Oh, I didn’t then, because Eigong had three boss forms, normal, a little wilder, and the one with the screen wide cuts. Now I’m really curious about it.
hmm no you did get it based on the ending you described, i think i’m just a fucking idiot that doesn’t know how to count
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lmao fair I’ll look up later anyway because of 
's mentioning the other thing, which sounds pretty fun
Also like, that was a legit 3 hours, maybe more, long boss fight and my hands were not doing great by the end, but it was still beyond amazing. The fact that the attacks are just so simple to follow but tricky to master is godlike design.
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thank you for the reasoned reply! you actually did put words to some stuff I’d considered so I appreciate that. :)
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Okay okay okay so I know I made this post on cohost back when Quinn () beat the game the first time and I saw the end sequence, but. Holy shit the way this game incorporates its mythology into it.
Nine Sols end spoilers
So Nine Sols is based on the myth of Hou Yi, a legendary archer from mythic times. The way the story goes is that there used to be 10 suns who all took turns, until one day they decided to all come out at once for a laugh. In order to keep the planet from burning to a goddamn crisp, Hou Yi strung up his bow and shot nine of them down, leaving the final sun standing so life on earth could continue.
SO THE FACT THAT THE ENDING WHERE HE SAVES THE HUMANS. HAS HIM SHOOT ONE FINAL ARROW AT THE ACTUAL SUN. FREEING THE EARTH FROM ITS ARTIFICIAL ICE AGE. I saw that frame of the cutscene and began swearing out loud in front of everyone because I was So Mad at how good and thematic an ending that is. It’s sideways and clever and still fucking fitting. Red Candle cannot keep getting away with this. Fuck’s sake.
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AND ALSO
More character-spoiler mythology rambling
I only found out after the fact that Heng is in fact the Chang’e analogue character - Chang’e was actually originally named Heng’e until her name was changed due to an emperor with the name Heng (you could not share a name with the emperor, even if you were a mythic figure). Hou Yi is married to Chang’e, and as a reward for his heroism he was gifted two immortality pills, one for him and Chang’e. There’s a couple different variations on *why* Chang’e does this, but whether through impatience, curiosity, or Hou Yi turning out to be a tyrant, she eats both pills herself, and the overdose of immortality ascends her straight to the moon.
I like the fact that Heng is a sister instead of a wife, I like the sibling and familial narrative. BUT ONCE AGAIN. RED FUCKING CANDLE. Heng is the one who has accepted mortality and Yi is the one who left to preserve his people and scrabble for a cure. And they are still separated across space from one another because of a core conflict around immortality. Christ almighty I am realizing this game is an adaptational masterwork on the scale of Hades, if not more because it is not Directly about the mythic figures in question. I want to holler at every player so they can Know, more people need to know
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YES when I realized this I SHOUTED
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Before I go and find the Qud thread, started a new game after my Pathfinder game last night and immediately was delighted (again) how the game memorializes old rules who were absolute dumbasses in statues.
First one I read was ablut a sultan who went to a city of like Electromancy, bought a cool ice bracelet then immediately lost it gambling.
It added a quest to find that city, and one to find the bracelet
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Right before I had to go to bed last night I ran into an absolutely wild twist in Ever17 that got absolutely no fanfare because its entirely a meta thing and none of the characters have any context for it (the cast is different the second time around, You and the kid ran into Coco locked in the elevator instead of Sara like they did on my first playthrough) and that has been a real treat to be forced to sit on all through work today. I’ve got theories, some of them I even feel confident about, but nothing solid, and nothing complete. I am definitely going to be playing a lot of this.
I also did the quick research to figure out exactly where my interest in this series dies out (Aside from Uchikoshi, a few other big names in the scifi mystery VN world cut their teeth on these games), and it looks like I’m doing Remember11 (Same team as never7 and Ever17) and 12Riven (Mostly the same team but probably some big shakleups considering development paused for several years after the developers went bankrupt in the middle of making it, and it was picked up and finished later by a different company with some/a lot of the same staff) after this, but skipping Code18 (Series reboot, none of the same staff as the earlier games)
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I was just searching for games about cuddling and found this simple and adorable little game where you just hold the spacebar to make two cats cuddle with each other, but have to avoid getting caught by “Mr. Dad Cat”. Such a repulsively evil concept for a villain.
I don’t think this is going to go anywhere, but I was a little curious about a thing
(Persona 2)
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(Balatro)
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Persona 2 my beloved ahhh 
Game’s combat is a little wild. You can directly target enemies with Persona skills, but not with basic attacks; its a little like doing manual auto-battle, beforehand you get to pick the order of characters and what they’ll do, then let it autoplay for one turn or until you cancel.
I was trying to remember what was going to be the grind, since I played 1 hour of Eternal Punishment ages ago, and the Demon Negotiation was the reminder. You get Tarot Cards from demons, not them joining you, and those cards can be used to summon back at the Velvet room. Different demons needs different cards or different arcanas. You can only do 1 interview per battle, and there’s different outcomes, like making a Contract - which is not having them actually join, just be more friendly.
You also have different leveling up from your character and your Persona, and the second only grows from being used, like Grandia’s skills.
There’s some mana regen that I don’t get, I think I get topped up after going Rank Up? But I’ve been making some fairly liberal use of skills so far, at least from this very brief introduction.
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Wow, enemy freeze builds in Vampire Survivors can get… really out of hand. 2000 health, +1000% growth, level 500, and there’s already a lot of synergy between them to begin with considering the Glass Fandango does extra damage to frozen enemies… I can only imagine the kind of nonsense I could achieve with a bit more planning, and some more DLCs (Haven’t started the Contra or Castelvania ones yet, and haven’t unlocked everything in the others yet)
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I’ve been out of the loop for a while, is there a well known, reliable 3DS emulator?
Citra is the one I’ve seen people use the most, I’m not sure if there are other ones out there but everyone says it’s good
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Danks, I was thinking if there perhaps was something silly like just using Desmume to also run 3DS games, but I’ll look that up
Aight, Path of Exile 2.
In short? It’s excellent.
It’s really, really polished; in a way a game can only be if you’ve spent the last decade REALLY MAD at design decisions you’ve made in your previous game.
It has an answer to most little nagging issues with Path of Exile 1, really makes a lot of systems interact better. Less backtracking, less downtime in general. Clearer trading systems without a lot of the accumulated cruft and guide-dangit secret-but-vital stuff.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is simultaneously slower and busier. I’m sure somebody will craft a great 1-button nuke-everything build, but that won’t be the average experience; you’ll be pressing a bunch of buttons.
For example: I’m playing monk, a evasion melee/magic hybrid. I punch with lightning. That inflicts shock. I have a different skill that eats shock and turns it into power charges for me. I can then convert those into either a big lightning nuke, or a buff that adds damage and lightning projectiles to all my attacks. Additionally, I can call down a bell I can strike to spread my melee hits (including all shocks they’d inflict) in a circle.
That’s like 5 buttons I routinely press, before additional utilities.
The main campaign is overall harder in my opinion. Act bosses are surprisingly ruthless, but retrying is virtually free and instant, so they accidentally kinda went kinda soulsy on that one. In my estimation the hardest bosses I’ve fought so far are about comparable to the “emissary”-tier bosses in PoE1 I’d say (the dark star/infinite hunger). Which is wild to put into the main campaign, but I like it!
Even moment-to-moment your bevy of options is balanced out by the sheer variety of situations that will simply murder you. Even in act 1 already you run into combinations of enemies that leave a (very deadly) puddle on death + enemies that shoot at you from afar.
It helps that when you die, the map repopulates with fresh enemies, so you never really have to run around an empty map to get back to where you were before (a notorious issue with the old game).
Overall, it’s just really, really fun. The skills are fun to use, it feels good to shred through a group of enemies, it feels good to finally down that fucking boss, it feels good to find that one piece of gear that’ll carry you through the entire next map.
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Nice, I put in a few hours with ranger but I might try monk next. Would also like to point out how good the controller feels compared to PoE, I’m actually gonna spend time in this game for that reason alone lmfao
I was actually most interested in Monk and Warrior but I wanna make my first run be an experiment character while I figure the game out
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