Lurker > KanzarisKelshen

Yeah if thats the case that changes things for sure

Duran's only issue is that its bonus is absolutely booty until you cap merit, if you can do it quickly its pretty godly

Doom 2016. An absolute technical masterclass. Not only does it scale phenomenally well upwards with better hardware, it also scales down perfectly with dynamic resolution adjustments. It looked stunning on just about any vaguely capable PC, which is a huge accomplishment on a platform where variable specs are such a bane.

Also damn that cone looks godawful, I honestly had to ask myself if it wasn't a 4 star cone until I checked the stats

The numbers can't possibly be right, that's a combined 20% steroidal value. Surely the ATK part is meant to be stackable or something?

Duran isn't bis for Ratio I don't think. It takes a whopping four turns to max it even assuming an ultimate goes off which is way too long if you're trying to go fast compared to Salsotto and high end Glamoth. Probably worse than Sigonia for dedicated PFers like Herta and Himeko too, though you can at least see if that pays off. Definitely bis for Topaz though, and possibly Clara. Windsoar Valorous is likewise way finicky compared to something like Pioneer on most units. Iron Cavalry might be legit for breakers but we have to see what the kit for HarmoBlazer looks like for it to surpass the Thief set's energy efficiency I feel.

Depends on if the mods are bugfixes/tech opti or new content

If a game needs new content to be good, it's a bad game. If a game needs help running smoother and is otherwise a blast, it's good.

My personal take for progression is something like this:

-Prologue/earlygame (locked to one district): Do every gig and side mission you can. This is to help you get set up with a proper chunk of perks and also used to the combat.
-Advance the story.
-Once the map is open to you, start picking at sidequests and gigs as you please.
-Simultaneously, advance the two paths that don't start from the Afterlife as you see fit (I suggest intermixing MSQ and open world gaming).
-Once shit starts getting real dark and/or climactic, go do the Afterlife critical path for a while. Once it hits a point that seems like shit is really about to go down, return to the other two critical paths.
-Knock out all three critical path major segments in a row.
-Go sidequest more. Advance story as opportunity allows.
-If something is gonna send you to the Voodoo Boys, do this absolutely last. It leads to the DLC and that one is best experienced as one of the last few things before endgame.

There's so much side content you can add in more as you like, so don't feel pressured to do it all in one go. I suggest using the main story as a sort of palate cleanser between sidequest batches, since its setpiece heavy style contrasts well with the more gameplay-focused sidequests.

Also, more generally, if we're not measuring by sales then I think this is the pivotal fighting games shortlist:

-SF2
-MK1/MK2 (pick one)
-Tekken 1/Tekken 3 (again pick one)
-X-Men: Children of the Atom/X-Men vs Street Fighter (pick one depending on what part is more important, the tag battle system or the 'versus game' fighting style)
-King of Fighters '94/98 (as above, pick one)
-Guilty Gear X (could also do Guilty Gear 1 but X is the one that really created the anime airdasher fighter I feel)
-Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm

These games all created subgenres or standardized them, and these subgenres thrived beyond their own sequels. Some combination of these is the Rushmore list IMO.

I agree with 'sales aren't the barometer of success' save in very obvious cases (I mentioned MK2 selling well because it was one of the first games to come out after sf2 that really killed it saleswise and proved you didn't have to be a blatant ripoff to succeed), but even setting that aside, Smash's legacy is tiny. We can't count a single truly successful game on its corner besides sequels, and in terms of 'what impact did it have on the greater genre sphere', it took like...fifteen years after the release of Smash Melee or something for more standard fighting games to start consistently including a 'Modern' control scheme that was directional + button for specials, which I'd argue is by far the most important change Smash introduces from the standard fighting game formula. Compare that to KoF being the first major tag fighter of any kind, Tekken codifying what the 3d fighting game would look like, or MK proving the viability of the genre and there's just no room for any Smash games. You could even argue for SF4 before any Smash games due to proving that the genre wasn't dead, too.

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Also, on an unrelated note, no fuckin shot Dissidia has anything to do with Smash beyond 'mashup of various barbies'. It legit has more in common with the Bamco arena fighters like Budokai and Naruto Storm than anything else. This feels like a strong cope. Arguments for Smash should be focused on how Smash by itself changed the landscape, because that's what it can relyon.

Also, fun detail: Smash Ultimate represents almost half of Smash's total sales as a franchise, with both Brawl and Smash 4 doing about the same amount of sales (combining Smash 4's Wii U and 3DS version). I honestly don't find the argument that Melee had a huge impact super convincing if we're looking at the reach of its successor entries, considering the one that came soon after it was on the former most popular console of all time and had a kilometric amount of hype behind it, and yet it was an isolated success for ages. If anything I would argue Smash 4 + Ultimate are the turning points for that franchise, considering Smash 4 matched Brawl while mostly sitting on a DOA console and paved the way for the 'everyone is here' wave of Smash Ult.

Yeah, I was out having lunch so I couldn't just, y'know, post a link, but a quick look says Smash is like 75 million units moved. Tekken by itself is 58mil. I think you could unironically just pair up Bamco 3d non-licensed fighting games and outperform Smash handsomely?

Fake edit: Just checked. Tekken + SoulCal by itself is exactly as many units moved as Smash, for reference (SoulCal has moved 17mil). If we also counted Virtua Fighter and DoA as part of the 3d fighter movement, we're looking at another 18 + 24 million sales, handily exceeding Smash plus every single one of its copycats combined as a genre. It really is the case that 3d is the most popular subgenre for fightan, I don't think arguments exist against it unless arena fighters (think Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm and DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi) have sold a truly absurd amount of copies.

Lopen is right about this entire thing, and this in particular...

UltimaterializerX posted...

Melee belongs here for inventing the most popular subgenre in the history of fighting games. It would be like leaving Street Fighter 2 off the list. You cannot objectively do it and be taken seriously.

You could MAYBE make a case not to include Mortal Kombat, Tekken, or MvC2. Maybe. You cannot reasonably make a case for SF2 or Melee not to be here.

...Is wrong. 3D fighters are the most popular subgenre. If this is the argument we're going with then Tekken justly deserves the slot over any Smash rep.

Votes:

Street Fighter 2
Mortal Kombat 2
Tekken 3
King of Fighters '98

These feel right. Quick explanations for each vote:

-SF2: Genre bedrock. 'Nuff said.
-MK2: Street Fighter 2 invented fighting games as we know them. MK2 proved they were a real genre and not a one-off. The exact argument used against Smash (no legacy except itself) cements MK's spot.
-Tekken 3: Tekken is the genre turning point in general. The first franchise to consistently outsell SF. 3d fighting games are slept on, but they are more mainstream popular than 2ds!
-KoF98: I am from South America. KoF is like football here - it is an instinct. The world plays KoF. It belongs here for bridging all cultural divides.

It's a lil less good than it sounds because you're going to absolutely bleed skillpoints and Bronya will HAVE to start autoing to pay the bills (because Robin takes herself out of the turn order and no other single unit can pay for her and the DPS' skill bills), but yes, Robin can be very silly and doesn't need a chaser team to do her best work. She's very devastating in DoT teams in ways you wouldn't expected since she can apply her buffs to multiple attackers, and DoTs favor speed anyways so they take a load of turns.

KamikazePotato posted...

Currently in character creation.

Male or female? Which has the better voice acting?

Both have extremely good voice acting but in very different ways. Gavin Drea manages to pull off an extremely convincing 'street punk' and I think he's a slam-dunk choice if you go Streetkid. He also did an incredible job in the DLC if you get that far, using the years since the base game to sound wearier, weather-beaten, and wiser, which perfectly fits the context of where V is at in the story. Cherami Leigh does a better Corpo, IMO, which is probably because it's the path that is least close to her usual typecasting. Nomad I think both are about equally good.

EDIT: Also, I wouldn't be sure Female and Male V have the same voiceread quality, because IIRC Leigh was cast a solid year sooner than Drea and they didn't record in the same studio. Very different context, AFAIK.

That's not sarcasm, 15% crit value is perfectly usable. For reference, if all of your pieces has those exact stats (sans a crit% chest, we'll assume that rolled raw ATK% and upgraded critdmg once) you'd be looking at like 65% crit% and 85% critdmg. That's very very playable, even if it can be scaled up higher. Obviously not as good as the orb you already had, but that orb itself is a super strong one and you will spend months trying to replace it. No reason to get annoyed over a misfire on something that is liable to take a quarter to upgrade.

That orb looks very juicy tbqh, only way it could be better is if it had rolled atk%. Nice work!

Gepard is freezable! Idk about Cocolia but I know he's eaten shit to Dissociations before. You do need to stack a bushelful of freeze resistance reductions and that one -EffRes buff from nihility to make it consistent, tho.

PL is very very good and if you liked '77 I would call it a must-have. I think opinions are unanimous that it's as good as the best parts of the base game or better pretty much the whole way through. Speaking purely personally, it also really completed the game's thematics! But more on that later once FFD's ran through it, lmao

Good tasty loredump incoming. Assuming you finished Goro's path alongside the VDB path, it should be time to go do PL afterward. Hypehypehypehype

IIRC no. Victor might be better on like, Seele, if her talent works like I think it does. On most Hunts Cruising is by far more performant.

That's fair, it's a psych thing. Picking your handicaps feels meaner than having them picked for you in a lot of ways. I do think, unironically, that the game can't be said to be finished until you win an Extreme Measures 4 run, though. It's such a profoundly exhilarating experience, and effectively the 'hard mode' of the game and not just simple debuffs and limitations.

None of those issues are real if you up Heat high enough

Like high Heat Hades is legitimately harder to finish than Nethack, people should really try cranking the heat ultra high before saying you don't cede control or that there isn't impactful decisionmaking to it. Especially once you add in Forced Overtime 2, the game becomes wildin' tricky and you have to really make use of everything you get.

ExThaNemesis posted...

I grailed EMIYA up to 90. Now gotta work on his strengthen quests...

Question, when does it ever get easier to farm skill materials? I seem to always be really struggling on that.

Run enough lottos and you will eventually have hundreds upon hundreds of every mat. That's the general method of not dealing with mats in this game.

Helping someone else's scorched earth revenge tour, good times

No comment on the Zen Master line...yet. Just noting it's very good you did it because there will be more to say about it down the line. It's not an important questline in terms of in-game lore but I think it does a lot to elaborate on the themes of the game.

It also helps that she probably is collaborating with Gallagher for positive goals. We don't know what Gallagher is about, particularly given he's a fictional entity in a lot of ways and connected to Mythus, but given death is fake in the dreamscape, it's very likely he killed Robin at her request so she could go to the real Penacony, and likewise guided Something Unto Death to Sunday for similar reasons. Seeing how she fits into the Penacony puzzle should be super duper interesting.

People like Pela as a character just fine but that banner is not great if you have her maxed already. Sucks cause I kinda wanted to get myself a sustain but not with so little 4 star upside. Robin it is!

It's Microsoft. People who didn't PC game hardcore don't understand just how big a deal microsoft's gaming side was. How big?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN0K58EfJSg

So big that, in a developer conference where the entire point was to talk shop, this commercial aired selling Windows 95 as a Doom machine. The whole point was to sell the appeal of Windows as a games platform. It succeeded, and today, we just don't really play PC games on anything else.

Just E1, really. Nothing else helps him vs multiple dudes. Think of it as a sort of consolation prize that makes it so his scaling is better than 'literally Herta ult but with RNG' against big waves. Here's an example of what Misha is capable of in a situation where he's set up to shine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd2KOvabnP0&pp=ygUJeHVleWkgaHNy

I don't think Misha is good at all in PF. Like at all at all, not even with maximum investment. Jingliu can and should do better than him, especially if the current trends hold where they throw fat adds in. What Misha is very good for is fights with low concentrations of enemies right now. His ult actually does absolutely ungodly damage if you can stack it up and he has eids (up to 770% damage vs one target and about 420% vs two). If anything he should perform decently in the upcoming gamemode that's meant to favor Hunt units for this reason. PF is his nightmare scenario.

Also, Misha is 100% better than Yanqing. Misha is where Yanqing was before this patch, except his ceiling is way higher because all he wants is something that lets him inflict debuffs on hit (most probably a light cone), or abuse his breaking potential. The second he gets that he'll take off like a rocket because his traces give him an actually absurd amount of free EHR. He may never be SSS tier or anything but there's niches he can fill. IDK how Yanqing ever does anything unless we get a support that directly converts speed into damage multipliers.

pyresword posted...

What comes first? Yanqing scoring a gameplay W, Yanqing scoring a story W, or the heat death of the universe?

https://imgur.com/zA0LteK

I feel this says everything that needs be said about this matter

Yep, that is indeed the entryway to the dlc. I feel it leads very directly to endgame so I'd go talk to Panam first before jumping in, but I kinda love that that's how you unlock it. it feels completely earned to get contacted right after wiping the VDBs off the face of the fucking planet. Who wouldn't sit up and take notice?

azuarc posted...

I mean, I'm over 50 hours in at this point, and I've done every gig I could find in 3 districts, as well as tons of general sidequests. I'm just not good at understanding and recognizing themes. I'm able to think of occasional moments that relate to what you've described, but it's not something I would have ever concluded for myself, nor do I see enough of it to feel like it reaches the level of "thematic."

Did you find the zen master? That's maybe the most obvious hint, I feel.

Yeah this game really really really wants you to do the sidequests. Some of them make this very unsubtle. I wouldn't say they're the meat of the game at all, but it's one where the rabbit hole runs pretty deep all told.

azuarc posted...

When the daily pattern started repeating, I was expecting something more to happen. But no, it just sends you on your way.

What, the moment the cube breaks didn't get you? That was one powerful swerve as far as I was concerned.

That was The Sun, by the way. It's a good ending, though IMO there is an even better version of it to be found. You miiiight have gotten a nonconfirmed bug that swaps the dialog tracks. I think I recall this happening to me the first time I played through and not the second.

Also re: gameplay talk, both sandevistan.and hacking are an actual platinum standard for their respective niches. Deeply, deeply satisfying.

FFDragon posted...

I am about to go on a scorched earth revenge tour against the Voodoo Boys.

They done fucked up.

The only canon choice imo. Trusting Bryce makes sense but it deprives you of one of the most cathartic sequences the game has.

azuarc posted...

I have no idea if I'm safe to click on that spoiler or not. I did the World ending.

There is no World ending, on purpose. The endings are (name spoilers) The Devil, Temperance, The Sun, The Star and (Don't Fear) The Reaper. If you just got the first I truly recommend going back to get at least one more. It's devastatingly bad because it's not meant to be a satisfying ending, even if it is a valid one.

Yeah it's a combo of being very depowered + the servants are all weak fighters to begin with save Nezha + we're trying to save these people, not murder the shit out of them + if you die in the game you die for real. Makes combat a super unappealing proposition on every front.

Can you give an example of what type of 'magic is present in people's lives' do you want? 'People use spells to light up candles' is very different from 'divine spirits are real, we know they exist, and their existence affects how we lead our lives' a lot, for example.

LeonhartFour posted...

the barrier could be much lower than 250 hours, that'd be nice

Those hours are pure content, though. It's not 'spend 250 hours fetching bear asses', it's 'spend 250 hours playing through three Final Fantasies in a row, which range from very good to comparable to any of classic era FFs'. People sell the game like ass, frankly, and make it sound like the stuff before the paywall is a chore. It's not. It's where 'the final fantasy energy' went while XIII and XV were busy shitting the bed.

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Unrelatedly, the remarks of 'Sephiroth wasn't that present in ff7' are flabbergasting to me. The dude was fucking everywhere. He's with you from literally the bombing mission to the city of the ancients very obviously! Sometimes he's onscreen, other times he's giving running commentary on everything you're seeing. It's subtle, but he rarely is ever far away. The remakes don't change this beyond making it a bit more explicit, tbqh.

Does it apply the debuff on other chars? If so stick it on someone else for extremely funny ult spam

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Acheron's kit is such a word salad that I only just realized you can overcap on 3 stacks of her Ult.

I noticed this immediately cuz I started playing last week, pulled her before I could farm echoes, and lemme tell ya Acheron without a2 is the greatest struggle I've ever seen in an rpg, and that includes beating superbosses with joke characters

Crazy how much she gains from investment on every level. The more pieces of her power budget I get (traces, cones, etc) the more powerful she becomes. Actual zero to hero stuff.

Gotta be either Vagrant Story or Aconcagua I think. Both of them push the system so hard they almost break the generational barrier.

Definitely the Cyberpunk experience. Takes a bit to click, but when it pops it pops.

ExThaNemesis posted...

Some of these gimmick fights in Shimousa are obnoxious. The assassin one where she NP seals the highest percent and stuns the last attackers is just pointless difficulty addition.

Training you to learn how to use the tools you have. Nobody even talks about that one cause it's free as hell iirc.

That absolutely has an automatic frontrunner in Penny Arcade

And possibly MSPaint Adventures if you wanna go there, but PA is like, an actual absolute automatic lock considering its impact IMO.

Saying Tomb Raider as a series has no good games is super wild to me tbqh

Last Revelation absolutely holds up to this day, the new TR trilogy are all quite good, the first reboot series also had multiple excellent games

People just kinda forget TR is like, a HUGE franchise for a reason and it's not just 'oh, it had Lara'. If the games were not well liked it wouldn't sell as much as it does to this day!

Wanglicious posted...

it's the Saturn.
the hardest part about a mount rushmore of the saturn is getting 4 games.

Lunar, Sakura Wars, Tomb Raider, and, uhh...a sonic game??? Yeah this is a toughie

Final Fantasy 7
Metal Gear Solid
Resident Evil
Tomb Raider

It devastates me to not have Symphony of the Night, Crash, Tekken 3 or Gran Turismo in there but I think this is it. Every single one of these games makes me go 'without them, their genre as we know it doesn't even exist'. You can say that for SotN too specifically, but Tomb Raider has a lot of factors in its corner that tiebreak in its favor. It got the psx rolling, it advanced the conversation on women in gaming as protagonists, and it just sold way more. Too many intangibles to take other games.

FFDragon posted...

Resident Evil
Silent Hill
Final Fantasy VIII
Parasite Eve

This top 4 is unfathomably based though and if I wasn't trying to be super objective I would take cues from it btw. Good picks.