I'm about 65 hours or more into Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment. It's sort of an action RPG kind of game, but its gameplay is hard to describe. Maybe it's like an action-slash-MMO hybrid? Skills have cooldowns, but you're also meant to direct your partner (and sometimes other NPCs too) for when they should use skills or run away.
There's two places to progress, the main story areas which involve climbing the dungeon floors to level 100 starting from level 76, or the "hidden" area (the hollow part) where stuff is a lot stronger and where the best loot is. Pic related is a screen from beating a floor boss- SA:O it has the game-within-a-game thing going on.

>>67968
I ran into a random boss encounter to sort and display the gameplay a little, but I didn't do a very good job. Thankfully when friendly NPCs die here (and they die a lot) they're not actually dead for real which they would be during the story boss battles.
I'm going to save kissu some storage and just link these video clips.
[[ https://files.catbox.moe/jzn0aq.mp4 ]]

The picture shows an outfit I really like, you can unlock 4 bonus outfits per main female character by maxing out each of their combat behavior AI path thingies.

>>67969
Are those her PANTIES!?

>>67969
Something neat that I really like is that you can "date" the girls, too, although it's pretty rudimentary. Unfortunately, it quickly turns into a grind so that you can increase their relationship rank in order to give them better combat orders.
Giving orders and hitting a button that tells them "Good!" is what you use to customize their AI. I'm building Lizbeth here to be a tank that prioritizes defensive skills, but AIs will always be retarded so I don't have her using "Hate" moves which keep aggro on her.
I made my character short and wide for the video, the "body type" slider for customization literally just scales the width of the character, it looks really bad but funny.
Example of part of a date:
[[ https://files.catbox.moe/rt0yqp.mp4 ]] ]
You either response enthusiastically or tactfully to her questions, the music notes mean I chose correctly.
The conversations really don't make any sense, but it gets the job done I guess?
Also, the dates can't go anywhere story-wise because you're Kirito and he's married to Asuna. This part is really lame. Lisbeth is clearly the best and yet I have to go home to Asuna.

>>67970
YES! It's a really sexy outfit- she's normally covered but when she runs or swings a weapon the cape flows and exposes them!
>>67971
Anyway, going back to combat. There's simple skill trees, but these side trees have requisites that are tied to weapons, so even if you want to use Katanas exclusively if you want access to these Tactics or Awareness skills (which provide buff skills) you need Level 1 spears for them. You gain weapon skill by, well, using it, and it's another form of grind, although you can power through it with attack speed buffs and tanky, higher level monsters.

>>67973
And I think the last thing I have to mention is this 'implement' system which is perhaps the grindiest of all, although it's purely optional. You take on certain restrictions or just plainly fulfill kills and you clear Hollow Missions (random fast kill quests) to unlock the skill or item out in the world.
Some of them are neat, but others are just a pure grind.

Hmm... I guess that's it, but I'll answer questions and stuff. There's a few of these games and I think they all play the same, including an Alicization one that came out last year. These games also tend to get DLC for a couple years afterwards which is pretty cool.

>>67974
Oh yeah, there's also a good chunk of story content which is basically VN-like. I think you could skip most of it if you wanted to, but I don't.

>>67968
>it has the game-within-a-game thing going on
Not exactly the same thing, but this reminds me of dungeon siege. I remember getting that game and playing it for a while but when I recommended it to friends so we could all play multiplayer they all asked what's the point when they could do the same thing in MMOs.

The more I hear about SAO the closer it gets to joining .hack in the videogame/anime/multimedia franchise thingies I wish to get into. That sounds like a lot of content for a simple anime game cash grab and I have to appreciate games that go the extra mile.

>>67971
>https://files.catbox.moe/rt0yqp.mp4

What an eventful date. You took her by the hand and talked about... something. At least she looked at you cutely.

>>67978
This looks really awkward

This is tangentially related but I bought some Pocari Sweat for a laugh, it tastes like a flat grapefruit drink, very thicklike too.

>>67982
I hate it, it tastes like medicine to me. Got 1kg of it and no idea what to do with that.

I've been playing a lot of Banished recently. The gameplay is fairly simple: it's essentially a Sim City-style game with the added challenge of having to manage the production of food, clothing, tools, and shelter in order to keep your population alive. In order to get things done, you delegate work to citizens to do a particular job, like farming, teaching, or leading church congregations. The game can be rather challenging at times; if you fail to increase the production of food as your population grows, it's very likely that your town may experience a famine, greatly reducing the number of citizens available for work. At times, you may have to reconcile the fact that it may be more important to have enough food to survive through to the next harvest than it is to educate children or gather resources like stone and iron. Similarly, at times your town may experience outbreaks of disease, which will require hospitals to treat them. As you might expect, sick citizens will spread disease to those they've been near, making it best to have hospitals nearby so that citizens don't have to travel a long distance, along the way infecting people they pass. Pastures and fields may also experience blights that can spread nearby, killing crops and livestock. It's also important that your citizens have firewood or coal so they don't freeze during the winter season.

Planning out your town can be very fun, but the challenge of keeping everyone alive, healthy, and happy is fairly novel. That said, at certain point of development, the game will level off in difficulty as you get more and more established. That's not to say the game is easy, however. Early deaths are common if a town isn't properly managed.

All in all, I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys city planning games and would enjoy a survival mechanism added into the fray.

>>67994
Try it with Gin and tonic then?

>>68002
I don't drink but it's worth trying with tonic or lemonade, yeah.

>>67994
Give it to me I love that stuff.

Played a bunch of Nioh 2 last month and got to the point that I had beaten the final NG+ and was just grinding the abyss for loot. My thoughts were that it was a really immersive and fun, albeit very tough, action game. I say action game and not soulslike because while it may resemble souls in some areas, it's a completely different game, with a randomized loot system ala Diablo. The combat system that much more emphasizes skill combos, proper preparation, quick thinking compared to Dark Souls' more tame and slow pace of dodge and stab. Although like the souls series I'd highly recommend a controller for this as who ever knows how to get PC controls working right on one of these. It's difficult at first to adjust to, but once you get used to the flow of combat it's a blast and the challenge of the fights becomes the challenge instead of what you're supposed to be doing. The game eases you into this fairly well by ramping up the difficulty and having a set scaling for each NG+ difficulty all the way up to NG++++, where you'll want to have used the knowledge you've accumulated through the prior playthroughs to define a build for yourself made up of gear/skills/levels that works well enough to take down the strongest the game has to offer. Also it's got great co-op, where you and up to 2 others can progress through the entire game together mission by mission. It's done in a much more multiplayer way than souls, since you make a room for your friends to join and you both start and finish the missions together from the main menu, and progression is shared(also co-op scaling makes it so you're never too op for earlier difficulties unless you've got an endgame build).

Would definitely recommend /qa/ check it out if they're into fun action RPGs.

Soul Sacrifice Delta (on Vita)

I've talked about this game before, but I'm going to go into more detail with a review.
I didn't look into why, but there's a Soul Sacrifice game released in 2013 and then Soul Sacrifice Delta that came out a year later with more content.
This is a very atmospheric game, and although it's a dark European fantasy deal I find myself drawn to it. It's set in a world where monsters run rampant and humanity uses 'sorcerers' with dark powers to fight them, becoming monsters themselves in the process.

>>72037
The story is experienced through a living diary, with cutscenes mostly being lightly animated images accompanied by text. It really does feel like you're reading something outside of your experience. Although you are being told of things, you 'rewrite' yourself into the narrator's position and that's your custom character playing through the quests.

>>72039
Of course, to help immerse you into this twisted world is an orchestral soundtrack composed by Yasunori Mitsuda and Wataru Hokoyama. Yeah, THAT Mitsuda.
Here is the theme for the guy pictured above

As you may suspect by the name, sacrifice plays a major part of the game story and gameplay wise. Your right arm contains the souls of those you have sacrificed, and you equip them as 'Offerings' to enable offensive and defensive magic. There's a limit to how often you can use them within a mission without 'recharging' by killing or saving monsters. Thankfully, most of the weapon magic is utilized via unsheathing something and you get a timer instead of a per-swing consumption.
This is a strength and weakness of the game, as I think a lot of things have insufficient charges and skill experimentation suffers as a result. The gameplay is third person action and uhh... it's pretty good? I don't know what I can compare it to, but it's made by JAPAN Studio which made stuff like Shadow of the Colossus. Pretty good, but not amazing.

>>72042
Soul Sacrifice Delta is a really amazing thing to experience and I recommend you play it, or at least install it and read the pages and pages of lore for every type of enemy.
As I said at the beginning it's a dark European fantasy and sacrifice is a big theme. However, the monsters all seem based on old folklore and fairy tales like the stuff from the brothers Grimm, but with very different interpretations.

To give an example I'm going to dump the story of the succubus monster. For the best reading experience you should listen to the attached music on loop

>>72046
oh and it's left to right, the proper Western way

>>72047
gse

>>72048
4ey5

>>72049
jkyt

>>72050
sye5

>>72051
5ydr

>>72052
4egtw

>>72053
6rud

>>72054
The end.
I should mention that the red text means you can click it and it will tell you about gameplay stuff, like the lower right text here hints that she's fire element.
Oh, and the chalice mentioned in this story is connected to all of them if it seemed out of place.

>>72055
And that's my sort-of-a-review of Soul Sacrifice Delta! Even if you decide not to play it, go listen to the soundtrack. But, you will be missing a great story of a strong friendship between two cursed men in a doomed world.

I can give a review of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA. I played it on Vita a couple months ago and unfortunate abruptly stopped right at the end because my power cable died and I suffer from severe procrastination in replacing it.
Anyway, it's part of the 'easy' JRPG side of Ys games (there's hard ones that have almost no story) and I'm a big fan of this installment. You're stuck on a deserted island and you find villagers and build up a little village. There's very simple fishing (very VERY simple) and also a cool mode where monsters attack the village and you defend it from waves of attacks. My only complaint is that the boss battles were very easy as was the whole game in general.

Pros-
-Nice characters, it's cool to have a village of people with story elements and character progression instead of just your small party
-SHOEBILL!
-Decent skill variety between the characters. A big guy with an anchor has some pretty satisfying slow attacks which is hard to get right in these games
-Pretty good overall story, certainly more involved than I expected when it came to certain interactive breaks from the main character
-Pretty visuals- I love the vibrant colors
-Unlike previous Ys game, it's not a major headache to do the mapping thing

Cons-
-Easy
-The cool costumes for the characters cost real life money if you don't pirate them. Maybe it's an unfair complaint since I generally don't buy games since I can't afford to, but it's a full price game so it should be earned inside the game

Great game, I recommend it if you're not someone that demands a Dark Souls-style challenge.

Played through Machinarium. It's a short point and click adventure where you play as a robot exploring a grimy industrial robot city while completing puzzles.

The puzzles themselves make sense for the most part, although some can be rather challenging. That said, what can be equally challenging at times is realizing what you can interact with to get items, and whats just scenery details; the muted rusting and gray tones make some items blend into the background, however, most are quite clear.

For those who get stuck on puzzles, there's two ways of getting hints: each screen has 1 general hint, but if that's not enough for you, you can complete a small challenge mini game, where the whole screen gets explained for what you need to do.

The music and ambience is also really nice and builds the world.

If you enjoy point and click puzzle adventure games, I think Machinarium is an easy recommendation if you have a few hours to spare.

Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage (Dreamcast, 1999)

First of all, voice acting isn't bad at all. But I find it funny that they use Gattsu instead of Guts even though 'Guts' is literally in the title of the game (also in the credits).
I'm a big Berserk fan. I didn't like this game.
This game is really short. The manual tells you that there's only 3 savepoints in the game. Which means there's only 4 stages. Not much. The game takes around 5 hours. Plus-minus one hour.
But those 5 hours are mostly cutscenes.
The game is 70% cutscenes, 30% gameplay.
Is the story interesting though? No, it's not. It's not moving at all, I felt nothing. Sitting through the cutscenes was painful.
Does the gameplay make up for it? No, it doesn't. In short, it's chaotic and often annoying.
You get knocked back a lot. You get stunned a lot. You're fucking Guts and you have the Dragon Slayer, but you don't feel powerful at all. Normal enemies take 2 full combos. A single tiny frog can send Guts flying across the screen. It's not good. In fact, the best course of action is just to run past the enemies until it's necessary to kill them to progess. So, you skip 99% of the enemies because killing them gives you nothing, you just lose health in the process. It's ridiculous and not satisfying at all.
The boss fights are not very good as well. You get to fight Zodd, the fight isn't good, but it's fucking Zodd, so you still feel good about it.
Also, Skelly Knight makes a cameo appearance. Neat.

5/10.

also i don't know what's going on with that screenshot

>>78422
I watched DemoD play a bit of this right after Miura died.

>>78277
very nice birds they look fun to be around.
I've never played a single Ys in my life actually.

Just finished Gungrave, probably the only exception I've ever seen to simultaneously the videogame adaptions suck rule and the source material is always better rule. Through and through the anime managed to nail whatever emotion/atmosphere it tried for while delivering some of the greatest characters and development I've seen in anime. It starts off as a mafia story, rife with themes from the genre done extremely well. Throughout which you're introduced to an organization and a pair of street punks whose journey through the ranks and the hardships they face along the way is the focus. As I've only seen done a few times before it expresses the iron code of loyalty and honor of the mob in a way that doesn't leave you questioning why everyone allows themselves to be bound by such rules, but sympathizing with them over an understanding of the rules existence. It's a beautifully tragic backstory that most certainly could've stood on its own without the rest of the anime. Ironically however, the anime is then held back from perfection by it's own concept, since as an adaptation of an action shooty game it needs to eventually get to adapting the game material. This is where the anime starts to go a bit off the rails into a paranormal/sci-fi slugfest that at times starts to wear you down with what I think to be somewhat tedious battles with uninteresting monster creatures, which aren't particularly the best in the animation department.

My favorite aspect of the anime was most likely how the characters aren't portrayed as caricatures, they're all humans with their own motivations and logic. Instead of forcing contrived moral quandaries on the viewer it allows you to develop an understanding of each character so when they act, their actions fall in line with what makes sense for them. The anime is aware of this and so after it comes time to actually adapt the video game, the action spectacle is mostly supplanted by character drama that which uses the former half of the anime to make the fights all the more impactful. Although the tone and theme changes for the worse in this half, I'd still say that the strengths of the anime like drama and character are still present throughout this arc, only hampered by the fact it has to somewhat follow the game. My only real issue with a character was Mika at first since she annoyed me a bit, but eventually I came along to accepting her as a protagonist.

And that's it, perfect first-half and still good second half. Don't watch the first episode it's shit and just episode 18 of the anime placed at the beginning for fans of the game to know it's actually adapting the game, probably.

I finished playing Stella glow on 3DS. It's a turn-based kinda tactical game like Disgaea. It's so similar to the Luminous Arc series that I had to look it up and it seems the same company was responsible for it. I was hoping for a happy world without any substantial problems, but unfortunately it did have death and destruction in it.
You're a guy that has the power to synchronize with witch girls and you can hang out with your friends and the witches, so it has moments that remind me of a short VN. The characters are great.
Battles weren't very challenging to me at all, but were still pretty fun. I do have to note an annoyance that's common with these games, however. Some maps would have 15 or so enemies at once with good turn speed order and that has the unfortunate implication of waiting for them to each take their turn even if they're not doing anything. There was a bit of a pause for each one and the camera panning for it was slower than I would have liked.
I do want to emphasize again that the girls are really nice.

Watched "Birth" and it really was something that you'd never see today. Rife with animation errors, missing sound, and bad models, while also at the same time having really fluid animation during moments. It was a story without a beginning that was a complete mess and ended on almost a troll of an ending. I don't know what to think, but it sure was something.

So I watched the new Robert Eggers film, "The Northman", and it was pretty great as I had expected going in. Had a strong anti-traditionalist message which it didn't needlessly beat you over the head with, yet conveyed it quite well unless maybe you hold the same values as teen Thorfinn. I don't really want to spoil it so I won't really go into more detail than that, but it was really good and I recommend that kissu checks it out as well, should probably be coming to streaming and torrents soon enough if you're not into theatres.

I watched Puni Puni☆Poemii a couple days ago and its a certified /qa/nime, really funny and it moves so fast you dont have time to think about the fact that the plot makes no sense.

I'm playing a game called the Heroic Legend of Eagarlnia, it's just a simple strategy game made in China. Most Chinese games like this or in general are awful but this one actually has a charm to it and the gameplay isn't bad either, it's systems are reasonably engaging.
The characters are 2D images and there are lots of them each with a page of backstory but there isn't really much plot. The dialogue is quite interesting and how more Chinese games should be though I turned the voices off because I dislike Chinese voice acting. The dialogue is just responses to the missions you send heroes on and things like that but it comes across as being uniquely Chinese and not just a poor attempt at a Japanese rip-off like most are.

>>79930
Loved stella glow but its definitely a game that gets better after a couple hours. The game itself feels really slow until you start getting the movement + items and teleporting items. Once you get those it feels a lot better also the girls are really cute.

Watched the corn scene of Boku no Sexual Harassment. Might have done it before but forgot. Complete disappointment, he just uses a corn cob as the dildo. I can't believe this was even mentioned in the same sentence as Yakin Byoutou.

I watched the new Top Gun and it was so beautifully American that at the end everyone got up and clapped as guns shot through the roof to reveal a fighter jet formation soaring through the sky with bald eagles following up in a flock singing the national anthem.

But in all seriousness it was pretty good, a great action movie that didn't over-rely on nostalgia and instead opted to tell a new story unlike a lot of IP revivals today. As usual for Tom Cruise the stunts are insane and a good chunk of what's shown are practical effects. So if you like classical action movies then by all means watch it.

>>89279
The Chinese like their strategy games, a lot! I remember they were making very ambitious games on early computers and probably deeply influenced by those Koei grand strategy games like Romance of Three Kingdoms and Genghis Khan.
>>90931
It's nice to have a summer blockbuster that feels like a summer blockbuster tbh

It's been a long while since I watched it but Utena is one of my favorite anime and I think everyone should at least try it once. It's by far director Ikuhara's best work, excelling in its story, characters, comedy, plot, and dramatic tension. I love the anime so much that it's one of the few that I'm actually considering rewatching to understand it better.

still haven't watched utena

You don't like a show if you haven't rewatched it, goofus.

>>91718
Then I don't like anything... Unless you also count partial rewatches, which I have done.

Utena is still in my backlog. The manga left a bad taste in my mouth. It's garbage. Shoujo manga is never good, including stuff like Sailor Moon and Sakura Card Captors; their anime is way better.

>>91722
Utena's anime is mostly dissimilar to the manga. They were both created around the same time and thus the creators of each had different ideas in mind as to how to present and go about the story.