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What the fuck is Titanfall

I fucking hate both of you

You're not funny and that song is old as dirt just let it lie

Sazh definitely needs a Barret outfit, gun arm and all

I'm starting to see where you're coming from. But I think that just means the calculations should be more complicated. Different enemies should hit for more elemental damage than others. And that's probably true already, it's just a matter of fine-tuning it. But I'm against not messing with it at all, for reasons I've explained, and cutting it out would just neuter the already frivolous magic mechanic. Elements are common, and if you ask me, that means they deserve some blood and sweat to make sure they're an airtight and engaging aspect of gameplay.

But again, all of this happens in RPGs as well. It depends on what part of the game you're looking at. If you're looking at the early stages of a Kingdom Hearts game, enemies absolutely do appear in chunks, and elemental advantages are important and don't require an overt amount of micro-managing. Towards the end, some catalyst occurs that fills these worlds with a large variety of enemies, but that just means you have to use a wider range of offensive techniques and not rely so much on static resistances. For one, I am talking about isolated segments of gameplay, and for two, I've been talking about defense most of the time; both yours and your enemies'. The equation becomes more complicated when we look at the whole of the game, of course. But it's during these small segments in the beginning that the effectiveness of these strategies matter most; towards the end of even the slowest-crawling RPG, you're throwing so many items, spells and skills that it can be hard to wrangle them all.

Of course. And I'm not saying that sort of strategic entropy doesn't arise. But no matter how inevitable it may seem, it needs to be combatted. Developers should always be looking for that perfect mix of routine and complex, and imo KH has settled too much into the routine. Everything is too predictable, too simple. I know it's a kids' game, but I was a kid when I first played Kingdom Hearts, and I smashed the crap out of it. A game should be able to teach you how to play it without becoming exceptionally easy once you've passed the final lesson.

One technique to combat this entropy, and one which Kingdom Hearts should have no trouble utilizing, is strategically combining enemies. This results in what I call an 'enemy puzzle,' where the goal of a battle is not just to know how to defeat each singular enemy, but how best to defeat them in sequence or as a team. To apply this to our debate: If you meet a group of three mages who all use different elemental spells, and you have no trouble dealing with two of them but the last one nearly kills you, you can equip something that improves your resistance to that enemy's element of choice. Then you'll still be required to exert your skills to defeat the first two, but you'll have an advantage against the last one. As it stands in the Kingdom Hearts series, you could just equip resistances to all three; this would trivialize the attacks of the first two in addition to padding you against the third, effectively leaving you facing one gimped enemy.

Again, I disagree. I think KHI block was mad unstoppable, and the rest of them sucked up until BbS and 3D, where Dark Barrier is mad broke but everything else is pretty fair. I'll explain myself game by game:
KHI - With Guard I can beat Rikunort on Expert, having given up the shield, and take zero damage. 'Nuff said.
KHII - Not only is the Guard animation more sluggish coming and going, but most enemies will hit you clean around it, because it's just too small compared to your hurtbox. Xaldin and Sephiroth are two of the most frustratingly annoying enemies out there, because every time I put up my Guard during their combos, they dance right around it like I'm not doing anything. Xaldin has been attacking me from the front as I'm guarding and HIT ME IN THE BACK. So Guard suffered due to poor design or perhaps intentionally to force you to use Reflect.
BbS and 3D - The same basically holds true, though it is far less pronounced and Guard is somewhat worth the trouble on most of the characters. Barriers are broke as f#&k because, well, they work like Reflect, and Reflect is broke as f&%k.

Yeah but you kinda have to. Elemental attacks are magic, and the fact that magic is mad underpowered is part of the reason the element system needs a facelift. Unless you want to get into some crazy experimental sh#& like I'm writing up for some game ideas, but that most assuredly is a whole other can of worms.

I can remember them. Believe me, if anyone remembers them, it's me. If you name me an enemy, eight times outta ten I can physically demonstrate their attacks for you. The problem is not whether they're memorable; Kingdom Hearts is never gonna drop the ball on that, because as you say, it's helmed by a character artist, and I still love his designs (zipperbelts and all). The problem is that after a while I treat them all the same. When they wind up for an attack, no matter what it is, I have the same response; and when they guard is down I hit them with the same attacks. It's that strategic entropy we were talking about, but again, the issue is not that it happens; it's that it happens too soon, that Squeenix is not fighting it hard enough.

I dunno, I think all the elements are pretty distinct as they are. Shadow is usually something black or purple, with either a smoky or viscous texture, and very little else combines those features - or even uses them separately. I can tell when I'm being hit by a Dark attack. I think the real issue is that I can defend against every element at once, and possibly that it doesn't constitute enough of the damage - that is, I can shoulder it just by buffing up my level/Defense as opposed to really thinking about what gear to bring. There's also the fact that, as we appear to agree on, the game could stand to give you some clue as to what you're up against. To use a previous example, maybe Ursula could swing the Trident around and shoot some thunderbolts in a cutscene before the final battle? Just as a hint. Maybe I give the wrong impression, but I'm not necessarily calling for a grand overhaul of the system - just a lot of little tweaks where they're needed. That and a paring down of some aspects, like sheer thoughtless enemy density and the amount of AP one has to spend on resistances.

Most of the enemies you named either don't have an element, which practically excludes them from the debate, or show up after the Hollow Bastion keyhole has been unsealed, which counts as that tactical singularity I mentioned earlier. And honestly I've only ever seen Jafar use the boulder attack during that fight :'D I know he has a laser, but he never ever uses it against me, ever. I mean, it's not the only example. Another area that's surprisingly heavy on fire is Wonderland; the only enemies that have an element of any kind use fire, including the Trickmaster.

That's not what I mean at all. I was referring more to changing gear between each fight. But Hel, what do we have to lose? Let's swap bangles in combat! More excuse to diversify the attacks enemies can bring to bear. And yeah, I realized I was focusing intensely on defensive options, which are more limited. But then again, elemental attacks are pretty pointless too, when I can literally count the number of hits any enemy will take to die from a Keyblade on my fingers.

Did we play the same games? KHII Sora's swings are way slower. And he may be able to combo his magic, but it's so impractical that I never use the function. It actually reduces your DPS, since the combo terminates in a slower-than-average iteration of the animation. The only spell that comes out even remotely fast enough for me is his grounded Thunder. Everything else comes out faster in KHI, and Thunder is a little slower on average, but more consistent.

I can't bring myself to believe that, because what you're telling me is patently untrue. And it doesn't matter that those longer strikes have multiple hits, because the hits do reduced damage. When I take off all of those skills, I kill quicker. I've studied it too.

I'm following. It was the grammar on some parts that threw me off, multiple possible meanings and such.

I guess so. I dunno. My writer's instinct tells me that a distinction like that would be in the game if it was true. But I have to remember not everyone approaches the craft with such precision.

You take the smoothness of your connection for granted, friend.

...Ok, you must be arguing a totally different point right now, because people switching to PS4 is the last thing Microsoft wants. I'm talking about why the Xbox One is bad as a system, why it's going to get crap sales, and why MS is to blame for all of it; not how every gamer can continue in their hobby in the next generation. I'm not a patriot, we're just having two totally different discussions.

...That's... not true in the slightest. In fact I'm considering getting a second, far less powerful computer almost exclusively for non-internet functions, to paint a picture of how many there are.

Yeah, with the features they cut that they had absolutely no need to cut. So whose fault is that?

That's a whole other barrel of monkeys, but inciting change in many things at once to create balance is impractical when the only thing one needs to maintain it is to... well, stay the course. There's nothing wrong with the state of it as it is. I mean, do you really understand what you're suggesting? Basically, Microsoft should go around and demand that ISPs start charging less for better service, and provide service to areas with poor internet, just to accommodate the needs of their system. Do you understand how ludicrous that is? Microsoft has unrealistic expectations for what the consumers can handle.

Except that the Xbone was about to launch with features it did not need that did nothing but harm the consumer for no foreseeable benefit. And when the consumers asked that they be removed, Microsoft did so, but in so doing it also removed a lot of features that it would have benefited from, that could have been improved over time, and that, once again, have been proven to work just fine as stand-alone features, then tried to make it seem like an unavoidable loss that they were forced into. Steam didn't launch with a sensor that detected when someone was playing a game besides the one who purchased it and then forcibly ejected them from their seat unless they paid full price. One of the great things about console gaming and hard copies of games is that you can share them with whoever you want, and MS was asking us to live without that. When we decided we didn't want to, they started to act like we'd have to, or else we'd miss out on all this cool new stuff over here! Stuff which, call me a broken record as long as it sinks in, they did not have to remove. That's bullshit.

You're a little late. The pros and cons of anti-used policies, always-on Kinect, and daily check-in validation were debated to death in the first week of this fiasco, that's what led to the stripping of a majority of those features. At this point it's just beating a dead horse.

They imagined those to make people feel guilty. That's what seems most likely, considering, one more time everybody!, the features they claim couldn't make the cut without all the loathsome stipulations attached already exist on other systems without those stipulations.

Do you know what else leads to stagnation in development? Getting ahead of yourself. PS2 hardware was a piece of crap compared to the stuff computers were running, and it produced the best goddamn games of its generation. It didn't need an internet connection. It didn't need motion controls. It didn't need check-ins or family sharing or all-digital or console installation or any of that. It just needed to be gripping and fun. Somewhere along the line these systems got featuritis, and that's when the industry suffered - not before, not after, and scarcely for any other reason.

I find it ironic that you're preaching the evils of homogeny to me, when you would have everything work like Steam. Aren't you really just promoting the system you like best? Consoles are not PCs, they do not belong to Valve, they do not sell their games on GoG, they do not require an Origin login (...well, unless they didn't survive the EA season pass purge from a while ago), and whether or not they would benefit from introducing features similar to these services, they do not need to become these services. Gamers deserve the right to choice. If you're so in love with always-online and all-digital, hey, I hear Rogue Legacy just dropped for fifteen bucks.

We are not tapping these systems' potential. That is the problem here. One of the things that is causing this industry to stagnate is the needless piling on of superfluous gadgets and features instead of focusing on the freaking game. Who cares how it's delivered to us? Some of us still play Pong, for godsake. Companies are too excited about the systems and not enough about the game. The game that takes millions of dollars to make and expects to sell as many copies as the population of China, the game that looks the same as the game that came out two weeks ago, the game that sells based on apathy and animal impulse. If you wanna talk to me about homogeny, let's talk about what matters most. Let's discuss the launch titles. Let's talk about what games are in development for these systems. Let's not talk about whether or not you can get them on disc.

If you're really trying to be devil's advocate, you could stand to do it without the condescension. If you just wanna be bored with the state of the industry? Go right ahead. But don't act high and mighty about it, like everything sucks now and you know the reason, and everybody else is a blind idiot for not seeing it. Getting Microsoft to buckle on these absurd system specs - and frankly it concerns me that their absurdity is even a subject of debate! - was an achievement. The only one this generation that's really worth any points.

Not getting the logic there. If you're saying the enemy has less of a chance of being afflicted, that's really confusing, because didn't you just say it's getting hit by those spells even faster? By all rights it should stand a greater chance of catching the ailment. And if you're referring to the player character's chances, the game is boringly easy if the enemy never gets a chance to hit back, and that's when it's going to dole that out. In fact, if an enemy is focused on dealing a status ailment, in that environment it should fire back with its own combos. If FFXIII status ailments don't work as often, either the game's way too easy or the calculations are different.

But none of that affects the argument that these things should still be taken into consideration. You have to use different numbers, proportions, and calculations in an action game, yes, but that is very different from just not using them altogether. Elements might as well not exist in Kingdom Hearts for how often they affect the gameplay, and that should be fixed.

Again, not getting your logic. In fact now you've got me all spun around and I'm not even sure what you're saying.

Ok, but that can be factored in. All of this can be factored in. No matter how hard the work turns out to be, if Squeenix is leaving something to be desired, they're gonna get nitpicked. And it's a prevailing issue with Kingdom Hearts that being a full-on caster pretty much isn't a thing, and that most enemies cower before the might of your Keyblade regardless of what abilities you have on. (Except for the ones that autowin unless you're a SC/OMbag, of course.) The game has balance issues, and the only way the format plays a part is in explaining why they're having issues balancing it, not in rationalizing the exclusion or ignoring of certain mechanics.

If they're distinctly designed but they all turn tail when I bonk them over the head with my 5-foot door opener, I'm not going to notice or care while I'm playing. They will all look pretty but die the same, and that's not variety. That's sameness.

The only thing I will say about them is that they all move uniquely, and that's something an action game has that an RPG doesn't; but unless masterfully utilized, it is not enough to keep a single game from going stale, much less an entire series. That mechanic needs backup. And the elemental attacks are already there, so why not flesh them out more?

I pointedly brought up a whole world as an example as well, and it's an equally valid one: Three steps into Agrabah, you know what you'll be facing for the rest of the world, up to and including the final boss of the world, and it makes a difference if you choose to prepare with the appropriate elemental resistances. It still manages to throw you some curveballs, like the dark bulbs the Cave of Wonders shoots out, or... whatever the Hel the Pot Centipede does when it runs out of body parts. And I agree, KH needs to rely less on trial and error, but if it were to fix that, it would only better fit the RPG mold, so that's not really helping your point.

Man, you won't let that go, will you? For one, it is not impossible to strategize on the fly; it just means making snap decisions and having a fast, efficient interface available. And for two, I disagree! The later KH games don't feel faster to me at all. All they have is artificial speed. The characters move at a quicker pace, their weapon swings are faster, so on and so forth, but animations on the whole are lengthier and the games swell to bursting with in-fight cinematics, which means input is expected from the player far less often. And no, I'm not just talking about Reaction Commands; I'm talking about every basic action. In KHI, compared to KHII, BbS, and 3D, a fireball comes out faster, a Keyblade swing comes out faster, a dodge roll comes out faster, and they all have less cooldown frames so you can immediately perform another action.

Then that means he was only there to induct the last of the vessels of his heart, and then he'd have to go back. Which makes sense if there's more to the ceremony than a bunch of conformists in one room, but then one must ask... where on the timeline does this happen for him? And yes, I know he would forget the encounter anyway, if that's how time travel works in Kingdom Hearts; but when he arrived in KH3D, he knew Mickey and the three children whose lives he'd ruined, and furthermore how he did so. He wouldn't have known all of that before the events of BbS, and I doubt he'd have had time for... well, a trip through time after the fact. Then again, he is offscreen for a while after the exam...

I dunno, Baccano! and DRRR!! came from light novels and they turned out all right. And imagine what a train wreck they must have looked like on the cutting room floor, all those side plots and errant strands of exposition. I don't think that alone explains it. Unless the SAO light novels are also trash, which could be the case if it's the character development that's lacking.

Also I never got why they're called light novels are they for pansies who can't commit to reading a real book

Please don't

I don't want to be even partially responsible for this

So what would've changed in Dream Drop Distance? And how would he be "returning" a complete person if he'd never really gone anywhere? It's exceedingly odd wording if all he did was jump forwards through time.

There's no need to be forgiving with weaknesses of any kind in a game where you can dodge or block them. I would venture to say that you have it harder in RPGs, where your only chance to dodge a lethal strike is pure RNG. If what you were implying is that there are so many enemies in the average action game that for each of them to have unique stats and elemental strengths would be pointless because they all blend together, then yeah, I agree on some level; but KH shouldn't be hitting that level. More enemies does not equal harder gameplay. Some of my greatest struggles in 3D were against pairs of endgame baddies. In that kind of fight, I would definitely take notice if one guy used wind and another one used ice, and if I had the tools I'd plan accordingly. I don't think it's that easy to classify all RPGs or all actions games and line up what works and what doesn't in each genre; it depends on what you're going for. But I think an action RPG should definitely be going for substance over style (though a good one would manage both cough original KH.)

I'm not talking about switching after every fight, for Pete's sake. I'm talking about bothering to switch anything at all, throughout the entire course of the game. I can run any new world without messing with my abilities, straight up.

But Kingdom Hearts uses the exact same formula as those old RPGs. In fact, in the original I knew a number of people who would get stuck on Ursula, and I'd ask them if they found the Thunder Bracelets or whatever they are lying around Atlantica. Most of 'em would say no. And do you know how much easier Agrabah would be for me on Expert if I ever stopped to check that my party had fire-resistant accessories on?

If you don't stop to check your gear that often, that's your business, but this series used to punish you for it same as any other RPG would, and it didn't sacrifice fast pace or fun to do that. It's not that it doesn't work fundamentally, it's that it doesn't work anymore because the developers got lazy-*ahem*, the design focus shifted.

That's true. I guess what I meant to ask is, how is he complete now if the MX we're seeing is from the BbS timeline? He can't have felt very complete at the time, what with the churning in his loins for possessing some fresh-faced youngblood and extending his life.

Incorrect. Sustaining a console's internet connection is harder than sustaining a computer's internet connection, not to mention each one eats its own amount of bandwidth, which makes it difficult to keep every device online. Some people access the internet from free wi-fi, or from phone services, in absence of a stable connection, and they wouldn't be able to connect to Xbox Live every day. And I don't know how many times it needs to be brought up, maybe people are just desensitized to the issue or what, but I know a great handful of friends who serve in the military, and they assuredly don't have an internet connection to begin with and can't use a system that forces you to connect every single day. A big point you seem to be missing is that we are not all barred from basic functions on our computers if we decide not to - or, for whatever reason, can't - connect to the net on a particular day.

But forcing it at a time when a large swath of people cannot sustain it is out-and-out a bad business decision. As always, companies are trying to advance in technology well before the world is ready, and Microsoft paid for it - duly so. Not to mention part of the reason we can accept having our music, videos, documents, and even Steam games all-digital is because (1) we can back these things up to actual hardware, making it more difficult to lose them; and (2) much of our all-digital media is backed up in cloud storage by the companies who sell it, in a way we can access without jumping through a dozen blasted DRM hoops.

MS does not deserve defense for their actions, nor can they blame anyone but themselves, regardless if any other companies were going to go down the same route in the end. They jumped the gun, and deliberately saddled their service with consumer-unfriendly features, which no one should ever have to deal with at any stage in the evolution of a product.

They explained that, because their DRM measures were removed, they would also have to remove other "awesome" features (which were mostly dull and useless tbh). The problem being, the PS3 has a couple of those features already - installing your games to the console, off the top of my head. So we've caught MS talking out of their asses for the umpteenth time, big shocker there. If they are forcing us to choose between the lesser of two evils, that is their fault, not ours; they're reacting like spoiled brats, and at this point it's only due justice if they lose their hordes of gold for it.

Well, now I think this makes it much more obvious why MS was in disarray. Like the guy said, it still makes Mattrick a dick, but now he's an amusing dick and not just an infuriating one.

Just don't ask us if this is real life

Yeah man, like bony and shit. I'm into the ladies who look like their diet is more than potions and herbs, you feel me?

...Which is totally untrue for Kingdom Hearts because you can block/dodge everything.

I think that's the real reason it doesn't work. Damage scaling is garbage from KHII onward, because they're all using that system, and I'm not going to bother detailing the infernal depths to which I despise that system, but suffice it to say there's no spot of hope in terms of how hard the hellions hit. If damage overall was lessened, but elemental weaknesses made up a greater portion of that damage, then it would work better and make more sense to play with the idea of juggling resistances. But then, if damage was lessened they'd have to put more work into the AI so it could actually hit you once in a blue moon without resorting to absurd reach, battlefield-spanning combos, or a lame option select - and that's apparently too much work.

Ok, so... is that different from a traditional RPG? Yeah, if you're in a volcano, you're gonna run into a lot of blazin' baddies, but you might stumble upon some earth warriors as well. With how quickly one enters and exits combat in KH, it would not be unreasonable to go into your first fight unprepared, emerge with some damage dealt but lessons learned, and go into the next ten to fiteen properly equipped.

YUI has reserved MARIO. She is now standing by.

Meh, too shrimpy for me but whatever floats yer boat