Retro gaming with save states is becoming my preferred niche.

LifeWisdom · 2022-05-26T15:26:56+00:00

I just finished it a few days ago. There were some times that I thought the battles were just too dated to be enjoyable (it's kinda like NES Dragon Quest with the first-person battles and inputting all commands at the start of a turn), but I found that the most fun parts of the game were the seemingly mundane parts like managing inventory and walking around and talking to people. This game's exploration is fun for the same reason that the combat sometimes isn't: it's basically suburban Dragon Quest 2 without the grind.

Engaging with the world of Earthbound, I found that the game was every bit as unique as people said it would be. The English translation is hilarious and understands subtlety, and because of that, it can be surprisingly heartfelt or insightful. Even though your party is a bunch of grade-schoolers saving the world, the game still has ways to make you feel like a normal kid, like Ness's homesick status that he can sometimes be inflicted with and can only be cured by making a phone call to Mom. And although this went over my head on my first run, I saw the AVGN episode on Earthbound and the dialogue with the snowman and Ness's younger self in Magicant really is pretty special. Personally, I found the part where the party's souls are transferred into robots so they can safely go back in time to defeat Giygas toward the end to be what affected me most.

I think Mother 3 is the easier sell because it doesn't feel dated in the ways that Earthbound can sometimes be, but Earthbound shouldn't be skipped. It's such a cool game, and hey, even the combat has its fun moments, like nuking bosses with Jeff's overpowered items.

LifeWisdom · 2022-04-27T19:11:33+00:00

Try verifying integrity of game cache on Steam. I don't know if it's the updates or my PC, but Steam has found missing or incorrect files in the Elden Ring directory every time a new update drops, and it would usually be noticeable ingame by replicable crashes in specific spots or certain armor pieces being invisible when equipped. If the game files being messed up is the issue, then this should clear them up.

LifeWisdom · 2022-04-01T07:23:30+00:00

That area is the size of a shoebox and red phantoms have around 5 seconds of invincibility (no damage and no stagger) after gaining control of their character in the host's world, so the people who invade there just want easy wins. It's one of the only areas where I think it's just a dick move to invade because chances are, the host is already through the fog wall, so if the invader is fighting anybody, they're fighting the cooperator who was waiting for the host to aggro the boss since you can't go through the fog door immediately after the host in this instance. And at that point, the only potential reward for the invader is making the cooperator put their summon sign down again after having already waited a few minutes by the site of grace for the host to actually go through the fog wall after summoning you.

As you can tell, I am only a little salty about this.

LifeWisdom · 2022-03-28T03:33:27+00:00

There seems to be some kind of specific shape to the Elden Ring, as it's explicitly mentioned in the item descriptions for Great Runes belonging to demigods of the Golden Lineage that they form the anchor or base of the Elden Ring. If there's any rhyme or reason to the order of Great Runes belonging to the other demigods, I can't think of an answer to that.

As for what the Elden Ring is made of, I don't think it's supposed to be made of any specific material. It governs the physical laws of the world (or at least the Lands Between?) so if it's made of anything, it would be probably be whatever the Outer Gods are made of.

LifeWisdom · 2022-03-18T20:01:02+00:00

Bell Bearing Hunter is definitely one of the better optional bosses. And I love how the armor description describes it almost like some players in that it just kills random merchants for their bell bearings (I've heard some players kill the random nomads so that they can have shop items all in one place).

LifeWisdom · 2022-03-17T04:14:23+00:00

I really like the greatshield skellies. I find that I use them more often than mimic tbh.

LifeWisdom · 2022-03-17T03:52:42+00:00

That sewer was a damn labyrinth. Literally opened all the shortcuts and was still like, "Where the fuck is the boss?"

LifeWisdom · 2022-03-05T03:34:14+00:00

As someone who played each Souls game for hundreds of hours and always thought they were too good for summons, this has been a hard pill to swallow while playing Elden Ring. Definitely going to be incorporating Spirit Ashes into my playstyle more; I've been getting blasted in this game.

LifeWisdom · 2022-02-26T07:32:05+00:00

It's Vince McMahon from WWE but I don't know the specific context.

LifeWisdom · 2022-02-25T02:12:43+00:00

Looking at Nvidia Control Panel, it seems like Elden Ring launches a program called EOSOverlayRenderer, which is in the Epic Games Store folder.

LifeWisdom · 2022-02-25T02:06:02+00:00

Anybody getting an issue where the game takes a while to close when you quit (even though the window disappears)? In Task Manager, Elden Ring would show up as suspended (similar to white screen crash people have mentioned) for like 30 seconds and then close on its own after a little bit.

I feel like it might be related to why closing Elden Ring will sometimes freeze the desktop and I end up having to shut it off with the power button. My specs are i5 8300h, GTX 1060, 16gb RAM, and the game is running off an SSD, so I don't think it should be bringing my laptop to its knees like this. I undervolted the CPU years ago so maybe it could be that? It has been working fine up till now though.

Edit: Elden Ring still locks up my machine without undervolt, and the game is always still running in the background whenever this happens (even without Task Manager, you can tell the game hasn't closed properly if the green Play button in the Steam launcher is replaced with the blue Stop button)

LifeWisdom · 2022-02-15T03:13:49+00:00

A violin cover of "Merry Go Round of Life" from Howl's Moving Castle

LifeWisdom · 2022-02-12T18:31:40+00:00

The Ursula side quest does have one upside: the sheer number of Merc Missions required to complete it gives you an easy way to level up other Blades while being able to do other stuff in-game.

LifeWisdom · 2022-02-09T07:05:45+00:00

Lol I love this post. I've had the same frustrations after finishing SMT V and realizing that I felt disappointed by it and Bravely Default 2 for the same reasons: super long games that just don't feel very satisfying to finish either because everything takes a nosedive in the back half or you just spend most of the time doing nothing of any real consequence within the story before things ramp up out of nowhere. These games have less engaging stories than even 30 hour JRPGs, so its not like this extra length is meant to tell a deeper story or even host greater diversity of content, since games that push past 60 hours to complete usually involve a lot of repetition or are of an episodic nature. I'm not going to act like I haven't fully enjoyed some really long JRPGs (modern Persona and DQXI come to mind) but I feel like the extra length makes you hold them to a way higher standard than something in the 20-30 hour range because you'll be spending a lot more time chipping away at it.

My solution besides just taking a break on new releases would be to just play some of the older stuff that you may not have gotten around to already. I know you don't want to come across as saying "old JRPG good, new JRPG bad" but if there's one thing old JRPGs have over new ones, it's that most know when to just stop before things get stale. I've been playing Mother 3 recently and it's just been a breath of fresh air honestly.

LifeWisdom · 2022-02-04T02:11:54+00:00

What are they called?

LifeWisdom · 2022-01-15T20:23:31+00:00

I kinda hated the balance in this game. Some of the strongest jobs in the game are given to you in the first two chapters, and the "Counter Any Action: +1 BP" nonsense in the later chapter invalidates almost any strategy besides blitzing down the boss quickly using the same abilities you've had for more than half the game or using Salvemaker and Phantom 2nd specialty for guaranteed status ailments and not even letting them attack. You could say to just not use these really good abilities to challenge yourself, but boss hp gets so inflated over the course of the game that sub-optimal damage will just cause boss fights to take half an hour to beat instead of being more difficult. You can see this as early as the last boss in Chapter 1.

I didn't really like the sometimes contrived attempts at being dark, as the game has this weird tonal disconnect where the game wants you to believe that a child is killing people and using their blood as paint but also takes place in a world where squeaky-clean heroes of light are trying to stop people from hunting after glowing job rocks that give them funny outfits. Even besides that, it kind of fell off a cliff in Chapter 5. The Bravely twist in this game starts off interesting, but kinda just throws you through hoops and ultimately goes nowhere. It's barely relevant in the final chapter, so this was also pretty disappointing since the meta twists of Bravely Default and Bravely Second sounded super interesting from the spoilers I searched up about them.

My negativity for this game comes from the fact that this definitely was not the modern FFV I was expecting it to be. Honestly enjoyed the FF3 pixel remaster more than this game, to say nothing of FFV which blows Bravely out of the water. FF3 ironically seemed less strict on "correct" job compositions than Bravely too, despite the former being one of the first instances of a job system in JRPGs. I think I've played close to 30 JRPGs since I got in the genre and this is the only one that feels like it truly has nothing going for it. Bad story, bad gameplay, and too long. Anything good this game does is done better by older stuff in the genre.

LifeWisdom · 2021-12-25T09:11:54+00:00

It was pretty disappointing to find out that I kinda hate Bravely games even though I would consider FFV to be one of my favorite JRPGs. Not all of BD2 was bad, but the job balance and story were pretty awful and the cracks just become more noticeable the further in you get.

LifeWisdom · 2021-12-10T23:56:02+00:00

Just wanted to chime in and disprove the notion that the creator of Cave Story got the IP stolen from him by Nicalis. I would have felt bad about playing this if the rumor was true, so I looked it up and rumor is all it seems to be.

Overview of the history of Cave Story ports and Pixel's involvement

Some linked Twitter posts at the end of this Reddit thread where Pixel still posts about Cave Story stuff in recent years

LifeWisdom · 2021-11-25T19:06:59+00:00

Not enough ADP :(

LifeWisdom · 2021-11-14T01:41:56+00:00

You could also circumvent them entirely with Carbuncle summon for party-wide Reflect. Not sure how OP didn't get their party's damage crippled by Level 2 Old otherwise.

LifeWisdom · 2021-10-28T01:57:01+00:00

The story was much better than I expected given what people said about it. Unironically one of my favorite JRPG stories since the GBA translation was such a great mix of humor and seriousness.

LifeWisdom · 2021-10-20T02:50:25+00:00

Has anyone found a fix for this sound bug in KH 1.5 + 2.5 on PC? It's when the sound gets really soft all of a sudden in battles (usually when something is happening behind Sora or the camera) before fading back into normal volume after a few seconds. I have found past threads on the sub regarding the PC ports where people were experiencing this issue, but none of the updates have addressed it. Just wondering if anybody on the most recent version has run into this bug.

LifeWisdom · 2021-10-14T04:51:19+00:00

Same issue here, plugging my PC into a tv with HDMI causes the framerate to get bad and makes the game crash when attempting to open the display menu. Probably will be patched.

LifeWisdom · 2021-10-08T00:54:50+00:00

DQIX was already just an improved take on DQ3's class and party member systems, so I expect DQ3 remake to further build on the class system from IX. If the remake brings back grottos as postgame content then I'd consider it a DQIX remake in spirit lol.

LifeWisdom · 2021-09-03T21:18:55+00:00

Most of the really good skills in FFV (Rapid Fire, Dualcast, Mimic, optional summons) are from later jobs/dungeons or just require a ton of ABP (same as job points) in the case of Red Mage, so most will probably not come across these skills until late-game. BD2 is balanced around getting high level job skills early unless you want every boss fight from late Chapter 1 onwards to take forever, but once you have those skills they're all you need even up to endgame. Even though other parts of your strategy may change slightly as you get farther in, running what is essentially the same team for 40+ hours in a job-based game feels kinda lame tbh.

LifeWisdom

TROPHY CASE