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Essays 02 August 2021, 20:00

author: Michael Pajda

Single-Player Games Worth Playing After End Credits

Reaching the end credits doesn't always mean the end of your adventure with a game – some games still have plenty of attractions beyond the main storyline.

Table of Contents

Disgaea series

You came to the wrong neighborhood, motherfu...

  1. Genre: RPG/TBS
  2. Play it if: you like sublime humor that offers a commentary on pop culture
  3. Don't play if: you are having a great time listening to churlish
  4. Related Games: other games in the Disgaea series

Nowadays, video games are not conquered by gross-out humor (with the exception of both parts of the brilliant South Park, which are based on the convention of a series definitely not intended for young audiences), but by clever and fine-tuned humor that breaks the fourth wall. That's how the folks at Nippon Ichi Softu approached their production, creating Disgaea, a series whose mechanics are based on a mix of the best elements of turn-based strategy and full-blooded RPG. Apart from that, however, the jokes mocking pop culture and its clichés are great. In addition, the series boasts an extraordinary graphic design, which refers to the history of video games.

So, it's worth giving it a chance and really delving into its world – especially since the creators have prepared a specific new game mode + called "new cycle," which turns out to be necessary to unlock completely new playable characters, their humorous comments or other plot endings. But the real fun is grind, grind and more grind, which prepares our characters for Carnage Dimension, which is a reworking of previous levels. With an appropriately raised level of difficulty, of course. So, if after more than 100 hours of playing Disgaea 5 you're at level 140 out of 9999 possible (!), then know that you're dealing with a game that provides fans with literally hundreds of hours of fun (500 or 600 to be precise).

Fallout 4

The Sims 4: Fallout gives you a new, exciting way of killing sims – radiation.

  1. Genre: RPG
  2. Play it if: this is your first contact with the Fallout series
  3. Don't play it if: you expect 4 to be at least on par with New Vegas
  4. Related games: Fallout 3

Fallout 4, released in 2015 by Bethesda, was supposed to be revolutionary in every way. There were lots of praises, even before the official announcements. However, the first trailer turned out to be average and the hype created around this production slowed down a bit. And it's a good thing that it did, because it's more like Fallout 3.5 – most of the problems of the third part were removed, but new ones appeared. So, we have an even shallower story with even shallower NPCs and an even shallower dialogue system, which was quite clear in the previous installments, while here, the single word often poorly represents the actual sentence.

So, Fallout 4 is a weak Fallout, but it's not a bad sandbox game that, with a few innovations, has a chance to be really engrossing. The first new feature is the base building system. To expand our own settlement, we're forced to obtain raw materials – which can be extracted from anywhere, even car wrecks. Other items, on the other hand, can be used for decorative purposes – the sims-like construction element even encourages us to waste hours building walls, placing furniture and locating various accessories in our new home, our new world.

It's also worth considering testing this production again in survival mode, from which the save game in any place has been removed (you can save only while sleeping) and fast travel, while the damage system has been made more realistic, statistics for hunger, fatigue and thirst have been introduced, as well as a number of other difficulties designed to require inventiveness. And here, the game seems to stand on a much higher level – if Bethesda had decided to implement this mode before the premiere, the ratings of the whole production could have been much higher.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild

  1. Genre: A little bit of everything
  2. Play it if: you're not intimidated by the thought of a huge sandbox with a billion things to do...
  3. Don't play if: You have a family, a home, social life and a loan to pay
  4. Related Games: Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

The Legend of Zelda – the video game series that Robin Williams loved so much that he named his daughter... Zelda – lived to see another installment in 2017 (and so far, the most modern one), Breath of the Wild. New adventures of Link (for the uninitiated: the protagonist dressed in a green suit is not Zelda – don't ask, it's too complicated) immediately conquered the hearts of players around the world. It was no different with the reviewers, whose legs bent into pretzels with delight – and we shared this bizarre condition.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is more than just a sandbox, though. It's not an "open world game," but rather a "virtual world that the protagonist is a part of." The adventure itself boils down to exploring the land of Hyrule – that's the name of the beautiful land we have to thoroughly explore – and it is not dotted by any markers and question marks (of course, we can set markers ourselves, but the quests don't lead us with some forbidden breadcrumbs as most games today).

We quickly learn that the most important element in Breath of the Wild is exploration and performing various intuitive activities by the protagonist – such as chopping wood to light a fire. The best part, however, is that the adventure – in keeping with the idea that in these types of games, the fun picks up after the end credits have rolled – doesn't begin until the endgame. This is when we have time to complete the remaining multitude of side quests and challenges (including those that we impose on ourselves). The most important thing is that it's up to the player to decide the order of completing them - finally, we're no longer treated like sheep who need a line drawn on the map from point A to B, because otherwise wolves will surely eat us whole.

Zelda is also worth a look for another reason – it's a production crafted in the hallmark Nintendo formula, making Breath of the Wild a game created with incredible precision – if this was food, you'd have to eat it with chopsticks. Any bugs or glitches are almost unheard of in this game. The game is huge, and its size can overwhelm even the most seasoned sandbox enthusiasts – but that doesn't change the fact that it's almost impossible to come across any design oversight.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Borderlands 2

Borderlands 2

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Diablo III

Diablo III

Disgaea 5 Complete

Disgaea 5 Complete

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