Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

@NEStalgia TMS is interesting, but I found the premise to be a bit thin, and the gameplay systems to be too streamlined for my liking. Also, the ridiculous censorship still irritates me.

And it's funny. Everyone's excited about God of War, but I can't even see myself downloading it as an PS+ freebie. I have... less than zero interest in this. I'm not particularly excited about Spider-Man either, but I could absolutely see myself buying it in a good sale. But the grungy, dirty, very masculine-looking God of War world... nah.

@NEStalgia I've never played a God of War game, none of them looked appealing to me. But I can dig this one. Different location, different tone. I'm glad the red and white on Kratos are a bit more subdued, cause he looked ridiculous before. And it's getting positive reviews, so I want to see it for myself.

Kratos was a massive, ridiculous man-child in previous games. So edgy he bordered on being a parody of himself.

But that was the concept, and the games were okay for what they were.

It's "God of War," not "God of Emotional Stability and Healthy Parent/Child Relationships."

@Ralizah But they're going after young parents this time. How to be a good parent 101

@Ralizah The premise was goofy and fun. "Thin" compared to the amazing depth of DQ games (8 still amazes me how deep it was going into some things with such simple trappings to encase it) or core SMT which is outright philosophical, but it was a fun romp, and sometimes that's what's most important.

Gameplay....I suppose it was "streamlined" but in reality no moreso than SMT core, sans the crafting, which I loathe almost universally in all games anyway Dungeons could have been bigger or more interesting, I'll give it that.

@NEStalgia Actually, the dungeons are my favorite aspect of TMS. The ones I played through were pretty inventive. I also kind of liked how the GamePad was used to parse through text messages between the party members.

But I didn't care for what I saw of the plot (I'll probably restart it some time and get further in), the music (some of the worst I've heard in an Atlus game, which is pretty ironic, given the focus of the game), or the combat (it's an odd fusion of SMT and Fire Emblem, but I didn't care much for it).

And what depth in Dragon Quest VIII? That game had bog-standard plot, characterization, and gameplay, outside of the weird monster battling thing at the arena and the crafting system that I could never get into.

@Ralizah The plot's very.....anime. I mean it's about pop idols somehow trapped in a plot where the Shadow Dragon saga (FE1, Famicom) intersects with modern Tokyo. It's as bad as it sounds But it doesn't need to be good. It's the character's stories that are fun and memorable. I don't give a rat's rear about the big bad when it intersects with FE history, but I will remember Tsubasa, Kiria, and Yashiro forever. (Ok, plus Tiki....she's core FE stock but it's impossible to not love Tiki in this game....)

But if you play with a focus on the side missions and characters you'll get a lot more out of it rather than expecting some meaningful redemption plot.

Music: Errr....but it's legit J-Pop. They even contracted AvexTrax to produce it all, and they set up the fake characters as though they were actual clients, with the full program. (Which goes to show how engineered by blueprint J-Pop is, after all..... ) Maybe you're just a bigger fan of OSTs than legit pop?

Combat: It's biggest fault was it was repetititive. It's strength was that it was so addictive for some reason I stopped noticing. How far in did you get? Combat doesn't start getting awesome until you have more party members you can swap in and out, and some of the more high level synergies where individual attacks are endless chains of fireworks (which include the characters NOT in the on-screen party(!) ) It makes landing the weakness hits with the right combinations of characters important. Simple next to many JRPG systems, but darned addictive since it's like hitting a slot, no pachinko jackpot. It's much more SMT than FE. The only FE element is the weapons triangle, but it's not really implemented in an FE way.

Whoops, I meant 7, not 8 for DQ! The venerable novel of video games. The towns had some heavy stuff just below the surface.

@NEStalgia I liked the J-Pop. I meant the instrumental stuff. Like the battle theme. Atlus games usually have awesome battle themes, but I barely even remember what the one in this game sounded like. Same with the music that plays in dungeons.

Maybe I didn't play long enough to really allow the battle system to sink its teeth in. Being fair, I don't really care for the battle system in Persona 5 either, considering every fight devolves into all-out attacking enemies once you get a good spread of skills.

Ah, DQ7! Never played that one, unfortunately. VIII looked more interesting and came with a cute pouch if you preordered it at Gamestop, so I played through that one. My second DQ game after the original NES version (which sucked; at some point, the series was just too basic).

@Ralizah Ahh, that makes sense. I think it was a stylistic choice for the battle and dungeon music to play a background role to the featured character/pop tunes. The battle themes, though, had a dance party kind of feel to them, in a subdued form, which fit the very stylish battle animations. To me music is one of the high points of the game (I imported the soundtrack before I was done playing (funny fact: the ever-long streams of kana of track titles are so long they're invalid filenames.....) but yeah, I wasn't thinking much of the "hard synth" battle music. It fit the pacing.

The battle, I won't say it's not streamlined, it is. But I can't say it's bad. It can get repetitive if you grind a lot (I did, but some of those bosses are brutal if you're not leveled up with the right synergies in your team and I just had fun overall so I ignored the slight repetition and kept battling.) It's streamlined, uncomplicated, yet very fun to put in motion even if it can be relatively easy. By late game you should be going into deep overkill for most enemies (but they can overkill you too if you miss your window.) The fact that you have a party of 3 "on stage", but your ENTIRE roster can chain on an attack once you get the synergies....it's just too fun. It does take some strategizing but overall can become easy if you're level matched....but so addictive. (Bosses are another story....there are some huge difficulty spikes on bosses. It's Atlus. What else is new.) Buff/Debuff does matter in late game.

DQ7 has 30 minutes of reading for every 10 minutes of playing, I swear It's all text and dialog. It's a masterpiece. It seems simple, as you uncover mysteries, and the simple graphics belie the heavy themes, so you have to go into empathy mode to really get the moods and tones, but it's done very well.

I'm inside the mountain in The Witness, and I think I'm done with it.

I was OK with clever puzzles that use lighting, sound, color, etc. to create challenge. What I'm NOT OK with is taking simple puzzles and then spinning them around so fast that I get nauseated just trying to complete them. Or making me complete simple puzzles at extreme angles that make it hard even to see them. Or making me run back and forth from upstairs to downstairs continuously to test and see if I can squeeze through a ball of garbage so that I can get over to the next puzzle. The game is trolling me at this point. It was fun while it lasted, though.

PS4 has received a lot of amazing games lately. It's pretty insane.

@Ralizah They were quite gimmicky, but the puzzles themselves were rather easy.

@Octane I enjoyed the puzzle at the very end/depths of the mountain, but the ones in-between, whilst not too challenging, were not the most enjoyable to solve. I remember taking a bit of a break when I was going through that passage of play. Perhaps @Ralizah would be wise to do the same?

@Octane Yes, so they make it either irritating or physical uncomfortable to complete them. It's like the puzzle design just falls out of the floor when you enter that area. The spinning one is so sickening that I can hardly look at the screen when solving it.

@Peek-a-boo I just don't understand why the game is suddenly punishing me for playing it is all.

For now, I'm just going to consider it done and then maybe come back to it at some point when I have fewer games on my plate. I completed almost all of the other areas, anyway.

@Ralizah I suppose they're trying to push for the idea that the game itself is breaking on you or something like that. It's certainly a kind of Portal-esque testing facility. It's just that one floor that is like that by the way.

Yo !
I played The Sims 4 PS4 version lately.
This is my looking and my little house.

Sorry about poor photo quality.

I just realised that this is the same mythological character:

@Dezzy Upon returning to the chocobo ranch much later in the game, it was so, so satisfying to walk over to the nearby marshy wetlands and be able to kill the Midgar Zolom in one hit...

I learnt that you could poison the Midgar Zolom and use Barret’s Mindblow limit break to take away all the MP from the enemy, thus not being able to cast ‘Beta’. Hopefully this method of defeating this giant snake very early in the game carries over to the remake!

p.s. Over twenty years on, I still have so much love for Final Fantasy VII.

Watch Dogs' turning controls are genuinely awful. In both games. It's near impossible to straighten out from a turn at high speeds to the point where you just start snaking uncontrollable, even if you barely even tilt the Control Stick. Whoever programmed it this way deserves to be shot.

@Bolt_Strike Never really had an issue in either game with the driving. I do play a lot of racing games so perhaps that helped me but I don't think they were truly that bad