Last game you DIDN'T finish and your thoughts

Buskalilly wrote:

Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
Look, I just don't think I'm a JRPG guy. XB1 was a fluke exception, I should stop trying to repeat it.

XC1 is pretty much the least JRPGy JRPG that's still arguably a 'traditional' JRPG, and XC2 has some areas that lean much harder into JRPG territory, so I guess that's not super-surprising. (3 is closer to 1 in feel for what it's worth.) What put you off in the end? Or was it just Splatoon 3 distracting you as predicted?

I'd also say that XC2 has one of the roughest openings of any RPG I've played to the point I was getting close to saying it's not worth it myself, so I can imagine that's an even tougher sell for folks that aren't really into JRPGs as a whole.

Yeh, the opening was rough and I didn't have much game time as it was and every second I played felt like I was forcing myself to play it when I'd rather be playing other things,

Can't really argue with that.  And speaking of rough JRPGs:



I feel like I'm generally kinder to sequels than many.  When I'm looking at a sequel compared to the game it sprung from, I think of how good the two games would be to play now, without necessarily assuming you've played the first one before the second.  That's part of the reason why I prefer Mario Galaxy 2 to Mario Galaxy, for example: the second's obviously less innovative in context, but I've played them both now, so I judge them on their own merits (and I prefer the level design and post-game in 2).  My Top 30 Of All Time contains 9 successors or spiritual successors and 7, if you count BotW and Wind Waker (technically followed by Phantom Hourglass), first games followed by sequels.  Generally, then, I prefer the sequel after the fact!

This, though, is taking the piss.

Voice of Cards 2, an unrelated tale to Voice of Cards 1, doesn't have a single new idea of its own.  That would be okay (given the short turnaround time for these) if VoC1 was pretty much perfect, but it wasn't.  It was immensely slow and unimaginative itself, with a random encounter rate that slowed the game to a crawl and bosses that were marathon slogs.  None of those are corrected here.  VoC1's positives were the novelty value of a world made of cards, worn off; the nice card art, reduced to apathy given just how many of those cards are reused wholesale here; and the weird and creepy writing, somewhat diminished in 2/FM given that the whole story takes a jump in creepyness, so the slightly creepier bits don't stand out as much.  

Given that the positives are diminished and the negatives are present and correct, it's amazing that I almost finished this game, and I know Andy was amazed that I even bought it.  The truth is that for the most part, it was something I could pick up for ten minutes in the working day and play through without much mental engagement or stress, before the random battles started to bother me and I put it down again.  It and its predecessor are the gaming equivalent of lift muzak, albeit at this point you've been stuck in the lift for too long and the tunes are starting to grate.  The reason it's in this thread and not in LGYF is a separate rant, and I've gone on for too long already so I'll spoiler it:

Final Segment Spoilers (not like they should be spoiling anything for anyone):

Like hell I was doing that again, for a game I wasn't enjoying anyway.  I'm not going to pretend I'm not taking a mark off my score for that alone, but scores are subjective and I'm petty and pissed off and you shouldn't have been buying this for one mark higher either, unless you can ignore turgid gameplay for passable writing and ambience like Mas apparently can.  

This is one of my ten least favourite games ever.  Andy, rest assured I will not make the same mistake a third time.


p.s. The picture's actually from the previous game.  This is on purpose.

I've still got Maiden (I'd give it an 8/10 myself) in my Top 10 of the year, but I didn't play the first one that the negatives wouldn't be as highlighted as much for me with Maiden.

Did buy the third one Beasts which from reviewers is the best of the three (all around the 70s on Opencritic) and the five hours I have played is just fine. I'm in no rush to go back to it, and may even sour Maiden a tad as it will all blend in together I feel.

Didn't know Andy had played any of them.

I haven't, I was just absolutely stumped when Balla said he was playing the second despite his negativity towards the first. So many better games to play

Hey - neutrality towards the first.  At the time I gave it 5/10 and I stand by that score. Now having played this one I'm inclined to tug it down a point in hindsight, given how similar they are.

Was that enough to buy the second one (when on sale), not knowing what I know now?  Well... perhaps I should have researched how similar that second one was before buying it. None of them should be Metacritic 70s though. (And I still think 2's worse.)

I had my fill of the first one with the demo, so I must admit I'm ultimately unsurprised that any sequel ended up being a load of shite!

You say that Jay but a 2 from Balla, 8 from me that's 5/10 so average which is about same as Meta/Open 70ish average some how (why 70 is 0 in Fantasy).

Independently, out-of-context, played in 2022 . . . Galaxy is a better game overall than Galaxy 2.

All games about cards are shite, unless its Texas Hold 'em Poker.

Pokémon Cards, mate

I like playing IRL card games - me and a pal are hard into the Digimon card game right now - but videogames and card games are both abstractions of doing a real thing and going two layers deep always feels lame to me.

Pokémon TCG allowed me to live out the fantasy of having a well-stacked supply of Pokémon cards without spending £loads on boosters. For that alone I'll always have a soft spot for it.

Buskalilly wrote:

Independently, out-of-context, played in 2022 . . . Galaxy is a better game overall than Galaxy 2.

Nah.

Buskalilly wrote:

I like playing IRL card games - me and a pal are hard into the Digimon card game right now - but videogames and card games are both abstractions of doing a real thing and going two layers deep always feels lame to me.

What about card games within games like GWENT

I really dug the Gwent music, but I didn't end up playing loads of it.

I don't mind a bit of digital poker.

I really enjoyed playing Gwent within The Witcher 3 but from what I've heard from Andy and others, the standalone game isn't much fun at all.

I remember reading after the buzz had died down that Gwent didn't really make competitive sense; you just got stronger and stronger cards as you played the game. Worked as a side quest, less as a game unto itself.

Buskalilly wrote:

Independently, out-of-context, played in 2022 . . . Galaxy is a better game overall than Galaxy 2.

All games about cards are shite, unless its Texas Hold 'em Poker.

I agree violently.

Although it does get me thinking in a contrarian bullshitometer kind of way: people make games where mechanics are based around cards or dice... is there another sort of board-game-y thing that could be used? I might try an experiment. Roulette Conquest Destiny maybe?

Dicey Dungeon has some interesting twists along those lines, even though it sounds like it's just dice, check it out.

I have heard this of Dicey Dungeons - I technically have this on Steam, but also a big backlog, however your recommendation makes it tempting to move it forward in the queue, like a This Morning presenter.

I didn't finish
SkateBIRD
Looking back at critics, they were a bit down on this as a far-too-simple version of Tony Hawk's best era. That's probably true - I never really played much of THPS as a young'n, so can't directly make that comparison myself - however, having 100%d the first level, I got a couple of missions into the second, and my thought was "oh boy so it's more of this then". That might well be how people feel about the original game SkateBIRD is based on, but I suspect the simple "this button is a trick" mechanics don't help.
However, I did enjoy everything around the gameplay; and up until the point I felt I'd done it all, the gameplay itself was fine. The "modern internet humour*" did make me laugh a bit, and is much more bearable than what I've seen of the THUG-era buffoonery. And let's be honest, it helps very much that you play as a little bird: I've got to shout out the choice of no less than 41 real bird species to base your character on (having had real-world experience with these lads, I went for a barn owl with a baseball cap and trendy scarf).
I'm not going to uninstall it yet, as I may fancy 5 minutes of whizzing round as a birb**; however I'm aware that I stopped at a single choke-point mission which I couldn't begin to work out how to complete, so this may not happen.

* / ** they do say birb on more than one occasion - this is probably a warning to you all more than anything

Jimbob wrote:

The "modern internet humour*" did make me laugh a bit, and is much more bearable than what I've seen of the THUG-era buffoonery.

Even in the mid 2000s when that style of humour was at its zenith, I still couldn't really bear the wacky humour in THUG 2.

Jimbob wrote:

(having had real-world experience with these lads, I went for a barn owl with a baseball cap and trendy scarf)

Wow, I have had a little experience with owls but none that radical.

When my sister spotted Pikmin 3 in my Switch library and said, 'Oh I haven't played Pikmin in years, can I play that?' I was pretty quick to offer her the chance of keeping the game for now.  It's in illustrious company, sitting as it will in BotW's box (she's just got to the first Divine Beast), but more importantly gives me an excuse to stop playing Pikmin 3.

Because I kind of did need an excuse.  You don't need me to tell you how oozing with Nintendo magic this game is.  The Pikmin are full of charm, as are the log entries, and the fruit has been much covered already in how good it looks.  As far as RTS games go this is a light fluffy entry point, not too difficult and taking place in a world keen to reward you for anything you do.  There couldn't be a better game to get an RTS hater into the genre.

And, well, it hasn't really worked.  It's not that I haven't enjoyed Pikmin 3 whenever I played it, stripped of the time pressure of the first game that really made me feel under the pump.  Drumming up the desire to play it over anything else, though... that's what's not really been there.  The game has been in my 'currently playing' file for just under a year at this point, and I've still not unlocked the blue Pikmin.  RTS have something of a perfect storm for me, rewarding multi-tasking with the efficiency I crave in anything, but I'm shockingly bad at multi-tasking!  So I just see how I play and go, 'Tch,' and that 'tch' puts me off coming back to the game.  

Pikmin 3 is also a victim of a crowded release schedule, as 2022 finally ramps up near its end and I want to move onto other things that through no fault of the game's I'll enjoy more.  I should've got this on the Wii U really, I'm sure I'd have finished it then.  As it is, I had a surprisingly good time with it for an RTS and I hope my sister will get even more out of it.  I don't regret the purchase at all.  It is, more than almost any other title, me that's the problem, not the game.

BONUS - Castlevania Circle of the Moon:

I also hate RTS games, but Pikkers worked on me.

Balladeer wrote:

 It is me that's the problem, not the game.

Saved me typing it.