asylumrunner

What a garbage take. Ignoring the absolutely ridiculous insinuation that media criticism isn't beneficial and that everyone should go take up welding or whatever instead, you are literally making this point on a website run by and centered upon people who have dedicated their professional careers to discussing and playing video games. People are, as it turns out, allowed to have interests. Especially weird to make this argument against two people who, by basically all available metrics, have extremely successful careers.

Go be an asshole somewhere else lol

To be fair, he has stated that he wants it to be viewed in parts and not as a continuous whole (there are chapter headers, and intermissions, in which he literally asks you to go do something else instead of binge watching), and since pretty much no one in the English speaking world has played Tokimeki Memorial, 2 hours of those 6 are two (summarized) complete playthroughs of the game

@frytup: This is, like, the opposite of the appeal for me. So much writing on games is, still, just a basic factual checklist of features read one by one, with the added light zest of "I liked/did not like it". If I wanted to have a non-personal description of what Tokimeki Memorial was like I'd read the Wikipedia page.

I finished Tim's video yesterday, and it's so good for me because of how much he's able to tie his own experience and expertise into it, between his love life, his adolescence, his time in Japan, his time working at SE, his experiences in the industry, and all of that creates this fantastic, hollistic view of the game that makes me appreciate it so much more than if I saw a video that was just "this dating sim is good, also the devs went on to make Symphony of the Night, isn't that weird"

Just finished it. No spoilers, but I think the sort of mid-game stuff with the major companion NPCs is easily the best stuff in the whole game. If I could have had my way, I would have cut eeeeeeeeevery fixer mission from the game because they're all the same and boring and forgettable, and added 4 or 5 more quest chains as good as those, or elevated some of the tertiary characters to that same status and given them major questlines.

I think this game is a core of really, really good writing, marred by a garbage first act, a looooooot of terrible open-world filler that shouldn't have been there, and thoughts about the ending that I've put in that thread.

@serryl: yeah, I remember all of the dialogue, I actually watched it twice because I thought it was bugged. That dialogue doesn't clear up my problem, it is my problem. It doesn't make any sense at all. Ignoring the fact that V never even considers the idea of handing Johnny the keys permanently ever in the 55 hours before that moment, it runs completely antithetical to the entire middle of the game. The entire middle of the game is V finally making connections in the world and finding things to live for, and Johnny tidying up his loose ends and righting old wrongs. It's just not set up at all, thematically or narratively, it comes straight out of nowhere.

Not to mention the fact that basically everything in the epilogue is pure gibberish. The game suddenly snapping back to "on a quest to become a legend the world has never known" gave me whiplash, it's a theme that the game hasn't cared about since the end of Act 1.

I just went back and went with the Nomad ending, and it is significantly better. It feels like much more of a natural progression from what comes before it, and ties in a lot more with what the game's doing thematically with the identity of reclaiming control over your own identity. My only real complaint with that ending is that Johnny's character arc lacks a meaningful conclusion in that ending, he just shows up at the very end to peace out.

At the risk of being the kind of obnoxious person who asks why they didn't fly the eagles all the way to Mordor: why doesn't V just call Rogue and the Nomads?

Just wrapped it up, went with Rogue and Johnny, what an absolute bumblefuck of an ending.

The actual gameplay side of things is relatively enjoyable, although it's a little strange to me that Arasaka HQ seems to have weaker security than some random-ass luxury hotel from act 1. Watching Alt tear through at the end was kind of fun, though.

Narratively, though, what the fuck. V's furious at Johnny for giving her the body back, for some reason that I absolutely don't understand, but whatever. I feel like everything that happens after Johnny crosses the pearly gates is a complete non-sequitur, though. V's dying, which, yes, I chose that, but it seems like her relationship with everyone has gone to total shit, including her relationship with Judy completely dissolving on terrible terms for reasons I absolutely don't understand. The one thing in the game I actively cared about, the relationships with the other characters, gets completely obliterated because I didn't want Panam to get shot, I guess. I wouldn't even mind a bummer ending if the game told me this would be the bummer ending. But no, Johnny's dead, Rogue's dead, V's relationship has evaporated, all of her friends are calling her like she's been big-timing them, but I guess I got to be in space.

Looking through this thread, and at some other posts, looks like the Nomad ending is the only one that isn't trash, I'll probably load up a save and go through that instead just to get closure that actually feels like it logically follows the preceding events.

I don't hold this against the game because it's more about my expectations rather than anything the game did, but I was really expecting, if I may borrow a term from another contentious ending, a "Synthesis" option, where I could merge V and Johnny into a single person. It has setting precedence (it's the option I took with the Delamain personalities as well), and I think would have tied in really well to the main theme of the game about the way that people's fundamental identities can change.

Hit about the 35 hour mark, this game is a mess but has really high highs, but I think they're too few and far between. Apologies for the incoming doctoral thesis.

The current general rule of thumb I'm working on is "any quest that finds you is good, any quest that you find is terrible". If someone calls you, you're probably in for a good quest with good writing, well-crafted encounters. If you run into a mission on the map, it's probably boilerplate filler garbage where you're just going to have to fight 7 dudes in a boring warehouse or whatever. Which, y'know, great, love to be actively disincentivized from exploring in an open world game.

I have really mixed feelings on the combat. I'm currently on Normal, and the game is just straight up too easy. I've handled the last few missions without drawing a gun, my Quickhacks are so good that they trivialize every encounter. However, when I bump the combat up, I end up running into what frankly feel like broken stealth mechanics: sight lines are weird and inconsistent and bad, the fact that an alerted enemy instantly alerts their entire network is extremely annoying, the enemy combat AI is.... just bad. The rules on what quickhacks trigger alerts feel inconsistent, and the rules on how enemies trace back to you after being attacked by quickhacks do too. Relying on all of those things to spice up combat is just as bad as it being too easy, but at least I clear the encounters quick.

Special shoutouts to fistfighting for just being straight up broken. As others have mentioned, the "damage they do in a punch v damage you do in a punch" mismatch is insane, but I'd also love to know if Rhino is out here firing ki blasts or something, because I swear I'm getting hit by punches from like 5-6 feet away.

The user interface on console is absolutely terrible. The menus are a pain in the ass to navigate, with no button shortcuts for several subheaders in the menu, making you reliant on the crappy little Destiny fake-mouse. Scrapping or selling items en-masse sucks (please for the love of god give me "mark as junk"). Managing shards and especially managing texts is an excruciating, half-baked process. There's one side job that makes you manually use a BD, and I spent five minutes trying to figure out where the hell it was before I eventually found it in my Junk.

The writing is extremely hit and miss. From the perspective of having control over the narrative progression of a main character, I don't think this is an RPG. V is as much a predefined character as Geralt is, and other than some minor quibbles about intonation you don't have any control over who V is or how they act. Despite that, I've been pulled this far into the game by some morsels of good writing in the better quests in the game. I think people expecting this game to deal in the larger conceptual themes and questions of cyberpunk as a genre will be disappointed, but I do think this game is using cyberpunk as an interesting set dressing for a more personal story about regret and coming to terms with your own mortality and lack of control over your own life, which I am enjoying. The incidental writing, and the moments where they do try to deal with cyberpunkier themes, is far more rough.

Lastly, I'm playing on PS5 at the moment (my gaming PC is at the shop getting some repairs done right now), and this thing runs like garbage. I have never closed this video game, it has only crashed, which it does approximately once every hour and a half. My movement gets bugged constantly and I am unable to run or get stuck on nothing. I am frequently unable to choose different dialogue options during a dialogue, like the cursor is stuck. The quickhack menu has about 60% odds of showing up when I highlight an enemy. This thing is busted.

Honestly? Pretty great. Had some good calls with my family, otherwise mostly just spent my time bumming around my apartment, playing video games (had some infuriatingly close Hades runs), reading, doin' some chores, baking. It was a decent time all around!

Current acquisitions are Space Court, Yuppie Psycho, Library of Ruina, Golden Light (no idea what the hell this is, very excited), G-String, Jet Lancer, Stone, Othercide, Raging Loop, The Floor Is Jelly, and the absolutely baffling The Long Drive

@humanity: As someone with a decent amount of familiarity with the source material, some of the changes I've noticed seem to be, uh, worse.

My big sticking point is with the Valentinos. In the text of Cyberpunk 2020, the Valentinos are a non-ethnically-defined gang that's essentially a criminal organization of pick-up artists. In 2077, they've been completely overhauled into Stereotypical Latinx Gang #3289: calaveras, low riders and motorcycles, heavy Christian iconography, the same lazy trope that's been pumped out since, like, Los Muertes in Crackdown 1. It's possible that this was a change from R. Talsorian's side of things (as they did change the Voodoo Boys from a gang of sociopath poser white boys into a gang of Haitian spiritualists), but flipping through my copy of Cyberpunk Red, the edition of the RPG that came out roughly alongside 2077, there literally isn't any mention of the Valentinos.

My completely speculative guess is that they wanted a Stereotypically Latinx Gang for Jackie to be part of, so they just took the Valentinos and overhauled them into what they needed for the game, but it's still a pretty weak, tired trope at this point.