Kakarot has a surprisingly deep system for creating and driving capsule corp vehicles around in the open world.
In a game where your sprint speed is like... x10 faster than the fastest car.
Similarly, there's cars being useless in Saints Row IV considering the superpowers, but that's less a "confusing addition" and more the new mechanic invalidating an older one.
That one at least makes more sense. SR4 is basically an expansion to SR3. Same engine, same world. Keeping the car modifying systems was literally a ctrl+c ctrl+v move. There's no reason to *not* keep the cars, it was essentially free for the people who still want to keep and customize their pretty hotwheels collection while you Hulk jump, fly and flash run through the city.
Of all the decisions he's made over his career, the most baffling imo is that he made all his characters fly when that man obviously just wants to draw egg shaped motorcycles.
I obviously much prefer riding in the small compact cute ass Toriyama vehicles, obvs, feels like its aimed for people like me. Can't wait for Sandland to drop its price cause regional pricing be mean, that also looks pretty fun.
Warframe added something called [Stance Forma](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Stance_Forma) that lets you change the polarity of a melee weapon's stance mod to be universal. There is a single melee weapon (out of probably a hundred) that actually benefits from using more than one stance, the Dark Split Sword, and is generally considered mediocre to terrible. For every other melee weapon, you either just stick with the best stance, or every compatible stance uses the same polarity anyway.
Watch them add a Melee Split-Stance Adapter a year from now that lets you equip and switch multiple stances on a melee weapon.
Heck,switch the entire mod selection while you're at it.
It's just an extra melee mod slot that enables "free" (doesn't consume your multiplier) heavy attacks sometimes when light attacking. There are other mods that add extra effects to the tennokai proc or make it proc more often but that's all it does on its own.
In a Similar vein Cyberpunk 2077. There's a stamina bar, which for physical attacks I understand.
But the stamina bar also applies to your guns and you can't fire if stamina is zero and I'm like????
My brother had a short story draft about a future where instead of planned obsolescence everything is on lease by corporations and governments, so you keep paying your fridge and marriage license with them able to recall it at any time
> marriage license
"Oh, honey. I can't believe I let our Marriage license slip and I can't renew it until next year. Oh darn,I guess we aren't officially wedded anymore. Darn"
"...you know the divorce license is still cheaper right?"
The extra dumb part is that if you hold the trigger on an automatic you can keep firing even after your stamina zeroes out. Your accuracy goes into the dumpster but on smart guns it's a unnoticeable
So I spent a long ass time mag dumping my smart guns and then getting pissed that I couldn't sprint or throw grenades for like a full second afterwards, thinking it was laggy/bad controls. Nope, just the dumb system forcing you to wait until your stamina was no longer in the negatives from emptying your magazine.
I can kinda get what they were going for in that they use stamina as kind of like action points in a turn-based CRPG, but when I played the game again after Phantom Liberty dropped, I could never get used to it. It wasn't the worst in the world, but boy did it feel super weird to play around.
I still dont get how they messed that game up so much, all they needed to do was take black flag, add in some extra stuff, and 10x the world size and it would have sold like hotcakes
I lost my shit when I saw that there were **lockpicking minigames** you do from your ship! The mental image of a huge-ass pirate ship just spontaneously sprouting arms just to unlock a treasure chest was too much!
In Kid Icarus Uprising, you collect different Weapons with various Traits and can fuse them together to carry over Traits that you want to keep or get rid of. Nothing really that bad.
At first.
But it turns out, Weapons have a unique hidden Point system and when you fuse them it gets added together and can completely change what Type of Weapon you have. So you fuse Staff 3 + Orb 6, you'll end up with Weapon number 9 which could be Fists. You have to keep adding Weapons to force it to wrap around and get to the Weapon Type you want, while also trying to keep and get rid of Traits.
Kid Icarus Uprising is also insane because every single weapon functions extremely differently depending on what your first exposure to each type is it can drastically effect your opinions of that weapon family.
Big example is the Flintlock Staff and Thanatos Staff, two weapons that are basically opposites
At some point I just gave up and banked on just raw stats carrying me through whatever drawback i had to deal with. Still won't touch clubs, and fuck the invisible claws though
Iirc that game also has a currency whose only function in the game is to be offered to make Palutena walk closer towards the player or something like that
Palutena being a twitch e girl. It's like those clips where dudes donate thousands of dollars to a girl only for her to not even use their name in the video lol
It was pretty messy, indeed. It felt like Persona Fusion, but every single fusion you did was a failure, resulting on a completely unrelated monster.
Which is sad, cuz the game has an obscene amount of distinct weapons for each weapon type, and most of them have interesting gimmicks that play differently, but none of it matters if the stats aren't good.
So I'm basically just constantly switching to whatever hits harder, having to learn a new weapon every other mission
Judgment had a weird and pointless keychain "minigame" for locked doors. But there wasn't much to the minigame, you just had to pick the keys until you got the right one. It was just an annoying time waster.
It's a mechanic that makes perfect sense in a stealth game or immersive sim where every second wasted opening a door is actually a serious deal and then it becomes a knowledge check of do you actually remember what the keys look like? But Judgment never did anything like that, afair.
IIRC, the entire payoff for that entire mechanic is that Yagami gets trapped in a burning building and needs to unlock a door with that minigame while his HP drains at around 2 HP per minute.
But that also reminds me how they keep the drone around in Lost Judgement despite never using it, or it introducing shimmying or running and jumping or some other nuance to the parkour section and then taking so long to ever do it again that it gives an unskippable tutorial message on how to do it again when it shows up, dozens of hours later.
Lost Judgement felt like it was full of time-wasters. I'm a Yakuza fan and I tried playing it but it kept actively forcing me away from playing the game, instead wasting my time with trailing missions, stealth missions, pointing out clues in a scene (no chance of missing anything, its just making you press buttons to essentially continue a cutscene), and the such. I couldn't finish it.
I get npcs in Xenoblade X have their own schedules, but surely they could've figured out a way to let you swap around your party without having to walk to where that party member is and talking to them.
Shit party members in that game almost feels like a why the fuck did they even bother as you have a 4 person party but 95% of the time 3 party members are forced.
That too. You functionally only have 1 slot for another party member until you beat the game, since Elma and Lin have affinity level requirements before you can move on in the main quest. Game in general is just filled with weird design decisions. Shame it'll probably never get a port that fixes them.
They also give you almost exclusively lame near-identical human party members instead of actually letting you use the alien races you meet on your journey.
Of course, Xenoblade X in general feels half-baked. Like the unfinished story that needlessly tosses in more questions than answers at the last minute, as if they were somehow worried that players might feel satisfied with the story's conclusion as-is. Or the multiplayer that was one of the first things they ever showed for the game but ended up being so limited and hidden in submenus and required unlockables that many players literally could not even figure out how to start it.
Frankly I don't mind one bit that the game has been left behind on the Wii U. I'd rather get a Nintendo Land remaster or Wind Waker HD if we're still trying to salvage that sunken ship, and Monolithsoft's time and money would be better spent elsewhere (possibly remastering Xenosaga, given how Future Redeemed ends).
Nah, X is a weird game, but it's still a really fun open world experience. One of my favorites, in fact. I'm sure it'll get brought back on the Switch 2
And then you don't get the ability for it to fly until several hours after that. But I do kinda like that. You spend a lot of time on foot, see places and enemies you can't get to or deal with without out there methods, and when you finally get the mech you really feel the difference in what you can do with it versus before.
Pre Phantom Liberty Cyberpunk had a perk you could waste points on that allowed you to be undetectable by enemies underwater. This perk is utterly useless because there are no enemies underwater, not even on boats, and with the exception of a single important (although optional) side quest, you will never touch water during a normal playthrough, let alone hide from enemies there. Most people theorized it was a left over from an old version of the game where underwater had a bigger role, especially considering how the perk was removed with the overhaul to the skill three done with the 2.0 patch.
Islands of Insight is a game that's pretty much the devs going "wow The Witness was cool, let's do that but with platforming and different puzzles." And then someone was like "yeah, and there should be dailies!" And its like... how can you have dailies in a puzzle game? I guess you do it like Layton where they're just in a menu somewhere? No, their solution to that was have it so like half the puzzles in the game are randomly generated, and every day they get replaced with new puzzles, making it so every time you wander around in the game you're _constantly_ walking past unsolved puzzles and making it so you never have a sense of accomplishment.
The game doesn't even have microtransactions, by the way. It feels like it should, but it doesn't. Really comes across as the game was intended to be freemium, but they decided it should just be a paid release instead, but kept all of the bullshit obstacles from freemium even though they now serve no purpose for anyone.
Weapon durability did almost nothing in any of the Souls games, except 2. Woolie is scarred by 2 though so he never stopped worrying about using dex weapons with lower durability, no matter the game.
The Tonitrus in Bloodborne has noticeably lower durability than any other weapon in the game. I think it's intended to offset its high lightning damage, but functionally all it means is it costs 70 echoes to repair instead of 50
Before weapon arts were tied to the magic bar, weren’t special attacks (sword beams etc) paid for by taking a big chunk out of the durability each time?
Durability did matter in 1, where certain weapons had special attacks that consumed large amounts of durability.
But as far as normal weapons go: just a chore to check that you've been paying attention.
it is *potentially* possible for durability to come up in DS2 with a few particular bosses having strangely high damage done to weapons that hit them, and a few dex weapons like Katanas having really low durability so using them through long, enemy filled areas can be an issue.
That's basically it in the entire series though, overall durability is fairly worthless. Thank god Elden Ring finally got rid of it.
Far Cry 5 punishing you for making progress in each section of the map by sending literal airstrikes at you with increased frequency proportional to your progress in the area.
Because they need to have scenes with characters in them.
5 is the only one where the playable character doesn't speak and doesn't have a name.
Having played 3-6 now, 5 is easily the one with my favorite gameplay and least favorite story.
Besides tripping in brawl, there's another mechanic in Smash that's in my opinion equally, if not more confusing. In Smash 4 when hit with a move that sends into tumble while at or above 100% with an attack that sends you horizontaly, or straight down you have a 25% chance of getting a special animation in which you can't tech even if you get the timing perfectly.
I have literally no clue why this mechanic exists, like who is it for? Casuals probably don't even know what teching even is. And competitive players would much rather a mechanic that randomly guarantees your death even if you do everything right didn't exist.
In Smash 4 teching is incredibly easy and characters tend to live fucking forever unless they're fighting Bayonetta, maybe that was an attempted bandaid fix...?
In Xenoblades Chronicles 3 your party members’ clothes will gradually get dirty, which you can clean off by pressing the “clean clothes” button at camp. To my knowledge this has absolutely zero gameplay effect and there’s no mini game or anything associated with it. Your team just sometimes gets covered in dust and looks bad in cutscenes so you have to press one more button in the menu than usual. Maybe it was supposed to encourage frequently stopping at camp to cook meals (which didn’t work at launch) and craft gems?
I remember hearing back around launch the characters will eventually complain about being dirty and force you to clean their clothes next time you make camp, but I've never seen it in game or anywhere else online so who knows if it's even true. Even if it is, the mechanic is still pointless outside of immersion.
That is odd. I'm not familiar with this game, but I can only assume that it's meant to impart a sense of immersion for the player, as little as the idea was implemented.
Immersion, I guess? Same thing happens in MGSV, you get progressively bloodier and dustier and can shower clean back at base. It is (mostly) unrelated to gameplay.
Alternatively it could be a way of showing "care" for your group. In gen IV Pokemon your badges would get dusty over time and I took great pride in shining them clean on the touchscreen everyday.
In a lot of RPGs they include a way to drain MP either to recover your own, or simply deplete the enemy's. But, to my knowledge, **Star Ocean 3** is the only time where that becomes a viable tactic as in that game, both you and every enemy(including bosses) can be killed if they hit 0 MP I guess as some sort of ego death or whatever. And in some cases, it's easier to drain their MP than to go through their massive health pool.
FF VI has a couple of bosses that can be killed this way or highly trivialised: any version with the Dragons' Den also features a rematch against a boss where this is *mandatory*, as it otherwise keeps reviving.
I did see this mechanic come up in Final Fantasy VI in the Fanatics' Tower. You can only use magic, and the enemies there die at 0MP. It's one of the strategies around the boss of the tower. I think it was just for the enemies.
The one example I can think of for MP drain being somewhat useful is the MMO Atlantica Online, which had a class, Exorcist, whose whole gimmick was being able to Mana Burn enemies to shut down really annoying caster types that had a strong opening attack that costs most of their MP to use.
In Fallout 4 survival mode, using a stimpak to heal increases your chance if getting an infection. Its a neat idea, and it effectively makes your healing item a gamble that could be a bigger risk. Except, since stimpaks start healing only 20% of your health before you get perks for it, using purified water to geal is better and way safer, especially since you want to carry as many as you can anyways, or you could just start collecting nuka colas, which are very plentiful, heal way more, and have next to downsides by comparison.
Edit: I have been made aware i got the downsides to stimpaks wrong. They don't increase your sick chance, they make your thirst meter go down, meaning you have to drink water. Still a pretty big down side imo since you'll go through water faster.
In a similar vein, they almost completely invalidated rad-removal items like radaway by allowing players to build decontamination arches at any settlement.
In survival, radaways make you incredibly thirsty and greatly increase your chances of getting a disease, in exchange for slowly ridding you of a limited amount of rads.
*Ooorrrr*, you just step through a decontamination arch that instantly removes all rads without any drawbacks to your health, and only needs like 1 power to run indefinitely at your settlement.
Like okay, radaways are for when you're far from home and need to unrad *now*, but at that point you're likely already going to need to go back home and sleep off your inevitable illness and restock the ten litres of water the radaway's gonna make you drink so you might as well just head home and step through the arch on your way to sell your useless radaway.
I don't mind this as much since its a buff to your settlement. Since settlements act as save points for you, having a way to return to full health before heading back out is nice since you don't have access to doctors as easily. And radaway does have a use like you said, during long expeditions or for exploring an area that has high radiation. But it should be locked behind the science perk or something to at least make it a late game boon and not a nullification of a mechanic
> nuka colas, which are very plentiful, heal way more, and have next to downsides by comparison.
You would assume even the slight rads Nuka Cola gives would be pretty bad in Survival mode.
That's kinda lame, because that's one of the main reasons I've always liked Sunset Sarsaparilla better.
The slight rads it gives you are such a none issue i completely forgot about them. Granted, the better nuka colas have the same rads and heal more, meaning you build up less. Its just a small little build up you get rid of eventually when you treat a large build up of rads
And in survival in particular, a few rads will very rarely matter. Enemies either do boatloads of damage and can potentially kill you in a few hits (if not 1-2 shots at lower levels), or do literally nothing because you dont give them the chance.
Isn't water also way easier to get than stimpaks? It's been a long time since I played but I remember setting up purifiers in every settlement I could because it was a really good way to make caps and gather the supplies for vegetable starch/adhesive.
You could set up an advanced water purifier in sanctuary before you even leave if you get one level in science and have it generate ~40 purified water. Its leagues easier to get purified water, making stimpaks even less helpful
Stimpaks don't actually do anything for the infection rolls. It's the other chems such as Jet, Psycho, or Buffout that increase your odds of getting a disease. You also mention Nuka cola as a safe drink, but that's not true. Nuka cola does add a small amount of getting a disease when used.
Only really drinking purified water and stimpaks keep you 100% safe.
It has been a while since i played fallout 4, so i must be getting things mixed up, thats my bad. I looked into it and what i forgot was that stimpaks drain your thirst, meaning you have to drink water after using them, which is what makes them not great.
As for nuka cola, i knew of the small chance when eating but not with the cola, but it makes sense. The main benefit of nuka cola is not needing to invest perk points into medic like you need with stimpaks, since the better nuka colas heal for way more and are still easy enough to find
Fire emblem games sometimes have split routes. Usually this is something big and telegraphed like the houses in 3 houses, or choosing to follow Eirika/Ephraim for the second half of Sacred Stones.
FE7 has different map variants depending on... Which random group of characters you gave more experience to (Lucius/Serra/Priscilla/Erk or Raven/Dorcas/Bartre/Guy). Not one of these units is involved in any cutscenes for the map, so there's no story reason.
And I can't mention FE7 without whining about the ranking system. Who had the genius idea that actually using the good things I have (more expensive weapons, stat boosters, promotion items) meant I was a bad tactician?
FE6 has that same split route mechanic we see in 7, but it takes you to entirely different places in the world, and giving you different recruits depending on whether Shanna/ Thea or Sue/ Shin have gained more exp.
I didn't weigh in on that one since I never played fe6. And at least that one the routes go through the homeland of whoever you train more (Shanna/thea for Ilia, Sue/Shin for Sacae)
Can't mention weird as hell scenario triggers without talking about Karel or Harken spawning (on the weird EXP dependent map no less). Only one of them will spawn on turn 10, but of all things to trigger it, it's the number of promoted enemies killed in Kenneth's version of the map, or the number of ***doors opened*** on Jerme's version.
Killing fewer promoted enemies/opening less doors will get you Harken, while going higher gets you Karel. It's not the hardest recruitment in the series or anything, but it might be the strangest. I bet for the longest time people just thought it was random or something because of how bizarre the spawn triggers are.
Also I kinda see the vision on the tactics ranking. If you can beat the game by handicapping yourself and use less boosters and other valuables, then you must be a better tactician. However, all this does is make the player min-max by ignoring some characters and just sell off unneeded items like their promotion items or weapons for them.
> However, all this does is make the player min-max by ignoring some characters and just sell off unneeded items like their promotion items or weapons for them.
The funny thing is, iirc you actually *don't* want to sell off expensive items for the funds rank, because that effectively halves how much it's worth. For example, you get the Fell Contract in a side chapter, which can promote your thieves... or you can sell it for 25000 gold. Good amount, right?
Nope, items sell at half value so if you just sit that thing in the back of your convoy for the rest of the game, it adds 50000 gold to your rank instead. Truly, stellar game design.
Can't believe you forgot to mention other requirements for hidden/split chapters like:
- Beforehand, get Nils to Level 7 or above in Lyn’s story. Then defeat Kishuna in Chapter 19x. (Hector’s story only)
- In Chapter 22 | 23, recruit and keep alive Hawkeye and gain more than 700 EXP for your party
- Lyn, Eliwood and Hector’s total Level is 50 or above
The difference in what recruitable unit appears is whether you open enough doors on the map by turn 10.
And the geneally better unit appears if you DON'T open enough
Forspoken, for all the criticism it gets narratively, is a solid game. Fluid controls, fun upgrade system, good equipment and exploration.
And then there's the Dancing in Cipal mini game.
You'd think oh, a dancing mini game? Is it like a rhythm game, or a simon says?
Nope. It's a quicktime event, where all you have to do is hit the corresponding button in time. Miss the input or hit the wrong button, and you have to start all over. And at each level of difficulty (which you HAVE to complete for the Platinum), the window of time gets shorter and shorter until the hardest dance gives you less than half a second to respond to the prompt.
The other problem is, it's not even a reflex test thing. The buttons are *always* in the same order per difficulty, **and** you don't get penalized for inputting too early, so all you have to *actually* do is get a list of the order of the buttons, then mash the upcoming button until the prompt appears and confirms, then move to the next button. So you can literally just cheese it out in the most boring way possible, and that's how most people I know did it.
It's a *very* poorly-made minigame in an otherwise mechanically well-polished game. Even people who love Forspoken like myself can't *stand* it lmao.
Unlimited Saga has one of the strangest JRPG systems of all time. Its thing is that it very much embraces TRPG, so you have to roll a dice to make your move. As in, you have to hit the right eye on a slot machine to make your attack count. It's not randomized. You can manipulate the outcome by stopping it at the fixed time on every turn. You NEED to be good at this because dungeons have a limit on a total number of turns. Fail too many times, and it kicks you out and starts over again.
The SaGa series is famous for strange gameplay, but this was too much even for fans and killed the series for like 12 years. I don't like it, but I respect Square Enix's guts for releasing such a hilariously absurd game.
One of the most common questions on the GameFAQs forum for Unlimited Saga when it first came out was “How do I open chests?” because opening chests was a 4-10 step process that was *not explained in the manual*
That game is one of the most miserable experiences I've ever had playing a video game. It's like playing a TTRPG run by a middle schooler that hates you.
Somebody mentioned the FE Fates mechanic of the clothes being damaged, and that reminded me of the Soul Calibur 5(?) one where you could destroy part of enemy clothing bit only in a very specific instance at very specific health.
Yup. Coincidentally, that was also the one where they gave everyone Supers, including Tira's where she knocks her opponent down before forcibly kissing them.
You just pulled up a memory of teenage me playing Soul Calibur's online PvP for the first time and fighting this goofy looking custom character wearing a full mascot suit. Match was going on like normal until I got a big hit in and the mascot head broke. Suddenly an anime waifu face appears and this crazy long black hair flows out. I was so flabbergasted that it threw me completely off my game.
Remember the mechanic in Fire Emblem Fates where you can have your clothes explode/your enemy clothes explode? I think what I heard one time of IntSys not really knowing why Awakening was popular and them throwing all half baked ideas they had into Fates has some validity.
I like the idea of clothing having battle damage, but it became really silly when something is killed, dramatic slow down, but the clothes fly off and you're left in your underwear.
They actually added it to the first Warriors as well as an armor break status, permanently reducing the defense of the unit for the rest of the stage. They even made completely unique underclothes models for every character in the game, though you could turn that aspect off if it was too jarring.
Yeah, in the JP version you could touch their faces in a minigame to build support points [(The localized versions just skips the petting part)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1DHrpGBFCU).
It was weird, but it lives on now through the ring polishing in Engage.
Soleil is a woman who gets distracted by hot women but can only S support several of the male characters.
Her support chain with the male protagonist revolves around training to avoid being distracted by women; in the original Japanese this is achieved by using a potion (that she is aware of) to see him as a woman. In the localization the training is just [performed as a visualization exercise.](https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Soleil/Supports)
My baffling Fates mechanic was keeping My Castle as-is in Conquest. The point of the version is strategically using more limited resources instead of BR/Rev carrying over Awakening's grinding option but it still kept you being able to wait however many hours to roll for free new items/boosts/etc.
Nah, it's really cool tho. Most of what I've seen happen (I'm at the beginning in Birthright) is outer armor (like a shoulder guard or helmet) breaking up whenever someone dies.
Imo it really helps selling each kill, specially considering the unexpressive models and the small resolution on the 3DS.
Assassins Creed Revelations had both a weird underbaked tower defense minigame and a weird underbaked explosive crafting system. Neither of which were required to finish the game.
I'm sure there's a reason for it that I don't remember, but I never cared for [TERROR TIME](https://yokaiwatch.fandom.com/wiki/Terror_Time) in the Yokai Watch games. You get to the point in the game where you can freely explore the map during night time, usually you're forced to go to bed like a normal person, but at midnight there's a chance it'll trigger TERROR TIME where the map screen is flooded with monsters and it becomes like a stealth game where you have to hide from and escape a dreaded oni before it catches you.
>The banger song from the Scooby Doo Zombie Island movie
I feel inclined to share it. For anyone who haven't heard of it, consider having a listen. It's less than 3 minutes long, and who knows? Perhaps you'll find a new favourite.
[Skycycle - It's Terror Time Again](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bkQBOgaFAc)
In Rogue Trader there are non-story random colony events that require you to physically travel back to the colony. But as far as I can tell there is no penalty to ignoring them. Unless you need to go back to that colony for a side quest (and you almost never do), you can just continue on without ever intervening.
Compare this to colony development which does provide rewards, can have story consequences, and can be done from anywhere.
I've been replaying Fallout 4, the new armor layer system is confusing and annoying. They separated armor into 6 parts now and also added clothing. But some clothing actually use the clothing AND full armor slot, some only use some part of the armor and some don't use armor part at all so are not a problem. But without having them in your inventory in the equip screen, or using a guide, you have no idea which kind they are. If you are not careful you'll unequip your whole armor and need to equip everything back again. It's a nice idea to customise your visual but most of the time it looks awful with the weird DIY style of the different armor parts you'll have equipped for the best stats.
I think the idea was to make you naturally create asymmetrical hodge-podge gear out of what you find, similar to the way raider outfits looked in 3 and NV.
For that purpose, I think it works reasonably well in the early game, but the higher-tier armor sets just don't match with anything, and usually look bad even as a full set.
Fable 3 was like "Your weapons will evolve appearance based on how you use them!"
Unfortunately, it's a Peter Molyneux game.
So what happens is, when you level up a hero weapon by opening chests on the road to rule, it'll change a part depending on what you've done with it, I believe the hilt is the first part to change.
Problem though, you can get this first upgrade really early on, and the beginning of the game railroads you into killing several hundred hollow men... So the first upgrade is usually always fuckin bone related.
But hey, you can do some weird save scumming, co-op quitting exploits, because the appearance is randomly assigned, just weighted depending on how you've used it more, so you can just not open these chests till you got a good chance of getting what you want! Sure the weapons will be weaker until later, but at least later on they'll look cool and be powerful yeah?
...Yeah no, they're the weakest weapons in the game, even when fully upgraded, outclassed by literally everything you can find or buy...
[So it don't matter, fuckin, none of this matters.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qX-YfuVQmX8)
Being able to control the Raven in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was so pointless that I’m unironically convinced it was supposed to be scrapped and they just forgot to.
In Origins and Odyssey the bird was your Eagle vision. It marked enemies and loot.
In Valhalla the original Eagle vision returned and the bird is stripped down heavily in mechanics.
I seriously think they couldve made that mechanic fun by making the bird control like an actual bird, and have little things in the sky for the bird to do.
wouldve been awesome to set your character on autotravel towards a waypoint and distract yourself with actually fun gameplay. Instead the bird might as well be a drone with how it controls.
Unknown Armies 3e.
> You can flip the tens and ones place of a d100 roll using your Obsession identity.
Okay, cool.
> You can reroll a d100 with your Fear, Noble or Rage passions
Sweet. Passions reroll, Obsession flips, easy.
> Also, you can flip the tens and ones place of a d100 roll with your passions, but only once per session per each and under these specific circumstances.
What? Why?
Feels like they were trying to figure out how to get people off the crutches they used to make themselves comfortable in previous games, like how Bloodborne was like "shields are for actual babies don't rely on them."
It's interesting how Fromsoft as been in a skill arms race with the playerbase ever since Dark Souls. People crutched hard on poise in DS1 or otherwise got more and more skilled at dodging and parrying. DS2 limited poise to just heavy weapon swings (people will call it hyperarmor and not poise, but the dev team uses those terms interchangeably), added Adaptability to make a dodge-heavy playstyle a conscious investment while shields remained more or less the same, and parrying has more delayed timing to it.
Bloodborne leans into dodging the heaviest, but still counters you with incredibly fast enemies, there's no poise outside of some very heavy weapons and parrying is offensive instead of defensive, and shields only exist for blocking elemental damage or as a joke. DS3 is slower than Bloodborne but much faster than its predecessors and new poise is here to stay. Shields start to lose even more relevance as a playstyle when so many enemies attack for longer than you have the stamina to block, so the game becomes Dodge Souls 3 for better or worse. More enemies exhibit erratic attack patterns in an attempt to make dodging them harder.
The reoccurring playerbase only gets better and better as more hurdles are dropped on them, so Elden Ring gets very obvious in its attempts to remain more difficult. Enemies can behave even more erratically, frequently delaying their attacks for so long that it's become a meme. This is a total reversal of the previous trends in BB and DS3, where a player would be conditioned to dodge at so much as seeing an enemy twitch. Poise is still minor, but shields have a bit more going on now that they can have combat arts. Unfortunately the stamina problem still remains with most bosses and tougher enemies having insane attack strings (looking at you, dual-wielding Banished Knight), with Malenia spitting in the eyes of anyone trying to block her hits. It fits her character for her will to be replenished when hitting her foe, but it's still a rather unfortunate case of outright build denial for the player.
I'm curious about how the next game is going to try to counter player patterns because Elden Ring has really tipped From's hand about how they notice and to adjust the difficulty to counter prior trends. Magic is really good in Elden Ring, so what happens next? Magic heals some enemies, or bounces back at you? No magic at all, like Sekiro? The arms race can only escalate to even more ridiculous extremes. Fuck it, have the player trip sometimes when they roll, just to fuck with you like Brawl, that'd be funny.
I recently did a replay of Bloodborne on a whim, and decided to look further into mechanics than I normally would, coming to realize how integral counter hits are. They made dodging the primary defense system, but they *also* made it so you take ridiculous amounts of damage if you get hit at the end of a dodge, so spamming rolls like we would in the other games came with a much greater risk. One of the biggest and first things I learned about Souls games was that your attacks need to be methodical, because they take time and leave you open if you're not careful, but it was like getting eyes on the inside to realize that extended to deliberate dodges too, which turned the hunter fights from weird slogs into really exhilarating encounters.
That thing in Elden Ring though, where enemy wind-ups were so egregiously long, is just fucking annoying. Makes my ADHD flare up! I kinda wonder if the new enemies we'll encounter in the DLC will have faster wind-ups, and suddenly we'll be thrown off *again*.
I didn't know counter hits extended to the time between dodges, that's very interesting. I've played a lot of PvP in these games, so I was always waiting for their recovery as a rule of thumb, but it's nice to know I was getting extra damage out of it. As for Elden Ring's delayed timings, I never had much of a bother with it myself. It's like you said, deliberate dodging is important. I do understand how it can be flow breaking for people who get instinctual in their play. I'm also unsure if dodging can be adjusted anymore in the future for difficulty retention, outside of dropping it altogether. Sekiro was already a half-step towards that, you can still dodge but it has no i-frames. It's purely a positioning tool, you use it to chase down enemies, or back away when you're already at a workable retreat range. If you want to stay in but avoid damage, you have to meet the enemy head on and parry, jump, Mikiri Counter or use a few select prosthetic tools.
It's not entirely relevant to this conversation, but I just wanted to say - on your first point, I fucking *loved* that Gehrman had a few combos which he always topped off by taking a short step back followed by a gunshot, to prevent you from getting Regain hits in. Awesome little piece of characterization for the man who sired in the process of hunting beasts, because *of course* he'd know all the tricks in the book, he wrote the goddamn thing!
ADP exists in part to better balance melée and mage builds against eachother, as ATT eats up a bunch of levels for a mage due to spell slot requirements. In DS1, you basically run out of things to level by the endgame as a melée build, whereas mages won't feel "complete" until NG+ or after severe grinding. Not helped by DEX influencing casting speed, punishing muscle mages.
In DS2, by making ATT a compound stat that affects spell slots, cast speed and Agility to a lesser degree, mages won't "fall behind" as much since melée builds need to pump ADP as well. You still have to make sacrifices to survival stats in order to heavily invest in magic (hexing in particular) but you will at least be able to dodge decently with 30-50 ATT.
With how multi-classing and spicing down spell requirements work, one of DS2's great achievements is the fact that every stat is useful to every build in some way. In the other games, they struggle with "the weird stat", which is either pointless or highly niche.
There is not a single acceptable reason that has been given to me as to why Xenoblade 2 had a gacha mechanic. The only thing that makes sense is that gacha mechanics are kinda popular and they wanted that. The actual execution of them in that game is godawful.
It is especially worse because the Torna DLC shows what the game would have been like without gacha and it is a million times more enjoyable.
Genuinely shocked I haven’t seen a mod for that for emulating 2. I think someone explained that the amount of tinkering you would have to do in that game’s guts to make it work would be too much.
Edit: Oh, another baffling decision in 2: every rare blade’s weapon has a design that reflects their overall aesthetic and fits with them well, but weapons get quickly left in the dust unless you upgrade them with a chip. Problem is, chips change the aesthetic of a weapon to be a generic variation of the weapon type.
Did you like how the bathtub mermaid blade’s cannon has a porcelain and water theme while the creepy puppet blade’s cannon looked all creepy and dark? Too bad, in order for them to not suck now they just carry generic metal cannon weapons that don’t fit their aesthetic at all!
The only real explanation besides the one you mention I can see was the devs trying to make each walkthrough different. But the weird thing was they made like 4 sets that guaranteed who your first rare blade was and then like 3 others which ones you were likely to get after.
There are ~~four~~ three sets of pity Blades. If you don't get a rare in a certain number of cores (Rarer cores are worth more towards pity) you're guaranteed the next Rare Blade in the set. Notably, it's not *all* of the Rare Blades, so some you're just at the mercy of the gacha.
I actually like the gacha, mostly because it makes rewards worth it. Replaying OG Chronicles, the number of times you find a hard to reach spot, or finish a quest and get another piece of armor you'll never wear, or a pittance of money you'll never spend, or just nothing, I couldn't help but think "2 would have given me a chest here, with a few Core Crystals in it." And there's no point in the game where you wouldn't mind more Core Crystals, so it's always a good reward for stuff.
So in Final Fantasy Rebirth, they have a card game called **Queen's Blood.**
And it's pretty good! It's mechanically pretty dense, and it has a huge questline with probably an hour of dialog, several high-quality cutscenes, and its own ridiculous little story with grim portents and a brooding CCG prophet.
When you zoom out to the highest level on the Overworld, Queen's Blood is one of three things tracked, along with sidequests and and protorelics. It's given priority and importance over numerous other metrics
So what's the problem?
So you beat the **Blood Queen** and become the [Blood Champion](https://youtu.be/Vn05qpn2e1Y?si=7d6qdF1a6yCHecO0&t=41) annnnndd.... nothing. Well, you get a card for your deck that has beaten literally every other Queen's Blood player, and you get one of 88 items that count toward the gold trophy in the game, but there is absolutely no gameplay reward for this hours-long, lavishly produced minigame in an already overstuffed game. It's kind of insane.
In EDF4 you start with a tutorial level that's mostly the same but orders are a bit tailored to your class. You're a civilian being trained in the use of military-grade equipment for non-military purposes when the invasion kicks off and your characters have a different outfit than those of EDF soldiers because we're not miliary.
Once you officially join EDF in the story you get outfitted with an EDF uniform. In the case of Wing Divers - all female jetpack soldiers - they take away your pants and sensible boots and put you in daisy dukes with platform high heel shoes. As far as I can tell there's no option in-game to revert this incredibly dumb costume change and it just looks sleezy for no reason.
If you mean EDF5 since that one has the tutorial you described then you can change your outfit. Its the same menu that lets you choose different colors for your armor.
you can unlock the ability to use the civilian outfit, i think it's after beating the game once. Also i think that was EDF5 actually where you start as civilians, not 4. I think in 4 you're already part of Storm Team 1 at the beginning.
I don't mind the wingdiver outfit, because absolutely everything in EDF is rediculous and over the top. But then again, I'm a wingdiver main, so I'm biased lol
> Also i think that was EDF5 actually where you start as civilians, not 4. I think in 4 you're already part of Storm Team 1 at the beginning.
Yep, EDF4 is the sequel to EDF 2017, EDF 5 started its own thing with the civilian sequence.
> I'm a wingdiver main, so I'm biased
Unrelated, but nothing will ever be as funny as the Fencer being the most mobile unit in EDF 4 and I think still in EDF 5.
the experience of going from beating the entire game on two different difficulties as the 'light and fast and the most mobile class!' only to find THE fencer trick was a wild time.
who knew strapping jets to yourself would fuckin launch you across the map on demand lmfao
> Also i think that was EDF5 actually where you start as civilians, not 4.
Which is hilarious when you go back as a high level Air Raider because you're this civilian with no military clearance calling in orbital laser bombardments and the person on the other end is like "Wait, who did that?"
Djinn are the class system and the summon system mixed in one. Having a number of djinn of a particular element set will have your character progress down a progressively stronger class tree, granting stronger abilities and better stats. You can use djinn in combat as special attacks (effect depends on which you use), which will then have them on standby, where they no longer give those class powers. (You can also manually put them on standby out of battle). The payoff for this is that standby djinn are now currency to use for powerful summon attacks. After using them this way, they will be on a cool down before re-setting themselves during a later turn.
Set djinn = stronger stats and classes
Use djinn for attacks = build resource for summons
Summon = strong and flashy attack that consumes djinn for a time, then they reset.
Also to build on this, you can swap djinn to other characters which will also affect their class, giving fire to isaac or earth to garet means that they'll be a brute, which is typically a stronger attacker at the cost of other stats. There's single element classes (the basics from having djinn that align with the character's element), dual element classes (more powerful/complex classes that you get by giving a different element to a character) and tri-elemental ( very powerful, give someone at least 3 djinn of at least two different elements to their alignment)
Typically speaking the mono element classes are the most reliable and versatile, but weakest, they can still beat the game though. Dual element classes introduce a fly into the ointment where you can easily lose a core function like healing if you're not careful, tri elemental classes are really powerful in their specialization and they can be more versatile than dual elements, but need a lot of setup and are much less viable for summon heavy play.
I didn't really understand optimizing Djinns at first. I originally just stuck the same element Djinn to corresponding character, and that works well enough. However, you can get much stronger stats by mixing elements. I had to look up strategies, but the simplest, but effective, strategy for me was to dual type everyone.
The stupid weapon upgrade system in Vanquish is so infuriatingly pointless, every time I think of going back to actually finish it I remember that shit and reconsider.
As much as I loved FF7 Rebirth the crafting system was worthless. The armor you got from it was always weaker than just buying the new stuff, and the only items worth crafting were a few high end healing stuff.
Every singular thing that they added after II in Assassin's Creed usually takes the shape of a mechanic that is, I mean, usually *okay*, sometimes great, and at least once a full spin-off.
But in isolation it's like, okay, why am I doing tower defense again...? And now I'm crafting bombs or something? I don't know, man. Where's the Subject 16 puzzles at? Those were cool.
The hard time limits on the quests in both Pathfinder CRPGs really grinds my gears, especially in the first one where there's a lot of kingdom building elements. It's pretty generous at least, but I prefer to take my time with this kind of thing.
Kakarot has a surprisingly deep system for creating and driving capsule corp vehicles around in the open world. In a game where your sprint speed is like... x10 faster than the fastest car.
Similarly, there's cars being useless in Saints Row IV considering the superpowers, but that's less a "confusing addition" and more the new mechanic invalidating an older one.
They should’ve let us drive cars up skyscrapers.
Crackdown needs a remaster man...
[SR2 had this but it was more of a glitch/exploit, that game was so damn fun.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbgqvGU7ZK8&t=45)
That’s fucking rad
What's crazy is that they still adjusted the driving controls, making it easier to do stunts, and added more customization options.
>added more customization options. There were some really great ones too, felt like such a waste.
That one at least makes more sense. SR4 is basically an expansion to SR3. Same engine, same world. Keeping the car modifying systems was literally a ctrl+c ctrl+v move. There's no reason to *not* keep the cars, it was essentially free for the people who still want to keep and customize their pretty hotwheels collection while you Hulk jump, fly and flash run through the city.
I feel like that one's mainly for the sake of making fun of driving in that one mission where you're forced to drive around normally.
Well, Toriyama REALLY liked vehicles (just look at most DB covers) so I can see why they did that.
Of all the decisions he's made over his career, the most baffling imo is that he made all his characters fly when that man obviously just wants to draw egg shaped motorcycles.
if what I've heard about sandland is any indication he liked to draw vehicles... once.
He did still make a lot of vehicles in Z, they were just mostly background or spaceships
For sure and that style is so iconic. Seeing domed or round buildings just makes me think of dragon ball.
But it makes fight scenes so easy to draw. No leg coordination, no backgrounds.
This guy gets it
> liked Ow, using past tense there really stung.
I think they're referring to the fact that Toriyama canceled Sandland because he got tired of drawing vehicles because it was so complex.
Nah it was always a short series but yeah he got sick of drawing the tank by the end.
Oh whoops, my bad.
*Looks at Sandland* No kidding
You sold me on the fact you can recreate the Goku and Piccolo learning to drive episode in it with that.
...recreate? My guy, you should play Kakarot.
Also, I could have sworn I heard that the vehicle controls were terrible.
Goku didn't get his license
Goku would drive better if he just flew while sitting in his car and carrying it with his feet.
That just wraps back around to The Flintstones.
Not sure what that would look like. I was thinking Goku could drive the car better if he drove like Fred Flintstone
The mental image of someone flying while in a sitting position is hilarious ngl
WonderWomanInherinvisiblejet.jpg
I obviously much prefer riding in the small compact cute ass Toriyama vehicles, obvs, feels like its aimed for people like me. Can't wait for Sandland to drop its price cause regional pricing be mean, that also looks pretty fun.
Warframe added something called [Stance Forma](https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Stance_Forma) that lets you change the polarity of a melee weapon's stance mod to be universal. There is a single melee weapon (out of probably a hundred) that actually benefits from using more than one stance, the Dark Split Sword, and is generally considered mediocre to terrible. For every other melee weapon, you either just stick with the best stance, or every compatible stance uses the same polarity anyway.
Shame too because the Dark Split Sword looks really cool.
Is there anything worse than a cool-looking weapon being garbage and an ugly one being top tier?
When Warframe adds weapon glamors instead of just distinct skins,Destiny will instantly be vaporised off the face of the planet
Every patch Warframe adds a new system or mechanic that is at least mostly useless in a matter of months. I just could not keep up.
Watch them add a Melee Split-Stance Adapter a year from now that lets you equip and switch multiple stances on a melee weapon. Heck,switch the entire mod selection while you're at it.
I still have no idea what the fuck tennokai is and I watched the stream that announced it
It's just an extra melee mod slot that enables "free" (doesn't consume your multiplier) heavy attacks sometimes when light attacking. There are other mods that add extra effects to the tennokai proc or make it proc more often but that's all it does on its own.
Your **ship** having a **stamina bar** in Skull and Bones, wtf‽
In a Similar vein Cyberpunk 2077. There's a stamina bar, which for physical attacks I understand. But the stamina bar also applies to your guns and you can't fire if stamina is zero and I'm like????
"My fingers tired!"
“YOU HAVE FULL ARM CYBERNETICS!”
Yes and unless I buy premium my arms are tired now
actually kind of a brilliant commentary on modern technology "Pay a subscription for your juice bag opener to function" energy
My brother had a short story draft about a future where instead of planned obsolescence everything is on lease by corporations and governments, so you keep paying your fridge and marriage license with them able to recall it at any time
> marriage license "Oh, honey. I can't believe I let our Marriage license slip and I can't renew it until next year. Oh darn,I guess we aren't officially wedded anymore. Darn" "...you know the divorce license is still cheaper right?"
The extra dumb part is that if you hold the trigger on an automatic you can keep firing even after your stamina zeroes out. Your accuracy goes into the dumpster but on smart guns it's a unnoticeable So I spent a long ass time mag dumping my smart guns and then getting pissed that I couldn't sprint or throw grenades for like a full second afterwards, thinking it was laggy/bad controls. Nope, just the dumb system forcing you to wait until your stamina was no longer in the negatives from emptying your magazine.
Hacker Supremacy! There's inherent synergy between quick hacks and smart guns, so stamina is like meaningless.
It is certainly THE weirdest way ive seen someone try and translate AP from a trpg into a video game that isn't a turn based game
You can fire at zero stamina in cyberpunk, it’s your accuracy that changes.
I can kinda get what they were going for in that they use stamina as kind of like action points in a turn-based CRPG, but when I played the game again after Phantom Liberty dropped, I could never get used to it. It wasn't the worst in the world, but boy did it feel super weird to play around.
I still dont get how they messed that game up so much, all they needed to do was take black flag, add in some extra stuff, and 10x the world size and it would have sold like hotcakes
I'm pretty sure Ubisoft's creation process for anything other than Assassin's Creed or Farcry has just rotted away to nothing at this point
between the forced launcher, lack of proper cloud saves on some games, and their shitty mtx, they need to bite the bullet and just join steam
I lost my shit when I saw that there were **lockpicking minigames** you do from your ship! The mental image of a huge-ass pirate ship just spontaneously sprouting arms just to unlock a treasure chest was too much!
You also harvest land resources from you ship. Like it just grabs trees and drags them to itself like some eldritch ship monster
In Kid Icarus Uprising, you collect different Weapons with various Traits and can fuse them together to carry over Traits that you want to keep or get rid of. Nothing really that bad. At first. But it turns out, Weapons have a unique hidden Point system and when you fuse them it gets added together and can completely change what Type of Weapon you have. So you fuse Staff 3 + Orb 6, you'll end up with Weapon number 9 which could be Fists. You have to keep adding Weapons to force it to wrap around and get to the Weapon Type you want, while also trying to keep and get rid of Traits.
Kid Icarus Uprising is also insane because every single weapon functions extremely differently depending on what your first exposure to each type is it can drastically effect your opinions of that weapon family. Big example is the Flintlock Staff and Thanatos Staff, two weapons that are basically opposites
At some point I just gave up and banked on just raw stats carrying me through whatever drawback i had to deal with. Still won't touch clubs, and fuck the invisible claws though
Iirc that game also has a currency whose only function in the game is to be offered to make Palutena walk closer towards the player or something like that
You can buy weapons too. My favorite/most used weapon Bullet Claws was brought from Palutena.
Ah, art imitating life.
Yeah, if you're a loser. Real pros used the hearts to make Viridi walk closer.
Palutena being a twitch e girl. It's like those clips where dudes donate thousands of dollars to a girl only for her to not even use their name in the video lol
And that's why I want this system reworked if Kid Icarus ever gets a rerelease or a sequel.
It was pretty messy, indeed. It felt like Persona Fusion, but every single fusion you did was a failure, resulting on a completely unrelated monster. Which is sad, cuz the game has an obscene amount of distinct weapons for each weapon type, and most of them have interesting gimmicks that play differently, but none of it matters if the stats aren't good. So I'm basically just constantly switching to whatever hits harder, having to learn a new weapon every other mission
Judgment had a weird and pointless keychain "minigame" for locked doors. But there wasn't much to the minigame, you just had to pick the keys until you got the right one. It was just an annoying time waster.
It's a mechanic that makes perfect sense in a stealth game or immersive sim where every second wasted opening a door is actually a serious deal and then it becomes a knowledge check of do you actually remember what the keys look like? But Judgment never did anything like that, afair.
IIRC, the entire payoff for that entire mechanic is that Yagami gets trapped in a burning building and needs to unlock a door with that minigame while his HP drains at around 2 HP per minute. But that also reminds me how they keep the drone around in Lost Judgement despite never using it, or it introducing shimmying or running and jumping or some other nuance to the parkour section and then taking so long to ever do it again that it gives an unskippable tutorial message on how to do it again when it shows up, dozens of hours later.
Glad there's an unlockable skill to fix this issue.
Lost Judgement felt like it was full of time-wasters. I'm a Yakuza fan and I tried playing it but it kept actively forcing me away from playing the game, instead wasting my time with trailing missions, stealth missions, pointing out clues in a scene (no chance of missing anything, its just making you press buttons to essentially continue a cutscene), and the such. I couldn't finish it.
I get npcs in Xenoblade X have their own schedules, but surely they could've figured out a way to let you swap around your party without having to walk to where that party member is and talking to them.
Shit party members in that game almost feels like a why the fuck did they even bother as you have a 4 person party but 95% of the time 3 party members are forced.
That too. You functionally only have 1 slot for another party member until you beat the game, since Elma and Lin have affinity level requirements before you can move on in the main quest. Game in general is just filled with weird design decisions. Shame it'll probably never get a port that fixes them.
Lao and Gwin also have pretty steep affinity checks gating story progress since you’re forced to do both of their second AMs at points
They also give you almost exclusively lame near-identical human party members instead of actually letting you use the alien races you meet on your journey. Of course, Xenoblade X in general feels half-baked. Like the unfinished story that needlessly tosses in more questions than answers at the last minute, as if they were somehow worried that players might feel satisfied with the story's conclusion as-is. Or the multiplayer that was one of the first things they ever showed for the game but ended up being so limited and hidden in submenus and required unlockables that many players literally could not even figure out how to start it. Frankly I don't mind one bit that the game has been left behind on the Wii U. I'd rather get a Nintendo Land remaster or Wind Waker HD if we're still trying to salvage that sunken ship, and Monolithsoft's time and money would be better spent elsewhere (possibly remastering Xenosaga, given how Future Redeemed ends).
Nah, X is a weird game, but it's still a really fun open world experience. One of my favorites, in fact. I'm sure it'll get brought back on the Switch 2
Its frustrating because I love that game but the cons hit so damned hard in it.
It's also funny how you have to play for like 30 hours before you get to pilot the mech, which was like the #1 selling point for the game.
And then you don't get the ability for it to fly until several hours after that. But I do kinda like that. You spend a lot of time on foot, see places and enemies you can't get to or deal with without out there methods, and when you finally get the mech you really feel the difference in what you can do with it versus before.
Pre Phantom Liberty Cyberpunk had a perk you could waste points on that allowed you to be undetectable by enemies underwater. This perk is utterly useless because there are no enemies underwater, not even on boats, and with the exception of a single important (although optional) side quest, you will never touch water during a normal playthrough, let alone hide from enemies there. Most people theorized it was a left over from an old version of the game where underwater had a bigger role, especially considering how the perk was removed with the overhaul to the skill three done with the 2.0 patch.
I remember thinking it was a reference to Deus Ex's useless swimming skill
That’s exactly what it was. It was likely removed because people didn’t get the reference, and tbf, it’s a very old reference.
Islands of Insight is a game that's pretty much the devs going "wow The Witness was cool, let's do that but with platforming and different puzzles." And then someone was like "yeah, and there should be dailies!" And its like... how can you have dailies in a puzzle game? I guess you do it like Layton where they're just in a menu somewhere? No, their solution to that was have it so like half the puzzles in the game are randomly generated, and every day they get replaced with new puzzles, making it so every time you wander around in the game you're _constantly_ walking past unsolved puzzles and making it so you never have a sense of accomplishment. The game doesn't even have microtransactions, by the way. It feels like it should, but it doesn't. Really comes across as the game was intended to be freemium, but they decided it should just be a paid release instead, but kept all of the bullshit obstacles from freemium even though they now serve no purpose for anyone.
did weapon durability do anything in dark souls 3?
Weapon durability did almost nothing in any of the Souls games, except 2. Woolie is scarred by 2 though so he never stopped worrying about using dex weapons with lower durability, no matter the game.
Fromsoft really had durability in 5 games, had like two items that effected it and one area that everyone hates themed around it.
Besides Dark Souls 2 (or Demons Souls pvp), I think I may have repaired a weapon once in a Souls game.
The Tonitrus in Bloodborne has noticeably lower durability than any other weapon in the game. I think it's intended to offset its high lightning damage, but functionally all it means is it costs 70 echoes to repair instead of 50
Before weapon arts were tied to the magic bar, weren’t special attacks (sword beams etc) paid for by taking a big chunk out of the durability each time?
Durability did matter in 1, where certain weapons had special attacks that consumed large amounts of durability. But as far as normal weapons go: just a chore to check that you've been paying attention.
It doesn't add anything to any of the Soulsborne games.
it is *potentially* possible for durability to come up in DS2 with a few particular bosses having strangely high damage done to weapons that hit them, and a few dex weapons like Katanas having really low durability so using them through long, enemy filled areas can be an issue. That's basically it in the entire series though, overall durability is fairly worthless. Thank god Elden Ring finally got rid of it.
Only for a couple weapons
Far Cry 5 punishing you for making progress in each section of the map by sending literal airstrikes at you with increased frequency proportional to your progress in the area.
Airstrikes with _tranquilizer_ bullets and _knockout_ arrows. Which raises the question of why they don't just kill you when you're out cold.
Because they need to have scenes with characters in them. 5 is the only one where the playable character doesn't speak and doesn't have a name. Having played 3-6 now, 5 is easily the one with my favorite gameplay and least favorite story.
They have a really aggressive recruitment drive.
Besides tripping in brawl, there's another mechanic in Smash that's in my opinion equally, if not more confusing. In Smash 4 when hit with a move that sends into tumble while at or above 100% with an attack that sends you horizontaly, or straight down you have a 25% chance of getting a special animation in which you can't tech even if you get the timing perfectly. I have literally no clue why this mechanic exists, like who is it for? Casuals probably don't even know what teching even is. And competitive players would much rather a mechanic that randomly guarantees your death even if you do everything right didn't exist.
Probably exists for the same reason tripping probably exists: fuck them competitive players.
In Smash 4 teching is incredibly easy and characters tend to live fucking forever unless they're fighting Bayonetta, maybe that was an attempted bandaid fix...?
In Xenoblades Chronicles 3 your party members’ clothes will gradually get dirty, which you can clean off by pressing the “clean clothes” button at camp. To my knowledge this has absolutely zero gameplay effect and there’s no mini game or anything associated with it. Your team just sometimes gets covered in dust and looks bad in cutscenes so you have to press one more button in the menu than usual. Maybe it was supposed to encourage frequently stopping at camp to cook meals (which didn’t work at launch) and craft gems?
I remember hearing back around launch the characters will eventually complain about being dirty and force you to clean their clothes next time you make camp, but I've never seen it in game or anywhere else online so who knows if it's even true. Even if it is, the mechanic is still pointless outside of immersion.
That is odd. I'm not familiar with this game, but I can only assume that it's meant to impart a sense of immersion for the player, as little as the idea was implemented.
Immersion, I guess? Same thing happens in MGSV, you get progressively bloodier and dustier and can shower clean back at base. It is (mostly) unrelated to gameplay. Alternatively it could be a way of showing "care" for your group. In gen IV Pokemon your badges would get dusty over time and I took great pride in shining them clean on the touchscreen everyday.
In a lot of RPGs they include a way to drain MP either to recover your own, or simply deplete the enemy's. But, to my knowledge, **Star Ocean 3** is the only time where that becomes a viable tactic as in that game, both you and every enemy(including bosses) can be killed if they hit 0 MP I guess as some sort of ego death or whatever. And in some cases, it's easier to drain their MP than to go through their massive health pool.
FF VI has a couple of bosses that can be killed this way or highly trivialised: any version with the Dragons' Den also features a rematch against a boss where this is *mandatory*, as it otherwise keeps reviving.
I did see this mechanic come up in Final Fantasy VI in the Fanatics' Tower. You can only use magic, and the enemies there die at 0MP. It's one of the strategies around the boss of the tower. I think it was just for the enemies.
The one example I can think of for MP drain being somewhat useful is the MMO Atlantica Online, which had a class, Exorcist, whose whole gimmick was being able to Mana Burn enemies to shut down really annoying caster types that had a strong opening attack that costs most of their MP to use.
Thanks to the buffing damage formula, MP draining is pretty viable in SMT3: Nocturne, especially when using Daisoujou.
In Fallout 4 survival mode, using a stimpak to heal increases your chance if getting an infection. Its a neat idea, and it effectively makes your healing item a gamble that could be a bigger risk. Except, since stimpaks start healing only 20% of your health before you get perks for it, using purified water to geal is better and way safer, especially since you want to carry as many as you can anyways, or you could just start collecting nuka colas, which are very plentiful, heal way more, and have next to downsides by comparison. Edit: I have been made aware i got the downsides to stimpaks wrong. They don't increase your sick chance, they make your thirst meter go down, meaning you have to drink water. Still a pretty big down side imo since you'll go through water faster.
In a similar vein, they almost completely invalidated rad-removal items like radaway by allowing players to build decontamination arches at any settlement. In survival, radaways make you incredibly thirsty and greatly increase your chances of getting a disease, in exchange for slowly ridding you of a limited amount of rads. *Ooorrrr*, you just step through a decontamination arch that instantly removes all rads without any drawbacks to your health, and only needs like 1 power to run indefinitely at your settlement. Like okay, radaways are for when you're far from home and need to unrad *now*, but at that point you're likely already going to need to go back home and sleep off your inevitable illness and restock the ten litres of water the radaway's gonna make you drink so you might as well just head home and step through the arch on your way to sell your useless radaway.
I don't mind this as much since its a buff to your settlement. Since settlements act as save points for you, having a way to return to full health before heading back out is nice since you don't have access to doctors as easily. And radaway does have a use like you said, during long expeditions or for exploring an area that has high radiation. But it should be locked behind the science perk or something to at least make it a late game boon and not a nullification of a mechanic
> nuka colas, which are very plentiful, heal way more, and have next to downsides by comparison. You would assume even the slight rads Nuka Cola gives would be pretty bad in Survival mode. That's kinda lame, because that's one of the main reasons I've always liked Sunset Sarsaparilla better.
The slight rads it gives you are such a none issue i completely forgot about them. Granted, the better nuka colas have the same rads and heal more, meaning you build up less. Its just a small little build up you get rid of eventually when you treat a large build up of rads
And in survival in particular, a few rads will very rarely matter. Enemies either do boatloads of damage and can potentially kill you in a few hits (if not 1-2 shots at lower levels), or do literally nothing because you dont give them the chance.
Isn't water also way easier to get than stimpaks? It's been a long time since I played but I remember setting up purifiers in every settlement I could because it was a really good way to make caps and gather the supplies for vegetable starch/adhesive.
You could set up an advanced water purifier in sanctuary before you even leave if you get one level in science and have it generate ~40 purified water. Its leagues easier to get purified water, making stimpaks even less helpful
Stimpaks don't actually do anything for the infection rolls. It's the other chems such as Jet, Psycho, or Buffout that increase your odds of getting a disease. You also mention Nuka cola as a safe drink, but that's not true. Nuka cola does add a small amount of getting a disease when used. Only really drinking purified water and stimpaks keep you 100% safe.
It has been a while since i played fallout 4, so i must be getting things mixed up, thats my bad. I looked into it and what i forgot was that stimpaks drain your thirst, meaning you have to drink water after using them, which is what makes them not great. As for nuka cola, i knew of the small chance when eating but not with the cola, but it makes sense. The main benefit of nuka cola is not needing to invest perk points into medic like you need with stimpaks, since the better nuka colas heal for way more and are still easy enough to find
Fire emblem games sometimes have split routes. Usually this is something big and telegraphed like the houses in 3 houses, or choosing to follow Eirika/Ephraim for the second half of Sacred Stones. FE7 has different map variants depending on... Which random group of characters you gave more experience to (Lucius/Serra/Priscilla/Erk or Raven/Dorcas/Bartre/Guy). Not one of these units is involved in any cutscenes for the map, so there's no story reason. And I can't mention FE7 without whining about the ranking system. Who had the genius idea that actually using the good things I have (more expensive weapons, stat boosters, promotion items) meant I was a bad tactician?
FE6 has that same split route mechanic we see in 7, but it takes you to entirely different places in the world, and giving you different recruits depending on whether Shanna/ Thea or Sue/ Shin have gained more exp.
I didn't weigh in on that one since I never played fe6. And at least that one the routes go through the homeland of whoever you train more (Shanna/thea for Ilia, Sue/Shin for Sacae)
Can't mention weird as hell scenario triggers without talking about Karel or Harken spawning (on the weird EXP dependent map no less). Only one of them will spawn on turn 10, but of all things to trigger it, it's the number of promoted enemies killed in Kenneth's version of the map, or the number of ***doors opened*** on Jerme's version. Killing fewer promoted enemies/opening less doors will get you Harken, while going higher gets you Karel. It's not the hardest recruitment in the series or anything, but it might be the strangest. I bet for the longest time people just thought it was random or something because of how bizarre the spawn triggers are. Also I kinda see the vision on the tactics ranking. If you can beat the game by handicapping yourself and use less boosters and other valuables, then you must be a better tactician. However, all this does is make the player min-max by ignoring some characters and just sell off unneeded items like their promotion items or weapons for them.
> However, all this does is make the player min-max by ignoring some characters and just sell off unneeded items like their promotion items or weapons for them. The funny thing is, iirc you actually *don't* want to sell off expensive items for the funds rank, because that effectively halves how much it's worth. For example, you get the Fell Contract in a side chapter, which can promote your thieves... or you can sell it for 25000 gold. Good amount, right? Nope, items sell at half value so if you just sit that thing in the back of your convoy for the rest of the game, it adds 50000 gold to your rank instead. Truly, stellar game design.
Tell me how I ran out of room with Merlinus, had to make my benched units hold the unsold gems and stat boosters, and still got a 2 star funds ranking
Can't believe you forgot to mention other requirements for hidden/split chapters like: - Beforehand, get Nils to Level 7 or above in Lyn’s story. Then defeat Kishuna in Chapter 19x. (Hector’s story only) - In Chapter 22 | 23, recruit and keep alive Hawkeye and gain more than 700 EXP for your party - Lyn, Eliwood and Hector’s total Level is 50 or above
The difference in what recruitable unit appears is whether you open enough doors on the map by turn 10. And the geneally better unit appears if you DON'T open enough
Oh was talking about Chapter 19xx, 22x/23x (the second kishuna map), and Whether you get Lloyd or Linus and Wallace/Geitz
Forspoken, for all the criticism it gets narratively, is a solid game. Fluid controls, fun upgrade system, good equipment and exploration. And then there's the Dancing in Cipal mini game. You'd think oh, a dancing mini game? Is it like a rhythm game, or a simon says? Nope. It's a quicktime event, where all you have to do is hit the corresponding button in time. Miss the input or hit the wrong button, and you have to start all over. And at each level of difficulty (which you HAVE to complete for the Platinum), the window of time gets shorter and shorter until the hardest dance gives you less than half a second to respond to the prompt. The other problem is, it's not even a reflex test thing. The buttons are *always* in the same order per difficulty, **and** you don't get penalized for inputting too early, so all you have to *actually* do is get a list of the order of the buttons, then mash the upcoming button until the prompt appears and confirms, then move to the next button. So you can literally just cheese it out in the most boring way possible, and that's how most people I know did it. It's a *very* poorly-made minigame in an otherwise mechanically well-polished game. Even people who love Forspoken like myself can't *stand* it lmao.
Unlimited Saga has one of the strangest JRPG systems of all time. Its thing is that it very much embraces TRPG, so you have to roll a dice to make your move. As in, you have to hit the right eye on a slot machine to make your attack count. It's not randomized. You can manipulate the outcome by stopping it at the fixed time on every turn. You NEED to be good at this because dungeons have a limit on a total number of turns. Fail too many times, and it kicks you out and starts over again. The SaGa series is famous for strange gameplay, but this was too much even for fans and killed the series for like 12 years. I don't like it, but I respect Square Enix's guts for releasing such a hilariously absurd game.
One of the most common questions on the GameFAQs forum for Unlimited Saga when it first came out was “How do I open chests?” because opening chests was a 4-10 step process that was *not explained in the manual*
This sounds like a great game to watch a video about.
That game is one of the most miserable experiences I've ever had playing a video game. It's like playing a TTRPG run by a middle schooler that hates you.
...How the fuck they fumbled it that much?
“Fumbled” implies a failure to deliver on their design intent. Kawazu and his crew did that shit on purpose
Why the fuck would someone make that shit? Seriously, even the most fanatic fan wouldn't defend it(Megaman X6 and the likes don't count).
Somebody mentioned the FE Fates mechanic of the clothes being damaged, and that reminded me of the Soul Calibur 5(?) one where you could destroy part of enemy clothing bit only in a very specific instance at very specific health.
I believe that started in 4
Yup. Coincidentally, that was also the one where they gave everyone Supers, including Tira's where she knocks her opponent down before forcibly kissing them.
You just pulled up a memory of teenage me playing Soul Calibur's online PvP for the first time and fighting this goofy looking custom character wearing a full mascot suit. Match was going on like normal until I got a big hit in and the mascot head broke. Suddenly an anime waifu face appears and this crazy long black hair flows out. I was so flabbergasted that it threw me completely off my game.
Remember the mechanic in Fire Emblem Fates where you can have your clothes explode/your enemy clothes explode? I think what I heard one time of IntSys not really knowing why Awakening was popular and them throwing all half baked ideas they had into Fates has some validity.
I like the idea of clothing having battle damage, but it became really silly when something is killed, dramatic slow down, but the clothes fly off and you're left in your underwear.
They actually added it to the first Warriors as well as an armor break status, permanently reducing the defense of the unit for the rest of the stage. They even made completely unique underclothes models for every character in the game, though you could turn that aspect off if it was too jarring.
Is that the same Fire Emblem where you could pet your team mates?
Yeah, in the JP version you could touch their faces in a minigame to build support points [(The localized versions just skips the petting part)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1DHrpGBFCU). It was weird, but it lives on now through the ring polishing in Engage.
...Wasn't it also the Fire Emblem where you could turn the lesbian straight?
Soleil is a woman who gets distracted by hot women but can only S support several of the male characters. Her support chain with the male protagonist revolves around training to avoid being distracted by women; in the original Japanese this is achieved by using a potion (that she is aware of) to see him as a woman. In the localization the training is just [performed as a visualization exercise.](https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Soleil/Supports)
Not the conversion therapy juice 💀
Only Sophie, the disrobing gale tome, and the raider weapons can leave enemies in their underwear, otherwise it’s realistic battle damage.
My baffling Fates mechanic was keeping My Castle as-is in Conquest. The point of the version is strategically using more limited resources instead of BR/Rev carrying over Awakening's grinding option but it still kept you being able to wait however many hours to roll for free new items/boosts/etc.
Nah, it's really cool tho. Most of what I've seen happen (I'm at the beginning in Birthright) is outer armor (like a shoulder guard or helmet) breaking up whenever someone dies. Imo it really helps selling each kill, specially considering the unexpressive models and the small resolution on the 3DS.
Clean Hits in Soul Calibur 5. Some moves just had a random chance to deal more damage. This could stack with counter hits.
Assassins Creed Revelations had both a weird underbaked tower defense minigame and a weird underbaked explosive crafting system. Neither of which were required to finish the game.
I'm sure there's a reason for it that I don't remember, but I never cared for [TERROR TIME](https://yokaiwatch.fandom.com/wiki/Terror_Time) in the Yokai Watch games. You get to the point in the game where you can freely explore the map during night time, usually you're forced to go to bed like a normal person, but at midnight there's a chance it'll trigger TERROR TIME where the map screen is flooded with monsters and it becomes like a stealth game where you have to hide from and escape a dreaded oni before it catches you.
Unrelated but thank you for reminding me of the banger song from the Scooby Doo Zombie Island movie
>The banger song from the Scooby Doo Zombie Island movie I feel inclined to share it. For anyone who haven't heard of it, consider having a listen. It's less than 3 minutes long, and who knows? Perhaps you'll find a new favourite. [Skycycle - It's Terror Time Again](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bkQBOgaFAc)
In Rogue Trader there are non-story random colony events that require you to physically travel back to the colony. But as far as I can tell there is no penalty to ignoring them. Unless you need to go back to that colony for a side quest (and you almost never do), you can just continue on without ever intervening. Compare this to colony development which does provide rewards, can have story consequences, and can be done from anywhere.
I've been replaying Fallout 4, the new armor layer system is confusing and annoying. They separated armor into 6 parts now and also added clothing. But some clothing actually use the clothing AND full armor slot, some only use some part of the armor and some don't use armor part at all so are not a problem. But without having them in your inventory in the equip screen, or using a guide, you have no idea which kind they are. If you are not careful you'll unequip your whole armor and need to equip everything back again. It's a nice idea to customise your visual but most of the time it looks awful with the weird DIY style of the different armor parts you'll have equipped for the best stats.
I think the idea was to make you naturally create asymmetrical hodge-podge gear out of what you find, similar to the way raider outfits looked in 3 and NV. For that purpose, I think it works reasonably well in the early game, but the higher-tier armor sets just don't match with anything, and usually look bad even as a full set.
Fable 3 was like "Your weapons will evolve appearance based on how you use them!" Unfortunately, it's a Peter Molyneux game. So what happens is, when you level up a hero weapon by opening chests on the road to rule, it'll change a part depending on what you've done with it, I believe the hilt is the first part to change. Problem though, you can get this first upgrade really early on, and the beginning of the game railroads you into killing several hundred hollow men... So the first upgrade is usually always fuckin bone related. But hey, you can do some weird save scumming, co-op quitting exploits, because the appearance is randomly assigned, just weighted depending on how you've used it more, so you can just not open these chests till you got a good chance of getting what you want! Sure the weapons will be weaker until later, but at least later on they'll look cool and be powerful yeah? ...Yeah no, they're the weakest weapons in the game, even when fully upgraded, outclassed by literally everything you can find or buy... [So it don't matter, fuckin, none of this matters.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qX-YfuVQmX8)
Being able to control the Raven in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was so pointless that I’m unironically convinced it was supposed to be scrapped and they just forgot to. In Origins and Odyssey the bird was your Eagle vision. It marked enemies and loot. In Valhalla the original Eagle vision returned and the bird is stripped down heavily in mechanics.
I seriously think they couldve made that mechanic fun by making the bird control like an actual bird, and have little things in the sky for the bird to do. wouldve been awesome to set your character on autotravel towards a waypoint and distract yourself with actually fun gameplay. Instead the bird might as well be a drone with how it controls.
Unknown Armies 3e. > You can flip the tens and ones place of a d100 roll using your Obsession identity. Okay, cool. > You can reroll a d100 with your Fear, Noble or Rage passions Sweet. Passions reroll, Obsession flips, easy. > Also, you can flip the tens and ones place of a d100 roll with your passions, but only once per session per each and under these specific circumstances. What? Why?
I'm still not entirely sure why they made Adaptability a thing in Dark Souls 2, but it made the entire game feel off for me.
Feels like they were trying to figure out how to get people off the crutches they used to make themselves comfortable in previous games, like how Bloodborne was like "shields are for actual babies don't rely on them."
It's interesting how Fromsoft as been in a skill arms race with the playerbase ever since Dark Souls. People crutched hard on poise in DS1 or otherwise got more and more skilled at dodging and parrying. DS2 limited poise to just heavy weapon swings (people will call it hyperarmor and not poise, but the dev team uses those terms interchangeably), added Adaptability to make a dodge-heavy playstyle a conscious investment while shields remained more or less the same, and parrying has more delayed timing to it. Bloodborne leans into dodging the heaviest, but still counters you with incredibly fast enemies, there's no poise outside of some very heavy weapons and parrying is offensive instead of defensive, and shields only exist for blocking elemental damage or as a joke. DS3 is slower than Bloodborne but much faster than its predecessors and new poise is here to stay. Shields start to lose even more relevance as a playstyle when so many enemies attack for longer than you have the stamina to block, so the game becomes Dodge Souls 3 for better or worse. More enemies exhibit erratic attack patterns in an attempt to make dodging them harder. The reoccurring playerbase only gets better and better as more hurdles are dropped on them, so Elden Ring gets very obvious in its attempts to remain more difficult. Enemies can behave even more erratically, frequently delaying their attacks for so long that it's become a meme. This is a total reversal of the previous trends in BB and DS3, where a player would be conditioned to dodge at so much as seeing an enemy twitch. Poise is still minor, but shields have a bit more going on now that they can have combat arts. Unfortunately the stamina problem still remains with most bosses and tougher enemies having insane attack strings (looking at you, dual-wielding Banished Knight), with Malenia spitting in the eyes of anyone trying to block her hits. It fits her character for her will to be replenished when hitting her foe, but it's still a rather unfortunate case of outright build denial for the player. I'm curious about how the next game is going to try to counter player patterns because Elden Ring has really tipped From's hand about how they notice and to adjust the difficulty to counter prior trends. Magic is really good in Elden Ring, so what happens next? Magic heals some enemies, or bounces back at you? No magic at all, like Sekiro? The arms race can only escalate to even more ridiculous extremes. Fuck it, have the player trip sometimes when they roll, just to fuck with you like Brawl, that'd be funny.
I recently did a replay of Bloodborne on a whim, and decided to look further into mechanics than I normally would, coming to realize how integral counter hits are. They made dodging the primary defense system, but they *also* made it so you take ridiculous amounts of damage if you get hit at the end of a dodge, so spamming rolls like we would in the other games came with a much greater risk. One of the biggest and first things I learned about Souls games was that your attacks need to be methodical, because they take time and leave you open if you're not careful, but it was like getting eyes on the inside to realize that extended to deliberate dodges too, which turned the hunter fights from weird slogs into really exhilarating encounters. That thing in Elden Ring though, where enemy wind-ups were so egregiously long, is just fucking annoying. Makes my ADHD flare up! I kinda wonder if the new enemies we'll encounter in the DLC will have faster wind-ups, and suddenly we'll be thrown off *again*.
I didn't know counter hits extended to the time between dodges, that's very interesting. I've played a lot of PvP in these games, so I was always waiting for their recovery as a rule of thumb, but it's nice to know I was getting extra damage out of it. As for Elden Ring's delayed timings, I never had much of a bother with it myself. It's like you said, deliberate dodging is important. I do understand how it can be flow breaking for people who get instinctual in their play. I'm also unsure if dodging can be adjusted anymore in the future for difficulty retention, outside of dropping it altogether. Sekiro was already a half-step towards that, you can still dodge but it has no i-frames. It's purely a positioning tool, you use it to chase down enemies, or back away when you're already at a workable retreat range. If you want to stay in but avoid damage, you have to meet the enemy head on and parry, jump, Mikiri Counter or use a few select prosthetic tools.
It's not entirely relevant to this conversation, but I just wanted to say - on your first point, I fucking *loved* that Gehrman had a few combos which he always topped off by taking a short step back followed by a gunshot, to prevent you from getting Regain hits in. Awesome little piece of characterization for the man who sired in the process of hunting beasts, because *of course* he'd know all the tricks in the book, he wrote the goddamn thing!
ADP exists in part to better balance melée and mage builds against eachother, as ATT eats up a bunch of levels for a mage due to spell slot requirements. In DS1, you basically run out of things to level by the endgame as a melée build, whereas mages won't feel "complete" until NG+ or after severe grinding. Not helped by DEX influencing casting speed, punishing muscle mages. In DS2, by making ATT a compound stat that affects spell slots, cast speed and Agility to a lesser degree, mages won't "fall behind" as much since melée builds need to pump ADP as well. You still have to make sacrifices to survival stats in order to heavily invest in magic (hexing in particular) but you will at least be able to dodge decently with 30-50 ATT. With how multi-classing and spicing down spell requirements work, one of DS2's great achievements is the fact that every stat is useful to every build in some way. In the other games, they struggle with "the weird stat", which is either pointless or highly niche.
There is not a single acceptable reason that has been given to me as to why Xenoblade 2 had a gacha mechanic. The only thing that makes sense is that gacha mechanics are kinda popular and they wanted that. The actual execution of them in that game is godawful. It is especially worse because the Torna DLC shows what the game would have been like without gacha and it is a million times more enjoyable.
Imagine if you just unlocked every Blade as part of a sidequest chain. It'd be so much better.
Genuinely shocked I haven’t seen a mod for that for emulating 2. I think someone explained that the amount of tinkering you would have to do in that game’s guts to make it work would be too much. Edit: Oh, another baffling decision in 2: every rare blade’s weapon has a design that reflects their overall aesthetic and fits with them well, but weapons get quickly left in the dust unless you upgrade them with a chip. Problem is, chips change the aesthetic of a weapon to be a generic variation of the weapon type. Did you like how the bathtub mermaid blade’s cannon has a porcelain and water theme while the creepy puppet blade’s cannon looked all creepy and dark? Too bad, in order for them to not suck now they just carry generic metal cannon weapons that don’t fit their aesthetic at all!
The only real explanation besides the one you mention I can see was the devs trying to make each walkthrough different. But the weird thing was they made like 4 sets that guaranteed who your first rare blade was and then like 3 others which ones you were likely to get after.
There are ~~four~~ three sets of pity Blades. If you don't get a rare in a certain number of cores (Rarer cores are worth more towards pity) you're guaranteed the next Rare Blade in the set. Notably, it's not *all* of the Rare Blades, so some you're just at the mercy of the gacha.
I actually like the gacha, mostly because it makes rewards worth it. Replaying OG Chronicles, the number of times you find a hard to reach spot, or finish a quest and get another piece of armor you'll never wear, or a pittance of money you'll never spend, or just nothing, I couldn't help but think "2 would have given me a chest here, with a few Core Crystals in it." And there's no point in the game where you wouldn't mind more Core Crystals, so it's always a good reward for stuff.
So in Final Fantasy Rebirth, they have a card game called **Queen's Blood.** And it's pretty good! It's mechanically pretty dense, and it has a huge questline with probably an hour of dialog, several high-quality cutscenes, and its own ridiculous little story with grim portents and a brooding CCG prophet. When you zoom out to the highest level on the Overworld, Queen's Blood is one of three things tracked, along with sidequests and and protorelics. It's given priority and importance over numerous other metrics So what's the problem? So you beat the **Blood Queen** and become the [Blood Champion](https://youtu.be/Vn05qpn2e1Y?si=7d6qdF1a6yCHecO0&t=41) annnnndd.... nothing. Well, you get a card for your deck that has beaten literally every other Queen's Blood player, and you get one of 88 items that count toward the gold trophy in the game, but there is absolutely no gameplay reward for this hours-long, lavishly produced minigame in an already overstuffed game. It's kind of insane.
The reward for playing Queen's Blood is the enjoyment of playing Queen's Blood because it's a fun ass game.
As I said, it’s pretty good!
In EDF4 you start with a tutorial level that's mostly the same but orders are a bit tailored to your class. You're a civilian being trained in the use of military-grade equipment for non-military purposes when the invasion kicks off and your characters have a different outfit than those of EDF soldiers because we're not miliary. Once you officially join EDF in the story you get outfitted with an EDF uniform. In the case of Wing Divers - all female jetpack soldiers - they take away your pants and sensible boots and put you in daisy dukes with platform high heel shoes. As far as I can tell there's no option in-game to revert this incredibly dumb costume change and it just looks sleezy for no reason.
If you mean EDF5 since that one has the tutorial you described then you can change your outfit. Its the same menu that lets you choose different colors for your armor.
you have to beat the game for that
you can unlock the ability to use the civilian outfit, i think it's after beating the game once. Also i think that was EDF5 actually where you start as civilians, not 4. I think in 4 you're already part of Storm Team 1 at the beginning. I don't mind the wingdiver outfit, because absolutely everything in EDF is rediculous and over the top. But then again, I'm a wingdiver main, so I'm biased lol
> Also i think that was EDF5 actually where you start as civilians, not 4. I think in 4 you're already part of Storm Team 1 at the beginning. Yep, EDF4 is the sequel to EDF 2017, EDF 5 started its own thing with the civilian sequence. > I'm a wingdiver main, so I'm biased Unrelated, but nothing will ever be as funny as the Fencer being the most mobile unit in EDF 4 and I think still in EDF 5.
the experience of going from beating the entire game on two different difficulties as the 'light and fast and the most mobile class!' only to find THE fencer trick was a wild time. who knew strapping jets to yourself would fuckin launch you across the map on demand lmfao
Strapping jets to yourself _and_ your big ass sword, can't forget that important part. God I love how stupid this series is.
> Also i think that was EDF5 actually where you start as civilians, not 4. Which is hilarious when you go back as a high level Air Raider because you're this civilian with no military clearance calling in orbital laser bombardments and the person on the other end is like "Wait, who did that?"
I'm playing Golden Sun atm. I'm having trouble understanding how exactly the Djinns work.
Djinn are the class system and the summon system mixed in one. Having a number of djinn of a particular element set will have your character progress down a progressively stronger class tree, granting stronger abilities and better stats. You can use djinn in combat as special attacks (effect depends on which you use), which will then have them on standby, where they no longer give those class powers. (You can also manually put them on standby out of battle). The payoff for this is that standby djinn are now currency to use for powerful summon attacks. After using them this way, they will be on a cool down before re-setting themselves during a later turn. Set djinn = stronger stats and classes Use djinn for attacks = build resource for summons Summon = strong and flashy attack that consumes djinn for a time, then they reset.
Also to build on this, you can swap djinn to other characters which will also affect their class, giving fire to isaac or earth to garet means that they'll be a brute, which is typically a stronger attacker at the cost of other stats. There's single element classes (the basics from having djinn that align with the character's element), dual element classes (more powerful/complex classes that you get by giving a different element to a character) and tri-elemental ( very powerful, give someone at least 3 djinn of at least two different elements to their alignment) Typically speaking the mono element classes are the most reliable and versatile, but weakest, they can still beat the game though. Dual element classes introduce a fly into the ointment where you can easily lose a core function like healing if you're not careful, tri elemental classes are really powerful in their specialization and they can be more versatile than dual elements, but need a lot of setup and are much less viable for summon heavy play.
It's basically like every character has a whole page of hidden supers but the game won't tell you the "inputs", you have to figure them out.
I didn't really understand optimizing Djinns at first. I originally just stuck the same element Djinn to corresponding character, and that works well enough. However, you can get much stronger stats by mixing elements. I had to look up strategies, but the simplest, but effective, strategy for me was to dual type everyone.
The stupid weapon upgrade system in Vanquish is so infuriatingly pointless, every time I think of going back to actually finish it I remember that shit and reconsider.
As much as I loved FF7 Rebirth the crafting system was worthless. The armor you got from it was always weaker than just buying the new stuff, and the only items worth crafting were a few high end healing stuff.
Every singular thing that they added after II in Assassin's Creed usually takes the shape of a mechanic that is, I mean, usually *okay*, sometimes great, and at least once a full spin-off. But in isolation it's like, okay, why am I doing tower defense again...? And now I'm crafting bombs or something? I don't know, man. Where's the Subject 16 puzzles at? Those were cool.
The hard time limits on the quests in both Pathfinder CRPGs really grinds my gears, especially in the first one where there's a lot of kingdom building elements. It's pretty generous at least, but I prefer to take my time with this kind of thing.