raocow's talkhaus

Lunar: Silver Star Story: Talked to Mel, got the Diamond to Dross, got it stolen by Dross, chased him down to the Meribia Sewers, gained a few levels (12 -> 14), found out that the multiple weapon and armor shops in town are actual multiple weapon and armor shops (i love this /s), Suited Up, beat up the Water Dragon (アクアリザード Aqua Lizard in Japanese) aka Lingling as Dross calls him in the JP version, though Alex died before we beat him, Ramus left, Nash came back, got the application and entered the Trial Cave.

EDIT:
Vay: Got the Blanket of Fog at the Ice Tower after fighting the Argua (Agua? Agua means water in Portuguese), had the Temple of Water rise from the bottom of the ocean, recovered the Water Orb, defeated some Darneck Soldiers but the Darneck leader guy (Zool? I forget it's jeal) shot

Pottle

in the back and through his chest with a crossbow. We still got the Water Orb but

Pottle is died

. Now we're at Balinasrow (Hogshead) in Penan to look for some leads as to where the Fire Orb is.

raekuul wrote: ↑2 years ago dangit i just beat mmbn2 why am i going back in for another round of it right away

when you can't help, but, fol-low

IT PUTS YOU RIGHT BACK WHERE YOU CAAAAAAAAAY-AY-AYME

So...I decided to go all in on that Next Game Fest business, knowing from experience that Steam for whatever fucking reason puts fucking time windows on demos. Like...why? What's the point?

I picked up 11 demos, of which I'll speak about 9, below. Here goes:

• Terra Nil - This was a cool demo. Basically a sort of reverse city-builder, you're restoring the land from a wasteland to a proper living space with multiple biomes with various flora and fauna. It's secretly kind of challenging, because you do have to plan out the placement of equipment. The end part of it requires you to clear out your equipment, which makes placement critical. I made two attempts, one which death-spiraled (I ran out of resources), the other had a bug that caused the boat to glitch out. Still, kind of cool to play.
• 《Drifting : Weight of Feathers》 - This was meh. It's a 3D platformer in the style of Mirror's Edge with heavy parkour elements. Had an overwrought intro, then the play was just...uneven. I partly wondered if this was due to me using K+M on this particular instance, but I had to wonder if even controller would've been better, because moving around was so ramshackle. There were also not a lot of clear senses of direction or guidance on what I was supposed to do.
• Sail Forth I had this wishlisted a while back when I first saw it, and after the alpha demo, I'm sticking to it. It's an open-world pirate game where you have your own ship, sail around, shoot other boats. Build fleets, add cannon and crew, stuff like that. It was really fun to play. While didn't go too deep into the alpha demo, the impression I had was pretty sound. Still, could use a little help steering myself out of sandbars.
• Frontier Hunter: Ezra's Wheel of Fortune - A Metroidvania on the SOTN/Bloodstained of the scale, with a special feature of being able to switch between characters to play as during fights. It seemed pretty interesting in terms of gameplay, especially because one character was melee-specific, while the other used ranged attacks. With that said, the game suffered a black mark by being unable to work with my Wii U Pro Controller (which has a dongle that makes it emulate an XInput controller), and I had to play with keyboard and mouse, which is bleeeeh. And even there, it wasn't always working. Second, localization was kind of iffy in many places, which I suspect is due to them being a Taiwanese joint (Taiwanese games struggle with localization, I feel). Third, the game makes some odd choices with equipment. For example, your ultimate attack is limited to your starter weapon for some reason. Finally...it's weeby as all get out. You start the game broadcasting a NicoNico-style stream (which, given your lead is a blonde girl, gets really stupid at parts), there's a QTE to avoid some dumb anime trope with your sister (who is the ranged fighter), and the characters do a lot of annoying anime-style expressions.
• Leif's Adventure: Netherworld Hero - This was okay-ish. 2D platformer with breakable weapons, and a Ghost thing that you can send out and do stuff with. The demo got really hemmed in, with the dev just handing out incomplete areas. I lost interest in this rather quickly after it became obvious I was going to get very little out of the demo.
• Severed Steel - Interesting FPS that apes a lot of Superhot's mechanics, in particular the slow motion, limited ammo, John Woo style movements, and so on. But whereas Superhot also had this amazing aesthetic and compelling meta-narrative going on, Severed Steel uses standard-fare sci-fi aesthetics, and it's selling point for narrative is that the lead is a disabled person. (As a disabled person, I shrug at that shit, and I find people who cheerlead this kind of thing as patronizing, insufferable fucks) It's cool, but not my thing, really.
• Lifeslide - Okay, this one was fun for a casual game. You're basically a paper airplane flying through the land, in an arcade-like setting. There's a weird rogue-lite element to it, but I don't mind it so much. It's fun to fly through the countryside. I might wishlist it.
• Industria - Very interesting FPS. Demo was very brief, but compelling. Takes place in some form of...alternate universe East Berlin? Starts on 9 November 1989, expands into some weird parallel dimension where Berlin is taken over by Cold War era style machinery (what do we even call it? Biopunk?). Weird to see the game have English speakers only, would've liked to see German VOs (then again, it's a small team based in Berlin and Glasgow, sooooo) Still, this is rather cool, and I'm kind of down to play it.
• GRIME - Another Metroidvania, also on the SOTN/Bloodstained end of the scale. Definitely in the Dark Souls/ mentality in terms of narrative, if not aesthetic. I'm ambivalent about it. I get what it's going for, and the dash mechanics for dodging are kind of cool, but eh. I guess playing Hollow Knight kind of makes this less interesting to me than it would have.

Of these, I wishlisted Sail Forth (already), Lifeslide, and Industria. We'll see how this all pans out.

Back to Cursed Fiesta over the course of this week.

Vay: Past the Maytake Cavern northwest of the Dry Oasis (knew hoshi had another meaning, it wasn't in kanji lol) aka Vaygess in US. Recruited Lance/Lynx, freed the Penan Castle after a detour in the sewers (you can't save there to avoid softlocks, fun) and fighting a Dark Dragon (Ebony Dragon in US). Heading to Balsse/Treefall to recover the town, then get the Fire Orb and Vay Armor.

some demos from the steam fest thing i recommend:

Misc. A Tiny Tale - cute lil 3D platformer, maybe lacking in personality atm but it scratched that collectathon itch even in its demo
The Murder Mystery Machine - acab but this is a cool detective/investigation game that's like, the logical extension of the logic system from the edgeworth games & seems really intriguing
Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan - what happens when you mix cuphead-esque visuals with paper mario 2.5 RPGing and undertale style empathy battles, also boats, idk this is kind of its own thing despite those comparisons and i really dug it
Reina and Jericho - really intriguing metroidvania, swordplay feels a biiiit clunky atm but the one boss i did get to fight was rad and the exploration and platforming feel good too, also the story hooks you fast, definitely looking forward to this
Sable - it's like indie breath of the wild, but sans combat (read: better)
Velocity Noodle - stylish and fluid precision platforming? sign me the heck up

besides that just been playing KH2 rando all weekend lol

i'm already back up to the shademan boss fight send help

Cursed Fiesta continues. I spent...3(?) hours last night getting through about an hour of game for all four seeds. I named the Bartzes in the four seeds after letters of the Hebrew abjad, so I'll use them for here:

• The Normal seed, led by Alef, started with Knight. I grinded a little at Ship's Graveyard, then trounced Siren and bounded through North Mountain with ease. Currently at Castle Tycoon to pick up goodies. Walse Tower shouldn't be difficult, though I may add a couple levels if I have trouble with Garula.
• The Popular+Fifth seed, led by Bet, started with Ranger. Because the only mod is Sound Restoration, the team is Freelancers at least until Walse Tower, possibly up to post-Karnak 500. This team also did a little grinding at Ship's Graveyard, then trounced Siren, followed by quick-killing Magissa with the Frost Rod. Also at Castle Tycoon for goodies. This team will have the easiest time at Walse Tower (because of Whip on Garula), and may likely get their second job first.
• The Advance seed, led by Gimel, started with White Mage. While this does have Fiesta mod, it has not come into play yet. I grinded at Wind Shrine for Karlabos, then (after dealing with it) waltzed through Ships' Graveyard to beat Siren. At Carwen now, but I'm going to return to Ships' Graveyard to grind again (since all the enemies are undead) for Magissa and Forza (Garula isn't hard, just slow and tedious with all White Mages. M&F are the first brick wall you really face because of Magissa's magic.)
• The Pure Chaos seed, led by Dalet, started with Time Mage. This also has the Fiesta mod, and thus is in effect immediately. This one had the most struggle so far. Grinded a little at Wind Shrine, grinded a lot for levels in Ships Graveyard, nearly got killed by Siren. They're on the way to Carwen. Unsure what to do next. I can quick-kill Magissa with Frost Rod, but I then don't have a means to quick-kill Garula with the same weapon. And Garula with Time Mages seems much harder without Frost Rod. At least with White Mages, you can turtle your way to victory. Time Mages, not so much (though Loon was able to pull a variant of it off Friday). At the same time, there isn't really a good grind spot for Time Mages, and it may take a while before I would feel comfortable in my current style to face Garula. I'll have to think on this.

Cyril wrote: ↑2 years ago some demos from the steam fest thing i recommend:

Misc. A Tiny Tale - cute lil 3D platformer, maybe lacking in personality atm but it scratched that collectathon itch even in its demo
The Murder Mystery Machine - acab but this is a cool detective/investigation game that's like, the logical extension of the logic system from the edgeworth games & seems really intriguing
Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan - what happens when you mix cuphead-esque visuals with paper mario 2.5 RPGing and undertale style empathy battles, also boats, idk this is kind of its own thing despite those comparisons and i really dug it
Reina and Jericho - really intriguing metroidvania, swordplay feels a biiiit clunky atm but the one boss i did get to fight was rad and the exploration and platforming feel good too, also the story hooks you fast, definitely looking forward to this
Sable - it's like indie breath of the wild, but sans combat (read: better)
Velocity Noodle - stylish and fluid precision platforming? sign me the heck up

besides that just been playing KH2 rando all weekend lol

Of those, Reina and Jericho and maybe Sable seems interesting? (Then again, unsure if that "(read: better)" is implying Breath of the Wild's combat sucks, or that combat in that type of game sucks...I mean, I've never played BotW) The rest...I feel like I missed the 3D platformer boat, and I'm undecided if I actually like the Paper Mario series as a whole (it doesn't that every time a Thousand Year Door fan appears, I want to slap them because they're so insufferable). Plus precision platforming I've never gelled with.

i did not like the combat in BotW
i actually didn't like BotW much but sable still seems neato to me
the paper mario comparison is thin at best tbh, the combat is nothing like it so if that's your sticking point then ignore it that's just the closest comparison i could think of but it's really its own thing tbh

I wouldn't say combat is the sticking point. It's more a holistic view of the game (series) itself: My only exposures are an aborted playthrough of Paper Mario many years ago, and Paper Jam (if that counts as part of the series, indirectly). I'm unsure what to feel about it, and it's not helped by a certain portion of the series fandom that seems to treat a single game in the series with such unwarranted adoration that it becomes idolatry.

I intend to do a proper playthrough of the series at some point. But I'm not sure when. Maybe after I'm done with the Bioshock series? (I'm considering Infinite as on my timeline this year)

At Stage 6 in Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu (Go For It, Goemon! A Video Game Journey). Really fun game, love the mechanics, very approachable.

thatguyif wrote: ↑2 years ago I wouldn't say combat is the sticking point. It's more a holistic view of the game (series) itself: My only exposures are an aborted playthrough of Paper Mario many years ago, and Paper Jam (if that counts as part of the series, indirectly). I'm unsure what to feel about it, and it's not helped by a certain portion of the series fandom that seems to treat a single game in the series with such unwarranted adoration that it becomes idolatry.

This is me whenever someone calls a Smash game "the best fighting game ever made"

Street Fighter III 3rd Strike didn't die at the cross for you to shit the bed like this

EDIT: Past the Trial Cave and Vane and into Nanza Barrier in Lunar: Silver Star Story.

Played through Hellpoint which was being given away for free on GOG recently. It's a Dark Souls clone set in a hellish space station.

Final verdict for me is... mixed. The atmosphere was great, and the game had some neat designs. Controlled mostly fine, etc. But you could tell it didn't quite have the force of a bigger company like FromSoft behind it. Stuff felt a bit amateurish at times, bosses were mostly pretty simple and hit or miss on the design. It was also very frustrating how when you died on the final boss it would immediately throw you right back into fighting it after the loading screen, and since the game can't be paused, you're just stuck there, looping forever until you defeat it or turn off the game. I had to take a bathroom break which meant letting my character repeatedly get killed over and over again while I was gone cause there was just nowhere to put the controller down. Also from what I can tell, the background of the boss is essentially a looping video of wacky space effects on repeat, and one of the effects was so crazy that it made it impossible to tell what's going on, which was bad for this boss in particular because there's already so much crap going on, and watching for particle effects that blended into this background

I wasn't super impressed by the level design either. A lot of exploring the world comes down to running around until you find a new path, finding locked doors and trying to keep track of how you got there, and then you occasionally find a boss that might drop a keycard with a vague name that doesn't really tell you where to use it. So you keep running around and see if you can find any of the previously locked doors and check if you can open them now. It was hard to tell where you've been in a lot of areas because they're so sprawling and maze-like, with no real defining features or landmarks. Enemy variety was a bit lacking. And there were a lot of quirks and bugs that caused issues occasionally.

I kept almost entirely blind and managed to make my way through, though near the end I ended up searching for a few hints to find my way forward in optional areas where I had no idea what to do, and also for one sidequest that was 1. so vague that it would be almost impossible to figure out what to do on your own, and 2. bugged for me, and apparently it's a pretty common issue where the NPC for it disappears from the game hub where you'd expect him to be, and goes back to where you originally encounter him the first time, where he's completely forgotten you know him.

I think what I found online said there's 4 endings. I got the "true" ending I guess (because I finished that aforementioned sidequest with some help) which included fighting a final boss that I think is optional depending on a choice at the end of the game. I'm not sure I'll go back for the other endings, the game just didn't do it for me.

Oh also how could I forget how obtuse and non-obvious some mechanics in the game are. It took me forever to figure out you could upgrade weapons because the UI is so bad, seemingly some items you pick up just can't be viewed in the menu, choosing weapons and upgrades can be a pain because certain UIs for choosing certain things doesn't show stats to compare to your current stats, by the end of the game I still had no idea how the health upgrading system worked or what the other healing items were for, I didn't even know how to activate the weapon abilities until I read a reddit comment that said how to do it (which was like 15 hours into the game probably), etc etc etc

Cursed Fiesta continues apace:

• Bet's team is in the lead in terms of progress. They're currently dog-hunting outside Karnak. That lead is about to collapse though: The Water Crystal job was Thief. Again, this Popular seed does not have Fiesta mod. Ranger, which was first job, does not become available until after 2.5 dungeons: Fire Powered Ship, Karnak 500, and Library of the Ancients. Thief is a very fast but weak job. An all-Thief stack will suck against Liquid Flame, because you have zero room to heal, and it always counters. I may Steal-grind Poltergeists in the Fire-Powered Ship to have a stack of Hi Potions on hand, just to ease the pain of Liquid Flame. If Bet gets an Earth Crystal job at Karnak, that pain extends to Byblos, who basically demands you have someone who can hit him with Fire elemental attacks. This could very well drop to last, depending on how Gimel and Dalet's teams luck out on jobs.
• Alef's team is close behind, just getting its second job as Mystic Knight. The combo of Mystic Knight and Knight solves a big chunk of the game, including most of World 1. Sol Cannon is iffy if only because of the setup required to hit the Launchers and needing to avoid getting hit with Old. But the team will have an okay time dealing with Liquid Flame and Byblos. They'll certainly take the lead, since they don't need to do that much grinding.
• Speaking of grinds, Dalet's team is now done with its grind and is heading toward North Mountain. I'll make an honest attempt or two at Magissa/Forza without the quick kill. But it's probably going to happen, which'll make Galura a slog. But once Galura is out of the picture, they're going to have an easier time for the simple reason that Karnak opens up rod-breaking.
• Gimel's team is last, still in Ships' Graveyard grinding. But it's almost done. Both Magissa/Forza and Galura are solved through turtling (Silence on Magissa, Protect against Forza and Galura, hope your flail person lands hits). Given this is an Advance seed has Fiesta mod, it'll pick up immediately after Galura.

made it to guia in tloh4 windows and beat up the gargoyle commander person and their big gay stinky disney's gargoyles in balusse in vay

Fiesta continues, and oh boy, has it taken on its character as


C̴̢̺̠͇̠̞̼̮͍͑̏́̈̑͘̕ū̷̧̢̱͖̮̲̩̙̖̫̌̓͆́͌̃̉̽̿̍̾̀͗̅̐̽͋̓͜͝ṛ̶̛͇̺͔̪͓̬̰͆̽̃̅̈́̈́͂͆̃̓͆̀̔͆̐̿̚̚͘s̶̢̧̛̝̦̺͓͉̩͎͊̎͑̃̐͋̈́́̾̽͒͛͂͊̎ͅė̴̙̼̫̱̲̲̠̣̬̳̾ͅd̴̡͔̜͖͙̻̤̳̦̱͎̝̺͈̖͇̗̞͉̾͗͑̓̐̂͛̅̐̕



To wit:

• Alef's team maintain their solid lead, having breezed through Fire Powered Ship and the Karnak 500. Their reward? Ninja. This is my first run with this job, and I'm pleased as peach about it, since I've been wanting it since I first began running Fiestas 5 years ago. But a team like this (Knight/Mystic Knight/Ninja) is extremely powerful and deals with 90% of the rest of the game with ease. The only major roadbumps I can think of are the Tree Crystals and maybe a boss or two in the Cleft/Rift? But still, it's quite good. Currently, they just finished with Library of the Ancients. That said, they do need to do a dog hunt for Ninja Scrolls and Shurikens. That will occur after Black Chocobo has been gained.
• Bet's team is surprisingly close behind, having attritioned their way through Liquid Flame and the Karnak 500. The Steal grind for Hi Potions helped immensely, as did some choice RNG that prevented Blaze from being used all that much. But now, the collapse is inevitable: The third job rolled was Thief. Popular Runs are a variant of Chaos runs, which allow for repeat jobs. I still have yet to pick up Ranger, for it is with the Black Chocobo. I still have to go through Byblos before I get to that point. In casual playthroughs of the game, Byblos is considered the game's first brick wall for many: It casts Protect (which halves all physical damage) and Dischord (which halves your level). You're basically all but required to have some kind of fire-elemental thing to do well in that fight. Otherwise you have to grind a lot. Last time I had to do that, I grinded to Level 19, and that was with an all-physical team that included a Knight. An all-Thief stack? Good lord. I'm probably going to have to grind to level 22 minimum just to attrition my way to victory there. And that's just the tip of the iceberg with the problems on this team.
• Gimel's and Dalet's are vying for third place right now, as both have just finished Garula. And both got the same exact second job: BERSERKER. Double Thinkzerker Action! Dalet's team, with Time Mage, has a slight overall advantage by virtue of being able to cheese Liquid Flame and Sergeant/Iron Claw through breaking rods. Gimel's team will tank through both those, and will be unable to raid all the chests in the Karnak 500 (for the simple reason that it has to rely on Berserker for damage, and it'll just take too long).

While I was eating breakfast this morning, I came to the conclusion that I will not attempt any Triple Crowns. Dalet's team has Time Mage, which guarantees a Triple Crown through Quickleak. But I'm not going to do that, especially because the shuffler's function. I may attempt Shinryuu if I get a team that makes it feasible (say, one with a Chemist, Blue Mage, and/or Bard, depending on the team), but Omega requires playing adeptly and precisely. Hard to do when the game shuffles every 90 to 240 seconds. If there's a team that's super-fit to take down Omega, I may do it after I finish the Fiesta. But I dunno, this is already intense enough as it is.

Update: My original plan was to own the team Bet was becoming, for it is the cost of the Curse. But, upon further consultation, I was encouraged that this was unacceptable pain to endure. So I rerolled the second Thief. It became...Geomancer. Still kind of cursed, but given that a Fire attack is one of the Gaia moves in the Library, it'll make the Byblos fight more bearable. And I could very easily still get Thief from my Earth or Fifth jobs.

Took a break from Breath of the Wild to start Shadowrun Dragonfall the DLC/second campaign in Shadowrun Returns. Returns is really more of a campaign building game with some high quality dev campaigns thrown in, the first one is called "Dead Man's Switch", even though I just call it Shadowrun Returns.

The biggest difference between DMS and Dragonfall is that in DMS you have a large selection of potential party members who are all pretty inconsequential, but in Dragonfall you have a few, proper characters. It feels a lot more like an RPG because of this.

The DLC portion adds new weapons and such, which adds more character building options. My favourite are throwing knives, they use the same stat as grenades, which makes grenades more attractive as you no longer have to put points into a skill that only affects a consumable weapon; they also give strength focused characters a reliable ranged option without having to dip into other stats.

When running around the environment or talking to characters there are a lot more options that show only if you have stats above a certain threshold when compared to the first campaign. I was quite pleased to see that my PC has both high enough intelligence and charisma to do spontaneous anti-drug PSAs.

Whereas DMS was fairly linear, Dragonfall gives you a ton of options on what kind of levels you want to do and in what order.

In terms of plot; DMS starts out with your PC going on a quest to pay next month's rent and things spiral into weirdness over time. Dragonfall doesn't try to ease you in, within an hour your team of mercenaries have upset a radioactive ghost dragon, and they are now being gunned after. (Yes the phrase "radioactive ghost dragon" is used with absolute deadpan seriousness in the game.) Also things just get weirder and darker than they do in DMS.

started up Solas 128 yesterday, it's uhh... a really damn good puzzle game lol

at its core a "bounce lightbeams off mirrors" puzzle game but the mechanics of the puzzles are all clever and more interestingly the game is one giant, interconnected puzzle (and the individual rooms interact with each other a hell of a lot, up to 9 screens at a time is the most i've seen so far but it could easily end up being more lol)

Playing some Switch stuff on the side while I edit and upload some videos quietly. Mario Golf: Speed Rush & Tetris 99 both seem fun. Doubt I'll ever get first place in Tetris 99, although I've had a few top twenty placements and even one top ten finish so far.

More demos. As I predicted, Steam has shut down many of the demos that were available for Next Game Fest. And of course, there's no explanation or reason for it. Which sucks, because I was really looking forward to finishing up Sail Forth.

Regardless, per Cyril's suggestion, I loaded up two more demos, and played through them:

• Sable - Honestly, I wanted to like this. It's got a really cool aesthetic going, and the setting seems interesting. But it's hobbled by a few things. One, movement was rather jank, especially when climbing. Two, there was a sound bug where music that was supposed to turn off didn't, which meant songs overlapped. Third, and most importantly, the demo kind of emphasized the main quest at the expense of exploration. Granted, the demo was meant to be the start of the game, but even so...I just want to, you know, go.
• Reina and Jericho - This was a little better. Game is a Metroidvania between the Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion sides of the spectrum. Kind of linear, though it requires some exploration, and power ups are rather . There's an interesting plot going on, but it's not revealed all that much, and in ways that are kind of frustrating. Like there's some context we're missing here. Anyway...movement was kind of interesting, though a lot of it feels rather floaty. That kind of undermines the whole "precision platforming" aspect the game sells.

I'm not entirely feeling either, though the latter I might pick up if it became free at EGS.

More Cursed Fiesta this week. Goal by Friday: ideally get all teams into World 2. Again, Alef is farthest in and is in the best shape to go straight through to the end of World 1, but there's still some grinding to do. Bet's new member changes things, though to what degree I have no clue.

i forgot how bad the endgame of Might And Magic 8 is. the dungeons are bland and everything resists everything and it doesn't help that i'm playing a mod that somehow makes it harder.

About 3.5 hours into The Surge which is basically the bigger budget attempt at sci-fi Dark Souls.

It has some neat ideas in terms of spicing up the gameplay from a typical Soulslike, such as targeting specific bodypart to potentially salvage that part of the enemy's equipment for crafting materials. But there's also just like... a lot going on. Something Dark Souls does good is keep the HUD information fairly minimal. You have the health, stamina, current weapon, souls, and what's about it. But with The Surge there's just CONSTANTLY text popping up and disappearing all over the screen. You get near an access panel and 3 full sentences of text will pop up explaining what the panel is or what it will do or why it's not working. And not as a tutorial either, it's just a mechanic of the game. It's constantly trying to get you to read stuff in the middle of gameplay, sometimes while enemies are attacking you and so you can't be reading. And this issue with text also transfers over to all the menus which have so much going on and are incredibly unintuitive to read. Like you go into your stats menu and you're hit with 800 words of text and a bunch icons breaking down everything.

The story has also not really gripped me so far. And it also fails to do what Dark Souls does to make the world interesting, which is be subtle. There's a lot of dialogue, and voices coming through announcement speakers, and audio logs you'll find on the ground that are difficult to pay attention to while you're fighting enemies, and again it's just too overwhelming and doesn't allow you to take stuff in at your own pace.

Anyway, I'm being fairly negative but it does some stuff really well too. I'm hoping it can win me over at some point, but so far the introduction has been rough.

Defeated Thunderblight Gannon in BotW Master Mode. I was dreading that boss because it's a pain in the ass in Normal Mode and Master Mode makes enemies regenerate health. As it turns out giving an enemy whos entire gimmick is being hard to hit and stalling health regeneration lead to more pain. At the very least there is a limit to how much health bosses can recover.

I've found that in Shadowrun Dragonfall, the easiest way to deal with enemy conjurors is to ignore them. Every time an enemy unit has a conjuror, the conjurors first tries summoning a spirt, which then immediately goes maverick and begins chasing the conjuror around mauling them. This is in contrast to my own conjuror who summons a spirit, commands it to cast one fireball, then looses control of it and spends the rest of the fight running away trying not to get evirated.

Been chipping away at Shin Megami Tensei II. I think I'm nearing the end of the game at this point, at the moment I need to gather all the pillars to open a gate to the abyss. I think I have all of them except for one. I kinda wish there was a way to check what key items you have but there is not in the SNES version as far as I can tell. Just got the one from the dance contest.

Also been playing the remastered version of Yakuza 4. Just got to Chapter 3 of Saejima's part. Overall not really sure how I feel about Yakuza 4. A little more interesting than Yakuza 3 perhaps, but it's hard to say right now. It's weird playing Yakuza in 60 FPS since I played Kiwami and Kiwami 2 on my laptop, which can't run the games at that speed and I played the PS3 version of Yakuza 3 which only runs at 30 FPS. Not like it matters that much, but everything's so smooth now, it's weird.

Fiesta continues, though more slowly than usual. Progress:

• Alef's team maintains its lead. Most of the session was dog hunting for ninja scrolls. At this point though, I'm in a good state to just advance the game with them.
• Despite having something other than Thief, Bet's team is slogging. Currently at level 18, and yet it was barely able to beat Ifrit. A Hi Potion steal-grind occurred after that. I may have to STILL grind this team to low 20s at this point, depending on how Byblos goes.
• Dalet's team has taken a somewhat definitive lead over Gimel and will likely pass Bet's team. Clearing Fire Powered Ship (though without some struggle, Berzerkers made Liquid Flame ironically harder to cheese) and the Karnak 500, the third job revealed is Black Mage. This team has become extremely powerful with this addition. There are some definite glass cannon elements at the moment, but with these three, most everything in the game is solved. It will need to money grind at dog hunt for rods, though, probably before Sol Cannon/Ronkan Ruins.
• Gimel's team has entered the Karnak 500. Liquid Flame was a slow but manageable fight with turtling.

The teams as of right now:

• Alef: Knight/Mystic Knight/Ninja/???
• Bet: Ranger/Thief/Geomancer/???/???
• Gimel: White Mage/Berserker/???/???
• Dalet: Time Mage/Berserker/Black Mage/???

Also, I am super zazzed about the Pixel Remasters. Contrary to what the idiots at Kotaku say, there's been some info leaked that give the indication FFV, along with the other Final Fantasy games, will be remastered from the ORIGINAL game (in this case, the Super Famicom version). And it looks really good (though I'm less enthused on the UI).

Doing PC98 TLoH4 since I'm already doing PC98 TLoH2 (and TLoH3, just for the sake of it, the attack preset icons are borderline incomprehensible). Up to Fighting Level 7 as Avin, buying equipment for Mile now.

Love beating some Flamestrike Sybils (炎撃シビル) while having like 94 EXP left for the next level and then when I beat them it says



this says a lot about our society