What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Sima Tuna]

I'm playing Tales of Xillia and enjoying it.

The combat is pretty much exactly what I wanted from Vesparia (but didn't get.) Namely, a more refined Symphonia combat system. It's fast and enjoyable. Little button mashy but I feel like that's every Tales Of game.

Unlike Vesparia, the game doesn't chop out massive chunks of its combat engine to feed back to you piecemeal, and it doesn't cap you to a three hit combo plus demon fang ender for hours of game time. In fact, with the link system, you can get some pretty long combos going fairly early. It's a little too easy, almost.

Oh yeah, and since this is a remaster version I'm playing, it gives you the Grade Shop on a standard new game. Most of these options seem like cheats to ruin the game balance, but I went ahead and got double components and extra money because I do not enjoy grinding for materials. I kept xp gain on the base value which seems fine. Didn't enable any of the other grade purchases because as said, they sounded like cheats. I only allowed the double money because most Tales games are pretty goddamn stingy on money and I wanted to, for once, not have to grind money.

[Steven]

Xillia's battle system is great. It's very 2D fighting game-like, which is good because that's literally the reason the series exists. *glares at shitty Berseria and Arise battle systems*

Boss fights are terrible, especially because optimal play for bosses is just having Milla and Rowen spam Fireball and Splash while you serve as a distraction, but otherwise it's just fun to beat up zako, and Jude is fun to play as in general. Wish they'd given him throws like what Senel has, but they did give him some OTG stuff to have fun with, and he regains so much TP from normals that he has a practically unlimited amount.

[XoPachi]

Saturday, I started Demon's Souls. It's my first game like this. I only have the arch demon of Boletaria left and he's a bit of an obnoxious health tank that also straight one shots you. I don't see myself beating him for a while.

I was on a bit of a streak at first having killed Leechmonger, Flame Lurker, Penetrator, Old Monk, Old Hero, Storm King, and Dragon God among others in one go. Most of the game is fairly breezy but there were some troubled spots here and there.

The King is the hardest part right now. I'm assuming when I kill him, that broken Archstone in the nexus will reform and take me to one final area. @-@

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Saturday, I started Demon's Souls. It's my first game like this. I only have the arch demon of Boletaria left and he's a bit of an obnoxious health tank that also straight one shots you.

My experience with the series is there's always a few things that feel jank or trollish, but when you get experienced with the game you learn how to manage them in creative ways, and the games are fulfilling and worthwhile. Hope you're enjoying it!

[ryu]

It's a long weekend starting today and I just wish I had bought Saros yesterday. That would be dope to play now.

[To Far Away Times]

Saturday, I started Demon's Souls. It's my first game like this. I only have the arch demon of Boletaria left and he's a bit of an obnoxious health tank that also straight one shots you. I don't see myself beating him for a while.

I was on a bit of a streak at first having killed Leechmonger, Flame Lurker, Penetrator, Old Monk, Old Hero, Storm King, and Dragon God among others in one go. Most of the game is fairly breezy but there were some troubled spots here and there.

The King is the hardest part right now. I'm assuming when I kill him, that broken Archstone in the nexus will reform and take me to one final area. @-@

It took me a few tries to really get along with Souls-like games. I bounced off my first attempts on Demon Souls and Dark Souls. But once it clicks there really is nothing like it. I ended up marathoning every FROM souls game back to back and honestly, I need more of them.

If you do continue on with the “series” I think you’ll see the stages get easier and the bosses get harder. Demon’s Souls has tough stages but fairly manageable boss encounters because they’re far away from checkpoints. Later games put checkpoints closer to bosses and ramp up the boss difficulty, while stages become a bit easier.

[XoPachi]

It took me a few tries to really get along with Souls-like games. I bounced off my first attempts on Demon Souls and Dark Souls. But once it clicks there really is nothing like it. I ended up marathoning every FROM souls game back to back and honestly, I need more of them.

If you do continue on with the “series” I think you’ll see the stages get easier and the bosses get harder. Demon’s Souls has tough stages but fairly manageable boss encounters because they’re far away from checkpoints. Later games put checkpoints closer to bosses and ramp up the boss difficulty, while stages become a bit easier.

I started Dark Souls and I'm finding the stages are actually significantly harder both in comparison to Demon's Souls's's's and it's own bosses. At least during this early game, weak start, it took me much longer to get to the first real bosses and there's a lot more tankier, one shotting things randomly around corners in this one. I killed the Bell Gargoyles and Taurus Demon, but I find I have to run away from some enemy encounters whereas Demon's Souls, I was clowning those guys fearlessly
Those burly, big dick, 8 foot tall knights in Dark Souls have killed me to enough where I just avoid them now until I feel confident in my loadout to go back and destroy them. I could only kill the first one.

I don't think I terribly like having my magic on a standard ammo system. I feel like I'm forced to use melee when that's not the class I chose. I get forcing closer encounters and I get Fresh/Old Spice was basically infinite in Demon's Souls. But I feel like I'm just never able to use magic beyond one encounter and it doesn't kill enough to warrant that. But I'm assuming that will change as I progress and it's too early to say anything about it.

One thing I'll say... Playing these two games immediately made it apparent how BADLY people imitate the more popular mechanics of the series. No one copying what these games do has done it right out of the ones I've played doing as such. This is on top of just generally being sick of seeing a ton of games taking those mechanics.

[Steven]

Done with Tales of Berseria, two months and a week later. Obviously, I did not like this game. Only thing to note is that even on Hard difficulty the game waited until the final boss to actually try to put up a fight, and even that turned out to be pitiful once I revised my strategy.

Maybe I'll go watch the Zestiria anime now since that supposedly fixes the story of these games somehow, or maybe I'll play a game that is actually fun and stay far the fuck away from the impossibly boring world of Zestiria+Berseria for the rest of my life.

[Daytime Waitress]

Still knocking down co-op levels in Nightmare Reaper, now at NG1 after a bit of a break. The latter third of the game gets a little bogged down with spongier enemies and multiple keycard/macguffins required to progress through levels, so getting back to the popcorn-massacre blitzkrieg of the opening chapter feels infinitely more comfy.

The co-op update also introduced another type of currency to grind for in order to unlock the ability to retain a third or fourth weapon after a round. While any kind of grind is lamentable, I've tried to take the mindset that I'll get there when I get there - the gunplay is magnificent and if you do it often enough, you'll get to keep more faithful sidearms at your side! Plus said update also introduced rainbow/unique weapon drops and pretty much every one I've encountered so far has been completely fuckbusted in the best possible ways.

It took me a few tries to really get along with Souls-like games. I bounced off my first attempts on Demon Souls and Dark Souls. But once it clicks there really is nothing like it.

Very much this. I had a really rough time with DS2 when first encountering it, and took a while to warm up to DS1 a decade later; but once I figured out how to put a boot into peoples' chests, I started to get a feel for the ebb and flow of combat and it just plain clicked. Which segues nicely into...

Those burly, big dick, 8 foot tall knights in Dark Souls have killed me to enough where I just avoid them now until I feel confident in my loadout to go back and destroy them. I could only kill the first one.

The black knights are, for me, emblematic of not just the game's/series' imposing and ruined aesthetics, but the gameplay itself. You spend your first (two dozen) encounter(s) terrified of the bastards, desperately attempting to kite them, draw them into the AOE's of other mobs in the hopes of damaging them, trying to use the terrain to your advantage... and still getting gouged to fuck. But after more time learning the parry windows of other enemies, you start to gain the confidence to put it into practice against the big boys, until eventually every thing they swing on you with meets a resounding, "get that shit out of my face, son!". That arc of visible game mastery is just so unbelievably satisfying.

One thing I'll say... Playing these two games immediately made it apparent how BADLY people imitate the more popular mechanics of the series. No one copying what these games do has done it right out of the ones I've played doing as such. This is on top of just generally being sick of seeing a ton of games taking those mechanics.

What are the mechanics and titles that fuck them up royally that immediately jump out at you, Xo?

[XoPachi]

What are the mechanics and titles that fuck them up royally that immediately jump out at you, Xo?

Every other game has a half hearted parry system now and I attribute that to the popularity of this series, chiefly Sekiro. Every other game with parries instantly flattens the tool which is already extremely easy to do but, I'm finding that is not the case in Dark Souls. I didn't parry at all in Demon's Souls because there's no need. But parrying in Dark Souls leaves you crazy open and it takes a loooong time before you get to grips with it. The game doesn't give you obvious tells for windows and you are frequently in fucked up positions where risking it means accepting that you will die if you miss your timing. You could criticize how these games do it, but I think they certainly do it better than what followed them.
But soooo many games since Demon's/Dark Souls put you in massive arenas with stupid enemies, overly generous windows, and even excessive visual/audio cues to make sure you get the parry. So in most games I've played with it, the parry is the game. There's no better option and it's boring. Indies especially fuck this up.

The other one is losing your stuff on death and needing to collect it. It works in Souls games because they're RPG's from the onset with map design to facilitate soul loss as a genuine tension builder. It also has other reasons why you'd want to retrieve your stuff such as reversing Hollowing and kindling the next bonfire instead of just being simple currency. Losing your souls is integral to every facet of exploration and is a meaningful asset in a genre meant to be about exploration. It's one of the only RPG's I know right now where the world is dangerous beyond mid to late game boss encounters. All enemies can contest your piggy bank, traps are a concern, heights/fall damage are a concern, bottomless pits become scary. Environmental hazards are emphasized. You take everything that could harm you very seriously and in turn it makes you interact with and examine the world far more thoroughly. It's very elegant and actually kind of understated in the game in some ways.

But then you have platformers for example that want to add this system. And what happens is, well, you have to lose something so that means they need some kind of progression to allow the player a tangible loss instead of it essentially just being a loss of score. So that means you have these linear platformers forcing RPG elements because "Dork Sauls does it". Now they need shops. Now they need leveling or something. Now they need "skill trees". Now they need some kind of hub. Sometimes you get "quests" and minigames that feel like wastes of time but get you more of whatever currency can be lost. It becomes less of a "mechanical glue" and more of just a goofy tedium that forces a game I'd prefer be more focused to now spread itself out and take longer than is necessary. It has to force things in a genre that's usually better off not having RPG elements in the first place. The Shovel Knight series comes to mind. They're collectathons pretending to be more hardcore than they actually are because they're not even remotely difficult enough to be attempting something like this.

Then you have things like Blasphemous which *is* better suited to the retrieval system but, it still does it poorly because unlike From Software games, that game is unpolished in a way that makes the mechanic very frustratingly inconsistent. You'll get knocked into a pit of spikes, die instantly, and then your exp is in the damn spikes or some other area you can't reach. It would be one thing if it was intentional for certain deaths to destroy your haul and communicates that there's no way to come back from specific failures. But the mechanic is clearly broken in that game. But they REALLY really wanted to be 2D Dark Souls so they had to have the system. It doesn't happen all the time of course, but it happened enough to me where my progression through it was very stop and go and I didn't even want to finish it.

I don't get annoyed with Dark Souls or feel like I'm meandering. But it's imitators ARE annoying and feel like they're watering themselves down. So it's why I held off on these games for SO long because I figured the followers doing things this poorly meant the leader didn't set a preferable example. Boy, was I wrong.

I could also get into combat and aesthetic copycats but, I really can't articulate all that and don't want to try right now.

EDIT: I know platformers have had RPG elements since the 80's with things like Faxanadu and Zelda 2. I don't mean to imply RPG platformers are a new thing because of Souls games. What I was getting at was games wanted to rip off one specific mechanic from Dark Souls so that in turn means taking something that could otherwise stand fine as it's own small thing now needs to have the full suite of RPGisms to accommodate this new toy. Hope that makes sense.

[guigui]

I hear XoPachi's points and moslty agree that many Soul's clones or inspiration do not feel as satisfing as the original.

Now we could ask the other way around : what games with Souls-like mechanism do you find good ? I for instance enjoyed a lot of Hollow Knight.

[vol.2]

Finished Prey (2017)

Hmmmm. I did enjoy the game. I more or less stick by my assessment of it at about 10 hours in; it's an interesting mix of fairly obvious influences with a decently written, if not wholly original story.

Final thoughts are that it could have been a little longer; the possible endings don't feel especially fleshed out and I didn't really feel like I got much use out of the weapon load-out and magic system. I also have a couple of big qualms with the morality and choices in the game, but I don't want to spoil anything so I will continue below.

Spoiler

My biggest issues with the morality system of the game is that you don't actually make the choices for the character. You start the game as a pre-written character that has already made huge choices that go far beyond what the vast majority of people have to face in the course of their lifetime. Even though you have lost your memory, that doesn't automatically abdicate responsibility, nor does whatever choices you make in the game cancel out anything you've already done. When the final end comes and you learn that it was all a simulation designed to fool you into revealing something about your character, that only effects the very last choice you are allowed to make, which you have no further responsibility for afterwards. It's almost as though they knew that there wasn't any satisfying choice and consequence system in the game, and they tacked on the surprise ended to try and make up for that. "If we just say it was all a simulation, then none of that matters, right?"

One very specific instance of choice-making that annoyed me was the final choice of either killing the aliens or blowing up the station. I was completely unsure that I couldn't do both. It made more sense to me (in fact the only sense) to kill the aliens off immediately and then figure out the station later. Why would I blow up the station, risking the lives of everyone in the process, when I could just kill off the immediate threat and then take my time turning the arming keys when I was left on the station alone. I could have even used Alex's escape pod myself afterwards, it was right there waiting for me. The first time I ended the game, I stunned Alex and blew up January (just a robot who cares) and first killed off the aliens and was surprised that the it forced the end of the game. So just reloaded and did it the other way.

Anyways, good bones of a game that felt a little half-baked at times, especially towards the end. They shouldn't have tried to introduce morality and choice into the game because there's no real consequence for any of it and none of it really matters to the story. Ending the game with a weird robot blow-by-blow of what you chose to do during the game brings the meaningless of it all into much sharper focus.

[Sumez]

Those burly, big dick, 8 foot tall knights in Dark Souls have killed me to enough where I just avoid them now until I feel confident in my loadout to go back and destroy them. I could only kill the first one.

Oh yeah, I don't think those should be thought of as obstacles in the stages early on. They are definitely to be avoided until you have the gear, stats and confidence to actually start taking them down.
There's a reason they are never placed in your way, but always off the beaten path

One thing I'll say... Playing these two games immediately made it apparent how BADLY people imitate the more popular mechanics of the series. No one copying what these games do has done it right out of the ones I've played doing as such. This is on top of just generally being sick of seeing a ton of games taking those mechanics.

Absolute truth

[Sumez]

Now we could ask the other way around : what games with Souls-like mechanism do you find good ? I for instance enjoyed a lot of Hollow Knight.

I feel like the only thing that Hollow Knight really lifts from Souls is the way it applies mood and atmosphere, but even that is wholly its own, being much more cute and endearing than Demons/Dark Souls' bleak worlds.

It does have the "collect things after you died" mechanic, but I'm not sure what it does, like what are you even collecting? I also think I only needed to do that twice in the entire game, because it's so rare that you actually die while exploring. That's almost exclusively at bosses or the arena. So definitely doesn't feel like Souls in that regard either. It's a very bog(bug?)-standard metroidvania game, and I always found the comparisons to the Souls series really odd.

[guigui]

I agree that Hollow Knight is much more of a Metroidvania than a Soul's like. The "grab your lost stuff on death mark" thing is not that important, and did not put pressure on me more than twice in a full playthrough.
Though I remember the lore, world, level design, characters have been deeply influenced by Dark Souls. During my 1st run, I recognized elements inspired by DS countless times.

But now, what games bothering elements from Souls games are actually good ?

[Sumez]

I mean the most obvious one would probably be the Nioh games. Those are probably the best(?) games to fully qualify as "soulslikes" - as in they basically replicate all of the great stuff from those games, while also doing a few things of their own, which vary from great (the combat and enemy stamina systems) to awful (the diablo loot system)

But yeah I'm also curious about games which take from the Souls series without actually trying to be the same sort of game. Because there is definitely things that can be reused well. Like XoPachi said, the soul retrieval thing is one aspect (though I think there is more to it) that helps the player taking every single step, enemy and potential trap or ambush seriously. It really is this awareness of every little nook in the level design that makes the Souls games so engaging and enjoyable to play. And I think more games in vaguely other genres could potentially do the same, although it's definitely rare that it's done well.

Salt & Sacrifice is the most obvious example of a 2D indie game (out of the many that try) that actually manage to feel like it correctly replicates such elements and "feels" from the original Souls series. It massively suffers from a lack of variation though, and feels extremely pointless once you've made some headway into it. Momodora 4 (Reverie) also feels like it really wants to be a 2D Bloodborne moreso than a metroidvania, and to some extend I think it actually does it quite well. Or at least, that's how I remember it. I recently played the newest Momodora game, and thought it was just overall not good, with especially combat and enemy encounters being extremely poorly designed.

One of the best things I think MANY games of today like to lift from Dark Souls is the estus system. Where using healing isn't tied to a collectable resource like health potions, but one which always refills at checkpoints, so that you don't have to manage some arbitrary inventory that creates a massively unbalanced difficulty level based on how many you own or don't. The "estus" style system is just objectively so much better, and I think it's great that so many games have learned from it.
Of course, Dark Souls didn't invent this mechanic, but it's definitely the reason why it's become the gold standard for "healing potions" in action video games nowadays. Hell, FromSoft themselves even used basically the same system with crystal flasks in the King's Field games ages ago.

[Daytime Waitress]

But then you have platformers for example that want to add this system. And what happens is, well, you have to lose something so that means they need some kind of progression to allow the player a tangible loss instead of it essentially just being a loss of score. So that means you have these linear platformers forcing RPG elements because "Dork Sauls does it". Now they need shops. Now they need leveling or something. Now they need "skill trees". Now they need some kind of hub. Sometimes you get "quests" and minigames that feel like wastes of time but get you more of whatever currency can be lost. It becomes less of a "mechanical glue" and more of just a goofy tedium that forces a game I'd prefer be more focused to now spread itself out and take longer than is necessary. It has to force things in a genre that's usually better off not having RPG elements in the first place.

EDIT: I know platformers have had RPG elements since the 80's with things like Faxanadu and Zelda 2. I don't mean to imply RPG platformers are a new thing because of Souls games. What I was getting at was games wanted to rip off one specific mechanic from Dark Souls so that in turn means taking something that could otherwise stand fine as it's own small thing now needs to have the full suite of RPGisms to accommodate this new toy. Hope that makes sense.

It definitely makes sense. But I do wonder how much of that is down to consciously aping From; how much of it is the capacity to recognise how and why DS elements maybe can't/won't work in another unrelated genre and compensating accordingly; and how much of it is just the manner in which that kind of padding has become some kind of industry-wide standard (I don't even know what to call it - the MMORPGification of everything? The insistence that every genre needs RPG elements (Numbers Go Up), because adding leveling mechanics gated by multiple forms of currency means more dopamine handouts across more hours and thus more Engagement with Product and/or Service).

I'm not disagreeing with you, mind - heck, I've been fortunate enough to avoid a lot of stuff deliberately riffing off of Souls, and that's why I asked you what aspects stood out in your experience
I'm just curious as to how much of it is due to a wider cultural shift towards bloat, is all.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

One of the best things I think MANY games of today like to lift from Dark Souls is the estus system. Where using healing isn't tied to a collectable resource like health potions, but one which always refills at checkpoints, so that you don't have to manage some arbitrary inventory that creates a massively unbalanced difficulty level based on how many you own or don't.

Oddly enough, it feels like earlier games that did this went unnoticed or people complained about the limited carrying capacity of healing items, when RPGs with limited inventory slots or limited healing resources basically had this by making your items and spells limited resources you had to manage, rather than simply being able to stockpile 99 of every item in the game that gave you full HP and MP healing.

Dragon Quest, Mother, the first Final Fantasy, Wizardry, various similarly styled RPGs, all had limited item slots and so you couldn't carry a literal infinite hoard of healing with you, making dungeon exploration a lot more meaningful and consequential. Even the "Tales of" games limit this by only allowing 15 or 20 of each item to be carried at a time. But people don't typically talk about the limited item capacity and the strategic consequences of that favorably. I suspect it's because the item list also gets filled up with key/story related items, rather than storage for those items being managed separately?

[vol.2]

Oddly enough, it feels like earlier games that did this went unnoticed or people complained about the limited carrying capacity of healing items, when RPGs with limited inventory slots or limited healing resources basically had this by making your items and spells limited resources you had to manage, rather than simply being able to stockpile 99 of every item in the game that gave you full HP and MP healing.

I think the real issue isn't the healing items or lack thereof, it's the balance of the game outside of the healing items and how "grindy" the game tends to feel. When much of your game is spent grinding random encounters to unblock a tougher area, the healing items are just a calculation of how many battles you can fight before you have to refill.

When a game gets less grindy, the calculation leans more toward how far the healing items can take you to the next objective or town.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

People complain about grinding in any older RPG even when you can literally camp out next to a town or use a game's version of tents to recover as needed, I don't think it's related to grinding.

It's more relevant for how far you can safely push into a dungeon before you need to make your escape anyways. Auto-saving and checkpoints have also dumbed down that aspect I find, older RPGs where you have limited save points or can only save outside of major dungeons are more consequential I think.

[Sumez]

Oddly enough, it feels like earlier games that did this went unnoticed or people complained about the limited carrying capacity of healing items, when RPGs with limited inventory slots or limited healing resources basically had this by making your items and spells limited resources you had to manage, rather than simply being able to stockpile 99 of every item in the game that gave you full HP and MP healing.

I think there's a massive difference between just having a cap on healing items vs. having a limited stock that always refills on its own without the player needing to go buy or find them or whatever.
The elegant design in Estus flasks is exactly that you *don't* need to manage any sort of resource.

If I have a cap on items I can use, and I need to go restock somehow once I run out, that just makes me much more hesistant to even use them at all. Estus reset on their own, so not using them would just be a waste. But using them safely does require some thinking and timing, so they aren't just some extended lifebar either. At least not exactly.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I mean, you do have to manage upgrading Estus and kindling bonfires. I've lost track of the number of newbies I've watched fail to real the descriptions and immediately eat the Fire Keeper souls they find without using them to upgrade. This results in a struggle against later bosses; trying to fight Ornstein & Smough with an unupgraded Estus flask is not a tremendous idea unless you know what you're doing! Estus is faster and typically far better than healing miracles are too. Estus is really equivalent to healing spells in a typical RPG in that MP is more quickly and easily recovered at an Inn but can, in a pinch, be recovered with more limited and expensive recovery items. The actual healing spells in Souls tend to be much slower to execute and weaker, so healing miracles are more akin to backup items that aren't important for when in combat.

There are plenty of games with resource caps but the resources themselves aren't particularly cumbersome or time consuming to replenish; they really just serve as a cap on how long your expedition can go until you'll need to consider restocking, which is what serves as part of the tension in lengthy dungeons.

[To Far Away Times]

Reverting from the estus system back to consumable healing items is why I've never really gotten along with Bloodborne, whereas many people list it as their favorite. Don't get me wrong, it's still a good game, but with the cap for consumables set at 20 I feel like I'm expected to grind them back up to 20 when I die otherwise I will just keep dying, and then it kinda feels like the game is wasting my time when Miyazaki and Co. already had this figured out. Kind of a weird regression.

[Sima Tuna]

Grinding blood vials is probably the one aspect of Bloodborne I can safely say is flawed.

I would rank the game a 10/10 in all other respects, but the blood vials are definitely a downgrade from the estus system. The thing is, if From wanted to have consumables back in a Souls game, they could just have added some relatively rare ones in addition to the blood vials. A lot of people used Humanities that way in Dark Souls anyway, just popping them for healing after they'd used their estus. It's not something a novice player would probably do, but veterans with extra humanity can get use from them that way, especially if you know you're going to push to the next bonfire and kindle it, so the number on your humanity counter won't be potentially wasted.

Anyway, obviously the lifegem system from Dark Souls 2 was hugely fucking flawed (you could use the souls from a single boss kill to stock up enough lifegems to steamroll early game, and by the time you need to refill on lifegems, you can just do the same thing again with a different boss and buy 99 of them, so nothing kills you unless it's a OHKO or true combo.) But I'm sure there would have been a way to add something similar without completely breaking the balance of the game.

One thing I actually like about a lot of non-From Souls games is they typically don't give you AS many Estus Flasks as a souls game will. I thought Salt and Sanctuary and The Surge both did a good job with theirs. Both games gave you typically two types of healing: Good Healing and Weak Healing. Good healing would be your estus flasks, and you'd have maybe 5 of those by midgame, at best. The weak healing items you could buy, but they really would be very slow regen and/or not recover much. You could use them while traveling between fights but they wouldn't do a lot in a boss battle. Not if you were trading hits. In The Surge, I think even the weakest healing items couldn't be purchased. They were more like equipment you put on your character. You had to decide if you wanted to slot a few weak heals or something else instead, in addition to your strong heals of course.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

A lot of people used Humanities that way in Dark Souls anyway, just popping them for healing after they'd used their estus.

Humanities were just cumbersome enough to farm that if you wanted to use them exclusively to heal you could, but they were slow and you could only farm them in a reasonable amount of time once Sen's Fortress was opened (Covetous Gold Serpent Ring). They were also far slower than Estus, so having access to full hp healing items didn't feel too unbalanced there. Divine Blessings and Elizabeth's Mushrooms were even stronger but there's a limited number each playthrough quite sensibly.

I agree that blood vials were a step back, but not as bad as Sekiro's emblems where the cost actually goes up later in the game, meaning you want to farm them early on or it becomes even more of a nuisance later. I don't understand why you didn't just get your emblems / MP restored to full at a bonfire without the whole having to buy them thing, it adds an unnecessary layer of awkwardness that's not in spellcasting in the souls game. You do eventually get to use your health to produce emblems, similar to blood bullets in Bloodborne, but that's a ways into the game (and I never discovered the item that lets you do it on my first playthrough).

Emblems are also punishing as you need them to experiment with subweapons, but it feels like you're pissing cash away when you experiment with them and it doesn't pay off. Fortunately they're not too expensive, but it still feels unnecessary.

[Steven]

I guess it's time to play StarCraft for some reason. Spent an ungodly amount of time playing UMS online with my IRL friends when I was like 10~15, but I never finished single player without cheating. I did finish the Terran and Zerg campaigns without cheating a few years ago and was over halfway done with Protoss, but it seems that this game doesn't have cloud saves and my saves seem to have been on my SSD, which got wiped when I switched to Linux and back to Windows, so I have to start over again. Done with Terran now and 1/3 done with Zerg. Zerg campaign is way easier than Terran, which is already super easy until The Hammer Falls, so I don't think it will take too long to get back to where I was. Just now realized that I could cheat and get back to where I was, but this is probably the longest I've gone in my life without playing since it released, so I really suck horribly now and need the practice.

This game used to kick my ass when I was a little kid, but when I played it a few years ago I found that it's actually mostly pretty easy. I guess that's what happens when you aren't 10 years old anymore. Not doing any save scumming, either; if I fuck up, I restart. The new HD graphics suck horribly and I hate them. At least widescreen is nice and Duke's head doesn't look really weird anymore, but I'm going to stick with the old graphics and 4:3.

Also tried StarCraft II for the first time in a while and I still don't know what to think about this game. Single player's normal difficulty is so brainless that the only strategy you need is to mindlessly spam whatever new unit you got in the mission you are playing and F2 A-moving, but I'm so damn rusty at literally everything that I don't mind it being super easy right now. Let's pretend the story itself literally doesn't exist at all and that only SC1 has a story. Not sure if I'm going to play this game for real right now, but once I am done with SC1 I'll definitely play SC2.

Also decided to resume Tales of Destiny Director's Cut. It's been 20 years and I still can't believe how fast this game's battle system is. Stop paying attention for one moment and your entire party except for Mary is dead because they got smashed by a billion things at once that you failed to stop. Playing NG+ Stan's Side with nothing from the bonus shop or whatever it's called on Evil. This game is hilariously mean on higher difficulties, but it's so well designed that grinding is unnecessary even on Evil and you can get through with pure skill only... but then there is the insane last boss and the bosses in the second half in general will relentlessly hand you your ass even on Normal. I don't even know if I want to see how it is on Chaos, but at least higher difficulties don't just do the typical thing where the only change is to multiply enemy stats, maybe moderately change enemy behaviour, and leave everything else the same, and of course you get rewarded for playing on higher difficulties. As the difficulty level increases both the player and the enemies get higher critical and weakness damage, and also reduced resistance damage, so even someone like Lion's fragile ass can take multiple resistance hits on Evil or Chaos and barely notice, but taking a single weakness hit even as someone as tanky as Stan will probably be instant death, so it's a lot of fun in that way. Lion still dies to anything he takes normal damage from in like two hits, though.

I just got Woodrow and Chelsea back. I was playing as Lion for a little bit because I normally don't do that for obvious reasons, and holy crap he's amazing if you know that Gen'eijin gives him big iframes, which he can abuse to safely refill his Blast Gauge in seconds and spam Jouha Messhouen and Majin Rengokusatsu almost as much as he wants. Too bad I don't have the supremely broken Majinken Setsuga... I am very tempted to immediately play Lion's Side once I am done with Stan's Side so I can get Majinken Setsuga. I didn't feel like doing it the last time I played this game 5 or 6 years ago, but we'll see.

[drauch]

The new HD graphics suck horribly and I hate them. At least widescreen is nice and Duke's head doesn't look really weird anymore, but I'm going to stick with the old graphics and 4:3.

Damn. This is the first time I think I've seen anyone say that. I've always thought of this remaster as the template for how it should be done. Gameplay the same, everything looks the same -- just more detailed. You can actually see a lot of Zerg units heads now, lol. Genuinely confused on what "suck[s] horribly" about them? But if you just prefer the pixel look from before I can at least get that viewpoint.

Maybe you're aware already, but there's also a cheat to skip levels if you want to continue where you left off in your previous save, since nothing carries over from mission to mission.

And speaking of aesthetics, one of the reasons I could never get into SCII was the character design. Ever since Warcraft III everything has been super bulky and cartoony. I mean, I hate the giant blob of units gameplay and the awful story as well .

[Sima Tuna]

I got past the point of the major "plot twist" in Xillia. I say "plot twist" because the

Spoiler

two worlds

thing is a plot twist in a bunch of Tales games and basically expected at this point. There's also a super obvious traitor character who functions more as a deconstruction of a traitor character than anyone you would actually care about. The dude is so cartoonishly traitorous, yet never gets punished by the party... At least not yet.

Bosses are dumb. They gain hyper armor whenever they want and when they decide to attack, you better hope you aren't locked into another animation. They can OHKO from anything. It's not that uncommon for this to be the case in Tales games. I did learn some interesting things about the combat system though.

1) Palm strike combos into itself 2) it's really fast 3) it deals a lot of damage. If you're willing to spend your entire sp bar in one go, you can deal a massive assload of damage to anything by just spamming palm strikes. I tried using other moves, like Beast, but Palm Strike works probably the best. The other secret is to just chain using the linked arts over and over, since even if they miss, they grant invul. There are other moves you can use, but I haven't found another move as broken as Palm Strike. The basic demon fang is also solid to spam, and that's what I used prior to obtaining palm strike, but the damage isn't as good.

I'd say I'm 7/10 on Xillia as a game. Combat with enemies is very fun. Jude is one of the most enjoyable playable characters in a while. I like martial arts characters in general, and he's got a lot of cool tech... When the game will LET you use it. Since backstep isn't fully invul and block can be broken without the right skills, there are a lot of bosses you just can't use half your shit with. Boss attack hitboxes are quite bullshit.

The story has been FINE.PNG. Elize and Teepo are great. For once, a mascot character isn't annoying in Tales. Jude having a job that a typical normal person in real life might have is a nice change of pace. Milla is ok. I'm not crazy about her trope but it's fine. Old Man and Childhood Friend are quite generic, although Childhood Friend has a fun weapon. For once, "old man" isn't 35, but more like 65. You know... Actually old, but still active.

[Steven]

The new HD graphics suck horribly and I hate them. At least widescreen is nice and Duke's head doesn't look really weird anymore, but I'm going to stick with the old graphics and 4:3.

Damn. This is the first time I think I've seen anyone say that. I've always thought of this remaster as the template for how it should be done. Gameplay the same, everything looks the same -- just more detailed. You can actually see a lot of Zerg units heads now, lol. Genuinely confused on what "suck[s] horribly" about them? But if you just prefer the pixel look from before I can at least get that viewpoint.

It's largely the change in art direction combined with a lot of weird character redesigns. Raynor and Mengsk look very different from how they look in SC1, but they also look pretty different in SC2 as well, so it's weird, like there are now 3 separate designs for some characters and none of them match the others, so none of them look like they are supposed to be the same person. Jim Raynor probably got it the worst. The general art direction is very different from the original. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I do like SC1 to look like SC1; I really liked the dirty, gritty aesthetic that SC1 had. Now it looks super clean and sterile, which means it does not look like SC1. What I definitely do not like is the way the units look like they are superimposed upon a background as if they float above a picture of where they are supposed to be instead of actually being in that location, if that makes sense. This is a problem with a lot of games that use pre-rendered graphics, though.

Comparing it to C&C, I think C&C turned out much nicer, even with the weird-looking AI-upscaled cutscenes in C&C. Best part is that C&C is officially open source, which has nothing to do with how it turned out, but it's cool. Never thought that one of the largest publishers in the world would make their game open source, but they did! I'd like for EA to fix C&C3 so it's not stuck at 30 FPS, but I doubt that will happen. It's more likely than making C&C4 into an actual good game, but...

And speaking of aesthetics, one of the reasons I could never get into SCII was the character design. Ever since Warcraft III everything has been super bulky and cartoony. I mean, I hate the giant blob of units gameplay and the awful story as well .

The art shift in SC2 is very jarring coming from SC1. I remember the first time I saw Raynor and I was like "who the hell is this guy? WTF this is supposed to be Jim Raynor? He looks totally different!" He talks very differently too, despite very obviously having the same voice actor. Not sure why they suddenly decided to give him a completely new accent that he definitely didn't have before, but they did and I've never liked it. Still, I'd rather pretend that no aspect of SC2's story exists.

I'm not really sure about the gameplay, either. There are a lot of excellent changes to general control stuff like showing your control groups, being able to select multiple buildings at once, not being limited to groups of 12, not having borderline useless unit pathfinding, and all of that other stuff, but it also sometimes feels overly simplified while other things simultaneously feel overdesigned. The devs kept adding and removing or changing a bunch of stuff for some reason and it felt like the devs were just making a bunch of arbitrary changes to see what everyone liked because they had no clue what they were doing. SC1 got a bunch of changes too, but entire units were never outright removed from the game at any point like what happened in SC2. I remember when Spawning Pools cost 150 minerals... actually, when I played the first Zerg mission a few hours ago I noticed it's kind of messed up because the tutorial audio telling you to build a Spawning Pool plays once you gather 150 minerals even though they've been 200 for like 23 years now, so you can't actually built it when the game tells you that you can.

Anyway, there is the weird new mechanic in SC2 where certain units are designated as counters to certain specific other units for some reason. How does it go? Marauders are the counter to Roaches which counter something else or something like that? There are a bunch of weird things like that now. The armour system in SC1 was weird and I think think it's ever explained to the player in any official source, so at least SC2 actually tells you how it works, but it also works in the opposite way; SC1 gives you damage reductions against certain types of units while SC2 gives bonus damage instead. It makes more sense logically for certain weapons to be less effective against some targets than to get bonus damage against some targets, but that's how it is now, and at least it tells you exactly how it works.

Eh... SC2 is a mess. At least it has decent pathfinding most of the time, but yeah, it's got a lot of deathball gameplay going on and I don't think that's too interesting.

Bosses are dumb.

lol I told you~♥

Have Milla and Rowen spam Fireball + Splash. Splash is especially effective because of how many hits it does so quickly, so it will keep many bosses locked in place doing their blue ! attack thing that they use to break out of combos. It's stupid, but that's how it is. I no damaged the last boss of act 2 on my first attempt doing this. Or was it just no deaths? Whatever. It was one of those two.

No spoilers, but be ready for the final boss. On Hard difficulty, it's infuriating. It's not hard, it's just annoying as fuck, as if the devs decided to specifically make the most frustrating boss possible. It took me 42 minutes and 52.81 seconds to beat that fight. It's nowhere near as hard as some of the bosses in the 2D games, like the final boss of the Destiny remake that is completely ridiculous, but in many ways I think it's way worse.

[drauch]

a lot of weird character redesigns.

That's a fair criticism. I played fairly competitively up until last year, so I haven't had the time in-game to even acknowledge them since it came out, lol. Completely forgot about how they sexied up poor Jim's unibrow and took away what I always assumed was Kerrigan's (human) braided hair.

I still watch Starcraft almost every night. I think its 'limitations' are what makes it so enjoyable to watch. With the smaller unit groups that require more control, and the fact that units don't just ball up and overlap makes for more tactical gameplay imo. I love playing it, but the only other RTS with high-level screened gameplay is AoE II, and I find that dreadfully boring to watch with its massive control groups and slower gameplay. But hey, I get it. If you're not playing a billion hours of Starcraft, sometimes getting that Dragoon or Siege Tank down the ramp is infuriating .