What games are you playing 2019?

[dunie]

Kingdom Hearts III:

I made it to the mansion. That must be about 2.5 hours in to the game if you spend lots of time Munny searching and slashing all kinds of bushes and buckets. I remember a comment I posted earlier about despising games that design basic gameplay learning into its beginning? KH3 does that, and I hate it just as equally. Now, I would have been more lenient if they cut some nostalgic instances out, such as "Press X to Slash Monster!" Quality lost to nostalgia, and I'm not accustomed to that type of division. Going to admit that the number of "How to" screens frustrated me so much that I did not read, etc., and when I was clueless about things such as taking photographs, I simply went to the info menu. So what's going on with SE? You take photos in 15, you take photos in KH3 now, like, are they information-mining me? (/sarcasm)

I'm still mulling over how I feel about the gameplay, and will review it after two planets destination planets in. I'm currently overwhelmed though? The camera is Nier-levels of insane without Nier-levels of offensive and defensive battle features? I mean, blocking right now seems pretty much worthless with hordes of enemies on the screen. . . .

Music? Dope.

Sora looks different. I'll get over it.

Goofy's shaping up to be KH MVP.

[NotMiki]

Another Eden: a mobile game that boldly answers the question, "What if Chrono Trigger were boring?"  I'll stick with it a bit longer to see if it develops but I wouldn't recommend it based on the first few hours.

[SnowFire]

Tide: Yeah, that's something that was kinda meh about FF9 for me.  It has some really good character work (Vivi, Steiner, Eiko, & Kuja), and it has a few characters who have promising starts, and precisely because I know Square can do some damn good characters, it annoys me just how much the ball is dropped for the others.  Beatrix is completely paint by numbers for the badass working for the wrong team.  Amarant & Quina barely exist.  Freya has a strong intro and then proceeds to not exist.  Brahne is frustrating.  It's not like villains have to be rational, but she's such a rargh-I-am-evil flat archetype it dulls the impact.  It's even an explicit plot point that she is NOT mind-controlled or anything, she's just willing to hire mercs to kill her adopted daughter she presumably put a bunch of time and effort into raising as a successor.  Like, if they had just changed that one thing and made her positive about her daughter Garnet but disappointed that she doesn't want to rule the world that Brahne is nicely conquering for her as a gift, that would go pretty far.  "Join me and together we can rule the Continent as Mother and Daughter" and all.

That said, I got my complaints about FF9 but "discs are not of exactly equal playtime" isn't one of them, Disc 4 had lots of ending FMVs and the like I presume. :p

[DjinnAndTonic]

Another Eden: It has transdimensional god-kitties and pretty art. It certainly hits all of the same story notes as Chrono Trigger, but doesn't really have much depth to the battle system at all. Perhaps it opens up more later?

It does get points for being decently localized and for being a functionally-normal JRPG on mobile which doesn't build its whole gameplay loop around gacha.

As someone who played FFD2, Another Eden feels like Kato took everything he learned from that game and tweaked it just slightly so that he could own the IP for it. It has a similar art design, similar sprite engine, similar battle system, a toned-down version of its gacha system, similar balance issues, similar pacing, the same musical cues, the same mission structure. It is basically FFD2-2, now with less FF.

It is worth noting that FFD2 ALSO started out exceptionally cliched and boring and I ended up loving the majority of the game (the parts between the tired-cliche intro and the thrice-repeated final chapter at least). So Another Eden, perhaps if it learned anything from FFD2, might at least be able to improve on that ending?

[VySaika]

Muddling along with DQ11. I have met Sylvando. He is very, very gay, but not in a way that makes him seem like a joke, which I appreciate. I'm going to presume there's no way to actually beat him in that race, either.

Smash Ultimate has also been eating up some playtime for me. The adventure mode is fun, and I'm near the end. Finally got Ike, which has been a major boon for me. Nothing like being able to knock a Legend class enemy off the stage at ~40% because I baited them into a partially charged F.Smash. Or to quote Kier, "this spirit empty, YEET"

[DragonKnight Zero]

Finished up my Normal replay of Metroid Prime 2 after beating Hard and seeing that it wasn't much lower than my previous Normal time.  About 5 hours faster which I'm content with (16 hours down to 11).  Lots of rolling around with morph and boost and not doing much fighting.  The game is more accessible on replays since there's less pressure in the dark world to wait in safe zones.  As long as I make it to the next save point, I'm good.  OK, got to keep health up before a boss fight but other than that...  Player is almost never required to fight tanky enemies and the few times where it is necessary, there's a quick kill method available.

  Most of the tanky enemy battles are early on, which makes the game even more unfriendly to newcomers.  Anyways, I feel complete with the game.  Translation: I've accomplished everything I wanted to and will probably never play the game again.

some more FFT retrospective:

  Ramza was running high HP + Move HP-up again for Grog.  So of course, a squire spawns with an Ancient Sword and lands a Don't Move to troll me.  When it wears off, squire lands another lucky proc.  Otherwise straightforward fight where one dismantles the enemies one by one if they refuse to clump up for a summon.

  Yardow was a massacre.  One reset because a Ninja randomly was a Virgo with high WP throw and Rafa died before I could move.  Winning attempt, Priest Ramza with Summon and MA up and Archer Agrias with PA gear and Equip Sword sent all three Ninjas into the dirt on their first turns.  What a difference a strong opening offense makes.   Massacre for the enemies.  Trolled Malak with Arm Aim while I waited for crystals and grabbed all the Move-Find items.

  OK, one additional reset because Rafa killed off Malak while I was stalling.  Of all the times for her to have high accuracy...

[Lady Door]

Cultist Simulator: Started playing this yesterday. I've now put like 3 hours into it and I'm still not sure if I understand what it is I'm supposed to be doing. It's a found narrative resource management RPG thingy? But it preys on all my worst impulses which is making it hard for me to know whether I'm actually enjoying the game or not. Timers, optimizations, push-pull resource management, serendipities, unfolding narrative - all driving me batty since on top of it I wasted the first 15 minutes of the game not reading any of the prompts (TIMERS!) or understanding there was a pause button or realizing that there were some obvious interdependencies with resources.

I think I'm liking it? It's at least giving me the hate-fuck feel where it makes me actively annoyed and I want to keep going just so I can satisfy my curiosity over whether I even like it.

[Captain K]

KH3: This has got to be in the running for most useless minimap ever. You can't expand it to a large size, and the way the levels are designed the map doesn't actually help because there's high areas on top of low areas. I don't get lost easily in games and I have no idea where I'm going half the time here.

On a positive note, theme park attractions are great.

[NotMiki]

The Surge: Dark Souls, reskinned for FPS fans.  It's your stock "the corporation that was pretending to be good is actually evil" near-future sci fi affair, wherein a bunch of cyborgs with their brains connected to the internet are zombified by something (spoilers: the something is going to be the intentional machinations of the company's Mark Zuckerburg-alike founder).  You play a middle aged brown haired white guy who became a cyborg to walk again.  The game never says why he was in a wheelchair at the very beginning but my headcanon is that he was injured trying to replicate something he saw on TV.  An everyman!  I call it Dudebro Souls.  More impressions on the plot later.  Not because it's some great thing that y'all need to experience, but because I'm finding it a good jumping-off point for analysis.  (My current impression is that it just doesn't lean hard enough toward satire or seriousness to work as either.)

Anyway, gameplay.  Combat is good but not great - you're able to target specific enemy parts, hit the armored bits to try to chop them off to farm goodies, hit the squishy bits if you're in business mode.  Mostly this has been pretty shallow, but there are a few standout enemies that have tricky movesets and require serious attention and effort.  Exploration and level design is where the game really shines, and it has great Dark Souls-like environments that function as labyrinthine levels but never lose their character as places that, were they not infested with enemies and strewn wreckage, would pass as actual distinct locations.  The level designers did an excellent job parceling out shortcuts, so that you have this tension of a long Dark Souls-ish excursion where you're sitting on a bunch of EXP and don't want to lose it, and you're incentivized to press onward in the hopes that you'll find safety ahead.  You get these treks where you have a vague sense of where you need to go (thanks to some good signposting) and are planning out a route to get there with enough healing left to handle any unknown threat.  It's not artistic in the way the Souls games are, but it's great, tense fun.

I'm probably about halfway through, more thoughts later.

[Niu]

Another Eden: a mobile game that boldly answers the question, "What if Chrono Trigger were boring?"  I'll stick with it a bit longer to see if it develops but I wouldn't recommend it based on the first few hours.

The plot stays boring forever. The gameplay does improve though.
Also, fetch Mariel from gacha.
The game's difficulty is heaven and Earth of a difference without her.

[SnowFire]

Tokyo Xanadu

Started this up.  What if you took Trails of Cold Steel, but had Ys 8 action-y combat rather than being an RPG?  Yeah, that's pretty close to what we have here.  Well that and the modern-Japan-with-superpowers-and-relationships setting Japanese devs love these days.  Prepare to pick which friends of which to have short vignettes with to power up your friendship meter and unlock cool combat bonuses, run errands to help people out, etc.

* Falcom is actually kind of a small studio, so you can tell they reused a bunch of assets.  Same sound effect for meters filling, same UI for teleporting around town & school as ToCS, same person-icons on minimaps with exclamation points for side quests, very similar art style, etc.  Luckily, that was all very solid work, so I'm not complaining.  (Although the fact that the game was designed for the Vita definitely shows as the dungeons being a tad sparse by PS4 standards...  but hey, call it cleanliness, less stuff to distract you in the dungeon background?)

* The music is new, but very similar in style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWcHShXPWis&list=PLzFTGYa_evXhpikCGKPmhrhEVOFzzcUIL

* Like Ys 8, if you do a last-second dodge, you get time to slow down and get an opening.  Also like the Ys series, the bosses are way way way WAY harder than the randoms, if you have trouble with the randos you will get your face melted by the boss.  Also like Ys 8, I am bad at this.  Playing on Hard mode, the boss of the Moonlit Garden (Sora's first dungeon...  no not that Sora, KH3 players) kicked my ass pretty hard.  I cleaned out all the dungeon randoms twice and saw that I gained about 1/4 of the way to the next level, so I'd only need to re-clear the dungeon 7 or so more times to grab another level.  Guess I'm not grinding my way out of trouble!  (Okay, you can grind MONEY with which to item-cheeze bosses if you like, so it's not totally pointless.  Although Mr. "I beat Infernal Ys 8 with no items" will probably look down on me.)  And yes, I did beat him, eventually, but it required gitting gud.

* As a slight difference from modern Ys games, there's only 1 character on screen at a time, and you're always in control, which is cool.  Barring super-team up attacks at least.  You just seamlessly tag in party members at the press of a button with the other two mysteriously not on screen, which makes no damn sense, but hey, gameplay.

* Plotwise, the secret world already exists and there's organizations dedicated to dealing with portals to the Eclipse, using that technology to build cell phone networks and apps and other cool gizmos, forging weapons, etc., which is cool and I prefer it to the "only 10 high schoolers know about this" approach.  Japan likes their techno-magic, though, with characters just manifesting their Soul Devices psychically.  If you're going to have blacksmiths as an in-setting thing, and call them devices, why not have it be closer to just straight-up tech?  Oh well.

* I get that nobody wants to watch a crisis of faith that weird psychic power stuff is going on, just as nobody wants a big crossover series to have characters worrying about going back home or WTF is going on, but Our Hero is reacting in very stereotypical shonen ways about using power to protect blah blah blah so far.  Yawn.  Aren't you more interested in why a bunch of high schoolers at the same school suddenly manifested psychic weaponry?  That seems like an interesting mystery, and unusual even in-setting where Wielders are supposed to be rare. 

* I'm not sure if this is just the natural logic of supernatural Japanese High School drama or what, but I'd just like to say that there's a purple-haired student & old family friend who looks after Our Hero like a sister, a young female teacher who also happens to look out for Our Hero, and a new exchange "student" who is a mentor in the ways of the supernatural, has blondeish hair, is coded as somewhat American/European, and seems like the default romance possibility.  This seems...  familiar...

[DjinnAndTonic]

* I'm not sure if this is just the natural logic of supernatural Japanese High School drama or what, but I'd just like to say that there's a purple-haired student & old family friend who looks after Our Hero like a sister, a young female teacher who also happens to look out for Our Hero, and a new exchange "student" who is a mentor in the ways of the supernatural, has blondeish hair, is coded as somewhat American/European, and seems like the default romance possibility.  This seems...  familiar...

But is there a twin-tail-sporting tsundere magical rival/love interest? You can't skip the most important part!

[074]

Muddling along with DQ11. I have met Sylvando. He is very, very gay, but not in a way that makes him seem like a joke, which I appreciate. I'm going to presume there's no way to actually beat him in that race, either.

It is actually possible to beat him, though pretty damn hard.  You don't get any special rewards for doing so, sadly.  (or maybe fortunately, since otherwise there'd be a lot of savescumming going on about the minigame)

[Luther Lansfeld]

Suikoden V - I decided to replay this because it’s one of my favoritest/oldest games that i have never replayed! I can’t remember why i haven’t played this soo- oh my god those load times why. It is totally bizarre and baffling that you can have this late PS2 game that has worse loading times than earlier PS2 games and even the PS1 era games. If any game needed an early toggle to skip randoms like BD, then it would be this game. Holy shit. This game is soooo slooooow.

Yeah, yeah, we know, the gameplay is dull and boring. So why are you playing this game again?

Oh yeah, the characters, the plot.

I think the character work in the first arc of the game is superb. The game presents you with a fleshed out, full family. How rare this seems in RPGs! Your parents are both distinct individuals and are both in fact quite real takes on parents (aside from the fact that my mom doesn’t have a nuclear bomb that she can fire at people). I always forget just how everpresent and important Sialeeds is throughout the whole game. The jaded edge that she brings to all of the conversations, particularly those about the duo of assholes, is well-needed and offers a great insider voice to the conflict at hand. She is sooooo good and would be one of the game’s best characters even before the face-heel turn.

Gizel is also really well-done. Marscal works effectively as the cold, calculating coup leader, but Gizel is is really the compelling one of the two. He’s also jaded in his own way (it’s as if the arranged marriage between Sialeeds and Gizel left both of them jaded!) . He seems to fancy himself as a magnificent bastard but also has a twisted soft side (he really does care about Sialeeds/Lym). It was fun to watch him in action as a casual tour guide of the Sacred Games, especially knowing how the plot ends up going. It’s actually neat having the PCs casually interact with one of the main villains when the player already knows that this guy is bad news. Reminds me a bit of Seymour in early FFX.

I really enjoyed the scene where Marscal and Gizel casually stroll through the halls of Sol-Falena castle after their coup, revisiting environments that you have previously explored while visiting your family. It's just that one extra gutpunch that you didn't know you needed. Haha.

Other than that, I like all of Georg, Miakis, and Lyon, although in my mind, I had definitely put Miakas higher than the other two but I’m not certain why so far. I will hold that thought, obviously, because I’ve only played eight hours of the game so far. We are just about to go recruit Lucretia.

The in-cutscene gesturing in this game is a little off. The subtlety of Suikoden III’s facial gestures and expressions is gone and replaced with wild hand flapping and overdramatized cutscenes. I think that’s the only real black mark plot/character wise so far. Translation is a lot better than Suikoden I-III (no comment on 4, been too long). The voice acting in cutscenes is actually a bit better than I was fearing, although the voice acting in the battles is poorly mixed.

Interesting experience so far!

[Tide]

One of my speedrunning friends basically described Suiko5 as a Visual Novel with minor RPG elements - that's probably pretty accurate given the strengths of the game!

I haven't played anything new yet; thinking about moving my PS4 to the condo so I'll need to do some packing but might be able to squeeze in Cold Steel 3 after. Right now, I played some of the post game in FF9 and good god, this is the worst post game in the PSX FF Series. I think attribute this primarily to Chocobo Hot and Cold (Who DESIGNED this?) which is just an awful experience playing it. I cannot understand how people enjoy this considering the fact that you just get garbage for like most of it. Also, I read the treasure guide and you don't even get that many good things out of it. FFX and FF12 had the right idea of making it more curtailed towards their battle systems (main selling points). In the PSX era, FF8 had Triple Triad and FF7 had a weird combo of grinding/Chocobo racing. FF9's treasure hunting/Tetra Master just doesn't work.

[DragonKnight Zero]

I happen to enjoy Chocobo Hot and Cold for its own sake.  Worst case, all those extra consumables can be sold for cash to fund my Disc 4 spending spree.  I'll admit to some frustration when Choco pecks all around a treasure spot without hitting it.  And going over 50 games without a Chocograph in the lagoon did wear on me.

  Lost some respect for FF9 over the years since they most likely ganked the Synthesis shop mechanics from Atelier series.  It's just that series stayed in Japan at the time so US players wouldn't know better.  Also a convenient segue into something I will have lots of words about.

Atelier Ayesha

  Background blather: I'd never heard of the Atelier series until the music tourney.  So my first impressions were a tune I ended up taking a liking to despite a lack of context and a "Who's the cute blond?" thought at an artwork sample.  Looked up a bit about the series in general and it seems the kind of thing I'd enjoy.  Played Mana Khemia 10 years after the rest of the DL as I didn't have a PS3 and it validated that I find the item crafting enjoyable.  That game whetted my appetite for an entry which fully embraces a girly-girl protagonist.  I have no complaints about using a male lead to help the game sell better in other regions (a smart move) but given the seriies' roots, was still interested in experiencing a game totally unapologetic about having a leading female.

  Maybe I'll get into the story of how I found a PS3 within my spending limits another time.  Still wish the connection inside the TV I use weren't so worn out.  I feel like I lost some graphical quality because of a worn S-video connection that a new cable didn't seem to completely fix.  It;s a good thing I went with PS3 since I noticed early on how small the text is.  Would not want to try playing this on a portable screen.

  Selected gameplay impressions: The global timer doesn't feel that oppressive.  Only select actions move it so routing doesn't feel that stressful.  Standing around doesn't appear to advance it or if it does, it advances so slowly that I don't feel like I need to rush.  I'm not going to try for 100% or a perfect file the first time through.

  There's a lot of learning game mechanics as I go.  Game does give out enough info to feel like I have a foothold on basic actions but leaves a lot to discovery.  Some of it is just buried in in-game help files that I didn't pay close attention to though other times, it appears some things the game doesn't explain at all.  It was several ingame months before I worked out what the different colors of damage numbers really mean.  I also didn't figure out how to correctly pick up monster item drops for a while which led to losing quite a bit of loot in the early going.  Feels like I've barely scratched the surface on item synthesis.  Mostly use whatever ingredients I have more of at the moment and not thinking about quality too much.  There's a deep system in place so output of the same item can be quite highly varied and most traits will have some kind of effect.

  Main source of income seems to be filling delivery requests, which I feel fits the context of the game.  Battles give pithy cash for the most part.  I also dig the varied ways of acquiring Memory Points.

[074]

Etrian Odyssey Nexus - Kind of the last hurrah of the EO series on the 3DS.  And it's one hell of a sendoff, what with having a shitton of classes available.  The combat and exploration are about what you expect from the series (so I can't really say it has anything that would convert people who don't like EO's bit) but they retain the general level of quality.  First game to have a world map of sorts (symbol-based), and it seems to try and ease players into it a bit more along the lines of Untold Story Modes.  It's still a classic-style EO, however, and with 60 character slots, it's encouraging customization.

EO5's its base system, mechanically, so armor is still a necessity.

Observation of classes I've tried heavily so far:
Hero: The devs said this was meant to kind of cover all three categories, and in a sense it does.  Heroes have a fairly standard set of offensive skills (albeit, nothing special thus far), have solid defense due to being able to equip shields (alongside a skill that lets them give the party a defense bonus before the attack goes off), and a passive that lets them recover the team's HP when they use a skill.  Decentish TP pool too.  The main wrinkle they get is that their actions will sometimes create afterimages which take up a party slot, and then echo the action that spawned them before disappearing.  They're basically the closest thing to a Mana Khemia character invading the game, and there is some strong potential there with that skillset.  Solid with a cute gimmick, but nothing *really* special at the time being.

Gunner: Yeah, not going to lie, I liked this class so much I had to use it again.  These guys are different from their EOU2 counterparts, tossing aside the elemental bullets for playing around a good bit with accuracy and evasion, binds that ignore evasion entirely, and a strong, albeit inaccurate attack skill in Rapid Fire.  They also retain Stun as being their big status effect of choice; Riot Gun remains their Force Break, and Shell Shock is also good at keeping a back row tied up.  Double Action doesn't offer that great of damage benefits, but it does let them get a second action in for free for the relevant skills.  Medic Bullet remains their backup healing option, of course, but if you're relying on this guy as a healer you're probably doing something wrong.

Ronin: This is what happens when Blademaster Masurao get improved on.  Rather than lock moves to stances entirely, Ronin instead reward you for using stance-related moves by having them autocrit when you're in the relevant stance.  These guys have probably the most consistent damage in the earlygame, and they're absolute monsters in that sense.  Probably the squishiest frontliner this side of two-sword Shoguns or Nightseekers, though.  Just, skill crits.  Enough said.

Landsknecht: HI GUYS I HOPE YOU LIKE CHASERS.  Seriously that's like half their active moveset early on.  Their other abilities are an initiative attack, a buff that trades DEF for more ATK, and a shield-based attack that debuffs the target's ATK.  So...yeah, not the worst, but nothing really special.  Their passive ability lets them give more damage and accuracy to allies when leading off, so that can be helpful in some cases (coughGunnercough), but they're...nothing too great?  Force Boost is a general self-buff that gives them more speed, power, and accuracy.  They're really good at hitting things.  And chasers.

Survivalist: ...weird hybrid ranged/utility class that is also the inverse of gunner in some ways.  Whereas Gunner has gimmicks working against enemy evasion, Survivalist instead is about breaking down enemy accuracy and facilitating evasion bullshit for your party.  They also get line-piercing physicals and a fire-elemental option early on (...surprisingly rare outside of Zodiac).  Lots of out-of-combat utility, too, including stealing the Warlock's "I ignore terrain bullshit" skill from EO5 and keeping their EOU2 out-of-combat heal.  Force Boost is a partywide speed and evasion boost.  Plays very well with a dodgetank-oriented party.

Medic: ...they heal people.  They also have some staffbeat abilities that require me to put them in frontrow to see how well they work, but they heal you.  Their force boost makes their heals faster and cheaper.  They are the platonic ideal of healer.

Sovereign: Uh, holy shit these guys.  Buff like mad and with proper investment, can heal while doing so.  ...alongside the varied passive healing effects they just throw out.  Also tanky as hell.  The value of buffs cannot be underestimated, though, especially in a game like this.  Force Boost making them AoE and cheaper only helps.  Probably one of the MVP classes of the game.

Imperial: The other high-end offense class of the game, these guys specialize into being walking tanks.  Best STR this side of Ronin, best VIT this side of Protector, and they get some of the craziest burst damage options in the game, with Assault Drive being absolutely monstrous...with a 7-turn cooldown or so.  Doesn't stop it from doing over 200 damage under the right conditions in super-earlygame.  Nevermind the ability to prevent the cooldown entirely with their Force Boost.  Their drawbacks?  A couple.  These guys are almost entirely selfish, skillwise, and their speed and TP pool blow.  The latter is kind of mitigated by their Force Break (letting them overheal their TP), but they're first and foremost a damage-dealer who works best when built around.  And they're almost always going last.  I love the bastards anyway.

Harbinger: Feels like they got a weird tradeoff between 5 and Nexus.  They're a lot less investment-heavy in Nexus, with Auto-Miasma being folded into Miasma Armor (thank god), but their numerical effects got downgraded.  Probably as a result of being in a game where subclassing is A Thing, and having to compete with other status-slingers like Nightseeker and Ninja.  Still pretty good, though, and Miasma Armor lets them be faster than their stats suggest they should.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Yeah I also enjoy Chocobo Hot & Cold as a mini-game (unlike all the other FF mini-games Tide mentioned). I don't really care about how good a mini-game's rewards are; a fun mini-game with bad rewards is still fun, while a bad mini-game with good rewards is a chore you feel obligated to play. That said mini-game taste gonna vary, and there's nothing wrong with that.

That said FF9 hasn't aged well to me anyway, and synthing was always bad. Just what I want, running between stores to get things I need only to synth something in hopes that the skills it will teach me are actually useful instead of junk how fasci-zzzzz

[Niu]

KH3 - gummi ship seriously needs better navigation.
Respawning crystal is also the worst design ever...

[Fudozukushi]

The in-cutscene gesturing in this game is a little off. The subtlety of Suikoden III’s facial gestures and expressions is gone and replaced with wild hand flapping and overdramatized cutscenes. I think that’s the only real black mark plot/character wise so far. Translation is a lot better than Suikoden I-III (no comment on 4, been too long). The voice acting in cutscenes is actually a bit better than I was fearing, although the voice acting in the battles is poorly mixed.

Interesting experience so far!

IV's translation is generally fine for base understanding but the sentence structure is incredibly stiff and overwordy.  Too many broken contractions and examples of dialog no person would speak.  Tactics and V really shoot way, way ahead on translation and text quality it's kind of insane.

[Captain K]

Is this the first time the DL is playing a game at the same time as Niu?

KH3: THE FUCKING MOBILE GAME?

[Cmdr_King]

Funny enough KHIII had close to a world wide release (Japan got it about 4 days sooner) so everyone got to do it around the same time!

[Halbarad]

Finally getting to some backlog, started Danganronpa 2 a few days ago. Interesting blend of VN and Ace Attorney, enjoying it quite a bit so far.

[NotMiki]

Etrian Odyssey V:  This game is literally impossible.  In order to beat it you have to form a party.

[Niu]

Is this the first time the DL is playing a game at the same time as Niu?

KH3: THE FUCKING MOBILE GAME?

Yes, the plot is entirely about mobile game now.
Ven and Marluxia are both mobile game character from distant past. The girl Saix and Axel is looking for is also a mobile game character. The black box is also from Mobile game.
The REAL chess master that is playing everyone is also a mobile game character.
But this still pales in front of the true insanity that's the secret movie.