So I've been playing this recently...

[Laith]

Arutone 2 is probably the best Ar tonelico game with the best music

[2Bad]

I thought that Tales of the Abyss was jargon garbage but then I got to Ar Tonelico.

[LJ3]

Tales of Zestiria: Zaveid is quite the asshole. Cool music though.

Lailah is just precious. lol Arma Dylan, that skit came out of nowhere.

[Sesto]

One Way Heroics is a neat game

[2Bad]

[RoydGolden]

^Out of curiosity, what game is that?

[Laith]

Sakura Taisen: So Long, My Love

[2Bad]

it's very dumb

[RoydGolden]

Hmm. According to one dude who grew up there, it may not be quite as racially insensitive as it looks. Still pretty damn goofy, though.

[Seika]

Post-lifting the nostalgia veil on my AoM experience.

I must have cheated so much on this game when I was younger. I swear I never built half as many villagers as was necessary this time around to sustain production and tech. Also, I hadn't seen how maybe fifty percent of the campaigns went without just dropping Meteors on the objective as soon as I got bored.

Fall of the Trident needed to lose several dumb gimmick scenarios, and just needed a trim generally. Still had some fun characters in, though.
New Atlantis needed to expand itself with something other than gimmick scenarios. Not once do you get to just do a Mythic Age build-up, blow-up map, which is absurd when you're introducing a new civ.

Having played various more modern RTSes for a long while, even in fifteen hours or however much it was to do the campaigns, I barely began to re-adapt to the idea of actually building walls.

They did a surprisingly good job with their character animations. Without moving, they look like arse, because it's an early 2000s RTS, but the movement itself is solid and there are a number of really good custom animations employed for the campaign (e.g. Prometheus snatching a Roc out of midair and stomping on it, or Kastor's fight with the servant of Kronos).

The credits are hilariously unprofessional by modern standards, with everyone displaying their nick, a lack of grand and sweeping orchestral music, a load of red-eye candid photos of the devs, and some very silly (and occasionally mocking) outtakes from the voicing included at the end.

Speaking of music, I dig the weird funk in this OST and always have. You don't need to go all traditional just because your game is based on myth.

Now on to Rise of Legends.

[Five_X]

Ensemble was an incredibly good dev studio and I'll always miss them.

Now on to Rise of Legends.

yasssss

RoL isn't the best RTS game I've played (AoE3, the undefeated) but it's definitely the most plainly enjoyable. Fun units, diverse factions, fantastic visuals and music. Probably my favourite soundtrack for an RTS next to C&C Generals.

[Nihilm]

EE 2 and 3 were the worst RTS's I have tried, though AoE 3 was pretty bad.

[Five_X]

I still don't understand why people dislike AoE3, it's perfect in every way, my baby has done nothing bad ever.

EE3 is the worst mainstream RTS ever made though, yeah. Incredibly sloppy production, actually unplayable on release, riddled with bugs everywhere and the graphics are far under par for the time it was released.

[2Bad]

what kind of broken person thinks AoE3 was better than 2

[Five_X]

Famous video games critic Rod Yle

[LJ3]

Tales of Zestiria: Dumnonia Museum is 2spooky4me

but seriously, that blood writing is sinister

and then it was a Normin. Uh, aren't you also responsible for a plague where people idk, fucking died

[Megas]

really liking how dragonball fusions goes out of its way to show that Ginyu is actually a really nice guy and totally wouldn't fight you if Freeza hadn't told him he had to.

[Canon]

Doll waifu is hnnng

[Sesto]

for honor beta

it's fun. 1v1 and 2v2 can get pretty intense

[Seika]

TR2013 pretty much holds up on a replay. There's a bit of filler, but it turned out pretty short when I knew what I was actually doing, so I guess that's fine.

It does suffer from knowing what you're doing, though. Not in the sense that knowing the puzzle solutions is a problem, because I never found them very fun in the first place, but you're really meant to be experiencing Lara's growth alongside her. If you're any good at killing wolves at the beginning, and don't have that frantic scramble to survive while cacking everything up, it takes a fair bit out of the emotional journey toward furious, ruthless, hyper-competent Survivor Lara.

Should probably have been a couple more stealthy woods sections at the beginning of the game before ramping up into the murderous path through the WWII base, just to lengthen the frightened noob part of the story. And more should have been done with hunting, partly because it again puts off the homicidal maniac stage for a more basic struggle to get food/water/shelter/not-eaten, partly because all those perks are completely useless as soon as you get them.