Glen-i

Can't get to a Desktop, so you'll have to cope with mediocre formatting. This week, we're playing on Woody Woods. The key thing about this board are the three signs with arrows on them. They dictate where players go and they change direction at the start of every turn, if someone lands on any happening space right in front of a sign junction, or if someone pays Monty Mole to do so at the bottom-left structure. Yes, it's very annoying. Reverse Mushrooms are immensely powerful on this board if a sign sends you in the wrong direction. The happening spaces in front of Woody lets you play a mini-game that can net you 5 coins or an extra roll. The happening spaces in front of Evil Woody at the top-left let's you play the same mini-game, but the prizes are -5 coins or a dice block that sends you backwards. See you tonight at 8pm, @S.C.G and @BowserBasher

Ah, yes. The "Good Bad Bug*, as TV Tropes calls it. Always fun!

Honestly, most of the time, enemies will drop better equipment then what you can buy, anyway. That said, check every new shop for "art books" which let you upgrade corresponding arts to level 7. That's what you should spend money on.

Flew by, didn't it? That's Christmas for you!

Mario Kart tonight at 8pm. Player's Choice.

Definitely the plots.

Visual novels, so I won't actually explain why, because they're great plots, brought to you by the developers who gave you Pokémon Mystery Dungeon! Unlikely to be the same writers, but it's still amusing.

The only New Year's Resolution I ever set myself is to play whatever dreadful tat DCubed or his family got me for Christmas. I actually lapsed on that this year, so now I have two of them to trudge through. Pray for me.

Welp, it was fun while it lasted, but I'm afraid this is where we differ. 2 veered too much into anime tropes for my liking. Embarrassing character designs (Pyra, Brighid, Poppi, a certain character that would be spoilers), embarrassing character (Tora makes Nopon look bad) and mostly dumb decisions throughout. The last few chapters are great, but you wade through so much cringe to get there.

Oh, no doubt about that. The battle system in Torna is way more streamlined while still maintaining the system the base game has. I enjoyed it more then the base game.

For what it's worth, Torna: The Golden Country is not super important in the over arching Xenoblade trilogy. It's more to provide some extra backstory for 2.

Yep, can confirm Argos have it, just checked myself.

Yeah, that's when it happens. I imagine it's because FR spoils a load more of the base game then Torna does. Torna doesn't go too deeply into things that will happen in base 2. FR immediately refers to stuff that happens in the base game incredibly quickly. Monolith probably didn't want people to spoil a load of the big twists that easily.

Interesting theory @Julius. I never considered that angle as an option. Although, that does run the risk of getting to Kingdom Hearts level of confusion. As for the other point. I feel like that general viewpoint of "retro not being playable" that more younger people have is partly why a lot of developers are pivoting to what is perceived to be popular. FF7 Remake does it well, but when a game does it poorly (Lightning Returns: FF13 being a prime example), it really highlights what gets lost in the change in direction. Sure, it's great when a genuinely good game like FF7 Remake comes around, but if anything, this might encourage more niche genres to shift to more contemporary ones. After all, BotW has made more then a couple of other Ninty IP's ape what it does.

I knew I could count on you. Seems appropriate, considering I'm playing Chrono Cross at the moment, where the Game Over screen has this line. Eerily relevant...

You're gonna trust an immobile snowman who can't even see itself with a reflection with that judgment? I weep for your island with a representative with that kind of "it'll do" attitude!

Well, seeing as I got every other base game Pokémon... Walking Wake (Scarlet) and Iron Leaves (Violet) make their third appearance in 5 star raids from today until the 7th of January. You absolutely cannot get these Pokémon in any other way, even with the DLC, so if you're like me and missed the first two times, you should probably catch them. You'll need to join a raid another player started to get the one from the version you don't have, and you can't catch them again if you already caught them before.

Some more silliness from our session last night. I'm player 1, @S.C.G is player 2, @BowserBasher is player 3, and @Dcubed is player 4 Mario Golf was strangely devoid of hilarity, but it did have this from S.C.G.

Starting to think he bribed the Millennium Star to win that game. I'd like to nominate this as the new "Unluckiest Performance in N-E history", please. Naturally, S.C.G won all three of his Game Guy games. Missing the timing is one thing, but it just had to be Whomp straight after, didn't it!? All that health means jack when Chain Chomp just hits everyone anyway! And for the final step in my humiliation conga line... At least BowserBasher and DCubed were entertained...

That head is too big. Christmas ruined! Merry Christmas to you too.

Heads up, @S.C.G. An hour until we kill each other.

Right, caught up, just in time for the Christmas special.

I was catching up on Masahiro Sakurai's YouTube channel, where I saw this video: He talks about about how leaderboards can sap motivation to improve just as much as it may provide a goal to reach. He also talks about why he went for a more inverse ranking system in Smash Bros, called "Global Smash Power". Personally? I fall into the camp of "Online Leaderboards suck because all it does is show me how not amazing at a game I am". It's just demoralising, I much prefer something like Global Smash Power, because I know that in Ryu's Classic Mode route, I'm better then 15,825,811 people. Having no frame of reference for how many people were better then me really motivated me to improve in that mode, which made me better with a lot of characters in that game. (Not Diddy Kong though, nothing can make me good with Diddy) But what do you think? Do you think the more traditional method is best, or the inverse method Smash Bros uses? Or maybe you just hate any form of online ranking system?

Anyone here played Pizza Tower? You should, the game's amazing! If certain bits of that song remind you of Wario Land 4, that's not an accident. The whole game is like that!

I think we can all agree @Dcubed deserved to win that last one. Of course, Smash Bros don't care, and that's why I love it. Good games!