Underrail: Expedition (Just the DLC quest so far) - It's a "timed" mission, so you have to rush the quests and manage resources, but I did like the ending. You basically find spoiler (click to show/hide)
a lost race/people that only has a sole survivor, you find a monolith that you can possibly destroy [I didn't], and a sort of "Garden of Eden Kit" to use Fallout terms.
The time psi powers was cool, but the quest itself was mostly "eh," until the ending. Tony is probably my favorite NPC in the DLC due to him being very crude and a practical jokster that drives the other merchant crazy.
I'm about half-way through Underrail's main-quest itself, so I'll have to finish that up. But man, the DLC is a HUGE expansion (in some ways) and took longer than I expected. Like a 20-40 hour expansion.
Ruiner -
KILL YOU
KILL YOU
KILL YOU
KILL YOU
----
Nintendo hard (and not in a good way): Just check the Steam achievement stats: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/464060/achievements
70% of owners finish the tutorial area [A little lower than expected but...]
45.5% of owners finish the FIRST FUCKING CHAPTER. That's under 50%, that's insane.
But that area is probably the easiest to come. Once you reach "Hell," the games difficulty goes to (https://media0.giphy.com/media/Ogfnxl7tX0lXi/source.gif) levels of insane. Final boss? Same as the chapter 2 "boss" which has a high-damage laser.
Now you throw in the "Angels" (Eva theme opening here) which spit-out "Dolls"/more enemies to deal with. They're like zombies. You NOW have to dodge a high damage (which got buffed, WTF) laser while dodging/killing the zombie Dolls that can kill you just as fast.
18.5% of owners finish the game. 18.4% (.1% under that) completely [the Epilogue chapter included] on Easy.
On Normal, which is where I suffered thinking "oh, they balanced this" 13.6% of owners finished it.
Crazy.
One of the fights you have to do three times with no checkpoint. It's a known complaint (https://steamcommunity.com/app/464060/discussions/2/1760230157501015973/).
The developers response?: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "Seems fine to us. No checkpoint is needed."
While you can respec the build at any time, it's kind of dumb that you have to tweak and test to figure out a way to "stunlock" the bosses to finish the game.
I can't imagine Hard mode (or New Game+ which apparently is a buffed version of that?) based on my struggling with Normal.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
GIT GUDS placed here
$5 for Style over Substance is fine, but I can't recommend this despite being a Cyberpunk fan.
Basically this review (which isn't me) (https://steamcommunity.com/id/Karn435/recommended/464060/) hits the nail on the head for me with Ruiner.
Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition - Really solid CRPG. I enjoyed the fact they let you (bar it was your primary class in the lead) raise your stats on level up to where you could get all stats to 25 if you ground (or cheated :doge) to the level 127 class cap.
Story is very WORDS WORDS WORDS but that's not a bad thing after Baldur's Gate 1. I dunno the Planescape material, but the fact that you're basically spoiler (click to show/hide)
trying to find out how you're immortal, you find out that it's fucked up and that you're trying to escape being a total bad-ass murderer
spoiler (click to show/hide)
"yeah, I'll kill myself if it stops you from keeping me around and making me lose my memories." or "you can merge with me and we go to hell together to suffer for our murdering" or "I can resurrect my party and then kick your ass and go to hell then."
was pretty nice. I forget what is next on the "Infinity Engine" release timeline (Baldur's Gate 2? Icewind Dale) but I'll have to get around to those after dicking about in PSO2 a little.
Final Fantasy Versus 13/"15" -
Theme for the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZYrEz0mxts
Actual Theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv2DSmy3Tro
(https://i.imgur.com/lD2HRiH.jpg)
Bebpo basically gives his thoughts in the "what are you playing" thread, and I mostly agree with him: It's a good first half, but it kind of falls apart in the second half. Insomnia is only shown in the opening five minutes (and we don't explore it) and then the big battle after 10 year time-skip. Which is pretty shitty after how much Nomura and team focused on it in the Versus 13 trailers.
The game works amazingly well as a road-trip journey. But once that road-trip suddenly stops with the Leviathan trial, it starts to collapse hard because a lot of the story is missing.
HOWEVER once you reach the enemy Empire HQ's/lab, the game picks up in having an interesting twist on the "Daemons" being something entirely else. BUT the game doesn't explain the rest at all. A lot of the lore it seems comes from the supplemental material which is total horseshit because if they focused on Versus 13 exclusively, it would've been a very solid (and I'd probably put it in my top 5) Final Fantasy.
Unfortunately, they didn't.
Then you have the combat system which is hit and miss. I'm not against it (though I prefer 12's "play itself" MMO style) but the tactical ability isn't... really... there. There's a reason they're hiring Action Game genre folks now a days at Square it seems and this prototype doesn't have the "depth" beyond like Omega and some higher level enemies that want you to abuse certain shit that you normally don't need to, especially if you do side-quest and level up.
Controller wise:
(https://abload.de/img/351c244d-cd2a-4923-9qqocj.jpeg)
OH MY GOD you have no fucking idea how much that shit bothered me. "Gathering ingredients? No, fuck you. Hop up and down like five times before I register you wanting to pick it up despite the prompt being there for a good minute or two." I started to wait until Noctis stopped moving to do that and even then he'd still hop up and down before registering. Fuck whoever at Square designed the controller and didn't play test it extensively.
I will say that the photo selection bits are important for the ending, when you see what you chose (and a lot of mine was Gladio... :-[ ) it fits the theme-song for the ending extensively if you did it "right" as Square intended (have shots of the team, don't focus necessarily on just one. :lol :oops ) and shows that the cut back-half/rushed ending really hurts the journey more than anything.
I haven't done the episodes yet, but I will. I do think a DLC that focused on the other three post Light coming in would've been the first thing I'd have done instead of individual character focuses but that's just me.
Get it on Sale, and maybe wait to see if this last patch on Steam fixes the performance issues and memory leaks that apparently were introduced with Ardyn's DLC.
Finished up and Plat'ed Persona 5 Royal
Loved the new semester and True Ending. I really hope the next Persona games have more dungeons, villains and characters akin to the new ones we got in Royal. Story wise, it enhances - but also undermines some of what happens Vanilla P5. I felt it was necessary considering I wasn't the biggest fan of the original main narrative for various reasons.
Most fans seem to prefer the Vanilla True Ending, but I feel the new one is more fitting and actually commits to something compared to how the original game couldn't fully commit to a single fucking message lol
If you wanted the happiest ending
spoiler (click to show/hide)
You should have agreed to Maruki's reality.
Also loved how they introduce Sumire's character originally, then use her trauma subtly as an example of how both Maruki is right and wrong. The fact that it's implied Maruki had the power to bring people to life even in his unawakened state, but still giving Sumire what she wanted - to become Kasumi, her sister. He did that rather than bring Kasumi back to life, showing how committed he was to bring "happiness" to someone rather than fixing the root of their problems. However, Sumire wishing to be Kasumi rather than having her sister back is an indictment of her resentment and wish to surpass her. The only way she got over it was for Maruki to give her the reality she wanted, and her using that experience to move forward. Hell, everyone wanting to move forward after experiencing Maruki's reality was good shit.
Even better is how the Phantom Thieves went from the biggest force in Japan to a cringe old meme in a matter of months
The tracks you hear in the third semester FUCKING SLAPS and we got the best final boss tracks in a JRPG in fucking forever, somehow even managing to beat out what we got in FFVII remake
spoiler (click to show/hide)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBe68842Ces
Xenoblade Chronicles "definitive" edition:
This game does not respect the player's time. Thankfully we are in a global pandemic so my time is not overly valuable and I can chase down bullshit 2% spawn rate items that I have no way of knowing if they spawned or not to rebuild a city or something. Honestly if they cut the sidequests out of this game it would be a solid 20-25 hour game with a reasonable enough story and combat system that could use a few more options to it. Instead they padded this game with 400+ sidequests, many of which rely on random drops or random spawns. At the 60 hour mark I got a pretty big lore dump and some interesting story. Then after 2 hours of being locked into story events and cutscenes, I spent 20 hours doing more side quests before I beat the game (and I probably had another 5-10 hours of sidequests, plus another who knows how many hours of other things to do).
I gave up on Colony 6 after getting everything to Level 3. Juju is a little bitch; you can't tell me he has to have some rare-ass dinosaur tooth to rebuild the city, he's probably selling it. :maf
Yeah the difficulty skyrockets for levels 4 and 5. Those quests and the spoiler (click to show/hide)
replica Monado
The last boss was pretty boring and I didn't even use my primary party for the first two phases. My character levels were between 88 and 91, and the second to last boss was level 80, the final boss was has its level hidden. The general curve is 3-5 levels above is challenging but doable, 3-5 levels below is not worth your time. Over 5 levels above is pretty much impossible unless you can topple lock it. Just an absurdly inconsistent game, which I guess is what should be expected from the people behind Xenogears and Xenosaga.