What Games are you playing 2016?

[Magic Fanatic]

FFBE - Did a last-ditch 11-pull before the new banners in a misguided hope of getting either Zidane, Garnet, or especially Freya.

...Well, I got a 4* Amarant!  Aside from that, mostly junk.  Bah.

[superaielman]

Civ 5-playing this whenever I'm in the mood and have the time of late. I do have to say, getting three Deity AIs to all declare war on Alexander at once feels good. (Reason: It's Alexander, he deserves to be wiped out)

[AndrewRogue]

1 did you work out the gimmick?
2 did you find Bro in the dungeons?
3 vulberable to silence
5 with or without shortcut?

1. There's a gimmick?
2. I did not. I think I have failed every character quest in the game.
3. Also vulnerable to fuck-off massive sword to the face.
5. There's a shortcut that does not involve Dancer Bonfire -> Mace Bro -> Elevator -> Past Pus of Humanity -> Past Greatsword Bros?

[SnowFire]

re super: Oh yeah, fallen off the wagon a bit and Civ5'd myself some.

Did co-op with VSM on King, BNW.  Random'd into Austria (and ended up not needing to buy any city states...  for all that this would have been super-helpful for some invasion).   Received wisdom is that the Nat College rush in 1/2 cities is best, but I went for going up to 4 cities then Nat Colleging because city #3 was like the perfect science city (as was city #4!).  Both in jungles, city 3 adjoined a mountain for Observatory, both had multiple bananas, and both had a seaport + fishes for easy food caravaning.  Yeah, Nat College / University / Obs in one city with lots of banana'd jungles = unholy amounts of science, it was pretty sweet.

Both my single-player attempts went down in flames, though.
* Tried out Sage's hack again w/ Aztec Honor...  and got stuck on an island with 2 city states.  Found my first opposing Civ on TUrn 70.  My capital wasn't even on a lake for Aztec super-food.  Well might as well just restart.
* Did a OCC as Egypt.  Went for YOLO Great Library rush.  Missed it by 5 turns.  Game abandoned!

[Grefter]

1. There's a gimmick?
When he summons the clone, it always does the same move the main guy is going to do before him.  So you will always have to deal with the same moves from them one after the other.  It is kinda of a neat twist on it that it is main guy copying.
2. I did not. I think I have failed every character quest in the game.
Damn, I think I noticed you would even get up to there.  Onionbro is somewhere the Profane Capital in the Toxic pits part I think.  His is the easiest quest to get near to the end (yes this includes finding him in a fucking well), then they jam him in a fucked hiding place in the last place before the quest completes.  He rolls up on the Yorm fight with his own Stormruler and you can gangbang him to death with stunlocks.  Sometimes he solos it.  Sometimes he Dark Soul NPC AIs it up and derp flails.   


Also how fucking sick is it for them to work back in that Demons's Souls's reference to Elric books?

3. Also vulnerable to fuck-off massive sword to the face. 
Yeah everything is.  Mostly noting it because it is cute rather than its durrr you just do this!  It is super build specific.

5. There's a shortcut that does not involve Dancer Bonfire -> Mace Bro -> Elevator -> Past Pus of Humanity -> Past Greatsword Bros?

Yeah, if you go into the buildings on the right in the swamp there is a path back to a door just at the start of the area, before the Mace Bro.  It takes you out past the swamp to a drop off near the 2 Knights before the boss room.  Has some slaves and a couple of clerics on the way.  Still gotta dodge trash (and the 2 fucking knights before the boss door), but it is better than dodging Puss of Man.  I think there is a garbage ring on the drop off.

[Sierra]

There is indeed a garbage ring on the drop off. Also the knights can be easily sniped (or just lured from the fog gate with arrows), so Consumed King is really one of the easiest boss runs if you found the shortcut.

Star Ocean 5: Was acquired for the birthday. Started up, played a few hours. I see this time our protagonist team is on the Totally Clueless side of the UP3 divide. Fair enough. Not sure what I think about combat yet. Kneejerk is to say combat feels less precise than SO3 did, but I also haven't played SO3 in ten years. Maybe I need to try different PCs more.

Fiore's outfit really does have to be the most ridiculous thing a JRPG character has ever worn. How does this even stay on her body? Ramza's buttpants look positively demure in comparison. Seriously, this may not be as obvious from character art alone, but in-game it cannot escape notice that her entire ass is just hanging out there for everyone to see.

[AndrewRogue]

Project Diva X: The true Dark Souls begins here.

[Grefter]

Project Divax sounds like either an alien invasion or a Crank Tank media campaign.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Fire Emblem Fates

<Elecman> Man this XF stuff is stressing me out, I need a to relax with a simpler SRPG experience-
<Fuga> ^_^
<Elecman> ffffff

A few tries later I eventually manage to pull everything off, well except Elise dies due to a stupid mistake on my part (second death of the playthrough I accept, first was Silas). We'll see if this manages to be the Conquest map I have the most trouble with two playthroughs in a row, so far it seems primed for that position. I unlock Forrest so at least I'll get a replacement staff user soon. Also Ignatius. Actually I unlocked Ignatius the previous chapter, but I wanted to wait until I could pass him down Wary Fighter, both for his own usability and for making sure he actually survives long enough to be recruited on his paralogue.


Blue Dragon

In the town which Nene traps inside a forcefield because it's funny. Disc 2 is lame. I feel like I'm about 10 hours in (that might be overstating it somewhat) and I've only fought one boss? Gameplay just gets really slow at this point, I remember why I tuned out of the game somewhat around this part. It's a pretty sharp contrast to Disc 1 which had a much more consistent slate of enjoyable dungeons and bosses.

HM's enjoyable for a challenge (or it will be when it gets back to the better design of discs 1 and 3) but overall this replay is convincing me that this is the worst of the FF5 imitators (I kinda already knew that, but). The general sluggishness of the game (especially those battle animations) really hurts it.


Wild Arms XF (Elementalist/Geomancer/Grappler/Nightstalker fiesta)

4-5 (Rupert 4) [7 resets]: Okay so. There are Rupert + 10 randoms in this map, they all charge you from the start. Rupert has Crisis Reflex Up, which causes him to get faster and faster as you kill his allies. Not only that, his damage is based off his speed, so that rises too. He has ST OHKO, can hit a range-3 ray, and has a MT attack which is... range 18? I don't know. Huge anyway. Hits his allies too, but killing them doesn't make you happy. It's only VR 2 and he doesn't use it too often unless you Shut Out him. (I learn not to Shut Out him pretty fast.)

At first I try my usual strategy, which is to walk towards him, kill off a few nearby enemies, then kill him before he can get out of control. Doesn't really work, I can neither control him nor blitz him down at all, and a bunch of his allies will catch up (especially those goddamn 650-HP High Cavaliers who will haste him dear god no) causing me no end of pain, and if I kill them Rupert just goes berserk. I try this from a few angles but it doesn't work.

Then I hit on a moment of genius, I can charge towards the wall and when Rupert reaches me, I can throw him up to the top of it with Ground Slam! Great! Then I can take out the other enemies at my leisure, and finish off Ruper- no, wait, I can't. Shuriken don't reach that high. Elementalist spells don't reach that high. Not even Item Toss (which has been impressively useless on this playthrough, incidentally) reaches that high. Okay. I try a few times to sneak up and Shut him out or something but dealing with maxed out Rupert doesn't work, even if I shut him out in the perfect hex (4 squares above below me on the stairs so he can't wreck my face with Blade Pulsar) he breaks out sooner or later with his stupid number of turns and destroys me. I even try a run where I get above him, instead of below him, since shuriken do reach that far down... only to discover that no, the wall is perfectly crafted so this can never happen. There are a few places where I think it might be possible to lure him against the wall and then snipe him, but all those would-be sniping locations are blocked by TREES. Every single one. Curse you, consistent landscaping!

I decide then that blitzing him is the only way. And I can't do that with my current arsenal... so I leave and buy a whole bunch of Exploder Gems, and make three of my four PCs mages to best abuse them. The nightstalker has four, since she'll get time to use them all; the other two mages have three + two revive fruits, while the straight fighter/grappler exists to do physical damage and survive/revive if necessary. (I'd make him a mage too, but he wouldn't be a very impressive one; my Nightstalker and Geomancer have enough Magic because MAG+25.) Anyway, I still charge towards the wall, but this time, I toss the two striders and enigmancers up there instead. This isn't really the perfect plan, because the striders can still damage ME, but they don't hit that hard with their bows and I stay out of Drop Kick range, so I manage. Meanwhile I toss Rupert away from anyone who might heal or haste him (the rest of his support) and gang-beat him with Exploder Gems, taking care not to hit my own allies of course. I need to use around 8 Exploder Gems or so and a few other scattered attacks but finally, success! Hardest fight of the playthrough with the possible exception of that town defence map.


4-6-A (King Tarrasque III final): So hey I do this map too. There's one disease-causing blob but I make sure that as soon as I get near it I use a movement-spellsling combo to take it out before it gets a turn. The Forsaken Mutants that show up as reinforcements have a weirdly weak array of attacks: poison, three MAG down (would be annoying, but it's melee), Electrigger... the worst is probably disease and even it's not that bad. So all in all it's actually not a great setup for the Zortroa and they fall to the usual tactics in time.

The King himself... is actually a big letdown in this fight! See, in his past two appearances, he was immune to be being grappled. Not so this time! I'm really glad I bothered to check. Anyway he has 3 move so the 5-range throw makes a total mockery of him, I have Alexia toss him down the stairs repeatedly for bonus damage, as if his high weight didn't result in enough already. Haha.

[Sierra]

SO5: CK Avatar and Girl Rufus have joined the party. What CK's avatar does not make obvious is that Emmerson wears a pretty princess backpack. But that's okay, so does half the PC cast by this point.

I have decidedly mixed opinions a few hours into the game. It feels like a budget title in a lot of little ways. There's already a considerable amount of backtracking through environments that are relatively unornamented and unexciting. Sakuraba phoning it in is never any surprise, but I've recognized several background tracks imported directly from SO3 with no apparent change at all (I suppose they could be doing this with SO4 BGM too and I just wouldn't notice). And then there's just odd design stuff like why is a PC's basic status screen buried under the equipment menu?

Combat is conceptually fine but plays out in ways that bug me. You don't have to specify a battle party in this game since all party members participate in combat at once. Reasonable enough since the old RPG convention of "You have ten dudes but only three of them will fight at once" isn't something that makes a ton of sense beyond the programming constraints of generations past. So your whole mob runs around with you out in the open at all times, sometimes they'll randomly start PAs to break up long sequences of backtracking, and when you get into a battle there's no transition at all. All of this sounds fine, but I cannot get used to the implementation. See, in exploration, you're always controlling Fidel, the main character. When you enter a battle, you'll resume control of whichever PC you were controlling at the end of the last battle. What makes this awkward is that you initiate battles by attacking an enemy, as Fidel since he's always the exploration lead, and then mid-attack, when combat proper actually triggers, you get shunted back to the previous battle's control PC, who is god knows where at that moment since your allies are always behind you during exploration. It's confusing, and I've actually accidentally escaped a couple battles because the PC that control reverted to was outside the specified radius of the battle at its outset and I didn't notice the Escape bar building until I'd already run away. Also with so many other dudes in your party I'm genuinely curious whether you could just sit there and do nothing and let them autobattle the entire game for you.

So I think the base idea is sound, but the execution is wonky.

Talking to NPCs is also weirdly imprecise. Sometimes there's a bizarre degree of fiddling involved in just angling myself properly for the interaction button to pop up, so by this point I generally just don't talk to anyone (not like JRPG NPCs usually have much to say anyway, but I'm ordinarily very much a Talk to Everyone kind of player). You can also run straight through NPCs and knock them out of your path, so I kept merging with NPC character models whenever I tried to talk to them until I decided not to care. I'm pretty sure that by this point a good 50% of the protagonist's spoken dialogue has just been apologizing to random townspeople that he carelessly mowed down.

PAs are a thing! A thing that they tell you about in advance when there are some available in town, and how many there are left unfinished. That's appreciated, but the strange thing is that they don't necessarily tell you about all of them at once. Like I can complete all of the ones listed, regather the party, then split again and now there are more. I guess this happens because it'll only show one per PC at a time, so if someone has more than one PA in that town, you'll have to split multiple times to see them all. This bugs me in approximately the same way as those RPGs that give NPCs multiple dialogue lines if you talk to them more than once in succession, although I realize I probably shouldn't go out of my way to exhaust all the PA options in every town immediately since it's obvious I'm going to be revisiting all of these towns a million times anyway.

And stop calling me Fiddly!

[Captain K]

And stop calling me Fiddly!

She does.

Yeah your points are valid.  Parts of the game are extremely polished, parts are just shoddy.  I also can't stand the super zoomed-in camera angle when you control Fidel outside of battle.  Makes it very difficult to even see NPCs talking without moving the camera constantly.

FFBE:  My bakery is in full production.  Made 15000 cakes yesterday, so I don't see a problem getting everything I want before the event is over.  Also pulled a 4-star Warrior of Light in the half price draw yesterday, noice.

[superaielman]

Received wisdom is that the Nat College rush in 1/2 cities is best

Outside of Venice and possibly Korea, I don't agree with that statement.  It's better to get your cities set up early before the AI starts gobbling up all the good spaces.

[Sierra]

Yeah your points are valid.  Parts of the game are extremely polished, parts are just shoddy.  I also can't stand the super zoomed-in camera angle when you control Fidel outside of battle.  Makes it very difficult to even see NPCs talking without moving the camera constantly.

Hm? Up and down on the D-pad change camera zoom. I use this constantly and haven't found the furthest scope a problem when the party goes all talky.

Anyway, first game over acquired. "Protect Anne!" *Anne dies within ten seconds* Reload and I can't skip the pre-battle dialogue. Argh. Burn reserve rush immediately so there aren't three enemies stunlocking the entire party to death this time. And then DRAMA ensues. Lots of drama. It's actually pretty cool and I'm prepared to just call Emmerson the real protagonist here. Tri-Ace finally just threw their hands in the air and put Captain Kirk in a game.

That said, the most faithful way in which the Star Ocean series copies its favoritest franchise is just the regularity with which the UP3 gets violated.

[Captain K]

Hm? Up and down on the D-pad change camera zoom. I use this constantly and haven't found the furthest scope a problem when the party goes all talky.

... I just finished the game and never knew this.  Well that removes my biggest complaint about the game!

So, this is easily the weakest of the Star Ocean series, but it's still good.  7/10 game compared to 8/10 for SO4 and 9/10 for SO2 and SO3.  Plot is poor, but combat is great, and that's what you really play Star Ocean for.

Spoiler stuff:
Cid's not wrong that Emmerson is the real protagonist.  Plot for this game can be summed up as thus:

10 Relia/Feria gets kidnapped
20 Rescue Relia/Feria
30 GOTO 10

There are zero plot twists.  Everyone wears their identity on their sleeves.  You know who the villains are because they go "MWA HA HA".

Character stuff:

Fidel:  Pretty down to earth main.  Levelheaded, fairly intelligent, won't cause emo complaints like SO4 main.
Miki:  What the fuck is wrong with her eyes?  They're like twice as large as any other cast member.  Other than that she's pretty entertaining, especially the food stuff.
Viktor:  Is boring and a waste of Crispin Fucking Freeman.  Has some fun skills though.
Fiore:  Really wasn't bothered by her outfit as much as other people are.  It's no worse than anything else young women wear these days.  Basically the equivalent of yoga pants.  Kind of boring as a character.  Was MVP for hard content because many enemies are resistant to physical attacks.
Emmerson:  Is an UOM and a massive troll.  Nice to see a member of the Kenni family (fuck you it's not Kenny) that isn't inherently noble.  His special attacks were all stupidly slow so I just chained normal attacks with him.  Luckily this also earns you many battle trophies.
Anne:  Is boring.  Also may be a cat.
Relia:  I guess it's a plot twist that she's not a plot twist?  I kept expecting her to unlock a super Reserve Rush or something and become fully playable.  Nope!  She is just there to run around in battle and cower.  I actually didn't mind this though, makes more sense than having a plot NPC follow you around but mysteriously disappear during combat.  She is also adorable.

So yeah, game is really polished in some areas and really unpolished in others (Charles D. Goale?  Seriously?).  It's really short plotwise, although I took a long time on it because I did quests and such.

[Sierra]

Hey, does Relia actually do anything in battle? I can never tell. I'm tempted to toss the Scavenger role on her just so someone can level it up without anyone useful being reduced by it in combat.

EDIT: also I can't believe you played the entire game that way.

[Dhyerwolf]

Rupert being the most evil boss on a challenge makes complete sense. Very few bosses tend to make as good use as his support as he does.

[Captain K]

Believe me, I was scouring the options menu trying to find a way to change it.  It was horrible.

As for Relia, not really?  I sometimes see her casting... something... maybe a buff spell?  She mostly just runs around and cowers next to someone else, and I'm like NO NO GET AWAY FROM FIORE I DON'T WANT THE BOSS COMING THIS WAY.

[Sierra]

Sometimes squares randomly appear around other PCs, and I haven't seen that happening during her absence from the party, so I'd guess she does have some buff spell and that's it. Anyway, second game over acquired: "Protect Anne!" *Anne dies within 10 seconds* Okay, note to self: next time you don't have enough money to buy everyone an armor upgrade, make sure Anne gets hers first.

So this morning I went mildly crazy and decided it would be a good idea to run Pugilism Souls 3. Pretty much the same restrictions as I did with it in Dark Souls 2: dual caestus all the time, no armor, no ranged offense of any kind*, no summons (though I already said fuck it and called someone for the Deacons after dying first time with them at like 5% HP--it's a bad fight to have no crowd control, I couldn't stop the healers). I will also try the Demon Fist once I have it upgraded, though (I strongly suspect I'll need the fire damage for Aldrich). Also weapon swap for Yhorm is a gimme, I don't hate myself that much you guys. Anyway, caestus is better than I'd expected. It's not DS2 good, where it let you completely mock anything armored. I'd hesitate to call it good, really, but it's not terrible. You just have to learn to cope with the weapon's limitations: poor range, and too much wind-up on the L1 (my solution is usually run/dodge attack to skip it). You can stunlock to death most anything that lacks poise or hyper armor cheese, but L1 spam is a real hazard--the game seems able to queue up like 3-4 attacks with this weapon, and it's easy to find yourself stuck swinging at air if something actually manages to dodge out of a combo. Anyway, it's been different--I'd never actually fought either the Catacombs fire demon or ODK totally in melee before.

I'm running with Flynn's Ring, and this really is absolutely the only build that it could possibly be of any remote use for. It's so hypersensitive in this game. Sometimes the damage goes down just from equipping other rings. Sometimes you can see the ring itself nerfing its own damage. That's right: equipping Flynn's Ring may reduce the damage bonus from Flynn's Ring. You can see this slight flutter in your attack stat when equipping it: the game calculates the raw bonus from the ring itself, and then docks you like a point of attack from the ring's weight. Hilarious. If I had any armor or other weapons equipped, it would devolve to being outright useless instead of just very slightly beneficial. Running naked is also a nuisance just because it gives me too much mobility. My roll takes me way past enemies that I'm trying to get positioned next to for attacks, which is doubly inconvenient when using such a short-range weapon.

(*I have no idea how the prison will even be possible. I'll probably run past all the jailers because there's nothing I want in there, right? Wait no box full of scales for the Demon Fist in the mob room, arrrgh.)

[Captain K]

Yeah she's definitely buffing, she gives an attack buff and a defense buff.

Started a new game on Universe.  Got an achievement for starting a second playthrough.  O_o

[Sierra]

SO5: So picking up exactly where I left off last time, "I'll just burn reserve rush again and insta-gib this fight like the last protection mission." *A second wave of enemies materializes, complete with giant flamethrowing robot that immediately burns down Anne* "Okay, I'll just have to item-spam through the first wave and reserve rush the second!" *Anne gets flamethrowered to death during the reserve rush attack animation* "Are you fucking shitting me. Okay, item-spam -> STUN BOMB -> then reserve rush!" This finally does it. EDIT: I don't envy you dealing with fights like this on Universe, Captain K. They've pretty much ensured I'll never try that.

This didn't ultimately take up that much time, but it was annoying because this battle comes after a sequence of unskippable dialogue (I don't know whether you can skip the fully-rendered cutscenes, haven't tried because I haven't needed to, but you definitely cannot skip in-engine dialogue). I think the real problem with fights like this is that they always occur immediately after cutscenes in which the entire party is clumped together talking in a small area, meaning that once enemies spawn, no one has a chance to get to a safe distance before the enemies open fire and basically stunlock the entire party. I really do not think that your battle system is built for anything more complicated than Defeat All Enemies, Tri-Ace. And yet this was not actually the worst battle I had to deal with last night!

Cue moderately confusing prison dungeon (those stair rooms, how do the employees deal with this place?), some DRAMA, and then we get to the real horseshit. We're fighting this whiny enemy general (all SO5 villains are insufferable whiners so far, it's satisfying to beat them down) in some desert town we've occupied in retribution for our neighboring nation invading us. It's a pretty ordinary fight for the first few minutes, kill adds, chuck spells at boss, kill more adds. Then at 50% or so boss HP a third of the arena erupts into flame and insta-kills almost the entire party. It's so hot we're going to die. Only Emmerson survives since he's on the other side of the map sniping (I was prepared to say something snide here like "Of course the space captain uses a crossbow in battle," but it's actually completely justified since he's supposed to look like a local on a low-tech planet). What the shit was that?! I start rezzing and healing people one PC at a time, which is painful since this jerk's still running around trying to kill us and with fewer PCs it's only more likely he's beating on the team healer, but eventually I manage to have everyone on their feet again.

Then a third of the arena erupts into flame and overkills almost the entire party.

So yeah, he can do this repeatedly, anytime he feels like it he is guaranteed to simply murder anyone in melee range just from raw damage, and it only gets harder to put the party back together because with fewer active fighters I am no longer able to trim back his support (did I mention he has infinitely respawning allies? Because he has infinitely respawning allies) so now I've got people interrupting my healers whenever I try to patch someone up. I don't even know who was still capable of damaging him in the second half, it was probably Victor's NPC goon squad or something. I surely didn't have the luxury of personally directing any attacks at him. But eventually, after 6-7 cycles of carefully repair party -> watch almost entire party get overkilled again, he does finally fall. Altogether, I burned 18 out of 20 resurrection items (eventually I realized I had to save those for when Miki got killed, since she's the only one with a revival spell). It's a good thing I like Albel's fight music, because I had to hear it for like 20 minutes straight here.

What makes all this so much worse is that all of this comes after another annoying boss fight (annoying because it removed your healer for the first half!), followed by a cutscene where someone's dying and it's very tragic but it becomes difficult to take seriously because the camera angle in this cutscene* makes it screamingly obvious that Fiore scrupulously shaves her bikini zone, and you cannot save in the middle of any of this. If I'd died in the big boss fight--which was a definite possibility since I was down to one PC on at least half a dozen occasions--I would've been set back like forty minutes of progress and would've had to redo the first annoying fight before I got back to the one I'd lost. Difficult is okay, guys. "Can OHKO your entire party on a whim" is not fucking okay. I have no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to give an earlygame boss that kind of offense. I have no tricks to get around this at this point in the game, no notable fire protection, no endgame Life3-style gimmickry. I dunno, maybe you can stun him out of it, but that would require me to know the attack was coming, and I definitely didn't have the luxury of personally directing anyone's offense after the first time he used it.

(*It wasn't me this time, seriously.)

Day full of crap boss fights, hopefully the game's done with this BS for a while.

So I've been burning some of my skill points on this seemingly useless Augury skill, which lets you ask the goddess "Tria" for advice. A lot of skill points, actually, it's quite expensive, but I'm kind of bent on finding out just how much of a troll this is on Tri-Ace's part, so I've ranked it up to like five or so. The first couple ranks she said nothing more than standard fortune cookie pap like "You will have an uneventful day, it could be worse." That wasn't silly enough so I spent a few thousand more skill points on raising it until she started repeating tidbits that were already in the encyclopedia or the tutorial, except phrased all formal and prophetic. This is indeed an impressively useless waste of resources, let's keep mashing the button and see what else she's got?

Then she told me to stay away from big butts on pain of divine retribution. What the Christ.

[Captain K]

Almighty Tria likes big butts and she cannot lie.

Stop wasting points on Augury when you should be wasting them on Emoter instead.

[Sierra]

I don't think I have that one yet. I guess it does what it sounds like?

[Dark Holy Elf]

Another XF update:

4-6-B (confused drifters): This fight is RNG and rarely precisely easy but I do win first try in a bit of a close scrape. The extremists are annoying because only my mages can kill them and confused enemies never do, while they hit reasonably hard (and use Debilitate once they break out of confuse), the grapplers also hit reasonably hard and have Accelerate hax. I can reposition enemies to get them away from my allies and towards other enemies, so that helps, but there's not much to say about this fight past that. It was interesting to do, lots of moment-to-moment decisions, just pointless to write strategy notes for.

4-6-C (Eisen 1) [1 reset]: The reset here doesn't count, it happened because I had a brain cramp and forgot the loss condition at the start of the fight (i.e. don't kill any enemies), and gleefully OHKOed the first enemy with a big elemental weakness. Whoops. Beyond that, not too bad. The enemies are spread out and easy to deal with since they go to sleep once they're in critical. Eisen can only hit one enemy at once, and only his melee attack even hits that hard (and even that doesn't OHKO), so I just let him run about; I can Shut him Out if necessary (his only ranged attack hits a line) but there's no real need.

Onto the chapter's big dungeon; I stock up on lots of Potion Berries, Revive Fruits, and Exploder Gems.

4-7-A (Charlton 1): This fight should be difficult since Charlton's Dark Destruction poses a large threat (ranged 2HKO that also inflicts misery) and he has good speed/durability. But it doesn't, really, because he's also an idiot, thanks to his Sacred Slayer OC which makes him waste lots of turns casting Fragile on my PCs. (Sadly, he won't have it in later fights.) I start the fight by tossing him off a cliff until I can deal with all the undead near him, then take him on alone. I just steadilly blast him down with magic and hit him while healing. Several PCs get miseried and diseased but I manage anyway, and fortunately revival does get rid of all that.

4-7-B (Eisen 2) [3 resets]: This fight isn't really that hard, but I keep losing due to stupidity.

Reset 1: I don't realise that all the knights have Defender. At one point late in the fight a knight is standing besides another already in critical; I attack the first with Heavy Throw and the second uses Defender to take the toss instead.
Reset 2: An elementalist below half HP uses a spell on me, I reflect it and kill them. The sad thing is there's a prompt to not activate Reflect and I don't react fast enough to press it.
Reset 3: I throw an elementalist using Heavy Throw, gauging I won't do enough damage to kill him. I misjudge (grappler moves are two of the only attacks with no damage projections) and do exactly 179 damage to his 179 HP.

Besides that, this is a notably harder fight than the previous Royal Knights expedition because the enemies all move towards you and Eisen himself is more dangerous due to picking up Circle Slash, which hits everyone within 2 hexes for solid damage. So I set up a ring of people around him 3 hexes away, nobody on a line, so that they can safely lob spells at him and reset Shut Out. The fighters take breaks to toss away or any knights who try to interfere.


Now I am up to the final Chelle fight with its eight Stealth Stalkers; it is unsurprisingly nasty.

[SnowFire]

Ace Attorney Investigations 2:
Finally went back to this.  Finished Case 2, started up Case 3.  Uh, game.  I thought I was gonna, like, investigate some crimes?  I mean, I love me some PW, but let Phoenix be Phoenix, and let Edgeworth be Edgeworth.  aka not a defense attorney two cases in a row.

Also...  erk.  I mean, it's not all bad or anything, but I don't think I was a fan of Case 2 in retrospect.  Yes, all PW cases are required to be ludicrously convoluted, but...  this one didn't quite stick together.  And it's a problem when it's not the obviously fantasy elements that make no sense, but the more humdrum parts.
A few too many nonsensical twists here, and the final chain of "logic" is mostly terrible.  We're expected to believe...
* That the utility room with circuit breakers is WARDEN-ONLY.  Okay sure fine.  It's Warden only, and janitor-only, and electrical contractor only, and random people who follow the janitor in only.  Sure.
* The only way to get metal into a secure area is via...  evidence transfer?  So let me present Dogen's bells as an example?!  ZOMG, worst present in the game so far, I had to manually present everything.  It's not so much that it makes no sense that the warden could get metal in, but rather that it's too *simple* to do so and not even worth discussing.  We live in a world where the security camera goes down for 3 hours without anyone noticing, there's busted prisoner tracking bracelets, and random entertainers are able to bring an entire show w/ props & crap into secured grounds, but the HOLY METAL DETECTOR is unbeatable?!  WTF.  It wouldn't be unbeatable for low-level employees, and it CERTAINLY isn't unbeatable for a warden, who could have carted in whatever she wanted 6 months ago and give some bland justification to a guard even if it beeped as she entered.  WTFWTFWTF.  You've sold the image of an *incompetent prison*, you can't very well turn around and assume this is Ft. Knox with ultra-strict procedures.
* Basically what I'm saying with the above two is that the case against the Warden is crap.  She might well be the killer, but this isn't close to enough evidence, and the stupid "oh she KNEW TOO MUCH" seems to more indict shoddy documentation procedures if Debeste & Courtney were just keeping all the investigation info in their head.
* The tunnel Jay Elbird dug met to a pre-existing tunnel.  So...  who dug that one?!  This is a bizarre hanging plot thread.  The obvious assumption at the time is "this is Dogen's supply tunnel" but we get told later that nope, he gets supplied via Warden Roland.  So...  ???
* For that matter, the way Jay Elbird gets dragged back into the plot was total nonsense.  Everybody suddenly decides that he must have dressed up as a guard for no apparent reason?  And nobody noticed the new guard hanging around before?  And he went into Dogen's cell rather than chilling in the bathroom or something?  This isn't a huge deal I guess, it'd be no different from "hey we recaptured the escapee here he is" functionally, but a wee bit too cute here.
* Villains don't necessarily HAVE to make sense, they're often people who do something desperate or uninformed and aren't exactly coldly rational, but a warden willing to kill to get her way seems like she should have had more options.  For example: Turn off security camera, shoot Dogen + dog, stab self with chisel, say he went crazy and thew a chisel at her and she had to defend herself.
* In the same way, I'm not really sure why exactly Justine Courtney hates Edgeworth.  I guess it remains to be seen, but I *hope* whatever that babble was was just a cover for some real reason to mess with him, and not some abstruse philosophical difference that flew over my head. 
* In the same vein, prosecutors have a long and storied tradition of standing on their initial claim long after it's ludicrously implausible they're the killer, but it's still kinda bizarre that Courtney & Debeste even officially suspect Keyes.  It was *Dogen* who was framed, not Keyes!  There's basically nothing tying Keyes to the murder, while Dogen is a much more plausible suspect.  You'd think they could have switched their (wrong) horse over at some point.
* Also, a bunch happened in the first half of the case that I'm not sure how much it really ties into the second half of the case.  Maybe part of the general multiple-plots trainwreck pileup, but yeah, this case still doesn't make tons of sense in my head for what the "real" timeline was of the murder and how all these false leads & red herrings got generated.  There's certainly a lot of "well sure let's trust Jay Elbird absolutely about his claims of the condition of the tunnel over here, but ignore him on his claims of not negotiating with Knightly upon arriving in his cell", or something.  There is, as usual, also a "let's assume that absolutely everyone was at the show at this hour and nobody else could possibly be doing anything."  Which might be MORE plausible in a prison, granted, but still!

[Dark Holy Elf]

Pretty good analysis; I like that game and that case pretty well, but your comments are fairly spot on. The cases are ridiculously convoluted (in contrast to your statement comparing to the rest of the series, I feel they go far beyond the AA norm) and tend to have some pretty severe structural problems once you untangle them, and sometimes feel extremely forced narratively. They are certainly fun to untangle at the time, with the information given, but they are very, very much cases designed for that sort of gameplay and not for any sort of realism or reflection, unfortunately. That's ultimately why it's the second weakest AA game to me, but it is quite unique in the way it structures cases so I definitely appreciate the attempt.