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The 2019 Completed Games List
Comments
River City Girls (PS4)
Tacoma (PS4)
The expansion was outstanding. It's crazy how far the game has come since 2.0, which had a story I didn't like, characters I didn't care about, and a UI with a slew of inconveniences. Heavensward may have been my favorite SE story of the last 20 years, and Shadowbringers's story is better. I got the final story boss fight in a roulette on day 60 of my sub, and it still gave me chills. It's a testament to how powerful this expansion's final moments are.
This is the only MMO I've played, and I'm starting to feel how I've read others felt about MMOs. That the story is amazing, but now takes a significant time investment to reach the latest, best content. That combat classes have been reworked, then reworked again, and someone playing now will never know what Astrologian or Summoner (my 2 mains last expansion) were like from summer 2017 to summer 2019. I tried new jobs and probably enjoyed Machinist best as a DPS class, but it's been reworked more than any other job and I'll never know what it played like before summer 2019. It's an odd feeling. Personally, I preferred combat when it was more complex in Heavensward than what it's been dumbed down to now. I enjoy it, but it's tipped a bit too far toward accessibility and away from high skill ceilings.
Great game, it really a nice throw back to the old castlevania game. But not the best version everytime I talk with a NPC, there a good chance that the game will crash... it happen near 10 times in my 30 hours of gameplay... not fun!
I like that the series is more plot-heavy now, though this is 2 in a row that ended more abruptly than I was expecting. The open world aspects worked for me. We might go back to it after we finish Borderlands 3 for some horde mode.
interesting but way to easy, I did finish it with around 115 lives to spare...
Funny enough, I have a lot of thoughts on this one. If Stella Glow is the most underrated 3DS RPG, then this has to be the most overrated one. The game just has too many problems to list. The biggest detractor for me was by far the battle system and reward structure. For most of the entire game, the player is given so little talent points and gold per random encounter that it feels practically worthless to fight enemies. Instead its better to just get by on the bare minimum and let bosses/story give you money and HP growths instead. The Positional Level ups are also ridiculously slow, and with the seemingly high variability in this game's formulas its impossible to see any sort of tangible evidence of growth from them. Furthermore, I don't even think the Analysis rate does anything until you get Library rank 8. So yeah, rewards for fighting suck. On top of that, the battle system itself is pretty flawed. Because healing in this game is so incredibly weak, single target, and expensive if using items, there is very little incentive to use the Support Position. Defense Position is a little bit better, but I found most of the defensive skills to be unreliable, and because healing is practically worthless its difficult to justify having a tank in almost every scenario. This just devolves the game into killing enemies as quickly as you can, and because there's no difficulty settings this is easily achieved if you have sparked decently powerful skills.
The story was really nothing to write home about, I didn't care for it at all, but I wouldn't say its bad by any means either. Its just kind of slow and plodding, and doesn't feel like there's much character interaction beyond little quips here and there. The visual art style is one of the main attractions to TAA, and I do like it overall, but Im typically a bigger fan of more richly saturated colors than the pastel shades here, though they do fit the tone of the game better. The open world exploration is actually pretty good, but I found that because you don't have the option for quick travel for much of the game that it is just better to save a lot of the optional stuff like guild recruitment and dens until things open up more adequately. Another thing that pissed me off royally is that Guild Recruits and Masters are permanently locked into where you place them. Early on I wasn't sure what I wanted to go for and I was fairly conservative in my selections, but I still spent a few members on Blacksmith and Recon just to see what they would give. Later on I decided I wanted to invest heavily in Tactics and Library, but unfortunately because I wasn't super ultra conservative, I couldn't achieve Tactics rank 10 by 5 members even though I had 33 applicants left, because all of those for whatever reason were not specialized in Tactics.
Anyways, thats my thoughts on it. I didn't really like the game very much, but I did appreciate having an okayish RPG to play on a mobile device.
Dragon Quest (Switch) -- Shadowcat was very sweet and let me borrow his Switch to play this. I'd played this (with a ROM) before but never really beaten it. Now I can say I have. Fun little game and it shows where this all started, Dragon Warrior/Quest wise. Be warned if you do, it has a new translation from the NES, some spell names are different if you are using a walkthough (and with old games, it's wise to use a walkthough) but chalk one up to the beaten list on Switch..before I could buy my own!
And yes, if I get my own this may get replayed. ^^ This is actually one of the reasons I'm saving for my own Switch. ^^
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I took what seems to be referred to as the Church path, which I enjoyed. I would like to see the other paths, but I'm not replaying this. Married Petra and loved the epilogues for all the characters.
As for BL3, I don't know if its that bad on other platforms or just Xbox. The crazy thing is the 3 of us each have a different type of Xbox, the X, S, and Normal and between us theres on average 3 issues on all of our play sessions. Just last night a mission objective vanished, not allowing us to complete, my friend with the X crashed once, and my friend with the S glitched a Cutscene to where his entire screen artifacted blue with a random Cyclone visible that absolutely should not have been there. I was lucky not to get anything that time, but 2 days ago I had a level 1 Legendary drop in a level 50 area and also a freeze. Ive never seen anything like this spread between 3 different players. The Menu thing is also really aggravating even without couch co-op for us too 7th. Im glad you don't have it that bad though. Wish my friends had PS4s so I could play this game in 4K, but they don't. Hopefully they shift their focus to addressing these problems for you and others that have yet to try it, Ombres.
It's sort of a case study in writing. 2/3 of the game has this ANYTHING GOES vibe where writers could just do whatever they want as long as they made the Changing God seem like a jerk periodically. Then the last third gave those same writers a thematic guide to follow, and it was the best part of the game.
That said, something about the ending fell flat for me. Maybe the key characters were too one-dimensional in the final conversations... or I wanted to feel like I outsmarted the villains, or had some sense of danger or risk in the last scene. More like The Master from Fallout 1, TTO from Planescape, or the whole final act of Tyranny. The final moment in this game felt like whatever I wanted to do, I could pick it in the dialogue and win.
I know I did play a lot of the old version, but I did not remember much of it, was fun, beside the end boss, did not have much of a challenge.
Took the vanilla Black Eagles route, but have a save before the critical point, so it would be easy to go back and do the church route. It’s maybe a 4.5 for me, purely for pacing. I’m tempted to knock it down to a 4 just because it was also pretty unchallenging - but I did play it on normal, so I’ve only myself to blame.
Favourite relationship was Ferdinand and Dorothea’s - glad they ended up together in my playthrough! Caspar and Bernadetta was also a good one - though Bernie bizarrely ended up with Hubert. Didn’t see that one coming!
Also just knocked off another one: Dragon Quest IV on iOS. I’ve been chipping away at it for months on mobile, and finally rolled credits this morning. Beat Psaro at level 35 with my final attack - if he hadn’t gone down or he had hit me first, I would have been toast! Very satisfying! Took me just over 33 hours, but you can probably round that up to 36 hours with all the resets in the casino.
As an aside, while I know the iOS version is based on the DS remake, DQIV is still a great example of why 8-bit RPGs have much to offer still. The story was light, zippy and uncomplicated, but told with great charm and fun characters. The combat is pretty no-frills turn-based action, but there is enough variety in the spells and characters to make it interesting. And I didn’t need to consult a FAQ once, which is great for any game from that era. I’ll probably tackle DQV in the new year.
Wow. This was truly something special. Everything from getting the Collector's Edition early, playing on my brand new OLED, and the content of this title, I knew something remarkable was in the works. The entire time I played, I was thinking it. After finally finishing it, I still felt the same. There's no better way to say it, Cold Steel 3 is my new favorite game of all time.
An average point and click adventure game as the score would suggest. I thought the voice acting was probably the highlight. Didn’t really get stuck at any point from beginning to end. Had 1 hard crash.
According to GoG Galaxy - Play time was 11h 26min
5/10
Raging Loop (PS4) - This was my cool off game after Cold Steel 3, and surprisingly it delivered in spades. I'd go so far as to call this the best budget title I've ever played. That being said, the "Visual" elements of this Visual Novel are some of the absolute worst I've encountered. The background stills are mostly awful, with a huge number of them just being vaguely illuminated colors, and the actual CGs here are sparse in number and typically on the uglier side. The character art is on the borderline threshold for something I'd be willing to give a chance, in fact the only reason I did so here is because of the positivity surrounding it. And you know what? On writing alone, this is one of the better VNs I've played, and I've played a lot over of the past couple years. As a mystery and suspense title, this was way more satisfying for me than The Somnium Files was. I earnestly believe that if this had the budget of a Danganronpa or Chaos;Child; say having a healthy number of songs, more detailed CGs, a better artist, and more detailed backgrounds to fully fleshout the suspense and atmosphere, that this could be one of the most talked about and enjoyable titles in its class. Instead there's just a very entertaining and enjoyable read that comes across as a legitmately worthy kickstarter project, where someone had a really good idea but not enough funds and assistance to fully realize its potential. At the end of the day though I deeply enjoyed Raging Loop and if the next title from this scenario writer ever gets translated I'll definitely be playing it in the future.