Games You've Beat MMXIX

[TheMightyEthan]

I just officially beat Pokemon Let's Go! Pikachu, in that I beat the Elite Four and the credits rolled. There's still a ton to do though: obviously there's go and catch Mewtwo, and complete my Pokedex, but they also added in master trainers for each Pokemon in the game, each of which will only let you use one particular Pokemon to fight then. So even though I'm "done" I'll probably still be playing this for a while yet.

[Thursday Next]

I beated Into The Breach in so far as I got to the credits on Easy. Can definitely see this being my go to conference-call game.

[Mister Jack]

I usually don't buy two games at the same time anymore because I tend to let one of them fall by the wayside, but there is no way that's going to happen here.

 

[toxicitizen]

You've already beaten those two unreleased games???

 

As for me, I just realized I forgot to post Vanquish, which I beat like a week ago. I played it on PS3 years ago and it didn't really leave much of an impression. Then it came out on PC and I just kinda bounced off of it after a couple hours. Ended up going back to it while I was waiting for the port of Catherine to come out and it finally clicked for me. I'm almost done replaying the campaign on hard and after that I'll only have the challenges left to do to get the final achievement. 

 

It can be kinda frustrating at times but then you'll rocket boost up to a robot, backflip off of it while kicking it in the head and finish it off with a shotgun blast to the face in slow-motion before you even touch the ground again. Then you just go "Holy shit, FUCK YEAH!" and forget about all the frustration from earlier.  When the gameplay comes together, it's some of the most ridiculously satisfying bullshit ever. 

[Mister Jack]

Son of a bitch, I gotta start double checking the thread titles

[toxicitizen]

Onimusha: Warlords

 

It's basically Resident Evil in feudal Japan. I knew that, so I'm not sure why I was so surprised by how good this was. Melee combat with tank controls felt super weird at first but that was mostly due to the game not explaining its controls very well. Turns out you can actually lock-on, do a kind of side-step dodge and even pull off some special moves, which makes things significantly less clunky than the first boss fight led me to believe. There's also an option for "modern controls" (which admittedly make more sense here than they did in the Resident Evil remasters) but I didn't use them because I'm not a sociopath.

 

Those boss fights can still be annoying, though. Some of the later ones present a bit of a difficulty spike and this game has unskippable cutscenes, so you have to rewatch them every single time. I'm assuming there were technical reasons why they didn't change that because that would've been near the top of my list of things to fix. I'd be lying if I said those moments when I got stuck on a boss didn't sour the experience somewhat but ultimately I still really enjoyed the game and I hope they'll remaster the sequels. I'd love to play a version of this that's (hopefully) been refined and iterated upon a bit. 

[Baconrath]

I got fed up with one of the dlc missions (Pride, I think? It was the bullshit one with Lucemon) in DIgimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and just finished the dang ol' game.

The ending boss fight was kinda anti-climactic but that may have been because I was overpowered. Kind of a grindy game. It's definitely...a thing. Not sure if and when I'll try the sequel.

[Mal]

Okami HD

Got all the Ana- Stray Beads as well. Overall I do like this game but man, platforming in this game is almost 90's level. Doable but it's a chore when you aren't sure of the distance you need to travel. Camera is bull too. 

 

Onwards... 

[Mister Jack]

Alright, now I've ACTUALLY beaten Kingdom Hearts 3.

 

The first question I'm sure most people would ask is "did it live up to the hype?" Honestly, how could anything live up to 13 years of hype? That's not to say I'm disappointed in the game. I thought it was great. I just realize that a lot of people probably either expect absolute perfection from this game or they're smugly waiting to gloat about how it didn't live up. I, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than a great game and that's what I got. All the loose threads from the clusterfuck of a story are finally wrapped up and the final confrontation that's been building up for over a decade now did not disappoint. Square had to have been well aware of just how high people's expectations were because the last few hours are absolute balls to the wall insanity like what you'd expect from the climax of Nier: Automata or the Infinity War movie. Some great improvements were made to the battle system, picking out the best bits from previous games while also adding some new stuff on top of it that makes literally every fight as flashy as you want it to be or not to be.

 

So what's not so great? Well, not much. The pacing is sometimes a little uneven, but it didn't bother me too much. The camera occasionally becomes an issue, but it's not a constant problem and it's usually fixed easily. Something else that bears mentioning is that barring some quick recap movies in the main menu, this game doesn't even pretend to care about players who haven't gone through the other games first. When I said it wraps up the loose ends, I mean aaaaaall the loose ends from almost 20 years in this series. If you haven't been keeping up then the game says "fuck you, you had your chance." Outside of a few brief conversations here and there where characters reminisce on past events, the game does not care if you're new. At all. I've played all the games though so thankfully this didn't both me, but I'm sure there are some PS4 and Xbox players out there who would try to start with this as their first game in the series and I would advise against it. The gameplay is still fun, but when you have no idea what's even happening it can damper your enjoyment.

Edited January 31, 2019 by Mister Jack

[Mal]

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown 

 

<< This is pretty good. >>

<< Drop dead gorgeous. >>

<< Awesome soundtrack. >>

<< Overall great missions. >>

<< Only some naggles here and there. >>

<< Story wise, I think it is a bit weak? I dunno. >>

 

<< Overall, I rank this towards the Holy Trinity. >>

<< Meaning that this entry has its place. >>

 

<< Give me a remaster of the Holy Trinity! >>

 

[TheMightyEthan]

I really want Ace Combat 7, but no PC demo makes me hesitant since that's a game that really needs to run well...

[toxicitizen]

Catherine Classic

 

I was taking my time with it, both because of RE2 and because I was waiting for the first patch but I ended up finishing my normal run today. The patch is available in a beta branch right now but I think I'll wait until they push it to main to start a hard run. The port has some minor issues that I'd like to see ironed out because really digging into it.

 

Otherwise, it's the same old game I loved back on PS3. I feel like I had a much easier time with it this time, though. Only the last couple levels really frustrated me, and even then it was only because I already had the gold trophies on every previous levels, so to make sure I'd get the last one I wasn't using checkpoints or allowing my combos to break. I'm looking forward to seeing how the puzzles change on hard, though, because I wouldn't mind a bit more of a challenge. I'm also curious if the remaster is gonna be changing or adding puzzles because otherwise I'm not sure I fully get the appeal. The addition of a third Qatherine (yes, that's how they spell it) doesn't seem to me like it would improve the game all that much and the puzzles are by far the best part of the game for me.

[Mister Jack]

Resident Evil 2

 

Really, I don't have much to add here that everyone else hasn't said already. It's a gold standard for remakes of classic games, adding modern improvements and polish without losing the things people liked about the original. It's got a great atmosphere, you never feel like you have enough ammo to go guns blazing on everything, even at the end, and it has a ton of replayability. Anyone with even a passing interest in horror games owes it to themselves play this remake.

[Mal]

It's kind of great that people are trying to mod in fixed cameras and tank controls into the RE2 Remake. Hopefully it all pans out and I will have another way to play the game whenever I get it. So glad it turned out great. 

 

15 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

I really want Ace Combat 7, but no PC demo makes me hesitant since that's a game that really needs to run well...

While there has been some complaints, I think mainly from AMD folks (same old story that shouldn't be a thing), overall I haven't heard of anything performance wise in the negative. I think the biggest performance hit I gave myself was a quick mod (.ini edit) to eliminate/greatly reduce pop in (highly recommended mod). That was like a 15-25 FPS hit, sending me to an average of 90 FPS on my 980TI, 16GB of RAM and some older i7 CPU (from the 980TI generation). Everything is at max at 1440p resolution.

 

I think I recall you are running something more modern and better than me so I think you'll be fine. If your monitor is 1080p then I think you'll crush the game. If you try out 4K then I can see it struggling. I do have a Gsync monitor so it does smooth out any unevenness in frames. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I'm on a 4k screen.

 

*Edit - Though I guess with Steam refunds I could always buy it, try it, and refund it if it doesn't run well enough.

[toxicitizen]

Resident Evil 2

 

Finally finished 2nd run last night, so that's my first full playthrough complete. I think it's safe to say that this is the best video game remake since the original REmake. At first, I was disappointed it wasn't done in the original remake's style but now I actually kinda want them to remake the original like this one. It was just that freaking good.

 

My first run was with Leon and it was the strongest of the two scenarios. It was incredibly tense not just because of the atmosphere but also because of how I played. I sneaked past almost every single licker and once I noticed that running alerted zombies to your presence and aggro'd them, I started carefully walking everywhere. So I spent a good chunk of that playthrough slowly walking around the police station, in corridors filled with lickers and zombies. It was wonderfully stressful. Then Mr. X showed up and it became a fucking nightmare lol.

 

The 2nd run scenario was cool but ultimately made me wish they'd done more with it. Apparently the whole idea of A/B scenarios was cut until much later in development, which kind of explains how it ended up. There were some really cool moments where Claire got somewhere and it was clear Leon had already been there. At one point Leon sees someone get cut in half and when Claire gets to that part you see a little torso zombie crawling around. That stuff was great and I wish there had been more of it. But other than a handful of rooms that only one character can enter and a small area unique to each in the middle of the game, you're mostly going through the exact same places (although sometimes with slightly remixed item placement). Instead of letting you choose which characters do the first and second runs, I wish they had put more effort into making two distinct campaigns that would form a more cohesive version of the game's events.

 

But other than that small nitpick, it was a fantastic game. I loved RE7 but this was on another level entirely. Now I need a remake of RE3 done exactly like this. Seriously, Capcom. I know you love experimenting with this series for some reason, but you just need to do the exact same thing with RE3 here. You have the perfect blueprint, don't try to fix what isn't broken! You can go back to first-person for RE8 or do whatever else you like but give me RE3!

[Mal]

Transistor 

I personally like this way better than Bastion but it took me a while to figure out what and why the story was about. 

I'm only really frustrated by how enemies can bounce around and still smack you. Otherwise the gameplay is on point. I'm not sure if I'll do a new game plus run since I have such a backlog and replaying Ace Combat 7 is already a time sink. 

[TheMightyEthan]

I loved that game. One of the few that I dove straight back in for a NG+ immediately after finishing the first run.

[Mister Jack]

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise

 

This is an unusual example of a licensed game. Most of the time licensed games either adapt the show/movie/anime story more or less exactly or they make up a new story that's separate. This game did both. Many of the HnK characters and iconic battles are present, but the circumstances behind them are changed around in order to fit into this new setting. The other half of the game is an original plot with new characters. This does mean that not every story from the source material makes it in, but what they have works well enough. Unlike the manga, the game mostly takes place in a city called Eden that has managed to thrive after the nuclear apocalypse. Similar to Yakuza, you spend the majority of your time doing missions and side activities in this modestly sized environment. However, you also get a car in this game to drive around the wasteland to go to other locations from time to time. It's not a total game changer, but it does give you an extra side activity in racing and upgrading your car.

 

The game borrows a lot from the Yakuza series, but if there's one area where it feels different it's the combat. As you can imagine, Kenshiro is much more lethal than Kiryu, so the developers compensated by throwing waaaay more enemies at you per encounter. Kenshiro's signature fighting style allows him to instantly kill people by hitting pressure points, so the increased enemy count was necessary for balance. You still have to beat people into a stunned state to instakill them, but this is not that hard to do for most mooks. What is hard is keeping track of what 15+ enemies are doing at all times. Individual enemies usually aren't too strong, but there's so many of them that if you're careless you could be looking at death from a thousand cuts. Also, this game has giant enemies you don't see in the more realistic Yakuza series. These enemies are much harder to stun and you can't toss them around as easily as normal sized foes, which adds another level of difficulty to encounters. By and large, I'd say this game is a LOT harder than the Yakuza games, at least the ones I've played. The bosses are especially challenging. Since everyone important in this setting uses crazy mystical kung-fu, their attacks are unpredictable and also fast as shit. On top of that, these bosses hit like a truck and can take a ton of punishment. Even the first boss of the game will wipe the floor with you if you treat it like a tutorial and go in mashing buttons.

 

Kenshiro only uses one style as opposed to Kiryu's four, but Hokuto Shinken is extremely versatile. Kenshiro doesn't really need separate styles for speed, balance, and power because Hokuto Shinken pretty much combines all three. Activating pressure point attacks is usually accompanied by a short little cutscene and QTE, but you can turn off the QTE part of it in the settings if you prefer to just have the damage be decided by the skill's level instead. The attacks are so lethal that it won't make much of a difference except maybe against bosses. Later on you also gain the ability to skip the cutscene as well and just instantly kill people with a timed button press if you desire. Killing people with techniques (cutscene attacks) can give you health with the right upgrades and killing people with perfect channeling (no cutscene) will cause them to drop energy for your super mode, so neither method ever really becomes obsolete.

 

I enjoyed this game, but part of that definitely comes from my being a fan of the source material. It's good in its own right, though. As licensed games go, it may not shine like the Arkham games or Spider-Man but it's a solid and enjoyable effort from the Yakuza team. If you think the Yakuza games are too easy and want a better challenge, this could be a good game to look at. 

 

Oh, and Kenshiro as a bartender is too good.

[CorgiShinobi]

So I finished the Kingdom Hearts 3 story some time ago and felt I should bring my opinion. I'll leave spoilers at the end.

 

I have to disagree that things were nicely wrapped up and that the story had any proper pacing. As fun as the game is to play, it feels hollow. Aside from the fated gathering that would occur once 7 Guardians of Light and 13 Seekers of Darkness clash, there's little motivation to the story for Sora to be popping up in Disney worlds. It's brought up that Sora needs to obtain the Power of Waking and that "his heart should be his guiding key." Certainly one could argue that these worlds have a lesson for Sora or that they allude to a plot point for the entire series.

 

Yet it boils down to Sora being on an XP grind since he lost his powers from the events of Dream Drop Distance. He doesn't even play an active role in two of the worlds, meaning you need to be familiar with the events of those movies. Heck, the "real" Organizations XIII doesn't act like much of a threat for the majority of the game. Instead they love to tease Sora and speak vaguely about why they're even skulking about the worlds. Supposedly it's to find backups to the 7 Guardians of Light if Sora and company can't do it. Maybe it wouldn't bother me so much if they had done something besides talking. Not to mention, of all the time traveling, revivals, and power of the heart, that Sora's memories of Larxene and Marluxia are 100% gone so we get this whole, "Durr, who are ya!" and "I don't know about that person..." for a good while.

 

Still, the game is fun to play. While the game bogs you with tutorials (because there's many minigames here), you can still play how you prefer. I never bothered with Flowmotion, Links, and upgraded stuff here and there. Believe it or not, I got though most of Toy Box (Toy Story's world) without adding on all my new abilities (forgot about that mechanic). So yeah, the game gives you so many options in combat that it begins to become rather easy. I only ate one meal from the Bistro and that was at the very end of the game. You'll see on online that people went through Proud (hardest difficulty) and it was still easier than normally what how other games have been on Proud. Most Attractions got old to me and I would actively NOT use them unless they gave me a window of invulnerability so my MP could fully recharge. I also turned off transformation cinematics as they got old.

 

The music as always is fantastic. The very aesthetic of this game is appealing and even on an original PS4 the game runs mostly well. I read an article about performance issues, but either I'm blind or it was exaggerated for clicks. Not to say you won't see framedrops, but with how active the gameplay is in combat and scripted events, you'd have to really be paying attention. You can level up Keyblades, so if you like how a certain one plays, it can still be viable for the end of the game. The worlds are very huge, but that sometimes becomes a hindrance especially when you're trying to find emblems, treasure, or "This might be a good spot to find some ingredients." San Fransokyo is hurt the most by this.

 

I know I'm really ragging on the game, but for such a big title and one that could really never live up to the hype, it's still frustrating to have these hiccups. It's almost like Metal Gear Solid 4; a game with the responsibility to wrap up all the crazy nonsense laid before it. The difference is that Kingdom Hearts 3 builds up for more games during its run, a.k.a. Saved for the Sequel. That annoyed me as I went in thinking this would focus all on... Well, spoilers now!

 

Closing the Xehanort saga. So yes, I'm aware that Nomura wants to continue the series. Yet, like, keep it in your pants. The mysterious black block, from Union, is brought up throughout the game constantly but doesn't play any part until the Epilogue. So Xigbar/Braig was Luxu all along and

his plan succeeded, which somehow coincided with Master Xehanort's overly complicated plan. Somehow a mysterious girl Ansem the Wise tested on that both Isa (Saix) and Lea (Axel) were friends with is relevant to KH3's story. Yet, endgame content is where we learn about her relevance, so this indicates yet another sequel element being throw around in the main game's story. Pete and Maleficent are completely useless as always, so why even bother having them in the game? Final Fantasy characters weren't here because Nomura said they had nothing to contribute to the story. Yet the secret movie resembles The World Ends With You game, so SE characters are still going to be in the mix...

 

What the hell happened to Demyx? How the hell did Xion end up with the real Organization XIII? Is it that Sora's heart reaches her and somehow in that moment she's whole? And wouldn't Sora need to be near Roxas's replica body to transfer Roxa's heart? I guess the importance of San Fransokyo is the confirmation of hearts from data. Something that... "Dark Riku" would pursue to create Xion once more. So I guess you get a good enough copy for Roxas to get to the Keyblade Graveyard... But then Namine was completed when Kairi was still lost!

 

Did Lingering Will go away after his clash with Terra-Xehanort? Going back to Demyx, we know what legacy Marluxia has with Union Cross, but what about Demyx, Luxord, and Larxene? More Foreteller nonsense? People are coming up with the idea that Demyx is the Nobody of Master of Masters and the Black Box contains his heart. It can't be or at least I don't want it to be because then this damn series is saying one of the most important character in the series has been around since KH2...

 

Oh wait, Xigbar.

 

/end

[Mal]

Vanquish

Kind of run of the mill 3rd person shooter with difficulty spikes (it got frustrating a few times*). Also where you can beat bosses to death with your fists. If I were younger with more time, maybe I would try to get better and speed run this game (love the hand cannon) but for now... onward!

 

*Especially when you die repeatedly and have your upgrades removed from you, making the section even harder...

[toxicitizen]

12 hours ago, Mal said:

Kind of run of the mill 3rd person shooter

 

I hate being that guy but... you may have been playing it wrong. Vanquish is anything but that.

 

It's also one of the very few games that I think is actually possible to be played wrong. I'm convinced that most people who didn't like it played it like a cover shooter ( mainly because it's really not great when played that way) when in reality it should be approached with the same mentality as something like Devil May Cry. You should only be taking cover when you overheat, and you really should be trying to not overheat.

[Mal]

I dunno, I got pretty good on sliding around pinging Romanovs with the hand cannons. All other enemies I blast with my laser cannon (maybe I shouldn't use this) or assault rifle.

 

Eh, maybe I'll give it another go... I would like to punch more enemies to death. Oh, speaking of that, I hate not being able to melee when overheated.

[toxicitizen]

Tbh, I started having the most fun once I bumped up the difficulty and did a second run with better knowledge of the game. It's definitely a "first playthrough is the tutorial" kinda game, like most Platinum titles. I never used any of the laser weapons but that's mostly personal preference, I'm sure all weapons can be valid choices with the right play style. 

 

I mostly relied on the heavy machine gun and assault rifle when I wanted to maximize damage (e.g. unloading on a boss' weak spot) and the shotgun for small fry enemies. The shotgun is ridiculously satisfying once you get good at dodging fire and popping in and out of slow-motion for quick headshots. It's also pretty lethal against tougher enemies once fully upgraded. Outmaneuvering a Romanov and taking it out with a few quick, well-placed shotgun blasts is the kinda thing that makes me wanna fire up the game just thinking about it. Another move like that is throwing grenades, vaulting out of cover and shooting them in the air for maximum destruction.

Edited February 13, 2019 by FLD

[TheMightyEthan]

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

 

Well, I was quite enjoying it until the end, which is ridiculously anticlimactic and just made the whole game feel like it fell flat. The end was so much not an ending that I didn't even realize it was the end until the achievement popped. Like, seriously, I felt like I was getting kind of close to the end, and that this was just a little lull before the final climax. Your game should not end on what feels like a lull...

 

*Edit - I mean Jesus, it was just bad...