I’ve beaten Route A of Nier:Automata today. So next is Route B, a.k.a. the reason a lot of players missed the true ending of the game. And I won’t blame anyone, I almost stopped playing there, too.
My progress in Sparks of Hope has been minimal, but I hope to finish World 2 this weekend.
There was a time when I replayed the whole Trilogy every year when summer came around. When it gets hot and sweaty, I still get the urge to dig out the Wii Remote and play them again.
Still playing Nier:Automata, still on Route A. I forgot how much the side quests ask you to run back and forth the same few areas, but knowing what the game is truly about, it actually makes a lot of sense, so I’m okay with it.
I’m halfway through the second world of Mario/Rabbids Sparks of Hope and my first impression is that I preferred the first game in every single way. The battles are no longer rated in any way, so you don’t need to try to play all that well, just win and move on. Most of the maps are kinda bland. No weapon upgrades, it’s just cosmetics. having two characters fully voice-acted when everyone else is silent is really jarring and it’s the first time I turned voice volume to 0% in a game, now I can actually enjoy the comedy more.
But the most jarring thing to me is that it seems like Ubisoft tried to make the Rabbids… cool? Thankfully the volume decrease also gets rid of the snippy one-liners, but why do they speak in the first place? Rabbids say Bwah, nothing else. And why am I picking up pieces of lore about the planets I’m on? It’s Mario and Rabbids, I’m here for slapstick, not world-building! I’m not sure where to even begin about Edge…
I’ll keep playing it out of curiosity, but I’m really tempted to boot up the first game again afterwards to see if it’s really the game or me that changed so much.
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The second game has a secret dungeon that is unlocked by collecting all Djinns in both games. No Djinn is missable within their own game, but this obviously doesn’t apply across games. You can miss 1 Djinn of each element in the first game and the second one will give you an opportunity to encounter them there to help you out, but that’s the end of the leeway.
I stand by what I said originally: Shantae is great when you’re in the dungeons, but annoying in the overworld. I’d say it’s definitely worth looking at for the visuals though. The game is so ambitious that I have to wonder why they made it for the GameBoy in the first place. When the game released, the GameBoy Advance and the GameCube were already out for a year, too! I can only assume development took a really long time and the overall bad timing affected sales enough to get the sequel cancelled. Luckily, it’s being revived now, so I might actually wait for that to keep playing the series in order.
New year, new games. I accidentally managed to do a triple-finish, so I really had to think about this.
I finally finished Baten Kaitos’ New Game Minus! All Achievements gotten! The game finally got hard, actually. I expected the hardest part to be the fight against three antagonists at the same time. One of them gets two attacks per turn and the game forces the weakest character into your party, so it’s technically a 4 on 2 fight. Oh, and you have to do it twice in a row. I thought once that was over with, the rest would be easy, but no, the final boss actually smeared the floor with me pretty hard. I actually had to adapt my decks for the first time. I ended up putting two characters on offense only and loaded up my fastest character with light element armor and the best healing items to revive the attackers who would inevitably die to anything. That strategy even worked first try!
I’ll probably replace the Switch-slot with Mario and Rabbids Spark of Hope. I was going to tackle Baten Kaitos Origins next, but maybe I should take a break after everything…
I completed all Challenge Maps in Arkham Origins, too. I still insist that the game is not as bad as people say, but I cannot overlook the amount of glitches. I’m looking forward to my first playthrough of Arkham Knight eventually, but first…
The PC slot has been replaced with Nier:Automata a few days ago. I already beat the game a few years ago, but that was when I was still unemployed, so I wasn’t playing a legit copy. Now I’m going after the achievements on Steam because the game is definitely worth buying.
I’ve also beaten Shantae on the GameBoy. I’m glad I saved all the overworld collectibles until the end, when you can just fly everywhere. That made it much less of a headache. The ending got a bit confusing though. No spoilers, but you’re dropped into a tense and dangerous situation, only to find it’s not at all dangerous and after five minutes of having zero clue as to what to do had to look up a walkthrough. I’m not replacing this one, three games was a mistake, but the Shantae journey will continue eventually.
That’s what I was wanting to hear after the Trials of Mana remake! The renaissance was long overdue!
Completing Baten Kaitos is something I was never able to do when I tried back on the Gamecube and it got to the point where I didn’t even enjoy the game anymore. But with the HD Remaster and the New Game+ option, I knew that even if I miss something, it wouldn’t be the end of my entire save file. I ended up not needing it, but it removed the stress.
Wonder isn’t quite beaten yet, but I also have no plans to start anything fancy, especially on the PC side. This is the month I plan on replacing my PC from 2016 in its entirety, so I’ll have to focus on that first.
Alright, weekly Baten Kaitos update. I left the final dungeon right after the penultimate boss became the true final boss because there’s a single unique card that was awkwardly placed in between them and I wanted it now. With it, I now have all weapon, armor and photo cards, which required having a guide nearby for the missables. So now I’m grinding out SP Combos, which isn’t hard, but takes patience. Especially because the list isn’t ordered in a logical way! Some recipes require cards you get from combos much further down the list, so I have to jump around a lot. And then there’s the combos that require cards that have aged to a certain point, but not too far, so I had to buy some grapes and wait for them to rot and become wine in six hours before I can do the combo that needs them. It would have been easier to do them throughout the game, but there’s ~140 of them and none of them just happen naturally. I would have had to spend a lot of time researching when to do all of them before I could even start playing the game. But it’s not like I’m pressed for time, the shampoo is still sitting there, waiting to age…
Today, I beat the last regular world of Mario Bros. Wonder. I’m backtracking to all the Special World locations before continuing though.
I never noticed anything being wrong either. I don’t think the idling would be related, but that’s the only thing that’s different now. And it stays on 100% for a few hours before doing it regardless.
My in-game time is ~115 hours now. It’s more difficult because the Switch goes into Sleep-Mode and stops the timer and after a while, the battery starts draining while in the dock, so I try not to overdo it for the console’s sake.
Still playing Baten Kaitos. Still having Baten Kaitos run in the background when I’m not playing it to grind out time.
I recently beat Assassin’s Creed and started continuing my journey through gaming history I missed out on with Beyond Good and Evil. I’m only three hours in but I can already clearly see why this game is still such a fan favorite. This is a level of charming I haven’t seen since Banjo-Kazooie!
My biggest pipe dream is an F-Zero with an extensive single player mode that’s not even a racing game but plays like a Yakuza game instead. The series has such amazingly stupid characters that it would be a shame if nothing was ever done with them. I want Captain Falcon beating up people in Mute City in that over-the-top Yakuza style.
The achievement is to have all Magnus (cards) in your collection. Some cards evolve over time, like fresh green bananas that deal damage becoming regular bananas that heal and later spotty bananas that deal damage again. The shampoo card is one that, in its description, says you should try using it for two weeks. And they mean that literally. If you have that card for 336 hours, it transforms into a card called ‘Splendid Hair’. It’s not even a useful card, it just also unlocks the last few tracks in the music collection for some reason. It’s legendary in how stupid it is.
And yes, there are 100% speedruns of the game that take slightly over two weeks!
Caligula was okay. I enjoyed the plot of the first one more, but the sequel was a lot easier to complete all sidequests in. For the record, the first game had over 500 NPCs each with a quest and most of them were roaming around certain areas, whereas the sequel has far less and you can easily look up where they are.
Since I’ve finished Caligula Effect 2, I started the Baten Kaitos Remaster today! The plan is to beat the first one, use Super Mario Bros. Wonder as an interlude, and then jump into Baten Kaitos Origins. Which would have been fine, as I expected to play Baten Kaitos normally, without trying to complete it. But alas, the game has in-game achievements so… “Ah shit, here we go again!”. And the 300% game speed option does NOT affect card evolutions, so I’ll have to let the game idle until my shampoo has been in my inventory for 336 hours because that’s normal, right? That’s what normal games ask normal players to do, right?
But there’s one more amazing thing I need to share. So the remaster only has the original Japanese voice acting, not the hillarious English one. But apparently, the opening cutscene before the title screen is English in both versions anyway. Except the overall quality in the Japanese version is better than the English one? How did that happen? Why did the developers of the Japanese version hire English voice actors for that intro, despite all the same characters being voiced in Japanese in the actual game? And if that was so important to them, why were they fine with the localizers getting their voice actors from the bargain bin instead? It’s all so bizarre!
I also started playing We Love Katamari Reroll as my B-Game on the side. Not much to say about it yet, but I wish there was an easy way to see all the stages with target times for their ‘good’ endings and what’s still to collect in them.
Don’t panic, but you might be a robot.
For the most part, I see the two original Paper Marios as equals. They both have good and bad chapters, so it’s hard to say which one I prefer on that front. The aspect that pushes TTYD slightly ahead for me is that your stats aren’t capped at 50/50/30 anymore. You can play the game with 10HP and a goombillion badge points if you want and the game won’t stop you!
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Techically 3, I would say 2 and a half. Route B is mostly the same as Route A, except you play a different character. Many people stopped playing, thinking it was just a bonus, and completely missed that Route C afterwards is a continuation of the story.