Forum Overview :: What Are You Playing Right Now? :: This is what happens when you ask AI to think for you

[quote name="Rafiki"]I didn't say "the Dark Souls of JRPGs," I said "Dark souls <b><u>as</u></b> a JRPG." Take Dark Souls, replace real-time combat with turn-based combat, and replace a vague suggestion of a story with a less vague but cryptic actual story and you have Clair Obscur. It's also not as relentlessly difficult. There are some hard fights, yes, but if you stick to the main story, the fights are quite reasonable. I reached act 3 of the story, and while it took an admittedly unexpected turn it left me being VERY ANGRY at what <i>might</i> be a really stupid premise that undermines any reason to give even half a fuck about what's happening. But because the turn was unexpected, I'm willing to see it through to the end in case I'm wrong. But rather than do nothing but shit on the game, let's talk about some positive things. Despite the combat being derivative, I still liked it enough to put 39.3 hours into it. Every game in the universe implementing From Software's dodge and parry system is wearing on me <i>a little</i>, but I can't bitch too much when I'm willing to repeatedly throw myself into literal 15 minute<sup>1</sup> boss battles 9 times and then immediately jump into the next one. Overcoming the difficult fights in this game give me that feeling of mastery and not the Super Meat Boy-like feeling of flubbing my way through something exhaustingly punishing. The art direction is fucking gorgeous. It is, once again, clearly inspired by Souls', et. al. heavy emphasis on vistas, but whereas the Souls games use dreary, muted color schemes to craft a bleak world, Clair Obscur isn't afraid to use bright, bold, striking colors and big, bright, sunny lighting while still managing to establish a bleak, crumbling world. You can pretty much turn the camera in any direction at just about any orientation and it'll be worthy of a screenshot. The sound effects of attacks landing have a nice punchy bass to them. The music is fine. That sounds bad, but I'll probably never listen to a video game OST (except maybe Shadow of the Colossus). I still have the music and sound turned on as opposed to muting everything and putting on a podcast or whatever, so positive! Turn-based combat instead of real-time, I think, makes the game more accessible. You don't have to worry about being offensive or defensive, baiting and luring enemies, or watching the terrain so you don't roll off of a cliff or get boxed into a corner. <sup>1</sup> This might be my fault. I reached a point where the game informed me that I just recently I unlocked the ability to do uncapped (I guess?) damage and this was after I did some ridiculously long (optional) boss fight. [/quote]