Mister Jack

So I like this new Fire Emblem quite a bit but I have a problem with the support cutscenes. The pre-rendered story cutscenes are fine, but the ones where they are just standing around and talking are bare minimum. Cutscenes with people just standing around and talking don't bother me that much. What bothers me is when they start acting like they're doing something that they clearly aren't because you can see it plain as day. For example, there was a cutscene where a big, muscular character is talking about how he's carrying a whole bunch of heavy objects in his arms and on his back, but he's not carrying jack shit. He's just standing there like normal. The argument in favor of this might be something about budget or time, but to that I say that if you don't have the time, money, or talent to animate somebody performing a physical action, maybe don't write a scene that requires them to perform physical actions. I can look past this sort of thing for little indie games where small teams or sometimes even single creators are just trying to make the best of what they have, but Fire Emblem is a sixty dollar AAA title from a major studio so there's no excuse for that.

Good point. I forgot for a minute that Rockstar might have the worst crunch in the entire industry. Top 5 worst for sure, at the very least.

So you remember that guy who stole a bunch of money from my mom and we were gearing up to take him to court? Yeah, he's dead now. We ain't getting that money back, and yet I don't really feel angry about it.

I just hope it brings down the price of the S10. I want a new phone but only suckers pay for the latest model.

Never underestimate corporate greed. Look what EA did to Madden despite being the only football game in town.

You may already know this by now but it looks like Dan Houser has left Rockstar. Allegedly it was because 2K is pushing Rockstar to make shorter single-player games and focus more on online microtransactions, but I haven't seen any confirmation on this. It wouldn't surprise me in the least, though, and unless I hear otherwise I'm willing to believe it.

@TheMightyEthan Byleth was announced as the last DLC character for Smash Bros season 1 character pass, making him/her the eighth Fire Emblem rep so far. People are especially sore because a while back Reggie had said all the paid fighters would be from unrepresented franchises.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses So I know everyone hates Fire Emblem and Byleth right now but this might just be the best game in the series. I've only played a few of them but I feel pretty confident in that assessment. There's a ton of content and branching paths here and you don't have to buy the game three times to see it all (fuck you, Fates). Your choices, while they are few, actually matter to a significant degree and change the entire course of the story in wildly different ways. The students can be a little tropey, but I still couldn't help getting attached to most of them. Except for Hubert. Fuck Hubert. This game is quite clearly influenced by Persona with the new school system and time management mechanics, but it's not so similar that I would call it a total rip-off. I enjoyed that stuff in Persona anyway so I like it here too for the most part. There were some story beats that went unresolved, but I'm going to assume that playing the other routes will give me the full picture. When it comes to battling I really appreciate that they deemphasized the rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle. That was always my least favorite thing about the series next to the permadeath. It feels limiting, like you have to play a specific way if you want to get anywhere. It's not completely gone and certain weapons will still have an advantage over others, but it's not so huge that it forces you into a specific play style anymore. Speaking of permadeath, I turned it off. Yeah yeah, filthy casual, but I'm the kind of guy who will reload a whole battle and do it over again if someone dies until I get a result where someone doesn't die. I can't stand losing units because it means missing out on content, so I just cut out the middleman to save time. The new combat arts system kinda feels like an afterthought. I don't know if I was doing something wrong but after a while my regular attacks were doing more damage than my combat arts so I never had any reason to use them except for Bernadetta's long range archery skill. Even skills specifically meant to do extra damage to certain enemy types were somehow doing less damage. I found that very strange and I don't know why that was the case. I don't have any other major complaints about battles, though. The new battalion system is cool and it feels a little more balanced than Awakening did when you could pair up and steamroll over everybody. Battles in the first half of the game are still kind of easy though, at least on the normal difficulty. When there weren't any special objectives like defending a certain VIP or killing a specific enemy I often got by just fine on the auto-battle. I wasn't expecting to jump back into this game right away but with the New Game+ file I should be able to see the other paths without taking so much time so I'll probably replay it soon.

I actually think this is kind of cool but I can understand how that can be subjective.

I'm finally playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses and it's good so far but I absolutely refuse to believe that Nintendo wasn't looking very closely at Persona 5 when making this game.

Tough call. There's some great stuff slated for this year just like it was really hard to choose last year. If I absolutely have to pick one, though, I'm going to go with the FFVII Remake simply because this game has been hyped up for, what, ten years? And what we've seen so far looks pretty great.

Luigi's Mansion 3 This game was delightful. Luigi himself only has a small handful of moves and abilities and you get most of them at the beginning, but the game cleverly finds new ways to utilize them for every floor that keeps it feeling fresh. For example, your vacuum will always use suction but on one floor you might use it to grab vines for swinging and on another you'll be using it to steer a boat. Each floor of the hotel has a different theme and is full of puzzles that can sometimes be tricky but not too difficult. The boss fights with the various ghosts are all quite unique and no two bosses ever really feel the same throughout the whole game, which is great. Luigi himself is ridiculously charming and lovable, jumping at every loud noise and trembling before every ghost yet always pushing ahead with his quest to save his friends even if he's timidly calling out for Mario the whole time. Top it off with a bunch of optional gems to find and a ghost hunting multiplayer mode and I can see myself coming back to this every now and then. I'm a sucker for ghostbusting gameplay and catching ghosts in this game feels great. Grabbing onto a ghost and slamming it into other ghosts who are suddenly afraid of Luigi after all their previous taunting and bullying is super satisfying. I can only really think of two criticisms. First, it isn't always apparent what you're supposed to do. Since every floor is different that means they're constantly expecting you to solve puzzles in different ways you haven't ever done before. You can usually figure it out yourself but on one occasion I had to consult a guide to find out that you're supposed to pull on a statue's arm to open a door even though I hadn't been doing anything with statues whatsoever for the past 8 hours. My second gripe is that the game can be a little too fond of pulling a bait and switch on you. The objective for each floor is to find an elevator button to get you to the next floor, but sometimes when you've beaten the boss and picked up the button the game will yank the rug out from under you to take the button away, forcing you to jump through more hoops to get the button back. It does this at least three times that I can remember, and by the last time I was yelling "Oh come on!" Even with those nitpicks I would still recommend this game to anybody with a Switch unless you just hate fun or something.

Playing Luigi's Mansion 3 at the moment and god this game is absolutely adorable. I'm kicking myself for not getting into the series earlier.

@FLD As much as I liked Sekiro, I think I'd still say Bloodborne is my favorite From game. I'm a sucker for cosmic horror themes too as well as gothic horror and putting the two together is just...mwah. It also helps that the lore is much easier to grasp than any of the Dark Souls games. Even with From's minimalist style of storytelling, I still had a pretty good idea of what was going on. The Old Hunters really adds a lot and the sawblade on a stick from it became my go-to weapon, though there are lots of other interesting options including actual eldritch body parts if you go for a high arcane build. If you ever somehow get the opportunity to revisit the game with all the content included I highly recommend it because the DLC's additions can make it feel almost totally new again depending on how you play. As far as the armor goes I found it's more about maximizing resistances than increasing your defense stat and I would often change my outfit depending on what I was up against. You definitely notice a difference between armor with low or high frenzy resistance when you're up against those damn winter lanterns. God I really hope we get a Bloodborne 2 on the PS5.

How is this not infringing on Nintendo's patents?

Snatcher Yeah, the old Sega CD game that was one of Hideo Kojima's first projects. I modded my Genesis mini to play CD games and loaded this onto it because it's always listed as being one of the few good games on the system, and it is. It's got a few shooting segments that are meant for a light gun, although they work fine with a controller, but for the most part this is a visual novel. It's a pretty cool premise, though. It takes place in a dystopian cyberpunk future 50 years after a bioweapon has killed 80% of the Eurasian population and society is starting to rebuild itself over there, with Japan being a hub for people and refugees of all races to live together. In the last three years, however, androids called Snatchers have appeared out of nowhere, named such because they are killing humans and replacing them with identical replicas. You play as a junker (Snatcher hunter) with memory loss who is assigned to a government junker agency as a new recruit along with a little robot buddy named, wait for it, Metal Gear. Over the course of the game you investigate a murder and naturally get caught up in a conspiracy while working to regain your memories and find out where the Snatchers came from in the first place and what they want. If this sounds a lot like Blade Runner and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to you, you're not wrong, but the two ideas marry together pretty well and it's a pretty interesting narrative for such an old platform. The final act is mostly an extended ending with minimal interaction, but apparently this was added to the Sega CD version after the original game's cliffhanger ending didn't result in a sequel. It still manages to provide a decent payoff for the story. I wouldn't really say you need to play this game yourself since the shooting sections are just kinda tacked on and the rest of it is just going through menus, but it's worth at least checking out on Youtube sometime. Kojima had his unique style even back then.

It's 2020! I know we have a Game of the Year thread for 2019, but this is a little different. This is about picking any game between 2010 and 2020 that you feel defines the whole generation for you. If some time traveler asked you to look back at one game from the last ten years and point to it as being the most influential, the most memorable, the most popular, or even just better than every other game, what would it be? I know what my pick would be. To this day I still maintain that Witcher 3 is the best open-world game ever made. Yes, better than Grand Theft Auto. Yes, better than Red Dead Redemption 2. Yes, especially better than Breath of the Wild. It's just amazing what they put together here. A story I actually care about? Check. Side quests and missions that are actually interesting? Check again. Combat that can be challenging but not too frustrating? Check. Choices that actually matter? Check check check. On top of that, Geralt is probably the best open-world protagonist I've ever played. In almost every other open-world game the main character, especially a custom one, gets so much shit dumped on him or her by every other character and all they can really do is sit there and take it. There are so many times when I wish I could just push a button and tell them exactly why what they just said is fucking stupid. Witcher 3 actually heard my wish because Geralt is a master of snark and an absolute riot, but despite this you can still take him seriously as a character and care about his journey. If there's anything that pushes this game over into GOTD territory, though, it's the open world. It's wonderfully designed, full of color and interesting things to see and people to meet. A pet peeve I have with many open world games, and this does apply to Rockstar, is that sometimes it feels like it's just big for the sake of being big. There are long stretches of nothing that are supposed to impress me but just make me feel very aware that I am playing a video game right now and I become impatient to get to the next objective. Witcher 3's world is big without feeling too big. There are a generous amount of fast travel points so you don't have to waste too much time riding aimlessly unless that's your thing. Most importantly, the world is littered with a bunch of really cool stuff to see and do. Thanks to the bizarre human characters and diverse monster population you can never really be sure what the game will throw at you next. And all of that isn't even getting into the fantastic expansions that I still remember fondly even today. I imagine most people have played this by now, but if you never got around to it because you feel like you have to play the first two games before you do (which is why it took me so long) then put that feeling aside and just do it. Skip the first game. Your choices in it literally do not matter and it's barely referenced at all aside from some old acquaintances of Geralt's. Watch a Let's Play or something of the second game. Witcher 2 is good and your choices in it do matter, but if you don't have time to put it on your backlog then just do what you gotta do to let yourself play Witcher 3 because it is the game of the decade.

Let's not forget Kathleen Kennedy made the unfathomable business decision to let the guy who wrote Batman v Superman do the script.

@FLD I agree with pretty much everything you said there. Last Jedi had some major problems but hell, at least it was trying to do something new.

The Rise of the Skywalker Man, that sucked. The pacing is ridiculously rushed, there's more holes in the plot than a slice of swiss cheese, the comic relief is bad, the story makes no sense, Rey takes a flying leap into Mary Sue territory, every other character except for Kylo Ren is treated like crap and given nothing important to do except prop up Rey, and not even the John Williams score is very good. The way it tries to paper over The Last Jedi to appease the angry fans is so pathetic, too. I've never felt so pandered to while watching a film. This kind of movie is a franchise killer. Yes, even Star Wars. It retroactively makes the original trilogy worse with its retcons. I'll probably watch The Mandalorian at some point but as far as theatrical releases go I am fucking out. I don't expect Kathleen Kennedy to keep her job for much longer. She is no Kevin Feige and it is PAINFULLY apparent that they went into this trilogy with no plan and made it up as they went along. How do you do Star Wars without a plan? As bad as the prequels were, and they're still bad, at least Lucas had a story with a beginning, middle, and end he was trying to tell. At least he HAD a plan, even if it wasn't a very good one.

This was actually a gift but we didn't do a Christmas thread and I don't feel like making one so I'm posting this here. I got a chance to play around with this for a few hours and I have to say that it might just be the best of all the mini consoles, and that includes Nintendo. The game selection is pretty solid with only one or two I'd consider duds. There are also a couple of games that were only released in Japan and a couple more that were never released at all, and I'm not talking about that shitty shovelware you find on the AT console. There are also more of them than you get on the NES or the SNES classic. It comes with two controllers that feel pretty nice and have a nice, long 10 foot cable on them. I wish they were the six button controllers, but you can get those separately at least. The menu lays all the games out in nice, organized rows of five, and with a push of the B button you can flip the boxes sideways so you have two rows of 20 and you just read the spines. Unlike the SNES and NES mini, where you have to get up and hit the reset button to bring up the system menu, all you have to do here is hold down the start button for a few seconds. If you are using a six button pad you just tap the mode button to bring up the menu. The reset button on the console still works though, and it even has a sliding headphone switch and a little cartridge flap. They don't do anything except add to the authenticity, but it's still cute. But that's not the best part. The best part is that there are multiple regions depending on your language. For example, if you set it to English and play Contra, you get the original US version of Contra Hard Corps that's hard as balls. If you set the language to Japanese, you get the Japanese version of the game that is much easier thanks to the life bar that they took out of the US version for some stupid reason. If you set your language to a PAL territory you get Probotector. That is cool as hell. It even changes the box art to match! There's no hack for this console yet, but there's a group hard at work on it at this very moment and they've been making pretty good progress. Even with no hack though, this is still the best mini console out there as far as features and hardware go. About the only thing it lacks that the SNES Classic has is the rewind feature, but you can still use save states so it's not a big deal. I'm just glad to see someone besides Nintendo actually give a crap about putting out a quality product when it comes to these retro consoles. I'm having a blast with it. Edit: There's a hack now! It's really impressive too. Not only can you add games to the console but it scrapes all the relevant sorting information like release date and number of players and even the box art from the internet, and that includes the spine art for when you want to use that particular UI. The only downside is that using this hack means the console takes a few extra seconds to load the main menu when you turn it on or reset, but that's to be expected when you're giving it more to sort through.

I just played a raid online, the point of which was to get rare weapons and materials to unlock bonus abilities on said weapons. That's pretty common, but what isn't common is that even if you do the raid and everything you unlock is trash, you can choose to give up that trash in exchange for an increased chance of higher level prizes on the next go. This is something that stacks in a system they call "potential," so I chose to give up enough drops to raise my potential to level 10 and then with my next roll I got a max rarity critical chance up ability. This is the sort of system I'd love to see in every online game, where no matter how much time you spend doing a raid you never feel like you're not accomplishing anything because you're always bettering your odds for the next go around. I did all of this in only three raids, too.

Had the chance to finish up two games I'd left sitting for a while recently. Shadow of the Tomb Raider It's been a while since I played Rise of the Tomb Raider so maybe my memory is not entirely accurate but this felt pretty much exactly the same. If there were changes made to the formula for this one, they were so small that I didn't even notice. She can swim underwater now, I guess? Yaaaaay. I don't mean to sound like I didn't enjoy this game because I did. It's a well-made game and all, but I can kind of see why this one flopped when it does so little to stand out from the one that came before it. If you liked the last one I'm sure you'll like this one just fine, but that's all I can really say about it. It's just fine. Pick it up on sale or something. Monster Hunter World: Iceborne Now we're talking. I "beat" this game in the sense that I slayed the final boss monster and saw the ending cutscene and credits, so I'd say that counts. The truth is, however, that there's still a lot to do. As popular and well-received as the vanilla game was, one of the criticisms most people can agree with was that there was no real endgame other than farming decorations from elder dragons, which was admittedly kind of true. Of course, it took 100+ hours to beat the vanilla game in the first place so even with no endgame I still got more than my money's worth, but these live service games are meant to be played for hundreds or even thousands of hours so I can see why people would be underwhelmed. Capcom did what they could for a while by occasionally adding new monsters, events, and even a siege, but for a long time there was no real endgame area to take advantage of all your fancy gear. Well, now there is one. Beating the final boss---who is waaaaay harder than the final boss in the vanilla game, by the way--opens up an entirely new area that is specifically meant for endgame gear. Not only is this area huge and populated by monsters that didn't appear in the main story, but it's also constantly growing and changing based on what and where you hunt. It's designed to be played for the long-term, and while I have only hunted a couple of monsters in it so far I can tell that it will keep me occupied for a good while, especially when Capcom is already adding new monsters to this area through free updates. Putting aside the endgame, there are a ton of quality of life improvements to Iceborne, some of which I didn't even realize I wanted. The clutch claw is such a valuable tool to have that it would be hard to go back to playing the game without it now. The new hub, Seliana, condenses all the important NPCs like the chef, blacksmith, and resource center so that they're much closer together, and yet Seliana still feels no smaller than the old hub, Astera. I didn't exactly take a ruler to the game world so maybe it is technically smaller, but it sure didn't feel that way. If anything it feels bigger, especially in the gathering hub area where players can congregate between missions. In Astera the hub was a small area the size of a ship deck that was pretty much an afterthought. You could show off your gear or arm wrestle with other players but that was more or less it. In Seliana you can still do those things, but now you can also play around in hot springs, footbaths, and saunas. It's silly but it's fun. Speaking of bigger, the vanilla game had personal quarters you could decorate with things like paintings and furniture. You could also populate them with small pets you caught out in the wild. This was cool, but you couldn't show it off to other players. It was just for you. In Iceborne, however, not only is your room now much, much bigger but you can finally invite other players to see it! This adds a whole new layer of incentive to keep playing the game because certain missions will now help you unlock new things to decorate your room. Oh sure, getting a new bookshelf or statue won't help you whatsoever when it comes to actually doing hunts but I WANT IT! I just want to feel like I'm accomplishing something while I play, and even without the new monsters Capcom is already adding I would be motivated to keep playing just to unlock new room decorations, which are being updated quite frequently. Capcom really went out of their way to give people reasons to keep playing this game long after the credits roll and I couldn't be more happy about it. This is some of the best value you could ever get out of a forty dollar expansion pack and I already named it as my runner-up for Game of the Year 2019. Oh, and you can also pet your Palico now. VERY important feature.