Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 44 of 2024)

[Cacher]

New week, new thread! What are you playing?

Heaven Burns Red continues occupying all my game time. Story continues to be superb, but the need to grind for resources starts to get out of hand. According to past experience and things that I read online, most gacha games are actually grinding games so this is part of the experience, I can't say this is an exciting way to "play" games.

Anyway, I will keep playing but interest and motivation definitely took a hit from managing the countless resources in the game. Cycling between a few other games should be a good idea to change the pace.

 

[curi0usBystander]

Metaphor: Finished the 4th main dungeon/town. Doing side stuff until the story moves.
While my opinion might change, I feel that the game, so far, strikes a better balance between "social aspects" and dungeons. Also I like that the game does not "punish" you for answering wrongly during the social events.
The story has made a reveal that while i expected in some capacity I think it was well executed.

 

[Ascheroth]

Persona 5 early in the week then I've been in Gachaland for the remainder - New Star Rail patch, Genshin main event and the Zenless stream on Friday made me want to clean up some side content Also been doing a bit of catch up on Honkai 3rd cause it finally got added to the Hoyo launcher (convinience) and I'm curious about the upcoming Star Rail collab.
Should be more Persona this week though.

 

[einstellung]

Harold Halibut: gorgeous game. It's basically a really long movie, or inhabiting a book. Requires a certain mood or high patience. Feels like a rare piece of media that has a positive view of humanity, that will warm your heart and bury you under Sensible Chuckle magazines. Has a delightful cast and good writing that follows a man who's not yet come into his own. Watch him become a full, autonomous human being.

Humanity: as soon as I saw trailers for this game, I knew I would love it. I was right. Always enjoy a puzzle game with good production value and a story. The game mechanics are shaken up regularly. I especially liked the war/battle puzzles. The constant kinetic feedback the game gives you by nature of constantly streaming throngs of people about the place and off of cliffs elevates it. Gives some of the visceral connection you get from an action game.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess: Another gorgeous game. A combination of 3D graphics and scanned in handmade models. The model detail is exquisite. You could make beautiful desktop wallpapers from screenshotting the model viewer. The game takes some work to look proper. I had to change the color space and inject saturation to get it looking choice. The game is a too easy for a turret defense veteran (does have a harder NG+ mode but I'm saving that for another day), and the attempts at boss fights are an awkward change of genre with you doing the heavy lifting with your sword. I warmed up to the boss fights later on.

I really enjoyed the general turret defense levels though. Many games lack in enemy variety. This game may have too many. Often times I felt they struggled to find interesting ways to use them all. Your own forces have some redundancy in them as well. Maybe this is aleviated in NG+? The game taking place on a single mountain, and the story contextualizing your shared purpose well in the gameplay works really well. Overall, I really liked it, and it's a good podcast game if you're so inclined.

 

[QFNS]

Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
On maybe the last dungeon? Or maybe the second to last. The game is fun but maybe doesn't quite live up to the promise of those initial reveals. I do like the summoning mechanics but have found a few go to monsters that kinda make a lot of the ones you find not matter. Will probably finish it out tho, since I'm already close. Not gonna bother with 100% tho, some of the side quests are pretty silly and the rewards are this far not worth anything.

Metaphor: ReFantazio
Just starting out and I'm only now up to where the demo ended. I did restart after playing the demo so I could fight the dragon and see how that went. Tough but doable fight.

 

[Durante]

I am also playing Metaphor. It's certainly better than Persona (in pacing, variety etc.), but there are still some fundamentally bad core design decisions which strongly encourage what Josh Sawyer would call degenerate gameplay behaviour.

The whole game is an exercise in time management, and as such, its design encourages the player to optimize their time usage. That, in itself, is perfectly fine, and can actually be really interesting (i.e. some of the old Atelier games did this well). However, the way in which it is implemented and how the systems interact makes optimal gameplay unfun. Basically, since you can play a dungeon infinitely without spending actual game time, the most effective way to play is to grind each dungeon for everything it has (and lots of resources) on your initial and only visit, while ignoring all the other ways to spend time to generate resources in lieu of only those that improve attributes which cannot be replaced by anything you can do in a dungeon.

What I don't understand is why they didn't fix this. It wouldn't be hard to prevent infinite grinding by e.g. simply not having enemies respawn unless you spent in-game time on it.

(A completely different topic is the technical quality of the game, which is pretty atrocious. I have absolutely no idea how it is almost 90 GB, given its asset quality and level of reuse; I don't have a huge problem with that on my PC, but playing on Steam Deck is painful in the larger towns when it really shouldn't be)

 

[Parsnip]

The funny thing is that in Persona 3 on PS2, AFAIR you couldn't realistically grind the dungeon out on your first time there as your party gets tired after a while, and when tired their combat effectiveness is severely reduced. I don't recall that being in a thing in P4, not sure about P3Portable or P5.



Anyways I'm playing AC Valhalla.

I'm still enjoying it but there has been some story bits that feel completely out of place and/or unearned. For example in the Sage Stone arc there's this weird hostility from Eivor towards Sigurd and Basim that doesn't really match how the character has been towards these folks previously.

 

[curi0usBystander]

The funny thing is that in Persona 3 on PS2, AFAIR you couldn't realistically grind the dungeon out on your first time there as your party gets tired after a while, and when tired their combat effectiveness is severely reduced

The trick was, doing it the day before the story event (full moon) where that didn't happen (tho, they changed it in the late revisions).

. I don't recall that being in a thing in P4,

They replaced that with limiting the healing resources you could find in the dungeon, problem was they introduced the fox after the first dungeon IIRC (that lets you fully heal for a fee), that kind of neuters that.

 

[Parsnip]

The trick was, doing it the day before the story event (full moon) where that didn't happen (tho, they changed it in the late revisions).

They replaced that with limiting the healing resources you could find in the dungeon, problem was they introduced the fox after the first dungeon IIRC (that lets you fully heal for a fee), that kind of neuters that.

Ah yeah, this rings a bell.

 

[Stevey]

Finished Space Marine 2, so good.

 

[Cacher]

Discovered that my monitor can downsample PS4 Pro 4K signal to 1440p. Great! I restarted Poison Control which I dropped last year. Apart from slight amount of slimmering and jaggies, the game looks pretty good on screen thanks to the artstyle. Very happy that I can tackle my PS4 backlog on the new monitor without compromise.

 

[LEANIJA]

Life is strange Double Exposure — loving it so far (about 8 hours played).

 

[Cacher]

Half-way into Heaven Burns Red chapter 3.

The game loses its novelty. During the first two chapters all the banters and drama work, but going deeper into the game, I expect more. I get it: first and foremost, it is a story about girls trying to survive and have fun in an ending world. But the scope is just too limited under a post-apocalypse premise. The game seems to start foreshadowing the bigger picture, but they are too sparse too few. In addition, the military side of HBR isn't written well at all. There are action scenes where girls doing military stuff, eg. formation or scouting, but I feel absolutely nothing when reading these scenes. They read like textbook, dry and boring. So much wasted potential. Very disappointing.

To be fair, event story are much better because they are short and compact. Pacing and writing is great so far. Whereas the main story is just... unnecessarily lengthy and boring to read. Shits need to happen, asap.

 

[DrShrapnel]

I’ve been playing Fashion Police Squad as of late, and really having a good time with it. It’s done in a “boomer shooter” style, and is quite competent as a shooter. Enemies are people who are not fashionable like the guy that wears socks with sandals or the oversized suit guy. Your weapons are meant to tidy them up and correct their fashion wrongs. Different enemies require different weapons to take down, and that extends further with weapons having alternate modes that also become a requirement. So you can’t just go in blasting everything. If shit really hits the fan you can don your sequined glove and just zip around slapping the shit out of everyone.

Armor pickups are bow ties and gold watches, while mocktails give you health.

There’s plenty of humor, and I’m just soaking in the light heartedness. It’s a nice change of pace from the norm and you can likely find a key for around $1 since it was previously bundled.

 

[Cacher]

Heaven Burns Red chapter 3 done and chapter 4 day 0 done. Yep, my view on this game is further reinforced: during key moments the story and writing is really good, otherwise the writing is a complete mess because of the pacing. Going to write more in the new thread tomorrow.