Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

I recently beat Super Mario World (Wii U VC) for the first time. A relative owned it when I was a kid, but lack of console access plus a lot of trial and error then means that I only made it to Castle #4 at the time. The game has a gradual difficulty curve, and overall I really enjoyed it. The only thing that was vaguely disappointing was the battle with Bowser at the end, but I don't play the Mario games for absurd difficulty. XD

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. I 100-percented it. Even 100-percented the extra levels!

Beat Fire Emblem 7. Surprisingly short game. My save file has less than 25 hours on it. It was also fairly easy until the final chapter, where it became unreasonably difficult. Overall, I was pretty happy with it, and managed to only let one of my characters die (one I cared nothing about). It was my second game in the series, after Awakening.

@GrizzlyArctos: On the subject of Bravely Default, did you like the part about halfway through the game that a lot of folks, myself included, thoroughly disliked?

It was enough for me to not only swiftly delete a 50-odd hours save file, it made me feel like I had wasted so much of my time, even though I enjoyed the majority of my time with the (first half of the) game.

I wish I was interested in the sequel however, the original game left such a sour taste in my mouth that I hadn't even noticed that Bravely Second has only just been recently released!

Curious to see what you think of it, and on another subject altogether; are you buying Dark Souls III at the end of March?

It would be nice to have someone to converse with whilst we both inevitably stumble and struggle through the game, ha ha!

@Peek-a-boo: Good question. I will admit that it definitely slowed the pace of the game right down, and I do think it could have been handled better, but in terms of the story I think it worked. I found it easy enough to rush through those parts, and the last few chapters did add a few more challenges for those that wanted them. The game does so much right that I can excuse something like that, kind of how I feel about collecting the Triforce shards in Wind Waker.

The payoff with the final boss made up for it in my opinion, though I hope Bravely Second won't do something similar.

And as for Dark Souls 3, definitely! Out of all the RPGs coming this year, it's one of the ones that I'm looking forward to the most!

A Kiss For The Petals - Remembering How We Met. Cute, all-ages shoujo-ai kinetic novel on Steam.

@Peek-a-boo: That's sad to hear. Despite the annoyance of the time looping shenanigans, the final hours of the game, especially the last two boss fights, are easily the highlight of the entire game. It has been awhile since a JRPG had such a satisfying climax.

@Ralizah: That final chapter is the reason why I was unable to beat Fire Emblem 7. I managed to storm my way to the final confrontation, only to find out that my entire party was too weak.

I'll go back to it someday, but man, that defeat still burns.

@RevolverLink: Yeah, I think that's an issue with the game: there's a bit too much of a focus on overpowered boss characters. If you try to evenly level up even ten or so of your units, you're going to be too weak to overcome the boss rush at the end of the game.

I finally figured out that the best way to beat the resurrected bosses, though. So long as you can quickly eliminate his guards and surround him, Uhai is harmless. I sent Athos alone up to the upper left room to kill that stupid mage with Bolting that kept killing Nils from all the way across the map. After that, I played keep away with everyone else until I could get Lyn and Athos to take out the other bosses.

The dragon was tricky at first, until I figured out that, for all those fancy magic spells I was using, it was equipping Athos with Luna and sending him, Lyn, and Eliwood against the dragon that would kill it. I bet Athos and another mage of sufficiently high level equipped with Luna could kill that stupid thing in one turn.

My big problem, besides not leveling up a couple of units excessively, was not taking better advantage of the arenas. The rest of the game was easy enough that I didn't think any grinding was necessary.

I just beat Steamworld Heist in veteran difficulty, it took me 25 hours to beat it with all the reputation stars. It was AMAZING!

@Ralizah: There's also the case of certain characters which are so helpful if you recruit them, 2 main ones are connected to the fate of a single chapter (Raven and Canas) but even one of the hardest chapters provides a key recruitment (Jaffar by recruiting Nino, talking to him and then accepting the gaiden chapter provided both survive).

@Grumblevolcano: I tried collecting all the recruitable units in the game, but I was so focused on stopping one of the thieves in that mission from stealing something I couldn't get back by killing him that I completely spaced recruiting Nino until it was too late.

Canas was extremely useful. Never got around to using Raven, unfortunately.

Also, my one character death was the pirate, who died the same chapter he appeared in my party. I just sold the ocean seal when I got it.

@Ralizah: Well the situation with Dart (the pirate) and some other units are the setup of them having bad weapon choices when made available for the first time. Dart is pretty useful on the first chapter he appears on but only if you switch his Steel Axe for an Iron Axe as the difference in weight between the Steel Axe and Dart's con stat is such that he ends up have poor speed. I'll give an example below:
Con = 10
Steel Axe = 15
Iron Axe = 10
Hand Axe = 12

Say for example Dart starts with a speed stat of 8, here's the final speed stats when using each of the weapons:
Steel Axe - 3
Iron Axe - 8
Hand Axe - 6

The formula is speed - (weight - con), if weight - con is negative then the final speed stat is identical to initial speed stat.

Speed of course affects change of dodging and chance of x2 attacks. This concept of weight and con was present in all FE games until Awakening of which in that game weight of weapons and con stats of units don't exist basically simplifying the gameplay to just "can your character wield this weapon in terms of weapon rank and looking at the damage and percentages before making an attack".

@Grumblevolcano: Interesting. There were a few aspects of the gameplay I was unsure about until later on, as the game does a poor job explaining them. I didn't realize there were support conversations in this game until 21 chapters in or so, for instance. I didn't think to check the weight of a weapon, either. By the way, did my rank as a strategist mean anything in terms of the gameplay?

@Ralizah: Not that I know of, it's just there to let you know how you're getting on. If your survival rating is low, you'll want to change your strategy to avoid losing characters for example.

@Grumblevolcano: By the end, all my ranking categories were near the top except for the one telling you how fast you complete battles, because I'm extremely cautious so that I can avoid needless deaths and resets. I might go for an S rank if I replay in Hector mode, however.

Last week I was finally able to finish unlocking all of the costumes in Super Mario Maker. That took...a while.

Finished Persona 4: Golden the other day, and got the Golden ending. Really enjoyed this one. While the story wasn't quite as good as 3, the small changes to the gameplay really did work well. The music was all really well done too, with the theme for the boss of the new dungeon being a favourite. Now I'm all up to date and ready for 5!

Just beat Chrono Trigger DS, possibly for the first time. I beat all the sidequests too, including the tedious Lost Sanctum chain of quests (save for the Lumicite/Wonder Rock enemy) that requires you to repeatedly go up and down a mountain and travel between 65,000,000BC and 800AD for about 2 hours.

I'll look to achieving the 12 other endings eventually, fill out the Dojo and Bestiary, master the Arena of Ages and complete the Lost Dimension dungeon, but for now, it's time to move on to something else.

Majora's Mask 3D. Very unique game but I personally prefer the conventional Zelda games, with full 8 dungeons and no time limit.
I hated the part where you hunt for Zora eggs, most boring part of the game for me.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright on Hard/Classic. Pretty good. Better than Awakening, for sure. Having just played two FE games in a row, I'll likely wait a while before starting Conquest.