Played around 20-30h (I wasn't keeping count) of Baldur's Gate 3. There's good stuff there, but man, waiting for the full game to release is going to be a trial unto itself now. There's that and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous next year, so yeah, hopefully they don't release in the same month, because that's gonna split my playtime something fierce. But given that Kingmaker wasn't really playable at launch or even the months that followed after, maybe I won't have to worry.

 

So Ghost of Tsushima dropped a new content patch about a week ago, allowing for new game+ and, the big feature, the new Legends mode, which is effectively coop/horde mode.

The basic story premise is "Mongols cut a deal with demons, so the ghosts of the fallen samurai rise up to defend the island". Each player plays one of four classes, samurai for melee focus, hunter good ranged focus, assassin for stealth focus, and ronin for support and disruption focus. You then take your kit into either a story mission with one other player or a survival mission with 3 other players and fight your way through demon Mongols for a while.

Each mission gives you loot that most classes can equip and you hop on the treadmill doing higher and higher difficulty missions, with commensurately more powerful loot, until you get strong enough for the "Nightmare" missions, which is the closest thing to end game it's got. At least until the raid comes out on Halloween.

I've put a good 6-8 hours into it since it's come out, and it's a really good time. Anyone else been poking around at it or interested at all?

 

Anybody here interested in Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory? I tried the demo, and feel like it'll be a fun little rhythm game.

Of course, I'm a huge KH fan to begin with, so I'm biased as hell anyway.

 

Sounds really fun, I think I'll wait until PS5 to fuck with it though.

Every day I look at my PS4pro with more and more disgust lol..

Clarification. What do you mean you take your character into story missions? Is it NG+? Or is every quest open on the world map at once? Is the world changed in any way? Is the world cut out entirely and it's more like Nioh where you select missions from a menu?

 

Neither. The Legends mode does not have an open world at all. It has it's own, completely separate story that you access through a menu, picking the level you want to do (or doing a "quickplay" option that puts you in a random level) with its own set of mechanics and modifiers. The pithy summary of the story is "Mongols are working with not-funny Aku, and the spirits of dead samurai rise up to stop it". It's a series of 8 or 9 missions, each one broken into 3 distinct chapters.

A chapter is a combat arena lifted from the base game (e.g., a village, a mongol war camp, a mountain pass, etc) and you get an objective to accomplish in that arena. It's pretty much always "kill all of the mongols in this area", but each level has its own unique twist to spice things up. For example, one level has some of the mobs paired together, and if you don't kill them at the same time, they revive and heal to full. Another level has special mobs that have big auras that rapidly heal any enemies within them, so you gotta kill them first then worry about the other mobs. Etc, etc. You and your partner go through all three chapters, dealing with the unique mechanics, and then get loot for the number of chapters you made it through.

Each mission also has 3 tiers of difficulty, and once you get above the first one, all of the special effects become random modifiers. So if you do a mission above the lowest difficulty, you get up to 3 additional special effects on top of that level's own effects. So you could have paired mobs along with the aura dudes, or a big horde of demon dogs and enemies that you can't damage until you run over to a shrine with the matching color and channel on that for a couple seconds, etc. There's a lot of replayability to it, and I'm enjoying it a hell of a lot.

Oh and before I forget, the whole story, and the survival modes, is narrated by Japanese!Uncle Iroh, who gives running commentary on how you handle the mongols/demons, on top of narrating the story beats.

 

That sounds pretty great ngl.

 

FF16 is looking blander and blander with every new glimpse.

https://na.finalfantasyxvi.com/world/

 

Not gonna lie, I'm reading this and every other paragraph makes me go "Yup, this is a Yoshi P game alright". I'm on board with it, as I really enjoy FF14's story content, but I have zero expectations of it being innovative or exploratory with the lore and the world.

That said, given how fucking awful 4 of the last 5 final fantasy games have been, largely because the design team kept getting lost up their own ass, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

 

No Nomura is all I needed to know.

 

You're not.

Completed it twice on Xbox then got the Royal Edition when I switched to PS4 and completed it again.

 

I enjoyed 15. It wasn't the best story, the 'bros on a road trip' dynamic was not as charming as they thought it was going to be, and there really needed to be better female characters, but everything else was pretty great.

 

I liked 15. The scars left from all the cut content were very visible, though, and I felt constantly reminded of the game it could have been if only they had finished making it all.

 

You'd have had your better female characters in the full game. Altissia and everything re Highwind were very obviously cut. Ugh, that's why 15 frustrates me so much! It had all the components to be incredible but it was handled so poorly that they had to scrounge whatever they had up to recoup their losses.

Seriously, how Nomura still has a job I'll never fucking know. I dunno what Japanese people have to do to lose their jobs tbh...

 

Not enough main story, with far too many fetch quests/hunts/other fillers thrown in to pad the game out and mask the general lack of actual plot content. So basically, pretty par for the course with most modern RPG's I've played. I gave 15 one run through and never touched it again after. Certainly never gave a thought to shelling out for DLC.

I also didn't think Noctis was a very good MC. Kind of a whiny brat, and that really stood out due to the fact that two of the main companions were grown adults who acted the part. I get that this was intentional, but that doesn't make it good or enjoyable.

 

Honestly the biggest what the fuck thing about 15 was when they moved Nomura over to KH3 they put in charge a guy who doesn't like action games.... when 15 was an action game. As for how Nomura still has his job... well because they know they can work that man to death. He's currently doing the next normal KH game, FF7R2 and I don't think has had a break since Final Fantasy Versus 13 was announced. Plus since the Diretor of FF15 left (Tabata? whatever) I... don't think they have but Nomura and Yoshi-P at the moment. Oh and the Bravely Default and mobile teams I suppose.

 

15 was alright, but the combat was infuriatingly bad, with terrible camera, clunky controls, and a weird central conceit. The rest of the game ranged from mediocre to actually pretty great (except for the fact that the game clearly expected the audience to have watched that anime or whatever they made about the setting/story), but the combat was just shit through and through.

 

I enjoyed what I played of XV, but I will always lament the loss of Versus XIII. I was really liking where that was going.

Seems like KH will resurrect some of those ideas though.

 

I personally loved XV, specifically the bros on the road aspects. I really appreciated the bonding and interpersonal connections. I do agree, it needed more female character involvement.
For the ending, it helped that I've spent too much time playing VIII, XIII, and watching Evangelion and other anime where the ending makes little sense.

 

Reading the character descriptions (Clive is 15, Joshua is 10, Jill is 12), we're definitely looking at a two time period game, yes? We see the young protagonists, get to play as them, then tragedy strikes and fast forward to the grizzled mid-20s/30s Clive we see in the trailers?