Hero-of-Time

A remastered version of this.

My journey through Grandia continues. Apparently I'm now on what would have been disc 2. I ran into a spot of trouble with this boss. The thing was doing stupid damage to both Justin and Feena. Also, Justin's attacks were pretty pitiful against it. I decided to reload my save and do some levelling up. I switched the automated battle system from doing regular attacks to doing magical attacks. I think I had neglected this for too long and as such some of my stats weren't the best. I also changed the weapon on Justin to one that was just pure raw damage. After doing all of this I ended up annihilating the boss. I've lost yet another party member but gained another two in Rapp and Milda. This is the only aspect of the game that I'm not a fan of. I'm not too keen on when JPRGs chop and change party members. I prefer to have my main party and leave it at that. I don't mind having some in reserve but having them there and then having them disappear from the game/story doesn't sit right with me. Plus, I'm not huge on both Rapp or Milda. I took on one of the bonus dungeons yesterday evening. You get a shockingly low amount of exp for fighting battles in there, especially for how much of a fight the enemies put up. I decided it was probably best to just avoid what battles I could and run my way through the dungeon and fight the boss. This worked out pretty well. It was still a trek to get to him but at least I had plenty of SP/MP left for the actual battle. I love that between all the battles and hectic dungeon crawling the game allows for quiet moments between the characters. The conversations on the boat between Feena and Justin were lovely and the visuals once again helped enhance these scenes. I also continued to make progress with Neo Geo Pocket Selection Vol.1. There's not a lot to say about this that I didn't say back when I played the original game. It's more of the same really, which isn't a bad thing. It's just a standard run and gun game that allows for multiple path choices and has 2 characters to play as. It was fine. Another fighting game is in this collection. This one probably sits in the middle of the two that I have previous played. Once again, I aimed at beating the game with each of the characters and unlocking any secret ones. The unlocking mechanism is pretty bad in this though. It's all completely random. When playing trough the story mode you will get challenged by a fighter and if you're lucky it will be one of the ones you need. I didn't have an issue with this until it came to unlocking the final one I needed. The dude just wouldn't show up. I actually finished this on Tuesday evening but it took another evening of essentially grinding play throughs in order for him to finally show up. Here they are. I was pretty disappointed with them. They are essentially just colour swaps for some of the main fighters. Still, it was a decent enough game and yet another title from the collection that is off the list. Character Endings

Seems to be an average port. The game is somehow worse than the Wii version. Summary from Era. Given who they hired to work on this, it actually isn't that surprising.

I hope so. I wanna see the meltdowns.

Decent line up, especially for those who've yet to play God of War or Like a Dragon Gaiden. Interested to see whether or not the Indiana Jones game has trophy support.

Nah. It slipped me by. I started it years ago on the Vita but never stuck with it. I then bought it last year for the PS1 but the HD collection got released soon after I purchased it. There are lots of JRPGs I've not played yet. The Breath of Fire games, Shadow Hearts and certain entries in the Shining Force series are ones that come to mind. I only played my first Star Ocean and Ys games last year.

Nope.

Nothing for me on this list at all, which is no surprise when it comes to 3rd party games on Nintendo consoles. Lots for Nintendo only owners though. It would be crazy if Elden Ring didn't get a port. I can see that doing silly numbers.

Like clockwork.

Put some more time into Grandia. Man, I love some of the scenes in this game. It's a real looker and takes me back to simpler and happier times in my life. I've picked up a fourth party member in Gadwin and he's quite the powerhouse. Dude can take a beating and dish out some major damage. Also, his running animation is absolutely hilarious. I've not needed to do any grinding in a while and so I've progressed the story some more. Story Spoilers

Or a Saturn. Worked well for Sega.

Standard practice for all these lot. Eurogamer used to do it all the time. Nobody wants to go first.

From Nate, who is usually pretty decent with info.

Let's say they don't and they do start charging £60+ for each of their games. Would you still be willing to cough up the money for day 1 releases?

Aye. That's the fella.

Probably a factor. A lot of their game sales are front loaded and then fall off a cliff.

Aye. He kept diving way too early.

Arsenal were shocking. 60 minutes against 10 men and at home and they still couldn't finish the game off. Man U played stupidly well and they probably should have won it in regular time.

This is no doubt completely fake but it does have me thinking about the price of games. Current Switch retail titles usually go for £40-£45. Do we think this will go up, just like what Microsoft and Sony have done? Needing to pay £60 to play a game at launch is something I've refused to budge on when it comes to the PS5. What would your stance be if Nintendo start charging the same for their games? It's not as if they drop in price much either.

I finished off Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition. It didn't take long to grind the coins I needed to purchase everything I was missing. Many people said playing one of the Super Mario Bros. 2 stages was the quickest way to earn money but I found this way was far more lucrative. 60 coins every few seconds. It was definitely the way to go. With the Switch 2 being released this year, I need to try and get on top on my original Switch games. I decided to crack on with Neo Geo Pocket Color Selection Vol.1. I played Metal Slug: First Mission a year or two back but didn't really play around with any of the other titles. This was pretty fun. I loved the chunky sprites on show here, which is something that I love about this handheld system. It's quite amazing how the game plays when you consider there are only a couple of buttons to work with. I went through the game with all of the characters (ending shots below) and unlocked the hidden character and I have no idea who he is. Shout out to Billy Kane who was a thorn in my side in every single playthrough that I done. Dude kept battering with his stick combo and seemed to be always one step ahead of me. I'd rather have fought Geese Howard another round than take on Billy again. Next up... I enjoyed this one a lot more, purely because it allowed you to turn the speed up. The previous game was a little slow and here I was able to crank things up to the speed I preferred. Once again, I went through the game with each of the characters and unlocked all of the secret ones (ending shots at the bottom). The endings are pretty funny, with each of the girls winning the tournament and getting to make a wish but most of the time the wish goes wrong. A neat feature in the game is the ability to unlock items. You can equip one of them to help give you the advantage in a fight but if you lose the battle then you also lose the item. These are obtained by doing certain things in a match, like getting a perfect victory of finishing an opponent with a special move. What I did enjoy when playing through both of these games is the tasks you needed to do to get extra fighters. Remember when a fighting game wasn't sold off to the players piece by piece and you could actually earn extra fighters by doing various things in game? Happy days. Ending screens for both games

Yeah. There are only a few missable trophies, the biggest being finding all of the Mana Eggs.

Absolutely

Played some more Grandia today. I've just realised I can set the battles to auto. This means I can farm exp and do other stuff at the same time. It works a treat. Thanks to the grinding I've done, I came across a boss and just set it to auto while I made my breakfast. Came back and the boss was dead. Tactics? Don't make me laugh. Still very much enjoying my time with it and is far better than Secret of Mana.

I've never liked you, drahkon. You know that, right?