Re: Completed Games Rest-of-2019+2020

[KMR]

I agree, and Cosmic Star Heroine was especially egregious with this, I think I already started having a lot more money than I needed about 1/3 of the way through the game. Although the super-hard difficulty mode halves the amount of money you receive from combat, so it's probably meant to balance for that on other difficulties. But I definitely wished the game gave me more options for useful things to spend the money on, so I could make meaningful choices about where to save and where to splurge. Instead, I was just buying out every weapon upgrade from the shops, just because I could. And the other frustrating part was, I'd be exploring an area and there'd be treasure chests with cool gear in them, and I'd get excited whenever I'd see one, but sometimes they'd just have money in them, and it would feel like such a letdown because it's basically worthless.

[Enail]

Yeah, exactly! And now that almost everything has crafting, in a lot of games the stuff you can buy at the store isn't as good as stuff you can get from crafting or quests at the same level, so you can buy everything, but you don't even want to.

[bomaye]

17) Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (100%) (PS3 Port of Genesis game)

Another nice quickie. Sonic still feels a little too slide-y, Super Sonic can be a boon or a curse, music's still awesome. Also quite hilariously earned 2 psnprofiles-grade Ultra Rare trophies from this game. For comparison's sake, of the 6 Metal Gear Solid games I 100%ed, I only earned three psnprofiles Ultra Rares

[bomaye]

18) Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna - The Golden Country for Nintendo Switch


First Xenoblade game I basically did everything in (aight, I didn't get to Level 100 or max out each character's Arts but I'd beaten the game, beaten all the unique monsters, beaten the superbosses, crafted all the stuff, raised all the affinity levels to max, so there's no real reason to do it), might end up being the only one because I always burn out in the end-game of them because there's so much goddamn stuff to do. Took me 30 someodd hours all together.


If this was cheaper, it'd be a really good game to check out for those on the fence about Xenoblade's playstyle, it's turbo-charged so you level up crazy fast and the party is restricted to 9 people (they're split up into teams of three, you control one team and the other two are handled by the AI), but probably not so good for getting a feel on Xenoblade 2's story since it's a prequel but also glosses over so much of the setting that the story probably doesn't make a lot of sense without the full game.


Story-wise, it was mostly just there. It didn't tell us much that we didn't already know. There was cool cameos. The ending segment was really good and gave me a few feels. I would've ended the game at a different point to tie it into Xenoblade 2 more but that's just nitpicking. Had a good time, even with how expensive it was. I got the Season Pass version, just over $40, so not only did I get a 30 someodd hour game out of it, but extra quests and S-S-S-S-S-Swimsuit DLC necessitating another future playthrough of XB2, so it does actually feel worth it all things considered

Where I would've ended it...

Spoiler:

Got FF7 Remake shipping next week (or next-next week) so I'm trying to do a quick runthrough of OG FF7 on the PSP (no sidequests or things like that, just beating the game) so it's fresh.

[bomaye]

19 Final Fantasy VII (PS1) for PSP

Good game overall. I only partially played this one back in the day, and the overhype and obnoxious fanboys had me gassed up to hate it and pick it apart. Had a much better time with it this time around. Nice customization (hated "All" Materia being a thing), great setting, good characters (even started caring about Cait Sith), had forgotten some plot twists and they caught me off guard. I didn't like how some boss fights or hard enemies in the late-game would start battles by one-shotting a party member or knocking your HP down to nothing before you can do anything, felt cheap. Saw a lot of shades of Mario RPG in it.

I am now mostly prepared for FF7 Remake (whenever it comes in the mail)

[KMR]

FF7 gets a lot of hype, but FF6 has always been my personal favorite of the Final Fantasies. Where's our remake of that? I wanna see a fully-animated Sabin suplexing a train, dammit!

[bomaye]

IV's the one for me, that was my first JRPG/RPG in general. Even got a DS remake

[KMR]

I didn't get to play IV until the PS1 version, but the difficulty got to me. I basically had to try every boss fight multiple times because they all have some trick strategy for beating them that you have to figure out through trial and error. Got close to the end but never got around to beating the game. Totally get why people love this one though.

[Enail]

I'm a combo of the two of you, I'd probably have to say VI is my favourite/the one I rate most highly overall, but I've got a massive soft spot for IV as my nostalgic fave that was possibly the first JRPG I played and kind of the site of my memories of hanging out in my best friend's basement playing videogames. And then VIII is my trashy fave -  but VII did really impress me at the time and do a lot of striking things that really stuck with me (more than Aerith, the feeling of being absolutely terrified to fight Sephiroth the first time because they'd made him seem so badass sticks with me), it just wasn't at quite the right time to be as deeply formative as I think it would have been if I'd been younger at the time.

[KMR]

I feel like a lot of people's first experience with Final Fantasy was either IV, VI, or VII, and whichever of those they started with is the one that sticks with them most. FFX really resonated with me when it came out for some reason, maybe it was that it was fully voice acted so I felt more immersed in the story and it was just gorgeous with that jump in graphics from PS1 to PS2, so that's my #2 FF game, and VII would probably fall into my #3 spot. I also have a soft spot for FFV just because I adore the job system, even though the story and characters are super bland and I wouldn't rate it particularly highly in any objective sense.

But the first RPG I ever played was Chrono Trigger, and there is no knocking it off that pedestal of "greatest RPG of all time" for me.

[Enail]

Yeah, firsts definitely tend to stick with you the most.

[bomaye]

Chrono Trigger as your first, god fucking damn that's rough to live up to afterwards

I'm playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake right now... I remember when this game came out years ago as Final Fantasy XIII and everyone hated it

[bomaye]

20) Final Fantasy VII Remake for PS4 (Platinum)

101:00:50 was my game time for the platinum.

Graphics and music were amazing. Most of the big stuff and little stuff was done well. A lot of padding and filler to extend it into a full game but at least it adds more backstory and character to Midgar, makes adds some logic and sense to some of the plot points that happens, fleshes out side-characters and organizations, and they worked in a lot of characters and concepts from the other Final Fantasy VII media. They found a happy medium between remaking the game and providing something new, you can play this without ever playing FFVII or watching anything else and still be as lost as the people who are superfans that consumed all the previous media

One thing I absolutely hated was that most bosses would have at least one (sometimes more) tactics change/power-up cutscene in the middle of their fights and that would drain your accumulated stagger bar for no good reason, like the game just decided "you're winning too much, RESET." Those cutscenes will also nullify any damage you do, so I've lost a few Limits to it. I otherwise dug the battle system, very action-oriented, seemed like it was the natural evolution of the FFXIII series, like it's pretty much FFXIII-4 (or maybe Kingdom Hearts, but I haven't played any of those yet).

One other change that I think didn't serve the game well was that the original Shinra HQ raid was fast-paced and tense, whereas this one was pretty slow and almost laid-back at times.

[KMR]

Bravely Second: End Layer (3DS)

This felt like such a lazy sequel to Bravely Default. Reused locations, characters, and most of the jobs. Of the handful of new jobs introduced, only a few were interesting to me, and many felt like either poorly-executed versions of classic jobs (e.g. Catmancer is basically a blue mage, except that you also need special consumable items each time you use the skills) or were so similar to other jobs in the game as to make them feel a bit redundant (e.g. Bishop & White Mage). So I mostly felt like I was playing Bravely Default over again but with a more mediocre story.

If I weren't such a fan of the job system in general, I would have quit this game long ago, and in fact, I thought that would have been enough to carry me through the game despite its flaws. Instead, I ended up taking a long break partway through because I was getting tired of it (I ended up replaying Chrono Trigger as a palate cleanser in the meantime, because of course I did). Interestingly enough, when I came back to Bravely Second, I found myself enjoying the game more all of a sudden. I don't know if it actually started getting better partway through or if I had just lowered my expectations. Either way, it was nice to at least stick with it and finish.

I did appreciate that this game was not as long as Bravely Default, nor as repetitive. That was one aspect of Bravely Default that also felt extremely lazy, so at least this game didn't fall into that same trap. There are some post-game dungeons that I contemplated doing, but decided against because I had already maxed out leveling the jobs I wanted in the final dungeon, and that was 95% of my motivation for playing this game, so it just seemed like overkill at this point.

[KMR]

Ori and the Blind Forest

Picked this up on a Steam sale recently and was in the mood for a platformer. This game is beautiful and sweet. It plays very similarly to Hollow Knight, which I played a while back and enjoyed, but lighter on the combat and more focused on platforming challenges/puzzles. Which I really liked, because I'm not a big fan of combat in platformers and it was my least favorite aspect of Hollow Knight. I'll take a tricky platforming challenge over a troublesome boss fight any day. And this game had some tough ones as part of its main story line that you can't avoid; it'll autosave the game for you right before a big platforming sequence and force you to keep trying over and over until you get it, so it's like "get good or go home." I feel like if I hadn't learned to appreciate the persistence needed for difficult platforming from my recent experience with DKC: Tropical Freeze, I would have rage-quit this one at some point and then just felt bad about myself for not being good enough to get through it. It's a real testament to how much I've grown as a person that each death and failure didn't really phase me and I just kept at it. The game menu has a counter that keeps track of how many times you die, and it was somewhere in the 500s for me by the end, which feels like a badge of honor.

I was sad at how short the game was, though! I actually ended up accidentally beating it before I finished exploring everything, because I didn't realize that was going to be the last area, so I had to reload my save file afterwards to finish collecting things. Got to 100% completion, but did have to look up how to access a couple minor things.

[bomaye]

The Ori games are definitely games I want to play some day

21) Sonic CD for PS3/Sega CD (100%)

I've been playing Xenoblade Definitive but when my sister has more time on the weekends she'll take the Switch for Splatoon and Animal Crossing and instead of playing more Fire Emblem, I was feeling a hankering for some retro gaming so I hit up the one old-school Sonic game I never played. As I understand it, this looks like a port but they actually rebuilt the game from the ground up so it's technically a remake even if it's pretty much identical to the original.

Really good Sonic game. Love the music, especially the Tidal Tempest set of themes, Eggman's Boss Theme (if it wasn't for this, it'd probably be my favourite Eggman theme) and the End Credits, such a cleaner sound compared to the Genesis synth so it really stands out for all the 2D Sanic games. I was expecting to not 100% the Trophy list on this because of how hard collecting the Time Stones is, but the game Saves your progress including before Special Stages so as long as time doesn't run out to trigger the auto-save you can keep trying again and again.

[bomaye]

22) Infamous: Second Son for PS4 (Expert Evil Playthrough/Platinum)

I think I originally played this not long after playing the other two games, so I was a little less impressed with it then. I definitely appreciated it more this time, I liked Delsin and Reggie both representing the opposite side of the old "X-Men" argument, I used the other powersets more than I did the first time, actually 100%ed it again even though I didn't really need to. It's a nice, fun easy game.

[KMR]

The Witness

This was a very cool puzzle game. I really appreciated how the game teaches you how to solve its puzzles entirely through subtle visual and environmental cues, with no dialogue or text tutorials, and using gradually increasing complexity to expand from one basic concept to its various iterations. The way you explore the world and periodically realize what the game is trying to get you to recognize and understand in order to find and solve new puzzles leads to some really mind-blowing moments.

I played with my friend via Discord screen sharing and it was a lot more fun to share in the experience. He had played the game in the past (got close to the end but hadn't quite beaten it) and recommended it to me, so mostly he let me take the lead and gave occasional guidance. We got the standard ending, the hidden secret ending, and successfully completed the final gauntlet challenge with a timed sequence of randomly generated puzzles (which was a lot more fun than I expected and gave a great sense of accomplishment).

[bomaye]

23) Infamous: First Light for PS4 (Platinum)

Pretty fun. Trophies were a little challenge-heavy (the bane of my Infamous 1 Platinum existence) but the challenges also weren't too bad. I liked how Fetch could temporarily take over some enemies. I can see why people thought this was better than Second Son, it was hard to go back to Delsin (I tried for extra points in the challenge mode), and it felt like it was just getting going when it ended. I'm impressed that Sucker Punch figured out how to make a Flash game and kinda sad they never will because they're working with Marvel now (I will get to Spider-Man eventually and I assume it'll be great).

[KMR]

Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Definitive Edition)

Started this one many months ago, got over halfway through, then ended up taking a long break and finally pushed myself to get back to it and finish. I probably could have beaten this game in one shot, except that I made the mistake of starting it immediately after finishing the first game and ended up getting burned out. It was weird trying to jump back into it after such a long hiatus in the middle, but once I got used to the game again, it worked out kind of nicely, because it's a long and slow game and being able to split it into chunks made it feel more manageable by the end. It's one of those games that feels like it has more content than it actually does, because everything takes a long time to do. Combat takes a long time, exploration and dialogue takes a long time, picking up and sorting through loot takes a long time. I stopped bothering with crafting halfway through or else that also would have taken up a lot of my time. But it's a fun game, with engaging combat mechanics that forces you to come up with clever solutions to problems. The story isn't anything special, but the characters are interesting and the voice acting is great, so it's pretty immersive.

[Enail]

Animal Crossing: New Horizons - pandemic-perfect low-key fun for a surprisingly long time; I'll probably even keep going back sometimes to catch new creatures etc. at the change of month and maybe look after my village a bit, which is quite rare for me, usually, once I'm done I'm done. It just feels like a friendly little world that's yours now.

[bomaye]

I saw this said in a video review about it and I lol'ed because I've experienced this same thing with my sister: If you know someone who's been playing Animal Crossing, they talk about the characters as if they're real people so you sometimes end up confused until you figure out it's video-game characters they're talking about

[Enail]

That seems kind of funny, b/c they're not complex or developed at all, but there's a pleasant familiarity to having them about and just enough personality that it does feel like some background people living in your day-to-day virtual world that you see around every day, so I can also see it.

[bomaye]

24) Detroit: Become Human/PS4 (Platinum/100%/Secret Ending)

God damn that took a lot longer to finish off than I thought. All those things I listed have different completion methods.

As a video-game choose-your-own-adventure novel, it was really good the first one or two times or when seeing a new "good" scene for the first time. There's some completely awful shit in this too because the game maker accounts for every situation that can end the game. There's interesting little twists that are never outright explained that I like (Beyond Two Souls did this too), but I also think the game doesn't hold up after more than two playthroughs (there's so many pitfalls and bad choices that you're almost guaranteed to get a shitty ending, I had a pretty fucked up 10 out of 11 characters die but at least the important one survived).

Despite any flaws it has, I think this game is special. It's Asimov shit, it looks at how the near future might look if Android servants were a real thing, some of the moral choices you have to make are agonizing. Loved it.

[bomaye]

25) Streets of Rage 2 (PS3 Port from Sega Genesis)

I popped all the single player trophies (one of them was scoring 800k points on Hardcore mode, which was way not fun but save-scummable). Still not technically done with what I want to do with the game, there's a few easy online trophies to pop assuming I can find someone on PSTrophies.

This is about what I remember of that era of beat'em up on the SNES. First few levels are fun, then it starts getting not-fun. The flying enemies are total bullshit and the health bars getting longer and longer makes things more aggravating. I beat it on Normal and then did the Hardcore mode trophy with Axel, then played a few rounds with Max (love his power, especially when you German Suplex someone and they die or a huge chunk of their health goes), Blaze (I like her flipping dash move) and about 10 seconds of Skate (way too weak for what I like). I think weaponry is a bit of a gameplay weakness, knives get in the way more than they help and while it's pretty fun to beat down fools with the Pipe or the Katana, you can also probably do more damage with a combo rather than a weapon and sometimes they get in the way too. I also think enemies have a bit too easy of a time hitting you from a different plane but maybe I just wasn't used to using my character that way either.

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