Xenich wrote: ↑ October 25th, 2024, 01:31Odd, I never noticed any issues. Ran smooth for me, even at extremely high resolutions. I wonder what the cause was.
It was also very choppy for me around release. Not consistently from what I remember, but there were some areas running really poorly.
Ah, I didn't finish it so I may have not got to those areas.1998 wrote: ↑ October 25th, 2024, 05:51It was also very choppy for me around release. Not consistently from what I remember, but there were some areas running really poorly.Xenich wrote: ↑ October 25th, 2024, 01:31Odd, I never noticed any issues. Ran smooth for me, even at extremely high resolutions. I wonder what the cause was.
Is this game good? Yes ka No ka Hanbun ka?
Yes, it is very good, probably my favorite game to come out this year. Spent 300 hours playing. I played through the story on hard difficulty and then beat everything up through the Lucilius true final boss. Only thing I didn't do was the four patch super ultra hard quests, which I don't think the devs intended for everyone to beat. It probably helps though that I had already been reading the visual novel gacha for 7 years prior and was already pretty invested in the characters, Hideo Minaba's art, and Uematsu's and Narita's music, and was looking forward to it getting a high production value 3D game.
From what I have heard, the English dub was not very good, and also you could tell at times reading the subtitles that they did not match the tone of the gacha or how the characters are supposed to act (most conspicuous moment was Rackam saying "well, that just happened").
The character models (when properly lit in cutscenes and certain battle areas) and the visual effects look fantastic. I'm hard press to think of other anime JRPG with characters and VFX that looks this good. Trails and Valkyria Chronicles come close in the character department but this is really something else, and nothing comes close to the VFX quality. The environments also look good, though Xenoblade probably has the edge in more imaginative and grandiose JRPG environments. The Granblue 2D illustrations look superb as usual.
One of the new characters in the story (not playable), Gallanza, felt pretty derivative. Draph male who is one of the chief lieutenants of the empire who wants fights. Already seen him two times before in the mainline game with Ghandharva and Baragona. I quite liked the new original characters of Magielle, Roland, and Id. Shame they haven't been added to the mainline game yet.
Story wise, I'm a little peeved by there being a third Bahamut. The foundational lore of the setting in the gacha is that the god of the GBF setting, Bahamut, was split into two and the universe was split into two: the Sky realm which GBF takes place in, and the Astral realm which is never visited. Gran's sidekick Vyrn is the reincarnation of the Sky half of Bahamut, and the Astral realm Bahamut is over in the Astral realm which is inaccessible to the Skydwellers. No one has managed to cross the boundary between worlds since the Astrals retreated at the end of the War 2,000 years ago, and the Astrals who were left behind (Loki, Lucilius, Beelzebub, etc) have been unable to return home. It is highly unlikely that this is the Astral side Bahamut. So where did this Third Bahamut come from? It's never satisfactorily explained.
If I had a complaint, it's that the postgame bosses are rather unimaginative. You get to fight the cool story bosses a couple of more times but otherwise you're mostly fighting generic enemies: more goblins riding wolves, more giant skeletons, more golems, more crocodiles, and more dragons, etc. The penultimate boss was the only thing new that I hadn't fought before. It's a shame, because the gacha has a wealth of fantastical monster designs but they're unused here.
I liked that the true final boss was human sized, Lucilius (not a spoiler since it's just a bonus fight that was patched in and has nothing to do with Relink's story), so you weren't slashing at the back of a dragon's ankles. Was pretty climatic.
Other issue off of the top of my head is that a lot of the roles like tanking and healing or buffing/debuffing become pointless in the endgame, since almost all missions boil down to "kill the boss to win". There are only a couple of "hold out and defend" sidequests early on, and that's it. And because you have limited resources, and later on have a 10 or 15 minute timer, and because of the sheer damage potential of damage oriented builds and due to this being a 2 or 3 hit game where you can't really tank hits and live (also making healing roles pointless), you wind up just turning everyone into a glass cannon to try to burn down the boss before you run out of lives/time. For a Relink 2, I would like to see the other roles be tuned to be more viable, and more variety in mission objectives/design so as to encourage setups other than 4x glass cannons.
If you guys want to play together (as in do the quests, can't do the main story together) I would be happy to reinstall. I mained Vaseraga in the endgame, though I can also switch to a different character if one of you guys want to play as Vas. I found him to be the most comfortable to play since I can't button mash or do combos, and Vas is just about charging up for 2 seconds your XXYY quadruple heavy swings.
Oh cry me a ******* river.
It's how val discusses a game, I like it
The kids are calling it quality posting
any gud?
Val the Moofia Boss wrote: ↑ November 7th, 2024, 17:53Yes, it is very good, probably my favorite game to come out this year. Spent 300 hours playing. I played through the story on hard difficulty and then beat everything up through the Lucilius true final boss. Only thing I didn't do was the four patch super ultra hard quests, which I don't think the devs intended for everyone to beat. It probably helps though that I had already been reading the visual novel gacha for 7 years prior and was already pretty invested in the characters, Hideo Minaba's art, and Uematsu's and Narita's music, and was looking forward to it getting a high production value 3D game.
From what I have heard, the English dub was not very good, and also you could tell at times reading the subtitles that they did not match the tone of the gacha or how the characters are supposed to act (most conspicuous moment was Rackam saying "well, that just happened").
- Good aesthetics, faithfully adapts Akihiko Yoshida's and Hideo Minaba's designs from the gacha.
- Fantastic soundtrack by Uematsu and Narita. Also reuses a couple stellar tracks (Zero from the gacha, and the Wings of Terror cover from the Stella Manga album)
- Pleasant characters, the good guys are good. I didn't want to punch any of the heroes in the face, which is a sadly low bar these days.
- Good Japanese voice acting. Dunno about the English dub. I'm used to hearing the Japanese voices from the gacha, and what little I heard of the English dub from trailers did not sound inspiring.
- Nice looking fantasy environments. If I had to nitpick, I was a little bummed as the Zegagrande Skydom that this game is set in is an aesthetic rehash of Phantagarde, which is overexposed. Phantagarde was the first Skydom in the gacha and most side storylines are set in Phantagarde since the devs want new players to have easy access to those side storylines without having to play through 80 chapters to get to Nahlegrande with it's more original fusion of medieval European castles with Japanese/Chinese/Thai architecture. (See my recent post in the art thread for examples)
- Story is good enough. The writing in Relink isn't deep stuff like Xenogears or Trails or even some of the gacha's storylines, and some moments can be rather cliche, but it serves its purpose as getting you from cool setpiece to cool setpiece, and some of the moments were admittedly pretty fun. If you're a fan of the gacha game like me then some of the lore in Relink makes no sense and can feel a little fanficy, though (where are the Enforcers aka the world police during all of this? How does this random cult in this completely different Skydom know about Lyria and Gran? There being inexplicably being a 3rd Bahamut when the origin story of the GBF setting is that there was only one Bahamut and he got split into two, etc).
- PC port is overall good. I've had no major issues, though the framerate does drop a little in the first town (Folca) even on a 3070ti at 4K, which I thought was a little odd. Also, if you press F12 to take a Steam screenshot, the game will stutter for a second. I had to use the Nvidia geforce screenshot keybind (or Microsoft Xbox screenshot key, I forgot which) to take lots of screenshots without constant stutters during gameplay.
- There are network issues, though. I might queue up for the most popular quest in the game at prime time but then get repeated "no matches found" and have to retry over and over until it work, even though the game still has a big active playerbase on steam. The matchmaking/network connectivity issue is a common complaint. If you make a lobby and then queue for a quest it works just fine, though.
The character models (when properly lit in cutscenes and certain battle areas) and the visual effects look fantastic. I'm hard press to think of other anime JRPG with characters and VFX that looks this good. Trails and Valkyria Chronicles come close in the character department but this is really something else, and nothing comes close to the VFX quality. The environments also look good, though Xenoblade probably has the edge in more imaginative and grandiose JRPG environments. The Granblue 2D illustrations look superb as usual.
One of the new characters in the story (not playable), Gallanza, felt pretty derivative. Draph male who is one of the chief lieutenants of the empire who wants fights. Already seen him two times before in the mainline game with Ghandharva and Baragona. I quite liked the new original characters of Magielle, Roland, and Id. Shame they haven't been added to the mainline game yet.
Story wise, I'm a little peeved by there being a third Bahamut. The foundational lore of the setting in the gacha is that the god of the GBF setting, Bahamut, was split into two and the universe was split into two: the Sky realm which GBF takes place in, and the Astral realm which is never visited. Gran's sidekick Vyrn is the reincarnation of the Sky half of Bahamut, and the Astral realm Bahamut is over in the Astral realm which is inaccessible to the Skydwellers. No one has managed to cross the boundary between worlds since the Astrals retreated at the end of the War 2,000 years ago, and the Astrals who were left behind (Loki, Lucilius, Beelzebub, etc) have been unable to return home. It is highly unlikely that this is the Astral side Bahamut. So where did this Third Bahamut come from? It's never satisfactorily explained.
If I had a complaint, it's that the postgame bosses are rather unimaginative. You get to fight the cool story bosses a couple of more times but otherwise you're mostly fighting generic enemies: more goblins riding wolves, more giant skeletons, more golems, more crocodiles, and more dragons, etc. The penultimate boss was the only thing new that I hadn't fought before. It's a shame, because the gacha has a wealth of fantastical monster designs but they're unused here.
I liked that the true final boss was human sized, Lucilius (not a spoiler since it's just a bonus fight that was patched in and has nothing to do with Relink's story), so you weren't slashing at the back of a dragon's ankles. Was pretty climatic.
Other issue off of the top of my head is that a lot of the roles like tanking and healing or buffing/debuffing become pointless in the endgame, since almost all missions boil down to "kill the boss to win". There are only a couple of "hold out and defend" sidequests early on, and that's it. And because you have limited resources, and later on have a 10 or 15 minute timer, and because of the sheer damage potential of damage oriented builds and due to this being a 2 or 3 hit game where you can't really tank hits and live (also making healing roles pointless), you wind up just turning everyone into a glass cannon to try to burn down the boss before you run out of lives/time. For a Relink 2, I would like to see the other roles be tuned to be more viable, and more variety in mission objectives/design so as to encourage setups other than 4x glass cannons.
If you guys want to play together (as in do the quests, can't do the main story together) I would be happy to reinstall. I mained Vaseraga in the endgame, though I can also switch to a different character if one of you guys want to play as Vas. I found him to be the most comfortable to play since I can't button mash or do combos, and Vas is just about charging up for 2 seconds your XXYY quadruple heavy swings.
With a bit more organization/meat, this might as well be a game review.
viewtopic.php?p=15441-gord#p15441fkirenicus wrote: ↑ November 15th, 2024, 16:14Anyone tried Gord? On a scale of 1-10 where 10 is "non-buynary" , how high is the "Veilguard factor" here?
https://www.gog.com/en/game/gord_deluxe_edition
Played it on release. It struggled with trying to be too "modern" for the times with all of its new aspects of play and ended up losing the feel and depth of the previous titles. It was multiple CD's at the time and required swapping out discs in play constantly (If I remember right). Spent too much time trying to dazzle with the graphics and animations and cheesed a lot of the game play elements.
He he, thanks. One of those villagers really looked like slav part, I guess...rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ November 16th, 2024, 14:08viewtopic.php?p=15441-gord#p15441fkirenicus wrote: ↑ November 15th, 2024, 16:14Anyone tried Gord? On a scale of 1-10 where 10 is "non-buynary" , how high is the "Veilguard factor" here?
https://www.gog.com/en/game/gord_deluxe_edition
Gloomhaven is on a decent sale. Is it any good? The physical board game is quite popular.
Jordy wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 09:11Gloomhaven is on a decent sale. Is it any good? The physical board game is quite popular.
IMO the board game is better. I dunno why, I just didn't get the same "mood" with the computer game version.
fkirenicus wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 09:19IMO the board game is better. I dunno why, I just didn't get the same "mood" with the computer game version.Jordy wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 09:11Gloomhaven is on a decent sale. Is it any good? The physical board game is quite popular.
Isn't the board game quite rare and expensive?
All the reviews I read at the time said it was ****.Xenich wrote: ↑ November 16th, 2024, 14:17Played it on release. It struggled with trying to be too "modern" for the times with all of its new aspects of play and ended up losing the feel and depth of the previous titles. It was multiple CD's at the time and required swapping out discs in play constantly (If I remember right). Spent too much time trying to dazzle with the graphics and animations and cheesed a lot of the game play elements.
Didn't do well on release and I remember only playing it a bit before I dropped it due to lack of interest.
Jordy wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 09:48Isn't the board game quite rare and expensive?fkirenicus wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 09:19IMO the board game is better. I dunno why, I just didn't get the same "mood" with the computer game version.Jordy wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 09:11Gloomhaven is on a decent sale. Is it any good? The physical board game is quite popular.
Hmm. Purchased it around this time 2 or 3 years ago. At that time it had been out for about a year at the most, I think. Guess they stopped printing shortly after we got our copy, then.
But how many purchase/how big a market is there for a board game that weighs about 10-15 kilos or something? 
Pretty much. It was like someone who knew nothing about Wizardry decided to make a game using all the modern gimmicks of the time.Tweed wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 10:13All the reviews I read at the time said it was ****.Xenich wrote: ↑ November 16th, 2024, 14:17Played it on release. It struggled with trying to be too "modern" for the times with all of its new aspects of play and ended up losing the feel and depth of the previous titles. It was multiple CD's at the time and required swapping out discs in play constantly (If I remember right). Spent too much time trying to dazzle with the graphics and animations and cheesed a lot of the game play elements.
Didn't do well on release and I remember only playing it a bit before I dropped it due to lack of interest.
Jordy wrote: ↑ November 19th, 2024, 09:11Gloomhaven is on a decent sale. Is it any good? The physical board game is quite popular.
It's one of my favorite games, but the audience is extremely narrow. You have to like extremely hard tactical gameplay with heavy resource constraints, bordering on puzzle-like. I have 100+ hours in it playing on the hardest difficulty (which is probably only suitable for single-player). It might be the best game I've ever played for pure tactics. You have to put in the time to learn it though. Note that the solo scenarios DLC has abysmal reviews, but I enjoyed figuring them out.
A nice touch is that the narrator for the pre-mission story blurbs is great, which adds more than you would expect to a game like this. Normally you would read the text in 10 seconds and not really take it in, but the narration does a good job of setting the scene and making it feel like a role-playing campaign rather than a series of unrelated generic maps.
The one thing I really didn't like is that apparently in the tabletop game, when you max a hero and "retire" him, you can put a sticker on one of his cards which serves as a permanent buff to that card. If you reroll the same class, you get that buff. That feature is totally absent from the PC version, which eliminates any incentive you would have to retire a character and roll a new one. I haven't played the tabletop, but from what I understand, it's a pretty significant omission.
Is Darkest Dungeon 2 any good? "Tried" the first game but never got too far into it, was wondering if I should get into it at some point and then play through to the second game.
they don't have a whole lot in common.DagothGeas5 wrote: ↑ December 29th, 2024, 02:24was wondering if I should get into it at some point and then play through to the second game.
