Summer Games Challenge 2018 - begin when ready!

[MrPopo]

I think Metroid just works best with minimal storytelling, though in my head I have this hybrid fiction where Samus is really the pawn of Durandal.

Mary and Shelly are certainly tricky.

[noiseredux]

Zero Mission is the shit. So good.

I'm hoping that the Prime trilogy and yes, Other M come to Switch.

I've been thinking about Axiom Verge for a Metroid fix lately tho.

[pierrot]

Sorry to hear that Metroid Fusion wasn't everything you'd hoped for, Key. It's been so long since I played that game, I didn't even remember the sentient computer. You'd probably find more to enjoy in Metroid Prime, if you like first person shooters at all.



Dragon Quest VI has sunk its massive talons into me, and I am now in the throws of its signature submission move, "The Spiral of Death." The game is nucking futs, and I kind of really like it. I had forgotten just how much Dragon Quest does not care about my pride, and will throw the kitchen sink at me whenever it feels like it. There is so much going on in the story, with the game just tossing out little bread crumbs of hints all the time. Somehow I passed through the Dharma Temple from Dragon Quest III, and even ran across Ruida. I was expecting Celestians, but so far that hasn't been in the cards. I'm told by the King, who became the Queen, that it will all make sense once we go kill her-- or the Demon Lord-- I mean the King. Anyway, something's happening, and I may or may not learn something as a result. We'll see.

[pierrot]

I guess I'll double post about Dragon Quest VI, then.

I'm a fair way into the open progression portion of the game. After beating a few of the most challenging, and harrowing boss fights that I can even remember in a Dragon Quest game (which is saying something), against the Demon Lord, I'm sort of left to my own devices in these two worlds, while searching for some answers. I recruited a warrior named Amos--who can transform into a massive, purple beast--had glory stolen from me by this dink named Terry, acquired a massive land boat, and lead a punk prince through his royal trials. That last one was a real chore. I thought I might actually lose my mind at a couple points when he kept running away, and making me chase him down, but the shift in his character after the trials were over almost made it feel worth it, actually. Almost.

I thought the boss fights might tone down a little bit after those pivotal fights with the Demon Lord, but they really haven't. Not by much, anyway. In general the difficulty at this point is just brutal. Maybe that's because I have access to different classes now, but the starting classes really don't do anything other than make my characters overall weaker than if they had no class. The classes are kind of oddly (I'm only a little hesitant to say "poorly") implemented in this game. They don't seem to exactly affect how my characters are trained in terms of their stats, and available equipment; The equipment pool, especially, appears to be inherent to the specific character, which is kind of weird. Changing a character's class just seems to rearrange that character's current stats, and gives access to learning new abilities and spells. The abilities are pretty crazy, like the Hayabusa Slash, which functionally acts like a Hayabusa Sword, but with any available weapon (unfortunately, it doesn't simply attack with the equipped weapon twice, for a double boomerang attack, for instance). The Spin Kick ability from the brawler ability set is also intense, granting a whip-like group attack. Unfortunately, these abilities haven't really improved my effectiveness against the enemies in this game. Normal encounters are actually a little ridiculous, because everything is just hell bent on multi targeting me for 20-40 damage a piece, sending characters flying out of combat, using insta-death spells, or locking me down with confusion/paralysis attacks. My mage characters are made of glass, and made even worse by the hits they get to HP and defense by classing into the Magician and Priest. I'm surprised by the abilities normal enemies have at this point, because I don't really have the tools to counter most of them yet. I just got a second character with Zaoral, and before that, if the one character who actually had Zaoral went down, it was basically game over. Actually there are a number of occasions where I've just lost a character, and had to stop what I was doing to go get healed up, but a ton more situations where I just skated by because the game decided not to kill me. I feel like in most situations, I'm just lucky the game decided not to kill me in any particular battle, which kind of reminds me of the later part of Dragon Quest II. Never felt like it was more necessary to have better access to party-wide healing in a Dragon Quest game, than I do right now in DQ VI.

My hope is that the upper tier classes will actually start to make my characters better, but I guess we'll have to see. Similar to the classes being added back into this game (sort of), I think it's kind of interesting that there's monster training returning from V, but the much reduced emphasis (for obvious reasons) makes it seem a bit tacked on here. I'm not sure that I really feel much incentive to use it, but it's possible that it would actually alleviate some of the stress in battle if I recruited some of the better monsters at this point. The interesting thing is that even monsters can be assigned classes. So, I guess in some respects it might not be totally worth it to put the effort into the main characters.

That's sort of another thing I'm a little disappointed in, at this stage, is that the main characters are sort of throw-aways. The story really revolves around the Hero, and Hassan has a bit of a supporting role, but it's honestly a bit difficult to see why the other three are even around. I do enjoy the flow of the game, and the incredible world that's been constructed, but this is definitely not a game with an emphasis on building main characters. It's just a bit of a shame, because it doesn't initially appear that way, and because V had such a wonderful cast of characters. I think it's pretty clear to me at this point that DQ VI will not be surpassing, let alone reaching, the heights of DQ V. Oh well.

[MrPopo]

Some of the other characters get pulled in later on, as their personal stories intersect with the ongoing world story. But the whole dream world thing means that the characters tend to be cyphers for a long period of time.

[pierrot]

I thought that could be the case. It's just a little strange to me feeling like I'm carrying a few coffins around, in terms of the story, at this point in the Dragon Quest series.

Currently, I'm searching for a flying bed, and I guess I'll have to scale a cliff face to find it. This arc in the story seems to be gunning for my tears. Pretty emotional so far, but I don't think it will actually stick the landing the way I could foresee. We'll see.

[pierrot]

Dragon Quest VI update: The final boss of this game is one of the most insane bosses I've ever seen in the main campaign of a game. I was on the last form of it, when things went super sideways (as anticipated from its other forms), and I rewound the battle with the Sands of Time--bet no one knew this was a Prince of Persia game. The second try went much, much worse than the first, and the annoying thing that I realized later was that I probably could have brought Barbara in to the battle on the last form to one shot it with her Madante spell. Maybe. Anyway, not too sure what I want to do with this game, now. There are some things I could do like grinding classes/levels/casino coins, but I don't really want to. I kind of want to take a break, but I also just want to finish it. It's not like tense final bosses are anything new in Dragon Quest, but this one is just ridiculous.

I see that I went through a lot of stuff without really updating my progress. Oh well. Lots of things happened, but the end of the game is kind of excessively drawn out. To be fair, Dragon Quest V was similar, but it was just more fun. The end of this game, and especially that final boss, has sort of soured my opinion of the game. It was going so well there, too. I still get a laugh out of seeing the hero fly around while standing on a bed, but I'm just not as impressed with a lot of the story elements as I was when I started the game. In a lot of ways Dragon Quest VI feels to me like a greatest hits album, or one of those flashback episodes in sitcoms: Yeah, it's built on a solid foundation, but the structure feels sort of thin.

[Nemoide]

I feel like that's a fair assessment of DQ VI.
On one hand, I think that game deserves more credit for being great because it IS Dragon Quest and it does what Dragon Quest does and that's always a good thing. On the other hand, it doesn't really stand out the way the other games in the series do. It's totally not weaksauce pseudo-DQ the way the bad Final Fantasy games are to the FF series, it's just... an entry in the series. But it's such a good series! I'm glad you played it and had fun with it, even if your interest waned by the end.

Also, I'm not sure if this came up in the thread already, but I *do* appreciate that the game introduces Terry, the character who served as the protagonist for the original Dragon Quest Monsters. I like that the spin-off series is directly connected to the main series.

[pierrot]

I feel like that's a fair assessment of DQ VI.
On one hand, I think that game deserves more credit for being great because it IS Dragon Quest and it does what Dragon Quest does and that's always a good thing. On the other hand, it doesn't really stand out the way the other games in the series do. It's totally not weaksauce pseudo-DQ the way the bad Final Fantasy games are to the FF series, it's just... an entry in the series. But it's such a good series! I'm glad you played it and had fun with it, even if your interest waned by the end.

Yeah, I don't necessarily mean to come down too hard on it. The final boss has taken a lot of the wind out of my sails, but not all of it (I'm still working on the final boss, though). I was liking the game quite well up to about the mid-point. Once I had to go to Horstock, and deal with Prince Hors' ritual, my enjoyment started to very gradually decline for a good portion of the back half, and then it plummeted a bit in the 'rift world'. Overall, I still think it's pretty good. Partly, I feel like there were just a few too many ideas, and too many of them that weren't really touched on very much.

I also love Dragon Quest as a series, though. So I agree about a lesser Dragon Quest still being a highly functional gaming experience. I like VIII, and V the best, with I, III, and IV occupying a slightly lower tier, and I think VI will probably slot in to somewhere around the bottom of those, but still a bit above DQ II.

Also, I'm not sure if this came up in the thread already, but I *do* appreciate that the game introduces Terry, the character who served as the protagonist for the original Dragon Quest Monsters. I like that the spin-off series is directly connected to the main series.

Oh, I hadn't made this connection! Although I was recently noticing that the two versions of DQ Monsters 2 borrow some of the DQ VII characters. I've been meaning to grab the DQ Monsters collection on the PS1 for a while, but it continues to elude me. Do those games play much like typical Dragon Quest games, or is it a wildly different type of game?

[MrPopo]

Also, Caravan Heart starts a younger Kiefer from DQVII. The DQ Monsters series plays a bit different from base DQ. The first game has all random dungeons and you have a party of up to three monsters. While you do have the ability to command your monsters, it requires them to be big fans of you (so fresh caught monsters won't listen), leaving you to set them to use one of three attack styles. The big thing is that you will constantly be going through monsters, as breeding them together is essential. Think of it like how in SMT you're going to do a lot of fusing, because just leveling a monster isn't enough. DQM2 has the main story areas being set, and then randomly generated side worlds which is where you get the better monsters. Caravan Heart I haven't played much, so I can't report much. Joker and Joker 2 are all fixed areas, and they changed how you catch monsters. In DQM 1&2 you have a chance at end of battle for a monster to join you (including in battles against teams owned by another human), which can be raised by giving them meat ahead of time. In Joker and Joker 2 you tell your team to show off against the enemy monster, and then you have a chance of that show off to succeed. Joker and Joker 2 also add in VIII's boost system, and you can pretty much always control your monsters.