PixlBit

I can't believe I put off playing this game for so long. As an indie game still in Early Access and boasting 2D graphics, I was initially turned off by it, but this is one of those games that really needs to be demoed to get into. Combat is turned based. It is very much like Dungeons & Dragons board game with party and dungeon exploration, a little Etrian Odyssey and the mood and feel of a Dark Souls game. After a while I started digging the flow of combat, although there are some issues I have with perma-death and leveling new characters all the time.I do feel like the difficulty is way high, but it's still in Early Access so it might get tweaked a bit more. It might be one of my fav indie games in recent memory. 

I was just wondering what opinions you have about the game if you are playing it.
It's supposed to be a more casual, accessible MOBA with a Blizzard theme, and so far that is what my impression of it is.  I've seen it being called a dumb baby game and all sorts of bad things from MOBA fans, but I still think it's fun. It's fast, short,  free and in Beta right now. 

 

The othe game it reminds me of is Infinite Crisis, the DC Comic MOBA, which has short rounds but still has the 'last hit' mechanic of League and DoTA2. 

~asreal. 

Atelier Shallie : Alchemists of the Dusk Sea ~Review~

I’ve never played an Atelier game before—ever! I like Anime and Japanese role-playing games, but the prospect of having to make EVERYTHING to use in the game, including healing items, armor, weapons and all of the base elements required to synthesize before you make those things I just mentioned through harvesting and also time sensitive objectives that make up the core gameplay experience, has always discouraged me from trying these games out.

Atelier Shallie, however, is one of the most streamlined and approachable games to come along for newcomers like me. For starters, there are no time sensitive objectives any more. You can progress the story further or hang out and synthesize or go out harvesting all you want with no time limit whatsoever. It’s more of an open world experience. The game gives you experience for almost every stupid little thing you do like walking or talking to anybody, so you can level your character and alchemy experience very easily. The synthesis menu list all the recipes you’ve learned, including any missing items you need to gather and there are plenty of recipe books to acquire through shops or story progression. The fusion system can get very deep, but I was able to make all of my items without any real penalty.

Now, the thing that I really enjoyed about the game, surprisingly, was the combat! You have between 6-8 characters to build a party from towards the end of the game, which is about 35+ hours long, and your party members all have flashy skills and super moves, and the bosses can get pretty tough and tricky at times, as well as some of the enemies out on the field. On the surface the game looks like any other generic Anime role-playing game, but its crafting system is pretty fun and deep but easy to use and the combat is pretty fun and has enough of a challenge to keep battles interesting.


You can play as either of two characters, who pretty much join each other and follow the same overall path half-way through the game, but they have slightly different stories and your stuff carries over in new game + so you can play with the other character to see their side of the story. The story I played through reminded me of a Final Fantasy game. In it, a young girl alchemist, Princess Stera, travels by airship over a sand ocean to seek help to solve her homelands drought. On the way her ship is attacked by a sand dragon, and gets stranded in a city where she has to use alchemy to do odd-jobs to repair her ship, and later to explore the world to solve the water crisis. Very formulaic, but epic enough to keep me invested in the characters and story nonetheless. Overall, I’m a fan of this series now and can’t wait to see where else they go with it in the future as this is the last entry in the Dusk series, and last Atelier game on PS3 until PS4. 

~Prologue~
I was listening to an interview with comic book writer Scott Snyder, currently helming Batman, who is known for putting an emphasis on horror into his stories— underline horror with a big fat red pen! The interesting thing that he said was that when working on Batman, he wanted to focus on writing smaller stories, but because of the precedent set by previous writers and the significance of the character, he feels like he can only write big stories. As I was finishing up Revelations 2, I was wondering if considering that the Revelations series was meant to be a smaller scale side story, did the precedent for the series force Capcom to go overboard yet again?

This guy really hates this game. He gave the game a try and hated it. Doesn't really get the Souls series. From what I read, he describes every Souls game experience I've had, but you eventually get over hurdles if you work enough, or learn to adapt--similar to Monster Hunter I suppose, which I also really enjoy. There's like 18,000 comments below it.