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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 17, 2016 16:36:55 GMT -6
What, no rhythm game bullet hell bosses? If there's a boss that plays out like the music levels from Rayman Legends I'd be so down.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 16, 2016 19:44:24 GMT -6
If there's some kind of weapon/equipment loadout swapping option, it should be fast and snappy with no menu nonsense. I never used Dawn of Sorrow's because it felt so clunky to me, but OoE's feels fine. A good option to cycle through equipment means the difference between Phantasy Star Online (fast, on the fly, overall very non-intrusive to gameplay) and Phantasy Star 0 (slow, you have to stand still, and it doesn't pause the gameplay). actually i have the opposite problem, dos its a button push and youve swapped, theres 2 options so you dont have to cycle or accidentally pick the wrong one ooe i cant stand that i have to hold down a button, cycle through, and im constantly overshooting or picking the wrong set cause i went the wrong direction, or getting hit cause my backdash is occupied, its as unintuitive as having to use A to use an item in skyward sword instead of B >.< i think a mix of the 2 systems would be better, where you can have up to 3 sets like ooe but you have the added option to turn set c off for a more dos setup, and have swapping mapped to a single button press (maybe l1/r1 by default) so you arent having to perform an awkward button combo to swap and are less likely to overshoot Oh no, did I get them mixed up? Shoot. I guess I'll backtrack on that and also add the addendum of wanting more than two equipment loadouts.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 16, 2016 19:36:39 GMT -6
I think...
That in Castlevania's history, bosses that straight-up fight you come across as puzzles! Goliath, Blackmore, and Eligor from OoE (Yes I love this game and maybe I will marry it!!!!) both have specific patterns and attacks you need to work around, and figuring out which attack they'll use after the next are the puzzle. When I first fought Blackmore, I came to the conclusion I had to use some gimmick to beat him because he dealt such an absurd amount of damage, but nope, you just need to figure out his attacks and work around them.
I mean, think about IGA's favorite boss, Abaddon. You can work around his attacks, moving to avoid specific attacks by using various souls, or you can try to go on the offensive to attack through the locusts that Abaddon summons. The solution to the puzzle is the same: beat Abaddon, but the tools you use and which route you take are just how you're solving the puzzle. That being said, I think that Eligor is the closes OoE gets to a "puzzle" boss, because of how involved all of his attacks are depending on which portion of the battle you're at.
I guess basically what I'm saying is that every fight in Bloodstained should be like Azel in God Hand.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 12, 2016 22:07:37 GMT -6
Battle Fantasia is a fighting game by ArkSystemWorks (best known for Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and P4A) that was designed as an engine test game for the Taito Type X2 that has a great art style meant to be reminiscent of an JRPG. It also has a pretty good soundtrack. The story is presented in the visual novel style typical to ASW games, however the fighting mechanics are a bit easier than most ASW games, and it feels much closer to Street Fighter than BlazBlue, I would say.
Also, Ashley is mai husbando. Like sooo much.
BATTLE FANTASIA HYYYYPPE I used to contribute articles to Gather Your Party, and one of their most prominent members is HyperbitHero, who makes videos about the kind of stuff in this topic. It's called Your Next Favorite, and while the bulk of it is about the Yakuza series (there's over twice as much Yakuza footage between two videos than the other two videos in the playlist combined!) I picked up Folklore on his suggestion and I'm quite enjoying it. Check the series out here: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAKDpWaRcK8coLGAO5ZJgN7vWc-Xcj9F9
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 12, 2016 20:49:08 GMT -6
Old topic resurrection! (and/or paging Dragon_of_Dojima ) I can't stop listening to the songs from the various entries in the Yakuza series. They're all amazing, span a TON of genres, and sound great while checking off all the points I consider to be necessary for good video game music: having a unique sound that fits the situation, being memorable, and being a good piece of music in its own right. Of particular interest is this awesome boss theme from Yakuza 0: This intense chase music from Yakuza 4: And an arrangement of a classic in Project X Zone 2:
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 12, 2016 20:33:32 GMT -6
I feel like the farther we are from Dracula the better. Bloodstained is its own thing, so the *wink wink nudge nudge* stuff with Dracula will feel really forced for people familiar with the game, and really jarring for people not familiar with the game. Additionally, I feel that IGA establishing Bloodstained as its own thing and making bank with contributions means that the fans support IGA making things happen rather than just wanting Castlevania.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 12, 2016 20:31:30 GMT -6
So, something a bit crazy happened over the weekend. Wearing Castlevania shirts tends to make things happen like this. I was wearing an Alucard shirt, an original design from Yetee I believe, and someone I'd seen before at a fighting game tournament comes up to me Saturday and asks "Hey, is that a Castlevania shirt? Are you excited for Bloodstained?" And to affirm that, yes, I am absolutely excited for Bloodstained lol, I start to include the statement, "You know, there's this Bloodstained fan forum--" and he tells me he's on there and posting! That person is GenericSoda . What are the chances? lol. Maybe there were more of them there? It was in a LAN/game/anime merchandise shop in a strip mall, so not -that- many people haha... If anyone is down to share, have you met or personally know others on the forum? Would you like to? We do like to talk about things, it seems like. This was the coolest chance meeting. I even recognized the character in your avatar on the Melty setups and thought "hey haven't I seen that before? Oh yeah, it's from the Bloodstained forum..." Also yeah, I'm totally going to be at Magfest. Let's try to meet up again! You could probably just check the Guilty Gear setups at any given moment and see me, haha.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 9, 2016 8:42:05 GMT -6
Honestly, I really dislike Fire Emblem: Awakening's take on the dynamic music, mostly because the past games had very distinct themes in maps and battles and Awakening's take makes both feel equally forgettable. The Banjo games pioneered this and I still feel like they did it the best, even some 20 years later. That being said, recent games like Darkest Dungeon and (Really Dragon_of_Dojima? I have to be the first to mention it?) Yakuza 0 implement dynamic theme shifting really well. Bottom line is, I'd love to see the music shift around in Bloodstained: Imagine being in a garden area and you get to a part where everything is twisted and rotten and the pitch changes menacingly, or you're in a water area and you encounter a section where everything's frozen over, and the tune lightens. That's what I'd like to see.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 8, 2016 15:24:03 GMT -6
Invitation of a Crazed Moon is the best. It's a very different tone than the rest of the games in the series, which fits PoR's tone being much lighter than most of the other games save for DoS. It's adventurous and bold, but it still hints and danger and mystery. Also the cover of it in Harmony of Despair is amazing, with its rad grunge guitar at the start.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 8, 2016 15:17:51 GMT -6
Well, like some of the character concept art has shown, it shouldn't have been a surprise. She's had some concept art with large breasts before. I feel like the more we talk about this the more attention it's getting so I think I'll just... I want somebody to edit that so the text says "See you later, fuckers!" But in all seriousness, I actually don't think things changed at all. The original post is kind of head-on towards Miriam's front, so it's harder to get a grasp on it than the pictures in another angle. Coincidentally, I watched a video earlier today where some members of Playtonic were talking about how people "noticed changes" in the designs for Yooka-Laylee when nothing had been changed at all. That's where my vote is going in all this.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 8, 2016 15:13:13 GMT -6
If there's some kind of weapon/equipment loadout swapping option, it should be fast and snappy with no menu nonsense. I never used Dawn of Sorrow's because it felt so clunky to me, but OoE's feels fine.
A good option to cycle through equipment means the difference between Phantasy Star Online (fast, on the fly, overall very non-intrusive to gameplay) and Phantasy Star 0 (slow, you have to stand still, and it doesn't pause the gameplay).
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 7, 2016 11:07:50 GMT -6
What Chuckles said. Ideally, every weapon would have a different hitbox and attack speed, but if it goes the route of the DS titles, it would be meaninglessly bloated. If it worked akin to SotN or OoE where you could wield two weapons at once and the order in which you used your attacks made a difference in what your attacks would turn out to be, that would be the coolest thing in the world, especially if holding up or down varied your attacks as well. That would kind of be my ideal design document for a Castlevania title, honestly, as well as having Adventure Rebirth-style jumping and no leveling up. That's a discussion for somewhere else though.
If stances have to be shared between weapons, then the shared ones should make sense; you wouldn't weild a claymore like you would a rapier. I'd also like to see the katana be its own thing since it won the Sword or Whip poll.
Than again if we assume we're getting six different weapons types (based off of Sword or Whip) then I don't think it would be very difficult to have each have their own unique attack aniamtions and stances to accompany them.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 5, 2016 15:00:45 GMT -6
That's sort of what I was going for. I don't want stupid slapstick stuff, but it would make sense for Miriam not being totally on the level to be played for laughs as well as being used to help ease the player into the game's concepts. As long as it's not overboard I'm fine with some silliness, I just don't want 100% serious all the time, because that makes for a really dull game.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 5, 2016 14:44:48 GMT -6
HIT THE LEVER Short answer: I guess I'd like a tone sort of similar to Harmony of Dissonance or Order of Ecclesia. Long answer: Tone is super interesting between all of IGA's Castlevania games. I'll go on record saying that I'm totally fine with the anime artstyles in Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin because they suit the tone much better than Kojima's gothic style. DoS and PoR have very low stakes in their stories: they're both about investigating sketchy circumstances rather than there being an immediate threat to deal with, like the missing characters in SotN and HoD, the stolen glyphs in OoE, or being trapped in Dracula's Castle in AoS. With that in mind however, I really didn't grow to like Shaona a whole lot as a character for the bulk of OoE. Shanoa's lack of emotions just made her so boring, even though she did have some fun moments interacting with the villagers and her "go to hell" at the lighthouse. By comparison, I'd like to see Miriam's fuzzy memories played for laughs occasionally, or use it to flesh out Bloodstained's concepts a bit. I do think that since Gebel has summoned the demon castle the stakes should immediately be higher, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a moment to have the characters goofball a bit. Post-boss conversations would be a good start, since the catharsis of winding down after a boss and meeting new characters goes hand in hand. It shouldn't be all shits and giggles though, especially since Gebel means business; his conversations in particular should be serious.
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Post by GenericSoda on Jan 5, 2016 11:29:54 GMT -6
I guess it depends on the context. Like for items, you could discover incriminating evidence that somebody you trust is doing something sketchy to trigger a boss fight against them. It makes sense that both the player and Miriam would want to talk to that character to find out what exactly is going on.
Relics also tend to grant abilities, so mixing them together would be fine. When it comes to switches, generally I'm against them because they can be a bit vague in their effect. ("Something appeared near to the wooden bridge," anybody?) I guess it would make sense for a cutscene to trigger to show what exactly happened, like a tower that Miriam is in could show a bridge being lowered in the distance, or a trapdoor nearby could open up.
As for bosses destroying the environment to open up a new area, I quite like that. Gergoth is a really memorable battle because of how he wrecked the whole tower during his boss fight. I'd love to see some sub-basement full of really strong monsters get opened up by a golem exploding the floor or something. That being said, there should be some lead-up to it or hint that the area has another hidden section.
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Post by GenericSoda on Dec 31, 2015 11:22:43 GMT -6
I bought Xrd on PC not long ago, and for whatever reason the framerate just tanks whenever I play online. It's fine on my PS3, and other games work fine online. I've got the settings set to processing quality. Does anybody else have this issue?
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Post by GenericSoda on Dec 31, 2015 11:11:54 GMT -6
I don't like item restrictions because it feels arbitrary and punishing for no real reason. I earned that super good item, why should I not get to use it how I see fit?
Now that I think about it I'm a glutton for Darkest Dungeon limiting the amount of items you can buy for different quests, so maybe I'm just a doof. In that case it's about stockpiling for specific missions though. Maybe if on harder difficulties the store (if there was one) would only allow you to hit say, five high potions in your inventory, so if you had five already you couldn't buy any more but could get them from random drops.
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Post by GenericSoda on Dec 21, 2015 1:01:41 GMT -6
Ok so, Castlevania difficulty is something I ruminate over often, so let me give my two cents.
SotN and AoS are piss easy. SotN gives you so many options between multiple pieces of equipment to pimp out your stats that removes most of the challenge from early on: gigantic knight enemies who deal billions of damage. You can simply outdo the enemy's stats by amassing equipment. AoS has some souls that are flabbergastingly good for their cost (Lightning Doll and Nightmare come to mind) and make the one instance where the literally game-breaking Claimh Solais is useless - Julius - pretty inconsequential. Potions heal way too much for their cost, so a single high potion can just get you out of any trouble. I honestly don't remember SotN's bosses a whole lot, but in AoS most of the bosses only had one or two attacks that worked in pretty predictable ways. Headhunter was probably the first real challenge in that game because he was mobile and had lots of different things going on between all the phases of battle.
DoS: Competent challenge. Some stuff is pretty tricky, like the final boss, Abaddon, and the Puppet Master if your weapons aren't optimized (which is good! Experiment with your equipment!!), but a lot of the normal enemies don't really leave a strong impression outside of damage sponges like the Iron Golem or Frankenstein, or monsters that deal baffling amounts of damage like the Cave Troll. The bosses all have lots of tricks up their sleeves, keeping the player on their toes at all times. Similarly, the most memorable regular enemies also have several different options, like the Malachi. Potions are a good deal less effective, but still matter because they restore decent chunks of HP.
PoR: See above, except enemies have a lot more options in general, which is a really good thing. Potions have a good balance in this game, being a bit less effective early on but also costing less.
PoR Hard Mode: bats and ghosts do 30% with each hit regardless of your level, bother this nonsense
OoE: Bats don't deal absurd damage, but everything else deals lots and lots of damage. I basically never used potions because this game is more based around Shanoa's mobility and dealing lots of damage. I like this though, it makes taking the initiative in battle really important. Blackmore is one of my favorite battles in the series because he deals so much damage and doesn't rely on gimmicks. Eligor is also a really neat gimmick/puzzle boss that doesn't end up being really tedious. My favorite part is that most of the game's enemies have lots of different methods of attack, especially the bosses. The Colossus boss in the mansion kicked my ass until I figured out his gimmicks.
The recurring pattern of this half asleep rambling is that enemies with lots of options make for the most challenging games. PoR is a really fun, solid game that I feel gets a lot of needless hate, but I can't stand its hard mode for simply clusterfucking the screen with objects and minor enemies that deal far too much damage. The parts in the Nation of Fools where you ascend past bone swings and Acrobat skeletons is actual challenge because you can move at a pace you feel comfortable with, killing what you feel like because the swinging bones work as platforms. Throwing ghosts and fleamen at the player in the pyramid level is just needless crowding and forcing the player to keep up with infinitely spawning enemies that can pop out of nowhere for attacks that can't possibly be reacted to is completely unreasonable and no fun at all. It forces the player to pick Jonathan just to tank hits.
Challenge isn't just about damage, it's about creating new situations where there wasn't a huge challenge before. The Medusa hallway in Castlevania 1 wouldn't be as hard if the enemies still did two pegs of health: you could just tank hits and stroll up to Death unopposed. My ideal difficulty curve would be between DoS and PoR, with higher difficulty settings focusing less on punishing the player and more about betraying the player's expectations by altering particular room's layout, enemy placement, or enemy behavior in specific rooms, especially if it takes into account the distance between save rooms.
Like Adventure: Rebirth did.
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Post by GenericSoda on Dec 13, 2015 10:18:56 GMT -6
As far as i recall, Julius mode on Aria of Sorrow, does not make all enemies in a area weaker. What it does is increase all Julius's stats when you get the red sphere after killing a boss. I know, that's why I said a variant of Julius mode in my post. I'm a bit tired of the traditional methods of leveling since they're everywhere. I feel like the Julius mode variant would feel the most like a classic-style Castlevania while minimizing the frustration of backtracking (after all, nobody wants to backtrack through Castlevania 1's Medusa hallway). Plus, I feel like giving a huge reward for beating a boss in the form of weakening the enemies in that area would be very cathartic without making the player spend extra time leveling up. Honestly, my ideal style of game would emphasize Ecclesia-style combat with Adventure Rebirth's jumping and movement with IGAvania exploration, and I feel like Julius mode's style of leveling would complement that style of gameplay the most. Adding in stuff like double jumps as rewards for exploring and beating bosses would make exploration easier and add more variance to combat. I feel like Julius mode's greatest prize is the ability to head straight to the boss, and by keeping similar ideas but making it tougher to explore without double jumps would both make beating bosses more rewarding and skipping them to take harder routes directly to specific areas more rewarding for speedruns. By removing the "leveling" aspect of Julius mode's bosses and instead making areas easier to backtrack through, it's more of a challenge to navigate through areas without needing to spend time leveling. My problem with Julius mode is that Graham is a time-consuming slog if you choose not to beat any bosses, and I feel like the style of leeling I have in mind would remove the frustration while keeping the challenge.
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Post by GenericSoda on Dec 11, 2015 15:31:21 GMT -6
If I recall correctly, IGA doesn't hold any kind of animosity towards Konami based off of interviews, questions, and the like. IGA's experience working on smartphone games were his own choice as well, but I can't say anything else about the circumstances of him leaving Konami.
I really feel like Mighty no. 9 kickstarted (boooo) a boom in crowd-funded games to bring back abandoned game ideas. Bloodstained dropped around the same time as Yooka-Laylee, so some of that fervor carried over to Bloodstained. I backed Bloodstained because I find Lord of Shadows to be incredibly mediocre in the gameplay department, and since the traditional Castlevania subgenres (IGAVania and ClassicVania) ended on a high note with Order of Ecclesia and Adventure Rebirth respectively, I really hoped that a lot of the experiences that made these games my favorites in the series would be carried over to Bloodstained along with the inventiveness and audacity that made SotN what it was.
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