Still Playing Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout as my primary game. I think I should be in the later half of the story, not sure though. Pretty much just playing this now, so should be able to finish it soon-ish.
One exception though, with all the Donkey Kong drops, I started Donkey Kong Country 2 (NSO SNES) again. And I don’t know what issue I had last time, but this time I was able to clear the first area pretty easily. Died couple of times in last level, but other than that it was pretty simple. I didn’t find all the secrets though. Only 2 DK tokens, though got most of the KONG letters, not sure about other secrets, but I am sure I missed some.
Stopped playing at first level of the second area / world. The lava one. Only started it on impulse and may play it a bit here or there, but will return to it seriously only after finishing Atelier Ryza. I really enjoyed playing it though, hope difficulty won’t spike too much as the game progresses.
What about all of you? What have you been playing?
Paper Mario TTYD is my holiday season nostalgia game. I got it for Christmas when it first came out on Gamecube, and I started playing it every year since COVID winter 2020. And now I can enjoy it in all its remastered glory on Switch, so that’s pretty cool.
Haven’t found much time to play recently, but I beat the Deku area in Echoes of Wisdom today. This was probably my favorite area, mostly because we haven’t seen Deku sprouts as a serious race since Majora’s Mask. I find them a lot more interesting than the Korok, so I really hope they return in a major role again sometime.
At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m about to beat the game, so it’s time to finish off all the side content. I already finished the Dream Dojo including the advanced time requirements, which wasn’t that hard except for a select few challenges. Though even those wouldn’t have been so bad if there was a way to just restart without quitting out entirely! That’s a major oversight a game of today really can’t get away with anymore.
And one more thing I’ve been meaning to say for weeks but always forget… how is the lock-on so bad? Why does it seem like it prioritizes my own summons over the enemies? 99.9% of the time I do NOT want to lock on to the rock I placed somewhere! I’m actually unhappy that when Tri levels up, some summons become cheaper because the last thing I want is more entities to lock on to!
Splatoon 3
I been mentally exhausted a lot lately. So this game is relaxing because I only have to think about the now, and rely on reflex.
Yeah, multiplayer games be relaxing a bit, since you don’t have to care about any story or anything.
Finished Qualia: The Path of Promise!
Feels to me like the developer could not quite figure out what they wanted to do with this VN and just tried adding a bit of everything, but the end result is a very average game with nothing really strong or memorable.
It spends most of its runtime on the romance, but the chemistry between the two leads is not strong enough to carry the game, and while there are some interesting twists and themes those aren’t explored properly.
There’s one neat feature at least: You can enable two languages at the same time, which can be useful for people learning japanese. I’ve seen VNs before where you can switch between languages with a button, but this is the first time I’ve seen something like this.
Playing If My Heart Had Wings!
Resumed this game after Qualia, but didn’t get much progress this week. It’s quite good so far, I really like the way it’s deailing with the theme of disabilities and the overall relaxing slice-of-life feel of the story.
Playing Under Defeat!
Current side-game, a classic G-Rev shooter. Really hard, and the heli controls can take a while to get used to, but what a great game. Unfortunately only available in Japan right now, so you either have to get it from the japanese eShop or import the physical version.
No Vampire Hunter this week?
Do you have a Japanese e-shop account or imported the physical?
No Vampire Hunter this week?
Vampire Survivor? No, I ended up taking a break this week.
imported the physical?
For this particular game I got the physical version from amazon.co.jp. I’ve been buying a lot from there, because there’s a few interesting games that only get physical releases on Japan/Asia, but also because a lot of Switch games are multi-language and for less popular games it’s often easier or cheaper for me to get it from there.
I believe Under Defeat is getting a western release sometime in 2025 though.
Do you have a Japanese e-shop account
But also I do have an account there. 😀
It got it because of a VN I was really interested that for some reason is only available in Japan digitally, but I’ve also used it to redeem free codes with extra stuff on some physical games I bought from there.
My plan is to continue meditating my way through Picross S 6.
Heh, cool. I am just about to finish S 4, just 5 or so puzzles remaining, then just Colour and Extra. Everything else is done.