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Post by Ex on Sept 16, 2018 20:09:58 GMT -5
Lottery Tickets... don't tell me the wheel minigame is back again for stuff outside of battles? Wasn't a fan of that in the first. Yes the Lottery Ticket mini-games makes a return. It's totally optional of course. I don't think I'm up for Covenant right now Fair enough. Perhaps nullPointer will still play Koudelka and talk about it here.
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Post by nullPointer on Sept 16, 2018 22:01:41 GMT -5
Fair enough. Perhaps nullPointer will still play Koudelka and talk about it here. I'm playing it now! I'll post up some more detailed thoughts soon, but so far I'm really enjoying it. I've been trying to strategically ignore some of the other posts, so hopefully I don't regurgitate too much previous discussion. The voice acting is pretty good for a game from this timeframe, and I'm definitely getting a Resident Evil vibe from the wonderfully executed setting. So far so good!
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Post by Sarge on Sept 17, 2018 10:57:34 GMT -5
If you post new thoughts, they'll be fascinating, and if it's stuff we've already hit, we'll feel validated. It's a win-win!
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Post by nullPointer on Sept 17, 2018 16:54:53 GMT -5
So one of the criticisms I've noticed about Koudelka (nor necessarily here, but rather the 'internet at large') is that the battles are slow. To be honest I don't feel like the battles are a whole lot slower than other JRPGs of this vintage. Maybe they really start stretching out towards the middle/end of the game but given my current progress I'm cleaning up most battles in a matter of 3-4 turns on average. In fact I've found myself wishing the battles would have gone in a bit more on the tactical aspects of combat. It would have been cool to have some varied elevations and/or other elements of cover on the battle field. This would of course made the battles feel even longer, but as it stands the combat plays out like an amateur hour SRPG. That's not necessarily a knock! There's still more engagement here than you have in straight turn-based combat, it just would have been cool to see them take it fully one way or the other.
Where I have noticed some real lag is in the load times, particularly when accessing the memory card. This may be (i.e. is probably) due to running the game on PSP via POPSLoader, but it does seem a bit more laggy than other PS1 games I've played in the same way. The one other aspect I've noticed here is that playing it on the PSP makes it very tricky to see items laying around to be picked up. It's almost literally a pixel hunt in some cases. All the same, I really like the look of PS1 games on the PSP screen due to the increased pixel density on the small screen. I'm certainly no expert on various display nuances, but to these eyes it gives the illusion of a higher resolution image. And Koudelka is a great looking game which I think is one of the aspects I'm enjoying most up to this point. Good stuff!
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Post by Sarge on Sept 17, 2018 17:05:15 GMT -5
Nope, it's pretty laggy regardless. I played off my discs on a PS2, and load times, particularly in battle, can be quite severe. (Actually, though, the exploration areas actually sport solid load speeds.)
As for the pixel hunting, that's why I didn't play on PSP; I needed a bigger screen so I could at least see the visuals halfway decently.
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Post by Xeogred on Sept 17, 2018 17:44:14 GMT -5
I emulated it via epsxe and yeah, the battles are just... sludgy slow. Is POPSLoader an emulator? Can you push something to frameskip or speed things up? I didn't really consider that until I was near the end so I never did it myself, but I wouldn't be against someone doing that to speed up the battles. Worst part is how when you kill an enemy, it takes a bit for the camera to focus back on them just to show them slowly disappear. lol I wouldn't fret too much about pixel hunting, outside of getting the map in that early attic room, I thought most of the items weren't too hard to miss. There was a time or two I couldn't tell if part of the ground was an item or some weird floor texture though. I think what bugged me the most was how weird going up and down steps was, I think you have to stop moving, perfectly face it, and push X. Just something about it felt weird and finicky.
Agreed that it's kind of a half baked SRPG system, null. Though there is ONE boss that has "cover", one of the two bosses that took me down once haha. I put Edward in front of Koudelka who was in the back row, then James next to her. Never touched the formation again after that.
It would probably be hard to find a better looking PSX game. 10/10 graphics for that platform for sure! Probably looks even better on a sharp CRT.
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Post by toei on Sept 17, 2018 18:32:54 GMT -5
So one of the criticisms I've noticed about Koudelka (nor necessarily here, but rather the 'internet at large') is that the battles are slow. To be honest I don't feel like the battles are a whole lot slower than other JRPGs of this vintage. Maybe they really start stretching out towards the middle/end of the game but given my current progress I'm cleaning up most battles in a matter of 3-4 turns on average. Nah, they are slow. Even if it's just 3-4 turns, every little animation is overlong, and there are noticeable load times before and after each battle. It's true that it was a common problem with 3D PSX RPGs (2D 32-bit RPGs never had that problem), but it's especially bad there. And what makes it worse is that the game isn't even a proper RPG, anyway - it should have been real time, like any other survival horror game. Standing out in a bad way is not a plus. I wish I was patient enough for it not to bother me, but I'm not.
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Post by Xeogred on Sept 17, 2018 19:43:52 GMT -5
One of the two tracks from "The Music of Koudelka", both tracks are an arrangement of Incantation.
I wish Hiroki Kikuta at the very least could have stuck around for some more music on the Shadow Hearts games too.
And here's a cool arrangement of a Shadow Hearts track:
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Post by Ex on Sept 17, 2018 20:33:15 GMT -5
I played through Koudelka using ePSXe, with the polygonal resolution enhanced dramatically thanks to the badass power of Pete's OpenGL2 plug-in. I don't remember load times being an issue, as I was playing using ISOs off a computer harddrive. The battle system is a little slow, but I still finished the whole game in under 11 hours. Not bad for a JRPG.
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Post by nullPointer on Sept 18, 2018 11:07:56 GMT -5
I emulated it via epsxe and yeah, the battles are just... sludgy slow. Is POPSLoader an emulator? POPSLoader is kind of 'middleware' that sits between CFW on your PSP and the official PS1 emulator for PSP (POPS). Specifically it's a plugin that lets you specify which version of the emulator you want to run on a per-game basis. This allows you to sort out game compatibility issues specific to various versions of POPS. The downside here is that if you do run into issues, it can require a fair amount of research to determine whether an alternate version of the emulator will solve the problem or whether it's just a problem in POPS all together. POPSLoader is a userful tool, but sometimes it can introduce more issues than it solves, especially if you try to start monkeying around with different versions willy-nilly. There are various compatibility lists on the internet, though I'm remiss to recommend any particular one over another; I'm not even sure what's the most up to date at this point. Google is your friend if you find yourself in need of such a thing. I can definitely see that I'm in the minority, but I guess they just haven't bothered me up to this point . My closest frame of reference here (i.e. the RPG I've most recently beaten) is Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions though. Between known porting issues leading to achingly slow animations, and the fact that the battles in this game could be a bit lengthy in the first place, it was a game that started to wear on my patience in terms of combat mechanics. It's not uncommon in that game that it takes 2-3 turns before you can even engage with the enemy, sometimes more. So by comparison the battles in Koudelka have even felt downright snappy to me. Had I played at a different time, I probably would have felt differently.
There's one other aspect of combat I want to pick on for just a moment though (and then I'll be done harping on the combat for the time being). This sort of ties in with my earlier comments wishing that the game had opted to up the ante in terms of tactical strategy elements. I find it exceedingly odd that you can't 'cross the enemy line' as it were. I think it would have made combat at least a bit more interesting if you had the option for flanking maneuvers and the like, possibly even with a backstabbing multiplier or something. I know I'm playing 'what if' here, but I'm definitely in agreement with the consensus that the combat in Koudelka is one area in which improvements could have been made. It's fine for what it is, but doesn't quite reach the bar set by other elements in the game.
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