Topic: What are you playing?

[broodwars]

Rolled credits on Nioh 3 and Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, both with 100% completion.

Nioh 3 is...OK. I really wonder if all the lavish praise for this entry comes from people who simply didn't play the 1st 2 Niohs, because this game really is just OK. The "Open World" is both "unnecessary" AND "a lie." The former is because it adds nothing to the Nioh experience. If anything, having to actually have a coherent world severely undercuts what the level designers could do with any given scenario, and the few times the missions have any life to them is when the game has to segment off an area so the player can only enter it at an appointed time and has to proceed through it in a linear fashion.

Where the designers try to inject some variety into the game is where the "lie" comes in: this isn't an open world game. It's 2 medium-sized fields and 1 small-sized field representing different time periods bridged by linear levels pretending to be other time periods. If you actually came here for the Open World experience, I think you'll find it extremely jarring how the game's structure is a sandwich, with the game world actively getting smaller as you progress until it expands out again at the end.

Overall, this is easily the weakest of the Nioh games, especially in terms of narrative. There is just so much...nothing...here. Characters just flit in an out of the story on a whim, and clearly you're supposed to know who all these people are, historically, ahead of time because the game does absolutely nothing to set them up. If the 1st Nioh was a good story that was convolutedly told and the 2nd Nioh was an OK story that was badly told, Nioh 3 is a bad story that is badly told. Also, I hope you really liked the bosses of the previous Nioh games, because a good chunk of the lesser ones got sloppily copy-pasted here as well.

As for Ender Magnolia, I like the game but it feels too eager to be a "sequel" for my tastes, such that the game rushes through mechanics it took you the entirety of Ender Lilies to build up. For instance, I don't remember Lilies allowing the player to form a full 4 person party until very late in the game. You have a full party in Magnolia in the 1st hour. Where Lilies took its time to build dread; isolation; mystery; & gloom, Magnolia has what passes for entire towns of chatty NPCs that you regularly return to.

What IS a definite improvement over the first game is the in-game map, which is so much clearer to read than Lilies' map was and it VERY helpfully color-codes areas based on whether you've found all the secrets. That said, there were still some times when I got stuck trying to figure out where I needed to go to proceed. I wish the game was better at nudging you in the right direction.

It also takes Magnolia a while to ramp up the difficulty. I remember struggling with bosses in Lilies pretty early on, but Magnolia is a cakewalk until probably about halfway in. At that point, the switch gets flipped and enemies start doing absolutely absurd amounts of damage, including status effects. In both games, you WILL master the parry and dodge or you will die, but Magnolia pretends its lighter fare for much longer.

Story-wise, I feel like Lilies told a better story, but Magnolia tells a more complicated one with more moving parts.

Overall, Ender Magnolia is excellent, but I just prefer Lilies more.