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Sonic the Hedgehog Community |OT2 Battle|

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PKrockin

Member
Anime game.

Did you like the part where I realized that magic spells were completely OP and can one-shot enemies? That was my first time using it and I was completely shocked.

The part where you realized you have magic spells that only take a few seconds to charge, and deal literally 25-60 times more damage than normal attacks? Yes.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
I noticed that Japan's getting Sonic Lost World 2 days after NA (which is the usual thing).

KOjcWI5.png


At least they won't have to wait a full month like they did with Generations.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
For some reason, I keep forgetting that Europe (and presumably AUS/NZ) was Sonic territory back then.

Waitaminute, Coldman--let's be sure here. Which one of us is putting the Lost Worlds thread up, just so it can be claimed in the OT OT.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
I thought you were. Alright, I'll do it. This should be fun.

You'll have your cameo, since you requested it. And I'll try to find a way to fit OGB's art in there too.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
You're too slow, qq. I'll let you help with something that I have in mind, though. It's something that usually comes up in OTs that I directly help out with/write for (ie: the Graces f one, the DJMAX Technika Tune one, and now the almost-finished Tales of Xillia one).

As usual, everyone can help out with the thread title because I'm terrible at coming up with those.

I'm up for images, as always.
As luck would have it, I'm not too good at images outside of resizing, adding layers, adding alpha channels, and reflections in GIMP, so I'll ask you for banners if you're available. Thanks!
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
I'll PM you, BlackJace. Thanks a lot. I have a few ideas already and since you look like you want to have a head-start, I'll PM you in a sec.
 

Daingurse

Member
Just watching some Lost World gameplay, Frozen Factory with my high ass and this shit looks sloowwww, slow ass fucking zone at the very least, but I fucking love the fan service. Seeing the pinball gimmick and the old character cards, well . . . I felt something tingle man, deep inside. Definitely going to need a Wii-U in the upcoming future.


Also what the fuck is a Zone anyway?
 

Noi

Member
In my eternal quest to play every shitty #2 entry in a series ever, I'm now playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.

We'll see how long it takes for the generic buttrock to get to me.
 

Spinluck

Member
That's not dumb. Aha, that's part of getting older, I guess. It's why I hope the next mainline Tales has online MP or something, so I can actually play it with a few J-GAF people when we import next time.

My favourite games in the series are Graces/Destiny R/Rebirth. Rebirth has the worst story in the series, but it's still one of my favourites to play. Destiny R is what all the games should aspire to be should they continue on a 2D route, and Graces is the best 3D battle system in the series to me (and it's an excellent attempt at trying to make all of the systems cohesive and work together nicely).

As for Xillia, I've written a lot about how the game just dissatisfied me in the end in many a Tales thread. That isn't to say it's a bad game, because plenty of people enjoyed it, and if I hated it, I wouldn't have played through the game four times. Here are a few posts:
http://neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=43179295&postcount=1400 (detailing why I thought the game has design problems after my second plat run)
This post where I compared Graces and Xillia

Additionally:
  • The boss design in the Tales game has been pretty bad since Tales of Hearts, and it continues here. It actively encourages the player to free run instead of dodge. Bosses like to break out of combos after 10-12-20 hits, and they like to OVL/hi-ougi for no reason.
  • Every character is broken to a degree, and the systems are easily exploitable enough if an enemy has an elemental strength and continues to use it so that you null out the damage. Essentially, the game has poor balancing that's too much in favour of the player.
  • The environments are terrrribleeeeeeeeeee. Giant empty fields filled with nothing.
  • This doesn't feel like a 15th anniversary game at all. Graces f, by contrast, actually felt like one. This strips a lot of the side content that you're used to seeing in a Tales game outside of the Fell Arms quest. Xillia 2 rectifies this by a lot, but it's just a shame that we don't see that in the game that they spent the time developing for the 15th anniversary.
  • One of the characters drove me nuts. Outside of that, I thought the cast was fairly decent.
  • The EX Dungeon is freaking terrible and I hate it. Map retreads all day everyday. And you have to do the stupid thing three times to completely finish it off.
  • Arena battles are just meaningless now.
  • Shop levelling system just kind of diminishes the significance of entering a new town.
  • No cooking; you buy food from restaurants now.
  • The levelling system is like the Crystarium. It gives you the illusion of choice, when really, it doesn't seem to matter much because you're going to get all the skills for the characters anyway.
  • The game and its plot are not unfinished, but you can't help but to feel the game, or at least the final act of the game, was cut short, possibly due to time constraints. It's a shame because they had an interesting world building up there.
  • The sidequests are basically MMO-like fetch quests and they don't feel as significant as previous Tales game quests.

There's a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember off the top of my head, but those are the most significant. EDIT: I should add that I thought Xillia was fun to play. It's just flawed.

Xillia 2 gave everything a speed nerf which I enjoyed a lot. But I don't like the pacing and design of that game very much, as I wrote here:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=44456832&postcount=800
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=44518930&postcount=815

Xillia 2 is still the better game.

I see. I'm a little disappointed to hear some of that, as I was pretty hyped for Xillia. But I'll see what I think about it when I get my hands on it. No doubt it still looks fun, good to hear Xillia 2 may have been an improvement- however slight it may be.

The environment news sounds disappointing, since I tend to actually like a bit of exploration in Tales games as long as the maps are interesting. When I saw footage of the world, it looked reminiscent of FFXII, I love that game though. And that leveling system sounds like something a lot of JRPG's I've played the past few years seem to have a problem with.

I really liked what I've played of Graces F, and it's probably my new favorite in the series so far- me and my friends were having a blast with it. I haven't played all of them all though. Just Symphonia, Dawn of The New World, Rebirth, Abyss, Vesperia, and Graces. But I'm looking forward to picking Xillia, even with the negatives you had with the game, I feel it still sounds a lot better than some of the weaker entries in the series. Lol.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
I just learned that Lightning Returns has no levelling system.

How disappointing.

On a better note, SMT4 just got even more awesommmmmme. I love this game.

I see. I'm a little disappointed to hear some of that, as I was pretty hyped for Xillia. But I'll see what I think about it when I get my hands on it. No doubt it still looks fun, good to hear Xillia 2 may have been an improvement- however slight it may be.

The environment news sounds disappointing, since I tend to actually like a bit of exploration in Tales games as long as the maps are interesting. When I saw footage of the world, it looked reminiscent of FFXII, I love that game though. And that leveling system sounds like something a lot of JRPG's I've played the past few years seem to have a problem with.

I really liked what I've played of Graces F, and it's probably my new favorite in the series so far- me and my friends were having a blast with it. I haven't played all of them all though. Just Symphonia, Dawn of The New World, Rebirth, Abyss, Vesperia, and Graces. But I'm looking forward to picking Xillia, even with the negatives you had with the game, I feel it still sounds a lot better than some of the weaker entries in the series. Lol.
Well, like I'd mentioned, I had lots of fun with the game when I'd learned how to exploit it easily, and the battle system/movement is faster paced. Normal battles are a lot of fun to experience, especially on Hard (you don't unlock the hardest difficulty until NG+).

Don't let me deter your hype by any means. The running joke in this thread happens to be that I hate video games because I make long posts about games I've just finished... especially for the ones I don't enjoy. (BTW, it isn't true; I like video games! I've just played a lot of them to be more critical. >.>) But I enjoyed my time with Xillia's battle system, and the better cinematic flow of delivering dialogue. Towns are very nice to look at, being able to switch characters on the fly mid-battle is highly desirable (ie: you can switch characters in the active battle party with characters in standby as you're battling with R3), and fast-travel with R3 saves a hell of a lot of time. There is no airship, so R3's fast-travel is the alternative.

With respect to the environments, there are some cubby holes that you can crawl into and elevated areas that you can climb up for treasures or sparklies on the field in order to use to level up your shopes, but outside of that and fighting enemies, there's little design relevance for them (other than the developers showing that they have control of more scale in terms of environments, but they just don't do anything with them). In FFXII, you can do more things like fish, do quests, watch enemies beat on each other, etc. Not to mention that there are environmental conditions (ex: weather, terrain effects (ex: Dalmasca Estersand is on sand, so Earth attacks are 20% stronger than normal, etc)). So, I suppose the difference is that FFXII does something interesting with its expansive environments, while Xillia kind of... doesn't outside of leaving duffel bags and sparklies for players to grind for the treasure trophies/increase shop levels with.

So keep hyped. I think a lot of people are going to like Xillia in the west because it's more story-focused than Graces was. Xillia's just not the sort of Tales game I like because I just prefer the Team Destiny-ish games.

Also what the fuck is a Zone anyway?
When I was young, I envisioned a Zone to be like part of Robotnik's construction area and he just segmented parts of that construction area and themed it. It's like a Zone of a city or something.

But nope, less complicated than that!
 

CorvoSol

Member
SO I got Sonic Generations on Steam and its nice but it runs really choppy on my laptop. Which settings to I need to play with to fix this?
 

BlackJace

Member
If Lightning Returns has no leveling system, then what's the point? Seriously, what's the fucking point of an RPG if you don't level and build your character so that they can play a role in an adventure?

Square, cmon.
 
Having no levels means Lightning is perfect. If there were a levelling system, then that would imply that Lightning isn't already the best she can be.

Lightning.
 
My laptop chugs just trying to play bionic commando rearmed, sad times.

In my eternal quest to play every shitty #2 entry in a series ever, I'm now playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.

We'll see how long it takes for the generic buttrock to get to me.

it wont take too long for you to get "Godsmacked" by the buttrock and before you know it you'll be watching the Scorpion King as well, smouldering with generic rage.

Don't let me deter your hype by any means. The running joke in this thread happens to be that I hate video games because I make long posts about games I've just finished... especially for the ones I don't enjoy.
Since we're talking about Xillia I should point out the running joke shifts to you dooming this franchise in the west by trying to put people off, see you're totally doing it up there.
 
With FFXIII, Square removed towns, open worlds, dedicated shops, healing after a fight and more.

With Lightning Returns, Square is removing leveling up.

Truly, Square is on the cusp of innovation. Assuming innovation is "removing features all good examples of this genre have in common".
 
Removing features and then putting them back in for a future entry advertised as a new feature is where the real innovation lies, I call it the Yukes tactic.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
Edit: Daingurse is right; this looks slow. I wonder if this is going to be one of those gimmick levels. Hmmm.

Sonic's collecting coins. >.>

Since we're talking about Xillia I should point out the running joke shifts to you dooming this franchise in the west by trying to put people off, see you're totally doing it up there.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that running joke, too. Hahaha.

Every time I talk about some of the bad stuff in a Tales game, one sale is lost. :)

Well, Intelligent Systems were the first to the "remove levelling" punch. I didn't think they'd be starting a trend...
Well, they like to think they're creating trends and innovating, when really all they're doing is trying to throw in as much as possible including the kitchen sink in order to facilitate gaining newfound audiences for their subsequent titles. Their approach to game design truly does boggle my mind as there's no consistency or cohesiveness at all.
 
Removing features and then putting them back in for a future entry advertised as a new feature is where the real innovation lies, I call it the Yukes tactic.

That kinda reminds me of Gamefreak...well not the advertising the old removed feature as a new one but the removing of good features is still super annoying.
 

qq more

Member
That kinda reminds me of Gamefreak...well not the advertising the old removed feature as a new one but the removing of good features is still super annoying.

VS Seeker
Pokemon following you
Certain useful touchscreen stuff (especially HGSS)
Secret Bases
Day and Night (Missing in Gen 3 that is)

I bet they're gonna make TMs finite again. (nah they wouldn't go that far... I hope they won't >.>)
 
You mean tries to emulate the classics, but has various quirks with the physics and remarkably phoned-in graphics that hold it back?

I think we had that already. It was called Sonic 4.
 
You mean tries to emulate the classics, but has various quirks with the physics and remarkably phoned-in graphics that hold it back?

I think we had that already. It was called Sonic 4.

But does Sonic 4 have the enemies dancing to the tune and trying to color your dark soul with rainbows of happiness, color and joy?
 
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