BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I disagree, but with a caveat. I think for narrative purposes it's not unforgivable to necessarily have you play different characters over the course of a campaign, but New Game+ has to include an option where you can play the entire campaign as the character of your choosing, even during the parts that character's not supposed to be around. That way you only have to deal with it for the storyline on your first playthrough, and can play whoever you want whenever you want for subsequent runs.
My issue with those situations is that narrative takes hard-left precedence over mechanical pacing, so unless you're looking at a Bayo / Jeanne / Rosa proposal where the difference is subtle or nonexistent, it acts as a soft reset and forces the player to relearn just as they're hitting stride.
Even after the fact with some domain knowledge, having to slog through V's sections of DMCV makes a replay less appealing despite having some of the series' best combat and character moments.
Though yeah, I think making the full Character * Stage ranking matrix available for post-game play should absolutely be baseline, even if it involves turning off character-specific setpieces and introducing immersion-breaking floating platforms, i.e. so Dante can get past a Grim Grip sequence.
DMC4 was particularly silly in that respect, since they more than doubled the character count in Special Edition, but stuck doggedly to bisecting the campaign for everyone but Vergil...
Sima Tuna wrote:Now that the dust has settled on Bayonetta 3, does the thread have a verdict?
Bah. So much for being able to close my tab, walk away, and do productive things today
Sima Tuna wrote:I know the story is complete trash. The internet was all up in arms about that. I honestly don't care about bayo's story because it's always been trash and the characters all sucked aside from Bayo herself, Rodin and maaaaybe Jeanne. I don't care if the story betrays the deep lore and bayo dies 1000x or whatever the hell.
Even throwing the content of the story out the window, the way it's told is rubbish compared to the first two. I went back to replay B2 to make sure I wasn't rocking nostalgia goggles, and nah, the presentation and overall level of cohesion is absolutely night and day.
It's as if they took a minimum-viable approach this time, ensuring that the boxes that define a Bayo game are checked on paper, but without the all-important between-the-lines polish that makes an exemplary stylish action game.
Sima Tuna wrote:What I care about is whether or not the demon slave shit makes bayo's combat better or worse. I've heard it both ways. I've heard it cheapens combat because you just summon for the entire game and summons are OP. I've also heard that it opens a new dimension to gameplay and the weapons are as deep as ever.
Combat wise, it's a mixed bag. The weapons themselves are tight aside from a couple of small-but-tangible regressions to series staples, and there are tons of them, but they took some cues from Astral Chain's crap RPG unlock progression and split the previously-core moves like Stiletto into duplicated per-weapon upgrades, which makes unsatisfying busywork of the unlock process.
Masquerade is neat I guess, but ultimately amounts to deviantart bait, super moves, and traversal gimmicks.
The demon slave stuff is interesting, but confuses the combat - there's a degree of weaving big-bang summons into your regular combos, which is cool, but it feels more like a big toybox than something that comes together into a system whose elements truly compliment one another.
It acts as an optional win button for smaller encounters, and tends to take center stage over regular moves in the larger ones. Jack's point about cheese is fair, but the erosion of challenge is more codified here than in most action titles.
Should have been its own thing that wasn't weighed down by the need to also be Bayo, since it nails neither despite showcasing potential.
And Viola sucks. She's a try-hard comic relief jobber from start to finish, yet the game treats her like the newtype who's going to replace all the boring old characters in Season 4. The walking, talking,
quipping avatar of "we have a product for you oldheads, it's called Bayo 1+2".
Cheshire brings some fun yuks to proceedings, but supports a core character moveset that is actively at odds with itself and tends toward scrabbling up meter so the big galumpher can smash everything.
I hear they patched in a more forgiving parry window at some point, but that's neither here nor there given that we're looking at a borderline-DMC2 'just forget it' situation
Sima Tuna wrote:Performance definitely appears sub-par on switch but ayyy lmao that's just switch life at this point. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 looks like a ps1 game at times when I play handheld.
Wonderful 101 has got that variable 31-55 framerate going on. Not sure what's up with the green toothpaste enemy designs in bayo 3 though. Didn't anyone tell Kamiya during testing that glowing green enemies look a bit
ass?
The level and enemy design is, for the most part, godawful. I would have considered that a harsh appraisal during my initial run, but feel it's quite fair after having my jaw hit the floor while revisiting Vigrid and its denizens.
3 has big pop-offs, but
nothing that comes close to elegant design of the first two. The green cummies never get interesting, and the world is a victim of its own initial aspirations to more open structure.
You can really feel the back-down from attempting to make open-world bayo, because the areas tend to be massive, empty, limp-wristedly photoreal, and covered in
RETURN TO THE BATTLEFIELD mist that both looks crap and acts as an obnoxious new evolution of the much-maligned invisible wall.
They should have stuck to their guns and made Super Bayonetta Odyssey tbh, since that would at least have justified the regressions.
In Short: It's
Kamiya's Ninja Gaiden 3.2.
A thematically comparable feat of cratering a beloved series, with gameplay that doesn't need a proverbial Razor's Edge to fix it up, but is conversely too flawed to hold a similar pedigree when viewed through the lens of pure action.
(And don't even get me started on Bayonetta Origins. The hidden demo already felt like cynical 'Platinum wants to make a feelsy indie' pitch material on first blush, and only reinforces the New Coke scenario now it's been revealed and released in full. I fear P* have forgotten their own recipe at this point.)
Sima Tuna wrote:Wonderful 101 is going really rough. Everything about playing this game feels wrong to me. I'm going to assume it's user error, because my first instinct is to go full DSP and blame the game. "Oh mah gawd the game is laggy! I pressed BLAWK! WHAT THE FUCK DOOD" And then I flail my arms as poor Wonder Red eats a cannonball to the face. The mobility feels really bad in this game compared to other PAD titles I've played. Standard movement feels slow. Enemy attacks track. Maybe I need to be holding the dash button all the time? I want to use the Spring but it uses up my power bar really fast. So I assume I need to save that for dodging only. The block timing is both lenient and harsh-I can't get the hang of it and inevitably block too early or too late. Or I block and then try to punish, but an enemy I could barely see (or couldn't see) on the edge of the screen homes in on me and hits me.
All of this is probably my fault, for sure. But it hasn't been a whole lot of fun so far. I remember the first time played ninja gaiden or god hand. I got my ass kicked, but it was fun. So whatever the secret sauce is that makes wonderful 101 enjoyable, I haven't encountered it yet.
Invoking DSP is textbook first playthrough
How far through (ish) are you? For me, the core started to click somewhere around when you get Yellow (an airship level?) but remained overwhelming until looping back around with upgrades in the post-game.