Fenrir: I forget from where, but I definitely didn't get the "understand unintelligble monsters" upgrade too soon, but got Sukukaja anyway. And it's goddamn necessary for Minotaur, getting even a single dodge on his MT nonsense to deny a turn is pretty crucial.
While I felt money-shy in SMT4, money also isn't TOO important? There's a bunch of minor alternate options which are all pricy it felt like, but you won't lose much not having access to them unless you're trying to set up to specifically spoil a boss. (There ARE some really good things to burn cash on endgame, but that won't be for a good long while.)
Anyway, belated gaming updates...
Breath of Fire 4: RIP. Plain ran out of resources, I should have sold off more stuff even more aggressively than I did, 30 Ammonias were not enough (and 6 150 AP restoration potions, 2 Ambrosias, ~7 Moon Tears, and 13 Vitamins). But mostly the Ammonias, they made me revert to Raise Dead and missing a Raise Dead is seriously awful. Mentioned this in chat, but while I think Tyrant / Astral are doable at LLG levels (w/ no grinding minigames / fish /etc.), it requires some good luck, and possibly knowing the battle a bit more than I did. Not going to finish it... well, ever, now, because my Vita was stolen a few hours ago and it's not one of the recent save games I'd have backed up to my PC. Alas. But I probably wasn't going to take a hack at it again anyway, that is a seriously long battle (75 minutes or so? Maybe more?).
Basically, I got lucky vs. Tyrant and Tyrant spammed a bunch of status / Sanctuary / ST physicals at !Kaiser while Kaiser just berserk unrolled a bunch of Kaiser Breaths. Which was an absolutely huge amount of my real damage when I'm stuck with dinky L2 spells otherwise. So good. Astral... Astral, I was not as lucky on. He was very good at using Soul Rend in response to dragon transformations which is just horrible. My L2 spells did around 500 damage, sometimes more if I combo'd 'em, so yeah that's a 100HKO or so, gonna need Ryu to come through. I wasted my first Ambrosias too readily in retrospect; I should have ran down every dragon before using them, not just Aura & Kaiser. With my bad luck on Soul Rends (or just plain MT damage), my final dragon sets didn't last long enough, but it was too late to conserve Ambrosias. :( In the same way Astral ran out my revival and healing. Rough.
Also, checking an LP, there's some cool symbolism in the glyphs that flies over your average Western audience, e.g. Ryu entering the final battle standing on the symbol for Earth, and Fou-lu standing on the symbol for Heaven. Neat stuff.
http://lparchive.org/Breath-of-Fire-IV/Update%2029/Mega Man X4 - Also gotten for like a buck with BoF4 on PSN. I am bad, 0 robot masters defeated, none of them seem to have a big flashing "you can reasonably buster me down" flag. Also they'd have been better off having no voice acting and possibly no plot as well, but oh wellz. Back to living in cyberspace and attempting to destroy the global network.
Kid Icarus: Uprising - All Meeple-approved games? Apparently. Finished C18 (Magnus + BOSS PIT), onto C19 shortly. A strange game. It's too easy except when it's not and I randomly die. But the dialogue is actually amusing for a derail-our-own-plot 4th wall breaking fest, a tricky feat, but one they pulled off. So far at least.
