If I'm taking 15 minutes to beat an Ogre in The Everfall, I'm doing something wrong?

I play on my widescreen PC monitor and I jar just noticed the black bars after your post. Dark Souls didn't have any.

It lacks the character of DS but I am having A LOT of fun with combat as a strider. I actually forget it's an rpg sometimes and think I'm playing an old devil may cry game but you have to assign your skills with very few slots forcing you to make a great battle system for yourself. The world is pretty and you do come across stuff regularly while on a journey(but nothing really inspired like in Dark Souls, just generic fantasy stuff).

The RPG part is kind of dull and poorly organised. Lopsided as fuck, I like what I like enough to enjoy it quite a bit but I could see some people hating it, even DS players. The shadow of the colossus thing isn't really there like they marketed, I don't bother with it as it just feels wonky. However, picking up and throwing enemies (or teammates) off of massive sheer drops never gets old.

Make sure to give Curtis' pawns rotten fruit and 1 star ratings.

tigerswiftly wrote:

Sell this to me, guys. Really need some justification before dropping the Won.

That should be quite easy, read from page 2 onwards and that will justify it I think.

Engage wax mode.

Let's start with the stuff that will put a lot of people off. I'll never staunchly defend this as a highly polished, perfect game. There are technical issues for one - bad tearing on 360, long loading times, a habit of bombarding you with far more info than you can take in, so-bad-it's-sometimes-good dialogue, questionable texture quality and a bewildering levelling and combat mechanic system.

Underneath that unappealing shell though, I've found a soft, delicious centre that I'll be chewing on for some time.

In an RPG with a mute protagonist, the aim of the developers is to make you imprint yourself on to your characters. It's hugely successful at this. It starts with the best character customisation tool I've used, and this is more important than just allowing your main guy to be, in my case, a 7 foot Amazon woman with a muscly chest but strange, bamboo stick-like limbs. The reason is you make your main follower too, and this guy can get hired through the ether by any other players. So with my John Romero looking mage, it's in my interest to make him as bad-ass as I can so that he is hired and rated highly - this gives you in-game rewards.

So the online elements are really clever, and you care about your team. None of that would be worth anything if the combat wasn't excellent. I'm not sure how many times I've read about party based RPGs that you need to 'pick companions that complement your play style', but in Mass Effect a team of Vanguards would be just fine for example, my point is for the most part it's just not true. Sometimes I don't want it to be true - for the first ten hours of DD I was rolling with three mages, and we tore shit up. As the areas started to get harder though, I found myself spending a long time tweaking my party for a long time. Someone mentioned War of the Lions, this has that same feeling of having a lot of fun just in the menu screens. It’s a decidedly old school, but satisfying and therapeutic kind of fun.

The action is visceral, the animations are surprising and varied, and the enemy design keeps you from going through the motions. Wander the wrong way and you'll bump into a cyclops completely unprepared, leave with your tail between your legs, then return later levelled up and kick his arse. I loved that in Demon's, I love it here.

And the wandering itself is just fun. You can jump and climb, there are no invisible walls on ledges - falling to your death is a real threat, as is stretching your expedition into the night when all sorts of nasties come out. You'll be on a quest, notice a door, then engage in a 2 hour dungeon crawl with nothing but your lantern for comfort, and forget what you left town to do in the first place.

Finally, the bosses. They're made by Capcom, do I need to go on? The scale and the way they move is incredible and with your team of unleashing hell upon them while you climb up their neck to land the killing blow, you feel like a heroic badass.

And that's what these games should be about : )

Edit: Main character Chiquito (yes, she's a woman) and loyal pawn Churro

Character creation is swell, not bottomless but there are plent of presets that make for much better chatacters than those silly sliding scales. Nick's designs are always hilariously absurdist, my female warrior is slightly more typical, but there are some nice touches you can add: She has green eyes, but a scar going through her left eye, consequently her left eye is white. Little things like that are neat.

The only thing I am not a fan of so far is the health system, whereby you lose chunks of your actual health bar in combat, meaning the longer you spend in the field or exploring a dungeon, the less health you can recover, unless you buy lots of healing stuff, which is where the inventory management system reveals itself to be a slow pain in the arse.

Yet, it is still fun and I am tempted to buy it and send my lovefilm copy back.

AH, I knew you could craft stuff, I'll need to give it a go. It seems to be willingly obfuscating, a little like Demon's/Dark Souls but it isn't elegant enough for it to fly just yet. I'll smash it over the weekend though.

Churro needs a healing spell mang! Nearly wiped the deck when I realised we were short a healer in the middle of a bandit camp.

I think one of my cats has made off with the battery holding element of my 360 pad. I can't find it anywhere. FFS. Not even any point buying this right now argrhrgh.

Haha! Found it eventually, hidden under the Buddha.

Just need some better games to play now. Bayonetta, Halo: Reach, Bulletstorm, Skyrim, UMvC... Eesh. Need more griffin in my life!

Channelling Man Who Fell To Earth some.

The night and day cycle is more relevant in this than any other game I can think of. What level are you guys, think I'm 20.

I didn't play it. Glad, cos it's all been a nice suprise.

Light controls and mashy combat, noisy partners and HUD (the latter is somewhat switchable, thankfully), boringly flat level design, drab presentation. In the main.

Here's my team. Balderak is hiding.

Nick wrote:

Nice ZMM - did you use the ingame thing to do that?

Yep, take a picture, post it to FB.