Whatcha Been Playing?

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
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Simonsloth
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Simonsloth »

Alex79uk wrote: June 12th, 2021, 9:23 pmQuadrilogy :(
I think maybe it’s like Indiana Jones, everyone forgets about the other one.

Unlike Indy where I consciously try to forget the fourth film with Arkham Origins it’s because it wasn’t by the same team so it slips my mind.
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shadowless_kick
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by shadowless_kick »

Lonely Mountains Downhill

I'm not into mountain biking at all, but I read this game had a kind of peaceful, calming effect in the reviews, and I'm happy to say that's true. (well, calming for everything but my left thumb, which gets more of a workout than usual from hugging all those curves!)

it's got a simplistic look and no music, just the ambient nature sounds. everything gels nicely, aesthetically. it's challenging keeping your rider from slamming into a tree or careening over the edge of a cliff, but failing just makes you wanna try again (and again...). plus, there are lots of alternate routes to find to improve your times.

unfortunately, it suffers from what I originally thought was "dropped frames," but a quick search suggets that only applies to network errors. periodically everything will just freeze for a fraction of a second—and it's really jarring in a game so focused on flow and continuous movement. it's my only real issue with the game.
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Jon Cheetham
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Jon Cheetham »

Simonsloth wrote: June 12th, 2021, 10:41 pm
Alex79uk wrote: June 12th, 2021, 9:23 pmQuadrilogy :(
I think maybe it’s like Indiana Jones, everyone forgets about the other one.

Unlike Indy where I consciously try to forget the fourth film with Arkham Origins it’s because it wasn’t by the same team so it slips my mind.
There's four?! I'll be honest, I have only mild interest in Batman as a character I just know I bagged three of these when they were free!
Marlew
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Marlew »

I've been playing Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart and enjoying it. I don't really know or like the series besides twenty minutes here and there but I was swayed by the reviews and I fancied a new game. It's certainly a technical showcase. The gameplay feels the same as ever but it is very tight and snappy and the haptics add a certain satisfying something. With RT60 mode on, blackout blinds, 3D audio, OLED screen, it is one hell of a spectacle. I'm only just at the second area, not sure how long it is but I already want to go back to replay the first 'chapter' because there was so much going on, I couldn't possibly take it all in. Feels like being injected with Skittles.
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Angry_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Angry_Kurt »

Alex79uk wrote: June 12th, 2021, 2:57 pm [
Personally I just found it a bit dull compared to the Uncharted games. Didn't care about the story or characters, which is a huge part of the Naughty Dog series for me. I never played the first two rebooted TR games, however, so it's a little unfair of me to say that considering I may well have built up an attachment to the characters prior to playing this third one, but that's how I felt after I'd finished it anyway. The difficultly settings were nice though, individual sliders for combat, puzzles and climbing.
I find the story and characters dull too, especially in comparison to uncharted, but I think everything else about it is better.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

I finished The Saboteur on PS3. Would have blown me away in 2009, but still a very enjoyable World War II open world. Also got a good finish on Riddle of the Sphinx on Atari 2600, but no one wants to hear about that, and the same is probably true for arcade BurgerTime, as good as it still plays!

Loads of water-based racing this week too - mostly more Wave Race on GameCube, which I’m alright at again now, but also arcade Hydro Thunder on PS2 and my old university arcade favourite Hydra on the Spectrum, which is a bit messy at times but a fine attempt that came very late in its life… Would have loved an ST version, but it disappeared without trace just before release!

Not really sure what to sink my teeth into next. Toss up between Silent Hill 3 or Dead Space, neither of which I’ve ever played, but while there’s loads of football on telly I might also stick with some more arcade stuff.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

Took a break from Monster Hunter Rise after playing 65 hours in a month, and returned to 3D All Stars. Picked up my save on Mario 64 where I'm at 62 stars. I'd planned originally to try to get every star, but I can't be bothered now so just aiming for the 70 to see the ending.

I will say, control issues aside, the game has terrible pacing. Pacing might be the wrong word, but the fun is so heavily front loaded. Early stages like Bom-Omb Battlefield, Whomp's Fortress and Cool, Cool Mountain are still a lot of fun to play. But later areas like Tick Tock Clock and that Huge Tiny World (?) are just not fun. Loads of instant death drops, hard to navigate, horrible. In fact, the castle itself is a huge pain in the ass, just trying to find the stages to actually play! Mario 64 is a real game of its time I think, this shit wouldn't fly today. (Unless it was wearing a wing cap, hur hur hur).
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Truk_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

I've also gone back to All Stars but with Mario Galaxy with the aim of getting everything in the game. I'll see how far I get. Ever since getting everything in Bowsers Fury I have had an urge to go back and getting everything in other 3D Marios. I do want to know whether I can get everything in each galaxy as I go through them before moving on to the next one, or does it work that some stars and comets (which I think are a thing) unlock when you see the credits? It's been so long since I played it on Wii I can't remember.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

I played a couple of demos of a few games that have been put out as part of E3. The first was the demo for Sable. This is one that has been on my radar for a while. It's an adventure game of sorts where you explore around a desert on a hover bike. In the demo you're gathering parts to build your own hover bike as part of a ceremony taking place because you're leaving the nomadic tribe you're a part of. It has a nice relaxing feel to it, and an extremely striking art style. It has a sort of psuedo-Moebius comic look to it, with really strong colours, cel shading, and sharp outlines to everything. It also has intentionally limited animation frames for the running animation. It actually worked well, giving it the feel of some old cartoon or something. Another nice touch it has is that a lot of the dialogue is also narrated (through text) by the character you play as. It's probably partially a way to save on having to do much animation work for NPCs, but it adds a nice sense of personality to the game as you get to see what your character thinks of others by how they comment on them through their own inner monologue. It's pretty well written too.

It had some pretty rough technical issues though, but I think they are probably only because of this being an unfinished demo. For some reason there was no ability to make the game properly fullscreen. Only windowed or borderless, although changing that setting seemed to do nothing. There are no options, and no v-sync, meaning constant screen tearing all the time. It could also use with some better anti-aliasing as well. An issue probably made worse by the sharp outlines on everything. But I'm fairly confident these won't be an issue with the full game.

The other demo I tried was for Unsighted. This is a game I hadn't heard of until hearing this demo existed, and it was a pleasant surprise. It's an action adventure game that seems like a mix of influences like Hyper Light Drifter, Metroid, and a bit of Zelda too. You play as an android who wakes up in an abandoned lab, in a half-destroyed futuristic city. No humans in sight, only robots and a few strange black monsters. And a dog that you can pet. It has your usual melee abilities, that include a pretty satisfying parry, as well as a gun that has an active reload mechanic. It feels pretty nice in the hands, although it does have a weird quirk in that your sword swings feel much slower and heavier when they actually connect with something. Like if you just swing your sword around at nothing it's fast and snappy, but if it hits something it slows down a lot, almost like it's a completely different weapon. It didn't feel bad or anything, and it's obviously meant to give a sense of impact, but it does it in kind of a strange way.

Although it has a top-down perspective and has plays similarly to HLD with a few Zelda puzzles, the world has a very Metroid-like structure to it, where you can loop back and open up new areas with new abilities. The map screen is so clearly taking cues from Metroid that it's impossible to not notice. Aesthetically it seems mostly in line with Metroid too, with a very dark and moody sci-fi style, and a sense of isolation and mystery. The music is clearly trying to emulate Metroid, and it's also raining in the demo area as well, which adds to the atmosphere.

There's a couple of boss fights in there too. The first is against a robot that dashes around the arena and fires shots at you as well. It was pretty fun and intense. Quite challenging, but not too much. Movement patterns happen really quickly and change up a lot, but it gives you just enough warning to be able to pick up on it. I did have an issue keeping track of my own character in these moments though, but I think part of that is down to the rain covering the screen, that I assume isn't a thing for other areas in the game. The demo ends with another boss fight against two large tentacle monsters that it seems you're not meant to be able to beat, as it goes in to a cutscene after you get killed. But it didn't feel unfair at all though, and I think with some practice I probably could take them down. There's a leaderboard in the demo too, so it seems some other people have already done that.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Started God of War 2 HD today. Been meaning to get back to this one for a long time. I've been mulling over whether to play on the PS3 or try it out on the emulator, as I did with the PSP remasters recently. First I went with the PS3 version, and I was surprised to find that this version isn't as good as I remember it. It has a lot of frame drops during combat, in scenes that aren't even especially taxing. I was also reminded of some of the issues I've always had with the sound design of this game. It's always annoyed me how whenever you hit a wall with your blades it makes a very loud and unpleasant clang noise. On top of that the intro mission is filled with enemies that all have shields, and for some reason they decided that the sound they make when you hit them an awful bonk noise, regardless if they are blocking or not. So not a great first impression.

I decided to switch over to the emulator instead to see how it compared. Turns out, it's much better. While performance is still not perfect, it's a significant step up. It still dips every so often, but never to a noticeable degree during combat. The colours also looked richer and nicer too, although that might just be down to my TV settings. And once I got past the intro level, the constant bonk sounds stopped, and impacts start feeling a lot more meaty, without the audioscape sounding like a total mess. It turns out that having vibration enabled also improved the feeling of impact too. I wanted to play this with the Dualshock 4, and the PS3 recognises it as a third party controller, and so rumble doesn't work. But with the emulator it does, and it's surprising how much it actually improves the experience.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

Didn't realise PS3 emulation had come on so much. Imagine you need a pretty beefy PC, right?
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

Alex79uk wrote: June 19th, 2021, 4:34 pm Didn't realise PS3 emulation had come on so much. Imagine you need a pretty beefy PC, right?
Yeah it's really impressive. My PC isn't particularly powerful by current standards either. Still running a GTX970 with an i7-4790K CPU. That said, so far I've only tried one game that was actually made for the PS3 natively though. Rain, which is a pretty small scope adventure game. It did run pretty satisfactorily though. At some point I might try something a bit more ambitious.
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DeadpoolNegative
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Cyber Shadow- so much for the generous checkpointing! I've finally hit a wall in level... four, I think? I've been doing this same stretch of level over and over again for what feels like months. And yet, I'm not mad (Probably because it's on GamePass), there's something weirdly pleasing, at least for this particular game, about trying to crack the classic 8-bit difficulty. Anyone got any pointers?

Grand Theft Auto V- Beat this for the fourth time last month, and as I said, previously, it's one of the best single player experiences of its generation, if not THE best. What's bizarre is that I realized that in my three previous playthroughs for the final heist I always chose jacking the armored truck and Fast and Furiousing out of there as opposed to stealing the gigantic drill and blasting my way into the Union Depository.

Well, this time I stole the gigantic drill, and while it was slightly more of a hassle setting it up than stealing the cars, it was no less thrilling and amazing once the heist actually happened. Shooting your way through the Los Santos streets, reminiscent of the classic Liberty City bank robbery in GTA4 (The one you could cheat your way out of by running down into the subways and waiting for the wanted level to go down).

for the third time I chose the the C ending, the only ending that logically makes sense. I did once do the "Kill Trevor" path and that was well done but... why would Franklin kill either Trevor or Michael, or why not give us the option to kill them both?

At the end of the game, I decided to try my hand at the hunting elk minigame with Trevor. When I played it on the 360, I was able to get a gold medal. However, this time around I've spent several attempts to progress with it, and this version of the game, at least, is pretty unfair. I get ten, twenty minutes into hunting and I always get ambushed by a bobcat. Always. I hear the growl, I try to gin up a shotgun or rifle to attack it but it overtakes me and that's a insta-kill, and my entire attempt is ruined. And I have to reload the save to drive all the way back to the hunting spot so I can get an early morning start. I hate when my time isn't respected like that.

But back to the game. As I stated in an earlier thread, without Dan Houser and Leslie Benzies, the era of the great Rockstar open world game has come to a close. There's just too much money to be made in things like GTA online, and there's no GTA6 anywhere on the horizon. The Take 2 E3 presentation would have been the place to at least give us a teaser, but there was... nothing. And it's a crying shame. But money is money. I haven't really tried GTA Online at all, but I get that millions of people love it.

I have to tell you, though, if I wind up with a Series X this fall, and assuming it's gone from GamePass by then, I might get that upgrade. There's a part of me that holds out a faint hope there will be new single player content, even though that's a pipe dream. But I want to play this adventure again, on the best non-PC tech available. It's just that good.

Dull Grey- I got this cheap ($3.99) and it's a pretty clever, absurdist visual novel that should take you about 15 minutes to complete (well, I am also a very fast reader). I assume its creators are Russian, or at the very least eastern European, since it's got a pretty fatalistic tone. We're in a strange, arctic techno future, and the main character's mother is taking him on a journey to find out his career path. either being a lamplighter like your father, or a tallyman like your uncle. The game presents this same decision to you over and over again, and it seems like a joke, but the more it happens the more you suspect something else might be going on. The world itself is illustrated with cable trams and wandering robots and lonely mountains. What is a lamplighter? What is a tallyman? The game is pretty vague about this. But you have to decide... or do you? There are 11 endings according to the achievements. Here's hoping I make the right decision to uncover them all.

Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl- I'm not much of a fan of Kevin Smith These days- to put it mildly- but I was pretty intrigued by this side scrolling brawler done in the 8 bit style, which I believe came out a year ago as a Kickstarter bonus for a current gen side scrolling brawler that's set to come out by the end of 2021.

I'm given to understand that the game was not reverse engineered 8bit from current tech like, say, Shovel Knight, but built on actual NES hardware. This version also is a slightly upgraded version from the original, which got some criticism for difficulty spikes (You can play the original version). The game really does look, sound, and unfortunately play like a game that was made for the NES, back in 1995.

I say "1995" because the game is an epilogue to Mallrats, explaining just how Jay and Bob got out of the Mall after causing all that mayhem during the dating show. It plays a lot like my beloved River City Ransom, as you punch and kick your way and jump kick and grab all sorts of weapons, some of which the game actually doles out achievements for as you pick them up- really, I got an Achievement picking up a hockey stick and a sock full of quarters. I also got an Achievement for beating up Mooby the Golden Calf, one of many, many ViewAskewniverse references.

Or there would be many, if I could get past level 2- the game can be super hard, sometimes randomly, I think I've figured out the rhythms of an enemy at one attempt and I completely blow it in another attempt. The game has the stiffness of the weaker NES brawlers, and the frustrations of enemies too fast for me. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what the game wants me to do in that second boss battle.

You get to play Bob and Jay of course, and you can switch between them even if there's little reason to do so other than one's life meter is running out. They have different moves but play pretty similarly. They all look cute and it's a nice reminder of how unique the whole Smith thing felt 25 plus years ago, before it disappeared inside its creator's own ego.

--Dan
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Angry_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Angry_Kurt »

If Rockstar don’t release a GTA 6 with a single player component to it, I’ll eat my metaphorical hat 😜 I get that GTA online is a big money spinner, but there’s going to be millions of people that want a single player campaign with no interest in online which is money they can’t turn their nose up at and would still be worth the investment to do, until V GTA games were still best sellers even without a online component (except the ok online mode in IV). Just my opinion on the matter.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Dragon Spirit on PC-Engine is one of my regular football on the telly halftime games, so I was keen to try Dragon Spirit: The New Legend, the NES follow-up on Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 on Switch, which I picked up for about £3 in a sale recently. It’s also a very good shooter, but it’s short and not very difficult in comparison, especially the handful of bosses, one of which only took one direct hit! A couple of hours play and you’ll see the end, but a fun time all the same.

Also beat arcade Continental Circus on PS2, which I’ve spent years not quite seeing the end of, but when I finally crossed the final finish line in first place I spent the rest of the evening with a pleasant sense of mild elation as a reward!

And I’ve played through what I guess is most of Silent Hill 3 on PS2. I adore SH2, and this is nowhere near that, but it’s been growing on me as the week’s gone on, and while a lot of it is by numbers, there’s one part involving a maze that I thought nailed it in particular. I also picked up the HD collection on Xbox for £6 in the latest sale, paid for with the £8 credit Microsoft awarded me a couple of months ago - better than the prices I’ve been seeing on eBay for months!

Apart from that, a load more GameCube Wave Race, and Forza Horizon 4. Fun times.
Marlew
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Marlew »

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

I don't know the series at all really, but I'm enjoying this as a mindless Saturday morning-style romp. I don't especially like this kind of Dreamworks/Pixar art style in movies, but it looks very impressive in motion - very colourful and smooth and snappy. I wouldn't necessarily say it's worth £70, but I'd rather play one of these every few months than spend twice that looking for treasures in the mass of fodder released every day. I'm definitely happier these days for predominantly just playing the big name releases and shmups.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

My eldest has brought over that 51 Worldwide Classics games collection for Switch, but unless we are missing something, it doesn't appear to support couch multiplayer? There's 4 of us here and I'd assumed we'd be able to play the bowling or some of the other stuff, all on the TV with a joycon each. Is this possible, does anyone know? First time we've booted the game up and the option just doesn't seem to exist...?

EDIT: Never mind, you CAN play couch multiplayer, you just have to play some single player first for some reason. Additionally, the bowling game only supports two players, you can play 4 player. Which seems a bit bullshit, frankly. Not sure why they've decided to limit that!
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Seph
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Seph »

I got Devotion the other day, from the unfairly treated, but incredibly talented, Red Candle Games. From what I've played so far it's a fairly good replacement for PT in that it's a first-person horror game with no combat, but plenty to discover. There's already moments early on that are making me feel tense; and like their first game (Detention) the atmosphere is really foreboding.

You need to buy direct from them because no store front will distribute it because of complaints from "gamers". CDPR were especially poor with their handling of it and I'm happy to see people finally calling out this shower of shite for the way they've been acting recently.

https://shop.redcandlegames.com/games/devotion
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Feirsteax »

I really liked Detention, must give that a go.

After the Nintendo Direct and seeing how good Metroid DREAD looks, I decided to get my 3DS again and play Metroid: Samus Returns.
It seems I only got a few hours into it back when I first bought it then forgot about it, so I've picked up my save file and continued from there. It's absolutely brilliant, I'm loving it. It's just good, classic metroid, but the combat and movement feels satisfying and smooth, and there's a good level of challenge here too.

Playing it has been fun, and it's just amped my hype for Metroid Dread significantly. Watching the trailer again, the gameplay looks so slick in 60 fps :mrgreen:
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

After finishing the main story I continued on with Final Fantasy XV some more, clearing up some endgame stuff I always wanted to do. Not 100%ing the game exactly, just stuff I felt like I was missing out on before. Some of it was good, some not so much.

I did the massive Adamantoise boss fight. The giant mountain-sized superboss which takes like 40 minutes to beat. Honestly not particularly fun. The main problem seems to be the sheer size of it breaks the games combat systems. Mostly with the lock-on not knowing what to do with the thing. Often I was trying to hit it, yet Noctis would just stand there doing nothing, or he decided he would rather run in to the limb I'm standing next to trying to hit the one behind it instead. The camera frequently freaks out with similar issues. The boss itself isn't particularly dangerous. Attacks can wipe you out in one hit, but by that point in the game you'll have more than enough healing items, and those attacks don't happen very frequently. The hardest thing was just trying to find a spot that I was actually allowed to hit and keeping locked on to it.

Another thing I did was go through all the dungeons hidden behind the sealed doors you find at the back of other dungeons. Seeing these things and not being able to do anything with them has always bothered me all the way back to when I first played the game and you see one in the first real dungeon you go in to. These were much more fun, although I feel like perhaps they don't offer much in terms of unique content. They are long combat gauntlets full of copy-pasted rooms and tough high level enemies. At the end of each one there's a boss, but each one is simply a variant of another monster seen elsewhere in the game. But I still really enjoyed digging in to the combat mechanics here and getting stuck in to some high level fights. I got better at the Armiger Unleashed mode doing this too, so it was fun to master that. The last dungeon was a bit of a roadblock though. The suggested level for it is 99, which also happens to be the soft cap, so grinding to over-level yourself for it isn't really an option. On top of that, it arbitrarily prevents you from using any recovery items through the whole dungeon. So on my first couple of attempts I got totally crushed pretty early on. After a while preparing I worked out other ways to heal using magic and some of Ignis' abilities, and I got through it without much trouble. It was pretty satisfying to finish, and finally complete those dungeons after them taunting me for so many years.

I also tried the secret platforming dungeon for a little bit, but I lost patience with it only about a quarter of the way through and decided it wasn't worth it. Don't feel like I missed anything worthwhile there. Currently wondering if I want to give the Omega boss fight another attempt, but I'm not too motivated to do that right now. I also tried going back to the Comrades expansion since I never played much of that before. I get the impression there's actually significant story to this, and I do want to know what happens during this period of the timeline. But it wasn't long before I realised why I quit before. It's nothing but combat which is much inferior to the main game, and the rate you gain XP is absurdly slow, requiring tedious grinding right from the start. No thanks.
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