Surprisingly, Shenmue II. I bought a bundle of the first two games recently and I've never played them before. Finished the first one recently and had a great time with it and looking forward to what Shenmue II brings.
I kind of see why people have said Shenmue is tedious now. Well actually, I found the first game to be more like an adventure game with real-time elements and overall it was pretty great.. It has minigames but they never felt mandatory to progress the story. The sequel is where I feel things are tedious. To break up the action they have you repeating lots of stuff, and some minigames are required to progress, not to mention QTEs. The sequel seems to pile everything on. The first Shenmue invented the QTE, but it still wasn't too bad. But in the sequel, just as an example, I've just been stuck in a QTE loop. It's a fairly long sequence too, that requires you to make the correct button presses with split second reaction time and I was stuck on it for over an hour and a half.
Yeah, that annoyed me a bit too.
Last night, I fired up Shadow of the Tomb Raider again for a bit. Haven't played it in ages and whereas I'd completed the previous five games, I'm only at about 15% of this. (One day, I'm going to have to seriously try the older ones too as I've only played demos of those).
I also had a quick go of The Expendabros that's usually fun for a quick blast. (It's a steam freebie based on Broforce but released as a tie in to The Expendables films).
Yeah, agreed. I think I get more annoyed with them when they're used as a replacement for gameplay content. Shenmue II, given that the series invented them, has this annoying habit of having fairly long QTE sequences. I wrote about one in my first post above, but I encountered another fairly long one last night.
The annoying thing with them is the brief window of reaction time you have. You can't bypass them, so it becomes a scenario of failure repeating itself until you can remember what to press in order to do it correctly. And everytime you fail, you have to watch the same cutscene and restart the sequence from the beginning. Fortunately, for the most part, it allows you to make at least one mistake before failing the next prompt so that you can catch up and still make it, so it's fairly lenient. But so much repeating. There are two types of QTEs in the game. The sequences of prompts, and then there's a second type showing a quadrant of arrows representing the d-pad on the left and buttons on the right, showing you what to press quickly, less you fail utterly. Fortunately there are less of those ones. But man, does it ever have a love affair with QTEs. The problem with overusing QTEs in the manner that this game does is that it gets to a point where you're stuck in a loop with no way to exit and quit out to save and it becomes patronizing to the player.
Last night, I was in a QTE sequence I thought would never end. It felt like it went on for half an hour! Just as I thought it would end, it would keep going. QTE sequence followed by cutscene followed by QTE sequence, etc. Finally, eventually I was able to save and quit out. QTEs feel like interactive cutscenes added as afterthoughts rather than actual gameplay. Would rather the game would just let you use your freeform martial arts at times like this.
They usually work best for me when they are at the very end of a boss fight so you get a big dramatic, interactive finish to the fight, or something like the character is falling off a clif and you do the QTE to stop the fall. They are the kind of thing that really should be used as an occasional way to enhance the tension in a big life or death moment, not in every fight or every time you progress to a new area.
Yeah, I agree. They work best as a way to cap things off, or a way to perform an action that's not a part of one the game's moves, but to have them be part of the narrative that can't be broken up is nasty.
Aren't most of the Final Fantasy games a massive QTE in between cutscenes? I have Final Fantasy VIII and VIII-2 but never finished them, and never bothered to go back to them. The only reason I have them is they were super cheap when I bought them I think it was a sale or something got both for $15 or such
Dunno, I've never played any of the Final Fantasy games, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were. Thankfully, I think gameplay has changed a lot and we see far less of those example these days. Well, I think the only modern example that's been consistent have been the David Cage games, ie Heavy Rain, Detroit: Become Human, Beyond: Two Souls.
His games seen needlessly weird. I've never played any of those but was once almost tempted to get Beyond Two Souls.
Is Enslaved Odyssey To The West one of his? Because I have played that and found that one a bit weird.
Been playing Super Mario Odyssey lately via rental. It's really fun. Also been playing Pokemon Shield. Got done with as much of Crown Tundra that I can until I beat the Elite 4. So I'm back to hunting for a shiny Sandygast.
There is only one FFVIII...
FFXIII is probably the one you are thinking of, it has 2 sequels...
And no, they arent massive QTEs between cutscenes, do some fucking research...
I played VIII and kept getting button prompts through big events. Isn't that a QTE?
And you were right it was XIII-2 in my steam list
Yes, they are very weird. They can best be described as interactive movies. The games are made up of scenes, some of which are fully explorable, such as picking up clues, but when it comes to the action, it's all driven via QTEs rather than having the character controlled directly by the player, so for instance, a chase sequence would be full of QTEs. That's based on the games I've played, and I haven't played any of the more recent ones, so I don't know if he's improved on the actual gameplay. There are also some realtime elements , as in Heavy Rain's example, that sadly rely on QTEs for split-decision making and being in the right place at the right time, where if you fail at such a QTE, it will end up killing a major character if you just happen to slip up. Rather than the game just ending, it actually goes on and the narrative changes based on what happened. These are made to make the game feel more exciting and possibly replayable, but I feel it robs the player of choice in what actually happens.
His games also tend to have awful puzzles. One of the worst examples, again in Heavy Rain is when you're in a crawlspace maze. There's broken glass everywhere, and it's completely dark and the only way to know you're going in the right direction is to pay attention to the direction of the lighter you have at your disposal, looking for air drafts. Meanwhile, you have to do all this while avoiding all the broken glass and remembering where it all is, and if you take enough damage, you have to restart the sequence. It's like the sequence was designed by a masochist.
I think I know which puzzle you're referring to. There was a stupid electrical puzzle. But yeah, in general, I've found the prompts hard to read, mostly because they had to go and try to be stylish by putting them at an certain angles. I completed it, but mostly out of curiosity than anything else and it's not something I'd want to go back to.
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