PWB July: It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Your driving test must have been entertaining.

I was coming up to a roundabout and the instructor said "Go straight over." How was I supposed to know he meant round the road bit?

I genuinely failed my (first) driving test by going the wrong way round a roundabout into four lanes of oncoming traffic. The driving instructor went a very peculiar colour.

I failed my first test by attempting to turn left at a junction and queuing behind a row of parked cars.

My second test I failed because I was asked to turn right at the next junction so drove On the wrong side of the road for about 300m forcing cars into the bus lane.

Third time was the charm.

Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter - so far, so Trails. Down to the world map and characters which are literally identical, but that's consistency I guess. After THAT ending to the first game how could I not dive straight into this. Anyway, characters are as great as ever. My favourite being the older bracer lady who likes to get pissed and attack people with whips, can we have more people who like to get wankered without disgracing themselves or anyone in our RPG parties please in future? ty.

Near the end of Chapter 3 and so far this has built on everything good about the first game and made it better. It's much faster paced for a start, I know that's why people loved that game and I eventually 'got it' too, but it's not like the pacing is an answer to the slow world building of the first so much as it's simply carrying the momentum forward. Even the power scaling has (and literally can transfer saves if you go from the same console version of 1 and 2) carried over and I started the game doing damage I was doing at the end of the first, at like level 35 or so.

The battle system, which was already really good in the first game has had one or two tweaks and it's so fucking good now. There's now a new 'chain craft' system which is at it says, lets you chain multiple characters specials in a row on one enemy for huge damage. The real winner so far though is that you get to make your own party for the most part as opposed to the revolving door approach in the first game, and messing around with party composition and the 'Materia-For-Geniuses' Orbment gem system is a lot of fun. And it's the same Stratgey-RPG Disgaea esque battle system as ever, with the same great decision making and choices and whatnot that made it good in the first.

I've already bought the first two Trails of Cold Steel games on PS4 and will get the 3rd soon.

I was a bit underwhelmed by next gen Assassin's Creed, but it got me hankering after some historical fun times so I bought Rogue.

I remember really enjoying Black Flag when the PS4 first came out. Hoooo boy it's not aged well. (Assuming you can judge Black Flag by Rogue, which I think is fair.) It's very ugly and SO much jankier than I remember.

It also has potentially the worst accent of all time. Captain James Cook, Middlesbrough born and bred, sounds like a Jamaican attempting a bad Scottish brogue.

So I gave up on it, and downloaded Origins instead. Pretty sand.

I saw Valhalla and thought 'Why is it even an AC game, it'd probably be cool Viking stuff with the Assassin/Templar shit sprinkled all over it' then I remembered that's exactly what Black Flag was and that was great. I might be wrong though because I didn't watch the Ubisoft thing.

Rogue was the old-gen only apology in place of Unity, so I don't know how well you can judge Black Flag (which was at least half-intended to run on PS4/XBONE) against it. It'd have to be some mess to unseat ACIII as the worst entry in the series, though.

It’s Black Flag with less plot and more side activities, so if that’s what you like then it’s fine. But it is a bit clunky and probably one for the fans only.

Odyssey and Origins have moved this series on quite a long way - but if it’s old school AC you’re hankering for, the secretly-really-good one is Syndicate.

I did like Syndicate quite a lot, with its ridiculous names, stupid gadgets, and collapsible top hat. I don't remember if I ever fully completed it; I suspect not.

I know I didn't finish the DLC, despite picking up the season pass for pennies in some sale or other.

Origins was maybe the first game ever that felt too big. I felt like I'd been playing it forever, but it just kept opening up more and more stuff, and eventually I just gave up. I know Odyssey is meant to be great, but it's also by all accounts even bigger, so I daren't even try it.

Yeah, Odyssey's even bigger but it also feels like the space is better used, if that makes sense. The quests are much better-written, there are many more side activities and in many ways it's a lot closer to an RPG like The Witcher than it is to the earlier games in the series. Origins is atmospheric but also a bit empty-feeling (which of course isn't necessarily a bad thing in a game that's 90% desert).

I'd definitely recommend Odyssey as the best the series has ever been - though you can probably skip the DLC. I'm very much looking forward to Valhalla.

Odyssey does somewhat appeal, and it's been a while since I could say that about an AC. I like that they've seemingly embraced the fantastical, with the myths and folklore stuff.

Do you need to be up-to-date on the (now presumably utterly ludicrous) overarching story?

Do you need to be up-to-date on the (now presumably utterly ludicrous) overarching story?

Absolutely not, it's almost incidental, in the main game at least. There are a few segments where you play as a modern-day character called Layla Hassan - she was introduced in Origins, so if you've played that game it'll make more sense - but it's literally a handful of 5-minute segments in a 100+ hour game and it's nothing that won't make sense even if you're coming to it completely fresh.

She plays more of a role in the second DLC, which really goes nuts with the mythology side of things, but again it's still almost entirely historical stuff with a few modern-day bits to join the dots.

If anything I'd say this needs more desert. I didn't realise it's set in Greek-occupied Egypt, I thought it was more ancient.

I'm basically just playing Odyssey again at the minute. Greek NPCs, giant Greek city, Greek statues, Greek amphitheatres.

The ancient Egyptians are ancient to Bayek, too. I wanted proper Pharaohs, not this Ptolemy nonsense!

(It's still a lot better than Rogue.)

If you fancy Assassin's Creed and are not up to date with the story, apparently you can just buy Ghost of Tushima.

If you fancy Assassin's Creed and are not up to date with the story, apparently you can just buy Ghost of Tushima.

That's actually exactly what I ended up doing.

I’m playing a game on Apple Arcade called mosaic. It’s beautifully designed Kafkaequse game which looks like a Radiohead video. You play a worker who is very much a cog in the machine, your only distractions from the daily grind being your phone, which has generic apps and messages from friends. It’s a tale of the depression of the white collar worker. Then a talking fish shows up.

I've seen that, looks interesting. It'll be in Game Pass at some point no doubt.

Played a bit of Neon Abyss on GamePass which is (just for a change, because the service doesn't have many of these) a pixel-art platforming roguelike. It's shit. It's ugly as sin, has weird controls and feels like you're playing against a random number generator. Swiftly deleted.

Ah, that's a shame you think that. I wouldn't say it's shit, but it's definitely an average attempt at a genre that already has a few shining stars (Enter The Gungeon being the obvious standout).

I got it on Switch after trying the demo. I've beaten the first 'manager' (read: main boss) which unlocks more stuff, and I quite like the way you unlock rules that modify how the game plays. Sadly, some of the vital resources like keys and grenades are far too rare to be of use, the bosses are all really uninspired compared to, again, EtG and it does a really bad job of explaining a lot of the mechanics under the surface.

Am I enjoying it? Yeah, I think so. But I can also see why it's nowhere near as good as other examples of the genre.

Fundamentally I think it's that I don't like roguelikes much - it takes a very good example of the genre to really grab me. They need to be very finely balanced: as soon as I find myself feeling like I'm battling against a random number generator and waiting for an easy run, the battle is lost. If it feels unfair at any point, I lose interest very quickly.

The best roguelikes (for me, that would be Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, Spelunky) never do that - they always make it feel like you have the tools to counter whatever they throw at you, so they keep you coming back for another run. I don't think Neon Abyss has anywhere near that level of balance.

Yep, agreed. I'd not thought about Dead Cells, but I think that's because it's not gun focused like Neon Abyss is. This one will get some attention because it's Team 17 but, honestly, their stuff recently has been pretty average. Only Overcooked really stands out from their third-party stuff, and even that's a one-trick pony in my eyes.

Forager is a compulsive little thing. I don't typically like crafting games much but this boils everything down to its absolute simplest form and comes out with something you can lose hours to without blinking.

Watched a hell of a lot of Ghosts of Tsushima and honestly don't feel I saw a whole lot to match the time I watched, very pretty game, but I'd probably get this way down the line. Hoping it's one of those games that feels better to play than to watch.

Additional Play: Nier Automata. Well this is a bit mental.

Additional Play: Carrion. Really neat role reversal, needs more stealth than you'd expect and doesn't outstay its welcome. Choosing how vicious to play it is nice too.

You'd hate it, Gar.

Finally got my copy of Paper Mario last night so took it for a spin this afternoon and I really enjoyed it.
The battle system reminded me of something I’ve played before, but can’t quite put my finger on it.
I’m about three hours in and feel it’s all been a bit hand heldy so far but I’ve already managed to screw up some fights.

Additional Play: Nier Automata. Well this is a bit mental.

Correction. The first hour (basically the intro sequence) is a bit mental. After that it seemingly turns into an incredibly boring game where you run backwards and forwards across empty landscapes doing tedious fetch quests for people. It’s nothing like the intro at all. What is happening? It’s terrible. Has anyone here played this?

Yep. I don't get why everyone thinks it's amazing. I got past the fairground to the desert area, turned it off and never went back.

That fairground is amazing… proper Ghost in the Shell creepiness. I've done one playthrough of it, but that's only the start from what I've been told.

That fairground is amazing… proper Ghost in the Shell creepiness.

But it's sooooooooo boring.

Have you met errrr, Adam and Eve yet? You meet them early on and…it's quite a sight.

Beat Trails in the Sky the 3rd and thus, I'm done with the 'Trails in the Sky' trilogy of the Legacy of Heroes series, done with Estelle and Joshua's story and done with Liberl, it's been a fucking comfy ride. Pretty crazy how this trilogy is much better at consistency, world building and carrying the ball across all three games than something like Mass Effect ever did. (which didn't even manage to carry the ammo type used from the first game)

The first two games are probably the best games on the PSP. They're on PC too…which is much less impressive in a sense, but I played the first on PSP which was fine, but I played the second on Vita and I kept forgetting it's still a PSP game becaue it was so fucking good. Considering you can play P3 on PSP and P4 on Vita I still stand by that.

I am now, 2 (TWO) games away from the Cold Steel trilogy! Woo! Ao no Kiseki and Zeo no Kiseki AKA the Crossbell* games which weren't localized or released over here, so need to figure out the best way for that.

*The entire series is set on a continent called Zemuria, the Trails in the Sky trilogy is set on a region inside this called Liberl, the next two games in a region North East of Liberl called Crossbell…and aforementioned Cold Steel games are set in the huge region of the Erebonian Empire north of both. You know how I mentioned worldbuilding/consistency in the trilogy earlier? I'm led to believe this carries on and on, characters you meet in one 'saga' show up as you'd expect doing what they should be in another saga. I'm very excited tbh. (also very tired, these are quite long games)

I played quite a bit of the first one on the PSP years ago, it was really good but nothing ever actually happened. It just plodded on and on without any real plot from what I remembered. Perfect handheld grinding fodder but I never found out if it actually went places in the end.

it was really good but nothing ever actually happened

This sounds a lot like the first Trails of Cold Steel; it spends over 60 hours worldbuilding, then ends – out of nowhere – immediately after its only major story beat happens (which involves a plot twist that makes zero f–king sense).

I have Trails in the Sky 1 on my Vita and a friend of mine who loves the series keeps on recommending it.

Yeah, the first starts slow, it got to me at first. It's basically a grand tour of all of Liberl, meeting all of its people with a bunch of events that may or may not be connected happening now and again until the 'shit got real' ending. The sequel takes this momentum as I said and gets straight to the shonen tropes. Events that happen in the second have more impact because of how they did the first game in my opinion.

If nothing else I really like the battle system.

A good battle system is enough IMO.

How can you buy Trails in the Sky 2&3? I couldn't see them on the store.

I had to buy the first one from the US PSN store, which is why I was cursed with having to play that on PSP since its actually region free, second game is on the UK store for Vita and the 3rd should be on Steam/GOG/whatever.

I think all 3 games are on PC but I wanted to play then on handheld for my commute, then realised it wasn't working out for my commute and I stopped playing for months when I realised that per trip I barely got anything done.

….fast forward to me wanting to play Cold Steel and actually understand it, and me wanting to go back to it I said 'fuck it' and started playing it instead of my PS4 at home(I have delayed my 'Tales of' series marathon for this actually* ;_;) and I decided to be smart and make sure I was always before a dungeon/boss before turning off so my commute gaming wasn't wasted on a cutscene (OPTIMISE LIFE ITSELF AND TAKE BACK CONTROL!!!!!!)

*Since I can't play them on handheld now I am actually playing Tales of the Abyss on 3DS, feels good man