Joined: 09 Oct 2007 Location: sagamihara, kanagawa
Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2013 3:30 pm
Interstellar Dinghy wrote:
Grant Dempsey wrote:
I don't know if this is already common knowledge and I've just been dumb 'til now, but I just figured out that attacking while in Ninja Run chops down missiles the same way Blade Mode does (but with the advantage of not having to stop moving to do it).
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 1:01 am
InterDinghy wrote:
so i beat VH mode today and unlocked revengeance mode.
I've started VH mode too. It's really satisfying to have the difficulty spike like that.
Some of the VR missions are a little gimmicky too, particularly the speed-run ones that require you to get to the end point as fast as possible. I do like that you need to sneak your way through in AR mode to see where usable platforms are, and then gradually find paths that work up to a point, refining how you approach that point, and so on. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 4:41 am
Aww yeah, D ranking my way through Very Hard.
Just got past the prologue stage. I would like more practice on those dog type enemies. Having two at once got pretty sticky until I figured out that their projectiles will take out the three cyborgs with rocket launchers, so I focused on those dudes, let the dogs take them out incidentally, and then did a combination of parries, dash sweeps, and square attacks.
Got a solid 15 minutes on the Ray. There are some attacks that I don't think I even had to mess with on Normal and Hard. _________________
I'm near the end of File R-01 on Very Hard. So far Very Hard is looking pretty much like Hard (except for that first fight with the two Fenrirs because File R-00 ignores upgrades and denies you anything other than the basic HF Blade). I'm expecting all the bad stuff to really pick up once I hit Denver. Bloodlust is still whoa.
Also, I've been trying to stealth my way through much of it so far, and I'm finding that really enjoyable. Obviously it doesn't take as much to run up behind an enemy and hit the circle button as it does to manage and survive a hectic combat situation, but it actually starts to feel very MGS-y. I've come to realize that you can get through I'd say at least two-thirds of the enemies in File R-01 with stealth tactics. It's pretty fun to play around with some MGS-y tricks like getting an enemy's attention from afar and luring them into a stealth-kill trap.
One thing I managed to do in File R-01 tonight was catch the attention of three scattered cyborgs (the ones in front of the bridge after the fight with LQ-84i) so that they all came to be clustered together at one time and then I Ninja-Run-slide-kick-Blade-Mode-ed all three of them from behind. I didn't trigger an alert, and I got a double-Zandatsu out of it. I'd say this was one of the best "show me what an action game MGS looks like" moments. It was magical.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 5:31 am
Quote:
One thing I managed to do in File R-01 tonight was catch the attention of three scattered cyborgs (the ones in front of the bridge after the fight with LQ-84i) so that they all came to be clustered together at one time and then I Ninja-Run-slide-kick-Blade-Mode-ed all three of them from behind. I didn't trigger an alert, and I got a double-Zandatsu out of it. I'd say this was one of the best "show me what an action game MGS looks like" moments. It was magical
Yesssssss.
The practice in VR Mission 01 is really paying off here, particularly with respect to parry stuns and that slide kick. When fighting the proto-Wolf miniboss, I found that sliding into that trio of cyborgs who show up halfway through gets me a triple zandatsu pretty quickly. Getting the parry counter on proto-Wolf also leaves him open to the combos needed to S-Rank through.
I have yet to get the timing on his attacks into muscle memory. I forget if there's a VR Mission that lets you practice against them. Surely there must be.
Turns out my D ranks have been exclusive to the prologue R-00. I guess this is the "starting naked" phase of the game like you have in every other MGS. It's interesting that the part that's supposedly introducing you to the game could turn out one of the more difficult to master once you've gotten used to your upgrades. _________________
When an A+X Evade is used to interrupt a strike within a pre-set combo chain, your position within the combo will be stored through the whole Evade animation. You can then continue the combo from where you left off - just like you could in Bayonetta.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 12:27 am
Schwere Viper wrote:
whoooaoaoaoaoaooaoaoaoaoahaohoahoahhahahohoho
Saur wrote:
When an A+X Evade is used to interrupt a strike within a pre-set combo chain, your position within the combo will be stored through the whole Evade animation. You can then continue the combo from where you left off - just like you could in Bayonetta.
Oh wow! Going to practice with this now-ish. _________________
I'm a short ways into File R-02 on Very Hard. I'm trying to keep up the stealth play, and I'm still enjoying it. I'm finding myself making more use of certain stealth mechanics and tricks in MGR than I think I've made of them other than in goofy experimentation in MGS, such as, yeah, luring enemies just by letting them catch glimpses of me from afar (I'm more comfortable just using Books, Magazines, and knocks to achieve similar effects, in MGS). Plucking sentries far out of their patrol patterns is not just tremendously useful, but often seems strictly necessary, for getting through zones without detection in MGR, because in many cases overlap among patrol patterns makes sneaking otherwise impossible. And I haven't found the 3D Photo Frames to be a very reliable alternative yet. I am, however, playing a lot more with the Cardboard Box, Drum Can, and Red Phosphorous Grenades because of this.
I suppose it's worth noting that killing seems ultimately necessary in stealth play (I mean this in contrast to MGS, obviously not in contrast to combat play in MGR). Some zones, I can slip through without interacting with any enemy at all. But others, like the little stretch of road between the fight with LQ-84i and the bridge, and the interior of the refinery, have enemies placed precisely so that the only way through them appears to be to (stealth-)kill at least one or a couple of them to create the gaps that I need, or all of them. MGS games tend to encourage the player to couple stealth tactics with a non-lethal disposition. So of course in MGS, playing stealthily, playing "well," means devising ways of slipping through zones with minimal to zero cost, including in terms of harm caused and sometimes more broadly in terms of any and all interactions with sentries. In MGR, though, playing stealthily means picking out which enemies to neutralize, deciding in what order to neutralize them, and so on. And the stealth kill is an always lethal action (I don't know yet if it's non-lethal with the wooden sword), and so are the other attacks that seem able to eliminate targets without triggering an alert. And this is just the ground of the experience. In fact it's only when every enemy in a zone has been eliminated that a member of the support team will praise Raiden and declare him the stealth expert he's known to be, and the game does this not just the first time a zone is cleared stealthily, but every time. In other words, the game consistently and practically explicitly encourages the player to kill everyone even when it's no longer necessary to progression. Everyone dead is the result the game wants. My feeling in stealth play is less that I'm being like Snake, working out how to get by without being harmed or causing harm, and more that I'm a predator stalking prey, which helps to make the sentries feel to me even more like what mechanically, conceptually, they are: a cross of the sentries and animals in MGS3. A stealth kill doubles, after all, as elimination of an enemy and as a much easier opportunity to Zandatsu.
I'm finding that it's changing my relationship with the enemies enough that I'm anticipating the Ripper event in File R-03 and understanding Raiden's ethics somewhat differently this time. It was one thing for the game to assert that even the enemies on my screen deserved ethical consideration when it seemed to me that actually encounters were for the most part unavoidable and that actually I had to kill everybody in order to proceed. Raiden's "They're bad guys" principle actually had my new-player bumbling and new-player feeling of victimization on its side. It may turn out to have a fuller or different impact, though, now that I've learned how to manage the very occurrence of encounters in a majority of cases and still found myself (encouraged by the game to engage in) killing everybody regardless of whether or not there's a combat barrier blocking my advancement. And even though stealth play and combat play can to some extent be boiled down to structural similarity (like I said, in most cases, even in zones in which stealth play is possible, it seems necessary to kill at least one or two people, so the game is still requiring its player to kill), I think they're aesthetically/experientially quite different. The power fantasy's different in stealth play. Maybe more incriminating.
It's interesting because this is making the long-term experience of MGR indeed exactly opposite to that of MGS2, which requires the player basically to demonstrate some internalization of Raiden's lessons in ethical self-reflection in order to earn better and better marks. "Don't kill; be better than what your surroundings demand you to be" = "Put everything but the tranq gun away; die and restart a zone if you're spotted in it, rather than give up and try to escape the alert with violence." My long-term experience of MGR is turning out to be my learning how better to kill enemies, including how to clean them all up without their having a chance even to resist combatively. I'm becoming a better ninja-Punisher, not a better ninja-Batman. Even the stealth play is more Jack the Ripper than it is "Snake."
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 9:08 pm
Big ol Grant response post.
zangrantsu wrote:
He's also found himself generally incapable of staying off the battlefield; both his MGS2 and his MGS4 happy endings fail, and primarily just because he can't bring himself to actually like them. Whatever ethics/rationalization he's to try to live by/with after MGS2 has to be one that makes fighting-for-fighting's-sake itself justifiable, which is to say one that doesn't depend on the particulars of political causes to make possible the excusability of killing. He needs an Omar Little-esque "anyone in the game is a fair target for being in the game" principle.
This part isn't unexpected for me. It's the single theme of each major PC protagonist in the MGS series, and it's a trope that affirmed the series' wavering back and forth between self-consciously adopting sequel tropes VERSUS using those sequel tropes at fact value. To be more specific, each sequel featuring a main character who had been introduced in an earlier game requires that that character's vows to give up the battlefield have failed.
Big Boss is interesting in this regard since he doesn't really vow to promise to give up the warrior's life like Snake and Raiden do.
Raiden's iteration of this trope had more interesting possibilities (to me) than what was ultimately explored. He was, in an indirect way, fighting for Rose and Little John since he had to provide for their material needs. There's a level on which this is a day job for Raiden who literally has the skills to pay the bills. He goes a little nuts when he finds out the depths of evil perpetrated by Desperado and Armstrong, and his departure from Maverick does signify a beginning to the end of his days of rationalized killing. I would have liked to see motivations other than a facile "oh dang bro tough life decisions made cyborgian hm didn't think of that before" revelation emerge.
Raiden's got a lot of different reasons for being on the battlefield. I would have been more interested if the complex of those reasons had been the focus of introspection rather than a cliche that's the quickest possible route to Super Saiyan Jack the Ripper mode.
My other problem with his moral recognition is that, well, he's actually correct before talking with monsoon. Those dudes did join up with Desperado, however manipulated they've been into joining. (The lamentation "Oh god, they've got my wife and kids" is probably the better point made to this effect.) In context, it's the way of a world run on immoral laws. The second that Raiden steps into the ring, he's already part of the "problem"... something that I think he acknowledges at the start of R-01 with his "I'm just the reaper" quip.
DEMPSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY wrote:
In another sense, in context it's just another self-serving, defensive response anyway, as much as it's any sort of awakening to ethical objectivity: to do anything other than actively construct himself as "a sympathetic human being healthily appalled by death and destruction" would be to surrender to the two parties (Solidus and the Patriots) actively trying to define him as something he's yet hopeful he doesn't have to be (a soldier/killer "by nature"). Either way, things change for him as, over the course of nine subsequent years, it becomes only more and more apparent that he can't prove Solidus and the Patriots wrong about him. He rejects every happy ending that would be his proof.
Rising emphasizes Raiden's uniqueness in this regard, though. I know that the end of MGS2 pumped up Raiden's kidnapping and training by Solidus, but and that element gets played up more to side with the "nurture" argument of his development. "Nature" was the problem that Snake & co faced, whereas Raiden's actions have always been about conditioning (salt petre in food, Libarian war training, etc).
Rising inadvertently deflates this "big reveal" that Raiden loves all the killing by giving him a philosophical approach to his actions. He already seems sufficiently self-aware of the fact that he doesn't have much choice for employment because of Rose and Little John, as well as the unreal appearance of synthetic skin over his R-00 body.
Ultima1 wrote:
(We can blame the possibly ethically oblivious Doktor for that straw on the camel's back.) He's got to devise a way to be okay with himself as such a being.
I think that there's a sciency explanation in the Codec calls about this, actually. Raiden asked Doktor why he has to nip the nanopaste spines from downed soldiers, adding that he doesn't understand why he doesn't just have one of his own. Doktor points out that (1) the rate of healing of an internal nanopaste unit resembles the pace of human healing and (2) Raiden's body would be too inflexible if he had one of those heavier nanopaste units inside.
I actually think that he's ethically correct when he makes the whole "I'm just the reaper" point. I get the feeling that it's supposed to come off as a rationalization that the game will explode later (prelude to fight with Monsoon). Whereas Raiden might not have been explicitly aware of the fact that he enjoyed the killing, the fact that he realizes that he does should not overwhelm the other reasons for his presence on the battlefield.
I'll need to revisit the latter cutscenes to see how Raiden responds to this. He's still got a larger purpose for being on the battlefield, and (outside of whapping them on the head with a wooden sword) there's just nothing to be done for the soldiers who made it on the battlefield, however they arrived. The game provides a kinder way out (concussion inducing wooden sword) but that's entirely optional. Dude's gotta do what he's gotta do, and he's gotta do it for reasons independent of how much he likes his work, so the fact that he does like the killing seems overblown as a character motivation.
The whole execution falls in line with the trope of immediate credibility given to a rival who's only known the PC for 10 minutes but whose ideology reveals The Dark Truth. I really wanted Raiden to stand up for himself during the whole emotion-overwhelmed stumble sequence instead of going straight into insecurity.
That's who he is, I know, but I'd like to see a more interesting character development.
Also worth noting... I don't remember who I was talking to about this, maybe Grant, but all of the members of Desperado flash characteristic grins and smiles. This becomes a kind of identifier for Desperado, which makes Raiden's near maniacal Ripper grin right before the last fight ("Now... let's dance!" itself being a claim on Sam's warrior ideology) thematically significant. _________________
grrr... ChairTax showed me a bit more of the game, it does look pretty awesome, still not the game I wanted after finished MGS2, but it does look like a damn good game.
So, that crow? Tasting pretty good.... _________________ Steam: Godamn_Milkman
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 1:11 am
I think that Dinghy and analogos mentioned a few times that the jump in difficulty between Normal and Hard is nothing like the jump in difficulty between Hard and Very Hard. I think that that's pretty accurate. I've gone through without using any rations so far, but I've been stuck on this part of R-02 for about a day now. It's the room after you push back the little bulldozer like enemy that shoots you with a cannon, and then it reveals its bipedal form.
In Normal and Hard, I'm pretty sure that there was only one of them. In Very Hard, there are two, and the entire room begins exploding almost immediately. If you don't gain control of the fight right from the start, Raiden gets juggled by both bipeds as well as the room itself.
Things I have learned thus far:
(1) When the large cylindrical tankers begin exploding into bits, quit fighting which ever mech you're on and ninja run through the room, cutting with square to diffuse the remaining chunks. One of the more frustrating recurring events in this setting is finally managing the two mechs and then have your rhythm disrupted by an exploding chunk of fuel reservoir.
(2) Almost exclusively use the square button. While you can parry cancel some hard attacks, it's not worth the extra .4% of damage you might take off to have that window of vulnerability. The more frequent exceptions include Raiden's hard dash attack and the flying kick from midair.
(3) Auto target the legs. Unless there's some way of targeting the upper shields, this seems to be the best way to get enough licks on the shield parts themselves to weaken them for cutting mode.
(4) Try to use one of the mechs as a shield itself. This usually works best once the explosive containers are all gone.
Parry counters don't seem as valuable in this fight as in others. Unless I'm missing something, they seem to do .5% damage to the mechs and that's it.
I also noticed that the machine in the back doesn't "notice" Raiden straight off. I've tried several routes to sneak up and stealth kill it, but it always seems to be looking at me when I emerge from cover.
Hey Dinghy and Grant, how did you make it through this? _________________
Perfect parries don't do a lot of damage to them until Rev mode yeah, but I usually started the fight by just running up and doing one on the first attack anyway. After that the GRAD always jumped back, so I'd just follow it, run around it, and go for the second GRAD. The second GRAD acts like the enemy versions of the GRADs, so you can just stunlock it to death with the Sai, keeping it between you and the other one the whole time. After that you're just fighting a single GRAD, which isn't too bad.
The same strat works on Revengeance mode, too.
Also just in general I found the Sai a lot more useful than triangle attacks with the sword.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 1:41 am
Interstellar Dinghy wrote:
Perfect parries don't do a lot of damage to them until Rev mode yeah, but I usually started the fight by just running up and doing one on the first attack anyway. After that the GRAD always jumped back, so I'd just follow it, run around it, and go for the second GRAD. The second GRAD acts like the enemy versions of the GRADs, so you can just stunlock it to death with the Sai, keeping it between you and the other one the whole time. After that you're just fighting a single GRAD, which isn't too bad.
The same strat works on Revengeance mode, too.
Also just in general I found the Sai a lot more useful than triangle attacks with the sword.
Hm. This will be a problem for me since I started over with a New Game for Very Hard. But you're saying that the second GRAD has normal enemy-type health rather than the set piece GRAD's 100% bar? I noticed that attacking one GRAD brought that bar down and not the other, but I figured the other one just had a health bar that was equal in length but invisible.
Guess I'm going to try this out. _________________
You can basically stunlock an enemy if you just do good sword combos, probably. It's just a little trickier to keep the GRAD between you.
Basically just make sure you kill the non-boss GRAD first, and always keep it between you and the other one. Also you never want to be too far away from either GRAD, or it's just unblockable missile hell.
what jerk i made it through it too ok. anyway i died maybe half a dozen times max so i didn't exactly have to break it down into a science to get by, but
you can always parry (except when dizzied). it's not about some exclusive light or hard attack window you just do it or you don't do it. something i maybe didn't explain well enough when you were streaming the other night is that parry is not something you should treat as a passive tactic. standing around waiting for your enemy to do the thing you want it to do is not a valuable use of your time. you put up as much of an offense as you can muster and then when/if your targeted enemy retaliates and/or an additional threat outside of the one you're currently attacking comes your way, you parry in response and carry on. in that way it's not really an option you think about whether or not you should bother trying for. you apply pressure until you're forced to stop at which point you either parry, dodge-slash, or (in the rarest instances) get the hell out of there entirely. in any case you have no real reason to neglect the triangle button unless your concern is your window of opportunity to attack. conversely, using heavy attacks more often only accelerates the likelihood you'll get a significant attack opening anyway.
in other words:
Quote:
Almost exclusively use the square button.
help please stop
---
perfect parry might not do much damage by itself. it rarely does, until Revengeance difficulty. it's not really the point. the value of the parry counter is what it sets up for you afterwards. what it does here is significantly increase the chances of inducing a heavy stun on a GRAD, giving you ample free time to either go nuts on it offensively or ignore it to focus on the other GRAD without having to worry about getting tagged by the first for a while.
there's no need to actively target the shields, yeah. at least if you're sticking exclusively to HF blade tactics. if you do enough damage on the legs you get an auto-zandatsu prompt that gives you instant access to the shields.
i think my success run was similar to dinghy's, anyway. really the thing about MAP IS EXPLODING OH NO is, iirc, to not be intimidated by the GRADs enough to allow it to dictate the pace of the fight. you want to move further back in the room into open space and engage them there. if you take the outset of the fight timidly you're going to get stuck in explosion hell. if you duck your ass out of there straight away you can end up not being affected by the environment at all.
Last edited by analogos on Mon Mar 04, 2013 2:23 am; edited 2 times in total
i kind of feel like your HF blade exclusivity might be based on a faulty assumption of what the custom weapons are actually like in this game. this isn't like DMC or Ninja Gaiden or whatever; they aren't entirely new movesets and playstyles that outright replace the role of the HF blade and force you to learn a new game. at most they change certain aspects of the role of the Heavy attack button, but the HF blade is still your primary weapon and you actually still have access to most of your heavy HF blade special attacks anyway.
that said the pincer blades are overpowered on every difficulty to the point of being kind of dumb. it's still good to know your options, though.
I also noticed that the machine in the back doesn't "notice" Raiden straight off. I've tried several routes to sneak up and stealth kill it, but it always seems to be looking at me when I emerge from cover.
If you're talking about a GRAD, it wouldn't matter anyway. There is no stealth kill for GRADs. At least not that I could figure out, and not for lack of trying. I used an RP Grenade to get and hang out behind one looking for a circle button prompt, and there simply isn't one. On top of that, unless you've got the effect of an RP Grenade going, a GRAD can detect you even when you're behind it. GRADs seem to detect you by sheer proximity as well as by sight as long as nothing's actively clouding its perception in general.
I suppose the idea is that it's too armored an enemy to take out that way. Even the usual triangle+circle QTE kill prompts you into Blade Mode twice in order to kill one, so.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 2:54 am
Messing with this some more, it seems that the parries will weaken the armor more quickly. I've taken to the second "normal" mech first, and I seem to be having a better time whittling it down than the other.
Right now, I've changed strategies. Going after the second one, I'm using the hard-run slide to whack the mech's legs while keeping moving so I can deflect bullets. When it melee attacks, I go for the parry-counter. Raiden's got some invincibility frames during the parry-counter, so I'm at less risk standing still when that happens.
I used some rations to experiment with how the fight will flow once I've gotten better to defeat one of the mechs. Having experimented with each mech, I see that the "normal" one toward the back actually has a zandatsu box, whereas the fore-mech does not. This makes going for the second mech first an even better idea since you can refill your health once it's defeated without using a ration. _________________
Having experimented with each mech, I see that the "normal" one toward the back actually has a zandatsu box, whereas the fore-mech does not. This makes going for the second mech first an even better idea since you can refill your health once it's defeated without using a ration.
Does the boss GRAD not offer a Zandatsu opportunity? I think you might have to kill it via QTE because it's a boss, so you can't Zandatsu it outside of that, but does the QTE not let you Zandatsu either? Not that it'd mean anything as far as which GRAD's better to kill first. I'm just curious about how the boss one works. It never lodged itself in my memory whether I've gotten a Zandatsu out of it or not.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 3:11 am
analogos wrote:
you can always parry (except when dizzied). it's not about some exclusive light or hard attack window you just do it or you don't do it. something i maybe didn't explain well enough when you were streaming the other night is that parry is not something you should treat as a passive tactic. standing around waiting for your enemy to do the thing you want it to do is not a valuable use of your time. you put up as much of an offense as you can muster and then when/if your targeted enemy retaliates and/or an additional threat outside of the one you're currently attacking comes your way, you parry in response and carry on.
Most of my standing around waiting for the enemy to attack so I can parry-counter is part of an effort to get the timing of the enemy's attacks down. It's an interesting phenomenon for how I perceive time in a game like this. Mostly it's relative to animations rather than something like "wait half a second before parrying to counter this move." So a lot of that is watching to get a feel for things. I find that I'm distracted from focusing on the enemy's movements in context if I'm also watching Raiden's fight animations at the same time.
So basically the watch-and-wait is testing the waters, getting a rough sketch of the enemy timings in my muscle memory.
I parried a lot during my first two playthroughs but not with the goal of consistently countering in mind. This playthrough requires a better sense of that timing.
analogos wrote:
in any case you have no real reason to neglect the triangle button unless your concern is your window of opportunity to attack.
This is the main problem in my case, actually. I can more quickly segue from a light attack into ninja run if I find that the other mech has circled behind me. The only times I'm using hard attack are when
(1) I'm airborne since the diving kick keeps me moving
(2) I'm ninja running since the slide keeps me moving
(3) When the mech is "crouching" so that it can fire at Raiden with its large tank cannon because, once you're under the chassis and in between the legs, most bullets or missiles from the other mech don't hit Raiden.
analogos wrote:
what it does here is significantly increase the chances of inducing a heavy stun on a GRAD, giving you ample free time to either go nuts on it offensively or ignore it to focus on the other GRAD without having to worry about getting tagged by the first for a while.
Parry counters seem to be doing a certain kind of non-life-meter damage. After about three parry-counters, the shield/bludgeons on either side of the GRAD's head are free to destroy.
I was messing with this on the GRAD with a life meter. I've been able to whittle it down to 60% without getting the destructible cutting mode prompt, yet other times I've been able to get its armor off by 85%. Some of this has to do with where you land your hits, but I think I've noticed fewer hits needed to clean off the armor after a couple of successful parries. These parries do about one light attack's worth of life-meter damage though.
analogos wrote:
i kind of feel like your HF blade exclusivity might be based on a faulty assumption of what the custom weapons are actually like in this game. this isn't like DMC or Ninja Gaiden or whatever; they aren't entirely new movesets and playstyles that outright replace the role of the HF blade and force you to learn a new game.
I did have that preconception of them at the outset, yep. In this instance, I only actually have the polearm, which seems pretty useful for getting a lot of hits in quickly. I generally keep it off so I can have access to the diving kick during this fight.
Grant wrote:
There is no stealth kill for GRADs. At least not that I could figure out, and not for lack of trying. I used an RP Grenade to get and hang out behind one looking for a circle button prompt, and there simply isn't one.
I wonder how easily they can detect you if you're in the drum can. The drum can's description specifies that it renders infrared detection useless (as opposed to the box where your heat signature gets through to Gekko and GRADs and other UGs). _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 3:13 am
Grant wrote:
Does the boss GRAD not offer a Zandatsu opportunity? I think you might have to kill it via QTE because it's a boss, so you can't Zandatsu it outside of that, but does the QTE not let you Zandatsu either? Not that it'd mean anything as far as which GRAD's better to kill first. I'm just curious about how the boss one works. It never lodged itself in my memory whether I've gotten a Zandatsu out of it or not.
Well, the destruction sequence for the boss GRAD is the same as for the normal GRADs everywhere else. Same animations and everything, ending with Raiden flipping over what's presumably the CPU unit for cutting. I've never seen a zandatsu red box on the boss, but you get one on the normal GRAD. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 3:32 am
As a side note, I find that I'm more easily prone to sensory overload as time goes by. When the screen gets filled with flying gas tank particles, and the GRADs, and Raiden, and a camera that decides a better orientation when I'm near a wall -- my mind kind of goes blank and I stop actually seeing what's happening on screen.
I'm having to turn both the music and the voice work down on this one. The battle music in the previous MG titles was always supposed to be the exception rather than the rule because Snake was supposed to avoid direct confrontation. As a result, doing badly (injury, death) while intense background music played made sense because... well, when you get found, you're supposed to have a more sharply graded challenge that's less likely to end well. It synthesizes with the game, as do the SNAAAAAAAKE death-codec yelps.
The music in Rising definitely communicates "you're doing the ninja awesome," but it's harder to reconcile the music's message with the game when, well, you encounter a sticky spot where you need to learn new depths of the game's mechanics. You're not being awesome. You're figuring things out, observing things, coordinating old skills with new observations, etcetera. The communicated emotion interferes with what I'm cognitively doing with the game. Granted, previous MG titles had especially tense music for boss fights, but it felt less rushed than the music in Rising.
Which is, of course, part of the point. It just has a limited appropriateness for the game experience when you're messing around to get better. It's kind of like the end-game time-played counter. It only records your victorious fight times, not all the times you screwed up and restarted. Likewise, the background music seems fit only for those victorious fight times.
I'm also questioning how well the MG trope RAIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN death screech complements Rising. When I've failed for the twelfth time in a row on a new challenge, and especially if I've become mildly overloaded by flashing on the screen, the last thing I want to hear is someone screaming at me.
It provokes the same response in me as, say, getting told that I've found a blue rupee and that a blue rupee is worth 5 rupees when I'm two steps away from fighting Ganon in Twilight Princess. I want to brush it aside as quickly as possible because it's not telling me anything I don't know, and it's also not reinforcing anything that needs extra enforcement.
The death-yell in previous MG games served as a pretty good way to bridge the event of fail-state with the narrative world. That works really well given the atmosphere of the MG titles, like you've run to the end of a parallel universe where Snake died to Raven or something else.
In Rising, even though there's obviously a plot connection to fail-state, I think that the death-yells indicate the plot over-assuming its importance to the actual experience of playing a game. When I die in an MGS title, I think, "Well damn. Snake died." I hop back in to the role-play and start gutting it out again. With Rising, though, I think, "Damn, I need to try that again." I'm much more aware of Rising's status as a game that needs restarting at several points because of encountered fail-states, so being asked to care about Boris's disbelief in Raiden's death overassumes that I care about Boris's reaction to anything. And, again subjectively, it's one of the least welcome sounds when it appears, not for what it signifies, but for the visceral experience itself.
I'm also not sure why the death-yell shows up in the VR training. Maybe so Raiden will know exactly how distraught his peers will be in the event of his death???
So some things about the presentation here seem off to me. They come out most distinctly when I'm repeating an area over and over again.
I don't know how widespread these reactions are to merit calling them problems with the game, though. _________________
I wonder how easily they can detect you if you're in the drum can. The drum can's description specifies that it renders infrared detection useless (as opposed to the box where your heat signature gets through to Gekko and GRADs and other UGs).
Yeah, to be honest, I'm still not really sure what distinction in proper use there is between the Cardboard Box and the Drum Can. I noticed the description of the latter, which emphasizes protection against infrared scanning and would seem to indicate that the Drum Can hides you from certain enemies that the Cardboard Box can't, but I've yet to encounter an enemy that can see through the Cardboard Box anyway. Even UGs like Mastiffs are tricked well enough by the Cardboard Box.
The problem I see with sneaking up on a GRAD using either of those, anyway, is that it seems like it'd be likely to detect your movement, even if, hypothetically, its sensors wouldn't penetrate the Drum Can while you were stationary in it.
To lay out the situation a little more clearly: it appears to me that GRADs have two "phases" in their perception. Next time you encounter one in a situation other than that boss fight, approach it slowly and watch it does. It anticipates your presence even before it "detects" you. What it does, once you're within a certain range, is turn its head in your direction. It follows you with that distant gaze when/as you move too, unless you go back out of that range. And strangely enough, neither Alert nor Caution will be triggered yet. This is why I say it seems to detect you by proximity as well as by sight: it knows you're there even before it knows you're there. It's like a spatial-scanning pre-perception. This means you absolutely can't sneak up on one, because its head is literally always going to be turned towards you as you approach. It's unlike every other enemy, which you need only wait for it to look in another direction. Only an RP Grenade will let you get right up to the GRAD without fear of its "pre-perception," but it seems that as soon as the RP Grenade's effect is done, bam, that GRAD's head turns your way immediately and, now that you're in its visual range, it's an instant Alert.
(In fact, there seem to be three phases in a GRAD's perception, not just two. If the first is this harmless-in-itself pre-perception, and the third is actually seeing you outright and starting an Alert immediately, then the second phase is triggered when you've got between the ranges of its pre-perception and perception. In this phase, it sort of sees you, but it's still not sure, and a circular icon will appear over Raiden's body while, if I remember right, a second circle shrinks and closes in towards the first from the edges of the screen, this all representing the GRAD's scanning process or whatever. Once the second circle shrinks into the first, bam, it recognizes you as an enemy and starts an Alert. GRADs seem to be pretty sophisticated anti-stealth bots. Snake's worst nightmare.)
Most of my standing around waiting for the enemy to attack so I can parry-counter is part of an effort to get the timing of the enemy's attacks down. It's an interesting phenomenon for how I perceive time in a game like this. Mostly it's relative to animations rather than something like "wait half a second before parrying to counter this move." So a lot of that is watching to get a feel for things. I find that I'm distracted from focusing on the enemy's movements in context if I'm also watching Raiden's fight animations at the same time.
and i totally get that, but i think it also doesn't necessarily reflect what practical application of parries is like in this game. it's part of the reason square button working the way it does makes sense, and seems intentional. light attacks are random and often interchangeable. their ability to be applied marginally unthinkingly frees up attention to spatial consideration of your enemies. it is in itself a consolation to the problem in focus you're talking about, but even then i feel like being prepared to respond to threats while actively performing offense is something you have to learn by forcing yourself to do it. in real-time "oh, it's that move, i know how to respond to that" is going to be overwhelmed by how much is going on past a certain point, and you're really only going to get better at it by being in that situation.
it kind of applies to a broader observation about the game which is just that i think it's more about intuitive response than a pain-stakingly deliberate This Tool Circumvents This problem solving mindset, and i think you're applying too much of the latter to problems that are mostly asking the former. trust me, this takes me out of my comfort zone as well, but i think it's a good mindset to be in when you're having trouble.
Quote:
This is the main problem in my case, actually. I can more quickly segue from a light attack into ninja run if I find that the other mech has circled behind me.
you can also use the dodge-slash or enter blade mode and instantly release to cancel your current action into ninja run for pretty trivial fuel expenditure. i don't know i mostly just think that the concern for safety re: the length of hard attack animations is being overstated here. if you're putting up a heavier offense you're more likely to encourage it to use an attack you can parry, more likely to put it into zandatsu stun, more likely to do damage that will move the fight along quicker and leave you less at risk of having to sustain dangerous situations in the long run in general. also a GRAD that's off screen is going to be more passive than one that's in your face, so this isn't always a downside anyway. also several hard attacks sequence pretty smoothly back into light attacks.
analogos wrote:
I did have that preconception of them at the outset, yep. In this instance, I only actually have the polearm, which seems pretty useful for getting a lot of hits in quickly. I generally keep it off so I can have access to the diving kick during this fight.
i mean if you're getting use out of it that's cool but i don't think i've ever made any conscious attempt to use a divekick against a GRAD.
The music in Rising definitely communicates "you're doing the ninja awesome," but it's harder to reconcile the music's message with the game when, well, you encounter a sticky spot where you need to learn new depths of the game's mechanics. You're not being awesome. You're figuring things out, observing things, coordinating old skills with new observations, etcetera. The communicated emotion interferes with what I'm cognitively doing with the game.
Yeah, but even all that trial and error is oriented towards figuring out how to be an awesome ninja. The music's made to suit that goal. It's music the game expects you to want to live up to on the other side of all your practice, not music the game expects you to feel represents what you're doing as you die over and over and gradually figure out attack patterns and such. It wants to get you pumped for an Epic Showdown, not relaxed while you treat the boss as an object of study. In my experience, in games like this, even when I end up stuck and having to practice for a while, my appreciation of the music ends up growing in correlation with my skill and comfort in the fights; there's a feeling of satisfaction in sort of "earning" Fast and Awesome music as the soundtrack to my action.
I mean, I'm not saying that you should keep the music on while you practice on the bosses, I'm not saying MGR's music is brilliant, I'm not saying the lyrics are Badass, etc. I just think "It doesn't fit my slowing down" is a weird criticism. I don't know any action game that tries to offer "This is the part when you concentrate a lot to figure out a little bit more of the system" music during Epic Events, as opposed to either pumping you up or psyching you out with THIS IS IT music that's supposed to be an auditory mark of what you should aspire to through the practice.
The music in Rising definitely communicates "you're doing the ninja awesome," but it's harder to reconcile the music's message with the game when, well, you encounter a sticky spot where you need to learn new depths of the game's mechanics. You're not being awesome. You're figuring things out, observing things, coordinating old skills with new observations, etcetera. The communicated emotion interferes with what I'm cognitively doing with the game. Granted, previous MG titles had especially tense music for boss fights, but it felt less rushed than the music in Rising.
Which is, of course, part of the point.
yeah this is exactly what i'm talking about. i think "figuring things out, observing things, coordinating old skills with new observations, etcetera" while "you're doing the ninja awesome" is exactly what the game is almost always asking you to reconcile (when not playing stealthily) and that it's what you're probably going to have to come to terms with going forward. it's not even a music thing, it's just kind of built into its design.
i don't know. i feel like the more i talk about it the less empathetic my perspective is going to come across, but the music just doesn't really have that much of an influence on my play experience outside of maybe the semi-dynamic audio thing with the bosses. music is whatever. dying is whatever. "RAIDEEEEN" isn't significantly more intrusive than most games' death sequences. i would prefer to get back into the action faster but i'm pretty sure that's more of a loading issue than a sound design issue. it's there because haha mgs remember that and also because there is a codec team.
i am probably more inured to the expectations and tropes of games like this than you are, though. there are a lot of ways in which mgr is going to make it difficult to think of it like an mgs game, but it seems like kind of an important thing to do. or just do what grant does and stealth kill everything that's cool too.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 5:40 am
analogos wrote:
edit: hi
THIS IS THE GREETING WE'VE WON FOR OURSELVES.
analogos wrote:
and i totally get that, but i think it also doesn't necessarily reflect what practical application of parries is like in this game. it's part of the reason square button working the way it does makes sense, and seems intentional. light attacks are random and often interchangeable. their ability to be applied marginally unthinkingly frees up attention to spatial consideration of your enemies. it is in itself a consolation to the problem in focus you're talking about, but even then i feel like being prepared to respond to threats while actively performing offense is something you have to learn by forcing yourself to do it.
Maybe so. I don't play many games like this largely for the sensory overload problem. It's another reason why I don't play many bullet hell shooters, and it's a problem that I'm running into with Rising where there's so much happening that I lose track, get frustrated, stop having fun, and even lose that problem-solving pleasure that comes from watching enemy actions and responding to them. This could simply be an affirmation that the genre and I aren't an ideal match.
A lot of it comes down to multitasking. The ways that certain genres match certain cognitive modes interests me, particularly here where my skills are not flattered by the game's demands. Learning new skills for a videogame requires the same processes of muscle education that any other manual task does, though it's made easier by the fact that your means of input (hands on controller) already have some familiar elements (two analog sticks, face buttons, shoulder buttons, etc.) to navigate through.
I'd be interested to see a comparison in proficiency in a game like Rising between groups of people who have tested differently for multitasking ability. One of the general rules that I've heard is, if you need to turn down the radio when you come to a stop sign so you can look both ways, your ability to multitask language and physical responsiveness is weaker. I generally need to do this. I've found that paying attention to language completely overwhelms whatever physical action I'm trying to perform unless I'm doing something with a deep, ingrained muscle memory as opposed to collecting discrete data ("No one coming from left, right, ahead. OK go.").
I tend to play worse during streams with Skype chat for this reason, actually, and I know that when I try to talk on Skype while playing a game, I'll lapse into mid-sentence lulls of "uuuuuuuuuuh" and "...hold on..." which owes directly to that same phenomenon.
I'm sure that this could be taken as "lol adi rationalizing why he sucks at a videogame" but there surely are reasons why some games come more easily to some players than other games do. Having scrutinized my own general cognitive patterns for years, I'm pretty familiar with the kinds of environments that I need to learn and to perform, and they require the diminishing of the very same elements that I reduce in Rising when I'm working through a knot (language, generally).
Quote:
it kind of applies to a broader observation about the game which is just that i think it's more about intuitive response than a pain-stakingly deliberate This Tool Circumvents This problem solving mindset, and i think you're applying too much of the latter to problems that are mostly asking the former. trust me, this takes me out of my comfort zone as well, but i think it's a good mindset to be in when you're having trouble.
I'll give this a shot when I pick it up tomorrow. Thanks.
Thinking on it, the approach that you've described might simplify the input timing, actually. If you're attacking with a series of light strikes during the orange attack's windup, you're basically already hitting square so all you'd need to add to that is the left analog click in the correct direction.
Quote:
you can also use the dodge-slash or enter blade mode and instantly release to cancel your current action into ninja run for pretty trivial fuel expenditure.
I think I knew but must have forgotten that blade mode cancels whatever you're doing. That, too, will be useful.
Quote:
i don't know i mostly just think that the concern for safety re: the length of hard attack animations is being overstated here.
It's possible. It might also be that I'm using them a half-second later than they'd be most effective. I think that the blade mode cancel will help here a lot, actually.
Quote:
also a GRAD that's off screen is going to be more passive than one that's in your face, so this isn't always a downside anyway. also several hard attacks sequence pretty smoothly back into light attacks.
Weird. Most of my deaths during this fight come from the GRAD that's off screen. A few different things will happen... I'll focus on the GRAD in front of me and suddenly MISSILE BARRAGE (possibly pre-indicated by an orange reticule on Raiden, though I'm not sure if this consistently is indicated that way). Alternatively, I'll be fighting one of the GRADs, try to get some distance, and find that I'm running in place because the other GRAD has snuck up on me and is translucently blocking my path.
Quote:
i mean if you're getting use out of it that's cool but i don't think i've ever made any conscious attempt to use a divekick against a GRAD.
It can be good for covering distance quickly since I don't have the Sai yet.
Grant wrote:
It's music the game expects you to want to live up to on the other side of all your practice, not music the game expects you to feel represents what you're doing as you die over and over and gradually figure out attack patterns and such. It wants to get you pumped for an Epic Showdown, not relaxed while you treat the boss as an object of study. In my experience, in games like this, even when I end up stuck and having to practice for a while, my appreciation of the music ends up growing in correlation with my skill and comfort in the fights; there's a feeling of satisfaction in sort of "earning" Fast and Awesome music as the soundtrack to my action.
Interesting. I hadn't looked at it that way. It still doesn't sit right with me because the feeling of accomplishment that I get when I do overcome those obstacles and render the Awesome Ninja performance is not at all represented by the music that portends to represent my accomplishment.
In a vague way, I get this recurring gut response to the music along the lines of "Who the hell do you think you are? Get out." I decode it as a kind of condescension since, particularly in Very Hard, the majority of experiences are of failure. Having the Ninja Awesome soundtrack validated once out of thirty tries comes across as "HEY YEAH BRO YOU DID IT WOO YEAH SPRING BREAK IT'S LIKE YOU DIDN'T JUST SUCCEED AFTER REPEATEDLY FAILING FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS, KEGGER ON THE BEACH BYOZ THAT'S Z FOR ZANDATSU."
The Ninja Awesome aesthetic feels a little too genuinely meant for me to get into it, also. The game has an aesthetic or quality of experience that it wants me to inhabit, and I guess I'm disappointed that that aesthetic was all they could drum up. It's overdone.
"And he was a badass ninja who had secret bloodlust personality and end game cyberwink with red eye fighting own war creepily leering ten seconds on Sunny's face."
What's interesting to me about that sensation -- feeling bored with the aesthetic because it's overly familiar -- is that the MG series itself is, in one sense, little more than a grab bag of overdone genre tropes. It's possible that these aspects of Rising will grow on me, but they haven't yet. I'd be interested in an other perspective.
I should also clarify that there's a lot that I think that the game does well. I really like the CODEC depth, and I like the attempt to envision a future world wherein cyborg/transhuman identity is actually forced upon people from youth up. In the overwhelming majority of the time, I enjoy the gameplay very much, which makes the pickle spots stand out more, which is why I'm given to trying to unpack those experiences.
As I wrote before to Judge Ito, I think I understand what the music/game is trying to do; I just don't like it and am glad that the option exists for me to get it to leave me alone.
Grant wrote:
I just think "It doesn't fit my slowing down" is a weird criticism. I don't know any action game that tries to offer "This is the part when you concentrate a lot to figure out a little bit more of the system" music during Epic Events, as opposed to either pumping you up or psyching you out with THIS IS IT music that's supposed to be an auditory mark of what you should aspire to through the practice.
This is interesting as well, and I've been wondering why I hold this reaction to the music in MGR when I don't feel this way toward similar staging in, say, DMC. Perhaps it's a holdover expectation from the Solid games that doesn't need to be kept? I don't feel the same way toward all music in Rising, mind. Again, it's the music with lyrics that are problematic for me as focus disruptions, and this is more likely an idiosyncratic problem with the game than it is an aspect that the game should be held responsible for.
analogos wrote:
"RAIDEEEEN" isn't significantly more intrusive than most games' death sequences. i would prefer to get back into the action faster but i'm pretty sure that's more of a loading issue than a sound design issue. it's there because haha mgs remember that and also because there is a codec team.
These are all good points. Something about the delivery/execution of the final RAIDEEEEEEEEEEN screams is extremely off-putting this time through. I don't mind Doktor's "You were supposed to be stronger than this!" When I hear Boris or Kevin yell "RAIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN" I want to throw a brick at the TV. It is maybe one of the least welcome sounds.
A lot of this could also be different players' reactions to the kind of stress that games like Rising generate. Part of the game's experience is to create a situation that generates stress -- and then give the player the option to "diffuse" that stress through playing the game. Hitting a fail-state during those stressful moments requires some self-regulation of that stress, which some people dissolve by swearing at the TV, hitting the floor, ragequitting, etc. When I hit a fail-state -- and when I hit a fail-state repeatedly, as I've done with this GRAD fight -- I'm almost immediately reducing that frustration by mentally reviewing what happened, noting things to try that seemed different from the previous encounter, and so on.
And then someone is screaming at me, which is antithetical to my own habits of stress regulation. I consistently find that hitting that RAIDEEEEEEEEEEEEN point will trip frustration into something closer to actual anger (because stress self-regulation has been interrupted), which is my cue to put the game down for a while and turn off the voicework for the remainder of the time that I'm stuck.
I want to clarify that I'm not exploring these points simply to gainsay praise for the game. I don't even think that it's a bad game! I do, though, think it's really interesting what we can observe when a game rubs the wrong way.
Quote:
i am probably more inured to the expectations and tropes of games like this than you are, though. there are a lot of ways in which mgr is going to make it difficult to think of it like an mgs game, but it seems like kind of an important thing to do. or just do what grant does and stealth kill everything that's cool too.
I do a lot of stealth killing as well. For enemies whose orange telegraph timed attacks I'm familiar with, I'll rush in to dispatch (at this point that's mainly soldiers and Gekkos). _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 12:06 pm
Looking over that last post before I head in for work, I want to re-emphasize that I'm not necessarily holding the game responsible for some of these problems if those are simply aspects of the genre. I'm mainly looking at how/why the experience differs from a routine MGS style game, where that's working for me and where it's not, etc., so not all of that should be taken as describing design flaws.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 4:20 am
Interstellar Dinghy wrote:
There's no german word for "Kills"?
HUH.
I must have polyglossed over that when I was looking at the results screen. Sterben might be politically problematic, so maybe it's a localization choice idiosyncratic to DL. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 4:29 am
Grant Dempsey wrote:
I don't know anything about German!: Google Translate tells me kills is tötet. Does that work?
tötet is third person singular for the verb "kills," not a plural form of the English noun "a kill."
Off the top of my head Sterben was a best guess since it might can be function-shifted into service as a noun (root sterb-) with the plural inflection -en.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
