93 reviews liked by Parma


This game was absolutely written by chasers.

This review contains spoilers

My favourite part of this Fantasy RPG is when you ride the Starship Enterprise shooting down TIE Fighters to go where no man has gone before and win the respect of the princesses

Omori

2020

i ran over 6 pedestrians but its ok because i forgave myself

If anything, the game isn't committing to its weird ideas enough? For all the complaining about things like how much anxiety stuff like the consumable checkpoint system i.e. vestige seeds cause (Which would actually be fucking awesome, for the love of god please bring back some tension when exploring levels in these sorts of games), the illusion falls away when temporary checkpoint spots are so frequent, and the one place you can always teleport back to is also the place that infinitely sells seeds for not very much. It used to be higher, but people complained enough that they halved the price. Thus, there's no real consequence to just placing a checkpoint down whenever you see one.

Complaints about how you need to use the lamp to pop the umbral parasites to knock The Hushed Saint off his horse in his boss fight are also pretty funny to me, because that's exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see; Have the umbral lamp be used in a way that adds a bit of a puzzle element on top of the standard Soulslike roll-and-slash-'em-up without replacing it. Sadly, the game doesn't really do this to the same extent after; The few times it tries to after just come off as token with how little of an advantage you get from using it, or unneeded with how easy the boss is. Alternatively, where are the other umbral parasites that add some sort of buff to normal enemies besides just invincibility + regeneration? One that adds poison? One that increases their damage? No? Just on a couple of bosses? Ok then.

The dual-world system in general is also weirdly underexplored. There are a few moments where you find a pretty lengthy path in the Umbral, you dive in there, and actually find yourself with the timer ticking down, or have to use the lamp in a way that allows you to avoid fully immersing yourself into the umbral, but most of the time, it's just another part of the main path that you have to go into; Certainly not helping that the whole "avoid having to go into the umbral" puzzles I mentioned are often undercut by it just giving you an escape point right after you cross it. This is where I think the movement restrictions (i.e. only being able to walk) while holding up the umbral lamp greatly hold the opportunities presented by this gameplay back. You could present far more scenarios to strategically use the lamp to partially immerse themselves if they could fall or sprint while holding up the lamp. There are a few more neat uses, like the one time where they use it to hide a level (Revelation Depths), and a few times where you have to fight a boss in it, but said bosses are literally just normal enemies with a health bar, and a pretty crappy NPC fight. At least the last one added some incentive to backtrack to various levels to find the required items to reach him, but where's stuff like having to go into the umbral to use a shortcut, thus raising the stakes for a bit? Or using the umbral to find an alternate entrance to the level? Or a level set entirely within the Umbral, with you having to scavenge around for checkpoint spots that aren't part of it to catch your breath and rest there?

Other than that, my complaints aren't anything you haven't heard of already if you've been paying any attention to the discourse around this game; Excessive use of ganks, mediocre enemy variety with a fair few reskins (Looking at you, Harrower Dervla! Don't think I didn't catch you splitting your moveset in half to create Crimson Rectors and Proselytes.), balancing, overreliance on tracking, skating on your attacks, overtuned enemy stats, nonexistent variety in movesets within weapon classes, bosses too easy, yada yada. Still though, I'm opting to give this a step above an above average rating. The art direction, the physicality of the world, and a lot of the enemy designs certainly help to get the game on my good side. But the overall experience was pretty electrifying, warts and all, if just for how willing it is to try to make exploring levels tense again. It's willing to throw you into stressful situations. And most importantly for me, it remembered that Soulslikes aren't just action games. It managed to ignite a sense of adventure in me in a way that other Soulslikes haven't.

And just to really be a shitter, there's something appealingly ironic about the way Dark Souls and Demon Souls got attention and praise for flouting what was "conventional wisdom" in games at the time, and now, a portion (Not entirety by any means! Don't misunderstand me) of flack towards this game was for the way it flouted conventional wisdom as established within Soulslikes. At the very least, this game bothered to strike out on a pretty interesting vision of some kind. If there ends up being a Lords of the Fallen 3, or a DLC of some kind, I'll definitely be on that rickety, experimental train ride.

Alternatively, this could all just be copium on my end, and I'll have an SMT V arc the way my man Fortayee did.

This game is kind of vapid and uninteresting, but on the bright side you aren't even allowed to interface with it in a way that requires any thinking.

Almost thirty years after its initial release, this is still bizarrely overvalued as an emotional experience, and the remake leans into this with a florid translation meant to shore up its artistic cred. "Look, your counter-cultural adolescent fixation is actually deep and literary after all!" Square now claims of a game where you can fart on a dinosaur until it dies. The effort to canonize games as art has given birth to a whole lot of anecdotal overexaggeration, but I seriously cannot comprehend forming a legitimate bond with any of these caricatures, cute and expressive as they are.

The dishonesty is a shame, because even taken at its truer comic-book face, Live a Live has always been ambitious and rich with the spirit of experimentation that characterized Square's best work in the mid-to-late 90s. Unfortunately none of these virtues extend to the inane battle system, in which nearly every character sports ten or twelve different moves when there are at most two optimal options for any given encounter. It is no coincidence that the best chapters in the game (Sundown and Cube) are the ones that downplay the combat the most.

The Distant Future, in fact, has always been the most interesting chapter for this reason. While many of the other chapters pioneer early iterations of genre systems - item synthesis (Pogo), a crude skill point gimmick (Shifu), performance-based storytelling/rewards (Oboromaru) - Cube's chapter is brave enough to ask whether JRPG storytelling can survive without any mechanical hooks at all (save the last boss, only necessary as a justification for the frame narrative). Does it succeed? Insofar as anything ripping off two of the best sci-fi films of all time will, sure, but it's also hampered by its lack of depth. There just isn't enough time to take any of these characters anywhere interesting, and that goes for every chapter. It's a double-edged sword, because the breezy pace is a positive (and this battle system could not support a 40-hour game), but none of our seven protagonists make for especially strong anti-hate thesis statements when the time comes to wrap the whole thing up. The narrative is left fundamentally wanting, doubly so if you have even basic knowledge of English prefixes and can predict what lies in store for the final chapter.

Even if it doesn't make good on its lofty pretenses, there is plenty to enjoy here and it's one of the more justifiable expressions of the remake fetishism running rampant through the industry right now. We should at least be thankful that we got this and not Bahamut Lagoon.

there's a point halfway through where you realize a lot of what you assumed was just humor because of the satirical tone of the writing was just the game saying what it meant. like, okay, let's examine the white supremacy shit: there is no route where the text is "hell yeah we love white supremacy it rocks!" and the joke is that this is a stupid text. the text itself is instead very explicit about how this is an abhorrent and violent ideology which even treating with apathy is wrong. the joke is, holy shit isn't it fucked up that we're just kinda describing the real world at you? people believe this and act like this?

so then there is no reason to believe that the rest of what this game is saying on the surface level is any less sincere and straightforward. and man it has some powerful shit to say at times, i'll be honest. some parts toward the end of my playthrough had a fairly strong emotional impact. feminist kino.

Las vagas similitudes de Dark Souls 2 con la saga King's Field solo sacan a relucir el deterioro en el diseño vertebral de estos juegos. Donde antes el protagonismo estaba en el lugar, ahora lo está en la acción. Donde antes se buscaba ponerte en los pies de un aventurero y actuar en primera persona, ahora se limitan a saturar el pasillo al siguiente atajo de enemigos en sus estudiadas posiciones. Poco queda de la espeleología de la saga prima, aunque se ven retazos. Se intuyen paralelismos en los golems del bosque renacidos en árboles o en la imagen de un rey Vendrick consumido en su soledad (en Dark Souls 3 habrían convertido este encuentro en una pelea multifásica). Existen ecos de cierta ciudad subterránea en esta aventura suplementaria, donde buscamos la corona de un rey olvidado en lo profundo de un templo custodiado por un dragón. Cuando pisamos una placa que activa una trampa o accionamos con una flecha un mecanismo que descubre un pasadizo secreto, nos viene el lejano recuerdo de cuando éramos arqueólogos y no guerreros.

Played this since it won GOTY. Something I haven't seen in the public conversation at all about BG3 is how incredibly badly engineered it is.

I've had multiple quests bug out on me entirely (sazza the goblin, the emerald grove quest, and the inn defense battle), one of which resulted in me permanently losing a character.

Combat is incredibly bugged. There is a roughly 10-15 percent chance on a melee attack that the attacking character will stand there for upwards of 10 seconds, and no animation will play at all. Combat can start, and you won't be able to end your turn, or use any action, or even save or load the game. The enemy AI is so laggy, and as the game throws more and more at you, you can wait upwards of 3 IRL minutes for you to take a single turn (happened to me when fighting gortash).

The game is a hundred hours long, but I would wager 30 percent of that is literally just waiting in combat. Any competently made strategy game would allow you to fast forward enemy turns, or skip them entirely. If a set of enemies are in a contiguous action block, just have them execute their move actions all at once.

This is /after/ Larian has patched the game and applied multiple thousands (!) of bugfixes -- I can't imagine how bad it must have been for someone playing a few months ago.

===DISREGARDING ALL OF THESE INCREDIBLE TECHNICAL ISSUES ===

There is a massive pacing/content distribution issue in the game. Act 1 is okay, but in the roughly 30-40 hours of Act 2, I levelled up maybe 4 (!!) times. There are extremely few NPCs, and you are mostly walking from one middling encounter to the next. Content wise, Act 3 is much better than act 2, but it's incomplete and so buggy and broken so as to be borderline unplayable. Also you hit level cap at basically the very start of it, so for the next 30 hours your characters go nowhere. This is an inexcusable miscalculation.

The encumberment system is also inexcusable. You can already teleport stuff to camp or to another party member (even during combat!) so weight capacity feels like this vestigial organ that no longer has any reason to exist apart to annoy you. If you're a wizard with low strength like I was, it's even worse. Why do I have to stop every 5 minutes to manage the individual inventories of 4 party members? There is ZERO enforced gameplay reason for characters having individualized inventories at all. Just throw it all in a single group inventory and be done with it.

The positive public response to the party characters is largely the result of good VA/mocap, and clearly money was spent in that arena. But at the same time they feel pretty flat to me -- characters don't really DO stuff so much as REACT to stuff.

Take Astarion as a character: his entire being could be summarized and the wiki would be 1/8th the size of any party member's plot in FF7. There's just a lot less going on, and its not very substantive.

As a matter of fact, i went to the BG3 wiki on fextralife or w/e and the article is literally 50 percent by volume a guide on how to fuck him, and the other 50 percent is just a list of how he reacts to stuff.

I really want to watch other people's letsplays of this game, because in earnest I have no idea how this was even in the conversation for GOTY.

There’s something inherently insecure and pathetic about making an entire game to poorly defend the concept behind your own franchise.

It tries to frame itself as a discussion but it comes off as a straw man saying this is wrong, the game spending its entire runtime telling you he’s wrong, he says he’s wrong and goes away. No lesson is learned, nothing is gained, and the status quo is restored like normal. What was the point?

There really is nothing wrong with keeping Pokemon in tiny balls because they helped build a few towns? Because they like it? Imagine making that argument for any actual social justice movement.

Kind of disgusting, but it did give us Hydreigon, probably the best thing Gamefreak ever produced.