end up turning into a Sonic fan, and I just wasn't ready for that kind of heartache. On 4/4/2023 at 4:01 AM, Integrity said: PENTIMENT (OBSIDIAN, 2022) Finished: 3/4/23. Playtime: 21.2 hours. I don't have a superb relationship with Obsidian. I also have a pretty terrible relationship with Obsidian. I have a grudge against Fallout: New Vegas from before it was even released which I'm still holding 13 years later (long story, but in fairness it was actually the fault of one of the community management team rather than anyone at Obsidian, so I really shouldn't hold it against them). Then I tried playing Pillars of Eternity II because a few of my friends were raving about, but only managed to play for about 5 hours before getting deeply bored and giving up on it. But now you have to go and recommend something of theirs and make me want to give them another shot. Dammit. On 2/15/2023 at 9:03 PM, Parrhesia said: Play Pyre. Then give it a bit to rattle around in your skull and play it again. Though I should just play Pyre instead. Especially since I actually already own it but never got around to playing it. And especially since Supergiant just don't make bad games. I mean, I kinda hated Hades, but even as I hated it, I still recognised that it was objectively good but just not for me. But I will take any excuse I can get to continue pretending for a while longer that Obsidian haven't made anything worth playing. (My own attempts at 100%ing stuff have largely been on hold due to seasonal depression, but hopefully they'll pick up again a little bit now that the sun has come back to grade us with its presence again.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 17, 2023 Author Share Posted April 17, 2023 6 hours ago, Armchair General said: For an minute there, I actually thought you were talking about Frontiers. don't worry, at the rate i'm going frontiers will show up on this page by the end of the year, as i play through eight different sonic games trying to figure out how to talk about what i like and dislike about platformers 4 hours ago, lenticular said: I might end up turning into a Sonic fan, a fate worse than death... 4 hours ago, lenticular said: Obsidian genuinely, even if you've bounced off of obsidian before for their particular cough chris avellone cough brand of wordiness, definitely go in for pentiment on the next sale cycle. after pyre of course. parrhesia would kill me if i dissuaded someone from playing pyre. it's funny to me that the specific game you bounced off of is one of the two or three of theirs i've never played. we're diverse in our petty haterdom. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 18, 2023 Author Share Posted April 18, 2023 GUNFIRE REBORN (DUOYI, 2021) Finished: 17/4/23. Playtime: 135.5 hours. Let's talk about Borderlands. Borderlands is one of those franchises that so totally frustrates me because it's built around an exceptional core, and then makes every possible wrong decision in service of that core. There's a reasonable to even commendable amount of gun variety, but the truly interesting stuff is locked behind obscenely-rare legendaries and the bulk of weapons will end up being used or not based on momentary necessity. The breadth of kit across characters and depth of progression in any given one could be completely fine and even entertaining - for a campaign that lasts four or six hours, not twelve-to-twenty with the intent being that you keep going past that. Converting the hack-and-slash clickfest of Diablo into an action FPS was a superb idea (we don't talk about Hellgate London) that was completely undermined by a horrid disparity in enemy health growths versus player damage growths outside of optimal play. Worst of all, the games think they're far funnier than they are. I could go on at length about the damn games, and yet it still took me a full playthrough of 1 and two of 2 (one solo, one co-op) before it finally clicked into place why I thought they were bad. Whatever screed I can type online, they still provably conned me into sinking 40 hours into them figuring it out. I think that's a testament to just how solid the gameplay core underscoring Borderlands, the concept, is. So, then, what if someone just made all those decisions but, like, the opposite way? What if the guns were basically just the legendaries, with the chaff discarded? What if the character progression was fast and loose, with significant and frequent changes happening, rather than plodding and stretched modifiers? What if the gunplay was rocket tag all around, rather than a glass cannon against bullet sponges? What if the writing of Borderlands was just, for instance, gone? Gunfire Reborn takes that gameplay core, ruthlessly strips every ounce of fat from it, straps a roguelite loop around ~45 minute full campaigns, and dusts off its hands. The variety in weaponry is absolutely stunning, and the randomized structure ensures you'll try out a huge fraction of the guns at some point, if not all of them. The eight characters play sufficiently differently to make the decision to play each interesting. Enemies are lively, charming, dangerous, and fall quickly with good play. The closest thing to a proper Complaint I have with the game is that the difficulty structure makes a single strange decision. Once you clear Normal, you unlock Elite difficulty. Once you clear Elite, you unlock Nightmare difficulty. Once you clear Nightmare, you unlock Reincarnation 1. Beating further numbers of Reincarnation N unlocks Reincarnation N+1. Each difficulty makes things harder in, I think, fairly reasonable ways and the difficulty curve is pretty well designed. The one problem I have is that Reincarnation 1, and all beyond, add two extra systems (set bonuses to the buff scrolls you get during a run, and the ability to spend metacurrency on another set of random buffs) that have no real benefit from being locked behind a higher difficulty. While I find Reincarnation 1 to be a really satisfying baseline difficulty, these two systems add a lot of flavor to the builds you make in a given run that could stand to disseminate downwards, even if they're locked behind the meta-leveling system to keep complexity down for new players. That's... it, honestly. That's the biggest thing I could complain about here. Fantastic game. The achievements don't tread any especially new ground beyond what one would imagine from the words 'roguelite shooter'. Various ones to kill certain amounts of enemies in certain ways, challenges to get your kit to such a state that you can do silly shit like killing a world boss in 10 seconds, dying in every imaginable way, and a series of character-specific challenges make up the bulk of them. While my favorite to play is the bird, Qing Yan, the most fun achievement award absolutely belongs to the tiger, Lei Luo. Lei Luo's kit focuses around being a strange sniper-wizard hybrid - he has a lot of abilities in his random pool that enhance large single shots, including his primary ability, which are intended to push him towards sniping but a lot of them can be repurposed for, say, launchers or particularly large shotguns. His ultimate achievement, getting you the Lei Luo profile frame to show off your mastery of Lei Luo, requires you to show your mastery of Lei Luo. Namely, complete the game on Nightmare or higher, solo, using only sniper weapons (in this case, largely rifles and a bow) and your backup weapon, plus your spells. Lei Luo has a unique trait not shared by other heroes to cheat the randomized design somewhat and guarantee a sniper rifle out the gate, and I found the resulting run (which took a few tries!) to be quite a lot of fun to figure out. It's worth noting that 100% Gunfire Reborn isn't just an inevitable case of playing it enough. A good number of the achievements, like Lei Luo's profile frame, do require you to get good to some degree or another. There's a series of speedrun challenges - 30 minutes per difficulty - which felt amazing to nail, though they're probably quite a lot easier to do now that Tao (high mobility and damage) is in the game compared to when I did them. There's a series of achievements which are based around the newer Spiritual Assault gamemode, a wave defense arena fight, which requires you to beat it with any one character but is kind of ballbustingly hard. There's also a handful of achievements that deadass require other people, so heads up on that front if you decide to follow me down this deep path. All told, I've had a wonderful time 100%ing Gunfire Reborn and having it be invalidated, what, like three or four times now. The Spiritual Assault update, the most recent to undo my trophy, happened while I was going through the backlog of games when I originally made this thread, and I've gone back every few weeks to wipe out horribly at the mode and wait again until finally cracking it today. There's more updates coming this year, and I'm sure they'll bring with them more achievements, but I doubt they'll change my review. Game's been great since early access started, and it's only gotten better year on year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armchair General Posted April 18, 2023 Share Posted April 18, 2023 11 hours ago, lenticular said: I'm so glad that I've never been a Sonic fan. With the exception of the two Adventure games and possibly Frontiers, you aren't really missing out on much Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Punished Dayni Posted April 19, 2023 Share Posted April 19, 2023 On 4/17/2023 at 7:31 PM, lenticular said: The only Sonic game I've even been tempted to play since the early 90s is Sonic Mania, which looks pretty sick. But then I realised that if I liked it then I might end up turning into a Sonic fan, and I just wasn't ready for that kind of heartache. Oh man, this comment, I love it. As someone who's in not too dissimilar a boat (Only have Mania and I guess free 1 on the phone counts?), I have not been that tempted thus far with Mania, but I've been slow to get into it. On 4/18/2023 at 4:37 AM, Integrity said: Let's talk about Borderlands. Borderlands is one of those franchises that so totally frustrates me because it's built around an exceptional core, and then makes every possible wrong decision in service of that core. There's a reasonable to even commendable amount of gun variety, but the truly interesting stuff is locked behind obscenely-rare legendaries and the bulk of weapons will end up being used or not based on momentary necessity. The breadth of kit across characters and depth of progression in any given one could be completely fine and even entertaining - for a campaign that lasts four or six hours, not twelve-to-twenty with the intent being that you keep going past that. Converting the hack-and-slash clickfest of Diablo into an action FPS was a superb idea (we don't talk about Hellgate London) that was completely undermined by a horrid disparity in enemy health growths versus player damage growths outside of optimal play. Worst of all, the games think they're far funnier than they are. I could go on at length about the damn games, and yet it still took me a full playthrough of 1 and two of 2 (one solo, one co-op) before it finally clicked into place why I thought they were bad. Whatever screed I can type online, they still provably conned me into sinking 40 hours into them figuring it out. I think that's a testament to just how solid the gameplay core underscoring Borderlands, the concept, is. Agree on the last point in particular, even from having less experience with the series. You really see enemy health just shoot up and that's a problem if you don't get weapons of the types you're using. Even if I wasn't as bothered by the other two points, I was playing with one or two others and that made it less of a bother imo, maybe I'd have felt differently playing solo. Gunfire Reborn does sound interesting from what you've said, but the point about many short campaigns is probably a matter of personal disinterest, at least at present. Not helped by being Windows locked, but that like the campaign length is a me issue. On 4/18/2023 at 4:37 AM, Integrity said: While my favorite to play is the bird, Qing Yan, the most fun achievement award absolutely belongs to the tiger, Lei Luo. Lei Luo's kit focuses around being a strange sniper-wizard hybrid - he has a lot of abilities in his random pool that enhance large single shots, including his primary ability, which are intended to push him towards sniping but a lot of them can be repurposed for, say, launchers or particularly large shotguns. His ultimate achievement, getting you the Lei Luo profile frame to show off your mastery of Lei Luo, requires you to show your mastery of Lei Luo. Namely, complete the game on Nightmare or higher, solo, using only sniper weapons (in this case, largely rifles and a bow) and your backup weapon, plus your spells. Lei Luo has a unique trait not shared by other heroes to cheat the randomized design somewhat and guarantee a sniper rifle out the gate, and I found the resulting run (which took a few tries!) to be quite a lot of fun to figure out. So you don't go into this beyond this text, but have they added characters with the updates? How many are there? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 19, 2023 Author Share Posted April 19, 2023 (edited) 8 hours ago, Punished Dayni said: So you don't go into this beyond this text, but have they added characters with the updates? How many are there? yep, eight in total, to wit (when i say 'base game' i mean 'was in it at whatever early access point i bought the game'): crown prince, the cat (base game) - pretty forgiving newbie character, kit doesn't tend towards any particular weapon, can freeze enemies and debuff them with grenades (e: i don't mean this disparagingly, crown prince is fucking bonkers and can stack completely out of control once you know how his funk works, he's completely competitive with the others at late difficulties - he just has two abilities with simple use cases and easy to observe impact, balanced defenses, and no particular weapon affinity to make him a newbie character) ao bai, the dog (base game) - basically the gunzerker from borderlands. focuses on shitting bullets downrange and can temporarily (or Basically Permanently, depending on the kit you get) wield both guns you're using at once qing yan, the bird (base game) - mobile melee and short range skirmisher, trades the halo-style regenerating shields that everyone else has for armor that doesn't regenerate, but he can replenish it with his abilities while fighting lei luo, the tiger (base game) - as described in the quote, long range sniper/sorcerer tao, the rabbit (early access) - unhinged mobile damage, qing yan played in attack mode, but more pushed towards submachine guns qian sui, the porcupine (1.0) - a bruiser and tank for mid to close range combat, qing yan played in defense mode, but more pushed towards shotguns xing zhe, the monkey (dlc pack) - midrange aoe damage, gently focused on launchers and the like but not especially. kind of the offensive counterpart to the crown prince. li, the fox (same dlc pack) - a fire wizard focused on carbines and submachine guns, lei luo with his range band closed up a bit. almost certainly my second favorite after qing yan. note that for all of these a kit 'encouraging' or 'pushed towards' a weapon type is really nonbinding. pretty much the only thing that doesn't work is ao bai with bows and swords since those can't be dual wielded, nothing's stopping the cards from dealing you a mobile lei luo with an autoshotgun if you desire it and the opportunity presents. most of their profile frame achievements are a bit dull - crown prince, ao bai, qing yan, tao, and qian sui's are all just 'get this combination of enhancements so your spell can <freeze a guy for a long time / let you dual wield for a long time / do a lot of cleave damage / do a lot of swords damage / go really, really fast>'. xing zhe's is one you'll get entirely by accident. li's has you kill a boss solo on nightmare+ with nothing but spells, which would be a fun baseline Complexity for the others to work with but i won't complain too much. lei luo's stands alone as a really great achievement. Edited April 19, 2023 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Punished Dayni Posted April 19, 2023 Share Posted April 19, 2023 1 hour ago, Integrity said: most of their profile frame achievements are a bit dull - crown prince, ao bai, qing yan, tao, and qian sui's are all just 'get this combination of enhancements so your spell can <freeze a guy for a long time / let you dual wield for a long time / do a lot of cleave damage / do a lot of swords damage / go really, really fast>'. xing zhe's is one you'll get entirely by accident. li's has you kiss a boss solo on nightmare+ with nothing but spells, which would be a fun baseline Complexity for the others to work with but i won't complain too much. lei luo's stands alone as a really great achievement. Little surprised most aren't as elaborate as Lei Luo's. 2 hours ago, Integrity said: yep, eight in total, to wit (when i say 'base game' i mean 'was in it at whatever early access point i bought the game'): I'll admit it doesn't seem that in keeping with rougelikes, at least from what I've seen in terms of progression systems that you'd have distinct characters with their own preferences from the off, so that does make Gunfire Reborn stand out a bit more to me. Admittedly I've dabbled with the genre at best. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrhesia Posted April 24, 2023 Share Posted April 24, 2023 (edited) Oh, yeah! A few weeks back I finally cleared the 100% mark on Mechwarrior 5. Ike already said what that entails. My experience of Battletech, The Franchise, is getting some peripheral knowledge from watching a Battletech streamthrough, finding Battletech itself really didn't click with me somehow, getting a long-threatened copy of MW5 as a gift, figuring it sounded fun on paper and was definitely worth a shot but that I would almost definitely bounce off it too. Why did I think this? Here's the thing: peoples' FPS styles are heavily influenced by whichever one they picked up first, most, best. For me that was Unreal Tournament '99, which is so fucking far and away better than Quake 3, I have no clue how that was even a debate in the era, let alone one you generally see Q3 tipped for. So I play more or less every FPS like I learned to play UT99 (and '04), which can be broadly summarised as the slowest of the classic arena twitch shooters; I'm aggressive in securing space, I seek out enemies and try to bring them down quickly on my own terms, I prefer to be very mobile in defensive play, I'm comfortable settling into a loop of a small area and I don't tend to conserve my own lifepool, because you need to go out and find kills to win a (non-1v1) deathmatch, not play cautiously. My pinpoint aim is poor, but I'm very good at snapping shots to the approximate location of mobile targets. I'm not saying this to brag, because it means my ability in FPS is wildly variable. I'm very good at the UTs (by most standards; anyone still trolling deathmatch multiplayer in TYOOL 2023 would destroy me effortlessly); I'm a very good L4D2 player but a very unconventional one; I'm good enough to beat the CoD MWs on Hardened or wingman for Ike on Veteran, but not to play Veteran alone; I'm pretty good at old-school survival shooters but die a lot (see Doom, Quake); and I was genuinely fucking dogshit at the Wolfenstein reboot. This confused me for the longest time. Wolfenstein was really interesting. Wolfenstein was regarded by reliable sources as extremely good. It felt like it was really good. But I just wasn't getting... anything, from the gameplay loop. And then Ike said something to me about mounting weapons and leaning, and I said something intelligent like, 'what?' Because neo-Wolf is, turns out, all about finding careful angles and vantage points to shred Nazis from, not about surging forward and taking points in a couple of shotgun bursts before ducking away into a hall. Hand me a keyboard and mouse and that just isn't how I problem-solve. (COD:MW2019, incidentally, is pretty similar in this. I found COD:MW2019 far tougher going than COD:MW1-3.) What's this got to do with Mechwarrior? Well, what does someone only good at fast-paced, reaction-centred, close-quarter shooting do when they're piloting a 70-ton juggernaut? Well, I had the above sussed by then, mostly by hearing others tell me what they'd observed, so while I definitely wanted to give MW5 a shot but I felt a fair degree of trepidation. I needn't have worried. Somehow, this shooter that's comprised basically of slugfests between sluggish juggernauts with agonisingly slow turning circles just works for me. MW5 just feels so good, so natural, and the constant dance of resource management - what damage you can put out, what damage you can afford to put out, what point you stop putting out the long-ranged firepower to preserve heat for when you're in close, what point to pull out before you start to lose limbs - leads to a bizarrely cerebral, cool-headed experience as you clinically put 24 missiles into a cockpit. It's somehow zen. And somehow, I'm very good at it, for reasons I still don't fully understand. The STK-3F is the best, by the way. I don't make the rules. Edited April 24, 2023 by Parrhesia Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 27, 2023 Author Share Posted April 27, 2023 SONIC FORCES (SONIC TEAM, 2017) Finished: 27/4/23. Playtime: 29 hours. Generations sucked, Lost World was fun, so let's take on the generally-maligned Forces! I hated 'the good one' and loved 'the bad one', right? The reason Forces is maligned is because it's a dogshit game. Holy shit. It's impressive how badly this does so much. Let's go from the ground up. The level design is uninspiring at best. Very little about it is particularly onerous, but the entire main body of levels just about peaks at 'fine', with a lot of segments that are mostly just holding the fast button on autopilot until so-and-so segment was done. I've run several of them fuck-you amounts of times (we'll get to that! hoo!) and I still can't remember much about half of them. If there's a nice thing to say about the stages, it's that I generally enjoyed the Secret and EX stages and actually just had a good time with the little Shadow DLC, which remixed two of the generally-better stages and one of the mediocre ones for the better. Your actual gameplay is... hoo. 90s Sonic feels like shit to control, in ways I can't really describe. The closest I've come to a single explanation is that he's got a bizarre amount of air acceleration - not the fine air control one would expect from a decent platformer, but he accelerates in the air as though he's on the ground, which is just disconcerting - but that only explains an element of it. 90s Sonic always sucks to control. Your custom sparkledog also controls really badly, largely just being Aughts Sonic but without (unless you're a bird) the corrective mini doublejump, having no boost, and having abilities on their gun that, more often than not, give bursts of speed or perfect acceleration at times where you're not expecting it and you fly off to your death. This becomes particularly shitty during SOS missions, which have you using someone else's character and loadout and require you to beat a stage without dying; sometimes a tall task when you're presented with a gun that you don't remember makes you go really fast after using a stomp. Bizarrely, I actually more-or-less enjoyed how Aughts Sonic controlled, flipping the paradigm of Generations. Outside of the camera being chronically just a little bit too low, I can't really fault that third of the game. Making and dressing up your sparkledog is, honestly, not bad. There's a lot of options and you can make some unhinged shit with it... but the options are locked behind the challenge system, which is obscenely long. See, there's a hundred and eightyish challenges, comprised of completing each stage, S-ranking each stage, beating most stages under a time limit (which is often a lot lower than the time needed for S), leveling up each kind of sparkledog, doing rental missions, getting red star coins, getting kills with each kind of gun, etc. etc. There's tons. Locking a bunch of cosmetics behind a system this long is already kinda wonky, especially since the hard ones to earn aren't exactly meant as prestige things, but this leads into an interface problem as well: every cosmetic you get has to be individually confirmed. You get four to six per challenge. If, for instance, you're using a new weapon and ace a stage, S-rank, on the first run, you can fairly trivially have to press X upwards of twenty times in the postmatch screen before getting back to the world map. The interface tax presented by the cosmetics is both completely unforced and absolutely insane. It's one of the most frustrating things in Forces because, unlike many fundamental issues, it's so easy to fix. I'll compliment the interface on one thing, though - unlike Generations and Lost World, Forces has (in addition to a useless overworld) a simple stage list with the ranks and times you've gotten on every level, plus which red star coins you've gotten (in order, Generations, ) and whether you've gotten the other two kinds of collectible. It's fantastically convenient for 100% completion, and easily encourages you to fill it up with Ses like a beautiful little checklist. Mmm, checklists. Haven't even gotten to the worst part of the game, though: behold the achievements. Almost everything boils down to the aforementioned 100% challenges and 100%ing stages. See, for most of the 30 maps in the game, there's no conceivable way to finish in fewer than three, and no realistic way to finish in fewer than five, clears. Every stage has an S-rank condition, five red star coins, five number rings, five silver moon coins, and most have a speedrun target besides. The problem is that the number rings only spawn when you go back into the stage after getting all the red star coins, and the silver moon coins only spawn when you go back into the stage after getting all the number rings. Hypothetically, if one could S-rank the stage and get all of one of the collectibles and hit the speedrun target in a single run through (an absurd task), that stage would Only take three runs to get everything, Realistically, every stage is going to be once to clear (may or may not hit the S), once for the red stars, once for the numbers, once for the silver moons, and once for the speedrun, for a total of five or six clears. Topping that off, a few stages have mutually exclusive red star coins, and completion is only logged when you finish the stage (no resetting or leaving), so add another clear for each of those. For just collectibles and challenges, you're looking at a ballpark of a hundred and fifty clears of these thirty stages - and when they're running thin on the first or second run, that's a slog to say the least. This doesn't get you all the challenges done, though. I mentioned leveling your sparkledogs earlier, and there's seven species that you can pick from, each with its own gimmick. When you beat the game, the limiter is taken off and you can create as many more as you want. Beating the game gives you approximately the experience (based on stage score) you need to level up your first one, and there are separate challenges for leveling every single species to max. I got every single other challenge and collectible finished somewhere while leveling my fourth or fifth character. At this point, I've completely stripped the game of content, and I'm around two-thirds of the way done with the grinding challenge. And it isn't the long grind. There's an achievement to pack away one hundred thousand rings at the end of stages - rings lost during the map don't count. It's a fair assumption that a decent player will come out of any given stage with a hundred or two on average. The math is right there in front of you. I finished the campaign with a balmy 2,500 rings. I finished all collectibles around 24,000 rings. I finished all challenges except for the experience grind around 33,000 rings. I finished the experience grind around 67,000 rings. Every ounce of gameplay had long left the game, and I still had more rings to go than I got in the entirety of the game's content, such as it is. The outlet is Secret Stage 6, which can be completed in about 30 seconds easily and 25 if I'm on the ball, and awards 403 rings. That's a disgusting rings per minute pace, and I ran Secret Stage 6 something to the tune of a hundred and thirty total times making this number go up. Boring? God, yeah. Anything else would have added hours to the grind, though. All in all, did I enjoy Sonic Forces? No. I didn't. It was a shit game that I had to find ways to make myself have fun with, and I'm half past glad it's done and dusted. It did give me some interesting insights into what I like and dislike about platformers though, and I'll definitely be trying another Sonic game or two next time a big sale rolls around to further refine those hypotheses. As Sonic's legendary catchphrase goes, let-sa go! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrhesia Posted April 28, 2023 Share Posted April 28, 2023 (edited) Let's wash the taste of Forces out of our mouth. Just now, I got my full 100% in Potionomics! It's like if Recettear wasn't painfully anime. And didn't try to impose a second, inferior sub-loop on your greater, more capitalistic core gameplay loop. Probably not everyone knows what Recettear is. So Potionomics has a simple loop. You have ten days to prepare yourself for a contest. Make potions, sell them at a profit to make better potions, until you have good enough potions to compete in the contest and destroy your rival. But selling the potions causes stress and is hard and Sylvia, initially, is terrible at it, so she also needs to befriend her circle of locals; they'll not only offer utilities, give her deals and help her relax, but hanging out with them will give her advanced rhetoric skills. There's five contests in total, then you pay off your debt, get the McGuffin (Sylvia's last two plot actions are to 'taunt' and then 'flagrantly lie', incidentally) and win. Advanced rhetoric skills here means cards, and what's interesting is that different peoples' techniques offer different ways to succeed. The chilled-out dryad offers ways to handle stress and play the long game; the bard strings together potentially devastating combination plays, the shanty cats as a tandem act generally offer an offensive or a defensive action - which is very useful when you generally only have a hand size of 3-4 - the, um, Silicon Valley moth??? basically lends herself to a blood knight path where you deliberately ramp up your stress to force through interest. But I had the most success using cards like the walrus', who lent himself to big, unsubtle buffs and massive hits, and most tantalisingly the succubus, who basically lets Sylvia sell even the shittest potion at a massive markup by gaslighting, gatekeeping and girlbossing her customers into submission. One of the two weaknesses of the game is that it isn't quite smooth in terms of progression... or it wasn't for me, but that was partly down to the way I played it. Bizarrely, the loop is at its most convoluted in early midgame; options open up, but margins are tight enough that you feel like you have to optimise every action. By the endgame, you're basically too big to fail, and I think the plot knows this, shifting emphasis from sheer cashflow to McGuffin. I entered the final contest week on 20/30 achievements, but by that point I could trivially make any potion, was basically post-scarcity. So I spent it cleaning out the achievement list. The other weakness is basically just that there's a significant item bloat and that there really ought to be slightly better UI in terms of inventory management. If filters were remembered by default. If there was a 'buy all available' button instead of clicking nine times to go from buying 1 -> 10, which you'll do a lot. That kind of thing. I have two pieces of advice for anyone playing Potionomics (which you should). The first is to play fast and loose, don't worry about getting perfect balance on everything, lean on macro, let resources slip cleanly out of your hands. The second is to go for the 100%, which you can absolutely do in a single playthrough. This involves: - Winning the game - Making tier 6 (max-rank) potions of all 16 kinds - Completely befriend everyone (10 characters, 10 ranks) - Fully upgrade the Store - Have an adventurer clear the hardest location - Humiliate an opponent with your superior alchemy The store and the potions are basically a time-locked cash-sink. It's going to take until you have endgame-level cauldrons (which are more robust, so can make better potions), cashflow and resources, but then it's just a matter of brute force - especially since by then you have a way to automatically vendor your excess potions. So almost all my final week was spent ramming the most expensive possible gifts on the companions, having basically cheapskated on them through the game (another thing I'd recommend someone doesn't; my deck was somewhat stagnant as a result), and rushing through the rest of their storylines in a single week. I did actually enjoy that! It felt like good closure, having basically wrapped up the commerce side of the game and attained potion mastery. Clearing the hardest location isn't complicated, because unlike others of the genre, Potionomics doesn't decide to force you to play an inferior RPG or hack-and-slash. It's purely 'match adventurers to dungeons, throw potions at them until they can clear it'. It's not the most engaging, but like, I wouldn't want it to be. In terms of its writing, Potionomics is straightforward 7/10 cozy fare. You have ten friends that each have a Relatable Millennial Experience they're grappling with, that all happen to be able to be solved by bouncing off Sylvia, who is, herself, probably the best part of the story; she's going full pace all the time, she's easily bewildered, she isn't too bright. You'd probably be her friend, too. It's one of those things where some of the characters are going to resonate more than others. Muktuk's a big, exuberant walrus and much of his dialogue is taken up by being a big, exuberant walrus - no bad thing, by any stretch! - but his greater struggle with inspiration and a need to build something that outlived him did resonate a lot with me, as a (massive wanker voice) fellow creative. The succubus has had to fight for everything she's ever had, so shortcuts are tempting. It's one of those situations where you fail the marshmallow test because that's what life has conditioned you to do, the second marshmallow has not, historically speaking, arrived as promised. Sylvia romanced her because I'm predictable, but it isn't really a romance-oriented game; you hit on people or you don't, you only have one forever partner, if you hit on someone else while you already have a date they'll chide you good-naturedly at the threshold for determining friendship vs. romance arc (sorry Xid), and you'll be experiencing basically the same story beats en route to maxed friendship regardless. It's a pretty game. It sounds nice, both in terms of SFX and music. This is important when it's such a vibes-based experience. ... Anyway, while I said you could get your 100% in a single playthrough, I actually only got 29/30 because I'm a cheapskate. One of the achievements is to win one of the challenges by simply having the best potion to the point where you don't need to haggle, but I'd been constantly undercutting as best as I could and making it up with rhetoric. So after the finale, I took like five minutes to go back to my day 9 autosave, make a tier 3 potion, destroy Sylvia's future girlfriend utterly, throw the tournament and quit. Potionomics is very unlikely to be your favourite game ever made, but it's going to be a very good use of 20-25 hours. You should play it. Edited April 28, 2023 by Parrhesia Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 29, 2023 Author Share Posted April 29, 2023 6 hours ago, Parrhesia said: It's like if Recettear wasn't painfully anime. And didn't try to impose a second, inferior sub-loop on your greater, more capitalistic core gameplay loop. i am going to fucking destroy you Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrhesia Posted May 9, 2023 Share Posted May 9, 2023 fucking lol ike's on the hook for all of TWW3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 11, 2023 Author Share Posted May 11, 2023 (edited) TOTAL WARHAMMER 3 (THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, 2022) Finished: 11/5/23. Playtime: 296.1 hours. Total Warhammer 3 is as good as Total War has ever been on nearly every front. In the middle of the writeup, the 3.0 patch dropped and it was, ah, not amazing for the game overall. We'll get to that on the one hand, I'm going to write up the whole thing as though it was patch 2.X, assuming things will be fixed at some point in the future. The reason I'm giving it this big a leash is that almost all of Total Warhammer 3 nails down things that even the previous Total Warhammers missed a bit. Immortal Empires feels like a better map than Mortal Empires did, overall. The new factions are interesting, play differently, and generally have the right weight of mechanics, and they fill out the world pleasantly. Chaos is relevant, fairly diverse, and has its own entire playscape rather than just being the horde from the northeast. Units control just a bit better, and settlement battles are better than they've ever been, which is a fairly slight bar to clear in the Total War franchise. Reinforcement mechanics in particular were changed to be far better than they were in previous games, now being movable map markers where the further you deviate along the edge of the board from the default, the longer it takes the reinforcements to arrive; and if a side is wiped out before the reinforcement timer ticks down then the other side can elect to end the fight instantly. The interface does a lot of lifting as well. This shit is completely subjective, but I love how Total Warhammer 3 is presented overall. The colors are nicer, the presentation is slicker, the map paints in pretty colors if you zoom out like a Paradox game, and it's easier to pick out idle units in a pitched battle. Pick an element of Total Warhammer 3, and I'll probably have good things to say about it. It's not all gravy, even ignoring 3.0. Routing enemies, particularly named characters, just kind of mass their way through hordes of units who bump them Ys style except without doing any damage. Given the huge variety of shit in the game, there's some annoyingly over-tuned stuff - once again, particularly named characters - but a lot of these inherited themselves from 2. The autobattler has been spotty in previous games, but is completely psychotic here. The performance, particularly loading times, does suffer slightly, which ties into the previous a lot when one has to do several relatively-trivial battles that the autobattler decides you sent your 20-man swordsman unit straight into the fray. I brought up Immortal Empires as a step up from Mortal Empires; I was not a fan of the Vortex campaign, but I think it was better than the Chaos Realms campaign. To its credit, it doesn't have the grating inevitability of the Dark Elf Confederacy, and the objective isn't nearly as annoying to do as the Vortex, but that means one ends up just doing the objective each time, and the objective is on a strict cycle. While the Vortex objective relied on gathering tablets and shit to fuel your four rituals, the Chaos Portals just spawn every ~30 turns and you need to succeed at four cycles to fight the final battle and win. It's also critically segmented - the northwest is All Chaos and a little frozen, and really can't be used well by anyone but Chaos. The southwest is All Frozen and really can't be used by anyone but Kislev. The east is All Temperate And Desert and really can't be used by anyone but Cathay. The mountains that make up a huge chunk of the map are still designed to be used by burrowing factions, of which you don't have any (except Tzeentch, sort of) at base. It's just not a very good map. It's a good section of Immortal Empires, though! Standing proudly at central stage for changes Total Warhammer 3 makes is the Allegiance system. Allegiance gets built up over time by building outposts in allied territory, and can be cashed (for AI allies) to give them gentle wartime directions or even steal an army for a short time. More importantly, though, allegiance can be spent on Allied Recruitment. Via Allied Recruitment, you can recruit up to four unit cards (from a total of 20 per stack) to each army you own from any combination of allies. This is fun in singleplayer, giving you related stuff - say, a few dwarvish units augmenting your human armies, or poaching your favorite of the other Chaos factions' demons - but really shines in the co-op campaign. The co-op campaign is not difficult, handles multiple players quite well, and since you have no need to match alignments you can just go apeshit. French knights in your stack of lizardmen. Rats, you want rats? If someone's playing rats, have rats. All you need is at least a defensive alliance with the target. This also created some fun and unique scenarios in various campaigns that I'll have fun and enumerate below like I did for the other games. Now, the elephant in the room: 3.0. 3.0 added a few things and, largely, was a negative for the game. Performance was hugely affected - a game that almost never crashed for me crashes once every few hours now. Rice paddies in particular cause huge FPS drops, and some other map elements can get nasty. Loading is all over the place. There's a new game mode, I'll bitch about it, it sucks. Maybe-worst of all is the triumphant return of the Chaos Dwarves. The Chaos Dwarves have been absent from Warhammer Fantasy for a good while, and Total Warhammer 3 gave them a makeover and a new place in a shiny game. They're an interesting faction and reasonably-fun to play, I'm told, and not especially overtuned (though they have their balance issues). They slot in well to Immortal Empires and act as a good control to the various dwarven and orcish factions in the Dark Lands. The problem is they didn't just add them to Immortal Empires. They added them to Chaos Realms as well, and they fucking suck. They're a tough nut to crack, completely isolated from the rest of Chaos and mutually supportive of one another to create a horrible knot in a normally-contestable zone that blobs up and pushes out. The dwarves and orcs and rats that are their traditionally natural predators simply aren't there - there's two rump states of dwarf and Grimgor alone - but Chaos Dwarves start in a smaller map with their full strength and their back to the wall. It shakes up the already-tenuous Chaos Realms balance extremely for the worse. The only thing that can keep them in check is if Kislev hellblobs, and then the balance is is still horrible because then you have a different thirty-province hellblob in the other corner of the map. They make Chaos Realms suck significantly more and, like Tomb Kings in the Vortex, they don't even play the campaign objective. Nasty little fuckers. Achievements aren't anything out there. Each faction has a handful of side-objectives and a Very Hard campaign victory, any one of which must be Legendary, exclusively in Chaos Realms. Immortal Empires doesn't have any achievements, which crops the fifteen potential repeats from 2 out in favor of just the eight new factions. There's a tutorial Prologue which is a little bit slow for me but seems like it does a good job introducing Total War to a newcomer and has a few stretch goals for achievements. There's a handful of generic campaign achievements, and the only multiplayer ones are to play a campaign with anyone. There's no viral achievement in this one, thank God. The Chaos Dwarves did not come with any achievements of their own, but did come with Mirror of Madness, the aforementioned game mode. Mirror of Madness is a dull, longwinded wave survival mode that does just about everything one shouldn't do in a wave survival mode. There's a constant trickle of enemies, you have the exact same army comp for all five maps, and you need to double the score that gets you all the rewards on every single one. The army comp thing is notable because you have a single game plan for every single run - your lord has insane spells that wipe out huge swathes of enemies, so you just have to keep him from getting beat up until those spin up and keep your army from dying long enough to get up to the target score. One of the five is lizardmen, and they bring their own beefy flying melee troops to eat your lord, a thing for which you have pretty much no answer. Vibe around, try to get them to aggro your other troops and, if you get it right, it's just twenty minutes of microing your other guys to buy time while new fliers spawn in every time you kill the old ones. Mode sucks. EDIT IN DRAFT PHASE: the motherfuckers announced immortal empires achievements in the summer patch the day after i wrote this fucking paragraph All-in-all, it's in a rough patch Right Now, but even at this relative low Total Warhammer 3 is just about as good as the series has ever been. High recommendation all around. You don't even have to own the older games - all races of all the older games are a la carte DLC for 3 or, if you already own them, they grandfather in just fine. Let's go over the campaigns and, for fun, I'm going to go over the multiplayer ones I've been doing with a few mates. Skaven - Immortal Empires, Normal, Ikit Claw My first run was actually a multiplayer campaign, with myself as Ikit Claw, Parrhesia as Kislev, and our two mates as the Ogres and High Elves. It was a strong first impression of the game and I hadn't even done my Skaven run of 2 at the time. I burned down almost all the Wood Elf trees in the world before we restarted, and renamed every one of them to Ratwoods. It was a great time. I talked about how much I loved the rats in the 2 post, and they're even more fun in 3. Nurgle - Chaos Realms, Very Hard, Kugath Plaguefather I love Grandfather Nurgle. I'm one of those weird shits who very much comes down on the 'Nurgle is the good guy' side of Warhammer 40,000 discourse, but something about the whole ethos of decay and rebirth feels right to me on some strange level, deep in my soul. Obviously, he had to be my first run of 3, now that he's a full-fledged faction. Nurgle units are defined by being slow, bulky, and sticky. You get them into melee, you gum up the works, you let inevitability grind them down. Not much flanking speed, not much ranged support, just big lumps of dude you put at the enemy. Nurgle buildings are completely different from every other faction's - you don't build and upgrade them. You have a significant buy-in cost for every building but, every few turns, it grows into its next phase, giving more money or control or units or whatever. This continues until it decays back to the original stage, and the cycle of life goes back around. It's a fantastic little shakeup of the usual way of things, and Nurgle's recruitment follows suit. Units get put into a summon pool as their recruitment buildings wax and wane, and you summon them to your lords' stacks to deplete the pool. It's very Inevitable. I like it a lot. I swarmed all over the frozen north, taking out the other Chaos factions and gumming into Kislev, but I kept the rats alive. Keeping the rats alive meant that I could add the one thing Nurgle is missing to the roster: fire support. A couple ratling guns firing into the hell-melee that Nurgle is grinding out? Oh, fuck yeah. Kislev - Chaos Realms, Very Hard, Tsarina Katarin I have very few things to say about Kislev. I didn't really interact with its unique mechanics, and I didn't really make any friends besides the dwarves. I didn't explore Kislev's roster of infantry, sleds, and bears, because I had streltsi. Streltsi are guys in medium armor with rifles which have axes on them. My stacks, including the endgame final, were a lord, a priest, and between twelve and eighteen cards of streltsi with some armored kossars slotted in against races more capable of closing distance (like Khorne) and with some bow kossars slotted in for ones where I played tighter (like rats). Sometimes, later, I put some units of dwarves in front of the streltsi to soak hits. Streltsi got that dog in them. Wood Elves - Immortal Empires, Hard, Drycha Drycha is the 'evil' wood elf faction. Her elves suck, but her treemen are better (and purple) and she has access to wild forest animals to bulk up her armies. This was a really unique run, with Parrhesia as Grimgor Ironhide, king of the orcs, and the other two as the South American French expedition and the Chaos-seeking lizards of the Antarctic. Parrhesia created the largest land empire the world has ever seen, given as Grimgor's canonical start in Immortal Empires is meant to be held in check by the Chaos Dwarves, who didn't exist yet. I took over the trees and put out fires all over the continents using the elves' new ability to travel between the big trees, and I got the fun of adding support dinosaurs or angry Frenchmen on horses to my natural armies. This one was great fun. Khorne - Chaos Realms, Very Hard, Skarbrand the Exiled Khorne is gloriously straightforward. Skarbrand is just a massive guy, Khorne units are entirely defined by how prolifically and how long they can get stuck in. The Khornate mechanics give you bonus movement after fighting battles, and rewards for fighting lots of battles back to back. You don't even stop to occupy settlements - any ruined settlements in territory you control partially have a chance to be resettled for free every turn, so you just take the big cities and burn everything else to the ground. I'm not sure I entertained a single thought while running this entire campaign. Slaanesh - Chaos Realms, Very Hard, N'Kari I didn't have much for hopes for Slaanesh. Slaaneshi units tend to be my least-enjoyed in other adaptations, like Noise Marines in 40k. Somehow, though, Slaanesh worked for me. All the Chaos Gods have marks they put on the generic units, and Slaanesh's is speed and pheromones. This didn't mean much for the bigger units, but it did track beautifully onto the Forsaken - a generically balanced Chaos unit. Slaanesh's gift, uniquely, made them great flankers, without the paper mache durability of daemonettes and with staying power unlike the cavalry. I ended up with a very simple game plan of Chosen tanking and Forsaken flanking and it worked for every battle I ever fought. The campaign mechanics were pretty fun too, honestly - seducing units out of enemy stacks before you fight, and summoning legions of simps to rush out to side objectives for you. Slaanesh was, lowkey, one of my favorite campaigns of Total Warhammer 3. Ogre Kingdoms - Chaos Realms, Very Hard, Greasus Goldtooth To the contrary, Ogres were really boring. One thing I dislike about factions is when the endgame stack becomes apparent early and that apparency is correct and doesn't change. Ogres are supposed to transition from Ironfists to Maneaters; I never did. I just kept up Ironfists into Leadbelchers starting from about turn 15, and with very little shakeup up to turn 125. The Ogre flankers - Sabretooths, Gorgers, et al - never pulled their weight really. The Ogre heavies - Maneaters, largely - never justified their cost. The Ogre dinosaurs took too much investment to get into my squads, to the point that it was easier to simply bring up two squads of Ironfists and Leadbelchers rather than try to get the heavies in. The Ogre campaign mechanics are also really bad, honestly. Every army has a Meat level, which one might thing is meant to mean you need to get stuck in with your proper ogre squads - but it's an axiomatic 1 meat per 1 unit, which means that your shit dudes (gnoblars) eat the same as your ogres. There's no reason to ever have gnoblars. Meat, alone, discourages any use of your silly green ogric auxiliaries, because you get fucked if you run out of meat, and a unit of gnoblar trappers eats exactly the same as a Stonehorn. It's a really shit system, but it doesn't have the weird strategic implications that camps do. There's a system across all the Totals Warhammer that has each province consist of a Major Settlement and a few Minor Settlements. The Major one goes to level 5, the Minors go to level 3. For Ogres, all settlements only go to 3 - but their camps, that are freely placeable, go to 5. The problem comes up in how the game presents this. The camps, thus, unlock all your highest units, and also give global income bonuses to every settlement you own. On the other hand, camps prevent meat usage for armies in their circle, and give bonuses when fighting inside their radius. With a limited capacity, it's a system that doesn't really work either way - you want camps to grow to give you huge factional bonuses and entire lines of units, but you always want to do this insanely gamey spawn a camp wherever you're going on the siege. It isn't satisfying in either case, it doesn't really work in either case, and it feels like a half-cocked system that wants to be the herdstone system 2's Beastmen invented. Ogres just, sadly, aren't all that interesting, unless you play them in a very videogamey way. That said, I ended up pinning Helman Ghorst into his shitty little forest early on and not ever getting around to conquering him, so I ended up with Vampire Counts units sprinkled through my armies. It turns out that putting Corpse Carts to give Balefire buffs to Ogres is pretty fuckin' great, and great weapon Grave Guard fill a huge role that Ogres are lacking. Top five ally, honestly. Dwarves - Immortal Empires, Hard, Grombrindal the White Dwarf This is our ongoing multiplayer campaign, post-Chaos Dwarves. Jim and the other guy are playing them, while Parrhesia is following my steps and playing Cylostra Direfin. We've wiped Malekith off the fucking map already, and that makes me happier than anything a video game has ever done. Time to keep it up, hey. Tzeentch - Chaos Realms, Very Hard, Kairos Fateweaver Tzeentch is appropriately strange to play. All the Chaos Gods have unique currencies they gain through spreading corruption and which can be spent on various things, and I haven't mentioned them much because they're not terribly remarkable. Khorne's skulls are pretty much nothing for a mechanic. Slaanesh's disciples give you the aforementioned simp armies and, hypothetically, other things, but I never splashed into the other things very much. Nurgle's infections are used to concoct plagues, which themselves also give infections by spreading, so it's more of a start-up cost than an interactive mechanic. Tzeentch gets grimoires, which are used for the Changings of the Ways. These are a grab bag of random bullshit that, honestly, are really fun to play with. Start a rebellion in a settlement, trade a city between two factions who aren't at war, provoke a war between two factions, set a war coordination target they'll try to strategize around, even freeze a whole faction's armies for a turn. Unlike all of the above, I never felt like I had enough grimoires, and anytime I had a surplus I had some petty scheme I really wanted to dump them on. It wasn't only fun, it was properly Tzeentchian. I became a flamboyant schemer. Units were nothing to write home about, honestly - I just relied on the core of Chosen and Forsaken mostly, or Forsaken and Horrors for cheap armies. Grand Cathay - Chaos Realms, Legendary, Miao Ying, the Storm Dragon Hubris is absolutely my cardinal sin. I consolidated Cathay quickly and with relative ease, and decided to simply go into the Chaos Wastes and go for a domination victory instead of messing with the rifts. Since I don't get any backup saves, thanks Legendary, I'll just take a measured approach to conquest. Gut through the entire world, snowball out of control, the works. Never let anyone tell you I'm intelligent. A hundred and twenty turns later, I'm horribly bogged down around the Bay of Blades. All the Chaos minor factions are holding onto a single settlement each. I cannot surge forward and wipe any of them out. I cannot make any progress. The Chaos Dwarves have all declared war on me. I'm fighting a hell omniwar, and it will not end. I sit, I consider my options, and I mulligan. That's a blow to the ego, doubly since Legendary difficulty fucking sucks. Daemons of Chaos - Chaos Realms, Very Hard, Sylvanas II Time for my Warchief to burn down their tree again. The Daemon Prince's gimmick is that you can be blessed by the Chaos Gods and put together a mixed-demon army from the rosters of all four. In practice, this meant making a huge stack of Warriors of Nurgle and Daemonettes of Slaanesh and then just... going. I did this campaign in a sitting. It was completely brainless. There's a real chance that this is the easiest campaign of Total War I've ever finished. I spent more time parsing the legion of samey pieces of gear you get for dedicating yourself to Chaos than I did planning any sort of grand strategy. Grand Cathay - Chaos Realms, Legendary, Zhao Ming, the Iron Dragon I'm tired, Squirtle. Zhao Ming is the idiot brother of Miao Ying, and he's far less swaggy than she is. He's got a crucial trait, though: he's a tough wizard who natively regenerates. He can solo armies, if you have little enough respect for the game to slug it out, cheesing the AI. At this point, I just want to be free. I just want to get to not playing Total Warhammer for a few months. I'm so, so close. I hunkered down in the native borders of Grand Cathay, fortified everything, and pressed end turn eighty times, running the rifts when they spawned. Not a very satisfying end, but it isn't even really an end, is it? Grand Cathay - Chaos Realms, Hard, Miao Ying, the Storm Dragon The punchline to my entire campaign set is that, after all of it, there was a lingering achievement: have a net income of 60,000 gold. My biggest campaign only hit about 42,000. I pondered publicly which campaign to resurrect, redo the final battle, and postgame to where my empire was pumping out that level of dosh. Parrhesia responded by loading up his own victorious Cathayan campaign and finding his income was already there with a few disbandments. After a bit of self-reflection, I asked him to provide the save and he did. Fuck it, I'd done enough. I loaded his hard work, the achievement unlocked itself, and I felt no sense of shame or stolen valor. God bless him. I'll absolutely make another post about this game when I finish the inevitable next-fifteen campaigns in, oh, November or so. Til then. EDIT: November wasn't a terrible estimate, actually! Edited December 15, 2023 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.