What games are you playing 2021: Please don't bully cute, girly-girl alchemist

[DragonKnight Zero]

  Surprisingly, not starting off with yapping about Atelier.  Well, only a little.  It just sunk in I have a console capable of playing early Atelier.  I lack the Japanese literacy to do so though and I hear the early games are kind of clunky and rough so not much incentive to seek imports.

Tales of Symphonia - The last rodeo

   Thought I'd have nothing interesting to relate about a replay where I start with carryover titles, over 350,000 Gald, and 30 item capacity.  But then proto-Flonne dies in 3 consecutive boss fights, twice while controlling her which is quite comical considering I got Friendship First on the previous playthrough (no allies KO'ed before a set boss fight).  As well as Eternal Apprentice on the same one (and glad I never have to do that again unless I'm feeling masochistic).   So she's very low-leveled for a while which is compounded by blazing through not fighting many randoms.  Raine also dropped at the Clumsy Assassin and I managed to finish a later boss with Lloyd in the dirt too.  This time around, I do the unicorn quest before unlocking the 4th seal which gives scenes that are new to me.  Some of them are quite funny.  "Pact, pact, pact."

   I reach just before the first Tower of Salvation visit and its big plot reveals with a battle count of 124.  This is noteable only because the last Training Manual entry requires 150 and a party member who won't be around for a while after the tower.  Could have played it safe and grind them out and get some progress towards Berserker while at it.  Go on for science and because how often am I really going to look at this point?

[Dark Holy Elf]

Mega Man 5 - Continuing the weapon-focused playthroughs. This time, the required order of use was Gravity > Gyro > Wave > Napalm > Crystal > Stone > Charge > Star.

For the most part, the stages weren't too bad, or at least no harder than normal. Perhaps the biggest exception was Crystal, who's just a rough boss to buster. But overall, nothing I couldn't handle.

The Darkman/Wily stages get way tougher though. Most took me a few tries to finally get through.

Darkman 4 is just a boss, but beating it with essentially an uncharged buster (Gyro) is tough! He 5HKOs and requires good play to dodge.

Wily Fortress 2 features a tricky stage (lots of platforming over pits) followed by a tricky boss weak to Gyro. I get through eventually by managing to conserve ammo so I have just enough Gyro to win.

The boss rush isn't too bad relatively, I mostly just use up my weapons in order against their weaknesses. Takes a few game overs to get things right but it's fine. Helps that the Wily boss at the end is really easy.

But no, the big problem in this playthrough came at the very end, against the final boss. Oddly MM5 does not have what is normally considered a particularly difficult final boss, but... here's the deal. There are two forms, and both are immune to Gravity and Wave, so my first two weapons in order are Gyro and Napalm. Both do 1 damage to each form. And it is virtually impossible to hit the first form with Napalm without getting hit, because you have to get right in close and he can either shoot you in the face with a cannon ball or use a suction attack which pulls you into him for impact damage. The whole point of the fight normally is to keep your distance!

So, yeah. If I run out of Gyro I'm using Napalm here and I'm toast. Obvious solution is to not miss with Gyro when killing the first form (or maybe at most once). But there's an extra problem; on the way to the boss (which you have to redo if you die), there are a couple of enemies immune to Gravity who are too big to jump over or walk past, so either I have to kill them (using up substantial amounts of Gyro ammo) or take damage from them. I settle for taking damage. 6 each time = 12 total, leaving me with only 16 health to beat both forms of the final boss. And while the bosses aren't the toughest in the series, hitting them 56 times (since I'm only doing 1 damage) before I get hit 3-4 times (depending on what hits me) is rough! Final boss has cool music, though.

I eventually do it after 2 or 3 hours of trying. After 20+ times of reliably getting to the boss with only taking the two hits from the big robot enemies, I eventually let myself use the Switch Collection's load game feature to restart right before the boss, since I figure this is just saving my sanity.

Weapon thoughts:
-Gravity Hold is interesting and well-balanced overall. You only get 7 shots, 1-3 kill anything, you can fire it quickly, and it hits everything on the screen. Nukes problems with great accuracy, but limited ammo. In this playthrough I largely end up using it at the start of most stages, so RIP first rooms. Interestingly although it costs 4 WE, you can use it even if you only have 2 left, so getting even a small recharge is another shot.
-Gyro Attack is a respectable weapon, decent power, initially goes horizontally and you then can changes its direction to up or down at any point by pressing up/down. Don't slide after firing it unless you want it to go down! It's quite useful overall, good power and flexible, though the one per screen limit hurts.
-Water Wave is AWFUL, holy shit. In a series with bad groundcrawlers (Bubble, Snake) somehow this the worst one yet. You can't even fire it unless you're on the ground, it doesn't climb walls, there's a one-per-screen limit. It can cancel shots travelling low to the ground but that's about it. Lowish power too, often needs two shots to kill things. Gross. It also costs 2 WE per use for some reason, but this is a mercy since I use it up faster.
-Napalm Shot is another ground-crawler, a slow moving one. Great. But this one can be fired in the air, has decent power, and explodes when it hits something, so it's far far better than Wave.

The weapons past that point see only limited use.


Fire Emblem Three Houses - Mage playthrough done!

Everyone went Monk -> Mage pretty much.

Byleth: Enlightened One -> Mortal Savant
The face when your personal class is basically MS without Tomefaire. Anyway Byleth trained bows up to C as well for Curved Shot and to have a pegasus-killer. She didn't typically OHKO pegasi anyway, but the options were certainly nice.

Edelgard: Warlock -> Valkyrie -> Dark Knight
Probably should have gone straight to Valk first but my poor planning. Anyway she ended up with horrible speed but incredible defence, so she usually strapped on the Aegis Shield and accepted being doubled for hopefully not too much damage. Her res was really high too, but still, anything which could overwhelm her got pretty scary. tbh I should have gotten her a guard adjutant as well. On offence she had nothing overwhelming but a bit of everything, Hades and Lightning Axe and Raging Storm and Brave Axe all offered various power options even though her magic was only middle-of-the-road.

Hubert: Paladin
Frozen Lance'd things, used Arrow of Indra, used Rally Magic occasionally. He had good mobility and OHKO potential, though fell off a bit towards the end.

Linhardt: Bishop
He healed and occasionally used Warp or attacked, although he was magic-screwed so everything that wasn't healing didn't actually work as well as I'd like. Held the Stride battalion. The 11th PC.

Dorothea: Warlock -> Mortal Savant
Kinda got RNG blessed, had the best speed on the team as well as high charm and magic. Also Physic, Thoron, Meteor, Hexblade, got Black Range +1 quickly due to snowballing. Probably the overall playthrough MVP (certainly had the most kills).

Sylvain: Warlock -> Dark Knight
Lower magic, but higher speed than other mages. Gave him Vestra Sorcery Engineers so he'd have decent avoid (stack with Evasion Ring and Black Magic Avoid for +40 total), which allowed him to bait some things, especially when on favourable terrain. Also had Physic.

Mercedes: Bishop -> Gremory
A bit RNG-screwed and I didn't get her super-early. So she was primarily a healer but could still throw in competent enough damage. Also was my res-tank, with the Hexlock Shield and armour Annette adjutant.

Lysithea: Valkyrie -> Gremory
Luna is such a good troubleshooter for the mage team (she and Edelgard were my only really good options for enemies with super-high res). Between that, Dark Spikes, and high power, she had an answer for a lot of things, though really wants a range-booster of course, especially once I sent her back to Gremory (which I don't regret, 4 Lunas instead of 2 for lategame was crucial).

Marianne: Valkyrie
Didn't get her until Chapter 6 so joining with E reason kinda sucks, and she never did get Fimbulvetr, but Frozen Lance and Thoron are both great options, and another Physic user is nice too.

Constance: Dark Flier
Dark Flier is busted and whoever I put in it was destined to be useful. Constance also had good damage but shaky accuracy with her power spells (due to limited supports and Nuvelle Fliers having poor hit). Rescue was nice sometimes.

Hapi: Dancer
Was getting respectable stats overall but I ended up putting her in Dancer due to being able to get Move+1 relatively easily from her riding boon (could have used Marianne for this as well I suppose... they're pretty similar! But Mari does have Frozen Lance).

Jeritza: Only used as a 12th, never did anything besides use the Blessing gambit on others (survive fatal damage once per battle), which never ended up actually kicking in but did allow me to deal with the final boss much more safely.

The last two maps are probably the ones where the team was a bit weaker compared to a normal one, partly because enemy stats spike up so OHKOs (something mages are often good at) get harder, and partly because the monsters have anti-magic barriers so I had to poke a hole with a blessed weapon or gambit then barrage away before they recharge. Worked though. The two big Chapter 17 bosses were both pretty tricky, especially the moving one (Luna MVP), and the final had more durability when I couldn't shove lots of brave weapons down her throat. Even after all remaining my gambits and five Raging Storms I still had some more HP left to carve through, but fortunately Edelgard's defences were super-high so she could even survive a crit (+double, with Blessing) and Sylvain could almost null her hit on player phase, both of which helped. Still no full resets, so hey! Was fun.

[SnowFire]

Super Mario Bros. 2 (All-Stars edition via Switch online)

Summoning Salt doing a new video reminded me that it's been ages since I replayed SMB2.  Decided to give the All-Stars version a shot, never played that one before.  Was gonna do all the stages (no warps) and generally try to avoid major shortcuts; we'll take the scenic route.  I picked a random character for 1-1 then always advanced to the next character right in strict rotation (barring times I muffed up, I guess?).

Thoughts?  Well, 3-3 is still a MASSIVE SLOG, I remember that.  Sheesh is that a long level; while any one part isn't necessarily super-hard, it adds up over time.  And...  the world 5 stages are hard.  Granted, this is a bit of an artifact of having a lot of practice on stage 6 & 7 thanks to how warps work in the NES version, and not much practice with stage 5, but still, sheesh.  Didn't help I drew Toad for the jumping across waterfalls with flying fish stage of nonsense that Luigi mocks but Toad has to play the hard way.  Yeah, there was some Switch emulator rollback abuse there.  Also, is it just me, or are the Bob-ombs way less cute in the All-Stars version?

World 6 wasn't so bad even taking the long route for 6-3.  Stage 7-1, same.  7-2...  hrmm.  I died once to the stage, once to the bird head gate at the end, but had 11 lives left going into Wart, so what could the problem be, right?  Well.  Um.  Yeah, Wart wrecked me and easily crushed all of my attempts; this was having 3 life too (getting 4 life I seem to recall being really annoying on 7-2).  I didn't even get CLOSE to beating him; maybe I fed him 3 vegetables once.  While I clearly remember some of the stages well enough, I've apparently totally forgotten how to fight Wart, or he's tougher in All-Stars; that bubble spray just hits a huge area and blocks my attempts to feed him vegetables.  I can feed him at point-blank range if I get a lucky guess on when he's about to open his mouth but that risks both getting hit as well as just ramming into him.   Yowch.  (I've got a save state for the fight, so I really have infinite lives, but was trying to play somewhat legit-y, which means getting sent back to 7-1 after you lose your last life on Wart!  Ouch!)  Moral is clearly Wart for Smash.

[DragonKnight Zero]

So I blew through Mega Man 3 again.  (not in one sitting)  Rather than try to give highlights and lowlights, I'm using as an excuse to yap about the special weapons.  Namely, giving my ratings on how fun they are to use.  This is a completely subjective rating where I incorporate overall usefulness, how enjoyable it is to use, and creativity.  Gimmicky weapons are seen as a positive.  Scale out of 10 just because.

Needle Cannon: 4/10  Kneejerk is lower actually.  But it has built-in autofire and low ammo consumption so that boosted my rating.  Lacking in power though maybe I need to experiment more.  Still, only firing forwards means it's dull to use and I may as well stick with the peashooter unless I'm feeling exceptionally lazy.

Magnet Missile: 5/10  There's a few sections where it's really useful and one of the few options for hitting enemies high up that Shadow Blade can't reach.  Can burn through ammo really fast being able to have two onscreen at once.  Has an annoying tendency to go after projectiles rather than the enemy firing them or miss on enemies with decently fast horizontal movement (like the bomb droppers or the ones that launch torpedoes from below) which kept it from a higher rating.

Gemeini Laser: 2/10  The gimmick is a funny one, I'll give it that.  However, missing a shot reveals a lot of weaknesses.  There can be only one shot on the screen at a time and you're unable to pause with any weapon fire onscreen (that doesn't change until Megaman 4) so you're very vulnerable while it's bouncing around.  And if you're not reflecting it off surfaces, it becomes another ho-hum forward firing weapon.  The satisfaction of making trick shots with the laser is enough to boost the rating, even more on a moving target.  On pure usefulness, it would be a one or even a zero.

Hard Knuckle: 4/10  Being able to alter its vertical axis raises the fun factor and the usefulness.  Packs decent power too.  Slow firing speed just doesn't do it for me in most cases though.  And it does seem to lack a certain oomph in a power weapon because of the firing sound being the same as the buster.  Yes, I am lowering the rating because of this.  Being able to smack Gamma in the head out of its firing line is a fun time though.

Top Spin: 5/10  Most of the rating is in the silliness and fun factor.  Flinging Megaman around like some berserk ballerina is such a novel thing.  Has it's uses in stages but the all-or-nothing nature of Top Spin can make it frustrating to use.  Either it oneshots the target or the enemy is immune and Mega eats collision damage.  So takes a lot of memorization to get the best mileage out of it.

Search Snake: 7/10  I got a lot of use out of this thanks to low energy consumption and the fact it scales walls.  Deals with other ground hugging enemies quite well without the hassle of aiming.  Less than ideal for enemies on the same horizontal plane; use something else.  This also isn't a power weapon, barely doing more damage than a buster shot except on select foes.  Robotic snakes are a more exotic form of attack than yet another plasma, fire, or weapon with pointy bits and the creativity of it also boosts the rating I gave it.

Spark Shock: 1/10  I wanted to give it a zero but it's very well suited to two of the bosses.  The other bosses it hits weakness on, Shadow Blade also hits for the same damage.  Sucks to be you Spark Shock.  Spark Shock's issues are fairly well documented but I wanted to write about them anyways.  It can only stun regular enemies, not kill.  Thing is, a stunned enemy is counted as a weapon shot onscreen so you can't switch weapons after stunning one unless you move far away enough that it's no longer on the screen.  Combine this with that this only fires forward; geez using this is actively detrimental when you hit something in front of you.  It just creates the awkward situation of trying to work around that stunned enemy  and now you can't switch weapons until the enemy is unstunned.  Could try to zap flying or jumping enemies with it so they don't block the way forward.  Or just kill them with something else or use Rush to evade them and not be a sitting duck.   If it could be aimed in 8 directions like Metal Blade, it could have theoretical use to zap something so that it doesn't get in your path but what we got is such a letdown.

Shadow Blade: 8/10  5-way aiming (couldn't aim down with it), decent but not overwhelming power (so it doesn't overshadow everything else in the arsenal), low energy use so it can be used often.  Many applications during stages.  This is one of the few MM3 weapons that isn't a disappointment for use outside bosses.  Ninja stars also have that cool factor going for them.  I don't have that much else to say about Shadow Blade; it's the quirky, gimmicky, or awful weapons that inspired me to do this writeup.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Brigandine LoR - Beaten as Shinobi, on Hard (first time playing Hard)

The biggest difference of Hard seems to be that the enemy does get better monsters faster, and scale into the later stages of the game better. The earlygame is pretty unchanged, near as I can tell, beyond the enemies being smarter about retreating after their monsters attack. I basically steamrolled the earlygame anyway, Shinobi have a super-easy path into Norzaleo and then Gustava during which they only rarely need to have more than 3 borders, and Shinobi have more than enough competent knights for that. The toughest part was taking over the centre of the continent which came later, when I needed to expand the border count to 5 and the enemy had done a decent job levelling up, but fortunately Shinobi had the tools to handle it.

Interesting nation, especially playing after MS. There's no one super-dominant knight in Shinobi. Nobody is as good as Stella, and certainly not Rudo. And despite having not played them, I feel pretty confident that nobody is as good as Eliza or Tim either. Instead, the nation has literally about half a dozen knights who could be the second best in many countries, or in the conversation for it. Some specific notes, detailing every character I got to tier 3 on this run:

Medessa - There's always a case to be made that the best knight is the one with the most magic pool, so here she is. 5 command range too, only one in the country. I just used her as a pure Saint, Area Heal is nice and there are worse things than having healing options (Cure, Heal) as needed. Divine Ray has enough oomph to kill things, though only range 2 is a downer, and Paralyze at range 3 is a neat trick other saints don't get. I do think that I probably should have reclassed her ASAP (she starts with Healer mastered)... you trade away some HP but getting another knight with Charm (Enchantress) or buffs/debuffs (Bard) is a big deal.

Toby - The other end of the spectrum, has the lowest magic pool of the nation's "good" knights (still above average), but has the best combat. His dodgetanking is insane (game-best Agi, +40 from class, buffs himself further with one of his attacks), and unlike many melee units, he actually has a decent 1-3 range attack, even in tier 2, so he doesn't need to worry about getting tied up on the front lines the way most melee knights do. Just so good, even without the ability to do super-high damage.

Della - Or maybe she had the best combat, IDK. Since the hard parts of the run came later she was actually around for most of them. Not as dodgy as Toby but still pretty darn dodgy, and just so flexible - range 1 nuke, range 2 coinflip status + decent damage, Double Movement to get where you want after it.

Sid - I think my biggest departure from Super is that I don't really see the appeal of Sword Master? It needs to use its buff just to match Assassin evade (still a nice option, mind), and it has no ranged damage or double movement. The range-1 high-damage move is nice but since it's not post-movement it can be a bit hard to use when you really need it (and you only get one shot, and it doesn't hit that much harder than Assassin's anyway tbh). Sid is still a very solid all-rounder with good stats everywhere, but never felt like he was challenging for the MVP. Maybe I should have made him a Treasure Hunter, especially since he'd be suffering through Thief during the easy part of the run.

Carla - Kinda like Sid, she's very generically competent in all stats (bit less Str/Agi, bit more durability/rune). I like her class more in tier 3 because Grand Wave is so good, though less in tier 2. It's funny how she's so clearly a better Emma on paper, but MS standards for knights are so much worse that Emma's in the running for #2 knight of her nation and Carla definitely isn't.

Reche - Project character but actually good? Again, benefits from early Shinobi being on the easy side. i dualled her with five levels of Enchantress followed by Bard, so she was basically a Bard with Charm and Frost (the latter mostly just saw use for getting kills and levels in the early going). Charm good, though. Loads of magic pool, good skillset. The squishiness was something to watch, though.

Jose - Worse version of Sid (he starts four levels higher and his only advantage is a bit more rune which will vanish), but definitely still respectable.

Sylvie and Scymerius - Gustava sure has pretty good defeat-bonus knights. They were filler but competent at it, both made it to tier 3.

Talia - She's the weakest ruler, probably (can't comment on Rubino vs her yet, but he seems better?). Still, there's a lot to like about her. Still has the second highest magic pool in the nation by a fair bit. Takes hits much better than most "mages" and having a 2-range breath weapon that hits decently hard AND is actually IFF is nice (meaning it's still useful even if she's hiding behind a bulky monster). After promotion, Area Heal and Holy Word are nice tools too, and she has the MP to use whatever she wants a lot. Just very flexible. That said, isn't a death tank the way many other rulers are, and I got burned for this once or twice... losing other knights is annoying, but it's extra terrible when it happens to a ruler since you auto-lose the battle and have no chance to win and thus reclaim any monsters they randomly leave behind.


In terms of monsters:
-This was the first run I used mandrakes a lot. I don't like their low move in tier 1, but the added status on all their stuff is a neat boon for a frontliner. No breath weapon, but a ST 1-3 move is still a nice option.
-Goblins feel quite buffed now with the third form. 1-3 post-movement lets them be centaur-like, and it has added status! Still inferior centaurs until then, of course, but there's no shame in that since centaurs rule.
-Titans... mm. Less impressed relatively. The last form gets a 1-2 line but unlike Talia's it's not IFF so it's just "hey this is what dragons and sea serpents have been doing since Level 1" and I don't think the cost is enough lower to justify it, especially with how bad the first two forms are relatively.
-I gained respect for Nightmare's push. It's something they can do on turns they need to move and is a great little repositioning option. You don't always want to push enemies, but fortunately Nightmares rarely want to attack otherwise, so it just ends up being yet another utility use for them. Such a great monster.

Such a good game, I'm starting to think I might have underrated it a bit.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Hades - So good.

EDIT: Also, Zagreus and Thanatos are very much estranged lovers. Dionysus is the nice-cocked friend with benefits. Finally we have the egregiously gay roguelike I've been craving for all these years.

EDIT2 for the Greftars: https://twitter.com/KaiserNeko/status/1347850772273373186?s=20

[SnowFire]

Fire Emblem Three Houses: Azure Moon
Finished.  Sheesh Three Houses is a long game.  I really wish that, similar to Bloodstained getting a classic mode, there was some sort of no-monastery and you'll like it option.  I know Elf did that low-monastery run, but I found it difficult to avoid the honey trap of Optimized Between Mission gameplay, which helps stretch things out with lots and lots of dining-for-support conversations or the Sauna minigame yet again.  Ah well.  I did manage to get no less than 3 characters all the way to S+ for the last three missions, which I didn't come remotely close to in my more casual original run of the game, so the game does reward this a bit.  (Felix got Bowfaire, Ingrid Lancefaire, and Annette Black Tomefaire.)

Final battle is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY_-H2Wg8WQ
Annoyingly enough, it seems that the sound isn't quite sync'd with the video.  Wonder if there's an easy way to move the audio track 2 seconds later everywhere or the like?  Ah well.

The infamous nastiest-ninja-reinforcement ever in the Azure Moon final did indeed burn some divine pulses, but is also kinda dumb.  Like, given how Maddening is balanced, I'm not really sure what they were thinking.  Almost nothing (maybe Flayn?) can survive 2x surprise siege tome hits, so it's "DP to staying really far back with only your dodgetank up front."  That isn't actually interesting.  (Or some sort of Retribution / Sacred Shield combo I guess.)

Anyway, characters / builds…  were mostly pretty standard, really.

BylethM: Standard Merc - Assassin - Enlightened One, yawn.  It's free and solid.  Byleth was the only front-line normal swords user and this doesn't require any fancy training, meaning I didn't feel the need to branch out.  And I'm always happy to have more free heals and the ability to fry Armor Knights.  Despite his weak magic, got a decent amount of Levin Sword+ work in after Curved Shot Iron Bow fell off and to set up more linked attacks.

Dimitri: Cavalier - Paladin - Great Lord.  Yep, nothing special here, except I gave Dimitri the Sacred Galewind Shoes from the DLC for +2 Move, a March Ring for +1 Move, and eventually +1 Move from A+ Riding.  Got to skitter around on foot like he was a sprinter.  Super Charm meant he landed some key Wave Attacks when getting mobbed by enemies (e.g. Reunion at Dawn, or Fort Merceus when you take out one of the reinforcement sides and foolishly haven't taken out the central units like I did.)

Ingrid:  Pegasus Knight - Falcon Knight.  I gave her the Knowledge Gem early so she got to Alert Stance+ really fast (C9 or so?).  While her damage is tragic, a really good dodgetank that can also eat magic attacks is just essential on the last few maps which love their long-range mages.  More than once I was able to send her off on solo missions to distract enemies I didn't want to deal with while the rest of the team mobbed the others, such as on the Enbarr city map where Ingrid could distract a bunch of Flying Demonic Beasts. 

Felix: Archer - Sniper.  Got MVP a lot, probably was the MVP.  Felix qualified for Bow Knight, but I never ended up using it; Maddening enemies are just too damn fast, meaning that Hunter's Volley was just always better than a regular attack, even with a Brave Bow.  I gave Felix a Boots and the Fetters of Dromi for total +2 Move and Canto, allowing the same kind of move forward, kill something, dance back pattern that Bow Knight has, and the Hit / Crit increase combined with picking between Iron Bow+, Silver Bow+, and Killer Bow+ depending on how much damage was required still killed damn near everything. 

Annette: Mage - Dark Flier.  Got Thrysus and eventually Black Mage Range +1 for super unfair strike from a zillion miles off then fly away shenanigans, great for aggroing enemies.  Did some cheesy extra qualifications since DF bases suck so badly, notably Wyvern Rider / Fortress Knight / Warlock.  While Annette's stats do not age well, the Weight -3 from training up her Armor was relevant for a nice long time to keep her speed from going completely in the tank.  Practically never used Crusher or Dust, although did use Lightning Axe'd Devil Axes before then occasionally.

Ashe: Brigand - Wyvern Rider - Wyvern Lord.  Even with Deathblow and Strength+2, Ashe struggles to get OHKOs, barring breaking out a Brave Axe vs. the frail.  Thankfully, Seal Defense and Curved Shot / Deadeye make him fantastic for softening enemies up for a Hunter's Volley / Swift Strikes / Brave Axe / whatever, and hey, sometimes there are injured units that can be safely cleaned up by Ashe.  The defense break effect was always pretty handy on monsters as well to make it efficient to chew through 'em.  Like Annette, the stats let him down, but no unit in Wyvern Lord or Dark Flier is ever gonna be truly bad.

Dedue: Brigand - Wyvern Rider - Wyvern Lord.  Yep, worked against the flying bane to get another WL, it wasn't as bad as I feared.  Helps salvage Dedue's speed decently, especially in the midgame, even if the trick mostly stops working by endgame.  For the most part, I didn't really need/use Brave weapons that much, but timeskip Dedue was definitely the exception: he needed the Brave Axe rather than Killer Axe / Silver Axe Smashes decently often, but his murderous strength made his Brave Axe kill way more stuff than Ashe, of course.

Mercedes: Mage - Bishop - Gremory.  She got Caduceus and (very late) Black Magic Range +1, so could also do some ranged chip nonsense herself.  Decent mix of a front-line chipper and a back-line healer; the fact she has an actual speed stat was very nice.  Losing Bishop's bonus to healing when going Gremory was unfortunate though and was definitely felt in her Physics / Fortifies feeling a bit puny compared to expectations.

Sylvain: Cavalier-Paladin.  Killed stuff with Swift Strikes Scythe of Sariel.

Seteth: Cavalier-Paladin.  Killed stuff with Swift Strikes Lance of Assal.

Dorothea: Mage-Dancer.  Her job was to have a Meteor tome out as often as possible and provide free linked attack bonuses, pretty much.

Marianne: Priest - Trickster - Bishop.  She helped take up the slack on healing which allowed Mercie to do more front-line smashing, although she got to swing around a Levin Sword+ occasionally.  Did indeed get to Beast Fang some cavaliers in the face on C19 and the like with Blutgang.

I did build Caspar so he could get the turn 1 win on The Face Beneath (didn't seem like something that would make sense to delay), so I guess he was the 13th character?  Recruited him as late as possible in C12, ground up Deathblow and Fierce Iron Fist on him in aux battles / as an adjutant, then Mercie Ragnarok (backed by Gilbert as a defensive adjutant to ensure DK didn't horribly overkill her on the counterattack) into Fierce Iron Fist did the trick.  But then it was back to adjutant duty for him.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Hades - Beaten six times. I felt like I was at a major wall with the final boss then something clicked about the fight and now I've beaten it six times our of seven (and the one loss I was very, very close to a win).

Like everyone else has already figured out, this game is good. Not sure how much longer I'm gonna play it. I'm close to one reasonable stopping point but pretty sure I want to do more than that, just not sure how much.

Wild Arms 4 - Beat this again for my line counting project. It's still good. Everything seems easy after how crazy my last challenge run was, this time I still just banned Intrude/Slow Down and nah I generally know the game too well. Also the game gave me three Tiny Flowers from drops/steals, that kinda breaks the game.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Decided to download this for the PS4. Yep, frame rate is definitely a lot better!

[Random Consonant]

Octopath Traveller - Played, cleared all 8 character's stories, game has some annoying design decisions and the job system doesn't grab me quite as much as others but I still enjoyed it well enough to actually want to bother with the aftergame content.

[SnowFire]

In SnowFire has become a crochety retro-gamer or something, I should probably add that I did eventually beat SMB2 All-Stars and Wart, and hadn't miscounted - 5 stages for everybody.

Cyber-Shadow
I had literally never heard of this game until the day before it came out, but it looked pretty cool - Castlevania III is to Bloodstained Curse of the Moon as Ninja Gaiden is to this, maybe (although there are other influences - there's one boss + music that is blatantly ripped from Metroid Fusion of all games, there's a few bits that are more Mega Man esque as well).  I think this is the result of a minor Monkey's Paw wish after playing Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, which was a cool platformer but a little too easy.  "Can't I have something like that", SnowFire said, "but more difficult?"  Well, here we go, and the Paw was not kidding about the difficulty part.  It's still quite cool, but I'm not 100% sure I'll be able to beat the final stages, which get absolutely brutal.  The game is generous in that there's essentially no penalty for dying, you just get sent back to the previous checkpoint, but just a checkpoint-to-checkpoint trip can be dangerous enough by endgame.

To go into a bit more detail...  the music slaps, definitely one of the highlights.  Jake Kaufman didn't write it but did produce/finish it and he only works on good stuff, and newcomer Enrique Martin does a fine job as well.  Lots of tracks as well - all the bosses have their own themes, stages frequently have a change halfway through, etc.  The story does one part quite nicely that is kinda my jam so far as far as what 8-bit stories are good at - that is, having an excuse to hide / not make explicit due to paucity of dialogue.  Makes certain "hiding in plain sight" plot points easier to pull off.  (Specifically: So, there are "synthetics" rampaging everywhere for the enemies you fight.  And the health stations are computer terminals with options like "Automated Repair" to fix your health.  And despite the protagonist calling himself "Shadow," the game itself is called "Cyber Shadow."  And you eventually read about how AIs can be made of people that are their most focused desires.  Yeah, the game doesn't explicitly say it - at least not yet - but you can put two and two together and sagely nod that yes, we're in a Blade Runner situation here, very cute, we're playing a ninja robot clone.)  There's also the later-Metroid style plot dumps of "read computer terminals" which works well enough (as well as sense dead spirits or the like to talk to dead people, because we're a spiritual kind of ninja).

Anyway, to loop back to the difficulty...  so the game starts off as a rather no-frills platformer, which is part of the appeal of retro games to me (less craziness going on, few options other than git gud).  As you progress, you unlock more and more special abilities, and the game expects you to learn them and use them.  e.g. you eventually get to parry (most) enemy bullets, and you better learn the timing on that - the parried shots deal tons of damage and the game starts introducing enemies that will throw a hail of projectiles at you, clearly expecting you to reflect them or get owned.  So by Stage 8 or so, you're in practically a different game, capable of doing crazy double jump & triple dash nonsense.  To prevent you from just dashing past everything at light speed, the game helpfully starts throwing spikes and bottomless pits and walls and other such things everywhere.  I'm on Stage 10, the penultimate stage (Meka City Spaceport), and we'll see if my patience holds out - nothing like traveling on moving platforms around tons of insta-kill walls with flying enemies ready to knock you into them.

[DragonKnight Zero]

Some random blather about my previous FFT playthrough as well as some more recent stuff.

Dogoula Pass: Accidentally killed everyone the first time when I wanted to steal some stuff oops.  The enemies on the lower level bunched up for a MA Up Cyclops to nuke them all and a Lightning Stab and a summon dropped the upper level archer and wizard resulting in a one round win.  Redid the fight holding back a little so I could nab an Oberisk and Crystal Helmet.

Bervania Free City: It just so happened that my Math Skill caster ended up on the rotation for this fight.  I've played the game enough times that another session of Meliadoul's support sniping at me from the high ground didn't appeal so didn't bother to play nice.  Nearly all the enemies helpfully moved to panels such the Height Prime Number Holy on round one smashed them good.  Meliadoul survived the Holy bombardment and recovered through her auto-regen.  Which suits me fine since I intended to rob her of her rare gear and don't want her dying to counter attacks.  Maintenance on everyone and Threaten on her is a hilarious way of neutralizing her for theft attempts.

Tales of Symphonia: Disc 1 finished.  It turns out that nope, I don't get to acquire the missing Training Manual entry.  Thought I was on pace for Gung Ho title despite not trying for it but the last four required boss fights give a lot of EXP and I ended up a bit too high so gave up.  Maybe I could have made it by letting Zelos die after getting nuked by Indignation but oh well.  There was also one fight I could have solo cheesed but forgot to.  Kind of irritates my completionist urges but not enough to restart the game over it.  First time I've ever used Presea's Personal skill and wow, I've really been missing out.  Free cooking ingredients over time is a helpful perk.

Didn't fight Sword Dancer 2 but I already know it won't disappear yet (contrary to what every last FAQ says).  Found out by accident on a previous playthrough where I forgot to fight it and found it was still there at the start of disc 2.

Megaman 8: Loaded up my save where I've already beaten all 8 robot masters and took a crack at the Wily stages... oh no, not another Turbo Tunnel section.  I'm not ready for the amount of rote memorization it will take.  In spite of my grumblings, it isn't that bad before the crumbling platforms, yuck.  Maybe at some point I'll put in the rote memorization to pass this and maybe I won't but not now.

  Er, yeah, Dr. Wahwee.  The voice acting didn't make as big an impression on me as the hype promised.  Mostly because I could barely hear it.  A combination of low volume settings and my TV having janky and worn A/V connections such that I'm generally only getting sound through one speaker at a time.

[DragonKnight Zero]

In a mood to blather.

Megaman 8 again:  Gave the jetboard Turbo Tunnel segment in Wah-wee 1 another 15 attempts.  Got farther than before but still haven't cleared it.  Still hate it.

Power Battle 2: I've had this unlocked for over a year but never bothered to try it until now.  Fairly standard sequel with some enhancements to the formula from the first one.  Seems to be harder than the first game as well but I haven't spent as much time with this to really claim one way or the other.  no, I haven't 1cc'ed it yet, credit feeding to see the bosses.

Final Fantasy Tactics: Dusted off my FF5 team save that had been unused for years and beat another story battle.  Feels weird finishing fights as fast as possible.  Bartz/Galuf have worst compatibility with each other as well as Faris/Krile so things have a potential to get messy with support and healing.

Not that it matters to mention but this particular game I only stop to grind or do propositions when raising cash for equipment.  So the skillsets are less developed than a normal playthrough.  So even though gamebreakers like Math Skill, Blade Grasp, and Auto-Potion are technically allowed in Chapter 4, it's less likely the training to learn them will be squeezed into the rush.

[Reiska]

So my project for the year(?) is playing (or replaying) every single mainline Dragon Quest game.

Dragon Quest - The original!  I played the Switch remake/port, which is based off the mobile version (which is in turn based off an earlier Japanese phone port which was in turn based off the SNES remake).  I'm not sure if the difficulty of this version was tuned at all differently than the SNES/GB versions since it's been too long since I played those; anyway, this is a very streamlined version of DQ1.  Finished it in two sessions I think, maybe it was one long one; I went against the Dragonlord a bit underleveled and got lucky.  There's not a whole lot to be said about DQ1; it's a very simplistic game, and most of its enduring value is as an artifact of early electronic RPG history, but it's not actually bad as a handheld game timewaster at all.

Dragon Quest II: Luminaries of the Legendary Line - Once again, I played the Switch remake, with the same provenance as DQ1's.  This version of the game is definitely significantly changed from the SNES/GB version; the level curve is different, they buffed the prince of Cannock (even more), and the difficulty curve is also smoother.  Nonetheless, it's still recognizably DQ2 at its core - enemies are notably more dangerous than most later games even with a stronger Cannock, and I had several full wipes and several more near-wipes throughout the game.  The cave to Rendarak (Rhone in the old translation) is still brutally difficult.

Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation - Once again, played on Switch, where it's basically the SNES version without the annoying pachisi minigame.  Good riddance IMO.  Pretty standard run of DQ3 on the whole, but I used a Merchant as my main melee attacker to mix things up a little from the usual and they performed better than I expected.  +Resilience personalities are, IMO, far and away the best to go with in this game (even moreso than Vamp IMO) - having lots of HP really takes the bite out of most of the game.

Dragon Warrior IV - Played the NES version this time rather than remakes!  I still like this version of the game the most - AI allies don't bother me and I'm pretty good at manipulating the AI anyway thanks to tricks learned from watching speedruns.  Bosses in the remakes feel much sloggier to me than this version, almost as if they overtuned them to compensate for manual control.  On some level, I still find DQ4 NES to be something of a technical marvel for the console - it's honestly kind of embarrassing that most JRPG AI control schemes have not really improved on DQ4's model.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride - This one was played on DS.  Finished it for the first time, though I'd played *most* of it previously.  The hero married Nera and I fielded the family team against the final boss, who went down on the first try.  Overall it was a pretty smooth playthrough and a largely enjoyable game, think I'd put it in the top half of the series for me?  The level curve is weird since you keep getting new PCs even late in the game but they come with highish stats for their low levels, so catching them up isn't actually hard. 

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation - DS version, and it's my first time playing this one.  Haven't finished yet, would estimate I'm about 3/4 of the way through the game?  On the one hand I really like the narrative themes of DQ6, it's quite inventive conceptually with the whole real world/dream world split it has going.  On the other hand I feel like it has the worst gameplay of the Zenithia trilogy with the weakest (mechanically) PC cast this side of DQ2.  The enemies are similarly overtuned too (and this is accounting for the fact that the DS version cut all enemies' HP by 25%).  The job system is poorly executed, and I think the DS version boosting EXP gain by 20% actually exacerbates this, since the level caps for job advancement in each area weren't adjusted in this version.  (The mobile version does but I'm not playing that.)  That said, I haven't actually been running into the caps for a while, so maybe it doesn't matter that much.  But I haven't been intentionally grinding at all and, this far in the game, don't even have an advanced class yet.  So the class system is too damn grindy.

[Niu]

Disgaea 6 - It really is about time for N1 to stop with Disgaea.
The story and characters are again not as fun as before.
They cut away the weapon skills and a large amount of of the common jobs.
The transmigration system gut buffed so much that the equipment and item world mattered less than before.
And then there is the auto button that just do the grinding for you.
And then it became a loop of auto battle-transmigration-auto battle-transmigration till there is nothing left to do....

Disgaea is... not like this. Just... what went wrong?

[SnowFire]

Niu: I think that was the mobile game leaking over to Disgaea 6, since autobattle was a feature there too:
https://www.4gamer.net/games/530/G053005/20210107033/

(hattip to Djinn for the interview link)
But yeah, one of those tricky traps, similar to how people complained about FF12 playing itself with gambits.  You DO want to eliminate busywork... but...  sometimes the busywork was what was guarding players from casually breaking the game, and if they do want to break the game, make 'em work for it.

[SnowFire]

In other random comments...

* Yeah, I beat Cyber-Shadow, was just frustrated on one checkpoint-to-checkpoint travel, the rest of Stage 10 didn't turn out THAT bad.  If you want a rough idea of the flavor of the later stages:
https://twitter.com/AngryangryD/status/1355075837440258048
If you cross those platforms like a normal person rather than a dash-spamming awesome cyberninja, note that they sink if you stand on them too long, and there are those helpful dudes who jump up in-between to intercept your jump and send you plummeting.  Also if you're doing the dash strategy shown in the tweet, your dash only refreshes if you hit an enemy or touch the floor, so screwing up the aim on those dashes also sends you plummeting to your doom.

* Re personalities in DQ3 remakes, I'm not quite as sure as Reiska on +resilience necessarily being the way to go.  It is definitely great in that raw HP is the most useful defensive stat, but trusty ol' more speed-is-always-better in Bat out of Hell / Quick is pretty busted too.  Certainly it's handy for random-clearing, which is a pretty major part of DQ3.  On the other hand, remake Baramos is a ridiculous roadblock, so I can see the argument for "anything that helps in that fight". 

** Yeah, the final bosses of DQ5 aren't...  that bad.  Notably, Bishop Ladja is a lot scarier in his earlier boss form than the form at the final evil mountain, which just randomly goes down like a chump.

* Been going through White Clouds on playthrough #4 of FE3H, trying to clean out all the remaining unused characters.  (Which I won't quite get..  Alois & Anna will still be "not part of the main team" at the end of this, but just them.)  (EDIT: Oh, right, Gilbert too.  Eh, using him for Weathervanes of Fodlan is close enough.)  My comment will be...  I do think Shamir & Catherine were "intended" to be recruited around Level 15 (=C7 or C8), which makes them serviceable-but-nothing-special (and Shamir doesn't grow that well), but whether it was an intended easter egg or just a whoopsie, increasing support to C+ (even when C+ doesn't exist as a support conversation level!) knocks that level requirement down to L9, and if you C4 recruit Catherine, wow, due to the way class mins work for a L7 character in Swordmaster.  It's like force-feeding her massive stat boosters (+5-6 Strength, for a start!).  Shamir also gets substantially better with a prompt C6 recruitment.  I have never seen the C6 Death Knight be such a chump - okay, he actually DID get a Killing Intent crit and murder Catherine the first time, but post-DP and having the higher Luck Byleth eat the blow, a Rally Str (Balthus) / Rally Dex (Hapi) / Rally Spd (Ignatz) Catherine in SM could Quad DK with Thunderbrand for massive overkill damage (he actually died before the Quad even happening of course, just took 2 blows).

I had this thought in Azure Moon too, but the DLC battalions - specifically the 3x Nuvelle servant whatevers, and the various battalion rewards from the Wolves Paralogues (Leister Dicers, Timtheos Magi Corps, Mockingbird's Thieves, and Nuvelle Flyers) are just insane, and help devalue bothering to get to A Authority.  All 7 of them are endgame worthy and are just C / B rank required, although I'll grant that the C-rank servant brigades 45 durability eventually becomes an issue.  Especially handy in this playthrough as I have a lot of mixed damage threats (Trickster Yuri, Trickster Manuela, and War Monk Balthus notably, also Byleth to a degree - building more Mageleth but she occasionally takes a physical shot as well), and normally you're stuck with just Gloustcer Knights as a good P & M Atk battalion, but the DLC battalions help fix that a lot.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Disgaea 6 - It really is about time for N1 to stop with Disgaea.
The story and characters are again not as fun as before.
They cut away the weapon skills and a large amount of of the common jobs.
The transmigration system gut buffed so much that the equipment and item world mattered less than before.
And then there is the auto button that just do the grinding for you.
And then it became a loop of auto battle-transmigration-auto battle-transmigration till there is nothing left to do....

Disgaea is... not like this. Just... what went wrong?

I played a good chunk of D6 JP and I mostly just skipped using the autobattle features. Just like with any Disgaea game, if you're not grinding, the story mode can actually put up a fight. Honestly, there were quite a number of fights that had some stellar map design that genuinely made me rethink the usual Disgaea strategies. Probably some of the best map design in the franchise. I like that the autobattle features are there for accessibility purposes or if I wanted to do a second run. But it rubs me the wrong way to see people complain about it... it's like when people skip all the cutscenes and then complain that a game's story sucks...

Regarding Weapon Skills - I kinda like that they removed the Weapon Skill system. Most of the iconic attacks have been made into Unique Class Skills for the various generics, which actually gives you a reason to use them this time, apart from aesthetics. I can understand people not liking the loss of unit customizability, but I like how this makes assessing an enemy unit in-battle a lot easier. You know what kind of strategy you need to use to handle them, without having to check their whole status screen. As a result of this, I think the devs were able to be more bold about the difficulty, since the game definitely put up more of a fight than any of the last 3 games.

I think in some ways, the Weapon Skill System was kind of a mistake from the beginning. While the Passive skills that got introduced in D3's Evility System did a lot to finally differentiate the generics, ultimately every Disgaea game has functionally had only 8 'classes' - depending on what Weapon type you chose to give any given generic. Stat differences and proficiencies flatten out fairly quickly unless you're doing a low-level/challenge run, so ultimately you're just left with which Weapon type a unit relies on (or being a Monster). D6 guts the customization but now there's actually 22 distinct classes worth using / battling. A big step up in my opinion.

tl;dr - Autobattle Option is good actually, game has the best unit balance and map design in the franchise; what I saw of the story seems pretty good but I'm gonna have to wait for the official localization before finally judging it since Disgaea localizations are (almost) always better than the originals

[Reiska]

Re: DQ3r personalities - speed is at least a clear second best IMO.  In general I find speed is only worth twinking on classes that are already drowning in it, though, since turn order randomness is so extreme; and the class that benefits the most from twinking it (Martial Artist) benefits from twinking resilience *more* because otherwise its HP is problematic for Baramos.  So I dunno.  I'd agree it's at least an interesting tradeoff!

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation - Well, the fourth Dread Fiend is down and I've got the last PC.  Terry is ... honestly, there's no reason to ever use him in the DS version since he's almost certainly going to have the same class build on join as either the hero or Carver (since both take very well to Gladiator) and he's weaker than both by a fair bit; he *is* faster, however, which could be helpful I guess?  I dunno.  He's not terribly underleveled or anything; he's just underwhelming.  On mobile he gets 5 more levels and 2 more mastered jobs, which would make him a little overleveled on raw levels compared to your team and a lot overleveled on class mastery (plus he has even more of an agility advantage from mobile version buffs!) so I'd say he's a far better PC there, since he can be immediately made into any one of your choice of Gladiator, Paladin, Armamentalist or Sage and he has the stats to be good at any of them (although, granted, his MP is a bit low for a caster).

In any event, I got to the final boss tonight, but there's absolutely no way I'm actually killing it at the levels I got there at.  Think I'm going to just grind up to a level where I can have a much smoother fight.  For what it's worth, I got to the final boss for the first time with a level 34 hero and my main party at rank 5 in their advanced classes, but it's not really a winnable fight in that state.  The second phase in particular really wants you to have access to Disruptive Wave, since he will buff himself with Buff and Oomph and you cannot counter with Sap (he's immune); this requires rank 2 in the Hero class, which requires a mastered advanced class.

[Reiska]

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation - Finished it now.  I grinded until I unlocked the Hero class for, well, the hero, which took a fair while (I went from level 35 to level 43).  Final boss wasn't terribly difficult with the extra levels, although I wouldn't say it was exactly a pushover still.  My initial take mostly holds up: I loved the narrative and it might be my favorite plot of the middle trilogy, but I don't see myself replaying it likely ever since, unlike 4, it's not a quick and breezy playthrough.  The poor tuning of the class system really drags it down - to unlock Disruptive Wave I ended up having to grind out about 125 battles or so over what I'd naturally faced over the course of the game.

Terry ended up being not useless, if only because he could be subbed in over the hero or Carver for a turn when they were at low HP at the start of a turn to allow me to keep doing damage while I healed (since Multiheal/Omniheal affect the non-active party as well).  So that was nice.  Didn't tackle the postgame bonus dungeon in this or 5 yet; I may come back to them at some point, but right now I want to move on.

Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past - To this, of course.  3DS version.  Maribel is a stunningly useless PC in the early game; even when she does get Frizz she doesn't really get enough MP to use it freely at first.  Anyway, this is going to be a mostly blind run too; I know the broad strokes of the game from watching Highspirits' speedrun grind back in the day, but that was on the PS1 version.  Myself I only played up to the class change stuff unlocking, and that was also on the PS1 version like 20 years ago, so. 

As an incidental comment, it's hard to understate just how important copious use of the party chat function in the later Dragon Quest games is for fleshing out the PCs' personalities.  I find that they have something new to say after almost every little thing that happens; often (especially in 5) this meant party chatting on every new dungeon floor and after talking to every NPC in a town.  So many little things that can be casually missed in these games that I'm now seeing because I'm taking time to stop and smell the roses. 

[Dark Holy Elf]

I've played a lot of Hades recently. Also Bloodstained. But sorry, I'm gonna talk about...

Zero Time Dilemma - One crazy Uchikoshi game per year, it's the law. I'm about 13 hours in.

To be specific I've gone through all the scenarios that unlocked after the initial execution vote. I've gotten ending symbols with a crossbow (Mira's backstory) and biohazard symbol (Diana gives the speech recorded in VLR).

I think this is pretty clearly the weakest of the Nonary Games so far, and the reason is pretty obvious, at least to me: the "game" that the game is about just isn't interesting. 999 had a cool setup with the bracelets making digital roots and how those could be used to escape and therefore how this influenced the characters to act. VLR was even better, Prisoner's Dilemma rules, I already hyped why I think that made the story work so well when I played it. In ZTD we're locked up by a psychopath who makes us make arbitrary and uninformed decisions.

The game's decision to have you essentially be blind as to where you are in the plot when you choose a scenario is interesting, though checking the flow to piece them together after is fun enough.

The game's new artstyle is quite a shift. Has any other trilogy changed artstyles so wildly between the games? Is this deliberate, so that the characters "feel" new to the new protagonists? (especially Clover in VLR and lots of people in this game). IDK. I will also say the new artstyle also kinda creeped me out for the first hour or so but then I got used to it.

The game keeps making me feel smart in that I keep calling twists and then not smart in that it tells me right after, so it's not like I'm calling major twists, specifically:

-Diana is the inspiration for Luna. Why yes I know my Roman mythological references. (I guess she also looks similar, though the new artstyle makes this almost impossible to tell, I definitely didn't recognize Junpei or Akane until the game told me their names.)
-Mira is a killer of D-Team in that one scenario in the C-Team execution branch. I mean she almost has to be because Eric is dead and Q is too small but her being revealed as a serial killer makes it even more likely, albeit still a lot of mystery there in terms of how she moved between zones. (Also, I have to say, Mira's backstory/personality reminds me an awful lot of a certain someone from AI:tSF... different specifics, of course, but...)

As is often the case for these games I am enjoying the characters. The gameplay is well... it serves a purpose I guess. The game got me to convert a number to base-13! Then the game went ahead and did it for me.

Current speculations:
-No clue who Zero is. The characters gave their usual thing that Zero is one of them and maybe that's true but I'm not convinced, wasn't Zero physically there with all of them at the start? I do wonder if he's Brother.
-There is definitely something up with Gab. What, I have no idea. Has someone jumped their consciousness into a dog? Is that a thing?
-Mira isn't actually dead in the ending where Eric flips out and murders Q, she's just in coldsleep. Ain't that the point of the pods?
-Also no idea who killed Junpei.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Hades - So I've played this a lot since the new year. It's good! The roguelike model doesn't really click with me innately but Hades gameplay is enjoyable enough that I was down to put ~50 hours into this game, even if it's definitely a game that ended because I felt like I'd put in enough time than one that ended because I reached any sort of natural ending.

Favourite weapon was probably the spear since it struck a good balance between reasonably-high DPS melee weapon and great ranged options (especially the Achilles aspect which lets you choose whether to double ranged attack or ranged attack then teleport, that rocks), shield probably second. Bow/rail/fists are all interesting but flawed in different ways, sword feels the most underwhelming at base.

Getting all the different boons are also a lot of fun. Doom on special is usually good, Poseidon/Athena/Artemis have some good casts (tbh Athena is good top to bottom). I usually used the "deal 50% bonus damage to enemies with bloodstones lodged in them" so the casts which do that are a must.

Definitely a game which I could very much feel myself getting better and better at, both the third and fourth major bosses initially felt super-nasty but then I got to the point where I'd beat them almost every time, and even won on Extreme Measures 4 on my first try (which is the point I chose to put down the game, ain't toppin' that any time soon). The writing isn't precisely the reason to play it but it's better than nothing, ends up mostly being a story about a broken family trying to get together again and a father-son pair who are too stubborn for their own good. It works.

Great little action game, never stopped being fun, highly recommended.


Bloodstained - Got the PS4 version, yay less lag. (There's still some lag in the Tower of the Twin Dragons, but oh well.) Ran through again on Normal Mode, despite it being over a year I found my muscle memory for the biggest boss fights was still pretty good, so y'know the final boss took me only like 10 tries instead of 5 hours' worth. I beat the three optional bosses in the key rooms this time too; Carpenter seemed the toughest but then he got cheesed by Beast Guardian blocking his projectiles, Revenant got blown up by guns (I'm not a huge fun fan in this game on average, they're kinda slow for some bosses and they eat ammo too fast for randoms, but certain bosses do get owned and he's one), Millionaire's Bane wasn't too bad in general.

Then I played the game on Randomizer mode. Definitely an interesting idea (I've never actually played a randomizer before), getting the shards in wacky random order means way more time to play with whichever things you get ahead of schedule (Reflector Ray, Invert, Dimension Shift for progression tools in my case, the boomerang from Revenant for another notable one). Don't think I like what the randomizer did to the plot items though, in particular I never actually found the Zangetsuto so I couldn't actually finish the game. I'm not sure if the randomizer messed up and placed it the areas beyond which you need it, or if I somehow missed a secret (though I consulted a guide to try to find everything). Oh well, in my hunt for every last secret I found the 8-Bit Nightmare, a boss I'd missed on my previous runs, so he ended up being essentially the final boss and that was satisfying enough, he's pretty tricky. Fire everywhere.

Now playing as Zangetsu. Like Albus mode this feels stripped down and less fun than the main game, but man, those boss fights, still good. And Zangetsu being really fast-moving means he gets to them more quickly!


Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Yep. Verdant Wind this time.


Zero Time Dilemma - Progressed a bit more. Akane, do you look for random conversations to casually drop that you have 6 to the 10th power memorized? Nerd.

[SnowFire]

Minor updated thought after reading my old comment: Hmm, I haven't used Jeritza seriously either.  (I did his Paralogue & mini-quest but that barely counts.)  So Alois / Anna / Gilbert / Jeritza.  Well, if I ever do playthrough #5, it'll be S*lv*r Sn*w, so, uh, probably no to anyone but Alois there.  Anna having no supports and also being bad = just why would I ever use them - to hear their voiced combat lines for crits if playing with animations on, I guess?  But I already got that from her paralogue + CF Legend of the Lake.

I beat good ol' Reunion at Dawn (Deer version) w/ no casualties despite not stealing the Evasion Ring at Gronder 1 (grumble grumble Thief getting ganked) and Lorenz / Leonie / Lysithea / Raphael / Marianne being dead weight.  Okay, the Nosferatu dodgetank build of Byleth is legit on that map.  Byleth just needs to hold out long enough for a danced Claude to pick off enough enemies while cowardly hiding on the sidelines with Canto bowshots, and Nos is definitely a way to get there.  Went ahead and shamelessly used Failnaught charges too, this is definitely the time to use it.  I seem to recall somebody on Serenes whining about the number of charges of Nosferatu for such a build - well, in a map where Byleth is solo-fighting the hordes, this would be where you would expect it to come up, but Bishop Byleth still had some Nos remaining (single digit count, granted), so seems sufficient to me.  Gronder 2 is next.

I will say in whining that Mage-leth is a very Monastery intensive build.  For EO builds Byleth's skills don't matter that much aside from eventually hitting A Swords for Windsweep, but Mageleth kinda wants to hit both A+ Faith & A Reason, and that is a slog of a lot of sauna trips and faculty training.  I guess I'd be hitting the Monastery a lot for a few extremely skill-intensive builds.  Manuela might be the most greedy character in the game on this...  starts way behind on training and wants tons and tons of skills and gets a lot from them if you want something better than "emergency Warp user".  In a bit of a conundrum now as I just qualified for Mortal Savant, which helps on damage, but the speed cut from Trickster is notable and Maddening enemies are damn fast and I didn't grind up her lance rank + qualify for Peg Knight to get Darting Blow, so I risk stopping doubling enemies if I switch to MS, but she risks just being chipping / utility only by staying in Trickster.  Decisions, decisions.  And hell, if I was feeling *really* grindy, she might be the unit in the game that most wants an extra S+ rank Swordfaire - she badly needs the damage to one-round, and a mixed Mortal Savant / Assassin / Trickster build are all mixed damage threats that like an unconditional +5 damage rather than Death / Fiendish Blow's +6 damage to just one style.  But that involves wailing away at an auxiliary battle Bishop with Renewal with a Training Sword or the like, or else waiting for so long that it hardly matters, so meh.  (To really maximize Manuela, you also probably want to run Hanneman so she gets her damage boost off that support...  run two weak characters, get a mediocre character!  Get hyped.  Well, I'm doing that anyway, although more just to use Hanneman for once.  A rare pure mage with easy access to Hit +20, at least?)

--
Re Elf on ZTD: Ah, cool.  While ZTD is probably the weakest of the trilogy, that's a pretty faint criticism. 


* I thought the conceit of the Decision Game was fitting for the story, at least - it fits in with Zero's talk about the role of chance and coincidences in the snail story, which gets echoed by a lot of the death traps.  I do agree it's a lot more arbitrary compared to the puzzlier 999 and a lot less dramatic than VLR, but I suppose the arbitrariness fits Zero's point here.
* That said - I don't think this is even a spoiler, I think I've said as much before, although maybe look away if you're extra paranoid - Zero's plotline has...  issues, so yeah, that's part of why ZTD is the weakest of the set.  Just don't spend TOO much brain cells on the nature of Zero in ZTD.  Unusually for Uchikowski, there's some just...  either it's a plot hole or it's "narrative cheating" where what the player sees didn't really happen that way so as not to spoil what was really going on.  Or maybe a little of both.  That kinda ruins the fun of speculation a bit.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Zero Time Dilemma - Beaten. Short version: probably the weakest game of the trilogy, but still very much worth playing. Better character work (and probably better gameplay for what very, very little that's worth) than 999 but worse plot. VLR remains the best.

It's a game I have a lot of nitpicks about, so let's get them out of the way first.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Mira and Eric a fair deal, but they just seem very... dropped/irrelevant late? Particularly Mira. She's a freaking serial killer and first of all she disappears for a significant chunk of the lategame due to being randomly killed by Zero on one major timeline (not getting a satisfying answer for either how/why she killed Junpei or why Zero killed her is weird incidentally) and then I guess we're supposed to shrug about her serial killing in the ending? How do she and Zero know each other? What's the nature of their agreement? What does Mira think about her role in this? I don't need all the answers, but I would like this to feel less completely dropped.

Game does some weird tone/pacing things sometimes. Eric threatens to murder everyone, then we take a five-minute diversion to talk about how the wards are all the same, during which Eric seems to calm down, then it's right back to "Eric threatens to murder everyone".

Mentioned already of course, but the narrative cheating of Q never been shown on-camera for some reason, and Sean/Mira/Eric never really talking about him (yes, they flashback to one instance of a man in a wheelchair being mentioned, that's not enough, sorry) makes that one feel like a bit of an ass-pull, which is a shame, because the game wants it to be the biggest twist. I feel like the writing had some idea that it wanted to misdirect who "Q" was but clearly didn't know how to actually pull it off in a satisfying manner.

I really disliked the scene where Carlos acts all weird and rapey as a cover for his plan. Plz don't. I'm not sure if the fact that it ended up completely pointless makes the sequence better or worse.

That out of the way, let's talk about the interesting stuff.

We've now gotten three spins on Zero, of course, in which a character makes a bunch of people play freaky escape game in service of some grand plan. In some ways, the first two are kinda similar to each other (unshockingly since Akane is Zero the 1st and a conspirator with the 2nd). Through experiencing multiple timelines, both found that this was the best way to thread the needle to the narrow goal of accomplishing their goal of not burning to death / saving humanity from Radical-6. Obviously what they did is traumatising for everyone involved, but both felt like they had to do it. Some ends-justify-the-means to be sure, but they're both very moral people in their own way.

Delta is recognizably similar to them, but he also comes off as far more of a malicious bastard. Unlike theirs, Delta's game is needlessly cruel. The deaths that occur in Akane's game mostly occur because Ace is a vile murderer (plus that one time Clover loses it). The deaths in Sigma's game mostly occur because it turns out Radical-6 is really really awful, and also Dio is a dick. But the deaths in Delta's game mostly occur because Delta seems to legitimately enjoy watching people kill each other, and killing them himself. Gatling guns, hydrofluoric acid showers, carbon dioxide poisoning, multiple bombs. The game itself encourages, demands, even, that its players murder each other while he watches. Are there some noble goals to what he does, as he states? Yeah sure. But the cruelty is also absolutely, 100% the point, driven home by such scenes as where he mindhacks Eric to shoot himself, or when he himself (literally) shoots the dog. He's a complete asshole. The game largely owns this, right down to its final scene where it asks the player whether they think Delta deserves to die. (My answer: I probably wouldn't shoot him in Carlos's position, both because it's not my place and because he'd likely be a very valuable ally in heading off this supposed nuclear catastrophe, but I do find him immensely detestable anyway. And to be clear, that's a good thing.)

Random other thoughts:

So Gab was just a complete red herring then, just a dog and nothing more? Huh. I... did not expect that.

I said this before, but I really liked most of the characters again! It's nice to finally see Old Sigma. And I was so here for Diana's despair, Eric's madness, Akane being the big manipulative nerd with a slight lovesick side. There wasn't really anyone I disliked. Junpei is mildly detestable as a person in this one (I definitely noticed that when the game needed someone to do something stupid or selfish, it usually relied on either him or Eric) but I mostly bought into why.

The morality of constantly killing your alternate timeline Marty McFlys is an interesting conundrum. I actually thought the Final Decision was pretty obvious (the versions of the characters who actually know about the nuclear terrorism and can take actions to prevent it are the ones who should survive), but the characters somewhat flippantly getting their other selves killed so that they can SHIFT at other points is a bit more questionable! Probably still overall justified for the same reason, but...

Good times.

[Cmdr_King]

Persona 5- Beat.  Posting just a short one for now because it's late, but I still want to make a record for myself for later of this.  8/10, mostly on the strength of giving you a lot more tools so it feels like you fucked up when things go wrong rather than the game just completely disrespecting your time.

Despite clearly having a fierce desire to be relevant, honestly nothing in the game quite has the same punch in that department as Adachi in P4.  Now that IS sorta an unfair standard of course, but despite the strong opening act they never really quite follow up on the hardest-hitting themes of that portion and the parts they do follow up on feel a bit... milquetoast to me?  Like, insofar as there's a cohesive, game-long message to the game it's essentially "the older generation has sold out the youth for social harmony and comfort" which... cool, but they also end on a literal note of "welp, the kids did the dangerous work and now it's time for the adults to take over... and undermine them and blunt the results".

... okay yeah no more words tonight.

[Reiska]

Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past - 50 hours in now and still enjoying it.  In particular I really like the game's storytelling loop of going to an area in distress in the past, solving their distress, and then seeing how the place has changed in the peaceful present, and DQ7 has a different take on the overall concept compared to something like, say, Chrono Trigger by not having the overall scenario framed by a nebulous known future threat on the scale of Lavos. 

DQ7 also plays it more vague with specific time periods, and has the heroes show up multiple times in the same places on different timestreams when islands are connected to each other, providing extra context to previous events and sometimes additional closure as well.

For example...

In Greenthumb Gardens, on the first visit, there's an unresolved plot thread involving tangled relationships between four characters in the town: Dill (the son of the town's mayor), Carraway (the mayor's gardener), Lavender (a young woman who lives in the town), and Cayenne (the mayor's maid).  Carraway and Lavender are in love with each other, but Lavender owes a great debt to Dill's parents, and feels obligated to marry Dill as a result.  Cayenne is in love with Dill, and is aggressively trying to break up Dill and Lavender and encourage Carraway to elope with her, so that she can have Dill to herself.  Her machinations fail spectacularly for all involved, though; Lavender goes through with her proposal to Dill, and Carraway breaks off from Lavender and runs away from the village in shame because he isn't willing to disrupt the engagement.  When you return to the island in the present, Greenthumb Gardens has been abandoned and fallen into ruin, but there's a new town to the east, "Wilted Heart", that was not previously there, overlooked by a nunnery, the Regrette-Rien Convent.  Exploring both locations gives the implication that Carraway founded the new town, and the visit to the nunnery reveals Carraway and Lavender to be buried next to each other at the hilltop behind the nunnery.

Later in the game, when you solve the "Groundhog Day" problem in El Ciclo, the architect Pomposo is able to complete his grand bridge connecting to the northern island... which happens to be where Greenthumb Gardens and Wilted Heart are, so you get to visit both locations in a different past time.  It turns out 30 years have passed since the hero's first visit.  Dill and the son he fathered with Lavender are still living in Greenthumb Gardens, but Dill is revealed to be a deadbeat who has had to sell his father's house, his son hates him, and Lavender is nowhere to be found, having run out on an apparently loveless marriage.  Cayenne is also still present, still pining after Dill, and still working as a maid in the new mayor's house; the hero finds evidence (by way of a callback to a DQ6 scene where a jealous lover of Port Haven's mayor attempts to poison his dog and frame his maid for it) that she's been secretly feeding the mayor poisoned food, and that Dill knew she was doing it, and the two are ultimately run out of town together.

Continuing to Wilted Heart allows you to meet Carraway, confirming he did in fact start the town there, and exploring the nunnery reveals that when Lavender ran out on her marriage to Dill, she went to the nunnery and lived out the rest of her life there; she died 6 months prior, without her and Carraway having interacted, though both seemed to be vaguely aware of each others' presence, Carraway never worked up the courage to actually go up to the monastery, and Lavender assumed that Carraway would want nothing to do with her after she ran out on Dill.  This closes out their half of the plot, but I have a sneaking suspicion I have not yet seen the last of Dill and Cayenne...

It's absolutely a long game, I don't think there's any debating that; if I had to call out DQ7's greatest sin from what I've seen of it right now, it's absolutely the pacing of the intro, which is pretty long even on the 3DS version (which substantially shortened it), and makes for a pretty bad first impression of the game on PSX because a typical blind player will spend about 3-4 hours plodding around talking to all the NPCs and trying to solve the initial puzzle before they can even get to any combat.  On top of that, PSX loading times after every battle are a bad, bad fit for a game like DQ7.  But these are problems the 3DS version doesn't have, so yay.