#gameblogging

[downtroddendeity]

I started playing Ni no Kuni 2 a few days ago having played the first game but entirely blind to everything about the sequel except that the main character was a catboy, and this was absolutely the best way to play it because nothing could have prepared me for the experience of turning the game on, pressing the start button, and finding out what the real premise was.

[loyalhorror]

favourite things to do in any game: find picturesque places to sit

[foxstens]

have i. have i fallen down the fromsoft rabbit hole

[farfromdaylight]

thinking about what games i want to play next so here's an informal list

mostly these will be JRPGs as my backlog of them is HIGH and some of them are getting harder to find and play. not listed in any particular order.

persona 3 & 4 (bought on switch, will be playing there first)

trails in the sky second chapter (not owned yet)

tales of symphonia (i think i have the PS3 version but... i don't know where my PS3 controller is... we might play this one on steam)

tales of the abyss (3DS, not owned)

final fantasy x-2 (the only one of the series i haven't played... but i should replay x first. own on PS3, will probably get on PS4 or switch)

tactics ogre reborn (owned, not started yet)

i think that's it for now... i have other games sitting and waiting to be played, but i've been in a real classic JRPG mood so i don't really want to dive into, say, horizon forbidden west. (which i have, and am sure i'll enjoy, but it's not quite time for it yet.)

i think first i will probably return to my replay of ff7 remake, though, since i'm a good ways through it and rebirth is nigh. after that, maybe tactics ogre? i'll probably wait for sales on most of these games, aside from tales of the abyss which i just need to bite the bullet and buy.

[foxingpeculiar]

Alright, per Tumblr’s decision, I started Lies of P.

It’s interesting. I had to get used to the combat, which is a little chunkier than Bloodborne, at least at first. And it’s the first Soulslike I’ve played with the Xbox controller, so that took a little adjustment as well. But, once it stopped throwing tutorial UI windows at me in the middle of combat, I started getting the hang of it.

I played the demo, so the Parade Master wasn’t too challenging since I knew what I was in for. I think I got him in 3. The Mad Donkey took 2 tries, but once I figured out how easily he can be backstabbed, it was over. The crawling electric police fella I got in one with the help of a specter. Then I got to King’s Flame Fuoco or whatever and had to stop for a while.

THIS fucking guy. Like holy shit, what a spike/skill check that is. I pissed through my Star Fragments like it was nothing, so now it’s just me and him. The first phase is manageable. I can mostly read his move set and while there’s a couple that give me trouble—I get caught in the backspin in the middle of one of his 3-part combos a lot and his Fury move hammer slam is a matter of luck based on my position when he starts the animation—but it’s manageable. That fucking second phase though. The ass fire gigantic AOE thing is bad enough, but then stacking the range attacks on that is just batshit. And it becomes a matter of endurance, cos he’s tanky as fuck. I can see the path to victory, I just haven’t been able to execute yet. But ima get ‘im.

The regular enemies aren’t bad—some of the heavies can be a little troublesome, especially that robot miniboss in the factory, but nothing I can’t handle. I need to work more guarding into my playstyle though—I’m relying mostly on dodging at this point, and it’s doing me well so far, but I have a feeling it’s not gonna work for everything.

I’ve been rocking mostly the balance weapon, sometimes bringing out the heavy sword. And boosting Vitality, Vigor, and Motility mostly. Got a couple of cool looking fire weapons in the factory, and after a couple of upgrades, the fire axe is doing me pretty well so I’m gonna rock that for a bit and see how it goes.

The level design is mostly pretty good—it feels like a labyrinth while still guiding you forward in a pretty linear direction, with a couple of interesting diversions. I helped the weeping woman (by lying to her about her baby) and met the Riddler fellow, at least via the telephone, and am curious what other things like that the game is going to throw at me.

Story-wise I’m bemused but intrigued. It sounds like the Alchemists did something to the Ergo that made the puppets go all Westworld on everybody, but I don’t have a full enough picture of what’s going down in Krat yet. That Fox/Cat stalker duo was pretty cool though, looking forward to running into them again.

Further updates as events warrant.

[lacett]

it’s been around a year since i played the english patch of planet laika (1999), and i still think about this game constantly. i enjoyed it tremendously and have been itching to find another piece of media that will make me feel the same way/give the same vibes...

[cielospeaks]

so in order to try and keep myself motivated for the grind(tm) of -dv i need to post my progress every week.

end of week 1 (nov 2-5). actually at the top of my friend list, nice! thats what antonio does to a mf lol

also of note: look at my cute ricky icon! i was using the story2 + story2 frame but tbh it was too depressing for me as the story is just awful to him (good for development yes but makes me sad for my fave. like..... he tries so hard to get back good with his awful family even tho theyre using them only to get probably killed offscreen and have no one give any fs. like on one hand yea that adds up to most of my faves, but on the other, dude.....)

anyways bc it made me too sad (lol) i wanted to switch it, happily i got his essence 1 icon, and monokuma works great w it too! so thats nice!

anyways i should update this at the end of this week (aka sunday, before the reset). if this was an anime the preview would be like. antonio frame, juliet capulet arrives on the scene, something something idk

[jrwiyuri]

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH ANYBODY 😭😭?? DID MY PARENTS HIRE A STALKER??

[lieblogger]

spider-man 2 playthrough spoilers

- fucking love harry osborn... this is gonna be sick and awesome and epic holy cow

- im probably gonna rb this by day if i dont finish it all in one day but if i do shoutout to my friend who bought the game and hyped me enough to buy it

- THE SANDMAN FIGHT... good golly how i love the animations and combos this is so so cool ougghhh

- i already watched a bit of the playthrough from a yter but i love kravens vibe hes very action movie esque and i love action movies so. i do wish i replayed spiderman 1 first seeing as last time i played it was in ph with my siblings lolll

end of 1st chap/achievement... I'll section these by those + days i guess

- i really like the controller effects i know thats a main thing for most ps5 games but ough i truly feel like spiderman breaking crystals..... wonderful

- J JONAH JMESON? i like that i can just lug him around he sounds like mr krabs hehe

- i love hailey... cant wait to see the trios relationship develop i really like artist characters in media

- Rand scholarship... like danny rand. oh this isnt dc i just realized he probably actually means danny rand sorry i havent been reading marvel lately

- i like the little interactions peter and miles have post-crimes like they just flunked a high five and went in for a hug instead thats real that's cute that's kuya peter

- i love harry... who else cheered

- ended it right before the highschool break in bcs i’ll be back tmrw YAY!

[domidextrus]

I played through the second Doctor Darley VN, thinking it'd be a morbidly fun little diversion for me as Christmas was fast approaching. Boy, did I not expect it to go into some tense directions.

Granted, it still had a similarly lighthearted ending to its predecessor. Still, with its "death game" premise, its deconstruction of the main protagonist, and one character in particular coming dangerously close to offing the main cast, it somehow managed to be a much more chilling story (no pun intended)... which is saying something when the preceding VN in the series involved an epidemic of children literally losing their bones!

[danicamo]

Super Mario Odyssey 100%

I am SO close to 100%-ing Super Mario Odyssey and I'm so excited. I have something like 827 moons so far. I really only have the races and a few moons that don't have hint names yet and I'm unable to find. Oh, and a few pesky hint art moons that remain elusive.

I'm also simultaneously excited for yet dreading the very last moon on the Darker Side. I tried it right after I beat the game. I died about 19485738391746485 times before I temporarily gave up and decided to get all the other moons first. I never got past the glydon part.

I'm glad that I did, though. Right now I'm going through and getting all of the freerunning moons and that has made me realize that I haven't *really* mastered the moves, yet. Like, I'm good, but I still mess up a lot. So, I'm sort of thinking of this phase as "final practice for the final moon". 😁

Cue some upbeat 80s hair metal chorus 🎶 🤘🏻🦹🤸🏼

Idk what I'm going to do when I finally complete it. I still have a ways to go before I 100% Luigi's mansion, and I've yet to even beat Sunshine and Galaxy. It's also been a long while since I've 100%-ed SM64. Choices. So many choices.

[downtroddendeity]

@turnkeyassurance saw your tags and figured I'd take the opportunity to pause my descent into madness to give my more sober opinions on the Ni no Kuni franchise, lol. (Warning: I am a humongous JRPG nerd)

The NNK games are really odd ducks, quality-wise. You can call either one a good game or a bad game and call either one better than the other, and any combination of those opinions can be something I think is entirely justified. Both of them have things they do remarkably well and also serious, profound, deal-breaking flaws, and the really weird thing is that there's almost no overlap between those two lists for the two games. What clicks and doesn't about both of them is going to be deeply individual.

What Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch does, with resounding success, is Vibes. It sets out at every single step with the goal of being a playable Ghibli movie, and it sticks to that principle. It's all about beautiful, cel-shaded whimsy. It's a game for people who want to feel like they're wandering through the meadows in the movie version of Howl's Moving Castle. There are lots of puns, and you can befriend all the random encounter monsters and feed them ice cream.

But that's also its Achilles' heel: because it's dedicated entirely to imitation, it has trouble bringing things to the table that are really its own. It has the visual and narrative aesthetics of Hayao Miyazaki's films, but it doesn't have the raw emotion at the heart of them. And as a game, its mechanics combine the clunkiest features of menu-based combat and action RPGs, and while everything about the Pokemon-esque mechanics seems designed to encourage players to collect and experiment with them, the balancing turns attempting to do that into a miserable grindy nightmare.

The other problem is that it... isn't actually the first Ni no Kuni game. Wrath of the White Witch is, in fact, a remake of the Nintendo DS game Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn, which was never released outside Japan. The reason for this is pretty easy to explain, because DDD had another gimmick besides its aesthetics: it came with a real-life physical copy of the wizard spellbook, and the player had to look things up in it and draw sigils on the DS touchscreen to cast spells. So, we've got a high-effort remake that had to completely cut the central mechanic... and which also expanded the plot so that the original main villain was no longer the primary antagonist. This results in a game with what is very clearly a final dungeon and very clearly a final boss and very clearly a resolution to the story, which suddenly has a completely different plot dropped on it like a fucking anvil that it expects you to be just as invested in even though it hasn't had anything like the same level of buildup.

And ironically, this is almost the exact opposite of the biggest problem with Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom, a.k.a. the one with my new blorbo, the President of the United Union of Eagleland. 2 is an effort to try to cement an identity for the series that can be its own, rather than requiring them to depend indefinitely on borrowed Miyazaki nostalgia. It just has the teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy problem that at some point in development it had a budget shortfall so bad that you can finish the game without ever realizing that there is a continent-sized crashed interdimensional spaceship on the world map.

This game has had a machete taken to it. Don't get me wrong, I genuinely respect the work they did to make what they could with what they had, but you can see the signs of massive scope cuts to literally every aspect of the game. The back half of the game has almost exclusively recycled enemy and environment assets; voice acting has been trimmed down to canned voice clips; the catboy protagonist's ears and tail are barely animated; one minigame was so inadequately playtested that a level 16 mission is massively harder than level 50 ones; and while whatever restructuring they had to do to the main plot still left the final version with a more solid and coherent central arc than WWW in my opinion, it also left a lot of truly gaping plot holes, like oh, I don't know, why the President of the United States got turned into a 19-year-old.

Literally, they just. Entirely forgot to explain that. Half the DLC is just the writers scrambling to fix stuff like that and add a bunch of character development that should have been in the base game.

However, despite all this, I personally enjoyed NNK2 more than NNK1 unironically, not just for Rolandposting reasons. Compared to the first one, it plays much more smoothly as a straight action RPG, and while it can't provide the same knock-your-socks-off aesthetic cohesion, to me it seemed a lot more heartfelt- that is, like a game that was made because people had a story they wanted to tell.

But, well, we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the non-unironic reasons, because the story they really, genuinely wanted to tell was about a magical catboy growing up and learning to become a leader, and somehow, miraculously, they really thought that was the story I was here for too when they opened the game with the President of the United States being isekaied by Nuke-kun.

Sorry, guys, I have a crippling addiction to dramatic irony and my day job is tech work in local politics, you could not have more laser-targeted this at making me specifically laugh my ass off if you tried.

[loyalhorror]

in other news i started playing lets go pikachu again which is kind of a trial because my switch joystick is FUCKED (if i want to move downwards i have to JAM the stick as far down as it'll go) but i'm having fun so far

so far.

[foxstens]

i'm losing my mind madarame's route is so bad aaaaaaa

[farfromdaylight]

i keep seeing ads for unicorn overlord and i'm quite interested in it because the reviews make it appear as if the gameplay is right up my alley... but every single review is also consistent that the story is dogwater lmao. sorry fam, i will not be pursuing this one until it's well and good on sale...

[foxingpeculiar]

Lies of P blogging (Spoilers up through Rose Isabella Street or w/e).

Most of what I remember about the second part of the cathedral level is trying not to walk in the decay swamp before burning it off. I did do Cecile’s little questline and got the record from her, though (and it’s my favorite so far). Father What’s-His-Nuts wasn’t that bad. With the Specter to break aggro, I just gave him a wide berth and did my best to parry his spinning attacks when I got close. The second health bar kinda threw me, but didn’t change the fight too much. Got it on the third try, no muss, no fuss.

So then I was in the Malum District and ran into the Fox and Cat again. In fact, we even ran part of the level together! That was fun. And it was nice having backup for once. But then, of course, they fucked off.

I think I might’ve fucked up here, though. There was a zombie guy trapped behind a grate just past the Stargazer, and I just kind of reacted and killed him before he could pop out at me. But then, when I died later, it didn’t respawn. So now I’m like “shit, I shouldn’t have done that.” I don’t know what it’s going to affect, but it feels significant.

The District itself wasn’t too bad. The only tricky bit was the big guy wandering around the fire in the plaza. He’s guarding some treasure I still haven’t managed to nick, but I’ll head back for it.

Then there was the Black Rabbit Brotherhood fight JFC that main guy hits like a truck! And you’d think somebody with that kind of power would be slow, but no! I never for a minute felt in control of this fight, but somehow managed to squeak by on the third try (and I do mean squeak—no pulse charges and within one hit of being killed). Most of the fights so far I feel confident about, but this one I don’t know if I could do again, cos I’m not sure how I managed it.

So now I’m in Rose Isabella Street getting skewered by The White Lady. This bitch is fast, AND she can parry me, which I sure don’t love.

Story-wise it still hasn’t really come into focus. That the Alchemists are up to something seems more and more evident, but I don’t know what. It has something to do with the Golden Coin Fruit, I think, or maybe being cut off from it by Antonia? Also, I found that portrait of the boy who looks like me and now I’m pretty convinced that Geppetto remade his dead son into me, and that makes me not trust him, in like a Pet Sematary, “sometimes, dead is better” kind of way.

I also got the record from the merchant in the Lobster Inn, and I found the old lady who wants a “tipple” (what a delightful word) of wine. I like her style.

But yeah, further updates once I figure out how to not get turned into shish-kabob on this lady’s rapier.