Still working through Shin Megami V Vengeance!

Finished the second main area, out of 4, I presume. By now the story has established the new group of antagonists and gave more screen time to the previously underused cast. There are enough new demons that I can barely keep up with fusing them all! But I always feel to need to collected them all in SMT/Persona. (Funnily enough, I never did in Pkmn.)

Finished the first route of AI: The somnium files!

Got Ota’s ending, which didn’t actually solve the case. Luckily, the game tells you about each branching path and you can freely jump to them.

The humor is hit or miss, but it did land with me and my partner. The mystery is fun and the characters are all around fun, too. We’ll do the other routes and then jump right into the sequel!

Man in the first panel isn’t funny and people call him out specifically. He should get better.

Woman in the second panel isn’t funny and people call all woman unfunny. Woman shouldn’t be comedians.

It’s about misogyny.

It probably has the best translation tooling. On top of that, they even learn it as their second language.

But I don’t think that’s a major factor. The UK always had special privileges within the EU and was probably just the most susceptible major country for the idea of leaving.

Thanks for asking, but there isn’t yet. I’ve dabbled around quite a bit and wan’t to focus on actually finishing something this year. Maybe for the next one.

Over the last two years, I’ve often lost my drive to continue since there are always new shiny ideas that are far more interesting than doing a lot of the menial work game dev involves. Kinda the opposite of your problem, really.

Didn’t game too much this holiday season and I want to focus more on making games instead of playing them this year - let’s see how that one is working out.

Anyhow, got in a good chunk of SMT V Vengeance! The QoL stuff is awesome, but it’s still pretty similar to the original - just with more quests and demons along the way . I don’t mind since I loved the original game, but if you didn’t it likely not worth it.

Started Ai: The Somnium Files! Decided to play through some detective games with my partner. This one is a great start! I like the characters, it’s both fun and has a good mystery. I’ll probably go through the entire series + rain code, then do the Ace Attorney games. Are there other games like this?

At this point getting slandered by Israel seems more like a badge of honor. I don’t even want a nation committing an ongoing genocide to like me.

First of all, I plan on clearing my backlog:

• Octopath 2
• Nioh 2
• 13 Sentinels
• P5 Tactica

Besides that, I have a few things on my mind:

• Hundred Line Defense
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2
• Xenosaga 1-3 (or maybe the rumored remake?)
• FF 7
• Persona 4
• Dragon Quest 1-3 Remakes

Probably already too many RPGs for a single year.

My cat does leave a strong smell. It has become my favorite smell.

Vaguely in order from worst to best, always referencing the most recent release:

• Baten Kaitis Origins Just worse in pretty much every way compared to the original.
• Super Mario RPG It does show it’s age and feels way too simplistic for my taste.
• Pokemon Legends Arceus I loved the first area. In fact I spent so much time there, every other area became boring since I was overleveled and already had most of the Pokemon. Needs some serious balancing.
• Baten Kaitos There is much to be loved as the game does so many things you normally don’t see. However, a good chunk of mechanics is best ignored as the game progresses and battles become monotonous.
• Star Ocean Second Story R Kinda a repeating thing this year, the first half was awesome, the second half not so much. Both story and many mechanics took a nosedive.
• Harvestella All around really solid but simplistic. The story goes hard after a certain point and at the end I felt like I finished multiple games.
• Xenoblade X I love everything Xenoblade, but this one has a few problems. E.g. Skells. They don’t scale with anything and are so much better than ground combat, they basically drain the RPG elements out of the game once you get them. Beat the entire second half without ever changing my Skell. Also, much more personal, I much prefer the headcanon I built for half a decadd over the new story elements added in the remaster.
• Metaphor A mixed bag. There is so much good compared to Persona 5, but having endless mana regen just completely kills any challange and led to way less thightly designed dungeons.
• Pokemon Conquest I just love SRPGs and having multiple layers and meta progression between dozens of different stories made it perfect to play every so often. Placement is heavily biased, playing a few campaigns with my partner is a tradition for the holiday season. A good chunk of maps is really annoying if you play the game for longer stretches.

But like, there is no reason you should have to travel further, just because your country is bigger.

In addition, as an EU resident you can travel across the EU like it’s one big country. The US is only about twice as large as the EU.

It’s in a similar vein. There are new demons, quests, QoL stuff and some rebalancing changes just like in P5R. However, instead of a new chapter, Vengence added a new route through the game - revamping most of the story. (Or fixing the lack thereof.)

Currently, it’s still quite similar to vanilla SMT V, but I’ve been told it will diverge a lot more quite early. Don’t know if or how many new locations there are.

Still not that big of an achievement, but it’s total length and India is only about 1/3 the size of the US. So it’s more than 3 times as dense already.

Probably Alaska then, but I have no clue which episode. These types of episodes are all jumbled together in my mind.

I think it’s the one future episode with Lisa as the POTUS, ‘the president wore pearls’.

The joke was Maggie writing a card from Antarctica, which now is a beach paradise due to global warming. If memory seerves right, there are even some penguins sonewhere in there.

Finished up Harvestella.

Overall, I really like the game. The farming and combat are both somewhat simple and the story does start out generic. However, then it speedruns a complete JRPG story within a single chapter and then throws another 5 chapters at you. The characters are fun, the world is interesting and I felt engaged throughout. Even did some more farming after I already bought everything until I hit the money cap at 999,999.

Finished Pokemon Legends Arceus!

My initial impression stands. The first area was some of thr best Pokemon I ever played. Afterwards the entire thing kind of fell apart. Too many repeated Pokemon per area; most things didn’t even reach half my level and fhe story never hooked me. The final fight against the hidden antagonist, I guess, was somewhat challanging, but I don’t think the battle system is all that fun. Sometimes, you defeat a Pokemon and the next one just gets 4 turns in before you move again (even using my fast moves!). But still, I really enjoyed that initial catching of Pokemon and think it’s woth trying.

Just yesterday, I started Shin Megami Tensei V Vengence.

I love the original SMT V, it’s one of my favorite Switch games. Having played some more SMT games since then, it does show some cracks, but I’m still having a great time and enjoy the new stuff. It’s probably best coming of Persona and I still prefer it over SMT 3 Nocturne, which I think is somewhat uncommon. (Although that’s mostly due to Nocturnes save system. On the highest difficulty, not being able to save for sometimes hours at a time really does suck when you could die from a single random encouter at any time. At full health. Without getting a turn in.)

This may not necessarily apply to you, but those 30 minutes of walking would do wonders for the overall health of your average American.

Pretty much every country except for the USA seems to be a bull shit magic fantasy land. At least when living in any kind of larger city.

Psychonauts is really good and currently less than 2 bucks. There’s also a sequel, currently about 9 bucks. (Both in €)

VII is one of my favorites! It is quite long, yes, but it’s structured in such a way that you can easily take breaks inbetween mostly self-contained areas.

I’m still planning on going through the entire Trails series at some point, but I’m still debating on whether to play these or the originals.

On one hand, these are probably the most polished games in the series, right? Spoiling me for the rest of it. On the other hand, having played the demo for the first one, I still thought it felt somewhat awkward and clunky. Making me think I might not enjoy the originals.

What’s consensus on this? Does it make sense to start with the remakes?