Ashen44

I’m a real youngster here, so my first final fantasy game was 16, but I really loved it so I picked up 14 and 7 remake. I never really got into 14 because MMOs, but 7 was an absolute blast! I’ve got rebirth and 16 lined up, but lately I’ve been getting more and more into retro RPGs so I’ve been considering going back and playing some of the older titles. I’ve heard tons of good things about 6, but I wonder if anyone else has any recommendations?

Monster hunter mentioned!

I really want to tell you to give rise a try because the sunbreak expansion is absolute peak monster hunter, but I agree that february 28th release date is creeping up way too fast…

Oxygen Not Included - after binging ONI videos all month I finally decided to give actually playing the game a go. Turns out watching lots of high level gameplay does not make you a good player! The struggle is tons of fun though.

Stationeers - A second super complicated game, I just had to hop in and play with all the new robotic arms they just added! Or rather, I would if I could make a functioning station in the first place… Time to go refactor the atmospherics again!

Satisfactory - The hat trick for brain melting games this week, with the release of 1.0 I’ve started up a brand new world and I can’t wait to mess around with all the new toys we’ve got! Unfortunately I’ve been hit with a nasty post-release bug but hopefully they’ll fix it right away and I can continue my factory adventures!

Astro Bot - A game to help unwind after the stress of the other three games, I genuinely cannot comprehend the amount of heart that went into this game! I seriously find myself grinning from ear to ear every time I boot it up, and I’m always looking forward to my next chance to play!

Started up a new world after not playing since like… update 5 I think? Already having a blast with it, though I’ve ran into a bug where coal miners won’t take coal from belts unless you have coal in your inventory and I think I’m gonna have to shelve it until that’s fixed unfortunately…

All the new QoL features are amazing though, and I’m crazy excited to see all the new late game content and what insane production lines I’m gonna havr to think up!

That’s totally fair, Monster Hunter is infamous for its utterly terrible onboarding process. If you ever decide that you want to really figure out Monster Hunter, there’s two options I always recommend.

The first is incredibly simple: get someone who knows the game to play with you. They can walk you through what does and doesn’t matter, and help you get used to the game with someone there to keep you engaged.

The second option, if you don’t have a MH friend or don’t want to play with other people, is a simple process you can follow which I’ve found tends to work for getting people through the early game confusion:

First, ignore the constant tutorial popups. They’ll be there in the hunter notes in your menu at any time, and most of them don’t matter until after you figured out how to literally play the game at all.

Second, find your weapon. Every weapon type in Monster Hunter plays very differently. The weapon that sounds the best to you might not be the weapon that feels the best to you. Once you unlock the training area (I think it happens before your first quest even) just go in there and pick a weapon from your box and start slapping shit. If you don’t like that weapon, pick a different one and rinse and repeat until you’ve found the one that speaks to you.

Finally, just start playing! I find things make way more sense when you actually experience them rather than just reading about them or watching someone else experience them. Just start playing and eventually all those complicated systems will click and you’ll wonder why you ever had a problem!

A common joke in the Monster Hunter community is that everyone loves monster hunter, they just haven’t played it long enough to realize it yet! I hope you give the series another chance someday because it’s really something special!

Regarding the movie, as a terrible movie fan I agree, it was a fantastic watch! As a Monster Hunter fan however, ohhhhhh boy was I screaming at my TV! WHY did they give gore magala a beard?!?!?

lets goooooo, my favourite franchise of all time! Techbically, my first monster hunter game was tri on thr wii, when I was a wee bab. I say technically because I was a tiny idiot and I did not know how to do quests so I just spent hours wandering around moga woods in free roam, just hanging out. I still had an absolute blast doing it though!

The game that really got me into the franchise though, and my favourite game, would be world! I just love the incredible attention to detail, and the clear love that went into designing everything! I have more hours in rise because that’s the game my friends all play, and it’s a phenomenal game no doubt, but I always find myself creeping back to World.

The next game, Wilds, is looking like it will far surpass World for me though, the 2025 wait is killing me! The gamescom previews really showed that they have been listening to thr community, and are making the monster hunter game we’ve all dreamed of.

That’s one of my favourite things about the monster hunter teams in fact, that they clearly know how to learn from their previous works! I would readily argue that every generation has been an overall massive improvement over the previous one. I say generation rather than game, because comparing Rise and World is rather unfair. They’re two different games made by different teams for different hardware with different goals in mind, and if you ask me they both achieved their goals spectacularly, no matter what some nerds will say about Rise… Grouping them both into 5th gen and looking at the series by generation, each one has so far been an improvement in nearly every aspect, and I think that’s an amazing track record. That is why I am willing to put my wholehearted trust in the monster hunter teams that they will absolutely deliver with Wilds and any games after that.

seconding this! Crosscode is an insanely good game! IMPORTANTLY before you go in though! there are two main criticisms against the game, which to me are both incredibly strong positives, but it’s important to know what you’re getting in to!

First is that the dungeons are very long. we’re talking an hour minimum, often even longer. You are spending time in these locations.

Second is that there are a lot of puzzles, and they are not always baby easy action game puzzles. This game is an action/puzzle game and it does not slack in either regard. Expect to be utterly stumped sometimes. Also fights are puzzles too, and if you’re struggling on a fight try to see if you can figure out its puzzle, I promise it will make it a lot easier!

damn I might have time to finish a tenth of gregtech new horizons now!

Wish I had anyone to play co-op with lmao T_T

Super excited for the improved physics though! The physics traps were always my favourite and it sucked that they were almost never the optimal choice.

hell yeah! OMD is such a good series, I’m so ready for this!

The Talos Principle 2 dropped an expansion out of nowhere. It hasn’t even been a year since the game released! The puzzles so far are really creative and cool, and of course it wouldn’t be The Talos Principle without a healthy dose of philosophizing about the human condition!

absolutely! Genshin is actually a surprisingly good game as a f2p player! If you’re having a lot of fun with it, I’d highly recommend checking Honkai: Star Rail! It’s somehow even more f2p friendly, and it’s clear they learned a LOT from Genshin when making it. It is a linear turn-based RPG though, so quite a different game from Genshin.

AI War 1 & 2 are both great and unique space RTS games. These games place you in the role of the last vestiges of humanity attempting to fight back against a galaxy spanning AI empire. You’re tasked with covertly taking down the rogue AI without letting them realize you’re a real threat, lest they bring the full might of their fleets down upon you.

Creeper World is a series of tower defense games with a unique twist: the enemy is a liquid! You’ll have to use a variety of weapons and tools to fight back against the literal tide of creeper. The third game is my personal favourite, though they’re all awesome.

Mosa Lina is self described as “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim”. This game is chaos incarnate. Every level you are given a random set of tools and must touch or destroy all fruit and make it to the goal. Some levels will not be possible. Failure is expected. You can do some prettt cool things with a spear and a phaser though.

new rimworld DLC came out and that has taken up all my time. I’ve got to admit I had a few doubts about this one compared to the others, but sure enough they did it again and made an absolute banger of an expansion and now I have to sink another couple hundred hours…

Oh my god I’m so excited! This is the perfect excuse to get back into Rimworld, and these new stories sound so messed up!

I don’t know, if I had to guess it’s probably the return to world campaign.

With the announcement of the next monster hunter game, which is being made by the same team as world (so likely it’s going to be very similar to world) Capcom started advertising world again and that shot it up to daily peaks of ~160K concurrent players for a while.

Since this year is looking to be the first year in monster hunter history without a new release (ironic since it’s the 20th anniversary of the series) people have started imagining the possibility of Capcom re-releasing older monster hunter games that are no longer on the market.

As a natural continuation of this, people have speculated on how they would handle these re-releases. The most popular opinion, and one I share, is that they should absolutely not touch the game content. Modernized controls, re-opened multiplayer servers, maybe a slight graphical touch up, and if we’re getting really fancy possibly implementing multiplayer monster health scaling, but anything beyond that would be damaging the reason people want to play these games, which is that they’re the old monster hunter. They’re weird, clunky, and sometimes jank as hell but that’s their charm. They also lack all of the quality of life improvements that came in the 5th generation, however those annoyances that were whisked away come Monster Hunter World were truly part of the identity of those older games, and any new release should absolutely keep them in. It may turn away many newer hunters but it’s about preserving the history of monster hunter more than anything.

Anyways tl;dr yeah “updated for modern audiences” can be concerning regarding the preservation of the history of these games. If you mean shit like removing slurs and stuff though I’m all for it.

OMD is a fantastic series! I remember playing the first one back on the 360, and then being sad because I didn’t have a PC to play 2 when it came out. When I eventually got a PC I sunk so many hours into the series. I’m also quite sad the series is probably over because there really isn’t anything else that fills that space. I’ve tried Sanctum but it’s just not for me.

I’ll throw my hat into this ring with Monster Hunter Rise. I often spend my time browsing monster hunter content and almost every time Rise gets brought up it’s just to talk about how much worse it is than World. I’ll say it now, yes I also prefer World to Rise, but holy fuck do I still love Rise.

To start with, let’s compare the two. Monster Hunter is developed by 2 teams who take turns making games. World was developed by the mainline team who are known for more grounded and polished games. Rise was developed by the portable team who are known for flashier and more experimental games. Most players started the Monster Hunter series with World (it’s Capcom’s #1 best selling game of all time after all) and so going from the high detail immersive World to the action packed fast paced Rise was extremely jarring. A massive portion of the hate just comes from the fact that it was different.

Also, as you can probably guess from the name, the portable team makes games for portable systems, such as the Switch, which immediately gives them less power to work with system-wise. Couple this with the fact that Rise was developed during the pandemic, and Rise was really dealt a rough hand. Graphically it’s a massive downgrade from World, and it even ended up releasing without an ending or any non-scripted elder dragon fights.

In spite of all this, even though Rise lacks a ton of the personality and charm of World, it’s still an absolute blast to play! The combat is stellar, and while it may not have the weight World had, its fluidity and high adrenaline action makes it some of the best in the series. The sunbreak expansion especially really improved the game in every single way, fixing a ton of the issues people had with the base game. I feel that most players already moved on after base Rise and so didn’t get to experience that improvement unfortunately.

TL;DR play Monster Hunter Rise. It’s really good. Just don’t go in expecting the same experience as World.

Man I loved Days Gone. I played through the whole game and deeply enjoyed it. I’m always surprised when I hear it getting shit talked online because it was really well done in my opinion. Maybe it was launch issues or something since I played it on PC long after release.