Super Robot Wars K - replayed through
Went for restoring the Fafner team as I hadn't done that before. The first hurdle is kind of a terribly jerkish move, requiring you to psychically intuit that the Mark Sechs is going to benefit from upgrades to the Mark Elf, which the guide I was following conveniently didn't mention and I ended up having to sell a bunch of non-consumable items. But it was all worth it as Sakura got to get the last hit on Lugh COBOL.
Focussed pretty heavily on giving kills to people with low kill counts this playthough, as at the start of the final chapter most people have 70 kills or over except Lou on 63, Fafner Kenji on 19, and Shoukou on 13. Of course this meant that Tetsuya K. was only able to get his kill count up to 625. Still several playthroughs required before that can be maxed out then.
Half-Life: Opposing Force - played through
It's Half-Life but shorter.
You don't fight anywhere near as many tanks or helicopters, so that's a plus. I was disappointed that you don't get a heavier shotgun or assault rifle, though. (I guess the chaingun can sort of count as a heavier assault rifle, but not really what I was after.) The sniper rifle was appreciated.
Used the zappy alien gun a little, never really touched the grenadey one. The teleport energy gun was great against the big semi-insect aliens. I tried using the self-teleport function a couple times but it seemed pretty pointless?
The barnacle was a bit janky.
Machina Of The Planet Tree: Planet Ruler - played through
Not good.
Starts off fine enough. Then aways in you get Estiole on your party, and she has so much damage that they counter this by giving bosses regeneration to the tune of most of the damage she can do. So you either need to settle for making very slow progress or get her to use those turns which give you double the amount of actions which I forget the name of, which leaves her useless for the several following turns along with being much more vulnerable. (Sequential actions typically build up a combo counter which increases the power of subsequent actions, so this isn't necessarily a losing trade.)
Eventually her damage falls off, there's a couple of bosses without regeneration, then Retla gets an insanely overpowered weapon and starts doing freakishly large amounts of damage and the regeneration comes right back. And by now, you have the resources to casually restock character SP or whatever stat it was that's drained on a double-action turn that makes them more vulnerable - except bosses are typically able to just one-hit kill Retla even when she isn't affected. By bizarrely high amounts. Retla does typically hit many more times per attack string than Estiole, so she builds up the combo counter to spectacular levels. Definitely got to at least 108 at one point, I tried to take a screenshot for posterity but of course the steam overlay version doesn't work and I forgot to paste the printscreened version somewhere after shutting the game down.
Anyway what I'm trying to say here is: I don't think that this game is very well balanced.
Incidentally, I'm not sure on this, but I'm fairly sure that Retla's weapon above was a rare drop from an 'attribute' gathering spot. Most new weapons are. I don't really want to imagine having to fight the lategame bosses without it - Estiole isn't really helping much at this point, and Cram can do reasonable amounts of damage but it would take forever with just him, setting aside any turns where he has to do things other than attack.
Your starting weapons and ones that you find can be upgraded (and essentially have to be upgraded before becoming usable for the latter) at the workshop, with specific item combinations. It initially seemed interesting but ultimately devolves into everything needing some item that you won't get before a boss drops it, and afterwards it will only be able to be found as a rare drop from specific attribute gathering spots.
Your characters can change their armour and accessories, but I never found any different armours and only ever saw a single accessory for sale at the end of the game. Maybe all the options are hidden as rare drops from specific attribute gathering spots. Maybe there are no options.
Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam Bros. - played through
Highly entertaining. But then I also thought Dream Team Bros. was great which seems to be somewhat controversial stance to have On The Internet so take that as you will. Still not as good as Bowser's Inside Story.
As far as I can recall, it has literally no original named characters or original races (unless you count Paper Mario/Peach/Bowser/etc. since this is strictly an M&L game) in case that's something you care about it. It is disappointing, but I feel like they do good work with what they have.
The card system is fairly interesting, although they take way too long to introduce it. Ultimately it led to me applying three level down effects to the final boss, which was fairly amusing. People more into that sort of thing could probably break it much further.
It is annoying that you can essentially only get shiny cards as rare drops, as they're considered to be separate cards to the non-shiny ones. I've ended up having 110/154 cards, where 77 of them are normal ones, and 33 of them are shiny versions of the same, and the only way for me to collect the other 44 shiny cards is to grind battles. So, I'm not going to bother with that.
The papercraft battle system is fairly uninteresting, unfortunately. Each battle has some new gimmicks but they pretty much all devolve into the same things.
I know that some people will be shattered by this (assuming it didn't already happen in Dream Team Bros. and I forgot) but I have to inform you that the level up bonus spinner is no longer a thing.
One thing I am frothing with rage about, is the final '3d' battle mechanic, which they spring on you at one point and you only get seconds to realise what's happening, and if you fail you get hit with an guaranteed-terminal attack (999 damage to all characters). You don't get set back very far, but it's still very poor behaviour on their part as far as I'm concerned. To be fair, I'm not exactly quick enough to do a lot of the things the game asks for (final stats say I have 51% dodge rate), so maybe it's all on my head.
On the plus plus plus side: No 3ds-gyro-based mechanics.
Hammer bury mechanics are back again but they managed to make them somewhat enjoyable to use, so that's another nice thing.
