Games You've Beat 2020

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, you basically can't 100% the compendium on a first playthrough due to money shortages.

[Mister Jack]

Ghost of Tsushima

 

I still have a lot of side stuff to do but I finished the main story and all the supporting character stories so that's good enough to post here. I'm surprised just how much I loved this game. A critique I hear over and over is "Assassin's Creed but good" and yeah, that's pretty accurate. This is more or less an Assassin's Creed game without all the tedious Ubisoft baggage (microtransactions, bugs, an overwhelming number of objectives) and with a lot more polish. I would be lying if I said it doesn't check a lot of the open world checkboxes. You clear out enemy camps, you do stealth kills in tall grass, you track footprints, and you do climbing/platforming challenges. All these things are competently implemented but they don't really bring anything new to the table. If this was all there was to the game it would be fairly average but there are two big saving graces to Ghost of Tsushima.

 

First, the combat in this game is great. Sword strikes feel nice and heavy and the constant juggling of stances for managing different enemy types along with using your tools for crowd control is really satisfying. If you time your blocks just right you can also do parries that you can follow up with a powerful deathblow, but this is a lot trickier than it sounds, especially when you're being attacked by a group. Make no mistake, if you rush in and button mash you will quickly get your ass handed to you.You have to fight like a samurai, not a barbarian. It's also worth mentioning that stealth and open combat are usually both viable options for clearing your objective. I personally liked to start with stealth to thin out the herd a little, then jump out in the open and yell for all the remaining enemies to come get some. It's a lot of fun.
 

The other thing this game does so, so right is the presentation. If this isn't the most beautiful open world I've ever played in then it's at least in the top 3. The world here is smaller than most open world games, but Sucker Punch took that smaller space and crafted an absolutely gorgeous environment that is oozing with atmosphere and natural splendor. I took so many screenshots just while riding around the map and I would gladly make any one of them into my desktop wallpaper. It looks that good and it feels super rewarding to explore the island when there's always some breathtaking new sight to see. As if that wasn't enough, the game's navigation blends seamlessly into the world itself. Animals you find will lead you to secrets and the wind blows in the direction of your current objective. Instead of following a map marker, you observe the grass, the trees, and the leaves to find your way. It makes you feel much more connected to the world and it's really cool. I won't say there's no map markers at all, but they only pop up once you're extremely close to your goal and need to narrow down your search area. You can also minimize the HUD if you wish to make it even more immersive. There's a black and white Kurosawa mode if you want to play it in the style of his movies, but while I appreciate the gesture I just can't imagine missing out on these colors.

 

The story is fine. It's a solid if unremarkable samurai movie tale. The characters are also fine. I don't love them but I do like them, if that makes sense. However, even though this plot treads familiar ground there were still a few points where I felt an emotional impact. It's a story we've seen before but it's presented well with great music and strong performances, especially in Japanese. It's hard not to get at least a little invested when it's told with this much style.

 

Spoiler

The two endings are also rather intriguing. The differences in the endings themselves are nothing we haven't seen plenty of times before, but when you put them into context with the rest of the game's story you can interpret them in some pretty interesting ways. I'm already seeing debates on which ending feels more "right" and there are some pretty strong arguments being made on both sides. I could see either one of them being canon for different reasons.

 

On one final note, I was really happy to see that this game doesn't lean too hard into realism to the point where it becomes a detriment to your enjoyment. You don't have to watch a slow animation to pick up every item you come across, you don't have to wait for your horse to catch up to you when you whistle for it, and some of the physics are kind of "video gamey." Is it realistic? No. BUT IT'S FUN, DAMN IT!

[toxicitizen]

Death Stranding

 

Yeah, this is definitely a Hideo Kojima game by Hideo Kojima. I honestly don't have that much to say about it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, gameplay and story both. At one point I was watching what I was sure was the ending cutscene and got seriously worried the game was going off the rails but it turned out not to be and there were a few more hours to go. Although that particular cutscene did grace us with what might be the stupidest line of dialogue to ever appear in a video game.

 

 

 

I'm just gonna assume it sounded real fucking clever in Japanese or something because lmao.

 

Other than that, the ending sequence was a bit protracted but that's par for the course with Kojima. Although one particular bit was kind of obnoxious because it kept alternating between an exposition dump and giving you back control while credits rolled and it seems like you're supposed to be doing something to trigger the next bit of story but I'm pretty sure you're only in control to distract you until it's time for the next bit of exposition. It's basically just tricking you into watching the credits and the game still has a bit to go at that point, so it comes off as pretty self-indulgent. I THINK I get what he was going for but the way it kept putting you back in the same spot kinda undermined the effect.

 

The gameplay was basically what I expected and I honestly loved it even more than I thought I would. Hiking through this haunting post-apocalypse is just so relaxing and soothing. At one point I spent like an hour hiking my way up a particularly steep mountain and kept eating shit, fucking up my cargo and reloading and it was the most fun I've had with a video game in months. In building an entire game around what would be considered downtime in any other game, Kojima basically created a game with no downtime to speak of. Until you unlock the ziplines, at least. Those things are too useful not to use (especially when going for S ranks on Premium orders) but when you've got a huge network of them set up, riding from one end of the map to the other takes a few minutes of just staring at the screen.

 

So yeah, not disappointed with this one at all. It's good to know Kojima still has it in him to write a complete and satisfying story. This is thankfully no MGSV. I'm eager to see what he makes next. Here's hoping it's something completely weird and out of left field again!

Edited August 4, 2020 by FLD

[TheMightyEthan]

That game is only exactly what it wants to be, but it bes it perfectly.

[Mister Jack]

Nioh 2: The Tengu's Disciple

 

It's pretty short with just two main missions that last about an hour each if you don't die and a handful of side missions that can range from 10 to 30 minutes each depending on skill level and mission type, but the whole season pass is only 20 dollars so I kind of expected this. There are, however, multiple new bosses and they're pretty good. A few of the them are recycled from the first game but they've been redesigned with new attacks that make them stronger than before. Whether they're harder or not is a matter of opinion. Nioh 2 gives you far more defensive and offensive options than Nioh 1 so at least for me personally I didn't struggle with them nearly as much, but I've gotten pretty good at Nioh after playing it for so long. Full disclosure, I was also overleveled for this DLC. I've heard that the original game's DLC expected you to be at least halfway through NG+ before you tackle it, which a lot of people complained about, so this one is balanced in a way that makes it accessible right after you beat the campaign. However, I was already halfway through NG+ so I pretty much breezed through it. I'm sure when I eventually replay it on NG+ difficulty it will be much tougher. The new splitstaff weapon is pretty cool and introduces a new style of gameplay since it's a weapon based more on draining ki and then going for deathblows than it is on doing large amounts of direct damage.

 

I think this applies to everyone regardless of DLC but there are also new accessories called picture scrolls that you can equip. These are rare, high level drops that provide very powerful bonuses but in order to unlock them you have to first go inside of the scroll and complete a mission. Each scroll has one static perk and two random perks, but if you don't like the random perks you have a limited number of attempts to re-roll them by completing the mission again.

 

Not bad so far. Looking forward to the second episode.

[TheMightyEthan]

Ghost of Tsushima

 

What an absolutely fantastic game. Just wow. The combat could deal with some slight tweaking (main thing being sometimes I know I hit the button to dodge/parry/block but Jin just doesn't for some reason), but even that is pretty great overall. Best Assassin's Creed game since Black Flag, or possibly Brotherhood.

 

5/5

 

Also

[toxicitizen]

Your insanely positive reviews on top of all the gifs and whatnot I've been seeing online really make me hope this is one Sony will bring to PC down the line. I don't expect it to happen for at least a couple years if not more but I wanna play this game so bad lol.

[TheMightyEthan]

Do it now!

[toxicitizen]

That's kinda hard without a PS4.

 

For now I'll just have to settle for Horizon on Friday. The closer to launch it gets, the more tempted I am to pull the trigger despite the outrageous price...

[TheMightyEthan]

Finished Ratchet and Clank last night. It was fine. The gameplay itself was just okay, a little overly simple, but the game overall was polished to a shine. It honestly felt like a Nintendo game in a lot of ways. I don't regret playing it.

 

3/5

[Mal]

Ratchet and Clank probably wouldn't fit with me too well now (quite grindy in the bad way) but teenage me, fuck yes. Loved those games. It's a series of a different era/for a different age. Fond memories but not one that I want to relive. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I wouldn't have called it grindy, but it was very samey throughout. I liked the different weapons, but every enemy felt basically the same to fight, and every fight was just "you're in a room/on a platform, kill everything".

[MetalCaveman]

Ghost Recon Breakpoint

 

Man this game... This game! 

 

Compared to when it released it has improved a bunch, in particular, the Ghost Experience stuff added a ton of customisation, you can select different difficulties for enemies, and for survival, change hud size and elements, subtitle size and background, etc.

 

Want giant subtitles but no hud? Sure!

Permanent hud and no subtitles? Yeah, here it is.

Want enemies that are blind and deaf, but you'll run out of stamina in an instant, and just falling down a ledge kills you? Go for it!

Maybe enemies that are omniscient, but you have infinite stamina and bandages? Hell, why not!

 

And everything in between.  

 

Most important of all, at least in terms of how much it affects gameplay, you can now turn off gear score and tiered loot. So now an M4 is just and M4, whereas originally it a green M4 was worse than a blue M4 unless it's level was higher, but the purple M4 was better than either.  

 

This makes the game much more fun, and gives you the freedom to select a mission appropriate loadout, or pick whatever you like the most, as opposed to always having to change to whatever the best gear you have is.

 

Unfortunately, it also highlights the fact that the game is balanced around tiered loot and gear score. Specially when the Wolves are involved, they're meant to be the elite enemies that hunt you down if detected, highly trained and equipped with state of the art weapons... Except that only matters when gear score is on.  They're a threat because they're usually 10-15 levels above you, making it extremely difficult to kill them, with no gear score they're just normal enemies with fancy looking weapons.  

 

Levelling up and unlocking skills is also somewhat meaningless without gear score on, there are some things that are still helpful, like increased stamina, more healing items, more ammo, etc, but others, like unlocking better loot tiers in the shop, are useless.

 

Still, that it's much more fun without all that stuff on just shows how pointless it was to add all that in the first place.  

 

Storywise... Boy, where do I start. There's a ton of different stories this game is trying to tell, and it ends up not telling you anything, you have Walker, with his Big Boss approach to creating a world for soldiers, except he only cares about American soldiers. You have Skell and his desire to create a better world with technology, while at the same time being open to developing weaponized drones. You have the AI that spits names of people, predicting who is more likely to cause some kind of global crisis if killed and marking them for death. There's that CIA dude that's working with the other dude, who's working with someone in the shadows, who has some kind of interest in drone technology and betrayed the Ghosts. The whole Wonderland thing, that seems to imply there's way more Wolf bases around the world. So much stuff that just gets a passing mention, or gets talked only once during a mission, or simply falls flat because they couldn't pick one story and develop it properly, instead telling tiny chunks of all these different plotlines and then sort of forgetting them.

 

There's that bit about project Deus, and the nature of transhumanism, and whether "The Future Must Be Human" is a worthy ideal, even if to uphold it one must murder innocents.

 

THERE'S SO MUCH STUFF, and a lot of it could make for it's own game/expansion. But it always fails to capitalise on any of this stuff.

 

Even at the end, there's this implication of 

Spoiler

Oh crap, this drones now have a will of their own.

 

But that's it! That's the end! And the first expansion seems to ignore it.

 

Speaking of the expansion, I didn't play it, only the first mission, which is available for free. Main issue being that buying the season pass would cost more than triple what I paid for the game, and the only thing I care about is the mission set, all of the other stuff the season pass offers has already been unlocked or it's cosmetic stuff I don't want. If you wanted to buy the expansion alone? Good luck, because you can't just buy it, you need to buy it using Ghost Coins, and of course, the damn thing costs 1900 Ghost Coins but it's impossible to buy 1900 Ghost Coins, you need to do some math and figure out which packs will get you what you need. That also ends up costing way more than what I paid for the game, so unless it goes on sale, and I mean SALE, I don't see myself playing it any time soon.

 

So yeah TL;DR:

 

Game has improved a ton since launch, and while I had fun with it, unless you're a hardcore, diehard fan of the Ghost Recon series, I wouldn't recommend it. The Terminator stuff was fun though!  

[Thursday Next]

Links Awakening - Switch

 

It's barely a Legend of Zelda game. I score it meh out of ten.

[danielpholt]

15 hours ago, Thursday Next said:

Links Awakening - Switch

 

It's barely a Legend of Zelda game. I score it meh out of ten.

 

 

The Last of Us Part II

 

I'd struggle to say I really 'enjoyed' my time with it, but that's more to do with the nature of the story its telling, and the world you're inhabiting than the quality of the game itself. It's a Naughty Dog game, with all that entails. Brilliantly engaging story. Beautiful visuals. Incredibly realised characters....with a fairly mediocre action game holding it all together. 

 

Props for the accessibility options though. We need more of that going forward. Even just being able to change enemy AI difficulty was massive for me. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I really liked Link's Awakening, and I bounced off the original version hard. I get what you're saying about it not really being a Zelda game, what with there being no Zelda or Ganon, but it's still great. I wish they would remake A Link to the Past in the same style.

[Thursday Next]

18 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

Yeah, I really liked Link's Awakening, and I bounced off the original version hard. I get what you're saying about it not really being a Zelda game, what with there being no Zelda or Ganon, but it's still great. I wish they would remake A Link to the Past in the same style.

 

I really didn't, it's not just the lack of Zelda, Ganon, the tri-force, the master sword. It's the stuff like the chain chomps and goombas randomly being in the game. It just feels like they were making an adventure game, chucked in a load of placeholder assets and then just decided that it was going to be a "Zelda" game so they could launch it.

[Thursday Next]

Ghost of Tsushima - Platinumed. That was fun.

 

Spoiler

I let Shimura live. WIll look at a video of the other choice I guess.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Spoiler

How does he react if you do that?

 

[Thursday Next]

11 minutes ago, TheMightyEthan said:

  Hide contents

How does he react if you do that?

 

 

Spoiler

You have a little convo about how the shogunate will hunt you down. When you get to your new home Yuna asks if Shimura will join the hunt and you say "prolly not". You get some natty red and blue ghost armour "Ghost Transcendant" or something like that.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake

 

I really liked it, though as everyone else has said the ending was opaque as shit. I listened to a deep dive podcast though and now I feel like I understand everything. I had no idea how much they had changed about the actual story from the original. Pretty cool.

 

4/5

[deanb]

Ghost of Tsushima

 

Also Platinumed, since it turned out I was only missing like 3 trophies (though two of those were oddly specific ones so wouldn't ever get without a guide, but at least they weren't "go and get all the flowers").

 

 

And choice wise I

Spoiler

killed him. Still got that ghost transcendent thing; must be from doing the platinum as I'd though I'd got it from honouring Taka's grave

 

The "guiding wind" thing, and the smoke pillars, and birds and such are really quite neat and would be nice to see in future games (though it's odd that it's not until 2/3 in that it tells you about the pillars of smoke thing). But I'd wager it's like nemesis system where we go "oh that's quite neat" and it never shows up in any other game ever again. Largely it's otherwise largely a "competent" game, not really bringing too much major to the table but very solid. Like if it came from Ubisoft you wouldn't be very surprised.

 

I do have a few minor grievances with it. The mission directives can be quite vague; e.g "kill the khotun", with no direction of where he is (and not like you get very accurate maps when you're in a fort). Also be nice if the hook didn't require you to be jumping/falling to use and could just look at a point and latch on to it. Also the "stances" thing is quite neat, but when you're up against multiple types at once that can get quite annoying trying to swap, and then you're wailing on the wrong type.

[TheMightyEthan]

Control: AWE

 

Between the base game, Foundation, and AWE, I'd saw AWE is by far the weakest part. It doesn't really have much development, you just fight the same boss several times, with little in the way of variation between encounters. It was also pretty light on lore, which is weird considering it's tying this game into the Alan Wake universe. Still fun, but not as great as the base game or Foundation. The end though... 

Spoiler

There's a teaser for an Alan Wake sequel and boy howdy am I stoked for that.

 

3/5

[MetalCaveman]

Code Vein

 

 

Spoiler

Io!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

Probably the easiest Soulslike I've played. Bloodborne had the Ludwig's that was awesome, here, the Zweihander crushes EVERYTHING. Transform it into a Fortified Zweihander and you're an unstoppable killing machine. Depths bosses go down in 2-3 hits, one if you stack enough buffs.  Even story bosses are a joke most of the time, I only died a couple of times to bosses and mostly because I tried to play defensively, or got distracted while applying buffs, and that one time I tried to use Final Journey, a skill that increases your attack, speed and heals you completely, but kills you after 1 minute.

 

Still, it was really fun, I enjoyed my time with it, save for the Cathedral of Fuck Off and the last area with the spikes that shoot out from the wall. Other than that, pretty cool! I liked the combination of the more modern city environments and the old dungeon/castle areas, music was good, main issue is the super limited amount of outfits, you can change and customise the existing ones to get different looks, but still, it needs more variety, specially, I would have liked to unlock some of the outfits other characters use, that would have been fun.

 

Blood codes can be a bit confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it they're an interesting mechanic, specially because you can unlock gifts(skills) to equip them on other blood codes and then mix and match according to your play style. I didn't mess around too much with this though, as I only focused on the gifts that increased physical damage and one that heals you when you get hit.  Took a bit of time to get used to, but once I was able to time the cooldowns and ichor usage, I was able to constantly keep my main two skills active pretty much all the time.  

 

Overall, a pretty fun game, I'd like to see a sequel, maybe after Scarlet Nexus.  

 

Spoiler

Although, given that it's revealed that Code Vein connects with the God Eater series, I wonder how they'll handle that, if it takes place before GE3 then would Fenrir welcome the revenants as another weapon against aragami, or would they just treat them as enemies?

 

Does this mean that SN also takes place in the GE world? Is this some kind of God Eater Cinematic Universe?  

 

Or it could be that they just put in a Vajhra in here just for the hell of it.  

 

I even thought about going for the Platinum, before reading about a trophy that requires you to either play through the game 100 times, or spend hours grinding online and/or offline. Essentially, to get the trophy for reputation level 30, you need 400 medals, with a guaranteed 4 found per playthrough, you get one for defeating a boss online, or they can sometimes drop from some enemies, but with a really low drop rate. So yeah, that'll have to wait for a while.  

 

Edit: And.... I just learned that they added a challenge map called the Tower of Trials, where you can farm for these things...

Edited September 6, 2020 by MetalCaveman

[Thursday Next]

13 hours ago, MetalCaveman said:

Code Vein

 

 

Thought the game looked interesting, but I seem to remember seeing a clip of the bosses and they were all just waifu pole dancers which seems a bit dull.