Diablo IV, for me. I love the Diablo series and just a bit ago, I sank 2 hours down to get my necromancer character up and set in Diablo II Resurrection. I have Diablo III and its expansion too, but they’re online only and I almost can’t be bothered to go through that. I’ve beaten it a long time ago.

And I really do want to get Diablo IV, but they’ve made that online-only as well. Like, I know I’m always online and everything but I do like to have that fallback where if I am without internet or I can’t afford internet for a time, I can play or watch things to bide the time over. I can’t do that with online-only games because it’s like being gated away from something you bought.

So everytime I look at Diablo IV, I just get a little depressed at times. Blizzard should do what D2R did, have an online character and have an offline character.

  • missingno@fedia.io
    1·
    10 hours ago

    If you want a few recommendations that I think are particularly great for their combat mechanics:

    • Etrian Odyssey - Regular encounters are no slouch, FOEs are a terror, status effects hella matter, and you always have to carefully gauge how far you can push before it’s time to retreat back to town. IMO, 4 is the peak.
    • Bravely Default - The ability to bank your turns or take an advance on future turns adds a really cool layer to combat. As a spiritual successor to FF5, the job system gives you lots of fun toys to play with and encourages you to constantly change up your builds.
    • Tales of series - These games are partially inspired by fighting games, and if you squint hard enough you can see those influences in the early titles before it started to go off in more of its own direction. I think Vesperia is the most polished, though I actually want to suggest starting with Symphonia for the story/characters, because otherwise you’ll find it a hard game to go back to since it doesn’t have the Free Run mechanic from later games. The trick is that you won’t miss it if you play Symphonia first.
    • CrossCode - Closest thing I can try to compare this to would be Secret of Mana, if that game was faster and significantly more technical.
    • The World Ends With You - If you can, play the original DS version to fully enjoy how it was built around the hardware. If you can’t, the Switch version is still worth playing, and does have some cool added content to compensate for some of the sacrifices made to adapt it to a single screen.