Say more. (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Tuesday, July 25, 2023, 10:39 (279 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I’m genuinely curious what you think. You played far more of the first game than I did.

While I did describe my issues with Yaesha as a returning world, and we had an issue with the bugged + teleporting boss, We did find ourselves in a wholly different scenario the day before yesterday with the broken temple that I appreciated, so my complaints have a strong asterisk that I have to consider.

Otherwise, I've been loving what little we've seen of the game, especially its greater emphasis on "encounters" over the boss battles of the first game. Stuff like the Cube maze and the story Puzzle with the shadows hit me with that sense of wonder that I straight up have not gotten from any game that I can think of in recent memory. I can't think of a game that has hit me like Horizon Zero Dawn, Thomas Was Alone, or honestly, Remnant: From The Ashes, where I feel the need to grab someone and sit them down to experience it, or where we stop to discuss strategies and possible solutions to puzzles.

If you recall how I gushed about Ixillis XV and XVI in the first game forching us to restructure our builds to make sure that we could even survive the fight by focusing on healing, I felt that same dopamine as we slowly figured out what was making the Nameless One tick, realized how we were screwing ourselves by, ironically enough, focusing on healing- then we took a beatdown to him once we decided to tank him as hard as we could by simply having you flip your Archetypes and having Sammy's dog be our main healer.
We didn't get punished for investing in the wrong gear, we simply couldn't bring our tried and true strategy to every encounter, and we keep having to rethink approaches.

I'm watching some videos and seeing how packed with secrets and unlocks every world is, even the Labyrinth has a batch of secrets and items that we missed simply because we didn't experiment enough (the murder portal is way more generous than we gave it credit for, our timing is just off). And I'm remembering that thing you were telling me about how someone applied a bit of logic to the sewer water rising to get a secret. It's just great to know that you're not crazy if something tugs at the back of your head, and again, I can't think of the last time a game did that.

And did I mention the cube encounter? D1 raid vibes as we saw the encounter present itself, wipe us, then we looked at it better and figured its nuances out, then we worked on the execution until we conquered it, and got one of my favorite weapons as a result, letting us use the enemy's tools against them... That's the greatest.

And while it's unfortunate that we both got the Impostor King main quest on Losomn (knowing we could only see a third of the world at most) being able to tackle Faerin with tweaked attacks, then going back to your world to get even with Faelin, and discovering that he was the impostor all along?
Great stuff, and just more reasons to go back and reroll that world.

It's unfortunate that my time with the game as a full team is limited, but I'm definitely looking forward to making the most of the game this week.

-PS. Because they play so similarly, I really don't think it's difficult to go back to the first game. I totally wanna go back and finish the Subject DLC so I can see how Clementine's story there plays out, especially knowing what we know now in R2.