toxicitizen

Yep, now we wait until E3 to see if XSEED announce it. Some of their Steam anouncements looked neat. People on ERA seemed hyped for that Coven game, so it might be worth a look. Kinda surprised at no Disgaea PC announcement, though. We know D5 was rated for PC a while back, so I wonder what the hold up is. Would be annoying if they stopped at 2...

Going by these descriptions, seems like Ys VIII should be my new favorite. You know, if NISA ever manage to fucking release the PC version. As if I needed another reason to be mad at them lol. Speaking of NISA, their press event stream starts in about 3 hours. If they don't announce Cold Steel III, then the next week will be one of celebration for Trails fans. Cold Steel II launches on PC and hope lives on. This is such a weird situation for me, though. I will be absolutely crushed if they announce Cold Steel III but literally any other Steam-related announcement from them will have me pretty excited. It's been a year since Disgaea 2 hit Steam, so we're likely due for the next one soon. The only question is whether they'll go with 3 or skip to 5. Man, I hope they skip to 5. I love D3 but it's the weakest one and I don't feel like replaying it for a third time.

Have you seen Event Horizon? Because that one legitimately feels like a Warhammer 40K origin story. It's also horror, which seems more appropriate for anything related to 40K/the Warp. But yeah, Cloverfield Paradox is super silly but that's why I loved it so much lol.

So, it's 5AM and I just finished reading Uzumaki. That sure was an ending. I really enjoyed it but I expected a bit more of a narrative. It picks up in the last volume but the first two kinda feel like a collection of short stories. They all take place in the same town, are told from the POV of the same character and use the spiral as a central theme but most of them could work as standalone shorts like the ones adapted in the anime. Going by what little info there is on his wikipedia page, it seems like Ito's work is mostly just short stories collections. It's kinda weird to think Uzumaki might be his longest story at just 3 volumes long. I'm so used to these never-ending shonens. I kinda hope Gyo is more of a traditional narrative, though. I'm tempted to start it right now but I should probably go to bed before I pass out at my desk. Oh and yeah, this stuff totally works better in manga form. The lack of sound and motion forces you to really take in his insane art in its full glory. Even in its most ridiculous moments, it never made me laugh like the anime does. Those fucking snails, man... I should watch the live-action movie soon, if only to see how monumentally they most likely fucked it up.

Yeah but in SotN you literally get exp and get that little "level up!" text pop up and you can farm for gear/weapon drops. I even want to say you sometimes need to grind a little because you can be low level compared to enemies but it's been a while, so I could be misremembering on that one. Symphony of the night almost feels like it's an RPG disguised as a Metroidvania. That's why I said "as heavy as". Skill trees like in Ori have become so ubiquitous these days that they barely register as "RPG elements" for me anymore.

I'm not sure if I've even played another Metroidvania that has RPG elements as heavy as SotN. So I wouldn't say they're required, no. I assume all the Igavania games have them but stuff like Ori, Guacamelee and Hollow Knight don't have any leveling up or loot drops. IIRC, I brought up that same point after playing one of them (probably Axiom Verge?) a few years ago. It was so identical to Metroid that it got me wondering what Castlevania brought to the table other than being structured like Metroid.

The Cloverfield Paradox I loved the first two Cloverfield movies so I've been anticipating God Particle ever since I first heard of it. It's kind of insane that they officially revealed it AND just dropped it on Netflix today. I kinda hope this starts happening more because being able to watch the movie right away, when my excitement for it is at its highest sure as hell beats paying 20 bucks to sit with a bunch of obnoxious, loud assholes in a crowded movie theater. Anyway, I think it might actually be my favorite of the three. I just love this kind of sci-fi thriller way more than what the first two movies were. I won't say any more than that because I feel like this one really benefits from going in as blind as possible. My advice would be to not watch the trailer and don't even read the Netflix summary page (it spoils something huge that I really wish I had only found out during the movie), just click through as quickly as you can. I didn't watch the trailer until after the movie and I'm really glad I didn't because it would've ruined even more. Really makes you wonder wtf they were thinking with that trailer because they were dropping the movie out of nowhere anyway. They had the perfect opportunity to keep this super mysterious.

So basically their implementation of nVidia tech is dogshit and is hurting performance? Lol, can't say I'm surprised, this is Square Enix after all. This is good news for me, though, because I never expected my GPU to be able to handle those effects. I always turn them off and it sounds like I should get a nice performance boost in this case.

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.