Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

@NEStalgia I don't think it's a deus ex machina, or that there was no justification for its use as a plot device (unlike some games I could mention, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box...). I just found it to be poor writing. Especially with the late introduction of that lamp or whatever it was that was poisoning the water. In general, though, I liked Uncharted 3 better: some fantastic set-pieces (the entire boat sequence beats anything in the rest of the series, imo), preteen Nathan Drake was adorbs and the baddies in this were more interesting than that macho caricature you fight in Uncharted 2.

Well, at least in the first game, Reapers had a touch of Lovecraftian cosmic horror to them, which made them interesting (I really dig any mix of space opera and cosmic horror). Avoiding TLoU is the right move, if only because it's a miserable experience that doesn't differentiate itself enough from its peers in the post-apocalyptic genre. I really dig good horror, though. You should play Silent Hill 2 one day, at least, as it has fantastic characters and is a memorable exploration of the darker sides of human sexuality.

Don't get me wrong: I think Atlus should stick with what it does well. Which is why I'm not so fond of them trying to inject a more straightforward narrative into their Etrian games, since they excel at more subtle emergent narratives and manage to make exploration both exciting and terrifying. One of my absolute favorite video game series. And speaking of EOV, you know it's a 3DS game, right? I imagine we'll get a release date at E3, once Persona 5 is fully out of the way.

I first played CT on the DS, and yeah... I just didn't care for it. It's not a bad game, I just never felt terribly compelled to come back to it. I forced myself to finish it and moved on to other games.

My favorite pre-FFVII JRPGs have to be Phantasy Star II, Final Fantasy VI, and Lunar: Eternal Blue.

Never tried Mario RPG or the Mario and Luigi games. I've tried at least two of the Paper Mario games (N64 and Sticker Star) and couldn't get into them. I'm going to try TTYD, but if I can't get into it, I'm giving up on the series.

@Ralizah I'm from Great Britain (although the 'Great' part will soon be gone...), therefore I would not have seen that Final Fantasy VII advert. I genuinely cannot believe the part where the word 'love' appears, only to show what is perhaps the most important and iconic scene in the whole game!

Also, on the subject of the seventh generation not being the most memorable one, I kind of agree AND disagree.

Disagree:

• The Wii took over the world and captivated everybody - whether you were three years of age or eighty-three years old - and Wii Sports was the single most accessible game that anyone could pick up and play.
• Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 were two of the best games of the generation, although I slightly prefer the sequel more so than the original.
• Online gaming came along in a big way, thanks to Xbox Live.
• BioShock ended up being one of the most memorable game of the 7th generation, and was one of the first tent-pole release for people to move on from their GameCube, PlayStation 2 or the original Xbox.
• Xbox Live Arcade; it paved the way for small bite-sized indie games on a console for the first time.
• Xbox 360 was arguably the best console for the first four years, until the Kinect came along ...
• ... whilst the PlayStation 3 had the best twilight years with the likes of God of War: Ascension, Gran Turismo 6, Journey, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Puppeteer and, of course, The Last of Us.
• And Naughty Dog introduced us to an Indiana Jones inspired character in Nathan Drake.

Agree:

• The Wii was good fun for the first few years, then Nintendo just kind of abruptly stopped turning the wheels. The fitness, party and mini-games area of the market soon fizzled out too.
• The first party support for the Xbox 360 immediately disappeared as soon as the Kinect became a hit. Outside of Halo 4 and the first Forza Horizon, the last three years for the Xbox 360 was rather dire.
• In contrast, the PlayStation 3 took a very long time to get going, and it wasn't until its third year that the Sony we knew and loved from the PlayStation 2 days finally woke up from a deep slumber.
• DLC add-ons, micro transactions and season passes became a (terrible) thing.
• Last but not least, there wasn't any genuine innovation or original ideas during last generation that didn't involve something hardware related (Move, Kinect and the Wii remote). The quirky, daring and outrageous ideas from the PlayStation 2 days seemed to vanish into thin air...

It's funny really. Only Super Mario Galaxy 2 would make it into my top ten that features games from the seventh generation, which kind of shows that it was a pretty tough era (of games) to please some people.

Lol wtf?

@Dezzy I'm guessing he's knocking Brexit.

@Peek-a-boo Yeah, apparently "spoilers" weren't considered a thing in 1990's America? That's my only guess as to why they would spoil the most important scene in the game in a TV commercial!

As to last gen... I mean, yeah, there were some good points. Some amazing games did release. And, to be fair, if you're a big fan of Western AAA shooters, last gen was your jam. I think the death of substantive Japanese game development for consoles (sans Nintendo, at least) and, as you mentioned, the sheer lack of creativity outside of the burgeoning indie game scene were what killed that gen for me.

This gen is already better. Japanese console games are making a comeback in a big way, even some big AAA games are taking more risks, and outside of a few key franchises, the brown and gray color palette seems to be dying out. Also, yeah, gimmicky seems to be coming to an end: motion and touch controls, if they're still a thing, are just being integrated into modern gen devices as supplements to regular controls. Even the Wii U GamePad, the most gimmicky bit of hardware this gen, was still fairly useful in most games, serving as an alternative screen on which to play games as well as giving the player a useful, immediately accessible map/inventory screen if they were playing on a TV.

@Ralizah I can see that for those who came off the back of all those brilliant Japanese software on the GameCube and PlayStation 2, heck, even the original Xbox which had shades of Dreamcast 2 about it, then yes, last generation would have been a bit of a slog to get through.

Although I slightly prefer games from the East, mostly due to their imaginative art style and original gameplay ideas (Gravity Rush is a good example as any), I also don't mind games from the West, especially when you consider how good and popular they were.

You had the likes of Assassin's Creed II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, BioShock, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 3, Gears of War, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Mass Effect, Portal, Red Dead Redemption, Rock Band, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and The Walking Dead.

In terms of Japanese games, I can only really immediately think of Bayonetta, Dark (and Demon's) Souls, Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots, Street Fighter IV and the reinvention of Pac-Man (in Championship Edition DX). That's it!

I had some good fun last time round however, I already prefer this newer generation.

@Peek-a-boo Xbox 360 had some decent examples of both Eastern and Western games early on. Mass Effect and Bioshock were strong Western "exclusives." The Viva Pinata games were lovely. Shadow Complex was a fantastic indie. Alan Wake was a reasonably inventive Stephen King-esque meta horror story.

On the Japanese side, it got stuff like Lost Odyssey, Tales of Vesperia, Ninja Gaiden II (the first game I got for my 360, even before GTA IV!) and decent multiplats in the form of Catherine and Bayonetta.

And, of course, I love the first Arkham game and both Portals.

I'll even admit I enjoyed Grand Theft Horse

But yeah, after years of JRPGs and survival horror games left and right, when every console had a decent library, last gen just couldn't do it for me. EVERY new console was a downgrade in terms of the library.

@Ralizah I think UC3 taken in context with the trilogy leading to it was refreshing. At that point they had you trained to expect "supernatural phenomenon to break the carefully setup ancient civilization excavation." That was even kind of core to Indiana Jones. So you go into 3 expecting that, and you hear the conversations preparing you for that. and then you get there and find out there is no such thing it's all perfectly natural scientific explanation! The vessel containing the poison was never described in enough depth unfortunately to justify it but they did hint that the King sent the demons to the bottom of the city in a bronze vessel, which made you think supernatural, and it makes sense that a nomad in the desert would know the tale that way from ancient times when in reality it was just toxin dumped in the water. That's actually one of the few very good story setups in gaming, IMO. They set your expectations for one thing, it turns out to be something else, and when you look back at the story you realize they were telling you that from the start.

Horror, no thanks....I know my limits

I actually meant SMTV on Switch. I'd forgotten about EOV! Ugh, my aching backlog.... I don't mind the stories in EO, they add something. If anything they aren't done well enough. EO had become too roguelike for its own good and that shakes it up, but honestly, Persona Q is hands down the best example of that whole gameplay format to the point it's going to be hard to get into EO again. They really nailed it. Characters, interactions, the nice touches, plus EO exploration all in one. I never finished that game and I feel bad about it. But it was just so good. I tend to choke on FOEs in all of them though

I think Mario RPG is on the WiiU eshop if you have a WiiU, you really owe it to yourself to play it. Some aspects haven't aged well but it's pretty short for an RPG. More importantly it's the only time ever you will get to play a collaboration between old Squaresoft (the FFVII Squaresoft) and Nintendo. Purists love TTYD the best, and it probably is the best, technically, but the original with its very Squaresoft pure RPG touches and characters really was magic. And the pre-rendered art style never REALLY gets old, it just gets more charming. It's not a terribly challenging RPG, but that's not the point.

Paper Mario N64 I actually haven't played, but heard it was good. Sticker Star..gag. That wasn't really a Paper Mario/M&L, it wasn't really an RPG at all, and in many ways it really just wasn't a good game in any way. Color Splash inherits most of its combat flaws but at least manages to be a good, fun game. Sticker Star wasn't even that. It was the oddest of the whole franchise. Keep in mind Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi are both spin-offs of Mario RPG: Legend of the 7 Stars, but they're also different. Paper Mario used t be the true successor, and that's made by Intelligent Systems (FE), M&L has really taken on the RPG mantle (wonder how their Switch games will go?! Exciting!) and that's Alpha Dream. But the original SNES Mario RPG is the only one made by Square.

@Peek-a-boo You're a Brit. Based on the sales charts that automatically disqualifies your opinion on quality gaming as rubbish

Seriously though I think the bit point you listed in the "disagree" column is the one that really broke the 7th gen. "Online gaming." It was always there on PC, and was always it's own niche. In 7th gen, games became mostly ABOUT the online, and gaming devolved instead of grand adventures and explorations of the unknown into being a violent gun-based virtual recreation of a sports arena, first and foremost , with team play and replaying the same competitive matches over and over and over and obsessing over the meta and such. I say that as a slight hypocrite as a big fan of Splatoon, but that's the one that feels a little different. Still not sure how much I want to get back into it again. I did my 6 months or so. It's probably best to move on. Still, that "sports-like competition" environment that was the focus after online became a thing.....especially as a former PC gamer, I'd been there and done all that in the late 90's. It got boring, I moved on, back to exploring new worlds. The result was the endless brown-grey rehashes of samey games trying to get in on that market. I think that's really what defined the 7th gen, and for those not into arena combat, the generation was lacking a lot of true creation. Mostly it was the generation where PC game companies moved into the console space and stuck primarily with whatever the prevailing trend was. It had some high points but they were pretty infrequent (and less so if you're not a horror fan.)

My spoiler tags in that post refuse to work for some reason, I don't know why. Apologies to everyone that hasn't played Uncharted 3 or 4 until I figure it out!

@NEStalgia Regarding UC4, I thought Avery going insane meshed well with the game's overarching exploration of greed and obsession with regard to Rafe and Nathan. Remember, he double-crossed EVERYONE, even killing his friend, in order to claim riches for himself. He was obviously paranoid of everyone around him and, as he further isolated himself, lost all grip on reality. I thought it made sense contextually.

The only thing I didn't like was Nadine. She had no purpose in the plot other than to be The Dragon for Rafe. No character arc. She's disappears at the end of the game and nothing changes. She's the loose thread in the game's otherwise excellently woven narrative.

I tolerated the story in Persona Q because, well, it's Persona, but I feel like any overt narrative elements mesh poorly with the Etrian formula, which is all about random explorers getting together and braving the depths of terrifying labyrinths and dungeons. Adding cutscenes, premade characters, etc. destroys that balance and, furthermore, obscures the smaller and more interesting stories that organically emerge as you play the game. I don't mind limited dialogue from NPCs, quests that have some narrative structure, etc. But I hate any attempt at making the Etrian games more like normal JRPGs. They're unique and perfect the way they are. I'm glad EO5 seems to be classic EO and doesn't appear to force too many story elements on the player.

I do like Persona Q, though, as I think it's sufficiently distinct enough to be its own sort of game, even if the exploration is pure EO.

And yeah, there was never any doubt that we were getting SMT V. I just hope we don't have to wait until 2020 to get it. Being developed for an HD platform means its going to take longer to develop. I might take another stab at Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga in the meantime.

Regarding spoiler tags, make sure you include one set for each paragraph. Putting a line break in-between the beginning and ending tags seems to break them.

@Ralizah I just think that although it made sense contextually they never really explored why not just he, but seemingly the entire council went insane. It was not just Avery who was acting more than a little crazed, it was the whole bunch of them. He was just the last nut to fall off the tree. And, yeah, Nadine was pointless other than to be a foil for Rafe. Though I suppose she didn't need to be more. She was the hired hired muscle, and in the end she was nothing more than the hired muscle. She wasn't anything more than they claimed she was supposed to be, which is suitably realistic if somewhat boring. In that context the error might have been the dead-end attempts early on to make her more than just a PMC contractor.

Well I have to say I'm not a fan of roguelike aimless dungeon crawls overall. I like feeling like I'm there for a purpose beyond treasure hunting so I have a bias there. I get bored when the whole goal is just "find the exit to get to something even harder." But I don't think the way they've been doing that story detracts from the dungeon crawl. It's still open ended, and never really interferes. And I never found much in the way of emerging stories in regular EO, just an endless dungeon crawl for the fun of it. But again, I'm not a fan of "emergent gameplay" in general. To me it's like being told to play legos and make believe in my game I don't need story, but I hate when they get into "the story is whatever story you create". I thought that was called role playing...which is what the genre is!

But I love Persona Q. It's just as exploration driven, but also includes a story on top of it. Having a story doesn't really interfere with exploration and open ended-ness, and the character moments are a highlight to keep driving me forward.

SMTV is slated for 2017, at least for Japan. So far they're not backing down (we'll see on Sunday), so I really doubt it's going to be any later than 2018 for us. MAYBE even 2017 still. They've obviously been working on it for quite a while while doing all the other games for 3DS to have a release date that ambitious. Unless they're just making dates up, but Atlus doesn't tend to do that and they're not foreign to HD development. I'm guessing it leans heavily on Persona 5 code. (Which makes me that much more sad that we're not getting Persona 5 on Switch.)

Thanks for the spoiler tip, that was it! That's a pretty shoddy tagging system!

@NEStalgia I originally dismissed online gaming altogether for a couple of years however, when my friends - some of whom don't even live in the same country, let alone the same town as I do - started playing over Xbox Live, it became easier to 'get together' and play a game for an hour or so once a week.

I mostly played games with co-operative mode though, like Halo: Reach, Left 4 Dead, Portal 2 and Resident Evil 5; the single player campaign is quite mediocre, whereas playing it over co-op is great! My highlight was playing Mario Kart 8 online with my friends, which didn't cost me a penny (subscription wise) to play.

Online gaming has its good and bad points.

I do miss the PSone and N64 days of sofa bound multiplayer when we were young, but things change.

That's because Bioware Montreal first full real game was Mass Effect: Andromeda, thay where put together to assist Bioware Edmonton (Original Bioware) on game's like Mass Effect. Montreal did most of the N7 missions and around half of the cinematics for ME2 as well as its DLC, for ME3 thay did the Multiplayer as well as helping on the single-player campaign and also its DLC. Bioware Edmonton (Original Bioware) is working on a new IP most probably why Montreal was given Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Great example of what happens to a lot of companies, they grow above a certain size and they struggle to expand the general talent and work ethic they had previously in order to cover that new team size.

It's clearly what happened to Squaresoft. They really lost their mojo when they merged with Enix. They've done a few good things in the last decade, but very little that anyone would say is a masterpiece.

I worry about Naughty Dog and CD Projekt going that way too. Very few companies can maintain that quality for a long time. Nintendo is really one of the only companies that has managed it. Maybe Rockstar and Bethesda too.

Sorry to be a bother for going off-topic, but where's @CanisWolfred these days?

I just hope that those in-game photos/screenshots of mine didn't make him huff and puff too much!

@Peek-a-boo, he left a week or two ago.

From what I remember, he said that while he likes the community here, he thinks the quality of the articles on the main site has plummeted in the past couple years, and the new site design strains his eyes too much.

Oh, that's a shame... I actually agree with his points however, I too believe that this community is worthwhile and (mostly) easy to get along with. In any case, I hope he decides to pop back in the foreseeable future!

On another note altogether, has anybody on here completed Horizon Zero Dawn?

Things have gotten awfully quiet in the 'other games' folder since the Nintendo Switch suddenly appeared.

I also saw this image elsewhere which goes to show just how extraordinary these past three months have been:

Not yet. Almost done with Zelda, either tonight or tomorrow. I've played HZD for about 30 hours I think, and I've got 3 out of the 5 Tallnecks. After I'm done with Zelda I'll focus on HZD.

Assuming you've beaten the game by now, what did you think of it?

@Octane You are right, yes. I completed it yesterday evening (and was in a bit of a hurry to do so too, as I wanted to clear the way for the last Dark Souls III DLC chapter).

I am more than happy to wait until you have finished the game because, just like The Last Guardian, I shall probably just post a big wall of spoiler-related text, then tap my fingers whilst patiently waiting for a reply.

I had a bundle of fun with Gravity Rush 2 and I loved the return to the survival horror roots in Resident Evil VII, but it's Horizon Zero Dawn that made me happiest all the way through. I genuinely think it will end up being my Game of the Year, even with Breath of the Wild ready and raring to go on my Wii U.

To my surprise, the story - and the characters within - ended up being my favourite things about the game, alongside the breathtaking visuals (that were created by literal wizards!) and the living and breathing world Guerrilla Games has created with painstaking attention to detail.

It's a top, top game.

Now that BotW is finished, I'm back to wanting to play on the PS4. I really have to finish Nioh seeing as it was a gift from the bf. But fricken Kingdom Hearts 1.5/2.5 comes out today and I never had a PS3 so of course I'm going to get it. With that there will finally be a single place to play every single Kingdom Hearts games...minus Re:Coded, 358/2, and Chi, though I'm not broken up about that, haha.

@Peek-a-boo I haven't played HZD for an entire week, because I want to finish Zelda first, but I can't wait to return. What I've played so far was awesome. I like the combat and animations (don't mean the faces!), they're great, but having played Zelda, I did find myself humping walls and cliff expecting to climb them... We'll see how that goes!

Still need to play Gravity Rush 2. I think that's my next game after Horizon. Don't worry, I'll get to Bloodborne as soon as I can, but I'm currently moving and it's packed in a box.. somewhere!! Don't know where exactly and I don't think I get the chance to unpack everything anytime soon. I feel like a game dev delaying my game a million times haha!