Puukko
Arcane
I'll be grabbing SMTVV soon enough, but between that and having cleared the Elden Ring expansion, I'm dabbling in some Caligula Effect 2. This is one of those niche JRPGs with a small but autistic dedicated fanbase. It's Hatsune Miku's Wonderland where everybody is carrying a dozen people's worth of baggage.
I never played the first game, and as I understand Overdose made some unsavoury changes, so there's like the one game I could see myself trying out Vita emulation for down the line.
The game so far is heavily carried by its style and especially soundtrack. On a technical level it's sub par at best, with very stiff and repetitive animations, models that are a bit off, and janky cutscenes. I don't know if this even qualifies as AA, more like A+. It's the sort of stuff you just overlook for the actual meat of the game.
The combat has potential but comes with some annoyances I can only hope get sorted later. It's ATB with semi-free movement and area-based attacks. You can delay your attacks to counter enemies and get a bigger party wide hit counter. You can even see the outcome of an attack beforehand. Thing is, the ATB gauge when doing so moves slooow and in real time meaning that when you test if delaying an attack by 5 seconds has the best outcome, nope, make that 6 seconds, repeat, you have to wait every time before it shows the outcome. Furthermore, for comboing you'd want to fine tune each party member in tandem, but once you've locked in one character, you can't change it anymore, so you may change to another character and realize a small tweak on the other would have been perfect, but now you've just got to wing it. I'm very early in the game so it could be these things get addressed, but I'm not holding my breath.
Technical note, I couldn't get most changes in ini files to work with this game, so I just grabbed the UE4 unlocker and used the console to tweak the resolution scale since even at 4K with maximum AA the jaggies were pretty bad. It's prone to turning the game into an unplayble stuttery mess depending on the phase of the moon if I try anything else, but attempting to improve games until they break is exactly up my alley. Also, grab the translated lyrics in battle mod from Nexus, it's a bit hard to read depending on the scenario but definitely worth it.
I never played the first game, and as I understand Overdose made some unsavoury changes, so there's like the one game I could see myself trying out Vita emulation for down the line.
The game so far is heavily carried by its style and especially soundtrack. On a technical level it's sub par at best, with very stiff and repetitive animations, models that are a bit off, and janky cutscenes. I don't know if this even qualifies as AA, more like A+. It's the sort of stuff you just overlook for the actual meat of the game.
The combat has potential but comes with some annoyances I can only hope get sorted later. It's ATB with semi-free movement and area-based attacks. You can delay your attacks to counter enemies and get a bigger party wide hit counter. You can even see the outcome of an attack beforehand. Thing is, the ATB gauge when doing so moves slooow and in real time meaning that when you test if delaying an attack by 5 seconds has the best outcome, nope, make that 6 seconds, repeat, you have to wait every time before it shows the outcome. Furthermore, for comboing you'd want to fine tune each party member in tandem, but once you've locked in one character, you can't change it anymore, so you may change to another character and realize a small tweak on the other would have been perfect, but now you've just got to wing it. I'm very early in the game so it could be these things get addressed, but I'm not holding my breath.
Technical note, I couldn't get most changes in ini files to work with this game, so I just grabbed the UE4 unlocker and used the console to tweak the resolution scale since even at 4K with maximum AA the jaggies were pretty bad. It's prone to turning the game into an unplayble stuttery mess depending on the phase of the moon if I try anything else, but attempting to improve games until they break is exactly up my alley. Also, grab the translated lyrics in battle mod from Nexus, it's a bit hard to read depending on the scenario but definitely worth it.
