Personally I'm not really willing to give bad lines in text that sort of benefit of the doubt.
Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies - Finished. Hmm, overall I'm not sure this game holds up quiite as well the second time through as some of the others? In that, when you know the spoilers, it's a bit more transparent what the contortions are which the plot is going through to reveal things in a certain way for maximum drama. (Speaking of drama, the third case has way too much.) That said the final case and DLC case are both still excellent, and the cast is still terrific.
Shantae and the Pirate's Curse - Beat the game, then collected the two cacklebats I'd missed and beat it again to get the full ending. Final boss of the true ending is pretty brutal if you aren't spamming items, definitely a bit of a spike over the rest of the game (although Dargon gave me some trouble too). Spent about 12 hours on the game which certainly made the game more than worth its suggested price, never mind that we got it for silly cheap due to a sale.
Anyway, this was fun! The game's writing is a light-hearted romp but generally managed to stay quite enjoyable. It's not on the level of Mana Khemia 2 as far as comedy games go but it's certainly good enough to grease along the solid gameplay. Speaking of said gameplay, it's a pretty fun Metroidvania type, definitely more like Castlevania than is is Metroid. The base gameplay is rather plain (certainly nothing on the level of all the cool gylphs from Order of Ecclesia) but the items you gain that let you platform better work pretty well, giving you a pretty fun and varied skillset. There's a bunch of pretty fun stage design especially once you get your hands on more stuff, and it's always enjoyable to take your new powerups and revisit old areas, now with the ability to get through them more effectively and find more treasure. Boss fights and enemy design is generally only okay, but good enough to support the game.
There are some nagging times when it feels like the game doesn't really introduce concepts as well as it could. I was a bit stumped that there are certain platforms you can attack to flip, since the game doesn't really do a wonderful job of introducing this concept to you, for instance. And at least one other occasion where I felt things weren't intuitive enough. This is mostly obvious playing the game right after Shovel Knight, which felt like it had an excellent eye for such things (also reading up on old platformers and seeing the good things some of them did). It's not the end of the world, the internet exists for help at worst (although notably Shantae doesn't actually have any good FAQs, so I had to dig a bit more). I probably wouldn't even mention this if I weren't kinda actively looking out for it.
Overall the game isn't really exceptional, but still quite enjoyable. The game's solid gameplay and level of writing put it above all non-OoE Castlevanias to me, and probably pretty comparable to Rayman Origins and Shovel Knight. So something close to that same 8/10 region.
Star Ocean 3 - Haven't played this in a decade, so decided to start it up again.
1) Discovered that you need a file with battle trophies to play on harder difficulties. Which of course, neither Ciato or I had because those things eat a sixth of a memory card. fffffff
2) The opening is still terrible, Tri-Ace why you so bad at this.
I'm sure this decision to replay the game will pay off eventually!
Fire Emblem 8 - Also randomly started replaying this, no real goals in mind.
