Backlog 2022

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.
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Mikodesu
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WARNING to anybody planning on picking up Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (now or in the future), this is the time to block keywords on your socials. I just heard that the [b]Very Bad Thing™[/b] is already out there, so spoilers will be around soon if they aren't already.



Had a weirdly rough time with the ending, but I finished Wind Waker tonight. The last phase of the last phase of the final boss is...a thing. The game has this parry system where a big yellow A!!! flashes on the screen for a second. You push the button, you juke the enemy. Minor spoilers for a 20 year old game...
Spoiler:
Final phase has Zelda wandering around trying to hit YOU with light arrows. You're supposed to keep your shield up, targeting Ganon. After Zelda hits your shield with a light arrow (finally) you have to parry Ganon to trigger a cutscene for the final blow. My FIRST time through the fight I did this at LEAST 10 times, and the parry would not trigger. My SECOND time through I tried pushing the A button after the arrow bit, and THEN the big parry A shows up. Frustrating.

I wouldn't have worried had I not had very little healing and hearts. :| Did so good throughout the whole rest of the game? Boo.
Even as mad as I got, the music for the ending got me. I still RESPECT Majora's Mask more, but I think Wind Waker is may be my favorite. It's just fun. Not enough to explore, but most of what's there is good fun. And for as little story as there is, the story they tell is very, very effective. In a video game I appreciate that. I may enjoy watching others play Kojima movies, I don't think I'll ever try them myself.

And the credits song makes me tear up. I don't think they've done such a good job melding Zelda's lullaby into any other music yet. So, so much love. Got another NG+ file ready to roll...so some day I will do a jammies run.

I have pet sitting to do soon, so part of me is ACTUALLY considering picking up Xenoblade 3 on time, but I may finish the Twilight Princess file I dropped (last year, I think?) instead.
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simside
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Okay! Got stuck on some grind-y games, and also went back to work this week. Finally beat Pokemon Shining Pearl, got a bit hung up on the Elite Four. There are a few more mons I'd like to pull out of BD before I give up completely, but I think I'll limit it, since I don't want to burn out before S/V.

I also beat Worth Life, but I got stuck on the last quest and was so frustrated I put it down for a week. XD It's a ridiculously easy game to get stuck on.
Spoiler:
The final crystal to revive requires a recipe, and at this point I had all but four. The requester wanted something with jelly and egg, but not lemon jelly. I cooked every egg recipe I had, it was none of those. The recipe NPC wasn't showing up in the final town. I went back through and grinded for the last veggies I didn't have (for some reason, this won't take the better quality veggies for cooking, and I didn't realize until late game I still needed to farm basic veggies). I unlocked all but two recipes, STILL couldn't figure it out. No one is playing this online, so there aren't any guides. Turns out, she actually DOES want lemon jelly, it was the last recipe on the list.

I liked this game a lot, but I have a high tolerance for minigames and grinding, and I enjoy games like this that let me feel a sense of progression. There are multiple endings, and I got a rather anticlimactic one. I may go through this again once there's a little more documentation online, I'd like all the endings and I'm pretty sure I completed most of the other content.
I started House in Fata Morgana, which I'm enjoying so far. I'm at the end of the second door. Also started Picross: Lord of the Nazarick, which I snagged during a Jupiter sale in June. I don't know anything about Overlord, and so far it's delightfully cryptic, with enjoyable puzzles. I'll probably start Dragon Quest XI this weekend. Hooray! I've been trying to start that game for about a year and a half, and there's always something new coming out. I'm passing on XC3 and Digimon Survive at the moment (although... not actually, because I bought both... ;_;), I'm sure I'll love DQ.
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Kikki
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Fortunately, I blocked Xenoblade on socials quite a while ago. Basically as soon as we had a release date and Nintendo started putting out new trailers and tweets about it and so on. I want to go in as blind as possible, so putting actual story spoilers aside, I didn't even want to see intros to main characters or anything. So yeah, thoroughly blocked. I've felt a bit like this game has no hype, lol, then I remember that I have every possible keyword banned already and that it can't show up on my feed anywhere, and that's why I never see it talked about. There are lots of hidden tweets for me even on non-Xenoblade posts by Nintendo and so on, when commenters are mentioning it. Absolutely nothing has been leaking through my wall, except that stupid 'mirrored' post of Nintendo's yesterday since it was literally written backwards, including the tags, but that contained a video, so I just didn't press 'play' and I have no idea what it was about. Gotta say, though...Nintendo is pretty bad for spoiling their own games!

Dunno if it'll do anything, but I went into the first Xenoblade while knowing nothing about it, and for me, it was so, so good. Knew a fair bit about XC2 going in, and didn't really like it much. No idea if knowing much about it had anything to do with that, but I figure...why take a chance? I'd probably find Rex to be a deeply uninteresting protagonist no matter what I knew or didn't know beforehand, but I may as well give myself the best chance of finding XC3 fresh and surprising.

~

My game shipped last night, and it's going by Canada Post, which means it'll take a long time to get here, because Canada Post doesn't deliver on Saturdays, Sundays, or any regular or civic holiday. And Monday is one, so I won't be getting the game until Tuesday. Canada Post is good for not making many mistakes, but they tend to be the slowest. Intelcom is much faster because they deliver ANY day, but they screw up a LOT. I mean, a crazy lot. Most notably they tend to deliver to unsafe spots even in the face of a safe one being right there, so it's like they have no common sense at all, but I've also had two packages of mine delivered to a neighbour, instead. (Fortunately my neighours are all really nice even when I don't know them and they walked the packages over to me themselves, as I've also had to do for some of them because: Intelcom.)

I don't like that Best Buy didn't plan better and send the game out in the morning instead of at 9PM at night, so that it'd have time to get to me before being held at a stand-still for three days by the weekend and a holiday, but I'd be a lot MORE upset if Intelcom botched the delivery entirely and gave my game to someone else, so just as well that Canada Post has it. Plus they'll actually, you know...put it in my mailbox. No matter how small the package and how nicely it'd fit in the mailbox right there beside the door, Intelcom always just tosses packages on the ground in front of the door. *eye roll*

I have a really awesome mailbox, btw. It used to be for milk deliveries, back in the day where Canada still had milkmen who went around with their glass bottles and delivered them to houses. It's a door built right into the house...I don't even have to step outside to get the mail, just open the little hatch beside the door. :) Well...if they actually put the mail into the box, that is. Canada Post always does, but Intelcom hasn't done it even once.

I don't care about a physical copy of Digimon Survive, so I could get it right away...but not gonna. I'm not super enthused about it, so I may as well wait and see a bit more of its reception.
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My Twitter that I'm currently hanging out on shouldn't have any Xenoblade in my feed, hopefully. I am still not in the 'mood' for a big JRPG, but I am strangely attracted to Digimon Survive atm. I say 'strangely', but in actuality, it's 100% my cup of tea. I've found that in the recent years one of my favorite genres is Visual Novels X Turn-based SRPGs that are dialog heavy and light on battles, which is apparently exactly what Digimon Survive is. As I really enjoyed the Utawarerumono trilogy and still have plans to do Triangle Strategy's other routes, it's clear I'm starting to get a bias (it's probably why I like Fire Emblem so much too, but it's definitely more heavy on battles than the VN elements). It's also probably why I'll forever be salty we never got the Sakura Wars series over here besides the PS2/Wii entry and the reboot that ditched the SRPG mechanics entirely, boooooo.

But yeah, if you're looking into Digimon Survive, it's about 80% VN and 30% battles according to the brave players who waited for the midnight release drop and put reviews up, because Namco sent out 0 review copies for whatever reason. I feel like most are going to go for Xenoblade 3 first and put Digimon on their wishlist for a sale, so maybe they just knew? Ah, whatever.

That being said, I should finish the other VNs in my backlog before jumping into another one. I did get to the second killing in Danganronpa V3 yesterday, and then I proceeded to (you guessed it) pass out. I also haven't started the Ace Attorney Chronicles and my wishlist is packed with other VNs I have yet to buy too. I still might bite though, it's too much of my thing to ignore for too long.

I also finished the summer event in Genshin (though it feels like we're still going to get some cutscenes because the story isn't fully resolved?) and I got 2/3 things I wanted from the moogle event in FFXIV. I may just take a break from both of them for awhile because we have a long time before both of those events poof. Maybe I should just try to binge Danganronpa?
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Kikki
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Bluie wrote: Jul 29, 2022 6:27 amBut yeah, if you're looking into Digimon Survive, it's about 80% VN and 30% battles according to the brave players who waited for the midnight release drop and put reviews up, because Namco sent out 0 review copies for whatever reason. I feel like most are going to go for Xenoblade 3 first and put Digimon on their wishlist for a sale, so maybe they just knew? Ah, whatever.
I'm quite into VNs, *if* there is a lot of player input. Digimon Survive since first reveal (before it was restarted) presented itself as a 'choices matter' game, which appeals to me. That's part of what I'd like to know. I don't love SRPGs, but I don't hate them, either...turn-based strategy battles would probably be a nice break in long bouts of reading. But I'd like to know just how much influence the player really has over story progression, and how much sense the choices and their consequences make. Sometimes otoges, for example, are very irritating with their choices. With moderate logic, you should be able to figure out what kind of path a response will contribute to. Like, if you belittle a sincere fella who has low self-esteem, it shouldn't make him like you MORE, imo. And I don't like gag choices that have serious consequences. 'Drop the banana' should never be the choice that defeats the ultimate villain. Not unless the game is a spoof.

Anyway, yeah, I'd like to hear about how involved the game keeps the players. I like to have LOTS of choices to make, not to read for hours between any player input. I tend to forget that Ace Attorney even IS a VN, because there are no long spates of text, with nothing to do but read...you're constantly directing the game, and I love that. AA is definitely one of my all-time favourite series. I have no idea what Digimon Survive balances out at, in terms of how engaging it is.

EDIT: My Steamdeck has gone into the shipping process...I now have a tracking number for it, so it's packaged and labelled, though it looks like it hasn't been picked up by FedEx yet. It's supposed to be here on August 4. I hope setting it up isn't too onerous...I CAN do the tech stuff, from tweaking settings to actually opening up the machine to put extra bits in or take little bits out, when absolutely necessary...but don't like it and it really stresses me out. I'm hoping I can just run Steam on it with little to no tinkering and that most of the games in my library and wishlist will run with minimal adjustments required.

I also need to make sure I have the right cable to connect the Deck to a TV. (USB-C to HDMI.) I think I already do, but no harm ordering an extra.
Last edited by Kikki on Jul 29, 2022 1:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Bluie
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Well, I bought Digimon Survive, so I'll keep you updated. I do know that your choices will determine which evolution line the MC's Agumon will be set into and that there's different endings. I remember when the game was fairly new that they teased permadeath as well, but I don't know if it's still in or not.
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Mikodesu wrote: Jul 28, 2022 8:34 pm Even as mad as I got, the music for the ending got me. I still RESPECT Majora's Mask more, but I think Wind Waker is may be my favorite. It's just fun. Not enough to explore, but most of what's there is good fun. And for as little story as there is, the story they tell is very, very effective. In a video game I appreciate that. I may enjoy watching others play Kojima movies, I don't think I'll ever try them myself.

And the credits song makes me tear up. I don't think they've done such a good job melding Zelda's lullaby into any other music yet. So, so much love. Got another NG+ file ready to roll...so some day I will do a jammies run.

I have pet sitting to do soon, so part of me is ACTUALLY considering picking up Xenoblade 3 on time, but I may finish the Twilight Princess file I dropped (last year, I think?) instead.

Ah, Wind Waker. A good game that I appreciate much more now than I did as a kid (thank you, HD version's fast-sail).

When it comes to melding Zelda's lullaby, the first track that comes to mind is the Hyrule Castle theme in BoTW. I'll have to listen to that and the WW credits to compare them.



I picked up XC3! I honestly didn't know if I was going to until yesterday, so thankfully I live somewhere where last minute decisions like that are reasonable. I'm only an hour in, but I'm liking the feel of it so far. I put it on easy because I know I got tired of the XC1 battle system about half-way through the game (I don't like MMOs, this gameplay is based on MMOs.... but the story, tho). But. But GUYS. I went digging through the game options and there.

Is an AUTO-BATTLE SYSTEM.

HECK. YES!

((If there was one in XC1 that I missed, I'm going to be embarrassed, but. I found one this time.))

It even auto turns off for boss and unique encounters, and throws text up on screen to tell you about it, how nice of them. I'll probably keep it on easy just so I can progress through the world/story faster, since that's what I really care about, but this will save so much of my sanity.
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Finished ai somnium files in time for Xenoblade 3.

I've only played an hour and a half so far, and the game crashed once for me (with a "software has closed because an error has occurred message") so, not sure if anybody else has had any crashes or if it's just me.
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Bluie wrote: Jul 29, 2022 6:27 am I've found that in the recent years one of my favorite genres is Visual Novels X Turn-based SRPGs that are dialog heavy and light on battles, which is apparently exactly what Digimon Survive is. As I really enjoyed the Utawarerumono trilogy and still have plans to do Triangle Strategy's other routes, it's clear I'm starting to get a bias (it's probably why I like Fire Emblem so much too, but it's definitely more heavy on battles than the VN elements). It's also probably why I'll forever be salty we never got the Sakura Wars series over here besides the PS2/Wii entry and the reboot that ditched the SRPG mechanics entirely, boooooo.
Yeah that is one of the many things I didn’t like about the new Sakura Wars. I mean why change the main gameplay if it worked well and there are many fans of the games? The Fire Emblem series blew up in the 2010s and it was doing similar things to what Sakura Wars was doing in their older games, being a SRPG with slight romance elements (way less than Sakura Wars in Fire Emblem’s case, but they still exist) The strategy gameplay also made every unit essential in battle since you work as a team to complete the battles. Releasing a new Sakura Wars game should have been a home run for Sega, but they decided to add and change things in the games that shouldn’t have been changed. As much as I want the old games to be officially localised, with a character like Iris being handled the way she was in game, I’m not so sure if it will be possible anymore.

Well my final thoughts on Stardew Valley are that it’s a good farming game but not the farming game for me, if that makes any sense at all. I don’t like a lot of the characters, especially compared to those in RF4 or Trio. Also don’t really get the point of the community centre if no one really uses it. It’s like all the work I did to revitalise it was for nothing. Why not let the player change parts of the community centre to make it more useful to themselves or the townsfolk, like adding a school room for the kids of the town. It doesn’t feel like the community centre at all. The town feels a bit disjointed for similar reasons. Also Sam looks almost exactly like Jacky Bryant from the older Virtua Fighter games and I’m surprised that not many others have brought this up.

Going to quit Stardew Valley to play something else. I really don’t want to start HM Tott again so maybe I’ll chip away at my old HM ANB file, because in the early seasons I get bored doing the same things over and over again so I need to play it a bit at a time.
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Bluie wrote: Jul 29, 2022 12:31 pm Well, I bought Digimon Survive, so I'll keep you updated. I do know that your choices will determine which evolution line the MC's Agumon will be set into and that there's different endings. I remember when the game was fairly new that they teased permadeath as well, but I don't know if it's still in or not.
Ew, permadeath. Unforgiveable! If there's no opt-out on permadeath (if it's in), that alone is enough for me to give the game a big, fat, "NO!" Guess we'll see. Any game that has permadeath in could only be played (by me) with a full guide, to avoid it.

~

I'm starting to be pretty sure of why you're forced to play the 'normal' ending of CSIV first, even if you already qualified for the 'true' ending. Now, this is mostly speculation on my part, but...I think Rean's route in Reverie is based on the normal ending, making it necessary for you to see it. I don't know how they can make that work...perhaps it's based on the true ending and the normal ending at the same time? Ugh, normal ending, so sad, I don't wanna see it ever again...well at least NG+ lets you skip it.

But I was exhausted yesterday and the day before and just could. not. play. I'll finish up my replay today, I hope, though it's not urgent since I won't have XC3 until Tuesday. Three full days to finish up this game, and it SHOULD only take me a few more hours! In theory, there should be no problem. That's why...it's experiment time. I suspect that my allergy meds (just OTC stuff, but have to take them every day due to being allergic, to one degree or another, to every substance on planet Earth) are increasing my fatigue. They're the new-gen antihistamines that aren't supposed to make you drowsy, but I'm always special when it comes to side-effects. Starting tomorrow I'm going to skip taking them for a week and see if anything changes. I know it's definitely not behind all of my fatigue, but it could be worsening it to this unworkable extent.

I'll have to be extra careful of everything I eat to avoid the issues I take the antihistamines for, but this level of fatigue isn't livable, so gotta try everything to get around it, and gotta get it under control before extra fatigue settles in, in the form of seasonal affective disorder. Isn't it fun-fun-fun to have a body that believes itself to be the specialest of all special snowflakes?

So, wrapping up CSIV today, I hope, and then no time to start anything else, because XC3 on Tuesday. It'd be great to feel awake when I start it, lol. Gotta save these awful modafinils for days when I really NEED to be awake. Gaming's not important enough. I'll need one to go down to the city to visit grandma soonish, and I can't take 'em more than once a week.

Oh, Strange Horticulture is available, now. I want it, but there's no space in my game schedule for it, so both it and Digimon Survive have moved from my 'Wanted Upcoming Games' list to my 'Wanted Available Games' list. Yes, I actually keep multiple game lists...I can't possibly remember them using my own brain. This thing is nigh-on useless.

EDIT: Refinished. UGH I HATE OSBORNE. Falcom, that was a FAIL! Please absorb the concept of too little, too late.
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Mikodesu
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yzafre wrote: Jul 29, 2022 2:39 pm Ah, Wind Waker. A good game that I appreciate much more now than I did as a kid (thank you, HD version's fast-sail).

When it comes to melding Zelda's lullaby, the first track that comes to mind is the Hyrule Castle theme in BoTW. I'll have to listen to that and the WW credits to compare them.
Credit to the castle theme in BotW, it does a good job of blending more old tracks (what I think of with that track is Ganon's piano in his castle in OoT).

It's probably a bit of bias talking, but I think why I'd count it as "better" is melding Zelda's lullaby into a very different style to a lot of the other music in the series. Woodwind instruments are unfortunately typecast as Toon Link now, but that's neither here nor there I guess. It took me listening to the soundtrack to catch it (and iirc Zelda's lullaby starts out more in the Toon Link "style", and slowly gets more obvious toward the end of the credits track).

I may have played OoT a few too many times, though, because anything that makes Zelda's lullaby sound different is already a win in my book.


--
Gonna get back to Professor Layton & the Azran Legacy tonight. I'm in the run up to the finale, just feeling a little bit of puzzle burnout, while also trying not to miss anything, which is not a great combo. :|

Last night was Genshin. I finished up all of the puzzles in Mona's domain... honestly, I think it's my favorite. The cinematic stuff in Kazuha's was "cooler" but, I like the puzzles. They did some really neat environmental tricks, which I'd love to see more of. (My only complaint is there were a couple of puzzles that I would argue in court could be solved two ways, but the game would only accept one of them...) I like it in "domain" style settings, where you don't necessarily need a hint to puzzle things out because it has a theme to narrow things down.

The overworld stuff I'm still a bit... ??? on. There's a neat trick to the whole thing that I stumbled on before a quest took me there and I'm...impressed to say the least. Aside from all the questing I'm still trying to raise up a few more characters. I've had my supports at level 60 for the last year plus and I am imagining Sumeru is going to be another step up in difficulty from Inazuma, so level 60 is gonna be tough to cut it anymore. But the jump from 60 to 70 is a LOT of exp books... and a lot of money. Woof.

Didn't spoil myself on any characters in the last Sumeru preview (scrolled down to read subtitles) so I don't really have anybody I want to wish on just yet. Maybe I'll get caught up by the time I do?
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Kikki wrote: Jul 30, 2022 3:37 amEw, permadeath. Unforgiveable! If there's no opt-out on permadeath (if it's in), that alone is enough for me to give the game a big, fat, "NO!" Guess we'll see. Any game that has permadeath in could only be played (by me) with a full guide, to avoid it.
Legit still don't think any permadeath is related to battles, but instead the outcome of your choices/actions in the VN sections. It still exists though, so you could lose a party member if you go down a certain path. Maybe wait until there's some extensive route guides so you can avoid it? Battles themselves are easy and have toggleable difficulty on the setup screen. I'm just playing completely blind to see where it goes. So far my choices have made one battle outcome easier and my Agumon digivolved into Tyrannomon. Gonna play some more and get back to you.

Somerandom wrote: Jul 29, 2022 10:36 pmYeah that is one of the many things I didn’t like about the new Sakura Wars. I mean why change the main gameplay if it worked well and there are many fans of the games? The Fire Emblem series blew up in the 2010s and it was doing similar things to what Sakura Wars was doing in their older games, being a SRPG with slight romance elements (way less than Sakura Wars in Fire Emblem’s case, but they still exist) The strategy gameplay also made every unit essential in battle since you work as a team to complete the battles. Releasing a new Sakura Wars game should have been a home run for Sega, but they decided to add and change things in the games that shouldn’t have been changed. As much as I want the old games to be officially localised, with a character like Iris being handled the way she was in game, I’m not so sure if it will be possible anymore.
Both the PS4 reboot and (now shut down) gacha game completely missed the mark with their audience, I think. The Sakura Wars boom is long gone, but there are still loyal fans who I feel Sega just ignored and instead tried to get a new audience. They essentially crashed and burned and the series is probably dead and back to being cameo material. I would kill for a collection of I-V, it's been ages since they had a proper re-release and some are still stuck on their original console. Honestly, all the kid 'love' interests are questionable, Iris being the worst offender with the 10 year age gap. She could be rewritten, but then it'd be paraded around as censorship, and it could possibly invalidate her arc/development. I get that age gaps are less of a taboo in Japanese media, but she's more just a token character of the 'harem' checklist then an actual romance option. Ogami (iirc) never actually accepts her confession nor is her attracted to her, but rather is more of a big bro/mentor. Most people love Iris because she's a genuinely well written character and to SEGA's credit, she's never sexualized either (that I can remember). With all that being said, Twitter/Reddit would have a « Snuggly Bunny » field day so I understand why SEGA doesn't want it outside of Japan. Still surprised we got V and VI localized, but at this point I'd take a collection on Switch localized or not. I just want to play these games and I want them to be more accessible.
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Mikodesu
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Finished Professor Layton & the Azran Legacy last night...probably stayed up a little too late for it, which may be good because I got to just go to bed and process it. Can't say I'm happy with the ending. I put a lot of stock in endings, and this being the end of the series probably made it worse. The way the whole story is written (full fan service right up to the end), the devs MUST have known the series was ending. And that was not what I wanted. :?

Spoilers from here on out - reminder that quoting me will open up the spoiler tag.
Spoiler:
The story was pretty much on par with the rest of the series up until the third act, when the writers decided to take a big dump over the whole thing. WHY did all of the characters have to be related in the end? NONE of it was justified. NONE of the ending plot was foreshadowed in any way. You just get right up to the end of the second to last chapter, and a character you've been hanging around the whole story gets this...I look evil now face, and my gut just...dropped.

It was like that...wrestling thing that's become the meme... IT WAS ME, THE WHOLE TIME! *evil cackle*

And I pretty much checked out at this point. Emmy doing a betrayal got a little rise out of me (again, no foreshadowing). Her BS is probably the worst bit of the whole story because you have multiple games of established trust and then literally out of nowhere she holds a knife to a kids throat. There may be one exception to the lack of foreshadowing, I'm not entirely sure. I was reading on the Wiki after I finished the game to try to make a little sense of things and the old man MAY have been in another game. I legit don't remember.

And the whole bit of Aurora being a golem, « Snuggly Bunny » off game. Seriously. Absolute « Mr.Gourmet's hat » pull. Golems bad, except for the one "not like other golems" who also looks just like a person when none of the others do. In a society that quite literally has the technology to bring people back to life, why would they pick one of the death robots who slaughtered their whole civilization to help choose who gets to inherent their technology?

I don't know anything about the games with Layton's kid in them, and even though she doesn't look exactly like them, I was honestly hoping Aurora would survive and he would adopt her. That would have been a little redemption for the rest of the Star Wars esque family drama. They centered the adopted family being the "true family" too. Boo hiss.
The ending doesn't ruin the game for me...but it does taint it.

NO idea where I go from here. Couple day break at least. I do still have a bit of an itch to go pick up Xenoblade but... I dunno. Not sure now is the right time. We're like 3 weeks out from Sumeru dropping, do I want to start a 1 to 200 hour game right now?

What I REALLY want is a turn my brain off game. I've solved WAY too many puzzles as of late, between Genshin and Layton. Just gotta figure out what that is.
Last edited by Mikodesu on Jul 31, 2022 3:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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You know...Worth Life was cute. The main characters look like they're supposed to be the illustrations for 'derpy' in the dictionary, but still...overall, a cute game. And it actually draws you along, once you start playing...I played about three times longer than I intended to in that first play session. The problem is, once you set it down, there's no urge at all to pick it back up. There's nothing memorable or compelling about it. It's completely forgettable. Once we get to our GotY 2022 thread, I probably won't remember a thing about it and will only have it on my list because I keep lists actively as I acquire new games, or finish them, or etc, so that I don't have to rely on my actual memory at the end of the year.

I figure it's a 10-15 hour game, so I COULD have finished it over today and tomorrow, before Xenoblade 3, but...like I said, it's hard to pick back up. Not hard as in difficult, just...no motivation. When I'm the least bit tired, I just can't be bothered with it, and I am ALWAYS tired, now, so...yeah, bit of a problem, there! It's just a matter of tabbing over to the right icon and clicking A once...once I open the game, it's easy to play. But finding the spark to even get the game running...that's not so easy.

I'd much rather go biking or water the garden. Or nap, or read. I have to actually WANT or NEED to do something, to get it done, now. Willpower turns out to take a fair bit of energy! And I have none. Ugh, I just have to press A, darn it. Just get the game open. It's not like I dislike it, so if I just open the darned thing, I'd make decent progress. Well, I have ALL of August for XC3, and nothing definite in September until the 27th. I guess I'll just jam Worth Life in there somewhere. I don't think XC3 will take me all of August, though I guess it depends on the side content. My game is sitting at the closed post office right now...I'll have it on Tuesday. I don't really feel in a hurry. I'm not sure I CAN feel in a hurry with this energy level, lol. Trying out the no-antihistamines thing, now. I don't know if I should hope it helps or not, cuz I need the things, but if it DOES help, I'll have to stop taking them.
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yzafre
New Seedling
New Seedling
Posts: 14
Joined: Mar 30, 2021 12:03 pm

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I played... a lot of XC3 this weekend. It's really good! I love the world, the characters, the story. Not having to actually fight anything myself except for unique encounters and bosses. I'm running around side-questing in Ch3 and I'm having an absolute blast. If I'm not careful I'll end up staying up wayyyyy too late.

I do have... one little critique/complaint. Just the one: the map system. It got kind of long and ranty/fix-crafting, so I'm putting it in a spoiler.
Spoiler:
First off, the little "circle" that fills in map data is just... way too small. Especially compared to how large the environments are. If you just explore naturally, running from point-of-interest to point-of-interest, you're going to end up with all these awkward shaped empty-spaces on the map you have to run back and fill in later. And I'm... extremely particular about filling in map data. I hate just having empty areas sitting there.

I think part of why they did this is they don't want you to miss anything? Like, there might be something you didn't see in those empty spaces, or something you saw and forgot about, and going back to fill them in will show you the icon on your mini-map! But. Hm. In practice, it just hurts exploration.

So, if you're wanting to fill in the map data, you have two options. One, do what I said above, but then have to run over the entire area twice to carefully fill in the missing areas. I... exploring is fun, running over a super-large areas you've already explored is tedious. Two, you outline a small chunk on first exploration then carefully sweep back and forth to fill it in. Rinse and repeat until the whole area is done.

Either way, what you end up doing, from experience, is run around with the expanded mini-map up and covering the screen to make sure you're not missing something. Instead of, you know, looking at the sweeping landscapes, the enemies, or the environmental-indicators of something of interest. It's just.. bad. It feels anti-exploration.

And they could make it bigger without the "missing things" issue being that big a deal! The smaller version of the mini-map is really small, so I usually end up expanding it anyways to check for icons I might have missed. These icons go all the way out to the edge of the mini-map, but the "circle" that fills in only goes 1/3 of the way out, if that. They could expand that to 2/3 or 3/4 of the expanded mini-map withot letting players easily miss things, and you'd have to be a lot less particular to fill in the map.

The other thing is just... any sort of note-taking system. I desperately need a BoTW style pin and stamp system, but you get one measly marker per map area and that's just... not enough. There's too many things you can't interact with the first time you encounter them. I guess they do seem to be adding icons for some of those once you can interact, but what about things like the previously-impassible slopes, or entrances to hidden areas guarded by too-high-level enemies? What about "I see something I want to go look at but I'm going this way first"? My point is, I don't want to be taking all these notes mentally, this map is too large not to allow for on-map markers.
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