[Game Journal] Cherrim Tries to Talk About Games Other Than Final Fantasy XIV

[Cherrim]

I can't speak for FF or FFII, but I really enjoyed III. I'm surprised how high you rate V because the story and characters (other than Galuf) are pretty meh, but if you like V you will definitely like III. Mechanically, V is a bit better than III but they're very similar. III's story is basically "V's story but good" though so if you enjoyed V you should love III.

Oh why did I think I'd already responded here what

I never got far in III back when I played it for DS but I don't remember much of anything drawing me in. I'm hoping to go through 1-3 this year just to mark them off my list tho. I've heard the first two are a slog but hearing III is like V makes me happy because I really did enjoy it. (As for rating it highly... I think I've always just been in Final Fantasy for the Girls and a game where 3/5 party members in a very old game are female is just an automatic point increase even if there's not a ton of concrete substance to work with lmao.)

 

[gimmepie]

Oh why did I think I'd already responded here what

I never got far in III back when I played it for DS but I don't remember much of anything drawing me in. I'm hoping to go through 1-3 this year just to mark them off my list tho. I've heard the first two are a slog but hearing III is like V makes me happy because I really did enjoy it. (As for rating it highly... I think I've always just been in Final Fantasy for the Girls and a game where 3/5 party members in a very old game are female is just an automatic point increase even if there's not a ton of concrete substance to work with lmao.)

I mean, fair enough lmao. III uses a job system very similar to V.

 

[Cherrim]

Log Update #25

First update of the year! I haven't really been up to much so it took me a while to decide on a new journal theme and write an entry. But it's already February so even if I haven't been playing much, I figured I should drop an update. Idk if I'm just gonna use this same picture of my wol every update this year or switch the footer up with other stuff I'm playing (or maybe just different pictures of my wol? probably just that actually). Time will tell!!

Update Summary

• COMPLETE: Down in Bermuda
• BEATEN: Thimbleweed Park
• BEATEN: Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
• Final Fantasy XIV: Patch 6.55
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village
• Muse Dash

Thimbleweed Park

I think I mentioned near the end of last year that I have a pretty cheap subscription to Google Play Pass right now and this is one of the games on it that I'd been eyeing for years because of its art style. It's a pixel art game with absolutely gorgeous backgrounds. I think the idea during development was that it would be a very traditional point-and-click adventure game where you have an inventory of random stuff that you pick up and use all over to solve the mystery but with some updates for the modern world.

However... I don't know that they updated it enough for me. The game environment looks great, sure, but it still very much has the awkward trappings of early adventure games. It's one thing to be an homage to the old games, but this doesn't really feel like decades of progress circling back to the genre. It just feels like a clunky point-and-click from the mid-90s with nicer backgrounds and crisper voice acting. I don't know if maybe the version I played felt especially cramped because I was just playing on my small phone screen, but the UI is so big in order to fit all the verb-commands you can do along with an inventory on screen at all times. It took up so much of the screen which was a shame because as I keep saying, the backgrounds are really nice! However they definitely get massive points for having a really, really good mobile system. They made it really easy to pick what you want even with your big fingers on a small screen, so it was nice they took the time to really get the mobile port right. But that doesn't really save how dated the gameplay feels. I even played the scaled back version, I think, where they took out a lot of the BS, and I still thought the game felt clunky and awkward. I think there's really just no good reason not to streamline a genre like this and this game showed me why. Thankfully they had a really robust "tips hotline" you could call with the in-game phones where it would give you different options for where you're stuck and I was always able to figure stuff out myself based on that. So at least it wasn't entirely clunky!

The story was pretty decent, I thought, and I liked most of the main characters, but I did find it pretty disappointing that like... you have all these characters to switch between but they never really feel like they have any good reason to work together by the end. I wish they'd dedicated some time to giving them an actual reason to join forces beyond the two FBI agents (who actually weren't even supposed to work together anyway!!). The humour in the game was exactly what you'd expect from the era. Really referential but also pretty charming.

I think for people who really loved this genre of game, especially with nostalgia goggles on for its inception, this game is probably pretty perfect. If you like the genre but find the earlier games sort of obligatory to play for being the foundation of the genre, this will feel similarly frustrating.

Status​

Beaten

System​

Android

Challenge​

Free Choice

Down in Bermuda

This is another Play Pass game I picked up. I sorta played it on and off over the course of a few days and often as something to occupy my hands while I watched a TV show with my mom. It's basically just a little puzzle game with an element of hidden object. There's only a few worlds to go through and nothing is terribly difficult, but it's a cute little game to pass the time with and the environments are all vivid and beautiful.

I keep playing games that make me feel a bit bad that I'm just playing these on my little phone as opposed to my iPad, but I'm definitely finding that there are WAY more games on Play Pass than there are on Apple Arcade so if I choose to continue this one, I definitely feel like I'm getting more value. But we'll see how many games I can complete during my preview and maybe I won't even need to renew. :')

Status​

COMPLETE

System​

Android

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

This is a replay. I've got the game from the library that includes all three main games and I really want to play through them all along with the like... beach episode thing? But it's just taking me forever. I know back when I played them all on Vita I got through each game with a platinum in about a week's time, if not much faster, but I guess knowing all the twists means I'm not as glued to my console trying to figure out what happens next. I really gotta haul ass though because someone's put a hold on this game and I don't know why my library has let me renew it twice since then but I'm being a jerk by not returning it and soon I'm sure they'll stop letting me renew. u_u

I always liked the first game better than the second and that definitely still holds true. While I really love some characters in 2, I also have a lot more that I really just cannot stand. They're very polarizing characters for me where either I love them or I hate them with barely any in-between whereas in 1 I think I just kinda liked everyone and really liked a few more. iirc the third one is similar to the second where some are great and some just aren't, but when I was reading the wiki for 2 today I stumbled across a character from 3 that I had utterly forgotten about lmao.

Anyway, my replay was fine. It's nice playing on a console that doesn't have achievements/trophies so I don't feel obliged to 100% these games all over again. I'm doing bare minimum plot and it's liberating. Especially because for whatever reason I think all the trial minigames are WAY worse in 2 compared to the first game. I thought I was just crazy but a friend mentioned it unprompted when I mentioned that I'd beaten this game on twitter and it's TRUE. It's like they made them more complex and more frustrating on purpose or something. I didn't remember that from my first playthrough and now I'm worried about v3. :( Plotwise, I remember really hating the big twist at the end of this game, but this time I didn't mind it so much. I think since I knew everything that was coming, I could watch for any and all hints about it, so it wasn't quite as blindsiding.

I... don't know why this is the only screenshot I took.

Status​

Beaten

System​

Nintendo Switch

Professor Layton and the Curious Village HD

I've been wanting to replay the Layton games for a while, especially with a new one on the horizon. I'd actually intended to replay my actual DS copy which I picked up in Japan way back when with the intention of using it to study but uh... I really wanted to see what the mobile port was like and my DS is not with me right now, so we're playing this off Play Pass instead!

I'm not very far at all since I've just played it a couple times in the car while my mother is at some medical appointments, but it seems like a great port so far. One quirk I kind of love is that I have a flip phone (z flip 4) so I can actually sort of... bend my phone in half and it looks like a DS screen kinda. I don't do it often because it's kind of awkward to play that way but sometimes I'm just too tickled not to. :'D I should look into more DS or GBA SP emulation on this thing.

Status​

Playing

System​

Android

Muse Dash

I don't have a lot to write about this yet because I only played for a bit today, but this is a really cute game! It's a rhythm game with no story to speak of, but the art style is cutesy and vibrant, the songs are bouncy and a good fit for a rhythm game, and the gameplay is great! It's kind of a battle sidescroller rhythm game with repetitive looking levels but they all look fantastic so I can't say I mind. It's less than $5 too, so it's an easy pick up if you like the genre. It looks like there's DLC for like $40 with hundreds of songs? That's kind of insane lol.

I was gonna pick it for February's Game Along since the theme is <10 hour games, but since there's no story I thought it might be a bit hard to tell when I've actually beaten it. I'll set it for when I have played all the songs, but I don't know if credits will technically roll.

Screenshots are kinda hard to take so I don't have any to share now but I'm prob coming up again the image limit anyway. :')

Status​

Playing

System​

Steam Deck

Final Fantasy XIV: Patch 6.55

Uhh... for the very first time since I caught up back before 5.3, I did not complete MSQ on the day of patch. In fact I still haven't done it! Idk why, I just do not really care about the story right now and am also not very excited for the story of Dawntrail, so I just haven't seen the point in going over to finish it up.

I did do the Manderville stuff on day one and I've since gotten all the relics I wanted. A very boring and uninspired grind! I hope next expansion the relic is a proper grind again. Just like... I still don't understand why they made this one uncapped endgame tomes the whole way instead of doing a more Heavensward-style relic where you could at least get the items you need from multiple sources. That way at least maybe stuff like Variant Dungeons wouldn't be totally dead on arrival. But oh well. A few hunt trains and I was done and now I've got BIS for finishing up the savage tier.

Another thing I've done these past few weeks instead of MSQ: I bugged my FC leader to give me access to the workshop so I could try to figure out subs and I gathered and crafted like a madman this past while to get a sub up and running along with the parts for 3 more subs when I unlock more. My FC is basically just me and a couple friends who are never on my server anyway so all the profits will likely be mine. >:3 I can make all the subs pink and no one can stop me!

Also look at my new glam it's right below. ♪ I figured out how to take gposes with transparent backgrounds and that's very exciting, although for what I'm not sure yet.

Status​

Playing

System​

PC

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[Cherrim]

Log Update #26

It's been kind of a while but I haven't really been up to a whole lot anyway so that's... fine. (Actually I wrote that sentence and then I went in and updated the little list directly below this and oh, I guess I kind of have been up to a lot.)

Update Summary

• COMPLETE: Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
• COMPLETE: Cat Museum
• COMPLETE: Doronko Wanko
• BEATEN: Professor Layton and the Curious Village
• BEATEN: Muse Dash
• BEATEN: Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls
• BEATEN: Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
• BEATEN: Assassin's Creed III: Liberation
• BEATEN: Final Fantasy XIV: Patch 6.55
• BEATEN: Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE
• Evoland
• Anonymous;Code

Cat Museum

This was my Game-Along game for the theme "short game". I'd seen it on Steam and was intrigued by, well, let's be honest, cats. But I also wishlisted it because it mentioned everything in it was hand drawn and that's cool! I ended up playing it on my phone because it was part of Google Play Pass or whatever it's called.

I do kinda wish I'd looked into the game a little bit more since it definitely had more of a horror aesthetic than I realized and that's not really my jam. Just a bit like... grotesque, in a lot of places? It's someone's jam, for sure, but not mine. I still enjoyed the game though. It's sort of a point and click but you can also pet cats and it sort of tried for a deep-ish story but I'm not sure I totally liked how it was told. Still made me cry though!!!!

Status​

Complete

System​

Android

Challenge​

Short Game

Muse Dash

I was originally gonna play this for the short game theme but then I wasn't sure if there was a clear enough "win" scenario, so I picked the above. But then I ended up playing this anyway. I dunno if it truly counts as beaten but I did clear every song so I think that's good enough!

This was a really well put-together rhythm title. The art style is really cute and colourful with really great lines and animations. The beatmaps are pretty good and intuitive and it's really satisfying taking out enemies to the music. The music itself was... well, it was fine. I had some songs I really enjoyed and a lot that I didn't care for at all. I don't have the DLC so I just had the base songs, but apparently the DLC (which is like 5x the price of the game itself lol) is super chonky and adds like hundreds of songs or something insane like that. I don't think I'll ever spring for it because I was pretty content with the length of the game, but if you like rhythm games, I'd definitely check Muse Dash out.

Status​

Complete

System​

Steam Deck

Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

So I beat Danganronpa 2 at the time of my last post here and had started on DRV3 (next section) but I kind of like... could not stop thinking about the series at all so I decided I'd just play this weird shooter spinoff too, so I grabbed my PS Vita from my dad's and then realized I could not for the life of me find my copy of the game so I ended up modding my Vita and well, now I have a lot of games. ;) It was surprisingly easy and I love the Vita as a console so I recommend it a lot.

Anyway! This game is like... not great. But not as bad as I thought it would be either. I remembered enjoying my time with it back when I platinumed it on first play but I kind of assumed that maybe I just was just remembering it wrong. But I actually enjoyed it again this time too. There's a lot of really annoying parts and I feel like bullet upgrades are kind of confusing but... I think there's just a certain charm to the game and it plays surprisingly well for being a handheld shooter.

I also think Komaru and Toko are extremely endearing together even though they start off as such opposites.

Status​

Beaten

System​

PS Vita

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

It took me so long to get into this for some reason... I remembered pretty quickly that while I LOVE some of the characters in this game, I also cannot stand a lot more of them so I was not really enjoying myself at all... but I really wanted to play the weird beach spinoff game that came in the Switch bundle and I knew I'd enjoy it more if I took the time to actually play V3 so that I was refreshed on its characters... #DoItForGonta.

I think I played the first two chapters over the course of three or four weeks and then forced myself to do the last few all in a week. It got better as I went and I actually had forgotten quite a bit of the game, surprisingly. The presentation of this game is so much more impressive than the others. The trials are so much more dynamic with the varying text and animations and the QOL all over is so much better since you can run around much easier. I wasn't huge on the like... instead of having lots of things to examine in each room, there's only a couple and the rest of the clutter can be whacked away and out of the room to clear it up and that's how you get extra monocoins. It was nice to have the source but I'd much rather have been able to examine more things for flavour text.

I remember being pretty ambivalent to the story of this game. I remember people haaated the twist in it so much when it came out because they thought it was insulting to fans of the series but honestly, I liked it back then and I liked it again this time. I guess part of it is people didn't like how it kinda closed the door to more games in the series but I'm sure they could manage it if they really wanted to keep milking it.

Anyway do not get this game on switch, the port is garbage. For whatever reason it just could not handle class trials. Playing for longer than a few minutes would make the menus slow to an absolute crawl (like 3fps) and sometimes if you opened the menu too often, even just to read back what people said, the music would unsync in a weird way. I had to constantly save the game because every time it switched to a new section of the trial, be it a minigame or a debate, there was a decent chance the entire game would crash and you'd lose all your progress. I don't understand how they managed to mess this game up because the other games worked just fine?? It's not like this is a AAA title from PS3 or something, it's a visual novel with little minigames from a less powerful handheld!

I did a bit of postgame stuff here and to be fair I think it has the best postgame of all of them, but in the end I was actually just missing the DR2 characters so I went back and completed that game by getting all the relationship link things and doing Island Mode. Putting that here so I don't have to do a whole heading for it. :P I'll also add here that I'm tentatively playing through the beach side game I mentioned above but honestly, I think the scope of it is way too big so I'm not certain I'll finish it. The board game in DRV3 that that game is based off of is much better.

Now I have to watch the anime even if I hear it's awful. u_u

Status​

Beaten

System​

Switch

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation

This was my game for the March theme, "stealth". I actually got this game in a bundle when I originally bought my Vita over a decade ago but I never played it. I always wanted to but by the end I recalled that I hadn't because people told me to play Assassin's Creed III first but even when I eventually did, I didn't like it at all so I didn't bother with the spinoff. And then this time around I forgot they were actually even related at all until the end lol.

Man, what to say about this game. I guess I'll start with the good, since there's not that much of it. I think it's pretty cool that they managed to get an Assassin's Creed game running on the Vita. The maps don't feel insanely small and the crowds are sufficiently crowded, which is genuinely impressive. The graphics aren't amazing but they also aren't awful. Like, characters look terrible but the maps look pretty and impressive. I think the combat feels okay enough. It's from the era of "counter was too OP so we nerfed it but as a result every battle kind of sucks" so I'm not huge on it, but eventually they gave me a whip and it made me OP again so I didn't mind too much. The missions were pretty varied and felt very Assassin's Creed.

Another thing I genuinely liked about the scope of the game was the idea of having different identities in one character. Aveline has three identities to choose from: Lady, Assassin, and Slave. You can change between the three in any dressing room and they each have their own advantages and disadvantages. I thought this was a really cool idea to use with their first female character because so much of socialization as a woman is like... code switching for different situations, so this felt like kind of an extension of that in a neat way. Very intersectional, too, since that's also something POC have always had to do, so combining it all into a gameplay mechanic actually felt a bit ahead of its time for me. Not sure if that's actually what they were going for, but the idea behind it worked really well for me. I loved it. Alas... I kind of didn't see the point in being anyone but the slave persona for nearly the whole game. As a Lady you're stuck in a poofy dress and you can like... power walk, but you can't jump or climb anything and you can't really fight at all save for your parasol gun. Guards don't attack you but groups of rough guys will harass you, so it's just annoying to get anywhere. As an Assassin, you have access to all your weapons and movement, but you're in a constant state of "guards will notice you" so you always have to use stealth to get around. But as a slave, not only can you be pretty invisible to enemy NPCs of all kinds, but you have all your movement, you have all your weapons but the pistol, and you can blend into other groups of slaves really easily during missions. I basically never saw the point in being either of the other two options except for missions where it forces one or the other on you. It's just a shame they made this mechanic the core of Aveline's identity and then it was largely just irrelevant to missions.

As for the bad... well... the game was ambitious but because of that, it's suuuuper glitchy. I was constantly finding that climbing around wasn't as snappy or as consistent as in proper console Assassin's Creeds. Sometimes the game really struggled with enemy AI and sometimes the game couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. On several occasions I'd clip through the environment and get stuck inside something's hitbox and be unable to get out. Once I walked into a room to engage with an NPC and Aveline walked in circles until I shut the game off instead of starting the cutscene like she was trying to get into the right position for it. The game also had a lot of frustrating design choices that were really obviously meant to use all of the Vita's features. Like, a lot of things were tied to the front and/or back touchscreens. Rowing a canoe was stroking the back of the vita on alternating sides, opening letters was running your finger and thumb along the top on both back and front like a letter opener, and the worst: in order to see invisible ink on letters, you had to hold the vita's back camera up to a bright light but it was so finicky it only ever worked if i held it right up to my phone's flashlight... very annoying when you're playing a bit before bed!

The game also just felt dated in a lot of other ways. The characters didn't feel very consistent and while the plot twist was kinda good, the cutscenes were so bad! The script was just awful for this game. You could really tell they came up with a bunch of map/mission concepts and then struggled to fit in a coherent story. Generally they were too short to make me care about anything but then by the end they started making them longer but also extremely boring so I definitely zoned out sometimes and that did not help my story comprehension. :/

Also part of the reason I was never at all interested in the proper console Assassin's Creed III was because in the promo stuff it showed Connor running through snowy areas way too easily and as someone from a snowy climate it always bothered me. But for this whole game, my mantra to keep going was just "at least you aren't running unbelievably through snow" so what happens at the end? You join Connor for a mission in the snow. I am sorry Ubisoft, but while I can suspend my disbelief for the iconic dive-into-hay, I will die on the hill of a Louisianan would NEVER be able to scale a frozen waterfall. Are you kidding me??

In the very last segment of the game, not only did I get clipped into the environment and have to restart, but the game launched me into the abyss at one point and then also glitched out the enemy I was trying to assassinate so I had to restart THREE TIMES because the game was glitchy. I have to hand it to Ubisoft... it was probably the perfect sendoff for this game, lol.

Status​

Beaten

System​

PS Vita

Challenge​

Stealth

Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE

I played this for the "Visual Novel" theme this month. I got it from the library and had to rush through it in about a week. It was... fun, I suppose. I liked the characters well enough and the gameplay was... fine. I'm not sure why the game didn't totally click for me. I really loved the setting and the environments and that's kind of it. I think a lot of the mysteries were a bit predictable and the whole mystery labyrinth mechanic and its mini games, which was the core of the game, fell a bit flat for me.

One thing I did like, although it's a major spoiler so don't read if you haven't played, was the way they lampshaded the pink blood. At first you think it's just a reference to Danganronpa and something they're going to carry into this series as well, since it obviously took a lot of inspiration and instruction from DR as a mystery series, but then by the end everyone's like "WAIT the pink blood IS weird!!!" and it becomes a plot point that it's not red ahaha. I thought that was a really cute way to introduce this series, since it's obvious that we're going to get more games in it. I wish I had a screenshot of the cityscape but for some reason I don't. Just trust me that the vibes are great and it's fun to run around in and get to know.

Status​

Beaten

System​

Switch

Challenge​

Visual Novel

Final Fantasy XIV: Patch 6.55

Omg for once I've done like a million things on FFXIV. I finally caught up on MSQ so I can mark this beaten now. It was fine. I like Wuk Lamat and especially her banter with Erenville (I'm so excited for him to be more of a main character in Dawntrail).

Speaking of Dawntrail, I am terrified for the update because I hate what happened to my character in the benchmark. I know Yoshi-P said it shipped with the wrong lighting system in character creation but most of my issues weren't even really related to that. My markings were invisibly light, my fangs got filed down, my lips are wrong... I really hope it's all stuff that gets fixed in 7.0 but I'm not holding my breath. It kinda seems like they just got lazy with character edits and did one half of the races and just copy/pasted all the features over to the other, making them less unique. I guess we'll see.

Onto more exciting things, @Austin and I had a sham wedding for the glam! It was fun! More fun has been abusing the teleport ring for important things like cheesing jump puzzles or teleporting 3 feet to the right. I forgot to hide my chat in like EVERY SINGLE WEDDING SCREENSHOT so,,,, the only good screenshot I have is the group shot. (Austin let me make the theme of the wedding Pink!)

And continuing on from pink, my static finally cleared p12s! It took us absolutely forever possibly due to a combination of taking a lot of nights off over the course of prog and most of us not playing much outside of raid so I think we weren't as focused as we had been previous tiers. This was my first tier tanking savage for real though and I feel pretty good about how it went. At the very least I am not being forced to go back to dps by my static so I guess there's that lol. We're gonna dip our toes into TEA a little bit before DT comes out, so I'm excited to see what ultimate raiding is like!

I don't think I have much else to say about XIV. I've been playing more lately since PC's group has been a lil more active and that's fun. I upgraded the RAM in my computer yesterday and now I've got 32gb which means I can go back to being able to have my browser open alongside XIV without the latter chugging to a stop. Exciting!

Status​

Beaten

System​

PC

Anonymous;Code

This is overdue so I have to rush it before I incur late fees like I did with Rain Code, but I'm enjoying it so far. I'm not very good at rushing it because I keep playing FFXIV instead but I still wanna finish it before it goes back. I'm not very far at all though so wish me luck aaaaa.

I really like how lively the characters are and the additional popups on the screen are pretty neat for a visual novel. I can already tell I'm going to love the ludonarrative synergy in this game. ♥

Status​

Playing

System​

Switch

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