It’s still ongoing. Might as well ask how long the cross gen period between PS4 and PS6 will last at this point.

RPG Maker MV is 80 bucks and that one is from 2015. DLC included you’re looking at ~130 bucks. I’d expect it to be quite a bit more expensive.

In the order I played them in:

• Pokemon Ruby + Pokemon Colosseum
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
• Fable
• Dragon Quest Monster Joker + Dragon Quest 5
• Risen
• Dark Souls
• Dragon Age: Origins
• SMT Devil Survivor
• Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology
• Xenoblade (as a series)
• Witcher 3

There are probably others, but that’s the list I came up with in the moment.

I’m somewhat disappointed. Mind you, I’ve only played via GameShare and watched my partner play it.

Coming from Dragon Quest Builders 2, which is phenomenal, I was hoping to get more of that. However, it’s not that. The areas feel quite small and the mining/building process felt more cumbersome to me. I could work with these drawbacks, but the biggest thing for me are all the non-voxel buildings you can (and sometimes must) create. They kind of kill the aesthetic and on top of that, I don’t vibe with the real time waiting times at all. Also, these buildings introduce loading screens.

In DQ Builders 2, you would place your blueprint, add all materials to a chest and the NPCs would literally take them and place every individual block for you. Every building was made out of voxels. Furniture of course wasn’t, but I’m fine with that. Watching them go was one of my favorite things to do.

Maybe it will click with me if I go for a full playthrough myself, but it’s certainly not the game I wanted it to be.

I just don’t see how this could provide any value. Assuming a new games comes out, there is literally no information to train on but the game itself. You kind of need existing guides for that and if developers have to write them themselves, you might as well add those with a good full text search.

On top of that, the age of guides seems kind of gone. Most games are quite on the nose about everything and tend to present more tutorials than you will ever need.

And lastly, I just don’t want to write stuff out on a console and neither do I want to wear some kind of microphone for my single player games.

I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.

Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.

Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.

If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.

It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.

I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.

God of War 2018

I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.

• The game is littered with “puzzles”. The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to “solve” it. They just waste your time.

• Stats don’t matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about “showcasing” my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.

• The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.

• Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your “cinematic angles” mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.

• There are so many “cutscenes” that have you walk at a snails pace. If your “gameplay” can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn’t immersive.

• You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.

• Probably some more things, but it’s been a few years.

The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that’s what I did your second entry.

Pokemon is owned by GameFreak, Creatures Inc and Nintendo. Roughly split in thirds.

However, Nintendo also owns an undisclosed amount of Creatures Inc and I think parts of GameFreak, making them the majority holder of Pokemon as a whole.

GameFreak does release other games on different platforms. Notably, they will release Beast of Reincarnation on everything but the Switch 2 this year.

I deal with crack and I’m fine! It’s those damn addicts who are the problem.

It’s the same thing every time. Someone tries to stop a corporation from preying on vulnerable people and others jump to its defense because they “aren’t affected”. Have some empathy, man.

Psychonauts is really good and currently less than 2 bucks. There’s also a sequel, currently about 9 bucks. (Both in €)

I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:

• I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
• I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
• I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
• Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.

Then:

• Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
• I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
• Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
• All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.

Oh and:

• Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.

Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.

That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.

Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:

God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.

Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.

Honestly, it would be weird for any industry to start caring about ethics after all this time.

Not an endorsement of AI but a criticism of capitalism.

Personally, I don’t care about TLOU, but I don’t think you should be leading with a massive spoiler as the thumbnail. Others might give you a lot of shit for that.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt, for the most part, I’ve mostly enjoyed games released in the third generation and didn’t touch anything past the seventh. The increasing amount of handholding turned me off and degrading mega evolutions from the once advertised evolution of the gameplay formular to a mere gimmick broke the last straw.

That being said: The Gamecube games hands down. The intro cutscene to Colosseum has more story than some generations did in their entirety and instead of you just stumbling into the plot you are actually an integral part of it. As an added bonus, both games feature final bosses that actually fight back. I think Colosseum is the only Pokemon game I ever struggled in.

Of course, taking everything Pokemon into account, Mystery Dungeon is the only true answer, but I wanted to go with an traditional RPG first.

If you insist on mainline games, you’re probably right about the fifth generation. These games have everything you would need, but the execution itself is fumbled - and it has to be, since they questioned their own franchise at its core. Logically speaking, N is right and everyone else is wrong.

There are some interesting things in other generations, but it usually feels tacked on and isn’t actually relevant for 95% of the game. Like, the sixth generation had some nice ideas - but they are mostly implied or retold, without you having any urgency in the matter. Once again why I chose the GC games, two of the few games with you being part of the plot. In the early mainline games, you mostly happen to be there when story happens, in the later games, you sometimes only get told that story happens somewhere.

Yes, there’s a main story event in the DLC with the single best piece of equipment - the Professor’s spectacles. Buy them, it’s your only chance!

Also there is some missable witcher gear in the very same quest, I think. Just get everything in rhe Borsodi Brothers’ venue.

I don’t think they truly understand their audience. Everything before the endgame is just a tutorial in MH. Yet, they usually ship the endgame with the DLC .

Then again, it sells anyways.

Wouldn’t have expected anything else. The two types of people I’ve mostly seen buying the Switch 2 are those who are really into Mario Kart and those who are into Pokemon, for the extra frame rate.

Neither of these groups is known for buying 3rd party games - at least not the ones I know.

You see, that’s your problem. Companies don’t make games for any other reason than money. Since there are no microtransactions or subscriptions available, they quite frankly don’t care if you ever play the game after you’ve purchased it.

They moved a lot of units already and considering it’s only a side game with reused assets, they made a profit. Therefore, the game by all means is a success for them, even if nobody would play anymore.

Concurrent players also shouldn’t influcene future sales by much, since you only need 3 people at a time

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, above all else.

That being said, Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 1 and 2 are awesome. They combine SRPGs with the usual SMT combat - I don’t think I’ve found something similar yet.

You move around like you would in any other SRPG, then you can attack enemies in range to enter normal turn based combat - however, at most, you can only play out 2 full turns before combat ends. Afterwards the next unit moves. Each unit represents a squad of up to three characters you will be batteling with, usually a human and two demons. Depending on your squad, you may have different movement, range and abilities.

You do not need them, yes, but I think it’s always fun to recognize people in games like Like a Dragon.

That aside, it’s always been a thing in Onimusha. It wouldn’t be a proper revival of the IP without one of their biggest USP.

It seems to be heavily inspired by Portal, so that’s par for the course. Portal was more about the writing - does the game deliver on that?

I’ve played them all! Although, I haven’t finished all of them. I’m planning on fixing that with the FFT remaster, however, I had to drop the original release.

Personally, it goes FFTA > FFTA2 > FFT. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who likes FFTA2 the most.

Funnily enough, I really didn’t like FFT. The only thing I could get behind was the story. However, I’m planning on giving the remaster another shot.

Usually, whenever people talk about A, you get a few of the following arguments:

• The story is bad/too childish
• Laws/Judges are overall a terrible mechanic
• Learning skills from equipment is bad
• SRPGs need permadeath
• Send missions are bad and just there to promote the game with having 300 missions

Of course, I disagree with all of these. Actually, these are some of my favorite things about this game.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

People only ever talk about Final Fantasy Tactics and dismiss any of the other games. However, going by the original release, Tactics Advance is by far my favorite. It’s my favorite GBA game and at least in my Top 25 JRPGs, despite having played almost nothing else for the past 20 years. I like many of the things the game gets criticized for.

You’re missing many of the most iconic games on PC, namely stuff like League of Legends, DOTA, WoW, Overwatch, Runescape… Kerrigan is the only one you’ve included that kinda fits this group.

Now, to be honest, I haven’t touched most of these games myself, so I can’t tell you their mascots. But at least the MOBAs are bound to have one.

Afaik, they are. It’s just that third party developers would need to optimize their file sizes heavily for the great pay off of reducing their profit margin. They already didn’t want to do that for the Switch and Nintendo now enables them to not do it to incentivize more ports.

At least in Japan, I think, every 1st party game comes on the cartridge, pretty much every third party game except for Cyberpunk comes as a code.

These games are meant to be played in 1st person and 3rd person is just an after thought. In this case, yes, that’s maybe just laziness or more likely they didn’t have time for low priority stuff.

There is nothing hard about 3D rotation, at least not for people successfully building a 3D open world game of that scope. Their characters can turn and you have a direction, there is no difference to walking in that sense.

If anything, assuming this is about NPCs, they didn’t want to create animations for that and just turning them mid animation looked stupid.

As for the PC, automatically turning the player is honestly a bad idea in first person. It can be disorienting for some players.

For the most part, the story is nothing to write home about and it’s not exactly the most beautiful game out there. However, I think the mechanics are great - I did enjoy my time with BD2 a lot and would recommend it.

That being said, if you don’t enjoy the gameplay, it won’t change that much. You just get more classes.

I’ve not yet touched it. But since you mentioned it: How does leveling now work? And more importantly, how does enemy scaling work?

If I remember correctly, in the original, I felt strongest when I got Umbra at Lv 1 and just never levelled up.

Furthermore, how are the character animations? I saw the Emperor in the Remake and while the model was quite nice, in combination with his facial animations, I actually preferred the original. What I assume to be the original animations paird with updated models seemed too uncanny. However, that problem could be specific to him.

I never came around to Monark. Was it any good? I can’t quite remember what detered me back then. This does seem like it’s build on it.

Edit: Got corrected in another thread, these games may seem similar to me, but have different devs. It’s just the same publisher. These devs made Crymachina.

Those are some impressive scores, sucks that I don’t own anything I could play it on. Hopefully there’s a Switch 2 port in the future, since I’ll likely get one once a new Xenoblade game is on the horizon.

I’m not big on hardware, is a Switch 2 stronger than the weak Xbox version?

Did they change anything meaningful, like removing that aweful level scaling?

Earlier this year, I was in a similar predicament. I actually told Triss that I loved her. However, that only works if you take advantage of her while she’s drunk at the party. (She falls down while drunk and after you catch her, you can randomly kiss her.) I didn’t and locked myself out of romancing her early.

I would have lost many hours of progress by going back and frankly, I didn’t want to go for that choice. I cut my losses and went with Yen. Since then, I finished the whole game, DLCs included, and I don’t regret my choice. She gets a lot better later on and I came to appreciate her. Her quests are good. I just think the game does a poor job introducing her. I don’t care for either the books or the show and I’ve only played Witcher 2 once on release. With my first playthrough of Witcher 3 only starting last year, I knew literally nothing going in. Up until I could romance Triss, Yen was annoying and arrogant.

Assuming that’s correct, all my interest in the game died instantly. Which is sad, because it’s the only title I was truly interested in.

I’m interested in trying everything the man does, Katamari is such a gem. Probably the best game in the “genre” of replayable stage-based games.