>>12584
Then you'll love this one. I can't remember where it was recommended to me but someone did say that there were a few weird spikes scattered throughout. I will admit that seeing that bastard go down after about a dozen back to back attempts was massively satisfying. A dozen mightn't seem like many but that was today's session. In total I'm looking probably at 25-30 attempts, but I'm trash at JRPGs anyway so don't take it from me. At times though it will play more like a puzzle game than an RPG, many fights will be tricky as all hell until you try the intended strategy then you'll shit all over the encounter.

>>12585
Yeah, can't do it with 2 party members only though or else I'd have abused the shit out of it for that fight. I try to avoid using it simply because of how much it breaks the game. I haven't gotten the second SMG yet so it hasn't reached retarded levels of power yet. I imagine that with two rounds of scratch damage followed by someone breaking it, that it'd get really dumb really fast. With just one SMG, it's a bit more balanced, but not by much.

>>12586
Don't worry about breaking the game, the post-game levels will break you hardcore (if you decide to check it out) so you might as well learn the best way to break the game.
Also, when you only have two characters, really utilise what the game gives you, such as grenades, different ammo types, dual wielding pistol and smg together et cetera.

>>12586
I don't remember ever hearing about that game before. I assume I skimmed across a review for it at some stage and closed the tab as soon as I saw it was a Japanese game aimed at a Western market.

Is Resonance of Fate good? I was thinking of buying it but I'm assuming it's pretty linear and I'm not fond of that.

Is there customization and post-game content?

>>12589
It has an interesting combat system, hard to understand at first but very fun and kinda breaks the game when you get all the tricks. It's open world, but the world looks like a board game with little dungeons and different strata.
There is customization, but only for guns. And the only stats that matter for them are the loading time. You can go full retard with it. There is a post game

>>12588
I didn't get the impression it was aimed at the Western market, playing it.
Reviews are hogwash, writers too shit to be journalists (of whom are too shit to be novelists) shouldn't be trusted.

It has a nice dress-up part, some anime shirts in it. Doubt it really is Western targeted.
Interestingly, in Japan it's called 'End of Eternity' which is a reference to Isaac Asimov's novel of the same name. Gives some insight to the story.

Rising Storm 2 is dead. It released with only 2 decent conquest maps, the rest was garbage rush mode that I got sick of immediately.
They're supposed to finally release new content so I checked back, can only find 70+ ping rush only servers. What a disappointing game.

>>12590
> And the only stats that matter for them are the loading time
I reckon they're all important, or rather, it isn't wise to skimp the other stats just for load speed. A large Magazine Size is useful for building and executing airborne targets, for example.

Currently playing Tempest (pirate themed naval combat) from a recent humble bundle. It's a bit weird. The style of it implies it's a game grounded a bit more in reality, yet the UI showed a big glowing alien rock thing in the middle which felt really out of place. got attacked by a giant squid at the end of the tutorial, and soon found weird looking alien/magical temples and ruins, scifi monsters attacking my ship, and fighting ghost ships filled with skeletons. All of which felt kind of out of place, yet is presented like it's perfectly normal with no explanation of how any of it came to be in the story. Story is paper thin for that matter, it's all about the mechanics here. The way the ship combat works feels wrong at times, but it's still overall fun. Main annoying little thing is when one ship has the other in it's sights and starts firing it's cannons. logically when you're out of it's range you should stop getting hit, but instead it's like those cannon balls are homing missiles. Also, the UI is pretty freaking horrible. It almost feels like it was designed for mobile phones. When in port it's like they can't decide between different UI styles and makes the thing really confusing and frustrating to use. It was an interesting surprise to see there's third person combat when boarding ships, but it's a bit clunky to say the least. Far as I could tell you've got one attack, you can't block, and hit detection is way off. Anyway it's not bad, I'll keep at it for a while more.

Been playing pokemon moon after getting a N3DSXL not too long ago. Haven't really played a pokemon game since Ruby red, so it's a pretty big leap. Kinda surprised how many original pokemon I came across in my first couple hours, I expected a flood of pokemon I've never seen before. Instead it's more like being eased into the current gen which is fine by me. So far I'm pretty impressed by the visuals and mechanics. Map seems smaller than I expected however. while it's multiple islands, the first one felt almost tiny. The loading screens are so short I'm not sure why the game even has any, shame it couldn't have been seamless. Picked my starter without doing any research and ended up disappointed since I picked Litten and it turns out it becomes a furry sonic reject in it's third stage. Another slightly disappointing thing was the lack of TMs outside of battle. As soon as I found an area with abra in it I knew I had to catch one to use that teleport ability. After trying half a dozen times, getting one, then being unable to activate it, I learned they were removed after looking it up. That's not such a horrible thing though in retrospect. I used to form my party around those skills, aiming more for practicality in traveling the world than full on combat ability, so now I can focus more on that and not worry about having a pokemon that can use surf and another that can use fly. Anyways, it's not half bad.

Had my eye on gal*gun for a while, and it went on sale for a decent price recently so I picked it up.
Right off the bat I found that it was a very half assed port to pc. In steam it says the game the game is designed for keyboard use and wouldn't work well with a pad as well as having keyboard icons in place of gamepad ones ect, but when I started it I found all the icons were for a xbox controller, and the tutorial too even though mouse and keyboard are the default. It wouldn't be a big deal if the tutorials didn't tell you to do actions with the pad and don't tell you what they mouse/keyboard controls are. ie "use x to shoot and rb to zoom in" but I was able to figure out the controls with some trail and error all the same. Interesting enough, the game can almost exclusively be played with a mouse. Since it's a rail shooter you don't really need the keyboard at all during the gameplay segments. Given the nature of the game, It's not surprising it'd be designed to be played one handed.
Also, video settings were extremely limited and I had to edit some .int files to play it on my 144p monitor, as in game settings max out at 1080p. Had to do the same to enable vsync, change aa, and so on since those options aren't in game. Encountered some massive screen tearing meanwhile I couldn't do anything about. Then there's the in game shop with missing icons for the items. They have descriptions for the items if you hover over where they should be at least, so it's not game breaking.

Game itself is pretty fun. It's a rail shooter filled with tons of really cute girls who climax when you shoot them. What more could you possibly ask for in a videogame? Sometimes when you take out an 'enemy' they might say "Nippon saiko", which couldn't be more true. I thought the game would be a lot easier than it turned out to be, since it was made for consoles it seems and fps games have always had to be made slower and easier for use with a gamepad. Even with a mouse it's easy to miss lots of the hidden objectives. The camera flies past them pretty quick. I imagine it's easier to catch em on a second play, but so far it seems story mode doesin't let you replay previous missions/levels. Like I said before, the characters are cute and all, but the visuals do feel a tad dated. If I didn't know this was released on 2015 for ps4, I'd have thought this was a game from 2010 for xbox360. I'm guessing not much changed since the first game under the hood.

I'm really glad to see games like this translated and available in the west, and even more so they left the original audio in tact. That said, they have some very cringe worthy translations, with phrases like "these girls have no chill", "home girl is crazy" and so on.
Kinda funny though that there's segments of the game where you have to listen to the girl to tell you where to touch/rub, and without knowing any Japanese this could be very confusing and hard. Likewise, girls will shoot japanese text at you, which I guess no one in the translation team cared enough to bother translating. Then again, they know who's buying these games and probably figure things like this don't much matter.

Playing Heat Signature, and enjoying it a lot.

The game favors stealth/waiting tactics over pure combat, though the combat part is a lot more fun and challenging.

The late game goes downhill quite fast though. By and large, armor and shields are either stupid overpowered or stupid useless without anything in between. Generally, there is nothing you can do against them until you get very specific items, but you won't get them until the late game where those items just become an extra expensive before you do the personal mission.

Fun little game though, the more challenging defector missions are great, and the underlying mechanics are solid. The missions being 2-5 minutes (hold F to speed up time for abusing the AI patrol mechanics) is quite nice, makes it easy to play without a large time commitment in order to make progress.

Bought poly bridge because I pirated it and really enjoyed it back in the day. But after all these updates it's just kinda annoying to play. The tutorial gave me cancer.

I recently hacked my 3DS that I've owned for a couple of years but haven't used since 2016 and despite access to hundreds of games, I'm completely hooked to the Mii Plaza minigames in general. While usually prohibitive to play because they need either "PlayCoins" (which you can only get 10 per day) or Streepass encounters (which need you to go outside, and even then you should be lucky if you pass near one (1) another person), it can be easily defeated by a coin setter which hacks the currency in. The games and the title in general have a very nice assortment of cute characters, like in pic related.

>>13209
There was a thing a while ago where you could set up your own access point and street pass hundreds, if not thousands of people just to play the games or whatever you needed for the other games that used the streetpass feature for bonuses. I used it a bit and it was fun, even if it was a long while ago.

If you care at all about this kind of thing, you could probably find out more about it on GBATemp, although I suppose that there shouldn't be as much activity on it with the 3DS being as old as it is.

>>13213
Thanks, that's Homepass. Sadly it got nuked this year when Nintendo shut down the relay servers, so the method used to spoof that signal is gone (until further notice).

Ended up buying a original Playstation One. I've sunk around 8 hours into Spyro and 12 into Dukem Nukem.

>Dragonball FighterZ
Android 21 is sweet!

been playing lobotomy corporation.

Interesting macabre management game, with a macabre (though predictable) story told in VN form. In typical VN form, the side story interactions with the AIs are the best part.

The premise is that you run a company, and your job is to have your employees harvest power from a mix of other wordly and supernatural things. There's a lot of trial and error involved in how to properly deal with each one and their individual quirks, and that can easily result is at least one employee killed in a large variety of ways. You are generally expected to lose a fair number of them, so new employees are fairly cheap and easy to restock.

Unfortunately, the GUI is a bit shit and feels like a flash game that makes selecting a single unit in a pile of units a pain in the ass. There are several core features that need to be unlocked via the story, making things a bit more difficult to get started.

Overall, enjoying the game a good bit.

>>12222
Seems fun like Diablo2 but the always online makes it a hard pass for me:
https://youtu.be/YFAPw_F3jyg

>>13310
Try "Path of Diablo"? It's Diablo2 with qol changes and minor rebalancing.

I played Kenshi but I don't know how to feel about it.
It's a very interesting game and worth trying but I wouldn't say it's very good.
It's an open world, open ended RPG (no central plot, no quests) with settlement building and survival mechanics. You control a squad of dudes in a weird-fiction, post-apocalyptic setting with arms and armour inspired by feudal orient.

Gameplay is minimalist. In combat you don't even control your guys directly. You can set each one's behavior (like melee/ranged and offensive/defensive/passive tactics) and try to direct the flow of battle by pointing where they should move or who to attack, but they mostly do their own things.
Most of the time you don't have to touch any controls and your squad will fight automatically, which makes you almost a spectator to the game. It sounds really boring but watching the bloody fights play out can be entertaining for some reason.
Combat mechanics are harsh both to your characters and the enemies. Player's team has no special skills, stats or properties that would make them stronger than NPC's in any way, same rules for everyone.
In a fight guys will bleed, lose consciousness and try to get back up, get crippled and even dismembered, and anyone can die permanently fairly quickly.
Punishing games are hard for me so there was lots and lots of saving and loading all the time, or I wouldn't even be able to get out of the starting area.
HP is independent for each body part, plus one for blood. There is a fair amount of weapons and outfits you can equip your squad with. It all makes combat and post-combat management of your squad's injuries and resources surprisingly engaging considering the player's role is more passive than usual.
The game's world is a big island with numerous diverse biomes. Each zone has different environmental hazards and roaming bands of enemies. The game has pretty bad graphics so many of these zones ended up looking samey despite obvious efforts to make them unique.

Survival is about having enough food for your band to stay alive, having guys with first aid skills carrying enough medical supplies to patch up the squad after combat, and if you lose- to have enough dudes being able to get up and stabilize other incapacitated members, and carry them to safety.
Skills are not levelled up traditionally, your people slowly get better by performing relevant actions.
Most stats are improved independently, for example by running with light inventory your characters will train to run faster, and with heavy load they won't get any faster but will improve their strength by a little.
There are exceptions though, for example fighting with heavy weapons will improve both heavy weapons skill and strength stat.

Settlement building is very standard. You unlock buildings by buying blueprints and having them researched by your guys with proper science skills.
You can then build almost anywhere on the map, using materials which have to be bought or found at first. Later you can mine or grow stuff and refine it into relevant resources.
There are also buildings available for purchase in the cities but the space and range of objects you can build within is limited. Unfortunately ruined towns and lone buildings spread around the world can't be claimed and rebuilt.
There's not much depth to building and management beyond finding a good spot and constructing a defensible town with self sufficient manufacturing loops.
I found settlement building to be pretty boring, I used it only from time to time to make further exploration easier by providing my group with resources and crafting better gear.
Settlements can be harassed by locally spawning enemies or raided by enemy factions, but it's very simplistic.

Most recruits for your squad are randomly generated NPC's. There are some unique characters that will be available in every game but they're not much different from randoms, they sometimes have better initial stats and gear.
They will sometimes display short comments in combat and while traveling, dropping a line or two about the world or other unique companions present. This too is done in a simplistic way.
It's possible to destroy factions by eliminating key NPC's, or to help one faction conquer another's cities. This apparently can have secondary consequences like spawning new outlaw groups, but I never got strong enough test it.
I doubt the changes would be very meaningful, so far my actions had no impact on the world.

Closest thing to quests is bounty hunting. You can meet randomly spawned wanted bandits or look for named NPC's with big prices on their heads, and bring them to authorities for cash.
Dealings with big factions aren't much more complicated- a faction leaders can ask you to go destroy this town, or kill that VIP to get a reward and a boost in relations.
This doesn't mean much as far as I know. Neutral factions ignore you, hostile factions will attack you on sight and with friendly status you could maybe get away with having illegal stuff in your inventory if a guard randomly stops you at city gates.

Worldbuilding is uneven. Kenshi's backstory is full of uncertainties, in-game lore is disjointed and vague. It's largely up to you to gather information and form your own beliefs about that weird place.
Parts of the world are full of strange ruins and artifacts left by fallen civilizations and extinct creatures, little of this is explicitly explained. Sometimes the more ancient characters will make ambiguous comments about certain locations and the planet's past.
Overall I'd say that people behind this game (or was it just one guy? I don't remember) were partially successful in creating a mysterious, bizarre world that makes you want to explore and uncover its secrets.

However the factions and some of the characters populating this world are in my opinion poorly written.
Three biggest factions are: a cartoonishly evil mock-christian religious kingdom, a kingdom ran by mustache twirling dastardly nobility who just want to eat caviar and beat up slaves for fun, and the Klingons.
I'd be alright with a setting having a tragic backstory while being home to farcical organizations and ridiculous characters, but it should be witty and at least somewhat subtle to be rewarding for me. In Kenshi it's pretty blunt and uninspired.
In the game you can find books which will provide you with a paragraph or two of flavour text about the current inhabitants of Kenshi's world and their beliefs, but it mostly serves to further portray the main forces as comically shallow, self serving, belligerent gangs.
What I do like is that most of Kenshi's peoples only seem to know their recent history well. The apocalypse happened so long ago they're not even sure what exactly happened to their world, and how it ended up in its current state.
Some of their current ideologies can be seen as a result of trying to make sense of the broken world and remaining scraps of information about some bizarre shit that went down in their deep past. It's pretty bluntly presented in game, but I like the idea. Bonus points for effort.
The few beings that could probably remember the ancient times either have bad memories or for some dark reason don't want to reveal the truth about the past to others. That's interesting.
Smaller factions of insect-like hive mind colonies and remnants of ancient super advanced robot race are more grey- outwardly civil, and victims of persecution by some of the bigger kingdoms, but it's hinted they harbour some disturbing secrets. Not much more is known though, they're left to be enigmatic.
The really small regional factions have even less personality, mostly being written as "we're band A, we fight B, we'll reward you if you go to C and change D's status to dead."

Maybe the creators are not very competent at writing, and them leaving much of the stuff unclear makes it better simply by letting you fill in the blanks, and choose what you want to believe.
It's a legit trick, I have nothing against this approach. The problem is not everything can be left mysterious and untold so I feel Kenshi is strong where it can be ambiguous and weak where it has to be explicit.

Graphically it's rather ugly most of the time. It's often interesting and original, but still ugly. Game looks nothing like the picture I posted, not sure why because as you see it had some solid concept work.
I get that it's made in some rinky dink weirdo engine, but that's no excuse for bad art. For some reason they chose to make their initial nice designs much duller.
For example I'm pretty sure you could make rusty ancient robots feel positively rusty and ancient without making them look like shoddy clay sculptures.

Pathfinding can be infuriating. Often you order your squad to go somewhere and for some reason they will split into smaller groups, each trying to take a different route. This can turn into a total defeat if the groups separate and run into enemies.
Your guys can get stuck in objects, but quitting the game and using the reset squad positions option on loading seems to work now (it used to do weird stuff like spawning a duplicate of your squad but reverted to their initial stats and equipment).
Crashes to desktop happen, although not very often.

I'd say it's a very good sightseeing and traveling game, but for me it lacks deeper, higher level gameplay mechanics that would justify the game's size and how much time it takes to get anywhere.
To explore the whole world and its most dangerous parts you have to spend a lot of time to train and equip your squad, but once you get there there's nothing to do except fighting stronger enemies and sightseeing.
Ruins containing loot are all the same across the game's world, and the items within them are randomized from the same pool.
There are a couple of unique legendary quality weapons to find in the hands of boss-like enemies, there are a couple of lines of dialogue providing hints about the world to be read when reaching some distant places but it's not much, certainly not enough for me.
Of course you can make up your own goals or set challenges, write your own stories, but to me that's practically LARPing. I can't get into playing pretend if it's not supported by actual mechanics in game.
If you do enjoy that style of playing then I'd say Kenshi is well suited to try it, providing a blank slate kind of open-world experience.

I wrote a lot because Kenshi took 12 fucking years to make, and I don't know if it was worth it.
I think I'd like to see some kind of sequel even though the game was only released in December. Something with the same soul but deeper gameplay, and better in terms of art and writing.
Something made in a reasonable timeframe too. I'm sick of waiting for these massively delayed "masterpieces" only to find out that 8/10 of them are complete crap, and the rest are only so-so most of the time. I don't have an unlimited lifespan. Shit, I'm never far from ending it by my own hand.

>>13353
I tried it not long ago too. I really like the premise of it but I think it is executed poorly. It's really quite large but it feels empty and soulless even thought it was in development for so long. There are not many assets to the game really and what there is is constantly recycled so the factions don't feel that unique which is made more apparent by the lack of quest lines or character in general. Factions just kind of feel like a bunch of NPCs standing around doing nothing. Even nation building is flawed, there is no real point to it. You get a few scripted bandit raids but you can;t invade other bases and take them over, it just feels like a lot of micro managing for no reason. Also it's supposed to be Japanese inspired but to me it felt nothing like that.

I felt like I was missing out on the persona games so I installed a ps2 emulator and I'm currently playing Persona 4!

>>13356
First PERSONA is the best.

Is this game any good?

I just got it from Steam. Persona 5 is been good so far (on RPCS3) and I love Catherine, but I'm not sure about this one. Am I better off watching the anime?

Post edited on 15th Mar 2019, 2:59am

>>13382
Do both. I prefer the game as it's more interactive. Enjoy.

Amy Makes Her SOULCALIBUR VI Debut on March 26
Bandai Namco to add DLC character a day after update version 1.30

Tekken7. Julia's new look and change to streamer-girl just does it for me.

Moonwalker... I forgot that I used to play this game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku8oaK_iEwk

Finished Planescape Torment. Excellent story, though ending is kinda anticlimactic. Got a couple of frustating bugs and design choices though. Like how party members drop all their items on death so if you forget to pick it up then they disappears after a while. Or how a possible mid boss of the last dungeon is immune to piercing weapons and has ridiculous magic resistance, and since you have to face him alone guess what happens when you are a mage? It ended up as a slogging fest between a fighter and a mage only kept alive by chugging healing items. Oh did I forget to mention that mages can only use edged weapons that deals mainly piercing damage? Good thing that I happen to have a dagger that deals poison damage or I'd be stuck. Goddamn developers, plenty of bugs elsewhere too. But I digress. It's a good game and everyone should give it a try. These kinds of classic verbose rpg also reminds me of visual novels. It's not like their gameplays has been anything surpassing mediocrity, it might as well be a vn.

I've been playing a lot of Factorio. I'm at that stage where you transition from a main bus starter base to a decentralised train base.

>>13467
Planescape Torment has been on my to play list for years. Might finally get around to it soon.

>>13468
Do it. Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment:_Tides_of_Numenera

I had high hopes for X4 but it's unacceptable, barely better than the Rebirth abortion.
Starved for space shooters I tried Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. It's trash, stay away from it.
Repetitive, shallow, simplistic to the point of being crude, ugly graphics.
Combat is designed around a horrible autopilot mechanism. It doesn't need to be used but the controls and AI are so bad that free flight is somehow even more unpleasant than autoaim pop-a-mole. It's like being stuck in one of those shitty turret sequences they always put in Call a Doodie games.
Very basic economy and missions. Gets boring and irritating almost immediately.
The most interesting feature they were supposed to have in RGO was an advanced ship painting tool which was supposed to let you do anything™. What they actually did is just a clunky imitation of a popular graphics editor, awkwardly jammed into a game.
It's uncomfortable to use, unreliable, slow. Everything ends up looking like shit anyway.
Also there's only 5 ships available.
What the fuck was it even delayed for? What a piece of garbage.

Heat Signature. Boring. I'm so sick of indies but the big titles are also supremely uninteresting. What a nightmare.

Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons and Rune Factory heal the soul. That is all.

>>13623
What are your favorite games?

>>13627
I don't even know anymore. See how long it took me to reply, in this time I couldn't come up with a definite answer.

The only ones I consistently went back to would be Kerbal Space Program and Mount and Blade but I don't know.

I used to like RPG's but it's been ages since I played a decent one. The last one I truly enjoyed would be New Vegas and that one was massively flawed, and Gamebryo is an abomination.

I used to like shooters too but out of that trash heap the only one I considered OK in recent years was 2016 Doom. I used to play UT99 and Q3 back when.

Turn based tactics or strategy sometimes. Don't even remember the last one I liked.

Space sims too but that whole genre is in deep shit today. Elite Dangerous is currently the best of them... and it's pretty bad.

Oh, and Silent Hunter but submarine simulation is dead and buried.

Post edited on 14th Sep 2019, 6:16pm

>>13638
You can also mod rpgs like SKYRIM.

>>13670
>rpgs
>like SKYRIM
I must remain calm and resist the temptation to spend the next 20 hours writing another summary of the decline of cRPG as demonstrated by The Elder Scrolls series.

>>13673
To be fair Morrowind and Daggerfall weren't that good either, Skyrim was quite playable at least.
Now Gothic, that was going to shit, but no one cared because it was a PC franchise. Also Fallout, but since Fallout 3 is considered best by the majority I don't even want to think about it.

SubVerse is real?!?

>>13674
After reading this it took me a month to calm down enough to be able to submit a coherent response.

Don't ever post such heresy again.

>>13688
What part bothered you exactly?
Only "heretic" part I can think is about Elder Scrolls, but I will always maintain Morrowind is not a well designed game.

I'm playing Fire Emblem Three Houses. It's quite good so far.

Been playing the Disgaea 4 re-release on Switch.

>>13694
It was really good.

Just finished playing farcry5. I'd call it disappointing but I didn't really expect that much anyway. It had an interesting concept with how influential and dangerous religious fanatics could be, mixed with American's glorification of violence. They don't really do much with the former and barely scratch the later. They could have also played around with morality, what's right and wrong vs what your faith has thought you but they kinda screwed that up. You've got an objectively wrong hypocritical villain who's '''right''' in the end but still very very wrong. farcry4 wasn't great but at least I could understand the villain's logic in that one, one might even agree with him. Here they're literally torturing and skinning people alive as bosses tell you "you just don't understand bro" as they die. The story telling feels pretty disjointed too with scenes in which the main villain talks directly to the player character in their dreams or something? I don't really get it.
The idea is they're prepping for the apocalypse which comes in the form of nuclear war, which happens at the end of the game as a character not so subtly screams in your ear "they were right" over and over. Because I guess kidnapping people to carve sins into their bodies, decorating the landscape with mutilated bodies, or getting them hooked on drugs that turn people into remote controlled zombies, is gonna help them survive?


The gameplay is pretty much the same as before. Only notable additions are some aircraft that make you really OP and break the game, and some squad mates you can send in to fight and die for you because most of them are pretty useless. The dog that tags enemies and brings you ammo was pretty cool though. Might have been nice to see a bit more "America fuck yeah!" type humor/content but that's limited to skins on a couple cars and a some lazy feeling race course mini games.
Most annoying thing in the game has got to be the lazy way they progress the story by having you be captured regardless of where you are to be taken prisoner then have you break free, over and over. One boss does this by apparently tranquilizing you (even if you're in a plane, underwater, or in the middle of a friendly stronghold), another boss plays music over a radio you've been programed to obey(how I dunno, why you can't mute your radio I dunno) which I guess teleports you across the map. Then there's a boss who, again, regardless of where you are will spawn in front of you and blow drugs in your face that again teleport you to some other part of the map. In the end the game was "fine" but could have been a lot better.

>>13694
Jedi: Fallen Order is ok. I like the shoulder-perching droid.

I tried playing Ark Knights, I was disappointed with it(not that I usually am a big fan of Mobage in he first place). One of the problems it and other Chinese games like Girls Front line seem to have is a lack of individuality in it's cast. I don't actually hate the designs, they have a cool dystopian feel but they lack character and individuality, I can't easily tell them apart and I can't really get motivated to work towards earning new characters because they are all look the same with just a different name and stats, it's alright for original artworks but not for games like this I feel.

>>13728
Funny enough someone I know was complaining about that same thing a few days ago but targeted at Azure lane while saying Girls Front Line had much more individuality in comparison. In azure lane (and KC) many characters really do run together by design while having similar outfits in sets. Hell azur lane recently had Tony Taka do a few characters, and we all know how much of a range he has. They also tend to be limited to just one quirk/character trait and shallow ones at that.
I don't see it in GFL though. Maybe in it's main story characters, but there are ton with very unique character designs who look like they have no business being on the battle field. It's hard to comment on personalities when you don't get to learn much about the not story characters, but in that regard I'd say the characters who are in the story certainly have a range of personalities and depth to said personalities. One of the things that makes team 404 interesting for example is seeing these very conflicting personalities. These team members seem to have a love hate relationship that makes me wonder how they can stand to work together.

I can see how you'd feel the characters run together in Arknights too, since it has much more consistent designs for it's characters that feel appropriate for the world but don't feel 'that' unique as a result. I'd say it's hard for individuality to surface when the nature of the story's world and situation calls for certain types of people to get involved. From what I've seen so far there's still plenty of range in character types, but it's very subtle. I'd compare it to your average police department. Not everyone there would be the same person, but it does take similar mindsets to make that your career.

I recently played NieR:Automata, and knocked out all 27 endings in spite of how tedious some were to get. I thought the game was both good and extremely disappointing at the same time, and I feel it could have been much more.
My initial impressions were very high as I progressed the first stage, it had been a while since I played a linear story focused game and find them to be a refreshing change from more sandbox types of games that dominated the market, then in chapter two when the game opened up I soon realized this was more of a sandbox type game after all, but in it's worst possible iteration. I actually do like plenty of open world games, and have such from the days of playing GTAIII on my ps2 onward. The thing is the layouts those games mostly make sense, a sandbox city or environment can feel like a real living breathing place when made right. The sandbox in Nier on the other hand is a series of loosely connected biospheres with randomly placed constricted pathways. The village and theme park being the most constricted areas, with the desert and city being the least constricted. It feels inconsistent and poorly laid out. This would work if you were only going from one area to the next then onto the next, but the game wants you to revisit these areas -a lot- and that ruins the illusion of exploring a real world. It reminds me of another old ps2 game, Tony Hawks American Wasteland. This game was promoted as being the first in the series to be fully open world with no loading screens, when in reality the game was composed of stages like the games before it, but with hallways/paths connecting each stage. They were still very obviously separate stages but this "technically" made it an interconnected open world. Obviously having you progress from one stage to the next in a linear path would make this a much much shorter game, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Quality can often be better than quantity, but the game was clearly designed with the opposite in mind and would have players play the game like an open sandbox game with quests/missions, in environments that are in some cases very poorly suited to this. The factory being the worst place to do fetch quests because it meant navigating a very long occasionally branching path that you've already likely been down before, only to have to repeat it again to leave, then go alll the way back for some other mission that becomes available latter on. Needless to say, I don't find this to be fun and it comes across as a means of padding out the game's run time. Which brings me to the endings.
Frankly I feel the game shouldn't have had multiple endings and that it doesn't benefit from them at all.

I've seen them all and can safely say they're a pointless gimmicky means of again padding out the run time. The vast majorly of them are joke endings which will have you doing achievement like activities in order to get would normally be considered a 'bad end' in other games, and not much effort is even put into them anyway. An example would be committing suicide, which would give you a couple sentience long message saying something such as "2B for some reason decided to kill herself, with no one to fight back the bad guys won. The end" Then credits roll and congrats you got yourself an ending. All but very few endings are like this, but even the main ones are fairly pointless. Which I'd say are A,B,C,D,E, and Y. If you go in hoping for more than that, say alternate routes or a branching story, you'd be disappointed. A and B are the same thing, A is the ending half way into the over all game, and B has you play the game front the start to A's ending over again just with another character from his perspective. He's with you for almost all of A so the game doesn't change much, and what it does change could of easily have been added into the A path. That being a few new cuts scenes that are independent from your actions and don't really change anything on their own, and a few gameplay segments that they could have simply had you switch to during play A. The one and only saving grace of ending B is a twist fact the player learns which changes one's perspective on the game, but that twist comes so near the end of route B that it's irreverent. It would have far more impact if you learned this as soon as you start route B and had to play everything over again knowing what you now know, but of course that wouldn't make sense in context of the story. It would make far more sense to simply be revealed this information at the point where ending A ends. You reach ending A, credits roll, cut to black with text that reads "Four hours earlier" and switch to the second character and playing as him up to the reveal.
Ending C and D meanwhile are just a continuation of ending A/B with the only difference between them being a single decision at the very last minute of the game. This decision does have some weight to it, but ultimately only results in a slightly altered ending cut scene. It's essentially the Mass Effect 3 color options again, but with two instead of three options. This I could accept and would be content with if all it was were these two endings, and 'maybe' ending E, even though I don't like that ending at all. Ending E is, as I see it, is an tacked on and unnatural feeling bonus happy ending to the story's bleak and miserable true ending. It's the videogame equivalent to telling your kid a bedtime story that leaves them sad and depressed, so you close the book and make up an ending on the spot to stop them from crying, and as such it comes across like cheap condescending bullshit that undermines everything that came before. They might as well say at the end of E "Look Look, it's all better now, we fixed it! Everyone's okay! please gamers, don't cry!"
Needless to say I lost a lot of respect for the game when I saw ending E. It's the same as those precure movies that have kids in the audience cheer for the characters to give them the power they need to win the day, and I expected better. Especially considering how difficult it is to each ending E. The game literally asks you if you want to reject the ending and save the characters (after they're already dead), then initiates a mini game that is by design practically impossible to beat unless you're a top 0.001% freak of nature with the reflexes of a god. The intended way to beat this being to let a random player from around the world help you at the cost of his save file, with an overbearing message that "you're not alone" "Everyone needs someone" "Together we can do anything" well, fuck that. I -AM- alone and always will be, so I hacked that shit mini game and beat it alone, which has some irony to it considering the mini game itself is hacking the game to change it's outcome.
Ending Y meanwhile is simply a pointless dick measuring contest where a somewhat out of place and almost pointless side character (mainly there to connect to the previous game) has you collect and max level every weapon in the game (Holy fuck is this tedious to do) Just so you can fight a reskined boss in the desert, watch said character commit suicide, then get another short message telling you how the game ended. People call this non-linear story telling, I call it an unnecessary mess.
(I'll be getting a bit more spoilery from here on out.)
Another issue I have is the direction in which the story itself goes. As I played it, I felt like there were many hints and clues at a direction which would have made the issues I've mentioned before make perfect sense. We're told and shown number times that the machine life form enemies have a tenancy to repeat their mistakes over and over while emulating humans, the machines and androids meanwhile aren't 'that' different as demonstrated by the adam and eve characters who take on a similar appearance to the androids who themselves are based on humans. We see a few instances of almost forth wall breaking events. Messing with the menu early into the game, some comments that feel almost directed at the player latter on, cutscenes you see that the characters don't, a gameplay segment where you tap into a computer and control a machine while you're given it's life story, and random appearances of a ghostly holographic character that the other characters don't notice. Even the blindfolds on the characters as support devices constantly hover around them, lead me to believe that within the context of the story the characters aren't in control of their actions and this is an constantly repeating simulation carried out by an unseen entity (you). The characters wouldn't need to see anything themselves if all their actions are controlled by a pod/camera hovering above them. The game could be encouraging you to see out all those different endings as a means to find a better way to end the simulation. In otherwords, something like OneShot meets Steins;gate or Hirigashi or All You Need is Kill.
But nope, instead we get lazy explanations for some of those things (like 2B's skirt being a heat sink, and her blindfold being a tactical visor), a whole lot of setups that go nowhere (2B handing off her memories), and no explanations at all for note worthy events.
The end result felt a lot more straight forward than I expected, even with it's share of twists.

Then there's gameplay inconsistency with story events. Early on in the game for instance the characters are supposed to be dead set on killing all machines without question, yet when you get to the amusement park you find the game's first non-aggressive machines. The game mechanics and design would seem to imply it wants you to spare these machines as there are a -lot- of them, and most don't fight back while having different colored health bars. You also have the ability to talk to some, or even buy from one. By this point you may have even stumbled across quest giving machines, who within context of the story should be killed on sight before you reach the white flag waving machine that risks it's life to ask you to spare it and lead you to it's village where they show the androids that not all machines are bad and start to build some trust. It's also weird that right after leaving the village you're sent to the forest kingdom to commit genocide on a monarchical community as if nothing has changed. There we see A2 for the first time, who shows up out of freaking nowhere to kill the king (who turns out to be a baby), she then fights you, and runs away while only saying our characters were betrayed by their organization. We never learn what her motivations were for killing that baby specifically (or how she got there first) aside from "she hates machines" I mean yeah no shit, all the androids do. And what she says implies she knows the organization's secret. Which I was under the impression was only something 9S's model type uncovered, and which is the whole point of the big reveal at the end about 2B being created specifically to monitor 9S and kill him should he learn the truth, which she's apparently done multiple times already. So how the fuck would A2 know anything? Also, If the 9S models are prone to snooping around and getting into information they shouldn't, wouldn't it make more sense to modify that line of androids rather than create another line of androids to baby sit the former? By that logic you might then need to assign another android to the team to watch the 2B models in case they fall in love with the 9S models and don't do their job, and then you'd need another android to watch over that android in case it decides it wants to see these two succeed. That sounds silly but that's essentially what happens in ending E.

Going back to the machines in that village, there's a rather eye rolling segment near the end of the game in which they abruptly cut to the village and you briefly get to play as the village leader as he acts like a super nice friendly guy with cute kids in their perfect little village where nothing could ever ever go wrong. They might as well have been signing about how much they love being alive at this point.
Another nitpick is how the game has status healing items available early on which seem completely useless and can be seen as hints for things to come.
Which brings me to another nitpick, how 9S was able to hack away 2Bs initial virus infection, but can't do the same for the support units you can recruit. It acts as an amusing surprise the first time you resurrect one and it attacks you, but that should only happen when playing as 2B or A2 once the infection starts.
Likewise there's a point that was aggravatingly stupid in which 2B and 9S report back to command that a virus took over rest of the android ground team and they barely escaped, and in response the commander acts flat out insane and unreasonable and accuses these two of being the infected ones instead, with the virus they just told her about and orders them to be locked away. At which point other androids in the room flip out and we learn the virus reached the base and has infected everyone there. So I figured "ooooooh, okay. The commander is infected! That explains it!" But no, she wasn't. She helped them escape and only showed signs of being infected just as they left. So then I thought. "Wait, why would you reveal yourself when the commander is about to imprison the only two uninfected androids left on the base? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to wait until after they're locked up, so you can attack them in their prison cell? What the hell do you gain by saving them then attacking them?

One other thing that didn't bother me much personally but did seem to bother other people I spoke to about this game, is that it's apparently too easy and boring from a game play stance. I think it gets more challenging latter on but it's 'sort of' true that the game is piss easy, but I'd say it's as easy as you want to make it or as hard as you want to make it. It all depends on the types of items you decide to keep equipped.
All that said, for as many problems as I had with the game I felt it was still good, good enough to get me this invested into the world and put this much time and thought into it. A crappy or even average game on the other hand, I'd finish and uninstall without giving it much attention afterwards.