Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs King Abaddon. I'm just a couple hours in.

It borrows a bunch of things from SMT, Persona and Digital devil saga, but in a new setting ('30s Japan), great style and music. Raidou is badass, the cat gouto serves as an assistant companion exactly like Morgana in P5, perhaps slightly less annoying and not as anime.

Combat is action, much like Tales games it transitions into a separate battle field which i'm not a fan of when you do it for action games, but the mechanics are not irritating so far even though magnetite is there. You can summon two demons that will fight alongside, and can even help during negotiation.

I've been also playing Ninjala since launch, both casual matches and ranked. It's very fun, runs really well on Switch, matchmaking seems faster than Splatoon, they have to fix a couple of things (only temporary cosmetics is kinda dumb, matchmaking while fast it's not always fair). People have strong opinions on the parry system but i can live with it tbh.

It looks really cool, visually better than the 2 Heroes games, but the western release all depends on whether the anime is also coming or not (fingers crossed)

My List

Xenoblade Chronicles
Tropico 4
Portal 2
Alice Madness Returns

Honorable mentions:
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
Child of Eden
Anno 2070

One of the best years for me not much in terms of releases but simply because i was still in high school so i had more time to play games in general and try different genres.

Xenoblade Chronicles is very close to my ideal type of JRPG cause it's both comfort food, crazy value with potentially hundreds of hours of contents, but also manages to engage you with its very unique world and story. One thing it's easy to forget now is that at the time it looked extremely impressive: because it was almost a seamless open world and people wanted those, because it was on the Wii hardware and nobody knew you could make giant worlds in such a weak hardware, but also because JRPG as a genre was facing a weird transitional period, we didn't have a game so ambitious like that in years. Visually it doesn't hold up but thankfully there's the definitive edition for that.

Tropico 4 is a game i appreciated more over time, when it came out i wasn't super into the colorful aesthetics, but out of all the 3D Tropico games this is the one that best recreates the same atmosphere of the first one, and expand upon that concept without ruining the vibes. Great soundtrack too, many catchy songs that remained stuck in my head for a long time.

Portal 2, like others said, legendary game, infinite replay value thanks to the editor and the community. I already loved the first one so this got me immediately, in terms of level design maybe the best game Valve has ever produced.

Alice Madness Returns, i just have good memories of its amazing art direction, visuals and crazy locations.

El Shaddai maybe one of the coolest extremely underrated last gen games, very unique and artsy, but also fascinating how it came to be between developers and publishers.

@zindenga said in [Official] What are you playing?:

Have been playing Dragon Quest XI for a while now. Really like it, but boy that game never ends. Also been playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Didn't like it to begin with, but enjoying it more now. The story and characters are pretty meh, but exploring the planets looking for secrets is pretty fun. Combat isn't too bad either.

By JRPG standards (which i always consider meaty games, for those who want the long experience) i thought the lenght was fine, not too short or too long.

As much as i love Dragon Quest, and feel that XI (or XI S) was one of the strongest entry, but there are flaws mainly with the level design. (rehash of the same environments throughout the game and the extreme simplicity and linearity of most of the dungeons)

I swear Silph tower in Pokémon Red/Blue is more complex than pretty much all the dungeons in XI except the fortress of fear.

Playing new and old Square Enix games across all their franchises, you get the impression their level design feel downgraded in their modern games.

One thing kind of annoys me nowadays is when you see or navigate the map of the in-game world from above and everything look so much bigger than the actual locations, finding places you can't actually visit. This made sense 20-30 years ago, but now you have the tech to make these worlds fully realized.

I was about to include it, the thing is i'm playing it these days and haven't finished it yet so not felt enough knowledgeable to put it above the other games.

I like older Persona more than the 4 or 5, probably cause i like core SMT more.They are just more straightforward, I don't want to wait 5-10 hours of chitchat about kids romance before getting into the real meat of the game (dungeons and combat or even more serious story stuff).

The only thing i'm not liking it so far is the combo of high encounter rate + random encounter (and extremely long dungeons), but that's common in old JRPGs.

The remake is perfection, they brought some nice quality of life improvements including a far better UI, the problem is Eternal Punishment remake which is the second part of the story didn't get localized, but there is an extremely good fan translation online. (far better than the original official one for the PS1 release)

I'm 5 hours into "The 25th Ward: The Silver Case", near the end of Correctness which is the first part, roughly 1/3 of the entire game. It has been a pleasant surprise so far: i hadn't played a visual novel in a loong time, for some reason i thought that genre was not for me, and this was an impulse buy coming from the Golden Week sale on Steam, the whole package (game, soundtrack and a very small artbook) was around 5 euro.

The tone is on the line of other Grasshopper games, a bit sad at times but never takes itself seriously. Despite having not played the original Silver Case so far i've never felt i missed out on something, the game does a good enough job at setting the atmosphere and the characters.

The gameplay is a bit archaic: characters are pretty much still images, 3D environments look like Killer7 and you move using in-screen navigation keys; having a piece of paper and a pen to write down all the names and passwords, is essential cause there isn't an in-game notepad, and occasionally it will ask you to put the a code you read like 10-20 minutes before.

The fights against the hitmans have been intentionally annoying, they literally want you to choose those options in a specific order or you're dead, and the game basically trolls you. At least you restart immediately in the actual fight.

The art style tho is phenomenal, and the music also is excellent (Akira Yamaoka and Baiyon worked on it)

@mbun said in Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia (Switch):

@gageblackw23 When you say English sub, will I be able to read all the necessary menus and such or is just the spoke dialogue offered with English Subs?

Sorry for being late.

The game is entirely in english, only the dub is in japanese (but there are subtitles)

Demo is out in the Japanese eShop (JP dub / English sub).

I really like how it looks both in handheld mode and docked: it's the simpler visuals, and the art style also helps a lot.

The hex based maps add a ton more strategy, it's an addition i'd like to see in Fire Emblem, besides that there are other neat mechanics based on class and skills. I have never played the original on PS1 so this reminds me a bit of both Fire Emblem and Romance of Three Kingdoms.

https://t.co/WJHhp7z3gI?amp=1

If you unlock it in the next 24 hours, you can get Stadia Pro (it has 8-10 games included) for free for 2 months.

I'm trying it right now and i don't know if it has improved over time or something else, I played a bit of Gylt, Steamworld Dig 2 and Grid, and so far so good with a up to 100 mbps (realistically around 50-70 mbps most of the time) connection.

Input lag is not bad considering it's streaming, playing it with mouse and keyboard, i tried Geforce Now too a while ago and to me they are comparable.

Simultaneous worldwide release on June 25 with english localization, and physical edition too thanks to Limited Run Games.

Youtube Video