The NEW Game Journal

[Ranadiel]

ME3 - Doing a bunch of stuff on the citadel.

I have to ask - why would they make so much effort to pain Cerberus in shades of grey in ME2 and make them so cartoonishly evil in ME3?

Change of direction? Budget constraints taking out Cerberus related options?(no insider info just random speculation) Because ME3 was horribly thought out in many regards? Bad writing? Because they thought it would be funny? To troll Cerberus fans? Take your pick the answer is probably one or more of those.

[Draak]

ME3 - Doing a bunch of stuff on the citadel.

I have to ask - why would they make so much effort to pain Cerberus in shades of grey in ME2 and make them so cartoonishly evil in ME3?

It's even weirder if you consider that in ME1 they were evil incarnate. The writers couldn't make up their mind.

Speaking of Mass Effect, I gave in and bought the Citadel DLC. It's silly, cheesy, packed full with fanservice and awkwardness, but who cares? It was fun. The villain was better than the Cereal Killer too. Well, the bar was pretty low to begin with, but still...

Not sure if it's worth to get the remaining DLC though. Probably not.

[GrimReality]

Started up Tomb Raider last night. Man, that poor woman sure goes through a lot in the first 15 minutes alone.
The game looks pretty darn slick, and has a great presentation.
I haven't gotten to any actual combat situations yet, so can't comment there.
Looking through the item screens shows a LOT of things to find, which I like.
I notice Lara gets xp as well. It seems almost every game nowadays takes the good from rpgs, and leaves the rest. I'm cool with that, as I don't have time for traditional rpgs anymore.

[Wild Armor]

Been playing The Last Remnant non-stop for the past two weeks. This game is unforgiving...it practically made me a more patient person playing it. I normally don't save often when I play games, so when I died the first couple of times (sometimes to simple monsters), I was a bit upset. Now after two weeks, I save a little bit more (still not as often as you would think) and when I die, I am unaffected by it (Unless it was because of the move "Curse", which is the DUMBEST thing EVER).

What I love about the game is having various squads--or unions--of characters you give orders to by general statements rather than being specific. I've always enjoyed controlling mobs, but not getting to micro-managing-y. Also, I actually like the main character (I mean, he bluntly pats the Marquis and calls him Dave, practicing no etiquette whatsoever).

Not going to lie...the Frog-Rabbit people are adorable (I want three).

[Annubis]

Funny to hear that, since I think the opposite. I wish I had more control to manage units in TLR instead of just those math.random
Random skill growth, stat growth, semi random weapon growth, random orders...
I switched the main guy to a caster from twin sword because the game decided to give me INT at level ups even though I was melee-ing all the time.
Worst is there's a good number of classes for the hero and it's hard to even get the one you'd want. Add some bugs in there too that can screw you up or even stop you from class advancing.

Some later bosses and the extra bosses in that game are just fucking cheap.
Auto-counter, act twice a turn, auto kill unit on hit (wish for a parry) boss ? Totally fair bro...

[MeshGearFox]

Annubis, which version did you play?

[Annubis]

The superior PC version.

[MeshGearFox]

You can influence which orders come up in combat by selectively disabling skills, from what I remember. Party composition also affects that, as does the amount of MP? or whatever on hand an battle length (or morale, maybe). It's not really THAT random from what I saw but there are a lot of factors affecting it so it's not necessarily predictable unless you intentionally limit what a party can do.

Meanwhile I have no idea how stat gains are supposed to work because Square's been hiring meth addicts to write their manuals for the last decade and a half. IIRC though, Rush is supposed to be innately geared towards favoring axes, so I'm really wondering why he was getting INT for you. Wonder if certain equipment or formations effect stat growth?

I'd check but I'm not in the mood to play something fiddly right now. I think Solatorobo is about the speed of my mind is am work right now.

[Wild Armor]

You can influence the skill outcome to a certain degree, granted you have to have enough AP to execute special skills if that is your aim. From what I've seen, it's broken into a couple A LOT of executions. Here are a couple

1. Attack - No special, so AP is raised)
2. Specials 1 - Use some specials/weaker specials mixed with attacks)
3. Specials 2 - Use better specials but not the best, even if you have the AP to spare)
3. Specials 3 - Go All out with guns blazing ( I believe the choice/leader says, 'Give it your all!' but don't quote me on that).
4. Evocations (Use magic attacks)
5. Heal - Characters heal by means of Magic or items, but characters go into standby (no action taken that round)
6. Heal & Attack - Heal and attack
7. Yellow Text Prompt - Use a character's special attack. I believe this uses up all the union's AP.
8. Standby - Standby.

These are just a couple of the options you can get out of the myriad of choices when fighting. However, once you throw in Critical Triggers (pressing the button that appears on the screen at just the right time), then forget about: WILD CARDS FOR EVERYONE! Actually...unless you master the critical triggers--which isn't hard when you discover that the button choices aren't as random as you think--you might as well shut the game off and sell/trash it. The Critical Trigger literally is the Wild Card that can turn the tides of a battle when things seem hopeless (and they will feel it when you are ambushed by a 4 monster linked battle like I have...frequently).

I think what might frustrate players even more about battles is that even though you see only three enemies on screen, that does not represent the amount of enemies you will fight in battle. As the hero of the game, Rush, represent a full armada of soldiers/leaders, the same can be said of opponents. That 4-linked ambushed i mentioned above? Yeah? Try 15-20 monsters (5 groups of 3/ 6 groups of 3 + 1 group of 2) in battle, all attacking your two squads in the earlier stage of the game with morale at zero. They all decide to attack and take down a squad's leader? Leads to a botch (the game's way of saying the squad is running around with their heads cut off, AKA can't give them orders).

Never be Reckless.
Never be Greedy.

But you know what? It's that this game isn't going to hold your hand that I love it so much. I actually feel a little hopeless some battles, like I'm feeling what it must feel like for enemies when I come towering into battles and winning, getting my 2 exp, 1 gold and moving on to the next fight. I've Game Over-ed at least 15 times...but I'm still coming back.

Also, leveling is completely random. During a run of the game, a couple of my skills upgraded, but I died and had to restart. Went through the same motions and fought the same enemies using the same tactics, but did not get those upgrades back. There cannot be a logical system in play if my motions were near identical to the last (Alright, I admit I circled a monster like duck-duck-goose before I encountered it). There's definitely a random element to leveling/skills.

[MeshGearFox]

For the record, from my understanding a lot of players just put Critical Trigger on auto. I had to because I get just enough input lag in battles to screw it up.

I thought it was funny that the manual never explains what the unique stat each character has does. In reality, it's really simple -- stat name indicates, roughly, what their AI package is, and the higher the stat is, the better the odds that they'll make a good choice when reassessing mid-battle. Incredibly simple thing. Manual doesn't mention this. And it's not a big deal, but it's useful. Like for Heal, instead of a character going on standby, they might be all HM I SHOULD KILL DUDES if their special stat is high enough/appropriate for that.

[Wild Armor]

There's incredible lag with the Critical Trigger from time to time, but I've hardly had any trouble with it (sometimes the lag helped me nail some of the Critical Triggers). But yes, the player can turn on auto-trigger in case lag really gets in the way or if they want to take away some of the battle participation from the player. I prefer to keep it on manual for the adrenaline rush when playing.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that about stanby. Standby acts more of a situational trigger to be turned on if certain conditions are met--such as their specialty in class and skills. Just had a quick run in the game a couple of mins ago and had one of my unions standby two turns. The first standby was a healing one, where they ran to the aid of another union in case things got risky. I chose standby again, but was targeted by an enemy union, which everyone switched to attack (regardless of being on standby for healing), and used specials that matched their specialty. I think what I really appreciate during raidlocks is that even after terminating a union, if you had healing actions left, they will continue regardless. What's even more interesting is that if you have 2 or more healing in effect after the union termination, if your union's health is raised close to full/near full health, the rest of the healing actions will turn to standby, so you don't waste items/AP.

Maybe I should record some of the gameplay to show how ridiculous it gets...

[Annubis]

Here's my 2 cents from a caster hero. The spell Caustic Blast is incredible. It's so-so on solo bosses, but if you hit a union with one, you'll pretty much explode them. If 2-3 unions are close together, you can hit them all too. While Blackout is the superior spell, this one is a lot easier to pull.

[Lard]

I'm *shocked* at how many bugs there are for missions in ME3.

Jesus, was this made by Bethesda?

[Akanbe-]

Kara palms elude me.

SMT: SH - Tire factory boss was kinda difficult.  There was probably some trick with Nemissa that I wasn't doing right, but I kept dying.  I just said fuck it and turned down the difficulty.  I don't know what to do with all the different things you can do with your demons.  Trade them, turn them into swords, get items from them.  Just fight for me man (though the swords do look like they could be useful).

[MeshGearFox]

http://www.ign.com/faqs/2003/chrono-trigger-walkthrough-437178 Based on section 5-C in this, it looks like a lot of the dual techs really AREN'T doing anything but just adding the damage from the component skills :T

That sort of confirms my long-standing suspicion that combos were generally pointless in CT, especially when you start getting combos that would hit the damage cap, but where doing the component techs separably wouldn't hit the cap and thus do more damage.

I do wonder if Level Zero rebalanced that any.

Anyway, still working on the second boss in Dawn of Ys. I have the attack pattern down but you don't have a lot of room to maneuver so actually pulling it off is hard.

Also played Solatorobo a bit. Cleared the early sidequests in Airedale and the arena ship (almost lost to the last battle there wtfffff?), on Spinon now.