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keltenaSMT: Nocturne continues, slowly but surely! Since last time, we've cleared a couple dungeons, hit the series' most infamous difficulty spike, and gotten a lot of practice pacing in circles waiting for the moon to wax. Also, High Pixie is now Pyro Jack. I like to think she just threw the cape and pumpkin head on over her leotard.
The Matador fight definitely lives up to its reputation. My brother and I stumbled into it unprepared (my bad call, there), and put up a strong enough effort on our first try that I'd almost started to think, "damn, I see why this fight is so infamous, thank god we had enough debuffs on hand to deal with it"... and then he hit half HP, pulled out Dekunda and annihilated us. (Funnily enough, we didn't learn until the rematch that he even could use Dekunda in the first phase.) A valuable lesson was learned that day about the difference between buffs and debuffs in mainline SMT.
Playing this game as a team, I'm beginning to realize that my attitude towards unexpectedly brutal boss fights... may not be the universal human experience? My brother and I are on more or less the same page with most gameplay, but his first reaction to Gamers Hate It!! The Latest Boss Tactic That Could Wipe Your Party tends to be frustration. Whereas mine is usually, uh, unbridled glee and some variation of the phrase "oh, it's on". Normally I can blame my skewed perception of difficulty on the fact that Last Scenario was my formative JPRG. But it was my brother's too, so I guess this one is all on me.
Shortly after beating Matador:
Me: I'm beginning to worry I'm secretly one of those shōnen manga rival types who don't care about anything but finding an opponent strong enough to give them a ~real fight~.
Him: I mean...
Several hours of gameplay later:
Dante from the Devil May Cry™ Series: This is getting good! You're having fun, aren't you?
Me: See, this guy gets it! ... Fuck, I literally am.
Speaking of, Dante from the Devil May Cry™ Series delights me so far. He's so completely and utterly tonally mismatched with the entire world around him, and he neither notices nor cares in the slightest! Here I am, a normal human high school student just trying to survive the apocalypse while everyone around me is trying to kill me and/or monologue at me about their hot sociology takes... and then in the midst of it all, in swoops this flashy anime badass who names all his attacks, speaks almost exclusively in quips, and within 30 minutes of meeting me decides he's going to try and beat me to the Elite Four. It's the best. I feel like every SMT game should have at least one character who just kind of wandered in from another genre entirely and is now here to stay.
Also, the Amala Labyrinth is gorgeous, dang. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out it's not randomly generated like we first expected; we've cleared the First Kalpa, and it was a ton of fun. We're both heartbroken that you can't make friends with any of the demons, though. What's even the point of carrying all these Life Stones if we can't hand them out like treats to every random encounter we come across? >:(
Some more real sentences spoken while playing:
"Why must fences separate us from our cubes?"
"It was all just smoke and mirrors. Without even any mirrors."
"Clearly these guys are in the pocket of Big Friendship."
"What do you think Pyro Jack's preferred pronouns are?" "Hee/ho."
"Yeah, just be gentle. Just punch them like a friend."
"Please, Mr. From The Devil May Cry™ Series was my father. Call me Dante."
"No, he's totally pitting us against each other. You know, like a test, to see which genre of anime will win out as the new face of humanity. If Dante wins, the world will be remade in the style of the Devil May Cry series."
"So what you're saying is, we should have Moth-man turn into a dragon."
"I hope someone has drawn rainbow Demi-fiend for Pride Month."
"The labyrinth was the only friends we made along the way."
"'The Floor Is Lava' should only be played with fully informed consent."
I think one of my favorite things about SMT is how obnoxious both Law and Chaos are. Not even in terms of ideology, just in the sense that somehow, nearly every single Law or Chaos NPC simultaneously manages to have the most punchable personality in the game. I'm honestly delighted at how well the writers succeeded at making both factions the insufferable one. On the one hand, Law are holier-than-thou assholes who think they're objectively rationally superior to everyone else; on the other hand, Chaos thinks they're cool.
I look forward to beating up all of them.
In unrelated news, the other day I mistyped てもいい (te mo ii) as てもああ (te mo aa). If that's not a mood, I don't know what is.
The Matador fight definitely lives up to its reputation. My brother and I stumbled into it unprepared (my bad call, there), and put up a strong enough effort on our first try that I'd almost started to think, "damn, I see why this fight is so infamous, thank god we had enough debuffs on hand to deal with it"... and then he hit half HP, pulled out Dekunda and annihilated us. (Funnily enough, we didn't learn until the rematch that he even could use Dekunda in the first phase.) A valuable lesson was learned that day about the difference between buffs and debuffs in mainline SMT.
Playing this game as a team, I'm beginning to realize that my attitude towards unexpectedly brutal boss fights... may not be the universal human experience? My brother and I are on more or less the same page with most gameplay, but his first reaction to Gamers Hate It!! The Latest Boss Tactic That Could Wipe Your Party tends to be frustration. Whereas mine is usually, uh, unbridled glee and some variation of the phrase "oh, it's on". Normally I can blame my skewed perception of difficulty on the fact that Last Scenario was my formative JPRG. But it was my brother's too, so I guess this one is all on me.
Shortly after beating Matador:
Me: I'm beginning to worry I'm secretly one of those shōnen manga rival types who don't care about anything but finding an opponent strong enough to give them a ~real fight~.
Him: I mean...
Several hours of gameplay later:
Dante from the Devil May Cry™ Series: This is getting good! You're having fun, aren't you?
Me: See, this guy gets it! ... Fuck, I literally am.
Speaking of, Dante from the Devil May Cry™ Series delights me so far. He's so completely and utterly tonally mismatched with the entire world around him, and he neither notices nor cares in the slightest! Here I am, a normal human high school student just trying to survive the apocalypse while everyone around me is trying to kill me and/or monologue at me about their hot sociology takes... and then in the midst of it all, in swoops this flashy anime badass who names all his attacks, speaks almost exclusively in quips, and within 30 minutes of meeting me decides he's going to try and beat me to the Elite Four. It's the best. I feel like every SMT game should have at least one character who just kind of wandered in from another genre entirely and is now here to stay.
Also, the Amala Labyrinth is gorgeous, dang. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out it's not randomly generated like we first expected; we've cleared the First Kalpa, and it was a ton of fun. We're both heartbroken that you can't make friends with any of the demons, though. What's even the point of carrying all these Life Stones if we can't hand them out like treats to every random encounter we come across? >:(
Some more real sentences spoken while playing:
"Why must fences separate us from our cubes?"
"It was all just smoke and mirrors. Without even any mirrors."
"Clearly these guys are in the pocket of Big Friendship."
"What do you think Pyro Jack's preferred pronouns are?" "Hee/ho."
"Yeah, just be gentle. Just punch them like a friend."
"Please, Mr. From The Devil May Cry™ Series was my father. Call me Dante."
"No, he's totally pitting us against each other. You know, like a test, to see which genre of anime will win out as the new face of humanity. If Dante wins, the world will be remade in the style of the Devil May Cry series."
"So what you're saying is, we should have Moth-man turn into a dragon."
"I hope someone has drawn rainbow Demi-fiend for Pride Month."
"The labyrinth was the only friends we made along the way."
"'The Floor Is Lava' should only be played with fully informed consent."
I think one of my favorite things about SMT is how obnoxious both Law and Chaos are. Not even in terms of ideology, just in the sense that somehow, nearly every single Law or Chaos NPC simultaneously manages to have the most punchable personality in the game. I'm honestly delighted at how well the writers succeeded at making both factions the insufferable one. On the one hand, Law are holier-than-thou assholes who think they're objectively rationally superior to everyone else; on the other hand, Chaos thinks they're cool.
I look forward to beating up all of them.
In unrelated news, the other day I mistyped てもいい (te mo ii) as てもああ (te mo aa). If that's not a mood, I don't know what is.
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Date: 2019-06-26 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-26 11:14 pm (UTC)