mento

@zombiepie: Nope, no S-Rank for me. I dunno if I told you that or what, but if I did I might've gotten confused with XIII-2 (which I did indeed S-Rank).

What I did do is complete all the Cie'th Stone missions. Just apparently not to the extent of getting 5-stars for all of them. I'm also missing both the 100% achievements (Crystarium and equipment) and the one where you hunt an adamantoise (though I did kill the one in FFXV, albeit through trickery).

@riostarwind: It's a goofy idea that will take too much work for GB's overworked producers to implement. All the same it might be the thing to settle the occasional standoff, especially as they get an ever-longer list with harder sorting decisions to make.

Both the POE games are great, and only loosely based on D&D and the Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale games that preceded them. Like Mass Effect, the POE games benefit from some fantastic worldbuilding; adjusting its dialogue and descriptive text so as not to be too exposition-heavy and instead lets you mouseover terms, people, organizations, and places for any required context. It's all masterfully done and plays to Obsidian's strengths as a storyteller (meanwhile their weaknesses, which is to say the amount of bugs their games are plagued with, is something that improves the longer you wait - between this weekend and last, they put out another major patch that enhanced the game a lot).

It's still going for that so timely Swery pun for its title I see. What's the next one going to be called? Bedly Proposition?

@frodobaggins: I'm absolutely doing the console thing for Divinity: Original Sin 2, which I hear is out on PS4 next week (though I'll be buying it way later on sale, most likely). CRPGs on consoles have come a long way since Diablo for PS1 or Ultima for SNES, and I definitely had a great time with Divinity: Original Sin 1 and Torment: Tides of Numenera on PS4. PoE's going for that deliberately old-school Infinity Engine feel however, which is why I felt like I could chance it on a lesser rig. So far it's a bit framey but otherwise functional enough. (And I thought Disenchantment was fine, once I saw what it was doing. The ensemble of recurring characters they built up was fun and I hope they continue to expand on that in future seasons. I'd super recommend Futurama if you end up loving Disenchantment btw, unless sci-fi really isn't your thing.)

@dochaus: If you already own it, you should be fine. De-listed games still exist in libraries even after they leave the store. I am wondering if Giant Bomb will do anything about the news, since they never played or Quick Looked it in its day (though I might suggest it's not the kind of game that can be easily explained in an hour-long video anyway).

@arbitrarywater: I've been too intimidated by the big "not for beginners!" warning whenever faced with a multiclass opportunity that I've backed down so far, and I genuinely don't know who I'll have available to build a party from anyway. I made Eder a fighter and Xoti a priest because I understand what those are and the utility they have in a party. That said, I'm rocking a cipher protag right now, so I'm not necessarily against dipping my toe in some uncommon waters.

The Last Remnant has a lot of problems, whiny ol' Rush included. It sucks that we don't get to have a sale between this apparent death sentence and its execution, because if it showed up for $3 again I'd highly recommend people just poke around in it for a few hours to see how its combat works. As it is, I dunno if I can justify telling everyone to buy it at full price just because it's going away soon, even if I do vouch for it. Like the original Nier, it's just one of those games that has strong zeniths and nadirs alike and it's the former that sticks with you longer.

@relkin: You've got some good points here. With a handful of exceptions (those respawning slimes in the aquatic world) there's very little randomness with enemy placements and being mindful of them in subsequent runs does pay dividends. I didn't give the game nearly enough credit for its deliberate level design.

If I could rephrase that paragraph better, I'd say that Volgarr's challenge isn't in the individual components - the enemy attacks, the platforming, the traps (at least after the first time you encounter them) - but that the large number of them added together between the last checkpoint and the next (or the boss) is often sufficient to trip you up occasionally, which is all that's needed to hit the fail state and be forced to restart. Memorization of patterns and learning from mistakes are fine components to any game retro or otherwise, but the dark side of that - relying on repetition until you get it right (the tortured Whiplash analogy I used) - is less palatable. It's why I'm glad Dark Souls (and its ilk) tries to mitigate that slightly by either giving you alternative routes to clear your palette with or the opportunity to apply a few extra stat points or new equipment to adjust the odds in your favor.

Besides arcade ports for obvious reasons, I don't believe any NES game was really going out of its way to be cruel to the player. It can feel like that with a few of them, but back then I don't remember a high difficulty level being something the backs of boxes often touted. Usually it was things like game length and the graphics. Saying that, I don't doubt there were a few designers who considered it a badge of pride that no-one could beat their nightmare game.

@r_matey: Oof, tell me about it. Ran into this feature title issue a lot back when I was covering UbiArt Frameworks games and the Microsoft-owned Ori and the Blind Forest too. We're still missing a good term for "sufficiently small downloadable game" in the lexicon.

Hey folks, we're just going to lock this thread down after that last outburst.

Besides, after two months I think everyone's had time to say their piece and move on.

@arbitrarywater: That's absolutely true of the Yakuza games being very similar. I've had to space them apart in the past - in fact, this is the first time I've played one less than two years after the previous. (Thanks to my regular "Games Beaten in [Year]" lists, I know it's 2010 for Yakuza, 2013 for Yakuza 2, 2015 for Yakuza 3, 2017 for Yakuza 4, and now 2018 for Yakuza 5. Almost caught up.)

I know Yakuza 0 went through a lot of changes, and I think one of those might've been to greatly condense the amount of content because it really is bananas in Y5. It feels like they went out of their way to make things take longer than they should too, like not doubling up on identical food items sold in different establishments and having to complete the coliseum with all four of the fighter characters for the completion tick. Mechanically it's a little sharper than 4 with all the tweaks you'd expect from a sequel, but it's way too bloated in comparison. Still, you certainly get what you pay for.

As for that kid: I was a little skeptical too at first, but that Flash game became a meme during Y5's development and at one point the kid's pitches vanish into thin air and reappear inches from your bat. I don't think it's a coincidence.

The discourse in this thread doesn't seem to be heading anywhere positive, and rarely does with farewell threads, so I'll just lock it and say that you're welcome back to the community any time OP.

@jeffrud: Weird. I didn't think to fact check that because I played it in a Club Sega arcade sandwiched between the Virtua Fighter cabinets and the claw machines full of Super Monkey Ball and NiGHTs figurines. I wonder what kind of deal Sega had with Namco?