Arty

Made tonkatsu today for the first time. I even made the breading myself, due to the sheer absence of panko bread crumbs, which I am led to believe are fundamental and change everything. I'll have you know I achieved a double fry crispness that makes Kimigayo sound loudly in the distance.

My only real gripe with the combo system is the lack of actual combos per se. If they had just done some basic combo A, B and C, that would have been enough additional depth to last forever. But just having a combo A with a bunch of spice still feels a bit bland, in my opinion.

They layer on a lot of complexity fairly quickly in the part of the game I am right now. Obviously you can do without min-maxing it, but I feel cool doing it, so I will keep on doing it. I find the second set of abilities a bit underwhelming, but the topple mechanic is nice, if a bit inconsistent.

I also figured out the specific conditions to perform Torgal's attack with the perfect timing. Having you do this repetitive, yet timing-based rhythm is just about the last thing I expected from a FF game, but here I am doing a full combo of swings, interwoven with magic bursts and ending with a sic

If nothing else, it makes me feel rather cool that I can do that same boss fight with less tools and cool powers. Maybe that was the idea - trying to surprise people who played the demo and have them feel like they're walking in a little bit naked, but still come out on top. Definitely interesting.

It also surprises me that the demo version of the game was in fact a fairly sizeable chunk of this "first act" of the game. Even the mode where you are given a fully kitted out Clive with a lot more powers happens to be played at a much lower lever in-game with way less abilities.

This might be revealing too much, but there are some genuine pure spectacle character-action kaiju battles in this and they are phenomenal, despite being rather basic gameplay-wise. The way they treat the summons like weapons of mass destruction is really compelling. Fickle still.

I played just as much today, and with a similar level of enthusiasm. I covered essentially all there was in the pre-release demo version. Doing so, I had the though that in some regards it reminded me a lot of Bayonetta - specifically in the way it treats cinematic and choreographs action.

I honestly don't care if half of this game is me watching a movie after holding the left analog stick forward for three steps - this shit is tighter than Benedikta's leather-clad ass-cheeks. It looks gorgeous, the music elevates the visuals, and that DMC-inspired combat just fucking works, man!

I'm simply at a loss for words. It's as if someone mature took another look at high fantasy and made it not be just pretty elves, fireballs and crystals. It's as almost if there is a human story being told behind the veneer of magic systems, pantheons, and world-building. You know, like fiction.

FFXVI is genuinely one of the most artistically cohesive games I've ever played. It's genuinely stunning.
That and it's a game where children are killed, forced to watch their parents get mutilated, and see their pet chocobo get beheaded, while the villains are having sex... in a Final Fantasy,

Started playing Way of the Samurai again and just noticed this banger of a sword I got at some point from someone's cold dead corpse. This shit refolds itself ten thousand times as I take it out of its sheathe and sears wounds upon cutting

Yesterday, I found out that the band OhGr is actually Nivek Ogre from Skinny Puppy and I've been listening to the two separately for years without ever making the connection.

I had this game back in the day, because it was one of the rare few that saw wider distribution across Europe, even in the days of optical media. There's still patches on forums which let you translate it into everything from Bulgarian to Polish. It really is a trading game first and foremost.

I've woken up with a sore throat out of absolutely nowhere. And just when I was excited to get some more shows in!
Gonna take it easy for the next day or so, see if I can't get this sorted. Thanks for bearing with me.

the kinda magic I get to play

I like the simplicity of it compared to its remakes. Modernity has added a lot of faff on top of an already effective skeleton for a game. RE2's remake shows this to full effect.
I'd maybe be interested in checking out the 2002 GameCube remake of RE1 to compare and contrast. Not soon though.

I think the leaps in fidelity towards '98 and '99 with Metal Gear and Silent Hill are far more impressive for their utilisation of the PSX's hardware. RE1 has certainly not aged badly in any regard, and is completely playable, even to a modern sensibility.

I did find the contrast with the original auto-aim-less 1996 release to be significant. I'd never recommend that over the Director's Cut. The base game itself is well put together and is definitely impressive visually in that late 90s way. It's been an educational experience. Food for thought.

My issue is probably not with choosing a character, but rather whether I would recommend RE1 as an experience at all. On one side, I feel pretty blase about it. I'm not entranced by it or madly in love with it. On the other, I did beat the game twice, which I often never do, especially back to back.

Having to backtrack more and having to make more deliberate decisions as to which corridors to clear and make your life easier for Chris is a different mode of through than with Jill, who only really needs to go to a place once and can then run away with little consequence or inconvenience.

Would I recommend her for first-time players as their first character? I'd say no. Chris has a much more careful and considerate balance between combat and exploration, while Jill can ignore a lot of things that teach you how to play the game in Chris' route. It definitely puts hair on your chest.

The reason why Jill's speedrun is significantly shorter, and why most people seem to gravitate towards her side of the game, is because she is through-and-through the built-in easy mode in the original release of RE1. With the Director's Cut, Training Mode might as well make her route a scenic tour.

And that's all before you get into the Lab, where you can't save for a while, so if you fuck up and you haven't saved since doing all those chores - you get to do all that again every time you get chewed to death by respawning zombies. I did that section 4 times last night and I remember it by heart

If you saved before it in the snake corridor, you'll have to leave the flamethrower, dodge the snakes, dodge the boulder, crank three times, push the statue, crank twice, get the book, open the book, run out, get the map, get the MO Disc, and then go up to the Fountain.

Last, that little section of the Caves, just before you get to the Fountain, where you have to hex-crank the pain away of having to dodge another boulder, have enough slots to hold the MO Disc, the new Doom Book, still keep the Hex Crank, have a weapon and ammo, and still haul the other book too.

I also deeply dislike the reactor/generator rooms in the Laboratory, full of Chimeras.
I'm wise enough to just run through them and not waste my time, but the angles are just more numerous and disorienting, even knowing the layout. It's hard to navigate with the tank controls more than other rooms.

At the end of both playthrough, I thought about what are the real groaner parts of RE1. My conclusion was that Yawn's fights are immensely annoying, especially with the sequences you need to have cleared up before hand in order to have a clean and easy save to retry his fights from.