Lurker > Xiahou Shake

Congrats, dude, that's seriously awesome!

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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Ground Zeroes side missions are legitimately amazing and honestly what MGSV should have been like.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

Anybody have tips for playing Rinwell? She's got a super obviously amazing air game once she lifts an enemy in range, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to smoothly launch enemies. Best way I've found is just comboing two lower level spells to semi-reliably break, then walk up and do the launcher. Feels like there should be more she can do on the ground, though - maybe I just don't have the tools to do so yet. (Photon Shot and its ilk seem almost completely useless but maybe I'm missing something there.)

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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The world of this game doesn't really lend itself to humor at all out of the gate so I'm fine with everyone being more serious up front. It feels like it's loosening up a little as more people join the party, which also works since there's more room for characters to feel optimism and joy as they come along.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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My sole complaint with the game ~20 hours in is that they've done the Xillia 1 thing again and made bosses effectively play by completely different rules than normal encounters. Normally I can't stand when games do that, but in this game I'm pretty close to feeling that it works. Obviously it's a bummer that you can't flex all your awesome combos and have to completely change your playstyle, but the way the back-and-forth works with both human bosses and giant zeugles is pretty interesting - you're made to take advantage of the mechanics in entirely different ways, which I can definitely appreciate.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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How are people feeling so far about the other playable characters, out of curiosity?

I've only got three characters right now - should be just about to get the fourth - and I feel like everyone besides Alphen is simply far too limited by only being able to place three artes per state. I imagine that opens up later, but even though I can recognize some potential, there just doesn't feel like there's room to do anything cool right now because of how limited your inputs are. Shionne gets this really bad where if you're playing as her you basically only get one grounded gun arte unless you want to completely ignore her spells or grenades.

Wondering if this is like Vesperia where only Yuri really feels "complete" until a certain point where everyone else gets fun. Not thrilled about that seeing as I usually like to bounce around the full cast - especially after Berseria where that was very doable from early on.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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Shadow Dino posted...

Honestly, I'm not really understanding how to do some of these non-zegule bosses correctly. They never stagger and you can't juggle them, so artes that send you in the air feel absolutely useless.

At least against the first boss, being in the air let you combo right through a lot of his attacks since he'd be swinging below you. It's a weird choice that you can't truly combo them but your air artes do still have a role to play.

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I always go for the highest difficulty in Tales games, so I'm on Hard right now. Personally feel like these games shine the brightest when I'm really pushing for mastery of their mechanics. Sometimes that backfires when the systems just aren't put together well - like Zestiria - but usually they're impressively well crafted!

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Nioh is significantly harder to learn than any of the Souls games. The combat system is insanely deep.

Once you get a handle on it though it's probably on the easier end of things overall, but there's still a crazy amount of room for mastery.

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I agree it's pretty bad design but also there's no reason not to be using alt + f4 to begin with

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

RikkuAlmighty posted...

I've been very close to impulse buying this game all week but I keep being put off by the extra DLC.

If I'm gonna buy it, I want everything. Even if it's just costumes. ESPECIALLY if it's costumes. But not for $30 more lmao.

I basically never use all the cosmetic stuff in these games until I'm done with my first playthrough since IMO they all kind of mess up the drama, so I figure I'm fine with the regular edition and then maybe picking up the other stuff when it's priced less laughably.

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I'm not personally experiencing the PC controller issue, but it sounds easy enough to fix if you do get it. PC vs. console will always just be a matter of how strong your hardware is, as long as there aren't any port issues. This port seems excellent based on my ~5 hours - 144 fps at 1440p with 2x resolution scaling and this game's new engine all adds up to an almost bizarrely beautiful and smooth Tales game.

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Game is sitting at a 45,680 concurrent player peak on Steam with room to climb.

For context, that's more than the peaks of every other Tales game released on Steam combined, and nearly quadruple the all-time peak of Dragon Quest XI.

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Prologue done

This game is doing literally everything right so far

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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Literally like four fights in and I'm already so excited to see where this combat system goes. I was doing legit full blown ground to air to ground combos by the second fight wtf

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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Gacha never again

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

Those mechanics look legit promising, very interested to see how this plays.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

I had a pretty big Shadowverse phase where I nearly climbed into Masters, but now all my cards are out of rotation and apparently the game has power crept beyond what I feel like I'd recognize. This could be a really great way to dive back into it! I wonder if there's any chance it comes to PC later, though - I've got so much muscle memory built up for queueing up my turns.

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Psychonauts is extremely timely of course, but Yakuza 0 is a must play.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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colliding posted...

if tales of arise ends up sucking (the chances of which are looking 50/50 imo)

Legit curious, what is this based on? I've heard nothing but good things from the demo and other early impressions.

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I feel like I've only opened up to more genres as I've gotten older, though my favorites have definitely shifted. For one, my all time favorite genre, character action, didn't even exist when I started playing games.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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I genuinely didn't think The Wolverine was terrible. It's still just a so-so movie at best though, while Logan is utterly immaculate.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

Nintendo sure loves timed exclusives. Hope NMH3 is only six months as well.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

The entire Ys series (sans 1 and 2) are on my list, but even among Falcom I want to play the Trails games first so it might be a while! Glad to hear it's so good, though.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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Can't believe they insisted it would be 2021 for so long, lol

For real though this is just basically the year that games didn't happen. Hoping Tales will be great so we can have something in the last half of the year.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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Definitely keeping an eye on this one, looks great.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

Lots of strong options here but Fukai Mori is straight up legendary

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

I posted my overall thoughts on the game in the other topic, but to get specific on the story:

There are definitely some interesting things going on with this story but, as I said in the other topic, I'm pretty certain a lot of it won't land with most folks. My own interpretation is that the entire time loop is an imagined part of a hypnosis session with the dad, trying to get the main character to realize why it's best to walk away from his incestuous romance. That's why every return to the library starts with "you're back," why the cop looks and sounds exactly like the father and why the only endings that actually break the loop are either giving up on the relationship or accepting the memory-wipe hypnosis.

It's kind of neat IMO when you cast how ugly the reality is against the beauty and emotion of the "perfect day" non-ending you can get, but this exact contrast is what I feel will turn off the average player who was probably hoping the actual ending would be more like the non-ending, minus the late game reveals.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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I had a good time with this one! It's got some cool stuff going on but you can definitely see the seams at times. Also while I enjoyed the story I feel pretty certain that later parts won't land very well with a majority of players.

There's one specific point I hit that IMO is really rough and trial-and-errory, especially given how much tedious set up is required to give a chance at progress. Outside of that one stumbling block I felt the game progressed very logically, and it was fun continuing to peel back the layers.

The game's biggest strength is definitely in its presentation and cozy puzzle box atmosphere. Not a mindblowing experience by any means but I feel it's pretty memorable - basically the perfect Game Pass game.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

https://youtu.be/7u1oXhiHJM0

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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Oh I legit had no idea it was that short. Thanks folks, I may make my first foray into manga in ages due to this topic!

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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GANON1025 posted...

Finished! What a great manga. Probably the best one I read since Steel Ball Run.

Jesus now this is how you get my attention.

I haven't read any manga in quite a while. Good paneling gets me really excited but also I'm kind of debating if I should just hop onboard with the anime given the timing.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

I feel like people who didn't finish reading the manga might be slightly confused by the actual ending....pairing? Which, can't blame them, it had even worse delays than this movie did.

I would enormously appreciate a quick and dirty explanation on this because man you want to talk about out-of-nowhere romances I was super confused by this.

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Watched 3.0 + 1.0 - it was really cathartic. Feels weird to finally be done with this series after being in from the beginning, but I love how this wrapped up. I'll probably be thinking about this one for a long time and even now I feel like there's so much more to understand about this series.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
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I haven't watched live TV in 6+ years and I don't suspect I ever will again.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

Please no stupid gacha this time

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!

MGSV. I may never recover.

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Let the voice of love take you higher,
With this gathering power, go beyond even time!