Hello Everyone!
Didn’t get to play much this week. And haven’t really started anything new.
- Played a few levels of New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, not much though, still on the same water world.
- Played Dragon Quest XI for couple of hours, going to continue playing that.
- Reached High Rank in Monster Hunter: World but now I am stuck at Pink Rathian, maybe I need to improve my equipment, or maybe I should cave and fire that SOS flare.
- Playing a bit of Brotato before sleep, if I am not tired. Finally cleared it once, now trying other characters and weapon combinations. A combination of guns has been working out great for me though. All guns, all different type, and focusing on increasing ranged attack.
That’s all from me, what about you guys? What have you been playing?
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Breath of the wild (I know I’m late!) then moving to super Mario sunshine and then octopath traveler :)
I got BotW for Christmas back in 2019 and only just finished it a few months ago lol. I was just happy to finally understand all the memes!
My 4 year old and I started playing Mario Sunshine recently, too, and it’s a lot of fun. Definitely one of the more challenging Mario games, but not as big as some made it seem. Very fun.
Did you regularly played the game for 3.5 years? Or stopped played and resumed recently?
I’m excited to play Octopath at some point. I’m probably going to start with the second one. Heard it was better and the stories between 1 and 2 aren’t really dependent on each other.
Yeah, I have heard the same, but if you plan to play both, it might be difficult to go back. 2 is definitely much better though.
As long as you are enjoying the game, doesn’t matter when you are playing it. I still have games for 2014 on my to-play list. So, are you enjoying it?
Also, nice list of games!
Links Awakening (GB version). As a kid, I have memories of just wondering about talking to all the characters and not knowing what yo do to progress. As an adult, I can see why, and have had to consult an online guide to find out what to do. How did I ever manage it as a kid?
I had the exact same experience. I tried Tunic last year and I was like “nope, I’m not doing this to myself again.” It gave me the same feeling as Link’s Awakening as a kid.
So triggered.
Finishing off Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s post-game content before moving on to Future Redeemed. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of it, though I am basically ready to be done, so… that lined up pretty nicely, actually.
Oh, I had completely forgotten about Future Redeemed! I was planning to play it after TotK, but then completely forgot it’s existence. Going to get it soon.
CrossCode! So excited, this game makes me feel like a little kid again, back when I would just sit and do nothing but game all day, totally lost in the experience.
One of my favourite games ever, and it gets even better the further in you are. Have fun!
Been a busy week, haven’t been playing a ton. Picking up a little Overcooked 2 here or there, I always loved that game but couldn’t find friends to play it with. Apparently none of them like it nearly as much as I do, so I’ve just been playing it solo. Still a fun game though!
How are you enjoying it solo, I have heard it becomes quite hectic when playing alone?
Yeah it’s a bit much one the more difficult levels. You have two chefs to control, and you switch between them (using L I believe? Hard to say without just playing lol). So if you multi task well, you can set a chef up with some stuff and start chopping, then switch to the other to focus on other tasks
I’m working through my first playthrough of Stray. Last save I was just about to leave the Slums for what I understand to be the final time. Going for 100% and so far don’t think I’ve missed anything.
Not exactly video games, but I’ve also been doing puzzles lately - just completed my 4th in like a week. They were 300, 300, 1000, and 1000 pieces - but the last one only had 999 pieces present 🙁 Gonna try to make the missing piece myself before I return them to the library.
After Stray I might start on New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe too. Wanna get through it before Wonder comes out.
Edit: lol just realized this is the Nintendo community and not general gaming. Oh well, at least I fit NSMBUD in there
@zkfcfbzr Hardest puzzle I ever did was the White Mountain Lucky Charms 500 piece puzzle. The box art of the puzzle washes over the sides, top and bottom, so you can’t get a clear picture, and there’s only like 5 lucky charms shapes and colors that repeat over and over again.
The last of the puzzles I just did was a Wasgij - which always does tricky things with the box art. For this one you’re shown a scene on the front of the box, then the actual puzzle is what someone in that scene would see from their perspective - so most of the puzzle isn’t actually shown, and the things that are shown are in the wrong perspective. It was interesting to do since my puzzle strategy usually relies heavily on comparing pieces to the box.
Just learned about Wasgij from you. And same question as I asked above. How do you even solve that? Isn’t jigsaw all about seeing the picture and then matching the piece with the picture on board and so on.
That’s my usual strategy - this was the first time I had to do it without really having a reference image. I didn’t even try to use what was visible on the box.
It ended up not being too hard. In the beginning (after the edge obviously) I progressed by sorting pieces by color. As an example, I put every single piece with even a tiny bit of purple into one pile. Then I tried to connect the pieces in just that pile - which in the case of purple ended up making me 3 or 4 distinct objects. While I didn’t know what I was making (I thought I was making a sea monster, ended up being a straw hat), the pool of pieces was low enough to make it not too hard to find connections.
Once I’d done that for all the colors that were rare enough to make that strategy useful, I was about half-way done - by which point it wasn’t too bad to figure out what sorts of pieces I needed to find to extend which sections of puzzle I already had assembled. The only truly painful part was all the pieces that were just water - which would have been hard even with a reference picture.
It can also help to sort the pieces by shape: since there are so many fewer of the non-standard shapes you have a lot fewer pieces to check when you find a missing spot that’s not going to to fit a standard piece. And you can get pretty tricky about how you spot where nonstandard pieces go: For example, two innie or two outie bits in a row on an edge mean one of them has to be nonstandard, as do a few other patterns.
The surprise is nice: The puzzle I did ended up being vaguely Christmas themed, which is something you can’t tell from the box at all.
Okay, looked up Wagij, they look awesome. I want to try a few.
This sounds like a nightmare. Same charms, repeating over and over, in a jigsaw puzzle. How do you even make that?
Loved Stray, it’s a really fun game. Good luck with 100%!
I love jigsaw puzzles, the last one I got from some random shop, and I think it wasn’t original, or maybe just faulty, as the colours on the pieces didn’t exactly match the box. And all the different shades of dark gray were simple black. I just gave up on it. I want to try some nice ones.
As for Mario, yeah, I started it for the same reason. Wanted to finish it before Wonder comes out.
I got a little burnt out on TotK so I decided on playing a little bit of Persona 5 as an in-between game and got completely hooked on that instead. Even though I usually don’t really enjoy turn-based combat. Super cool game, I can definitely recommend it
Back to Tears of the Kingdom until Fantasy Life i drops. Finally cleared Korok Forest. It was surprisingly easy after the Hyrule Castle fight.
I got bold enough to try facing a Gleeok. I didn’t die but I wasted a whole lot of stuff. Seems like my stuff is not up to par yet. Am I supposed to have a bunch of elemental eyes or what?
@TwilightVulpine The elemental eyes help, fire vs ice etc… but aren’t a requirement by any means. My best strategy is a Lynel bow that shoots 3-8 arrows because they only use 1 eye at a time.
I’m currently playing through Super Mario World and having a blast - it’s been decades since I played it.
I’ve been fancying trying my hand at kaizo so thought it would be best to play through the base game first.Super Mario World is fun, but I can’t even dream of playing kaizo. Would love to hear how that goes. Good luck!
This will be my first clear weekend for a while.
I’ve been playing a BG3 campaign with my buddy when I got a few spare hours, so we’ll probably play that some this weekend.
I’ve also been playing Thronefall. Great, simple tower defense RTS kinda game.
Also been playing New Star GP. A retro style, arcadey Formula One game in a retro style similar to Virtua Racer from the devs that made Retro Bowl. It’s got a fun little career mode.
Civ 6 (long loading times) Tears of the Kingdom Splatoon 3 And soon Quake 2!
EDIT: I’m currently on vacation
Honestly, I’m probably gonna crack away at some more Triangle Strategy. Crazy underrated.
I loved that game! Not many games make me want to playthrough all the stories but this this one’s writing was so delightful.
The game looks great. I have heard that there is lots of talking, and few maps which you keep playing on. What do you think about that?
Finished Trails into Reverie.
Well, that took a while, more than 90h, but I went for full completion - main game, post game dungeon, trials, daydreams, minigames, everything done.
I love the Trails series, it’s one of my favorite JRPG series ever, but it has its fair share of problems - they use the same formula for most games so it’s easy to get burned out if you play many of them in sequence, there’s a lot of cast bloat due it being a series with all games interconnected, an annoying tendency to keep trying to redeem villains, and just being too verbose at times (often because they want to use all members of that huge cast).
Why I’m talking about this? Because while I had a lot of fun with the previous game (Cold Steel 4), it also did showcase all the problems above at full strength, but Reverie does something different and provides a much necessary “break” from the usual Trails experience.
The game is split in three routes, two for protagonists of previous games (Lloyd and Rean) and one for a mysterious new masked character (“C”). This breakdown is a good shift from the usual game dynamic, lessens the issues with cast bloat since they are all spread around, and "C"s route is focused on new cast members making it a much fresher experience.
Another major change is the Reverie Corridor. Most of games in the series are heavy into sidequests, but this time the “main” game barely contains any, only a few optional extra-challenging monsters. Instead, almost all optional content takes place in this dream-like world where time flows differently and memories from the real world as hazy. Here you have access to the full cast of the game (and even some extras!), a randomly generated dungeon you can use to grind freely, a ton of minigames including series classics like Pom and Vantage Masters, and a very nice section called “Daydreams” with a lot of mini-stories showing what’s going on around with both the main cast and some familiar NPCs - very similar to the Doors from Sky 3rd.
This keeps the main story very tight and focused while also having a lot of fun optional content, and gives you freedom to decide if and when to focus on each. I don’t expect this to become the norm for future games in the series, but I enjoyed this structure a lot and I hope they do use something like this time to time to avoid burnout from the usual formula.
Finally, on the story, this is an epilogue for both Zero+Azure and Cold Steel 1-4, so obviously not a game for someone starting the series. It does a much better job story-wise then CS4 IMO, in particular in the Crossbell section - it’s still the weakest of the three routes largely due to it just rethreading old plot lines, but it fixes a lot of the things that bothered in the last two games. Rean’s route is a nice epilogue that touches on the impact of the last game’s events in Erebonia, and "C"s route is just great fun with a cast of anti-heroes.
And now the wait for the next game begins. Really looking forward to see the Calvard arc.
Started Grisaia Phantom Trigger 5.5 to 08.
Phantom Trigger is the 4th game in the Grisaia series, with the three first games (Fruit, Labyrinth and Eden) being available as a bundle as well on the Switch. This last game was released as a bunch of 2-5h “Episodes”, and this is second half of that game.
The original Grisaia games have a very interesting structure. The “Common” route of Fruit is 70% of the story and it’s full slice-of-life comedy, but once it splits into the individual routes for each heroine it gets crazy dark as you learn their backstories. Labyrinth shifts into having the main story being dark (it’s the MC’s backstory) with “lighter” after-stories for each heroine. Finally Eden goes towards a more action-focused story, but I wasn’t a big fan of it, and one of the main reasons is that most of the cast was just regular girls, so having they become involved in a spy conspiracy didn’t really work for me, it was just too hard to believe.
Phantom Trigger is more action-focused, much like Eden, but it fixes the above problem by stating from the beginning that the cast is part of “school of assassin” of sorts. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier games, but so far has been a completely independent story with a brand-new cast.
The first five episodes were focused on introducing the cast.
- 01: Introduction of the initial cast (Shiori, Haruto, Rena, Tohka, Chris and Murasaki) and premise.
- 02: Rena’s backstory, adds Maki.
- 03: Tohka’s backstory, adds Gumi.
- 04: Chris’ backstory, adds Taiga.
- 05: Murasaki’s backstory, adds Yuuki.
I only had time to start 5.5 for now, but it seems to be centered on Shiori, the focus character of the first episode - a new “civilian” teacher that just joined this school. Looks like this chapter will be about how she is adapting to the her new school and students, but I’ll talk more about it next week.
As for my overall impression of the story, a redditor once described Phantom Trigger as “pretty cozy comfort food reading”, and I think that’s an accurate description. It doesn’t do anything special or amazing, but it’s been consistently fun and entertaining.
Been playing through a lot of Oracle of Seasons, I love 2D Zelda so I’ve been enjoying it a lot. The puzzles require a bit of thinking but are easy to complete. The season changing mechanic is also pretty cool. Currently on the 5th dungeon, Unicorn’s Cave. I think that places me around somewhere halfway through the game?
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is always fun to sit down and play for a bit. Love the series, ever since playing Double Dash as a kid.
Also have been thinking about restarting FE: Three Houses lately, loved what I played during my first playthrough, but life happened and eventually began playing less and never got around to completing the game. Honestly would rather start up a new playthrough instead of trying to remember everything that had happened leading up to where I last saved.
I’ve also begun an obsession with Pikmin. Up until the demo for Pikmin 4 released I had never played any of the games, but it’s got me absolutely hooked. Unfortunately can’t afford Nintendo’s usual $60 at the moment, so I’ve been making due with 4’s demo. Definitely going to be my first purchase once I get things in order.
I have been hearing good things about Oracle of Seasons / Ages, glad you are enjoying them.
I have FE: Three Houses on pause. I love the combat, but the monastery stuff feels a bit of chore, and I was in about my 7th or 8th month, and not even close to recruiting anyone, so it kept making me feel I am missing out on stuff, and not playing properly. Still, going to get back to it once I clear a few games, as the combat was really fun.
Good luck with Pikmin, hope the things get sorted out for you soon.
Pikmin 4. I grabbed a Japanese copy at the Tokyo store last week. I only played it on the flight home.
How are you enjoying it? Have you played the previous games in the series?
I’m still only on day 2 lol.
I found Pikmin 1 and 2 ROMs and got them running on my Wii (custom lanucher). There’s Pikmin 3 deluxe too. My kids play it a lot more than I get to.
