The last time I played it I made some progress in Dragon's Dogma until I didn't. I don't know what it was but I just didn't find the world interesting at all which feels like certain death in the fantasy genre. I also made the mistake of speccing out of my comfort zone to shake things up and got bored with that play style on top of being lost.
If the topic is about high fantasy RPGs we want an excuse to replay then that would be Divinity: Original Sin 2 for me. Now THAT'S what I call high fantasy lore...volume 2. Even though I just played it in 2019 I desperately want a reason to play it again. Unfortunately I'm now all too aware of how long the game is and my backlog is a real nightmare right now. I can't even decide how I'd play it the 2nd time and I'm not accepting suggestions. I can't think of anything in that vein within the PS3 and older timeline that I'd want to replay more than that at the moment.
I finally binged through it last weekend and it turns out, I kinda liked it! Maybe being nearly 2 decades removed from the source material has made me less precious about it, maybe I've just mellowed out in general. Even with the changes, liberties, and truncation I couldn't help but get sucked in to this version of the fiction. There's something about seeing actualized versions of characters like Ny'naeve in addition to iconic locations and sequences that was making me feel weepy and wistful.
Sure sometimes the production feels a bit cheap, I must have missed the meeting where middlebrow fantasy shows weren't allowed to be a little shoddy. Like the Trollocs look real generic, it's asking a lot but I wish they had at least a few with bird heads and feathers to express a slight variety as oppose to merely being off-brand orcs. I personally would like to see more of this show and where it goes from here though I could also see book-agnostic people bouncing off of it.
I think I might get into this but then I realize I still have to play Intergrade and I guess a few rounds of First Soldier. It might seem silly to prioritize considering they shouldn't be connected at all. However this is Nomura's world, we're just living in it.
Finished The Forgotten City a few weeks back, what a fabulous little 9 hour video game this is. The Elder Scrolls influence feels somewhat uncanny at first so I appreciate that you can only interact with very few items in the world. There are some great characters who are gonna stick in my mind for a while.
Recently finished Persona 5 Strikers. It's been a joy to return to these characters this way, I'd say far more than it was to play Royal last year. One thing I want to call out are the character/Persona icons on the health bars. I'm amazed by whichever artists it was who made a stylized icon for every single demon that Joker can acquire in the game. The SMT bestiary is kind of set in stone at this point so it's cool to see them still make some unique art out of these iconic designs.
@nodima: It's not really a big deal but it is just one of those small things about Horizon's systems that stop me from having the effusive praise for that first game as I'd want to. That mechanic is designed that way to make a task easier for you in the world, but other games have long since figured out how to make those exact tasks easier if the idea is to empower the player character. Aloy should be too badass to have to worry about not attacking in see-dudes-through-walls mode.
Hard to say. I've grown to really like the Soulsborne games and even liked playing through Sekiro for the first time last year. However with the amount of hype people are giving this next game, I can't shake this feeling that people are setting themselves up for disappointment. I'm hoping it's good too but let's slow our roll on expecting it to be better than 10 superbowls. The RR Martin connection feels like a big question mark for me. Granted I've only seen the TV show for Game of Thrones but to me the good part of that series was the geopolitics. I found the actual fantasy aspects of that world to feel sort of lacking compared to other stuff in this genre that I'm familiar with. I appreciated the lore and styyyyle of Dark Souls because of how much it evoked Forgotten Realms and Eberron to me, and I personally don't think Martin's fantasy ideas measure up to those settings.
Yeah it's starting to sound like they didn't learn the lessons I hoped they would from the first game, which is bananas because Zero Dawn already felt like a dated open-world game at the time. Someone who's played it will have to let me know if focus/detective mode has been improved upon. In the first game when you're in focus mode you can't attack and move slower. You could tag enemies but that involves merely placing a small, barely visible chevron on them that persists out of focus mode. Now 4 years before Zero Dawn Assassin's Creed Black Flag made it so that you can highlight the entire outlines of enemies, and Ubisoft just kept that in all their future games and even games like The Phantom Pain followed suit. Could Forbidden West at the very least meet that modest design choice?
I remember it being okay though I made it to the room just outside the final boss and...never finished the game. I have no excuse or explanation, it just didn't happen. It was also weird timing because I believe Okami came out the same year, and honestly I like that game more than every 3D Zelda and Zelda-like I've played (still haven't started BotW).
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