Nakar

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About Nakar

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  • Birthday August 27

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    RPGs & Etc.
  1. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E41: Proxy War Without End Spoilers: It ends next mission, when MGS5 runs out of ideas. But at least the last idea is a good one. This one's not bad either, it's African Backup, Back Down but not.
  2. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    Mission 32: To Know Too Much We begin Chapter 2 with a mission that's actually kind of neat if you don't attempt to S rank it, which seems counter to the entire point but okay whatever you say Konami. E35: Cursed Legacy Yes, we did go from 32 to 35 and it's not a mistake: 33-34 are replay missions with additional rulesets which don't really make sense with this gimmick and are largely irrelevant, so I'm skipping anything that's not new. That will rapidly prove to be most of the remaining missions in the game. This is the only mission in the entire game that requires you to Fulton anything. I don't think it even lets you start the mission without the Cargo upgrade. E38: Extraordinary No it isn't.
  3. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E30: Skull Face & E31: Sahelanthropus Why did I make this.
  4. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E28: Code Talker A simple rescue, other than the Sniper Skulls and the zombies and other stuff we mostly just kind of try to ignore as best we can. E29: Metallic Archaea The one time you're actually forced to fight the Skulls. These have armor, telekinetically throw exploding rocks, and are just general dickheads, but they have one critical weakness: Their pathing is really stupid and their armor cannot protect them from multiple direct hits by a high explosive round. A major design flaw, if you ask me. Good thing Zero Risk Security left all this stuff lying around their heavily-fortified empty airfield, since I certainly didn't bring anything useful myself. Sleep Grenades wouldn't have worked like last time anyway, as the Skulls begin the mission fully alerted to you and I don't think you can lose them and make them stand down.
  5. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    It came out simultaneous on PS3, 360, and Steam if I'm remembering right. E26: Hunting Down This one is interesting because the target moves across the open world, instead of sticking to bases or roads. It's still quite easy, but it's a shame there weren't more missions like this throughout the game as it makes the intel file that shows the target's route a lot more valuable to a first time playthrough, as opposed to just telling you something that was probably obvious because there are only so many bases/outposts in a mission. E27: Root Cause I did say I wouldn't use other buddies unless it was amusing, and I think this qualifies. Plus, D-Walker always costs at least half the allotted GMP budget, so I think it's fair as long as I don't run over that. This run acquires the No Traces bonus by zipping across the countryside on D-Walker, who is shockingly maneuverable for a two-legged robochicken, and snagging the Intel Team member before he does anything stupid. Two rather short missions, but up next are quite a few longer ones as we approach the end of MGS5's "storyline" (such as it is). And then they get short again. Real short. Comically short. "Konami pulled the plug" short. Well, you'll see.
  6. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E24: Close Contact Fences. My one enemy. I mean, plus the Soviets, the African PFs, and Skull Face. E25: Aim True, Ye Vengeful Infinite Heaven broke and started me in the chopper so I rolled with it and I think the music made me better at the game because that was a smash and grab.
  7. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E22: Retake The Platform This one's not actually scored, because it's more of a FOB invasion tutorial, but it still works okayish as a mission even if it's not terribly difficult. It does take into account Mother Base's status, so if you have a fully-developed four platform R&D strut, as I do, you've got to go farther and bypass more guards to reach the main platform and take out the commander. E23: The White Mamba Eli gets chumped. I probably gotta stop using the Stun Arm. And yes, riding directly into the base is that easy. If you're ballsy you can ride (with leaning) straight up to the boat. Man, who would've thought child soldiers sucked at military stuff?
  8. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E21: The War Economy Another mission that ends up being somewhat uneventful if you do it "properly," but doing it improperly is just less optimal so it ends up being kind of whatever. I do hold a man on a Walker Gear up through a wall so that's fun.
  9. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E20: Voices The first No Traces score of the run sees us "defeating" the Man on Fire by... not really defeating him I guess. No Traces is fairly easy on this mission if you Fulton him out after the water tower incident, but since I can't do that I have to legitimately escape him while he's still hunting me. This requires manipulating his AI so that he misses/can't hit Pequod during the extraction, because he can and will destroy the chopper and kill you if he's given the chance.
  10. True, but Fire Emblem for the most part has deterministic AI and fixed enemy stats. An example of where I think it's a problem would be if a certain enemy in Ch1 of Awakening Lunatic+ could random their Strength to either be high enough to damage Frederick or not, and if it couldn't damage Frederick it wouldn't move. Since a huge part of the Ch1 Lunatic+ strategy involves manipulating Frederick to take hits and eliminate problems on a very tight timetable (since Frederick is really the only unit capable of it), an enemy randomly either moving up on him and dying to a counterattack or not moving at all can completely throw off the map balance. This did still happen with Lunatic+ skills which is probably one reason why Fates Lunatic doesn't do random skills even in Conquest, which is the hard route for series veterans. Being able to see enemy stats on deployment would help, but because there's often still a touch of randomness in gear assignment and Zodiac compatibility, you'd still end up having to know the AI backward and forward to know whether that Ninja is going to come in on you or not. Still, it'd be better than not even knowing what Zodiacs the enemy has until the map starts.
  11. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E19: On The Trail Mostly just goofing off, as a fully-charged Stun Arm does what I do here in vastly less time.
  12. Frequent resets should not be encouraged behavior in a tactical RPG. It's one thing to restart a bunch and tweak your strategy or setup, but having to do it because sometimes the first enemy to move can kill two of your guys (or something unrecoverable, whatever that may be) isn't a good thing. If early misfortunes caused by randomness balance out in the grand scheme of a battle, then no big deal; however, that isn't always the case with 1.3. And rerolling a fight on purpose for more favorable enemy Br/Fa/Zodiac is, in my mind, basically cheating and should not be encouraged. It's fine if it's random but choosing to repeatedly reset until the randomness is in your favor is exploitative. The ideal setup should be to encourage the player to roll with the misfortunes and fortunes alike, assuming they're balanced such that you're likely to experience a bit of both in every battle.
  13. They're balanced over a long period of time or in a scenario where the first turn isn't that impactful. In Tactics Ogre, which has more people on the field and generally longer battles, you usually don't worry too much about potential random factors because what will cause a restart won't be the very first action. However, it can be a problem in FFT, and it's definitely a problem in 1.3, because when done wrong FFT turns into rocket tag with a quickness. Whether an enemy advances or retreats is also a big deal and they consider factors like compatibility in doing so, so you can never be sure if that guy's going to be lured in to get jacked or charge something nasty and wander off out of range each time you restart. If you have to restart a lot, it becomes considerably more frustrating. So one way to address the issue is just to treat the other problem and ensure that the first turn of any given map does not have a massive and potentially determinative effect on the outcome of the attempt. That's something that is an aspect of 1.3 that could stand to be significantly altered, and doing so largely eliminates problems that random Br/Fa/Sign can cause.
  14. There were good and bad points to Death as implemented, from a balance standpoint. The only things I'd add to your general overview of its effectiveness: When Death did miss and dealt damage instead, it dealt quite a lot; this made it worth using Vanille's entire ATB bar on Death as an alternative to Ruin spam as a Commando or something. Death could only be cast in SAB which prevented Vanille from gaining damage bonuses from COM (though she could get the passive benefits of the other two party members being COMs, or the debuff boosts from both being SABs as well). That allowed the developers to make it incredibly strong because it was inherently impossible to use in Cerberus. Death actually worked on things and could instant kill even powerful marks like Ochus and whatnot. These are really good things and made Death worthwhile, but they did lead to one small problem that does remind me a bit of 1.3: Because there were no consequences for resetting a battle in FFXIII, there was no downside to fighting something way out of your depth and just starting over if you couldn't get Death to land in time. On the one hand, it's nice that Death actually did something. On the other hand, fishing for a Death proc felt cheesy and not terribly rewarding when you did win with it and you knew there was no way you could've won without it. While the ability to influence its proc rate via debuffing made it feel more like a legitimate strategy than a pure gimmick, it could still prove rather gimmicky against things with a low-but-nonzero chance of being affected by it. I've always felt that things like random Zodiac and Br/Fa are the same kind of thing in FFT. The difficulty of a battle can be completely up in the air depending on something as simple as the compatibility between the first enemy to move and the nearest ally, and that's not only bad from a strategic standpoint -- I can't predict or plan when enemy behavior changes when I do the same things each time, unless I have encyclopedic knowledge of the game's AI -- but also from a player frustration standpoint. They add depth to the system just as Death does, but in a way that can occasionally encourage scummy reset style gameplay that's tedious when it doesn't work out and unsatisfying when it does. A risky strategy involving a powerful but conditional ability is perfectly fine, but when it's random or it doesn't feel like there's a viable alternative (which there often is in FFT, hence why the randomness isn't a huge gamebreaking problem), it can sometimes feel like the game is suggesting you use something that might work but probably won't for reasons outside your control. Not that I have any good ideas on how you address that issue or if you even can. If nothing else I don't see how you'd do Zodiacs except either having them be fixed per battle for consistency's sake (which makes them exploitable with foreknowledge and doesn't help with random encounters) or leaving them random and just accepting that they'll alter the AI's behavior in potentially large ways each time you approach a battle.
  15. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    E18: Blood Runs Deep I complete my mission objectives to the exact extent that the game requires, and that's what makes me a true hero. Sorry about that, kids.