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2 yr. ago

  • First and foremost, I have finished Visions of Mana! The post game was done in one sitting and there were no annoying achievements preventing me from getting that completed either. In fact, there's no even an achievement for doing all side quests, which would have been the most annoying one! I did have to lower the difficulty to beat the Black Rabite though, that thing is insane!

    The game is generally considered 'good, but not great', and I'll have to agree with that. Weirdly enough, you can very easily divide the game into two distinct halves. The first half, which is mostly exploratory in large locations with very few bosses, lots of time trials, a villain that you generally agree with and boring combat. And the second half, which is focused, has lots of bosses, an interesting villain and you finally have access to all elements to really get into combat! Since I was playing as a mage, the elements were a huge part! It didn't make combat in general any better, but you can nuke everything a lot easier. And the boss fights are the true highlight anyway. I generally hated the time trials, but I also think I did them way too early.

    But the single best thing about the game are the environments. The areas are all very pretty and dense and I can't think of a single place I didn't like being in. Maybe the desert during the sandstorm, but that's temporary.


    I know what my next big game is going to be, but I looked through my Steam library to see if there's something shorter I want to play first and so I started One Piece: World Seeker. It's generally considered to be okay at best and it definitely is as rough around the edges as you'd expect from a One Piece game that isn't Pirate Warriors. It's interesting what they were going for though. There are parts in the movement that are straight-up the grappling hook from the Batman Arkham games, just a bit too stiff. There are parts where you can swing though the town like Spider-Man, except it's way too stiff. There are even stealth aspects with Arkham-style takedowns, but (again) just too stiff. Also the idea of Luffy being stealthy is ridiculous!

    But, for what it's worth, I'm enjoying it! Rose-tinted fandom glasses just do that, I guess. I basically played it for three days straight, sacrificing my Yoshi time.


    Katamari Damacy is progressing. Stuff's getting rolled up, stars are being made.


    In Star Fox, I now have all Normal Medals and I briefly dipped into Multiplayer. I now understand why Peppy always tells everyone to stay in formation, staying together is a powerful move. But good luck communicating that with randoms online!

    Last week, I kinda forgot to talk about my impressions of the game! I like how the extended cutscenes explain why the route splits sometimes. The Sector Y split, for example, never made much sense to me on the N64. I do have a problem with a lot of the voice direction, however. The original is the most quoted video game of all time for a reason, trying to play it straight makes a lot of lines feel very wrong. The major exception is the boss of Zoness, he goes hard on sounding like a pirate and that's exactly how it should be! Overacting is key!****

  • I knew about it, it wasn't that rare of a practice in the GBC/GBA overlap years. Shantae had an entire transformation locked behind 'Advanced' Magic.

  • They'd be mad if a movie about Shaka and the Zulus had any black actors in it.

  • Sometimes I do feel like I'm playing the game wrong, as I tend to forget levels have a 'goal' you have to achieve to move on. Usually, the goal is just something I stumble upon during all my other research, but it wasn't until post-game that I tried to leave a level to reset it only to realize I haven't even beaten it yet.

  • I find difficulty in Yoshi very hard to judge. I'd say there are difficult research tasks appear more often for sure, but they aren't necessarily new. The main game makes you juggle three boomerangs at some point and to me, that was the most difficult thing to do in all my play time.

    As for Star Fox, it's not much, just some emblems at the bottom of the list, but it'll leave most players at 99% completion at best.

  • Made some more progress in Is Yoshi Even Able To Read Books, Mysterious Or Otherwise?. I wonder if the post game is as big as it is because they just had so many ideas left. Even classic enemies like the Piranha Plant offer brand new experiences.


    I was going to wait until after Yoshi, but since there's still so much to do, I finally played Star Fox. It's hard to say how different it is from the original, some bosses feel like they die faster, then Solar's boss was the first one to beat me and I don't remember him being an issue!

    But for what it's worth, my muscle memory is still largely intact. There's only six or seven medals I didn't get on my first try. I also completed all 12 challenges for Corneria, the latter six being rougher than I expected. I'm glad you still get credit when you die though, as I crashed and burned after finally getting two of them done in the same run.

    I'm not sure how hard I'll try to complete the game though, since you can't get true 100% without Amiibo anyway...


    I finally beat Visions of Mana today! There's still some post game, no idea how much though, and afterwards I'll check the achievements list to see if there's anything dumb to stop me from truly completing it. I'm surprised the final boss ate into my resources as much as he did though (the first boss to do so at all!), considering I was level 82 thanks to the double experience from the Lil Cactus rewards. I still can't believe they just give that to you...


    Something awful happened to Jimothy in Fallout 3, so he took a lot of drugs and now we're playing Katamari Damacy Reroll for a while.

  • I think he came down with Distractonitis, a rare disease that appears when a colleague of yours dies but it has to stay a secret.

  • Die kriegt er, der ist schon seit Jahren regelmäßig dabei und mittlerweile Tradition.

  • For once, I am not joking. The one element I tried out was the health bar to see if you can die with it, but it's just a way to see how much damage enemies would do and how much something would heal you if the game had a health system. Very weird.

  • I made a push to finish Yoshi's Never-Ending Story and I had no idea what would happen. The final level was very neat, the credits roll and the game casually expands its content by 66% for post-game. And there's room for more, so I'm not going to count my Yoshis before they hatch again! Well, I love the game, so I'm a hundred percent into having even more to do!

    It's very strange that you also suddenly unlock optional HUD-elements. I've never seen anything like this before! I don't see myself ever using a gauge that shows how clean the water in a level is, but I admire the fact that they made all these gadgets at all.


    In Visions of Mana I defeated the last Benevodon, so I assume I'm approaching the end soon. But first I'll pay a visit to all the ruins that have been taunting me with their high-level enemies all game long. If I ever run out of side quests to do, that is. I've complained before, but it just doesn't stop: This game has entirely too many side quests and they're not interesting enough to justify such quantity!


    In Fallout 3, I'm being a complete tourist in the area around The Mall. Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the National Archives... I'll be hitting up Pennsylvania Avenue soon! I hit level 29 today, so I'm almost at the cap. I'm not sure what I'll do with myself when I'm out of growth...

  • I'm done with World 5 in Yoshi Reads Mystery Books. One world left, maybe I'll finish it this week to get started on Star Fox.


    In Fallout 3, I've been heading north for side quests. Lots of Deathclaws this way, which is supposed to be dangerous, I guess. They feel kinda underwhelming, too weak. Super Mutants, Ghouls and even Scorpions have some endgame variant that have a ton of health and make me pull out the heavy damage but the Deathclaw just has its basic form. It doesn't feel right!


    No new glitches to report for Visions of Mana this week. I'm just starting to overlevel a bit thanks to the Cactus bonus that has been doubling my exp gains for weeks now. I don't think they've thought that one all the way through!


    I am also officially done with Monster Hunter Wilds now. Going from grinding a very fun boss monster in Zoh Shiah to grinding this 'new generation' of boss monster with Omega and Gogmazios killed my motivation. At this point, I'm not even interested in the Ascendance expansion next year. They teased a return of Lao Shan Lung, but how can I trust it not be be ruined by some DPS check or whatever else they come up with? I just don't enjoy Capcom's idea of boss battles anymore.

    Expansions usually fix issues with the main game, but I think mine are too fundamental. They split skills into weapon and armor skills to account for the ability to carry two weapons at once, but this also means that almost all interesting skills have to be crammed into the three slots you get. Add to that the set bonuses armor gets and creating your own mixed set suddenly becomes very restrictive. This is not what I've been grinding every armor set for!

    And then there's the seasons. The environment can look very pretty, but 90% of the time it just doesn't. Even in the pre-made quests with fixed environments Capcom usually decides to set the season to Fallow and it's just such a weird decision.

    I'd rather play a certain other Monster Hunter game that I've been meaning to play for years... but not before taking a long overdue break.

  • I almost had this happen once and I never went from fully asleep to fully awake this quickly. I'm talking about full awareness of everything that almost happened. If we could somehow harness this power, we could eliminate all the time we waste being half-asleep in the morning. But Big Caffeine would never let that happen.

  • On PC piracy is a lot easier. If they take my game, I take it back.

  • Now I just need Brody King to turn on Bandido (don't leave though!) to finally get my Hangman/Bandido/BryanKeith Trio

  • I'm surprised you don't remember the stealth level, it's the only one I've seen so far where an enemy just murders you. You're trapped in a temple and need to get four keys to get out.

    And you just reminded me, speaking of doing a search on Visions of Mana bugs, I had another one early on where the second wave of enemies in a trial battle didn't spawn and I couldn't find help on that either. It worked after a restart though...

  • Took a short break from Fallout after Point Lookout to play Mega Man again. Back on the Wii U I managed to beat the game without the Pause-Exploit for the first time and thought I'd have a hard time with that again, but apparently Mega Man is like riding a bicycle. I was definitely a bit rusty, but didn't really get stuck.


    Slowed down my pace on Yoshi's Mysterious Mystery Book Mystery. It's a nice one-level-at-a-time game. When I first saw the stealth level, I expected to hate it but it turned out to be one of my favorites. Which was a nice change of pace after the surfboard level was my least favorite level despite what it should be.


    Visions of Mana froze on me. Don't pause the game during a class strike! I don't know if it's consistent, but I'm not going to try. Then a group of enemies' walk animation broke and they hovered towards me, T-posing menacingly! Also, for a long time now, a lot of area maps have had outdated quest markers the game never cleared. I wasn't going to mention that, but since we're apparently now collecting glitches, I might as well!

    I think I'm really approaching the endgame now. Hunting down the Benevodons is classic Mana and I'm loving it! It's a bit strange that they brought back Zable Fahr as the Benevodon of Darkness when the other seven are new, but that one has always been my favorite and seeing a screenshot of it was a big reason why I had the urge to start the game when I did. I'm also starting to get side quests for the high-level nemesis-type enemies. Which is great, because I never bothered to write down where they are! Very convenient.

  • Earlier today, I managed to crash Yoshi's Mysterious Book Club. In the exploding chestnut stage, I just scooped one up out of the water and the game froze. It never happened again after a reset though, so I assume it was a very rare accident. Still in Chapter 4, I just haven't played as much because


    I really got into Visions of Mana this week. The game flows so much better in its second half! Having a real villain definitely helps, so does finally having access to all elements as a mage. There haven't been any large open areas lately to slow me down and there were finally some larger indoor areas that have been sorely missing so far. And each of them had two bosses, which have been my favorite part of the game! Though one of them glitched out somehow, making me unable to cast my spells. It wasn't Silence, I was able to swap characters and tell my mage to cast their spells remotely, but when I controlled them nothing would happen! So that's two games that broke this week...


    Fallout 3 breaks a lot, being a Bethesda game, so I'm not counting that for a triple! I finished the main story of the Point Lookout DLC and I can't say I liked it. The location is great though, and I'm looking forward to exploring the corners I haven't been to yet before going home to D.C..

  • Some enemies have blood effects and attacking the walls of Jabu Jabu's insides does the same. Those aren't 'changes' in the Ganondorf sense as there is no version where those are red, but they made the conscious decision to have blood effects in a softened form, which I consider a change.