In a lot of respects it’s a good game, its fans even love it as a part of this big ongoing series. But it repeated a few tropes and trends that really started to get to me; wherein so many villains are introduced in a Dragonball style of escalating power rather than character definition.
The first two games introduced one supremely powerful hero, but invented mature and elaborate reasons as to why he couldn’t save the world alone - why evil or influential forces need cooperation of everyone to defeat, not a single showy swordsman. Then, later games try to impress you by showing villains that could easily beat this hero; without character definition to make such claims worth it.
They also really sold into the anime gender tropes - where every woman makes shy/teasing comments about the male lead, most girls are lesbian only for the sake of sexual harassment rather than true connection, etc.
Oh man, the moment I clicked on this thread, Trails came into mind. Now, I myself haven’t played it, but my mother is close to finishing Kevin’s game, and we were peeking at the the next few games and the most recent one to be released. And man, I don’t even know if I wanna play this series anymore.
The anime tropes we saw and read about from people’s reviews are killing us, and me and my mom fucking love anime. Hell, she’s a shonen-anime lover through and through. But the way the older characters like Agate get yassified into looking like generic anime guy #1 with red hair and Zin into slightly less generic anime guy #2 kills me, these dudes should not look like college kids 😭
The shitty romance that they’re hinting between Agate and Tita is 🤢. I really wish they had kept them as a sibling dynamic, and I thought Tita’s mom was freaking out because she thought he was a pervert, not that he actually liked her…
Also found out about the adopted siblings from TS:CS that seem to like each other, which is creepier than Estelle x Joshua because this pair was raised together since they were literal toddlers unlike the original two… God Japan’s not-by-blood adopt a son to marry thing kills me. The adopt a son to marry is fine if the girl wasn’t raised with him or like, they’re 20 years old. But this, “we literally were raised like siblings” thing kills me sometimes.
But yeah the egregious fan service, flanderization, and overall lack of seriousness that we saw from some of the newer games made me be like “maybe I won’t pick this game up,” which is a shame. I’m really disappointed to hear about the anime gender tropes stuff…
Been playing some Battlefield 3 after it went on sale, mostly multiplayer. It’s still fun! There are occasional hackers but they get vote kicked within a few minutes.
I’m impressed how well it stands up graphically, and aside from a few control quirks it plays great. The biggest problem is that everyone else on the servers has been playing for the past 15 years so I’m pretty outmatched 😆 though I can occasionally get a nice sniper kill with my recon loudout
I’ve been in a few, but not the big cash prize tournaments they have now. I was in the TF2 studio rumble around `09ish against several game development studios. We made it through 3-4 rounds until we played against Valve, who of course wiped the floor with everyone. Later I joined a competitive team for a game called Guns of Icarus. It was fun at first and we did really well, but over time it became more and more stressful as we focused on winning over having fun. I finally gave it up because the competition eventually took all the fun out of the game. Edit- I just looked it up and the Studio Rumble I participated in happened in '07
What do you mean exactly by “wiped the floor with us”? Even if they are the devs of the game they’re still devs, not pro players. How much better could they be?
Yea this was back in 07, so still the early days off the game. They also had an actual strategy, unlike the rest of us lol. I wrote a little bit more about it in reply to shayeta below if your interested.
Valve was the only team that seemed to have a plan. The matches we played beforehand were sort of like a really good public match. People were taking it seriously, playing well, communicating, and going for objectives, but there was still a lot of “doing your own thing” and not a lot of team strategy. I think most of the studios, including ours, were just in it for the fun and didnt really practice very much beforehand.
I believe we were on gravelpit when we played valve (might have been dustbowl or one of the other western looking maps, this was back in 07 so it’s been a while). The spawn gates were sort of down in a dip in the ground, and on the defenders side where we couldnt see yet, they setup a row of turrets with a row of dispensers behind them. Like a lot of them, probably half the team or more was engineer. When the gates opened, anyone that went down into that little dip was immediately wrecked. Their engineers were running between the rows constantly spamming repairs, and they had pyros spamming flames to catch spies. We almost broke out a couple of times, but in the end never made it out of the spawn area.
Never video games, but I came in second my only ever Magic the Gathering competition, was probably 1998 or somewhere around there. Was a counter spell/horseshoe crab deck. Lost against a very similar deck.
Not always for the overarching main plot, but a lot of the games have decently written characters. The main story of Ruby/Sapphire is pretty dumb (let’s flood the entire world!/let’s get rid of all of the ocean!) but Wally is a pretty fun character to watch grow.
It’s kinda the beauty of the franchise. There’s a lot for everyone. I mostly play because I’m a completionist who wants to complete the Dex, some people want to shiny hunt their favorites, some people want to get into competitive (and even then there’s tiers/which gens you play, which are all vastly different strategically), and sometimes it’s just to see all of the different character designs.
Reading Playboy for the articles was 100% legit btw. They published stories by Arthur C Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury…
StarCraft and Brood War were amazing, but the writing quality took a nosedive in the sequel. StarCraft 2 felt like poorly written fanfiction that didn’t understand the existing characters or their motivations at all.
Completely agree. The whole tone and setting changed. SC:BW went for gritty realism. Obviously, there’s a suspension of disbelief when you’ve got psionic aliens, but it felt like three scrappy factions barely surviving in the endless dark of space.
SC2 went full Warcraft. Ancient gods, portals to other worlds, all the same kitschy fantasy elements that are fine in the campy context of WC but really clashed with the established character of the SC universe. I get that they wanted to raise the stakes in the sequel, but I really disagreed with how they went about it.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
Agreed 100%, how Kerrigan was handled was the worst of StarCraft 2’s many sins against prior characterization. They spent an entire expansion setting her up as an irredeemable monster and the new big bad of the setting alongside Mengsk and whatever Duran was up to, only to undo it all because NuBlizzard wanted their waifu.
And there is no way Jim Raynor as of the end of Brood War would ever ally with Kerrigan again after her betrayal, yet he goes from having sworn to get revenge for Fenix’s death to helping Kerrigan “redeem” herself with little more than a mention of past grievances.
When I was very young and video game places were a thing, I entered the nation wide Tron contest. It was fun, I won lots of tokens, and came in second to the winner over the whole US. :)
I need help enjoying this game. How can I get past what feels like certain tedium. I’m very early in the game and I don’t really enjoy the time spent walking, riding, or looting, is that essentially the core of the game and maybe it’s not for me?
I am interested in and excited by the story and the environments. I also really enjoy a game with choice, and so far feels quite one tracked.
Yeah that tedium doesn’t go away, imo. There’s a mission that seems inconsequential at the time, but has huge implications for the main character that I really didn’t want to engage with, but the story is the story, there isn’t much if any player agency.
I suggest going on the hunt for the Klan rallies that happen in one area of the map before putting it down. Incredibly satisfying killing those pricks in exotic ways.
The looting you can skip with cheats. Technically you can skip a lot of traveling that way as well. But That’s a bit part of the game, imo. If you don’t enjoy spending time in the game, then all you want to do is shoot people? There’s better games for that.
The game is essentially a trudge from shooting gallery to shooting gallery, with a large open world to do very little of consequence in. There isn’t really anything more to it than what’s on the surface. Either you enjoy the slow burn cowboy experience or you don’t. It doesn’t really get any better.
Metro Exodus. Opening up the map was a mistake. The linear levels were fine, that gives you tight pacing and you always know what’s next. The confined underground spaces were part of the soul of that series. I only played maybe 8 hours of Exodus and can’t be bothered to play more.
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