Ys IX Monstrum Nox

I’m at the final chapter of the game, and here’s my thoughts:

The game has adopted many bad trends from other games that it becomes annoying halfway thru the game, here are some of my complaints:

• The dialogue, a lot of useless fluff dialogues that takes extra 2 seconds for the characters to animate. If there’s 10 people in the scene, then those 10 feel the need to chime in to say something frivolous.

• Just can’t get emotionally invested in the character, maybe it’s the writing, maybe they just follow cookie cutter anime tropes most of the time (thrown in some ‘twist’ later on). I weirdly care more about the side characters from Lacrimosa than this one.

• The constant interruption of the flow. You gained control of your character, moved to main/side quest point, cutscene, walked forward 10 steps, another cutscene. And the problem is, most cutscenes are just insubstantial.

• Side quests that are not side quests anymore, since you need them to remove those artificial barriers. You can farm nox, but it’s way slower. Side quests also suffer from ‘everything needs lengthy writing’ RPG syndrome nowadays. Better writing, not more writing. I had the same issue with Horizon Forbidden West, where most side quests contain way too much dialogue that’s been used to pad the game to 100+ hours, where it could be a 30 hour game.

• The raids / grimwald sections are bit too much. I like how they are mostly optional in Lacrimosa. In this game, you even need to do them to remove the barriers to optional area.

• Third Eye / detective mode is a mechanic that devs should move away from. Just outline the points of interest, don’t make it so it’s hard to see everything else.

• The lock-on in combat is a wild mess for me. I don’t know whether it’s my settings, or the game.

On the other hand, what I like about this game:

• The vertical mobility, that’s to shake up the exploration. The problem is it’s kinda janky, I’d often fall down after grappling to a ledge, because the ledge is too small. Wall run often ends up being blocked, etc. I hope that they will polish the mechanic more in the future. In combat though, I barely use them to fight enemies thanks to the messy lock-on

• I enjoy doing the collectibles (petals, treasures, graffitis) in this game.

Besides that I’ve been slowly progerssing Resident Evil HD Remake, trying to get infinite rocket launcher.

Taking it a bit slow this week after more than 200h of Pathfinder Kingmaker the last month.

More Risk of Rain Returns. I finished all the Providence Trials, that I have available, the only ones missing are for the two characters I haven’t unlocked yet. I gotta say, those trials are a nice way to unlock and get to know most of the alternative abilities.

Next I started Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion. I’m in chapter 3 currently, and so far it’s not that interesting. You can pretty easily tell that it’s based on a 16y/o PSP game, even if it’s a remake. The cinematics look alright, but are full of upscaling artifacts. The animations are pretty stiff at times, which is a bit disappointing, since I thought FF7R did that really well. As for the combat, it’s kinda one-note. You only have one attack button, along with four materia slots, so you can do some super basic chains. Although, since those four slots also include pure stat increases, like HP Up, you might just run around with one or two offensive abilities, so it can feel really samey. The main missions are really annoying, since you get a short cutscene every few steps, it feels like. Outside the main missions, you have tons of tiny side missions (300 apparently). So far these have been super short, like less than five minutes most of the time, four or five environments, and almost all in linear corridors. To be honest though, I like a mindless grind like this from time to time, I just wish the rest was a bit better. I will keep playing though, since the game is on the shorter side, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

Then, I also got me one of those new Steam Deck OLEDs, and sold my old one for cheap to a friend. I haven’t played a lot on it yet, tried Crisis Core and Risk of Rain Returns, and did like two runs in Peglin, but I quite like it. I barely used my old one (I found the fan to be super annoying), and this OLED model might end up the same, but the improvements are really great. Even during Crisis Core, which had the GPU at 90%+ and the chip at 20W TDP, it was pretty quiet and a more pleasant frequency, same with Nioh 2. Maybe I should replay Ori and the Will of the Wisps on it, since everyone’s always saying how great the HDR is in the game and how beautiful it can look on an OLED screen.

Mars First logistics, it fucking rocks.