Ultimate Paradise

I may as well call it that since I need a reason to post slightly more, so I wanna do it by talking (or b*tching) about games I played a while ago or currently

*sets up chair*

*Powerslides in and kicks down chair*

Excellent!

I’ll come right out and say one of the reasons for making this was to throw more shit at Devil May Cry 2. I didn’t play any Devil May Cry game till I got the DMC Collection on a whim, partially due to DSP playing DMC 1. Now I heard for ages how bad DMC 2 was and how everyone rags on it but I paid it no mind. There were numerous times where fans of a series would talk shit about a game I somewhat liked. One being the second Tales of Symphonia game (not for the story, mind you), it wasn’t that great but I didn’t hate it either. There’s Disgaea 3, where many fans seem to hate it for some reason yet praise Disgaea 4 which simply added a few extra things good things, but also changed some decent things and made them stupid due to relying more on RNG (Random number generator). There’s also Sonic Unleashed, which I loved, but hate on that is debatable (and mostly the cause of the Werehog).

So yeah, I figured it was gonna be like, “The game isn’t that great, but its not horrible.”, sadly, it was one of the few times I couldn’t find any decent enjoyment in a game. This game, man, where do I start. First of all, the story is the most nonsensical of the 3 games (though that’s not saying much), half of the enemies have the most retarded names (Agonofinis? Yet that’s one of the more simple ones), Dante has the personality of a cardboard box, the combat is even more barebones than the combat in DMC 1, and you’ll use guns more than your sword, sometimes they’ll enforce it too. It started off okay, not too shitty for the first few levels but as soon as I got to the city levels it plummeted far below average. Well the boss before that level was stupid but whatever. City level was meh till it got to the tanks then it became stupid.

Having to stand in front of an infected tank (How does that even work?) and mash away because it has multiple health bars and there’s several of them. This game, man, I can’t believe it. Next you fight an infected chopper as a boss, it has more than 1 health bar, and since it’s a chopper you have to shoot it down. Twice. I still can’t believe this game. Then comes another boss after with numerous health bars since that’s a running theme here. One later level has some weak butterfly boss with a bunch of stupid larva worm enemies, once you easily deal with the boss you gotta kill the annoying worms that continuously spawn for another minute and try to eat you at every opportunity, which is more annoying than anything. This game, man. Also, that level and many others contain blue orbs you have to light up by hitting them continuously, its harder than it should be to do this if you’re using lock-on, which is on by default and turned off by holding a button. This game hurts so bad.

There’s one mini-boss(?) where you’re circling round the room with some blue red orb that generates electricity and have to do jumping slashes to break a bunch of crystals. Wow, this game. One mission a little later has you running around some town finding 4 blue orbs to light up and one’s placed in a dumb spot (part of my hate for those orbs came from that). This game. Having to fight a boss underwater with Lucia who can regularly turn invisible so you can’t lock-on, and you have no dodge underwater. Just tank hits and hope you win. This game. One of the last bosses are three floating heads that move around throwing projectiles while all you can do is shoot at them. Really. This was unbearable on DMD (yes, I stomached it that long) They have even more health and constantly spam projectiles there, most of the fight was just me doing cartwheels around the platform.THIS. GAME.

Arius’ boss fight has two stupid Secretary minions who you can barely kill since they have priority over most normal attacks. dis gaem. I will say Dante’s one-liner (probably his only one) after beating him was nice, but enough of that. Final boss was okay. Bloody Palace is boring as shit and sometimes features fights more annoying than what’s in the main game, like having a room of pyromancers and those humanoid goats = 5 minutes of cart wheels. A room of wolves that do nothing but spam spiral arrow = Endless frustration. So yeah, one of the worst games I played last year (around Christmas too).

This topic has already reached my expectations.

dat gaem, mang

DMC2 is the only DMC game I haven't played. Glad I skipped it.

I also saw DSP up there. I hate to be off-topic, but since you watch him, I want to leave you with this if you haven't seen it already:
htt p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSH39aiTx2A

And this.
htt p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCent_2q7ZE

Already saw the first ages ago when it was recent, as well as the MGS3 one. Hadn't seen that second link though, the music was a nice touch

So I wanna talk about Sonic Unleashed, a game that’s like 4 years old but I don’t give a shit. I’ll say it straight up, I fucking love this game. The music (well that’s to be expected), the levels (debatable), etc. (ran out of things to mention) Coming off the previously god-awful Sonic ’06, but hate’s divided on Unleashed. Talking about the superior 360/PS3 version here btw. There were many complaints: The game is “Boost to Win” (and that mentality gets you killed easily in later levels), how the hub worlds are bad (even though they’re small and there’s only 1 point where you have to talk to people, it’s pretty early on too), how you have to collect medals to proceed (which is a legitimate point), or the Werehog in general.

There might also be the level up system like an RPG but I don’t hear very many even bring that up, but it was more reasonable than Sonic and the Secret Rings. The only Sonic stats that needed levelling were speed and ring energy, so he started off pretty good, on the other hand Werehog started off weak with low health, barely any combos to start with, his power up mode to unleash the beast was small, etc. Most of the levelling is spent getting the Werehog form up to speed. Honestly the only issue I really had with the Werehog levels is that he doesn’t move that fast, unlike the power characters in Sonic Heroes. Also, his levels are too long compared to Sonics. A Sonic level will take around 4-5 minutes first time while a Werehog level will take 15. I just considered the combat average. Not horrible, not great, just average, because I’ve played far worse (before DMC2) and Werehog gets better as he levels up. 

The Werehog levels can be somewhat hard if you don’t take the time to level up, which I did as soon as they let me do hot dog missions after Sonic’s second level. They basically just have you going through levels doing 3 different objectives for Sonic: Collect rings, kill a certain amount of enemies, or finish within a time limit (these normally require using the best shortcuts). Doing the hot dog missions after every level really helps, especially for the last few levels. One annoying thing on later playthrough is that there’s someone in one continent to tell you which area the next level is available in. Even if you know what level is next, you usually can’t do it until you talk to him first.

Also, having to collect tons of sun and moon medals during both Sonic and Werehog’s levels, boss fights and hubs was pretty stupid. They also went to ridiculous lengths by having the requirement to play Sonic’s final mandatory level, be 120 sun medals (out of 200) while the Werehog’s is 100. Tons of people had a problem with that and rightfully so. I was aware of the medal requirement ahead of time and was constantly collecting medals during the game, by the time it came to the Adabat levels (last unlock), I think I had around 130 sun medals, and I had collected a majority of the ones in main levels, hubs & boss fights. But moving on, I loved the Sonic levels just like most people, but unlike most people my favorite Sonic level wasn’t Spagonia (shocking, I know). Honestly, my 3 favorite levels were:

Adabat

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UWsXqDM_xGM

Also liked Act 3 of that since it was all about reflexes (if you’re speeding through, which is expected)

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XjlIBlWGnXc

Shamar

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mSidhvcFVBo

And Eggmanland (yes, really). Eggmanland had a big difficulty spike compared to the likes of Adabat, Shamar & Empire City. So big that they start leaving extra lives regularly 1/3 into the level just so you don’t continuously see the game over screen. It’s a ridiculously long level, and there’s death-traps all over the place. There’s also 3 hot dog time trail missions for it too, but that’s not the problem, completing the level 3 times without dying is. A first run would take between 35 minutes-1 hour. These days I can run through it in around 15 minutes. Once I eventually got used to it, I learned to really like the level once I could speed through it without dying.

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Dm0VQjAFDFg
http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8kDQYeip80I
http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=g2JxhpuQGcs

Oh, there’s also one infamous side mission in Shamar worth mentioning since its far harder than others. For ages the thing stopping me doing it was the wall running section before the end.

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SMXB0Gl9WQI

(http://files-cdn.formspring.me/photos/20120919/n505a39282da2c.jpg)

#takingnotesfromMM, I'm totally original, pleasedon'tsue

So with the new (and possibly last?) story DLC coming out for Borderlands 2 next week, I may as well talk about memories I have some form of recollection from. This last one is focused on Tiny Tina who seems to be getting quite a bit of attention, that’s not to say I don’t like her (nor is it a surprise that a lot of people like her), just pointing it out. Since I have the season pass which I bought during a sale, I’ll get it free anyway. For the 6 or so people that read this, if you haven’t played Borderlands 2 by this point, why the fuck not? It’s pretty damn cheap at this point. So I’ll start by saying when I started I chose Zero.

1. Because getting his action skill trophy required getting to at least level 31
2. I liked his look + the siren wasn’t as broken as in the first game at high levels

I did like that it had an actual story and villain (who was trying way too hard at times), and the whole badass token system until overtime I realized the tiny stat boosts are barely worth anything (I had over 20,000 points by the 3rd DLC), but I’m a collector so I did as many of the challenges as I could though some were ridiculous/absurd to do above completing level 1 (Jimmy Jenkins easily being the biggest offender). It’s always kinda irked me that you can’t have 4 different weapons to pull out your ass at any time till like a third into the game which you get the upgrade. I had no qualms finishing the first game, thought it was pretty damn easy if you weren’t rushing, not sure if it was due to the siren skills or not. The only truly hard section was Sledge’s warehouse/clubhouse/apartment/whatever because it was all enclosed and had an explosive barrel around every corner which killed me more than the actual enemies did.

In the end the 4 types of weapons I usually carried around were: An SMG (that anarchy gun), a machine gun, a sniper rifle & a shotgun. I rarely had to use more than an SMG, due to Lilith being a beast with SMG’s, it helps that I fucking love SMG’s too (imagine my dissapointment when I discovered The Bane really was cursed). Anyway, getting back to Borderlands 2, my 4 weapons ended up being an SMG, a machine gun (eventually got replaced and became a shotgun slot), a sniper rifle (which I used a lot more due to it being one of Zero’s strengths), and a rocket launcher (which became permanent due to cheap deaths which I’ll get to). Like with the first game, I would always do the side missions first before continuing, for the levels and nice potential weaponry since that gives you the advantage, but in the first game a level difference of 2 meant curbstomping hard or getting curbstomped, here levels barely seem to matter.

Even if I was 3-4 levels higher, it would seem like the enemies were on a even playing field. If I was 5 higher, then I had a clear advantage. For most of the game though I was fine, I only had issues with Wilhelm and his gang since I came unprepared and only got through because I had recently picked up a rocket launcher that did 5000+ damage, stood in his face and kept firing till I won. Aside from that it was smooth sailing, bear in mind I’m doing all this solo since it’s easy to get paired with assholes online that steal your loot etc. Towards the end, the enemies were starting to do ridiculous damage, knocking my shield down in 5-6 hits kind of damage. I mean, sure, I loved using the sniper rifles over the course of the game (especially one specific rifle which talked every time I got a headshot), but I don’t wanna be forced into staying away because I get downed so quickly.

The last area was where this got to ridiculous standards where around 2-3 shots would either knock off my shield or down me immediately, forcing me to go through the last area like a pussy, making enemies spawn then run a mile away and snipe them from a distance, like I’m playing Uncharted 1 on Crushing. When Brick and Mordecaishowed up to help, I sat behind a wall and watched Brick clean house because a bunch of robots & turrets were aiming at my wall (since I’m still playing solo) & if I poked my head up for longer than 2 seconds, the shield would likely have immediately depleted. The cheapassbadass Constructor at the end was worse, had to stand behind a barrier in a way that I could shoot him but it couldn’t attack back. It only got worse on True Vault Hunter Mode, which I eventually started to codename DGHM (Don’t Get Hit Mode), when for a majority of the game my weapons did little damage to most enemies and most of them were putting me in FFYL constantly, so my rocket launcher quickly became my most used weapon, aside from a powerful close range shotgun I found eventually.

I ran through most of TVHM with a Conference Call shotgun & The Bee shield (some consider that combination pretty cheap if you don’t download the patch) because most shields & weapons I was getting were rather shitty. Felt like Heaven or Hell in DMC where I either get raped fast or I dominate because I never got touched. After a certain point, I got so annoyed with the absurd damage that I started running past every enemy as long as I wasn’t required to fight them. I actually did this for most levels and managed to find some fun in just running right through most enemies & seeing how far I could get before they gun me down, and if they did, attempting to use my rocket launcher. I usually carried that close range shotgun and blasted my way through most enemies during my runs, not giving a shit about avoiding damage. The bosses were ridiculous to take down solo though, such as a certain bird. I don’t even know what the deal was; there were some sidequests I specifically chose not to do because they have weaponry which I wanted to get at level 50, but the bosses had so much health on TVHM and killed me so fast too that getting past them was technically luck.

So a while ago I come back to play the 3rd DLC with Sir Hammerlock (Just wanna say I really liked the Torgue DLC, the campaign anyway), and I found out they had increased the level cap to 61 (finally) and added a new mode: Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode. So I just had to sit there and wonder, how could this actually get harder? Is this literally Don’t Get Hit Mode? Because it would probably be more accurate. I truly don’t understand what I was doing wrong since the “best shields” were still being rather shitty as a 30000+ capacity shield would still go down in a few shots & most of my new weapons would just about barely put a dent in enemies’ armor. Always felt like I was at a disadvantage regardless of my “supposedly” better equipment that I’d end up falling back on the CC+Bee combo. I rarely see anyone say anything, so I have no idea why I had such a hard time with TVHM.

Also, they went overboard with the raid bosses, they only had Crawmerax in the 3rd DLC for BL1 (who I still think is cheap as fuck), never liked fighting him. Then they had Terramorphus built into the main game, with at least one raid boss for every DLC (Tiny Tina’s DLC will have more than one), making it worse by only allowing you to fight them once a day. “What’s that? You got scraped and lost your entire health bar? Tough shit, try again tomorrow, bitch.” Sure, you’re supposed to fight them with a group, but that makes them even stronger, i.e, ridiculously high health bar & such absurd damage that a major hit will most likely down you instantly. Plus, almost all of them have at least one AoE attack that running simply can’t avoid. What this game needs is an actual dodge button so you can evade other than running like a bitch and hoping he misses.

So yeah, tl;dr, I suck at Borderlands 2.

                                           (http://comicartcommunity.com/gallery/data/media/739/neo_contra.jpg)

So I recently played Neo Contra with a friend who came round over the weekend. I wasn’t planning on doing this one but since I’ve actually played it, I might as well. I had this downloaded from PSN like 2-3 months ago, but since it took so long to download it, we never actually got a chance to play it. Recently, he had some time free & I had some time free, so he came round & and we finally booted that shit up. I didn’t touch the game after it downloaded because I’d obviously know what I was doing & what’s coming up, so that would be no fun. I had no idea what the game was like, but hey, it’s Contra. You run around, shooting the fuck out of anything that moves & blowing shit up, what’s to know? Unlike a few other Contra games I’ve played, you don’t grab gun upgrades off the floor etc. You choose your gun & weapons at the select screen & you start with 3 types (there’s 6, type 4 I personally found the best but it requires finishing level 5, type 5 & 6 require beating the final boss after stage 6).
 
There's:

Type A: Machine Gun, Grenade Bomb & Lock-on Missile (specific enemies require lock-on weapons)
Type B: Charge Shot, Fire Whip & Lock-on Laser
Type C: Spread Shot, Classic Fire Ball & Lock-on Thunder
Type D: Lightning, G Bazooka & Heaven’s Laser
Type E: Drill, Reflective Laser & Fairy Laser
Type F: Ripple Laser, GV Laser & Variable Weapon

We both just went with a basic one to start (Type A). We started with about 5 continues & about 5 lives each continue though we had kind of a rough start. There were only 4 levels available to choose in any order, but they were kinda long the first time through. The first two levels, we would make it through to the boss, then die halfway into the boss fight & retry from there. We’d then end up beating the boss and each have like 1-2 lives left. Then we’d either make it to a checkpoint in the next level or to the next boss & die again. Happened on the first three levels, but the boss of the third level was long and had us waste 2 continues while level 1 & 2 took one each. My friend died halfway into level 4 and I went through the rest by myself, going slow so enemies don’t get a cheap hit on me since I had 2 lives left. I did get hit once towards the very end of the level by BS, and then died on the boss (which I didn’t know was the boss till we tried the level again).

It’s also the kind of game where it increases the amount of continues you have & the amount of lives you start with every time you get a game over. When we tried again we did level’s 4 & 3 first since they were harder, and since we were somewhat used to them we used one continue on both stages and none on the first two stages. Stage 5 opened up after that but it was much harder than the previous ones & I quickly ended up on my own again and had to proceed cautiously with the tons of enemies roaming about. Since this game lets both players take each other’s lives when they have none, he joined again like a minute later when I gained a life from killing enemies, then we both went through it slowly instead of charging in like Rambo. We ended up dying to a miniboss that came up shortly when it changed its easy pattern and started spinning while firing laser beams, which of course you’d only know if you’ve seen it before.

After getting through that and eventually to the boss of the level which was far harder, some cutscenes occurred (and I wanna say, Contra games continue to have some of the more absurd stories I’ve seen) then the game ended there since we apparently didn’t have a high enough rank to reach level 6, and this was where the game got stupid. So I look this shit up on GFAQs, apparently an overall ranking of A was needed to reach level 6. Your ranking is purely determined by two things: Your kill rate (killing everything except mooks who respawn) + how many times you died (-1% for each death). To get an S rank, you can’t go below 98%, in order to get an A rank, you need at least 95% (B rank is 90-94%), so even if you killed everything in a level, if you died more than 5 times then you get a B. After a long while of trying and failing (more due to my friend dying to random things since he owns an Xbox and isn’t as used to the PS3 pad) I ended up eventually doing it solo with the Type D weapons which make speedrunning levels far easier. Lighting has wide range and insta-kills any small enemies, the bazooka while it’s a little hard to line up shots, when it hits it does ridiculous damage & can end boss fights pretty fast, and heaven’s laser is also OP as well as instantaneous so it rarely ever misses its target & comes out super-fast.

On the first four levels with that set, I got a ranking of A,S,S,A (could’ve got an S on stage 1 if not for one cheap off-screen attack that hit me), then an A on stage 5, so I no longer had to worry about stupid rankings, and there’s no drop-in, drop-out multiplayer so my friend couldn’t join in on the last level (which barely qualified as a level. I just killed some guys then fought a boss, and then level 7 was the last boss fight). By the time I reached level 5, I looked up another guide which apparently said stage 6 was available with just a B rank overall, but at that point I didn’t wanna find out. The ending felt like it was made by Gainax, then I found out the true ending requires me to get an overall ranking of S. Yeah, that shit wasn’t happening. Just completing the last stage was good enough for me.

Pleasing read. The PS2 Contras are both pretty weird in the grand scheme of Contra but I have a soft spot for them both (Shattered Soldier a bit more.)

Heard Shattered Soldier is harder. Not sure if I saw it under the PS2 classics section last time I checked though.

Its pretty vicious. I've never beaten it.

                                                                   (http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2010/10/28/hyperdimension-neptunia-screenshots-20101028034755587-3342384_320w.jpg)

So because I felt like it (and for a long time I’m gonna be building up to something), I’m gonna talk about my experiences with Hyperdimension Neptunia. Oh also, that picture up above is the unedited picture of the same one on the game case, not sure how many countries had it modified. Figured I’d do this for a certain someone. I KNOW YOU’RE THERE. I SEE YOU. The series already has 3 games (yes, 3 games) & there’s gonna be an anime of it in a little while. The game’s like 3-4 years old & I got it day 1. Just to say it straight, I got this game for two reasons:

1. After hearing about it from somewhere (can’t remember where), I was interested by the premise.
2. It was an RPG (Expect to see this a lot)

Of the three games, the first isn’t liked very much compared to the other two. Aside from a few issues it had, the gameplay in general was just really generic; there really isn’t much to say about it. Most people mainly just liked the characters & dialogue of the game, and I would also be one of those people. Also liked the opening too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViBkSySF6ec

Might as well talk about the plot since I don’t have much to say: It’s basically about the console wars, except those consoles are in the form of girls, or well, goddesses (don’t judge me).

The main character is Neptune, who represents the Sega Neptune, a console that was never released. She’s pretty laidback & fun-personified in her normal form but all the representatives have some ability called HDD to transform, getting high-tech armor, matching the console they represent a little more, etc. http://www.notcliche.com/lbw/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/hyperdimension-neptunia-009.jpg (yeah, that’s the same person in both forms, it’s the best of both worlds)

The PS3 rep is Noire, who’s a workaholic & has the tsundere archetype (aside from Neptune, she’s also the most popular of the other three). The Wii rep is Blanc, who’s a foul-mouthed, reserved little girl with anger issues. The Xbox rep is Vert, a buxom, graceful girl who spends most of her time gaming. That’s also in the order that you visit their places (which is the same in the first & third game), those places being Lastation, Lowee, & Leanbox (not sure why they all start with ‘L’, apparently there’s a joke I’m missing).

So yeah, at the start the four are fighting in some random place in the sky & the others gang up on Neptune, who gets beat up, falls out the sky & lands in Planeptune, and then loses her memory. She meets IF (Idea Factory) & Compa (Compile Heart) and you just have those three for most of the game. There are Gust & Nisa, but you have to see all their optional scenes & do some things to have them join. The game has a lot of subtle jokes like how Lastation has a whole bunch of industrial factories and is kinda barren because PS3 didn’t have many games when it first came out. They also tend to break the 4th wall or be genre savvy at times, Neptune in particular. So you run through small dungeons to get to the other towns & it doesn’t have random encounters, the monsters are just wondering around the dungeons themselves. The game is kinda linear, and not really that long.

One of the main issues in the game was the healing system in general. Aside from needing the right ingredients on you to use specific healing skills, you need to set the percentage that the character will do it only after they’ve been hit e.g A heal that gives back 50% health has a chance of automatically activating 70% of the time if their health falls below a certain amount. I think the percentage you get is determined by level, can’t remember exactly. Why is that such a problem? Using one example I actually experienced, in one of the early dungeons, IF got KO’d by some miniboss in a dungeon. While the game auto-revives her after a fight, I can’t heal her except in fights after she gets hit & she got revived with like 5-10% health. Every time an enemy hit her, she got KO’d again, and they loved targeting her so it kept happening till I finished the dungeon. Just in general, having a healing system based on chance is stupid in the first place.

So the main villain is some pale-skinned goth chick called Arfoire (R4, GET IT?) so Neptune tries to get the other three goddesses to team up and fight against piracy, that’s the main theme of the game. It’s also one of the RPG’s I’ve played that required barely any grinding at all. Levels are pretty much handed to you as long as you’re not skipping every enemy. It also has difficulty levels, but the only difference is that on easy, everyone does half damage (you included), and on hard everyone deals double damage (again, you included), but the game is pretty damn easy regardless due to a certain infamous move that Neptune even references in later games. Unfortunately, you can’t get the other three goddesses until right before the final dungeon because their towns are under attack by whatever the hell Arfoire is doing and you gotta convince them to join by beating the shit out of them in typical RPG fashion. But to challenge them, you have to get their ‘shares’ up to around 40% if I remember right, which requires doing specific quests which transfer shares from one area to another. Yeah, it’s a long & tedious process. Once you get enough you just go visit them. Also, I love White Heart’s theme, it’s pretty catchy. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hiCN-Mxo0oY

Also, you have to fight them solo as Neptune & beat them 1-on-1 to have them join. You can fight Arfoire without the other three goddesses; you just need them for the True Ending. But one thing that makes the game so easy is that Neptune learns a certain move called ‘Neptune Break’ somewhere halfway into the game (I think it’s around level 25). The move is absurdly overpowered, can pretty much be used almost every turn, and it hits every enemy on the map. I don’t even think Neptune needs to be in HDD form to use it either, so there’s no reason not to spam it as much as possible and end fights quick. With the things you have to do to actually fight the True Final Boss, I remember it being no match at all. Not to mention once I got the other goddesses & saw their stats were vastly better than IF & Compa, they got quickly replaced by Noire (whose power is comparable to Neptune) & Blanc (who can tank attacks much easier than other characters). I would’ve had Vert too but in the first game you only had a main party of 3 & I didn’t like her fighting style much. But what the final boss could do didn’t matter very much when I just charged in there with level 90+ characters & started spamming supers with all three of them. The fight pretty much went:

“Alright, I’m a big-ass motherfucking dragon, and I get far stronger when my health is below 50%, I get multiple turns and-“

“Nope, I got Neptune Break. Stay free.”

And so I stomped & stopped piracy for good. The End.

                                                                   (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XmLu9TgUnPM/TtVsT-a41FI/AAAAAAABYPw/OEMjySaA07I/s1600/Nptuniamk2_PS3_cover.jpg)

So the sequel was called Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2, and it pretty much rebooted the series by retconing the True Ending & shifted the focus to four other characters. I also bought this on day 1 (Don’t judge me). There’s Nepgear, who represents the Sega Game Gear & is just as pure-hearted and kind as she looks, Uni who represents the PSP & is tsundere-lite while having an inferiority complex compared to her sister, then there’s Rom & Ram who represent the DS, the blue one is innocent & shy, the red is a troublemaker. It’s funny because one of the complaints in some of the reviews for the first game was that some of the girls were a little young, and so they shift the focus to girls that are younger. Nice. This obviously isn’t the kind of cover you can actually show to people though, not that the first game’s cover was that great. At least with the first game, I could make some excuse if a friend or someone saw it (the edited cover, at least), this one’s a lot more questionable.

So early on, the original 4 are fighting some chick called CFW Magic who beats them; along with Nepgear and holds them captive using tentacles (well of course). So IF & Compa show up to save them, only have time to get Nepgear out due to some robot called CFW Judge showing up who no sells Nepgear’s super move so they’re forced to run. Unlike in the first game, Nisa & Gust do join naturally early on. There’s also 5pb who’s some idol who fights with a guitar, so yeah, she’s good though. I also dun goofed when I said the first game didn’t have random encounters. I was thinking of this game when I said monsters just wondered around the dungeon map. Anyway, the CFWs are trying to bring back Arfiore somehow, and the gist of the game is going around the other towns, fighting bosses & convincing the other CPU candidates to join to save their sisters, I don’t actually remember very much of the plot. Unlike the first game, the battle system is actually rather good, and so I’ll barely mention what’s good about it whatsoever in the next few paragraphs. I guess I’d compare the movement in battle to games like Disgaea, but that’s a bit of a stretch. I also really liked the battle theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpyb6z7maU

Unfortunately, HDD is almost useless in the second game. It costs like 100 SP just to transform (which you gain from doing attacks in normal battles) & I think it naturally consumed 20 SP every turn, can’t remember exactly but the cost wasn’t worth it when super moves also required the SP. The damage increase from using HDD was barely even noticeable too, if I have to take notes on how much more damage I’m actually doing since the boost isn’t much then there’s something wrong. There was this lily rank system introduced too, where you partner up characters in the back row with ones in the front to use special skills, create specific items etc. As I just mentioned, there’s a synthesis shop too to make items, weapons & armor you can’t buy & some require getting a high affection rate with another character which can be done by just partnering them up.

There’s tons of different endings in this game depending on getting Nepgear’s lily ranks above 5 with certain characters, those being the Normal ending which meets no special requirements, Planeptune ending (having Neptune’s lily rank with Nepgear being over 5 as well as the highest which obviously shouldn’t be very hard + having 70% shares), Lastation ending (Having Noire & Uni being over 5 & the highest plus Lastation having 70% shares), Lowee ending (Blanc, Rom & Ram), Leanbox (just having Vert as the highest), human ending (IF, Compa, Nisa, Gust & 5pb), the True Ending (requiring everyone’s lily rank being above 4 & all four places having global shares over 15% while Arfiore’s global shares being below 40%) and the one ending almost every fan seems to hate, the Conquest ending (which takes the longest to set-up and is best to do early since it gives Nepgear one of the best swords in the game. Didn’t even know she could use the sword till I saw it in my inventory hours later, thought it was purely a plot weapon). There are many events with characters towards the end of the game that make it a lot easier to increase Nepgear’s lily rank with other characters.

One annoying thing regarding shares is that the quests don’t split them equally, for instance, there’s many more quests which take shares from certain cities in Lastation and give it to Planeptune, but little to no quests to transfer those shares back. Due to a few S-rank quests that had this and had outfits as rewards, I nearly got screwed over trying to go for the Lastation ending. Fortunately I knew to keep multiple saves when playing RPG’s so I could load a file from an hour earlier to get the ending. Oh, and like in the original game, you don’t get the goddesses back till like ¾’s into the game after going back and fighting CFW Magic again, and though it’s supposed to be a hopeless boss fight, it’s still possible to win but the reward isn’t worth it. But she’s beaten in a cutscene after when the original 4 are freed, then Neptune naturally joins but the other 3 require getting their main city’s shares over 50% before joining. Getting characters anywhere near level 99 takes ages compared to the first game, hell, there was a free dlc which opened up three islands that had stronger enemies that gave far more xp than any others & it still took like 6-7 hours grinding there. It was mainly to fight the strongest boss in the game, that’s an arena fight in a coliseum you unlock towards the end of the game.

During grinding my main party became Nepgear, Neptune, Noire & Blanc, and while the original 4 had superior stats to other characters, they barely had any special moves. But I have no loyalty to characters I use for most of the game, if others have better stats; you’re going in the back. This game also has a broken super just like the original had with Neptune Break, but Neptune Break isn’t in this one (a free dlc later did apparently give the original goddesses more special moves later on but I was completely done with the game by then). It’s a special move called Violet Shwestern

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb0Vu8hRYMo

I deliberately chose the non-HDD version. Those angles are far more blatant in the third game. The move requires seeing a few events between Neptune & Nepgear in Planeptune to learn the move but those events aren’t hard to miss, then they have to be partnered up. When Nepgear is the one using the move, it’s not that great since its only 5 hits and there’s a damage break limit of 9999. Nepgear’s innate ability for having her as a character’s partner is to allow that character to go above 9999 in a single hit. So at high levels, with Neptune using the move with Nepgear as her partner, I was regularly doing 300,000+ damage at like level 80. When I fought Delphinus, the strongest boss in the game, I had IF use 2 items on Neptune that gave her 200 SP then used the move twice. I won the battle in under a minute. Everybody was level 99 and he was the last guy right before I fought the final boss on the true ending path but still, and it’s obvious what happened.

“Alright, I’m back to fuck shit up as the final boss. I’ve got many strong AoE moves; I get stronger when low on health, I’ve got a second monstrous form where I become a motherfucking beast from the fifth dimension, I also get-“

“Nope. I got Violet Shwestren. Stay free.”

And so I stomped, yet again. The End.

                                                                   (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/39/HyperdimensionNeptuniaVictory.jpg)

Finally at the third game so after this I no longer have to talk about it. I also bought this on day 1 yet again (You’re judging me, aren’t you? I swear it wasn’t an intentional thing; I just had a lot of money on me when these games came out. Well, I was low on money at this point but I knew this one was good). This one went back to having Neptune as the main character since a lot of fans said Nepgear was boring in comparison, or so I heard. Plus, unlike in the first two where the other 3 goddesses aren’t available until near the very end of the game, they make up all of the playable characters. There’s only a few new ones but they all have a HDD form (at least until DLC), and HDD is actually worth using in this game. All the human characters are gone and good riddance, fuck them. The game takes place in an alternate universe for a majority of  the plot due to spoiler details and there isn’t much difference aside from Noire, Blanc & Vert having somewhat different clothing & such (Noire is more obnoxious, Blanc is more sociable & less prone to violence etc.) though Planeptune has a different goddess called Plutia in that dimension (or Pururut in JPN) who’s a ditzy, lazy & carefree person who just wants to have fun & sleep so naturally she & Neptune get along pretty fast. Plutia & Noire join very early on then the rest overtime.

The little menu things added were mainly challenges that functioned like achievements but weren’t and gave permanent stat boosts (like reviving a certain character a number of times, walking in dungeons using that character etc.), and the HDD armor customization to mix & match pieces for different stat boosts. They had that in the first & second game, but it matters a lot more in the third game & can really make a difference in fights. Plus, you get far more HDD sets than in the previous games, and most are handed to you over the course of the story. Blanc probably gets the most, considering the amount of consoles Nintendo have (and some are really modelled after the look of the console like the SNES armor has the button layout & all). Going HDD takes 20% of a character’s maximum SP and doesn’t take more to maintain it every turn now. Super moves are now done using an EXE gauge which becomes available from chapter 3 if I remember correctly and goes up to a maximum of 4 gauges that increase 1 bar every chapter, and you build it by using multi-hitting attacks. There’s a shit ton of tag-team EXE skills too, pretty much every character has some, and some have an EXE skill with 4 specific characters. Most of the ones that require 2 gauges suck though, there’s honestly no point using supers above 1 gauge most of the time, most level 2 supers do less damage than a character’s level 1. I also love the theme that plays whenever you use an EXE skill:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-dmtr9IDxk

There’s one with Plutia in place of Neptune, as well as one for the main characters of the second game but whatever. Might as well mention a broken super while on it. While Neptune has Neptune Break as her level 1 EXE skill (which mentions the move breaking the game as its description) and can naturally go beyond the damage limit without accessories, its Noire’s Infinite Blades EXE that takes 1st place partly because Noire has one ability that Neptune doesn’t: Ignore Enemy Trait. Since a lot of enemies are machines, physical attacks don’t do full damage against them. IET bypasses all that shit and does full damage regardless of what resistances they have. Not to mention, Infinite Blades hits all enemies on the map & debuffs them, Neptune Break doesn’t.

“Alright, I’m a badass mean machine, about to fuck up these girls. Got a whole bunch of-“

“Nope. I got Infinite Blades. Stay free…is what I’d say if you didn’t have so much health.”

Enemies have a shit ton of health in this game compared to the first two, or at least its more noticeable. Sure, you had to break their guard in the other two, but it didn’t take that long knocking it down, it takes quite a while here. Pretty much no point busting out EXE skills till that guard is down then you go all out before that guard starts recovering piece by piece on the enemy’s turn. This is also the first game in this series where I’ve had to grind in the storyline to progress. It was really early too. Couldn’t defeat a boss with Neptune & Plutia alone in chapter 2, so I had to go buy rings to up my health and grind a few levels. I felt confused, having forgotten it’s an RPG because there was never a point in the first two where the game basically said, “You too weak, son. Go back to that last area & kill shit for half an hour.” Bosses get tough later if you’re not grinding, or doing the quests which require you being stronger than the story is expecting you too anyway. Pretty much every chapter you’ll get a quest or two telling you to go fight some rare powerful monster. Of course, the game doesn’t tell you shit about where it spawns. That’s where the scouts come in.

You get a few guys that you send to explore dungeons and come back overtime to tell you what they find. Could be some items, an opportunity to increase drop rates there, alerting you of rare monster spawns, and sometimes they find fuck all. I’m not sure whether paying them tons increases chances but they level up the more you use them which increases their chances of finding shit anyway. The things that need killing for quests are usually better than storyline bosses at that particular moment so I usually needed the best stuff available in the shops, being higher levelled and so on to beat them, but they weren’t that hard. There’s one rare monster in particular called the Gargoyle for a quest in chapter 4, who’s not reasonably beatable on a first playthrough unlike the others. Sure, it’s possible but the effort required is way beyond what some grinding and better equipment can achieve. On a second playthrough, he was the only enemy who put up a fight (never killed any characters but he sure tried). There’s also a lot of optional dungeons that can only be discovered using scouts & they’ll also sometimes recruit newer scouts too. The optional dungeons will usually be far above your level when you find them. Twice I would visit a new dungeon and get curbstomped by the first enemy, or watch it no sell my attacks, try to run & be denied because the game doesn’t believe in a tactical retreat, so I had to save every time I visited these optional dungeons. They never say whether it’s safe to explore the area at your current level either.

Any other complaint pales in comparison to my biggest one though: The drop rate system. Good lord is it bad. It’s mainly concerning the tough spawn enemies. Later on, they’ll be many quests wanting you to track down a rare powerful monster, and collect 3 of the special item that it drops. The monster which takes 3-4 minutes whittling down and has a drop rate of like 10%. You can imagine how frustrating that is. There are game “chips” to increase the drop rate, but I swear they weren’t even tested because they barely work. Drop rate chip lv1 or lv5, doesn’t matter: Whether the character using the chip killed the enemy, whether multiple characters are using them, whether they were part of an attack that killed the enemy. Shit doesn’t matter. Hell, one time I kept fighting a large enemy with a drop rate lv2 chip that dropped nothing the first 4 times. As soon as I took it off, I got 2 drops. Immediately, 2 drops. Shit is faulty as hell. Oh, the lv5 drop rate chip comes from a tough enemy spawn too. Yeah. Since I mentioned chips, I’ll get to that. You get chips doing all sorts of things: Enemy drops, finding them in dungeons, storyline given chips etc. There are yellow, blue & red kinds and the combination of chips are burned onto CDs to be used. Some CDs will have say, slots for a red lv5 chip, lv4 blue & lv3 yellow, or just lv3 blue & lv3 yellow, depends on the CD. There’s around 24 or so for a majority of the alphabet.

Aside from the very first, you get CDs by collecting large medals, which are gotten from beating those rare powerful monsters. Since you only get 26 CDs, you gotta be careful which chips you put on the discs. You can also give the discs names after burning the chips. Oh, using certain combinations of chips will give an extra effect too. At first I put down dumb ones like disc-kun then I eventually used names for particular discs depending on what I wanted them used for, and I’ll list them all:

Disc-kun - (Physical Defense Lv1 & Drop Rate up Lv2)
Floppy-Woppy - (EXE Charge Lv1 & Physical Defense Lv1)
Disc-san - (Same as F-W)
Golden Girl - (Physical Defense Lv2 & Drop Rate up Lv3)
Booster Gold - (EXE Charge Lv1, Animal Defense Lv2, Lily up Lv1 & EXE Gauge Boost Lv5)
Exp - (Physical Defense Lv5 & Gained EXP up Lv3)
Media Lily - (EXE Charge Lv1, Magic Defense Lv1 & Lily up Lv4)
Hopefully Decent - (Critical Rate Lv4 & Drop Rate up Lv5) – The point where I realized how bad the drop rates were
The One - (Critical Rate Lv1, Plant Defense Lv1 & Gained EXP up Lv5)
Prep Time - (Physical Defense Lv4 & Gradual EXE fill Lv4)
Skyfall - (Post-HDD SP Drain Lv2, Physical Defense Lv4 & Gained EXP up Lv3)
The Grinder - (Skillseal Immunity, Physical Defense Lv2, Lily up Lv5) – Lily rank grind, same with next two
Grind The Love - (Critical Rate Lv2, Physical Defense Lv4 & Lily up Lv5)
Love Grind - (Virus Immunity, Physical Defense Lv4 & Lily up Lv5)
Staying Free - (EXE Gauge Boost Lv5)
The Heart - (Break Damage Limit, Physical Defense Lv4 & Lily up Lv3)
Hope - (Break Damage Limit, Physical Defense Lv2 & Drop Rate up Lv5)
Sensation - (Critical Rate Lv4, Physical Defense Lv4 & Gained EXP up Lv4)
Revengeance - (Critical Rate Lv3, Physical Defense Lv5 & Gradual EXE fill Lv4)
Fate - (Paralysis Immunity, Physical Defense Lv4 & Gradual EXE fill Lv4)
The Infinite - (Break Damage Limit, Physical Defense Lv5, Drop Rate up Lv5)

It’s also a shame you can’t check out the costumes & accessories in the shop before you buy them just to see how they look, since there’s so many & they’re not cheap (No, I’m not talking about things like swimsuits. How rude to assume such a thing. Plus it would be very inappropriate to go running around dungeons & fighting monsters in such things). So yeah, I’m done. This went on far longer than I was expecting, but shit happens.

I'm judging you.

How dare you, sir.

(https://imageshack.us/scaled/large/526/injsdxhbwtpri.jpg)

Since I’ve talked about how much I hated DMC 2, I suppose I should talk about the other two. Until I bought the DMC Collection I’d never played a DMC game. It was one of those series I missed out on during the PS2 era (God of War was also another series). I’d regularly hear shit about how DMC was so balls to the wall hard & that it’s for hardcore players & it’s comparable to Ninja Gaiden 2 etc., just making me less likely to check it out when the collection was announced. Then I eventually watched DSP play Shotgun May Cry & I liked the look of it. I eventually bought it early December & thankfully it was nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be (at least until DMD). Didn’t take me long to beat it either since I had some idea of what I was doing. I’ve always thought the secret missions thing was stupid though, especially the placement of some of them & completing the task of some requires you to know a certain method or have a specific move. Killing the 3 shadows wasn’t even that hard once you get their pattern down, did it on my first try (not bragging or anything, just saying). As I’ve said before, the combat is pretty wooden & stiff as well as there not being many combos, at least not ones the game will ever tell you. Sure, using the guns doesn’t net many orbs needed to upgrade but unless you’re killing enemies with an A or S combo, the extra orbs are insignificant. Once I found out rolling after firing the grenade launcher negated the reload time, I was constantly doing it, not like I wasn’t gonna gain enough orbs to get all the moves in 1 playthrough just through combos.

Hard mode would’ve been far harder if I didn’t increase the health bar from all the blue orbs found in random spots & secret missions, not to mention they force you right into a hard mode playthrough as soon as you’re done. Dante Must Die was pretty much a slightly easier Hard in terms of normal enemy placement but now there’s a time limit to kill all enemies in that area or else they’ll activate devil trigger and become a pain in the ass. It only ever happened once early on in some garden area where the enemies kept coming, fortunately I didn’t have to fight off the rest. I actually did many runs of normal mode before attempting DMD since if you knew the item placement you could just keep picking up holy waters, vital stars, untouchables etc. to get past a lot of things and I really needed them. Unlike the normal enemies, the bosses are brutal in DMD to where they’ll easily kill you in like 2-4 hits. But no boss could compare to the true final boss of the game: The camera. That thing made DMD far harder than it needed to be and got me killed on many occasions, especially in rooms where walking one or two feet in one direction will alter the angle completely. Nelo Angelo’s second fight was unbearable because of it (his third fight had one, but I’d saved many holy waters purely for that part). On normal and hard, when fighting Phantom I’d normally stand in his face, tanking the hits & just using stinger till he died, I was curious to try it on DMD and only got halfway since all bosses have like 3 times more health.

Oh, and Nightmare. Good lord, this guy lives up to his name on DMD, his third fight in particular. Fighting the previous bosses inside of him on DMD is almost as bad as fighting Nightmare himself, he took so little damage once his weak points turned red that the fight took ages, and I used so many untouchables on that **** just so it wouldn’t kill me in 2 hits. Didn’t help I tried not to use too many items because I still had Mundus to come (who I cheesed since I knew exactly what takes him out fast and leaves him unable to do shit). Also forgot to say last time that I actually liked Dante’s design in DMC 2 the best, that’s enough compliments for now.

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After having played through DMC 2 before I got to 3, it makes DMC 3 which was already a fairly good game look far better in comparison. Since I’d heard about how hard the third one was, I actually did the first mission over and over for 15 minutes just to grind orbs so I could buy blue orbs and get a decent health bar since I knew I’d need it. Good thing too since the boss of the second mission nearly beat me when I was done (which later becomes a somewhat normal enemy). Seems to me like the difficulty is more of a result of having so little of anything to start with and you have to face a boss like Cerberus so early who’s actually rather difficult for a boss anyway (at least compared to some others). For a majority of the time playing I stuck with the Trickster style since the roll is honestly kinda shitty, covers little distance & you can still be hit during it. The Trickster dash that replaces it covers a big distance & you’re invulnerable during it, plus you can do it three times at level 3. Aside from having to level the other styles to 3, I only used ones like Swordmaster for those combo statues that only break when your style meter is high enough (the ones requiring a stylish combo or higher I found stupid because some weapons are hard to combo moves with even when using Swordmaster).

While I enjoyed the game, I got a little bored around halfway through due to the backtracking with a few missions and some stupid objectives I had to do making it clear they were just padding, also coupled with me not having taken a break yet. It got my interest back when I got to the Lady boss fight, which surprised me because I didn’t think it would be like hide & seek, makes sense though. Then came the laughably easy Doppelganger boss who’s probably the easiest in the game IMO just due to how basic his pattern is. The boss rush after was a little annoying though, sure you can just fight 3 specific fights & get through it quick (those being Cerberus, Beowulf and Agni & Rudra), unfortunately they just had to be three bosses I’m not very good at fighting. Cerberus has an attack or two that’s hard to tell until he’s just about to use them, Beowulf has many AoE attacks, he’s fast for his size & hits like a truck, and I just never figured out how to counter A&R effectively (I managed to down them on DMD and do like 50% damage before they got back up but I have no idea how). I had less trouble when one of them used the other as a sword. Arkham was just, well, a fucking blob. Couldn’t even tell what the hell he was doing most of the time, not to mention they handicap you halfway into the fight which is stupid. I holy watered his ass as soon as the second half started on DMD.

But the final fight, Vergil 3, it was the first time I can actually remember wanting to literally throw my controller at the wall. That fight pissed me off so much. The guy blocks or counters almost everything and spams teleports like crazy. For a while I could barely even touch the guy, then I soon found out the Beowulf weapon was the best way to fight him (the weapon I rarely used up till that point), by doing cannon strikes over & over until I hit him during a point where he doesn’t have any invincibility frames since he can’t interrupt the kick. It was more annoying because the first two encounters are easy (the second is a little annoying because he keeps doing the dive kick himself). Since I grinded orbs by fighting this **** on easy many times in order to fill up my inventory for hard & above, I had a really easy time with him by the time I got there on DMD. I rarely even used a majority of the items I stockpiled, it was mainly 1 or 2 vital stars on bosses at very hard or DMD. Also another thing, devil trigger sucks ass in 3 compared to the previous games. Strength increase is really minimal, health regen is small & it runs out so fast that you don’t get much health back anyway. Speed is good though. Oddly enough, there aren’t really enemies that I can look at and immediately go “This guy right here’s a cheap fucking ****.” (except those Enigma enemies only on hard and above where they suddenly turn into projectile whores & run like pussies when you get close, plus they fire red projectile spikes that can attack me even if I’m in the middle of comboing the guy, because that’s totally fair)

The one thing that makes DMD frustrating isn’t the bosses; it’s the normal enemies, unlike DMC 1. There you had a time limit to take out enemies before they DT, here you get no such privilege. These guys will DT at the drop of a hat. Even if I kill 1 enemy in a room of 8 guys, the rest will usually DT seconds after. If they got a strength boost & health increase, that would be fine, but they get like 5x more health from it. I literally spent nearly 30 seconds at one point continuously comboing one guy in the corner, of course his buddies didn’t jump in to help lest they get clipped & join him. But that’s still ridiculous, I ended up avoiding fights where I wasn’t forced to kill anyone just so it wouldn’t take 5 minutes to clear the room. Enjoyed it though despite the complaints (aside from DMD enemies).

                                                                      (http://media.desura.com/images/games/1/18/17075/gunGundeadligneXMBWall.jpg)

It’s been a while. The last time I posted here was early into Summer, but I’m sure everyone’s been doing their own shit over the last two months. So, I bought 3 games for £10 (That’s somewhere around $15 for you Americans, that’s right, I know my shit) and those 3 games were Gundemonium Recollection, Gundeadligne, & Hitogata Happa. They’re all part of the same collection & were put down in order, plot-wise (not that I gave a shit about that). To be brief, these 3 are shmup games (i.e Shoot-em-ups/Bullet hell/It’s like Touhou but it’s not Touhou). While I had my eye on this collection for a little while despite knowing jack shit about the games is that Gundeadligne was a 2-player game. So yeah, my friend and I played that when he came over recently, the same one I played Neo Contra with. He’s the type to generally not to care what kind of game it is as long as it looks fun, so he didn’t question it at all. Being abnormal is just how I am, I’ve played some games which no-one here has probably ever heard of, I tend to like characters in shows which people aren’t that fond of, I ask the questions that people normally don’t think about, I find NTR more laughable than actually hurtful, I’ve liked some games which people generally hate (but I can actually acknowledge that these games are bad) etc. But enough about me, I’ve padded this beginning out enough.

First of all, this game has a dynamic difficulty system known as a “Phase level”, which increases & decreases more based on how well you’re doing so the game gets harder if you’re doing good, in a God Hand sort of way. Novice only goes between 1-5, Standard starts at 6 & goes to 10, Advanced starts at 11 and goes up to 20, and Demonic starts at 21 (I forget how high it goes). The two playable characters are Eryth (who’s the only playable character in the first game) & Elixirel (who’s the final boss of the first game, chick on the left); they both look like little girls, of course. There’s a third character called Nagi but you gotta complete the game without continuing (I did that later on). The game lets you practice a level so we did before really starting just to know how to play. You get 3-5 hearts (depending on whether you changed the options) and have to continue if you lose them all. The levels are separated into 4 sections (e.g. 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D) and mini-bosses show up throughout the level like every 2 minutes and drop a heart every time they’re killed. Enemies randomly drop them too on occasion. The game really started off on the right foot with me just because of the first level theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL4h9oP-MbA

So cash. Also, it’s a sidescrolling shooter, not a top-down one. I played as Eryth while my friend used Elixirel, who’s pretty broken in this; the game said she’s for beginners but still. Eryth gets dual pistols to use while Elixirel gets a big laser cannon, so she does damage faster. Plus, Eryth’s alternate fire is to rapid fire the pistols but her guns overheat if it’s held down too long, while Elixirel basically gets the spread shot from Contra. Of course there are bombs but we normally used them in moments where 80% of the screen was covered in shit and there was no chance of getting through it without taking a hit, even now I still have no idea where the specific hit box actually is (I just know its somewhere around the chest area) since I’d avoid things which I thought would hit me for sure many times when I played on Advanced later which gets pretty crazy at the amount of things they throw at you. Eryth does have a weapon ability where she throws a wheel that slows down time for all enemies if it hits someone, I doubt Elixirel had a much better ability since I can’t remember what it is and I used her later to do Advanced.

There’s only about 5 levels (the last is just a long boss fight), and the fourth is purely a boss rush of like 10 enemies which was where we died halfway through it. We continued and got through that then my friend died somewhere into the final boss fight (who had 3 big health bars) and I spent the last half taking her down myself. It’s a pretty short game though, can be finished in around 20-30 minutes if you don’t continue. There’s some connect 4 type mode too called Endless Babel where you line up boxes by shooting others off the row, there’s a trophy for getting to 25 combos too. I couldn’t reach it naturally since the timer is short and speeds up like crazy when you pass 10-15 and some steel boxes will appear block off rows completely, couldn’t get higher than 19. The one time I decide to stop playing normally and just moved around randomly blasting everything, I managed to get to 28.  I never finished Demonic difficulty, that one throws everything it can at you right from the start, only got to level 2 before I stopped, haven’t played it since but I’ve had the level 1 theme stuck in my head for several days.

(http://kipchu.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/tales-of-graces-579-2.jpg?w=551&h=310)

So onto a game I played through shortly before Summer, just before I played another game after that, which I’m still currently playing and despise it greatly. The special word of today is friendship, because that describes Tales of Graces F’s plot in one word. This is gonna be a long one, I won’t go into plot much since there’s a certain someone who’s still casually playing this. There’s a childhood arc before the meat of the game which a lot of people didn’t like, and looking back on it I can see why, but it’s basically about the main character, Asbel befriending this prince called Richard, which kick-starts the friendship angle. The game’s combat (which is probably its best feature) becomes a lot better and more advanced in the adult arc. It has one of the best combat systems in the Tales series, I mean I can barely remember the Symphonia games since I played them so long ago, so I can’t point out what makes it the best BUT IT IS. A lot of people say the combat is really good too so that’s gotta be proof. I’m not sure if one of the other Tales games I know nothing about did this kind of thing before, but most of the buffing the characters get are from levelling their titles, but I’ll get to that soon. From left to right, the characters are Asbel, Sophie, Hubert, Cheria, Richard, Malik & Pascal.

You fight using CC (Chain Capacity) and all moves require it (dashing does too if I recall correctly). You start off with a very little amount (5-7) whereas one full length A-Arte combo takes around 9-10 CC, but over half the artes are gained through titles from story progression, or just a reward from some random title on the list since the character doesn’t have the move yet. There’s also dualizing which you do by upgrading weapons and armor by adding shards randomly dropped by enemies that increase its stats slightly and add special effects depending on the quality. I rarely did this since I was swapping out old stuff every hour or so, plus I wanted to save them for some really annoying inn requests much later on. A-Artes are standard moves that are part of a combo while B-Artes are special attacks that have to be set and you can only use 4 at a time with the analog stick (but the AI is allowed to use all the B-Artes at any time as long as the character knows the move) Wasn’t till like halfway through the game till I could do long combo chains from the extra CC gained from titles and better equipment.

There’s 5 difficulties: Easy, Normal, Moderate, Hard, Evil & Chaos, and the game lets you switch difficulties on the fly, and good thing too since the bosses really aren’t scaled that well. Very first boss I had problems with was this Slime Queen but there was more due to me not being used to the combat system yet, and the Queen producing minions while I fought the boss. My teammates died to the minions, and I was pretty much screwed. I unintentionally put Asbel on auto-pilot while I looked something up and he played better than I was and the 3 characters I had at the time beat the boss, clearly the AI was a better friend than I was. The biggest bump was a while later on two bosses within the same dungeon. I really should have prepared by taking a bit of time out to grind titles but I wanted to get it done and get the other party members. The first boss, while acrobatic, hard to stun & had long reach wasn’t too much to handle for Asbel & Sophie, the problem was Richard & Pascal, or should I say their AI. Both didn’t have the stats to really be taking major hits unlike the other two, not to mention numerous times they’d run right up beside me to attack the boss, they didn’t play along like good friends. At least Sophie’s AI usually had to sense to attack from behind so we don’t both get hit at once.

Honestly, Sophie’s AI stands out as being the only real competent one, at least when she did stupid stuff; it was nowhere near as obvious as the others. The next boss was a lot harder than necessary due to the incompetent AI, which was the point where Sophie’s AI stood out, since the others kept dying while just Sophie and I lasted much longer by ourselves. I retried after and swapped one member for a healer. One annoying thing about bosses is that they basically get free Mystic Artes, which are just supers. Not to mention the whole becoming much stronger & such at below 50% health etc. Bosses would normally get like 3 Eleth Bursts a fight at which point they can’t be stunned at all and they get free supers if they hit me even once. There’s one particular boss towards the end that a lot of people have problems with, and due to my annoyance with some previous bosses before that point, when I knew the boss was coming up at the end of a dungeon, I immediately put the difficulty down to easy, didn’t even care. Though the game handing the bosses free supers aren’t the cheapest thing, it’s the final boss’ mystic arte and in extension, the final boss of the future arc afterwards that really push it. As far as I’m aware, the final boss’ mystic arte hits everybody and not just one person. Not sure if distance really matters but for the f arc boss, that mystic arte hits everyone regardless of how far away you are and reduces their HP to 1, that’s ridiculously cheap.

Back to the titles, you have a menu for that and within are many different icons for each unlockable title. I think there’s around 140-160 for each character. You unlock the titles by doing all kinds of things like using certain special moves to hit enemy weaknesses, getting 50 hit combos 5+ times, use low rank artes a lot of times, killing multiple enemies 5+ times, using a certain arte 50-100 times, then using that same arte over 800 times to get another etc. There’s also some only certain characters get like Cheria getting some for collecting stamps on a point card and cooking the many dishes the game has, Sophie has several depending on the percentage of skits seen (the last is at 95%, which I knew right off the bat I’d never reach), Hubert has ones like finishing 200 battles on Hard and 300 battles on Evil (which is required to actually unlock Evil and Chaos difficulty) and so on. On each title, there are five effects that are permanently required once you level it up to 5, by equipping it and gaining SP from wining battles. So a title will have buffs like:

1. Eagle Dive – Damage +5%
2. Evasion +3
3. Elegant Flash – Damage +5%
4. Evasion +5
5. Parry Heal – Evade = HP Recovery +3%

A lot of titles generally follow that kind of structure. Basically levelling it up adds all kinds of boosts to skills, stats, special effects like naturally regenerating a little over time, being given brief invincibility after 1 minute into a fight, regain health when landing hits on enemies etc. Knowing this, as soon as I reached the point in the game where everyone finally joins and stops leaving every 5 minutes, I went back to a previous spot, turned the difficulty all the way up for extra SP and grinded out all those titles for 5 hours straight to get all the bonuses I could. While grinding I’d unlock new titles so I’d end up grinding those to level 5 too. Just to show how absurd the boosts can get with the massive amount of titles gained and levelled, I’ll just write down Asbels, who has the most:

Physical Attack +234                                         Physical Defense +275
Cryas Attack +328                                            Cryas Defense +231
Accuracy +246                                                 Evasion +282
Maximum HP +1620                                            Defeat Enemy = HP recovery +110
Critical Hit = HP recovery +100                            Near-Death = Chance of HP recovery +15%
Mininmum CC +3                                               Maximum CC+6
CC Recovery Rate Up (24%)                               Poison & Arteseal Effect Down +25%
Paralysis, Burn & Petrify Effect Down +20%           Curse Effect Down +5%
Bird & Insect Resistance +20%                            Beast, Dragon, Fiend & Nova Resistance +25%
20% HP Recovery after 1 min                              Full CC Recovery after 1 min
4 secs Invulnerability after 1 min                         Eleth burst = HP Recovery 60%
Eleth Burst = CC+3                                           Eleth Burst = Physical Ailments Cured
Eleth Burst = Revive from KO                              Eleth Burst = Physical Attack +15%
Eleth Burst = Cyras Attack +10%                        Vs. Petrified, Critical +3
Vs. Slowed, Critical +2                                      Vs. P.DEF Downed, Critical +1
Vs. EVA Downed, Critical +3                               Vs. Max HP Enemies, Critical +5
Level Up = Full HP Recovery                               Near-Death = Damage Dealt +30%
Near-Death = Stagger Time Down +20%               Near-Death = CC Recovery Rate +10%
When Drawing Sword, Iron Stance +3                  Not in Active Party = EXP Earned 40%
Not in Active Party = Post-Battle HP +15%           Not in Active Party = SP Earned +40%
Evade = HP Recovery +9%                                Guard = Damage Down +15%
Critical Damage +50%                                      When revived w/Life Bottle, HP Recovery +40%   
Item Usage Wait Time Down +32%                     Stat Boost Effect Time +80%
Strike Stunned Enemy w/1 CC A-Arte = CC Recovery +4

A few bumped up due to gaining some new stuff much later on but I had a majority of that near the end of the main arc. The others had similar boosts with some tweaks here and there. There’s an arena called Riot Peak somewhere halfway through after getting everyone which was where I tried out everyone for the first time. It’s just going through waves of enemies with a character of your choice and facing a boss at the end, but with a team since the best way to beat down bosses is with friends. In the future arc, the arena is changed in that you have to go through the six waves using a different character every wave but you choose what order, so you’re forced to use characters anyway to complete that. The order I did that in was:

1. Malik (Though the AI makes good use of him, I can’t play the guy to save my life. He’s got slow & awkward standard attacks, and his main strength is his spells, which I can hardly cast with all enemies targeting me)
2. Richard (Not that I can’t use him, I just didn’t try him very much so I didn’t know much about him but he’s good in combat)
3. Pascal (She’s like a magic knight, who has a healing spell as far as I remember but it’s mainly for herself. She’s actually pretty decent & fast, without relying too much on magic though)
4. Cheria (She’s got some of the best magic in the game but her normal are slow, easily interrupted & have short range on start-up, though some normal speed up her casting time)
5. Hubert (Guy has long combos that stun enemies quite a bit but he tends to leave small gaps in his combos that sometimes allow enemies to get a cheap hit in if they aren’t stunned, plus his defense is so low he breaks easier than tissue paper, so he goes down pretty fast)
6. Sophie (One character I’m actually confident using, and never actually tried out until Riot Peak where I realized she’s actually a fun character to play as. Bouncing all over, twirling in circles, doing all kinds of mix-ups, firing laser beams & shit, the girl’s fighting style is insane once you unlock most of her artes, some of which are moves copied off the others like Mega Man which she learns just from fighting with them enough. She also has healing spells too)
7. Asbel (I used him like 80% of the time so I’d obviously save him for last. He’s got a lot of crowd control   moves and can dish out damage rather fast, though he can’t heal. He’s like the Mario of the game)

                                                          (http://www.sunday-game.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Mugen-Souls-PS3-DUPLEX.jpg)

I just wanna start off by saying this game is one of the biggest reasons I made this topic, so this is gonna be a really, really long one as I’m gonna go over a ton of things and why I hate this game. For a lot of other people, what they may consider bad I would just call ‘Meh.’ Because I’ve experienced so much generic crap that those other examples may look tame in comparison. I’ve played some pretty bad games like Venetica which was so bland I can barely remember it.

Cross Edge was one of the very first RPGs by this company on the PS3 which I found in a shop when I went to Atlanta many years ago (I’ve been to America several times, in fact), most people outside Japan that played that mainly did for the Disgaea & Darkstalkers characters. It was turn based on a 4x3 grid, the instructions were pretty barebones, they just told you the basics then left & you had to work out half the other things on your own, and it had the most demanding requirements for a True Ending route I’ve ever seen with so many "See this specific scene at this limited time when you have no reason to come here,” & “Beat this enemy in the corner during this dual boss fight but don’t touch his friend,” & “Win this timed fight within five turns.” Without a guide, getting the True Ending was almost impossible unless you wanna play the game through 15+ times, altering tiny things to see what changes, and I’m really not kidding. This company tends to make dirt cheap games so it recycles its dungeon designs & enemies a lot, there’s one particular big blue beast in Cross Edge called a Behemoth and it’s pretty much showed up in every game prior to that, just making a quick cameo so it can get its pay check.

I think Trinity Universe was next (wasn’t made by Compile Heart though), that was turn based too but no grid. There’s really not much to say, it had two main characters, it was pretty meh. There were some dark spirits or whatever that would usually show up if you stayed in a dungeon too long and fight you, at which point you’d get raped if it’s still early into the game. 2/3’s into it, when they showed up, they’d normally avoid fighting me, as if they took a moment to check my stats first. It also had this convert shop that opened after you beat one side and could easily be exploited by repeating buying and selling certain weapons to get really overpowered shit.

I played Rainbow Moon at some point (wasn’t made by Compile Heart) which wasn’t bad but had a lot of things that rubbed me the wrong way (effects like poison were ridiculously overpowered to the point that I’d ignore bosses if he had minions who could inflict it, almost everything doubled in price when buying stuff for your characters, enemies didn’t naturally drop a lot of money so most of it was gotten from finding it in dungeons & selling things, a lot of enemies would ignore characters wide open in front of them to chase another character across the field who did less damage than the others, took ages to level up, you had to manually pick up items before the fight ended to keep them all, final boss was a cheap SOB etc.). Post-game fixed many of my issues and I had a lot more fun with that than the main game.

There were also many small issues with Graces F which I didn’t go over since I still liked the game (such as the dualizing aspect in general which is the worst part, waiting for CC to recharge which slows down the flow of combat, my combo suddenly stopping just because the enemy isn’t stunned even though it clearly hasn’t blocked yet, some of the Inn Requests in general, and how the game tends to get pretty cheap when doing certain battles above Hard difficulty). I’ve already gone over the Neptunia games which may not be that innovative and stand out gameplay wise but I had fun with them and that’s what really counts, having fun (Except the first game, that one sucked. That Behemoth also makes regular appearances here too). Over the many years, I’ve made many game purchases with really small reasons, as I pointed out before when a game just happening to be an RPG will get my attention. One of the earliest games I bought for the PS3 like five years ago was X-Blades (though it’s not an RPG) which is “Incredibly bland hack & slash #427.”, I randomly found it in a second hand shop. Only reason I got it was because it was a hack & slash game, and well…

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/X-Blades_Cover.jpg

Yup, you guessed it, it was the hairstyle. It was so absurd that I just had to check it out, but I still managed to get some fun out of it even if it was repetitive, which is why bad to someone else would probably just be meh to me. There’s also the Disgaea games which I love (and Mads was the one who introduced me to the series ages ago), but they started making some dumb decisions as they made more games. D3 had a lot of changes and stuff that seemed a little stupid, and while D4 fixed some of those, it also changed a lot of post-game things that made it even more stupid which is why I preferred D3 when it came to those changes which I won’t go over. This whole build-up may have seemed unnecessary but it’ll serve its purpose later. If you wanna hear me talk about a really bad game then you’re in luck.

The biggest reason this game is bad is because of its gimmick, I’ll go into detail. It plays up the appeal of ‘moe’ to use it as a game mechanic. The main character is Chou-Chou who’s apparently an undisputed god and has the ability to charm others into becoming her peons through the power of moe. Her natural personality shown is her egocentric one, but she has a completely different look for each personality that she can change into at will, which you gain early on. Those 8 personalities are Ego, Hyper (or Genki), Bipolar (or Tsundere), Ditz, Terse (Kuudere), Sadist, Masochist & Graceful. Each monster has a particular type of personality it likes. For example, one may like Ditz so you change to that type, walk up to it & play a short mini-game. You have a bunch of phrases come up and you’ll have to pick 3 random ones to charm the monster. It’ll also depend on the monster’s mood shown on the right of its status. For instance, one monster that likes Hyper but is sad would probably prefer positive phrases, though success in charming them will also depend on Chou-Chou’s overall charm level with her personalities, which is increased by continuing to collect more peons. There’s only three bars for progress, a yellow bar which when filled up will make the monster drop double the amount of peons & give you items. A blue bar, which means the monster is frenzied & is now stronger but drops 3x the peons. Then there’s the pink bar, which when successfully charmed will insta-kill the enemy & give you 5x the peons. You can end battles normally or through peoning.

Sounds pretty interesting, huh? Maybe at first. I started out with a bunch of overpowered DLC stuff since it was being given free on PSN but I didn’t wanna use it & steamroll everything with no effort. The plot of the game is basically, there are six different worlds, and on each world there’s a Hero & Demon Lord and in order to conquer the worlds Chou-Chou needs to charm them both, which starts out normally then it usually came down to the Demon Lord being charmed through some random circumstance & the Hero of that world joining of their free will, but they mix it up quite a bit like in one world the previous Hero & Demon Lord both had a truce to stop fighting but died of old age so the Hero & Demon Lord titles go to two kids who are related to each other. Each world is split into three different continents & to get from one to the other you need to charm the previous continent. Really, I'm not kidding. You do this through finding certain spots on the field & there’s three kinds of charm spots: Personality based ones, money based ones, and grinding out kills to charm the third kind. The last two are pretty annoying, and the first can be annoying at times because your charm level might not be high enough at the time.

Should’ve mentioned it earlier but in every normal battle, there’s a big blue crystal in the middle and over half a dozen small crystals around the field. The small ones have area effects that only effect characters near them, the big one affects the whole field but it normally doesn’t matter very much. The game wasn’t too bad until the 3rd continent on Water World (World 4). The fights here were stealing health from my characters before I’d even have a turn and it kept happening. It took nearly half a dozen fights to realize the large blue crystal had an effect that took HP every turn, until this point that crystal had never been that unfair. Right here, I stopped caring and began using the DLC equipment, and oddly that one place was the only place where the HP stealing naturally occurred. Also, around that point you’ll quickly begin to notice that linked normal attacks will do far less damage than average normals, but the game doesn’t let you disable linked normal attacks (Mugen Field does but I’ll get to that shit heap in due time). How you buy most equipment from the stores is that you collect the materials yourself & sell it to the shop to be able to buy the item. And you have to do this every time you need more. It gets really annoying late post-game because many of the higher tier equipment can be upgraded & converted into certain stat boosting things like Self Defense (boosts all accessories stats by ?%), Enemy Ability Decay (lowers enemies stats by ?% within a certain radius) etc. To max those out you have to find the materials constantly.

You can actually get stat boosts before you go anywhere by using a combination of soaps & shampoo at a hot spring on Chou-Chou’s ship. Yes, really, I'm still not kidding. There was apparently a mini-game here where you scrub the girls that are covered by steam to get the stat boosts. They took that out & after looking it up, the mini-game looks stupid anyway. Also, while I dislike the game, I have to at least say it’s good that for once an RPG isn’t vague as shit in regards on how to get the True Ending, one of the NPC’s gives a pretty clear hint. The requirements are to get an average charm of 20% (You’ll only reach 17% at best normally, so grinding is mandatory) and reach floor 60 in the Mugen Field. This was the point where the game tripped & kept falling down the stairs until it broke its back, it just kept happening. The Mugen Field is this game’s Item World from Disgaea, but far worse. The game basically plays like a hybrid of the Disgaea & Neptunia games, but not as fun.

See, Disagea asked if you wanted to leave every ten floors, Mugen Souls allows breaks at floors 10, 30, 60 & 100. Disgaea was more about speeding through the randomly generated floors; sure you could kill the enemies but only the gatekeepers & Item Bosses every ten floors really mattered. Mugen Souls’ Item World works like every other fight, but with more small crystals. Disgaea had geo symbols that could be destroyed & you could easily tell what effect it had just by being on the colored space. All Mugen Souls crystals can’t be hit directly and take ages to peon (and that’s just if you’re successful), you need to take moments out of your time to highlight every crystal (even though there’s a big space in the right corner where you could show what it does without slowing me down) & some tend to have effects even more annoying than Disgaea’s. Disgaea let you leave with a Mr. Gency at any point, Mugen Souls doesn’t let you leave on any floor ending in 0. Though to be fair, I should talk about the Mugen Field itself.

When you enter you put down a bet that determines how strong the enemies are & how big the rewards are etc. There’s three routes, the Normal route (just the generic floors mainly), Tough route (More mini-bosses, ship battles & such), and Eventful route (most of the time there’s no point to this one. It supposedly increases chances of ship battles & event occurrences like a bit of money, but half the time the game throws things at you that stop you from doing certain things in battle). Should’ve gone over this earlier but ship battles consist of Chou-Chou’s ship & another basically playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. There are three starting options & you unlock more to improve the ships stats with peons: Attack, Reflect & Pierce. Attack usually doesn’t work unless the enemy is attacking, plain defending or healing itself. Reflect is there for things like attacking. Honestly only Pierce serves a purpose, it’s slightly weaker than attack but it goes through everything. Ships will eventually get skills to absorb enemy fire but that only works if the enemy attacks so eventually my only moves became Pierce & Absorb when I was low on HP & I never lost even when the other ship clearly outclassed mine. At floors 10, 30, 60 & 100 you reach a point where they let you do many things like upgrade skills using Mugen points, increase your equipment slots to wear more gear etc.

There’s also a menu which you can use to handicap yourself with certain things to increase your bonus multiplier. These handicaps are: Linked Attacks Sealed (This is a bad thing?), Physical Skills Sealed, Magic Skills Sealed, Restore Skills Sealed, Enhancing Skills Sealed, Special Moves Sealed, Peon Ball Sealed (I’ll get to this shortly), Item Use Sealed, Party Switching Sealed, Blast Off Attacks Sealed & Form Change Sealed. Some of these handicaps will occasionally be forced on you in Normal & Tough routes, in Eventful this is commonplace. Moving on, like in Disgaea games there is a post-game sidequest but the gap between the final boss & the first fight afterwards is massive. As in, if each of your team is just as strong as the final boss, you’d barely lay a scratch on the first post-game boss & would most likely get one-shotted. It takes a ton of grinding & prep to become strong enough to take them on, but once you’re able to solidly beat the first guy, you’re done. The rest are around the same strength as the first guy (a few towards the end are slightly stronger) so if you can beat one then you can beat the others. Those post-game bosses drop Tier 15 peons, which is the highest tier & the only other place to get them is a battle which only unlocks by getting Ego’s charm to 70%, but I’ll get back to that.

Though this won’t matter to many, the trophies in this game are some of the stupidest designed ones I’ve seen, including that one from D4 to see every special move. Getting charm up to 100% & creating a peon ball over 10,000,000,000km go hand-in-hand. You need over a million peons to do those, you can only get 9999 in one category & there’s 101 different peons, you basically have to max every category but one, and many of them don’t have a concrete spot where they can be easily found. It was a nightmare using the Mugen Field for some of these, warping out, saving then going in, peoning the monster I need (if it even shows up), save & repeat for 5+ hours. Then do it for a dozen other peons that are found nowhere else. It’s the first time I can say I almost died of boredom and mean it literally. If I wasn’t listening to/watching/doing whatever else during this I really would have died from the boredom. You don’t know shit about grinding till you attempt this. Grinding in Disgaea never made me want to shoot myself. I had to go through the story & do the post-game battles over a dozen times to max out all the tier 15 peons because it’s the fastest way to gain charm levels, which tells you just how slow the process is.

So, time to talk about the peon ball. It’s one of the biggest reasons to collect the peons because it gets bigger depending on how many peons you have. When you get over 100 PP in a fight (you gain it by killing enemies, attacking them, and being attacked even if they miss) Chou-Chou can use the ball & its strength increases depending on the PP you have. It’s easily the strongest attack to use and starts doing millions of damage not too far off. Unfortunately there’s a major flaw here. There’s a percentage in the top left of the screen that shows when the peon ball is likely to overload, when it does it hits your party. Very early on, this will wound them but not kill them. Halfway into the game, the ball gets strong enough to insta-kill everyone. You may think, “Well this will only happen if you abuse the peon ball, right?” Sure, it increases faster if you spam it, but it increases naturally. Every two enemies you kill increases it by 1% (Mugen Field requires this, remember?), and worst of all, when it overloads is entirely random. It’s sometimes overloaded as early as 62%, I shit you not. It’ll say that the ball will drop on Chou-Chou’s next turn. You may be thinking, “Well the game will let you swap out Chou-Chou for someone else to stop it, right?” Nope. As soon as she’s next your team is dead before you even get to move. Peoning enemies lowers it by 2% each, but good luck doing that early on.

There’s a way to lower the percentage by turning on “Peon commands.” Which is just doing certain things that the game says but this too is luck based. They’ll sometimes tell a character to use a healing skill, when that particular character doesn’t have one. Or tell a character to use a skill which they can’t use because they’re paralyzed, or defeat a foe when the only enemy is a really strong boss you’ve been fighting for several turns. Also, you get even one command wrong & the percentage goes up by 2-3% every time, that’s fair, right? Some people may shake their head and say, “It adds challenge, dude, you gotta-.” NO. Shut the fuck up. I will suplex you through your computer, you son of a bitch. That word’s as overused as the word ‘epic’. You can’t just excuse BS & say, “Oh yeah, that’s pretty challenging.” Challenge implies some sense of fair play, throwing tough odds at you to put you at a disadvantage but still seeming fairly reasonable. If I was playing Tales of Graces & my team was dominating a boss, then it randomly pulls a super out of its ass and immediately kills the entire team in one move, I consider that total BS, not challenge.

Now to move on, that’s right, I’m still not done. I told you this would be a really long one. The loading times are pretty bad & I usually don’t mention loading times, so yeah. On occasions they rival Sonic 06, I’m still not kidding. Even then, these loading times seep into normal fights where you could run up to an enemy and use a skill, and your character will sit there for 5-8 seconds before they actually attack. This counts for the enemies too, the amount of times I’d get ambushed & have to wait nearly a minute while 4-5 enemies take their sweet time lining up. On that note, enemies on the field are annoying. In HDN mk2, enemies were found roaming around the field just like here, but enemies didn’t immediately move twice as fast as soon as they noticed you & couldn’t run faster than you can so avoiding them wasn’t such a hassle in that game. Another annoyance is random BS that would happen involving small crystals, mainly in the Mugen Field. There were many occasions where two characters would start off right beside a crystal that prevents them from moving. They never even got a chance to move, and these crystals can’t be attacked physically. Disgaea never started you off on a spot that prevented you from moving right at the start of a normal fight, only if you ended your turn there, and y’know, geo blocks could easily be disposed of.

One thing that really pissed me off is that the game doesn’t have a decent status screen. There’s one particular fight towards the end of story mode against two bosses. One can be hurt until around 25% at which point he dodges almost everything, the other can’t be touched at all. The game never tells you why this is. Many enemies can just naturally evade your moves too in the Mugen Field. There’s no small crystal preventing me from hurting that type of monster, it has 10% of the stats that I have, yet I can’t hit it. In Disgaea 3, if you couldn’t hit an enemy for some reason, you could highlight them, go to their status page & see why your attacks weren’t working, I didn’t have to guess (or throw a peon ball which negates all BS and always hits). Also, the whole moe system I talked about earlier, half the rules get through out the window by post-game. All the monsters require you have an absurdly high charm level to effectively peon them (At least over 65%), or in terms of the big crystal, a shit ton of luck. Before the post-game battles, the big crystal had a charm limit of anywhere under 20%. In post-game, the big crystal levels as fast as your charms, & the whole thing about choosing 3 specific phrases based on their mood doesn’t work anymore. For some reason saying some of the harshest things (but not too harsh) works better, regardless of their mood altogether. You choose any positive ones & that frenzy bar will shoot up faster than The Flash.

Don’t hit the topic list button just yet, I’m still not done. Unlike Disgaea that required the Item World, you max out your equipment grade by spending G Up points at a shop. Unfortunately, all the good/great/best equipment take anywhere around 1500-2600 G UP to fully upgrade & a normal run through the Mugen Field will get you anywhere between 1900-3000 G Up if you go 100 floors without exiting. Going through the floors increases your multiplier & points, as does killing bosses & winning ship battles so the points you’ll get for leaving around floor 60 will be measly compared to leaving at 100. Now for a big issue, many of the fights past the sidequest fights post-game that open up depending on your charm level aren’t designed well at all. Enemies may have had 27,662,374 HP in the last fight, but now they all have so much HP they can’t fit it on their status screen, it’ll just be shown as 999,999,999. This makes those fights take ages since even with some of the best equipment; it’s rare to do more than 20 million damage with an attack. So moe kill them, right? Again, this is the point where requirements to successfully do it are ridiculously high, the only way to get your charm that high is peoning other easier types and that’s gonna take a while. Past 70% charm it can sometimes take hours to go up 1% depending on the peons.

The hardest one, Overwhelming Apocalypse (70% Ego charm) is the only other place besides the starting post-game bosses to obtain tier 15 peons. They apparently have over 100 million in every stat (not even counting the ridiculously high HP). This confuses me because even though Chou-Chou has 3 Sun Goddess Medals equipped (easily one of the best accessories in the whole game) & a DLC armor that’s even better, she’s barely able to reach 50 million. Apparently to go beyond that I need to do peon fusion, which increases a character’s aptitudes & allows them to learn what the other character knew (it doesn’t kill them though). Sadly, this would take weeks since the stat gain percentage goes up to 600% and fusing at any decent level (1000+) gives a measly 2% normally. Y’know, back in Disgaea 3, one of my characters was able to beat Baal in the Land of Carnage just by having the best accessories equipped, and the Class World took around 7-12 hours to fully max out a character’s aptitudes, except in that game it wasn’t essential. 

And…yeah, I think I’m done. Or at least I can’t remember anything else bad at this point. It doesn’t take too much for me to somewhat like a game, but it takes a lot for me to actively dislike it. There’s only three games in the last year that I’ve loathed: DMC 2, Fairytale Fights (which I’m not gonna talk about) & this one. This one gets special treatment because it seems to be going out of its way with its problems as if it was designed purely to piss me off as a person. It takes things from certain other games & tries to put some original gimmick to it, but those other games do it much better. There’s apparently a sequel to this (doesn’t surprise me), I heard they fixed some things but whatever. This game is a jumbled mess of traits thrown into a blender, shall remain on my list of games that I’d wish I could erase from my memory, made me waste over 500 hours on the POS because I’m a masochist & have the obligation to completely finish what I start to completion, and I don’t understand how anyone could like it if you’ve actually played decent RPGs. I’d like to kick the designers in the nuts, and throw the disc into outer space because I despise this game, 10/10.

I’m not sure if I’ve actually said it on the site but I’m a fan of Blazblue, despite not really being a fighting game player (weird, I know). The story was the reason I got into the game, and I’ve played through every game except CSII (but I don’t think I missed anything important anyway). Then again, towards the end of Continuum Shift the story started to feel pretty convoluted & confusing with so much info about crap being thrown at me so fast, but maybe that was more because I tried to play through everyone’s story modes in one-go, then finally took a break when I got to Hakumen who I think was 4th from the end. I forget who the other 2 after that was but I know Hazama was last, which was good since I didn’t have to fight him again for the 15th time in a row. Anyway, Chrono Phantasma came out a long while ago in Japan and people have been importing it but not me since I speak English & can’t read half the shit on screen, but a lot of tracks have been remixed, so I figured I may as well talk about some of them cause this topic is a blog. Would be great if they weren’t getting taken off Youtube every few hours though.

Ragna – Rebellion 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= sqww7ryEg-o – Maybe I’ve just heard the original too much but it’s hard to notice a big change other than the part before the section towards the end
Jin – Lust Sin 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= xhpCPzIqPD4 – Like it more, the buildup helps too.
Noel – Bullet Dance 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Y8V55Ymi1MA – I liked the first better, the remix seems all over the place.
Rachel – Queen of Rose 2 – Loved it. Already loved the first version but this fits a little more, except the bit towards the end which they changed greatly, it was much better in the first.
Hakumen – Susanoo 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= mDMndrmfyUY – Like the first better. This one feels toned down.
Tsubaki – Condemnation Wings 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= O0uVRyp03Pc - Already liked it more just from the beginning.
Makoto – Alexandrite 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 2mpFzV3q17c – Liked the first better. That’s it.
Carl – Marionette Purple 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= zQvwgFOPyak – Liked the first better, this one’s still good though.
Arakune – Thin Red Line 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= OWFF6hSRy10  – Just seems a little sped up & I don’t know why they removed the beginning section. I like both in their own ways.
Valkenhayn – Howling Moon 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wQ3wFFPsGBE – Sounds even more like a theme from Castlevania, not that that’s bad.
Platinum the Trinity – Active Angel 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= qAonIgYG5fw – The first already sounded like it wouldn’t seem out of place as the theme for Emerald Coast from Sonic Adventure, this one more so. I like the first better though; the remix removed some bits I liked.
Mu-12 - Sword of Doom 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wb3yUbQ8ccE – Like the first better honestly, don’t like that they took out the beginning build-up too, it was good to have there (and not just because it felt fitting when fighting her at the end of abyss mode)
V-13 – Awakening the Chaos 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wunwZUftbNI – Like the remix a little better though I already loved the original, that added choir near the end helped too.
Relius Clover – Plastic Night 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= _5sOyuKI4Z0 – The beginning is so different that it doesn’t feel like a remix, like the theme better though.
Hazama – Gluttony Fang 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1Jtw243bZUU – Love it. Then again, beyond the beginning section & the “chorus”, I didn’t care much for the original theme. Yeah, I said it.
Unlimited Hazama – Endless Despair 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 4xgiFKm-bpk – Love it more than the original, especially the beginning section that seems more 8-bit.
Azrael – The Tyrant http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= b-A0GjNlUxs – wuz gud
Amane – God of Dance/BUSHIN/Whatevs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ZfDuAFFDPGo – I’m surprised I liked this one as much as I did.
Bullet – Spirit of Fire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 4vooDKFHcH0 – Love it. I must also be one of the only people who doesn’t care for the beginning bit.
Kagura – Black Agression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 5MygRB6bjrw - #PiratesoftheCaribbean, it’s aight.
Ragna vs Jin – Under Heaven Destruction 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= upDv7UXqs2A – Better. That’s it.
Jin vs Noel – Imperial Code 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= -lbXm1kR5Zk – Better. Also good that they sped up the intro, was pretty long in the original, chorus was better in the first though.
Ragna vs Rachel – White Requiem 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= OP6xBv_xNao – Think the first is better, they removed the organ. Unforgivable.
Relius vs Valkenhayn – I have no idea what it’s called http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= hzc7hJ2MJ7s – Didn’t think too much of it at first but it really grew on me.
Carl vs Relius – X-Matic 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= zQzfeFQ2zAQ – Love the shit out of it. It’s really just the original sped up and that’s good enough.
Ragna vs Hazama – Nightmare Fiction 2 (good luck even finding it but just watch this if you want http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=tD0Nn4Qzg8s) – Original was better. That’s it.

I expect half the links here to be deleted within a day.

I'm personally not a big fan of a lot of the remixes. Maybe its because I've played way too many hours with the originals in the background. The new ones seem almost like they're trying too hard to be Guilty Gear songs rather than their own thing that they originally were. I've heard Kokonoe's Theme though and while its not amazing the production and overall sound is more in line with the older tracks, which I enjoyed.

Yeah, I also heard a few other people say the same about the Guilty Gear comparison. A lot of the theme changes seem rather unnecessary.

Which is weird considering there's a new Guilty Gear coming out so they'd be better off keeping the two with their own quirks and styles rather than bringing them closer together. Maybe that's just me though.

So I wouldn't be wrong in assuming Arakune is your main, right?

You are correct, sir.

                                                                        (http://img.game.co.uk/ml2/2/6/4/0/264015_pcw_b.png)

So like 2 weeks or something ago I finally got round to playing through this. It’s old as fuck by this point but whatever. I liked it the most out of the 4 DLCs, it was a lot funnier than I was expecting it to be, laughed out loud many times. I played through it on Normal since I’m a faggot and prefer my shields to function like shields and not tinfoil that appears to be a shield. There were a few stupidly designed side missions like the last bits of the crumpets mission with one placed halfway up a lift where you can just barely reach it if you jump/fall perfectly. There were two side-missions I just didn’t bother with: An escort side mission early on (I know they’re generally awful but I had hopes) where you protect some tree monster while it destroys six huts, and the game throws tons & tons of enemies at you with many of them carrying bombs & if they explode anywhere near the tree it loses like 25% of its health & it doesn’t regen either. There was some long ass tower defense side-mission after finishing the main story where you gotta protect this thing through like 4-5 waves of enemies or something, after taking like 4 minutes to finish wave 1 and noticed I had several more waves, I just killed myself.

Before this there were these 5 arena challenges I had to do, but they weren’t as good as in the original game because there’s trapdoors, buzz saws, lasers, fire etc. covering like 75% of the area. There was barely any safe spots to stay at, i.e. areas with a lot of breathing room where I won’t get killed by a random hazard, cheap insta-death trapdoor & won’t get knocked in by enemies zerg rushing me. The raid boss was actually almost balanced for me doing it solo on Normal, it would’ve been if they were doing about 30% more damage since even though I was a lot higher levelled they still came close to knocking off my shield on a few occasions, the 3-4 large elemental dragons I had to kill didn’t take 5 minutes each (I think one revived itself too, or it just looked too similar to a previous one I killed so it seemed like they revive over time), they didn’t have tons of AoE moves that did too much damage (except the shock dragon. If they had an actual dodge button & I could see my character I’d shut my mouth) and they attacked one at a time (except one of the other dragons flying around will support the grounded dragon every now & then).

So yeah, really enjoyed it. I’m assuming that was the last story based DLC (not collecting the Halloween one) and it ended pretty well too.

(http://www.deathsdoorprods.com/wp-content/uploads/rayman-legends-21455-1920x1080.jpg)

So around the time I bought GTA V I also got Rayman Legends. Surprisingly it was only £20 at the time so that was fortunate. I assume the sudden drop was due to new games like GTA V just recently coming out, and it was a pretty dumb idea to release this game so near to that date but whatever. I’m gonna come out and say right off the bat that I thought the first game was overall better. Because:

The path to 100% in Origins was short but not frustrating like in Legends. In Legends you collect 10 teenies throughout the level instead of 6 and those 10 can very easily be missed, especially the king & queen ones. Not to say I’m not looking hard enough, twice I missed one because it was behind a hidden wall. Walls which actually looked like real walls and not walls you can clearly tell stand out, one was beside a bottomless pit too. One was hidden in a tiny pathway in a right wall during a swimming level, I spent several minutes trying to find it then I looked it up and realized that the tiny hole wasn’t even visible on my TV, unlike the other secret passages. In Origins, the sixth teeny was always at the end of a level so you just had to find five & they weren’t hard to find unless you were speed running the level, I think I only missed a teeny on one level in the original game going through the first time. The bar has been raised from needing to collect 300 lums to 600, with the king lums taken away and replaced with stupid "follow the pattern perfectly or immediately lose the 2x lum multiplier" purple ones. It’s harsh as fuck too, in Origins you could do reasonably well and finish with over 300 90% of the time, here half the levels require near perfection (every purple lum, physically kill all enemies, get all teenies in one run, get heart at the start & never get hit so you collect every bonus heart for +5 lums etc.) just to reach 600. One swimming level that sticks out in my mind I went through it pretty damn slow making sure to get everything yet I finished with 595. Apparently I missed out on a small cave that gave you about 35 lums, so yeah, 630. Again, this was a perfect run, and I had to go slow as shit to make sure I got all the lums I could.

The levels with Murfy are crap because he just slows down progression most due to the game wanting you to play a point & click platformer, not sure who thought this was a good idea. They basically took out the Tricky Treasure levels for the Invasion ones (more like the time trials really which were also better because the Origins levels were designed to be speedrun except in some spots where you're forced to slow down to avoid dying), which are alright but they don’t compare, though I did like the Invasion themes. The one from Olympus Maximus the most of all, I wish all the invasion worlds had that theme, it certainly got me in the mood to beat the time limit of 40 seconds for the 3 teenies. Just look how well the theme matches up in The Amazing Maze:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTs-al-9ioI

Of course you can finish pretty early since I’ve finished that in just under 37 seconds. Most of the invasion levels are surprisingly easy to finish in under 40 seconds really, with most I finished within the 34-38 second range. Hell, I managed to finish one in under 32 seconds, but a few seem more like they were designed to have a 45 second timer in mind, those two being Quick Sand (I had to work my ass off trying to go as fast as possible in any spot where I had the space and still struggled) & Infiltration Station (Dark Rayman makes this aggravating since you gotta kill all enemies in 4 rooms so you need to know the right path to get anywhere under 40 or just avoid running into DR period). Just like everybody else though, I loved the music levels, Eye of the Tiger & Land of the Livid Dead deserve special mention. Having levels that match your movements with the beat is just awesome, a shame there weren't more of those. On the other hand, most of the 8-bit music levels you unlock after getting 400 teenies were either dumb or pointless aside from hearing familiar tracks with a retro filter. They've all just got some gimmicky handicap & make it so dying sends you back to the start. Most effects were bearable but 8-bit Orchastra Chaos was the worst, or as I call it, "Can't See Shit." Seriously, look at this shit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1saGczFoGVA

I had to replay it like half a dozen times due to needing a perfect jump to get all those lums 2/3's into the level. 8-bit Land of the Livid Dead was good because it used every kind of retro effect every few moments & it went the extra mile near the end with the whole splitting the screen into 4 chunks, then 9, then 16 etc. Now that was inventive. The only disappointing thing was that LotLD's music level didn't have the same kind of difficulty as the final bonus level of the first game, or that there wasn't a level like that in general.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tkepcWyB9U

Now a level like this I actually consider challenge, but one that's actually fun & not frustrating just for the sake of it. I've played that level enough times to run through it without dying, which isn't required since there's a ton of checkpoints but I did it. Not to brag about my 12 inch E-peen, not because I was bored and couldn't afford any new games, but because I really enjoyed the level. I can speedrun it consistently these days (though I find the hardest parts the first area & the last before the boss). The start of the second area is also where one of my favorite themes starts up, which was the one they used for the music level. So yeah, still enjoyed it a lot but Origins was overall better because Legends had a little too much unnecessary shit in it.

Huh. People have started uploading the CP OST again since that soundtrack came out.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nathanevo580/videos

eeeeeexcellent

(https://www.developersaccomplice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/dark.jpg)

So I decided to start Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen (which supposedly is the same as the original game but with this new island to visit) since it was free on PSN+ & I have like a month left. Since it’s a long RPG since I doubt I could wrap up in a few days, I figured I’d actually talk about my progress during the course of the game for once. When I started the game, I decided to ultimately make my character a female elf warrior called Fuka because I couldn’t think of any amusing names. Would have had her full name be Fuku U. Mayne if I could. I’ll admit I got beat up a lot more than I should of during the prologue as I was still getting used to the controls & all. When it got to the part of the game where I could start using my character, I spent like an hour in that starting village (Cassardis, I think it’s name was) just running through everyone’s houses, smashing all their stuff & stealing their money/items. I was doing more vandalism than Link would do in the LoZ series, even though I have no idea yet what half the crap I picked up even do or if they’re worth having. I did a few quests during this, bought some decent armor & finally left that village with this pawn that joined near the exit.

What would have been a normal route of simply: Walk down this route, kill some goblins taking some dude then walk further to the next area took much longer since I ran around for 10 minutes smashing stuff, looting everything in sight & finding some chests lying around in odd spots. It helped that the pawn was as much of a kleptomaniac as I was since he’d pick up stuff I sometimes missed or grab items before I would. Since I was going out of my way to kill goblins not on the main path I was level 4 by the time I moved on to this Encampment. Ran up some stairs to a riftstone & to make my own pawn I had to kill this Cyclops outside the encampment. I got knocked around like a rag doll a bit since I was foolishly charging right in & attacking from the front without other soldiers nearby to distract it since they were busy with other goblins. I soon started attacking from behind, grabbed onto its leg & kept stabbing away & it eventually dropped. Then I made my pawn who was a young female mage who was the shortest you can make a character (according to the options at least), I was gonna make my character this when I saw one of the builds but I decided to go with something more normal. I also called her Vanity too, because I’m a hipster like that.

I also had someone else’s online pawn join, some Sorcerer called Grand who was like level 67, but most of the ones available were far above anything at the moment sadly. So I did some side stuff like investigating this well & killing some stuff & escorting some chick across a small area. Then I talked to this one knight & unintentionally moved on to a Hydra boss fight before I could get Vanity some new skills. Then in the middle of the boss fight some other user decided to use my pawn, which I wouldn’t have minded if it wasn’t right in the middle of a boss fight & if she didn’t miss out on the XP. The Hydra itself was basically a sponge, weak as hell but had tons of HP.

So after the Hydra a story quest required me to assist escorting a few soldiers along with some animal carrying one of the Hydra heads I cut off, but that’s not important. I did some side quest in Witchwood to find the witches house, which was a lot harder than it needed to be due to it being dark as fuck even with my latern & incredibly foggy, plus I went in circles because of the layout. Half the things that attacked were spirits, which I couldn’t hurt at all unless it grabbed one of the pawns. My pawn, along with another died & so I just ran past everything with this other overpowered pawn I had with me. Of course, ignoring the path completely and climbing over everything in front of me allowed me to immediately find the witches house. I then spent the last two days just grinding & doing a bunch of side quests. Kill shit, get money. Then I hired two more pawns before the next story mission, both striders, one was either max level or hacked (it’s level simply says oo) & one slightly below my level.

Became stronger than the game was excepting me to be by this point I’m sure. Protecting that animal from waves of enemies was a cakewalk. Only thing that remotely hurt it was during a split path & I went the opposite way to loot some stuff so the animal got hit by some boulder which took like 70% of its health. Yeah. Only gripe I had with that mission was that it was ridiculously long since the animal doesn’t move very fast. Once I got to the next town, Gran Soren, I bought the best new stuff, was finally allowed to start upgrading equipment & did so, then I pressed the wrong button & immediately got thrown in jail for attacking the merchant. Had to pay 5,000G to get out of there, total BS. Got more side quests then went to this area called The Ruins of Aernst Castle. There was a Cyclops right near it, just minding its business, but I needed 3 kills for a side quest so I attacked it. None surprisingly, my team raped the shit out of it in about a minute, didn’t stand a chance.

There was some bandit camp at the ruins & for once they didn’t immediately attack me, so I ran around, caused vandalism like usual & grabbed a side quest item, looted some chests & found this incognito mask. My character now looks a little more like someone out of Assassins Creed (if it didn’t completely cover the face), at least till I found better armor later. Vanity also looks a lot better now, and at least has enough primary skills to not get immediately stun locked if an enemy gets within 5 feet of her. Two at the front:

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot1.jpg)

It's an area in Witchwood which I went back to for a later side quest at night, but I guess the spirits no longer roam that area. At first I had issues with not being able to do any ranged damage whatsoever, but I’ve gotten much more used to the physical combat & can easily combo into the special moves I have to take out & stun lock foes pretty easily. I have the options at the moment to change my class as well as my pawns to something like magic knight or magic archer but I’m gonna wait to max out my class rank & get the skills I want first.

Did tons more sidequests over the last few days (kill shit, get money etc.), I only do a story quest like once every 8-10 hours, then again some of them are timed so I can’t do them if I progress too far. I have technically finished 4 story quests given to me while I worked on sidequests, I just haven't turned them in yet. Several escort quests opened up back in the first town & they’re all long as hell. Like 5 minutes long if I had unlimited stamina & ran there without stopping for allies or enemies, they’re all like 20 miles away, normally in spots I haven’t been to yet. Plus they stick to me like glue, and since I’m playing a Fighter (Warrior is another class/vocation, got that mixed up) I have no ranged attacks. Whatsoever. Which means it isn’t a good idea to attack things I can’t kill in seconds. During a second escort quest, as I neared the area at night, this Drake appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the forest, along with a horde of goblins that apparently formed a temporary alliance to kill me. Naturally, the guy died since he didn’t have any sense to realize its probably not a good idea to be anywhere near me when I’ve got a Drake & goblins gunning for my ass all at once. Still won, cuz I’m a beast, but the drake was the first enemy to nearly kill me, 3-4 hits would've been enough to knock off all my health & he kept killing my pawns with fire breath. Thank goodness I had one of the best Fighter skills at the time called Steel Will, which makes me almost invulnerable for around 30 seconds. Seriously (It just says less damage but the amount of times I took any significant damage or got stunned could be counted on one hand, if at all).

Speaking of which, the best offensive skill is easily Dragon’s Maw. It cost like 5000-7000 Discipline points but its one of the few times a really expensive skill was worth the cost. It’s a multi-hit sword combo that covers 270 degrees, is pretty damn powerful, tends to stagger & knockdown enemies for more free hits & can easily be thrown out at random. An enemy is blocking my normal swings? DM doesn’t even acknowledge the enemy had a shield. Surrounded by a group of enemies about to dog pile me? Nope, DM will make sure they all back the fuck up. An enemy decides to no sell my swings & land attacks on me? Nope, eat that reversal, invincibility frames, son. Hell, you can just throw it out if you know a strong foe is about to hit you & you can’t dodge so you take no damage. If there are any downsides at all it would be the range isn’t that big & it uses quite a bit of stamina (can only use it twice in a row, three if I wanna risk getting exhausted right after). Also, as far as I’m aware escort sidequests don’t respawn, the quest for the guy who died to the drake never came back. If he dies…he dies. I was worried when another from Selene came up later to go to another area I hadn’t been yet. Didn't say earlier, but Selene is the granddaughter of the witch who lived at Witchwood, but had already died ages ago so Selene lives there by herself apparently.

Also been hunting these badges that give 1k exp & rift crystals (used to hire some pawns, half tend to cost nothing but I don't know what determines the cost) for each one but some of these are placed in the stupidest places, they’re so tiny that I can’t even tell where it is till I’m standing right on it, and they don’t even glow either so I spend like 2 minutes looking in one tiny area for that one obscure spot where the map says its located (one required a double jump which Striders get & many tend to be on roofs). Maxed out the vocation/class of my character & my pawn so I changed them to learn all the skills & passive abilities I could. It costs 1,000 Dcp to change but surprisingly you only have to pay once then you can switch classes on the fly. Using the Strider class now & fortunately saved some good gear to equip myself with instead of selling the stuff my Fighter couldn’t equip, actually looks good too, thank goodness it wasn‘t a case of: Horrible gear, really good stats.

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_11.jpg)

Changed my pawn to the Warrior class, who seem less about balanced offense & defense like the Fighter and are more, “Tank that shit.” plus I think pawns can’t change to hybrid classes like Mystic Knight & Magic Archer sadly but I may as well experiment with the different classes while I progress. I’m probably like 10 levels above what I should be for story quests because of all the sidequests I’m going out of my way to complete, running through areas I have no reason to go to yet story-wise & killing all kinds of enemies & cyclops/chimera/ogres/drakes etc. whenever the game informs me one is near. I’m liking the Strider a lot with focus on evasion & daggers for close combat (its just missing a roll) & bows for range but I wish I still had a shield (though I’m so overpowered it doesn’t really matter) or a skill that no sells other moves. Also discovered the move that was reaming right through mini-boss' health bars whenever I encountered one with a Strider pawn: Hailstorm Volley. If it hits, the damage is ridiculous. Makes me wish I could play with three other online players, feels like this game should have had that option.

Did a ton more sidequests again, some story quests & unless I’m missing an area not available to me yet, I’m pretty sure I’ve explored the majority of the whole outside map. After taking care of some business in some canyon, I pretty much ran through everything ahead just to fill in the blank spots on my map, then use a ferrystone to fast travel back to Gran Soren since running all the way back would have taken like 20 minutes. Ferrystones cost about 2000G each too so I don’t wanna waste them unless it saves me a lot of time. You can get them for 1000G from some fat rich guy, Fornival, I think his name was but he stocks less. While on my sidequest binge, I suddenly get a notice for this Trial & Tribulations mission that I had 2 days left to gather evidence for this guy’s innocence on some court trial. I didn’t fully read it when I took the next batch of quests so I didn’t even know it was timed & I had 4 days. Sure, I could do nothing & let him get thrown in jail, sure, the guy technically was guilty & kind of a dick, but fuck that, he had some good deals for certain items, morals be damned. I dropped everything I was doing to go talk to numerous people, then I had to escort this knight across a forest so he could be a witness to get him off the hook. He even lowered his prices a little after I saved his ass.

As mentioned previously, I finished with the Strider class (which I really liked) and moved on to max out the other classes & pick up some of their best skills while I did sidequests. As a Strider I was swiftly taking names like that one elf chick I don't even know the name of from the new Hobbit movie who was totes digging on dat boy, Lego. According to the guide I followed (because about a third of these quests are vague as shit, which I hate & some I wouldn’t even know about if I wasn’t told to go to a specific spot) I only have a few sidequests left, and I’m also nearing the end of the game too. After the Strider class I moved on to:

Mage: Playing as one is pretty meh. I automatically felt weaker as one the second I swapped. You can’t really move when charging spells, the good spells take like 10 seconds to actually finish charging & most of them won’t even get used since you’ll be reserving spots for a healing spell (which didn't work sometimes, it was weird), one to remove negative status effects & the last to temporarily raise resistances & defenses, and you only have 6 spots for skills with Mages & Sorcerers. There are even 5 elements you can enchant other characters weapons with: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Holy & Dark. They all have a small damage buff regardless of an enemy being weak to the element but I’m not sure I encountered one who was clearly weak to Dark. Also, their light attacks which are just 5 rapid fire BB gun bullets have a long starting animation, allowing you easily get hit if you don’t use it ahead of time.

Oh, during this time I also ran into the Drake again. He was pretty salty about losing last time since he decided to spam some AoE move (I’m can’t even remember what the hell it was) that kept insta-killing my pawns then I somehow dropped from 50% to 0 in an instant. Pretty sure he never hit me since I was the furthest away, I didn't see a flash or anything. 1 sec I’m fine, the next I’m dead. Nearly lost an hour of progress since I hadn’t saved, thankfully the game did just a few minutes before I fought it. So I try again, this time I steamroll him, so I have no idea what the hell was going on the first time. I no longer pin the blame on Vanity dying so much as a mage & have me rush other to revive her, I can sympathize, but I can still be annoyed. Happens much less after getting some really good augment skills from other classes. Also, having a double jump is better than a short levitation.

Warrior: Fuck defense, tank that shit, all day everyday. Once I get going I don’t stop. Sleep status effect? Getting grabbed? Instant death? Get that shit out my face, I’m a strong female character. But seriously, Warriors suck. They suck hard. I don’t know how my pawn made Warriors look good during her time as one. They’re so slow & not “Swings half a second slower than a Fighter.” More like several seconds. Combos just barely exist for them, half their moves take several seconds to come out too, their special moves suck ass. The only thing they have going for them is their ability to no sell most stuff (unless they’re hit by Dragon’s Maw) & their range, you have to use two handed weapons but the radius is pretty big. I was relieved when I finally maxed them out. Never fought the drake as a Warrior but I feel I’d at least do better than as a Mage. Oddly enough, when I was maxing out my Warrior class, I was maxing out Vanity’s Fighter class, and those two classes seemed to have some good chemistry together for stun locking or just holding enemies down to deal more damage than normal. I’m not sure if it was just coincidence or if Vanity used certain moves depending on what I was doing at the time, I’m gonna go with the former.

Sorcerer: Like mages, but focused more on offense, which automatically makes them better to play. They share some spells like enchanting weapons & the core attacking elemental skills but Sorcerers differ by having stuff like poisoning enemies, turning them to stone etc. Their BB gun bullets are darker (might be the weapon) and at least seem stronger. With the mage, their light attacks seemed pointlessly weak & their heavies were slow along with having tiny range. The Sorcerer's heavy attack is basically a force push out of Star Wars. Oh, they also have a Necromancy spell too, which I got as soon as it showed up out of curiosity. It’s alright, but sadly you just summon skeleton spirits around you & not actual skeleton knight minions. They also get level 3 elemental spells, like summoning meteors, a massive long wave of ice that destroys everything on the way to its target, and a magnetic shield that hurts anything within 5 feet (the last one kind of sucks though). So yeah, that all is enough to let me have more fun with the class than I did as the mage.

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_21.jpg)

Magic needs no explanation

As you would have guessed, I’m really enjoying this despite some small issues. Won’t be very long till I finally move on to the hybrid classes, those being: Assassin, Mystic Knight & Magick Archer (The ‘k‘ is silent). Still wish there was online multiplayer, though I suppose it would be unfair on the enemies when you got one Fighter abusing Steel Will to avoid all damage & throwing out Dragon's Maw every 5-10 seconds for free damage, a Sorcerer enchanting other players weapons with the boss' weakness & throwing out high level elemental spells on occasion, a Strider abusing the few moves which utterly **** bosses in moments etc. a majority of the monsters wouldn't be able to touch a team like that who knew all the best skills & how to abuse them.

Spoilers, in case people care about that in a game over a year old. Finished the last few sidequests and then continued the story missions. I came to quickly find out at that point I was 2 missions away from finishing the story. The last sidequest was rather annoying because I had to sneak into some dungeon & rescue this duchess, kill a bunch of knights then kill a ton of bandits while going down an underground path because the main exit would’ve had tons more guards. I had no pawns to back me up until halfway through the quest & had to protect her, plus I was a Sorceror so close range combat happened fairly often, which was just fake difficulty for me due to unfortunate timing. Shortly after getting outside & completing the quest, within a few steps I got tackled by a chimera that came out of nowhere, but the large monsters are always worth killing just for the money & exp, plus they’re more fun to fight anyway. Shortly after, I maxed out the Sorcerer & started playing a Ranger, which is the last class I have left to max before starting the hybrid classes. Like with the Mage & Sorcerer, Rangers play pretty much identical to Striders in terms of melee combat but their bows actually function like normal bows, not the ones Striders have that can rapid fire arrows like a handgun. They have some different bow skills too, though there is one early skill that fires 6 arrows at once if you want rapid fire (10 when upgraded). Rangers also level up surprisingly fast, by the time I got to the final boss the Ranger’s class was already at 5.

Moving on, as soon as I entered the final dungeon they immediately send two Cyclopes after me, which was no big deal since my team is so overpowered. Hell, it would only be fair if I was on my own, stripped of all clothing & only used my fists & I’d most likely still easily win. Faced a chimera a few minutes later in a somewhat small room, then this one black knight right before the boss arena. Had to fight these sorcerer dudes from this cult called Salvation who are apparently aiding the big red dragon at the beginning of the game that took your heart (still not sure how that works). The dragon shows up himself and literally stomps a mudhole in him so I follow him into the final area of the place. While running through that part, killing stronger types of enemies, it wasn’t till around 1/3 through where some areas began to look really familiar that I noticed it was the same place as the one from the prologue. I also got the trophy for visiting 150 locations very shortly after noticing this. Saved like a few feet before the dragon early yesterday morning since I didn’t have time to finish it. Madeleine, this one female merchant, showed up just before the fight for some reason. I’m assuming it depends on what character has the highest affection by this point, so it was kinda unavoidable since I escorted her twice & did a bunch of sidequests involving her too.

The first half of the fight could essentially be described as free damage, then running like Benny Hill for 5 minutes up a tower, then riding him through the skies. The last half was nothing big, since I fought that drake numerous times by this point, I knew what to expect, this guy just had more health & was bigger. My pawns also apparently died during this fight, probably from him abusing that random instant kill the drake had too but once I revived them it didn’t happen again. Really enjoyed it even if it wasn’t much different from a regular Drake fight, but with more cinematic set pieces, and making it visually look great. But that dragon deserved it, no-one steals my heart, you gotta earn my love, bitch. Afterwards, credits rolled, my group all posed beside the dragon’s corpse & took pictures (except that never happened but I would have done it), and we got the hell out of there.

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_31.jpg)

Here’s Big Red taking me for a ride.

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_41.jpg)

Here’s me getting a good angle of Big Red coming at me with that attack while it flew around for about a minute. I was a little lucky to get such a good angle (The attack missed too, which surprised me).

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_51.jpg)

Here’s me climbing this guy like a colossus, about to fuck him up while he ran about distracted by my pawns.

Madeleine came back to the starting village with my character apparently so there’s now two chicks in my house since Selene is also crashing there due to not being safe in the woods because some people attacked her in a sidequest because they thought she was a bad witch etc. I already know there’s one or two more things to wrap up. Hopefully I’ll have maxed out the Ranger class shortly so I can focus on Assassin, Mystic Knight & Magick Archer once I get fully into the post-game stuff.

So killing the Dragon basically fucked up the world with there being a lot stronger (and occasionally cheap) enemies wondering about, the skies being so bad there’s no longer any bright sunny mornings, and about half of Gran Soren being completely gone with just a massive bottomless pit there instead. Imagine my surprise when I ran all the way through the more dangerous fields into town to rest at the inn, only to nearly fall into the massive pit that begins at where the inn used to be. It really took me by surprise. After being blamed for it & have guards chase me, the only solution is to jump into the pit, which leads to a large dungeon called the Everfall. Composed of 15 floors with a boss on most, but I surprisingly didn’t have to beat them all. I did actually do all 15 floors, it kinda felt like a rouge-like RPG with there being a lot of similar floors with variations of random enemies thrown at me in both normal rooms & boss rooms. I remember two in particular being cheap: One had two Cockatrice & hobgoblins who regularly threw something that turned you to stone so without the cure I had no chance of winning that one at the time. The second had this undead spell caster, two chimera & 4 hellhounds (hellhounds are the most annoying enemy, I was unsure before but that room cemented their spot. They were the only thing making it hard to kill anything with their stupid invincibility frames all over the place, their cheap hit & run tactics as well as shooting fireballs at every opportunity).

There wasn’t much special in the Everfall, most bosses were just rehashes of ones I’d already fought numerous times earlier on in the game. Though there was the Evil Eye:

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_81.jpg)

Archydra (The Hydra‘s older brother):

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_71.jpg)

Cockatrice (which was in the main game):

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_61.jpg)

I tried out the hybrid classes for a while, they were honestly kinda meh. Most of the new skills they learn kinda suck and the ones that don’t tend to be just decent. Mystic Knight can enchant their weapons & the weapons of others around them, and use magic to bring holy & dark enemies closer to them, besides that there isn’t much to them. Thought Magick Archers were meh, can’t even remember much about them other than their bows shooting magic arrows. Assassins did have some pretty good skills and was the class I ended up going with, plus I think they had the least stamina drain when running & using special moves so that helped a lot. Moving on from the Everfall to face the true final boss required me to collect 20 wakestones, which can revive you if you die. In the main game you very rarely find shards in chests which form a full wakestone if 3 are collected, or you buy the shards but only 1 every few days. I expected the worst but fortunately the shards drop regularly there. On occasion the enemy hordes will drop shards when killed but the bosses are almost guaranteed to drop some, some will even drop full wakestones so you’d only have to go through 4-6 chambers before you get all 20. The true final boss, Seneschal, was quite an anticlimax and is basically there to just make sense of the plot, and I suppose it does make sense (as much as a gainax plot with in-universe logic can make sense, at least).

Having done all the sidequests, levelling up a vast amount, having some of the best gear fully levelled up as high as I could take it (with some looking bad in design but I want the stats), with some of the best backup pawns & skills I could get I finally fought the one enemy I’d be preparing all game for: The Ur-Dragon. He resides on the 7th floor, the Chamber of Lament & the game pretty much considers him a New Game+ type boss.

(http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af319/Redx500/Dragons_Dogma__Dark_Arisen_Screenshot_91.jpg)

Normally when I hear word of a certain end game boss causing problems for people or just considered really hard, I pretty much prepare myself from like a few hours after starting. Like almost everything I do will benefit me leading up till that point. I’ll pretty much look up all I can about the boss just so I don’t lose to something I could’ve foreseen: What attacks it has, are any of these instant kills & when it starts using them (that’s pretty important), what kinds of attacks is it weak to, where exactly does it spawn, are there any safe spots in the area, how much damage does its attacks roughly do etc. Basically, I walk in there like Batman with a week of prep time. That ultra expensive armor that’s easily the best? Got that several days ago. That elemental weakness it has? I’ve tailor made all attacks to target that if possible. That one spot on the map it can’t reach? Already first in line. Those ultra valuable items you only get a few of in the game & are so broken you never wanna use them aside from being a last resort? I’ll take them all & actually consider using them (but probably won’t because they’re so rare & a another occasion may come where I’ll need them even though this is that final occasion).

Being so over prepared for these kinds of fights, the boss usually ends up looking like a joke when its done. In this case it was the same till its last 3 health bars (he had 8 btw) then it got annoying, tail sweeps, jumping & running around etc. Plus this is the point where you really need to start hitting these red spots on its body since that’s the only thing that deals decent damage. Oh, it takes less & less damage for every health bar you go through, plus it just ups & leaves after about 5-8 minutes. Yeah. You gotta leave & come back the next day to continue fighting it, sure, it doesn’t get its health & you get a quick break to grab some items & such but its annoying if I’m kicking its ass then it just decides its going home halfway through. Had to fight it 3 times to kill it & I’m sure it was close to just leaving the third time too, this guy was such a sponge. Well I’m done. I also have another special game I’ll be playing pretty shortly.

Imma start that 'special' game on the 11th since I'm not sure how long it'll take me. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.

so yo check it, i don't even give a **** if you cant keep up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz84jWgARoE

There’s no rest for the wicked, when I’ve still got work to do,
You can come try to stop me if you can, Amate-ra…su.

Hey there, Rags, the funs just began, this ain’t a dream, it’s a nightmare fiction,
The hero of Ikaruga, Jin Kisaragi, I doubt you remember me ‘cause your mind’s pretty foggy,
Lieutenant Noel Vermillion, I act pretty shady but I’m totally not a villain,
I could care less about the shit that you conspire, but stay out of my damn business, shitty vampire.
You should all go die already.

I’ve got some time to spread some misery, well would you like at that, all the pain that I see, it’s music to the ears for me,
I’ve played my part in this little game, they’re all unaware of my old name, the time has come, might as well drop the façade, and finally get this shit done.

What am I after? I don’t have much to gain
Who am I really? I go by many names
Why am I here? I’ll start with your grief & dismay
Leeeeet’s plaaaaaay.

Try all you like but this ain’t one spirit you can capture, when you least expect it, you’ll get hit by this serpent’s infernal rapture.

I’m done playing, I’ll show you fear, I’ll have you experience endless despair,
Better get ready for the fall, you’ve just been hit by a smooth criminal,
The fat lady’s already sang, I’m gonna hit you with my gluttony fang,
Now lay down there & suffer, just diiiiie.

Another visit from my old pal, Haku, but in his condition there’s not much he can do,
I also expect an appearance from that goddamn furball, but with my backup it won’t change things at all,
Another nuisance, that stupid witch, Trinity, you think you can stop me? Bitch, don’t be silly,
Get the hell out of my face, you damn old fart, I’ll stomp you into the ground before the fight even starts.
You should all go die already.

All these fools are just so second rate, they have no impact on my plans, because they’re all so late, I simply consume their hate,
Hit ‘em with a 2A then a 5B den a 3C en a 214D~C n a 5Cn2Cn4D~Dnj.Cx, it’s likely that this weakling passed out halfway through but I’m more interested in who’s next.

Cut off your arm? Man, that’s so yesterday.
Kicked you into a cauldron? I’m sure you’ll be okay.
Creating the Black Beast? I kinda fucked up that day.
I really haven’t got much to say.

I’ll need a little something special on my end, of that I’m sure,
To form a life-link with Noel Vermillion, the Successor of the Azure.

I’m done playing, I’ll show you fear, I’ll have you experience endless despair,
My style is all about class, but that doesn’t matter when I’m kicking your ass,
The fat lady’s already sang, I’m gonna hit you with my gluttony fang,
Now lay down there & suffer, just diiiiie.

Grief, frustration, despair, causing such emotions makes me care,
Feel free to struggle & cry, accept that this world is a lie.

People suffer & die in vain everyday, that’s just how it goes
Whether or not I unleash the hungry darkness of 1,000 souls,
I’ve observed & seen every familiarity, just enough to prepare for most attempts at stopping me, haven’t come across anything surprising yet, I’ve got an advantage others won’t easily get.
I won’t be done even after the rising sun, I’ll keep going until everyone is dead, don’t keep it bottled up, embrace the hatred.

I tend to drop the calm pleasantries once I spike my hair up, at that point I’ve had enough of your mouth, that means your shit out of luck.

I’m done playing, I’ll show you fear, I’ll have you experience endless despair,
Die fast or slow, you’re free to choose, either way you’re gonna lose,
The fat lady’s already sang, I’m gonna hit you with my gluttony fang,
Now lay down there & suffer, just diiiiie.

Come & face me, I’m the one true Susano’o, but I ditched that shell to kill Amaterasu,
Brought back by Takamagahara, and so I’ll kill them just as a starter.

The wielder of the Nox Nyctores, Ouroboros.


...I was bored.

do more of these please

i've also been listening to thin red line quite a bit too.

>.>

*slow clap*

Magnificent.

You know what to do.

The Smooth Criminal!

So Thin Red Line is a lot harder than I originally thought and I'm lazy & a procrastinator so I'll get to it eventually

I await the day.

(http://www.otakultura.com/wp-content/uploads/dark_souls_prepare_to_die_edition.jpg)

It was a bright and sunny morning, and I happened to acquire some excess money. While that money may bring a feeling of joy, I felt anxiety. The feeling that I had been avoiding something for some time now. Like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle which got lost under the bed. But the bed hadn't been cleaned in over half a decade, and I was unsure of its depths. But this time is different, I've got my rubber gloves. There I was one day, laying on my couch, watching some crap on my laptop & being a useless piece of shit all day when the phone suddenly rang. So I said, "Hello? Who is this?" The voice on the other end was barely audible at first, then after a short period of silence it whispered, "Dark Souls..."

I burned the phone, for it had been corrupted by the devil and his heathens, but these blasphemous words showed themselves everywhere: The television, in the sky, randomly inserted during random conversations with friends. The beast would taunt me till the end of my days, saying, "Come at me." and I would turn my back on it with such excuses that, "It looks pretty boring,", "It seems vindictive & kinda cheap," and the well-known, "Eh, it's not my kind of game." but no longer. I journeyed to its sacred dungeon and entered its lair to meet this sinful beast where it had waited all this time, expecting my arrival. It said once more, "Come at me." and with controller at the ready, I came. The game arrived like a flash, I torn off that plastic & sparks flew. I popped open that concealed case and the light hit me, fierce enough to melt a volcano, but this had no effect on me because it may be a beast but I'm also a beast. I slam that shit into my PS3, with the force of a thousand suns and boot it up. My anus is ready, I'm prepared to die.

Thought it would be more amusing to talk like this when I play through it

This is one of my new favorite posts.

I will be watching this topic like a fucking hawk now.

*senile old man voice*

And so the foolish casual player began his perilous journey. He strived to be somewhat different, do something uncommon, attempt to be a proto-hipster, like a true hero should be. He chose to spend his early days learning the arts of sorcery, though started as a Pyromancer because he heard that class is better overall. Like his many soul brethren, deep down he had the soul of a warrior, but he felt the need to see uncommon things, variety is the spice of something or another as they say, and so on. This journey began as I sat in the midst of some dark dungeon cell as an undead, baked like the bark of a tree that’s been cooked at 225 degrees for an hour, oh boy I tell ya…one day this knightly fellow appeared through a hole in the ceiling and threw down a key to the cell doors. Who this person was & where he had gotten this key, I did not know. I quickly began to try out the somewhat awkward controls I’d have to eventually get used to if I were to triumph (breaking character for a second, why is left stick + roll the run button? Why not just clicking the left stick? Plus why does the roll feel half a second late? Also what’s up with the triggers being the attack buttons & the normal attack buttons being the heal?).

I ran through the narrow hallways & paths, killing them halos because they have no right to occupy the screen. Upon opening a set of doors, I was suddenly ambushed by some kind of monstrous demon. The beast must’ve been at least 30 feet tall wielding a massive club that could completely destroy the bodies of most men in a single swing. I ran for a door I spotted out of the corner of my eye on the left and evaded that monster. Making my way through the short area ahead, I picked up a shield & axe, it’s not much but it’s a start. I knew ahead of time of tricky traps on stairs as one undead attempted to crush me with some newfangled whatchamacallit but created an opening in a wall. Here I met with a knight who was sadly on his bed death. Could this be the same knight who freed me? I don’t know, I stopped paying attention, but god rest his soul. He gave me an estus flask, I get the strange feeling this thing will be of some use to me. Moving on, after a little rough start in combat on my part & needing an estus already, I transversed the white light and appeared on a ledge overlooking that demon. Naturally, I hopped off that ledge and plunged my axe deep into his whosawhata, dealing around 1/3 of his health. I went toe-to-toe with that vile demon, only managing to get hit twice when the beast fell on my first attempt, I had learned quite a bit from the many travellers who had encountered the demon & told tales of their encounters.

So I moved on, grabbing that one undead soul in the left corner while doing so because you can’t hide those items from a kleptomaniac like myself. I ran to the edge of the cliff just ahead, eager to experience what was ahead. Suddenly, some kinda giant eagle of sumthing came outta nowhere and swooped me up in a flash. Next thing I know, I find myself truly in the heart of Lordran, at Firelink Shrine. Now the great wizard or whatever, Essaytu, can truly begin his adventure.

*essaytu*

*smiles*

This is extremely fun to read.

I can't wait until you reach Ornstein and Smough and also the DLC content.

First things first, there was a little grinding that had to be done, so this squishy wizard was not so squishy. Then this sorcerer finally proceeded to Undead Burg, which had a lot of undead commoners & soldiers around so at least it wasn’t a lie. Strolling through the ruined city, making use of my soul arrows for anything I didn’t want to get close to, I defeated a black knight in the lower levels by spamming him with heavy soul arrows, though I did not emerge without serious bruises. I travelled up & fought with the gruesome Taurus Demon, but as a squishy wizard, I already knew how to cheese. I spammed the beast with soul arrows while backing up every two spells to evade his blows & it was over. I quickly encountered a red dragon or drake, this thing had flames for days, oh boy I tell ya…was hesitant to step out onto that bridge for a few moments. Oh! I also encountered this knight of sunlight or whatever called Solaire, golly good fellow, that man. To proceed I needed to get past that dragon…but first I walked below the bridge and shot arrows at the tail to collect that drake sword, because why not? After an attempt or two of being roasted like I was on the BBQ menu, I made it to the bonfire. Yeah, that drake had to throw that meal away, he couldn’t handle all that salt.

Dying several times in the Undead Perish on my way to the blacksmith made me remember that I take more damage than melee classes, so I still need to draw out specific enemies & cheese as much as possible, forget the 4000 souls in the corner while I fight two black knights, they’re not worth it. Going slow & steady, I got through 90% of the area with strategy, then I ran into the church, grabbed my souls & ran like a bitch as they gave chase until I got to the bonfire just ahead at the blacksmith. Just ahead the entrance to the Darkroot Garden was blocked by a handicapped demon wielding a titanite catch pole the size of a car. Fortunately, it mainly used ranged attacks but it simply couldn’t outdo me at my own game. I ran deep into the dark forest, down an alternate path & encountered the massive multi-headed Hydra within the centre of the lake. Though annoying & time consuming, I did eventually vanquish the beast once the foolish Hydra was done bombing the crystallized golems in the area.

Walking around the side of the lake while hugging the walls which almost nobody would normally think to do, I came face to face with a mighty golden golem, though he didn’t feel much different aside from having tons more health. I freed Dusk from her once crystallized fate & bought the miracles she had to offer, along with a catalyst that was much better than the one I was using. I’ll be forever grateful, what a charming young lass. Once I get done with Capra Demon I can finally start on the real bosses (Oh, and Capra Demon is a cheap fucking ****. That fight is artificial difficulty in a nutshell, there’s no degree of fairness there. Tiny room? Annoying backup? Ridiculous attack range that somehow ignores my roll’s invincibility frames for some reason unlike other enemies? This fight is hell for a wizard, and I’d rather not have to grind for better stuff so I don’t get killed 5 seconds after walking through the door. Despite a few BS deaths like the game rolling the opposite direction of my joystick, being pushed off a cliff or getting stabbed from some guy to the side, I was still enjoying the game up until this point. Also found out you can just run by holding the roll button, why the game didn‘t say this, I have no idea).

Capra Demon is 100% the worst thing in the game. I hate it more than even the Bed of Chaos fight. It literally stopped me from playing the game for a year. Not an exaggeration;a full year.

Solaire is amazing though.

I killed Capra Demon first try.

But then again I also had trouble with the boss of the Depths so I guess I can't talk junk.

I think it's hilarious that you're doing so well in the game but didn't know you could run.

I am impressed. You seem like you're doing a lot better than I did my first time. Capra Demon sucks but only because of those damn dogs. Even after replaying the game multiple times I still hesitate to enter that fog gate.

Different people have very different experiences with the game I guess.

For real. People hate Tomb of the Giants and I never have problems with it.

I knew I could run, it's just that the game said left stick + roll, making it seem awkward. Only an hour later I found out simply holding the roll button lets you run. The game could've easily said, "Hold O" instead. Honestly a lot of my fast progress is due to me already watching a playthrough of the game ages ago, so I generally know most of cheap ambushes & traps that would catch most people. It helps that I'm trying not to rush through areas. My weapons & equipment are a lot better at the moment, I can actually take some hits now & can easily block most attacks. Before I was forced to play Don't Get Hit mode to compensate for being fast so 2-3 hits was enough for almost any enemy to kill me.

After a long drawn out session that felt like an eternity, I managed to cheese Capra almost as much as he was cheesing me & gained the key to the Depths. It was home to living fecal matter the likes of which would make most men wet themselves in fear, but not I. After proceeding carefully like normal but nearly getting killed by a butcher who somehow jumped me from behind, I used my master key to reach a bonfire. Around this point I learned of a fan spoken term known as “soft humanity.”, why the game never explained the increase of the counter in the left corner & how it can benefit you in many ways, I have no idea. So I spent an hour or so killing halos for banked humanity, as well as killing the fecal matter for various shards & the rats for consumable humanity. When I had banked 10 humanity (which is the most you can get at any one time), I was hesitant to fight the boss as I had gathered 100,000+ souls in that time & didn’t wanna risk losing it to BS like the kind only Capra could muster. I instead left the area to spend most of it on a level or two, spells & so on, while proceeding to the very first bell tower In Undead Perish. I became human briefly to acquire the aid of that sunlight fellow, Solaire of Astora, golly good fellow, that man. I was offline, of course, can’t stand those young whippersnappers with their invasions & so forth. We fought the Gargoyle brothers: Tom & Dick, could’ve sworn they had a third though. Was nearly roasted that day due to one of them burning the roof so often. Magic was super effective against the duo, who would’ve thought. After reaching the top, it was time to go down below, far, far, down below.

I finished Dentata Dragon with the aid of Solaire once more, then gained the key to the infamous location most players would rather forget. The likes of which would scare ghosts, the mere mention of it would silence rooms, the kind of place challenge gamers would look at & shake their heads in disgust: Blighttown, where frame rate goes to die. It was a rough start, the bad level design was what was killing me the most due to not being able to one shot enemies & getting knocked off cliffs repeatedly. Don’t even get me started on the camping assholes in random corners shooting toxic darts, those cures ain’t that cheap. It was a horrible experience trying to navigate the place long enough just to reach a bonfire at first, then reach the bottom when I was stumped on where to go down at one point. When I finally found the bonfire at the bottom & grinded on slugs in the poisonous lake since they dropped a lot of shards, I was attacked by a dark spirit, Maneater Mildred. I ate that woman like a beast, then found out I could summon her to aid me in the fight against Chaos Witch Quelaag. Her feminine wiles were not enough to charm a person such as I, aside from 80% of her being a lava spewing spider. While she was the easiest part of Shittown & I could have easily solo’d her, having Mildred to distract her so I had the time to use the bigger spells sped it up. Kill thy witches, get thy souls. Upon ringing the bell & joining the Chaos Covenant downstairs just for the trophy, it was time to get back to the surface. But there was a problem, I had no idea how to get all the way back. There was no obvious shortcut in front of me back to the surface. I spent nearly half an hour finding the exit, and I lost around 40,000 souls, yet I didn’t care. I just wanted to leave & never come back…then I learned there was an NPC sitting by a pillar near the boss’ lair who sells Pyromancy spells.

The next target on my list was the Moonlight Butterfly of the Darkroot Garden, it’s had this coming for a whole day. So radiant, so captivating, so easily killed by magic within 30 seconds. I then ventured to Sen’s Fortress, the experience was not very pleasant. Due to not being very melee oriented & them having shields, those humanoid snake monstrosities took too long to kill, plus the amount of cheap deaths suffered was starting to get to me. I lost 50k souls during the very last area and I didn’t react. I knew some BS was gonna kill me during the 10 minutes I had to spend running back up there. The golem encountered at the top was all Iron, no fat. He towered over the very fortress itself, but it was no match for magic spam while walking backwards, of course. While there was a glowing ring I could’ve touched after defeating the golem, I chose not to since Big Hat Logan had agreed to teach me the best magic skills for saving him so I left to buy them at Firelink Shrine after some grinding. Though before I proceed further, I have many foes on my list who still have yet to get theirs.

http://i.imgur.com/QEn3jKV.jpg

Relevant!

Huh. After a ton of bad luck & BS, something I was really worried about went far more smoothly than I would've thought.

So where was I? Oh right, at one point during all else that was going on, I took the time to buy the Crest of Artorias when I had the 20k souls needed, where the Great Gray Wolf, Sif resided. The opening portion was also home to a pretty good grinding spot, at least until they patched it & made the area just not worth the effort. After killing the garden residents, I spoke with a talking cat called Alvina and joined the covenant briefly before taking a soothing jog to the wolf’s lair. Sif himself was quite a nuisance & caused many deaths when using soul arrows. The beast reacted like a wild calculating animal, somehow being able to read minds & for a while only attacked during the two seconds I couldn’t move in the middle of my spell, even if he was across the room he would dash over and strike me down in an instance if I dared to cast a soul arrow. I also must say how lovely it is that my souls are usually placed in horrible locations when you retry. I mean, it’s not like these brutes tend to rush me the very moment I walk in the door, so placing my souls at the back of the room when Sif charges at me immediately is very kind of you. I did somehow manage to get them back & win the fight that attempt by using nothing but homing soulmass instead but still. I would feel sorry for the wolf as it acted with reason, but it was a stupid dog, it made me look bad.

The next order of business was travelling back to Undead Asylum where I was forced to kill that kind fellow that gave me the estus, bless his soul, and I found a doll in my starting cell, guarded by a black knight. I wonder what this could be for. So I was on my way out, about to look up Snuggly the Crow’s list & trade items with her, about to pull out my spear & kill the h-Gadzooks! The very floor collapsed beneath my feet, dragging me down. I thought that was it, but it was worse. That vile demon had returned from before had returned from the dead, seeking revenge & boy was he mad. The range he had in such a small room covered 75% of the area, and worst of all, he had an AoE that hits you from almost anywhere except a few feet behind him, it doesn’t care how good your shield is, he spammed that like the expiry date was the next day. Through all the frustration, I did eventually beat him but I felt no relief from the victory, no happiness, no sense of accomplishment. I felt I got lucky because he didn’t start spamming AoEs right off the bat so I could finally get into position & “get all up in that ass.” as the kids say these days.

Finally, I went back to the Taurus Demon tower & went down below to fight Havel. Havel & I have a history, we fought many times over my journey, slowly getting better & stronger over time. Sometimes getting pretty close during a long drawn out encounter, sometimes not even halfway, it all came down to the fact that when he eventually landed a hit, it was fatal so one slip up meant it was all over. It was generally the same, but with soul spear & homing soulmass he went down in no time at all. Having put it off for quite some time, I took the cage express in Sen’s Fortress to the top & went back to the glowing ring. Suddenly, a pack of gargoyles carried me off to another location yet unexplored. I arrived in Anor Londo, where the giant knights took a little while getting used to but it was still smooth. After resting at the bonfire, killing thy enemies, collecting thy souls & moving staircases, I came to a massive hall with a bunch of clan members or something standing around. I dispatched them with ease then noticed a painting nearby. I admired the presentation, but then I was suddenly pulled into the painting itself, great Caesars ghost!

Friggin Sen's Fortress. That place is the worst when you're playing online.

Y'know, I can see why people hate Tomb of the Giants. I haven't even been able to find the first bonfire because I can't see shit. I don't even care that I lose souls, I know areas that lets me grind that back within 10 minutes.

Yeah, Tomb of the Giants is a pain. Mostly because of those damn giant crawling skeletons.

Could never physically hit the damn things, they just no sell things like crazy. I save all my homing soulmass for them because it killed them easily. Thank god for Cast Light, even though it takes up one of my spots, at least I can see things now. How the hell could people stomach the beginning area without that?

I dunno. Floyd and I opt for melee almost exclusively, but we had different experiences with Tomb of the Giants and Blighttown.

You should get the Skull Lantern after you meet Patches. Unfortunately it takes up spot in your left hand equip, but it's useful and you only really need to wield it temporarily to see the path for a bit.

I fell like I'm gonna have to be more melee orientated at this point, the game is beginning to really test my patience more & more at this point.

Yeah, I'm always melee with some very light Pyromancy supplement so I don't know the magic way and how it functions near the end game. Its not Demon's Souls, I know that, where magic is basically easy mode. And I unno those skeleton guys aren't bad to me, its not like they're the wheel skeletons and ****.

Don't get me started on those assholes, they're the worst.

Other than Basilisks, agreed.

I love their design though.

Advancing through this odd painting world was a slow & cautious experience. It also felt like a bigger jump in difficulty compared to some previous areas, though that may have been down to my lightning spear not being that up to snuff. But real talk? I hated this place. It was good that I had clothing that was pretty resistant to poison attacks so those deformed hollows couldn’t cause instant toxic on me from dying, though I didn’t take the risk anyway. Early on, as far as I was aware, I dropped down to an area near where the Undead Dragon spawns to grab an item & was apparently stuck there. I looked around for like two minutes. No alternate path, no ladder, no ledge to drop down to, there might not have even been a hidden wall. I had to homeward bone because I saw no exit. What would I even do if I didn’t have those? The rest went fine until I was forced to go down into the well & meet one of the worst enemies I’ve seen in years, those stupid Hot Wheels skeletons. Even worse, the paths down there were practically a maze with narrow corridors & intersecting paths. Not even getting adjusted, I run to the left, I get quickly run over by a skeleton who was apparently just camping a corner to the right. Wasn’t waiting down a long pathway, it’s a dead end just 5 feet to the right. Turning your back to these assholes is a death sentence, and this place was filled with them, and naturally when they show up they’re already coming right at me. Do these guys serve any purpose other than getting cheap kills? I’d be hard pressed to find any other reason for their inclusion.

Even knowing they’re coming still gets me killed sometimes. They’ll just spin dash into my shield for 5 seconds & drain most of my stamina. If I dare put down my shield, I may as well put down the controller because I’m already dead. One of the many hidden walls had a big area filled with the things, and two spin dashed as soon as I open that path so if I do anything besides block, I get stun locked to death. First one eats 75% of my stamina & rolls past me, second immediately follows up and eats the rest while eating through my health too, first comes right back & hits me from behind. I love it so much. After being so hesitant to want to go anywhere near that well so I don’t suffer the 11th death in a row, I had no idea what I had to do. Apparently there was a switch in that big skeleton room I had to activate to reach the end. Is this hinted or said anywhere? I don’t recall it, plus with instant death hot wheels, it would be hard for me to even notice the thing when I cleared  that dark room. Priscilla was aggravating, not the boss itself mind you (she’s weak as shit, though she is annoying). It was cutting off her tail that made me hate it. The other dragon bosses tails come off easily whether you want it for the weapons or not. The hitbox on Priscilla’s tail is so damn small that I had to keep dying just so I don’t kill her before I got it. Tried weaker weapons, swapping out my spear for my old axe since the range was bigger, waiting near the exit so I know where she’s standing when she’s invisible, didn’t matter. I eventually got it after who knows how long.

The rest of Anor Londo after my stop to visit the painting caused just as much frustration. Well, one part in particular, I doubt I need to say any more. I was forced to use hidden body & walk because if I blocked their stupid arrows, I would get knocked off, if I let it hit me, chances are I would be knocked off. How the hell do people get through that BS section? Wasted 20 minutes before I tried hidden body, grabbed my souls & kicked both those assholes off their perks because I was pissed. Soon after I had to fight tons of black knights, which I hate. I’ll say it straight up, I don’t get backstabbing. I just don’t. I circle around them, put my shield down & attack, like 30% of the time it actually works. I just don’t.

So I used half my best spells & stuff getting through all the knights & reached the door of Ornstein & Smough. I was nervous as fuck, hell, I put it off so I could get better spells & level a bit. So I reluctantly enter…and I beat them on my first try. No Solaire to distract. No online help. Not even human. They. Could. Not. Even. Touch. Me (Well Super Ornstein did once but aside from a few near surprises I got his pattern pretty quickly). Pretty much brought out homing soulmass, got my shield out & went to work. I evaded everything the two did just by trying to keep the two where I could see them. Then I mostly used great soul arrows on Super Ornstein. All you doubters can suck it, I stomped like I had done that fight numerous times. Actually having a lot of room to be evasive helped so it wasn't cheap like the Capra Demon fight. Even now I’m amazed how easily I handled that fight once it was finally time. After finally being able to teleport between places (but only specific bonfires, why?) I went back to Blighttown to go down to Ash Lake, fight the Hydra who made the fight even more drawn out & boring than the first, and I joined the Dragon covenant…then cut off that dragon’s tail for his weapon, which he apparently didn’t feel whatsoever.

I’m almost up to date on this, as you can tell from some previous comments.

Mad respect for taking out Pikachu and Snorlax on the first try.

fuck you though priscilla is super nice

nice girls dont hide weapons in their tails

she had it coming

every person i've ever known hides weapons in their tails

are they part dragon

possibly

Lol. Try getting Kalameet's tail. That was a fun experience.

I'm not looking for forward to that.

pffffffffffft tails real warriors forge their own weapons

Real warriors spend their time and patience honing their skills to cut the tail.

The Catacombs. Ugh. That says enough. From the relentless **** happy skeletons that stalk me until I find that stupid necromancer & kill the ****, to the spike traps & exploding skulls, plus they had the nerve to hide a second bonfire in such a random spot which I didn‘t know till I was done with Tomb of the Giants, just why? I eventually made it down to the blacksmith after dying several times attempting to drop down there, and somehow a skeleton followed me in and attacked me while I was busy checking out his stuff, the fuck? Why the hell did it not die from the drop? Thank fucking god it hit me & not the blacksmith, I’d rather it didn’t risk fucking up my game because they let enemies do that. Dealt with the stupid spin dashing skeletons with nothing but block & homing soulmass, that spell is my best friend when it comes to those assholes, it never misses them unlike the other spells. Then I somehow get struck from the side by a knight, where the fuck he came from, I have no clue. He was apparently standing in the right corner of the field or something. Proceed along to the boss fight with Pinwheel and wow…I heard what a laugh this was due to how low his health was, but I didn’t think he was this weak. 2 soul spears, free win, less than 10 seconds, it’s the kind of thing that makes you ask, “That was a boss?” Also, about kindling, do you really need 15 estus flasks? Unless you’re doing incredibly risky shit & being sloppy as hell, you’d never need more than 10. Hell, I’d probably be dead before I get through all 10. Normally I don’t need more than 5 except in a few occasions where its best to bring 10 like Sen’s Fortess in general.

So, Tomb of the Giants, the beginning was an eyesore. “Can’t See Shit.” pretty much sums it up. I died 4 times, once from walking off an edge because CSS, once getting flattened by skeletons, once straight up kicked off the edge, then finally I got raped by two giant skeletons. The souls didn’t matter, it was the fact that I had to run past the skeletons from the very beginning of the Catacombs EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I died. Why the fuck isn’t there a bonfire after Pinwheel? Then I remembered I had that spell: Cast Light, was this area here just so that spell would have a use? Since I could actually SS this time I made it to the bonfire no problem. Got kicked into a pit, killed two hollows & got replenishment, which seems good but sadly I’d have to waste points on faith. Began to encounter the skeleton dogs, which have a high spot on the list for most annoying enemies since they no sell shit like crazy. Fortunately homing soulmass was looking out for me like always. Black knight showed up & ran off an edge the moment I saw him, so I got free souls. Went down & found the second bonfire. Since I’d heard about it, I became human again & got invaded by Paladin Leeroy as I got near the boss room, and killed him so I could grab his armor within that boss room. Soon reached a wide room with half a dozen Pinwheels, which I suppose explains why he was so weak. Fell into water & got raped by baby skeletons, nice. Second try, killed the Pinwheels with magic, any skeletons nearby I’d kill with this rapier I got from the Painting world.

Arrived in Gravelord Nito’s lair (made sure to join his covenant & grab the goodies he had for ranking up first), put on my HS & rolled down. Then I got raped. Skeletons just trying to beat the shit out of me, Nito spamming groundspikes which I couldn’t evade for some reason, the fucking skeletons that wouldn’t let me run for 2 seconds just to heal, the one giant skeleton that joined the party midway, I felt I got robbed. I try again, running past all the Pinwheels because I was pissed. Didn’t give a fuck this time, as soon as Nito appeared I threw all my best shit at him right off the bat, non-stop. Reduced his health just under a 1/3, then used great soul arrows while moving a few feet right & left. Skeletons barely attacked at all, as if they saw the damage I was doing & really didn’t want a piece of that. Killed Nito easily, and took back my souls he had put beside his coffin, which I had totally forgotten about because I was so pissed about the last death, then I grabbed Leeroy’s armor that was nearby. It had surprisingly good stats across the board. When I do eventually swap to armor, I’m probably gonna use it once I have the right stats.   

Went to Duke’s Archive so I could finally pick up the best magic spells. But...ugh. I feel like that’s gonna be my opinion of most areas to come. For a squishy wizard, this place is a nightmare. I got the feel of the Capra Demon fight, but the frustration split into chunks & sprinkled across a level instead of a boss. I waste like 3-4 minutes fighting the crystal guys, making sure to not lose too much health, I get the DLC item from the golem that’s just staring at the wall for some reason. I draw the two crystal guys beside the door & kill them behind a wall. I run for the caster ahead, block the spell with my shield and try to cast my own. Oh wait, he has backup archers just behind him that I didn’t see from the door that tear me to shreds. Do it over. I love it, time well spent. It had narrow corridors that felt like a maze at times with more assholes just waiting to land that one hit & take half my life. I had to be so patient & cheesy to get through this place, because this game has no mercy. You fuck up once, you’re done unless you’re wearing really good shit or have overleveled like crazy. Hell, a mimic nearly got me too. I attacked a chest twice, thinking it was okay. I decide to attack once more & it lands, scared the shit out of me for a sec. Did my other attacks just clip through it or something?

This was also the point where I really noticed the developers just love to have enemies get cheap hits on you. Oh, there’s a guy down the hall shooting arrows, I go up & whack him, oh, there was another just to the left who gets a hit, I stagger. They both use Level 3 X-factor & **** the shit out of me, blocking will only delay the inevitable. Getting real tired of your shit, Dark Souls. That’s overused like crazy here. I see an item on a balcony, I raise my shield & stop a few feet away. Turn the camera & what do you know. Crystal guy standing to the right. He’s stunned that I saw him coming, then I tell him I wouldn’t if 6 other guys didn’t try the same damn thing in the last 20 minutes. So yeah, found the exit, went back to free Logan who was imprisoned, found him by the exit leading to Crystal Cave where I bought the best spells. They’re expensive too, which made it really frustrating going through here because I didn’t want to lose all those souls. I finally have the stronger versions of soul spear & homing soulmass now, about time. 

Nito's a cool guy.

I don't know how to reply to that

Lol. I like Nito. He's not so bad if you stay where you drop in the boss room so that those giant skeletons don't come to fu(http://)ck your sh(http://)it up.

Four Kings were my favorite Lord Soul to get. Even though they're assholes. Bed of Chaos is the absolute worst boss in the game. Fu(http://)ck that thing.

At this point I might actually get enjoyment out of Bed of Chaos. At least it's honest about being a shitty boss.

its undeniable just look at him

(http://i.imgur.com/S7AA9.jpg)

Bed of Chaos is just... kind of boring. Which is a shame because I actually think in terms of visual design its a really cool boss.

It's a nightmare if you have heavy armor on. That thing is only beatable with light armor.

3/4 of the DLC's boss fights are the best in the game. Even the Sanctuary Guardian is awesome and cinematic and stuff.

Bed of Chaos' area sucked just because of the Chaos Eaters. No other enemy seriously frightened me like them after meeting them the first time.

I like them derp they remind me of a myth unit in Age of Mythology.

Are Chaos Eaters the derpy octopus monsters?

Yap.

Well, now I know who to consult when the Eldritch Apocalypse is upon us.

Crystal Cave. UGH. Though I doubt you expected anything less, yet another gimmicky area & I thought it was worse than Tomb of the Giants. At least Tomb of the Giants had several quick ways to see the path, getting any of the rare items here is a nightmare. Why did they feel the need to place a blue titanite slab at the end of a ridiculously long, constantly turning invisible path that I could only see with prism stones. Prism stones that aren’t very accurate since they don’t say how narrow the path is or how close I am to an edge so naturally the game makes me slip off the side after wasting nearly 5 minutes trying to navigate that path. It would help if the stones had a bigger radius or made the path flash for a second or two so I know how far to go. Y’know, things sadists wouldn’t do. I don’t think those Moonlight Butterfly clones can be killed normally with magic. It happened first time, that was it. The rest just ignored the soul arrows like they weren’t even there, why? Moving on, the clams outside Seath’s door were annoying. There was one sitting in the left corner like I’d expect but it didn’t feel like it was attempting to get a cheap hit from behind since it was clearly visible as I entered the area & didn’t aggro till I actually walked over to it. One of these clams managed to knock me down, then it was allowed to ram me twice more while I was recovering & practically instant killed me. The fuck? Since when are enemies allowed to ignore your recovery time?

And Seath, my goodness, he was a pain. Just like his daughter (apparently), getting his tail was too much of a hassle. I had to call in online help for the first time because after many attempts I just couldn’t get it & as a magic user his weapon is the one I really want. The guy turns to face you as much as possible faster than you can run & if I get anywhere near the big tail behind him, he spazzes out and stomps me into the ground, instant death. 100% to 0% in one hit. I bring more durable armor, get hit, instant death. Excuse me? I may not be as weak as I used to be, nor a tank but you can’t just ignore my defence stats & pretend they don’t exist. This ain’t Disgaea 3. Then I found out I was going about it wrong because I didn’t just look it up & tried to use common sense. I had to attack the tiny bits to his left & right to get his weapon, not the big tail behind his back, because every other dragon’s weapon required me to ignore the big tail behind them, oh wait. I summoned two guys to help kill this ****. Apparently I didn’t make it clearly obvious I wanted to rush through the forest to kill Seath because they fought the crystal golems outside. One got the hint & followed me. The other guy just stayed & stupidly got himself killed. Not sure what the hell this other guy was doing while I kept Seath distracted but he was good, reduced his health at one point from like 70% to below 20%, and this happened after he got his tail. Wasn’t sure what it was either but magic barely worked on him, even though some spells were clearly hitting him, the game acted like I was too far back, but Seath doesn’t have many long range attacks besides his stupid instant curse beam.

I have no words to accurately express how I felt about that whole thing. Just no words. I didn’t even wanna come back to Crappy Cave after lighting that bonfire to get the Soul of a Hero I missed, because the area was so awful. I could make that in 2 minutes using another grinding spot. When I learned the item was like a minute away past the clams, I decided to get it. Went to New Londo Ruins…it was alright. At least its gimmick wasn’t plain frustrating: Ghosts can only be hurt by cursed stuff, use transient curse. Some ghosts may annoyingly pass through walls to get hits on you but they’re weak anyway. Watch out for ambushes behind every 2-3 corners, there you go. At least I didn’t have packs of endlessly respawning skeletons gunning me down while I chased necromancers. At least it doesn’t have already strong crystal enemies being buffed by annoying bishop magicians who run the moment you show up while half the corridors look exactly the same. At least I didn’t have to walk in the dark with a radius of 2 feet. At least I didn’t have to walk across invisible paths & hope the game isn’t spiteful enough to make me slip off.  It was short too so if you’re fast you only need to use the transient curse once. Draining the water takes me down to encounter the Darkwraiths who are one of the least annoying new enemies. They may be strong & have range, but they’re slow. If I knew how to consistently backstab, I’d be able to land them all day because they takes ages to turn around. I’m now at the Four Kings door & a little hesitant to enter with such an awful time I’ve had with some of the other bosses.

*thumbs up*

So what Soul Level were you guys when you got to the final boss anyway?

I can't remember exactly but I want to say in the 80s.

I'm 87 right now & I feel I need to go grind to actually improve my stats because magic is horribly gimped late game.

bows

bitches

cash

You'll probably be fine once you reach the final boss. I think I was in the high 70's. Plus you'll gain some levels when you do the DLC anyways.

Soul Level 79 iirc

So I finally got the upgraded crystal versions of Homing Soulmass & Soul Spear, which just do more damage & thankfully aren’t slower to cast. One of the earlier magicians also started selling copies of Soul Spear & Homing Soulmass around this point too so I bought them. I went back to where Seath first appeared to kill Logan who had gone nuts & hollowed. He nearly killed me as I walked in the door with this spell called White Dragon’s Breath which I got for killing him, along with his hat, then I went to the earlier spot he’d been when he taught me the crystal spells where his set of clothing & catalyst was, almost all of which was much better than what I had. So I spent some time upping my health since apparently 7 bars isn’t enough, & upping endurance so I can equip Leeroy’s paladin armor that I fully leveled up & still roll effectively. I went to fight the Four Kings & I stomped them pretty hard. Late game, almost every place I’d been to had it out for sorcerers, I normally felt like I was at a disadvantage, but Four Kings can’t do shit against magic. I brought 8 regular soul spears with me (just 4 was able to get Nito close to 1/3) & 4 crystal soul spears. Killed the first three rather quickly with them, then I just used crystal homing soulmass on the last. Their attacks weren’t even that strong so sometimes I didn’t bother to dodge. Also, seeing how I didn’t have to get within 5 feet of them, they seem to telegraph their attacks well in advance. Apparently Four Kings are no match for one supreme wizard.

Went down to Demon Ruins & fought Ceaseless Discharge (that name makes me raise an eyebrow every time I hear it), destroyed him easily with soul spears like Four Kings. Went along, easily killing numerous Taurus Demons, also easily killed the Capra Demons because they don’t have something the original did: A tiny ass room, two annoying pet dogs & me being gimped in lack of good spells. Quickly got through to get too the bonfire, then fought Demon Firesage. He felt cheap as fuck like Stray Demon, I don’t even know how but he was getting hits he didn’t deserve & killed me once. He started doing the same halfway through a second attempt but I didn’t care, I just traded hits with him since I had more health. Afterwards I made sure to go back down the shortcut through most of Lost Izalith & kill that bug that’s supposed to infect Solaire later, then I continued ahead & summoned him for the Centipede Demon boss, who’s annoying, naturally. I just sat in a corner & waited for him to come on land so I could blast it with spells. Solaire, always being a big help, cut off its tail while I distracted it so I could then pull out my best spells & fire away. Though this one dropped that lava resist ring from having its tail cut, would you get that even without cutting it off? 80% of Lost Izalith is covered in lava, so it seems mandatory without the shortcut. The Chaos Eaters were assholes because they somehow heavily damaged my stuff which made me do less damage. I run through the shortcut to repair them & get stomped by a Taurus Demon. Then I waste time grinding 10k to fix my stuff & run back to get my souls.

So, Bed of Chaos. From the look of the area, this feels like it should have just been a standard boss fight. I got the root on the left rather easily, then on the way back I rolled into a hole, which I laughed about at the time. Second attempt, I run for the right root & get slapped into a hole. Third attempt, I baited him into attacking, then ran & somehow reached it before it could do anything. After that, it pretty much kept flattening me repeatedly until I died. I was well aware there would be BS deaths all over this part, but that just about exceeded the normal quantities of BS I usually get. Fifth attempt, I get near the last one, the hole opens up revealing where I need to land but I’ve already fallen in so I’m dead. Could’ve opened that hole a bit earlier, game. Sixth attempt, make it to the hole & roll in, nope, not enough distance. Seventh attempt, I put on my Nikes & run up, Bed of Chaos simply laughs & I get pimp slapped like I owed the bed money souls. Eighth attempt, bait it into attacking before I run for it. I jump & get smacked as soon as I get in the air. Ninth attempt, actually make it. I was using the Moonlight Greatsword that scales off INT, gotten from Seath, but doesn’t swing very fast, so Bed of Chaos used some fire move that took half my health as I got to the centre. So I’ve now done the last mandatory boss (more like a mini-game instead of a boss. Unlike the others, progress isn’t reset upon death so they even knew it was the worst designed one. I can’t imagine having to do those 3 roots in one run).

I quickly ran over to Blighttown to speak with Quelaana & she gave me the very last Pyromancy spell, Fire Tempest, as thanks for putting the Bed of Chaos out of its misery. Made a quick run through Kiln of the First Flame just to see what it was like, and ended up grinding on the black knights a bit down there since they drop titanite chunks of every type, and they’re guaranteed drops too which is good. Since I’m at the last boss, I’ll just finish up any small bits I wanna quickly get done then start on the DLC.

The DLC is amazing, by the way.

So I've heard. I just don't want incredibly tiny rooms that leave me at a disadvantage, then again, I upped my endurance a lot just to wear that armor so tiny rooms don't quickly get me killed.

Yep. Bed of Chaos sucks.

Also there aren't any closed off spaces in the DLC, at least not that I can think of. There is a dark area but it's not Tomb of the Giants dark.

Quick question, does anything change in Anor Londo if I beat Dark Sun Gywndolin?

If you shoot Gwynevere to get to him, some enemies disappear from Anor Londo and if you're human while there you can get invaded by Darkmoon Covenant members (only in Anor Londo though.) There's a Fire Keeper who fights you as well, and then obviously you can fight Gwyndolin.

I'll reserve him a spot near the end of the list then.

You should kill Gwyndolin because he sucks and is supremely lame.

Finally got started on the DLC, I didn’t know that much about it aside from who the bosses were & that Sif can assist you if you find him in some room & save him or something. Quickly picked up the stuff that was behind the portal before going in. Fought the Sanctuary Guardian & wasted two estus flasks trying to cut his tail because he kept running around & I could barely even reach the tail with the Moonlight Greatsword since you swing it so slowly. Then I just stopped giving a shit and blasted it with soul spears for a quick win. Don’t really care for his weapon so whatever. Upon entering Royal Wood, I noticed after about half a minute that it was the same place as where Sif was, so I guess this is some time travel kinda thing. The lanky farmers go down in one swing from Moonlight, but the stone giants were annoying, they do too much damage. Didn’t even bother fighting them physically after a while, just threw soul spears at them. Explored the entire area, finding the pieces of the guardian set (except the helm so I had to go look up where it was) as it had good stats so I wanna use it for NG+. While exploring, I’m pretty sure I found the location where Kalameet is gonna be, if him flying by the area as I approached it wasn’t an indication. There were apparently two slabs I hadn’t gotten according to the wiki so I’m assuming they’re in that one spot, that would make sense, at least.

Found this merchant who really didn’t sell anything new and his stuff costs more than normal. I have to look up whether he drops anything good if I kill him. So, Knight Artorias, surprisingly I really enjoyed this fight. Reminded me a little of Ornstein & Smough again, he really tested my evasion reflexes. I used 2 estus on him, one more than I should have because I was getting really greedy about landing hits that I didn’t care too much about evading every blow as long as I got hits in. Ones like these make me wish I could replay boss fights, because it was fun. Plus he didn’t have some kind of cheap attack like Stray Demon‘s AoE, thank god. Came across Battle of Stoicism Gazebo & looked around a bit. I have no idea how it works, I just know its PvP, but why wasn’t this thing in the game to begin with? Proceed on to Oolacile Township, almost immediately as I walk down one set of stairs, there’s a bloathead in the right corner. Oh boy, the game’s gonna do this shit again. I run through all of them easily, for once purely using melee & not a single spell. Also wanna say those bloathead sorcerers are overpowered, taking a direct hit from their spells takes most of my stamina & does like 30% damage, I wish my spells were that good. Found these carvings inside a mimic that nearly got me, and from some bloathead standing by a ledge for some reason. Since I didn’t have cast light for one spot, I used the sunlight maggot instead & picked up the silver pendant behind a wall.

Eventually went inside some building & killed more bloatheads as they tried to ambush me, but this game tries so much that I regularly expect it & brace myself for any backstabs before grabbing an item off the ground. I go down the stairs & see a message saying to fight one at a time. I stop at the bottom & move my camera around the screen. There’s like 6 bloat heads & 2 sorcerers here, so I quickly turn around & take out the sorcerers from the stairs, because the bloatheads themselves are easy with Moonlight. There was a Soul of a Hero out on a ledge, was hesitant to go down there because I can no longer trust this game when I get ambushed so much. Shoot down a corpse holding one of the DLC spells, picked up another earlier on. I go up some stairs, past some rooms & up more steps to fight some bloathead, and this other **** appears right behind me to get free hits. Where the hell did he come from? I checked the rooms, this guy wasn’t even there, as if he spawned as soon as I touched those stairs. After going through more of them, come to some big room & fight some ’thing’, not sure what it was but I killed it. Then stabbed some guy who was getting off the elevator & took it down to Chasm of the Abyss, and I’m there right now.

So I explored the chasm, and seriously these sorcerers are so overpowered. Of course the place is almost as dark as Tomb of the Giants but they can see me from a mile away, as well as the physical enemies, so I have these guys firing ridiculously powerful spells while I’m fighting these guys. Killed me in like 3 hits & running away didn’t work very well since they can target you from a mile away but I can’t target them unless I get within 10 feet of them, of course. Grabbed all items, saved Sif & moved on towards the boss fight. To be honest the humanity shadows kinda creep me out a little. Since I wasn’t very far from the boss I tried it solo because I wanted to know where the hell the door was. Manus was a total fucking ****. His shit wasn’t even that hard to predict, he would just delay his crap as long as possible to hit me because I rolled a second earlier than he would throw it out, or he would still hit me even if I rolled through a move. I paid attention to my health bar, it would just drop if it wasn't a pixel perfect roll. Roll evasion? Not in my house, boy. Put on your good shit or get wrecked. Doesn’t help that he’s apparently resistant to magic too, so that‘s nice. I try again as a human, only remembering that you have to find Sif’s sign somewhere in the boss fight. This guy starts destroying me  about 20 seconds after I walk in & actually summon Sif. He arrives just in time to save my ass for a second but aside from that he didn’t provide much help. Manus still ignored Sif like 90% of the time & only got in like 2 decent hits, especially halfway through when Manus started spamming dark magic AoE’s, only two of which I could actually avoid sometimes. Ugh, I hated this ****. 

Next, Black Dragon Kalameet, ugh. Had Gough shoot him down so I could fight him, and the arena was where I thought. I didn’t care about killing him originally, just wanted his tail which was almost impossible for me to get because the MG is slow & only has horizontal reach which is why I don’t use it for boss fights, period. But this **** would not expose his tail for more than a second. Then he stun locks me with his breath, followed by a charge, then a tail stomp etc. the game might as well have killed me early because it wouldn’t let me get out of his stupid pattern. Next try, fuck the weapon. I don’t even care anymore, wouldn’t be surprised if it’s shitty. I won’t even use the damn thing anyway. Fuck it all, I just want him dead. Unfortunately, he also had a resistance against magic, of course. So I fight him again, soul spears do moderate damage & great soul arrows barely dent his health bar, he pretty much laughs off any kind of soul arrow. I had to use them after going through all my soul spears & homing soulmass. Soul Arrows? lol, get that shit out of here, boy, I only acknowledge the best. He was constantly stun locking me with some of his BS moves & wouldn’t leave me alone for more than a second to actually heal. His charge move in particular deserves mention for being cheap, doesn’t matter what I’m doing, that charge takes priority over pretty much everything & hits me like 70% of the time regardless of my roll. Whether or not I get stunned from it was 50/50. Fighting this guy was more frustrating than Manus, the Hands of Fate, thank god I’m done.

I killed those other two NPC’s, Marvellous Chester & Lord’s Blade Ciaran because I heard they drop stuff besides humanity, but not Gough since he’s cool & he gave me his bow anyway, so I have even less reason to attack him. Guess I can finally move on to the last bits of the game.

Love the Kalameet fight.

haet

kalameet called me on the phone

he told me he hated you too

errybody's ridin the hate train on this site

well he can suck a fat one

he should stop being so clingy

why do you reject his love

ain't no love, floydboy

just tail

dats rite

So I went to Anor Londo to kill Gwendolyn (who’s room was open for me to fight him for some reason. If you equip that ring to find him even once, is that illusion no longer there?), had a ranged battle & took him down rather quickly. Then I killed the fire keeper so I could upgrade my estus, then Gywnevere to see the real Anor Londo, which apparently is composed of just two guys. It’s weird that apart from the Blacksmith (and oddly enough a few of those bat wing demons that take you back to Sen’s Fortress) the place is completely empty once you kill those two guys downstairs & the fire keeper. I then ran around in Havel’s gear, charging through everything like the juggernaut to kill all the NPCs because I only had Gywn let to fight so I may as well incase they drop anything interesting. Felt like a total **** after killing certain NPCs & hearing what they say as they die but oh well, I also got a fire keeper soul for killing Quelaag’s sister too. Went back to kill Gough too because I heard he dropped a set of armor, he’s cool & all but I want it. Then I charged through Kiln, of the First Flame in human form, easily killing the black knights like I’d done numerous times over the last 2 days. Summoned Solaire because I may as well, and went to the boss.

Gywn is surprisingly pretty damn fast, so I doubt I could take him in melee. I know the universal method is just to parry then attack but I’ve never tried parrying even once. In a game where just two guys can easily kill you at any point if they have the chance, and you take ridiculously high damage sometimes if you actually get hit, as a caster who‘s already weaker than a knight, why would I even want to risk attempting to parry? So yeah, I finished him with crystal soul spear then linked the fire to praise the sun.

Plus the parry method is lame.

Well done, sir.

Going on to some stuff I didn’t mention before, I helped out 3 other players pretty early on. At least I attempted to. In one instance, this guy & another phantom were pretty strong & I was with them to fight the Taurus Demon, but my game crashed right at the fog door, can you believe that shit? Next, I get summoned into a NG+ game, which I could tell because enemies hit me for crazy damage & took ages to kill for me. I stayed on the top tower & fired magic spells at Taurus Demon while the guy stood near & watched…then Taurus Demon jumped up & hit us both. I somehow survived but the host died, I didn’t even know Taurus could do that. I got fed up & later got my three victories on the Gargoyles, as well as a sunlight medal during one victory which I got because I believe the host may have been in the covenant already. I needed the victories not because of the humanity, but because joining the sunlight covenant requires me to have a faith level of 25 (used to be 50 before patch 1.05, which is retarded) & the requirement is lowered by 5 points for every person I help defeat a boss. Unfortunately there was this one **** invader making it harder for me to get my victories because this same one guy kept invading. First time he killed the other phantom while the host ran for the boss door as I just stalled him. Second time the host & another guy were already fighting him & the host got killed. Third time we just ran straight past him, didn’t help that every time he spawned directly in the way of the ladder up. Don’t care about invaders, I just want to join the covenant early & start praising the sun.

So after becoming a warrior of sunlight with that permanent gold plated clothing, I had to think to myself which bosses were easy & around what level I’d find people doing them, because DS has some stupid system where if I’m like over or under 10 levels of other people, they can’t see my sign. Sure, it’s to stop unfair invasions but it makes it a lot harder for me, the hell do I do with the tons of souls I’m getting from helping these guys kill bosses if leveling stops them summoning me? At the time the two options I had were the Gargoyles yet again, and the Gaping Dragon. Would have done Quelaag if I had gone down there yet, as she was kinda easy too. The pool for Gargoyles had kinda dried up after 2 summons so I went to the bonfire at the Depths & got a lot more summons there while I farmed for humanity on the rats while I waited. Fortunately there weren’t that many invaders, and they usually got stomped when they did. Got about 6 medals here, which was enough since I needed to offer 10 of them for Great Lightning Spear & 3 would come from Anor Londo, not to mention I had 3 opportunities to summon Solaire too. While grinding in the painting world, I was summoned & another sunlight member was there too, we even had similar looking equipment. We pretty much steamrolled the place, going in different directions for a while & clearing out the whole area while that soul count kept rising. I then met the other sunlight guy near the fog door leading to the Phalanx.

The only time I ever summoned was for that one occasion with Seath because he had the one weapon I really needed his tail for, that was all. I’d have killed him myself normally, I just wanted his tail. In an invader would have come I'd have just run past him, wouldn't give him the time of day. Then the game would shake its head & teleport me onto the end of his sword for daring to just run past an invader to fight the boss. Late game, I was trying to get summoned against some of the big four, namely Seath or Nito. Had no luck with Nito summons whatsoever, would probably help if I knew where people naturally put their signs, that would be great. Got summoned around Seath quite a few times, and it went terribly every time. First guy got invaded & stupidly backstabbed at the clam section as he just stood there. Cleared out the area with just me & some other guy, we’re right at the fucking door when some guy invades, so he leaves to fight. He clearly wants me to go with him, but like, the door is right fucking there, dude, I just, get in there. I came for the boss, just get in. Nope, goes to fight the guy who’s doing backflips, gets backstabbed & dies within 5 seconds before I even get there, wow. Third guy, actually make it there but Seath spawns right in front of me, cornering me in between him & the fog door. I try to jump over his tail, he spazzes out & takes over 80% of my health, then a hyper beam because he hadn’t killed me yet. Nope, not cheap at all, totally fair. Never bothered again, I had the medals I needed anyway.

Also pretty much sped through NG+ yesterday, running through like some beefy motherfucker cosplaying as dat Havel, charging through all them bitches with my big ass fucking MG & tanking shit like I just don’t give a fuck. Think you hit me with that hammer? Nah son, I’m just thirsty, better start running once I put that flask down. Ran around in human form with 10 humanity in my counter on me almost at all times. Barely got touched in most boss fights since I already knew their patterns (also noticed Sif kinda fights like Artorias which I suppose makes sense even if it’s a stretch since Sif uses his mouth & is a giant wolf, yet I died on Sif numerous times first playthrough but stomped Artorias, though equipment & experiment made a big difference). Exorcised that Demon, smashed those Gargoyles, squashed that spider, put that dog down, got on that Hydra’s back, went out to eat with Havel, sent that other optional Demon back home, shoved my steel into that Iron, left Priscilla alone because I only needed her soul & weapon once (plus she mai waifu), killed Slim first since I needed Fatboy’s soul (I somehow had a tougher time with lighting Smough even though he’s pretty predictable, took a while to work out the timing on his electric slide).

This was where the BS happened, Four Kings NG+, everyone complains about this guy. First attempt, start out with soul spears, second guy appears before I even kill the first. Eventually I kill him, then another shows up. Soon there’s three of them & I get raped. The hell? Geez, game, give me a minute with these guys. Clearly dodging means shit in this fight, it’s the one point where they want you to play like it’s a button masher, fuck defense, just tank their shit & keep drinking, then hope they die before I do. Started out with crystal soul spears, then onto soul spears & crystal soulmass. Had the 4th down to half health when I ran out & had to use soul arrows to finish him off, then near the end this 5th fifth **** shows up. Wat. Hold the phone, is that shit a typo? It says Four Kings, not Five. Get that fool out of here, the player’s lobby next door is missing a fourth.

So I put Nito back in his Grave permanently, played ring around the Rosie with Seath. Charged right through Ceaseless, skipped **** Firesage & Centipede **** with the shortcut but grabbed the sunlight maggot again then finally put that Chaos to Bed in 6 tries (and actually managed to hold onto my souls, believe it or not). Fought Gywn on my own & got raped first attempt, foolishly thinking I could just block. Ignored his knights & fought him again, fuck the souls, no parry, no magic, just me & him. Aside from him landing quite a lot of hits to start, didn’t take too long to learn his pattern & the timing to dodge, which I had to because 3 clean hits & I would most likely be dead. Going for blatant grabs was pretty much my cue to drink, I played ridiculously safe, he nearly got me towards the end when I backed up into a wall but he thankfully didn’t follow up on his attack. So I slayed his ass, man to man, and I walk out of there. All these motherfucking serpents standing right outside the door. Bow down like they know, I walk past all these fools. Like a Sir. So yeah, I'm kinda done.

Four Kings on NG+ is ridiculous.

I've been wondering, is it a bad thing to have summons with you for the Four Kings? As I learned on NG+, it's an entirely different fight from most others. You're pretty much on a time limit since his buddies will be spawning every minute or so, two makes it harder to land hits & 3 of them there at once will quickly lead to you getting stomped. Doesn't help that they have a grab which seems designed to stall for time while his buddies are away. Generally, I never went to this fight in human form so I don't know. I heard this NPC, Witch Beatrice could be summoned for this fight though, but only if you summoned her for the Moonlight Butterfly boss (who isn't really hard & since I was already a caster I had no reason to summon her). I also heard having summons gives the boss 50% more HP, which just makes Four Kings harder considering that fight is more about dishing out damage as fast as you possibly can. Fights like Ornstein & Smough, which are 2v1 seem designed for the summon tactic to help separate the two.

It might be, I can't say for sure. Last time I fought them I soloed them and I've never played NG+ since I'm not into that kind of thing generally.

(http://cdn0.spong.com/pack/d/r/dragonball402800l/_-Dragon-Ball-Z-Battle-of-Z-PS3-_.jpg)

So I got this about 3 days ago. Randomly felt like picking it up because I has money, and because I haven’t played a DBZ game in a while (though I heard Ultimate Tenkaichi sucked & was a QTE fest). The controls of the game are actually more basic than I thought, I assumed DSP was just mashing basic stuff when he played but there really isn’t much to it. I’ve technically finished all 60 missions at this point so it’s just gonna be two long posts, the second I‘ll do later. I felt it was kinda dumb to shove team based battles into fights which were completely 1v1, like the Frieza fight, but whatever. Every character has 2 unique skills they can use using the left & right triggers, and a super that you can use when the game feels like letting you use them (since it seemed it was random at what point the game would let me start throwing out supers during fights). Having played the demo a bit, a had somewhat of a head start since the full game lets you transfer all your DB points, premium points & cards. Game went rather smoothly through Saiyan to Frieza saga aside from a few things I’ll bring up in a bit. The Android Saga was where it began to get a bit annoying. Where enemies kept unfairly claiming they have priority on attacks.

May as well list my issues with the single player at this point:

- Most of the time, my AI teammates will feel completely worthless. What’s the point of even being there if you’re just gonna fly in circles 80% of the fight? Sometimes I’ll get attacked while comboing another enemy & they’ll just stand there watching me get combed, feel free to just sit & watch. They won’t even bother to revive me most of the time, normally when DSP complains about things I’ll roll my eyes because he regularly misses stuff, though on occasion I can easily see his point. This is one of those times.

Doesn’t matter whether I get knocked 5 miles or 20 feet away, if I’m lucky I’ll see one of them attempt to get me, but they’ll usually just stand around. I once dropped like 6 feet away from one, he waited, then flew away. Excellent AI there. Only the support characters I’ve noticed actually make regular attempts to get me. Doesn’t help that I get penalized if they die, I only get 5 secs for them to revive me but they get 10, and drop like flies regularly, so I have to stop what I’m doing & go get them. You only get a certain amount of lives depending on the overall “power” of the team, and the AI can easily use up a lot of them. If they die when you have 0 retries, game over. I hate it when AI can cost you a victory, one of the more BS examples on the artificial difficulty list.

- On the other hand, some of the enemy AI is too good. Two or more enemies are quite likely to target me, or pelt me with continuous ki blasts while I’m beating his friend, a shame my AI partners aren’t that bright. Some enemy AI (mainly the “tough” ones with a star by their name) will just decide shit on the spot. Sure, I started up my combo half a second before I can hit you after getting up but you don’t care, you no sell that first hit & get a free combo on me. Sometimes even though I clearly landed the first hit, they’ll just start pummeling me anyway, because it’s not “challenging” if enemies don’t have super armor, of course. Often they’ll just teleport out in the middle of my combo, why? Because, that’s why. Hate having to deal with those types, the ones that are ridiculously overpowered, can throw out as massive quick beams all day if they want, no sell 80% of what you throw at them, and show no mercy towards you when you need to revive AI. I began doing online at mission 26, the Cell Games fight. I heard how infamous that one fight is for being so ridiculous. Thought they were exaggerating a little until I actually saw DSP do that fight. I already found the AI a nuisance during the Full Power Frieza fight, which y’know, should have been 1v1. I really didn’t wanna think about having to constantly revive because the AI walks into moves you could see a mile away, I’d want competent players for that fight. Unless they’re a healer, the AI is normally a liability.

- Premium Points, period. They’re used to buy all kinds of rare cards to equip to characters to level stats, give special bonuses etc. Some of these good cards cost like 10k+. You get DP just for finishing a fight, you only get the chance to get PP if you get a special bonus during a fight. Getting that requires you doing something specific, like killing one specific character in a 4v4 fight within the first minute, or killing a character while using the character who beat them in the story. Some of these are random or just ridiculous to naturally achieve solo, like mission 26 normally & it has 3 (you only need to complete 1):

Kill all 6 Cell Jrs within 1 minute (these guys love hit & run tactics, so they’re annoying as fuck)
Land a 30 hit combo (Cell Jrs die too fast, Cell decides when I can & can’t hit him, and AI doesn’t assist often in melee combat so that require a specific build solo & a little luck)
Win without retrying (a lot of people doing single player complain about this particular fight the most, enough said.)

A portal then opens up in a certain spot on the map (which you’ll only know if you’ve played the map) & you throw as much energy that you have available. How big the energy bar is depends on team links & such. But you like a measly 1500 PP for a normal early fight while you’d get 5k+ in DP. Having 4 human players gives 4x more but its still glitchy as fuck & sometimes I’ll get less than if I did the fight alone. Oh, they don’t tell you what the special bonuses are either, as far as I know they’re only shown on the results screen, so yeah.

- Unlocking characters in earlier games just required you to naturally progress through the story fights, or beating a character with another specific character. Here its not enough to finish the levels, half the characters require you getting an S rank to unlock them (SS is the highest from a normal finish) making the special bonus points almost essential for some of these fights, or your team would have to pretty much dominate to get the points needed. SSJ2 Teen Gohan requires an S rank on mission 26, I got it first try with a decent team though. Some I had to do a few times, and retries lower your points. Not to mention, I joined a group of people on my friends list & we did mission 59, fully prepared to fill our roles, all of us having senzu beans equipped to get a full restore just in case.

I played as SSJ2 Goku, and the only other major damage dealer played as SSJ2 Vegeta, with Goten & Whis as support (Whis is actually unlocked here so that guy had already done it). Simply put, it was smooth sailing through the first half of the fight. During the last part against Beerus/Bills/Birusu/Whatever & Whis, I said ahead of time I’d handle Whis so he can’t heal Beerus. Whis kept blocking & evaded but I was merely stalling. By the time they took down Beerus (and did a damn good job, didn’t see anyone get downed but I have no idea what was going on on the other side of the map), I had Whis down to half health, so when they arrived we quickly stomped him. We easily dominated that fight, didn’t even use the senzu beans, but I didn’t unlock anyone because I was 2 fights away from unlocking it on my save. That’s just BS IMO. Same when I found a group of randoms who were decent enough to finish mission 60 with an ultimate, couldn‘t believe it. I don’t get credit because I hadn’t found a team to do 59 yet, of course.

I’ll split this about here for the moment.

I played the demo. The A.I. NEVER did anything for me. I had to stop after 15 minutes, I could not take it. I loved Tenkaichi 2 and 3, so this was a massive letdown. And it was only the demo.

I have fond memories of both those games (and Budokai 3 a friend & I played it quite a lot & were pretty much even when we played it once all afternoon). Honestly it's the co-op that makes me look past some of its many flaws & enjoy it. That was the reason I decided to waste money on it (plus I had a lot of money to waste).

Forgot to get back to this, so anyway, I got this for the co-op. I’ve always loved co-op stuff, or just fun things in general. I like fun. So completing a mission with other (good) players I would consider fun. Emphasis on good. I don’t like sounding like one of those try hard “play to win” people who pick the overrated, overpowered characters & insult everyone then make up excuses if they ever lose, but some people can be so stupid online. But hey, it’s the internet, that’s to be expected. It’s just annoying when one bad teammate can easily screw everything up. In this game there’s a retry system, basically the weak characters get 2 retries, the ones in the middle get 1 & the ones the game considers really strong get none. Going to random rooms you’ll regularly see whole teams with 0 retry characters, and I’m usually not surprised when I’m the best player there. SSJ God Goku, SSJ3 Goku, LSSJ Broly, Beerus, Kid Buu, I would almost always see one of these in every room & they’re all 0 retry characters. But if you’re going to use a 0 retry, at least be good with the character. I once ran through mission 60 with Kid Buu when with a decent team, and even though I had only used him about twice before then, I knew how to effectively use his stuff. Then again, I love KB, in every game, even in the show when he was just a mindless killing machine. Me & my friends always considered him to be a little OP in the early games, and he always had tons of crazy long combos & really good unique skills. He’s not good enough in this game to qualify for a 0 retry character honestly. I think SSJ2 Goku is one of the best characters, and he actually gets a retry.

He has instant transmission that lets me speed halfway across the biggest map in half a second (yes, halfway), it’s incredibly useful for reaching enemies across the field & reviving teammates that were smacked across the map by an enemy attack. His second unique skill is a dragon rush combo that can be triggered at any point so its best to do so before the last hit in his standard combo, plus it has invincibility frames so he can’t be knocked out of it by BS enemy priority. Kid Buu gets a low distance IT (If SSJ2 Goku’s went 10 miles, Kid Buu’s would travel 6) but also has a stretchy arm skill that pulls enemies & teammates towards him. You can reset a combo twice by using it before the last hit, don’t think I’ve ever seen another player do that. Then again, Kid Buu isn’t strong enough to really bother. I also think SSJ God Goku sucks honestly, what he can do, I feel every other Goku can do it better, only thing that stuck out is that his super is more powerful. SSJ2 Teen Gohan is also a 0 retry, but I didn’t consider him to be that good either, SSJ2 Vegeta can be if you use him a certain way (a cheap way, spam ki volley attacks all day). Back to the point, I like teammates with brains: The type who don’t run into blatant attacks, take advantage of the boss targeting yours truly, throw out ki & such when desperately needed etc.

Seeing people with 0 retry characters equip senzu beans so they automatically revive teamselves is quite uncommon. The times I’d see the other 3 go into a mission like 59 with not even a ½ senzu & no retries made me shake my head. I can understand the absurb price of full beans but the ½ ones are just 8000 DP, when you’re regularly getting 15-20k a mission by that point its no big deal. Btw, if you equip a senzu but didn’t use it because another player got killed early on, it’s still gone (http://www.themonolith.com/wp-content/uploads/why-would-you-do-that.jpg). Am I a rare breed of player who doesn’t wanna rush right into everything & would rather learn enemy patterns & have some kind of backup available? After the second time, characters like Super Vegito at the end of mission 60 were no longer hard, I knew his stuff. He throws out tons of ki blasts & zigzags all over the place while teleporting around if you catch him in a combo. Keeping up & putting pressure on him greatly lowers what he can do. Plus, if I’m there Vegito will regularly target me. Like 90% of the time, his first attack will be directed at me. Doesn’t matter what character I am, if I’m the highest levelled in the room, if the data taken has considered me the best player there, or where I’m currently standing, when he shows up I’m his main target, so I was forced to learn how to effectively dodge shit to keep up with him. If there’s a healer they usually notice this too, focusing on keeping me healed even though I don’t need the health since I still have my senzu.

Some enemies just naturally target me & I have no idea why. SSJ Goku, SSJ Sword Trunks & SSJ2 Teen Gohan, on mission 60 that’s basically a gauntlet of all characters, these three will always seek me out if a teammate doesn’t get them first. SSJ2 Teen Gohan once followed me across the map to attack me so I always had to make it a priority to kill him ASAP before he can do anything. I’m one of those rare players who regularly has an almost full energy bar because I save it for stuff like killing annoying characters quickly, using unique skills all day with little worry & throwing out energy to others on occasion. Also saving myself from double teams because supers although not that strong, can’t be interrupted, on both sides. Enemy charges a super & can’t be stopped? Throw yours out to avoid getting hit completely. Enemy got BS priority? Throw out a super which stops their combo completely. I don’t always play melee types though, I occasionally played as healers like SSJ Goten (though I normally wouldn’t because playing as a healer implies you have faith in your more melee orientated partners). Was on a team with Final Form Cooler, an LSSJ Broly & Kid Buu, I believe. The first two segments of the mission are just running around beating the crap out of whatever enemy spawns. The last half a dozen fighters tend to have super armor & other BS so by then I drop out of the action & focus on healing & interrupting enemies if there’s an opening. The guy playing Cooler regularly provided ki if I needed to heal while staying back himself to fire finger beams.

Halfway through the list the two doing the main fighting probably took notice of me only rushing in to attack when the enemy focused on someone else, since they were no longer so reckless. Kinda bored of the game now though, still waiting on the 4 cards I need to complete my collection that are all weekly premium cards I have to wait for. Oh, there’s also Ultimate attacks, only 7 characters get them: Goku, Full Power Frieza, Perfect Cell, SSJ2 Teen Gohan, LSSJ Broly, SSJ3 Gotenks & Kid Buu. You need an ultimate jewel equipped to use an ultimate, and you can only buy 3 a week (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-p0OadRapq4). You need to completely fill up the top energy bar, then at the final part of a mission you have the option to use it. You gotta charge up energy for like half a minute to actually use the damn thing & for some reason enemy damage can be random while charging so a good team is needed to stall the enemy. While I fucked up once & used an ultimate earlier than I should have, regular ultimate users tend to bust it out at some of the stupidest times. Noteworthy example, one mission has you fight SSJ3 Goku, SSJ2 Vegeta & Majin Buu, in the middle of everything the guy holding the jewel decided to use it…while all of them were still alive. Clearly this guy is a retard, he could at least wait till SSJ3 Goku was dead because he was the main threat. Naturally the enemies targeted him soon enough & he died, but there have been numerous other times they would choose the worst team to use it. But yeah, I have far more memories of the incredibly awful teams than of the good ones, and that’s depressing.

So since our lord & savior is around the corner, I may as well bring this up before I eventually get into it. With the release of the second game approaching, there were many people over time feeling that they just had to go back & complete Dark Souls or at least give it a try if they passed over it in the past (like myself). Kinda felt like the Ghouls & Ghosts of this generation, except nowhere near as hard since I doubt very many actually finished the original GnGs legit. While it’s to be expected, the game wasn’t as hard as I heard, but that’s what you get with expectations. It flows rather smoothly if you don’t go into the game with the wrong mindset i.e. mashing the attack button, being impatient & incredibly reckless since that shit will get you killed pretty damn fast. I got used to all the controls like 30 minutes in (it helped that I had played Dragon’s Dogma just before it) & while I soared right through most beginning areas, I still died a lot during those points too, and it usually came down to rushing in too fast & getting greedy with hits when it was clearly dangerous to go for it. I don’t count Hellkite though, still think he’s random as shit which makes getting to the sunlight altar rather luck based. Overtime a lot of things really began to piss me off around the mid-point & kinda went downhill from there (I just stopped acting completely around Painted World since my favorite enemy makes its most wonderful appearance there). At the end of the day, I still ended up liking the game. Then again, it doesn’t take much for me to like a game but it takes a lot for me to hate it, may as well go over the bigger points that annoyed me.

- Lock-on. My goodness, as I got closer to end-game, it’s flaws got far harder to ignore. Most times you can’t target something unless you’re within 5 feet of it, which kinda defeats the point of any ranged stuff. It’s perfectly okay for an OP magician to target me from a mile away in the darkness when I can’t even see the guy on screen yet though, that makes sense. Say I run up to one of those tower knights to lock-on then quickly back up, sometimes it’ll turn my back to the enemy instead of lock-on because I was apparently 2 feet too far even though the guy’s only like 10 feet away, occasionally letting them strike me from behind. A memorable example, with the channelers in Duke’s Archives. I run up the stairs towards these guys, staying just far enough that they don’t run. Guy is right in front of me yet I have to hold my shield up & click lock-on like 3 times before the game notices he’s right there. Unless the enemy is moving 2 miles an hour, actually hitting shit with magic is more frustrating than need be, sometimes it’ll somehow miss because an enemy was half a foot to the right, practically scraping the guy’s shoulder at best, not staying it should always hit unless clearly dodged, there’s just no excuse to miss when an enemy is running towards you in a straight line but slightly to the right. This made the bonewheel skeletons more frustrating because any spell except my homie, Homing Soulmass,  would usually miss & leave me wide open to get insta-killed.

- No pause button. Not really a big complaint but I’ll put it here anyway. Say what you want but unless I’m being invaded or have other players with me in general, there’s no excuse for not being able to pause. There are times when you simply can’t stand in a corner while you quickly leave for a minute, for instance, in the middle of a boss fight when your bowels suggest you better get on that pot ASAP. There were two occasions where I had the wrong weapon equipped, but I can’t just pause, go to the menu & swap it out to my main weapon, I gotta kill everything nearby with that crap which will take 3 times longer before I can swap it out.

- Constant ambushes. Sure, they can be done well to keep you focused & all but Dark Souls abuses the hell out of this to the point I just sigh. After the first time I get caught out, fair enough, I’ll pay more attention & it’ll probably come up once or twice more at most. In DS, like a 1/3 of corners have some **** sitting there, waiting to get a free kill. Duke’s Archives was the worst when it came to this. Almost all narrow pathways & half of them had some **** standing in a corner (Once I could clearly see the guy, from my character’s viewpoint he was clearly visible & a few feet away, staring at him but couldn’t target him because I wasn’t fully round the corner, that makes total sense.) When I went down the first steps in Oolacile Township, I knew there would be one enemy attempting to ambush me. I just knew he would be there, I was so used to random enemies camping tight corners that I started making note of spots where they could easily stick one but surprisingly didn’t.

- PvP. Not the thing itself, mind you, then again, as a sorceror who operated under “My magic won’t hit you unless you very slowly walk towards me in a straight line.” I wasn’t going to be that fond of it anyway. Second, the horrendous lag which regularly shows up. This is right before your opponent uses IT to teleport halfway across the room to lagstab you & get a free win. The amount of times duels haven’t ended like this can be counted on one hand. The guy is half a mile away? I randomly teleport onto his sword. I clearly rolled away from a swing? Nope, get over here, lagstab for you, bitch. Then there’s the random invaders abusing some cheap shit like that one miracle that shoots shockwaves, guy was rapid cancelling it or something. Just ran up & spammed it till I died then had the nerve to bow like what he did wasn’t cheap as fuck. Just makes me want to avoid fighting people, period, and some of these fights take too long. In Anor Londo, was grinding out the painting guardians for my humanity counter when some guy invaded just as I sat down at Gywndolin’s bonfire. Figured he’d come to me, he didn’t so I ran up the stairs & he was waiting right there. Spent like several minutes running in circles with this guy using Pyromancy & such, I kept wondering why this NPC was more annoying to kill than the others. Eventually took him down with several soul arrows on the narrow path to the first bonfire, then only realized minutes later I was still online. They’ve apparently fixed the lag but I’ll believe it when I see it & I’d rather not even glance.

- Just gonna call it freedom. Now I know that you can physically kill enemies & use Pyromancy & spells etc. on any character, but you can’t do most of that till like 2/3’s into the game, and probably not even that if you haven’t grinded a little. Starting out with the standard hand axe, I used it for killing weak foes & saving the spells for strong enemies & bosses, and that’s about it. Yeah, you can do whatever build you wanna start with, but if I don’t like a particular play style due to environment changes, I gotta grab a ton of souls to level up my other shit so I have more to fall back on, or start over & choose another class. Hell, a lot of the weapons I was simply curious to try out normally required me to use like 8 soul levels to up specific stats I didn’t care too much for normally, not like I could try it out beforehand to see if it’s a weapon that‘s worth the souls. Don’t get me wrong, I like the game, I just wanted a little more to work with. I liked Dragon’s Dogma more as I could change my character class on the fly by just visiting the inn, and I could experiment a lot more without getting quickly punished for not sticking to my strengths (of course, for most of DD, the head gear with the best defensive stats was a brown sack, so yeah, didn‘t like that little bit). In order to do all that I wanted, I had to level up to like soul level 160 or so, mainly I needed far more endurance than necessary to equip Havel’s gear (which might have the highest defence in the game) & roll without his ring taking a permanent spot.

I also spent a ton of points on attunement so I could go from 6 to 9 slots & use an extra batch of great soul arrows, soul spears & homing soulmass, but after 6 slots the points needed to get more become more & more ridiculous. You can’t really tell how a weapon is gonna swing in your hands till you really try it sometimes. Going off that, the Uchigatana would have been my preferred weapon of choice since the stat requirement isn’t way too high, it swings fast, it’s damage is actually pretty good, and it can be buffed. I hate that spells like sunlight blade & crystal magic weapon seemed useless for me since they can’t be used on “special” weapons. Why the fuck not? The special weapons aren’t even good enough to stand on their own without that, honestly, a lot of them kinda suck since they can only go up to +5 (I assume that’s because twinkling titanite couldn’t be bought in the past. I did not know this…and it is stupid.) Actually trying out crystal magic weapon on some random sword actually made it look cool, but it apparently clashes with anything not common. Hell, as far as I know, the Uchi can only be gotten two ways, kill the first undead merchant (which I wouldn’t want to do on a first play through), or from Shiva, but only in Blighttown. Again, why? Why not at the Forest after joining that covenant, the guy’s right there! Why does he set up shop in Blighttown of all places? Isn’t he losing sales this way? Who the hell would want to visit that shithole other than to ring the bell? It’s pretty high on my list of places I’d rather avoid like the plague.

Great magic shield too, I wanted this on my magic list, y’know, for variety. Then I found out it sucked, looked it up, seems it only lasts like 15 seconds instead of one minute because people were apparently abusing this in PvP. Far enough, I would’ve been a reasonable person & shortened it to around 30 seconds, but 15? That makes it fucking useless, why must really good things get nerfed to hell instead of being balanced? So yeah, I grinded like 70 levels in the Painted World which took like 3 hours (since the grinding spot there gives like 10k souls every minute with the right gear & pyro spell) after I’d done everything expect kill Gywn, so I could run around with all the shit I wanted in NG+ and have more fun doing so.

Oh, and the notion that everything is fair & that anytime you die it’s always entirely your fault? Lol. Not trying to say the game has tons of BS in it, but that’s quite an exaggeration that it’s entirely fair, unless they‘ve forgotten about some of the smaller details. How random the Hellkite dragon can be? That one butcher standing on that piece of wood in the beginning of the Depths just to surprise you from behind (yeah, I saw him on NG+)? The pit with the frogs that can instant curse you if you take them lightly unless you conveniently happened to be wearing curse resist stuff (like myself)? Most of Blighttown in general? That one lightning throwing **** to the left of a narrow path leading to the outside of Sen’s Fortress (you could say the mimic too though that catches almost everyone unless you already knew)? **** giants chucking AoE inferno boulders right after if you stop for a few moments? The infamous archers of Anor Londo? The dreaded well in the Painted World? The beginning of Tomb of the Giants? Duke’s Archives, period. Crystal Cave, period. Stray Demon, its not enough to take health from your fall, he’ll spam AoE’s with absurd hitboxes like crazy. Centipede Demon with 90% of the area covered in lava that eats through your health in seconds? The derpy octopus monsters that can break your shit just from touching you once? Bed of Chaos, need I say more? While most bosses are generally fair (though you don't expect Four Kings to be a DPS race), if you need an example of luck based BS look no further than Capra Demon. Gets two annoying dogs to help him & a tiny ass room, he’d be on the same line as Pinwheel without either of these. Having a weak axe that kills dogs in two swings & no poise whatsoever, having a good shot at him required me to not get boxed in 2 seconds after walking through the door. Say what you want, MM, fucker was cheap.

I'm not trying to give the impression I'm whining because it was too damn hard. One of the things that made me want to finally give the game a shot was that DSP gave it another shot & beat it (with massive amounts of help from his stream chat, staying in the back while his summons did 90% of the work, being given near maxed out humanity so he could keep doing it, and being handed overpowered gear so he could tank through stuff). If he could beat it, then it can't be too hard. I didn't lie about the things I posted, sure I didn't list every death because that's a waste of time but I knew things about the game ahead of time & what mentality to have so I died far less than a new player would. When I said I beat Oreo & Smores 1st try & got hit once, I really did it (http://newssbb.smfforfree3.com/index.php/topic,39365.msg1094871.html#msg1094871), then again, my build was perfect for that fight but I didn't set up my build for those two (honestly it was for Four Kings on NG+). I was expecting to get stomped because my spell count was low & I wasn't human but I had to obviously give it a try. Wasn't focused on specifically killing one of them, just making sure to keep an eye on them both. Considering what kind of game it is, Oreo would likely get a quick stab on me from the side if I ignored him, allowing his boy, Smores, to smack me into the ground. I only called in help ONCE, and it was purely to get Seath the Shithead's tail because the **** was being a bigger prude than Priscilla & would refuse to hand it over, could've killed him without help like every other boss. Overtime, I began using the souls I had on random stuff: items I'll probably never use, random weapons & armor I don't have, just anything so I don't possibly suffer some random death & lose them all. If I was like 2k souls away from a level, I'd get them & level so I don't worry about dying, which made the last areas far less frustrating.

So yeah, I may like the game (I completed 3 playthroughs, at least) but I’m not gonna get on my knees & work my mouth like half the other fanatics. Just because you like a game doesn’t mean you should automatically write off any & all flaws, I’ve acknowledged flaws in several of the games in this topic that I liked. I’ve heard more bad things than good ones from the changes made in DkS2, though I haven’t been actively looking for them, but I won’t be too sure until its out. Oh, and Floyd, I haven’t forgotten about Thin Red Line, I’ll get back to it soon enough.

Praise his name.

Yeah, Dark Souls and Demon's Souls fans are terrible. I love Dark Souls to death but it has its share of stupidity in its design. I think the problem is that certain people (I know a few in real life) take those flaws and act as if they're something positive towards the game, as if bad design making things harder was a good take away from older games rather than the clever level design, interesting mechanics or other things. When you're in Blighttown and the frame rate makes it actually difficult to see where the poison darts are coming from, that's a serious problem.


yesssssssssssssssss

Sadly people will find a way to defend any small concern or make up BS to try & twist it into something good. It just baffles me when occasionally I'll see someone list something & then all the dickriders will show up in droves saying things like, "That's just want you gotta expect from these games.", "You're not playing it right, be more immersed so you can be properly challenged.", "This game is perfect in every way, stop crying." & "Stop whining. Chug down that BS & learn how to cheese it, filthy casual."

A friend of mine just beat the game a few weeks ago and had a similar experience with the community. It kind of blows my mind that a game where getting help from others is a key point has such a hostile community.

I forgot to include collision detection on the list, though it came up pretty frequently in Blighttown so I guess it doesn't matter. Saw a 4 hour steam of Dark Souls 2 on Twitch 2 days ago. Really liking how fluid the movement & combat looks in this game (is that the right word to use?) and the areas look pretty good (not that the areas didn't look great in DkS, that was one of the good points), bosses seem a little eh at the moment, haven't got much to say on the ones I saw. 1 thing I do hate is the healing system in general. Apparently having 5 estus flasks was simply too generous, didn't some people say that they were planning to appeal a little more to casuals? Plus the healing is so slow, reminds me of replenish in DkS, but somewhat faster.

Again, I don't get people. Going on about how watching any of this will completely ruin the game for them, break full immersion & the joy of exploration etc. At points like this I feel I have to acknowledge I'm weird but these guys need to calm the fuck down. I want to have the general gist of what the first hour or so will be like, possibly where to find the good equipment for a particular build, all the gameplay changes between the 2 games by viewing the final version. I didn't play Dark Souls for immersion, the lore, or because everyone said how hard it was & I needed to stroke my e-peen, I decided to finally play it because as an action RPG I figured it would be hard not to find enjoyment in the gameplay. As a game, that's the most important thing.

I think they said they wanted to make the game more accessible. But by that they meant they just wanted to make certain objectives and aspects of the game clearer to gamers in general, since Dark Souls was a little too cryptic at times.

And yes, Dark Souls fans are awful creatures.

The healing thing is definitely bogus. I've only seen two bosses thus far but I liked both of them . BOSS SPOILERS The Last Giant ripping his ar off and using it as a club was great and the Pursuer just looks awesome.

Youef hit the nail on the head though; I think they were going for clarity rather than making it any more easy or anything like that.

Wow, not only is my favorite enemy coming back, they'll be used as backup in a boss fight. I never asked for this...

The community always feels the need to dictate how the game is suppose to be played, like they developed it. It's one of those things that they feel like they have pride for since they have nothing else and anything that isn't what they consider the "norm" is deviant or "casual". They have their own little society going on and it's bolstered by anonymity.

I remember telling ChristoperOdd about getting the Dexterity Scaling Uchi in DS from the merchant and I got flamed by like 5 people because apparently "that's not how you play the game" even though it was up to HIM to follow my advice or not. I guess It's impossible to avoid with niche games and people that will literally get upset when you don't play the game exactly like they did.

It's contradictory, laughable, and biggest of all, because of a fictional video game

Some people just don't understand that there's really no one way to play Dark Souls. You can play it however you want. That's what makes these games enjoyed by all sorts of people. It's flexible enough to fit with most people's play-styles.

People are dumb.

Only casuals like variety, youef, remember that.

filthy scum

mlg giant dad is the only way to play

Wt ring you got bithc?

Havel's ring
Ring of Favor & Protection

STAMINA
HEALTH 
ENDURANCE

EVERYTHING YOU COULD EVER WANT

I GOT BACK UP AND PWNED HIM

GIANTS
GIANTS
GIANTS

BECOME
UNSTOPPABLE

I couldn't help but smile when I saw the name...

*thumbs up*

(http://operationrainfall.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Dark-Souls-II-Logo.jpg)

Aw yeah, it’s here! I’ve been waiting my entire life for this! Ever since Dark Souls saved my dog from that house fire, and was there to loan me that $200, and that time DkS was my wingman, I considered him the best guy ever, so let’s start this up & get back to seeing him again. Bando Namkai Games, whatevs. Aww yeah, gotta get me some of that FromHard dick, that 20 icnher, it’s been too long, no homo. Terms & Conditions? Get that shit outta here, what is this? Casul souls? Skip that cutscene, seen it enough, don’t care. So I take this jog to some house in the middle of some woods. My name? Rek, cuz dats wat I do, scrub. I play as a Knight because that’s a real man’s class (I actually chose a sorcerer just for their starting stuff but I’m gonna be focusing more on my STR & DEX to get that up to speed, yes, a caster doing more phy combat instead of mag, I’m that good. I‘m also probably gonna do a Swordsman on another file). These bitches must be crazy, lose all my souls? Bitch, I played the first game, can’t lose tons of souls if you make sure to spend ‘em. Mo’ souls, mo’ problems. Run through these fog doors and ignored the tutorial tablets, those are for faggots. Came across some big ass hungry hungry hippos, and would’ve normally pwned them but I let them live for now. So I come to this place called Majula, I ran around the area & eventually got attacked by some scrubby pigs who thought they were all good. Found items, the covenant of champions which only hardcore players like myself join, and other nonsense.

I decided to go with ‘ignorant tryhard gamer’ this time instead of ‘senile old man’

Cereal talk:

- First of all, I LOVE that I can target things more than 5 feet away
- Next, spells can be cast even faster & cancelled if need be, praise the lord sun
- Third, you now have 3 equipment slots per hand. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted more so I could have a physical weapon, a staff, a shield, a tailsman & a Pyromancy glove to swap between on the fly. Now I can have a bow fit one of those slots too. Always did love having some variety for almost any circumstance.
- Still don’t like healing in general. How you start with just 1 estus that takes even longer to drink than in the original & the heal is a regeneration effect, and lifegems leave you wide open for 5 seconds and are even slower than flasks. Thankfully, I’d rather avoid being hit so I’ve barely used the lifegems & have like 25 right now from running all over the Forest with the merchant hat that increases drop rate. It just makes the early game harder for new players who don’t know very much about the game besides enemies disappearing for good after 15 kills (which I still think is dumb)
- Speaking of which, hate that the I-frames on rolls were nerfed, as if the heals being nerfed weren’t enough. Haven’t found an 100% block shield yet so I take 10% if I block & half the time I try to roll I’ll still randomly get hit so I’m better off blocking things.

First hour I started, I messed around with the Swordsman, just quickly getting used to the controls, running around & going through the first half of Lost Giants Forest. I’ll continue with that file eventually. Just recently beat Dragonrider with my sorc. Also, the summon thing was no joke. After beating the Last Giant I got summoned like half a dozen times in 15 minutes. Once I got summoned like 10 seconds after putting my sign down, I randomly alternated between using magic or melee during that, his pattern isn’t too hard to learn that I’d avoid fighting him up close. I'll actually made a lot more progress pretty soon.

yessssssssssss

Dragonrider is such a disappointment. When I first saw his name on the boss lists I thought he would be so much more than he actually was.

I originally went in planning to magic spam him since I picked up great soul arrow & figured it was strong enough, didn't go so well after the first ten seconds, fortunately, upping STR & DEX let me use this fire longsword I found that was really good. Beating Dragonrider only required 3 things:

- Shield up
- Circle Strafe all day
- Get in one hit whenever I got behind him, two if he used a move which left him wide open

Aside from the first hit, he never touched me after that.

Yup, more or less.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I fucking love the backstab animation, that always felt so satisfying to land that

The axe one is nice and brutal.

For a short period till I had enough DEX to wield the longsword, that's what I was using since the daggers I started with sucked & let enemies get free hits on me numerous times.

so i saw your name change and recently looked this up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdjAqY2tXtE

Yup, saw it on Youtube around the time too, still pretty impressive reflexes

Been doing co-op for Old Dragonslayer, barely found anyone decent enough to stay alive during the fight, one guy got killed moments after walking in, I knew he would too since he had like half his health left. Only one decent guy so far but OD randomly turned around mid combo & killed me in two hits after 2/3's of his life was done, I'd be surprised if the guy didn't manage to finish him off after that.

So I run though the Forest of the Lost Giants with my two hander, smacking bitches about left & right. Find some big knight sitting by a tree soon enough and stomped him into the ground because I felt like it. Sorry man, this is Dark Souls. Met this crazy fool who flew in on a hawk or some shit, all them casuls call this noob the Persuer, well my foot’s about to pursue his ass…but later. So I delve deep into the depths of this forest where the Last Giant resides. This scrub tries to stomp the yard & smack me around using his own arm, this guy wasn’t on my level, you giants better not come round here no mo’. Moved on to Heide’s Tower of Flame, smacked Dragonrider into the ground like a faggot, stay free. Went back to the Forest since I forgot about that noob, the Pursuer. I called this fool out & he drops down from his hawk again, pulling out those visor eyes & floating like he’s hot shit. This fool was nothing, I showed him how to dodge & put him 20 feet under, get rekt, scrub, get that glow in the dark sword outta my face. Put on my nikes & ran through Heide to the Cathedral of Blue, oh shit, it’s my boy, Pikachu, shame his homeboy isn’t with him, probably too busy with dem twinkies. Now I’m not gay but I’d totally suck this guy’s dick. Slim felt the sequel was too easy & came back to represent, show them other bosses how its done. Sadly I took him to school, too easy, what happened to you, man? I guess we all have our off days.

I go the way of the other path down to No Man’s Wharf, double teamed that Flexible Sentry from both ends with dat girl, Lucatiel. Don’t know what makes him so flexible but it doesn’t matter because he’s dead. Flew the coop to The Lost Basille, eventually came face to face to the Sentinel triplets. They may be casuls but don’t say there ain’t strength in numbers. These fools somehow caught me by surprise at first, got lucky & knocked me down…but then I got back up & pwned them. Pfft! These casuls thought I was done, PFFT! I don’t die, scrub, I don’t even block, I dodge those. I don’t get hit, like a true player, get on my level.

Cereal:

- Until No Man’s Wharf, I hadn’t died yet, really. Outside of co-op at least but I don’t count that. Last Giant came close, Old DS came close twice. What was my first death? Walking into water I couldn’t see on the screen near the beginning. Bull, that wasn’t even a legitimate death.
- I got a little lucky against Old DS, nearly got me halfway through then again when he brought out his spear skewer grab. Unfortunately, he never realized that if I’ve seen the attack once, I’m not gonna fall for it again, but he kept spamming it so I got free hits.
- Pursuer was rough, I could’ve died at any moment during that fight. Why the hell does blocking any attack take so much damn stamina? I had to learn to get used to the wonky roll here, since 2-3 clean hits was enough to kill me
- Flexible Sentry was easy, that’s about it. Only summoned Lucatiel because she needs to survive 3 boss fights to get her stuff. The other three chances I’m dreading because Lost Sinner & Smelter Demon are two of them, I at least know enough that fighting these guys solo is gonna be frustrating for me, let alone trying to keep an NPC alive while doing so.
- Was about as nervous about the Sentinels as I was for O&S. 1st attempt, slowly killed the first on the small platform with melee, the second jumped up & got a BS hit before even landing, taking 60% of my health. Third quickly joined & it quickly went downhill. 2nd attempt, tried magic spam & quickly went back to melee as I was doing more damage that way (not sure what half these other guys are doing that say magic in DkS 2 is so easy). Started hammering away at the second Sentinel, when the third joined I rolled to the bottom area before I got cornered, had the second at half health. Then I played keep away with great soul arrow whenever an opening appeared. Had to really learn how to dodge here since spells actually consume stamina now. Once I had one down, it was done. Just a repeat of the first circle akin to the Dragonrider, but with even more space. Surprisingly enjoyed it only because most rolls actually came out right.
- Oh, and I died right after on the way to the bonfire because a zombie randomly exploded behind one of the jail cells. What's that thing people like to say again? About how every death is entirely fair & always your fault? Never gonna agree with that crap after witnessing that BS

I tried desperately to keep her alive in those fights. I came close in the Lost Sinner fight but Smelter Demon seemed almost impossible without summoning a second person.

Yeah, my first death was stupidly running off a cliff in Things Betwixt. I also died a lot through the levels, particularly when I get impatient with enemies.

Also, I could only keep Lucatiel alive in the Flexile Sentry fight. I summoned her for the Lost Sinner and she died almost instantly and provided with no help. I'm hoping I can get her to stay alive for the other two.

Those shield zombies in the Forest regularly got free hits on me because they took ages to drop their guard & wouldn't let me backstep either so I could move on.

Looked it up earlier & heard you can buy this red eye ring from that cat, it gets nearby enemies to focus on you. Actually tried it in co-op, works pretty well.

I'm currently passing over a few things I should be doing to go down a path where I'll finally find the Sunlight Altar. Normally wouldn't do this but someone apparently thought it was a good idea to place the altar so far from the start.

Rail cereal:

- So I looked up where the Sunlight covenant was so I could join it & get my 30 sunlight medals so I could stop worrying about being too high levelled, what with soul level affecting the number of people that could summon me. I actually had to go look up where to go after exploring Huntsman Copse & getting knocked off a cliff by a NPC red phantom of all things since I didn’t see the path behind the waterfall. Fought the Skeleton Lords, when the bonewheel skeletons showed up, I wasn’t happy, like an elderly retired man experiencing Vietnam flashbacks. Then I found out their spin dashes don’t stun lock & cause instant death like in 1 & took them for granted. Next thing I know my health was all gone. Yeah, Pursuer didn’t get me, Oreo didn’t get me, but these guys did. But yeah, these guys are easy, just thank god they aren’t the ones from the first game that stun locked you on the spot for days if they so much as grazed your leg. One point here for magic.

- Ran through Harvest Valley & found the covenant in that cave towards the end, missed the first bonfire completely when I entered the area. Before that, I walked into an ambush area with 4 of those sickle guys. Thought there was 2 at first but found out 4 show up on my 2nd attempt. Took me 5 tries to kill them after noticing there was a second floor so I could run around & spam magic to whittle them down. As I mentioned before, I went back to No Man’s Wharf at level 57 to grind out my sunlight medals. I was getting summoned at least once every few minutes, which confused me. I had pretty high soul memory since I was buying every kind of spell I came across, and the lowest I’d assume people would have to be to summon me is like 42 or so, so why was I getting so many summons there? Think I cleared that area in my mid 30’s & even then I did grind a few levels to make it easier to keep the NPC alive. Many summons went fine, some were a complete waste of time because the hosts were being morons. One of these had the host get killed aboard the ship right before the boss, I went left & he went right then died within 10 seconds. I have no idea how, he full had health last time I checked, still baffles me.

Whenever a boss came, I wore the red eye ring so the boss would focus on me since I’d rather the host didn’t die & waste my time when I already know the boss’ pattern. After the first few summons I decided to wait by the bonfire when the summons increased a lot. Didn’t know I could still get a medal just for killing a certain amount of enemies or keeping the host alive for like 5 minutes. Makes it easier as long as the host isn’t dumb enough to fight the lanky monsters close up that inflict massive bleed damage & actually take two hits, I soon started to run on ahead & magic spam them just to not risk it. Also got invaded for the first time in the middle of this, decided to wait by the bonfire, the area was small but I’d rather not clear out the entire area for the guy. I had that giant seed that has enemies attack invaders & the guy somehow died before he even got to me, laughed my ass off, free 15k souls, as if I didn’t have a massive amount on me after getting 21 medals.

- Is it me or does armor make pretty little difference? It seemed that way for a while, like I’d wear weak plate armor, then upgrade to one which has over twice as good stats & the damage reduction would be pretty damn minimal. Either that or damage enemies inflict is just random. While grinding out sun medals, I just decided to stop wearing armor. Bare in mind, I’m playing as a toned chick with purple pigtails & bushy dark purple eyebrows, and I stripped off all armor then used my sword two handed. Still got plenty of summons while doing this. Not sure if it was because they needed someone, just wanted a sunlight medal, or assumed I was a godlike player who naturally played like that (and I would if there was no penalty for doing so), my character’s name being ‘Rek’ also makes that kind of play style more amusing.

- After offering my 30 medals to the shrine & maxing out the sun cov, as well as getting their stuff, I went on into Earthen Peak because I heard Iron Keep was after it & the merchant there gives you a +1 ring that raises drop rates. Took me a minute to realize the stone statues I thought were scenery were actually enemies who were trying to poison me, there was one on a platform below I killed & it dropped an item. I ran off the edge, landed on the platform then the game rolled me off the edge into the swamp & lost my human form, thanks game, much appreciated. Covetous Demon must somehow be related to Pinwheel since I consider him up there in terms of easy bosses.

- Another thing, what **** on the developers team decided what this game needed was more 10 foot jumps where your character’s animation covers 4 feet at most. This wasn’t called Platformer Souls last time I checked, stupid jumps like these kill me more than the enemies. I either wasn’t pixel perfect to just barely make the jump, or the jump gets delayed so I’m in the middle of running off by the time I jump. I lost 10,000 souls (the only significant amount so far) to one of the stupid jumps here, I knew I should’ve done the smart thing & homeward bone rather than jump back over, but I’m stupid for assuming I could make such a badly designed jump twice in a row. Hated the knights with glowing blue spears here, since I couldn’t stagger them, so I spammed magic. Enemies like this are what I save the spells for, if they’re gonna be assholes than I’m gonna be a dick & spam magic all day. I knew to burn the poison producing thing, not that its hinted where to specifically go unless you were told.

Boss was annoying, I went in magic & it went horrible, like she turned on a lag switch since everything seemed a second off, plus she spammed more wide range powerful magic than I did when I stayed back, of course. When I rolled as she threw her head, the AoE still hit me even though I wasn’t near it. Tried again with melee this time, staying close & circle strafing like usual, she eventually grabbed me 2/3’s through so I kept my distance a little more so I could actually dodge. Fight was far easier even if some of my actions still seemed a little delayed, point to melee. This was probably the most annoyed I’ve been so far, even though no boss has taking me more than 2 tries so far.

- Went on to Iron Keep, knights here were also annoying since they randomly stagger & I have no idea when they do. Got my drop rate ring, didn’t wanna risk getting the item by the fire since in this game that’s likely to kill me. Pretty sure I met that one knight on the bridge Youef mentioned, tried to lure him back inside using a soul arrow & he somehow killed himself. Finally got the legendary bass cannon and picked up the dull ember before leaving for the moment. Now I can finally get my Uchi, hopefully a lightning one won’t suck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG-Y7EeNFg4

Transversing through the fog gate…

WOO! Land safety on a small platform, a lanky sentinel to my left, long hammer in his hands, huh, I think I can take this guy
BAM! Block a strong swing, pay attention to the chip it does, study this guy carefully, let’s see him try that again

Strafe. To. The left, block, then strike his leg. Strafe. To. The right, roll, then strike again. Move. Around. The wide swing, just get two swings in. Roll. Through. Another. Swing, get 2 more in. I’m staying on top, I’m messing him up, I’ll stagger his ass then unleash 5 swings in a row that is guaranteed to finally make him drop.

Now I can take a sec to chug my estus, yet another Sentinel’s now in my face, better start to put him in his place, but now it feels like a race, because the third won’t give me space.

Two on this platform may spell my dooooom, drop off the edge to give me more rooooom, it’s suddenly become two on ooooone, now the real fight’s beguuuuun, better brace myself because here they come.

Avoid the overhead, strike him back instead, try to back up from dat spinning attack, block the first swing, get punished for striking again, when is it safe? It’s hard to tell when. Don’t block too much, keep an eye on that bar, these guys may not look tough but they hit like a car, this fight’s nearly won, don’t hesitate to run, the second guy’s nearly down, it’s almost done.

This tenseness is toooo reeeaaal…I’ve nearly got this woooon…bide my time….get in those two hits & get that kiiiiill.

One. On. One. With. The. Last. Sentinel.
I’ll. Take. My. Time. And. Se-cure. My. Glo-ri-uous. Vic-tory.
It’s done, your time has come.

Slash, then roll, strafe, and block, bait him out, I’m not all talk, get him stunned, estus if need be, he’s still free, it’s the last bit, land that final hit, time to emote, so I can truly gloat, shove those souls down my throat

This was actually highly entertaining to read.

It was an entertaining fight even with how basic it was

Been through a lot & I’m near the end of the game so I’ll try to go through everything a little fast.

- Ran through shaded woods, everything past bonfire 3 was highly magic resistant so melee all the way, lightning Uchi was surprising good here. Katanas are rather meh in this game, they nerfed the speed for some odd reason as they really aren’t that strong, yet swing so slowly after the initial first swing. Fought Najka, attempted to magic spam her, but in true DkS2 tradition, she could out-range me & do a better job of it so another point for melee. She also had the DkS1 version of homing soulmass, the one that did good damage, tended to track targets & came out pretty fast. Shouldn’t be a surprise to learn I stomped her once I got her pattern down & strafed like usual.

- Ran through Doors of Pharros & unintentionally got to Brightstone Cove Tseldora, cleared out the enemies & got to the boss door before turning back. Went back to Pharros & began farming all the enemies here till one finally dropped the Grym Greatshield that’s oh so good. Then I kept farming them since they dropped chucks, which are too damn rare in this game. Travelled back to Iron Keep once I was done grinding like 20 levels since actually holding that shield required a str level of 32, and mine was only high enough to wield the Uchi.

- Smelter Demon, my goodness, this guy was an douchebag. I’d also like to know what **** on the development team thought this fight needed to be one 1 of the 4 required for Lucatiel. The one who wrecks normal shields, wrecks health bars when he eventually hits you, and eats away health just by being near him. He’s also one of the few bosses who doesn’t give a shit about my ring, he just destroys Luca all day because her AI is retarded & he has such a massive health bar I could never kill him in time. Props to anyone who could actually kill this guy with Luca alive at the end, you’ve got far more patience than me. After repeatedly quitting the game every time Luca died, I just pushed her off the ledge before the door & she stayed there the whole fight. Though I had to do this 3 times because he got 2 BS deaths on me, one was his AoE when I was like a mile away, second was because I was having a good run but I was struggling to keep my stamina up. Figure I’d eat one of those stamina recovery herbs, a shame that it takes like 6 fucking seconds to eat the damn thing. Enough time for Smelter to charge at me from the other side of the room and hit me. The fuck is this shit? How long does it take to eat some damn herbs? This ain’t the time to guess what favour they are, I’m in the middle of a serious fight here! Here I thought the estus was too slow…don’t even know if the win with Luca counted, don’t care either.

- After such frustration, I decided I needed more & went to try the Lost Sinner next, cleared out the place before summoning Luca. Attempt was going well, getting a lot of good hits in & such then Luca got hit & died when she had like 20% health left. Sighed, waited to get some space, then press start & quit game. Tried again using the red eye ring, this time I could barely get a safe hit in, whenever I striked she always seemed to be attacking, and even wearing some of the best armor I had, she could have still killed me in just over 3 hits. I still think the defensive stats make very little difference. Nearly died because Luca took her sweet time actually landing hits while I tap-danced around the area as I tried to line LS up so Luca wouldn’t get hit, rather annoying.

- Since I was still human, I figured I may as well rap up Luca’s stupid stuff & went down to The Gutter. Place was annoying due to the stupid poison statues, most of which I broke in advance, died twice to crappy jumps, aside from that I took my time & got through. Black Gulch was even more annoying because the number of poison statues increased 3x as much. Had to go look up how on earth you get Luca for this boss since the game tries pretty damn hard to hide any trace of her. The Rotten was rather easy, he was nice enough to take a dive so I could finally be done with Luca’s stupid side quest. Good looking out, man.

- Went back to Brightstone & cleared the area to fight the boss with Benhart who also has the same requirements as Luca, but far less frustrating. I take back what I said about the Jabba the Hut dude, this guy is the Pinwheel of the game, Prowling Magus or something. Took out the cleric helpers & minions with ease using my longsword then threw 3 dark orbs at the boss & watched his health drop in moments. I had no idea the guy was gonna be that weak, would have killed him first if I knew his HP was that low, Benhart barely had anything to do since I was killing these guys so fast. On another note, I hated the second half of the area since the magicians are placed just far enough so that you can’t lock on & fire magic at them, but of course the same doesn’t apply to them, and they can do it all day, of course. Ran through and entered some building where the next boss was, walked all the way down on cobwebs & arrived at the door. I wasn’t actually ready for the boss but I couldn’t leave at this point.

- Found an NPC summon tucked away in a corner, Ashen Knight Boyd. Normally I’d go solo for any boss the first time unless I have to bring the NPC along for a reason, but what the hell, figured I’d try him out. This guy was surprisingly good, took out the minions with me fast, then ran right in & started fighting Freja while I stood in the corner & spammed magic for the first time in ages since almost no boss lets me get away with that. To my surprise, this guy was actually blocking & rolling through half of Freja’s attacks, holy shit, I was stunned. It’s as if the one NPC they want you bringing numerous times is the one you gotta babysit, where the hell was this guy when I fought Smelter? Hell, where’s the mage chick who could spam soul spear all day during the Ruin Sentinels fight? Where’s the clown I’ve heard about that’s capable of soloing the Medusa boss with his pyromancy? So things went well, he still got hit a lot but he could take the hits unlike Luca, both him & the boss were down to like 20% when Freja’s backup squad began to show up. I wasn’t having them interrupt so I ran in with my sword & got smacked. I get back up, land one swing, second somehow misses, land the third, get smacked. Get back up, land the final hit & win. Nearly got killed with the second hit somehow missing, those hitboxes tho. You were a big help, Boyd, I'll place you on the good summons list. Easily killed Vengarl’s body because he glitched near the bonfire.

I’ll update the other bits later

Prowling Magus still has a great name.

Shame I can't say the same for his fighting skills

Word.

I still hate Dragonrider more though.

Why?

Well on one hand I found him to be on the same level of difficulty, he's just a slower fight (if you can circle him you've basically won.) Beyond that, his design is boring and his name is super disappointing since I was expecting a dude riding a dragon or something. Prowling Magus is easy, but there's still some slight management you have to do with the crowd and he's not just another "circle the warrior" fight.

I was gonna touch on that tactic later on, and how most fights generally come down to that.

Most of my favorite bosses in the game are the ones that deviate from that to a certain degree.

- Forgot to mention somewhere down the line I visited Belfry Luna (offline, of course so I don’t get invaded every few minutes) & fought the Gargoyles. I have fond memories of grinding these guys for sunlight medals back in DkS because magic was super effective against them. I don’t know if the same applies here, it did pretty meh damage. But 90% of the time you’ll regularly have 3 of these guys gunning for your ass & their attack patterns seemed pretty random which just annoyed me. I one-shot it because I ran around using long ranged attacks because running in to attack got me hit half the time.

- Went back through Iron Keep to finish it, explored Belfry Sol while doing so. Old Iron King while visually being a nice looking boss, his actual attacks leave much to be desired. My first attempt, I died because during the long build-up I started spamming magic, I mean, why not? The guy’s taking his sweet time to come fight me so I may as well get a head start. Then I moved to the right & immediately drop into a hole of lava, why the hell is there a random hole right there? Second time I’m on the right side & I get ground bounced right into the lava. Third time, since I hated the arena as it was getting me killed more than the boss itself, I just tanked most of his stuff, didn’t bother rolling anywhere that looked unsafe.

- Took a bit of time out to go back to Doors of Pharros & kill the Royal Rat Authority, who’s basically Sif combined with the cheapness of Capra Demon with the 5 rat minions that inflict toxic upon being hit twice. As if toxic wasn’t already too much in the original, they made me lava level bad. The big rat himself was annoying, for some reason I couldn’t consistently dodge the charging headbutt, even though I knew the timing. The two sweeps? I’d get that like 90% of the time, headbutt was like 50%, after a while I’d just block if the game was gonna delay my dodge & not have it come out.

- Went back to kill the Executioner’s Chariot, which I had completely forgotten about, as I only went there to grab the sublime bone dust back before I fought the Skeleton Lords & never looked back. Was pretty easy, as I was far overleveled for this boss since I should have done it ages ago. At this point I had lighting spears, which were better than the magic I had so I used them once I got the horse out in the open to fight on my level.

- Took a little while to figure out where the hell I had to go to get to Drangleic Castle. Ran through the first part rather smoothly, actually missed the first bonfire & kept going, killed some statues then a sentinel showed up out of nowhere. Welp, better start strafing to the left. Actually grinding this area is a little annoying if all the sentinels get out because they’ll always try interrupt & get hits on you from offscreen. Anyway, I passed a few rooms & stuff, rolled through the poison mask room & came to one with three shield knights in there. I wasn’t ready since I was low on estus & resources, then all of a summon some **** NPC invades & the guy is literally 2 feet behind me on the stairs, attacking my back, the hell is this? Had to lure that **** back to a bigger room before continuing. Found the Queen, found the boss gate, turned around to go find the bonfire I missed. Also found the hole in one of the nearby rooms leading to that Dark Pilgrim guy so that’s good.

- So, first attempt at two Dragonriders. Guy was across the room so figured I’d start with lightning spears, I get speared by the second guy up top. Circle around the first & try to attack, speared again. I try to get some space to estus, speared again, dead. I know I normally go on about BS, but this was true BS, as if he deliberately waited for any moment where I was doing something to snipe me. Second attempt, I just fight this guy normally & one of his swings knocks down the second guy, then I back up & start ranging them. The second one had lower health for some reason, odd, well whatever. Run through the rest of the place while talking to Benhart beside the next bonfire, open the path up to that Looking Glass Knight. Decided to kill the chess pieces 15 times so they wouldn’t come back before challenging LGK. Summoned Benhart beside the door because this is one of his 4 fights. Wore the red eye ring because although I had no idea if he was as bad as Luca since Prowling Magus was a joke, didn’t wanna risk him dying.

- Fight went rather smoothly, LGK was slow enough that I could have easily taken the guy using strafe 101 but I didn't wanna risk Benhart possibly getting killed so I kited him around with ranged stuff, then ran in to attack when he called a mirror NPC. Of course, LGK interrupts when I nearly killed him and I almost die. Aside from that it didn't take long to get him down.

- So, Shrine of Amana, the place most people hate & I can easily see why. Probably the first place I considered killing all those annoying soul arrow spamming mages just so I wouldn't have to see them again. It was bearable until the small bit right before the cave with the 3rd bonfire where two mages will target you at once, I just couldn't get past those assholes. First time I attempt, I killed the one to the far left then the other killed me moments after because I had little health when I got to her. Second time, I kill both but then the two other cleric guys rush over & beat my face in when they didn't run over before. Next I just sniped them with arrows (yet they're somehow still able to target me from a mile away with magic, that's totally fair) and lured the cleric guys away from the healer beside them. Did you also know there's an NPC summon halfway to the third bonfire? Surprised me too, I was still human at that point. After the third bonfire, I groaned when as soon as I exited the cave there was a mage already shooting soul arrows from a mile away. Had to bring out the bow again just to leave. Fortunately there weren't many still around, although it was very annoying to have an NPC randomly spawn & start hitting me with crystal soul spears. Had to drawn this **** back to the cave to kill the caster. Fortunately spells fly over your head if you're right up in their face, the constant rolling was merely wasting my time though. Getting real sick of the invasions at the worst times.

- Demon of Song, how do you fight this guy exactly? Can't do much when he covers his face (and does the annoying body slam) and half the time he reveals himself he's swinging his arms everywhere. Magic was actually beginning to get decent here so I magic spammed him as I didn't wanna risk dealing with the stupid mages again.

Still got a lot more left.

Gotta wait for his skull face to pop out then attack that in the interim between his attack and his going back into the "shell".

- So I ran through Undead Crypt, had to deal with the same annoying NPC invader who fortunately didn’t spawn right behind me this time, also picked up a spare copy of Soul Spear from the merchant here. I died in that room  you drop into right after the shield knights in the narrow hallway several times while trying to find the exit, keeping my souls was quite a hassle. Activated the shortcut here from the 2nd bonfire to the path leading to the boss. Cleared out the enemies once, then I restocked & just made a run for the fog door, only getting hits moments before I got there. Velstadt wasn’t took hard, for one he never hit me with his overhead slam, and only once with the horizontal swing, I had him beat. Though I never managed to avoid the attack where he fires dark orbs around the room, what do you do against that?

- Took a while to figure out how to get to Aldia’s Keep, found Luca by the bonfire, almost forgot she shows up here. Finally gave me her stuff and afterwards I felt compelled to kill her after the frustration she put me through, would have probably been a mercy kill even if I had actually done it. Killed the NPC phantom that spawned as soon as I walk in the door, then got killed by the undead dinosaur using a suicide attack on me, I was unaware it actually tries to target you. Didn’t free Navlan like everyone says so I could talk to him while hollow & eventually get his stuff. Found a bonfire halfway through behind a random hidden wall on stairs near the acid room with the dogs only because I saw someone else find that bonfire. Found Soul Geyser in that room, now finally magic can be OP, since Soul Geyser is basically Soul Spear on steroids & not in the Crystal Soul Spear way. Soul Geyser fires 5 Soul Spears at once at an enemy, can only be used once but you get an extra cast if attunement is levelled high enough. Anyway, I figured I’d fight melee style for the boss like usual. I walk in to fight the Guardian Dragon, run up & do about 140 damage, which was kinda weak compared to normal. Then the guy flies up & starts bombarding me with fire AoEs until I’m pretty much dead, cheesy as fuck. So I to get out my spears & do the same to him the next attempt, got him down to 20% then finished him with 2 great heavy soul arrows, which was probably the first time I could do a better job of out-ranging the boss than the other way round.

- Get to Dragon Aerie, the first dragon immediately attacks as I’m on screen, I try to block, lose all stamina & knocked down. I get up while he’s still breathing fire & die since it hits me while I can’t block, BS. I cheesed him out the same way, then came back to get the titanite bugs & found out they’re like the demonic spiders of DkS, as they don’t respawn at all, which I suppose is good enough since they took too long to kill. For some reason there’s a ton of stupid exploding zombies walking about, I really hate these guys.  Not really sure why Dragon Aerie & Dragon Shrine needed to be 2 different areas but whatever. Finally got the staff that actually makes magic worthwhile, near the end of the game. The guys with swords function the same as the old knights back at Heide’s tower. The guys with the massive maces swing ridiculously fast compared to how they look, & can easily kill me with one full combo, these guys are OP, nerf plz. Same with the dudes wielding shields & hammers, but not as fast. Got to the Guardian Dragon eventually after a few deaths, got the heart then it was time to wrap up some optional stuff right after memories.

- Went through the optional giant memories to get the items & the soul of a giant for later. Met Benhart twice so his summon would be available during the boss. Summoned him for the boss but I died to BS where smoke covered the entire screen as I was hit by the stupid assholes throwing fire, then smacked into the ground by the Giant Lord the second I could see things again. Hell, I could barely tell what the guy was doing with his sword most of the time since I could only see his damn feet. Benhart lost tons of health due to stupid nonsense & got flattened by the boss when he was moments away from being killed, press start, quit game. Wore the red eye ring but it was harder to survive because I was over 70% burden & one sword slam couldn’t be blocked. I don’t exactly appreciate the constant fire AoEs being thrown near the boss that take 40% of my life though. Spoke to Benhart again, got his stuff, time to wrap things up.

- One of the big guys I’d been preparing for a long time ago, to the point that I was so stingy to spend effigies on anything other than summoning NPCs to get their stuff, I’d stockpiled at least 80 human effigies by this point, I regularly beat bosses at 75% health only because of the ring of binding, and if it came to it, I’d do it at 50% because FromSoft decided effigies shouldn’t be infinitely bought or acquired by farming, and that turning human after helping others kill bosses was apparently a glitch & not supposed to happen. I’d done a ton of grinding on all the guys at Dragon Shrine so I can wear most of Havel’s stuff & his shield before starting this. Got through the first & second abyssal dungeons rather easily, it helped that the enemies did reasonable damage to me & they weren’t taking like 40% health with every hit so I could have tanked them if I wanted. Died immediately in the 3rd dungeon because they put bottomless pits in the area right off the bat, thanks game. Only real tough bit in that area was dealing with the Havel dude & Ricard, who was annoyingly fast. Then I finally got to Darklurker, and I one-shotted him. Yep. Dominated him with magic, brought out my Soul Spears & tried not to attack if he was in the middle of something since I had no idea how much damage his attacks did. When he split, I brought out my Soul Geyser & it ate through his remaining health bar quick, then I ran to the side to avoid the attacks the two were launching when they died. Go home, Darklurker, you’re done, get rekt. That’s why it’s good to have magic as an option, even if it may suck for about 65% of the game.

- Next was Vendrick, I had cleared out the path 15 times much earlier just to make the run there much smoother. Figured I could magic spam him but I got him to around 55% when I ran out of the good spells, would probably be much lower if I bothered to kill the Ancient Dragon. He got me after during one moment where he broke my guard & couldn’t roll, even with Havel‘s shield at +4 (not +5 because From deserved I can‘t buy twinkling titanite & if the few enemies that drop it stop spawning then you‘re done, nice). I try again, full melee this time, took ages & what was the ultimate strafing challenge but I eventually got him down without being too risky, took far less tries than I was expecting. Now I just have the final boss for me to deal with.

Darklurker is a tremendous pain without magic.

So I've heard, good thing magic can finally become OP by the time you're actually able to fight him

- So I finally went to the Throne of Want to face the Throne Duo, along with Benhart & Vengarl because why the hell not? Seemed like they were useless for some reason, both bosses focused on me for the first half a minute & ignored them, then when the bosses did target them, they were dead in less than a minute while I could barely get their health below 50%, is there HP normally that low? They felt about as useful as Luca. Afterwards, Nashandra showed up to fight with her cheesy curse orbs. Fortunately, I had a greater quality of cheese with me to spam soul spear from 10 feet away where she can do very little about it since she moves at the speed of a snail, that's what she gets for attempting to play Fashion Souls. I hope Nashandra had insurance, because she just got rekt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luQvaWmZ9zA#t=0m8s

Anyway, I wrapped up any optional stuff & tidbits I hadn't done besides Ancient Dragon because fuck that. Also got any boss weapons I wanted & used every kind of consumable soul I had in my inventory, came to just under 900,000. Finally checked the monument & I had a total of 119 deaths, probably would have been around 140-145 if I wasn't aware of some things beforehand. So now I suppose this is the point where I go over the things I liked & the many things I didn't like since I complain a lot. As I said with my initial thoughts, I liked the bump up from 4 equipment choices to 6, I liked that spells at least early on came out decently fast. It's good that I don't have to be incredibly light to do a decent roll. 90% of the time, when I'm going for a backstab it'll regularly come out like it should. I'm forgetting a few things but whatever, time to move onto stuff I didn't like so much.

First off, I don't like how practically all your tools for survival were basically nerfed, though I do get the thought behind it. Dark Souls was probably most known for its difficulty, a lot of people tried it for various reasons, some dropped it when they just didn't get it, some came back to it later on & ended up enjoying it when they gave it another chance. If you haven't played Demon's Souls or seen Dark Souls beforehand, you'd go into it with the wrong mindset & get stomped on repeatedly. But once you know the mentality you should have, it's really not that hard (Though you still gotta put a lot of effort in). But Dark Souls was out for over 4 years, people have run through the game like half a dozen times, done speedruns, done SL1 runs (which I still think is nuts but who am I to judge?), people know almost everything there is to know, eagerly await the sequel & hope its as artificially difficult challenging as it can be, or else they'll be dissapointed. So the way to truly attempt to up difficulty is by taking away what kept you alive in the previous game during the early portion of it.

Estus flask? You start with 1, you gotta find the rest if you wanna last very long. Hell, it takes longer to drink the damn thing than it did in the first game & far longer to recover your health. Lifegems? Pfft, They heal less & even slower, plus take even longer to use than estus flasks, I rarely use these. Shields? Most kinda suck since they'll usually have around 80%-90% physical defense, it's not like you only have 2-3 estus flasks or something. You lost all your stamina while blocking because enemy attacks drain it so fast? Whelp, I'm just gonna stretch for about 4 seconds, feel free to land all the hits you want. Rolling? Nerfed, for a good while I'd just prefer to block & take the chip rather than attempt to roll & have a 50% chance of somehow being clipped by an attack which at least on my screen didn't touch my body, the hitboxes in general seem to be a little questionable at times. Many of these points seem to be tied to the stat Adaptability. Basically if you want some of it to go back to DkS 1, you gotta dump 20 points or so into it so you don't get killed because your character took their sweet time doing something. Moving on, titanite, there isn't enough. The basic ones aren't a big deal but there isn't enough large titanite shards & titanite chunks during the first half of the game (especially the chunks), yeah, it's apparently for balance but when it takes 8 of them to go up 3 levels, you don't get much room to experiment. For quite a while I wouldn't go too far with upgrading my stuff even though I had the materials, because the upper levels of titanite were scarce & I didn't wanna come across some better weapon or armor & couldn't fully upgrade it because of that. Took me a while to fully level up my fire longsword when I figured a better weapon wasn't going to come along, I'm still using it in NG+.

The rings, many of them aren't that great. It's cool that you get 4 slots now, though it would be great if they wrote down exactly how much of a percentage boost some of those rings are giving you. Did you know the Chloranthy Ring that boosts stamina recovery is pretty much worthless? I found out it only boosts it by 3.5%, that's basically nothing. Armor feels a little useless compared to the previous game, I raised an eyebrow at the damage inflicted on me on occasion, but fighting Lost Sinner made it feel more apparent. When I upped by defense by like 300+ points, giving me like a 4% damage reduction just so I can barely survive her full combo, but now I can't roll. Sometimes I just didn't even see the point of bothering with armor, I'd do just as fine completely naked, wielding my sword two handed (I was tempted to do this for NG+, may reserve that just for Smelter), no wonder many people just wear whatever they like the look of. If armor is gonna mean little, may as well just wear whatever looks good on your character, stats be damned. You gotta make sure you look your best even when you die, this is Fashion Souls, son. I may shake my head at you for dying to Covetous Demon, but hey, you looked damn good during it. Don't like how they changed illusionary walls either, and never said anything about it, there were many I missed & had to do quite a bit of backtracking because I initially thought you just pressed a button now, but the ones you attack are still here, so why have two different types without the game saying anything about it?

Oh, the whole despawning enemies. Technically, I don't actually have a problem with this, I neither like it nor dislike it, the only issue I have is with drop rates concerning this. Many enemies drop some pretty special stuff & if you're unfortunate enough to receive this stuff before their expiration date arrives, you're screwed. After all, it's not like there's only a select few enemies that drop twinkling titanite while there are a ton of decent armor & weapons that need 10+ twinkling titanite to upgrade & you can't simply buy it, GG FromSoft. What's that? A bonfire aesthetic? Maybe I would use one if it didn't make the enemies on the level of NG+, and it doesn't get reset upon actually going into NG+, so if you're planning to go pretty far it might be a bit of a bad idea. Can't believe I almost forgot one of my biggest gripes, the platforming, ugh. There was too much of it in this. Many points where there was an item across a ten foot hole, which wouldn't be so bad if the jumping animation looked like it covered 3 feet at best, makes it hard to tell where exactly you need to be jumping to make the jump. I think I died over a dozen times overall doing jumps like these, after a while I simply looked up the items for jumps which just looked stupid. It's not very good when I'd rather go look up whether what's over that hole is worth the effort because I'd rather not up with dying to a badly designed jump repeatedly. Oh, the fall damage too, a lot of it is pretty absurd if you're not wearing something that lowers it, in DkS 1, you could easily make that drop down the well & survive no problem. Here, even with the ring, you'll be nearly dead when you hit that plank, the forced drops aren't as common as in DkS 1, but you take far more damage over the smallest drops.

Don't like the auto-tracking of the enemies. Many enemies seem to target me mid swing to the point they can turn like 130 degrees to the side & do chip damage when they really shouldn't be able to, it's just annoying that many enemies have CoD auto-aim to try & prevent you getting backstabs. Durability can be rather annoying for some weapons, sometimes it can be a little silly like wanting me to stop using my fire longsword so I can be forced to magic spam instead, I’d rather spend the tiny amount of souls every few hours to fix my stuff like in the first game. To this point, I still don’t get half the people going on about sorcery being OP pretty much the whole game, because it’s really not, coming from someone who basically played through as a Magic Knight (more emphasis on Knight). Honestly, Sorcerors probably have the easiest start since the early enemies die rather easy to the basic Soul Arrow but a little after the Ruin Sentinels, it starts to become rather mediocre/stagnant. From that point, Dark Orb, a Hex, takes over as being my go-to spell because it did almost as much damage as Great Heavy Soul Arrow, has twice as many casts, and comes out almost as fast as a basic Soul Arrow, only faults are that it doesn’t home in & go as far but that doesn’t matter very much in PvE. If people are referring to lighting spears & certain Pyromancies when they talk about OP magic, I’d agree. Lightning Spear was regularly doing 500+ damage which was around the same Soul Spear was doing. Lighting Spear, that only required 22 faith, compared to Soul Spear, that needed 40 INT and only has 2 casts at first while Lightning Spear gets 10, doesn‘t help that most of the new spells suck as & aren‘t worth using. Sorcery finally got OP once I got an extra copy of Soul Spear, got Soul Geyser & finally got the Staff of Wisdom…at the Dragon Shrine.

Before that, running through with melee was far smoother than doing magic because many of the good spells in DkS 1 got nerfed to being near useless like Homing Soulmass. It’s like they physically abused him for several years, I thought he was still himself, but I had to accept that he’s just not the same, what happened to you, HS? Early on, like many others, I read up on the book of strafing & never looked back. You could say that upping my INT increases fire damage so technically it was making my sword a little stronger, but it must not have been very much since I didn’t notice. What, like +5 damage per hit? That means nothing when it comes to bosses. Most of them operate under the same rule of simply strafing in one direction all day & you already win since they can’t do much about it. I even poked fun at it using the Ruin Sentinels theme. Hell, the boss fights wouldn’t take very long at all if most of them didn’t have health bars on par with Four Kings, Old Dragonslayer in particular. Seems like killing just one of the Ruin Sentinels would be around how much health a normal boss in DkS 1 would have. May be forgetting a few points but whatever, I’ve gone on long enough.

...So I liked the game a lot. Around as much as the first. Yeah.

Sounds about right.

I'd probably be interested in doing some co-op on bosses at some point. Just running through NG+ atm, not much different aside from a few extra enemies through in certain spots & really annoying red phantoms thrown in numerous spots that have too much damn health.

Seems FromSoft are making a whole bunch of nerfs to spells & such, not like there wasn't already enough nerfs before. Well, at least I got my plat before they began nerfing the MLGS into the ground. Only bothered to get it on NG+ after apparently hearing how good it was, and sure it was a little better than my fire longsword, but it wasn't a massive difference, it could also be buffed too which is what I wanted in the first game. Still swings a little slow though (and they're gonna make it swing slower, and not allow it to be buffed...so make it like the first game where it was just plain avarage) it does look nice visually though. But I cheesed most of NG+ with magic, especially the bosses since if every enemy is gonna do half my health with almost any hit or combo, I'm gonna respond in kind by destroying their health bar with 4 Soul Geysers, took down Smelter Demon within 20 seconds with that, it was surprisingly amusing how fast I could tear down bosses when I got right up in the large ones faces & fired that, coupled with some Crystal Soul Spears & Soul Spears. Honestly, melee needs to be buffed a little, my NG+ run made that clear, especially due to the stupid red phantoms placed all over who use Megamule so they can have 5x more health than the other enemies. After a while they were just annoying to fight so I reserved my Soul Spears for taking them out, I wasn't going to put up with their nonsense. Would also like to know what **** decided to place one red phantom with a greatbow & a dual wielding in the tiny area where you need the Kings ring to get to the Throne of Want. Had to wait all day for that door to open then I just ran through, I was sick & tired of seeing red phantoms by that point. Anyway, yeah, good thing I'm basically done by this point at least. Looking back, I actually like the first more.

I agree with the last statement. I mean I still super enjoyed this, but the first one is just too cool.

I found that during NG+, when I was doing a lot of stuff that wasn't really mandatory, I ended up just complaining about any nonsense that happened, while that happened in the first game, it was nowhere near as often. It was mainly the gimmicky last half of the game that I had issues with.

Finally got off my ass & did it, mainly had some trouble with the second half but didn't wanna just half-ass it. Hope I didn't get a little too much into it & it's still understandable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_8N8eoY6YI

Whoa! What’s that blob thing I see? what on earth could it be? they say it came from the boundry, sounds creepy when it is near, better get out of here
Huh? What the hell’s up with this, it’s speaking gibberish, I simply can’t understand this, something must be amiss, worse than broken English.

I  eed   reg  ar supply of se thr in  der to fully s stain myself, gugagaga, gotta…eat…I h d kn  ledge to gain, t e experi nce drov  me insane, I contin    again, th s ain’t the same, it came from th  depths of the boundry 
With  he azure being ne r my mind is   coming more clear, azureazure, kiihehehehe, I’ll devour it!   
I’m r nning out of  ime, the sit  tion may no  be fine but at the  nd of the day the azure is mine

Come! You can go do your worst but you’re still gon’ get cursed, I’m about to anticipate the burst, hold on, I’m not done just yet, I still got that reset
Yeah! I’ll devour your soul, I’ll block that reversal, then I’ll land that astral, when you’ve accepted defeat then it’s time to eat

Across the globe, many people know me by so many names…black squiggly, one of the boundry bros, that goddamn beekeeper: A-ra-kune.
I’m all alone, a black heinous creature, I’m running out of time, the bigger picture doesn’t really concern me at all while I’m walking the thin red line.

The bodies themselves don’t matter to me, power & knowledge is all I want to see, the Azure Grimoire is the pinnacle & the key, I’ll devour that azure with glee, frooooom n to infinity.

*dem guitar & drums, skip to 2:28*

Kiiiihehehehe!! I no longer h  e any mouth or  ven a face, so I can just make  ne & it’s just fine,    doesn’t m  ter to me. As I creep   ound the corners of the town & ambu h them before they hear a  ound. Ghuhguh  rhk. A  empts to try & p rsue me are    vain. When they see me  gain, it won’t be the same, but they’ll be sure to remember the name.

Ha! I’ll consume you with ease, they’ll scream “No! Not the bees!” You’re trying to block that string? Oh please, you’re not cursed just yet, but they’re still quite a threat.
See? My insects are aim to please, no, I’m not carrying fleas, you could call it some kind of boundary disease, when the cursed you’re mine, so feel free to whine.

*drums & more drums, fin*

I got goosebumps following along with the song. You have done my main and greatest fighter proud, sir.

I never quite noticed until now but the added bridge in the middle sounds kind of Castlevania-y.

you're welcome, I'd probably be playing CP right now if developers weren't busy fucking Europe in the ass like usual, and I don't feel like probably having to pay £45-50 just to have some website send it. I don't have as much money to throw around as I did when Dark Souls 2 was nearing release.

I would be playing it too if I had the system to play it on. Some things about it have left a slightly bad taste in my mouth though; I'll probably wait for the next revision or the Kokonoe edition or whatever.

That's what you get for not owning a PS3, shame on you

I did have one but it broked

wat happen

somebody set him up the bomb

wat!

it deaded

(http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130227035558/sly/images/8/8b/Sly_4_box_art_empty.jpg)

So I finally got round to playing Sly 4, I was interested when it was first out but just like usual, Europe was busy taking it in the ass (I.e. having to wait months for games those on the other side get on release day) so I eventually forgot all about the game. Before the Sly Collection came out the only game I had played was the second game (which is funny because usually when it comes to old school trilogies, the second game is the one I don’t get to play, ala Ratchet & Clank 2, Sonic 2 & Crash 2, I also don’t like them as much as the game that came after, might be some slight nostalgia bias though), I ran through the first game quick since it was so short & while I liked Sly 3, it seemed to have too many side characters just for the hell of it. Throwing in the time travel plot to play as some of Sly’s ancestors was nice even if they play like Sly with something added on. Rioichi with his super quick ninja leap jump but nothing really outside of that, Tennessee Kid who’s cane is also a gun & plays like a 3rd person shooter who can also target 5-6 things & instant kill them in half a second with his special, incoherent gibberish “Bob” who plays more like Murray & climbs walls, Sir Galleth who really just has that upward thrusting spear when ascending towers, and Salim who can climb as fast as Rioichi can leap.

Didn’t care very much for clue bottles being brought back. They were pretty much right on your path in the first game & scattered all over in the second game, didn’t mind it even though collecting 30 took ages. What I didn’t like is when you have 1-3 left over and you just can’t find those last few as they’re likely to be placed in the most absurd spots ever. It’s good that the safe rewards for the 5 episodes are worth getting, and its better to get them ASAP. In previous games though there were many safes, like 70-75% of them usually contained something crappy or not good enough to swap out another skill for. Here they all have some use: Magnet that pulls coins towards you, a coin that doubles the money you get for smashing objects & pick pocketing, a hat that lets you take no damage from water, Guru’s moonstone that halves all damage permanently & the reward for episode 3, Clockwerk’s eye, that lets you see all clue bottles on every map. I suppose having upgrades show up after every other mission instead of once an episode was also a good thing. On that point, I liked it a lot better that all of the upgrades stacked for the characters instead of like in previous games where you chose 3 skills & dumped the rest.

Suppose its good they tried to throw in checkpoints all over the place to save you repeating a lot of stuff. Game seemed rather easy & a little short, but then again when I think back to any hard stuff in previous games its just certain bosses that trigger memories. Though for a team oriented game, Bentley & Murray’s roles seemed pretty damn small, and didn’t seem to have much variety outside of punching things & like 80% of the time Bentley got to do anything it usually just came down to hacking things. It’s been quite a while but I figured they had quite a bit of mission variety with them in previous games. While in the second game Sly was clearly the main character & got the most missions, Bentley & Murray also got a great deal of missions too, I liked the team based missions (though playing as Bentley wasn’t actually that fun in Sly 2). Carmelita joins them late into episode 2 & I figured she would actually have missions since you can even buy upgrades for her gun but she really just usually has one small bit part in someone else’s mission every episode except 3 (and episode 5 where she just has that one belly dancing mini-game & that’s it). The mission progression was pretty linear too in that there was usually only one available mission at a time instead of just choosing from a set which you wanna do first.

On the hacking stuff, Bentley gets 3 types now instead of just one: An upgraded HD-like one from Sly 2 & 3, a shmup with Rambo Bentley, and a pinball one with awful sixaxis controls. Sixaxis is never a good thing, I passed the high scores on all the arcade machines within 1-3 tries but that awful one where they expected me to get over 1000 points was plain stupid, spent over half an hour on it then looked up an easy way to do it because the ball just does what it wants half the time. Oh, main villain sucked too. The Cooper family seem to get a surprisingly amount of hate from any other character who considers themselves thieves. Was quite a shame that the final boss was nothing but a long QTE sequence done 3 times over, well whatever. So that’s it, actually enjoyed the game quite a lot though, glad I finally got to play it.

(http://3rd-strike.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/gr1.jpg)

Oh boy, it’s that time of the month again. Yep, time to start bitching about another game. Once again another game I got off PSN+ but I had it downloaded like 4 months ago. I don’t play very many racing games though I’d say I’m about average at them. They had a career mode about starting as a nobody & rising to the top with your progress coming down to the number of fans you have, and you need like over 20 million to enter the last tournament. There were five seasons & the first three went in a simple order: Finish a variation of different races & events on offer & place high to get more fans - Allowed to participate in the WSR race series & move on or finish up remaining races - finish the several playlists of events in the WSR to move onto the next season. From the fourth season, they skip the first part all together & just make most of the other events a lot longer.

For events you’ve got: Races, Time attack (drive around course three times, fastest lap time wins), Faceoff (race 1v1, point-to-point, 1 lap, do it three times to win), Touge (like Faceoff, 1v1, point-to-point, leave your opponent in the dust, you win, if you eat their dust, you lose), Elimination (drive around track while cars get thrown out every 15 or so seconds), Overtake (pass big ass trucks while you drive around the course, an extra 100 points added for each passed without bumping into anything up to getting 1000 for each pass, the multiplier slowly goes down until you pass more trucks), Checkpoint (try to extend time & get more points by driving around the course as fast as possible to reach the markers), Endurance (basically a race but at least 5 minutes of continuous driving,  minimum), and Drift (which is the most fitting event as the cars seem to love slipping & sliding all over the place). There were also these vehicle challenges where you’d unlock a vehicle if you could beat a lap time on a map with a car you already own, then choose one of two. You normally get the car you didn’t choose later anyway. Game was alright till later seasons, where the AI just becomes pretty damn annoying, oh, and there’s this one guy who always(if its not him its some guy with a black & green paintjob) seems to be in first, Harrison Carter (Kept calling him Ford for a while), and he has this American flag style paintjob.

I swear that guy is cheating & brings an upgraded car to those races because this guy regularly finishes like 4 seconds ahead of everyone, I could rarely beat this asshole on normal, he could just speed off like a rocket sometimes & I couldn’t do shit about it. So I eventually turned it down to easy so I could run through the rest without much hassle & actually regularly beat this guy. I don’t even give a fuck that I turned it down, shit was annoying, mainly because the game has bad controls. Cheating AI or bad controls, I’m only willing to deal with one, not both (I’d prefer neither but that’s asking a lot). With most of the vehicles, when it comes to corners they handle like I’m driving on ice & my wheels are made of ice cubes & it happens to be raining so more sliding. The kind of controls where slightly tapping that right corner wall just after a turn if enough to spin you out or you turned into that corner slightly too much to the left & now instead of going straight on you’re being forced into driving right into the left wall. It’s annoying as fuck and it’s pretty damn common. Game just doesn’t give a shit if your drift around that corner was near perfect, you brushed up against that corner at the end? Get rekt, don’t care if it was a love tap. I try to smack a driver against a wall? That’s foul play, sir, get rekt. They try to smack me against a wall & I fight back? Accept your fate & prepare to get rekt.

To ease the frustration they give you flashbacks to rewind time & attempt to correct your movement. You only get 5 per event & unless you go back like 5-6 seconds before the crash, you’re likely to just crash in a slightly different way & waste them. I eventually figured out how to properly tell which cars had awful handling without driving them first. Basically all drift types were awful, balanced I’d expect to be bearable, & grip was “supposedly” good (a few didn’t have as good handling as I’d originally thought). “But SA2,” you say, placing a hand on my shoulder as if I know you IRL yet you don’t know my name, “Playing with bad cars can be challenging. How can you feel accomplishment if you don’t step out of your comfort zone & become a masochist?” Whatever, dude. I know, what’s primarily fun can have a tendency to also be considered challenging for others (I‘ve considered many things just plain fun in the past which some others would consider pretty hard), but what’s primarily meant to be challenging can also be seen as annoying as fuck by some others. I’d rather not have “annoying as fuck” for lunch, I’ll take the fun to go, please. As much as I loved nitpicking the shit out of certain games some people believe are perfect in every way which I won’t mention, those issues weren’t showing up every time I turned a corner, I could avoid most of them if I wanted, that’s not the case here.

This is already long as fuck but may as well talk about online, it’s just stupid for many reasons I mentioned. You gotta buy your cars to race in them online, it doesn’t take a lot of races to get a car you want & you can upgrade them too. The problem is the tiers of  cars, there’s 4. If say, someone chooses a T4 race & you don’t own any T4 cars, the game will loan you one (they take 50% of your winnings too, BS). Unfortunately, the cars they loan you for T3 & T4 races are just horrible (T2 was decent, then again, upgrading a T1 car enough can bump it up to T2 class). I barely got used to the handling over time, but I never won any races with those awful loaned cars. They couldn’t loan me any of the good cars? “But SA2, why not just buy one of the good cars?” I would if the game let me, you have to get to at least level 20 to even start buying T3 cars, it took a long while just to reach 10 so I didn’t even stick around for that. Just stupid nonsense. The one thing I value most in any racing game (hell, any game period) is the handling. I don’t care if that other car moves at light speed, if there’s a car that flows through corners with ease & can speed through almost any tight corner without slowing down, I’m there. Games like Motorstorm Apocalypse (wasn‘t perfect, but whatever) & Sonic & Sega All-Stars Transformed (did a little over 100 races online, finished within top 3 in over 90 of them, usually 1st or 2nd. Not bragging, I could just drift like a pro & had full control over my vehicle. Sadly online is pretty much dead on that game) were fun as hell. Imma stop before I eventually reach the word limit.

And yes, I actually looked them up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8_w8TikYRE

*Dat violin…dem strings, dose drums. Move to 0:53*

Wielding this sword, Blood-Scythe, I’ll destroy the Librarium,
I’ll be fine on my own, don’t need the help of anyone,
Finally reached the headquarters in the city of Kagutsuchi,
I met up with Jin again, I’ll teach him not to mess with me

Dead Spike! Do me a favor & go take a hike.
Ice Blade! Let’s put an end to your little charade.
Hell’s Fang! Get lost, I haven’t got time to hang.
Crystal Strike! My goal to kill you is something I’ve come to like.

Get the hell out the way, I’m tired of your face, if I had a choice I’d rather not give you the time of day,
You’ve had your fun, the way you talk pisses me off, don’t go thinking you’ve won, under heaven destruction.

(1:40) How fortunate this is, it’s good to see you, brother,
Let’s enjoy our time together, how about it, Ragna?
I’ve been waiting for a while now, you really can be quite a fool,
Let’s go, I’m really going to enjoy my time killing you

Frost Bite! I won’t let you out of my sight.
Gauntlet Hades! I’ll kick your scrawny ass with ease.
Violent Ice! That doesn’t sound very nice, brother, in-
Ferno Divider! Would you prefer I become a sword rider?

Isn’t this great? We’ll fight till just one remains, really now, what’s there to hate?
We’ll continue into the night, as long as you have the will to fight, we’ve just begun, under heaven destruction.

*Dis guitar, Move to choir @ 3:25*

The conclusion can wait, but this battle’s our fate,
The Black Beast must be killed, it’s a threat to the whole world

(3:44) Blood Kain! You truly are quite a pain.
Snow Flower Storm! I hope you’re still able to perform
Carnage Scissors! Haven’t had enough yet? It figures.
Ice Fang! Rejoice, brother, let’s go out with a bang.

I’ll send you to hell, once I beat the shit out of you, bastard, you’re clearly just insane,
I‘ll complete my goal, brother, to kill you is my aim, let’s go again, under heaven destruction.

*dat guitar, fin*

*slow clap*

SA2, my brother. The brother I always wanted.

Magnificent.

I try.

You do an excellent job of making the otherwise bland CP songs entertaining.

I'd consider half of them to be rather good or at least comparable to the original

Most of my problems lie with the production I think. Maybe Ishiwatari was too busy with Xrd to check up on the soundtrack for this, I unno.

EDIT

That said though, I do really like Kokonoe's theme.

I'm pretty neutral on it.

So about a week ago I went back to Dark Souls 2 & started from scratch in preparation for the DLC coming out soon, since my original file was in NG++ and I had sold the majority of my stuff in order to get through the 3 mil souls gate earlier & buy the last spells I needed at Drangleic Castle. Ran through stuff pretty fast since I knew what I was doing this time, saved 10,000 souls & instead of using them to wield the fire longsword effectively early, I spent them on the old hag so I could get the 20% extra souls ring right off the bat. If I wanted to maximize soul gain at the start, I’d have killed that merchant near the cat’s house too since he drops a full set of gear that adds around 10% extra souls for each piece, so it’d be around 160% soul gain. I didn’t since I wanted to cosplay as Smelter Demon later on when I got round to doing a bit of co-op. So after Dragonrider (who actually wasn’t a hassle to kill with magic like I originally thought, but strafing already makes him a total joke so whatever) I skipped the main path & progressed down the Old Iron King path to get Smelter Demon’s armor early. Naturally, while running down there I saw no signs, since I wasn’t waiting around to grind & I rarely died playing a second time so my soul memory & level were pretty low, so the only people who would be in my range are people who were deliberately going down that path early like me.

I was speeding through things quick & hadn’t died till I got to Iron Keep if I recall. My level was in the early 40’s by this point, yet I wanted to take down Smelter this early. Naturally no signs since nobody wants to fight Smelter that early (hell, don’t speedrunners skip this guy?). Things were fine until this point, fighting him while that low levelled was so frustrating. I died like 20-30 times fighting him since getting clipped once would take like 80% of my total health bar, even more once he gets fired up. While I love the theme that plays (which he shares with the Sentinels) I started to get sick of it after a while where I would likely die because I guessed wrong just once or due to hitbox shenanigans. The delayed controls were also a big factor. On many, many occasions, after getting his flaming sword he’d do a thrusting stab which I would easily dodge if the roll didn’t always feel delayed at that point. At one point the did the attack 3 times in a row & not a single time could I roll when I clearly pressed the button. I swear his flaming sword destroys framerate since 90% of the time I entered that room his very first attack was a running sword stab that I’d regularly dodge. Only when he lights it up the game decides it’ll rarely let me dodge it. I only won once I stopped giving a fuck & just attacked after blocking & healed when necessary. I can’t help but worry when any time I get hit during the last 2/3’s of the fight, he’s likely to one-shot me or come pretty close to doing so.

Trying to run past everything to the boss after repeated attempts is also the worst here, many of the knights blocking the path & being so aggressive meant that I was dying about 20% of the time while attempting to roll past them all (that AI mid swing auto-aim tho). Anyway, grabbed the Smelter suit, was gonna get his sword to complete the set then saw I needed 40 fucking strength to wield it, fuck that. Went through  Pursuer & set up shop around the Ruin Sentinels, the set was more heavy than I was expecting so I almost wasn’t allowed to roll at all, being just under level 60 when I got here. Got summoned quite often for the Sentinels, and surprisingly they were all competent so they never got killed. On 3 occasions it turned into a situation where we were all on the ground floor & we ended up fighting a Sentinel each, which is the kinda thing I’d want honestly. Makes me wish you could go through the game in co-op. After a while I got bored & fought the Sentinels myself. What I mentioned earlier about bosses getting inflated health bars during co-op came from here, I was wiping out Sentinel’s within like 30 seconds using my fire longsword, took much, much longer online with 3 guys.

The rest was randomly running from one boss to the next with no particular order, just warping around to get stuff I wanted first. Used some bonfire aesthetics once I figured I was strong enough too to get the silver & gold covetous serpent rings +2 for higher item drops & even more soul gain, I started with one aesthetic for this purpose. Oh, killed the merchant too to get his extra soul gain stuff since he no longer had a use to me. Pretty much done everything now, killed all bosses, over level 200 & been upgrading endurance like crazy so I can equip Havel gear & still fast roll. Did all this in just over 40 hours, compared  to my first file which was around level 275 in NG++ at just over 170 hours. I could probably reach that between 60-65 hours on this new file, really shows how much time I wasted.

(http://operationrainfall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DrgCrwPS3Rp.jpg)

Finally got round to playing Dragon’s Crown with a friend this weekend. Had the game for quite a while, got it before it was still in its “You’ll never find an RPG-like game below £30 until nobody cares about it anymore.” phase. Had to wait a while till we both had some time free to play it together. I chose to play as everyone’s favorite cum dumpster mai waifu the Elf, the choice for expert players, and since I’m a pro that’s right up my alley. My friend chose the Sorceress Amazon, during the early sections he was better till I soon got used to the play style of the Elf. Having mediocre melee & long range DPS with limited arrows that I can sometimes pick up from enemies when I attack close range I soon got used to. I generally had to play evasively due to not being that strong, which is fine since I like running circles around bosses & learning their attack patterns well enough to stop beating their faces in for a second to briefly dodge. After the first few levels, we started doing side quests to both level up a little for the recommended level range for the next dungeons & to get more skill points to upgrade our classes. Quite a bit of them tended to be annoying enough that I’d just sometimes look up how to do them, maybe because we didn’t spend time reading the first two pages of the quest & just viewed the requirements (the code to one quest we couldn’t figure out was at the bottom of one page but since we didn’t read it all it took a while to notice).

After completing any dungeons, regardless of how many times we ran through any pervious ones, we’d get a bunch of treasures to look at & appraise afterwards. You wouldn’t get to look at the stats & special bonuses applied to the equipment unless you appraise it though, which costs money, so you never truly know if one item is better than another till you spend. Overall though, the S & A rank items are the ones worth looking at, B ranks occasionally end up with high stats or a combination of many bonuses which outclass an A rank item. For a long while early on, I was mainly the one getting equipment while my friend tended to get gypped when it came to high ranked treasure. If we found an A or S rank treasure, there was a pretty good chance it would be a bow for me, not sure if it was because I was player 1, or if he was just really unfortunate. Since the game naturally gives you 3 lives every dungeon & then you pay a fee of gold to continue if you die 3 times in that dungeon (which we rarely had to use), as long as we completed the quests as they appeared before going to the next dungeon, we had no problems. I didn’t start really using potions till the last few bosses, at least I didn‘t until the final boss.

After finishing all 9 levels, you gotta go through them again but have the choice of taking a B route which has a tougher boss, you need to beat those other 9 for these talismans in order to fight the final boss. They’re much higher levelled in comparison to the first 9 so we did a ton of quests to level up. When we got to around level 24, we left the rest of them and ran through the levels to get all the tailsmans as it was the next afternoon & my friend had to go in like 4 hours. All B route bosses seem to be on a time limit, you don’t kill them fast enough, no tailsman for you. We were unfortunate to start with two gimmicky bosses where the requirements to win weren’t as simple, one of which was ridiculous & took several tries & only got done because we now knew what to do & prepared because that time limit was pretty small. The rest were simple, just kill the boss & do it fast.

I actually had a FAQ up because of those first two, just so we knew ahead of time if there was any random shit to do besides fight the boss. Many of the rest were rather easy to kill, since we had to kill them fast, we’d go to this church in town & pray at an alter for extra lives, then normally run through the level without losing any. Then we save our best stuff for the boss & basically mash buttons, not really giving a fuck about taking hits because we had a ton of lives. The Chimera boss was tough because he had tons of health, had to use a continue there, I’m sure we nearly lost too. Then again, we fought it at level 26 when it was level 28 because we’d done all the other levels besides him & the Red Dragon who was level 30. The latter had a shit ton of HP, we didn’t get close to killing it the first time, but was just able to on a second attempt. Having gotten some quest requirements done during the B route runs, we were level 29 when it was time to fight the Ancient Dragon, who I’d heard was best to wait till around level 32 to fight. We gave it a shot anyway and brought AI teammates, we got destroyed. Tried it without them since they’re probably buffing the dragon, still got destroyed. Did it again, I last longer because I’m learning his attacks and how to stop some of his broken attacks but not all of them.

Overall, Ancient Dragon is cheap, by the fifth try I could easily take this guy as my friend saw, but if he ever got out one of his charged moves I’d get rekt faster than a Dark Souls player. At one point I’d gotten him from 50% down to around 20% by myself, he’d summoned skeletons to back him up, I was dodging all over & putting the moves on him, then I get knocked down by the group of minions while he’s summoning meteors. Can’t stop that shit so I die. You can’t buy extra lives or anything for this fight either. You only go right in with the equipment you bought. Oh, he starts to heal himself later on too so it’s also a DPS race & if you’ve already used your best stuff early & have gotten to the point where he can recover from the majority of damage you dish out, you’ve most likely already lost. In the hour or so we spent, we never beat him even know after knowing how to stop his projectiles it should have been possible but we didn‘t have enough DPS. Later that day after my friend left I did more quests, ran dungeons for better stuff & got to level 35, also found out Ancient Dragon is supposed to be around level 35 as well, which might explain why he was outright one-shotting us because I lasted much longer after grinding. I’ve already beat him in Normal & Hard mode that unlocks after but I still think he’s cheap as hell.

Also beat him in Infernal difficulty, which I went through rather quick at level 65 by finding a decent group in a random room online. Chained 7 out of 9 bosses together before I left to get my XP, new equipment & repair my stuff. All the levels recommended I be anywhere between level 80-90 to handle those bosses, but I could easily keep up with the other players despite being far lower levelled. Made sure I was ready to kill Ancient Dragon & make it the last time I had to fight him since a trophy required killing him in 4 minutes on Infernal. Also beat the Demon Lord in the Labyrinth of Chaos which was just running through random screens & killing many bosses I’ve already fought until floor 9. Though any boss that repeatedly spawns minions tends to be annoyingly cheap in my eyes, so I hated some bosses they’d force me to fight (One I had to fight two floors in a row).

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Disgaea_D2_cover.jpg)

So just recently started this up, for once I’m just gonna jot down points as I go through the game rather than write 4-6 long paragraphs about it in one go. Normally I wouldn’t give too much of a shit but I went out of my way to avoid knowing much about the story, aside from one or two things I found out because of people putting spoilers right in their topic title.

- Got a chuckle out of one conversation with a demon where they bring up what the deal is with the barely noticeable design changes of the trio.
- I like the new addition of mounting monsters & gaining specials from doing so. In all of the games I abandoned prinnies pretty quick so at least that aspect will let me get more use out of them before they fall too far behind.
- I’m sure later on the whole ‘move this story character over to this one for a special convo’ will get harder to do unless I’m overlevelled.
- First unit I made was a fire type witch I called Mahou. Since her magic kinda sucks so early on she was usually riding Yoshi mounting one of the prinnies & using the mounted specials that did decent damage.
- I’m not too sure what the deal was but after the first three tutorial stages & first real stage, Flonne kept dying ridiculously fast every fight. Enemies would specifically target her first & she’d get one-shot, two-shot if I’m lucky. I tried to up her defense a little but she was still dying like crazy. By the last stage of Chapter 1, her only real purpose was to heal Laharl & Etna. I’ll have to get her a mage apprentice, I remember her becoming pretty damn good later on once she learned some spells.
- Also created those male & female martial artists that I called Kick & Punch it’s all in the mind & they managed to get high enough to unlock the Thief by the end of Chapter 1.

- Did some grinding & stuff for a bit while I made more characters & levelled up those new ones to at least level 8 before moving on to Chapter 2 where I sped through the 5 stages, trying to use the weaker units as much as I could until the last two stages where I mainly used the story characters.

- Had Sicily join the party after beating her & her 4 dragons, then got myself a dragon, which is regularly mounted by one of my witches since it has no regular skills on its own. The novelty of riding a dragon wore off when its limited movement became noticeable & when it wasn’t one-shoting things with its AoE.

- Finally got item world available. I can already tell they’ve made a lot of improvements from being able to up stat increases before even starting the item, to pirates being surprisingly easy to find. Got up to floor 26 on a gun then gency’d out since it wasn’t possible to reach the next floor in one turn & the enemies were strong enough to rek my team if their turn came.

- Since I hadn’t bothered to do more in the Item World besides level a gun for my Thief & gain some levels, I went through the six stages of Chapter 3 mostly using, y’know, actual strategy instead of overpowering everything…usually. Went smoothly until one stage halfway through, I think someone on the development team fucked up or something because the enemies on one stage were doing ridiculous damage, and since I had to sacrifice 4 turns to take out a +100 defense effect, it was worse. Most of my team were dead when they were done attacking. Laharl killed the boss by himself, then I had the last few alive kill any enemy that was almost dead before getting killed, then Laharl finished off the other 6-7 enemies still left. Thank god for his evility that ups his stats by 10% for every enemy he kills.

- The next stage felt completely different in comparison, my team could actually take hits without getting stomped so it was no hassle. Same with the final stage, except the boss (some chick called Barbara) of that level who had enough HP that I had to gang-up on her.

- Did item world stuff and found out normal equipment gets upgraded to rare if you complete 30 floors. I’d assume the same happens if you go through 60? If so, any complaints are now almost insignificant. Somewhere between this I also made a wind mage called Shoujo, and when I unlocked the next I just called her Meduka. To my surprise tier 3 witch had the star spell, which is the one I actually give a damn about.

- Due to contrived plot reasons, Laharl is a woman for all of Chapter 4 & Etna is Player 2. Laharl’s evility changes too, which seems more situational due to getting a 25% stat boost only for killing enemies higher levelled than you. Ran through the chapter rather quick after levelling up equipment for a few hours.

- The boss was some idol called Lanzarote, who’s brainwashing people with her songs, huh. Most of my team got wiped out, not because of her but because of her overpowered horde of helpers. She sat in one spot with a bunch of geo effects on her & only moved after I’d killed everyone & couldn’t reach me. She was far weaker than I expected once she did make a move. She joined after beating her. 

- Ran through chapter 5 abusing spacing & the tons of buffs that Lanzarote had, some of which I passed on to Sicily to keep buffing Laharl, Etna & Flonne every 3 turns to easily kill things. Last stage was just against a bunch of generic monsters, with assistance from this other demon called Xenolith that’s most likely related to Etna & this other angel he was protecting. I cleared them all out myself while the angel briefly came out twice to heal my party.

- Ran through a few stages of Chapter 6 doing the same stuff, then made one mistake & my main damage dealers got killed off, so clearly I either need to actually go buy decent gear at this point, and grind out a few items in the Item World.

Go thru 60 and it becomes Legendary or Godly or some ****.

Have you fought the Sho, Ryu, and Ken brothers in the Item Sea, yet?

Ahh, that rank upgrade is gonna be a massive help in post-game.

I would assume I've most likely not seen them yet, what ship do they arrive in?

- So spent like 2-3 hours getting 8 or so characters I actually use to learn all the buffs at a reasonable level to buff multiple people from an alright distance, i.e. getting it to level 4 for each one, which took ages & was boring as hell. Reminded me of that one RPG that was the dullest thing ever by the time I was done. Apparently spamming these skills also gives you exp so most of them levelled up at least 5-6 times. Then I levelled up a better gun & some glasses for my Thief.

- Using the bribing methods from Disgaea 3 & 4 that actually carry over demons personal feelings if you keep giving them shit they want, I unanimously won the vote to go fight Asagi. The one stage before her seemed odd, those masked guys seemed stronger than they should be, while Asagi was weak as hell in comparison.

- Did some random item world stuff I barely remember then ran through the rest of chapter 6 easily. Then all of chapter 7 rather quick, eventually not bothering to use most of my team & just abuse Laharl’s 10% boost because he had enough defense to ignore the majority of their attacks.

- Unlocked the next optional thing in the Assembly before chapter 7 to go fight Porkmeister. I thought it was the other dude till they pointed it out. The fight wasn’t too hard since his backup was weak, though they were also strong enough to kill a few of my team when they got a chance to attack.

- Unlocked Prinny Land after doing chapter 7 & ran through the three stages available to complete part 1. Since I had done the other two, I was a little curious about whether or not it’s a bad idea to try & complete that area at the end since the boss is likely to be someone I currently can’t handle. The boss is who I thought it might be, but I likely can’t actually get to that stage until post-game.

- Then I went through a bomb for hours to grind Mr. Gencys, as it’s the weakest thing I have. Also noticed when a normal or rare upgrades to the next level, the floors are reset & you can go through it again. Now I see what people were talking about when I heard level 300 items being mentioned before. Not that I didn’t already know it’s best to get the legendaries if possible. Also got enough mana with Flonne by spamming Star from a mile away pretty much every floor & unlocked Cave of Ordeals. Was strong enough to get through the first floor after some trouble so I’ll leave that till much later on.

So I finished the game quite a while. Ran through most of the rest with Flonne, who became Pure Flonne for the last two chapters. Managed to get her to level 300 by grinding 6-1 for a while in Tower mode to level up my other characters too. Since she was doing 10-15k damage, any strong enemies I mainly had Flonne handle, anything 6k or lower was reserved for Laharl, Etna & Sicily, not counting buffs. Final boss was probably one of the harder ones because of his evility, or at least he would be if Flonne wasn't over 200 levels above him. I relied on her to win that, the others were just backup. Also ran through all the post-game maps after going through Cave of Ordeals & grinding on CoO6 for ages. Through out buffs every now & then while doing the maps, had to break before going to Hades since Flonne couldn't solo the map, and against DDEM, after getting the **** to use his three unique skills (which was far harder than just killing the guy) I cheesed my way to victory. Brought out units to up party stats, one to lower enemy stats, others to get the early hits in a combo so Flonne can do even more damage at the end, having around 600-800k damage, then have a unit pick up DDEM so he can't get a turn. Repeat 4 times until Flonne kills him.

Still enjoying it but there isn't much to say. There's a ton of good things in this to reduce frustration compared to the others. 3 things that aren't included is letting the gatekeeper counter after you knock him off the gate, having no innocents on items in the store and I forget the last at the moment. The rest is either alright or a big improvement.

Don't ask.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S087OgtOgQU

Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese,
Gonna get my…Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese, let’s buy it.

It’s finally at the end of the day, (Gonna rest up tonight)
Go down to the store & get some food, (Grab a snack to bite)
Get my ass down to macky D’s (I know you recognize it)
Then buy myself a damn meal (Better supersize it)

Order my food, this guy scoffs, Imma tear his fucking head off, “IS. IT. EDIBLE?”
Ignore this goddamn whiner, just throw my patty on the fire, (let it burn x7)

Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese,
Just gotta get my…Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese,
You should try the…Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese,
Gonna buy the…Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese.

Came with a friend, I’m back again (From across the border)
Figured we’d grab a bite to eat (I know what I’m gon’ order)
Grab my food mighty quick (Find us a place to sit)
My friend still couldn’t decide (But I’m lovin’ it)

He says, “What’s up with that burger? It’s not something I’ve even heard of. IS. IT. EDIBLE?”
“Just buy a goddamn burger, or there’s gon’ be a fucking murder.”

Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese.
Gotta get one on the go, Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese,
Don’t go messing with my flow, Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese,
Don’t act you don’t know, Quarter Pounder with Cheeeese.

Eh, I'm feeling it less than the other ones.

There's just not enough strong correlations between the words and the tune, so it's hard to find verses.

Well I wasn't serious with this one, just came up with it in like 10 minutes

(http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_small/8/84290/2670378-6122032634-image)

So I bought this game a short while ago, it came out sometime in June. Got it for £25, which is even more than it really should be since its $30. According to Google, the exchange rate between the two means it would accurately be £18, so it should technically be £20, but when have game publishers ever cared about accurate pricing? Anyway, the only reason I initially know anything about the game is because the main character, who’s name is Plume, was one of the DLC characters in Disgaea D2, and while she was adorable, her evility which upped ally stats by 10% for every enemy she killed (which is pretty spot-on after playing her game) wasn’t that great for me. I’ll admit that simply connecting it to Disgaea & it being an action RPG was all I needed to actually look it up, and on the surface that’s normally enough for me to like a game (and unless I’m forgetting, I think I only regretted that once with a certain other RPG).The game actually ended up being longer than I would’ve first figured since it‘s got a ton of levels.

So the levels are separated into 3 types:

Combat - It plays apparently like Odin Sphere (I say apparently because I’ve never played or seen it), Murasama the Demon Blade & Dragon’s Crown. The game’s pretty dumbed down in its hack & slash element, with some minor RTS stuff. Just run from left to right, cutting down foes. In every level you go into it with 3 characters of your choice (there are 10, one is missable if you ignore the timed side levels) and you can swap out to the others whenever you want (though later on I rarely had to). They also all have an affection meter that rises the more you finish levels with the group still alive. Higher affection leads to your partners jumping in to join in occasionally on combos & just getting some hits off, MvC3 style. They most often tend to fly in & land a few hits when you launch enemies into the air. You also soon gain specials with each character you can use when a meter fills up as you beat enemies to basically clear the screen. If three characters have high affection, they’ll join in when you use your special. I normally used it as an FU button when 20 enemies suddenly come out of nowhere & attempt to gang up on me.

Siege - Basically a mini-boss stage. Here’s where the RTS stuff comes in since you’re assisted by 150 AI units to fight the boss, though only around 30 or so will be on screen at once. If all 150 units are killed than you lose, outside of dying obviously. You can give orders to your brigade like fighting defensively where they’ll mainly block though it lowers the army’s morale (there’s a bar that basically lets you use a super when its full. I rarely needed to use one in Siege but it immediately guard breaks the boss when used), and attack formation where they focus purely on attacking. The units also die in one hit so attacking all day isn't the best method unless your troops are overlevelled. You’re better off setting them to defense at the start, and keep running back & forth behind the boss to greatly lower the chance of them hitting you. Bosses have a guard break bar so you can’t truly start hurting them till it’s gone. Once it is you just change your army to attack mode & hammer away before his guard fills back up. Most siege bosses rarely lasted more than one round.

Skermish - Unlike siege, winning these is more dependent on the strength of your army, not to say that your efforts make little difference. Winning is simply your brigade’s side being the last one standing, it could be 2 brigades vs 3, 4 vs 4, 4 vs 5, whatever the terms are, your AI needs to wipe out the enemy AI. Brigades have their own levels, and you level them up by paying for their training (this is where the majority of your money will go since the costs get ridiculous later on). The level you can raise them to is dependent on the level of the characters who’s weapon of choice is the same, which also makes later skirmishes annoying. These wars have a rock-paper-scissors system, though there are seven weapon types so setting up your brigades in order can be a little annoying, not to mention the enemies aren’t kind enough to wait while you cycle through your menu to swap out to another brigade. You fight mooks accompanied by an elite mook being the leader in the foreground while all the other troops fight in the background. Killing the group & leaders gives you 20% morale boost every time & you can use a super to deal big damage to the other brigades when your bar fills. If you don’t care to much for the R-P-S stuff then you can grind & Disgaea your way through, i.e. no sell their attacks & immediately one-shot everything.

Though of course this mode can be rather random. Your sword based army could be 7 levels above the enemy & have the advantage against the first mage army, yet they’re getting dominated a minute into the fight. On the other hand, I once took my level 38 sword army against 5 other level 30 groups & destroyed them, only losing 50% by the time I won & never had to swap out, you seem to never really know how the result is going to go unless you’re like 15+ levels above things, at which point it’s an automatic win. So yeah, I really enjoyed the game for what it was.

how do you feel about Disgaea 5? What are you hoping to see?

personally, I didn't care too much for D2. It was fun the first time around, but I had no desire to go through the super endgame stuff, play through it again, or get the DLC characters. OHKO or get OHKO'd-fest.

After I FINALLY acquired Valvatorez, my interest plummeted to nonexistence unfortunately.

Don't really have anything to say about 5, at least not till I play the finished product. Nowadays I just buy the games since I already know I'll enjoy them.

Well after Val there's only 2-3 people left to fight, though the power gap becomes far bigger than it should. Plus the OHKO nonsense wasn't on the same level as in D3 & D4.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/7/79/20120827083528!DmC_box_art.png)

Finally got round to playing DmC a while ago (and by a while I mean last month) and completed all the difficulties on it, as I do in all of them (except DMC4 which I’ve never played). This game has been so hated by its fan base, though I can easily see why, what with it changing the entire story & personalities of well-known characters while supposedly trying to make it more mainstream (Dante also looked better with the white wig from that one cutscene in the first level). I honestly never cared about that stuff (though the writing here is bad & not in a campy way so that’s a negative), I was only really interested in the gameplay, but not at pro level with jump cancels & all that shit. I just make use of what’s given to me & try different tactics if certain annoying enemies show up. This game had numerous annoying enemies though: Anything that could fly (even worse, the game has no lock-on so it‘s far more annoying than it should be), the super armoured assholes with buzzsaw arms, the witches, elemental rages that decide to super armor through your attacks once their buddies die, and of course the one & only dreamrunner. I had no qualms playing incredibly cheesy when many of these guys would show up. Dreamrunners were the worst, whenever one showed up, if I had DT available then it would immediately get used since they take ages to kill otherwise with them just  countering whatever they feel like.

Speaking of which, the Devil Trigger is pretty bad & how it functions is kind of a negative outside of Hell & Hell difficulty. It takes so long to build up your DT bar you’ll only really get to use DT twice assuming you switch it off right after killing your annoying target, the design is just making him look more like the original Dante, and it throws all enemies into the air indefinitely, making it a hassle to combo them when your DT doesn’t last very long. The writing can be rather cringe-inducing at times, such as the infamous cutscene leading to the Succubus as the game loves throwing in as many swears & sex jokes as it can when the series was more about being really campy and having a lot of cheesy moments instead of: fuck this, fuck that, fuck you, fuck fuck fuck, bitch is near, whore’s gonna die, god versus a piece of shit, I’ve got a bigger dick etc. It’s a little too much (yes, I see the irony). DMD in this game wasn’t too hard outside of a few moments where they want you to go through like 3 enemy waves in a row with an assortment of enemies & environments that become really frustrating when combined. Though with pretty much every DMC game, I rarely use items outside of DMD, which I do last and even then I get stubborn on not wanting to use items if I know I can get through a certain part without them, or only using one just to not risk dying near the end of a boss fight or enemy wave (though I do abuse the whole ‘this enemy can‘t attack you if it‘s not onscreen’ in certain fights, of course some enemies would try to force themselves onscreen anyway).

I mainly give the game a pass because I like the combat. Sure, it’s rather dumbed down but I don’t get the opinion of them giving you less to work with (though I never played DMC4). You felt more limited in DMC3 since you could only use 2 weapons at a time and it’s not like those weapons had a dozen combo options, the styles really just limited your moveset even more, honestly. Here you can use all your stuff with a flick of the button so I’m not just using two weapons the entire level. The bosses kinda sucked, not much to say here, they just did. Oh, and I actually agree on the ranking system being kinda broken since waiting to do a demon dodge right into trillion stabs will make your style rank skyrocket (though it seemed like 1 or 2 levels required abusing that kind of thing for the best rank), which is rather SSStupid!!!x8, though I do appreciate them telling you how much style points certain moves actually give you & your overall style points. DMC3 would’ve greatly benefited from that since I had no idea what moves were worth spamming there for guaranteed S ranks.

And to say that this game is worse than DMC2? I think some people need to actually go back & play DMC2. While this game has some bad & dumb things, DMC2 was awful in  almost every aspect and it committed one of the worse sins in gaming: It was boring as fuck, even Dante seemed bored in that game, what with its ridiculous enemy design, its over inflated health bars that made fights 3x longer than they should have been (in case people forgot, there's a boss fight with an infected helicopter and you're stuck on buildings just firing your guns at it all day since it has several health bars), physical weapons & combos so limited yet guns kill everything twice as fast, the story being a random mess of whatever. Outside of its DT being the best, it’s hard to come up with positives for that game.

(http://www.insanedifficulty.com/board/uploads/905940631ee21de7d4e542dc0262ad08.jpg)

Shortly after DmC I played this game too. Wasn’t really interested when it first came out, though it was free on PS+ recently so I may as well get my moneys worth. May as well get the ‘Smash Bros. but…’ comparisons out the way since you use supers to kill opponents instead of knocking them off screen. The levels are actually pretty varied & change repeatedly as the fight goes on, which is nice. The final boss of the arcade mode is really kinda dumb & pointless, you’re just fighting three random characters which you have to kill twice while beating up a purple plastic polygon head in-between this like a punching bag, and he’s pretty damn annoying with the shit he does in the background. Was kinda surprised to find out the game actually has more combo potential than SSB when you get used to characters attacks. Though the only thing that really matters is beating the shit out of your opponents until you gain enough AP to use your super & get kills to win the match. There’s 3 levels of supers for each character, though the usefulness of them is pretty varied for every character. Some have level 1 supers that’ll have big range & come out fast, while some others will have horrible range, can easily get interrupted or dodged a mile away, and will rarely be able to hit more than one character.

Some characters in general are overpowered like Kratos. One dude I played online would do nothing but spam long range grabs & mid-air tornado attacks with him & I could rarely hit the guy even if I dodged first & attempted to grab him, he’d just spam attacks & land the first hit anyway, it was pretty BS. Dante also had some BS range to his attacks where I couldn’t land a combo on the guy unless I pressed a button long before he did. Didn’t help that I kept seeing certain annoying characters online who would abuse moves that some characters with really short range couldn’t do much about. So yeah, that’s kinda it, really don’t have much to say for once. There’s not that much to the game either besides: Spam your best moves - wait for the right moment to get easy kills - repeat. Or just save up to get guaranteed level 3 kills, which depending on how good your character’s level 3 is may win you the match right there & then.

(http://www.time4rpgs.net/wp-content/gallery/demons-souls/demons_souls-wallpaper5.jpg)

So I’ve gone through its two stepbrothers, time I finally got round to this one. For ages I was waiting for some kind of sale since it costs too much even at this point considering how old it is. Found PSN selling it for under £5 ages ago so I got it just so I could finally play the game at some point. This is so long ago I forgot when I bought it, but whatever. Of course this won’t really be blind since I’ve seen some playthroughs of the game just like Dark Souls. I started with the Royalty class and I’m fully aware magic is broken in this game so I’m going the Dark Souls 2 route where I mainly use melee and save magic for certain situations I‘d rather not deal with.

- Getting used to all the controls again didn’t take long at all, not that it took long in the first place. Got killed by that Vanguard guy & didn’t even get to fire off one soul arrow. I actually barely survived the first hit though.
- Got through half of 1-1 pretty smoothly, then got one-shot by some cheap black knight. I came back & soul arrowed his ass, I would’ve killed him 1st try if the backstab worked right. Only game that didn’t cause me hassle with that was DS2 because the backstab triggered an actual animation. Took me a while to notice but you have to have your shield lowered and wait a moment before you press a button to get the backstab, no idea why it’s made that way.
- Had to magic spam Phalanx since rapiers suck ass against whatever the hell that thing is made of & completely bounces off their shields.
- Went out of my way to go get the Uchigatana because I want to use it, and used the glitch, not to become incredibly overpowered (because then there would be no point playing) but so I could wield it one-handed.   
- Fighting Tower Knight in 1-2 was a litlle annoying due to almost every attack being some AoE move. I also can rarely seem do dodge attacks with my roll, it’s either so delayed I get hit or I take damage anyway. After a bit I just two-handed my weapon & mashed attack since playing conservatively meant I had a lot of moon grass.
- Running through 2-1, many of the enemies seem pretty resistant to slash damage, either that or the Uchi kinda sucks. Seems to do far more damage to these guys when I two-hand it.
- After finding out what the deal was, it seems easier to do backstabs here than in the other 2, over half the enemies in this level I’ve killed have been with backstabs.
- Killed Armor Spider but the thing just baffled me. Trying to fight that thing with my Uchi felt like a complete waste of time, I could barely even reach its weird hitbox while it kept stomping me.

- 2-2 felt ridiculously long, think I was there for like 40 minutes before I reached the boss room, after making sure I didn’t completely miss any optional areas of course.

- The damage formulas feel bizarre, though that’s the case with the other games too. Normally the game will be more lenient than the others & only have you take around 10% damage from a casual hit, which is cool. Then that same enemy will land a random hit & do like 70% damage which you won’t notice till moments later, at which point I back up & heal so I don’t have 15 minutes wasted off one lucky hit.

- Flamelurker was annoying as fuck, hated this dude. He kept doing guard breaks & AoE punches that also caused guard breaks. He got far worse below 50% when he would just spam AoEs constantly to the point that I didn’t feel bad about magic spamming his ass by that point. How the hell do you fight this asshole in melee once he starts spamming AoEs?

- Hate the level design of 3-1, it’s just a boring maze. At one point I was stuck for 10 minutes because the next path was placed in one blind spot in-between two floors. Seems like the Octo-guards are the Bonewheel Skeletons of Demon’s Souls, I’m unsure another enemy will top it in terms of how cheesy they can be.

- Fool’s Idol was alright at first, seemed kinda like Pinwheel except she actually has a health bar befitting a boss. At least she was until her health was below 50%, then she starts cloning herself like crazy & spamming magic which freezes me in place so she can stunlock me all day when I run up to attack, that BS nearly killed me too. Had to stand behind a pillar & use soul arrow on any of the copies nearby till I eventually killed her. Not enjoying the bosses so far, most seem to have some kind of cheesy attack they like to spam at some point which in turn just makes me want to start standing across the room & magic spam them to find out whose cheese is more moldy.

- 3-2 was weird, the level itself was surprisingly easy, just incredibly long & barren. Except that one really cheap Octo-guard on the stairs leading to the boss (Of course they would place him in the worst spot possible), he can eat a dick. Melee? Freeze me in place with a cheap move that takes all day to wear off so even if you trade & he’s stunned he’ll still get you 80% of the time. Bow? He has more leeway with his magic while invisible walls stop me, plus he always does 50% damage regardless of how big my health bar is. After dying like 4 times, I only got past the guy by equipping the thief’s ring so I could casually stroll up from behind & actually kill him before he can turn around. Pure nonsense.

- The Maneaters, people rarely ever speak fondly of this boss fight, not hard to see why. These guys really wouldn’t be hard at all if they gave you a decent arena considering that most of your deaths will likely come from being knocked right off the edge. It only happened to me twice but that was more than enough to make me not want to do anything unsafe & would rather take a hit than roll near an edge & hope I’m not pushed off. Magic did laughable damage so it was off-limits which made it even more annoying when they would spend the whole fight doing hit-and-run tactics. 3 hits from a two-handed Uchi would do around 20% of their health bar so I could have easily killed the first Maneater if the thing would have stopped running away. I hated their charge attack though, they would spam that like crazy & it was so easy for them to try & knock you off the edge with it. But yeah, they would be easy without instant death pits everywhere.

- I was ready to believe the spindashing skeletons in 4-1 would be the worst enemy in the game when I ran through here early on, though they’re still on my list. Along with the flying spear chucking enemies. Getting to the Adjudicator was simple, had no idea 4-1 was gonna be as short as it was. Grabbing the Uchi from this place covered around 35% of the area. Knowing how to properly guarantee backstabs made killing the few golden skeletons & the black dual-wielding one before the boss one of the easiest levels. 

- All I found out about Adjudicator was that I could only do damage to his head, so magic it was, I just didn’t know what the game wanted me to do, and I wasn’t gonna die with so many souls trying to figure it out. Took a long while but he was slow so it didn’t matter. After looking it up, I wish I’d known it was the same thing as the Tower Knight, then I’d have killed him much faster.

- Now at 4-2. I don’t know who decided having flying spear chuckers everywhere outside to get constant cheap hits on you was a good idea, because it’s not. It’s terrible. Beyond terrible. Speaking of terrible, the crystal lizards are easily the worst here. They have too much health, start running when you’re still half a mile away to the point that most had to be killed using a bow from a mile away, and they only spawn a limited amount of times. Having spirits spawn on narrow stairs & fire 180 degree energy beams is also annoying.

- Killed that blind boss fairly easily with the thief’s ring. Get two hits with my two handed Uchi, dodge the incoming swing, wait for him to completely lose sight of me, repeat. Never got hit once.

- Finally at 5-1, didn’t wanna do it early because I heard it’s comparable to Blighttown, which is already enough to make me love the place. The first part wasn’t bad, outside of this one halfway spot where I foolishly tried to fight some stupid miniature rats that caused plague. One thing lead to another & I was being attacked from all sides by undead assholes with fire poles & stupid rats, while still having the plague plus getting poked & prodded from all sides repeatedly. I only survived this frustration because they were weak. Level ended up being surprisingly short just like world 4, but also having no actual shortcut to the boss to save time, just like world 4. 

- Leechmonger was weird, it was landing cheap hits on me while I had to run all around to get down to its level, with it all the while spewing shit all day. I just ran up & chopped it to pieces, I’m unsure if it had more attacks because it didn’t live long enough.

- 5-2 was awful, easily the worst area in the game. Making a massive swamp that covers 90% of the area and then making it so you can’t roll or run very fast is awful and my a dozen or so deaths were purely an extension of this. One point where I encountered some big dude with a club, he knocked me into the swamp and since they made it so attempting to roll freezes you in place for several seconds, I was already screwed. Hell, he hit me once before my character was actually allowed to get up. This place was so shitty. If you were anywhere near the swamp then you were left wide open when trying to roll. Even on land sometimes it would happen when I wasn’t touching the swamp, reminded me of Dark Souls 2 hitboxes. Even felt like they were trying to hide the boss room of all things, I’d explored the whole area twice & had to go look up where the boss actually was, it was an odd placement for the fog door too.

- Dirty Colossus was easy, he didn’t have cheesy attacks or an awful instant kill arena so I could go to town on him & roll when needed. He had some weird black sludge attack that started spreading when it hit me but I regularly made sure to keep my health above 50% & killed him fast so it didn’t really matter.

- Finally time to take on the last sections of each map, starting with 5-3 since I was already there. First time I landed in the swamp while collecting items & got mobbed by undead babies which wouldn’t stop spawning. Second time I went straight for the boss, when I got to Garl I used black turpentine, cast Warding to be almost as durable as the Hulk, two-handed my Uchi & went ham on him the second he put down his shield, knocked off the majority of his health then rolled away. Did it again & killed him, got a surprisingly easy win.

- Went to 4-3 for the Storm King. Was shooting down spear chuckers with magic since I could till they were nearly all dead, then the boss showed up. I forget why I turned away from him for a few moments but I immediately got speared to death when I did, and it was a really cheap death since my health was no way near low enough to get one-shot.

- 3-3 Old Monk was laughably easy, though I suppose he’s always going to be if you’re not playing online. The hard part was the cheap-ass Octo-guards on the stairs leading to the boss. The boss itself was too weak to do any significant damage & could be stun locked really easily.
 
- 2-3 Dragon God barely even counts as a boss since you’re just running to both sides of the map to shoot spears at him then quickly finish him off. I somehow got burnt to death near the end so I did it really slow during the last half on the next attempt

dis goes out to all the unappreciated homies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YWRREgi8dA

0:23
As I browse through the net, where people whine, scream & shout,
There are others things on my mind that I’d rather talk about,
I’ve been playing the same trash for so long, even I gotta wonder if my interest is gone,
But I always talk trash when I think it deserves it, if there’s a way to cheat a system, I’ve probably heard it, simply give an excuse & everyone else is in the wrong, nothing else to hear because they already gone,
I’m a jack of the trades, I swing in all directions, just there for the gameplay, that’s my real confession, fool.
When I’m in my zone other players can’t handle me, I turn into a beast, I just become MLG-like.

1:00
Treat it like a second life, posting in a Blogger’s Paradise,
They might comment once or twice, browsing in a Blogger’s Paradise,
How much of it are just lies, reading through a Blogger’s Paradise,
Got time to sacrifice, update a Blogger’s Paradise

Try my hand at anime, hope the weeaboos feel me, but I don’t wanna start off light, can’t deal with mainstream,
The medium’s overrun over the years, filled with pure crap,
Moe, harem, cute girls doing cute things, what the hell is that,
All those body pillows are just so damn sleazy, I only own one for just sleeping, not for something skeevy,
Don’t want those filthy guys stinking up my show, if you add a character it’s gotta by a loli with twintails, fool,
Time to bring it to light, put it up on a website, if I post it & defend my interests they can’t tear down my defenses, right
Jot down what I’m watching here & there, keep the word count on the lowdown, no-one will really care

2:00
Tell me whyyyy do we, read then leave quick-ly, when the feelings involved bruise so eeeeasily

Treat it like a second life, posting in a Blogger’s Paradise,
They might pause to criticize, browsing in a Blogger’s Paradise,
Look through the past archives, reading in a Blogger’s Paradise,
Be a hipster, put on a disguise, update a Blogger’s Paradise

Update in the morning, update by the hour, update on the toilet, update in the shower,
They’ll get to looking when they got the time, but they don’t know what I’m posting, they may be here to read my lines,
Gotta keep things fresh, hope to start some fads, need to find a subject cause I’m running out of gas,
I may post tomorrow, or another day, then when I get bored it will likely just fade away

Treat it like a second life, posting in a Blogger’s Paradise,
The guests stalk me just like spies, browsing in a Blogger’s Paradise,
A subject you don’t recognize, reading through a Blogger’s Paradise,
Tune out everything, ignore advice, update a Blogger’s Paradise

Tell me whyyyy do we, read then leave quick-ly, when the feelings involved bruise so eeeeasily
Tell me whyyyy do we, read then leave quick-ly, when the feelings involved bruise so eeeeasily

I'm aware of how stupid this is

I have wanted someone to do this for so long. Thank you.

It wasn't stupid. It was beautiful.

Should actually finish going over Demon's Souls after so long. Spent about two weeks playing another game which I'll talk about soon enough.

- 1-3 felt incredibly annoying & unnecessarily long the further I got into it. Died several times to ridiculous amounts of damage & had to spend 5 minutes every time getting back to that point. Opening the gate for the shortcut took way too long. Also wasn’t sure how on earth you fight the 3 charge spamming knights without warding or attempting to lure one away with a ranged attack since they’ll all keep spamming that move & quickly kill me otherwise.

- Penetrator is alright, but only because due to warding & black turpentine I had nothing to fear from the dude & therefore killed him really fast, so I have no idea if he would have been a real challenge or not.

- 1-4 went rather smoothly, used the bow to snipe quite a number of enemies from afar, including the blue dragon. Actually liked fighting False King Allant (felt a little like Artorias just because of his speed), he was able to handle two-handed uchi swings powered by black turpentine. Nearly killed me twice too, once with some cheap AoE which apparently covers almost the whole room.

- Killed the corrupted king right at the end, found out he could actually do some damage if you let him just swing away at you. Chose not to kill the maiden in black & simply left.

So guess it’s done. It’s pretty clear that I didn’t like it as much as the original Dark Souls, there was usually one or two really annoying things just around the corner in many of the areas, and many of the bosses feel frustrating in general either because of the arena they make you fight in or the boss just having one or two really cheesy moves. Then again, the other two games have their fair share of problems & annoying traits so whatever.

I feel pretty similar about it. I've never really felt the urge to go back and play it again after beating it. Still a good game, but just not one that stuck with me as much as Dark.

(http://planetagames.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Tales-of-Symphonia-Chronicles-PS3.jpg)

So I decided to start playing the first game a while ago, first time too, I most likely won’t make updates on it, just briefly mentioning it. When I did start sadly I wasn’t enjoying it very much…for the first 7 hours. Reason being that the early game was hard as fuck, holy shit. This baffled me, whenever I heard people rave about the game, no-one would ever mention that the early game could be around as harsh as Dark Souls if you went into that expecting a typical hack & slash game. You start out with only around 1000 HP for your characters & a lot of stuff hits you for around 200-300 HP, you don’t have much to quickly heal you because Raine doesn’t have good support spells yet, and gels cost too much because the enemies give you pennies for the first ¼ of the game. I spent far more time sleeping at the inn than buying a gel that would let me take 2 more hits at most. I was straight up running from certain enemy encounters & bosses felt so frustrating. Kinda takes the fun out of the game when the boss is killing your team almost as fast as you can revive them so you’re spending more time in menus trying to organize things & barely holding on than actually fighting the boss. All this just confused me, how it just felt so hard to actually progress. I had to wonder what the hell I was doing wrong because I’d never had so much trouble adjusting to a Tales game’s default difficulty. Found out this version was a port of the PS2 copy which received some tweaks to make the game harder by basically buffing enemies. Wonderful, it wasn’t like I considered Tales bosses to be a little overpowered already.

I mean, it’s hard enough having to put up with the plain stupid ally A.I. (though bad ally A.I. is a Tales series tradition at this point), especially when they do shit I told them not to. Genis had a big tendency to be a fucking moron & run right up to melee the boss even though he still has enough MP for spells & I specifically told him up & stay in the back. Raine has stupidly tried to attack or heal near the boss too. Turning up the difficulty on Tales games usually just involves deciding how much work you wanna do, since after a certain point your team will be dying like flies & you’ll regularly be soloing. The only character in a Tales game I fully recall actually having really good A.I. is Sophie in Graces. Regularly backed me up or drew aggro if I needed it, tended not to bunch up right next to me on a boss so it doesn’t hit us both, actually knew how to dodge etc. I normally didn’t have to worry about her fighting a different enemy on the field & getting knocked out within 10 seconds. Seeing as she was a brawler, obviously I’d notice her playstyle more (has nothing to do with her looking like a little girl), but still, I could rely on her on anything below Evil difficulty. There was also one boss where I didn’t bother to revive anyone but Sophie & I held out with her as backup for several minutes for a boss I was underleveled against.

Symphonia is pretty vague on some other things too as far as I can remember, like how using certain EX gems will add bonus effects to a character, and that using certain moves during a unison attack will trigger an extra move once its over. Feels even more in the vain of Dark Souls where bothering to look this shit up greatly helps to get accustomed to the game. Though honestly the biggest factor with the difficulty is as I said earlier, early on they try to give you as little money as possible while some enemies just do ridiculous damage which is hard to cover since gels & life bottles cost too much to regularly store up on them. Wasn’t till I grinded for like an hour to store up money, gear up everyone &  looking up those tips mentioned above while roaming around this water temple that things finally went smoothly & I wasn’t dreading every boss fight. Especially since the combat is as basic as can be. You get a few hits in, then block & let the enemy attack. Don’t you dare attack during their turn otherwise you eat a combo, it’s pretty much turn-based. Apparently it's rude to interrupt. If your back is exposed to the enemy, you can’t quickly turn to face them either, I just eat a critical. I’m too used to later Tales games that focused far more on being like DMC where you keep that combo going as long as possible, and you got rewarded for dodging their swings. Trying to backstep an attack is likely to get me hit anyway, I’m better off just blocking. Once Zelos came along & and I started whoring him out like a pimp, having a full stock of restoration items was no issue & I can save all my money for stocking up completely on gear.

So I’m enjoying the game a lot, but it took a long while to get there due to how unforgiving the early game came be. It somehow gets easier as you progress through the game. 

The Tales series seems so mystifying to me.

Why's that?

I don't know. Maybe because there's so many of them and they're all so different looking (from a casual glance.) Its like the one major RPG series I've never played and know nothing about really.

You don't need to know very much about the series to get into them. I've only played like 4 of them, the majority have a new cast of characters as only a few of them get actual sequels, like Symphonia. But everyone hates the second game, I think it was actually the first one I played.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/be/Destiny_box_art.png)

So almost everyone has taken a dump on this game at some point, may as well take 15 minutes to occupy that bathroom while I can, it‘s gonna be pretty long. I’ve spent nearly a month playing it so I feel I can form an opinion on all it has to offer atm. Game was hyped like crazy, barely paid attention to the ads myself. My brother bought a PS4 and a couple of games, this being one of them. Didn’t actually start playing it until one of my real life friends started, he’s already moved on though & I could agree with the many issues he had. Before I get carried away I just wanna say I actually like the game…the gameplay that is. You got three character classes to choose from, and they both have 2 subclasses to switch between (but the second isn’t unlocked until level 15). You can carry one primary, secondary & heavy weapon, and can swap around skills & armor to suit different play styles. Unfortunately there isn’t very much variety outside of messing around with the stuff the 3 classes get. The story is almost non-existent to the point where I didn’t pay attention to cut scenes, the only way the game feels it can make enemies harder is to give all the “tough” ones (yellow HP) noobtubes so the splash damage is the thing killing you.

The game gets far worse once the “story” is done & you’re past level 20, now the never-ending grind can begin. There’s 5 types of equipment. Whites, greens, blues, purples & yellows. The last two are legendaries & exotics. While greens & blues were upgraded with stuff like weapon parts & armor scraps which were easy to gather after a while, the last 2 go overboard by having you collect like 70-80 of these random materials around  from one of the planets and ascendant shards or energy depending if its armor or a weapon. Exotic armor requires 16 to fully level while legendaries require 18 (which is weird since exotic armor is overall better, but you can only equip 1 exotic). You can occasionally get shards or energy from doing random daily events on any of the four planets & 3-starring it, but again, these are random. There’s a website to say when they should show up but I rarely do these anymore since there are times I’ve had to wait up to 45 minutes just for one to finally show. Even then it’s a waste of time if one like ‘Eliminate the enemy’ shows up since they’ll likely spawn a beefed up enemy with a shield that will regen within 5 seconds if not constantly shot, and you lose if he reaches a certain area. It’s possible to kill the spawns that don’t have a shield, but even then, twice the game randomly za warudo’d the enemy halfway across the map while I was throwing grenades so by the time I reached him it was too late. If the enemy has a shield and there’s no other player close by, I just keep on going.

Other ways to get shards, legendaries, exotics & other endgame stuff is doing the daily heroic missions, weekly heroics, the nightfall strikes & of course, the raid. For a while I couldn’t do any of these, at least not at a level where it mattered since they start at level 20. For dailies you get crap at 20, you gotta do the level 24 one to get just one ascendant, then the level 28 if you want two. Dailies are just story missions with somewhat tougher enemies thrown in & a random modifier to handicap you, like no ammo drops for your current weapon, extra enemy melee damage, unflinching enemies etc. The weeklies have difficulties at 22, 26 then 28 & you get 3-9 strange coins depending on which you do. Those coins are used to buy exotics from this trader called Xur who only shows up on weekends with a random selection, sells armor for 13 coins, weapons anywhere up to 27. Weeklies are just strike missions but harder just like dailies. Nightfall is a weekly with several handicaps thrown at you & expects you to be level 28, and since the level requirement is one of the highest, you have a better chance to get endgame gear there. For a while I hated having to do this stuff since I was stuck at level 27 for a while against level 28 guys. Y’know how in Borderlands if you were a level or 2 below the enemy you had a big damage & defence loss while being above them meant you could mow them down casually? Not here, that shit still applies to enemies but not to you. They’re just beefed up to be on the same playing field, while you can expect to get one-shotted as a level 26 against a level 28 boss. Melee deals ridiculous damage against you at that point regardless, most often I’ll die from a random swing and it’s total BS.

The bosses tend to be bullet sponges normally, especially Valus Ta’aurc (the biggest bullet sponge I‘ve seen in years), the first weekly I tried to do. Normally they match you up with random players when you choose to do a strike, but there’s no such system for weeklies. You either find a group or do it solo, and though 1 level before the intended, I was able to get through the massive horde of enemies all the way to the boss…twice. Yet I couldn’t kill him. Dude was roided as hell, had gallons of HP, could kill me in 3-4 shots from his minigun & regularly spammed barrages of missiles that would probably kill me with a direct hit. Worst of all he kept spawning mooks every 30-40 seconds, hell, every strike boss does this, which makes it frustrating when they’re around your level so it sometimes takes 10-20 minutes of hiding in certain spots & poking your head out briefly to get a few shots then running if the boss gets near. While clearing out about 14 spawns in the middle of all this. There was a cheese spot for Valus but it only works for nearly half the fight, then you gotta run out & draw him over to his starting position with enough damage. After wasting like 15 minutes pumping like 50 clips into the dude, he randomly killed me as I tried to get back to the spot. After seeing his HP fill back up I just quietly turned the game off. They recently made changes to scale less for three players, or at least it seems easier. Either I got better & had good teammates or it really does scale less now.

The raid, Vault of Glass, is…actually pretty good. There’s a lot of teamwork involved. It does have it’s flaws though, like activating the portals to get in, and the whole confluxes part taking much longer than it needed to, and there was no need for the dumb jumping puzzle, but whatever. The whole team is also likely to die if someone fucks up at some spots. The boss fight with Atheon is also rather glitchy. Which is due to players cheesing Atheon a long while ago by pushing him off the edge for easy kills in order to get raid gear, since actually reaching max level requires you to have it, but it’s entirely luck based to get it and you can only get rewards once a week. So when they patched it, along came glitches like Atheon sometimes only teleporting one person to a different place, or only two, which can get the whole team killed if they die there without someone to cover them. They made a massive update recently with a whole bunch of changes & upcoming strikes with a second raid, and while the glitches are well-known by now, Bungie still never bothered to fix them, clearly they don’t give a shit.

Now to my main beef with the game that I’ve been bypassing repeatedly: the levelling system. After level 20 you reach a cap, and instead get motes of light after every 50-100k xp gained. To go above that you need armor with light on it. Early blues will have anywhere from 2-13 on them, they increase as you upgrade them. You need 21 to reach level 21, then 11 more for every level. 32,43,54,65, etc. Legendaries can’t go above 22 without using your ascendant shards or energy so the highest you can get at 88 light is level 27. To get just one character to 28 without an exotic it’s around 36 shards. Remember what I mentioned earlier? 2 ascendants from the daily? Level 28 mission. 9 strange coins? Level 28 weekly. Nightfall in general? Level 28. Everything feels one level higher than it should be because of this asinine idea to have level be based entirely off gear, which I feel is just bad game design. Sure, you can do these at level 27, but I never had much fun with the damage I was taking & dishing out by being lower. The raid actually expects you to be at least level 26 and the enemies to start off are roughly around that, the enemies in Atheon’s room are level 28 though, so yeah…hard mode raid supposedly goes up to level 30 too, and requires maxed out raid gear to reach, but the helmet only drops randomly on hard mode, so you can only reach 30 with an exotic helm if you don’t have it. Almost all the endgame stuff is decided upon RNG, this game loves that system more than Disgaea 4 did.

Oh, forgot to mention, you can buy legendaries from vendors in the hub and will probably be where most of your early ones come from. Before you can buy them you gotta get your reputation up with that faction. That’s done by doing bounties, just random stuff in story missions or planets that give xp & rep. There’s 12 everyday, 6 for PvE, 6 for PvP. Oh, and with everything mentioned previously, creating a 2nd and 3rd character will help you get more upgrade materials & give you more chances for rarer weapons & armor, but that means it’ll be even more of a grind. You start at rank 0 for all factions, rank 1 takes 1,500xp, rank 2 is 3,500xp, rank 3 is 6,000xp. Bounties will only give between 50-100 for each one, and patrol missions will give 10 with the easiest one being to kill some dude giving 25. Rep isn’t shared between characters, there are around 5 factions to level and they each have armor & weapons that differ. At rank 1 you get jack (you can buy emblems but who cares about that?), at rank 2 you can buy armor, and at three you can buy weapons. The majority of these vendors cost crucible marks too, from the PvP. You get 3 marks for winning a match, 2 for losing. But your cap for the week is 100 marks, yet the weapons all cost 150. Oh, you can’t hold more than 200 marks either. Vangaurd marks are gotten doing stuff like daily events, heroics, strike playlists, weeklies & nightfall, but they move at a much faster rate even though vanguard has only one weapon vendor.

Crucible is okay. Yeah. A lot of random nonsense happens. What works for the enemy rarely works for me, lag makes it so their rules aren’t my rules, just gotta accept it. I don’t care anyway, I’m average at best & only there for the marks to get certain stuff. What truly pisses me off are the ones running around using nothing but a shotgun or fusion rifle, basically OHKO weapons, the whole match. And of course shotgun users will OHKO me from like 10-15 feet away yet I have to be within like 3 feet of them to do the same. Fusion rifles are basically mid-range shotguns that have a charge rate. But since you can tell when someone’s nearby due to the radar, it doesn’t matter. Many times I’ve seen someone come round the corner & instantly vaporize me before I could even raise my gun, hell, once I got blasted before the guy was actually on my screen. Don’t even wanna start on the random supers & how screwed you are against most of them. A few times in a FFA I got fed up with that crap & just decided to go Leeroy Jenkins on everyone. Somehow I regularly got within the top 3 when I decided to stop caring, rush right at players & bash their skulls in till they die. Apparently most players don’t know what to do when I dodge their initial shot & get right in their face. I once actually won a match doing nothing but this, didn’t even have to use my AR AK, gotta say it was a good day.

Oh, and before I finish, the loading times, can’t believe I forgot about those. Good lord, it’s Sonic 06 tier, that’s not even a joke. 50 secs-1 min, that’s how long I’ve seen it take to load maps, I rarely take note of the seconds unless it’s just that bad. Of course, for every complaint I list they’ll be people who proudly defend such dumb decisions. Sometimes the words they use will make me wonder whether or not they’re playing the same game. On the other hand people will whine & complain about anything that’s not wrapped in a neat little bow for them. Now onto my full list of whining & complaints in the form of questions:

Why do ¾’s of the factions use nothing but crucible marks? Why can you only get 100 a week and why can you only hold 200 at most? Why must every “tough” enemy carry nothing but noobtubes? Why are “tough” enemies the only ones who drop glimmer (the currency)? Using RNG items dropped by enemies lets all enemies drop bits of glimmer when used for a short while, but only between 1-15 for each kill, why don’t they all naturally drop that much? Why can you only hold 25,000 glimmer? Why must I run in circles collecting 70+ planet materials to finish upgrading my legendary gear? Killing enough enemies on a planet will give you a bonus of sometimes getting 2 material drops, but only sometimes, why not permanently? Why aren’t the cut scenes skippable after you’ve seen them once? Why does the game randomly take away half my special ammo & all my heavy ammo when I log out? Hell, why do I lose half my current ammo when I switch to another weapon, even if it’s another weapon of the same type. Why do I need at least 36 ascendant shards to reach level 28 if you don’t have any exotic armor, even though you need the shards the most before you reach 28? Why do the accessories for all three classes cost 25 motes of light each for any piece?

So I think that’s it, pretty burnt out over this game, it seems to want to eat away as much of your time as it can doing the same shit, day in, day out, week after week and hoping RNGesus has given you his blessing. If you like FPS and thought Disgaea 4 was way too lenient on the RNG then this one’s for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hihEhsdwiIk …at least for a little while.

(http://www.shonengamez.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Dragon-Ball-Xenoverse.jpg)

You thought it was Bloodborne, but it was me, Xenoverse!

So just like with the last one, been playing another DBZ game for about a month. There’s a lot of good in it, and a lot of bad that become more & more noticeable over time, oh boy do they. In a nutshell, this one’s basically a fan fiction story since you make an OC (do not steal) and run through a bunch of the well known DBZ arcs, fixing things in time that someone else is trying to mess with so that the good guys don‘t lose. You can choose from 5 races: Majins, Saiyans, Earthlings, Namekians & Frieza clansmen. I started with a female majin (Buu waifu is best waifu). They all seem to have different melee combos, both male & female. Honestly the story mode is one of the good things in the game just because you’re not running through all the arcs like normal with very minor differences. Since you’ll always be playing with your OC in story mode, you don’t get a signature moveset and will have to collect a wide range of supers, ultimates & evasive moves so you can be prepared for any kind of battle. Gaining a ton of skills from the characters, mixing & matching a group of them so you can make different builds or have them simply for cosplay is one of the more fun things about the game too. 

There’s also a ton of z-souls which have different benefits like upping all stats after using any Ginyu Force poses, auto recovering ki & regenerating health when low, not getting staggered until below 80% health etc. to also go in conjunction with builds. Though a few were a little overpowered and of course got many complaints due to PvP with people abusing some tactics so naturally several of the really good z-souls with no negative drawbacks got nerfed into the ground. Then one got accidentally massively buffed & eventually had to get fixed because you could rarely lose with it on. There’s also a whole bunch of outfits your OC can wear, from getting the clothing through parallel quests & buying it at the clothing store. You can bring about 4 capsules into battle with you for purposes like recovering health, ki & stamina, as well as senzus for reviving yourself, though you can’t bring 4 of the same exact capsule into one fight.

Parallel quests are just optional fights you can do at any point (sometimes with specials objectives besides travelling through the areas & beating up a group of characters) and you can choose two AI partners to accompany you (Except for PQs given to you by NPCs, two of which are infamous partially because of this).You also level up by doing all these fights in story mode & parallel quests, with the max being level 80 for some reason though the grind can be a little much at lower levels before you get the easy & fast grinding PQs at the end of the story. You’ll get most of the attack skills from parallel quests, and they’ll tell you which quests will give you certain skills as rewards. The other skills can only be gotten from mentors as you progress through the game. A few have level requirements to accept you as their pupil but once they do you just do more quests & your progress bar fills faster depending on the ranks you get. They all have about 4 training sessions, the last being the one where you fight them for real. Afterwards they’ll randomly ask you to spar with them & you get an extra z-soul for winning those fights. There’s about 10 mentors (not counting DLC), those being: Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Krillin, Gohan & Videl, Hercule, Ginyu, Frieza, Perfect Cell & Beerus. Cell easily has the best dialogue of the mentors.

The fighting system isn’t very complex, though the game doesn’t tell you that much about it. Just gives you the basics & expects you to figure out the rest. Took me a long while to do more than the basic few combo strings they had in the menu, or that using stamina can keep the combo going far longer. Stamina is just used for evading & blocking in general outside of that. I also liked a lot of the tracks in the OST as well. Frieza (though the one I‘m thinking of is the only one of the three that didn‘t play during his fight with Goku in the prologue unlike the other two), Perfect Cell & Kid Buu’s (easily one of my favorites) themes in general. Now that I’ve gotten most of the good stuff out of the way, I can bring in the complaints, starting with the biggest one.

Most of it is RNG. All those skills & clothing from the parallel quests, it’s all RNG based whether or not you get them, but that’s not the worst part. There’s 55 quests & over half of them require you to achieve the special requirement in the mission to spawn a special event, then you gotta beat that extra enemy to get whatever skills they had. 1. That special enemy actually spawning is random. Even if you cleared the mission within 5 minutes like it said, the enemy will just decide not to turn up just because. 2. If the enemy does show, their drops are still entirely random. So basically: http://ifunny.co/fun/EtMGjQ0j2. Also, say you & a friend need the same skill & grind out that mission. I could get that skill in a few tries while he may not get shit. While some people will somehow defend that shit because it extends playtime, it’s not doing it for a good reason. In my goal to get all skills I had to put up with RNG for 50+ missions & didn’t play for several days because of how tedious it was. You can bet your ass if they were forced to do a 5 minute mission with the special event showing up only 6 times out of your 25+ attempts & just wouldn’t drop the one skill or piece of clothing you want, they would do a complete 180 and call BS. I’d rather not look back on past games & groan because my first thought is of a really tedious grind due to bad game design. Bad design is bad & you should feel bad for thinking it’s good.

Finding mentors is also RNG. What, did you think they would stay in a certain spot in the hub when you’re ready to train with them? Pfft, that’s stupid, it’s obviously better to have them spawn somewhere in the big hub entirely at random. Also, let’s make you run around the 3 big hub areas at slow speed instead of flying through so it takes longer to search. Hey, I finally found Goku, but I’m on my alt so I can’t train with him since I gotta be level 70. Surely I can quickly swap to my main to swap mentors quick, right? Nope, tough shit. Hope you can find him again when using a character who’s above 70. The clothing all positively or negatively affects certain stats, which can be a pain if a certain outfit looks good but weakens melee since you want it on your melee OC. Not that big a deal if you’re gud but you can’t preview any clothing at the shop. You don’t know what it looks like till you get it, and some outfits can get expensive. Oh, the online connections suck dick too. Most of the time you couldn’t connect to the online hub, and if you could don’t be surprised if you get booted back to offline within 30 min.

Getting the dragon balls? That’s RNG. You gotta find other human time patrollers who are being controlled by AI within the PQs and fight them. Thing is, having them show up is random, and then having them drop a dragon ball when you beat them is also random. If you want the characters & skills that can only be gotten with wishes, you gotta collect them all 6 times. Yeah. Now the AI, good lord. Just like with Battle of Z, your companions are laughably bad while the enemy AI is rather competent (and stupidly aggressive). Most of the time your teammates will just fly in circles & shoot ki blasts that knock enemies out of your combos because that needed to be in the game. Only occasionally will they get in some combos themselves, but don’t think they’ll actually transform, and don’t you dare wonder why they aren’t using any ultimates. The parallel quests where they throw a braindead AI character on your team & expect you to protect them through a gauntlet of foes are easily the worst (escort missions in general tend to be awful), there isn’t that much you can do when the enemy spams ultimates & the AI keeps running into them. Thing is, there are capsules you can buy that heal your team instead of just you. Do these capsules work on AI you gotta protect which the game has placed on your team? Of course not, don’t be silly. So those capsules do nothing but collect dust because the AI are mostly meat shields in general.

PQ 37 wants you to help Super Buu survive against Piccolo, Gotenks, Goku, Gohan and then Vegito. Doing it with AI, I got to Goku & Gohan and while I was busy keeping Gohan pinned down with beam spam, Goku killed Super Buu easily in two combos. After that I played all escort missions online because at least one real player could have easily stopped that. Even just 2-manning missions, they become far easier when you have at least one competent player helping. Did one late game mission using my female majin with another, triggered the special event & fought Frieza, Cell & Kid Buu. Took a little while but it was no sweat taking them down with just us two. Just like Battle of Z, it’s far easier when you actually have backup instead of being a babysitter. So when they expect you to play the same missions constantly and protecting the retarded AI constantly to get skills the only real answer is to spam. Super saiyan (a transformation that counts as an ultimate) lets you have unlimited supers & ultimates while it’s active, basically meaning they’re encouraging you to spam. You’re doing a parallel quest online? Are the two other players saiyans? Expect to see nothing but beam spam all over the screen, because super saiyan encourages it. I soon made a female saiyan since they have stronger ki blast attacks (named her Spam La Spam, btw you can only make one OC until you beat the game), grabbed Perfect Kamehameha (Cell) and went to town. Most PQs I’d do nothing but run, charge up, go super saiyan & spam those ultimates all day till I cleared it. The sad thing is, spamming ultimates will get you easy Z ranks while I’d tend to get shit on with my melee female earthling character (called her PMS) for putting in more work. 

Only time I was forced to use melee was on PQ 19 since the special requirements were plain stupid & required precision to achieve, which AI & randoms can easily fuck up by spamming beams & killing certain characters before others. You had to kill Trunks before Vegeta & kill Goku before Gohan to trigger the event. Thing is, Trunks doesn’t show up till Vegeta is below 50%, and Gohan has such little health that spamming beams regularly led to those two running right in like morons & dying too early. Using kaioken x20 with Recoome kick that boosts attack if it hits, plus Pose K that gives super armor, plus Pose E for more attack, plus final pose for more attack, I couldn’t be staggered & easily kill Trunks & Goku within 15 seconds with standard combos that I could keep going all day. The worst of the AI is when they just give them infinite ki & stamina, the most notable being PQ 32 & 47. 32 has you fight Goten & Trunks, then Vegeta & Future Trunks, then Goku & Gohan. They can all spam their ultimates all day, and while Vegeta & Future Trunks aggravate me, Goku & Gohan are even worse. They’ll try to time their ultimates to stun lock you to death with constant super kamehamehas.

47 is even worse since you start off against Tien, Piccolo & Yamcha. Then Krillin & #18. Then Hercule & Videl, followed by Majin Buu. Then onto Vegeta, Future Trunks & Kid Trunks. Then finally Goku, Gohan & Goten. The last part is just as BS as in 32, Goten’s just tagging along this time. Beat them all & Goku gets back up & goes SSJ3. Beat all this within 10 minutes & you go on to fight Gotenks, then Vegito, at which point Gotenks gets up & goes SSJ3, then Vegito transforms too. Did I mention the first time you do this they expect to solo all those 3 on 1 fights? Most people spam the shit out of ultimates to win, less they become the main course at the super saiyan gangbang. Once again, the mission is a cakewalk with actual online players. Otherwise all that beam spam is reserved just for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Mtog6XLLo

Enough said.

Well, I talked about this far longer than I thought I would. Still enjoyed the game, but it has a ton of flaws, the majority of which of course they won’t fix since it’ll lessen time spent on the game.

i would be a namek guy

i had a black namekian too

*sends a thumbs up your way*

(http://www.twinfinite.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Bloodborne-Game-Wallpaper.jpg)

Rising from the grave once again. Should go over this otherwise I’ve probably never get to it. The newest Souls game (some will deny it but let’s be honest, many things just have some name changes but it’s mostly the same gameplay) & while getting tons of hype & attention it faded away surprisingly fast. Tons of people talked about it for like 2-3 weeks, finished the game then it just didn’t get brought up very much, I forget whether it was the same with Dark Souls 2. So, kinda mixed on the gun, wish it did more damage (outside of wanting to cheese bosses) though I do like the aspect of catching an enemy in the middle of an attack animation to get a critical attack. The game emphasizes quick movement & gives you a lot of stamina to do so, even at the start, which is always good. Blood vials isn’t good because by a certain point you’ll likely use them all up then have to go grind out kills or souls blood to buy more, don’t know why they couldn’t give you like 10 if you’re completely out. Kind of a bother when a boss is eating away all your vials. In the previous games you just kept running into that wall until it fell, you didn’t have to stop sometimes to tie your shoes.

Having armor where the stat differences are so small that you wouldn’t miss much when wearing the doll’s outfit in a boss fight, I’m rather neutral. Letting you just buy all weapons from a shop after beating special enemies is great. I don’t truly like the true final boss being hidden unless you do certain things. It’s not incredibly vague here but on a first run you have a good chance to miss it by doing certain things too early in the story or not visiting certain areas later on, but whatever. All in all, a fast paced Dark Souls is totally my thing. Now for spoilers: I don’t actually own the game. I know the whole plot, the range of weapons & guns, seen all the bosses & areas, know all the mechanics, and yet I’ve never played the game. Mainly because I don’t have anywhere as much money as I did when Dark Souls 2 came out & people seem to love fucking Europe in the ass when it comes to PS4 game prices (unless you pay $70-$75 for every new game on Amazon, then I’ll drop it).

Something amusing about the many playthroughs I saw of Bloodborne due to tons of people naturally starting around the same time was that Dark Souls style playing seems more like a determent. In Dark Souls you’re normally urged to play patiently & defensively. Study attack patterns, go in for one to two hits, back out if you get hit & heal up etc. Unless you gut gud, then you deliberately used bad weapons & ran around naked because you rarely got hit regardless. BB even has a health regen mechanic if you hit back the enemy within 3-5 seconds which is great, and removes shields to take away that security blanket. I’ve seen many people get hit once then back down & chug down blood vials all day. But the game wants you to get back in there. Don’t back down, stay aggressively focused. Don’t plan things out, just react. Eventually with a few more pushes down this line the Soul series might become like DMC & Bayonetta, even if that’s a laughable theory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FI0J-sDQBU#t=0m39s

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Tales_of_Xillia_characters.png)

So I got around to playing Tales of Xillia 2 a long while ago, if you know about the first you kinda already know what to expect. They’re kinda like the Call of Duty of Japan at this point, with one being made almost every year and the gameplay making rather small changes from game to game. Though the Tales of series tend to come up with dumber non-existent words as it goes on. So the game is split up into main chapters, and side chapters for another special sidequests you do in-between the mains for other party members. All of the cast of Xillia 1 return, with the additions being Ludger Kresnik, a silent protagonist & the two final bosses of the previous game (far left). A silent protagonist just really doesn’t fit in a Tales game & is rather pointless IMO, he’ll rarely speak & when he occasionally does it’s normally a one word response. Sometimes in cutscenes & skits you’ll be given one of two responses to say. Usually it’ll be for upping your affinity with some of the cast which has only has a purpose much, much later. In order to do tag team mystic artes (which are far stronger than single ones) you need to get a character’s affinity with Ludger to 9 and to bring characters into the secret endgame dungeon also requires them being around that high. Not that the game lets you know accurately how high a certain character is, and it takes ages to raise those affinities. If you’re not following a guide, don’t expect to get them over 5 by the end of the game without a ton of resets since it’s not too obvious what responses will increase the affinity of which characters until you make them. I would just pick the silliest response if the choice wasn’t going to affect anything.

Early on you get a massive debt slapped on you & have to keep paying off small amounts to continue with the main plot. It was okay at first but then got really annoying halfway into the game since if you happen to have enough to currently pay off your debt they’ll keep bugging you on every screen to pay them. It’s naturally set around 10% so you quickly give them that then the very next screen they’ll keep asking for more. Pretty frustrating if you’re saving a lot of that for new weapons & armor. Near the end of the game due to plot they back the fuck up a little & decide when you wanna get to the end you can hand in your next payment, then post-game you can just pay whenever you feel like it now. The system wouldn’t have been so awful if I could just pay whenever from the start instead of bugging me every two fights because I have slightly above my threshold. You get most of your money through easy jobs on a bulletin board that are either killing things, giving a certain number of things etc. The plot was about visit alternate dimensions where some details are different, finding the issue & destroying it, basically wiping out that universe. Was okay though I was actually surprised at how they did the True Ending. Oh, they also use a shit ton of the same assets & areas a lot.

The combat I didn’t actually like as much as I should have since they kinda force you into using certain attacks. The three main attack styles are sword, hammer & guns. Ludger picks up all three early & the actual element artes he gains later. But many enemies (especially bosses) will happen to no sell your attacks if you don’t spam certain attacks they’re weak to. So I can’t just use the hammer on every enemy when the enemies in the area tank the hits but are weak to guns. Some bosses were plain aggravating since they would plow right through what I was doing if I didn’t spam their weakness on a loop to eventually stun them. I’ll admit I didn’t fully get the weakness system & I’d just prefer normal high-speed, dodge encouraged combat like Tales of Graces (but I’m always gonna say that). Ludger has a chromatus mode that he can use in battle to become super powered for a short while & take the enemies on field to a pocket dimension while he’s using. The ability gets stronger as the plot progresses but soon I started to only really have it there to quickly get out a mystic arte during that mode when the boss was doing too much no sells. The mystic arts were fine but Tales of Graces still had the best & the most in the series. Mainly the 3rd & extra 4th ones being top-notch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNTqoBY5hqQ
(up to a little under 4 min)

So yeah, liked the game but hell, I’d probably take the first Xillia over it.

(http://www.pocketmeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/sonic_and_all_stars_racing_transformedmain.png)

Recently got myself a PS Vita (very odd, I know) and so I grabbed a port of an old game I very much enjoyed at the time. Honestly it’s one of the best kart racers I’ve played, it’s got a lot of great tracks in it. What made me go out & buy it at the time was the drift challenge on the Golden Axe stage, which is also one of the best stages. Almost everything about it is good. Just watch the first minute. Look at those awesome visuals & that hype-ass intro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqtakEpUOz0

Sometimes on the demo I wouldn’t press anything & just let it go on. So anyway, the first Sega All-Stars game was decent but this one improved a lot of things. There are around 24 racers overall and their standard stats can be altered as you like by unlocking mods for each, gained through xp and they each get 7 that focus on improving certain aspects. There’s no main story, just world tour where you run through a ton of different events & collect a certain amount of stars for each event cleared depending on difficulty. Of course there are mirror races that unlock later. The game is very drift dependent on higher difficulties so you gotta maintain good control of your car to stand a decent chance of winning. They got a lot of good tracks from many other games, a few obscure ones too. Outside of the races, the other events you do are versus (outspeed a series of opponents 1-by-1), drift challenges (drift within the highlighted areas to gain time & reach the finish) boost races (no items, just boost pads), boost challenges (get to the next checkpoint, time only freezes when boosting), traffic attack (avoid green, blue & orange cars while collecting extra clocks & getting to the next checkpoint), battle races (everyone has 3 lives, kill them with weapon pickups before they get you), ring race (like boost challenge in a plane, but no time stop), sprint (basically casual time trail), and pursuit (blow up a tank with rockets).

Expert difficulty becomes unlocked when you make it past the original 5 sections of world tour, and that last difficulty can be somewhat dependent on luck when it comes to winning events because the AI will attempt to rubberband & gang up on the human as much as they can if possible. Some victories were only possible due to holding on to an all-star power up like halfway into the race & using it near the end. The main gimmick with the game is the transforming your kart into a boat when on water & into a plane when in the sky, as you could guess. Without a doubt, the best track to me even if it doesn’t do anything special will be the afterburner track, because it looks amazing & has the best version of the theme I’ve heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAAMM0gUoo

I rarely lost online races on that course, regardless of the character I used. I tended to pull off a lot of clutch wins there. Another thing, I loved the online for the short while that it actually had people around, the only bad thing was the skill gap being too large. If you could legitimately win races in expert difficulty you could destroy most people online since there’s no blue shell & experts will be drifting through over half the track & get constant boosts. I’d regularly enter rooms where one dude was above average & the rest were between decent & awful. But the ragequitters, good lord did this game have a ton of them. So often would I enter a big room, beat the top guy then see a message say he left the race. Often that guy would pull ahead while everyone attacks each other, I’d pull away later & spend the 2nd and half the 3rd lap catching up, then through a mix of luck & skill manage to knock them out of 1st place and steal the win. Cut to them leaving as I approach the finish line. Then they still happen to be in the lobby ready for the next race. One dude did this 4 times, 3 of those being when I beat him. The fourth time someone else took first & I got 2nd, I waited for it to say he left and sure enough he did. It always made me laugh when I see them quit, sadly wouldn’t happen so often if there wasn’t a points counter. Of the 100+ of races I did online, over 90 of them I’d always finish within top 3 (usually 1st or 2nd), but I earned a ton of those wins.

Depresses me somewhat that when I go back there it’s a ghost town. Even the rage quitters who later on would cheat hard enough that weapons didn’t slow them down just to keep their points don’t even show.

delicious golden axe

indeed. shame it kinda died after that beast rider game.

I mean to be fair to it, it was dead before that too. I never played it but the reviews and sales probably didn't help. That said I would think a Steam/Xbone/PS4 arcade style beat em up would be viable in today's market.

fun fact i'm going to a barcade with the express goal of playing golden axe today

do those arcade machines still exist

only in places specifically meant to cater to retro arcade people

They're few and far between but living in Philly means there's a few of them. The one I'm going to even advertises having Samurai Shodown II which is like the holy grail.

(http://www.godisageek.com/wp-content/uploads/Senran-Kagura-Shinovi-Versus-Review.jpg)

So I tried Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus - Proof of Tits Life - a while ago, been interested in playing it for a long time because the gameplay looked fun, and it is fun as long as you’re alright with it being basic as hell. As you can see from the picture, there’s a shit ton of playable characters, so it subtitutes long varied combos for a ton of characters with different attack patterns. The gameplay is kinda like dynasty warriors with you just mowing down tons of mooks throughout the level until you reach the boss who’s going to be one of the other girls. It’s a small bit of air combat & you sadly gotta level up the girls somewhere between level 10-20 to unlock their best stuff. After building up some power you can use shinobi transformation which will then let you start using level 1 & 2 supers once you transform. It also lets you recover all your health but I only occasionally needed that since most levels are stupidly easy. It wasn't until chapter 5 of the first school where I had to actually start blocking & dodging. There’s also frenzy mode which is a different transformation that trades defense for attack so it can destroy bosses & mobs incredibly fast. There are 4 different schools and 5 girls in each though the last isn’t unlocked till you finish the first 3 (unless you enter a code).

There are 5 chapters for each school and it normally rotates the 5 girls so you use them once in a random order every chapter. Usually. Outside of that there’s 5 Shinobi Girl’s Heart missions for every character, which is basically their arcade mode. Many of those mini-arcs I found far more entertaining like Mirai fighting filthy casuls who pretend to be fans of a show or don’t know about the original source material. The girls lose clothing as they take hits & the game pauses briefly when this happens to highlight it. But this loses its novelty after the first hour. I’m not actually sure if you can turn it off as it would start to get in the way of combat after a while. Oh, also tried the versus multiplayer modes too, sadly had to be with AI since online is dead on this. It’s chaotic as fuck which is just the kind of thing I’d want. Guess I’ll have to wait for Estival if I want that with real people. The music was great too, liked a lot of themes, shoutout to Crimson Heart & the opening theme. Pretty fun basic game at the end of the day.