What Are You Currently Playing?

[Alunissage]

My Megadrive Mini 2 arrived so I've played some Eternal Blue! It's been so ridiculously long since I played, and I think it was around 2003-4 when I played it in Japanese (up to just after Borgan). I knew there were a lot of little cutscenes that weren't in the remake but I don't remember much of the details. My husband was watching and trying to piece out the Japanese -- he knows a bit more than I do but I remember a fair bit of the dialogue so between the two of us we're mostly getting it. Except that I haven't gotten back to it since arriving at Larpa because I started playing Silver Star Story Touch again.

Spouse wanted something light and played Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. It was cute but rather more mean-spirited than I was expecting. He's now playing Tunic, which is doing an amazing job of feeling like we're playing a Zelda game for the first time in a foreign language that we're slowly working out. That's fully deliberate on the developer's part; you find pages of the game manual as you go and most of the text is in unreadable symbols with a few English words interspersed. I think more of it is turning into English as we go but I'm not positive. It really does remind me of importing games where I knew the basic idea but not that game's specific gameplay and had to try to figure out what the manual was saying from the pictures and my experience, which is pretty much how I first experienced several Zelda games before they started being released in NA and JP simultaneously.

[ShugoHanasaki]

Still playing Atelier Sophie 2. Afterwards I'm going to make a pit stop at LUNAR 1 and 2 on PSX again.

Then on to Legend of Heroes: Trails of Zer & then onto Star Ocean 6! (^.^)

[Sonic#]

I'm still waiting on my Mega Drive Mini 2. Until then, I've been playing Live A Live. I'm almost at the final boss. I appreciate the anthology of individual stories, their quirky experimentation with gameplay, and the way everything comes together toward the end. The only thing I dislike is that the last few hours certainly turn into a grind. I could stand navigating the final areas without a near-constant encounter rate.

I've also been playing Victoria III, a 19th century grand strategy game. After a couple of partial playthroughs I've stuck with Japan and learned the economic and political systems in the game. I do like that the game makes it viable (if challenging) to play as an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist. But it feels like one of the more numerically-heavy strategy games. The moments of compelling emergent narrative are pretty thin and mainly in broad strokes, like inverting the Commodore Perry narrative and winning recognition from the international community after a successful naval war with the US. This will probably be a once-in-a-while game for me, like Stellaris or Civilization.

[Sonic#]

Well, besides playing the Mega Drive Mini 2, I played and beat Pentiment. It is a dialogue/narrative-based game from Obsidian, telling the story of a small 16th century village and abbey in Bavaria, and the man (an aspiring artist, Andreas) who has visited to learn from the monks in the scriptorium. He soon finds himself in the middle of a murder mystery.

The game is gorgeous in design. At moments it reminds me of Curse of Monkey Island (the cartoon-like animation that in many cases still holds up today); at other moments it does its own thing, playing around with illuminated manuscript styles to tell its story. Some of my favorite sequences involve these manuscripts themselves; early in the game, Andreas and a nun (Illuminata) have a conversation about Aeneas and Dido overlaid on a gorgeous illustration of the moment Aeneas sails away from Dido. The allusions to classical and medieval literature are rich without being condescending.

The centerpiece is the village, abbey, and the characters within though. They all have a story to tell, both about themselves and each other. I also find where the game goes satisfying, though going further into that would involve lots of spoilers.

The one word of caution I have is that this is not a game where one has fun trying to win or get the best ending, especially the first time. The game only autosaves and doesn't facilitate save scumming. Persuasion checks can fail quite easily and to interesting effect. The game doesn't give enough time to do all the activities it offers in one playthrough. So what you choose to do, who you talk to, and sometimes even how you fail is important too, and you have to be able to roll with it.

[Imperial Knight]

As part of my personal project to fill in the gaps in my experience with classic RPGs I've missed, I've been playing Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. It's an amazingly ambitious game for its time, with a story that feels unique even today. Your ultimate goal is to retrieve a magical macguffin, but along the way you need to become an Avatar of Virtue, which is to say your goal is in a sense to be a good person (with a fair bit of treasure hunting for various magical runes and shrines and the like added in). The game keeps track of your actions and in order to progress you need to uphold eight virtues (Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, Spirituality, and Humility) by, e.g., giving money to beggars and donating blood to healers while refraining from lying and stealing.

As you might expect from a game released in 1985, it's decidedly old school. You'll need to keep track of a slew of keyboard commands that aren't always intuitive (press "K" to "klimb" stairs, if you try to "climb" instead you'll press "C" to cast a spell) and be prepared to take careful notes. Much of the game requires you to piece together clues about your objectives from NPCs. Person A in Town X might tell you that Person B in Town Y knows about Key Item 1, that sort of thing.

Combat could best be described as a sort of proto-SRPG. The battle screen is made up of a grid with your characters on one side and enemies on the other, and sometimes obstacles to be navigated around. Each gets a turn to either move a square, attack, or cast a spell. At least so far I've had success just giving everyone ranged weapons and letting them pick off enemies from across the screen but I haven't really explored any of the game's dungeons yet, so maybe it gets trickier.

It's an interesting and historically significant game, though one that certainly requires a fair bit of patience to play. I'll also note that it's available for free on GOG if you're interested in giving it a try.

[Maus]

Stardew Valley, at long last!

[Shinto-Cetra]

I finished Final Fantasy X. I was not expecting death metal to play when I fought Braska's Final Aeon, but I guess they wanted something other than apocalyptic chiptunes like in FF6/7. The CTB combat, music, and world design were really nice. Not many RPGs can claim to be inspired by India meets Thailand meets Polynesia. I mostly liked the characters, Tidus was annoying, but he sorta grew on me by the end. Yuna was the focus of the story, so I wonder why he's the de facto protagonist. I took issue with the Bevelle Cloister of Trials, the HAHAHA scene, linear dungeons, Tidus's existence making little sense: it's not a flawless game, but taken as a whole it's emotional and beautiful. I'm not playing FFX-2, the plot looks terrible, and that opening scene is cringe.

Otherwise, I've been playing many things at once, but my big project now is translating (and naturally play-testing) the NEC PC-9800 game, Dragon Knight 4. You can see some samples of it so far: https://utreon.com/c/ShintoCetra/videos ... -4-english

[Alunissage]

The protagonist isn't always the main playable/viewpoint character. FFXII was similar, where Vaan was the viewpoint character but Ashe is definitely the protagonist. A similar argument could be made for Lucia and Hiro.

[Shinto-Cetra]

The protagonist isn't always the main playable/viewpoint character. FFXII was similar, where Vaan was the viewpoint character but Ashe is definitely the protagonist. A similar argument could be made for Lucia and Hiro.

I'm aware it happens, but I don't think it's a good narrative decision, that's all.

[Alunissage]

Apologies, I sounded far more stiff and stern than I intended.

I think it works in cases like FFX where the viewpoint character is also the stranger to the world because it allows the player to get to know the world and setting along with the viewpoint character, who is as ignorant as the player. Tidus not knowing the ultimate end of Yuna's quest is an important reveal for the player as well as Tidus, while Yuna has much less to learn about how the world works. I think that kind of thing works better if the viewpoint character doesn't know what's going on.

[WD RPG WD]

I still haven't made time for FFX. I feel like it's not my type of FF.
I've finished 1-8 over the last 3 years. All for the first time. FFIX is next.

Playing Wildermyth right now. I hated the art style. I hated the first 3 or 4 battles. Then the characters started to shine and the battles had purpose. These characters have permadeath scenarios, and after spending more time with them, they will have children and those children will fight beside them, to then have a decision to be made that makes you want to throw up, wishing someone else had to take this burden.
The battles do become better once they gain abilities, so that was a relief.

10/10 so far.

[VidKid369]

I'm playing Atelier Ayesha right now on PS3 I think I'm almost done with it. I put it on the second burner for now because I started LUNAR 2: Eternal Blue Complete tonight. It's just going to be a normal playthrough nothing crazy it's just refreshing playing an RPG I'm already quasi-familiar with and it's fun to think the same things I always do when playing a game I've beaten before! I've always loved Working Designs and LUNAR ('specially) I doubt that's gonna ever change.

I'm in workings of working out a deal with a seller here for a PS4 Pro I wanted to just bite the bullet on that buy and I just wanna get it out of the way.

I also wanna try to get a play in on LUNAR: The Silver Star on my laptop at the same time I just don't know why! I figured it'll be easy.

[Kizyr]

I finally finished FFX2 (I got caught for non-game reasons, I didn't have much time free to play consistently, so I'd just spend 20-30min here or there levelling up while I had a break, but it wasn't enough time to proceed to a place to progress the story). Really enjoyed that. I'll go back and play the prequel sometime later so I can figure out what all they were referencing during the game.

For now, though, I'm going back to an old game. I've been gradually rebuilding the Genesis collection that I sold off back in 1997-8 when I got a Playstation (and regretted since), and pick up such games whenever I find them at a used game store. And a couple weeks ago the one near me had Star Trek: Echoes from the Past -- so now I'm playing through that again.

The Genesis Star Trek game was actually really good. Had a few down-sides (music is not that great and the third mission is a maze that literally drags the whole game's pace down, but aside from that every other part is pretty good -- almost feels like if there was way more development time and resources of modern-day this could be a good engine for a more open-world type of game).

After this I'll either try one of the NES games I picked up recently (Startropics or Magic of Scheherazade) or go ahead to FFX.

[Imperial Knight]

I'm now playing Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past for 3DS, a remake of the PS1 original.

Dragon Quest is a series that has a much stronger consensus as to the relative quality of its entries than, say, Final Fantasy. Ask almost any (Western) DQ fan and they'll sing the praises of DQ5 and DQ8 while telling you that DQ2 is one of the weakest games in the series, if not the weakest. DQ7 is the exception. In my experience it's by far the most divisive game in the series. For every person who will tell you it's Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii's magnum opus and one of their all-time favorite games, there's another who will tell you it's a plodding and bloated collection of fetch quests and backtracking (Japan's a bit of a different story, where I believe DQ7 is both the best selling PS1 game of all time and the best selling DQ of all time, but I digress).

At this point I'm about a dozen hours in and while I can see where the complaints are coming from, I'm having a wonderful time and what flaws the game does have do not seriously detract from my enjoyment.

At the start of the game the entire world is at peace and united under the banner of the Kingdom of Estard, which sounds more impressive than it is seeing as the world consists of a single island containing a castle, a town, a fishing village, and a few other scattered locations, including the obligatory ancient ruins that no one visits because they're just too dangerous. The silent protagonist and two friends naturally end up exploring these ruins in hopes of confirming their suspicions that there must be more to the world outside the island than just a vast, empty ocean. This leads to a sequence reminiscent of the opening to Chrono Trigger (complete with very similar special effects) wherein the three are transported to an unfamiliar forest, beset by monsters, and now need to find their way back home while solving problems they encounter at their mysterious destination. Lest we dismiss this game as a mere Chrono Trigger ripoff, we should consider that Yuji Horii was one of the major creative forces behind CT and that while DQ7 does cover some familiar ground (namely time travel and the resulting exploration of cause-and-effect), it has its own take on these themes and ultimately does feel like its own thing.

One notable contrast between DQ7 and CT is the pacing. While CT is a snappy adventure that covers a lot of ground in a short time, DQ7 is definitely a slow burn. I was nearly two-and-a-half hours in before the sequence described above, which is to say before much of anything actually happened and before I actually fought any battles. On the one hand I took the time to explore thoroughly, talk to every NPC, etc. So certainly one could get to that part before I did. On the other hand the 3DS remake specifically tried to streamline many aspects of the game, including the whole opening sequence. That all having been said, I don't think a slow pace is necessarily a bad thing. I didn't find the opening hours on Estard to be boring, but enjoyed getting to know the personalities of my party remembers and others living on the island as well as getting to understand the quiet setting (before the party's actions naturally disrupt this tranquility). Once the action begins there's a nice air of mystery and the relaxed pace at which the pieces of the puzzle fall into place feels perfectly appropriate. I certainly wouldn't want all games to be like this, but the pacing feels right for the story it's telling and the structure lends itself nicely to DQ's typical emphasis on the small scale stories you encounter at each individual location.

One complaint I do have is related to a change made for the 3DS version. The game originally had random encounters but for the remake they replaced these with visible encounters. The problem here is that they apparently didn't adjust the dungeon layouts at all, and they weren't really designed around having visible encounters. In particular, some are full of narrow corridors that, combined with the frequency of spawning, lead to a frustratingly high encounter rate as there's simply no room to go around the enemies. It's not a huge problem, but it's enough to make me wish they had just stuck with random encounters instead.

Given its large size and slow pace, I can see why DQ7 isn't a game for everybody, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it as someone's introduction to the series, but it has a lot to offer if you're willing to accept it on its own terms, and I've been having a great time with it so far.

[MaroonChan]

Still working at Pokémon Violet.

[VidKid369]

^^ I loved Dragon Warrior VII for the PS1! Initially, I had dismissed it when I was a kid cause I didn't like how you couldn't see your party members in battle + battles took place in just text-boxes popping up kinda like Earthbound and I just didn't really like it at first. But then I had re-played Earthbound and popped in DW7 again and I loved it!! The game was so old-school, classic and traditional kinda like a SNES RPG on the PS1! It just had everything I was looking for at the time when I had just-moved and was looking for stuff I liked when I was younger. I put in like 200 hours into the game which was a first for me so I definitely popped my cherry on that one. Yeah, can't praise Dragon Warrior 7 more.

Ok. So I've just finished LUNAR 2 again. It took like 3 months this time cause I had been posting about it with a friend of mine kinda like a dual-play playthrough with two people. I just finished last night, and boy, did it feel really good to get another notch in on LUNAR 2. It still feels good playing it to this day. I just felt so relaxed afterwards it's nice just thinking I have something I can go-to like a hobby or just a favorite thing just cause I think about all the temptations we have today in this world and I could be doing much worse things than playing games.

Ok. So after finishing LUNAR 2, I popped in Final Fantasy XV and picked up where I left off in the beginning where you do the first hunt. I love the game so far I think the graphics are amazing. I'm all for eye candy and as a guy it feels kinda cool to have just all-guys in the party, and you go camping at night and cook food, and eat together and stuff. I love Survivor so it's right up my alley the camping and being outdoors and stuff.

Ok. Thanks Guys!! For another great one.

[Shinto-Cetra]

Ok. So I've just finished LUNAR 2 again. It took like 3 months this time cause I had been posting about it with a friend of mine kinda like a dual-play playthrough with two people. I just finished last night, and boy, did it feel really good to get another notch in on LUNAR 2. It still feels good playing it to this day. I just felt so relaxed afterwards it's nice just thinking I have something I can go-to like a hobby or just a favorite thing just cause I think about all the temptations we have today in this world and I could be doing much worse things than playing games.

Oh nice! I must have missed this in Discord lol. I'm glad that you enjoyed it. I'm still replaying Lunar: TSS, I think I'll play Lunar 2 (PS1) afterwards.

I finished the Albert route of DESIRE: Haitoku no Rasen , https://vnstat.net/novel/151 , a Japanese adventure game that got a partial retranslation for PC-98 computers (There was an older version released for IBM-compatible Windows in the 90's USA beforehand, so the English PC-98 version is coming full circle.) It was directed by Hiroyuki Kanno and scored by Ryu Umemoto who later went on to make YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World. So you can see a lot of plot points/ideas that were later fleshed out more in YU-NO in DESIRE. Mainly it's a detective story told by a reporter who is invited to a private island owned by a mysterious coroporation, and he tries to find out what exactly the aim of the research there is. Also, he meets a young amnesiac girl, Tina and develops a father/daughter relatonship with her. I tried playing the Makoto route, but it was really bad: it had so much "fanservice", and so little plot. The later routes are the same story told by by different protagonists, with a few details unique to each one, so I don't think I'll be continuing as I know the basic story.

I'm also playing Suikoden V, and Ace Attorney 4.

[MaroonChan]

Pokémon Violet

[ShugoHanasaki]

Legend of Heroes: Trails From Zero

[VidKid369]

Ok. So I've just finished LUNAR 2 again. It took like 3 months this time cause I had been posting about it with a friend of mine kinda like a dual-play playthrough with two people. I just finished last night, and boy, did it feel really good to get another notch in on LUNAR 2. It still feels good playing it to this day. I just felt so relaxed afterwards it's nice just thinking I have something I can go-to like a hobby or just a favorite thing just cause I think about all the temptations we have today in this world and I could be doing much worse things than playing games.

Oh nice! I must have missed this in Discord lol. I'm glad that you enjoyed it. I'm still replaying Lunar: TSS, I think I'll play Lunar 2 (PS1) afterwards.

Yeah, I was posting about it like everyday I don't know how you missed it. Or did you just mean about the part about me finishing it?

I'm shocked (clutches pearls) that you're gonna re-play LUNAR 2: EBC I thought you don't really replay your RPGs?

I finished Final Fantasy XV like yesterday in the evening, I had a meal to celebrate. Usually I have an instant noodles (just whatever) but I had tikka masala made from scratch instead. It's quickly becoming one of my favorite dishes or it always has been.

The cinematics were nice. I enjoyed it towards the end. It's very straightforward as usual per Final Fantasy. I wish they got more creative with the trophies!

Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (Standard) was delivered today so I popped it in. I was told the Definitive Edition - S has lower quality graphics since they made it for Switch too, so I opted for getting just the Standard Version. It's not available on PSN download so I'm lucky to have found it here?

I'm gonna have beer and just explore the first hometown, and just say goodbye to everybody... and just mess around in it in the beginning.