What are you playing right now?

New Vegas is crashing hard like me, so im bought saint's row 2 for the ps3 for 9 dollars along with the DMC Trilogy so im gonna mess around with those at the moment.
 
No More Heroes 2. Holy shit can you kill minor enemies in more ways than Bubba from Forrest Gump can cook shrimp, and it's satisfying. I love to pin a foe against the wall and outright juggle the shit out of them to red with punching them to death.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Gravityqueen4life and Violence Jack
GenociderSyo said:
If you find the chases hard you can turn it to safe mode and this eliminates the chase scenes without losing anything else.
Click to expand...

Nah, trying too hard, not too hard. I can't blame it for chewing the scenery a little when the scenery looks that tasty though.

Speaking of chases though the release date is still up in the air but I'm beyond excited for The Outlast Trials. Adrenaline-stealth survival horror is my favorite and it'll be cool to see how Red Barrels applies their particular flavor to co-op.
 
  • Like
Reactions: GenociderSyo
Yaoi Huntress Earth said:
Star Ocean: First Destination R. It's great they're remastering all the old JRPGs we English speakers missed out on.
Click to expand...
I was playing this earlier too. Got it for my switch since I need more games for it. Fingers crossed we get the psp remake of Second Story, I L O V E that game.

Currently I'm a taking a break from Generations Ultimate and putting more time into the DQ 11 demo. I'm definitely going to ask for the full version for Christmas.
 
1576643753631.png
Alright, I had to give it the benefit of the doubt and really try to like it, and ultimately I was not disappointed.

Mary Skelter 2, Nintendo Switch, it's a 1st person dungeon crawler like Wizardry(or Etrian Odyessy or Labyrinth of Refrain for modern players) with an all-female animu cast. Everyone's named after Grimm's fairy tale characters, and all of them are vampires. It's pretty tough to get through the introductory chapter and give a shit about the plot at all, but when you finally get about 2 hours in the depth really starts to show.

The dungeon crawling part is solid. Maps start out being 20x20 grids(the grids expand to 40x40, haven't seen anything that big yet; Bard's Tale 1 maps were 21x21 and Wizardry 1 were 20x20 for comparison), with pretty good design for a feeling of progression and inter-connectivity. Battles are typically unseen random encounters, maybe every 25-30 steps. It's not overdone and the starting monsters aren't bad. A few black Google bots march in place on a few squares as "move here and you fight a common mob" as guards or roadblocks, there's never more than 2 or 2 of these to begin with. Treasure respawns and is randomized when you go out and in again to dungeons, so it's worth revisiting them for quests from your base. Mapping happens in-game, and you can pick a square on the map and "automate" your movement to it, which is a quality-of-life feature I didn't think I'd use but actually love it now. There's pitfalls, springboard squares, doors, spikes that pop out of the floor or statutes that swing at you that require moving fast or timing. Rope swings, chain bridges you have to balance across with the right stick. The starting map graphics are cartoonishly garish and totally Persona-inspired, but they quickly get to other tilesets that aren't as awful. Also, the first "real" dungeon out of the tutorial area is 5 floors, and if you explore it thoroughly enough, you unlock 1-way shortcuts that streamline you progression to higher floors; there's locked doors on floor 1 that you can't reach until you get to the end of 2, at which point you find stairs back down to 1 that opens that door before you go up to 3. Great design!

The battle system is tight and detailed. Your MC ends up getting double actions for bonding with a goonish giant and the only character that can use items, but otherwise it's turn-based, "highest AGI goes first and gets more turns" that is scheduled with the monsters with little portraits on the top of the battle screen. The everybody-is-a-vampire matters in deep ways for combat: as you crit, overkill enemies, hit elemental weaknesses the monster blood will splatter to the attacker or sometimes party members and fills a pip meter for it. If you get completely covered, you enter a "Massacre" form where the girl has pink wings come out of their back or head and they power up for a few turns. If you time it right, you can transform when it matters and take advantage of mana-efficient special moves or just hit harder. On the other hand, spending too much time in a dungeon and taking hits fills a Corruption meter, and the blood pips are darker the farther you are corrupted(bright pink means you're fresh, darkens down to purple or black). If you're covered in blood and corrupted, you may go into Blood Skelter mode on that character instead(the darker, the more likely) with a sexy transformation sequence. Their stats and damage dealt roughly triple, but will act on their own with insane cackling VO and can hit enemies or allies. All characters can spend a turn before these transformations to Lick another character, and consume the blood splatter off them(some or all) and heal/shield for doing so, so you can control when you transform a bit. If you survive combat in Blood Skelter, you transform back at the expense of your goonish giant's mental meter that also needs managing; if he ever get corrupted, he can go wild and steal your main character's actions(besides managing blood on them) and if he's wild for three turns it's game over. If you're unlucky or mismanage shit, you can have all your characters blood frenzy on each other and lose on that alone.

1576645904679.png

Every individual character has custom alternate classes. Little Mermaid for example will never be anything but a caster, but you get to transition from a healer to an offensive mage or buffer/debuffer depending on your style and choices, and you get cute outfits and portraits to match. There's mild gear changes but a lot of it is simple to manage. Once you start levelling alot and try a few classes out, you get to start buying skills from different classes and mix-match them together to get multiclassing power. Later you can also de-level to keep good stats but start over at a lower level to earn more skill currency and min-max if you have the 'tism.

The most interesting element to the dungeons is Nightmares; invincible bosses that move around the map just like the player, and broadcast their proximity through walls with a circular aura. If you bump into it, it begins a Chase mode: your mini-map goes away and you need to run from it to lose it. If you get into a battle while running, it'll hit you like an asshole while you try to finish your normal encounter and need to run that much further to lose it. If it catches you, you have to fight it until you break combat because you can't kill it. Finally, if you do get to the end of a dungeon and find the Nightmare core, that allows you to actually kill the damn thing later. There's a different Nightmare for each area, so that spices up the exploration and drives some of the map design. A much fairer version of Trebor's ghost haunting you through the dungeon crawling.

1576645964555.png

Also dungeons have gimmicky puzzles where each character has a map power to solve puzzles; one creates bamboo plugs for hols in the floor to cross, another extinguishes flames or freezes water, another has magnetism to pull cubes to hold down switches or fill deeper pits, etc. This forces you to manage your mana and carry item supplies. Doesn't hurt, but the powers are so animu-flavored that it hurts a bit in my eyes.

Once you get your town area, you can visit individual character's rooms to give them gifts for affection/quest content down the road, upgrade items, get fetch quests to go revisit areas for decent rewards, etc. There's also a currency of "blood crystals" besides gold that farming mobs gets you, which goes into the item upgrades, unlocking character skill slots or putting towards "blood flower farming" in the dungeons. You can blow your money to do this automated in town, or manually go to dungeons and find the pink squares where you can plant the crystals. You clear X number of fights on that floor and you can harvest these plants for items(A blood gets you weapons, B gets you armor, ) gets you accessories, etc). It's obviously cheaper to do this manually, but if you're lazy you can dump gold into it. Overall there's a good economy of gold value, crystal value, and damage/HP balance early on the feels really good overall; playing the game on normal feels like the game was very carefully balanced and it shows.

On an original switch the battery's good for about 4 hours of this specific game, and pretty fun to play in small bits portably. I hated the dialogue and setup, but now that I'm actually dungeoning and running from Nightmares and growing character sheets it feels way better. Highly recommend despite the weeb shit(or for it, if you're into it, some people live for this shit; MC is a chick that boob-binds and wishes she was a guy).
 
  • Like
  • Informative
Reactions: Magnum Tenebrosum and That Darn Mimic
SaGa: Scarlet Grace Ambitions, and before that Romancing SaGa 3. I'm so glad Square is finally sending SaGa games west.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Hummingbird
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back