Check out @OhBollox creation for Heat in the Actual Table thread if you haven’t seen it already.
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I started Fell Seal. It’s the closest to a proper FFT clone I have seen in a long while. More so even than the FFTA games. Early in but hopeful it has the goods.
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Do tell me if it is still good later on. For me only Tactics Ogre has that FFT-itch covered. I have fewer problems finding good Fire Emblem lookalikes/playalikes than good FFT clones.
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Sure thing! I was always a bit lukewarm for TO, both the original (which took me years to finish because of the dull grind that was Hell’s Gate) and the wonky but creative PSP remix. Probably my favorite non-FFT games along those lines were Front Mission 1 and 3, along with Jeanne d’Arc.
So far, it’s still got the goods. Characters are a bit two-dimensional, but the writing is good, and the job system is clearly very deep. Ability learning, jobs/missions, and all like that are not only directly inspired by FFT but improved upon in some areas. This could be a Sea of Stars for the SRPG crowd.
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That.
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Yup. It was a gem.
I also really liked Suikoden Tactics.
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Brings back memories, both of those!
A couple of new purchases from the Steam Winter Sale:
Grapple Dog: 2-D platformer in which, shockingly, the main character is a dog with a grappling hook. The platforming evokes the best of the Mario side-scrollers, while the grappling hook reminds me of Bionic Commando, the NES game I probably completed the most times.
Soulstone Survivors: Damn you, @kennfusion, for dragging me into this game. It really is a great survivors-like, with so much stuff to unlock. Feels way more polished than VS was during its early access phase.
Got a couple of other games (Moonring, which is free, and Shogun Showdown) that I haven’t sunk much time into yet. After all, why would I want to do something like “finish Cobalt Core” when I could just add four more games to my library?
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So I went through a flurry of new games recently and yet was just playing Path of Exile, so I decided to run through a bunch of them the past few days and figure out which I should put on the Steam Deck for this business trip I am going on tomorrow.
(yes, I could put them all on, I have the space, but I am trying to not bog down the steam deck with games I don’t really want to play while traveling).
I think the general theme of my first thoughts on these games (and some I only have like a half hour or so of playtime on, is impatience, which I have expressed a few other times recently.)
Cobalt Core - I get how movement of the ships is kind of a neat twist on the genre, but in one of my first battles, I came across a ship that moved every time I shot at it just about. And I only had one way to shoot and then move and then shoot again, and I had to get 3 exact cards in my hand at the same time, and the battle took like 30 minutes - and I quit after that. I will probably pick it up again in the future, but that really annoyed me.
Alina of the Arena - I liked this, it’s a mashup of like a deckbuilder and into the breach - the problem is that so is Inkbound, and Inkbound is way more polished - and it is still in EA. I will likely come back to Alina some day, but it is not high on my priority list to play.
Tainted Grail - As I wrote the other day, it has me wandering around a world for no reason other than to create some sense of tension, as you walk around some evil magical mist closes in on you and if you don’t keep your magic candles lit, you will die or go mad or something. It’s a Darkest Dungeon type mechanic, with the added unfuness of walking around an RPG landscape. In addition, the battle seemed out of scale, monsters had hundreds of hit points and can hit for high damage, but you can completely negate their hits with both stuns and blocks - so it just serves to drag the game out and make it seem like there is more depth.
ChronoArk - honestly, I fell asleep during the intro tutorial because it was so damn boring. And then I think I fell asleep again in some of the tutorial battles. (But maybe I was just tired, and I need to try this one again.)
Backpack Hero - I think this is my favorite of the bunch - You wander around a dungeon and have to fight monsters with items that are in your backpack, and filling your backpack is part of the fun as it is like a bunch of tetris shaped items and everything takes up limited space. Then as you go up in level, the backpack gets bigger and you get to decide how it expands. I started with the campaign mode, and there is a city building aspect to that it seems. But there is also a quickplay option. I like that even though you are walking around a dungeon, you don’t actually have to walk, you kind of just teleport anywhere in the dungeon as if you walked there.
Luck be a Landlord - Ok, I have played the hell out of this game on iOS, I am just about done there with my goal of 10 wins on all 20 levels now. But this came with the humble bundle and I wanted to try it on Steam and try some of the workshop mods. There are some nutty ones, but they actually kind of make the game fun in some ridiculous ways.
Fights in Tight Spaces - Ok, this one is a tactical deck builder that just oozes style and I really like it. It was easy and intuitive to pick up, and yet some challenge also. It also is a deckbuilder/Into the Breach mashup of sorts. My only gripe with the game is that on the main menu, they placed the DLC buy link over the Play button so that I have to think about what to click every time. I get why, but something about this decision is really rubbing me the wrong way.
Kingdomes of Amular, Re-Reckoning - It’s like an action combat RPG. It has been on my wish list forever. I was having fun with it for the most part through the tutorial areas until I got to level up and I selected some new skills and had no idea what they did after or how to use them, I thought I was getting a charge strike, but that is not what I think I got, and that just annoyed me and then I wondered if I made a bad choice right off and was that going to gimp me, and I did not feel like starting over, and so I closed the game.
There is an important point I want to make about that here. This is why I mostly stopped playing RPGs, which is what got me into computer gaming in the first place. Wizardry, Ultima, the Gold Box games, sure if you took a party of all clerics, you might not make it, but generally take a balanced party and you could finish a game. Today’s RPGs I am so worried of making the wrong decisions and making my game too hard for myself. This I think is why I have gravitated toward roguelikes and roguelites. Even in the 90s when I found Angband and Zangband, they provided that feeling that I could try and experiment and it did not matter as I was likely to die quickly and would have to start over anyway.
Poker Quest - Ok, this one seems neat and after the backpack hero, was probably my 2nd favorite of the group. I seriously love taking a simple understandable concept like poker and adding this type of depth to it. And I only put like an hour into it, but it seems that there will be a lot to uncover.
Astrea - I think I like this? I appreciate that it is both familiar and different at the same time. I kept misunderstanding what things did and don’t think i was picking my dice well but was doing ok on the first run, and I think this definitely is something I need to sink some time into. It has this whole concept of using dice to both help and harm you or your opponents that make for some very interesting tactical decisions.
Dave the Diver - This seemed like a lot of fun, I just got a feel for the diving part and then the restaurant part and then put it aside, but this was the 3rd favorite, and it seems like it might even have more potential.
DotAge - its a turnbased roguelike village builder. I have really wanted something like this for a while. My initial thoughts is that it is interesting how it plays, I think I like the general way you place workers and then let a turn play out. My problem with the game was that it had me build something during the tutorialish part of the game that it turns out I don’t need for a long time, and according to Reddit, is a “noob trap” building. And I know that because I was trying to figure out how to get value out of it, and then discovered the tread on Reddit that told me that I should not have listened to the game and wasted time and resources on building it. Those types of things frustrate me and get me to turn a game off. But I am likely to go back to this at some point.
And…that is what I have been playing 
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Is that game on any current platforms? Heard about it at times and would be curious to try it.
FITS is great.
Not that I know of.
Since we are talking SRPGs, has anyone played Tyrant’s Blessing on iOS? I know nothing of it other than screen shots.
I’ve been playing Cyberpunk for like 80 hours. The “semi-interactive movie” aspect is pretty good. Keanu phones it in a little, but I still love him. Male V’s actor is much better than the internet would have you believe. The actual game aspect is…not that good, but it’s good enough. Movement feels off. First person platforming and melee still suck as concepts for the most part. The city is annoying to get around, and the driving is some of the worst I’ve seen. Game just seems to love wasting my time with pointless bullshit, which I guess is just par for the modern AAA course. Still, I must be enjoying something about it because I keep coming back. It’s curiously addictive, a huge tube of gaming Pringles that doesn’t taste all that great but I can’t stop eating. It gets away with a lot thanks to good presentation.
But good god is this game the buggiest piece of shit I’ve played in fucking ages, like I can’t actually even remember another game that was this aggravating from a technical perspective, and I’m on console! Crashes, quests breaking, infinite saving, cloud save issues making the game not even boot…I’ve been able to work around them all but at this point I can’t imagine giving CDPR any more money for a game of theirs (I still buy the odd old thing on GOG). I had to rant about it somewhere it’s been so bad. And they’ve had three years to fix it up.
Also lol at a fair number of internet children not understanding why there’s so much “Japan stuff” in the game.
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It’s still buggy after all this time? Shame.
I might have the craziest reason ever for never having picked up this game (or any game, for that matter). I remember a report shortly around the original launch that there are dildos absolutely everywhere in this game. I was immediately out, not because I’m prude but because that one report gave me an immediate impression that they are trying waaaaaaay to hard to be adult/edgy/mature/whatever. I just rolled my eyes and moved on…
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Haha, well…there are a few in billboards for a specific in-universe show, but other than that I can’t recall seeing one.
One good reason not to pick it up is that advertising is constantly blasting almost everywhere, so even though I don’t know any current real life ad campaigns or slogans I often have the stupid ad taglines in this game pop into my head out of nowhere!
One thing that is neat is the amount of throwaway callbacks to previous missions there are. Like, optional stuff. It doesn’t amount to anything gameplay-wise, usually, but it really does make the game feel responsive in a way to your past actions.
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Haha, Christ, I just finished the DLC and had a bug hit me there, too. A different bug (or anyway what I consider a bug) had been annoying me for a while: the “I really want to stay at your house” quest, where the person you ban…uh, “romanced” comes over to your place, keeps coming up. I did it once, got it again, did it again and it was exactly the same. It came up again (and it leaves a notification of a quest message) so after hours of that notification I finally just said “ok fine, come to my place” and left it at that, since I figured it wouldn’t have any repercussions other than getting rid of the notification. Well, finish the DLC, credits start to roll, and presumably it behind the scenes transports you back to your apartment, because almost as soon as it starts the credits music stops and instead I hear Panam go, “who is that,” and then while the now silent credits sequence plays go, “uh, V?” and “well do you have any thoughts?” over and over instead of the music that should have been playing. Hilarious and so very emblematic of this game’s problems.
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Pretty sure you’re ruining the meme that cyberpunk is veritable ambrosia from the gods, and starfield is a bug and loading screen mashup.
We can all appreciate criticism here, but be careful out there in the wilds of the internet when saying this kind of thing
Is that a meme? I mean the subreddit is of course full of people who believe it can never fail, only be failed (if you are on PC, your PC is the problem; if you are on console, maybe your fans are blocked or the OS is corrupted), but I seem to recall the game getting panned for problems pretty aggressively when it came out.
Im not a fanatic, but I think the cyberpunk dlc coincided with the starfield release, so there was some obnoxious console war drama. Cyberpunk had a very rough release, Im pleased people are enjoying it now