Goodbye Deponia - played through
It was less terrible than Chaos On Deponia. Not that that's difficult.
Thomas Was Alone - played through
Pretty enjoyable. I feel like it could have used a bit more closure.
Bravely Default - In Eternia again
[...] Meanwhile here I'm probably somewhere between 1/2 - 3/4 done with the game and three characters are still in the first jobs I've put them in, and the only reason that the fourth isn't is because the fourth is still a freelancer. [...] Laughably, freelancers have an inherent ability which causes their stats to raise by 1% for every mastered job the character has. Unless JP gains slam through the roof shortly, that is never going to matter.
So JP gains did essentially slam through the roof at that point. Furthermore, while I thought I had been allowing a lot of leeway for the game to expand its plot (regarding how much time I though there was left in the game to get JP in), it looks like it's expanded far more than that.
Still have to deal with the fact that you only get one slot for a separate class's skillset (even freelancers), and only five slots for support abilities. So even though it is actually feasible for characters to master a good deal of classes, they generally can't actually DO anything with them (unless you're willing to micromanage things). There's that bonus the freelancer gets as classes are mastered but if you do go freelancer you're stuck with the Miscellany skillset which is pretty useless.
My characters are currently partway through their fourth classes but only because I am finding it generally pleasant to grind outside Eternia City. Moreso the first time I was there than now, because at that point all the daytime enemies could be killed with two amped compounded bomb arms, which is very cheap to begin with but also all the daytime enemies can be killed with
exactly two amped compounded bomb arms, so if that's all you use you get the sweeper bonuses for every battle and get even more money out of them.
Unfortunately, while most of the enemies currently operate the same way, there's been a new enemy added which can't be killed with exactly two amped compounded bomb arms so this doesn't work as well. Still works pretty nicely when it doesn't show up for a while!
(Also, anywhere you do need to go, for the main quest and for side quests, is marked on the map, so it's not like you ever need to find anything. I don't remember any points at which the characters didn't know where they needed to (directly) go next.)
It turns out you can actually turn the markers off. I'm not going to do that though, since as I said earlier the game doesn't let you do anything that it doesn't want you to do anyway (Although given the amount of things it seems to want me to do currently, maybe that's been relaxed by now...).
The plot has been edging closer and closer to
reverse Golden Sun territory with confirmation that
awakening all the Crystals is supposed to be a Bad Thing, for all that nothing apparently untoward happened the first time we did it (assuming you don't consider being sent back in time/to alternate timeline a bad thing). But there's still been no time devoted to explaining the actions that pretty much any of the enemies were taking in pursuit of this purpose.
Personally, ever since Olivia didn't appear to know what a Cryst-Fairy was, I've suspected Airy, and some of the details in Vampire Castle make that look even more likely - but nothing has come of that yet. Maybe later.Vampire Castle is awesome, plotwise, and the way the game locks it up is criminal. I ended up using a 1xDark Bane, 15xAmped Compounded Shadowflare combination on everything to get in (and I have no idea how anyone is supposed to guess that the
monuments which looks like they're teleportation targets/waypoint stones/whatever are actually guarding the castle keystones). Then disabled encounters in the castle itself. (I don't know what encounters in the castle are actually like but I didn't care enough to find out after the previous). Unhappily the aforementioned combination isn't enough damage for the boss of that area. Unless you change the difficulty to Easy for that fight!
So currently, I'm pretty interested in seeing where things are going. But I'm also pretty apprehensive that most of the current sidequests available to me are
going to turn out to be exactly the same as they were in the first cycle. I haven't done any of them yet, so I'll see whether that's the case when I see.
But in the meantime I've been distracted by the 'missing' Pokémon having become available in X/Y GTS and so on.
