toxicitizen

From what I heard, hard mode is just straight up unfair. It sounds like that's an issue with Falcom games in general. It's certainly not meant for a first playthrough, at the very least. I'd just stick to normal if I were you.

Sigh... so much for that Vita copy I never really got around to playing. Probably for the best, though. A fast-paced brawler like this is definitely going to benefit from 60 fps. Hell, even in Trails of Cold Steel the performance often makes me wish I was playing on PC. It's great to have these bigger 3D games on a handheld but the hardware really struggles to run them properly. :/

Whaaaat?! Get back to it, then! I don't know what else you're playing right now but it's probably not as good! You need to finish it so you can at least play SC and be blown away once you realize how much better it is.

Started playing Trails of Cold Steel a few days ago. About 30 hours in now and I'm having a blast with it. It's a Trails game alright. Although the overall structure is different (it actually takes a few pages out of the Persona book), the core gameplay loop is very similar to Trails in the Sky where you explore a town and its surrounding areas and complete various jobs/quests there. Hell, the quests themselves are pretty similar with monster hunts and whatnot. I'm on the 3rd chapter now and still no clue what the main plot is supposed to be about. I'm assuming it'll start to pick up in the next few chapters but this was expected after Trails in the Sky FC. The first game is taking its time to introduce the world and the characters properly and the second game is likely to be where most of the action happens. But holy shit, like I said, 30 hours in so I kind of assumed I was roughly halfway through. Then I pop into the game's OT on NeoGAF and someone informed me that I wasn't even 1/4 of the way through lmao. Some people are even reporting final playtimes of over 100 hours. What the fuck did I get myself into?! This one is going to take a while...

Same name, same avatar.

There's never been an FLD thread. Also, I mostly stay out of OT.

Off the top of my head, I know me, Cowboy and Wally are there. Also Kenshi/SomTervo. Not sure about anyone else.

Kind of but from what I understand it's more of an RPG than just a sandbox block-building game. IIRC, it's set in the same world as the original Dragon Quest and the premise is that the bad guy won and you have to rebuild the kingdom.

Dragon Quest Builders coming west this October on PS4/Vita! Really glad this one is finally confirmed, was a little worried we might not get it since the announcement was taking so long. I'll be there day one... in December for the late Steam release. At least, I hope that's what they'll do like they did with Dragon Quest Heroes. I'd rather avoid getting it on Vita if possible.

It's the only Oddworld game I was still missing and it's currently on sale for like a dollar. I was holding off until they updated it to the HD remaster (or whatever you wanna call it) like they did with Stranger's Wrath a few years ago. It took fucking forever but it looks like the HD update is in open beta now, so I finally grabbed it.

Yeah, there's a button for it, Ethan! See?

Gameplay footage. It's some random youtube dude talking over a short clip but at least you can see the game in action a little bit. edit: Less annoying version of same footage. At least in this one you can hear the sound better and the guy doesn't pause it every 10 seconds.

Yeah, it really sounds like it was rushed to be out in time for the movie. Not too surprising coming from Activision but it sucks since a Platinum-made TMNT game could be so fucking great. They weren't rushed with Transformers and from what I heard that one's pretty damn good. :/

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past + A Link Between Worlds. And so my mini Zelda marathon comes to an end. My worries that playing both games back to back would result in burnout turned out to be completely unfounded. Replaying LttP was a blast and then LBW followed it up nicely by completely blowing it out of the water. This and Super Mario 3D Land weren't even factors in my wanting a 3DS but holy shit, they should've been. They're two of the best games I've played in quite a while. There's not much to say about Link to the past. We've all played it before and it's still every bit as great as we remember. One thing to mention is that the SNES emulation on 3DS is a bit dodgy. I encountered slowdown fairly often, usually when more than 3-4 enemies were coming at me at the same time. Nothing game-breaking and it certainly won't put me off of buying more SNES VC games in the future but still kind of an annoyance. Then there's Link Between Worlds. Man, this game is great! I'm coming from a weird place where I haven't played any Zelda since like.. Wind Waker, I think? So, I have no idea how it holds against more recent titles like Twilight Princess or whatever. But looking at it purely as a follow-up to Link to the Past, it's pretty goddamn good. It takes everything that was great about LttP and improves on it. It was pretty neat to see the same world map recreated so faithfully in 3D, too. Other than that, when the game first came out and people were talking about the whole item rental thing, I remember thinking it sounded awful. I've said it before that I'm not a fan of unnecessary non-linearity and opening the game up in that way just didn't seem very interesting to me. Well, I don't think the game was particularly better for it but it certainly didn't get in my way or anything. I rented pretty much all the items right away and ended up buying them all as soon as I could. I guess having everything on me from the very start made it less annoying to walk around the game world since I didn't have to make as many mental notes to "come back to x when I'll have y". Being able to tackle the dungeons in whatever order I wanted was fine but at first I didn't really know where I should go and, honestly, I prefer the forced order from LttP. I'm kinda meh on that whole aspect of the game but it didn't really impact my enjoyment of the game one way or the other. So, that was a much needed palate cleanser after Persona Q. I really need to play both Shin Megami Tensei IV and Trails of Cold Steel before their respective sequels come out in a few months but getting into either of those right after PQ seemed like asking for JRPG burnout. But now I'm ready to tackle one of them, I think! Oh and I guess I can make a bonus entry: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I technically beat this one back in January but it looks like I forgot to post about it. Anyway, I'm bringing it up now because when you beat the 4 main cases you unlock a fifth bonus case that's mostly unrelated to the main story. I didn't really feel like playing it at the time and mostly just wanted to move on to another game. So I needed to come back and do it before I could play the sequels. It was alright but not quite as good as the main cases. The overall game is as good I remembered, though. It had been so long since I first played it that I'd forgotten most of the plot, so it was pretty enjoyable to replay it. One thing this series has going for it is that it's not predictable at all. Even when you think you've figured something out ahead of time, the game almost always ends up throwing some kind of curve ball at you. Compared to Danganronpa where it's almost always immediately obvious what happened and who did it, you have to appreciate how much better the writing is. It doesn't have any crazy mind fuck twists, though. Anyway, really looking forward to playing the sequels soon. I beat the second one back in the day but I'm pretty sure I never finished the third one. So, that should be fun.

Wrapped up Link to the Past late last night and went straight into Link Between Worlds. I'm like 3 hours in and really digging it so far. Doing a replay of LttP was the right move, I think. I still remembered most of the game but a lot of the details would've been fuzzy whereas now I'm having a blast playing LBW and noticing all the similarities and differences on the world map. I kinda want to play some more but it's past 10AM right now and I'm pretty close to passing out in my chair. I should probably get some sleep...

That was my understanding as well. The founders edition card is sold at a premium price for a while and is essentially the same card everyone else will get later for 100$ less.

Yeah, I'll probably try to do it in one sitting. Maybe later tonight, if I don't have anything better to do.

I heard there was a flash sale on PSN, so I had a look to see if there was anything good on sale for Vita. Ended up buying this for PS3 instead Better late than never, I suppose. Couldn't say no at five bucks. No idea when I'll play it, though, as that would require actually turning on my PS3.

Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. I wanna play Link Between Worlds and felt like I should give LttP a replay first. I played the shit out of that game as a kid, so I was worried replaying it would be a little tedious and might even put me off of LBW a bit, but that's not the case at all. The game holds up incredibly well. It's also going much faster than I expected it to, I only started it last night and I'm already almost halfway through the Dark World (3 temples done). The dungeons are much shorter than I remembered, so I usually end up completing 2-3 back to back. I have to say, it's pretty awesome replaying a game like this on my 3DS. The emulation isn't perfect (there's some slowdown at times, usually when 3-4 enemies come at me at once) but it's not a big deal for me. I still have Earthbound and Super Metroid to play but I really hope Nintendo will release more of these. Super Mario RPG would be an instabuy.

Yeah, Space Marine was pretty great. It was a surprisingly solid third-person action game coming from a studio most known for their RTS games. I'm still hoping we get a sequel someday. 40K is way too awesome of a setting to not get another big-budget action game. I mean, Dawn of War is great and I'm glad we're finally getting a third one but Space Marine really brought that universe to life on a scale and level of presentation that top-down strategy games simply can't match.

I wouldn't necessarily rule it out just yet. That one is likely handled by XSEED and we all know how they love announcing shit at the very last minute. Hell, when they don't it seems to backfire. TitS SC is now infamous for its delays and even caused delays for Corpse Party PC. And then last fall they announced a bunch of games for Spring/Summer 2016 and not a word about any of them since. At the very least, Xanadu Next should've been out by now.

Phantom Brave coming to Steam in July. Never actually played this one but it's a Nippon Ichi SRPG, so if it's anything like Disgaea it's probably excellent. I know I'll be getting it. Also, that's another confirmation for that leaked list from a few months back. At this point, I feel like pretty much everything major on it has either already released or been confirmed to be coming.

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. Finally finished it at like 4AM last night and holy shit, that was a long one! Took me way longer than I ever expected it to, at least. My clear save says about 76h but according to the 3DS' Activity Log it was actually a little over 90h when accounting for deaths and reloads. I did the P3 route so I'll have to come back and do the P4 route at some point but I really don't see myself doing that anytime soon. Not with the 3DS backlog I have right now. Anyway, so, this was definitely different than what I expected going in. It was the last Persona spin-off I needed to play and so far none of them had been particularly good when it came to story. I expected this one would be different and, well, to be fair, it was certainly better than the shitty VNs in Arena and Dancing All Night. But as I came to realize over the course of my playthrough, this is much more Etrian Odyssey than Persona. The story isn't awful or anything like that, it's just not the main focus. There's the setup at the beginning, some more stuff after the first dungeon and then basically nothing until right before the final dungeon. There's little vignettes throughout the game but most of it is basically just fan-service interactions between the P3 and P4 casts. It can be funny but there's not much substance to it. So the game is like 20% story and 80% gameplay. But how good is that gameplay? Well, I ended up buying Etrian Odyssey Untold before I was even done with this game, so that should tell you something. Like I said, this is very much an Etrian Odyssey game with a Persona coat of paint. There's the characters you know and love, the great music and even all the Velvet Room stuff like fusions and what not. But the meat of the gameplay is very much exploring dungeons and mapping them out carefully. Even the combat system is a far cry from the regular Persona combat. Because of "reasons", everyone gets the ability to equip a secondary Persona and you can have up to five characters in your party. Even stuff like weaknesses and all-out attacks don't work quite the same. It just has a completely different flow to it. That's not to say it's bad, though. But someone who loves Persona and doesn't like Etrian Odyssey could be massively disappointed here. Overall, I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have a regular Persona game but I still loved the hell out of it. It's by far the best of the spin-offs and if they ever make a sequel I'll be there day one. What little disappointment there was at finding out the true nature of the game was completely overshadowed by the discovery of an awesome new series. Basically, the main thing I got out of it is that Etrian Odyssey is fucking rad and I really need to get into that series proper. I guess using the Persona series as a gateway to the EO gameplay wasn't the worst idea ever. I mean, it worked for me.

New info on IGN. They're changing the art deco style of the UI to an Age of Exploration theme. Think compass, astrolab, etc. Also the fog of war is no longer clouds. Instead, in keeping with the UI theme, it's a blank parchment with longitudes and latitudes lines on it. And for stuff that's partially uncovered, instead of just being darker than the rest of the map, they have a shader that simulates a pen-and-ink drawn map. Pretty cool stuff!