Various thoughts on a variety of topics.
Hachiman goes on a ‘date’ with Iroha to research date locations. Later on, Yukino and Yui go out with Hachiman to the same area.
This is a side-story for the parent series‘ second season. It’s primarily focused on reaction comedy though, so you may be able to watch it even if you haven’t seen that (to decide whether or not you want to).
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So, taking a break from Titan Quest, I decided to give the first Heretic Kingdoms game another shot. Loading up my save from just after leaving the opening temple area, I immediately entered Dreamform and explored the new map… finding nothing but ~4 Hex marks (which grant attribute points) and a ghost that gave a quest. This seemed a bit strange, so I left Dreamform and found myself being attacked by a lizardman in short order. The starting wand did 1 damage a hit to it, and it had ~25 life, while each of its hits took off about 15% of my health bar.
I only just barely defeated it. Then three more showed up and promptly killed me as I was trying to see if attacking with a halberd would be more effective (it didn’t seem like it). Deciding there that the game is quite clearly much more like the first Baldur’s Gate than Diablo, requiring some serious effort to understand its mechanics (What attributes should be raised? What early-game tactics are effective? Etc.), I decided to go try a different game for the time being.
Enter Nox, which I grabbed some time ago during some sale or other. This game is far easier to grasp and pretty forgiving of wandering into areas unprepared, at least as the class I started out trying (Conjurer). It’s somewhere in-between an RPG and an action RPG, with a somewhat odd control scheme. In most games like this left-click is move/interact, moving you to whatever you may be trying to interact with if you aren’t already near it. Here it’s just interact. You have to right click to move in the direction of your cursor, as though the mouse were simulating WASD (which are used as spell hotkeys), and can only interact with stuff you’re next to. It feels off. The humor too feels off, and the combination made me put it down after getting killed by some bandits I honestly shouldn’t have been engaging.
So back to Titan Quest it was. In addition to my first character, who’s at the very start of Epic (in Sparta at the moment), I made a few more characters:
A lightning-spam Oracle (Spirit/Storm) who’s now in Thebes, a soon-to-be Harbinger (Warfare/Dream) who’s just reached Athens, a soon-to-be pierce/bleed Warlock (Rogue/Spirit) who’s at Delphi, and have plans to start a reflection-death Templar (Dream/Defense) and some sort of class focused on summons (Nature/Earth? Nature/Spirit? Unsure). All three of the existing characters are doing much better than my first, partly thanks to a tighter focus and partly a result of the much larger equipment pool (I have yet to really find any gear tailored to a Diviner), and each play rather differently. So having to repeatedly clear the same areas doesn’t end up as boring as I thought it would be; it certainly helps that there’s such a wide variety of equipment drops (though I seem to be getting an inordinate amount of INT-focused gear).
The Oracle is vaporizing enemies with Ternion, the proto-Harbinger is mincing them with Battle Standard, and the proto-Warlock is doing hit & runs and/or insta-gibbing with Lethal Strike. The first two will only get more powerful in the near future, but I’m a little worried about the Warlock. Automatons and Undead are both resistant/immune to pierce/bleed, so I see some tough going ahead unless I try to rush Deathchill/Necrosis… which will likely cause some severe Energy-related problems.
Have you ever played Diablo II? Titan Quest Anniversary Edition is basically that with a more varied skill system, a few quality of life improvements (base health/mana regen, infinite portals, keep equipment on death, no item durability, easy respec), and no random maps.
The maps are quite linear, the sidequests amount to killing/finding things, and the dialog and storyline are both very simple. If you don’t enjoy wandering around viciously murdering hordes of enemies while constantly picking up shiny new equipment there won’t really be any reason to play this game. On the plus side you pretty much never have to backtrack through a previously cleared location (there are 2-3 exceptions in Act IV, added by the Immortal Throne expansion).
My first playthrough was with a Diviner (Mind/Spirit) who focused mainly on ranged attacks, Psionic Immolation (which killed nearly every non-boss in one hit once maxed out), and the Lich summon. At the end of Normal they were at level 40 and ready to start maxing out Lich and Temporal Rift (which turns out is even nastier than PI) in Epic.
Despite not being optimized in the slightest and not doing any real grinding, for the most part I didn’t have any trouble getting through to the end. Hades’ third form did kill me something like 6 times though because Immolation kept missing his floating body and his life drain wave did tons of damage. However, before going into Epic with this character I think I’m going to run through Normal/Epic with a lightning-spam Oracle (Spirit/Storm, which apparently isn’t very gear dependent) so that I can find better Diviner-focused equipment, as I suspect it won’t do too well in Epic just using whatever.
A young girl from the city transfers to a school in the countryside. The students there, most of whom are talking animals, suspect she may be related to a powerful wind spirit called Matasaburo.
A short fairy tale-like story presented with picturebook visuals set in the modern day.
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A story of regrets and second chances. The protagonist receives a letter from her future self, on the first day of the second year of high school, detailing events that will soon occur and the choices she made at the time which in retrospect feel like mistakes. The letter implores her to not repeat them.
The time travel aspect is essentially just a gimmick, a bit of flair to make the show stand out. For the most part it’s a normal, realism-styled school life drama/romance that takes the uncommon step of dedicating a portion of each episode to showing how its characters (may have) ended up a decade later.
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Wanting to try something new after middle school, the protagonist initially wants nothing to do with her high school’s band. Circumstances conspire against her and she ends up joining anyway with her two new friends. Together, along with an old classmate and a childhood friend, they try to improve enough to perform in the national-level competition.
This is an abridged version of 2015’s Hibike! Euphonium. It focuses primarily on the improvement of the music club as a whole, cutting out most of the dramatic subplots and romance aspects.
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An MMO-playing otaku finds out that his online wife (Ako), who’s not a very good player, is a socially awkward girl in real life who can’t separate online fantasy from offline reality. Not only that, she and the other two members of his guild all turn out to attend the same school he does. Together they try to both improve Ako’s skills in game and help her separate fantasy from reality.
The show alternates between virtual reality settings (primarily fantasy), depicting the characters’ online gaming adventures, and a modern day school setting. The comedic setup isn’t much different from an ecchi harem at the base level, the main difference being that only one of the girls is pursuing the male protagonist.
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A continuation of 2006’s D.Gray-man, this series picks up an indeterminable amount of time after the point that one ended. The protagonist(s) get their first chance to visit the Black Order’s new headquarters since being destroyed in the previous series, and Allen finds himself treated like an enemy after learning that he may no longer be alone in his own head.
The show does a decent job explaining the plot for people who may not have seen the earlier 103-episode series, but doesn’t elaborate on or explain the characters’ relationships with one another. So while you can jump right into the story here, treating it as an example of in medias res, you’ll probably not get much out of it since the character behavior/interactions are fairly central.
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Finally got around to playing though the expansions for Witcher 3 (Hearts of Stone & Blood and Wine) and Pillars of Eternity (The White March), after having touched neither game since shortly after they were released.
Pillars‘ expansion is essentially more of the same sort of content/gameplay that you’ll find in the base game. Aside from the Soulbound weapons, which are extremely powerful, and some of the new vignette sequences, which are a bit more elaborate in that they can check for specific spells/abilities, you’ll still be exploring/looting/fighting same as always. Which if you enjoyed the base game will probably be welcome enough. If you didn’t however, then it won’t really offer anything that might change your mind about the game.
The Witcher 3 expansions on the other hand do add something a bit different to the base game.
Hearts of Stone extends the Novigrad half of the main world map a little to the north and a decently large amount to the east. It fills this newly explorable space with mostly the same points of interest found in the base game, the only real difference being that bandit camps actually contain useful loot here and have their own little story linking them all (and that all enemies in the area are leveled to the mid 30s). It also adds two new types of enemies (boars and giant spiders) and of course plenty of quests… which is where the trouble lies. The sidequests are fine, but the main expansion questline (which features an old friend from the first Witcher game) is filled to the brim with extremely forced sequences and questionable content. I did enjoy the Dragon Age: Inquisition reference though.
The second expansion, Blood and Wine, adds an entirely new world map to the game (which seems to be roughly the size of the post-HoS Novigrad half of the Novigrad/Velen map). This new location is filled with both familiar and new varieties of interest points, with the most notable change being that locations near each other are often directly related. If you raid a bandit camp for example, you may find a note describing a danger lurking in a nearby abandoned location. You may even stumble into a full-blown sidequest/contract while doing a simple hidden treasure search. There are new enemies to be found here as well (banshees, barghests, a spiked drowner variety, armored moles, evil plants, panthers, vampires of all sorts, and a few of the same enemies introduced by HoS), ranging in level from the high 30’s to high 40’s, along with quite a number of new quests.
These quests should really, really be done after you finish the main game. It doesn’t seem to matter when you do HoS, but there are quite a number of reasons to not start Blood and Wine until after the Wild Hunt is no more. Similar to HoS the main questline here re-unites Geralt with some old acquaintances, though this time around it’s characters from the books rather than the games (though a couple characters from the first game show up in a particular sidequest). Pleasantly enough these quests do not force you into arguably lore-breaking situations and give a decent amount of leeway in how you can go about resolving them. Honestly, the only negative thing I can say about Blood and Wine is that the English voice acting is extremely uneven; I suspect it may be related to the accents, but a good majority of the ambient dialog just sounds incredibly half-assed/jokey.
Two of the main comments I’ve seen regarding this game are that it’s hard, and that it’s full of bugs. Well, perhaps the earlier versions were, but the only bugs I’ve come across in the Special Edition (with DLC installed) are occasional random freezes… which completely disappeared after adding -force-gfx-direct to the shortcut’s target line. I’m only a little over halfway through the third chapter though, so maybe that will change later.
As for difficulty, yes there are some sidequests that are notably hard (the Dwarf Games and Heart of the Forest quests come to mind). The majority of the main quests up to this point however aren’t particularly difficult so long as you pay attention to the battlefield (always look for interactive objects), don’t neglect buff/debuff spells, and don’t screw up your character(s) builds. That said, it is very easy to screw up a character’s build.
See, the thing about this game is that its statistic system’s a bit overly complicated. There are 8 Attributes and every action except attacking/defending rolls against 3 of them. If any of those rolls fails then the action as a whole fails, and spells in particular rely on all sorts of different attribute combinations. This means that an effective character will tend to only focus on at most 4 attributes and then 3-4 abilities related to those attributes; trying to be a jack of all trades just flat-out does not work here. ‘Dual classing’ (there are no actual classes) is certainly possible though and in fact happens to be a pretty good idea since you don’t get any permanent party members explicitly built for handling archery/traps.
You get two pure mages (the latter of which can be turned into an archer relatively easily) and two pure fighters (the latter of which, again, can be turned into an archer fairly easily). The archer you get toward the end of the first chapter only sticks around until near the end of the second. Why even bother with archery? Because the Triple Shot ability is insanely powerful. Of course, you won’t want more than two archery characters (one for bows and the other for crossbows) as otherwise you risk running out of ammo; merchants have limited inventories and don’t restock. Something else to keep in mind during character creation is that the flashback sequences no longer force you to wield an axe, so the rampant advice to always put some points into axes/maces is no longer valid.
But what about the game itself? Is it fun/interesting? It’s okay. The dialog and quests have been pretty simple so far, but there are hints that the plot might take an interesting turn, many sidequests give you multiple ways to resolve them, and quite a few of the battles have impressively elaborate constructions (the optional and not-so-optional arena battles in particular stand out). While I certainly wouldn’t pay $40 for it, it’s well worth the current $4.49 sale price.
