What Game/s are You Playing? Daily / Whenever Check :) (GAMEPLAY)

[Aussie2B]

I'm currently ready to tackle the four-wing version of Ethereal Queen in the second iteration of the post-game dungeon of Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness on PlayStation 4. I was a little nervous doing the Anima fight again, but I did clear it on my first attempt. Also managed to have all my party members alive by the end of the battle, unlike my first victory against them. Again, I only got one Moonstone, which sucks, but I'm still not sweating it. Gathering all the needed Orichalcum to make every Item Creation recipe is the bigger pain, and if I actually accomplished that prior to having all the Moonstones I need, I could just use Synthesis to turn any extra Orichalcum into Moonstones. The Orichalcum is also more annoying because, by the time you have enough to make all these different recipes, you'll probably already have the weapons they make, so there's not much reward in it. With the Moonstones, you can at least use Synthesis to make each character's strongest weapon, and since only one Item Creation recipe requires one Moonstone, I've used the additional ones I've received so far to make a couple of those.

All that said, I've put another pause on Star Ocean because I'm sick for the third time since late September, ugh. Such is life as a parent. So, out of my desire to play something more basic, I started up Game & Watch Gallery 2 on my Game Boy Advance SP. I've ended with the second, third, and fourth games in the series (not counting the Game Boy Gallery game released only in PAL regions), despite never intentially aiming to collect them, and, until now, never gave any of them much time, partially because I figured there was nothing to do in them but try to improve your scores. Now that I know there's stuff to unlock and that you can earn a credits roll and "beat" the game, it's more interesting to me. Though, it's still just a matter of scoring high enough in each variation of each game. I like that the game also goes into the history of the Game & Watch series, which I know little about. I mean, I know some bits of historicial info, like the D-pad originating with the series, but I've never owned any of them and, to the best of my recollection, have never once played one, though I did own some Tiger handhelds and what have you. I've played a little of every game on Game & Watch Gallery 2 now, and I can see why there are people nostalgic about these games. As simple as they are, some of them are pretty addicting, both the Modern versions and Classic versions. I think I like Helmet and Vermin best so far. Parachute is decent too. I'm still trying to get the hang of Modern Chef. Managing both Peach and Yoshi simultaneously throws me off. I haven't figured out Donkey Kong at all yet. I'm not sure what exactly I have to do to progress after flipping the switch. It also throws me off that Mario snaps from spot to spot, instead of the smooth movement in arcade Donkey Kong. Which you'd think I'd be fine with, considering I played a ton of the Coleco Donkey Kong tabletop back in the day, but I guess I gotta reacclimate.

[Aussie2B]

I'm pretty much over my latest cold, but I'm still playing Game & Watch Gallery 2 on my Game Boy Advance SP and have yet to return to Star Ocean. I've racked up 40-some stars, which is nothing compared to the 120 there are in total. But I believe there's a credits roll at 50 stars, so I'm not too far off from counting it as beaten. I think there's another credits roll at 120, but I don't know how that differs. I'm finding the "Easy" and "Hard" designations are kinda wacky. The Easy versions definitely start off slower (painfully so, in some cases), but they eventually speed up and don't seem much harder at that point. In fact, the first game I got over 1000 points on (and thus earning all five of its stars) was Classic Ball on Hard. The very first time I played it, I scored well over 2000, yet I'm still struggling to get more than a few hundred in Classic Ball on Easy. The other game I've got all five stars in is Modern Helmet on Hard. The only game where Easy is significantly easier for me is with Modern Chef. I'm getting better at it and enjoying it more, but I have a tough time when there's more than two adjacent columns of food. The food definitely flies around more on Hard. I still stink at Donkey Kong and have barely been touching it, though I have been improving a little and can at least clear the stage.

[Atomicfear]

my everquest proj1999 is crapping out on me. has an error ;(

[kupomogli]

Ys10 is worse than both Ys8 and 9 in nearly every way, and while I was disappointed in Ys9, there were still some things I liked better than Ys8(there were less bosses, but they were generally better on average.) The one thing I will say that I like better on Ys10 is that weapon skills appear far more balanced in usefulness. The stab into the ground on Ys8 for example is completely useless the entire game, you're never going ot use it, but the one on Ys10 is actually good whether you're doing it from the air or on the ground and interacts differently than other attacks This is based on the first three skills I've used and their usefulness.

However I've played five hours, and according to PSN, I've completed 25% of the main game. Now, that wouldn't be a problem in most cases, but most of that five hours has been text dumps. tThe dialogue is great and the characters are likeable, however this is modern day Falcom padding. This is some of the worst padding I've played in any Falcom game to date, and I've stopped playing their Trails games midway through Cold Steel 3, so I'm not sure how utterly absurd the padding gets in the later games. I'm going to throw a few comparisons out there, but one comparison I'm going to throw out there is a game that does it well, a game that doesn't feel like it's too padded despite the very reason the game existed is to flesh out the storyline of the original game, and that's Final Fantasy 7 Remake. On Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the first two chapters of the game include the Sector 1 Mako Reactor and Sector 1. These two chapters take a combined total of less than two hours. When it comes to the amount of exploration I've done in Ys10 in the first five hours, those two hours on Final Fantasy 7 Remake have more exploration, a much larger amount of video game real estate to actually explore. So despite all of the depth to the characters that were added and additional dialogue to make the charaters more likeable than they were on the original, the game is still better paced than the text dump extravaganza that's Ys10 and you actually see and do more. So the second game, and I use this one alot when comparing classic RPGs to modern RPGs, is Suikoden. Now, I won't go into too much detail and instead just name the areas that you go to, but there are a lot of things that happen in each of these areas, you explore all of thehse areas, and this is only the very first hour of the game. So you start in Gregminster Castle, Gregminster, dungeon island to meet Leknaat, Gregminster, Rockland, Bandit Hideout, Rockland, Gregminster, Lenankamp, Rockland, Lenankamp. There are at least 12 main events that happen within that first hour(there are more because more than some main events happen in each of those areas like Ted's meeting with Windy, Ted giving the Soul Eater rune to the hero and the death of Ted, and then Viktor helping the party escape from Gregminster in the last time you are in Gregminster. But the game gets straight to the point in each of these events and still finds time to make these characters important. Suikoden 2 in total is a 9-12 hour game. I know the game like the back of my hand so I can get all 108 stars in under nine hours, but for someone who doesn't getting 100% in 12 hours aside from some stars being RNG if they're there or not wasting more time. Consider that I've done nothing on Ys10 at all in comparison and you can complete the entire game of Suikoden 1 in less than twice the time.

So the last game I'm going to point out, is Ys8. Now granted, I could easily point out, Ys 1 and 2, Origin, Oath in Felghana, different classic Ys games that have a smaller storyline and are shorter games, but all of these get to the point, you get a good understanding of all the characters motives and personalities, and you really like these characters. Before Ys8, my favorite Ys was Ys Origin. It has a great storyline but yes, you do have to play through the game three times to see it all, but atleast it does have such a great replay value. However with Ys8, there's a more expanded storyline, but like Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the text dumps weren't out of control. Now, when I first played the game on the boat it was a bit rough, but once you're given control at the end of that chapter, even when the game does want to provide you a lot of story, it's it's still not too much. The Dana stuff is usually a few lines of dialogue here and there and then Dana needing to go from one area to plant a sapling to allow Adol passage through, but you're atleast given the freedom to explore during this time. The few points during Ys8 that have the most storyline and the most dialogue still haven't came close to what Ys10 has already had and that's during a few sections of the game where you repeatedly keep going back and forth between the area of the town and certain locations both in the middle of the first half of the game and at the very end of the late game. In between all of the fairly concise dialogue from modern gaming though, Ys8 just has these incredibly well designed monstrous areas to explore. The game has a total of 36 different bosses and that's not including all of Dana's bosses.

Long story short, Ys10 has an obnoxious amount of padding like modern Falcom games are known for, but that's not its only issue.

Ys10 issue is also with its gameplay which is not very good. Now again, it does have the more balanced weapon skills as I stated earlier, true, but the core gameplay is ruined just by how you play it. So they reduced the amount of playable characters from six on Ys7, Celceta, 8, and 9 to two. That's fine, it's not a big deal there. However, it's not like Adol and Karja even feel that different to play aside from Karja's main combo string being slower than Adols. So there's that going against it. In all the other games, playing nearly all the characters feels very different. But that's not even the issue here, how the characters play for the most part is fine, even if there feels like much less of a reason to change characters, but more on that later because that's included in part of its own section.

The first biggest issue to the games combat system is the new duo and defensive mechanic. Now, the one plus side to this system is that after doing a perfect guard you have a slight amount of invincibility and the enemy themselves gets staggered back to stop them from damaging you during the counterattack. That's great because, at times you can do perfect guards on Ys8 and Ys9 and just be invincible from follow up attacks. I do think Ys Celceta and 7 did it the best where your perfect guard had no invincibility. It has the exact same perfect guard that works the best, but you're not using it on easier to guard attacks then avoiding the rest of the damage or perfect guarding other hits in the middle of invincibility. So atleast with that, I give it to Ys10 combat system, because I haven't yet got to the issue with the new duo and defensive system.

So the issue with this new duo and defensive system, is that the defensive system and duo system is on R2. So think of it as its own moveset, because that's exactly what it is. You hold R2 to attack and use duo meter for your attacks and skills for your duo gauge, you don't hold anything to normally attack, and then you hold R1 for your regular moveset. Adol's regular moveset, Karja's regular moveset, and duo actions all have their own meter. There is no shared meter like there was in the other Ys games, oh no, that'd be way too simple and fun. I might actually enjoy the combat a bit more than(wlell, probably not because I haven't even got to its biggest issue.)

But seriously think about it, if you want to guard attacks you're pressing R2, which has a bit of delay going from attack to guard back to attack again unlike there being no animations in the past games, you having to hold either R2 or R1 depending on duo or single character special attacks or hold R2 or hold nothing when doing duo or single character regular attacks. The amount of mental and controller voodoo you have to perform to play this game is uncomfortable. I didn't even mention jumping, evading, and switching between the two characters. I will mention one thing with evasion though, blue attacks are unlbockable and are called "quick attacks" you have to evade them. So the game has a lot of rock, paper, scissors defensive mechanics as well always a joy to find in action games /s.

So I mentioned none of that's even the worst part of the games combat. It's all pretty bad, but bosses now have defense bars on top of their HP bars. I started the game on hard, and on the third boss, this became such a chore, among also being killed in two to three hits, that I just turned it back to normal. So Karja's normal and special attacks deal more armor damage than Adol, while Adol deals more HP damage, again, more of that rock, paper, scissors bullshit round 2. Their duo attacks also deal either more guard break damage or more HP damage. The guard break bar however is as slow to remove as damage towards the HP bar. So when you remove the guard break bar four times in the course of the boss battle, it's like the boss have five bars of HP and on hard mode it's like the guard break bar and HP amount both reduce as if the enemy difficulty was on nightmare on any other game. It's absolutely ridiculous just how much of a damage sponge these bosses are. Below is a video of me defeating three bosses in nightmare on Ys8, but that's the thing, if I wanted to play nightmare difficulty on Ys10 and have damage sponge bosses, I'd play nightmare difficulty, not having super damage sponge bosses because of this garbage guard break mechanic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtH6OOY5nJw

You want to see a guard break mechanic that works well, that isn't a chore to play through and just allows you to deal more damage while staggering enemies? A guard break mechanic that actually gives you the benefit of dealing more damage after breaking their guard. You have the opportunity to break their guard faster by using break skills during certain points and then going all out during the window of opportunity that their guard is broken. Even if you're not very good, the guard break still builds up, so you can still go all out when their guard is broken getting the benefit of the extra damage, but on Ys8 it's like, hey, here's four extra HP bars.

https://youtu.be/G0y3YWnQTCs?t=1608