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

[Cmdr_King]

Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight- Got all the SLinks except Ryuji 8, so I'm calling it here.

On the whole I think I did have a better time with this than the P3 game, a mix of having a better sense of how to work with the system and P5 just having better remixes than P3 did honestly.  I think this is also partly just P5 already having a stronger and more unified OST to start with.  That said, visual noise with scratches is still an issue for me so playing on the higher difficulties is weird streaky misery at times.  "higher" here meaning 'above normal'.

Still, pleasant enough and addressed a standing issue P5 has of not really letting the cast interact much with one another and Haru not existing.  6/10? I dunno, I'd have to cross reference the other game but that sounds right.

[SnowFire]

Bravely Default II
It's finally out!  I figure this is the closest we get to the "a new Final Fantasy is out" experience back in the heyday of FF8/9/10.  Didn't play the demo so started totally blind last night.  An American, an English princess, a Ye Olde English Knight, a Scottish drunk, and a Russian (?) must fight an evil German and Australian.  Sounds like something out of Team Fortress 2. 

* I note with dismay that Adelle, the less-chosen-by-destiny female of the party, has an immediate sidequest involving collecting ingredients for a new dish then being creeped out by it.  I didn't play Bravely Second but they damn well better not pull an "Edea's personality becomes an obsessed glutton and nothing else" bit of nonsense, as that was one of the things that really put me off on ever trying BS.
* Can we just ban the plot device of "bad guys threaten to kill an unnamed kid"?  I shouldn't overthink this short event that the writers clearly didn't think too hard about but it really doesn't cover Gloria in glory, and the day is saved only because the tone of the setting isn't that dark.  Bad guys basically say "we are willing to murder people for funzies" with their threat and want an Artifact Of Incalcuable Power, and Gloria orders her loyal knight to surrender, and then he gets his ass beat (and is lucky that he isn't just flat murdered).  Gloria is fine of course, don't need to sideline a main character, but gramps gets sent off to the infirmary.  This is elder abuse.  And it's not like Gloria is supposed to be some sort of pacifist.  I should write some sort of take-that fanfic on AO3 where some mobsters roll up to an army base and threaten to kill some unnamed kids, and the army just shrugs and sends them a free tank and the soldiers bringing the tank all get clubbed by the gang.  (Actually, this was already sorta done...  by Monty Python.)
* You can tell the king's minister is evil because...  gasp...  he's raised taxes!  Those damn tax-and-spend liberals.  (Trails of Cold Steel 2 did this, too.  Sigh.)

Good times!
--
Re Elf on Zero Time Dillema:


* Yeah, ZTD's overall length feels about right, yet nevertheless some characters end up short-changed, Mira notably, and Eric a bit.  (Mira does have a little bit of extra plot that isn't obvious - it's heavily implied she was the one who killed the doctor who was going to operate on Sean in Delta's story of the snail, IIRC.  Although considering how much Delta liked poor Sean, it's surprising he wasn't inflicting even more sadistic torment on Mira in the scenarios.)  Also Phi a bit - her plot is fine but she spends so much of D-team's scenarios dead or not in the party that she herself doesn't get to do a lot, which is too bad.  It's nice that Q/Sean & Diana get time instead, of course.
* Some of the Q / Delta confusion is somewhat played fair (e.g. the team asking "who the hell are you" to Q and the rules not precisely applying to him in the same way), but others are definitely not.  The puzzle in the study with the 9 portraits and the like definitely only makes sense if Q is the team member rather than Delta, for example.  So I guess Zero stuck a solvable version of that puzzle for Q?  Except the other characters should boggle at this then.
* Another minor issue I have with ZTD - and I suppose this is a limitation of the conceit it sets up - is that it seems to much more clearly embrace a multiverse, albeit with the idea that multiverses are only useful / controllable if stuck in a sealed environment with clear branch points.  In 999, it feels much more like exploring possible futures and attempting to guide toward the one that works best for Akane.  I *guess* Delta is doing something similar, aiming for a future where he doesn't commit any crimes but has merely been prepared to do horrible things in an alternate timeline and has a bunch of people armed with knowledge and abilities...  except..  things like Delta and Phi being born, and then having clones sent back in time, clearly come from the initial branch point where Carlos-loses-the-coin-flip.  Kind of muddies the waters on if it ensures that the timeline where no horrible things happen is really The One.
* Uchikowski for whatever reason wanted to do a darker and more horror-y game and was semi-freed from studio constraints, hence resulting in a crueler and less sympathetic Zero...  but...  even still, some of Zero's shenanigans are silly / stupid.  The bracelets in 999 weren't actually armed / active except for Ace / Nine; the bracelets in VLR at least injected you with tranquilizers before killing you.  Considering that the gas chamber scenario was time-delayed and everyone was put to sleep anyway, I have no idea what the point of waking people up in order to kill them horribly was - fine you gotta kill 'em to make the branching scenario, but just do it quietly in their sleep, and have the gas chamber nonsense be a fakeout.
* While on that note, it fits with the probability theme that Delta believes that killing a lot of people in the aims of killing one dangerous person, but...  this is kinda crazy, I'm sorry, especially if Delta was born in like 1900 or something.  Different circumstances lead to different results, it's not like if this religious fanatic lives they're guaranteed to start the apocalypse no matter what else is going on.
* Speaking of the religious fanatic - a lot of fans of VLR were disappointed that Brother didn't really come up in ZTD.  Sure seemed like Eric or Carlos might have been related to that plotline but nope.  Ah well, respect the need/desire to do something different rather than be a straight-up VLR sequel.  Same with K/ Kyle not showing up.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Hades - Completed the epilogue. Persephone is a clever mom.

The gameplay loop remains compelling, especially now that I understand the game well enough to break it open from the start. Coronacht is hilariously busted, range flexibility is by far the most important thing to have in this game and the bow provides obscene damage from any range with little to no strings attached. Aspect of Chiron in particular is just ridiculous, since it enables high-end, high-speed status stacking and high damage potential in the same token. Exagryph is almost as good, though it wants Aspect of Hestia to really shine (while Coronacht is honestly gamebreaking even at base. You REALLY have to work to make a truly bad build out of the bow, though it can be done; the rifle can be somewhat easily screwed up). Varatha ends up being the worst of the ranged weapons by default due to having shockingly low DPS potential, but range alone's way too good in this, and it has the best crowd control out of the long-ranged weapons, all while being very simple and intuitive, so I still like it a lot. Malphon is very dependant on Daedalus hammer upgrades to have any sort of range and works very poorly with anything Poseidon, but it has insane damage potential off good speed - it actually gives you the illusion that a melee lock isn't inherently crippling in Hades. Aegis... good lord, it's really awkward at base, but the shield block no-sells a lot of dangerous boss patterns and Aspect of Zeus is off-the-wall bonkers for offense and ranged crowd control. That may well be the second strongest aspect in the whole game (Aspect of Chiron being the first). And Stygius... oh, Stygius. Just so janky.

Tangentially, I really really like how the game treats non-heteronormative affections and relationships. I didn't expect I'd get a wholesome, gentle portrait of bisexual polycules from a fucking roguelike, but 2021 is full of surprises like that.

[SnowFire]

Bravely Default II
Still pretty great.  Up to the first "real" boss of Chapter 2.  The bosses are a lot of fun.  Apparently some of the reviewers complained about them being too hard or frustrating, but I see what the designers were going for: they want you to engage with the gimmick of each battle rather than just ignore it and win anyway.  I will add the slight disclaimer that some of the "power" in the game comes from your equipment setups and you have to go into the battles blind, but...  just restarting (which I'm fine with, I'm playing on Hard, that's my own fault) after knowing what statuses / elements to watch out for is pretty potent.  The current boss I'm on has a Silence move, so quick, put on the Silence-blocking hats, the usual pretty much.  Currently one wipe and one sanity restart after seeing what was up so it's not an onerous amount or anything.

* I thought I found an awesome combo for randoms, but I'm a little less sure now, or at least wondering if there's weird under-the-hood stats not displayed.  My Adelle went Freelancer -> Beastmaster.  Freelancer gets kinda garbo BUT learns an extremely good ability at JL 11, Body Slam, which costs 1 BP but just does a crapton of damage, at least for this point in the game.  Beastmaster learns Spearhead, which is "this character has initiative unless you got back attacked" (which is hard to have happen, you can let enemies charge into you and miss your sword swing all day and Spearhead still works even if enemies get a BP boost).  So Adelle just always goes first and flat deletes 2 enemies (or 1 really tanky enemy).  Mages can also clear most randoms very well but you'll burn through MP fast if you're doing that constantly or at max power, so the free Body Slams are nice.  Anyway, after mastering Beastmaster in early C2 (you master classes fast in BD2 compared to BD1, although in fairness mastering Freelancer speeds things up), I switched over to Berserker, and now suddenly 1/3 of the Body Slams miss?  Same enemies too, it's not like I went to a different dungeon with dodgier enemies.  Seemed a lot, LOT slower too.  I checked the stats screen and yes, there was a slight Aim & Speed penalty in the new class, but it wasn't drastic or tragic or anything, just a ~5 point drop in Aim.  Seemed too consistent to be a bizarre luck swing, too - I used this combo a LOT and it was very consistent before and very inconsistent now.  Some hidden stat based off job level maybe?!  I guess I could go back to my old setup but I don't like leaving JP on the floor.

* The old 60s TV show Mission: Impossible is a bit weird to modern eyes used to the Tom Cruise version.  TV was a lot more...  nice?  ...  back then, even the stuff for adults.  Anyway the MI team generally didn't just murder the Nazis / terrorists / whatever they'd infiltrated even when they had a good reason to after infiltrating them, even when there was a stinger pre-ad break where it looked like they'd been caught doing some suspicious act and were about to get shot themselves (they'd probably talk their way out of it after the show cut back, rather than pulling their own guns).  Which isn't to say that the bad guys wouldn't die; just the MI team would trick them into thinking that they'd all betrayed each other and the plan was in ruins and they should shoot each other instead, or otherwise abandon their evil plan.  I guess they didn't want the team to be some sort of Call of Duty international roving American assassins, which is fair.

Anyway, BD2 seems to have some weird variant going on of this.  (FE Fates Conquest had a wacky version too where whenever somebody was supposed to die, the narrative took pains to keep Corrin's hands clean - they'd beat them up nonviolently, then either the target would commit suicide (Rainbow Sage, Ryoma) or else Iago / Hans would roll in and kill them instead.)  The party beats up a villain, and then a DIFFERENT villain rolls in and kills them, or they go crazy and commit suicide.  I'm...  not really a fan.  Let Our Heroes make the tough choices, whether it be killing 'em or letting them live, rather than outsourcing it to other entities.  (Okay, one of these deaths was actually still kinda cool dramatically so I'll spot you that one, just it still counts as part of the trend.)  If you want to keep it clean, then the party can just choose to spare 'em, and figure out where to go from there.

* Speaking of the above, the game was also a tad... naive on one particular plot point?  (End of Chapter 1 spoilers: Felt a bit like Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice, which simultaneously has an corrupt government yet one also mysteriously bound by defense attorney's discoveries.  You get betrayed by the Prince in charge who has soldiers sufficiently loyal to go along with, essentially, "I'm gonna kill this person for the good of the state in front of lots of witnesses, then order the arrest of these other people for the crime."  Fine.  But then after Magic Happens and it's revealed he also killed his father the previous king...  the soldiers hesitate and switch sides?  Like, you were already on his team when he murdered an important person before, what's another body to the pile?  Just stay cool and keep blaming everything on these outsiders.  Or, alternatively, rewrite the earlier scenario to be one where the Prince frames the party out-of-view of his guards if the guards are honest and true and all of that stuff. )

* (Gameplay spoilers? Poison works on bosses!!1!  Was pretty important vs. one particular boss that both made it so you can't productively default AND had a powerful parasitic healing move, so mustering up enough damage to take him down was non-trivial. )

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Bravely Default 2 - Just beat the first Asterisk boss in C1, pretty fun fight. The prologue honestly felt a bit stiff until the party got together and the game gave you the first set of jobs to play with, but once it did, the general breadth of the Bravely experience started coming together: putting Bravely Default in a CTBish (it has gauges like ATB, but the turnflow is very much CTB and the gauges are merely an aesthetic choice for the indicators in practice, which is very fine) setting felt weird at first, but once I got used to it, yeah, the game's just been a blast when I sit down to play. The Brave/Default system remains a very compelling, layered approach to turn-based combat and it's delightful to see even enemy randoms making very liberal use of the mechanic. Bosses also have more flexible Bravely/Default patterns than in BD1 (reminder: I never got far in Bravely Second because the writing annoyed me very fast, so all my comparisons will go straight to BD1). The new enemy counter mechanics do change your approach to fights to a degree, making setups a bigger part of the overall ethos in dealing with enemy formations and particularly bosses - including equipment, which is unusually potent even besides STATS in general being very significant in the damage formula and whatnot. I often spend a good minute or two just tinkering with equipment whenever I get a new piece, there's just a lot to put into consideration and I like that.

This said, navigation could be a wee bit more streamlined and I'm still not sure if I like random encounters being visible on screen rather than having the random rate adjustable to any degree you want, but eh. At least the game making enemies just run away from you when you're higher levelled enough chokes a good deal of the tedium in moving around and backtracking.

Writing-wise, eh. I'm mostly in the SnowFire camp in which some of the general ethos employed by the writers kinda irks me, though at least the game doesn't WANT to make any sort of hard-hitting statement. It's just kind of a fantasy story with insanely quirky visuals and a bunch of cliches employed inoffensively. But we'll see how far the game struts along these lines. I'm just glad Elvis isn't a womanizer as of now, since I like the lazy scholar with Scrooge McDuck language schtick he has. And Gloria is sometimes kinda badass? It's okay.

[Reiska]

Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past - Finished the game, final time was around 88 hours.  On the whole I enjoyed it, DQ7 ends up being one of my favorite DQ games for plot/worldbuilding/setting/whatever you want to call it.  It's on the weaker half of the series for gameplay but the setting was compelling enough to keep me interested, overall - the main problem with the gameplay is that it pretty much stops challenging you about halfway through (basically when you first get at an advanced class) and only really starts again with some of the lategame bosses and final dungeon randoms.  This is a problem DQ11 also has to an extent (on baseline difficulty), but in DQ11 it feels better because you tend to be mixing up your tactics to respond to enemy setups more, whereas in DQ7 there's pretty much 30 hours of the game that you can just spam Scorch forever and win against.

I do think the game is a bit longer than it needs to be, yet much like the Lord of the Rings movies, there's not really any substantial part of the game that I feel you could cut without losing something valuable.  Nearly every island plot ends up being relevant to the overall game in *some* fashion.  The three I'd say are the least relevant ones...

• Ballymalloy, which has no relevance to the later plot at all and is pretty much just the establishment device for the party dynamic between the hero, Kiefer, and Maribel.
• Faraday also has little enduring relevance to the main plot, despite seeming like it should; the situation with the automatons is never referred to again outside of some easter-egg callbacks, and robots are never a relevant factor anywhere else in the world.  However, Faraday also has what I consider one of the game's more memorably poignant emotional scenes (hint: E.L.L.I.E. and soup).
• The third and last would be Nottagen, which is basically just an excuse plot for why the Monster Meadows exists in the game world, but also is a much-needed segment of levity in what is otherwise a fairly dark game by DQ standards.

Anyway.  Solid 7/10 game at least?  I liked it about as much as DQ5, and DQ5 and DQ7 are both games that on some level I appreciate more for concept than for successful execution, but I think DQ5 executed just a bit better than DQ7 did.  As we'll see later, DQ9 revisits a lot of DQ7's relative narrative structure, but is much more concise in going about it.

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King - 3DS version.  Not far in it yet, so not much to say, and this isn't new territory for me, but I am once again reminded - even with the snappier menu performance of the 3DS version compared to PS2 - just how much slower of a game DQ8 feels like compared to everything before it.  Admittedly some of this *may* be my emulator, which isn't quite consistently getting full speed on DQ8.  But just... it's hard to really express how much slower movement around maps feels in 8 compared to previous games (some of this may also be the maps being larger relative to the PCs), and of course the large upswing in production values means battles play slower.

None of this, to be clear, is really intended as a criticism - it's just a much more chill game.

Dark Souls III - oh yeah I've also been playing this but don't have much of substance to say about it.  I feel like it's a good game on the whole but it has a lot of little things which I understand to be series sacred cows but which, frankly, aren't particularly great design, but none of them rise above being minor annoyances.  If I were going to compare it to another similar game I've played, I tend to like Code Vein more outside of the boss fights, which I will concede that Dark Souls III does better (and it's not close).

[Cmdr_King]

Romancing SaGa 3- OKAY WE'VE GOT THIS.

Context: https://twitter.com/CmdrKing/status/1370851150841450503?s=20

So between this and RSMS, what I've learned is why SaGa Frontier is basically the best one.  See, the Romancing SaGa games innovated a lot of those systems, in particular the selectable protagonists with altered quest availability.  But both RS3 and RSMS basically treat that as having a unique opening then maybe some characters have a few odds and ends.  SaGa Frontier changes the balance to have a lot more unique quests or alterations of quests scattered throughout and a smaller pool of universal options, leading both to a more distinct experience and more importantly making a deliberately short game since a lot more effort had to be spent on content not every character would ever see.  Like even ignoring the extra 10 hours spent learning how to manipulate the system enough to beat the bosses in the final dungeon, there's a reason I paused my playthrough about 20 hours in and I was already ready to be done and skipped several endgame quests at 30 hours.  Ha ha ha.  Some of that is the system being rougher and less generous with procs to be sure, but only some of that.

For all of that it's not... like, bad.  It's rough but mostly in the ways both any SaGa game and any SNES game are.  5/10 surely.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I'm currently replaying Fire Emblem Awkening and Trials of Mana. Also beat Zangetsu's mode on Bloodstained, don't think I mentioned that. The new last boss was very, very tough! Fun though, in the usual RotN fashion. But of course this post is about...

Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Verdant Wind

In which Elf completes his support library. (Well, not the S supports.) Never done that for a Fire Emblem before, despite this game having more supports than most of the others. Manuela/Flayn probably wins the award for hidden gem this playthrough, Flayn's best support IMO.

Byleth: Pegasus Knight -> Brigand -> Assassin. Assassin is the best Swordfaire class, and the nice thing about doing that with Byleth is it makes the build cheaper (notice I was able to get both Pegasus and Brigand on her in a timely fashion, not always the case) and that you get to use Windsweep which is only rarely useful but quite so when it is. Stealth is cool, since it meant she could go where she wanted safely as long as there was a dodgetank in range (see below). That said the class is a bit lacking offensively with 0 str + swords being bad.

Claude: Brigand -> Sniper/Wyvern Master -> Bow Knight. A Bow Knight with high stats is always a joy and Claude's one of the best. Compared to his unique class, the huge extra range is nice, especially since Claude's gonna support most people in a typical VW run. Very versatile offensively, high power to slay things with Inexhaustible, enough speed to double, etc. Great at countering too, although his bulk didn't let him take too many hits at once. I had other people for that.

Ferdinand: Brigand -> Wyvern. Gave him Immortal Corps, because it's time to dodge! He got str-blessed so he could even do decent damage back, though there was another I used even more for that. Not much to say past that, dodgetanking is really damn good at this game, Ferdinand's personal + Immortal Corps is one of the most potent ways to do it. Had all the usual wyvern perks otherwise.

Petra: Brigand -> Pegasus -> War Cleric. Also insanely dodgy with her speed and Brawl Avoid. Even got her Alert Stance (not the plus version) but didn't end up using it because she was dodgy enough. Gave her Gautier Knights and never repaired it, when it finally got down to 1/3 health by Enbarr I slapped Battalion Wrath on her, gave her a few strength boosters, and watched her countercrit everything with Retribution. Kinda silly. Obviously Killer Knuckles need a lot more str to do this effectively than other weapons, and I don't actually have the objective highest opinion of the battalion skills (too finnicky and a bit risky) but it was fun.

Mercedes: Mage -> Sniper. Yep, you read that right. Magic Bow + Hunter's Volley = best magic damage in the game, even typically one-shots the juiced enemies of the final VW map. Has the usual Sniper problems of bad move but otherwise is actually better than the physical Snipers... after Chapter 16 anyway. Before then, you lack the Arcane Crystals to really power this build, which eats through a lot of them. Is rather terrible in the early Sniper phase.

Lysithea: Mage -> Assassin -> Mortal Savant. I did this build with Lysithea back when I was a newbie and went for Swordmaster instead of Assassin then. Oops. Assassin is so much better for her, because Stealth is a hell of a way to patch her game-worst durability. Later Soulblade stops OHKOing everything in sight, so it's a good thing MS exists so she can retreat to having long range nukes. Her kit's good at non-healing things as usual.

Marianne: Mage -> Valkyrie -> Dark Knight. So in early Advanced tier she felt like my best PC by far, Frozen Lance to OHKO anything with canto + Thoron for 6 threat range + Physic, hell yeah (helped by losing Mercie's Physic, of course). Her offence and relative threat range fall off but still a solid contributor throughout, as Marianne tends to be.

Hilda: Mage -> Dancer. She's basically the VW answer to dancer Dorothea, played this way. Support with Bolting, me likey. Also has high bulk so she could take hits even though she wasn't using swords to be dodgy. Move+1 came late (Chapter 21, I believe?) because rushing Bolting was more important, but did come.

Leonie: Brigand -> Pegasus -> Wyvern. Fun fact, every other member of my team was decided by my desire to finish my support library, but not Leonie: she was the free pick to make the team better. Great offence with either Point-Blank Volley or axe nonsense from a wyvern, good bulk, and when that falls off... guess what she ended up getting Alert Stance+ and with her high speed and Galatea I figured what the hell, I have enough Evasion Rings, third dodgetank time.

Balthus: Brigand -> War Monk -> Seteth got recruited. The low speed is just too frustrating for this build, he was clearly feeling very outclassed by Petra because he kept getting doubled, his personal starts falling off for physicals and he was always getting cooked by magic. I guess I could have stuck with him with a guard adjutant but y'know when Seteth joined up and beat him in every stat I decided I'd had enough. Useful PC early, though; +6 atk/def below half health is one of those things which really is strong out of the gate.

Seteth: Brigand -> Wyvern. Not having Reposition was a downer, but he got deal with squishies and cavalry well with Swift Strikes once he got that, and gave Leonie 10 extra damage by standing beside her. Don't have much to say about him, it's a pretty standard build.

Cyril: Brigand -> Paladin -> Bow Knight. The 11th. Point-Blank Volley is nice, especially in Part 1! The stats were not. Str and the durability both perenially needed work. He managed to stay on the team pretty well until Seteth finished his turn in Brigand then he got mostly benched for a while, but came out again lategame as deploy count ballooned. By then he had A authority so I gave him the A-rank Retribution gambit to make the dodgetanks better.

Flayn: Mage -> Bishop. Because I wanted more healing, she got to be my 12th rather than Balthus or someone else. Bishop actually gets enough Fortifies and Rescues to have things to do. Pretty bad outside those two tricks, but they're nice tricks. Gremory's probably better for her (she wants move more than Linhardt etc. does) but oh well.

Flayn 8 / Balthus 44 / Hilda 47 / Seteth 70 / Cyril 93 / Mercedes 108 / Marianne 123 / Ferdinand 139 / Lysithea 161 / Petra 179 / Byleth 185 / Leonie 190 / Claude 201

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

BD2 - Just started Chapter 2, currently mastered Freelancer on Seth and Black Mage on Elvis. Gloria's nearly capping White Mage and Adelle's kinda coasting on some lower level classes, but she's less than a level away from mastering Vanguard if I care. Problem is she's currently deleting randoms from existence with Spearhead+Crescent Moon spam as a Berserker, jesus christ Spearhead is just bananas for your physical blitzkrieg setups at this point.

[SnowFire]

Jo'ou: In response to your earlier comment, while you can't turn the encounters directly off anymore, you can just Ward Light your way past everything if you want.  (Good ol' Breath of Fire 1 style "consumable item to turn off encounters.")  That said, the game's XP isn't really that curved, so you can potentially fall really far behind par on level if you skip too aggressively.  I've been getting Underdog XP for a long while and the monsters still glow red usually, and that's with not using many Ward Lights, so...  I guess their expected XP curve assumed not too much encounter skipping.  Thankfully "surprise" bosses are pretty dang rare, there's almost always a save point before 'em to use a tent at, so it's not like games where skipping encounters is important to go into the boss with full resources.

And yeah, the characters are pretty good, after their rough start in the prologue.  But at least in Chapter 1 & beyond, most of the characters seem pretty clueful and mature, where the BD1 crew was just a bit younger / more naive / more carried away easily.  And yeah, Elvis isn't a womanizer; if anything his issue is that he has the "slight cluelessness about people crushing on you" thing that Japanese main characters usually have.  Especially appreciated for Gloria, since "naive princess does stupid shit because she's sheltered" is like a super common trope that would also make zero sense in her particular case, and they thankfully don't do it - she's perceptive, trained, knows what she's getting into, etc.  Well after the prologue at least.

Bravely Default II
Remains pretty neat.  Just finished up C4 & doing all the sidequests that opened up in early C5 + unfinished leftovers from C4...  actually let me mildly complain about that first!

So BD2's treasure chests & sidequest rewards are generally terrible.  That's fine for treasures (you learn to just ignore and have no stress about leaving some parts of the map untouched) and fine for character moment / plottier sidequests - hell, I don't need a reward at all for those, I'm fine if it's just some scenes & character development.  I will whine, however, about the game messing with completionist tendencies by having really pointless and uncreative sidequests stolen from an MMORPG like "kill 10 monsters of XYZ type", and doubly complain if said monsters are from a "zone" I already cleared and beat a bunch already that don't "count" because I have to get 5 fresh hides or something.  I was willing to spot the game early because you want some piss-easy sidequests to introduce the concept for the true newbies, but sidequests that are essentially "pick up glowing icons on the world map / in a dungeon" better have a somewhat interesting plot stapled to it, 'cuz it's rarely thrilling gameplay.  FE 3 Houses has a bit of this too IMO, too many placeholder quests that are essentially "walk to person, walk to glowing icon on minimap, walk back, congratulations you are winner" where the glowing icon isn't particularly interesting and the quest never was upgraded to something "interesting" before the boss said ship it.  Ah well.

Okay, moving on...

* Chapter 2: Pretty good.  Villain's plot is very Silver Age comic booky but I respect that it's treated as just insane.  The bosses definitely might go a bit overboard on the "haha we spoil XYZ", with the Shieldmaster fight in particular potentially taking FOREVER.  Specifically, there was a demon helper in the backline that can heal at below half health...  so fine, chip them there...  but also immunes a ton of elements and such, so I had to have my typeless physical attacker build up BP for a deadly Body Slam chain, except ANOTHER demon has Dread, which immediately sets you to 0 BP.  And Adelle was in a slow class at the time.  If I could do it again, I'd have said screw the JP, stick Elvis back in mastered Black Mage to ignore immunity / absorption, and stick a Dread-blocker on my fighter.  Ah well. There's also a random bit of horror toward the end of this chapter that was rather surprising and well-done I thought.  You'll know it when you see it. 

* Chapter 3: Definitely the best chapter so far.  A few of the bosses just rolled over & died, but one boss fight was quite good (Spiritmaster & Swordmaster), and the plot was substantially more serious and well done than usual - fantasy Salem Witch Trials, but taken seriously and not as a joke, i.e. it's just horrible murder.

* Chapter 4: Did the developers like Trails in the Sky SC?  Maybe it's just my imagination, any one of these plot elements alone would be fine, but C4 & late C3 has a few parts real similar to SC, what with a wacky anime squad going to places Our Heroes already visited to stir up trouble.  (Also bad guy shows what a badass he is by fighting a dragon, Our Heroes survive a collapse from a great height by dragon transport, although thankfully not via falling onto it this time.  Of course the difference is this is done at breakneck Chrono Trigger pace (ignoring the dumb sidequests) rather than thorough Trails pace, which...  actually I'd rather they take the time to do some of these plots a little more fully?  Speed is nice and all, but things like Halcyonia getting conquered then unconquered  - you could easily spend an entire chapter on that if you wanted rather than 3 fights + a boss battle.  They go more for the great man theory of history that it's all about the king instead.  Also one of the mini-episodes doesn't make tons of sense but it doesn't linger on it very long so whatever.  (Everybody gets kidnapped from Wiswald by an undead army, then unkidnapped and everyone is fine?  Yeah that didn't actually happen, especially since Wiswald is supposed to have more than 50 people living there.  Wish they'd just kept it at "crazy bad guy is in local dungeon and has kidnapped SOME people, no you can't talk to the other villagers for (reasons) but they're there" or something.  Also, the most random source of someone quoting Agnes's signature line from Bravely Default 1.)

[SnowFire]

Also, character builds so far:
* Seth: White Mage -> (Enough Freelancer for L9 / JP Up ) -> Black Mage -> Red Mage -> Pictomancer -> Spiritmaster -> Bard. 
Although I'm not sure why I'm bothering with Bard so late, it does seem like a late bloomer class (you want the speed-up-other's-turns ability which costs mad MP, otherwise you're better off with Pictomancer debuffs) and mastered Spiritmaster has a busted 2nd passive that makes me just want to run Spiritmaster / WM all day for my support duties.  Ah well, you never know, can't hurt to have Bard in my back pocket if it'll help some day.

* Gloria: Vanguard -> Freelancer -> Thief -> Berserker -> (enough Salve Maker for L8 / Thrust & Parry) -> Ranger -> Swordmaster -> Phantom. 
Has run Heroics as secondary all the time, although used it a bit differently...  Thief (pre-mastery) makes good use of high speed to spam Gift of Courage & items when not Godspeed Striking, say, while Neo Cross Slash is better than Swordmaster's skill set in general other than Flowing Stance but works nicely with an S in Swords.  I'll just mention here for both her & Adelle that, at least when underlevel, Berserker's Bloody Minded passive skill (100% accuracy at the cost of some can't-be-fatal recoil damage) seems like a soft requirement if you actually want to reliably hit stuff, which you really do in a system like Bravely Default where you want a confirmed kill when going deep into negative BP.  Also, despite being the best painter canonically, she's the only person I've not sent down the Pictomancer path!  Curious.

* Elvis: Black Mage -> White Mage -> Pictomancer -> (enough Salve Maker for L8 / Thrust & Parry) -> Red Mage -> Oracle. 
Oracle is a steaming pile of crap, I probably shouldn't have bothered, but maybe it'll have a really busted secondary?  We'll see.  It's insanely slow which kinda negates the benefit of the time magic stuff.  That said, a mastered RM w/ Pictomancy secondary is pretty badass, although randomly Pictomancer's stuff doesn't count for Chainspell for some dumb reason.  Oh well.  Gaia Rod helps make Red Magic secondary pretty good for earth damage currently.

* Adelle: Freelancer -> Beastmaster -> Berserker -> (enough Pictomancer for L9 / Sub-Job BP Saver) -> Shieldmaster -> (enough Ranger for L6 / Counter-Savvy) -> Dragoon -> (enough Salve Maker for L8 / Thrust & Parry)  -> Bastion -> (enough Red Mage for L7 / Revenge) -> Hellblade (?)

Sub-Job BP Saver is an insanely broken passive.  Agree with Jo'ou that Spearhead is insanely good for randoms, and would use Adelle just to Body Slam twice off Miscellany, but once you get Sub-Job BP Saver, Body Slam is just STUPID.  I remember comparing a double-weakness hit of a lightning spear off Dragoon vs. Body Slam, and Body Slam still did more damage (and throws in CTB Delay while you're at it) since the game is balancing thinking it costs a BP, but it doesn't.  Could do similar tricks with other costs-a-BP skills like Pressure Point, Crescent Moon, or Minus Strike, I'm sure.  Body Slam is especially cool since bosses don't seem to ever counter Miscellany, although some will counter any physical attack of course.

* Benched: Monk, Gambler, (Bard until very recently but I've not used Bard in serious boss fights).  They just didn't sound all that compelling.

As a side note, something odd about BD2 is that your job learning actually SLOWS DOWN late-game.  JP gain is essentially flat from start to C5 it seems, but early on you can stick the JP Up & Up / JP Up combo on lots of characters if you spend the time in Freelancer to master it and it's not a big deal to get 1.7x JP.  Spending 3 skill slots on that, even for randoms, is a lot to ask later on.  Of course, if you really want to grind JP, you can, but the game is in general generous enough about JP that it doesn't really seem necessary unless you're trying to max out Freelancer or something silly.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

BD2 - Just beat the Ranger asterisk fight, going into the Tower in Wiswald. The Ranger boss fight can be notoriously unstable, especially if you let the boss get a turn at full BP below 50% HP, and the support is pretty annoying... but Godspeed Strike and Neo Cross Slash to the rescue there, after I set up my buffs, Seth was dealing 4k per GSS under -resistance- (the boss resists Daggers, y'see), which is just gross. This said, because of the aforementioned instability, that took me two resets to really get it going, paralysis blockers are a very good idea there in general, especially since Quickflurry deals more damage to paralyzed units. Red Mage asterisk also got me a reset, but that was mostly me not paying attention. The status can be a bit of a pain there, but it's fortunately not hard to setup for it, be it via status healing items, be it via equips.

The writing seems to have gotten some steam as well. I like how the game doesn't dump the former asterisk holders into the void after their fight, and some of the reappearances got me to smile a wee bit (Bard in particular being an entertaining loser). Out of the main cast, Seth feels like the loser characterization-wise, just sorta generic. Gloria is very good - no-nonsense, duty-driven and very logical at what she sets out to do. Elvis is just goddamn likable and good-natured, all while having that thick Scrooge McDuck accent. Adelle... well, she's meant to be the girly girl out of the cast, and those moments are kinda eeeeeehh, but she has some good stuff going, mainly in her rapport with Elvis (the shoe sidequest is a pretty good example. Also, her first line after the Gambler asterisk fight got me smiling a bit as well, because she's so good at showing she's tired of that shit). The main thing, though, is that the characters definitely feel more adult and thoughtful than the usual, which makes sense given they're supposed to be, y'know, adults. Elvis is 35, the others are all in their mid-20s, so they actually do think things through and make logical connections. It's frankly refreshing in a sense.

Anyhow, my setups:

Seth - Mastered Freelancer/Monk/Thief, currently running Ranger with Thief sub-job. Ranger has a lot of damage and good speed, which lends well to running Thievery as a sub. Monk is a great earlygame carrier if you're willing to deal with the HP costs on their skills, Bare-knuckled Brawler also helps a lot with mitigating bad weapon affinities in just about any class you want and Pressure Point kicks ass. Freelancer... is all about Body Slam after Berserker asterisk, tbh, and Body Slam -is- really good, but not really "worth a full skillset slot" good. Thief is fucking bananas, though, mainly because of Godspeed Strike - granted, the speed also helps quite a lot. Thief just gets a lot of turns and this is important in BD2. Stealing sucks -ass- without farming setups I have no access to as of now, but if you're running Thief, it's because you want to abuse GSS and the speed.

Elvis - Mastered Black Mage/Bard, L6 White Mage, currently running Red Mage with Bard sub-job. Bard doesn't sound compelling at base, but I'll be upfront and say I'd be in SERIOUS trouble in half the asterisk fights if I hadn't run Singing in my setups. Stacking those full-party damage buffs and reductions really helps both blitzing through boss fights and surviving the necessary turns until my setups are ready to melt bosses down. Sleep and non-elemental MT damage also have their place in dealing with randoms. Black Mage... I'm frankly not impressed, MT really waters down the damage potential and the spells are EXPENSIVE (though the latter frankly isn't a big deal, with ultra-cheap Ethers and the MP regen passives, it's honestly hard to feel pressed for resources in BD2). Still functional enough and BD2 does a lot of specific damage spoiling, so you want multiple damage types waving around in your party. Red Mage seems pretty neat so far, covering elemental weaknesses Black Mage doesn't have and a more balanced stat spread, along with having a status game attached to its damage (and it also extends to a Black Magic sub-job if you care!). The healing not being MTable is a bummer, but it makes sense.

Gloria - Mastered White Mage/Black Mage, currently Red Mage with White Mage sub-job. White Mage remains borderline unskippable in BD2 and I setup Gloria for ultra-tanking with tons of HP equips and Res-based staves and shields. Offensively, she's kinda inept, but she's the lynchpin of my party just by virtue of keeping everybody alive.

Adelle - Mastered Vanguard/Beastmaster, currently running Berserker with Beastmaster sub-job. Spearhead, Crescent Moon and Mow Down mean she's my random-deleting button, no questions asked. Beastmaster capture is also super powerful, the damage is scaled upwards (Petunias with Aerora were dealing more damage than Neo Cross Slash -before- factoring in weakness...) and you can access status and debuffs you'd normally not be able to use with them. The chipping could be annoying, but Mercy Strike and Mercy Smash help A LOT with it, and it doesn't hurt Mercy Smash in particular is strong damage you can use just anywhere. Beastmaster is kinda busted, guys. Berserker has a lot of damage and axes are -powerful- (having an A in spears so I can abuse Spearhead with dual-wielding doesn't hurt either, and they're so bad at using shields that you don't really want to use those with them anyway), but the speed is a bummer. Vanguard has both damage and utility, which isn't bad - debuffs have been nerfed from BD1, but they're still pretty dang useful (I do -not- want to consider dealing with Berserker asterisk without Bard's damage reduction and Defang, for instance). She may be my offensive MVP overall as of now.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Trials of Mana - Beaten again. Used the three people I didn't last time (Charlotte, Hawkeye, Duran), did the one route neither Amy nor I had done yet (Charlotte's). Fought the aftergame trial bosses but decided not to do Anise's stockade this time.

I also read that No Future has an item cap of three per battle and decided that sounded cool, so I decided to roll Hard but implement that. Might be trickier for some parties but I had lots of healing, so it mostly made me pay attention because three Cups of Wishes is quite a limit if I screw up. I only died to Harcypete, Zahnoa, and Machine Golems mk2 though a few other bosses came close certainly (Mispolm, Xan Bie, Zable Fahr, and Dark Lich off the top of my head).

Charlotte: Light/Dark (Sage). She's bad early because ST Heal Light just isn't worth much. Gets a lot better after class changed because the MT version is actually very good. MT sabers that are also attack buffs is pretty cool, as her late pickup. Doesn't have too much offence herself but that's okay. I was going to use High Priest but it sounds like Turn Undead got nerfed.

Hawkeye: Dark/Light (Ninja Master). So uh this is a very solid class. It's just "fine" at Ninja tier when the debuffs are ST, but once the MT versions come out to play, he can just start wrecking randoms. Stack the passives to make the jutsus stronger and watch the fireworks. Better yet, he gets passives which cause the jutsus to build CS gauge (up to 15% per target from Flame Jutsu, or 36% if you get the improved version and stack them, which I sadly didn't). As you can see when facing 3-5 enemies suddenly he builds gauge very fast indeed. Only downside there is all his CS moves have small hitboxes relatively.

Duran: Light/Light (Paladin). Tanks with Provoke and various passives which mitigate damage or make him stronger due to it. Holy Saber sees some occasional use too, although since it's only ST it only came out against bosses weak to holy and nothing else. Which, well, Zable Fahr, Gova mk2, and Dark Lich do all exist and two of them are among the better lategame bosses.

Generally this team was less physically gifted than my previous team buuut the sabers sometimes changed that, since I didn't have those last time.


Fire Emblem Awakening - Up to Chapter 19.

Fire Emblem 4 - Okay let's do this. Still clunky, but interesting enough and I feel obliged to actually beat this myself and show that I'm a true FE fan. As well as Thracia. FE1-3 have remakes so...... we'll see.

[Niu]

Mo Astray -

I was reminded again how bad I am at plat forming game.
The wall climbing stage is especially rage inducing.
The spinning trap chamber boss fight is rage inducing.
The sky stage is rage inducing.
How fingers hurt is rage inducing....
But the aesthetic & story really made be persisted in playing.
I mean, the aesthetic is really really my thing. The whole lonely planet air and the game's of light in its general art direction.

The experience could be better if the OST can be a bit more exciting.
The OST is pleasant enough over all. But I don't know, it just felt to calm in general. Even the more fast paced boss themes felt that way.
The sky stage's theme is the only one that actually catches my attention on spot and gave some sense of excitement. (But damn the stage's design nailed me so hard with the music.)

[Cmdr_King]

Streets of Rage 4- ran through on Easy.  This is pretty satisfying all things considered, but I don't think I'm gonna obsess about doing unlockables and stuff.  Just... yeah, this is such a perfect template for what these kind of revival fanservice games should be.  Sprite work is excellent, I love how the new elements both mechanically and in plot play with the idea of remixing and building on the original, good music, just a good all around package.  Not something I need tons of, but real good.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Fire Emblem Awakening - Beaten again on Hard. Female characters only. I played the first half of the game primarily on the bus so reinforcements are kind of terrible but it's okay, most early maps either don't have them or you can avoid seeing them by going fast. Biggest exception being Chapter 13 which is definitely some nonsense and seems to exist to punish the player for trying to use unpromoted staff users or Olivia. Lots of things about the game do this honestly. This probably isn't a hot take but Olivia is the worst dancer in the series. (I ended up letting her die in Morgan's paralogue.) Second half of the game I played mostly at home so having a guide for the reinforcement nonsense helps a lot! Game has a very snappy pace, very few maps take more than 7 turns and you have so much control over the speed and such. That definitely remains a nice thing about it, it's such an easy FE to just get into.

Best units in some order were Robin (class changed to Dark Mage, Nosferatu too strong), Sully (just a big ball of stats, with high move), Lucina (class changed to Cavalier -> Paladin, ludicrous stat ball with high move), Sumia (Dark Flier, great stats early then fell off later due to poor str/def but Galeforce gives her nice utility towards the end), Cordelia (Falcon Knight, better stats than Sumia once her speed gets properly rolling, also Rally Speed and Rescue for utility), Tharja (Nosferatu is OP, not as good as Robin though), Kjelle (basically another Sully once she caught up), Tiki (invincible stat ball with 1-2 range, just breaks the lategame). Also used Cherche (good but has her weaknesses), Nowi (has moments of being early Tiki but the stats definitely aren't as good relatively, I dropped her midgame), Say'ri (she's fine, mostly Tiki's pairup partner but did enough of her own work to get Swordfaire), Anna and Maribelle (healers, with some bonus early Levin Sword combat goodness for Anna; Maribelle has issues early as mentioned but later can take one hit from most things). Storebought Rescue staves at E rank are certainly a thing all right.


Fire Emblem 4 - Beat Chapter 3! So far I have promoted Lex (Paragon is a thing) and Lachesis (was able to snag the boss kill to get her Paragon as well, then Heal gives her 30 exp a pop and her promoted class is really stupid). About to promote Aideen as well, and a few others are close. Sigurd is a ridiculous unit, no shock there.

Random thoughts:

-So the game opens with this neat opening scroll telling you about the game's political situation. I appreciate that. I don't appreciate the fact that the opening scroll is "Grannvale is ruled by Man #1 with the help of his son Man #2 and their advisors Man #3 and Man #4. Their political enemies are Man #5 and Man #6. There's also the high priest, Man #7. Man #8 is your protagonist, assisted by his friend Man #9. Taking advantage of the political situation, soldiers from Rapey Kingdom led by Man #10 are invading, threatening the castle of Woman #1 and taking her captive." This is not an exaggeration.

-God mounts/Canto are so dumb in this game. You just do so much moving from point to point, units without mounts can fall behind. When you're not moving towards things you sometimes face like 10 enemies at once so being able to hit and canto to safety is huge. And canto-users can even switch weapons after they kill something! Not as big a deal in this game as it would be in some others but still, c'mon.

-This game would be much better if it were faster. Even if you have to have the gigantic maps (and they sometimes do serve a plot/setting purpose), there's no excuse for how slow the "animations off" animations are. Enemy phases take forever to sit through sometimes. Also it badly, badly needs a Civilization-esque "move this unit to this square" feature so you're not manually moving 15+ units every turn even when no enemies are in sight.

-The pawnbroker system is so silly. Forget Manfroy, evil capitalists have taken over Judgral and it's a shame we never get to deal with them.
Lex: I just got this staff, but I can't use staves. Can I give it someone who does?
Sigurd: No. That staff is your property, and if you can't use it you deserve compensation for it.
Lex: I really don't need compensation, I can't use it and surely our army would benefit from its use. Look, I'll just give it to Aideen as a gift.
Sigurd: Completely unacceptable. If she wants the staff she must pay for it, at its market-determined price.
Lex: But I already got it as a gift from this village we saved.
Sigurd: I will pretend I didn't hear that you were part of something so... scandalous. Regardless, there will be no unauthorized gift-giving in this army.
Aideen: Okay. Apparently the market value of this staff is 10000 gold. So I give Lex the gold, and he gives me-
Sigurd: WRONG. The two of you do not have a license to make a financial transaction.
Aideen and Lex: ...
Sigurd: Lex, you must sell that staff to the registered pawnbroker. He will give you half its value, 5000 gold. Then, Aideen, you may buy the staff from him, at 10000 gold. Anything else would be illegal. Aideen gets her staff, Lex gets some money, and the noble pawnbroker who made the transaction possible is compensated for his invaluable contribution to our society.

I don't want to talk about how much money that pawnbroker has made so far. Eat the rich.


-While the plot is juvenile and regressive at points I do like the general feeling of Chapter 2-3 where Sigurd feels like he's doing the right thing but everything keeps getting worse anyway. I'd like it more if this was happening organically instead of it being the result of Evil Manfroy the Puppetmaster but it's still a neat feeling. I do like the scene where Sigurd rescues his friend and he's like "dafuq, why have you invaded my country" and Sigurd is all "just gimme some time dude, I'll make it right". (Spoiler for the next chapter: he gets his time, he does not make it right, and his friend ends up dead.)

-So uh this game has a cult dedicated to Loptyr who is kind of the Satan figure of the world. We learn from a village that if people are suspected as being members of this cult that they are burned at the stake, like some good ol' medieval witch hunts. How gross and barbaric, right? Only spoilers, this cult does actually nearly bring about the end of the world in this game so this basically means those witch hunts are actually objectively, completely justified? What the fuck. Someone did not think that plot point through.

I'll probably have more things to say about how absolutely awful the Loptyr cult are from a writing standpoint later!

[SnowFire]

Elf: I think it's a general problem that comes up when you include religions that authentically worship an evil god.  Which is something that fantasy settings do like to include, so...  hard to entirely get away from.  Obviously something a little more subtle like Final Fantasy X, where the religion is fighting an evil entity but in a really awful way while being dishonest about the true nature of the situation, is generally going to be a lot more interesting. 

I'm not sure about FE4 in particular but I think your best bet in general is to either make it a small and insane cult (a la your average Cthulhu literature) that really is okay to kill because they're people who've made dark pacts for power or the like, or if you're going to have it be a proper religion, at least give them a respectable front that claims to be about love and justice and obeying whatever Bishop Manfroy says.  That at least makes it properly awkward that random adherents are not necessarily bad people.  Awakening had a bit of a similar issue with Grima's cult, but to Awakening's credit, it also includes clearly sympathetic characters like Henry & Tharja who seem to at least nominally have been part of Grima worshippers, albeit just due to where they lived.  (To Awakening's discredit, it might still be correct to kill even nice-but-deluded followers depending on just how that sacrifice-Grima-worshippers-for-power thing near the end worked...   yeah the writers shoulda just tossed that plot point out and forgot about it.)

--
Bravely Default II

Finished!  This game was awesome - I truly enjoyed it.  (Just... harder to talk about the parts I like because they inherently involve spoilers, while the silly / dumb stuff I don't feel any shame in spoiling.)  Worth mentioning that Revo's music remains great too, although there might have been a few too many remixes?  Good for keeping it a "Bravely" series feeling game and BD1 nostalgia, but new stuff is cool too.

* As mentioned earlier...  the main characters have a rough start IMO in the prologue, but they do find their strides and become really enjoyable overall.  The secondary characters are mostly decent too, with the slight proviso that this is a standard heroic RPG and not a steely depiction of larger societies, especially in Prologue / Chapter 2 where there isn't very much time spent on characters who aren't directly leaders / enemies / plot coupon holders.  The Chapter 1 / Chapter 3 towns are much better about this thankfully.  I was annoyed in the already weak Prologue that it introduced 3 characters the game wanted me to care about without bothering to give them names, but thankfully at least one got a name eventually, which was nice.  Also, there's one particular character who is just...  I kept expecting their plot to be resumed but it wasn't.  I can only hope/assume they're being saved for BD2-2, because their plot is left totally hanging, but I suppose we'll see.

* There's a part of the game that doesn't directly tell you what to do, and I did get mislead by my own theorizing a bit, but I eventually noodled it out.  Don't FAQ it!  That was a nice and rewarding feeling.

* The boss of C5 had awesome music, nice remix of a famous BD1 track in there too, but wasn't TOO threatening.  The C6 boss, on the other hand, was extremely scary and I only barely hustled out a victory, although it'd have been easier if I'd known what to expect - although a lot harder if I wasn't using one particular class that spoils one of its main tricks ( Spiritmaster, which offers free partywide MP regen against boss that just loves to bust your MP).  The final boss wasn't actually that bad; I think I was more threatened by the C6 final boss (which, granted, was done at ~8 levels lower), although maybe I didn't use one particular busted thing the game hands you late it'd have been a lot more legit (the final secret class - the way the final final can threaten you is with busting all your BP and denying you turns, but the final class gives you BP regen which is the most powerful ability to possibly have, bar none.  That and good ol' instant death, which Spiritmaster still spoils.).

* Speaking of which, BD2 has a truly galaxy brain approach to one of its job system aspects.  I wasn't really expecting to beat the final boss above, just poke it and see what it was like since I was still getting thrashed by some lategame challenges that open up that are the rough equivalent of the BD1 C6-C8 Eternian asterisk team-ups.  But no, the final boss is actually easier, or at least approximately as difficult as, these team-up remix fights.  Dafuq.  This is like locking job upgrades in FF5 behind beating Shinryuu-level threats.  And then making you grind some more to actually get the benefits!  I dunno, maybe there'll be a postgame to use those abilities on.  Maybe relevant for a NG+ too?!

* The obligatory slightly meta wanking / other dimensions plot from BD1 returns a bit in BD2, but...  actually done fairly well, I think.  Definitely has the cool thing where you're doing something and you gradually realize what you were Really Doing later on.  (Spoilers, although not a huge one: So...  there's a boat-lending lady where you have a seemingly not-through-closely thing where you go on crazy adventures while the system idles, and if you connect to the Internet, you get better rewards and they invoke the names of other BD2 players.  And she claims the boats even work in a landlocked nation, where there's a will there's a way, etc.  And her deal is specifically with Seth, who is established as a "sailor" from afar.  You eventually realize that the "outer oceans" are literally other worlds, and when you get to visit another "island", you see the same kind of pop-ups for others helping out on your boating adventures elsewhere to help you out here.  And yeah, Seth is an in-setting isekai protagonist, he wasn't merely from another continent but from a different world entirely.  Cool stuff, certainly less silly than BD1's let's all power up across the dimensions to make a Spirit Bomb or something.)

* Random tidbit: So we're told early on about this big evil threat called the Night's Nexus, and then later on we learn a bit more about the nature of this threat and how it works and why...  and then somebody says something like "Oh, so that's why it's called that."  But...  the explanation has only vaguely something to do with being a nexus but nothing whatsoever to do with night, so I wonder if there was some Japanese reference in the name that didn't translate.

If anyone is curious, the boss battles...  big spoilers though.  The plot is worth enjoying so definitely a only-watch if you're never going to play, or at least skip the cutscenes.

* https://youtu.be/PS5mhYyIqm4 (C5 boss)
* https://youtu.be/0VNC4x3TYJo (C6 boss)
* https://youtu.be/sG5ZiPN2AMU (final boss)

[Dark Holy Elf]

Elf: I think it's a general problem that comes up when you include religions that authentically worship an evil god.  Which is something that fantasy settings do like to include, so...  hard to entirely get away from.

I think even simply not having the line about the witch hunts would be a big improvement. You can still have the cult be around, but change the framing to "There are rumours some people even worship the Satan figure. Sounds ridiculous to me, who would want to do that...?" As is, we're left with an uncomfortable conclusion that a practice that actually exists in real life and has killed hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people is something which the game, presumably by accident, is essentially putting forward as a good practice in setting.

Generally agree with your comments about Awakening.

In general I'm obviously not the biggest fan of massive cults of people overtly dedicated to the end of the world because I don't really find them all that credible. Obviously you can have an effective evil cult and/or religion in fiction and I'm fine with some awful people at the top of them, but they're a lot more credible if the rank and file are just ordinary people (complete with credible reason(s) for how they were recruited/radicalized, and there are plenty of possibilities!) instead of them being supervillains top to bottom. FFT works because only a small subset of the Shrine Knights are in on the plot to foment war and an even smaller subset are in with the "actually controlled by demons directly". FFX works because even the Grand Maester legitimately believes he is doing what's best for the world. etc.

[Cmdr_King]

In general I'm obviously not the biggest fan of massive cults of people overtly dedicated to the end of the world because I don't really find them all that credible.

I mean that's basically what most Evangelical "Christians" are at this point.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premillennialism#Dispensational_school

[superaielman]

Obviously you can have an effective evil cult and/or religion in fiction and I'm fine with some awful people at the top of them, but they're a lot more credible if the rank and file are just ordinary people (complete with credible reason(s) for how they were recruited/radicalized, and there are plenty of possibilities!)

You know which god you are paging with this.

[Cmdr_King]

Ghostbusters The Video Game- Fin.

So I originally tried playing this when it first game out, but it might've been the game that melted my xbox or something?  In any case I sold it off then never ran across a PS3 copy so anyway switch!  That's a thing.  Honestly the game takes a while to get you the basic tools so the early going is a bit sluggish, and the later parts of the game feel janky in that "we had to drop everything and ship so there's a missing level and a few cutscenes too unfinished to put in the game so we're just gonna warp from one boss fight to the next level just because.
Point being the game only truly fires on all cylinders in the Library level and I apprecaite the little writing trick they do here.  While if I'm honest the game is rarely properly *funny*, in terms of building on the Lore and that end of things it is pretty successful.  Kinda fan-wanky overall but some nice cute touches.  I feel bad because on the whole I'm noticing mostly the technical flaws (the other big one is the sound mixing in this remaster is BAD, although it was always sketchy and they lean too hard on recycling the movie OST) and it's an overall decent game so... y'know?  But so it is.

[Reiska]

Dragon Quest VIII - Finished main game.  Good game overall, but it's hard to shake the fact that in most ways it's a worse DQ11, having also played that.  The one place I'd say DQ8 solidly beats 11 is tighter writing, perhaps? 

I dunno, I don't have a lot to say about DQ8 in general.  I certainly have no complaints about it, besides the voice acting paling compared to 11's (but it was excellent for its time, certainly). 

I'll do the Dragovian Trials later, but for now I wanna move on to the next one.  Solid 8/10 game I think, in any case.  I probably would have given it a 9/10 if I'd finished it years ago before playing 11, but DQ11 is a 9/10 to me and DQ8 is a little worse in enough ways that I can't feel comfortable giving them the same score.

Edit: After some reflection, editing in a few comments about DQ8 in the interest of not double-posting.  So, yeah, on the whole I liked it quite a lot even if it mostly felt like it was a worse DQ11.  I think my biggest complaint about it may well be that while it was a giant leap forward for the series in terms of presentation, I wish the game had more options, in a word - options to choose between classic or redesigned menus (on the PS2 version anyway; 3DS version uses classic menus), options to completely disable the added battle animations (3DS version allows you to double animation speed but not turn them off), etc.  It's not that I don't *like* the animations - I'd likely turn them on for boss fights - but they make randoms take considerably longer for a game like DQ8 where you end up fighting an awful lot of them, and don't get me wrong - I *like* fighting randoms when they're engaging, and DQ8's were more often engaging than not - but having to sit through skill animations by the end of it was starting to drag a little, even on double speed.  Similarly, with the menus on the PS2 version, I respect that they're easier for some people and think that those people should have the option to use them, but for me (who was already deeply familiar with DQ-style menuing from playing 1-4 and 7, in the era) they felt sluggish and cumbersome, even before accounting for the fact that the added screen transition which wasn't there originally adds several seconds of loading time every time you open the menu which accumulates rapidly over the course of the game. 

Dragon Quest IX - Now I get to romp through this as something of a (premature) victory lap.  Morag was surprisingly rude about turn order this time, and it dawns on me that real-world events have proooooooobably dashed any chance DQ9 had of getting a port/remaster anytime soon.  (Coffinwell.  Just... Coffinwell arc hits in a very, very different way in 2021, and I strongly suspect that a theoretical DQ9 remaster would have to substantially rewrite the arc there to not be found offensive to Japanese sensibilities about ongoing disasters, much like FFL1 in the SaGa collection on Switch deleted all references to nuclear power being to blame for the post-apocalyptic state of Suzaku's world.)

[Dark Holy Elf]

Fire Emblem 4 - Beat.

An ambitious game and undoubtedly impressive for the time, let down by its writing being pretty poor and the gameplay often being too slow to be fun. Short form review:

What I liked: The detailed setting, where we learn about so many parts of the world and the people from them. The use of the large maps to tell a story, and the way they fit together to cover the continent. The ability to repair weapons (which for some reason vanished until FE3H). The love which went into crafting the individual bosses and their formations. The game auto-saving each turn. It's still Fire Emblem and FE is great generally.

What I didn't like: Glacial enemy phases even with animations "off". The pawnbroker system. Waaay too much time spent just walking across a map. The Loptyr Cult. How slow (but sadly useful/necessary) the arena is. Promotion being locked to the "home" castle. The combat forecast hiding key information (re doubling, etc.). The characters who matter being almost all men. Post-timeskip Lewyn/Forseti, what a sanctimonious douche. Gen 2's story in general.

No idea what it works out to as a rating (5ish?). I certainly respect it more than Shadow Dragon or New Mystery. Is it more fun to play than them? Yeah I dunno there.

I looked up a bit about pairing which mostly consisted of following advice that stated "Tailtiu + Lewyn good" and "make sure most couples include at least one person with Followup as a personal skill". It turned out pretty well!

Ayra + Lex: Gives Larcei and Ulster (too lazy to look up his canon name) Paragon and Vantage and great stats generally. They were held back by being infantry but very effective when they could see combat.

Aideen + Azelle: This one was accidental. Only good thing is the characters both get Pursuit, but Lester getting no bow inheritance makes him quite bad at first. I was ready to bench him but then wyvern country and the Brave Bow (gained right before wyvern country) gave him a niche and he ended up competent. Lana's got an A in staves, not much to say past that, could actually combat reasonably well after promotion if she ever saw it, which was rare.

Lachesis + Beowulf: Kids get Followup, not much to say. Both have Charm which is nice. Nanna is just quietly solid, good physical stats and sword paladin but also gets staves too randomly? She looks like she'd be a mage but no her magic growth is garbage.

Tailtiu + Lewyn: So Arthur joins in the first chapter of Gen 2 with Holsety, and he also inherited the Followup Ring which Lewyn was using. Good game enemies. Held back only by having 5 move at first, and then he gets a horse on promotion. Insane evade, high HP if he does take a hit, only certain formations in the final chapter could give him any pause. One of the candidates for gen 2 MVP obviously. Tinni unfortunately is just bad though (she'd be better with a Followup dad, but still not great?).

Erinys + Jamke: Fee having Adept/Accost off her high speed gave her loads of attacks, often murdering things in 6-7 hits from the Wind Sword. Since she flies she's easy to favour and make extremely effective. Ced is an all-around competent staff user, 6 move + B rank. I gave him the Barrier Ring so he could tank status staves, and Restore.

Brigid + Midir: Not sure how much this one even matters, the thief is gonna be the thief and Brigid passes down most things that matter to Faval. Perhaps the most interesting thing I thought of here is that Brigid + Alec would make Faval the best person to fight the final boss if you want to beat him without Naga (highest atk + Nihil).

Sylvia + Alec: Sylvia's husband doesn't matter too much given that the kids are a dancer and a staffbot. Anyway Lene is busted, FE4 dancer who can start with the Leg Ring. (Looking things up her replacement if Sylvia is unpaired might be even better, has to buy the Leg Ring but gets Charm, wow.) Cairpre is a filler lategame 5 move staffbot, gen 2 Claude without the res.

Arthur and Lene > Ares > other PCs in some order. Seliph turns into Ares lategame (mobile magical tank) but is clearly outclassed before he gets Tyrfing, the fliers are good, Nanna is good, Oifey is good, Leif is bad, Tinni and Johalvier were the worst PCs overall. No wait, Hannibal was, given I never deployed him and his castle defence neer ended up mattering. FE4 armour knights!

In gen 1, Chulainn died against the Agustrian calvary in chapter 2, that was tough so i accepted it. In gen 2, Leif got one-shotted by one of Ishtar's pet pegasus knights (with capped speed and Followup/Adept/Critical/Earth Swords) and I accepted it because Ishtar's formation is brutal in general. Also Ishtar having 100 hit against Arthur, despite having WTD is just funny.


Turn counts:
19,35,43,32,33,44(though I dragged this out to finish one pairing)
35,49,22,23,26,35
Total: 396

Sigurd 80, Lex 46, Ayra 42, Lewyn 38, Midir 37, Brigid 34, Finn 34, Alec 27, Jamke 27, Erinys 26, Quan 19, Beowulf 18, Azel 17, Lachesis 16, Tailtiu 16, Noish 9, Deirdre 6, Ethlyn 4, Chulainn 3, Arden 1, Dew 1, Claude 0, Sylvia 0, Aideen 0

Arthur 99, Ares 67, Fee 57, Seliph 47, Lester 36, Dermott 31, Leif 31, Shannan 28, Larcei 27, Julia 26, Altena 23, Ulster 23, Oifey 21, Nanna 19, Finn 19, Faval 19, Johalvier 11, Ced 4, Tinni 2, Lana 1, Patty 0, Hannibal 0, Lene 0, Cairpre 0
C in everything, Time: 57:13.

[Cmdr_King]

Atelier Meruru- fin.  Well, as finished as I plan to be, got A Rich Nation, which is sorta the default Complete ending as best I can sum it up.

I definitely felt travel and gather time really hard in the midgame, and it seemed like the options for mitigating all that opened up really late?  buuuuuut, part of that is  is because there's some ways to get the materials earlier but you have to know what facilities to build in what order to get them.  In general getting lots of endings in a dry run feels super FAQ bait in a way most of the PS3 era games don't to my knowledge?  Like, I finished the main quest in Ayesha really late too, but that was in part me fucking something up then getting really hung up on doing things meant to be done later/in between other activities because I missed a flag.  In Meruru it's just... rather demanding most of the time.

Anyway so Meruru herself is a pretty simple character but she works, and I like seeing Totori here.  Rorona feels like they finally nailed down how to do her, despite the obvious handicap.
Astrid is a goddamned supervillain jesus.  It's weird to me the writers didn't seem to reckon with how bad she was until after the Arland games finished, hence her being uh written out of Lulua more or less.

... gosh this means I've played all the Arland games now.  Neat.
6/10?  7?  I dunno, I'll have to look at the listing.

[SnowFire]

Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth

Short but fun indie Symphony of the Night ripoff.  VERY short - like 5 hours including sitting through the credits, and that's with what I think was a completionist playthrough.  It doesn't have quite all the random touches the real SOTN does from a budget, but as far as platformy combat?  Good to go.  The main gimmick is an elemental-shifting one which I was worried I wouldn't like, but it plays decently enough.  The other gimmick is a very feast-or-famine health system - if you can keep your spirit levels topped off, you regenerate health rapidly, meaning you're basically invincible.  If your spirit levels are not topped off, you can die very fast as you won't regenerate and enemies can hit for lots of damage and/or stunlock you.  For the most part, the result is a game on the easy side (especially if you use consumable items), but it's not toothless easy, so sure, it's cool.  The exploration is also very "nice" (in the sense of cluing in the player places they haven't been) if a tad uncreative - in a "real" big budget Metroidvania, you'd have lots of creative ways to unlock new sections and backtrack.  Deedlit opts for the simple-but-boring colored keygates method, congrats you can go through red doors now.  This meets the letter of a Metroidvania but not the spirit of one, as you should be getting the banana repellant ability to make your way through the banana jungle or whatever or other more flavorful excuses to open up exploration ideally.  (Oh, I should mention that the third, less important gimmick is some archery puzzles as well as having a decent ranged option in pestering your enemies with arrows the entire game.  Let's go for 4 gimmicks and say that "magic you just cast by pressing a button rather than some silly fighting game combo" is a gimmick.  Kinda busted that one of the best spells, a homing light attack, is also gotten very early.)

Also...  ladies, if your man is totally ignoring you, is semi-translucent, and seems to randomly disappear, that's not your man.  That's...  uh, you're probably trapped in some extradimensional magic labyrinth or something and that's just an illusion / reflection / dream / spirit / etc.?  This is a rare game that would probably be improved if you removed almost all of the protagonist dialogue aside from simple nods & approval.  Deedlit comes across as seriously clueless / in denial for some fairly obvious Something Is Up Here plot points from the start.  I'm cool with letting the player noodle out the plot and thus avoiding the protagonist spoonfeeding the player the "answer" via dialogue, but just have her be quiet and make it seem like she's playing it close to the vest, aside from occasionally yelling Parn's name, rather than act like a surprised deer in headlights that she seems to be mysteriously fighting the entire Lodoss rogue's gallery again in some undisclosed location.

Anyway, enjoy one of the best old anime openings again (pls ignore the series it was the OP to was bad by all accounts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Ee6PJvek4

Bravely Default II
I guess I'll mention for the record I did beat the superboss team-ups (no extra grinding).  They were definitely way harder than the final.  Beating Dragoon / Spiritmaster / Oracle really broke the rest of the fights open as the Spiritmaster upgrade is broken as hell (FREE RESURRECTION AND BRAVE POINTS FOR THE ENTIRE TEAM?!).  Kinda wish there was some post-postgame thing to actually throw the powered up jobs at other than "the superboss fights you didn't beat yet"?  Oh well, not a huge deal, some of those fights were *legit* even after I got the Spiritmaster upgrade.

For some more final very spoilery BD2 thoughts for those who completed the game (or weirdos who like spoiling themselves) while it's still reasonably fresh in my head...


* So the character who I have to hope is being saved for BD2-2 is Edna of course.  We don't learn anything about what caused her to hate humans - or, if she was just mind-controlled, how she ended up mind-controlled.  And yet, even that simple rivalry, if unexplained, is dramatically powerful because Adelle cares.  She's still an effective "presence" villain.  I feel that the game dropped the ball a bit with the Night's Nexus.  The interesting part about the NN was that it *was* a human originally before dunking its head in a negative vortex for ultimate power or something as villains are wont to do.  Even if they are no longer recognizably human, I feel that playing up that aspect, especially in the final-final C7 fight of the Night's Nexus, would go far to helping spice up the NN.  Make it so Inanna retained some core of themself, albeit insane, so that they could give her some more lines than just CONSUME CONSUME.

* While on the villains note...  Adam is in a bit of an odd spot.  When the party confronts him in C4, they essentially take him at his word that he's trying to unite / conquer the world, and have a standard hero vs. villain argument as such.  However, what we learn later kinda works to make this seem less true?  All we know early on is that Musa was "destroyed".  But in C5, it's claimed that Musa was more like *annihilated*, with Gloria / Sloan / Orpheus essentially the only survivors it seems.  Uh, this changes the equation.  Same with Vigintio's plan for conquest of Wiswald essentially being "kidnap everyone and turn them into undead."  There's CONQUER the world and there's KILL EVERYONE.  The game clearly wants it to be "conquer" when thinking about Adam, but I think they needed to tone down the backstory stuff, then, which retroactively makes "honorable enemy" people like Lonsdale look worse if Holograd was literally committing some sort of genocide.  Alternatively, if that really did happen, the Gloria / Adam conversation at the end of C4 needs to be very different - first off she should be smoldering with rage, secondly she can point out he's a hypocrite and that he doesn't really want to unify the world, but rather slaughter it.  Either way can work but you gotta pick one.  (Okay, you could also write Gloria off as a very VERY forgiving person, but that's even harder than the two options I mentioned to do right.)

* Also, Truff's plot feels...  dramatically incomplete?  By the rules of drama, if Our Heroes help out a hapless obviously unimportant person 3 times, the hapless person will surprisingly pay them back after it turns out they had the Amulet of Awesome or whatever.  But nope.  He just gets a happy ending, move on.

* This is more of a "nitpick" than a major complaint, but one of the plot threads is Gloria freaking out at the misuse of the crystals, and we find out later that they were essentially powered by Braska granddad (when BD2 suddenly decided to be Final Fantasy X!).  Now, to be sure, sealing the Night's Nexus is a well and good use of the crystals, but considering the powerful, crazy things they do otherwise over the 3 years after the fall of Musa...   this may not be a totally wild trade?  Assuming it can be any strong-willed human and not just the Musan royal line or something, of course.  Do you really think that there wouldn't be a single death in fetching water and building aqueducts and preventable heat stroke in 3 years in Savalon?  Not a single death in 3 years from people freezing to death, or suffering some severe injury chopping wood for fires, in Rimedahl?  These are some pretty major societal game-changers!  While the Wind & Earth crystals were used pretty frivolously, it might actually be worth continually throwing people into the grinder to power these up considering the amazing results.  I mean, how many people died in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge or the railroads?  Lots!  But it was sometimes worth it, right?  (Yeah, the game didn't remotely intend this to be the moral, so like I said, a nitpick!)