FMW

Okay, this bit with splitting the party between Oeilvert and the Desert Palace with finicky dungeon sequencing and heavy restrictions placed on both teams? This blows. I don't like this one bit.

And here's another thing. Walking around towns talking to NPCs to advance the story between dungeons. It's been a part of the JRPG formula pretty much since the beginning, and often it's a bit of a slog. Games can sometimes add some spice with side quests, charming NPC dialogue, and lots of hidden goodies but it's still never a highlight of the experience. FF 9 does these sections better than any other game I've played. Every time you hit a village the party splits up and folks do their own thing. And the camera doesn't tether to our anime hero all the time, you just take control of whoever happens to be most interesting at the moment. And they have all their Active Time Event cut away scenes so even the characters you don't control get to have their own little solo scenes. So functionally nothing changed. You're still walking around static town environments talking to NPCs, buying new armor, and triggering a cutscene or two. But by splitting the characters and actually paying attention to what they do during their down time these parts of the game do a really good job of characterization. Is there some important royal business at the castle? Zidane says meh, he goes to the local tavern and the player goes with him. When you hit the black mage village you control Vivi because it's his part of the story. When you hit the rat kingdom you control Freya. And I just find myself wandering "Why didn't this become the genre standard"? It's not like this is calling for extra technology investment or anything like that. The gameplay doesn't change. But splitting the party and selectively choosing who the game follows massively improves the focus of these town segments that are otherwise often flaccid. Why yes, FF 12 WOULD be a million times better if when I got to town the sequence the game cut to controlling Balthier while he cuts a deal for safe passage going forward, or Basch looking into the local resistance cell, or Penelo doing.... anything. And some solo content in the towns for Selphie, Zell, Quistis, and Irvine from FF 8 would have gone a long way to making them not completely irrelevant.

Why didn't you people TELL me that FF 9 is the best game in the universe? 1. The decision to move from portraying urban realism in FF 7 and 8 to the warm colored fantasy pre rendered backgrounds in 9 was such a wonderful decision. Not just because the backdrops in 9 are aesthetically pleasing, but what they're aiming to portray fits the technology better. Most of these settings (boring castle interiors aside) feel like little diorama sets laid out to move your heroes through (who are conveniently shaped and proportioned like many dolls). 2. I don't know if this is accidental synergy or not, but this game has this whole theater motif it keeps coming back to. Even after the opening sequence with the theater troupe the characters keep coming back to quoting these fake melodramas as a lens through which to view different relationships. I personally feel like it might have worked better if they had thrown out the fantasy and quoted real plays (because how meaningful can a made up quote really be? If you're making them up you ALWAYS have the perfect quote) but the device is nevertheless effective and fits with a lot of the look of the game. 3. So a lot of the anime/JRPG space likes to use "defy your fate/predestination/what your parents want you to be" as an arc. It works a lot of the time, I don't hate it, and I understand why it would resonate with kids growing up in Japan. But I've personally gotten less out of that arc over time because as I've grown up I kinda moved to a different understanding of life. Looking at life as "what the world wants me to be vs what I want to be" is a very contrary and adolescent perspective I think. The experience of being an adult is much more about seeing who and where you are and figuring out "okay, how do I define myself within this space where I am and how do I carve out my own little bit of happiness in life?" And I feel like FF IX is kinda on that wavelength! They set up all these characters who in a typical game would be in major conflict with their authority figures. Steiner is doing duty vs. honor. Garnet is doing family vs. goodness. Vivi is doing I'm a weapon but I'm a person. Even Zidane started out the game by directly defying orders and deciding to bail on the troupe to go help the princess. But nobody is angsty over it! And nobody ever does a hard rejection of their role or past. Steiner decides that being a Knight of Pluto means protecting the princess instead of the Queen, but he's still captain of the Knights of Pluto and he's still as boorishly hung up on that as ever. This crystallized for me when Amarant joined the party. He's the last party member and gets very little introduction. He's a bounty hunter out to kill you and he abides by a strict kill or be killed philosophy. Honorable 1 on 1 combat only. When you defeat him he demands to be slain and has trouble understanding why Zidane won't kill him. In 90% of games this guy is a recurring villain. He sticks to his (dumb) philosophy and jumps you again and again in an attempt to balance the world and make events fit his honor code by killing you. But not here. In FF 9 he's confused and upset but Zidane just says "Why don't you come with us and try to figure it out along the way?". So he does. And he doesn't stop being who he is, the super bounty hunter combat man. But he figures out a happier and more healthy way to define himself within that role. The way this game approaches character change and self actualization is just so good. Everyone has a conflict, but it's an internal conflict resolved by how they define themselves within their existing role in the world. Cecil in FF 4 going from Dark Knight to Paladin lovely, but if he was in FF 9 he would have stayed a dark knight and his story would be about figuring out how to find his own happiness and save the world within that existing class. ...but I haven't finished yet so I look forward to Vivi going into hysterics at the end yelling about he's a person and Kuja can't control him any more. :/ 4. Zidane's outfit is top tier Final Fantasy awful character design. "So our main character is a sky pirate type character, so give him big naval boots and a vest. And he's a free spirited thief so... give him a monkey tail. Monkeys are symbolic! And he's in a theater troupe so put a frigging cravatte and tie on top of everything." And here's the thing, it isn't even the worst outfit in the game! Because garnet is out here running around in orange overalls low cut to make room for her boobs.

I bought three games in the Steam Sale. Jet Set Radio, Half Life 2 episode 2, and Final Fantasy 9. I have never played any of these games. I have already started with FF 9. It froze up at the start of a battle in the ice cavern right near the start of the game, and I had to hard shut down and lose some progress. That is a bummer. You never wanna see a hard crash in the first 2 hours of a game. Fingers crossed this isn't a recurring issue. Because I REALLY dig the vibe of the game so far. But if I'm afraid of a crash every time an encounter pops up that kinda sucks the fun out of the thing.

Actually, I'll betcha they announced Metroid Prime 4 prematurely for the benefit of the Metroid 2 remake. I can see the narrative forming already - "You made us wait over a decade for THIS? This isn't even made by Nintendo! AM2R was better than what you're selling and that was free! #NotMyMetroid" But the way they did it, even though they didn't have anything to show (or even have a fully established team yet) this worked better for the marketing. There was a promise that yes we are working on a top tier high budget Metroid Prime game. That is a game that will 100% happen. After giving that a slot in the main video presentation when they casually mentioned this weird 3DS remake of Metroid 2 all those narratives kinda didn't emerge. Metroid 2 is a bonus tertiary to the main Metroid event in 2019.

He's also the producer from Metroid Prime Federation Force and Hunters. Kensuke Tanabe does not have the golden touch. He was also associate with both Retro made Donkey Kong Country games and those were good but... that was Retro. And this is not. For some reason.

1. I give zero shits about Metroid Prime 4. Nintendo has shown that they have limitless capability to screw up Metroid. Other M and Federation Force being exhibits 1A and 1B. So now they show a logo for Metroid Prime 4 along with the old Metroid Prime 1 theme music. No gameplay no trailer. It's not being made by Retro Studios. No release target. The entire pitch is "Hey we're bringing back Metroid Prime guys!" but they don't get my enthusiasm with just that. Tell me who is making it, what will make it great, when it will release. Then we'll talk. 2. Goddamn it Xenoblade 2 dove into the deep end of the anime pool. Xenoblade X wasn't good storytelling, but at least it wasn't "pretty anime teenagers go on a journey together across the world and inevitably discover the power of true love". 3. What. The Fuck. Is Retro. Studios. Doing?? They've gone totally dark since DK Tropical Freeze 3.5 years ago but they're not making the new Metroid Prime game?

Splatoon That single player mode is pretty rad. Very Mario Galaxy. Introduce a central idea for a level, explore it for 4-8 minutes, move on. Sometimes the idea being explored is "learn your way around this multiplayer map" so that's not as exciting as the actual uniquely designed levels. But those missions also take 3-4 minutes so whatever, I don't resent them. The final boss is also pretty rad. It cheats! I repeat the pattern to damage him three times, he falls down a pit, I go to the credits. That's. The. Rules. But this guy, oh nooooo. He requires FIVE damage instances. And it gets pretty hard for rounds 4 and 5! Yoshi's Wooly World It's not as good as Kirby's Epic Yarn, but that's an unreasonable standard to hold any game to. Epic Yarn was lightning in a bottle. Yoshi's Wooly World is pretty good. It's way over on the Donkey Kong Country end of the platformer spectrum where finding the secrets is actually the entire point to playing the game. So even though I've now "beaten" Wooly World odds are I'll continue to play it off and on through the next year going back to random levels looking for yarn pills and flowers I had missed. I kinda wish this game had secret exits like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. When a 2D platformer is all about the secret hunting, it's great to make one of the secret rewards "and now you get a whole new LEVEL!". Yoshi technically has unlockable levels too, but you get a bonus level for getting every flower in every level for an entire world. That's a bit of a steeper mountain to climb. The nice thing about going back to find secrets in Yoshi is that it's easy. I've never gone back and dug into Tropical Freeze as much as it deserved because it's actually quite hard. So I can't go back to just chill and look for fun nooks and crannies I missed, it's full on fight for survival even for round 2.

Okay, here's a question. I tried (finished) Trails in the Sky FC and didn't like it. The reason is that the combat was slow but easy without many interesting risk/reward decisions, the dungeon level design was just really bottom of the barrel featureless hallway stuff, and the story was about two teenagers with super obvious crushes on each other that are ashamed to admit what's obvious to the player from minute 7. That's one of the worst anime clichés, and both main characters have a SEVERE case of it. Also the game doesn't let you play for like 10 minutes ever without stopping to talk about every single little thing. So Legend of Heroes isn't for me. That's fine. What about Ys? By reputation that's much more of a gameplay focused franchise. Given my specific complaints with Legend of Heroes, would Ys fit my criteria for fun better? I like challenging snappy combat with good level design and minimalist story (I tolerate high story quantity only when it's good). I like atmospheric music, I like meaningful customization, and I like simple controls. Any chance Ys is for me?

I beat Shovel Knight Spectre of Torment! Goddamn that's good! They don't make 'em like that any more. Every level is just a sequence of ideas. "Here you encounter green bouncy goo. Next room you must use it to traverse lava. Next room you must avoid bouncing too high off it lest you impale yourself on ceiling spikes. Next room you must apply green goo to a lantern to solve a tricky jumping puzzle. Next room lets put it all together. And a boss. Next level, next idea, no more green goo." This is a lot of what I wanted from Zelda Breath of the Wild and didn't get. Coherent sequential level design. It's gone out of style. Everything is about being open and making your own fun now. I don't want that! I want really smart curated fun from great level designers. Like those Shovel Knight guys! I also beat Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga part 2. On one hand I kinda want to hate the ending. They basically pull a "all the world needs is love, that would solve all our problems" resolution. Suuuuper trite. But instead of calling it love, they specifically invoke the Shan-ti Shan-ti Shan-ti Om mantra. And the whole game has been about Hinduism. To be fair, the theology there is that if you truly do wish for peace and sacrifice yourself for others then you will ascend from this mortal plain (or at least be reincarnated to a better life). So on one hand, from a Western storytelling perspective ending with "I have achieved enlightenment, the world just needs to remember to desire peace and to abandon selfishness" is trite and reductive as hell. But on the other hand... that's kinda how the theology works. And what, am I gonna go bitching about a game actually having a theme and representing a real world religious philosophy? JRPGs have a problem with being vapid, so I should celebrate that this one was not. ...but it still ended with a hippy bullshit All You Need Is Love

I mean, the counter argument to make here is "It's unfair to judge a game for not having satisfactory long form level design when that game is making no attempt to have long form level design." My position is just that isolated snippets of level design consumed in a random order is inherently worse. When the authorial control is reduced you lose pacing, you lose sequential progression of ideas, you lose cause and effect, and you lose any semblance of a difficulty and power curve. These are all good things that Zelda games usually are really good at! Even Skyward Sword which had some CRUMMY pacing turned white hot as soon as the game got out of its way and just left you to conquer a level. It wasn't even just the dungeons in that game, just getting to a dungeon almost always required an hour plus of tricky scripted level progression. Linear level design just has a higher ceiling for craft than open world level design. So if you accept that new Zelda is an open world game and judge it on the rubric you would use to judge Just Cause 3 or Mass Effect Andromeda... yeah! It's better! The NPCs are more distinct, the content is less nakedly presented as a content checklist, the actual terrain you clamber over is more detailed and distinct. ...but lets not lower our standards because other games suck. Classic Zelda is a delicious beef wellington. Carefully made of highest quality ingredients with each specifically layered, cooked, and proportioned to maximize deliciousness. New Zelda is a slow cooker beef roast eaten on toast. You've still got your beef, your mushrooms, your onion, your bread component, and your seasoning. The basic ingredients are the same. But a beef wellington is harder to make and will always be superior unless you REALLY fuck it up. New Zelda is just a well seasoned beef roast where you fish out the good parts with your ladle and even if you get all your favorite bits it won't ever be as tasty as a wellington.

So I've got a hot take: Zelda is bad. See, old Zelda was a level design game. The connective tissue between the levels changed (fly around in the sky, wander a barren hyrule field, play pac man on railroad tracks) but the core of each game was that there were gonna be 5-10 dungeons that would each take 1-2 hours of really well paced and designed puzzle solving and traversal obstacles. That was the meat of the games, and frankly nobody else does that style of long form level design better right now. The satisfaction of figuring out the large puzzle of a dungeon that ties all its little puzzles together is profound. NEW Zelda has only 4 dungeons and they're tiny compared to series standard. 35 minutes or so. And to replace that you've got this great big open world and a ton of tiny one off shrines and combat camps sprinkled everywhere. That's not the same thing! And it's not as good. Any old game can come up with 100 ideas that will hold interest for 5 minutes. Fleshing an idea out, providing progression of difficulty, introducing new layers to old mechanics, and demanding mastery is what's hard. Well at least we'll still have Mario for classic level design OH WAIT THAT'S GOING OPEN WORLD TOO. God damn it everyone. There are better ways to structure game content than in 5 minute chunks to be accessed in a random order. Zelda Breath of the Wild feels like ADHD Zelda. "What if you never got stuck, you never had to be in the same place for more than half an hour, and any time the game gets hard you can 1. Do something else or 2. Beat the challenge using tools overmatched for the task at hand (Blizzard rod makes 90% of this game negligible)." Why did Zelda want to be Skyrim? Skyrim sucks. Make good levels again please.

The internet sure does seem to like that new Zelda game. I haven't seen an up front critical reception this enthusiastic since... I think The Last of Us was the last game to come out and be immediately anointed like this. There are certainly other game that have been modern classics (Witcher 3, Bloodborne spring to mind) but nothing since TLoU has played this well in the media on release. I guess that's a good thing? I'm still personally still not convinced that "open world fantasy RPG" was a niche that needed filling, nor that it is one well suited to what makes Zelda special.

Final Fantasy 8. I finally beat it. I've never had a love/hate relationship with a game like this. There's been plenty of like/dislike, but I can't think of a single game that was both this good and this terrible. The combat mechanics are stupid, the best way to level up is to stand still in battle and draw spells over and over for 5-10 minutes at a time. Enemies auto scaling to your level works terribly. The UI is terrible. The junction system is incredibly finicky. It's easy to get lost, nothing you can interact with is well defined from the environment and even doors are frequently hard to find. The plot has a laughably awful reveal where EVERYONE is an orphan and they ALL have amnesia. The final dungeon of the game is hair pullingly frustrating. It strips you of all your powers and then randomizes the levels of all the mobs. So it is 100% possible to get destroyed through no fault of your own. Also it's filled with terrible puzzles. BUT Squall is one of the best realized characters I've inhabited in a video game. Yes he's a douche, but a lot of people are! And the game created complete empathy for him as a human being through his constant thought bubbles running commentary through the game. He starts one place, has a proper arc, ends in another place without ever losing his initial character traits. The soundtrack justifies the entire endeavor on its own. The use of CG and cinematic flair blew me away in 2017. It's not showy for the sake of it, they do some seriously cool stuff with their tech. The game used the Laguna sections to explore alternate gameplay content and tones extremely well. The game never stopped throwing in new ideas up through the final level. Even if those ideas were sometimes terrible, most RPGs only have new ideas for the first 10 hours and then you're just executing the formula from there. No so in FF 8. I have never played a game more worthy of a remake. What FF 8 achieves is timeless, what FF 8 fails at is easily replaced. You know, those pesky "game mechanics and level design" things.

I'll be curious to see exactly how substantive the DLC is. Nintendo has, so far, actually been pretty great about DLC value per dollar. Obviously different people have their own individual value scaling for different types of additions, but at the very least when compared to genre contemporaries Nintendo DLC offers more bang for your buck. On it's surface this Zelda stuff does not blow me away. But Nintendo is spacing this so that there's plenty of extra development time. So maybe we'll be okay? "Additional story content" could be anything from "Here's a 3 hour side quest chain with Farore" to "Here's a whole new game mode where you play as Zelda and the movies are different".

I'm comfortable with expanding the group of people who love bad game franchise stories to include not only those who were exposed before developing discerning taste, but also those who never did and just like bad things. Really I don't think I was condescending, I was the optimist. My view is that people are smart and will know a bad story when they see it, and judge that story accordingly. Only those corrupted as children are lost. Your position is far more cynical. "Nah, it's bad and people just like bad shit man. They're like pigs. They seek out shit and roll around in the shit. They like it." This has been your 109% sober forum check in from Wisconsin. TLDR I'm right.

Holy shit that was some Japanese ass melodramatic dialogue right there. Adios you damn fool. See, this is why I always worry about getting into long running game franchises that are supposed to have great stories. I'm pretty sure that most of them have hammy bad stories, but since they've been around so long there's a whole generation of people who grew up on them and didn't know better when they became deeply invested in the lore. Examples of long form game franchise stories that fans revere but are actually definitely trash: Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear, Metroid, and everything in the Final Fantasy 7 universe. Ace Combat seems like it's prooobably another one of these. It's been around forever, it's got a big double helping of internal lore, and it comes from Japan (which, let's face it, is a pretty good sign that the story is gonna be crummy), and it's on installment 7 not counting spinoffs/prequels/whatever Ace Combat 0 was. Hopefully the soundtrack is up to snuff though. I don't play Ace Combat, but I have been blown away by the music. Very very good stuff.

I won't lie, this trailer set off some warning klaxons as far as the depiction of Zelda. We have her falling into Links arms in tears, we have her partially clothed in a bath, and we have her voice over describing how she has failed to do something. Because Zelda actually getting shit done? Nah. She's gotta fail so that her man Link can fix things. THAT SAID anyone passing judgement of the game based on how a single NPC is depicted is clearly not interested in the actual game. And anyone passing judgement on how a single NPC is depicted based on a few shots cut out of context in a trailer is clearly not interested in appreciating the actual story as told in the game and is looking for a reason to be upset on the internet. The game is more than Princess Zelda, and Princess Zelda is more than what was shown in the trailer. We've only got like 6 weeks until the game is out and people can judge the shit out of it. Just hold your horses folks.

Nintendo Studios still MIA: Intelligent Systems (Paper Mario and Fire Emblem Strategy games), HAL Laboratories (Kirby, Boxboy), Alphadream (Mario and Luigi RPG series), Sakurai's team (Smash Bros). Camelot could have had a Mario Sports game ready to go (or even Golden Sun). Those teams are all working on stuff, but none of it is likely to broaden appeal for this console. Even if every one of these studios had a game for Switch landing in the first 12 months... so what? Is there anyone not on board who would get on board if we just had MORE JRPGs and Platformers? Maybe we just need Good Feel to follow up on Kirby Yarn and Yoshi Yarn with another cute yarn game! The only studios I can think of that might have any sort of audience expanding cool shooter games are Next Level Games and Retro Studios. Because those have both made Metroid Prime games for Nintendo. However, both of those studios have also made Mario Universe games that sold way better than their shooter output. Next Level killed it with Mario Strikers Charged and Luigi's Mansion 3DS. Both strong sellers. And Donkey Kong Country far outperformed Metroid Prime's sales numbers coming from Retro. So any time I see complaints regarding the number of software titles, I just feel like it's missing the forest for the trees. If we had more games announced, it would be more of the same because that's what Nintendo and Japan makes. All Nintendos JRPGs and unique first party titles in the world can't fill the mainstream hole in this console's heart.

So Nintendo has spent a lot of time talking about their unique hardware. It seems kinda cool on a pure gadget level. LOTS of functionality tucked in there. But I don't think that's terribly important. The console won't live or die based on the quality of the controller build. The big elephant in the room is the software. Not the quality or quantity shown... but what WASN'T shown. We saw zero online survival games, zero MOBAs, zero first person shooters (Splatoon 2 was the only shooter of ANY sort) and zero realistic racing games. The open world games on display were either first party Nintendo or ancient. And those are kind of the genres of game that make the gaming world turn, you know? Xbox One is chugging along just fine on a library of nothing but shooters, open world shooters, realistic racing games and hybrids of the three. The games that sell on Play Station 4 are largely the same. The games that generate revenue on PC includes survival games and MOBAs. Across the board in this industry, these are the game types that bring in consumer interest and dollars. And Nintendo didn't have ANY. They didn't even pretend to care about having any. They went big on... JRPGs. Which, I mean, I'm a JRPG guy. I'm stoked. But at some point you need to look at what people are playing and look at the Nintendo Switch software library and say that there isn't a lot of overlap there? It's like if a movie studio said "Okay we're gonna make movies but next year we won't do any superheroes, cinematic universes, 80's action remakes, buddy comedies or romantic comedies. I think there's a big future in quality documentary and X rated dramas." It doesn't matter how GOOD those dramas and documentaries are, they just aren't what people go to the movie theater to see! That's the big issue. What the majority of the current gaming audience plays is not being provided on the Nintendo Switch. And Nintendo is either unaware of this, unable to convince those developers to create software for their platform, unable to make the games themselves, or they genuinely believe that they just don't need these kinds of games. Are there enough people who care about games off the beaten path to support a console that has ONLY games off the beaten path? The Wii U suggests no. I subscribe to the "software sells hardware" mentality and nothing here looked like it would sell a lot of hardware. A lot of it looked GOOD, but that's not the point.

Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. It's honestly pretty decent. I mean, it's basically a Ratchet and Clank game. Simple mashy action game, go to different themed planets for each level, enemies blow up into buckets of shiny pickups, light 3D platforming, and you get to level up all your flashy guns/attacks. Both are quite easy. I realized that those two franchises scratch the exact same itch for me. Pretty cartoon action games. As for how birth by sleep fits into that space specifically, as long as you skip all the cutscenes it's fantastic. Short playtime to beat it, short upgrade loops, and short levels keep everything compulsively moving forward.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. BOY I wish this game was better. What if all the polish, care, and money in the world was spent on a JRPG where the basic building blocks of the experience (combat, story, and worldbuilding) were all bad? That's Ni No Kuni. Combat is 90% of the time mindless attack mashing, and 100% of the time easy. There's no real risk/reward relationship involved in combat decisions guiding how you play or which critters you use. Just pick what you like and dump out them attacks. If you pick a magic type critter one pick the magic type attack from the menu instead. Boom, you can now beat the game. The AI will handle the healing. The story is playing with some powerful themes at the beginning and end, but the bulk of the game in the middle does nothing to communicate, elaborate, or reinforce them. It's an idea for a good story with 50 hours of JRPG fetch quest storytelling replacing all the substance. Oliver starts in one place with his grief and he ends at the other side of said grief, but the game doesn't really do a good job (or even bother trying) showing how his experiences in the fantasy world help teach him the lessons to overcome his grief. It's just like, I dunno. He's overcome enough dungeons now and once an RPG character has cleared x number of zones and side quests self actualization is achieved. It's implied character growth, not communicated character growth. And the world... for what it's worth, the fairy tales in the Wizards companion are dope. Some of the writing there is great, way better than the writing in the actual game. The PROBLEM is that the good writing of stories, history, etc in the Wizard's companion is entirely disconnected from and unnecessary for the, you know, interactive video game. And the world as presented in the video game is bland and lame. I get that they're doing the "fairy tale world" thing, but that doesn't excuse the stodgy traditionalism of everything. An interesting exposition dump in the menu isn't the same as a well built world, as FF 13 proved all those years ago. Such a bummer. There are so many good JRPGs that suffer for limited budgets, and the one JRPG that had all the stops blown out was just not a very good one. Your appreciation of this game will be entirely based on how far excellent graphics, music, and a nostalgic PS1 JRPG era design philosophy will carry you.

Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold: The Fafnir Knight Well it turns out that if you go into classic mode there's no Fafnir Knights, no voice acting, and basically no plot. Just a team of five player created units and 25 floors of pain in the ass dungeon crawling between you and the credits scroll. So yeah, fuck story mode. I had a blast with this and absolutely cannot wait for Etrian Odyssey 5. These Untold remakes have been interesting, but the story mode is something I always skip and the new "grimoire stone" upgrade system is a convoluted mess. I've needed to actively avoid certain features to get my pure Etrian Odyssey hit. By all accounts EO 5 continues in the tradition of the main line and will not force me to avoid certain features to get my fix. It will be the pure product unfiltered. Final file timer: 57 hours 3 minutes. The party: Two tigers in front, two archers in back, a medic in the middle. Magic is for the weak.

Combat has taken a SIGNIFICANT step towards Dark Souls. Basic attack inputs that vary in utility based on weapon type? Check. Stamina meter governing action? Check. Parry and riposte is now perfect dodge and attack flurry. Looks like the hit boxes on everything are really precise too, which Dark Souls brought back to popularity after the imprecision of PS2 era hack and slash (DMC/God of War were all about big cool attacks hitting everything, not so much precise hit detection to models). I basically see this as a good thing. Dark Souls has dope combat. I hope there's something else though. It would be sad if Zelda turned out to just be Dark Souls for babies.