What game are you playing?

[TedEH]

Done with Sly 2. It's a step forward from the first one in most ways. Probably will do #3 soon.

 

[wankerness]

I'm at chapter 4 in Final Fantasy Rebirth and at this point I totally love it. We'll see if that curdles as I get to harder chocobo stealth minigames or whatever. But right now? The dialogue and stuff is much better than FF7 Remake and the characters are infinitely more likable than FFXVI so cutscenes so far are enjoyable instead of a chore. Similarly, sidequests are at their essence similar to FFXVI with a character telling you to go do something and come back, but they feel SO much less mechanical, they're often goofy, and you actually get fun character moments during them all so it feels more like a Yakuza game than an MMORPG. Combat's about the same as remake, with some extra "Synergy" stuff added I am still figuring out. The card game isn't "fun" to me but at least it's straightforward instead of confusing and bizarre like the FF8 one was in some regions. Graphics are blurry, but that's cause i wanted the 60 FPS for combat, and it still looks good. The open world ubisoftian stuff is OK with me cause part of my brain likes that stuff (I pretty much 100%d like 8 of those games).

 

[gabito]

Just got the plat for Like a Tourist: Infinite Grind.

Man, I grossly underestimated the grind to get Ichiban to level 70 and to max his personality. Luckily there are a few boosters spread around the game's world, but still... I know that's SEGA's strategy to get people to buy the extra DLC, so fuck you SEGA.

But oh well, nobody forced me to do it and it's done now. I feel like I have Yakuza withdrawal.

 

[wankerness]

Just got the plat for Like a Tourist: Infinite Grind.

Man, I grossly underestimated the grind to get Ichiban to level 70 and to max his personality. Luckily there are a few boosters spread around the game's world, but still... I know that's SEGA's strategy to get people to buy the extra DLC, so fuck you SEGA.

But oh well, nobody forced me to do it and it's done now. I feel like I have Yakuza withdrawal.

Personality boost was easy enough but level 70 is definitely not fun without the DLC dungeon.

 

[gabito]

Finally got around to finish Beyond Two Souls.

As I said before: Graphics are great (for the time), acting is generally good, I don't know what they were thinking with the controls, and there are bad stories and there's this... there are a few good parts, but holy shit.

Steam reviews speak about how great the story is... I don't know what's wrong with these people

So: David Cage does it again. I keep playing his games to see how bad they can get. He never disappoints.

 

[Ralyks]

Final boss of Persona 3 Reload. Great game, but I'm ready to finish it. One, because I have Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth waiting in the wings, but I'm also like 3 trophies shy of the Platinum in P3R and I know it's going to take a second playthrough (plus The Answer episode coming in the fall).

 

[p0ke]

DS2: I started doing the chasm of old stuff, and got through 2/3 of them. So now I've just the one under the castle to deal with. It's difficult though as Havel keeps pushing me off the ledge. I checked the wiki, and looks like my best bet is to simply use Force and push the enemies off the ledges instead of them pushing me So I got myself enough faith to use it. I have to use a ring to get atunement slots, but now I can use it anyway. So now I just need to get a few more human effigies so I can enter the chasm again... Oh yeah and I found the place where you can go human without effigies. What a pain in the ass to get to -> I had accidentally killed one of the singing ladies before, so I had to use a bonfire ascetic to get her to respawn in order to open the door. But it worked, so now I can unhollow myself for free. Just gotta despawn the enemies between the bonfire and the altar, there's a pretty powerful pyromancer there who's pretty likely to kill me whenever I go there.
I also defeated the Ancient Dragon (that's where I got enough souls to get a few levels of faith), he was really easy in the end. I just stayed between his rear claws and rolled out whenever he did the stomp attack, and then went back again. Smelter Sword +5 did some pretty nice damage too, so the fight didn't take that long.

 

[SalsaWood]

I play this fun game where every time I have to interact with any part of the government I tell them why they need to go fuck themselves in detail, and then a week later I get to do it all over again because they frequently throw whatever personal check or filing in the trash due to my adversarial attempts to elevate them consistently backfiring on me.

 

[profwoot]

I might have mentioned how I bounced off of Baldur's Gate 3 because it was too tedious to be a good downtime activity during the busiest teaching part of the year. Sure enough, with a couple weeks until things get busy again I'm thinking about bg3 even when I'm not playing it. Currently doing an evil playthrough and wondering if I should slow down since they just announced they're adding some stuff to the evil endings.

 

[wankerness]

BG3 seems like it may end up being a good game to replay every couple of years. I had a great time with it after the first 1/4 or so, and when I finished immediately wanted to do a new playthrough to start the stuff I missed, but I'm glad I didn't cause I would have burned myself out on it.

I'm now on chapter...7? of FF7 Rebirth. I'm on the beach island and I just finished the hellish situp minigame. They took the pull-up one from the previous game, and made it far worse by making the game use entirely L1/L2/R1/R2 and making you mash the button on L2/R2 with the stupid haptic feedback fighting you the whole time. OR, you can turn off haptic feedback, and then it makes you hold the button down at half strength for a couple seconds, release it, and press it again precisely, which is wayyyy easier with the haptic feedback preventing you from pressing it all the way down. Argh. I think I took 30 minutes to do it. It was bad. On my successful try I beat the snot out of that bastard Jules, though - 58-50!

The other thing that I think is going to kill me eventually is the piano minigame. I got As on the first two songs with only one or two attempts, but I can tell that as soon as one of those charts actually requires you to pay attention to both left and right hands at once that it's going to be very, very difficult for me.

I've heard that the worst minigame is later on in the game, but I haven't heard what it is, so I'm kind of dreading that vaguely. So far the only one I haven't been willing to get max reward on is the awful Fall Guys-style Frog game where you have to jump around in circles with a terrible camera for 90 seconds without dying or getting hit by spinning bars. But, it seems doable, just something that will raise my blood pressure greatly.

The game's still great...besides Yuffie. That character is SO obnoxious and is loaded with that kind of performative Japanese woman thing where she's constantly waving her arms around and bending over all obnoxiously during her lines and gah. They did such a good job with making all the other characters very endearing, even some of the intentionally annoying ones like Jonny, but she's just like fingernails on a blackboard. I know that there will eventually be at least one more playable character (Cait Sith) that I think is controversial, but we'll see. He's got to be better than Yuffie!

The other thing I have trouble with in this game is the lockon - it seems like my controlled character is always spazzing out randomly locking onto enemies across the field of battle and then snapping back to different ones without me touching the left stick, even if I've manually locked onto a target. I'm probably doing something wrong.

 

[Ralyks]

Beat Persona 3 Reload. Again, great game. That said, I think I still prefer Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal.

Now it's a coin flip if I play Like a Dragon or FFVII Rebirth.

 

[wankerness]

Beat Persona 3 Reload. Again, great game. That said, I think I still prefer Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal.

Now it's a coin flip if I play Like a Dragon or FFVII Rebirth.

I think FFVII rebirth might be the more polished game, but Like a Dragon I loved almost the entire way through while FFVII rebirth does have some teeth-gnashing minigames here and there (and I've heard the worst is yet to come). Like a Dragon you can also get the platinum on in less time than it takes to do a single run of FF7 rebirth with all the sidequests (let alone all the trophies for hard modes and highest rank on all the minigames and crap).

 

[p0ke]

Ok so I figured I'm better off looking for human effigies in the DLC areas in DS2... I think I have all the dlc key items now, so off we go... I went to the one that's behind The Rotten first, got through the first area relatively easily and I'm now in the Dragon Sanctuary. The basic enemies are pretty easy to circle around and my hammer back"stab" oneshots them.
And as always I missed the first bonfire (probably would've been to the right immediately where I went left and ended up having to go each time to get my souls back...), and the next one was pretty far. Also had to run past a whole bunch of ghost enemies whom I couldn't hit. But now I'm in this flooded area with some weird dinosaurs walking around.

And I was succesful - I have already found a couple of human effigies, so I can get back to the chasm again, now with the Force-spell...

I've also got enough faith now to use the black knight ultra greatsword - pretty massive damage, but what's with the explosions every time I hit something? I mean, I get the Smelter sword doing that since it's fire based, but this one isn't and it still does that.

 

[wankerness]

Ok so I figured I'm better off looking for human effigies in the DLC areas in DS2... I think I have all the dlc key items now, so off we go... I went to the one that's behind The Rotten first, got through the first area relatively easily and I'm now in the Dragon Sanctuary. The basic enemies are pretty easy to circle around and my hammer back"stab" oneshots them.
And as always I missed the first bonfire (probably would've been to the right immediately where I went left and ended up having to go each time to get my souls back...), and the next one was pretty far. Also had to run past a whole bunch of ghost enemies whom I couldn't hit. But now I'm in this flooded area with some weird dinosaurs walking around.

And I was succesful - I have already found a couple of human effigies, so I can get back to the chasm again, now with the Force-spell...

I've also got enough faith now to use the black knight ultra greatsword - pretty massive damage, but what's with the explosions every time I hit something? I mean, I get the Smelter sword doing that since it's fire based, but this one isn't and it still does that.

I dunno, for some reason in DS2 they decided black knight weapons were split fire damage weapons. I guess the black knight armor/shields in DS1 had a ton of fire resist so maybe that's where they got the idea?

The best ultragreatsword in DS2's base game by far is the Crypt Blacksword which you get from the soul of the Rotten if you kill him with a bonfire ascetic or NG+, which is split dark/physical damage. My favorite of the others would either be the Fume Ultra Greatsword (from a DLC boss) or the Pursuer greatsword (which is a lot of fun but really easy to miss with cause of the swing pattern).

The dragon sanctuary is PROBABLY the easiest of the three DLC areas. There's some really cool stuff in it but I definitely died over and over my first playthrough to those invisible guys cause I didn't understand the gimmick and would always end up just slowly chipping away at them while they were still invisible. Now that I know how to rush the coffins it's a lot easier.

 

[CTID]

Finally got around to finish Beyond Two Souls.

As I said before: Graphics are great (for the time), acting is generally good, I don't know what they were thinking with the controls, and there are bad stories and there's this... there are a few good parts, but holy shit.

Steam reviews speak about how great the story is... I don't know what's wrong with these people

So: David Cage does it again. I keep playing his games to see how bad they can get. He never disappoints.

man, David Cage is such a fucking hack. i watched my wife play through all of his games (Fahrenheit->Detroit) and the only good one (imo, of course) was Heavy Rain, and even it had its (plentiful) share of bad writing, bad acting, bugs, etc. it also killed me (in a funny way) that it was supposed to be in Philly but all the toilets are in separate rooms from the rest of the bathrooms

wild that he's had such a fruitful career and that people engage with his stories so much but hey, to each their own. there are people who view the MCU as peak cinema too, so yeah.

 

[wankerness]

Hey, the worst MCU movie still has far better writing than a David cage joint.

 

[p0ke]

Oh yeah, I found a bunch of effigies in the DLC area and went to the chasm again. The Force-strategy didn't work at first and Havel still beat the crap out of me, but then I practiced using the spell a little bit and went in again, and was able to push him off the ledge. The rest was a breeze and I got to the Darklurker, but wasn't able to kill it yet. The fight was relatively easy until it split into 2, during which I was changing equipment since I was frustrated that my poison sword didn't do enough damage (apparently the lurker is resistant, not surprised tbh), and wasn't fast enough in the menu.
Then I tried again, and I imagined I'd just be able to run through the chasm and hop into the boss fight but no, turns out you gotta kill the enemies again too. So then I was back against the fog with Havel and the 2 other guys and there was just no way I could survive that... I'll be entering through an easier chasm next time, and now I gotta go looking for more effigies again too.

I still didn't find the first bonfire in the Dragon Sanctum despite starting at the city bonfire and going from there. I guess I'll check the map on the wiki... Oh and I also defeated the demon of song again since I used the bonfire ascetic before to respawn the singing lady - the boss was just as easy, maybe just took a little bit longer than the first time.

 

[p0ke]

Hmm, interesting... Looking at the map, I've been right next to two different bonfires, but somehow missed them. And apparently they're not even behind doors or anything.

 

[wankerness]

Hmm, interesting... Looking at the map, I've been right next to two different bonfires, but somehow missed them. And apparently they're not even behind doors or anything.

The dragon sanctum has all those platforms that move up and down based on you hitting those pillar switches, some of which you can only hit with a bow. I think the second bonfire involves getting pillars all in the right place to make a path to them. The next one is inside the hallways and behind a locked door you have to open with a switch. The other ones you’re seeing as “close” on a map I think are way up high and you can’t get to them till you’ve gone through most of the level.

 

[Alberto7]

Been playing Ghost of Tsushima for about a week now. I'm in love with this game. Story, gameplay, everything. I think this tops just about anything else I've played in terms of looks. I just wish I could skip some of the wait scenes after finishing missions. I don't want to see Jin standing next to his horse for the next 90 seconds EVERY time.