Castlevania extra modes generally fail to garner my interest at all, personally. HEY GUYS YOU CAN PLAY AS THIS MUCH MORE SIMPLE CHARACTER BUT IT'S OLDSCHOOL or something.
I started OoE Hard Mode, and just beat the forest. God, that place was badass, totally lived up to the hype, the first two screens were nightmares. Third was pretty easy by comparison since medusa heads are much easier to dodge than the goddamn bats with their annoying trajectory and the random, all-over-the-place Winged Guards. I swear, one of these days I'll play a Castlevania that will make me understand Medusa Head hate. Maybe.
FFX - About to go do the Bevelle raid. This game is the stuff. I have swapped the roles of Lulu/Wakka (needed some L1 Key Spheres), Yuna/Tidus (needed some L2 Key Spheres) and Auron/Rikku (needed the Teleport/Friend Spheres from Bikanel). Things are interesting so far, Black Mage Wakka is MVP aside from aeons most likely. Aeons I relied on as a bit of a crutch for a while even though Yuna had no sphere levels (and hence the aeons had gimpy stats) because my team sucked, but once Yuna entered Tidus' grid their strength went into super-ridiculous mode so I stopped using them for physical attacks because seriously, that's just broken (Bahamut will break the cap with his physical the moment he joins, guaranteed). This will limit them a bit, though their overdrives are more than ever the only way to overkill tough enemies (this playthrough gimps the overdrives of most PCs due to them running off weaker stats). Lulu's Deathtouch weapon was very helpful in Home, as was cheesing enemy AI (the Guado want to silence her!). Tidus is not doing a very good job as a healer, but he still has decent strength from spending some time with Kimahri... this won't last. Too early to really pass judgement on my new Auron and Rikku.
I also beat FF4 the After Years with a party of the classic team, replacing Kain with Ursula since screw Kain. Team thoughts...
-Edge and Ursula are both very solid fast fighters, although Edge is slightly superior overall due to being able to hit flying weakness and, later on, his awesome itemcast weapons (before then, he has Shadowbind, which is actually useful in this game what the hell), although Ursula does have her advantages in slightly better speed, ability to hit holy weakness (not as common as flying, but notably useful once or twice), and maintaining damage against fire/ice/lightning weakness better.
-Rydia is pretty great overall, Stop is good stuff and Quake/Leviathan are both really good attacks once they get rolling. Sylph is great backup healing and reflect-piercing early, falls off later though. MT Break is fun. In general she really picks up mid-dungeon with Quake/Leviathan/Break and the Assassin Dagger, which raises her speed to not too far below the speedsters, and falls off a bit towards the end as MT fights get rarer and status immunity finally becomes common. Still has a decent argument for MVP though.
-Rosa has early Haste/Blink/healing, obviously this is very good. Bows are solid for a long time in randoms, Holy helps late, but mostly she's about being awesome for bosses. Arise is also a great late pickup, obviously.
-Golbez was extremely good and overall MVP during the time I used him, which was the Subterrane dungeon. Great in all stats, especially damage and HP, but he does lose that as time goes on. I dunno how good he'd end up feeling in the end, though I'm confident he'd be better than...
-Cecil. Man, what the hell. LVP by far of the people I used, it's not even remotely close. He doesn't even pass Edge in HP until late and never builds a reasonable lead, due to a level disadvantage, his white magic is basically worthless. All he really has going for him is Cover/Auto-Cover but it doesn't feel like TAY battles conspire to make this terribly valuable, all he really does is reduce your need to cast Blink by 1. ps his main competition (Ceodore and Kain) can actually just, y'know, cast Blink. Kinda surprising and embarrassing, I think there's probably at least 10 PCs (the other five I used, Palom, Porom, Kain, Ceodore, Yang) who are just indisputably better than him and that shit is fucked up after how good he was in FF4o and the way the plot continues gushing over him in this one.
Overall it's a game that is hard to rate. Final dungeon is very, very obviously the highlight (kinda like Blue Dragon!) and the only real reason to play the game. Plot has glimmers but overall is about what you'd expect from an FF4 sequel and has some really trashy bits like SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR DEAD GIRLFRIEND FROM TWENTY YEARS AGO EDWARD ahem. Gameplay is great late but does feel like it could have been just a bit more interesting (boss designs are decent but nothing really floored me), still you gotta love that level of polish and challenge. Still a game I want to replay at some point. And by "replay" I mean starting at the start of the Subterrane when you get partyswitching, or possibly right before since the Mysterious Girl showdown at the end of the earth arc was pretty badass.
I never did beat Shinryu (or finished off Deathgaze, but I saw no reason to hunt him down when I had no reason to get Dualcast, did make him run away once so whatevs). Nobody on my team had high enough HP to reliably survive Tsunami, and while I could probably win eventually with a basic strategy of "get fortunate and survive opening round, put party back together and start spamming Shell", things just never turned out that way. A few extra levels would make it more reasonable, or just using someone like Yang. Final boss was decent but only decent, I had more trouble with Bahamut (and also liked that fight's design more, his support was just perfect), as well as Omega and Ultima Weapon but I suppose that's to be expected. Lots of love for the bosses in general, no real shock there.
Game's probably either a 6 or a 7, could have been better if it were just the last quest but so it goes. Final levels were 59-64 (screw you Cecil), final time in the last quest was 17:30 with all other quests being 2-3 hours.
