Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

@Zuljaras I'd say get it, if you enjoyed those you might love Elden Ring.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch) - Finally watched the credits roll after nearly 150 hours (about 3 months of playing nothing else but this). Great game, I have some minor issues with it (I wish it would tell you when there are new quest related convos available in a colony that way I didn't have to run through them multiple times, and I would have liked more outfit customization, the DLC swimsuits are nice but too late), but otherwise a very engaging experience. Definitely feeling a bit of that "content" bloat though (not sure I want to pour that much time into a game again, lol).

TOEM (Steam) - A nice, briskly paced experience after XC3. A very chill, "photo adventure" game. Think I have a handful of optional objectives left, but I'm satisfied with what I've done (main story + free DLC world).

Astro's Playroom (PS5) - Another briskly paced adventure that I worked through now that I got a PS5. Absolutely brilliant little platformer that stands right alongside Odyssey & Forgotten Land IMO. Really felt like a celebration of PlayStation history (gave off a vibe I only thought Nintendo would be able to pull off until now), and the company would be fools if they don't have a larger Astro adventure in development. The final boss in particular was fantabulous.

100 percent on Kirby's Forgotten Land! I am proud, I am normally very put off by big games which have that optional 100 percent to beat. Find them a bit overwhelming, and if I get into them, then I have to get the 100 percent, otherwise it is pointless to stop a bit before.

Final obstacle for me was the HARD level on Tilt and Tumble Kirby. Many many many many tries to do it!

Return to Monkey Island - beat the game this weekend after approx 11-12 hours of play.

I’d ultimately recommend to anyone that enjoys the genre, or has familiarity with the older games in the series (and presumably had fun playing these games).

A fun romp and a nice change of pace from more action-orientated games, nice to actually use my brain for once… and fortunately most of the puzzles are solved through cerebral rationalities - instead of obtuse/random solutions.

My only critique would be it’s a little on the easy side… and only really ‘hits its stride’ in Act IV (total of 5 acts in the game).

Act IV has a lot of moving parts, location variety, and ramps up the challenge…. And it is a real shame that all the acts don’t follow this blueprint!

I set out to avoid using the in-game hint system …. But let myself down and had to utilise the hint book for the very last puzzle in Act V (in fairness I was totally barking up the wrong tree in my solution/tactics… probably would have had me stuck for a few days!)

Overall I’d give it a solid 7/10, and maybe 8/10 if you are a huge fan of the genre.

Today I beat Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for the GameCube. This playthrough showed me that I really love this game and it will be remembered dearly. Surely this is not my last playthrough.

Crimson Shroud (3DS) - Definitely a unique RPG/pseudo visual novel, part of Level-5's 3DS Guild releases and designed by Yasumi Matsuno (Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics). This one has decent worldbuilding and characterization, and the presentation is visually decent for an early 3DS game. The action is presented with each of the characters as minifigures in their environments; not too unlike a tabletop RPG. There's no experience or leveling; all your stats are controlled by equipping gear that you obtain as you play, either from chests or via combat. Melding two or more of the exact same items (or adding a spell scroll to an item) is often key to help progress; this is often better than just equipping items. Some attacks, buffs, debuffs, actions, etc. are determined by rolling various dice; while reminiscent of TTRPGs like D&D, this isn't quite the case.

Overall, this game is worth looking into if one likes tabletop RPGs, decent yet compact lore, likes grinding (You will grind, especially from what I'm reading about New Game+), and knows what they're getting into. I highly recommend watching some videos and reading some impressions/reviews out there to determine if this is for you. I generally liked the game, but some of its gameplay, not to mention a bit where you have to grind for a random drop, put me off of trying NG+ (Where the true ending can be found....) for now.

I finally beat Neo: The World Ends With You. I know its a JRPG but even with that in mind, wow is a lot of this game's story in the third act.

Ok, having finally beaten it, while I did really enjoy it from the start, I would've said for the first half of the game (which because of how this game does sidequests (in that it does them before post-game, unlike the original)), is significantly longer with less reason to care. Not that I didn't care, but it was failing to grab onto much of what made the original's story work in the same way. But slowly it started to come into focus and it felt like it got back on track with probably a much stronger climax than that original game (in that it is also much longer, but the pacing isn't ruined by that). One of the things I really love about TWEWY is how it does fairly standard adolescent anime coming of age storytelling way better than most. And while this game lacks the clever use of DS gameplay to add to that experience, it focuses even harder on getting you invested with the actual story (eventually), with JUST enough nostalgic fondness for the first game to be endearing but usually not so much that it gets in the way of the new characters (one of them might be my favorite in the series).

And the story is what put it over the top for me. At first I was still enjoying it a lot, these games are quality action RPGs that are a joy to play. But for the first half of the game I would've said it was a bit disappointing, and that combined with being less novel as well (both as a sequel and lacking the cool DS integration), it would've been just that. But now I think its dangerously close to being as good as the original. And having the entire big finale of your big story driven game being so strong and emotionally effective does improve my opinion of the story in particular (see also: the 2nd Xenoblade and Professor Layton games).

In particular, this also modernized it in ways that felt genuine that I appreciated a lot, in particular in what it has to say about both being friends with and idolizing people you know online. And of course, it has the absolute best character designs like the original. I don't pay attention to Nomura's existence or what he has or hasn't done in modern Square Enix too much, but his work in these games is remarkable. Most of the reason to ever watch the rushed, underwhelming anime adaptation of the original game is simply to see these character designs in an actual anime. And the music is a similar level of top tier, even if it really over-relied on slight updates of older songs.

Recently beat Pokemon Fire Red for the first time. Couldn't really afford to ask for it as a kid, since there wasn't tons of money to go around and I did already have Ruby. I enjoyed it a lot though. Retro Pokemon is always great.

Working on Fire Emblem Blazing Blade as my next completion.

@kkslider5552000 I liked NEO a lot. I was worried because Squeenix had almost no marketing for it, so I was worried it would be a careless cashgrab. I think my biggest issue with the plot was how all the TWEWY characters come back and are like "yeah we had an epic adventure after the first game but you can't see it, we're just gonna talk about it, trust us though it was awesome!"

Here's hoping for a TW3WY

Triangle Strategy

Platform: Nintendo Switch (now also on PC)

Two playthroughs finished; 82 hours total playtime

Triangle Strategy is a result of a collaboration between developer Artdink and ascendant Square-Enix producer Tomoya Asano, whose creative insignia appears most prominently in the deeply bizarre names his projects carry, also including Bravely Default, Octopath Traveler, and Various Daylife (these are all real names, I swear to god). Like Octopath before it, Triangle Strategy makes prominent use of S-E's much vaunted "HD-2D" art-style, which combines pixel art with 3D environments, complex shading, and other modern visual effects to create a unique visual fusion of old and new. The end result is, in the case of this title, something that looks like an evolution of the visual style adopted in many JRPGs on the PS1.

Actually, in many respects, Triangle Strategy feels like a PS1 game that had been lost to time until now, and I mean this as both light criticism and heavy praise. New games like this simply aren't made any more. It's not just the visual style, but the writing and game design itself. Fans of Japanese RPGs, if they're old enough, will remember a time when characters weren't primarily high school students, fanservice was rare and tastefully implemented, humor was more subtle, character designs were detailed and avoided adopting a generic 'anime' look, and one didn't have to suffer obnoxious and frequently misogynistic tropes in order to get to the good parts of a game's story. In this respect, Triangle Strategy is a throwback to the 90s in the very best sense, treating its extensive cast of characters with deep respect as it weaves a story dense with twists and political intrigue.

I mentioned that all of Asano's game titles are bizarre, but they all tie back to integral aspects of the games as well. Which brings us to Triangle Strategy. Trios of things (or trianglular relations) actually feature prominently in the game. The most obvious is its setting. The continent of Norzelia is split between three civilizations: The Duchy of Aesfrost, a mountainous, bitterly cold land in the northernmost portion of Norzelia, which trades in iron mined from its mountain caves and prides itself on being a meritocracy where anyone can ascend the social ladder and better their station in life, regardless of race, creed, or sex; The Holy State of Hyzante, located in a sprawling desert to Norzelia's East, a theocracy which thrives on the export of salt harvested from the only know salt lake in existence, said to have been a gift from the Goddess of Salt; and the Kingdom of Glenbrook, located in the Western part of Norzelia, a land of verdant, unspoiled natural beauty and longstanding feudal tradition where the game's protagonist, Serenoa Wolffort, hails from.

When the game begins, only a few decades have passed since the end of the Saltiron War, a vicious conflict over key resources which enveloped the entire continent, and the political balance of Norzelia is only beginning to truly recover. A transcontinental consortium is established to fairly manage the distribution of salt and iron across the land, and, at the beginning of the game, we learn that Serenoa, heir to one of the three high houses of Glenbrook, is to be married to Frederica Aesfrost, which is as explicit a symbol as any of the friendship between the two civilizations. This fragile balance of peace is shattered, however, when, days before the marriage is to happen, Aesfrost launches a brutal and unprovoked invasion on the capital city of Glenbrook. Serenoa and Frederica escape the capital with the crown prince, Roland Glenbrook, in tow, and are left with the rest of House Wolffort to manage a situation that threatens to plunge the continent back into the fires of war once again.

Triangle Strategy is a tactical RPG in the vein of other Square-Enix classics like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics, although it distinguishes itself from other games in the genre by reducing the degree of customization and character building available to the player. There's almost none, in fact, outside of being able to equip different accessories, which don't really alter how you approach battles. This might be alarming to people who like to spend a lot of time customizing a party of untouchable death machines, but that would conflict with the very hand-crafted nature of the game, which is all about providing balanced battles that force the player to heavily consider which units they're going to deploy and how to command them. You know... tactics. To this end, the characters you'll unlock throughout the game are all effectively their own unique classes, with most of them playing wildly differently from one-another.

This sort of approach is only meaningful if the maps you play on encourage tactical thinking, though, and this, thankfully, represents one of Triangle Strategy's greatest design triumphs. The map design throughout is some of the best I've seen in the genre, with many featuring their own unique gimmicks that change the flow of battle, and almost all of them are designed in such a way as to force the player to reckon with multiple fronts at once, guard chokepoints, and maintain a constant awareness of the capabilities of the enemy. Almost no flat maps with units puked out at random, as is unfortunately common in series like Fire Emblem and Disgaea. This, combined with balanced character builds and tight combat mechanics that emphasize the importance of positioning and resource management, leads to Triangle Strategy being one of the most splendidly satisfying TRPGs I've ever played on a pure gameplay level.

I'm talking up the gameplay, and rightly so, but one of the distinguishing (some would say 'alienating') characteristics of Triangle Strategy is the premium it places on storytelling, worldbuilding, and other generally literary characteristics. This aspect of the game is at its most brazen at the very start, where the game immerses players in the setting and begins detailing its elaborate nest of character relationships and political intrigue. This is done primarily via cutscenes and dialogues. While most of them are quite short (and most of the non-plot relevant ones are actually optional), the game does sort of bury you in words at the beginning.

Thankfully, this narrative-heavy approach at the start pays dividends as the game progresses, as mid and especially late game chapters can focus entirely on the gripping moral dilemmas the game faces the player with. Early promotion of the game focused especially heavily on the branching nature of the game's storyline, which forces the player to make what at times feel like impossible decisions in order to survive the predations of more powerful forces within Norzelia. This becomes evident early on when an invading force led by Aesfrost's intimidating General Avlora surrounds House Wolffort's demense and demands the surrender of Prince Roland into their custody. Turning him over to Aesfrost seems like an obviously bad idea at first, but it quickly becomes evident that defending your demense from the invading army will be nigh impossible without activating fire traps that'll destroy much of the land Wolffort's peasants rely on for housing and basic survival. Later dilemmas will face players with sometimes far crueler options, testing how far they will overstep basic moral boundaries in order to survive and rebuild in order to take back Glenbrook. Triangle Strategy is at its very best when the player is lost in the painful calculus imposed by these narrative turning points.

How the game handles its branching narrative will be a bit disappointing to some, unfortunately. While choices do make concrete changes to how the story progresses, and the game itself features multiple endings, your choices generally only factor into unlocking alternate chapters that lead to unique battles and story beats. But these always tend to collapse back into the game's primary narrative thread, making them feel less crucial on subsequent playthroughs.

There is actually an exception to this: while most of the endings in this game are determined by a choice made prior to the game's final major divergence point, all of which are various degrees of bittersweet, there is actually a true ending that leads to the game's best and most complete ending, and the player will have to make very specific choices throughout the story in order to unlock it. Unfortunately, while the conditions to unlock it make sense in retrospect, I have no idea how someone would figure out how to access the true ending without any sort of reference to an online guide.

I do want to speak briefly about how the player actually goes about making choices in this game, since the system the game utilizes seems utterly unique compared to anything else I've previously played. Players don't actually technically make any choices themselves on how to progress the story. Instead, different main characters will all initially adopt certain viewpoints about what choices should be made in a situation, and the player will need to have discussions with people of dissenting viewpoints to sway them to their viewpoint. This is generally accomplished by sharing information gleaned from discussions with NPCs that can help to shed new light on specific situations. Once you feel like you've swayed the right characters to your preferred choice, a sequence will play out where the characters actually cast votes for which choice to adopt by dropping tokens into the Scales of Conviction.

While I could see some people becoming annoyed with this method of directing the flow of the narrative, I really enjoyed the layers it added to the game, and how it emphasizes the folly of making decisions unilaterally in a game filled with competing ideologies and personalities.

Triangle Strategy also features a Shin Megami Tensei-esque alignment system. As your character has discussions and makes moral choices throughout, points will be added to invisible meters that influence their emergent philosophy. The ideological axis of this game is Utility, Morality, and Liberty. These meters both influence how much sway you have in conversations during story branching events and affect the order in which the game's wide swath of unlockable characters will join your army. In theory, this will lead to players having often very different experiences on their first playthrough.

Thankfully, one of the many nice quality of life features the player can enjoy in New Game Plus runs is seeing how many points they have in each ideological category, and how many points they need in order to unlock other new characters. The game will also tell the player which conversation choices add points to which category, allowing them to effectively unlock content that eluded them on their first run.

Actually, this game's implementation of its NG+ mode is impressive and thoughtful overall. Setting aside the many new characters the player will unlock as they continue to build up alignment points, new optional battles will also unlock, and making different choices will lead to new battles and story sequences throughout. In many respects, much of my NG+ run felt as 'new' as my initial playthrough of the game.

The focus on replayability is also helped by the reasonable length of the game. In an era of 100+ hour JRPG epics, a single run of Triangle Strategy can be completed in 30 - 40 hours. Potentially less if the player focuses mainly on main story cutscenes and doesn't spend a lot of time messing around with optional battles in order to grind for material to upgrade character skill trees. This makes it much more attractive to play through the game multiple times in order to discover new story content.

Triangle Strategy's visual presentation is ostensibly its biggest draw, but it's one of the few aspects of the release I haven't found myself to be fully enamored with. Triangle Strategy's low-ish resolution and reliance on modern visual effects (such as an aggressive depth-of-field effect) lead to the image often feeling a bit... soft. On my Switch OLED, this gives the game a bit of a painterly look, and the slightly higher pixel density almost allows the game to look sharp on the Switch Lite, but overall it often just looks a bit messy. This isn't helped by the chunky sprite work for the characters, which borders on being blurry on the big screen.

To add insult to injury, this very thoroughly retro-looking game chugs big time whenever a lot of visual effects are popping off at once and the screen is filled with units. So smaller levels perform well, but some of the bigger, grander battles will often look quite choppy at points. That Square-Enix couldn't wring better performance out of a device that is able to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Monster Hunter Rise without skipping a beat is... disappointing, to say the least.

The game is also almost fully voice-acted, but the quality of the voice acting itself is mixed. Some of the voice actors turn in incredibly good work, whereas others can sound a bit wooden overall.

All that being said, these complaints mostly stick out to me in retrospect.

I'm far less mixed on the game's amazing soundtrack. Seasoned composer Akira Senju, whose work anime fans might recognize from Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, brings this war epic to life with a powerful score that really helps to heighten the level of drama throughout. I'll just go ahead and post a few tracks to highlight some of the standout pieces in this game.

Triangle Strategy was a massive surprise for me. What looked like a B-tier budget game for the Switch in a genre I have mixed feelings about turned out to be one of the best games I've played this year, or any year. Despite a small army of nitpicks I've managed to amass, I can't deny that this game utterly gripped me throughout with its story and fantastic gameplay. I'm quite picky about my tactics games, but Triangle Strategy frequently managed to meet or exceed my expectations on a variety of fronts. This was an experience I didn't know I needed, but I appreciate what it added to my life, especially in the wake of Nintendo's frustrating decision to indefinitely delay their release of the upcoming Advance Wars 1 & 2 remakes.

I just beat Stray on PC. Overall, I thought the game was decent, but I was left a little disappointed. I'm surprised at how much everyone else seems to love it, but I guess it just didn't click with me.

Gameplay: The game consists of you running, jumping, and solving environmental puzzles. And I think it's alright. Your base movement as a cat feels pretty responsive overall, especially combining it with the great animations. However, I'm not a huge fan of how jumping was implemented. I understand why they made it the way it is to accommodate the super tight environments, but to me, it just ends up feeling very restrictive and limited. You're basically just moving the camera around looking for the A button to pop up in order to progress, and it doesn't feel very rewarding. The camera can be extremely annoying to deal with at times as well, with it getting stuck behind certain objects and walls. The sections against the aliens were pretty annoying and ends weirdly quickly. The mechanic with them never even shows up again which I thought was kind of weird.There were also some extremely annoying fetch quests littered throughout the game which really disrupted the pacing.

Story: I thought the story was very interesting. Granted, I didn't 100% the game, so I didn't get filled in on all of the backstory and lore. However, I thought the base story that was presented was very unique. I liked how your character basically becomes the last resort for the Earth in a way, at least for this robot civilization, killing some goopy alien guys along the way. I especially enjoyed the ending, without getting into spoilers I thought it was a pretty satisfying conclusion.

Presentation: As a whole, the presentation side of things was extremely impressive. The game is beautiful and looked great even on my lower-end system. I did run into some performance issues, though. Whenever I loaded into a new area, the game absolutely CHUGGED for like 10 seconds easily. Other than that, it was a pretty stable experience. I also thought the music and sound effects were incredible and really added to the incredible atmosphere.

Overall, I didn't think Stray was bad, but it was just not what I was expecting at all. I was hoping for a super immersive and cute cat game, and while it was those things, it was also a game filled with disruptive fetch quests, annoying "combat" sections, and performance issues. The game has a super creative and unique concept, but unfortunately, for me, it just underdelivered. I can still lightly recommend the game if you're able to get over a good amount of hurdles, though.

6/10 Not bad

I finally finished Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. Only took 21 years. :V

To me Circle of the Moon is a defining GBA game. Not because of the quality of the game, but because it had the least amount of game I could possibly experience via failing to git gud out of the games I played at that time, and partially because its the defining game for why Nintendo really needed a new GBA with a backlit screen. It's also funny because I also failed to get anywhere in Castlevania 64, so it took me a 3rd Castlevania to play to find a Castlevania I could actually enjoy.

But nowadays none of that is an issue, so as a game now, I really like it. Even though its been a long time since I've played this type of Castlevania (much longer since the GBA games), I can kinda tell this is a first attempt at a handheld Castlevania in this style (and Igarashi didn't make it AFAIK). I feel like the card system is undercooked and relies too much of random drops (this is not untrue of the Sorrow games to an extent), and I'm not sure it plays the best out of the games. But despite that, it was still a nice return to this type of game and a really fun first attempt, even if the problems to me are kinda obvious (did these games always rely on needlessly long hallways?). The issues stop mattering when I'm actually playing it and in the middle of an actually fun enemy encounter or discovering a secret or using certain abilities, and it felt very rewarding to figure out the attack patterns of bosses and certain enemy types. Also, maybe its because of how it relied on catchy songs from other games, but I actually maybe like the soundtrack more than Aria's.

Beat Metroid Fusion a couple days ago on my original DS. Trying to replay all of the previous Metroids before I finally get to Metroid Dread....and then I had to send my Switch back to the store as I noticed a defect and have to wait on a replacement.

Also beat Tokyo Mirage Sessions a few weeks back. Great game if you're looking for something similar to SMT or Persona.

@themaskedjackal What did you think of Fusion? I really like it even though it’s a pretty big departure from the other games in the series, mainly due to its linearity and focus on story.

@StarPoint Honestly, it might be my favorite in the series. I love exploring in Metroid games, but there's times when I just want to get to the story and uncovering more about the world and the lore. I really enjoy the Metroid games, but the amount of times I've gotten lost because I have no idea what to do or where to go, are more than I can to count (looking at you Super Metroid) .

@themaskedjackal I definitely understand the getting lost thing. Super Metroid, while one of my favorites, definitely has that problem. I think you might like Dread, since the exploration is pretty straightforward and it has a lot of lore.

@StarPoint I really hope so. I still can't believe that Dread got released at all. I really enjoyed Samus Returns so I'm expecting great things from Dread. Unfortunately I can't play it at the moment as my switch's dock died. I'm currently experiencing Majora's Mask for the first time on my 3DS to keep me busy until I get a replacement.

@themaskedjackal Same here, it's still surreal to me that a game that was pronounced dead over 15 years ago made such an incredible recovery. If you liked Samus Returns that much then I think you're going to love Dread. It's an improvement in pretty much every way.

Inside
Glad I got this on sale, would've been quite annoyed at paying full price for it.

Nice graphics, but short, with basic, repetitive puzzles, and a lack of variety in the locations and colour scheme. Just when you think the game is going to pick up, it stops.

Pretty new to PS5 and have recently completed both games that came with it, Astro's Playroom & Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Astro was fantastic, just as good as Nintendo's top tier platformers, IMO, and I loved the way it felt like a love letter to PlayStation history (gave it a sense of history that until now only Nintendo has been able to pull off). Earlier this week I finally found the last puzzle piece I was missing, so have now collected everything.

Wrapped Miles this week as well. I actually really enjoyed the smaller scale vibe & length of it, made the game feel much more personal (the time capsule, music, & postcard side quest lines really added to this too).