Lurker > HeroDelTiempo17

Still haven't played Death's Door (will probably get around to it soon) but I can see how they'd kinda compete for the same audience. And of course Metroidvania fans were all about Dread. Pretty unfortunate timing!

Riolu with Bonsly and Wynaut close behind

Honestly I blame actual hippos, which are dopey yet terrifying monstrosities. So in that regard this is an accurate design.

colliding posted...

the timer mechanic is what keeps me from checking it out honestly

I'd hazard a guess that it's still worth playing even if you disable the timers - the rest of the game is still great!

Honestly, while I adore it on a conceptual level, the NPC timer is one of my biggest criticisms. Mechanically, it's just not fleshed out enough for me. But that's good news if you're not into it! I don't think the game would lose too much. I think the devs must have recognized it would be a divisive thing to include.

Man these pure ground days are weird. Voted Donphan who is a classic tuff stubby boi.

But the others I'm all very mixed on.

The Gen 1s aren't bad but they're all worse than their prevos. I still like Sandslash quite a bit but the other two are mid.
Hippowdon has a stellar design concept that just never seems to look good? I hate this art that's all mouth, the 3D models look pretty goofy. Just an awkward type of guy.
Mudsdale is a horse with dreads. No disrespect to Mudsdale/horse fans: this is a great design. I'm just ambivalent to horses, they're cool enough but I lack an inner horse girl.
Sandaconda is right on the line between stupidity and genius and I can't make up my mind. It feels just shy of greatness - however GMax Sandaconda is wonderful and meets that standard.

Hope I'm not late to the party but this game feels highly overlooked - I see it pop up in some year-end lists here and there but not really a lot of discussion. That's weird to me, because this game is doing a lot of super cool things! And I think it's the sort of thing a lot of people would enjoy. Quick pitch: Unsighted is an action-adventure based on 2D Zelda games, with map design taking cues from Metroidvanias, and combat reminiscent of Supergiant games. Also some light Soulslike elements because why the hell not. Plotwise, it's about android lesbians trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

If any of that sounds good to you, then great! There's one more thing you should know going in but I'll get to that later. Skip to the bolded sentence if you're already sold. First let me break down that description in more detail, because it's a lot of vague comparisons to different things. But all these inspirations come together in a way that's very satisfying to me.

Getting it out of the way first: many articles and reviews call it a Metroidvania, which is what initially got my attention, but it's not even a platformer. Not to spark a genre debate but this probably disqualifies it for a lot of people. HOWEVER, it's got stuff that obviously would appeal to fans of the genre. On the surface level, it is a 2D top-down action game with a big overworld map like Zelda. There are monsters to fight, puzzles to solve, items to collect, and dungeons to beat. Where the "search action" elements come in is how the map design intersects with the gameplay. The map is generally very open, though there are lots of one-way gates or obstacles requiring an item puzzle to progress. However, there are plenty of sequence breaks built in. Different items will open up alternate routes, and as you collect loot, learn the map, and master the game mechanics, you discover alternate solutions. There's a clear set of objectives and a recommended order to do them in, but there is potential for nonlinearity if you wish. Put this all together and it feels a lot like A Link Between Worlds but without the dark world and 2d gimmick.

Combat-wise, you can equip two weapons at a time. Typically you'll have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon that you control with the right stick, which makes Supergiant (specifically Hades) my point of comparison. Melee weapons don't have a ton of variety (there are swords and axes) but ranged weapons do. You can swap between loadouts. Then for the Soulslike bits: you have a jump/dodge and a block button. Perfectly timed blocks become parries which allow you to riposte for bonus damage. There's a stamina system but it's not too awful. You've got an estus flask for HP that recharges by dealing damage. Overall this makes for simple, but snappy and fast-paced combat. Honestly the Soulslike elements are light and just normal game mechanic stuff by now - die and you have to recover money you dropped, resting at a checkpoint revives enemies, "game hard." Except for one of the major thematic elements.

Here is what is probably the most controversial mechanic: the whole game is on a timer. You and all of the fellow robots you meet run on a limited resource called Anima. When someone's Anima runs out, they go Unsighted, losing consciousness and becoming a mindless killing machine (so, it's Dark Souls). There's an in-game time cycle (I think 1 real second =1 ingame minute) and everyone has a different amount of hours to live, which you can see when you talk to them. You start running into these deadlines a few realtime hours into the game. There's a resource you can use to extend someone's timer, but it's limited. So depending on your speed of exploration and combat skill, you might have to choose between NPCs to live or let die. IMO most NPCs aren't deep enough to make this as heart-wrenching as it could be, but there's still enough to create an interesting tension that rewards mastery. And if timers are a dealbreaker, don't worry - there is both an easier difficulty setting that also increases the timer and an accessibility option to turn them off completely regardless of difficulty.

Overall I find it to be very tightly designed. It's a love letter to a lot of games that reconfigures them into something new but familiar. The pixel art is gorgeous and has a lot of personality. The game's length is reasonably compact, but still manages to feel like a full experience that encourages replay. That said, I really hope they expand on this formula because there is so much more room to build on and flesh out. But that requires the game to be a success so I'm out here talking it up! Give it a shot or let me know how you felt about it if you already have.

Also: spoilers for items if you care about that sort of thing, but one of the things you get is the Spinner from Twilight Princess and that just fucking owns.

AOC

Yeah this is not some sort of ignorant causality over art discourse or attention spans, nor is it a puritanical one to protect children from questionable content, this is a deliberate political move to ban a work that can be used to accessibly teach a young audience about the Holocaust and fascism. The flimsy excuse they give does not really matter. People should be looking at this in the same vein as all the "CRT" uproar - books by Black authors are also being banned in the same way. Maus is one of highest profile things to be banned in this manner but this is a pattern that has been going on for a while now.

edit: here's an article I found on it with a quick Google. Coincidentally enough: also involves comic books!
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/book-bans-schools-are-catching-fire-black-authors-say-uproar-isnt-stud-rcna10228

Diglett gang

Crustle is so incredibly dumb. Love this strong lad.

Except for Crabomniable these are all pretty strong. Kingler may be a classic but not even top 5 here.

Dwebble fans rise up

A lot more competitive than the base forms. Darmanitan, Camerupt, Ninetales, A-Marowak all great and most of the rest are solid. Going with the camel.

banananor posted...

I'm a bit deflated about no ps/pc crossplay, but I don't know which company to get mad at about that

Is there even Xbox/PC crossplay? I really have trouble imagining it would be worth the hassle to coordinate 5 platforms of multiplayer for a Souls game.

I'm not even mad, that's fucking hilarious

Numel is a cutie but I have to give it to Vulpix

https://youtu.be/o3tFDA0pKv4

play Undertale...?

I haven't but it sounds like something I would find interesting to read if I ever actually took time to read books

"Lying about fiction you've read" is a very wild thing to do though. Very mid-2000s energy to that kind of shitposting.

CasanovaZelos posted...

Marill feels like a funny what-if scenario - what if each generation had its own signature mouse of a different type? And then they immediately switched to electric rodent and never looked back.

Oh this is a really good way to sum it up

I feel like there was a ton of promo for Marill as the face of Gen 2 in the anime and such, and then it turned out no one really cared about it as much and they said fuck it and went back to Pikachu.

Good article on potential impacts the buyout has going forward

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp3q8/the-consequences-of-microsoft-buying-activision-blizzard-are-dizzying

Stoner Typhlosion is great, I love him

Sneasel though...uhhhhhhh well the original line was one of my favs and this. Is not!

BK_Sheikah00 posted...

Ok I've seen people fail add phase because 3 dps go to one side. Or someone dies to tether. Or you enter the phase with someone dead. I have never seen a pf fail the dps check when everyone is doing it properly. Would be a big oof

A lot of that is involved, but I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Even when everyone lives it's generally pretty tight. A lot of times I've seen the big add ghost the enrage for a last minute pass. Maybe this can be chalked up to people not knowing the mechanics well enough to hit adds while positioning, but there's a lot of issues.

P3S adds phase seems to be a huge DPS check wall for Party Finder atm. And if I wait for people to get more gear all the more skilled players will be getting clears in the meantime. The classic PF catch-22.

pyresword posted...

To me it's pretty easily Chrono Trigger but I also am probably using a different definition of definitive. The way I'm thinking of it is more like "this is the game people would point at to illustrate what a JRPG is", and not necessarily just the game the most people would recognize.

Of course there's also different stylistic trends between modern JRPG's and JRPG's from ~1990-2005, so maybe you'd use like Persona 5 or something for the former category. IDK.

In that case I'd probably go with Dragon Quest.

trying to pug p3s now and someone posted a helpful raid guide

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8COZPpQWgQ

so that's the pf experience

No, but another use is another use. It's free healing. And the fact that you can use either Bene or WAR's own heals is another point of flexibility for it.

Look, I'm more than willing to admit that DRK's effect is better in a vacuum and Holmgang is only better because Warrior has busted healing and fights are more favorable to its shorter cooldown, but game mechanics have context!

agesboy posted...

Three of the four tanks benefit from benediction when using their invulns. WAR doesn't need it but it's the best possible use of Benediction anyways.

But if the WAR is able to free up a use elsewhere to use on something that isn't the tank invuln, that's still a point in its favor. If you can gain another use of Bene over the fight that's a different kind of efficiency.

agesboy posted...

I mean, yeah warrior is better than dark knight by a LOT, but I was just directly comparing the two abilities.

Ok but Warrior's other abilities are what lets it heal itself to full from 1 which is a pretty big deal! If you're including Benediction as part of LD I don't think you can ignore this.

Even with organization I still think it's Holmgang. The argument is what, that LD gives you ~10-20s of free healer DPS time for only one healer cooldown? WAR has so much self-healing that it's constantly reducing healer load in a different way TBN doesn't compete with, and sometimes doesn't even need much help recovering from Holmgang. The shorter cooldown on Holmgang lets you cheese things more frequently - two tiers ago a WAR MT could absolutely demolish E8S for example, deleting every tank swap and eating some Ahk Morns too.

I think I would have argued for Living Dead a few expacs ago, but at least since Shadowbringers WAR has been really stupid

Cone aoes are fine and occasionally better than circles! Just adjust!

sewaddle a cutie

I kind of wonder how Oceania is going to play out because it's meant to serve Australia as well as the entirety of SEA, right? From what I understand SEA uses the JP servers and this is being done just as much to free up space there as it is for QOL to non-local players. And I'm assuming Aus and NZ are currently a mix of JP and NA players? Throwing that all together creates a uh...interesting culture clash in terms of playerbase habits. Specifically thinking of exporting Aether's party finder culture to other regions and weeping for those poor souls being newly subjected to it.

FFDragon posted...

Also, sidebar, wasn't the entire plot of Winter Soldier preventing this sort of system from existing?

Yeah weeks later after seeing FFH it just hit me how phenomenally out of character it is for Nick Fury to hand over this tech to a teenager and/or care so little he allows his Skrull doppelganger to do so. He knows what happens if the wrong people get it, he was there!

Good example of handwavey bullshit from the science side though

skullbone posted...

Movie 2 is about not wanting to accept the responsibility of replacing Iron Man. He literally gives away Iron Man's glasses (great power) to another superhero so he doesn't have to deal with the responsibility.

The glasses are the most obvious example but he also leaves for vacation without bringing his suit, he avoids Nick Fury, tries to ask if other superheroes can deal with the elementals instead of himself.

This is my main beef with Far From Home: Peter Parker dealing with having to become an Iron Man successor is... dumb? It's much, MUCH bigger than the "Peter vs Spidey" dynamic. He shouldn't have to, Tony is much more immensely irresponsible for putting him in that position, it is ridiculous that every other character goes along with it. It turns out Peter can only ever have one (1) responsible adult in his life and then they fucking die.

The stuff about him abdicating all superhero responsibility and Aunt May packing him his suit is good though. But that's why I framed it the way I did. He has to learn about accepting power and responsibility but he doesn't learn how to actually use it because the rest is him putting out his own fire.

HanOfTheNekos posted...

And it can take him even longer if it's convenient for the next writer to also need Peter to not understand basic responsibility stuff that he's demonstrated understanding before.

I dont even blame Peter for most of this movie! Mysterio/JJJ/Strange are more at fault. I mostly think the only bad thing Peter really did was betray MJ's trust (and I guess not listen to Strange when it was time to send people back?).

First part is true but also I don't think that's what's happening here. What lesson did he learn from FFH, exactly? That he should have kept Tony Stark's drone army for himself? That's in line with "I have cool superhero friends that can help me." Movie 1 he responsibly turns down power he isn't ready for, movie 2 that power is thrust on him anyways and after giving it up he's forced to accept it, movie 3 he is working through actually using his power and status as an A-list superhero.

HanOfTheNekos posted...

Peter knows about power and responsibility. He had a full two movies about it already.

All three movies are about Peter struggling to fix his own (and Tony's, and Strange's) reckless mistakes. So yeah they're about that but it sure did take him a while to figure that out!

HanOfTheNekos posted...

Strange never starts that spell without explaining what the effect is, yeah.

I also don't really get this. Strange's defining flaw is his arrogance and it's fully on display here. Even when he is trying to be humble and do Peter a favor he jumps to his own conclusion. He's trying to treat Peter as a colleague ("Ok Steven") and not a teenager and assumes they're on the same page with his brief explanation. Unfortunately for Strange, MCU Peter is a dumbass that has not learned about power and responsibility yet. That's the point of Strange's meltdown when he learns Peter didn't even talk to the college. He realizes he was wrong and Peter's just a kid, and the arrogance is fully back.

Is it dumb? Yeah. Doesn't feel particularly out of character, though.

LeonhartFour posted...

I imagine it means they forget about the Tom Holland Spider-Man (and possibly Garfield forgets about Tobey and vice-versa? But who knows).

but yeah I wouldn't bet on there being another Spider-Man set in the Tobey or Garfield universe unless the MCU just loses the rights and Sony decides to go their own way with the franchise again

Disney doesn't have any rights to lose here. Sony has them. I don't think they plan to leave the MCU but I also think this was the only movie that got negotiated and they intentionally left all the escape hatches they could in the event negotiations broke down again.

I promise the MCU does more than its fair share of "it's technology who cares" as well and this is no different. I understand wanting magic to have internal logical consistency but so far the only difference in handwavey approach between tech and magic here is that magic has explicilty been left undefined, mysterious, and having arcane rules if there even are any. Ultimately this is a good distinction to have, even if it occasionally leads to some stuff that isn't ideal.

Suprak the Stud posted...

I also think it is less likely them leaving the door open for future movies and more likely they wrote themselves into a corner and this was the cleanest way they could figure out to "reset" everything.

I agree with this but both things are true. They don't want to deal with logistics, that space can be used to clearly define them later if they want. Defining them now cuts off that ability.

It's not a logical leap to me that Strange can't undo the spell once it's out of control or that he can't fight the huge out of control spell with the same spell. It's clumsy but also not hard to accept that a literal wizard did it. Not all magic needs a Sandersonian level of explanation, and the unexplained stuff about the other universes is very obviously them leaving the door open to potentially revisit later.

MrGreenonion posted...

Titanic and Inception were both spectacles

I literally said that in my post and noted Inception was probably a stretch. Nolan's stuff relies on some drama but it's still very actiony.

My point was that Titanic was a blockbuster mature adult drama spectacle. I would not put that in the same boat (lol) as "spectacle-based event movies like the MCU." I mean, someone jokingly brought up Gone With the Wind which was also a spectacle for its time! It seems to me that the conversation immediately shifted towards genre and what movies are allowed to be spectacle blockbusters these days.

swordz9 posted...

Yeah I didnt get Raiden. I got to a summon before pity on her banner and it went away while I was out lol. Ive got Diona for shields too, but my Noelle is probably built better so far. Eula just does so much raw damage I probably should get her that Battle Pass weapon.

What are you using on her now? If you were playing around Raiden banner did you do the event to get the fish? Because the fish is pretty good and the BP weapon isn't much better.

(source: https://keqingmains.com/eula/#Weapons )

Disgusting.

Childe National doesn't use shields so that's "fine" I guess but my other semi-built team is Yanfei/ Raiden/ Xingqiu/ Diona and Yanfei is made of fucking paper. Since I've built her I've been annoyed I only have C3 since her C4 gives her a shield when she bursts but that's...a sidegrade now I guess???

I dunno I'm still not hardcore into abyss but that doesn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm

I don't have Zhongli but Raiden is nuts as a sub-DPS. One of her best weapons is completely F2P, her artifact set (Emblem) is amazing and you'll be farming the hell out of it for multiple characters anyways. Brings burst AOE and energy gain. Her flaw is that she takes time away from the main DPS but you can throw her on any team where the main DPS has some downtime. I think she's specifically great with Eula so I would recommend going for her.

I've been making do with Diona for shields and I think Thoma is viable too, though obviously Zhongli is very good I think he has better F2P subs. He is more general and Raiden is kind of a specific role.

swordz9 posted...

Supposedly shields are gonna be getting clobbered soon from what I saw the Genshin board saying. Id assume its because Zhongli is just that good.

This is a yikes though

Titanic? Inception? Maybe that's a stretch but that's off the top of my head and I'm not a big movie guy.

There have been blockbusters for a while, and they've always involved spectacle, but the types of blockbusters have been shifting.

Oof, finally got Inazuma reputation 9 for the treasure compass but 30 onikabuto hurts a lot when I have Itto waiting in the wings. Hate these buggers.

I haven't made the Mondstadt compass for a similar reason (I hate the climbing mushrooms and fed them all to Barbara to get her to 50 lol). Plus I have most of it explored and its chests don't give gems.

Raka_Putra posted...

Does it have better activities to do around town?

The open world is maybe the worst it's ever been. Jank as hell. That said, the story and bosses are fun which is what I wanted from the game.

(also if you do care about the story you should watch the TSA cutscenes if you haven't played it. bad game. great story.)

paperwarior posted...

People always talk about this show and fetishes. What went on with it?

I don't think there's much to explain besides "animators be horny." Have you ever been watching a kid's cartoon (not really exclusive to them though) and seen something that made you go "oh this only exists because it's an animator's fetish"? A classic example is idk, Minerva Mink in Animaniacs, or all the thick milfs in a lot of things but notably Pixar. Totally Spies is just like that. A lot. And it's French which adds to the stereotype.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

It was a gift...

They're gonna ask how I liked it, and I'm gonna say I did.

Just (re)watch the 10 hour Tim Rogers review and you'll have plenty of material to fuel your lies in less time! There's even a plot summary!

UshiromiyaEva posted...

And Johnny does suck. The voice acting is a major part of it. I love Keanu, but this is just further evidence that actors aren't voice actors, and when you put them next to actual voice actors it's almost always going to be distractingly bad.

He's just doing the Keanu thing. I'm sure it's exactly what they wanted out of him. It's a little off-putting at first but also like...have you rewatched The Matrix recently?

Regardless, if you don't like the characters it's safe to just drop it. They're the only truly exceptional part of the game, and it sounds like you're not getting the production value of it across either so there's even less of a reason to stick around.

Edit: Actually I lied, find and complete the "Sinnerman" series of quests and THEN there's nothing else exceptional about the game.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

So just to confirm, will they release another tier of crafted crafter sets later? Trying to determine if I should bother pentamelding if a I'm going to gave to risk retrieving the Materia later anyways and I'm not crafting the current sets.

If it follows the pattern of previous sets, we will get a new left side and tools in 6.1 and another new set including accs in 6.3, which will be BiS for the expansion. I believe that scrip gear is on even patches as the catch-up gear but am not sure. Because accs stay the same for a whole year, and scrip accs are usually trash, pentamelding them is high value. If you're especially cheap you can squeeze even more time out of them if you invest a bit on melding now to try and skip a set later.

I would not go super hard on melding until 6.3 but you still want to meld a little. You need to hit recipe minimums and the next set will be slightly higher. Although we don't know what that will be so safest thing is always to save materia now and remeld when we do.