Topic: Catherine Full Body

Does anyone feel like its a little bit easier than the original release? I struggled years ago, even on easy. Now I play on medium and it's a perfect challenge.

@JaxonH I'll keep that in mind if it becomes truly unbearable, but I'm more of a 'rise to the occasion' sort of person (at least when it comes to video game, lol), so I'm going to stick with this difficulty and see if my performance improves. Besides, the game is probably trying to inspire exactly those sorts of feelings in the player to boost sympathy for Vincent.

@jump Precisely.

There's no way I'm touching harder difficulties any time soon though, lol.

@Ralizah
Ya I wanted to, but after dying like 57 times in a row (not even exaggerating, I died so many times I was about to throw the controller in frustration), over and over and over again, using my Undos and still finding now way forward, I realized I was not having fun. And given that was my turnoff last time, I figured I would enjoy it more if I wasn’t constantly dying to the fork stabbing.

I’m just not very good at thinking on my feet. I love these puzzles. Super Rapunzel arcade game in the bar is amazing, but it’s not timed. I need a nice, generous time allowance to properly enjoy this game.

But I’m clearly way worse at it than most others.

I haven't bought this, but I just felt like saying that I would absolutely play it on easy.

Stressful timers are no fun 😩

It would also give more time to appreciate the atmosphere in the puzzle levels.

I'm also playing on easy, to warm up to the game. But it's very fun so far!

The opening song is great, btw.

Never played this game, but considering it. Does it offer much in terms of replay value?

There's multiple endings in the game to encourage multiple playthroughs and has a multiplayer mode,

@SpringLand On top of what @jump mentioned there's also harder difficulty levels and a remix mode, which alters the way the puzzle segments work. There is also DLC and other puzzle challenges you can do, I believe.

So i caved and bought it....

Ouch, normal is seriously brutal. But part of it is imprecise controls for the camera angles. I don't like dying repeatedly due to imprecise controls going the wrong way.

And so far I think Vinnie should just fly solo and ditch all the dames.... They all irritate me. . I pity him more than i probably should. Kat seems manipulative and I dislike "ambitious type" people intensely. Cat seems like a trollip (and might as well jump in and yell "hee ho!") And Rin is a lolli anime trope. It kills some of the attachment to the story for me that i don't really sympathize with any of the women.

I saw a Let's Play of Catherine a long time ago when it was new (and when I would bother with let's plays of games I've never played) and what I got from the story is that the game was more interested in looking at different types of ideals of relationships rather than having deep or realistic girls to choose from. Still thought it was really interesting and entertaining, but is definitely odd in hindsight how you probably just shouldn't date anyone in this game. :V

Though to be fair, that's my assumption for how nearly all dating sims work too, that they're there to fit a certain type of role rather than being realistic, nuanced human beings.

@NEStalgia Yeah, the camera controls could be a LOT better. I also sometimes can't tell if flicking a certain direction will turn Vincent that way or actually make him step forward, which has led to some issues.

Overall, though, I'm mostly enjoying the puzzle gameplay on Normal, even if it gets brutal in later boss encounters.

I definitely sympathize with Katherine. She's very tolerant of Vincent's wishy-washiness. She might seem strict, but I get the sense that she just wants a stable home life, and I can relate to that. Vincent just needs to grow a pair and lay out some ground rules about what can change and what can't (no reason he should give up drinking with his buddies, for example).

On some level, it's a story where every single person is frustrating in some regard, but that seems more realistic to me. Life isn't black-and-white, and I'm curious to see where things go for Vincent. I'm just answering the questions honestly, though, and doing what I think I would do in his shoes, and seeing where that takes me, instead of deliberately setting out to achieve a particular ending.

Rather than ideals i feel more like the character design is purposely such that the "real world" is an echo if the nightmare world, and all sides represent imprisonment. Kat is the most realistic but it's the embodiment of a common real life trope. She's maybe tolerant of him, but for her own ends. He's a path to the lifestyle she wants and is the most direct path to it, therefore she consistently manipulates him into it. The "all my friends are married with kids therefore i want that now too" trope is also ripped out of real life, but not the good part of it.... That's the fastest path to divorce court there is, seeking the status and lifestyle despite not really being suited to it together. There's no good long term with Kat. He stays because he's wishy washy, she stays because she's more or less using him for status in her peer reviewed life. The nightmare world represents that as much as Cat is represented.

Rin would be a nice "good option" if not a darned anime trope, and afaik you basically have to blow off the cats consistently, and unreasonably for that to even enter the mix, so it's clearly not the main story angle. We're left playing Vinnies Cupid with either the selfish manipulative narcissist or the brazen bimbo bobblehead..... Or the lolli.

@NEStalgia
I don’t think I agree with the categories you’ve boxed everyone into. Katherine is responsible. There’s nothing wrong with her wanting Vincent to grow up. You don’t know why she stays with him. That’s your own speculation being projected into the story. It’s more likely she stays with him because she loves him. I don’t see anything about Vincent that screams status symbol to me. She was the most sought after cheerleader in high school. She could have any guy she wants. She doesn’t need Vincent for anything.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her wanting more out of their relationship either. When you’re with someone who refuses to commit to more than just “take it one day at a time”, that can be truly frustrating. And her feelings from seeing her friends settle down in life while Vincent refuses to commit to more, they resonate with me. As someone who was married to a popular girl in high school but who still wanted to party and cheat, I feel more connection to Katherine than anyone. It doesn’t mean she’s perfect but, her emotions seem genuine.

And Catherine is great. She’s just a young, insecure flirt. I love her character in the game. And Rin, she provides a nice balance to the other two. She’s the nice one. And the only one where Vincent isn’t constantly feeling on the defensive. Never understood complaints about tropes either. Just kinda feels like an intellectual argument to not like something, rather than a genuine emotional reason. Intellectually I could probably nitpick 100 different reasons to not like anything in just about any game, but at the end of the day what I care about is whether it works. For example, the “I lost my memory” trope doesn’t bother me just because it’s a trope. What matters is whether it is done well in a game. For some they are, for some they aren’t, but it’s decided on a game by game basis, rather than categorically rejecting it just because “it’s a trope, ergo bad”.

I’ve had a few issues with the controls but overall, not really been a big issue. It was a bigger issue when I was playing on normal because the difficulty was so high that any mistake came at a high cost. Now that I’m playing on easy, accidentally turning a corner I didn’t mean to just doesn’t have the same negative effect it did before.

@Ralizah
I’m playing the same way. If I have to follow a guide to make every single choice for me just to get a particular ending then it feels like I’m not really playing the game at all. I might as well just watch cut scenes on YouTube for the playthrough and ending I want to see. I do, however, want to not rule out any possible paths just yet. There’s a few questions you need to answer in the confessional booth in order to ensure the Rin path is available later. And I do want to make sure I get those questions right so that I can save the game afterwards and use that as a launching pad for future Playthroughs (kinda like Fire Emblem Three Houses Edelgard path before the choice).

@JaxonH Yeah, tropes are literally just the building blocks of almost every story. We catalog them to get a sense of collective patterns in storytelling. I don't know if you've read Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology work, but it reminds me a lot of that: studying different religions and myths and finding commonalities between them, in terms of both content and narrative patterning, that point to deeper truths about the human condition.

Granted, people can fall back on a reliance on overused tropes without contributing anything new to them or using them in interesting ways, but I don't think that's true here.

Catherine: Full Body is a fascinating study of dualities — freedom vs. responsibility, young vs. old, dreams vs. reality, male vs. female, etc. etc. — in addition to a fun interactive anime and challenging puzzle game.

I'm really happy this is on the Switch.

@JaxonH well, the game says explicitly she's the ambitious type... That right there sends up my bat signal for hate mode

But...i know the type.... And the "my friends are settling down" real world trope. Not from personal experience so much as external, both male and female, and have watched it go down in flames every single time....i warned them.... But nobody ever listens to me... . It's getting "the life" " on schedule" more than about the person it's with when it gets to that.... It never ends well at all. So when i see Kat i can't help but think "run, Vinnie, run!"

Not that i especially like Vincent.... He's a dude bro in the worst way.... But he's Yuri Lowell in my head so i can't help but like him, rogue or not.

But i do think that the game intentionally painted him into nightmares on all sides and each relationship is really "the wrong one". Maybe not Rin, but again, i think to get that one you basically have to "not play the game" with some of your responses and it doesn't seem like a natural playthrough you're intended to cross like you and Ralizah were saying.

Though i happened into spoilers for Rin unfortunately while trying to figure out if her VA is who I thought it was or not, so that spoils that significantly. Note to everyone:. Do not search for anything regarding this game at all... You will get spoilers everywhere.

As for the camera, yeah I'm playing on normal... And that camera is a real problem. If i switch to easy it's not because i really want to play in easy, but because the camera and controls aren't really suited to the precision normal expects you to play with. I'm holding up for now but i doubt my patience will last.

@Ralizah The problem with tropes is they become like idol group positions. The center, the face, the front, etc. Each story assigns the characters with that given role.... Is the character version of a macguffin. There's a million motivations a character might have, but it's always "amnesia", a real world rarity, in every story where a characters past needs to be unknown to be developed through later exposition.

Weird game, but story wise i still see all (or at least cat and kat) as intentionally bad choices to tie the whole nightmare into the real life. Atlus is into layered symbolism like that.

Level 6-3 took me an hour and a half to beat. :/ The dumb thing is, once I realized how I needed to clear the roadblock, it was elegantly simple.

On another note, there's supposedly difficulty confusion. In the JP original, apparently they're were 3 modes: normal, hard, and very hard. In English they renamed them "easy, normal, hard".... So "easy" was normal in Japan, normal was hard in Japan. But in full body, easy is now easier than easy was in the og. Blocks still feel in easy in the og.

It isn't actually letting me switch to easy at the landing or main menu... Not sure why. Maybe next time in the bar. I turned retry assist on for now. Maybe that's better than easy. Falling blocks is cannon after all.

I think one aspect of the game that doesn't get talked about enough it the soundtrack imo. Some of the songs are really good at breaking up the tension of the gameplay and on their own are they good enough to listen to without the game.

I also find the online stats for the players answers to the confessional questions humorous and interesting. "Is marriage the beginning or end of life" 20-40 m/f age group is relatively even with maybe 18% M saying end, and 21% F saying end. Surprising, but close. But the funny part is when you take the age limiter out and it's like 53% "end" across the board. Not sure if that's because you add the teens that think so, because you added the older adults who learned the hard way, or because you have less people in the know gaming the answers for Rin.

@jump atlus games always have great music
Though i have to say at least the first set of puzzles. Was grating with a Holst sound alike on repeat the whole time

I wish you could adjust volume for music vs voices though. On switch without headphones in handheld, the music is too loud compared to voices so i either have the music way too loud and annoying or i can't hear the dialogue.