Nintendo

Took a break this week from CrossCode since I was getting a little bored with the game. Will resume it after I finish Silksong.

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

I should be putting more time into this (Aoko is such a fun main character), but I haven't been in a great mood for reading. Still making small progress here and there.

Playing Hollow Knight: Silksong!

This game is amazing, but it's not something I can recommend to everyone - there's a line between "challenging" and "punishing" and I think it crosses that line way too often.

It inherits a lot from Hollow Knight, including some of the controversial aspects. Game is super difficult, save spots are sparse (and sometimes quite distant from bosses), the mapping system is the same with all the annoying "must track the map seller in each area", "must spend equipment slots to see your position on the map" and so on.

I'm finding Hornet a lot of fun to play with. She's fast (in particular once you get the dash ability), and her moveset is flashy and acrobatic. The inclusion of "crests" that let you swap her moveset is really cool, and people who miss the Knight's moveset will be happy to know that you can unlock an option to play that way. "Tools" that act as sub-weapons are another great addition, though the fact that they have limited uses and eat resources to recharge can feel limiting. I also love the new "healing" system - it's more "all or nothing" since you eat most of your meter to heal, but you get 3 life immediately, meaning you have to take less breaks to heal and boss battles get better paced.

Bosses have been generally quite fun and well designed, though I hate the ones who have summons. Savage Beastfly is by far the worst one so far due to the small arena, big hitboxes, and being very RNG-based since some of this summons are far more dangerous than others.

In-game economy is bad. There's two "currencies" and you always feels starved from one of them. Having to occasionally do "farming" sessions to recover my stash before progressing is one of the worst parts of this game.

The overall "feel" of growth over the course of the game is also lacking in some aspects, with the "movement" upgrades being amazing and "combat" ones underwhelming. You start with 5 life, and by the time you manage to go up to 6 there will be so many enemies dealing 2 damage that you went from "dying in 3 hits" to "still dying in 3 hits". The first weapon upgrade is so minor that there's some early-game enemies that still take the exact same number of hits to die. And BTW, did I mention that enemies in this game are annoyingly tanky? Having to hit 4-5 times is incredibly common, and this can get really annoying when dealing with flying enemies that love to stay out of your melee range.

Right now I'm deep into Act 2, just got the "grappling hook-like" upgrade and I'm exploring the upper areas of the citadel.

I finished Bananza for good. The only things not 100% completed are the music disks, because that's just grinding, and the stats page because I'm not insane. And then they released the DLC an hour later! But like I said in the other thread, I'm not going to get it. The roguelike gameplay is just not something I'm interested in. But finally, huge shoutout to the Credits Theme! I cried when that part happened!

So today is finally the day I'll pull the trigger on Xenoblade X. I remember my final verdict on the game on the Wii U was something along the lines of "The first 50 hours were some of the best I've ever experienced in a video game, followed by 100 hours of chores". However, since Xenoblades 2 and 3 went into a direction I was less fond of, I think I'll be able to appreciate X more than before. I've been meaning to play it again for a few years, but I had faith in a Switch remaster and waited.

The Witness is longer than I expected. I'm probably almost done now but I've seen enough inaccessible passages to know there's more than meets the eye underground.

And a little more of Yakuza 3. Just a bit.

I've been playing Rally Arcade Classics for a review. It's an arcade simulator rally game with a retro aestethic and works pretty well on the Switch.

I put Cyberpunk 2077 on hold while I play SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake. It's a fun platformer if you like the show, just like Battle for Bikini Bottom. I don't think it's one of the best 3D platformers or anything, but as a fan of the show, I'm having fun.

On the retro side, I recently got Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance on the Game Cube. So far I've only played Sub-Zero, but I'm planning on trying out all the characters and fatalities. It's "Mortal Kombat 5", the first one exclusive to consoles (no arcade). It changed the fighting formula a bit, so it's interesting. It's also not included in the Legacy Kollection, well the GBA version is, but it's not the same 😬

I've had the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. on my calendar for so long, I planned to play the original game on my Famicom to celebrate. So I'll try to finish it in one go on Famicom tomorrow (remember to press A on the title screen before pressing start to go back to the beginning of the world where you got Game Over!).

So, I did something stupid. I started an MMORPG, when I don’t even have time for normal games.

Sounds like me every time I get invited to a Minecraft server 🤣

Anyone else a bit overwhelmed after the Direct? I definitely want to play Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection, the Mario Galaxies (just for 2, since haven't played it, played 1 on Wii and Mario 3D All-Stars), Metroid Prime 4 and Hyrule Warriors, maybe Yoshi and who knows what else... 😱

I've been meaning to check out FF XIV for years, but I spent so much time of my youth playing MMORPGs, deep down, I just know I don't have that kind of time any more. It's just too much commitment, especially once you join any kind of guild. But I can't bring myself to remove it from my To-Do list, either.

Anyway, I've been continuing with Baten Kaitos. I think I'm close to the end, but it's hard to tell with this one. By now, I'm mostly out of topics to write about, too.

The most notable thing was a major jump in difficulty. For the most part, the game has been a walk in the park. However, this week, I fought two bosses back to back. The first one was just like the ones before them - I disposed of it within a few minutes. The second one, however, hit hard and actually healed itself. While I never actually lost, we fought for about 25 minutes before I finally won. Some of that may be due to my deck building - his healing came from his life steal, and I simply had no defensive cards at all.

Other than that, I also checked out the demo for Digimon Story: Time Stranger. It's still janky and a lot of ideas are directly lifted from various Shin Megami Tensei games, however, I can't help but like it. Should they release on Switch/2, I'll probably get it eventually. But for the demo, I actually had to play on someone else's PC.

I haven’t been playing anything and there’s so many games I’ve bought recently and so many games that have come out too. I think I will continue buying new games and have them as a backlog of stuff to get to at some point in the future. It sucks to have nothing new to play when you are craving to boot up your switch.

Why are the links PlayStation store ones ?