Finished Chatper 10 of Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition !
Now doing side missions etc to level up for chapter 11. I noticed my play time is about 70 hours. Didn’t realise that I have played this much. It feels like I should be still be around 30 hours or so. Which shows that even with all the complaints I had about the game, I am still enjoying it so much that I didn’t notice the time.
Played some more Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
I recall reading interview of the Firaxis guys (forgot their name) about how they wanted the people to play aggressively and that’s why they added timer in X-Com 2. If you don’t clear the mission in that time, some very strong enemies join the battle.
Midnight Suns fortunately doesn’t have that, but each turn enemy get reinforcements. They are all one-hit kill, but when you have only 3 attack (some cards give you free attack if you kill in one hit), it means you have to be aggressively attack all the other enemies, or you will just keep fighting until you die.
Not a big fan of this, but it is much better than the X-Com 2 solution, IMO, which gave me too much pressure and I wasn’t able to enjoy the game. This is not too big of a deal here, but still a slight annoyance.
Also played some more Ghost of Tsushima.
Just slowly exploring the second area and clearing territories and anything I come across.
What about all of you? What have you been playing and/or plan to play?
Finished Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land!
I enjoyed my time with the game, but it’s a definitely a flawed one.
It’s buggy and poorly optimized, and it lacks the relaxing feeling and exceptional crafting systems that people expect when the see the “Atelier” name. I think the “Mixed” rating it has on Steam is excessive, but I can understand why some people are not happy with the game.
I really liked the worldbuilding and and exploration aspects. The crafting system is serviceable and better than most non-Atelier games, but honestly among the weakest in the series. Yumia is great and I hope to see more of her in future games. Story is fine, but too sparse for a game that tries to have more focus on that aspect.
Playing Never 7: The End of Infinity (part of the Ever 17/Never 7 Double Pack)!
After a lot of headaches with shipping and customs I finally got this. It’s a pack of two very old VNs (Never 7 is from 2000 and Ever 17 is from 2002) from the same author as the Zero Escape series which is one of my all-time favorite VN series.
You can clearly see the age of the game in the technical aspects - background and art look dated, and the low quality of the voices in Never 7 is definitely bothering me (thankfully I booted Ever 17 and they sound much better there). One thing I noticed is that this VN has a lot of choices - I took a peek and found a flowchart for the game and it looks very complex, so I’m most likely just doing an initial “blind” run then using a guide to get the remaining endings. 😃
As for the story, there’s already some hints of sci-fi elements (potentially time travel?) from the earlier scenes, with the protagonist having strange “premonitions” for the future. The main negative so far is that I don’t like most of the cast, but let’s see if they’ll grow on me over time.
Playing The Mummy Demastered!
Current side game. So far it’s a solid metroidvania.
Looks like this will be a very short game, I’m at ~30% of the map with a little more than 1h of gameplay. But I got this on a sale so this doesn’t bother me too much.
Interesting about the Yumia game, I guess it’s the one to skip.
I still have Zero Escape (and Danganronpa) series to play, will probably get around to it this year. Let’s see how that pans out.
You’re going to find a lot of people saying “solid JRPG, bad Atelier” for Yumia, and I think that’s the perfect summary for the game. There’s the technical problems that still need to be adressed, but the developer has been consistently pushing updates so hopefully most will be fixed eventually.
Also, since we’re talking about this series - we just got a trailer for a new game, which looks to be more of a “classic” Atelier game but this time including Shop management! Hope that part of the game works well, I remember very fondly my time playing Recettear.
Ah, interesting.
Heh, I shared the trailer for next game before looking at your comment 😀 Shop management could be fun. Would wait for your review.