matt0

It just keeps going on and on... I think I'm on the last level now. Some late game spoilers: I've played and enjoyed a couple of solidly C-tier Soulslikes like Ashen and Mortal Shell in the past few years and I'd put this in that bracket. It sets itself up as a punishing, ultra technical game with that first boss fight, but if you engage with the equipment and levelling mechanics at even a surface level you can get through almost all of it soaking up hits and playing sloppily. The one thing I really like is the fortitude / moral system and how it gives each level it's own mini levelling up arc. It's an enjoyable enough game with some cool ideas but the lack of variety is wearing thin now.

I linked my 3DS / Wii U account to my Switch account and added funds from the Switch. Fiddly but it works.

All good picks! I've just bought Soul Hackers which I've never played but is a well regarded Shin Megami Tensei spin off game and also on sale. From the Atlus stuff that's not on sale there's Etrian Mystery Dungeon (Etrian Odyssey themed roguelike), SMT Strange Journey (another old school dungeon crawl, well regarded and has a great apocalyptic SF / Horror theme, but I preferred the gameplay in EO) and SMT 4 / Apocalypse (not played these last two, but they're the mainline SMT games on the system).

How do you feel about old school dungeon crawls and / or Shin Megami Tensei + Persona?

A lot of Atlus stuff is still full price. SMT 4 / Apocalypse, the first Devil Survivor, Etrian Odyssey Nexus etc. What's the betting these aren't going to go on sale?

It asks you when you strip / salvage them too. You get so many weapon and armour drops that the chances are you'll wind up with multiple better versions of anything you scrap or sell soon enough.

I could've sworn they were all unlocked from the start on the xbox, but I just started a new profile to test it and it turns out they're not. You can scroll through them all though, which is probably where I got the impression they were all freely selectable.

Probably too late but, you can skip levels. You can just select any level from the off.

My first two attempts I was completely overwhelmed, but then I equipped an area of effect damage spell (one of the Earth ones) that sends a shockwave out from your character. So I waded in to the middle of them, set that off, the area of effect spell lowered the spirit of all his fakes and they only took a few light hits to stagger, so I could mop them up easily and then after each wave get the big hit in on the real boss. I didn't think to try leaving one of his fakes alive. Just went through three waves of fakes then he stopped spawning them. Deflected and punished a couple of his unblockable attacks and he was done. I've been playing in a very sloppy way and brute forcing my way through most encounters without ever really getting the parry timing down exactly, soaking up lots of hits. The game so far has been pretty generous in letting you do that. I'm on the snowy level now so I think Lu Bu is the next big boss. There was a big difficulty spike in the regular enemies with the setup I had and I was getting battered without making any progress but I did a bit of reconfiguring and I'm back to hacking my way through them now. Will probably be up against Lu Bu in my next session...

I hope this post gets my point of view across better than my last few. There's been a lot of talk in this thread that while not openly transphobic is using the rhetoric of transphobia and it's frequently impossible to tell what people really mean. The language around trans issues has been seeded this way, to give plausible deniability to transphobia and to get others to echo it. It's a minefield. There's at least one case where I know for a fact posts were made in bad faith because the same poster was trolling multiple threads across the forum and copped a ban for it. And they were making the same arguments as other posters. And I read posts like the ones just above by @bradigor and @Graham S and I accept that I'm out of line in saying this, but it reads like you're both second guessing yourselves and I don't think you should. There's times when I post where sometimes I would've been better taking a deep breath and closing the browser window or I've wound up posted something ignorant or damaging myself. We can all do better, learn when to stay in our lanes and when and how to speak up. But time and time again I see trans and NB people and people trying to be allies asked to empathise with the positions of people who rarely ever reciprocate, who may or may not be trolling, who may or may not be actual transphobes. There are posters who've said some real shit in this thread, who I doubt will ever consider the implications of it. Who have openly ignored or talked around people who've tried to explain and have zeroed in on snide or angry posts frequently with no attempt to reckon with where that emotion is coming from. There's been incredibly tenuous accusations of abuse and bullying thrown around. I respect @NickC's position, and I'll admit I frequently fall in to the trap of only considering the posts I'm responding to on here and not the person behind them, but this is what I meant by "parlour game of civility". A forum which is just people screaming at each other isn't something anyone wants. People feeling they have to leave isn't something anyone wants. But this false civility and pearl clutching when people don't respond in kind isn't any better than the snide or angry posts that are being called out. I don't think anyone is a bad person or a transphobe just for buying or playing a videogame but I don't weigh both sides of the debate the same.

To clarify, I'd be much happier if the outcome was that people didn't feel unwelcome or leave but given the weight of what trans people have to face on one side against being able to talk about Hogwarts Legacy on the other these past few pages have been maddening. I'll consider my posts with more care in the future.

Yeah, it's not lost on me that being openly angry about this is a privilege of not having to face it yourself directly.

I am sick to my fucking stomach with this thead and this parlour game of civility and the associated bullshit moral judgements. Imagine if, instead of feeling victimised and unwelcome on a videogame forum, what if there was the potential to be made to feel that way at any time in any aspect of your public life, amplified through a level of institutional and personal prejudice where the issue isn't over whether you should talk about your wizard game but about whether you are considered a person or not.

"lunacy"

This is what I took away from it:

Good to know!

Have you been upgrading your armour? I just did that boss and I could soak up a fair bit of damage after upgrading all my stuff to +2. If you haven't been upgrading as you go you should have a nice stockpile of materials waiting to be used. It does mean quitting out to the village to get to the blacksmith though. I still have no idea how these jade beasts things are supposed to work. I used it in the battle but the one I had selected just made a bunch of spikes appear, didn't do any damage... ...until the boss jumped on them and impaled itself.

Still mostly guff in the sale so far but Severed is supposed to be decent. Touch screen action dungeon crawl thing from the makers of Guacamelee.

I honestly think it's bad design to put that first boss in the opening. As a skill gate it doesn't make sense, because nothing in the next few areas is anywhere near as tough. It's sprung on the player at the end of a section that's basically a tutorial. You don't have any real sense of the mechanics yet. You don't have much scope to experiment with builds or understand how you could take different approaches to tackle challenges yet. It's blindsiding anyone who isn't already familiar with Team Ninja's take on the genre just for the sake of it. The boss fight itself is fantastic. If it was at the end of the second or third area I wouldn't have an issue with it. This is a genre where people act like developers decisions are sacrosanct in a way that we don't do for any other genre. This is just clunky design, like if From had put the Capra demon in the Undead Asylum. It's not dumbing down to onboard new players in any other genre, it wouldn't be dumbing down here either.

The first area doesn't give you much opportunity to grind but you might be able to get some better gear and level up a couple of you aspects with half an hour of running about which helped me weather some of the harder hits from his second form. I also didn't look at the Wizardry spells until after the first boss which would have made the whole experience a lot less painful. What really got me through was Timmo's advice in this thread that you can deflect while holding block. It means you automatically block on a lot of your whiffed attempts to deflect and gives you more breathing room. Knowing that, it only took me 2-3 attempts after a solid 2 hours (!) of trying to beat him. Although that 2 hours involved a lot of learning deflect timings and attack signposting which helped too. After that the game is a lot more forgiving. Not easy overall but definitely in comparison to the first boss. Spoilers for the first boss - this is the shaky, incomplete knowledge of his move set that got me through:

Steamworld Dig 2 and Steamworld Heist together for just over a fiver is some good gaming for next to nothing.

There's a place called Flashback Arcade in Bradford which is trying to do the whole Arcade Club thing but with way less resources. They've got some very cool stuff there, two player Outrun 2 setup, Afterburner Climax sitdown cab, Pacman Battle Royal, Darius Burst (the big 4 player sit in cabinet), something called Star Wars Battle Pod which is like a modern version of SEGA's old Star Wars trilogy cabinet but with a giant curved projector screen, air cannons, surround sound etc. Surprisingly great game. But a lot of this stuff is in bad shape or done on the cheap. There's a Ghost Squad cabinet where the gun is held together with duct tape. The Darius Burst cabinet had the volume set up way too loud so it was unpleasant to play. A fair few generic Jamma Cabs with bad LCD screens, a couple of 4:3 games running stretched on 16:9 monitors (some of these might actually have been MAME cabs and not original hardware), wonky controls etc. Anyway, the point of this ramble is there was one cabinet that was immaculate. Really nice high quality buttons and sticks, CRT monitor, everything set up perfectly, to the point where I was 100% certain the game must have been a favourite of whoever was in charge of setting up and maintaining the machines. It was Outzone.

The first part this is a copy and paste from my post in the A&F thread about Hogwarts Legacy with a couple of things added for clarity. But a short breakdown of why boycotting Hogwarts legacy and boycotting companies with ties to Saudi Arabia is not a direct comparison: One feels directly personal. JKR is an individual who is a prominent anti trans voice and who personally benefits from sales of Hogwarts Backgammon League or whatever the fuck that game is called. And crucially, you can extricate yourself from this completely, if you chose to. You just don't buy Hogwarts Legacy. One is obfuscated through layers and layers of capital. You know at a gut level that all large corporations are tainted. They all have dodgy shareholders and make dodgy investments. The hardware is almost all made under terrible conditions. Yes, the things you buy contribute towards this. The games and software. The consoles sat under your TV. The hardware in your PC, from the new GPU or processor you bought the other day, right down to the most mundane, esoteric parts like the front panel LED hub made by Foxconn or whoever. You CANNOT extricate yourself from this, short of never playing commercially released games or owning mass market computer hardware. That's the difference. And obviously at one level these two things aren't reconcilable. Are all your actions perfectly rationalised and balanced without contradictions? Of course not, nobodies are. We all have to personally navigate this shit show. And it doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing either. I won't directly buy from Steam if I can help it, for various reasons. But I still, very occasionally (I mean very - once in the past five years) do buy from there. But I've gone from maybe 50% of my gaming budget being spent through Steam to practically nothing. I haven't bought a Ubisoft game since the news about what was happening at their studios came out. I haven't bought a Blizzard Activision game in that time either. I've started to buy more stuff second hand as a direct result of Saudi investment in the games industry. I did buy that one game off Steam though. I do occasionally buy Nintendo games on release. And now some more stuff I've been thinking about since I first posted that: If you are going to boycott companies based on investment from Saudi Arabia. If that is your genuine belief. That's a good thing! You should do that! Fuck it, when I said "short of never playing commercially released games or owning mass market computer hardware" that's also an actual good thing you can do if you want to. And none of these things, by degrees, invalidates the others. One person fully or near totally removing their financial contributions to the games industry doesn't invalidate another person boycotting companies with investment from Saudi Arabia which in turn doesn't invalidate another person boycotting Hogwarts Legacy. It's not Top Trumps. And please, anyone who hasn't, try and attempt to understand the depth of feeling around this. Why a game linked to a specific, high profile transphobe might provoke this reaction from people. Why this reaction is justified. What is at stake and the level of institutional and personal prejudice that trans people are subject to. I don't know if what I'm about to describe is what you're doing. I've seen so much bad faith posting on this issue that is an almost word for word match to what you've posted. Only you know the actual sentiment behind your words and whether this applies to you but: Bringing up horrible things, things that yes - are on a more extreme level, that are happening to people in one country as a gotcha to get people to stop talking about horrible things happening to them. To their friends and family. To people they know. That's greasy behaviour. Don't fucking do that.

They're on the title screen and you navigate to them using LB and RB. I was still having trouble finding them, even after I knew they were there. I kept getting stuck on the level select and not being able to get back to the title screen. Or the game going back to level select and I would just have to leave it to time out to get to the title. Possibly I'm missing something obvious or there's an easy way to do it when you know exactly what to press (shades of Tempest 4k putting pause on LB so for ages I thought there was no pause button... ).

Navigating a non-euclidean dreamscape to make some toast.