I absolutely love XC1 and 3, and I enjoy XCX for everything that’s not its story, and…
Yeah I totally agree with you. XC2 is cursed on many levels. It’s the one I just can’t replay and it’s mainly because of its characters and degenerate quirks. You’ve played the worst game of the series by far.
I am sure anyone who played Tears of the Kingdom did that at some point, but there are those koroks little guys you’re supposed to guide to their destination, generally by designing machines to carry them there.
Of course instead you just strap them to the most absurd rocket powered contraptions and play Korok Space Program.
It was not a huge problem for me, but I play lots of metroidvania, and I am used to memorizing stuff for later. And for stuff that I know will be hard to remember, occasionally, I might take notes or screenshots of hints.
Though most of the time, there are more than one hint for a single quest. The game does a very good job at updating every related NPC dialogue when something has changed.
But if you want to find everything, yeah you have to talk to absolutely everyone. TWICE. Almost everyone has two lines of dialogue at any moment.
I like CrossCode, but I am going to bat for Phoenotopia Awakening, one of the best game almost nobody has heard about. Slightly different perspective but similarly massive game full of secrets, puzzles, fun characters and a consistent world where even the tiniest bit of banter can lead you to discover something on the other side of the map.
It doesn’t actually appear anywhere in game but Oblivion’s main character has an internal name in the editor. “Bendu Olo”. Very Geoge Lucas kind of name.
Shin Megami Tensei games have you rename their protagonist (and often the 3 other central characters too), but most of them don’t have a canonical name. Also most of the time those people are supposed to be Japanese. Every time I am starting a game like that I struggle to choose a name that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb for them.
If there is a default name, I usually use it. Exceptions are the kind of RPG where the character is a blank slate, whose identity doesn’t matter at all and whose appearance is custom (like Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Xenoblade X for example). And stuff like Pokémon, obviously. When your avatar is going to meet other players, doesn’t look good if everyone has the same name.
I started Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U) without even knowing the main character had a canon name (it’s… Cross. Like the X is supposed to be pronounced in the games’s title). But even if know it now I still rename them. They are custom, there is multiplayer, and story-wise they’re the blandest of characters anyway, so…
A bit of warning : I’ve seen indie developers mention that having a single common word for their game title was a mistake. It makes it hard to search for. A combination of words or a simple phrase is better in that regard.
Searching only for “Architect game” right now already yields a bunch of things, like a Korean MMO, actual house architect simulators, and you know, the very popular Prison Architect.
That cycle was artificially squeezed into one year though.
If we’re staying in the area of games that don’t rely on story or lots of new manually crafted environments, a game like, say, SimCity could have had a minor update and be released slightly better every year. That didn’t happen, it got 3 games in ten years despite being quite popular.
They litterally did 4 years of re-releasing the exact same FIFA on Switch with only a roster update, just slapping a “legacy edition” on them for good measure. If it’s the same game, by comparison, making it a DLC of the previous edition is slightly more honest.
Annual sports game editions are just a wet dream a marketing genius had back in the 90s. A shame that it must still work on a significant part of their audience.
Yeah, the fact it’s only mobile games surprised me a bit, especially since they don’t seem to mention it anywhere until you see the only platform filters are iOS and Android.
There are several games I have a small interest in but from companies I don’t trust much, so a review of the potential manipulation tactics in those might have been useful to me.
I don’t play mobile games though. This is unfortunately not at all exclusive to mobile.
Edit : just saw the notice about other platforms coming. Makes sense.