By December things get dramatic. Nanako, the protagonist 7 years old niece, gets kidnapped. Her father and protagonist’s uncle gets badly injured chasing the suspect. Fog descends on the town. After being rescued, Nanako dies in the hospital.
Unfortunately, that’s where the game starts to get annoying too. In order to get the true ending, you need to pick not obvious dialogue lines, such as “I don’t know about that”, while the gang discusses if they should lynch Nanako’s kidnapper by throwing him into the TV World.
Teddy disappears, but Nanako recovers. Turns out that the first two victims where kidnapped by someone else. And Nanatame, the suspect, was throwing people into the TV World because he believed they’d be safe there from the real killer.
The problem with those investigation mechanics is that there are long dialogs preceding them. And if you fail, you get one of the bad endings, and endless credits, so I just end up restarting the game every time that happens. And I don’t remember 20 characters by their Japanese names, so that did happen.
Category: PS4
I don’t mind school kids fighting demons inside the TV. But a schoolkid detective helping the police is a bit too much for me. Although that’s as a staple as a TV idol coming to a small town and falling for the protagonist. Detective Conan and all that. Although people tend to forget that Detective Conan was an adult trapped in kid’s body.
But I must admit, the plot twist that Naoto is actually a girl dressing like a boy because otherwise people wouldn’t take her seriously is a good one. And they even managed to tell that story convincingly, instead of going for “you just need gender surgery!”
Categories
Persona 3 Reload
Discovered that unlike Persona 4, which is a port with a few enhancements, Persona 3 was completely remade on PS4, apparently using Persona 5 engine.
It’s unlikely that will ever play this version, though, despite not remember much about the original game. I do remember that the choice of companions annoyed me immensely: a kid, a dog and a robot, to name a few.
Getting a triple boss in a dungeon for the first time is fun. Getting the same triplets for the third time… not so much.
Speaking of fun, the story bosses drop junk, but the Treasure Goblin dropped an actually useful bow that randomly creates a pool of poison, and while you’re standing in that pool, your poison attacks are free. Finally a mechanic that is not just about shooting monsters in their faces.
Elias is supposed to be some kind of a villain, and he certainly gets a lot of people killed, but for a good reason, it seems? He’s cullying humanity, because invasion is inevitable. So only the strong will survive to fight the demons. Makes sense to me.
By September maximized my relationship with Yosuke, which has double benefits: the character gets their ultimate persona to use in battle, and you get one of the ultimate personas to fuse.
The best storyline so far is by Yumi, a girl that tries to reconcile with her dying father whomlwft her family for another woman:
On a schooltrip we meet Chihiro from Persona 3, who’s now in her final year. Which means that the game is set a year or two after the events of Persona 3. I haven’t thought before that those games even happen in the same universe.
I was completely blown by the fact that they have special portraits for when the party gets drunk in a nightclub.
A third body is discovered: sleazy homeroom teacher of the protagonist. This is surprising, since he never appeared on TV, unlike all the other victims, and apparently wasn’t even thrown into the TV-world. But then as the characters point out, since they managed to rescue the last three potential victims, the killer has decided that simply throwing them into the TV-world is not efficient anymore.
Another twist is that Teddie is not only able to come out of the TV-world, but also acquires a human shape in the human world.
The game tries to convince us that the killer is Mitsuo, a creepy teenager that approached Yukiko at the very start of the game.
His dungeon is literally a 80s JRPG dungeon, with pixelated walls, and the endboss is that cubic hero character. This boss is much harder that previous ones, attacking twice each turn.
Second big dungeon is a men-only public bathhouse. Kanji is a though guy that is struggling with his homo/bi sexuality. A bold theme for a JRPG for teenagers.
After the rescue, Yosuke keeps making jokes about his uncertain sexuality throughout the game:
The next victim is Rise, a local teenage popstar. Her dungeon is a strip-club, because she gets to expose too much of her working as a model. And the boss is literally a huge pole-dancer.
The fight while not difficult in itself, turns out to be a double-boss battle, as Teddie discovers he also has a persona. This is interesting. Aegis from Persona 3, a cyborg, was given personality in order to acquire a Persona.
That’s my second or even third time trying to play Persona 4. It’s not bad or anything, just long.
The only bit that annoys me is the fact that character mouths are not moving.
The premise is that people start to get sucked into their TVs at night, where they have to face their Shadow, the dark self. And if they die, they die in the real world too.
The problem with the game is same as Persona 3. And honestly, with most shin Megami Tensei games. When your entire combat system is built around exploiting enemy weakness with magic, once you run out of mana, it becomes boring. And since characters are designed to compliment each other, once one character runs out of SP, you may as well end the run. Although SP recovery items seem a little less of a problem than in PS4 version than in the original PS2 release.
Completed Nier Replicant.
As I already mentioned, OST of Nier is something else:
Being grown up means mostly you revisit same locations again, and with the Junkyard, I think even twice.
Some of those are better, like the Octopus Girl boss.
https://youtu.be/0dZfR-LhLO0Some of them are meh, like the Wolf boss.
Devola and Popola, the town major and her twin sister, turn out to be evil witches. And everyone turns out to be android, while the Shades are the real humans. This is all explained in a sneaky burst of images at the very end of the game. Not a real surprise, as the subtitle of the remake is “Replicant”. Akin to “The Island”, the plan was for people souls to return into the android “shells” after the pandemic is over, but souls turned into monsters, while shells developed conscience and rejected their owners.
There are 4 more endings, achieved by playing the second half of the game 3 more times, and then the entire game again from the start. But I think I’ll stop there. It’s great the Nier has a sane difficulty: unlike Bayonetta or Revengeance, nor like Souls games, not once I wanted to break my gamepad while playing it for 20 hours. But I played it for 20 hours, and I think that’s quite enough. No amount of post-irony and self-humor about boring dungeons and quest can hide the fact that those are indeed boring.
A game makes a timejump 5 years. Timejumps aren’t new: Ocarina of Time pulled it, Breath of Fire 2 pulled it too. But I still respect every game that manages to do it properly. This one does.
Now our hero isn’t a teenager anymore, although that makes him resemble Dante now much more. I was also wondering why the game mentiones that the sword you find are “one-handed”, since they all were one-handed. This is why. As an adult, the protagonist can also weild two-handed swords. Nice.
Emil, the kid that is able to petrify with his stare, discovers that his mansion has a laboratory underneath (another Resident Evil reference), and there his sister, turned into a huge monster, is kept. And he was given his capabilities to stop her. The game perspective switches to 2.5D isometric ARPG-like for a while.
The siblings merge, Emil receives magic abilities, but now looks like a skeleton, a miniature version of his sister. I always thought that the skeleton on the cover is Grimoir Weiss personified.
With that, Kaine is un-petrified, and the monster she held sealed finally beaten.
Categories
Nier Replicant
The music in this game is something else, I must admit. Having vocals is not something many games try to pull out.
Bad mouthed Kaine is sure a good comic relief.
With her, we travel to a Sand City that has thousands of rules. Obviously the dungeon / temple puzzles are also based around following bizarre rules: no jumping in one room, no running or using magic in another.
And suddenly the game turns into a text adventure.
And then it mocks Resident Evil with its mansion and keys.
There we meet and kill Red Book, that doesn’t speak, though, and a boy, Emil, that can petrify with his gaze.
Then the village gets attacked. This episode is seriously technically impressive, with that huge boss chasing the hero:
We try to fend it off, but Kaine has to be sacrificed, turned into stone, to seal one of the Shades, and a dark twin of a protagonist appears alongside Grimoire Noir, which we were about to start chasing. Noir explains that it must unite with Weiss to bring Shades upon the world, but Weiss refuses. Still, protagonist gets stabbed, and Yona stolen by the Shadowlord.
After beating all three installments, I decided to try and play against human opponents.
First, even though I already paid for the console and the game, I had to subscribe to PS Plus. Without it, the multiplayer just doesn’t work.
And then… there are no opponents. For the whole evening, I had just two matches with a single opponent. That beat me twice. And the lags were abysmal. For the next evening, I had one opponent, that got disconnected after the first match. I have a feeling I won’t be extending my subscription to PS Plus.
Story wise, there are two siblings, one of which, Yonah, is sick with some curse. Her brother finds a talking White Book, that is supposed to heal her, if he finds the Black Book. This is all set in a post apocalyptic world that fell into Middle Ages
I tried to play the original Nier back in the day on Xbox360. The English version protagonist was a middle aged man, Yonah father. Then when the remake came out I discovered that in the Japanese version it was always Yonah’s brother, a teenager.
Most interesting part of the game is the camera work. Usually it’s just a free 3rd person view. But sometimes it would switch to a sidescroller, or a top down view.
The gameplay is quite boring, that’s why I dropped it the first time. It’s a mix of ARPG and slasher mechanics. It’s interesting though, that the game has some selfawareness. At one point, Weiss asks the hero what he thinks about the stupid errands everyone gives him. At another point, the hero asks why a girl he meets is wearing just a lingerie: a common fantasy trope for sure.
Changed my build to be more poison and traps oriented. That gives me a bit more satisfaction and smugness, as you can win before enemy even knows it: neat feature shows you if the enemy will eventually die from your poison or not.
After reaching level 35, “orange” drop rate improves a lot. Funny though that those legendaries still get quickly outpaces with the yellow-rare drops. The main difference between “rare” and “legendary” being either effect when player is hit or some bonus to cooldowns. Strange that rares have some unique names, but “oranges” are often just generic “bumpy helm of greater might”.
Strangely, they managed to screw up the fight with Andariel. Andariel, the treat of Diablo 2, the sight of her monstrous body! Now, you barely see her. Seriously, it’s a shotout fight. She shots at you from across the screen, then dies. I’m not even sure what she looks like.
By level 43 or so I finally got a horse. A horse makes traveling easier, and feels a bit like Legend of Zelda with its “boost carrots”. Here you can also gallop it 3 times in a row. Anyway, since all monsters are basically the same, horse allows speeding up by them, which is great.
Now I’ve beaten all three versions of Street Fighter 3 with Yun. The easiest is probably 2nd Impact, as Gill is not even the last boss (Yun’s brother, Yang is), and he doesn’t have the nasty resurrect.
You can also see how the game becomes more “barebone”, as new characters are added. First background quality degrades with 2nd Impact, then with 3rd Strike there are no win screens anymore.
I’ve been trying to “get” Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike many times, maybe since 2004 when it was first emulated. But it took me an hour in a real arcade to finally start to understand it.
The 30th Anniversary Collection is probably the best version for a couple of reasons. First, it has a training mode, something most of the original games lacked.
And I’m actually impressed by its “arcade” filter, which turned out to be pretty close to the real arcade.
The character I picked this time is Yun. Not because he’s considered one of the strongest characters by the experts: I’m too dumb to use his juggling abilities. But because his basic attacks are very strong.
This time I even managed to beat Gill. The boss has a nasty ability to ressurect himself with full health, if he has a full meter when downed. Even if you manage to survive his comeback, he usually wins with a timer. So, I won with a timer as well 😝
Something I didn’t expect is that I’d have the most success with Rogue, out of the three classes I tried until now. Rogue has the same concept of two weapons slots the barbarian has, but in her case it’s for ranged and dual-wield set of weapons.
The class mechanics are what you’d expect: homing arrows, barrage of arrows, imbuing arrows with elements. But with her I didn’t die once yet. With barbarian: many times.
I’m at level 24, ending of Act I, and I’m seeing an “orange” item for the first time just now. How times have changed since Diablo 3…
Are we dealing with a dysfunctional family again? I think we’re dealing with dysfunctional family again. First we had Adria who sacrificed her daughter.
Now we have Lilith and that Angel who killed his son the goth-necromancer because anger management and prophecies, and now mommy is angry.
Seeing Vigo as Knight Penitent after playing Blasphemous is… strange. I’m not sure if the reference is intentional, but it is quite obvious.
They certainly took a lot from MMORPGs. Diablo 3 was mostly linear. Here, every village has a bunch of quests for you. And since everything is leveling up with you anyway, it doesn’t matter much which village you start with.
Interesting aspect of playing as the barbarian is that your weapon mastery grows with use, not with your level. That’s different from any other Diablo game I remember, where everything, and I mean everything, was tied to your character leveling up.
I of course build a Whirlwind barbarian. Luckily, this skill is available as soon as level 3. And in the meantime, it’s a lot of fun, mowing hordes on mobs.
Surprising that the first area is very Slavic. Less surprising after the success of Witcher, of course, but still, names like Fedor, and areas like Zeleny Lowlands or enemies like Volkodlak.
After another 45 minute wait for yet another 4GB patch that should have been downloaded in 15 minutes, I finally launched the game.
It does feel a lot like Path of Exile, which I always found incredibly boring. When the skill tree has a search button. At least characters wear pants, though.
I usually play as Crusader/Paladin, but for the lack of such, decided to give Necromancer a try. Nice that they give you 4 skeletons right away. No need to slowly build your army anymore, it seems.
The main mechanic from Diablo 3 remained the same: use Signature Skill to build Essence, use other skills to kill everyone, repeat. Better than spamming a single skill from Path of Exile, I guess.
Then, I decided to give a Barbarian a try, and strangely, I enjoying it much more than I’d expect. Funny thing about Barbarian is that she had 4 weapon slots. One for bludgeoning two handed, one for slashing two handed, and two for dual-wield weapons. And her skills work in such a way that she uses the right weapon for each job.
What I like about console versions of Diablo 3 is that they work completely offline, both on Switch and PS4. No such luck with Diablo 4, unfortunately.
The game won’t even show menu without internet connection.
So, I had to download latest system firmware.
Then I had to set up PSN account.
Then download 12GB update.
I wasted an hour, and didn’t play Diablo 4 at all this evening.