Currently Playing

[Animalmother]

Diablo 4 is now on Game Pass. Downloaded it yesterday decided to have a quick look last night. Much to my annoyance it required setting up an account with Blizzard, this was after already logging into Xbox and Game Pass. In a fit of probable stupidity I got the hump and uninstalled without ever playing it. I might come back to it another time...

[Sly Boots]

Ha, yeah, had the same thing (minus the installation, I clocked beforehand that it needed the Blizzard account). I think I even have Battlenet after playing Hearthstone for a while years back, but I just object to having to sign into a second account in order to play a game I'm not that fussed about in the first place

[DjchunKfunK]

I think it makes sense as everything is stored on the Battlenet servers.

[Wrathbone]

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Finished this exceptional game. The vast majority has been a sheer joy to play, not falling back on nostalgia but building upon it in ways that frequently surprised and delighted me. There were obviously going to be more changes from the original FF7, but I found most to be reasonable adaptations… with a few exceptions. I’ll spoilerise the rest, focusing on the changes I'm not convinced by.

Barret and Dyne

Spoiler

Absolutely loved everything they did with Barret, though I don’t understand why they handled Dyne’s ending the way they did. The original having him conclude he was beyond help and not good enough for Marlene, leading to him falling off the cliff, was simple and heartbreaking. Rebirth seems to make out he was still nuts and had no real contrition, just getting shot by Shinra troopers. Weird change.

Cait Sith

Spoiler

Mostly still a shit, baffling character that is the Jar Jar Binks of FF7. I really disliked how they handled his ‘twist’, as they’ve made out it was some altruistic intention rather than the outright monstrous stuff he does in the original.

Gongaga region and reactor

Spoiler

Gongaga was my least favourite region for a variety of reasons, including its awkward navigation, the grating music (possibly unfair, given the high bar of the music across the game) and the fact that a tiny incidental area from the original had been extrapolated out into something massive with little justification. It felt like the plot ground to a halt until the reactor, and then it jet-boosted into bizarre and unnecessary changes.

They couldn't help themselves, could they? They couldn't wait to reveal Weapon (now apparently a fish beast) or to tease the pivotal lifestream section which presumably will come in the third game. As far as I could tell, all the reactor stuff served only two things: showing that Sephiroth is controlling the black whispers, which are engaged in a battle with the lifestream, and that he can control Cloud in dangerous ways. The latter becomes obvious later anyway, so it was pointless here, and the black whispers thing could have been explained without everything else going on. I really don't understand what they were thinking.

Red XIII and Cosmo Canyon

Spoiler

The voice change! Why?! Good grief, why? Red's deep, growling tone up to this point was perfect, and then suddenly his Nanaki voice turns out to be a bratty, obnoxious skateboarder?! This for me is the bizarrest thing in the game, being absolutely jarring and nonsensical. It turns one of the coolest characters in the game into an insufferable pre-teen. It's Poochie 2.0.

Cosmo Canyon as a whole is superb, though.

Cid and Vincent

Spoiler

I thought they were handled pretty well. It’s a shame to miss Rocket Town, but narratively it only becomes relevant later so it makes sense to bump it to the third game. I get why they’ve made Cid less of an arsehole from the get-go, though I always thought his domestic abuse in the original was an interesting (albeit horrifying) aspect to his character.

The ending

Spoiler

They were always going to fuck around with the ending, so I made my peace with it before starting the game. And yes, they 100% fucked around with it. I think most people would have preferred a simple remake of the original, but that's clearly not what we're getting as it's been signposted since the first game that this is instead some multiversal continuation of the original story. And on those terms... I don't hate Rebirth's ending.

I don't love it either, but I accept where they're trying to go with it. I'm still processing some of the implications, and I do wish they hadn't made everything so convoluted, but there is potential for it to pay off in the third game. Probably not, but you never know.

Despite all that spoilery negativity, I still consider it a huge triumph of a game. Weird plot stuff aside, the game itself, the beautifully-realised world, the vibrant characters and the surprisingly excellent comic moments are all masterfully done.

[Raid]

I'm just hoping it gets a PC release sooner rather than later.

I also finished a game I very much enjoyed over the weekend; Jedi Survivor. It's a better game than its predecessor, and extremely generous in terms of content (I think I clocked up about 55 hours in total, I'd hunted down 95% of the cosmetic boxes). I'm still not really sold on the more expansive maps (it doesn't really feel like a true open-world game, but it contains some wide-open areas that require animal mounts to traverse), but they do at least give you a fast travel option in this one which was a big failing of Fallen Order. The new lightsaber styles add variety that the first game didn't have, and I ended up settling for the Blaster / Saber combo and Double-ended. It's generally quite forgiving in terms of difficulty, so much so that I played the vast majority using the perk that decreases the parry timing window to grant a boost to your black-gauge damage. Despite playing on the second-highest difficulty setting, most bosses I managed to defeat in two or three attempts, although there was one I simply had to turn the difficulty down for (big story spoiler here):

Spoiler

It's Cere's fight with Darth Vader. I'm not sure what it was, but I just couldn't click with this one. There were just too many unblockable attacks with timing that felt unintuitive and unfair. I could reliably get to the last phase, and there were a couple of times I got him down to within one or two hit's worth of health, but it got to the point of being so frustrating that I called it quits. Maybe it was the fact that it forces you into playing a different character with a lightsaber style I was unfamiliar with, I reckon if I'd been playing as Cal I'd have made short work of it. It's also quite irritating that an obviously pivotal story moment ended up being a tiresome slog and, by the end I just wanted it to be over. I mean sure, making that fight easy would have been to do the character a disservice, but Vader does so much to interrupt your flow that it was more annoying than exciting.

I can't remember the first time I ever actually bothered with a New Game + run, but I've leapt straight into this one. You're given a handful of new perks at the start that increase the difficulty that sounded fun. There's one that massively increases all damage (both taken and dealt), meaning your lightsaber actually does one-hit kill a lot of enemies, but you can also only take a single blaster hit before you need to heal. There's one moment during the intro area where you're grabbed from one of those narrow passages and thrown off a ledge into an arena by a Security Droid (who are normally quite dangerous enemies when they attack with others). The cutscene ended, Cal took a step back, and then just sliced the thing in half in one swing, which was beautifully cinematic. It makes the crossguard saber attacks (Kylo Ren's saber style) extremely satisfying as they have a long wind-up time and are clearly meant to look powerful, and it's how most people imagine a lightsaber to work. I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it as the bosses doing one-hit kills are maybe a little much (I may just use the perk that upgrades enemy types instead).

Technically it's a mixed bag. I think I'd said back when I started that I wasn't having many crashes; that comment didn't age well. There's a repeating crashing problem around the home-base area of Pyloon's Saloon, which happened often enough that it made me actively avoid the area, or at least regularly visit save points when I was nearby. I don't think I had many crashes in other areas. The loading times however are excellent - the game does run through a shader cache building every single time you start it which takes a minute or two, but after that the load times are maybe three or four seconds at most, even when moving to entirely new areas. It's a little frustrating how many animation glitches there are, particularly with fabrics that jitter all over the place, and I don't really understand why they gave you so many cosmetics that your holstered lightsaber clips through - it's not like that position ever changes. There are lots of little bits that don't quite work right, and while the map is generally very good at pointing out places you haven't visited yet but have the ability to access, the game just does not point out the narrow gaps that are almost a trademark of this series - in the first game they tended to be marked with good use of texturing to draw your attention, but in this one they just haven't bothered and they're far too easy to miss.

The biggest problem I had was a bloody annoying design choice that makes it impossible to drop more than a certain height before it just fades to black and puts you back from where you last had your feet on the ground. The game involves a hell of a lot of vertical traversal, and there's an invisible boundary that stops you from jumping back down again, despite Jedi being shown to be capable of falling from enormous heights without issue. It's clearly designed as a general catch-all to put you back where you started when failing a tricky bit of platforming, but it affects the entire game rather than those specific instances where it would be helpful.

[DjchunKfunK]

No Rest for the Wicked

New ARPG from Moon Studios, the people behind Ori. It's been described as a cross between Diablo and a Soulslike but it mostly avoids ARPG staples. The world is handmade rather than procedural, combat is very considered a feels a lot like a Souls game. The only thing they take from classic ARPGs is the random loot.

As you would kind of expect from moon Studios it looks beautiful and the combat is very tight and a lot of fun but also can be quite hard, especially when you are up against more than one enemy. It has a similar bonfire system to Souls games where you will resurrect if you die but enemies you have killed in the vicinity stay dead and it's where you save. It has a fog of war system on the main map which will cover parts of the map with a translucent grey so you know that you have already visited there but if you go back I think enemies and loot can respawn, at least I think that is how it works. Levelling is also very similar to Dark Souls with dex, str, intel and faith(?) effecting the damage you do with weapons that have an affinity with that stat. You also have equip load and stamina. So as I said very Soulslike.

Out the gate the game got a fiar bit of criticism, partly because despite what Moon Studios had said I think a lot of people expected it to be much more like Diablo and it really isn't. On top of that the stamina usage was incredibly high which made combat seem a tad unfair, the drop chance on weapons was way off, I spent half an hour or more without finding one for instance, and durability degradation was rather punishing. That coupled with the low chance to find weapons meant some players would find a weapon die multiple times and then have their weapon break. Thankfully all these three issues have been tweaked since launch and feel a lot better.

After putting an hour or so into the game over the weekend I can see myself loving this game as it has such a good combat system and a gorgeous world that rewards exploration. It still needs some tweaks and I'm not sure how much content is in this Early Access version but the base is already there.

[Raid]

It's certainly appealing looking for me, but I read a review that said that healing items are consumables that don't get automatically replenished, and you have to gather materials to craft them. That's an instant deal-breaker for me; I like games that are challenging, but the second you make me grind for basic necessities like healing items, it makes failure punishing rather than a learning experience, and I just don't have time for that. It's one of the reasons I'd never touch Bloodborne, even when it's the Soulsborne that appeals most on an aesthetic level.