No big shockers in the latest cast announcement, but that's ok. Story mode is back! Apparently all the characters are getting washed away in a flood of purity.
I've complained about this before, but seriously, why, Nintendo? Why in the world do you think anyone, ever, wants to have to press two buttons together just to start game? Because really, it's annoying! It's not just a couple of games, either, or something from the past; quite a few Wii, Wii U, and even Switch games do this stupid stuff. But why? What possesses Nintendo to continue annoying anyone playing their games by forcing them to press multiple buttons together in a somewhat uncomfortable manner?
Seriously, it'd be great if they would stop. This is a quite minor thing, but it is a little annoying.
So I started playing GW1 again a few weeks ago, as I mentioned in the Games Finished thread after finally beating Nightfall for the first time, but I have continued to play the game since and yes, I still think that, as the title says, Guild Wars is one of the best and most addictive games ever. I'm going to write more about why soon, and will probably post it here, but I just wanted to start with this, because well, the game is still incredible!
+ The graphics hold up exceptionally well -- this is still an amazingly beautiful game, with some of the best art direction ever in games. The insane degree of improvement between that E3 2003 trailer and the game as it has existed since the open alpha I played during E3 2004 is incredibly impressive, and while there have been a few tweaks since, most recently in this years' patch which added infinite draw distance and helped to reignite my interest in the game, most of GW looks as it has since its release in 2004-2007, but looks way better than a whole lot of games many years newer. Sure, newer games put a lot more polygons on screen, but the art design and overall visual look is some of the best ever. The soundtrack's pretty great, too! The music is more on the atmospheric side, but when the music's just as great after a thousand hours as it was at the beginning you know they did something right.
+ While not as content-rich as World of Warcraft or EverQuest, due to sadly only getting new content for a few years (the least paid expansion was in 2007, and the last free content addon in early 2013), Guild Wars has a vast quantity of things to do. Between the four main campaigns, the intense challenge of Hard mode, the scores of quests all over the world, the time-limited events that rotate in and out every year, and PvP if you have the right group together or are playing at the right time, Guild Wars has many hundreds of hours of content; I've played like 960 hours since launch now, plus somewhere between 150 and 200 hours of alpha/beta before that, more than half of that on my main character, and there's still a huge amount of stuff left to do! It's sad that I've finished all four of the campaigns now, but with everything else the game has to offer I could play it for a lot more hours, doing new things most of the time.
+ Exploration is still incredibly fun! Between the scenery and the combat, this is a great game to explore in, one of the most addictive ever for me. Guild Wars' unique skill system, part MMO and part Magic the Gathering card game, is one of its highlights, and making builds of skills is always an interesting challenge. I started a few new characters recently, and the way the game scales up from easy to hard as you go through a campaign is just fantastic. Of course there's a huge time commitment, but they reward you for it at least.
The game isn't perfect, though. Of the complaints I have, these are the main ones.
- My main issue, probably, is with that time commitment. So, I've spent most of my time in this game with a Necromancer. That's great, but it'd be very cool to try high level play with the other classes, everywhere in the game! But you can't do that. To get to all the areas, use all the skills unlocked on my account, use all of the Heroes, and such, you need to do everything again with each new character, which is a prohibitive time commitment for almost anyone. I may have fun playing as other characters sometimes, but when I want to really play the game I have no choice, I've got to be playing as my main. It's kind of unfortunate that there is no real solution for this. The game does have one kind of max-level-from-the-start character, PvP-only characters, but as that suggests they are only usable in the Battle Isles PvP modes, which means the random arenas, guild battles, or the Hall of Heroes. You can't even play the other PvP modes, such as Fort Aspenwood or the Jade Quarry, with PvP characters; those are for regular characters who have gotten that far in Factions only. I can equip my Hero characters with a full set of skills, but you can never play as those characters in the regular game. Oh well.
- One of the other main issues is that after some number of hundreds of hours, the game does get repetitive. GW is a game that's all about running around and activating skills. If you boil it down, that's really all you do -- run around, listen to or read the story texts, and hit skill buttons in the right orders during combat, while selecting the correct enemies or allies to attack/heal. It's fantastic fun, but after a few years I started to get bored of the repetition and going back to playing it again reminds me of why. I still really love this game, but it IS true that like most of the better endlessly playable online games, it gets repetitive before you run out of new content to experience.
- On that note, finding human groups, if you desire that, will be challenging. While people are definitely still playing Guild Wars, since about 2007 finding human groups for random missions or quests has been hard. I disliked the Hero system at first because of how much it devalues player groups, and I still dislike it for that, but I also find it essential at the same time, because most areas don't have other people in them anyway so Heroes are essential! Henchmen often just won't do the job, you need the great control you have over Heroes. But even Heroes pale compared to a human team, which is the problem -- in the vast quantities of super-difficult postgame and Hard Mode content Guild Wars has, how are you supposed to have any chance at beating most of it solo or just with Heroes? Maybe with just the right builds you'd have a chance, but I never found those builds; AI allies in this game are no replacement for humans, but humans looking for random groups are few and far between, and again, have been for over a decade now. It's a problem that makes the Master difficulty and Hard mode stuff particularly really, really hard, because having to do everything with just Heroes can be nearly impossible at times. I'm sure there are good builds I could look up to make this easier, but I usually like to play this game just making builds up myself, instead of looking up good ones, so yeah, it's hard, much harder than it was in the earlier days when finding human groups was easy. Still though, even just solo with Heroes Guild Wars is still incredibly fun, so while this is definitely an issue, it's not a dealbreaker.
= Oh, and on the note of the story, GW's stories are ... fine. The first campaign, Prophecies, starts out with the most interesting plot piece of the whole game, the Searing. That part is compelling, and I still pretty much hate the Charr! But after that, and in Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North? GW's writing is alright. Some plotlines are amusing, and some here and there have some weight to them. It's mostly kind of forgettable though. I know writing stories for online RPGs is hard, since many players will entirely ignore it all, but I've always thought that GW has an alright to good story, but not a great one. There is no player choice at all, for example; all you can do is follow the story along, and never affect anything beyond the prewritten story. I do like that the game consistently does a good job of giving many of the enemy groups good, believable motivations and realistic character depth, though, that is a strength of GW. There are some straightforward crazy-evil villains, but many, such as the Charr, Shiro, the main enemy in Nightfall, and such, are interesting. From what I read about GW2 I think they've taken the story in some bad directions there, but just looking at this game it's solid. It's never amazing writing or something with a real message, though; this is no Planescape Torment certainly. So yeah, it's fine, better than what I've read about plenty of MMOs, and with one very interesting thing right at the beginning of the first game, but otherwise story is probably not the reason most people have played so much of this game.
So of the things I have listed in this thread, the faults are somewhat minor compared to the strengths, and the story issue is really a mixed-bag category and not a fault really. This game is incredible, one of my favorite gaming experiences ever, and it's fantastic that it's still so great! It's really impressive that the graphics have held up so well too...
I know, I should start with the crazy part, that one of those ports is, yes, Final Fantasy VII. But other than that, while this Direct was pretty good, almost everything announced was a port:
3DS - Three 3DS games were shown, one "new" -- a port of Kirby's Epic Yarn from the Wii. The other two upcoming games, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story and Luigi's Mansion, were also shown. A port of a Wii game is hardly a huge new announcement, but at this point it's nice that Nintendo announced anything for the clearly-being-phased-out 3DS...
Switch - Most of the Direct focused on the Switch of course. It started and ended with the two announcements in the thread title, Luigi's Mansion 3 and Animal Crossing, but almost everything shown in between was either previously announced or is a port of an older title or multiplatform game. Other than those two games only one other new game was shown, which I'll get to later. That's fine, but it reinforces that for many third parties that is what the Switch is, a platform you put your older games on but not your major new ones.
So, Square announced a mountain of Switch games! None are new games, however. They announced upcoming Switch ports of Final Fantasies VII, IX, X & X-2, XII: The Zodiac Age, XV Pocket Edition (a mobile game?), World of Final Fantasy (the newest game on Square's list of ports), Crystal Chronicles (the first one, now with no GBAs required...), and Chocobo's Dungeon. Even if none are new games though it is It's great to see all this stuff coming to Switch, and most of these games have never been on a Nintendo console before. FF7 on Nintendo is kind of weird, and the Switch has Crash Bandicoot as well... heh.
Otherwise, Nintendo finally showed the Switch Yoshi game again, and it looks like a lot of fun. It's got that same yarn artstyle as the other crafts-platformers Nintendo's made (including Kirby's Epic Yarn of course), and should be a good game. I've never loved Yoshi games as much as Kirby ones so I wouldn't get this over Kirby, but it does look good. Other previously announced titles like Daemon x Machina were also shown; that game looks pretty good.
One other rumor is also true: yes, New Super Mario Bros. U is, indeed, getting a Switch port, as NSMBU Deluxe. Sort of like the port of DKC Tropical Freeze, the game is the Wii U game, including the NS Luigi U DLC addon, with a few new characters: the Neeber guy who can't take damage from enemies now is playable in the whole game instead of just the Luigi part, and Toadette is playable. It's great that there's finally a female playable character in a NSMB game, as this is the first time that has happened, but I wish it was Rosalina and not Toadette... ah well. There is one weird thing to mention here, though -- if Toadette grabs a crown powerup, she turns into... Peachette, a new (?) character who looks a whole lot like Peach but I guess is Toadette actually or something? It's kind of weird, but as the actual Peach is stuck with her usual "she got kidnapped go save her" storyline in this game, they had to do something else and this is it.It's weird but... okay.
The third new game announcement is a new RPG from Level-5 codenamed "Town". It's got very kids-anime-cartoony graphics and is apparently entirely set in one town. It could be fine but looked underwhelming to me, both in gameplay and graphics. The graphical look is kind of bland and, one town only? Will this be a regular RPG, or something part life-management sim... who knows now.
A few more of the games shown include Mega Man 11, Just Dance 2019, and a collection of seven Capcom arcade beat 'em ups, including two that never got home console releases before. No licensed games are included here, but it's still an ice collection. It'll be on all formats (PC, PS4, X1, Switch), not only Switch.
I'm sure I'm not mentioning a lot more games shown, but I need to mention the other thing the Direct covered, Nintendo Online. Most of the presentation here is basically saying 'here are all the things you get for paying!' but they aren't new things, they're just the same thing the Switch has had since day one, but now you have to pay for them! It's the same exact horribly, inexcusably bad internet featureset as before, but now you have to pay for it. Thanks, Nintendo.
The only new things I can think of are access to NES games and cloud saves. Most Switch games will support cloud saving, though certain titles won't, including Pokemon and Splatoon. it sounds like most games will, though, thankfully. The little animation with Luigi's Switch getting crushed by a Thwomp was amusing, as an aside. As for those NES games, at least they finally gave details on that, with full lists of titles for what will be released through December. There will be 20 games available at launch, with about five more added per month. I guess that anyone subscribing has access to all games, instead of the XBL Games with Gold style of limited availability, so it's more a Netflix model. Sure, that works. Giving away so many games for a relatively low yearly fee is interesting, yes you have to pay every year but it's a lot of games. On the other hand though you do need to keep paying to keep playing them, so that adds up over time. There has been a lot of speculation that if they add newer consoles they could add additional fees for those libraries, I wonder if they'll go that direction or if they will just add them all in for the same price... or if the price will just go up a lot. I guess we'll see sometime in the coming years.
So yeah, it was a good Direct, I think. I still dislike the Switch's online system, but otherwise they showed quite a bit.
I mean, I have seen all the videos from anti-sj claiming "the left got totally triggered" but I've yet to actually find even one complaint about that line from the, you know, left. Frankly, I thought it was funny. It's a cheap easy joke, "the term demon is offensive", it got a laugh from me. I don't think it meant what these people think it means though. I didn't read anything political into it, but there they are, claiming everyone on "my side" did while they're the ones reading way too much into it.
So I just expanded the thoughts summary I wrote up for this game a few weeks ago in my thread for those things, so I thought a full thread was in order.
Ys VIII, which released in 2017, is the latest game in the very long-running Ys series from Falcom. Dating back to the mid ’80s, the Ys series of simple but fun action-RPGs. While the Ys series has never been as popular as the top series in this genre, particularly in the West, many of the Ys games are great and deserve attention, often more than they have gotten.
This game is no exception, as it is really good and addictive! Ys VIII is a great action-rpg, with a well-thought-through mixture of elements from both the classic Ys games and modern titles. I’ve been playing a lot of this game over the past few weeks, and quite enjoy it. As always in the series, Ys VIII is a very combat-heavy action-RPG. The way they keep the combat system simple, but add depth as expected from a modern game, is great. You’ll spend a lot of time in combat here and it stays fun.
Historically, you play as one character in Ys games, the red-haired hero Adol. However, in Ys VII that changed as the series moved to having three party members you could switch between. This game works like that again, as the game has three characters active at a time, and you control one while the AI control the other two. You can switch between the three active party members with the press of a button, and once you get more than three characters you can swap out the others on the pause menu anytime. It seems that only the three active ones get experience points though, unfortunately, so you will need to switch characters out to keep them levelled. There are three main types of characters, with a rock-paper-scissors-styled system determining what type of enemies each one is good at fighting, either regular enemies, flying enemies, or highly armored foes. This encourages you to switch characters while playing based on which enemy type you are fighting, which adds to the game.
Beyond that, combat is mostly centered around pressing a single attack button, but there is also a vitally important roll button used to dodge incoming attacks, and you can equip four special attacks per character as well that you access with button combinations. A meter on screen, shown as a ring around the special-attack icons, controls how much you can use your specials. Additionally, as you defeat enemies with specials you fill in the background of the specials icons with yellow. Once this is full, you can use a super special move with another button combination, which differs for each character. Again you’re fighting a lot in this game, as expected from the always-grindey Ys series, but combat is fun so it’s not too bad. The game does seem a bit easy on Normal difficulty though, so I’ve mostly been playing on Hard. Maybe it gets harder later on, I am still not too far into this fairly long game. On Hard the game is plenty challenging from the beginning, though. Dodging is critical to survival, and selecting the right character and using your skills well is important. It’s rewarding when you get past a tough boss fight in good shape. Fortunately, as always in Ys games you can save anytime. I know I said it already, but I have also been playing some Ys I for the Sega Master System recently, and this game feels like half classic Ys, and half modern action game. It’s great stuff.
Ys games have always had a plot, but Falcom mixed things up this time with an original concept for this fantasy adventure series: you are stranded on a deserted island. Ys has always been a gameplay-first, story-second series, but there are always characters to care about. This game goes farther along on that route than before. The game begins on a large oceangoing ship. Adol and his friend Dogi are working on this ship as crew members, wandering the world as he usually does. However, after not long the ship wrecks, and you wash up on a forbidding deserted island. Starting out with only Adol, you quickly add a second party member, then set up a base camp. The whole game is set on the island, and you explore it, find new survivors to add to your party or who will stay at the base camp and do something there, and collect stuff. Every so often, Adol sees dreams of a woman called Dana who lived in some long-ago civilization perhaps on the island. She becomes important much later in the game, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Along the way, there are many fully voiced cutscenes which give the characters personality in a way I don’t remember seeing in this series before. Ys VII also had a party, but this one makes you care about your party members a lot more than that game did and the party members interact much more. The deserted-island setting is also reasonably interesting, if inordinately dangerous in that way only a videogame could be. The game is definitely anime though, with anime-style character designs and constant anime-style humor and design elements. I have long found it weird to see how there is almost nothing actually European-medieval anything Japanese “medieval fantasy” games have in them… it’s kind of comical, how impossible this ship’s contents are for this ostensible world setting! Apparently this world has advanced far enough to make some guns, so there is that, but still. That ship in the beginning or most any characters’ clothing doesn’t fit the ostensible setting at all, as usual for fantasy anime. Oh well.
Returning to the gameplay though, since you are stuck on a deserted island a money system wouldn’t make sense, so there isn’t one. Instead, it’s all about collecitble monster parts, plants, and such. All purchases in the camp are done through barter with the stuff you collect, so the monster-parts-collection element of this game fits the setting well. Yes, as with many modern games this game has a crafting system, but they did a good job making it simple enough that I don’t mind it. There isn’t any complex crafting system here, you see; you just get stuff that people say they want and bring it to them, either for side quests or for getting new items in the shop and such, and then they will give you the reward. That seems simple enough, if you know where to find the things they need, but that latter part can be a challenge sometimes. Yes, finding the right items can be tricky.
Story quests, on the other hand, usually have you going to a specific point in the map, either to search for a survivor, kill monsters there, or just to explore to that point. These points are marked on your map, whether or not you have reached that place yet, which is very helpful; when you have a story quest you always know the direction you should be heading in, you just need to figure out how to get there. This can be trickier as it sounds, as areas can have multiple paths and are often gated either with obstacles you need a specific item to get past that you may not have yet, or obstacles that you can only get past with the help of a specific number of survivors. So yes, rescuing people doesn’t only add to your little town, it also allows you to unlock new areas on the map. It’s a good system.
I like exploring the world a lot. Vs VIII has a fairly large world made up of interlocking areas. The area sizes are designed for the limitations of the Vita, but each one is plenty large, allowing for a good amount of space to explore and fight in. They can have multiple floors, and in addition to a wide variety of monsters are also full of treasure chests, collection points where you get plants or minerals or such from, scenic vistas, and more, all marked on the map. On that note, graphically the game looks great for the Vita, and is probably one of the best-looking games I’ve played for the system. I’m sure it looks even better on PC and PS4, and probably the Switch too, in framerate particularly as the Vita version is 30fps and the others try for 60, but I am quite fine with 30fps and I think this game looks very nice. Some Vita games look dated compared to major-console titles, but with its great graphics and art design this game impresses. The soundtrack is fantastic too, it’s great stuff. Ys games have often had memorable soundtracks and this one is no exception. The good grpahics and music help make this already-great game even better.
So I mostly quite like this game, but though I am ‘only’ a bit over 10 hours into the game so far, there are a few issues to mention. First, this is a long game, as much as 70 hours to finish, and a lot of that time will be spent levelling or killing monsters for parts. I’m sure the grind gets old after a while, and not everybody has time to finish a game as long as this. You surely can finish it faster than that if you ignore all side content, but it is not a short game. And second, the Vita version of this game here is the original version of the game, and does not have a whole list of features that were added to all of the later ports, including the PS4, PC, and Switch releases. The additional content of the other versions includes a bonus dungeon at the end of the game for Dana to play through, more combat modes for Dana to switch to when you play as her near the end of the game, a bunch of interface and map improvements and such, and more. On the other hand, the improved versions also cost a lot more than the Vita one does — this version is easy to find for under $40, while the other three are still a full $60. So despite the cuts I got this version, and don’t regret it. I probably will also get the PC version someday as well, but Ys VIII is a great game and a nice showcase for what the Vita can do. It looks great on the OLED screen. It would make more sense to just get one of the ports and stick to that, but there is more than enough here in this version to keep gamers occupied for a long time, and so far I am quite liking what I have seen. I recommend playing Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, it is a good game worthy of attention.
