onan

@mattgriffin said:

Judging by what Brad said about Leviathan in the GOTY 2012 stuff, you should definitely include Leviathan in your first go. Apparently it factors into the story quite a bit and adds something substantial as far as narrative goes.

If by substantial, you mean it adds foreshadowing, context, and all of those things writers do so that the ending of a story makes any sort of logical consistency with the rest of a story at all, then yes.

Of course, that also means you miss out on all of the righteous indignation the rest of us had when the game was released in an unfinished state and in doing so miss out on the camaraderie... although that might get supplemented by the shock at realizing you just paid extra for something you couldn't fathom Bioware being able to tell the story without.

I really liked From Ashes, but it came with my Collector's Edition so I didn't have to decide to buy it. In retrospect, I probably would have been disgusted that was a paid add-on as well of some very core lore content.

The only real "add-on" content so far has been the Omega stuff, and it doesn't feel like just a cash grab. It's a side story. The rest is all kind of gross (not counting free multiplayer DLC)

"A gallery of innocent and often sexualized depictions of women is what you'll find, and it’s what I’d surmised about the genre during my brief investigation into it. I wrote it off, truth be told, and didn’t feel bad. Who would want to play that?"

Why wouldn't anyone want to play that? It sounds like every other game released ever, except it forces people to read more.

If we can take off our politically-correct hats for a moment, there's some good fun to be had in some of the visual novels that get easily dismissed otherwise. And it's not just a one way street, there's are entire visual novel categories geared toward women and gay men (although in Japan, women are the #1 consumers of VNs featuring male-on-male romance). Sexualized depictions can be fine in the right context. Adult games: That's the right context. As a bloody torso with a great rack that gets bundled with the Dead Island 2 Collector's Edition: Not the right context.

It's just a pretty bad double standard though when you're willing to accept the dim sexy teenager who exists solely to get naked and then get murdered in your typical slasher flick, yet cluck your tongue at similar behavior in a different (and much less mature) medium.

Personally, I can't truly understand why people would willingly subject themselves to horror games, but to each his own. Anxiety, stress, fear? No thanks.

I’m accustomed to game companies marketing towards men. But rarely is it quite so blatantly i.e. "Here are some tits!"

That said, I still enjoy a lack of carpal tunnel from the booby mousepad packed in with the original Agarest War.

@MiniPato said:

@TohruAdachi said:

@Narx: I stopped using SOS function a long time ago,it's annoying,for one reason it takes like five seconds to load,and second,it makes me angry when I waste five seconds,help other people,and they don't even help me back... Well I'm just raging,but it could really be useful,when you get to the higher dungeons people actually start helping you,or that's in my opinion,but I got Rise now and her revival gives you full SP,so I sometimes just die on purpose to get full SP,but rarely.

Yeah, SOS is only really useful in like the first two dungeons. I'm playing on hard difficulty and I'm having zero trouble keeping full health and SP. Especially with a Rank 10 Rise and since the game tosses you a recovery card in the shuffle time every now and then. I'm in Magatsu Inaba and I'm coming out of every battle with full bars. I've got like 80 snuff souls and a boatload of other SP recovery items

Recovery cards never worked for me at all, I thought they were broken so I stopped picking them.

Not sure how to get pictures off my vita so I just took a screenshot with my phone:

The Japanese games that no one played should be excluded from the other categories because the math is broken. i.e., Root Double is both the most and least completed game this year: Least because no one got any achievements in it (because no one played it), and most because 100% of the people who played it got 100% of the achievements.

(That said, I did play Phantom of Inferno a few years ago, just not on 360.)

Sure, mine is hyperbole because being literal is boring.

They still made some incredibly poor choices with this thing that makes it difficult to enjoy it on either a skill-based or narrative level. That's really a shame.

I downloaded this for free the other day on my Vita and was all set to like it, however it's set up with the now standard 3 star ranking per level, something like Angry Birds. The third star is always for beating the level in a certain amount of time.

The issue is that Chronovolt tries to have a narrative. That's great, but it interrupts gameplay with the same plot-filled text boxes every time you restart a level. When one primary aspect of your game (time trials) is suggesting you ignore another aspect of your game (plot), you may want to rethink that design document. It wouldn't be that bad if on the retry, they skipped the dialogue, or if playing through the story version of the level unlocked the time trial version. Honestly, anything. As it is, I try to launch my ball very quickly to get that time trial star and the game abruptly stops my ball for dialogue. When I click the dialogue, my ball goes flying off a ledge.

I don't want to hate on the game. I absolutely love the character design for Jessica Chase and the art for the game. After 2 levels, I gave up on the time trials, and after that, I felt like the game was penalizing me and telling me I was playing wrong when it would throw in my face I didn't "fully" beat the level with 3 stars. I feel they could have done better.

Three shocking realizations here for me:

1: Mudo/hama are actually more effective against dark/light weak enemies? I figured it was a moot point because if it hits something, unless it's immune to dark or light, it's going to die. They're instant kill (at a certain probability rate). It's not like it can die+50% extra damage, or whatever weaknesses are. So it sounds like they're a guaranteed hit on weak enemies?

2: It didn't occur to me that I could splice together multiple auto-characters. That's epic and I'm so going to try that now.

3: I probably made a mistake keeping rebellion on Chie earlier. That and evasion buffs are too unpredictable, the only time I'm going to want to use it is if someone is weak to a skill, and at that point I'd just guard to not let the enemy get the extra turn. I wouldn't want to chance it.

4: Okay, 4 things. There's a strip club?? This game just gets better and better. And here I was wasting time catching bugs and planting tomatoes with little Miss "Everything's Great at Your Junes."

@kerse: I only JUST realized that physical attacks use HP instead of SP in hour 31 or so, I've never seen that before in an RPG. I was using Brain Shake a bunch on a boss and pretty soon I wasn't able to, but was still able to cast everything else, which was weird. I looked at my bars and one was full and one was empty, and then for a minute I wondered if I had those bars backward this whole time until I looked again and saw "HP" next to some spells for the first time.

Seriously, that's nuts. I need to reevaluate my strategies going forward. I was using regular attacks with everyone sometimes trying to save SP.

Rambling is fine, I'm still pretty new to the whole Persona franchise and it's turning my assumptions on their ear.