Henry Spencer wrote: Yeah, Wolfenstein is probably the best shooter I've played this gen yet. My mate keeps telling me to play Doom, though. Should really get that at some point.
Currently I have given FFXIV a well earned break, after around 10 or so days playing it non-stop. The main reason is because my bro got me this fine gem:
I've pretty much just been playing so much of that since Christmas, every day whenever I can. Just as weird, crazy and madly addictive as ever. I love this series. Already has a much better pace than SMTIV did and the list of improvements is massive:
+Bosses stay tough throughout the game, not difficulty spike early on and then game gets too easy. Also, there's better build up to bosses in this game. You will feel dread going against some of these bosses who you meet early on, just like in Nocturne, these demons all have their own personality traits that you just don't meet for one battle and that's that. In that sense, it's way better than SMTIV where you just meet the boss, kill it and move on forgetting about them straight away.
+Difficulty selection is available from the offset and you can swap the difficulty whilst in the game itself.
+World Map is no longer a clusterfuck and everything is labelled clearly. There's now even a Mapper system that makes navigation sooo much easier. And oh my god, so much of the enemies racing after you whilst you try to get your bearings. Game changer, honestly.
+Much easier to obtain AP than before now (dead bodies now instead of giving you resources give you AP).
+Alignment system actually has more than just Chaos, Law and neutral again like in Nocturne. There's a lot of factions in this game and even within these factions there's Civil Wars going on. Feels like there's a lot going on in the setting, not just you being the centre of the universe.
+The cast of characters are waaaay better than SMTIV's cardboard cut out factory of "I'm the Law guy who believes in Justice and I am pretentiousness incarnate" to "I am the Chaos guy who believes in survival of the fittest and think people should fight to earn their right to live" to Neutral "I have no personality/am boring but like manga and think both sides suck". Yeah, was not a fan of the writing in SMTIV at all, it was plain as fuck, not at all memorable like past games and not in the Nocturne way of minimalism but rather in a way "simple as simple gets" kinda way. Here, it's way more interesting and complex. So many dynamics going on.
+Masayuki Doi, the new SMT series artist (replacing Kaneko) is now a fantastic artist to me. I really like his character designs in this game, a big step up from his boring designs in SMTIV. Also, the Demon Designs are faaaar better this time. No more ugly Demon Art that is jarring (bad Art Direction in SMTIV, imo), Masayuki Doi steps up as the new Demon Artist of the series and redrew all of the bad art from SMTIV into making it similar to Kaneko's designs. He did a very, very good job. I love the look of Lucifer and the new demons in this game like Dagda. Doi did Kaneko proud. *sniff*
+The Voice Acting is surprisingly great. Felt like it was decent in SMTIV but everyone seems perfectly cast here this time.
+/-Atmosphere is just as strong as ever. However, now that you have all of these party members following you it makes the loneliness factor a lot less. This game is closer to Soul Hackers and Digital Devil Saga in that sense, than it is Nocturne. Your mileage may vary on how you like mainline SMT.
-Music is certainly very good so far, but is definitely a step down from SMTIV's soundtrack which was fantastic (not Meguro, but still fantastic).
+Combat is so much better balanced now. They've made some big changes as well adding in some new twists to the formula - Smirks from SMTIV do not guarantee you a dodge from enemies and it is only through smirking that Mudo and Hama (previously instant kill spells) actually insta-kill enemies weak to them. Mudo and Hama now actually do damage to enemies in normal phase (which mean I actually use them a lot more now). Heavy attacks only use MP now, none use HP at all, so MP is even more important now. Spells now have a + and a - effect, if it's in the minus it means that Demon is crap at using it, whereas the higher the + the better the damage output and crit chances. Speaking of critical attacks, you can now perform them with Magic spells as well as with Physical. Press Turns can now be chained even higher more easily because of this. Also, you have party members that each grant special abilities and have a Persona like "All Out Attack" mechanic that also grants you another set of extra turns against enemies. This is balanced against the fact that enemies hit you hard in this game.
+No more "you have to go here to accept quests" bullshit, now it's simply assigned to you automically as you are playing the game.
-You visit a LOT of the same areas as SMTIV. Would be advised to leave it a long time after playing SMTIV before touching Apocalypse. Especially since it follows one of the routes in SMTIV.
Also got Batman: Arkham Knight which is all kinds of ace as well. Glad i took such a big break from the series after Origins since I didn't want to go in feeling burned out on the formula. And hey, it works for me, the beat'em up combat came back to me as soon as I landed in my first group of baddies that needed the snot kicked out of them, plus just being Batman is always so satisfying in these games, alas they have gotten too carried away with the Batmobile missions but the actual act of being Batman has never been captured as well as it has in this series. There's something to be said for being able to come up against such a wide array of batman's Rogues gallery. I have played countless batman games over the years, the SNES Batman Returns, the Mega Drive Batman Returns, the Sunsoft Batman game based upon the 1989 Tim Burton film, the Adventures of Batman & Robin for Mega Drive, the awful Batman Forever game, the rather bad Batman Vengeance game, the arcade game etc they all tried to various degrees but none captured the actual spirit of being the Bat like these games have. Being able to just explore Gotham and complete all of these RPG like quests makes it even better for me. Also like seeing the Joker being a psychological scar tissue for Batman opening those old, hard wounds of his. Having a blast with it, a shame so many didn't like it much.
I always got the impression that it wasn't so much that people didn't like Arkham Knight (the game is ridiculously well-designed, I don't know how one could dislike it so much), but that the PC version (and maybe the console versions, I dunno) suffered from some major bugs early on, so it got bad feedback because of that and never really recovered, despite the problems being patched later on. The shitty thing about the pool of Steam reviews, for example, is that they stay around regardless of patching, and "thumbs down" reviews stay thumbs down reviews, no matter how much the problems become remedied later. Arkham Knight is a fantastically well-designed game, but it's status remains "mixed" on Steam because of problems early on. Not really fair, and that's a damn shame.
I actually just bought SMTIV: Apocalypse yesterday myself, funny coincidence. Haven't even gone far at all into SMTIV yet, but figured I'd grab this anyway. Played just a few minutes, but man, it's crazy how well they manage to mix the basic presentation styles of the old Super Famicom games with that of Nocturne. Aesthetically, the game is really goddamn attractive. No clue when I'll delve in fully, but I know I'll enjoy it when I do.