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


Log Update #38

Beat a few more games...!
  • COMPLETED Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney HD
  • COMPLETED DLC Quest
  • COMPLETED WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter
  • COMPLETED Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
  • BEATEN Final Fantasy XVI
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney HD
I needed a Steam Deck game for winding down in bed at the end of the day and I just finished up my 123/AAI playthroughs and I'd picked up the Apollo Justice trilogy over the holidays so I figured I'd finish up a replay of the series with this.

First up, I was very surprised at the art style... it's like upscaled sprites but still with very thin linework. It's a bit weird at first but it looks very slick and I love it WAY more than the art style of the 1-3 trilogy HD games. It kinda reminds me of like... Blazblue with its intricate spritework. I think it's not as nice as the Edgeworth games I just played though which perfectly rode the line between faithful sprite recreation and not being ugly. But like on the whole I vastly prefer this to how bad the 1-3 trilogy looks to me after having played them on DS. I've always loved the spritework in Ace Attorney so much and that was suuuch a big loss in the move to modern consoles. I wish they'd redo the Phoenix Wright trilogy to update the artwork to be like this. Maybe modders can do it?? [EDIT AFTER WRITING:] Actually the artwork isn't spritework, it just looked like it when scaled to Steam Deck screen size. It was simply very, very well done linework that mimicked the original sprites REALLY well. My absolute kingdom for them to remake AA1-3 with this style instead of the godawful HD style they picked originally that ruins all the beautiful detail work of the sprites.


For the game itself... I really loved Apollo Justice when it came out. I think as a standalone game I might have enjoyed it more than the original trilogy. But having played all the games and coming back to this one after a long time away... idk. I mean I still enjoyed myself and I really like the characters, but there were more plotholes than I remembered and it's extra frustrating knowing that Apollo never really gets Justice (heh) in any of his games because he keeps having to share the spotlight with others. Back when I first played this game, I am pretty sure my takeaway was "yeah, Phoenix sort of stole the show by the end, but this was only Apollo's first game and they probably wanted to do it this way to sort of have Phoenix pass the torch for more focused Apollo games in the future" and then that... didn't really happen in a satisfying way.

That said, while I've played all the games after this, I've never replayed any of the other games in AJ's trilogy, so I'm gonna go in with an extremely open mind because I want to like them more this time around than I did when I first played them.
Status​
Completed

System​
Steam Deck

DLC Quest
I was feeling pretty tired one night and just couldn't muster up the energy to do anything other than play a mindless game so I scrolled through my steam list and noticed this game. Haven't played it since close to when it came out so I booted it up and quickly played through both campaigns.

I didn't remember much of this game but it did come back to me as I played. According to my Steam achievements, I played it a week after it came out but couldn't finish the second campaign. But I did this time so that's character development! (It had a LOT more exacting platforming than the "base game" so I'm less surprised that I struggled back then and more surprised that I managed it now... I really HAVE gotten better at platformers in the last 12 years!!!)

Anyway, cute silly little game. It pokes fun at the idea of DLC which, while not terribly new by the time this game came out, was still not as mainstream. You can tell it's old though because while the DLC stuff is kinda evergreen, the predatory stuff that the game riffs on has shifted to lootbox stuff which is visibly missing in this game. (That said the creator did make a second game called Loot Box Quest which is a clicker idle game so RIGHT up my alley and you know I'm going to buy it the moment the next steam sale starts.)

There are a lot of stupid little bits in this but I think my fave one is the stupid horse armour dlc actually coming in clutch at the end. Though honourable mention certainly goes to the Canadian Speech DLC in the second campaign.
Status​
Completed

System​
PC

Final Fantasy XVI
Well, this certainly was... a game! I was fairly excited when this was announced because it was pretty much right off the heels of Shadowbringers in FFXIV, which was the best Final Fantasy story I'd ever played. I figured with Yoshi P at the helm of another numbered FF, we might see something really great. And then he kept doing interviews during the publicity circuit and managed to completely mangle any excitement I had for the game, so I really only picked this up because: A) PS5 exclusive, B) it was like $35, C) feels weird having beaten every other mainline FF besides the 11 MMO. Of course, in the time it took me to actually finish my copy, not only did it come out on PC but I've also built a PC that could play it really well LMAO. Alas, I still finished on PS5 which was fine. Still much cheaper there lol.

Anyway, the game was very boring. When they said they took a lot of inspiration from Game of Thrones, it feels like they completely misunderstood what actually made GoT great. It wasn't the gratuitous violence, it was the political intrigue. They basically took all the parts I only tolerated from GoT and highlighted it while completely leaving out the parts that I tolerated all the violence for.

Clive is a nothingburger of a protagonist. The only thing I really enjoy about him is the fact that it's hilarious that every time you encounter, like, anyone, all they can say about him is he's hot. Jill is only there to prop up Clive and everyone else is just... in and out of the story too much to get attached. I feel like the only characters I really liked were NPCs and that may well just be because they didn't overstay their welcome. The game does sooo much timeskipping, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it usually uses the timeskips as an excuse to simply not show anything happening. I don't always believe "show, don't tell" is the be all end all of storytelling, but it was so ridiculous any time there'd be a skip as something really important happened and you're sitting there like... huh? No, show me the fallout! But then for like 5 in-game hours you have to sit there and listen to character imply how terrible something was but at least it's all good now and it just sucks because you feel like you missed out on the most important part which was the character connections and growth as a result of the story unfolding. And this happens over and over again!

Battles feel like a chore because your attack options are very limited at the start and once they expand they're just... not very fun or engaging for an action game. Dodging is slow enough that it feels like maybe you're just not supposed to do it except the game rewards you for it and it's quite clear that it's an important mechanic to deal with. The only time battles were genuinely fun is when you were doing an Eikon battle and even then it's just... alright, I guess, since those also mostly just felt like glorified cutscenes.


Anyway the game was very pretty but it didn't really give me much of a fantasy feel because they tried to make the environments all realistic with the exception of ruins which weren't really used well in the story. And I guess the giant crystals but since those were few and far between I keep forgetting about them. Also the maps were boring to run through because there wasn't really any reward for exploring them. You could pick up items but they weren't useful for anything at all--crafting exists in the game but you can so rarely upgrade stuff anyway it's never worth it.

I guess I'm glad I finally played it, though. I have no intention of ever playing the DLC and I hope they never let the writer of this game near another Final Fantasy again.
Status​
Beaten

System​
PS5

WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter
This is a game I played the demo for during the last Steam Next Fest and I loved it soooo much. I missed out buying it during its release discount and was kicking myself, so the very next time it went on sale, I snapped it up immediately, and no regrets!!

I actually highly recommend everyone play the demo because it's one of the most unique demos I've ever played. It frames the full game as, like, the protagonist going to a fortune teller to get advice on whether or not to take the temp job and you get to play through some partial days and it's a really good hook for the story and also lets you play some full levels so to speak. And then that framing is nowhere in the full game, which is just the aftermath of taking the job. It's a fun way to do it and it feels like you're getting extra bonus story.

The gameplay is pretty fun, if simple. You are watching over a vendor stall for cleaning magical artifacts so you have to clean the items everyone passing by hands over to you. You can spin the item to check out every nook and cranny and use different tools (that largely all work the same way) to remove different blemishes on the item. Some of them are dangerous so you have to be really careful with where you click while others are tricky and magical so you have to figure out the trick to finding all the things on them. While you're doing that and making slight choices, a conspiracy unfolds around you.


But what really drew me in and is what I will fondly remember the most is the writing. It's really silly and made me laugh a lot. You play as a goblin who really isn't taking stuff seriously and your dialogue options reflect it and sometimes it's just so ridiculous. the characters are also pretty neat. There's a lot of recurring NPCs who have a whole schtick, like this one spider-looking NPC who keeps bringing you more and more dangerous artifacts to clean in the hopes that you'll die in the process, expressing disappointment every time you successfully hand it back to her. Or the mouse catcher who always sneaks off without paying. The artifacts are just as much characters as the actual characters sometimes, too, and the fact that they're magical makes them really interesting to figure out and clean. Even the background NPCs who walk by on the busy street while you work the stall are interesting to watch with their bizarre alien-like designs. This game is really just such a treat!

My literal only complaint about the game is just that I wish it was a bit faster to play through it. I keep missing this really specific thing to get an achievement and it's on like day 6 of 7 and it's incompatible with some of the other achievements I'd missed so I've played through the game like 4+ times now and last time I went through I accidentally skipped it because I was trying to mash through dialogue so fast and wasn't paying attention, augh! It leads to the only achievements and ending I'm missing and I'm gonna have to do it all again but I think I'll try to save it for a year or so from now when I'm just kind of itching to experience the game again.
Status​
Beaten

System​
PC

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
Okay, I have to say I do not understand how this game got good reviews. It has some strengths but I don't think they're good enough to offset how boring and uninspired the rest of the game is. I'd never played anything else in the series so a few little references to previous games definitely went over my head, but I think the games are standalone enough that you can play any of them and not feel lost.

That said, the gameplay feels very dated. I think it's basically a slightly more streamlined version of the original games from the 80s. I can see how it might appeal to people in terms of giving you a sense of agency over the investigation, but the fact that there don't seem to be branching paths just makes it feel pointless and annoying in the end. Instead of doing what comes naturally to advance conversations, you're doing this weird song and dance where you ask about a topic until your conversational partner clams up, then you have to figure out how to get them to keep talking but usually it's just some weird combo of talking about other things, showing them something, sometimes looking at them... it's generally not hard to figure out what the game wants because you can always stop and "think" about what to do and it'll often give you a hint, but it was just so tedious going through all the options trying to figure out what weird quirk of writing will finally let something happen. And this is how every single conversation works. It allowed for a few ludonarrative things like one time near the end when someone tells you to stop your investigation and go home and the choice to proceed is to actually hit the "save and quit" option which is usually just for, you know, saving the game and quitting to the main menu, so that was cute. But on the whole, I don't think that anything gained by having this be so convoluted was worth how annoying it was to play this game. But then if they streamlined conversations, the game would probably be half the length because the writing would have to be much tighter... and it's already a pretty short game.

Storywise... I don't know that I've ever experienced such a boring murder mystery. The characters were pretty bland and the POV characters barely did anything at all. Sooo much time was spent on characters that were not relevant to the story. Like the teacher? He's in so many scenes in the early game that amount to absolutely nothing and he's basically just there to hit on his old kouhai (from like? middle school? dude you're a teacher who's graduated university WTF are you doing still pining over someone you knew for a year in middle school) and then make her assure him he's a good teacher when he gets down in the dumps. It was too much, especially with the male detective who, while probably my favourite character at the end, was kind of an annoying womanizer earlier on so going from one character talking to the teacher to the other character talking to the police detective was like ugggghh make it stop.

There were 12 chapters in this game and it truly felt like nothing happened at all for the first 2/3rds of it. You learn the basic details of the case in the prologue and then learn almost nothing else new for several chapters. Any time you do learn a snippet of something, it comes with so much fluff from characters who aren't interesting in the slightest, especially early on AND it's almost always something you'd already deduced yourself from the existing evidence. I will say it picked up near the end and some sections even had proper tension to keep me interested but... even then they'd drop it pretty quickly in favour of spinning your wheels again. Frustratingly, most of the mystery is resolved after the game concludes in an epilogue that is almost entirely just a long anime cutscene (the only one in the game like that). It was so, so unsatisfying! Looking online a lot of people seemed to like this but I hated it because locking basically the entire mystery behind the epilogue meant I didn't really get to know the characters involved at all, most of the investigation I'd done and filled into my notebook in the game was entirely meaningless to the protagonist, and I just didn't feel much of anything except annoyance at the situation. I think people might only like it because it is DARK for a Nintendo game and maybe that's all they ever play and want a change? I have no idea. I did not enjoy basically any part of it.

I can at least say what kept me playing even through the sheer boredom of the first half of the game was the visuals. This game is GORGEOUS. The backgrounds are beautiful, the characters you speak to are slightly animated in live2d style but in ways that look pretty natural and are more engaging than just a still sprite. Even really minor characters seemed to shine. There was one point that impressed me a lot which is when you're talking to this elderly lady in an old folks home and at some point a caregiver goes to get a photo album from her room for the two of you and when she comes back , she appears in the frame and leans down to hand it over. It was just such a minor interaction that in any other game, no one would ever think to fault the devs for just letting it happen off-screen, but they included the whole exchange. idk why that struck me so much, but it just felt like a lot of care went into staging each scene and bringing the characters to life.

Anyway, I guess I'm glad I played it but I will never play anything from this series again. It was not worth the effort it took to play, although thankfully it was a game from the library so at least I didn't have to spend money on it too. I guess I didn't think to take any screenshots of this game so I guess go look up how pretty it is and then don't play it unless you need a good way to fall asleep. (I did actually play this before bed most nights and damn if I didn't play like 5 min at a time because it was boring enough that sleep came very quickly.)
Status​
Completed

System​
Switch

 

Log Update #39

Got an absolute pile of games in here thanks to a big archipelago run I did with a friend, lmao. It got me back on track with my gaming challenge... at least at the point that I finished them. I might be behind again now, I haven't done the math.

I'm having computer troubles so most of my screenshots for this entry are locked away on a drive I don't currently have access to but I will edit this later once my computer is back up and running with the screenshots. I really wanted to just post this and get it out of the way tonight, though, because if I had to write about a bunch of June games in addition to all these Archipelago games I'd probably explode.
  • COMPLETED The Rise of the Golden Idol - The Lemurian Phoenix DLC
  • BEATEN Chrono Trigger: Jets of Time (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN DLC Quest (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Donkey Kong 64 (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Doronko Wanko (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix+ (Archipelago Randomizer x2)
  • BEATEN MS Paint (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Stardew Valley (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Archipelago Randomizer)
  • BEATEN Tales of Arise
Archipelago Runs
It would take absolutely forever to go through all of the Archipelago games I played in May so I am simply going to consolidate it all here and be as brief as possible. Basically, my friend and I wanted to do a big test run of a whole bunch of games to see if we liked them in Archipelago, either by switching the parameters of our randomization settings or trying out games that were in beta/alpha to see how they played. So we played about 10 games each and then PC did a little Archipelago right in the middle of that so I tossed KH2 in for that too. (And then I decided that I will simply be including every game I beat this year in my list even if there are doubles... since lord knows I'll probably beat KH2 again for another AP run!)

My takeaway from the big AP run my friend and I did was that it is a very bad idea to try to do like 10 games all at once. In theory it sounded fine because hey, each game should be blocked at the same rate as all the others, right? But in practice it was just like... certain games fell by the wayside and I wouldn't be able to play them for a few days of our progress and by then the unlocks had blown them wide open. So it was pointless to try to learn how the randomizer progression worked in them because suddenly everything felt like it was available. It was just too many games for me to juggle and my enjoyment of them suffered as a result. So a lot of them I'll have to go back and give another chance to in a more chill run, I think.

Chrono Trigger: Jets of Time
I love this game in theory for Archipelago but it's definitely very unfinished in its implementation. It's got a solid base in the Jets of Time randomizer, but a lot of things like chests or entire segments of the game are completely unprogrammed for AP so it was hard to tell when something would be worthwhile to spend time on or totally pointless. Sometimes even in the same screen, one chest would send out an AP item and the other wouldn't be programmed into anything so it'd just give the normal item. I think one day this could absolutely be a staple game for me but I'll probably wait until it's better implemented in the future before I try it again.

DLC Quest
I played this legit last month to get a feel for it after not touching it in a decade because I knew I wanted to try out the AP version and... well... I didn't love it. I dunno if maybe I just got bad RNG or if it also fell victim to the abovementioned "too many unlocks to understand progression" thing I mentioned above, but I got blocked like immediately and then couldn't backtrack to do anything and thought I was stuck for like the entirety of the AP run only to realize near the end that if I'd just started the game over instead of loading my save that I could beat the whole thing fine. But that felt really antithetical to the whole idea of Archipelago so I just didn't enjoy it at all. That said, I was pretty tickled when I started up the game for the first time and immediately loaded in a death trap and died in the opening cutscene LMAO.

Donkey Kong 64
I think this was the game in my list that I was most excited for and then it was the biggest disappointment. BUT I think I just got really unlucky and got a terrible seed for my first time playing. My earlier world unlocks were almost exclusively all the last worlds that you visit so the progression of those worlds expected you to have all these really early-game things like weapons and special abilities and I just had nothing. And weirdly I never unlocked any of them until basically the very, very end. So every time I loaded the game to play, which was often because I reeeeally wanted to have fun with this, there was basically nothing I could do. Or at least, nothing exciting. Even by the end I'd basically finished the game while doing barely any checks because the go mode parameters were just slowly handed to me while none of the early stuff ever unlocked to make it easy to actually play the game and do things. But like, surely that has to mostly just be poor RNG and if I'd gotten better worlds or character upgrades early on, I'd have had more to engage with. So I'll definitely try it again.

Doronko Wanko
I really loved this game so I was excited to see it in the beta/alpha list and then was on the github to get it going and was like omg Vendily! I know her!! :O I hadn't played Doronko Wanko since basically the day it released so I kinda forgot how the progression was supposed to go and spent most of my time in the game confused but it worked out in the end. It was a nice game to open up a lot right at the start since there were so many checks you can do even without progression since most of the house is available to you. I'm not sure I'd do it again anytime soon but I did have fun.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep
Ah, BBS, my beloved. It's my fave KH game so I was really excited to check out the AP version and I had a lot of fun. I did Aqua's route ofc and I think it went fine! I do think maybe I set my level multiplier a bit too high because I breezed through the game and not to toot my own horn but I've played it enough that I'm really good at it so I probably needed the extra challenge of being underlevelled to feel satisfied lol.

Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix+
The only change I made to this one (besides playing on Critical because I'm no longer a randomizer coward) is I enabled bounties and I thought that was neat, even if the bounties seemed kinda default? Maybe I need to actually turn superbosses back on but I got burnt on my first ever archipelago for last year's get-together where 5qwerty needed something locked behind Lingering Will and I was too out of practice in the game to do the fight. T_T Maybe it won't be so bad if I try it again? Surely I can do most of them...

MS Paint
Okay this was the big surprise. I LOVED this in my Archipelago run. It was ridiculous and challenging and fun. It was perfect!!! It's basically MS Paint in the browser in JavaScript but all your tools, colour palette slots, and even your canvas sizes are thrown into the AP mix. The point of the game is you upload a picture and then you have to redraw it perfectly. It seems to mostly take general shape and colour into account so it doesn't need to be exactly but there is like a difference filter you can add to get an idea of what should go where. It ended up working (albeit kinda poorly) on my iPad thank god, so I was able to draw directly on the screen with my Apple pencil which made things a lot easier. It was SO much fun trying to get things as close as possible, especially this one night when I thought I could beat it (get to 80% match) but I was missing a canvas size upgrade so I couldn't quiiiite make it, but I got DAMN close, I was at like 78%, mighta dipped into 79% once... it was such a fun exercise picking colours and trying to match a gradient to eke out just a bit more percentage. I didn't end up doing it and had to wait for the canvas upgrade but I still loved every second of it. :D



I was gonna go hunt down my old wacom bamboo tablet at my dad's house at some point before my next AP run just so I could do it on my computer and then in the interim I got an insane deal on a Cintiq so guess who's playing it with a fuckin Cintiq screen tablet next time babyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!

Ori and the Blind Forest
This was just plain fun in Archipelago. I got lucky and got some useful movement tools really early so it felt pretty open world. I ended up getting "stuck" at some point and didn't come back to the game until near the end because I couldn't figure out what would get me out of there only to realize shortly before beating the game that the randomizer enables teleporting from everywhere and I just didn't know the keystroke to do it lol. Oops! So I probably could have played this more consistently and had even more fun. I'll definitely play it again in future runs here and there.

Stardew Valley
I had fun playing this because I haven't played SDV in a while and there were new things in it that I hadn't seen before BUT... I did not enjoy this at all LOL. It was so slow and such a timesink. Part of it was certainly that I was playing it too normally instead of minmaxing stuff like growing fall/winter seeds early in the greenhouse (it didn't even occur to me that I could and should be doing that till I'd hit a second season lol) and another part was that other games kept needing things from fish and I hate fishing in Stardew Valley with all of my being but didn't have my usual "skip fishing minigame" mod on because I didn't see it in the compatibility list (though in retrospect I think the ones in the list were almost entirely just additional content mods that the AP mod was written to hook into and also randomize). I just spent forever in this game every time I played and it felt so tedious to complete the . I think I would have really enjoyed it if it was the only game I was playing in an Archipelago because then the time I'd be dedicating to it would feel more in line with what I'd expect but as it was, I probably spent like 3-4x longer playing this than almost any other game and it was just not fun. I will never touch this in Archipelago again lol.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
I had fun with this but I think it suffered a bit in execution because I hadn't touched the game since I got it a few years ago and forgot how it went AND since I was only playing most of my games once every few days to try to keep my head above water in all of them, every time I'd hop on I'd have all this stuff and it was hard to tell what the progression of the game was supposed to look like. As such, I could see myself playing it again in a smaller run or one where most of my other games weren't also masses of confusion. :)

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, learned a lot about my limits in Archipelago and learnt whether or not I like a good handful of games that I'd never tried before. Or at least got an inkling of it. It was a great experience even if in future I will definitely limit myself way more lol.
Status​
Beaten

System​
PC

The Rise of the Golden Idol - The Lemurian Phoenix DLC
Time for another Golden Idol DLC!

I enjoyed this overall but one of the cases just did not click with me at ALL. I used my first ever hint across both games, iirc, and had to use all three hints because I still just wasn't getting it lol. It's been too long since I played for me to remember what my issue was but I remember staring at the one level for like 2-3 hours straight just trying to will myself into understanding what it wanted, redoing everything over again. I thought I'd be mad about using the hints but considering I still didn't really get it even after all three of them, I'm just gonna call it a fundamental disconnect between me and the devs. Probably my fault or maybe the hints just weren't quite leading enough in the right way, but it was not a very good time.

Thankfully, one of the last levels WAS a good time. It was like entirely language decryption and ohhh my gosh I had so much fun puzzling it out. It went really fast because that's my jam and I was very into it and am pretty good at it, but I don't mind. It was my favourite part of the DLC by a longshot! I hope there's more of it in the last two DLCs which it feels like I will have to wait a good while for since they're in Q3 and Q4. :')

I picked up a few Golden Idol-likes in the past week and I spy a bundle in Steam's latest puzzle event that has a couple other games that come highly recommended to people who like these games so I might go for these pretty soon when I get the itch between these DLCs.
Status​
Completed

System​
PC

Tales of Arise
Hoo boy... well! The evil has been defeated! This month's game along theme was to play a game you'd started but never finished. I didn't have very many games that fit the bill because honestly I've gotten very good at finishing what I start. I almost picked a really old game to play from before I got good about this, but... then I remembered Arise. And hot off the trail of finishing Final Fantasy XVI despite not vibing with it at all in order to top off my Final Fantasy mainline games, I figured it was only fair I do the same for Tales. Both were on my goals to play this year and I'm thankful I picked Arise for this challenge because without the end-of-the-month deadline looming over me, I think I would have done what I did last time where I dragged my feet playing so I didn't get attached to the characters and then just stopped midway through, never to return. But I didn't! I beat it!

The first time I played Arise was fairly shortly after it came out. I've felt so bad about not finishing it for ages because a friend bought it for me and then I just... couldn't get into it. I thought I'd given it a fair shot and, to be fair, I suppose I kind of did, but where I thought I'd played 25+ hours I'd actually only played like... 15 tops. I'd gotten all the characters but I must have been so disengaged with the story and party that I'd leave the game idling so even though it said my file had 25 hours on it or whatever, by the time I got to that point in this month's playthrough, I only had about 15. I had briefly considered continuing my old file since I was pretty sure I remembered the story beats, but ended up not doing that and I am SO glad I did, because this time around I vibed a lot more with the characters. I don't think I'd have gotten attached at all if I'd tried to continue where I'd left off.

To start with the good: I actually quite liked the party by the end. They were a bit all over the place in terms of importance (Alphen and Shionne have the spotlight, which is fine, and then Dohalim and Rinwell get a lot to do and are very important to the plot and then... poor Law and Kisara could basically have been removed and I don't think a whole lot would have changed lol.) I ended up really enjoying the party's vibe together and I was even rooting for the hets by the end. I do wish I liked them all, like, more, but even the things I hated about them in the beginning were explained and I found endearing by the end. Several of them grew quite a lot as they opened up to each other and it really felt like a Tales party. I also thought the plot was pretty engaging, especially after the twist in the middle. (This seems to be a point of contention where people either love the first half of the story and hate the second half or vice versa... I guess I fall in the latter camp but also the story itself is so quintessentially Tales that I feel like expecting either part to go differently is just weird lol.

Also the visuals in the game are absolutely gorgeous. Everywhere you go, it looks like a painting and the character models were beautiful. They put a lot more care into the character animation this time, not just in the gratuitous mocap fight scenes here and there but even normal cutscenes... the characters were so expressive, from minute eye movements to facial expressions. I hated the new skit format at first, especially since they were so overused compared to normal cutscenes, but by the end I didn't mind them at all because you got a lot more closeups and character focuses with them. I still kinda miss the super anime styled stuff, but it didn't feel like THAT much of a departure. I also really loved the music in a lot of the game. This is the first Tales game in a long, long time where I wanted to go listen to the soundtrack because I liked so much of the music vs games like Berseria or Xillia where I really only liked a handful of tracks, if that.



However... man. I mean, I did enjoy the game by the end, but I think that only came after I set the battle difficulty to very easy. It's not like the game was particularly hard outside of the first few bosses (more on that later), but it's just... so poorly designed! Battles are mainly against trash mobs you run into in dungeons and fields but they are SUCH damage sponges that all I ever wanted to do was avoid them because every time it would mean a couple minutes or more of relentless battle. And then the bosses were always such a total departure from the playstyle you build up from all the long, boring battles, to the point of utter frustration early on. It was so much better when HP was gutted so things didn't take forever anymore and I didn't groan upon entering a battle but it should never have gotten to that point. Plus, the whole "healing and doing field actions take up your limited cure points" just sucked. I get what they were going for but I completely hated it and the early game economy felt so punishing.

The through thread of this is of course that I think the beginning of this game is the absolute worst that Tales has ever had to offer. The characters are all immensely unlikeable at the start. Our introduction to Alphen is basically this mysterious dude who can't really think for himself. Shionne's first couple hours are her being aloof and rude, refusing to the generosity of Dahnan rebels to wear the clothing they provide and dragging you to some random place for prettier clothes, making her seem shallow af. Rinwell joins and is so vitriolically antagonistic and prejudiced towards Shionne that even as you sympathize with her because she's a slave biting back at her enslaving class, you're sitting there like whoa chill out and it feels BAD. Then Law is hotheaded and annoying. Dohalim goes the complete opposite way and Kisara has like nothing going for her outside of hating her brother and then doing a 180 and being obsessed with him. (She... doesn't really evolve a whole lot past that, unfortunately, except I guess she gains the ultimate waifu traits of doing laundry and cooking good food lol.) Like, I had to try SO SO hard to find any of these characters endearing this time. I think I got luckier this time around and ended up seeing a few more silly skits than I saw the first time I played and the levity really helped the tone of the game, but man. It really was a struggle until later in the game when the characters all feel more balanced.

Even setting aside the characters, because maybe it's more personal preference than I think and they just didn't vibe with me then, the beginning of the game just feels... so poorly designed? The first town you get to after getting proper control of your characters has a handful of sidequests. TWO of these sidequests are meant to be completed in the endgame. The fuck????????? One is for an optional boss that is LEVEL 40 (I could not do this even after I had a full party because I was only level 20 at the time and still getting one shot) and the other is like some fashion sidequest that took so long to proc an update to that I was literally in the second half of the game before I could go back to see it and when I beat the game, honestly, I hadn't seen another update to it. Maybe I didn't engage with some system in the game enough for it to trigger but I felt like I was doing pretty much everything as soon as it was available to me. Either way, having those be in the first set of quests you pick up just feels awful because you can't do them so it starts to feel like it's pointless to be picking up sidequests in the first place and/or trains you to just hold off on doing stuff indefinitely.

Beyond the quests, I felt like the game was soooo bad at teaching me how to play it. The first zone is fine, I guess. And then you get to the second zone where you get Rinwell, the mage whose special ability is to steal spells from enemies. And then it proceeds to not really give you any spellcasting enemies for like 2-3 dungeons straight???? Furthermore, her spells when you get her are restricted to a wind spell and a water spell. Almost all the enemies in this country are resistant to water and absolutely none of them are weak to wind, so she just kinda feels useless the whole time. WTF? Why?? One thing I often appreciate about video games is when you sort of notice that you're being guided into making the right choices based on your options or you're naturally shepherded into doing something over another. Arise doesn't do this at ALL and it's just so baffling because it's not like it would have been hard. Like, sure, you get Rinwell in the icy place and most of the enemies are water/ice element. Just make all the others weak to wind? Make more of them spellcasters so at least you can practice using her special ability, even if she'd be stealing spells of the resistant element? It's such a weird choice.

Anyway, I probably could rant more about the game but I just don't care enough to. I'm sure if I liked the game more and/or was more into Tales at the moment I'd rant for ages about what didn't work for me but I just feel very apathetic about the game. I know it doesn't seem like it because I wrote more here than I've written about any other game in a very long time BUT with Tales like... I haaated Zestiria and especially Xillia 2 and at the height of my investment in this fandom I could write essays upon essays about all the things that didn't work or were poorly designed in them. I'm sure if challenged I could do the same with Arise but I also just like... don't care about it enough to. Sometimes I'd be playing and I'd literally think "wow if I cared more about this game, I'd be really mad at this part". But I didn't and now I don't even remember what those parts are because my brain smoothed over them.

I'm so glad I played this because it means I've officially beaten every single non-spinoff Tales game. No "well FFXI is an MMO...." caveat like with Final Fantasy, I've just straight up played all these games. And I had to know Japanese for a good number of them because they never came out in the west! I'm proud of that and even if I didn't like Arise all that much, it feels good to have finished it.

OH--wait one more thing, I was having so many computer troubles during this and it was such a relief to have Steam just work so seamlessly between systems. I had to send some parts in from my new computer to be fixed (;_;) so I haven't had access to it for about two weeks but my save was waiting for me on my laptop and I could pick right back up. And then when I wanted to wind down for bed, I could shut down the game, walk upstairs, and launch it on my Steam Deck where I'd continue precisely where I left off. It was wonderful—I simply would not have been able to finish this game otherwise and would have had to pivot. Also also I modded the game slightly to pull back the FOV so running around in the world didn't feel nearly as claustrophobic and the same mod came with a speed/jump modifier so I zoomed through the game faster than usual and it was a godsend. I was very pleased that it was equally easy to install the mod on my Steam Deck as on my computers. It really made the game feel better.
Status​
Completed

System​
PC/Steam Deck

Challenge​
Unfinished Business

 

Log Update #40

Computer is fixed and I got a Switch 2, life is good again!!!
  • COMPLETED Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
  • COMPLETED A Year of Springs
  • BEATEN Melatonin
  • BEATEN Mario Kart World
  • BEATEN Blue Prince
  • BEATEN FEZ
Melatonin
I had my eye on this game for sooo long but it almost never went on sale. It finally did months ago and I finally got around to it last month, playing it as my before-bed game.


I still absolutely love the aesthetic of this game. It's all pastel pinks and purples and blues (my fave colour palette!) that just look so dreamy. And the animations are all hand-drawn so the whole thing is just an absolute treat to look at. Unfortunately... I just didn't end up liking the gameplay all that much. It was obviously created as a game with a lot of love toward the Rhythm Heaven games but it just missed the mark a bit for me. The beatmaps, especially in the beginning, just felt a bit off and for some reason a lot of those earliest levels just seemed more complex than even some later ones.

The game was fine and I mostly enjoyed it. I did manage to clear all levels with at least two stars, but I was mostly just glad to be done than my experience with Rhythm Heaven and similar games where I just wanna keep playing and perfecting it. :( At least for every level I hated I think there was a level I equally really enjoyed, but it was still disappointing to look forward to this game for so long and then just not really vibe with so much of it when the time came to play it.

I will give it major points for having a lot of accessibility features. In addition to calibration settings, you could also choose to always have a metronome going or to keep the obvious visual cue from the tutorial mode of each level onscreen at all times with no penalty to level completion. I generally tried to keep both off but by the end I was very pleased that the game didn't shame me in any way for needing the help here and there. (Though I do kinda fault the beatmap or music for not being more obvious.)
Status​
Beaten

System​
Steam Deck

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
This is a Golden Idol-like I've had my eye on for a while. It went on sale because the sequel was coming out, so I snapped it up to play at some point when I wanted more Golden Idol... and then within a couple weeks the sequel actually went on sale in a bundle with another game that comes highly recommended for fans of the aforementioned game so I figured I should really play the first game to make sure I vibe with it because otherwise I'd just buy the other game and call it a day.


But I did really like this! Rather than separate-but-connected cases, it's one longer case with different chapters to solve and it worked really well. It's bright and colourful with a loveable cast of characters and full voice acting. You wander around from clue spot to clue spot inspecting things, using your magnifying glass to notice details, and combining all your clues to make deduc(k)tions. It's basically the same thing as Golden Idol but I appreciate the way this one added in more unique mechanics like having to suss out details on someone's person or zero in on specific clues in a letter.

The voice acting/sound design of the game was really, really good. In particular there's a cat character who works in customer service and is severely overworked and when you're wandering around the office sometimes you'll hear the phone ring and she'll answer with the low yowl cats do when they're very upset LOL. The voice acting on the whole was really well done with some big names in it, but my one complaint about the game is that some of the dialogue was just a bit.... off? I suspect the developers are not native English speakers so even if the grammar is technically right be right, sometimes dialogue just wouldn't sound quite right and the voice actors spoke everything exactly as written so here and there, especially at the climax, I'd be totally removed from the story like "whoa, I don't think they'd say it like that". Like not using contractions where they'd definitely be and just making things sound too wordy, that sort of thing. It was mostly just a distraction and a tiny nitpick on what was otherwise a great experience.

I'm excited to play the sequel sometime. :) That one I probably will try to save for when I need a fix of this genre.
Status​
Completed

System​
PC

Nintendo Switch 2 (and Mario Kart World)
I got a Switch 2! I probably shouldn't have, at that price, but out of idle curiosity I tried to get a preorder to see how difficult it would be thinking "oh well I can just cancel it after if I get one" and failed at the first one I tried but then Amazon let me have on in their lottery and I had some gift cards so I was like you know what, sure. My OG Switch has been struggling for a while. The charging port is broken so it only charges if the cable is in one way (apparently USB-C is NOT perfectly reversible, who'd have thought) and the dock has the cable in the wrong way so I have to use a third party dock and even that loses contact with the Switch fairly often while trying to play it so it was really annoying. It would've been $130ish to repair it so I just kind of thought... it made more sense to buy the upgrade rather than repair it when I knew I'd get a Switch 2 one day anwyay.

And then after all that, on release day by 6:30pm Amazon still hadn't shipped my console bundle so I went to Costco and bought it there and cancelled my preorder. I'm sure I will use those gift cards on gifts for people throughout the year or something and the Costco one, while $30 more than the standard bundle, also came with a full year of the upgraded online subscription so it's fine!!! I'm happy with it and I'm so excited to play Switch games again without all the struggle.


Anyway I beat all the cups in Mario Kart World so I guess I've beaten that too. (Please ignore what looks like a scratch/crack along the right side where the joycon connects... this thing is already a cat hair magnet lmfaoo.)
Status​
Beaten

System​
Switch 2!!!

A Year of Springs
This was a really sweet game that I've been meaning to play for a while and I figured pride month is the time!! It's a short choices-matter visual novel about a trans girl who is invited to a hot spring vacation by a friend and must work through her anxiety about it as well as two short follow-up stories from the perspectives of the other characters. It was very thoughtfully written and I had so much love in my heart for the characters by the time I finished up all the stories. I got all the major scenes.


I started it in English before realizing I could swap the language to Japanese and then played the other 90% in JP which was fun. I learnt some new queer words in context so it was fun and entertaining hahaha. The art style was also just super adorable and I liked the implementation of text chats and phone calls too. Just a very well-designed game that tugs at the heartstrings and brings a bit more awareness to the reality and struggles of being trans.
Status​
Completed

System​
Steam Deck

Blue Prince
Well... hmm.

I picked this game up pretty soon after it came out in April because the circles I run in (thinky game lovers!!) were raving about it. It very quickly got overshadowed by Expedition 33 or whatever, which I think might have come out the same day, but I had every intention of playing it real soon after I finished Arise in May. Which of course then took me the entirety of the month because of my computer issues lmao. (Those are fixed, by the way! I made a few upgrades since I had to completely rebuild anyway and now my computer is pinker and more obnoxious than ever. And I have a $500 motherboard in it to boot because the mobo they gave me as a replacement for the one I thought was broken [first issue turned out to be one of my RAM sticks slowly failing btw] was actually broken and their policy is to replace with a different model if you have to take it back more than once lol).

Uhhh anyway, first game I played on my fixed computer was Blue Prince. Roguelikes was the theme for June and I was like, wow, this is absolutely perfect! And I think it was very serendipitous that I was able to start the game with the "you must finish this within the month" requirement looming over me because I found the game very frustrating and I think I would have had an even worse go of it without feeling rushed. It meant I kept at the game even when it got really discouraging and otherwise I... think I would have set it down for days or weeks at a time and simply forgotten so many particulars even with my notes to look back on. On the other hand, maybe if I didn't feel like I had to put in really long sessions to make sure I actually beat the game in time, I could have come at the game in a more relaxed way and enjoyed it more? But honestly, probably not.

This game is pretty cool in concept. Your weird noble uncle has passed away and you are his nephew, who is set to inherit his estate but only if you can explore it and find its 46th room. Every day, the house resets to a blank slate and you have to assign rooms on its grid using random blueprints generated each time you open a door. Each room has a specific layout, with some having no doors (dead ends) or only one door that may or may not lead to another useable square. Each day you have to get enough currency (coins for buying items, gems for using fancier blueprints, and keys to unlock locked doors) to make it further and further, all while exploring the rooms you've placed for clues and hints towards the many mysteries in the house.

Sounds fun, right? And at first when every room is new, even if you aren't getting far, you can still go methodically through each room and discover new things so it is fun. And then you hit the "midgame" where you've collected a fair few mysteries and seen all the common rooms and you have a handful of mysteries to solve aaaand... you have to wait for the rng to be kind to you. You know you need to have a run where you get both the labratory and the boiler room side by side to solve a puzzle in the former but it just isn't happening. Or you keep finding a specific deposit box key but you aren't getting the vault room that it goes toward on any run where you've picked it up. Maybe you know exactly what you need to do for several different mysteries to progress on any one of them and your run completely fizzles out three rows in because you just never got anything useful and your last chances only gave you dead ends so the whole run was a wash. I know that's just the nature of roguelikes but it absolutely sucked in this context!!!!

I'll admit I'm really not a fan of roguelikes. I like them in the sense that they often force me out of my comfort zone, which is somewhere I stay way too often in games. Like, I'll play a game and the first weapon it gives me is often what I get comfy with so I never really change, but with roguelikes since you never get the same build each time, it forces you to experiment and that's cool even if I'm not always good enough at games to adapt the way I need to... but it felt different with this. The randomness element was fun sometimes and it felt REALLY good to have a great run where you unlock or learn a whole bunch of things... but then when you get 5-10 runs in a row where nothing at all happens but it still takes you like half an hour each time, it just feels like a total waste. You aren't learning anything new, you aren't adapting to a new way to play the game, you're just struggling and the whole time you're forgetting important details because it becomes longer and longer since you last engaged with them. I will say that I think they did a really good job of sprinkling clues in multiple rooms for certain puzzles to account for the fact that players might not end up seeing one important thing if they just never get the rooms that tell that information. At the same time, though, finally getting a new room only to find out that the only clues in it seem to be for puzzles you solved hours ago... is rough.


The game tells you and pretty much forces you to take detailed notes of what's going on, and I do love a good journalling game (see above for a puzzle in the game and some of my redacted notes on it--can't spoil, after all!), but the pacing in this game was just so, so off because of the roguelike features that even with the journal I just felt like I was suffering. I think I would have enjoyed it so immensely more if they'd given you more options to mitigate the rng much earlier. Let me carry over more items or even just make the item check room an upgrade for the foyer or something. The game felt so much better once I had a consistent starting pool of gems and coins (and especially the bonus room in the west path) but I think it took too long to get/build that up.

And I haven't even touched upon how apparently even once I reached room 46 I'm only like 10% of the way through the mystery or some BS!! Like, yeah, that is kind of cool. I'm glad I saw credits for completing the main goal and still have stuff to chew on but the problem is... I also don't really care about it anymore. I liked the mystery of the house and its workings and then it started getting into geopolitical stuff and genealogical history within that world and I just wasn't interested in it and I think that's really what all the mysteries are going towards now so I'm feeling very checked out. I may play a little bit here and there, but I'll also just as happily watch some sort of retrospective on the game on YouTube in a year or two when everyone has ironed out all the mysteries and discovered everything there is to discover lol.

I wish I could say nicer things about this game. I really wanted to love it and I love parts of it for sure... getting to explore a new room and make connections and pour over screenshots because something you see suddenly reminds you of something you saw hours and hours ago was pretty fun. I just think the scope of the game is too big to satisfactorily handle the restrictions that come from making the exploration mechanic hinge on rng.
Status​
Beaten

System​
PC

Challenge​
Roguelike

FEZ
I technically beat this a few hours before Blue Prince but I'm talking about it after mostly just because I think my timing with this game was really unfortunate. It's mostly just a platformer BUT to interact with it on a deeper scale than just "rotate the level and jump/climb to find all the little cubes :)", you gotta put your thinking cap on. And unfortunately starting this game in the midst of my Blue Prince runs meant I simply did not want to engage with that part of the game at all. Which sucks! Because I can see a language to decode and that's my jam.

Buuut the presentation of all the deeper stuff was just... very unsatisfying? And the fact that I was playing it usually in bed before I slept meant I didn't have anything on hand to easily take notes, so I just didn't. I didn't like how it coaxed you into learning the mysteries of the world but I also just didn't really like how it coaxed you into doing anything. I know this is one of the earliest indie darlings but I feel like it really shows its age in the sense that it doesn't hold your hand at all and it doesn't really respect your time either.


I enjoyed it at the start but quickly got very frustrated trying to remember where I'd gone and what I'd done. There is a map you can pull up that shows every room/level in the game in sort of a tree format so you can see what connects to where, but some levels have so many doors that it's not a lot of help if you're trying to get somewhere specific. Couple that with there only being a handful of big warp points (that you can only warp to from another warp point) and it was just very annoying to get around. I think I'd have liked the game way more if I could warp to/from anywhere, or at least warp to major maps from anywhere. As it was, I got to about 23/32 of the required cubes to beat the game before I pulled up a guide which got me about 3-4 super cheaty cubes that I wasn't supposed to have until a new game+ but also unlocked a few new maps where I rounded out the rest and then went to beat the game at like 35 cubes. I'll take it.

Ideally I would have taken longer to finish my previous "winding-down-in-bed" game and then instead of trying to start this game (or, well, starting another game, realizing I was still shit at it, and then starting this one), I would have taken just long enough that the Switch 2 would have come out and then I could have played literally anything else and saved this game for a better mind space.
Status​
Beaten

System​
Steam Deck
 
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