There is no missable content; even when you defeat the big bad, the game time travels you back to immediately before the start of that mission to allow you to clean up any remaining items;
The game has multiple mechanisms by which you can find trophy items:
** You can buy map fragments that show you locations
** You can learn shamisen tunes that, when played, will call the wind to direct you
** Certain creatures alert you to nearby trophy items and will lead you to them
So many trophies - mostly combat-related - are earned naturally in the course of gameplay
You can acquire armor sets and charms that increase your chances of help from the local fauna too. In fact, wearing the right gear at the right time makes a big difference in how easy or hard this game will play for you. By then end, I had 5 distinct load-outs with different armor and charm sets:
Melee fighting
Stealth/range fighting
Duels
Confronting enemies with firearms
Exploring
I had taken my time during the game to take on all the side quests I could find and “gray-in” the map as much as possible. There is only one collection for which you cannot get any help via the above mechanisms and one other where you probably won’t find all of them without some luck or help from outside the game (see spoiler below) and these two had me going on the internet to finish out.
There is also a bunch of stuff that is not trophy-related, particularly anything to do with the Ainu - an indigenous hippie tribe.
Platinum Spoilers
There are 10 “prayer posts” scattered around the map. They are not hidden, but they are so few and it’s a big map. They are just a wooden plaque on a post with a silhouette of a bowing man, and are easily overlooked (they look almost identical to the mostly pointless road sign posts).
When you find one, you bow in front of it and the natural environment will react in some way to indicate that your respect has been registered. The problem with this quest is that these posts are not marked on the map when completed, and the environment will react even if you’ve prayed there before. So unless you are lucky/thorough enough to have found all 10 by accident, without help you’re going to be riding around repeating old posts you found already.
The other item I had help with was the Pillars of the Fallen. These are monuments to fallen shinobi and you collect their katana dressing. I found most of them with maps bought from the cartographer and a few more just from navigating the map, but I was missing a few at the end which I looked up on line.
They are much easier to spot than the prayer posts, but only if you’re looking from the correct direction as they are often plonked on top of overhangs or even on detours from parkour routes to other quest items. So you can have walked/ridden right past one and never have known it was there.
Last post on Yōtei (for now), here is (Palace fan) Rob’s channel playing the first 90 minutes. I’m not suggesting you watch the whole thing, but for a 20-minute time investment you get the revenge plot set up and the epic opening of the game. Everything is stunning from the visuals, sound design and music.
Red Dead Remaster watch is reaching a peak. The game was launched originally on October 28th, 2018 so, with that anniversary now 7 days away, people are expecting an announcement imminently and a release on the 28th.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to sell all my shit and cut off my nuts in anticipation of the remaster being delivered by comet, but I’m going to hold off on that for now.
You get access to the Takezo fight in the first part of the game,. You get it by beating his 5 disciples, so you think “how hard could it be?”
So you try it, get absolutely shitmixed, drag yourself away and do not come back until you have got every upgrade, buff and weapon available and beaten all the bosses for practice. Then…maybe…you have a chance.
This may be of interest only to Craig, but I thought it fascinating. The sound design in Satisfactory is excellent, and this is some inside baseball as to how they achieve it.
In most other games, the environment is fixed and so the sound response can be dictated purely by the location of the player. In Satisfactory, the sound has to react to changes the player makes to the environment, which can be anything from cutting down trees and blowing up rocks to erecting giant fucking buildings, where you can be on the inside and hearing the echoes or on the outside hearing muffled sounds from within.
That’s really interesting and does sound unique. To me, sound design is one of those things that might as well be magic because I understand so little about it.
We did something sort of unique on Burden of Command. The battles are on a hex map, and will start silent except for ambient noise like birds. But as units engage and begin fighting, the gunshots and shouts will begin from both sides, and persist as you move other units around. You can kind of track where the fight is heaviest by listening to the ebb and flow of the battle noises.
So a slightly off the wall question. We’re getting some updates to our house television system, switching from rgb inputs to HDMI, updating the operating system, replacing the Apple TV. One of the options is installing a game console, but here’s the thing: I have no idea how game consoles work. The last game I bought probably came on floppy disks. So questions: which game console should I buy, how do you get the games if they no longer make floppy disks, what are the controllers like and can you play the games on any old tv? I could ask my son, but I hate to appear ignorant in front of my children, and I’m used to appearing ignorant here.
Games can be downloaded and stored on the consoles hard drive.
If you’re just switching from rgb you might also be interested to know that there are now vehicles that can transport you and others under their own power. No more pack animals to feed and house!
We had our house system installed when we built the house 13 years ago. We had a funny conversation with the company this morning about why then they still insisted on RGB – they said that at the time the HDMI was still bug-prone and they didn’t want to put up with the complaints. I don’t remember HDMI then being an issue, or even particularly new, just a better picture.
Now if I could just get them to integrate my reel to reel.
There were, for a time, compatibility issues with early implementations of HDMI, and I can believe installers got tired of dealing with them. But in my memory that was more like 15-20 years ago, and I haven’t heard of such things in a very long time now.
