I feel like adding actual dungeons and puzzles back into the series would help this. Even though Symphonia for example had some idiotic puzzles it definitely helped add variety to the experience. I'm in it for the battle system but for people who don't care quite as much about it, it would do wonders for them I think. In Xillia if you're not super invested in the battle system or narrative there's not much else to the game.
Sonic the Hedgehog Community Thread |OT3 & Knuckles|
- Thread starter Professor Beef
- Start date
I feel like adding actual dungeons and puzzles back into the series would help this. Even though Symphonia for example had some idiotic puzzles it definitely helped add variety to the experience. I'm in it for the battle system but for people who don't care quite as much about it, it would do wonders for them I think. In Xillia if you're not super invested in the battle system or narrative there's not much else to the game.
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
Y'all know how much I don't care for Xillia and Xillia 2 so I'll keep my mouth shut. 'Sides, I know there are people in here who love it or like it a lot, so I'll feel bad for not being favourable towards it. Shit, I still have to finish Xillia 2 and I just don't want to, lol. I'm glad I've streamed it a few times for some people in here because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to progress in some portions.
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See, I liked Gravity Rush's atmosphere a lot. It did a lot of things very well with respect to maybe how it conveyed its narrative and how Kat interacted with different people across various areas of the game's covered areas. That's why I want a sequel out of it. I don't care for its combat or controls much, but I like the premise of it. It's just clunky which weighs down the experience by quite a bit, that's all. I don't think it deserves as many accolades as GAF gives it because of its clunkiness and sub-par combat, but outside of that, it has an interesting story and atmosphere.
I haven't platinumed the game just because I find some of the controls kinda dodgy.
This from Lufia II haunts my dreams:
But I feel like maybe adding Naridan's job system to at least one game in the main series might serve as a decent change of pace. I loved that system and I wish it got more exposure.
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See, I liked Gravity Rush's atmosphere a lot. It did a lot of things very well with respect to maybe how it conveyed its narrative and how Kat interacted with different people across various areas of the game's covered areas. That's why I want a sequel out of it. I don't care for its combat or controls much, but I like the premise of it. It's just clunky which weighs down the experience by quite a bit, that's all. I don't think it deserves as many accolades as GAF gives it because of its clunkiness and sub-par combat, but outside of that, it has an interesting story and atmosphere.
I haven't platinumed the game just because I find some of the controls kinda dodgy.
I actually miss puzzle dungeons in the series a lot. The last mainline game that kind of had that was Graces. But I legitimately miss the puzzle dungeons. I think I've discovered that I'm a bit of a fan of gimmick dungeons. At least it's something to do. Not all puzzles in dungeons in general are great, though.
This from Lufia II haunts my dreams:
But I feel like maybe adding Naridan's job system to at least one game in the main series might serve as a decent change of pace. I loved that system and I wish it got more exposure.
Schala, I think I've seen you post this a half dozen times or more. It's okay. lol
It's actually a pretty easy platinum once you get the basics of gravity sliding and that throw move down. There might be some hard to find mysterious traveler locations, but FAQs will help.
Nocturnowl
Member
Yeah this is a good point, sure I'll gripe about the absurd fish and fruit puzzle, backtracking around the lightning temple, leading around mindless shadow blobs and more of Symphonia's dungeon design but hey it was something, the most interesting thing to happen in a Xillia dungeon so far was some poor pickaxe usage. Following this area was a plethora of cutscenes that killed the co-op run I had going on the game which was the main thing sustaining it.
Even though its battle system is fine I feel spoilt by Graces.
It starts with you feeling obligated to finish off a game you don't enjoy, it somehow ends many moons later with a platinum trophy.
I think the story side of things held too much back for the sequel, seemed like there was a whole big angle they just kind of glossed over, between that and the final boss itself it didn't exactly end on the highest of notes.
In Zestiria, since they're going for more open-world stuff, it might be cool to see some kind of resource gathering minigames or something. Fishing, crafting, environmental puzzles, or something like what Monster Hunter does. I haven't played more than the MH demo so I don't know exactly how that kind of thing plays out, but it might be good. Just, some kind of gameplay outside battles.
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
Haha, I knew a lot of people would like Xillia/Xillia 2 a lot, though. I just feel weird about it now. Even though I did put it on my 2011 GotY list... my opinion of it has fallen fairly sharply for various reasons.
Just checking and I seem to have a lot of stuff to just Gold and some stuff to Silver. That Airboat race sucks. I think the Airboat was the reason why I stopped.
(Oh wow this game has long load times)
You know, the company that likes to cut corners.
Just checking and I seem to have a lot of stuff to just Gold and some stuff to Silver. That Airboat race sucks. I think the Airboat was the reason why I stopped.
(Oh wow this game has long load times)
I think that was the thing they were going for, though. I think they were trying to go for the new IP angle and wanted it to be a serial sort of affair. Thus a lot of cards were held very close to their chests. But yeah, I agree; there were a lot of things that could've been more specific.
Bear in mind that you're talking about Namco.
You know, the company that likes to cut corners.
Nocturnowl
Member
Speaking of long load times, I noticed the console version of Dustforce had snuck out at some point this week, I took the trial for a spin and there was some loooong loading at the start which was jarring, I also apparently suck at the game now.
See this just reminds me that i've been trying to get four more bits of a specific ore in MH in the last month only for the game to ignore my wishes in a way that defies all logic and percentage chances for said object, I'm sad again now.
Monster Hunter's resource gathering isn't actually anything special, specific points on a map yield certain types of resources and you can get about 4 or 5 randomized objects from a point before it "runs out" per quest, in a sense it's not too far removed from Xillia's shiny spots and what not only much more prevalent and central to the game and infinitely more frustrating to work with because if there's one big failing for MH in my eyes its low drop rates and excessive material farming.
I do get the sentiment though for a Tales game to feel more robust as a game outside of its battle or skill focused systems.
See this just reminds me that i've been trying to get four more bits of a specific ore in MH in the last month only for the game to ignore my wishes in a way that defies all logic and percentage chances for said object, I'm sad again now.
Monster Hunter's resource gathering isn't actually anything special, specific points on a map yield certain types of resources and you can get about 4 or 5 randomized objects from a point before it "runs out" per quest, in a sense it's not too far removed from Xillia's shiny spots and what not only much more prevalent and central to the game and infinitely more frustrating to work with because if there's one big failing for MH in my eyes its low drop rates and excessive material farming.
I do get the sentiment though for a Tales game to feel more robust as a game outside of its battle or skill focused systems.
Even though Xillia is flawed it's still one of the games I had the most fun with last year. The recycled areas got tiresome, some of the bosses cheese you, going back to the old cooking system was eh, the lack of puzzles was disappointing... but Jude's moveset was fun as shit, Snap Pivot never stops being satisfying, the party AI was finally improved significantly from previous games, and I liked the linking system a lot. The fact that I don't want to strangle the entire cast helps only a little.
You can speak your mind on it. We won't make any more jokes about you trying to kill the series, right guys? lol
And yeah, the problem with Gravity Rush's challenges isn't the difficulty, it's the long load times between retries.
Cutting corners? no no no, that's "tightening focus"
I enjoy brawl but yeah personally I wasn't very impressed with it after a while. I felt it had too many problems to me. I guess I have the opportunity to express how I feel about the flaws of the game now. This isn't directed at you but I really wanted to vent at how disappointed I was with the game.
Multiplayer-wise, it can be really fun a lot of the times but then there's times that it gets either boring or frustrating for various of reasons.
I felt online was really a mess due to lag and really weird design decisions. For lag, it screws up fast characters due to very noticeable input lag because I'd be sometimes mess up my timing real easily. Not to mention the game would sometimes think I'm doing a regular B attack instead of Up+B when I'm trying to recover. Design-wise, I didn't care for the timer that does not gives you enough time to fully customize the rules/settings. Also hated how I couldn't play custom stages from the stage builder online... had to use cheat codes to do that.
While Brawl doesn't exactly play bad, tripping and some unbalances aside, I do feel the game didn't need to be slow down. The slower speed lacks the excitement fights usually have, they feel a lot less intense and not to mention matches sort of feels prolonged due to that which gets boring after a while. Even when I first got Brawl, I was already feeling a tad bored from playing the game for more than an hour (at the time I was too hyped to stop playing). In contrast, this did not happen to me with Melee or Project M (which is a mod of Brawl). I feel Brawl lacks the excitement the other games had thanks to the slower speed.
On the stage roster... I hated how some of the stages decided to be gimmicky to the point it's not very fun to fight in at all. I'm talking like stages such as 75m (DK Arcade stage) and Hanenbow (that weird rhythm plankton stage), where their level design is poorly designed for fighting (you could barely so much without dying by poor stage design). And I was not a huge fan of how most franchises only gets a single new stage, meanwhile in Melee almost every franchise gets 2 new stages. Such a step down... I'll go more in detail but that's probably enough for now.
As for single player, I've touched on this subject before so I'll link this here.
I am not really used to typing such huge posts, but there's a bit more I'll cover later if you guys are interested. There's still a lot I want to say about the game.
Right, the online was the biggest disappointment at release. I don't know how much was due to my often-shitty internet connection, but it should not have been as laggy as it was.
I too feel they took things too far with slowing down character falling speed and such. However in terms of controls they made a lot of improvements such as adding buffering (too much, but IMO better than not having any at all) and customizable controls set to registered names.
On the other hand, Brawl had stages to represent franchises that didn't have characters, like Animal Crossing, Pictochat, and Electroplankton. It also brought back 10 stages from the previous game to Melee's 3. Brawl had more gimmick stages, yeah. I guess that's because it's very easy to make simple stages in the stage creator if that's what you want. That's what my friends and I did, anyway. "LOL" was one of our favorite stages to play on.
I will say Brawl was much more fun with all the fun items on high. Rolling crates, gooey bombs, soccer balls, franklin badges, green shells... the physics made for a lot more mayhem with shit ricocheting everywhere... God help if you played on Yoshi's Island. The one downside: they nerfed Pokeballs.
Seven Force
Banned
I tried playing Brawl again last week, and I tripped right into a CPU's smash attack, killing me. Fuck that game's randomness.
I never really had much of a problem with Brawl, but this is the shit that kills me. The number of times this has happened to me is... it feels like it shouldn't be possible.
Project M made it really hard to go back to vanilla Brawl.
Try playing the best Brawl player in the world, tripping into his grab, and getting thrown into a grenade.
it sucks
Tizoc
Member
For the most part I liked Xillia, but I think I liked it most when it was just Jude, Milla and Alvin only, Al and Jude bro-ing it out during end battle scenes and skits was my fav. moments from the game.
When I beat the final boss I didn't even stay to watch the freakin' ending, since it would've been some generic anime BS.
Seriously if the Tales games cut down on anime tropes I prob. would've liked it more, as is it's a jRPG with cliche anime characterizations trying to be serious.
Then again I haven't played any Tales games outside of Xillia and Graces f. Graces f I quit early on because the pace and characters were so weak, despite it's interesting combat system.
I should aim to play the older games, I'd prob. enjoy them more.
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
Tales has always been generic anime stuff, though. It just takes a lot of nods from the anime of the game's era. It's the junk food of RPGs generally directed towards teenagers and early adults. Its saving grace is its customization, battle system, and general flexibility with lots of rewarding stuff for the player to do (which Xillia kind of forgot about because 15th anniversary/new type of scene direction). Its narratives aren't really its shining star, and you shouldn't be surprised by general tropes either.
Just like how when you play Xillia 2, you shouldn't be surprised by the oh-so-cute little girl being clumsy and falling on her face because it's cute right, cute tsundere women who help you out because i-it's not like they like you or anything, one scene where the guy's trying to save the girl but in doing so he touches her boobs and she gets really mad at him because it happens in other anime all the time so it's funny right, and other stuff. Stuff that I stopped caring about in my late teens.
Tales is built on anime. It's not like you're going to get away from it, like ever.
Just like how when you play Xillia 2, you shouldn't be surprised by the oh-so-cute little girl being clumsy and falling on her face because it's cute right, cute tsundere women who help you out because i-it's not like they like you or anything, one scene where the guy's trying to save the girl but in doing so he touches her boobs and she gets really mad at him because it happens in other anime all the time so it's funny right, and other stuff. Stuff that I stopped caring about in my late teens.
Tales is built on anime. It's not like you're going to get away from it, like ever.
Professor Beef
Banned
Collette (Schala's favorite Tales character, btw) is full-on anime in nearly every sense of the word. Her dumb ass ain't stopping me from getting dat collectors edition this month though.
Maybe.
*Deletes Sonic 4 from my PS3 hard drive*
I'm fairly confident I will never get the urge to play this one again, because it's just so mediocre and outclassed.
I'm fairly confident I will never get the urge to play this one again, because it's just so mediocre and outclassed.
Apparently there's a significant female fanbase in Japan that cares about the romance stuff, which, I mean... that just blows my mind to think about. That anyone could give a fuck about Asbel and Cheria's relationship, or Luke and Tear's. Vesperia didn't need a hackneyed love story to have the best relationship between the male and female lead in the series.
Was accidental boob grabbing ever funny? Even when I first started watching anime I thought it was dumb and cheap.
Nocturnowl
Member
Coming to think of it, ToS was like a introduction to various tropes for me, I didn't even know excessive tripping and apologising was a thing that could define a character until Colette bumbled into my life.
But that's why you keep it, to remind you of how much better other things are.
I can actually still play it from time to time, as mediocre as it is it's got...something I guess.
Man I'm not even sure if Asbel and Cheria should even constitute a relationship, I think Asbel/Richard was more authentic.
What I wouldn't give for a different response to this event for a change, perhaps where they acknowledge the absurdities of such a chance event with apologies and understandings of its accidental nature.
I've noticed as of late my disdained trope is hot springs because it is ALWAYS the same deal every time, at least its partner in crime (the beach scene) can sometimes find different directions to go in.
BlazeHedgehog
Member
Sakurai apparently had a pretty poor opinion of the fighting game community so he kind of intentionally made certain aspects of Brawl to spite them, the primary one being tripping. It seems to be intentionally meant to discourage high-level, high-speed play; tripping happens most often when you are changing directions rapidly, dashing everywhere, and doing certain smash attacks.
By poor opinion, do you mean he disliked how some of them behaved or just hated the concept of people playing competitively? If the latter I cannot fathom that way of thinking.
BlazeHedgehog
Member
I don't actually remember; I had somebody explain it to me once. My memory is that he viewed a lot of the people who played smash competitively as rude people and did not want to support their style of play.
He's warmed up to them a little bit more for Smash 4, though, which reportedly takes tripping back out.
Shadow Hog
Member
Something Awful's The Flash Tub presents: Chucky vs. Sonic
That's the Child's Play serial killer Chucky, not the Rugrats Chuckie or anything.
A little bloody at the end, although probably not in the way you'd expect
That's the Child's Play serial killer Chucky, not the Rugrats Chuckie or anything.
A little bloody at the end, although probably not in the way you'd expect
ughhhhh, hot springs scenes...
look, the perverted guy is planning on sneaking in. ha ha
look, the straight guy found out. ha ha
look, the perverted guy says some bullshit about the unquenchable fires of youth. ha ha
look, the straight guy runs after him and tries to stop him. ha ha
look, the girls discovered them and the perverted guy runs away leaving the straight guy to take the blame or fall in the hot springs somehow. ha ha
ha ha
ha ha
fuck anime
Nocturnowl
Member
It was playing Persona 4 Golden last month that had me at last reach my breaking point with the trope in the first place.
I'm not surprised to hear this happens in Persona.
I forgot to mention, usually the pervert gives it a stupid name like "operation surveillance" or something.
And Persona 3 had it at the beach. It's just boring to go dashing on the X button when you realized in the first minute that nothing interesting will happen.
I've watched like 5 or 6 anime series in my whole life, and the hot springs episode in Tengen Toppa is easily the worst of all. Yeah they went through a director change or something like that but it remains bad.
Haven't seen any news or anything, but they're adding Eggman. Don't know if he's replacing Zazz or in addition to Zazz, but the fight is probably going to be the same.
Well this makes sense since he's the fastest character in the Sonic Universe.
Fastest thing alive my balls.
Diablohead
Member
It's a fun endless runner but I see no need for the game's IAP, I did buy it when it was new and cost £2.99 however.
Yeah, it's a decent game, disregarding the IAPs.
Well, if people is impatient, and want a character, they could buy it, in my case I bought the double coins pack since grinding in the game is a drag
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
Such subtle artistry is lost on my uncultured mind.
Haha, how timely.
Lightning Lord
Banned
Watch Da Birdie
I buy cakes for myself on my birthday it's not weird lots of people do it I bet
I started playing Generations again today, my second way through. I beat the main game, but didn't do all the challenges/Red Rings.
I'm enjoying A LOT more on the second go-around, still think the Modern segments are a bit better since Classic Sonic is so awkward. But maybe I'm getting old, I went back to play Genesis Sonic recently, and had a really tough time with it. Especially Sonic 3, where I kept getting lost in the Marble Garden Zone.
I was thinking a cool idea for a "Generations 2" would to do "merged" levels. So each game now has four levels, Act 1 and Act 2 Classic, and Act 3 and Act 4 Modern.
Basically, each Stage would be a mix of 2 Zones from one game, like I was thinking the final level would be Green Hill x Scrap Brain, as perhaps you'd go in reverse of the games release to change things up, with Lost World first, dropping the whole "Genesis - Dreamcast - Modern" division. The first Act would focus on the first Zone, with elements of the latter Zone "leaking in" in gameplay and music, subtlety. Then the second Act would focus on the second Zone, with leftover elements of the first Zone still present in lesser quantities.
I was thinking due to this, Sonic 3 and Knuckles would still be "one game", but the first Zone would be from 3 and the second from Knuckles, I thought Ice Cap and Magma Zone would be cool mixed together. And add Sonic 4, with Episode 1 inspiring the first Zone, and Episode 2 inspiring the second Zone.
I'm enjoying A LOT more on the second go-around, still think the Modern segments are a bit better since Classic Sonic is so awkward. But maybe I'm getting old, I went back to play Genesis Sonic recently, and had a really tough time with it. Especially Sonic 3, where I kept getting lost in the Marble Garden Zone.
I was thinking a cool idea for a "Generations 2" would to do "merged" levels. So each game now has four levels, Act 1 and Act 2 Classic, and Act 3 and Act 4 Modern.
Basically, each Stage would be a mix of 2 Zones from one game, like I was thinking the final level would be Green Hill x Scrap Brain, as perhaps you'd go in reverse of the games release to change things up, with Lost World first, dropping the whole "Genesis - Dreamcast - Modern" division. The first Act would focus on the first Zone, with elements of the latter Zone "leaking in" in gameplay and music, subtlety. Then the second Act would focus on the second Zone, with leftover elements of the first Zone still present in lesser quantities.
I was thinking due to this, Sonic 3 and Knuckles would still be "one game", but the first Zone would be from 3 and the second from Knuckles, I thought Ice Cap and Magma Zone would be cool mixed together. And add Sonic 4, with Episode 1 inspiring the first Zone, and Episode 2 inspiring the second Zone.
ViewtifulJC
Banned
ok so WTF is this Sonic Boom shit and why did Knuckles' friends let him skip leg day
The Xtortionist
Member
BOUT FUCKIN' TIME