Lurker > NBIceman

wallmasterz posted...

I did not make it to Acadia but I thought Portland was a lovely city. Anyone who wants to know more about my trip for whatever reason is welcome to ask, but otherwise I assume were here to talk about games.

Did you check out anything south of Portland at all? My fiancee and I are honeymooning up in that general area in just over a month - gonna be mostly in New Hampshire but we're taking at least a brief jog across the border into Maine in the last day or two.

pjbasis posted...

keep it official, I almost don't even want any smash remixes in but it's fine

Yeah, I'd be inclined to vote just for stuff in the official games (including spinoffs of course), no remixes of any kind - think this is definitely a series that can justify it. Not a huge deal, though. But no music from "clones" for sure.

Got about 5 more hours of playtime in today, probably won't get a whole lot more for the next few days. Definitely really enjoying it. One of those games that just feels pleasant to go through.

Biggest criticism so far is that the two leads really don't have a lot of personality yet, but there's plenty of time for that to hopefully come out.

I'll grab Baten Kaitos eventually.

Played up to the second boss last night, about two hours in. Definitely a slower start, but that generally doesn't bother me in JRPGs - I like worldbuilding and come into any game in the genre expecting lore dumps, wherever they're placed is fine with me. Plus, basically every review said to expect it so I guess I came in prepared.

That post about the writing wasn't lying, though. I think Thierry Boulanger is an extremely creative guy, but he does not understand commas at all. I know English isn't the first language for most of the team and it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it can't be that expensive to hire a freelancer to go over the script of your dream game project.

Recent example, but the first completed run in Hades was the first thing to come to mind for me. Especially if it's a skin-of-your-teeth victory like it was for me.

_stingers_ posted...

https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1696188932784783731

Apparently some issues with the English script? They wanted to emulate SNES RPGs in every way, it seems...

Another similarity to Chained Echoes already!

One of those Kickstarter backers checking in - only game I've ever backed, by the way - and I can at least say that from the beta test and then the demo, the game is shaping up to be everything I hoped for.

Really interested to see how this ends up being compared to Chained Echoes, which I didn't like as much as some folks here but still thought was very good. I remember that game's developer said that his goal was to make something that captured the feeling we had playing RPGs as kids rather than something that captured what those games actually were, and Sabotage said the exact same thing in their Making-Of video that just game out a few days ago. Hope more people realize that's the way to go so we get more of these games and less I Am Setsunas.

I'd vote for keeping it to just the games for whatever franchise gets picked. Fangames I think are an edge case and I wouldn't be upset if they were included, but it seems a little unnecessary.

Nobody has put Mega Man last in their ranking yet, as opposed to the series it's tied with in the poll right now, just saying.

Mega Man is the only one of the four that I have any real affinity for at all.

Sonic would be fun enough but that series has as many meme tracks as it does anything else, and I always personally feel like the quality of a contest here is inversely proportional to the amount of meme content that's included. Smash Bros gets most of its best stuff from other series, and that's fine, but it'd feel like an uber-discount VGMC to me. Pokemon, outside of a few standout tracks that immediately come to mind, has never been a series in which I've felt like the OST was a particular strength.

Mega Man >>>>> Sonic > Smash Bros > Pokemon
if I had to rank them.

Firefly's "Out of Gas" will probably always be my pick.

Doctor Who's "Heaven Sent" and the Black Sails Season 2 finale are right up there, though.

Yes

Put me down for Mega Man as well. Only series mentioned so far where that I'd really have strong interest in.

Pokmon Trading Card Game 2: The Invasion of Team GR! (GBC)
Fan translation of a sequel that very sadly never made it West. It's really just the original TCG but better. More cards, more content, more everything. It's even got a Game Corner - and it doesn't suck! Some of the same annoyances are around, too (i.e. the AI obviously getting much better luck with coin flips than the player) but it doesn't get in the way of the fun factor. Doesn't overstay its welcome, either.

Most of the bosses in this game played with special rules that made things a little more interesting, like the leader of the Fire "Fortress" (gym) ignoring the Fire weakness to Water or one of the main villain's Executives eliminating the discard pile and completely removing cards from the game instead. I like those sorts of twists and wish the mainline games would've experimented with something like that in the past too.

I know we've got some TCG fans here considering the excitement I've seen around it being released for Switch Online, and I would definitely recommend this one to any of them if they want a little more of a good thing. The translation patch is easy to find.

Just finished TCG 2, so here's a final somewhat involved update that I'm going to try to keep succinct. Therefore, bullet points!

• Forgot to mention last time, but the special rule for the Fighting leader was that opponent Pokemon could not resist Fighting-type moves.
• Taking down the Fighting Fortress opened up the Psychic Fortress and Colorless Altar. I go Psychic first, where for some reason you just have to defeat any 3 out of the 4 available peons to open up the leader, whose special rule is that Energy cards attached to KO'd Pokemon go back to your hand instead of the discard pile. Bad move when the Blastoise cards in my deck have the PKMN Power that lets you attach as many Water cards as you like on your turn.
• The Colorless Altar is home to my new great nemesis, Seth - not the leader, just another underling. He wants 4 Double Colorless Energy cards in my deck before he'll duel me, and for the first time in the game, I don't have all that I need. Because I'm not insane, I look up which players in the game give you booster packs that can contain those cards and it thankfully doesn't take too long to get the needed stuff. His battle is super annoying in its own right, though, using what I guess is a TCG "stall" team. Lots of high-HP Pokemon with attacks that cause status effects, with as many Energy Removal cards as he can cram in to boot. I'm eventually forced to switch to my Fighting deck to break through, but even that has some problems until I'm able to get a Machamp on the board early that just runs him over. Screw this guy.
• The Colorless leader didn't have a special rule for whatever reason; he just wanted 4 Meowth cards in my deck. Hilariously, one of those Meowths pretty much won me the duel because he got so unlucky with his card draws.
• At this point, I've got all the Coins I need to enter GR Castle, where the final boss awaits flanked by two Executives. I discover I can't duel them without having the Legendary cards from the first game, though, so it's back to the first island to face off with the Grand Masters again. They honestly don't put up much of a fight.
• Executive #1, Clay, has no gimmick - he just wants the 4 Legendary Cards in my deck. Not even really sure what his deck was built around because I kind of just steamrolled him.
• Executive #2, Allison, had a deck built around Poison, which was annoying but certainly manageable at this point. She chose one of three special rules at random - increased Retreat costs, lowered Resistance for not-very-effective attacks, and one where cards sent to the discard pile are removed from the game completely instead.
• The final boss, Villardi, didn't do any special rules or requirements at all. His gimmick was just that he would use one of 4 decks at random in a best-two-out-of-three format where the player could also switch decks between games. I won the first two games without issue, so, you know, kind of an underwhelming ending.

Villardi has so much fun dueling us that he realizes the true purity of the trading card game and promises to start playing it the right way instead of stealing people's cards. Yay, happy ending.

Finished up with an album of 308/441 - lots more cards in this one. Fun game - anyone who likes the original would enjoy this one too, I'm sure.

I always call Pyre the best game I've ever hated. Recommend it all the time because I understand why some people love it - just wasn't for me.

Technically I finished that one, but that was more of a sunk cost decision than anything. I'd be saying the same thing about it even if it hadn't been beaten.

Street Fighter 6 has been taking up most of my gaming time for the last few days, but I've made it through 3 more Fortresses in TCG2. Water and Fire were straightforward - most of the peons at this point either require you to have only one type of Energy card in your deck or 4 of a certain Pokemon before you can duel them. The Water leader's special rule was that Water Pokemon could Retreat for one fewer card cost, and the Fire leader's was that the Fire weakness to Water is ignored entirely.

With both those Coins in hand, the Fighting Fortress opened up. For some reason, they made this a maze, complete with trapdoors that sent you back to the start and honest-to-God chests with goodies inside like a real RPG. Found both underlings in the maze (fortunately it isn't all that big, or else it would've been a big headache), beat them, and then took down the Leader.

There's not much that's putting up a big fight at this stage. I've switched my main deck to one built around Water, mostly because I've got multiple copies of the full Squirtle line which is better than the Charmander line anyway. I've also got a very annoying special Vaporeon card with an attack that removes Energy Cards from the defender, plus a couple Gyarados cards backing them up. Doesn't seem to be much game left at this point, so hopefully I can just keep rolling.

Zero's final dungeon has my favorite chest joke in the series (although to be fair I haven't played Azure yet).

Tales of Zestiria

Pokemon TCG 2 Update #2:

Business is definitely picking up a bit. The blimp at the Team GR airport does indeed lead to an entire new island with eight "Fortresses" instead of the eight Clubs we've gotten familiar with. Interestingly, the game is injecting some traditional Pokemon-style linearity now - seven of those Fortresses are gated by locked doors that require the Coins you get from defeating the leaders at other Fortresses to open. The only one that's available at the beginning is the Grass Fortress, which was fine since my primary deck is still heavily loaded with Fire Pokemon anyway.

Even the Fortresses themselves are now laid out more like traditional Gyms, where you're forced to duel the underlings in a predetermined order before you get to the leader. This also marks the return of some of the special conditions from the first game that have to be met before some players will agree to a match with you - one girl at the Grass Fortress won't do it until your deck contains no Energy cards other than Grass Energy. Then, the final duel introduces one final wrinkle: every leader duels with one extra rule designed to give them an advantage, the Grass leader's rule being that all Grass-type Pokemon are immune to status conditions, for example.

I handled those twists without much issue considering I've got a perfectly good collection of Grass cards at this point and I still had a giant type advantage over the leader. So, with the Grass Coin in hand, I was able to enter the Lightning Fortress next, which proved to be the first real challenge of this playthrough for me. The first player there wouldn't duel me unless I had 4 Pikachu cards in my deck. Annoying, since Pikachu and even Raichu aren't very good in these games, but still pretty trivial to work around in the grand scheme of things. The next player, though, was another Energy card geek who wanted nothing but Electric energy in my deck, and it was at this point that I realized I had basically no good Electric-type Pokemon in my collection at all, and not enough good Colorless Pokemon to make up for it. So I was at a definite disadvantage here and it took a couple of tries, but I eventually got lucky enough to bring a Jolteon into play that swept up after a few fortunate Pin Missile coin flips.

The Electric leader is where the game really starts getting mean, though. Her unique rule is that all Electric-type attacks deal an extra 10 points of damage. Doesn't sound like that big of a problem. However, her deck is entirely built around a special Raichu card with an attack that deals 30 points of damage to the active opponent Pokemon and 10 to all benched Pokemon. It's not just the damage to the active Pokemon that gets increased - it's the 10 (now 20) to the benched ones as well, so once Raichu hits the board, whatever you have on your bench is going to be decimated pretty quickly and there's not much you can do about it, especially since those Raichus have quite a bit of health themselves.

I beat my head against that wall for a bit until I finally caved and made a new deck of mostly Fighting-type Pokemon, with a few insurance pieces thrown in to account for the cards that the leader has to ruin such a strategy. She went down pretty quick after that. Machop Low Kick too strong, apparently. The Lightning Coin seems to give me access to two or three new Fortresses by itself, which makes me happy as a Johto fan as it reminds me of the openness of GSC after Ecruteak.

Oh, interestingly, the GR Island also hosts a Game Corner. I messed around there for a little while until I realized all the prizes kinda suck, but I want to give it credit for something - one of the "games" there is just a gauntlet of card duels that you can wager an increasing amount of tokens on as you rack up wins. It's nice to see a Pokemon Game Corner where you can just win stuff by, you know, being good at the actual game you're playing.

Wow, that was longer than I realized. Promise my future updates will be much more compact!

Been working my way through Pokemon TCG 2. Fun fact, this is the first Pokemon game released with the option of playing as a girl.

Mechanically, it's pretty much just more of the same, but they do make things a little more interesting. The plot picks up right after the conclusion of the first game, where the player has defeated the Grand Masters and collected all the cards and what have you. The island gets invaded by Team Great Rocket, whose grunts essentially run around to all the Clubs and steal everyone's cards, including yours. So in your quest to stop them, you have to start off with a pretty ragtag deck built from some leftovers that Team GR didn't manage to get their hands on. It's not necessarily awful, but it sure ain't the starter decks from TCG 1. Mostly Fire-types with a handful of cards from the Machop and Rattata lines thrown in. You've got Charmander and Charmeleon, but no Charizard. Trainer Cards available are eh, just okay.

The first part of the game has you going back around to all the different Clubs that have been taken over by four of the Rockets to take them down - you have to do a little hunting to find them sometimes but for the most part the conditions to actually duel them are less annoying than some of the ones you have to meet to face the Club Leaders in the first game, I think. Each defeated Rocket gives you a piece of a GR coin; collect all 4 and you can go to the new Airport location that will take you to their headquarters, which I guess is a whole new island?

Anyway, that's where I'm at at this point. Charmeleon and Rapidash have been my MVPs thus far and I finally just now picked up a Charizard to throw in. Tracked down enough decent Grass-type cards to make it a respectable secondary type in my deck as well. So now we'll see what surprises are in store! It's been fun so far.

The older I get, the more I hate flying. So yeah.

Rocket Knight (PS3)
Perfectly fine little short game, although very much on the easy side. The exception is that the final boss is one of the most annoying I've ever encountered in a platformer - felt like success or failure was almost purely random. Won't spend much time thinking about this ever again.

Snake5555555555 posted...

I do think the Justified intro visual wise is bland but I do love the song.

I actually think the very opposite.

wallmasterz posted...

If you do, please feel free to share your thoughts here if youd like. Unless you want to do your own thread which is perfectly fine! But Im guessing there are several people who would enjoy following along with you.

If you're sure I wouldn't be stepping on your toes, I might take you up on that. Don't think that's the sort of project that would merit its own thread but I also don't want to hijack your thing here.

Dodgeball Academia (PS4)
For the most part, this was a blast. Dodgeball is a sport that's very near and dear to my heart in a lot of ways and one that I think has been historically underrepresented, not just in video games but in pop culture as a whole.

Dodgeball Academia does a great job capturing the controlled chaos that is dodgeball, both in the battles and the story. Making it an Action RPG was a great call. There's strategy in the game of dodgeball, but there's obviously silliness too - in the end, it's a sport about trying to hit other people in the face with a ball, and a lot of strategy can fall apart when there is, in fact a ball flying at your face. It's basically a sports anime in video game form, to the point that the dialogue will often directly call it out. If that sounds like it could be a perfect recipe for cringe, it's really not - the writing is legitimately funny and clever and doesn't just try to force meta jokes into everything for the sake of it. When you see lines like "Quick! Get them while they're dazed by the socio-cultural implications!" coming from the mouth of an otherwise pretty dim protagonist, it becomes very obvious that everyone who had a hand in making this game had a perfect idea of what they wanted it to be and what it should be. It's just dripping with charm all over.

Battles definitely get a little repetitive and the sidequests that are available are mostly junk (though plenty of them are also quite funny, don't get me wrong), but this isn't something that overstays its welcome by any means, especially if you aren't trying to be a completionist at all. TL;DR, if a dodgeball anime RPG sounds like it might be appealing to you, this probably will be.

All this TCG talk is reminding me I still need to play through the translated sequel at some point. Maybe I'll do that soon.

Underleveled posted...

Tales of Legendia Remastered.

Oh God please no.

Hoping for the looooong shot Rebirth English release but I know it's never really coming.

Kevin is pretty easily my favorite Trails character and probably my second-favorite video game character overall. Gonna be getting his stigma as a tattoo sometime in the next year or so.

I think I have Richard ahead of Estelle too. But she's still pretty good, no doubt about it. Sky just has great characters.

See also: Lillard and Durant

LeonhartFour posted...

It would hinder their ability to move to another team because some teams would be less likely to take on the giant cap hit.

Yep. Players are getting more and more outspoken trying to control their trade destinations. Anything that's gonna get in the way of that is going to be met with a lot of opposition.

Problem is the players would never agree to that.

Zodiac Age is secretly the best FF so that.

I played through Grandia II myself at the end of 2021 and was planning to mention it here. Not everything about it is great but it mostly nails the things I find important in JRPGs. Think the reason you might not see much praise for the story is that it's inconsistent. There's times it's legitimately dark and surprising and willing to take risks, but there's also times it's almost laughably straightforward and cliched. Net positive overall IMO, but yeah, inconsistent.

Think you could probably point to a lot of JRPGs for this, really. I still play through the original Paper Mario once in a while and think it's fantastic - best in the series. Then you've got Skies of Arcadia, Chrono Trigger, a few Final Fantasy entries...

I've also spent a good bit of my gaming time just this year playing through classic Mega Man and those games still absolutely rock too, pun intended.

I've only played the first Cold Steel so far but I liked Alisa well enough, kinda surprised to see so much hate for her here.

Got partway through and then got distracted by life and haven't gone back to finish it. Very good for sure, though. One of the better FE hacks alongside Lonely Mirror and Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light.

Dice

Thought of Black Sails because I binged it for the first time lately. Tough to choose one there because its highest highs have lots of buildup to them and I don't think its pilot is really the right answer either. Would probably go with the season 2 finale - it's an all-timer with proper context but probably still amazing without it.

I agree with the choices in this topic for Doctor Who and Justified.

I'm not well versed enough in anime to be able to tailor any recommendations based on your MAL or anything, but I'll throw out 86 Eighty-Six because I think it's a masterpiece in general.

Somewhere between 3 and 4, probably closer to 4. I definitely have a bit of an Achilles heel for the NES era, but anytime I play a more modern difficult game - Celeste, Meat Boy, Furi, Cuphead, most recently Aeterna Noctis - I seem to have less trouble getting through it than the majority of people. And though I certainly wouldn't call myself a fighting game "master," I generally end up in at least the top ~20% of online players rank-wise when I commit myself to learning one, so I don't consider them a weakness either.

So I'll call it a 3.75 or something like that I guess. Really would love to get into speedrunning to try and push myself a little harder but I just don't think I'm ever going to have the time.

I was skipped, I've been Anagram'd.

This looks fantastic. Need to go back and finish the first series soon.

I want my Leon series though, dammit.

Ancient Cistern

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

No Skarner No Buy

Biscuit, you continue to prove to be a fellow of exquisite taste.

I determined very early on that social media sucks so I've mostly avoided it all my life. Never had a MySpace or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Truly think the latter two are doing irreparable damage to society.

I do use Reddit but I feel like that's a completely separate thing given the anonymity - always feels more like a traditional forum to me. And I have a Snapchat that I use exclusively with my fiancee.

I understand the struggle for content creators, though. Tough world in that space.

_stingers_ posted...

Star door 15

x_x

Pokemon X, probably.

Don't remember a single gym leader or Elite 4 member. Vaguely remember one or two towns. Don't remember anything about the evil team's plot or what they did. Only remember the new Pokemon that I actually used on my team, and not even all of them.

The only thing I remember clearly is all of your stupid friends constantly getting in the way but never actually doing anything, and damned if I can remember any of their names.

Spyro Reignited Trilogy
A Hat in Time
Furi

Yes

The 2nd and 3rd Pirates movies get waaaay too much flack.