toxicitizen

Yeah... Maybe I'll change my mind if I can find a decent deal somewhere but right now I'm leaning towards getting the Styx sequel that comes out three days earlier instead. It's much cheaper and S-E's non-Final Fantasy games get discounted crazy fast on Steam. Not a fan of DMC/Bayonetta then? Shame, they're some of the best action games ever. You don't really have to bother with the deep combo stuff all that much, really. I was never all that great at them and I managed to beat DMC3 on the hardest difficulty back in the day.

It being a Platinum game is the only reason I'm actually interested in Nier: Automata so much. The original Nier had some cool ideas and did some neat experimental stuff but it was not a good game. Having a competent studio behind this one should change that. Haven't gotten around to it yet but I'm pretty sure that's one of their worst ones. edit: Also, finally!

And we finally have an official announcement! https://twitter.com/NieRGame/status/837437370903339008 Holy shit, was that so fucking hard?!

Steam release date is most likely March 17th, which was the other option besides March 10th. S-E had a page briefly go up on their own store. It's now gone but you can't hide from Skynet Google https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Q0OK7zyb_h8J:https://store.na.square-enix.com/product/418950/nier-automata-pc-download+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=en

Started Valdis Story: Abyssal City tonight. It's a metroidvania with DMC-like combat on a 2D plane. It sounds awesome but I think I kinda hate it a little? It's not bad or anything. The metroidvania part is about as fun as you'd expect but during the two hours I played the combat made me rage an unreasonable amount. It also feels a bit unpolished. The graphics look kinda blurry, movement and jumping both feel kinda floaty and imprecise and the combat is just challenging enough to become frustrating when there's a difficulty spike. I want to like it but right now I'm trying to distract myself from buying Hollow Knight and I think I'm gonna need to play something better than this if I'm going to succeed.

Outland. I played a little bit of it on PS3 back in like 2011 but never got very far into it. I'm really glad it ended up appearing on Steam out of nowhere a couple years back because I grabbed it during a sale at some point and finally got around to playing it, which would not have happened if it had remained a console exclusive. Anyway, it's this weird mix of metroidvania and bullet hell. Yes, it's as weird as it sounds. It does this thing like Ikagura where you have blue mode and red mode and by swapping between the two you can avoid damage from the same color of projectiles. It's pretty cool but it does require a certain kind of coordination and timing that my brain kinda sucks at, so I was not very good at it. Not the best metroidvania I've ever played but it's definitely worth a look. Stories Untold. Really enjoyed this one. I was right that it's more than just a text adventure but I don't know if I'd call it meta. Experimental is probably a better way to describe it. I'm hesitant to really talk about what it's actually like because the fun mainly comes from figuring out what you have to do and what is actually going on. All I'll say is that you're doing much more than just reading text and typing actions. It's a bit on the short side (took me around 3 hours to finish all 4 episodes) but I think it was worth the 10 bucks for the novelty of it alone.

Heard really good things about the initial prototype for The House Abandon (as well as the full game in the past few days), so I'm really looking forward to checking it out. I'm going in mostly blind. All I know is it's text-based and I'm assuming there's some kind of meta element to it because I seriously doubt people would be making such a big deal about it otherwise. Plus, if you couldn't tell from the logo, it's one of those 80s nostalgia projects and I'm a huge sucker for that stuff so if anything I'll probably enjoy it for that alone.

Shadow of Mordor was an alright Arkham's Creed type game but when I finally played it I really felt like most people saw something in it that I didn't. Not getting this one until a significant discount but all I'm really hoping for is for the Nemesis system to be fleshed out and become something more interesting. Having combat encounters constantly be interrupted by assholes coming at me with their fucking cutscenes is not "emergent storytelling", it's just fucking annoying.

Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book. Finished it last night. It was my first Atelier game and for the most part I really enjoyed it. For the first 20 hours or so it was basically crack, I couldn't get enough of it. Then I started putting more effort into alchemy and getting better at it and had a sudden realization of "holy shit, this game can turn into fucking work!" And I mean that in a good way, it's just something that I can personally find a little tedious at times. Like, when a request wants me to make a specific item with a specific trait on it and none of its base materials have it, it becomes a game of figuring out which material does have the trait and what I can transform it into to eventually use it to make the requested item. It's fun stuff but when your container gets pretty full the UI can make it a pain in the ass to figure out whether you even have something with the trait on it. Another thing worth mentioning is that the game has a pretty low level cap. So once you start going after late (or post)-game bosses, it's not all about grinding to brute force the numbers. You can still improve your characters' stats but the main thing is you need to craft higher quality materials to have the blacksmith make you better weapons. I thought it was a pretty neat twist on the typical JRPG grind and it really fits with the game's theme, so it gets bonus points for that. So yeah, I'm glad I finally gave the series a shot and I definitely plan on playing more of it in the future. I probably won't get Atelier Firis at launch, though, since it's coming out in like 2 weeks and it's day and date with console, so it'll probably be 60 bucks or so. I really hope they eventually go back and port the older games to PC as well, I'd love to play the Arland and Dusk trilogies but I'd rather not do it on Vita.

I don't think it ever did, no. They announced the Steam release months ago and almost immediately after started pretending it didn't exist. It's pretty obvious that some kind of marketing deal with Sony happened and they're not going to acknowledge the PC version's existence again until after the PS4 release. It's been mentioned off-handedly a couple times during streams and such but never in any kind of official capacity. What I'm curious about is whether the March 10th date was old and no longer correct or just revealed prematurely. I mean, even if it was a fuck up it has to have come from somewhere. Given S-E's habit of just dumping their stuff on Steam at the last minute with no fanfare whatsoever, my money's on an announcement on March 8th with a release on the 10th.

Lmao, Square-Enix have deleted the trailer that mentioned Steam and have reuploaded a version that doesn't. This would be incredible annoying if it wasn't so fucking ridiculous. Watch the Steam trailer magically reappear on March 8th...

Damn, if true that's actually a little surprising. I was expecting something like a 1 month delay at best. Kinda fucks with my plans as I was increasingly considering giving the original another shot before Automata's release. Leaves me only ~2 and a half weeks to wrap up Atelier Sophie and do Nier but I'm not anywhere near done with Atelier. The story is wrapping up but I still have so much shit to do, that game is a real time sink. I'm enjoying the hell out of it, too, so I want to keep playing and 100% the achievements.

An important special message from Yoko Taro!

Looking pretty damn sweet!

With Zestiria wrapped up, I can finally justify getting this. I still have Disgaea 2 to finish but I'm more excited about finally trying this series right now.

Tales of Zestiria. I finally beat a Tales game! After I got bored with Symphonia and dropped it after 20h, I figured the series might just not be for me since it's generally one of the most highly-regarded entries. But I still wanted to give it another shot and Zestiria being on Steam made it the natural choice. I'm really glad I did because I ended up really enjoying this one, which is kinda weird because, from what I can tell, most Tales fan seemed to hate it. It probably helped that I went in with incredibly low expectations but I think that was the correct approach for this series. Looking back, I can kinda see why Symphonia didn't click. I went in with the completely wrong expectations. I had heard so much praise for it over the years that I had it built up in my mind as some kind of semi-hidden amazing JRPG that would stand alongside the greats like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI and what not and lmao, that is not this series. But back to Zestiria. You play as Sorey, who becomes Anime Jesus the Shepherd and has to go defeat Ganondorf the Lord of Calamity. As far as JRPG plots go, it's incredibly straightforward and laid back. You're not gonna fight the evil pope to keep him from resurrecting Cthulhu or find an ancient spaceship or go to the moon on a whale or any other kind of typical JRPG nonsense. I mean, I love that stuff but now that all's said and done I kind of appreciate how relatively normal Zestiria was. The main plot is a little dull at times but (most of) the characters are very likable and there's these little optional skits you can watch throughout the game that are way more fun and charming than anything from the game's actual cutscenes. My biggest gripe (and this was true of Symphonia as well) remains the combat system. It's more actiony but you're essentially locked "on rails" towards the enemies as far as movement goes. It ended up growing on me in Zestiria but the side-view camera in Symphonia really made it seem like glorified 2D combat, which was a huge bummer at the time. I started enjoying it more once I really dug into the Artes system and the mechanics finally clicked but I could never shake the thought that I would enjoy it a lot more if the combat was more Ys-like. The game is also "open-world" which is just a buzzword-y way of saying it has these huge open, barren areas you have to cross to move between cities and dungeons. It's so bad that the new game actually introduced a fucking hoverboard to make traversal less of a chore. Although, to be fair, the parts where I had the most fun were when the main story gave me more open objectives (go find/collect all the XYZs) and I was mostly free to explore and do side-quests as I pleased. So the open-world thing is not a complete failure, it just needs some work. Overall, it's not my new favorite JRPG or anything but I enjoyed it enough to want to play more of the series. I'll probably give Symphonia another shot at some point but right now I'm more interested in Tales of Berseria. I'll wait until the price drops a bit but everything I'm hearing makes it sound like it improves on all the issues I had with Zestiria and apparently the story is pretty good (I'm hearing "the best since Vesperia" a lot but I don't know what that means and at this point I take everything fans of the series say with a grain of salt anyway). Oh and if you play Zestiria on PC then definitely install the Zestiria Fix mod. It adds a lot of cool features but the main one is 60fps. I played the first 5 hours or so at 30 and thought it was fine but then I installed it just to check it out and holy shit, it's night and day. The game seriously benefits from the framerate boost, it's very much a "you can't go back" kinda deal. I think the mod had some issues early on where some animations and game logic were sped up but the modder did a pretty damn good job of fixing all of that, so it's mostly flawless now. The only issues I encountered were very minor stuff. Mostly just cloth physics sometimes going apeshit during cutscenes.

Maybe now but he wasn't always one. Also, holy shit, 2011?!? Goddamn, this place is ancient. This is probably the longest I've been on a forum before it died. Well, there's another one that's technically still up but it gets like one post every two years and it's almost always someone going "holy shit, this place is still up?!". Sounds like he did you a favor there...

Resubbed to Humble Monthly. I skipped the last two months because I wasn't interested in the early unlock games but ended up regretting it when they turned out pretty good (especially last month). I've also been meaning to get back into Total War for some time now and this seems like the best/most fun entry point, so two birds one stone. Of course, now that I've subbed for the month, they're probably scrambling behind the scenes to replace all the good games they had planned with shitty ones. I look forward to my duplicate copies of Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines. Oh and I still think not calling it Total Warhammer was the stupidest missed opportunity in the history of gaming. I mean, fuck brand recognition. That would've been the coolest title ever!

That's not a very nice thing to say about Chewblaha.

Have you tried Ethan Must Die mode yet? The achievement for beating that is the main reason why I don't expect I'll be able to regain my 100% once the DLC achievements are added on Steam.

You don't even need to go that far, you can just interact directly with the Steamworks API without actually launching any game. There's a program specifically for it but I never used it. I kinda want to sometimes to reset some games (for example, most of XSEED's releases of older Falcom games have glitchy achievements at launch) but I could never get a clear answer on whether or not it's considered ban-worthy, so I don't want to risk it.

Aaaand done. Of course, no platinum on Steam means that this will be short-lived. As soon as they add the DLC achievements, I'll lose that 100%. But still, not bad overall, even after the inevitable -1.

Hahaha well, when they first announced the port he actually reached out to them on twitter saying he was a big fan of the series and would love to help with the port. It sounds like KT US was very receptive but KT Japan wasn't interested. He did say he gave them some feedback but didn't elaborate on what kind exactly. My guess is the code came from the US branch as a kind of compromise since he couldn't get involved more directly.

It sounds like Atelier is a solid port. Durante was able to get a Steam key from Koei Tecmo like a week ago and, while he's under embargo until it releases, he's been dropping screenshots and vague hints in the Steam thread over on NeoGAF. He's a huge Atelier fan and he seems pretty happy with it, so I think it's safe to assume all's good.

I really want to do the same but money's tight and I just bought an expensive mouse and Atelier next week and...