Games You've Beat MMXIX

[Mal]

Why

 

[toxicitizen]

The short answer is because I hate myself.

Edited July 10, 2019 by FLD

[danielpholt]

Void Bastards

 

Wasn't expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did. It's the sort of 'Rogue-lite' that someone who doesn't hate themselves might enjoy; not overly difficult or punishing, but treats death as almost a sort of...refresh.

 

Also looks absolutely awesome and there's tiny dudes running around calling me fuck-face. What's not to love?

 

 

[CorgiShinobi]

12 hours ago, FLD said:

The short answer is because I hate myself.

 

I'm in the same boat. When the game went back on sale for $12, I gave it a shot.

 

It feels hollow. Like sure, it's suppose to be a "spiritual successor," but it doesn't do anything to innovative the formula. Maybe it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario as people were wanting essentially another Banjo-Kazooie. Ironically, it feels like a rip-off even with the original talent behind it. And the voices... there's just something annoying to them now. Doesn't help that you hear them any time you want to navigate the menus.

[TCP]

Super Mario Maker

Hey that single player story mode was pretty fun!

[TheMightyEthan]

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

 

Super good game, managed to get the true ending. I stand by my assessment that combat is a fairly minor part of the game, the only part that bothered me at all was the last fight. 

Spoiler

I kept fighting for way too long, because I didn't realize you were supposed to lose. Sure the voices tell you to give up, but the voices have been giving you shit the whole time, and a major theme of the game was overcoming them, so I didn't realize I was actually supposed to listen to them at that point.

 

[MetalCaveman]

Halo CE

 

Kinda... I mean, I've completed all missions but they weren't all in the same difficulty.  Long story short, past me wanted to try Heroic difficulty while trying to get all skulls and terminals, present me was having none of it and so I started Keyes on easy with a couple of skulls on, and then I learned I would not be able to go back to my Heroic save afterwards.  

 

So yeah, ended up completing Keyes and The Maw on easy, everything else on Heroic, and I still missed a couple of skulls.  

 

[toxicitizen]

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

 

Fuck, this game deserved better. It's so freaking good! It's probably my favorite Ys game yet and definitely the most ambitious by far at over double the length of the previous two. And unlike the Trails series, it doesn't suffer from pacing issues at all. Every single time it seemed like it was about to overstay its welcome, it threw a new curve ball to keep things interesting. The one criticism I'd make against the story is that the lack of a proper antagonist is kinda weird (without spoiling anything, the "antagonist" is more like an abstract concept/force of nature) but Ys was always about dat adventure over anything else, so a survival angle works for this series.

 

Believe it or not, I thought the re-localization was completely serviceable. I played with the (redone, I think?) english voiceovers and it seemed mostly fine to me. The only noticeable issues related to the actual text of the game were typos. Most of those I noticed were early on but it's entirely possible my brain just started filtering them out at some point. It wasn't on the level of XSEED's work but it does give me a small amount of hope that there's a chance, however small, that they won't completely fuck Trails up. No, the real problem was the port.

 

I guess I was among the lucky ones because it only crashed on me about half a dozen times. It sounds like it's still completely unplayable for some people. It was the most annoying kind of crashes, though. The game would completely lock up and remain the top window without actually closing, preventing you from tabbing out of it. So the only option is to reset your PC. The framerate is also all over the place in some areas, which is absolutely ridiculous considering how basic the game looks. This I'm willing to (at least partially) blame on Falcom having shitty coding practices, though, because even Durante had to rewrite the entire rendering pipeline of Cold Steel I and II to get them to what he considered an acceptable framerate on a high end desktop. He also added unlimited draw distance, which Lacrimosa of Dana sorely needed.

 

So yeah, absolutely LOVED the game but I'm crushed all over again knowing that Trails is now in the hands of these fuckers. You'd think that hiring Durante's new studio to port Cold Steel III would be the obvious move but at this point I wouldn't put it past them to either lack the common sense or just not give enough of a shit. Ugh....

 

[Mister Jack]

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3

 

It's been a while since I've played the others but going purely from memory I'd put this one below the first one but above the second one. There's more customization and upgrading in this game compared to MUA2. Being that these are Marvel characters, you don't get armor or weapon drops but instead there are plot relevant crystals that enhance your stats and come in different rarities. Combat can get a little repetitive sometimes, and it's probably obvious to say that your level of enjoyment will be influenced by just how much of a Marvel fan you are. That's not to say the game has no merits on its own, though. A lot of these dungeon crawler games devolve into mindless button mashing, but there's actually some strategy involved here. Stronger enemies have both a health bar and a stagger bar, and certain attacks work better on one bar than the other. Characters can also combine their specials into more powerful synergy attacks. For example, combining one of Storm's tornadoes with Star Lord's flamethrower will make a flame tornado. In general, the combat does a good job of keeping you from just spamming the same attacks the whole time, but I take issue with the recharge rate of the special meter. This is something you can upgrade and enhance, but even by the endgame I was relying more on orb drops than my own attacks to recharge my specials. I'm hoping this gets a balance patch.

 

The story is basically a reimagining of the Infinity War. It works well enough here, but I do hope that Marvel games cool it on the whole Infinity Stones thing going forward now that the movies are done with it. The dialogue and plot beats are very comic-booky, so you shouldn't go into this expecting some deep drama like the Arkham series or Insomniac's Spider-Man. It doesn't take itself very seriously and will take any excuse it can to shove in more Marvel cameos. This is both a good and bad thing. I loved seeing some of my favorite heroes and villains pop up, but there's so many characters to go through that many of them only appear for a brief cameo or a single boss fight and then are never seen again. Then again, if you give everyone more screen time then it means you have fewer characters to work with. You gotta take the bad with the good, I guess.

 

When it comes to endgame (heh) content there are two things I noticed. Beating the game unlocks the Superior difficulty which is naturally more hardcore but also gives you better drops. There are also the Infinity Trials, which are basically challenge rooms you can play to get rewards and costumes. I would have preferred if the Infinity Trials were full-fledged dungeons rather than individual fights you have to load separately every time, but at least it's there. The costumes you unlock seem to just be skins without any sort of stat changing effects like in previous games, but I hear we'll be getting free DLC down the line with actual stat-enhancing costumes. In fact, it sounds like we'll be getting quite a bit of free DLC, so good on them.

 

Regarding the things that suck about the game, I have two main gripes. The biggest issue by far is the camera. While it's not the worst I've seen, it's still bad and had an irritating tendency to get stuck at angles where I couldn't see what the hell was going on. When there's so many attacks with effects flying around, you really need to be able to see where you are. If you can help it, it's usually best to just not fight next to any walls. The other thing I didn't like is there's no shared XP whatsoever. I'm sure this is meant to encourage replaying the game with other characters in theory but in practice this means that certain characters are likely to get left in the dust and become useless in the late game unless you've been using them the entire time. You can collect XP cubes to level up weaker characters, but this only helps so much. At the very least, they don't try to sell you XP cubes as microtransactions. On a positive note, the online actually works. I did notice that sometimes my teammates were jerking around the screen, but my own gameplay was always perfectly smooth and I didn't have any disconnects. If teleporting teammates is the compromise required to get that kind of performance on my end then I'll take it.

 

I know this game has been getting lukewarm reviews but I don't regret buying it. There's a lot here for Marvel fans to enjoy and it's a lot of fun in multiplayer. I can't really recommend waiting for a price drop since it's a Nintendo published game and it will probably never get a price drop, so I guess I'd say if you're curious, watch some gameplay and come to your own conclusion.

Edited July 23, 2019 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

@MetalCaveman Halo doesn't really have "saves", you can just do level select and launch Keyes on Heroic and then it will show you've finished the game on Heroic.

[MetalCaveman]

That's good to know, thanks! \m/ \m/

[toxicitizen]

Dragon Ball FighterZ

 

Picked it back up earlier this week and finished the story mode as well as cleared all the arcade courses, so I guess that counts. Story mode is alright, I guess. It's basically just an excuse to do a bunch of fights and explain why Yamcha is able to fight the Saiyans without getting immediately vaporized. They throw in some light RPG mechanics but they don't really affect things all that much. It's super repetitive and needlessly long, though, so you really have to enjoy the fighting game part to get anything out of it. It's not like the recent Mortal Kombat games where it's almost like a movie with interactive fight scenes.

 

The real game begins now, though: getting gud. Aka getting endlessly destroyed online. If I can find a match, that is. I don't know if the game is supposed to have good netcode or what but I tried playing earlier and whenever I tried to get online the game would just go idle while trying to find a lobby (the opening demo video would literally start playing after a while). After that I'd get a network error and would have to try again. Hopefully this was an isolated incident...

Edited August 9, 2019 by FLD

[TheMightyEthan]

Final Fantasy XV

 

It was so close to being great in so many ways, but in the end all it manages is OK. You can definitely see the troubled development. Nothing fits together, and the story is an absolute wreck. They try so hard to make it seem epic, but it just feels disjointed and small. But throughout you can see this massive, epic story they were going for, and it just feels sad that it never lives up to it.

 

Basically the best part is the opening scene, and it's kinda downhill from there.

[Mr. GOH!]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses. 

 

I neat it a regular game as the Golden Deer a few weeks ago and just finished my Black Eagles New Game+ this morning. I think I've seen enough of the story and support conversations to not need a Blue Lion playthrough to declare that I have completed the game.

 

I loved it. GOTY 2019, even if it was kind of easy even on the hard difficulty setting.

 

Spoilers if you haven't finished as the Black Eagles and Golden Deer.

Spoiler

I sided with Edelgard on my second playthrough and was disappointed it ends with the fight against Rhea rather than the underground humans with nuclear weapons, which is how the Golden Deer playthrough ends after you slay Edelgard. I suspect the DLC may involve the war against the weird underground people. Also, why does Sothis cease to exist when you kill Seiros? 

 

I also feel like the choices you make essentially retcon some of the characters; the Rhea in my Golden Deer playthrough was not evil, whereas the Rhea in my BE playthough burned thousands of innocent people. In my GD run, Edelgard had lots of monsters to help her, while in my BE run, she did not (though maybe that's because she didn't have Byleth on her side so she needed the extra juice).

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Holy shit you beat it twice?! I have a feeling I'll be lucky if I just finish the Black Eagles by the end of the year...

 

*Edit - I just realized I posted MH:W in the wrong thread...

 

*Edit 2 - Also I never posed Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble in here. It was really good. It added some more features that the Advance Wars games had, like leader powers and fuel and ammo limits on units, but where I felt it really shined was the mission design. In the first Tiny Metal the later missions had a tendency to get "harder" by just turning into a slog, where you were just engaged in a battle of attrition, but this one didn't do that, all the missions were a lot of fun to play. I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes either Advance Wars or the first Tiny Metal.

[toxicitizen]

Monster Hunter: World

 

It took me over a year to get back to it but I finally finished the main story. The only reason I put it off for so long is because getting back into it seemed like it would require some amount of work but it all came back to me pretty quickly and I was actually fairly close to the ending, at least in terms of how many main story missions I had left. It still took me an extra 40 hours because I had to grind for new gear twice by the time I was at the actual final mission but that's just how the game goes. I think I could just wait for Iceborne now but I'm gonna keep playing because there's still some cool armor I could upgrade to and some DLC monsters I haven't tried yet. I haven't fought any tempered monsters either, so I have that nightmare to look forward to as well.

 

But yeah, this game is pretty great! Almost makes me sad I missed out on the series for all those years. Only "almost" because from what I understand World introduced a huge amount of QoL improvements and I'm not sure I want to bother with a shittier version of this tbh. Especially not one that was made for the 3DS lol.

 

I don't know if this opinion would be controversial to long-time fans but I kinda hope they stick with World going forward and never go back to handheld exclusivity because this series is way too good for that and I really don't want to have to skip the next game because it's only available on Switch. I probably don't have anything to worry about, though, since this somehow became Capcom's best-selling title of all time in just a single year.

[Mister Jack]

Good news. Capcom has said that future iterations of Monster Hunter will be based on the World formula, which should surprise no one since like you said, it's their best-selling game of all time.

[Mr. GOH!]

Control.

 

This is now my GOTY and I cannot wait for the DLC expansions. The whole game is extremely my shit.

[TCP]

Dragon Quest Builders 2: honestly, it's the best building game I've played since Terraria. Performance on the Switch was pretty poor when you started building a lot but for the most part in the story it ran fine. It's the perfect game for handheld though so the trade off in performance is well worth it. Game play wise, it's a big improvement from the first Dragon Quest Builders. I just wish it gave you more opportunity for creativity in the main story. Fun fact: it's the first Dragon Quest game I've ever completed (I got about 99% of the way through Dragon Quest 9 but gave up at the final boss due to needing to grind). 

 

[danielpholt]

Astral Chain.

 

Astral Chain is a bit like the Andrew Garfield Spider-man franchise. Everything on paper looks amazing. However, when you're finished watching (playing) you're kind of left with a big ol' plate of 'meh'.

 

From a technical perspective, AC is truly impressive. It runs super smooth, and looks interesting whilst doing it, the character design is fun and there's the core of a very interesting plot here. However yeah, it never finds a way to transition that into a good game.

 

Astral Chain. Its fine.

[Mal]

At least it has butts to look at?

[MetalCaveman]

Halo 3. This game is still pretty cool!

 

Now on to Halo 4 and then Halo Wars 2 and with that, my Halo backlog will be completed.  

[TheMightyEthan]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

 

So, that game was absolutely fantastic. Easily my favorite game so far this year. I was tempted to just immediately launch a NG+, which is pretty rare with me.

 

I managed to stumble into the "secret" path where you stay with Edelgard and fight against the church on my first playthrough. That path strikes me as the "true" path, although I haven't seen anything else that refers to it like that.

[TheMightyEthan]

Control

 

Holy shit this game is amazing, though the ending felt slightly abrupt/anticlimactic. The final fight was just too easy compared to the rest of the game, so it felt like it kind of just petered out.

 

I did every side mission except defeat Tomassi. That fight is just stupid, it's too fucking hard to hit him, he does too much damage to you, and his shield comes back too fast.

[Mal]

Fire Emblem: Three Houses 

 

Fantastic game but some issues... 

 

Kind of disjointed story though (I wonder if my choices determined that). Hell, ending was too... I played Golden Deer. 

 

Spoiler

Very idealistic ending and so many things left unexplored. Hell, the Mole People was kind of just there. But yeah, after war conversations... Is it just a single choice!? 

 

Also, the game can be rather easy on normal. I highly recommend Hard or the newer difficulty. With Divine Intervention, you really should be playing with perma-death. 

 

I'll probably have more thoughts later when I consume the old Fire Emblem thread. Now... NG+ time. The Boar against the Eagle!  Then Eagles time! I want to see how Hubert shines. 

Edited September 21, 2019 by Mal