Cassylvania Posted July 22, 2022 Share Posted July 22, 2022 15 minutes ago, Briste said: When I said I was getting it, they said it was important to not look anything up. I was expecting soft core kind of stuff and was like, 'sure, no problem'. You were a little more excited about it than that... I liked the review. I didn't think you were actually going to play it. One of the unfortunate things for me is that I almost always review a game extensively before I jump into it. Sometime I watch videos about games I think I have no interest in. I think it usually works to my benefit because it means I'm not going to be fooled into playing a bad game, but there are times when I wish certain things weren't spoiled for me. Doki Doki LCP was one of those. I'm not even sure how they market a game like that. Glad you were able to "enjoy" the experience that I was robbed of. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
realm722 Posted July 22, 2022 Share Posted July 22, 2022 13 hours ago, Briste said: SPOILERS CONTAINED Hide contents I really appreciated the recommendation from my friends and really appreciated them telling me to go in completely blind. I totally judged this book by its cover and I was able to experience the full effects of what the game was trying to do. If I had been spoiled, it wouldn't have been as impactful. Hopefully, if you read all of this, you have already played the game. If you haven't played it yet and got this far, I'm afraid you won't have the same experience I did. I'm sorry for all of the fluff in the first part of this review, but I thought it was important to walk you through the story and my impressions to see just how floored I was by the Sayori hanging scene. A+ from me and so far I'm 2/2 on visual novels since I really enjoyed Steins Gate; as well. I may just have to sprinkle these in a bit more frequently.... I too shall hide my entire reply in a spoiler! Spoiler That was one of the most satisfying reviews/recaps of an experience I've read on here! The fact you got to enjoy it as intended by the developers going into completely blind was spectacular. Each moment where the game hits that "oh crap..." spike of "We're not in Kansas anymore and this isn't a cute waifu dating sim" was perfect. I got spoiled of it as once it started to gain traction there was an incessant amount of: "it's not what it seems!!" which in and of itself kinda removes the shock value. Glad to see you loved it and consider yourself very lucky that you got to bask in all its glory organically! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted July 27, 2022 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 27, 2022 On 7/21/2022 at 10:57 PM, Cassylvania said: I liked the review. I didn't think you were actually going to play it. One of the unfortunate things for me is that I almost always review a game extensively before I jump into it. Sometime I watch videos about games I think I have no interest in. I think it usually works to my benefit because it means I'm not going to be fooled into playing a bad game, but there are times when I wish certain things weren't spoiled for me. Doki Doki LCP was one of those. I'm not even sure how they market a game like that. I don't often check out reviews for games since I'm so far behind on games in general that if someone recommends something to me, I'll pretty much trust their word. I also don't have much of a distinguished palate and pretty much will think everything I play is at least ok. Even if it's not 'great', I figure when you guys recommend something, it could just be for the ha ha's and that can be worth it too. On 7/22/2022 at 11:42 AM, realm722 said: I too shall hide my entire reply in a spoiler! I too am very happy that I was able to experience the full effect of the game. The game really isn't the same if you go into it with a lot of background knowledge. I think it's worth playing even if you do, but the effect will be quite different. I try to stay spoiler free for the most part. I'll check out trophy lists and guides, but nothing that goes too deep into story. I have to give a lot of credit to many of the guide writers as they do a great job of keeping trophy descriptions spoiler free when they can. My ignorance with games due to a lack of research has been a blessing more than a curse. The downside is I've never heard of a lot of hidden gems, but the upside is when I do hear about them, I get almost totally blind playthroughs so genuine reactions. I've had a lot of reviews to write recently and I'm getting behind on it. I've got two to do and we'll start with: Platinum #174 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 As I mentioned in my last COD review, this was a series I never had any interest in due to me getting waxed online when I played with a friend on Xbox way back when...MW3 was one of the first two games I'd purchased and finally finished it a couple of months ago. I had such a good time with it and playing with my co-op buddy, that when he suggested MW2 together, I jumped on it. Having someone fun to play with is a huge benefit to these games, but I have a confession to make....when I checked out this trophy list I saw a great contender for my 8,000 trophy milestone. I try to make my milestone trophies be either funny or have cool artwork or both. This one leans heavily in the direction of funny. The platinum image is cool, but there was one trophy that pulls a quote from one of my favorite movies of all time. When I saw a trophy called 'Royale with Cheese', I knew it deserved a spot on my wall alongside other movie greats like The Holy Hand Grenade. The trophy image isn't perfect though....it gives a nod toward Burger King with the picture and not Big Kahuna Burger. I mean, the restaurant in the game is called Burger Town....but with a trophy name like Royale With Cheese plucked from Pulp Fiction, it would have been great to get the Big Kahuna Burger logo too. We'll just chalk it up to a licensing thing or a huge missed opportunity. With regards to Pulp Fiction being one of my favorites, I didn't like it at all the first time I saw it. Granted I was 13 or 14 years old, but I didn't realize that the timeline was mixed up and thought it was dumb that guys that died early, appeared later and so on. I didn't understand what all the hype was about and thought it sucked. However, since everyone was saying what a masterpiece it was, I figured I'd give it another chance. It was on my second watch that I saw how great it was. It's one of those movies that gets better each time you watch it. You'll pick up some small detail that you never saw before...but what I really loved about the movie was the dialogue and interactions between the characters. Everything felt so organic and natural and I just really liked the story being told. It's a movie that I watch probably 2-3 times a year and something I've probably seen over 200 times. My freshmen year in college, I brought a 13" TV/VCR combo for my dorm room. I had paid for cable, but I didn't have the remote for the TV, so I wasn't able to bring up the menu to change the TV from the Antennae setting to the Cable setting so that it could go past channel 13. Only old people will understand that problem lol Anyways, there wasn't a ton of good TV shows on the lower channels and I had brought two movies with me to college. Pulp Fiction and Spaceballs. Let me tell you that I watched the shit out of those two movies. By the end of the semester I could pretty much quote the entire movies from beginning to end...My first semester freshman year consisted of playing baseball, going to class, watching those two movies and playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night while blaring Alice in Chains: Best of the Box CD over and over again. It was a great semester. Anyways..... I didn't realize this at the time, but apparently the Modern Warfare games are one long story and MW3 picks up where MW2 left off. Had I known I would enjoy these games as much as I have, I would have played these in a different order, however I didn't. It was fun to get some background on some of the character's from MW3. As far as the game itself goes, it virtually plays identically to MW3. The only thing I noticed that was different is that there's no points in this game to level up your profile. In MW3, weapons are unlocked in special ops as you gain levels on your profile, and you get points by killing guys and stuff. It was useful in MW3 because you could tell when you got someone since points would appear on the screen, letting you know they died. That does not happen in MW2 so some times you might leave cover thinking someone is dead and get blasted since they didn't die yet. It was a small upgrade from MW2 to MW3, but it was a helpful one that you don't realize is helpful until you go backwards in generations. I did some of the special ops levels solo, but most with my co-op partner. It was very hard to do co-op only because of how bad the servers are. We had no problem connecting, but the lag was atrocious and never got better. The good thing about the lag was that it lagged for everyone at the same time. Me, my partner and the game. It would have been really bad if the bad guys got to move freely while we were skipping, but at least they lagged too. So long as we took our time, we were able to do a lot of the levels. There were a handful, however that proved to be a bit too challenging to do with the lag and we decided to tackle solo. Despite the lag, I did have a lot of fun with my partner again and this game left me with another positive experience in the series. I enjoyed it enough to get Call of Duty: World at War, which I hope to be playing for the Gaming by Numbers event. It was apparently the 5th trophy list ever on PSNP and I think it'd be fun to use as my '5' for the event. While I did have fun with this game, I'm hard pressed to recommend it to anyone at this point (if you haven't played it already). The game is doable solo, but not quite as fun, and the co op lag is just horrendous. However, odds are if you haven't played the game yet, there's a good reason that you haven't lol I'm happy though, it got me a trophy milestone and one game closer to my platinum 175 milestone with Genshin Impact, which I hope to review before the end of the week. I've put over 450 hours in that game so I have a lot to say...but I'll try to keep it a civil length 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NZBigC Posted July 28, 2022 Share Posted July 28, 2022 That's a pretty sweet name for a trophy, especially for a milestone! That reminds me, I have to get the Zombie 4 Dead War platinum trophy for some reason... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted August 19, 2022 Author Popular Post Share Posted August 19, 2022 (edited) On 7/28/2022 at 8:34 AM, NZBigC said: That's a pretty sweet name for a trophy, especially for a milestone! That reminds me, I have to get the Zombie 4 Dead War platinum trophy for some reason... Yeah, I get pretty excited when I find something that I'd like to immortalize on my wall. Z4DW has a ton of great trophy names! I'll have to file that away in the back of my head just in case.... Platinum #175 Genshin Impact I'm quite delayed on this review and I've played this game for over 475 hours so there is a lot that I could say. This is going to be a weird review because I obviously really have enjoyed this game and there is a ton to like....but this review will probably have a lot of the things that I despise highlighted. I'll start by saying that I don't watch anime and that I never really heard the lingo since it's not a hobby/genre that I've ever paid attention to. Words like 'waifu' were lost on me. This is not a game that I probably would have picked up on my own if left to my own devices...however, I'm in a Discord chat with a few friends from on PSNP and they were talking about Genshin. It had seemed like most people were at least familiar with the game except for me. I was in the midst of living out one of my worst nightmares I had as a young adult...sitting around at a bar/dinner party/camp fire (pick your setting), with a group of people who all knew about some cultural phenomenon, and me on the outside looking in. It's the whole reason I read the Harry Potter series originally... It was about a month before the last book in the series was set to be released. I was working as a server/bartender at a restaurant and a bunch of the staff (all in our early to mid twenties at the time) were sitting around eating before we opened, talking about how excited they were that the book was only a month away. They were talking about getting the book at midnight and doing a sleep over reading or something. I had always thought it was a 'kids' series so never gave it the time of day. I was sitting there listening and proclaimed, 'You guys are all nerds....I can't believe you all are talking about 'reading parties' for Harry Potter....' They all looked at me like I was the crazy one. All of a sudden, I had that feeling that I was in fact the crazy one. How could all of these people love it and it be that bad? How could I confidently say what it was without giving it a chance? Nervous I'd be the only one not knowing what was going on, I stopped by Barnes and Noble on the way home and bought the first book. I surprisingly liked it. I decided to get the next book and before I knew it, I had read the entire series in time to be able to get the last book right when it came out! I got the book and had it read in just a couple days....I learned two things there....firstly, don't assume what something is or isn't without giving it a try because I might just miss out on something I'd like....and two, I had successfully avoided being the only person who didn't know what happened at Hogwarts. Anyways, I started getting that similar feeling here with Genshin. There is a ton of technical jargon that goes into playing this game and reading it on the Discord chat was making my head swim. In all fairness, my head continued to swim for several weeks after I started. I decided to take the plunge with some of the other members of the chat group and I had several first impressions. A) I thought the colors in the game were absolutely splendid and the level of detail in the world was top notch. I was super impressed at how well made this F2P game was looking. 2) I was going to hate Paimon with all of my soul throughout the game and was very concerned that the story was going to annoy me and D) I really wished the default running speed would move faster...period. The thousand foot view of the story is that you and your sibling get separated in this Abyss area (whether it's the brother or sister depends on the gender you choose. I chose the brother). You come to on this beautiful beach with this annoying Pixie named Paimon, who doesn't have an inside voice, and only refers to herself in the third person. She gets to be your travel companion throughout the entire game. If it wasn't for Paimon, I may have actually paid attention to the story in this game, but I have never spammed X so fast in my entire life. The cutscenes are absolutely brilliant and I cannot stress enough how beautiful the world looks, however I find most of the dialogue to be absolutely brutal to sit through. This game has a very steep learning curve. As a 'Free to Play' game, it has a lot of weird dynamics that slow down your ability to progress. Some of the items renew over time and it takes a while to learn how to properly manage it. Having said that, the game does a great job of scaling the learning curve. When you start the game, you feel extremely powerful and that is because your 'World Level' starts at 1 so you are fighting all of the enemies at their weakest. As you progress through the game, your 'World Level' will go up as well as the strength of the enemies. It gives you a lot of time to learn the basics. In the world of Genshin, the majority of people are just normal people, however there are some that gain the ability of a 'Vision' that allows them to use a certain elemental type and makes them unique in their world. What makes The Traveler (main character) unique, is the ability to change the element type they are attuned to. All other characters have an element and that is their element forever. I wish I could tell you more about Visions and how people attain them, but as I said, I've spammed through most of the story so I really don't know. Aside from the amazing graphics and world, what sets this game apart from some other open world games I've played is how fluid and fun the combat can be. Your party can consist of up to four members at a time, however only one is on the field at a time. What is great is how seamlessly you can swap between them. You assign each of the four party members to a direction on the D-Pad and when you want to switch to someone else, just push that direction. Some of the characters work best as a DPS, while others as a support or healer. What is really cool is how your 'off field' party members can contribute to the current active character. Every character has a regular attack, a charged attack, an Elemental Skill and an Elemental Burst. There are bow users, sword users, great sword users, polearm users and catalyst users (these are people that use magic books or hand to hand). The fun is in creating a party that complements one another. Some people have weapons that will increase the attack percentage of the next character you switch to on the field. Some will increase in element type's strength. Most of the synergy comes in creating parties that create reactions for additional damage. For example, having one character that uses the fire element burn the enemy and then switching to a water element type character to use a skill/burst will create the Evaporate reaction and causes extra damage. Sometimes having multiple of the same element types can be beneficial where having multiple of the same type will strengthen the element. Most parties consist of a DPS, sub DPS, Support and Healer. Some characters are just so strong though that it doesn't matter too much how they are in the party, they will just destroy. Ganyu and Zhongli are two such characters that I have that are a bit of an easy button. I'm going to spend several paragraphs now talking about the things that I find super frustrating in this game. I've talked about the amazing graphics, world and combat but how you get your characters is one of the most annoying things about this game. Characters have a star rating and can be either four or five stars. I'm not sure exactly what qualifies some to be five star over four star since there are some four star characters that are better than five star characters, but it basically comes down to the rarity. Most of the characters you get in this game you get from the 'wish' system. This is where it gets a bit complex as well. There are 'standard' characters and 'event' characters. There are always three different 'banners' (sometimes four) that are run at the same time. One will be the event banner that has a unique five star character and three four star characters where the likelihood of getting one is boosted. There is an event weapon banner that usually features the best weapon for the 5 star character on the current event banner. The standard banner is always there and none of the featured event five star characters can be drawn from that banner. There are two different types of wishes you can earn that allow you to make a wish on either of the event banners or the standard banner. You make wishes on a banner by using a 'fate'. An 'Intertwined Fate' can be used on the event banners and the 'Acquaint Faint' can be used on the standard banner. You can achieve wishes in several different ways, however the main way is by converting 160 'Primogems' into a wish. Primogems are a kind of currency the game uses to 'buy' items. It can't be used in the actual game to buy items from a shop, that kind of currency is called Mora, but can be used in the game's menu shop to purchase wishes. The game allows real money to be used to buy 'Genesis Crystals' in the game which can be converted into Primogems (at a 1:1 ratio) and/or other things like character outfits. It is an absolute ripoff of epic proportions. $99.99 will buy you 6,480 Genesis Crystals (with a 'bonus' of 1,600), which if used solely on Primogems can get you 50 wishes. Just to illustrate how bad this ratio is, this game uses a 'pity' system to guarantee that you will get a five star wish eventually and don't have a string of bad luck where you never get one. You are guaranteed to get a five star character (or weapon) every 90 wishes. You are guaranteed to get a four star character (or weapon) every ten wishes. All of the other wishes are 3 star weapons. You can get a four or five star before those Pity check points, but if you pull 89 wishes and get no five star, you are guaranteed one on your next pull. So, for $100 you can get just over halfway to a guaranteed five star pull. That is absolutely bananas. What makes it even more bananas is that you are not even guaranteed to get the event five star character once you finally pull one. You have a 50/50 chance to pull one of the five star characters from the Standard Banner instead of the Event character. However, if you pull a standard five star character the first time, you are guaranteed the event five star the second time. That means to guarantee you get the event banner five star character you may have to make 180 wishes. If you do that with real money, it could cost you almost $400 to do so....to me that is absolutely criminal. I won't lie, I did it one time and regretted it immediately. I had originally started the game in September last year and took a bit of a break from it to finish up some events and some other games, but came back to it in late December. I had gotten a $100 Visa gift card for Christmas and ended up buying the $99.99 Genesis Crystal package. I got more than 50 wishes since I think the bonus was double the amount instead of the 1,600. I think I got 100 wishes, which guaranteed me at least one five star. I'm going to pause here for a moment to say that I have been extremely lucky with my pulls. I have thirteen five star characters and with three of them, I have pulled multiples of the same character five other times. I also have three five star weapons. So all in all, I have pulled 21 five star characters/weapons. I have played this game virtually every day since the end of December, have 21 five star pulls and consider myself lucky. I've had six of those five star pulls with a pity of 25 or less while the most amount of wishes I've had to pull before a five star was 82. Despite my 'good luck', the system is still extremely predatory and broken. You may have seen me mention that I have pulled multiple of the same characters and you may have asked yourself, what happens when you get the same character? Well, one of the stat fields for each character is their 'Constellation'. Everyone has a zodiac sign with six stars that make up the constellation. Each time you get a pull that results in a character you already have, you get a constellation star. Each star you unlock will strengthen your character by adding damage/healing/energy recharge/etc or enhancing a skill or burst. It is usually a really good bump to the usefulness of the character and is a good thing to get. What happens if you get all six constellation stars for a character? Well, it would be really cool if they removed that character from your wish pool since you can no longer upgrade your character via constellations, however that is not what the wish system does. Instead, you get something called 'Starglitter'. Each time you get a four star or greater character or weapon, you get a little 'Stardust' and 'Starglitter'. 'Starglitter' is more valuable than 'Stardust' however both are another form of non-ingame currency that you can use to get more wishes or other farmable items. This is where the wish system is even more criminal. For five 'Starglitter' you can buy one wish. If you end up getting six constellations for your character (C6) and you pull an 8th wish of that character, all you get back is some Starglitter. For a four star character you get five Starglitter. For a five star character you get 25 Starglitter. As I mentioned above, you are guaranteed a four star character/weapon every 10th pull....as a reward for getting an 8th duplicate or more, you get one wish back or 1/10th the value of a unique four star. You get a five star every 90 pulls and you get only five wishes back on an 8th duplicate or more or 1/18th the value of a five star. THAT IS RIDICULOUS!!!! Could you imagine if you spent money on wishes only to get a duplicate and maybe five wishes back if it's a five star? I wouldn't care as much if they didn't charge you but that is absolutely insane. There is no reason why they can't remove characters whose constellations have been maxed out from the pool. I have had this happen to me with Yanfei. I have gotten probably 11 pulls of Yanfei and every time I see her now I get pissed off. The frustrating part about this is it could be easy to fix, more fair and much more likely more people might spend some money to get extra wishes. I'm sure there are plenty of whales that spend thousands of dollars on these wishes to max out their characters....but they should lower the five star pity number to 50 and remove duplicates from your pool once they've reached C6. These two small changes would make this system seem much less predatory. It's too bad that I really like this product because I really want to not play this game since I think this business model sucks. That is the most egregious issue I have with the game, but there are a couple of other items that I find super frustrating. As I mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs, the game has a time block mechanic which stops you from being able to farm some items in the game. Genshin uses a 'Resin' system to limit how much you can do certain activities that usually result in materials needed to either gain Mora (money), experience books, artifacts or weapon/talent leveling items. There is a cap of 160 resin and it regenerates at one resin every eight minutes. The minimum amount of resin needed to do any kind of instanced farming event is 20 and can go as high as 60. Basic Mora/XP farming happens at something called 'Ley Lines' that are strewn about the map. Orange ones yield Mora and blue ones yield XP books. You get very small amounts of XP and Mora from normal fighting, but it's not nearly enough to do anything with so you'll need to farm at these Ley Lines eventually. To level up your character talents (Basic Attack, Elemental Skill and/or Burst), you need to farm a type of book that is relatively unique to your character, along with a couple of other items. The strange thing is that the different books are only available on specific days of the week. Each book can be farmed on three different days. Did you want to farm materials for Ganyu today? Well you better hope it's a Tuesday, Friday or Sunday or you just can't since that domain won't drop that item. Once you have farmed enough items, you can level up any one of those three talents to level 10 before they are capped (unless a constellation adds more skill points up to a hard cap of 15). Most will only ever get to level 9 since in order to get to level 10 you need a 'Crown' item that is only sparingly rewarded from some one time events. I think I've only earned about 14 Crowns since I started playing, so you need to pick and choose who you are going to 'Crown'. Anyway, those talent books are found in instanced domains that also cost 20 resin to do. To level up your character, there are similarly 'unique' items that you must collect from boss type characters. Those boss type battles are free to fight, but if you want to open the treasure box after winning, it'll cost you 40 resin. The 60 resin battles are from true instanced boss fights. They are re-battles of boss fights from quests throughout the game. I think there are five of these instanced domains and one that is just out in the open that acts more like the 40 resin cost battles, but is a 60 resin fight. These last instanced fights drop items you need to level your talents past level seven. None of them are particularly hard, but as you can see, with only 160 resin you can store in a day and with an eight minute delay in the recharge, you can burn through your resin very quickly and be left with nothing to do. There are four types of resin in the game...the normal resin that regens on it's own that I discussed above, and then there is 'condensed resin', 'fragile resin' and 'transient resin'. Condensed resin is made from normal resin. You can take 40 normal resin and make one condensed. It basically doubles your drops from one of the different 20 cost instanced raids I mentioned above. This is good because it halves your farming time and doubles the drops. It also is a quick way to use your resin in a day if you do not have the time to do a full farm. Fragile resin is a reward item that you can get from certain quests or from the 'Battle Pass' (a pass that allows you to get extra items every 45 days or so that costs real money). Using a fragile resin will give you 60 regular resin. You can go over the 160 cap by using fragile resin, but they run out quick and you don't get a ton of them as rewards so it is not a consistently reliable source of resin. Transient resin is something you can buy with 1,200 'Realm Currency' once per week that you acquire from your teapot....your teapot is something you get around Adventure Rank 30 that lets you create your own home. The teapot was broken half the time I played, where you couldn't rearrange your house, but with that currency you can buy the transient resin, which has a shelf life of 9 days. If you do not use that resin within 9 days, it will disappear. If you've never played the game or only played a little, I bet your head is swimming right now. Don't worry because mine was swimming for months after I started playing. It was probably three months before I felt a good rhythm with what needs to happen each day. When you first start the game, you really don't realize that there is a cap on what you can do each day because there is so much to do and explore that it never comes up. But once you finish the storyline and get all caught up, you'll find you can only play for about twenty minutes in a day before you run out of shit to do and then log off. This seems like a stupid concept to me. Why make it so that people have to stop playing your game? I end up playing other things and move on from this game except for that twenty minutes a day. The whole resin system seems unnecessary to me. You can't buy more of it with real money to speed up the game and it just prevents the gamers from farming to strengthen up their characters. I'm sure that people would spend hours and hours replaying the domains to get all the materials needed and then even more hours artifact farming to further enhance. They have enough events that they add and updates to keep people coming back so I truly do not understand what resin is there for other than to drive people to play something different once they run out each day. I mentioned two things in the last couple of paragraphs that I haven't touched on yet. The first was 'Adventure Rank' (AR). Anytime you complete a quest or domain, you'll earn some AR XP. This experience is separate from the XP books you earn to level up your characters. This AR XP is how you level up your world to make the enemies tougher and the rarer drops more abundant. Some of the content is blocked by your AR level. This is there to prevent players from doing end game things before they are ready. You get some rewards from leveling your AR, including wishes and fragile resin. This system is actually pretty good because it allows players to slowly learn what they are doing and wait to level up until you are ready. You have to manually talk to an NPC to level up so it won't do it automatically for you. The benefit of leveling up the AR is not just to level up your world, but to level up your characters. The max level they can currently attain is level 90, however you cannot get that high until you unlock their Ascensions. You start at Ascension 1 and your character level cap is 20. Once you have a high enough AR rank, you can do a quest that will level up your world and then unlock Ascension level 2 for your characters. They can then level up to 40 before they are capped. The next level ascensions only unlock 10 character levels at a time and you cannot cap your character level until Ascension 6. More talents are unlocked (passive talents) the higher your ascension level so there is a lot of incentive to level up as soon as you can. The cool thing though, is that if you are struggling once your world levels up, the game allows you to lower the world level back down a level. This lets you farm and strengthen your characters until you feel comfortable that you can survive. You can change your world level once per day (I have never done this so I don't know exactly how it works). The biggest grind in the game is Artifact farming. Each character can wear up to five artifacts. An artifact will boost your character stats and are vital to making your characters as strong as possible. The five different artifacts represent five different areas where you can only wear one of each. There is a Flower, Plume, Sands, Goblet and Circlet. You can only wear one of each, so if you have two killer goblets for one of your characters, you have to choose which one you want to wear. You can't have two goblets and no flower or something like that. Once you get an artifact, you can level it up to level 20 (if it's 5 star), which will further enhance their abilities. Artifacts also have a ranking similar to characters and weapons, but they go all the way down to one star. To level up your artifacts, you use other artifacts to enhance them. There are also items that you can use to enhance an artifact level, but those aren't too common until you can buy them from your teapot shop. Artifacts can boost, HP, HP%, ATK, ATK%, Crit Rate, Crit Damage, DEF, DEF%, Energy Recharge%, Elemental Mastery, Healing Bonus, Physical Damage Bonus or one of the Elemental Bonuses. An artifact can boost up to five different categories on one piece. If you have a five star artifact, you'll get one stat that gets a major boost and then four additional sub stats that can get varying boosts. The main stat that gets the major boost will get an increase each level you raise the artifact while one random sub stat will get a boost every 4th level. This is one of the biggest reasons artifact farming is a beast. There are a few of challenges with artifact farming. The first being that you have a 1/10 chance in a run to get the piece you are looking for. The majority of artifact farming involves doing an instanced raid that will contain two different kinds of artifacts and with the are five slots for artifacts, nothing is guaranteed. While there are five artifact slots, there are dozens of different types of artifacts. If you have multiple of the same type of artifact in different slots, you get a bonus that is in addition to the stat bonuses from leveling. You'll get that bonus at two and then four similar artifacts equipped. For example, one artifact type is called 'Emblem of Severed Fate'. If you have one of those artifacts in your Flower spot, you get no bonus except for the random stats that are on the piece. If you add an Emblem artifact to the Plume spot, you get an Energy Recharge boost of +20%. If you then add two more emblem pieces to make it four total, it increases your Elemental Burst Damage by 25% of your Energy Recharge stat for a maximum of a 75% boost. Since there is no boost at five of a same type, you can use that fifth slot to just put the strongest artifact you can. As you can see, this can be a significant boost to your character. Once you have chosen the type of artifact you want to equip on your character, you find which instanced raid you must do. This raid will have two different artifact types that can be rewarded for clearing the raid. The good news, is most of the raids can be completed in just a couple of minutes or less...the bad news is the artifact that is dropped is completely random. If you are using regular resin, you can get up to two artifacts per run, however the vast majority of the time you will get one artifact. If you use condensed resin, you can get between two and four artifacts. That one artifact on a regular resin run could be the other artifact that you aren't targeting making that run a waste. It could be for a slot that you do not need, it could have stats that are not beneficial to your character, or it could actually be useful. I find that last scenario to be very rare. I tend to use condensed resin on artifact farming runs to increase the likelihood I get something useful but that is still rare. With how quickly you can burn through resin, it can take a long time to get good pieces. There are not many characters that benefit from a boost to DEF or DEF%. That seems to be a stat that appears often on artifacts and pretty much will render most artifacts that contain that boost useless. Unfortunately, you have to be somewhat selective with the artifacts you choose to level up because leveling materials run out quickly and it can get very expensive to level up artifacts, causing you to farm more Mora. As far as the trophy list goes, it's not too bad. The only really shitty trophy is the DLC trophy for getting all of the 'Toki Alley Tales' book. That involves fishing for 10 pages of a book and fishing is kind of brutal in this game. It took me about 990 fish before I found the 10 pages, which I've read isn't actually that bad. Some people need a couple thousand fish before finding all ten pages. It takes a while because unless you can fish in another person's world in co-op, you have to wait 48 hours after clearing a fishing spot for the fish to respawn. Almost all of the collectibles you find from exploring are like that though. If you pick a flower, it'll be two days before it reappears. The most grindy trophies are the ones for getting reputation in a country. You only get three quests and three bounty hunts per week across all of the countries. You only can get like 420 reputation points per week and you need several thousand points to max reputation...so that one takes a while but isn't hard. The hardest trophy to get is the one for clearing floor 12 of the Spiral Abyss. This is the hardest dungeon in the game and each floor consists of six battles...three on one side and three on the other. In order to defeat the abyss, you need to make two parties of four. What makes this hard is getting eight characters strong enough to be able to survive. Once you start a floor, you cannot change gear, party members or heal (except skills during battle, no items/food) until you either quit out or complete the floor. Each round has a maximum of three stars that can be earned, usually for defeating the floor under a certain time, however floor 11-1 seems to always involve protecting an obelisk from getting destroyed. So long as it stays higher that 60% health, you'll get all 3 stars. Once you get passed floor 8, you need a certain number of stars to be able to unlock the next floor. The Abyss can be unforgiving and challenging, however you can retry as many times as you want so there's nothing lost except time in trying. Once you beat that last enemy on the 12th floor, you'll have achieved the most challenging trophy. My first five star character was Keqing and while she is considered one of the weaker five star characters, I love playing with her and made sure she was in my party. Party A for me consisted of Raiden, Keqing, Xiangling and Barbara and Party B consisted of Ganyu, Zhongli, Mona and Venti. Most of the other trophies you'll do naturally as you play and you will see some gorgeous landscapes on your adventures. My favorite area was probably the Dragonspine. It's a giant mountain in the middle of Mondstadt (one of the countries in Genshin). It has a frost mechanic where if you are away from a heating source for too long, you'll start to take damage...but it was a cool mechanic and it was pretty up on the mountain. You'll have to do tons of exploring to get enough treasure chests for some trophies and there are some fun puzzles along the way. One of the positives of the game are the fun characters. There are only a couple that are intolerable with Xinyan being the most annoying by far. Qiqi is up there as well, but for the most part, I enjoy all of the characters. I wish they would add some more dialogue considering how much time you spend in this game...you'll hear Ganyu grunt a ton or Keqing telling you to stop procrastinating a million times if you pause for more than 10 seconds. They say the same things every time you open a treasure box or when it starts and stops raining. While the dialogue is limiting, the characters are cool. My list of characters are: Five Star: The Traveler, Venti, Zhongli, Ganyu, Keqing, Raiden Shogun, Yelan, Mona, Shenhe, Itto, Yao Miko, Jean, Qiqi and Diluc Four Star: Barbara, Sucrose, Diona, Xingqiu, Benny, Xiangling, Ningguang, Fischl, Yun Jin, Kaeya, Gorou, Noelle, Amber, Heizou, Sayu, Rosaria, Chongyun, Kuki, Kujou Sara, Beidou, Razor, Lisa, Thoma, Yanfei and Xinyan It's funny because Barbara and Keqing are considered two of the weakest characters, yet I love playing with them and both were a part of my Abyss team. Keqing is great to use when exploring because she can teleport with her lightning skill and get to hard to reach areas. With Babs in my party, I feel like it's impossible to die. I have her HP over 35k and her healing has been a nice security blanket when doing stuff. While I've been lucky with pulls and character's like Ganyu and Zhongli make the game have an 'easy button', you can have a ton of fun with any of the characters. I think it depends on who you get first will end up being who you're going to like best. Babs was my first four star pull and Keqing my first five star. They've been with me the longest and are my favorite to play. I've used Keqing less on the open world map since getting Ganyu since she makes everything a breeze, but the fun thing is to mix and match and see what works and what doesn't for you. In addition to the dialogue being repetitive, the daily commission tasks are extremely repetitive. There are like twenty of them in each of the three main countries and you can do four per day. I don't know about other players, but I seem to get the same handful all of the time. I've been playing for months and months and still have not gotten the daily commission 'An Art to be Honed' four times to unlock a mission. I do the Inazuma commissions every day, and I think I've done that one twice so far. It's the last mission I need to complete them all in the game. If you can't tell, I'm pretty passionate about the game and will play this one long past the platinum. If they fixed the issues I have mentioned above, this might be my most favorite game of all time. I've written too much as it is and I've not even touched upon a lot of the different aspects of the game, but I think I've touched on most of them. The biggest takeaways are that the combat is extremely smooth and fun. There are tons and tons of different party comps that you can try and tons of ways to challenge yourself in battles. While the game has a co-op function, it isn't very good for stuff other than for farming domains with someone. You are blocked from doing quests together and are blocked from doing the Abyss (the most challenging dungeon in the game) co-op. However, I've had a lot of fun with @Cassylvaniaand @Mesopithecus in the game and chatting about it. I'm sure it hasn't been quite as fun for the members in the discord chat that aren't playing the game, but Genshin is a lot of fun when you get into it and is a lot of fun to talk about since it is constantly updating and adding new things. The good news is that while I spent most of this review bitching about certain aspects of the game, the game itself is a near masterpiece and I'll spend many more hours in it to come. There's a huge update coming and I'm curious to see if more trophies are added. It's been a while since they have added anything, but I'll be ready to go! I highly recommend this game to anyone and everyone...just be smart with your pocketbook and you get hundreds of hours of enjoyment from it. Edited August 19, 2022 by Briste 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
realm722 Posted August 20, 2022 Share Posted August 20, 2022 (edited) First of all... damn man. Sensational job with the review! I can't imagine how much you had to juggle all of your thoughts on a game that's been a part of your life for so long now. 7 hours ago, Briste said: I won't lie, I did it one time and regretted it immediately. I had originally started the game in September last year and took a bit of a break from it to finish up some events and some other games, but came back to it in late December. I had gotten a $100 Visa gift card for Christmas and ended up buying the $99.99 Genesis Crystal package. I got more than 50 wishes since I think the bonus was double the amount instead of the 1,600. I think I got 100 wishes, which guaranteed me at least one five star. Huge respect for admitting this aspect. I've only seen the game in a passing fashion while watching one of my fave streamers play it temporarily and it is a bit terrifying how it's so easy to fall into the justification of: "well I know there are whales out there spending thousands of dollars on the game... what's a couple $20's for something I'm enjoying?" 7 hours ago, Briste said: I'm going to pause here for a moment to say that I have been extremely lucky with my pulls. I have thirteen five star characters and with three of them, I have pulled multiples of the same character five other times. I also have three five star weapons. So all in all, I have pulled 21 five star characters/weapons. I have played this game virtually every day since the end of December, have 21 five star pulls and consider myself lucky. I've had six of those five star pulls with a pity of 25 or less while the most amount of wishes I've had to pull before a five star was 82. Despite my 'good luck', the system is still extremely predatory and broken. When you first start the game, you really don't realize that there is a cap on what you can do each day because there is so much to do and explore that it never comes up. But once you finish the storyline and get all caught up, you'll find you can only play for about twenty minutes in a day before you run out of shit to do and then log off. This seems like a stupid concept to me. Why make it so that people have to stop playing your game? I end up playing other things and move on from this game except for that twenty minutes a day. I found it very noteworthy these two anecdotes you included. Nearly around a year ago today, I wrote little post about my reasons for why I'll actually NEVER play Genshin Impact. One of the biggest reasons being "I don't want the game dictating when I play. I always want to be in control." The "games as a service model" goes directly in contrary to this. They make content exclusive or time limited. You're already invested in the game. You'd have a huge fear of missing out if you don't log on and it's how developers seep their tentacles into becoming an active part of your everyday routine. I'm not saying this like it's criminal or something(though very predatory/problematic as you pointed out is a very worthwhile argument). I just don't like the idea of "having" to get my 20 minutes in everyday due to the way the game is developed. If I may propose a theory on the latter question you posed, I'd say it's simple. Genshin Impact developers DO NOT want you blowing through all of their content as quickly as possible. They don't want you to binge it. Because if you COULD, you WOULD, but then once you're done... you move on for good. Sure there will be SOME people who come back when a new giant content update drops but it's far more effective to string content along and make it part of a player's routine. Play right before going to bed. Don't forget your daily's. Etc... and that familiarity is part of what makes the game such a money-making machine. It becomes a part of people's lives even more so than the newest Spider-Man game comes out, people play it, love it, but move on as once they've seen the end credits... on to the next game! Genshin Impact is trying to become a forever game and it's definitely working with how much love I continue to see it receive. I hope that didn't come across as negative/holier than thou. Based on your review, I'm about 9999% sure that I'd become absolutely obsessed and be all on that wishes, resin, 4 vs. 5 star jazz ?. So thank you for allowing me to get a hit of the narcotic without actually dabbling in it myself EDIT: Since you also love the game as much as you do, may I recommend NeverKnowsBest(YT video game critic) video on it? You can perhaps have it on in the background as a bit of a podcast but I think you'd really enjoy it as having similar backgrounds of not really being anime folk. Edited August 20, 2022 by realm722 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassylvania Posted August 20, 2022 Share Posted August 20, 2022 22 hours ago, Briste said: I'm going to pause here for a moment to say that I have been extremely lucky with my pulls. I have thirteen five star characters and with three of them, I have pulled multiples of the same character five other times. I also have three five star weapons. So all in all, I have pulled 21 five star characters/weapons. I have played this game virtually every day since the end of December, have 21 five star pulls and consider myself lucky. I've had six of those five star pulls with a pity of 25 or less while the most amount of wishes I've had to pull before a five star was 82. Despite my 'good luck', the system is still extremely predatory and broken. Just to further emphasize how extraordinarily lucky this is, I've been playing just as long as Briste (with almost 700 hours of playtime), and I have 14 five stars. I've also only won the 50/50 three times. 22 hours ago, Briste said: There is no reason why they can't remove characters whose constellations have been maxed out from the pool. I have had this happen to me with Yanfei. I have gotten probably 11 pulls of Yanfei and every time I see her now I get pissed off. 15 hours ago, realm722 said: I found it very noteworthy these two anecdotes you included. Nearly around a year ago today, I wrote little post about my reasons for why I'll actually NEVER play Genshin Impact. One of the biggest reasons being "I don't want the game dictating when I play. I always want to be in control." The "games as a service model" goes directly in contrary to this. They make content exclusive or time limited. You're already invested in the game. You'd have a huge fear of missing out if you don't log on and it's how developers seep their tentacles into becoming an active part of your everyday routine. I'm not saying this like it's criminal or something(though very predatory/problematic as you pointed out is a very worthwhile argument). I just don't like the idea of "having" to get my 20 minutes in everyday due to the way the game is developed. That post is directly responsible for me -- and, by extension, Briste -- playing this game. So, thanks for that. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted August 21, 2022 Author Share Posted August 21, 2022 On 8/19/2022 at 8:37 PM, realm722 said: First of all... damn man. Sensational job with the review! I can't imagine how much you had to juggle all of your thoughts on a game that's been a part of your life for so long now. Thanks, it took me a few weeks to actually think about what I might want to say. There is soooo much going on and while I did go quite a bit into the technical side of the game, I hope I explained it well enough that it wasn't that confusing On 8/19/2022 at 8:37 PM, realm722 said: I found it very noteworthy these two anecdotes you included. Nearly around a year ago today, I wrote little post about my reasons for why I'll actually NEVER play Genshin Impact. One of the biggest reasons being "I don't want the game dictating when I play. I always want to be in control." The "games as a service model" goes directly in contrary to this. They make content exclusive or time limited. You're already invested in the game. You'd have a huge fear of missing out if you don't log on and it's how developers seep their tentacles into becoming an active part of your everyday routine. I'm not saying this like it's criminal or something(though very predatory/problematic as you pointed out is a very worthwhile argument). I just don't like the idea of "having" to get my 20 minutes in everyday due to the way the game is developed. I remember reading that post at the time and since I hadn't really heard of the game yet, I didn't really think much of it. But once it became a larger topic of conversation in my discord chat, I kind of just dove into it without looking at all. I've been doing that a lot lately lol I know what you're saying with regards to the game 'dictating when I play', however it's not quite that bad in Genshin. I've played MMO's before where the game is literally playing while you are not there and you feel this compulsion to log in and take part of things all the time. There was a time when I was playing FFXI where I was setting my alarm at 4am to get up every 30 minutes for the window pop time of HNM's (High Notorious Monsters) and I would do this every day. These were monsters that dropped the best gear in the game and only appeared once per 21-24 hours and every four days and higher, there was a chance an HQ version of the monster would appear and drop some of the best and rarest gear. The drop rates were trash, but the fights were so rare, you felt you had to be there every night just for that chance. I would give up shifts at work to make it to events and I used to either skip family gatherings or plan them around longer events that were taking place so I could go. I made a lot of great friends while I was playing, but I was neglecting my life around me. Genshin isn't like that at all really. It's a single player game with online components. When you log off, the game isn't continuing without you. When you log back in, you start exactly where you left off. The events are all pretty lame to be honest and only serve as a means to earn some Primogems to make wishes. I log in to do the dailies since it's a quick twenty minutes to earn 60 Primo's, but I don't really feel like I've 'missed something' if I don't log in. Most days I do log in though since it's wasteful not to use your resin and it's easy Primo's, but it's a very different feel from other MMO's I've played in the past where the game is constantly on your mind. You can comfortably log off of this game and not have that same feeling. On 8/19/2022 at 8:37 PM, realm722 said: If I may propose a theory on the latter question you posed, I'd say it's simple. Genshin Impact developers DO NOT want you blowing through all of their content as quickly as possible. They don't want you to binge it. Because if you COULD, you WOULD, but then once you're done... you move on for good. Sure there will be SOME people who come back when a new giant content update drops but it's far more effective to string content along and make it part of a player's routine. Play right before going to bed. Don't forget your daily's. Etc... and that familiarity is part of what makes the game such a money-making machine. It becomes a part of people's lives even more so than the newest Spider-Man game comes out, people play it, love it, but move on as once they've seen the end credits... on to the next game! Genshin Impact is trying to become a forever game and it's definitely working with how much love I continue to see it receive. I'm sure that is a big reason, but I still feel they'd be more successful letting people binge. Idle hands are the Devil's workshop and if you run out of things to do, people don't just stop playing games and they might find something else they like better. Nothing's changing so it's not like it matters lol I can only speak for myself, but I know I would play this game more if they lifted the limits. On 8/19/2022 at 8:37 PM, realm722 said: I hope that didn't come across as negative/holier than thou. Based on your review, I'm about 9999% sure that I'd become absolutely obsessed and be all on that wishes, resin, 4 vs. 5 star jazz ?. So thank you for allowing me to get a hit of the narcotic without actually dabbling in it myself Not at all! You know your limits and what's best for your gaming habits and psyche. You are smart enough to know what you should I avoid, just like I am now after my experience with FFXI. I think it's unfortunate that you have to avoid a game that would bring you so much potential joy, but I understand 13 hours ago, Cassylvania said: You smug bitch.... I have a Lara Croft GO review that I need to write up in the next few days. I just got back the other day from a 10 day trip that we took our kids to Disney World and that was the Vita game I played to keep my trophy streak alive (643 days in a row!). I'll also give my thoughts on Disney World during that review. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted August 21, 2022 Author Share Posted August 21, 2022 Platinum #176 Lara Croft GO This was a spur of the moment choice that I decided to play a couple of weeks ago. My wife and I had been planning and saving to take our kids to Disney World for almost a year. My kids are 8 and 5 and we felt like this was a good age for the 'magical' trip. They are at an age where things like that are just special. We will probably go one more time when they're like 15 and 12 or something and it's more about the rides...but this trip they were into the characters and the princesses and pretty much everything they have to offer. We were going for ten days and I have a current trophy streak of 644 days. I have no hopes or delusions of ever making headway on the leaderboard, but this is an achievement that I can try to keep myself that is a nice little challenge to keep me interested. Anyways, on the trip, I was going to bring my Vita (since my kids are small and would be in bed by 10:00 most nights) to be able to play for an hour or so at night before bed to try and keep the streak going. I was originally looking for an isometric style, TBS game, however I didn't find anything that wasn't going to require a large time investment. I'm already playing Shiren The Wanderer, however none of those trophies are quick. When I was scanning through the list of Vita games, I paused on this entry since I have already done Hitman GO and enjoyed that game for what it was. If this was anything like it, I knew I'd be able to keep my streak alive while playing a game I might enjoy. Turns out I was right on both fronts. I was wondering why the completion rate is as high as it is, since it didn't seem like the usual 'EZPZ' game that litters the front of PSNP on a daily basis. I found out pretty quickly why. In Hitman GO, there was a 'hint' option...but if I remember right, it only gave you a hint on your next move (maybe it didn't since there's a trophy for not using a hint so I never tried really). This game has no such trophy and the 'hint' option doesn't give you a hint so much as it just gives you the solution. Not only does it give you the solution, it doesn't let you walk off of the path of the solution. Outside of the collectibles, you never really have to pay attention to the game at all to get through it. It was nice to know that was in my back pocket if I wanted it...I mean I was in Florida to go to Disney, not play games, so having the option to speed things along if needed was nice to have. Having said that, I did try to do each puzzle on my own. Some of them were very straightforward and not too bad to do, but some of them were very convoluted and I resorted to hints. The game has a chapter select option to be able to easily go back and do the collectibles. Most of the collectibles were pretty easy to spot, but some of the later ones in particular were very well hidden. I tried to find each of the collectibles as I went so that I wouldn't have to do much back tracking. The boards are isometric in view and you move one block at a time. There are spiders, lizards and snakes that try to eat you as you go as well as trap boulders and darts from walls. Lara has to try to either avoid these traps or move so that the enemies are in-between her and the trap when they go off. There are movable columns and pitfalls to avoid and there's a decently good variety to the puzzle solutions. Nothing groundbreaking here, just a decent puzzle game with an easy button. There are only a handful of mechanics and the game does act very similar to the Hitman version. The only real downside to the game was that the loading times were pretty long. Not XCOM 2 long, but long enough. At the end of the day though, it served its purpose and did provide a little bit of fun in the process so I can't really ask for much more considering what I was looking for. It's not a game anyone needs to run out and buy...but if you find yourself in a similar position to me, it's a good choice to casually play something on vacation. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted September 5, 2022 Author Share Posted September 5, 2022 Platinum #177 Jurassic World Evolution 2 Jurassic World Evolution was not a game that I had on my radar a few years ago. I was scrolling through a sale and my son, who was a dinosaur nut, saw the logo and was like 'Daddy, can you buy that came to play with me?' I thought it would be a good opportunity to bond together a bit over a game he might enjoy so I did. My son loves building things. He's big into LEGO's and we have magnetiles and blocks all over the place, and I thought he'd have fun helping build a park with me. For the most part, we did have a great time. Most of the game was over his head (and over mine for that matter at first) but we enjoyed building paddocks together and he loved to tell me which dinosaurs should go together. We probably played together for six hours or so and the other hundred hours I did it myself. While it wasn't on my radar, I had a ton of fun with the game and really enjoyed my time with it. It was hard and addicting and a cool concept...plus I don't have a lot of those 'Sim' style games on my profile, so it was somewhat unique for me. I had no idea that there was a second game being made and again, it was not on my radar, but when I saw it as a new release, I pounced on it because my son is a bit older now and I thought we could have fun again together. My son was super excited when I told him that I had bought this game for us to play and I loaded it up. I started the campaign and we beat the first level together. I let him tell me where I should put stuff and it was a lot of fun. It wasn't hard, but my son got bored pretty quickly. He has the patience of a gnat and just wanted to be able to build a huge park with all the cool dinosaurs, so I switched over to the 'Sandbox' mode. I took all of the difficulty settings off and just let him go to town making a park...however since we had just started the game, not much was unlocked yet to be used. He wanted an Indominous Rex and an Indo Raptor and all of the big name dinosaurs right away. The problem for us was that, it's not unlocked in the Sandbox mode until you unlock it in one of the game modes. We got about two hours of the game done before he lost interest because he didn't want to help with the campaigns. The game went on the backburner for a bit because I was hoping he'd want to play it again, but he's really into Minecraft and Don't Starve on his iPad and also Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my Raspberry Pi. Because of this, the game sat untouched for several months. I wasn't sure at first if I had liked the changes that they had made to the game either, so I wasn't in a huge rush to get back to it. So now that I've given you the backstory into how it found its way into my active game list....how about I talk about the game? So for those of you that don't know, it's a park simulator game. There are four different gaming modes, the campaign, chaos mode, challenge mode and sandbox mode. The campaign is the games attempt at creating a story. They are all quite easy and are pretty good tutorials on how the game will work going forward. Chaos mode thrusts you into a scenario (loosely based around the events that happen in the different movies) and gives you a series of challenges that you must complete in order to complete the level. Challenge mode is to simply create a five star park. There are five areas (in the base game for the platinum) that have varying wrenches thrown at you to make it a challenge. The higher the difficulty, the bigger the wrenches. The final mode is the sandbox mode which is exactly that, a sandbox for you to play around and fiddle with the game pretty much any way you want. It's fun to mess around in there and was helpful for unlocking a few of the trophies in a controlled environment. The game is very thorough on its demands of what you need to do in order to build a profitable park. You need to build 'Operations' buildings to make sure you have the staff to run a park. That includes a Response Team that has Ranger Jeeps and a Helicopter crew to maintain order with the animals. A Paleo-medical facility to make sure you can cure any diseased dinosaurs or heal their injuries. A staff center, which affects how many scientists you can hire for research, expeditions, hatching, etc. A dig team for finding fossils and extracting the DNA, and a science center for research. In addition to operations, you need to build hatcheries to create the dinosaurs and paddocks for them to roam around in when free. You have different types of Power outputs, whether it is a generator or power plant. There are guest attractions to build that bring in the guests and amenities to build to keep them happy and help make profit while they are there. There's a lot to learn, however a lot of this was carried over from the first installment so playing the first one helped a lot with understanding this one...however they added so much more to pay attention to, yet also made some things so much easier as well. I'll start with the things they added that are annoying. The biggest change to this installment is the addition of scientists. In the first one, you just did stuff and the scientists were implied as being a part of the process. In this game, you have to actually hire them...and they are not cheap. It might cost you $450k to hire one, and then they have an hourly wage that cuts into your profits continuously. If you hire too many scientists, you could go bankrupt if you aren't bringing in enough money...but you can't do anything without them. There are three categories of stats that they could have, Logistics, Genetics and Welfare. The cap for each is as high as 10 points (unless they have a bonus), however usually a scientist's cap is somewhere between 5-7 points in any category. In addition to having points in these different areas, they each have one specialty about them. They might speed up research time or decrease the cost of an expedition or be altruistic and have a cheaper salary. You can level them up (via research) that will give you more points to put into a category, but that costs money and also raises their hourly wage. Generally, you need logistics for all research and digs, genetics for some research, DNA extraction and egg synthesis and Welfare for some research healing dinosaurs and hatching eggs. Everything has a monetary cost and everything has a minimum number of points you need in order to research. For example, researching a small power plant costs $500k and you need at least 5 points in logistics to research. You can have up to three scientists involved in any one research (unless you pay for an upgrade that you also must first research). If you have a scientist with 5 points in logistics, it takes only that one to research the item. If you don't, you might need to use a scientist with 4 in logistics and another with 2. Any amount of points you have higher than the requirement will speed up the time it takes to complete. That's a basic explanation on it, but the higher/better the research item, the bigger the cost and requirements. If your scientists do not have enough points in the required area, you cannot research it until you either level up your scientists enough to where you can (which also requires its own research and money) or you fire your scientists and hire others that do. There's an extra wrinkle with these scientists as well. Every time you have them do a task, they get a bar of fatigue. Most of the scientist have like 7 bars of fatigue, meaning you can use them 7 times before they need to rest. You can't use them if their fatigue bar is maxed and they can't rest unless you have a staff center. If you forget to research a staff center and your scientists are fatigued, you better hope you have enough money to fire one and hire another new scientist or else you need to restart. Letting them rest costs $125k and also takes like 3 minutes of time (researched upgrades can lower both of those figures). While I can appreciate what they were trying to do here, managing the scientists is just a major pain in the ass. Why it costs so much money for them not to do anything is beyond me. There is no logical explanation that can be provided to me why it costs $125k to let them take a break. The scientists is a big change, and to me, mostly negative. Almost all of the other changes though are an improvement. The biggest of these improvements is how they handled herbivore food. In the first game, you had to build feeders that needed to be refilled, which cost money and didn't make a ton of sense. In this game, herbivores eat what is in their environment. You plant fruits, leaf, nuts or fiber and so long as you have enough of their food growing in their paddock, you never have to worry about feeding them. This is a major improvement. It's really easy to do as well. You can click on a dinosaur and it'll tell you it's comfort level and what it needs to be more comfortable. Does it need more water? Put a man-made lake into the paddock. Do they prefer to live in the forest? Put a bunch of trees in there until they are happy. Is it missing fiber, add plants high in fiber for them to eat. I like this change a lot and was a huge quality of life improvement. Another big improvement was the addition of the 'Ranger Station'. You can build one of these in a paddock and if you click on it, it will show you how much area it covers. You can then assign a Jeep, Helicopter and Medical Truck to it and the assigned vehicles will monitor the dinosaurs within its range on their own. If a dinosaur is sick, the Medical Truck will automatically go out to diagnose. When dinosaurs need status checks, the Jeep automatically embarks and if that Jeep is under attack, the helicopter will automatically go out and tranquilize the offending dinosaur. It helped a ton take the focus of the game away from micromanaging the vehicles and into growing your park. This was another awesome quality of life change to the game. The biggest game breaking change was the addition of a pause button. Part of what made the first one so hard, is that the game kept moving...always moving. If a storm came and dinosaurs escaped, you'd spend 10 minutes tracking things down and putting them back and it was so hard to keep up with at times. In this game, if a storm comes, you can hit pause and time will stop. You can then open all the shelters, close all of your amenities (you lose a TON of money if you keep them open during a storm), and once you are ready, hit pause again to get time moving. In addition to pausing, you can also speed up the time by up to 3 times, which was also nice. I would generally pause the moment there was a storm, then get my park prepared, then have the storm move through at 3 times speed and pause again if there was any damage so I could get my ranger teams out to fix, then move time again and once the storm was over, pause the game and reopen all of the things I closed. It takes all of the stress out of these moments. I'd also pause a lot when I had learned new research or when I was checking the different 'birds eye' view of things. There's a menu where you can view your park and see where people are overcrowded or missing restrooms or shelter or amenities and it was extremely helpful in figuring out what needed to be build and where. The addition of this pause button made this game sooooooo much easier than the first and a much more relaxing experience. The only real downside I found to this game was how formulaic it tended to be and how expensive it made things, which in turn meant you didn't use a lot of the things. Basically, to maximize profits, you build a paddock and a hotel next to it with a viewing gallery. Then you build a restroom, a shelter and one of each of the amenities (food, drink, shopping). Add dinosaurs to the paddock to improve the appeal and get people there, then make a new paddock and rinse repeat. As you get further from the entrance of the park, add a monorail to improve transportation, if there's a crowded area, widen the path. There's not a ton of incentive to spice it up more than that. I never needed to research anything passed the basic fence. I never had to research any power options past a small power plant. It just wasn't necessary at all. The other problem is how outrageously expensive things are. It costs like $2M to research T Rex, and then it's like $2M more to send out a dig team, which you need to do several times before you get the genome to 100% (you can synthesize at 50% but the fail rate is high). Then you need to spend $1M to synthesize the egg and then like $2M per egg to fertilize. It costs like $15M to get a T Rex in your park. When doing the challenges on Jurassic difficulty, no way in hell are you going to make enough money to make that worthwhile. You pretty much use the same handful of dinosaurs every map. I didn't make one hybrid, T Rex or Spinosaurus in any of the challenge maps. I only made a Lagoon or Aviary for the novelty of it since the cost of setting one up was so expensive, most of the time your resources were better spent on other things. The only time I got to see them in this game was in the sandbox or during the campaign. It was kind of a bummer that they had over 100 different dinosaur species and you get stuck only able to afford about 20 of them in any one scenario. I didn't even make a Stegosaurus or Triceratops. I got to use the 'lesser' versions of those dinosaurs, but if you want to get a 5 star park, you really can't spend much time trying to get the cool dinosaurs. By the time you have enough money for one, your dinosaurs will die from old age....literally. The trophy list isn't too bad. The 100% database was the hardest trophy to get since it isn't clear how all of the diseases/injuries get unlocked and you have to actively try to get a couple. The hardest one I had to get was for 'ingrown claw'. In order to get this injury, you have to get a dinosaur that has a broken claw and not heal it. They get a broken claw by fighting or attacking a fence. Sometimes it will turn into an ingrown claw. Well I spent three hours trying to get this one before I realized I was sabotaging myself by having my medical truck assigned to the ranger posts because they were healing the broken claw. Then I must've gotten a broken claw ten times before one turned into an ingrown claw. I ended up forcing the issue by making a very small paddock with the strongest fence and loading it with Coelophysis (small carnivore). They were too small to break the wall and they were uncomfortable enough to keep trying. I had like 30 of them in this small zone and after about 15 minutes, I finally had a broken claw turn into an ingrown claw. All the rest of the diseases and injuries happened naturally for me. The trophies for beating the challenges on Jurassic Difficulty were also quite easy due to that pause button. I beat each map in six hours or less and the par time on Jurassic Difficulty was over ten hours for each. Once you get a hang of what is needed to get a five star park, it is super easy to do. I didn't mention some of the nuance involved with amenities and how there are different types of guests that come to your park and how attractions can lure different types. I didn't mention it since while it is a thing, it's not something I really paid much attention to other than making sure my amenities made happy the type of guest that was visiting it (you do that by offering different food/drink/shopping item targeted towards certain guests). If you have attractions that make 'adventure guests' happy, but only 'luxury guests' are visiting that amenity, well you'll probably lose money. Selling the right good or having the right attractions present means big money. I liked this game very much. While I found the scientists to be a pain in the ass, especially in the beginning, once you get the formula down for making a profitable park, even the scientists became pretty easy to manage. If you like park builder games, I would recommend this one since it brings something a little different to the table. It's not a perfect game, but once I got back into it, I had a hard time stopping each night. I kept on wanting to just finish this one last thing before bed, not wanting to lose my train of thought. It was addicting and fun and if you can get it for $20, you will have many hours of enjoyment. I finished another game today in Stray, but I'll write about that one another day. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted January 1, 2023 Author Share Posted January 1, 2023 (edited) I started this review back in September and then just kind of left it...It's been crazy busy at work and I've been saving all my free time to play my games. I've had a bit of a mid-life gaming crisis at the same time. I had been all about this streak of mine for two years and I found that trying to keep it going had made me break a lot of my gaming habits that were formed from me simply enjoying the games I play and doing it the way I want to. My streak was two years in mid-November and I let it lapse on the two year anniversary. it's been about 6 weeks since I let it expire and I feel great about it. I'm no longer stressing about what game I need to play or stopping at a certain point so I have a 'gimme' trophy on a day I need one. I have a mini-project I'm working on in advance of an event that I hope happens again next year. I won't say anything specific now, but my goal is somewhat lofty and ridiculous, but I think it would be cool if I can get it done. If the event doesn't happen, I'll probably just post my results on my own. My short term goals will involve finishing up my incomplete games on my list. There are a few I'm not looking forward to, but I want to get back to doing what I loved about trophy hunting, which was to finish every game I start. I had planned on doing the Soulsbourne series this winter (as you can see by the Demon's Souls game sitting one trophy from the plat), but I'm going to put that on ice until I get my unfinished games back down to something I'll be happier with. What have I been doing with myself since my last update in September? Playing a lot of Shiren the Wanderer on my Vita. I can smell the platinum right now and everything hard has been done....just some grindy stuff left to do and I'll be done. I could be anywhere from 5-20 hours away from completion. I'm up to about 350 hours in it so far and I'd say about 250 hours of that has been since September. 95% of my time on PSNP is done on my phone, where I'll usually read threads and give the ole heart to my favorite posts...but I only post from my desktop. While I don't consider myself 'old' per say....if you saw me try to type on my phone, you'd think I'd never picked one up before. I can type 80-100wpm on a keyboard and that dips down to about 5 wpm on a phone. Needless to say, I'm not terribly active on the forums when I'm on my phone. Time I would have been on my desktop being active here has been spent with my Vita. With Shiren almost done, I would think I'd be much better about updating my progress here....in addition to the many events I try to participate in. Anyway.... Platinum #178 Stray I'll start off by saying I don't have the same infatuation with cats that a lot of people seem to. I don't dislike them, but I also don't feel the need to run up and pet every animal I see either. I'm allergic to pet dander so never really had any pets growing up, so never developed that 'fur baby' mentality that a lot of people have. I like other people's pets, but don't need one of my own. Having said all that...I'm not a monster lol I like a cute cat video as much as the next person but I'm sure my allergies and not having any pets growing up has made me a bit more apathetic towards the pet-life than if my situation were different. I got this game because it was free at the time, it seemed somewhat unique, and I thought it was a cat sim game to be honest. I thought it'd be fun to do some evil cat shit and push other cats down a flight of attic stairs or chase after a red laser dot or something. Plus, it looked like a short enough game that I could casually play to get some quick trophies to keep my streak alive. Needless to say, I didn't exactly get what I thought I was lol... As I mentioned, I thought this was going to be a Cat Sim game, maybe not as goofy as Goat Simulator, but not far off either. I wasn't expecting there to be much of a story and was somewhat surprised that there is a story and that it's actually not as shallow as you would think. It's fairly original and takes place in a post apocalyptic world. Emotions ran higher than I would have expected from a cat game....but robots are our friends and little gelatin-like parasites are out to get us. The game starts with you falling from the 'outside world' into this dystopian city and you are trying to get out to get back to your family. Along the way you make some friends and help them out. The game is pretty linear, but has an open world feel to it in some of the areas. You can run, jump and meow. Those are your tools against the forces of evil...until you find a flashlight...then you're a badass and microwave explode the little shits. The controls are decent...there is some drag when you're trying to turn at times and it can be slightly frustrating when going for the Can't Cat-ch Me trophy where you have to run through a parasite infested zone without any of them latching onto you. There seems like hundreds during that sequence and they are yeeting themselves at you from every direction. In general, running in a zig-zaggy way seems to throw off most of them, but if that's all you do, you won't get through the area unscathed. It probably took me 45 minutes to an hour to get that trophy. I never really got frustrated since the whole sequence is only a couple minutes long, but there were a couple really tricky spots that took a bit of luck to get through. The graphics were quite good. There was a lot of detail in the city and the lighting in the sewer areas was pretty well done. It was colorful, but you could definitely tell you were in an apocalyptic world. I can't recall any puzzle being that hard to figure out. Finding some of the music sheets were a bit out of the way, but the scratching posts and memories weren't usually too far off the beaten path. Outside of that one trophy, the rest of the list was pretty straightforward. I cut the speed run pretty close clocking in at an hour and 55 minutes. I thought I went pretty quickly through most of the areas, but I think the game can be done in about an hour and 40 or so, so I must've taken the long way around on more than one occasion. For an indie game, it was extremely well done. They took the time to flesh out the story, tighten the graphics and make a pretty enjoyable gaming experience. I beat the game in like 10 hours or so, so it's a game you can do pretty quickly. It's not the best game I've every played, but if you didn't know it was an indie game, you probably wouldn't think it is since there were really no rough edges to be found with this one. I enjoyed my time with it and it was definitely worth the price I paid If you haven't played it yet, it's worth giving a shot. Since my last post, I've beaten two other games completely that I'll need to review and I've gotten two other games a minute away from the plat that I'm saving to pop later. I'll probably write the reviews on those two ahead of time since I'm not sure when I'll finish them and I want to give them a fair review and write about them while they're fresh in my brain. I hope everyone has had a great holiday season and I hope you have a happy and safe New Years! Edited January 1, 2023 by Briste 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted January 5, 2023 Author Share Posted January 5, 2023 My next game review is a game with no Plat. Guns Up! Apparently this game has been around for a while and is another one you can add to my pile of games I'd never heard of. I learned of this game quite accidentally and it was pretty fortuitous. I saw a thread on the the main page of PSNP that mentioned the servers were closing in April and that anyone who had an account prior to the end of October would get 50k free gold to use in the game. When I see that a game server is closing, I usually take a peek to see if it something I would like to play before it is gone forever. I played Mad Max for that reason and enjoyed that game quite a bit. When I saw this game, it reminded me a bit of Clash of Clans that I played on my phone, except it was a side scroller. The concept is the same though, you build a base to defend your fort and you use troops to assault others. I enjoy games like this quite a bit and decided to pick it up and start playing. I figured the 50k gold would speed up the process, but I had 6 months to beat it in any scenario, so I wasn't very worried. Turns out that the headline was a bit misleading. What the promotion actually was, was that anyone who had an account before they made that announcement, would get 50k gold before the end of October. Me, and several others I'm sure, were duped by the misleading headline and started playing the game expecting the 50k gold to come. It never did. The good news is that it didn't really matter that much. I think the game was much harder for me and those that didn't receive the gold, who were just starting out, because EVERYONE had stacked soldiers from being able to buy card packs with the Gold. I swear to Jeebus, that virtually every base I assault has Commando's (think Jesse Ventura in Predator with a mini gun) or Bombardiers, who just spam grenades at you. There are some bases that you just can't beat without 'Hero' characters. While the game was harder without the gold, it is still very doable. So I haven't really said anything about the game yet other than it feels like COC and that there was a gold giveaway I didn't qualify for. What is the game though...it's a side scrolling real-time strategy game. You utilize troops with different strengths, that you can further enhance with perks and helmets, to assault other bases to earn 'Dog Tags' and other rewards like cards. I don't think the the Dog Tags do anything other than serve as trophies for how well you're doing. You can earn alliance battles by getting some during an alliance war season, but other than that, they seem to be mostly used for daily/weekly/monthly rankings. You start with some basic troops and can unlock more by leveling up. You can use Munitions (in game currency used for upgrading), Gold (you can buy this with real money but not anymore since they announced the closure), card packs or battle rewards to unlock new troops. They are rare from battle rewards. You mostly earn attack cards, perks and munitions from battle rewards, but you can occasionally earn structures for your base, dynamite (to clear your base debris from your base), Valor (to unlock more troop perk slots), Gold (used to purchase card packs and unlock soldiers) or Build Points (used to expand your home base). Attack cards are used during an assault to give your team a short advantage. It could be a missile strike, tear gas, a decoy, health boost and several other things. The basic soldiers are Grunts, Assaults, Grenadiers, Medics and Engineers (you might unlock those last two early in leveling). They are cheap to use in battle, but they are not terribly powerful either. You will mostly be using Grunts as you get five of them to spawn each time you select them for the least amount of munitions. I feel like this is getting confusing....I made a brief video for the thread I mentioned above because people were having trouble beating other bases and I discussed my strategy. I'll put that here too so you can get a quick look at what the game is like: So basically the job of the defense is to use the terrain and setup their structures in a way to prevent you from destroying the base and as the attacker you want to kill it. Very straightforward. The game was not very hard at all to 100%. I finished it in just over a week. Alliance battles happen every couple of weeks, so that one is common enough. The scariest trophy is the one for getting a Legend card as a reward from a battle or card pack. You don't get any Legend card packs unless you have 900 gold to spend or are in an alliance that qualifies for one. I got my Legend card as a reward from a battle, and it wasn't until about my 250th battle that that happened...so it is quite rare. The rest of the trophies though aren't too bad...it takes a little planning for the 'Well Rounded' trophy for spawning five different veterans in one battle...but you can slowly work towards that. You soldiers earn XP during battle, and if they earn enough and survive the fight, they can be upgraded to a one star veteran (boosting stats). They can earn enough to get up to a three star veteran. You can carry over a set amount of Veterans (this amount changes the higher level you are). I only use them for defense for the most part...but for this particular trophy, you need to spawn a veteran from five different classes during a battle. I just used different soldier types until I got five of them saved up and then just spawned them all towards the end of a fight so I didn't lose them and the trophy popped. The grindiest trophy was probably for getting a level 7 wall. It costs like 300k munitions and you don't get them that fast in the game. Plus you want to use your munitions to level up your base and unlock new soldiers, so it's hard to save up that much....but this is another one that just takes a little time. I very much like this game and have continued to play it every day since I started. I'm a bit bummed it'll be shutting down in April, but I'm happy I've gotten to play it this much since it is a genre I do enjoy quite a bit. If you do too, you should definitely give it a try. I'd be happy to friend anyone to help them get the friend trophy and you have more than enough time to get the rest. My next review will come some time in the next few days and will be for the new(er) Gotham Knights game that came out. Happy hunting all! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted January 17, 2023 Author Share Posted January 17, 2023 Platinum #179 Gotham Knights This is a new game so I'll keep this spoiler free beyond the intro/tagline. I had pre-ordered this game because I was really excited about the prospect of another Arkham style Batman game. Arkham City was my first ever platinum and it's the only series I've played all the games for, including all the versions. I absolutely love the series and have loved each and every playthrough I've done. As a kid, I was lukewarm towards Batman and was always more of a Spider-Man fan. I enjoyed both animated series, and the Michael Keaton Batman movie was amazing. The next few that came out kind of turned me off a bit to Batman, but the Christopher Nolan Trilogy brought me right back into the Batman fold, and the Arkham series games helped make Batman my favorite super hero. As I mentioned, I was initially very excited when I heard about this game...and then I heard that it was going to be a Batman game without Batman since he is dead for this one. That made me a bit nervous, but I figured it'd be fun to play an Arkham game with the Bat Family as well, so decided to keep my pre-order. The opening of the game is about a 15 minute cutscene that shows you the sequence of events that lead to Batman's demise and the game starts off with you picking which of the Bat Family you want to play as. The choices are Batgirl, Nightwing, Robin and Red Hood. I decided to play as Babs since one of her abilities is to not be detected by cameras. Since I enjoy playing stealthily, I thought that would match my playstyle the most. I also figured her combat would probably more closely resemble Batman that the others. The opening sequence is cool, but I'll say it was quite jarring to hear someone other than Kevin Conroy voice Batman. Well, let me say it was jarring to have someone who sounds so different to Conroy voice Batman. I felt like Roger Craig Smith, who did Arkham Origins, was close enough that it didn't feel that off. Michael Antonakos does the voice acting in this game and his voice is incredibly deep and very different and was extremely noticeable. He didn't do a bad job, but it didn't sound like Batman. I was incredibly sad when I heard that Kevin Conroy had passed away shortly after this game came out. He was the voice of Batman and extremely good at what he did. I feel like now is a good time to say that this game is the textbook definition of mediocre and it could/should have been great. What this game did well was the graphics and the city of Gotham. It is wide open with a ton of detail and it doesn't look like any expense was spared when creating this game. The handling on the Bat Cycle wasn't too bad but unfortunately, that's the last of the good things I have to say about this game. Nothing is bad, but nothing is good either. The biggest sin that this game has, by far, is the combat. I don't understand how you fuck that one up in this series...the thing that made those Arkham games so iconic (well was several things but...) was the combat. I can only speak from the perspective of Batgirl since I didn't play with any of the other characters, but I hope you didn't like countering in the other games, because it is gone in this game. The combat moved away from the perfected Arkham free flow style to something closer to the Spider-Man game's method of combat that relies on dodging and agility in lieu of countering and brute strength. You have to relearn the combat and it is just not as smooth or well done. Gone are the gadgets, replaced with Momentum Abilities. The abilities are fine, but aren't as fluid in battle. The game is much more button mashing in this than in the previous games and it was my biggest disappointment in this game by a landslide. Once I got the hang of the combat it was a bit better....but it was no longer great. The story is kind of meh also. With Batman dead, there's a power struggle that ensues between some criminal factions and it's the Bat Family's job to step in and subdue the chaos. I found it to be very predictable and several of the 'big reveals' were not as surprising to me as I think they were supposed to be. The voice actors are also fine, but the script is pretty camp-y. Most of the cutscenes end with someone saying something inspiring and then they stand there awkwardly while the camera zooms out and fades away. A lot of head nodding as the camera zooms out too. It was just kind of lazy. There was no darkness or edginess to it like there were in the other games of the series. While the script felt lazy, I thought how they had the story play out was even lazier. As I mentioned, I only used Babs even though there were four to choose from. Nothing stopped me from switching at any point, but I just started with Babs, stuck with Babs and had no reason or motivation to try anyone other than Babs. This was a huge missed opportunity here. They should have interwoven some sort of story for each into the main story where you had to play as each for a while. They could have done something like Final Fantasy VI when Sabin is knocked off the raft and floats down the river and you're introduced to Cyan and Shadow, while Locke has to go to South Figaro to try and sabotage the Empire from advancing to Narshe and meets Celes, while Edgar and Terra go to Narshe to get the help of the Returners against the empire. In that game, you can pick to do any of the three in any order, but you must do all three to advance the story. That is my favorite game of all time and it's because they did stuff like that to really flesh out the story. If that was too much for Gotham Knights, they could have done what Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep did by having all the characters have a different story happening at the same time and you had to play as all three to get the full story. That did not happen here. I think the story is basically the same for any of the four except maybe some dialogue so there is really no reason to have all four at all. What they should have done is have different events within the story where you had to go as Red Hood to do something, while at the same time Robin is off doing X and Nightwing is doing Y, while Babs does Z. You'd have to complete all four events as a team for the story to progress. That would have made the characters you aren't using as your main, at least feel a little relevant. In this game, they're basically on comms the whole time and contribute nothing to what you're doing. It seems like a wasted opportunity and the game wasn't good enough for me to playthrough four times to see what the differences could be. I will say this for them, when someone had an idea...they did the shit out of it. Didn't even have to be a good idea, just an idea, and you'd have to do it hundreds of times. Similar to Spider-Man having crimes that you had to do, Gotham Knights has the same thing. You have to prevent 250 crimes for a trophy. None of them are hard, but there's like six variations and it's the same shit over and over and over and over....It's got your usual collectibles like finding batarangs scattered throughout the city and different street art and some other stuff. There's a couple side missions that involve fighting some peripheral bad guys, not in the main story. But basically the day time in the game is a cutscene advancing the story or allowing you to upgrade/train at the base, and the nights are preventing crimes and doing fetch quests to advance the story. It is a formula that has been done a thousand times and this game truly doesn't bring anything new to the table. The DLC they added didn't bring anything new to the table either. The trophies require you to beat 'hard versions' of the side-bosses from the main game, but they did the annoying thing that these games do to make the bosses 'harder'....they made it have a million hit points. Your 'power level' goes up as you get better gear and better mods to add to the gear, and each boss has a 'recommended power level' you should be before fighting them...but if you have patience, you can ignore that. The first one of those I did, I was like 3000 power under the recommended level and beat it easily....it took me 27 minutes since I wasn't doing more than 500 damage and he had like 1.2 million HP, but I was able to do it. I decided to level up my power after that fight since I didn't want to spend 30-45 minutes each fight. I decided to do the Heroic Assault part of the DLC first and holy shit is that repetitive. You have to beat 30 floors of battles for this trophy. Each floor has three sections before it is beaten and I think there's only like 5 different things it can be. Either defend a console, beat some faction leaders, survive four waves of bad guys, escort a laser gun or fix some consoles to unlock some doors. It is brutally repetitive, but you can play with three other people. It doesn't make things any easier really (except for a couple of the escort levels and the very last level). The best way to get through these is to put the difficulty to very easy and then just watch TV or something while you go through this mind numbing addition. This game's biggest problem is the fact that it was following in the footsteps of some masterfully done games. If you weren't comparing this game to the others in the series, it'd probably be fine...but the problem is you are. They took the best part of the previous entries and changed it and then didn't do anything new or make anything better. The game runs fine, I had no crashes and everything popped when it should have...but there was nothing memorable at all either. If you get this game as a gift, or it ends up 'free' on PS+ some day, and you have a craving for some Batman-like gameplay....you could play this one...but under no circumstances can I recommend you pay full price for this. Everything this game is has been done before and probably a lot better. On my other gaming front. I'm a few hours away from getting the Plat for the behemoth that is Shiren The Wanderer. I've also gotten Call of Duty: World at War one trophy away from the platinum. I'm saving this one for a project I'm working on. I'm going to re-100% Jurassic World Evo 2 since they added DLC since I beat it a few months ago. Once I'm done with that...my next game will be Farcry 2, which according to my friends, makes me nuts. I have my reasons and we'll see how it goes. What I've learned recently is that I really enjoy these old PS3 games. Bioshock was more fun than I expected and I also had quite a bit of fun with WaW. I run the risk of this game becoming my first true 'unobtainable' if the servers shit the bed in the next few months....but I'm willing to roll the dice for now. Hope everyone is doing well! 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted January 23, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 23, 2023 Platinum #180 Shiren The Wanderer This is going to be long so be forewarned. I'm only the 25th person to platinum this game on the site, so I don't think there's a ton of information out there on this one. Shockingly, this was another game I had never heard of and had nowhere near any radar I might have had on games to play. The way I found out about this game was from doing the RPG Mania Event for 2021. The game was on the 'Most Wanted' list that counted as extra points. I had wanted to try and do one of them for the event, and that seemed like the most likely one that I could do. I ended up starting the game on my family vacation to New Hampshire that summer. I was in the midst of my huge streak and was looking for a few Vita games that I could pop some quick trophies while there. Since I was on vacation with my family, it needed to be something I could play for a short while after everyone went to sleep. Shiren had a couple that seemed quick to get and I figured if I wanted to get the game done for the event, I needed to start soon (the vacation was in July). I still had no idea what Shiren was at this point except that it had a ton of UR trophies, and that it seemed grindy as hell. It is grindy as hell....BUT....I did enjoy the vast majority of the game. For those of you that do not know, Shiren the Wanderer is a mix between Rogue-like and Rogue-lite dungeon crawler. There is kind of a 'main hub' called Nekomaneki Village, which is where you respawn if you die, and is also where you store your Gitan (money) and gear that you successfully extract from dungeon exploring. There's a dude to lift curses, a shop, a point card exchange, a place where you can make your own items (I didn't do this at all when I played since I didn't understand the mechanic), and a bunch of other NPCs. Some of those NPCs can join you as an ally and a handful initiate quests. There's the beginning town Inori Village, which is connected to Nekomaneki and is the home of a few important dungeons that you need to do several times. Other than that, there's only a couple of other 'Towns' that you find on the trek up the Tower of Fortune. The Hermit's Hermitage and the Sparrow's Inn. There are sixteen dungeons that you must complete for trophies, however there are probably about ten more you could do, but don't have to for the platinum (I didn't). The dungeons will randomly have shops along the way where you can sell stuff you don't need and maybe buy a few items if there's something useful. Most of the different dungeons have some sort of weird gimmick, like hunger goes down at a timed rate instead of each step (turn), or the room caves in once you leave it meaning you cannot go back. One dungeon you use the traps on the ground against the enemies instead of the traps harming you. You always start at level 1 when you enter a dungeon and most of them make you start with nothing...but there are a handful that you can go into and bring gear. Those ones are the main ones you use for farming the vast amount of items/monsters you have to get for the True Shiren Fan and Shiren, Monster Professor trophies for completing all the item and monster entries in the tracking books. There is a ton of stuff to learn in this game and I'm pretty sure that this game would take over a thousand hours to beat legitimately, without the benefit of save scumming. It is soooo easy to run into bad luck and daytime monsters hit like a truck the further down you go. Several can one-shot you and without a revive item, that ends your 100 floor plunge real quick. Oh yeah, I mentioned daytime monsters...there's a daytime and nighttime mechanics (daytime is in every dungeon with night time being in only some). During the daytime, you can use weapons and a shield, can use scrolls and is pretty straightforward (well not really, there's a ton to learn still). At nighttime, it's dark so you cannot see anything unless it's right next to you or unless you use a torch that casts a small amount of light around you...which expires over time. Each of the dungeons that have a daytime/nighttime cycles have a set number of turns before switching. A turn occurs anytime you do anything. Taking a step is a turn....taking an item out of a pot is a turn....equipping an item is a turn...eating food is a turn. Daytime is generally longer than nighttime. I'd say it's usually between 500 and 800 turns for a day cycle and 300-600 turns for a night cycle, depending on the dungeon. If you attack an enemy at night with a weapon, you only do 1 HP. What you have at nighttime for offense instead of a weapon are 'Abilities' that you can use to do damage, but you can only use each slot one once per floor (there are 8 slots). They only refresh if you collapse and are revived or use a peach to restore some hunger and abilities or use a scroll that regenerates the abilities. Due to this, you generally cannot stay on a floor too long at night or you'll run out of ways to kill the enemies and be a sitting duck. The only benefit of night enemies is they can't see either and will often attack each other as well...so if you can avoid them, they'll clear the floor for you. Early on in the game, you pretty much just avoid enemies and rush the stairs at night since you don't start with any really good abilities. Once you get some more abilities (namely Stairlight, Crawling Confusion and Electrocute), I found night time to be the safer way to travel. Daytime monsters can eff you up in a hurry. I've also mentioned hunger...which is another thing you have to monitor. For every dungeon but one, hunger depletes slightly after a set number of turns (let's say 10). If your hunger gets to 0, you start losing HP. Fortunately, you get a warning when you're at like 15% hunger that says 'Shiren feels dizzy' so that you are reminded to eat a peach or Onigiri to replenish. The downside to waiting that long, is if you are in 'Super Shiren' status (a random status you get from killing enemies that boosts abilities and can grant random beneficial effects), you can lose that bonus. Doesn't always happen, but can. It's actually very easy to lose Super Shiren status. Stepping on a trap (these are hidden unless you use a Navigation Scroll or have on a bracelet that reveals them) or taking enough damage where your HP is flashing red will often do it. Traps are pretty plentiful too, so it's really easy to step on one. You can reveal a trap by swinging your sword at the square in front of you....but that would slow you down tremendously and wastes a turn for hunger as well. The floor layouts are generally consistent from dungeon to dungeon. Usually a cave setup, but there's also floors that have water or are floating or that have lava that can erupt. Most of the dungeon trophies aren't too bad either because the first time you do a dungeon is generally an abbreviated run, like get to floor 25 is the finish line for the first run. If you go back in though, it's 100 floors. Many of the dungeons you only need to do once, so you only need to do the abbreviated tour...but some of them you have to get to floor 100 and some of them you have to go that deep to finish up all the entries in the 'Monster Book'. The early floors are generally not too bad (except in dungeons where you can bring gear). The game gives you a chance to try and accumulate some gear to use in dungeons where you start from scratch. You can find Staves, Talismans, Pots, Scrolls, Grasses, Food, Arrows/Rocks, Weapons, Shields, and Bracelets. Some of the stuff you find is really useful, some of it is harmful and some of it is a joke (literally). Staves give you the ability to do certain things when you wave them. They each have a set amount of charges (usually like 5-7) that can range from useful things like swapping your position with an enemy, or boring a hole through a wall, to detrimental things like hasting an enemy or stupid things like nagging you or putting on a play. There's a Drama Staff that when you wave it, the game says some random lines from a made up play. It is useless and there only for comedic affect. The only reason you would use this staff is because in most of the dungeons, the items are unidentified and the only way to find out what it does is to use it. You can also use an Identify Scroll or Identity Pot, or if you're lucky, an Identify Bracelet that will identify any item you pick up without expiring (not common). Learning what these items do and how to use them effectively is the only way to get through some of these dungeons...even with save scumming. It's the same story with the grasses and scrolls. There are some very useful grasses that can raise your level, heal you or revive you if you fall....then there are some really nasty ones like 'Amnesia Grass' that makes you forget all the identified items you've found or the 'Super Unlucky Seed' that resets you to level one. This is where save scumming becomes useful in some of these deep dives. You can save, use the item, and if it was a good item, keep going or if it was a bad item, you can reload the save and know what it is going forward. The game has a nifty 'name' option where you can rename the item...so that is helpful after you've learned what it is and reload the save. Where save scumming is vital though in this game is the last 25 floors or so of a dungeon. The monsters are really nasty here and can pretty much hurt you from anywhere on the map. Dragons can breathe fire that go through walls and can do 30 damage a clip (you only generally get round 300 HP), Porky enemies can lob rocks at you from anywhere on the map, Tanks that get two moves per turn and if they can see you can shoot two missiles at you for 60 damage each, Fearabbits can warp you from anywhere on the floor (as well as several enemies) and place you right next to it. Each enemy is supercharged that far into the dungeon and most of them have some annoying ability. If there are multiple of those specific enemies I mentioned on a floor, you can have several hundred damage done to you each step, effectively wiping your run. This is why I'm not sure how anyone can beat this game without some save scumming. Well, I know how...but there's a lot of luck involved. So each each weapon and armor has 8 upgrade levels as well as a max of +99 the rating can be. It sounds confusing, since there's two different types of levels, but it's not really. A Katana starts as a Katana, but once it's earned enough XP, it'll level up to a 'Good Katana' and so on for 8 levels. There are scrolls/blacksmiths that can raise the power of a weapon/shield as well. If you find a 'Fate Scroll' and use it on a sword, that Katana goes from a Katana to a Katana+1, which raises it's damage by one. In addition to these levels, weapons/shields have the ability to equip 'runes', which are basically buffs. The lower the level, the weaker the item and the fewer runes it possesses. As they level up, they gain power and more runes. Once they hit level 8, you can equip an infinite amount of runes. Many items come with some special rune as an innate ability. For example, the Scythe does bonus damage to plant enemies. If you have a Katana (that has no innate ability), you can get the rune from the Scythe onto your main weapon in one of two ways. The safest way is with a Synthesis Pot. This pot will synthesize items together and join the power/rune with the first item, of the same kind, you put in. That means you cannot fuse a shield with a sword so you can't get the rune from a shield to play on your sword. It has to be the same type of item to synthesize. What's great about this pot is you'll also get the bonus attack/defensive power if the item you're adding to the pot has bonus power. So if you put your Katana+4 in a Synthesis pot and then add the Scythe+2, your Katana will become a Katana+6 with the rune that does bonus damage to plant enemies. A synthesis pot always holds 5 items, so if you save up some random weapons you find on your dive, and then throw them all in a Synthesis Pot, you can add a ton of runes to your sword. As I mentioned though, there's a cap the lower level the sword is, so the base Katana might get 5 runes, while the Good Katana gets 7 and so on until it's infinite at level 8. The other way to add runes to your weapons is from the enemy called 'Mixers'. If you throw something at a Mixer, it will swallow it. If you throw another item at it, it will swallow that too. The higher the level the mixer, the more it can swallow. The weakest Mixer can only swallow two items. Once you kill the Mixer, it'll drop one, synthesized item. The benefit of using Mixers, is that they can also take the abilities from grasses, some staves, some scrolls and some bracelets and put them on your sword/shield. These monsters only show up on specific floors, so it is beneficial to save these items until you get to floors that these enemies are and then boost your weapons. This is not fool proof and I often would save scum this process as well, since you are generally trying to synthesize the equipment you're using...once you throw it at the Mixer, you're now left without a weapon or a shield and the monster becomes that much harder...oh they also get a 'boost' when they eat something...so there's that too. The luck involves finding the correct items you need to mitigate the damage on these later floors and/or finding Pots that can completely neutralize the damage. There's a rune you can get that eliminates blast damage, which makes the tanks unable to hurt you. There's a rune that halves fire damage or a Pot that will completely neutralize fire damage if you put something inside it. There's another pot that makes it so all thrown items miss. If you find those things and can hold them until these levels, you have a decent chance of getting through....but if you get there and don't...it's virtually impossible to get through a floor without dying. What I would basically do, is save every 5 floors and upload to the cloud until I got to about the 50th floor. Then I would save every floor, because so much can go so wrong so quickly, and if you die....you lose all the items in your possession at the time. It's not as big a deal in the dungeons where you start with nothing (unless you've built a really strong weapon/shield during that dive), but it can be catastrophic in dungeons where you can bring stuff and you've brought your strongest gear. BUT....and I cannot stress this enough....YOU MUST ABORT TO THE MAIN MENU BEFORE UPLOADING YOUR SAVE. If you upload a save without doing this and then either close the game or download a save where this has happened...the game will assume you perished in the dungeon and kick you back to the main village sans your gear/gold. This happened to me right after I had just leveled up the strongest sword in the game to level 8 and had a ton of runes on it. I didn't even do it from being stupid with my saves....and this is the second part I cannot stress enough....TURN OFF THE AUTO-UPLOAD SAVE OPTION ON THE VITA FOR THIS GAME...I lost all my stuff because the Vita uploaded a save file overnight, where I had suspended the game outside of the abort menu, and I died in the dungeon and went to reload my prior save to try again. The save on the cloud was the overnight save and I had lost all my shit. I was extremely frustrated and took some time away from the game. At the time this happened, I didn't understand the game as well as I did by the end of it and felt like I had just added 100 hours to my platinum attempt. It was a nuisance for sure, but that weapon didn't even end up being the best weapon for farming so wasn't as bad as I had thought. I did have that happen two other times (from my own stupidity those times) and while it was very frustrating, I knew better how to replace the gear. So while save scumming is the only safe/efficient way to platinum this game....it does come with risks so beware. For as grindy as this game is, I didn't mind most of the grind since the dungeon dives were pretty fun and several of the more grindy things had shortcuts. For example, to max out the weapons book, you had to find every weapon AND get them all to their final form (8th level). Normally, the amount of grinding needed for that would be insane, however there is a scroll in the game called the 'Gambler's Scroll' that has several different things it can do for you. It can make you go bankrupt, increase the speed of every monster on the floor, explode, raise your character 10 levels, warp you 5 floors ahead OR it can raise the level of every weapon/shield in your inventory by one. There's also a pot called a 'Blessed Pot' that will bless any item you put in it. For scrolls, it gives them a second use. The problem with a Blessed Pot is that there is only two ways to get the item you put in there out...one is to throw the pot to break it, but the other is the use of an 'Extraction Scroll' which empties the pot and puts everything on the ground around you. So the trick for this trophy is to get a Blessed Pot with a 5 capacity, fill it with 5 Gambler's Scrolls and then use the Extraction Scroll to get the Gambler's Scrolls out so that you can use them twice. Use the scroll one time, put it back into your pot and then extract them again. So long as you have enough Extraction Scrolls, you can do this cycle forever. It is this method that is used to level up all the weapons/shields to fill out the book. If you're low on scrolls, you can save scum this too, but it gets tedious. The only challenge becomes getting the base level item for every slot. Similar to Weapons/Shields, each monster has 4 levels for each daytime and nighttime cycles, for a total of 8 there as well. These are not as easy as the weapons/shields since you have to find and defeat each enemy, and not every monster is found in every dungeon. I had made a spreadsheet pretty early to track which monsters I needed in a dungeon before entering and on which floor I should hang out to find them. Some of them are pretty rare and took a couple of trips. Honestly...if you plan to play this game, this website will prove invaluable for you and is a must read. It has everything you need to Platinum the game. The roughest part of the Monster List is the Jackwand enemies. Apparently they were the boss enemies of the co-op levels when the servers were up...but since they aren't anymore, the only way you can fight them is by 'wishing' to fight them by turning in 7 different colored catstones on the 43 floor of the Inori Cave. Unlike the other monsters, there are only 7 versions of the Jackwands and there are no day/night versions since it's a boss. Seven Catstones gets you one wish...so you need at least seven sets to fight all versions of the Jackwands. You also need several other sets to unlock unique items in the other books as well.... You can get one full set of Catsones by using 'Tanuki Passwords' and you get one full set for completing the Destiny's Descent Dungeon (the hardest in the game). You can also buy them from a merchant that goes to random dungeons and sometimes find them from Elite Shops in dungeons or by mining walls in dungeons...but the best way to farm Catstones is to find a 'Pick-a-Choice' Shop in the 'Lost Well' dungeon and save scumming your way to getting a full set of them. The 'Pick-a-Choice' shop involves paying 1k Gitan to the merchant, then choosing one of two warp tiles that shoot you to either an item or a trap door. The trick is to save to the cloud, talk to the merchant and then guess a side. If you guess the wrong side, you still see what kind of item was on the correct tile. In either case, reload your save and if it was a catstone, go on the other warp tile and see if it was a stone you needed, if not take a step sideways and talk to the merchant again. The potential item changes each turn you take before talking to the merchant...so you can cycle through the items until you find what you need. If you get an item you need, there's another warp tile next to the item you receive, that will shoot you off to a random place in the dungeon. Walk back to the merchant and rinse/repeat until you have a full set of stones. The reason you can't get all the sets in one trip is because you cannot put a Catstone in a pot, so each stone takes up one inventory space, and you only have 24 of them (not counting pots that can store any other type of item except other pots and Catstones). What makes this grindy, is that Pick-a-Choice shops can show up on any floor. I found them as low as the 6th floor and as high as the 92nd floor. While it can make your trek harder, my recommendation is to leave 14 empty inventory slots and get two full sets each trip to cut down on the number of dives you do. While you are looking for Catstones, I also recommend keeping any VIP Bracelets you find as well. Get as many of those as you can and it will help greatly on the next step I'm about to talk about... The item and monster trophies were grindy, but at least you were diving dungeons and playing the game to do it....the worst trophy by far is the one for maxing your Gitan (money). You can only hold 999,999 Gitan on your character at a time, but there is a bank in town that will hold your money for you. That can hold 99,999,999 Gitan. For this last trophy, you need to max out the bank. Similar to leveling the weapons, there is a workaround that involves using Extraction Scrolls, Blessed Pots and this time Coupon Scrolls. Coupon Scrolls make everything in the store free....so basically you drop all your items on the ground in a shop (hopefully many VIP Bracelets in Preservation Pots), sell it to the merchant, use a coupon scroll to get the items back for free and then sell them to the merchant again and rinse/repeat until you get 999,999 on your character, then pick up all your items and use an Escape Scroll or Undo Grass to exit the dungeon. I played this game for probably 300-350 hours, and I did this trophy last. After doing everything else in the game, I only had a little over 2,000,000 Gitan in the bank....so I had to dungeon dive 98 times to find shops to do this since you can't do this in town. The easiest place was the 'Merchant's Hideout' where you will always (at least I did) find a shop within the first 10 floors. The good news was I had enough good gear where I got 500k each round of Coupon scrolls, so I could get in and out of a dungeon in about 5-10 minutes using only two Coupon Scrolls....but multiply that 5-10 minutes times 98 trips and that's how long it took for me to do this one trophy. It wasn't interesting like filling out the item and monster books either....and I was super paranoid of dying and losing my stuff or messing up a cloud save. It was mind numbingly stupid and took me almost two weeks to do. Honestly, I could write a full dissertation on the intricacies of this game. I only touched the surface and have said a lot of words already. This game is definitely not for everyone, but with all of the tricks and the ability to save scum...it is definitely doable. Despite my use of save scumming, I'm still pretty proud of this Platinum since it was still grindy as hell and took a lot of patience to overcome. The game is extremely deep, thoroughly executed with well thought out and diverse mechanics. I had a lot of fun learning the ropes and if you want a challenge and a good dungeon crawler...then give it a go. It was one of the longer games I've played and I don't regret it. Now that it's over though...I think it's time to get back to Super Meat Boy to see if I can finally finish that one up. I'm not getting any younger so I feel like the window on this one may be closing for me. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AihaLoveleaf Posted January 23, 2023 Share Posted January 23, 2023 I appreciate the write-up for Shiren. There is a very passionate cult for the game online, but not a lot out there in regards to the trophy experience, so this has been pretty useful. I've played and made a guide for a game that takes direct influence from Shiren, so I have experience with quite a few of the game mechanics you went over: taking turns, using staves, identifying items through scrolls or use, and -- of course -- lots of save scumming, lol. I'm not currently mentally prepared, but Shiren is on the "someday" list for me, and I am interested. It's nice to know what some of the tougher parts of the game are like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted January 24, 2023 Author Share Posted January 24, 2023 On 1/23/2023 at 10:40 AM, AihaLoveleaf said: I appreciate the write-up for Shiren. There is a very passionate cult for the game online, but not a lot out there in regards to the trophy experience, so this has been pretty useful. I've played and made a guide for a game that takes direct influence from Shiren, so I have experience with quite a few of the game mechanics you went over: taking turns, using staves, identifying items through scrolls or use, and -- of course -- lots of save scumming, lol. I'm not currently mentally prepared, but Shiren is on the "someday" list for me, and I am interested. It's nice to know what some of the tougher parts of the game are like. Thanks! I did notice that there were some very passionate players of the series. You can tell with how thorough that wiki page I linked is. If you have experience with those types of mechanics already, you might have an easier go of it than I did. I didn't even really start using a lot of the mechanics until I had already cleared half of the dungeons. I couldn't find a great explanation on how the Synthesis worked, so for most of my early playtime, I didn't upgrade my weapons/shields at all, which made things a lot harder than it had to be. Once I learned how it worked, I had a better time of things. The cool thing is a lot of the enemies have some little quirk that you can possibly exploit to help make your trek easier. I didn't need a lot of them since I wasn't afraid to savescum....but to beat it legitimately, I'm sure you'd have to be a master of all of them. I hope you end up trying it because it is a really fun game If you do and have any questions, feel free to stop back in here and talk it through! Good luck! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted March 7, 2023 Author Share Posted March 7, 2023 Platinum #181 Walden, a game It's been a minute since my last completed game. As I've mentioned before, I have a little project I'm working on in anticipation of a potential future event. I've been playing these games and am about two minutes from the Platinum in four of them. I'm one upgraded weapon away from the Bioshock platinum, with a save right in front of the last upgrade station. I'm one collectible in Call of Duty: World at War away from the platinum with that one collectible being at the start of the level. I'm one cracked safe away from the platinum in Godfather II with a save at the nearest safehouse and I'm a 'viewing the trophy art' trophy away from the platinum in Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. I've also made good progress in Battlefield: Bad Company, but the 10,002 online kills trophy is probably going to take me several months to achieve. So even though I don't have a ton of completed games recently, I have been making some good progress. Since I'm not sure when I'll be completing these games, I've been writing my reviews about them and saving them to a Word doc so that I'm giving them a fair review at the time they are completed. Walden, a game was me taking a break from these more grindy games to play something a bit more laid back and relaxing...and what could be more relaxing than spending a year by Walden Pond fishing and taking in nature? One look at the trophy list should have clued me in that this wouldn't be quite as laid back as I was thinking. There is one pretty mindless, grindy trophy and several of them didn't pop when they were supposed to. In all honesty, I probably would have never played this game if left to me own devices. My friends @Jens and @eigen-space wrote a very nice guide for the game and since they seemed to enjoy it enough to write the guide, I thought I'd give it a go. To their credit, the guide is quite comprehensive for what you need to do to get the platinum and I found their recommendation of doing two playthroughs to be the best approach. For those of you that do not know, Walden Pond is a pond in Concord, MA (slightly northwest of Boston) where Henry David Thoreau decided to live on his own for a year back in 1854, and he wrote a book about the experience titled Walden. Thoreau was a 'Transcendentalist', which is the belief that people are inherently good and that society and its institutions are responsible for their corruption. My biggest memory from learning about him in high school was that he went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes to support a war he did not believe in. That is a very 10,000 foot view on it, but Thoreau decided to test this theory by withdrawing from society and living on his own out in the woods to see if he could, not only survive, but thrive on his own. This game was developed by USC Game Innovations Lab and is, by and large, an educational game. At its core, it's supposed to be a survival game, but I don't think you can actually die in this game, just lose inspiration. In this game, you play the role of Thoreau and the game begins in the summer. You are placed by his unfinished cabin, and are left to your own devices on how you wish to proceed. The goal is to survive an entire year in your cabin. There are several seasons that you must make it through, starting with early summer, then late summer, early fall, late fall, early winter, midwinter, late winter and finally spring. Each season lasts three in-game days and each day lasts about 15 minutes. Based on this, you can see one playthrough is roughly 6.5-7 hours. The basic tenant of the game is to forage enough food, gather enough fuel (wood), keep your clothes from falling off your body and keep your cabin from falling down. If you can do all of those things, you'll make it through. There is generally plenty of ways to stay alive. You can fix your clothes, chop wood and fix your cabin right at the cabin. You can forage for berries almost year round just outside the cabin as well. It really isn't that hard to do. The 'gimmick' in this game involves trying to 'find inspiration' while you are roaming around the pond. You'll find as you're playing, that the more inspiration you have, the more vivid the colors of the game are. While the graphics aren't 'amazing', they are decent enough that you can really notice when you are missing inspiration. You primarily gain inspiration by reading books and examining nature (you can zoom in on things in the game). As you find new items, you'll jot them down in your notebook and gain inspiration. In addition to finding new things in nature, you can also find arrowheads laying around. You primarily lose inspiration by not soaking in nature and by becoming fatigued from doing tasks. If you get too fatigued, you'll collapse and when you awake, are completely out of inspiration. I'm pretty sure the arrowheads are excerpts of Thoreau's writings. You'll find that these arrowheads will give you clues on his beliefs as a Transcendentalist as well as a slight clues on maybe what you need to be doing. You'll also find that the phrases that are said when you find an arrowhead, end up being scrawled in your notebook. The side quests or tasks that you need to do, are learned about from the letters you receive at your cabin, conversations with your good friend Emerson, mail you receive at the post office in the city of Concord or fliers located on the wall of that same post office. There is a trophy called Hermit, which requires you to complete the game once without ever going into town. This playthrough is exceptionally boring. There is not much to do in the game beyond foraging, chopping wood, fixing your house and mending your clothes without going into town. There are a few letters that you receive that let you know of potential side quests to do...but every one of them, except finding Emerson's books, requires at least one trip into town, so you can't really do anything during this playthrough. My recommendation for this playthrough is to just jog all over the place. The trophy Sojourner requires you to walk for 50 miles. You absolutely will not do that in one playthrough and I didn't get that trophy to pop until the end of my third playthrough. I basically just spent that playthrough jogging from your Cabin to Emerson's house and back. You run out of energy just outside of Emerson's house if you run there all the way from the cabin. He has a fireplace, which is important, because Thoreau regains his stamina by staring at a fire...you can then turn around and run back to your cabin and stare at your fire....and just do that over and over only stopping to replenish food/fuel as needed. The Saunterer trophy for walking 20 miles, popped just before the end of my first year at Walden Pond. The bummer about this trophy is that there is no tracker that lets you know how far you've walked. You just have to hope that the trophy isn't bugged and keep walking. I was convinced that the trophy was bugged since I felt like I ran several marathons that first year at Walden and the 20 mile trophy only popped at the very end. I spent the entire winter ice skating back and forth between two fires on the pond (ice skating is faster walking in this game) and it still took a full year for the 20 mile trophy. I was curious, since I was nervous it wasn't counting my miles, how big Walden Pond is...I Googled it and it says it is 1.7 miles to walk around...so you have to walk all the way around the pond just under 30 times to hit 50 miles. If all you do is walk around the pond, you can make it all the way around one time per day. You won't need to do that since you have a lot of walking to do in your second playthrough...but I thought it was worth noting. Another trophy is called Townie and that is for spending an hour of real time in town. I spent my time in town running laps around it trying to kill two birds with one stone. If you can't tell already...the stupid walking trophy is in the back of your head the whole time as a trophy hunter. I'm pretty sure that they have distance being extremely accurate and you legit have to walk 50 miles. As I mentioned, I ended up doing three playthroughs. Not by choice either mind you. On my second playthrough, I ran into a couple of glitched trophies. There is a trophy called Surveyor for doing surveying jobs around Walden Pond. You get the job by visiting the post office and reading a flyer that is pinned to the wall. The flyer is up there from the beginning of the game and I started doing the jobs the moment they became available. Once you finish one surveying job, you can revisit the post office to find the next request. I believe there are eight in all. Once I finished the eighth job, the trophy should have popped but didn't. I believe in late fall, you receive a letter from Emerson letting you know that there are surveying jobs available. I'm pretty sure that you glitch out the trophy if you start the surveying jobs before Emerson tells you about them. I was frustrated it didn't pop, but continued on with my second playthrough to finish up the Abolitionist trophy for helping slaves escape the US. Frustratingly enough, this trophy didn't pop either when I did the final request for that trophy. I'm not sure if they are tied together or not, and it may have been that the Naturalist trophy for gathering all of Dr. Agassiz's specimens would have glitched out too...but I didn't complete those side quest requirements. Once the Abolitionist trophy didn't pop, I stopped my second playthrough and started a third playthrough. On this playthrough, I waited until Emerson told me about the surveying jobs and on that playthrough, everything popped as it should have. So word to the wise if you plan on playing this game...on your non-hermit playthrough...DO NOT start the surveying side quest until after Emerson notifies you about it. It may have been a coincidence, but it's the only thing I can point to that caused the trophies not to pop when they should have during my second playthrough. Turns out I would have needed that third playthrough regardless as the 50 mile trophy was the last one to pop for me and didn't pop until spring started. In hindsight, it may have been a blessing that the trophies glitched in the second playthrough because it meant my third playthrough gave me more to do than just walk back and forth. If I had finished that second playthrough, it would have popped sometime during the winter of the third...but I suppose you could continue your second playthrough and just go through the seasons, walking each day, until it popped. I have mixed feelings about this game overall. I was bored to tears during my first playthrough as there is legitimately not enough to do in the game if you aren't going into town. Your hermit playthrough only consists of walking, taking boat rides to get that trophy out of the way, and maintaining your different supplies. The idea of inspiration enhancing the colors in the game was interesting...but there's no consequence at all for having low inspiration other than lifeless graphics. The second playthrough was way more interesting, but littered with trophies that didn't pop when they should, which soured that experience. That ended up making the third playthrough feel stressful as if I could be wasting my time if the trophies didn't pop this time. It was a relief when they did pop, but the focus was on making sure I didn't do anything to glitch out the trophies rather than enjoy what the game has to offer. At the end of the day, it was a pretty low stress, but boring game. If you read all of the diary entries, you would learn a thing or two about transcendentalism and about Thoreau, but the story doesn't go into any great depth outside of these small phrases you find. I bought Walden, a game back in June of 2022 for $4.49. That is a fair price for this game and I do not walk away feeling ripped off. It would have been a much more enjoyable game to play without the hermit playthrough and without the trophy popping issues. If you can find the game for that price, it's probably worth a playthrough...but any more than that and you may walk away feeling shortchanged. I'm going to try and mix in a few more 'non project' games so that I have more reasons to write. Hope everyone is having an enjoyable gaming year so far! Can't believe it's already March... 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rally-Vincent--- Posted March 7, 2023 Share Posted March 7, 2023 16 hours ago, Briste said: I'm going to try and mix in a few more 'non project' games so that I have more reasons to write. Hope everyone is having an enjoyable gaming year so far! Can't believe it's already March... It's march, and I played only one game this year and am not even half way through, so you're good im comparision. The project doesn't sound like birthday Plat rain day coming again, so what is it? Or is it still hush-hush, secret-secret? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gruffiiti Posted March 7, 2023 Share Posted March 7, 2023 Maybe hes trying to spell his username in a plat rain? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted March 7, 2023 Author Share Posted March 7, 2023 3 hours ago, Rally-Vincent--- said: The project doesn't sound like birthday Plat rain day coming again, so what is it? Or is it still hush-hush, secret-secret? 45 minutes ago, gruffiiti said: Maybe hes trying to spell his username in a plat rain? It's not super secret really, it's just that it's for an event that's been run annually by someone else. I don't want there to be any pressure to run the event again or anything. I just can never finish this particular event in time and I thought it'd be cool to spend the year getting ready for it just in case. There is a common theme among the games, but there is one unfinished game that will cause confusion I'm sure lol When I pop them, it probably won't all be on the same day, but there will be a specific order to how I pop them, whether the event happens or not. Speaking of events...I'll need to put my progress in the DLC event since I've finished several DLC's already 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted March 10, 2023 Author Share Posted March 10, 2023 Risk of Rain Quick little 100% game up next. This was a complete spur of the moment game. I had remembered @realm722's glowing recommendation when he had played and and @Cassylvania had recommended it recently as well. I knew it was a roguelike, but not much else. I didn't even know what roguelike/lite meant until a couple of years ago and my first real introduction to the genre was Enter the Gungeon, which I absolutely loved. Technically, Shiren the Wanderer was a roguelike/lite, but that had more of a Legend of Zelda feel than EtG. I had a craving for that Gungeon feel and am not quite ready to tackle The Binding of Isaac quite yet so this game was a pretty satisfying fit. Risk of Rain is a 2d side-scroller with graphics that reminded me of my NES days. The 'story' is that your spaceship has crash landed and you are trying to get off this planet that you've landed on. Your character is a 'Survivor' and according to the selection screen, there are twelve of them to choose from. You only start with one, the Commando, and you have to unlock the others through playing the game. After completing all of the trophies, I unlocked ten of the twelve. The only one that you need to unlock for a trophy is the 'Bandit' and that's because you have to beat a boss with one of his moves. I enjoyed playing as the Commando and felt that his arsenal of abilities and weapons matched how I like to play these games so I pretty much only used him. I didn't like the feel of the Bandit and only used him three times until I got that trophy and moved back to the more comfortable Commando. I never tried any of the other characters. The levels are relatively small, but you start at 'Ground Zero' and your mission is to find the 'Gate' that will lead you to the next level. Once you find the gate and activate it, it takes 90 seconds to charge and enemies start spawning at a much faster rate in addition to one (or sometimes two) of the possible bosses. Once the gate has charged, enemies stop spawning and you can leave the level once you clear out all the remaining bad guys on the floor. Similarly to EtG, I was getting creamed out of the gate and thought this game was going to be quite a challenge. I started playing on the 'Rainstorm' difficulty (normal) since you need to play at that level in order for the enemies to drop a 'Log Book'. The 'Log Book' is a fairly rare drop and you need 15 of them from the possible 31 enemy types for a trophy. I figured I'd play on that difficulty until I got enough books and then step down to 'Drizzle' to do the trophy cleanup. One of the trophies is for dying 50 times. Considering I died ten times relatively quickly, I figured that would be one of the first trophies I'd win and I was surprised that the rarity on that trophy was as low as it is. Well, while I got my ass handed to me relatively quickly in the beginning, the learning curve isn't that steep, and once I got my bearings, was able to hold my own pretty quickly. There are many, many different artifacts that you can get and you can get the same one several times. As you do, they stack and make the effect, and by proxy your character, even stronger. You may feel exposed and vulnerable early, but once you figure out what they are and how to farm them...you can get beefy pretty quick. The main way to get artifacts is by opening treasure boxes or by paying for a wish(?) at a shrine. You'll also get them from Boss drops and one artifact will make 'elite' enemies also potentially drop artifacts. You earn a little money for each kill and enemies will spawn indefinitely until you activate the portal, so you can farm gold as long as you want. I found that it was best to farm enough gold to unlock all of the boxes and shrines until they were all gone, before activating the gate portal. You don't want to dilly-dally though. Sticking around to farm too long does have its drawbacks....there is a timer in the game and the longer you play, the harder the difficulty is. It starts at 'Very Easy' where the enemies have the least amount of HP and they spawn more slowly and with not as many. In the 'Rainstorm' difficulty, about every one and a half minutes, the difficulty is increased...so every 90 seconds it'll go from 'Very Easy' to 'Easy' to 'Medium' to 'Hard' to 'Very Hard' and so on all the way up to 'HA HA HA HA HA HA' difficulty and in turn the spawns become faster with more spawned enemies and with more powerful versions. So if you take too long, and don't get enough artifacts, the enemies will become too strong and you'll get slaughtered. However, if you farm enough artifacts and get lucky with some good ones, 'HA HA HA HA HA' difficulty isn't that much harder than 'Very Easy'. On my last playthrough, I was virtually God. I had like seven stacks of every artifact (I had 237 at one time!) and I was regening health faster than I was losing it...that was if the enemies could get through my shield. The good news is that level of OP'ness makes the clean up for trophies super easy. A typical run has about five or six levels before you have the option to go to the last level. You can then either choose to go to the last level or replay a random level that is not the last level. The way I was able to get so many artifacts was because I was replaying the other levels. One of the trophy's requires you to open a Gold Treasure chest using the 'Explorer Key' (the wiki page calls it a Skeleton Key). It took FOREVER for RNGesus to bless me with that key as an artifact drop. I think I cycled through fifteen levels before getting one. The Gold Treasure chest will only appear in two different levels (thankfully, one of them is the last level), so I just kept cycling levels until I got the key before going to the last level. Overall, the game ended up being quite easy. I'm not sure why the guide seems to think it takes 25 hours to beat...I beat it in about 10-12 and I got relatively unlucky with RNG. My playtime will probably show like 30 hours because I left my console on overnight. One of the artifacts is a piggy bank that gives you a constant stream of money over time (about one gold every 2.5-3 seconds). The more stacks you have, the faster you get money. I had two stacks of the piggy bank and decided I'd leave the game on overnight, after clearing a level, to get the $20k trophy to pop. I left it on for about 16 hours or so and got to $21k when I turned it off. Trophy didn't pop...so word to the wise, don't waste your time with that method. In all honesty though, you get money really fast by the end of the game and the $20k trophy is super easy. That last run I did I had over $350k by the end of the last level. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack. It was actually quite good. Each level seemed like it had its own theme song and some of them were bangers lol It runs on a loop, but it sounded good and matched the style of game. I would 100% recommend this game to anyone. It scratches a nice itch for those that already like roguelike games and for those that are unsure if you'd like that genre or not...it's a good introduction. It's relatively short, has a smaller learning curve and is not terribly priced. It's a small bummer that there's no plat for this game. There are many in-game achievements to unlock that are not on the trophy list. They could have easily added more stuff to do and I would have happily continued to play this game. I would have liked to see a trophy for beating the game with each character or something. For a trophy hunter, there's a lot of the game left untapped due to the lacking trophy list....but as a person who also likes to have fun playing games, this game checked all of those boxes. Pick up this game and feel confident you are going to have a good time! 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted April 19, 2023 Author Share Posted April 19, 2023 (edited) Platinum #182 Strategic Mind: The Pacific Here's a secret about me...I love Turn Based Strategy games. I love them. I grew up playing games like Civilization 2 and Lords of the Realm 2 with my brother. I like playing board games like Risk and Mage Wars and some of my all-time favorite games are from this genre. I'm a sucker for them and no matter how bad the reviews are for a game, there's a decent chance I'll still give it a try if it's a TBS. That's why Space Hulk is on my profile and that's why I played this game. I had never heard of it before and the only reason I picked it up was I saw it randomly when scrolling through a PS Sale back in November. It was 50% off and with a name like that...I figured TBS. I looked it up here and saw that there were only a few dozen players of the game and nobody had played it in like a year. Didn't bode well for how good it would be, but I looked up a review, which gave it a pretty poor score, but I saw some of the gameplay and didn't care what the reviews said. This was a game I was going to enjoy. I picked it up with no real timetable of when I wanted to play it...but its scarcity and genre had me interested. There's almost no information out there on this game and what little there is was less than flattering. So what is Strategic Mind? It's an historically based TBS game that utilizes a grid format for maps, reminiscent of Civilization. There are towns/cities (that you don't do anything with directly, but are important to the strategy of a level) and chess-like pieces that can move certain spaces and have specific attacks. There are Naval Ships, Naval Planes and Land Soldiers/Tanks. The green pieces are your core/forever pieces that stay with you throughout the game. If they die, they're gone from the game, but you can level them up and give them bonuses to attacks or extra things they can do. The gold/yellow pieces are also pieces you control, but they are rentals. You can only control those ones for that specific map and whether they live or die won't matter since they don't go to the next zone with you....well that's not true exactly....if too many of your pieces die, you lose 'promotion points' and miss out on the trophy for that level. But if you're going to sacrifice a piece, you want it to be the gold/yellow piece. The blue pieces are allied NPC's that you do not control and the red pieces are the enemy. The story of the game follows the US and Japanese conflict in the Pacific during World War II. It's supposedly fairly historically accurate, however I can't say for sure since I skipped all the cutscenes (I'll explain why later). There are two campaigns. One as the US Navy and one as the Japanese Navy. Each campaign has nine battles to complete to finish. The maps do seem to be pretty accurate, which was neat and I did end up enjoying the game...HOWEVER! This game is so brutally, and almost unforgivably, flawed. I'm going to write about all of the major sins this game has. The first major sin is also the first one you see. The game opens with a CG scene, just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Never mind how terrible the scene is, showing a family having breakfast before being bombed from the sky...but the CG and voice acting is HORRENDOUS!! The mouths move completely independent of what the person is saying and there is absolutely no syncing involved at all. The voice acting is extremely flat and they would have been much better served having still frames with a Narrator or something. It is by far the worst CG I have ever seen in my life. I think games in the 90's did a better job of syncing the mouths to the words than this game. It was horribly bad. The next major sin for me was the lack of a tutorial mission or anything. I played the US campaign first and you get dumped into a battle where you are given primary and secondary objectives. You have no foot soldiers yet and only Naval ships and planes. There is no explanation of the stats of each...no explanation of anything. It's the Dark Souls of TBS games. You get dumped into a battle and have to figure things out on your own. I got the platinum and I still have no idea what most of the things on the screen were. I know that the buildings are train stations, runways, ports, supply stations and a couple of other things. I know as your units run out of gas or ammo, you need to go to one of these things to refill...but I'm unclear as to how close you need to be or anything. Some of the hexagon squares on the map are red, which I thought meant you were in range of the supplies or something...but that didn't seem to be the case. I know you don't get the benefit of the building if it's destroyed until it is rebuilt...but I have no idea how to leverage the buildings to your advantage. It doesn't help that the controls in this game are completely fucked. They aren't bad, so long as you do not try to use any of the quick keys to change the size of the map or navigate the HUD. If you should try to press any button outside the D-Pad, twin sticks, , , or ...the cursor just randomly will start to move around the screen. Pressing L1/R1 buttons is supposed to jump to different areas of the HUD to help make navigation easy...but if you do, and then move the cursor, it will just keep wanting to return to that spot. The only fix I found was resetting the game. If you play this game, only use those buttons I mentioned above or you're going to pull your hair out trying to maneuver around the screen. It also doesn't help that you can have three units occupy the same square at once. It could be a building, ground unit and air unit or submarine, ship and plane...but trying to select the on you want was more of a pain than needed. I figured out by around the sixth map that the HP of the units could be selected and that you didn't have to click on the image of the unit. That helped, but was still not fool proof. It also was a bit of a pain having a unit try to occupy a town. If you didn't click just right, you'd click on the town and see the supply routes (which I still don't understand how they work.) Despite those headaches, once you do figure out how to move around the screen without the random cursor warping....it's not bad....but it is really bad until then. The HUD in between missions isn't terrible. In between missions you have the opportunity to acquire new units, upgrade existing ones, get equipment, add/upgrade abilities for individual units via the level up tab or add/upgrade abilities that you can use as a commander. You earn a type of currency in each level that you can spend in this phase. The promotion points (called Victory Points in the war room) can be used to upgrade the the commander abilities, which either add things you can do or lessen the cost of abilities during a campaign. The other currency you have is called 'Prestige', which you earn by defeating enemies and finishing objectives. That currency is used to get new units or upgrade existing ones. I found that I liked to upgrade my existing ones more than buy new ones. New units are expensive and I feel like you get more mileage for your prestige on making your existing ones stronger. I tried to get two Capital Ships (Battleships), two Carriers, two to four Destroyers and two subs. I'd then try to get up to five fighter planes and five bombers to go on the Carriers. For ground troops, I got more infantry types than tank types since infantry types tended to be more mobile...but I'd have a couple of each. It takes several campaigns to be able to afford all those units, but that was what I aimed for. The next brutal thing...the phrases your units say when you click on them. I think they were trying to add a bit of humor to the game...but it is so bad and gets really annoying really fast. Plus they randomly throw in swears for no reason. Sometimes when you click on your ground units as the US, they say something that sounded like 'hang on, we've got to take care of some stupid fucks' or something. I ended up not being able to play the game around my kids, which was a shame since they were interested in it. I don't get upset at swear words, since I swear all the time myself...but it just seemed really out of place for this game. I'm also not one that gets offended easy, but one of the Japanese submarine lines seemed borderline racist. All the other pieces speak in perfect English (whether they are Japanese units or US), but this one line goes like 'oooo how you see me' in a Japanese accent that felt like it came from South Park. It wouldn't have stood out as inappropriate if all of the Japanese units spoke with the accent...but it came across as them trying to make a joke on the accent and again didn't seem necessary in the context of the game and the story. In any case, they all get so repetitive and what may have been funny once, got super annoying by the 400th time you hear your pilot say 'low on ammo, not on altitude'. The last sin I'll blast them for are the bugs. I don't know if it got buggy because I had 600 save files in the game, but my game crashed about 30 times on the last US campaign alone and another 10-15 times throughout the entire Japanese campaign. Why did I have so many saves you might be wondering...because the game makes two autosaves each turn. Once at the beginning of your turn, and once right before you hit 'End Turn'. Doing that makes save scumming insanely easy, but it then will auto save your save scumming attempts and the number of saves you have grows quickly. By the time I got to about the fifth level in the Japanese Campaign, any time I tried to make a manual save, it told me I had too many saves and had to delete some. I like the autosave at the beginning of each turn...but it should cycle through ten or something. Anyways, on the last level of the US Campaign, I had upgraded my tanks to the highest level. Apparently that broke the game, because the sprite for the tank didn't appear on the screen. Instead, a giant red question mark appeared where my tank should have been. You could click on the question mark and move it like a tank...but the sprite started to fall through the screen or randomly warp around. Just check out this awesome tank sprite: The shame about it is the game was actually really fun outside of the nonsense. It is very challenging as the fog of war makes virtually all of the enemy units disappear at the end of each turn and you have to re-discover them. Scouting plays a huge role in success and since most units can move a great distance, you need to play it a little safe as it's easy to have the enemy units gang up on your aircraft carrier and send it down to Davy Jones Locker. Now that I know what I'm in for, I'll probably end up playing the other games in the series if they go on sale. I figured out how to avoid the annoying stuff (mostly) and will be able to just have fun with the maps. The trophies are straightforward even if there is no real explanation on what you need to do. Basically you just need to do all the objectives, defeat all the enemies and control all the buildings and you get both trophies each level has. It's a bit easier said than done because some secondary objectives have a time limit on them and some are well hidden. It can also be challenging finding all of the enemies at times due to how strong that fog of war is. Half of the trophies are for 'Gain Enough Promotion Points'. There are 400 promotion points available each map. You gain promotion points for completing objectives and defeating enemies. You lose promotion points for taking too many turns to beat the level and/or losing too many units. There are probably other ways you can lose promotion points as well, but none that I came across. The good news is your promotion points are shown on the top of the map so you can tell when you've done everything. The campaign will want to end after you finish all the primary objectives, but you can return to the map instead of finishing to clean up the rest. This game has a really good concept and the framework of a really good TBS, but the execution of it was such garbage that I have a hard time recommending this game to anyone other than TBS enthusiasts such as myself. The levels were fairly long too, mostly due to how many units you control. You could have anywhere from eight to twenty units. Trying to figure out what to do with each of them and then battling the HUD made each turn take several minutes. It took me roughly 80 hours to beat this game, however a lot of it was going back to replay earlier saves to make sure I completed all of the objectives before moving on. It's definitely not a quick game, but I probably took longer than is needed. If you know what you're doing, you could probably get through it in about 40 hours. Since it takes so long to learn the game and you are battling the HUD half the time, 60 seems more likely. Despite all of the headaches and all of the bad things about the game, I'm glad I played it and I did enjoy it enough that I'll buy the rest of the games eventually...but not a chance in hell for $30. We'll see if/when they go on sale again. As of now, I'm only the third person to platinum the game and I can't give any really good reason why there should be a fourth. On to happy news though. The Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster comes out tomorrow and I'm stoked. I'm really excited to get these games on my profile and I'm going to savor these (as much as I can since I'm going to play them all right away). If you haven't played any of the originals...I highly recommend giving them a go at some point. The price tag is a bit steep for all of them, but when they go on sale, it'll be worth your time to play them. Edited April 19, 2023 by Briste 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted April 20, 2023 Share Posted April 20, 2023 On 4/18/2023 at 6:58 PM, Briste said: Platinum #182 Strategic Mind: The Pacific Great write-up! It's hard out there for console-based strategy lovers, man... I feel your pain! Reading the intro had me so intrigued, the genre, the name drops, was definitely hoping for that to end on a more positive note but it happens, whaddayagonnado. I applaud you for seeing it through and finding as much enjoyment out of the experience as you could, mad props for that? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted April 21, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted April 21, 2023 (edited) On 4/20/2023 at 1:43 AM, YaManSmevz said: Great write-up! It's hard out there for console-based strategy lovers, man... I feel your pain! Reading the intro had me so intrigued, the genre, the name drops, was definitely hoping for that to end on a more positive note but it happens, whaddayagonnado. I applaud you for seeing it through and finding as much enjoyment out of the experience as you could, mad props for that Thanks man, it definitely is. Obviously the mouse and keyboard add a level of ease to the game that would lower the frustration...but I've only played a handful where I didn't notice that frustration. The XCOM series and Valkyria Chronicle series were no doubters. I really wanted to get that game finished so that I could focus on my next game without this one hanging over my head. With that said.... Platinum #183 Final Fantasy This is it folks....this is where it all started for me. I had played games like Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, Contra and Mike Tyson's Punchout and enjoyed them, but this was the first game I became obsessed with. I first saw the original Final Fantasy at my best friends house when I went over to play. He had older brothers with a Nintendo and they were playing this game. I had never seen anything like it. You got to pick your own party and name your characters, very different from anything I'd played before. The music was amazing. I was entranced with the into music and loved the battle theme and the first time they went over the bridge behind Coneria Castle, I used to let the image show and music play for a good ten minutes before continuing on. The black mage sprite was just so awesome. When I went home, I told my mom that I had to have this game. I wouldn't be able to sleep until I had it. I would never ask for another thing as long as I lived if she got it for me. The next time we went to our Mall, we stopped in the Electronics Boutique and I saw the game on the wall. I begged my mother to get it for me and she calmly told me no. I don't remember throwing a lot of tantrums in my life, but I threw one there. I went all out, crying and yelling and all the things I'd be mortified at if my kids did to me in public. There's no way in hell I would get a game for my kid if he pulled the same shit I did, but my mother is not me. Turns out she had already bought me the game and wanted to surprise me when we got home. It was the first time in my life that I remember feeling really embarrassed and ashamed about my behavior. I also felt really guilty about how I ruined my mother's surprise. At the end of the day, it ended up being a good choice for my mother to get me the game because it did make me a bit more self-aware and I never did that again. Now I had my own game and I couldn't wait to get home and play it. My brother was also very excited to play this game that I had talked so much about. A quick aside for those of you that are whipper snappers...these old NES games didn't have many save slots, if they had them at all. You had to ration out saves and make wise choices if you were playing a game that was able to save more than one game of progress at a time. Final Fantasy on the NES was a game that could only have one save on it at a time, meaning only me or my brother could have a game going at once. We didn't learn this until we got home of course and my brother was not pleased that he wouldn't get to play, so my poor mom ended up getting a second copy after our next trip to the mall in order to be fair. Before that though, I loaded my game, heard that famous intro music and put a big smile on my face. It was my turn to choose my party. There is only one real party and one set of names that is canon of course....that party is Fighter, Black Belt, White Mage and Black Mage with the names York, Dee, Thor and Zeus. This was my first party lineup and has been my bread and butter lineup when I replay the game every so often. Of course, with games as expensive as they were and my mother having just bought two copies, we didn't get another game for a long while and that suited us just fine since there was no need for another game after we had this one. My brother, best friend and I played the shit out of our copies. We used to have competitions among ourselves to see who could beat the game the lowest level? Who could beat the game with four White Mages? Four Fighters? Without promotion? If any of us had a thought for a challenge, we all did it and compared notes. I played through this game so many times and it was amazing. For those wondering, I held the record for lowest Chaos win at level 22. My brother had the earliest Marsh Cave clear at level 3 and my friend had the earliest Lich victory at level 7. We all beat the game with virtually every job combination possible, but that first one I mentioned, that is the original and best. The instruction booklet for Final Fantasy came with a large map of the world. On one side was the map and on the other side the bestiary. Here's another nugget for you young'ns that don't know what it's like to grow up without a cell phone....people used to read in the bathroom. If you forgot a magazine or something, it used to be the back of a shampoo bottle or Q-Tip box or whatever you could get your hands on to pass the time. Once I had video games, it turned into instruction booklets and Nintendo Power (or still shampoo bottles if I forgot reading material). No phones to pass the time while doing your business. Why on earth am I talking about this during a Final Fantasy review? Because I had memorized that Bestiary due to the nature of no phones back then. I have forgotten quite a bit, but I know a Pirate had 6 HP, an Imp 8 HP and GrWolf 72 HP, Lich 400 HP and Chaos 2000 HP. I knew where all of everything was located. This game had no secrets from me. It's quite amazing actually, how much this game/series shaped my life. I fell in love with games with Final Fantasy. I bought an SNES to be able to play Final Fantasy 2. I bought a Playstation to be able to play Final Fantasy VII. I spent 8 years of my life playing Final Fantasy XI, where I met some of the members of my linkshell in New York City to hang out. I ended up going the PS3 route over the XBox route to be able to play Final Fantasy XIII. I'm a trophy hunter today because of this game. In between all this, Final Fantasy helped me through some very difficult times in my life. When I was depressed and alone, Final Fantasy was my escape. Where I could pretend I was a hero and could make a difference in the world. When I was very low, it helped me feel like things were ok. I turn 42 next month and Final Fantasy has played a role in my life for about 32 of them. A lot of people probably think I'm nuts, but these games were there for me when I felt that nobody else was. I'm thankful to the series for what it provided me and I will always be a fanboy for those reasons. When I saw that these games were being released on the PS4 with trophy support, I was giddy with excitement. Not because I'd finally get to play them again, but because I really wanted them to be a part of my profile since they were important games in my life and I wanted them on here with the rest of the ones I've played. I tried to pre-order the physical version but it went on sale and was sold out while I was sleeping and I never had a chance. I love this series, but I'm not paying $800 on Ebay for it either. The games were originally supposed to come out the end of May...which happens to be the week of my birthday. Once I saw the release date, I decided to treat myself for my birthday. By and large, I don't care about my birthday. I'm a day older than yesterday and a day younger than tomorrow and age is just a number. I never take the day off and always work because it's a Tuesday and who gives a shit....but this year I was going to bask in some nostalgia and spend the week bingeing on my childhood. I was probably the only person in the world that was a little sad when the release date was moved up to April 19th. I ended up canceling the days off for my birthday and moved them to this week...no harm, no foul right? Nope lol For those wondering, I work in the back office of a bank. I've been very fortunate since Covid started to be able to work remotely and I've been working from home with my games three feet away from me for over three years now. 95% of the time, working at the bank has been amazing...the 5% of the time it's not is generally when we're being audited. Guess what this week is at my bank...that's right...audit week. Normally, we only have one audit at a time going on when we do them and these are audits that are being conducted we pay a firm to do so that if/when we're examined by the real thing, we're confident that we're in compliance with all standards and regulations. That means we schedule them ourselves...wouldn't you know it but our audit scheduler didn't just sign us up for one audit this week but THREE!!! My day off requests were denied (well I canceled them since I'm the supervisor and I can't be out during an audit) and instead of spending my week basking in nostalgia, I've been answering auditor questions about ACH returns, debit card disputes, wire forms (among other thing)....trust me....it's every bit as fun as that sounds. Well, I was determined to play the game the day it came out and cue the 95% of why it is awesome to work at a bank remotely. I was able to play the game while working. I couldn't focus completely on the game and it was slow moving at times...but I was able to do enough to keep me happy. As I mentioned earlier...I've played this game many, many times including competitively for a bit with the Final Fantasy Randomizer group. I play the game fairly often but I've never played the remastered version before. For the most part, the remaster pays good homage to the original. I appreciated that it allowed you to play the game with the original soundtrack and original font. I was thrown for a bit of a loop at first since the enemies have different HP than what I'm used to and most are also called different names. I figured it out, but it was different. Not only were most of the enemies named something different, but virtually every weapon, armor, and item is also named something different. I've played enough Final Fantasy games that I know what they are, but it's something to be mentioned. They also made several quality of life improvements. In the original version, you had to manually select different enemies for your guys to fight. If you selected the same monster as another warrior and the monster was killed, the system didn't auto-select the next monster, but your next warrior would swing at an empty slot and got the 'Ineffective' message. 'Ineffective' was the stuff of nightmares. You couldn't spam 'A' during farming battles, you had to make sure you picked carefully or risked death. That is gone in the remaster...you can hold 'A' and pray just fine now. Also in the original, you could not by things in bulk. If you wanted 99 heals, you had to buy 99 heals individually, usually a 5-10 minute proposition. There was also only one level of heal. In the remaster you can buy 99 at once and there's potions, hi-potions and x-potions. A lot of the quality of life improvements made the game far easier as well. There was no such thing as a Phoenix Down in the original. If you died, you either needed to have a life spell, or trek all the way back to a town with a church that could raise you. God help you if you died near Melmond and had to trek all the way back to Coneria for a raise. Being poisoned was lethal (it's actually more lethal in the remaster since you lose more HP per turn than the original). The cutscenes are a nice touch and the map is altered slightly in this version. This is mostly noticeable up near Onrac and by the Mirage Tower, but there are small differences everywhere. This part explains my routing and has some spoilers, so I'll hide it for those that haven't played this game since it's so freaking old at this point... Spoiler Having played the game so frequently, I have a preferred route of doing things. The game and guide are setup so that you do the Volcano after Earth Cave, but I don't like that route. I always go from Earth Cave directly to Castle Ordeals. It's a shorter walk from the river to the castle than from the Airship landing spots and the monsters in that area suck ass to fight. The Zeus Gauntlet (just Gauntlet in this version) is located there and is an item that casts Lit 2 (Thundara) and helps make the WHM more useful pretty early. It's a relatively short dungeon and you can get it off your list quickly. From Ordeals, I generally go to the Ice Cavern to get the Floater (Levistone?) for the airship next. After Marsh Cave, the Ice Cavern is the worst dungeon in the game. The Sorcerer's (Mindflayers) only do 1-2 damage per hit, but have the chance to insta-kill you with an attack, and they usually travel in packs. The Frost Dragons and Frost Wolves can cause some damage with their AOE abilities and it's kind of a longer dungeon. But, getting the airship really opens up the game. Once you have the Airship, you can pretty much do whatever you want. I usually head straight to the Cardia Islands to loot the treasures and get promoted. I usually then swing by Melmond and Crescent Lake to pick up Warp and Exit before then heading over to the Oasis to buy the Bottle for the Fairy. If I'm short of the 50k gold, I would generally head back over to Earth Cave to farm the 'Hall of Giants'. That is actually removed from the remaster, as are all spawn tiles. The 'Hall of Giants', the double Agama tile in the Volcano and the Mummy tile in Astos' castle are great farming zones since you can force spawn virtually every step. The mummy tile is safer since there are no random encounters and it's a quick step outside to use a Tent and save or hop in the airship over to Coneria for a 30g per night stay at the Inn. In the remaster, it goes from being a spawn tile in front of the chest to a monster-in-a-box or wandering one-time fight. Since the game allows you to quadruple your gold and XP gain, there's really no need to farm in this version...but in the original, it was a necessity. In the remaster, I used the double gold boost, but didn't touch the XP one until I ran into the Warmech.... Once I could afford the Bottle at the Caravan, it's a straight shot to Gaia to get the Oxyale. I like to clear out the Onrac area in one trip, so that means a trek inside the waterfall and then on to the Mermaids and The Kraken. You usually get some good levels in the Kraken's lair and since you have the Cube from the Waterfall and scored the Tablet (Rosetta Stone) in the Shrine, you can swing back to Melmond to visit the infamous Dr. Unne to learn the language of the Lefeinish. Now that you can understand what those toga dudes are saying, you can pick up the Chime and head over to Mirage Tower. Don't forget to pick up Nuke (Flare) and Fade (Holy) while you're there though! Mirage Tower kinda sucks too. It's windy and the enemies are of the pain variety. Fortunately, the boxes on the first floor are easy to grab and then save since the entrance to the next floor is right next to the exit from the dungeon. Once you get past the Blue Dragon, you've made it to the Sky Fortress and the home of Tiamat. This area is annoying only because the boxes are very spread out and you are very exposed to battles. It's another great area to get some levels and gold if needed. That last floor though can be a doozy. The hardest enemy in the game, The Warmech, lives there. I don't remember him being that rare in the original (I used to farm him to try to hit the level cap), but apparently it's a 1/64 or 3/64 chance to spawn in this version. I killed Tiamat first and then walked up and down the corridor looking for the deadly machine. I got very lucky and got it on like my fifth encounter...but got very unlucky in the fight and he used Nuke 4 turns in a row, causing 300 damage to all of my characters each round. The Warmech is hard in the original, but he wasn't ridiculous like this game. I didn't use the XP bonus in the game until this point. When I saw the kind of damage the Warmech dished out, I wasn't going to waste my time on a 1/64 spawn rate if I was going to die and lose my progress like that. While I got that first encounter in 5 fights, it took about an hour before I saw him again..but in that time I was able to get to level 50 and get that trophy out of the way. In the original game, the level cap was 50 so I was surprised when I continued to gain levels after 50. Even with my levels that high, the Warmech was still a challenge as he again spammed Nuke on me. This time I was expecting it and relegated my WHM to heal each round. After about six rounds, the Warmech was down for the count and I was able to move on to Gurgu Volcano at last. I will take this opportunity to mention that I know where every box in the original game is located...there are extra treasure boxes in the remaster version. None of the boxes in the original that were 'Empty' are in the remaster. They all have something. There were also three boxes in Marsh Cave and three boxes in Gurgu that I'm fairly certain aren't in the original. I had missed the Marsh Cave ones the first time I was there and didn't notice until I realized the map shows you how many boxes are left. I was very surprised to see three missed in Marsh Cave and I almost made the same mistake in Gurgu, except I checked how many were left on Kary's floor and saw there were three more. They were all on that last floor, but I swear there's only one there in the original, yet there were four in the remaster. Anyway, I zerged through the Volcano and made Kary my bitch before cleaning up the last couple of monsters in the bestiary around the world (there were four I didn't fight through normal play) and heading to the Temple of Fiends for the final march to Chaos. At this point in the game I was like level 65 or something and the monsters melted in front of me. It took very little strategy to get through TOF. In the original, TOF was extremely challenging. It's a long slow walk to Chaos filled with battles against the hardest enemies in the game along the way and another round against all four (beefed up) fiends before the final battle. In the original game, Chaos has 2000 HP...in this game he has 20,000. It's almost like the game expects you to use the modifiers as that would be an impossible battle in the original. All the OG Final Fantasy players can tell you the horror of getting all the way down to Chaos, do like 1800 HP worth of damage, only to have him Cure IV and wipe you with a Nuke the following turn. No save state or quick save in the original and it meant another full march to Chaos. In the original, spells like Fast (Haste) and Tmpr (Temper) are critical in winning these boss fights. It was less so in the remaster and it felt like the damage on spells was boosted a bit as well. In the original, there was a lot more variation in the amount of damage a spell would do. In the remaster, spell damage was very consistent. I had originally hoped to be one of the first ten people to complete the game. The game meant so much to me as a kid, that I just wanted my name to be up there with the first completed. The irony is not lost on me considering the thread that is going on in that game's forum...it would mean nothing to anyone but me, but it was something I did want. Being unable to take the day off, I did the best I could and beat the game in just over 12 hours and am currently the 30th person to finish the game. I'm happy to be on the list, but I had hoped for higher. This game did usurp The Wolf Among Us as my fastest plat. I had intentionally not beaten any game in less than 23 hours because I loved TWAU and it's trophy image. This game is a good replacement on my milestones considering how important it was in my gaming life. I don't love the platinum image, but I do love the game. The remaster is a fine representation of the game, but is missing that something to make it feel truly authentic. I'm not sure I'll play this version again since access to the original via an emulator is so easy and I'd rather play the original for that nostalgia than this one. If you have never played Final Fantasy though, I think it's worth the $12. If you're not a superfan, you could probably wait until it's on sale and be ok. Shit, if you've never played it before you've waited 30+ years already, what's a few more months right? I don't expect others to have the same reaction to this game as I do, but this is my love letter to Final Fantasy and I thank it for all it's given me over the years. I'll take my time a bit more with the next installments in the series. I've never completed II, III or V before. I played all of them briefly on an emulator way back when, but was busy doing other stuff and never got too far. I won't speed through those games as they will be legitimate new games for me. I'll take my time with IV and VI since those games are two of my favorites ever. I will probably do a similar write up when i beat IV and VI so fair warning Edited April 21, 2023 by Briste 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rally-Vincent--- Posted April 23, 2023 Share Posted April 23, 2023 I started with VII, loved VIII and Tactics, had a good time with IX and X and was okay with X-2. Unfortunately, beginning with XII (I am not counting the online games XI and XIV as main FF games, sorry), I felt the series went downhill, with XIII as the low point. I didn't even bother to play that game a second time. At this point, I only want one thing from Final Fantasy: A Tactics remaster. That is the one game that I absolutely want as a milestone on my profile. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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