BlazingDarkness
Member
so it is!Spiegel said:
he beat it
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The 3rd Birthday (Parasite Eve 3) JP |OT| Hot Chick + Guns + Shower Scene = mmmmm
- Thread starter duckroll
- Start date
he beat it
Sword Familiar
178% of NeoGAF posters don't understand statistics
Xater said:
Probably because it was fun.
Mejilan said:Better than nothing! Thanks.
Do you know what other notable soundtracks the other two worked on recently?
I don't recognize their names.
Suzuki generally arranges and synthesizes soundtracks for S-E games. This is the first soundtrack he is actually significantly composing for. Sekito last worked on The Last Remnant.
JustAnotherOtaku
Member
I must resist watching anymore of this, I don't want to be too spoiled
Nice to see English menus, will make things that bit easier when this arrives.
Nice to see English menus, will make things that bit easier when this arrives.
BlazingDarkness
Member
there is a lot of blood in this game
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
Spiegel said:
GOTY
I feel like reconsidering my opinions about this game.
BlazingDarkness
Member
this guy is terrible :lol
keeps taking them out of cover and diving into other men, killing them all
keeps taking them out of cover and diving into other men, killing them all
PetriP-TNT
Member
This might be my top wanted handheld game atm
Infinite Justice
Member
Spiegel said:
GOTY
nice :lol
Finally finished PE2. The second last boss was FUCKING ANNOYING to beat. Good thing the actual final boss was a total joke. I took a grand total of 0 damage, and basically just stood in one corner moving a little bit to avoid the charge attacks, and just spammed grenades until she died. :lol
Overall I'll say PE2 is a weaker game than PE1, ultimately not because it's an action RPG, but because the game was designed in such a cheap way. There are way less actual areas, and the narrative design is very similar to a RE game, which means that while the middle part of the game gets really fun and exciting, once the game exhausts all the areas, it becomes tedious backtracking through the same areas with more annoying enemies in your way. Not the most inspired game design there. Oh well.
I'm happy that by replaying PE2 and giving it another chance, I learned to appreciate things about the battle system I didn't before, and I definitely like it a lot more than I originally did. Still, there are significant weaknesses in the game which hold it back from being as memorable and polished as PE1.
Now I'm all ready for T3B!
Edit: For anyone else planning on replaying the 2 PE games before T3B is out in English, if you have concerns about how long it'll take... don't worry. PE1 took me about 9 hours, and PE2 took less than 8 hours. But ultimately I think they're about as long in terms of total actual play time, because I died a lot more in PE2 than in PE1, plus you can skip cutscenes in PE2 when replaying a segment you died at. Both games are about 10 hour affairs, and it shouldn't take more than a week to play through each one even if you don't have much spare time at all.
Overall I'll say PE2 is a weaker game than PE1, ultimately not because it's an action RPG, but because the game was designed in such a cheap way. There are way less actual areas, and the narrative design is very similar to a RE game, which means that while the middle part of the game gets really fun and exciting, once the game exhausts all the areas, it becomes tedious backtracking through the same areas with more annoying enemies in your way. Not the most inspired game design there. Oh well.
I'm happy that by replaying PE2 and giving it another chance, I learned to appreciate things about the battle system I didn't before, and I definitely like it a lot more than I originally did. Still, there are significant weaknesses in the game which hold it back from being as memorable and polished as PE1.
Now I'm all ready for T3B!
Edit: For anyone else planning on replaying the 2 PE games before T3B is out in English, if you have concerns about how long it'll take... don't worry. PE1 took me about 9 hours, and PE2 took less than 8 hours. But ultimately I think they're about as long in terms of total actual play time, because I died a lot more in PE2 than in PE1, plus you can skip cutscenes in PE2 when replaying a segment you died at. Both games are about 10 hour affairs, and it shouldn't take more than a week to play through each one even if you don't have much spare time at all.
Sword Familiar
178% of NeoGAF posters don't understand statistics
duckroll said:
Yeah, I remember enjoying PE2 when I first played it, god knows how many years ago. It's actually a pretty decent game. Granted, PE is much better, but PE2 gets a lot more crap than it deserves.
Looking forward to playing 3rd Birthday.
Holy crap. The S-E Members integration for T3B is pretty amazing. I wonder if they'll be doing something similar for the English version. This is something I've only seen western developers do in general.
On the title screen, you can select Extra, and Square Enix Members. From there, you can select your latest save file, and it takes all the data from that save, connects to S-E's server online from your PSP automatically, and then generates a unique Player Code for you. On your JP S-E Members account, you can then go to the special T3B community section, and register your Player Code with your account, and from there the website displays all your tracked stats: How many times you cleared the game, how long you've played the game, total distance traveled in the game, number of game overs, number of Twisted defeated, number of Overdives made, number of times Liberation was used, number of times Crossfire was used.
Based on what you've done in the game so far, it also unlocks stamps on the S-E Member site. Apparently if you get a certain number of stamps, it will unlock certain things in the game itself as well. You can also view the stats of other S-E Member players who have registered, to see how other players are doing.
On the title screen, you can select Extra, and Square Enix Members. From there, you can select your latest save file, and it takes all the data from that save, connects to S-E's server online from your PSP automatically, and then generates a unique Player Code for you. On your JP S-E Members account, you can then go to the special T3B community section, and register your Player Code with your account, and from there the website displays all your tracked stats: How many times you cleared the game, how long you've played the game, total distance traveled in the game, number of game overs, number of Twisted defeated, number of Overdives made, number of times Liberation was used, number of times Crossfire was used.
Based on what you've done in the game so far, it also unlocks stamps on the S-E Member site. Apparently if you get a certain number of stamps, it will unlock certain things in the game itself as well. You can also view the stats of other S-E Member players who have registered, to see how other players are doing.
Put in about 3 hours into the game so far, some initial impressions:
This game is definitely designed as a third person shooter and an action game. The game is pretty challenging, and most people playing on Normal the first time through will find the game relatively tough. While playing through stages, there are secondary objective Achievements which you can aim for, but many of them are pretty tough to accomplish the first time through, so I wouldn't worry too much about it at all.
The controls and handling is about as good as it gets on the PSP. Which is to say, you basically can control the game have have quite a lot of fun if you get used to the controls, but you really wish it was on a console instead. There's no dancing around it, this game is designed to be a console style experience on a portable, and it would be much better on a dual analog gamepad on the big screen.
Graphics are really, really impressive. Environments are pretty nice looking, and the texture work makes the areas look a lot more interesting. The animation in the game is really phenomenal for a portable game. Probably the most impressive animation in an action game along with Peace Walker. The gameplay models are a bit weak for the human characters, but that's probably to compensate for the fact that quite a number of people and enemies can be on screen at the same time with a solid framerate.
The game is pretty fun to play, and the level design and shooting mechanics are pretty interesting. There's a very clear western influence in many general areas so it looks and feels a lot like what to expect out of a TPS at the first glance, but there are very western design philosophies in the specifics of the game design. Enemy patterns and AI design remind me of Japanese action games like DMC and Onimusha as opposed to the more humanoid based design enemies of most western shooters. In this game each enemy type has a distinctive pattern and number of attacks, and it pays to learn the patterns and tells of the enemies to be able to avoid them better. The game is very fast paced, and enemies do quite a bit of damage, so you definitely can't just rush in and hold fire to expect to win (maybe on Easy mode).
Music is REALLY good, and generally fits the tone of the action or events perfectly. Kickass soundtrack. The story is total lolz, which fits right in with the tone and concept of the Parasite Eve series. It's a weird wacky Japanese take on what an American movie/tv series would be like with lots of weird scifi crap, stock "agent" characters, and tons of B-movie violence. The gore is the game is really over the top, and man the monsters are gross. But it definitely works. :lol
The game isn't really perverted or as sexual as implied by most of the marketing. I'm guessing a lot of the silly shit they've been hyping up lately is meant to be rewards for players to replay the game and to get more achievements and better ranks.
This game is definitely designed as a third person shooter and an action game. The game is pretty challenging, and most people playing on Normal the first time through will find the game relatively tough. While playing through stages, there are secondary objective Achievements which you can aim for, but many of them are pretty tough to accomplish the first time through, so I wouldn't worry too much about it at all.
The controls and handling is about as good as it gets on the PSP. Which is to say, you basically can control the game have have quite a lot of fun if you get used to the controls, but you really wish it was on a console instead. There's no dancing around it, this game is designed to be a console style experience on a portable, and it would be much better on a dual analog gamepad on the big screen.
Graphics are really, really impressive. Environments are pretty nice looking, and the texture work makes the areas look a lot more interesting. The animation in the game is really phenomenal for a portable game. Probably the most impressive animation in an action game along with Peace Walker. The gameplay models are a bit weak for the human characters, but that's probably to compensate for the fact that quite a number of people and enemies can be on screen at the same time with a solid framerate.
The game is pretty fun to play, and the level design and shooting mechanics are pretty interesting. There's a very clear western influence in many general areas so it looks and feels a lot like what to expect out of a TPS at the first glance, but there are very western design philosophies in the specifics of the game design. Enemy patterns and AI design remind me of Japanese action games like DMC and Onimusha as opposed to the more humanoid based design enemies of most western shooters. In this game each enemy type has a distinctive pattern and number of attacks, and it pays to learn the patterns and tells of the enemies to be able to avoid them better. The game is very fast paced, and enemies do quite a bit of damage, so you definitely can't just rush in and hold fire to expect to win (maybe on Easy mode).
Music is REALLY good, and generally fits the tone of the action or events perfectly. Kickass soundtrack. The story is total lolz, which fits right in with the tone and concept of the Parasite Eve series. It's a weird wacky Japanese take on what an American movie/tv series would be like with lots of weird scifi crap, stock "agent" characters, and tons of B-movie violence. The gore is the game is really over the top, and man the monsters are gross. But it definitely works. :lol
The game isn't really perverted or as sexual as implied by most of the marketing. I'm guessing a lot of the silly shit they've been hyping up lately is meant to be rewards for players to replay the game and to get more achievements and better ranks.
JustAnotherOtaku
Member
duckroll said:
Thanks for those. Not making waiting on my order shipping any easier though
BlazingDarkness
Member
stream is back up http://ja.justin.tv/rx_888/#/w/679818080
GamePnoy74
Member
For some reason I've never seen screens or preview videos of this game...until now. I thought it was still primarily a mobile phone game with the PSP version a long ways to go...glad to know that's not the case :lol
Definitely looking forward to the NA release
Definitely looking forward to the NA release
Cool, when it eventually hits I'll give it a go on normal first but if I find myself having to fight the controls at all, I'll pop it down to easy.duckroll said:
Nice impressions by the way. Anything about the greater game structure? It was probably detailed elsewhere and I missed it.
StuBurns said:
It's not the controls which are the problem at all. The game is just tough. You take a lot of damage if you get hit, especially from certain enemies, so you have to be careful. A lot of the design is balanced around the fact that you can't actually die as long as there is a single other human on the map that you can see and overdive into. So that automatically means they could design some challenging areas where you have to navigate certain paths or areas solo, and it means you have to be really careful when there's nowhere to auto escape to, since if you die in a body with nowhere else to dive to, you die.
The greater game structure is episode based. There is a title card showing for example Episode 1 - A Brave New World. And after the cutscenes setting up the situation of the story in that episode, you are in the CTI HQ with a few rooms (think of it like a bigger version of the MIST HQ in PE2, or a smaller version of the police station in PE1).
Here you can customize your weapons, buy new weapons, change your outfit, customize your DNA Board, read up tons of flavor text on characters, timeline, monsters, tutorials, etc. You can also talk to various characters if they're around the HQ. The dialogue is like FFXIII, so you just walk up to a character and a conversation will start even as you continue moving around.
When you're ready you can choose to start the actual mission. Aya will start the Overdive System and transport her consciousness into the past event that they want to change or investigate. Once in the mission it progresses like any other shooter, where you get cutscenes and events when you get to certain checkpoints, but otherwise you just keep moving towards your objectives on each map (either an exit, or interacting with something, or destroying a target, etc). If you die, you can retry from the last checkpoint. Or you can Ascend back to the CTI HQ to change configurations before retrying the mission.
Each mission has several chapters, and a mission can be fairly long. The first episode's mission started with a miniboss fight, then you progress through a bunch of areas, then there's another miniboss fight, then you go through more areas, and then eventually you fight the actual boss. Took me over an hour. At the end of a mission you're ranked based on how long you took, how many times you died, how many soldiers died, what difficulty you were playing on, and also on sub objectives completed. Aside from the mission sub objectives, there are also achievements for each chapter of a mission, which you can check in the pause menu during a mission. These are challenges directly related to the level in that chapter, and can be pretty tough (like requiring to keep all civilians alive in a club area which is overrun by enemies).
Krauser Kat
Member
I might have to steal my friends PSP to play this. Loved the first one and got mostly through the second.
All sounds very promising. I expected the missions to be much smaller, more akin to the missions in Crisis Core given the game being portable and coming from cell phones initially. Not an issue for me because I don't tend to be play the 'grander' games out of the house. I hope it does make it out in the first quarter.duckroll said:
Litflynt912
Member
hey duck,
since your closest right now to impressions....cut scenes...subtitled? or no?
can't seem to find an answer...I'm noticing options and menus are layed out well...
thanks
since your closest right now to impressions....cut scenes...subtitled? or no?
can't seem to find an answer...I'm noticing options and menus are layed out well...
thanks
Litflynt912
Member
yea, that is what I meant...the captions....thanks!
Beat Episode 2. Yeah, the game is definitely tough. Also, it's not a straight "kill everything by shooting" kind of shooter either. It's the sort where especially for boss battles, you have to pay attention to what's going on and figure out the unique pattern or weakness to beat it. Knowing howto dispatch enemies in the most effective way with save a lot of ammo and pointless damage too. The ranking system is pretty brutal, so far I've gotten B for Episode 0, D for Episode 1, and C for Episode 2. I suck. :/
The story for the game is amazing. Amazingly.... nonsensical. It's probably one of the most illogical serious takes on the nature of time travel I've come across. Not only does it make no sense, but it's presented in such a serious and matter of fact way that I wonder if Toriyama is really smoking so much bad weed that he really believes that the crap he's writing is actually in any way something that presents itself has being non-confusing and just bizarre. :lol
The story for the game is amazing. Amazingly.... nonsensical. It's probably one of the most illogical serious takes on the nature of time travel I've come across. Not only does it make no sense, but it's presented in such a serious and matter of fact way that I wonder if Toriyama is really smoking so much bad weed that he really believes that the crap he's writing is actually in any way something that presents itself has being non-confusing and just bizarre. :lol
adversesolutions
Member
Yeah I'm getting low grades on missions as well.
Seems that a big part of it is clearing them on Hard.
One thing I would disagree with from your impressions: I think mapping look to d-pad with movement on analog stick is basically crazy. Any TPS you're going to have be looking as you dash around, and you can't do that in this game. I've adjusted to these controls, but it's obnoxious to be in a hairy situation trying to dodge, and have to stop Aya in her tracks to look around with the d-pad.
Seems that a big part of it is clearing them on Hard.
One thing I would disagree with from your impressions: I think mapping look to d-pad with movement on analog stick is basically crazy. Any TPS you're going to have be looking as you dash around, and you can't do that in this game. I've adjusted to these controls, but it's obnoxious to be in a hairy situation trying to dodge, and have to stop Aya in her tracks to look around with the d-pad.
adversesolutions said:
Weird, I haven't used manual camera controls much at all in the game. It's pretty much useless imo, especially in the firefight, because of the way the lock-on system works. You can't even manually aim, so even if you manually look to a general area you want to aim to, if you press lock-on you might end up switching to looking at a totally different direction anyway. You have to manually scroll through the targets to get the one you one. While I agree, that's a flaw in terms of making the player feel annoyed, oddly enough the game seems to be designed around that as well. Bosses deliberately spawn distractions which make it really hard to aim at the boss itself before all the minions are killed.
Instead of using the camera to look around, maybe you should try using the map in the pause menu to check out the general layout and where you can move to evade enemies, etc on each map. I found that doing that is a lot more useful than actually looking around with the camera because sometimes you really can't tell where you're supposed to go or what is a valid path or not a valid path just by looking.
Soundtrack review: http://www.originalsoundversion.com...-the-horrific-3rd-birthday-soundtrack-review/
Full track listing + composers: http://mora.jp/package/50000004/SQEX-10217/
Disc 1 = 23 tracks
Disc 2 = 27 tracks
Disc 3 = 16 tracks
66 tracks in total. Suzuki is the main composer with 39 tracks to his credit, Shimomura did 16 of them, and Sekito composed 8 tracks. 3 tracks were collaborations between Suzuki and Sekito.
Full track listing + composers: http://mora.jp/package/50000004/SQEX-10217/
Disc 1 = 23 tracks
Disc 2 = 27 tracks
Disc 3 = 16 tracks
66 tracks in total. Suzuki is the main composer with 39 tracks to his credit, Shimomura did 16 of them, and Sekito composed 8 tracks. 3 tracks were collaborations between Suzuki and Sekito.