huuuh.. hey guys.. today were gonna be streaming [COUGHS TWICE LOUDLY] were gonna be streaming spore hero arena for the [COUGHS ONCE] nintendo ds... uh... chat please slow down [shakily holding glasses up to eyes] i cant read chat when its this fast... huhh... today we are going to be [breathes in] streaming spore... hero arena [breathes out, breathes in] for the... nintendo..... uhhh... what is it again...

Bree doesn't appreciate Arthur's singing.

Sick of this shit.

Let's irresponsibly breed a dog together!

Share as much as possible that dog gotta be atrocious by the end of the week

flanderization did not get coined for you to claim that writers simply Can't mess up their own characters

wouldnt it be fucked up if it were flandreization and the simpsons neighbor was doing bullet hell shit to bart and lisa all the time

i found her while cleaning my files

WELCOEM TO MY FUCK HOUSE

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

OJ simpson has entered valhalla

Finally got the platinum in this game after almost 140 hours. Review, maybe? Probably not but my thoughts.

Microtransactions: 21 unique mtx for things easily obtained in-game. Immediately left a bad taste in my mouth, but they'd already had my pre-order in by that point, sunken cost fallacy and all that. The game truly didn't need these mtx for any reason, and are hardly even worth an "early-game boost".

Anyway time for the actual game.

Combat is certainly more satisfying than the first game's, and all of the classes felt fun to play as. Even the Trickster, whose gimmick is pulling aggro and using illusions to distract enemies or cause them to hurt themselves, at the expense of dealing basically no damage directly. I do certainly wish the game had taken some inspiration from other popular action RPGs of the past decade, or even the Monster Hunter games. Sometimes in melee combat you might snap onto the wrong enemy and begin attacking them, and without a lock-on system, it seems that you just attack the closest target that you're next to.

The new and returning vocations are all pretty great, and I didn't dislike any of them besides my first few hours of using the Trickster class. I'd go more into what they do but I'm sure a quick reading of the in-game description could describe it better than I could.

Enemies in this game? Not really a huge improvement compared to the original game. The variety of enemies is artificially inflated by having different tiers of the same enemy. They might look or sound different, or they might have a specific gimmick or status ailment that they inflict. Dullahans are cool, though, until you encounter like 3 in one in-game night cycle.

Pawn AI? Not a massive improvement compared to the first game. They made them more helpful in terms of quests, for sure, but they'll also point out the same signs and ladders ad nauseam. There's not much you can do to really control what special moves they do, which can be an extreme annoyance when you want a Fighter or Warrior class pawn to launch you into the air outside of combat to reach something that is high up. They do this attack ALL THE TIME in combat, though. Nothing I love more than playing as a sorcerer or trickster and a pawn will decide to launch me into the air as I'm just trying to position myself. Just like the first game, they are hilariously bad with water hazards. Like, Lucatiel in the Sinner's Rise in Dark Souls II levels of tripping and drowning in the water. I've also had many close calls and deaths with pawns essentially shoving me out of the way when traversing a bridge or any narrow platform suspended above an abyss.

Traversing the world, once you get used to the oxcart system, is not nearly as bad as the original 2012 Dragon's Dogma release (before the game came bundled with the Eternal Ferrystone for infinite teleports). There's an oxcart travel network that essentially connects most of the major hub towns together, with a final area you reach much later in the game forcing you to travel by foot or by teleport. I guess they really wanted to double down on making fast travel a more premium thing in-universe, but fuck, why can't I even sprint forever out of combat to travel the world faster?

Story is, kinda just there. Probably about the same level as the first game, for better or worse. I don't really know what would work better in a game like this, but much of the main story is "guy tells you to go do this one task, you go do it, and return back to him". It very quickly feels like less of a grand adventure and more like I'm going through a list of chores. Because of this, I reached the end of the game before I realized it. I was quite shocked because I had spent an absurdly long time grinding to level up each vocation and also go on a 20 hour, 4 in-game day hunt of where I found my first collectable for a series of tasks in a sidequest.

Sidequests are okay, also about the same quality as the first one. A lot of varying ways to complete quests that often involve delivering items to one person rather than another, or delivering forged items to one person to keep the genuine article for yourself or another NPC. Vague spoilers below for both the end-game of Dragon's Dogma and Dragon's Dogma II. So, in the first game, there's a post-game after completing the final story mission that completely alters the game world. You can freely explore the world with much more powerful enemies and an entirely new area with enemies to fight and items to collect. In the original, there wasn't much of a story in this part, just enough to link the NG+ cycle to the gameplay loop, which imo was kinda neat.

In Dragon's Dogma II, there again is a post-game after completing the final story mission, but the method of reaching it is a bit vague and easily missed. Once you reach this post-game, the entire game world is changed in a more drastic way than the first game. You are now in an apocalyptic scenario with a time limit (think Majora's Mask but there's no loop or starting over while keeping some amount of progress). This section of the game is brutal if you haven't already read up on what to do or you've failed enough times to learn what to do. Basically, you cannot rest in-game, because that wastes precious time that could be used to stop the looming threat. Once you've stopped the threat, however, the time limit is removed and you are free to enjoy the endgame grind for the best gear and items, or you can end the cycle and start all over. Now that I've gotten the platinum, I'm happy to shelf this game for the foreseeable future. I might return to it someday, but I think I'm more like to revisit the first game before that. Taking everything into account, including the microtransactions and how few QoL improvements were made to an already kinda janky game from 12 years ago, it's really hard to recommend this to anyone unless you REALLY liked the first game and are dying for more.

I think I give the game a 3/5. It deserved a hell of a lot better, and so did the fans. Maybe they'll improve things with updates, but to be honest, I doubt it. Besides, the extra damage to Capcom's rep is already been done.

Rather than buy this for $70 USD, I say try the first game out. It's on most current platforms and it constantly goes on sale for like $5 to $10 USD, so wait for one of those to snag it. Otherwise, idk, play Elden Ring with some friends using the seamless co-op mod. Guarantee it'd be more fun than this.

I'm so fucking worried about Monster Hunter Wilds next year.

recently i’ve been in the mood to change my life. I won’t be doing anything to achieve that goal but i’ll be thinking about it extensively which is the same thing

we are all going to be ookay some day i promise

stingray blast

how does she look like this

i was trying to perspective scale timothee as a bit but for some reason it just keeps making him chadlier why is it giving him the call of pussy treatment

[Showing you my camera roll] oh yeah heres me lost in the forbidden wood, afraid

might as well post these old ones too