It’s funny when you’re playing soccer and you’re locked in and then out of nowhere a player gets domed by the ball. Especially when you smoothly recover like you meant to rocket the ball off the defenders head.
I guess I should have some stance on this. I played Nier Automata, and the combat was horrendous to me. I still think there must have been some core mechanic that was unclear to me, but even on brief review, I didn’t see anything.
I dropped the difficulty down to nothing so I could quickly force through all the story content and see “what’s so amazing about this game”. And the story did nothing. It had me burst out laughing in mockery at the times players were supposed to be crying.
That could just be a quirk of that game’s story in particular. I do think some scenes I’ve enjoyed out of long JRPGs were only notable because I’d invested time and effort in them, so I think a lot is lost if the player isn’t interacting with the premise at all. It’s why I’d prefer forms of difficulty adjustment, removing just one form of challenge, over total removal of the entire gameplay system. Unfortunately, I think a lot of action games handle that poorly, in a very lazy way that doesn’t appreciate what challenges players.
Personally I enjoyed Nier Automata’s story, but I think that’s mostly because I enjoy camp/anime trash. I can definitely see why it wouldn’t be appealing if you went in looking for a more well put together story. That said, I don’t really remember the gameplay well enough to have an opinion on it.
To the point about being more granular with the difficulty settings: I’d definitely like that if it were done well. There are some types of gameplay I really enjoy and some which I don’t and depending on how intrusive the parts I don’t like are, I either put up with it or it’s enough to make me abandon the game. For me, while I like games that make me think and make decisions like RPGs, card games, strategy games, etc, I get really overwhelmed by too much complexity. I like games which enable me to make deep decisions using relatively simple interactions. So there are almost certainly some games I’d play if I could flip a switch that hid/automated all of the stuff like making complicated character builds and just let me do the parts I like. The game that actually prompted this thread was Expedition 33. I really wanted to play it because of all the good reviews it got and I enjoyed the combat, story, setting, etc. But I just got exhausted by having to mess around with the character builds. I supose I could have just looked up some builds online and who knows? Maybe I’ll go back to it some day and do that, but it would have been nice if there were a difficulty option that just said “Choose my skills/passives.” That way I could still engage with the combat at a level that was challenging for me without getting overwhelmed by the build stuff.
I can’t comment on Nier, as I’ve never played it. But I did notice the reverse situation— after beating Final Fantasy X, I replayed it with a “no sphere grid” game… and suddenly found a lot of these scenes far more impactful. What used to be a “meh, another stupid boss fight, whatever, no big deal…” suddenly became impactful fights to the death that carried emotional weight for me. So I think you have something there in your hypothesis.
I think the loudest and longest laugh I ever got was at the very end of Untitled Goose Game. Not gonna spoil it for anyone, but once I figured out the joke that had been stewing for three straight hours, it had me laughing for the rest of the night.
Playing “RV There Yet” with friends. I’m replaying “DELTARUNE” and that game has me laughing out loud every 5 minutes (same goes for UNDERTALE). Also recently played the demo for “Yapyap” and laughed a bunch.
In Borderlands 4, there’s a side quest to cure someone of being a psycho. You need to get a handful of macguffins and plug them into this elaborate machine. There’s a lot of whirring and build-up, and then the machine essentially zaps the psycho and makes him explode. “He’s cured!” It got me, lol.
Or the side quest of the rocket that didn’t blow up and you do all of this grabbing parts, set up, fight Order forces and you finally get to launch the missile which developed a bond with humans but didn’t want to be a dud. They end up being fireworks instead of an actual missile.
I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I’m sure it wasn’t long ago. I laugh pretty easily at a lot of different things, like ironic situations or bugs/glitches that look silly.
Fuck yeah! I don’t think I ever will. I’m down hundreds hours in of just fucking around and exploring and I keep hitting walls in the expansion. There’s a crazy tree bitch I can’t kill at the bottom of somewhere even with expert help. Aaaaaaaaa
Get more scadutree fragments to increase your DPS and look into weapon arts that drop a DOT blob on the field (e.g. a magma puddle) since those are meant to hurt enemies that walk past and do ridiculous damage on the biggies what barely move.
And if your build supports if (or you want to go hang out with mommy), Great Stars is RIDICULOUSLY good for the DLC due to healing per hit. And the Prayerful Strike weapon art is more or less cheating in the DLC because of a mix of strong healing and holy being one of the few elements DLC bosses tend to at least not be strong against.
I want to say that is one of the last bosses of the DLC “narratively”?
But yeah. From love stuff like that. Gargoyles and Maneater in Dark 1 and Demon. The gargoyle gauntlet in Dark 2. The idea being that it is meant to pressure you but is really just a thinly veiled DPS gate.
I forget if the tree fuckers are one at a time or if they can Four Kings to overwhelm you, but the idea is that you are going to take damage but that is what your estus is for. The idea being that you can spike DPS to minimize the damage you take per health bar. And then you cry when you realize you decided to do that on NG+ where you can no longer rush them.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne