Pokemon Alpha Sapphire - Beaten. The end of the game was better than the rest, certainly. Aside from Victory Road itself (already commented on), the Wally fight was better than I remembered it being in Emerald, and the final boss sequence was fine; I had one reset on Drake (due to missing two consecutive 90% accuracy Dragon Chops mostly) and one on Steven (lost Latias to Toxic and various other pokemon due to errors against Cradily leaving Armaldo to finish off the team). Delta Episode kinda tries to have an actual plot, it's cute. Actually less terrible at it than I was assuming? Anyway the overall level of fight competence here was high enough too, nothing too amazing. I liked that they threw in a fight against a re-imagining of Emerald!Wallace who was certainly better than the gym leaders in the game but still not that great for various reasons (worse movesets than Em, lower levels, bad AI). Final Zinnia was pretty nasty because I refused to use Rayquaza but still won on the first try, Deoxys ate a Master Ball to end the playthrough.
Sceptile - Leaf Blade, Dual Chop, X-Scissor, Mega Drain/Earthquake - Well it could use better physical durability and it would be nice if it had more movepool to run off its higher SA but who cares, that speed + grass is amazing in this game + a mega evo for even more stats made for ridiculousness. Even though I pretty much only used him against things that Grass (or occasionally Bug/Dragon) was effective against he still ended up 3-4 levels higher than the rest of my team at most times because water water everywhere. Really wish I'd gotten Giga Drain, but oh well.
Latias - Psychic/Psystrike/Double Team, Shadow Ball, Recover, Calm Mind/Thunderwave - Only real objection to Latias is that it doesn't learn a special dragon move stronger than 60 power. Aside from that she's tanky, fast, has a ridiculously deep movepool (in addition to the stuff listed I made plenty of use of Surf), and can sweep with the ol' Gardevoir strategy only does it better. I actually had really terrible luck trying to sweep Steven with this (ate multiple crits through Double Team and had terrible luck with evade in general, eventually running out of Recover) but it still killed half his team.
Crobat - Fly, Cross Poison/Sludge Bomb/Dark Pulse, Confuse Ray, Roost - Be faster than everything, confuse + healing is always good, have no really bad stats. Serviceable against most things. Dark Pulse got used against Steven because with steel losing dark resist it's an oddly good element in that fight, now. Also, it evolved into Crobat after one level as Golbat as usual, even though it's obtained later in this game than some. Good times as always.
Aggron - Iron Head, Stone Edge/Rock Tomb/Rock Slide, Earthquake, Thunderwave - Well once it reached its final stage and could learn Thunderwave that was certainly nice. Otherwise it has a typing which walls some things very well and dies to things badly. Slow but could at least outspeed a few things, but more to the point Thunderwave was great for making up for this. Decent enough damage, though you can't call it an offensive pokemon. I hardly ever used its mega form because Sceptile and Latias were so much more important for anchoring the team.
Wailord - Surf, Ice Beam, Earthquake, Strength/Waterfall - Man its movepool gets shallow after the first few moves. Anyway its stats aren't too great but the water/ice niche isn't a bad one to fill, and its stats aren't that bad either. Overall a bland filler but it joined at a pretty high level unlike most things I caught in the second half of the game that weren't legendaries.
Camerupt - Overheat, Fireblast/Flamethrower, Earth Power, Will-o-Wisp/Yawn - So on multiple occasions I went over an hour without fighting a pokemon that isn't a Water type (yes, I counted). Camerupt is total junk for any such sections. Toss in the fact that I was fighting Team Aqua and that he's also weak to Ground and it didn't feel like there were many places he could be used safely, especially since his speed is "always goes last" territory. I want to like Camerupt, his design is cool, but his stats + typing would be horrible in any Pokemon game and are even worse in this one. Oh well. Only pluses is that he was good for nulling electrics (on the very rare occasions those show up, and of course you get him after Wattson) and that his raw damage was pretty good, especially with Overheat.
Anyway I don't think this game was nearly as good as it should be by Pokemon standards. It's a combination of my two favourite games in the series, but generally didn't manage to capture what I liked about either. The thing I liked most about X/Y were the excellent array of options, the fact that random trainers and random enemies were up-to-speed level-wise and presented a constant moderate level of challenge (at least without Exp Share. This is not present in Alpha Sapphire, regular trainers are jokes and randoms are underlevelled, and pokemon availability could be better. It also did away with Fashion~ which is a shame because Default Male Trainer looks really stupid; instead we get secret bases which I can't give a shit about.
The thing I liked most about Emerald is that it has the best boss fights in the series, lots of well-designed teams which led to an epic feel in many boss fights. In this game the gym leaders are Diamond/Pearl level bad with much worse setups (going back to Ruby/Sapphire was a big mistake) and often felt a bit underlevelled (again, I didn't use Exp Share and ran six pokemon, so no excuses!), and had derpy AI in many cases. Like Diamond/Pearl the game steps up a bit at the end but that's not really enough.
So it's okay. I mean it's still Pokemon, still reasonably polished, infinite-use TMs are still cool, and it doesn't have any egregious mechanical errors like D/P's sluggish animations and surfing or RBY's bugs and documentation errors. And while the enemy design isn't where I want it to be it doesn't have anything as egregious as the Mahogany arc. And the game's villains don't make me facepalm as much as Cyrus or Lysander, that's something I guess. So it's better than RBY, GSC, DP, and HGSS at the very least. A decent game but a bit disappointing. 6/10 or so? Sates my Pokemon itch for the next year or two most likely, though I would like to play BW and/or BW2 at some point since that does feel like a definite hole in my experience with the series.
Final Fantasy Dimensions - Just beat the Memorist chapter. Game remains fun; I have more to say on it but will wait until it's not packaged in an already large post.
Final Fantasy 5 - Fiesta time! So I'm doing Chaos this year, the first job I drew was Berserker and the second is Samurai, which means until the earth crystal I have to do a Berseker SCC.
... this is... not a thing I'm willing to do. See, the Berserker SCC walls hard on Sandworm and Soul Cannon. It's generally agreed you need to overlevel like mad to stand a chance against them. (And I don't mean agreed by the type of bad FAQ-writer who claims you need to be Level 80 to beat Zeromus, I mean by people who are super-knowledgeable about FF5.) Oh well, just meant I used the Job Fair to re-randomise my Berserker job and got Summoner instead. Much better!
Anyway the first part (until the water crystal) is Freelancer only. Freelancers are definitely somewhat weaker than Knights early due to lower HP which means you need to pack a fair number of Potions (I used like 15 getting through canal + ship graveyard) and Siren was moderately scary. Magissa was nasty, had a reset here. Drain OHKOed me (I was slightly underlevelled to be fair) and she used it four times in a row when able, which didn't help, and her husband hit really hard as well. I won by lowering her just above her limit threshold, blitzing her, then finishing her off after the summon. Afterwards I switched everyone to the back row (otherwise Forza does ~135 damage with Tackles) and slowly chipped away.
After that you get access to Tycoon Castle and lots of cool stuff (Ashura katana, Whip, Heal Staff) which makes Garula a complete joke.
Getting Summoners was a relief. I've never used Chocobo/Sylph much before but they're actually pretty worthwhile ST damage at this point, certainly beating out physicals at no real cost and even adding some healing! I decided to take a run at Shiva; I lost once because I didn't realise having everyone in the back row would make her cast Blizzara ST and that one-shotted people, but I was more careful the second time and also got a lucky Fat Chocobo in to wreck the Ice Commanders. Sylph could keep up with her MT Blizzaras, the ST ones were just met with a Phoenix Down and plugging on. Not too bad.
Then Shiva proceeds to wreck absolutely every random until the Library, as well as Iron Claw who gets 2HKOed. The only thing worth noting is Liquid Flame who was certainly tough; he only transformed to Hand once but OHKOed when he did and had enough MDef to mock Sylph during it. I did win first try but at one point everyone was down to 0-3 HP after a Blaze! I've also beaten the Library, Ifrit gets one-rounded by Shiva and Byblos would have been one-rounded by Ifrit had I thought to buy four Fire Rods in advance. No biggie, it was still super-easy. Ran away a few times to make sure I didn't hit Level 15.
