Lurker > Dels

Voted "Maybe/I don't know/Unsure" because I sort of disagree with the premise of the question. Discord and a message board are just not really comparable (unless we use this threads feature which I've never even seen used before tbh so idk how similar it is). I'm already on the discord but the convos there aren't the same as following a thread here so I just don't think it could replace it, and if anything, the chat scrolling by even quicker would make me less likely to try and follow it.

well they literally have p o l in their name!

Fransisco

mnk posted...

Also Famitsu gave it a 33/40 (I think it was a combo of 10/8/8/7), which is kinda low for them. Hmm...

I feel like I've asked this before but have any of these "veteran dev returns after many years to make spiritual successor" games done well? I don't think they have a very good track record. Even Bloodstained, which seems like it turned out okay (I haven't played it yet) didn't seem particularly beloved.

KamikazePotato posted...

The ratings of these last few cases have not exactly inspired me to watch the rest of AAI2.

My own comments have been pretty negative, but I'm also speaking about "the case", i.e. the logistics of the murder plot and the self-contained mystery. There are character arcs happening throughout these cases that are actually pretty good and worth seeing through imo.

Honestly might be the least memorable case in the game to me. I remember there was a lot of stuff that happened but I don't remember the details or why any of it did, much less who died or why or how or what the mastermind's deal was. Perhaps there is such a thing as doing too much in an epic case! I remember figuring out the mastermind being pretty satisfying though.

CoolCly posted...

Haha yeah. What does this mean for how grindy the main game will be?

probably not much. this was a little side-project to drum up interest during the years-long wait for the game, so i'm guessing the idea was to use as few resources/dev time as possible to make something that would still last a decent amount of playtime. i'd be surprised if a modern casual-ish JRPG in 2024 will have that much grinding.

what i do wonder about, in the vein of how streamlined games in 2024 are, is how hard it will be to recruit all characters. in suikoden (and i've only played IV and V actually), it was basically impossible to do on a first playthrough without a walkthrough. y'know, classic "your window of time to recruit this character was by traveling back to the previous town after this one plot event and if you advance to the next plot event you're locked out, oh and there's no reason you'd ever travel back to that town anyway"

this doesn't really fly in modern game design anymore (missables in general, really) so i wonder if they'll cut the strict time windows or put big exclamation marks over people's heads or etc.

mnk posted...

I just unlocked Hogan's shop and did a spit take when I saw how many stamps some of the trades required. I'm only 3-4 hours in with 18 stamps and I already think the game is getting a little long for how simple and repetitive it is, and the most expensive trade requires 160 stamps?! How.

This will not be a game I try to be (quasi-)completionist about, lol.

that's about as far as i got as well, but i would say it's less that "it's getting a little long" and more like i'm still waiting for the game to start. every gameplay segment where you finally get to go into a dungeon lasts like <5 minutes before you're forced to go back to town and talk to more NPCs. just let me actually play for more than a couple of rooms!

Country

Haven't played Radiata. If this is anything like Suikoden, then not all 108 characters will be battle-playable - some of them will add functionalities to your home base, which is usually also a military base, and the JRPG gameplay will occasionally be interspersed with some, like, military/ship battles, and some 1v1 duel minigames I think?

But I mean, it seems you have the gist of what it's about, probably moreso than many people if you've actually played the spinoff, so idk what else there is to say. Battles will use 6 party members and you'll get various co-op attacks depending on which party members you use, I think. Been ages since I played a Suikoden game.

Para's memory is better than mine but I assume I felt similarly. From what I remember, I really didn't like this case. And what's odd is that compared to stuff like mediocre DD cases or AAI1 cases where "didn't like" means "I was bored / not invested", I mean I think I actively disliked this one. Everything about it just felt "off". I don't remember why in particular.

Part of it is likely due to the "pacing" - E2-4 is a "short case." Nevermind that it's still longer than a ton of non-finale cases from before the series got bloated pacing, in context of this game it is filling the "4th case" slot which tend to be short cases. But this case tries to do a lot, if any case deserved more time it'd be this one! But from what I recall, the murder mystery was lame and then everything with Blaise felt like it kinda came out of nowhere. I mean I get he was probably the climax of the "you're losing your badge!!!" plot but we hadn't met him and then we did and then he's taken out and idk it just didn't feel right ever.

We did it for every single person, every single piece/spell/profile though every time.

I don't know why modern AA games / fan-made games haven't yet implemented some way to just highlight which pieces of evidence/profiles will give dialogue. Going through every single one individually and getting the default response 80% of the time just to find the few with real dialogue is not fun. It's 2024, guys, come on!

Hat
Max

MacArrowny posted...

(I thought Kazuma was great in GAA1 but hated him in GAA2)

Yeah I thought his newfound edginess was annoying lol but andy was tripping over himself making excuses for it ("well he's just pasionate! it's understandable!") but that's okay, your unconditional love of kazuma is cute

Maria's the best. One of the rare side-characters in an AA game who entirely just helps you when you ask and is entirely honest and competent while doing so!

Truly we are in the dark age of Gamefaqs.

Fill

Kind of surprised by the low ratings here, though I don't know if I disagree with them. At the time, I remember still riding the high of how good case 1 was and even this case still just felt better than AAI1's cases did. But in retrospect, that's a pretty low bar, and this case wasn't particularly special or memorable in any way. I think if you asked me after I played it I would've been like "7/10! That was pretty good!" but I don't think I'd feel the same way now that I'm not coming out of the AJ+AAI dark ages.

None of these are particularly noteworthy but I guess my best are completing Aria Low % in Necrodancer, getting 100% in Super Meat Boy (though I think you can go above 100 if you do even more hardcore stuff), and, I suppose, clearing DSR and TOP ultimates on-patch in FFXIV (also week 1 cleared all savage raid tiers for Endwalker) (I guess clearing the second raid tier is kind of a big one considering the devs nerfed it a week later and apologized for tuning it to be too hard)

With AAI1, I wondered if maybe the first case was the best in the game, which was an indictment (Though I do think I'd probably put case 5 above it, from the little I remember)

For AAI2, I certainly think this is the best case in the game. (And I played this more recently, enough that I can remember feeling that way for sure) Except that's decently high praise because AAI2 is solid.

Wow, what a stopping point you chose!

wait isn't the release date for this still 10 days away? kickstarter backers get it that early?!

Central

Shovel
Chloe

Libel

Yeah I feel like being really careful about "spoiling" people is (rightfully) such a taboo, but I do kinda think it should be standard practice to let people know that case 4 is just the final case so they don't get disappointed, because that is probably a universal reaction.

Definitely one of the best moments in a video game for the interaction between music + story + gameplay. Still get chills every time I hear that track.

yeah i dunno, i think i may be retroactively judging this game to be worse than it actually was. like, it was unremarkable, but i'm not sure i was bored. they may actually be 5/10s. then again, this was 14 years ago so i may have been easier to impress at the time. wtf has it really been 14 years? if anything, my memory of these cases is surprisingly decent for being 14 years ago.

i'm secretly very bad at deckbuilders so silent is my favourite because i can try and force a poison build where i spam poison cards and defend every turn and stuff dies without me needing to do any complex math

Yeah I'm shocked at the high ratings for this one (yes I consider 5 to be high in this scenario), because like I said, case 1 was still neat, case 2 still felt novel enough at first, and this case was about when I started thinking "huh y'know i'm really not digging this game". looking at the character list, it's all very , especially the suppporting characters but kay too.

Die

i know, i interpreted the post above mine as suggesting that perhaps they moved on to a sequel to get away from unity.

slay the spire 1 wasn't made in unity though.

Square

Oh and let's not forget our favourite detective, Orym White, whose character arc rivals fan-favourites Dick Gumshoe and Ema Skye and... whose character development was... is... um, his greatest moments - oh sorry, these were my notes for if his character arc didn't get left on the cutting board. But it sounds like it would've been great!

I would basically rank this game higher than AJ, DD, and AA1 by default just for making me actually care about the characters, which is a decent accomplishment for what is only a few steps up from a fangame. (And I don't think any other AA fangame has done that, certainly not aviary attorney)

And I like Celeste more than basically any of the non-Maya sidekicks (other than Susato) and Aria more than like half the prosecutors. And Ruby is a refreshing take on the mentor angle as well, I wish she'd done a bit more in the end but maybe it got cut as well, I hope she gets some redemption in the sequel. And even Tyrion himself, I mean, I feel he's a more coherent and relatable character than Apollo is, even with how hard DD and SoJ tried to salvage his character.

Oh and the music is actually really good. It doesn't always fit the moment and themes tend to start/end awkwardly, but the Objection, Pursuit, etc themes are great and Celeste's theme is lovely.

In seriousness, I mean, yeah, I basically agree that case 5 doesn't quite reach the peaks it should, but the segment involving Celeste and Pierce and the contract was genuinely intriguing in a way that lots of late-era Ace Attorney games never managed to be (Even good games like the GAA duology never really had you shocked about the circumstances of specific events like the original trilogy did back in the day) so it has that in its favor, and it works well for the character arcs which, as I said, is the main thing I'm invested in, so, whatever. Case 4 is probably the tightest ("best") case when it comes to just the mechanics of the murder mystery. They did want to do more with case 5 I think but had to wrap it up for budget reasons (this is why Alaric being polymorphed goes literally nowhere) so oh well but hopefully the sequel will have more room to work with.

MrSmartGuy posted...

Anyway, yeah, guess everyone can dump whatever they've been waiting to contribute now.

I just really like Aria and Celeste.

MrSmartGuy posted...

This is taking me a while because this game is too open-ended in its evidence. I've spent no fewer than 20 times trying to contradict Celeste's statements about her timeline with the fact that Aria's timeline doesn't match up because she went sicko mode before 1:45, and even got a game over in the Asmodeus/Horus battle because of it. Turned out they specifically wanted me to present von Sanctus's death because he was killed too early for it to be from Aria signing a contract after Celeste signing one.

This is extremely frustrating.

I do recall getting stuck on something frustrating around that point.

"too many meta jokes" is another thing i associate with low quality fangames, but this game didn't overdo it and really made it land when they did them

i mean, surely he's still... villain-ish, right? He's not a good guy? He gets in your money and is a bad person...?

Paratroopa1 posted...

Cammy Meele is a fairly brief but fun villain

okay so as you can see, i forgot who the villain in this case was. which is just a testament to how forgettable it is, really.

I think it would be funny if E1-1 ended up the highest ranked case in the game just for being brief, inoffensive, and fairly neat.

But I haven't played this game in long enough (basically since the week it released) to remember if I actually agree with that. From what I recall, the start of this case still had the game feeling fresh, and the airplane setup was cool and I liked Rhoda but then the case just sort of went nowhere and idk I don't remember anything about it other than Rhoda's love of suitcases. Zinc Lablanc is not a good villain.

i couldn't quite recall if the structure of case 4 started with trial or investigation, tbh.

Wait, I'm confused on where you are. The previous post (about how a case can end without using all the evidence) made me assume you meant you were done with case 3, so you've done the first trial day of case 4, or?

Pass

its kinda sad that the circumstances led to such an anticlimactic and awkward finale, but in retrospect it makes for an interesting story.

i also can't even begin to imagine the patience that people needed to have to do this level for hours on end. how many hours exactly did the person who beat it spend overall...?

Echoing the others, but the scenes around there also had me absolutely dying of laughter and that was about when I realized, oh, I actually like these characters. It's rare for a piece of fiction to even get me to truly laugh at all, I don't know if I can say the ace attorney games ever did - so that's definitely one of the reasons I value this game despite its rough edges.

andylt posted...

Acquitted of all charges, only to be found mauled to death by a Reaper Cuttlefish three days later.

wtf i thought you said you stopped looking at spoilers for cases you haven't played...!

andylt posted...

Time for recess, hopefully this is a good stopping point and Gina isn't going to get immediately stabbed in the defendant's lobby when I next play this.

??? But what happened to the dolphin?