Glen-i

I suppose this is more general Pokémon stuff, but I do like a little vindication that Gen 1 stuff was wrong. Yeah, turns out they were scanned very poorly and most of the colour was mangled in the process. I knew it! I always had a feeling that they weren't meant to look like that.

Player's Choice tonight at 8pm.

The Switch is actively conspiring to stop me actually finishing Tales of Vesperia at this point. I can't wait!

OK, I wasn't gonna say anything, because I'm not a Trek fan outside of enjoying Lower Decks. But you gotta let this go, I saw the episode because of "certain someone". It's neat, harmless, and makes some sense in context of the show and conflict going on at the time. You didn't even watch the series, so you don't even know what happened in the eight or so episodes before hand. You're pulling a "Francis". Except you're being completely serious this time, and it's a little sad.

OK, @BowserBasher, I looked up that fight in Wii Fit Studio. (Around 7:30) @S.C.G did manage to chuck that Reaper's Scythe at you in the chaos from your Final Smash.

Octopath Traveler II is the sequel to best open-world game ever, Octopath Traveler. It's a turn-based RPG published by Square Enix and released back in Feburary this year. I'm sure all of you know of it. The first game kicked off the string of HD-2D games that we've been seeing from Team Asano, the team behind Bravely Default. This sequel, much like the first game, embraces retro style turn-based combat while subverting some traditional RPG tropes by having 8 seperate stories following 8 different characters as they tackle their own personal problems. You kick the game off by selecting one of these characters to act as your main hero, each one has a "job" which determines what their general role is in fights. I started with Temenos, the Cleric. Because you can't go wrong with a bit of healing, can you? Whoever you choose, you complete the first chapter of their story, and then the game sets you loose in the continent of Solistia to go almost anywhere you like. Whether that be running off to explore the world, or meeting up with the other 7 characters to help you out, or play through their story. Or you could do what I do, and steal everything I could from every NPC I found. It's not quite as open as the first game, as more areas are gated behind story progress, or neccessary party members, but eh, the open world was never the point. One of the new features is a day and night system. At the press of a button, you can swap between the two. The time of the day has a variety of effects. Different NPC's appear, enemies show up more often at night, even the path actions (An ability each character has that let them interact with NPC's in various ways) each character has changes. By day, Temenos can guide NPC's around the world and have them assist him in battle, while by night, he can get information from them by whacking them really hard with his staff. Yeah, he's kind of the worst Cleric ever, and it's hilarious! He runs around up in the rafters, for Christ's sake! The first Octopath game had a medieval setting, but this one seems to be set on the cusp of an industrial revolution, but, you know, with more monsters and magic and stuff. The voice acting really elevates the plots here, but the first game had stellar voice work anyway, so I'm not too surprised. What did surprise me was the jump in quality of the sprite animations. Enemies have attack animations for their more brutal attacks, while your party members have far more elaborate movement themselves. The majority of abilities have special animations depending on which character is using them. It's a vast improvement. A common complaint with the first game was that the party members didn't interact with each other much. Well, the sequel addresses this by having characters comment on stuff other characters do during battle, as well as special chapters that focus on 2 characters working together toward a common goal. You're not gonna see them interact in the main story cutscenes, but I'm fine with that, then again, I never had much of a problem with this in the first place. Of course, the real star of the show is the combat. It revolves around the "Break-Boost system". Best post a picture to make it easier to follow. Nothing special going on here, no sir! Every enemy has various weaknesses to specific weapons and elements, and nailing these weaknesses lowers their shield points. Lower these shield points to 0, and the enemy becomes broken, making them miss all of the turns you can see at the top of the screen, as well as lowering their defenses, making it the prime opportunity to let rip with your strongest attacks or heal up or whatever you think is appropriate. To help really lay on the hurt, you have the boost system. At the start of every turn, each character gets a "Boost Point" (BP, represented by the orange circles next to a party member's name on the right), you can spend up to 3 BP at once to increase the effectiveness of your next action. This creates an immensely satisfying loop of exploiting weaknesses to break enemies and then whaling on them by spending BP for immense bursts of damage. Of course, that's only the most simple of applications. Some skills use BP to increase the amount of times you attack in 1 turn, making them good options for breaking quickly, or you can spend BP to apply longer lasting buffs. Or you can spend BP to kill yourself in embarrassing ways. Bewildering Grace is always a source of laughs. The "Break-Boost" system is only the center of the combat in this. There's a job system in this game. As you explore, you'll find licenses that allow characters to equip a "secondary job" This lets a character acquire the abilities of another job. So while Temenos will always have Cleric skills, as that's his Primary job, he can use a license to get the skills of a Warrior, or a Dancer, or a Merchant. Experimentation with job combinations is the name of the game here, and you're going need to find some proper good combinations, as this is not one of those RPG's where you can just cruise by without a thought for strategy. Sure, you can somewhat get away with it during random encounters, but figuring out a good strategy will take you further then anything else. Grinding levels is helpful, but it isn't efficient. Keeping up to date with equipment and utitlising the skills of your party members as well as being efficient with turns is far more effective. And I just love that. I love finding new and powerful combinations that I think are way broken, only to find a boss that makes me rethink my approach. It's great when I beat a troublesome boss by changing up my strategy, which happened often, because a lot of them will introduce some kind of new mechanic to mess with you. It's not quite like Octopath 1, where pretty much every boss had a new gimmick to deal with, but the amount of times I looked on in despair as some new mechanic popped up to shake things up was impressive. So yeah, I love this game. It's more Octopath Traveler, it's better Octopath Traveler. Various quality of life improvements and visual upgrades all serve to enhance the solid gamplay structure. It honestly might be the best game on Switch. It's that good. Even if getting 100% is somehow even more brutally impossible then the first game. Got the Pimp Crown to prove it though! Oh right, I also finished Kirby's Dream Land again.

Stamina matches tonight at 8pm.

Kirby Triple Deluxe Oh right! Because it has 3 D's. I get it! Releasing in 2014 for the 3DS, Kirby Triple Deluxe is the first time we got a new Kirby in the new style on a portable console. The big selling points were the stereoscopic 3D effects and the Hypernova ability, which allowed Kirby to inhale objects far, far larger then himself. Jesus Christ, how horrifying! The plot begins with Kirby going to bed for the day after a grueling day of fishing. During the night, a large seed falls from the sky and rapidly grows into a massive beanstalk, which the game refers to as the "Dreamstalk". Kirby wakes up, is presumably horrified that his pristine garden is ruined, and rushes over to King Dedede's castle, presumably to demand he lives up to his self proclaimed title and actually do something for the community. The problem is, his castle has been lifted up by the Dreamstalk. Kirby reaches the castle, where he meets Taranza, a magic toting tarantula. Yep, Kirby character, it's cute. Taranza abducts Dedede and legs it up the Dreamstalk, and then not much else happens plot-wise until you reach the end of the game. Right, so the majority of this game takes place in Floralia, the kingdom of the sky. It's home to the imaginatively named People of the Sky. After beating up a hypnotised King Dedede, Taranza reveals that he works for Queen Sectonia. Queen Sectonia is a massive wasp like creature that has overthrown Floralia. The People of the Sky responded to this by dropping the Dreamstalk seed down to Dream Land in order to encourage the hero of Dream Land to climb it and help out. Queen Sectonia then countered this manuever by sending Taranza to capture that hero. Yeah, Dedede isn't the hero. Taranza clearly has never played a Kirby game, the snob. Queen Sectonia throws a hissy fit and fights Kirby. And then I paused... OK, not much there I didn't already mention, but it's the final boss, there's gonna be more phases. Sectonia merges herself with the Dreamstalk and becomes a big stonking flower thing, because why the hell not? There's two more special screens. There's not a lot to really say about this particular boss, all of the cool stuff happens after the credits, in the "Dededetour" mode. It's similar to Meta Knightmare Ultra, except you play as King Dedede. And the standard EX bosses are fought along the way. Until the end, where you don't fight Queen Sectonia. Hey! Remember that GBA game, Kirby and the Amazing Mirror? Well yeah, turns out Sectonia had said Amazing Mirror after that game. How? No idea. But it's here. For your information, the official name of this thing now is the Dimension Mirror, and it functions as a portal to the mirror world. Said mirror world has "Shadow" versions of the standard Kirby crew, and Dedede naturally ends up fighting his Shadow self. BTW, Dedede doesn't show up in Amazing Mirror, so it's nice to get confirmation that there is a Shadow Dedede, at least. Speaking of Shadows. Dark Meta Knight from that game shows up, but there's nothing in the Special Screen that is noteworthy. So let's move on to this game's True Arena, which has a harder version of the Sectonia fight. Wanna guess what her name is? Hah! Wrong! It's Soul of Sectonia. You suck! That second Special Screen is interesting. Allow me a moment to throw a theory around. I'll point out that as far as I'm aware, we haven't got confirmation of this, so I could be wrong. That pretty much wraps up Triple Deluxe, no really. Galacta Knight isn't in this game. There's not much in terms of revolutionary lore in here, to be honest. Some neat references here and there. Speaking of that. This boss is the sister of the villain from Canvas Curse My favourite Kirby is next, because it has mechs and deep lore. Coincidentally, I love Xenoblade. Maybe there's a connection...

Saves me the trouble of having to faff about with the weird breeding system to get one, cheers.

I mean, opinions and all that, I can overlook it because Bravely is the best implementation of the job system from FF3 and FF5. And I'm quite the fan of the more grounded stories in Octopath Traveler. You don't see that often in RPG's, so it's quite refreshing. And yes, @Ike. You're not the only one concerned about Dragon Quest. This notion that turn-based is generally seen as a dirty word in Square is weird, because there's clearly an audience for it, and it certainly hasn't stopped the likes of Pokémon.

It's weird, isn't it? The Final Fantasy portion of Square Enix seem to be really embarrassed by being known as the RPG company. You see a gradual distancing from that aspect of the series ever since FF 12. Thank goodness for Team Asano though. Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler have basically become New Final Fantasy at this point.

Something from a cutscene from incredibly late in the game. You know, like BotW did. But if you don't realise it at the time, does it count?

You're assuming it'll be in the game. Because remember what happened last time there was great music in a Zelda trailer?

What can I say? Reptiles are pretty cool.

Nice try, Nintendo. You ain't tempting me in by making up some kind of dragon people race. Good trailer, but I have no desire to play this, so no trailer was ever gonna sway me.

Second SaGa pack is out now. Skipping over Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 to give us 4 songs from SaGa Frontier, 2 from SaGa Frontier 2, and 1 song each from Unlimited SaGa, and SaGa SCARLET GRACE: AMBITIONS. It's a very solid pack, (Then again, it's SaGa music) there's 7 songs that weren't in Curtain Call. "T260G's Last Battle" has a very cool developing background. "Battle #5" is proper good though, that's my favourite here.

Player's Choice tonight at 8pm.

I'm more surprised that tweet encourages people to try the Gym Leader Castle. Because, ahem, that's a massive "lol, no". Your average Pokémon player ain't doing that here.

I was always under the impression that specific point of the ending was Link being more interested in getting back to Hyrule and continuing his search for Navi. That, or the time-tested notion of "Don't risk revealing to people that you futzed around with time travel" Of course, that's just my interpretation.

Lol, "Quickie" gets censored for some reason.

That checks out. Guy has range. He voices one of the dragons in Skyrim if I remember correctly.

Stock matches tonight at 8pm.

I'm gonna guess no, I booted up Smash Ultimate and checked the DK Rap credits, and it has a generic "by Rare" credit for the original song. And despite Grant Kirkhope being credited for the Banjo-Kazooie remix he did for Smash, all the other Banjo songs have the "by Rare" credit. For what I've heard, that's more credit then the movie gives the DK Rap. It's the sad state of video game composers, they're not given as much as respect as more "normal" music composers.

Watched it last night myself before @Dcubed's cheeky free trial ran out. Very much enjoyable, but yes, some of the more Hollywood esque thriller embellishments were a bit much. But I guess you can't just have a movie be 90% boardroom meetings, huh? It never got too outlandish. So it didn't detract from the movie too much. There's a neat site that delves into what was accurate and what was fiction if you're interested. Spoilers there, though.

OK, let's continue our journey by returning to Dream Land. Kirby's Return to Dream Land I'm gonna preface this with a warning, because of the most recent Kirby game. While my following post will not refer to any new content or lore that developed from the Switch game "Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe", I will be going into detail about things that were in the original Wii title (Known as Kirby's Adventure Wii in Europe). If you have not played the Wii title, but have plans on playing the Switch remaster, I advise against reading this post. For this reason, I'll be using a spoiler tag here. Kirby Triple Deluxe is next. It's about flowers, or something like that, I don't know?