Marvel Midnight Suns: Firaxis unveils the Nico vs. Chthon showdown Marvel fans have been waiting for!

Ooh, thanks for bringing this up, because I want to backpedal from something I’d posted upthread. I had previously been willfully skipping the cutscenes, banter, and basically any “writing” or “narrrative” as much as I could, mostly because I just wanted to find out more about what kind of game it is. But now that I’ve found that out, now that I know I’m here for the long haul, I’ve been letting some of the cutscenes and dialogue play out. I’ve even been reading some of the banter in the faux social media screen, and I’ve come to the conclusion…

…Midnight Suns is good writing.

I don’t want to make too much of it, and I’m not saying it’s clearing any high bars, or that it’s even any meaningful worldbuilding or ongoing narrative. Instead, I’m saying it’s playfully and effectively riffing on that same mythology we all know to varying degrees and all variously love, mildly like, or even loathe. It’s easily better than the pointless nonsense crammed into Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, which is the other big Marvel videogame I’ve played enough to know the writing (I didn’t play the Guardians game). However, I’m not the least bit invested in the main storyline or the player character, so the whole thing might be a wash in the end. But I can say that I’m finding some of the ancillary stuff charming enough to pay attention to.

You’re the third person in as many days to bring up this thing with a glowing comment. I’m still reeling from the Rob Zombie Munsters, but I’m just going to have to got over that, aren’t I?

You guys posting all your Hunter photos as a guy is weird. FemHunter all the way.

And the order of attack (if you want to consider it) is always the same on the hero combo cards. Left, then right. It shows the symbols of the characters to denote it for quick look on the card.

If you like the writing here, Guardians is better.

@robc04 & @Misguided
Happy to say that I was able to reinstall the game and my saves started working again.

@TheWombat
Ok - I love dogs too. But how many times do I praise her? Do we keep hitting R key until something happens? I read somewhere that praising the pooch can raise our Arcana but no idea if that means Praise once a day or what. ; )

@Everyone
What does this symbol mean?

image

I am not sure what objectives I am supposed to be working on. They were always spelled out before.

Love on/pet your dog once a day.

It’s like leveling up in any other RPG - the character is leveling up. I’m not sure what leveling up “for a particular battle” would be?

Use your mouse wheel (not sure on controller). Believe you have two things to do in the yard (like potential card upgrades)

On controller it’s up on the D pad I think.

Agree that the writing is good for this sort of thing. I haven’t intentionally skipped any of the dialogue.

Thanks everyone for answering my level-up question. I think my confusion was not seeing what effect leveling was having, but I was just missing it.

This goes to the top of my pleasant surprises. I had a bad cold Thursday night into Friday, so I took off work. I bought this not expecting much, but why not, I was going to be laying around at home anyway, and I think I like everything about it (so far).

I have to say that the humor has made me laugh out loud a couple times:

Scene where Blade states how Spiderman is so annoying (and the reasons) was priceless

Not sure I’ve seen that one, but Blade has some hilarious dialogue in spots. Like when Hunter first meets him and asks if his nave is really blade.

Absolutely.those characters were great.This game seems much better. It was difficult to play through all the action in that game, but I wanted to see what happened.

Eurogamer recommends it.

One night last week I went to a book club with Blade. It was Blade’s idea, actually. Captain America and Captain Marvel were there, so we were pretty much knee deep in captains. Blade had arranged the whole thing to spend time with Captain Marvel, but then the other captain overheard and wanted in too, and Blade was too shy to say no. We read The Art of War. It was Blade’s pick. We talked about the strategies and wisdom in the text, and someone mentioned how funny it was that Blade’s favourite book was written by someone named “Sun”. Funny because Blade is a vampire, right? After the book club was done I went foraging for mushrooms with Iron Man. Incredibly, these are not the ramblings of someone who’s just banged their head on a shelf.

But there’s also more than all that. As with Fire Emblem, say, there’s more than just utility in play here. Look at the book club: a whole evening chatting with Blade about what he reads. The scattering of friend points you get for that does not make it seem entirely worthwhile, until you realise that attending the book club with Blade was worthwhile in and of itself. Ditto hanging out with Captain Marvel. Ditto spending money to make your bedroom look nicer - to find the right couch and bedside table and move the art on the walls around, to choose a better jumper to wear in the afternoons. Ditto the whole business of rambling through the abbey’s grounds, which grants rewards, certainly, but also makes you feel like you’re part of a handful of intriguing mysteries that will need time to unravel. (There’s a whole XBLA game out in the abbey grounds, I reckon, and it’s got nothing to do with turn-based battling and everything to do with storytelling and exploration.)

@Scotch_Lufkin, I try never to mention my dreams because I always figure people’s dreams are only interesting to oneself, never to other people. But your dream was very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

@tomchick, thank you for all the detailed explanations and stories in this thread so far. I’m glad I decided to catch up despite over 200 new posts since the last time I was in here.

So, I keep getting the same clue even though I think I’ve ahead done the relevant thing:

Does anyone still on the first word of power find more than two elder god statues (the big tall ones whose eyes light up)?

I just got my first arcane key… Agatha told me to open the nearby common chest, but there is an epic one in the abbey. Wouldn’t it make more sense to use it on that one?

I am doing really bad in the game the last few missions. Even the easy side missions. I do ok in the beginning but eventually the number of reinforcements do me in. I have been mostly working on Blade, Spiderman, Hunter, Nico with upgrades but maybe I am picking the wrong cards or something. It feels like the Normal Mode is Hard Mode for me. I have tried the missions several times with different Heroes; I am going to have to see if I can find some Youtube videos to try and figure out how to up my game.

Ideally, you want a team that has the option of doing big AOE damages to wipe out reinforcements or those with chain or quick abilities (targeting those minions). Typically these AOE abilities have a moderate heroism cost (3 seems to be when a lot of these abilities come online). Make sure you have chosen a character who can or you have made their deck of one generate a good amount of heroism (even Hunter can do this early on) and then 1 heavy heroism spender then 1 sort of hybrid/position utility (Spiderman/Blade base decks are like this).

Also, look for good opportunities to use your move every turn to use an environmental either that is just by itself in a good place or you can herd multiple enemies into it. Also, prioritize who you want to take damage into consideration. The game is pretty good about choosing 1 person to take multiple attacks and you can increase your offensive actions instead of worrying about defense by shaving down the number of attacks they get by killing them and spreading the damage around.

A good just stock team that does all three of these would be Hunter, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange/Spiderman/Blade.

You can replace Carol with any other good AOE hero like Ghost Rider/Ironman, etc but I think early on she just does it better than anyone else until you get upgrades/items.

Wow this is the first game I’ve ever bought on PS5 that straight up just crashes on startup.