I'm going to give Deus Ex another try. Normally I'm not bothered by dated games, but I couldn't get into Deus Ex when I tried it before.
I don't really understand the mechanics like stealth.

I really like Human Revolution. The stealth there is great. I never played the first one, though.
What do you mean by not understand, do you keep dying?
I should try it too, someday. I head the other games have a lackluster stealth, and went for a more brute tanky approach.

>>14534
Yeah, I keep dying. Maybe I should just kill things instead. I just kind of suck at it.
Haven't played the other games.

>>14535
Speaking from my experience with Human Revolution, I don't think a brute force works for most portions of the game, the game is designed to prioritize stealth, because the health bar drops very fast when being attacked, so you die very fast. In human revolution, I would try to go full stealth, using vents and cardboard boxes, or whatever else I could use to distract the enemies and get by unnoticed. Another neat thing the game had was this tranquilizer rifle, it made no sound and the enemies did not get startled hearing screams or thuds. It's only downside was the lack of ammo. All that said, playing on easy is always an option.

I'm going to play the M&B:WB Touhou mod again. I return to it fairly often because my computer runs it just fine, and there's just a lot of ways you can have fun with it, especially with everything the mod gives you to play with.
This time around, I want to see how far I can get without any troops. It started off pretty difficult, but I found that my character was faster than most of the weak bandits so I could manage to kite the enemies around and slowly kill their groups.
Now I'm just doing horse archery to raise money that I'll invest in some towns that'll give me a bit of passive income for when I decide to get some troops.

I'm going to try playing Ookami again. I didn't get too far in when I first played it. Not that I didn't like the game, but I had a lot going on at the time so it was hard to sit and enjoy.

I'm about to finish my first playthrough of Digimon Survive (Moral route), but I wanted to get some thoughts down on the game before I wrap it up.

I'll get the negatives out of the way first. The translation is janky as hell, with typos and inconsistencies (most notably with Labramon's pronouns) all over the place. There's some pacing issues early on in the game - the intro drags a bit and Parts 4 and 5 are padded with some repetitive filler. The TRPG gameplay is rudimentary, with not much variation in stage design, sluggish pacing even at 3x speed, and poor balancing (Minoru's Falcomon pretty much breaks the game). The evolution system has a weird quirk where the "free Digimon" you recruit through the negotiation system can only evolve with certain items, and the hardest ones to get are the ones that let Child stages evolve to Adults. Paradoxically, the game is super generous with the higher-level evolution items, but it's not much help when it's so hard to evolve your Child stages in the first place. However, you can recruit higher-level Digimon from trash mobs as the game progresses, and the main characters' evolutions are tied to their Affinity scores instead of those items, so it's not a gamebreaking issue. All in all, the effects of constant delays and developer/engine changes did end up taking their toll on Survive. How could they not?

This hasn't been a problem for me, but it may be for some: when Habu cited Utawarerumono as his influence for Survive, he wasn't lying. I would also compare it to classic Sakura Wars. This is a VN first and foremost and a TRPG on the side. There's a lot of reading the whole way through, and if you don't have the attention span for that, Survive isn't for you.

As a VN, Survive is excellent. While doing my best to avoid spoilers, the story is tragic, emotional, and mature, and they pulled no punches with the characters. They are all flawed, they all have moments of weakness, one of them is even flat-out unlikeable and irredeemable (but intentionally so, and you find out why through the story, and there are consequences for their behavior). The graphics/artstyle are nice even on the Switch. While it is a blend of 2D and 3D, the 3D elements don't clash with the aesthetic. The sprites in battle are well-crafted with nice attack animations, although having to create all this stuff from scratch means that the roster of Digimon is quite limited.

Although I was critical of the gameplay earlier, I do have to praise Survive for taking a giant leap towards the experience fans have spent years begging for. A story that feels like the anime, but for older audiences (and you get to choose how dark it gets). Partner Digimon with real personalities, dialogue, and evolution mechanics that work like the anime. Battles that give the tamers a role from the sidelines. Some of what Survive has introduced needs to become the standard for future Digimon games, whether it's Story, World, or something else. Digimon is getting so close to translating its biggest selling point (the bond between tamers and partners) to video games, and they're just a little bit of refinement away from achieving this vision.

Overall, Survive's highs are so high, I can forgive the issues. It's one of the best games of the year in my opinion, and perhaps the best Digimon game ever made. I'm debating whether to jump into NG+ immediately after I finish up, or take a break and wait to play some other new games I want to play first.

>>14579
>I'm debating whether to jump into NG+ immediately after I finish up, or take a break and wait to play some other new games I want to play first.
I ended up caving and starting my NG+ run tonight. I'm just in too much of a Digimon mood these days to put this game away so quickly, and I just really want to do the Truthful route. I think after that I'll be done with it for a while, and maybe I'll get to the Harmony and Wrathful routes someday.

>>14581
I'm already almost done with the Truthful route, just three more chapters to go. Turns out that besides Ryo and Shuuji staying alive, barely anything changes from the base game besides a few lines of extra dialogue and a couple more Affinity prompts until Chapter 9. I was able to fast forward through most of the dialogue without missing much, and since NG+ also lets you skip every tutorial and keep all your Mega-evolved Digimon from the first run (turning early-game fights into a joke), it didn't take anywhere near as long as I was expecting.

The problem is, even with fast-forwarding and not having to spend hours grinding for recruitable Digimon and evolution items anymore, the sheer repetitive slog of Chapters 4-7 still shone through on a second playthrough. There's a particularly annoying part of the game where you have to point-and-click your way through the same underground maze four times in a row to help Takuma and a few other cast members tell the difference between their partner Digimon and a fake illusion of it. You have to sit through three cutscenes of the fake Digimon berating their partner, then decide which one is real when they're standing side by side, and two of these sequences lead into miniboss fights that take even more time. It's a colossal waste of time, and the poster child for how bloated the midgame is with repetitive filler.

Also, the tension/fear between some of the tamers and their partners in Chapter 7, which is an understandable reaction in the base game, becomes nonsensical in NG+ when Shuuji DOESN'T get eaten by Wendigomon in front of them and thus the whole reason for the tamers' fear never happened in the first place, but they're still scared anyway! It's mindblowing that this part didn't get a serious rewrite.

I was all gung-ho about getting to the other two routes I missed eventually, but now I think I'll just play the Harmony route from my backup save at some point, and then watch the Wrathful route on YouTube rather than slog through all that again. I still think Survive is really good, but it's not "four consecutive playthroughs" good because of the padded midgame.

>>14583
I forgot to mention, and the site won't let me edit my previous post to include this for some reason, but that tedious underground maze is completely unchanged in NG+. They did nothing to speed it up so players could get to the new content faster. It's honestly "that part" of the game for me that I dread on future playthroughs.

There's a lot to love about Survive, but this is again where the four years of development hell, engine changes, developer changes, etc. took their toll in a noticeable way. They just couldn't buy any more time to give it the last round of refinement it needed without pissing off the fans who had already been waiting since 2018 and making Bamco seriously consider canceling the game altogether.

I tried System Shock 2 today. I've never bothered much with retro pc games, so I'm a bit blown away really. Game looks really good compared to other (console) games I've played from that year. I think simple graphics are really nice. Easier to appreciate while actually playing the game.
Gameplaywise, it feels really nice. I'll have to get used to it, but it is better than I anticipated. The stats and skills seem nice. Looks like they'll make different playthroughs varied enough to be fun and none of them seem like they'll be practically useless.
It seems like it'll be better Doom 3.

I bought Banished on the first day it released--if I correctly recall--and until recently, I felt buyer's remorse since its initial price was twenty smackers; I think I put in a few hours of playtime and then moved onward to something else.
So eight years later, and I'm finally getting my money's worth as I've spent almost fifty enjoyable hours of my life on it, and that's with just its vanilla-ish gameplay as I'm only using mods that enhance the quality of life and provide minor additions like standalone fences. There's a few overhaul mods to look forward to, and thank goodness, because the base game's content isn't much: There's neither any settlement defense, nor any interesting production chains.
Still disappointed in myself for spending $20 on a game I'm only enjoying now as I could have gotten it for one fourth of that if patience were adhered to.

As an aside, I'm looking at the games that are inspired by Banished and released thereafter, but--well--let's just say that Early Access strikes again. Hope the guy who made Banished will release his next game before I'm dead.

Post edited on 16th Oct 2022, 10:12pm

Never did finish Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, so I began a new game. Like the other DS titles (except the first one, I suppose), there's a gimmick: Instead of depositing items in a shipping box everyday, you sell your loot directly to your customers in the form a minigame, once a week. There's also windmills instead of maker machines and a blacksmith.

It's different at first, but the minigame is much too simple to justify the bazaar's inclusion. That and inventory management sucks, a lot. One reason for this is the preservation system that some of the HM games had at the time; it's just an annoyance, and doesn't add any depth in my opinion. Thankfully, one can use an action replay code to disable item degradation.

This might seem minor, but I prefer it when one starts out with a simple abode, where one is to upgrade their property by expanding the house, building outbuildings like barns and coops, new tillable areas, etc. Grand Bazaar begins with a nice house and a big barn. Grinding is only fun if you feel an appreciable difference between where you were and were you are or will be.

The map is small, and there's neither a real wilderness area nor mining. While I would prefer this not to be the case, it makes grinding your relationship levels with the NPCs easier since they're very close.

Speaking of NPCs, the bachelorettes are merely okay: cute and nice. They could use more personality. That said, there are two secret marriage candidates, one guy and one girl, which I always appreciate. And the latter is notJapanese, so I look forward to meeting her when the next year begins.

The graphics are nice, specifically the terrain. Reminds me of Rune Factory 1-4. As usual, the music is unremarkable. I've complained about this before, and I will continue doing so since there's no excuse for it. (Hire me, Marvelous.)

I could go on, but I won't (for now, at least). Maybe a SoS/HM/RF thread might be a wise idea.

As I'm nearing the end of Winter of the first year in Grand Bazaar, I've noticed that, unlike other titles in the series, I'm not quite financially comfortable yet. Usually by Autumn, I would have amassed quite a bit of money, but the need to spend quite a bit of gold on ore and storage has had a dampening effect since other games either don't have much of a storage issue or permit you to mine your ore for upgrades. But the biggest hang on my revenue is the bazaar itself, as it only happens--at best--four times a season.

Nonetheless, I expect Spring to be a turning point in this regard since I've already purchased another field during the Winter. So, even though I've complained quite a bit about Grand Bazaar, at the very least, the second year is going to be more interesting than the first.

(Need to make a threads for this.)

I made the mistake of getting back into Battle for Wesnoth. It seems like every time I do, I find something new about it to hate. People love to complain about how RNG heavy the combat is, but honestly, the real problem is how the economy/gold is implemented. Unit upkeep costs don't really deter you from just recalling a bunch of your leveled units every scenario, since there's no punishment for running out of money midlevel and having stronger units usually means you'll finish the map faster and get a better early finish bonus as a result. Same thing with capturing villages. There are exceptions to this where you actually do want to be more conservative with what units you take, but it feels like there's basically no way to know about or predict them without having already played through the campaign or looking at a walkthrough. I think that's my real problem with this game, in that it feels like the "correct" way to play is to just follow a walkthrough online or memorize everything like it's some speedrun or 1cc. I hate it.


Or maybe I'm just shit at strategy games like this. I'm almost tempted to try doing a sort of screenshot let's play type thread here as I go through a campaign to better organize my thoughts while I play. I think that would make me less stressed out.

I've been playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2. It's alright, better than I expected. I played the first a long time ago, so the reused assets aren't a big problem, but I wouldn't want to play them back to back. I'm having fun, and that's what matters.

Atomic Heart
Bascially Bioshock in alt-history russia. Not bad but doesn't really do much that hasn't been done before in gameplay. PC port is great though; no frame-rate slowdowns or weird glitches.
Play it in russian audio for max immersion.

>>2003
I reinstalled Starcraft/Brood War a few days ago, right now I'm on the 5th mission of the zerg campaign

I'm playing FarCry these days.

I've been playing vanilla wow on turtle and ffxi on eden and catseye. Does tohno-chan ever play mmos? I was thinking of trying out a new ragnorok online pserver too.

>>14700
It feels like my MMO years are long behind me. I'm far too jaded and averse to interacting with other people to do that now, and I always feel like it'll be too much of a time commitment. Sometimes I'll see that other anons are doing something MMO related and feel tempted to join in, but I never really act on it.

>>14700
I've never played MMOs because I never had people I really got along with in the past. I also thought about trying a recent RO private server, but I didn't understand all the files in the download.

Exploring Vana'diel while listening to Haruka Shimotsuki albums in the background is nice. I've been playing solo so far, I think everyone plays these games solo now. I'm not much of a guildie type but if a tohno linkshell were to come into existence I'd join. I think I'll probably be on Eden more than Catseye, I prefer the classic feel where one must move more carefully.

>>14698
Now I'm playing the new System Shock. I'm normally not a fan of remakes but this one actually seems good so far, definitely still faithful to the original game.

『ENDER LILIES』: Quietus of the Knights
https://yewtu.be/i2O6YbhDVsQ
Holy rori with knights as stands jumps, dashes, dodges etc and fight monsters in a rainy world.

Despite the gothic nature, I find it soothing mainly due to the soundtrack.

Tohno or anybody else for that matter, any games you recommend buying in the upcoming Steam summer sale?

>>14723
It depends on what actually goes on sale but I've been enjoying Crystar. I hope that does.

>>13743
Just finished playing this(the main endings). It's also my first 3d "modern" game. So that took some adjusting to.

I liked it for the most part. Enjoyed the combat, although I have no point of references in the 3rd dimension. Some tediousness, especially having to replay the first part of the game as 9s.

I agree with many of your criticisms. You revisit the same places so many times, the world starts to feel small. The multi-"ending" thing, is padding for the most part. One thing though, I didn't have a problem with ending E. From a logical standpoint, it's not that far-fetched. They are androids after all. The pods gaining emotions is hardest thing about it for me to swallow.

Tonally, I don't really think a grim dark conclusion is necessary for the story to be taken seriously. What about the story is undermined by ending E? That bad things happen? Well good things can happen too. That what they do is pointless? Well it'll still be pointless. Pointless peace is better than pointless war.

The only thing I didn't like about ending E was the whole needing a helper thing. It's a little pretentious. I'm a filthy pirate, so I had to cheat. Still technically receiving help from someone, so whatever.

Something is not deep because it's sad, or because it wallows in angsty nihilism. Having some positivity adds yang to the yin.

>>14725
I finished Nier Replicant, all five endings. It's a bit of a mixed bag.

Combat is more dynamic than in Automata, since it has guarding and counterattacking, as well as letting you choose 2 special attacks on hand, instead of just 1. When enemies are knocked over, you can also "finish them off" right then and there. That last feature does speed things up, but maybe makes things more monotonous, so removing it might have been a good call. The flight and hacking sections, kind of compensate for the less interesting combat in Automata too.

Automata has little quality of life things Replicant lacks, like being able grab onto ledges you jump to, and "instant" transportation. The environments are definitely more interesting and 3-dimensional in Automata. Neither one has a world that feels "big" though. You go to the same locations A LOT in both.

Regarding the 5 main "endings", Automata is way less tedious. Seriously, if you thought that was tedious, you haven't seen anything. Both games can roughly be split into 2 parts. When you play through the first part in Automata again, you do so as another character, and there's quite a few differences. You only play through the second part of the game once.

Replicant has you play its second part twice, as the same character. The only difference being a few more cutscenes and now you can understand what your enemies have been saying. That's okay though. You get a different perspective. BUT THEN, you have to play the second part of the game a third time. The only difference now being a bit of new dialogue, and one boss battle ends in a slightly different way. All changes that could(should) have been incorporated into the second playthrough.

On top of that, you have to collect every weapon in the game. Completely arbitrary nonsense I would expect from something released in the 90s. You have to play the last bunch of boss battles again to get ending D(that's 4 times overall). Finally, to get ending E, you have to play most of the first part of the game a second time, no differences.

After that, you are rewarded with a bit of new content, where you play as Kaine, which was a much appreciated change of pace. Her combat is very fun. Had to play part of that twice too because of a glitch that softlocks the game.

The music is good and the characters are entertaining. In fact, the characters and their interactions were better, but Automata has the more interesting story. Replicant's story has contrivances, as does Automata's, but the emotions are on point. The story is harmed though by how much repetition there is. Some of the emotional impact is lost when you've seen the same thing more than twice, so you skip dialogue and cutscenes out of boredom.

Would I recommend Nier Replicant? Kind of. It depends on how much you liked Automata and want to know more about the lore and whatever.

Playing Blasphemous 2

>>2003
ASS CREED MIRAGE
It's fine.

>>14784
Finish the first one first...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_G9vMy-hWk

Playing Capcom vs SNK 2 for the first time...

I bought a SNES and some games, currently playing Dragon Quest III for the first time. I have played all modern Dragon Quest and it's a series I keep close to my heart, but man... As someone who may apply to the 'casual' label, playing a retro JRPG it's a bit overwhelming. It's not "hard" per se, but I don't feel like I'm at the right level at all, seems like I will need to grind even more because the first boss kicked my ass in just a few turns. I will get better and stronger and take revange soon. Another issue is the money, I don't earn enough per battle, barely can upgrade to new gear.

Currently something like 70% of the way into Windwaker I think. I'm playing the gamecube version which I think looks pretty great on an emulator, and only just realized there's an HD version, which without even looking into I bet messes up a lot of stuff as HD re-releases seem to do. (I just looked into it and boy is it uhh "bright") It feels almost overwhelming at first but doesn't take long before the world doesn't really feel 'that' big. Not to say it's not a nice game, but the map honestly feels mostly empty. It has a bunch of islands spread out, but it takes some time to get to each one and most are really tiny. I think it'd be nice if there was more to see and do on each island, but if nothing else the game does have that sense of exploration.
...I wish the boat was faster.

I also finished Spyhunter for PS2 a couple days ago, which I guess was something of a reimagining of the NES game of the same name that I played as a kid. I was always a bit curious about how it'd translate but just never got around to trying it, and apparently they made a couple sequels for it too.
Each level is like a course you run with objectives you need to knock out along the way, each objective gives you a point and you need X amount to progress to the next map. Most are straightforward but some are easy to miss, especially when you need to take secret hidden routes to reach them. Kind of made me miss how simple and fairly straight forward many older games could be. That's not to say the game is easy, and the controls could have been better. I kept fumbling around trying to switch weapons on the fly to whatever was needed at the moment. Reminded me a lot of Stuntman, how you needed to think fast and on the go.

I've also been playing the old PS2 burnout games off and on. The first one was quaint and charming in it's simplicity. A couple tacks, a few generic looking cars, and some weirdly relaxing music for a racing game. Not much in the way of features or anything, but it had a cost counter when you crash that adds up the damages, which along with the damage system would have been pretty neat for the time.
Burnout 2 felt a lot like an upgraded version of the first game, with a little bit more polish and better ui, more cars and more races. They seemed to remove the damage counter for some reason, but improved the burnout/boost system that gives you boost power for driving well. I knocked out the first burnout fairly quickly, but the second took a bit longer because of the extras it had.
Then there's burnout 3... This was... interesting...
First thing you notice is that it feels like a massive overhaul, no longer looking or feeling anything like the previous games. It almost feels over preproduced compared to the previous games, almost. You could tell at a glance it had a much much larger budget this time around. Visuals have been upgraded all around, tons on new content, achievements before those were even a thing, licensed popular music where as 1&2 had a soundtrack that sounds like what you find when you google "copyright free music", and online play at a time when consoles typically stayed offline. It also has this radio DJ that between lame jokes would remind you constantly to head to EA .com for all the latest racing states and blah blah. The DJ helped liven things up at first but got really annoying once you've heard all their lines 5 times each. Thankfully there's an option to mute them, since they had this bad habit of interrupting songs you might be enjoying.
But yeah this was very much an EA game in their early stages of mutating into what they are today. You could see some of the signs back then, literally, the game is spammed with advertisements for their other games with in game billboards. (though I will say it's not nearly as bad as other racing games that line their tracks with nothing but ads, even the initial D games do that which ruins the aesthetics of those mountain roads but that's another discussion)
I still haven't finished the game because the carrier mode is pretty long. It's essentially 3 maps, with various courses set up on those maps with many of the races feeling the same and a bit repetitive after a while, which isn't helped but how sammy so many of the cars look. You've got a bunch of cars in each class of cars, but in those classes the cars all look weirdly similar with only three selectable colors. It's certainly the best of the three without a doubt all in all. Shame the F1 car you unlock near the end handles like such garbage though. There's cars that turn on a dime, but that thing turns on a million dollars. A cargo freighter takes sharper turns than those cars.

Another racing game I recently revisited was the original Midnight club, one of the first PS2 games I ever played. I'd say it didn't hold up well but even back then I wasn't crazy about how it played compared to the sequels. Unlike traditional racing games at the time, it didn't have courses and would drop you in an open world, with checkpoints you'd needed to navigate your way to. The game has a very simple look to it which I think was fine for the time, but the main issue is the cars drive and handle like garbage, all of them, they're all horrible.
Forget 0-60 in ten seconds, it takes these cars ten minutes. They sloooowly crawl their way up to a decent speed, like you're pushing a freaking glacier. Then once you got it up to speed the challenge is keeping that speed, it's not so much car racing as it is managing and maintaining your built up momentum, because if you hit anything or screw up, you'll likely loose a lot of your momentum and struggle to regain it.
The game has this system where if you want to challenge someone to a race (which you need to do to unlock races and progress), you need to first go to them on the map and follow them for a bit, once you've done that for long enough they'll lead you to the location for the start of a race. Here's the thing with that, which was just as much of a problem when I was a kid playing this. In order to get to the second half of the game, London, you need to first beat the boss of the first map, New York. Problem is his car has much higher stats than the other racer on the map (who you can beat to claim their cars). Even using the best one, you simply can't catch up with the boss when trying to follow them to start the race, he's driving in a loop around the city at a speed you can't reach. Even if you start accelerating on his path well before he reaches you, at your top speed in the best car you can get trying to time things to follow him, he'll still pass you and drive away before triggering the race event. The only way I found to make it work is doing what I just mentioned but also trying to get him to rear end you and block him, and waiting for him to do a lap of the city if that doesn't work. This drove me nuts as a kid, and feels like terrible game design, so I just had to mention it. It's funny that in spite of how terrible the game places, I still find myself having a little sense of nostalgia for it. I haven't gotten around to replaying part 2 yet however, now that one I remember being a lot better...

I'm awaiting PoE2.

<3 War Thunder & World of Tanks

Symphony of the Night is the only Castlevania that I've managed to finish. It's far easier than the older ones and far enjoyable to explore and collect loot than to replay the same linear levels many times. It's hard to appreciate play games earlier than PS1 because the design principles are so harsh and restrictive.

The cutscnes were also extremely soothing. This kind of darkness suits my aesthetic principles just fine.

>>14983
Have you played Super Castlevania 4? I would say it's the most best one to start out with if you wanna play classic style of Castlevania.

>>14983
Classicvania games are action oriented while Metroidvania is focused more on navigation, exploration, a lot of platforming and features RPG elements, they're effectively two different series hence why these terms exist in the first place.
I think you should check out Rondo of Blood, if you're not impressed by the gameplay the visuals/soundtrack will keep you hooked. Being able to play as loli Maria might represent a bonus (she's more fun to play than Richter and stronger which makes the game easier).

>>14983
I disagree if you're referring to the castlevania games released for the SNES, most agree they aged well. It's fine not to like them because I get frustrated repeatedly dying in them too but that's part of the fun.
SOTN art direction is great even compared to other CV games that already have a good atmosphere.

Playing Golden Sun right now. This games started out great and turned into absolute shit faster than you can say "garbage". I'm thinking of dropping this piece of trash, I am not having fun with this anymore.
The game turned into absolute shit right after the 2nd desert. There is so much wrong with this game I don't even know where to start.

>>15001
what don't you like about it? i haven't played it since i was a child but i always remember preferring the 2nd game a lot.

>>15005
Nearly everything. It is genuinely one of the worst games I've ever played. It is very rare for me to drop a game, especially near the end, and especially as a NEET with no other obligations and time to spare, but this game made me do it. Please bear with me as I explain why this is one of the worst games ever made. There's a tldr at the bottom, if this wall of text is too much.

Story/Script/Dialogue/Pacing/WorldBuilding/Characters: Absolutely terrible. The game has this generic story about kids saving the world, blah blah blah. Everything about it is as bland as it could possibly be. Not only that but the characters talk A LOT. And 99.999999% of what they speak about is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT, captain obvious shit. They keep repeating what each other is saying like the most stupid people ever. Do you know those idiots irl that take 4 hours to say something simple and keep repeating everything said with other words. Imagine a world filled with those morons. That's Golden Sun. The MCs are boring with no personality whatsoever. All that dialogue is wasted, when it could be used for character development. The pacing however, is even worse than the story. See, the story starts out ok, just generic, and you get introduced to Menardi and Saturos, which are the most interesting character in the game (this doesn't mean much), and the only ones with actually discernible design. Their design and the mysterious aura about them in the beginning is well done. But the pacing absolutely destroys any chance of improvement here. After leaving SS, you only get to seen then twice, once in Mercury Lighthouse and once in Venus. The other time (90% of the game) you spend doing boring, dull filler shit that gets forced on you by the devs. By the time you see then in the end, you don't even remember their motivations after 900000 lines of filler garbage. And their motivations don't matter, because the devs also forgot everything about them, and all the stuff about hostages and Mars star is completely tossed aside. This game also has more plotholes than all the time travel movies ever made together. Some parts of the story and present in a bizarre way such as the colosso trials, where the game fuses dream with reality, and were it not for ONE random NPC who actually remarks that she is talking to the winner I would have never figured out if the colosso victory actually happened or not.

Gameplay/Dungeon Design/Puzzles/Controls: TOO MANY RANDOM ECOUNTERS. WAY TOO MANY. I can't stress this enough. To make things worse, the game is one BIG railroad, and will force you to do exactly what it wants, when it wants, as it wants. But unlike other shitty railroad games, this one doesn't even set the worldbuilding or the background, and talks a lot about useless shit, while leaving the actual relevant lines of dialogue to a random NPC among dozen uninteresting NPCs. There are many examples of this, like the ship-sailing event. Where the game forces you to enter Kalay inn, and speak with the imbeciles there. If you do this other time, or don't do it, there are no lines of dialogue to guide you in that direction. Only ONE NPC far away from the ship will mention "tourists at the inn". A similar case exists about leaving Tret and going to Mercury Lighthouse. Where you have to read the mind of trets wife, except this games controls are shit, and has two buttons that do the same thing, except that one of them does other thing when near people. Very efficient. To use magic in this game requires a level of sub-atomic precision. If you're not on the EXACT place at the EXACT angle it won't work. When saving Hsu, the idiot devs have you use magic at this oblique angle and awkward position, and even when you do you have to do it twice 'cause it may not work. Because the devs have a pebble fetish, and put pebbles everywhere, so you can't face forward. The puzzles started out very great, impressive actually, well designed. But by Venus Lighthouse the devs lost their minds. The puzzles before VL: Use your brain and combine these logs to get there. The puzzles on VL: "We hope that the players suffer from EXTREME OCD and will use Ivan's reveal power at every nook and cranny of the maze, while we spam them with random encounters. Yeah VL is a Venus/earth temple, but unlike ML, we ran out of ideas, so you must rely on a Jupiter adept, even if the MC is a Venus Adept. Fuck design and continuity and logic, babe!!". Also the first cities/dungeons are well designed, but the 2nd half is just the first half copy-pasted with colour changes. Blue water now becomes yellow urine!! Even the desert gets copy pasted. By this point the random-encounters get out of hand and you have 100000 of then at any given dungeon. Can't even walk. And the items and magic that "reduce REs" have ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT. And because the enemies get stronger, this means more enemies, larger enemy HP bar, more damage caused by enemies, and the cast magic which takes some additional 5 secs of animation, so these REs last much longer. This part also has forced backtracking.
All cities have NPCs moving around in the most annoying corners imaginable, so they keep getting in your way while moving, sometimes they will actually cause you to get stuck while getting stuck themselves, and there is no solution to this other than restart the whole game. This game also has many "choices" (yes or no questions) that in no way affect the outcome of the game.

The Djinn system is interesting, but only has animations for up to 4 djinni. Combat is boring and tedious. It gets a more difficult during and after the ship, but the strategy is spamming sleep spells or curse ones and attacking a neutralized opponent. Even the djinn get tiresome after a while. The dungeon maze-like map design is great and would be a strength having you explore the mazes, but the insane number of REs ruin this in the latter half.

There's even other stuff wrong with this game, such as forcing you to carry useless items in the inventory, giving garbage rewards from completing quests and that the entire game is a gimmick to sell you another game. But most of it I already covered. I was actually shocked when playing this game, given how many praise it.

>>15006
I played goldensun 1 or 2 years ago and I thought it was slightly-better-than-okay, mostly due to it's battle system alleviating things I don't care for in rpgs, as they aren't my favorite genre. Mainly, how djinn function and are found both allow a player to remove the need to grind entirely instead rewarding exploration, moreover they allow the player to make on-the-fly build changes and thus approach a fight in different ways depending on the opponent and the point in the game. Alteration on acount of the latter leads to different gameplay "arcs" due to the suitable build altering over time, also how it functions in battle makes timing matter. This item-based progression immediately makes it more preferable than stathogging button mashers (I remember thinking "this game being enjoyable is really a tribute to how much rpgs suck rather than being of quality"). I would guess our different experience in this regard may be a result of differing levelling (I almost always fled), in which case the devs didn't properly scale. Also it's bonus sections were both fun and lucky dice was very cool. That said it isn't particularly great due to issues you mention to which I will lightly add:


Travel time was agonizing, not just cause of encounters but simply cause the scale was too large, especially if you ever wanted to backtrack, not to mention the amount required due to no fast travel; there's very few shortcuts on the world map and most dungeons. It's made more frustrating considering the aforementioned incentive to explore exaggerates this flaw. I seem to recall if you wanted to get back to the asiatic monk village, you had to go all the way back around for some reason, though I forget the reason why. Moreover while the game is pretty, I remember being annoyed at how long animations lasted for.

While I don't recall encountering issues with psynergy button binding, I did find it quite spammy (move move move) and plenty of the psynergy was annoyingly frivolous.
What was the point of douse when logically whirlwind should have the identical effect? Force was such a stupid function to have it's own psynergy. I was also very dissapointed by halt being entirely useless outside of maybe one bonus section. It could've been cool had it allowed you to skip the tornado lizard boss, but it has no effect on it. And all of them, except move and mind read I guess, had no interesting gameplay effects stem from them, they all were just stimulus response: see x do y.
And yeah, key items taking an inventory slot for sake of these psynergies was extremely stupid.

>>15006
Also, after writing that I decided to look if there was a patch for fixing these things, and one was recently made (though I think out of battle psynergy should still require pp): romhacking.net/hacks/8063/

>>15007
>allow the player to make on-the-fly build changes and thus approach a fight in different ways depending on the opponent and the point in the game
This was a strong point of this game.
>differing levelling (I almost always fled), in which case the devs didn't properly scale
I started out mostly fighting, but during and after Suhalla desert(2nd desert) changed my strategy to fleeing. Did you not run into problems because of too much fleeing later? Like not a big enough hp bar or attack points to fight most bosses? I realized after I started fleeing this happened to me, and boss fights became difficult.
>it's bonus sections were both fun and lucky dice was very cool
By bonus sections do you mean that extra island you can get by choosing a particular set of rowers or using the red cyclone? I never went there, I thought it was something very hard to get into, as the game doesn't give enough tips about it. Did you manage to find it on your own? I didn't play much lucky dice, I played more of the other minigames.
>to the asiatic monk village, you had to go all the way back around for some reason
Yes, I found the kung-fu village even worse.
Speaking of off-battle psynergy I was fine with the other psynergies but I felt that many were too repetitive. You have move, catch, lift and carry. These four are almost the same conceptually. They could've added fire based puzzles for Garet or something.
>And yeah, key items taking an inventory slot for sake of these psynergies was extremely stupid.
I remember giving the "important" Mars sphere to Ivan at the very beginning just for kicks, and then Ivan went away with it for a moment and I worried I would reach the end and not be able to progress. Turns out the thing is useless in-game.
>>15008
Nice. If I ever come back to this game/series to finish it or give it a second chance I'll use this. This was actually my first time playing a JRPG - I've played them as a kid but only a couple mins - and I don't feel like playing such games any time soon.

>>15009
>stat issues
Due to the strength of healing and the enemies lacking in this regard, what matters most is the max amount of damage one can take in a single turn; as such defense matters more which gear adequately accounts for, likewise with attack, though less so (and if insufficent elemental bonuses typically tip the scales). I'm not sure if this is different in the sequels as I haven't played them.
The main boss I struggled with in this regard was storm lizard who I was always running slightly negative against. Due to such, Issac assumed an off-healer build, and to evade aoe attacks the party was spaced out such that the healers were at the borders. Mars djinn were spread amongst each to cyclically cast a summon by garet who was the almost sole source of damage. The game assisted me in this by giving me flash just before the fight and the usage order was such that right as corona's defense boost ran out flash was ready to grant invincibility for the turn left vulnerable. Ivan couldn't survive this fight effectively so I used him to cast two summons at the start and then promptly die. I seem to recall by having two mars on Mia she changed to a class with a helpful (de)buff, which may have been helpful beyond just the start. If this boss could summon enemies, it would've been a lot harder as aside from the routine summon, I had poor aoe.

The other fight I died a decent amount on was the final one. Though I dont recall the details cause the fight had more nuance to it, which made it satisfying to beat but harder to remember. I changed my class/gear roster 3 times before settling on one, where I then made further optimizations to my djinn usage before winning, I think I needed to use buffs in this fight a lot more and predict hard combos with defend; which itself staggered the usage of djinn.

>that extra island
Yes, that and Lunpa which you can do after tolbi.
>Did you manage to find it on your own?
No, I knew of it's existence prior to playing the game and may have known of the ships relevance (it's foggy). Upon being given the task of choosing the rowers, I figured you had to veer off course but I either chose the wrong candidates or the wrong direction and it didn't work. I inadvertantly found out about the tornado method after beating the lizard boss and looking at it's wiki page to see it's stats as it was one of the tougher fights, as stated. Though I would've looked it up before beating the game anyways.

I am playing a doom mod called delta doom and its a pretty good mod so far. It tries to be like alpha doom.

Urban Reign for the PS2. It's rough around the edges, but a really fun beat em' up with tons of fightings styles and room for experimentation