Forum Overview :: What Are You Playing Right Now?

Metroid Dread, Dungeon Encounters, Yoku's Island Express by Rafiki 11/07/2021, 10:37pm PST Yoku MM is right, it's good. Pinball Metroidvania with Rayman art. Proceed if you're not bothered playing cutesy cartoon games as a grown-ass man. Dungeon Encounters I feel like I should hate this, but then I find myself playing it for 2 hour blocks at a time. I can't tell if it's actually any good, or it's something that appeals just enough to the OCD in me to sucker me in. If you've never heard of this game, it's a barebones turn-based RPG. Every element in the game, the player characters, the battle and magic system, items and inventory, exploration, the artwork, the music, etc. is reduced to the bare essentials to make a complete game. I'm not going to bother to deep dive into the all of the little details to set up my thoughts, because every review ever already perfectly explains all of the details. There's so little to explain it's impossible they left anything out. So if you want a deeper explanation of everything, just go read a proper review. Reviews keep saying that despite the simplicity it's surprisingly complex! It's not, really. Does an enemy have more magic or physical defense to start? Attack accordingly. Every party member can equip two attacks. You could, in theory, have a member with two melee attacks or two magic attacks, or one melee and one ranged. That would be incorrect and stupid, but you could do it. Instead, you'll just equip everyone with one physical and one magic attack so that you can maximize damage by never needing one or more people to sit out a turn or split damage between magic and physical. You'll also likely start prioritizing ranged weapons over melee weapons so everyone will always be able to do physical damage to flying creatures with low physical defense instead of wasting turns whittling down huge magic defense (see: damage maximization). There's no classes in the game, and no chance to even build specializations via stat points and the like. Everyone will always do the same damage with the same weapon or spell, there's no modifiers. By default, the game uses the Active Battle System so enemies will keep attacking if you're sitting around trying to make decisions. Generally, enemies are deadly enough that you don't want to fuck around and waste too much time because extra enemy turns will wipe your party, so it creates a need to act quickly. However, you can disable this in the options menu or disable this by just hitting the pause button. There's permanent status ailments that can't be cleansed in or out of combat by any kind of spell or inventory item, and instead can only be cleansed by finding a specific friendly tile that can heal them. Some ailments incapacitate party members and remove them from your party until they're healed. However, if you bother to explore you'll find permanent immunities to every single one before they have a chance to become a problem. Every black-numbered tile represents a group of monsters. You have a battle log that lists every number in the game and the potential monster make up of that tile. If you want, before you step on a monster tile, you can look up the group composition and then reequip your party accordingly. So far, up to floor 35, I just keep my party equipped with whatever weapons and spells create the biggest number. Exploration consists of running over every tile in the floor, which also includes clearing every possible battle. You'll pretty much want to clear every encounter so you don't fall behind in leveling and because monsters can drop really useful upgrades. You'll also want to clear every tile since clearing them on each floor rewards extra ability points that allow you to equip special abilities like healing spells, resurrection spells, and the aforementioned immunities. The overall benefit of clearing tiles so dramatically outweighs skipping them to get to the next floor sooner that there's no real sense in not doing it (and once you get to floors 30-39 there's literally no optional tiles). So there's this sort of illusion of depth and complexity but it all mostly still reduces down to the "hold down the attack button" level of gameplay that turn-based JRPGS have been criticized for since they were invented. In fairness I still have 60 floors to go, so maybe it somehow gets SUPER COMPLEX, but given the deliberate lack of combat options I suspect not. A lot of the potential challenge is optional. The active battle system can be ignored, you can optionally turn off displaying where monster tiles are located so you can blindly stumble upon them, and not clearing all tiles and monsters each floor is for min/maxing speedrunners on their 50th playthrough. Your healing and resurrection spells are limited to about 6 uses each, but healing and resurrection shrines with infinite uses are relatively common and eventually can become just a teleport spell away. So why will I keep playing it and probably finish it? I don't know. Slay the Spire is a better turn-based game by a mile with a better risk/reward "exploration" system. I would recommend that game over this any day. Maybe it's because clearing a single floor is straightforward and doesn't require a whole lot of time. Clearing a floor (I mean completely clearing) has such an obvious benefit to succeeding in the rest of the game that it doesn't feel like a waste of time. So you can knock out a floor in 15 minutes during a break and feel like you're actually making progress in the game instead of grinding a million random encounters or wandering some overworld getting nowhere. This would also probably count as a "chill game." If you need something to mindlessly plow through that checks all the boxes of what a game is, then here you go. Maybe. It's $30, so maybe wait until it's on sale. I guess I can also pretentiously appreciate it as kind of an educational guide on JRPG game design for amateurs. It strips away all the bullshit so you're left with nothing but a game board and game pieces and a minimal set of rules for how they interact. Additionally, everything in the game serves an actual functional purpose. Physical and magic attacks have direct and obvious uses in combat and you will most definitely use both through the end of the game. Exploring every tile isn't there to check off some 100% achievement (although there is a log of completion percentage of every floor), it is basically vital to success. Equipment and items have clear and obvious benefits to survival. Etc. In other words, every part of the game actually justifies its existence instead of padding things out or being some vestigial idea that should have been cut. Metroid Dread Is also good. It's a new side-scrolling Metroid, not a 3D one like Prime. Super Metroid is still the reigning champion of side-scrolling Metroids, but this one is pretty good. It's also hard. I died an embarrassing number of times on bosses. Part of that is because propping my foot up on my opposite knee is apparently enough to interfere with the bluetooth connection of these FUCKING joycons, creating infuriating lag, and the other is that I'm probably old and stupid. Like, seriously, I was making rookie mistakes that my 10-year old self would have found embarrassing. The other challenge is the new gimmick of the one-hit killbots. Think of it like Metroid crossed with Mr. X from Resident Evil 2. In certain parts of each area, unstoppable robots will hunt you down and if they find and catch you they will kill you in one hit. The loading screen recommends you run from them if they detect you, and for once the loading screen is not fucking around. I rolled my eyes and PSHed so hard when I first saw this "tip," but I died probably 50 times. A big chunk of that was me stubbornly trying to nail counter-attacking, but I eventually had to give up because the game just kicked my ass. If a killbot grabs you, you get TWO chances to counter-attack which will stun it so you can get away. You have to time counter-attacks perfectly, and the killbots telegraph the moment with a big yellow flash. Seems easy, except the timing of the flash is random and you have about half a millisecond to react when the flash occurs. It effectively turns into one of those reflex tests on the internet where you click a button as soon as the screen changes to measure how fast your reaction time is. I'm old and stupid so I succeeded exactly 3 times total out of 50+. Other than that, it checks all the appropriate Metroid boxes of exploration and power-ups to unlock new areas, and shooty jumpy parts. I thought the melee-counter ability was integrated well. I really hate the ledge-hang mechanic, though. It breaks up the flow of movement by bringing you to a dead stop. No, ASSHOLE, I did not want to grab onto that ledge and hang like a dumbass. I wanted you to vault up ONTO the ledge so that I could then jump off it, into the wall, off the wall, up onto the other ledge, and slide-kick through the tunnel into the next room. This is especially maddening when being chased by a killbot. Chases can be fucking thrilling while you're panicking and staying juuuuuust ahead of the killbot, jumping and flipping and wall-jumping and sliding, but then you grab onto a ledge, get caught, and die. Fuck you, ledge hang. This game also dips into a tiny bit of character building for Samus, demonstrating that they should have just left her a blank template for people to project whoever they wanted onto it. Sort of like what Tom Chick was talking about when he wrote that article about how Valve shouldn't have put Gordon Freeman's picture on the loading screen of Half-Life. I'm going to get up on my soapbox here, but fuck you, you have a back button. Metroid Other M already ruined establishing a backstory by being the most embarrassing thing ever, and further attempts to keep trying to build it out will almost assuredly Wookipedia it to death. Then you have to factor in that video game writers are mostly shit, and that Nintendo-hired video game writers are sub-fan fiction awful because their budget for story-telling is probably whatever is recovered with bottle and can refunds from the recycle bin in the breakroom. They would have been better off doing nothing. All the way back in 1986 they unintentionally created probably the best female character in video games. Let me break this shit down for you. She's a bounty hunter. Before they attempted to develop any kind of backstory, that was just her day job. All you could assume was that she would tear-ass through uncharted hostile alien worlds by herself because that's what she decided to do to pay rent and buy groceries. What kind of unspeakably huge Godzilla balls does someone have to have to make that a career choice? In contrast, I'm a programmer that works from home. I sit in a cushioned, climate-controlled room, sheltered from the sun, the elements, the outside world, and human contact. I'm basically the anti-Samus and a candidate for the Dos Equis Most Boring Man in the World. "Intergalactic bounty hunter," on the other hand, probably has the coolest stories ever. Every Metroid story should have been confined to whatever kickass adventure was taking place during that specific game. Wondering what Samus' hopes and dreams were, or what molded her into the proud, strong woman we see before us should have been sidelined to only being some dumb nerd shit in a wiki curated by autistic fatbeards. This isn't to say writing no character is always better than writing a character, just that it can work! And it was like 20 years after the release of Metroid that they really started trying to establish a story for her character, and there was no way some hack writer would ever live up to what people had probably built up in their own head by that point. They would have been better off just leaving it alone and creating an air of mystique around the character instead of the embarrassing crap they're turning it into.

Metroid Dread, Dungeon Encounters, Yoku's Island Express by Rafiki 11/07/2021, 10:37pm PST