Rebirth does something with the open world mechanics I haven’t seen in other games. It interconnects everything.
The life springs give you a shitton of materials for the crafting system, they reveal the locations of crafting recipes, and eventually the area boss.
All of which interconnects with side-quests, not just at the start as a tutorial, but throughout each region.
It hence manages to make you want to do everything, almost on accident. If you do all the sidequests, you progress the collectathon a bunch. If you do the collectathon, you end up progressing quests a bunch just by “coincidence”.
Add to that the fast travel that lets you jump anywhere instantly, and nothing ends up feeling like a chore.
If you’re just watching, you won’t get the main appeal of the modern FF combat systems. That being the underlying turns and the strategy around what to do with them.
And unfortunately, at lower difficulties, you can get by with button mashing. It’s really disappointing that the difficulty that actually requires thinking is locked behind ng+, but at that level, the system really shines.
It’s all strategy, dressed up as a hack and slash, but if you just button mash, don’t min-max your builds, utilize the entire party, their abilities, spells and synergies, you are dead.
And it’s all made more intense by the combat happening in real-time (though you can slow time to a crawl at any time). I really love the panic of the way you are forced to control any last surviving party member, waiting for your turn to be available so you can use a phoenix down.
I absolutely adore the remake games. They both follow a type of game-design that makes me feel like I’m playing something from the PS2 era again. Both the good and the bad. Makes me feel like a kid in the best kind of way.
The games do have some trouble with time-wasters. It’s both improved and made worse in Rebirth. Luckily, in open world fashion, a lot of it can actually be ignored in Rebirth. And if you don’t ignore it, you get rewarded with actually good side-content. And Rebirths fast travel is good to the point you basically never have to travel anywhere “the long way” twice.
I have the same problem with the combat being too easy. It wasn’t too bad with Intergrade as I was new to the combat system, but with Rebirth I am absolutely crushing enemies. I’m deliberately sabotaging my character builds to make it more challenging, but I really wish they didn’t lock “hard” behind ng+. Coming from the first game, you should be able to jump into the second at that higher skill level from the start. But no.
Don’t worry too much about your stuff not carrying over. The characters do not get reset to level zero, and no abilities. They start with a little less than what you have at the end of Intergrade, but a lot of the stuff you’ll have gotten by the end of Intergrade, is what you have at the start of Rebirth. And then over the course of the second game, you get a lot of NEW stuff, rather than just re-aquiring the stuff you had in the first.
They created an entire new character, who is just as new to the situation as a player who might not have played the first game, allowing a new player to step into the story quite smoothly, sight unseen.
Not necessary, is not the same as “not worth doing”. All “not necessary” means is that AW2 stands entirely on its own even for players who might not’ve player the first one, or Control.
Edit: I feel like my comment got colored by a lot of the consequent replies. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, nor that if you want every detail, there isn’t more to see by playing it first. I’m saying AW2 isn’t among the interconnected games that you might as well not even play unless you’re up to date on every detail. Yes, it has a lot of interconnects with other Remedy games, but it’s fan-bloody-tastic entirely on its own.
You can. It’s not necessary.
It ties into stuff from Control a lot more, but even there you could play them in either order.
It has the complexity of a MOBA (but genius level UX that completely addresses how that would normally be daunting, through a fantastic community item build system), movement approaching the intensity of Titanfall and a match format that finally fills the hole in my heart that was left by Battleborn, and is maybe even better.
It has a a unique 80s magic/fantasy aesthetic, and what we know of the lore so far is fantastic. (I laughed out loud when walking by a radio in-game and a newscaster voice went “Have love potions ruined dating?! These 20-somethings tell all!”)
My advice, hit up !deadlock, get an invite, and just give it a try. The way it’s looking, it might turn out my favorite game of all time.
There’s a third person mod for it if that style of gameplay would suit you better.
It’s an absolute masterpiece, but it requires your active attention. You have to put the pieces it gives you together, or you won’t get that expansive “more than the sum of it’s parts” effect that really good art can do.
Higher framerates only in part improve the experience due to looking better, they also make the game feel faster because what you input is reflected in-game that fraction of a second sooner.
Increasing framerate while incurring higher latency might look nicer for an onlooker, but it generally feels a lot worse to actually play.
Is it really like that for you? Does the same thing happen with books, movies, TV? Should they have an “option”?
I have absolutely no trouble immersing myself into Aloy, Lara Croft, Jesse (Control), Red (Transistor), Bayonetta, Faith (Mirror’s Edge), and others.
Like, the character not being the same gender as me, doesn’t even register as an obstacle for inhabiting them. I’m able to mentally become them in literally the exact same way I do any other protagonist.
Since, it’s not like I need to be the same as someone in order to see the world through their perspective.
The opposite, the less they are like me, the greater the chance I’ll get to experience something from outside my own lived experience. And I like that.
I’m with women in that they should have representation in games (and stories in general), but even just for myself I’m cheering this particular progression on for the sheer variety it brings.
In fact, if anything, I try to be sensitive to when I start to burn out on a game, and when that happens I avoid playing until the desire is really strong again.
Sometimes looking for something to play means having a LARGE number of false starts before I find the thing, but I make a note of not trying a bunch of similar games whenever something isn’t scratching the itch. I make each attempt with something very different.
And coming back to a game can take years.
That’s kind why you need a TON of games if you don’t want to take breaks from gaming entirely, because otherwise the medium just doesn’t have enough variety to keep the human brain engaged.
You should try shorter games, and completely ignore whether something is “big” enough to be worth your time. The big stuff is what’s boring you right now, so don’t waste time on trying to force the enjoyment.
Plus, if you’re restricting yourself to stuff that achieves critical acclaim, you’re limiting yourself to games everyone likes. That means you’re probably missing some stuff only you and people like you would like.
Not all good things are enjoyed by everyone universally, some things are just for a subset of people.