Jashugan
Scarface won
50%
50%
I think far too many Quests in this game are either "go here, kill x monsters" or "go here fetch x item" all while following someone in a dungeon. One standout quest in the game is the bell, book, and candle quest. You're approached by an elf that asks you to help him break a curse of the undead attacking him because he's part of the legendary family that governed that area ages ago. It's believable because this quest takes place in the 4th or 5th large area of the open world so I've been fighting these undead throughout the entire game. So you follow him into a castle to do a ritual. As you progress you start to notice that he's lying about some details. The undead isn't only attacking him and he slips up and tells you he wants to raise an army of undead if you pass a persuasion check. By the end, you meet his ancestor that started the curse and he says that the elf is a liar, and he wants to use the undead for an army while the ancestor wants to break the curse. The elf says he wants to use the army to protect the area.
You're now left with two choices, side with the ancestor, kill the elf, and break the curse. Side with the elf, kill the ancestor, and allow him to raise an army of the undead. Morally, both guys have done wrong, ancestor cursed his family while the elf is a liar, there's also no guarantee that the elf can truly control all of these undead.
My problem with this is that you have choices but few consequences outside of killing one of them, and never seeing the other for the rest of the game. The undead still spawns throughout the game if you side with the ancestor, and you'll never see the army or hear about them from anyone else in the world.
The game still has a good amount of reactivity. I was in the underground part of Rathir and I started combat with one of the citizens, and the rest of the citizens fled in fear because they were not fighters. If this was the surface, the guards and the rest of the citizenry would've attacked me back.
One thing they should've done is had recipes for the shards in sagecrafting as they do for alchemy. I can't remember all the shard combos to make the gems without testing all of them. A big oversight on their part.
There are a few other technical issues. One quest had to do with a dwarf in a cave, I suppose the dwarf was supposed to die but he doesn't and I can still talk to him but he won't move. The other dwarves outside all believe he died though.
There is stuttering every time you walk through the long hallways between zones and the loading times are terrible on the PS4 Pro.
Fae blades & daggers stealth kills: The game forces me out of crouch after the kill. It also doesn't have an animation for some of the kills which is weird. I don't like the context-sensitive assassinations because it is so easy to press the button and it instead counts as a regular attack because the button prompt didn't come on the screen. If a monster is moving while you press the assassination button, the attack doesn't hit the enemy and instead, you're forced out of stealth and exposed. WTF? You also can't assassinate enemies that are sitting in a chair.
Missing Keys is another quest that would've probably been decent if the game had some proper faction system that remembered choices. I did this quest after completing the traveler's faction questline. In doing so, their primary camp is raided by the gnome authorities, and their leader is imprisoned, but our PC is named a legend of the camp and the entire traveler's faction. The quest giver did not even know who I am, she mentions visiting the sun camp but is completely unaware that it is raided and destroyed by the gnome authority. She also comments on me being a poor fit for the travelers if I ever try joining because I gave her the stolen documents for free which are funny because she's completely oblivious to the fact that I am a member of the travelers. At least the game acknowledged the fact that I stole the document and read it before ever attempting the quest. However, it is funny that an elf downstairs is completely aware of what happened to the sun camp.
It's far too easy to be OP. Exploring and finding Lorestones and completing main and faction quests give the player permanent stat bonuses. By the end of the game, I had 50 permanent stat bonuses. On top of the OP random gear, I found that it was far too easy to 2 or 3-shot bosses and barely take any damage as the archmage, the most OP destiny in the game.
No real point in using money since NPC shops are instanced and will spawn items the first time you ever speak to them and will never update items to be better than that afterward. So I ended up with 8 million gold that I no longer used for anything else because I just sold gear and didn't need to create new equipment because randomized gear was good enough.
By mid-game pure damage matters more than everything else. All armor in the game has a meager stat investment necessary to wear them. For example, to max any of the three ability trees in the game: might, finesse, and sorcery, you need about 115 points. However, to wear the best armor in the game, you only need 35 points in any tree. Since most builds in the game involve finesse or might, it means your player character will already have enough stat investment to wear just about any armor for your specific build by the very early game. Finesse aka the rogue build is just as tough as the might build because finesse gear generally has about 70% of the armor rating of might armor. You will never be threatened by enemy attacks due to how ridiculously tough most builds will be in this game, and that's before you even bother socketing gems in rare armor or building your own gear.
On the flip side, the archmage build is the most powerful in the game. You can generally one-shot most groups of enemies and bosses with the meteor or tempest spells. These are the only two abilities in the entire game that are actually powerful, however, things become boring once these two spells are constantly spammed. There isn't even a cooldown for tempest once you've got upgraded it past its limit.
Overall, this was a long game. Took 122 hours to complete everything. I didn't play the fatesworn DLC, because I wasn't going to buy it since they recently released this remaster but wanted to charge for DLC separately. All in all, there was a lot of potential for this title to be one of those big open-world franchises. Wouldn't mind a new installment in the future.
You're now left with two choices, side with the ancestor, kill the elf, and break the curse. Side with the elf, kill the ancestor, and allow him to raise an army of the undead. Morally, both guys have done wrong, ancestor cursed his family while the elf is a liar, there's also no guarantee that the elf can truly control all of these undead.
My problem with this is that you have choices but few consequences outside of killing one of them, and never seeing the other for the rest of the game. The undead still spawns throughout the game if you side with the ancestor, and you'll never see the army or hear about them from anyone else in the world.
The game still has a good amount of reactivity. I was in the underground part of Rathir and I started combat with one of the citizens, and the rest of the citizens fled in fear because they were not fighters. If this was the surface, the guards and the rest of the citizenry would've attacked me back.
One thing they should've done is had recipes for the shards in sagecrafting as they do for alchemy. I can't remember all the shard combos to make the gems without testing all of them. A big oversight on their part.
There are a few other technical issues. One quest had to do with a dwarf in a cave, I suppose the dwarf was supposed to die but he doesn't and I can still talk to him but he won't move. The other dwarves outside all believe he died though.
There is stuttering every time you walk through the long hallways between zones and the loading times are terrible on the PS4 Pro.
Fae blades & daggers stealth kills: The game forces me out of crouch after the kill. It also doesn't have an animation for some of the kills which is weird. I don't like the context-sensitive assassinations because it is so easy to press the button and it instead counts as a regular attack because the button prompt didn't come on the screen. If a monster is moving while you press the assassination button, the attack doesn't hit the enemy and instead, you're forced out of stealth and exposed. WTF? You also can't assassinate enemies that are sitting in a chair.
Missing Keys is another quest that would've probably been decent if the game had some proper faction system that remembered choices. I did this quest after completing the traveler's faction questline. In doing so, their primary camp is raided by the gnome authorities, and their leader is imprisoned, but our PC is named a legend of the camp and the entire traveler's faction. The quest giver did not even know who I am, she mentions visiting the sun camp but is completely unaware that it is raided and destroyed by the gnome authority. She also comments on me being a poor fit for the travelers if I ever try joining because I gave her the stolen documents for free which are funny because she's completely oblivious to the fact that I am a member of the travelers. At least the game acknowledged the fact that I stole the document and read it before ever attempting the quest. However, it is funny that an elf downstairs is completely aware of what happened to the sun camp.
It's far too easy to be OP. Exploring and finding Lorestones and completing main and faction quests give the player permanent stat bonuses. By the end of the game, I had 50 permanent stat bonuses. On top of the OP random gear, I found that it was far too easy to 2 or 3-shot bosses and barely take any damage as the archmage, the most OP destiny in the game.
No real point in using money since NPC shops are instanced and will spawn items the first time you ever speak to them and will never update items to be better than that afterward. So I ended up with 8 million gold that I no longer used for anything else because I just sold gear and didn't need to create new equipment because randomized gear was good enough.
By mid-game pure damage matters more than everything else. All armor in the game has a meager stat investment necessary to wear them. For example, to max any of the three ability trees in the game: might, finesse, and sorcery, you need about 115 points. However, to wear the best armor in the game, you only need 35 points in any tree. Since most builds in the game involve finesse or might, it means your player character will already have enough stat investment to wear just about any armor for your specific build by the very early game. Finesse aka the rogue build is just as tough as the might build because finesse gear generally has about 70% of the armor rating of might armor. You will never be threatened by enemy attacks due to how ridiculously tough most builds will be in this game, and that's before you even bother socketing gems in rare armor or building your own gear.
On the flip side, the archmage build is the most powerful in the game. You can generally one-shot most groups of enemies and bosses with the meteor or tempest spells. These are the only two abilities in the entire game that are actually powerful, however, things become boring once these two spells are constantly spammed. There isn't even a cooldown for tempest once you've got upgraded it past its limit.
Overall, this was a long game. Took 122 hours to complete everything. I didn't play the fatesworn DLC, because I wasn't going to buy it since they recently released this remaster but wanted to charge for DLC separately. All in all, there was a lot of potential for this title to be one of those big open-world franchises. Wouldn't mind a new installment in the future.
2020
Platinum trophy. Delta Difficulty
This game is effectively a stealth shooter. I expect and prefer to play this game as an open-world over-the-top supersoldier type shooter but Crysis isn't that. It's a very slow open forward moving tactical shooter with a lot of the same mechanics you'll find in those types of shooters.
However, a high point in this game is at the end of Chapter Relic. You come up to a landing zone deep in the night of the jungle, but there are enemies around and you don't know it. These enemies have the same capabilities as you, they're 4 Korean soldiers with nanosuits too. You don't know this yet because they aren't showing up on your radar until they turn off stealth mode or start shooting. At this point, I had this very predator-style back and forth where I was sneaking slowly while they were sneaking slowly and I kept baiting them by throwing grenades in open areas and then resuming stealth mode so they would think I was in that position, and they would attack there, allowing me to ambush them.
There's a huge bug in the mission Awakening where you can't see through the sniper scope or the visor when you reach the part where you fight the Koreans in nanosuits.
The final few missions where you fight the aliens are so shit that they completely change the pacing of the game and this game probably has the worst final boss in FPS history. In essence, there are only two alien types - the smaller ones and the bigger ones. They're both airborne-only enemies, and the missions where you encounter them tend to have much smaller maps like the aircraft carrier, and the enemies are bullet sponges that don't have any hit reactions so you're expected to use the stronger weapons such as missile launcher, gauss rifles, and miniguns. It's too bad that these encounters are shit compared to the sandbox nature of all the previous missions. The small aliens can only bum rush or shoot you while the bigger aliens just fly through the air shooting you from blind spots. They're such an aggravating enemy group to fight in comparison to the human + nanosuit soldiers that could do so much more such as flank you, throw grenades, enter stealth mode, use vehicles, etc.
The game has two real boss fights: the Korean general and the massive alien platform. Both are shit. The Korean general is a nanosuit soldier who isn't wearing a helmet but is a massive bullet sponge. Before the fight, you're knocked out and lose all ammunition so you have to use the pistol + SMG in the small room while the general has a minigun. He just eats everything while you scavenge for ammo.
The giant alien at the end of the game is the worst final boss of a shooter in recent memory. It's divided into 4+ different stages. First is an alien walker that you need to shoot with about 12 missile launcher shots, yet it has no hit reactions or health bar to tell you if you're doing anything to it. Then the real boss starts and you have to take down parts in stages while fighting waves of the aforementioned big flying aliens. Crysis is not frenetic nor fast enough of a game to constantly deal with that many enemies on the screen at once while being shot by a massive alien using a freeze ray and big explosions.
This game is effectively a stealth shooter. I expect and prefer to play this game as an open-world over-the-top supersoldier type shooter but Crysis isn't that. It's a very slow open forward moving tactical shooter with a lot of the same mechanics you'll find in those types of shooters.
However, a high point in this game is at the end of Chapter Relic. You come up to a landing zone deep in the night of the jungle, but there are enemies around and you don't know it. These enemies have the same capabilities as you, they're 4 Korean soldiers with nanosuits too. You don't know this yet because they aren't showing up on your radar until they turn off stealth mode or start shooting. At this point, I had this very predator-style back and forth where I was sneaking slowly while they were sneaking slowly and I kept baiting them by throwing grenades in open areas and then resuming stealth mode so they would think I was in that position, and they would attack there, allowing me to ambush them.
There's a huge bug in the mission Awakening where you can't see through the sniper scope or the visor when you reach the part where you fight the Koreans in nanosuits.
The final few missions where you fight the aliens are so shit that they completely change the pacing of the game and this game probably has the worst final boss in FPS history. In essence, there are only two alien types - the smaller ones and the bigger ones. They're both airborne-only enemies, and the missions where you encounter them tend to have much smaller maps like the aircraft carrier, and the enemies are bullet sponges that don't have any hit reactions so you're expected to use the stronger weapons such as missile launcher, gauss rifles, and miniguns. It's too bad that these encounters are shit compared to the sandbox nature of all the previous missions. The small aliens can only bum rush or shoot you while the bigger aliens just fly through the air shooting you from blind spots. They're such an aggravating enemy group to fight in comparison to the human + nanosuit soldiers that could do so much more such as flank you, throw grenades, enter stealth mode, use vehicles, etc.
The game has two real boss fights: the Korean general and the massive alien platform. Both are shit. The Korean general is a nanosuit soldier who isn't wearing a helmet but is a massive bullet sponge. Before the fight, you're knocked out and lose all ammunition so you have to use the pistol + SMG in the small room while the general has a minigun. He just eats everything while you scavenge for ammo.
The giant alien at the end of the game is the worst final boss of a shooter in recent memory. It's divided into 4+ different stages. First is an alien walker that you need to shoot with about 12 missile launcher shots, yet it has no hit reactions or health bar to tell you if you're doing anything to it. Then the real boss starts and you have to take down parts in stages while fighting waves of the aforementioned big flying aliens. Crysis is not frenetic nor fast enough of a game to constantly deal with that many enemies on the screen at once while being shot by a massive alien using a freeze ray and big explosions.
Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) with Xbox Game Pass
94% complete in finish
Definitely one of the best star wars games I played, streaming instead of playing natively hurt some of the experience though.
94% complete in finish
Definitely one of the best star wars games I played, streaming instead of playing natively hurt some of the experience though.
2018
game is bad
Starting a new game since I never beat it and old save was deleted by PS4.
Gonna pick this back up when I pay for the subscription. If only I started with the free trial.
Really odd might I say poor Quest design in A Realm Reborn. You go to a quest and you know who you're supposed to speak to but the quest of says I must speak to another person first to then speak to the person I want to actually talk to. I can't skip speaking to this person first and there isn't unique dialogue anywhere that would be there if this was any other regular western rpg.
Many main Quests are just: go here & click on this & then talk to another person and Quest is complete or go here & watch two cutscenes & Quest is complete. You get a Quest where you're asked to speak to another person so you teleport there then that person says you must speak to/ go to another person so you teleport there.
Far too many fetch Quests and "go here kill X people" Quests. Unfortunately combat isn't fun enough to make up for it from the level 10 - 35 questing experience.
I like the mini game triple triad but 1 big flaw against AI is the rewards. Every AI you can play against has 1 - 4 cards the player can win but the chance to win a card even after winning the mini game is random and the game will give duplicate cards when you win so you can beat an enemy in a triple triad match 20 times and only get a card 8 times and 6 of those cards will be the same card.
Really odd might I say poor Quest design in A Realm Reborn. You go to a quest and you know who you're supposed to speak to but the quest of says I must speak to another person first to then speak to the person I want to actually talk to. I can't skip speaking to this person first and there isn't unique dialogue anywhere that would be there if this was any other regular western rpg.
Many main Quests are just: go here & click on this & then talk to another person and Quest is complete or go here & watch two cutscenes & Quest is complete. You get a Quest where you're asked to speak to another person so you teleport there then that person says you must speak to/ go to another person so you teleport there.
Far too many fetch Quests and "go here kill X people" Quests. Unfortunately combat isn't fun enough to make up for it from the level 10 - 35 questing experience.
I like the mini game triple triad but 1 big flaw against AI is the rewards. Every AI you can play against has 1 - 4 cards the player can win but the chance to win a card even after winning the mini game is random and the game will give duplicate cards when you win so you can beat an enemy in a triple triad match 20 times and only get a card 8 times and 6 of those cards will be the same card.
Hard Mode Boss Difficulty Ranking Easiest - Hardest:
Roche - Easiest human boss since almost all his attacks can be countered.
Specimen H0512
The Valkyrie
Swordipede
Scorpion Sentinel
Crab Warden
The Arsenal
Reno
Airbuster
Failed Experiments
Jenova Dreamweaver
Rufus Shinra & Darkstar
Abzu second fight
Reno & Rude
Whisper Harbinger
Sephiroth
Hell House
Eligor
Roche - Easiest human boss since almost all his attacks can be countered.
Specimen H0512
The Valkyrie
Swordipede
Scorpion Sentinel
Crab Warden
The Arsenal
Reno
Airbuster
Failed Experiments
Jenova Dreamweaver
Rufus Shinra & Darkstar
Abzu second fight
Reno & Rude
Whisper Harbinger
Sephiroth
Hell House
Eligor
Fucc, I messed up getting further into the devil pits. I mistakenly left the room.
I don't know why I keep only fighting mom's heart. Where's the devil and angel from before?
2006
I played a bit of this on PC and I was liking it but the graphics weren't so hot and something about the controls & UI rubbed me the wrong way so I tried it on my Galaxy S10+ and it was a lot better. Clearly the UI was made for a touch screen especially with the use of zooming in and it looks rather clean on my phone than my laptop.
First play through - 36h36m19s
I was given three stars
Important tips the game doesn't tell:
You can group heal & attack with white & black magic spells. When you select the spell, look at the top right hand corner and press all.
Higher overall level is more important than job level because it determines more how many spell charges and damage you do.
First play through - 36h36m19s
I was given three stars
Important tips the game doesn't tell:
You can group heal & attack with white & black magic spells. When you select the spell, look at the top right hand corner and press all.
Higher overall level is more important than job level because it determines more how many spell charges and damage you do.
2016
K:O - 19
Hits - 368
A rank
Hits - 368
A rank
It wasn't until doing one of the harder combat challenges and played more on hard mode that I realized that party members don't have any smart AI to do much on their own without player constantly switching to them.
While mass effect and Dragon Age Origins didn't have the best AI the former had quick abilities of companions mapped to the controller while the latter had a tactics menu to input behavior for companions when certain parameters are met.
This game could go a long way with having that.
Having custom materia loadouts would also allow the player to heavily cut down on the time needed to switch out and pick individual materia in the menu.
The aerial combat is rather poorly designed in this game and becomes more of a problem in hard mode where combat is more serious and deadly. Since Cloud & Tifa have little air control they just leap in the air and stay there until an attack finishes which feels wrong against enemies that can easily strafe in the air or stun lock either character mid-air since neither can control their movement midair. This leads to that annoying thing where Tifa or Cloud automatically jump into the air to miss hitting an enemy that is "out of bounds" because of the invisible walls that only exist for those character's melee attacks.
Also, I can't help but feel that while it's great that knowing your enemy's weakness is important, you won't know an enemy's weakness until you've fought them and can't change equipment in battle. This leads me to game the system by entering combat & using access to learn weaknesses & then reloading save to easily put in the correct weapon + item + materia combo. It's not an easy win in hard mode but it's too efficient but rudimentary.
However, this is my favorite real-time with pause (or slowdown) combat in recent memory.
While mass effect and Dragon Age Origins didn't have the best AI the former had quick abilities of companions mapped to the controller while the latter had a tactics menu to input behavior for companions when certain parameters are met.
This game could go a long way with having that.
Having custom materia loadouts would also allow the player to heavily cut down on the time needed to switch out and pick individual materia in the menu.
The aerial combat is rather poorly designed in this game and becomes more of a problem in hard mode where combat is more serious and deadly. Since Cloud & Tifa have little air control they just leap in the air and stay there until an attack finishes which feels wrong against enemies that can easily strafe in the air or stun lock either character mid-air since neither can control their movement midair. This leads to that annoying thing where Tifa or Cloud automatically jump into the air to miss hitting an enemy that is "out of bounds" because of the invisible walls that only exist for those character's melee attacks.
Also, I can't help but feel that while it's great that knowing your enemy's weakness is important, you won't know an enemy's weakness until you've fought them and can't change equipment in battle. This leads me to game the system by entering combat & using access to learn weaknesses & then reloading save to easily put in the correct weapon + item + materia combo. It's not an easy win in hard mode but it's too efficient but rudimentary.
However, this is my favorite real-time with pause (or slowdown) combat in recent memory.
2016
Clear time: 2:42:21 - A rank
KO: 41 - B Rank
Hits: 661 - B rank
Overall: B rank.
I haven't played this in about 2 or 3 years and I wanted to jump back in to get a few trophies, unfortunately I didn't get any. The sniper boss was utterly fucking ridiculous in this playthrough that I couldn't believe it.
KO: 41 - B Rank
Hits: 661 - B rank
Overall: B rank.
I haven't played this in about 2 or 3 years and I wanted to jump back in to get a few trophies, unfortunately I didn't get any. The sniper boss was utterly fucking ridiculous in this playthrough that I couldn't believe it.
They succeded in making it much harder, I'd say that much. I beat Afterbirth & Afterbirth+ over a dozen times yet only managed to beat this about 3 so far and I started a clean slate.
It is still varied in terms of pick ups and more varied in terms of bosses but it seems that you're far less likely to find those OP power combos like before.
It is still varied in terms of pick ups and more varied in terms of bosses but it seems that you're far less likely to find those OP power combos like before.