STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANT

FINALLY

sick of playing 9.5/10 [derogatory] games I need some good honest Jank

bad games are Good bc you can look at it and see fingerprints of all the artists putting the work together

it's like how every awful 70s scifi movie with rubber puppets and model train dioramas looks more compelling than every glossy frictionless 4K marvel joint

it's got INTENT

lmao it's trying to run in 4k but it's 4:2:2, also known as Basically Just 1080 But Weird And Fucked Up

I don't know if this is actually the game's decision or if it's weird ps4 stuff; I've never played anything that even tried to do 4k on a console lol

okay holy crap I can't post a screenshot due to Technology but this is the most eye-searing HDR implementation I have ever seen. Utterly impossible to read lmao

it's like they're tonemapping to SDR and then just stretching the gamut out to make it HDR afterwards? Maybe? Every particle effect is just BLASTING full-saturation R, G, or B against a black background

whole tutorial fight was like staring at a christmas tree through binoculars

fuck i love Video Games

okay this is genuinely unplayable in hdr

magnificent

I might actually see if I can refund this and switch to pc because wow it's a MESS on ps4 lmao

I do love a good mess but at least on PC I could get nice full-res screenshots of the mess without subsampling and the framerate would be better

so the macroblock smearing here is from my capture card, not the game, but this is a mostly-accurate image of what this game looks like in 4k 4:2:2 lmao

it's rendering at MAYBE 720, and then has some kind of Wrong FXAA that actually *adds* aliasing (check out the grass stems)

there's a "prefer resolution over framerate" mode that improves the blurriness, but the AA remains the weirdest I've ever seen and also it runs at less than 30 fps lmao

gonna try to switch to pc

I've already got my money's worth of entertainment for the evening this rules lmao

PC version already off to a fucking incredible start

okay now that I can get proper screenshots, here's what I meant about the tutorial fight lmao

in HDR the gamut is just blown to hell, so imagine these (nigh unreadable) screens on an OLED: all the dark areas are pure black and all the glowy bits are just 800 nits of blinding LED

choose your gender

huh, so the AA on pc is.... fine actually? I can't reproduce whatever insanity it was doing on the ps4

was thinking it might be related to resolution or render scaling but it seems to work correctly at any setting

kinda disappointed lol; I wanted to figure out wtf was going on

okay now that I can actually PLAY the game:
please observe the, uh, remarkable *legibility* of this combat tutorial

(also imagine on the ps4 it looks like this except also super blurry+noisy and running at 20 fps)

holy shit lmao im dying

we're 30 seconds in this game and already going full Xenogears "we cut out a whole quest line but added some interstitial text to tell you about the game you would have played"

absolutely fantastic

troubling indeed

like half this man's dialogue is just really loud exasperated grunting

hnnghhnhghhh colonel

I'm trying to sneak around

new grace just dropped

wait omg it literally is Touch Grace

this is the most X Box Three Sixty looking game I've seen in a decade

all the armor in this game has unique models, which is usually one of my favorite game features

except, these are Team Ninja costume designs, so everything looks kind of awful, and also like something Tomonobu Itakagi would have personally worn in 2004

yes i am aware that itagaki no longer works at team ninja and did not work on this game, but: team ninja has been making games like it is the year 2004 since the year 2004

mmngh

team ninja are probably the most "do not kill the part of you that is cringe / kill the part that cringes" studio out there

should i play Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball (2003)

it's very funny playing this right after elden ring bc this game WANTS to have souls-y parrying and stamina systems, but where fromsoft ensures maximum readability and super consistent tells, every enemy here is just an inscrutable black blur that randomly deals instant damage

the game has a brightness slider but it's basically useless because gamma adjustment is helpless in the face of a tonemapper that just crushes half the screen into pure black

yeah okay getting far enough into this to understand the combat system and be annoyed by it lol

it's SUPER technical with like a dozen different weapons with totally different play styles that you're supposed to switch between proactively, but then it just throws a room full of 12 indistinguishable black blurs of damage spinning around and you have no control over anything

I feel like if you wanted to make a combat system based around reading and punishing enemy behaviors, you should probably ensure that the visuals are more legible than.... whatever the fuck this game is doing lmao

those aren't like cherry-picked screenshots that's just actually what the game looks like

with the brightness slider pushed all the way up lol

dismantling 40+ garbage weapons for materials in order to Upgrade this sword's attack by 0.6%

where did they get this auto-exposure code from, unity hdrp ha ha ha ha

so as near as I can tell the plot of this game is that Jack Xbox is being forced by a wizard to play Final Fantasy and every time he fucks up his memories get erased so now the only emotion he possesses is Gameing

so this area is nominally based on FFXIII, but they don't have anywhere near the budget to emulate XIII's aesthetic so we just get some brown underexposed rocks+crystals while a remix of the XIII theme plays

this is mostly just making me wish I was playing Final Fantasy XIII tbh

I love that this dude is just written like somebody's deviantart oc

soul calibur character editor lookin ass

one INCREDIBLY bullshit thing this game does:
they apparently couldn't be bothered to actually make consistent tells for bosses, so while SOME moves have windup animations, SOME just display the name of the attack in tiny fucking color-coded text at the top of the screen

since they don't do it for every attack you still need to be looking at the boss's body to see normal tells, which means you miss the text-only ones most of the time

then it gets even shittier where some attacks are unblockable and the only indication is the COLOR of the text

most of the time this game is bad in ways that are good

unfortunately this is one case where it's just some incredibly shitty design that's miserable to play lol

as always, playing this right after elden ring makes it a lot worse

the level of effort fromsoft puts into enemy tells is insane

EVERY attack is distinguishable by its windup, the timing is ALWAYS consistent unless it's a deliberately-designed fakeout. Incredibly careful design

team ninja made a final fantasy game and it's somehow like... absolutely 0% horny. honestly kind of disappointed

extremely funny that this is ostensibly a Final Fantasy Game, but team ninja didn't really attempt the final fantasy aesthetic and instead mostly stuck to their house style, so most of the armor looks like it was designed for Ninja Gaiden (2004)

i love the famous samurai combat franchise Final Fantasy

the American AAA Protagonist Butt Skirt but made out of leather and straps is certainly a decision

unironically kinda love that there's just zero effort to hide the edge of the heightfield here lol

long-distance terrain is Hard and this engine was built for dark twisty corridors and we are NOT building a streaming LoD system for the background of one level

okay the probably-final boss of this game is absolutely fucking miserable i hate this lmao

okay I finished STRANGER OF PARADISE FINAL FANT

it's not very good but it's surprisingly ambitious for what definitely seems to be an extremely minimal budget

the fact it exists at all is kind of fascinating

for what it's worth, the bafflingly stilted dialogue that you've seen in Popular Tweets is like.... sort of intentional? The characters' brains are all kind of fucked up from scifi memory tampering and they get more natural as the story progresses

like the dialogue/voice direction never really becomes GREAT but it gets up to, like, normal low-budget jrpg level of quality lol

if nothing else, the whole "this dude is a bizarre 2000s edgelord whose sole brain cell is dedicated to Violence" thing is, like, actually textual

once you realize the secret reason for Jack Xbox screaming the word CHAOS you will feel ashamed of your words and deeds

I really hope someday we learn more about how it got made in the first place , because it's fuckin WEIRD

it has two publishers? sort of? I don't think either of them actually gave team ninja enough money to make a videogame

level design is SUPER bare-bones, mostly a bunch of very ugly dark corridors, which are reused sometimes 3 or 4 times. No hub zone or overworld or exploration, just a mission-select menu that dispatches you to one of the aforementioned corridors

i.e. nowhere near enough money

...but then they also spent a bafflingly gigantic effort modeling like a million individual armor pieces and making all of them swappable and ensuring they all interact correctly without weird overlaps/clipping? and they all look kind of bad?

given that the gameplay is heavily based on Nioh, and the armor designs are all samurai armor that doesn't look remotely like Final Fantasy...

I kinda suspect this started as a Nioh game and then Square gave them Not Nearly Enough Money To Make A Final Fantasy?

So with funding for like HALF of a videogame, they took some Nioh-related project that was already in progress and used the Square money to Final Fantasize it?

this is 100% pure speculation so like, don't read too much into it

but having played the game it does feel like a reasonable explanation for how... singularly WEIRD this thing is