chacobo

Can't disagree harder about Octopath, and to detriment the art by saying a toddler put together is really shitty. None of it I found blown out, so i'm guessing you don't actually know what that term means, or maybe your switch's brightness was too high. That writeup shows a real lack of understanding of creating really good readable pixel assets with the color separation instead of using black and line ratios that work in and out of motion. They're also really good implementation of job systems with depth that exists outside of combat in both BD and OP - there isn't an argument here, either you found the depth or you didn't and that depends on your skill and knowledge as the person playing the game. It definitely doesn't seem like excess either, if it was excess it wouldn't use a key light, vignetting and DOF to keep the focus on where you are, it would keep everything in focus at all times and light things evenly like a bad artist's painting. Can't agree with either of those takes and I don't think the arguments hold much weight.

I agree that FFXIII, The Quiet Man and Detroit were all trash fires. FFXIII people claim to like the combat and paradigm system but X-2 made a more interesting set up for its jobs and how they progress than XIII did, and XIII's enemies never really warrant or entice any exploration of its systems until extremely late game - and by then Death is so overpowered.

It ends really abruptly it's weird. I haven't been feeling the presentation of the music in this installment though outside of the intros I think it's been pretty strong.

@humanity: I never had camera issues to be honest, maybe once or twice it pulled to a corner, but, unlike GOW, it makes foreground elements transparent, it cuts away the set like a film would, instead of just forcing the character to stick to the camera and causing literally half the screen to be blocked by kratos' great trapezius muscles - not very cinematic. I love the camera so far because it pulls away from combat, if there are multiple enemies, it lets you know that they are there, and it takes the NG approach of not having enemies attack you from off screen - another mistake a lot of games do. I also always use the hard lock-on, the camera never behaved badly for me with that active even when I was air taunting and gerbera dashing in circles and just being an asshole. I'm gonna play it more to see if I can try to break the camera but otherwise I know what I'm doing. I more have an issue with how intense the particles are, that can straight up hide what i'm doing sometimes.

I don't think the reboot really tried to do anything of it's own tbh outside of one specific combat thing. It has an interesting system where if you switch weapons, the combo doesn't reset for the new weapon it branches off from the "step" in the previous weapons combo, so when you switch you could just peform a combo ender instantly - that's an interesting take on it - Kingdom Hearts does a similar thing. But otherwise, i'm glad that game can be forgotten and I can finally google search DMC5 and not have to see those awful redesigns anymore. I played through the DE of DmC since it never released on PC a few months ago, and ..that game was bad and aged in its tone when it came out and it's even worse now. It's "wake up sheeple" the game and literally a stage where you have to stop the big bad government from putting things in the soda that makes people stupid, it's like a comedy but it thinks it's the coolest most meaningful thing in the world. When I go to the upgrade statue in real DMC games it gives me cool smooth tunes and a nice UI, in the reboot, when i approached the upgrade thing, big text in the sky appeared that said "SUBMIT TO DEBT" and i was like boy oh boy.

Yeah not a lot comes out in this genre anymore, I think it's just too difficult to make for the most part. Everyone's trying to do Souls now and just like action games, like one or two get them right and the rest just sort of exist. Nioh and maybe Darksiders 3, but even big mainstream Assassin's Creed and giving it a shot. I was watching the combat designer of Darksiders 2 play through Darksiders 3 and just talk about the elements of more actionny games that are still in there it made for an interesting discussion.

@humanity: Yeah I don't think it feels dated at all, I think it feels right because it's taking fundamentals from games that worked right away instead of trying to push the camera way too close to be "cinematic" or making enemies snap and slide around like in GOW to make it simpler. It's responsive, it's deep, it's challenging, I don't know what else I could ask for in a game made now, or a game made in 2004. So many other games that might be considered "modern" took from DMC and then took from Souls and it's usually really obvious to see, but generally the execution falls apart. I also wouldn't say anything about it's presentation is dated either, it's amazing this game runs so smoothly, I love Capcom with money I totally forgot they make some of the best games in the world.

Also they're elaborating a lot more on what Nero can do, the Devil Breakers are a very significant build on what he could do in DMC4, the Exceed system is tweaked, Blue Rose is way more useful now and functions differently than DMC4 - you start the game with Roulette so you have more of the active dodge since DMC has i-frames on the Jump, that's actually how you're supposed to avoid damage as well as just staying aggressive. I think it's testament that fighting games largely still apply the same foundation, and Itsuno having his fighting game background it makes sense that the game is the way that it is, and I hope it doesn't change and instead just continues to improve.

It also has the cameo system, drop-in drop out co-op is definitely not a dated game thing. Also yeah it is a bit easy to get an S-rank but I'm sure that demo is set on the easier difficulty...I don't think people should be too mad about that - also with the inclusion of microtransactions that is pissing some people off, wouldn't you WANT to get more red orbs through just playing anyway? It's still not as simple as the reboot where you can mash Aquila and SSS rank in a second.

I'm so excited, this game is everything I could have wanted. I was so scared GOW 2018 was going to be the path they followed, what an awful action game. I was alarmed when the camera is pulled in tight right away at the beginning but otherwise very rarely had an issue with the camera. The zoom-in shot that they took from the reboot seems to be the most problematic - go figure that taking ideas from that mess of a game might not be a good idea - but I'm so glad PROPER DMC is back to get things back to how they should be. I have hopes for Nioh 2, Lost Souls Aside and of course Bayonetta 3 to get us back to stylish 3D action games again. There's a crazy amount of potential with Nero in just the demo alone and seeing the Sins from DMC3 back and I guess a take on the Beelzebubs from DMC1 as the basic trash mobs is great. The Sins in particular are wonderful. Goliath is fun, and though there are a lot of devil breaker moves they've shown off that aren't in this demo, he's a good tutorial boss as has always been with the series - big dude, basic projectiles that you can deflect and a few very dangerous moves to look out for. The fact that parrying him can lead into other maneuvers and all the environmental destruction just look fantastic

They needed to get those horse balls and overly long reload animations right, but the shooting still looks terrible and the quest design looks like boring ass slice of life trash, the stuff that Shenmue gets shit on for.

Biggest surprise The Missing, never expect Swery games to actually play that well but this one has been a really cleverly designed experience with the bizarre Swery flair.

Biggest disappointment God of War, that game just misses the mark everywhere, awful camera that doesn't even do the basic foreground transparency, boring enemies at best and annoying enemies at worst and way less enemy types than an action game should have, unpolished combat where you and enemies are sliding to connect, pointless stat system, bad characters with forced arcs because of the devotion to making the game in one cut. Just a bad game overall but looks really nice and has some funny dialogue here and there. I think just like GOWII to GOW1 on the PS2, the sequel to this game will be much more worth playing.

This is pretty cool, it really just makes me want Shinji Mikami to do more action stuff though. I love the options to put difficulties under your own control..I feel like so many games have no understanding of that.

All FF's before 5 feature some of the best music on their systems. They've been remade a lot but even the original versions have the same strong uematsu melodies. The FF3 overworld music in particular is worth mentioning. The final dungeon of FF4, FF2 and of course the arpeggio prelude and main FF theme from FF1. FF3 also introduced the chocobo theme.

I love seeing all these fun crossovers, I really liked the Valve helmet in Nioh - the steam effect added a lot. These are free and are just developers having fun and I can't fathom why people are so upset over it when FFXV has been getting also very significant core game content for free too.