What games are you playing now?

[Storm]

i already cleared almost everything GoW has to offer but i don't want it to end, all the possibilities in the story excites me, this never happened with a GoW title before; this is the type of game you'll remember and think about regularly for a while, the norse mythology is crafted in a way that you have the backstory for characters that havent even appeared yet, its not something thrown your face like past GoWs which lacked a deeper set-up for the greek elements.

personally i found impressive how the game holds such a superb quality during the entirety of its lenght, since we're talking about a game that can easily surpass 40 hours, and the narrative jump in quality is huge, i've never imagined Kratos could reach this emotional level.

engrossing in every sense, i would even call it a masterpiece.

i score it a 9.5, also best GoW and just entered my top 10.

for the cons (hard to find them):

puzzles arent that complicated to solve
there's a bit of backtracking
not many finishers

 

[Nova]

Playing Xenoblade 2 right now

-Combat feels notably improved from the last two games so far
-Ace+ already doing gods work with the OST god daaaaaaaamn
-Cutscene direction when shit goes down is on fucking point
-ENG VA was so awful i immediately downloaded and switched to JPN VA. Like, holy cow Dub Rex cannot legit scream to save his life
-Cast seem pretty decent right now, Pyra's cute
-Handheld mode looks like literal cancer

Still on chapter 2, looking forward to the rest.

 

[Guitar (pseudo)God]

I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I'd classify it as a passable game at best and inferior to the first one.

One man's opinion:

1. The story - yeah... There's not much I will talk about without venturing into spoiler territory, so I'll give impressions. First off, Rex must have spent his down time from salvaging watching old Tony Robbins videos. I lost track of the number of motivational speeches, and for each one the law of diminishing returns certainly applied. The game did a good job of setting up the main antagonists' motivation and subsequent actions, but I found them so baffling stupid I simply didn't care. Conversely, the smaller interactions between the characters were far superior to the overarching plot. Overall, it's a fair regression from the first game in both concept and execution.
2. The less said about the voice acting the better. The dialog itself wasn't too offensive, but the performances were cringe-inducing.
3. I did find the world compelling. The environments seemed smaller than the first game, but I thought those were far too big and overstayed their welcome very quickly (Mechonis -- urgh). Of note was the fast-travel implementation -- so much better than the first game. It also helped that the Switch was able to load these areas to where it didn't make exploration a chore.
4. Now we come to the battle system. It combined the excitement of an Excel spreadsheet with the joy of waiting for paint to dry. The developers must have taken the Taco Town idea of battle implementation; it has systems on top of systems on top of systems it quickly becomes overwhelming. To be fair, I did get used to it later on - but I reverted to a strategy of break -> topple -> launch -> smash in conjunction with the Simon Says routine of the Blade specials. This, frankly, was enough to take me through the entire game and survive the bosses and most all optional encounters. (Thankfully, death immediately returns you to a checkpoint and you keep your progress - great if you run into a level 90 monster -- or fall off a cliff because of a F**KING HOLE IN THE MIDDLE OF A BOSS FIGHT!) I'm sure if I put enough time into the accessories, core crystals (which was better implemented than the first game) I could have made things easier on myself, but I simply didn't care.
5. Thankfully the game has a way of getting around the battle system, and that's by overlevelling through side quests. Here is where the game truly shined. Most of them were to the point -- even the obligatory fetch quests. It was helpful that they revealed more about the world than was presented in the main story. (I did mention fast travel, right?) And if I can run through an area (through the power of FRIENDSHIP!) without wading through swarms of creatures with way too many hit points, so much the better.
6. The Blade system - so this is what compulsive gambling feels like. Sure, I get it in the context of the story -- but it left so much to be desired. I think it would have been much better to have the Core Crystals be all the "named" blades. I think I got about 5-6 through resonating (through 20+ Legendary Crystals, even after looking up the goddamned mechanics and muttering an audible "you've got to be f**king kidding me"). The others were from side quests, which I could handle. And only a few were useful - the vast majority were just plain awful.
7. Other complaints - the field system. Okay, decent concept - poor execution. Why did I have to equip 3 separate blades on every goddamn character to be able to dive in the water? All my resonated blades HAVE THE REQUIRED SKILLS ALREADY! What time-consuming rigamarole do I have to do now to build affinity? Feed this blade collectible items? Cool. Fight untold number of battles? Not cool. Play "Tiger! Tiger!" and get 100 ether where I need 30K? HELL-to-the no.
8. The enemy names must have come from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator. "Hey, we need a name for a big monkey." "Okay -- Big Monkey comes out to be... Immortal Gonzalez." "Done!"
9. I haven't followed the game's reception on the various forums, but I can only imagine some of the reaction to the character design. I'm the furthest thing from a prude imaginable, yet some of the Blades (and certain leering camera angles) looked like they came out of a late-night Cinemax movie. My teenage self would have loved it; my adult self just sighed.

I could have written 10K more words -- on the plot alone. Overall, it's not a "bad" game (most aren't these days), but it's a case study how overstuffing a game with superfluous content can't replace a compelling narrative.

 

[Lulcielid]

Bought the game two days ago, have played about 5hs of the game, first impressions:

The story is pretty followable for someone like me who never played the previous games. There's stuff in background about War and the Wild Hunt that I don't particularly care though.

It's a pretty looking game, probably the open world game with the most density of assets per meter square I've played.

So far the side-quest are nothing special but, I do like that you can fail a quest and said quest remain permanently as failed, don't know what other games do it but this is something I would like to see more often in RPGs.

Combat is OK. I don't think it's bad like some people say but, I do think it's quite unresponsive half the time, I think the main issue is that half of Gerald's attack (both Sword and Hand2Hand) animations take longer than they should to perform. Outside of that everything seems functional so far.

Navigating the menu is cubersome, by far the thing I like the less about the game.

I like the music, can't elaborate much.

Misc Stuff: Gerald has a quite low and raspy voice that can distore a bit what word he's exactly saying.

I'm liking it, as early as it might be, at the moment I'd rate it 8/10.

 

[Vankwisha]

Just finished God of War, definitely the best game I've played on the PS4.

 

[AnGer-dono]

Playing Fate/EXTRA right now b/c the anime killing female Hakuno off annoyed me. Picked Saber (Extra) as my servant and holy smokes, this game is just fun. Nothing deep, but enjoyable when all you want to do is zone out.

It's a shame, really, that CCC has never made it west and probably never will.

 

[Guitar (pseudo)God]

Octopath Traveler - first thoughts: Great, great music. Interesting premise. But it's a grind-fest and repetitive as hell.

 

[Storm]

Just finished God of War, definitely the best game I've played on the PS4.

close to me

Bloodborne still king but damn GoW is amazing

 

[Nova]

Finished Xenoblade 2 recently.

Good RPG held back by various issues ranging from technical (handheld mode, memory leak, etc) to fundamental (field skills, gacha, etc). The combat is currently my favorite in the franchise & the soundtrack oozed of ACE+ & Mitsuda magnificence. The action cutscenes were also stellar.

Plot had its highs & lows despite the more interesting second half picking it up, not a big a fan of what they went for during...

Spoiler

the ending with Mythra & Pyra surviving, thus making the "sacrifice" scene prior feel almost needless imo.

Overall i can definitely conclude that while its not the "essential equvilent to FF" I've seen spewed nor did it top Xenoblade 1 for me, i still had a meaningful time with the game.

I give Xenoblade 2 a solid B-.

 

[Guitar (pseudo)God]

Finished Xenoblade 2 recently.

Good RPG held back by various issues ranging from technical (handheld mode, memory leak, etc) to fundamental (field skills, gacha, etc). The combat is currently my favorite in the franchise & the soundtrack oozed of ACE+ & Mitsuda magnificence. The action cutscenes were also stellar.

Plot had its highs & lows despite the more interesting second half picking it up, not a big a fan of what they went for during...

Spoiler

the ending with Mythra & Pyra surviving, thus making the "sacrifice" scene prior feel almost needless imo.

Overall i can definitely conclude that while its not the "essential equvilent to FF" I've seen spewed nor did it top Xenoblade 1 for me, i still had a meaningful time with the game.

I give Xenoblade 2 a solid B-.

Yeah, I was hoping I wasn't the only "get off my lawn" type with XC2. The more I think about it, the more I like the concepts -- just not the execution.

Spoiler

And I consider it a missed opportunity that Brigid slapping the hell out of Rex wasn't a Level 2 Blade Special -- 'cause I would have been mashing "B" like crazy.

 

[Nova]

Yeah, I was hoping I wasn't the only "get off my lawn" type with XC2. The more I think about it, the more I like the concepts -- just not the execution.

Spoiler

And I consider it a missed opportunity that Brigid slapping the hell out of Rex wasn't a Level 2 Blade Special -- 'cause I would have been mashing "B" like crazy.

Understandable, neat ideas and cool moments but hoo boy when XB2's low points rear it's head it gets quite ugly. Speaking of which:

Spoiler

Chapter 4 for instance, to say it was a lackluster experience would be a HUGE understatement.

That dragged out filler trite of a beginning with the bandits & kids did not need to happen in order for Roc to be Rex's new driver, period. Then when you finally reach Mor Ardain the problems just keep piling on, ranging from the encounter with Lila who i couldn't give less of a fuck about as a character to the Factory area where losing Tora and being stuck with only two party members made that section a living chore (never mind that i somehow wasted countless time getting lost at some points due the awful Compass).

Then there is Bana who is without a doubt the absolute worst side villain in the game right next to Dughall who harbors everything i hate in a cartoonish'ly evil villain (which almost makes me dislike the first half of chapter 1 even more for wasting screen time on them in the first place AND the beginning chapter 6 for bringing one of them back). Apparently one of the writers has an obsession with Noppons in general hence the focus which explains a lot, making them into an antagonist of all fuckiny things was a mistake.

I actually had to put the game down for over half a month due to pent up frustration from that horrifically written/designed chapter alone. I also feel that XB2 went a tad overboard at points with cutscene triggers to a degree where i almost feel railroaded, which makes make appreciate games like Nier that at least give me more control during various in game dialogue presentation. Didn't feel this way with XC1's honestly.

By the way i can't stress how poorly optimized XB2 is even with the latest patches, after beating the final boss on my first try the framerate during the ending itself tanked to slideshow levels of performance until the entire game froze, which forced me to reboot and face the fucking final boss all over again. It took more than several retries until i finally got another win while internally screaming my head off. I've also seen this bug reportes multiple times before so i'm not the only one who faced it for sure, christ....

 

[Lulcielid]

Started Monster Hunter World last weekend.

The game is pretty overwhelming, played four hours of the game and I feel the game is in an odd position where it's in a rush to teach me dozens of mechaniques at once with boring textboxes but at the same time is no hurry to explain other stuff (like how weapons work or a bunch of exploration stuff).

At the moment I can say that hunting monster is entertaining, even if I don't quite get the grasp of combat, yet.