PlayStaiton time in 2019 for the record…
Interesting to see all this stuff. Also looking at my list of completed games for the year, I already had 4 games beat by this time last year. Because of Destiny 2 I currently have 0 beat this year…
Some of you might have seen on the pickups thread that I picked up Daemon x Machina last week. Played a couple of hours so far. It’s…okay I guess. It’s nice that a game like this got made, but at the same time it’s not as unique as I thought it might have been.
The controls are very slick, it almost feels like a third person shooter but with flying. There isn’t all that much character to it since you can get to grips with it immediately if you’ve played other shooting games.
That’s fine, if a bit boring, but the mission design is what lets it down for me so far. In the ever presence trend of quantity over quality it really reveals a lack of discipline in design. There are so many similar missions, many of which aren’t all that eventful, that most of the game starts to blend into itself. The giant boss fights in-between are memorable though.
There’s also a loot element and online play, so I’m sure it’s all rather compelling if you stick with it in the long run. But I’m not sure I will - I’d take a dozen expertly crafted, bespoke, memorable missions over fifty plus dull ones.
Ring Fit Adventure: Managed to get back into this amidst the CV-19 lockdown, and I’m playing this about five days a week. It’s just a delightful game, the audio-visual feedback when you’re doing exercise routines is just incredible, makes exercising a joy even 25 hours into the adventure mode. The new rhythm game update is a lovely surprise, too.
The Last Remnant Remastered I’m always on the look-out for unique RPGs, and this game has a really neat battle system, whereby you control unions of units to either individually or simultaneously battle the enemies’ unions. But outside of combat it’s a bit of a mess, I think the main problem is it spreads itself too thinly, and the combat system doesn’t come into its own until twenty hours in. The more units and unions you can bring into battle the better, but the game holds you back for a long, long, time. The balancing is also all over the place - I’m currently stuck on a boss fight despite finding everything before it relatively mindless and easy.
Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Mega 39s: Still playing Sega AM2’s rhythm game - finished all the songs on Hard mode this week so I’ve got more to play on Extreme and Ex Extreme difficulty now!
Langrisser 1 and 2: Thought these were poor remakes of the originals. Okay, I only played Langrisser 2 in this collection, but the difficulty quickly becomes far too easy, and that’s with me not even using any of the ample opportunities to grind that the remake now lets you do. If you get a game over all your EXP and levels are retained, and even quitting back to base does the same. By the midway point of the game my units were so strong they were practically just tanks waiting to destroy any enemy units that would attack them. The overly bland presentation isn’t the main problem of this game, balancing is. The only thing it has going for it is the inclusion of the original FM Synth soundtrack.
It’s a shame because Langrisser 2 has a lot of interesting ideas still going for it. You primarily control a small number of commanders, and each commander has their own surrounding units. So in theory you should be placing your units in ways optimal for protecting your commanders and whittling down the enemy commanders’ health. But the game quickly becomes far too easy for any of that to happen beyond the first two chapters. This is all you need to know:
I beat Streets of Rage 4, I really liked it. I did Normal on my 1st run and never got a Game Over. The difficulty seems to be all over the place though I still managed. Going to try out more modes as well.
I just finished FFVIIR.
Honestly it’s just okay. A solid 3/5 for me.
The expanded character development was great but the level design was terrible, the side quests are cookie cutter fare and the visual presentation is inconsistent to the point that it’s distracting. I sold my copy the day I beat it. I’ll revisit the series once the other parts are out.
Interesting, I guess it was inevitable that the game would turn out like this.
They’ve essentially stretched out the first 6 or so hours into a 40 hour game, presumably because of both modern expectations and because of how expensive it would have been to recreate all of Midgar as modern 3D locations. I guess a contemporary remake of FFVIIR would have always had boring filler side quests and inconsistent presentation just as a result of circumstance. Shame.
I played half a dozen hours of the Trials of Mana remake last weekend, but I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. It’s a strange one, as it’s much more faithful to the source material than I expected it to be. Surprising for a Square Enix remake.
- I liked visiting the recreated 3D locales. Towns were fun to walk around in and get my bearings in again, and the routes and dungeons retained the same general layout while being more involved than the original game, with plenty of shortcuts, secret paths and verticality to jump around in.
- The rearranged soundtrack is standout, its choice of instruments make it sound very true to the original music while being significantly higher quality.
- Also: Square Enix resisted the urge to add in sidequests, which I commend.
As for the bad: There are two things I found made me not want to bother playing any more…
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The first was the use of Quest Markers for literally everything. It certainly makes the game feel ‘project managed’ since they reduce progression to one of two things: Talking to the right NPCs at the right time and reaching the quest marker goal. Exploration was much more natural in the original without them. I sighed when I saw the quest markers on-screen during a couple of moments where the original game expected you to use your head.
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The combat is largely brain-dead, even on Hard difficulty. Okay, so combat wasn’t a standout point of the original game either but I feel this is an area they could have improved on, especially as co-op is no longer an option. My problem was with how enemy skills all flash a red danger zone beneath your party, which makes fights feel rather homogenous, boiling them down to attacking, using skills, and rolling out of the way whenever you’re on a danger zone. You don’t really have to do anything else to succeed.
As an aside, the presentation isn’t as polished as the original game, contextually. It’s not a bad looking game by any means, but the Super Famicom original was up there with the very best of what was being achieved on the system at that time, while this version clearly falls short. Even the ring menu, which was beautifully programmed and animated in the original game, is reduced to being very boring and staid.
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What frustrated me the most is that if they were going to stretch it out I assume that Midgar would be a giant interconnected metropolis and we’d spend more time on the plate (especially sector 7) to get a feel for the disparity between those in the undercity. I wanted them to really lean into it and give us a city with the density of Novigrad.
Instead there are a bunch of slapdash locations connected by corridors that have none of the charm (or detail) of the originals.
I think people giving it a 10/10 are crazy
Sounds very project managed, if you get what I mean. I’ve felt that way about a lot of modern Square games, it’s probably more a symptom of the circumstances by which big games are made today.
The latest Fire Emblem - made by hundreds of people at Koei Tecmo with only seven from Intelligent Systems involved. Also had this issue.
People often judge games by their budget, but really, everyone should be looking at craftsmanship. I feel beyond a certain era the potential for craftsmanship in these big games has fallen dramatically - the big games in the past may well have also been high budget, but almost every pore in them oozed craftsmanship. That quality is hard to come by in today’s big games.
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Been playing a lot of Modern Warfare (2019) and Warzone as well as Apex Legends.
If you ever wanted to try the Battle Royale genre, now is the time. Both of these are hitting on all cylinders when it comes to actual gameplay and competition with other real humans. Apex is still, for me, the closest a modern videogame comes to being an arcade game at home. Each “quarter” being a single character pick, drop, loot, fight, and finishing position. I think it’s still brilliantly executed with even more stuff and great changes in yesterday’s Season change. Again making it an excellent time to try it.
Warzone for Modern Warfare is similarly well executed but slower and more methodical like the BRs that came before. It’s a middle ground between Apex and PUBG. I love it just as much as Apex because the teamwork, guns, tacticals, and the decisions are just as engaging. This specific Call of Duty makes you feel like you’re playing soldier better than any before it in my opinion. Maybe CoD2 is on par that way in the WWII setting. It takes longer to win a game of Warzone and there will be more moments of inactivity and time to think, but when the bullets start flying it’s every bit as intense as other BRs and positioning and awareness are valued highly.
That’s the new stuff I’ve been playing with a fun crew I met online. While I already owned Modern Warfare, both can be played for free. They are the best value in games.
I started playing TT Isle of Man 2 on Switch today, but I’ve already come away pretty disappointed.
Not in the game itself, which developer Kylotonn has refined the handling and the camerawork to create something even more exhilarating than the first game’s recreation of one of the world’s most dangerous sports.
It’s in the visuals. The first game was clearly optimised around docked mode first. It had a rather low resolution but the graphics were scrumptious. But really, in handheld mode it was far too blurry - think of Xenoblade 2. This new game feels like the opposite - it was designed for handheld mode first.
Now that’s fine, but it goes too far in addressing the resolution issues, now so many graphical effects have been pared back, from the shadows, to the visor, vehicle and helmet reflections, to the postprocessing effects, to the textures (presumably due to a lack of video memory after increasing resolution).
Handheld mode is much crisper, and the game looks fine in handheld, but now the game looks like a shambles when docked.
Check out this gallery I created to get what I mean:
The best solution would have been to keep rendering resolution the same between handheld and docked, but turn on/off visual features. The higher resolution when docked, compared to the first game, doesn’t really work because the visuals look so basic now. The extra resolution only further highlights that fact.
Been playing my other new game, HeroLand, quite a bit over the last few days, but decided to give it a break.
So this one is published by FuRyu, who seem to be the only publisher giving mid-tier RPG developers work these days.
HeroLand is developed by Netchubiyori, who, going from the credits, are comprised of a bunch of people from companies like Brownie Brown and Spike. More interestingly however, its scenario and script were written by the director of Mother 3, and for what it’s worth the game’s sprites were designed by Mother 3’s sprite artist.
It’s the dialogue that really shines in the game, you work as a guide in a theme park that clearly exploits its workers, and its kooky guests are your party members. But the problem I had was the game really spreads itself too thinly, combat isn’t as deep as it initially seems (though attempting guide tours at levels lower than recommended is still fun), and there’s too much grinding required to even stand a chance at success in story missions.
This is largely down to the 20 characters needing to be levelled up individually, which leads to a lot of mindless repetition. The game would have been better off if it dropped levelling altogether and instead tested your ability to get through dungeons on limited resources and on specific character-equipment setups instead. But the lack of variety is motivation-sapping.
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I finished Shin Megami Tensei IV on 3DS this week. I’ve been playing this game on and off since it was released in Europe in 2014. The save game timer had about 70 hours on it, but I think I died a few times as well, so in total I guess around 80 hours. Great game and the first original SMT I’ve finished and really dived into. All the other SMT games I’ve played were spin-offs. Which brings me to…
I’m currently playing Persona 5 Royal. I’m about 75 hours into the game and I think I still have half of the game to go! This game is crazy long! Also I’m using guides to get me through all the confidants conversations. You have to give the correct answers during conversations and I just don’t want to miss anything here. Honestly, I like the confidants stories and understand how it integrates into the rest of the game, but gameplay wise it’s not the most fun. I’d rather play through some more dungeons (or palaces as they are called in this game) and beat enemies. Still, I’m enjoying the game a lot and I’m hoping to finish it hopefully somewhere this year still 
Great comparison shots.
The 2nd hand looks like a PS2 game. Those flat textures, especially in the bike and rider are really disappointing. There’s almost more detail in something like Grand Turismo 3.
What a shame
I think the only modern game I’m playing at the moment continues to be Ring Fit Adventure! It’s definitely reached the point where the designers have run out of new ideas - the last few worlds have been more of the same. But it’s still fun to play, and it just makes what would normally be tedious exercise workouts fly by, what’s not to love?
Got to world 21 today, there are apparently 23 worlds in Adventure Mode (at least before you unlock Extra and Master difficulties). Hoping to finish it before the weather gets unbearably hot.
Thank you! The lack of motion blur in the second game also doesn’t help - you really notice how flat everything is even when it’s all moving. The first game had motion blur, and while it’s lower resolution, it’s such a fast game that it doesn’t matter so much, and it looks like you’re watching the race on analogue TV anyway.
I gotta check out ring fit when it starts getting manufactured again. It looks like my type of game.
I’ve also been meaning to check out labo all this time but haven’t yet due to space concerns in my apartment. Hopefully I get to try that too someday soon.
I had the same issue with Labo, it’s why I didn’t pick up the Vehicle Kit. You don’t need as much space as I anticipated to do the building at least. You often focus on making individual bits of things before slotting it all together onto the whole. Labo VR is well worth it!
Finally finished Ring Fit Adventure’s Adventure mode, which I’m super chuffed about because one of my quarantine goals was to get back into the game, nevermind finish it!
Nintendo’s estimates of it taking about three months are accurate, give or take ten days depending on how much you play each day. I often exercised ten or twenty minutes beyond the game’s notices that ask if you want to finish for the day.
It’s a shame the game runs out of genuinely new ideas about halfway through because the only real blight is the recycling of level layouts in the latter half, which I begun to notice more and more toward the end. But the game still makes exercise workouts fly by - thank of it like an arcade game with a Pilates ring controller - and there’s always new exercises to try or add to your repertoire of moves when battles get boring.
I guess the next modern game is 51 Worldwide Games, which is still in the shrink wrap.
I finished Control using a free 1-week PSNow trial and I’d highly recommend anyone interested to play it for free. The game is downloadable from PSNow so no streaming lag (framerate on base PS4 is another issue entirely). The game is short enough for me to leisurely make my way to the end within 7 days.
I was super impressed by the graphics and the destructibility of the environment. Art design is on point. I was also pleasantly surprised at the Metroidvania structure. I happily did sidequests and explored at length to unlock new abilities and new areas. Didn’t love the story, was a case of style over substance imo. The combat had a good hook with the back and forth between using your guns and using your psychic abilities. The gameplay loop got a bit tired towards the back third of the game but it didn’t outstay it welcome by too much. Again, for the price of free, I enjoyed my 15+ hours I spent with Control.