What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Zevox]

With Sonic Mania finished, decided to play some shorter things until Persona 3 Reload's release next week. For the moment, that's Fire Emblem Warriors. Still have History Mode maps I can do, and special weapons to unlock the true power of. Not much to say about it though really, it's a Warriors game, just good, mindless fun.

In Granblue, "all characters to S rank or level 100" personal goal completed. Not counting the one DLC character they've released who I'm undecided on whether I'll pick up, anyway.

Soriz: As expected, he was pretty easy. He's the fisticuffs rushdown character of the game, a blunt force if ever there was one. Get close, use plus on block moves to pressure, make people hurt when you hit them. He does have some neat things about him, with his low-health super that rips off his clothes and puts him a special powered-up state (at no meter cost, apparently, which surprised the heck out of me, though the change is vulnerable enough you can't just do it whenever), but overall, he's in the "character I could play, but don't especially want to" category. Partially because I like others with a similar playstyle more, and partially because of how he's portrayed personality-wise - he's the dirty old man of the game, so that's always awkward.

Ladiva: The Zangief of the game. To be fair to her, there's things I like about her. Her character design is great - big beefy wrestler who looks extremely masculine (including a full beard), but is nonetheless a woman (I think trans, though the game is unclear on that point) who will strike very stereotypically feminine poses while fighting, including strutting like a runway model for her forward walk; and she's a pro wrestler who fights in the name of love in the cheesiest way possible, saying things like "Welcome to the love show!" while grabbing you for her super move where she hugs you and pins you to the mat for a dramatic three-count. Very fun. And to my surprise, she's actually quite good at combos - above-average among the cast, I'd say, as she gets notably better midscreen and anti-air combos than most, on top of being just as capable of corner combos as everyone else. Normally for a Zangief type I expect their combos to be short, simple, and not that damaging, because all of their strength is in their throws.

Those positives out of the way though, I don't like her, which is no surprise given the archetype. Playing her did help crystalize why for me though. While playing B-rank players with her, I was actually having a fine time - people at that rank didn't know what to do about her, so I could get in a do her stuff no problem, and once she's there she's similar to other characters I like playing, just with much scarier throws. The trouble is when you run into people who know that how you fight her is to keep her away from you. Once people start playing defensively, her bad speed and lacking normals compared to much of the cast, plus lack of any special move that really helps her get in, mean that she has to play defensively too, advancing slowly and blocking her foe's attacks. Since Granblue has a forward roll you can look for opportunities to use that to get in, so she's not as bad off as Zangief is in Street Fighter, but still, you end up with a situation where both players have to play cautiously and defensively, and that just feels awful to me, on either side of the equation. I did get her to S rank despite that, but I credit that to her high damage and most A rank players not being great at keeping her out yet.

Nier: The game's strongest character, though to be fair, not quite as easy to play as I expected. I did actually take a little longer to reach S rank with her than I did with Sigfried; but she's still the one I got there second quickest, and still pretty easy to pick up on the whole. She's an emo/goth kid who literally has Death as her companion - she looks like a puppeteer character on the surface as a result of using Death in combat, but she isn't. Death never truly acts independently of her, it's more like a Persona in Persona 4 Arena, where it's another entity that does her special moves for her, but Nier herself still has startup on all of Death's moves, which makes her a lot easier to play than a puppeteer since you're not learning to control two characters at once. What makes her ridiculously good is that she has some very powerful mechanics that no one else in the game gets: special-into-special cancels, and no cooldowns on her heavy special moves (which are, as usual for this game, just better than her light and medium ones, and quite potent in general). This is limited by a unique resource she has, heart points, which count down from 13 every time she does a special-into-special cancel or uses a heavy special move, and she loses access to Death for a while if it reaches 0; however, it rarely reaches 0 before a match is over. Thanks to these unique mechanics, she basically gets corner combos even when not in the corner, and has a safe-on-block, combo-on-hit meterless reversal, which are pretty overwhelming advantages.

All that said, I do kind of like her and would like to play more of her, I'm just inclined to wait until she gets nerfed, as she obviously will. There's plenty of other characters for me to play until then anyway.

So, at the end of all of this, where did I end up? The biggest surprises were Anre and Eustace, both of whom I'd written off at a glance, but who proved much more fun than I expected, and I will certainly play more of. Besides them, I'd say I intend to play more of Anila and Charlotta, and I've got a few additional maybes. And Nier once she's nerfed, but that was kind of my plan before anyway for her. Not surprising was that I did particularly poorly with Ferry and Metera, and really don't like the zoning playstyle they represent, and just reaffirmed that I don't like grapplers like Ladiva. Beyond that, mostly I found a bunch of characters I'm lukewarm on - could play them, they're fine, I just don't have as much fun as with others. Importantly though, I've learned things about every character I can use while fighting them, even if I never touch them again.