I'm completely on board with the idea of skipping to KH2. KH1 is a slog, many of the worlds are terribly designed, the combat is not great, and the vast middle of the game is completely irrelevant if you're just trying to get immersed in the overall insane story. Even if they kept moving in that game, they were about to hit Tarzan-land, which is worse than Wonderland.
You could literally play the part of KH1 they already played and the last world and get all you really need out of that game. Though I do wish Vinny got to experience the insane events in the last world.
When I replayed this series with my kids I ran into this same problem. These games have some serious difficulty spikes unless you grind out levels, especially early on if you select the harder leveling/stat options. I eventually did some level grinding while the kids were sleeping so they wouldn't have to watch Dad die over and over again to a boss.
@deathpooky: Eh, sometimes a straightforward story leans itself to great characters. I find games or movies etc. Use the 33% story, 33% character, 33% worldbuilding/other methods for general appeal but when you wanna focus on a great cast it's ok for the story to be a bit normal. Skies of arcadia at release was considered another one of those due to you chasing crystals from elementals etc. But the world-building was great, and the crew felt like a family by the end of it, so the normal story didn't matter. Set pieces and cool twist here and there pulled through. Sometimes that's even more fun than some philosophical take on why we exist (death stranding) or whatever Final fantasy games these days try to go for yet don't get much play from....Now that I think of it FF9 actually did a great job mixing deep stuff with simple, (mage part) So what do I know.
Yeah, I've certainly played my share of bland stories with fun characters and world, but this still stands out with how bad it is. The world is also fairly boring to start, even if pretty. They start to build up the characters more, but even that is pretty clunky - you have one character just randomly interject with their backstory since I'm guessing they felt they needed to give you something on her in the first act.
It just feels like most JRPGs have figured out how to build in a good hook to the story or compelling intro to get you invested in the characters and the world, while this just drops you into generic fantasyland with generic heroes of light going on generic quest to find the crystals and a multi-hour prologue before the story even tries to get going. And even in the second area things don't get much better.
I'm into the first real chapter after the prologue and liking the game so far, though I'm struggling to see much major difference from the 3DS originals (at least from my hazy recollection). But given that those games had some of the best grinding and multi-job systems in any JRPG I've played in years, I'm not complaining. Looking forward to unlocking more classes, since I know that's where the game really opens up with fun combos.
The only real gripe I have after ~5-6 hours is that the opening Freelancer class has two different JP+ abilities that bump up your job leveling speed. So as an efficiency degenerate who is into this game for the leveling and playing around with the systems, that's basically meant I've been trying to grind up those classes to the max so I can double my job leveling speed for the rest of the game. I'm sure that's my fault, but it still seems like a weird choice to make maxing the starting class the best thing to do off the bat, given that everyone knows that you go for XP+ abilities first.
Also I hope the story does some crazy things like the first game, because holy crap Jan is right on the story. The opening hours some of the most painful stock-standard ass JRPG elemental crystal, hero of light crap that I've seen in approximately three dozen games. The characters have some charm and humor, and they have tried to dumptruck some backstory on each character to make them interesting, but the story is downright awful in an era where JRPG stories have gotten a lot better and more varied.
Edit: It's also very weird that for the prologue they give you the crutch AI character that basically makes fights unlosable since every turn he will heal/revive a character, and then toss several boss battles at you that would be virtually impossible without his abilities since the bosses will constantly murder you in a single series of bad hits. It's not a great introduction to the battle system to just be limping through on his heals.
I really want to love the Persona games, but "every conversation is about twice as long as it needs to be" and "every plot point and dungeon is about an hour longer than it needs to be" is the weak point of every damn game in the series. I've been hoping for a decade+ that they'd figure out pacing or release something that isn't trying to be 100+ hours. P5 even added a lot of quality of life things to speed things up over P3/P4, but it's still insanely and unnecessarily long.
The fact that those issues translate even into the Musuo-inspired take on the game is crazy. You can have conversations that don't have every character speak! You don't have to reiterate plot points five times or spend an hour setting up an obvious reveal! Dungeons don't have to take multiple sittings to complete and be based around resource conservation!
The zoom out really got me in terms of what the game is going for, though I'm torn between that being amazing or too much. I fell off Astroneer after 20-30 hours once I launched to other planets and realized my next few dozen hours were just recreating basic infrastructure on each planet and shipping resources between them to build things, so I'm not sure I'd be into doing that on a system-wide and then galaxy-wide scale.
But if it's done in a more integrated and efficient way, I could see it being awesome. My main problem with Astroneer was that inter-planetary travel seemed like so much of a time and resource commitment, so having to space truck between the planets ferrying resources and equipment never felt good. But here the speed with which it looks like you can travel and then likely ship (automatically?) resources between planets could hopefully turn it into a just much bigger factory-building scope.
Though overall I'm with Brad. I can't see myself jumping in this early when things are going to change and improve so much in the near term.
The rollout of this definitely seems a little weird if you're trying to jump in with a complete Hitman 1-3 collection new, or trying to fill in gaps. I have Hitman 1, but not 2, and was looking to try to pickup 2 to catch up on the story and have it all in one place. There apparently was a sale on Hitman 2 stuff on PSN, but that finished up before Hitman 3 launched, so now there's only a $60 or $100 complete edition. So essentially $160(!) for me to get all of Hitman in one place.
Would like to support I/O, but until it all goes back on sale there's no way I'm trying to get back into the world of assassination.
Even when they disagreed, nobody jumped down the throat of another
Every choice felt like it had been justified thoroughly even if they weren't what I would have picked
Built games up a lot more than tore them down
Feels like a resounding success all around.
Second all of this. I know the team dropped the old format for a bunch of reasons, but this was a real return to form. Fun debates that got contentious but avoided going too far to the point where people got actually upset. A combination of "serious" and completely not serious categories, but everything taken seriously. Looking forward to the rest of the week!
I will disagree with a number of the things on this list, but god did they get the worst song of the 90's completely right and nothing ever will dethrone it from that title.
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