toxicitizen

Any twist that's not completely obvious from the very first reveal trailer is better than the Arkham Knight twist.

Yo, what the fuck? Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are legit great. You guys need to at least play those.

Lol nah, FFXII seems a bit pricy for a PS2 remaster and I'm more interested in a game I haven't already played. Besides, I'm coming out of Tokyo Xanadu and Cold Steel 2 is just a couple weeks away. Playing another long-ass JRPG between the two doesn't seem like the best idea.

So, I guess today is Final Fantasy day in PC Land. FFXII released and FFXV is up for pre-order. I was planning to wait for both but I'm a weak man so this happened. I caved for two reasons. FIrst, I ran the benchmark tool and the results were better than I expected. Seems to average around ~40fps, which I can live with. And this is normal settings, so I might even be able to fine tune a bit and hit 60fps. The other reason is I noticed the price on GMG was magically 10 bucks lower once I added it to my cart. Price mistake? I wasn't gonna wait to find out! Stacked a 23% voucher on top and ended up getting the game for like 37$ CAD. 30 bucks less than on Steam, not a bad deal. edit: Ha, it's gone back up. Totally was a price mistake. >:D

Tokyo Xanadu eX+ This is basically Trails of Persona. Cold Steel was already borrowing pretty heavily from Persona and Tokyo Xanadu goes even further. Take Cold Steel, set it in present day Tokyo and give it an Ys-like real-time action RPG combat system instead of turn-based, and you've pretty much got Tokyo Xanadu. The main difference is that in Cold Steel you would go on these field trips all over Erebonia and that was where the real meat of the story happened, whereas in Tokyo Xanadu you always stay in the same town and explore otherworldly dungeons. Sounds familiar? Ranked against other Falcom games, I thought it fell somewhere in the middle. It's better than the worst Ys games but never really gets as good as Trails. My one major complaint would be that the plot is way too episodic. Until the last few chapters, everything that happens is mostly self-contained and there's little to no main intrigue to carry the story. So, I would finish a chapter and feel no urgency to start the next one. Hell, I stopped playing right before Christmas and only picked the game back up a few days ago because they announced that the Cold Steel 2 PC port is coming out in a couple weeks. That's not to say the story is bad, it's just generic anime bullshit. I enjoyed it but it's nowhere near Trails level of quality. What is Trails level of quality, though, is the NPCs. If you've played a Trails game, you know what I mean. There's a ton of them, they're well-written with dialogue that updates frequently and they feel like they have their own lives going on even when you're not around. The combat felt weird at first because this clearly reuses code from Cold Steel and movement in that game feels super stiff. But after a while you get used to it and it's actually pretty serviceable. The one thing that bugged me was that for some fucking reason you can't dodge-cancel out of an attack once the animation starts. So, some characters with super slow wind-ups are kinda frustrating to use. One thing that is bad is the dungeon design, though. This has never been Falcom's greatest strength but yikes. They're basically Persona 4 dungeons... except they're not actually procedurally generated. Yeah... they look as bland and simple as randomized dungeons but they're actually hand-crafted. Only a handful of them didn't feel this way. They're also kinda short. Only the final chapter had you doing hours of dungeon crawling. Every other had like an hour of it tops and it's easily the most fun part of the game. so that seemed like a weird design decision. It's a shame because this is technically the successor to Xanadu Next and that game had fantastic dungeon/level design. This probably all sounds super negative but I actually really enjoyed the game. It's just that it's so similar to Trails on a superficial level that it just invites that comparison and it's not doing it any favors. One thing I will say it does better than Cold Steel is the free time stuff, though. In Cold Steel 1 it honestly feels like blatant padding and around the 50h mark it gets tedious as all hell, completely kills the pacing and starts to hurt the game a lot. In Tokyo Xanadu, I never really had a problem with it at least in part because there wasn't a super compelling main plot I was dying to get back to. I guess in that sense it's a more even experience. There's also a respectable amount of content, at least in the eX+ version. There are short side-stories added between each main chapters, there's a true ending epilogue chapter (that one might have been in the original Vita release) as well as a post-game After Story that I still need to play. Overall, this was a fun way to kill time while waiting for Cold Steel 2 PC. It's definitely worth checking out if you like Falcom's stuff. The PC port is also quite good. Kinda bare-bones but it ran well enough for me to downsample it from 4K and never crashed on me. Oh and the localization is alright. There's a handful of weird lines or word choices but overall it never really bugged me or anything.

No, I'm telling you, when you counter it doesn't reset your combo! Wait, what thread is this?

I got curious about reading some of Ito's work after watching the recent anime and I found these nice collected editions, so what the hell. Gonna feel kinda weird reading a manga with a hardcover, though. There's also one for Tomie but it was more expensive and I don't know anything about that one so maybe I'll get it later, depending on how much I enjoy these.

Yeah, the more I think about it the more I'm leaning towards his work simply being difficult to do justice to. Some of the visuals that made me laugh were absurd but it really feels like the intention is grotesque and unsettling vs laughing out loud. I really should get my hands on some of his stuff. I've been meaning to read Uzumaki properly and I've been super intrigued by Amigara Fault for a while.

Lol, good point. I'm tempted to argue that George Lucas comes across as kinda nuts and seemed completely disinterested in making movies, let alone more Star Wars, but in reality I really don't know shit about either of them as people. I can only hope that Gabe is nowhere near as insane as Lucas, I guess. Or that Valve is keeping him entertained enough to not want to bail.

Have you guys been watching Junji Ito Collection? I know Ito is like this legendary horror mangaka but I'm not really all that familiar with his work. I read a little bit of Uzumaki years ago and it was pretty good but that's about it. So, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the anime. I mean, I'm enjoying the hell out of it but not exactly how I expected to. So far, for every story that's genuinely creepy and cool there's like 2 that either feel like maybe they worked better as a manga or just make me laugh my ass off. Like, is this shit supposed to be funny? Because I'm kinda getting a b-movie vibe from the whole thing. More often than not, my reaction is "lmao wtf is this shit?". The Boy at the Crossroads is probably the only one so far that worked as horror for me as a whole. The Long Dreams one had a really cool premise but the dude's transformations just kept getting more ridiculous and hilarious. That was one instance where it seemed like it might have worked better as a manga. Did I go into this with the wrong expectations (serious horror) or is it just a shit adaptation?

At the very least, if he were to sell, I don't think it would ever be to Microsoft. I'm not sure what you mean by enigmatic, though. I can count on like one hand the amount of times I remember him making any kind of gaming-related appearance in the past decade. It's possible I'm just forgetting but from what I can remember him and Valve have always been kinda silent for the most part. At least, they have been since they stopped making the kind of games they're famous for. Can't say I blame them, either. They have one of the most insufferable and toxic community ever. You can only listen to so many tired Half-Life 3 jokes before getting fed up and going into hermit mode. But yeah, honestly, I don't think there's too much to worry about. Valve is doing all kinds of experiments lately. Designing a weird controller, (failing at) developing a Linux distro, investing in VR, etc. They're clearly doing whatever the hell they want and they have one of the (if not THE) biggest cash cow in gaming to finance their (or Gabe's) every little flights of fancy. Why would you ever walk away from that? lol

Valve is a private company, so they couldn't just forcefully buy it like Vivendi have been doing with Ubisoft. Gabe would have to willingly sell it to them and I really don't think that's very likely. He was at Microsoft years ago and left to found Valve. It's also no secret that he's not a fan of the way Microsoft have been doing things on PC lately with regards to trying to lock down Windows app store style with UWAs. Plus, he's already stinking rich so it's not like the lure of early retirement would mean much to him. The only scenario where I would see him actually selling Valve would be if he wanted out like Notch did.

Let me know if it's as good as it looks. The trailer and screenshots on the store page make it look like something I would really enjoy but holy fuck the bunny girl thing makes it a tough sell. And I say this as someone with a pretty high tolerance for anime bullshit...

Oh man, I remember really wanting to play that one back when it first came out but not having a PC capable of running it. Could be a fun pickup for next time I'm in the mood for an old-school FPS. Also, it reminded me of two more, for some reason. It's your typical shitty-looking FPS from the late 90s, except every now and then you would get into a giant Evangelion-style mech and play with that for a few levels. And it's actually made by Monolith, now famous for the F.E.A.R. series and Middle-Earth: Lootbox Simulator 2017. It's available on Steam. Next up is Oni. An anime-inspired melee action game made by, I shit you not, Bungie. I can't say much about it because I never got very far into it. It was hard as fuck but it was the first third-person game I ever played with a focus on melee combat (specifically martial arts) instead of shooting, so it seemed super fucking cool at the time. Sadly, it doesn't look like it's available anywhere digitally.

It's minor stuff that I thought was worth spoiling in the interest of selling people on the game.

I second the Anachronox recommendation. It's not just the earliest example of a western JRPG that I'm aware of, it's also absolutely bonkers. Your party members eventually include a superhero and a fucking planet. Shadow Watch is also pretty great and I never see anyone talking about it online. It's an XCOM-style turn-based strategy game with a comic book art style that seems to have held up reasonably well based on screenshots. It was made by Redstorm right before the Ubisoft acquisition and technically falls under the Tom Clancy brand since it's based on one of those books he didn't write but slapped his name on anyway. It was impossible to find for years but I recently found out it's on GOG now.

I mentioned updating the OP a few times before. I mostly intend it to be a bit of an info dump for new people that might wander into this thread. Because that totally might happen one day. Also, dear God, that drawing of Dogi in the first pic is horrifying. He would almost fit in Attack on Titan... O_o

Lol, beat me to it. I guess it's official then. Cold Steel II is releasing on PC before Ys VIII. Hell, in roughly the time since the first delay, XSEED will have managed to release on Steam: Ys Seven, both Cold Steel games AND both Zwei games. At this point, I'm honestly hoping they manage to squeeze Memories of Celceta in there as well, just to make the situation even more laughable. Anyway, that leaves me with two and a half week to go back to Tokyo Xanadu and wrap it up. I got distracted from it right before Christmas and haven't worked up the motivation to jump back in just yet. It's good but the story lost its hold on me after a while. Too episodic, I guess. It's easy to turn it off when you finish a chapter and there's really no sense of urgency to start the next one. Tbh, I was hoping for a late february release as I just started Pyre and was planning to do Prey after. Oh and I updated the OP a bit. Not that anyone reads it...

Tacoma It's Gone Home but IN SPAAAAAAAACE! Well, kind of. I thought the way you interact with the environment and uncover the plot was way more interesting here. You're basically watching glorified audiologs but they're in this AR format that plays in 3D space and include multiple characters. So, you have to follow them as they walk around and if they split up you need to rewind and follow them individually to get the full scene. The game is actually a neat little subversion of typical 0451 game tropes in a few ways (0451 games as in Deus Ex, ___Shock, Dishonored, etc.), so that alone made it worth my time. Also, did I mention it's set in space? Anything is better in space. Human Resource Machine I played the first few levels of this a while back and kinda lost interest but for some reason I felt like going back to it this week. I still have some optional levels and optimization challenges to complete but I got to the end of the main path. Out of all the programming games I've played, this has to be the most simplistic by far. Even though it's technically actual assembly, it's abstracted into this really easy to understand visual programming system that I think even non-programmers should have no trouble with. Also, I think I'm some kind of oracle or something because the devs just announced a follow-up today.

Obduction This is a Myst spiritual successor by the original devs. I went into it expecting something similar to The Witness but it turns out they're not as similar as I thought they would be. At first, I thought I liked The Witness more but now that I'm done with it I'm actually not sure. The obvious difference is that Obduction actually has a story. Well, more of a backstory, really. You're pretty much just piecing together what happened from reading notes and diaries. I never really felt like The Witness needed a story but having that context made exploring Obduction's alien worlds way more interesting. But there's also a core difference in how you interact with the game in general. I never really played any of the Myst games. I mostly just messed around with Myst and Riven back when I was way too young to understand how to actually play them. So, I didn't entirely know what to expect and ended up wandering around aimlessly for a while in the first half of the game. In The Witness, when you get stuck you know exactly where you're stuck. You can go check out something else and come back later with a fresh mind. Here, I had no idea what I should even be looking for, let alone where, and it got a little boring and frustrating. But at one point I had my first "Holy shit, wait!" moment and figured out something fundamental about the internal logic of Obduction's world. Suddenly a few things fell into place and I was able to make fairly steady progress for a while. These moments kept happening throughout the game and they more than made up for those aimless first few hours. There was this one area that I had no idea how to reach and I kept waiting for a passage to open or to end up there somehow and it never happened. Then in the last 15mins of the game I'm told to actually go there to do something and I'm still clueless about how to even get there. So I go look at the map in one of the houses, because what else am I gonna do? This time I actually noticed a small detail that I had missed and had the final "holy shit" moment. Suddenly, I understood the underlying logic behind this game mechanic I'd been using all along and relying on memorization to navigate. I instantly knew exactly where I needed to go to reach that area and it was the most fucking satisfying thing ever. You can beat The Witness without ever understanding anything outside of the puzzle panels and it's still a fantastic game. But these "holy shit" moments that kept happening in Obduction were way more satisfying than line puzzles could ever hope to be. I think The Witness is stronger as a puzzle game because of its laser focus (edit: pun not intended -__-) but the story and the need to understand the internal logic of the world made exploring and solving Obduction's mysteries ultimately feel much more rewarding and engaging. I'm kinda tempted to grab Myst and Riven and give them another shot but I have a feeling their age is gonna make it difficult for me to really get into them. Plus, it doesn't look like Myst 3 and 4 are available anywhere, so I'm probably better off waiting and hoping for an Obduction sequel.

I've only bought a fighting game at full price at launch once and I kinda regretted it. But this game still makes me want to not just buy it day one but also invest in a goddamn fight stick and finally learn to play fighting games properly. My love of Dragon Ball makes it way too tempting...

You might actually be thinking of this one lol. This is the second time they delay it, it was originally supposed to come out in September. The first time they delayed it like literally the day before launch. This time it was like a week after announcing the new release date. It's the very definition of a shit show. At the very least, I hope this time they learned to have their fucking closed beta BEFORE announcing the release date. It's super fucking petty of me, but now I kinda hope they'll be equally inept at porting it to Switch. The Switch worship on the internet is kind of insufferable lately and it's pretty much guaranteed to cause even more of a backlash.

A miserable little pile of delays!

Yeah, FFXV is in this weird position where everything I've seen and heard points to it being very unexceptional. But there's a part of me that will always be excited to play a new Final Fantasy game. It's mostly running on nostalgia these days but it's still there.