Games NOT Beaten: 2016

[TSTR]

Never stick your face in smelly box.

u mean always

[Exhuminator]

Dragon's Crown

Well my wife and I got a good 8 hours of fun out of this, but we're both tired of it now. Dragon's Crown fell into the same trap that Odin Sphere and Grand Knights History did. All three start off fun, and get you hooked with amazing graphics... but eventually reveal their true colors as massive grind sinks.

About halfway(?) through Dragon's Crown, the game takes a nose dive into severe grindsville. You're tasked with finding 9 talismans, protected by 9 bosses, that are ridiculously tough to beat, until you grind your levels and gear up quite high. Worse yet, you have to beat each boss in under 2 minutes to get their talisman. Or at least, that's what GameFAQs said. In order to level up high enough to have a chance, you have to replay the same old levels over and over and over, slowly building up experience, and hoping for better loot drops. It's clear cut artificial longevity contrivance, a shitty style of game design that Vanillaware apparently specializes in.

I don't want to come off like I'm saying Dragon's Crown sucks. It doesn't suck. It has amazing graphics and is quite a fun beat 'em up for a few hours. But it does wear out its limited content long before the game is willing to roll out the credits.

[noiseredux]

it took me a lot less hours to get bored with Dragon's Crown. Great looking game, but disappointing big time.

[Xeogred]

Glad I never bought it then. Probably gets even more boring solo.

[Exhuminator]

Might as well add these to the not beaten pile...



Sorcery Saga on Vita | Ex's Rating: 4/10 | Time invested: 7hrs 34ms

Sorcery Saga is about a cute girl trying to save her favorite curry restaurant, by exploring dungeons for the ingredients to make the ultimate curry. That's about as deep as the story gets. Sorcery Saga is also a roguelike, but not an especially well designed one. Actually Sorcery Saga is a really, really badly designed game.

Properly designed roguelikes give the player a fighting chance at all times, but Sorcery Saga is far more reliant on sheer luck than premeditated chance. Whether or not you make it through an hour or three hour long dungeon, is going to rely just as much on good or bad luck versus your careful planning and item usage.

Even worse, Sorcery Saga is prone to glitches and crashing. After having the game crash on me while I was almost two hours into an dungeon, and losing all my progress for that gaming session, I called it quits. Bad game design is one thing, bad game programming is just too much to bother with. I could go into excruciating detail explaining why Sorcery Saga is such a badly designed example of a roguelike, but it's not worth the effort. Ultimately it's "death of a thousand cuts" syndrome here.

You might be sucked in by Sorcery Saga's cute characters, with their endless reams of inane banter about nothing at all. You might also love the graphical style, and enjoy the excellent soundtrack. But unless you've got really stellar luck, the terrible unavoidable game design will wear you down, if the glitches and freezing don't kill the fun first. I would advise playing any other roguelike while eating an actual bowl of curry instead.

============



Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 1 on Vita | Ex's Rating: 6/10 | Time invested: 11hrs 22ms

I went into this expecting an RPG about sexy anime girls making fun of the gaming industry. Well, I kind of got that. I mean, yes the girls are sexy, especially in their HDD forms. And yes the plot does occasionally make fun of the gaming industry. So what I'd heard about this series did at first seem to be true.

But over time things wear thin, very, very thin. You see, most of the time, what you're really doing, is either grinding incessantly through very boring dungeons against milquetoast enemies, or clicking endlessly through inane dialogue boxes. If you want to read cute girls talking about nothing of substance for hours and hours, you'll find that here.

What really killed this game for me is indeed the terrible, terrible dialogue between the girls. It's not entertaining whatsoever (unless you have a pudding fetish) and is just endless vapid filler. To make matters worse, even after eleven hours of playing I did not see the point of the plot, nor feel invested in Neptune's quest. I'm used to JRPGs with bad writing sure, but Re;Birth1 takes this to a whole new level of WTF is even the point?

So the ratio here ends up being 50% vapid conversations, 30% grinding boring dungeons, 15% micromanaging subsystems and equipment, and 5% getting to see sexy anime girls battling tough bosses. This ratio for me is completely out of balance and not what I expected.

So despite the really nice graphics and great perky music, I just couldn't deal with the lack of substance in the plot, and the terrible reams of pointless dialogue boxes. Your mileage may vary, especially if you just love shallow bubbly conversation. But if what you really care about is seeing the Hyperdimension girls wearing fetish clothes while kicking ass, save yourself the cash, and just find pertinent screenshots on Google Image Search for free.

[Sarge]

This kinda confirms why I skipped over Hyperdimension Neptunia in the first place. While it's not always true, most games with sexy anime girls are just trying to cover for deficiencies in other areas. Definitely won't be prioritizing finding a copy for Vita.

[ElkinFencer10]

I have never been so disappointed in my senpai...

NEP IS LOVE. NEP IS LIFE.

[Exhuminator]

I do love the Neptunia character designs (especially dat HDD), and the personalities of the Neptunia characters are okay. If the sequels at least improve the quality of the plot writing and dialogue, we could have something worth putting 30+ hours into.

[ElkinFencer10]

I do love the Neptunia character designs (especially dat HDD), and the personalities of the Neptunia characters are okay. If the sequels at least improve the quality of the plot writing and dialogue, we could have something worth putting 30+ hours into.

The first one is definitely the weakest of the main series. It's not even part of the main universe; the main universe is only Mk II, Victory, and VII.

[laurenhiya21]

Dungeon Travellers 2 (Vita)

(hopefully I don't call this Dungeon Defenders 2 since I keep mixing those two up ._.)

I do really like this game, but right now it's just really difficult to play while I'm going to school. It took me a little while to figure out why it was difficult to play this after coming home from school, but I think it's because the dungeon progression can be pretty slow at times.

I'll play it for a while, like maybe an hour or so, but I'll hardly get any further in getting to the end of the dungeon. I would still level up my members a bit (so it's not like I'm not getting anywhere), but at the end of my playing session I just think that I have sooo much to do before the dungeon ends. It kind of makes me think of school in a way, which isn't what I want right now.

Hopefully I'll get back to it once I'm out for summer, but right now I'm probably going to play something a little more actiony and/or short.