Aperson

Getting towards the end of my first playthrough of Nier Replicant... at least I think I am. Gone through all the locations as an adult now and done all the storyline stuff there. I'm also trying to get all the weapons and it turns out two of them are locked behind specific side quests so trying to do those... I must say though trying to get Machine Oil was an absolute pain... I think there's a lot of credibility behind this idea... nobody tell me if I'm right about this or whether I've just spoiled a huge plot twist by wondering about this. It would call a lot into question about these things... Oh and... Someone on the Nier team is a huge hentai fan... actually it might be Yoko Taro himself! There are moments in the second half of the game which caught me completely offguard because of the way they are framed... you just don't see certain character deaths coming!

How convenient, that was the next game I intended to post music from in this thread! Yeah, that track's awesome (though imo the remastered version is better). As are these:

Wait... that's a real game? Um... OK... Anyway, sunk a lot of time into NieR Replicant over the past couple of days and one thing is becoming very apparent... this game is trying to challenge the conventions of video games by imitating them in some ways. It has segments that call back to Resident Evil, Diablo and top down shooters among other things. But most of all, there's one particular game that I think this game is trying to lean on heavily towards. Let me give you this scenario.... young boy who you name at the start of the game gains a magical companion and goes on a quest to retrieve multiple mystical objects to help stop a major villain's plans. He has to go through labyrinthian dungeons and fight a boss at the end of each one in order to retrieve these objects. After obtaining all these objects, the villain launches an attack on a main town and the young boy comes face to face with the villain. Despite his best efforts, the villain wins and puts the world under his rule and order. The young boy must become a young man before he has the chance to be able to turn the tide, with the adult protagnist having a wider range of abilities than their child self. Sound familiar? If you thought "Ocarina of Time" you;d be right, but Nier Replicant would also be the correct answer because I wrote this generic enough for it to apply to both games. e.g. Navi/Griome Weiss, Link/NieR and the Shadowlord/Ganondorf. The fact that both protagonists have both child and adult forms with the adult having expanded abilities (in NieR's case being able to equip more weapon types) is quite obvious. But I think the biggest wink and nod towards Zelda is... this! Just as I thought the game was starting to remind me of Zelda a lot, the game goes and puts a straight up Zelda reference in there... the jingle that plays is also extremely similar to the point where only one note is different. He even does the twirl around... actually, lets put this in video form... In spite of the Zelda paralells there seems to be something afoot. I thought it was pretty strange that the game flashed forward by 1000 years and everyone still seemed to be the same age. But the game gives further confirmation of this by strongly hinting at something in the Forest of Myth and then during one transition, instead of a page from Yonah's diary playing it showed a black notebook instead with a more complex date and year which talks about some sort of operation... what? It was a one off at the time but... come the adult portion Yonah's Diary entires don't seem to show up as much anymore and the loading screens are more of this black book. I suspect something like a Matrix or something along those lines where this entire world is in-universe virtual. It would line up perfectly with the whole game making reference to different video game genres. Anyone who has played this before will obviously know what that actually is so if there's anyone here who did play the original Nier back in 2010 then please DO NOT TELL ME what actually happens. I want to try and discover what happens myself. Some characters don't appear to be who they said they were and one of the companions has undergone a complete transformation. In the meantime, here's a few Twitter highlights of the last two days, I did make quite a significant amount of progress... I do think this game does have the slow beginning problem that also plagues the likes of Twilight Princess, Kingdom Hearts II and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. But the story certainly seems to be picking up the pace and I'm intruiged to see where it goes... the thing is though I've now heard that you need to collect all the weapons in order to see all the endings so I'm having to farm for money to buy the weapons at the shops that I don't have yet. They're pretty expensive now!

You know, I've been thinking about things and I realise... sometimes you have to play bad video games to help appreciate the good games better. I can understand only wanting to play good games, naturally we all want to enjoy our time with the games we play. But that can lead to a very high standard in terms of what is acceptable, so the "lesser" games among the pile of good games you're playing might be considered bad games if its the only thing you've ever played. For that reason I'm kind of glad I made a significant amount of buying mistakes during the first 10 years of gaming or got lumped with additional games when getting a console or a specific game (Crash Bandicoot Fusion, Shadow the Hedgehog, Enter the Mastrix, Minority Report etc)

Court lawyers should really learn how online video games work lol.

Good luck with this challenge. I'd been following ClementJ642 on Youtube and he did videos on every single Sonic game that's ever been released and I do mean EVERY one. The whole project took over 10 years to fully complete!

Nice, I finished that game recently and really enjoyed myself. Though, the game does have some of its issues... Anyway, onto my current main game I'm playing, NieR; Replicant. Made a good amount of progress in the game, made my way through The Aerie and finished the boss battle at the end after meeting Kainé for the first time. Played a bit more and now having to deliver letters for a really annoying old woman , just to see what happens if I do. Very manipulative woman that... Dang you hidden obscure ladders! Grimoire Weiss is my favourite character in the game, he's just so witty! I didn't quite make as much progress as I would have liked though as I was finishing up Soulcalibur VI's Custom Character Tournament that I've been doing on Youtube recently. Did a few Tweets with tournament highlights in an attempt to hype up the final! And now.... here it is! EDIT: Oh yeah, a friend picked up Hollow Knight recently so it inspired me to go back and do some of the side stuff to try and get 100%. Collected a few more charms and I'm going for them all now, this included unlocking the Grimm Troupe DLC as well as finding the Godmaster DLC in the process. I also managed to find a few secret rooms that I missed when playing through the game and that allowed me to pick up missing grubs, taking the Symphony of the Night mindset into this one certainly helped!

Most people, focus on beating one or two games in a single month. Hero-Of-Time: 100%s 6 games in one single update Anyway, I've just got Grimoire Weiss in NieR Replicant. Seems like a fun character though not much has happened afterwards. I can't even buy the weapon upgrades at the shop because NieR is not in the mood for it... well, that's certainly different!

Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair is on my "to buy" list at some point. Definitely very interested in playing it at some point considering the praise it got. As it happens though late April is when the first 2021 game coming out that I was interested in playing comes out... so I have now started on NieR Replicant Ver 1.22474487139.... Birth by Sleep Final Chapter Prologue Ultimate Prepare to Die Edition Deluxe + Bowser's Fury & Knuckles featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series with a New Funky Mode. Better with Kinect sensor. OK in all seriousness the bolded part is all this game is called so far. I appreciate how the prologue very quickly lets you get into action and fight the enemies as well as using all your abilities... I was wondering why I was levelling up so quick and already at Level 30... turns out this is just the prologue and the game is teasing all the abilities that you will get in the future. So now I'm in the proper overworld... I must say parts of this game actually remind me of Shadow of the Colossus, mainly with the shadowy creatures and the tone of the landscape. That's as far as I've got so far as I realised I needed to attend to uploading this particular Youtube video.... the semi-finals of the Soulcalibur VI Custom Character Tournament. Only four fighters remain... whose your money on?

FIFA's lootboxes being in game gambling is bad enough but it seems to be more systematic of the whole sport's obsession and acceptance of gambling. Perhaps this should be football's equivalent to the Star Wars Battlefront II fiasco and a springboard for a platform for change in the sport. Because it seems like the rot runs deep within all parties of the sport, not just the big clubs if this Guardiola interview is anything to go by...

Super League has now officially been cancelled.

Well, that post I made about my own club falling into an uncertain future quickly got dwarfed by all of football falling into an uncertain future lol. My opinion is pretty much that of the majority sentiment. This is the kind of decision making you see so often from the likes of EA and Activision although its with football clubs instead of video games. I really feel like there's a fundamental issue with American business as so often when you see these overly greedy aggressive business decisions it ALWAYS seems to be the Americans. Well, not always but quite a lot of the time you see it. It basically is "we don't understand the structure of football, lets change it to what we know". That being said, I did get a bit of a laugh when someone posted this picture on Discord.

Just finished Castevania Symphony of the Night. Kind of blasted through the last part of the game after taking a suggestion off someone on Discord to farm Schmoos to get the Chrissagrim, the most powerful weapon in the game... in fact its TOO powerful. Literally one shots ever single enemy and makes bosses a toilet training excersie. Literally three swipes of that thing was enough to kill most bosses in the game... so I put on the Alucard Sword for the final battle against Dracula, a battle I did twice due to wanting to go and get the 200% ending. Overall thoughts, really enjoyed the game, I can see why its an all time classic. At the same time I feel like there are a lot of problems with the level design which hold it back somewhat, while the first portion of the game is intuitive a lot of stuff afterwards isn't at all and key objectives are hidden in really remote places that you wouldn't know were very important unless you looked it up. Some hidden rooms were also TOO well hidden if you know what I mean. But this was a game I was looking to play for years and I'm happy to finally get around to doing it. Probably not done with Castlevania just yet though as I still have the Anniversary Collection to get through. I will also look to get some of the Castlevania games on Wii U eShop as I'd definitely like to play more SOTN style games, with Circle of the Moon (or Castlevania GBA as its known here) and Aria of Sorrow two games I'm looking to get in particular. The dark colour palette of GBA won't make too much of a difference on the Wii U eShop I reckon and I've heard good things about Aria of Sorrow... EDIT: Also uploaded the latest part of the Soulcalibur VI Custom Character Tournament, the quarter finals!:

*sigh* This club is a freaking joke Just as we get a key win against Bristol Rovers we go on a downward spiral in terms of form. But we still have a chance against Rochdale and Wimbledon right? Nope, lost 2-1 to Rochdale in midweek and now absolutely hammered by Wimbledone today, they were 4-0 up before we got the late goal to make it 4-1. Absolultely terrible performance though and the manager has shown great dignity by resigning... just as its pretty much impossible for us to stay up. Bottom of the league, too far adrift of safety and we've played all the other struggling teams in the league. The club is a mess, an ongoing court case and FA charge hangs over it, everything is falling apart and we have to get a complete new set of owners, manager and players in order to stand a chance of even staying in the Football League and even then it might not be enough. It wasn't so long ago that the club won League Two but in typical Swindon fashion we have completely imploded and being owned by a series of dodgy owners is really coming home to roost. I think the Swindon fans trust should buy out the club but the club have ceased communication with the fans trust and now its looking pretty dim. The sad part of this is that Sheridan is resigning before relegation is officially confirmed just so he can still say he's never been relegated... that will explain your positive CV if you're ducking out of the roles before the relegation gets confirmed. Even if you've never been relegated you've no doubt contributed to multiple relegations so stuff you!

If Prime Hunters was a "Hero shooter" it was an incredibly unbalanaced one! Sylux and Trace were the only worthwhile characters to play as in that game. Not to mention the online was absolutely plagued with hackers which is a shame as I used to play the game online but would get absolutely destroyed by people who were playing as Trace and hacking the game to stand INSIDE WALLS so that they could snipe everyone else from in there. Meanwhile I was just running around as Sylux because that was the only other worthwhile character due to the fact that Shock Coil heals you when you attack the opponent as well as the fact that the coil homes in on enemies. They REALLY didn't think to balance this game properly. TF2 and Overwatch HAVE to have more viable characters right? But thats getting off the point of the topic now somewhat... (Ironically Hunters was my first Metroid game unless you count its First Hunt Demo, so a Hero Shooter which I started playing because I was a teenager at the time and the FPS genre was popular with teenager boys helped me get into what would become one of my all time favourite franchises and shape my gaming tastes for the rest of time to the point where I don't really play a lot of the preceived "super hardcore adult" games with a lot of violence in them).

Interesting you mention this and how Japan has its own view of video game genres because Toei's Kamen Rider Ex-Aid which came out in 2016 and ran until 2017 was a video game themed tokusatsu where all the main characters' transformations were based around certain video game genres and the plotline was about people being infected by video game viruses... anyway before I go off on a tangent the main character was based around platformers, there was another character based around RPGs and the other two main "good guys" were themed around shooting and racing games. It goes on from there too, there are forms based around survival horrorr, puzzle, fighting games, dancing... and even dating games... Ends up with a real life MMO being a plotline of the villains to turn real life into a video game and kill everyone off by allowing them to be video game characters. If nothing else, it also gives the internet this memeable image... Anyway, one game that I think is a good example of blurring the lines between multiple genres is Ratchet & Clank This is a VERY unique game by today's standards as it incorporates aspects of many different game genres. Now this series is mostly know both for being a platformer shooter hybrid but the first game, while primarily being a platformer, doesn't have any similarities in level design too much to all the platformers that were being released around the same time. Rather than being an explorable sandbox that you have to go round to collect items, this game has stricly linear level design... or does it? Because when you touch down on certain planets you are presented with a range of options to travel from your ship. And when you reach the end of the route you're taken back to your ship and can explore the other routes from there. This is because Insomniac went into this game wanting to make more of a Zelda like game and this game was their third attempt to get it off the ground. But wait, some of these routes are blocked off by certain powerups... wait a minute, that would make Ratchet and Clank more of a Metroidvania right? Should we consider this game to have that kind of level design that requires you to accumulate powerups to progress? But... its split across multiple planets so that can't be right... And this is where things get curious. If you look at Metroid Prime Hunters and Metroid Prime 3, those games are set across multiple planets, albeit a fewer number but they have a very similar kind of level design. So really, Ratchet & Clank has taken aspects from many different gaming genres to form its own identity. Of course, the multiple routes in planets would get replaced with just one streamlined route from Ratchet 3 onwards as the series began to be defined more as a shooter but those early games had such a strong element of exploration and you are getting stronger as the game goes along with an assortment of upgrades, some of which are useful if you backtrack to older planets to uncover new stuff. But those upgrades are sometimes one use only so in that sense its similar to Zelda and... aghhh!

The term Metroidvania I believe actually first showed up to try and describe Symphony of the Night's change in style of gameplay for the Castlevania series. It was something like, "lets call the old ones Castlevanias and the new SOTN like games Metroidvanias".

Interesting question. I think its also notable how the definition of "genres" has evolved overtime. Sometimes that was due to negative stigma over certain genres, like after platformers fell out of public favour in the 2000s any platformer was simply marketed as an "action game". Even Sega did this with Sonic Heroes. If you go to the team select screen in that game and call Omochao to describe each team, he has this to say about Team Rose. Very specifically "action games". Similarly I only ever saw RPGs as RPGs and only ever call them by that genre name. But after the rise in popularity of games like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Mass Effect we began to see a split in genre classification, with the games mentioned being "Western RPGs" and the RPGs I was familiar with, the likes of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger etc now being referred to as "JRPGs". Similarly you see games like Super Paper Mario and Ratchet & Clank be genre hybrids. Super Paper Mario is half platformer, half RPG. Does that mean it counts as its own unique genre? Ratchet & Clank has a lot of segments with platforming but a lot of the games also have segments that feel specifically like a third person shooter. That's all I've got for now...

I would argue that Sony has used The Last of Us as a template for ALL their first party titles. They want every game they publish to have a cinematic flair with in depth storytelling. At least, thats from my experience of seeing their games. The Spider-Man games by Insomniac certainly seem like an extended playable movie.

Honestly its bad enough that shutting down the servers stops games from being able to be downloaded... the fact that there's a potential that you will not even be able to PLAY the games one day is something else. Something I really like about the PS3 is the library of PSOne Classics. Acquiring original Playstation games online through physical copies is becoming rarer and rarer though the PS2's backwards compatibility does leave the PS1 library quite playable. I had a look on eBay and there's only one person selling a Playstation copy of Metal Gear Solid for about £30. Or you can buy a digital version of the game off PSN Store and play it on PS3. Now, I feel like a good bunch of the must play PS1 classics are available outside this in some form now. The Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games have all been remastered by Activision, Final Fantasy VII has seen re-releases on modern consoles as have its two Playstation sequels, Metal Gear Solid got a remake on the Gamecube and also got released phsyically on the PS3 and Castlevania Symphony of the Night has been released on PS4. But thats beside the point, once the PSN Store goes down the only chances of getting these PSOne games, especially if they haven't been rereleased by their original creators, is either to track down original Playstation copies of the game or emulate them. Playstation discs also show their age sometimes, I have a copy of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos on Playstation but could never get past the first boss. That's not to say I couldn't beat the boss because I could, but the game always froze after beating the boss, rendering the game unplayable. PS3 is the only way to be able to play Xenogears now I think because you can create a US account and download it from the US store and play it on a European PS3. I bought Symphony of the Night and Crash Team Racing on PSN and after learning about these it does put a bit more pressure to finish SOTN knowing that one day I won't be able to play it again because the console doesn't let me due to a dead CMOS battery. Honestly, Sony's current decisions are putting me off from wanting to get a PS5, the fact that they're hard to come by doesn't help that right now. But a PS5 might be the only way to play PS4 games in the future.

Speaking of Castlevania music I'm playing through Symphony of the Night and I will definitely agree, all Castlevania games have such great soundtracks. I hadn't really heard much of Michiru Yamane's stuff but man, she's done some amazing music... ^ (This song was also in Smash Bros. but the Judgement version. The original is far better imo) (This boss theme rocks... literally!) Surprised this one didn't make it into Smash tbh... (The last two got into Smash too)

After extensive exploration I believe I found every single room in the castle in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. So I decided to go to Dracula's Keep and fight Richter... before destroying the evil presence controlling him! I am now in the inverted castle. I have also defeated Medusa in the Inverted Royal Chapel and thats as far as I've got. I also made a new character on Soulcalibur VI: Apart from that, Youtube continues to take up my gaming time in some ways and I made more MTG and SCVI videos... BTW one of the fixtures in the video above is particularly notable. Since two characters from the same franchise ended up facing each other I decided to do something a bit special...

Made some major progress in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. After finding the easily missable platform that allowed me to make progress in the Royal Chapel I proceeded onwards, defeated the red bird boss and made my way to the Castle Keep, at the very top of the map where the next major upgrade the Leap Stone, was hiding. Its at this point that I have a major issue with the game's main point of progression. There's a lot of easy locations to know where to use the Leap Stone to access, most notably the library. So, where does the game expect you to use the Leap Stone to get the next major upgrade? So, I think I may have missed the hint and only knew because of this being an old game and the knowledge being around the internet but... how is the game supposed to let you know that the clock area will open up if you wait in the room for a certain amount of time? The fact that you have to do this to get major upgrades that allow you to view story cutscenes and beat the game then that's a bit much. So after getting through this section and going through the next main area I reached the Colosseum area and saw the game's biggest plot twist so far! Fought the dual boss which I died to first time around but then beat on my second attempt after the Werewolf went down pretty quickly. Beat that boss and got the mist powerup. Oh hey, when exploring the library from getting the Leap Stone I beat a boss and found a dead end where I needed this mist powerup to pass through, lets go back there. So I used it and found the Bat form. Further exploration allowed me to power up the Wolf form and I know there are several other areas that I can get to now. It naturally follows in a genre built around gating where you can explore behind powerups that being able to fly is going to open up pretty much everything. Its mainly why you don't get the Space Jump in Metroid games until later in the game. It admittedly took a while for me to get back to SOTN due to making Youtube videos, including playing Soulcalibur VI for the tournament which reached Round 2 this week: I don't know whether I'm going for 100% or not in SOTN but given I usually 100% Metroid games but for whatever reason didn't do the same for Hollow Knight I will probably go out of my way to explore the game a bit more.