Last game you DIDN'T finish and your thoughts

Is 10hrs per Temple a lot? That make the game ??? long

Also remember I finshed BotW in like 25hrs that you can see I took my time more based from that.

Yep I think it's clear that you took your time more.  That said I'd say I've played maybe 30 hours so far, and I haven't got anywhere near the second temple.  It's not even on my imminent to-do list.

Balladeer wrote:

I couldn't with your views on BotW

1. Weapon Durability

Better in TotK as when it goes your sword is going to break after two hits, I can least put a rock on the end of it to make a club to get two more hits.

2. No Dungeons

Still in my opinion no dungeons, sure we got the temples which the two I saw looked the same and had the same objective.

3. Bosses

Better in TotK as the two I fought at least weren't just copy and paste like in BotW

4. Story

In BotW you do get some story told to you via the main quest, but a lot was told via the memories with those darn photos of a leaf in the wind on a cold winter's morning. Least in TotK, you've got those geoglyphs that can be spot from the towers and much easier to find.

5. Towers

Climb tower open map up, what's this a Ubisoft game?

6. Story Again

BotW never ever made me want to save Zelda, or why I should care beyond umm yeah I guess better save Hyrule. Again this is improved in TotK as some of the other characters are likeable or give reason to care.

7. VO

Princeess Zelda still isn't for me, at least Matthew Mercer is decent.

8. Shrines

Seemed more in BotW than TotK even though it's the other way around. Now I'd sooner have dungeons and you're going to say they're the same as before, yet this time I did like them maybe it's the white aesthetics, or I prefer Links powers now.

9. No items

Sill no items, I want a boomerang that I use for one dungeon and nothing else.

10. Haven't really got a 10th, maybe though for the next they should look at an ALBW where they make that game bigger, 3D and the dungeons I can go to in any order like in ALBW, but the fire dungeon is easier with the water bombs or along those lines.


Maybe set pieces because in the story at certain points something might happen like Link captured and you have to escape, where I didn't see that in BotW or TotK.

I think the only way I can respond to that is to return the favour...




Like Mas with TotK, I don't think Persona 4 Golden is a bad game. It's just a victim of a suddenly busy time in gaming for me. Why should I spend tens of hours playing a game I might get into, when there are so many games on my pile to be played? And one absolutely massive one that has dominated my time for the last fortnight, and will continue to do so for at least as long again.

I don't think it's a good game either. Or rather, I don't think it's a good RPG. The character customisation ain't much outside the Personas of the main character, the dungeon is a dull mess, the battle system is too simple to have any appeal, and on any of the harder difficulty settings (read: starting at Normal) grinding becomes a necessity. The social sim: sure, there I can see the appeal. The writing's good, shocker. The serial killer plot is enjoyably atmospheric. Chie and Marie are both instantly lovable, and I would have liked to get to know them better outside the RPG they were attached to. I have my struggles with the social sim, a great big set of choices for a gamer who can't stand them, but I can see why people like it.

I have Persona 5 waiting for me, a retail copy. I find it harder to give up on retail copies, and they do say it's the Persona game that finally nails the dungeons. There's one more chance for the Tenseiverse, whose games I've now had four cracks at, to get me on board. No rush, though. I've got an absolutely massive game to enjoy first.

Someone needs to change their signature.

P5 has a bunch of designed dungeons unlike like a certain game and I don't mean P4.

C'mon now you might not like the TotK temples (clearly because you miss that old Zelda gameplay loop) but they very clearly are environments that are designed.

Not uniquely designed at least from the two I did, just the beasts all over again.

Do you mean the objectives being the same? That was a bit of an eyebrow raiser for me at first but I still have to disagree as the puzzles are very different in each one & the main thing is not everyone will solve these puzzles the same way with ultrahand/recall etc either.

You may have done different but basically it was find three things, use power of sage for me and guessing the next three dungeons the same.

I don't have a good history with Platinum.  Bayonetta was, combined with Hyrule Warriors which hit the Wii U around the same time, how I realised I wasn't a fan of action games in general.  Astral Chain promised to be more of a detective game, but I found the detecting slow and the action was... well, more action.  NieR Automata promised to be more of an RPG than the others, and that combined with its critical reception made me keen to give Platinum one last shot.

And it was a notable improvement, in that I got to four and a half hours' playtime!  I made it to Pascal's village and to the fetch quest he gives you.  I could probably play the rest of Automata, even though I still don't really care for the action all that much and there's not much else in the gameplay, if it were a 10-15 hour experience.  I'm not sure the gameplay or writing have enough in them to help me play through the thing again after that.  Because that's Automata's deal, isn't it?  Replay it multiple times to get the full experience.  While I know that playthroughs after the second are meant to be quite drastically different, I've never much cared for macro-scale repetition in games.  Just see my stance on roguelites.

I do like the aesthetics though, in a washed-out way, and some of the ideas the game is trying for are certainly interesting.  Of all the games I've played and dropped on Switch, this is possibly the one I'm most likely to come back to in a drought.  Not that I've had much of a drought since 2019 or so.




Coffee Talk... not so much.  It's a cosy visual novel about running a coffee shop for various fantasy races (and a green-haired author in a tanktop who feels like the developers' representative), but given that it's a visual novel the visuals and the writing need to be on point.  Because, y'know, it doesn't have anything else.  While the largely static pixel art is nice enough, the writing (or localisation) is just there.  It's got no flair or spark to it, and neither do the characters you befriend.  They feel as two-dimensional as their art.  There is an interesting world in this game, but it largely happens outside the four walls of your establishment.  Meanwhile you read about it through newspapers and make drinks for the next bunch of dull social commentary proxies.  Toge Productions did A Space for the Unbound after this: if you fancy playing an Indonesian-developed narrative adventure, pick that not this.

I still need to go back to Nier Automata on something, especially after loving Replicant.

Little surprised on CT as the second one wasn't that long, I would have thought the first been shorter that could have been done. Toge Productions is nice litlle dev/pub, mind.

I know I say I can't relate to the stuff Mas says sometimes, but I really can't relate to "not into action".

It's Balla, doesn't like RTS or Action or S/TRPG or choices or open world's (last one might not be true or only likes two OW games) or shooters and I could go on.

I don't really understand it either. It would be easier if it was just, I don't like action - but it's not. Muramasa: the Demon Blade is one of my top games ever and puts an absolute spanner in my attempts to put 'action' squarely into the 'Balla hates this' box. Back in 2020 I tried to get to the bottom of it, and while 'If Astral Chain had been cel-shaded samurai fighting to a samisen solo I'd probably still be playing and enjoying it' is simplistic it probably is something like that: with good enough aesthetics I can ignore that I find the gameplay somewhat one-note. Also I had more patience/fewer games to play when Muramasa was released, so maybe I had more opportunity to appreciate its complexities.

More recently, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is distinctively Muramasa-like away from the farming, and that's a big reason I love it. It does have the farming however, and a bit more exploration to it, so it makes slightly more sense.

I didn't finish

(That's Recursed for anyone viewing this on a green screen monitor from the 80s and doesn't have images showing)

This is parallel with how I found Baba is You. Really neat concept: find the gem on each level, but to do so, you have to jump into boxes which take you to other rooms - however those rooms only permanently exist while you're in them - jump back out and that "instance" of the room disappears. You can however carry one object with you - which could be another box. Cue mega-headscratching as you work out how to get to a locked door with a key that's 3 iterations down.

However, I had the same problem as I did with Baba is You; although the idea is brilliant, it feels far too difficult to keep track of where you're currently situated, and therefore frustrating to attempt to plan out a solution, short of writing everything down on paper before you start. I suspect people that are good at chess are good at both of these games; I am not.

Even that description makes my brain hurt. It sounds like it has a little in common with Patrick's Parabox, in that it's a brain-scratchy puzzler with dimension-hopping boxes - except Parabox is much easier than what you describe. Given that I never finished Baba and am struggling to keep my attention on Parabox, I'll admire the ambition of but skip Recursed I think.

I seem to be adding to this thread a lot, which seems a bit negative.
Although I would like to shout out that

is really good. I know Tony Hawk's Pro Skater wasn't the most serious game, but this makes a big effort to be even sillier and more chill, with a modern Cartoon Network kind-a vibe.

However, apparently, and I don't know if this is because I'm getting older, but: even though it's a 2D game that scrolls from left to right, the speed at which it does so gives me the motion gyps. I tried limiting it to one level at a time but it was definitely making me woozy and possible migrainey. I'm alright with most first person games (albeit VR's been a non-starter) but for some reason this does my head in.

But - if you are a normal person who can deal with this, I would say it's a lot of fun.

Aw Jim.  As somebody who gets bad motion sickness, have a virtual hug from me.  I will never play VR in any form most likely.



Grrrrrrr.  I hate that this game is in this thread.  I don't quite hate this game, but I do love it a lot less than if it wasn't in this thread.

Let's begin at the beginning, because SoS has a slow bad beginning even for a genre where slow bad beginnings are the norm so it's only fair this summary has one likewise.  SoS frontloads a lot of writing and dialogue and gives you a lot of time with Zale and Valere, your heroes.  They're rubbish.  The writing and dialogue in general is not the game's strong point, and Zale and Valere are the worst of it.  They have no character at all, they're the most generic world-saving protagonists you could hope to meet.  You have to reach maybe the 2/3 mark before there's anything worthwhile to talk about on the writing front.  Luckily the other aspects are pretty belting.  

Combat, for instance, has big Paper Mario timed button presses influence, even if it looks more like Chrono Trigger.  There's also a lock-breaking system more like Octopath than anything else, where you desperately try to hit enemies with the right attacks before they fire off a powerful art.  There's a soft positioning mechanic as well, and good enemy designs with quirky features.  It's got a huge amount going on without ever being bewildering, but with more than enough to keep you on your toes.  As soon as you're in a fight the bad writing choices fade away.  It might be one of the best turn-based battle systems in games.

Then there's the rest of it.  The dungeons have a lot of quirky navigational aspects, including a nice line in puzzles.  They feel tactile to explore in a way that the best in the genre largely don't.  The visuals, my gosh.  They look initially like just a very nice throwback to the SNES, but wait until you start throwing the lighting around.  The music is mostly fine with the odd utter banger from JRPG royalty Yasunori Mitsuda.  And as I say, 2/3 of the way through the game the writing finally joins the party, with the sort of twist I imagine Jas loves from the Messenger, and becomes good.  Definitely good enough to keep me pushing through to... the end?

Sigh.  The base ending is deliberately disappointing.  It turns out there's a true ending, unlocked through the means of completing various side-quests... except one of the side-quests involves collecting all of the items hidden throughout the entire game world.  This is not fun.  This is a pain.  This is why this game is in this thread and not LGYF, because I can't be bothered to afford a game that offers me this little respect much respect in return.  Up until that point the game was a solid recommendation, but a title that hides its only adequate ending behind something only completionists and masochists will ever see shouldn't be recommended without caveats.

I repeat: grrrrrrr.

BONUS! Tin Hearts, What Comes After:

So you did finish SoS based on what you did, to just get base ending as you put it? I still may play SoS as it's on multiple services though I don't know if it is ohh going to play on the TV game, maybe a certain Portal(ble) come November be good to play on.

Nah, doesn't feel like it. I did get that base ending yes, but it's so obviously not the intended completion of the story. It's even less finished-feeling than Octopath 1, where at least the tying up of loose threads was hidden behind a superboss, despite the even less satisfying non-ending.

This is controversial this one, and I am getting worked up typing this, as my brother-in-law and sister were really hoping I'd get into this I think. And I know there are folks here - people I respect even - who have spent a lifetime here. But I noped out of Final Fantasy XIV.

I don't get it

Many problems I've tried to get over and I don't think I can. It was implied that it's something you can play along with buddies - which it true up until the point you can't. Or is the idea you play on  your own, and if you happen to see your friends on at the same time, great. If so, I'm afraid I can't budget the time to sit at the computer for 2 hours several days a week.

The point I jumped out on, I had to do on my own, and despite being a healing guy, I kept failing a mission because I couldn't click on my NPC buddy to heal him, because the bounding box for the bad lad was in the way, so either he died, or I died because I was do busy trying to click on him that I wasn't looking at my own character. So my real-life compatriots were waiting on me to finish something which they had to listen to me fail 6 times over. Then the final straw was trying to just quit, with a 20 second countdown to do so, twice interrupted because my character got attacked by a wandering lad during that time. I then used my most powerful magic, which was Task Manager.

And of course the MMO floaty "press a button to do an action you can imagine your character doing" from the early 80s. Unlike Monster Hunter where what happened was based on things I saw, did and reacted to, it's still got that turn-based "you got hit there" mechanic, which I believe was based on 5 year-olds making up a game in the school playground.

Sorry, bit agitated here, as what I do care about is not making my family members sad.

At least you tried Jim. Honestly given your views on the genre in general I'm not surprised.

It hasn't been a good month or so for my completion rate.  Here's the pile of shame:

GUNBRELLA:

PATRICK'S PARABOX:

COCOON:

for his views on Cocoon

We know you love a pair of mouthless trousers.

Balladeer wrote:

COCOON:

Ooh big disagree on this - thought it was excellent. The puzzles are a bit simple maybe - perhaps it would be nice if it did go on a bit longer, and added a few more things, as it was just getting to the "whoa what the hell did I just do?" stage. But it was jolly enough. And I did like the style of the worlds (and a refreshing change from the team's other work - I was waiting for a grim discovery of some sort which thankfully didn't happen). I've no idea what the fuck the story was about, but I'm fine with that.