Yeah, college students definitely reek a bit less of whiny self-loathing and edgy try-harderism, in my experience.

High school really just gels perfectly with the themes of the games though. The thing Igor is always riding you for is to strengthen your bonds with people, and doing so improves the quality of Persona you fuse, because Personas are a reflection of a person's psyche and personality so having a wide, deep understanding of the multifaceted nature of such a thing will improve those reflections. What better setting than high school to have a character who is constantly thrust into new and uncomfortable situations he needs to use to improve himself and his social skills? Even the occasional whiner or tryhard edgelord is perfect because one of the biggest obstacles the party faces is overcoming their own flaws. In P4 it was about confronting their deepest secrets and insecurities while in P5 the party themselves seem to have to overcome a more generic "face your fear" thing but it's made up for by the psychoses behind the actual dungeons and their Shadows MUCH more dark and twisted than they were in 4. Again, high school is perfect for that coming of age and understanding maturity theme.

If your personal taste just doesn't like it then that's fair enough and Persona just isn't for you, but the setting is a really large part of exactly why the games' themes work so well.

Sounds better explained in this way

My knowledge just increased by 3 points from reading BH's post!

maybe this is not a good idea and i will stop if it gets too confusing but i managed to get persona 5 at Big W(they still somehow had 4 copies) and i just got past the first palace and its an enjoyable game, sometimes it does move too slowly but i expected that, its very rewarding capturing a new pokemon.....i mean persona, i am enjoying horizon zero dawn more but both are great imo, with this and horizon and having both prey and injustice 2 fully pre ordered gaming is good right now and i am going to be very busy

prey looks fun imo

So? High school teenagers are inherently insufferable. I can't think of a less interesting setting. Maybe an old folks' retirement home.

my excitement for crash bandicoot the n sane trilogy is huge right now, i hope its just not nostalgia

Crash is still a lot of fun. Nostalgia may surely be a factor but i had good time at replaying them with my little sister few years ago: weird worlds + spinning marsupial still works in 2017!

I'm replaying DS1 to finally end the level 1 run that i left in a limbo, and i'm surprised that i'm still able to find people that invade me and white signs in this very limited range of levels.. that game really left a mark!

What platform? On PC I hardly ever saw any signs on my SL1 run. (Not that I would have summoned them, the whole point was the challenge haha.)

I must say... Manus at SL1 has to be the hardest game challenge I've succeeded, holy shit. I had retried so often, my hands were shaking when I finally won.

Ps3! Burg and Parish are an hotspot for getting summoned/invaded and i already helped two different guys with O&S.. also i got invasions from forest guardians when i was farming souls/few resins (including a poor guy with regular equipment that kept appearing every few minutes )

Eheh! i can imagine! Those dlc bosses have scary resistances, chipping manus's life by 50 damage per hit sounds like hell itself

I've also heard that the Dark Souls reddit has a "character reset" every several months to keep the game active across all SLs (from their community, at least). My friend did his first DS1 playthrough last year (PC) and coincidentally joined right around the time this reset hit, so he had a pretty active experience.

Really need to get around to playing the new DS3 DLC but Dying Light: The Following is owning my life.

Yup, i don't know if i'm in the middle of character reset, but finding a number of players higher than zero was a nice surprise (Sl1 pvp is awful however, who lands the first hit wins)

Currently i'm taking deep breaths before fighting O&S, but Four kings and Nito worry me more because in the past playtroughs i went full-heavy armor rambo on them and i don't remember their moves at all

Manus and Kalameet now are like death: they will surely happen, but hopefully after a rich and long satisfying life

thank you i just guess i worry since it was huge in my childhood but i am very excited for it, there is a reason why its so loved, when it was first announced(the n sane trilogy) early footage looked good but washed out but it looks like with recent footage they have very much improved the colour which makes me happy

this is perfect

this looks interesting, usually vampires bore me though

I was watching a Let's Play and realised that the "Grey Swarm" Travis talks about was mentioned elsewhere: the Apocashitstorm guy says they were the opening act at the amphitheater the night he OD'd.

Man, all the best-seeming games like Horizon and Nioh are PS4 exclusives. I want a One because of Forza Motorsport, but I can't justify buying the console just for that, especially when the alternative seems so much better.

Ah well. Back to indies for me, I guess. Anyone play The Curious Expedition? Looks kind of interesting, I always appreciate eclectic, semi-intellectual stuff in games. I regret not getting it when it was on sale a while ago.

Looks interesting for sure, but I hate that art style. I don't necessarily dislike anime aesthetics, but excessively adorned bishonen crap makes me want to claw my eyes out.

So, been playing Nioh. It's fucking awesome. No surprises there, I guess.

Indeed. Made worse by the bait-and-switch "teaser trailer" they released prior to this that had a completely different (and pretty cool) art style.


Yay! What weapons are you using?

(This post is doubleplusgood! )

Oi, I'm going fairly typical with regular katanas and axes; one for DPS, the other for crushing opponents' stamina. At the beginning I thought of maybe using dual swords and kusarigamas, but they seem a fair bit more complex to use and I don't wanna get shredded because I'm bad at wielding my weapons I'll surely use them on my second playthrough though.

Gotta say, I'm totally enamoured with this game's combat system. Even though weapon choice is rather limited, the fact that you can use three different stances with all of them adds tons of depth that not even the Souls series has. Combined with the ability to expand your moveset by buying new weapon skills and using jutsus and whatnot, it's just stupid amounts of fun. I also really love the spirit guardians, mainly because they're incredibly cool looking and the Living Weapons they give you remind me a lot of the super modes you unlocked in Onimusha In fact, this game is probably the closest we'll ever get to another installment of that series, only infinitely more refined.

My only complaints are that I don't really care a whole lot about the plot and that the game could use some more enemy variety. However, the ridiculously fun gameplay basically makes the former moot, and as for the latter, well, I'm just too much of a monster nerd to not gush about all of the creatures that do appear. I never thought I'd see a freaking karakasa included as an enemy in an action RPG, and having things such as a Jorou-Gumo or a Yukki-onna as bosses really warms the heart of my inner Japanese mythology nerd

In short, it rules, I love it, and I sure hope FromSoft take some notes for whatever it is they might be cooking next. We would all benefit from some healthy competition here, I think

i know what you mean, i like some anime visuals and cell shaded graphics(XIII for example) but it depends how its done

Sounds good, and yeah I agree with pretty much everything. I didn't know much about Japanese mythology so a lot of the monsters were new to me, but it must be pretty cool to recognize themé

Yuki-onna was possibly the hardest non-optional boss of the game for me. Ugh, only won with Living Weapon cheese to finish her off. I still feel ashamed about that.

Yuki-onna is hard as fuck. She even reminded me of some of the crazier Devil May Cry bosses with just how quick and relentless she was, and that attack where she rushes at you and stabs you in the gut was a bitch to dodge. However, I had a significantly easier time dealing with her after I did the logical thing and started using fire buffs on my sword Still took a couple more tries, but at least her health bar went down a lot quicker that way.

Okay. So I've very nearly finished Horizon : Zero Dawn, and dear god, I have loved the shit out of this game. It's a pity that I pretty much over-leveled and maxed out my XP before finishing the game (on hard mode), but that doesn't mean everything was a cake walk - far from it. There was a weapon upgrade that I could have used all game if I have followed the main quest in linear fashion and not free roamed, killing everything I saw and grabbing all side quests on offer but hey, no real regrets.

The story was fresh and invigorating, as you really wanted to discover the truth behind all the destruction, and the disappearance of the ancient Metal World and uncover the back story behind Aloy's mysterious birth. A true gaming masterpiece this was in my humble opinion. The world was gorgeous to explore and, well, just look at. Utterly amazing.

I am severely hoping there is a DLC expansion, or the best possible outcome a Horizon : Zero Dawn 2. Please bring that to life. I want more.

Now that I'm bringing this epic adventure to a close, it's time for me to buy Nioh and sink my teeth into that.

anyone played outlast 2? i will get it Thursday but i got horizon zero dawn and persona 5 so i already got a tonne on my plate

For cell shaded graphics, I'd easily put Valkyria Chronicles as my favorite. Would easily take that over typical modern AAA graphics going for a more realistic look.

Downloading right now. I checked a few Steam games and Doom is 90gb. Pretty ridiculous.

It's some of the best 90 GB you can have on your hard drive though, but yeah it's fucking insane with the uncompressed "Megatexture" technology and generally questionable update strategy which doesn't seem to "replace" stuff but adds content in packages additionally to the old content. Doom was originally about 55 Gigabyte, but updates bloated it to these ridiculous proportions. Newer Call Of Duty games are worse though, because they have all these pre rendered videos that look like shit on higher resolution screens (>1080p), yet take up massive hard drive space. The Infinite Warfare+Modern Warfare Remastered Package was about 200 GB in size as far as I remember when it first released!

i agree with that but doom was an enjoyable game, i cant wait to see what outlast 2 is like, well its pretty obvious what its like but i mean i wonder if its more scary than the original or whistleblower, i know it has some influences from jonestown which sounds .....fun

i agree with that its a bit more unique looking than the grey and brown shooters flooding the market

Played about 20 or so minutes of Outlast 2 (PC) and so far it's awesome. Some cool features that I didn't know about are a mic on the camera and getting bandages. I get the feeling Im going to like it a lot more than Resident Evil 7.

what did you think about resident evil 7? i spent $400 on that game.....was it worth it? no way in hell

It started off really good, but eventually I got to the point to where I didn't like that it was called "RE7", since it would've been better if it was called something else, set in the RE world. With that said, I got up to where you need to find the captains key, but just ended going on youtube to see the final boss and ending, which I found to be very disappointing. Im glad I didn't get the season pass.
As a kind of slap in the face, they said that my processor was outdated, to where I had to do all this stuff to make it work....To me, RE7 isn't a high end graphics game and I've been able to play everything else fine. I started Outlast 2 on a 4k tv and it plays smoothly on everything at the highest settings.

i agree with you, i got up to the in resident evil 7 and i just had no motivation to play any further, it had some great moments i just couldnt get the energy to complete it so i did the same thing you did

on another note i am actually watching reviews for crash bandicoot games(1,2 and warped) because of the n sane trilogy, i got too many games to play though right now, enjoying horizon zero dawn a lot, just doing a tonne of side missions

Good taste.

Psst, X-COM fans... https://www.fig.co/campaigns/phoenix-point

Kind of surprised people aren't liking RE7, I really loved it. Legitimately felt like an old school RE in first person.

I do think the flashback part on the ship kind of sucks, but once it gets back into the present it picks back up again.

Also, finally bought a Switch. An excuse to run through Zelda again

Oh god, I don't know if my body's ready for this... It looks like some sort of X-COM/Dead Space crossover, but in a far more interesting universe.

For any PS4 users, I recommend Drawn to Death while it's still free. The art style is fun and the gameplay is easy to get into.

i did enjoy it i guess part of it is just because i am irritated i decided to spend so much on it, plus on the last level i spent hours looking for this one item and it just irritated me so that was the end of the game for me

i miss Zelda

i am not far in outlast 2 and i enjoy it however sometimes the stealth feels a bit random, i was stealthing it through an area really proud of myself, just explored a house and was about to leave to the main area however an enemy just happened to be opening the same door i was trying to open and i died, so it felt unlucky because he was not there previously and i was trying to be safe but it is more realistic, its fun so far but i hear it gets samey

Work buddy lent me his 3DS along with Shin Megami Tensei IV, and I'm digging it. I've heard it called Pokemon for adults, and that's pretty much 100% accurate. Collecting demons and fusing them and leveling them up and doing it over and over again is so fucking addicting.

so far i have gotten persona 5,tomb raider 20th anniverary, outlast 1,whistleblower and 2, horizon zero dawn, nier automata, bloodborne game of the year edition and i am going to get a new 2ds(never going to use the 3d part), i dont have time for more home gaming so i need something portable, any suggestions for good games to get on the 2ds?

i heard moon and sun are disappointing so i might stick to x or y, obviously i am going to get super smash brothers, maybe mario kart, i'll see what happens but considering most of my shifts for work are around 4 hours and the travel time is usually over 4 hours i need something to do on those long train trips, played bloodborne for a bit, only died twice once to that wolf thingy at the start and once to the fat guy in armour, i know it gets much more difficult but it felt like a lot of fun