What games are you playing 2024? Battle strength determined by frilly outfits

[DragonKnight Zero]

Might as well get things started with finishing up writeups from FFT Fiesta.

  Was being indecisive about what I needed for the final series.  For accessories, picked up 2 Rubber Shoes (just in case though I don't plan to use them) and a 2nd Defense Armlet.  Grabbed a 2nd Red Shoes. (should have picked up a 3rd as well) Most of my remaining funds went to extra katanas for Draw Out.  Kikus and Murasames mostly with a few more Kotetsus and Heaven's Clouds.

UBS4

  Priest with Draw Out, Dancer with Punch Art and Martial Arts, Samurai also goes Punch Art + Martial Arts.  Blade Grasp on all.  The only really meaningful threat on the field is the lower leveled monk.  He dies to a Bolt3 from the mediator's Blast Gun and an Earth Slash from the dancer.  After that, it's just taking out everyone else.  Other monk, then archer, knights last.  I checked the knights' secondaries for anything that would threaten a full team of 80 Brave Blade Grasp, danger level nil.  Elemental boosted Blast Gun, Earth Slash, and Draw Out > enemy evasion.
  Did stall for a bit at the end.  Could have dropped the last knight with Holy but the first monk would crystalize first so I opted to wait a round to go for all the marbles.  Crystal which Felicia picks up.  Learn Counter and Move-HP up off it.  She now can master the class.  Only damage I take all fight is one arrow and random Throw Stone.

UBS5

  Everyone but the dancer is set up with a spell gun and a Black Robe if they can.  Arrange PBF to draw Rofel forward with a Petrify.  Firing squad executes him in three shots.

Morund Death City

  Priest and mediator go in squad 2, everyone else in squad 1.  Mediator, monk, and samurai have Hamedo and keep Blade Grasp on the rest.  I give the dancer a Bracer and a Power Sleeve to go with her Thief Hat.  Punch Art and Martial Arts on her and the samurai.  Move Ramza exactly 3 panels from his default location.  Kletian comes forward to charge Holy on the dancer.  Ninja on squad 2 side goes for Throw on the Mediator, Hamedo.  Other enemies advance doing nothing.  Dancer advances with a Spin Fist on Kletian, a ninja, and a time mage hitting all three. (this is the only time I've used Spin Fist all game)  Mediator shoots ninja dead.  Priest does nothing of importance: using Kiku on a samurai just for the action.  Monk Ramza punches Kletian for 210.  Wave Fist from the samurai does enough to drop him.

Death City Presincts

  My female Gemini's turn to be the priest.  I give her Blast Gun, Thief Hat, Black Robe, and Red Shoes and set Hamedo.  Samurai Artemis gets a Blaze Gun, Black Robe, and Hamedo.  Everyone else sticks with Blade Grasp.  Defense Armlets on the members unable to wear Thief Hats.
  I messed up PBF placement putting the female Gemini in squad 2.  So Balk ends up shooting at Artemis on his first turn instead.  Gun Hamedo.  Priest moves up and Kiku on Balk for 160. (and the hyudra)  Enemy Chemist tosses a Hi-Potion on the hyudra, not that it matters.  Monk Earth Slash on two, 40 to Balk.  Samurai and mediator shoot the hydra dead.  Dancer starts Nameless.  Balk gets his second turn and shoots at the female Gemini.  Just as planned.  Gun Hamedo procs a Bolt2 leaving him at 124 HP.  She does 153 with the Blast Gun allowing me to end it right there.  Easiest Balk 2 fight I've ever had.  And hey, that 40 damage Earth Slash mattered.  Dancer doesn't get any actions this battle.

Hashulam

  Black Costumes for all but priest and samurai to ward of Spell.  Hamedo on monk and samurai with the rest sticking with Blade Grasp.  MagicDefend Up on all.
   Turned out to be very straightforward bashing.  Hash mostly stuck to hitting 3-5 units at a time with magic but MagicDefend Up (and Move-HP up on the two who had it learned) along with Chakra, Murasame, and the occasional Cure were sufficient to keep up.  If someone got low enough to die to a physical, well that's why I have Hamedo on the two units with decent physicals.  Priest supports and uses Draw Out.  Monk and samurai go between offense and support as needed.  Mediator shoots,  Dancer uses Kiku or Slow Dance if not able to get a good fining line/offense would require too much bunching up.  Hash couldn't really get damage to stick and went down like a chump.  No Slow procs from Heaven's Cloud but didn't really need it anyways.

[Twilkitri]

Pokémon Scarlet - Hidden Treasure Of Area Zero Epilogue (Switch)

Accessing this is actually locked behind a mystery gift. ...that means that they can arbitrarily remove access at any time by just stopping distributing it, like they'd been regularly doing in older games but not so much recently. Not great! (Unless they put out an update that changes how it works later.)

Counterbalancing that situation is that this is pretty terrible, and appears to primarily serve just as a way to give you access to Pecharunt. So it might not be a huge loss if it was shuttered at some point.

If you want any actual lore about Pecharunt you're better served by the video put up on the Pokémon Youtube account rather than the DLC itself.

With regards to the Indigo Disk postgame, I did a little of it but it's really not doing much to entice me back to do any more.


Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch)

To my knowledge, I did everything except for beating the badge gauntlet level in the special world. (Unclear if there's anything else locked after that.) I was never able to get the timing down for consecutive parachute hat deployments and that level starts off with a lengthy section of them - not dealing with that on every reattempt.

Very enjoyable, possibly a bit on the easy side overall although that's hardly something I'd complain about. Also feels sparse for some reason that I think is mainly due to there being comparatively little postgame content? It has been a long time since the last 2D-centric platformer (...at least the ones I consider to be part of that category) so I may be internally comparing it against the wrong titles.


Escape Goat (Steam)

Escaped the Prison of Agnus (all rooms completed) with 1308 deaths.

I assume the majority of the deaths were in Final Path 9, but the game doesn't give you a breakdown unfortunately. Terrible room. Second highest probably a different room in Final Path, where there's concentric moving-block pathways where all the inner moving blocks have buzzsaws. Could not control the goat's jumps anywhere near finely enough for the sort of movements needed for these rooms.

I'm not going to try the alternate (harder) set of levels, although it might be interesting to look up someone else's playthrough of them.

[Captain K]

PALworld: It's a survival game (think Ark Survival) with Pokemon and Soulslike elements. You can capture Pals and have them work in your sweatshop or fight alongside you in battle. I like it because it's not very demanding - although you can certainly find trouble if you look for it. Currently level 15, dicking around the first island.

[Cmdr_King]

Atelier Sophie- Welp, a few weeks slower than I'd have liked but we finished!  Huzzah!

So... Sophie is a strange game because somehow by removing the calendar system they made it feel more bottlenecked?  I'm not sure if that's genuinely the case or just vibes but I frequently felt like I was just kinda grinding out the next Important Event points because there wasn't really any new alchemy or quests available and it was just doing one thing repeatedly.  There wasn't the sense of picking a focus and that still helping you do other things along the way.  I also felt like getting friendship progress was weirdly stalled, but maybe that was just the schedules being wonky so you didn't really auto-progress stuff very much?  I dunno.

There's this really great stretch in the midgame though, once you realize that Plachta needs some sorta body, that really has the good Atelier vibes, which is repeated later when it's time to unlock the reveal of the final boss.  Like yeah, you have a few different errands to achieve this one overarching goal, and each one has different facets that it needs done, and they have different timers so you can do stuff while waiting for stuff.  But the midgame stands out more because we suddenly go from "Sophie is a kind person who wants to help her friend the talking book" to "oh she's gay she is going to kiss Plachta now."  I gather the further entries of the Mysterious series only double down on this.

They did do the thing again where the final boss just drops a regen along the lines of 20% of his HP when on his last legs, so lol lmao hope your finishers and best items weren't spent getting to this point because you're just gonna lose ground every turn now.  Just extremely feelsbad game design and it's weird to me they used it so many times in this era of the series.  It's extra annoying because honestly the game is just not like that at all prior to the finale, but they hold back lots of stuff throughout the game so nothing truly mean would even make sense prior to the ending bits.  I mean we're talking about a game where after level 20 you stop gaining levels and instead get skill points.  Dunno if this carries over to the other Mysterious games but given the less than stellar reputation of Firis I can only assume they fucked it up if so.

Still, nice to have one of these off the stack again, even if I didn't make progress on the year overall.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Super Metroid

Played this randomly for the first time in a few years. I'm rusty but 52% in 1:24 is still pretty good. Just a really fun game to play around with even if the controls feel a bit clunky these days.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

New run idea: everyone trains exactly one skill. No variety! Well mostly. More of an interesting science experiment than an actual challenge run. It was harder than normal, but not dramatically.

1. Each character can only train one skill. "Train" covers faculty training (Byleth), setting as a goal, active instruction, and group tasks. It does not cover any automatic training before recuirtment (obviously) or actions in battle. However...
2. Characters whose chosen skill is a weapon or magic type (i.e. swords, lances, axes, bows, brawling, reason, faith) can ONLY use that weapon or magic type in battle. Characters who have a movement or authority skill are not restricted in this way.
3. Seminars are banned.
4. For battles where the deployment limit is 11 or less, each deployed character must be specializing in a different skill. For battles where the deploy limit is 12, there may be exactly one pair of characters sharing a specialization, since there are only 11 trainable skills. Adjutants may have any specialization, though rule (2) still applies to them.
5. Characters' advanced/master class(es) must in some way correspond to their specialization. i.e. I can't get Jeritza, train him in armour, and then keep him in non-armour advanced classes.

Results of the above rules:
1. Recruitment of many students (especially Ferdinand and Caspar) becomes significantly more difficult.
2. Most characters will likely need to certify in a one-prerequisite Advanced class. However, some caveats:
a. Lance specialists will likely need to go through Cavalier to gain enough skill exp to reach Paladin. Lance specialists basically need to start with at least E+ riding to have a shot at this path.
b. Riding specialists will need to use lances in battle in order to reach Cavalier / Paladin.
c. Flying specialists will need to use axes in battle to reach Wyvern, optional lances for Pegasus.
d. Armour specialists will need to use axes in battle to reach Fortress Knight.
e. Authority specialists will likely have serious trouble reaching any high-end classes. Dancer, however, is a legal choice for them.

Anyway, the hardcore mono-focus has interesting effects, particularly on the characters I focused on manual training for. Because authority/armour doesn't really need much training beyond B, riding/flying beyond A+, this means that the weapon specialists got a lot of attention. Anyway, for them:
-Characters reached A in their primary specialization around Chapter 7. Great for Sylvain (Swift Strikes) and Dorothea (Meteor).
-Characters reached A+ around Chapter 9.
-Characters reached S around Chapter 11(!)
-Characters reached S+ around Chapter 15. Crazy.
Coversely, authority obviously caused problems. Edelgard and Byleth hit B in late part 1, others (not Felix) hit C around then or slightly earlier, and never hit B... except Petra who used a Knowledge Gem for much of part 2. Felix hit D authority in early part 2 and then I wondered why I bothered.


Unit notes include battles/kills in parentheses, in ascending kill order.

Linhardt (faith, 30/13): Priest->Bishop. Seiros Holy Monks. I mean aside from losing armour- and flying-killing this isn't too different from vanilla Linhardt, Physic all day with occasional Warp or Stride. His damage was wretched but White Range+ (yes!) lategame actually mattered for expanded threat.

Jeritza (flying, 28/14): Wyvern Rider. Training him in flying gives him Darting Blow, so he was pretty generically cool, though since he didn't get Alert Stance+ or even to Wyvern Lord (due to failing five ~70% certifications in a row) he was definitely the backup one.

Mercedes (riding, 78/46): Mage->Valkyrie. Empire Magic Users. Asked to join around chapter... 10 I think? And I realized that I kinda wanted a second Physic user, so I set her to riding since she already had C+ reason and faith and thus made a capable Valkyrie. She certified in Chapter 14 and I added her to the team then. Didn't get Fortify or Ragnarok but wielding Thyrsus and sniping things from range 5 while also having Healing Staff Physic is still real good as it turns out.

Hubert (authority, 109/50): Mage->Dancer. Unlike normal Hubert he can't use any faith magic at all, and he was slower to get his key spells, so definitely subpar until dancer made this not matter. Authority is important but super authority focus not so much, apparently, though it'd be an interesting thought for Dimitri if I tried this run on AM.

Balthus (armour, 160/63): Brigand->Fortress Knight. Impregnable Wall battalion. Fortress Knight just ruins units, even ones designed for it. I got him in Chapter 3; at that point he was one of my best units with Curved Shot and Smash and good str/def. Falls off with time as he always tends to but when Advanced hits he really fell off a cliff, couldn't kill anything and all he could do is struggle to reach better units and protect them with Wall. Ended up like Level 27 when everone else was in the mid 30's.

Bernadetta (riding, 157/65): Cavalier->Paladin. Lances were her weapon of focus, but since I couldn't train her in them she didn't get Vengeance until like... Chapter 10? By which point other people were getting better killing power anyway, so she never really excelled. At least having both Tempest Lance and Curved Shot early was useful. Was replaced by Mercedes after Chapter 13.

Felix (brawling, 187/93): Brawler->Grappler. Jeralt's Mercenaries. From here on we hit the combat mainstays. Easy to recruit thanks to Byleth being a swordy. Anyway no 2 range sucks. Pretty good at killing things if he reached melee but definitely not perfect? Sylvain was better even at that. Really wish Brawl Avoid didn't require faith for this, I kinda used him as a semi-dodgetank with Jeralt+Ingrid adjutant and he'd be so much better if I could go all the way. As is, kinda meh, and particularly bad in Intermediate despite Nimble Combo.

Sylvain (lances, 234/110): Brigand/Cavalier->Paladin. Supreme Armoured Co. Did you know Chapter 2 Sylvain starts with D+ axes, letting him reach Brigand? Wild. Anyway Swift Strikes in 7, with Death Blow soon after, is silly. Kills all but the bulkiest enemies with high move and canter, yes please. Lategame CF isn't too cavalry-friendly as always which hurts him a bit but still very solid overall. Turns out pure lance is very much a valid Sylvain build!

Shamir (bows, 205/127): Sniper. Empire Snipers. Sylvain and Linhardt don't lose much from mono-focus, sure. Shamir, though? Basically loses nothing, besides B rank battalions. Get Hunter's Volley, kill things with Hunter's Volley. What more can be said?

Byleth (swords, 301/131): Thief->Enlightened One. Gloucester Knights. Swords would not be a fun specialization for a lot of people due to the lack of 2 range, as usual Creator Sword goes a long way toward making this more palatable. So, for that matter, is Enlightened One; even with magic banned, having +1 move on Swordmaster is a big deal. Windsweep is fun. Otherwise, generically solid stats.

Edelgard (axes, 305/151): Brigand->Warrior. Empire Heavy Soldiers. Emperor vs. Warrior is a reasonable debate (power/speed vs. defence), Armored Lord is trash though. Anyway, I gave her Fetters of Dromi to make Raging Storm better and generally to get my strongest statistically unit to better places faster. A pale shadow of Wyvern Edelgard but still one of the better units throughout the game.

Petra (flying, 313/145): Pegasus/Brigand->Wyvern Rider->Wyvern Lord. Galatea Pegasus (eventually). Alert Stance+ in Chapter 9 is a fun time! That said lack of other sources of evasion midgame (namely B authority for Galatea or Secret Transport, and a flying adjutant, and lower prowess skills) do hold the build back a bit. Had to really muscle it out in lance and then axe training to reach pegasus and wyvern. So a bit awkward, but with Death/Darting Blow and AS+ she was never going to be anything less than outstanding.

Dorothea (reason, 273/164): Mage->Warlock. Vestra Sorcery Engineers. Blast away with range 5-6 Thoron, great times. Black Tomefaire is wonderful, she one-shots axes/swords/bows and one-rounds armours all the way to the very end of the game. Not having healing was bad but early Meteor/Agnea/Range+/Tomefaire go a long way for making up for it, really good for a 4 move unit.

I dunno who the overall MVP was. Probably one of the Eagles women or Sylvain.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Tried out the first bit of Granblue Fantasy: Relink

I keep trying to get into this IP since it's just *everywhere* in Japan, and it has strong "old-school FF" vibes. But it just keeps falling short of being engaging. The gacha game of course has all the gacha problems, so I dropped that quickly. I tried watching the anime, and I definitely sat through all 26 episodes, but nothing deeper than the character names stuck with me. I tried the fighting game, which is gorgeous and created by favorite fighting game developer, but the story was so far removed from everything I'd gleaned from the gacha and anime that I couldn't get into the story or characters there either (despite Ladiva being the absolute best).

And so here I am, trying again with the console RPG. The story just skips over the intro bits, which is a little jarring if you haven't played the gacha or watched the anime I guess. The characters feel pretty flat as a result, but I'm hoping the goal is that they're jumping further along into the story to get to the 'good parts'. Since the intro of GBF is very boilerplate 'boy adventurer meets girl who fell from the sky' JRPG fluff.

The battle system is a little too ARPG for what I was looking for at the moment, so I'll have to come back to it after I finish SO6 and need a new ARPG.

tl;dr - GBF is popular and Djinn still hasn't figured out why...

[Twilkitri]

Rakuen (Steam)

RPGMaker-based adventure game. (No combat.) Decent, although unfortunately I didn't care for half the musical sequences.


Prose & Codes (Steam)

Essentially a decent amount of substitution ciphers of text taken from copyright-free books. So I found it pretty entertaining.

I was playing on progressive difficulty, where for each genre the puzzles start off having 6 letters pre-solved and that number goes down the further you go, with the last ten or so puzzles in each genre having nothing pre-solved. You can also play the entire game with nothing pre-solved, or with fixed amounts of letters pre-solved. (I don't know if the pre-solved letters are curated for each puzzle or if they're randomly selected.)

There's a followup which uses text from poems rather than prose but as a person who isn't really into poetry I don't intend to play it.

[Tide]

Wasteland 3 - I'm almost done. Just presumably the final battle, about 100 hours total.

So this is my second CRPG that I've played and we're batting 2 for 2 in terms of how much I like these games. WL3 is weaker than DoS2 though. There are some general polish issues and weak character writing which kind of sink it from being in the same tier as DoS2. On the whole however, it's good. Looks like earlier versions of the game had a lot more bugs and freezes which they patched out because my 7 year laptop was able to run this baby pretty smoothly.

In general, the overall strengths of this game come from the setting and decent enough gameplay to carry it through despite some unfortunate polish issues. The setting really does a lot of the work because not only are the environments cool to explore, but they mark a pretty important aspect regarding the characters, their motivations as well as the underlying plot of the game. It takes place post nuclear fallout where as the name of the game suggests, is a wasteland. To my understanding, this game also takes place after WL2 which had the organization your characters represent be in dire straits. In short, law and order are in short supply, violence is rampant and supplies are scarce. The game then asks you to make a lot of decisions with these factors in mind. For example, do you keep the crazy Ronald Reagan worshipping cult alive, knowing that if you gank them, you'll lose access to your only power source in the short term? Do you save those refugees knowing that doing so makes everyone else in the city's lives harder?

The game also likes to put a lot of excellent gameplay rewards BEHIND dubious moral decisions. For example, around 1/3 into the game, you'll encounter this slave trader who offers you a deal: Find one of her slaves and she will give you access to the bunker area in your base, which contains end game armors and weapons. The obvious decision is to tell her to take a hike. However, the power spike at that point in the game is so ridiculous that not only is it extremely tempting but telling her off doesn't even give you any consolation prize or punishment. You are basically strictly rewarded for making an awful choice. And as I noted, the game does this A LOT. Side with the Reagan worshippers and you lose access to the Robot Communities wares, which has one of the best vehicle parts in the game.

Where the game I think starts to lose steam is around the last 1/3 of the game. The game can be roughly summarized into 5 chunks: Setting up your base, Relations with the Bazaar, Denver, Aspen and Yuma County. Pretty much around Aspen, the game is either extremely difficult...or extremely cheesy. Enemies get a spike in HP and a lot of the fights late game are basically all rocket tag: whoever goes first wins. Lucky for you, you can pretty much enter all fights with initiative if you choose to attack first. However, this comes with a drawback where it is often better to shoot first and ask questions later - which ruins the immersion and makes dialogue options weaker. If you accidentally trigger a fight through talking, the game has an initiative stat that determines how many characters will be able to act immediately...but why bother with that if you can just shoot everything dead ASAP with no risk? Part of this rocket tag aspect comes from your weaponry but also because you get better skills and abilities. But if you've made a bad build or mistake, resetting your character sheet isn't free. And since this is post apocalyptic, money isn't exactly freely available. Sure, I had leftover cash at this point in the game but it's not like it grows on trees and you can just respec whenever you want. This is what I meant earlier by the game having some polish issues. Another one of these little problems has to do with crafting. Crafting Weapon and Armor parts is one of the strongest things you can do in the game. However, what the game doesn't tell you is that a lot of these parts and mod are limited and attaching one to a weapon is permanent. If you then sell the weapon or scrap it, you don't get your invested parts back. This means it is very incentivized to not use any of your good mods until you get those end-game weapons and encourages an unreasonable amount of hoarding. Sure, you might pick up on this in the whole "resources is scarce" theme. But really, you're telling me I can't detach a scope from my rifle? What?

It goes the other way too. If you've invested in the good stuff, all of a sudden, the combat becomes less strategic and more about "how much stuff can I blow up in one turn". Mainly because it is the most effective and efficient way to handle encounters, but also because tanking isn't very feasible late game. My dedicated tank healer has like 400 HP, 40% evade and like 50% elemental resistances across the board but he will still go down if like the 7 enemies all attack him. As a result, a lot of characters have kind of same-y roles - just different weapons so you're ammo stock doesn't go down like candy. For example, right now one of my companions, Kwon, is a mid-range attacker with an extremely busted SMG. On his turn he's often killing 3+ enemies due to a combination of his specs, weapon and abilities. My other companion, Lucia, is a shorter range pistoleer/shotgunner. This role is great at tackling close range threats with a little distance, but their role should be more support oriented from getting more access to unique Strike attacks and destroying enemy cover. Instead, I have found her to be more effective if I just make her a more efficient attacker. This is true of basically every role because defense is just not a thing that really works in this game. So yeah, the game actually loses strategic value the farther along you are into it.

Early on, you don't notice these issues because the strengths and weaknesses are more pronounced and enemies are still relatively balanced compared to your gear. But once you leave reach the halfway point, around a little ways into Denver, the game is very open in terms of letting you explore. So if you go into end-game areas, you can quickly loot them for the insane gear. The morally dubious choices with great rewards as I mentioned earlier also exist. The result is that you don't snowball but rather just end up dumping a bag of bricks all over the enemies at that point...or vice versa.

As for the plot, I'll go into it more when I have time (I want to see the ending first). But long story short, my current feelings are that I think Angela is written pretty poorly and despite the game having lots of moral conundrums it wants you to look at, the ultimate choice it wants you to make really falls flat to me. Maybe because I'm not an idealistic teen or my outlooks have changed since I've been married but the choice the game wants to give you is not really a choice. And while I agree with Cid's sentiments that tyranny isn't a thing that is ever okay, Angela's "solution" is so poorly thought out, it's borderline insulting. BUT maybe the ending changes things, so we'll see.

[SnowFire]

Momodora 5 - Finished.  It's pretty good.  A nice, short indie Metroidvania.  It's very similar to Reverie Under the Moonlight, but has some more impressive sprite work due to a slightly larger team (from 1 guy to...  1 guy + an animator + some support?  That's still a significant effort increase!).  It's also a little longer than RUtM, although..  still not quite long enough?  I had ~8 hours on the clock, which is probably closer to 7 hours without some idling.  The game will nicely mark areas with secrets with a question mark, and there aren't really weird Shinespark puzzles like modern Metroids, so it's pretty easy to be a completionist.  I got 109%/111% completion.  Maybe will get to 111% after doing the postgame boss rush?  We'll see.

In general, if played on Normal mode, it's of the style of high enemy damage but also enemy attacks being fairly dodgeable and telegraphed.  There'll be nice red warning marks even for off-screen attacks coming to give you a chance to get out of the way.  The game also has some aggro-encouraging mechanics where enemies are fairly easy to stunlock, so a strategy of just "immediately run toward enemy and unload your combo before it can get going" often works.  Although there's the By Law Obligatory enemy designs in 2D platforms with a dodge, like enemies armored from one side that you're supposed to let them attack you, then roll through the attack and hit them from the other side.  Archery is fairly busted for range games if you want - one of the very first Sigils you get (Think Hollow Knight Charms) increases the damage dealt by your first arrow hugely at Stamina cost, so getting that in as a first strike will blast a lot of regular enemies good.  And a decent number of bosses can be handled by just cowardly staying to the side and unleashing a hail of arrows with a bunch of arrow-enhancing Sigils.

Anyway, this style of combat is my jam, and the play control is real smooth.  Once you get to late game, you get a Sigil that makes perfect dodges more lenient to get which is a little centralizing, but whatever.  The lategame bosses are also a tad on the easy side?  Maybe they'll have more teeth on modes harder than Normal, but you get enough broken stuff that I was beating them on the first or second try, compared to having to take a few deaths to learn patterns earlier in the game.  The randoms can still be scary, though.  (Although the VERY final area is a bit of a letdown on challenge...  kinda wish they'd made the final final dungeon like 2x bigger just to let you style somemore with your endgame superpower builds.)

Speaking of lategame, one odd balance bit is that they sorta forgot to have a money sink?  There's several mechanics that reward money (Explorer companions, a Sigil that increases money drops, fishing) but nothing to use it on past the early game.

And yes, there is a topless demon whose weak spot is her breasts, again.  Ain't my jam but it's back.

Okay, back to the main event: nitpicking Metroidvania plot written by a non-native English speaker!  I think he muffed it up here, which, well, it's Metroidvania plot, so this hardly counts against the game.  But I like to write about such things anyway, and after Reverie under the Moonlight's success this had a real localization team (Jeremy Blaustein!), so what the hell.  Minor spoilers, followed by more major ones?  RUtM kept the plot pretty simple, there is an insane evil queen doing evil magic and shit and you gotta stop her to stop the curse, so just Dark Souls moodiness of a ruined town was enough.  Moonlit Farewell is more of a standard heroic quest but has some...  puzzling...  choices.

** (Minor spoilers begin here)
First, the game is called "Moonlit Farewell", so we're expecting to wave goodbye to someone.  Is someone going to die or heroically sacrifice themselves?  Something change forever?

The problem isn't where we end up, but rather that there's a setup that seems like it's setting up one plot, and then it does a different plot, and the switch is done less in a "cool plot twist" way but more a "wait what" way. There's demons loose, and also two warring sibling gods who hate each other.  There's also an expedition of an archaeologist from Karst (aka where RUtM took place) and her knight guard poking around ancient monuments with curious inscriptions, along with some sealed old temple areas.  Your mission is to get back the Big Magic Artifact summoning demons, but you also need to intervene in this divine quarrel.  Here are the two most basic ways to take this plot:

* Shonen option: Probably after getting your ass kicked, Our Heroine realizes she needs some Power-up.  She uses the archaeologist's research to collect the Four Doohickeys and do some ritual and beats some sense into the two gods, and maybe even kills 'em both (the "Farewell" part?).
* Making Friends option: Same as the above, but it involves doing sidequesty doohickeys to "fix" the problem and resolve the quarrel's source.

What actually happens:
First, the archaeologist and her escort are a total plot dead end.  You find them cowering in bandit town and send them back to safety.  They never help out in getting the needed vague power-up, despite the fact that said power-up involved poking around in ancient temples, which should have been the main reason for their existence!

Second, our heroines just take the side of the goddess in the feud.  Despite that the goddess is the one who attacks us for no reason other than it's boss fight time, twice!  We never actually see the brother god take any direct hostile action against us.  He's just sitting in his moon pillow fort doing nothing until we charge in to murder him.  Okay, okay, I guess the demons that are bad are sorta related to him, and we get TOLD that he's up to an evil plan to reset the world...  but by his sister, whom we meet by her attacking us and being told that she's part of a petty quarrel.  In almost any normal bit of writing, this would add a bit of tension - are we being lied to?  Are we just being told to go gank a mostly harmless rival by the Real Villain?  But I'm pretty sure that no, that was not the intent.  Now, there's no problem with the brother god indeed being bad news and the Final Villain.  Just...  why set up the plot to act like both sides were equally at fault earlier?  Or at least set it up as a direct plot twist that the goddess you've been fighting is actually good and she was fighting you because (insert excuse here)?  It comes across as just confused rather than a plot twist the way it's written.

And there is no Farewell to anything in this game.  The title is a lie!


--
Okay, back to no spoilers.  There's a carryover character from the earlier Momodoras that the game clearly thinks is very cool, but the only thing they let her do in this game is mostly get her ass kicked and let Our Heroine do the boss fight afterward, so...  meh. 

Anyway, still recommended.  Short Metroidvanias are around my attention span for video games these days it seems.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Since kicking the year off with Super Metroid and Three Houses, I've followed that up by played various other sidescrollers. And also Fire Emblem.

Super Mario Bros. 1 - I didn't take a hit until world 3 and didn't lose a life until world 5 (blame the surprise water stage in a pipe). Felt pretty good. Still game overed a couple times in world 8 though; still remains rude after all these years.
Super Mario Bros. 2 - Played through entirely as Mario, who is generally pleasant enough even though not being able to hit some of the bigger horizontal jumps is unfortunate. That said I decided not to take any of the major shortcuts through levels anyway. Built up loads of lives so never had to fear the game over screen, final level is still mean though.
Metroid: Samus Returns - This game is definitely proto-Dread, so it's interesting to revisit. Dread really is quite a lot better though; this game doesn't have nearly as good boss design (the second type of Metroid isn't really much fun to fight and you fight way too many of them) and the controls don't feel nearly as good, it's a more boring exploration experience too. That said it's still checks all those good Metroid boxes and was fun to revisit for sure; a very good game, just not outstanding like Dread or Super or...
Metroid Fusion - I feel I just appreciate this game more and more with time. So many brilliant atmospheric moments which really elevate the story. Good boss fights, good exploration, the feelings of slowly breaking free of constraints really resonates with me more than "here is a big open environment, go do whatever", good use of horror elements. I basically like everything about this game. Gonna have to play Dread again to decide which one is my favourite Metroid, I think. Or just leave it as a tie. Anyway, so far I've done a playthrough where I got 100% and a playthrough which I finished in 1:08. I realized there's an ending for 100% in under two hours and I don't think I've ever gotten that, so that's next.

Fire Emblem Engage - Doing a women-only playthrough. No Vander makes Chapter 3 hard, man. That said past the earlygame it's normal enough; Seadall is certainly the main unit I miss, not having him keeps some of the worst nonsense Corrin and Byleth would normally enable under control. This is the first time I kept both Lucina and Lyn on their starting users and the combination is completely cracked.

[Cmdr_King]

Super Mario RPG (2023)- It's astonishing how this is both a stunningly faithful remake and also just has a really distinct gamefeel.  Just a bunch of teeny changes that really speed the whole game up (my final play clock didn't even crack 10 hours).  It's also wild just how badly bosses EXPLODE, like in the back of my head I knew they weren't much but I think I like 3HKOed a bunch of them, it's absurd.

But yeah there's not a whole lot to say, game holds up with so few actual changes it's really funny.  Heck, they didn't even add voices like Live a Live did!  Mid-90s Square was something else y'all.

[Twilkitri]

The Hex (Steam)

Pretty good. The gameplay is more in service of the narrative and/or comedy than Inscryption's, at least for most of the characters. A couple of them could be expanded on. A little disappointing that you don't get much opportunity to do anything fancy in the programming sections (although that of course essentially also ties into the narrative).

Didn't touch any of the ARG stuff (or even discover pretty much any of it to begin with) and missed a bunch of secrets, but I ended up watching a video some days afterwards which went over it all.


Cat Quest (Steam)

Quite enjoyable. That said:
* It ends up being really checklisty which is a style that's kind of falling out of favour with me.
* For a significant portion of the game you end up walking back and forth between distant parts of the world map which gets to be a pain. You get some quicker ways to move about later on but some sort of fast travel would have been vastly appreciated.
* In relation to both the above, you can't tell if a location has anything level-appropriate available for you without visiting it. (The map does at least distinguish incomplete dungeons/quest boards from complete ones as I recall.) So unless you're keeping separate notes, every time you've gone up five or so levels you need to traipse around everywhere to recheck.
* Main story tasks which are on-map, meanwhile, don't have any sort of level recommendation attached at all, so the majority of the time I ended up being vastly overlevelled for them.
* The drops from chests give the impression of being primarily randomised, which isn't great. (If you get a second instance of a drop you already had it improves the one you already had.) You also see fancy chests a bunch of places from the beginning which you can't open until completing a lightly secret quest halfway through the game, but then once you can do so they thoroughly outclass everything in the regular chests. Then you get semisecret ultimate equipment later in the game which thoroughly outclass everything in the fancy chests. Still have to open them all though to flag each dungeon as completed!

All that said I still wishlisted the sequel afterwards.


Return Of The Obra Dinn (Steam)

Great.

Unfortunately I didn't end up getting everything correct in the intended fashion. For one example, at one point I thought I remembered something which indicated which of the brothers was which, but after having entered that information it eventually became clear that it wasn't correct when none of it locked in later, so that essentially ended up giving away what the correct values were. In most of these situations I did end up finding evidence I'd missed later on. (And, of course, there's no real way for the game to guard against this situation, and it's reasonable enough to conclude that there shouldn't be.)

Did identify the Chinese crew members via evidence at least.


Rock Of Ages (Steam)

Beat the story mode, missed around 4 keys. As far as I can see getting them all doesn't do anything important, so not worrying about the rest.

Not really a fan of the gameplay, likely because I'm not really a fan of tower defence.

[Tide]

Against the Storm –
I’m not normally into Rogue-likes. Against the Storm was advertised to me as a City Builder first and I like City Builders…especially when I can just chill and take it at my own pace. This game is interesting though in that it kind of combines multiple different genres of game into the end product. What you get is a sort of City Buidler Roguelike with a touch of RTS (not quite there, but close). And surprisingly, it’s real fun – even though I was just looking for something to chill with.

So the premise is simple. You’re basically building settlements in a storm riddled world. Your goal for every settlement is to reach the required Reputation score (usually 14) before the Queen runs of patience. You gain reputation by increasing your settlers’ resolve through fulfilling their needs such as preferred food, housing and services. You can never lose reputation but your settlers can get afraid and lose resolve from different events, during the harsh storm season and from hostility. The queen also gives you a set of orders, which when fulfilled gives you Reputation, lowers impatience and opens a new building you can build for that map from a pool of unlocked buildings.

You lose if a) all your settlers leave or die b) The queen runs out of patience. Since impatience can only go down when reputation is gained, you’re on a strict timer on every settlement. Essentially, the goal is to get in, maximize your settlers’ happiness as quickly as you can, then get out. There are lots of different ways to go about doing this The complexity is trying to find the quickest way out while managing an effective city layout for logistical and production reasons. You’re often juggling between multiple different resources and despite having about 30 hours in the game now, the supply chains are still tough for me to remember.

It is surprisingly real fun and even on these easier difficulties right now, I’m feeling the tension despite not being a serious danger. I think this is because ATS kind of turns the City Builder design on its head a little bit. For one, you never really know which set of Blueprints you will get. Some buildings are really powerful. Any farm for example is amazing because it will instantly solve food problems by giving you an ever renewable resource. However, you may never get these and if that is the case, you have to try to find ways to get food elsewhere. Second, the game forces you to expand because your starting resources are very limited. To meet your settlers’ demands, you are forced to open new forest glades which then generates new loot, resources and events. That’s the roguelike aspect of this game coming in.

You can still keep playing once a settlement reaches its max reputation, but you don’t get anything out of it. But hey, if you enjoy slow rolling to a win you can. On the other hand, getting a bunch of tools and then going a mass exploration, crate delivering adventure ala Eph can let you speed through a settlement since shipping crates back to the Queen improves Reputation by a notable margin.

I highly recommend this game if you can spare 30-40 dollars. It’s lots of fun and every settlement feels different. Will be moving to Veteran once I win through Pioneer a few more times.

[Captain K]

Blazblue: Entropy Effect (Steam)

Not a fighting game, but an action Roguelite (more of a Dead Cells/Hades-like). Pick a Blazblue character and kill enemies in a sidescroller.
You get different powerups based on your character and based on different elements. I beat the game, although there's more endings. Typical Blazblue nonsensical story. Took a while to get into, but it grew on me after a while. Takes a lot of design elements from Hades, so if you're looking for something that's kind of like that check it out.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Metroid Fusion - I got 100% items. And then I realized that there's an ending for getting 100% in 2 hours and I'd never gotten it, so my task was clear. 2 hours is definitely not too far from speedrun territory (the world record is a bit over an hour as I recall) so it's a bit tight, but I had fun plotting out a route (no clue if it's the best) to snag everything and then executing it. Took a few save loads on some of the more difficult items, but less than I feared. Ended up at 1:38 which is hardly great (included several major errors which I decided to shrug off) but good enough for me.

Fire Emblem Engage - This is the ninth mainline FE game I've completed three times. The women only run is done. Some notes:

-Chapter 1 is in theory trickier without Vander but is still largely scripted.
-Chapter 2 is... tricky without Vander for sure, but manageable.
-Chapter 3 is the hardest map of the run without question. Enemies come at you in waves of several, and I only had three units (Alear, Framme, Etie). Took several tries to execute a plan to survive the opening round, and the boss is just hellish since she basically can't be damaged except by Alear's personal boosting one of her allies and even then only barely, and she's carrying a vulnerary to heal and drag things out further! Ack. Eventually I manage it. I don't want to imagine what this map would be like if the pegasus knights had even 1 more HP so Etie would miss one-shots on them, y'know like how FE normally treats its earlygame archers.
-Chapter 4 and 5 are tougher than normal, and I'm unable to keep Louis from dying, the only casualty of the run. Still, our lord and saviour Chloe joins and that helps a lot. Celine's nice too.
-From Chapter 7 on the game plays fairly normally, with lack of Seadall being the only major noteworthy thing.

Alear (180/90): Griffin Knight with Lucina. So I'd read about Bonded Shield (engage command which protects adjacent allies of same movement type from first hits, doubles/braves/chain attacks go through) but never used it as much as it probably deserves. This playthrough... yeah I decided to leverage it more. I didn't always rely on it but typically used it on one or two turns in most fights, and it's really good at protecting a fast mounted mage. Alear is a good user because of the support list and personal.
Framme (13/13): Staffbot. Was basically only used when deployment was very high, but hey, she was one of the top fourteen, so that's something. Chain Guard has some nifty uses early but way too much worse than Bonded Shield later.
Etie (183/116): Warrior, used Marth earlygame. Her high kill count says more about her high availability and lack of staff access or utility than anything else, she was actually #13 and definitely benched in a bunch of maps. Good at killing fliers with Radiant Bow midgame but eventually even that falls off. Perhaps I should have forged her a brave or something for the lategame but I was worried I'd be too underlevelled for even that to work.
Celine (179/99): Sage with Byleth. Thyrsus good, Byleth's boost to magic and speed very good, Goddess Dance busted as always. Generally competent magical unit at most points.
Chloe (312/232): Wyvern with Sigurd. Just ridiculous. Post-well I think Chloe has a case to be the best physical unit in Engage, just dominates from the moment she joins and never lets up, has Canter when her competition doesn't in part 2 and then Lance Power plus her innate speed on Wyvern (which she reaches without a Second Seal) is just kinda amazing forever. Sigurd's a very good emblem, canter is extremely good and having it without a skill slot rules, and move is always the best stat.
Lapis (22/15): Filler in Chapter 7-11 (held Leif) and again in 14. You can make her work but I didn't really bother.
Citrinne (176/105): Mage Knight with Micaiah. Micaiah giving staves to someone with high magic is always nice. Kinda rocks right out of the gate due to promotion giving her speed but it does fall off eventually. Still the Micaiah user always has uses and her Levin Sword does wonderful things to enemy armours.
Jade (7/2): Filler in Chapter 10-11, not much to say.
Ivy (224/171): Lindwurm with Lyn. Here we are, default "canon" Ivy. Her naturally high magic combined with Lyn's high speed leads to someone who can easily reach ORKO thresholds with Elfire/Bolganone, Speedtaker to really get rolling and then Bonded Shield lets her clear out enemy formations like a champ. Would have been even better if I'd thought to put Celica engraving on a Fire (and upgrade it to Elfire) but still was probably the MVP of the run.
Hortensia (156/35): Sleipnir with Corrin. Flying 3 range Corrin user OP, it is known. Hortensia can't do the damage with it Ivy does, and the battle/kill numbers speak for themselves, she was always chipping enemies to freeze them and debuff them. She uses staves sometimes too of course, since she is good at that, but not nearly as much as she did evil debuffy combat. Corrin also lets her take hits with her beefy +15 HP, how novel.
Goldmary (143/78): Wyvern with Roy. Roy lets her easily get Sword Power so that was her build. It'd be nice if she were a bit faster but the offence is adequate (high atk) and the bulk is ridiculous, we're talking something like 45 def/30 res with Binding Blade by the end. And Hold Out for the extra hit at the end. Not quite as durable as the Ike-user and also no free Reposition, but significantly better offence.
Timerra (139/88): Picket with Eirika. Despite favouring her (I gave her the C14 boots, they're from her castle!) she was one of the less useful PCs overall. I gave her Lance Power (though it took longer to get than Chloe because of needing Sigurd levels via bond fragments) but the offensive stats just aren't great and proc skills aren't as useful as just building up reliable kill numbers, and don't stack with crits as nicely as you might like. No Eirika user is ever BAD lategame, mind, Sieglinde rocks (though kinda highlights a flaw of the build, Eirika wants Sword Power, not Lance).
Merrin (125/71): Wolf Knight. The opposite of Timerra, I did not favour her at all, never even giving her an emblem until the end when Marth rejoins. But she's so good midgame anyway, those bases. With no favouritism dagger offence does fall off a hell of a lot, major damage issues toward the end and there's no Knife Power to fix this, and Marth doesn't really do enough the way Eirika or Roy can.
Panette (170/110): Warrior with Leif. Standard Wrath/Vantage Panette build. Pretty good! You obviously have to watch numbers but nobody else has her power/crit combo (and good hit too!) so she pulls the build off well, impressively so considering it uses such a low-demand emblem.
Anna (11/4): I'm impressed I somehow got her 4 kills, though I did use her until Chapter 11 I suppose. Anna used as filler is very bad. Hey guys do you want Boucheron's bases four chapters later? Yeah me neither.
Yunaka (48/25): Filler for Chapter 6-11 and 14. To her credit, is better at it than my other filler units, Thief is a good earlygame class.
Saphir (99/42): Warrior with Ike. So Panette used Ike until she got Wrath and Leif. Conveniently Saphir joins shortly after, so Ike's gotta go somewhere! Her build also lends itself to Wrath since she gets a hit boost at low HP, but the power's no Panette so I didn't try to pull of Vantage/Wrath with her. Okay filler, durable and longbow chain attacks and all that.
Veyle (52/22): Dragon with Celica. So Celica's Echo gets range+1 on dragons, that's actually pretty sexy for Caduceus-esque counter ignoring. Too bad about her HP, and also the lack of staff access (outside Celica's Recover, which is nice to be fair) but she pulled her weight decently as magical might late without needing much investment or taking an in-demand emblem.

Was fun.


Since then the two things I've played are Troubleshooter and Unicorn Overlord since y'know I like SRPGs. Troubleshooter looks kinda interesting but is a bit of a slow starter, definitely seems like a game with too many systems for its own good so far.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Baldur's Gate 3

So I decided against my better instincts to try Baldur's Gate 3, since a lot of people from various directions have been recommending it to me.

First of all, whew! My file ended up being 78 hours, which is longer than it usually takes me to play games. I am generally not much of a completionist for sidequests, but I did the character quests which added a significant chunk of game clock.

Lae'zal is probably my overall favorite character (and I even skipped some of her plot on accident in the earlygame, so I'll need to fix that), but I found all of their plotlines quite compelling. Wyll and Karlach are both really good people but have just enough edge to be fun. Some highlights from the NPC cast include Raphael, Dame Aylin, Isobel, Gortash, Orin, and Rolan. They did a good job of making the villains reasonably fun while also making you hate them. I feel like Astarion and Shadowheart get the best character quests (with the caveat that I missed a lot of Laz'ael's), Wyll's and Gale's are both decent, and Karlach's definitely feels a little less fleshed out than the others. Not getting to meet Zariel is definitely a bummer.

The voice acting is really good too. I thought all of the main characters have great voice acting. I think voice acting can really make a cast shine brighter and this cast definitely does!

Setting-wise, the game does a great job. I really like how the different locations feel lived in, especially Baldur's Gate itself. I think the plot is only 'decent' but the game really thrives on his character interactions and confrontations.

Gameplay is kind of SRPG layered with random die rolls and 5e DnD elements. It would be quite a daunting system to get used to if you weren't familiar with 5e already, but thankfully I am. Even still, there are so many options! Jump command being so important is odd to me. I really enjoyed a lot of the boss fights; Dror Ragzlin, Phase Spider Matriarch, Marcus, the Chosen Three, Viconia, Lorroakan, Cazador... the MVP fight has to be Raphael though. Fantastic music, gripping and difficult fight, lots of moving parts. His taunting and sneering at me…. hot.

Party balance is good, although I have to admit that LVP Rogue is pretty apt to my DnD experience. I adored playing as an Oath of the Ancients Paladin. Would really like to try Bard next, since for some reason there is no Bard PC at all! I was really surprised.

My biggest complaints would be that the game is glitchy, a little finnicky/too much information thrown at you, and that it has a protagonist that doesn't speak except for your dialogue. And the DnD DNA means that chance plays a large factor in combat at times.

I'm definitely interested to play it again pretty soon. I'd like to play as Dark Urge and get Minthara because I want to see what she's all about. Sad to lose some of my PCs but I'd like to get her authentically and play the game that way. My ending was me turning into an illithid and roaming Avernus with Wyll and Karlach. (presumably in a polycule, but wyll won't admit it) At the reunion, I tried to eat Gale's brain but I managed to stop myself. Hooray!

Gameplay notes:

I played as Oath of the Ancients Paladin which is overall solid. Their 'Turn the Faithless' really only came in handy a couple times, but the Healing Radiance was frequently incredibly useful. Really like the mixed fighter and mage role, and Divine Smite is great.

Battlemaster fighter + great weapon fighting feat + level 11 + potion of cloud giant strength for the final battle = ridiculous damage output. Fighter is overall good in this game but especially late after they get a third swing. I think the final form of the final boss took like ~120 a turn just from Lae'zel, which was pretty silly.

Wyll was the overall MVP -- Warlock is dumb as fuck. The armor that adds Cha modifier to cantrips... please. He did like 1d10 + double cha mod with each shot which is ridiculous from range. Cloud of Daggers saved my ass so many times against bosses, and fireball is fireball.

I gave Gale the boring-but-effective Evocation Wizard build, which was definitely really good! His Cantrip game was definitely weaker than Wyll's which makes me inclined to say he's a worse unit but still can't really go wrong with the Wizard arsenal.

Shadowheart... respecced to Light cleric, as I joked about. Fireball/Warding Flare/Radiance of the Dawn/Spirit Guardians/Guardian of Faith are all great, And having a healing battery to extend time between rests is always very useful! Lategame didn't get as much use from her.


Karlach is decent, definitely hits her stride in midgame, but felt like she ended up a little overshadowed by Lae'zel ultimately. Lots of HP and tanking power vs. physical enemies though.

Astarion was probably the worst of the origin characters because Rogue isn't great. I did Assassin for him. I've heard that Thief might have more interesting options. Cunning Action is good utility, but his bulk and damage isn't wonderful.

I didn't really use Halsin or Jaheira much. I was more excited about the origin units and usually ran out of steam with my main character before needing to use them.

I really loved this game. Definitely a big competitor for game of the year, and it's only March 1!!!

[DragonKnight Zero]

FFX HD Remaster

  Picked up my postgame file again and finished up a bunch of captures for Nemesis.  Down to about 7 more species to go; one of the unfortunately being Tonberry so that's going to suck.  Beat up Earth Eater a few times for more Fortune Spheres during the process.  Somewhere, decided to give Dark Shiva a try.  Pulled off a victory with an underleveled party, to my pleasant surprise.  Well, underleveled relative to what the guides suggest for it.  The stat benchmarks:

Strength: 149 for Wakka, 255 for Anima.  Immaterial for everyone else.  Tidus and Auron both with over 160 weren't cracking 100k damage with Slice and Dice and Tornado anyways.  (doesn't help that I flubbed the Tornado input)
Defense: Doesn't matter as everything Dark Shiva did killed the target.
Magic: 100 or so for Kimahri for reliable 99999 Nova.  Ended up unused on anyone else.  Dark Shiva has extreme magic defense so spell weren't going to be doing a whole lot anyways.
Magic Defense: Doesn't matter, no attacks are subject to magic defense here.
Agility: 160ish for Rikku, 110-130 for Tidus, Yuna, Wakka.  Kimahri was on the right side of 98 with Auron and Lulu trailing around 90.  (those familiar with the game mechanics will know there's no really functional difference between 110 and 160 for a character not starting the fight)
Accuracy and Evasion don't matter as I never used a standard physical and every incoming attack ignores evasion.
Luck doesn't matter either but I have done a bit of Luck boosting and everyone has values in the 20s.

HP was at 9999 for all but Lulu but the only value that matters is anything above zero.
MP is whatever as I didn't use a single MP dependent skill in the winning attempt.

I've knocked off enough Greater Spheres to have Auto-Phoenix armor for everyone besides Yuna.  Yuna sticks with her Auto-Haste + Auto-Protect setup.

Overdrive mode is Comrade for all.  Auron, Yuna, Rikku is the starting lineup.

Auron goes first thanks to First Strike.  Swap in Wakka and Attack Reels.
Yuna gets a turn thanks to auto-haste.  Swap in Tidus and Slice and Dice; the delay on Blitz Ace is too monsterous here.
Rikku may or may not get a turn depending on starting RNG.  Use it on an overdrive from Kimahri or Auron.

  Attack Reels was doing around 200k damage, which was my best offense by far.  After that opening, it's let auto-phoenix handle revival and pray I get a turn.  Dark Shiva is constantly double-acting and may get a triple or quad action depending on how it spreads out who its murdering.  Hopefully, I get a turn right before its Overdrive to swap in Rikku for Hyper Mighty G.  Otherwise, splat.

  Things actually came together in only two tries.  On the first go, got into a situation where one more attack would fill up Dark Shiva's Overdrive but I only had one turn.  So I went for Jinx and prayed that someone could sneak in an action after the next attack.  Oops, it turns out even the non-damaging Jinx charges the boss' Overdrive meter.  Total annihilation follows.

  So basically, my turns are spent attacking with Overdrives: Entrusing Overdrive to Wakka if his was empty, the user's full, and his turn was coming up before the boss' (this situation never came up): or Hyper Mighty G to live through Diamond Dust.  Lulu stole once to meet the action quota and did nothing else of note.  Yuna's only role is to summon Anima to drop Oblivion as a finisher for the Overkill.  4 Attack Reels and some other overdrives from the dudes and Dark Shiva is worn down enough for Anima to deliver the killshot.

  Auto-Phoenix MVP; it was the decisive factor in being able to manage (read: flub) my way past this fight.  Had a good run where Dark Shiva tended to avoid bullying Wakka long enough for him to get turns to fire off Attack Reels and only needed to endure one Diamond Dust.  12 Phoenix Downs spent, a good return on item investment.  Equipment drop was a trashy weapon with only Icestrike but no way am I redoing this battle to try for something better. This marks my 4th dark aeon kill.  4 left though I don't know if I'll ever go after them for real.  I thought I'd peace out before Dark Shiva but it turns out I had the tools to win it without an enormous resource drain.

[Captain K]

Unicorn Overlord: Liked the demo so I bought the game. Nice to see a tactics game that goes back to Ogre Battle rather than being another FFT clone. The variety of conditions you can put on your skills is quite nice. Also a lot of freedom in terms of which stages you can tackle when you wish.

Just got enormous boob girl back, cleaning up a bit on the first area before I head to a second.

[Twilkitri]

Apocalipsis (Steam)

Played through both the main story & the side story.

I think it mostly tries to ride on its graphical style, which doesn't always look especially good in action. Outside that it plays pretty similarly to a worse version of Machinarium (which I already have a low opinion of).

The game is split into discrete levels where once you've solved whatever puzzle is blocking you from leaving you can't diegetically return to. You can return via a level select feature although this puts you back at the start of that level leaving you to solve the same puzzles over again. (For clarity, you can still return to the level you were up to via level select.)
Getting the non-bad (?) ending turns out to require you to have collected a bunch of non-puzzle-related items throughout the game. A little surprisingly, once you've actually beaten the game (and presumably got the bad (?) ending), you can actually just skip back to the levels containing these items (presuming you look them up, I guess it's not as simple if you don't) and pick them up, then return to the final level and re-complete the game with the other ending, rather than having to replay the entire thing.

anyway i thought that was surprisingly merciful

The main story has Harry taking an Orpheus-like role to rescue his beloved who was executed for being a witch. Then per the side story she literally is one, and not exactly a benevolent one. I don't have the capacity to understand exactly where you're trying to go here, Apocalipsis.


Dragon Audit (Steam)

Fairly short & simple 3D point/click-style adventure game which I enjoyed a decent amount. Contained more ribald jokes than I was expecting. Unfortunately had barely any unique responses for using the wrong items on things.

The graphics are fairly primitive but this is only really a problem in a couple of instances, the prime example probably being that the camera can start acting up when in confined spaces.

The story has been left open for a followup so hopefully one is made.


DUSK (Steam)

Horror-FPS which to some extent I enjoyed inversely to how heavy it was going on the horror. Somewhat correspondingly, my least favourite of the episodes was Episode 2 and my favourite was Episode 3 (which also had other things going on in addition to being comparatively less horrorful).

If they make a followup I'd likely play it.




The full version of Logiart Grimoire is out now, and they have added 115 extra puzzles to the game above the Early Access version - but unfortunately they're not included as puzzles in the core tech-tree-like gameplay mode, they're all siloed off in a separate area where you just access them through a list. This is quite disappointing.

[Captain K]

Unicorn Overlord: Damn I can't say enough good about this game. Fixed stat growth instead of random FE nonsense? Yes please. Also there's no stat penalty for promoting units early, although it takes resources so you can't do it to everyone.

I ended up restarting and using all hired units. That way I can color coordinate my entire army and execute all the story characters like the merciless bastard I am.

My only complaint is that the time limit on some stages seems too short. I'm playing on Tactical if that makes a difference. Not too terrible, feels like they just need a little tweaking. Like 10 more seconds in some cases. Anyway, Hallowed Corne Ash are reasonably plentiful so it's not a big deal.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Unicorn Overlord

What if Vanillaware wrote a giant love letter to Fire Emblem but borrowed Ogre Battle's gameplay concept? Having a blast with this. I'm not the biggest fan of Ogre Battle or Soul Nomad's gameplay so I was a bit leery about this too but the game is such an evolution of their formula. The game really wants you to get into building squads, considering how they imteract with enemy squads, and even adjust your tactics (AI settings basically) to get the results you want. It ends up being a lot of fun.

The game has a damage projection system which tells you how the battle will go, even accounting for the RNG. It's a bit of an odd choice since if you don't like how a battle is projected to go, often a good strategy is to mess with the RNG in various ways (toggling on/off assist actions, for instance, or doing a different combat first). But it ends up working pretty well anyway? The game might be even better with a detailed battle projection that included the percentage chance of each individual unit in the battle to fall, but it could have been much worse with no projection at all since combats are too complicated to hand-predict, so I'm not gonna complain too much.

The story's a bit disappointing. There are glimmers there, but yeah, this is definitely more in the style of Archanaea or Elibe Fire Emblem. Really feel the game could have stood to be more ambitious here; the two main villains are both particularly dreadful so far.

On the other hand the graphics and animations rule. Octopath Traveler had me thinking I just don't vibe with sprites these days but clearly that's a lie, since the spritework in this game is beautiful. I spend more time than I should watching the battle animations because they're so great (fortunately the game lets you choose whether to watch a battle play out or whether to skip it each time, good QoL there).

Playing on Expert, currently in Elheim.


Other things:

Phantasy Star 4

Replayed this for the heck of it. Enjoyed it a lot, but I know the game too well at this point and I was craving something more difficult. So I'm now replaying this again with a challenge run of "don't use helmets or armour". This has the effect of making everything tougher, but randoms moreso than bosses; enemies can do loads of damage so it's important to find ways to kill random formations as fast as possible. Hahn and Gryz are even worse than usual because they're so slow. Up to the Air Castle. The hardest dungeon was Tonoe Basement (a flashback to my first playthrough where I missed the Tonoe shops), with Nurvus being a notable second. Bosses aren't as buffed relatively but Dark Force 1 having a multitarget physical made him nasty (which is funny, I'd consider him one of the easiest bosses normally) and Xe-A-Thouls having three of them is also scary, for all that I've beaten every boss on the first try so far. Lashiec having another multitarget physical will likely test that.

Metroid Dread - Beat the game in hard mode in under 4 hours, which is the "best" ending. Also beat it on normal mode in under 3.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Baldur's Gate 3 - Finished a second playthrough of BG3 with the Dark Urge. It was mostly an evil playthrough, but I did a lot of talking my way out of problems/lying to people rather than fighting everything I encountered.

I was a Lore Bard, Expertised all the Cha skills and used them extensively to slither out of fights or just to be a pain in the ass. Also Insight and Perception.

Spoilers ahead!

Some highlights:

-I chose the “fantasize about cutting off Gale’s hand” option, which ended up with me actually doing it. RIP Gale I guess.
-Sided with Minthara/goblins over the grove. Feels bad, and the plot is less rich after that due to not having tiefling NPCs, Karlach, Wyll, or Halsin.  I only had Shadowheart/Astarion/Lae’zel for a lot of the run, until Minthy joined in Act 2.
-One advantage of that, though, is that you get a lot of those characters’ unique dialogue with each other!
-Did Lae’zel’s sidequest which i managed to skip first playthrough. Good stuff! I really enjoyed the plot there. One thing I didn’t like though — Lae’zel still says “for Vlakaaith!” even though I betrayed her. Feels kinda silly.
-Act 2 again is a bit depressing because I had the dark urge to kill Isobel and did it. Bye Jaheira and Isobel and Isobel’s gay wife. I feel like this part of the game is the part that feels much emptier than it did first playthrough. No saving the rot. feelsbadman
-Did the Shar path for Shadowheart this time. My culty little pal. Again, objectively the worse route but I figured I’d pack it all into the one playthrough.
-Minthara is fun; very pragmatic and driven, and has basically no moral qualms about anything. I wish she had a little bit more, especially since her camp dialogue is glitched to talk about Gale all the time, even though I didn’t even meet anyone called Gale. LOL. She could be a GOAT character but she ends up falling short thanks to the decreased dialogue and lack of a character quest. I was surprised that she didn’t have more dialogue during the Orin fight. I needed my fix of toxic yuri. Her voice acting is super super super good.
-Also, did her romance. it is very brief and doesn’t really reveal that much about her. Very disappointing. she’s still my hot, evil wife though.
-Did Vampire Ascendent Astarion. Again, objectively bad choice, but it’s very fun to watch him chew scenery in the lategame.
-I accepted Bhaal into my heart.
-I gave Raphael the Crown of Karsus in exchange for the Hammer. Nothing could go wrong
-I sided with Gortash. I think it would have been cool if he was a PC, instead of him just dying. I really liked the Dark Urge’s tie with both Gorty and with Orin. It really adds an extra dimension to their stories, especially Orin who didn’t seem to have much in a ‘regular’ playthrough.
-One random highlight is when I lied to the projection that Lorrakon set up and told him I was a tax collector and he gave me his tax money. LOL
-It felt pretty good to tell the Emperor to fuck himself. Stupid slimy bastard.
-Speaking of which, I used my one shot of Power Word Kill from being Bhaal’s Chosen on him in the final boss fight after chipping him a bit.
-Ending was ‘make everyone thralls, except Minthy who will help me usher in a reign of darkness’. Definitely not a great ending or very fleshed out compared to the regular ending, but it was honestly what I deserved. Sadly, Raphael didn’t come and try to take my crown. I could have taken that bitch.

Gameplay notes:
-Still did the base difficulty. I think I’d want to have a full party to play Hard.
-Bard is a fun class. Cutting Words is quite cool and made a lot of things that were hitting miss. I mostly used the Inspiration on that. Having to determine that you will use Inspo at the beginning of the turn makes its offensive capability less useful than normal.
-For my extra spells, I took Fireball and Counterspell the first time (because I was missing Gale and Wyll, and Counterspell rules), and Misty Step and Shield the second time. Teleporting is good, as it turns out!
-Went with a Rogue/Ranger multiclass for Astarion, which is way better than just Rogue. The extra attack on turn 1 at level 3 + extra attack at level 5 really adds the DPS element that Rogue desperately needed. I did Thief/Gloomstalker. Two bonus actions a turn is pretty swell for stabbing and hiding and dashing. He could really shoot down enemies a lot better than the first time.
-Did Tempest Cleric with Shadowheart. Much like first playthrough, she peaks midgame with max damage Shatter and Spirit Guardian, but she’s always pretty good. GOAT against Ketheric.
-I did Champion Lae’zel. Generally worse than the Battlemaster because of lack of options to increase accuracy, but once she gets rolling with Great Weapon she’s still solid. Action Surge is also sexy, especially with the ease of Short Rest in BG3 vs. 5e DnD
-Minthy is generally very solid; high AC, divine smite, Vow of Enmity. All around very good.
-Using a smaller party makes long rests more common. Didn’t really push my resources, but might have on the higher difficulty!

Final thoughts:

Gameplay is engaging and compelling; combines turn-based/grid-based tabletop gameplay into a game format quite well. The luck aspect is a bit of a damper on otherwise excellent combat. I liked how they took some of the weaker spells and abilities in 5e proper and buffed them. Definitely not an easy game, even on base difficulty, and has a lot of tricky bosses that you have to adjust your strategies to beat. Raphael was probably my favorite fight (and not just because of the music, although it helps), but I also really liked Cazador, Orin, Gortash, the goblin leader, and a lot of other random encounters which ended up being quite challenging and fun to beat. I want to revisit the game on Hard at some point.

I also like how customizable your party is and how you can play around with different builds if you want. I used Bard and Paladin and they felt like they played very different roles in the party while both being incredibly useful. The combinations of characters and classes you could play seems like it could lend a lot of replay value and tinkering around with the multiclass system is something I am interested in.

Plot is a mix of standard DnD flair with mindflayers, which adds an extra supernatural/horror element that I really liked. I wouldn’t say the plot is amazing and I think there’s definitely some parts that could have been done better, but overall I was satisfied with the progression. It starts a little slow, and Act 2 does feel a little fillery at times, but I thought Act 3 does a great job of tying together the threads.

Characters are the highlight of the game. All of your party members have fleshed out motives, backstories, and opinions on the journey. I like how the game gives you a built-in excuse to have party members of varying philosophies and alignments, which allows you to have Astarion and Wyll, two people whose life philosophies and moral codes are diametrically opposing, together in the same party without it feeling stupid or out of character for either. My faves are Lae’zel, Astarion, Karlach, Wyll, and of course Gortash, who revels in being the slimiest tyrant. All of them have compelling backstories and fun interplay with the other PCs. Gortash is a weird mix of power-hungry tyrant and actually a bit optimistic compared to your average character of his archetype?

I think all of the PCs are pretty good, though; I ended up with a positive opinion of all of them, even Gale who is the whitest white man to ever exist.. Halsin and Jaheira are a little less compelling but still likeable. Raphael and Mizora are two of the other highlights from the NPC cast, but a lot of them are quite good. Isobel and Dame Aylin are a great couple <3. Really enjoy their defying fate energy and Dame Aylin is suuuper fucking hot. Really missed them on this most recent run.

The voice acting really lends a lot to this! The game’s voice acting is almost universally very good (aside from Cazador, who sounds like my trying to impersonate a generic villain); Astarion and Lae’zel and Minthara are all great, and Gortash and Orin and Raphael have the right amount of villain pizzazz to make them compelling. I also really like the character designs and the outfit choices, and I really like that you can use not to wear a goofy helmet if you get it.

Some less good things would be
1. the load times and crashing on the steam deck is definitely a problem. I had a few cutscenes also fail to run properly, especially in the Astral Plane/Shadowfell. there are some times when things glitched out, and sometimes spells would take a minute to kick in.
2. the music. way too much of the game has barely noticeable music which is a shame. raphael’s song being a big exception.
3. some weird glitches, especially involving minthara’s dialogue. she repeated this line to me about gale like four times and he wasn’t even in my party. very odd and immersion breaking.  really should be fixed.

Overall, though, I had a great experience! Really enjoyed this game and its characters!

[Dark Holy Elf]

Unicorn Overlord

Still having fun, nearing the end of Bastorias.

UO difficulty is a bit odd. Playing on Expert, and since the earlygame my only deaths are due to third-party loss conditions (which Hallowed Corne Ash can't even save you from, lol) which are often kinda hard to see coming. Which isn't really great. That said battles are engaging anyway. Short maps can't really challenge you too much because items let you stomp things, but in long maps the 10 item limit is definitely a consideration.

Phantasy Star 4

Completed with no helmets or items. The hardest boss indeed proved to Lashiec, since with no armour even Thunder Halberd 2HKOs everyone, as does Another Gate, so I'm healing all the time, and only have four Star Dews. Profound Darkness had me worried about losing at a couple points (Megid after Cancelling one-shots some people so every time the latter is used, a bit of luck is needed to have Wren outpace the boss) but I pulled through, Raja was clearly the best choice since his Blessing buff let me Chaz and Rika survive the physicals, even without shields.

Air Castle and Garuberk Tower were both tough dungeons. Frost Sabers (an enemy) are very dangerous in particular because if they get a turn at 50% health or below they will use Air Slash which as a MT physical does crazy damage. Best solution against more than one ended up being to have Rika cast Saner so that I'd then reliably outpace them next turn and blitz them down. Tonoe Basement was probably still the toughest ultimately; Chaz and Rune getting to hang out in the back and cast Rever if necessary after the fight ends is certainly a big help.

The shield decision is always the biggest one for equips in this game. Kyra always had two shields which tended to make her the tankiest PC (although I usually put Wren in front for randoms), Hahn/Seth/Rune/Raja too though that's unsurprising. I only bothered with shield Chaz for the brief sections lategame where he's alone (more on that below). Rika was the one who varied the most; in the first half of the game I often had her with one shield just to have someone who could take hits near the front. After getting the Silver Tusk and Thunder Claw her offence is just too good to curtail in randoms, so I always used two claws for them, but usually switched to a shield for bosses (notable exception being PD, as above).

I actually lost the Chaz duel with Alys's ghost/illusion which feels like it shouldn't happen. 2HKOed by someone faster! Even with two shields! Yikes. The loss of endgame armour is a huge hit. Anyway I solved that by using the Swift Helm itemcast to outspeed her, then heal and wait for a dodge with my boosted speed, RPGDL strats here.

Was fun! Never really had too much trouble at any one point of the game but it made for a pretty neat hard mode experience.

[Captain K]

Unicorn Overlord: Beaten. Had an amusing game over on the last battle when I had all my units deployed and no Alain so when the mass takeover occurred I had no way to swap Alain into battle and cure the mind control. I should knock that for the game pulling a "Gotcha!", but they couldn't reasonably expect someone not using Alain on their first playthrough.

Anyway, outstanding game. Huge replay value. There's a lot of ways to break the game, but that's because there's a lot of ways to play the game. So many neat interactions between skills, so many types of equipment, etc. I can see this game taking off in the speedrunning community because you can basically go straight to the last boss.

I might delay my next playthrough because they dropped a random huge update for Star Ocean 2 R. Chaos difficulty, more gear, more raid bosses, and other stuff.

[DragonKnight Zero]

Believe I've reached a point in FFX postgame where I'm not progressing without some serious stat grinding (or Zamato, which I'm not going to use).

Dark Bahamut looks impossible with my 25-30ish Luck and 100-150 Defense.  Physicals barely land due to the Luck differential and it has stiff defenses so my only form of offense to get around that are Nova, items, and story Aeon Overdrives for one shot of 99,999 each.  Then there's Impulse, which is death at my defenses and total status havoc even with maxed Defense.

Dark Anima has the same issue of getting damage past its defenses as dark Bahamut: stiff defense and magic defense and inflated Luck to evade my Celestial weapon physicals.  Mega Graviton also causes status hell to all but my one Ribbon user.  (Doom taking someone out as a bad time can very well spell defeat) No counters to deal with at least but double the HP.  At least max Defense doesn't appear to be a requirement to handle this fight.

Dark Yojimbo also has high Luck but notably lower magic defense.  So I can damage him without stat grinding Luck.  Instead, it has sheer offensive brutality in Wakazashi to delete the party whenever it feels like it.  I don't think I'm getting past this one without max Defense. (as well as preparing to handle the status crap)

Yeah, could grind out the necessary stats and materials to craft the needed armors.  But nah, I'm good with peacing out of this one and calling it as done as I'll ever get it.