What games are you playing?

[KobaBeach]

Final Fantasy II - Some Esuna exploit levelling, then I hit the hay for the morning and slept like 6 hours?

Star Ocean - T'nique's Battle and Stat multiplier skills are all maxed out, working on Cyuss' next alongside with getting his Familiar level to 4. Took a whole ass day. Also got the 7 Star Secret Skill (Omega SFT) for T'ni, just for completionism's sake. I can't get the Wyrm King SFT for Roddick as I've gone through before, need Ashlay for that, but that's fine.

T'nique's at Lv90 right now and most of my mains - Rod, Ilia and Millie - have broken past 100.

[Ashan]

Played through Bowser's Fury 100% from start to finish this evening. I've managed to stay pretty spoiler-free from this game even though it's a few years old now. It was a pretty good time! Basically a mini version of Odyssey made within 3D World's engine, and a pretty interesting gameplay loop with the regular Bowser attacks. Though I never really understood how the game decides the amount of time between them, even by the end. I guess just once you have enough shines, it wants you to fight Bowser again to move into the next section of the game and keep things moving? By the end it's just nonstop so the game clearly wants you to just end it already and then you can move into the post-game and finish collecting everything. But it was a bit weird cause I basically hadn't explored 1/3 of the map the first time I got the credits. Maybe that's intentional.

But yeah I had a pretty good time, it's neat to play a Mario game with such a different gameplay loop. Better soundtrack than expected, and I also liked how they implemented Plessie to show up any time you're in a body of water or at a dock, and he controls pretty fun too. Made it a fun game to move around in.

Also:

the dive you can do with crouch + Y

Since this post I have found out the mid-air version of this was an addition to the Switch version, I assume inspired by Odyssey. So Odyssey still gets credit for this move.

[Bean]

Pretty much did a marathon session in Star Ocean: The Second Story R to go all the way from finishing off the field dungeons all the way to the end of the game. Postgame stuff might have to be put on the backburner for a bit, so that's why I made sure to get my fill in the last couple of days. Great remake of a good game.

[KobaBeach]

Star Ocean (SNES) - Wrapping up the Skill maxing out as I kill my sleep schedule. Cyuss is done, got his Familiar ability to Lv4 for the full list of Familiar shops, just in case. Also did Pericci, all I have is Phia left, then I'll finish the main game.

I've killed Gabriel so many fucking times

[Bean]

Never mind. They made it real easy to plow through the postgame in Star Ocean: The Second Story R with the right skills set in a few hours. Since this isn't a trophchievement run because it was on the Switch, that's that. Still have never done a run with Rena as the main character, but I'm good for now having beaten it again with Claude. For now, this one is finished. Great job with the remake here, Gemdrops.

[raekuul]

revelations: the demon slayer - i will not start this game over a fourth time. i will not start this game over a fourth time. i will not start this game over a fourth time

cave story - raocow's playthrough got me wanting to play through it myself again. currently up to monster x, with a weapon raocow hasn't seen yet.

dune 2 - i got obsessed with seeing what scenarios correlate to what regions on the world map so now i'm cheating my way through the campaigns courtesy of nyergud's dune 2 editor (thank God that Dosbox-X has a working savestate feature). atreides and ordos are "done", with harkonnen to in progress.

[KobaBeach]

revelations: the demon slayer - i will not start this game over a fourth time. i will not start this game over a fourth time. i will not start this game over a fourth time

:)

[KobaBeach]

Star Ocean - Post game dungeon clear. Overall, the big thing maintaining its difficulty is the lack of checkpoints which can be quite divisive, especially in this community, but I enjoyed it (granted I used checkpoint saves). This was exclusively due to how high level Roddick was, but the Looter was much easier than the Demonic Eye x2 trap battle in Floor 19.

I wanted the Ethereal Queen,,

Cleared with an all men party. For fun (and faggotry). Millie, Pericci and Phia did help with the deathtrap battles though.

Gonna work through Hanero Puunosuke now, before getting back to Tales of Destiny 2.

[Ashan]

I spent some time finally installing some game cores on my Analogue Pocket which I got back in January and proceeded to let collect dust on my shelf since then.

I couldn't think of a GameBoy game I wanted to play off the top of my head so I also installed the SNES core and went looking for a SMW romhack. The SNES core doesn't have support for savestates, and also, while this thing has pretty good buttons, the face buttons are a bit too smushed together to make me REALLY comfortable playing something too intensive, and the claw grip I usually use for SMW isn't really an option at all. So I needed something a bit more casual, where I wouldn't end up being required to stumble into a space-time paradox and discover an extra midpoint in a late-game level.

I had watched the first couple episode of raocow's A Plumber For All Seasons series, and while I don't plan continuing to watch all the videos, it seemed like a cozy enough game to try. So yeah, I installed that. Runs great, and looks fantastic on the Pocket's display. Especially a certain underwater level I got to today, I believe in Autumn world. Super pretty game.

[KobaBeach]

Gonna work through Hanero Puunosuke now, before getting back to Tales of Destiny 2.

Hanero Puunosuke - Cleared with all medals and I'm Not Doing The Bonus Stage. The level design is crap and Puunosuke's controls are way too messy for an actually hard stage. The final battle with Pokaponis-kun was already a fucking nightmare.

Cute game eitherway

EDIT:
Fantasia Sango - Made it past the initial part (and where I last had to stop) and managed to make it to Xiangyang City.

Continued from here, we were attacked by further Tianruo Palace goons, but halfway through the battle, Ningsheng's disciples came to help us. After warding the Tianruo folk off, we headed to nearby Xiangyang... Where Ji Xuan passed out from his injuries.

Placing him at the local inn to rest, Ji Shuang is pondering on how to treat him. Suddenly, her master Lei Bian came by to help her with the task, teaching her the Ghost King Summon spell as well. It's up to Ji Shuang to go out for some intel while Ji Xuan rests. I'll do that next time.

[11clock]

Been giving Super Sami Roll a go. It’s pretty ok (although excruciatingly difficult at times).

…Then you beat the game and unlock a character who is actually fun to play as.


Seriously, why is the hard mode character significantly easier to control to the point of being able to break like half the levels? I could never get a handle on Sami’s grapple tongue, but Vera’s glide is fantastic and so much more enjoyable to use.

[raekuul]

revelations: the demon slayer - i will not start this game over a fourth time. i will not start this game over a fourth time. i will not start this game over a fourth time

:)

okay so while i did start the game over again i made sure to beat the final boss first. so now it's actually on my "list of games beaten 2023" (or will be once I edit it in). Doing split Luck for everybody (LK/AG for El, LK/IN for Kishe, LK/EN for Uranus) because I'm not actually sure what LK does but I want to say it helps with magic defense which if it does then that means that Uranus needs to be pure LK in any future playthroughs because she just takes too much damage from the final boss's Mabufudyne.

Cave Story: Yrots Evac, on track for Hell. I'm a little ahead of raocow now so I really need to keep a lid on my comments.

[KobaBeach]

okay so while i did start the game over again i made sure to beat the final boss first. so now it's actually on my "list of games beaten 2023" (or will be once I edit it in). Doing split Luck for everybody (LK/AG for El, LK/IN for Kishe, LK/EN for Uranus) because I'm not actually sure what LK does but I want to say it helps with magic defense which if it does then that means that Uranus needs to be pure LK in any future playthroughs because she just takes too much damage from the final boss's Mabufudyne.

That is so cool, I still wanna like do replays to investigate the appraisal mechanic at the end of Super Tempo, to find the optimal money prize route for the best ending (where Tempo and Katy are the richest), because that info isn't very available online.

I do feel like it'd be handier to just investigate through memory editing in Mednafen if possible, need to see if the Saturn core has that in its basic debugger functions.

Fantasia Sango

I should add I'm using Universal Pause Button to help pause the game and extract text that way, I'll use Textractor still when possible. Very convenient tool, it's just that games tend to hang up if I click away from them, which turned me off from the program before when I tried it with a Gagharv Trilogy game.

But thankfully, there is a workaround where I can just use Process Explorer to resume the program from suspension, and it works just fine. Not extracting every single piece of text, but I'm getting the gist of the story.

I just wish I was able to understand Chinese better, Google Translate doesn't do the poetic nature of the dialogue justice, and DeepL isn't fully reliable for Chinese (or Korean). Thankfully I'm used to dealing with bad translations due to growing up with like FF4 SNES and such.

[KobaBeach]

Tales of Destiny 2 - Tiamat was easy, Barbatos took me three tries but... Was actually fun. I think I just wasn't understanding the first two Barbatos runs. That's what happens when your perfectionism makes you afraid to experiment.

My main strategy for now was, since he goes apeshit over every spell after a while instead of just recovery ones, I thought about having just physical attackers in the arena, Kyle, Judas and Loni as the main damage dealers, while Nanaly is in the back as backup and being the main item tosser (everyone lends a hand though).

It was actually super fun! I didn't get as big of combos as I got from having Reala and Harold casting + Kyle and Judas going apeshit with physicals, but it was great!

I'm gonna see, if I replay this game, if Round 1 can be interrupted by spell+arte combos as Loni and Kyle, while Judas and Reala can stay in the back casting, as their magic is the best out of the first four characters. Round 2 could be Kyle and Judas on attack duty, while Harold and Reala do spells. Loni and Reala are the ones with healing spells though... So is Harold, but since she'd be in the back with Reala, it'd be fine.

I could always have the triggers set to heal spell shortcuts.

At Heidelberg in Phandaria, gonna rest at the guest room in the castle, then continue. We were unable to recover the Lens that Elraine stole to power up Fortuna's revival, but at the very least we managed to fix the timeline and helped with causing the ending of ToD1 by finally placing Chaltier on the Eye of Atamoni. The scene with Chaltier and Judas was super cute.

Judas/Leon had such a glow up from ToD1... ( ^^)

[KobaBeach]

Tales of Destiny 2 - Literally just before the final dungeon, I'm going through sub-event hell, mostly unlocking Aqua Labyrinth, to unlock the weapon shop on the Katz Village and then just grinding to get all of the good gear. And maybe doing the Arena to fight Rimul.

As for the story, we managed to stop Elraine! So she decided that if she can't save this world, she will save the world from itself. By destroying it. And thus, she yeeted herself to the future, taking advantage of the Lens at Calviola Temple to recreate the Egg of Atamoni that was the catalyst for the Aeth'er Wars, the Aetherians originally planing to use it to remake the world, which the Er'thers rebelled against.

She also drops the bomb that both she and Reala are linked, both of them being reincarnations of the goddess Fortuna. If she dies, Reala goes with her. I mixed up the reasoning for Elraine gathering Lens, she didn't want to revive Fortuna oopsie. Anyway Kyle kinda shuts down for a hot sec, but Judas reminds him that it's best to fulfill Reala's wishes and stop Elraine from destroying everyone they love.

And with that we got the Ixi Fossler as our mandatory lategame-only airship. Very FFX.

I actually dont know if I'm gonna survive Rimul legit, and that's keeping in mind the difficulty of Barbatos and how I'm gonna have to fight him again at the Aqua Labyrinth. Anyway I got the Black Diamond from the Moai at the Ridge of White Clouds at Fitzgald, I hate this area, and I have to get like 15 (or 14?) artifacts like this to unlock the postgame dungeon.

I also got the title from the Mysterious Warrior at Cresta, got the titles from getting a Maneki Neko from Aquaveil to the Cat Lover at Aigrette, I cannot believe I remember where the capital of Aquaveil is, I did the Stamp Rally which netted me another title, and I'm working my way through the arena, to fight Rimul as I said before. The second stage of the 1v1 Battles is tits hard, I'm gonna have to get better weapons than this.

I think I missed a whole bunch of Berselium items and quite a few Recipes, so it's not gonna be 100% complete, and I'm NOT grinding to get the money based titles from the minister of finance. I don't wanna do the 256 Refines just to get the GGVSS Refiner title, that's stupid.

However, the Katz naming sidequest is done, and the Freeman at Aquaveil has been spoken to and I got his custom titles, of which the defaults are random English words, that most of the protags don't even like. Like FREEMAN, RESISTANCE, LIBERTY, SELFISH.

But yeah, I'm really not interested in collecting all of the titles. I get that in this game, they give stat growth multipliers but I Don't Care. I'm gonna consider this "completed" in my Backloggery in terms of, me beating Rimul and Magnadeus, and maybe some side stuff, like helping with Chelsea's hut.

This is a pretty good game, I'm very sad that Tales just tends to be Kinda There most of the time, Star Ocean has more problems but it feels more ambitious imo. I really enjoyed this, and I'm looking forward to finishing it, and then seeing how Symphonia's cast ruins everything.

EDIT: oh yeah and the battle against gaap in calviola was fucking shit

[thatguyif]

I'm now 69.4% done with Journey to the Savage Planet. On top of that, I 100%ed the DLC, Hot Garbage.

Hot Garbage wasn't its namesake. It was actually fine, all things considered. It was fun to explore a brand new area, with various little new elements in play (including this new rival corporation and its robot army). It was also cool to try out new mechanics such as jet vortexes and such. It's possible I could've had a slightly easier time if I'd gotten the gauntlet upgrade to store Shock Fruit, but it was fine. It was also just a nice detour from things. If I had some complaints, it was that it felt somewhat shallow to a degree (doesn't really connect to the rest of the game in any capacity other than some species migrating over), plus the boss of the DLC was kind of annoying, especially when you had to constantly use the jet vortexes because the floor became lava. Plus, the upgrades, while nice to have, felt less like improvements and more just bonuses. Ah well, it was still good to play.

One thing I will bring up is the writing of this game. For the most part, it's actually really good. It really conveys how fucked things are on Earth, but in a way that you can laugh at. Whether it's Kindred CEO being both a massive clown and your stereotypical sociopathic exec, or the various commercials showcasing items such as a mansion atop a monster truck or a living creature made of meat scraps (who is your friend! and who is the second player in co-op!), or the emails about your debts and the weather in Montreal (155 F most days of the week...except when plague mists occur) there's something laughable about all this. It also conveys itself pretty well with your AI-based navigator, EKO, who is completely snarky but not overly meta about it, and simply does acts like an overly nice customer service rep, you know, the type that will say bullshit with a smile. It makes the game fun to explore. The DLC had quite a bit less writing though (mostly through dialogue, which was fine), which I think made the connection between the DLC and game much weaker. Still, I enjoyed the former.

[11clock]

Finished Super Sami Roll as Vera. Definitely the better character, and I wish that the original game was designed around her instead. I just found Sami’s tongue grapple really difficult to be accurate with in a 3D space and feel that he would’ve worked better in 2D.

Overall, the game is alright, but it suffers from what feels like lack of playtesting with the unpolished physics and level design. If the game had like an extra half year or so of development time dedicated to polish and playtesting (and if Vera played the starring role instead), I think that we would’ve had a masterpiece on our hands.

[raekuul]

Dune II:

All Campaigns Combined Map.png (126.85 KiB) Viewed 376 times

finally I can put that away for a while

[KobaBeach]

hey gamers i did not play tales of destiny 2 yesterday bc of brainspace stuff. it is being worked on (the brainspace stuff i mean)

Dune II: All Campaigns Combined Map.png
finally I can put that away for a while

that's so fucking epic pokota

[thatguyif]

Journey to the Savage Planet is complete. 100%.

I enjoyed this game a lot, it was fun. The endgame (when you finally enter the Tower/Spire) was fun, and the final boss was a good go, even if I beat him in one shot. I think the main issue I had was with what I said when I started this game: The lack of a proper map. You eventually get upgrades that allow you to locate items via your scanner, and the game does notify you if there's a secret nearby. The trouble is, even with those in place, the game is rather big in size, and you often don't have a sense of where you are easily. This made cleanup so annoying towards the end, probably added an hour or two of extra time. Still, I think it's a very good game, and may one day return to it as a co-op run (especially with Old Game Minus).

It'll be interesting to see what Raccoon Logic (the successor to Typhoon Studio after it shuttered with Stadia) do next.

As for me...I'll try to get back into Sea of Stars this week. But given the five-day weekend coming up, I might play a couple short games on PC to clear up my backlog a bit. One will be Minit, an EGS freebie I got a while back. Another is Smushi Come Home, a game I really enjoyed when I played the Next Fest demo. And then I'll play a game that not only has been in my backlog for many years like GTA IV, but also features a dev from Journey to the Savage Planet: Spore!

[Ashan]

Lies of P went on sale the other day and I've been hearing very good things about it from Souls fans, which is honestly a bit rare in the past several years where a lot of studios have been trying to recreate the FromSoft magic while pretty much always missing something major that makes it not quite land.

But booted it up today and I'll be damned if this is not the most From-feeling soulslike game from a non-From studio. Great atmosphere, super tight controls, combat feels great. The only points I need to dock it in the atmosphere is for this half-assed follower you have that's just a voice called Gemeni. At first I was confused at their pronunciation, and then I realized he's Jiminy Cricket. Tee hee. Name put aside, I feel like he doesn't add anything to the game, and if anything his lines are like a cringe Marvel AI voice that sticks out like a sore thumb and isn't funny. But whatever. Level design is pretty well laid-out, with lots of shortcuts connecting the map back into itself, though I'd argue it's not really important in a lot of places? You get shortcuts back to an area of the level you've already been, but there's no reason to go back there, so... idk, thanks I guess?

I'd say it's more Bloodborne-inspired than anything else with the general setting, but the combat is a bit of that, bit of Dark Souls, and a bit of Sekiro. Which to some extent has caused me to still not ENTIRELY feel like I understand how I'm supposed to play, even after the 9 hours I put in today (whoops). You can do perfect parries like Sekiro, and it really seems to encourage that so you can get staggers and critical attacks off on bosses, but you can also dash through enemy attacks like Bloodborne. But if you dash through the attacks you seem to whittle down their health really slowly, so it's almost like you shouldn't be doing that? There's a bunch of upgrade mechanics that are kind of a lot. It can be a bit confusing how it'll give you an upgrade material and tell you what it does, even though you aren't far enough into the game to actually use it, and there's no indication that's the case. The mechanics for using consumables is a bit much too, you can toggle between 2 sets of consumables, as well as switch to a separate menu by holding A that then lets you trigger a consumable with the D-pad. It's caused a few scenarios where I press X to heal but I end up doing something else cause I was on the wrong belt layer you toggle to with up/down on the D-pad. I'm not sure their solution is much better than how typical Souls games do it. But it's not a huge issue.

Game is fun, it grabbed me even more than I thought it would.

[11clock]

Been playing the Super Mario RPG remake. I think that the new chain mechanic kind of breaks the game’s difficulty, since with a high enough chain your damage output gets ridiculous. Also they didn’t rebalance the game at all, so the original balance issues are still present such as healing spells being way too cheap and attack spells only being useful against enemies with high physical defense or weak to a certain element.

Other than those problems, I am still enjoying my time. Super Mario RPG has amazing pacing, especially with how lightning fast the battles and animations are. The maps are fun to explore and there is a good amount of variety. I especially like the boss fights, with each one having its own gimmick to force you to change up your strategy a bit.

I just wish that the remake was handled like the Mario & Luigi ones. Those games were fully reworked to account for all the new features, but Super Mario RPG keeps everything the same with the added features on top, making for a laughably easy game if you don’t impose your own restrictions. The remake really needed a hard mode.

[succo]

I've been playing the Mario RPG remake as well. It's my first time playing Mario RPG at all, and I've been really enjoying it.

On the topic of the chaining and balancing, I'm not great with the Action Commands so far, so I haven't gotten a chain past 30 or so. So for a first time playthrough, the difficulty has been adequate, but I can imagine a long-time player being bombarded with things to make the game easier is no fun. I was kinda disappointed they didn't make a hard mode or anything, because yeah the game is fairly easy.
Maybe in this era of patches and DLC we can cross our fingers for something cool like that .

Anyways, the game itself is super cool. I've played most other Mario RPG's, so it's interesting to see where the basis for those games' mechanics and conventions came from. The Action Commands are way harder than any of the other games, which has kept the combat much more engaging even against the common enemies.
I really appreciate how they captured the original art style, and mostly added to it rather than mindlessly changing things. The soundtrack is fantastic too, and I've been switching between the new and SNES versions often. All of the original characters fit in really well with established Mario stuff while also having a little bit of a Square twist to them.
I'm glad I started with this version, as the original seems to be very cryptic about some mechanics. The kinda thing where you find out about some little feature that would've really helped way too late. I'm very happy that this game exists, and that more people are gonna get to play it and have that little bit of more accessibility.

Hooray for Mario RPG's coming back!

[KobaBeach]

_____ - wyrdash on the discord showed me this game, so I pirated it (I cannot buy it legitimately sorry) and it's a very fun, very fair little Star Soldier clone. I really like the option phase shifting mechanic, but the upgrades you get as you play felt like they got in the way.

I think I made it past Loop1? But I'm not sure, because the entire game is written in an original alphabet with no translation, on purpose. I just know I fought the blonde girl, and I ran out of time during her fight. I assume she's the last boss of the loop since the next stage was pretty similar to the first one, but the boss I found after her was an upgraded version of the snake dragon boss (which was like stage 3 for me), rather than the round ship boss.

So, who knows. I'll research more.

Deffo recommend, I could link it here, but there is a no warez rule going on and this would count as warez, but it is on Doujin-Style (remember THAT relic?) for now.

[11clock]

I beat Super Mario RPG. Opinions are the same as previous post. Very fun game and a great remake, but being consistent with action commands can snowball the difficulty now, so experienced players will need to bring in self imposed restrictions to bring back in some challenge.

For me, I completely banned Bowser and Peach, never used gauge moves, and didn't allow myself to buy consumables. Despite those restrictions, the game was still mostly easy, except for a few boss fights and a random special enemy that OHKOed my party. It was enough to keep the game engaging at least. It never got to the point where I would spam physical attacks to kill everything. Super Mario RPG has excellent enemy and boss variety to keep you on your toes.

The main highlight of my run was when Speardovich knocked out Mario and Geno on the second turn, so I soloed him as Mallow for almost the entire fight and won.