The Gaming Den

You have to see him in action. Stefan has an insanely high skill/speed stat which basically means he attacks twice, period (in a game where a couple of hits is a big difference) and has a good shot at critting people...and he comes with a skill which, when it activates, hits the enemy five times. And usually, when he's in a scene, you just see the jacket because of how the sprite turns.

The basic premise still holds, and I'll provide more evidence if needed.

Maxus wrote:You have to see him in action. Stefan has an insanely high skill/speed stat which basically means he attacks twice, period (in a game where a couple of hits is a big difference) and has a good shot at critting people...and he comes with a skill which, when it activates, hits the enemy five times. And usually, when he's in a scene, you just see the jacket because of how the sprite turns.

The basic premise still holds, and I'll provide more evidence if needed.

Oh, I don't disagree that Stefan was fucking awesome, I just think he dressed like a guy who hadn't had much in the way of normal human contact for years, because he hadn't.

The largest disagreement with your theory is this:

Makalov

If you use fixed stats or going by averages, then out of the paladins he has:

• Most hitpoints
• Maximum Strength
• Second highest Speed, only beaten by Astrid
• About joint highest Luck of the male Paladins, and only 3 behind the max.
• Joint highest Defence, matched only by Geoffrey

He falls behind by about 3-4 Skill and has the worst Resistance, but other than that he is fucking awesome by stats.

But as you can see, he looks ridiculous. I refuse to use him and on my current playthrough just killed him with his sister Marcia. Mostly just to be a dick.

But, to a large extent I agree. Haar is a motherfucking beast of a unit, especially in Radiant Dawn. And he's the one with the eyepatch.

Starmaker wrote:Played Hidden Agenda (thanks mean_liar for the link)

10. Outstanding issues.
I don't like food rationing, but that's currently the only thing that keeps the populace from starving despite increased financial support for local food producers and all the food that i can get from Cuba and the USSR.
Terrorists attacking hospitals. I use every option to increase security stopping short of distributing arms to the populace (Evil alert!) and it's not enough.
The CIA blowing up the ships. The current strategy is "wait for them to stop".
Me not having any idea what's going on with the national army. The current strategy is "do whatever Correa says because he's Good (tm)." Or is he?

You're having troubles with the CIA because of your commie affiliations, but you'd be replacing them with problems with Correa if you went the other way. It's tough managing to run Ehrlich out of the military but still managing to keep Correa corralled - and those terrorists will kill and kill unless you do something to stop them, but the draft makes the populace hate you.

I think the country simply can't be effectively run from the right wing, but I can never really manage to make myself do that consistently.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Final Fantasy V would probably be the best game out of the entire 16-bit series if its story wasn't so scattershot (especially the middle part of the game) and Ex-Death was a better villain. Golbez, of all people, has to be the second best Final Fantasy villain in the entire history of the franchise and he's not even really a villain.

Yeah, the main flaw to FF V was that the characters (heroes and villains) were just not memorable at all. I mean I played through that entire game a couple years back, and I can't name a single hero. At least I remember Ex-death, even though he really wasn't a great villain. I literally can't remember a single one of the protagonists. They were just dry and lacking of any real personality. I don't remember why they were fighting or what kind of lives they had before the game started.

And that's just not true of pretty much most of the other FFs. I mean, shit, FF8 was a horrible game, but I can still remember the characters. You thought they were whiny bitches, but you remembered them because of that. The guys in FF V were cardboard cut outs.

The main strength of the FF games were pretty much always in their storytelling. And FF V just never had that.

I'll give it a try:

[Hero McHero], the adventurer guy who is a bit dumb but wants to save the world and protect the girl.

The old guy who I remember nothing about. I think his name was Galuf?

Iforgethername, the... princess or something?

And the pirate woman who all the guys took forever to discover was a woman despite players assuming it from the get-go.

Well, that was barely successful, though it has been several years. Still, from all of the pre-7 ones it's the best I can do. One of the others has Kefka and his laugh, and another one has The Black Knight... CECIL. Oh, and the first game is basically 8-bit Theatre, though I wish to word it in a way to imply that FF actually ripped off the webcomic that was based on it, similar to how Kefka's final form is just a silly tribute to that of Sephiroth, because according to a reliable source*, FF7 is actually the first game ever made.

I liked it more than any of the FF games directly adjacent to it - but I played them on an emulator after having played FF7, so I wasn't "old-skool" about it. I hear that in order to have a relevant opinion on FF, you have to have started with FFI on the NES or shadow puppets or whatever it used, and worked your way up, and are required to hate every single one of the ones that use polygons, saying "it all went downhill starting with FFVII".

Still, I don't think I can be bothered playing any of the FF games for a while. None of them sucked me in as much as 7, possibly that did because it was the first for me. For truly great RPGs, I'll stick with Suikoden 2 and Atelier Iris 2.

*I lied, it was /v/

The only two characters that anyone really remembers from FFV are the villains Ex-Death and Gilgamesh, which is why they keep popping up in subsequent games so frequently.

Koumei wrote:I'll stick with Suikoden 2

We've been over this before. Suikoden 2 is not a great RPG. It's a wretched game with brilliant moments in it that average out to ultimately unremarkable. It had some very good, even legendary moments in it, almost all of them involving Jowy or Luca. But everything else made me want to cry. Why did you make us do a school plot? Why did you make us suffer through Neclord? Why did you make us suffer through Silverburg's personal issues? Why is the combat system so mindblowingly dull and grindy? Why is the protagonist such a limp noodle?

GG: AND Galuf, but Galuf isn't pretty nor he's a villain so he's forgotten. But all-in-all I think that he gets the most character development of any 3rd/4th Generation Final Fantasy character, except for maybe Cecil. If the other characters in the game had his level of personality/awesome FFV would've been legendary. But it's just noted right now for being the least boring of the Final Fantasies to grind/dungeon crawl through.

Koumei wrote:[Hero McHero], the adventurer guy who is a bit dumb but wants to save the world and protect the girl.

I want to say Bart. I don't know why I remember that other than maybe because it's a retarded name.

Ganbare Gincun wrote:The only two characters that anyone really remembers from FFV are the villains Ex-Death and Gilgamesh, which is why they keep popping up in subsequent games so frequently.

Ya know people keep saying that, but I remember all of them.

Granted, they were not in depth at all, by any stretch of the imagination but completely forgettable? Nah.

Let's see...

Bartz - Come on, he's the Epic Fail guy. It certainly happens often enough. No other distinctive traits, granted.

Lenna - Doesn't really do a lot. For the entire game. And is gone for a part of it, so definitely the most forgettable. About the only thing of note she does is nearly kill herself a lot trying to help animals.

Galuf - obligatory amnesic with just a bit of old master. He got a nice moment vs Exdeath, granted.

Faris - Chick who dresses up at a guy. If I were the only female on a ship of pirates I'd do the same thing.

Cara - Little girl who beat up at least half the cast.

Now granted that's about the extent of the description that can be applied to them, but if I can remember their names despite being bad with those it's not QUITE as bad as you say... though not far off either.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: We've been over this before.

I'm pretty sure we haven't, nor are we going to: I enjoyed Suikoden 2 a hell of a lot, and I really don't care how groundbreaking, popular or unique it was. I mean, a lot of people like FFX, but that doesn't stop me from thinking it is complete balls, and that FFX2 was an actual improvement because it at least lacked Blitzball, AHAHAHA and (mostly) Wakka, and had funny moments and sexual innuendo.

Suiko2 was entertaining (even if the Neclord bit didn't really fit and was somewhat random and annoying), it had a nice enough combat system (not including the 1-on-1, which you can beat via GameFAQs for the ones that don't completely televise their moves, or the mass battle, which you can just skip and I wouldn't like in any form - and hated in Suiko5) and plenty of the cast were likeable. With that many characters, it's easy to get at least one full team's worth of characters you actually like, rather than having to put up with annoying characters that are just there to fill space.

Koumei wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote: We've been over this before.

I'm pretty sure we haven't, nor are we going to: I enjoyed Suikoden 2 a hell of a lot, and I really don't care how groundbreaking, popular or unique it was. I mean, a lot of people like FFX, but that doesn't stop me from thinking it is complete balls, and that FFX2 was an actual improvement because it at least lacked Blitzball, AHAHAHA and (mostly) Wakka, and had funny moments and sexual innuendo.

Amen.

Mortal Online. Why they chose full nudity is bizarre and ultimately counter-productive. It feels like they're trying too hard to be risqué.

Koumei wrote:I mean, a lot of people like FFX, but that doesn't stop me from thinking it is complete balls, and that FFX2 was an actual improvement because it at least lacked Blitzball, AHAHAHA and (mostly) Wakka, and had funny moments and sexual innuendo.

Haven't played FFX2, but I think your complaints (at least those, FFX does have a lot to hate) are a bit churlish. I actually liked how the minigame was integrated into the story as a method of shared culture and social integration. I hate Blitzball, but I liked what they tried to do with it. AHAHAHA is bad, but it's just random badness without any greater relevance. I also liked Wakka. He's a goofy, slightly fanatic, but still fundamentally decent guy who has a lot of patience and consideration for others.

If you want to talk FFX badness, let's talk about the level-up system. Dear god, WTF were they thinking? Why do I need to grind twice? Even as awful as that system was, it still beats the geography. How can you have an RPG setting this detailed and this thought-out put still have the world map look like a PARODY of the genre? The whole evil romance subplot with Seymour/Yuna was just an annoying distraction that didn't build up to anything special.

And Tidus kind of sucks as a protagonist. I didn't hate him; I wanted to like him, I was just frustrated at how his character was wasted. Like he'd have a really thoughtful and insightful inner monologue about the world at large but when he opened his mouth a stream of stupid came out. I would've much preferred the character we got when looking at his thoughts rather than the one the game and setting shows us. And I was kind of hoping that Inner!Tidus would eventually punt the jackass outer!Tidus and take over but it never really happens. To me, he's like Naruto. I don't hate the character, I hate what the story did with him.

Koumei wrote:it had a nice enough combat system

You mean that shitty fucking grindfest where you spammed team attacks and fought ridiculous immersion-breaking enemies and had to put up with the typical loading times of an early-generation PSX1 game?

Koumei wrote:With that many characters, it's easy to get at least one full team's worth of characters you actually like, rather than having to put up with annoying characters that are just there to fill space.

Except that like most RPGs with loads of characters only a handful of them got any development. Fortunately, the characters, except for Shinji w/ Tonfas, were on the whole decent but no one really memorable. Again, except for Jowy and Luca (who I admit were really fucking epic) and maybe that kobold village commander guy there wasn't anyone really memorable off the top of my head.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: You mean that shitty fucking grindfest where you spammed team attacks and fought ridiculous immersion-breaking enemies and had to put up with the typical loading times of an early-generation PSX1 game?

I'll let the rest go because I am not really into having a nerd war tonight, but seriously what do you mean here? Suikoden has the least grindy combat system of any rpg I have ever played. Let's say its the end of the game and your characters are at like level 60, which is perfectly appropriate for the end. Then you decide you want to bring Tuta in the final battle. Tuta's like level 2 because nobody ever uses Tuta. In most games your going to spend all day, if not all week, bringing him up to snuff. Suikoden its done in like five battles. Seriously, characters who are at a low level just gain levels like nothing while guys at high level gain xp so slowly its almost pointless. Which is pretty much what you want in a game that has sixty or so playable characters.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Haven't played FFX2, but I think your complaints (at least those, FFX does have a lot to hate) are a bit churlish. I actually liked how the minigame was integrated into the story as a method of shared culture and social integration. I hate Blitzball, but I liked what they tried to do with it.

Protip: if you have a shitty minigame, forcing it down the player's throat is not the solution. Dropping it is the solution. They should make such shit less relevant to the game.

I also liked Wakka.

You know, given your taste, that doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

let's talk about the level-up system.

And I had almost forgot how bad that was. The worst of it was that you have no idea if you're ready for the next boss or not, because you have all these random boosts here and there with no overall meaning. A guide can't say "You should be level X for this".

it still beats the geography.

Yeah, sadly they didn't change it for X2. Although it feels even closer together as though you could jog a few laps around the entire world every morning, as long as you don't mind going through The Ice Area, The Fire Area, The Lightning Area and so on. So I think they did finally say "Yeah, it's a joke".

You mean that shitty fucking grindfest where you spammed team attacks and fought ridiculous immersion-breaking enemies and had to put up with the typical loading times of an early-generation PSX1 game?

I can't remember the loading times, but it wasn't a grind, and I see nothing wrong with spamming team attacks and powerful runes. That beats the "spam highest level spell" or "hold your thumb on the attack button" of most RPGs. Sure, it's no AI2, which has a nice combo system similar to Grandia, but still, it's decent.

Except that like most RPGs with loads of characters only a handful of them got any development.

I don't even mind this. Sure it would be nice if they had the development for everyone, but 108 characters, of which a handful get developed, is better than "Here's half a dozen characters. They all get plot stuff, but you'll hate most of them".

Also, I thought I might just mention it, but people were talking about Chrono Cross and I happened to say "Wait, isn't that the one that's said to be the worst game ever?", and wouldn't you know it, the answer given was "Only by Chrono Trigger fanboys who cry about it not being the same game they played on the SNES. It's your usual bitchfits like when a new Final Fantasy comes out and is the Worst Game Ever to the fans of the previous one."

So it really all makes sense now.

Koumei wrote:Protip: if you have a shitty minigame, forcing it down the player's throat is not the solution. Dropping it is the solution. They should make such shit less relevant to the game.

The actual minigame sucked, I'm not disagreeing with you there, I'm just saying that I liked how they integrated said minigame into the setting and story rather than the usual jRPG approach of using it as a way to test your algebra or to juggle boxes or whatever. It helped tamper down on the rage.

Koumei wrote:You know, given your taste, that doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

C'mon, don't just leave it at that. What didn't you like about Wakka?

Koumei wrote: Also, I thought I might just mention it, but people were talking about Chrono Cross and I happened to say "Wait, isn't that the one that's said to be the worst game ever?", and wouldn't you know it, the answer given was "Only by Chrono Trigger fanboys who cry about it not being the same game they played on the SNES. It's your usual bitchfits like when a new Final Fantasy comes out and is the Worst Game Ever to the fans of the previous one."

So it really all makes sense now.

You're not taking their side, are you? I've written two separate rants on Chrono Cross in this very thread, and while I admit that a lot of my hate stems from the fact that it pisses on Chrono Trigger, this game is awful enough on its own merits in both gameplay, characterization, plot, settings, and gimmicks. The graphics were nice and the music was decent, but you could say the same thing about any of Sunsoft's shittier games.

Fix your quote tags.

Also, Chronocross being a shitty game is not just Chronotrigger fanboyism. Now granted, they did dig up the characters of the old game to systematically murder them in their childhoods so that absolutely nothing in the previous game ever actually happened. And that's a dick move beyond the pale for anything that could hope to call itself a sequel.

But it's beyond that. The cast is too large. And by too large, I mean that it's so large that the characters don't even have different dialogs for most scenes. Like, you find the alien technology and whoever happens to be in second position on your team says that he has no idea what's going on because he's never seen anything like it - even if you have the alien scientist from the future in second position!

The game is just sloppy. There's a pokemon character who undergoes an evolution progression depending on what color of effects he is hit with while he is leveling up. But if you play a new game plus, he reverts to his Eevee form, but since you're already high level you can't re-evolve him.

The game is annoying. You have a bunch of what are essentially magic cards that you load into slots on your characters. Which is a process that is kind of like preparing Wizard spells. But everyone is preparing from the same pile, so to switch party members you have to strip everything off your current team, then re-prepare everything onto your new team, and when you switch back everything is all unequipped again.

The story is... really bad. Basically, nothing anyone does makes any sense. Major crossroads that you have to go down to get characters include telling your girlfriend that you can't help her when she is supposedly dying rather than going over to fetch the antidote - an antidote that sh gets off camera anyway with no consequence except that you get a virtuous knight, a house wife, and a surfing doctor on your team instead of a couple of children and a forest fairy. I think it is important to note that neither attempting to help your girlfriend nor refusing to do so has any bearing on whether she dies or joins your team.

It is Confusing. I don't mean that it's an intricate tapestry of interconnected and interdependent events, I mean that basically most of the story happens for no reason. Really obvious solutions to problems are ignored, characters switch sides from good to evil for no reason, including the point of view characters. Yes, you are seriously required to do things that specifically make your own job harder after being told that that is what is going to happen for no reason. This is an actual major plot point:

Chrono Cross Fan Site Time Line wrote:Schala hears the cries of a little Serge across the dimensions. Serge is drowning in Opassa beach. Schala creates a daughter-clone (Kid) who travels through time and dimensions to save Serge from drowning. Kid is entrusted with Schala's pendant and is then born into the universe proper in 1003 or 1004 AD. I assume she homed in on when Serge was first born, and made that her target for her 'rebirth', even though Serge doesn't get saved until future Kid travels back to save him.

Seriously. A character in an alternate timeline created by that character monkeying with the timeline becomes her own mother to send her daughter clone self into the past of a different alternate timeline to save a 7 year old child from drowning on the beach in the future of an original (now obsolete) alternate timeline.

Also, many of the characters have no relationship to the plot, and are just there to be annoying. In the case of one of your characters who is a "doodling youngster" this is literally her only purpose. Did I mention that over the course of the game you kill the main characters of the original game in an orphanage fire, despite the fact that all three characters had parents with speaking parts in the previous game and thus had no reason to have lived in an orphanage at any points in their childhood?

Incomprehensible, annoying, insulting, clusterfuck.

-Username17

That sounds hilariously bad. Not "so bad it's good", but funny to hear about. Having never played it (never came across a copy, and never played CT so I had no desire to chase down a sequel), I assumed Lago simply needed to shovel the sand out of his vagina on this one. Going by that review however, I'll cede that point.

It doesn't make his taste any less shit though.

So, onto the FFX debate:
I still think it would have been better if the game didn't actually fit into the setting and was simply there for you to completely ignore.

Wakka is stupid and annoying. His character traits are "idiot" and "stoned Jamaican". That they then give him the ability to fight underwater makes it worse, as there are "You have to let him into your party" arcs. Compare to the number of times you have to put Cait Sith in your party (0), or Tuta (0).

I'm going to guess the reason it was such a big hit was that it was the first FF for PS2, and thus the first to make use of all those pretty pictures and the voice-overs, as "Lulu is hot" is actually the only redeeming feature to the game, so you can seriously enjoy all the good points about the game by going to the rule34 website. But that returns us to the main point: the majority of RPG fans are dickheads, I'm certainly not going to agree with them on what makes a good game. I'll use the measuring stick of "Did I like the game?"

Koumei wrote:I assumed Lago simply needed to shovel the sand out of his vagina on this one.

That doesn't go far enough in expressing my sheer impotent rage for it.

When Chrono Cross is mentioned, the sand that spans down below is enough to make the Sahara look like a rainforest. Earth elementals would weep in despair at the sight. Moses never found the Promised Land, he's still wandering with his dumbass Jews to this day in my sandgina.

I'm going to guess the reason it was such a big hit was that it was the first FF for PS2,

There's more to like FFX for than the fanservice. The setting is detailed and evocative once you ignore the stupid geography, the characters (except for Kimahri) have nice Chemistry, and the game has some nice--if undeveloped--themes about moving on and redemption.

This does not change the fact that the game has some serious problems, but except for the World Map issue the problems have more to do with them trying too hard rather than not trying hard enough.

I just cleared Bioshock 2.

Assassins Creed 2:

The plot is... tolerable. The characterization is decent. The gameplay is very, very good. I don't even like GTA-style games, and I'm having fun.

I still find the fact that your signature tool is essentially very similar to duct-taping a switchblade to your arm amusing. When I saw that knives were a combat option, I was momentarily filled with hope that I might get a somewhat less impractical way to assassinate people by walking up and surprise-stabbing them. Perhaps somewhat sadly, this was not the case.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I still find the fact that your signature tool is essentially very similar to duct-taping a switchblade to your arm amusing. When I saw that knives were a combat option, I was momentarily filled with hope that I might get a somewhat less impractical way to assassinate people by walking up and surprise-stabbing them. Perhaps somewhat sadly, this was not the case.

"Impractical" is not the word I would use. The hidden blade can be used to insta-kill any guard in range that hasn't actually drawn a melee weapon on you (and even some that have), even if they're aware of you. You can sprint straight at a roof archer that is yelling at you to leave before he shoots you full of arrows and stab him in the gut. You can walk up to a stationary guard that automatically shoves you away if you get close and kill him if you push the button fast enough. You can walk into the middle of a group of four armed guards that are looking at you, double-assassinate two of them, and then double-assassinate the other two of them before they react.

I thought Assassin's Creed 2 was a solidly mediocre game. Assassinating people is cool, the combat's pretty good...

Free running is OK, but it frequently won't do what you want. When you reach an edge, sometimes it will automatically stop you, sometimes you'll step straight off, and sometimes you'll jump, and there are situations in which you want to do any one of those three things, but the rules for what it actually does is a complicated combination of what type of edge it is and what type of movement you're using. Jumping off an edge will also sometimes automatically align you to a right angle with the edge, but it happens rather unpredictably, and frequently that realignment causes you to fall 3 stories to street level instead of grabbing the handhold you wanted. There's also a problem with the control scheme where the button you want to press to save yourself if you narrowly miss a jump is also the button that you want to make absolutely sure you do not press if you narrowly make the jump.

Your ability to survey your surroundings is also totally inadequate for a stealth game; there were lots of parts where it looked like you were supposed to be sneaky, but they just didn't give you the tools to do it. Many times I'd wait at a corner or ledge for several seconds, carefully trying to get a view of the next area without exposing myself, and when I despair of learning anything useful and take a tentative step out, the guards (that I couldn't see before) instantly spot me. And once anyone sees you, it's pretty much either fight every single guard or run far, far away. Eagle vision can occasionally be very useful, but it makes things like walls virtually invisible, it takes a noticably long time to toggle on and off, and the color codes don't persist after you turn it off like they did in the first game. After playing Arkham Asylum, this felt like a big step down.

I also experienced two (apparent) game-halting glitches. One of them I solved by aborting and restarting the memory sequence, which forced me to redo a nontrivial chunk of stuff. The other involved seemingly unclimbable architecture that you were obviously required to climb; after spending like 20 minutes and power cycling the game trying everything that I could think of (there are four separate, obvious maneuvers that all look like they should work, but none of them does), I went online, Google auto-completed my search, and I found big threads of people complaining that they got stuck on the same part, and apparently the only workaround is to use an advanced climbing technique that the game teaches you in a tutorial that happens later in the game.

I finished it, and I'll probably play the final game of the trilogy when it comes out, but it's not far above the threshold where I wouldn't bother.

Bought Okami for ten bucks.

Having a blast.

Realized I haven't eaten since breakfast and it's now almost five in the afternoon.

Manxome wrote: I thought Assassin's Creed 2 was a solidly mediocre game. Assassinating people is cool, the combat's pretty good...

Free running is OK, but it frequently won't do what you want. When you reach an edge, sometimes it will automatically stop you, sometimes you'll step straight off, and sometimes you'll jump, and there are situations in which you want to do any one of those three things, but the rules for what it actually does is a complicated combination of what type of edge it is and what type of movement you're using. Jumping off an edge will also sometimes automatically align you to a right angle with the edge, but it happens rather unpredictably, and frequently that realignment causes you to fall 3 stories to street level instead of grabbing the handhold you wanted. There's also a problem with the control scheme where the button you want to press to save yourself if you narrowly miss a jump is also the button that you want to make absolutely sure you do not press if you narrowly make the jump.

The pacing of the game is rather crappy too. At times it tries to be too Mirror's Edge, where you really have no foes or anything and you're just trying to figure out how to get up to somewhere through some convoluted series of jumps and climbs. That to me is rather boring. I want to get to planning assassinations and killing fools.

You're right that Arkham Asylum did this much better, you always felt like you were part of the action there. In Assassins' creed often times, I just feel like I'm doing tedious jumping. There's no enemies, no chance of being discovered, it's just a fight against the controls to get your character to do what you want him to do. And often times I was just saying "okay, come on... lets just get to actually being an assassin instead of running a stupid obstacle course."

Actually Arkham Asylum did do that at one point with that stupid sewer level where your bat grapple didn't work, but that was at least somewhat forgiveable because they didn't last long. AC2 always feels like I'm doing stupid obstacle course missions.