What games are you playing 2021: Please don't bully cute, girly-girl alchemist

[Dark Holy Elf]

Cthulhu Saves Christmas

'tis the season. Playing on Raving, three bosses done (all wrecked me at least once). This seems like it addresses my biggest complaint with Cosmic Star Heroine, which is pretty cool - enemies (especially bosses) have way more of an identity. Otherwise it's more Zeboyd.


Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Did a CF run which I am calling the "Actually be a good teacher" run, the rules being:

1. If someone asks to change their goals, you agree to it. Don't touch their goals otherwise.
2. Assign the character to Advanced/Master classes which line up with their stated goals.
3. The dancer is randomly chosen from current team members who unambiguously want to be chosen (for my team, that was Edelgard, Ferdinand, Dorothea, Petra)

I can still use Instruct however I want, which is good because almost nobody requests to train authority (and I never saw anyone do so this run).

I mostly used the Eagles themselves. Honestly it's not too unusual a playthrough, but hey.

Byleth: Myrmidon -> Pegasus -> Enlightened One. I dunno, I decided to do something vanilla instead of overcentralizing like Wyvern Lord. Sadly Byleth had just got horrid stat growths anyway, like 25 str / 20 spd lategame? Blah. Good charm for gambits at least.

Edelgard: Requested axe/armour. Brigand -> Fortress Knight -> Armoured Lord -> Emperor. Sigh, well, y'know. First time actually using Edelgard's canon class. It's cute at least? And having an extra point of move on Fortress Knight is really helpful. Still does great things with Raging Storm and the super strength but not nearly as great.

Hubert: Requested pure reason. Mage -> Dark Bishop. Dark Bishoo's Heartseeker lets him Frozen Lance better than Warlock does at least? It's something. Cool array of offence but the 4 move and lack of faith stuff is a bit sad.

Ferdinand: Was going to go to cavalier stuff but then the dance competition came around, and he was the one randomly chosen. Fitting because he practically begs Byleth for it. Anyway, he never asked to train swords so his Dodgetank Dancer von Aegir game wasn't quite as good as normal, but still pretty good.

Linhardt: Priest -> Mage -> Bishop. Requested pure faith. Never changed his mind. Bishop obviously. If you've used him you've probably seen this build, Physic and Warp and Stride/Blessing. Sometimes the #11 unit who was benched, but other units had weaker points of the game (Bernie in Intermediate, Ingrid in Advanced) so sometimes not.

Bernadetta: Requested archery, then quickly changed her mind to lances/riding. Archer -> Paladin -> Bow Knight. Mostly a middling if mobile Vengeance bot with all the ups and downs of that until Bow Knight rounded her out a fair deal with expanded range and Encloser and Brave Bow use. Typically held Impregnable Wall due to her own bad charm and inability to benefit from Wall herself if already at 1 HP via guard adjutant, Blessing, or poison.

Dorothea: Requested pure reason to show nobles that magic isn't their birthright. Switched to pure faith late, but fortunately I was able to push her to Black Range+1 anyway. Mage -> Warlock -> Gremory. Definitely showed up the nobles, had 40 magic which is silly with her skillset, yay Agnea's Arrow one-shotting things as late as Tailtean. Probably the best overall unit despite 4 move in advanced being blah.

Petra: Requested swords/bows. Brigand -> Assassin. Pretty effective doubling/quadding stat ball, had over 40 speed where all but one other member of my team was low 20's at best.

Sylvain: Requested cavalry stuff then switched to armour stuff late. Brigand -> Cavalier -> Paladin -> Great Knight. Do not use Great Knight in CF, awful mobility in the last two maps. Very solid unit until then with Swift Strikes largely killing the same things as Vengeance but without the HP requirement, and good charm to land Raging Flames.

Ingrid: Requested pegasus stuff then changed to swords. I figured Falcon Knight was enough swords to count given her previous request. Pegasus -> Assassin -> Falcon Knight. Unfortunately wasn't able to get Alert Stance+ due to her poor decisions. Str was lacking too. But she was fast and later, mobile. One of my less useful units as an Assassin, but solid as Falco.

Hapi: Requested reason/riding then lances/riding. The one slight deviation I made from the rules is that once she hit C lances, I switched her back to reason/riding because her stated reason for wanting lances was for Dark Knight, but I could not see how going past C lances would help for that while she still needed Reason ranks. So obviously, Mage -> Valkyrie -> Dark Knight. Decent offensive utility with Banshee, Death, cheeses monsters both offensively (insta break with any spell, including debuffs) and defensively (Impregnable Wall, gg Sothis paralogue), has Physic and eventually Warp (though obviously not having faith as a goal slows that). Solid despite the authority bane.

All four Eagles women had around 150 kills, then a drop to the next highest.

[Reiska]

Been busy, so here's a catchup post of stuff of note.

Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster - Pretty much blew through this in two days; I mean, it's FF4.  It's familiar territory.  FF4PR for whatever reason halved the EXP requirements to level up across the entire game, so with the way FF4's exp naturally scales you end up 15-20% higher level at pretty much any given point of the game.  There's some other little differences here and there of the QoL nature (arrows aren't consumable anymore for instance) but for the most part this game has a lot less mechanical changes compared to its original version than the first three PRs did.

Labyrinth of Touhou: Gensokyo and the Heaven-Piercing Tree - AKA Labyrinth of Touhou 2; it's now available on Steam, with English text built-in (taken with permission from the original fan translation).  My thoughts about this game are ... complicated, to say the least, but the most succinct way I can sum them up is: sometimes, less is more.  Compared to the original LoT, this game has a lot more everything - more content, more characters, an added subclass system, an added passive skill system, more grind, and a heaping helping of QoL.  The subclass and passive skill systems, while conceptually neat, add too much complexity to a game that doesn't particularly benefit from it being there (and aren't well balanced besides).  I finished what amounts to the original main game and its postgame so far - the original postgame is a really poorly balanced mess and nearly made me quit, but at least you can pretty much just powergrind past it to get back to the good stuff again.  I do plan on finishing the expansion content eventually.

All in all I'd say the original game was better at what I wanted it to be, and Windows 11 fixed whatever weird problem the game had with running on Windows 10.  Still, LoT2 isn't *bad*.

Super Robot Wars 30 - I was really enjoying this.  It's not nearly as cohesively written as VXT (owing to the nonlinear structure), but it's good at the whole smashing robots into each other thing.  It's probably the easiest game in the franchise - even on Expert mode I'm having little trouble.  But IMO difficulty really isn't the point of a fanservice game like this (*glares in LoT2's general direction*).

I say "was" because right now Bamco seems to be having some real trouble getting the game to be stable after the first DLC patch, so I've had to put it on the backburner for now.

Etrian Odyssey Nexus - Started this up again; new file since I lost my old save for Reasons.  Running Heroic difficulty with a Highlander/Pugilist/Nightseeker/Medic/Zodiac team.  Uhhh, what's there to say?  It's Etrian Odyssey but with a lot more content.  Anyway, I finished 5 labyrinths so far with this team.  It's working out fine.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon - This game is a lot better than I was expecting really, and my expectations were decently high given the hype.  "Earthbound for grown-ups" is a pretty apt description of it in more ways than one - it has some of the same offbeat quirky humor quality (if aged up into Definitely Not For Kids territory), the game's Basically Everything is a pretty much unabashed homage to Dragon Quest (to the point even that Dragon Quest itself actually gets namedropped in the plot), etc.  The mechanics aren't a direct rip though, best as I can tell, but I don't have a good handle on LAD's formulas or anything.

About the only flaw I'd say the game has is kind of inherent to its thematic nature: it's a game largely about Japanese men who exist in a generally very chauvinistic subset of society (the criminal underworld).  To its credit, the game manages to actually be quite respectful of its female characters (IMHO; obviously I'm not quite the right gender to fully judge this) - just, owing to the overall setting and subject matter, there are so few of them.  I'll go into a bit more detail in spoilersize text.

I'd estimate I'm about halfway to 2/3 of the way through the game at this point and there are precisely two significant female characters in the main storyline.  One is the game's only guaranteed female PC; she's a bartender who worked for a bar operated by the guy whose murder sets off pretty much the whole plot of the game, and while it's not explicitly stated it's strongly implied that with his death, she transitions from simply being the bartender to essentially running the place herself.  She is - refreshingly - absolutely not a shrinking violet, but rather more of a woman of action who refuses to be patronized.  Also she's more or less explicitly stated to have the highest alcohol tolerance of the core cast.  The other is the commander of the local Korean mafia and demonstrates herself to be quite capable (and ruthless) in that role.

There's a side storyline with a third female character (and second female PC) that is technically optional, but is the primary source of money in the game so it's unlikely most players will skip it; this third woman has no presence in the main storyline due to her optionality, but is pretty much the central figure of one of the game's most involved sidestories.  Basically, she's the daughter of a successful businessman who inherited her father's businesses when he died, proved dramatically less successful than him and got scammed by one of her father's competitors.  The guy who got murdered had been planning to bail her out, but on account of his murder, Ichiban gets roped into taking over the company and rebuilding it instead.  In any event, beyond that, she's pretty much a standard dutiful office lady sort of character.

Ichiban himself is an absolute delight of a protagonist and I'm very glad that he's going to be the main face of the Yakuza franchise for the foreseeable future, though.  Anyway, it's in the running for best game I've played this year, although I'm not sure it'll claim the title yet.

[Dhyerwolf]

Fell Seal- 7/10. Good overall game. An FFT variant with a lot of great polish points. Plot and characters were very well set up while moving relatively quickly. Basically all scenes felt like they had a purpose and were driving the narrative forward in some way. Character interactions were well done and the villain cast was nice and varied and interesting enough (although two Immortals felt conspicuously missing plot wise). I appreciated the unique art style, although I won't say I loved it. The injury setup was a great balancing mechanic, and there were a great number of core battle features that were enjoyable.

Early game battles really shined to me because it felt like you really had to pay anything to character placement in a way that you really generally don't in this type of SRPG. Creating chokepoints or preventing enemies from creating chokepoints felt really critical to taking control of the battle and it was really enjoyable. However, the game ruins this dynamic when nasty ranged status- mostly guns- comes into play. You don't have to worry about spacing at all when you can shutdown most of what an enemy can do from half the screen away. That nasty physical ranged status really needed a nerf. Had the game maintained the spatial balance better, it would have been an 8 /10. Guns in particular really needed either less range/tolerance/damage/status accuracy (not necessary all, but honestly could still be a phenomenal weapon/class even with all).

Very solid class system implementation on the whole. Spent most of the game constantly switching classes to maximize stat bonuses but I probably could have sat tight and just steamrolled things with more effective classes earlier than I did. Still was enjoyable messing with basically every class. Yates stood as out a great mage mixing together keys of several skillsets and pairing really nicely with Healer (Not sure anything else got Heal Up, which was great as is Counter Cripple). Other than ranged physical status classes, Warmage stood out as nasty class that you generally wanted to neutralize ASAP (also made Secunda a nasty boss).

Saga Frontier: 6/10. Played all paths. When I first played, I only did 1.5 paths, so effectively it was like a whole new game. Definitely more than the sum of it's parts. It covers a lot of fun bases with super quick pacing that doesn't get in your way. I will say that Monsters can make some great Jeigans. A few battles can unlock some very high stats and a decent enough attack move for them. They'll taper off come midgame, but definitely found them very useful early.  The different ways the game plays with randomness is also a fun change of pace.

Brigandine 2- 8/10. Played ~3.3 paths (Stella, Tim, Rubino, a little bit of an effective Rudo solo with 2 Knights only on defense, an even lesser bit of Eliza's). Have probably watched Super beat all paths, some multiple times. Great to see the game randomly resurrected after all these years. The choice of the VP artist(s?) is fantastic and really makes the game come to life.

I'd love to be able to play with the AI in this game, because that is its greatest limitation. The AI keeps consistently making major tactical mistakes and loves to rush Rune Knights into the meat grinder and a good number of them are basically carved to death immediately. Mages are even worse as they are liable to not even get an actual action (although to some degree, there's a limit on what you could do with just AI there). There's so many potential features to play with compared to a normal RPG so that be so fun to mess with). For example:

--Enemy countries attack too little, with means that's it's easy for them to fall behind on EXP.
--Enemy counties don't focus enough on raising monsters via EXP questing. They'll start bleeding monsters and have nothing effective to replace with them, and the jumps in having some promoted monsters would be worth more than the equips.
--Which characters to use and where. AI tends to keep the same failing parties in the same location instead of understanding where there are matchups that might lead to more challenge.

And that's all before all the ways to play with AI in battle. Even just tightening up movement patterns could go very far.

Octopath Traveller- 3/10. Mixed bag. The game is playable enough, with a quick paced battle system that unfortunately sheds aspects of what made the Bravely systems really shine for me, which is the balance of mixing in offensive and defensive aspects as least semi regularly. I'd like it a lot more if this was the first game of this team, as opposed to the third coming after two more interesting battle games. Granted, I spent all game waiting for those defensive skills to be useful and then they throw the mage superboss class fights at you and you proceed to make to a mockery fo them.

However, there are two things that really drag it down for me. The less offensive one is the writing/characters. I really like the vignette concept, but I don't think the game fully capitalized on it. The world felt like an afterthought in a way I'm not sure I've ever seen before. The plot structure decision was just unfortunate and made the characters feel really disconnected from each other.

The more offensive issue is the tangle of character balance, character switching and levelling. Some characters have innate traits that are just way too desirable. Cyrus' Analyze innate is too useful and actively removing Therion from your party leads to unopened chests (which goes against RPG psychology in a bad way). The game wants to you to switch characters a lot. but punishes you for doing it. Either lose those great unreplicatable aspects (on two of the better skillsets at that) or have some characters fall behind (I primarily choose option 1; exploring the world map still gave the left behinds sufficient EXP for their chapters at least). This could have been balanced if at least the EXP curve was more forgiving. Additionally, only being able to change party in a tavern is a hideous design choice. 20+ years after Dragon Warrior gave you the wagon at that. It's sad that even allowing you to change members in town would be a massive improvement. Even just allow you to unequip items from members who aren't in the your party! This mess of design choices was constantly infuriating me, guaranteeing that the game never rose out of the bog.

[SnowFire]

Dhyer: Interesting you thought Cyrus's passive was so good in Octopath.  I personally considered it one of the weaker ones.  GRANTED, this is largely because Scholar's skillset was extremely, extremely good for 80% of the game such that you'd want someone running it in your party no matter what, and Scholar job already comes with an Analyze ability that you can even throw some BP at to reveal more weaknesses.

Therion's passive...  I get that psychologically, that one may have been a mistake due to FOMO.  After all, just because the last 10 purple chests weren't worth it doesn't mean the 11th one won't have something insanely broken.  That said, there's nothing that special in Therion chests unless you go diving the dungeons with Level45+.  I made my peace with not getting every bit of purple treasure and it worked out.  (That said, yeah, the speedruns sometimes go dive an optional L45+ dungeon with the reduce encounters passive on, make a beeline to a Therion chest, then teleport the heck out.)

[Cmdr_King]

Super Robot Wars 30- Done!  T is more cohesive and overall better throughout, but 30 does pull together in the end and have some cool moments.  Great use of the Claw in particular.  No one stands out as being quite as good as Domon, but y'know, Domon was silly.  I think overall while the mission selecting was a decent experiment to try and loosen up the game... probably a net negative?  I'm not sure what could be done to refine it, or maybe I just am happy with a strictly linear sRPG experience.

It feels a little weird to compare so directly to T just because that was the first SRW I'd played in like 10 years but... so it goes.  Still good, does reinforce that I don't really need more than one of these a year at most.

[Dhyerwolf]

Dhyer: Interesting you thought Cyrus's passive was so good in Octopath.  I personally considered it one of the weaker ones.  GRANTED, this is largely because Scholar's skillset was extremely, extremely good for 80% of the game such that you'd want someone running it in your party no matter what, and Scholar job already comes with an Analyze ability that you can even throw some BP at to reveal more weaknesses.

Therion's passive...  I get that psychologically, that one may have been a mistake due to FOMO.  After all, just because the last 10 purple chests weren't worth it doesn't mean the 11th one won't have something insanely broken.  That said, there's nothing that special in Therion chests unless you go diving the dungeons with Level45+.  I made my peace with not getting every bit of purple treasure and it worked out.  (That said, yeah, the speedruns sometimes go dive an optional L45+ dungeon with the reduce encounters passive on, make a beeline to a Therion chest, then teleport the heck out.)

The whole battle system is built around "breaking" all enemies as quickly as possible, so a passive that gives you automatic information on how without wasting turns becomes very useful. I agree on Scholar's skillset being great most of the game, but that just kind of makes it worse since Cyrus will always have the passive and the skillset. And yeah, Therion's is more psychological. The effect of chests tapers off, but if you are going to ram against the psychology of a typical RPG player, this struck me as the exact wrong way to go about it. Granted, I have little interests in using half the passives beyond chapter 1 (any of the "Summons"), so the ones that actually give a solid boon stick out even more.

[Random Consonant]

Bravely Default 2 - Started this, got up to beating the Beastmaster boss.

So far I can't say I'm very impressed by the changes from BD1!  Weight is just a terrible level-as-godstat system that exists to arbitrarily screw over jobs (some of which aren't even good in the first place) and makes the durability curve even -more- wacky in the process, buffing/debuffing going to the Grandia 1-2 school of stack or GTFO while still being very temporary is bad enough and to make matters worse stacking doesn't even refresh existing durations so why even bother, having stuff counter random things arbitrarily and at random isn't an era of design that needed to be revisited (and of course just makes buffing/debuffing feel even worse), and honestly mixing CTB and BP is just a mess.  And of course they seem to have actually fixed precisely nothing in the process.  Sigh.  I'm not angry, just disappointed.

e: *plays around with Beastmaster some, sics a captured minotaur onto another minotaur* well okay that's pretty decent i guess

[DragonKnight Zero]

Got into that mood to do some Ancient Cave diving so tracked down Lufia 2 and did the legwork to aply the Frue Lufia patch.  Frue Lufia is essentially a restoration.  It restores content that is in the code of the retail release that doesn't get implemented such as a 3rd form of Gades for the endgame and several monsters that cast Mirror that didn't before.  The enemy name adjustments are welcome, no more of the ridiculous Gorems, Seirans, and Hidoras among others.  Also fixes the Ancient Cave item randomization so that it's possible to find helmets, shields, and rings in red chests after B9,  So used a cheat code to unlock Gift Mode and went for it.  Some notable defeats, because they're fun to document:

- Casting attack magic on an enemy I forgot used Mirror.  While this didn't lose the battle by itself, it was enough of a loss in offense and action economy that it did end in total defeat.
- Not paying attention on B90 to enemy coloration thinking I was safely facing a Copper Dragon when it was in fact a Gold Dragon.  It lived long enough to get a triple-turn of Stardust Blow, Zap, Stardust Blow and reduced the party to a smear.
- B77  Two Orochis (Orky in the retail release)  Actually admitted defeat and Providenced out instead of fighting this group that was blocking passage.  My instant death options sucked being only Perish and a lone Death Ball.  I have no gear capable of striking dragon species weakness.  My best source of lightning damage was Lexis' Bolt magic for 400 (to 2800 HP each).  I also had no defense buffs to deal with their likely 8 attacks a round. (16 as there were two of them)  Those are rather strong hits doing around 100 to a 350 defense character in the front row.  Didn't like my odds at all.

    I also stormed through the main game on occasion with the intent of applying acquired battle mechanics knowledge to cruise through.  It's vanilla Lufia 2 difficulty so I disrespected the challenge level.  The game seemed to take offense and many early boss fights sent at least one character to the floor and during a period where revival is limited/non-existent.  Taking on the catfish at Lv 4 didn't turn out well (and a game over since it was still one character)  Regal Goblin summoned a bunch of buddies and they ganged up on Tia.  Tia gets gangbanged again at Camu.

   Oddly, nailed Tarantula on the first try.  I expected to get wasted challenging it at Lv 14 and being too cheap to buy status curing.  Sure I spread out as much status protection as I could but there are unavoidable gaps.  Guy got paralyzed early but recovered quickly losing only two turns.  Tarantula only healed itself once and never summoned companions.  Guy did get paralyzed again late but Maxim had the Fire Dagger and finished things soon after.

[Random Consonant]

Bravely Default 2 - Up to C5 now, feeling less salty about things now overall so I can mostly enjoy it as the fascinating and underthought mess that it is.

Seriously though what even are some of these job specialties.

[SnowFire]

I'm super-behind on gaming in general.  Part of this is good in that I decided to distract myself with Proper Book Reading At The Library & research, part of it is just pandemic stress though.  So I have a whole ton of not-quite-finished games & replays.  I guess some short comments are in order!

The Great Ace Attorney
Finished the first half, finished case 1 & started case 2 of the second game... then... just...  stopped.  I was liking the game quite a lot though!

Fire Emblem Echoes
I was doing a challenge run of Echoes With(out) Mila's Divine Protection.  Oh no, all the Mila Statues have been cursed!  Nobody ever gets to promote.  Okay except Celica, who is a required promote.  Additionally, I have to deploy the lowest "rank" classes, aka yes you're deploying your villagers, although it's up to me to break ties for the various level 1 classes to fill out the roster.  Pre-promotes at rank 2 classes & above can't normally be deployed or recruited, although I spotted myself a minor cheat in letting myself recruit & use Valbar and Matilda for a bit (Valbar is necessary to recruit his pals, despite technically being a prepromote). 

Anyway, it was a fun twist on things.  It was mostly an excuse to try out one of the things Internet tier listers hype up which is a turbo-fast Killer Bow for Hunter's Volley in Chapter 3.  The game is ABSOLUTELY not balanced around this and requires devoting most of your funds to setting this up, but if you do, it doesn't matter that's a tier 1 archer, they can still murder things incredibly hard, just like HV in Three Houses.  There's some other odd quirks too - low range on your archers so they get outranged by enemy archers, no Sage/Priestess promotions for more healing, no Saints to undo terrain damage in the swamp, etc.  I had nearly beaten Duma Tower with Celica's Team but my 3DS turned itself off or crashed and I never got around to finishing it.  I'm quite confident her team can handle it, but the real test will be the final battle with Duma, especially since Alm never bothered to promote.  We'll see, but I think the magic of stat-boosting fountains on Alm have covered me okay.

Fire Emblem Fates
I also started up a random Lunatic CQ run of this ages ago.  It's not complete either and not very far along.  (I only did Hard on CQ which was still more difficult than Lunatic BR or RV... frankly a lot of Lunatic's ideas are a bit on the unfun side IMO, but whatevs.)

Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster
It's cool (after you replace the default font).  Started a run with 4x Red Mages, but I got bored and stopped around the Earth Cave.  The XP curve is massively ubered in this compared to NES - the only bit of "grinding" I did was to return to the Marsh Cave for a 2nd dive once I could open the locked doors, and I still had Firaga / FIR3 for the Vampire, meaning he died screaming.  If I return, I should probably download one of the mods that lets you turn off encounters entirely since it seems like that's the only way to get the game to fight back.

Brigandine II
I didn't play the original Brig.  Anyway, it was interestingly different.  I liked the game, although some of Dhyer's criticism above is probably fair.  I almost completed it with Gustava, and basically I'm happy with calling it a victory (I took on the final boss with just two teams and not knowing I should conserve MP, he was one hit from death, he resurrected on his turn a ton of allies and put back up his shield which made it so that Endorian's blast didn't kill, I was totally out of MP at this point, RIP.)  I did some of the Phantom Knight postgame battles for funzies afterward but they eventually became just grindy.  I'm sure I'd win if I tried the final again with a full complement of 3 RKs, but precisely because I'm sure, not feeling a strong urge to do so.

My biggest complaint is just that I don't think there's quite enough differentiation between army styles.  Let me first grant that too many blurry unit types in a game without a huge art budget is a problem, and I certainly got wrecked a few times by just not understanding what the enemies could do to me and how to maneuver around them during the learning curve portion of the game.  But...  all the factions play just a little too similarly in that even if you use unique Rune Knights, the mook support is just too flexible and shared among everyone.  I'd like it better if each faction had a more sharply defined favorite army types, even if any faction could use any unit via some mercenary system or the like.  Even if no units were added to the game at all..  there's 18 "base" monsters in the game.  What if each faction only had access to 6 of them by default, and had to conquer other territory to be able to recruit the missing monsters?  Or there was some stat bonus / discount for favored monsters?  Stuff like Sea Serpents would be shared by Pirates & Norzaleo, Angels by Mana Saleesia & Guimole, Goblins by Ninjas & Norzaleo, etc.  Or make it so that Elementals and Dragons and the like have to promote to the correct elemental theme of the faction - Norzaleo gets ice dragons, Gustava gets dark dragons, MS holy dragons...  you get the point.  As is, every team blends into the same too much.

Still, I'm interested enough that I do want to replay the game on Hard.

Fire Emblem Three Houses
I started a Maddening run of Verdant Wind awhile back, since that was my first route and therefore done on Hard.  See my posts in February on this!  Trying to complete more of my support catalog by using units I haven't used before.  Anyway, it's still not finished.  It's mostly complete (up to Fort Merceus) but I also randomly got bored and stopped.  The main thing I'll add - dodgetank mage Byleth is still legit.  I think I mentioned before it being good at Reunion at Dawn, it's also good for Legend of the Lake, one of the hardest paralogues - just boldly send Byleth forward on the right side of that map through the fog with the incredibly dangerous fast swordmasters, mages, wyvern knights, and archers.  The Nos tanking pushes the swordmaster hit rate to around 50, which is good enough to survive for sure while also greatly wounding the enemies to set them up for the rest of the team.

Shin Megami Tensei V
Probably deserves its own post!  I beat the first major major boss that sets up the first big plot twist at the Diet Building, then got SMT'd by a random enemy critting the hero in the next dungeon, losing a decent amount of progress.  Kinda annoying that SMT5 picked the SMT3 model rather than the SMT4 model on main character death, but so it goes.