kay, haven't written one of these in a while
Fairy Fencer F - PC version's out, so I've been playing this. Fairly fun little game. Difficulty curve in the early game feels smoother than the Neptunia games, which is good, but it has the opposite problem, your PCs grow in strength notably faster than the enemies do for a while and everything gets really easy. Using the World Shaping effect which is WP+50% and Damage x2 only compounds this; see, Damage x2 is intended by the designers to be a downside to that WP +50% (WP being basically FFF's equivalent of AP), but this is a game where your best combos/attacks are in the 2HKO damage range naturally. So you tack on Damage x2 - it applies to both sides - and now you're OHKOing left and right.
Still fun, and apparently I'm right before a difficulty spike. Good, game needs one right about now. The game itself and its plot are fairly standard IF/Compile Heart fare. It takes itself more seriously than Neptunia, but still not very seriously (to its benefit; the writing is probably around FF5 tier at best). The characters are all standard anime tropes, although I at least was amused that it's the male lead that's the tsundere in this game.
All in all, charming little romp, but I'd say Neptunia Rebirth 2 was probably better so far. Note that I consider Neptunia Rebirth 2 to be pretty much the best new JRPG I've played to completion this year thus far. (This is less a statement on the quality of the game itself, although I feel it's a fairly solid 7/10 or so, and more a statement on how poor the competition is in my opinion.)
Tactics Ogre (PSP) - Replaying this. Unlike my last replay, I'm not using the 2x skill advancement rate cheat. I _am_ using the 100% crafting success cheat, though, just to save the time of saving and reloading a bunch. Started from a clean file, playing Law route and generally trying to play a little more efficiently than previous runs. One of the big discoveries I've made this run is that trying to use one of every class early on is a fantastic way to get yourself badly underleveled because of spreading the EXP too thin. As such, the only hard battle in chapter 1 was rescuing Cistina, which is only worth the effort to save me having to World back to that battle later (I can instead just World back to Balmamusa and not have to replay half of chapter 1 to make Cistina alive again), because I'm doing law route.
Once crafting unlocks in chapter 2, I promptly sink all of my goth into crafting up a full set of Bronze Helm +1 and Linen Slops +1, as well as +1 ranged weapons for the archers and +1 basic crossbows for the people who can use them. These will likely constitute the entirety of my crafting for a long time, because these particular pieces of gear last a long time.
Chapter 2 thus far has also been fairly uneventful, although I had some trouble keeping Xapan alive. His battle marked the first time I broke from my all-generics team (bringing in a Cleric Canopus with a lobber to heal Xapan). Specials will eventually feature in the team full time, I'm not doing an explicit challenge run or anything, though, aside from limiting myself to two actual archers for the early game.
The loot system in this game is still really fucking stupid, there have been multiple battles where I've deliberately delayed killing a unit because there was no way I could prevent their item drops from being stolen, and at least one where I stalled killing the boss so I could kill more of his support.
