Dragon Quest 9.
That’s all there has been and that’s all there will be for a while. I’m loving this game so much.
I finished a game before DQ9 came out! Now I will probably be Dragon Questing all the damn time.
One game I did not finish but did poke through a bit more was Gyakuten Saiban. Slow reading in that one but I’m really enjoying the story. At the opening of Case 2 right now.
Popped in Final Fantasy USA Mystic Quest, the hilarious titled Japanese version of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Game is so easy but oddly satisfying. That was only to tide me over before DQ9 because I did happen to finish. . .
Final Fantasy 4 Easy Type. Which has a really weird looking version of the final boss who I forgot to screen capture. Dammit. The game is still a completely enjoyable jaunt through a neat world with great characters. I really love the game. Bizarre, but whenever I see the kanji é‡ which means needle, I get the urge to play the game. I can’t explain why!
But yeah, mostly Dragon Quest 9. It’s just so good. I finished the first big story arc and it was a really satisfying tale. Fairly simple but just good. Word is the scenarios are pretty great in this game so I’m really looking forward to digging in deeper. Some people don’t seem to care for the way the job system works out once you can change jobs but we’ll see how I feel about it when I get to that point. So far I’m loving it.
With the JLPT looming over my head I didn’t really get much done in the ways of gaming. Not much done in the ways of studying either but you know how it goes. That damn little abyss of not being able to do anything because of a looming situation that you feel is sliding out of your hands.
But yeah! Games!
Final Fantasy Tactics is going at a slow rate. I wanted to get some of the classes going early so I am fighting the first battle over and over again but my Experience and Job Point gains are minimal at best right now. There are apparently folk who master every job and such before even leaving this point in the game. That is hardly my goal but I’d like to at least get a head start and cruise through the first part of the game because I’ve played it so many times. I really want to get to the Wiegraf fight and crush his stupid head so much.1 I had this game pretty much around release and have never finished it due to this damn fight. Ugh.
Now as for my Final Fantasy 4 Easy Type play2 hit a bit of a standstill on the Moon. It’s so hard! This wasn’t dumbed down like a good portion of the game. Or maybe I always just ran from the enemies on the Moon when I first played this game because the enemies look so damn weird. I’m easily scared of things. I’m just a sensitive boy.
Other than that I finished up the first case in Gyakuten Saiban. Very fun game and I’m excited to keep on going through it. The English version I played was chock full of puns and in-jokes so I’m worried that I’m going to miss a lot of these by playing it in Japanese. But, my understanding is going well enough that I can at least play the game so that’s great.
But my free time is upping ever so slightly every day so I’m hoping to finish up FF4ET this week and pound a bit more into FFT before Dragon Quest 9 comes and steals my time for the next few weeks.
Finished two games this past week.
Finishing my Final Fantasy V challenge was exhilarating. Playing the game with such a crazy restriction caused good amounts of frustration but having to come up with different strategies to win was great fun. The final battle can be found here. I think I’m going to try to do a new challenge every month. Tomorrow I think I’ll start Final Fantasy Tactics and hopefully beat the damn thing. Been working on Final Fantasy 4 Easy Type and I don’t think I’m going to rush through that, but an hour or two every now and then really makes progress in this game. It is so short and after finishing the DS version of FF4 almost two years ago I really don’t find this game to be all that challenging. It is still fun, though.
I’ve come to determine that my lifestyle cannot simply hold an MMORPG amongst its endeavors. I just can’t do it. I have logged into FF11 once since installing it almost 3 weeks ago. It’s not even that I don’t have the time to sit down and play a game. Even though I do spend a significant amount of time playing games on the go, I manage to find time to play games on consoles. I just can’t dedicate it all to one game, especially a type of game that requires so much investment to actually do something of progress in one sit down. Hopefully this will finally be the time I give up MMORPGs for good, although I highly doubt it.
The other game I finished was Duels of the Planeswalkers on the 360. While genuinely fun, it reminded me of two hard cold facts:
- I have shit luck.
- People suck.
The first was confirmed with the number of times I got mana screwed/flooded. It is borderline stupid. But that’s random numbers for you. Why it seems they hate me on such a regular basis, I don’t know. But I can’t damn it too much. It is what it is.
People, on the other hand, really need to stop dropping out at the first sight of their loss. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but this is just ridiculous. The worst was when I was playing a four player game and the “Host dropped connection” after I had taken down the other two players. This wouldn’t be a big problem if the single player was great, but it isn’t. The AI is dumb. I have seen plays that don’t even begin to make sense. Why, when I am all tapped out, would you spend all your remaining mana on regenerating a creature that you’re not even attacking with? The AI just completely dumped their remaining mana on their turn into a Drudge Skeleton, which I was able to kill off the next turn. I know that it won’t make the best plays but where in the game of Magic would this even make sense? How would they have programmed it to think this way? It’s just silly.
I also started Gyakuten Saiban which is better known among English speakers as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. There are a good chunk of words that I don’t know, but I am surprised that I am actually understanding a large chunk of the story. Enough to actually solve the first case without a hitch. I know it’s supposed to be easy, but I figured the language barrier would be too much. Glad to see that this isn’t the case.
So this week should be that, Final Fantasy 4 Easy Type, some FF Tactics and maybe some Donkey Kong Country if I can convince Eriko to throw down a little.
A little old, a … Hmm, nothing new. As of late I’ve been picking up random cheap games I’ve wanted to finish but no new releases have even really interested me. My gameplay has been at a bit of a standstill in a few points.
In the Final Fantasy corner of my life we’ve got FF11, FF5 and FF2 going on right now. I’m not really progressing in FF11. Whenever I log in I don’t have much time to accomplish much and I’ve forgotten too much of the game to move at a speedy pace. FF2 has just been slight progression here and there when I poke the PSP on for a bit. FF5 has been the biggest standstill of them all as I can’t really figure out how to take my rag tag team of shitty classes and get them to do enough damage to finish regular battles. Good god, the thought of the latter bosses is giving me anal convulsions.
I picked up Duels of the Mages on XBLA last week. I’m a sucker for Magic: The Gathering to this day and for $10 maybe this will help quell the beast that rises inside of me from time to time. The puzzle mode was nice but I cleared it quickly. The last few required a bit of thought but the fact that there were only eight was quite disappointing. It reminded me of the puzzles found in inQuest years ago but in goal only. You have to finish the game in the turn you’re on1 but the situations don’t tend to be that dire. The campaign is pretty fun but I either get my celestial ass handed to me or the AI makes completely ridiculous choices and I smash face heartily. That all said, it is strangely satisfying if not limited. You can’t really customize decks, which is a shame.
Spent some time playing Donkey Kong Country with Eriko. I suck at this game and often she is asking me to get past difficult parts. Whoops. I don’t have two controllers so we can’t do cooperative play, but passing the controller back and forth is still good fun. For the hype this game got back when it was released I don’t think I ever really played it. I mean, I had played it, I think Paul had a copy of it? Someone did but it wasn’t me. Anyway, a few of the stages have been really fun, particularly the mine cart one, but for the most part they have been of the formula “Introduce mechanic, make it progressively more difficult, end level.” which is okay but it feels a bit too mechanical.
This week’s goals involve getting some serious progress towards finishing FF5 and plucking away some hours at FF2. Come the start of July I’d like to pick up Final Fantasy Tactics again and finally finish that game.
- Although I do believe some of the inQuest goals got rather strange from time to time instead of just always going for victory. [↩]
So a bit of Final Fantasy V and uh, some shame.
Got to the end of Galuf’s world in FFV and now I just need to beat Exdeath. Not exactly looking forward to pummeling him to death via fists but with my options as they are I don’t think I have any other choice. I got Monk, Berserker, Beastmaser and Dancer in my Five Job Challenge thing and no source of damage is a sure shot with this set of characters. I’ve got to upload some of my videos because they really show how lucky I have to get. And how often I forget that equipping Bone Mail doesn’t let you use potions on that character. Whoops.
So the shame comes in from me restarting FFXI. For the third time now, I believe, although I could be wrong. This time my client is in Japanese so it is a bunch of study time, right? Right. So I just started out a new character because I couldn’t find any of my old information. Getting the game cost me a whole $10 so even if I just goof around a bit once in a while during my free month that’ll be something.
Last week was Eriko’s birthday so I spent time doing things like baking a cake and repairing a watch band, so that ate up some gaming time. I think I’ll be able to squeeze a bit more in this week, or at least I hope to. I’ve been poking some of my free, yet I don’t have a console with me, time on Zenonia for my iPhone. Hope to have some thoughts on it up by the end of the week, but they are definitely a mixed bunch.
Mostly been playing Final Fantasy V with a few things sprinkled throughout.
I got back on the Wii Fit wagon and it hurts. Real bad. It’s too damn hot or I’m too damn lazy but I can’t make my ass get in gear in the morning any more. This means I’m doing it after work but at least I’m doing that.
Street Fighter 4 has been a mixed bag of mostly failure but it’s not as frustrating as it used to be. I’m trying to get more solid combos going with Sakura. There are some bad habits I have picked up that I need to get rid of. Mostly doing her EX Dragon Punch at every opportunity. It gets blocked far too often and can be better utilized elsewhere.
On the portable front, my play of Final Fantasy 2 on the PSP has been going much smoother than the Famicom try. I finished doing the same early equipment fetching that I did on the original version but in at least half the time. I’ve been messing with the added bonus dungeon which has not only been a blast but filling my inventory bag with a lot of random extra junk. Most of it I sold but that just means more awesome stuff I can buy with all the money.
Puyo Puyo with Eriko on the train stole the DS time I might have otherwise dedicated to 7th Dragon. That game is so damn hard that I really don’t know when I’ll sit down and make decent progress on it again. At least Puyo Puyo is good wholesome fun.
Other than that I’ve just not been finding the time to game. Trying to plan a trip back to the states and it is going quite poorly. Tickets have been found but I have no idea how the hell to pay for them. Don’t have a credit card that can accommodate the cost and no idea how to pay from my Japanese bank account. Not encouraging.
Played a bunch of Final Fantasy this week.
Gave up on FF2 Famicom. I just can’t do it. I spent about 4 hours trying to get through the last dungeon and I just kept getting screwed. Bad luck or a small mistake turned into game overs time and time again. I’ve beaten the Famicom version before so I’m just going to give up on this play but pick it up again on the PSP whose version I have yet to actually beat.
There is a thread on GAF of the Final Fantasy 5 challenge I’ve started. The thread is getting huge. There are over thirty people participating and more people keep asking to join. Basically, I’m only letting people use 4 of over the 20 classes available in the game. Some people have it easy, some have it hard some people really got fucked.
I got fucked pretty hard.
I got the Monk, Berserker, Hunter and Dancer. The first one is the only really good one. The third has a useful sill but only useful for getting other skills for a class I can’t use. The fourth has pretty good skills as well, but to help out other classes that I just can’t use. That’s going to be a pain. The Berserker is screwing me over royally. Having one class that I can’t control at all is proving to be a great challenge, but at the same time it is a bit of an asset as I can ignore that character and spend all of my time focused on taking care of the rest of the battle with only a few characters. Still tough as nails but it has been pretty fun so far.
Hoping to work on some other games for a change. It has been almost a month since I finished a game and I’d like to change that.
Earlier late posts! I’m getting almost better.
Nothing much but Final Fantasy 2 the past week. I’m not sure exactly where my gaming time is disappearing to. I’m not really doing much else. Time to bust out the old time management skills and see what is going on in my life.
Continue reading »
Last week saw me plodding a bit through Fallout 3, a good amount of Final Fantasy 2 and of course Street Fighter 4.
I’m starting to feel a bit “smoother” in SF4. Nothing special and still lots of losses. But something clicked on one level and a lot of the frustration has subsided. I’ve definitely gotten a better handle on Sakura and now I just need to actually start tying things together to keep my wins up. Alas, it is taking longer and longer for me to get matches in Championship Mode. And I still do stupid things while playing.
Final Fantasy 2 is just good fun. I’ve got a bunch of screen shots showing my stat progression day by day. Well, just HP/MP but it’s something. Weird how some characters can take a lot of damage but gain no HP. A bit frustrating, but if you travel to one of the later towns early on after acquiring some quick cash, you can get some good equipment to help the game go smoother. It’s fun to play something old again.
Fallout 3 is, well, Oblivion only a bit less terrible. Sometimes I get an itch to play a game I know I won’t completely like. I can’t figure out why this happens but if I fight it for too long I end up caving in anyway. Anyway, I always find myself picking up an open ended RPG and wandering around and eventually getting bored. If I raise any complaints I always get the “Do the main story” bit, but if I wanted to follow the main story, I’d play a game that does that route well. These games just don’t.
I’ve often wondered if it is too much freedom causing my distaste for the games. This sounds weird but oddly right at the same time. I’ll muse on it and write up something later.
