Nah. You really won't start dying too quickly. D3 is a lot more forgiving than previous games.

Just relax into the game. Play it to enjoy it for a little while.

Once you learn the nuances, then start to tinker with the different skills, masteries, etc...

There's no way you could play it wrong...

...you could play it like a straight strategy game, or delve into it's depths.

Either way, it's a GREAT, GREAT game!

If you have any questions AT ALL, fire away!

Who comes up with this stuff?

Mao said:

"This is the true power of a hero, a power that rivals the humidity of 100 fatties!"

Thanks for the advice, Leo. Will surely follow it. The game does feel like a regular SRPG, but at every turn it shows here and there a teeny tiny bit of the maddening, monstrous complexity hidden in its depths.

eggmiester said:

nis is one of my fav japanese develpment teams of all time they rarely ever make a bad game even the  wiiware game they did was great fun

I love NIS -- well that is to say, I have bought a lot of their games, including all the Disgaea games, but have not gotten to play them yet.  I bought them mostly because of their small production runs.

Everybody dance now

Iga_Bobovic said:

Everybody dance now

I drop a "i like to move it move it" reference a few days ago, and all of a sudden the 90's dance cliche's roll out.

Iga_Bobovic said:

Chance of epic gif material = very high

Epic gif incoming

So the PS3 version of Shaun White Skateboarding was recalled. I wonder if GAF will have a gigantic thread about how Sony is stuck in the stone age like they did for Nintendo for the same reason

Burned a bad version that couldn't simply be patched?

I got to play Sengoku Basara 3 on Wii (not my video, hard to find good videos too).

The engine is pretty nice, I wonder if Capcom will use it for other games. The level layouts are set up a lot like Monster Hunter 3, larger areas connected with smaller paths, except there's no loading within the same level, it's seamless. There is some pop in of scenery but it's usually not noticable with the way the levels twist and turn and with all the action. There can be tons of enemies on screen, although graphically they're pretty bad , only the main characters and bosses look really good up close, but again you don't notice it with all the attack effects and how many they are and how they get knocked back or start running panicked when you destroy their leaders and installations. There is some pop in for enemies but it's also usually not annoyingly noticable. It has enemies spawning from certain areas and enemies that are invisible until you get close but I guess that's a design choice and doesn't qualify as pop in. Overall it's not as detailed as Monster Hunter 3 but it looks pretty sharp and cool.

The gameplay's pretty simple, much easier and more straightforward than Samurai Warriors 3 where you can fail later missions easy by not meeting certain goals or having allies defeated. Here you mostly just fail if you die or in a couple of specific scenarios if you fail to defend an area. You tend to just move from area to area destroying an enemy installation in each to take it over, then once you do it to enough some extra path will open and allow access to the area boss. There are minor variations to that like levels where a boss constantly reappears while you do the same thing until the final showdown, or optional side objectives and things like that. There are many enemy types both melee and ranged to spice things up. You still only have two attack buttons as in Samurai Warriors 3 but then also get like 4 special moves and a super move and stuff which you can combine to rack up tons and tons of hits as you mow down crowds. 1000 hit combos are pretty common. The difference is that here you can choose when to do any special, while in Samurai Warriors 3 the special move was the ending hit to a normal attack combo, so you had to do like say 7 attacks then a strong attack to get a particular special, which felt repetitive.

The characters I tried were varied, Masamune and Magoichi, the former using swords and the latter guns. Their specials were very different as well, for example Magoichi could switch to a shotgun for some specials, and would then keep using the shotgun for normal attacks until you did a special that used the pistol. The same thing for a machinegun. Masamune on the other hand had more straightforward hacking attacks but could also activate a mode where he had all 6 swords out at the same time (like samurai Wolverine) but then could not block. You use the same button combinations for all the characters but they feel different enough to play as each.

Basically it's much more polished and stylish than Samurai Warriors 3 in everything, from the controls and character abilities to the visuals, but the levels have much simpler objectives.  I forgot to mention you can level up your character as well as one ally you can choose to take with you (you can choose between many different later with their own bonuses), acquire new weapons with their own stats and various accessories to attach to them for bonuses, and even craft more accessories with materials you earn in the battles, so you constantly feel your character improving as you play. Also any ally and accessory you unlock in one character's campaign you can use with any other character, although their starting weapons will be weaker and have less accessory slots so you'll still need to level up for each character's max potential. There are no motion controls outside shaking the remote to activate a special power. There's no lock on so in the beginning it seems hard to hit where you want but you get used to it soon enough, with the reach your attacks have it's nowhere near as hard as Monster Hunter 3's gameplay. Or hard at all. Often you won't bother moving the camera and just attack on and off screen.

Anyway, it's fun, if you can get into the crazy fantasy historical theme or at least like such Eastern aesthetics you will probably enjoy it, the gameplay's no worse than something like No More Heroes really, it just lacks Suda's craze. Although on easy and normal even the bosses are pushovers, but on hard it was pretty easy to die for me so there's either room for skillful play or you're supposed to level up your characters to the max before playing that. You should probably keep in mind I found Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers on Wii pretty competent as well (and I stand by it, cutting zombies in pieces is pretty damn satisfying and for such a low budget title it's very polished and only the forest area sticks out like a sore thumb as it looks bad). This is better.

Opinion time guys. Need one regarding the Assasn's Creed series.  That's been on of the HD series that I've been really interested in for a long time and looks like I'll finally have the chance to play.  Is it worth still picking up the first or should I just skip it and go straight to ACII?  I've heard that the first gets very repetitive and dull after a while, but the sequel corrected that to a great degree.  Still I don't know if I'd miss out too much on the story if I skip it.