It hasn’t quite been a year since I first got into Beat Saber, but I have other plans for the rest of the year, so consider this an early anniversary update. Since May, just a fair bit has changed, as it’s common for rhythm gaming skill to only increase logarithmically (loga-rhythmically, if you will), as I can attest to in my experience with Guitar Hero and this game. (Speaking of Guitar Hero, Legends of Rock (the third installment) is now fifteen years old. How time flies, eh?)
In terms of Beat Saber at large, the game now has two new Extras in honor of their fourth anniversary: $100 Bills (Camellia’s “215$-Step” Remix) and Escape Remix. (And now that the grand total is 8 instead of 6, each of my Setlist Shuffles consists of two Extras instead of just one.) It also has newer One-Saber maps for Into the Dream, LUDICROUS+, Firestarter, Magic, Ghost, and Cycle Hit (all with Normal, Expert, and Expert+ difficulties), giving Volumes 4-5 and the Camellia pack their first taste of One-Saber representation. To give a rough idea of how these maps are in terms of difficulty, here is where I stand.
- 215$-Step: Recent SS on Expert, not passed on Expert+
- Escape Remix: FCs on Expert (Faster) and Expert+
- One-Saber maps
- Into the Dream: SS on Expert+
- LUDICROUS+: FC on Expert+
- Firestarter: FC on Expert+ (before the above)
- Magic: FC on Expert+
- Ghost: Passed on Expert, not Expert+
- Cycle Hit: SS on Expert+
(Also worth noting about 215$-Step in particular is that it’s the one reason I’ve ever felt inclined to disable the background visual effects; even with “No Flickering” (the Expert default), it has some flashbang moments that my eyes find unprecedentedly hard to deal with.)
Speaking of SS, I now have that rank on every Expert map except Ghost, with Crystallized and 215$-Step being my latest. I have also passed almost every Expert+ map, with the only exceptions being Camellia songs: Spin Eternally, Final-Boss-Chan, 215$-Step, EXiT, Ghost, and Light it up. ($1.78 was a real doozy, somehow easier to FC on Expert than to pass on Expert+.) Additionally, three of the One-Saber maps listed above (Into the Dream, Ghost, and Cycle Hit) are now the only ones that I have not FC’d at max difficulty (making for a grand total of 25/28), with my latest FCs on that front being One Hope, Angel Voices, I Need You, and Rum n’ Bass. (I scooped up Origins before Firestarter.)
On that note, after having gained more personal room space, I’ve started to take the circular maps more seriously. Now I have FCs of all of them at max difficulty except for Rum n’ Bass 90° (since I only recently got 360° in my latest Setlist Shuffle), Origins, and Pop/Stars. (In other words, that’s 16/19 for 90° and 17/19 for 360°.) Origins is totally within my grasp and contains a clever bit of mapping: When the vocalists say, “Feel it all around,” a slew of obstacles encourages the player to do a quarter (in 90°) or half (in 360°) turn. (Oddly, though, the Expert+ map has fewer notes than the Expert map (which is basically a replica of the regular Expert map), and 360° has one more note than 90°.) As for the other two, I find Pop/Stars harder than Rum n’ Bass despite the latter having more notes, although that might just be because I prefer Rum n’ Bass as a song. (Preference might also be a contributing factor to why I’ve not yet FC’d the One-Saber map of Into the Dream.)
Back on the subject of Expert maps, I managed to FC WHAT THE CAT!? like I’ve been going for, but I surprisingly got Cycle Hit first.
I say “surprisingly” because I think its five-minute duration daunted me at first, but ultimately its few hard parts are not as troubling as those of WHAT THE CAT!? or Spin Eternally, the original two I had in mind. (On the latter front, I have grown rusty and can hardly get a combo through the first half of the song, not to mention I’m incredibly inconsistent at the multitasking part.)
Regarding WHAT THE CAT!? in particular, the second drop remained a real scoundrel to the end, but I learned a little trick to hitting the trapezoids in the second half: to focus on my dominant (right) hand and leave my recessive (left) hand on autopilot. (Yes, it works whether there are three blues or three reds.) That was after I figured out the transition out of the trapezoids, so the run on which I tried it was the deciding run, no outro chokes or anything. Now my Expert grand total is 38/45.
On Expert+, I finally got Give a Little Love, but nothing else I mentioned last time. (My closest Legend run held a Chorus 3 choke, but now just getting past the first verse is a pain.) Didn’t stop me, however, from increasing my count with songs that I realized were easier than my other previous goals: Magic, I Wanna Be a Machine, Escape Remix, and (just yesterday) I Need You in that order. Now my grand total is 13/45.
That brings me to my current goals besides those already mentioned.
- Final-Boss-Chan, Expert. I have had two outro chokes so far: one due to a total brain fart after the first guitar-to-synth tradeoff (my left arm just failed to move when it had to), and the other due to tunnel vision at the end of the last guitar fill. Long story short, I totally have this in me; it’s just a matter of not beefing it.
- Expert+ maps
- Turn Me On. I freaking choked the outro. This was after figuring out the funny sixteenths, specifically by loosely treating them as doubles, although doing so has affected my prowess in other alternation-prolific songs such as Legend and Commercial Pumping. At this point, I can’t pin down the multitasking part, but I’m sure it’ll be smooth sailing from when I do.
- Escape. It’s not hard. It’s just…awkward. Awkward enough, in fact, for me to leave it on the back burner in favor of the others. Note that I have gotten to the second chorus at least twice, however.
- Commercial Pumping. One day, I played out of my mind and got -1 on the last freaking sideways cut. I’m ill convinced that I will ever replicate that run, let alone break 700k again, at least until I’ve jumped some of the other hurdles.
- Full Charge. I have two -1s: one at the hard part in the middle, and one dumb one in the second drop. Part of me wants to get this one over with, because the less I feel obligated to play the only song in the game I dislike, the better.
- Immortal. Twice in a row, I have had max combos of 525 notes from the start of the song, and go figure that my first run of that nature got me a PB of 666k. I want to break this cursed PB someday, but somehow I’ve lost the mojo that I had at the time.
- Unlimited Power. My best run so far got a choke in the first cycle of the second chorus. Now I’m somehow incapable of even getting past the intro.
- Balearic Pumping. I have broken 500k with a -5, but it would be in my best interest to FC Escape first.
- Higher-speed maps with outro chokes: Angel Voices, Into the Dream (Faster), One Hope (Super Fast)
Speaking of higher-speed maps, I believe they are what remains of the FC totals to provide.
- Expert, Faster: Crab Rave, Curtains, Escape Remix, LUDICROUS+, Spooky Beat (Grand total: 26/45)
- Expert, Super Fast: Breezer (Grand total: 2/45)
So that about covers it for Beat Saber, but the post at large is not over. (Let’s face it: As much as I enjoy the game, it’s not all there is to VR.)
Megadimension Neptunia VIIR
My appreciation for the Neptunia series is uh…fairly evident, to be sure, so of course this remaster would be another of my go-tos when talking about VR games. I was originally going to save this kind of talk for my next Neptunia post, but since that won’t be happening until next year at best (partly because I don’t have the Senran Kagura “crossover”), I figured I would at least give an overview based on my playthrough ranging from April to May. (It is also worth noting that this game came out before Shooter and RPG.)
In terms of gameplay, I expected to be able to explore dungeons and fight battles from the perspective of the characters, or at least for some of the cutscenes to be adapted into VR events, but the reality is more primitive than any of that. Everything genuinely VR-related, save for an introductory cutscene, occurs in the Player Room: an environment separate from the main game, which is simply a refresher of VII with different mechanics and Noire’s English voice redone by Erica Mendez (as opposed to Erin Fitzgerald, who voiced the character before 4GO). Not to mention, interactions in VR are limited to head movements.
Below is the step-by-step procedure that I would use for a Quest 2 stationary setup.
- Initiate Quest Link and SteamVR. (Unfortunately, Quest Link does not support hand tracking, so the controllers are required.)
- In the SteamVR Home, use the right menu button to make sure the background stays in SteamVR while the Quest Link menu is open. If not, restart SteamVR; if so, launch VIIR.
- While VIIR is “Up Next,” open the Quest Link menu and minimize all windows.
- View Desktop Monitor 1, or whichever monitor contains the application.
- Push the monitor view at least three meters away to reduce headache. (A distance in meters briefly shows up near the controller when the view is grabbed with the lower trigger.)
- When a VR event occurs, make it a point to reset the app view (using the three dots at the right edge of the Quest Link menu) before pressing A to start. Use the SteamVR background and/or Player Room music as a cue to bring the Quest Link menu back up.
To bring it all down, I would return to the title screen from in-game, exit SteamVR, quit the application, and then disable Quest Link. If in doubt, I also have a few troubleshooting steps.
- If the headset view freezes, that means Quest Link wet the bed. Use the right menu button to quit Quest Link; if this option is not available, restart the headset instead.
- In the event of a “disconnection” while hard-wired (which I’ve experienced a bothersome number of times), just re-enable Quest Link and wait for everything to load. Then, repeat Steps 3-5 (and 6 as needed).
- I once had an issue where the Quest Link “Enable” prompt refused to pop up when expected, and I suspect it was because I had a Windows update queued up, because restarting to install the update resolved it.
- Or perhaps it was because I had a Visual Studio Code window open. I learned from getting into Vacation Simulator more recently that Quest Link has something against VS Code, but I can’t imagine what.
- If the Oculus app doesn’t go down with the X or Alt+F4, pull up the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and bring down anything Oculus-related that does not have a black icon beside it. Then, “bring down” OVRServer_x64.exe to restore the Oculus app. (I haven’t had this problem in months, but who knows?)
(I would prefer to just play the non-VR parts of the game on my PC monitor, but two key factors inhibit me: the inability to play audio from the computer (as opposed to the headset), and the headset’s sleep mode. I could just launch the game in non-VR mode, but only if I’m confident that no VR cutscenes will occur.)
Even aside from the above issues, I have had the game crash at least twice and even softlock in one of Noire’s VR cutscenes. (Of course it had to be Noire.) She said a line and just…stayed silent in her idle animation. I had no choice but to restart the game.
In terms of different mechanics, the overworld QoL improvements are appreciated: autosave, no map encounters whatsoever, being able to break literally any obstacle from the get-go, sprinting in dungeons, after-battle healing (which actually I have mixed feelings about because it ruins the survivalist vibe of the Zero Dimension), unconditional experience for all party members (which VII is one of the few series entries to limit to begin with), and the party leader being followed throughout the dungeon by other members (e.g. Neptune being followed by Uzume and Nepgear in the Zero Dimension). The combat system seems to be a cross between those of VII and Superdimension, therefore actually not half bad.
However, having to pay Credits instead of just leveling up to acquire new skills is the one thing that peeves me above all else, given how stingy I am as a result of my upbringing. I decided therefore to actively avoid the trifle for my first playthrough, and even though it made encounters difficult to solo with Neptune, it was a reasonable boycott in my book. Second on the list is the quest that requires a Neptune trading card, which generally involves playing gacha with the CPU Chips. (Ugh, I never thought I’d have to use that term in the context of Neptunia, let alone at all, but here we are now.) “Don’t you dare buy them just for the cards!” But what else am I supposed to do to complete this quest?
As for the refresher aspect, it feels like I have a better understanding of the story, particularly from noticing all the foreshadowing that I had previously overlooked. Also, the VR cutscenes taught me to not focus so much on the subtitles, improving my immersion in non-VR cutscenes.
Ultimately, VIIR is not worth getting a VR headset for, as reiterated by critics and fans alike, but it is worthwhile for a fan of the series who already has a VR headset, especially if they have not yet experienced VII at all. (That is to say that it would be ideal to play VIIR first in that case.)
Vanishing Realms
This is the only VR game I have that specifically requires a minimum play area space: 2 meters by 1.5 meters. So, I figured this month while I knew I had the room space that I had to at least give it a try. It was daunting at first, as in I almost chickened out in the axe-filled corridor, but resolving myself with the reminder, “I came here to play,” turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in quite a while. Beneath its foreboding surface lies what I would best describe as a bare-bones (literally in a sense, given pretty much all of the enemies are skeletons) rendition of what The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was meant to be when it was first released. (To think that was more than ten years ago…)
Squaring off against the undead in close combat with swords and/or shields is one thing, but my two favorite activities are:
- Climbing along ropes and chains by grabbing at one point, moving the controller away from the direction of intended displacement, and repeating as many times as needed
- Dueling ranged attackers by taking cover, popping out to attack with the bow, and so on
I haven’t quite completed the game yet, but it seems short enough (2.7 hours for more than half progress) that I would rather just savor what remains for now.
Other picks
- The Lab: SteamVR freeware by Valve featuring basic VR mini-games for those learning the ropes.
- Moss: A 3D platformer where you play as the reader and driving force of the story (specifically as if interacting with a pop-up book) while leading a mouse named Quill on a grand adventure. It took me 2.7 hours to beat this game, albeit with 22/38 achievements.
- Golf It!: One way to play mini-golf in VR. Not the best form of putting practice for genuine tee time, but it’s fun to play with family and friends. I have played on every course, but I only have 7/41 achievements with 5.3 hours of play time. Also, Walkabout is a possible alternative that I have yet to experience for myself.
- Vacation Simulator: 30% fun, 50% relaxing, 20% puzzling. The one goal is to “make memories” in three locations: the beach, the forest, and the mountains. Keep in mind that the elements are merely audio, visual, and somewhat tactile. I have put 6.4 hours into the game for about 50% completion (not even including the “Back to Job” expansion) and 7/26 achievements.
- Skyrim VR: If I could just overcome my motion sickness, then this would probably be the most satisfying VR game to play. It is the one game that I have bothered to modify, specifically using Kithara’s Steam Guide as recommended by my elder brother, although I still have yet to clear the tutorial.
That’s all I have for the time being, but I doubt it will be the last time I talk about VR.
À la prochaine! (Until next time!)
Vouiv-review 