Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Build Mode
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FishLion
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I really like the characters in Azuma so far, I am so hyped
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AiddonValentine
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Building mechanics kind of brings me back to the crafting bloat that's happened in a lot of games. Crafting is fun, fun unfortunately there's too much tedium associated with it nowadays. Slapping two items together in Star Ocean 2 and seeing what you get is fun. Having to grind up a bunch of basic building materials you craft into more advanced materials etc is boring. This if funnily enough what I thought Tears of the Kingdom did brilliantly by going back to basics. You don't need ten diamonds or twenty five rocks, you just need to fuse a sword with a rock to get a hammer. Same thing when you make a house, you just need the basic materials then can set it up the way you want. We maybe need to go back to wilder, looser ideas of crafting.
As for Silent Hill f, going to Showa Era Japan certainly is a unique idea. And if the rating description is any hint, we're gonna get put through the ringer. As expected, they're also doing melee weapons only considering Japan's gun laws. They better give me a katana at some point. In other rando news that happened past the deadline, Nintendo announced they're putting some of KOEI-Tecmo's SNES strategy games on Switch Online, including their Age of Exploration game Uncharted Waters: New Horizons. Do not sleep on that one! |
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 589 Location: PA / USA |
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We're stuck on a different planet - A lot more than we can manage, But we gotta keep on standing...
Certainly not the coverage I was anticipating this week, but I'm glad to see there's a lot of good news about the new Rune Factory. I hope the dev team is aware of how precious it is to be able to just play the game and not-worry about stuff being gender-locked, I think above any other function of the game. Quite frankly, if you were to ask me about the lore of the larger RF series world, I cant say I've ever cared enough to pay attention to it.
I think a big part of the problem is when it gets implemented as more of a retention method than a functional game feature. When Elden Ring went open-world-ish, it kinda felt like the bits of crafting that it has (beyond the traditional weapon enhancement stuff) was more or less just filler to explain why you'd go out of your way to pick up berries as you travel. On the one hand, if you come upon an unexpected situation where you need to toss fire or something, you can quickly craft it without having to scrub your run and backtrack to buy firebombs. At the same time though, it's just adding extra steps when you could have just gone prepared and bought firebombs. It can feel like added busywork when done wrong. The crafting/building for me is only enjoyable when it plays well into the larger "action economy" of the game. White Knight Chronicles (more than Xenoblade X, it needs a modern remake) would give you important materials from your small town you could build. On the original 3D Rune Factory Frontier, the game was difficult enough that you had to smartly manage your time to grow and craft resources - this would allow you to prepare for the dungeon/combat challenges, which would in turn give you access to more things to craft and grow. It made for a very tight gameplay loop of balancing how much time you spent socialising, crafting/growing, and exploring/combating. There was a fun tension present that implied you had to focus on one goal and forsake another to proceed. If the dungeons/bosses on Rune Factory aren't challenging, then that means I don't need to prepare and farm/craft as much, which then frees up more time to socialise. When I play Persona games, I usually turn the difficulty up to Hard so that it forces a gameplay loop where you either prepare sufficiently or you just outright die. It adds a tension and finality that (was narratively part of Persona 3 originally and) is otherwise lacking from planning your schedule wisely. With Rune Factory, I feel like they've unfortunately scaled back the difficulty a bit as time has gone on, at least with RF5. Otherwise, there's a bunch of people saying that a 60fps mode was found in Xenoblade X and that there's a high chance the Switch 2 is going to be doing some special magic to it. We suddenly have a boon of some pretty high-profile JRPG franchises all releasing at the same time, and I'd say that XCX and Azuma are at the top of my lists for taking my time. And hopefully we get a Wizardry Variants Daphne review now that it's on PC and is relatively bug-free. I would be VERY interested in seeing ANN interview the Daphne devs since they have some unique takes on what a challenging F2P game can look like. |
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