Games You've Beat MMXIX

[TCP]

@Mister Jack don't leave me hanging!

[Mister Jack]

Oh, my bad. Upon further research, it does seem to be PC only. That's the only version I played so I naturally assumed every other version had the same feature.

[TCP]

Ok good to confirm, thanks! The Switch version is on sale and that could push me over the edge but I think I'll hold off.

I can understand the PS4 version not having it since it came out first, but the PC version came out with it, and then the Switch version came out afterwards without it. That's so Square Enix it hurts. 

Edited June 14, 2019 by Ultra TCP

[TheMightyEthan]

Frostpunk

 

It's a cool take on city-builders, though as is often the case with the genre, I feel like it could use a more in-depth tutorial.

[toxicitizen]

Okami

 

Well, it only took me like 10 years (pretty sure I bought it when they ported it to PS3) but I can finally scratch this one off the backlog! I'm really glad I finally got around to it because it's far from perfect but there's a lot to love here. The music and story are both pretty good but that art style was a stroke of genius (no pun intended) because for a PS2 game it still looks absolutely gorgeous. Even the blatantly 2D vegetation that rotates with the camera doesn't look bad or out of place. It's crazy to me that they had to go with this simpler look due to technical limitations because I can't imagine the game would still look anywhere near this great if they had kept the originally intended more realistic look.

 

It's tempting to say that the game is too long but ultimately I can't really point to a single part that felt like padding. It's definitely way too easy, though. The only two challenging things in the entire game were some optional combat arenas and the fucking fishing mini-game, and the arenas were mostly just annoying to deal with. The trials weren't interesting or challenging in a fun way, they just threw way too many enemies at you at once, to the point where it often became a visual clusterfuck where I couldn't even tell wtf was going on. Also, for a game that's clearly going for a Zelda thing, it sure could've used more actual dungeons. A lot of them are really small and have basically no puzzles in them. Even the final one is basically just "Uh... fight these 5 bosses again, I guess?". That's probably the one aspect I'd say was genuinely weak. Even the combat, despite being way too easy, was fun due to the way it incorporates the brush mechanic.

 

Oh and I love it when a game doesn't waste your time by needlessly requiring multiple playthroughs!

 

 

And with that my Japan-themed gaming streak comes to an end because I don't think I have a fifth game to keep it going. No idea what the hell I'll play next, though. After the last few, probably something short...

[Mal]

6 hours ago, FLD said:

It's tempting to say that the game is too long but ultimately I can't really point to a single part that felt like padding.

I think this is due to the expectation that this is a shorter (20-30 hours) game but no, you'll be playing it for 45-60 hours. It wasn't helped by the easy combat. 

[deanb]

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

 

Beat this last night. Still got about 5 citizens to get and I'm kinda between the "drop this and move onto RDR2, or do I do that one final push to 'beat-beat' the game". I've a feeling I'm gonna end up on the former.

 

A generally pleasant game, nothing that's setting the world on fire in terms of story. In fact parts of it is a bit...funky in terms of your overall aim of building up your kingdom which essentially involves both destabilising foreign powers leadership and overtime stealing a bunch of their citizens.  But gameplay is light and breezy, all pretty, childish graphics, money is rarely an issue and most quests don't require much in the way of thinking. Great vegging out game, or just wanting something that isn't all doom n gloom. About the "right" length too, my playthrough is 50hrs on the save but it'd likely be shorter if you ignore a bunch of sidequests (or did them in the 'proper' order) and also it keeps the  clock ticking even if paused on the map which probs accounts for an hour or so on my save easy.

 

My only major issue with it is the RTS battle parts of it are wildly overleveled very quickly on, so without repeatedly grinding on lower leveled versions you're kinda SoL (and since I need to do some that are for Lvl 40 armies for the remaining citizens and mine are Lvl 25 at highest, it's definitely my drive to jump onto RDR2). They're kinda fine, just a bummer they're necessary for some parts, it's a very simplistic RTS which is mostly AI controlled so can be frustrating when your guys die and there's little you can do.

 

If you're in UK, but I'd guess same in US too, it's repeatedly going pretty damn cheap (£8 or so). Worth getting for that price. A good game to get the kids or niblings too.

 

[MetalCaveman]

Gears of War 4

 

That was an ending.  Went in knowing what the twist was since the trailers for 5 have already spoiled that, but still, the reveal was cool.

 

DBs are extremely annoying though, I feel they're more dangerous than any other enemy in the Gears series, they just talk and talk until their targets blow themselves up so they'll be spared further repeats of the same phrase over and over and over and over and over again.  

 

Looking forward to 5 now, wasn't that interested before but now I kinda want to see how this ends.  

[MetalCaveman]

 

\m/ \m/

[Mister Jack]

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

 

Symphony of the Night might just be my favorite game of all time, so of course I was going to dig this. While the graphics do have a little bit of that 2.5D indie stank on them, I've seen far worse done with this art style so it didn't bother me that much. The gameplay is what matters most, and it shines here. This game seems to have taken the good ideas from previous Castlevania games and combined them all here with some improvements. For example, the soul system from the Sorrow games is in here with the shard system, but there's five types to collect instead of three which opens up a lot of variety in the combat. The drop rate is also far more generous. There's familiars like in Symphony, but they're no longer useless in a fight. Weapons also have command moves like some of the weapons in Symphony, but there's far more of them this time and you can make the moves work universally by mastering them. Guns are actually a viable way to play the game now as long as you keep up with ammo and wear the right equipment to enhance Miriam's gun prowess.

 

Iga seems conscious of criticisms of his past games, particularly that they are thought of as too easy because Bloodstained is much, much harder than any of the previous Castlevania games under his umbrella. Some of the bosses were so hard that I found myself wondering if I had accidentally wandered into the room of an endgame superboss. Healing items are rare and expensive. You can cook food which heals you and gives you permanent stat buffs the first time you eat each dish, but you need to gather the ingredients first. Save points can be spread pretty far sometimes and enemies can have pretty unpredictable attacks so I probably died more in this game than in all the previous Igavania games combined. I'm not going to whip out that hackneyed comparison that game journalists love to make, but it's tough as nails regardless. If you somehow still think the game is too easy, there's also a hard mode where I hear enemies get new attacks, though I haven't had a chance to confirm it, and a nightmare mode which locks you at level 1. You'll find a challenge here if you're looking for one.

 

The story is passable. Not great, not awful. It provides an excuse to explore the castle, which is good enough for me. Music is good, although it doesn't reach the highs of the Castlevania series. That's almost unfair to expect, though. Castlevania has some of the greatest game music of all time. If I have any real serious criticism, it's that sometimes the game isn't clear on where you're meant to go next. Previous Iga games tended to have clear roadblocks or unreachable areas that you could return to after finding a certain item or ability. Here, it's not as obvious. For example, there's an underwater area and Miriam can't dive. I spent a long time looking for an item to unlock a swimming ability but it turns out you're supposed to farm a specific enemy that drops a shard that lets you travel through water. I had to go online on two or three occasions just to figure out where to go next because some of these mandatory shards and items you need to progress are a little too well hidden. I don't have much else negative to say, though. I finished it in about 12 hours, which might not seem like much for 40 bucks, but I do intend to play new game+ on hard mode and there's 13 pieces of free DLC coming including a roguelike mode, a boss revenge mode, and a versus mode. I can't wait.

[toxicitizen]

The Sexy Brutale

 

It's alright. By the end of it, the story gets pretty interesting and there's some neat ideas here. It also has a pretty strong aesthetic and a killer soundtrack. But the gameplay didn't really do anything for me. There's almost never anything to actually figure out for yourself, you usually just gotta follow people around and eavesdrop until they give you the solution. Sometimes you'll be missing a key piece of information and get stuck because what you think you need to do isn't working but that usually just means you stopped following someone too early and missed out on some info. I probably would've loved it if it had been more of a puzzle game.

 

That soundtrack is pretty damn good, though!

 

 

[MetalCaveman]

Halo Wars Definitive Edition.

 

I have HW2 ready to go but I could not remember the story of 1 so I used the game pass thingy to get this one and go through the story on easy just to get back up to date.

[danielpholt]

Cuphead

 

Much to my own surprise, I think Cuphead is one of my favourite games of all time. It's brutally hard, but the way in which it handles that difficulty never left me feeling like I was cheated, it never left me wondering how I died or if I was missing something. Each state of each boss fight is a delicate dance that needs to be learned in order to progress, and once you do progress I was left with this wave of satisfaction that is often rather rare in this medium.

 

Observation

 

Okay so the moment I realized this was the new game from the people who made one of my favourite games of 2017 (No Code's Stories Untold) I knew I was going to love it, and despite having a few issues with the games control scheme early on, I absolutely did love it.

 

I don't really want to say too much about this one, just that I think you should go play it. It's not overly long, doesn't ask too much of the player and has a really fantastic atmosphere and a killer intro sequence. 

 

Also check out Stories Untold.

 

Devil May Cry 5

 

I like Devil May Cry 5 just fine. My only complaint ( and this is deeply personal) is that there's so much choice in terms of weapons and fight-styles that I often found myself bamboozled by choice; ultimately deciding to just un-equip most anything aside from a gun and a sword from both Dante and Nero. With that said, I still had a really fun time with this one, I just wish there was a little less Devil May Cry in this, and a touch more DMC2 (I would watch a Netflix series based on this universe).

 

 

 

[TCP]

Final Fantasy XV

What the fuck even was that?

Spoiler

Did Noctis die? Did Luna come back to life? What.

 

[Mister Jack]

7 hours ago, Ultra TCP said:

Final Fantasy XV

What the fuck even was that?

  Hide contents

Did Noctis die? Did Luna come back to life? What.

 

Spoiler

Yes, he died. They made it pretty clear he had to sacrifice himself to permanently kill Ardyn.

 

[TCP]

Spoiler

So like, isn't it important that they have a King for magical reasons or whatever? Who's going to do that now that he's the last of his line??

 

[Mister Jack]

Spoiler

Nobody. Ardyn pretty much got what he wanted except for the part where Noctis destroyed him in the afterlife.

 

[FMW]

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne

 

This game is too old.  The newer SMT games are better.  Better balance of combat options, better UI, more demons, better story arcs, better save systems.  But SMT Nocturne is such a foundational work to this series I had gotten it into my head that I need to play it.  FINALLY after 3 years of chipping away at this file (to say nothing of multiple failed attempts longer ago) I beat it.  I didn't play on hard, I was probably overleveled, and I would never have gotten the super strong Freikugel spell without finding out about it online.  But still.  I won.  I beat the goddamn game.  This one's been my white whale for a very long time.

 

Do not recommend.  I'm glad to have it done.

[TCP]

19 hours ago, Mister Jack said:

  Hide contents

Nobody. Ardyn pretty much got what he wanted except for the part where Noctis destroyed him in the afterlife.

 

I hate this.

[deanb]

14 hours ago, FMW said:

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne

 

I think you mean:

Shin Megami Tensei III:Nocturne/Lucifers Call (EU name): Featuring Devil May Cry's Dante.

 

I had/have it on PS2 and got stuck on it years ago with some floor puzzle thing (I think I was underleveled for that section tbh). I do try it on emulators every now n then cos I really liked the art style and at the time the sort of "dark pokemon"-esque feel of it, but yeah I'm unlikely to ever finish it. I think it's one of the few games I bought based on a magazine review. In retrospect it was odd I was ever able to find a copy given it was pretty niche back then and non-FF JRPGs were hard to come by 20 years ago.

[FMW]

7 hours ago, deanb said:

 

I think you mean:

Shin Megami Tensei III:Nocturne/Lucifers Call (EU name): Featuring Devil May Cry's Dante.

 

It's unfair that so many games have lame subtitles like Judgement, Awakening, Rising, Rebirth etc and then there's Shin Megami Tensei III with both Nocturne AND Lucifers Call.  Both subtitles are bangers and both are unused by other games.  So many games would be improved by these subtitles.  Bioshock: Lucifer's Call.  Pokemon Aria and Pokemon Nocturne.

[toxicitizen]

Yooka-Laylee

 

Ugh, it's fine. I mean, I guess? Obviously, it was fun enough for me to finish it and for the first couple worlds I was really enjoying it and wondering why the reception was so mixed. But if you're like me and must collect all the things, then you're gonna have to fuck with the minigames and they're almost all trash. The bosses are trash, too. So that leaves only the platforming and collecting that's actually fun but even then it's not exactly the best that's available out there. I found the platforming in A Hat in Time to be much more satisfying once I started to get a feel for the controls. The only thing Yooka-Laylee has over Hat in Time is the graphics. Hat in Time looked kinda basic and generic but Yooka-Laylee has a nice cartoony visual style that looks pretty good. The soundtrack is also really good. That's about it.

 

If you're going to be playing just one indie 3D platformer, Snake Pass is still the GOAT. Play Snake Pass instead.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I played Yooka-Laylee enough to get through the first world and felt like that was enough.

[Mister Jack]

I couldn't even be bothered to get all the pagies in the first world. Yooka-Laylee was such trash that I couldn't believe it. Thank god A Hat in Time was available to wash that taste out of my mouth.

[toxicitizen]

Sane people that value their time:

2 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

Yeah, I played Yooka-Laylee enough to get through the first world and felt like that was enough.

 

56 minutes ago, Mister Jack said:

I couldn't even be bothered to get all the pagies in the first world.

 

Me: