Peer Review: Battle Arena Toshinden 2 should not have been ranked without trying the hidden characters. Vermillion uses guns. Guns. He just straight up murders the other player. With guns.
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I played a hell of a lot of this game back in the day, and of course I always put in the two codes for the four hidden characters (though Duke and Fo Fai remained my favorites). All four were pretty broken, Master perhaps most of all, but Vermilion certainly stood out the most with his guns, for sure.
The first Toshinden was very memorable for me because it was one of three games my cousin owned when he showed me his Playstation for the first time, the others being Tekken and Twisted Metal. Twisted Metal awed me the most, but all three of them blew my mind. At the time I owned an NES and a Sega Genesis and had never seen anything like this before.
I remember renting Toshinden 3 at some point and thinking it felt significantly worse than Toshiden 2 had. I'm not sure if that was actually the case or BAT2 was just better *for the time*. But it's definitely a game I have a lot of nostalgia for. Objectively it may not have been a great game, but it was plenty good enough to keep me amused at the time.
We all know Dan could be a big idiot, but usually in a fun way. He was like that kid in high school who would ask the question that no one else would ask because they didn't want to look dumb. Which is how we ended up with
I think I too must be counted as one of the people that just doesn't love this format. The timestamps are a godsend, but it highlights that I'm interested in hearing the staff talk about the games I liked/played, while the rest I'm just going to skip over. In the context of award categories, there is at least the interest in hearing people argue passionately for their favored game, even if it's not one I care about. In this format, it's like, well, I didn't care about that game when it came out, and still don't care about it now, why would I listen to people talking about it again?
I mean, I hate to say it, mostly because it makes me sound like a bit of an entitled dick, but if the end goal that GB is trying to achieve is to entertain its subscribers, and its subscribers aren't that interested in this format--for the most part, it seems to me, though opinions differ--then maybe it's time to stop doing it? It strikes me that probably the staff themselves have decided they enjoy doing it more this way, and are somewhat ignoring the complaints. I can get behind a certain amount of that, because people are going to whine and complain no matter what you do anyway, so you may as well do it the way you want to do it, right? But still, I dunno man. I feel like this could be so much better than it is.
Speaking only for myself, I can't help feeling a little disappointed, and will mostly be ignoring these year-rundown episodes and waiting for the actual award categories. Sorry, dudes...
In talking about Sekiro, they touched on what I think is an interesting design vector over at From Software, i.e. a move from a very customizable character/style of playing to a rigidly focused playstyle.
In Dark Souls, the degree to which your experience differed depending on how you specced was huge. You could do heavy melee with high poise, light and quick melee with high agility, pure spellcaster, pure bowman, not to mention miracles and pyromancies, etc, and any combination thereof.
Then came Bloodborne, and suddenly your playstyle was a lot less customizable. Poise wasn't a thing, and there weren't really any legitimately sustainable ranged builds. You were forced into a light melee style. But even then, you were still creating a character, choosing between stats, and had about a dozen melee weapons to choose from and about as many ranged options.
Then came Sekiro, and suddenly there is no character creator. There aren't different stats to choose from. There's only one weapon. In terms of character/playstyle customization, it's pretty much just a few moves that you can purchase and the prosthetic tools and that's it -- and the fact that prosthetic tools are limited by the number of spirit emblems you're carrying mean that a lot of players probably weren't using them much except against bosses.
None of these designs is inherently better than the others, but they have their advantages and disadvantages.
One drawback to the highly customizable nature of Dark Souls is that the developers were faced with an impossible task when it came to balancing the difficulty of the combat across all the different ways players could approach a given battle. E.g., Smough + Ornstein is usually considered one of the more difficult fights in that game; I specced in sorcery the first time through and breezed through them with Soul Spears and Homing Soulmass. Likewise, the Four Kings fight is easy for a high-poise tank build, or just one with Iron Flesh. That can make the game feel very uneven. Whereas with a more tightly focused gameplay style like Bloodborne or Sekiro, you can design bosses more tightly because you know that everyone is going to be approaching it with the same general set of tools. There is less scope to cheese things.
On the other hand, Bloodborne and Sekiro, due to the fact that there's less difference in fundamental playstyle, are inherently less interesting to replay. I've played through Dark Souls at least seven times now, and something like five near when it first came out. I only played Bloodborne and Sekiro once, and I don't feel any pressing need to return to them, in part because I know it's going to feel roughly the same the second time as it did the first time. I miss being able to change things up.
It really makes me wonder where Miyazaki and From Software will go from here. Are they going to continue making roughly this same style of third-person action game? If so, will they ever return to the abundance of options and styles found in the Souls series, or will this vector of making more rigidly defined gameplay experiences keep going? Or maybe they'll make something completely different altogether!
@shorap: Yeah, Remnant seems pretty great, and the GB crew has been playing it a fair bit. I would bet it makes it into their top 10 games list this year. I picked it up and beat it a couple times already, and I'm probably still not done with it. Thankfully it started off at $40 new, and perhaps there'll be a Black Friday deal on it somewhere, I dunno.
A bit more background: I really liked Sekiro, and also really liked The Surge (the original). Played through the latter six times (you can beat the whole thing in like 2-3 hours once you know your way around all the areas). Then I pre-ordered The Surge 2, because I wanted to support the dev after I bought the first game for not much. And it's... not great. The first game is much better. The second one makes the Darks Souls 2 mistake of swarming you with enemies in narrow areas in lieu of well-designed difficulty. It also introduces a lot of cheap ranged enemies that you can't do much about other than try to rush them down since you don't have any robust range options yourself, which wasn't a thing in the first game. I actually stopped playing it and don't really plan to go back, which is pretty unusual for me.
BTW don't know if it's on your radar, but you might also look into Remnant if you haven't already. That game is thoroughly OK, and scratches some of the same itches as Souls games.
Now this is content I can appreciate. I always enjoy watching the GB crew bang their heads against From Software games. Vinny's Dark Souls and Brad's Demon's Souls runs are some of my favorite content on the site. My pipe dream is still that @rorie will play some King's Field: The Ancient City on stream someday, unlikely though it may be...
This boss really is a tough one. I ended up using the strategy in this video to kill him primarily with the umbrella. Pretty easy that way. You do need to have the skill unlocked that lets you attack out of it, but if memory serves either the fire or lilac umbrella works fine.
Okay, I gotta try pimping this texture mod one more time, tried it for the first episode but maybe no one saw it.
Since you guys luckily started playing this on PC, I strongly recommend making use of the fine work done by two RE4 superfans over at re4hd.com. They've been working for over five years to remaster the game's textures from the ground up, and even started doing some model and lighting fixes, too, and it looks sooo much better (see video comparison here). The download page for their latest release is here. I really hope you guys will take advantage of this major visual upgrade, it's really something else.
One thing that hasn't aged well at all is having to protect Ashley, but that's a fucking escort mission and that shit sucked even when this game was considered revolutionary.
Actually, I think the Ashley stuff in this game is totally fine, and I normally hate escort stuff as much as the next guy. I've played this game many times, including mostly recently about a year ago (checking out the latest mid-July release of the fine folks over at re4hd.com), and never felt like Ashley screwed me. I think the key is that she sticks so close to you that most of the time she's quite easy to protect. She's so good at staying out of the way that you can almost forget she's there.
Though I suppose it's possible I'm a little biased. This game is easily in my all-time top five. It's really something special.
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