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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
tl;dr - Booted up the game expecting the Second Coming of Christ. He didn't show up. Dismay ensues.
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Developer: ATLUS
I started Metaphor: ReFantazio back in December, playing it pretty consistently through the holiday season (see posts one, two, three). My progress slowed way down after the new year, but I finally ended up finishing it on (2026-02-09). My "game clear" save clocks in at 89 hours, but I suspect my actual playtime is closer to 110 since I don't think the game tracks time when you game over, or otherwise reload a save.
My Playthrough
Act I: Woe Is Expectation
I was excited to start Metaphor: ReFantazio. Passively absorbing the excitement of Atlus fans over the years built up the developer as one of the best JRPG studios out there. Their UI design is legendary, they have great art direction, they go the extra mile with anime cutscenes, and their storytelling seems to really connect with their fans. My interest was piqued after Metaphor: ReFantazio released to critical acclaim, applying their Persona formula to a mature fantasy setting that I found more compelling.
Its incipit is strong: the inciting regicide whet my appetite for the mysteries surrounding the crime, the perpetrator, and politics. Mysteries the game immediately zooms out from, using a fourth wall break to frame game through its central question: "Is fantasy limited to the confines of imagination?". Just a couple minutes with Metaphor: ReFantazio was already showing a deftness that I don't typically see in JRPG storytelling. Which made me excited at the thought of a JRPG that would deliver in gameplay, while taking an ambitious swing to fully engage me with its storytelling. If it delivered, it would surely become one of my favorite games ever.
That did not happen.
My excitement dimmed in the very next scene. A sequence of clichés common to shonen media introduces the main character: a bandit ambush is thwarted by a mysterious stranger whose design is too elaborate to not reappear later, which climaxes in a fall down a sheer cliff and a subsequent chase sequence. Drawing from clichés isn't inherently bad; part of the appeal of JRPGs is how much they borrow from shonen storytelling. But clichés also leave an aftertaste from other media they've been in. Their overuse muddies emotional impact and can create tonal dissonance that makes the story harder to take seriously. I was looking for Metaphor: ReFantazio to stand with works like Pluto, Monster, or Vinland Saga. Stories where the occasional indulgence in genre cliché works in complement with the strength of their storytelling. Metaphor: ReFantazio establishes a premise and collection of themes that warrant exploration, posturing as though the playthrough would meaningfully examine them. But Atlus continually undermines that foundation with a "teen anime bullshit" approach to storytelling that is ingenuous, seldom entertains nuance, and often crutches on clichés. The first act of the game is marred by moments like this that pulled me out of the otherwise serious story because of how dumb it could be in the moment.
It's worth stressing that Metaphor: ReFantazio was still telling a perfectly competent story at this point. But the gulf between my expectations and reality spoiled my appetite for what the game had to offer. And unfortunately for me, Metaphor: ReFantazio's poor first impression did not stop at just the storytelling.
My first moment out of a cutscene started me in an area that looked a little off-putting. Definitely not bad, but not as good as I'd expect a AAA game from 2024 to look. I pushed that nitpick to the back of my mind, but it kept resurfacing as I noticed more technical issues with the game's graphical presentation. Muddy looking textures. Weird aliasing issues. Basically unfinished landscapes (one, two). Lighting that looked straight out of an early PS3 game. Odd NPC animations: walking with the exaggerated swagger of a fallen noble or the dog who spins like a beyblade to turn around (which made me notice that every NPC does this). These are issues that I usually don't notice or care about. But it wore me down as moments showcasing the game's world-class art direction were held back by technical competence frozen in the PS3-era.
The royal capital Gran Trad is the first major area in the game. A sprawling city where the wealthy luxuriate in gilded indifference to the suffering and persecution of the poor. Its introductory cutscene teases a broad possibility space to experience, that is flattened as soon as you see Gran Trad in-game. The image of the vast capital is betrayed by the in-game reality that the city is just a main street, a back alley, and a plaza split in half by an invisible wall. Every building is locked, except for locations essential to gameplay. NPCs mostly bark inanities that do little to further the player's immersion in the world, or even the quotidian. Which results in a city like a bad stage set, enough to set the scene but not to draw you in. Atlus' singular focus on function over form robbed my time in the city of any emotional texture, quickly teaching me that progressing the story was the only value the city had.
This austerity of purpose shapes the design of the game. Core systems like Side Quests, Follower Bonds, and Royal Virtues each felt like Atlus refused whenever presented with opportunities to make them meaningful and not just functional. Side Quests are little more than vehicles for exp and items. Their narrative framing is paper-thin, really only bookending the quest in conversation with the quest giver. The trite storytelling of Follower Bonds, quest lines that deepen your relationships to unlock abilities, delivers shallow character development that Atlus can't even carry back into the main story since the system is technically optional. Royal Virtues, social stats increased primarily through short in-game activities, left me with the impression that Atlus struggled with finding activities that were compelling and thematically relevant, to the point that they gave up and also had some cutscenes and quests raise virtues. Metaphor: ReFantazio fails to redeem these with moment to moment gameplay I enjoyed. Both Follower Bonds and Royal Virtues are almost exclusively experienced through short, low-budget, partially-voiced cutscenes with inconsequential dialog choices. With Side Quests, you're at best raiding a dungeon that feels like a palette swap of a previous side dungeon (hope you like caves and spiraling towers). At worst, you're buying someone a toothbrush.
I've enjoyed plenty of games with gameplay elements shallower than Metaphor: ReFantazio's, where I can usually get away with ignoring the stuff I don't like. But Metaphor: ReFantazio's design held my fun hostage by forcing me to engage with systems I disliked to make progress in the ones I did. The gameplay loop is structured around a calendar system, where time slots are spent building Follower Bonds, increasing Royal Virtues, completing Side Quests, or traveling, all in preparation for the main quest. You can't just indulge in the activities you enjoy. You'll miss out on most of the Archetype tree (the game's job system) without advancing Follower Bonds, no Follower Bonds without Royal Virtues, and main story quests will be really hard without the experience and equipment from side dungeons. Unsurprisingly, the calendar system continues the trend of core systems disavowing their primary strength. Time is a compelling mechanic because it's limited, adding weight to your choice on how to spend it. Games like Pentiment and Seance of Blake Manor exploit this to great effect. Metaphor: ReFantazio serves up a double whammy: there's an excessive amount of time to complete every activity, and the activities often aren't fun. Which leaves the calendar system as a source of friction. I spent my time on the things I felt obligated to do, while stewing in my desire to play the parts of the game I actually enjoyed.
In spite of my disappointment with the core of the game, I still found elements to enjoy.
Atlus has masterful (2D) art direction. Their anime cutscenes are well produced and high quality. Playing Trails in the Sky FC planted in me an appreciation for character portraits during dialog, and I loved seeing them here. Some locations you visit in the game are represented by "animated paintings". Initially a mechanical letdown, they gradually became moments I enjoyed because of how beautiful they were, consistently the most arresting visuals that the game presented me with. I would love to see a game from Atlus where they ditch 3D entirely and just make a sprite-based game or a visual novel, anything that highlights their artistry with a flat canvas.
Combat was the antithesis of the shallowness I felt in other areas of the game. Right from the start, it felt like Atlus delivered a turn-based battle system that was polished in every area. Battles showcase the best 3D animation the game has to offer. Atlus went so far as to make custom weapon models, with special effects for special ones. The music is awesome. Many of the most important tracks in the game are led by the chants of a priest, including on the main battle themes Warriors in Valour and Warriors in Arms. Even with the limited options available early on, combat already provided enough depth to let me have fun expressing myself in the combat framework.
Even in my disappointment with the calendar system added to the core loop, I found some of its secondary effects cool. The game goes out of its way to ground you in the passage of time, to the point that I felt as anxious about in-game deadlines as I do with real life ones. The simulation of time also presents an opportunity to depict a living world. The country celebrates "Forgiveness Day" early in the game, which mainly is used as an opportunity for shop discounts, but I appreciated it as a rare moment where the world didn't feel like it was a spectator to my playthrough.
Act II: Wait... This Game Is Actually Good?
32 hours brought me a third of the way through the game, and I was not having a good time. The bright spots weren't enough to overcome how little enjoyment the core gameplay loop provided me. So why keep playing?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe a misguided hope that I'd find the game I was excited about if I just stuck through the bad parts. It was a hope that carried me through a playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, but never bore fruit.
That hope was barely hanging on as I made it through the second major area in the game. A story mission whose twists you see coming a mile away, leaning on tropes rather than meaningful storytelling, while introducing a new character that I could not stand.
But then the mission hit its climax and the story started to click for me. The villain's monologue cut through the clichés, and got me thinking about the questions the game was raising about grief and our reactions to it. A train of thought that led me to notice how Atlus had spent this entire mission building up two characters as foils, which, through the structure of the comparison, also tied back to Metaphor: ReFantazio's central question. Suddenly, I found myself engaging with Metaphor: ReFantazio's story in the ways I had hoped it would've challenged me to from the start. And somewhere in the middle of this, the new character I disliked dropped my favorite line in the game and became my favorite character.
This was a watershed moment for my experience with the game. Metaphor: ReFantazio's second act was a marvelous crescendo, whose fresh-feeling narrative beats built towards a climax that paid off most of the narrative threads the game had woven from its start.
Atlus' writing felt fresh out of High School English class; anywhere you found a pair of characters, Atlus was probably setting them up as foils. But I never found it repetitive. It was refreshing to play a JRPG so committed to its themes that they seeped out of the storytelling.
The game's combat hit its stride as the story got good. I played the game on Hard mode. Enemies hit hard, owing to increased stats and an extra action per turn. The extra action elegantly heightens the danger they pose, by making it easier to pull off devastating sequences. The result is combat that pressures the player to continuously adapt, or risk a party wipe even from an ordinary encounter. That pressure provides a strong incentive to explore all options in combat, options that opened up fully as the story clicked with me. The game finally fills out your party, which gives you an extra action per turn. You start getting access to more advanced archetypes and interesting items, which let you start leveraging game systems in more interesting ways. Experimenting in Metaphor: ReFantazio is fun, and Atlus made sure to sand away any friction. There are few restrictions on how you build out your party, and you have the freedom to switch at any time. The game never asks you to grind; playing through the game normally always rewards you enough to comfortably proceed. You are free to inspect late game unlocks, which made me excited to plan for late game builds. The polish extended even in battle, where Atlus let you restart battles at any time and even optimized the button presses it takes to input your commands. For all of this streamlining, "solving" the combat puzzle doesn't trivialize the experience. At its best, combat in this game feels tense. Like you're walking a tightrope as you execute your plan, hoping that the enemy isn't blessed by RNGesus and wipes your team.
This is not to say that Metaphor: ReFantazio's second act is perfect. Far from it. I will think back on Metaphor: ReFantazio and remember some of the stupidest moments I've experienced in media. The ancillary content was still as vapid as it was at the start of the game. And the major locations and cities were as soulless as Gran Trad. But the good outweighed the bad. The story and the combat was more than making up for the fun I was missing from the rest of the game. Surely Atlus would carry this momentum into a strong finale...
Act III: Despair
Everything I was enjoying about the game was systematically dismantled.
Every narrative thread that had captured my interest was unwound, only leaving space for a clichéd conclusion that I no longer wanted to see through.
Major Spoiler: Second Act Denouement
Metaphor: ReFantazio's second act builds towards the reveal that the Church had a major role in driving the antagonist to commit regicide at the start of Metaphor: ReFantazio. A reveal that humanizes the antagonist's motivations, and establishes the Church as a tertiary member of the game's central conflict, narratively and thematically . Atlus could've leveraged this setup into some interesting nuance in its conclusion, developing the protagonist's eventual victory over the Church and Antagonist into an ideological one that argues the game's answer to its central question. Instead, Metaphor: ReFantazio unceremoniously topples the religious faction, thereby reducing the antagonist to a comically evil villain whose genocidal master plan perpetuates the injustice that originally inspired him to act.
The entire last act of the game is dedicated to the final battle, giving you a full 30 days of prep time before the point of no return. Even with my souring on the story, main quests still were the most engaging content the game had to offer. These 30 days were the longest period spent outside of one, a period that was unreasonably good at highlighting all the ways the game grated me. Blitzing through my remaining side quests really reinforced how samey the dungeons felt. Man was it annoying to max out my remaining Royal Virtues just so I could complete my Follower Bonds, only to be underwhelmed by the conclusions to most of those questlines. At this point, even the NPCs were getting on my nerves (I'm looking at you parishioner who complained that my presence was interrupting her prayers every time I entered the church).
Atlus did invest a bit more into the production of some late-game side quests, which broke up some of the monotony. One quest chain in particular ends up leading to some of the hardest boss fights in the game, that were lots of fun to figure out strategies for. But that wasn't enough to redeem the prep period.
With only a few days left of prep time, I realized there was no chance I would finish unlocking the remaining Archetypes in the tree. I was rich in every resource, except for the two that would actually let me make progress. I had been looking forward to these Archetypes since midway through the second act. But it seemed like I would be locked out of every late-game build and strategy, unless I suffered through a second playthrough in New Game+... or started farming. So farm I did. For 10 hours. Mindnumbingly fighting the same two enemies, sustained only by my defiance of Atlus' progression system. But my hubris in resisting the game's intended path would prove costly.
Spoiler: The Final Battle Experience (Music, Enemies, Design)
The final battle was broken across two dungeons. The first felt really ordinary, like every other main story mission. It just led to a verbal confrontation with the Antagonist before the final final dungeon.
The actual Final Dungeon managed to be the most underwhelming environment in the entire game.
I was baffled as I entered it and heard the main menu music. This wasn't a case of a musical theme that's recontextualized throughout the game's runtime to make its eventual payoff more powerful. This was Atlus taking the exact same track that you'd only ever heard while turning on the game, and plopping it right into the finale. Instead of a song that heightened my emotional connection, Atlus hit me with a track I more strongly associated with "▷ Continue Save".
The visual design just looked like Atlus took one of their uninspired side-quest cave dungeons, put it in the sky, palette swapped to imperial red, and called it a day.
Every enemy, including mini-bosses, was just a palette swap of an enemy I'd fought before. Even though there was a weak narrative explanation, it was hard to be excited to fight enemies that were on their 4th or 5th color change during my playthrough.t
I was sure that the finale would be a place that Atlus poured in their talents and effort to make great. Instead, it was another revolution of the cycle of disappointment I'd put myself through the entire game.
The fun in Metaphor: ReFantazio's combat relies on good balance. If the enemies aren't threatening, then combat isn't rewarding. My tunnel-visionned grind to unlock all the Archetypes I wanted blinded me to the fact that I was overleveling myself out of the fun. I managed to trivialize the entire final battle, mowing down everything, including bosses, with mindless attack spam. It was so bad that I don't even know what the final boss' gimmick was; I somehow interrupted it every turn by just attacking it.
What a deflating way to end the game.
Conclusion: The End Does Not Justify the Means
I felt empty finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Not the emptiness of having lost something cherished. The emptiness you feel after losing an afternoon to a TV show you barely like.
This was the second time that I've pushed through to credits, for a game I was convinced I'd love, and came away only being able to say "I beat it". Is that conviction enough to justify the 100+ hour commitment, for games I dislike more as I play? Up until now, yeah. The hope being that the game I was excited for would materialize if I just pushed through the bad parts. And that almost happened here; Metaphor: ReFantazio almost had the sauce. Top tier art direction, music direction, combat design, and an above average plot, all standing on top of a rich foundation of literary and artistic inspirations (e.g. Thomas More's Utopia + Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights). Yet, packaged as Metaphor: ReFantazio, these elements meshed so poorly for me that I wince at the thought of playing another Atlus game.
I do recognize my fault in this. Bloated expectations set an impossibly high bar for the game, one it was bound to fall short of, reinforcing a cycle of frustration. But I don't want my takeaway to be that I should stop being excited. Anticipation is part of the fun, and makes the experience that much better when your expectations are met.
I probably need to stop forcing myself to roll credits on games that I like more in theory than in practice. Or at the very least, I should've just played Expedition 33 instead.
Addendum
Ideas that I'm not a good enough writer to integrate into the above
Game Feels Cheap
There's a thin line between cheap and clever. Compromises that scream lazy in one game can read as elegant in another. The difference lying in whether the compromise is a weakness the game must overcome, or something it leverages.
Example (Spoiler: Pentiment's structure)
In Pentiment, its rare that your choices/dialogue meaningfully branch the narrative. But the game masks that convincingly, conjuring an illusion of choice that still succeeds in making your playthrough feel more personal. Metaphor: ReFantazio is overt about the linearity of its narrative, its token attempts at presenting choices in the story only detracting from the experience.
Metaphor: ReFantazio constantly presents me with experiences where the individual pieces feel compromised. Cutscenes with poor production quality, uninspired quest design, obvious asset reuse, to name only a few. Where I'd hoped to see these trade-offs enable another part of the experience to shine, my disappointment was only compounded by finding additional lackluster elements. Together, these issues formed a pattern that felt less like resourceful development and more like Atlus cutting corners even at the cost of the final experience.
There's a moment at the end of a Follower Bond where you go support a singer at their performance. This is the emotional payoff of the entire questline, that to this point had been middling. The game cuts to the singer performing... and it's completely silent. So silent that I thought my game had glitched, until the crowd started cheering about how good the singing was (and then they call her ugly). The silence seems to have been a deliberate choice, in a cutscene that doesn't have much going for it. A moment that could've been a nice closing note is instead overshadowed by Atlus making the scene look bugged, when simply playing an existing track or skipping the performance altogether would've worked just as well.
This feeling of cheapness was a cloud over my playthrough. A cloud darkened when I remembered that late 2024 was still early-ish in the wave of developers adopting an increased price of $70 dollars on PC, lagging behind consoles. My frustrations with this game were often compounded by the incredulity that Atlus was charging so much for what was often a subpar experience.
It may appear as if Metaphor: ReFantazio exuding an air of shoddiness is in conflict with its many elements that clearly took considerable care, skill and especially money to execute. The game's menus demonstrate art direction in a class of their own. 2D animation is expensive, and Atlus features anime cutscenes liberally throughout the game. The music in this game is inspired; I didn't know that I was missing the chants of a priest in my orchestral choir music, but Atlus had a vision and delivered on it. But even these elements fall into the trap of ineffective execution that plague so many parts of Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Anime cutscenes often are placed in great moments of the story and can convey than would be impractical with in-game assets, but other times are used frivolously.
Towards the end of my playthrough, I was convinced that I had been hearing the same 5-6 songs on repeat the entire time. I was so convinced, that I looked up the soundtrack and was surprised to see that it was as long as soundtracks I remember for their breadth. The songs in Metaphor: ReFantazio tend to sound quite similar, leading to a sense of limited dynamic range in its music. The soundtrack is dominated by driven, up-tempo songs with similar timbre. Many tracks, like the collection that can play in combat, go so far as to feel like sections of a single song. Where the game does venture beyond its typical sonic palette is in main story specific songs, which are never heard again after the hour or so you spend with them. Especially towards the end as main story missions became scarce, my auditory experience with the game was saturated by music that sounded so similar it just blended together.
Ultimately, Metaphor: ReFantazio didn't feel cheap because Atlus cut corners. Every game does. Metaphor: ReFantazio felt cheap because I could see the corners they cut, and struggled to see what those cuts bought me.
Plot Points That Keep Me up at Night
Act I
iPod Magla
Canonically, the game's soundtrack is fairy magic that plays music in the protagonist's head
Secrets For Thee but not for Me
Our party has a funny approach to guarding a country-destabilizing, antagonist-thwarting secret. An antagonist who, despite crashing the royal funeral to reveal that he's the killer, is extremely popular to the point of driving some to cultish devotion. On the other hand, our party can't escape attention. The main character is a member of a race so rare that many don't think they exist, and so hated that NPCs regularly go out of their way to throw jeers at him. His partner is a fairy, who were thought to be extinct. In spite of this, the game shows our main cast discussing their kingdom-destabilizing secret while walking down busy roads, over meals at the tavern, or even while fighting one of the antagonist's soldiers.
Justice is Blind. And so is foresight
Our party's plan to seek justice against the main antagonist is... to stab him during a royal funeral. The guy who came up with this was a mercenary so accomplished that he ingratiated himself with the royal family and became a swordsmanship tutor.
Somehow, despite needing to run a great distance through a crowd, this almost works.
Act II
Major Spoiler: Nakama
The main characters become friends with a lady who was sacrificing children. The entire point of their journey was to take her into custody, but they instead leave without her and trust that she would show up on her own accord to face justice and her likely execution.
Pride Comes Before A Fall
One mission requires you to infiltrate the antagonist's fortress to steal something, so the game asks you to case the place first. Each zone within the base is secured by a key safeguarded by top generals.
In the name of secrecy, our party obviously decides that the best plan is to do... a boss gauntlet. They challenge each of these generals to a fight over the key, with the expectation that the generals' pride would stop them from mentioning anything to their boss.
The game gives no indication that these generals said anything after the fact.
Aren't you a ninja?
One mission requires you to infiltrate the antagonist's base to steal something, so the game asks you to case the place first. At one point, your party decides that they need to send someone to sneak around some guards. The game presents you with a choice of who to send, so of course I choose my party member who was a ninja specialized in covert operations on the behalf of a royal knight order. In response to the obviously correct answer, the game hits me with a "If he gets seen, he won't be able to keep his cover" and sends the main character instead (???).
Major Spoiler: Sudden Onset Magical Blindness
A major plot point hinges on the fact that one of our party members can "see" magic. The game explicitly shows her differentiating between a Legendary Weapon and its counterfeit with her magical sight.
Atlus seemingly forgets this, because our party is foiled by the Antagonist swapping the weapon and its counterfeit without anyone noticing. Despite our magic seeing party member being present the entire time. She even has to ask for an explanation.
Major Spoiler: Social Engineering
The antagonist receives a mortal wound, only for him to show up the next day perfectly healthy. The game reveals that the Antagonist's right hand man infiltrated the clergy of the state region and saved the Antagonist's life.
This explanation gets more ridiculous when you realize:
Act III
Major Spoiler: Cosplay
One of the final major reveals in the game is that the antogonist has been disguising himself as another race using a headband with horns on it (picture a headband with cat ears and you aren't far off). The game suggests he's maintained this disguise since his youth.
How didn't anyone notice? The game lightly suggests that he might've used some magic to make the headband look less obvious, but that doesn't address the infinite ways someone could have still found out.
And why not go further. He's one of the most accomplished magic users in a world that definitely has transformation magic. Why not magically produce the horns?
Perfect Timing
Leading up the final confrontation, the game shows your entire party sacrificing themselves to give you the chance to confront the antagonist 1-on-1. The antagonist "kills" you with a spell, but you wake back up some indeterminate amount of time later. The antagonist is gone doing evil stuff I guess, but your entire party "miraculously" survived and has been worriedly trying to wake you up.
The antagonist somehow has the dramatic timing to reappear right as you wake up? Why did he leave in the first place? If he was watching you, why didn't he deal with your party while you were still out?
Extra Thoughts on Core Systems
Royal Virtues
Royal Virtues feel like Atlus gave up midway through their design. Canonically, Royal Virtues measure "the qualities necessary in a king": Courage, Eloquence, Imagination, Tolerance, and Wisdom. In game, you need to level up your Royal Virtues to continue progressing your Follower Bonds. The primary way the game has you interface with this system is through NPCs, and sometimes locations, that let you do an activity to gain experience towards a specific virtue. None of these activities are interactive; you're either spending 4-5 minutes button mashing through dialog boxes or sitting through a "talking head" cutscene. And they're really hit or miss. I appreciated the Tolerance, Eloquence, and sometimes Wisdom virtues, since they'd often give you satisfying nuggets that build on the world's cultures, religions, history, and politics. But the vast majority of these activities feel like they're just there to pad runtime. Lots of activities, like bungee jumping for Courage or people watching for Wisdom, only feel thinly connected to the virtue they represent. Their relevance to the temperament of a monarch is even thinner. Your companions offer some of these Royal Virtue activities, which compounds with many of the same Follower Bond issues that keep character development shallow and away from the main story. It eventually felt like Atlus recognized how dissatisfying these activities are, but instead of iterating, they just made it so that you could engage with it less by having some quests and cutscenes also reward you with virtue experience. The saddest part is that Royal Virtues don't even live up to their mechanical purpose in the game. Atlus sometimes supplants Royal Virtues by using your story progress to dictate when you can start a Follower Bond. Both approaches deliver the same experience to the player, which, given how little I'm getting out of them, really makes me wonder why have Royal Virtues in the game at all. .
Traveling
I found Metaphor: ReFantazio's approach to traveling especially disappointing. Traveling is often the backdrop to my favorite moments in games. These moments are compelling because they realize possibilities contained within the unknowns of the journey. Metaphor: ReFantazio has none of this. The only way to travel is to fast travel. Moving between the game's cities is just a quick cutscene. When you travel to points of interest, the game simulates your journey on your gauntlet runner, essentially an RV with legs. The routine is the same every time. You pass the time on a Royal Virtue, Follower Bond, or doing chores, after which there's a small chance your gauntlet runner gets attacked and you have to do battle. Repeat that n times until the game says you've arrived at your destination. The game tries to inject some sense of discovery by occasionally breaking the routine with mid-journey stops at small towns and natural wonders. Except these "stops" are just animated paintings of the location, in the style of a background from a visual novel. Granted, they're really beautiful paintings. But that doesn't make up for the fact that all you do is interact with a menu in the towns, or mash through dialogue while the characters stand in the natural wonders. Metaphor: ReFantazio reduces traveling in a JRPG to feeling like a road trip. A bad one at that, since you can't even enjoy looking out the window because of how ugly the passing landscapes look.
TIL Tildes has a character limit
Addendum cont.
Random Thoughts On Combat
Status Effects are essentially useless. Game goes out of its way to make status effects the strategy for an early boss. But you can't repeat that success, since status effects proc so infrequently.
Weirdly, some of the most broken builds in the game revolve around running the same archetype on your entire party
Realtime combat in the Overworld sucks. Attacking locks you into animations, which can make certain enemy attacks frustrating when they catch you mid swing. In normal play, this isn't really a problem because of how little time you spend doing this. But if you ever end up needing to farm, you're in for a frustrating time.
Metaphor is Pay to Win*
The Merchant lineage is a class where skills cost money. It's extremely broken, managing to side step many of the game's systems:
Fast Travel Doors
You get fast travel early and use it often. You'll frequently teleport in front a door, that you annoyingly can't interact with unless you move your camera a tiny bit after arriving.
There's Still Juice in the Lemon
The conflict of most stories in the game, from the main quest to mundane side quests, unfolds against a backdrop of the "systematic mistreatment of groups".
But I don't think Metaphor: ReFantazio really contends with any facets of this mistreatment.
The game limply uses it to justify the violence and societal harms seen throughout the game, in ways that only leave players with the takeaway that "mistreating people or groups is bad".
There's so much juice left to squeeze out of this theme, but Atlus never goes deeper than "thing bad". It doesn't help that some of the deeper explorations are undermined by fantasy elements in Metaphor: ReFantazio's world. The worst of it, however, is that Atlus' mishandling of the theme suffocates the genuinely interesting ideas the game presents about anxiety, self-actualization and the power to effect change.
There is absolutely nothing whatsoever I could add to your behemoth post except a comment on this.
This stuff was cute, if a little outdated, when it happened in Dark Chronicle/Dark Cloud 2. On the PS 2. In 2002.
Sometimes I wonder why some of the more tedious elements of JRPGs remain so steadfast. Swivel movement, slow dialog (and I mean slow as in a full second between each response), the same janky ass stuff that made games around the turn of the millennium a little tedious to play are still prevalent today. But we know better now so that tedium turns into frustration which turns into aversion.
I find it difficult to play games like this.
Reverse 1999 -- recently finished chapter 10, a big plot moment whose reveal was ruined by a comment on an unrelated video, though some facets were fresh and it was still exciting. Now in 11, I'm still wondering, where has Druvis been all this time? Especially since I would think she'd be really interested in being back to years before her forest burned down. I'd have thunk they forgot about her, if not for a new outfit. @Evie, do you know?
Big Walk -- like @phoenixrises, I picked this up and played with my friends this weekend. It's like a big hike, plus puzzles. It doesn't work as a single player game at all. As such, it seems like they're trying to get it into as many hands as possible: it's free for PSN subscribers and is perhaps the only game not charging a Nintendo tax on switch. It's from the same folks as untitled goose game.
Halo Campaign Evolved -- err not feeling this if I'm staying polite. They couldn't configure UE5 proper, which is rather embarrassing when your whole AAA project is a UE5 port. Downloading an engine.ini made it work much better. The bonus missions are basically MCU-like fan service. My brother was playing so I figured I'd check it out. It's OK if you like UE5 and hadn't played it before, but I'm glad I've got my anniversary edition in MCC instead.
ReStory -- this just came out, it's charming. You're running a lil electronics repair boutique in not-Akihabara circa 2000s. Assemble with Care was the best "fix it" game I'd played before this, ReStory is on par at least. My favorite character is probably the maid cafe waitress that "accidentally" breaks and steals electronics.
Also playing Hades 2 and ELDEN RING, but I haven't anything to say about those that hasn't already been said a thousand times.
I haven't heard about doing this - would you be able to expand on that?
Can you literally just tweak this config file to make the game run better?
Yep! I slapped it in and got less stuttering/better frame times without seeing a fidelity drop. There's a person that has dedicated a lot of time and effort into tweaking UE5 games, most these translate between UE5 games too. They've got a whole spreadsheet explaining each of the tweaks and what they do too.
https://www.nexusmods.com/halocampaignevolved/mods/5
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A71Q9jd0sm0MaCRWib8SJEY_urNk-Wuyl2pK5UI_4DI/edit?usp=sharing
Oh this is awesome! Will definitely be trying this out when I get home tonight! Thank you!
Hi Carrow! How you been?
So Reverse 1999's English-speaking community also was really jonesing for more Druvis around the release of chapter 10 a year ago. I had this same discussion at the time actually...
The main reason not to stick Druvis in the story is that she's a powerful, distinct character who already concluded her arc in Chapter 4. As you've no doubt noticed the main story is highly episodic. Every chapter you have to introduce an almost entirely new cast: their world, their ideas, their personalities, their positions on the chapter's main conflict. Having too many recurring characters there might create narrative inefficiencies -- if Druvis were in chapter 9, for instance, she would either be reduced to a reactive background character, or else the writers would need to give her a perspective on prison, surveillance, fate, the mental healthcare system, Latin American literature. And what does Druvis know about these things? To say nothing of chapters which don't involve the main cast at all!
In contrast, Vertin and Sonetto are unobtrusive characters who travel quite well. Having been raised in the Foundation they both have broad educations; they're both repressed or reserved enough that their perspectives don't overtake the narrative; their arcs are ongoing, but are general enough to fold into a wide variety of stories (Sonetto's increasing conflict between her love and her duty; Vertin's childhood trauma and need for a mother).
This is probably why we see so much of TK14 (the cute Chinese ship name for the Vertin/Sonetto pairing) in the main story and so comparatively little of Regulus, Sotheby, or Druvis: the latter have already had complete character arcs in one chapter or another, and are harder to integrate into a variety of stories. Druvis maybe has it especially rough because her arcane abilities are super strong when Reverse usually wants its protagonists to be largely powerless most of the time.
If I can ask, what part of chapter 10 got spoiled for you? I remember really not liking that chapter or chapter 11 on release actually but they've both really grown on me with distance, I think Paradise Regained does its horror and mystery stuff extremely well for a visual novel, and the prose and the character work in 11 is fantastic as well.
Thank you! I've been alright, and you?
Yeah, that tracks, I was hoping she'd at least show up in an event or such like some of the previous more essential folks have been. As is, last we left her was cleaning up the woods after our little rebellion! Like I generally at least know what's going on with Regulus or Sotheby, even if they're well in the background now.
Sentinel has been my #1 party member since I got her, my first 6*, seeing she gets a main story chapter was exciting! I lost the 50/50 for Marsha recently </3. I really didn't like 9, especially compared to the events that should be main story chapters, so 10 was a pleasant change of pace despite the gruesome aspects.
I've been really great actually!
Ah yeah that makes sense with the spoilers. I mean, I basically already knew those things too well before the chapter happened just from the subtext, but there's a difference between inferring it and being told. One thing that all of us knew when chapter 10 came out, but that a lot of new players don't get spoiled on,
Another victim of chapter 9 :') it is, by some margin, my favorite chapter in the game and in fact one of my favorite stories in any game but I do recognize that it's pretty opaque and among the community it's definitely the most divisive main story chapter. A good deal of its impact relies on your familiarity with the historical and philosophical context surrounding it, let me put it that way.
And yeah, the real doomed yuri in this game is losing your 50/50 so that the lesbians can't both be on your account </3 Always glad to hear your thoughts!
Well if I had to pick between the two, I'm glad that one wasn't spoiled, it was a real what the hell is going on moment!
Opaque is a good word for it. It felt written for folks that were familiar with visceral realism and its history, I can see how it'd be cool for them, but the plot developments were weak.
Glad to chat too :)
I'm a big fan of the original Halo trilogy, not-so-much Reach. For all the flaws that Combat Evolved and Reach had, Halo 2 and 3 remain the pinnacle of console FPS.
Halo for me has been in increasing decline since 343 Industries/Halo Studios took the reins.
Campaign Evolved has felt horrible from the get-go and I think I uninstalled it halfway through the second mission when I found that the Give & Take skull wasn't even spawning. Gunplay feels bad. Enemy AI is awful. The new cutscenes from what I have seen so far completely ruin the original's pacing, and I don't like some of the graphical changes made like how all the interiors look overly metallic.
My second-biggest gripe is with Cortana. She seems more cocky especially in the game's remade cutscenes (the scene where you first meet with Captain Keyes is just a few minutes of her bragging about how many Covenant ships she's downed), and I initially thought her jawline seemed rather masculine. Then I saw all the memes comparing her face to Jerma985's and it suddenly clicked.
But the worst is the prequel missions. Boring level designs, and just look at this cutscene of the Prophet of Harmony introducing all the Covenant races and tell me it isn't filled with levels of exposition so painful that even the script-writers at Toei Animation would cringe upon reading it.
I am actually baffled at how badly Halo Studios dropped the ball here. At least for how dreadful Rare have been after Microsoft bought them out, they could do remasters and ports rather well. 343i couldn't even handle remasters of their own without years of post-launch updates to fix the messes they created. A good example of this is with The Truth and Reconciliation (3rd mission) in Halo 1 Anniversary, where the Anniversary graphics don't even remotely align with the actual level's geometry, meaning that it's genuinely possible to get spotted and shot at by Covenant forces through what appears to be solid boulders.
Ohh, I've been thinking any getting Restory. What did you play it with, mouse/keyboard or controller?
I have the new steam controller and was wondering how that would play with it. The controller basically had a track pad, so I assumed it would be fine.
I've been playing with mouse! Only key press has been ESC to open the menu. It has a lot of click+drag operations, I think the track pads would suit well, especially if you set one more sensitive than the other.
I've been playing Big Walk this weekend with my friends. It's genuinely one of the most satisfying puzzle/co-op games I've played in a while. The puzzles themselves aren't very complicated but a LOT of it has to do with limited communication and such. It also generally feels like you're exploring a park with your friends, this group I'm playing with I went hiking with a month ago and it's funny how similar it feels.
I highly recommend it!
I've also been playing Big Walk with some friends! We're a group of four and it feels like a digital hangout, which is great considering it's August and everyone went back to their respective families, so we still get to mess around together. I'm not sure at what point of the game we are, but we're six hours in and we're having fun.
I've heard that the map itself is based off of a national park in Australia which might lend itself to the "we're walking around shooting the shit" kinda vibes. I think even though it might seem like friendslop the world itself is pretty curated and opposite of friendslop haha.
(I do think the puzzles are slightly different when you go under 4 people, we had one of our 4 drop out and when we restarted the world as 3, the game adjusts the puzzles for it)
Do you think that it would work well with two players?
Yes for sure! Just gotta be in different rooms! I don't know how the puzzles change or anything but I think they scale.
Awesome! Though that does mean we're going to have to figure out how to move one of our PCs since they're right next to each other.
headphones and music works probably! would definitely recommend, you really miss out on a LOT of the game if you just kinda talk to each other in the same room.
Its a long weekend here and I've spent a lot of it playing Iron Nest. It's a steampunk artillery simulator. You're trapped in the turrrent of a walking fortress. You have a big map table. And a mechanical ballistics calculator. And a command and recon radio that feeds you instructions and field updates.
The standard workflow starts with the briefing over freshly brewed coffee and you have a very abstract map with no useful information. Command conveys your coordinates and the position of field assets. Field spotters triangulate reference points, targets and movements. You plot a trajectory between yourself and enemies. Maybe you fire off a flare or order a recon flight to get a better sense of what you're shooting at and get some time stamped photos overlayed on the map table (their are targets that are also invisible from air and its dangerous when some photos are outdated). Plug all the measurements into the calculator and print the Fire Mission Cards. Sequence the cards to group shots that minimize adjustment and make sure the first shot has max travel time so you cycle into a quick followup after impact. With all the fire missions prepped, you head over to requisition desk and shuffel through the card catalog to stock up on the right munitions. Standard high explosives, double stuff HE if you want a 1 square km hole, clam shells (cluster munitions), AP if the target is underground or a ton of other options. Don't forget to properly sequence the autoloader and to have enough cheese (powder charges) on hand. Load up the first 2 rounds. Set the guns. Make sure you have a clean and orderly work environment. Have your fire mission cards in the order you need them. Clear the map of distractions. Make sure there's no steam valve leaks. Clear the clipboard. Put on some music.
At this point, I'm already having the time of my life. 10/10 game. Then you fire off the first shot and all hell breaks loose. Most likely, once the first rounds hit, you are subjected to counter fire and you have about 300 seconds before they zero in on you. Thankfully early recon identified enemy artillery positions and the cards are already printed. But I got a bit lazy and didn't lable my Fire Missions properly. And there are too many lines on the map so it's hard to find the correct measurements. And it doesn't help that the cards don't have distance. Screw it, I'll just make an educated guess. And in the rush I load a fire shot because its the same color shell as the AP while being for completely different use cases. And you can't unload the giant gun so I have to cycle out that round by using it. But that means reworking that fire mission since it was planned to hit a moving target at precisely 10:55 which is 20 seconds after I'm dead. And then we're hit with gas and I need to limit my vision with a mask. And the power goes out so the entire operation needs a manual restart. And that's not even done when I'm being shelled, so I do the last resort and order an emergency reposition. And now all my Fire Missions are scratched. And I have no idea where I am. And we've lost so much steam pressure that there's way too much offset to my instruments. And I can already hear the enemy fire closing in. So... we are blind firing. Friendly fire be damned.
Its a brilliant experience. Every new mission adds more and more complexity while the tone and atmosphere never lets up even once. Highly recommended if you like fiddling with analog machines, big guns or messing around with maps.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
2nd playthrough (first play thoughts here). Got an achievement/"ending" I (very reasonably) missed, and completed another fight I missed. Only thing I didn't do was complete the Hunter's Journal (which is not too difficult but takes forever).
I also wanted to play around with other crests, since I mostly stuck to Wanderer before. I ended up mainly splitting between Reaper and Architect this time.
Reaper: Increased attack range/slower attack rate, and for a limited time after you heal, attacks you land on enemies spawn little white puffs you can pick up to get some silk back. So you're incentivized to wait until mid-fight to heal, which can be a little dangerous. The silk puffs have timed life, so sometimes in boss fights you can get zoned out from collecting them. Colour-balanced tool slots. Let me experiment a bit with new red tools while keeping a reliable one equipped (Wanderer only has one red slot). Down slash has a little delay but a big arc, pogo-ing feels good. I took some damage here and there from the awkward lead time and sometimes falling into an enemy.
Architect: 3 red slots, no spell slot. Down slash is diagonal with what feels like less range than Hunter. Any time I knew I was heading to a platforming section with pogo-ing, I switched back to Reaper. Main attack is a drill that hits multiple times, which made it feel powerful to me, although it only deals like 10% more damage. Spamming out 3 red tools is...a thing you can do, but it will cost you shards. Honestly it kind of played out how I imagined. The tools tend not to deal enough burst damage to big enemies/bosses to be worth it (and if you spam a looot of them you will not be able to afford too many attempts). So you still need to get good at positioning/dodging attacks and dealing melee damage. There are some tools I didn't find this time (Silkshot) or bother messing around with (like the Rosary Cannon - I need my money for buying things!).
The other crests have such big downsides I didn't feel like enduring them long enough to appreciate the upsides. Maybe if I do a third playthrough.
I feel like this experimentation confirms what I felt before. For the most part, sticking with Wanderer is "better" in general because it does melee combat well and that is what you get forced into doing a lot of the time. Giving up a second red tool slot seems worth the price. The real cost I suppose is in losing gameplay variety and fun trying out anything but a few reliable ones. I imagine there are scenarios where certain red tools work really well together, but it's something to think about on a 2nd+ playthrough, or something to brew up when sitting on a bench cause you've already died (...).
So I find myself again critiquing the design choices and difficulty of the game because they are at odds with the gameplay variety they tried to bake in. The crests are somewhat hidden or gated behind difficult encounters to begin with, however the game does encourage exploration (sometimes rewarding it, sometimes punishing it). Also sometimes tools that pair well with certain crests are hidden. For example, I did not find the blue tool that lets you throw 2 (red tool) projectiles at a time - which I imagine would have paired really well with Architect!
My biggest critique of Silksong is how restrictive the tool/shard economy is. Mostly because tools offer the most unique gameplay opportunities and build diversity and I would have loved to do a needless run. But at the times when you would be most tempted to experiment and find a new playstyles (hard bosses, difficult areas) you are punished by being starved for shards and being forced to farm, just to access these features again.
The silk/spells work because the resource is damage and the opportunity cost is healing. You always do damage, even if you are struggling so its never out of reach. For tools, the resource is kills and even that is situational. The opportunity cost is actually playing the game against wasted time to stockpile shards and that can be too steep a price for players wanting forward momentum. Thankfully Silksong is sprawling enough that stepping away from an encounter has a high chance of putting you on a new path or exposing secrets, but in doing so; you'd probably fall back on old habits over expanding your skill set because you are already on the back foot. Its probably why a lot of people only start to tinker with builds on NG+.
Personally, I would have put tools in a Stock and Recharge type system. Shards could be the upgrade resource to improve the stock size, recharge rate and capability. Could even be made where those upgrades are assigned to crest slots over the tool itself so no one tool becomes overpowered. So a slot can only improve one of those variables and the Architect better embodies the idea of super fine-tuned builds.
Overall, I do think Silksong is one of those unique games where even my criticism is a testimony to how much the devs got right. I want to spend more time with the niche systems they made and explore different identities for the main character. Hornet is a fun a expressive character with the veriety of animations alone. I can imagine a version of the story where she survives with only the weapons she picked up along the way and the needle is a final unlock.
Fields of Mistria
Stardew Valley-like (Harvest Moon-like?) farming sim. Jumped in following the 1.0 launch last week and have found myself coming back more than I expected.
I guess we're firmly in the 80s anime aesthetic revival at this point. Can't complain!
The gameplay hews pretty close to its inspirations. All the usual tools are here and function the same way, as are the usual farming, fishing, crafting, mining and socialisation systems. However, there are also a whole raft of QOL additions like being able to craft from any chest, being able to use shops when the shopkeeper is away and no deadlines for any of the quests, so it feels noticeably more chill than Stardew Valley.
Money has been easy to come by so far, and most of the upgrades and progression come from crafting and completing quests anyway, so it doesn't feel like there's much incentive to be a hard nosed efficiency-maxing capitalist.
The characters are fine and each has a ton of dialogue and quests, but I'm not seeing much in the way of character development or depth, and the dark edge to the writing that Stardew Valley sometimes had is very much absent. I've heard people say it's closer in tone to Animal Crossing, which pretty much hits the mark.
Will likely play this one on and off between narrative games.
I have not finished any of the storylines yet, but they feel like out of an iyashikei/healing anime: Everyone is nice and archetypal, everything is beautiful and there is hardly any conflict or big surprises. It is fun to play but it feels shallow at times.
The QoL is great and it does make the experience relaxing, this is the first harvest moon style game where I have not burnt myself out after 3-4 seasons, running everywhere, planning map traversals to maximize utility and staying up until 1:50 to use up all my energy. The tools are very powerful and you can be done with the chores part of the day fairly quickly and give me time to try other things.
It's fun.
And Orbitals!
I've been getting back into GTA Online lately, but this time on PC. I actually completely forgot I owned both the Legacy and Enhanced versions of the game. I probably picked them up through some random offer or giveaway on one of the major stores at some point.
I've got a pretty long history with GTA Online. I started playing all the way back when it came out on PS3, so I basically watched the game grow up over the years. I remember when the first flashy new cars started appearing, when owning an apartment actually felt like a big deal, and especially when heists were introduced. At the time, the idea of getting a group together, coordinating everything, and having each person play their own role in the mission felt genuinely exciting. But I also watched the game slowly become something I enjoyed less and less. More and more ridiculous vehicles started showing up, with the Oppressor Mk II being the biggest offender. Motorcycle Clubs were completely broken for a while because you could basically summon an infinitely flying motorbike whenever you wanted, equipped with some of the best homing missiles in the game. Griefing became more common, and eventually you had people running around with mod menus and cheats while Rockstar either couldn't or wouldn't do much about it.
Eventually I just burned out. There were too many things about the game frustrating me, and I'd already sunk an absurd number of hours into it anyway. It felt like the right time to move on. I still came back every now and then, especially after the PS5 version released, but never really to "play" seriously. I'd just hop on, drive around in some new cars, check out whatever content had been added, mess around with things like the mansions from the last update, and then leave again.
Then, about a week ago, I started playing properly again. At first, I immediately fell back into the same mindset I used to have. I started looking up the most optimal businesses, the best vehicles, the fastest ways to make money, and how to squeeze as much profit as possible out of every minute I spent playing. And then it hit me: this is exactly what made me burn out in the first place. I wasn't really playing GTA anymore. I was min-maxing it. Every mission became part of a money-making loop, every purchase had to justify itself, and everything was measured by how many millions per hour it could generate.
So I stopped caring about that and now I'm just buying whatever I think looks interesting. I've decided to go through the heists in order, try to unlock achievements, revisit old missions, and experience the content instead of constantly thinking about the most efficient way to make money. You earn a ton just by playing the game normally anyway. And if I ever desperately need a couple million, I already know the usual loops and can grind them a few times. But for now, there's so much content that has accumulated over the years that simply going through it at my own pace feels like more than enough. There's something strangely refreshing about coming back to all this old stuff again without feeling like I need to optimize every second of it. After playing GTA Online for so many years, I think I've finally found a way to enjoy it again.
Been playing Pokopia because the big underwater update and first part of the DLC dropped last week. Building underwater is fun. I've already spawned nearly all of the new Pokémon, and working on Bubbly Basin has me thinking of how to move around Pokémon in other areas to spread out the activity. Also, I love the new light items.
But a related thought I had: the mainline games could be a lot better better if they use a similar block-based graphic style.
I recently learned that Pokopia was conceived by Shigeru Ohmori, the director of the recent mainline games who started out designing maps for Ruby/Sapphire. He was apparently nostalgic for working on tilesets and making habitats for Pokémon to spawn, and he thought players would enjoy it too. (He was right, it's addicting.)
And that got me to thinking how one of the bigger issues with the recent games is just the graphics and overall world design. The 2D games had incredible maps with all sorts of hidden areas that were fun to explore, but the 3D games... Not as much. Especially the most recent games. Sword/Shield is the most linear game, Scarlet/Violet has a fairly empty open world (made worse by the lack of buildings we can enter despite so many of them looking like we should be able to go inside), Legends Z-A is pretty gray due to being a city (and yet ALSO lacks buildings we can enter), and... Yeah, their 3D maps are just lacking a lot of the older games' charm.
Also, the repetitive textures in SV just look bad. I'm not even that critical of graphics compared to some people, but cliffs shouldn't look so obviously textured from a distance in what SHOULD be a AAA game.
GameFreak clearly still isn't used to working in a 3D environment after all this time. I feel like using a 3D "tileset" might work better for them, or at least for the initial design phase when mapping out the region. Doesn't need to be overly cartoony or voxel-based, but the final result would honestly probably look a lot better than the current bland and lifeless environments.
RimWorld's (first?) expansion Royalty finally went on sale, so I completed my expansion set and started a crashlanded colony with Royalty stuff in place, no Ideology no monolith. We're at a higher latitude than I normally go, there are four seasons but don't think I'll even need to install AC units.
Haven't engaged much with the Royalty systems yet, been just trying to get a viable colony going first. We're midwinter now and barring the unforseen come spring we'll have enough capacity to build a throne room or whatever.
One of my characters had a stillborn baby, don't think that's ever happened to me before. The debuff for the mother was surprisingly small at -15.
Well, she lost her baby but at least she could eat at a table, so her day wasn't probably entirely ruined.
When I was telling the father to bury the dead baby, I right-clicked the dead baby and for a (forgive the expression) pregnant second my mouse hovered over the option "Consume (disliked food)". But I didn't do it - if I had, there would be no baby-filled grave for people to go to from time to time and remember at for a low positive mood buff 💀
We started up another co-op run of Necesse. It plays a lot like a top-down Terraria but with a better villager/colony management system. It's the kind of game that looks like it might be fun for 20minutes and then you check the time and it's been several hours!
I first played this a couple years ago when it looked like this and wow they really have revamped all of the graphics and it looks so much better now. The map also used to be broken up into square biome islands that was rather annoying to travel between but the new system is continuous and feels a lot more fun to explore. We managed to get some farming and storage automated on the first day. Now I am really looking forward to exploring the new dungeons and bosses.
I've been playing the Switch 2 edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 since it's released. I got into Xenoblade back in 2021, when I managed to get a small lot of used switch games for cheap, which included Xenoblade 1 and 2. While it's a game I like, it's always been my least favourite of the lot, and the current replay has not been changing my mind.
For starters, I don't particularly like the change in narrative, writing, and artstyle, which in XC2 feel like a very generic anime. Characters are very stereotyped, but I remember warming up to all of them by the end of the game in my first playthrough, so I imagine that's what will happen this time too. A lot of people have problems with the main character, Rex, and i can certainly see why, but he doesn't particularly bother me. The artstyle change was a real shame, because I really liked the look of the original Wii release of XC1, however it got slightly altered in the Switch remaster to look a little more like XC2. Unfortunately the Wii's severely limited hardware was unable to properly render the artists' vision for the characters, but if you take a look at the old artwork you'll see what I mean. The story isn't anything too mindblowing, but thanks in part to its simplicity is still very enjoyable. Some scenes, however, are written in a way that's downright embarassing, and the game as a whole made me literally cringe more than once. Worldbuilding is still top notch.
The gameplay, on the other hand, is still good old Xenoblade, meaning it's fantastic. Exploring the huge maps is a lot of fun, as is engaging with the combat system. One of the problems of all Xenoblade games is that tutorials are lacking to say the least and the game doesn't really do a good job at explaining its functions. For this reason it took me an embarassingly long time to figure out how the combat system really works, however once I did I started to really have fun with it. If you're trying any Xenoblade game and you seem to not really get into it, try looking up a tutorial for the combat system on the internet: there's a decent chance that's what's holding you back from enjoying the game.
The version I'm playing, however, is the shiny new Switch 2 edition, so: how is it?
I'd say it's fine. There is some rare stutter here and there and the upscaling could be better, but it looks and plays pretty well. It's certainly a lot better than on Switch 1, as it originally had a very soft image and the frame rate wasn't extremely stable (but still reached its 30 fps target most of the time). The frame drops in the original were particularly problematic, because v-sync was not adaptive and the game logic was tied to the framerate. This means any even very slight frame drop would lock the framerate to 20 fps and slow down the gameplay. I can't say if the logic is still tied to the framerate, as the infrequent stutters I got so far were not enough to asses that.
I tried the new mode, merc assault, and it's cool that it allows you to play as blades directly, but that's pretty much it. When all's said and done I don't think this upgrade is worth €10 and it should have been a free update, at least for the framerate and resolution bump. But I guess the joke's on me, since I purchased it and allowed this behaviour.
RuneScape: Leagues II Equilibrium is out and I already have conflicting thoughts.
The first relic I obtained (Golden Touch) is overpowered as fuck. Goldenhawk Boots alone give you Agility XP and Goldenhawk feathers whenever you're running, skilling or using ultimate abilities. Feathers can be sold for 50,000gp or exchanged for a good chunk of prayer XP. I have managed to hit 40 Prayer and 86 Agility in about two hours of playtime.
It also lets you pickpocket without fail and multiplies loot, as far as 200x coins.
The other two choices were kinda dogshit. And I don't think I should really explain why solving three tedious skills and any money woes in one relic is absurdly busted.
I've been working through my thecatamites/garmentdistrict backlog and got hooked on the Anthology of The Killer series over the past few days. The collection of nine short games was finally released for the Switch and PS5 a few months ago. Really deep art design, soundtrack, and world building! I don't really like horror games but these aren't really scary--just a bit gory. It's horror/comedy.
They are basically walking simulators so not much play--but each game reveals its plot in a different way which is pretty interesting. It also presents minor* philosophical questions buried a little deep within abstraction... good material for the subconscious to munch on for a few days...
* well perhaps a bit more serious than "is a hot dog a sandwich??"; maybe you could say lowercase m-major or lowercase p-profound philosophical questions
To celebrate 100 episodes of our podcast on roguelike/lite games, we did a 3-part deep dive on the games that led up to 1980's Rogue, the first true roguelikes that followed, and 2009's Brouge CE to compare just how far ASCII games have come since.
Part 1: Rogue and Its Predecessors
Part 2: Moria, Hack, Larn, and Omega
Part 3: Brogue CE