If I tackle multiple games at once that I don't really wish to play for extended periods of time, things start dragging on. Like how I'm still both playing Shenzhen and reading a lengthy VN, and most of my day goes on something other than those two regardless. Problem is that if I take another game to play beside those, it's increasingly more likely one of them will slip out of my schedule entirely.
So those situations take weeks during which I'm not getting much done in terms of new games. Luckily a friend finally had time to come over so we could play some local co-op games, two of which I'll tell you about.
Starting off with N++. I'm slightly conflicted about it. On one hand, I can't say I didn't have fun, but on the other, I don't particularly like platformers. Perhaps N++ is all that more commendable then, for making me have fun on a genre I don't particularly enjoy. Although I don't at all wish to go back to completed levels to get a better score or any such stuff, which it seems this game is quite much about.
N++ is very similar to Super Meat Boy in a lot of ways which include, but are not limited to, difficulty, speed, enjoyability, and silliness. While I don't really want to go back to it after about 6 hours, I would still say it's a very well made game, and would highly recommend it to anyone who does, unlike me, like action platformers.
The other one was Tales of Zestiria. Now this one I'm a lot less sure about. The most painful thing I had to find out was that this isn't really worth the co-op label. 11 hours in, and an agonizingly large portion of that is a complete singleplayer experience. I feel sorry for anyone who got 4 people together to play it, hearing it supports that many players, only to have 3 of them quit one by one because the game keeps lowering the amount of characters you can play. It's also terribly inconsistent in how many people can play at the same time. You start off with two, then get a third, then either of them is missing most of the time, then you gain the ability to merge two of them into one which means the other player has to constantly play the third, now uselessly weak, character, and in the case they go missing, it turns into a singleplayer game again. And then you get a fourth and fifth character in your party, but you must apparently have 2 "human" party members for two actual people to play at the same time. I mean I half understand a character leaving the party for story reasons, but ffs if I have 4 characters in my party, why won't you let two people play at once and rather leave some characters sitting idle?
Too lengthy of a rant, but that really did irk me. And while I'm on the negatives side, the battle camera is downright broken in how nearly unusable it is, often leaving my character not within its boundaries or close enough to an edge that I can't see what I'm fighting. Also it sometimes zooms in so that the entire camera view is is obscured by a single monster.
Now, what weren't completely terrible were the battle and equipment mechanics. There's a lot of depth and complexity to them, to the point where it's downright difficult to comprehend even after it's been explained to you by a tutorial. The problem is that it doesn't really warrant such complexity. Basically, a lot of the things you can do, you don't really want to. It doesn't help that there's like 20 different attacks, and that you chain them into combos and to elaborate mid-combo switches and effect stacking or whatever. Reason being that there's still only just a few that you'd actually use, and then you just stick to spamming those until the rare case something better comes along. Oddly enough, basically the same applies to equipment.
I guess that's been my overall experience with the gameplay side of all JRPGs so far, and it's really leaving a negative impression on me. That said, comparing it to games in the Neptunia series, I feel it's better in pretty much all the aspects, from difficulty scaling and combat to story and visuals.
I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to finish it, or perhaps instead try the very fresh Tales of Berseria instead. Why I'd bother at all in spite of the honestly not-very-enjoyable gameplay is because it feels kind of relaxing. The story is fun to follow, and beating up lots of enemies is kind of cathartic. I don't even care that the story is neither thought-provoking nor deep, and that the combat isn't challenging nor elaborate. These are not serious games, and I'm not taking them as such.
