Snow

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Posts posted by Snow

  2. Posted

    I don't lie... but the fact that you get taxed twice, once when you buy a points card and once more when you buy an e-shop game with those points, has tempted me. 

     

    That doesn't seem fair, unless I'm missing something.

  5. Posted

    The music in Luftrausers becomes noticeably more triumphant as you approach death. I just thought I'd mention that, even if it's admittedly a very minor, and possibly unintentional, touch. And yeah... listening to Rami on the Indie Haven podcast (horrible audio quality, by the way), gave me the impression that they didn't have much of a vision. That's obviously not what he said, but that's how I read it.

  7. Posted

    Could you elaborate why? I'm near the end myself and I have to say that the game doesn't reach the highs, or sink to the lows, of Dark Souls 1. It is a very consistent experience, perhaps too consistent. 

    It's hard to say…

     

    I don’t like some of the changes they made to the combat. My attacks won’t connect if an enemy is too small (which is really annoying for crystal lizards). There’s actually a boss that can’t hit you with its melee attack when you’re close. It's good that enemies also play by those rules otherwise it wouldn't be fair, but it's still weird to say the least. At times, I'd hit an enemy and my attack would knock them back, so then my follow-up attack wouldn't connect.

     

    The world doesn't make sense to me. In Dark Souls, you rang the bells of awakening to open Sen's Fortress, to prove your worth and get flown to Anor Londo. In Dark Souls 2,

    there's some rubble on the road, so you need four great souls to go around it. Err, okay.

     

    Item descriptions seem uninspired. Too many of them basically amount to “No human could lift this” or “Its wielder is unknown.” Where's the story?

  9. Posted

    I don't want to accidentally kill an NPC or something and lose my way into a covenant or cool backstory. I've already been to a couple of places where this could be true, like

    the scorpion dude

    .

    I can confirm that's someone you can talk to. He even has a line of dialogue where he says most people try to attack him. :P

     

    You can talk to him by equipping a certain ring from Majula.

  14. Posted

     As for whether it's silly or not, I have some thoughts on what may be going on with some general lore:

     

    It may just be a goof, but I like that it's there. And I suspect that it's not a goof, that it's quite intentional.

    First, the casket establishes that you should be careful what you play with in this world. It was a bait and switch. In DS1, a casket took you to the Gravelord, and for gutsy players, it was a shortcut to an early super powerful weapon. I'm sure there are people who saw that casket and thought, hmmm, I wonder where that goes!  I did!  I was expecting a shortcut.

    Second, identity in Dark Souls 2 is malleable. YOu can see it in conversations, where people don't remember who they were, or why they came here. The blacksmith's daughter doesn't even know her own father. You don't create your character until the old woman asks who you are. You define yourself once you've entered this place. And then you have some ability to change it. You can respec. You can change your gender. Moreso even than the old Soul games, I don't think this place is real. It's an afterlife, or an in between place. Or this is inside the First Flame from the DS1. Somehow I don't think that old Firekeepers retire to a cabin. And yet that's the first thing you're presented with.

    So I think the casket plays into the idea of malleable identity. That everything here, even the characters, are in a state of change. This is a place of archetypes, but not a place of permanence in the details.

    I'm sure this is completely unintentional, but I also like that it basically lets you create a transgender character if you want. Born male, but transition to female (or vice versa).

    I definitely like that characters don't remember who they were, but I don’t know how to talk about this without getting too specific about NPC plotlines. And I think the firekeeper explicitly says you're in purgatory/limbo, but of course purgatory in Dark Souls might mean something different than what's usually associated with that word.

     

    As for why I'm not a fan of the casket, to be honest, it's because I attribute that mechanic to games like Fable and Saints Row. Not that Souls games don’t have a sense of humor (getting brutalized by mushrooms). There’s also a lack of context: you re-spec through the use of a soul vessel with help of a firekeeper, and people have amnesia because of the accursed dark sign (that'll probably be explained later in the game), but the casket just looks like any other casket.

     

    I ain’t got nothing against letting you play as trans characters, though while we’re on subject, is it my imagination or do characters tend to use neutral pronouns less frequently than in past games, and refer to you as a man when you’re playin’ a woman? Am I imagining things?

     

     

     

    Is that the Blacksteel Katana? That's the only one I've found. The first enemy type I saw wielding a katana forced me to start crushing rusty coins. It starts off with a A scaling in dexterity with no upgrades which has me excited to try it out more.

    Yup, that's the one, the renamed the Iaito. It only takes 1 or 2 upgrades to get it to S scaling.

     

    Speaking generally about progress, I've acquired two of the four major souls but at the same time I feel like I am missing a lot of stuff. For example, I haven't found a single ember, or any other way to give extra qualities to my weapons, despite finding all sorts of crazy titanite. I'm about thirty hours into the game and it still feels absolutely gigantic.

     

    Regarding embers,

    there's actually only one ember, and you unlock all the "infusions"/upgrade paths.

  20. Posted

    I'm guessing you still lose health every death. Also It'd mean going back to the blacksmith every time, unless there's some blacksmith tool-box i don't know about.

     

    a question about NPC's:

     

    In the Giant's forest, after the first bonfire, There's a white knight under a tree. I couldn't talk to him. Could anyone else? Does he appear later on in the game?

     

    Also, In the Wharf, I met a sorcerer who said I don't have the right intelligence to talk to him. I'm guessing this is int, but has anyone talked to him? If so, what's your INT? Mine's 8. lol.

     

     

    I'd say it creates a different penalty, a fixed cost of 3,000 souls and the time sink of having to run back to Majula to get it repaired.  It's certainly not a trivial cost long term.  I've probably spent 40,000+ souls repairing it since I started doing this.  That's a chunk of souls I could have saved if I was just willing to spend all the souls I have on me and run around like I normally do. 

     

    Oh, a bunch of my deaths came in Huntsman's Copse, at one particular jump.  It's the most ridiculous jump I've seen.  If you want my advice on how to handle it:

    The jump is right across from the first building you find, the one that has a pit in the middle of it's lower floor. There's a club wielding hollow out on a ledge, and directly across from that ledge, is a corpse with an item on it on a pillar. The jump needs to be perfect. Too far left, and you can't get up on the pillar. Short or right leaves you dead. But it's also very, very easy to overjump and roll right off the back to your death.

    I tried rolling and dashing off with no luck, after having overjumped a couple of times. I finally made it when I went from the far right part of the ledge (if you're facing the pillar you're trying to get to). I jumped about halfway along the short room to spring that I had. Jumping that early let me barely land on the pillar and finish the roll on it.

     

     

     

    I've seen two of those white knights. I killed both of them. My logic is that if I clicked to auto-target, I would get a target on both of them, even in their napping position. That doesn't happen with normal NPCs. You get a decent chunk of souls and they drop stuff. I'll leave it to you to discover what they drop.

    I had a 1 intelligence when I talked to the guy in the Wharf! He said I was dim.

    If you need to confirm, there's also

    a ring you can buy in Majula, the Ring of Whispers, that alerts you to enemy presence.

     

  22. Posted

    Not really a spoiler, but I was honestly quite disappointed in the Hartschild area in Bravely Default because it didn't skewer men and machismo in the same way it did with women and beauty / competitiveness in Florem.

    Is it weird that this makes me want to play the game? Not that I approve, but I want to see for myself.

  23. Posted

    I was going to add something, but I mostly just wanted to agree along the above lines.

     

     

    As an aside, I find that adding an article and an Italian accent to Danielle's twitter handle (Il Danielleri) makes for a much more sinister member of the Idle Thumbs Cabal. Maybe Jake and Sean glossed over it because they were loath to contradict the ringleader while she was there keeping tabs on their public messaging.

    I've always made her handle rhyme with pâtisserie (French pastry) in my head.