Ushi No Tane Forum

Kikki wrote:Cold Steel IV is so good.

Rean did not continue to get physically beaten up by ALL of his love interests. However, one of them does slam him to the wall of a secluded cave in a very aggressive, kabe-don style of move. Ha ha. Poor Rean? I love him, but if you know everything behind it, he kinda deserves it. The boy needs to wake up, once and for all. Why is it so hard for him to realize that the pain he feels when one of his loved ones is hurt/killed/endangered/etc is the exact same pain THEY feel when HE is? We've had three million speeches about it already, and he says he's sorry and seems to understand for all of 1.4 seconds, but minutes later it ends up being shown that he still does not really comprehend just how precious he is to nearly every freakin' person he knows.

Literally my favorite lines from Jello Apocalypse's 'So This is Basically Trails of Cold Steel' are;

"Follow this man as he goes from being bullied by his classmates to being bullied by his students!"

and

"Thats OK, why deal with my own trauma when I can slap another friendship speech against the nearest face like a DEAD FISH! FORWARD RELENTLESSLY, MOVING ON FRIENDLESSLY."


The fact that they actually got the VA for Rean to do the second one makes it 100% funnier. He sounds so freaking broken/tired. (BTW, anyone who hasn't played Cold Steel 1-3, don't watch the video, it literally spoils every plot twist in the first 3 games. It does so hilariously, but still).

I'm salty over him calling Elliot boring lol. He is the most 'normal' of the main cast, but I LOVE THAT BOY. Literally the one person in the original Class that Rean didn't have to jump through hoops to befriend. Best boy.

I saw Rean's VA post that on Twitter last week or whenever it was. I watched a tiny clip of it, but quit after that. It seemed cute and funny, but...I don't know how to say it, but I don't feel like watching a parody of Cold Steel or Rean. Not lately, anyway. Even though I'd probably totally agree with just about everything in it. I just don't wanna make fun of it, for some reason, no matter how ridiculous it may get.

My personal, deeply-held theory...with plenty of evidence, imo...is that no matter what happens, Rean thinks he's worthless. Or at the very least, that his worth is insignificant compared to anyone else's. Almost like he feels that he's barely human. He understands a person's pain over nearly losing him when he SEES it, because he's lost a lot, too, and knows what that feels like, but the minute it's not right in his face, it's like he forgets that it's possible for him to be truly important to anyone, to the point where they would be miserably crushed, were he to die.

He actually said "I don't want to die" in the game, recently, and I was a little surprised. It was news to me! That he actually has hope for a life of his own in the future...it never feels like it. It feels to me like Rean believes he has a purpose, but not a life. That he is basically a tool, existing for the use of others. He'll fight to the bloody, bitter end it if it's hurting someone else, but if it's only him, it's like he can't be bothered to put in any effort for himself.

I love him to tiny painful bits and it's just not surprising to me that some of his girlfriends have got to smack him around a bit, once in a while, because he Just. Won't. Get. It. They want to make him realise it once and for all, but they can't, and occasionally that results in him being slammed against a stone wall by the women who love him, lol.

It's kind of like Rean is the personification of chronic depression, with a sizeable helping of existential crisis thrown in for extra flair. I don't understand how people can find Rean to be a boring protagonist...to me he's quite intense.

EDIT: Gotta say, though, with Cold Steel games, they get a little more generous with the butt cleavage each time. On girls only, of course.

I watched the prologue of CSIV yesterday. The playlist is complete and finished (and digestible!) so I can work on my watch-through now. I will say though that having the videos at 2x speed is a godsend for watching. Playing is natural, all the text doesn't feel slow and droning, but watching it is just really hard to process without getting distracted. Speeding it up to the point of it all still being legible and the voices recognizable is a juuust right sorta feeling. Probs spend a lot of my time off this week watching it, especially in the early morning when I don't want to turn on systems yet.

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Alright, I bought Yakuza 0 because, come on, $20 is a good price. I'm gonna play through it whenever I have the time. I imagine after I finish Age of Calamity it'll be what I reach for next. For the sake of my sanity, i'm placing Hades along with Genshin Impact and FFXIV, where they're my games I pick up when I feel the mood. I enjoy all titles but have no burning urge to complete them, so they're not really 'backlogable', so to speak. I will consider Age of Calamity and Yazuka 0 my actual backlog (and the CSIV watch-through too, I guess) and see what strikes my fancy after I finish them both.

I am thinking of picking up Picontier in early access, but ehhh, maybe later.

Yeah, watching a Trails game is tough. (I watched all of the two Crossbell games, including side stuff and boss battles, but with the regular fighting/walking around cut out.) Even playing the game, when you get to an extra plot-heavy part and there's more than half an hour of cutscenes lined up, it gets tiring, all the information they unload on you along with new things happening. So. Much. Plot.

I'm taking a little break, right now. Just a little one, for the very reason above. TOO MUCH INFORMATION. I feel overloaded. I need a bit of time to process. I'll play again tomorrow, though. I want to play right now, but I really do feel flat-out overloaded. I don't want to stop, I need to stop, lol.

I may go ahead and buy Cafe Enchante, now. I feel like it'd be easy to pick up and put back down, and it is really different from Trails. The old 'sometimes a change is as good as a rest' situation.

I also need to pop on to Windfall (I finally updated my Dream a few days ago; I can ignore it again for a while!) and grab my 5 daily mushrooms. I find I really don't care to play ACNH at all right now, but I'll really regret it if I don't get all the mushroom stuff...I've been planning to turn the entire area around my main character's house into a fairy/mushroom forest for months, already. Of course, it's most important to get on and play daily from Nov 16-26, when the maple leaves are coming down. Well, there's almost no doubt I'll be done Cold Steel IV by then. Right now I can hardly force myself to open ACNH at all, I so don't want to play it when I could be following Rean around and beating up criminally deluded people so that the world doesn't get torn to bits. Playing ACNH right now just feels like a chore.

But I refuse to allow myself to play any more CSIV today, at least. Gotta let my brain rest a bit more! Might just watch some TV; that requires essentially no brainage.

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Next day EDIT: I got Cafe Enchante, and I am loving it. Which isn't much to say, because I've only seen the opening with Kotone and her grandpa, I haven't even seen a male lead, yet, but it is so atmospheric...it feels so warm and wholesome. The glow of the sunlight through the narrow, very simple stained-glass windows, into the dark-toned interior, the many glass pendant lights, the dark wood...I love it. I enjoyed her bout of nostalgia at looking at the pillar in the centre of the cafe that she used to try to climb as a child, and the tall wooden staircase that used to be such a struggle for her young self due to the steep steps...etc. It's just really charming. The music is a cross between lively and comforting, too.

I do wonder what kind of drama could come out of this, though. It's so warm and nice, so far, it doesn't quite feel like an otome game, lol.

Target’s having a sale and Stardew on Switch is an option (but FOMT is not)... I’ll bite. People have been calling this game “super relaxing” and “better than any SOS in [x] years” since it came out. I want to see what’s the buzz.

Anonymous Fish wrote:Target’s having a sale and Stardew on Switch is an option (but FOMT is not)... I’ll bite. People have been calling this game “super relaxing” and “better than any SOS in [x] years” since it came out. I want to see what’s the buzz.

It IS a very good farming simulator with a lot of possibilities that keep the gameplay loop very fresh. It has a SNES aesthetic but with the controls of a modern game and that itself nabbed a lot of old time fans, tickling their nostalgia while having QoL improvements. It's got a lot of charm and I like it a lot, but the 'Stardew purists' it's birthed are a pain in the « Mr.Gourmet's hat ». There is a group of people who solely play only Stardew and damn any other farming sim for not being just like it. 'It's like StardewX<insert other popular game here>' is another big thing that gets tossed around too, which is usually 90% wrong, which makes the purists ever more zealous.

IMO, it's a very charming game and has a lot to offer, but it's not « Harvest Goddess »'s gift to mankind like so many claim it to be. It's ONE game to many and it's not for everyone either. I rarely touch it these days and have instead moved onto other farming sims. What I will totally say is great about the game though is the co-op function + the game is still being updated, so it's really a labor of love on he creator's part that I totally respect despite my personal feelings.

I hope you enjoy it!

P.S. The fishing sucks, badly.

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GOSH, IT HAPPENED AGAIN LOL. My husband and I started the Night in the Woods playthough and he's doing the exact same route I did when I first played it! We got a decent chunk in before I was starting to fall asleep so we're gonna get back to it later in the week. He's very enthused and gets excited every time he gets to feed Mae's rat babies LOL.

For now I'm gonna watch some more CSIV.

The fishing in SDV is very divisive. A lot of people love it, and the rest of us hate it with the fiery, burning passion of a thousand suns, kind of a thing. I was not particularly a fan of the game overall, though I did like the whole 'restore the community centre' central theme. I didn't particularly enjoy the candidates or events in that game, though, and I don't really like the graphics, which means that overall it fell a bit flat, for me. An impressive thing for one man to have made by himself, though, that's for sure.

~

I saw Bluie play A Night in the Woods last night and it made me smile cuz I remembered, and was thinking, aw, look, Bluie's havin' fun with the hubby.

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Um...Cafe Enchante is a very...how do I say it? The quality of the game is very inconsistent. The common route is insanely long (took me more than 12 hours, though I did keep drifting off a bit during those hours) and the actual routes are much shorter. The prologue also completely lacks flow and feels like it's just a bunch of vignettes strung together randomly. It felt really pointless, to me...endlessly rambling...until it started to get toward the end.

They also have incredibly derpy-looking hairstyles that make them unattractive, imo. The faces are drawn well enough, but puffy hair horns and whipped-cream like dollops of hair plopped on their foreheads and down between their eyes...so many of them are completely ruined by moronic-looking hair.

Music is good, voices are pretty good, backgrounds are nice...women are drawn fairly well. Cute moments are rarer than they should be, though, and it's not actually very funny, most of the time. It started out very mundane and dull, and progressed to being patchily weird out of nowhere. There is no coherence, yet. I'm not even done my first route (going with Ignis...I try to save my favourites for the end, where possible) so the story should become more meaningful as I do more routes, but...I'm pretty disappointed. Cafe Enchante has the worst, most uninteresting common route I have ever played in an otoge.

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If finishing all the routes changes my opinion, I'll say so then, but I'm going back to Cold Steel IV, now. I've had enough of a break and am ready to do goody-two-shoes questing and bonding events and status-effect-ridden battles yet again. I think I've gotten nearly every 'love' event done already. Must be about 80% done the game? Hard to tell, these games are always so insanely detailed that their length often stretches out at every opportunity.

More than looking into new games, I’ve got a backlog of old games that I’ve played but never finished. I’m talking like 15+ year old saves here lol. Lately I’m focusing on Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 and 2. Finally going to get all the rare weapons and finish ultimate mode.

So I'm trying to find quick games to beat in my backlog and I picked up Pokemon Yellow on the 3DS and just beat it with a pretty under-leveled team, but hey, a win is a win.

I did try going back to I Am Setsuna, but I find the game a bit too difficult for my liking, so it's been eliminated from my backlog.

I might try all 3 of Freebird Games' games since they're not that long to beat either and they're still in my backlog.

I'm really happy to be done with my backlog, which was 50+ games (from a decade or so of playing but not always finishing) long, what...3 years ago? But now, no more backlog! Only new games to spend my time on, now. Maybe in 2021 I'll actually have enough game time to be able to replay old favourites, instead of always having to chip away at backlog games. :D

I finished Ignis' route. The very end of it was pretty good, but I was impatient for it to hurry up and be over. Not a good sign. Now I can go back to CSIV without having the unfinished route nagging me in the back of my head. I should definitely be done CSIV before Age of Calamity, and I think I'll also be done Cafe Enchante, since there are 11 days between now and then. Hopefully; cuz I think AoC will probably take up the remainder of November, and I don't really like having more than one game hanging over my head at the same time. I prefer to work on one game until I finish it. Keeps a backlog from building too, I find.

I can't wait for that feeling. I've got 78 games in total, which is down from when we started these series of threads. I may go back to some games I've eliminated or ones that I'm in the middle of a replay of even though I beat them before.

I think my plan is to eliminate my 3DS library, which just consists of Golden Sun Dark Age (which I'm only gonna play after I beat the other two Golden Sun games) and Dragon Quest 8 (which is my next game after Marvel's Spiderman Miles Morales)

Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed. I picked up Assassin's Creed Odyssey again. I probably have to thank MEA, I seem to get better at fighting upfront, with the dodging and stuff and having a controller helps a lot. I also promise myself that I should finished ACOd before getting Valhalla to save some money since I invested on a new PC rig.

Early 2021 will be a better year due to SoS PoOT and ME Trilogy Remastered. I will be probably be entertained for the first half of 2021 and probably get Valhala late next year.

I do really like being finished with my backlog. Each year I did abandon some of my games, but only after putting hours into each one and being certain that putting more hours in would be a waste of time spent turning gaming into a chore, which is the point where I realise I just have to accept that I made a mistake, not in being able to get into it, but in buying that game in the first place. At that point, any game I was working on got thrown onto the 'abandoned' pile. But all the others got finished, including all the new games I got along the way in the last three years (or maybe 4, I can't remember how many Backlog threads we've had now, even though I made 'em all, lol.)

It feels good to only have to think about current, new games, rather than worry about old-moldies. As long as I never let myself buy too many games at once (even two at once feels like too much, for me, though it happens once in a while since the game dev world seems to like to dump all the stuff I like on me in the same month) it seems like I'll never again build up that millstone of a backlog that I had 3-4 years ago.

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I don't know how many hours I have left to put into the game, but I do know that Cold Steel IV ends on 9/1 (the game is separated into calendar dates) and I am currently on the very last part of 8/30. There can't be a lot left...I was closer to done than I realized when I took my mini-break. More like 90% than 80%.

I've got all the battle trophies, now... EDIT: Okay, did the penultimate day, and got 8 bonding trophies. Didn't like ANY of the romances, tbh...weirdly, I may have liked Musse's the best of the ones I was able to get (you can only get a max of 9 on your first playthrough, and I can't get the 9th due to that horrrrrrrrible Vantage Masters. How I hate when they make mini-games manadatory for game completion!) Trails does romances really poorly, imo. The most appealing ones were actually Altina and Elise, for me...but in a platonic way. Looking at it positively, they left the romance vague enough that if you wanted to, you could look at it as the girl in question being Rean's favourite, but even so, not in a romantic way. I was really tempted to choose 'no one', and will probably end up going with that on my second playthrough. (This time I decided to stick with Sara, but not for any special reason.)

So, on the 5th of November I bought Part-Time UFO and Cafe Enchante on the Switch. And today, I received my copy of Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin just a few minutes ago (also on the Switch). I'm excited to play all 3 games.

I haven't touched Pokemon (Crown Tundra DLC) or any other game since signing up for Tandem (a free language exchange website and app) exactly a week ago.

However, I'm going to read through the little instruction booklet that game with the game and hopefully start on Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin after my dinner.

Sorry there's not much to report this time.

Got everything done in CSIV prior to the very final dungeon/battles, and I am on the path to the 'true' ending. I have passed the 'point of no return'...where I can no longer complete quests or travel freely, etc, because I am locked in to the ending...and am at 60% trophy completion...a few more will be gotten once the final dungeon is complete. But a second play is always required for completing bonding trophies and a few other things, so I'm fairly happy with finishing at 60-65% of all trophies.

I won't finish today, though. I want to, kinda, but...it's gonna be huge, I just know it, and will result in me staying up stupidly late to get to the very end. I'll wait until tomorrow to go down...or up, maybe...to the last, incredibly gross dungeon.

I really wonder what 'loose ends' Hajimari ties up. And if Trails moves on to Calvard from here...is it gonna be on PS5? And what group of people will be the main cast? Of course, I'll probably have even MORE questions once I'm actually finished.

Hard to express how it feels, coming to the end of this massive, emotional story, knowing that I'll be leaving Rean behind after this.