pkmango7

The difficulty in these games is a combination of wrapping your head around mechanics, learning combat animations, and practicing patience. You are often making some form of progress even if you die and it only gets easier as you learn certain tricks to push your advantage and exploit enemy behavior ("leashing", baiting certain enemy attacks based on your positioning, etc). The execution isn't that hard once you're able to recognize and digest all of this, I think this is the key distinction. Personally I've always found the i-frames on evading to be very generous, even moreso in Bloodborne, but this is coming from someone who went from Monster Hunter to Demon's Souls.

Jeff's perspective is understandable because a lot of old arcade games are much more challenging and unforgiving, mostly by nature. The greatly exaggerated marketing, word of mouth, and elitist community since Dark Souls have warped these games into some kind of pinnacle of achievement, to me this is completely missing the point. I play these games for the struggle and satisfaction of progression, and for the level of detail in their worlds and characters.

It seems more like a game that marries some concepts from each series rather than a more literal crossover game that leans heavily on either side, and from the looks of this SMT really has become a catch-all term that includes Persona while FE seems mostly represented by the Awakening team (pretty sure I have them to thank for those ridiculous outfits). I wouldn't be overly concerned about a lack of experience in the deep lineage of either series, I just hope it's a game that can stand on its own.

As it is now the game comes off as a bad anime, a product of its time mainly trying to cash in on the massive success and popularity of its contemporaries, adding in some idol performances and magical girl transformations for good measure. I can stomach some questionable character designs and a mountain of anime cliches for the sake of gameplay so I'll just have to wait and see, but I'm not holding my breath.

The shot of the post-apocalyptic cityscape clearly meant to appease SMT fans in the midst of all that nonsense just annoyed me instead, that about sums up where I'm at.

Lower abdominal area troubles are the worst.

I thought to myself, "the only thing Ludwig's is missing is a basic downward slash in 2h mode", and then I pressed L2.

Magic that uses bullets, the best kind. I was a bit worried too after hours of potshots and molotovs.

I really dig Augur of Ebrietas, it's got me super curious about the higher arcane requirement items.

I just want to point out that you don't sometimes get enemies that track your evade, some attacks are intentionally prolonged with windup to punish an early or panic dodge. You don't always have to evade through an attack either, many can be avoided simply with distance. But then you're baiting a long range attack! I find managing (and sometimes testing the limits of) this behavior is still quite fun. The only thing deterring me from exploration are the load times.

The comparatively low stamina cost of evasion and more generous invulnerability frames allow for an aggressive and active playstyle, once I realized that I had a much easier time. Before that I was being very conservative with my dodges (old habit from previous games and MH), a ton of enemies in this game will tear you up if you try to wait them out without dodging or attacking.

This game is also dark in an oppressive way, I find it much more pronounced than in previous games and I understand how it can turn some people away. I don't really mind the samey environment since it retains a high amount of detail and is always filled with the ambient and atmosphere of "this is a bad fucking scene", gives me the same feeling as the Tower of Latria in Demon's Souls which I was a big fan of.

@frostyryan: Insight is sort of like how deep you are in the Eldritch abomination rabbit hole, you'll notice it'll go up just from seeing some shit for the first time.

I haven't really seen or heard of anything in the world altering beyond the often cited 15 breakpoint though, it's hard to notice without testing.

For me I'm pretty happy with just getting the broad strokes from the podcast.

Now this is interesting! Would be nice to have someone on staff who can read more than katakana.

Please don't start with the older games, not even as a joke. They're tedious and clunky by modern standards (mostly referring to 1st and 2nd gen), and while each new iteration brings new conveniences and balance changes, the core gameplay is largely the same. I'd only go back and play them if you wanted an absolutely exhaustive look on the progression of mechanics, and even then most people only go as far back as MHFU.

If you did play them in order, at best you would be able to appreciate the minor tweaks to weapon/combat mechanics and streamlined systems. This might be more reasonable with another series but I don't think it's anywhere near worth the time investment in this case. They do add a lot of the old monsters to 3U and 4U, so there's that too.

Only crazy people on the internet will make fun of you for not starting with the original PS2 game. I actually stepped backwards to play FU after exhausting my time with Tri and even that was a trial in patience, everything felt foreign and byzantine.