Integrity Posted April 19 Author Share Posted April 19 SONIC MANIA (CHRISTIAN WHITEHEAD, 2017) Finished: 19/4/24. Playtime: 20.5 hours. Sonic has treated me weirdly so far as a franchise. It's batting almost exactly .500; I deeply disliked Forces and Generations, largely enjoyed Lost World and Frontiers, and unrelated to this thread had an absolute ball with The Murder Of. None of the four games I've gotten achievements for have benefited from the process of getting achievements for them, so I really probably should stop. But, of course, I won't, in that eternal seeking of the thread that unites what I like and dislike about Sonic, searching for the ones I like in the mix. You've seen all the goddamn Mega Man posts by now. Mania sits comfortably at the bottom of the list of Sonic games I've played. It fought valiantly with Forces to stay off the bottom for quite a long time before the final zone of the game lost it the war. Even besides that awful final experience, I just never had any fun playing Mania at any point. At its absolute peak, the thrilling heights of my Mania experience, it was just happening at me with minimal friction. At its worst, I was getting actively stuck in stages because of a simple interaction that the game's one-button gameplay doesn't hint at unless you'd known about it from a previous game, like going up the oilfalls. Crucially, though, none of this was ever... fun. At the end of the day, though, I'm almost glad that I did play Mania, because in my experience with the game came a certain amount of revelation as to what about these games, Generations in particular, isn't working for me. I think that the biggest thing this has shown me about my Sonic experience is that there's a fundamental disconnect between the game that I think Sonic is and the game that Sonic wants me to think Sonic is. It isn't a game of blistering speed and quick reactions to stay on the tightrope to blaze through a stage, it's a game of memorizing upcoming hazards and learning the stage design language deeply enough to predict jumps so that you can maintain that speed. Your ability to go fast is purely stage-based and has next to nothing to do with how well you control Sonic, which I think I touched on a fair bit in the Lost World recap as well but it's more cemented now. Sonic is the maps, the levels; without those, he's just Diddy Kong with fiddlier controls and floatier jumps. Sonic himself is empty. He's simply a vessel through which you are able to project yourself to experience the stages. So, reversing my thinking, a different problem emerges. I don't think these stages are particularly fun or interesting to explore. If they're not interesting to explore, I have no motivation to seek out alternate paths. If I'm not seeking out alternate paths, I'm not replaying stages. If I'm not replaying stages, I never get to go fast, outside of the (frequent) times that the game autoscrolls you quickly through a series of springs and loops and cannons. It's something I mentioned in the Mega Man 10 recap - it might be a game that feels great to be good at, but the process of getting good at it sucks enough that I never get to the point where I am good at it. "It gets good 20 hours in" can work for an 80-hour RPG, contextually, but it works a lot worse for an 8-hour platformer. All of that is high-concept and none of it is touching on the real stinkers that Mania lays down. Every stage (12 split into two Acts apiece) ends in a boss fight, and the boss fights almost universally suck, and no two in different ways. Some are opaque, some are boring, some are actually hard; I don't think I enjoyed any of them except for the Puyo Puyo one, which is incredibly random and a total pacebreaker but at least Puyo Puyo is fun. The actually hard ones, including the final boss, truly take the cake. Sonic Mania (2017) cleaves hard to old styles of life management: you have three (and maddeningly game over when the counter goes down to 0 rather than when you lose your 0th life), extra lives are sparse, and if you get a game over you go back to the start of Act 1 of whatever stage you were on. For a good few stages this is a retread of maybe ten minutes, something to grumble about and then get terrain crushed again and lose another life. For the finale, Titanic Monarch Zone, even after the practice of a few game overs it was still a 15-20 minute slog to get back to Eggman and to hope I still had enough lives to give him another real go. That's another anecdotal thing that really gave me the shits during Mania: terrain crushes. I don't know if I'm just not used to the old ways of Sonic or if Mania leans into this more heavily than most, but any time a single pixel of Sonic's hitbox is pinched on opposite sides by moving gubbinz, he will die instantly. This happened to me more times than the sum of all bosses, and possibly more than the sum of all other deaths in the game, and so many of them are just dickish. There's spikes that pop up from the floor in Titanic Monarch Zone to catch you unawares, but in one or two of the placements, the top of the spikes to the ceiling is less than a Sonic tall, so you take damage and then instantly get terrain crushed. There's plenty of times across many stages where you have to swap between alternating platforms, and a little mental or control latency means Sonic gets clipped by the edge of the next one, and that's a death. A big shoutout goes to the magnetic halls in Flying Battery Zone - I came up to a certain hall for the first time and jumped over the spike ball in my way just as the magnetism turned on, and the ball terrain crushed me against the ceiling. I came back up to it the second time, waited for the magnetism to turn on so it would hit the ceiling, laughed at the cheap gotcha, and then went under it. The magnetism, it turns out, cycles off and on. The next spike ball fell on and terrain crushed me. This was both the most frustrating and most prolific way for me to die, and probably contributed more than any other single element to my lack of enjoyment of Sonic Mania. The other major element is that, for a momentum-based platformer, Sonic's wielding of physics and momentum is gently deplorable. The biggest point of contention I have here has to do with the many, many backwards-facing springs you're supposed to sprint into during many sections of the game. Back in the Ishin! review, I made a comment about the sorcery of how RGG's camera transitions into stores and shit, where you'd have an unnoticable grace period to adjust the direction you were running so that Kiryu didn't run into a fixed camera area outside a Don Quixote and then instantly turn and run back out of the store because the camera flipped. Ishin! didn't have that input protection, so Ryoma would run into a camera transition, pivot on a dime because he's not on tank controls, and run straight back out. Sonic works the same as Ryoma here. You'll be holding left to gain speed (gotta go fast!) up and around a loop, and you'll shit out of the loop into a spring facing to the right because that's how the stage is constructed for you to go. If you're holding left after you hit the spring for any amount of time at all, Sonic will skid to a halt and lose enormous amounts of momentum. Without anticipation to let go of the buttons so you can properly transition at the spring, a shitload of the time you'll just hit a spring and either skid to a halt or, worse, burn off the speed you need to get up a slope, and then just have to meekly turn around and go back to the spring to try again. It's annoying and, worst, it's constant. This is a multiple-times-every-single-stage occurrence, not a once in a while thing. Not that the once in a while things are less crappy. There's a few instances, notably a boss you chase who fires missiles at you and the entirety of Mirage Saloon Zone Act 1, where Sonic is running forward at all times and his jump becomes fixed, not added, velocity. The Mirage Saloon Zone version is funny, because every time you jump you move steadily to the left, but the aforementioned boss is stupid obvious because you come to a full stop at the apex of your jump even if you're continuing to hold right. It makes a long and dull boss into a long, dull, and frustrating boss. Maybe it's the engineer in me talking, in which case I need to shut up, but I feel like these kinds of things - handling momentum sort-of properly - should be the absolute first thing you nail down when making a game whose entire mission statement is using momentum to go fast. On the other hand, maybe that isn't the game's mission statement at all. Maybe people are here because they like slow exploration and finding places to do what amounts to physics exploits to laugh at them. Who knows. To move on to the achievements, and to continue to harp on Mania for pettier shit, I'm baffled by the wealth of content in this game that's completely ignored by the achievement set. None of the Sonic games I've played have had what I would call a "good" set of achievements, with Frontiers coming maybe the closest, but Mania misses on such a strange pair of levels that I'm left scratching my head. Let's wax philosophical for a moment, if you don't mind. Loosely, I think, a "good" set of achievements for a game should accomplish one (or both) of two things: show off that you've experienced the breadth of a game's content, or show off that you've gotten really quite good at a game. There's exceptions, absolutely, but I'd say a good set at least accomplishes one of those two. Yakuza is a good series to look at for the former and easy to point to. A typical game in the series will have its achievement set based around finding everything in Kamurocho (and outlying cities), doing all the side quests, catching all the fish, etc. Even the bad achievement sets, like Ishin!'s and Lost Judgment's, are bad because of the content contained therein and less because of the achievements themselves. To the latter, you might look at a Call of Duty or any one of many other shooters. With no need to polish up my own skills, Call of Duty 4 took me fewer than 12 hours to crank out 100% on in a single Veteran run, and collection achievements were deeply deprioritized. Most games won't focus exclusively on one of these, but will rather have a mixed approach that skews towards one or the other. Something like Dark Souls has a completionist bent to it, set on getting you to experience all the content, but experiencing all the content is itself quite difficult to do. Super Algebrawl has achievements that can be earned in the alternate mode, but isn't particularly concerned with you experiencing it explicitly. The meat of it is to finish the main game on the top difficulty. This all sounds pretty banal, but the reason I bring it up is that Sonic Mania is neither focused on being comprehensive or focused on you beating the challenge, and leaves an absolutely bonkers wealth of content on the table. To wit, Mania has five different characters to take through the main campaign (six if you count Sonic+Tails separately), each of which can get two different endings (did / did not get all seven emeralds), and a separate campaign under Encore mode. All of this is distilled into a single "get any ending" achievement, as well as one to get the seven Chaos Emeralds but you don't have to refight Eggman with them or anything, you can just get them in the postgame stage selection. It's neither a check on your breadth or depth of knowledge of the game, and there's nothing beyond it. Each stage has a single achievement associated, but most of them are just finding a secret interaction in the stage. That's it. That's fourteen of the eighteen achievements, and fifteen and sixteen are just "spin a checkpoint post really fast" and "get the hidden item boxes at the end of a stage", which I'm told is a Sonic 3 & Knuckles reference that I would never have figured out without a guide. Then, on the other hand, Mania is completely comprehensive about one element of the game. When you touch a checkpoint post with at least 25 rings, you can go to a bonus stage where you have to tag blue orbs to make them red, and if you tag them in certain patterns they turn into rings to be collected. If you tag a red orb, you're kicked out. You get a gold medal for turning all possible blue orbs into rings, collecting those rings, and then collecting the rest of the blue orbs. There are thirty-two of these stages. There are two achievements for getting all silver and all gold medals in all thirty-two of these. Sonic Mania is a game with a ton of ways to play through it and, if followed like a roadmap, the achievements have you pick a single one and shrug about it, and instead asks you to shove your nose deep into and require comprehensive mastery of a kinda-shitty minigame that goes on too long and does not at all beg master of it. It's baffling, genuinely. It's even stranger to me than Möbius Front '83's achievement set of "beat the campaign on normal difficulty" and "win 100 rounds of cribbage solitaire". I don't understand why the decision was made to weight the achievements in this way, and it bothers me that I don't understand. To add onto that, late in the writing process, is Collect 'Em All. The final boss of World 11 is, for whatever reason, a gachapon machine. Collect 'Em All asks for you to spawn all eight possible critters from that boss without killing any of them before killing all of them. This is one of the worst bosses I have ever seen in games, as a concept, because he literally does nothing if you never press his gachapon trigger. You can stand under him, idle, for ten minutes, and the stage will just end with a timeout as he does nothing. So you have to jump into him to spawn the gacha children! This is further muddied by the fact that they take three forms, and one of those three forms suicides on you to do damage. Sorry if he decided to randomly spawn an Amy and you got hit by her, achievement is over. This is one of the worst achievements, on one of the worst bosses, that I've done for this thread. At the end of Mania, I can genuinely say, without reservation, that I did not like the game one bit. What's worst, at the end, is that I still cannot reconcile what it is that other people see in it. I still don't get it. I want to look at my experiences and go "yeah, I thought it was bad, but", but I don't see the but. This isn't a situation where I didn't enjoy the game, like Duke 3D, this is a situation where I don't see what's there to be enjoyed outside of a basic test of skill and pretty pictures whizzing by, and that's far more annoying to have experienced. Anyway, happy Apink day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armchair General Posted April 19 Share Posted April 19 4 hours ago, Integrity said: That's another anecdotal thing that really gave me the shits during Mania: terrain crushes. I don't know if I'm just not used to the old ways of Sonic or if Mania leans into this more heavily than most, but any time a single pixel of Sonic's hitbox is pinched on opposite sides by moving gubbinz, he will die instantly. I never really had this as an problem. But then again, I only played through this once or twice.  4 hours ago, Integrity said: There's spikes that pop up from the floor in Titanic Monarch Zone to catch you unawares, but in one or two of the placements, the top of the spikes to the ceiling is less than a Sonic tall, so you take damage and then instantly get terrain crushed Except for that one.  4 hours ago, Integrity said: A big shoutout goes to the magnetic halls in Flying Battery Zone And that one, lmao  Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlexArtsHere Posted April 19 Share Posted April 19 Might have to pull the trigger on gifting you Superstars a after all, if only to get this off the bottom of your list…of course, there’s also the possibility that you end up thinking that game is peak, causing me to tear my hair out before abandoning civilisation to live as a hermit with only a painted blue coconut for company. All joking aside…of course, I’ve expressed similar sentiments on the Discord server, but it absolutely breaks my heart that this is what your time with one of my favourite games ever ended up being, perhaps in part because I’m as incapable of understanding your feelings on Mania as you are of understanding the love for it. I don’t want to undercut my own review of Mania in however many years from now, nor try to debate somebody else’s individual experience with a piece of media, but now that you’ve delivered the final post, I would like to briefly lay out my own stall on why I love the game (and Sonic games in general) so much: I think the design of Sonic games, and the classics in particular, is a uniquely and deeply fascinating subject (shocking, I know). When dissecting the design of Mario, for example, I feel like there’s a very methodical structure to things, to the point that the discussion of 2D Mario’s teaching by serial escalation borders on cliche in YouTube videos on the topic by now. Mario can, I think, largely be characterised by everything but Mario himself. Not that the handling of Mario is unimportant, but the meat of his level design is in how challenged are permutated upon. You learn a gimmick and then go through a series of subversions and escalations. There’s, in the vast majority of scenarios, between one and a small handful of correct ways to approach any given challenge. And I don’t think that’s bad in the slightest, it’s not without good reason that Mario, to this day, remains the face of gaming. He’s pure, utilitarian quality. Meanwhile, I think 2D Sonic (specifically the classics and Advance games) has a well of depth and nuance in their design that’s born out of the fact that levels are more focused on being courses that facilitate exploration of the gameplay avatar itself. Gameplay is a relationship between Sonic’s ability and handling and the levels to be overcome by the leveraging of those intrinsic assets, particularly to take advantage of sophisticated and nuanced terrain, and I find that a lot more liberating personally. With that, there are different design considerations to be taken into account, chief among those being how to introduce challenges and conflict into levels. Sonic needs to be slowed down organically so as not to blindside players when an enemy appears, yet that must also be balanced with level design that facilitates largely unchecked use of Sonic’s speed, where the challenge is instead to be able to perceive and react to divergent routes, assuming you want to stay on particular paths, either to set a record or seek out particular goodies (though going with the flow is an equally valid choice). To get to the point, I think Mania does this the best the series ever has, working with the benefit of 25 years of analysis and refinement both within official releases and a multitude of fan projects (which is how much of the Mania team got to where they are today). There’s a keen awareness of when to go and when to stop, pumping the brakes with leading level design to subtly alert players to danger ahead. Beyond that, I think levels are built in such a way that flow is built and maintained not only in the moment, but between a multitude of intricate paths that provide frequent opportunities for switching. All this in a one of the best presented games in the pantheon with absolutely gorgeous pixel art and animation, visual design and theming that doesn’t miss a beat and a phenomenal soundtrack that’s bangers from start to finish. There are flaws, as with every game, and I will talk about them when my time with the game comes, but in fairness you didn’t mention the one thing from Mania that you enjoyed, being the special stages! Anyway, while I respect your opinion, I nevertheless hope that someday, with a few years of distance and a different perspective via my own writings-to-come on the game, you’ll be able to appreciate Mania, even if you never fully resonate with it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 19 Author Share Posted April 19 11 minutes ago, AlexArtsHere said: but in fairness you didn’t mention the one thing from Mania that you enjoyed, being the special stages! it sounds like he's being sarcastic but he isn't, i did actually enjoy the little ufo chaser game lmao Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 27 Author Share Posted April 27 PRODEUS (BOUNDING BOX, 2022) Finished: 27/4/24. Playtime: 17.8 hours. There's a fairly-memetic scene from the classical American anime ザ・シンプソンズ in which the lead character and father of the household, ホーマー, is presented with a volley of information that whiplashes his opinion from good to bad to good to bad until he short-circuits out and has to be prompted with how he feels. This is really similar to how I felt about Prodeus. Prodeus does a lot of things really exceptionally well and then just fumbles the last step of their implementation. It has a problem with being really derivative, and when it finally does break out it shines. It's a weird game. Prodeus is a deeply thrown-back boomer shooter that cleaves more to type than many. A lot of reviews call it a Doom (2016) themed .wad made entirely in Doom 2 (1994) and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment, though it does enough to make it obvious why the game wasn't just written for idTech 1. That said, though, when I say it cleaves to Doom 2, I mean it. The weapon progression for the first half of the game is nearly identical, stages are designed from a similar playbook, and the enemies are quite literal behavioral clones introduced in almost the same order as they were in Doom 2. Except for the Archvile, thank fuck, although the final demon is visually fairly similar. The game's fairly pretty, if brown, and gorey in a fun way, and the weapons do handle quite nicely and feel good to shoot, though your max ammo count is tiny and doesn't ever get much bigger so you do have to rotate to "whatever has ammo" a lot of the time. Then, something weird happens. Occasionally during your battles with the forces of Chaos, you get incursions from the forces of Order, and they're hostile to both you and the demons. The AI is simplistic, but works out so that any battle royale with all three factions present is going to have a few guys gunning for you and most of the rest gutting each other in a deeply satisfying way that these shooters almost never land this well. At about the halfway point of the game, you get to the end of the Realm of Chaos or whatever (the game tries to have a plot but I didn't care sorry) and invade the Realm of Order, and shit goes off the rails. See, not only have you busted down the dimensional door and as such there's a lot more interplay in fights between Order and Chaos, but the stage design has shifted tremendously. Gone are the industrial wastelands and Martian reds of the almost-cringily Doom levels of the Realm of Chaos, replaced with sterile whites and greys and stages that shift and reorient themselves as you progress, making actual labyrinths that are disorienting to just the right degree without actually being frustrating to navigate. As soon as it stops being derivative, the map design starts being really good. On the other hand, I've withheld a crucial bit of information here: the forces of Order are all exactly the same as the forces of Chaos except blue and ethereal and way more boring to look at, absolutely pounded chock-full of hit points, and with more and more accurate projectiles to spam at you. It kind of tries to line them up as "identical but one's more quality-focused and one's more quantity-focused", but this pattern of game just doesn't work well for the former - hell, look at the gentle shellacking I gave to Quake 2 versus its predecessor. When you're in Order-centered stages, rather than mixed ones, you just have to play a lot more carefully, and about half of your arsenal simply does not do enough damage to be worth considering. At about the two-thirds point of the game, I literally went into the menu and unbound the keys to equip all but five of my 13-odd guns, because the other options didn't cut the mustard anymore. As the variety in combat went up, my options for dealing with it went sharply down. All this is tied into an upgrade system that's nothing short of insane. There's a shop that you can visit from the overworld to spend your hard-earned ore, which is generally hidden in secrets and such across maps, expecting about 5-8 per level. The idea is, one presumes, that you spend money on the guns that suit you best, but the shop is tiered. You have to buy all of each tier to unlock the next, so you're going to spend 30 of your ores on the super shotgun and the plasma rifle so that you can buy, for instance, the double jump and airdash, one or both of which are required to get about a fourth of the ores in the game. Then you can get the bandolier, increasing your ammo capacity to a still-not-enough about 150%, and then you start getting the best guns in the game, which are transparently just the best guns in the game no contest. Getting through those later Order stages without the Swarmer or the chaos revolver sounds like an exercise in pure misery, but because I had them, I ended up going toe-to-toe bullshit-for-bullshit with the forces of Order and having a lovely time. The game would be far better served to cut back on the shop's impact. The shop especially led to a weird sense of progression for me. I was getting 2-5 ores per map as I was going, which meant that by the time I got out of the Realm of Chaos I only had the super shotgun and the plasma rifle and was closing in on getting the double jump. By this point, stages were absolutely being designed as though I'd gotten the double jump, and I kept seeing ores that I could have gotten with it floating just out of reach, and I had to make a decision: I figured that I should just accept Prodeus' shop as a bad handicap on the game, roll back to the first map, pull up a secrets guide, and replay the first half of the game and get all the ores as I went. I'm glad I did, even though it was demoralizing at the time, and I strongly recommend you pull up a secrets guide (there's a fantastic screenshots-only one on Steam) to walk along as you go. But the real problem is that, despite all this weight dragging it down, despite all the balls-out derivation from Doom 2, I still can't just say Prodeus isn't great. The core movement and gunplay feels astonishingly good outside of one or two flop weapons, and when it's firing on all cylinders, it's nearly as good a modern arena shooter as games like Doom '16. I think therein lies the core of what bothers me still at the end of Prodeus: its faith in the design principles of boomer shooter classics get deeply in the way of what could have been a genuinely exceptional modern FPS, so even when it's good one can't help but feel like it could have been so much more. I'd love to see this dev team throw off the shackles of the past and do something completely their own, because all of the elements of the FPS of the Year 2024 are right there in Prodeus. It just needed more confidence in itself. It also needed a UX consultant, because good God, going from splash screen root menu to your last campaign save on the overworld is, I shit you not, eight clicks. The achievements are just about as steady as they go. Beat the game, any difficulty, and do it with 100% completion, here defined as complete every stage with all secrets, with all kills, and without dying; all can be accomplished in as few or as many runs at the stages as you need. While none of the three completion metrics necessarily need to be done together, a fair number of maps have enemies that spawn to contest you getting a specific secret, so getting all secrets and all kills tends to go hand-in-hand. There's a pretty standard variety of "kill by x" ones, such as environmental kills and gibs and "friendly fire" kills, the last of which being made a lot easier when you get to the stages where the enemies actively fight each other. After that, there's two pairs of challenge run achievements. The first pair is to complete a level 100% on Ultra Hard and to complete a level without dying on Hardest; doing the former necessarily demands the latter. You can crank the difficulty up on a completed save and walk back to any map you like to get this done with your endgame kit. The second pair is to complete a level without taking damage and to complete a level without killing anyone. You can do these separate, but with the mobility upgrades you can do the first map (on an easier difficulty, again on the same save, if you like) super fast with some clever parkour and get them together. I did both these pairs as I felt like it, one somewhere during the Order world and the other right after finishing the campaign, and ended up with 29/30 with pretty organic play as long as you consider the secrets guide to be organic. Thirtieth from thirty is to kill 10,000 enemies. A massive, I mean huge as hell, map might have 200 or so guys on it. Running the whole campaign about 1.5 times on difficulty 4 from 6, plus a handful of stage reruns to get 100% Kills I had missed due to areas I couldn't backtrack to or rerunning the time trials to get to par time for more ore, plus the challenge runs, etc. got me to around 6,000. There's no way to track this exactly in-game, but someone's made a community map that gives you a minigun and a hallway of zombies (it is called Minigun Hallway) that gives 454 kills per clear. I kept a loose tally of the clears I did and it came out to around 4,000 extra kills over the course of about 40 minutes. Not the worst grind achievement in games, but still a little souring. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zapp Branniglenn Posted April 28 Share Posted April 28 Whoever designed Minigun Hallway deserves some community service hours, at least. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted April 28 Author Share Posted April 28 real Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 2 Author Share Posted May 2 NEVER ALONE (KISIMA INGITCHUNA) (UPPER ONE, 2014) Finished: 2/5/24. Playtime: 4.8 hours. I think this is the first time I'm posting about a game after someone else in this thread did. On 9/21/2023 at 7:20 AM, lenticular said: This is a bit of an odd one. Ostensibly, it's a puzzle platformer with optional co-op. Think of something like Trine or Lego Star Wars. There are different characters with different abilities and you need to use both sets of abilities to solve the game's puzzles, which you do either by playing co-op or by playing single player and switching back and forth between which character you're controlling. In this case, the two characters are an arctic fox (who is good at climbing and has the ability to control spirits) and a girl called Nuna (who is good at having hands). Except that that's not really the main point of the game. The main point is that the game is actually about Iñupiat (native Alaskan) people, their culture, and their stories. The story is based on an Iñupiat story and has an Iñupiaq language narrator (with English subtitles), some of the art is based on Iñupiat art, and as you play through the game, you unlock "cultural insights" which are basically just short videos of interviews with Iñupiat people, talking about their lives, culture, etc. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to call it edutainment, but it is definitely leaning in that direction. The basic gameplay is mostly fine if unremarkable. There are definitely moments of indie jank that can be frustrating to deal with. For instance, in single player, the computer will control the character you aren't using at any given moment, and typically just follow along behind you. Except that sometimes they will miss the most basic jump and instead plummet to their death. Fortunately, checkpoints are pretty damn regular, which kept the frustration to a fairly low level. But in purely mechanical terms, I couldn't really recommend the game. It's not bad, but it isn't particularly good either. But, ultimately, if you're buying this game because you're excited about tight platforming and intricate puzzles then you are absolutely doing it wrong. This is not a mechanics game. This is a vibes game. If you're playing this, you're doing it because you're interested in Iñupiat people and culture, or because you really dig the Arctic setting, or because you love the art style (which I saw someone compare to Studio Ghibli, which I think is overselling things but not absurd), or because you think that Nuna and fox are really cute. And if you go into it with that mindset and are willing to put up with a bit of jank and frustration, then it's a charming and really quite good game. Achievements are pretty straightforward. They're a combination of progress achievements that are impossible to miss as you play the game, and achievements which you get for finding and unlocking the cultural insights throughout the game. These vary from "pretty much impossible to miss" to "kind of out of the way, but not too hard to find if you look for them". My overall play time includes one full play through in 2015 and then another full play through in 2023 to get 100% achievements, so the "real" completion time is probably about half of what it took me overall. Which is awesome, because I genuinely have very little to add to this post, minus the personal stuff like "one playthrough in 2015". This is exactly how it landed for me - certainly no barnstormer of a game, but competently made; Fox is occasionally suicidal; as a nearly-edutainment cultural piece, I'm very glad it exists and I'm very glad that I played it. There's a sequel coming! I'm interested to see what they do with it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 2 Author Share Posted May 2 oh shit On 10/20/2022 at 6:07 PM, Integrity said: Since I'm at 81 now (and growing!), Quote ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone) we did it boys we've officially doubled Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted May 3 Share Posted May 3 10 hours ago, Integrity said: I think this is the first time I'm posting about a game after someone else in this thread did. I think that I also did We Love Katamari before you, didn't I? But our opinions were pretty different on that one (I liked it more than you did). Regardless, I'm glad that you played this and glad you had a similar sort of experience with it to what I did. I've been spending the last decade on and off recommending it to people and having nobody listen to me, so it's good to actually see someone else playing it for once. I did see the sequel announced recently, which I was not expecting at all. Will definitely be interesting to see what they do with it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 3 Author Share Posted May 3 oh yeah you're right, good call. totally blanked that one  the SECOND time i've posted about a game after someone else did! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 12 Author Share Posted May 12 what in the fuck a new achievement just got added to dungeons of dredmor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted May 13 Share Posted May 13 40 minutes ago, Integrity said: what in the fuck a new achievement just got added to dungeons of dredmor Blink. Blink. Huh. I did not call that. Seems there is also some sort of teaser image for something or other on the Gaslamp Games website? Though who knows who even controls that at this point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 15 Author Share Posted May 15 (edited) MEGA MAN X LEGACY COLLECTION 2 (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 15/5/24.  Playtime: ~46 hours. Time to rub my grubby hands together. We're going into a section of Mega Man that everyone has told me is awful, and I couldn't be more excited. Without further ado, I present... MEGA MAN X5 (CAPCOM, 2000) I don't want to say that Mega Man X5 is a good game, because to do so would be to deeply misrepresent the game. It's a bad game. It's littered with bosses that you pop the Boss Weakness on, wait, and repeat. It's got an overwatch voice that peppers you with text boxes every minute of every stage, tearing you out of the game and telling you about tutorial shit you know. It's got a set of stages with some really shit platforming sections, including a terrible Battletoads biker segment. It's got a ton of upgrades you have to earn, randomly, including useless defensive upgrades and the ability to have more shots on screen. It's got a complete nothing invasive boss in ...I literally might have forgotten his name. Doppler? Might have been that. It's got a victory condition that literally cannot be pushed to 100% success with perfect play. It's got a drop system that rewards you for losing. On so, so many levels, X5 is a garbage game. I adored my time with Mega Man X5. It sucked, but it sucked in such a charming, aesthetic way. I never wasn't having fun with it, and I lucked out to have the colony shot work on a 35% rate, or so I'm told [far later edit: this was wrong, see the second half of the post]. Because of that, I just surged into the second half of the game with momentum. I got the Falcon Armor, which gives you flight in exchange for combat ability, patching up my own holes as a player. The Sigma stages weren't terrible, and the only one of the bosses therein that was exceptionally bad was a new take on the Yellow Devil which was maybe the worst boss in the whole of Mega Man. Sigma comes back, far stupider and bigger than ever, and really drilling home what I have learned to like about Sigma. Wily just kept coming back as Wily, with all the same tricks and all the same forms. Sigma keeps dying and keeps getting stupider and his comebacks keep getting more preposterous. It's awesome. Mega Man 8 was cringe; Mega Man X5 is stupid as hell and rolling in it like a pig in shit. I'm deeply inclined to love it for that, despite all of it that sucks. MEGA MAN X6 (CAPCOM, 2001) Ah, there's the good shit. Mega Man X6 is an absolute trainwreck, and not even a fun one like X5 was. X6's contribution to the formula is the Nightmare system: every time you leave a stage, a few other stages get "infected" with the corresponding Nightmare effect from the stage you just left. It's fixed which stages get infected, though, which leads to an odd loophole: if the stage you want to go to is infected, you can just enter a different stage you've completed and immediately leave to trigger that infection. This is a weird and bad way to handle the "stages change based on stages you did" thing that other games have tried, but it's forgivable on account of the system's other sin: some of these effects just suck incredibly hard. The highlights include infinite spawning ghost enemies who go for collision damage and mess up your platforming, and especially one that limits your vision to a moving polygon that takes up about a third of the screen. It's a system that might absolutely fuck over someone trying to play the game fresh, and which can be 100% avoided by a player with any foreknowledge. It's Mega Man X6 summarized. What really lets X6 down, though, is its combat loop. X and Zero have been gently retooled, both for the worse, from their previous incarnations, and hitboxes just feel generally off in a way that I never really nailed down. The biggest problem, though, comes from Zero himself: his Z-Buster default ranged attack does a lot of damage. This sucks tremendously because, combined with the depowering of the Z-Saber against bosses and a significant increase in the difficulty of the platforming discouraging picking X, means that almost every boss falls into exactly the same strategy. If they're on the ground, you spam Z-Buster until they are dead. If they're in the air, you chip with jumping Z-Saber slashes until they go onto the ground, at which point your effective DPS triples or so. Combine this with a really poorly thought-out part dropping and grinding rank up system that I don't even want to get into because it's, like, the fifth worst thing about X6, and Route One of Z-Buster becomes increasingly attractive. This all ties together in the Gate (this game's Sigma [this series' Wily]) stages. Gate 2 might be one of the worst endgame stages in these games, combining spongy multi-phase enemies with precision miss-and-you-hit-spikes platforming, sometimes in the same screen. The bosses either - or both! - of have too much health and strange gimmicks to even be able to cause reliable damage to them. The inevitable boss rush is set up almost as vertically as possible, with the refills and exit at the very top of a shaft of portals, and ends up just easy enough that I pondered just doing it a second time to refill my energy tanks for the final boss after I went all-in and choked. The true final boss, after you chew through Gate and the boss rush, is - surprise! - Sigma again, and while Sigma's still amusing the hell out of me, it's a really shit fight. The first phase includes such attacks as "do nothing" and "fire a nearly undodgable projectile with no warning". On my first run, he did nothing but spam the latter and I went into the second phase on a third of a health bar despite actively trying to dodge; on my victorious run, I literally stood in front of him and shot him repeatedly with the Z-Buster while he did nothing but shuffle slowly at me and killed him without taking damage. His second phase has exactly the same issue: his attacks include a screen clearing laser, an easy to dodge attack that gives obscene punish windows, and just spamming the hell out of reinforcements that take a little bit too much hitting to kill. My first run involved him spamming the difficult to punish attacks and reinforcements on reinforcements; my victorious run had him use the long punish window attack back to back and I just won the DPS race against him instead of dodging significantly. What a fucking fart of a game. MEGA MAN X7 (CAPCOM, 2003) Oh HELL yeah. This is the good bad shit. Mega Man X7 was a lurching, horrid step forward into the third dimension, and the series did not pull it off with any grace whatsoever. It does absolutely everything wrong: it looks like shit, it plays like ass, it's got possibly the single worst UX I've seen in a game to date, and it's got loads of unskippable (terrible, naturally) voice acting to exposit at you. The game constantly fights any attempt to enjoy it. Upgrades remain in the form of rescuable hostages in every mission, but there's only enough upgrades in a full run to upgrade about 1.5 of your three guys. You can't even play as Mega Man X, in a Mega Man X game, until about the midpoint of the game. The bosses are universally spongy with simple patterns, and they'll still land constant hits thanks to the terrible camera and controls. It's awesome. It's a perfect encapsulation of how many ways transitioning to 3D can completely flop. Despite all that, I didn't hate my time with X7. Out of the eight robot master stages, I actively enjoyed about two of them. The Sigma stages are reasonably unobtrusive, obligatory boss rush aside. I really liked some things the game did, for instance that you now bring two out of the three available characters and can hotswap between them with a pull of L2, creating several situations (even bosses) where I'd almost fluidly swap between X and Zero to use their peculiarities to solve problems. When X7 worked, it was actually capable of being reasonably fun, and it worked just often enough for me to balk at saying I hated it. It's certainly a relic of its time, but in that derogatory way where it's actually a relic of a time two or three years before it came out, as a euphemistic way to say it's bad. MEGA MAN X8 (CAPCOM, 2004) 3D movement didn't last long. Mega Man X8 returns to the tried-and-true 2D gameplay of six of the previous seven games (but now with 3D graphics) and it all comes together to create a deeply mixed bag. I'm the most conflicted about X8 that I've been about any Mega Man so far, and I think on aggregate it balances to the negative. Here's the breakdown. The good of it is that the game mostly controls as well as it has since, well, ever. Outside of a few edge cases of dropped inputs or wonky hitboxes, the Core Loop of playing Zero (in particular) and to a lesser extent X feels great, and the game preserves the partner-swap mechanic of X7. Feedback on hits is clear, both enemies and you die fairly quickly, and Zero retains his variety of weaponry from X7 in addition to the techniques to create a lot of gameplay variety. I hardly used the gunners, they were option-swaps like the bow in Nioh or a bonus health bar when I was struggling. Bosses rarely feel unfair, and honestly feel a bit undertuned for the level of kit you've got at this point in the franchise. It's easy to see how the gameplay of X8 could leave someone with the ashen taste of needing More of it and lead them to, say, develop 20XX. The bad of it is that the map design fucking flops, and I mean that in the sincerest way possible. X8's robot master stages hover around the average quality of a Wily stage for sheer dickheadedness, and I can confidently say that I enjoyed going through approximately zero of them. The least onerous of them, Metal Valley, was only because it was a complete nothing burger. That was the height of X8. The Sigma stages not only had a paucity of Sigma in them, they have some utterly psychotic spike layouts - including two where you can feasibly die on screen transition like it's 1992 again - but blessedly only last no time at all. The plot's bad, but not as party shit as X7. The game's progression systems are... well, left for the achievements section. Worst of all, to compensate for having an entire character (Axl) based around rapid firing, bosses no longer have traditional i-frames, but become randomly invincible to damage for random (and huge) amounts of time after you do certain packets of damage to them. It turns the bosses into completely inorganic dodge-and-punish fights, because you cannot damage them during the non-punish windows. Every single thing that isn't the core jump-n-bust loop of playing Zero & X completely lets X8 down. It's frustrating as hell. X8's dumbest and most regressive random own goal is the way it handled lives. I have a contentious relationship with lives in the Mega Men, and generally find the games at their most enjoyable when lives are largely ignorable. X8 is the exact opposite of this. You start with two Retry Chips, which are lives, and none exist as pickups in any stage or drops from any mob. If you burn through all of your Retry Chips, there is no Continue option. You must exit to the stage select, go through the menus, and pick the stage to drop into again. You can buy up to three more extra lives (for a total of five chips or six deaths, because this thankfully isn't Sonic Mania) in the shop, but this doesn't increase your maximum, it just adds a buffer that you have to rebuy anytime you lose it, using the same money you're scavenging for upgrades. Thus, if you're dying and want to get through stages, you're spending the money that you would be using buying things to make you not die, or you're accepting your fate and game overing a bunch and restarting hellish stages. At least your two default Retry Chips are refunded upon game overing... except in Hard difficulty, where you have to manually buy every single life you want from the shop. Awesome design, lads. THE ACHIEVEMENTS Mega Man Legacy Collection Volume 2 deviates from the previous Legacy Collections in that each game has a significant amount of extra work to be done that you're not reasonably going to get on the first play. As such, let's iterate back through the games and go over some of the more notable, since I wrote all those above paragraphs right after finishing their respective games rather than after getting all their achievements. MEGA MAN X5 I mentioned in the main part of the post that X5 has victory conditions that cannot be guaranteed no matter how perfectly you play, and that ties into the meat of replaying X5. Loosely, the story can diverge at two points: how the colony is handled and how the ending is handled. Four of the robot masters hold parts for a gun and four for a spaceship you can crash into a colony on track to hit Earth; the gun goes from 1/16 to 1/8 chance of working as you gather parts and the shuttle goes from 1/8 to 3/4. If the gun is fired and fails to kill the colony, the spaceship plan can be implemented. If either succeeds, you land on the "good" route and can go to the Sigma stages as soon as you like, ignoring any remaining robot masters. If both fail, you land on the "bad" route, Zero dies for real, and the same thing happens with the Sigma stages. Interestingly, this does mean that you can load into a fresh save, clear the intro stage, fire off both weapons (hit or miss), and then leap straight into the Sigma stages naked as the day you were born. Anyhow, the three endings are to kill Sigma on the "good" route with X and with Zero for two different endings and then to kill Sigma on the "bad" route with X, since Zero is dead for real. This isn't too difficult to do: just reload a completed save to kill Sigma with the other guy, then start up a new game with Rookie Hunter on and fire both weapons to hopeful-failure then run the Sigma stages, a process which takes maybe an hour total. Note that the dice roll on the weapon deployment is set on save, so if one of the weapons does kill the colony, you have to reload and then go into a stage and Game Over out of it to save again to reroll. A little annoying, but not too bad. That's not X5's only point of achievement friction, though. X5's Parts system is unnecessarily complicated but easy to summarize. Every boss you beat gives you the option of a special weapon and a life upgrade, or a special weapon and a weapon energy upgrade. Every boss also has a level associated with it, and this level goes up the closer the colony gets to destroying Earth. That's represented as an hours to doomsday counter and decrements by 1 (from a start point of 16) every time you return to stage select, whether you succeed or fail at a stage. Crucial to this is the interaction of those two systems: once bosses are level 8, they begin to offer mystery parts as part of both upgrade packages. These mystery parts are basically the worst upgrade system possible: you choose blindly and you don't even know what you're going to get until you've completed two more stages after choosing, which is doubly insane when I add that some bosses offer an X-exclusive and a Zero-exclusive part as their two options. Hope you didn't want to both get health upgrades and Zero's sword upgrades! To make things even funnier, the life/weapon energy upgrades you get also have a creation time of one stage, and get applied only to the guy you use to beat the stage they're created in, not the guy who actually got the part or, you know, both. It's a tremendously stupid system. Anyhow, the achievement is to get eight of these parts. There's eight bosses, eight binary decisions, and it doesn't matter which way you cleave on each. Remember the levels, though? Boss levels are determined by time remaining and your Hunter Rank, which goes up or down depending on how you do in stages. Zero's starts higher than X's, so the only way to get these eight parts is to start a new file, get to stage selection, and then go get five game overs (returning to stage select each time) to manually wind the doomsday clock down to 11 hours remaining, then go through all the stages as Zero. To make things even funnier and more esoteric, you have to do all these suicides as X, because gaming over and quitting out can decrease your Hunter Rank, so if you do it as Zero, you have a chance to get demoted and then you'll have to burn extra clock to get boss levels high enough to get the parts. Then, at the end of it, you still have to enter into and quit out of (or just re-beat) two more stages to finish the production times of the parts. It's absolutely baffling. I am in awe. It's almost nothing compared to that, but also there's a throwback sequence to the Quick Man lasers in Sigma Stage 1 that you have to beat without using the time stop and without having Rookie Hunter mode on. A completed save won't let you go back to Sigma 1, but at least this dovetails nicely onto the file where you farm all the parts. I'm just mentioning it because the Quick Man lasers fucking sucked originally and they're even worse here because you can latch onto walls if you hug them too closely, which all but guarantees your death to a laser. MEGA MAN X6 Weirdly, considering what's bracketing it, this one isn't a pain at all. All you need to do is get a kill with each armor type (including the secret Zero armor only unlockable via cheat code), level up a bunch, and go to Sigma's stages after beating all eight robot masters - X6 also has a way to go to the endgame early. Chances are pretty good you get everything except the Black Zero kill and one other achievement in your first run. The other achievement is to see all eight nightmare effects, which just means going back to a completed save and loading into red stages, finding the nightmare, and quitting the stage until you have seen them all. Easy, luckily, given how little I wanted to play more X6. MEGA MAN X7 Here's some context before going into this. Every Legacy Collection shares an achievement for beating each game, an achievement for beating all games, and then various achievements related to individual games or challenge modes. Generally, the achievements get rarer as the games go in sequence; more folks have the achievement for beating Mega Man 1 than do for Mega Man 2, and more for 2 than for 3, etc. Legacy Collection 2 had a slight exception where a few more folks have the achievement for 10 than do 9, and X Collection 1 had the games go 1 > 4 > 2 > 3. X Collection 1 had achievements for individual games, and the bottom echelon of achievements is primarily challenge mode-based with a smattering of pain in the ass achievements from all three non-1 games. Still, four of the bottom five achievements are challenge based, with the only exception being to perfectly stealth Magna Centipede's stage at fourth from rarest. The achievement for just beating Mega Man X7 at all is in the lower half of the pack's 52 achievements. The achievement for beating X7 without Rookie Hunter mode is next in rarity to the achievement for getting all three of X5's endings. Seven of the rarest eight achievements in the entire pack are exclusively from Mega Man X7. To put it another way, the bottom ten - 20% of the pack's total achievements - are seven achievements from X7, reduxes of the shoot the staff credits and listen to the secret music track achievements from X Collection 1, and a single achievement from X8 that requires either NG+ or a cheat code to unlock secret characters which you then need to spend screws to buy in the shop. All these achievements demand is basically for you to be comprehensive. Three of them are to kill one enemy with each one of X, Zero, and Axl's special weapons, which is trivial to accomplish but many don't on account of these weapons being quite poor overall and, in Zero's case, just straight up not telling you that his parry is a counterattack when the enemy gets close. The fourth asks you, innocuously, to use Axl's special gun to transform him into 5 different enemies. Axl's special gun has to charge up to do about as much damage as a regular shot and must get the killing blow on an enemy to turn them into a pickup to be... uh, picked up. Picking up the pickup, for most enemies, gives Axl a temporary buff or some restoration. For exactly five enemy types in the game, many of them only appearing in one stage apiece, they'll drop a big pickup that temporarily turns Axl into that guy. Find all of them. The last two are the buttblasters of the pack: one tedious, the other tedious and also finicky. First up is to listen to all of Alia's tutorial calls. These are slow and don't usually give any good information, but since the stages are pretty linear, it's not difficult to get them all as long as you just hit R3 every time she barks at you, and progress carries between saves or into NG+. The other one is to rescue all of the Reploids in the game. Each of the eight robot master stages has sixteen guys scattered around as collectibles and you gotta catch 'em all, which doesn't sound too bad on the face of it, so let me add some context. First, they can die. If an enemy projectile (not yours at least) or an enemy itself collides with the guy, they die forever for that save. Leaving the stage doesn't count, you have to manually perform a hard reload to before the stage was entered to resurrect them and try again. Second, this game has PS2-ass load distances, because it was made for the PS2. This is to your benefit one time, as you can sprint offscren to deload a guy who is in a bomb's blast radius and then double back to pick them back up. More often than that, you'll go forward and see a guy load in on the edge of your sphere of influence and, if you don't dive him instantly, he'll die on account of the enemy who is set to spawn behind him and shoot through him at you. Some of them are just in crappy places, like over pits or lava or what have you, and a handful require Axl to do some copy shit to get to them. Unlike the calls, all of these must be accumulated on a single file. The good news is that X7 has NG+, making it a lot easier, but it's a massive chore and you're constantly running the risk of having to reset a whole stage because one guy ate a stray bullet. MEGA MAN X8 I said in the writeup part that "everything" besides the core gameplay loop betrays X8's core gameplay loop, and I meant everything. There's a few trivial achievements, for using the various Giga Strikes for X and for fighting and beating the genuinely pretty funny Cut Man cameo, and the rest suck. All of the rest are based around the upgrade system. Your shop in X8 takes metals, which drop in 1, 5, and 50 variants, as well as a 3,000 special one for the first time you beat each robot master. For a quick reference, I scrounged probably 50,000 metals over the course of my entire first clear of the campaign including reclears. Reclears happen because each stage, instead of having the unlockable parts from previous games, has Rare Metal pickups that unlock the ability to purchase new things from the shop. This is already the worst way to handle things, in my opinion, and it's exacerbated by the fact that a good chunk of these require specific characters, require a specific other upgrade, or require a specific upgrade from a different rare metal gained in the same stage. There's no feasible way to get them all in a single run, even if you know where they all are. Getting all of them only gives you the right to spend your cash money on buying them in the shop, and... They cost. A lot. Remember that 50,000 figure? One of the upgrades is to give you a handful (24) of metals every time you take a few steps. I weighted down my left arrow, stepped on a conveyor belt, and went to bed at 2330. I woke up around 0630, quit out with my 134,000 extra metals (nearly 3x what I'd earned legitimately), and that was only barely enough for all the normal upgrades for all three of my guys. I say "normal" upgrades because there are, in fact, abnormal upgrades, and it turns out X8 is the only game that doesn't just require reclears, but requires NG+ to finish out. Let's go through these one by one. You can choose one of three navigators every time you pick a stage - Palette tends to give you hints on rare metals and hidden paths, the one I remember literally nothing about tends to give you hints on boss weaknesses, and Alia returning from the previous games is the balanced one. I actually like the navigator system in theory, though X8 fucking bungles it in practice, but that's not the point. After clearing the game, whichever navigator you used the most will be purchasable from the shop as a bonus character for 40,000 metals. Completing four stages with her as one of your characters will unlock one of the other two, and completing four stages with the next her will unlock the last one. There is an achievement for beating a stage with each of the navigators, so add 120,000 more metals onto that tally. RARE AFTER THE FACT EDIT: I forgot that I'd left that section in from the prewrite, which is bad because it's just a lie. You unlock the next navigator by using her as a navigator in four stages in NG+, not using the previous navigator as a character. In other words, if you used Alia most on NG, you cannot use her in NG+ if you want the other two; you have to run four stages with some pair of your usual boys and Palette as your navigator to unlock her, and then run four stages with Layer as your navigator to unlock her. Upgrading all your guys to maximum power is one of the achievements, obviously, but you cannot do this in NG. You can upgrade X and Axl to 100%, but you can only upgrade Zero to 95%. Zero's final upgrade, the Sigma Blade, is only unlocked by having Zero upgraded to 95% before beating the game, whereupon the Sigma Blade will become purchasable in NG+ for another 26,000 metals. This isn't the only thing to pay attention to on NG, either; X, Axl, and Zero all have super forms that are unlockable. Zero's is unlocked by getting 100% power for him, meaning buying the Sigma Blade. X's is unlocked by having him be 100% upgraded before you beat the game. Axl's is unlocked by having him land the killing blow on the final boss's final form. None of this is hinted at in-game, even obliquely. Finally is Vile. Dumbass Boba Fett shows back up in this game, for some reason, fuck it. He shows up randomly, though, and overwrites a given room of each stage if he decides to show up. Each time you restart a stage thanks to running out of Retry Chips, it rerolls the dice to see if Vile will invade or not. For another achievement, you must have Vile invade four times across the eight stages in total. This is a gentle lie; Vile will only invade three times, and then after you beat Sigma 1, you have to go back to the tutorial stage to find Vile there before you go on, and you can fight him one final time. It's insane logic, but there it is. It should be noted that for those who do not possess my specific brain worms, many of these can be cheated through, well, cheat codes. I did not employ any of them, because I would not let X8 be the one game that drove me to cheating. Did I like the game far less for it? Yeah. THE REST Cleanup for the game was the same as in X Legacy Collection 1. I don't mean "similar to", mind. I mean "the same as". Busywork of getting the secret wallpaper and track and shooting through the credits, and X Challenge is back. Once again, I don't mean in the Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 way of challenges being back, I mean X Challenge is back. The 27 stages are organized into 1-1, 1-2, 1-3; 2-1, 2-2, 2-3; etc. Every -1 and -2 stage is exactly the same as it was in X Legacy Collection 1. Only the -3 stages are different, and they're still pulling from largely the same pool of bosses. It was already running thin by the end of the 27 stages in X Legacy Collection 1; redoing 18 of those for 9 new ones that are not notably different was torturous. X7 and X8 contribute absolutely nothing to this content. THE END This one is being posted without a definite final time because I'm done with gameplay. All I need is the metal count, a hundred thousand farmed overnight again in X8, to finish it out. It's the same deal as the THPS1+2 remake. It's absolutely fucking insane that this has happened in a Mega Man game, of all things, but here I am. I want to stress for the following ranking that I am ranking them based entirely off of the experience of beating the game, and nothing to do with achievements or challenges, because if I took that into account, X8 would be far off the bottom. 11 >>> X4-0 > 4 > X2 > X1 > 9 > X5 > 7 > 6 > 2 > 10 > X4-X > X7 > X8 > 5 > X3 > 8 > 1 > & Bass > 3 > X6 Edited Saturday at 07:35 PM by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zapp Branniglenn Posted May 15 Share Posted May 15 I have to say that X7 was a serious delight and palette cleanser for me after 6. The dialogue scenes have stuck with me for years as a highlight among my many memories of Mega Man X. I'm sorry to hear about its Reploid Rescue achievement. I definitely remember some of them would die mysteriously to an offscreen enemy before I could assess the situation. And having to restart the entire mission to account for awful level design is no fun. Some of them should have stayed home and played with their toasters  Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 15 Author Share Posted May 15 6 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said: I have to say that X7 was a serious delight and palette cleanser for me after 6. The dialogue scenes have stuck with me for years as a highlight among my many memories of Mega Man X. I'm sorry to hear about its Reploid Rescue achievement. I definitely remember some of them would die mysteriously to an offscreen enemy before I could assess the situation. And having to restart the entire mission to account for awful level design is no fun. Some of them should have stayed home and played with their toasters genuinely i warmed to x7 on the replay for achievements far more than i did for basically any other game. it's not a good game, and i think it's still a bad game, but it's not like a dirge of cerberus bad game. it's a regular bad game. it's still fun, in the way of its era, which is not a great thing to say. i liked x7, somehow, but it still sucked, you know? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted May 15 Author Share Posted May 15 update: lol the first night i idled the metal grind i was accidentally using the speedboosted X armor. the second night i got over 400k metals Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord_Brand Posted Saturday at 09:36 AM Share Posted Saturday at 09:36 AM I actually like X6 more than either X5 or X7. X6 was far less stressful to play through than X5 because of the removal of the time limit, and though the way they handled Injured Reploids and Parts was not ideal, I'll still take X6's approach over those of X5 or X7. I like the idea of Injured Reploids giving you rewards for rescuing them, I would just make them effectively invincible like the X5 Reploids. I describe X8 as "Plays well, looks ugly." I hated the design change for most of the characters barring Alia, and though I think mixing and matching armor parts is a cool idea, I do not care for how they presented it in X8 proper. Easily X's ugliest armor to date. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted Sunday at 03:28 PM Author Share Posted Sunday at 03:28 PM (edited) FINAL FANTASY VIII (SQUARE, 1999) Finished: 19/5/24. Playtime: 123.3 hours. Onwards and upwards, fellas. Starkly below even my limited experience with 7, being Just Most Of Midgar, my prior experience with 8 amounted to a demo disc where, as I recall, you got to explore Balamb Garden and go into the Fire Caverns to do the tutorial dungeon and that was it. Despite a complete lack of experience, I've always had a little bit of a soft spot for Final Fantasy 8, and I've never been sure why. Squall in Kingdom Hearts was cool, sure, but that was my only concrete experience with the game since the new millennium, and my feelings have always been a lot more vibes-based than just "cool guy from game I liked". I was excited going into this one. And lemme tell you what? Disc 1 of Final Fantasy 8 is kind of a stinker. The plot's slow to get going (but does have the Charlie Don't Surf amphibious assault from Modern Warfare like seven years early, bafflingly), but the real fault lies in the game's systems. Junctioning and Guardian Forces never stop being a pain in the ass, and the game is terrible at communicating how to use them, and most guides are terrible at communicating how they work, and you get basically the entire thing dumped on you in Minute Five of the game. Making things worse, your stats are directly tied to how many copies of a spell you have junctioned to them, which means that your stat growth is dependent on how much time you're willing to invest into spamming Draw on trash mobs to get 100 of a new spell for junctioning. The startup cost into the system, even once you get over the insane startup cost of figuring out how the fuck it works, is absolutely unreasonable, and made all the worse by the fact that you do get tools to speed it up significantly long after you've been forced to partake in the Draw->Stock spam loop. These compounding issues are further compounded by the fact that Final Fantasy 8 scales to you. Leveling carelessly, while not as bad as future failures to implement this like Oblivion, can make the game actively harder for you if you're not paying attention. Your GFs even have growth boosts deep into their skill trees, which implies that you really want to level up your GFs without leveling up your guys (this is tedious but possible) to get the growth boosts before you even start leveling up your guys. 8 is even slightly built around this, as boss encounters don't even give any experience, only AP for your GFs. I strongly feel like the game should have just committed hard to not having experience or levels in the traditional sense, because the balancing act it walks between traditional progression (levels, a completely vestigial gear system) and its own wild ideas (GFs, Junctioning) fails to stick the landing on either side and creates a game that's immensely lopsided to even figure out how you want to proceed through. What's truly weird, though, is what happens around the end of Disc 1 out of 4. Having sunk in the hours of Drawing and grinding Triple Triad according to a guide (we'll get to that later), a tipping point happens where there kind of isn't gameplay left. ENC-NONE ensures that you never fight random encounters again, and the rare forced trash fights can be turned to stone with Break for zero experience, and bosses never give experience. Since you're low level but junctioning shit like Flare and Curaga into your stats, they're absolutely colossal compared to the enemies - we're talking enemies hitting for double-digits into 3,000+ health at this point. At the odd point where you do have to Draw more magic, you're getting piles of 9-12 instead of piles of 2-3, making counting to 100 far faster. The game, unironically, benefits for this quite a lot. This is also when Final Fantasy 8 goes completely bugfuck nuts. I'm used to being told by various people, even people I trust, to totally trust them bro this story is INSANE, and then it's invariably just like quirky shonen anime stuff. Not to disparage it, for sure, but stuff like Jojo's isn't actually particularly insane or difficult to follow, more that it's absurd and revels in that. There's a place for that, that's fine. Final Fantasy 8 is genuinely completely insane, and it plays that fact close to the chest until the Disc 1 finale and then it never lets up until the end of the game. Going into Final Fantasy 8 with the intent to understand its events literally is, I think, a losing proposition. It's a character drama first and foremost, with the plot mostly serving to give dramatic situations for the characters to be in so that you can see them react and adapt to those situations. It's a dramatic version of Seinfeld more than anything else. Critically, this means that Final Fantasy 8 is forced to sink or swim based entirely on the charisma of its core cast, and fortunately this might be my single favorite party in a Final Fantasy, 1-14 (excluding 9, haven't played it). This is the story of the six dumbest boys alive, and I'd kill for five of them but despite the snub I still like Quistis well enough. Squall in particular has convinced me that the online discourse about Final Fantasy 8 and its cast that was born decades ago must have been shaped entirely by guys who played only Disc 1 and then gave up on the game. There's so much more to these idiots than I ever see people talk about, but considering how badly the game puts its worst foot forward, can I really be surprised? That said, I'm hardly touching on the supporting cast - Seifer and Laguna are dangerously close to topping my lists of favorite Final Fantasy characters overall, let alone just from this game, and the rest of the secondary characters put in the work needed to buoy them. Bafflingly, from the time you would put in Disc 2 onwards, Final Fantasy 8 just continues to improve. That startup cost to get into the game's systems was unreasonable and remains unreasonable, but there is a payoff to it. The Battle of the Gardens might be my single favorite sequence in a Final Fantasy to date, even including the stuff I remember from games after this. The final dungeon takes the ideas put out by Kefka's tower in 6 and expands on them hugely, making a tremendous pain in the ass platforming puzzle party swapping dungeon that I would have absolutely reveled in as a kid had I got there. Even as an adult, old stalwart ENC-NONE ensured that it was only a little tedious and not the worst thing possible. The ending, whew, hits like a truck. It's easy to forget the initial bad times as Final Fantasy 8 sprints to its conclusion, a runaway train with absolutely no interest in the concept of brakes. So, somehow, after a wretched start, I ended up loving Final Fantasy 8. It's gone to the top of the list so far, beating out even 5 although I have no interest in replaying it, and might even end up smacking down another old chart-topper like 12 by the time we're done. Time will tell. Absolute comeback of the century, this one. The achievements, now, are what truly lets Final Fantasy 8 down. First things first: there is no feasible way to 100% this game without following a step-by-step guide. There are five different sets of magazines to collect all of, in addition to seventeen Guardian Forces and one hundred and ten trading cards, many of each of which are permanently missable. There are also two multi-disc-spanning sidequests that you could feasibly do without a guide, and which I don't think you can lock yourself out of, but I'm not sure about that one. Then you also have to learn all the Blue Magic in the game, including one that requires a certain GF to refine a full stack of 100 of a certain item that can only be stolen from a certain lategame enemy. It's a mess. The truest mess of all, though, is Contrived Finish. Remember how I said the game scales to you? Contrived Finish asks you to beat the game without Squall ever leveling up, and this is why the gameplay element of Final Fantasy 8 suddenly melted towards the end of Disc 1. This involves running away from enemies until you've killed enough bosses to get the Card ability (which turns a low-health enemy into a trading card), as Carded enemies give AP (for GFs) but no experience. With that, you can farm GF abilities up, and GF abilities include Refines, which let you turn items into other items or into magic you can assign to party members. Then you go and play hours of Triple Triad, the card game, because you need cards to refine into certain magics to get your stats up, since you're not leveling. It creates an even more absurd earlygame time sink, but I think it pays off by smoothing out the latter half of the game to let the story take the spotlight more. With a guide, this honestly wasn't the worst thing to do, but I have no idea how one would do it without. That hundred and ten trading cards is another sticking point. Triple Triad debuts here, later to be reused for Final Fantasy 14. It's a simple 3x3 grid where you and the opponent take turns playing one card each, where the cards have numbers on them and can be flipped by bigger cards adjacent to them. It's not a hard game, but it comes with a few caveats. First, that higher level cards (10 levels of card exist) have higher number totals, so your initial deck is completely ineffective against everyone around you, leading to yet another indefensible startup cost. Second, that NPCs play random cards, and many rare cards are held only by a single NPC and might not even be played by them to be stolen after victory in any given round. Third, you have to lose certain cards to the Card Queen to have other cards show up in the seeding pool at other specific NPCs, at which point you have to go win your cards back. Fourth and final, the infamous Rules. After you leave your starting island, Triple Triad begins to have regional rules (governing things like combos or special cases like "1 loses to everything but trumps Ace"), and these can get absolutely brutal. Similar in spirit to leveling carelessly through the game making it harder, if you just play Triple Triad thoughtlessly and see the forbidden text "[Random] has spread throughout the region", you've fucked up badly. Despite all that, with a guide in hand and the fortitude to sink about 6 hours of dummy grinding Draw and Triple Triad in at the very beginning, Final Fantasy 8 wasn't that hard to slug through. 64 hours absolutely places it above the time taken to 100% any of the 2D ones, but would absolutely place it in the lower half by the time all's said and done. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Ah. You've noticed the problem with that number? Let's, uh, finish the story. There's still two sets of achievements left: Chocobo World and, well, the grind. Chocobo World is a complete nothing burger. It was released for the PocketStation (imagine a PSX memory card crossed with a Tamagotchi) in Japan only, and is basically just a proto-idle game where your Chocobo walks through the world, gets into fights, and loots things that you can send to your main save. It's packed into Final Fantasy 8's original Steam release, but not into the Remaster, for whatever reason. The good news is that you can run it almost completely in the background while doing anything else; the bad news is that the achievement is to max out your little guy's level, which takes roughly five days of nothing. If you do choose to interact, the progression goes significantly faster ("only" two-digits of hours), but it's quite literally one-button gameplay. The final set of achievements are Maximum Gil and 10000 Kills. Maximum Gil, like 7 before it, requires you to possess 99,999,999 gil at any one time. This game's moneymaking loop is even more straightforward: if you buy cottages and tents with Tonberry's discount, then refine them into megapotions, the result sells for more than you paid. It's an hour or two-long menu tax grind, but that's all it is. 10000 Kills is the real meat of the postgame. For reference, I exited the entire main story of the game, 64 hours in, with 301 kills. I did not miss a digit when typing that out. A proper clear of the game is still going to be fewer than a thousand kills, evidenced by fewer than half the people with "beat the game" having "get 1000 kills". Note, further, that this is a per-file count - you can't just get this by being a Final Fantasy 8 superfan and beating the game like thirteen times, you have to sit down on a single file and get those numbers up to ten thousand. Through some clever setups, I managed to get an autobattle grind loop going after beating the game and getting everything else. The result from that was the playtime you see at the top of this post. There's a save editor, if you choose to follow in my footsteps. Use it. Or, better yet, Final Fantasy VIII Remastered actually strips out every single achievement that's gotten its own paragraph in the latter part of this post, lacking all of Contrived Finish, all cards, Chocobo World, Maximum Gil, and 10000 Kills. Just play that instead. Edited Sunday at 03:32 PM by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted Sunday at 03:38 PM Author Share Posted Sunday at 03:38 PM i just realized it's a little weird that there are two different games on this page where i finished the game 100% and then had to go grind out, precisely, ten thousand kills  huh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zapp Branniglenn Posted Sunday at 05:39 PM Share Posted Sunday at 05:39 PM I feel like the most Seinfeld moment is when the party stops to sit in a desolate playground. Irvine delivers the big reveal: All our party members are orphans - from the Same Orphanage. And he was too embarrassed to speak up because he assumed they remembered each other but not him. He feared the crushing embarrassment of being the least memorable dude at the orphanage so he kept it to himself. And it was just his own ego/insecurities that kept him from discovering the real reasons for his friends' memory loss. We thought he was Kramer, but he was actually the George of the group. Anyways thank you FF8 for having the courage to say No to everyone in the Writers Room that's trying to politely talk you down from each scene. Enjoy your time in hell for inventing the High School RPG sub genre. This IS a Fire Emblem forum so someone has to stick up for the home team. 1 hour ago, Integrity said: i just realized it's a little weird that there are two different games on this page where i finished the game 100% and then had to go grind out, precisely, ten thousand kills Just be grateful you're not marathoning Warhammer 40K games back to back, getting 40000 kills in each. Sorry to hear about FF8's Not-Remastered achievement list. Perhaps the more efficient route through would be to do your No Level Ups run on a separate, second playthrough so you could AP grind more naturally in the 100% playthrough. I don't remember the mechanics of FF8 well enough to accurately guess if that had been more efficient. Incidentally I love that Beating the Game without Leveling Up is an achievement in the first place. Whoever came up with these challenges is a total dork for understanding the game so well, whereas in most achievement lists you'd swear whoever came up with these definitely hasn't done all this junk themselves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted Sunday at 07:08 PM Author Share Posted Sunday at 07:08 PM (edited) 1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said: I feel like the most Seinfeld moment is when the party stops to sit in a desolate playground. Irvine delivers the big reveal: All our party members are orphans - from the Same Orphanage. And he was too embarrassed to speak up because he assumed they remembered each other but not him. He feared the crushing embarrassment of being the least memorable dude at the orphanage so he kept it to himself. And it was just his own ego/insecurities that kept him from discovering the real reasons for his friends' memory loss. We thought he was Kramer, but he was actually the George of the group. my favorite part of that moment (which was honestly a good scene) was irvine picking up the basketball and completely fucking shanking his shot  1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said: Just be grateful you're not marathoning Warhammer 40K games back to back, getting 40000 kills in each. i actually have a wh40k game on the EDGE of being posted, i'm level 16/20 in the last stand in dawn of war 2 but nobody plays it anymore and my crew who i have roped into playing it with me is 1) only sporadically available 2) also my helldivers 2 crew and that game kinda took over  e: 1 hour ago, Zapp Branniglenn said: Sorry to hear about FF8's Not-Remastered achievement list. Perhaps the more efficient route through would be to do your No Level Ups run on a separate, second playthrough so you could AP grind more naturally in the 100% playthrough. I don't remember the mechanics of FF8 well enough to accurately guess if that had been more efficient. Incidentally I love that Beating the Game without Leveling Up is an achievement in the first place. Whoever came up with these challenges is a total dork for understanding the game so well, whereas in most achievement lists you'd swear whoever came up with these definitely hasn't done all this junk themselves. oh god no i did this the best way possible. you don't actually need any AP for the achievements at all, and the only leveling-related achievement besides Do Not Level is to get to level 100, which i think rinoa did about 2000 kills into the 10000 i needed Edited Sunday at 07:12 PM by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted Monday at 12:23 AM Share Posted Monday at 12:23 AM 8 hours ago, Integrity said: FINAL FANTASY VIII (SQUARE, 1999) Finished: 19/5/24. Playtime: 123.3 hours. I read through this entire post reading GF as girlfriend, which was at least moderately hilarious. I was dreading having to google "final fantasy gf" to try and see what it actually meant, but then I went back and read the start of your post again and got an actual answer. That is all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Revier Posted Monday at 03:00 AM Share Posted Monday at 03:00 AM GF is certainly a weird abbreviation for them, not sure why they didn't just go with Espers or Summons or whatever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord_Brand Posted Monday at 07:53 AM Share Posted Monday at 07:53 AM (edited) Maybe the GFs you'll be using most often are the ones fans wouldn't mind having as a GF in real life? :P Edited Monday at 10:56 PM by Lord_Brand Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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