What games are you playing 2014?

[Cmdr_King]

Nah, there's just two versions of the game.  Flying Fairy, which was the initial release, and For the Sequel, which is Flying Fairy with all the polish added.  For the Sequel is the version that was used for localization,  but it is available in japan.

Proceed immediately to nearest store and give them your 6000 yen yip yip yip.

[Grefter]

If I told you my dick was Aggressively Generic would you love it 7ever?

Planescape: Torment - Up to Clerk's Ward.  It has been so long I forget how to start so many side quests.  I should just play without doing them.  It gnaws at me focus though and I struggle to keep doing what I am doing.  Also I am being lazy and avoiding try to fix a crash bug I get when I enter the art gallery (only really need to go there to get Styx Ice). 

Otherwise I am listening to a podcast about Dark Souls while I still try to understand it and play

Pokemans - you really do go a long way between badges 1 - 3 in this.

[Fenrir]

I'm starting to get really fond of all the stupid names present-Square gives to its games. I'm looking forward to their next game titles more than to their next games.



Gungnir (PSP): That game doesn't even appear on the PSP/Vita store if you don't search for it.

Unlike Yggdra Union and Knights in the Nightmare (which come from alternate dimensions where videogames are completely different), Gungnir feels like a traditional SRPG... at first. Then it starts introducing all the more and more crazy Sting systems.

Jesus the mechanics. So many things. Elemental affinity, delay, range sweet spot, capacity, scrambling, tactics points, alchemy, weapon leveling/weapon skills, war gods, recruiting people at the guild or at the other place, etc.
The most important weird mechanic is that, while the enemy army acts like a regular CTB army, you can choose to keep using the same unit over and over with some penalties. The penalties aren't huge; you can use only two units and have no penalties. The game does encourage teamplay with combo attacks though, and leveling doesn't have much of an effect.


Like other Sting games there should be stress involved, in that there are way too many mechanics and every decision feels like it has big risk vs reward consequences  (much more than in say FFT or FE when you can relax at times) and no option to grind.

The balance is weird though. You get rewarded for finishing battles quickly and not having your units die, by treasure chests appearing on the next stage.
Sounds legit, but treasure chests basically take FOREVER to open, nuking your chances of a high score next mission.
So now I do well in one battle, get the treasure in the next, then do well again, etc.


About not-gameplay stuff, story is fairly standard (I was surprised at the beginning though with Teresa/Noah)  and character design is moe shit.
You can equip some bamboo sticks and throw them at the enemy though so that's something.

[Meeplelard]

Nah, there's just two versions of the game.  Flying Fairy, which was the initial release, and For the Sequel, which is Flying Fairy with all the polish added.  For the Sequel is the version that was used for localization,  but it is available in japan.

Proceed immediately to nearest store and give them your 6000 yen yip yip yip.

This is also why the game took forever to come out in the west.  Bravely Default: Flying Fairy was a 2012 release, I believe, but they held off and instead gave us a superior version.  Pretty much same thing that happened with Star Ocean 3, all things considered, and Capcom just announced they're doing the same with Monster Hunter 4 (aka skipping original release for western release, and going straight to localizing the superior version.)

Honestly, I am ok with this practice. Waiting longer does suck, but if it means we get a better version and don't get suckered into buying a game twice, then I'll wait the extra time!


SPEAKING OF GAMES THAT WE ONLY GOT THE ENHANCED VERSION OF IN THE STATES!!!

Tales of Graces F: Malik and Pascal are hiding something...wait, no they aren't, and by no they aren't, I mean "yeah, there is still a lot more than meets the eye because seriously, these things don't resolve themselves that fast!"

[NotMiki]

y no PS3 ToV ;_;

[Niu]

I'm starting to get really fond of all the stupid names present-Square gives to its games. I'm looking forward to their next game titles more than to their next games.



Gungnir (PSP): That game doesn't even appear on the PSP/Vita store if you don't search for it.

Unlike Yggdra Union and Knights in the Nightmare (which come from alternate dimensions where videogames are completely different), Gungnir feels like a traditional SRPG... at first. Then it starts introducing all the more and more crazy Sting systems.

Jesus the mechanics. So many things. Elemental affinity, delay, range sweet spot, capacity, scrambling, tactics points, alchemy, weapon leveling/weapon skills, war gods, recruiting people at the guild or at the other place, etc.
The most important weird mechanic is that, while the enemy army acts like a regular CTB army, you can choose to keep using the same unit over and over with some penalties. The penalties aren't huge; you can use only two units and have no penalties. The game does encourage teamplay with combo attacks though, and leveling doesn't have much of an effect.


Like other Sting games there should be stress involved, in that there are way too many mechanics and every decision feels like it has big risk vs reward consequences  (much more than in say FFT or FE when you can relax at times) and no option to grind.

The balance is weird though. You get rewarded for finishing battles quickly and not having your units die, by treasure chests appearing on the next stage.
Sounds legit, but treasure chests basically take FOREVER to open, nuking your chances of a high score next mission.
So now I do well in one battle, get the treasure in the next, then do well again, etc.


About not-gameplay stuff, story is fairly standard (I was surprised at the beginning though with Teresa/Noah)  and character design is moe shit.
You can equip some bamboo sticks and throw them at the enemy though so that's something.

This is actually the most forgiving Sting game, as they made the status in this game so very much overpowered. When worse come to the worst, you can just build a legion of sorceress class and have them spam Ice Rod none stop because the freeze status is ridiculously good. Not to mention magic ignores height completely, making it even more ridiculous.

As for the chest, 80% of them are trash, only a couple of them has good stuff. I suggest you use a guide here and aim for the chests that are valuable (aka, those with none suck 4 star weapons or accessory that reduce charge time).

The plot has a huge cut in its script due to the writer was not satisfied about something in the original draft. Thanks to that, Marietta lost her appearance in this game, and the new Grim Angel that suppose to show up also got removed.

[Meeplelard]

y no PS3 ToV ;_;

Apparently, Microsoft actually made a deal with Namco that if ToV is released stateside, it will be exclusive to the 360 in the states.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

y no PS3 ToV ;_;

Apparently, Microsoft actually made a deal with Namco that if ToV is released stateside, it will be exclusive to the 360 in the states.

I would imagine that porting over most JRPGs to the Western console market at this point is a question of whether or not you can get a publisher to give you money to do it.  It's probably not the most inviting business forecast.

Anyway, XCOM!  Anybody played with the second wave option "training roulette" enabled?  Basically all the skills that aren't directly related to one of your on-use skills like run and gun or whatever can show up in any skill tree.  I have a sniper who has the skill that gives her two shots per Overwatch now.  Ho ho ho.

e:  Of course I named her Natasha "Black Widow" Romanova because I'm re-reading Brubaker's run on Captain America/Winter Soldier/Captain America and she sure does shoot a lot of heads with a sniper rifle in that.

[NotMiki]

I would imagine that porting over most JRPGs to the Western console market at this point is a question of whether or not you can get a publisher to give you money to do it.  It's probably not the most inviting business forecast.

You would think.  But we still get, like, every Atelier game, so apparently there must still be money to be made.

[Grefter]

Anyway, XCOM!  Anybody played with the second wave option "training roulette" enabled?  Basically all the skills that aren't directly related to one of your on-use skills like run and gun or whatever can show up in any skill tree.  I have a sniper who has the skill that gives her two shots per Overwatch now.  Ho ho ho.

Haven't done it myself but my older brother ragequit a run with it after getting shitty skills and 3/4 of his recruits being heavies.  He doesn't even hate heavies like I do, but when you can't get an Assault shits kind of fucked.

Planescape: Torment - My evil Mage play through has taught me two new *regrets*.  I regret forgetting that Vhailor is resistant to Piercing damage.  Sitting there for 10 minutes punching him to death once was pretty painful.  Then forgetting to save and fucking up absorbing the Paranoid Incarnation is my second regret.

Things to remember.  If you are going to melee himm you should memorise more melee buffs if evil before that fight.  Put some more points in to Str so you can get some mileage out of Improved Strength.  Learn Fists of Iron so you have sommething other than normal punches.  Don't bother trying to be Lawful Evil, so much good Evil is tied to Chaotic and you will just end up Neutral Evil.  I could have got the Entropic Blade to help with Vhailor.

Making players fight a Piercing resistant enemy with 100% magic resist is all kinds of fucked in 2nd Ed rules game where mage weapons are restricted to Daggers only. 

On the other hand Missiles of Patience work on him, so if I was able to rest I could have just filled up my 16 or so level 1 slots with that and face tanked him while shooting him to death with that just fine.  Missiles of Patience is a ridiculous spell.

The writing in this game has only get better as I got older and have a better appreciation for theme and can actually appreciate and see resonance in story telling etc.  There is even just stuff I appreciate more now than I used to.  I knew Juliette and Montague was an obvious reference, but enjoying seeing Morte recommend the application of DENNIS system to Montague to get back at Juliette for trying to play mind games with him.  Apparently that totes Chaotic Good.

Ignus sucks I regret using him the whole game.  I really missed Dak'kon after selling him into slavery.  Morte still thinks you are a bro no matter what you do.

Torment supports Evil play through the quests, but it really doesn't fit too well in the narrative.  I had my evil dude unmake himself rather than go to the Blood War because fuck all this shit.  0 fucks given that all companions lifeless corpses will float in the Negative Material plane forever.

[Meeplelard]

I would imagine that porting over most JRPGs to the Western console market at this point is a question of whether or not you can get a publisher to give you money to do it.  It's probably not the most inviting business forecast.

You would think.  But we still get, like, every Atelier game, so apparently there must still be money to be made.

If jRPGs required an outside publisher, than we wouldn't have gotten ToGf or ToX.  I think they're still planning on releasing Tales games here.   Also stuff like Ni No Kuni

It's a pretty unfound statement frankly.  No, jRPGs are not mega money makers, but, FF13 aside, they also don't have colossal budgets so they only need to be moderately successful, which I suspect there's a strong enough fanbase that they break even on localization costs at least. 

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Modern HD console development is inherently pretty expensive. That's the whole reason that the industry is headed in the direction that it is.

[Pyro]

Bravely Default:

The Elf said it quite nicely, but let me add one aspect that I think Bravely Default compares favorably to FF5: The steady flow of new jobs and abilities into your hands.

Thus far the game has CONSTANTLY been delivering new shiny abilities and jobs at a nice pace. It takes a very long time to master  class because of the JP involved (17000+ JP to JL16). Earlygame you play around with combining the low-level abilities of classes and this is fairly interesting when combined with the fact that you constantly get new classes. As the game ages you get fewer new classes but in exchange you start to access the high-level class abilities, and those things DELIVER. Examples include things like 'make damage ITD', "Everyone gets +1 BP every turn", "Automatically revive someone as a free action if they are dead when you take your turn", "4x damage to all enemies upon a KO"), and so on. Also at this point you can see what the classes have to offer and start really making plans for how you want to combine the classes to do horrible and wonderful things.

Basically Bravely Default deserves high praise for the ability to balance the exploration of the class/ability system with the management of a team that has to compete against competent enemies.

[Tide]

Yes, I'm still alive even though I have posted in a few months >_>. Mostly been replying WA games. Goal is to learn every WA game in the series between myself and a fellow WA runner by 2015. This will likely end in tears.

Wild ARMS 4 - No news here. Got a god luck run with shitty execution. Clocked in at 5:23. Pretty sure that 5:30ish is basically the consistent time. More practice before C4L likely though

Wild ARMS 3 - Preliminary route is on GameFAQs. A nico runner recently clocked in 9:30. Time to review his run later this week to scrutinize for changes.

Wild ARMS ACF - Need more practice. Generally know what I'm doing although I'm not sure if there are any major skips that I'm missing out on. Block puzzles need to die. Need to learn to move quickly on invisible platforms without using the Tinder staff. Pain. But not as painful as...

Wild ARMS XF - This is a bad speed game. How bad? To our knowledge, the Japanese runners have refused to speedrun this game. And these are the guys who do Dragonquest RTAs. But sanity is overrated, so I started to do some routing yesterday. Took me 5 hours to get through Chapter 1. Promising >_>. The general strategy for most of these early battles has been to use the item dupe glitch to get money, then get three generics with good base RFX and MAG set up in Excavator with Elementalist EQ, Gadgeteer EQ and Elementalist OC. These three units proceed to sweep random enemies with the power of gems. Meanwhile, Clarissa and Levin spend time in varying classes to prepare for their set up towards the end, namely moving towards getting Widespread and Elementalist EQ. No idea what to do with Felius and Labby really although I've kept Labby as Fantastica for Rush because against elementally resistant enemies, Clarissa is my best source of quick killing things through Sacrifice. If NEB is correct, the enemies that spawn for every stage are the same every time you play the stage so I'll be making Excel maps and charts when I get the chance. There may be a faster way than using Excavators with gems and aprons. I could use a second hand looking at this.

[SnowFire]

I was getting at the fact that, in PE1, you basically gain superpowers and fight off Eve because of a corneal transplant.  While the initial transmission of Eve is also due to a transplant, there's also a lengthy bit where it's clear she'd have never been able to take over except Melissa, inexplicably, ODed on immuno-suppresants.  So the net message is more "Transplants help people live better lives, just don't work yourself so hard you become a horrible monster".

The two halves of the statement make no sense when put together.  Like "a diet low in LDL cholesterol will help you live a longer and healthier life, just don't drink and drive."  Still it's an admirable cleaning up from "people who sign organ donor forms for their loved ones deserve to be raped and then burned alive."

Look, officer.  Doctor's orders I drink 5 glasses of red wine a day.  It's my heart, you see.  You can let me go just this once, right?  Check my license, I'm not even an organ donor, so you know I'm trustworthy.

[Grefter]

Trust me, I am a business owner.

[AndrewRogue]

99-108: Artorias. So I'm not gonna beat him faster than Sanctuary Guardian.

109: Giant Knight. Derp.

110-111: Holy shit crystal hollows hit hard. Archers can one-shot me.

112: Channeler. I regret this low durability.

112-113: See 110-111.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Trust me, I am a business owner.

The term they prefer is "job creator" and they deserve to be worshiped as gods.

[AndrewRogue]

Fallout: New Vegas - Forgot to mention I've been playing this. Made it to New Vegas. Despite generally being a good guy, I concluded that Mr. House wasn't doing a good job being in charge of New Vegas so he met with an unfortunate end. Now Yes Man has been installed. I'm not really sure what to do now. I feel like the remaining plot is kinda short, so I should actually just spend time dicking around?

[Sierra]

Probably 80-90% of the game is dicking around. In practice though, remaining plot varies depending on who you're working for. Yes Man should've tasked you with dealing with the various minor factions hanging out around Vegas. Each one of those will be their own quest chain (which you could have activated without being prodded by the main plot though, hence why I say the majority of the game is just random sidequesting). And almost every place you go to knock out one quest's minor objective opens up other quests! (The interconnected nature of the game's locations is of course one of those things I love about FONV.)

You are weirdly on task with the rushing right to Vegas to deal with the plot, man you must still be thinking this is a short game or something crazy like that.

Dunno if you got the DLC or not, but it's varying shades of worth it. Dead Money rules for atmosphere (not so much for gameplay, but it does get you an outstanding energy weapon + optimal light armor); Honest Hearts is pretty bland aside from the survivalist journals you find while exploring (these are great though); Old World Blues is every flavor of win; Lonesome Road I think had more potential than it lived up to but is still decent.

~

Shadowrun Returns Returns: Oh right the new campaign came out. I started up an ork melee specialist, because it seemed the farthest thing from All-Natural Elfgirl Machinegunner (don't need no implants to frag you from across the map). This time, I intend to become a robot as soon as finances allow. Still, it's difficult to resist loading up the base campaign MC just to slaughter that first boss before he can run away.

[Fenrir]

I'm starting to get really fond of all the stupid names present-Square gives to its games. I'm looking forward to their next game titles more than to their next games.



Gungnir (PSP): That game doesn't even appear on the PSP/Vita store if you don't search for it.

Unlike Yggdra Union and Knights in the Nightmare (which come from alternate dimensions where videogames are completely different), Gungnir feels like a traditional SRPG... at first. Then it starts introducing all the more and more crazy Sting systems.

Jesus the mechanics. So many things. Elemental affinity, delay, range sweet spot, capacity, scrambling, tactics points, alchemy, weapon leveling/weapon skills, war gods, recruiting people at the guild or at the other place, etc.
The most important weird mechanic is that, while the enemy army acts like a regular CTB army, you can choose to keep using the same unit over and over with some penalties. The penalties aren't huge; you can use only two units and have no penalties. The game does encourage teamplay with combo attacks though, and leveling doesn't have much of an effect.


Like other Sting games there should be stress involved, in that there are way too many mechanics and every decision feels like it has big risk vs reward consequences  (much more than in say FFT or FE when you can relax at times) and no option to grind.

The balance is weird though. You get rewarded for finishing battles quickly and not having your units die, by treasure chests appearing on the next stage.
Sounds legit, but treasure chests basically take FOREVER to open, nuking your chances of a high score next mission.
So now I do well in one battle, get the treasure in the next, then do well again, etc.


About not-gameplay stuff, story is fairly standard (I was surprised at the beginning though with Teresa/Noah)  and character design is moe shit.
You can equip some bamboo sticks and throw them at the enemy though so that's something.

This is actually the most forgiving Sting game, as they made the status in this game so very much overpowered. When worse come to the worst, you can just build a legion of sorceress class and have them spam Ice Rod none stop because the freeze status is ridiculously good. Not to mention magic ignores height completely, making it even more ridiculous.

As for the chest, 80% of them are trash, only a couple of them has good stuff. I suggest you use a guide here and aim for the chests that are valuable (aka, those with none suck 4 star weapons or accessory that reduce charge time).

The plot has a huge cut in its script due to the writer was not satisfied about something in the original draft. Thanks to that, Marietta lost her appearance in this game, and the new Grim Angel that suppose to show up also got removed.

Nooo I don't want to know the pro strats
Anyway I'm really not into checking guides to know everything anymore.
Interesting about the story. I heard there's an Yggdra Union like cliffhanger!


Anyway what would SRPGs be without their idiot escort NPCs?

I present you Valerie:
- Charges into a group of 6 enemies alone with her -crossbow- and quickly gets pounded by combo attacks
- Targets the 2000 HP low threat enemy instead of the 2 HP high threat one.
- Runs into the AoE of an enemy spell. I have no words. At that point she died.

Harborym and Rafa are geniouses next to her.
Fortunately an NPC can die with no consequences after you've talked to them. So that's that.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Bravely Default - Holy crap is this game good.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Order of Eccelsia - Beat it! I guess this was last Sunday, but I forgot to post~ Great game.

[Fenrir]

I always play OoE legit then break down and use potions against Drac.

Oh yeah I've tried some FF7 hard mode hack. Man i love those hacks.

Actual thoughts I had:
- "Potions. I need more potions."
- "YES that robot in this tutorial dungeon just missed. I just avoided a game over"
- "When will Guard Scorpion die??" I should have stolen more grenades"

[Sierra]

SR mk 2.: Glory is more machine now than woman, twisted and emo. (Seriously pretty sure the only organic thing left is her head, she could've walked out of a Masumune fantasy.) Alas, roboticizing the MC remains prohibitively expensive, and I constantly feel like I should wait 'til later to graft anything on because you guyyyys there might be superior versions later I don't want to waste money. Oh well, all-natural katana shanking is still pretty effective.

I'm still baffled about the original version of the game not having manual saves in 2013, but at least they fixed that now and I no longer need to stress out about dying in the middle of an hour-long mission.