Wolf Kanno
is a Level 99 Chocobo
Memento Mori
Site Contributor

Support characters should never be underestimated. I’ve experienced stories where supporting characters have both made and broken the whole thing

It’s always good to keep ideas like that written down somewhere. Who knows where the character will take you?

Tbh I still think it’d be cool if you joined the RP anyway

Some day, I will get into the MGS series. But today is not that day

Yeah, the Witcher is also good about that. Sure, there are lots of quests to do, but not only is the amount much smaller than something like Xenoblade, but they also never feel like standard “get 20 bear asses” fetch quests and have their own little storylines. It feels like you’re actually helping living people rather than ticking things off a checklist. And I think that’s important in an open world game. So far Zelda is similar - the world’s physics engine really helps bring this place to life! I can start fires by hitting things and roll off big boulders from mountains. It’s fun.

I have actually heard a lot of people say that about Fallout 4, so maybe it’s just not a great open world. Breath of the Wild seems pretty tight as an open world so far. I mean, maybe even a bit too much. I mean, maybe it’s because you start on a plateau and you have a broader perspective, but everything feels a bit cramped together so far. Then again, when I played the Witcher, it just looked like places I’d actually visited in my own country so maybe that’s just more of a landscape I’m used to. Or maybe it’s just the trees that make it feel bigger, idk. But while I’ve yet to play an open world game that I don’t like (granted, I havent played many and they’ve all been RPGs... and the Sims), I do feel like BotW would be accessible enough to anyone.

Zelda is a series I don’t think about for long stretches of time, but then I come back to it and am reminded of how much I love it It’s great so far but also pretty different! Definitely feels more Western in that there’s as much focus on the player constructed narrative as the pre-made narrative.

And the soundtrack is just unbelievable

Speaking of needing to level - I’veststted an open world game that doesn’t require leveling. Breath of the Wild, here I come!

I think generation 5 did it best. They added this mechanic that made you gain more exp the higher the enemy Pokemon’s level was in proportion to yours, making getting your weaker guys catch up to the rest of your party pretty easy. And then the levels just scale very fluently (except for that twenty-level jump from the end game to the post game). They also added this mon that gives insane exp while also healing you in battle, so in general, they made leveling easier while still requiring a bit of thought and effort oh your part. Which can’t really be said for the later games in the series, where they dropped all of the mechanics I mentioned in favor of making your entire party gain exp from the battle, so you don’t have to worry about how you level anyone at all

As much as I love Pokémon HeartGold, the game has one big flaw carried over from the original Gold and Silver - the leveling curve. Wild Pokémon have much lower levels than the trainers around, and those have them still quite a bit lower than the gym leaders. This isn’t as bad a thing if you play like a kid, I.e. just let your starter beat everything and get forty levels higher than the rest of the party, but if you’re trying to make them pretty evenly leveled, you’re gonna have a bad time. Exp. yield is very low from random encounters and trainers don’t call you frequently enough for rematches. But still, all things considered, it’s a pretty minor blemish on a great game.