Warning:BIG IMAGE
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/173967012123377664/290715269771296768/20170312_231757.jpg)
I am spent :)
I am exhausted but its been done
Ultra Sun Pokedex complete
Big image warning
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/219633993522348032/404841267948683264/20180121_203330.jpg)
Finished Grandia 2 now, and I can definitely say I recommend it. It is a bit shorter than the first one, although I don't think I would have noticed this were it not for the "time played" clock - it didn't feel shorter. The story gets interesting much more quickly, and stays that way - though it's definitely a fair bit darker than the first game too.
Gameplay-wise, I stand by what I said before - this really takes the first game's gameplay, keeps the stuff that worked well, and chucks out the stuff that didn't.
I do feel this one was a bit easier than the first. Only two game overs here,
One against the Tio Clone, and one against the rematch vs Eye of Valmar (leading up to the final boss).
I've obtained Grandia III now, and will likely try it out in the near future - although I hear Grandia Xtreme is meant to come between II and III, so maybe I'll play that first. Definitely going to continue with the series either way.
Nearly every boss is ridiculously easy if you use the weapon they are weak to, and ridiculously hard if you don't.
The Mega Man games also have this problem (except Mega Man 2, where nearly all of the bosses are easy). Plus, half the time the weaknesses never make any sense, so for the most part it's unplayable without a guide, first to tell you which of the robot masters is the least absurdly hard to defeat without their weakness, then to tell you which boss is weak to which weapon. Plus, because of the fact that all the levels are available from the start means that the game gets easier as it goes along instead of harder, at least until you reach the Wiley stages, where there's usually a difficulty spike.
I have recently finished Chrono Trigger for the first time. It was absolutely amazing :D I loved the battle system, the characters, the story, and the music... I LOVED the music!
I also decided to try out a new Ocarina of Time ROM hack called "Master of Time". It's one heck of an ambitions Ocarina of Time ROM hack, going as far as to make a full blown game that is just as long as the original Ocarina of Time more or less. I have more detailed thoughts about his one written below :P
Let's start with what I consider to be the biggest negative of this ROM hack: the story. It sucks, and there's no nicer way for me to put it. I think one of the main reasons why it sucks so much is because it had the potential to be something truly amazing, but any potential it had gets thrown away and lit on fire towards the end.
Prior to the events of the game, from what I can understand, the people of a country named Apello were terrorized by monsters that would only come out at night. Eventually, a mysterious and unnamed person nicknamed the Master of Time appeared and using the power of six medallions created an endless day to protect the people of Apello from those monsters. No longer under constant siege from monsters, the kingdom of Apello was formed where people were able to finally live in peace. Alright, so far so good. Our Link from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask arrives at Apello and meets a fairy named Nite, who tells him about a prophecy in which Link collects these six medallions, uses them to break the curse of the endless day, and becomes the new Master of Time. Why though? I mean, you have to because it's the game, yet everyone seems to be pretty happy with this endless day and no one seems to be even bothered by it in the slightest. Why break the curse? First of all, this just takes out any type of urgency or stakes in trying to break the curse. Take a game like Majora's Mask where the stakes were extremely high in that game not only because of the literal countdown, but because even the NPCs helped to sell this urgency with the way each one acted individually as doomsday got closer. Even if the NPCs in Master of Time weren't bothered by the endless day, there seems to be a lot of missed opportunities to play around with the lore and further develop the world. For example, children NPCs that start talking about a myth they heard about something called a "nighttime" that also has a sun (moon) and many lights in the sky (stars). The dialogue doesn't do it any more justice. It went for a more dark and edgy tone to it and while normally there isn't anything wrong with that as long as it is done well, and I feel like it wasn't always done well in this game. It kind of made some interactions seem almost like a parody and it really takes you out of the immersion of the world and story.
Okay so you go off and collect the medallions in different temples. After collecting five of them you suddenly learn about this plot twist where the Zoras were using special milk to turn everyone in Apello into Zoras. It's never explained why they wanted to do this, but to be fair this plot twist was hinted at in the background throughout the game so I do give the creator credit for that. However, after learning this piece of information you are allowed to continue only to be suddenly captured. Your fairy helps in this and then mocks you later on as you are in a cell waiting to be executed. You don't get a chance to escape, you just get executed in the next scene and the game gives you the bad ending. The good ending is basically leaving Apello entirely, and a message telling you that sometimes it's better to just flee from crazy places. This just comes out of nowhere and anything related to the Master of Time and the endless day are just thrown out the window. What was the point of it all? You are just left completely unsatisfied. All I wanted to do was learn more about the Master of Time and how it all connected with the events of the game. If I did collect all the medallions and break the curse of the endless day, would I have had a final encounter with the monsters that come out at night in order to finally and fully free the people of Apello?
Not happy with that personally.
On the other hand, the dungeon design, music, and overworld were all on point. Dungeons were fairly creative with interesting puzzles. I do wish that some of them were themed a little bit better. For example, we had two dungeons that were called Fire Temple and Water Temple, but that's literally the same name as dungeons in Ocarina of Time. There were also some bits that were largely unpolished, but they were mostly nitpicky things and nothing too overly serious like softlocks and the like. The overworld was also designed well with different parts of it connecting via shortcuts if you had the right items, which is always a nice touch.
Despite having interesting dungeons, great music, and a decent overworld, Master of Time did not reach its full potential imo as it is greatly held back with a promising story that ends up crashing, burning, and going nowhere.
The new game is much harder than the first one. It still has dark levels, though they seem to be much, much rarer.
I really dislike those pitch black stages :P especially in the later levels (minus the third world which I don't think has that level feeling).
The 1st, 2nd and 4th worlds can have dark levels. Exceptions are that 1-1, 4-4 and The Worm can never be dark. The 3rd and 5th never have dark levels. You also won't get more than one dark level per world, and will not get one if you complete the previous level in under 20 seconds (or might have been 30 - not completely sure).
Thanks @namida for that info :thumbsup:
I have managed to reach Hell a total of two times now :) (one time during regular play and the other time during a Daily Challenge) but being too unfamiliar with the hazards has left me unable to get pass the first level in that world so far :forehead:
Has anyone of you here played Nier: Automata? (Yoko Taro / Square Enix / Platinum Games)
It's been in the headlines again recently because of frustrated players review-bombing the Steam version, which hasn't been fixed since its initial release in 2017.
It's not the type of game I would usually play. I'm neither into post-apocalyptic stuff (except for maybe "The 100", haven't seen the final season yet, though), nor into Anime.
But considering that e.g. Arty is currently still let's-playing another mature-rated Anime game (The Fruit of Grisaia), I thought there might be some overlap here. ;)
I only kind-of "hate-watched" Yu-Gi-Oh! as a kid occasionally, without actually playing the TCG myself. That may have biased my attitude to anything Anime negatively, because not only is the worldbuilding of Yu-Gi-Oh! so laughably unrealistic and inconsistent, but I also didn't like what the TCG was doing to my fellow students in primary school on a mental level :evil: . That one Anime series I had any contact with was always some sort of "competitor" for me - first in primary school as I was into Bionicle while everyone else was playing the game of the violet-black-blonde-haired cactus head, and then later in secondary school as I discovered Magic: The Gathering (which, being the first TCG ever, basically has a natural competition with Yu-Gi-Oh! built into the community by default).
Now in my mid-twenties, of course I have developed a calmer attitude towards such "fandom quarrels" in the meantime. I've realised that a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! players make fun of the Anime show themselves (like through the very successful "abridged series" parody on YouTube), and that the games and franchises can also co-exist in harmony. Thanks to Netflix, I'm now actually able to re-watch the Anime in chronological order, rather than just casually zapping into it when it was running on one of our trash channels on television back in the early 2000s. Konami even earned its first revenue from me recently, when I found out about the game "Legacy of the Duelist" that actually allows you to play through the "story" of the TV show, but with "correct" Yu-Gi-Oh! rules.
I would still never drop any money on actual cards - I'm spending enough on Magic: The Gathering already, and I still consider that a superior game to Yu-Gi-Oh! - but it's still fun to get to do some of the stuff yourself that you saw as a kid. Kind of like Lemmings: Building custom levels was also something we could only dream of as children, now with NeoLemmix, it's not just possible, but with the additional skills and tilesets, we can do so much more than what we were hoping for back then! :thumbsup:
I guess the main thing that always threw me off about the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game was the random combination of monsters from all kinds of different contexts: Fantasy, SciFi, Horror, Egypt, Superheroes, all the way up to playing with monsters that symbolised food, of all things... It seemed like the Warhammer 40k of card games.
And from Yu-Gi-Oh! to The Legend of Zelda to Nier: Automata: This seemingly arbitrary combination of a lot of "random stuff" into one setting is one common theme I see with a lot of Japanese fiction.
With Western Fantasy or SciFi, it's usually "here are a couple of species and locations, now let's have their interests clash and combine these elements of the story in all kinds of different ways". Of course, that's what I grew up with, but just considering the number of things you need to memorise to understand a setting, I find it much easier to keep the overview in such a Fantasy or SciFi setting. With the Japanese stuff, I often can't even tell whether it's supposed to be Fantasy or SciFi in the first place. :D
I only found out about the game by accident, while researching "nihilism in the media" on YouTube. Mainly because I was looking for an answer for why a lot of modern movies and TV shows seem to have become so bleak and misanthropic, with characters constantly yelling at each other and humanity generally being depicted as awful. Now I know I probably should have looked for the term "Grimdark" instead. Either way, these types of stories have become infamous in recent years (especially after Star Wars: The Last Jedi) for failing to inspire people.
Nier: Automata, in contrast, was then mentioned as a "good" example of playing with these ideas. And well... by the looks of it, it clearly did inspire a lot of people in one way or another, considering how many people seem to be waxing poetic about it.
I for one am always immediately suspicious when I discover something has so much unanimous hype behind it. And the fact that I only found out about this game because I was looking for content about a theme it happens to relate to, rather than about the game itself, means that I basically had the conclusion spoiled in the first 1 or 2 videos I watched. Given that it's also not in a genre I normally like, what mainly kept me looking for further information about the game were indeed analyses of its philosophy. Which inevitably led to me finding out about all its central plot twists.
Given that, I took a long time making up my mind whether I would drop 40 euros on this game (and have it take up 40-50 GB of my hard-drive space) to try it out for myself. Considering the dissatisfaction a lot of people were reporting about the Steam version (most players so far seem to have played the game for XBox or PS4), I'm definitely glad I didn't buy it earlier. The version I have now is the "Become as Gods" edition from the Microsoft Store, and I can't complain about any technical issues so far. In fact, it was the release of this improved PC version that led to the players review-bombing the Steam version, to make the developers aware of their unfinished business again, and it seems like now this has finally worked (they just announced on 13th April or so that they're going to fix the Steam version).
So at first, I thought I should wait until the Steam version was patched. But given that I hadn't heard any complaints about the Microsoft Store version, I thought I might just as well go with that one, and so far I don't regret that decision.
Considering this game relies on multiple playthroughs, and seems to care primarily about its story and philosophy, I expected gameplay to be much worse, namely more repetitive. So far, I'm positively surprised in that regard. Maybe things will start feeling more repetitive as I enter the second playthrough (since the game relies on multiple runs to unlock everything), which seems to have very much overlap with the first one, and it is only starting with the first playthrough that new things are added to the mix, which then eventually lead you on to the conclusion.
As I said, I'm not a particular fan of Anime, so I don't feel such a close connection to the characters either. Nor do I particularly care about gimmicks such as the first main character having a self-destruct function that removes her skirt. :forehead:
The main things that drew me in were the atmosphere of the setting (kind of eerie with all this bright light) and the music, of course.
Though I do find some of the tracks in what I believe is that forgotten Peruvian Chamicuro language a little annoying.
So far, it's a game I'm enjoying despite its flaws - which I mainly see with the game's philosophy. As a psychologist, I think the premises of the core philosophy of the game - Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism - can easily be debunked by modern science. But I'm giving it a fair shot by playing it for myself, and also accepting every little side quest I can find. Maybe some of the things it's trying to say make more sense if you get the entire context.
But don't be fooled, I know where the journey is going, and that the game's main intention is to depress the player and throw them into an existential crisis.
So I'm also kind of playing it as a challenge whether the game can break my spirit too. Apparently there are a bunch of people who cry like little babies when they reach the final credits.
Well, bring it on, game - you're gonna have to go to much darker places than where I've already been to get me to that point. 8-)
After all, for all the many real-world philosophers that are represented as characters in this game, I've noticed there doesn't seem to be anybody named Schopenhauer... :P
And even if there were a robot named "Arthur", I'd probably already be able to predict what he would be saying... :D
As someone who considers themselves the complete opposite of that philosophy, I actually don't mind it as long as it's used in a way that is in service to the narrative the person wants to tell or show
I think the game's main philosophy is not nihilism, but existentialism. Yet, there is also another term called "existential nihilism". Without knowing much about the details of existentialism, there are at least two core premises of it that I think modern science can easily debunk:
1) The claim that "existence precedes essence". (We exist first, and then have to find a purpose for it.)
2) The claim that "human beings are condemned to be free".
Basically, existentialism asserts there is no pre-defined meaning to life, but human beings have the possibility and responsibility to find and define a meaning for their own life.
The problems with those two claims are:
1) Human beings come with at least one pre-defined purpose: Procreation of our genes. And we come with instincts that serve that purpose. If people reject that built-in purpose, then yes, they have to find a different purpose for themselves to give their lives meaning. But it's not like there were no pre-defined purpose at all.
2) Take together all kinds of evidence from psychology, physics, neurochemistry etc. and the idea that human beings had free will, least of all were "condemned to be free", becomes pretty absurd. Especially with the built-in purpose of procreation our genes always drive us to, that actually makes it harder to make decisions entirely for ourselves than if we had no built-in purpose, and thus also no built-in behavioural tendencies, in other words: free will.
So you see how the two premises connect with and rely on each other: No predefined purpose seems more compatible with the idea of free will, but if you accept that we have a pre-defined purpose that is built into our biology, then whatever automatisms (pun intended) serve that purpose also simultaneously limit our freedom to act on our own volition.
As for the question whether the game implements the existentialist ideas in a subtle or narrative-serving way, well... it depends. ;)
If the "narrative" in an ideological sense is to convince the player of existentialism, then yes, most things in that game serve that narrative. If however by "narrative" you mean "do these elements serve the story?", I'd have to say no. Rather, the story is in service of the existentialist narrative.
As mentioned in my previous post, the game features several characters that are straight-up named after real-life philosophers. Among others, there is a robot named Jean-Paul (like Sartre) that just gives you existentialist talking points whenever you speak to him. It's not even subtle.
There are also two machine enemies who call themselves Adam and Eve (yet Eve is also male). At the end of the first playthrough, Eve tells the two main characters that he is sure they feel the same as him: "That this world is utterly meaningless."
I mean, I already knew where this game was going with its narrative, and even for me, that came completely out of nowhere at that point. It hadn't been sufficiently set up yet at all. The only thing that came before was Eve losing his brother Adam, who captured one of the two main characters and then challenged the other character - the one you are playing at that point - to a fight so that he, Adam, a robot, could experience the danger of death, in an attempt to better understand humanity. So now Eve is ticked off that you killed his brother (it's not like the game left you any choice in that regard, there are countless cutscenes that railroad you into certain outcomes to allow the story to continue, especially at the end of such boss fights).
In other words, whenever the game hits you over the head with existentialism, sometimes just by a character shouting in your face that any given thing were "meaningless" (it's even in the English version of the title song "Weight of the World"), this is often just asserted. In author speak, it's more "tell" than "show" so far.
I'm currently at the start of the second playthrough, route B. The first time you play the girl on the cover of the game, 2B, the second time you replay the same events, but from the perspective of her sidekick character 9S. And yes, he does feel like a sidekick, often just fulfilling the supporting role, as the game occupies you with "meaningless" busiwork in the background while 2B, the character you played on the first playthrough before, does all the stuff you did last time.
I know the central plot twist the game is headed for, so I am aware that the assumption of "no predefined meaning" is indeed "shown" through the story at a later point, too. But so far, up to the start of route B, it only ever really gets told, not shown.