MegaTen Mega Day

 

Today has been a day for Megami Tensei games and that means I had a very good day indeed.

In my work lunch break I broke out the Switch in order to play some Shin Megami Tensei 5 which basically involved me spending the entire hour getting my ass handed to me.  I've come across a side quest that I got from a Lilim who said that she would join me in exchange for going and murdering a Principality.  If you present me with a choice of cute girl in booty shorts or Statue of Liberty lookin-ass angel thing, I know where my loyalty lies.  So off I go, about to spit in the face of God once more, as is customary in these games where I come to the grim realization that I don't actually have a demon that knows Mudo.  This, I thought, would be fine because I'm still doing pretty good damage and despite the damage buff they get from the hard mode they aren't one shotting me or anything.  The problem with this fight however is that there's two of these fuckers and they keep healing each other.  Their heal gets them to full and eventually I just run out of steam before I can take them down.  This of course means that I made exactly 0 progress in my play session today as I went around gathering money from vending machines so that I can go and re-summon or maybe fuse a few things with Mudo.  I wasn't able to beat them this afternoon but I think I'm in a good position to win in my next session.

Afer that I came home from the office, fired up the stream and started playing Persona 2 Innocent Sin.  I'm playing a fan-translation of the original PS1 version because it has a set on Retro Achievements and I'm an absolute whore for that website 

https://retroachievements.org/game/11355

Given that modern Persona sort of bears a fair bit of similarity to mainline in demon gathering and fusion it's definately a change of pace to play a game like Persona 2.  Persona 2 still has a negotiation mechanic but a successful demon chat will result in them giving you a stack of cards of whatever type they are.  You then take these cards to the velvet room and summon them so the whole fusion thing is sort of out of the window and instead you just pay for demons.  Between that, the automated combat that you have to manage to make sure you're ranking things up and fusion spells (powerful magics that also have a chance to randomly raise your stats) there's an awful lot to take in at the start.  I spent my time strolling down easy street beating up on demons for level ups and not progressing the plot much but I have another session penned in for the first hour of tomorrows stream so maybe we can at least get to the first boss within that time. Looking forward to playing both this game and it's follow up, Eternal Punishment!

The Worst Controls on the Playstation

 

Was too sleepy at the end of the stream last night to fire up Blogger and write a post so instead I'll do it now, just after I wake up 

I've been making slow progress on Shin Megami Tensei 5, of course.  I've seemed to have hit a bit of a difficulty spike in the area that I'm in.  Previously every encounter was a walk down easy street and then I hit this next big area and suddenly encounters aren't so much difficult as much as they have the potential to go completely go tits up in a single enemy turn.  One bad critical or one miss and my life flashes before my eyees, especially in a game where the death of the main character means a game over even if all your other demons are just fine.  Nothing however, that a bit of demon management and maybe a little grinding for a level or two can't solve though.

I'm also coming up on the end of A Plague Tale which is a game that's FAR overstaying its welcome.  It's not a bad game by any stretch, a fairly generic hairy dad game where the hairy dad has been replaced with a teenage girl and her child brother but it just doesn't have enough ideas to support it's length.  I'm on chapter 15, hopefully the last one, but it feels like should have ended 5 chapters ago.  There's only so much you can do with "sneak around dudes" and "avoid rats" and you can see the game struggling at around chapter 6 to keep things interesting.  I don't hate this game but I'm sure as hell glad that Epic Game Store gave it to me for free, I might have been a bit less charitable with it if I had actually paid money.

Finally I spent my time on stream playing Megaman Legends on the PS1 which is I'm fairly certain the only series of Megaman games I've not played before unless there's some obscure Megaman Kart on something like the Wonderswan or some shit.  The game is actually pretty fun despite feeling a bit clunky at first but once you get a handle on it all it feels just fine.  Also the way the characters act and that specific brand of 90s anime voice acting makes me feel like I'm playing some kind of Saturday morning cartoon, it's the kind of game that a younger me would have REALLY loved.  One thing I cannot forgive though is the movement controls.  Holy Mary Mother of God these are maybe THE WORST movement controls I've seen in a game maybe ever.  People give classic Survival Horror tank controls shit for being "clunky and hard" but Megaman Legends makes Resident Evil feel like the smoothest thing in the world.  You move forward and back with up and down, as usual, but then you rotate Megaman with L1 and R1 and left and right are this weird strafe thing that isn't good for anything since the camera is too close and you can't see where you're going when strafing.  You can reverse these, which I did, but it still feels weird.  On top of that, the lock-on feature is the most fussy piece of garbage I've ever seen in a game.  If you are locked on to one enemy and another enemy comes even remotely near you, the lock on will start swinging back and forth between the two targets thus making killing either of them next to impossible.  Luckily shots sort of home onto enemies if you fire near them so locking on isn't actually required most of the time but it's still annoying when flying enemies decide to turn up.

With that Mega-man-mega-bitching out of the way I'm now off to try and finish A Plague Tale so that maybe I can spend my evening complaining about it on here. 

Snakes and Organized Crime

 Well I was in the office today so unfortunately the first "game diary" style post I'm putting up, I don't actually have all that much to say.  

In the time I had during my lunch break I, of course, played as much Shin Megami Tensei 5 as I could squeeze in.  I'm currently really enjoying this game and one thing I'm really happy about is my decision to put it on hard mode.  I remember back in my younger days, when I first got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne (Or Lucifers Call as it was called for me) and my unfamiliarity with the series meant that I found the whole thing quite challenging.  Every boss fight was a struggle, a hard earned win that felt good when I figured out a good team of demons or a good strategy.  As I got older and played more MegaTen I eventually "got gud" so when I eventually got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 4 I breezed through that entire game no problem and with that games hard mode being locked behind a full game clear, I haven't yet got around to doing it.  

Shin Megami Tensei 5 on hard, however, has BIG Nocturne energy that I'm really enjoying.  Just as I was getting comfortable running around the map and making short work of enemies, I enter a building and was treated to a boss fight.  I'm not going to spoil what the boss is or anything like that but it involves snakes but not by Tokyo Tower.  This boss stomped my shit effortlessly because my setup was AWFUL for it and unfortunately my lunch break ended before I could get another try.  However I've got some demons in stock that can help, I changed up my resistances so I'm not just granting it free turns and I'm ready to run right back in there and beat it's ass.  Excitement.

The other game I manged to get a fairly long session on today was Yakuza Kiwami, a game I'm playing on stream as part of my Yak-Attack series playthrough.  Most streams I do of that game devolve into me just doing mini-games for completion points but today I actually managed to progress the plot a little and I really like the plot of Kiwami so it's always a treat to see more of those cinematics.  On top of that I beat all the batting challenges which is a feat I'm particularly proud of since when I started the game I could barely even hit the ball AND I won a game of Shogi, a feat I thought was actually impossible.  I didn't get the completion point since you have to win a match without using the take-back function for that but the game can go fuck itself, I'm just happy I got a win at all.

I wanted to sign off each of these posts with a short "wot I plan to play tomorrow" bit but for the forseeable future every day is pretty much going to be playing just as much SMT5 as possible.  I actually think I'm near the end of my first playthrough for A Plague Tale: Innocence so maybe I'll put some time into that and try and see the ending but demon-busting takes main priority. 

Gaming Log March 14 2017

Well shit I fell asleep after streaming so I'm awkwardly posting this log from my phone

Whenever I have to work early my days are quite uneventful so I spent most of it playing Dungeon Travelers again.  I managed to kill that boss though pretty easily after I discovered that my characters could be class changed.  You would think it would take an idiot not to notice that but character levels aren't displayed on the main screen and you have to go into individual status screens to find out.  Since I don't check that shit too often I had no idea that class changes were even an option.

Once I got home I streamed Megaman 4 speedruns which went well for the robot masters and then I fucked basically every end game stage.  I finished the night with Final Fantasy 9 where I watched a bunch of cutscenes and then played Chocobo Hot and Cold which may be the only mini game worse than Blitzball

Gaming Log March 13th 2017

Here's a new blog feature for you all that will keep the written side of things flowing daily once again, a gaming log.  I know most of you don't give a flying fuck about what I'm doing day to day but I quite enjoy the idea of making a sort of public diary of my gaming so here I go!

Well this morning I did what I do every morning which is skip breakfast and fire up Persona 5.  It was a largely uneventful time although I am a little concerned with the current point in the game.  Without spoiling anything I THINK I've cleared the dungeon and done everything I have to do but there's still a big fat red countdown in the corner of my screen that basically reads "8 MORE DAYS TILL YOU LOSE!"

I'm assuming everything will be OK but the progress I stand if the story doesn't get off its arse and start moving soon is pretty great.  Still, I finished the session by heading into the optional dungeon, Mementos and fighting a boss that was susceptible to magic.  He nearly one shot my entire party in the first turn but after I survived and healed up, everything was fine and he went down pretty quickly.

Of course though, I can't spend my entire day playing P5 because I have my job to go to so that means I have to switch to something a little more portable.

Right now my current game of choice is Dungeon Travelers 2 on the Vita which I got for free a couple of months back on PS+.  So far its been a pretty enjoyable experience.  It's a competently made dungeon crawl game with an absolute metric shitton of fan service.  All the main cast with the exception of one character are cute anime girls and all the monsters are cute anime girls and at frequent points the game will show you full screen images of cute anime girls in their pants.  Well I love dungeon crawls and I love titties so everything has been pretty peachy so far.

UNTIL TODAY

The dungeon I've been currently crawling though is just bursting at the seems with complete bullshit.  Monsters doing absolute shit tons of damage with area of effect magic was just the tip of the iceberg with this place.

If you can't read Japanese then the big red text at the top of the screen basically says "No magic zone".  I'm pretty heavily reliant on magic for both killing shit and staying alive so these corridors are particularly annoying.  I don't mind being challenged in a game but this is just balls, I hate having my hands tied behind my back like this, it's just not fun.  Luckily, my main damage dealing spell caster has a rod that does instant death sometimes so it's not all bad I guess.

As if that wasn't enough though, I manage to make it to the end of the dungeon and then this bitch shows up.

HO-LY fuck the game has just thrown some impossible bullshit out of nowhere.  Every single boss up to this point has generally been pretty easy but this bitch is just smacking me all over the place.  If she isn't doing some weird party wide physical attack that comes pretty close to one shotting people, she's doing some weird debuff dance thing where at the start of her turn I just go and take a handful of damage.  Before I could figure out how to kill her I got home and stopped playing but I'm thinking that a little bit of grinding might be in order for this one.

After that I was sort of planning to stream but I made this mistake of getting into bed and lazing around for a bit and now I'm far to sleepy to do anything properly.  I'm sure there's going  to be errors in this post somewhere... Anyway I have to go to work a lot earlier than usual tomorrow so an early night and an early rise might do me some good.