Author Topic: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)  (Read 9477 times)

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #25 on: August 31, 2024, 03:25:14 PM »
Working on Luigi's Mansion 2 HD and Paper Mario TTYD at the moment!
Also might play Super Catboy, that looks like a great 16 high-bit pixel art action platformer.

Funny that you should bring up the Switch version of Paper Mario TTYD, because I just rolled credits on it. Overall, I still like the game, and the addition of the warp pipe room makes this game SO much more playable than the original version (if you did the Troubles or remember General White, you know why). That said, Chapter 3 (aka the Wrestling Chapter) is still fucking awful, and that last boss fight is an utter slog. I remembered it being one of the hardest boss fights Nintendo's ever made, and I still stand by that now after it took my entire inventory to take down. It's just an utter battle of attrition, which gets tedious as you just repeat the same actions over and over again.

Not gonna bother with some of the new post-game boss fights Nintendo added because I really don't care.

Happy to report that I just finished Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on the very last day of the month! ;D I kept playing it with my mother when I was with her last month and this month. Paper Mario and the Zelda games are her all-time favorites. It’s been so long since she last played TTYD so that she couldn’t remember much, it was a really nice experience to see her recall a few small things while playing. At the same time, it felt like a new game for her as well. She’s quite old now and not in the best physical health, so I suspect this might be one of the last few special games we play together. Who knows—maybe Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom will have a similar effect.

I’ve got to say, @broodwars, I only died once, and that was during the last boss fight. I thought the game was pretty easy otherwise, but I never skipped any fights, which I think helped a lot. :) I do agree, though—the last boss fight is super tough!
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Offline Luigi Dude

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #26 on: August 31, 2024, 08:04:07 PM »
Well I managed to finish Tales of Vesperia last night.  The final time on my Switch says my total playtime was somewhere between 85-90 hours.  The playtime is important since this game almost feels like 2 games to me.  The first 40 hours I was really enjoying it and would say it was a legit great game during that time.

The combat took me a little while to get used to at the beginning since it was clunkier than all other action games I've played in recent years.  Even though I knew there was no dodge button, I would still accidentally hit the ZL or ZR triggers sometime since most other action games I've played in recent years had something like that, and take damage.  Still after a few hours I got used to it and when the game finally game me a full team of 4 characters, then it really took off since I had more options to help me with combat.

I was also really digging the story and setting early on as well.  I liked that there were all these different factions within the Empire and all the different Guilds and how they interact as well.  This made me really enjoy talking to all the different NPC and I liked how their dialogue was constantly changing thoughout the game.  The interactions between party member and the various skits would also be pretty funny at times as well.

But then I reach the halfway point of the game and the games quality just drops off a cliff.  The combat that was interesting in the beginning now just becomes a slog since it's the same thing over and over again.  Despite the games monster log saying it has hundreds of enemies, most of them are just reskins of each other.  A lot of the enemies are behaving the exact same as earlier version of said enemies, except they now take longer to kill.  It also doesn't help that the game starts making the dungeons longer and longer as the game progresses, so you have to fight even more of the same enemies over and over again, making things more of a slog.

It also doesn't help that the combat also stops progressing so you're literally doing the same moves over and over again.  Now if the game had a wide variety of characters that were fun to use that could have helped change things up, but it doesn't.  Every other character just sucks compared to Yuri, so the game gives you no reason to ever change things up.  He's the easiest to control and can do more damage faster than anyone else.  And even with Yuri, despite the game giving me new special attacks, the best thing to do in 99% is the same combination of attacks that cause the most damage and are fastest to do and the game doesn't even try to give you enemies or bosses that force you to change things up.

Oh and the story just hits a total brick wall when the true villain shows up and reveals he was behind every thing that has happened in the story so far.  All the interesting world builing and relationships goes out the window when now everyone in the world is united behind Yuri and his group.  Plus the whole morality debate it was trying to have between Yuri and Flynn also is dropped when Flynn turns into a giant Yuri fanboy who doesn't even try to question was Yuri does anymore.

Seriously, the whole game feels like Namco gave the team enough time and money to make a 30-40 hour game but then demands it be turned into something that can be close to 100 hours.  I finally understand how they were able to pump out so many of these Tales games every year despite the fact the games are suppose to be very long.  The lack of time and budget just becomes so apparent in the second half when it's constantly reuses content, not introducing anything new, and the story and characters that actually started interesting, become incredibly boring and one dimensional versions of themselves.

The only part I still enjoyed from beginning to end were the boss fights that were where the combat really shined.  Unlike the normal enemies that become very boring and predicable, the boss fights actually have some new gimmicks to them each time that require you to change strategies more often and sometimes even switch up my supporting team members for.  Even when I turned down the difficulty to normal mode for regular enemy encounters, I would turn it back up to Hard mode for the boss fights.  The final boss fight in particular was a great time, with the boss being level 65, while my team was around level 57, and I finally had an excuse to go all out with all the items I had in my inventory that I had been saving up.

Of course I would love to hear what the **** the developers were thinking with that Gattuso boss fight.  I've constantly hear about that fight when people talk about game that have their hardest boss early on and yeah, now I understand what they talk about.  It's literally the type of boss fight you deal with in the second half of the game, put in the early part where your team doesn't even have the abilities and techniques the deal with it.  I eventually turned the difficulty down on that one, since that was literally impossible to do on a first time Hard mode run when your characters are under leveled like mine were.  I actually came really close once, but all my characters ran out of magic and I had no items to refill their magic meters since the nearest town doesn't sell items to refill magic.  Then after that fight is done, the town you visit after starts selling items that refill the magic meter.  It's like really guys, that's a massive oversight to not do that before this boss.

Oh and I also finally understand when people say Sakuraba likes to phone in his soundtracks for the Tales games.  The man has done amazing soundtracks in other games but in this one, his work is very forgettable.  That's another thing that made the game drag in the end as well, when the soundtrack outside of a few tracks was pretty forgettable.


So yeah in the end, I really loved this game for the first 40 hours.  The gameplay, story and characters were really clicking during this time but then they all start dragging out and getting more and more boring the longer the game goes.  Outside of the great boss fights, the rest of the game just doesn't justify being longer then 50 hours when the story, characters and normal enemy encounters just keep getting more boring and repetitive the longer it goes.


If you play another Tales game, I highly recommend Symphonia (especially if your only other Tales game is Vesperia, which is similarly styled). But from what I've heard, don't play the game on Switch. Every other version of the remaster apparently runs fine, but Symphonia on Switch was apparently a REALLY bad port.

That said, I can tell you that Symphonia kinda set the bar of all Tales games being 100+ hours long. IIRC, Arise does buck that trend, though.

I don't mind the long time as long as the games do a better job of justifying their length then Vesperia did.  Of course it's kind of funny the same week I beat Vesperia, we get the announcement that Graces F is getting remastered, and even more remasters will be on their way for the series upcoming 30th anniversary.  So it looks like I'll be getting more choices soon.

I hope they remaster the older 2D games since I've read they're much shorter and don't have all the filler the later 3D games have.  After Vesperia, I'd happily take games like it that are shorter and don't wear out their welcome.
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Offline broodwars

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #27 on: September 01, 2024, 01:32:39 AM »
Well now, it seems I ended up having the time I needed before the end of the month (+1 hour) to complete the remaining 2 Dark Pictures Anthology games I had in my backlog, and they make for a very curious pair: House of Ashes and The Devil in Me.

House of Ashes is very typical for the series: low on subtlety, high on the B movie acting and monsters. The scope is limited; the action is big (for this series); and the QTEs are many. You are a group of US Marines investigating what they think is Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons cache in 2003 Iraq, and they stumble into...alien vampires hiding out in underground Sumerian ruins. The story is pretty strongly focused on the theme of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and there's some spooky backstory with a previous expedition that had found these ruins...but what you see is what you get. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but the series needed this after basically fake-outs with the 1st 2 Dark Pictures games. Easily my biggest complaint with this game is that House of Ashes has by far the most QTEs in the series, they have VERY short timers, and the consequences for missing even 1 are extremely punishing.

The Devil in Me was a very pleasant surprise, as it seems that Supermassive decided that the big feature they'd add for this game would be...actual gameplay. Gone are the wide-angle "cinematic" cameras and the extremely robotic way the characters shuffled around the sets and bumped into walls, replaced with natural movement and an over-the-shoulder camera. Instead of forced letterboxing, you get the full picture. In previous Dark Pictures games, characters moved like they had both feet stuck in tar, but in this installment they can actually run. You can push and pull objects in the environment and perform context-sensitive jumps or crouches under objects. There are basic puzzles to solve and inventory items to pickup and use. The QTEs are dramatically less frequent and more forgiving in general. There's a fucking UI indicator now when you're about to touch something that's going to move the story forward and force you to stop exploring.

I realize how extremely basic all this sounds, but it makes this game so much more playable and SOOOO much less frustrating than the 1st 3 Dark Pictures games.

I also really vibe with the premise, following a team of serial killer documentarians who become trapped in a constantly-shifting murder hotel modeled after the one operated by America's real world 1st Serial Killer. The atmosphere is consistently spooky, and the sequences engaging. My only real issue with the game is that for all the information you can find about the killer over the course of the game, they seemed to work better as a villain in the background pulling strings than what they ended up as in my playthrough.

It's a real shame that the Dark Pictures series started with a game as profoundly bad as Man of Medan, because it's really colored how people see this series. It's certainly a large part of why it's taken me so long to play all these games. I look forward to seeing how Supermassive continues to improve as the series goes to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism: SPACE!
« Last Edit: September 01, 2024, 01:35:37 AM by broodwars »
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Offline broodwars

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #28 on: September 01, 2024, 09:52:21 AM »
The Splatoon 3 DLC is baffling to me. The setup would be perfect for co-op, so why is it only single-player? There are already several games with a similar premise which have co-op, so I have no idea why they keep making single-player-only DLC for a multiplayer-focused game.

My guess is that it was planned and prototyped, but scrapped when they saw potential technical issues when you had 2 players and dozens of enemies spraying ink everywhere. The enemy count on-screen gets absolutely absurd towards the end of the tower. A common remark about the DLC I see online is confusion as to why it took so long to get released, and I suspect a scrapped co-op mode could be the reason why.
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Offline Lemonade

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #29 on: September 23, 2024, 08:20:46 AM »
I totally forgot about backlaugust this year. I have been working on my backlog all year. In august I finished the Life is Strange 1 and Before The Storm remasters for Switch.

I also played some of Age of Calamity, but I didnt like it very much.

Offline Evan_B

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #30 on: September 23, 2024, 05:22:59 PM »
I also played some of Age of Calamity, but I didnt like it very much.
Weird how I absolutely devoured the original Hyrule Warriors, but pretty promptly bounced off of Age of Calamity. I think it had something to do with that stupid map unlock system- not a fan.
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Offline Lemonade

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #31 on: September 25, 2024, 09:48:38 AM »
Hyrule Warriors was fun and weird. Age of Calamity took its self too seriously trying to be a prequel to one of the best games ever made.
It wasnt fun.

Offline Luigi Dude

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Re: BacklAugust 2024! (Forums Are Dead Edition)
« Reply #32 on: September 25, 2024, 04:25:49 PM »
Age of Calamity took its self too seriously trying to be a prequel to one of the best games ever made.

Age of Calamity isn't a prequel though, it's a full blown alternate universe that has Future Trunks from DBZ time travel shenanigans going on where by the end of the game the events of Breath of the Wild will never take place because the events of this timeline are now completely different.

Yeah it starts out more serious than Hyrule Warriors, but by the end of the game it's pure fan fiction that's just as silly and light hearted.
I’m gonna have you play every inch of this game! - Masahiro Sakurai