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Also obviously Elden Ring I'm having a hard time making an attractive lady character in this (I'm sorry; an attractive "type B" character). It's definitely in character for me to spend an entire day just mulling over pointless cosmetic stuff in games like this, but it's frustrating when I want to get stuck in, find a greatsword somewhere and start being cool.

I'd say I prefer BB over Sekiro too, but I think the meat of that opinion just comes down to the types of game they are. I like being able to mix and match outfits and pick a weapon type and playstyle that suit me, while Sekiro is very dedicated to a specific playstyle. None of the Soulsborne games feel quite as satisfying as Sekiro when played right, though.

I'd forgotten, but the original reason I specifically wanted to complain about this was the little segment where Cloud has to walk slowly around an obnoxious pile of very loud obstacles in Aerith's house so she doesn't hear that he's leaving without her. It's something so small and stupid, it's very short and the game takes pity on you and removes most of the obstacles if you fail a couple of times, but the very existence of the segment is an issue. It's a microcosm of everything wrong with the game: the game isn't at all designed for this kind of careful movement, so failure comes down to the limitations of the control more than anything else; it's naked padding of a sequence that was simple and effective enough in the original; and the pseudo-comedic nature of it, as well as the fact that you're inevitably going to be caught at least once, detracts from the weight of what you're doing, i.e. quietly leaving Aerith because her mother ominously demanded that you do so. Everything...

Back to FF7R. I desperately want to love this game, but every time I'm wowed by the soundtrack or the sense of scale in the Midgar skyboxes something happens to drag it all back down. I'm surely biased by familiarity with - and love of - the original, but the pacing of this game feels atrocious. I understand that they've pretty much taken the first act of the original and made it its own complete game, so they had to flesh things out, but (for one thing) I really don't think the story of FF7 benefits from having me wander around searching for small children, or revisit locations half a dozen times to fight robots for some reporter or scorpions for some old man, or whatever. None of these people matter and their stories are so incidental. It's all so much fluff. It might not be such a big deal if the original game wasn't so defined by its nigh-perfect pacing.

Okay, I've just beat the game. Credits are rolling as I type. I stayed up far too late to do this. Gehrman/Moon Presence weren't super hard (Gehrman more so than Moon Presence, though) but I might be overleveled on account of Chalice stuff. Immediately before deciding to finally beat the game, I beat that Chalice that halves your health and tells you to kill an Amygdala (among other things) that can one-shot you, which was not fun actually, but I'm glad I probably don't have to do it again. Laurence didn't give me much trouble, but Orphan sure as heck did. Much, much more trouble than just about anything else, in fact. :catcry As far as frustrating but cool boss fights go, I think my favourite was Ludwig. Great design, great boss room, fantastic music, a somewhat sensible health bar, maybe only one or two completely bullshit attacks; I loved it. I find myself missing that feature they added in later Sekiro updates that let you replay boss fights whenever you like.

Still Bloodborne. Beat Orphan of Kos last night. One of those weirdly frustrating fights that feels pretty straightforward but for some reason gave me much more trouble than it should. Been doing Chalices, too. I like the concept of the Chalices, but I think it could have been truly legendary if there was just a little more to it - more variety in the procedural generation, perhaps more extra handicaps on some layers (e.g. some Chalices halve player health; more stuff like that), that sort of thing. It'll keep me busy for a while, though. The game's great, in any case. I still miss player messages, though. It's just not the same without seeing "insert but hole" in front of every bent-over corpse.

Still Bloodborne. Just beat the Blood-starved Beast. I think I'm getting the hang of it. So far, very good. I don't like that you need a Playstation subscription thing to even see and send player messages, though. In general, the only real issues I have with the game aren't issues with the game as much as they're issues with the console. My desire for PC Bloodborne only grows stronger.

If you're in a relationship with Garrus, Mordin will warn Shepard that "ingesting" might induce anaphylactic shock. Protection is probably a good idea for the same reason.

And when you're a lady with hips like Shepard, you have to fuck Garrus.

I don't think there are many (if any) non-obvious ways to really, permanently mess up the romances in 2, but then I never tried the Miranda romance. I only ever did one Man-Shep run, and that was for Tali.

Bloodborne. It's pretty good. I can wave a sword whip around. Romance Garrus.

Finished Hellpoint. There were clearly mountains of cryptic stuff and presumably some sort of true ending I missed; going for NG+ now. Game's pretty decent. Worth playing for sure. It's occasionally very frustrating for dumb reasons - sometimes awful camera, sometimes janky level geometry, jumping puzzles - but it rises above its problems. It does a better job at emulating the Souls tone and presentation than most soulslikes, while putting an interesting eldritch sci-fi spin on it. Anyway, I managed to acquire a PS4 through arcane wizardry, so I'm now playing FF7R as well. So far it's mostly pretty good, but I already don't like some of the story changes they made. Combat is fine; it's ten trillion times better than FF15, thank goodness. Soundtrack is great. And Bloodborne is in the mail :catsalute

I haven't yet, but I do plan to at some point. I've heard mostly positive things about it. :hm

Yeah. The setting kind of carries it. There's something to be said for the atmospheric sound design too, even if it's kind of hit (ominous space horns) and miss (why do my feet squeak so much in this armour?).

GMG pretty much gave me a free copy of Hellpoint, so I started playing that. It's not bad. A janky soulslike with a semi-interesting sci-fi horror aesthetic. The setting has promise: some sort of space station orbiting a black hole filled with demons, or something, in the wake of some sort of implicitly deliberate cataclysm. There's some kind of mysterious mystery going on. Definitely worth playing if you get it for free. Maybe worth playing otherwise too. I'll see how it goes.

I knew I recognised your avatar from somewhere. :faputa

I heard pretty mixed opinions about FF7R (in general, not the port). Most people seemed to think it was fantastic up until the point where the plot starts diverging from the original, at which point people were either basically okay with it or absolutely hated it. Given what I've heard about it, I suspect I'd fall into the latter category. Still, I'll play it once I hear the port issues are ironed out, and perhaps once it doesn't cost seventy cocking pounds.

Despite never getting into any of them, I have all the main series games in one form or another (including D2, for some reason) except for 3, which I'm waiting for a PC release of. I hear it's everyone's least favourite, so who knows when that'll happen. I've unironically been dreaming about geo puzzles for the last couple of nights. :hm

Trying to get into Disgaea. I've been sitting on these games for years because they're a bit of a time investment, but I adore the art style and I'm a big dumb fan of the "looking up wikis for spreadsheets of comparative data the game doesn't tell you" approach to game design.

I want to get into EYE but I've so far been unable to get past the tonally bizarre, strangely translated dialogue. I think this might be my equivalent of your issue with Hollow Knight: since you're a bug guy, it bugs you that the bugs are all wrong. Well, I'm a words guy. That said, I'm also a weird-pseudo-cyberpunk-sci-fi-shenanigans guy, so I suppose I'll keep trying. :hm