kosayn

Brigandine's menu music is pretty good, and it has to be because you spend forever in those menus. It's relaxing, and you need that contrast sometimes to the more bombastic themes of some of the nations in the game.

Of course that's a tactical game. Usually in a regular JRPG it's just best to just carry the regular background music into the menus to keep you emotionally connected to what's going on in the story.

Like if they cut you off from "Life will Change" in Persona 5 with a menu music as you're heading in to fight the boss, I think it'd really ruin the mood.

Game Room quick looks kept me coming back.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrboIp9iOi5rn5cJCAQnrz-9d8T__Lx5U

I am extremely positive on Zelda following that latest trailer. Pretty positive on Mario too! Also encouraged about the battery life. Cautiously encouraged.

I'm not quite so positive on the first year of Switch though. I don't want the same old virtual console drip feed that doesn't even get through the popular roms by the time the system is dead. I would like to see at least some digital purchases from the WiiU or 3DS moving over. Maybe I'll wait for a bundle, even. Maybe I'll even hold out for one with more than 32 GB.

My WiiU still has a lot of gaming left to do, so I'm in no hurry. I haven't even touched #FE or Bayonetta yet. And I still meant to play Earthbound and Paper Mario through on the pad! I'd have gotten to these things sooner if the range on the otherwise satisfying pad wasn't so terrible. If Nintendo was like, everyone come to the new console, and bring your stuff with you, I'd be on board. So far I don't see anything like that in the messaging. I see a lot of repackaging and reselling for $70 CDN coming up.

I still need more convincing, so I'll wait and late adopt a Switch. I try to avoid preorders for anything but Dark Souls, whole numbered Playstations, and Personas. We really all should be skeptical of most preorder products, especially when you have to put down the full amount. That said, everyone has their thing, and I wish those who do preorder a Switch all the excitement in the world!

The intro of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is pretty lean compared to these others, but it very quickly sketches what winter is like to a kid.

Also, tactical snowball fight as a tutorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s1DDt7a9v8

FF9's got such a kinetic first hour, and such a show-stopping finale. It rates very high for me. Zidane being a bit of a chauvinist is part of the appeal after many cookie cutter depressed, self-centered protagonists from Squaresoft. An actual character with different faults! Well, I can feel the love for it even amidst these gripes.

ANYWAY

I'd argue that most FFs have nichey and experimental mechanics in the middle, and the storytelling is mostly amateur hour. This is part of what made JRPGs fun before Chrono, FF7, and the PS2 pulled them kicking and screaming into mainstream success. It was trying to raise a whole different bar from what we were used to from Hollywood or western fantasy authors.

I had friends who played these milennial big name RPGs, but felt alienated by this strange, more anime-inspired storytelling once the sound and fury of the FMVs died down. Going back to these games now - often they amazed us due to pulling the most they could get out of the hardware and translation teams at the time. Square got to push the envelope over and over as the industry grew up, and growing up was a major part of their brand. But those things have improved steadily for 20 years.

We go back and try to hold everything to the standards and attitudes of say, Persona 4, but it's best to understand that even P4 will seem quaint and hacky someday, too. Also good to remember that these stories are meant to be appealing to your inner teenager, who may not be entirely dead, but has probably been turned down to a dull roar.

Didn't see this popularity coming. Played Ingress for a couple months. Enjoying this for what it is: something else to do on my dog walks besides listen to a podcast. It'll be really nice for the fall and winter when my town has less tourists around.

I'm not enjoying the servers getting thrashed, while other players are already far ahead. Niantic had better get Papa Google on the phone and spin up some server farms, and if they were wise, they'd have versus battle and trading in the TO DO basket right away, right now, before they lose the initiative on this ridiculous free attention they're getting.

So, I'm old enough to tell kids with disposable time to get off my lawn, but I guess I'm still hoping to loiter on the lawn myself.

God of War - Leaps and bounds ahead of what I expect from this series narratively. I'm not sure what to make of the threat level of the world they live in. Or the nonchalance of Kratos dealing with it. Either he's just always a badass, or he's specifically that same badass, having exhausted his Mediterranean murder opportunities.

Horizon Zero Dawn - I thought the dialogue was only okay, but also that it was refreshingly not an obvious vertical slice of quips and bravado. The talking to herself actually seemed much more strong, and unusual. The combat, crafting, creature design, world concepts, and the rest... so good. This looks to be Playstation's Zelda, and its own thing besides. Her headlong shambling run animation seems a bit hard to look at long term. Just saying.

Last Guardian -Yes, please.

Detroit - Sure. The world design alone drives my curiousity here.

Crash Bandicoot - I would have liked him to bust in with a suit and megaphone too. But I'm sure the ink is barely dry on that deal, so of course they have no real Crash game to show yet. Crash and Skylanders both needed each other as an excuse, so why not?

Spider-Man - Not a lot to critique, but the concept work looks good. It really does deserve another serious try. Prototype and Infamous have been like the methodone for Spider-Man 2.

FF15 - waiting for reviews as to how the whole package comes together, but I am sold on the pieces individually. I even thought the VR thing was fun to see, however badly realized. FF at its best gets very serious, and needs light-hearted diversions to balance that. Each little minigame doesn't have to be its own Michael Bay movie.

RE7 - Way past time for them to try something more modern, even if it is a direct shot at competition that no longer exists. At its core, this is a series that borrowed its game design whole cloth and made something good with it - see Alone in the Dark.

Days Gone - Mechanically, I think what we saw was very underrated, simply because it was zombies, and World War Z soured a lot of us on that trend. I'd like to see more.

Kojima's all you can waste crab buffet - I like restrained Kojima and I'm still bummed about PT. I dunno. Get him on the Gunslinger series if he wants to make something about seafood-themed drug trips on the beach. That said, some nice horror elements, and serious creativity... Maybe it'll get there.

I'm fine with 'games, games, games.' It's the middle of a generation, games are what we want. Let the console wars rest for a while and give VR a serious try with the mainstream. The worst that could happen is that we collectively learn what DOESN'T work with VR.

To respectfully disagree - I like a lot of the games on this list, which are heavily story based. I much prefer the let's play route for games that I know have a lot of mechanics-based gameplay that is either hard or obtuse. I may never play a Golgo 13 game, or Crusader Kings. I only developed the patience to really play Spelunky after watching it from multiple streamers. I bounce off every Souls game at least once, but watching others do it brings me back and eventually I complete them.

That said, I've also stopped playing every single Persona but Persona 4, despite really enjoying them. So often I get mired in completionism on the early games.

Watching the trailer just now, something clicked for me.

I'm making my peace with the fact that Battlefield is doing a jingoistic, fun depiction of WW1, with a few shocks in the campaign to show that they still know war is hell. It's the COD4 formula to a T - and I'm okay with that.

And the reason is, it will still drive awareness of what the great war was in a way that the likes of Valiant Hearts and Verdun cannot. The youtube video already has 28 MILLION views.

If you think for a second - that trailer enticing you to buy the game actually matches up pretty well with the glorious, chivalric attitudes about war and soldiering that were prevalent before 1914. The Dub-step and Shovel-swinging stuff is certainly there to relate to modern fps fans, but it has its historical analogues. Back then they had their marching songs like 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary,' and bagpipers, drummers, and cavalry wielding lances and sabres were being sent on offensives, before the generals realized how useless melee and morale boosting had become.

That was before the trenches, the railways, the mud, and the machine-gun turned the conflict into the pointless waste of life that it was. On the podcast, Jeff talked about how WW2 was important as the first truly mechanized war, where the weapons worked better. But WW1 was the first industrialized war, and the first 'total' war, where any and all resources the nations had were fed into the conflict. The weapons of the time certainly worked well enough to make hell on earth.

Even if they don't go all Spec Ops: The line with this game's campaign - it's still a big budget, wide-release title that has needed to exist for a long time. To exist, it has to be fun mechanically as a video game, and being reasonable, that means they must pick and choose which FPS conventions get broken for the sake of historical accuracy, and vice versa. However the game turns out, it'll still translate into more downloads of Hardcore History. It'll still lead to better understanding.

The 2nd/3rd area, Undead Settlement, is really, really good. There's a confidence on display in how they designed it - initially too easy. To the point where you will probably feel bad about killing so many defenseless enemies. The early part of the village defenses are really meant for the mindless hollows outside the gate, not for a badass like you. Then the traps, the guerilla warfare tactics, the archers, the red eye jerks, and the cages all come into play. When the inhabitants start pushing back, it's a lot of fun.

Mind you, I'm playing mainly with sword and board / bombs, as I usually do for the first run through. It's possible this level wouldn't have clicked so well for me on its difficulty curve if I had more ranged attack options.

They have done this in previous games - Latria 3-1 and the end of Valley of Defilement really did their best to make you feel like a monster for progressing. But man, has it been a while since they were serious about it! Bloodborne and DS2 did try putting you thematically in the role of callous invader in a few areas as well, but without ratcheting down the difficulty enough to sucker you in.

I was stoked to see people putting down messages like "Overconfidence..." and know that they got it, too.