What Are you Playing 7: Deadly Sims

[tyckspoon]

I've recently started Persona 5 Royal myself and I'm about 3 hours in, but I still haven't really played the game. It feels like there's a fair amount of gratuitous dialogue in the first part? I'm hoping it'll pull me in more later. And I wish they hadn't prioritized aesthetics over functionality when designing the UI. Everything looks so... jagged and spiky. I'm almost afraid to look at the menus out of fear of putting out an eye.

Also, Shadow Kamoshida, would it kill you to put on some pants!?

yeah, like the first.. five hours of the game are an annoyingly extended on-rails tutorial. I feel like Royal got through it faster, but that might be because I had done it in vanilla previously and didn't mind just mashing 'skip dialogue' on most of the scenes. The bits where it makes you manually walk through the subway stations like five times in a row are particularly obnoxious - you're never gonna do that again, once it finally gets out of the tutorial mode you can just fast-travel to points of interest.

And yes. Yes it would.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've recently started Persona 5 Royal myself and I'm about 3 hours in, but I still haven't really played the game. It feels like there's a fair amount of gratuitous dialogue in the first part? I'm hoping it'll pull me in more later. And I wish they hadn't prioritized aesthetics over functionality when designing the UI. Everything looks so... jagged and spiky. I'm almost afraid to look at the menus out of fear of putting out an eye.

Also, Shadow Kamoshida, would it kill you to put on some pants!?

Persona games tend to have a fairly long introduction, and it only gets worse every game in Persona 3 it's like half an hour or so, in Persona 4 it's about three hours, while Persona 5 doesn't finish it's setup for like 10-15 hours. Even the bare minimum 'get to where you can explore a Palace and build social links' is something like five hours into the game.

Part of the issue is that P3 built it's premise a lot slower, it takes 2-3 months for the plot to evolve beyond 'explore Tartarus, fight occasional big shadows'. Meanwhile P4 and P5 spend a lot longer setting up the actual main plot, but for P4 at least it doesn't actually build on the basic concept until about November (Naoto having real detective skills means that the next dungeon actually brings new twists). Honestly, while I'm maybe only a third of the way into P5R, it's why P3 probably still has the best central plot of the series.

Also, it's impossible for Shadow Kamoshida to put on trousers, they'd get in the way of his cape.

[Quizatzhaderac]

Random gripe:

Spoiler: FF WOTV

Show

Saldali (fantasy pope) is working with Gilgamesh (his "God", who is a physical being).

The evil King Khury talks about this like he's brilliantly sleuthed out some arcane conspiracy, not like one guy makes stained glass windows of the other.

I've recently started Persona 5 Royal myself and I'm about 3 hours in, but I still haven't really played the game. It feels like there's a fair amount of gratuitous dialogue in the first part?

One of the things this game does well, (but isn't obvious that a video game would be trying to do) is be a high school experience simulator. The main character does just happen to be a high school student, you will work at your education and worry about your grades.

Also, Shadow Kamoshida, would it kill you to put on some pants!?

Yes, that's how you kill him, by putting pants on him.

He's a lust demon, it makes 100% sense for him to dress inappropriately.

[Cespenar]

Yeah, this really is one of the most love it or hate it kind of games I've seen in years. Most people online seem to find it boring, and not even really a game, worse even than most walking sims. I find it extremely engaging, even if the pacing is quite slow and I played it in relatively short sessions.

Also definitely a game I need to either replay or watch someone else play, because just from watching someone else play the first day or so, there's tons of content you might not find, and you can only spend time with a limited set of the characters, but they all have relationships with each other and their own secrets.

People online are being people online as usual, which I don't care about, really. But I don't know, the only true fault that the game has for me is a lack of fast travel. The rest is all peaches.

I even like how the game doesn't tell you if you condemn the wrong or the "right" people.

[warty goblin]

It's been a week and a half, so this weekend I have had a gentle poke at Spellforce Conquest of Eo, a turn based strategy game where you play a wizard taking over a generic fantasy world.

Unlike the approximately eight hundred other games like this though, it is no holds barred about being a wizard. You have a wizard tower, not a city, and you can pull it up out of the ground and scoot it around the map. So you don't build an empire, you occupy useful terrain on a strictly temporary basis before moving on to extract resources out of somewhere else. A lot of your units need to be summoned, because the roving tax tower isn't exactly a stable economic basis.

There's also a lot of crafting, and to my genuine shock I like it. The key is that you aren't so much following specific recipes as you are concentrating different elements to get some final result. Every ingredient has some number of dots in Elemental, Life/Death and Arcane essences - what the ingredient is doesn't matter, only the essences. You need at least three essences of a sort to have any effect. Basic ingredients only have one essence, so to make the good stuff you combine them, get a useful item, and then use that item itself as an ingredient. Its actually quite fun.

Combat is budget Age of Wonders 3. Really, that's it. This is fine, AoW 3 has top notch combat.

Also the game looks fantastic. It doesn't use a procedural map, but a set map with randomly shuffled stuff like lairs and so on. This means it has proper landscapes and towns and so on, all done on this very warm oil painting sort of glow. There's not a lot of animation on the map, but I love just soaking in the ambiance.