Sunday 18 March 2018

Recent gaming status: FEH, DDR and TWEWY2

It seems like there are more gaming content than ever on this blog, and this entry is no exception. I planned to write something about travelling some time soon...eventually (like undertale on switch).

So again, here goes my thoughts on 3 of my beloved games.

Fire Emblem Heroes

The best way to comment on this self-evolving game is to count the major changes over the past two months...



Main plot development: it's certainly good. We get longer and deeper story that describes the characters in a better way (redditers are certainly worrying about the general who knows nothing when her sister was captured). And we get many good banners (that sucked our money) too. We got lots of good banners: fallen heroes created a shit ton of memes on literally every characters (Grima who is afraid of children of course), and the Morgans are too adorable for every Fire Emblem players (including those who have never played Awakening). (oh. who's Chrom? I don't even know he's here...)

Blessed garden: ok I got the idea that IS wants people to utilize the elemental mechanism, but giving out more of the blessings is not going to work super effectively because it's relatively restrictive to use. You need to be on the right season, you need to bring another legendary hero (which you don't always like), and the whole process is pretty much irreversible. It's a pain for me to assign blessings to characters so that they can enter the garden -- I ended up assigning into characters that make a balanced team and benefits from the associated bonus stat of that elemental type. I will just take the bonus as it is right now, but I am also looking for some more meaningful features as one of the "big 6" on the battle menu --- for example --- the town!

Tap Battle: well...that's interesting. The game design is certainly good -- it has a widespread difficulty spectrum and a rather relaxing rewarding system so that all players can enjoy the event in the way they liked. In the MUG aspect some may complain those randomly wandering wyvern knights but those are nothing compared to the W-shaped hitting zone in MUSECA (which then got fixed in the 1 1/2 gen). The timing difficulty is alright, though the setting that late hit is more favorable than early hits itches me slightly.
What can be improved is the storyline. They definitely filled some memes into it (Bartes and Fir; and Fae) and the spring reactions from bonded heroes are super adorable, but is it possible to have some minimal conversation pre-/post-event? That would improve the event significantly. Even a random masked Marth bullshit request works -- some is always better than none.

Rival Domains: that could be a turning point on the development of this game. This is much closer to the original franchise which I called the battle royle - a much larger map with forts and camps included as game target. Whether it's permanent or not it widens the possibility of the game and I now have even higher expectation on the game.
Controversy appears when official announcement told players "to try autobattle if you can't do it". Some thinks that the mode is flawed if the game tells players to autobattle. Well for sure the complexity is a lot higher (particularly with all those teleportation), so why not learn from the AI before battling fluently?
It sounds like another ideological battle between authentic FE players and FEH players -- the AI (both player and the enemy) showed that forcing a clear with 8 units is difficult; on the other hand playing aggressively and sacrificing units when needed turned to be an effective strategy. To FE players this is unacceptable as a no death clear is an essential part of the game, in contrast to repetitive, exhaustive usage of characters in FEH. The death of characters is worthless -- you know that since day 1 of assault-type missions are pushed into the game. It's just the official announcement and the elevated concentration of deaths from 20 in 7 battles to 20 in 1 battles that triggers the flames on reddit. Solving such dispute could be a big plus for me, though I doubt if there's any real solution, given the nature of handheld games.

Dance Dance Revolution

The biggest news in the town must be the brand new DDR A cabinet in Auckland which seemed to stay for a large period of time. And damn I never meet such a large group of DDR players here, some of which can play the 15-17 range proficiently.

I finally recharged my e-amusement card and get my 573 subscription going. It's extremely disappointing that you can't even find the DDR pentagon with subscription...while I am now fully confident to get some 100+voltage plays going I can never access my own pentagon again.

With limited practices I managed to tip-toe a bit better and hopefully I can steadily tackle most 16 now (except those stupid BGM changes like Pluto, Osaka evolved, Fascination ~love mix~...).

The World Ends with You 2

Oh.
My.

This is the sole reason of buying a brand new switch with no games (not even kirby -- unless it's a mirror labyrinth remake). It is finally coming after 10 damn years.
I am of course a big fan of it, which can be seen from my praise/comment entry on the blog 10 years ago. I now disagree with some of what I wrote, but my rating on the game only raised with time.

Solo remix is the reason I bought my first pad, and I went hard to get the game finished in no time. I again managed to complete 100% pin collection on the pad even with all those stupid controls without a second monitor. I saw hype-chan and got hyped since 2015, and till 2018.

I visited Shibuya and traveled around the first time with no difficulty, just as being a JK visiting all the trendy shops twice or thrice a week, My local friend even got surprised when I show unusual familiarity to the area.

And now, it's the time for the final remix.

To me, TWEWY is the best ever RPG fully exploiting every single possibility as provided by the console (DS here). That did not ended well while exporting to pad, but I have very high expectation on this final remix. I call TWEWY ARPG of the DS generation -- and I want TWEWY2 to reach the same bar. Labo is probably better when it comes to possibility exhibition, but we can still fight for ARPG of the generation :D!

And please, don't make "available in 2018" into "available in December 2018" lol - we have been waiting too long.