Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

Finished Circle of the Moon. Not much to say. It's a solid one-and-done kind of experience. Moved on to Harmony of Dissonance and oh MAN these controls are floaty and unsatisfying. Decent otherwise, I suppose.

@NintendoByNature
I am glad you loved it too. It certainly is a quality game. Should you ever feel like trying again, try using the beastmaster asterisk and catch many monster while leveling your asterisks. It takes a while, but this way you can breeze through the game, because the more monster you catch, the more your stats for the beastmaster asterisk grow.

It ... is ... done!

Elden Ring is conquered! At least the story

Of all of the games in my backlog I went for Super Princess Peach for the DS. I recently started picking up small random games from Wii and DS and there i was.
The game was... ok. The controls were a bit weird and the level design was meh but I had some fun.

Oh and I'm ALMOST finished with Xenoblade 3. Last chapter and almost all sidequests done. Great game but it is certantly LONG.

I recently finished Little Witch Nobeta on PC. It's a great game, definitely one of my favorites when it comes to soulslikes (after Bloodborne). The mysterious and dark atmosphere is spot on, and the game itself is super fun to play, IMO.

@blindsquarel

Yeah, I agree. Ocarina of Time isn't necessarily the best, but it's probably the most replayable. It's the best -paced Zelda in my opinion, especially in replays. The first time, you might get stuck on, say, I don't know, figuring out how to enter Jabu Jabu. But the second time, that takes literally five minutes. Or less.

It's also nice that the adult portion is surprisingly non-linear. You can tackle stuff in a whole bunch of different orders if you know what you're doing. (And I'm not talking speedrun strats and glitches here. Just playing the game conventionally.) That was my biggest surprise in one of my last playthroughs. It's not 1986 Zelda or Breath of the Wild levels of openness, but it's there if you want to do it.

I beat the first A Plague Tale. It was OK. It brings together many of my gripes with modern game design. Extremely simple stealth mechanics — like, often simpler than the original Metal Gear Solid, which I replayed recently — and puzzles so streamlined you're hardly solving anything and just moving forward until seeing a button prompt. In fact, most of the puzzles are basically the tutorial puzzle in the tutorial dungeon in Ocarina of Time, where you drop the ladder with the slingshot. That's what you do in A Plague Tale, over and over again. It's always extremely obvious what you're supposed to shoot at. And a lot of enemy encounters feel like those old cinematic platformers, like Flashback, where you're less interacting with enemies and more just figuring out what precise choreography you need to follow to get through the action sequence. It's very rigid. And don't get me started on the crafting system. I'm tired of modern games including crafting systems and weapon trees just because that's what modern games are supposed to do. It's tiring. Some games don't need that. Some games would be better off being 1993 Doom. If you're gonna do it, don't half-measure it. I appreciate something like Death Stranding that goes all-in on that sort of thing. Now that I can admire. If you're gonna force me to dive into a complicated interface and keep track of numbers and upgrades, go all the way. Make that an essential part of the experience. But the weak implementation in A Plague Tale or God of War — games that really don't need RPG systems just because Deus Ex had a neat genre-hybridization idea over 20 years ago — bores me to no end.

I liked the graphics, though, and the storytelling. Nice world and voice acting. Not sure I'll play the sequel any time soon.

Live A Live (Switch) - Definitely a fun spin on the turn-based formula with seven (Erm, I mean, eight) protagonists to follow. Each story plays a little differently and has a different gimmick; one may operate like a standard turn-based RPG with random encounters, another might operate not too unlike a fighting game (think Street Fighter), and yet another mostly thrives off of exploration and contains very little combat. They're all different lengths, but none of the vignettes are over 3-4 hours. There is a common element connecting the stories that I won't spoil, but suffice it to say that the final hours of the game where everything comes together has a ton of optional content that's worth tackling.

The presentation in the HD-2D engine is breathtaking. The remastered music is decent, the voice acting ranges from okay to decent, and the game is (usually) good at nudging the player in the correct direction. However, it's best to keep a guide nearby for some segments. There was one segment near the end where I genuinely didn't know what to do next, and another segment (Prehistory) wasn't very open about what items could be combined into better ones; I found it better to consult a short guide on the matter vs. experimenting. Some of this is likely due to the fact that Live A Live is, originally, a game from 1994.

In some ways - okay, many - I do feel this one is still better and more condensed than my limited experience with Octopath Traveler. Live A Live is easy to recommend for any fans of RPGs, particularly for those who want to sink some time into one without getting sucked into an open world or worrying about the story getting padded out for 60-100+ hours. It shows its age at times, but this remake clearly had a lot of care put into it. If you're on the fence, there is a demo that can be downloaded from the eShop.

Beat Pokepark for the Wii. It is a nice little game with cute Pokemon and a friendly atmosphere. Befriending the Pokemon is fun. I wish the game would be playable with ordinary controls though.

Edit: Pokepark 2 for the Wii is also beaten. The game feels a lot darker and dramatic and it is harder. The rest seems to be an improvement. I prefer the more relaxed first game, but this one is also very much worth playing. For now I will just play through the games without trying to do everything. It feels refreshing.

I beat Resident Evil 7. It was pretty bad. I hated the grimy Texas Chainsaw Massacre look; it came off as tryhard and somewhat pathetic. The beauty of the first TCM film was its slow doling out of gore and general eeriness, and it makes the dinner scene near the end all the more effective when the whole plot completely breaks down. That RE7 can't resist itself and starts with a dinner scene "homage" almost immediately is a testament to how hackneyed the whole affair is... makes total sense Richard Pearsey
wrote it. Unlikeable characters, trite dialog, cliche plot...it's just unpleasant on all fronts. Gameplay switched between okay-ish to bland. Hiding could have been a cool mechanic but the lack of peeking around the corner made it more awkward than it needed to be, and the mechanic is basically scrapped within a third of the game anyway. The actual FPS stuff is serviceable I suppose, and I liked the shadow puzzles with the weird bock things quite a bit. The boat section is when I fully mentally checked out. I would be more forgiving if the whole game didn't feel so dumb and self-serious and debased. Maybe this is better than RE6 but in no way is it a "return to form" as everyone says. Bleh.

Just finished deaths door which had great puzzles a la Zelda, tight combat and some memorable boss battles that had me swearing at the TV. In light of Pokémon releasing I have opted to go back and finish Arceus now, as I'd forgotten how much I loved playing it! Got to do the icy region for the fifth and hopefully last part of the main game

I just beat Spiderman Remastered on PC and was overall very impressed by it. Web slinging through the city feels great and never got old. Combat is super responsive and very satisfying. And the story and voice acting are surprisingly good. The only two parts of the game I didn't like were the puzzles and the stealth sections. Both felt like major detriments to the overall pacing. I also felt like the game was a bit too long, especially when including DLC.

It was a great game, though, and I had a lot of fun. I'll probably pick up Miles Morales when it goes on sale.

8/10

I just finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney HD. While it wasn’t the strongest game in the series, I still thought it was great and I think it belongs right up there with the rest of the series' offerings.

Story: Overall, I felt like AJAA’s story was very well-written. It didn’t have a level of cohesion or impact on quite the same level as T&T or TGAAR, but that is a very high bar to clear. For introducing several new main characters and tying them into the pre-established story, I think the writers did a great job. There are several plot twists in the last couple of cases that I genuinely was not expecting and thought were really well done. And it makes me interested in how those plot revelations carry over into DD and SoJ. Not every plot twist was done with immaculacy, however; there were quite a few that I predicted pretty early on. But I can argue that the most major twists were kept well hidden while still being built up well throughout the game. My recommendation for those that haven’t played the game is to pay close attention to almost every case. I believe this is the first game in the series where the “filler” cases still have vital roles to play in the overarching narrative. This is possibly excluding one case, but even that one case helps to establish the characters a lot more. I think Klavier is a great prosecutor and draws a good balance between goofy and cool, which I appreciate for that role. Also, the writing in this game has a lot more comedy overall. And some parts are very, very funny. I won't spoil any of the humor but there are some jokes that were Herlock-level.

Gameplay: The only real addition to the gameplay here is the bracelet, which allows you to “perceive” peoples’ emotions and find out where they’re lying in a testimony. So it’s sort of like Maya’s Magatama, but for trials exclusively. I think it’s an interesting idea for a new mechanic that wasn’t implemented in quite the best way. During certain testimonies, the bracelet will light up, signifying that the person is lying. The only problem with this is that you need to then perceive every single part of their testimony, which can get really tedious. I resorted to using a walkthrough for these sections just so I didn’t waste a lot of time on them. Other than that, though, I found the normal gameplay elements found throughout the series to be pretty par for the course. There’s some annoying backtracking in some sections, and sometimes it was difficult to figure out what piece of evidence you needed to present to someone. However, other than those missteps, I still enjoyed the “game” side of things overall.

Graphics: Apollo Justice introduced a slightly different 2D art style that I don’t think was ever really used again in the series. I think it looks good, though; characters tend to have a bit more details and expressions than they did in the PW trilogy. I really like Apollo and Trucy’s designs in particular. The only character whose redesign I’m not a huge fan of is Judge’s. Ol’ Udgey looks a little off in this game.

Music: This game probably has the grooviest soundtrack in the series. It’s a very unique take on the series’ music in general, and I think it leads to this game having a very unique feel. I especially love the Truth Revealed theme, the Investigation theme (which I think is the best one in the series), and Klavier’s theme. While it’s not quite the most classic soundtrack in the series, it does a great job of establishing a unique tone and feel.

Overall, I really, really enjoyed my time with this game. It has some of the issues that a lot of the earlier Ace Attorney games had, like tedious backtracking and investigations that drag on for a bit too long. However, it’s still Ace Attorney. And Ace Attorney is very good. So I like this game. It has its flaws, probably more than the average game in the series, but it still has a lot of great moments and I’m excited to see where the series goes from here with DD and SoJ.

8/10 Great.

Kirby's Epic Yarn is finished. I like it very much. The game is fun and the atmosphere is relaxing. My favourite stages were the snow ones. Swimming like a dolphin was also great.

Saints Row 2022. I really enjoyed this one. I liked the empire building (even if I didn’t like all the activities) and I adore the new crew (put on a shirt Kev!). The the final boss fight dragged a bit though. The new crew was much more relatable and the jokes were less vulgar which made them more palatable to me. The Boss is still nuts, but she seems to be a better person and more balanced than the old boss. I still need to clean up the map but I can take a break.

Sifu - Although it only took a few hours to get the good ending, I had a blast. This might be the closest thing to Punch-Out that's not named Punch-Out. Or maybe The Raid: The Video Game, because the inspiration is plain as day. I might go so far as to call this my favorite game I've played this year? It would be between this and XC3 honestly.

If you love kung fu and/or linear action games that don't overstay their welcome, I can't recommend Sifu enough.

Batman: Arkham Asylum.

The combat was kind of shallow but in a way that was mindless fun. Beating the crap out of mooks was always a treat, and the combo system was cool if a bit finnicky. Mechanically there's just enough going on to make it feel like you're playing an actual video game than Simon Says. I could take or leave the detective mode (aka Batman Vision), but I guess it's harmless in the context of the game, and trying to add some Bat-sleuthing is at least in line with the lore. The fact it was adapted to the Witcher 3 is a bit puzzling and ill-fitting (both games were published by Warner Brothers so I guess there's some influence there?), but that's beyond AA's control. The plot was appropriately goofy and dumb but in a fun way. I really enjoyed finding the Riddler trophies/collectibles even if most of them were just "use gadget X on object Y". I had 85% completion at the end (just enough to squeeze in a few achievements, lol).

Overall a rock solid (Rocksteady? teehee) game that holds up well.

I also finished Call of Duty 4, the favorite game of all the 83-IQ jock bullies in middle school. While they have inevitably landed cushy managerial jobs I'm here gaming and posting on a Nintendo forum. Joke's on them! Anyway, it was alright. Too much of a pop-up shooting gallery for my tastes but I liked how the guns handled (mostly). I didn't care enough to mess around with the multiplayer for more than a few matches. I don't play multiplayer often but when I do I prefer tactical games like Hell Let Loose and Day of Defeat (which is a ghost town now...RIP), or the ol' standby Monster Hunter.

I've mostly been stuck to my PC for the past few weeks, gaming-wise. I do enjoy playing a bit of Picross 3D before bed though. It holds up to my memory.

I just beat Mega Man 11 on PC. Overall, I recommend the game, but just barely. The controls, level design, and power-ups were the only real highlights for me. Other than that, there isn't much going for this game. The bosses are pretty boring, the double-gear system feels heavily underutilized, and the story is super mediocre.

It's good to see Mega Man back after so many years, but Capcom needs to give the series a proper refresh in order to stay relevant.

6/10 Not bad