Hello Everyone!
Didn’t get to play much this week. And haven’t really started anything new.
- Played a few levels of New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, not much though, still on the same water world.
- Played Dragon Quest XI for couple of hours, going to continue playing that.
- Reached High Rank in Monster Hunter: World but now I am stuck at Pink Rathian, maybe I need to improve my equipment, or maybe I should cave and fire that SOS flare.
- Playing a bit of Brotato before sleep, if I am not tired. Finally cleared it once, now trying other characters and weapon combinations. A combination of guns has been working out great for me though. All guns, all different type, and focusing on increasing ranged attack.
That’s all from me, what about you guys? What have you been playing?
Breath of the wild (I know I’m late!) then moving to super Mario sunshine and then octopath traveler :)
I’m excited to play Octopath at some point. I’m probably going to start with the second one. Heard it was better and the stories between 1 and 2 aren’t really dependent on each other.
Yeah, I have heard the same, but if you plan to play both, it might be difficult to go back. 2 is definitely much better though.
I got BotW for Christmas back in 2019 and only just finished it a few months ago lol. I was just happy to finally understand all the memes!
My 4 year old and I started playing Mario Sunshine recently, too, and it’s a lot of fun. Definitely one of the more challenging Mario games, but not as big as some made it seem. Very fun.
Did you regularly played the game for 3.5 years? Or stopped played and resumed recently?
Played it for like 30 minutes, but never found the time to dedicate to it. Then over Christmas last year I finally had the chance to dedicate to it.
Ah, nice! Any plans to play TotK any time soon? Or going to give it a gap of couple of years?
Probably get it for my birthday and then not play it for a few years. 😁 But really, I want to get it, but it’s $90 here and I just can’t justify that. I’ll probably wait a few years for it to finally drop to $70 then get it. Lol. Also, I keep telling myself I should get through my backlog of games before I buy more…
I fully support playing through the backlog before buying new games, but you also shouldn’t force yourself. When I finish a game, I go through the list of all the games I have (don’t have much bought games in my backlog, but with PS+ and NSO classic games, have quite a big library of games that I can play without paying), and see which one I feel like playing, and then start that.
Of course, sometimes you want to play a specific game, and just get it, but in general, I try to keep my buying games at minimal.
As long as you are enjoying the game, doesn’t matter when you are playing it. I still have games for 2014 on my to-play list. So, are you enjoying it?
Also, nice list of games!
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I had the exact same experience. I tried Tunic last year and I was like “nope, I’m not doing this to myself again.” It gave me the same feeling as Link’s Awakening as a kid.
So triggered.
CrossCode! So excited, this game makes me feel like a little kid again, back when I would just sit and do nothing but game all day, totally lost in the experience.
One of my favourite games ever, and it gets even better the further in you are. Have fun!
I recall hearing mixed things about it. Don’t remember what they were though. Glad to see people loving it here.
I think it is a relatively puzzle-focused game, which not everyone is a fan of. Basically half action RPG, half puzzle game (similar to Zelda games). I think the puzzles are incredible, complex and lots of fun to solve and the dungeons in general are super cool (especially later ones. But not everyone likes the amount of puzzles there is.
Ah, that sounds wonderful. This just moved it closer to top on my wishlist! Thanks for the info.
That’s nice to hear, the game is still on my wishlist, glad you are loving it.
Finishing off Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s post-game content before moving on to Future Redeemed. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of it, though I am basically ready to be done, so… that lined up pretty nicely, actually.
Oh, I had completely forgotten about Future Redeemed! I was planning to play it after TotK, but then completely forgot it’s existence. Going to get it soon.
I got a little burnt out on TotK so I decided on playing a little bit of Persona 5 as an in-between game and got completely hooked on that instead. Even though I usually don’t really enjoy turn-based combat. Super cool game, I can definitely recommend it
Haha, you chose a wrong game for playing “a little bit”. Are you playing Royal or the basic version? Enjoy your next 100 hours!
Royal, found it at a pretty good discount some time ago. Though I don’t know the difference between that and base game. Thanks!
Well, there are many QoL features, and there is an extra semester at the end of the game. The fans of the game says, Royal is definitive edition to play.
Been a busy week, haven’t been playing a ton. Picking up a little Overcooked 2 here or there, I always loved that game but couldn’t find friends to play it with. Apparently none of them like it nearly as much as I do, so I’ve just been playing it solo. Still a fun game though!
How are you enjoying it solo, I have heard it becomes quite hectic when playing alone?
Yeah it’s a bit much one the more difficult levels. You have two chefs to control, and you switch between them (using L I believe? Hard to say without just playing lol). So if you multi task well, you can set a chef up with some stuff and start chopping, then switch to the other to focus on other tasks
Yeah, that doesn’t sound easy. 😀
Good luck!
Civ 6 (long loading times) Tears of the Kingdom Splatoon 3 And soon Quake 2!
EDIT: I’m currently on vacation
That sounds like a fun vacation!
How’s Civ 6 on Switch? Just initial load times are long? Or every turn is slow?
Just slow turns. Since that I like to play on large maps with a lot of cities and Leaders. I’m just used to my pc that it’s quick and not taking 2+ minutes for every turn.
Ah, that might be annoying, waiting so long for each turn.
This will be my first clear weekend for a while.
I’ve been playing a BG3 campaign with my buddy when I got a few spare hours, so we’ll probably play that some this weekend.
I’ve also been playing Thronefall. Great, simple tower defense RTS kinda game.
Also been playing New Star GP. A retro style, arcadey Formula One game in a retro style similar to Virtua Racer from the devs that made Retro Bowl. It’s got a fun little career mode.
How are you liking BG3? I have mentioned it few times, but I am really excited for the game, but still haven’t gotten around to playing the Divinity: Original Sin series, so have to play that first.
Thronefall looks nice. Still in early access but Overwhelmingly Positive. I have added it to my wishlist, mainly to keep an eye on it if they ever release a console version.
How’s New Star GP? I used to love older Need for Speed games, but haven’t played a racing game in a long time, at least none that I liked. If the feel of the cars, and career mode is good, can add it to my list.
BG3 is great. So far I’m thinking it’s the best CRPG of all time. I’d recommend it over DoS 1&2, which is saying a LOT because DoS2 is amazing.
Thronefall is a great, cozy game that still scratches my RTS itch.
I think New Star is probably only going to work for specific people. It has the look of Virtua Racer, with old school arcadey car feel, in Formula One style races with a career mode based on managing your sponsorships, pit crew, and engineers, while upgrading your car. It’s absolutely nothing like NFS.
I’d recommend it if you liked games like Rush and Cruis’n USA, and Formula One.
If you’re looking for something like NFS, NFS Heat was pretty solid. Forza Horizon 5 would be another game you might enjoy. Project Cars 3 is another solid Arcadey racer. I mostly play Sim and Simcade racers, so I don’t have a lot of recommendations for arcadey racers.
Ah, thanks for the feedback and recommendations.
Yeah, from all I have seen BG 3 is much better than DoS 2, which is a lot better than DoS 1. So, since I want to play all the games, it makes sense to start from the worst game (which is still a really great game). 😀
Have you played BG1 or 2?
Oh yes! BG 1, 2, Icewindale 1 (and 2?). Played them all. Though don’t remember much of the story. Also, haven’t played anything modern. Not even Pillars of Eternity (though I did start it on PC once, but it didn’t work well on it).
I’m working through my first playthrough of Stray. Last save I was just about to leave the Slums for what I understand to be the final time. Going for 100% and so far don’t think I’ve missed anything.
Not exactly video games, but I’ve also been doing puzzles lately - just completed my 4th in like a week. They were 300, 300, 1000, and 1000 pieces - but the last one only had 999 pieces present 🙁 Gonna try to make the missing piece myself before I return them to the library.
After Stray I might start on New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe too. Wanna get through it before Wonder comes out.
Edit: lol just realized this is the Nintendo community and not general gaming. Oh well, at least I fit NSMBUD in there
Loved Stray, it’s a really fun game. Good luck with 100%!
I love jigsaw puzzles, the last one I got from some random shop, and I think it wasn’t original, or maybe just faulty, as the colours on the pieces didn’t exactly match the box. And all the different shades of dark gray were simple black. I just gave up on it. I want to try some nice ones.
As for Mario, yeah, I started it for the same reason. Wanted to finish it before Wonder comes out.
The last of the puzzles I just did was a Wasgij - which always does tricky things with the box art. For this one you’re shown a scene on the front of the box, then the actual puzzle is what someone in that scene would see from their perspective - so most of the puzzle isn’t actually shown, and the things that are shown are in the wrong perspective. It was interesting to do since my puzzle strategy usually relies heavily on comparing pieces to the box.
Just learned about Wasgij from you. And same question as I asked above. How do you even solve that? Isn’t jigsaw all about seeing the picture and then matching the piece with the picture on board and so on.
That’s my usual strategy - this was the first time I had to do it without really having a reference image. I didn’t even try to use what was visible on the box.
It ended up not being too hard. In the beginning (after the edge obviously) I progressed by sorting pieces by color. As an example, I put every single piece with even a tiny bit of purple into one pile. Then I tried to connect the pieces in just that pile - which in the case of purple ended up making me 3 or 4 distinct objects. While I didn’t know what I was making (I thought I was making a sea monster, ended up being a straw hat), the pool of pieces was low enough to make it not too hard to find connections.
Once I’d done that for all the colors that were rare enough to make that strategy useful, I was about half-way done - by which point it wasn’t too bad to figure out what sorts of pieces I needed to find to extend which sections of puzzle I already had assembled. The only truly painful part was all the pieces that were just water - which would have been hard even with a reference picture.
It can also help to sort the pieces by shape: since there are so many fewer of the non-standard shapes you have a lot fewer pieces to check when you find a missing spot that’s not going to to fit a standard piece. And you can get pretty tricky about how you spot where nonstandard pieces go: For example, two innie or two outie bits in a row on an edge mean one of them has to be nonstandard, as do a few other patterns.
The surprise is nice: The puzzle I did ended up being vaguely Christmas themed, which is something you can’t tell from the box at all.
I am very intrigued. I am going to try to get one as soon as I can.
Okay, looked up Wagij, they look awesome. I want to try a few.
This sounds like a nightmare. Same charms, repeating over and over, in a jigsaw puzzle. How do you even make that?
Back to Tears of the Kingdom until Fantasy Life i drops. Finally cleared Korok Forest. It was surprisingly easy after the Hyrule Castle fight.
I got bold enough to try facing a Gleeok. I didn’t die but I wasted a whole lot of stuff. Seems like my stuff is not up to par yet. Am I supposed to have a bunch of elemental eyes or what?
@TwilightVulpine The elemental eyes help, fire vs ice etc… but aren’t a requirement by any means. My best strategy is a Lynel bow that shoots 3-8 arrows because they only use 1 eye at a time.
That’s an interesting tip, will use that!
I still haven’t beaten a Gleeok, need to do that one of these days.
So far they are the toughest things I fought. Even stronger than the White-Maned Lynel. Each strike only done a tiny amount of damage.
Yeah, I haven’t beaten them, but I did come across them. Just ran away as fast as I could. 😀
Finished Trails into Reverie.
Well, that took a while, more than 90h, but I went for full completion - main game, post game dungeon, trials, daydreams, minigames, everything done.
I love the Trails series, it’s one of my favorite JRPG series ever, but it has its fair share of problems - they use the same formula for most games so it’s easy to get burned out if you play many of them in sequence, there’s a lot of cast bloat due it being a series with all games interconnected, an annoying tendency to keep trying to redeem villains, and just being too verbose at times (often because they want to use all members of that huge cast).
Why I’m talking about this? Because while I had a lot of fun with the previous game (Cold Steel 4), it also did showcase all the problems above at full strength, but Reverie does something different and provides a much necessary “break” from the usual Trails experience.
The game is split in three routes, two for protagonists of previous games (Lloyd and Rean) and one for a mysterious new masked character (“C”). This breakdown is a good shift from the usual game dynamic, lessens the issues with cast bloat since they are all spread around, and "C"s route is focused on new cast members making it a much fresher experience.
Another major change is the Reverie Corridor. Most of games in the series are heavy into sidequests, but this time the “main” game barely contains any, only a few optional extra-challenging monsters. Instead, almost all optional content takes place in this dream-like world where time flows differently and memories from the real world as hazy. Here you have access to the full cast of the game (and even some extras!), a randomly generated dungeon you can use to grind freely, a ton of minigames including series classics like Pom and Vantage Masters, and a very nice section called “Daydreams” with a lot of mini-stories showing what’s going on around with both the main cast and some familiar NPCs - very similar to the Doors from Sky 3rd.
This keeps the main story very tight and focused while also having a lot of fun optional content, and gives you freedom to decide if and when to focus on each. I don’t expect this to become the norm for future games in the series, but I enjoyed this structure a lot and I hope they do use something like this time to time to avoid burnout from the usual formula.
Finally, on the story, this is an epilogue for both Zero+Azure and Cold Steel 1-4, so obviously not a game for someone starting the series. It does a much better job story-wise then CS4 IMO, in particular in the Crossbell section - it’s still the weakest of the three routes largely due to it just rethreading old plot lines, but it fixes a lot of the things that bothered in the last two games. Rean’s route is a nice epilogue that touches on the impact of the last game’s events in Erebonia, and "C"s route is just great fun with a cast of anti-heroes.
And now the wait for the next game begins. Really looking forward to see the Calvard arc.
Started Grisaia Phantom Trigger 5.5 to 08.
Phantom Trigger is the 4th game in the Grisaia series, with the three first games (Fruit, Labyrinth and Eden) being available as a bundle as well on the Switch. This last game was released as a bunch of 2-5h “Episodes”, and this is second half of that game.
The original Grisaia games have a very interesting structure. The “Common” route of Fruit is 70% of the story and it’s full slice-of-life comedy, but once it splits into the individual routes for each heroine it gets crazy dark as you learn their backstories. Labyrinth shifts into having the main story being dark (it’s the MC’s backstory) with “lighter” after-stories for each heroine. Finally Eden goes towards a more action-focused story, but I wasn’t a big fan of it, and one of the main reasons is that most of the cast was just regular girls, so having they become involved in a spy conspiracy didn’t really work for me, it was just too hard to believe.
Phantom Trigger is more action-focused, much like Eden, but it fixes the above problem by stating from the beginning that the cast is part of “school of assassin” of sorts. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier games, but so far has been a completely independent story with a brand-new cast.
The first five episodes were focused on introducing the cast.
- 01: Introduction of the initial cast (Shiori, Haruto, Rena, Tohka, Chris and Murasaki) and premise.
- 02: Rena’s backstory, adds Maki.
- 03: Tohka’s backstory, adds Gumi.
- 04: Chris’ backstory, adds Taiga.
- 05: Murasaki’s backstory, adds Yuuki.
I only had time to start 5.5 for now, but it seems to be centered on Shiori, the focus character of the first episode - a new “civilian” teacher that just joined this school. Looks like this chapter will be about how she is adapting to the her new school and students, but I’ll talk more about it next week.
As for my overall impression of the story, a redditor once described Phantom Trigger as “pretty cozy comfort food reading”, and I think that’s an accurate description. It doesn’t do anything special or amazing, but it’s been consistently fun and entertaining.
Nice, that Reverie game structure sounds interesting, but I am generally not a fan of grinding just for grinding sake, so not sure if I’ll like that part, but rest sounds good. I just hope I can finish rest of the Trails series by the time Calvard Arc is finished (the localized version). If only they release Trails in the Sky on Switch, I’ll done with the Liberl and Crossbell arc in just a few months.
Grisaia is one of the VNs that you recommended me! I haven’t started it yet, but I have saved the list, though with the amount of games that I have in my backlog and to-play list, it might be a while before I get to them. Interesting to read about it, and the “pretty cozy comfort food reading” sounds good, making me interested.
It’s not quite “grinding just for grinding sake” because going through dungeon is also what unlocks the optional stuff like Trials, Daydreams and Minigames. But asides from the first visit you’re not required to go through it at all.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
Pokémon Violet, preparing for DLC release
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Honestly, I’m probably gonna crack away at some more Triangle Strategy. Crazy underrated.
I loved that game! Not many games make me want to playthrough all the stories but this this one’s writing was so delightful.
The game looks great. I have heard that there is lots of talking, and few maps which you keep playing on. What do you think about that?
I’m currently playing through Super Mario World and having a blast - it’s been decades since I played it.
I’ve been fancying trying my hand at kaizo so thought it would be best to play through the base game first.Super Mario World is fun, but I can’t even dream of playing kaizo. Would love to hear how that goes. Good luck!
I finished the PSP versions of Trails in the Sky 1 & 2, then watched a summary of 3rd recently. Now I’m playing Trails from Zero on Switch and I can’t put it down. I’ve already earmarked the money for Azure.
I finished the all the english-released games (my mini-review of Reverie is somewhere in this thread), but I still consider Zero+Azure my favorites. Best cast overall (though Estelle is my favorite protagonist), a fantastic setting, goddamn amazing OST.
I love this duology so much, simply hearing the CSPD theme play during one of the sections in Reverie was enough to make me immediately crack as smile.
Minor spoiler about the way the story is structured, does not mention any events or plot points
Another thing I love about these two games is how crazy is the ramp on the final stretch. Most Trails games follow the “start slow and increase the stakes near the end” approach, but IMO this duology is where they made the best use of this plot structure.
I literally just wrapped up chapter 3 (what a development!) and can’t believe I have already been at it for over 50hrs already. My goal is to play them all for the first time by order of release, so the western arrival of the cross bell arc couldn’t have been timed more perfectly for me.
Oooh! I had forgotten about the PSP versions! It won’t have things like making game fast, but it can be a good way to play the game handheld! I wonder if I can buy those for Vita now.
I would have much preferred to play the vita versions, but I left my vita at the foreign in-laws’ and haven’t had a chance for a trip back there. Whenever I get it back, I think I’m going to eventually replay the Sky games there. I miss my vita. :(
I just looked it up, the Vita version was Japan only.
That happens to be where my in laws live. But either way, I believe there are English patches if you’re willing to hack your device.
Ah, that’s cool. Unfortunately my in laws don’t live there. 😀
And yeah, don’t want to hack my device, not yet anyway.
