A Game Journal Reborn

[Arvis]

Yeah, XII definitely makes the player WORK for stuff.  I am dying for my Kumbha+Zodiac Escutcheon+Genji Gloves build, but the work necessary to acquire it means there won't be much left to use it on.

When are they going to put Suikoden V on PSN?

[Rook]

Man, VC 3 was just too good, even it was really just VC 2.5 (which I think was also good, if not for some annoynace with the credit system). Totally not happy about the new direction with the franchise. There was potential to make it like Kiseki, close the Gallian trilogy and move to new country. Wasn't meant to be I guess.

You could farm everything in trials, that is if you want to keep using that mode and savescum steals all day long. Also it's not the same thing getting a thing like Wyrmhero Blade in trials opposed to actually completing the questlines. Personally I think it's good only for trial 100, which was one of the best bonus bosses in the entire franchise. Other locations iirc, are Henne mines depths, Pharos subterra and I think you can get one from the hunt club quest, but it means sacrificing other great gear you could get there. Also I think those chests have something like a 10% spawn rate. In any case, there isn't need for more than 1-2 ribbons, since someone is probably rocking some Boots, Genji Gloves or a Bubble Belt anyway.

Almost done with the Titan trials in FF XIII myself. Got one extra trap too, but still need to farm some gil so that my "ultimate" weapon doesn't have lower stats than my tier 2.

Also noticed that Suikoden IV has managed to make it to PSN at some point. Seems I could actually finish this franchise now. Heard some bad things about it, but ehhh... in retrospect I even managed to like Suikoden III. I think my appreciation towards the series is growing with each game I play, though they may not be personal favorites.

-If you just "liked" Suikoden 3 (which IMO is a classic) then you will hate Suikoden 4. I lasted about 10 hrs with it. It hits you with random battles like every 3-5 seconds. It also looks terrible.

-I would be extremely happy if the news on the 20th is that VC3 is being remade on a console. I mean jeez you have the canvas engine sega and the original VC still looks crazy good.

Finished vol 1 of .hack//GU, CLIFFHANGER! Anyway apparently for the remaster they up the exp you get with battles. Which makes sense because why make this series 160 hours long when you can do it in 100. Was a bit starved for a challenge so occasionally I just plowed though a couple dungeons about 8-10 levels above my pay grade.

[Arvis]

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
Beat Zodiark last night, first try, no preparation.  I was really expecting it to be harder.  I did, however, get my main party wiped by Darkja three times.  Twice because I wasn't wearing Black Masks, and then the third time because the whole party got hit with the KO effect from it.

Incidentally, the switchbox junction where all the Abysteels appear wiped out all six of my characters twice.  That seemed way harder than Zodiark.  I had to rework my Gambits specifically to survive it (although, once I did that, it was very easy, so maybe to say it was "harder" is misleading").

Anyways, now I just have to go get Zeromus, who I completely forgot about and didn't notice that I had missed.  But first, I'm going to see if I can get that Zodiac Escutcheon.

[Der Jermeister]

I'm a few hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition and have had fun just dicking around. I'll be on vacation from tomorrow until Tuesday, and I'll have Tokyo Xanadu on my Vita, which I've already logged plenty of time into, and Metroid: Samus Returns, which I haven't started yet, to keep me busy.

[Aeolus]

Paper Mario: And Luigi Jam.

Past Desert Land and currently island hopping after having beaten Roy and Wendy Koopa. Did anyone take the plunge on the Super Star Saga remake yet? I keep feeling that this game is just lacking compared to that game and its almost LttP style game world (well that or more MM or MC styles where you're mainly operating around a hub; either way it was nice that SSS started you off on the country's border and you promptly worked your way to the hub before your quest began in earnest). It really doesn't help how lacking PJ's world feels compared to SSS (also, 'nother question for y'all plungers out there, did the major SSS original characters like Fawful get replaced by Toads?).

Anyways, I'm almost done with this area and I suspect that I will be moving on to Irwin Allen's Land of the Giants next.

[mecharobot]

Now that I'm finally the proud(?) owner of FF XIII platinum, I thought that what better way to celebrate it than playing FF XIII-2?

Just played the prologue. Did an epic summon battle, a QTE fight against the final boss and rescued what seems to be a keyblade master. Then I killed some bugs and dogs on a beach.

I seem to feel this weird jankiness in the game. Not sure if it's my imagination, but when I play a SE game that heavily reuses assets, I get this feeling that it just plays different from what it is supposed to outside the battle. The battles seem a bit slow too, but then again I was just  defeating the strongest enemies with max'd characters in XIII so that might have something to do with it.

[Der Jermeister]

I got close to the end of Metroid: Samus Returns and Tokyo Xanadu on my vacation, but fell a tad short of beating them. Samus Returns sort of gives too many regular missile upgrades, since I never ran out of them, and sometimes too few energy upgrades, but the difficulty is manageable if you track enemy patterns. I've been having a blast with Tokyo Xanadu, but don't care much for the story.

[Aeolus]

Today, I obtained a Switch and purchased a PS4. If I had sprung for it, I could've easily completed the set with an XBones. Need to recover from Turkey poisoning (in that I ate Turkey and don't have much left in the tank), but I've got BotW (Switch Edition), FEW, (upcoming XBC2 in like a week), Ys VIII, God Wars, and AssCreed BF to pick from.

But first, Mario & Luigi 5: Got the spin move, which means I can finally start farming Beans, ergo, I must be getting close to the end of the game (got like 15 hours on the clock and am level 19). This is sadly not the best M&L game, although the music is very nice (Mt. Burrmomise in particular has a very chill sound to it, while the Forest of Illusion had a remix to LotSS's forest theme sound to it). Most annoying thing is that enemy levels don't scale and that means that trying to go back for the Dodge Expert Challenges sucks since you have to burn 2 full rotations per Paper Spiney or Sandmiraagh turn, and there's no Pass Turn/Defend option for whatever reason (I'm forced to use Bros./Trio Attacks to waste turns and the Kite one takes forever to resolve).

[MeshGearFox]

... Why does the font get larger every time I come back here...

Neo Metal Fantasy - (Spoilered for space)

Spoiler: show

I was a little hesitant about this one since it didn't seem particularly well received in Japan, but Duomazov gave it pretty glowing praise and they didn't steer me wrong about Tenshi no Uta or Anearth. Anyway, the introductory bits are pretty standard -- you start off playing as a girl waking up on her 16th birthday. She's tasked with going to a nearby shrine and trying to wake up a legendary hero who'd been locked in stone after sealing away some demon a thousand years ago. Naturally, she's the chosen one and wakes up the hero. The bad guys immediately sense this, raid the girl's town, and kidnap her parents.

Naturally she sets off to save them!

... And promptly gets kidnapped herself, meaning you get to play as the legendary hero.

Who's like eight because he didn't really come back right. Erm... Anyway, he heads south to try to find help, promptly gets knocked out when some slime thing lands on him, and is awakened by a princess, and her two companions, and elf and a robotic centaur guy name (who has a brother named Sadness). There are some other fun characters in Aleph Base, such as Nick Tesla, a bird guy who's trying to install a railgun on the roof of the fortress, Mobile Monroe, the newscaster with a marked lack of regard for personal safety, and Misinformation Bobby, who doesn't give good information.

Very Phantasy Star-ish in style, but the battles are really fast, the dungeons are more reasonable, you have a run button which *really makes you move fast,* and there's this interesting magic system where you get a kind of secondary currency from killing enemies that works like shared party MP. Spells so far are all in the 100-200 MP range, and you get about 170MP per battle so far, so you have plenty of room to use magic fairly freely, which is refreshing.

Also there's voiced party chat, which is nice.

Dragon Quest 7 3DS - I liked the original a lot and was really interested in the new translation, but there are a couple of things that aren't really doing it for me in this version. There're some weird performance issues that make battles really slow (input lag in the menu?) which seems to be something limited to the English release. The new graphics are quite large and zoomed in, so the visible area of a given dungeon/town/overworld is really cramped, and I feel like it's sort of awkward to navigate with that? And then the major content addition's just randomly generated dungeon tablets which isn't something I really care about. (Also maybe it's just me but there've been a few parts of the new script that get so, er, dialectically heavy that they're weird to parse).

(... Also played a bit of DQ5 out of nostalgia. I have to say, as much as Sancho's accent in the DQ5 remake didn't bother me that much back in 2008 or so, encountering it now, for various reasons, it's, well... yikes).

Soul Hackers - Did the Judah Singh vision quest and picked up some sidequest from Paradigm X. Realized that the money in this is essentially bitcoins. Erm...

OneShot - This seems neat. I feel like saying anything more than that would be too spoilery.

Metroid Prime/Mario Sunshine - Picked up the wave beam in the former, messing around with red coin challenges and stars in the oil refinery/loading dock area in the latter.

Stardew Valley - Got a bunch villager story things happening in quick succession. References to the... events going on outside of the valley are are not something I expected going into this at all. Anyway, sitting on around 10k money, deciding whether I want to set up a chicken coop or just go straight for a barn.

[ironmage]

Valkyria Chronicles 3:  I'm up to chapter 17.

The end of chapter 15 was frustrating.  I didn't mind the supertank that sprays everything in range with bullets, attacks my tank with multiple shells per round, or kills all infantry not under cover every other turn.  What I hated was that armored infantry reinforcements kept teleporting behind my lines.  (They're the mook version of VC1's Ghirlandaio Selveria, but with slightly less attack, slightly less defense, lots of mobility, and no boobs).  If they showed up at the edge of the map, or were hiding in grass, it would be different, but appearing out of nowhere?  That's cheap.  And painful.

Tried looking up hints, but found nothing useful; one wiki implied a sniper could kill those mooks in one hit, and a youtube video showed a Kurt with a lot of HP somehow surviving a short range attack from said mooks.  I can only guess that there was a large level gap between me and them, and a brief dalliance with grinding showed I wasn't going to close that gap quickly...and I prefer to avoid grinding anyway.

Eventually I threw out my usual methodical approach, and just blitzed it.  Forget about conserving that precious SP point; Imca's SP attack turned out to be enough to almost wipe out the supertank's main guns, even from halfway across the map, which left just the teleporting mooks.

Although I lost Imca and Clarissa (my engineer) in the process, I managed to get Kurt (with anti-armor rifle) and Carisa tank girl in flanking positions, and then it was just blasting at the tank's radiators, abusing the Resupply command, and hoping that mook that just teleported in doesn't one-shot Kurt.

"Frustrating" battles are pretty rewarding when you finally beat them.

[Aeolus]

Got tired of looking at the blown up font so I zoomed out a bit to make things easier to read.

And speaking of frustrating battles, my playthrough of Fire Emblem Warriors hit a nasty snag for awhile on the mission where you need to stop Ryoma and Xander from killing each other. You basically have like 10 minutes at best to go through the entire stage while beating every noteworthy enemy and clearing every side objective while also making sure you don't take down a fort or a reinforcement from one side without taking one from the other immediately afterwards. Currently finishing up part four, which means that there's probably one or two more story battles left before I've got to start in on the rest of the game content. Promoted Lianna and Camilla so far, I'll probably promote Cordelia or Female Corrin next.

As for the best Paper Mario game since TTYD, I'm done fucking around for now and am back to Mt. Burrmonise to continue this thing called a plot. The game's gonna stick me on a second round of globe trotting, but I still don't think there's much left besides a macguffin roundup and Bowser's Castle.

[Starmongoose]

The font is bigger? It looks normal to me.

[Klutz64]

The font is bigger? It looks normal to me.

Same

[Annubis]

The font is bigger? It looks normal to me.

For some reason, the font got bigger in the last week.

[Kevadu]

The font looks the same as it always has to me...