I’ve never found sex scenes in games appealing. First of all, there’s rarely any build up to them. If there is, it’s just sitting there, listening to an NPC talking about themseves for 10 minutes and selecting the “good” answer to gain “affinity points” and proceed with the dialogue.
Then you get to the sex scene, and it’s either fade to black immediately (hopefully), or two uncanny valley dolls touching each other for a few seconds.
After the sex scene, the partner becomes another NPC, sitting there doing nothing, having completed their purpose. So inspiring.
I’d have to spoiler tag the entire message to be able to reply to that.
spoilerFor a multitude of reasons. First of all, the true ending is achieved by collecting random Shells around the world. Sure, you have a magical parrot telling you where the missing chests are, but in my case it would tell me that a chest was missing in the Flooded Graveyard, and I’d spend four hours straight going up and down the same map over, and over and over again, until I finally gave up and looked for an internet guide to tell me where the missing chest was. I’m a completionist, but I don’t care about achievements: I like exploring maps and collecting stuff and finding secrets, but I hate random, pointless collectibles and I never care about them in the games I play. Having them tied to the true ending was a huge mistake IMO and ruined my experience. Secondly, as I said in another comment of mine: I despise time travel. Always. It just doesn’t work, unless you put a lot of thought into it, and the Sea of Stars developers clearly didn’t even try. Garl’s chapter was probably the most emotional moment of the game, but the true ending comes and says “Yeah, no, he’s alive and well, and actually it never happened. B’st did those things, not Garl”, which doesn’t make any sense as B’st did not know Garl and would not be able to imitate him, nor do the same things he did. The purpose of reviving Garl was for him to throw an apple at the bad guy to taunt him and have him choose to fight in place of his minion? Seriously, you go through the hassle of collecting all conches, and that’s the only thing that differs from the normal ending. The rest plays out exactly the same. You defeat the Fleshmancer, and… Resha’an shows up, takes his bf into a portal with him, doesn’t say a word to the party, and goes away. And everyone’s happy. To say that I was underwhelmed is an euphemism. I was expecting some new revelations, some closure, but all I got is a slightly different turn of events with a different boss fight and an equally disappointing ending. Meanwhile, dozens of questions remain unanswered. What was Resha’an researching? What the heck was the “night” inside of Zale, and why had he to confront it? Valere is able to fly just as well as he does, and has no night inside her at all. Why was Serai hiding her true identity from her crew? What happened to Brugaves, the Acolytes and the Dweller? (Yes, I know that they end up being boss fights in the Messenger, but I should NOT be required to play an entirely different game to have some closure to this storyline. That would be like Capcom asking their players to play Monster Hunter to know what happens to Ada in Resident Evil)
The gameplay is fantastic and offers a lot of variety (especially as you grow your team and unlock more skills and combo attacks), and the art style and art direction, locations, and the soundtrack are beautiful. I had a lot of fun exploring, looking for treasure, talking to everyone, finding tons of secrets and side quests. The story is very much cliché and mostly an afterthought, but it’s fine (not bad, not good, just fine) and the cast is cute.
Unfortunately, 2/3 into the game, the developers either depleted their budget, or they stopped giving a shit. The story feels super rushed in the last act, and the ending is downright insulting. Half the cast enters a portal at the end of the second act, and you never see or hear from them again. One of the main party members goes like “Oh my, this thing I just discovered changes everything, I need to study this more” but you never see them again until the very end, and they don’t do anything, nor do they say why the thing they found was important or what did they study. A lot of things that were foreshadowed or hinted at, like the legendary sea slug or the Queen that was, are just random optional bosses scattered in the game’s world with no purpose or backstory whatsoever. Most don’t even have a dungeon attached to them. The true ending is a slap in the face.
I loved the game, but the last act and the ending really soured my experience with it.
I played Plague Tale 2 this summer. It’s a wonderful game and very much worth experiencing, but it would crash every time I opened the skill tree and the crafting tree. I tried contacting the devs about it, offered every info I had (system info, steps to replicate the bug, things I already tried to solve the issue, etc).
At first, customer support gave some generic advice (check files, uninstall/reinstall, update drivers, etc). Then they directed me to the Discord server of Focus Entertainment. Like, what? Why the heck is everything a Discord server nowadays? Why do I need to join a Discord server to get customer support?
But anyway, I did. They told me that, in the Discord server, I’d be able to talk to some developers. Instead, there were only a bunch of people from the marketing team, and they didn’t even bother with answering me. When I tried contacting customer support again, they didn’t reply to my email.
I’m 100% positive that I was not the only one who had found said bug, because I found a bunch of people on Reddit and Steam discussions reporting the same problem. As far as I know, it still hasn’t been patched.
So, not only do you have to deal with dozens of people before you’re actually able to reach the department that can actually deal with your problem. Sometimes, you are not able to reach the department at all. But hey, you can chat with someone from the marketing team on Discord! (If they actually bother with answering you at all, that is)
Just finished Sea of Stars. I never 180’d from a game so much.
I started it a week and a half ago, and I was in love with the game. The story was cliché, sure, but everything else was perfect, and the characters were kind of cute.
But the third act feels too rushed and the ending… Oh boy, the ending. It just doesn’t feel like an ending at all. I was extremely disappointed with it, and too many setpieces just led to nowhere.
And the true ending was even worse, in that it not only has very arbitrary requirements to unlock (including finding all 60+ collectibles scattered across the map in random locations), but ruins one of the best and arguably the most emotional moments of the game as well.
spoilerI despise time travel. Always. It just doesn’t work, unless you put a lot of thought into it, and the Sea of Stars developers clearly didn’t even try.
I enjoyed DS3 for what it was. The lore went surprisingly deep and the story was fun, although the love triangle was too distracting and the co-op partner was pretty much absent from the story if you weren’t playing with another player.
It was yet another game that tried to stray from its roots to chase the CoD golden goose. That generation was full of them (I remember being extremely disappointed by Resident Evil 6 and Ace Combat Assault Horizon). Dead Space 3 was, IMO, the game that managed to strike some semblance of balance between its two souls, at least compared to all those other COD copycats. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it was a great game, or even a good game, but I appreciated it for what it was.
At first I thought he was the comic relief guy, and I’d spend the following 20-40 hours listening to cringe-inducing Marvel-like humor. Instead they crafted a character that was funny but never over-the-top, and actually proved useful a few times (especially on a chapter that I won’t discuss because I’m not sure how spoilers work on Lemmy and its various applications yet).
I have not finished the game yet, and although the story is a bit cliché, it also has a few good moments, and I’m loving the cast so far.
Story is a bit too cliché at the moment, but graphics, soundtrack, gameplay and exploration are top notch. It really captures the feeling of being a kid, coming back home from school and playing those old school JRPG, but the QoL features make it much more enjoyable, and it doesn’t waste your time like those games.
I’m really satisfied for now. I also like the cast, it’s a nice change of pace from the edgy/moody characters that lots of JRPG seem to have. Sitting down at the firepit and listening to the two protagonists joking and having fun among themselves really makes me like them.
My only gripe is the story. As I said, it’s a bit too much on the “generic” side. Like, it’s not bad, I’m having fun, but it feels like, you know, been there, done that. Hopefully it gets better later on.