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Comments
Yeah, my first Ice Man kill was with the buster. I was too scared to do Elecman.
Not a hard fight, really. Just long, tedious, and you die horribly if you mess up, like, twice.
I'm going through Breath of Death on Hard. Definitely seeing the necessity of grinding out all encounters in each dungeon, and I had to pick up Lita and then backtrack before I could take out the 5-ogre pack in the second bonus cave. Shit hits HARD.
I'm also a little nervous, since Lita is really good at first, but her late-game loadout kind of blows because her level-ups keep splitting her offense stats. Also I forgot how long it takes Sara to learn good spells, and how long she ineffectually pops away with a staff in the meantime
Party buffs are actually kind of a difficult choice, since that one turn's difference is suddenly a huge deal over whether you should take a big buff skill or a small buff passive.
I am wondering how the hell the little parka dude takes less damage than Guts Man or Fire Man.
One day I'll have to fight Elec Man the fair way rather than just embarrassing him.
Got back to Driver: San Francisco. Still one of the funnest games I've played, but I suck at it now, so I started it over.
IMO, the game is best summed up by the following quote:
When I was a kid I just couldn't beat Pharaoh Man with the buster. Or any of the MM4 robot masters. I kinda sucked back then.
I expected it to be a crazy-awesome achievement to accomplish that. Except after I grew up and did that, it didn't feel like much of an accomplishment...
Yyyeeeah, Pharaoh Man's pattern looks intimidating until you figure out the trick to him. Which also applies to Ring Man and Skull Man as well. Not for fatty Lightbulb Head though, he's still a jerk.
At least they're more challenging than MM6. Those guys are total wusses.
Definitely agree there. MM6 in general is very easy.
I'd say MM7 almost matches them in general wussiness if it weren't for the fact that Slash Man exists. And that Freeze Man's pattern takes some time to get used to.
wrong thread
Well if you don't have their weaknesses, the MM7 robot masters are decently tough on average. Cloud Man has his wind, and Freeze Man and Slash Man are just jerks.
However, they don't compare to the final boss of MM7. That said I recently saw a vid demonstrating that there is indeed a dodgeable pattern to Wily Capsule's double-homing orbs, though it requires some unintuitive moves to dodge. Such as jumping into them.
I guess I just have a lot of experience against them. And yes, Wily Capsule is a jerk.
So remember that Adam Orth guy who went on that crazy Twitter rant defending the unannounced always-online next Xbox? Yeah, he "resigned" from his position at Microsoft today. Shocking.
So I'm watching the Dark Souls 2 gameplay reveal. It looks like they're handling it exactly right. Same gameplay, but with everything improved a little. The game looks better. Environments are three-dimensional and have more unique gameplay aspects (e.g. having to carry a torch into a dark area instead of your shield if you want to see farther). Enemies are more varied and react more intelligently. These two aspects combine nicely in that more powerful enemies can actually smash through walls if you try to, say, shoot them through a window. Kinesthetics seem to have improved, which is astounding given how good they were in the last game.
Also they talked about adding variety to deaths, which is cool, though I maintain that the deadliness of this franchise is exaggerated, and would point out that outside the bit where they just showed miscellaneous deaths all in a row, there were only two deaths in the video.
Yeah most of the MM7 bosses are actually hard if you don't lock them into scriptfail loops with their weaknesses. Suffice to say a buster run is a whole different animal from a regular one. If you play the NES hack, they don't even have the weakness script.
And that final boss...UGH.
This was in Dark Souls as well, it's just that they had a helmet that had the same effect as the lantern, so in practice you'd just use that instead. But it's entirely possible there will be something similar in this, too.
It works a little differently in the sequel, just going on how the video showed it. There doesn't appear to be a lantern item, but rather torches that you can pick up in specific places.
Also the helmet failed to spawn on my file T_T
Yeah, but those specific places are probably just going to be everywhere where it's dark, so it's functionally the same thing.
True.
@Bee: ...? I've done a buster only run on the 8 bosses so far, I haven't had too much trouble with them asides from Slash Man.
Well of course they aren't total ballbusters the way they are in MM1 or anything, but still.
Agreed 100%. Everything looks really positive right now, and I absolutely love the return to a kind of atmosphere and tone closer to Demon's Souls. Interestingly, apparently some bosses can be fought part-way through some areas and defeated early, which is a kind of obvious change when you consider the new directors have Monster Hunter games under their belt. The Souls games have always kind of been a sort of, "Okay, so what if Monster Hunter was actually Medieval Dungeon Crawler?", and having team members who actually worked on MH games is only going to stress that influence. In a good way, it seems.
The more significant emphasis on clever map design (returning directly from Demon's Souls, I think, which had better individual levels if less synchronicity between them) with stuff like destructable terrain (insofar as some enemies are concerned, at least), unpredictable boss appearances, new environmental conditions (such as more dark areas) and whatnot suggest this game might be even more freeform than Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. I just hope they don't stick you with a default characters, as has been suggested. If my character's backstory is predefined and the same across classes, I don't mind, but I think the initial class selection from the previous games was an interesting set of choices.
The big deal with Rathalos is that his poison attack is less predictable than Rathian's, plus he has a one-two punch of rage roaring and tagging you with a fireball during your recovery. Also, his sweet air. The fact that he spends so much time in flight makes some weapon attacks entirely useless against him. Such as many longsword and switch axe combo parts. So he can be kinda slow to go down, and that means he gets more opportunities to lay on the pain.
In other news, Pink Rathian down, High Rank Rathian armour set acquired, Jhen Mohran is super tough. Even though I get cannons and ballistae and stuff to use against it. It's a freaking sweet battle, though -- Jhen Mohran is one of the few monsters you can traverse.
I just finished playing Fortune Summoners.
This is a pretty challenging game. But I liked it, for the most part.
It has an interesting plot, a vividly-portrayed set of characters (thanks in no small part to the excellent work of Carpe Fulgur's localization), crisp graphics and cute art, gameplay variety (as there are three characters with different playstyles to choose from), and nice music. The pacing of the game, separating it into chapters, each lasting a day, worked nicely, and together with the script, it was pretty effective at maintaining audience engagement.
(Better music than Recettear, in fact, but Recettear's repetitive and somewhat lackluster soundtrack is probably the weakest aspect of that game.)
I would like a good way to go quickly between the towns and/or save points, though. There's quite a bit of backtracking in the game. Also, I totally suck at using the game's combat system; if not for the fact that the AI controls the other two characters, I would thoroughly suck at this game. Well, that, and exploiting unblockable attacks. That said, the difficulty of the game, and the limits on healing, actually made things like buff spells pretty useful.
I usually end up playing Sana, because I can stand apart from the other two characters and heal and buff them while they take the hits and deal craptons of damage. They're much more effective under AI control than if I were to try to hamhandedly guide them around, and probably forget most of their moves (especially Arche). Your mileage may vary, obviously; if you've played fighting games a lot you might be able to better remember and use all the various button combos.
I also wish the bonus chapter after the first part (which is the part used for the demo) were accessible later. I kinda missed that...
I ran across this randomly today. It's a reply to Anita Sarkeesian's (sp?) commentary about the "damsel in distress" trope.
Enjoy, comment, whatever.
So in rather hilarious news if Microsoft is going where everyone thinks it is, Xbox Live was apparently down today.
^^ nelsonmuntz.wav
Man, she brings up some awesome points.
I could never get the hang of Sana. I'd struggle with every single one of the water segments where she had to go solo, and I cheered so damn hard when she learned how to bubble Arche.
Then again, I really, really like playing as Arche. The swordplay just feels right.
Okay, fighting the Rathalos once or twice wasn't bad. Fighting him a half-dozen times to get enough materials for his armor set is a gigantic pain in the ass.
Good news is that I have a full set of Rathalos armor gemmed enough so it gives Attack Up (L).
I couldn't ever get the feel of Arche. She feels a bit like playing a Smash Bros. character: a bit floaty in the jumping, some momentum effects just to throw me off (well this applies to all three characters), and all I can remember is like, one or two moves, at a time.
So all I remembered (as of mid-game) was the slash-roll and the down-strike. And half the time when trying to execute slash-roll, I'd execute the normal roll instead, often because I'd mix the two up in the heat of battle. And I'd forget how to do the jumpkick or any other move pretty much; my whole focus would be on positioning myself and dodging and weaving around the enemies to get a good down-strike.
Heck, that's how I played Smash; I made use of a relatively limited set of moves but relied on positioning myself to get them to actually work.
And just like in Smash, this tactic in FS works brilliantly if you have other opponents distracting your target, so they can't dodge/block your attack. Anytime you're solo, though, this tactic is tedious at best, and falls flat on its face at worst. Unlike Smash, though, you can't confuse the AI into expecting one move from you and then do another.
With Sana, I found my best approach was to jump up and use a diagonal-downward water shoot at everything. This was the least likely to be dodged, since most monsters have a tendency to jump upward to avoid attacks.
Unfortunately, turning around in FS takes a moment. This is incidentally another reason I suck at Arche -- because some of the attacks don't work when you're facing the wrong way. Such a the slash-roll. For Sana, turning around is pretty much essentially to effectively kiting an enemy by jumping over it and repeatedly diagonal-downward water-shooting it from either side. I had to do this so much I got mildly good at doing it on snakes and slimes. Cocorats are still a gigantic pain in the arse, though, and nearly impossible to hit, because they're so darn mobile.
But yeah, playing solo as Sana is...annoying. Though i ended up having to do it a few times even in the final dungeon just because of the sheer number of platforms going around everywhere.
Playing as Sana along with a group, though, means that you have one AI bashing the enemies and another AI burning the enemies and all you really have to do is to make sure you're in a safe spot and keep watch over the bottom left corner of the screen (i.e. HP totals).
Edit: Oh wait i think I know what I did wrong. I should have packed a full load of Magic Candy and Mind Chocolate and Revives and then told everyone to go nuts with magic, rather than packing a bunch of HP healing items and saying "be conservative".
I did something similar, but I had an Attack +4 talisman, so I only needed one gem to get Attack Up (L). I used another gem slot to counter the negative effect on healing items and it remained my standard armour set until I got a full set of Rathian armour in High Rank (the defense difference is pretty significant). The Rathalos set is great, especially given that it gets Speed Sharpening. So you never really deal anything less than optimal damage.
Given that it gets Attack Up (L) so easily, I can see it being useful throughout the game, depending on whether its High Rank and G-Rank sets get the same ability.
Fun little tidbit about how I got my Rathalos plate: I decided to gun for the drop while Rathalos was finishing eating and pretty much decided to fuck the consequences. Got a Rathalos plate for my trouble and the bastard didn't even get me with his attack.
Also, a tip for any monster that likes to fly a lot: Flash Bombs. A flashbanged monster in the air will immediately fall to the ground in a prone state, pretty much allowing you to impose an opening at will. Sometimes it's tricky to pull off, given how erratic monster behaviour can be, but it's worth it even if you use up multiple Flash Bombs.
Arche is all about rhythm and playing defensively. Bait the enemy into attacking first, block, lead with stab, flow into wider slashes, finish with jump kick. If surrounded, either roll through the closest one or use the turn stab to keep pressure on the one behind you and keep it from getting aggressive.
If there's more than two, hold block and laugh while your teammates nuke them.
The Caedeus has got to be one of the most irritating final bosses in recent memory.
The worst part is that I have to fight it at least once more if I want the Incaedeus Axe.