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Post by Xeogred on Jan 9, 2022 22:05:55 GMT -5
Yeah, I might jump right into Shadow Tower again. I'll save KF4 for later this year.
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Post by Ex on Jan 9, 2022 22:27:07 GMT -5
I wager Shadow Tower would take you between 11-13 hours to finish.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 9, 2022 23:43:14 GMT -5
Yeah, bit more bite sized coming off KF2-KF3 heh.
That's one I plan to play with some custom BGM though. I can do the silence with newer games and modern Souls, since they have more real ambiance and dynamic noises or whatever. Shadow Tower Abyss was fine too, but the original... feels a bit odd. I'll probably queue stuff like this, or it would be amusing to just listen to the KF OST's too.
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Post by Ex on Jan 9, 2022 23:48:02 GMT -5
I played the game in all its OST-less glory as intended. Made it seem all the more ominous and intense.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 10, 2022 0:05:41 GMT -5
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 15, 2022 23:55:04 GMT -5
I'll keep this thread alive just a tad longer, as I put two hours into Shadow Tower tonight and plan to finish this one to put a cap on the PSX FromSoft first person RPG's.
I'm in some Quaking Earth Dungeon and freed up the demon woman you see in Abyss from some coffin.
I'm having fun, enough to want to beat it. But to be blunt, this doesn't even feel HALF as good as King's Field so far. I mean that in every sense and mechanically. I just read that this was a newer engine based off the KF work and more "refined", but it doesn't feel like it to me at all. The hit detection is freaking weird, to slap slimes you literally have to be looking 99% directly down practically. And I don't really like how any of the weapons swing and feel so far. I finally got some fire spell though which is awesome, but I know MP is going to be extremely sparse.
I might be missing a lot, since it's maze city and with no nice KF map here... but this also has to be hands down the hardest game of them all for these. At least I played them in a good order to work my way towards this one, because if this is what I put time into initially it would have been an extra rude awakening.
Like I said, I'm digging it for the most part. But it really does feel weird this is essentially what the follow up to the King's Field PSX trilogy was. It feels like a different developer made this. Perhaps new staff handled this project while the KF vets were doing Echo Night or starting on PS2 stuff. Who knows. It's intriguing and decent enough, but this ain't the holy grounds of King's Field at all.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 15, 2022 23:57:07 GMT -5
May as well - I might be doing some PSX gaming soon because Ex sent me his PSX, and it seems to handle burned discs better than my old ones. (Well, and the fact that my own has a random reset problem, which would either be tied to laser or power supply.) FreePSXBoot is still super cool.
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Post by Ex on Jan 16, 2022 0:41:32 GMT -5
XeogredYou might as well finish ST, then save KF4 for last. You may very well enjoy KF4 the most. I don't disagree with the things you said about Shadow Tower, I felt the same way when I first played it. That said, Shadow Tower does get better the further and deeper into it you go. The environments become more exotic and enemies become more strange as the experience progresses. Also the difficulty is at its steepest at the beginning, the game becomes easier the longer you play. I do agree Shadow Tower is the hardest of the entire FromSoftware first person dungeon crawling collection. (With the exceptions of the King's Field Additional games on PSP, which I've not played yet due to them remaining in Japanese language only - no idea how difficult they are or are not.) My opinion of Shadow Tower improved quite a bit when I finally finished the game. My biggest complaint is that lack of an OST... but that continued with the Souls games. DeS and DS both only have sporadic music.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 16, 2022 0:57:42 GMT -5
KF4 will slam dunk on Shadow Tower no doubt. Not sure if KF4 will beat the PSX KF's for me though, the bar is high. But yeah it's a good thing I wanted to play ST first, since I know I'll like KF4 a lot.
I guess Abyss had the inverted difficulty too and the KF's do as well. So I can see that probably being the case here as well. And contrast to KF, it sometimes seems best to just avoid enemies in ST here early on. They might drop some resources but it's all random. Stuff breaks fast and I don't want to waste my Dorado's Ashes (equipment repairing items) on low tier gear. So yeah... every step is walking on thin ice so far.
The atmosphere is awesome though, there's already been a lot of cool enemy types and I've seen fans of ST complain about the lack of enemy variety in Abyss. I can kind of see what they mean already. Abyss was mostly just a lot of goblins and stuff I can't even remember now. But here there's weird plants shooting laser beams at me, bats making weird sonic waves and noises, those evil KF trees can now paralyze you from a distance, I love all the weird sound effects, etc... compared to KF, this definitely feels more horror-ish in a way. This imprisoned world feels nightmareishly claustrophobic and dangerous in a lot of ways, but maybe not quite as imposing as the KF's do with how big those are in scope. Similar gameplay and design, but different vibes. So I appreciate that ST is different in that regard, even if it's not as cool.
Pretty weird how bringing up the menus sometimes sparks a loading screen. You NEVER got that in KF! But to be fair ST has a lot more stat tracking in the menus and a whole enemy bestiary, so I'll give it a pass there.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 16, 2022 23:19:03 GMT -5
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