What are you playing right now?

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For some reason I just keep playing Paladins even though I'm trying to actually get through the campaigns of various single-player games I've started (recently, Breath of the Wild and Nier: Automata).

Okay I really liked Neptunia Re;Birth 3 (aka Neptunia Victory). It felt like a good sitcom, I don't know how else to describe it. There was a lot of comedy and fun situations, the villains were inept right until the end. The ending was bad but I didn't get the true ending because they conditions for it were completely arbitrary and unexpected, but from what I read it literally doesn't matter so long as you get the good ending. Plutia and Nep are my favourite team!

VIIR (aka Victory 2, R) is pretty great thus far. It doesn't have as much humour as the previous game, but the story is CRAZY. This game isn't afraid to mess with your expectations. I'm just up to the second third of the game (as delineated by the game itself) so I can't give a full opinion but I'm enjoying this! Even the battle system is improved.

Outlast

I finished playing Mary Skelter: Nightmares. In the end, the difficulty scaled back up and I started having more fun again. Overall, I found it a really enjoyable game. A very polished dungeon crawler with a great style, fairly simple mechanics and a good amount of 'frills' - ancillary things like story and characters. I've played a lot of dungeon crawlers and I'd say while it was nowhere near the quality of something like an Etrian Odyssey game, it was still very fun. I would be interested in playing its sequel if it comes to PC.

I also picked up and I'm pretty sure I'll drop Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk, a dungeon crawler by Nippon Ichi. From what I've played, it's a shockingly bad game. I've never seen a game with so many arbitrary systems and gameplay mechanics, with layers of abstraction upon abstraction. It's one of the most fussy, overly complicated games I've ever played, with no payoff - for all the time you spend messing around in its several submenus within submenus, trying to find the information you need, the actual combat encounters are dull affairs requiring little more than for you to enable autobattle. I might play a bit more to give it more of a chance but so far nothing about it is pulling me in and I'm pretty shocked that they've made such a trainwreck.

Risk of Rain 2. I havent touched a single other game since it showed up in early access a few days ago. It's everything I could have hoped for, for a sequel to the excellent first game. And it's one of those things that acts as an example as to why I ignore AAA games and stick with indies.

With that and the various factory games (Factorio, Satisfactory, and Factory Town) I've got enough hyper-addicting stuff to hold me for a long time.

I am playing right now is Golf.

Daytona USA: Championship Circuit Edition for Sega Saturn

The World Ends With You.

My perfectionism is making me grind out stats. >.< I'm already so overpowered it's not even funny.

After I finally make it through TWEWY, whenever that may be, I think I might play Pokemon Explorers of Sky again, for what is probably the eighth or ninth time. I like it so much.

I finished Neptunia VIIR. To be honest, even though they threw every opportunity they had to make an interesting story, they exceeded my expectations by a huge margin. It's expected that these games are kind of bad, right? They made it less bad, but it's still not great; the best thing I can say is that this game allows you to skip through random encounters so fast that it feels like cheating.

Anyway, the game places itself into a three-act structure by presenting itself as three separate games, with three different OPs. This structure may have helped the writers, because there's actually a good amount of story here, and each act is distinct and - mostly - self-contained, yet pushes the story forwards.

That said, there's not so much panache here when it comes to the script. There are too many new characters and, for the most part, they feel underdeveloped. In fact, the story justification for the new characters and the middle chapter in general is incredibly weak; it's weird how much this game undermines every single interesting event.

The best new characters were Uzume, Umio, Affimojas and Steamax. The latter two gave me a lot of laughs, I'm a big fan of Affimojas' design in particular, he's absurdly overdone and works really well as a comic relief villain.

I'm trying to keep this vague to avoid spoilers but I guess I'd place this game as the 2nd best after Re;Birth 3 (aka Victory). OBVIOUSLY these games are trashy but I appreciate that they tried with the story, and it did give me some Feels but it's crazy how many missed opportunities there were.

Alright I might have contracted a brain disease because I have now played all of the Neptunia games, save for 4 Goddesses Online which is still much more expensive than the £5 maximum value that I have attributed to any individual Nep game. I will now rank the games. Apparently I was the last poster in this thread a week back so maybe this forum is dead, but also I was the OP under a previous account so it's appropriate in a sense. Hopefully this will help some other twisted human being to pick the best Nep game to play but really I just want to spit words into the aether as a release from the hell I now reside in

8. Hyperdimension Neptunia: Re;Birth 2 || This was a Nep game without any jokes and it was ten hours long (a mercy). The plot is that the neps all get captured by game pirates, and when you rescue them they decide to enact Japanese anti-piracy law. Actually the whole narrative is full of weird propaganda like that and it's played completely straight, despite the whole point of these games being that it's a self-aware parody. That said, it did introduce Nepgear, who is one of my favourite neps.

7. Hyperdimension Neptunia Action U || Really boring action game where the levels are all arenas full of trash mobs that take 9001 hits to kill each and some enemies will randomly 1-hit kill you, and then the same attack will hit your tag partner who will also die immediately after spawning. The antagonist of the story is an enemy called Next Gen Mech, and his sole lines of dialogue are: "My name is 'Next Gen Mech'! You will never defeat me!". Nobody else in the game even mentions this enemy once in anything but the vaguest terms. When you beat him, all of the characters remark that he didn't actually have a motive, and that perhaps they didn't need to beat him after all, suggesting that there is a True Ending. There is not. The game has scenes that suggest the story was originally going to have a twist and perhaps go somewhere, but it doesn't. It wouldn't have been good either way, but there's really nothing in this game worthy of note so I have to grasp at straws.

6. Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls || This is a crossover game featuring girls who represent Sega consoles. I've played maybe 1 hour of this so far but the battle system feels needlessly complicated for an Idea Factory game and also they reused a character sprite from Re;Birth 3 even though it's CLEARLY lower resolution than the other sprites in the game, which makes me think that maybe they weren't really bothered with this one. I might end up moving this but I need to play more. It has Neptune and Plutia, and I think Uzume too? Maybe I'll end up liking this one.

5. Hyperdimension Neptunia Blanc + Neptune vs. Zombies || Brainless action game. Basically this is like Action U except the enemies fall down quickly so the levels last about a minute each, if that. The story is pretty fun though, with the Blanc directing a student zombie film during an actual zombie outbreak. It doesn't go anywhere but it's an excuse for some fun scenes and I didn't hate myself for playing it. Also, it's the only game in this whole series with essentially no fanservice and I appreciate that.

4. Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart || I'm not sure if this one should be so high, but it's the best one in a pure gameplay sense so I have to give it some credit for that, right? Also, Noire is my favourite character besides Neptune. This is a decent tactical RPG, but it suffers from the usual issue with this sort of game where the gameplay isn't actually complex enough to justify how slowly the game moves. Also, the story has too much fanservice. I'm not a prude when it comes to that sort of thing, but I don't really enjoy it either, it seems like a waste of time if it's to the detriment of the script.

3. Hyperdimension Neptunia: Re;Birth || This was the first one I played and it is solidly okay. The battle system isn't exactly great, but most fights are quick. For some reason this one is much more difficult than the other games. The story is a good introduction to the characters. I like the Purple Heart and Black Heart designs in this one much more the later designs. Iffy and Compa are fun characters who are tragically neglected in later entries. This game definitely isn't as funny or as focussed narratively as my two favourite games, which hurts it.

2. Megadimension Neptunia VII(R) || This is the one where they made it real, kind of. The conceit here is that the game is split into three games, although this is entirely contrived -- the three games aren't given any kind of in-universe explanation (is there a word for this? I feel like there is). They all work towards one overall story which shows some potential but moves in the least interesting direction possible. The combat is still quick, but they added some more features, many of which struggle to justify themselves by being basically useless. The story is given pace by its structure, which necessitates three acts with individual setups and settings. I strongly appreciated the two comic relief villains and I liked Uzume, even if her HDD form was awful. I only played the R version of the game, which has some improvements and includes a VR mode where you can summon your favourite nep into your room. This is less fun than it sounds. Overall I really liked the game, but it missed out by splitting the team up so much -- especially Neptune, who is by far the funniest character, not really getting much screentime. The new Sha characters are boring and serve no purpose to the story, and I feel ashamed that I didn't realise their naming gimmick sooner, despite knowing enough Japanese to know what 'sha' means. Oh, and I really liked the alternate Neptune character, except she barely gets any screentime and I actually forgot she was a character when I first wrote up my opinion on this game lol (also it's Victory 2, or Vee-two, not seven - Re;Birth 3 was originally Neptunia Victory)

1. Hyperdimension Neptunia: Re;Birth 3 || Neptune gets sucked into an alternative universe, the Ultradimension (or kamijigen if you prefer) and meets some alternative versions of the other CPUs. Together with them and a new CPU character, Plutia, they get up to fun hijinks while being harassed by a group of comically inept villains. This is exactly how these games should be written. The story is basic and the ending was written out of necessity. The True Ending conditions are insane and, as such, I locked myself out of it and only got the Good Ending. The battle system is still basic but quick. That said, the game is structured like a sitcom with a basic overarching narrative, it's all an excuse for the neps to interact in various situations. There's very little to write about this game because it's straight-up just an extremely funny script tied to a game that carries you between scenes.



If I was to recommend this series I'd say Re;Birth 3 followed by VIIR. That's probably the optimal amount to play. If doing so causes you to contract some sort of brain disease then consider playing the other games at that point.

I'll add that I also want to play the original Neptunia game, because the remake in that case isn't at all the same game as the original. It looks really awful, like actually unplayably bad, but I need to know how this series began...

I picked up The Forest to play in VR on the basis of many glowing recommendations. It was a hard pass for me, and I had it refunded within 90 minutes. First time starting it up it's unresponsive at the main menu and requires the program to be restarted. OK, let's give it another chance. On the second chance it's immediately apparent the controls are a dumpster fire, with any of the game's three options for movement being either really freaking stupid, as in who the hell would ever choose this option, or just broken in its implementation. The visuals are really bizarre, with the game often becoming so dark that I can barely see my hand in front of me, despite being able to directly see the sun glaring down on me, like there's some issue with when global illumination is updated. But the dealbreaker in this survival game is that you can't eat food. Seriously, looking at the forums apparently the issue existed in January and the developer has never thought to fix this issue.

It just reaffirms to me that no matter how bad a VR game is, there is no shortage of people who will call it the best thing ever. 'Best VR survival game with minor issues' actually means for most people that it's actually unplayably broken and that nobody should be parting with their money for it. I'm used to game reviewers overrating big releases, praising average games, but with VR games there's this tendency for even players to rave about the most broken and mediocre crap around. We're well past the days where simply adding stereoscopic vision to a game and foregoing things like good UI or controls is what constitutes an acceptable VR release.

I've gone back to playing Elite Dangerous. First time I've played since any of the Chapter Four content and I'm glad to see that a lot of the mechanics that felt placeholder for a long time have finally been replaced. Small but ultimately very significant things such as persistent signal sources and radio spectrum scanning have fundamentally changed some of the worst parts of how the game previously functioned. It completely changes how many missions work, and exploration is far more interesting now. There's a bunch of stuff that's been added over the last few years that players have never run into because they didn't have the tools to find them, and now we have them. For example, I finally found volcanic activity, water geysers and organic life on a planet, even though they've been in the game for years, simply because prior to the most recent updates searching for these things was like finding a needle in a haystack.

It's a shame it's taken so long for the developers to get this far, as the pace of updates has been slow, and half the features they ever implement often feel half baked or are simply not fun. I often feel like the developers don't really have an idea of the direction for their game - they often ask on forums what players want from upcoming updates, which seems less about trying to engage with players and more about them not having a clue - but after many years of adding seemingly random additions to the game it's nevertheless still for me the best space flight game around.

For VR games that get you physically active, you can't go wrong with Beat Saber. It's a music rhythm game with absolutely tons of custom content and mods. There's even mods to track how many calories you've likely burned while playing.

For something that still gets you moving but isn't quite so physically demanding, Pavlov is the most popular multiplayer shooter around and is one of the few VR games that I expect will have a very active multiplayer community for a while. I'd hesitate normally to recommend anything multiplayer in VR because multiplayer playerbases for VR are generally short lived and small, but Pavlov's been around for a while and likely isn't going anywhere.

Payday 2 is another fun shooter that can be played single player or coop with up to 4 players, and also will likely maintain a playerbase because it isn't standalone from the vanilla game.

For a purely single player experience, Superhot VR is the best FPS game available. It's stylish, performs well and has some unique gameplay. It has a short campaign but good replayability with its arcade style mechanics.

Getting ready to fire up my Demon Hunter in Diablo III.

Pokémon Ultra Moon