Your 2019 Gaming Diary

[drahkon]

Bought and played 36 Fragments of Midnight and Midnight Deluxe on my Vita. They were dirt cheap and supposed to be short. Well...they were short. Managed to beat the first and get the Platinum for both (you don't need to fully complete the second game) on my two 1 hours travels yesterday and today. What can I say? They weren't really worth the 3 bucks total.  Easy Platinums, though  

Played the first two missions of Styx: Shards of Darkness with my best mate. Great co-op stealth fun  

 

Spoiler

Currently Playing

• Styx: Shards of Darkness (PS4)
• (Apex Legends (PS4) - multiplayer game)

Finished/Completed

• NieR: Automata (PS4) - January
• Super Mario Land 3  - Wario Land (GB) - January
• Steamworld Dig 2 (PSVita) - February
• Far Cry New Dawn (PS4)  - February
• VA-11 HALL-A (PSVita)  - February
• Shantae: Half-Genie Hero (PSVita)  - March
• Devious Dungeon (PSVita)  - March
• Spyro the Dragon (PS4)  - March
• Undertale (PSVita)  - March
• Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! (PS4)  - March
• Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon (PS4)  - March
• 36 Fragments of Midnight (PSVita)  - March
• Midnight Deluxe (PSVita)  - March

Platinum trophies I might get/games on hiatus

• Crypt of the Necrodancer (PSVita/PS4 - long-term playthrough)
• Sky Force Reloaded (PS4)

Abandoned

• Chasm (PSVita) - tedious and boring
• Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - bland and unnecessarily tedious

[Jonnas]

Quick update on my playing habits:

• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - I've been playing this the most, by far. I've been attending local tournaments, I've recently started to try out online, I've been playing with different button configurations (setting L to jump was one of my weirder epiphanies), my Incineroar keeps getting better, and Mr.Game&Watch (of all characters) is a serious candidate for a secondary (alongside Link and Zelda). Point is, I've been having tremendous fun with this game, with no end in sight. I might finally start the Adventure Mode soon;
• Tetris 99 - Tried this out a couple of times. Tetris is always fun, but I've always seen it as a relaxing sort of fun. Once you introduce competition into it, I stop enjoying it, and I get needlessly stressed out when the speed ramps up near the end. Best result I got was 5th place, and I'm fine with that;
• Fire Emblem Heroes - The Binding Blade banner was a fiasco (pity-broken twice!), and I'm ready to stop. Kinda. I still find the character-building aspect to be fun, and I love challenging the monthly Legendary Abyssal maps. For that reason, I want to keep the app around for those times, but I will also impose restrictions on my playtime with it;
• Fire Emblem Awakening - This playthrough went on hiatus for a bit, but I retook it. It dawned on me that, in order to do everything I want to do (like Galeforce for a bunch of units), I'll need a lot more time and grind. Since that might come at the detriment of me playing other games, I might put this on pause;
• Dr.Mario - The Online NES is wonderful. I had played Dr.Mario before, but actually owning it and trying to beat Level 20 was much better than expected. Might do it again;
• Super Mario Bros. DX - I bought this in discount on the 3DS, since SMB is a timeless game, I played this when I was younger, and this version has extra content... But the smaller GBC screen is bothering me way too much. Might be the first time in my life that happened. Probably because this is a straight-up port of a game I already know. Will likely drop it.

I noticed the majority of my playtime was on games I'm not likely to stop playing any time soon. I'll try to make space for something I can just run through.

  My 2019 log (Hide contents)

Played/Beat/Completed:

-Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land (1994) Completed (January 30th)

-Dr.Mario (1990) Completed, I guess (March 18th)

 

Currently Playing:

-Fire Emblem Awakening (Replay)

 

Will always be Playing:

-Fire Emblem Heroes (Controlled)

-Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

 

Dropped/Hiatus

-Tetris 99 (2019) Never won

-Super Mario Bros. DX (1999) Bad port

 

Edited March 26, 2019 by Jonnas

[Glen-i]

6 hours ago, Jonnas said:

• Fire Emblem Awakening - This playthrough went on hiatus for a bit, but I retook it. It dawned on me that, in order to do everything I want to do (like Galeforce for a bunch of units), I'll need a lot more time and grind. Since that might come at the detriment of me playing other games, I might put this on pause;

I actually did that... For every unit... And got all their stats maxed...

Don't look at me like that!

[Aperson]

On 3/22/2019 at 2:09 PM, GenericAperson said:

Fair enough. I did notice some parts that needed Reveal but when I reached Air's Rock I was a bit confused as to how to enter, only through use of the internet did I find out what I was missing. I've been trying to use the internet and save states minimally though, only when I've really gotten stuck have I looked stuff up and then it's only been for small prompts.

 

Anyway, despite getting the boat it seems I can't actually get to Jupiter Lighthouse yet and I'm only restricted to the ocean area above. So I did some exploring and eventually found myself tackling Gaia Rock and taking on the serpent boss.

 

So far Lost Age has been very easy. I had yet to get a game over and had only ever lost one party member, most enemies and bosses were going down very easily to my basic attacks, Synergies and Djinn.

 

Then this guy shows up and he's tough as nails. I eventually beat him by de-equipping all my Djinn first turn so that I could use Summons and do massive damage to the boss to get around the fact that he can heal 30 HP every turn AND cast Cure Well so his health is constantly going up. He also hits for massive damage so I had to heal a few times and only after I used a party potion to heal everyone's health back to max and then summoning Thor did I manage to beat him. That guy was tough as nails and I died multiple times. Need more Mercury Djinn to be able to revive my party going forward if I'm going to be facing boss battles this hard from this point onwards.

 

I'm quite surprised at how quickly I'm getting through this game but it does feel like I've passed the halfway point or am getting close to it already. The boat has made traversal infinitely better than the original Golden Sun. Trying to go back for the Djinn in that game is a lot of hassle as you have no fast travel or airship to allow you to quickly skip over to where you need. In most Final Fantasy games they give you an airship towards the end of the game that can fly over the entire map and that makes it significantly easier to go back for anything you might of missed or do the game's optional sidequests. In Golden Sun,you missed a Djinn? Tough, you have to walk all the way through the entire map and put up with random encounters to get to the actual place you want to go.

 

Anyway, I beat that monster and got the Sand Psynergy.

Turns out this was required to beat the game. The Sand Psynergy is needed to complete another dungeon and obtain three parts of a trident. You also have to backtrack to a previous town and go into the statue to get another one and then you need to complete the Aqua Rock to get the Parch synergy to get the other part. Now that I think about it you also need the reveal psynergy to get through both of these so I can see what @Glen-i was saying.

 

So yeah, now I'm trying to figure out how to fix the trident. It occurred to me that I hadn't actually set the ship in Ahlfara free again and now I have the Burst synergy I am able to do just that so I'm back there. Briggs has stolen the boat and gone to Champa so looks like I'm chasing him back there. I did actually at one point think the boat we were trying to free was going to be our own boat and completely forgot about the one near the Shrine of the Sea God which turned out to be the actual boat needed. So I completely forgot about freeing the other one until now.

 

I've acquired plenty of Djinn now, I think I'm doing better for getting them than I did in the first game where I may have missed out multiple levels. Everyone is in their level 3 classes now of Gallant, Hex, Mage and Commander.

[Jonnas]

2 hours ago, GenericAperson said:

I've acquired plenty of Djinn now, I think I'm doing better for getting them than I did in the first game where I may have missed out multiple levels. Everyone is in their level 3 classes now of Gallant, Hex, Mage and Commander.

Have you been experimenting with Djinn setups? You should be able to unlock some unique classes at this point.

On a side-note, reading your experiences is fascinating. I remember fixing the ship fairly early, before finding the drunken snake, and I think before even learning about the trident. Love that open-ended part of the game.

16 hours ago, Glen-i said:

I actually did that... For every unit... And got all their stats maxed...

Don't look at me like that!

I mean, that's roughly what I'm doing. I decided to do a run where the child characters are optimised in skills, parentage and class. It's nothing 100% serious, as I still need to find each setup interesting enough to use (and I did pair up Chrom with Olivia just to see if I could), but I do plan on getting Limit Breaker for all who eventually need it. And beat Apotheosis.

Raising the mothers as Dark Fliers has been the most sluggish part. I can live with incomplete/inefficient skillsets, but building a team of Galeforcers is crucial to the playthrough, and there's no way around that. At least I got Donnie!Kjelle and Gaius!Noire fairly early.

...After typing all that, I realise I really should go grab a few Paragons.

[Dcubed]

Yeah, you should be able to make some really good dual-type Djjin classes now.  IIRC, the best end-game class for the Venus adepts was Chaos Lord (which combined Mars and Venus Djjin); so you should definitely experiment!

[Aperson]

Still playing Golden Sun Lost Age (Wii U VC) and I've just cleared Jupiter Lighthouse... and Isaac's team has joined the frey so I now have eight playable characters and the ability to customise my party from the standard setup given to you. I resorted my Djinn on my original team to get some of the higher classes but yeah, now that I have two sets of playable characters I may as well have a standard and a mixed variant for both.

 

Also got an airship. Except it can't fly over forests so it's a rubbish airship... oh well, it's alleviated my problems with the first game so really glad to have it.

 

Also been trying to add to the Pokedex in Pokemon SoulSilver (DS) and the Safari Zone is one of the most frustrating and time consuming things I've ever seen. Basically you have to leave the game on for three hour stints multiple times if you want to get all the items for it, but then that's not enough, you need to place them in a particular area, wait for their value to multiply by turning the game on every day and when it gets to the kind of value you want THEN the Pokemon you are looking for will appear.

 

I was hoping to use this method to catch a Croagunk to trade to Pearl since I'm still missing Croagunk in my Pearldex (12 years after getting the game!) However, I did briefly go on Pokemon Pearl (DS) and get a Skorupi. I don't think I will be able to properly complete either Pokedex, but there is one that I may have incentive to do through transfer and that is White 2.

[Aperson]

Alright, it's time. Time to take on the Final Boss of Golden Sun Lost Age (Wii U VC).

 

 

Yep, I swapped the party around in between Lighthouses so that Felix and Isaac could fight on the same team. It means neither Sheba or Ivan get to be part of the main party but their synergy has helped get through this final dungeon anyway. So, here are everyone's equipment, classes and levels:

 

 

 

 

 

Sheba got the Teleport Synergy which is amazing for travelling across the map... it's a shame that you get it right in the middle of the final dungeon because the airship couldn't even travel that well...

 

I think I will take on the final boss later though... sleep might be a better idea!

[Hero-of-Time]

With March over, here is a what I played and completed. I’ll not go into too much detail over most of them as I've discussed them in other threads over the course of the month.

Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove (Switch)
This is a game that I was very much looking forward to but was slightly disappointed by it after my first play through. The game was pretty short and it also suffers from a few bug issues. After finishing the game I decided to go after the in game achievements and this is where it really took a hold of me. The short play time became a non-issue because I was having to do so many runs through it to unlock the achievements and unlockables. I ended up spending a crazy amount of time on it, despite the technical issues it was suffering from.

Batman: Enemy Within (PS4)
I loved the first game and I was waiting for a decent price before snapping up the second. At the start of the month Amazon were selling the game for £8 and I immediately jumped on it for that price.

I LOVED this and probably enjoyed it more than the original game. Seeing the Joker’s decent into madness and how I essentially pushed him there myself was a very interesting take to the story. Sometimes playing a TT game there are parts that drag or characters that I don’t really care for but I loved everything about his game and it’s sad that there will never be another in the series.

Devil May Cry V (PS4)
An amazing game that delivered in terms of gameplay and story. I just wish I had the skill to do some of the crazy combos that the game allows you to pull off. Capcom are on a streak at this start of this year with this, Resident Evil 2 and Onimusha all being released and all being top notch titles.

Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4)
I kinda started this back in October. A mate of mine bought it and wanted me to help him boost some of the online trophies. After I done that I shelved the game and never played through the campaign. The campaign started off great but it became very repetitive by the end of it. Most of the fights were the same and the story was pretty meh. It was annoying to constantly be fighting the same old characters over and over again and I think the game would have benefited more by having stories for each of the characters rather than having one big one.

The game does play very well though and it is visually very stunning. It’s just a shame that the story mode is pretty bad.

Captain Toad DLC (Switch)
Loved this. Very short but very sweet DLC for one of my favourite Nintendo games. Its a few hours long if you try to do everything in the DLC and the last level, while not as hard as the base game, still offers up a nice challenge when trying to do the extra mission within it.

Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space (PS4)
This was a game I bought AGES ago when I was in the mood to do some trophy hunting but by the time I got around to playing it I was burnt out. I decided to scratch it off the backlog and play through it this month.

It’s a very rough game that’s an hour or two long. For trophy/achievement  hunters only.

Burly Men At Sea (PS4)
With PS+ being cheap this month I decided to re-subscribe. This was a game that I had added to the library when it was offer and I decided to play through one Saturday morning when I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

It’s a neat a little indie game that is pretty much a story based game. You control 3 burly men and you set out on an adventure that has you making various decisions that will ultimately give you an ending based of the decisions you make. It’s a shot game that encourages repeat play throughs. The short play time allows you to see a bunch of different decisions to be made and endings to be seen. You can probably see everything the game has to offer in around a couple of hours.

Kirby’s Extra Epic Yarn (3DS)
This is quite possibly the final ever first party release for the ageing handheld and even though I have played through the Wii version of the game multiple times I did enjoy playing through this again. There are a few little things that are new to this version but for the most part the game is pretty much the same. It is a little easier due to the addition of the new hat mechanics that have been added but it still didn’t take away any of the enjoyment I had while playing the game.

Shining the Holy Ark (Saturn)
The banter in the Retro Thread is to blame for me playing through this again and I’m happy that the conversations in there lead me to do so because I had an absolute blast firing this up and playing through it for the first time in 20 years.

The game is pretty difficult and it can run pretty sluggishly at times but I just can’t help but love the game. It’s one of my favourite Saturn titles and it really is the successor to Shining in the Darkness on the Mega Drive. First person dungeon crawling, grinding needed and a punishing consequence for failing is what was offered in the Mega Drive game and this remains true for this spiritual sequel.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Switch)
This is another game that I’ve had in my backlog and never got around to playing. Absolutely adored this and I’m a little disappointed I left it sitting there for so long. Great pixel graphics, loved the character switching mechanic and amazing soundtrack all made for a short but fun experience. I wish I had played it sooner.

Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove (PS4)
With me enjoying the Switch version so much I ended up double dipping and buying the game for my PS4 as well. I heard the game ran more smoothly, had a better online experience and basically had less glitches than the Switch version and this was certainly was the case. I loved playing through it again.

Master Blaster Zero 2 (Switch)
This was my highlight from the most recent Nindie Direct. I was a huge fan of the original game and this certainly delivered on every front. It was more challenging and a lot longer than the first game, which were both welcome additions.  I’m hoping Inti Creates shows the same kind of post release support that they showed with the first game. If this is the case then I will be definitely be buying any extra characters they do put out.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (PS4)
PS+ was recently on sale so I decided to re-subscribe. This was one of the games that was part of the service this month and I decided to give it a play through. I hadn’t played the game since it was released back on the 360 and I have to say that the gameplay does hold up very well. There were a lot of levels I thought were in this game but it seems I was thinking of the second game.  The platinum was fun to nab purely because of the veteran glitch that now exists. No more trying to do Mile High over and over and over again on Veteran difficulty! I went through that hell on the 360 and was quite happy to bypass it this time.  

The Walking Dead: The Final Season (PS4)
What a brilliant finale to the whole series. I can't go into too much detail about what happens as it would spoil it for those who haven't played it yet but all i'll say is that the ending was very satisfying. Like when a TV show you enjoyed has ended,  you feel gutted and empty that you will no longer be seeing these characters again.  As a side note, the trophies seem to be busted for the game. You can unlock them offline but you can't sync them to the server yet. Very weird. Hopefully they wil get fixed and automatically get added to my tally.

Yoshi's Crafted World (Switch)
I finished the main story of this pretty quickly and I was left feeling very meh about the whole thing but once I started doing the boss challenges the game started to click with me a little more. I ended up finishing all of the stages the game had to offer but there are still a shed load of collectables to pick up. I'm still debating whether to go for them all but seeing as I have now done the hardest parts of the game I may as well try to 100% it. It will probably be a case of picking away at it in between playing other games.

[drahkon]

3 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

The platinum was fun to nab purely because of the veteran glitch that now exists. No more trying to do Mile High over and over and over again on Veteran difficulty!

Excuse me, what?

[Hero-of-Time]

38 minutes ago, drahkon said:

Excuse me, what?

 

 

[drahkon]

I've lost all my respect for you. 

[Ganepark32]

9 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Batman: Enemy Within (PS4)

I loved the first game and I was waiting for a decent price before snapping up the second. At the start of the month Amazon were selling the game for £8 and I immediately jumped on it for that price.

I LOVED this and probably enjoyed it more than the original game. Seeing the Joker’s decent into madness and how I essentially pushed him there myself was a very interesting take to the story. Sometimes playing a TT game there are parts that drag or characters that I don’t really care for but I loved everything about his game and it’s sad that there will never be another in the series.

Glad to see someone else giving this some love. Played it myself at the end of last year (IIRC, I nabbed the platinum on New Years Eve just before the bells) and I absolutely loved it. Like you, I really liked what they did with the Joker and Bruce's relationship and how they handled Harley and how she manipulated John to help him realise his full potential. That end sequence was brilliant as well and how it ended with John and Bruce was great.

It really does suck there won't be more of it. Most people focus on The Walking Dead for TellTales but with them having gone under, gone are more chances at the Batman series, The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands (though the latter looks like it might tie in with the third game so there's at least that) and that's a shame as they were great narrative experiences. Maybe someone will step in with them but I just don't see it happening.

[Aperson]

Golden Sun Lost Age (Wii U VC) is complete!

 

Doom Dragon was a bit of a pain and wiped my main party twice but thanks to having an additional four characters that could come in and do a decent job I did the fight on the second attempt. The main party was who I'd mainly been concentrating on so Felix, Jenna, Isaac and Mia were first up on both occasions. I used Jenna and Mia purely for healing and left Felix and Isaac to attack the boss. However on the second attempt I decided to de-equip half of the Djinn of both Jenna and Mia so that I could do some major damage first turn to both characters. I also stopped using Odyssey with Felix so that he had enough PP to revive anyone who died. I'm surprised at how quickly I was able to adapt to a winning strategy after having a bit of difficulty with this thing's ability to drain your entire Djinn pool as well as it's massive damage attack that it likes to do. Also multiple times my summons were used on turns where it put up a protective barrier so I was doing about 90 damage maximum or something with Level 4 Summons... whoops! After downing two heads the second time around however I had enough in the backup party to be able to finish off the final boss.

 

I have to say though, I don't think the ending was that great.

 

I thought Alex was going to be the Final Boss because it naturally seemed fitting given where the story had been going and what the Wise One was warning us about. Even then it seemed like a natural twist for the Wise One to have really been evil all along and it seemed like the natural way for it to go... especially because he then summons the final boss which turns out to be made from Felix and Isaac's parents. So in a shock twist at the end of the game you kill your own parents and that would have been one of the most striking video game endings ever... but then they go and ruin that all by saying "oh, they're not really dead, they had enough synergy to survive"... OK... then they sort the Alex issue out by having him "not completely immortal" from the Golden Sun and he sinks into the ground along with Mount Aleph. Vale is destroyed, some interesting developments for this ending going on but it's OK because everyone knew Vale was going to be destroyed and was evacuated. All so that Camelot can redeem the Wise One and have him out to test the protagonists all along and allow the main characters to get a happy ending. It's more of a bitter sweet ending though and one that is clearly trying to backtrack on some of the interesting twists this game had.

 

Meanwhile my dose of Pokemon has moved, like the TwitchPresents marathon, to Unova and Pokemon White Version 2 (DS). I have made quite a bit of progress on the regional Pokedex since going back to the game and I am missing about 3 Pokemon of which I haven't seen before. One of them is Buneary who is Black 2 exclusive but I think I can breed one in Pearl and transfer it to White 2. The other two are Oshawott and Vullaby, neither of which are owned by trainers and neither of which I can very easily get unless I restart White which I'm not really willing to do. My brother has Black but the cart got damaged and no longer works. He didn't pick Oshawott either. No Wi-Fi connection means I cannot trade for them using GTS. I hear there are some third party servers going around but I haven't been able to access them. Actually registering Pokemon for the Pokedex has made quite a bit of progress thanks to focusing on levelling up Pokemon that only need one level to evolve, or through circumstance can level up with only one level required if I use a Heart Scale at the PWT.

 

For a main game next I think I'm going to be playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna the Golden Country (Switch). It's been a while since the Switch has been used as a gaming machine and I want something fairly short as I plan to buy Final Fantasy XII on Switch when that comes out at the end of this month.

[Dcubed]

@GenericAperson Did you find all of the Djinn? If you didn't I highly recommend you do... The reward for doing so is awesome and well worth it!  (Hint: It's a good thing you found Teleport... You'll need it if you want that reward...)

 

I do agree that the ending is a bit disappointing in how it ends up pulling some of its best punches; but the end game portion of the story is actually really engaging and genuinely surprising isn't it!?

 

Definitely didn't see this coming...

 

Spoiler

That Issac and co were actually originally the bad guys, who were inadvertently going to stop Weyard from literally eroding away!

 

Amazingly enough, the non-standard game over at the start of Golden Sun Part 1 actually still makes sense as well!  Given that the Mars Adepts could never have possibly have lit the lighthouses on their own without Issac and Felix's interference!

God I love the Golden Sun games! How I pine for a proper sequel (one that is a LOT better than Dark Dawn...)

Edited April 2, 2019 by Dcubed

[Jonnas]

Spoiler

I saw the twist (that Saturos and Menardi were the good guys) coming from a mile away, even as a teenager. The villains were being coy about their motivations from the start (including Felix), and Kraden's statement about alchemy being bad for the world never convinced me. I didn't have to know the specifics to realize that Saturos et al. would ultimately be proven to be on the right.

That said, I do agree that the ending itself lacks a lot of punch. Opposing the Wise One turned out to be of little consequence, apparent mastermind Alex didn't go out in a satisfactory manner, and the bait-and-switch with Vale and the parents pisses me off to this day.

Still, despite the tone-deaf themes, this game had surprising attention to detail. The Wise One briefly asks Isaac to give him the stone for a moment at the beginning just to set up the ending with Alex. Even in minor stuff, they added an almost-useless puddle in a certain passage just to justify how Piers went through a dungeon off-screen. That's a level of plot and gameplay integration that I've never seen any other RPG match.

 

[Glen-i]

@GenericAperson If you do decide to go for all 72 Djinn, there are a couple of things you absolutely need from the first game to pull it off.

- At least 6 Djinn of each element

- The items that gives you the Psynergy "Force" "Carry" and "Lift"

You transferred your data, so there's no way you don't have Carry and Lift, but Force is optional. I hope you didn't brute force your way through that Forest Maze...

If you missed some Djinn in the first game, 1 of each element will appear somewhere in The Lost Age.

Oh, and whoever has the Sol Blade should just be unleashing Megiddo as much as possible. Actually, that probably goes for Excalibur too. (How often did you reset the game for that?) Those attacks are way better than any Psynergy. You should also focus their equipment on raising critical.

Edited April 3, 2019 by Glen-i

[Aperson]

I don't think I'm going for all the Djinn for the sole reason that I missed quite a few in the original game so it's too late for a 100% run of the second.

 

I have moved on now anyway and have started on Xenobalde Chronicles 2: Torna the Golden Country (Switch). Just got to Torigoth and was very surprised:

 

 

 

[/spoilers]

 

Very curious indeed. Actually I'm playing the game right now as we speak.

Edited April 3, 2019 by GenericAperson

[Dcubed]

Aww man... That would be a terrible shame if you didn't end up unlocking the secret final dungeon in The Lost Age... it's fantastic! And the ultimate final boss is absolutely infamously tough as nails! So much fun!  

Edited April 3, 2019 by Dcubed

[Aperson]

4 hours ago, Dcubed said:

Aww man... That would be a terrible shame if you didn't end up unlocking the secret final dungeon in The Lost Age... it's fantastic! And the ultimate final boss is absolutely infamously tough as nails! So much fun!  

To be fair, I remember I got stuck in the forest that @Glen-i mentioned in the first playthrough and that initially put me off finishing it. I went back and finished the game in 2018, I don't know if I have the post from the 2018 Gaming Diary thread at the time as to what I was saying about that maze if I ever did but I do know I missed that synergy.

 

Was about to leave Gormott only to get a Main Story Quest called "Where's the Boy Gone?". I hear there is a mandatory quest somewhere down the line in this DLC/extra game that feels like padding of sorts.

 

Actually, considering it has a physical release would you consider Torna to be it's own game or just a DLC campaign for Xenoblade 2?

[Dcubed]

17 minutes ago, GenericAperson said:

Actually, considering it has a physical release would you consider Torna to be it's own game or just a DLC campaign for Xenoblade 2?

It's basically the same thing as Uncharted 4: The Lost Legacy.  It's a standalone DLC story, sold as a separate release.

[Aperson]

Made quite a bit of progress on Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna the Golden Country (Switch) and I have to really complain about the forced sidequest section. They essentially gate you off until you've done 16 sidequests or got 16 people into the community (some quests recruit multiple people) and it is blatant padding to make the game last longer.

 

I got past that bit though and am now on a difficult fight which I have since tried to grind for before doing again.

 

I'm fighting Malos in what appears to be the same fight copied and pasted from the main game but in a new location. I was struggling to beat the Artifices before then but switched to Addam as the lead character to allow the AI to take care of healing, which is what I've done in previous games.

[drahkon]

Finished Path of Exile's story last night. 10 acts of good old Diablo 2-style fun. Besides Apex Legends this is the only game I've played so far in April and I'm not even mad. I've been spending lots of time with friends so gaming was pretty much background noise when I was alone at home. Both games are perfect for that. Pretty sure this won't change anytime soon (until my mate is done with Sekiro and I can borrow it ).

Anyway, now what to do...do the endgame content of Path of Exile or start a new character and try a new build...think I'll go with the latter. 

Spoiler

Currently Playing

• Styx: Shards of Darkness (PS4)
• (Apex Legends (PS4) - multiplayer game)

Finished/Completed

• NieR: Automata (PS4) - January
• Super Mario Land 3  - Wario Land (GB) - January
• Steamworld Dig 2 (PSVita) - February
• Far Cry New Dawn (PS4)  - February
• VA-11 HALL-A (PSVita)  - February
• Shantae: Half-Genie Hero (PSVita)  - March
• Devious Dungeon (PSVita)  - March
• Spyro the Dragon (PS4)  - March
• Undertale (PSVita)  - March
• Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! (PS4)  - March
• Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon (PS4)  - March
• 36 Fragments of Midnight (PSVita)  - March
• Midnight Deluxe (PSVita)  - March
• Path of Exile (PS4) - April

Platinum trophies I might get/games on hiatus

• Crypt of the Necrodancer (PSVita/PS4 - long-term playthrough)
• Sky Force Reloaded (PS4)

Abandoned

• Chasm (PSVita) - tedious and boring
• Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - bland and unnecessarily tedious

[Aperson]

Finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna the Golden Country (Switch). Sadly I only think it's worth it if you want to know more about what happened in the past and as I talk, the endgame events are the most exciting part of the whole thing. But oh boy is it bogged down by mandatory sidequests which equate to nothing more than padding to help give you a higher level for the final boss..There was a post final boss surprise which I wasn't expecting but the ending did tie things nicely into the main game storyline complete with the change of title screen. The plot twists were not really existent much due to the prequel nature of the game, if you played the main game you already know how this story is going to end.

 

To be honest, these guys were the highlight of the game.

 

I also went back on Soul Calibur VI (PS4). Amy was released as DLC before the end of last month so I decided now would be a good time to tackle her story mode. It was a pretty meaty story mode in the end with about 10 chapters, though sometimes I was confused at what was actually going on.

 

 

 

Also been filling the Pokedex on Pokemon White 2 (DS). Got the Shiny Haxorus fairly recently so trying to go for regional dex completion but missing any access to the Archen family due to choosing Tirtouga in both White and White 2. Whoops.

 

I've got a bit of time left before the next game I'm interested comes out, but I think I will spend time with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch) and the DLC before Final Fantasy XII comes out on Switch.

[Aperson]

Indeed, all I've been playing lately are Super Smash Bros Ultimate (Switch) and Pokemon White Version 2 (DS) in light bursts. Been filling the Pokedex in Pokemon and clearing Classic mode in Smash.

 

I also decided to try out all my DS games on my 3DS just so that my system's software library could truly be complete. And I came to discover that one of my games which I got nearly 10 years ago was pirated. It was an American cartridge which is why it wasn't immediately obvious but looking at it now the writing was a big giveaway. I was able to play through it on DS but the 3DS and it's piracy checks mean that it errors upon start.