Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 9 of 2023)

[Cacher]

Jesus, Feb is ending. What are you playing?

Still playing Ar Tonelico 1. Ten hours in. I am fairly surprised by the sexual metaphors in this game. The main girls belongs to a female-only race called Reyvateil. The Reyvateils cast spell for their partners in battle, and the stronger the relationship, the stronger they will become. The partners can also enter the mental world of Reyvateils (called "dive") to strengthen the bond and discover new spells together. Diving should be mutual consensual and the place for them to conduct diving is called dive house, and these dive houses look exactly like love hotels. In addition, the evil corp in the game is known to force their employees to dive so they can become stronger. Well shit...

The gameplay during diving is basically handled like a visual novel with level-like progression. Like relationships irl, the girls would slowly open up their hidden feelings and secrets during each dive. I like this mechanics a lot and it is a good way to go deep into the characters, although the writing is so far fairly mediocre and mundane.

Combat is still very easy and difficulty is honestly inexistence. But I continue to enjoy what they do. Fun game.

I also played 4 hours of Atomic Heart. Really beautiful game and it also plays nice. But I discover that the Xbox version has a bug where TV screens in-game show nothing, so I have probably missed some lores due to this bug. Waiting for a patch now.

 

[curi0usBystander]

About to finish FE Fates (Revelation), 4 chapters left, should be done today or tomorrow, depending on how long they last. I there are some DLCs left to try, but after that I'm done with the game(s).
Overall, I liked what I've played specially the conquest and Revelation paths, but at the same time It took so long that I don't think I want to touch this game for a long time (If at all)

 

[LEANIJA]

since it came out its mainly Hogwarts Legacy (currently about 50 hours in, and still liking it a lot!), with some Asterigos inbetween (new DLC was released recently, but I am nowhere near done with the main game even. The lack of any ingame navigation makes some sections tedious to get though).
A bunch of other games (like Kena, Plague Tale 2, Gotham Knights) are on the backburner right now.

 

[fantomena]

Still doing Yuzu/Ryu. Hopefully gonne get done with Metroid Prime Remastered today, then Im gonna check out Part-Time UFO, Mad Rat Dead and some other titles.

Really wanna play some games on my PC, both from the winter sale and recently bought (Atomic Heart, Hogwart's, Returnal etc.), but decided to make myself done with Yuzu/Ryu games regardless how long it will take.

 

[Acidote]

Playing Kirby on the switch. Been playing stuff on that for a few days nows to give my back and neck a rest. Metroid Prime is next on the list.

 

[hersheyfan]

I cleared Wanted: Dead the other day. Had sooo much fun, its a bad PS3/360 era action game brought kicking and screaming into 2023, bad controls and all. The difficulty curve is all over the place, and the action gameplay is janky as hell - beating the last boss almost gave me an aneurysm lol.

But the game is saved by its incredible weirdness - karaoke singalongs of 99 Luftbaloons, ramen eating contests, Jim Jarmusch style conversations about nothing, literal anime fever dreams, and hours upon hours of The Room level voice acting. I bought a physical copy of the CE for PS5 as soon as i finished, as this has future cult C-game classic written all over it.

As for right now, I fell head first into a Yakuza Ishin shaped hole. I've played 20 hours in the past two days, send help. Such a refreshing alternate take on the original RGG formula, and a criminal amount of addictive side content.

 

[MissCrom]

Playing twials of mana and absolutely love it,

scars above comes out Tuesday which I’m very excited about jumpinginto

Art style reminds me of returns and gameplay looks like remnant

 

[didamangi]

Continuing my on again off again playthrough of Quantum Break since it's release on Steam. Last time I stopped because the live action video was playing too fast on WIndows 11. But apparently Microsoft fixed it with a windows update, weird.

They're really banking on this game to be a big IP back then I guess huh? Those live episodes must've taken at least a small portion of their budget. And the steam version only offers streaming which sucks.

The game itself is not bad. I think with Control they improved the gameplay somewhat with faster and snappier movement than this game. Graphics still holds up now that I have a gpu that can play it at high framerate without having to turn on the awful upscaling method they use back then.

 

[Avern]

Despite finishing several games, my Now Playing list seems to be getting larger, not smaller. 2023 is a banger year so far.

I got the secret ending in Returnal, so I think I'm shelving that (though I may give the tower a few more tries). Fun game, but it started to feel like a slog as I figured out just how tedious it is to optimize your growth.

I finished my playthrough of Wanted: Dead, then almost immediately started it up again and am now over halfway through hard mode. The game's a hot mess, but I love the combat.

I thought I was done with Pizza Tower, but I guess I'm not, since I went back and started chasing P-ranks. I have 3 so far. They're tough to get, but so satisfying.

I started Stray, which shouldn't take too long. So far at least, it's fucking bizarre how this game makes no attempt to bridge the divide between you playing a realistic cat, and that cat somehow acting like a typical video game protag.

Got through the first Gulcasa encounter in Yggdra Union. The difficulty is getting out of control, and the game feels like it wants you playing with a strategy guide. It's fun, but I'm starting to wish it had less obtuse nonsense.

I've nearly cleared the second area in Labyrinth of Refrain. The first time I tried this game, I only just made it to the third area, and I can see why I quit. This area is a total slog. The dungeon design is fine, but the tower enemies are basically harmless while also being super tanky, and it makes combat into a chore. I really hope the third area is a bit faster than this.

I picked up Grim Guardians: Demon Purge and Pocky & Rocky Reshrined, but I'm not sure if I'll put much time into either right now. Both seem good though.

And then I'm planning to pick up Phantom Brigade and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty this week. So I'm hoping to wrap up Stray and the Wanted: Dead playthroughs before those start hitting. Otherwise this list of games is going to be way too much to juggle.

 

[Ascheroth]

All-in on Digimon World: Next Order currently. I'm liking it way more than expected.

Also gonna be checking out Limbus Company, which releases in a couple hours. It's a gacha from the Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina devs. Haven't finished either of those games yet but hey. They have stellar (and extremely messed up) lore/world building, so I'm quite intrigued.

 

[Durante]

I'm playing through Returnal in co-op. Just got the first "ending" today. Pretty neat story idea for a rougelike "bad ending" fakeout!

Also, K-T got me: I bought the "Mysterious DX" Atelier trilogy bundle. I already played and loved Sophie, but never played the other two since they really messed up those ports.
Since I read that they mostly fixed the ports for DX (still nothing to write home about, but not outright broken) I bought those.
I'm really curious about Atelier Firis since it seems like one of the most divisive games in the franchise. Only an hour in so far, so I can't say much yet.

Still playing Ar Tonelico 1.

Ar Tonelico 1 is a pretty good JRPG, and the world building is quite interesting.

But Ar Tonelico 2 is the real gem. It's easily in my top 5 JRPGs on PS2 (and that's one of the most stacked platforms for the genre).

I picked up Grim Guardians: Demon Purge

I also got this, and we played through the first 3 areas so far. Seems very solid.

 

[Parsnip]

Started Watch Dogs last week so I'm mainly playing that at the moment. It's pretty standard open world all in all, but open world shit is my shit. I do enjoy the whole aspect of hacking cameras to basically do recon and then do a relatively stealthy approach into an area. On the flipside of that is that every single time the game has forced me to engage in an active firefight it's been pretty miserable.

I also ended up buying Atelier Ryza a few days ago so I'm probably going to start it this week after I finish washing the dogs.

 

[Mivey]

Since I finished Chaos;Head Noah yesterday, I now started Dead Space and it's been pretty good in its first hour. I played the original, but never finished it, so it's interesting how much of it feels familiar and yet been clearly very carefully upgraded. The port is pretty good so far, just had to swap out the DLSS .dll to remove the annoying ghosting the base game has. Now it feels really great, aside from clear loading stutters when you enter new areas, it's pretty smooth and plays pretty well on keyboard and mouse.

Also trying to finally finish up Yakuza 5. I'm on the final character Shinada, and currently doing his side quests and the batting side story. I will neither confirm nor deny that I'm heavily using Cheat Engine and its speedhack to completely trivialise the batting mini game.

 

[Panda Pedinte]

I just finished Chained Echoes and it was a great game. I'm thinking about starting ME: Andromeda again as I dropped it the last time because I was buying a lot recent releases that I wanted to play.

 

[Arc]

I finished Atomic Heart. It was an okay game and I liked some of the puzzles, but it runs out of steam near the end.

I dropped Wild Hearts after about 25 hours. I like the gameplay mechanics, but there just isn't enough stuff to do to keep me engrossed for hundreds of hours like Monster Hunter.

I started Octopath Traveler 2. I've only got a few hours played so I can't say much, but I'm just happy at the prospect of playing a comfy JRPG in bed. For now I'm playing Octopath 2 as my "main" game and doing a bit of side stuff like sporadic hunts in Monster Hunter and runs in Dead Cells.

 

[FunnyJay]

Currently playing Fable Anniversary on Steam Deck.

I played Fable on the original XBOX back in the day, but never finished it. And 10 or so years ago, I bought Fable: The Lost Chapters on Steam. I played it for a little bit but it was a janky mess with horrible camera controls and seemed to be missing some sound effects for certain cut scenes.

So naturally, I bought Fable Anniversary a few years later, and it has been lying in the backlog since then.

I decided to try an evil playthrough, since I pretty much never play as evil in any games. I think I'm about half-way through it, and there really isn't that many quests that seems aimed for the evil side?

And the combat is so hack-and-slashy, without any really weight to it. I do appreciate that you gain experience depending on if you use combat, archery or magic, but it tends to boil down to gaining pretty much no archery experience since it is so unwieldy, and magic lacks a bit of impact IMO.
And I even try to spec a bit towards the magic side!

It plays really well on the Steam Deck, but the camera controls are still a bit stiff and juddery, but that seems to be how the game is made.

 

[Cacher]

Ar Tonelico 1 is a pretty good JRPG, and the world building is quite interesting.

But Ar Tonelico 2 is the real gem. It's easily in my top 5 JRPGs on PS2 (and that's one of the most stacked platforms for the genre).

Definitely going to check out the second game in the future! Heard many good things of it.

I like the art of 1 so I just got the artbook. Flipped through some of it and found that they dived (pun intended) into everything about the Hymnos: grammar, pronunications, lyrics, history.... Also a lot of worldbuilding stuff like how the science works in-game. Very, very interesting. I will read through it after finishing the game.

 

[Durante]

I have two Japanese Ar Tonelico books which are absolutely massive. I don't recall right now what they are officially called so I can't google them, will take a picture when I'm home.

It's basically the only franchise I ever bought something like that for.


Edit - here are some pictures - they are as huge as I remember them (A4, quite thick):
Front:

The first one is ~125 pages / second one is ~160 pages:

They have all kinds of information in there, character and location art, game design and planning, lore and world building (including hymmnos grammar, history timelines, ...), etc. Examples:

 

[xinek]

On the last chapter of Yakuza 3. Conclusion: this is an absolute shit game. Every minute has been a chore at best and a life-draining misery at worst. I kept hoping it would get better or that some of the sidequests would be good, but no. I actually started skipping the cinematics. In a Yakuza game! I'm totally put off from playing the rest of the games now and skipping right to Like a Dragon. Ugh.

 

[Mivey]

On the last chapter of Yakuza 3. Conclusion: this is an absolute shit game. Every minute has been a chore at best and a life-draining misery at worst. I kept hoping it would get better or that some of the sidequests would be good, but no. I actually started skipping the cinematics. In a Yakuza game! I'm totally put off from playing the rest of the games now and skipping right to Like a Dragon. Ugh.

For what it's worth, I also disliked Yakuza 3, and I'm glad I gave Yakuza 4 a try. It feels much closer, in terms of its characters, it's story telling and substories to the chronologically earlier games, like Yakuza 0 or Kiwami 2. In fact, I liked 4 a lot better than Kiwami 2 even, the new characters are a breath of fresh air and 5 continues to be just as fun (even if its' almost too big a game, but it's hard to complain when it continues to feature so much quality content).

 

[FunnyJay]

Picked up Return of the Obra Dinn since I think it was at all time lowest yesterday.

I've watched a bit of the beginning on YouTube before, so I knew this game for me. But it really is fantastic!
It's really interesting to track the individuals over the ship and try to figure out who they were...

 

[curi0usBystander]

I've started Catherine Classic on the Deck. For the most part after some tinkering it works fine except for 2 things: anime cutscenes don't work at full speed and the Depth of Field seems borked. Don't have much opinion on the game so far, only played like an hour.

 

[xinek]

For what it's worth, I also disliked Yakuza 3, and I'm glad I gave Yakuza 4 a try. It feels much closer, in terms of its characters, it's story telling and substories to the chronologically earlier games, like Yakuza 0 or Kiwami 2. In fact, I liked 4 a lot better than Kiwami 2 even, the new characters are a breath of fresh air and 5 continues to be just as fun (even if its' almost too big a game, but it's hard to complain when it continues to feature so much quality content).

I am very glad to hear this. Especially that 4 is as good as / better than Kiwami 2, because I did enjoy that one. Fortunately, I've now put 3 behind me forever.

 

[fearthedawn]

I'm just waiting for Wo Long to release at this point and trying to get some work done before so I can go hard when it does

 

[Mivey]

I am very glad to hear this. Especially that 4 is as good as / better than Kiwami 2, because I did enjoy that one. Fortunately, I've now put 3 behind me forever.

The plot gets pretty crazy, since it's split over 4 characters, but I really liked spending time with each of them. It's just nice to not always have Kiryu, since the games kinda don't allow him to grow all that much. He's the same kinda-dumb goody two-shoes, that he always is.

 

[curi0usBystander]

Well, I give up after a few hours trying I can't progress in Catherine on the deck, after the first "boss" the game should load a cutscene but it never does and hangs there ( I repeated the section son many times that I kept getting gold trophies).
I could continue on my desktop but I don't really feel like playing it there.

So I'll have to play something else.

 

[MegaApple]

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

Currently at the final point of the game.
As usual, with no meaningful authored content left, the game is turned into a chore. I don't feel like doing the enemy bases or challenges, I don't feel like unlocking any more costumes when I always end-up wearing the default one (I'm not a fun person, I know).

Maybe I should just leave it and finish the stuff that I enjoy (story-mode, meaningful side-quests)

 

[curi0usBystander]

Well, I give up after a few hours trying I can't progress in Catherine on the deck, after the first "boss" the game should load a cutscene but it never does and hangs there ( I repeated the section son many times that I kept getting gold trophies).
I could continue on my desktop but I don't really feel like playing it there.

So I'll have to play something else.

A little update, with a bit more tinkering I got it to work. The anime cutscenes are a bit choppy (and with a small audio delay) but so far it seems to work. I'll try a bit more. And If it hangs again I'll drop it for now.

 

[Panda Pedinte]

I also started playing Pizza Tower!

 

[Stevey]

Playing Atomic Heart, not even sure if I'm enjoying it all that much to be honest.

Also got Diablo 2 Ressurected on the go, and a playthrough of Oblivion and Doom 3 that seem to be a constant these days.

Started Moonscars as well, pretty neat action platformer on STEAM.

 

[Mivey]

Finished the substories in Yakuza 5 now, and while none of them are as addicting as the cabaret management in Yakuza 0 or Kiwami 2, it's really impressive how creative and different they all are, while still being fun. Really different experience from the boring Hostess minigame of Yakuza 3 and also 4 (from what I remember), which I barely engaged with.

Now all that remains is the long run up to the finale. Expecting things to get suitably dramatic and crazy again. If I don't see at least 1 exploding building (though not necessarily the millenium tower, it really suffered enough at this point), I'll be severely disappointed.

 

[Jaded_Alyx]

I feel like I haven't played anything in a while. I need to get back to Metroid Prime Remastered and Hi-Fi Rush soon.