100% canon that Squall constantly stops what he's doing to play a card game imo
Too be fair, it's a really good card game. You'd think everyone would be playing it 24/7.
FF8 has sone absolutely crazy plot stuff going on though...
Squall's in love with the daughter of his father's ex-girlfriend is one amusing thing.
But the fact that the main villain of the game is an 'alternate' future Riona who snaps and goes 'evil'/takes revenge on the world because of the suffering and prejudice she receives because... she's destined to go evil... is one hell of a convoluted tine loop.
And for Squall to save the world and Riona... He has to kill an alternate Riona is something man.
Man, I have been meaning to dive into this story because it's the only FF since 7 that I don't really have a handle on (7 I know the story but didn't really enjoy the game, 9 is my favorite FF and one of my favorite games of all time, and X is up there, too, and then the series might as well have stopped existing imo).
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
Wind waker always drove me nuts with all the urgency it instills in you
The triforce hunt isn't half as bad if you play the game just randomly exploring, figurinf out puzzles, and collecting triforce charts over the course of the whole game
But your dumb boat is constantly like we need to let to the next story island c'mon go go go
this worked a lot better in twilight princess, which had a similar sense of urgency, but doing your exploration once the game lets you take a breath is way less punishing
I think my first time through I did almost nothing on the world map until I finished the arbiter's grounds
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
+3
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
I mean,
you do you.
But when I play for three hours and attain, I dunno...a net gain of maybe 60 grand in space bucks, and then the first ship I see for sale is 12 million fucking dollars
That can fuck right off, I ain't playing the shit.
Bully cannot be made, anymore. The boat has been thought about and prayed for.
Breath of Fire 3 had really involved transformation-mechanics, but 2 and 4 were also fun, and Dragon Quarter tried a lot of neat things.
In BoF3, your main character can find and use a bunch of globs of magic don't worry about it.
It drains a bit of your magic-juice every turn, many of them counter-attack when they get hit, and breath-attacks are stronger when you have more HP.
At first you get, like, a fire-glob, which turns you into a small fire-dragon.
Then you find more, and can mix them, and become a large fire-dragon, or maybe ice-dragon, or just a dragon with big muscles, maybe?
You end up turning into a bunch of weird dragons and dragon-equivalent monsters, with various special abilities.
You can also mix one of the globs with which characters are currently in your party, to gain some properties from one of those characters. Bird-lady turns you into a bird-dragon, cat-guy turns you into a cat-dragon, the engineer turns you into a robot-dragon.
One glob just turns you into a saiyan instead of a dragon, and you're strong but you're also nuts. One of your other characters can use a command-skill to still make you attack the right target when you're nuts.
Maybe you'll get better at not being nuts, some day, if you try. Then you'd be a real Goku.
You can control the saiyan form if you combine it with the Failure Gene.
That one's significantly weaker, though. If only you could go even further beyond. If only.
There's another combination that allows you control Super Saiyan Ryu, but I can't remember that one.
Radiance Trance. It wastes a lot of ki.
There's also the slightly less human Myrmidon-form, if you prefer GT.
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Mx. QuillI now prefer "Myr. Quill", actually...{They/Them}Registered Userregular
The ship designs in NMS were the best thing in that game.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
I mean,
you do you.
But when I play for three hours and attain, I dunno...a net gain of maybe 60 grand in space bucks, and then the first ship I see for sale is 12 million fucking dollars
That can fuck right off, I ain't playing the shit.
Hmm, maybe it was luck but I was pretty regularly trading up in ships and multitools. Ships I mostly kept finding and salvaging better ones as I explored, but multitools I rarely had issues buying.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
I mean,
you do you.
But when I play for three hours and attain, I dunno...a net gain of maybe 60 grand in space bucks, and then the first ship I see for sale is 12 million fucking dollars
That can fuck right off, I ain't playing the shit.
Hmm, maybe it was luck but I was pretty regularly trading up in ships and multitools. Ships I mostly kept finding and salvaging better ones as I explored, but multitools I rarely had issues buying.
ok, that's fair. I never found ships, and was constantly caught up in the harvesting cycle of repair/research/refuel. Never found the fun gooey center in all that upkeep.
The New Vegas premise of you getting shot in the head works extremely well as motivation because it can motivate all kinds of different characters and doesn't make things weird as heck like when you stop looking for your child for hours on end.
I hate mainline stories that give me a sense of urgency. "Oh my god aliens are nuking the shit out of our planet as we speak, only you can stop them!" *stops saving the earth for an hour to help some girl find her lost puppy*
I love Final Fantasy games that do this. The final dungeon is revealed. The world is on the brink of extinction. Also, 20 minigames and 7 optional dungeons just opened up with grinding activity that can take another 100-200 gameplay hours. What’s a hero to do?
The split between gameplay and story has never struck me harder than Xenoblade 2. You are routinely being put into urgent emergency scenarios, often involving trying to escape from a location where you are stranded or that is under seige, and yet, except for a couple of notable specific exceptions, you can also just fast travel to anywhere at any time to work on sidequests and it just kind of puts the story on hold for you until then.
From a gameplay perspective I appreciate that concession but man is it absurd the moment you stop and think about it.
It is kind of weird that the micro environment-say, 'room full of mooks who will kill you if you do not escape/defeat them' is the absolute baseline of the nature of videogames:interacting with enemies in an environment in a way that allows you to survive/move to the next level, and the macro environment-the plot sort of running all the machinery underneath all the moment-to-moment stuff-is something that for the most part, players are not only encouraged to ignore, but are genuinely actively rewarded for neglecting in the name of loot/gear/fancy outfits/xp.
Like, I'd genuinely like an Assassin's Creed where it could be like, 'Whoops, you fucked up. Sure, you explored that mountain to the north and found a cool tomb, but while you were out the bandits you were warned about torched your village and it's just gone now. You don't even have the fast travel option to it because that tower has been destroyed. Gotta go find a new support system or learn to survive in the wilds.' A world where your active stewardship (or lack thereof) shapes the environment and your responses to it. It's...nice, I guess, having a list of Plot Quests that will wait for the sun to die while you don't go and do them, but dammit if it makes none of them feel that important, and unwelcome, when upon taking one up you are locked into it until it is over unless you reset the quest in the menu. It works, I guess, but it's a quiet kind of dissonance that could be thrown out for something more effective.
Dead Rising is probably the closest to this
Not exactly, since it is literally possible to do every quest and save every person within the given time limits. I mean, I get your point, but the timeline is stitched into the plot in Dead Rising.
The games we’re talking about have hundreds of hours of extra content that just doesn’t reconcile with the plot.
I think a better example might be Far Cry 5. Which has a multitude of content but also forcibly advances the plot on you and “completes” milestone missions for you if you continually focus on ancillary stuff. And guess what? I fucking hate it.
Drez on
Switch: SW-7690-2320-9238Steam/PSN/Xbox: Drezdar
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
The New Vegas premise of you getting shot in the head works extremely well as motivation because it can motivate all kinds of different characters and doesn't make things weird as heck like when you stop looking for your child for hours on end.
I hate mainline stories that give me a sense of urgency. "Oh my god aliens are nuking the shit out of our planet as we speak, only you can stop them!" *stops saving the earth for an hour to help some girl find her lost puppy*
I love Final Fantasy games that do this. The final dungeon is revealed. The world is on the brink of extinction. Also, 20 minigames and 7 optional dungeons just opened up with grinding activity that can take another 100-200 gameplay hours. What’s a hero to do?
The split between gameplay and story has never struck me harder than Xenoblade 2. You are routinely being put into urgent emergency scenarios, often involving trying to escape from a location where you are stranded or that is under seige, and yet, except for a couple of notable specific exceptions, you can also just fast travel to anywhere at any time to work on sidequests and it just kind of puts the story on hold for you until then.
From a gameplay perspective I appreciate that concession but man is it absurd the moment you stop and think about it.
It is kind of weird that the micro environment-say, 'room full of mooks who will kill you if you do not escape/defeat them' is the absolute baseline of the nature of videogames:interacting with enemies in an environment in a way that allows you to survive/move to the next level, and the macro environment-the plot sort of running all the machinery underneath all the moment-to-moment stuff-is something that for the most part, players are not only encouraged to ignore, but are genuinely actively rewarded for neglecting in the name of loot/gear/fancy outfits/xp.
Like, I'd genuinely like an Assassin's Creed where it could be like, 'Whoops, you fucked up. Sure, you explored that mountain to the north and found a cool tomb, but while you were out the bandits you were warned about torched your village and it's just gone now. You don't even have the fast travel option to it because that tower has been destroyed. Gotta go find a new support system or learn to survive in the wilds.' A world where your active stewardship (or lack thereof) shapes the environment and your responses to it. It's...nice, I guess, having a list of Plot Quests that will wait for the sun to die while you don't go and do them, but dammit if it makes none of them feel that important, and unwelcome, when upon taking one up you are locked into it until it is over unless you reset the quest in the menu. It works, I guess, but it's a quiet kind of dissonance that could be thrown out for something more effective.
Dead Rising is probably the closest to this
Not exactly, since it is literally possible to do every quest and save every person within the given time limits. I mean, I get your point, but the timeline is stitched into the plot in Dead Rising.
The games we’re talking about have hundreds of hours of extra content that just doesn’t reconcile with the plot.
I think a better example might be Far Cry 5. Which has a multitude of content but also forcibly advances the plot on you and “completes” milestone missions for you if you continually focus on ancillary stuff. And guess what? I fucking hate it.
In practice I end up hating this too! I just wish there was a way this could be done right and I didn't hate it, because the alternative feels so inconsequential
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
I mean,
you do you.
But when I play for three hours and attain, I dunno...a net gain of maybe 60 grand in space bucks, and then the first ship I see for sale is 12 million fucking dollars
That can fuck right off, I ain't playing the shit.
Hmm, maybe it was luck but I was pretty regularly trading up in ships and multitools. Ships I mostly kept finding and salvaging better ones as I explored, but multitools I rarely had issues buying.
ok, that's fair. I never found ships, and was constantly caught up in the harvesting cycle of repair/research/refuel. Never found the fun gooey center in all that upkeep.
Oh I definitely struggled with energy availability and was primarily stuck in my starting system for the duration of my time with the game (I think the procedural generation aspect really hurts the gameplay experience in that way--some planets just don't give you an easy way to leave them)
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
I mean,
you do you.
But when I play for three hours and attain, I dunno...a net gain of maybe 60 grand in space bucks, and then the first ship I see for sale is 12 million fucking dollars
That can fuck right off, I ain't playing the shit.
Hmm, maybe it was luck but I was pretty regularly trading up in ships and multitools. Ships I mostly kept finding and salvaging better ones as I explored, but multitools I rarely had issues buying.
ok, that's fair. I never found ships, and was constantly caught up in the harvesting cycle of repair/research/refuel. Never found the fun gooey center in all that upkeep.
Oh I definitely struggled with energy availability and was primarily stuck in my starting system for the duration of my time with the game (I think the procedural generation aspect really hurts the gameplay experience in that way--some planets just don't give you an easy way to leave them)
I did wonder a bit, like, if I wasn't constantly repairing my suit and tools and refueling my ship, what would I actually be doing in these geographically limited worlds?
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, Windwaker and AC Black Flag have really demonstrated to me that for some reason, a free-roaming world where you also pilot an awesome ship all over the place is just about my favorite kind of game world to be in.
So, how do you feel about No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
I mean,
you do you.
But when I play for three hours and attain, I dunno...a net gain of maybe 60 grand in space bucks, and then the first ship I see for sale is 12 million fucking dollars
That can fuck right off, I ain't playing the shit.
Hmm, maybe it was luck but I was pretty regularly trading up in ships and multitools. Ships I mostly kept finding and salvaging better ones as I explored, but multitools I rarely had issues buying.
ok, that's fair. I never found ships, and was constantly caught up in the harvesting cycle of repair/research/refuel. Never found the fun gooey center in all that upkeep.
Oh I definitely struggled with energy availability and was primarily stuck in my starting system for the duration of my time with the game (I think the procedural generation aspect really hurts the gameplay experience in that way--some planets just don't give you an easy way to leave them)
I did wonder a bit, like, if I wasn't constantly repairing my suit and tools and refueling my ship, what would I actually be doing in these geographically limited worlds?
Mostly just finding minerals and animals you haven't named yet and naming them. Which was fine by me but I get not being very engaging long-term for folks.
Doom 2016. Everything about that elevator sequence in the beginning is just perfect. Idk if you'd count it as late, as its only 10 minutes or so in, but its not right at the top, so maybe it counts?
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Final Fantasy VII - January 1997
Bushido Blade - March 1997
Final Fantasy Tactics - June 1997
SaGa Frontier - July 1997
Einhander - November 1997
Like, holy fucking shit.
Yeah they put out one good game in june
Bushido Blade 1 is Fine
Subsequent entries are stellar
Man, I have been meaning to dive into this story because it's the only FF since 7 that I don't really have a handle on (7 I know the story but didn't really enjoy the game, 9 is my favorite FF and one of my favorite games of all time, and X is up there, too, and then the series might as well have stopped existing imo).
this worked a lot better in twilight princess, which had a similar sense of urgency, but doing your exploration once the game lets you take a breath is way less punishing
I think my first time through I did almost nothing on the world map until I finished the arbiter's grounds
No Man's Sky feels less like a game about the awesomeness of exploring space, and more the functional equivalent of being a homeless person with a car who is scraping by from odd jobs, hoping one day to save enough on the side to own a house.
Yeah it rules
I mean,
you do you.
But when I play for three hours and attain, I dunno...a net gain of maybe 60 grand in space bucks, and then the first ship I see for sale is 12 million fucking dollars
That can fuck right off, I ain't playing the shit.
Radiance Trance. It wastes a lot of ki.
There's also the slightly less human Myrmidon-form, if you prefer GT.
Hmm, maybe it was luck but I was pretty regularly trading up in ships and multitools. Ships I mostly kept finding and salvaging better ones as I explored, but multitools I rarely had issues buying.
ok, that's fair. I never found ships, and was constantly caught up in the harvesting cycle of repair/research/refuel. Never found the fun gooey center in all that upkeep.
Not exactly, since it is literally possible to do every quest and save every person within the given time limits. I mean, I get your point, but the timeline is stitched into the plot in Dead Rising.
The games we’re talking about have hundreds of hours of extra content that just doesn’t reconcile with the plot.
I think a better example might be Far Cry 5. Which has a multitude of content but also forcibly advances the plot on you and “completes” milestone missions for you if you continually focus on ancillary stuff. And guess what? I fucking hate it.
In practice I end up hating this too! I just wish there was a way this could be done right and I didn't hate it, because the alternative feels so inconsequential
Oh I definitely struggled with energy availability and was primarily stuck in my starting system for the duration of my time with the game (I think the procedural generation aspect really hurts the gameplay experience in that way--some planets just don't give you an easy way to leave them)
I did wonder a bit, like, if I wasn't constantly repairing my suit and tools and refueling my ship, what would I actually be doing in these geographically limited worlds?
Mostly just finding minerals and animals you haven't named yet and naming them. Which was fine by me but I get not being very engaging long-term for folks.
Your face is beautiful interesting procedurally generated.
I'd worry about catching my lip or nose on the door.
This is a strong pick
I think I might actually give it to Nier Automata
It's a secret, but they already do.
Similarly I do love Assassin's Creed 2's title card, music swelling and all.
I'm more surprised it's a Male Shep.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
I don't have to imagine the second thing
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Doom 2016. Everything about that elevator sequence in the beginning is just perfect. Idk if you'd count it as late, as its only 10 minutes or so in, but its not right at the top, so maybe it counts?
actually it's only 40 CAD on steam right now