Games You've Beaten in 2018

[TheFlyingGerbil]

Yay. I've finished my first (only?) game of 2018. Golf Story. I don't think I fully got to grips with it - the ball rarely went exactly where I expected it.I assume the game takes into account how bad you are because the opponents were equally dreadful. Still, I enjoyed myself, and rarely felt frustrated.

[Bogie 2.0]

^ Are you sure it was about golf? Or even a game for that matter?
 

On 1/21/2018 at 1:26 AM, Mister Jack said:

Ghouls and Ghosts 

 

Then I can finally end this chapter of my life.  This chapter of...not beating Ghosts and Goblins.

Oh, I haven't read this previously!
Now open up a new one with Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins on the PSP and you'll be set for life; the game crossed the sacred line between 'balls-out hard' and 'cheap af' with a triple pirouette ending with a split. And it's ugly to boot!

Have you tried its 3D spiritual successor, Maximo?

 

Edited January 29, 2018 by Bogie 2.0

[Mister Jack]

@Bogie 2.0

Yech...I think I'm good on the PSP one.  I haven't played Maximo, though I am aware of it and I've heard it's decent.  

[Bogie 2.0]

@Mister Jack
You should try it if you like challenging platformers with challenging camera controls. Replaying the 1st one a few years ago was still a blast using the magnificent PCSX2 -- it looked pretty darn good. 

[FMW]

I have beaten Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Tales of Berseria.

 

Moving on to Jet Set Radio!

 

FF IX STILL stays on the backlog.

[toxicitizen]

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.

[Mister Jack]

I needed to make some space on the ol' hard drive so I went ahead and beat Batman: The Telltale Series since it was just sitting on there ever since it went free on PS+.  Overall, I liked it.  I think that as a self-contained drama, it was pretty well written and I also liked the investigation segments along with planning out ambushes.  I also appreciated how it was a much more personal story where Bruce Wayne is just as much, if not more a part of the struggle as Batman is.  However, there are some things I didn't like about the liberties it took with the Batman mythos.

 

Spoiler

I REALLY didn't like the whole "Thomas Wayne was a gangster" angle that pretty much the entire plot is built on.  I feel like it undermines the entire point of the moment that made Bruce into Batman in the first place.  Usually the Wayne killings serve as a tragic example of Gotham being such a crime ridden hellhole that anyone, even the great and powerful Waynes, can become victims over nothing more than a wallet and some pearls.  It illustrated just how out of control the city's crime was.  But in this game?  Nope, it wasn't a random mugging.  It was an assassination the whole time and the Waynes were specifically targeted by organized crime.  I feel like that cheapens the impact of that moment significantly just for the sake of a cheap twist.  I also didn't care much for Penguin's pretty boy redesign, though I did like how he was written and I do think his bird mask was pretty cool.  The Lady Arkham twist was better than the Arkham Knight twist, I will admit, and I think most of the other characters were handled pretty well.

 

[toxicitizen]

10 minutes ago, Mister Jack said:

 

  Hide contents

The Lady Arkham twist was better than the Arkham Knight twist, I will admit, and I think most of the other characters were handled pretty well.

 

 

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

[Mister Jack]

28 minutes ago, FLD said:

 

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

 

Well at one point Rocksteady had said they weren't going to do the obvious twist for Arkham Knight, and I believed that for a while, but as soon as you-know-who was revealed to be a character in the finished game I thought to myself "you lying sons of bitches!"

[TheMightyEthan]

Spoiler

At first I didn't like the Thomas Wayne thing cause it was too big a change, but it's grown on me. The stuff you're talking about, about it undermining the point of their deaths, is totally intentional, because Batman struggles with that same thing: this whole time he's been fighting to clean up Gotham because it killed his parents, but then he learns that they were actually a big part of the problem.

 

[deanb]

Prey

 

All three endings (easy enough if you make a save, there's only ~30 minute difference between them). It's an interesting game, though not without its flaws. Some of my main issues being around interaction elements, with the key codes not "self-typing" (which'd be fine if you could input on keyboard), the maintenance shafts frequently causing issues of getting "stuck" on them (which given some of the turrets handily clipped too so I'd guess a flaw in collision).

It was also a rather front-ended in story, the final act (including the arrival of Dahl) was rather short though maybe part of being the first half largely exploring the station and unlocking new areas, so towards the end with all the doors unlocked and most of the typhon dead (or easy to deal with, though that's also a more "end game" thing, they could be a PITA early on, more than I'd have liked) you could run through entire segments taking as long in the loading screen as you do the areas of the station.

 

Maybe one day I'll dive in and have a more typhon-powered run of the game, I'm sure that'll mix stuff up (though having only taken the morphing ability I'm amazed at the end it was said I'd taken a massive amount of typhon augments).

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, it says you used a bunch typhon augments at the end if you use more than 0 of them.

[deanb]

"Morgan, you have a massive amount of hands!"
"I have two"
"And that's well above average!"

[Mister Jack]

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

 

I think this is probably my favorite one in the series.  It definitely has the best gameplay, as it's far more active and there's much less emphasis on waiting for cooldowns if you are managing your abilities right. I really liked the blade system (basically weapons with Personas attached) and how it allowed me to customize my party rather than just depend on certain characters with certain abilities.  It's actually pretty complex and can seem overwhelming at first, but once you understand how it all works it's a ton of fun.  I liked the characters in this game more than the others with the exception of Rex, who I think is a poor man's Shulk.  The story in the first game was better too.  The story in 2 isn't BAD, per se.  It's perfectly serviceable and has some interesting twists, it just has a few too many cliches.  I know the anime art style is divisive, but I think it's a good change.  The Switch only has so much horsepower, and making a more simple art style lets the characters be more expressive.

 

What didn't I like?  Well, while the game isn't too grindy in terms of your character levels, it can be grindy in other areas. Blades are the biggest offender.  You acquire new blades through core crystals, which are glorified lootboxes.  Before you get the wrong idea, there is no money changing hands here.  Still, it's annoying because you have pretty much no control over what blade you get.  I went the entire game without drawing KOS-MOS, and I really wanted her.  You can supposedly influence what element you get by using certain items, but no matter how many of them I used I never got the element I want.  The entire blade system is based on RNG, and since blades dictate what abilities you can use, you can really get fucked over if the RNG decides to be a dick.  The worst part is that even if you use a rare or legendary core crystal, which are really hard to get, you can easily still have a common blade pop out.  I fucking hate that shit.  Rares and legendaries should be rares and legendaries!

 

The other thing I didn't like is the field skills.  Your blades each come with skills that you can use out in the field to unlock new areas or complete certain objectives.  A blade with lockpicking can open chests, for example.  This is cool in theory, but the problem is this only works for blades your party has equipped.  If you need the lockpicking blade but you aren't using it for combat then you have to rearrange your party just to open one chest.  They really should have just let you use backup blade abilities.  On top of that, leveling up your blade abilities so you can, say, unlock a level 3 chest can be pretty grindy depending on your blade's affinity requirements.  Sometimes you just need to use them for long enough, but other times you have to jump through hoops to level them up.  One blade in particular that I saw forces you to store hundreds of items just to unlock the privilege of leveling up his abilities.  I mean, come on.  Finally, since the blades you get are completely random, if you don't have blades with the abilities you need then you're just shit out of luck until you draw one with the right ability.  I have sidequests I never got to finish just because I could never draw any blades that had the right abilities.

 

I also ran into a nasty bug where after I beat the game, the framerate dropped to a crawl during the ending and then froze up entirely before I could save my clear data.  This doesn't seem to happen to everybody, but you bet it pissed me off.  I just ended up watching the ending on youtube instead.  I hope that was a fluke, but I don't feel like beating the final boss again right now just to find out. Maybe I'll try it again later after the new DLC comes out.

 

Something I'm realizing about the Xenoblade series is that they're generally pretty solid RPGs that just happen to be held back from true greatness by some confusingly bad design decisions or oversights. When I wasn't dealing with the RNG or having to shuffle my blades around just to use a specific skill, I had a blast with the game.  Those two things were persistent problems though, and I feel like if they weren't there the game would be a 9 instead of an 8.

 

Oh yeah, and the English dub is fucking atrocious.  I mean, Jesus Christ.  Thankfully the Japanese audio is available, but Monolith should be embarrassed about putting out a dub this bad.

Edited February 7, 2018 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

Middle Earth: Shadow of War

 

I didn't technically beat this, but I'm calling it beat anyway. Essentially the game should have "ended" with Act III, and then Act IV should have been post-game content, because it's essentially just open world shenanigans with no story missions. So I'm going to say I beat this even though Monolith made the baffling* decision to not put the end credits until after Act IV.

 

It's really quite a great game though, especially if you pretend it ended when it should (Act IV is pretty tedious). I would highly recommend it, despite the snafu with the ending placement. I'll probably get the Story Expansion Pass once the second story DLC releases.

 

*It's not really baffling, they made it part of the "main story" so you feel like you have to play it, and it's tedious because they want you to buy their microtransactions. Thankfully that's not a problem in the main part of the game, I never once felt like I needed to buy anything from the store.

[toxicitizen]

Is the story essentially over at that point or is it retarded like Arkham Knight where you need to do all the tedious post-game shit to get the real ending?

[TheMightyEthan]

The story is basically over, there's one little cutscene that you get after doing all that stuff, but it's really more like an epilogue than an ending.

[Baconrath]

Well I finally finished up my first steam playthrough of Cold Steel, so there's that. I don't know if the bonuses you get in CS II from your completed file will still be a thing but i think i missed the second tier by 1 (finished at lvl 69) but still got rank Ao. I'm not sure if I will go for 100% on achievements or not later but apparently I missed a treasure chest again ;_;

 

is gud game

guide damn it/10 

[TheMightyEthan]

Bastion

 

Holy shit that game was good. I can't believe it didn't click with me when I tried the Xbox demo at launch. Supergiant is 3/3 for fantastic games.

 

*Edit - Thank you again @Mr. GOH! for your lovely gift! ?

[Mr. GOH!]

You are most welcome, Ethan.

I need to restart Transistor; it seemed super cool, but I didn't have time to really get into the combat system.

[TheMightyEthan]

I loved Transistor. I really like how different all the Supergiant games are, and how beautiful the art is. They also have some of the best music of any games I've ever played.

 

I am a Supergiant fanboy.

[toxicitizen]

I really should revisit Bastion someday. I remember enjoying it but not really seeing what it was that made everyone cream themselves so hard over it. Transistor is my favorite of theirs by far, I played it at launch and thoroughly enjoyed it. I started Pyre a couple weeks back but it didn't really grab me. I should get back to it but right now I'm not interested in anything that's not called Trails.

 

Their soundtracks are always amazing, though. At this point, if I was to pre-order their next game I'd just blindly get the edition that comes with the soundtrack.

[deanb]

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

 

It's a bit weird in the "you don't have the mark of the outsider but totally still have a bunch of powers". Though I do find some of the powers were kind of limited in some parts to force down certain paths which was a tad annoying. Also trying to kill everyone but one guy for one mission.

 

Always fun to do some more bits in Karnaca.

 

I am curious where Dishonored goes from here though, assuming it still "goes".

[MetalCaveman]

God Eater Resurrection, tried to complete all missions, but some of them proved too much for me. At the point I am, the only way to beat those missions would be to craft/upgrade certain weapons I don't have, and after looking at the materials needed I decided I can't be bothered to farm for those right now. Looking at my stats, I apparently played for more than 200 hours, with more than 1000 missions completed, that's pretty cool. \m/ \m/ Loved Burst on the PSP and Resurrection is a huge improvement from it, so yeah, I'd definitively recommend this one.

 

I was surprised to see how much more content this has, finished the Burst storyline and then found out there were several more story missions afterwards. The way it expands upon the events of Burst was pretty cool, specially in regards to the development of certain characters. \m/ \m/

[Mister Jack]

I beat the story for Monster Hunter World.  It took me about 98 hours to get through, although truthfully I could have done it much sooner if I rushed.  I spent many hours helping out a friend with her own hunts.  Had I ignored that, the story might have taken me...I dunno, maybe 70 hours?  Just a rough estimate.  Honestly, the story in the game really isn't anything anyone is going to care about.  It's just an excuse to go from monster to monster, and now that I've beaten the final boss I can move on to the endgame where the monsters are super buffed but also drop better loot.  I'm nowhere near done playing this game yet.