Cassylvania Posted February 22, 2023 Share Posted February 22, 2023 Damn, that's some commitment there. I've obviously played some iterations of Tetris, but I had to look up reviews for this one. Looks really fun and really, really hard. Major props to you. These are the kind of platinums that become a journey and make this hobby feel worthwhile. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Together_Comic Posted February 27, 2023 Author Share Posted February 27, 2023 Update 40 Platinum 73 - Persona 3 Portable It's hard to come up with an interesting anecdote or tagline for what got me into the Persona series as I'm not really sure that there is one. I guess if I had to pick something, it would be that Persona 5 was on basically every single "best games of PS4" list available when I bought the console in 2018. So I picked it up and obviously it remained still in the plastic wrap until 2020 when I broke out Persona 4. Having loved both of those games, this one was an obvious play when it rereleased onto PS4 early this year. Persona 3 and Persona in general are a mixture of social sim and monster builder dungeon crawler. You are given a certain amount of time and during that time you have to balance leveling up your Social Links / Confidants (depending on which game you're playing) leveling your social stats (i.e. charm, intelligence, courage, etc.), against the dungeon crawling aspects of the game. Generally, once a month, you will have to complete some sort of combat that ties in the mainline story of this game. The game sets up a "lost hour" where everyone in the world pauses except those who have awoken personas an internal rebellion against the status quo. This was brought about by your pretty standard greedy scientists, which have accidentally? set off the end of the world. Of course its up to you and your band of misfit friends to save the world and defeat death itself with the power of friendship. Typical as far as JRPG plots go, but it is a typical plot told well. The story kept me engaged for at least a first playthrough and I think tied everything together better than the other persona games. The gameplay, however, is dated. As one might expect for a game that originally released on the PS2 in 2006. Don't get me wrong its absolutely competent, but its clear that Atlas learned something with their later sequels. For example, the personas pass on random moves and abilities when you fuse them, instead of letting you choose like in later generations. This removes a lot of the reason to level up some of your persona's instead of the "always be fusing" mantra if you're going to play it heads up. You can back out of the screen and reroll the moves but it gets obnoxious after awhile trying to get 1 or 2 particular moves passed on. I suppose that could be the point, but if you're going to allow me to reroll, might as well just allow me to choose. The main area for combat is also kinda poopy, but that may be something inherent in the series that I just don't care for. Here its Tartarus, in P5 its Mementos, in P4 its the actual dungeons, but any time there is just a large section of randomly generated garbage with repeated textures, and way to many enemies and floors, I get disheartened. At least in P5 mementos only has 66 floors or some such. Tartarus has a whopping 264 floors and if you're going to max all the social links you basically have to do it in 30-50 floor chunks at a time. The social links here are solid as they always are, but I did run out of stuff to do at night somewhere around September in game (game runs from April until Jan 31 for context), eventually more stuff opened up, but it still meant that most nights was going to bed early or working to get a bit of money. The arcade is busted, both sides of it. I probably single-handedly kept them in business with my 3 playthroughs. When you go to the arcade, the top option greatly increases one of your social stats, and the bottom option increases one of your persona's stats by 3. That is a lot, when the max stat in this game is 99. I think my Odin was 99 in magic, agility, and strength by somewhere around November, which meant the end game bosses were super easy. That said the super bosses where not super easy. They basically required you to get some of the busted magic items in order to beat them. One of them gives you 8 turns to whip out their hp or they hit you with a 9999 attack. You can block it with a super obscure item, but I'll be dang if that isn't the only way to win basically. They also have this gimmick where if you absorb or reflect any of their element on an attack they instantly do the 9999 attack instead. Its frustrating. I can build a super cool monster to beat the game with and the devs are like nope not today. The other superboss has one really tough phase but then its pretty free. Same idea though, they will hit with a 9999 if you so much as think about trying to be creative. Mostly I had to scramble to not have those kind of effects on my guys at this point. lol. All of that said, I still had fun though. Its still persona and if you like persona, you will like this. I wish this had been a full on remake instead of a rerelease though as maybe they could have fixed some of these issues by simply just updating the game for modern times. The trophies for this game are on the easier side as well. It's basically the P4 and P5 (original) list without the RNG nonsense of "hard core risette fan" or "passionate listener". You will likely have to follow a guide to get in all of the social links, as some of them are really crammed in at the end there. Also to note, make sure your second playthrough for "a pair of wildcards" is on NG+. I did my first run with the girl character on a separate NG file since NG+ in this particular game lets you trivialize everything even remotely combat related and didn't get the trophy, so I had to play through a third time. Luckily, if you don't care about anything, on a NG+ playthrough its super free. All you have to do is wait for the compendium to unlock on 5/10 (you have to beat temperance first but that's free) and then buy your OP persona from the superbosses from your first playthrough. Then simply wait until dec 31, and take the bad ending. You never have to even touch tartarus outside of the the 2 days you have to do so for tutorial. All said and done, I don't think I'm going to recommend P3 to anyone that isn't already a fan of the series. The game is overall dated and if you wanted to try out a persona game, I think both of the other offerings in P4 or P5 are better choices. ~TC 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Together_Comic Posted February 27, 2023 Author Share Posted February 27, 2023 Recently, I started on the highly anticipated Hogwarts Legacy. As of now, I haven’t made it very far into the game, but I wanted to talk about that first charms class with Professor Ronen and how absolutely magical (pun very much intended) it was. For anyone worried about spoilers, the charms class in question happens about an hour into the game and doesn’t really have an effect on the overall story of the game, at least not the portion that I’m going to nerd out about. However, I guess it bears saying that there will be very minor spoilers for that quest in the game. As I am some anonymous entity on the internet, many of you may be surprised to know that I taught High School Chemistry in the United States for 3 or so years after I graduated from college. During my time teaching one of the things that fascinated me the most (and one of the reasons I got into teaching to begin with) was the actual act of lesson planning. How to accurately access your student’s current understanding of a topic, determine what needs to be taught based on the regulations and goals of the curriculum, delivering the material in a way that engages your students, then accurately access them. I spent a lot of my professional development time with the subject, taking University classes, attending workshops, reading literature all on this topic. There are literal thousands of books, dissertations, youtube videos, and workshops dedicated to the topic, and Professor Ronen followed the playbook step-by-motherf***ing-step. A successful lesson plan is going to address three main components: 1. What is the object of the lesson – i.e. what are you trying to teach or convey. 2. What are the teaching or learning strategies – i.e. how are you going to convey the object. 3. How are you going to check for student understanding of the lesson. Beyond that, the best objectives are usually going to be action-oriented and focus on the most essential needs of your students and the learning needs of the overall class, they have to be measurable, and then flexible to cover varying needs of the class based on the dynamic of the class. That means that Honor students are going to need to be taught differently than special needs students, who in turn, will need to be taught differently than average students. While that may seem obvious, the most difficult dynamics are often when a mix of all of these students are combined and all need to be addressed without the lesson being to difficult or too easy for any one student. Let’s look at the classroom dynamic of Professor Ronen’s class. From what we can gather based on our introductions to the characters at this point, Ronen’s class is comprised of Natty Onai an honor student, several different students that we don’t get introduced too that I’m going to assume are on the average side, and you the main character who in this case would be classified as a special needs student, having missed the first 4 years of Hogwarts. Given this classroom dynamic, Ronen needs to access where his students are, including his new one. Framing it as a review, he asks the class various questions to ascertain where they are. No one able to answer, he determines a review is in order. He then selects a spell that will presumably appear on O.W.L.s (an important government exam) the summoning charm, and pairs students off to practice the spell making sure to pair Natty, his strongest student, with the newcomer. The new student is benefited by having the honor student there, and Natty’s understanding will need to be at its highest to help explain things to the new student. It also avoids having an average student, who may be struggling with the spell themselves, from having an extra burden. After seeing that everyone can at least perform the spell, Ronen escalates by taking the class outside to a constructed board to get some hands-on practice with control over the spell. This is genius, on the fly, planning that he was able to do because he evaluated that his new student was sufficiently able to perform the objective at hand, so he could further engage his students. Having conveyed the lesson, he then moves to assessment of learning, AND keeps his students engaged by making the assessment a game or competition. Gamification of lessons as assessment is relatively new tech, but it has documentation and does work. Most students are also naturally competitive so it allows you often to see their best effort, something they may get scared out of with traditional assessment (read as paper test). Even beyond that, for his stronger students as the MC proves to be, he again adjusts the lesson and assigns you and Natty an even tougher complication. Its honestly a beautiful example of how to execute a lesson plan. On top of that, Professor Ronen has the intangibles. He has the energy, the disposition, and the personality that students often look for in teachers, even if they don’t realize that they do. It makes it easier to engage and be liked by the students, which in turn makes them more likely to listen and engage in lessons. All of that to say, that this seemingly inconsequential mission definitely connected with me. I don’t know if the Devs had actual teachers help in the design of these lessons or they just did their research, but they definitely nailed this one. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Together_Comic Posted March 20, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted March 20, 2023 (edited) Update 41 Platinum #74: Hogwarts Legacy It is not typically my way to buy and play a game on its release. Any number of things could go wrong. There could be all kinds of bugs, the game could be awful, and on the whole I’m really not a fan of the $60 or $70 price tag on these games. That being said, I hit that perfect age range where I grew up with Harry Potter. I remember reading Philosopher’s Stone in Elementary School, waiting for the midnight release of Order of the Phoenix, Half-blood Prince, and Deathly Hollows, and the sleepless day afterward as I read the entirety of these 800+ page books in one sitting. Hell I even wrote a college lit final on the literary problems with Avada Kadavra and the Unforgivable curses. To say that Harry Potter has been a large part of my adolescence is the understatement of the century. Thus, when Hogwarts Legacy was announced as an open wizarding world experience I was caught by the hype of a new release for the first time in a long time. Understanding that this game just released and that a lot of people are going to play it, I’m going to try to keep spoilers for the game to a complete minimum. I will be talking about the spells used in combat, some of the character names will be mentioned, some of the types of side content available, and the basic outline of the plot as it is really difficult to talk about what I liked and what I did not without mentioning them briefly. I won’t talk about anything you couldn’t see in the first hour or two of the game, but if you’re hypersensitive to spoilers, you are warned. Hogwarts Legacy has you as an unusual student at Hogwarts. Having not received a letter for Hogwarts at 11 like usual, but instead having it be delayed until your 5th year. Leaving you in an interesting predicament. The school assigns you a mentor in Professor Fig who is responsible for getting you up to speed for the basics of magic and for delivering you to Hogwarts. As you head that way, everything is quickly derailed leaving you in the middle of an insidious Goblin plot for some strange magical artifact and the story progresses from there. As an aside, I never really understood people who got upset when things set in a particular world deviated from that particular lore, but I kind of felt like that here. I definitely understood why they made the decisions they did. If they took you as an 11 year old, there would have had to be another instigating event which may or may not have worked as well. They can’t just make you a normal 5th year because part of the experience is getting a house and then there would be the question of why you don’t already know a bunch of spells. I get it, but it’s still kinda wacky. Let’s move on with what I like about the game. The wizarding world has always been one of wonder and awe, and the team at Portkey did a great job in capturing that wonder even early on. The vistas are great, the castle seems alive, and the professors and student cast are lively. I like that a lot of the characters have easily recognizable names, but aren’t necessarily the characters we know from the main series. Phineus Black is a good callback, as is Professor Weasley, Peeves, and even Ominus Gaunt. It felt like a shout out that wasn’t completely blatant. But, beyond that a lot of the new characters introduced for this game are among the highlights of the game as well. The relationship quests with Natty, Poppy, and Sebastion are probably my favorites in the game. Poppy and Sebastion especially. The ending of Natty’s questline felt a little bit wrong to me, but I think that has more to do with suspension of disbelief than anything the game actively did. The aforementioned Ominus Gaunt is great, Deek is great, and they even do a good job with the main goblin characters in Ranrok and Lodgok. On the whole, I rather enjoyed the character work done in the game. I was pleasantly surprised with the combat. It felt really really good. It is sort of a ranged version of the Spiderman combat from Marvel’s game of the same name. Each spell is classified by a color. There’s Force spells which are purple, Control spells which are yellow, Damaging spells which are Red, and Utility spells which are white. During combat enemies can cast “counterspells” which shield them against certain types of spells and can only be broken with a counter attack “stupify”, “ancient magic” which is this games unique mechanic, or with a spell type they aren’t guarding against indicated by a colored barrier. Mixed in with all of that is a 4 hit main combo and you have an interesting system. Early on, you are limited to 4 spells but can expand that to up to 16 later on. There is a special move that will do a lot of damage that you must build up your combo to keep using and spells that can combine to do extra damage. It’s a remarkably deep combat system and most of the spells are good some of the time and I often swapped between the ones I had equipped. I can’t tell you the last time I couldn’t pretty easily optimize which attacks or spells were the best ones to use and just jam those over and over. But here, I had the hot key select wheels spinning and quickly unlocked all of the spell slots to get the most amount of spells equipped that I could. I also largely enjoyed the plot. There isn’t a lot I can say in particular about it without spoiling anything but I found myself entertained and didn’t often find myself reaching for the skip text button. The dungeons also felt like they were a good length to me, which I can’t even begin to tell you how much of a breath of fresh air that is. They last anywhere from 5 minutes on the shorter end to 15 on the longer and none of them feel padded for the sake of making them seem bigger. That being said, it’s difficult to talk about the dungeons without going into some of the problems with the game. The biggest problem is that the game suffers a lot of the same problems that other open world games suffer from, in that there is only so much unique content you can realistically generate for your game, so a lot of textures, puzzles, enemy types, etc. get reused. I can only really remember 1 or 2 unique dungeons that I felt were different enough from the others to warrant any real comment. There are really only 7 or 8 different types of enemy with a couple of variants each. There are Merlin Trials that function a lot like Korok Seeds from Breath of the Wild, but there are only 6 or 7 variants of that. You get the idea. I don’t think any of the 57 quests the game categorizes as “sidequests” are particularly memorable. Even the ones involving some of the more interesting characters or set ups are rather bland. Sure you might be able to say “Oh! That’s the one where spoiler happens”, but even then, the quest itself is just “go to the place”, “fight the enemies”, “collect the thing”. That said, I don’t have a lot of other complaints. I guess we can also briefly touch on the trophies. I am going to put myself out on a limb here and say that this is a good trophy list. The basic premise is that it asks you to 100% the game, do a few miscellaneous tasks, and then complete the unique mission from each house (the Hufflepuff one is by far the best, for the record). Some might say that there are far to many collectibles, but they are generally very clearly marked and at some point on your path to doing the other things required for 100% you will stumble upon most of them. By the time I was nearing the end of the game, I only needed 10 or so merlin trials, 30 or so collectibles, and needed to do 3 or 4 challenges from the combat section. It wasn’t a particularly terrible clean up. I think I would have been soured on the game a lot more if I had gotten the collection bugs that were popping up originally. I’m glad they managed to get that fixed before I had really started taking on the game in earnest. To be honest, I rather enjoyed my time with Hogwarts Legacy and am glad that I got around to it sooner rather than later. If I can borrow Realms transition, would I recommend Hogwarts Legacy? If you like I grew up with Harry Potter then Yes, 100%. I think you will probably enjoy it. If you don’t have any attachment either way, maybe. The combat system is pretty good, the story and characters are pretty good, and the trophy list is again pretty good. It isn’t going to reinvent the wheel or anything, but if you are in a mood for an open world game, or generally like the genre, this is one of the better one’s I’ve played. Edited March 27, 2023 by Together_Comic 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe Dubz Posted March 21, 2023 Share Posted March 21, 2023 Excellent write-up here!! As someone who has yet to play the game, but plans to soon, I appreciate the very spoiler-lite presentation ? With that being said, I'm not a hardcore HP fan like you seem to be! I was probably in my early to mid teens when they started coming out... Needless to say I was more about skipping school to smoke weed and party at that point ? Anyway, I digress... Back on topic, I did read the first 2 books at least before I pretty much stopped reading books til the party phase was over! Lol but this game looks magical ( pun def intended!), just that beautiful world and vibrant looking school are what caught my eye! Also, my buddy @Infected Elite was saying this was his GOTY so far! Which certainly caught my attention too. Glad to hear it sounds like they have a good system for finding collectibles, as that's usually my least favorite part of any game ? As long as they're clearly marked on a map, I don't mind so much! Cheers TC, congrats on the shiny new plat!! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Together_Comic Posted March 27, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted March 27, 2023 On 3/20/2023 at 6:41 PM, Joe Dubz said: Excellent write-up here!! As someone who has yet to play the game, but plans to soon, I appreciate the very spoiler-lite presentation With that being said, I'm not a hardcore HP fan like you seem to be! I was probably in my early to mid teens when they started coming out... Needless to say I was more about skipping school to smoke weed and party at that point Anyway, I digress... Back on topic, I did read the first 2 books at least before I pretty much stopped reading books til the party phase was over! Lol but this game looks magical ( pun def intended!), just that beautiful world and vibrant looking school are what caught my eye! I definitely get it. If you didn't grow up with the phenomenon, HP is just another pretty good fantasy magic series. I know I like them more than they objectively deserve lol. Also Update 42. Platinum #75: The Legend of Dragoon In yet another 2023 release that isn't actually a 2023 release (Gonna see that a lot on my profile this year. Just started Trails to Azure, and we still got Mega Man next month.) Legend of Dragoon comes out with trophy support. DISCLAIMER: The following will be heavily tinted with Nostalgia Goggles, take all statements with many many grains of salt. In my gaming career, I've played a lot of video games. At this point extrapolating from my current pace of call it 100 games in 5 years, that would put me somewhere around 500 games played in my lifetime. Of all the titles I've played over the years, this game along with Mario 64, may be the two individual most influential of them all when it comes to my taste in video games. The Legend of Dragoon was the game that really started my love of JRPGs. I was 9 years old when this game came out and couldn't stop looking at the case behind the glass at either Walmart, Kmart, or KB Toys anytime my family found its way into one of those stores. I think it was probably the box art of all the cool looking men and women in armor that captivated me, but idk. I remember looking at that game for months, until finally a birthday or something came around and I was the proud owner of the game. I played this game NONSTOP. During my childhood I probably completed the game something like 15 times. I had all the stardusts, the prima strategy guide, all the characters at level 60 something (you beat the game around level 40, and while technically you can go all the way to lvl 99, the game soft caps at 60) all the additions maxed out, everything you could do in that game I was going to do. In a way, it was the first game where I had bought into hype, even though I hadn't seen commercial one on it. And it lived up to my expectations. Amusing anecdote aside, I'm sure some of you are wondering what the heck even is this game. Legend of Dragoon (LoD after this) is a JRPG set in the land of Endiness. Endiness is composed of 3 major entities and you will explore the events happening in those kingdoms as the game progresses. You are Dart a hero on a journey to find the villain that destroyed his hometown, he is returning unsuccessfully form his journey to the village Seles where he migrated to after the tragedy. Unfortunately Seles has been destroyed by Imperial Sandora as part of the Serdian Civil War and has captured his childhood friend Shana. Dart must now venture into the conflict and save his childhood friend from captivity. Obviously things escalate from there, and in typical JRPG fashion, by the end of the game, you are embroiled in a battle to save the entire world. If you can excuse the genre tropes, the plot flows pretty well. Each event, logically moves to the next and the stakes are interesting at each step along the way. I will say that the character work here is, while not bad, I guess sloppy is the word I'll use. Each character has their own motivations to join the party and see the adventure through to it's conclusion, but the game just doesn't spend enough time with each character. Some of the character arcs seem a bit rushed (Haschel, Miranda, and the party member who joins after you fight the bandit king) If I go back to drinking the kool-aid, you can probably chock that up to a limitation of the age. As a PS1 game, LoD already took up 4 separate CDs and adding extra content is probably not something they can do easily. On a definitely more positive note, the pacing is excellent. No one area or story arc overstays its welcome. The dungeons are short enough that they don't get bogged down by the encounter rate, and the combat is excellent for an early JRPG. Turn based combat is one of the biggest turn offs for JRPGs in general. It was designed to imitate table top RPGs in early games and has been iterated on endlessly to try and keep them engaging. Persona uses the Once More system, Legend of Heroes uses the arts and crafts system, Final Fantasy has done 5 gazillion different versions from swapping in and out party members based on weaknesses (FF10) to traditional (FF9) to junction system (FF8), Materia (FF7), Jobs (FF Tactics et al), you get the idea. One of the more interesting systems that has come out is a sort of action prompt in the middle of combat. Paper Mario did this to a lot of success where you could do different mini-actions in combat to get a bit of extra damage, or block some incoming damage. LoD is in this category, iterating on that combat system with the Additions system. Additions reward you with additional combo hits if you can time the button press. A pretty simple concept to start with. You take the attack button, time a slash with Dart's sword and you get double slash. As he levels up though you get a new addition Volcano which is a three-hit combo, is harder to time, and can be countered, but it does more damage. Now you have a decision to make, do you go for more damage or do you stick with double slash. Additionally (No pun intended), your additions scale every time you perform them so at this point in time double slash may still do more damage, but eventually it will be out scalled by volcano if you can master the new addition. Later on when you gain the eponymous dragoon powers, you will have a new mechanic SP. 100SP is required for one turn of Dragoon and you gain SP by doing additions. However, some of the more high powered additions only generate a low amount of SP, while some of the weaker ones can give you 100 at a time. So now you have to balance the damage of your attacks versus generating dragoon power. The system goes surprisingly deep especially for a PS1 game. Beyond that Guarding is actually good in this game. When you guard attacks against you do 50% damage, and you regain 10% of your HP. Strategic Guarding can keep you going in battle even if you run out of items. Speaking of items, the number of items you have is limited. You can hold 32 items which have to contain all of your healing, status recovery (which is split into 2 types physical and mental, and a 3rd later), revival items, your stat buffing items when they become available, and your attack items, which are powerful magic attacks, but they are one time use. Between all of these your bag gets full pretty quickly which both encourages to use your items, and not horde them while also making you think about inventory management. The dragoon form is also interesting. While in the dragoon form, your stats are buffed meaning you'll take less damage and deal more, you also gain access to powerful magic attacks, however, you can only attack in this form, meaning unless you have healing magic or similar you are unable to heal with that character until your SP runs out. Additionally, certain enemies can make you extremely weak in this form so you'll have to be careful about just jamming it. All of this combines to make a system that is interesting and unique with a lot to think about if you want to do well in combat and the game while easy, isn't so easy that you can just mash the attack button and hope to get by. You will definitely have to "git good" at some of them to progress through the game. What are the downsides of the game? The voice acting is awful. Like legitimately terrible. There isn't much of it, but its approaching the it's so bad its funny territory, which definitely can undercut an otherwise serious moment. That's kinda it. I don't know if it is just the nostalgia talking, but for what it is, there isn't all that much wrong with the game. Gushing aside, I would recommend LoD only if you are a fan of JRPGs, specifically turn-based ones. if you aren't into the combat,there also isn't a lot for you here. There isn't anything really on the side to do or otherwise make this more tolerable if you hate turn-based combat, and the story while decent isn't going to carry this 20-30 hour game by itself. See you guys next time. ~TC 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted March 27, 2023 Share Posted March 27, 2023 3 hours ago, Together_Comic said: Update 42. Platinum #75: The Legend of Dragoon Awesome write-up! I have super fond memories LoD's original run too, played this while impatiently waiting for FFIX to come out and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was? Oddly enough I don't remember too much of the story, though that makes me all the more excited to play it! 3 hours ago, Together_Comic said: In yet another 2023 release that isn't actually a 2023 release Dude I feel that? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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