Axersia

Hadn't heard of the guy until Karl did the exposé, but I couldn't help but notice our very own Lucy James is in the second video, because apparently she does a podcast with Jirard called Friends Per Second? Looking forward to her statement on the matter.

I wanna say it was mentioned in the second stage. I already knew about it in the demo and I never did the basic training at the time.

And yeah, it's pretty useful. Not only is it a quick way to switch weapons, it also restores your negative Spirit back to 0. I watched a couple of No Damage Boss videos and was surprised that none of them seemed to make use of it.

Anyway, I just beat Lu Bu. Been a while since I played a game with this style of boss that's this hard. He went from being seemingly insurmountable to fairly trivial. I did end up completely overhauling my build in the process, though. Think I'll stick to Earth from now on, as the glaive with the Soaring Phoenix attack you get from one of your party members is just too damn good.

Also, Aqua Blink did not disappoint. It actually allowed me to teleport through Lu Bu's attacks and hit him from behind, which would've been impossible otherwise.

Shame the next stage sucks so much. It's just not very fun exploring a city set ablaze. Hopefully I can get through it fast.

Just beat the demo. I've been stubbornly putting all my points into Water despite not using ranged weapons and not having any dual swords yet (are they even in the demo?)

Wasn't sure what to invest in, but I figured anything relating to parry would be good. Earth would've probably been better though, as that would turn you into a deflecting tank.

That said, looking at old footage from last year, Aqua Blink, while somewhat counter-intuitive in a parry game, looks really frickin good. Hope it's worth the 20 levels, and hopefully it doesn't take too long to unlock after starting the full game.

I was a bit worried about the Morale system at first and ended up beating the first boss at Morale 25, but then beat the second and third boss at 4 levels below the boss. So I'm hoping future bosses stay reasonable at lower Morale as well and don't get tedious due to low damage output.

Never played Sekiro, but I gotta say the whole standing still and never getting hit part is pretty satisfying. I'd never use Royal Guard in a Devil May Cry game, but the parry in this is quite doable (at least with the weapons I was using). Will probably pick this up next month.

Had one been available at launch, I would've happily bought one. I'm not much of a Sony fan these days with their censorship policies, and outside of the new God of War (which you can play on PS4, btw, alongside everything else they put out...), none of their first-party output interests me. But hey, I knew I was gonna need one eventually for some sort of timed-exclusive Square Enix game.

Instead, I got myself a gaming PC in December of 2020 when I could still get a 1660 Super at MSRP. Got myself an Ultrawide monitor to go with it, and they've served me well. Since then I've bought not one, but TWO Steam Decks! Yes, my transition to PC gaming is complete now. And guess what? GPU prices have actually come down again, so I'm thinking of maybe grabbing myself a 3060 Ti or whatever.

Did I attempt to buy a PS5 in the past year and a half? Sure, I signed up for Sony's official waiting list program, but since I've been completely inactive on PS4 these past few years, they rejected me. Yeah, no shit, I'm not using my PS4 because I want a PS5.

Meanwhile, you're guaranteed a Steam Deck if you're just willing to wait half a year. Meanwhile, you can get yourself a gaming PC at a fair price. Meanwhile, the Xbox Series S has been readily available through this entire debacle, and runs all the same games the Series X does.

If something like Kingdom Hearts IV ends up being a PS5 + Xbox Series simultaneous release, guess what? I'll just buy a Series S and deal with the lower framerate.

Right now I just can't see a scenario owning a PlayStation this generation, or possibly ever again. It would have to be as simple as visiting an online store of my choice, and hitting the buy button. Or, Sony could get back to me on that waiting list I signed up for like a year ago, which isn't gonna happen. I'm not gonna line any scalper's pockets, and I'm not gonna jump through any crazy hoops to get one.

@wickedcobra03: Ah, thanks for the heads up. Just went ahead and bought the trilogy on Steam. Good chance these new releases will be the ones to play going forward, but eh, you never know.

@xolotl: I haven't played Demon's Souls in a decade, but I still remember that phantom being scripted. It's there every time until you kill it, like all scripted phantoms in the game.

Anyway, my initial speculation was that Danny was being held in the Matrix where he's forced to play games by his A.I. overlords (Tamoor), though I'm sure they've come up with something more inventive.

How'd you go wrong? Were you playing Expert Grid? Because you can't really go wrong on the Standard Grid unless you break a bunch of locks.

Not sure how far you are, but there's a point about 2/3rds of the way through the story that's an excellent leveling spot. You're in Bevelle, and you're on a very long bridge with a save point on each side, and a boss fight at the north end. The enemies here give insane AP. I guess because you're completely locked into the area and they didn't want players getting stuck on the boss. Just grind there until you feel the AP is no longer worth it. Though if I recall correctly, you can get 8.4k AP per battle there (with the right mob configuration and overkills), and leveling up eventually caps at 22k. So if you've got time to kill, you could just fill out everyone's grid.

At some point you'll also start getting more Return, Teleport and Friend Spheres than you'll know what to do with. If you just bank your AP for a bit, you can use those to travel all across the board and rectify whatever mistakes you think you've made.

The next step would be the first boss of Mt. Gagazet. You can, in theory, steal unlimited Lvl 3 Key Spheres during the fight, but the chance decreases with each steal. You should be able to get 7-10 spheres before the fight is over, though.

Aaaand, you're done. At this point nothing can stop you.

I actually prefer X-2 over X and it's in my top 5 favorite FF games. I had a lot of trouble with FFX's linear structure initially, and X-2 is the polar opposite that regard. It actually plays more like a SaGa game in that it's an open-world game based on fast-travel points. Just pick a location to travel to, and stuff will happen. NPCs will literally walk up to you with quests. The battle system is also the best the series has to offer IMO (and completely different from FFX), and the job/skill system has a good carrot-on-a-stick feel to it where you sometimes just want to grind to learn that next skill, which you can pick yourself in the menu. It also has a more lighthearted tone, which is when FF is at its best to me.

I don't know that you'd wanna immediately delve into FFX-2 after FFX, though... Depends on how prone to burning out on a game you are. Most of the areas have been recycled from FFX 1:1.

My personal suggestion would be to move on to FFXII next. Probably my favorite game in the series, and still has a more contemporary feel to it than the pre-PS2 era FF games.

Reservation process was a nightmare for me. I started at launch, and wouldn't get the 512GB model until 4 hours later. Now it just works so I also grabbed the 256GB model on my girlfriend's account. Not sure what I'll do with that one... There's a good chance she'll want it for herself (even though she'd never use it so that'd be a massive waste), but we might just give it to her lil sis.

Don't know how you're supposed to tell what batch you're in, but even now when visiting the reservation page it says Q1 for me. Same goes for when I login to my gf's account. Seems like each region gets their own quota, and us Europeans got lucky.

The 64GB model also seems to be quite popular, but I imagine many are gonna regret their decision unless they really just want it to be a pure SteamOS or RetroArch system. But this is a fully-fledged portable PC, and if you intend to install Windows or do any kind of dual-boot setup, you really want that 256GB minimum (the increase in speed is nice as well, I'm sure). You definitely don't wanna run Windows off a micro SD card.

I've seen plenty of people complain about this, but I can't say I've noticed it personally even a little bit. I've been far too absorbed in the game to care about that stuff. Also, my primary console these days is the Switch, so what do I even have to compare it to? The only other PS4 games I've played over the past year have been KH3 and DMC5. Does it look as good as those? Sure, I guess? It definitely doesn't run at 60fps like those games do (on PS4 Pro), which is unfortunate, but not something I was expecting in the first place due to how dense this game is.

Yeah, the days of Square Enix using custom tech are a thing of the past, for better or worse. The final nail in the coffin was when they set up a new studio for the director of FF15 specifically to create games for the Luminous Engine, only to shut it down within a year and kick him out of the company.

KH3, DQ11, FF7R, Trials of Mana... They all use UE4 now. KH3 was the first to announce dropping their own tech in favor of UE4, which gave me quite a scare when they released the BBS 0.2 demo back in 2017. That was probably the ugliest game they've ever released. But, two more years with the engine gave them enough experience to release one of the best-looking games this gen. Still, when you heard them talk about the "Kingdom Shader" and how ambitious that sounded, you can't help but think they could've done even more with their own tech. But then the game still wouldn't have been out right now, so eh.

Yikes, that sucks. Hope you had a PS+ subscription or backup your saves frequently, otherwise that shit's lost. Had it happen to me once as well, and ever since I regularly backup to USB stick and upload it to a cloud service (did it a few times throughout my FF7R playthrough, actually).

But hey, what's done is done. I'd go download that firmware file so you can get to playing FF7R asap. Although... I personally wouldn't trust an HDD after this. Mine became a paperweight.

Anyway, I'd be inclined to put the blame with the HDD and not the game.