What Are You Currently Playing? 6.65: Neighbor of the Beast

[Foggle]

So I recently played through A Link Between Worlds (finally) and lord have mercy that game was wonderful. I loved everything about it, though there were one or two moments I found a little tedious. Damn near perfect game. Excellent level design, beautiful music (the Lorule overworld theme!!!), best 2D Zelda gameplay ever, charming graphics and animations, fun story and dialogue; what a gem. Think I'm gonna' have to play some more of these while I wait for Nier Automata.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Yeah, it's one of my favorite games in the series and the reason I'm excited for Breath of the Wild. The non-linearity really gives it the kick in the pants to make it so much different from the other games. Also, that Dark World remix is gorgeous and one of my favorite Zelda tracks. I would say it's probably the best 2D Zelda game overall.

[Foggle]

It's definitely up there for me, probably my favorite game on the 3DS. You know a game is good when it can actually keep me glued to a handheld system for hours at a time. Really top notch stuff, and definitely made me a lot more excited for BotW as well. I'm playing through LttP right now and I think I'll go for another run of Link's Awakening, Minish Cap, or the Oracle games afterward depending on how much time I have left before Nier releases.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Also, I was playing Deux Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut for the Wii U. My friend lent me his copy and it doesn't work 90% of the time, so I had to stop after a good chunk of gameplay.

I wish it was easier for me to play these games, because they're a lot of fun. Great level design, a lot of things to do and places to go, and the game is just fun. Also can't get enough of Adam Jensen's voice actor: "I never asked for this." He has the best delivery. Wish I could play it more, but I really enjoyed what I played.

[Foggle]

Glad you like it! That game is really great, and the Wii U version is the best way to play it unless you can somehow acquire copies of the non-Director's Cut and DLC packs for PC. The new one's good too despite the myriad of BS imposed on the team by Square Enix - need to get around to finishing it, actually. I also love Jensen's voice actor, and Sarif's as well.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I almost wish there was a Director's Cut version for the Switch so I could pick that up. What I've played of the series has been great, but getting them together on the PC is a lot of work for me.

But yeah I like the gameplay variety Human Revolution offers. The different ways to approach situations and the aesthetics are top notch. With so many AAA games going for less and less it's nice to see a series that hasn't forgotten its roots.

[Pharass]

Picked up Nioh today. I won't really get a chance to play it until the weekend though.

I recognize the title, is it the game based on an unused Kurosawa movie-script, or am I thinking of another game?

Currently, I'm eagerly waiting for Night In the Woods to come out. It looks just like my kind of game.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yes, that's the same game that you're thinking of, though story-wise it clearly resembles nothing of Kurosawa's work, but to be fair it's not a game that one would really play for the story.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Damn, people weren't lying when they said how long this game was. I've been playing for 15+ hours collectively and I'm only just now starting on the second island. Granted, I'm a very slow player and like to dick around with different armor builds a lot, so that easily eats up at least half of my play-time. But still, from what I can tell I'm not even a quarter of the way through the game, yet.

I do think that I may have over-leveled a bit. Not because I've gone out of my way to grind, but because I don't hesitate to spend Amrita whenever I have enough to level up, so I never have to deal with losing all of my Amrita upon consecutive deaths. I'm currently level 42, and I'm well above the recommended levels for the missions that I'm currently taking on, and that's not actually what I want, so I'm considering letting it go for a while until I start matching up to the recommendations in order to keep my experience a bit more challenging. I've been watching some of TS17's videos, and he's much further in the game than I am, and is only at level 68 with a Ninja build taking on level 100+ missions. And this is a blind play-through, so it's on the spot and without any prior practice or experience, unlike his normal walkthroughs. At this stage most enemies can one-shot him, but it's impressive how well he's still able to play despite all of this. He hasn't died nearly as much as I expected.

Anyways, I'm loving this game so far. I've only played part of Dark Souls, but I love the action RPG formula that it set-up, and Nioh manages to borrow a lot from it while adding in much of its own flavor. In particular, it has arguably the best  real-time combat system that I've ever seen from any RPG that I've ever played. You can really tell that this is from a team with a lot of experience in the character action genre. About my only gripe is that the enemy variety is a bit lacking for a game of this length. To be fair, though, there are some new ones introduced every couple of levels to keep things fresh. As for the level design, while I'm disappointed that it's not one big interconnected world like in Dark Souls, I've come to love and appreciate it in its own way. They are sectioned off into missions, but the levels themselves can be tackled in a non-linear fashion with multiple branching paths and lots of secrets and surprises (both good and bad) to find waiting around every corner. What I like, though, is that essentially the levels feel like if you combined DOOM's labrynth-style dungeons with a hack-and-slash action game, plus the shortcuts from Dark Souls for good measure. It's a very interesting set-up that feels rather unique to this genre.

One thing that I do want to somewhat bitch about is the Tachibana Muneshige boss fight. Now, to be fair this fight is optional, but of course I'm not going to skip a boss fight (plus, that Paired Raikiri Guardian Spirits reward is just too good to pass-up). It took me so many tries, despite being well-above the recommended level, not because the boss was unbeatable, but because on-top of having ridiculous stamina, his ability to not have to adhere to rules that you and other enemies have to is flat-out unfair. Even with all of that stamina, he can chain combos on you with almost no set-up time, and if he hits you just once or twice it could easily break your guard and leave you vulnerable to be punished. And he might as well have just one-shotted me since it only ever takes him a single hit to stagger you, and at that point you'll be lucky if you ever manage to recover and dodge out of the way before he can finish you off with the rest of his combo. And as if that wasn't bad enough, his attacks have ridiculous range considering that he's only using a Katana, and with questionable hit-boxes to boot, so there are many times when you would swear you successfully dodged only to have three-quarters of your health-bar depleted and your character basically out of stamina and ready to be finished off. It took a while, but my strategy of using the Spear to poke him for some quick damage from a good distance whenever he was in recovery frames after an attack worked to slowly whittle away his health, while I waited for him to run out of stamina in order to knock him down and use an execution grapple on him for big damage. Occasionally when he messed up big-time, I would use the leg-sweep attack to knock him off of his feet and get a free opportunity to perform an execution. It took a lot of patience and perseverance, but it finally worked. Still, I just don't like boss fights like that. They are certainly hard, but not in a fun way.

That aside, this game is absolutely amazing so far. It's Team Ninja's best game since Ninja Gaiden Black (yes, I like it even more than NG2, and I'm a fan of that game), and I highly recommend it to anyone with a PS4 who likes a good action game with RPG elements. It's easily going to remain as one of the best games of the year.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I got all 120 stars in Super Mario 64.

Whoever believes this game is flawless hasn't played it since they were 10.

[Foggle]

Playing Nier Automata now. I couldn't wait for the miraculous dream-come-true Platinum Games sequel to my all-time favorite game so I gave in and bought the Japanese digital version, which comes with full English VA and text. Anyway, it's as amazing as I was hoping for - excellent, ridiculous gameplay, beautiful music, and one freaking weird story. It's missing the wonderfully written, likable characters from the original Nier so far, but then again, I'm only 4 hours in, so this might change at some point. It's the darkest and most serious entry in the series since Drakengard 1 (as well as the most bizarre), but it's still got some great humor at points. One scene involving robot "sex" made me laugh extremely hard, and, as it turns out, there aren't just four main endings (A-D as in previous titles), but also 22 joke endings (E-Z). There's a trophy tied to it, and most of them are missable/hard to find, so that's sure to piss achievement hunters off. Classic Yoko Taro trolling! The demo from a few months ago takes place about 10 minutes into the game, and the sequence leading up to it is fantastic.

Spoiler

It's a bullet hell shoot 'em up sequence that runs through every major camera style of the genre (top-down, dual stick, horizontal, and 3D) all within the span of around 5 minutes. And yes, there are other levels like it later in the game.

[close]

I got all 120 stars in Super Mario 64.

Whoever believes this game is flawless hasn't played it since they were 10.

I've noticed that with a lot of sacred cow games. Don't really like commenting on it as much anymore, though, since I don't want to stir the pot. Good perseverance! I 101%'d Donkey Kong 64 about a year ago and that was just... oh god. Never again.

[gunswordfist]

I didn't know it was out.

[Foggle]

It is in Japan. March 7th in the US.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I do want to play Nier: Automata, but I don't know anything about the previous games like the first Nier or the Drakengard series. Is it alright to just watch a compilation of the story content on YouTube before coming into Automata, or should I actually go back to the old titles? From what I hear, though, some of the older Drakengard games have pretty "meh" gameplay and can feel like a slog to play through. The first Nier seems to be liked well enough, though. Maybe I'll hunt down a copy of that for my XBOX360 if it's fairly affordable online.

It'll be a while before I get to anything else, though. Nioh is eating up most of my free-time, and it doesn't look like I'll be done with it anytime soon given how long this game is. Most sources say that it takes an average of something between 60-80 hours to clear on your first run through. Then again, there is a speed-runner who recently just nailed a world record and beat the game from scratch in under two hours, so it is possible to play it at any pace it seems. That said, I'm definitely in no rush to clear it. I'm enjoying my experience so far, though some levels aren't my cup of tea. Most recently I cleared a mining area mission with lots of poison pits and death traps, and I really wasn't a fan of it at all. That said, thankfully not every level is like this....so far, anyways. I'm hoping that these features don't become too overly-prevalent the further along I get as I continue to make progress.

But seriously, though, some tedious bits aside, this is honestly one of the best gaming experiences that I've had in years.

[Foggle]

I do want to play Nier: Automata, but I don't know anything about the previous games like the first Nier or the Drakengard series. Is it alright to just watch a compilation of the story content on YouTube before coming into Automata, or should I actually go back to the old titles? From what I hear, though, some of the older Drakengard games have pretty "meh" gameplay and can feel like a slog to play through. The first Nier seems to be liked well enough, though. Maybe I'll hunt down a copy of that for my XBOX360 if it's fairly affordable online.

Each successive game is more enjoyable if you've played the previous one just because of references and lore implications, but they're all pretty standalone to be honest. At this point I would recommend playing Nier Automata first, and then if you like its style of gameplay & storytelling, check out the original Nier afterward. Nier 1's gameplay is much clunkier (very PS2-esque), but it's still very fun and creative IMO, and I like its story/characters a lot more as of right now. If you end up liking that too, then MAYBE check out Drakengard 1 & 3, and make sure to have a walkthrough at the ready for the former. The first one is an art game and isn't much fun to play at all, really only enjoyable for the weird-ass story and bizarre presentation. The third one is a medieval fantasy sex comedy held together by duct tape from the developers of Deadly Premonition... you'll already know if you want to play it based on that description, I feel. Don't bother with Drakengard 2, it's shit and non-canon due to not being written/directed by Yoko Taro.

I'm glad to hear Nioh is so good. I really want to get it sometime soon.