Last Game You Finished And Your Thoughts V3.0

Rayman Legends (PS4)

The third console I've owned this for (Wii-U and 360 - beat on the latter) and I still maintain it's one of the best games of last-gen. Or is it current-gen? A Wii-U game that ends up on both last-gen and current-gen; let's just say it's a great game. And it truly is, the visuals, the mechanics and the audio are all top-notch. The amount of content is staggering, with that typical Ubisoft collect-a-thon (ie. Asssassin's Creed) hook of gold/silver/bronze trophies for lums (the game's currency), 700 teensies to be rescued, most of Rayman Origins as post-game content, the fun Kung Foot minigame, the ridiculous daily challenges and vicious speed challenges that will have you tearing your hair out until you nail the perfect 40 second run. I frickin' love this game and I'm seriously tempted to try and 100% it, which is madness given 2D platformers are usually titles I struggle to stick around for.

If I had a Switch, I'd probably buy it for that too.

10/10

Double post. Did anyone ever beat Legends on the Wii-U? The Murphy sections are still rather silly, being mapped to buttons.

I think I did the main game levels, but didn't go back and unlock all of the old stuff. Actually the Murphy thing worked petty good on the WiiU.

I beat it but didn't do much post-game, I'm afraid. It is a totally excellent game and I'm glad I played it (maybe it'll feature as one of the top Wii U games in our current vote? ) but there's too much on the Switch at the moment to tempt me back into it.

Cat Quest



From Kat Quest (Layton's Mystery Journey) to Cat Quest: an action RPG in which you play a feline warrior on a mission to rescue his sister. The unnamed protagonist is accompanied by the standard fairy sidekick, Spirry. Combat is basic, as are spells, and side quests are very repetitive. The graphics are crisp but functional, as is the music (although the main theme is something of an earworm, unfortunately). Somehow it's more than the sum of its parts... but only just. And the ending is diabolical, because it doesn't exist.

13/20

Horizon Zero Dawn

HZD came out back in March, 3 Days before Breath of the Wild and unless you're called Andyman949 then you weren't beating it before Zelda (Well I could of but I think I may have been on late's that week as I changed my hours to get Switch launch off).

Once I was done with Zelda, the 95-hour Persona 5 was here and the likes of HZD fail by the wayside. I could of and really should have got back to HZD sooner as it's absolutely magnificent, in almost any other year HZD would walk GOTY as it is that good.

Ashly Burch deserves all the awards she gets for her performance as Aloy and glad to hear she's back for Life is Strange: Before the Storm: Farewell. HZD is possibly the best looking game I've seen and why 4K, HDR is a thing as you get games that look like HZD, which leaves me very happy knowing Death Stranding is also using the Decima engine, especially knowing how cinematic Kojima likes to be.

Everything else is top notch be it combat, story, the world, character design etc only faults might be the last boss and music as I'm sure I've heard the same song over and over.

9/10

I think I picked it up after Zelda actually. Good game though innit.

For the record I recently played Knack 2 and it was genuinely very good. Took all of the issues with the original and fixed them leaving you with a fun God of War lite game.

Having heard nothing but the highest praise for this game, I went into it with high expectations. Oh dear, oh dear. It's just not very good.

Don't get me wrong, elements of it are really cool. I enjoy the whole shabang regarding the fusion of personas, capturing personas, that's all good. There's a great deal of depth to it and a certain amount of satisfaction in fusing together two personas to make something new and unexpected. I also like negotiating with personas when capturing them, and the strange, albeit repetitive, personalities and dialogues it gives them during this process. It's a novelty to me, and one which is supported by a very snazzy aesthetic and fast paced battle system that makes dungeon crawling fun.

The boss fights are a mixed assortment. Some are quite interesting - The Casino one - and others challenging - the Pyramid one. But I found that the Final Boss, Space Port boss and Shido were simply long and drawn out battles.

That aside though, the game gets dungeoneering right just about every time. It just cocks everything else up.

There's a lot of loading screens in this game within which "take your time" frequently appears on the screen. It'd be more apt to say taking the piss with your time. It's not that any individual loading screen is egregiously long, more that the game's pacing is slothful thanks to atrocious writing.

For example, assume that you finish a dungeon before its deadline date. Thereafter you'll be bombarded by daily text message chains from allied party members which constantly regurgitate a single theme, "do you think what we did will work?" That's fine in the aftermath of dungeon 1, but all the subsequent ones are entirely unnecessary. And yet there they are, ad nauseum. Indeed, this is often preceded by a bunch of pointless speech bubbles popping up within an urban area or subway carriage that showcases some incredibly bland diatribe about the general consensus of the city's inhabitants in relation to the plot. Again, it's repetitive, tedious, uninteresting and not needed, but the longer the game goes on the more mornings in which you're subjected to this prattle - and considering the game is set over the course of six months, jeez.

Vast swathes of textual quantity proliferates this game, most of which could be cut without sacrificing much in the way of character or plot development. Yeah, there's a fast forward option, but it's a damn shame when a game which, being over 100 long, clearly invests heavily in its story and wants players to be equally invested, perpetually presents its story through utterly uninspiring and tediously meandering text.

Then there's the downtime between dungeoneering and unneccesary main plot textual padding. You're meant to spend your time improving social stats in order to become closer with your companions and various other NPC allies such that you may unlock additional skills whilst dungeoneering and access stronger personas. Hanging out with your allies produces the odd humorous or interesting scene, but for the most part these characters are two dimensional (at best), and given some contrived antagonist, all of which is presented, ultimately, through masses of textual exposition. Any individual character arc isn't so bad in and of itself, but considering there are some 12 or so arcs to work through, it the quantity becomes irritating. After days worth of time into the game it's really difficult to give a damn after another wave of text overload positions a yet another character arc towards some either unrealistic, or bland and predictable, destination.

I fast-forwarded through the entirety of the game's epilogue after beating the final big bad but if I hadn't I'd easily have spent somewhere between 30-60 minutes of reading bland dialogue with a pitiful number of choices, none of which would have altered a damn thing. I mean, I even chose to ignore my girlfriend as much as possible, refused to hang out on Valentine's day, and she still popped up at some later date to tell me what a great guy I was (I'm probably going to write about just how bad the romance system of Persona 5 is relative to something cool like the Witcher 3 at some point on Gintendo). In quintessentially JRPG terms no choice that you make really affects anything because only the player character has any agency. To be fair, this is a bugbear of mine in most open-world western games, but in a game that has hundreds of hours to play with it's pretty lame that it's various NPCs only interact with each other in the most superficial ways. (Comparatively, Witcher 3's Triss and Yennifer react like actual people to the player's choices, showing a depth entirely lacking in any of Persona's cast).

I suppose if you like the characters, or the world enough (I actually did like the whole cognitive metaverse thing before it gets all - you gotta save the world, mate) then maybe the text doesn't become this horrid assault on your time. To me though much of my time in this game was plundered by writing there for the sake of being there, as opposed to being there for the sake of saying something important.

Everything you seem to dislike is what I love about the series (Yes Athrun, I've only played Persona 4 Golden, Dancing All Night and 5) and why I'm excited about the two new dance spin offs.

Would you go as far as this being what Breath of the Wild is to me, a highly regarded game this year but thought it was a bit muh.

So who had "Breath of the wild" down on their masofdas bingo card?

I'm not sure Mas. There's a number of critically acclaimed games I don't like because of their writing, e.g., Uncharted 2, Skyrim. I can see how people could really like Person 5 though, it's just not really something for me - it should be 30 hours shorter, easily. I know some people will like how long it is and see great value in that, but equally I could have read an epic book that would've had more detailed world building/character development.

I will follow with another question as you bring up likes of Uncharted 2 which is often praised for its charcters and the writing being a issue in that and Persona 5, do you think maybe the writing is maybe not up to scratch in games? This would also go into story telling and do you think possibly because games are games and still a young medium that when something is only half decent compared to a entertainment counter, is praised above what it should be?

Muss wrote:

Having heard nothing but the highest praise for this game, I went into it with high expectations. Oh dear, oh dear. It's just not very good.

...I have nothing to add to the conversation, I just wanted to post a 'shots fired' .gif.

I'm going to ignore the current conversation about all the games I don't understand, and quickly say:

Did this one. Jak and Daxter - The Precursor Legacy if yer images are off for some reason.

+ It's a 2000-ish platform collect adventure - hooray!
- It's not quite Banjo-Kazooie leve
+ But it's better than e.g. Donkey Kong 64
+ The voice acting wasn't so cringey for the time period
- Daxter is horrible, however; he exhibits all the charm of a Dreamworks character, including wisecracks that sound like jokes, and mugging to the camera after a quick dance
± This was the mid-2000s - even for a kid-friendly game, the female characters do appear to be specifically be-norked
± I did a platinum - it's the only game I've platinummed, and that's basically because all the trophies are "pick up things"
+ Impressive seamless world loading for the time
+ I got it for free, with another not-full-price game
- The vehicle sections can kiss my arse, except they'd miss as they should have turned about a second earlier

7.9/10 if I was being critical, but, as Pinky would say, "a lot of fun!"

Nice summary Jimbob. I've been interested in Jak & Dakky for a while and the low PSN prices on them from time to time often tempt one. Looks like it is definitely worth a few quid.

Will you be trying Jak II?

Waitwaitwait, people actually pay attention to more than two or three social links!?  

Seriously though they're always the weakest part of the Persona games to me, for every one like the journalist girl you've got the supreme lameness of Ann's.  Speaking of Ann that leads to another issue with Persona 5, that of how half the cast is ultimately irrelevant beyond their arc.  Ann and Ryuji don't even develop once the first dungeon concludes, and Ryuji is probably the worst "bro" in the Persona series, constantly going on and on about being a Phantom Thief in public places that in any realistic story would've got them all caught within weeks.  "Hey guyz isn't it cool we're the Phantom Thieves!?  RIGHT GUYS?  BEING PHANTOM THIEVES IS SO COOL!  YEP, GOTTA LOVE BEING THOSE AWESOME PHANTOM THIEVES, TOO BAD I CAN'T CLAIM ANY CRED IRL FOR BEING ONE!"


Half the cast was awful and half was fantastic, unfortunately the half that's awful were there from the start of the game.  Honestly the game would've been better off if they'd done something like retire non-core-plot-relevant cast members after their main dungeon, then brought them back for the grand finale (which was still a significant part of the game if one counts the sixth, seventh, and final Palaces as the final act).  Half the problems regarding pacing were caused by constantly forcing them into everything once they'd been introduced, even if they had absolutely nothing of value to add.  The inane texts wondering if it'd work every time, the bogged down dialogue during story cutscenes, both would have a significant amount of fat removed if they had certain redundant cast members absent.

As for the world saving stuff, I liked it personally.  If only because I loved that the main villain was a manifestation of humanities twisted desires, I'm always up for some cynical commentary of the human race, and since the world itself was left unchanged by the conflict I don't feel it stretched its credibility in terms of its resolution.

On Horizon Zero Dawn, I know I'm likely just stirring up things by saying this but Breath of the Wild is honestly why I didn't get on with the game as much as I hoped I would based on everything about it. Breath of the Wild was an immaculate piece of video game design. The world is a big example of that, everything had a purpose, and everything felt deliberately placed. It could tell a story about its worlds history without even a single bit of dialogue. In comparison Horizon's world felt poorly designed, just another typical open world game with various objectives splattered around the world map with the toughest ones placed furthest away from the player. But it goes further than that, there were things in it that felt blatantly unfair.

In Breath of the Wild you could go anywhere in the world and the only limiting factor was skill, with enough skill a player just setting out could realistically take on anything and win, with the ways you approached combat being plentiful and often only restricted by the players own imagination. In Horizon, well, lets just say that after trying to continue the story and getting blocked from the appropriate area by no less than two high level enemies and several mid-level enemies all in a pack that roasted me over a dozen times I lost interest.

Instances like that felt poorly designed, and losing never felt like it was a fair loss, but rather because the game unfairly tipped the odds in its favour. Whereas in Breath of the Wild not once did I feel any of my many many game overs were because of shoddy game design, each and every one of them felt like they were my fault.

Things like that are what separate the masterpieces from the "very good" games.

Also if we're talking personal niggles Horizon's camera is too close to Aloy for my liking. Often I found I couldn't get nearly as much of a view of the terrain as I wanted so as to form my strategies because the camera was forever zoomed close in on Aloy.

One of the issues bring up with HZD is something XCX had right at the start with a mission where you sneak in to a base but if you go slightly in the wrong direction, you'd come face-to-face to a level 40 odd monster when you where 10.

This is a problem with open world RPGs in general, I played HZD same as I did BotW and almost any game from point A to B doing the story and why HZD to me is miles better then BotW (or 3 point better in review terms).

@Athrun - you could almost be talking about dark.....

*is carried away by the Anti-Dark souls police*

Pokémon Ultra Moon



Aaaaaaarrgghhhhhhh. It's important to state from the off that this is essentially a mild remix of Sun & Moon. If you've played either of them, there's no reason to get this. If you haven't played Sun or Moon, you should get one of them, I'd say. The story elements are mildly twisted but it ultimately ends up slightly worse off, I feel. I just felt less satisfied on completion than I did with Sun. Very much a stopgap until Pokémon Blue Cheese and Red Leicester are released on the Switch. Still not a bad game, mind - just not what I was expecting.

16/20

Zero subjects himself to mediocre Pokégames so that we don't have to. Our hero(mosa).

A Kinect based episodic launch game from Swery exclusive to Xbox sounds like something that would flop and it did, meaning the game ends after Season 1 Episode 2 never to be concluded.

I played with a controller as you can do that but the controls are awful, the art style is okay but is starting to look a little rough 4 years on and really only has it's from Swery and a bit zany going for it.

If you like Suda 51's work and don't mind awful controls and no ending, then maybe give it a go otherwise avoid.

Snowballadeer wrote:

Zero subjects himself to mediocre Pokégames so that we don't have to.  Our hero(mosa).

Pretty telling at how lacklustre it is that despite being a remix of Sun and Moon those are still cited as the better of the group. Definitely going to skip. I miss the days of the Third Version and such gems as Emerald and Platinum.

They did basically confirm afterwards that the kids made Ultra S&M, that I can sort understand why it is a bit muh.

I just beat Steel Empire, a side-scrolling shoot 'em up from 1992 that was tarted up for the 3DS eShop a couple of years ago. I just downloaded it yesterday for 60% off - it was a bit too rich for me at almost fifteen quid, but £5.75 was much more enticing. It's a quite simple and short game that was probably very forward-thinking when it originally came out on the Mega Drive, but it's undoubtedly good fun. I think that Steel Empire would be a cracking place to start off if you're looking to get into the genre, or at least to give it a try. 7/10.

That artwork looks gorgeous. I imagine the game isn't quite as nice?
I always like the idea of shmups more than I enjoy actually playing them.