FMW
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Everything posted by FMW
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Realization 1: Kingdom Hearts and Dynasty Warriors are the same thing. Realization 2: I like them both.
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Nah. Both game are "run at enemy and mash attack while getting a delicious drip feed of RPG upgrades that make you better at running at enemies mashing attack but don't actually change how you play"
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I'LL NEVER SHUT UP, ATOMSK! AND WHAT'S WRONG WITH MINECRAFT?! HUH!?!?! HUH?!?! THE MOST POPULAR GAME IN THE WORLD VERSUS FUCKING KINGDOM HEARTS WHICH HASN'T HAD A MAIN ENTRY SINCE THE PS2 BECAUSE NOBODY LIKES IT! I'LL CUT YOU!!
Plus I mainly play Minecraft for the easy platinum trophies. Trophies are the only reason to video game.
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^ That gave me a hernia.
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Part of me is happy Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze basically put all the water levels together in one world. So they aren't ruining the rest of the game. But god damn World 4 is no fun.
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Sonic's water levels were the worst because the whole point of Sonic is to go fast and the water makes you go really slow.
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I have limited Sonic exposure, but I thought that the water levels in Sonic 3 and Sonic Rush were really good. Hydrocity is prob my favorite Sonic 3 level?
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I loved the water levels in dkc. man that music was calming...
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Opinion: Total War: Attila is a good idea but they should have made something else between Rome II and Atilla. Too similar.
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Agreed, FMW
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Rome II was real rough at launch with bugs and graphics and loading. Some of those things got fixed, but at this point since Atilla is announced I'd recommend waiting on that one. It sounds like Rome II but with more variety and (thank god) new interface.
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Normally, I would...but is Attila going to be just a jumbled mess as well? I guess I'll see...and perhaps if it is, I can just wait till they fix Attila.
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Oh come on, nobody actually thinks this is a convertible do they? This is Final Fantasy. That thing is an airship.
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Well the combat animations look janky, especially that dodge/sidestep move. Not great. On the other hand, I really like the premise. Bromantic roadtrip? Those are both good ideas! The roadtrip thing is smart because it gives a context to the old JRPG party trope. With the move to realistic graphics just "mash all the characters into a single model and wander the overworld with them" thing doesn't work so well. Having a central vehicle for the four of them gives a rational reason for this game to do what JRPGs always do anyway. Sure makes more sense than "and then the group of heroes walked to literally every inhabited point on the globe". And the bromance idea is also a good idea I think. See, JRPGs are all about a group of young people traveling together but the relationships between those characters are nigh indistinguishable. Childhood friends, "old" mentor characters all the way near age 30, romantic couples that can't admit they're romantic couple, comic relief muscle heads... I could list the cliches all day. This doesn't look like that. This looks like it's focusing on just adolescent males and how they interact with each other. This may or may not end up being good on it's own, but it's definitely different. I like different. If big budget Square Enix can't even do different, then different in JRPGs is dead. For the bromance angle to work though, I feel like a lot will hinge on the localization. I wonder if we'll get FF XIII Square Enix localization on this or Dragon Quest Square Enix localization on this? (For those heathens not in the know, Dragon Quest localization is really good).
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Spent the last two hours making Caribbean style peanut chicken. Turned out fucking delicious.
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I don't see ambient music as necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a different style and within that style there can be good and bad music. The trick to ambient music/sound is that it actually has to fit the tone and setting to help define it. In a Megaman game you could more or less assign any background chiptune loop to any level and it would still work because the point is to give you an upbeat driving melody line. Same deal in Shovel Knight, those tunes are almost completely interchangeable. With ambient music to be good it needs to be more specific. So when you look at something like Darksiders or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow the music is well made, but it just kinda blends into orchestrated sounding aural mush. Because those games could swap soundtracks and it would basically work, the "ambient" music isn't actually adding to the ambiance. On the other hand there are examples of really good ambient soundtracks too. I think that SMT IV is really good at this actually. It uses minimalist percussion lines and distinct sounds to define a specific character for each region of Tokyo. Shibuya and Ikebukero are as different as Bronx and Queens, and SMT IV uses the ambient style soundtrack to help communicate that. It's actually really good. Another good example of ambient music done right would be Metroid Prime 2. So I don't think the problem with contemporary game music is that it's gotten away from melody driven loops all the time, it's just that a lot of games aren't intelligently leveraging ambient style music as a part of the whole of the level it accompanies. A lot of the time what we get is "cut rate Lord of the Rings".
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The music in Strange Journey is weird. All synth military chants and shit. It definitely isn't music that a person would EVER listen to outside of the game, but I feel like it fits the specific atmosphere and military premise within the game pretty well. So I tend to say that the Strange Journey music is good soundtrack music, but not good listening music. Kinda like Zelda: Skyward Sword. That game took a hard turn away from hummable tunes and focused more on atmosphere/percussion lines. As for Vecha, I too am a big fan of Digital Devil Saga! That first game is an absolute classic. A few things start falling apart as the story goes off on the crazy train in part 2, but part 1 is so so good.
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Nocturne is a good game, but I think it gets a little over valued since it was the first SMT game in the west. I would say it's about as good as SMT IV, but the two games have different strengths. SMT Nocturne has more endings and better endings. It has better music. SMT IV has better environments and more interesting exploration. It has way better user interface. Neither game has particularly strong characterization or pacing. Both games have good combat/leveling/fusion mechanics. The real secret is that SMT Strange Journey, the odd one out that released between SMT 3 and 4, is better than either of them. Same good combat, same good demon fusion, but a unique premise and decent character arcs which isn't something the other games have.
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Hey hey, I'm our resident SMT enthusiast. I can respond to a few of your questions/thoughts. 1. Don't let SMT IV get you pumped for Persona Q. That's a very different deal from a different studio. Persona Q is actually "Etrian Odyssey - Persona Edition". The graphics, art style, and gameplay are all lifted from Etrian Odyssey. You may or may not be into that and that's fine, but don't let your impressions of SMT IV color your expectations for Persona Q. 2. SMT going back to consoles is.... unlikely. SMT is bigger in Japan than elsewhere, and handhelds are the primary gaming platforms in Japan. Persona is at this point a much bigger deal in the mainstream than SMT so Persona 5 is getting money heaped upon it during development and is gonna be a snazzy looking console game, but Persona is the only brand Atlus can do that with. Even if they DID make a super high definition fancy looking SMT console game any additional sales wouldn't nearly make up for the additional cost of development. 3. SMT V will probably not come out for a while. They like those games to be events. I mean, we're only up to IV and this franchise goes back to the SNES. Instead expect spinoffs that recycle the SMT IV engine. Atlus is big on thrifty development. After SMT III they reused their models from that game in four additional PS2 SMT games. I would expect some sort of SMT one-off like a SMT Strange Journey or a SMT Digital Devil Saga. Good news is, SMT spin offs are actually often better than the core SMT line.
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Yeah, episode 2 was great. Digging the current doctor and the current doctor/companion relationship a lot. And despite the Daleks getting woefully overused, it was a pretty good Dalek episode too. Hopefully that's it for them this season. NOT excited about the Missy thing though. Both episodes so far have been pretty good and then they'll do this cutaway to "Heaven" which is all the things I didn't like about Matt Smith Doctor who combined. Weird wife/girlfriend relationship with the Doctor? Check. Season long mystery that gets in the way of my adventure romping fun? Looks like it. Stephen Moffat loving his monsters and never ever actually being able to kill one of them? Yep, looks like they'll all just hang out in heaven to come back for the finale. But the actual episodes are super good, and so far they seem to have pretty much nothing to do with this Missy/Heaven nonsense. The longer that continues to be the case, the better.
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Well the title says Persona 5, but the content says The World Ends With You. Stop me if this is familiar: Japanese introverted male teen with questionable fashion sense stands in the middle of scramble crossing in Shibuya. Nobody seems to be able to see him, he is alone despite being in the crowd. He is forced to do battle with a supernatural bad guy/demon thing. But, I mean, The World Ends With You was pretty good! So maybe this will be too? That mock turtleneck.... thing though. That's a problem. That's bad. Real bad.
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I just caught a Shiny pokemon. How about that. There are people who grind for days to achieve this. I did it on accident.
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i like turtles
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Nope. The only value to shiny pokemon is that they're rare. That's why I traded mine away for nothing. I choose not to give value to such things.
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I'm trying to breed a shiny Honedge via Masuda Method since yesterday. 30 babies and counting...
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What's interesting is this new 3DS is exactly what the internet said the 3DS should have been back in that first 10 month span after the console launched when things looked real bleak. But since then the 3DS as exists took off and became a hit. Not a Nintendo DS scale hit, but it's sure not breaking a sweat outselling the PS Vita. Software sales have been good, hardware sales have been good, and although support is almost exclusively Japanese it totally rules that market so software is plentiful. And now, after Nintendo proved the naysayers wrong and proved that the 3DS they released could not only succeed but thrive... NOW they go back and give people everything they thought they wanted. I don't get you Nintendo. I might buy this just for Xenoblade. I've never bought an upgraded iteration of a Nintendo handheld before. I rocked the GBA dark, the DS Phat, and still the original model 3DS all the way through those life cycles. That's how I like to do it - buy the first version and then stick to it. But.... Xenoblade...
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Where do we rank Dragon Quest IV on the Dragon Quest scale? Right now I have it above VIII but below IX. Still working through it. Love this game.
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VIII has audio/visual prowess, but as far as substance I've found I prefer the mechanics in IV and IX.
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I've only played VIII. You don't need to defend your claim, I was talking out of my ass.
I did love VIII a lot, though!
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I think V is held in really high regard but I don't know about IV.
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Welp. In my first file I fucked up by leveling up dumb stats because which stats are important for what was unclear to me. In my second file I ate the fire keepers soul before discovering "oops, if you eat THAT soul then you don't get upgraded healing - have fun playing the rest of the game in hard mode!" In my third file my sword broke in the depths of blight town. Going forward was no longer a possibility. I managed to crawl out of there by running past all the big ogre things... after about a dozen tries. That file eventually ended when my controller broke. In my fourth file, which I am working on now, I have upgraded my estus flask, I have purchased all the smith boxes ensuring I will NEVER be caught without a good weapon or gear, I have found a merchant I had never found before so I can buy magic spells, I've allocated my stat points so as to benefit the weapon I'm upgrading, and I even cleared the goddamn Capra Demon. I've learned lessons from failure, I've taken precautions. My payoff is... Now I'm cursed. I need to fight my way back out of the depths on half health. And there's a butcher in the way. Fuck this game man.
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With Dragon Quest IX finished I needed a new game in my life. I picked 3. Why do I do this to myself? I can never finish all this.
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IX is my favourite DS game.
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IX is good. I think that if I could get into the post game multiplayer content it would be top 3 JRPGs ever. As is, single player campaign still rates "good".
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Cool. I'll make sure to get it once I have my 3DS.
I really hope Squeenix localizes the 3DS remake of VII, too.
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Wait, what? The ending of Dragon Quest IX is kinda sad. I'm not okay with that. AND I can't even play the multiplayer. What a shame. Great game though.
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Oh man, we're going back in tiiiiiime. Exclusive wars! Bloodborne vs. Tomb Raider!
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Yeah, Bloodborne is second-party, I think. Sony hired FROM to develop it instead of doing it internally, but they're 100% funding it themselves.
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Sony exclusives are generally games they've developed, or games they're hiring someone to develop.
Microsoft exclusives are games they pay to keep off Sony platforms (usually only for a certain period, see Tomb Raider or Mass Effect).
I prefer the Sony way. Though I wish they'd F off with the whole "exclusive content" thing, but generally that sort of stuff isn't that great anyways (see: Ass Creed 4).
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Exactly. Sony are doing it right, they make their own damn exclusives. Microsoft, for the most part, aren't. You'll never see me complain about Halo or Fable. Or shit, I love Platinum but if Microsoft bankrolled Scalebound themselves then that's that, nothing to complain about.
The Tomb Raider situation is fucking bullshit, though. Same goes for Ryse and Dead Rising 3.
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Ahhh. FOUR units within 5 xp of leveling up at the end of that battle. Miss the bonus xp so so much sometimes. Fire Emblem is cruel.
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yeah! I love Gregor! Kind of a stereotype? Yep. Not the most terribly useful class in the world? Yep. Worth it to make him part of the A team? Absolutely.
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Eh, didn't miss much. I don't entirely understand the internet's affection for Tharja unless it really is just that she's running around in a thong. Personality wise she and I never clicked. I liked her combat utility a ton though. Dark mages have always been the most fun. Especially the Necromancer class back in Fire Emblem 8.
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Transistor. The combat is good and the art is good and the music is good and the voice actor is good. So why isn't this game like super epic best ever? I think that the game honestly would have benefited from a slightly less ambitious narrative structure. For way too much of the game I didn't properly understand what I was doing, what the antagonist and protagonist motivations were, and how my current mission contributed towards the larger goal. Like, Bastion kept some secrets and had a reveal at the end, but right away from the beginning there were really clearly outlined goals. "There was a calamity, get to the sanctuary". "The sanctuary is broke, go fix it". "The girl got kidnapped, go save her". Without giving everything away the game still gave me pretty clear goals and reasons to pursue them. That's what I think is missing from Transistor. But just because the narrative structure doesn't do a great job of motivating the player to push forward, the actual game is so rad that I did anyway. It concluded with a great boss fight that showed off all the best parts of the game and an inexplicable ending that showed off the worst. It was interesting and had lots of good parts. I'm satisfied with my purchase. Will certainly play again. Not really interested in using the unlockables to add difficulty though.
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The issue isn't sexism - scantily clad ladies are like half of what the Japanese game industry makes these days. It's mixing that with the Legend of Zelda brand that's drawing attention. It's like... nobody cares about Wolfenstein being a super violent first person shooter shooting Nazis and giant robots. Because we're used to that. But if it was a super violent first person shooter about shooting, say, French people then it would be a bigger deal. Context and familiarity are important. So 1. People aren't used to seeing typical Japanese game dev bewbs in Zelda. 2. There may well be people who follow Zelda but don't follow other Japanese games so this is a little more of a surprise to them. This is funny just because Nintendo makes games in their happy Nintendo bubble and never gives a shit about what anyone else is doing. So now that their Zelda brand is doing things that every other game does it's weird and different and some people don't like that. Heck, I don't like that.
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Hyrule Warriors is absolutely an example of brand dilution because I can guarantee you right now it's going to feature both more simplistic violent gameplay AND the characters/world building are getting filtered through the pervy anime lens that all Japanese games from Team Ninja go through. Lots of boob, lots of violence, very "pretty" faces in an anime kind of way. Here's the story behind the story: to make more money in this hour when they aren't making so much money, Nintendo is looking to license out their properties to other companies. There's a whole new division working on this shit. But there's a problem - Nintendo are looking primarily to license their properties with Japanese companies. That isn't a problem as far as getting comics or figurines or posters or whatever. Japan is doing those things fine. But games? The Japanese game scene is in absolute tatters! Real talk: which Japanese developers are making better games than Nintendo these days? So yeah, Hyrule Warriors doesn't look great. Team Ninja and Techmo-Koei are working on this. So we can expect bewbs and violence and crappy music. The question is, who's gonna do any better? Square Enix is dysfunctional. Namco is already working on Smash Bros. Atlus is already working on Fire Emblem. Konami is dysfunctional. Compile Heart is the worst thing in the world. SEGA have some good RTS studios but their Japanese division hasn't output impressive first party content in forever. Like, Capcom and Level 5 are about it. Those two can still make great games.
