Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 29 of 2024)

[Cacher]

Sorry for forgetting to open a new thread. What are you playing?

I am still playing One Piece Odyssey. Finished most of the side content, only a few more tedious ones left to do. Meanwhile, I also step into the final dungeon and already reached the front gate of the final boss (I think?). Going to grind to Lv70 to get a achievement before engaging.

 

[Nabs]

I'm currently playing Cathedral. It's an 8bit Metroidvania, and the reviews made it sound like it may be too tough. The bosses are a little on the difficult side, but it hasn't be impossible or anything. Overall, the game is cool. I just hit an underwater boss and I have absolutely no idea how to do damage. Thank goodness for YT.

 

[Parsnip]

Tech Support Error Unknown.
Underwhelming so far, hopefully the story picks up.
More Islands of Insight, I think I'm on the last zone. I think the game's technically infinite with the way the puzzles work, not sure how much I'll play after I "finish" it, assuming there's an ending.
Occasional Voxelgram too, I had been playing that again already, but I also grabbed the DLC during the sales so I have some new puzzles there as well.

Started and finished REDO! just now. It feels laggy to play. Technically there's an NG+ to get the true ending, but I think I'll just check it from the tubes.

 

[curi0usBystander]

Crash 4. I think I'm well past the midpoint. 100% some levels is

 

[Panda Pedinte]

I'm still playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and I started Anger Foot

 

[einstellung]

Continuing with Star Ocean The Second Story R. I'm still disappointed the original English voices are absent (combat only, the original didn't have English voice acting throughout). I'm playing in Spanish with Japanese voices because I hate the English voices from the PSP remaster (this remaster is a combination of two previous editions). You can choose between the Japanese VA from the original (which was fully voice acted in Japanese) or the PSP remaster on a per-character basis. I like testing both and choosing which I like better.

I loved the original's English combat voice lines. They really hammed it up. Made each line very campy which was extremely charming. I'm having a funny experience with this remaster, as I know a small amount of Japanese, so after combat I'll hear something like "Kega wa nai ka", and from the dusty depths of my mind will come the original's goofy English voice of Claude melodramatically asking, "Are you hurt!?". Or a fragment of a line: "hachi ju" becomes, "I'd say that was about 80 points?!" in the dorky voice of a guy having too much fun in the sound booth.

So, yeah, the game is overwhelming me with nostalgia. Which is an uncommon experience for me; I'm not prone to nostalgia. I loved this game when I was a kid, and I still really like it now. The plot as I suspected is not very interesting, but the character moments and the gameplay are still fun. I don't think I could recommend the game, because knowing if you'd like this bizarre combat ahead of time would be impossible to gauge.

I understand its systems far better now, even in Spanish, than I did as a kid. And they've added a golden quality of life feature: you can just restart a fight on a game over. This counteracts the original's fatal flaw of throwing bullshit at you with no warning and destroying your progress since your last save. Now, you can just try again, or even reconfigure your strategy or even your party composition before restarting the battle.

This alone makes the game much more fun. You can attempt your stupid strategies again and again. You can counter their bullshit with your own bullshit. The game is fundamentally flawed, but with infinite retries, perhaps some party micro-management and a willingness to delve into its many supplementary skill-leveling systems, it's pretty fun for a subset of people, I'd imagine.

Honestly, with that change it's not too disimilar from Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, but much jankier.

 

[texhnolyze]

Once Human! I just posted my first review in a very long time on Steam for this.
Steam Community :: texhnolyze :: Review for Once Human

 

[Li Kao]

I'm playing through Star Ocean First Departure R for the first time and it feels great. And terrible. But in an expected way, based on past attempts.

So the game is still a SciFi JRPG that is terrified to show any SciFi, which is unfortunate as it's its differentiator in a sea of Fantasy JRPG. But ok, I knew.
The real-time combat is also barely working. You basically spam attack until the point where the game ups the difficulty and then you spam special moves. Incredible. Edge of your seat.
And finally random encounters are maybe every 10 seconds ? It's barely tolerable. There is a skill to lower the frequency but unless it has degrees and I should have used it several times in a row, it's a joke.

But it's charming. Nothing groundbreaking, but the plot has sort of an Isekai flavor, the characters are nice enough, it has a definite retro charm. I don't like missable content and the game is full of missable characters, but here this nearly works.

Good portable JRPG.

 

[Mivey]

Playing Trails Through Daybreak. Currently nearing the end of Chapter 2, and so far it's a pretty great game. As all new games in an ark, it's fairly slow going, building up the plot and our cast of heroes slowly over time. A fair bit of world building about Calvard and its various cities. Chapter 2 focuses on the port city of Langport, which is essentially a city run by immigrants from East of Calvard, giving the place a very different identity from Edith (which is essentially Trails version of Paris). It's interesting to see a country like Calvard that is truly multi cultural. In that respect it's closest to Crossbell, though that was essentially just one city.


Also making my way slowly through A Plague Tale: Requiem. Still in the first few chapters of the game. So far it doesn't feel like a huge deviation from the first game. Mostly it's just a few new ability and mechanics, but nothing that really feels too different. I kinda hope the latter chapters will change something about that. The overall plot is, I feel, also not progressing very quickly.

 

[rickyson33]

i've been playing Trails Through Daybreak and am somewhere in the middle of chapter 2 but I haven't touched it much the past week or so mostly because i've also been slowly playing Higurashi the past couple months and have really gotten into that lately now that i'm in chapters that I didn't already play through 7 years ago

 

[Cacher]

Finished the main story of One Piece Odyssey. As a OP fan I enjoyed the game a lot. Also has the urge to re-watch some old OP movies for some short adventures.

Btw, Bamco did not put the DLC on sale during Summer Sale so I need to wait. According to achievements it seems to be a continuation of the main story? The ending is honestly good enough so let's see how they expand the story further.

 

[Li Kao]

Star Ocean First Departure R finished (Ryujinx).
Some terrible downsides (combat mechanics, frequency of random encounters) but overall a charming retro JRPG. To the point I’m toying with a purchase of the second one right now.

Though, devs, I can’t articulate how much disdain I feel when I have to go read a wiki to see the resolution of two characters’ arcs because I missed a Private Action or something.

 

[Durante]

I started playing Troubleshooter. Had this on my wishlist for years, but I was always reluctant to buy/play it since it seemed like another huge time investment. But I was always really curious about it.

Now ~10 hours in, it's pretty much what I expected: (Korean) anime Shadowrun XCOM with more of a character and story focus (which makes it easier for me to get into) and a ludicrous amount of systems and skills and items and such.

I enjoy it so far, the biggest drawback is the very weak English translation. But I was also expecting that due to the reviews.

Oh, and this is a PC-ass PC game. Couldn't imagine trying to play this without a mouse, a keyboard, and lots of screen real estate.