Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

Most recently:

Okami HD - Fantastic game. First played it years ago on PS2, but got sidetracked near the end, so it was great to revisit it and resolve my unfinished business with the game. An absolute steal at $20.

Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders - Decent budget dog fighter that scratched that Ace Combat itch. A bit rough around the edges, but I found it worthwhile for the price.

Both on Switch.

I beat the true final boss in Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon on my second nightmare mode playthrough. What a brilliant little game! Better than a large chunk of older Castlevania games, actually. This is what I wanted Castlevania III to be.

I'll definitely need to do a run where I sacrifice everyone, but I'm pretty satisfied for the moment.

Severed
Got it for 3DS from My Nintendo. I'd heard good things about it and was meaning to buy it at some point anyways. It was short but fun experience. I completed the game in ~5 hours. Reminded me of Picdun which also features first person dungeon crawling, puzzles and touch screen combat but the tone was very different. Really good game. It doesn't have any flaws I feel I should point out.

Breath of the Wild
All quests but one part of one DLC quest completed
All shrines completed
All Korok inventory upgrades completed
Around 75% or so Armor upgrades
Basically every Photo gotten
194 Hours
DONE

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride (DS) - This is definitely one of the best JRPGs that I've played in recent memory and is my first Dragon Quest game to boot. I really enjoyed the plot and how it turned the whole "your character is the chosen one" concept on its head a little; it's also neat to watch the main Hero grow up and to walk with them on their life's journey. The world was fun to explore, monster recruitment was quite fun and threw another twist into the traditional RPG formula, there was plenty of side stuff to do, and there's definitely plenty of reasons to replay this game. Without spoiling too much, I intend to go back and pick a different wife since the one I thought was the most skippable is apparently the most entertaining. The graphical 3D presentation in this game was done really well; I enjoyed adjusting the camera to take in every little detail when it was allowed.

My complaints, all minor: 1. Monster recruitment can be a bit iffy. I mostly was able to recruit what I wanted sooner or later, but those King Slimes...I apparently have really bad luck with them. 2. I would have liked some more background about what happened between the second and third acts of the game, but I suppose that's not too relevant in the grand scheme of things. 3. I'm gonna probably get slammed for this one, but I'm starting to find that I prefer RPGs that allow you to control or adjust the encounter rate. Granted, this is a port of a game that was originally on the SNES, so I understand wanting to remain faithful to the source material.

Overall, I recommend this game highly! It's almost a shame that this series isn't as popular in the West as it is in its native Japan. I've now picked up another game in the series to try out at a later time (DQVIII on 3DS) and am contemplating grabbing DQIV at some point.

Wario Land 4 (Wii U VC/GBA) - Short, sweet, and enjoyable. The levels are fun and encourage multiple runs, are (mostly) pleasing to the eye, and have some interesting puzzles. Most of the Wario transformations reappear here from previous titles and are as mechanically crazy as ever. The mini-games are a bit meh and are easily skipped, but I played them a few times to earn coins in order to try out a couple of the boss aids. I much prefer the time mechanics here vs. what can be found in Shake It!

It's quite easy to see via the game's soundtrack and how some aesthetics influenced the creation of the WarioWare spinoff series.

@ReaderRagfish: It normally wasn't a big problem, but there were a few times when I wanted to scoot somewhere to heal up (low MP/items normally) and had to deal with running into something every few steps. To be fair, this became a little more manageable with some of Sancho's abilities and an item, but to my knowledge they only just decreased the encounter rate.

I understand that this was the norm back in the day, but I've been slightly spoiled by some games where you can either try to avoid enemies in the field (like you mentioned) or where you can control the encounter rate with a slider or something. There's a reason why I always preferred the tall grass to caves and surfing on water in Pokemon. It normally wasn't a huge deal unless I was short on time IRL.

Just beat Cosmic Star Heroine on the PS Vita. It was... alright. The combat system is interesting: the constantly cycling power meter reminds me a bit of Octopath Traveler (including that same focus on using certain skills at certain times to make full use of that meter). There's also something called "style" that you build up by using certain moves. It can be used as a resource when using powerful skills, and building up an abundance of it can also allow you to temporarily survive a blow that would kill you, giving you time to heal your character before she succumbs to her wounds. Also, like in Radiant Historia and some other JRPGs, it shows you a flowchart of when you and your enemies will move, and there's a lot of interesting ways of manipulating this to your advantage. I also liked the short, PC Engine-esque cutscenes, which show up periodically throughout the game.

On the other hand, the character writing here isn't great, the plot, while interesting, develops too quickly to really give any sense of significance to in-game events, the setting is never developed very well, and the music is passable. Much of the game feels like it's on rails, to the point where you can't even revisit a room in a dungeon that you just exited. In terms of the Vita port, in particular, the game feels poorly optimized, with numerous glitches, long loading times, etc. Which seems pretty weird for such a visually basic game.

Overall, though, it was fully worth the $7 I paid for it.

@subpopz I believe they retconned Megatron's form. Nowadays I always see him transform into a tank in various media. I can understand why though for various reasons both logistics wise and such.

As you mentioned someone else would have to use him rather then he himself able to attack which doesn't make sense if he's this big bad leader, kinda makes him look weak. Also there's size fitting. Basically making it accountable for his robot size and then shrinking down to a gun size. Then in this day and age especially in the US a toy that is a gun or even a character that turns into a gun not big with certain groups nowdays.

Finished Subsurface Circular last night. It's a fun little game, with a weird ending that I wasn't expecting. Does anybody know if there is much point to replaying it and trying different things? Even the ending, which has a great divide between which choice you make, was not tailored to my choice at all and could have been the ending for either choice.

@Xyphon22 I played through it and I don't think so. The 'sequel', Quarantine Circular felt more in line with your choices though from what I feel (then again I still stop after one run)

@subpopz Yeah I few places retconned him. I know the Michael Bay movies did for one (if you really want to count that) but some of the comics and TV shows did as well as well as the figures.

If you want an interesting thing to watch on the history of Transformers I suggest watch the Transformers episode of The Toys the Made Us on Netflix it's really interesting.

I beat The Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Switch Online service over the weekend. Saving Zelda never gets old! http://twitter.com/bezerker99/status/1044037996440248320

@Xyphon22
I liked that game aswell, but somehow couldn't finish it. I don't know if I did something wrong or if there was a bug keeping me from progressing. I got to the part where you have to talk to the two police robots and have to trick them into telling you stuff. And the game signalled to me that I succeeded doing so, but somehow the dialogue options didn't change. I tried again and again and consulted a guide that didn't help with the problem either...=(

@Tiefseemiez I know what you are talking about, but I didn't have any problems. I am not sure exactly what you have to do to get it to advance, but it's not like the game has a multitude of options. I'm sure if you tried everything, it must be some strange bug.

Well, you can't really beat Cities Skylines in the traditional sense, since you can just keep playing your city indefinitely. But I consider beating it when you buy all the land, have all the transport options, and unlock and build a monument after exceeding the final population milestone of 75k people. And that's what I did. I finished with 90k people and a freaking Space Elevator! Seriously a must have game on Switch for fans of Sim-City type games. Took my about 22-23 hours. At some point I will probably play it again and go for a dirty industrial type city, but I need to work on my backlog. lol

Xenoblade Chronicles, phew!

https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/wii/xenoblade_chronicles_h...

Finished Mario Odyssey (well got to end credits) and Punch Club.

@BlueOcean I also went back to beat the original Xenoblade Chronicles recently. I left the game about 5 years ago after getting stuck, but after playing Torna in XC2 I got the urge to go back and finally beat the first game. Funnily enough the part that I got stuck on was also Disciple Lorithia . From what I read around the internet, a lot of people seem to have troubles once they get to that part of the game. The game handles being under leveled really strangely, with it basically being impossible for you to hit an enemy if their name is displayed in red. I had to grind for a couple hours but I'm happy to have it beat.

As for games that I've beaten more recently:

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
I feel like this one is a bit of a hidden gem on the DS. The character design is really well done. You can clearly tell without even prior knowledge that the writing was done by the same creator as Ace Attorney. All of the characters have the same quirky feel to them. They honestly feel like they were pulled straight from an Ace Attorney game. The puzzle solving felt pretty unique and the story was interesting enough to hold my interest the whole way though. I'd probably even rank it higher than any Ace Attorney game.

Rune Factory 3
This is the only game in the series that I didn't play when it was released. I think I was originally burnt out from the series since so many were released in a short period of time. I'm glad I went back to play this one though! I'd say RF4 is still objectively the better game between the handheld Rune Factory games based on mechanics alone, but each one has their own charm and unique setting. Rune Factory 3 at least doesn't feel too far away from the improvements in RF4, and is a huge leap above RF1 and RF2. I also think that RF3 has the most interesting bachelorettes in the series even if they are a bit one-note. Sofia especially caught my interest with wonderful lines such as:
"I want to drag you out to the wilderness and let the monsters have their way with you! Repeatedly."
"I've burned everything that reminds me of you in a ritualistic bonfire!"
"I wish that a violent tornado would carry you off to a solitary island that would subsequently suffer a massive earthquake!"

@Cynas Yes, that's my story and I am happy that I am not the only one. Searching on Google I also found tons of threads by infuriated and frustrated players.

The final battle also gave me some problems. It's never logical what trio works best but I kept swapping them until I survived (Sheik was essential for me in these two battles). I am happy that I beat it too, but this game has really tested my patience in every imaginable way. It's not just the difficulty spikes but the overlapped big numbers in battle hiding enemies attacks, the awful camera, the chaotic battles when there is more than one big monster, the boring quests, the inventory management, the frame rate dropping and breaking some gameplay features...

However, the story of Xenoblade Chronicles is awesome and I cared about the characters, including some side characters like Kallian. Is Xenoblade Chronicles 2 more polished and gamer-friendly, if you have played both can you tell?

@BlueOcean Xenoblade Chronicles 2 made so many changes that it's almost hard to compare the two games. The combat in XC2 is a bit more daunting at first and there's a lot of tutorials that try to explain it, but it can be a bit overwhelming. The classic Break-Topple-Daze in XC has been extended a bit to Break-Topple-Launch-Smash, and they've also added in a new combo system with using special attacks in a specific order. However, once you get used to it I think it's much more fun than in XC. Going back to the original game I noticed the combat is much slower and dull than in XC2. Once you get 3 Blades per character in XC2 the combat is fast, fluid, and fun. Switching Blades makes it so you have no downtime waiting for Arts to reload so you're constantly in the action.

Unfortunately many of the sidequests in the base game are pretty boring and pointless. Even when talking to someone giving a sidequest your characters seem to respond with a small pool of text options that get reused for all quests. Often times it hardly makes sense in the context of the conversation. On the bright side there still are a handful of fun sidequests hidden within the mass of lame ones, plus there are interesting ones related to each of the rare Blades you can obtain. If you're looking for consistently better sidequests, the ones in the Torna expansion are mostly good. Even with all of that said though, I think the side content as a whole in XC2 is better than XC.

I think most other mechanics that have been carried over from the original game have been improved though. Character progression doesn't rely on having affinity with other characters which is nice. Plenty of other aspects have been streamlined with many quality-of-life improvements. It's certainly less frustrating than many of the mechanics in XC. XC2 still a typical JRPG, though, with some systems that seem complex at first, but I find it becomes to understandable quicker than in XC.

I loved the stories of both games almost equally. There is a very different feel between the two, though. XC feels more like a classic RPG adventure while XC2 feels like you're watching an anime. I'd say the the story of XC is more consistently well written, but XC2 had a few more specific exceptional moments even if they are a bit far between.

If you enjoyed the first game I'd say you should give XC2 a shot, just as long as you don't mind typical anime tropes.