The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Anastasia]

Tales of Arise is still good.

[spoiler]However, boy does the story get dumb the moment Almeidrea shows up. Okay sure, there's a point to be made that Rinwell shouldn't live for revenge. I get that. However, lemme get this straight. Law decides to shield the woman who just committed mass murder to the tune of 100+ innocents. I'm sorry, what? This is so intensely dumb that I suspect there's some sort of cultural disconnect here. It doesn't make any sense otherwise.

For that matter, after you beat her, the idea of Almeidrea facing justice from the Dahnans? Let's be honest, can you expect any other outcome than a quick and painful death? Let alone because she's a powerful spellcaster who may well be a serious problem to keep contained. There's a few good points here but most of the storyline here is pants on head stupid. Let alone the fact that oh, we're just gonna have a bad guy come kill Almeidrea two seconds later anyway.

That's such a cheap out to the problem that it lowered my opinion of the game. Go on, let Rinwell finish her and deal with it, or have the party at least grapple with the problem. It's a total cop out the issue. Weak storytelling, weak execution. The entire Mahag Saar arc felt weak. Dedyme might've been okay if he got more time on screen, but he was rather quickly disposed of. Too bad. I wasn't fond of him but he came off as one dimensional due to a lack of screen time. On the other hand, sometimes a jerk is just a jerk.

Vholran's coming off as a complete wanker while we're on the subject of jerks, FYI. Whatever, it looks like his arc is next so we'll see how that shakes out. I'm not impressed of what I've seen of him so far but it's too early to say for certain.

To close out the Mahag Saar arc, Almeidrea was okay for what she was. I felt she didn't get enough time on screen, she could've used a scene or two more. To be honest this arc only felt about her in the most tangential way. Sure, she mattered, but it was very much an arc about other people and she was merely the plot instrument for advancement.

Of course the game follows this up by Shionne leaving the party for awhile and Alphen's memories turning into a giant drama bomb. This isn't a game where I want my party to get split up to begin with, plus this means I need to use Dohalim in batter. Talk about a one-two punch. I quit there for the night (and probably a day or two to let all that process).

At least Kisara continues to show goodness. She politely told Alphen to sack up instead of moping and that was more than needed. She's my favorite character so far I think, at least when it's not about Migel every other scene. Shame she's somewhat attached to Dohalim - a good guy morally who I respect for what he did but as a character he leaves me cold - and I just don't feel any chemistry there. I suspect there's supposed to be some and nope, not feeling it.

[KLSymph]

Also, what's Lost Ark? MMO?

Yes, Lost Ark is a free-to-play Korean MMORPG that was released for Western markets last month. Speaking as someone whose most recent experience was 90s-era text-based Multi-User Dungeons, it's a very visually appealing game. The core gameplay is vaguely like Diablo 2, but much more dependent on skill cooldowns instead of mana resource handling. The story that I've seen strikes me as very generic, and the visual aesthetic is predominantly medieval fantasy but not very consistent due to the users going around on hoverboards, the multi-colored pets, and the Fortnite-esque dance emotes. Most of the quests before endgame are extremely trivial and make-work, which I'm not a huge fan of. The game space is quite large to traverse but content-sparse. There are a lot of time-gated or energy-gated systems to keep you logging in, but the game client takes many minutes to start up and consumes a lot of system resources, so it's not as convenient as I like for that sort of thing. I'll probably see where the story goes before dropping it.

On the plus side, I can now see where a lot of the MMO-fantasy manhwas get their tropes from.

Still playing Granblue Fantasy. Haven't gotten tired of that yet.

[Merc]

The story NEVER goes out of the generic, but it does hit you with genre shifts as you start going to new continents/islands. I just did an island that was a goddamn survival horror game where you are attempting to get out of a haunted/demon-corrupted mansion, with lantern fuel management and running away from things. Horror isn't my jam though, and the designer for that island is goddamn fucked in the head. I honestly kinda hated it, though I can see the appeal to some people. Again... horror not my jam.

Immediately after that, I went to another island where I turned into a racoon monster thing and was helping another racoon monster thing with its confidence issues.

So yeah, definite tone shift between islands and continents.

The time gating isn't very noticeable at tier 1 because of the daily login bonuses you get and the vast amount of islands that can give you tier 1 materials, each with its unique storyline.

At tier 2 on the other hand, you VERY much start to feel the slog, as it can take 2 hours of work for 2 seconds of attempts at upgrading your gear, and it's work because it's content you've been doing DAILY, not new content from experiencing new islands. Whereas there are something like 50+ tier 1 islands, there is...5-10 tier 2 islands?

And on the upgrading attempts thing, I DO mean attempts, because upgrading (honing in the game) has decreasing probability as you upgrade. To get from tier 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3, you have to upgrade gear from level 0 to level 15. Levels 1-7 have 100% chance of upgrading if you provide the materials. After that, each level can decrease 10-20% chance in probability of succeeding.

At tier 1 it's not bad because you can get materials easily, and still be experiencing new content.

At tier 2, there's a definite lack of islands to explore and materials you can procure while experiencing new content, so you end up having to farm a lot or play the market (which I have zero interest in doing in MMOs). And materials you can get while farming content is limited to daily and weekly content, so there's only so much you can get per day, with a small boost on Thursdays when weekly content resets.

Once you get to tier 3, everything I see shows that content is more sparse and grindy, and may cause me quit there and then. To be fair, a lot of my complaints with tier 2 is that the ambience is in general very bleak for the main storyline and islands plots (see aformentioned horror island). Tier 3 on the other hand takes place in tropical beaches or something? So who knows if that might keep me more interested. But I do know that tier 2 has been a complete shit show of an experience.

I do constantly find something very fun to do in the game though, and I never actually finished the tier 1 islands, so going back and doing more of those islands is still a fun experience. Of the 300 hours I've put in, I can safely say I've enjoyed about 2/3 of my game time.

But I've hated the general ambience of the tier 2 storyline, and what few islands there have been in tier 2 have not been fun experiences. One of the tier 2 storylines involves delains (basically tieflings), of which my main character happens to be one. And it drives me nuts how often delains are in-game treated like shit, and then the same people turn to me and thank me and gush over me. What few bits of storyline changes for my specific character being a delain feels contradictory like the one time I was given the option to say I was a delain, I was just told I don't carry myself like one and that nobody remembers me or all who would know me died. And then later there is a quest with my character's name as a member of a mission talking to a survivor of that mission...AND THE SURVIVOR WAS THE PERSON WHO I SPOKE TO AND SAID I DIDN'T CARRY MYSELF LIKE ONE AND NOBODY IS ALIVE THAT WOULD KNOW ME.

Experiencing that storyline with a different character probably wouldn't have been as frustrating, but the writing very much was something I struggled with (and tier 1 admittedly has another delain subplot that fell very flat to me because of my character's status as one), and the voice acting is often very bad as well.

Gameplay is still very fun, and I enjoy how different various classes feel, but definitely most of the fun comes from experiencing new content not repeating old content, and I am absolutely stuck in the 'repeat daily content' phase of the game at the moment with my highest level character.

[Anastasia]

Finished Tales of Arise. Fun game.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Lenegis through Daeq Faezol or whatever they are suck. It's a talking and plot overload to the point of absurdity.

8/10 overall. A weak 8/10 but its strong points ensure it stays an 8/10.

[Dracos]

Been enjoying a replay of Stardew.  Restful.  Even if I have played too much of it.

Tried some Bloons.  Very eternal.

Dragon marked for death has been fun and is fun co-op, but also a bit of a mess.  Its math is a joke.

[Anastasia]

Been playing the Trails series. Good stuff, got through Trails In the Sky 1-3 and then Trails to Zero. The first game's super slow and weak but it gets better from there.

[Anastasia]

Gave River City Girls a play. It's solid but not great. Like a 7 or 7.5/10? Enjoyable but short. Bullet points since I don't feel like synthesizing this into a full review.

- The art, the voice acting and the music's good. The art in particular is excellent and sells the mood.
- The game's short but not unacceptably so. There's a bit of NG+ content but not enough to make me want to replay right now. As for why I don't want to replay?
- I got bored of the combat about halfway through. I played as Kyoko and dominated, which wasn't the problem. What the problem was that it quickly felt played out. To be fair, switching to another character might've helped but I didn't want to go back to level 1.
- There's not enough. Not enough content, not enough depth to the combat system, not enough locations to explore, not enough gangs, not enough different names in the various gangs. There's not enough game here.
- Really, the game has good ingredients. It has a regrettable case of the whole being less than the sum of the parts. I have no idea why. There's some spark the game needs that it doesn't have. I want to like RCG more than I did.
- But I'd bet one of the big culprits is the gameplay. I could mess around for hours in RCR back on the NES. This game doesn't have that. For whatever reason it doesn't. Some vital ingredient or reaction's not there. I wish I knew what.
- Had some issues with the ending, but I looked up the NG+ bonus ending. It didn't entirely solve those issues, but it helped enough that I gave it a pass.
- At the end of the day there wasn't enough there to make me train up another character (and get more life from the game) nor experiment with NG+. Frustrating. This has the ingredients to be a 9/10 game.
- Oh, and the boss fights were too gimmicky for my tastes. I never felt like I applied what I learned playing the game in them, I instead learned what each gimmick needed to overcome instead.
- Still worth playing but a bit of a letdown. RCG2 might well fix all of this, I'll give it a shot once they iron out some framerate issues.

[Dracos]

It has been a long since an RCR has happened that really connected.

RCR Underground did well, but had some serious issues too.  Mainlines haven't come close save the RCR gba or ds port itself.

I have not played through all of RCG, but what I have didn't quite feel like it had the spark either.  Nothing above surprises me or seems off from what I saw.

[Anastasia]

It's a shame. RCG should be better than it is, but it isn't for a reason I still can't pin down.

[Anastasia]

Playing River City Girls 2. It's a noted improvement so far, I'm halfway in and I've spent several more hours on it than I did the entirety of RCG1. More later but midway impressions are positive.

[Anastasia]

After a break I finished RCG2 (barring a possible NG+ run if some NG+ content gets implemented).

It's an 8/10? It fixes most but not all of the issues I had with RCG1. The only reason it's not higher is a pet peeve and what I thought was a move done in poor taste.

Spoiler: ShowHide

I don't care for fourth wall breaking. It happens for comedy at times and it doesn't sit right with me. This is a personal pet peeve so I won't take too much off.

On the other hand, what they did with Marian and the Lee Twins from Double Dragon wasn't cool. I'd suggest looking it up on youtube if you want details, but in short: They really trashed the Lee Twins to build up Marian. For a game that has nostalgia as a selling point, trashing one of those sources of nostalgia is a baffling, self destructive decision. It isn't funny at all.

Also, one side note. I do like how Kunio and Riki feel like they treat the game (from what limited screentime they get) as no big deal, just some thing their GFs dragged them into. They're around but it's not their story.

[Anastasia]

Played the Star Ocean 2 remake demo. It's really good and I'd preorder the game if I hadn't already*, it's an interesting 2.5 remake that's not short on the remake but feels like it hasn't lost the core of the game. There's a few parts that feel a little too gimmicky so far, the bonus meter is one, but the core game feels the same. My complaints are mostly minor quibbles and there's a ton to like.

Looking forward to early November.

* Star Ocean 2 is one of my top games all time and I've played it 6-12 times. This was a rare game I was going to pre order out of loyalty. So yeah, this take isn't unbiased.

[Anastasia]

The SO2 remake is insanely good. 21 hours and some change in two days and I want to play it more.

Wow.

[Dracos]

Got lost playing Tohou Mystia's Izakaya.  It has been nice.