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

[Dark Holy Elf]

Unicorn Overlord

Beaten. Around 75 hours, Level 40-43 or so.

Had a lot of fun with this one. I think from a purely tactical perspective the game could definitely be better, but I get it; this is an incredibly difficult sub-genre to do well-balanced combat for and all things considered they still manage okay. But really, there's just such a joy in tuning squads in so many ways to respond to threats the game presents. I can't say enough good things about how the game is very public with how everything works and wants you to interact with it. Definitely just an unexpected joy of a gameplay game. I averaged over 2 hours per day until I beat it which is pretty unusual for me.

Lovely art/sprites. I do wish the story were better; that is certainly gonna keep the game out of the 10/10 range. But very fun. In a weird way, despite the obvious genre difference, it reminds me of a Warriors game... not quite as mechanically tight as some of its competition, but extremely playable. (The mix of different sizes of maps also calls the mind this comparison.) Will definitely play again at some point, and it's a good sign when I'm saying that so quickly about a 70+ hour game.

[Cmdr_King]

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth- Fin

Okay so.  There's some parts of this game that smack of lacking confidence in itself and in the player to be willing to roll with what flows naturally in the game.  This is most pronounced in the beginning and parts of the endgame, where it feels like the game is afraid to just not have a driving force moving the plot along beyond "hey Sephiroth is out there, we should figure out what to do about that" and insert action sequences that just don't really jive with the overall mood meant to be set in this portion of the story.  Like yeah, Shinra is a problem and they do rule the planet, but there's a big gap between their city and the rest of the world in how they exert control.  And there are some changes to the big plot modules that don't always work, like I'd say Cosmo Canyon is just overall weaker as a sequence, despite Nanaki's arc being drawn a lot more sharply. 

On the flip side the game's propensity for bombast sells the hell out of other sequences in a way that's amazing.  FFVIIR-2 basically pauses every hour or so to rip your heart out, and at least one time does it so much harder than the original game I was floored by it.  Just a fantastically well-composed scene.

As a game unto itself it feels a lot more able to stand alone than Remake.  Like, when Remake was being a remake it was good, and when it inserted gameplay to fluff out Midgar to a complete game it was kinda the weakest parts of the game.  Now, the stuff with Avalanche being real characters, that was good, but making Hojo's lab an entire Resident Evil Mansion of new dungeon is... a lot.  Making the Shiny Golden Wire of Hope a whole dungeon?  A lot.  Remake has its share of "this did not need to take 2 hours" dungeons but it a lot better about adding gameplay to sequences that were really short in the original, and as you might expect when it has 'permission' to make a dungeon of doom it does it with gusto.  I think I spent more time in chapter 13, which is "Literally just Temple of the Ancients", than any other chapter but it always felt properly paced and appropriate.

So yeah no like.  Go ahead and play this game (once you can, since I'm 100% several of you are just waiting for a PC version).  Even if you felt like Remake kinda fell apart at the end, Rebirth is a lot more thoughtful about its new stuff and is a lot more satisfying about going off the rails for being more reserved with it.

[Twilkitri]

Logiart Grimoire (Steam)

Regarding the additional puzzles which were added in the post-early-access release, while it's still a bit annoying that they're not integrated into the main game structure, it turns out that they are still at least somewhat thematically linked.

Each of the puzzles is tagged with two or three keywords, often a subject along with an action and/or location, so this is similar to how the majority of the puzzles in the main game need to be unlocked by combining two or three of the other puzzles. For example one might have 'Cat' and 'To Cook' and the puzzle resolves to a cat in a chef hat using a cutting board.

And this actually leads to a lot of these puzzles ending up much more novel than I'm used to seeing in a while, so it was ultimately a good experience despite my previous complaint.


Anuchard (Steam)

Shortish action-rpg where you go into various dungeons to restore various people/entities and parts of the world.

It's trying for some amount of depth re cycles of history etc but ultimately I think it's a bit too short to really reach what it's aiming at. (And it's implied that all the characters in the game are literally the only people in that location, given a few of the events, which makes some of the later events not really make sense.) I did like some of what it was doing.

Never got especially good at the combat but happily it never got especially difficult. (The combat itself isn't particularly deep, either, so that could be a turnoff for some people.)


Dráscula: The Vampire Strikes Back (Steam)

Fairly bad old spanish-developed point & click game.

Crashed on me numerous times, had some issues with the english voice work. Some unfortunate 'jokes'. The interface is also fairly clunky.

The most annoying problem is that often exits which weren't otherwise interactable weren't indicated by anything - you would only know there was an exit if you clicked to walk somewhere and you changed location as a result. The prime examples being a tree, and a non-visible secret passage happening to be in a cupboard which is in the same room as a second, visible secret passage and where when you initially opened the cupboard you got an item out of it. (It also doesn't appear to really work with the geometry of the location, given the cupboard is against a wall with a visible corridor on the other side.)


If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers (Steam)

Started playing this much more recent point & click only taking into account that it was well-thought-of and short, unhappily completely missed that it was a horror game which I am really not in the right state of mind for currently. Ended up being a much more discomforting experience than I was hoping for as a result.

That said, it's very polished and has some good sequences. There is one sequence in the third chapter that overstays its welcome a fair amount though.

[074]

Unicorn Overlord (complete)

8/10 game, I'm honestly extremely satisfied with this one and am willing to play it again at some point, but overall have some issues with the pacing in places.  I can accept a ho-hum writing job in a gameplay game, which this very much is, but there's just enough little problems I have that add up to some gripes overall.  I like the hell out of this game, I just think it could be better.

Probably the biggest is that it tries to have its cake and eat it too regarding the order in which you can deal with neighboring countries; giving you the illusion of freedom on that front while it's very much implying that you are supposed to go in a specified order.  This frankly could have been done better if they had gone further in either direction.  Either go for a fixed scenario order where you can have more in-depth storytelling or embrace the more open world approach they were teasing at.  Either could have worked, frankly.

I'm going to also take this time to vent a bit about how some of the localized chapters' stories played out.  Drakenhold's was probably the best fleshed out one.  The others didn't have enough time to cook - Bastorias could have gone from good to great if everything regarding Elgor and the Rat Bestrals wasn't constrained to a couple of encyclopedia entries and a last-chapter reveal.  Albion could have been decent had it expounded upon the small bit of local plot it got.  Elheim...good god Elheim was honestly the lowest part of the game, I don't know what the hell that needed.  I think ironically, Elheim and Albion suffered more from tying too much into the rather bare "collect the macguffins to do the big plot" aspect and not having enough of their own internal plot.  It also feels like the game needed one more chapter, so to speak where you could deal with the enemy using combined arms setups, but that may just be me.

Also Agrias Oaks syndrome is in full force here, don't act surprised.  Outside of a core few (mostly Scarlett, Lex, and Yahna), characters will disappear from the plot after the chapter they were introduced in is over, no surprises here.

I feel obligated to take a bit here to expound on just how much of a miracle it is that this game made it out in this level of quality.  Unicorn Overlord had a ten-year dev cycle, having originated as a PSVita title and going through not one but two large-scale refactors.  It basically limped across the finish line only because Kamitani funded the end of it himself.  I suppose to that end I can't blame its faults too much because there was barely enough money to make the game with by the end, so it had to be shipped out soon.

You know what games usually come out of those cycles?  Duke Nukem Forever.  Anthem.  Suicide Squad:Kill The Justice League.  Games that are just fucking terrible and out of touch with everything.  Shambling monstrosities that should have been put down years ago.  It's amazing that Unicorn Overlord basically beat the odds here and came out in the state that it did.

It's flawed, but I love it all the same.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones

Replayed this. Eirika HM. Decided to actually do early promotions. Core team was Eirika (promoted at 20), Ephraim (20), Seth, Tana (11, Wyvern Knight), Colm (16, Rogue), Vanessa (17, Wyvern Knight), Gerik (10, Hero), Duessel, Saleh, Lute (10, Mage Knight), Kyle (11, Paladin), and Tethys. Colm got pretty RNG blessed early, almost immediately turning into an excellent fighter. And then Tana possibly got even more RNG-blessed, even despite promoting early she was 23 str / 29 spd by the end, crazy.

Metroid

Amy wanted to see this. This is the first time I've played it since 2001, when I played it once before. It's... clunky. The DNA of later Metroid games is visible but it's just not very fun to play. Starting at 30 HP every time you die (which is as little as like ~5% later) is awful, the way the game emphasizes very slow grinding to heal is bad, lack of map is a bad combination with how same-y the areas are.

Kid Icarus

See above, another NES game which I consider much worse than at least one later game in the series. Made by some of the same people right after Metroid 1, so it's neat to play it as a pseudo-sequel. This one I haven't played since ~1996! Anyway while also obviously aged, I do think it's notably more fun than Metroid 1; enemies NOT dropping health is actually a huge addition by subtraction so I'm never tempted to grind, and you start off at reasonable HP anyway (100% early, as little as 40% later). Game's an odd hodgepodge of stages, the three castles have a bit of a Metroid feel but the rest of the game is either sidescrolling or upscrolling, with the latter being particularly dangerous because you can't go back, so if you fall you die, have fun.

Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line

Currently playing this. There's very little to say about it, it sure is more Theatrhythm. Which, naturally, means I'm having a good time.

[Cmdr_King]

Princess Peach Showtime!- Finished this.  It's not a very substantial game, and the A+ costume design is sadly the only truly excellent part of it, but it's... Fine, y'know?  Good enough game.  Probably wouldn't recommend dropping $60 on it for most people?  I don't think it really lends itself to replays or challenges in particular; as far as I can tell, there's 30 stages plus 5 bosses and you have to do all of them to finish.  There might be some extras but it's not many.  So it's not really like a proper Mario game in that way.

Now aesthetically it does pretty well at staying engaging across the entire run.  There's 3 stages for each costume, the stage play aesthetic is strong, it helps bind the whole thing together.  But I'm going to forget everything about this game by next week, and honestly only three or so of the stage types are actually engaging in their own right.  At the same time though, as you might expect from having 10 distinct stage types determined by your current job class in a platformer, none of the gameplay really has the depth to sustain many more stages than that.  The game just really never rises above the issues generated by its premise even if it's pleasant enough within that.

So yeah, not a bad game, but not one I can strongly recommend given the many other games out there and nintendo's pricing tendencies.

[Twilkitri]

Mega Man 11 (Steam)

Decently enjoyable. Played through on the default difficulty, which may have been a mistake - was harder than preferable, but fortunately I was able to be carried by E Tanks. I can't say I did a good job of using the gearing system or alternate weapons outside of boss fights so I guess I wasn't really meeting the game halfway here though.

The game feels weirdly uneven, location-wise - the robot master levels all feel like they're around 50% longer than they need to be, then the fortress is comparatively short. (And there's just the one.)

Didn't bother with any of the challenges.


Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra (PS2)

Mostly enjoyable. Probably the best of the three systems-wise, although not at all perfect. For one thing the game brought up the concept of managing character resistance to Gnosis early but then you barely ever fight any Gnosis on foot until late in the game. (Which is also a bit of a problem for chaos, who wants to kill Gnosis with one of his moves to boost another of them, although I have no idea how effective that mechanic actually is.) Mech combat is also more interesting early on when your energy is more limited and devolves somewhat later into primarily just continually repeating the same sequences of moves, bosses with shifting elemental defences aside.

Also saddening that Shion only gets one type of throw, which only works on humans, and even then doesn't work on some humans (or on humans facing the wrong way). Still v. amusing to spend most of a few boss fights having her continually send them to the ground.

The Miltia sequence in general is the highlight of the game as far as I'm concerned. The lowlight possibly Merkabah, which almost feels like a joke. Abel's Ark isn't great either but at least it doesn't have you retracing your steps so much. (Although it then does of course ask you to do that after you've left in order to get some goodies. But then Merkabah did that as well.)

I played through the first set of levels in HaKoX when I first ran across it and came to the conclusion that it was terrible. When the story decided that I needed to go look at a HaKoX machine to continue I played through half the second set and reconfirmed that it was terrible. Didn't touch it again.

Also didn't beat Ω Id or Erde Kaiser Sigma. I looked into the Id fight (after giving it a try and being slaughtered - this was directly after getting the key, not at endgame, although it sounds like that doesn't really matter) and it sounds fairly terrible, so not bothering with it - and my understanding is you essentially need to beat it to get what you need for the Sigma fight (which I also tried and didn't do very well at).

[Cmdr_King]

Trails of Cold Steel III- beat this. 

It's weird because like.  80% of the game is a very strong 8/10, just very good RPGing to be found here and while there's some pandering they mostly do a good job of keeping it on the right side of the line.  It does however have a kinda rough start with a lot of choices in the story that were at odds, and more weirdly an ending which I just don't see how they thought it was a good idea.  The Curse of Erebonia is a bad idea to start with, but you could make something like that sorta palatable by suggesting that there's a miasma which makes people more aggressive that resulted from some ancient collective sin.  Like, the seeds of that idea are there, but they assign so much agency to it and take it so far beyond people making bad decisions in the heat of a moment that instead it's just this case of mass demonic possession which arises from... nothing, just some ancient conflict in the past whose present manifestation has no real thematic link to how it arose in the first place.  It also kinda completely dumpsters every major antagonist of this arc along the way, and the whole thing arises from them desperately wanting to somehow make Osborne redeemable later rather than just letting this dude be beyond the pale from his own traumas and letting Rean have conflicted feelings about him or even hate him in the end.  Just a very dumb writing decision arising from Falcom not being willing to let go of their darlings.

Despite all that basically everything from late chapter 1 to the final dungeon is really good, and the final dungeon's issues are mostly related to "you all signed up for child sacrifices and at least half of you should have fucked off and stayed home after that" outside the actual ending being bad.  It's just so weird that this series which made a point of integrating massive leaps of technology and artifacts of god into the political elements of the story falling back to "devils made them do it" in order to get its world war.

[Captain K]

Hades II: Beat the two routes to the extent that they're currently available in early access.

I think where this game falls flat compared to the first one is the characters. Melinoe is very Mary Sue compared to charming rebel Zagreus. The hub area characters are just bland in general. There are some good characters scattered in the dungeons, particularly Arachne and Circe.

Gameplay is fine though.

I am gonna claw out your eyes, and drown you to death

[Cmdr_King]

NEO The World Ends with You- Finished this.  Might tool around a bit with Another Day but we'll see, seems a lot more combat-focused than TWEWY's version.

So in several ways this is really a better game than TWEWY.  Like, the way it handles fashion is smoother and easier to work with, the game feels more forthcoming with how food works, and the larger stable main cast is nice.  It has a bit of a VP vibe in terms of controls and combat flow, although that can make the handful of fights that really demand you employ the movement afforded by this being an action RPG kinda awkward.  So like, if you had any affection at all for the original, I do definitely recommend it.

But it should also be said that yeah, this game extremely assumes you played TWEWY, and honestly some late-game aspects seem to be entirely pulled from the Final Remix version that was released on Switch, although you can get the gist with just the original.  And more than that while it improves on the original in several key ways, it just doesn't have quite the same focus, uniqueness, and spark of the original.  And like, let's be real, you never could, but... think about the relationship between Undertale and Deltarune.  It's a bit like that.

Sometime I should probably like.  Actually talk about this game, but these post are really more about summaries and reminders for myself and I think the overall meat of the plot will stick with me a while longer.  Mostly you will be unsurprised to learn I love Shoka.

[Cmdr_King]

Trails of Cold Steel IV- Donezo.

The sins of CSIII's ending really means that a lot of this lands with a thud.  There's plenty of good scenes throughout but it peaks in the early chapters where Rean is absent and the emotional stakes are clear.  Once he's back a lot of the best stuff, including his best stuff, is buried among plot beats of former friends and allies who are either "doing their duty" to engage in Anime WWII or are 'cursed' with unquenchable bloodlust.  While some of the problem IS just the fact that all of the character beats that don't feature Rean himself all involve those terrible plotlines, which makes the contrasts rarer, the larger problem is that too many story beats need me to be invested in bringing people back from the brink when I think they're pieces of shit for being on the brink (eliciting a "okay, cool, glad Rean is happy i guess" reaction more than anything else) or that the thing that pushed them to the brink is the worst plot concept Falcom has ever written.

I'm glad the proper final boss is handled the way he is mechanically though.  Like they really gave Osborne a lot of variety for a boss with like 4 or 5 skills, you need a lot of stuff to go toe to toe with him, and it makes the earlier phases of the fight really hard because you don't really have a good way of knowing some of it before you go in.  But fortunately even if you take the "ugh just get me past this" options, it last for that phase and he's back to full strength for the next. 

But no, there's still a lot of good game here.  Just, it's mostly stuff that was already good in CSIII, and the parts that should be unique due to this being the climax of the story arc instead is hampered by how badly they balanced "we want WWII" and "Osborne should be redeemed" as writing goals.
And we really should have tossed Rufus off Orchis tower when we had a chance in the last game.  We'll see if Reverie does anything worthwhile with him but I'm not holding my breath.

[Cmdr_King]

Tales of Hearts R- Finished this.

It's.  An odd experience to play this now and actually be able to read it?  I mean, it's a fairly different game even without that, they changed how a bunch of stuff works, but it's recognizably the same basic game but also it's kinda specifically the same basic game which is a choice when they ramped up the dungeons so much.  Not that they're too bad, especially by Tales standards, but it's certainly a choice.

Funnily they end up really making Lithia the central character for the bulk of the story, despite her being strictly an NPC and staying that way, but it's very much her story once the second half actually gets going.  It's a shame in some ways because Kohaku's great, but eh, I also get it.  She was sorta the one that had to reach the furthest to bond with the rest of the cast and that IS just kinda what the game is doing.

Neat to have this done at least.  Nothing special, pretty average Tales game, but glad to have finally gotten to it.

[Captain K]

Elden Ring DLC. First I had to remember how to play Elden Ring since it's been 2? years since I last touched it. Having fun. I'm a bash-my-face-into-the-wall-until-I-win guy so I'm dying a lot. Boy I sure love loading screens. Spoilers ahead.

Gaol guy in mausoleum. ~25 deaths. Fun fight. This was before I had any of the Scad powerups.
Giant Fire Basket. Noped on out of here. I want none of that.
Lion Dancers. ~55 deaths. It's actually not bad except for its grab move that did 95% of my full life. And you can't see it coming when the lightning is on the screen. Ended up soloing it with Nepheli Loux ash because you need to burst this thing down and summoning players increases its HP too much.
Sir Erdredd. Not only no deaths, but no damage at all. This guy does not know how to deal with a greatshield.
Ghostflame dragon. 2 deaths before I decided to do something else.
Yet Another Ulcerated Tree Spirit. Sigh.

[Twilkitri]

Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (Steam)

Personally really didn't need the Antlion caves section.

In general was quite entertaining, didn't have any especially terrible defence sections (although the Magnusson-Device-focused one was getting close to it), didn't require too much use of the terrible rocket launcher.


Picross S Namco Legendary Edition (Switch)

Cleared all puzzles.

On the one hand, excellent, new developer-themed Picross S game. On the other hand it's primarily focused on Namco's games from the NES & earlier which I have very little familiarity with.

Nothing mechanically new to me in this edition to comment on.

Some of the translation did seem a bit off at points, but it could be that they were keeping in line with historic translation choices.


Runaway: A Road Adventure (Steam)

Point & click adventure game. It was fine.

Had an overreliance on pixel hunting and no way to highlight hotspots that I could find. The majority of the time I got held up it turned out that I had missed some item somewhere. (Plus a few situations where there were hotspots referring to collections of items/containers, where the character would not actually take an item from the collection/container until a need for it had come up. This would be fine if applied consistently but the character has no problems with taking a heap of individual items they don't currently have a need for, and it means there's at least one situation where a hotspot which will be relevant for taking from later isn't easily distinguishable from a hotspot that only exists for flavour.)

Puzzle solutions mostly weren't too out there but there were a few weird ones.

The character is quite bad on the 'Adventure game protagonists are jerks' scale.


Thirty Flights Of Loving also the included Gravity Bone (Steam)

Short first-person experiences.

They're both pretty unusual and I don't think I'm really the target audience.

Had resolution problems when playing Thirty Flights which meant around half the rendered image wasn't actually displayed but I don't think this caused any actual problems. (First person game so generally could just look around to see everything, although there were a couple points where camera movement is restricted so it's possible I missed something during those.)

[Captain K]

Have you played Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection on mobile, Twil? It's not deep mechanically, but it's very long and completely free. After you beat it 100% you get to do it again without the ability to mark squares.

More Elden Ring bosses. Spoilers ahead.

EDIT: Just going to keep updating this post.

Rellana. 23 deaths. Reddit is way overhyping the difficulty of this one.
Rhinoporcupotamus. 8 deaths. When this thing glows, run the fuck away.
Death Knight. No deaths Knight.
Clone Wars Yoda. No deaths.
Messmer. Tried it about 10 times and decided I'd rather go exploring. First half is easy but hoo boy there is not enough fire defense in the world. EDIT: Only took about 6 more tries.
Skibidi Toiletry. 15 deaths to kill its second form. Then I found out it has a third form. Fuck this I'm going somewhere else. EDIT: 4 more deaths to finish it.
Centaur Crucible Knight. ~5 deaths.
Hornsent. 4 deaths.
Romina 420blazeit. 10 deaths. This is probably the fairest fight in the game. Lots of telegraphing, No hour-long attack strings.
Yep It's Another Ulcerated Tree Spirit. No deaths.
Pustulant Knight. 3 deaths.
WAAGGHH BOAR RIDAZ! 0 deaths.
Dragon Knight. 0 deaths.
Jagged Peak Drake 1. 1 death.
Jagged Peak Drake 2. 1 death.
Seannax. 8 deaths and I stopped because I didn't see any real progress.
Charo's Mariner. 0 deaths.
Charo's Death Rite Bird. 7 deaths. Coochie coochie.
Yosh 2.0. 1 death.
Marigga. 1 death.
Cerulean Ghost Dragon. 4 deaths.
Moorth Ghost Dragon. no additional deaths.
Plains Fire Toilet. No deaths.
Moorth Fire Toilet. 4 deaths.
Shadow Keep Fire Toilet. 1 death.
Unte Fire Toilet. 1 death.
Rakshasha. 2 deaths.
Jori. No deaths.
Madding. 5 deaths. Shut up, I suck.
Midra. 3 deaths.
Leda's Prison Jump. 30 deaths. Surprisingly the trick is to kill them slower, not quicker. If you blitz Freya, Dune and Leda spawn in much faster.
Radahn, Seanassax, Bayle. These fights are not fun. They're sucking the enjoyment out of the game.

[superaielman]

Unicorn Overlord- Did a playthrough with someone.  I did not like this as much as the other people here did. The gameplay has a lot of depth and options, sure. All that complexity boils down to 'Alain and Cav murder squad handles things' or 'send fliers to snipe'.  Everything from the equipment system to the AI setting system to the number of classes felt overly complex for the sake of complexity. Ogre Battle (which this feels like a spiritual successor to) had the same issues, but it saddens me that they couldn't improve on that.

Writing, as noted by others, adds nothing to the game.

Probably a 6 or 7. It's fun on the surface but I was hoping for more.

[Cmdr_King]

Trails into Reverie- Properly finished this, clearing up the Corridor. 

I think this helps nail home something that was always true in the Cold Steel games but became a bigger problem as they went, the writing team isn't really great at making more than a small core cast of characters all feel equal and interesting.  So instead, the format of Reverie lets them do parts of the story much more closely to their strengths, with one of the routes having a core fixed cast of 4 characters that only katamaris up an additional three, all of whom understand they're supporting characters there to set the others up for success, while the daydreams, most especially the ones you unlock in the Coda, are able to zoom in on just one or two characters are a time.  The after-after game set, while not really doing THAT (well, the third one does but) do a wonderful job of communicating how excited the writers are for what's coming.

I have to admit I'm a little disappointed that the game makes a point of having you tell it who Rean's love interest was then only has her obliquely mentioned in a few scenes where they can just splash an image, rather than like.  Having even ONE scene for each of them when they reunite throughout the story.  Doubly so because like... if you picked Towa like I did (or Alisa, they're in the same boat storywise), she was trapped behind enemy lines when shit went down!  Rean should have things to say there!
Probably an unintended bone for the Rean/Crow shippers all told.

I honestly really liked the Coda and the questions it decides to tackle.  The Black Records became something of a plot tumor thanks to being tied into the fucking Curse and the resignation several characters develop around that, but revealing this as the source of them makes it all feel more natural and the misunderstanding of what they were have a bit of a tragic air. 

So this game axes Divine Song as an order, which makes the mid-game a lot harder than CS3 or 4, BUT instead the True <x> Bell items are so completely cracked that you get the same effect at the rough endgame as zero casting time WHILE ALSO being free to do more generic delay-reduction Orders that let your physical characters be useful for more than item tossing (S-Break machine being the easiest setup).  It's delightfully broken.  For the record my core team eventually became Rean, Rixia, Nadia, and Musse, and boy howdy Nadia is good with minimal investment and off the charts if you actually build her like a CSIV mage.

Hooooonestly if we consider this as a CS game, it's probably my favorite.  It's middle of the pack overall, a bit behind Sky 3rd, but it really feels like they were able to cut away some of the fat from Cold Steel and refocus themselves on their best strengths as writers.

[Random Consonant]

FF2 Pixel Remater - Well it's FF2 but FF2 is a game that's grown on me.  Finding out they patched in being able to turn off the automatic hp gains they added to the GBA version is nice since now there's at least a happy medium between that version and the previous nonsense.  Overall it's a perfectly acceptable (if still very breakable) SaGa experience.

FF3 Pixel Remaster - Well it's 2024 and I finally got around to finishing a version of FF3?  Yay?  Anyways while it's a more civilized iteration than the other two (this says NOTHING) it has the problem of bosses that do basically nothing spam MT 2HKO damage in a game that doesn't believe in having civilized turn order mechanics or means to compensate.  Would've finished at what would have seemed like a perfectly reasonable Lv47 except the game thought it'd be funny to pull that nonsense with Cloud of Darkness too many times and just 2HKO everyone with bad turn order/damage variance and fuck that shit so I settled for a nice round 50 to make that less likely.  Also the game decided that not only would it be funny to inflate the HP count of every endgame boss but they should also resist every element on top (including katanas EXCUSE ME DARK BLADES because fuck that weapon group and fuck you the player specifically for not using the special boy super endgame physical class I guess) which had basically destroyed what goodwill it had built up earlier.  That the job system is a weird halfway point between FF1's promotion stuff and a proper class change system is also, in all honestly, weird and bad and not helped by the fact that around two thirds of the ones that aren't directly obsoleted (ignoring the existence of super special boy ninja for a moment, god, fuck that choice if I haven't been clear on that point) feel like fake classes for idiots designed to be used at exactly one point and never again.

2/10?  At least the arranged soundtrack slaps but reflecting on things I just have no respect for the game whatsoever.

[SnowFire]

Played two puzzle games with abbeys...

Lucifer Within Us

Detective game with a really great plot setup.  Life has presumably been very boring because there's been basically no crime for 100 years, but suddenly there's a suspicious death at the abbey in a kind of future medieval-ish world.  Rather than write it off as a weird fluke (which, tbh, I probably would have done!), an exorcist is called for (Ada, Our Heroine), because OBVIOUSLY if anyone is committing crimes it must be because they're possessed by a demon.  That's the only reason why people would defy the will of Ain Soph of course!  But if people are getting infected, then that means someone or something is spreading it, so there's going to be more murders at the abbey before the day closes.  If you think that monks arguing about the power settings for tiaras or generators suspending giant swords in a cathedral or inquistors with detachable cyborg hands sounds interesting, this setting is for you.

Anyway, it's fun, but it's also short.  Really short.  Some of the reviews mention the "tech demo" aspect, but despite being an indie title, the credits list is long enough that I guess it goes to show just how much stuff there is to pack into even small detective games to ensure it coheres well.  You'll have ~3 suspects, 1 of whom is guilty and the other 2 who are innocent but have randomly decided that lying a lot is fun to provide some contradictions for you to hunt down in the witness statements.  The game shows a neat timeline of each suspect's claimed versions of events, and you can use this to point out contradictions between one witness's statement and another's, along with the usual pixel hunting for evidence.  To end the case, you need to pick out the suspect's motive, opportunity, and means, as well as identify the demon possesssing them.

There's also one kinda odd criticism: I wish the game had many more digital demons to pick from during your accusation, like 12 or 13, say.  Why?  Spoilers, but
so there are only 4 demons.  One of them is Lucifer, whom any degree of game sense can suspect will be the last demon confronted given the game's title.  This means that there's a rather substantial clue in the right direction for case 2 based on the remaining demons, and case 3 is basically spoiled from the start since there's only 1 non-Lucifer demon left and he fits one of the 3 witnesses like a glove.  The game really needed some decoy Not Appearing In This Game demons that could plausibly go with the various red herring motivations & dead ends.

Recommended, but it is just 2-3 hours of gameplay at most.


Chants of Sennaar

You get to climb the !Tower of Babel!  But with less jumping robots. 

Don't read any summaries or spoilers, it's best gone into blind on plot.  The opening area is the Abbey, where devotees seeking God want to climb the tower, but are blocked by warriors.  What's really going on?  Our Hero decides they really, really want to climb, and is ready to go do some Myst-style puzzle solving that is greatly eased by understanding WTF people are saying.  Conveniently, many regions of the tower have stories of people who also tried to ascend and left behind useful info before probably being devoured or something.  The local equivalent of why people in town know what's in the treasure chest at the bottom of the monster cave in a fantasy RPG, I suppose.

Our hero possesses the "subtitles" superpower that when others talk to them, they conveniently have the glyphs of what they're saying drawn on screen, because the game was not going to torture you enough to learn how to actually pronounce their fake languages too.  Which is fair.  You have a notebook where you can jot down your current guesses at glyphs, and the game eventually prompts you to make your choices.  Get a set correct and it'll be verified, Return of the Obra Dinn style (and often "Verified" in the sense of you were right, but there was a different sense of the word than your guess in the official answer).  There's some occasional annoyances where I understood the word fine but misinterpreted the picture I was trying to match it too, but oh well, just check a walkthrough.  Also, you might think that learning a bunch of new languages would be repetitive, but the game is savvy on that - it'll just give you common words early, and then go to new topics for what the people using a new language use it for, so it keeps things fresh.

The puzzles are mostly fine, but there are two that I didn't gel with at all, and unfortunately they're both close to the start of the game.  One of them barely qualifies as a puzzle at all, and is just doing some actions that are sure whatever.  So yeah, if you have a Lens, just walkthrough that sucker up IMO, because there's lots you could take from what it shows you that isn't what the game really wants you to use it for.  And if you have a lamp and a floor with slots for the lamp, then yes, you can solve the "puzzle" without further clues... (my hint)  Pretend that if you closely examine the rotatable-thing in the center, you'd see some tiny holes.  Was the game supposed to show this but just forgot?  I'd have figured it out fine if I'd seen what it looked like close up.

I won't spoil the plot, but I will say that the final area went somewhere entirely different than I was expecting.  Wild Arms meets WALL-E?  Okay sure game.  I think maybe they ran out of time there?  It's fine, but I wasn't a huge fan, but it did provide a fair excuse for the final challenges I suppose.

I do recommend clearing out the game once you sit down to play it, because you will want to keep the various languages in the back of your mind for the final tasks.  Most of the early part of the game is merely in understanding the individual words, where just wild-ass guessing is fine (swap the word order if you got the verb / noun order wrong, whatever, you're not punished for incorrect guesses).  But you will be expected to write some simple sentences by the end, and remembering "oh yeah this is the language where verbs always go at the end like Japanese", "this language plural goes before the word", "this language plural goes after", etc. is easier if it's fresh in your head.

Fun stuff.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line

Probably the best of the Theatrhythm games. They're all pretty similar at their core idea of being a rhythm game with FF music, not much to say there, obviously this one has the most tracks so far including numerous Square Enix games in addition to the expected Final Fantasy (Chrono, Xenogears, Saga, Mana, Nier, etc.).

But it's also the best one in terms of the RPG elements. The first game made me care about RPG elements, but only in the context of grinding as efficiently as possible to get all the characters. The second game made a lateral move to not tie characters this way, but also left me feeling like the RPG elements didn't matter. This one throws in a game mode, Endless World, which apart from being a fun series of random-with-choice track selection, constantly challenges you with completing quests to keep advancing further. Some of those quests involve just the rhythm aspects (e.g. get at least "good" timing on 95% of the notes in a song) but some also require the RPG elements, and messing with teams to pull those off is actually quite fun. Kept me entertained.

Monster Hunter Rise

Pretty fun action game. I kinda like exploring the environments and learning them better for the inevitable boss fights which take up most of the game. The boss fights themselves are reasonably fun, a bit on the long side but that does reward learning the tells of the monsters and getting good at them.

I'm currently 23 hours in or so, having completed up to 6-star in the village quests and 4-star in the hub quests.

Eiyuden Chronicles

I finished this. About 44 hours or so. Got 89 stars of destiny, or whatever this game calls them. Getting all of them was never gonna happen once I realized that several are gated behind some minigames I very much did noy enjoy.

This sure is a Suikoden game. Unfortunately Suikoden games live and die by how good their story is, and this one is only so-so. Without too many spoilers, here are the things I liked about it:
-The protagonist talks!
-The game manages to make a decent chunk of the cast feel reasonably important.
-Perielle's good. She's not the tactician (that role very clearly is held by another) but does remind me of Shu a bit in the sense that she's the ideological driver of the player side, and she tends to steal most scenes she's in.
-The main villain has pretty good stage presence.

But ultimately the story isn't really that interesting, and it manages to often undercut the things which would make its characters really good. Into spoiler territory:

Aldric's plans are reliant on literal human sacrifice which both remove any possible moral nuance from the conflict and kinda undercut him as a character; he gets skewered for hypocrisy nicely even without this angle. With Perielle I kinda felt like the writing wasn't really committed to her in her role; the game enjoys hinting that her manipulation might lead to troubles but it never does. Let her come into conflict with Nowa or Melridge or ANYONE more! Seign, similarly, is initially presented as been in confict with Nowa, complete with a duel that wants to feel super epic, but then he just kinda joins up with you as 100% ally and that's that.

Gameplaywise it's definitely above the Suikoden average, at least, if not massively. I think earlygame randoms are dull because early magic kinda sucks tbh (like Suikoden it's very limited, but unlike Suikoden it's also very weak, so feels barely relevant) so you're basically just auto-battling through everything instead of at least having the "hmm is this fight hard enough to spend my spell charges on" question. But they do get a bit better as your options open up, and boss fights are decent. I played on Hard and while I never lost a boss fight a bunch of them certainly had me nervous, and nothing just rolls over and dies like several Suikoden human opponents (especially S5) did. War battles are super boring and waste time, but they can sometimes tell decent story moments. Duels are more confusing than Suikoden's despite having two choices instead of three. There's one I lost a bunch of times until I basically got good enough to perfect it. They are reasonably stylish though; I thought the last one felt like a good way to end the game.

6/10 territory or so.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Did another randomized run, with a different ruleset this time.

Rules:
-A twelve-person team is randomly generated using non-Anna members of the roster. Byleth is one of the twelve.
-Other characters may be used extra party spots are available (i.e. before recruiting everyone), but their goals may not be touched and they are treated as having no "interests" (see below), which in particular means they can never certify for advanced (and beyond) classes.
-Each unit is randomly assigned three "interests" and three "disinterests", chosen from the pool of 11 skills. The other five skills are neutral. The list of interests must include at least one weapon/magic skill and will be rerolled if it does not. Broadly speaking, characters should focus primarily on their interests but may use neutral skills to round out their build. Specific rules follow:

Disinterests are subject to the following rules:
-Characters may not equip a weapon or use a spell associated with their disinterests.
-Characters may not set an ability (dex+4, weight-3, rally, etc.) learned via their disinterest.
-Characters may not certify, nor spend a battle in, a class which has their disinterest as a prerequisite.
-If authority is a disinterest, B rank and A rank battalions can not be used, even if the character reaches the required authority rank.
-Disinterests may not be set as a goal nor targeted for instruction
(Exception: Byleth may use faculty training in order to reach the minimum threshold to have a 100% chance to recruit a character who is a member of the twelve-person team, i.e. D+ rank for Ferdinand/Caspar/Leonie and D for everyone else.)

Neutral skills are subject to the following rules:
-Once a neutral skill reaches C+, the skill must not be set as a goal nor targeted for active instruction.
-Any ability, combat art, or spell learned at B rank or above in a neutral skill may not be used.
-If authority is neutral, A rank battalions can not be used.

Finally, the choice of interests will dictate legal advanced/abyssal/master classes. Characters may only certify for or spend a battle in an advanced (or beyond) classes if every prerequisite for that class is one of their interests. For master classes with C rank prerequisites, the C rank prerequisite is allowed to be neutral (but not a disinterest). For War Monk/Cleric, the Faith prerequisite is allowed to be neutral (otherwise female characters with brawling as their sole weapon would potentially have no legal classes).

e.g. A character with interests of swords/riding/reason and disinterests of axe/faith/brawling would be allowed to certify for Swordmaster, Mortal Savant, Valkyrie (if available), and Dark Knight (but not Assassin, Trickster, Paladin, etc.). Before advanced, they would be allowed to use most classes, but not Brigand, Armour Knight, Priest, or Brawler.

There is exactly one legal set of interests (out of 161) that will result in a male character having no legal Level 20+ class: lance + armour + authority. If someone gets that, they're either gonna be the dancer, or just be bad, I guess! Female characters also have to worry about brawling + two other non-weapon skills with a faith disinterest.

Anyway, here's my team. The numbers are battles/kills.

BYLETH: Brigand/Pegasus -> War Cleric (414/210)
+Brawling, Axe, Faith; -Bow, Sword, Reason
Punches things hard, durable, can toss out the odd healing spell. The disinterest list having both swords and bows is unfortunate but still pretty good.

DIMITRI: Archer -> Sniper (483/266)
+Bow, Sword, Authority; -Faith, Brawling, Axe
BVantage + BWrath Sniper! Aside from being training-greedy this is certainly good, since he can kill anything on player phase then set up to kill more things on enemy phase, and in many maps he doesn't even need Retribution to counter at 1-3 which is nice. Only downside is the -50 hit at range 4+ against siege tomes and Bow Knights, but this could remedied by switching to a Cursed Ashiya Sword. MVP. Dimitri would rather have more move overall, but still an interesting choice.

DEDUE: Brigand/Archer -> Sniper (270/146)
+Faith, Bow, Armour; -Riding, Authority, Sword
Sniper who misses some good maps for being a Sniper. Was weirdly defence-screwed so couldn't take hits from much of anything, i.e. one of the worst snipers I've used but there's only so bad they get.

YURI: Brigand -> Wyvern Lord (322/174)
+Faith, Axe, Flying; -Authority, Riding, Armour
Is a Wyvern Lord, is automatically very good. Had Alert Stance+ and Windsweep and excellent speed. Lowish power meant there were some things he couldn't kill, but great anyway.

BALTHUS: Brigand/Archer -> Wyvern Rider (250/129)
+Axe, Armour, Flying; -Sword, Lance, Authority
Struggled a lot midgame until he got to Wyvern, and was a little iffy even after reaching it. Really came into his own when I got him a Brave Axe; with that he could kill a decent number of enemies while having canto. The lance disinterest meant no Wyvern Lord, but Wyvern Rider is FINE as an endgame class...

HAPI: Mage -> Bishop -> Gremory (219/100)
+Reason, Faith, Axe; -Armour, Bow, Sword
Pretty bog standard Gremory Hapi build. Not much to say, did big magic damage from big range with Warp and Physic, obviously good. Only downside is the authority bane + neutral meant she never really got past C for authority, but School of Sorcery Soldiers isn't too bad.

DOROTHEA: Mage -> Warlock (245/149)
+Axe, Reason, Authority; -Armour, Bow, Lance
Aside from being stuck in a 4 move class, this is just vanilla Dorothea i.e. very good, she still gets Physic by the rules, and of course Meteor/Thoron great as always, as one-shotting snipers with Meteor right up until the end.

PETRA: Brigand -> War Cleric (289/158)
+Armour, Axe, Brawling; -Sword, Flying, Riding
The other punchy character, she didn't have as much power (though typically still enough) or charm as Byleth, or her Recover, but what she did have was crazy speed and thus evasion via Brawl Avoid. Was my primary dodgetank.

RAPHAEL: Brigand -> Dancer (37/7)
+Sword, Lance, Authority; -Riding, Armour, Brawling
Dancer Raphael is pretty bad as far as dancers go, aside from having good HP. Evade never got anywhere near reliable even with the sword interest. Still, is a dancer.

FERDINAND: Brigand -> Warrior (118/62)
+Axe, Armour, Reason; -Faith, Brawling, Sword
Warriors are mediocre. Only good thing I can say is he had accurate gambits, usually used Kingdom Snipers for Fusillade. Armour also gave him Smite, which was nice since he joined late.

HILDA: Brigand/Archer -> Warrior (252/134)
+Sword, Axe, Brawling; -Faith, Armour, Flying
Compared to Ferdinand she didn't have Smite, but did have a higher axe rank (and hence, earlier Axe Crit / actually reached Axefaire2) and much more power, so if she actually reached things she could do some good things with Killer/Brave/Freikugel at least. Still one of the weaker units.

GILBERT: Swordmaster (54/20)
+Sword, Armour, Flying; -Riding, Faith, Authority
Bottom-tier combat (though could take the odd hit Ferdinand or Dedue couldn't). Used Smite, and Retribution on maps where that was helpful and he wasn't on the bench.

[DragonKnight Zero]

Replayed FF8 due to a temporary obsession with it.  I don't feel there's anything interesting about the playthrough itself, rather I'm inclined to gab about what has changed since the last time I played.

- Seed rank mechanics fully cracked and documented.  This lets me time Seed tests for maximum gain/minimal lost points
- Triple Triad trade rule mechanics exposed, letting me have greater control over spreading ones I want.  Or what to do to get rid of Direct.  I spent around 70% of my Triple Triad matches with All in effect which really boosted my deck to an insane quantity.
- RNG methods for rule manipulation  Took advantage of this a few times to cherry pick which rules I want to abolish from each region.
- Magic effects on GF compatibility documented.  While not really worth paying attention to most of the time, it did let me make informed decisions about which spells I wanted to use.  Related, I was much more willing to use my Magic stocks for things other than Cures, Esuna, and Dispel.
- The Battle Mechanics Guide wasn't even published the last time I played through FF8.  Nice to know what is going on under the hood and I welcomed the detailed explanation of Draw difficulty and the Limit system, among others.

  Alongside all the new info that's come available since 2005, I also imposed some voluntary restrictions.  Drawing and stocking magic I limited myself to 11-15 times max per fight, per character. (to prevent situations of spending 30 minutes drawing and 3 minutes battling)  I also limited how often I went Limit fishing, generally only if there was a timer in play, and just had characters take their damned turns if one didn't pop.  Also I was more willing to refine spells to cut down on Drawing time rather than hoard everything for potential cash.  Those 75 Gil sellables aren't really going to be missed.  Variety helped make things interesting, more shutting down enemies with status application, less crushing everything with Limit spam.

I wish I hadn't bothered fishing for The End to log it on the status screen.  Took about an hour under ideal fishing conditions. (low-level fodder that's blinded and only uses weak physicals)  Truly a skill where if one can set up a situation to fish for it, sure not going to need it to win)  Which is still less time than the Shockwave Pulsar grind, which I'm not disclosing whether I bothered or not.

Some parts of the game are genuinely enjoyable.  Mostly my opinion hasn't changed in 20 years  though; there's a lot of tedium in between the fun bits.  It's a very customizable experience but that entails learning a bunch of concealed underlying rules.  With all the hidden game mechanics, sometimes I get the impression of a SaGa wannabe and wonder how the game would have turned out if it leaned all the way into SaGa's intentionally inscrutable game mechanics.

[Dark Holy Elf]

It's summer, so time to do a job system fiesta. But I've already done FF5 so many times, so...

Bravely Default 2 - Five Job Fiesta

I did a similar run of this for BD1. The rules are similar to FF5 fiestas, but like BD1, the jobs come in five distinct groups instead of four. Those groups are:

Prologue / Halcyonia: Freelancer, Black Mage, White Mage, Vanguard, Monk
Chapter 1 / Savalon: Bard, Beastmaster, Gambler, Thief, Berserker
Chapter 2 / Wiswald: Ranger, Red Mage, Shieldmaster, Pictomancer
Chapter 3 / Rimedhal: Salve-Maker, Dragoon, Swordmaster, Spiritmaster, Oracle
Chapter 4 / Holograd: Bastion, Phantom, Arcanist, Hellblade

This excludes Bravebearer which is gained way, way later than any other job, so I'm somewhat inclined to class it similarly to the GBA jobs of FF5 and exclude it entirely. I suppose I could also include it in the Chapter 4 group and maybe it I ever do another one of these I will, but as is I'd rather get a job which I can use for more than one dungeon, thanks.

Anyway the rules are as follows:
-Roll one job from each group, as soon as the first job is available.
-Before getting access to my first job, I treat the game as a Freelancer SCC, i.e. I can't use abilities from other classes besides Freelancer.
-From the point of getting the first job on, only use jobs, sub-jobs, and abilities from my list of rolled jobs.
-During the point where I have two to four of my jobs, at least one character must use each job as a main job.
-During the point where I have five jobs, no two characters may have the same main job, and whichever main job is not being used must be used as a sub-job.
-Hard Mode, no sleep mode nonsense.

Simple enough I think!

Anyway, notes:

I roll and get my first job, Vanguard! But first, it's Freelancer time..

Outlaw's Hideout: Sloan makes this completely trivial even with all Freelancers. Only notable fight is the boss.
BOSS Selene and Dag: Dag's brave quad actually threatens to overwhelm Sloan's healing. I could see losing this. I don't. Unfortunately, my offence is quite poor, so I have trouble overwhelming Selene's healing... especially since the game makes you waste Seth's first special as a tutorial. So I spend time turtling, building everyone up to 3 BP, trying and failing to blitz one of them down, building up again, and eventually deciding I should build up Seth's special again and use THAT in my blitz... and then Selene runs out of MP, rendering the battle trivial. I go into this fight at Level 2 (Seth) to 5 (Adelle).

Vanguard get!

Hydrangea Hills: Optional area, but sure why not, let's get some treasure (I badly need money) and a bit of JP to get rolling in my new job. I quickly realize that Vanguard's beefy defence trivializes physical randoms, which is most of them right now, and I blitz down the rest with basic physicals. Easy.
Fenrir: Optional quest boss. He buffs his attack like crazy (which leaves Defang mostly a waste of time), then counters physicals for 2HKO damage, not bad at all. He can't really deal with Sloan, but he slow my offence down a lot. Until I realize I can toss items that hit his weakness (Darts) and wow that does a lot more than my physicals while not triggering counters, okay, cool. I win.

Vale of Sighs: Enemies here are a step up. Well, mostly Aqua Elements, because they have magic, both the traditional type and Gravity, which does 50% MHP on a hit. They die with extreme prejudice. Other randoms mostly aren't too bad. Sloan still hard carrying. Cross Cut can be pulled out if I need more offence - it does over 3x as much as physicals, nice.
BOSS Horten: Is pathetic. He hates my good PDef. He hates Defang. He does counter physicals but those counters, and everything else he does, does 2-digit damage to my 1000+ HP. He's even weak to swords... which only really pull even with axes thanks Vanguard having a better axe rank, but it does mean Sloan hits him extra hard. I'm Level 8.
BOSS Adam: Yes yes, your damage numbers are very big.

At this point I lose Sloan. Guess I'll actually have to start worrying about healing.

Sandswept Ruins: Randoms keep improving. Terra Elements can do big damage, so they die first. Restless Souls are notable for having physicals, and can sometimes throw out magic damage, but also waste turns on much weaker stuff a lot. Sandworms have MT blind, screw them.
BOSS Orpheus: I was kinda worried about the start with his various allies but honestly they're pretty offensively inept. The scariest thing is when Orpheus starts attacking, he can use Stone which apparently counts as physical for the purpose of his own buffs (so if he uses Hurts So Bad it gets +20% damage) but otherwise is fixed 300 MT, reduced by default to 180, not reduced by earth resistance despite the animation. Weird. Anyway my healing is only potions which do 250 so I do kinda struggle to keep up with that, but then I realize I can actually blitz him reasonably so I do that. He doesn't counter physicals or much of anything that I saw.

At this point I roll my second job and it is indeed Bard! So I can start using that right away. I put one PC in that and keep the other three in Vanguard for better damage. Bard can use a bow but it's notably less damage than Vanguard axes.

Underground Reservoir: Dagons are annoying since they counter physicals with MT daamge which isn't a total joke (I mean, it's still less than 10HKO, but everything adds up), so they often merit Cross Cuts. Gelaflans have magic damage or can MT lower my defence so everyone else does more. Formations with 5 or 6 enemies can be a bit tricky but I can still generally manage them just by choosing how many Cross Cuts to mix in with my attacks in braveblitzes. I do need to start using potions frequently between fights now, though.

BOSS Anihal: By far the hardest boss so far, no real surprise. She fights with a Gelaflan, an Undine who is a tanky healer, and a Peiste which has a poison physical (including as a counter to sing, sob) and a MT fire physical, all with around 2000 HP instead of their normal figures (the Undine has less, but also has high PDef). Anihal herself can throw out okayish damage of both types (ST) and MT silence. Stacking Don't Let 'em Get You can really take the bite out of most things in this fight (though as mentioned, both the Gelaflan and Anihal herself have some magic to get around it), and if I'd lost the fight I'd have given my bard silence immunity to get it out more reliably. A lot of the fight is just trying to keep up with healing as best I can with just Phoenix Downs and Hi-Potions. Undine dies first, then Gelaflan, then the Peist. Once we're down to Anihal herself I use a special and just set up a big blitz: since she (as well as the gelaflan and peist) is weak to earth, Sword of Stone does extra big damage (similar damage to Crosscut before the weakness multiplier, but costs about 50% more MP, so it's normally not great) so I can take her down quickly. And good thing I do because as her HP drops she starts countering with Sandstorm which is awful, MT blind and also starts killing people. I just try to keep the folks with remaining turns alive, unblinded, and use Mini Ethers for MT, and successfully complete my blitz with one PC standing (the one with the Gaia Shield, which nulls Sandstorm).

Bernard's Mansion: Every dungeon has been tougher than the list, the trend continues here. Not much magic to worry about, but Axemaidens are scary anyway, their Outflank can do upwards of 1000 damage. So fights against lots of enemies are quite dangerous. But generally, it just means I'm using more and more Cross Cut relatively, and using more and more potions between fights. I buy up to 99.

BOSS Bernard: Oh no, there's an Axemaiden! I use a turn 1 Gloria special to nuke it off the face of the battlefield. There's also a swordsman who gets dispatched. My bard uses Don't Let 'Em Get To You four times immediately and I stay at 64% or better physical reduction the rest of the way, whic makes Bernard damage not very good (also slows the draining). Only error I make is doing some defaulting early, which he counters with stealing BP. No problem, I just switch to always using actions of some sort instead, Cross Cut or Potions or buffs. Bernard is weak to axes so he's an easy brave-blitz using a Bard special when the time comes, I do it at under 11k but I realise I could have done it way earlier. Pretty easy.

BOSS Berserker (3 resets): Another boss against whom Default is not very effective (all his damage ignores it), and in fact attacking is a better damage reduction due to Vanguard's Defensive Offence (-30% damage received on turns after using a physical attack or tech). He can use Vent Fury which sends himself berserk (this is great honestly, because berserk causes him to take more damage). On turns when he's not doing that he can use Water Damage (Manarobe is the armour of choice, to half this), Shell Split, and rarely, the incredibly dangerous Crescent Moon, which is MT. His ST moves all hover around OHKO damage if I'm not reducing damage (yes, even against my boosted HP), and pierces default. Ouch.

I employ the same strategy as last time but Berserker hits way harder and is way more durable than Bernard was, so even with all my damage reductions he still wears down my potion supply; I can't really heal enough to offset everything he does unless I stop my offence entirely. I can survive for a while even as my HP gets low but eventually he uses Crescent Moon which can wipe out people at low health easily. I make two changes to win: one is to level up just a bit more so that my Bard gets Hurts So Bad, allowing me to blitz from about half his health instead of well under. The other is just to buy a bit more HP boosting (Iron Bangles) to buy myself a bit more time. So ultimately the strategy is to maintain 4x Don't Let 'Em Get Ya (brave-blitzing to do this.), sometimes throwing in a fifth with another PC to reach the cap of -80% damage received, my highest-offence characters primarily attack with Cross Cut, and otherwise I throw in Potions, (Mini) Ethers, and other periodic Defangs with my lowest-offence Vanguard. I do use a Vanguard special at one point which helps with damage received. Then, when the boss is at around half HP, I use my Bard special to boost damage, begin attacking, use 4x Hurts So Bad on the Bard's next turn, and then 4x Cross Cut with the other three, buying myself time with Phoenix Downs. Sadly one PC is dead when I strike the killing blow and I do not have the action to use the Phoenix Down, it takes my very last Cross Cut to finish the battle with everyone at negative BP.

[SnowFire]

Unicorn Overlord
Realizing I didn't make a post on this earlier.  Not really much to say.  I got halfway through Bastorias and kinda gave the game a long break as it was getting a bit too easy, even on Hard mode.  I'll eventually return some day.

UO is a game that could have gone a lot of ways, but an interesting (IMO) what-if is if rather than a classic RPG style quest to gather allies and such, the game was closer to the Heroes of Might & Magic or Brigandine II series.  As is, it is rather tough for the game to get you to care too much about generics or about late-joining classes because you can already have created a bunch of doom squads.  A game that just flat reset your team every chapter, maybe having one or two carryover characters, might have been interesting - i.e. maybe there's 4 separate campaigns and we only throw everyone in a blender for the final showdown.  Or even make the game an outright strategy game where everyone's trying to unify everyone else by force.  Both of these would mean you're basically stuck with your starting area's team-squad, at least for a bit, so as to appreciate their strengths & weaknesses without having to compete against the entire rest of the cast.

Also I know people have brought it up before, and it's not strictly the most important thing to nitpick, but the plot tone remains...  weird in how the plot treats Alain & co. as if they're a tiny RPG party when the rest of the game very clearly treats them as actually liberating areas, rebuilding towns, and holding territory.  Yet bosses literally say lines about "Who are you" and treating the player army as if they're upjumped rats, despite the fact that we objectively control huge swathes of territory with fireworks & shit in our honor, and also just killed all the bosses' minions.  It's weird!


Shovel Knight: King of Cards
For whatever reason, I never got to this - maybe because I played the rest of the SK series on Vita and had mostly stopped Vita'ing by then?  Who knows.  Well, played it now.  100% items, 100% map exits, 100% merit medals, and bought all the fancy decorative upgrades from Mr. Hat.  It's pretty great!  Reasonably short & compact playthrough, too.  You also finally get to face the Troupple King as a boss, something I didn't realize we needed until now.

Similar to Specter Knight's campaign, they came up with new stages specially designed for King Knight.  There's also more stages that are individually shorter, which is fine, and will sometimes have a secret exit to find in addition to the regular exit.  For the most part, it's good times.  Only complaint is the usual problems when you expect to grab a ladder but King Knight inexplicably doesn't and you fall to your doom instead.  Also, as an interesting quirk, I found the Propeller Blitzsteed, a Castlevania Dagger equivalent and the first Heirloom you're likely to get, insanely useful.  King Knight is normally about very upfront, bashy combat, but throwing cheap flying daggers everywhere gives him a range game for free.  It's great against bosses, too.

The difficulty is for the most part on the easy side - harder than Spectre of Torment, but easier than Plague of Shadows.  All the trickiness is in the platforming.  Assuming you're buying the health upgrades, you shouldn't really ever be dying to damage; bosses emit restoration hearts on being damaged, and the stages are short and have health refills in them.  It's too bad because the boss fights are really cool; I'd love to have, like, doubled most boss HP to force you to learn their patterns better.  As is, the challenging bosses are ones like Tinker Knight who have insta-death pits in their fight to be aware of.  The main exception is the superboss; she happily can kill you via damage while not having BS instant death pits, so her fight was probably the most enjoyable in figuring out.  (And a random FF4 Zeromus flashback too!)  Certainly a better fight than the final boss.

There are two minorly bad things that aren't a huge deal, but can mess up the vibe a bit.  The "on death, lose money, get back to where you died to collect it" idea from older Shovel Knight returns.  Now, to be super clear, money is not that big a deal in game.  I bought everything without grinding.  It's mostly a decorative penalty.  And...  I still hate it.  It's just the worst, most frustrating feeling to watch your funds dwindle because you can't figure out the jump they want you to do.  And sometimes the death money bags spawn in totally unrecoverable locations, too.  I didn't even die THAT often, but it makes the deaths that do happen far, far more stressful than they have any right to be.  This is supposed to be a silly fun game, not a "get angry and in tears" game.   Whyyyyyyyyyyy rub this penalty in the player's face.  (But maybe I'm just a wimp for this?  SMT5 made me quit playing it after just ONE bullshit death.)

The second minorly bad aspect is tied to a largely good aspect which I now realize I didn't mention.  SK writing is in general good when it's being goofy and silly (Plague of Shadows) and bad when it's trying to be serious (Spectre of Torment).  For the most part, King of Cards is goofy, which is perfect.  Our Hero wants to be a king, and winning the title of King of Cards at the card game craze sweeping the nation sounds like basically becoming a king right?!  Unfortunately the plot swerves towards dumb, well-trodden, and played serious roads in the very last act.  THE ENCHANTRESS AGAIN?!  Come on, switch it up.  Maybe make the superboss the regular final boss, it'd be more fitting.  And if we're taking the plot seriously, didn't Spectre Knight recruit King Knight anyway rather than what ends up happening?  And they decided they needed an explicit insane plot point to explain why people aren't talking about Joustus in later games?!  Whatever. Like just let me beat up Shovel Knight & Shield Knight in a fun non-canonical prequel, it's not much to ask.  Not a huge deal though.

There is a NG+ mode that is tougher, but as usual, Yacht Club has made the game tougher in exactly the wrong way that SnowFire would prefer.  SnowFire would want to remove the penalty for dying but make everything way harder with more spikes, longer gaps, more enemies, etc.  The NG+ just reduces your health, and doubles down on resource tension where taking damage loses treasure and using Heirlooms (!!!!) costs Treasure, because how dare you have fun or something.  So you're either boringly perfecting everything or you're stuck in a downward spiral of losing your cash and then losing your ability to use subweapons.  Or you can grind cash safely for an hour and then spam abilities like crazy!!1!  Wow that is not for me, I want to take on a tougher challenge not show I can perfect the existing one (which is something that if I wanted to really do, I'd just speedrun the base game).

EDIT: Oh yes, Joustus was pretty fun overall, the Triple Triad esque card game.  The only asterisk is that I kinda liked the game strategically more in Worlds 1 & 2.  World 3 introduces a new mechanic, Cascade, which kind of overwhelms a lot of the other strategy in the game?  It lets you flip the allegiance of cards you push around, which is an insanely dominant ability - like imagine if moving your Queen in for a possible checkmate in chess could result in your opponent casually turning it into their Queen.  Or if someone could play a card in Poker where the lowest hand wins.  Totally puts the area control aspects on their head, as what was once exerting influence can now just casually be flipped into the other side's card.

Also, in important news, the Fairy of Research is now the King (Queen?) of the Fairies.

[Cmdr_King]

Xenoblade Chronicles- it is done.

This is a game that must speak so much to the 14 year old who was just there for it in its day.  It's got a lot going on, you can play it practically forever, there's enough there for the cast to extrapolate on, that's all good stuff.  But coming into it as a Xeno veteran I can only miss many things and find disappointment in some of the stuff that replaced it.  The game is scaled back so much in terms of the craft, depth, and texture of the plot and scenes, it has the unmistakable air of "okay we can't do what *we* want, so what'll sell". 

It kinda reminds me of Don Bluth's Anastasia in that way when I say it out loud.

Which isn't to say the game is shallow or lacking in good aspects or anything like that.  It's just.  So often I'd feel like I was making progress and then thought "hey I should look up how to <x>" and then get stuck in a quagmire of quests filled with generic dialog to even access <x>.  And you can see what they wanted to do with how all those systems interact and for the right person of the right age, I'm sure it's magical but.  Man I'd rather have some other way to see how Melia feels about Fiora or how Dunban feels about anything than either fighting a million things for proccing affinity points in battle or doing every major sidequest in a region hoping the generic quest barks go to the character I'm more interested in at the time.

On the plus side this version of the game has Casual Mode, which undoes some of the mechanical rough edges of the game like the insanely harsh level checks.  I played about half of it legit, I'd say up until Sword Valley, but at that point I kinda forgot to swap from casual for mobs to normal for bosses.  It's a shame in some ways because bosses crumple that way while mobs remain potentially tricky if they're even in your ballpark level wise.
It IS really fun to get a bit overlevelled and just walk straight into monsters that're terrified to attack you though.

But yeah, this does feel nice to just have done and dusted after so many years, even if it's a different version and couldn't possibly live up to my original hype for it back in 2011 or whatever it was.

[Cmdr_King]

Eiyuden Chronicles Rising- went on through this on a whim, it's pretty alright.

So, this game ended up being clearly a retro PSP game?  Like, it just has that structure of main and side quests that are deliberately designed to be digestible in chunks one could play during a commute, y'know?

In terms of introducing the larger conflict that I assume is going on in the proper Eiyuden it's kinda so-so, but as a Suikoden veteran it *does* do a good job of establishing how Eiyuden as a setting will be compatible but slightly different from that series.  Like, okay, yeah, Runes are pretty comparable in terms of how you use them and their appearance, but by breaking them up into the raw runes and the lenses you create a good way to differentiate between characters and explain how Runes can be "common enough for an army" but shy of "magitek singularity" (although unlike Suikoden there IS a suggestion, at least in this game, that things are on the cusp of such a thing).  It does make the sometimes too-modern dialog feel just a teensy bit less out of place at any rate.

So yeah this was a bit better than it'd been described to me, but I do get why it underwhelmed people a bit on release.