Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

I have finished the storyline of The Dog Island Wii last Sunday morning. 😀
The journey of the main character to save his / her sibling that got really incurable sickness. Only a Legendary Flower can heal him / her. But to find a Legendary Flower, the main character should through very Tough journey, become a Sniff Master and befriend with Anc creature (Petasi).

I have ever finished that game on PS2 version last time on year 2006 as i remembered (But with my pirated copy) , but this year i finished again with Original Wii disc. 😀

I'm proud to say The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Expansion Pass included. 6 days ago.

It's been a long ride (more than 205 hours, but I know many people play further than that), but I enjoyed most of it a lot. But, like with everything else, it comes a time when you just want to see the end, enjoy it and move on, no matter how much you like it. You want to focus on other things, and right now I'm going to alternate Dragon Quest Builders (whose Chapter 1 I already finished in early 2018) and short bursts on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, as well as small and arcade titles in even shorter bursts.

Beat Sky Force Anniversary on the PS Vita. This is the fourth game I've completed in 2019 thus far. Anyway, I probably spent 10+ hours obsessively playing through this game over the last couple of days (primarily yesterday), because arcadey, mission-based games tend to have that effect on me.

This is a fairly standard vertical shmup with an upgrade system (leading to a lot of level grinding if you want to level up all your stuff like I did). Each level is filled with stars. These are your currency, and the more of these collect, the faster you can buy side weapons and upgrade your stats. There are also medals you can achieve for completing challenges in each level (such as killing every enemy, completing a level without getting hurt, saving humans stranded throughout the level, etc.), and you use these medals to unlock more stages. There are only 9 unique stages in the game, though, so the vast majority of the game is spent replaying the same levels over and over on various difficulty settings to collect more medals (each difficulty level has four achieveable medals, and there are three difficulty levels, so you can achieve a max of 12 medals for each level) or grind for currency to improve your ship.

This all sounds like a grind, but it didn't bother me too much. The levels are unremarkable design-wise, but they had a good difficulty curve, and the game itself is, all things considered, decent fun if you like shmups.

The worst thing about this version of the game is the performance. Besides some bugs that kept popping up (certain levels would develop a nasty, static-y hiss if you replayed them, causing me to turn down the volume for large chunks of the game), the game runs at 30fps with infrequent dips. Really bad dips. They only last a second or so, but in a game where you can die in the blink of an eye, this caused more than its fair share of annoying and unfair deaths. The load times are also really bad, and it would sometimes take almost half a minute to load up a level. I have to assume this is due to shoddy optimization, as the game doesn't seem to have a lot going on visually beyond the sheer number of projectiles that are often on-screen.

The music and sound are pretty forgettable, all things considered, as are the bosses. The campaign has no narrative elements or real pacing to it, either. It just kind of... ends. It's very weird, as you get the credits roll after stage 8, but stage 9, which unlocks after the credits, seems much more like what I would expect from the final level of the game.

This sounds harsh, but keep in mind I've been playing it almost non-stop for two days, so it can't be too bad. There are still some more medals for me to earn, but... honestly, I think I'm done with the game. I'm giving the Vita version a 4/10. Maybe add a point for other versions of the game if they don't suffer from the same performance issues.

Beat Valkyria Chronicles last night. Real fun game with really great strategy gameplay and a pretty great story and cast of characters. Definitely got me extremely excited to play the other games.

I beat Fire Emblem Awakening last night. On casual though for my first try of the series so I’m not sure if that counts?

I’m trying to complete games I buy now as I got too guilty of buying lots of Switch games and never finishing them because I’d play another shiny new game that came out. Now I try and save the new game as a treat for finishing the current one. This works... occasionally.

For the first time in my life I got all 30 parts in the original Pikmin. I've beaten the game before but I've never been able to get all of the parts. It wasn't too hard though so I guess I was just bad at strategizing as a kid

Since the start of the year:
Amstrad:
Killapede
Nebulus
Blues Brothers
Fantasy World Dizzy
Yie Ar Kung-Fu
Zypnaps
Arkanoid
Beyond the Ice Palace
Masters of Space
NEIL Android

Switch:
Pokemon: Let's Go Eevee
Grim Fandango

Megadrive:
Comix Zone
F-117 Night Storm

Diablo 3 campaign. It was great, got better as it went on I thought.
Now for adventure mode.

Dragon Quest XI (PS4) - This was a pretty good time. I think I still prefer VIII (I very much preferred it's cast), but XI is still a very solid JRPG with some awesome moments and an absolutely gorgeous world.

Unravel (PS4) - A very charming and stunning looking puzzle platformer with a touching narrative. I got stumped a few times, but usually nothing I couldn't figure out after a few tries (except a little uphill section in the final level. That was a pain in the butt, but worth it in the end). It was a great way to break up the grind of DQXI's post game.

To add to my previous list:

Megadrive:
Cheese Cat-Astrophe Starring Speedy Gonzales
Castelvania: Bloodlines
Crack Down
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
Gain Ground
Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi
Sonic 3D Blast
Space Harrier II
Vectorman
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Bonanza Bros.
Ecco Jr.
Bio-Hazard Battle
Ristar
Columns III
ESWAT: City Under Siege

3DS:
3D Galaxy Force II

Pretty stoked, managed to finish 31 games over 31 days and take a huge chunk out of my Megadrive backlog while I was at it, less than 30 to go. Ristar, Gain Ground and Bonanza Bros. were quite fun. Cheese Catastrophe is finally out of the way, the last physical cart that I needed to finish. Ecco Jr. was quite relaxing in comparison to the original Ecco game. Still have tides of time to do though...

Beat NSMBUDX last night and finished the campaign of Ace Combat 7 the day before. Still have to do a few more play through but it's a terrific game! Oh and my kids and I finally beat Ghaleem in WoL too (yes I know he's not the "final" boss, but we still felt accomplished)

In my journey to invest myself in the RPG side of all things Mario, I made it to the end credits of Super Paper Mario this past weekend.

Positives

• Story: While I wouldn't call it GotY material, it was pretty well written. The motivation for Mario & Co. to save the day is outlined quite well and even brought home to the player in some drastic aspects. This game becomes pretty dark at times...something that I didn't think I'd be typing about a Mario RPG. Then again, this is Nintendo, and they can pull some pretty dark moments out of thin air sometimes. I suppose what was more surprising was that this game was full of them.
• Writing: The writing in this game was well done and pretty entertaining. I had thought that Color Splash had some decent writing, but this game almost puts that one to shame in comparison.
• Characters: Many of the characters were unique and memorable. I found the main villain's lackeys quite entertaining in particular.
• Music: While I've played games with more memorable soundtracks, some tracks like Soft Light, In The Darkness, and the main theme for O'Chunks stick out in my mind.
• The Pixls: Many of these were useful and were introduced in some crazy ways. Some were more useful than others, true, but overall I enjoyed using them.
• The very concept of Francis, plus his castle and robo-cat butlers....And the dating sim. I even found that entertaining.

Neutral

• The world/exploration: While I felt that this was done really well in some levels due to Mario's ability to flip dimensions, others seemed fairly linear and didn't have much to them. That's not to say there weren't any "Oh, that's cool!" moments. I did enjoy the different renderings for each world.
• Poor, poor Luigi. I feel like he occasionally gets the short end of the stick, but SPM "ended his game" twice, had him be forcibly brainwashed, and to cap everything off, the poor guy is controlled AGAIN by a magical delinquent. Guys in green just don't catch a break.

Negatives

• Switching between characters and Pixls: Is there any other way to do this besides going to the pause menu and selecting each from there? This seemed to ruin the pacing sometimes when you had to do a lot of switching in order to solve different puzzles and environmental obstacles.
• Recipes and Catch Cards: I suppose this isn't really a true negative, but I didn't really find much motivation to bother with either of these collect-a-thons very much. Though the recipe ladies are both entertaining....

All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend this game. It's an odd RPG/platforming hybrid, but the two elements mashed together here seem to (mostly) work. I really don't understand the complaints about this one, but that could be because I've been playing the Paper Mario games in reverse order...ignoring Sticker Star, which I'm skipping.

@Blitzenexx
Super Paper Mario Wii was the Darkest and the Scariest Mario games ever.
Who cannot stand for disturbing eerie sounds of World of Nothing and River Twygz Bed ? 😱

@Anti-Matter: I was pleasantly surprised at how dark it was at times. I admittedly knew about Mimi before starting the game since that character has appeared on a few YouTube lists, but some of the other dark moments took me by (pleasant) surprise. Not just dark moments either, but there were a few that definitely hit you in the feels.

It's amazing that the game pulled off an E rating back in 2007....

@Blitzenexx
Super Paper Mario was rated "E" for Eerie contents. 😱

Finally finished Nights of Azure 2.
I enjoyed it, although im a little annoyed as I came really close to getting the good ending but just ran out of time.
Will probably replay on ng+ but not for a while.
Now on to Rayman Legends.

I don't cry from works of fiction. Though I consume an inordinate amount of anime, books, games and movies, probably far more than is healthy, I don't cry. I can name 4 things, one book, two anime, and one western TV show that, in my 27 years, have made me cry.

Planetarium, the visual novel recently released on Switch, a remarkably simple presentation with at most, 15-20 still images and maybe 4 animations, is number 5. What a powerful story! I don't know if I can recommend it, because it is so overwhelmingly sad... But if you're looking for something very different, this might well be a good choice. I can tell you though, I absolutely loved it. It might have been a mere 3ish hours long, but I will remember it for a very long time. Powerful and Sad. Those are the biggest words that come to mind. But close behind them is important.

Just finished my third or fourth playthrough of Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness on the PS Vita, making it my sixth completed game in 2019. There are still several more routes and endings to see, but I think I'm done with this for the moment.

The game doesn't have a strict timeline placement, but it seems to fit somewhere early in the anime's first season... which is weird, given the suspenseful and tight timeline that season seemed to run on, but nevermind. For a bit of background, Psycho-Pass is a cyberpunk property, heavily inspired by 90's Western science-fiction cinema, where Japan has isolated itself from the rest of the world and abandoned traditional notions of law and order in favor of entrusting policing decisions in their society to a seemingly omnipresent computerized system called Sibyl. People in this society are regularly scanned to determine their "psycho-pass," which gives a basic overview of their emotional stability and how inclined they might be to engage in criminal activity. Anyone judged to be a threat to society is considered a "latent criminal," taken into custody, and held in detention centers as they receive treatment (which, apparently, almost never ends up actually tipping their psycho-pass back into a range where the Sibyl System would be comfortable with releasing them). A select few who show an aptitude for the work are reprieved from detention to work as "Enforcers," who work as detectives and help take latent criminals into custody, and "Inspectors," who oversee and manage the actions of Enforcers out in the field. You have the option of playing as two game-original characters: an Inspector named Nadeshiko Kugatachi, and an Enforcer named Takuma Tsurugi. They end up working alongside major characters from the anime series to deal with the threat posed to their society by a self-aware A.I. named Alpha.

My first immediate problem with the game is in how the original characters are developed. While the dynamic personalities of the established cast from the anime are well-represented, these new characters are... kind of boring. Nadeshiko (who I primarily played as) is an ostensibly emotionless amnesiac who seems to be weirdly competent at everything she does, turning into her into a very flat Mary Sue type character. While she become a bit more interesting as her deep connections to the plot are revealed, there's just not a lot to her, and her becomes more like an audience surrogate than anything. The major plot twist around her role in the story is the most obvious and telegraphed thing in the world, unfortunately. Takuma has a bit more of a personality, but still barely enough to keep him from seeming pretty generic. Most of the fun in this game comes from seeing how they interact with the established cast. There's really nothing to the Alpha character that you haven't seen in a million sci-fi stories about out-of-control A.I. who have good intentions but only end up causing massive amounts of suffering.

In visual novels, having choices that directly affect the outcome of a plot is important, and Psycho-Pass definitely has that. While the events driving the narrative on a broader level don't really change based on what you do, the angle your characters approach these situations from does pretty drastically change. It's also important for the player to understand how their actions are affecting the evolution of the plot, however, and there are so many little choices to make in this game where it's uncertain what the effect on the plot will be. You're prompted throughout the game about whether you want to use a supplement or not (that's used to promote mental clarity and a 'good hue' in the person taking it), and while it seems like this would directly relate to the stabilization or deterioration of your character's hue, I chose to ignore all supplements in my first play-through, and it never seemed to have much of an impact on what happened with my character. You'll be given a long list of actions to take in a situation, with most of them often resulting in similar outcomes, but every once in a while something innocuous will seemingly have a large effect on the characters. It'd also be helpful if the game immediately signaled which decisions were momentous, but it often doesn't give you any indication of the importance of a decision until well after you make it, when the game will seemingly randomly pop up a graphic telling you that you've reached a turning point. There's no flowchart to keep all these actions and reactions straight, though, and these graphics often doesn't seem to occur close to when you make a choice, so I'm not sure what the point of this is, as it's certainly not meant for the player's benefit.

The biggest factor going against the game, however, is how little respect it show for the player's time. In addition to the previous mentioned problem of the game not really making it clear what combination of actions lead to what outcomes, it has this nasty habit of forcing you to read slight variations of the same text and dialogue over and over if you're going for multiple playthroughs to see various endings. Most VNs I've played only include new text when it makes sense to change things up, depending on what choices you've made in a playthrough, and will typically skip all previously read segments, allowing you to quickly parse old material to arrive at something new. But it often seems like the game will force you to manually click through large chunks of text (10+ minutes of reading, at least), if there's a slightly altered line here or there. It makes replaying the game a pain in the keister, because who wants to re-read the same reams of text over again. I feel like there must have been a better solution to this, and it's what ultimately caused me to duck out before fully completing all of the endings in this game.

Finally, the localization is a bit shoddy in this, with typos abound and awkward sentence structures that don't really make sense from the perspective of a native English speaker.

I'm afraid I've made this sound pretty dreadful so far, but, on the contrary, I think this game had a few redeeming qualities to it. The presentation as a whole is quite good, with vibrant animated character portraits, full (Japanese) voice acting, and the same excellent score used throughout the anime series. Characters from the anime series are pretty authentically portrayed. The plot itself isn't... bad, it just does nothing new with the premise. What it does get right, crucially, is the world-building. While the Psycho-Pass anime is intelligent and well-crafted, it focuses on its central themes to the exclusion of everything else. Mandatory Happiness gives the characters a bit more downtime and, as a result, allows the writers more of an opportunity to discuss aspects of Japanese society that were never addressed in the TV show, helping to make the setting feel much more fleshed out and convincing. The anime never had the time for a character to mull over fashion trends surrounding holographic technology or the social stigma around eating food fashioned from natural ingredients, for example. While we know that Enforcers aren't allowed to go out on their own, you never got a sequence where you saw the hoops a female latent criminal working for the government might have to jump through to do something as simple as go out shopping for clothing. These details were extremely rewarding and, honestly, were much more interesting than the main story. Mandatory Happiness also lacks the juvenile fixation on extreme content that the TV show had in spades (these people have guns that, in the anime, made people literally explode in thick showers of gore, which always struck me as absurd; that still happens here, but it's not depicted on-screen, and the game doesn't linger on the violence, instead choosing to highlight how the violence impacts the other people involved). The writing here is smart and interesting, and while Alpha isn't a great villain, it at least mostly lacks the pretentious twit of an antagonist from the anime who constantly quotes literature and invokes "free will" to defend the horrifying serial murders and terrorism he regularly sponsors.

There are a lot of sound files and CGs to unlock in the post-game. More crucially, there's a little puzzle game you can play on the side where you have to combine tiles in a grid to form specific numbers; it's challenging (on higher levels), cute, and I honestly enjoy it more than the main game itself.

While there's a lot in this game I've yet to experience endings-wise, I've unlocked three true endings and a few bad endings, so I feel like I've mostly experienced what this title has to offer. Overall, to summarize, while I enjoy the world-building and somewhat more expansive scope of this game, in addition to the way it fleshes out character from the TV show, I don't think it can escape fundamental problems with its narrative, characters, and the way it manages decisions and previously read dialogue. Honestly, if you decide to play it, just follow a walkthrough to get the endings. It gets a 5/10 from me.

i've Finally beat Persona 4 a few days ago.
i have to say i liked all the characters. i only completed Yosuke and Teddie's Social Links and mange to beat the true ending boss. hopefully in my next run i'll be able to get everyone's Social Links.

@Aozz101x Dude what the hell I came here just to say that i beat persona 4 lmao.

I recently beat it about 2 weeks ago and have started persona 3 (psp version). persona 4 was honestly one of the best times ive ever had with a video game. fantastic cast of characters, music, story, and just overall vibe. cant wait to play 5 eventually (hopefully on switch). p4 remains one of the only games to give me an empty feeling after completing, looking forward to more of this series.