Recently played and completed
Torna: The Golden Country. It has been on my to-do list for a long time, just never really got to play it. Now that I have, I gotta say that I consider it to be "just okay". Really have more mixed feelings about it. Probably my least favorite Xenoblade content there is so far. That isn't to say that I didn't like it all, don't get me wrong. I enjoyed playing it. However, I enjoyed it considerably less than all full-fledged Xenoblade games so far. Really my main complaint about it is that a majort part of the game is filler. The main story is really short, and to pad it out, there's a lot of "whoops, we forgot to do this and that, now we need to get sidetracked and quickly get these two items before the actual plot can advance" moments. You're even outright forced to do sidequests at several points in the game. There were at least two such occasions. The game was like "whoa, slow down there, buddy! You gotta achieve a better reputation before you can continue. No go and do some side missions!". The problem I have with that is that side missiones are really only enjoyable to me becaues they're side missions. Once a game starts to force me to do them, they quickly fall apart, because they just don't have that much substance to them. It really felt as though they were desperately trying to pad out the play time of the DLC to around 15 to 20 hours. I also feel as though the game didn't even really deliver on its original promises. When Nintendo announce the game, they said something along the lines of "you will even return to familiar places, but they might be very different from what you remember". I didn't find that to be the case. The only known location you visit in the game is Gormott, and it's really not that different from the base game.
To not be entirely negative here, though, here's some things I liked about the DLC. I do think the one major new area in the game - Torna - was pretty nice. I especially liked the desert area, since it was an entirely new setting to the game. I also liked some of the changes made to the battle system. It was now way easier to create elemental orbs, which means it was easier to do combos and elemental breaks, which means this part of the battle system actually got way more utility in the DLC. In the base game, it was so difficult to achieve a full elemental break that I think I only did it on like one or two bosses in the entire game. Most enemies in the game simply died too quickly for that. Also I really enjoyed the final area of the game.
You went through the inside of Torna, which was actually a neat little callback to one of the final areas in the first Xenoblade. Kinda missed that kind of area in the game.
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Have been playing
Dark Souls III for quite a while now and finally completed it today. Exhausted just about all of the content there is in the game, including the two DLCs (unlike the first game, in which I missed a lot of the content, because it pushes you into a new game+ without a warning, and I just didn't feel like completing it again). Overall, Dark Souls III is what you'd expect. Very difficult, stressful and frightening game, but also a very rewarding and satisfying one. I felt like overall it had fewer asshole moments than the first game and was more forgiving, but of course it still had its frustrations and I was losing my cool every now and then. Still enjoyed it a lot. Now only Demon's Souls, Bloodborne and Dark Souls II are missing on my list, though I'm not sure if I will actually play DSII, since it is a bit notorious for being way more asshole-ish than any other Souls game.
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Also started playing
River City Girls recently. Somewhat mixed on this one as well. I do like the music, visuals, overall style and story of the game, but I'm only somewhat enjoying the gameplay. It's one of those games where I feel like I'm missing something essential about the gameplay. For example, I have no idea if there's any way to predict and react to enemy attacks. To me it feels like they're just way too quick to react to, and once you get hit once, you're basically guaranteed to get caught in at least a three-hit combo that (so far) I have found now way to cancel out of. The fact that I can't anticipate enemy attacks means that blocking is basically useless to me, because I can only use it on a basis of guesses, which doesn't help much, so I end up barely using the block at all and instead just try to keep my distance from enemies so that they can't hit me in the first place. I don't feel like the game is meant to be played like this, though, and that's why I think I might be missing something. Oh yeah, also really dislike how every three hits or so, your enemies get knocked down to the ground. That feels like such a useless waste of time. I mean, you do eventually learn a move to pick up enemies on the gorund and use them as a weapon, but aside from that, you can't attack them while they're knocked down, so after every three or four hits, you lose two to three seconds, simply because you have to wait for the enemies to get back up again. I really don't quite see the purpose of this.
Overall, I think I'm just not really into this 2D sidescroll fighting game genre. Never managed to get into Final Fight, for example, and while I did play Turtles in Time as a child, I enjoyed it more for its music and style, less for its gameplay.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!