Games you've played today

Battle Princess Arcadia - played for about an hour. the battle system is a very simplistic hack n slash, but it works so no complaints. i'm not too fond of the siege party system when it comes to boss battles, but it seems like you can overlook it for the most part.

Castlevania: Mirror of Fate HD - just got to the part where you play as Alucard. i don't quite understand the hate this game tends to receive since it actually (aside from the cross combat) feels like an old castlevania game.

Tales of Xillia 2 - arrived at Xian Du and tried out the coliseum.

Christ. I'm starting to get the hang of Hollow Fragment, but the skill menu is still pretty obtuse. All the skills in this game end up causing buffs or debuffs so a huge line of shit just hovers over your health bar the whole time (though I suppose this is accurate to the show, at least during the Calibur arc when you see their health bars.)

I also randomly seem to do huge damage but I don't know why (I got the last attack bonus on the first boss even though it had like an eighth of its health left after I finished a Sword Skill with Asuna, it just died like 3 seconds afterward when I wasn't even attacking.)

Also jesus christ, I've seen some bad localizations, but you can hardly call this one. It starts out okay, then gets kind of shaky, then it just shits the bed.


I also find it kinda funny, despite the easily-made comparisons to .hack, I think SAO is actually really fucking different...But Hollow Fragment, it plays a lot like the early .hack games, if the original battle system was improved instead of being remade (properly) like in G.U.. I mean .hack was all about diving through your skill menus as fast as possible because you eventually stopped doing damage to enemies unless you used elemental attacks, and you'd need to suck down healing items while tanking damage. This game has the skill pallette to avoid the menu diving, but you still need to use the correct moves on your partner's command to do reasonable damage, and occasionally use battle skills (which have cooldowns instead of using SP like Sword Skills) to restore SP, HP or buff/debuff.

I think you had to give commands to your party members in the original .hack quadrilogy as well, which is a decent-sized part of this (two fifths of the skill palette is dedicated to a fixed set of orders after all (at least I think they're fixed, didn't look to see if you could customize their order or if there are others.))

Edit: Also the fact that Kite, Haseo and Kirito dual-wield (not sure about the Link guy) and skills in Hollow Fragment play out just like the skills in the .hack quadrilogy (choose skill, consume points, then play out a canned animation with X number of hits and special effect, and you can't move during the animation.) Spells in .hack for buffs and stuff just used MP though instead of having cooldowns.

The friends list is also similar, except .hack let you just invite people and you could manage them from the menu instead of having to speak to them, but I think you could still run into them in towns and stuff and talk. Being able to see their current in-game location is reminiscent, and honestly the town teleporters are too.

Giving orders was always a huge pain though because I remember your allies not using skills at all unless you told them to, it was like playing an RTS sometimes.

Yeah the translations are riddled with derplations.

Taiyz wrote:

I really wish Hollow Fragment's tutorial wasn't so ass. There seems to be a really deep skill system but the horrible translation makes it really difficult to understand what everything does or how to manage the skill palette and edit them, then they just expect you to "experiment" with partner commands and sword skills, and it does a horrible job of explaining burst attacks, which I don't even think I fully understand.

I'll be honest with you, I had no idea what half the terms were and I still did okay xD
You get the hang of some stat buffs,
While there is a variety of weapon builds to go on, though honestly dual wield is the main one you will use most likely. Still, I recommend getting the Precise passive skill under Rapier and the Katana Master for SP regen which is useful for bossing, and spamming mob skills in general. The party commands are mainly used for bossing to tell them to GTFO when you want last kill bonus. For partner, use of switch and praise is extremely handy.

Also saw that you beat the floor 76 boss! Congrats!

Yeah praise just gives them SP and switching obviously lets them regen their SP normally, switching was really obtuse at first because it seems like it can be interrupted sometimes, but I got the hang of it. I don't like how praise will modify their AI over time because I don't really know what they're doing since the battles are such a constant clusterfuck.

Thanks for the tip about the Katana skill, I figured out pretty early when I bought Battle Step that the real reason to buy skills is for passive effects (and possibly replacing existing battle skills with improved versions, or ones that compensate for your weaknesses like if a boss needs to be sealed or something.)

This is one of those games where I have to wonder why they included a bunch of things, like why why they let you customize Kirito's appearance when he appears in cutscenes and has recorded dialogue. Oh sure they let you change his voice, but I reckon that doesn't change cutscenes. It's nice that they let you modify his avatar at any time but still, it's no excuse for his regular dialogue not to be fully voiced. Also, I guess that the Hollow Fragment cutscenes have him in that black and gold number, where-as Infinity Moment cutscenes use the classic SAO outfit?

I mean why would you want to use a spear or a mace with Kirito? It just feels like something they did to appeal to hunting game fans.

You can decide which passive skill you equip, the thing is though you can only equip one at a time (unless there's an implementation I am unaware of)

I also recommend trying to clear the Hollow Arc asap
I ALSO highly recommend learning the War Cry buff, very handy xD

Taiyz wrote:

This is one of those games where I have to wonder why they included a bunch of things, like why why they let you customize Kirito's appearance when he appears in cutscenes and has recorded dialogue. Oh sure they let you change his voice, but I reckon that doesn't change cutscenes. It's nice that they let you modify his avatar at any time but still, it's no excuse for his regular dialogue not to be fully voiced. Also, I guess that the Hollow Fragment cutscenes have him in that black and gold number, where-as Infinity Moment cutscenes use the classic SAO outfit.

Yeah, Kirito is really only voiced during cutscenes or important story events, typically the end of a story arc.
And yeah, you are spot-on right about his cutscene outfits.

The other weapons are solely for the person of having weapons for the skill list tree
You don't ever change weapons except when you grind skills.
I swear, only Dual Wield and/or 2H and Katana builds are the only decent ones, though with DW you have two swords with different passives which is typically more efficient for better skills.

Don't worry, I'm aware that you need to do the Hollow Area before completing floor 89 (I'll do it before beating 88, to be safe) to get all the event CGs.

I also had to re-do the first boss because I got stunned and some asshole got the last attack bonus, thankfully the game doesn't save until you bypass the screen that confirms the bonus and whether anybody died.


Where do I equip the passive skills? I didn't notice you had to equip them.

Edit: SOMEBODY should play Destiny with Jase and I.

I was thinking of finally getting around to a second character anyway. I decided the other day to make my Hunter a version of Kirito, with Arcblade as my substitute for Sword Skills. The DLC is gonna have a black Dead Orbit cloak called the Cloak of Oblivion that has a grey fur collar.
http://i1.wp.com/planetdestiny.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/dead-orbit-cloak.png
http://i2.wp.com/planetdestiny.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/dead-orbit-cloak2.png

Yeah, I'm not really playing this game anymore til the DLC comes out, but if you really want me to play just message me on AIM.

You just press circle on which passive you want, really. It will say you can only equip one at a time.
Pressing L+Down should help clear teammates for it bit, and using multi-hit sword skills help get last kills, though iirc you need 800 Dual Wield Sword Skill level to get Nightmare Rain and Starburst Stream.

Also be sure to get Strea's affection and bed event ASAP.

And even though I got Destiny, I am terrible at it. Still at like level 11.

Oh so there's a time limit on interactions with Strea as well? Sigh.

Prinny wrote:

Yeah, I'm not really playing this game anymore til the DLC comes out, but if you really want me to play just message me on AIM.

Actually I was talking about Falcom whose stats appeared in my PS4's leaderboard thing when the game is highlighted...

But I just realized that I'm an idiot and he's probably got the PS3 version.

Floor 95/96 can't recall, but yeah seduce her before then.

Taiyz wrote:

But I just realized that I'm an idiot and he's probably got the PS3 version.

Correctemundo.
No PS4 for Falcom.

COD AW: I prestiged today. Unfortunately the new patch didn't help with the lag for me so I can't play it anymore.
Also the spawns are terrible. If they can fix those two things, I might play it again.

You've said that every time a new Call of Duty comes out, word for fucking word. Please see a counselor, domestic gaming abuse is a serious problem.

Finally played/finished Ys Celceta.

Misfortune is the most retarded status ailments ever made in the history of gaming. When inflicted with it, every single time you're hit, your money is dropped to the ground by a certain percentage. I'm pretty sure it's percentage because I went from having 250k gold to 100k++ in mere minutes because everything in the area spews Misfortune nonsense around and hits pitifully but frequently.

Granted, it's my fault for not paying attention to the manual tutorial about status ailments, but who the hell read a manual about status ailments?


Now that that's out of the way, Ys Celceta is amazing of course. Never doubted you for a moment, Falcom bro (the company not the forumer). Really loving the reinforce system, definitely the kind of tempering/equipment upgrade system I envisioned in my ideal game mechanics although it's rather unfortunate that you're only able to reinforce until +72.

I was kinda worried we might just get a Ys7 clone,what's with it using similar engine, but I'm glad there's just a lot of improvement in both exploration and battle mechanics. Speaking about exploration, I reaaally love how they throw us literally into the sea of trees right at the beginning of game that is huge and fun to explore that you kinda lost track and got murdered by double teaming bigass ape that smacks axe around for double your max HP. Nice. Flash Dodge is a really fun mechanics too, but no one cares about it. Flash Block is pro.

And hot damn, the story writing in this is honestly among the best for Ys (which is nothing to boast of, but still...Ys Origin is still the best tho). Really loved the reference to the other Ys such as Galbalan, Ernst/Geis, and Altago. Also, Adol's backstory is pretty adorable and very normal, I liked that they didn't try to make such a pretentious backstory for Adol because Adol is just that, a healthy young male with an overabundant share of curiosity (and probably a twisted fetish of leaving young and ripe girls hot and bothered).

However, I have to say that the OST for this game is rather subpar. The field/dungeon theme is great, but battles were rather boring save for the Black Motherfucking Wings. Lack of The Great Ordeal is disappointing of course, but I got over that already. It's just that, when Gruda is spewing stuff like "survive my ordeal or whatever", I was half-expecting the Malmsteen licks kicking in suddenly.

Also, the boss designs are also lackluster. Almost every single boss have "smash down/jumping stomp attack" and "swing around attack" in their repertoire that I can simply predict the Flash Block timing for some bosses right at the first try. And the fish boss is downright an insult to Ys series, holy shit that was tediously unrewarding. I guess, after the Five Dragons of Altago, I was kinda hoping they would come out with a really great group of bosses that have their own gimmicks but what I get is rather uninspired.


All in all, I sank a lot my precious time this week for the game, and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite the grumbling. Still haven't got around to defeating the green fabulous deer god of purgatorial pink lightning and nigh undodgeable earth spikes though.

Taiyz wrote:

You've said that every time a new Call of Duty comes out, word for fucking word. Please see a counselor, domestic gaming abuse is a serious problem.

Yeah, I shoulda learned after MW3 introduced that awful netcode that has plagued the series since. Next COD, no dedicated servers, no friggin buy.

Advanced Warfare: Rippable Laser Sentry Guns are amazing. Running around, zapping dudes with a big laser gun is pretty fun.

Because Taiyz reminded me that I got this game.

Somebody ordered something from AmiAmi.

I have been playing project diva F today and been doing some of the hard ones before I tackle one of the extremes again.

Taiyz wrote:

Somebody ordered something from AmiAmi.

It was this.

Anybody else getting Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax?

This was from back on launch day, but Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit is pretty great.



(These two are in reverse order because I was not expecting a One Piece reference and I wanted to establish some setup.)


(bonus) https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v162/Taiyz/Screen%20Caps%20and%20Scans/Senran%20Kagura/2014-11-12-035751_zpsff56b191.jpg

According to a Siliconera interview, XSEED tried to do a really faithful "Just according to keikaku" reference in Akiba's Trip, but it just didn't fit with the mouth flaps or whatever so they went with a version that attempted to parody Death Note's dub, simply saying "Just as planned" with a goofy sinister voice. It makes me wonder if they wanted to do the same here.


In the immortal words of Tamsoft/Marvelous AQL's Bakunyuu Producer, Tits are life, ass is hometown.

I want to get into Tekken Tag Tournament 2, but I'm a masher.

Falcom wrote:

Taiyz wrote:

Somebody ordered something from AmiAmi.

It was this.

Is there a Sora no Kiseki one poster in amiami?!

Hearts R - Best tales game I've played in a while.

AKIBA'S TRIP IS SO GOOD YOU SHOULD BUY 20 COPIES

DylDawg wrote:

Is there a Sora no Kiseki one poster in amiami?!

Nay, Dawg.

Taiyz wrote:

AKIBA'S TRIP IS SO GOOD YOU SHOULD BUY 20 COPIES

How is it? I can borrow a copy from my pal.

It's probably my favourite Japanese IP since the Souls games. It's basically like what Dead Rising 2 should have been in terms of its sense of humour. I will upload a couple clips, the script is utterly amazing and the first time you do a chain-strip is a life-changing experience.

In other news,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJQxfr7Yajc (original)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IiHj-3DttQ

Holy shit Vocaloid V3 makes for such a stark difference. When YouTube isn't compressing the audio Kaito actually sounds like a human singer (and even despite the compression it could fool somebody.)

I swear to god there had better be a Meiko V3 song in here.