2023 GAMING DIARY

Update time? Update time.
Valkyrie Elysium


Tales of Arise

Rise of the Tomb Raider

So felt like loading up a file on some Tomb Raider and realized this game was basically almost complete? I beat the game sooner than expected but I guess it is a 10 hour game with 20 hour max when it comes to collectibles I was like 80% done when I beat it so makes sense. Might come back to it later. So onto Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

I'm enjoying the jungle environment in this game so far since it reminds me of MGS3 a little. Weird thing is getting all this definitive edition DLC that I'm not sure is useful since they seem to either have tradeoffs or are unupgradable. Really not that far in but a lot of things seem improved.

FInished off Mass Effect 3 tonight, again. Maybe the 4th or 5th time? Never gets old. What an awesome trilogy.

Should be done with Ultima soon, only need two more missions (Kill a Lich and a a Balron) then doing the Space Ace stuff and killing Mondain and I'll be through. Thank the lord for walkthroughs, saving me weeks of time battling through dungeons trying to find random monsters.

Also pretty close to beating Grapple Dog as well. I'm halfway through what's either the final or semi-final world.

Started Weird and Unfortunate Things Are Happening, now that it's been released on Steam. Honestly should have played it ages ago considering I contributed to its development, but that's a backlog for you.

author=jake-d
-The Friend™ talking to random strangers on the prison exterior while I was getting beaten up in the background

lol my friend and I also played this game, and it ended up the same way. The music segment, too. We were laughing pretty hard 'cos every segment seemed to be directly ripped from something else. I remember in the final segment where you gotta shoot at each other, instead of machine gunning each other we shot up the walls trying to make hearts and drawings as the overly dramatic music played.

Also, I lost connect 4 many times.

BUG TABLES FABLES

Whatever, I don't know if I'm comparing it too much to it's inspiration and it wasn't actually intended to be comedic or I'll find it less agonisingly unfunny later on or what, but I'm just completely ignoring the dialogue at this point. The kind of syntax every character has in this game gives me the vibe of some crappy anime dub or Canadian kids' cartoon where the delivery of each line is exaggerated to hell and nobody talks like a real person. Like it feels as if the writers (and the people online who basically demand that you play it) assumed the corniest one-liners I've ever seen in anything ever and what I think was intended to be character banter but just registers to me as sentences would be enough to get me to stand up and start clapping and going "HAHAHAHAHA I LAUGH"
I'm not even gonna talk about the actual game at all because frankly I only remember beating the mid-boss fight in chapter 2 and closing the window out of sheer exasperation

IT TAKES TWO (Ft. The Friend™)

Compared to A Way Out, this felt to me a like less of an interactive movie experience and more of a video game, so naturally we enjoyed it much more and very many wacky hijinks ensued. I forgot most of the wacky hijinks that ensued so you'll just have to trust me when I say we enjoyed it, but I assure you that there were very many of them

no connect 4 so far though

Switching to completely different games on my list. Been playing:

Gotham Knights About ten hours in, was expecting a generic shopping list open world but it has a strange Night system, where the side objectives are just for getting loot but also contributing to unlocking the next main story line? There's only so much you can do before forwarding to the next day. I don't know if it full works as it feels like it's trying to be a weird Dead Rising schedule thing (except not at all) it feels like they scaled back the idea in development to make it more streamlined thus losing the point of it. The game is pretty mid? But I keep playing it for some reason, I guess it's a batman game where you play as people other than batman and I'm vaguely aware of these characters from the animated series. So there's a weird curiosity about "something I was exposed to but didn't get super into enough from my childhood" osmosis sort of thing.

Psychonauts 2 I watched the 22 hour documentary on and off during work last week and figured I should play this game, I think I got a good chunk of the first game done but missed out on the ending. I just... wanted to play the sequel to get the freshness and see how the game turned out based on its development. So far the game is impressive on a setpiece/environment art direction level but the gameplay is... very simple so far. It's really hard to say what doesn't work about it. I think maybe it introduces the concepts too slowy and the concepts it does introduce feel somewhat dated or basic. The movement system just lacks momentum or chaining together moves. Not that you NEED that but it's missing something.

Valkyria Chronicles

Ok, so I finally got around to beating Valkyria Chronicles the other week and I've gotta say, this game was made for me. The story is pretty nice, the gameplay is exactly the kind of stuff that I live for and the artistic style, music and sound effects all are pretty nice and I don't think there is much room for improvement in that regard.

Now, gameplay, what can I say? It's different from anything else I've ever played. Valkyria Chronicles is a third person turn based tactical RPG. What does that mean? Similar to Fire Emblem where you select units and move them around the battlefield to attack enemies and such, you select your individual units and move them around, however, when you select an unit, you control said unit in third person mode! Running around with WASD and the Mouse, it even extends to attacking, where you have to carefully aim your cursor over an enemy before attacking, usually aiming at weakpoints in order to get a quicker kill on foot soldiers, or a mobility kill on tanks. I see no issues with this system, and although there are some instances of invisible walls that will block your bullets even though you have a clear line of sight towards an enemy, these are rare and usually avoided due to the simple fact that the crosshairs light up differently when they are hovered over an enemy, should an invisible corner wall be in the way, the crosshairs won't change color, helping you avoid useless actions.

Now, my one major gripe with this system are the tank controls. The tank can either be controlled with WASD/Arrows Keys to move around, and the Mouse/numpad to look around. The main issue? The Mouse doesn't only look around, it also moves the tank side to side, really inhibiting your movement and wasting precious move points correcting your tank that just suddenly turned sideways because you used the mouse to look around. If you play this game, avoid the mouse while driving any tank, you'll avoid a lot of intial frustration and you'll get used using WASD and the NUMPad very quickly to move the tanks around. Aiming and firing luckily works perfectly fine with the mouse while using tanks, so it's just a minor inconvenience rather than an experience braker. All in all, I believe the controls are solid and the traversal of the varied terrain is relatively solid, besides vaulting over ledges sometimes taking a second longer than I'd like.

The art style is impeccable, it uses this pretty nice artsy almost storybook looking anime style, with onomatopeyas popping up for multiple major actions you exectute, like firing at an enemy or just driving a tank, ratatata and RMmmble being examples of these. I think they really add to the style of the game and the world is also quite varied in scenery and color, managing to get the player to visit urban, forest and desert environments. The level design is also spot in almost every mission, just a few of them are a little grindy or unfair imo, but nothing you can't get past without using some cheese.

Talking about cheese, oh man, you can cheese some of the missions (or all of them if you know what you're doing) pretty well once you get access to orders; buffs that enhance a units defense, attack, etc. Each unit also has their own set of talents that they unlock as the story progresses, as you use them in combat, or level up their specific unit class. And some of these units have some extremely overpowered if not downright broken combination of talents if combined with the buffs gained by using orders, allowing a single units to solo a mission in most instances. However, I don't think this works to the detriment of the game, as this is only really a valid tactic late in the game when you have more talents unlocked as well as orders and understand the game better.

The game also features a multitude of upgrades for your troops' weapons and tanks, with... varying effectiveness. The weaponry upgrades are all useful, they all serve a certain niche that you can easily adapt to your own personal strategy, though some are better than others if you want to do the fastest run through missions (which is the only way of getting A ranks on missions, so slow and easy does it won't help you get the highest ranks, sadly). The only major issue I have with upgrades is with the tank upgrades. Most tank upgrades are pretty useful, but a bunch of them, mainly the ones buffing the defense and HP of the treads of a tank, are pretty useless and are only a good option for a small ammount of missions (which, until you've played these missions, you can't know installing tread upgrades would pay off, because they didn't pay off in earlier missions). Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied with this aspect of the game.

Your troops also, besides their inherent talents, have troops they like and dislike, fighting more effectively, or less effectively if paired up with them, something as simple as Unit A likes Unit B and/or Unit A likes women and is therefore effective near any woman unit, etc. It really encourages you to put some units close together in a battle in order to get the best ouf of them and I personally really like this idea, it also results in specific voice lines when a unit that likes another, saves them from death. And talking about death, if a unit gets reduced to 0HP, you have a turn to retrieve them, or they die, becoming unavailable for the rest of the playthrough (special story important units are an exception, and just are removed from that battle).

All in all, I think the story, game mechanics, characters and art style are all pretty good. The soundtrack is ok most of the time, it's nothing grand, but nothing super bland either, except at some rare instances where it works really well and the final mission's OST is the best for any mission by far. The story is compelling and so are the characters and although some missions might require replays because some suddent change that, lets be honest, was pretty unfair, appears mid mission, I still think the game is pretty fair. I had very limited replays of missions and only 1 mission got me super frustrated, but I was able to get past that relatively easily once I knew what I had to do. All in all, I enjoyed the game and am looking forward to beating it again in New Game+ mode. It's one of my favorite games of all time already, as it has just the right combination of story, characters, setting and mechanics to keep me hooked for hours on end.


Phew, that was way more writing than I had expected!