What game are you playing?

[KnightBrolaire]

Bullshit. I went to Nioh after Sekiro and it punished the fuck out of me, maybe because it's an entirely different combat style, but @wankerness did as well and I don't think he pushed much further than I did.

I forgot how much Shinobi Owl sucks after the other bosses I've faced, almost had him down on an attempt earlier but ran out of spirit emblems/bad positioning on my part. Dude eats up posture.

I honestly think Sekiro was harder. Nioh has some bullshit moments but it never outright forces you to utilize parries and posture breaking to advance in the game. Sekiro goes nah fam you gon git gud or get the fuck out from the beginning.

 

[wankerness]

sekiro will fucking wreck you if you don't literally git gud. Even Nioh is more forgiving ime

Yeah, very hard disagree on that one. Nioh at least in the early game is a lot harder than sekiro cause the numbers are so bullshit - everything hits like an absolute truck, defensive options are far more limited than sekiro (and way more about twitch reactions), monsters spawn like crazy, save points are fewer and farther between, and bosses have a fuck load more health and just healthbars (no posture system for rewarding aggression). The game also seems to expect you to constantly be farming gear and thus it seems every level you’re barely tickling enemies until you’ve grinded the level for drops. That said there are much more effective and consistent ways to cheese most of the game that don’t exist in sekiro. Unlocking them is the hard part.

Sekiro forces you to “git gud “ to some degree but doing so is a lot easier than in nioh if you’re old (ex over 30). But you can face roll through many bosses in sekiro to some degree. Again, my sword saint kill is a thing of beauty for showing just how badly you can play and succeed. I will try uploading that later.

I’ve been fighting owl father all morning after maxing out my prayer beads. I got to phase two ONCE and completely didn’t remember how to deal with the goddam flame owl attack. Mostly I just die pathetically before he’s even to half health in phase 1. Ridiculous how hard this guy is compared to every other boss in the game (for me). Sword Saint and Demon of Hatred seem downright easy and forgiving in comparison despite having more phases. EDIT: Of course i beat him first try after this. Big difference was just this attempt I would immediately dodge forward after he does that knockback that always precedes the firecrackers. Still had to use Rice on him though and had 0 gourds left at the end. Hate this guy. On to Demon of Hatred!

 

[wankerness]

I want to play Sekiro but holy shit it just sounds so exhausting. Like I platinum’d Elden ring but I out leveled anything remotely hard and summoned whenever I wanted.

This may mean I actually have to git good. And I only ever said that as a meme because the Souls’s games aren’t actually that hard lol.

Yes, it sort of forces you to git gud, however if you play Elden Ring right after it you'll probably feel like "wow, my defensive options in this game are so limited! I just have to take hits to the face from everything unless I dodge or have a shield build!!" Sekiro basically gives you a katana that doubles as a shield and you have unlimited stamina so you can just mash dodge/sprint/jump/attack all to your hearts' content. Plus the "posture system" is a HUGE boost to offensive ability, you'll find that once you get boss healthbars down to 50% all of a sudden the fight is pretty much over since their posture will stop regenerating and you can very quickly finish them. Also you can react a LOT faster to boss attacks. The hard end bosses in Elden Ring feel like they're more tuned around Sekiro abilities than Elden Ring ones in some ways.

Also you can pause and heal/choose consumables while the game is paused which really can make a gigantic difference in difficulty when you can just take a breather and carefully go through your items in the middle of a boss fight.

 

[Mathemagician]

Ooooooh good to know. Ok cool.

 

[TheBlackBard]

Yeah, I'm going to third that. I've played Nioh and Sekiro, and I made it MUCH further in Sekiro than in Nioh. With Nioh, it's like "the fuck just happened?! He only hit me once!" With Sekiro, I actively wanted to keep trying feeling like I could actually beat the boss I was stuck on.

 

[wankerness]

Just beat demon of hatred legit for once (my first attempt ever fighting him was to make him fall off the cliff, and then I reloaded my save since I didn't think that would work and was consistently getting into Phase 3 but eventually just quit trying cause there was no point since I just wanted to finish the game at that point). This fight IS hard. It took me like 10-12 tries or something. I still think Owl Father is more frustrating, but Owl Father definitely has more repetitive and easily punishable patterns and at least isn't inflicting burn with all his attacks. With this dude, I got him to Phase 3 with like 3 gourds, and then ended up popping both fine snow AND the rice ball and still had 0 gourds left at the end and thought my heart was going to pound out of my chest. Oof. The main problem with him is just the way he runs ALL the way across the arena all the time combined with how incredibly difficult it is to avoid his bullshit unless you're either right on him or far away from him, he's lethal at midrange, especially with those stupid fireball volleys.

 

[CanserDYI]

I know it's a mobile game, but has anyone played the rusty lake series of mystery puzzle games? Holy shit they're addicting.

 

[Carrion Rocket]

What did you think? I played it for a couple hours and just didn't get into it. I think the camera being zoomed so much further in on the character combined with the wallowy movement and slow combat just made it feel too clunky for me.

I realize this is late but, I was only able to play the game for a few hours before getting the unhandled error at the start of a level. Literally right after selecting the level I wanted to play the error comes up. They did patch it to not corrupt your saves, but the error still just kinda happens. And I might aswell just walk away from it if I can't progress.

So I went ahead and started replaying the Mass Effect games. I'm almost at the level cap for the first game. Just gotta grind out some more XP to reach level 60, but once I'm done with that I'm importing into ME2.

 

[Werecow]

I've been playing The Ascent alongside Sekiro. It's a twin stick shooter in a Cyberpunk open-ish world. The world is so good that i kinda wish it was a full RPG instead. It feels a lot more Cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077. The gameplay gets a bit samey after a while, but it's fun for a bit of a blast every now and then.

 

[Ralyks]

In a move I didn't expect, I broke out my PSTV and got both Persona 2 games on there (turns out I forgot I already bought the first Persona game). I've been curious as fuck about these games forever and with 3p and 4G finally getting ported to current consoles, figured it was time to finally check them out.

 

[wankerness]

Beat sword saint today, took like five tries. This guy is a hell of a lot easier than demon of hatred or owl father cause you get so many openings on him and he doesn’t have much health in each phase. Phase 2 where he gets out the spear/gun is pretty bad, though, and phase three gram go wrong in a big hurry if you miss any lightning reversals. Kind of a fun boss, instead of super stressful like the last two, though he’d be more fun if your goddam resurrection powers came back every attempt without going off and killing 20+ dudes to refill the two wheels!!! Oh well.

I died to Genichiro almost every attempt due to refusing to use heals on him so that’s my fault for being bad.

 

[Mathemagician]

Gonna make sure I send out 100 garlics, can’t give up free money on my farm. Also trying to fix up the hidden boat. I want a boat at least in video game life.

 

[wankerness]

Gonna make sure I send out 100 garlics, can’t give up free money on my farm. Also trying to fix up the hidden boat. I want a boat at least in video game life.

The boat's kind of a late-game DLC thing, though you can certainly do it early if you want.

My girlfriend is still playing almost exclusively stardew valley months later. She's deep into the Mr. Qi requests that are like super-endgame and are all like "get to floor 120 of the skull cavern" or "get 4 prismatic shards in 4 days" or other things that are not at all easy. But man, her farm looks ridiculously crowded now, covered with machines and statues that are constantly generating Iridium or making rare gems or whatever, along with all her farming stuff like the wine cellar and the greenhouse and ackkk. That game has a LOT of content.

The funniest thing I've seen in that game is that after she divorced her spouse, she then had the option to turn their children into birds. If only real life were that easy, huh?

 

[Mathemagician]

Yeah that Mr. Qi stuff I only did one of the first ones. “Get to level 25” and halfway there “IS THAT A STEGOSAURUS?!

Yes. Yes it was.

“I love this game”.

Lol.

I only just got to year 3. So I still have more stuff to discover but I’m also not trying to Min/Max my farm. I have my sprinklers set to auto and I check my greenhouse for star fruit and ancient fruits regularly.

Then I just poke around doing what I want like a hippie. It’s relaxing AF not having timers on anything. Even the “timed” bulletin quests will repeat eventually.

 

[Crungy]

Thanks to those who posted Switch suggestions. I have played some of the monster hunter games (wii and Xbox one versions, forget the names) and liked them but wasn't super crazy about them. I might pick them back up eventually.

Xenoblade 2 sounded good, is it necessary to play them in order though or no?

 

[wankerness]

Yeah that Mr. Qi stuff I only did one of the first ones. “Get to level 25” and halfway there “IS THAT A STEGOSAURUS?!

Yes. Yes it was.

“I love this game”.

Lol.

I only just got to year 3. So I still have more stuff to discover but I’m also not trying to Min/Max my farm. I have my sprinklers set to auto and I check my greenhouse for star fruit and ancient fruits regularly.

Then I just poke around doing what I want like a hippie. It’s relaxing AF not having timers on anything. Even the “timed” bulletin quests will repeat eventually.

Yeah, it's kind of jarring when you're on like year 10 of the game and everyone's still the same age and the holidays all repeat exactly the same. But, for a one-man game to actually progress time meaningfully for 40 characters or whatever would be totally unreasonable, plus it means the game is more chill cause you have as much time as you want for stuff. I'd incorrectly assumed when watching her go through the first few years that the game would just END after you hit the 3 year time limit set by the start of the game, like Persona or something, and you'd have to try again to see all the other relationships etc.

I still haven't played it at all except once or twice where she threw the controller at me to answer a phone call or something. Sure have seen a ton of it, though! Maybe I'll get it on playstation for the achievements sometime.

 

[RevDrucifer]

I’ve been looking for a new game to get lately and when I initially started reading all the Sekiro talk I got excited, but the more I read the more I realized it’s probably not for me. I definitely prefer a good storyline over memorizing combatants every move to be able to get one hit against them.

Hell, some games I’ll even put on Easy the first time through just so I can get into the story of it, then go back and beat it on Normal or Hard the 2nd time around.

I’ve heard Elden Ring isn’t quite as much of a pain in the ass as Sekiro. The trailers all look great for Elden Ring and obviously it was probably the most talked about game this year, I might just take the chance on it and get it.

 

[Werecow]

Beat sword saint today, took like five tries. This guy is a hell of a lot easier than demon of hatred or owl father cause you get so many openings on him and he doesn’t have much health in each phase. Phase 2 where he gets out the spear/gun is pretty bad, though, and phase three gram go wrong in a big hurry if you miss any lightning reversals. Kind of a fun boss, instead of super stressful like the last two, though he’d be more fun if your goddam resurrection powers came back every attempt without going off and killing 20+ dudes to refill the two wheels!!! Oh well.

I died to Genichiro almost every attempt due to refusing to use heals on him so that’s my fault for being bad.

I still find Isshin more difficult than Owl father for some reason. I often no damage the Genichiro phase and first phase of Isshin. But Isshin's second phase still regularly completely kills me. I've never fully got the deflect timing of the huge elongated spear combo he does that ends in a perilous thrust. Seems to be 50/50 i manage to deflect the first couple hits of it. If i get cought out by that, and then he really presses forward, i find it really difficult to recover. No idea why i still find it so difficult when i'm so practiced at the game now
His third phase i actually find easier, long's i get the lightning redirects. As he'll sometimes do the lightning enough to completely wreck himself with redirects.

 

[wankerness]

I’ve been looking for a new game to get lately and when I initially started reading all the Sekiro talk I got excited, but the more I read the more I realized it’s probably not for me. I definitely prefer a good storyline over memorizing combatants every move to be able to get one hit against them.

Hell, some games I’ll even put on Easy the first time through just so I can get into the story of it, then go back and beat it on Normal or Hard the 2nd time around.

I’ve heard Elden Ring isn’t quite as much of a pain in the ass as Sekiro. The trailers all look great for Elden Ring and obviously it was probably the most talked about game this year, I might just take the chance on it and get it.

Sekiro's more userfriendly in that you don't die instantly if you fall off a cliff and it has a pause button, but the combat is more difficult from a mechanical standpoint. Elden Ring gets very nasty towards the end but can be powered through with cheese. If you mainly want to play games on easy you might have a hard time getting into it. Just make sure you don't touch the first major castle until you've done all the side caves you can possibly find and leveled up your health and weapons quite a bit.

Also if you "prefer a good storyline" Sekiro is the only Fromsoft game where there's a standard story to speak of. The others are just vague cutscenes and otherwise it's reading item descriptions and stuff and that's about it. Very impenetrable unless you put a lot of effort in. I don't tend to care about videogame stories so it's perfect for me since there's basically no dialogue other than a few NPC sidequests and very limited cutscenes.

 

[StevenC]

Thanks to those who posted Switch suggestions. I have played some of the monster hunter games (wii and Xbox one versions, forget the names) and liked them but wasn't super crazy about them. I might pick them back up eventually.

Xenoblade 2 sounded good, is it necessary to play them in order though or no?

Xenoblade is really only loosely related in terms of story, and it is absolutely not important to play 1 to enjoy 2 or 2 to enjoy 3 (coming soon).