Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

I have not seen the other ending.

Spoiler

Saving Chloe (Of course)

I played it with a friend, so I also did not get the trophies, hence another reason to play it again

 

We did watch the other ending on youtube though, to sate our curiosity

 

Beyond Two Souls
I played through the game after having downloaded it for free from the PS Plus freebies not long ago. Here's the thing, I know there were people who've played the game and have had their share of criticisms about it. Maybe it's the controls. Maybe it's the actors/characters you don't like. Maybe it's the story. Whatever it was, I didn't see too much of an issue. The controls took some time to get used to; but after awhile it was like second nature. I really thought Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe played their roles superbly. I look forward to playing through it again to select alternative choices and see other possible outcomes; similar to the Life is Strange games and the Telltale games as I'd imagine (haven't played TT). IMO it was a good story with heart.

 

Monster Hunter World

Yeah, there's no real end to MHW, but finishing the story, with just under 150 hours on the clock, feels like an endgame completion.

 

Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier. Really enjoyed it, was able to sit back and relax as it was an interactive movie, basically.

Got the ending where

Spoiler

humans win

which was not my intention. Was aiming for the

Spoiler

peaceful ending

, but I messed up at the very end :/

Overall: 7/10

 

The issue most people, myself included, have with the game is just that: The Choices. The game doesn't really have any. There aren't any alternative endings or different paths. No different sequences or characters depending on your choices. Many sections of the game are impossible to complete if you don't follow the path that the game wants you to through its incredibly linear sections.

It's a game trying its best to be a movie, and I just don't see much value in that. It's definitely interesting, the graphics are good, and I enjoy the performances, but if I can get the exact same experience watching it on YouTube, then the game is just wasting its position as, well, a game.

 

Rayman 2: The Great Escape

Had a bit of a hassle with this one, bought the PS1 port on my PS3, after getting Rayman 3 HD free in PS+. Only it turns out that the PS1 port of Rayman 2 is widely considered the worst possible version, cutting loads of levels and features.

So I then got the game for my PC on GOG, and had to re-learn how to platform with a keyboard. I died a lot of times thanks to my sloppy key pressing

Overall it's a fun game, thought some of the levels are ridiculously tedious and overly challenging, such as one level relying on plum rebound physics over lava for the most part.

Always preferred Rayman 3 over 2, but was nice to replay 2 for the first time in years.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by suggesting there aren't alternative endings.

Spoiler

At the very end, it gives you the option of going in the path of "life" or "beyond"; I chose the life one where after several minutes of Jodie living on her own, it gives her the choice of reuniting with some people with her past. I chose the one where she winds up with Ryan. I'd imagine there are different endings depending on what you chose. As far as watching the ending(s) on Youtube is concerned; you can say that for any game, can't you?

 

1. The game has multiple endings. However, choices made in the story only affect the endings. They don't affect the actual story to any real extent. You'll play the same sequences with no changes. So, unlike The Walking Dead, you won't have different characters and different sequences if you play the game again and save different people.
2. The people you can save or let die aren't as a result of story decisions. Rather, they're the result of quick time events and actions outside of the story.
3. I'm not talking about watching the endings. I'm saying that watching gameplay footage without commentary would yield a similar experience to actually playing the game due to how little actual input the player has over the game.

 

Well I've only played through the game once. I couldn't say for sure that the actions/choices I made as the game progressed affected the outcome by the end. Furthermore, the sequences are random (at least that's how I played it). I'd finish up a level where Jodie is training with the CIA; and then the next level flashes back to Jodie as a little girl in the house with her foster family. On the menu screen it does give you an option to play through the game in chronological order; but I wanted to play it as it was originally released.

 

As far as I know, the order of the sequences doesn't change if you make different choices. They're always the same in the same order unless you go through them chronologically.

This playthrough kind of exemplifies what I'm talking about. These two pretty much play through the entire game, intentionally failing every prompt without repercussions.

Beyond: Two Souls - Failing Every Prompt: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjk2J8_j79MwvUPjLH5Oluh7T1x9xShO9

Language warning for the above.
Edit: Changed the link From the full LP to the edited one.

 

Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc (HD).

Was a smoother experience than R2 (once I fixed a PS3 error with the game having no audio), using a controller is so much easier than a keyboard. The only issues I had with R3 were occasional camera hiccups.

Overall I much prefer R3, the story's got more wit, the dialogue has some great one-liners, the platforming is less linear, and the combat is much improved.

 

I also prefer Rayman 3 over 2 so I'm glad to see someone else does too. The common opinion on the internet is that 3 is inferior to 2 which I disagree on.

Sure some of the power ups can be a bit annoying to use but I'll take them over the robot dog levels in 2 any day. Also Rayman 3 has a great soundtrack. I love the music that plays in the Land of the Livid Dead.

 

I agree, that track's really nice:


And my god, those Walking Shell levels in Rayman 2 are just the worst, you're travelling way too fast with poor turning control and one hit means you have to do it all again.

 

Octopath Traveler


Eight roads diverged...

I oftentimes find my enjoyment of JRPGs being similar to my enjoyment of Metroidvanias. I love the idea of them on paper, but very few of them actually hold my attention to the very end and manage to stand out as great games. Whether or not Octopath Traveler did that for me depends on your definition of "the very end," but it does stand out as a great game with excellent combat, marred only by bland stories and stereotypical characters that fail to make much of an impact.

The game begins with you choosing one of eight main characters. There's Therion, a thief who encounters a hiccup chasing a score; Olberic, a once famed warrior seeking answers for a fallen kingdom; Tressa, a merchant on the hunt for grand adventure; Ophilia, a loyal daughter determined to carry out an ancient ritual; Cyrus, a respected scholar pursuing a stolen tome; Primrose, a dancer with a heart of gold on a hunt for vengeance; Alfyn, a wandering apothecary helping those in need; and H'aanit, a fierce huntress searching for her lost mentor. Choosing your initial character is more important than you might think at first, as you will be unable to swap out that character in your party for the duration of his/her story. As you begin the game, the locations of the other seven characters around the world will show up on your map, and you'll make your way through the world meeting each of them and recruiting them to your party. With eight characters total and a maximum number of four members in your party at once, you'll want to make sure your first character sounds like someone you'll want to keep around for the long haul. Thankfully, they all have their merits, and you shouldn't find yourself regretting your initial decision down the road.


It's not the destination...

Each character's story consists of four chapters, and each chapter has a suggested level requirement based on its difficulty and the enemies you'll be facing. As you might've guessed, the level requirement increases drastically from one chapter to the next, making sticking to one character's story from start to finish an impossible task. So of course you'll want to complete each character's first chapter, then each character's second chapter, and so on. There are a few strategies on how to approach completing the game and which chapters to undertake in which order, but I won't get into them here. It's an open world game, and you have the freedom to choose what path you want to take and when. One of the bigger downsides to this kind of story structure is being unable to continue a storyline you're interested in until you continue in another one that you're not, but I never found myself being irritated by it.

Another downside to the game's disappointing story (stories?) is that the eight main characters are never featured in each other's campaigns. When going through a character's main story chapter, none of the other party members will make themselves known or contribute dialogue to the conversation, and you'll never hear an NPC mention the other three characters in your party. On the contrary, on occasion they'll actually comment on how you're traveling alone, despite the fact that three of your companions just helped you mow through a dungeon of enemies. Octopath Traveler has some major ludonarrative dissonance going on, and it requires you to check your logic at the door in that regard. The only time your party members ever interact is when you're in one of the game's various towns, and a prompt will occasionally appear on screen telling you to press + to hear travel banter. You'll then be taken to a separate screen with two characters (or three or four later on) in your party speaking to each other, and though it's a nice idea, none of the conversations are particularly enlightening or serve to enhance what little camaraderie there is between the party members.


Don't expect to find many meaningful conversations between companions.

But, setting all the negative story aspects to the side, Octopath Traveler truly excels in its gameplay mechanisms. Each character in the game has a Job (forgive me if this all sounds fairly standard, I'm hardly an expert in the genre). Olberic's a Warrior, Cyrus is a Scholar, Ophilia is a Cleric, and so on. Each of these Jobs have their own unique skills you can unlock using JP, which you earn from completing battles. These skills can be used in combat using SP, your character's standard magic meter. As you accrue JP and equip skills, you also unlock Support Skills, which are passive abilities that don't require SP and can affect the entire party depending on the attributes it grants. As you progress through the game's world, you'll find yourself coming across certain shrines that unlock these Jobs as secondary classes that can be equipped on any of your eight characters. Therefore, for example, while Olberic is initially just a Warrior, you can equip him with the Scholar as a secondary job, and suddenly the skills, abilities, and equippable weapons of that class will become available to him, thus expanding your options in combat and giving you additional options when it comes to managing members of your party. So while you can only have four characters in your party at one time, it's entirely possible to have all eight jobs active within that party, so that you're not missing out on any skills or abilities that your benched characters possess.

Independent of their Jobs, each character in the game has their own unique Path Action, which is a special ability you can use on NPCs. For example, Olberic can Challenge any NPC throughout the world to a duel. Sometimes this is necessary to remove a character from blocking a door you need to get through, or you can just use it for additional experience. Tressa, on the other hand, can Purchase items from NPCs that may otherwise not be available to you. In each chapter of your character's stories, you can expect to put those Path Actions to use to further the plot before moving on to the chapter's dungeon and boss. Each chapter follows that same basic formula - watch dialogue scenes, use Path Action, venture through dungeon, fight boss, chapter complete. It's formulaic to be sure, but it's a loop that kept me going and never felt tired in the 60+ hours it took me to complete all 32 chapters.


Octopath Traveler has great enemy sprites, especially the bosses.

The combat in Octopath Traveler is a battle system that would make the likes of Bane and Ivan Drago proud, as it revolves around discovering and exploiting your enemy's weaknesses in order to eliminate their defenses and "break" them. It's a turn based system, and at the top of the screen you will see the order of turns that will take place for the current and next round. Each enemy has a shield next to their name with a number on it, and slots next to that shield with symbols that tell you what their weaknesses are. At the beginning, they'll all be question marks, and you'll have to discover their weaknesses either by trial or by analyzing them with Cyrus (or any character equipped with the Scholar class). Once discovered, the weaknesses for that particular enemy are known to you for the rest of the game, so there's no need to analyze every time you encounter them. Now, each time you hit an enemy with an attack that they're weak to, the number on their shield will subtract by one. Once you manage to get that number down to zero, the enemy will break. They are then vulnerable to your attacks, allowing you to deal more damage than you were before, and their turns are also forfeited for the current and subsequent round of combat, allowing you to let loose on them while their defenses are compromised. In addition to your character's HP (health) and SP (points for your abilities), each character also gets one BP at the end of each round of combat. BP is used to boost your attacks, making them more powerful and allowing you to use them more than once per turn. Therefore, a basic tactic in a typical enemy encounter is to accrue BP as you whittle their defenses down, and once they're broken, use your BP to charge up your attacks and unleash all your might en route to victory.

All of this makes Octopath Traveler what I view as a phenomenal puzzle game. Every single encounter is a test of wits to assess the order of turns, what weaknesses your enemies have and which of your characters can exploit them, and the most efficient way to break your enemies to minimize their damage to you and maximize your damage to them. I'm explaining this stuff the best that I can, but just know that it all works in such a cohesive way that combat never gets old, and it's always engaging and extremely satisfying. It forces you to think in every encounter rather than just mashing the attack button until your enemies dissolve and you get your experience and move on. Again, I'm certainly no lifelong expert of the JRPG genre, but this is undoubtedly the best turn based system I've ever come across, and easily makes Octopath Traveler worth the price of admission alone. I really can't say enough good things about it.


"You taught me hate, I'll teach you fear."

It's also worth noting that Octopath Traveler is an absolutely gorgeous video game. It's got a retro inspired aesthetic that takes advantage of modern hardware, creating spectacular looking scenery. The characters' 2D sprites look great against the beautiful backgrounds, and the music also fits really well. It's a unique style that I've never really seen before, and I often found myself stopping to take in the views across the game's diverse array of environments. The animations that occur when you break enemies in combat is extremely satisfying, and so is watching them get pushed back and dissolve in a cloud of black smoke when they're killed. On the other hand, the game's voice acting ranges from decent to okay to occasionally bad, but they can be turned off in the options menu if you just prefer to read the text in dialogue sequences.


Get ready to use the Switch's screenshot button quite a bit.

One can make a case that Octopath Traveler is eight games in one, and that can be both a good and bad thing. The first time you finish a character's final chapter, you roll credits. The next time, no credits, you're just... done with that character. And then once you finally finish the 32nd overall chapter and have completed all of the character's stories, what happens is, well... nothing happens. There are epilogue quests to be done, but the game never points you to them. It's just you, the map, a journal of obtuse sidequests, and a head-scratching thought of "What now?" It's a really anticlimactic way to cap off the game's main campaign, especially considering those epilogue quests apparently tie the characters' stories together in a way that they should've been much earlier. However, I only ever dabbled in these, and once I realized that they're the kind of post-game, super difficult quests that are typically reserved for only the most dedicated of fans, I simply accepted that I was done with the game and moved on. It's a really odd design choice to tie crucial story elements to what appear to be optional sidequests. I can understand some games hiding their "true" endings behind full completion, but this feels worse than that. I wish I had the patience and determination to make my way through those, but considering the game's story never really hooked me to begin with, I didn't feel compelled to see it through to its actual final conclusion. I completed my characters' chapters, and that was that. Anything else would have to remain a mystery.

But despite that, Octopath Traveler is certainly one of my favorite games of 2018 thanks to its retro inspired gameplay mixed with modern sensibilities and an absolutely stellar combat system that sets a new bar for turn based JRPGs. It's a special game despite the lack of a compelling story or characters, and I hope that it's just the beginning of a new franchise, as it certainly lays a fantastic foundation for future titles to build upon.

 

Assassin's Creed III

This game took me a really long time to finish, approximately 2 months with constant stopping and starting. The first half of the game, to me, was awful! It was boring, the memories were short and just stuffed with cut scenes. One I was able to get passed around sequence 5, it started to get a lot better, the setting was nice as well as the music, and I quite liked Conor by the end. The ending was really good though, explained a spoiler that I found in Origins

My ratings now for AC is:

1. AC II
2. Brotherhood
3. Origins
4. Revelations
5. AC III
6. Unity
7. AC I

 

Crash Bandicoot 1 on the N. Sane Trilogy. The new physics make some levels much easier and others much harder but I still love it like the original. Onto Crash 2 now.

 

Those bridge levels tho.

 

Yeah the new physics made the bridge levels much harder. I didn't mind the first one but the High Road on the other hand.... Even with the exploit of jumping on the ropes it's still a stressful time.

I've actually had more game overs on Crash 2 than the first one though. The new physics are hard for me to adjust to. If you don't land dead centre on platforms Crash just slides off them. This is particularly bad in the river levels.

 

Tomb Raider (2013). This was my second play through and I decide to go all in an 100% it. I finished the game at 96% and spent an extra 45 mins getting the final 4%, which was mainly challenges. Thoroughly enjoyed the game, I liked it even more this time than the first. Moving onto Rise of the Tomb Raider next

 

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. One of my all time favorites, still holds up fairly well. Wish the conditions on some of the character specific sidequests weren't so strict, though (sorry Carth and Mission, just gonna have to YouTube what your estranged family members are up to). Honestly surprised I stuck with it to the end, usually when I replay KotOR I get to Dantooine and never go back. Only the second time I've ever actually finished the entire game, the first being back near its 2003 release.

 

What Remains of Edith Finch, which was a lovely little game. The numerous shifts in gameplay and plot kept things fresh throughout, and there was a nice whimsical (but dark) tone. Felt a bit like Gone Home at times. The music was great too, some good piano tunes.

 

Just finished getting all the gems in Crash 2. Tried getting some relics too but getting golds is a pain. It doesn't help that this game and Crash 1's levels weren't really designed for speedruns though unlike in Crash 3 where the levels were designed for them with time trials being in the original version.

Moving onto Crash 3.

 

The Witcher. Even though the first game has a reputation as lousy and the second game is, I'm told, a perfectly good jumping-on point in the series, I figured I might as well play it since it was like two dollars on Steam and I'm a completionist. Well, it was terrible. As the debut game for a Polish studio, you don't expect a lot, so it was a decent accomplishment, but still. The combat system is mediocre, the camera is terrible, the game does a terrible job of explaining its mechanics, the interface is total crap, there are a ton of small design issues like the tiny inventory, the dialogue is awful (though it's translated from Polish so I'll cut it some slack), the voice actors are wooden, it's got a juvenile obsession with Geralt banging every single woman he comes across, the world-building is really uneven, the visuals are dull and mediocre . . . it's just full of issues.

So what's impressive is that it mostly works despite all these drawbacks. There's enough to the story to carry you along, and there's a lot of depth to the roleplaying mechanics that they choose to focus on. It's mostly set around a big city full of political intrigue and bursting with questlines and characters, which gets you involved, and it has a pretty confident vision of its world and story. It's also unusually focused for an RPG because it's got one main character, Geralt, who's only defined around the edges by the player, and can thus get pretty strong writing. There's also no party, so the traditional focus on group dynamics goes away in favor of keeping the spotlight wholly focused on the protagonist (and avoids all the messing around with party-management mechanics). The decision to make Geralt amnesiac is weird and really gets in the way of the game's early going, since it's clearly just an excuse to let him level back up and ask the typical RPG-protagonist world-building questions and they want to keep the character's history and personality around, but as the game goes on it overcomes it. And it ends pretty strong with a great final act and none of the pacing issues typical of video game finales.

It's not a great game, in many ways it's not a good one, but it's fun and the fact that it manages to overcome all these debut-game drawbacks to deliver as much as it does speaks well to the studio, and it's not surprising they'd go on to success. Looking forward to the rest of the series now that I've gotten over this hump.

 

Yakuza Kiwami

What with Kiwami 2 finally out and thus this particular iteration’s value as a mahjong simulator exhausted, I figured I should do what I hadn’t bothered to do and play through the main questline. Annnd it’s a very faithful remake, to be sure, such that the later scenes (which I have stronger memories of thanks to many game overs back on the PS2) kept freaking me out with their attention to detail. Honestly, the faithfulness of the recreation is both Kiwami’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness - this is the first game in the series slapped inside a better engine. The writing leans from solid to maudlin, the obsession with giving bosses backup is just as infuriatingly misguided as ever, and every single side story (barring the K exclusives, which exist and are generally much more entertaining) is about a very, very obvious con attempt. Newer fans coming in hot off of Zero tended to complain, and with good reason - the value here is solely in finally having a definitive version of Yakuza with the original voice cast, and you’re going to sit through that goddamn car shooting segment and finish your vegetables!

That said, Zero’s mahjong was excellent, so naturallly so is Ks, they may have been supplanted by the new engine but by god, they’ve got a good ass riichi theme. Also it turns out making bank for like a year at the table breaks the difficulty curve since you can stock up on top shelf healing items and equipment without concern. Remember kids: it’s not gambling if there are non-cash prizes, even if the prizes are solid gold plates that you can sell next door for precision calculated cash equivalents.