Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

I finally beat Final Fantasy XII. Very disappointed by this one, in a specific way at least.

Every year, when doing the Favorite Games You Just Happened to Play this Year thread, and for the past few years, reliably, my most played game would just BARELY get into my list, and I was hoping FFXII would've been that game. it is another overly long game that has a lot of really good elements, brought down by its own tedium. Considering how this game is also generally considered (even if I don't know if this is actually true at all) a predecessor to Xenoblade Chronicles, perfect fit!

Unfortunately, its not quite good enough for that. Those other games, had elements I genuinely loved. While for FFXII, there was a lot of good elements but I'd really struggle to think of much that I loved about it. The music is quite good, but not in a way that will likely stick with me or have songs that stand out from each other too often. The gambit system is really interesting but isn't necessarily what I'm looking for and considering how little advanced ideas I ever had to use (which is a shame because the handful of times I did it well enough to have beaten a challenging boss with practically no input from changing it in certain ways is really cool, in a way). Like I assumed for a second when the enemies were overwhelming me in the final area that I'd need to come back and that they were doing the old school Final Fantasy thing where you need to get through some really cool side content that makes up the last third but...no I ran by the enemies instead and then beat every boss fight with no game overs until the end. I didn't even use the Mist stuff, which I'm not convinced is great either.

The story also feels like the opposite extreme of X + X2. While those games are cringey to a fault (much worse than Xenoblade 2, easily), it also has some really great high points. This is just very...acceptable. Very ok. Very serious. Eh.

I liked it, but too often in a kinda mindless way. It's not anything I want to go back to. Which is a shame, because I do love some Final Fantasies and I was really looking forward to this one in particular.

Just finished playing Inmost, a little indie horror game.
It tells three interwoven stories and is quite mysterious during its first two acts, making you figure out what's really happening. But it all comes together beautiful in a finale that made me bawl my eyes out. Gameplay is quite simple, but the story is a real gut punch. The game can be completed in about 4 hours. Great for a lazy afternoon.

I just finished TLoZ Echoes of Wisdom. It was a phenomenal game from start to finish. I managed to get all of the echoes, stamps, and side quests complete. The last two dungeons were pretty challenging, and the final boss was great and intense. With that said, I have a few nitpicks about the final boss fight that I won’t share here due to spoilers, but nonetheless it was a fantastic experience overall.

Done with these 3. And it was a blast to play them. Especially Vanguard Bandits! One of the best mecha SRPG games of all time

Just beat Link's Awakening for the Nintendo Switch. Over-all I would say that it was a pretty decent game. Nothing to write home about, but I enjoyed it a bit more than Echoes of Wisdom. The level design was incredibly tight and it actually felt like there was a reason to go out of your way to do a lot of the side content in the game. Especially when it came to collecting the shells in order to get the upgraded sword.

The story is pretty alright, but it isn't really the main focus. Doesn't help that I was spoiled on it before going in, but the main draw was the gameplay anyways.

The dungeons were pretty well designed. The bosses were a bit weak, but I still feel like a good number of them held up when compared to the Echoes of Wisdom bosses. The last two dungeons were pretty challenging and headache inducing with their puzzles and traversal however, with the ones before being pretty well designed and easy to read.

The character writing had a good amount of charm to it, and it does make you a bit sad to see everything end the way it does.

Over all I would probably give this a 7 out of 10, especially since I wasn't actually walking away tired of the game this time around. Nothing special, but nothing abhorrent either.

I just beat Echoes of Wisdom. Now time to 100%!

Just beat Hades recently, and now I’m working on Hollow Knight, which is testing my patience. Also, Kirby as a Metroidvania? Didn’t expect that!

Just rolled credits on Echoes of Wisdom. Pleasant surprise thankfully. I went in not thinking I was going to enjoy it as much, but it's easily my goty. Solid 9/10. Only thing that stopped me from giving it a 10 is the slow pace of battles, or needing to find the right echoes to use at times. Other than that, it's a damn near perfect game and just what I needed this year. Felt like a down year for me until EoW, so I'm pleased. Hope others get to enjoy it as well.

I also just finished Zelda EoW. There are a ton of types of collectibles and I 100%-ed most of them before rolling the credits, wracking up 45 hours of playtime so I am done for now until I someday replay. The game was a pleasure from start to finish and joins my personal exclusive club of 4 games on Switch I have rated 10/10.

Fire Emblem Engage
Finished every chapter and sidequest and brought peace back to Elyos. Great game with lots of likeable characters.

Just finished Echoes of Wisdom. Overall it's a very good Zelda game. I like how it set out to do something a little different compared to the other games in the series, and it makes me think a bit more with how the echoes are used. The exploration is still great in this game - I didn't quite get 100%, but I did still get a lot of the hidden items. Love the art style as well, and it looks fantastic on the Switch OLED. My only real critique is that swapping between echoes can get pretty clunky at times.

I managed to finish Ys Seven (PC) late last week, just in time for Ys X: Nordics later this week.

This was the first Ys game that made use of the party system after the "Zelda, with jumping" gameplay in the Napishtim engine games, and it definitely shows. Combat feels uncharacteristically slow for a Ys game until a certain point not quite halfway in since it's hard to build up the skill meter. Skills also have to be learned from equipping weapons and must be leveled to at least level 1 in order to keep them. Later games definitely improved on these aspects. Once it gets going and better skills are learned, gameplay flows more smoothly.

The plot takes a bit to get going until about halfway through, but the payoff is worth it IMO. This is probably one of Falcom's better soundtracks. Visually, the game can be rough - this was originally a PSP game - but is still perfectly enjoyable. Some of the party receives decent character development (We can finally play as Dogi!), while a minority of characters don't really contribute much of value outside of their themed sections.

Overall, Ys Seven is a decent title worth playing. I just think some other games do things better, especially when it comes to gameplay. That said, the fact that Altago's plight is on a smaller scale compared to the Lacrimosa in Ys VIII didn't escape me.

I finished crow country. Had to look up some stuff to get through unfortunately.
For the most, it wasnt a terrible time. There were however, some elements I did not enjoy. The camera, the death traps you can barely see, and the god awful aiming. They somehow managed to make aiming even worse than old school RE games. It was beyond frustrating. The traps were just as annoying too. Not to mention the loading times are really a pain.

The main thing it had going for it was the setting and the story. The monsters were really cool too honestly. Overall, not a great game. Definitely doesn't feel like masterpiece people are making it out to be online. I guess I'd recommend to old school RE fans, but doesn't really feel like it did anything to push the genre forward. If anything, I'd say heaven dust I and II are better games and they're half the price, and the gameplay is just as solid. There's also auto aim which helps in these games. 6/10

Visions of Mana
I got the platinum trophy today. Visions of Mana is everything I could have hoped for in a Mana game, I love it.

Just finished Shadow Generations. And my goodness, did Sonic team cook. This genuinely might be my new favorite sonics game and that's saying a lot. It is PEAK.

Technically this isn't a game since it's a dlc but side order with splatana stamper

Rolled the credits on Portrait of Ruin. Liked it even more than dawn of sorrow. I'll probably take a break from these castlevania ds games for a bit though.

@NintendoByNature Did you ever play Castlevania Bloodlines by chance?

Outer Wilds. For anyone not familiar with it, it's a difficult game to explain without spoiling anything, but basically you have to explore a solar system to find clues about the fate of an ancient civilisation. The twist is that you're stuck in a time loop that resets every 22 minutes or every time you die, so you never gain anything permanent other than knowledge. Your discoveries are recorded in your ship's log and you need to use what you learn to help work out how to access places you can't normally get to.

Considering the 'open solar system' nature of the game, it mostly runs well on Switch; there's the odd stutter, but nothing too bad. More annoyingly, though, I had the game freeze on me a few times, requiring a restart - including during the endgame, but thankfully the developers had the foresight to put a save point during this section (in a game that doesn't normally have save points as such) so I didn't have to redo as much as I expected.

It's a difficult game to give a verdict on too, because it can be frustrating at times, between the aforementioned freezes, the fact that the game never explicitly tells you what to do (although I found that every time I got stuck enough to have to resort to Google, someone on Reddit had already asked the same question I had, and the fan community is very good about giving hints as to where to go without outright spoiling the answers), and the way dying or running out of time in the middle of doing something forces you to restart the loop and make your way back to where you were (and possibly wait around for a bit if you're trying to do something you can only access at a particular time in the loop) - but the game is so immersive, clever and unusual that I can just about forgive these issues. In a way, I was glad to be done with it (it took me over 25 hours spread across nearly 2 months, so it's not a quick play), but I am looking forward to playing the DLC expansion (which is included with the physical copy) after a break. It's not a game for the impatient, but I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for something original and cerebral.

Space Marine II, although short campaign I loved every single second of it.