“If weak to fire then cast Fira”. You don’t even need to have your characters learn the weakness first by scanning them, they just intuit every weakness.
spoilerThe frame story of Returns, where Guybrush is telling an account of his life story to his son, is that a filter we’re now supposed to retroactively apply to the whole series? The end of this game, another “it’s all just Disneyland” ending like Revenge had, felt very pointedly like a cover-up. The whole story is low-key building up this theme of Guybrush actually being a terrible person and his quest being both personally unhealthy and harmful to those around him, with little things like the game silently marking off the checklist of horrible things he did on the how-to-be-evil pamphlet he got from LeChuck and big things like Elaine confronting him with his actions while they travel together, so when the ending turns into such an anti-climactic non-sequitur it reads like he can’t bring himself to tell his son the truth of what happened and you hope it’s because he actually gave up the quest and knows that isn’t the story kids want to be told but fear it’s because shit got real in a different sense and he doesn’t want Boybrush to view him in that light. With that in mind, now I can’t stop wondering if that’s what the Carnival of the Damned always was: an act of self-censorship by the hypothetical storyteller.
The enemies are placed on a grid and your characters have abilities that can move them around or place traps on certain squares, plus as part of the game’s time travel theme you can reorganize the upcoming turn order. Use those together and you can arrange the absolute sickest combos, knocking everyone into a big cluster and then wailing the shit out of that cluster.
Just be sure to play the original DS version and not the enhanced 3DS version with new art, voice acting, and story additions that ruin the tone.
I got no beef with the three prongs like you see so many fuss about but those analog sticks were extremely fragile and would inevitably go completely limp over time and wind up 99% deadzone.
I can’t think of another game that I like so much and enjoy playing so little. I will spend countless hours creating families and houses and then five minutes playing the actual game before I’m like “oh, right, I hate this” and then I start making another family.
Not in the sense where they failed to make it interesting, more in the Breath of the Wild type philosophy where any side-content you do is indirectly progress toward the main goal so there’s a mix of things of varying levels of interestingness in all directions. You have an organization that raises in “power” or whatever they call those points whenever you do a side quest and you need to bank up certain amounts of those power points to do the next story mission or unlock the next region. That progression is paced in such a way that you simply don’t need to do most things.
Many quests are genuinely interesting but other ones are just filler. And some filler between good quests is inoffensive, maybe even a refreshing little diversion. One generic filler side quest is essentially “stand next to this portal and kill all the ghosts that come out of it”. Doing that once in a while is okay, doing it as many times as there are portals to find is torture.
I still haven’t played the sequels, would you say they’re still worthwhile or is it for the best to leave the story at the end of Origins?
The short version of that answer is that the sequels do not have what you love about the original but you might also like them for the different things that they are.
Awakening feels less like a sequel (technically an optionally standalone expansion but I’m counting it) and more like a fan mod. It’s nerdier, sillier, edgier, and has that high-effort mod habit of adding concepts that should logically be new mechanics but are executed by old ones because you’re doing it on minimal skill and zero budget. I think that’s a pretty cute vibe but it’s fundamentally just Origins again but worse.
2 has high highs and low lows and, while I personally love it, it’s negative general reception is very fairly earned. The thing that it was trying to do in the first place, story-wise, is something that would already have been divisive even if the rest of the game were flawlessly executed and it was emphatically not flawlessly executed. The simplest way I can describe it is that it is not a story about an adventure, it’s a story about a place. You do not leave that place, you just stay there over the course of several years and experience the historically significant events that are happening there. So the narrative focus for you as a protagonist is on how you feel about things rather than what you’re accomplishing.
Inquisition, conversely, is the least interesting one from a conceptual standpoint but, like, it’s competent from a technical standpoint and the harsh criticisms you tend to hear usually stem from misunderstandings about its design rather than the lack of creative ambition. There’s another new evil horde and you’re another special dude who’s the only one who can stop them and now you’ve got a personal army instead of being an underdog. There’s more political conflict than the first game but the politics are less complex. Ultimately, though, I think the most important factor of any open world game is simply the degree to which you want to spend time in that world regardless of what it is you’re actually doing and it’s an interesting enough world to spend some time in. Certainly, it’s worth trying for free.
For anybody playing this for the first time, an important piece of advice:
Don’t be a completionist. Leave areas before you’ve done everything in them and don’t do any side quests you’re not interested in.
It’s my least favorite Dragon Age but it got a lot more hate than it deserved because other open world games trained people to play it the boringest way possible.