Lune was by far my favourite to use mechanically, the stains system just made for such fun planning of rotations. There is a lot of fun with various weapon combos too, like the Potierim support build that applies Greater Slow. I personally used her as AP and buff battery with Typhoon giving everyone max AP and refreshing greater versions of all buffs every turn. And then I used Braselim with Storm Caller and Lightning Dance to farm a tier 3 Gradient every turn.

The Genesis build is AP efficient but once you have 9 every turn it gets outdamaged by Lightning Dance (single target) and Hell (AoE). Though you wouldn’t guess so going by the astronomically poor and unclear skill descriptions.

I didn’t get Medalum either but honestly you don’t need it. The one shot builds only need it pre Cheater to start in Virtuoso, after that you can just Last Chance anyway.

I couldn’t beat it “fairly” either, but approaching it as a puzzle fight where you’re trying to figure out how to deal with its bullshit is also kind of fun. I ended up stunlocking it, which in itself you can do in several different ways. The game has a lot of fun things you can do with builds.

Or just Stendhal.

What difficulty setting were you playing on? I think Story mode post nerfs should be manageable even if you get hit a lot - at least as far as main story goes.

If you want to give it another shot, invest in HP and Defense, bring a healer and build Maelle as a tank with Egide to give yourself a lot of margins and sort of grind out encounters safely. There aren’t many DPS checks - if any.

Late game you can stack so much damage on Maelle that she one-shots everything, if you like.

Its a great game and worth trying to finish. Now as far as the optional superboss… Yeah, that’s another story.

250GB install sizes plus an additional 100GB shader caches. This is what the future looks like, buckle up.

I don’t know, to me everything I’ve heard about the Early Access versions of the companions sounds much better than what we ended up getting. The danger in wanting to please everyone and not wanting characters to be seen as abrasive or off putting is risking everyone feeling milquetoast instead.

But maybe you had to play it to understand why they were bad? I really should try to dig up some old footage.

Wyll is the character equivalent of eating cardboard.

“Well met”

Make sure you play the Mankind Divided DLCs after! A Criminal Past in particular is probably the best “new Deus Ex” content they ever put out.

Also, congrats on being made a mod! I literally cannot think of a better person for the role.

If the recent pathetic patent filings were not enough to finally wake you up to what an awful company Nintendo are I don’t know what to tell you.

Existing IPs, maybe. But the real point of this patent is to stifle innovation and preempt competition. No indie developer is going to dare enter this creative space anymore as they don’t have the resources to challenge Nintendo’s patent - even though I think this won’t hold up in court.

Let’s hope so, because this sounds like it could be pretty disastrous doesn’t it? But who’s gonna afford challenging Nintendo?

I imagine a non-insignificant portion of Silksong players never played HK and just jumped on the hype bandwagon. Which makes sense considering it was built up like it would literally pay off your mortgage and reunite you with your high school sweetheart.

What if I answer The Noid?

To be fair Ninja Gaiden Black did also have boss runbacks. It’s one of a handful of small complaints I have about what is otherwise a very close to perfect game (Chapter 9 in the military base being one of the others).

But NG2 did have boss checkpoints, yes, and was much better for it. Even the notoriously player-challenging Itagaki realised after one game that boss runbacks sucked, and this was in 2008 - Demon Souls wasn’t even out.

To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.

And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.

Yes indeed, when arcade games were the norm devs specifically designed for absurd difficulty ramp ups and cheap deaths to finagle another quarter out of you.

Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.

Damn they sold out huh.

Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.

Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring. Hell, even Ninja Gaiden went away from boss runbacks starting from the second game, and that came out in 2008!

I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which game had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?

There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.

I played Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time this week. Apparently Itagaki and some of the other ex-Team Ninja members who left after Ninja Gaiden 2 made it, so it felt like a natural next game after finishing the Ninja Gaiden trilogy.

I was very positively surprised by this game. Art direction is great, it has some very nice looking levels and apparently got both the original creator, some of the show writers as well as the original voice cast on board. Story isn’t going to pull up any trees but it felt appropriate for a cartoon and had some fun characters.

Gameplay definitely felt like it had Ninja Gaiden lineage, and felt pretty fun overall. Between the graphics and the ground pickups it felt a bit like a throwback to games of a bygone era. It’s a bit of a shame that many important combat abilities are gated behind the skill tree as it means the gameplay doesn’t make a great first impression, but it opens up and becomes a lot more fun as you start unlocking things.

Bosses were fun for the most part and felt appropriately balanced. Some fun designs and playing on Normal I didn’t need more than a couple attempts at most for each boss, which feels right for a game like this. Maybe the final boss’s vulnerability windows were a tad to small, but it was a cool boss otherwise.

Definitely recommend it if you’re interested in a more laid back and chill action game. Or if you’re a Samurai Jack fan, of course. Sadly I believe it’s been delisted from all storefronts but Epic, but you can of course always fly the black flag.