Last Game You Played

[Mr EliteL]

Unicorn Overlord

TLR version: Ranked up in a gladiator like arena, which was like the Glitz Pit from Paper Mario TTYD, to unlock a unit I wanted, then continued story stuff.

Went through the Colosseum with my level 17-20, then 20-22 units which beat 20-40 level units not because we eliminated each member of the squads but dealing the most damage/receiving the least damage as you can win a fight via those means to rank up. This unlocked Amalia, a level 40 unit who we had to beat solo in a special fight where she had like 600HP, and our fight we dealt like 10-20 damage to her but because of my debuffer and the two units I had could easily evade the attacks, it meant a win. I am disappointed that fight didn't have a stipulation of at least damaging her more than we did or outright defeat the 600HP to win, but whatever. Luckily there were more higher level fights so I'm going to aim to fight them properly instead of just dealing more damage than them. So now I'll continue the story and open up the map more. Liberated Drakenhold and well into the Elheim region now.

Wuthering Waves

Did the Alloy Smelt event which I mostly completed, got to the 30,000 score, then Depths of Illusive Realm but just got bored of that event. I'll get Yinlin's quest done today and dailies then just wait for 1.1.

Genshin Impact

Doing the new Endless Forms Most Merial event as the days unlock for it, very easy to do and no silly NPC required to start it which is cool. Got Furina's weapon within two 10-pulls, I was on 8 Pity then it came at 22 Pity which was excellent plus winning a 50/50 so I didn't have to use too much primogems savings to get it. My Furina is very happy now.

[Moonface]

@Maniakkid25: I assume by crash you mean you just force quit right? Is this the first time you've encountered something in a game where you just went "nope" and backed out of the game (not necessarily counting phobia related stuff because that wouldn't be unexpected like the situation in your post)?

@Mr EliteL: I pray I didn't ask this already but what got you to start playing WW?

Monument Valley (PC)
Finished this today, and really enjoyed it. Short, but very chill and I can't begin to imagine how the developers created the overall gameplay mechanic without constantly confusing themselves designing levels and puzzles around it.

Monument Valley 2 (PC)
Started this a couple of hours ago and already finished it since like the first game, it's very short but packed with great ideas that build off the first game. Level 9 is absolutely the highlight of the game for me out of all the levels; just a total visual trip that can really mess with your sense of space without actually doing much to achieve it. 

Overall both games are a very relaxing experience with great messages and themes behind them both, and I'd highly recommend grabbing them during the Steam Summer Sale if you like simpler puzzle games that don't drive you up the wall or take a lot of time to figure out.

[Kyng]

The Sims 4

Sadly, one of my Sims died after a long and productive life . I hope she'll still come back as a ghost to haunt her descendants, though!

[Maniakkid25]

@Maniakkid25: I assume by crash you mean you just force quit right? Is this the first time you've encountered something in a game where you just went "nope" and backed out of the game (not necessarily counting phobia related stuff because that wouldn't be unexpected like the situation in your post)?

Oh, that wasn't even the only time in that game alone I've done something like that. And yeah, I meant force quit. I call it "crashing" because I use the task manager to end the task, which I'm 99% certain is a bad idea. Either way, it's a lot quicker to just force quit the game when you realize you're overmatched than to just wait until you die and reload your last save. It's not like the game uses a checkpoint system, anyway. But yeah, as an example of another force quit, I had to fight Huang Long, and it turns out that quest is recommended for someone about 20 levels over my ass, which is funny because his first quest before you fight him is recommended for level 48 (I'm level 46). So, you know, that was an unpleasant surprise when I found out he was resistant to all elements and knew the strongest Almighty attack in the game. And then he summoned another demon, and I was like "F*** THIS!" Hell, not even going that extreme, I took three swipes at the current story boss before backing off to grind some more, and he just overmatched me every time. I know his weakness (Dark) and what attribute of attack he uses (physical and lightning); I just didn't have the team set up to support that. This game punishes like few others for making the basic mistake of walking into a fight without knowing the party set-up you need, and often times you need a mulligan just to learn the boss' attacks and defenses, so you can do the fight proper. If I have one problem with the game, it's that.

Though there was one hilarious time where I solo killed four enemies because they couldn't reliably damage me because I was immune to their element, so that was lulzy.

[Mr EliteL]

Genshin Impact

Just dailies, finishing off the previous event then starting the shooter event this week, also tried out the Imaginarium Theatre and got to Act 8, but stupidly chose Keqing over Hu Tao to join my cast and couldn't quite beat the Icewind Suite, because I thought I had enough to deal with it (had Wriothesley, Dehya and Xiangling as remaining cast). The was a point where I picked a choice to revive a character at 0 Vigor in which it gave me Wanderer back, but the seemed to be bugged as I never got Wanderer unless I misread something.
So I chose the go back to previous Act option to try and correct myself but messed up there as I decided to choose the more difficult Elite Assault route where the enemies got magic heals just to screw with my gameplan, kept almost defeating them but nope, they got healed and I'm out of bursts. So I quit at only Act 6 completed and will try again and make sure I damn well choose my Hu Tao even though she isn't among her best reactions.
Also helped a player who joined gather materials for Dehya (pupa and boss) on both my Main and EU F2P server, on my NA just levelled up my Baizhu's talents to 6/9/9, he was 3/6/6 before.

Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia

Finally started up a game file, haven't got to actual combat yet as I learned you shouldn't invade as soon as possible as I remembered from my demo entering a battle was hard from low level. It's a bit of a double-edged sword holding back and levelling as the other nations also do the same. I could invade with everyone on an area or risk losing that same area as it can't defend, even if I do leave any units behind to defend as they'd be too weak. Will be interesting to try and figure out when the best time to strike is, though I'm on a timer in this run of 120 seasons, I've used 5 or 6 so far and have 5 continents to conquer.

Wuthering Waves

Er just doing whatever. Levelled up my Jianxin's er...talent things to 5 each and unlocked a couple upgrades.

[Moonface]

This game punishes like few others for making the basic mistake of walking into a fight without knowing the party set-up you need, and often times you need a mulligan just to learn the boss' attacks and defenses, so you can do the fight proper. If I have one problem with the game, it's that.

Ugh, I always have really mixed feelings about games that do trial and error style things like that where the player can't possibly know what to do the first time. I've never really decided if I like or dislike the approach overall or not.


Grand Poo World 2 (SNES)
Fun fact, I have never played Super Mario World before. So of course the smart thing to do is to pick up not just an incredibly difficult SMW ROM hack as my first ever foray into playing SMW, but to also do it where I have to do a boss fight. The arcade at SGDQ '24 had a station where two SNES consoles were set up, and had a selection of challenges on them, and this boss fight is the one chosen from this game. I spent over an hour on this and managed to get to the finale of the fight four times, but I always ended up dying before the Chuck explodes. In the end I gave up but for having never played SMW before, I personally think it's a pretty big accomplishment to come so close to fully beating a boss fight in a very difficult ROM hack.

[ShiraNoMai]

Watching Moony play that was a treasure, especially cuz I could see the beginnings of a kaizo player being made there lmao

Golden Yoshi's Island
Been putting a serious dent in this over my time at GDQ. Really love this hack, it's really well done. My favorite (and most hated) part is utilizing the environment sprites to hide coins and other collectibles. Makes me want to explore every inch more and more.

[Dragon Lord]

Wuthering Waves (PC)

Haven't been doing too much here lately. Have all of the story done and every optional thing done except for random exploring. Currently working on just farming for my Jinhsi, Yinlin and Encore. Hoping to get my characters powered up enough to where I can fully clear the tower this cycle.

Zenless Zone Zero (PC/PS5)

The latest and greatest Hoyoverse release has finally arrived! Well, last week, but you know. Been enjoying the hell out of this game. The combat is so fun and the silliness and wackiness of it is a nice change from Hoyo trying to be more serious in games like Genshin and Star Rail. I've just been working on clearing out the story and all of the side content so I can get currency to roll and hopefully get the characters I want. I want Nekomata (the adorable cat girl you may have seen in advertising) and Ellen Joe (the shark girl maid that you may also have seen in advertising), but so far no luck. I got the fiery hammer girl as my first S-Rank character (at least it wasn't the disgusting furry, so it's a win regardless). Hopefully I can get Ellen in time, and hopefully Nekomata will come home as well, but if not, I can at least get her guaranteed after 300 pulls on the standard banner).

Genshin Impact (PC)

Haven't been up to a whole lot here. Got Sigewinne like I wanted and now I've just been pulling on Furina's banner when I can to try and finish off getting her to C6. I did get my C5 copy of her, thankfully winning the 50/50. Now I just need to win one more 50/50 and I can be happy, though if I lose the 50/50 instead I will sadly have to wait until her next re-run to finish getting her to C6. Sadly don't have the funds right now to whale, which is also why I can't go after C2 Sigewinne either. Oh well, just gotta saver up for her re-run for that.

Honkai Star Rail (PC)

Also not doing a whole lot here. I continue to eternally slack on building characters to actually clear the end-game modes. Man, the amount of pulls I've lost out on over the last 15 months from not clearing all of the end-game modes... oh well. Maybe some day I'll get out of the rut and actually build characters, but man farming for Relics in this game SUCKS. People thought artifact farming was rough in Genshin, Star Rail makes it look like a picnic.

Arknights (Android)

New 6* released today with a mini-event. I went ahead and did the usual ten pull on the banner (in Arknights, every new banner gives a guaranteed 5 or 6-star character in the first 10 rolls) and actually managed to get her. Been a long while since the game gave me the banner 6* off of the first 10 roll guarantee, so that was pretty nice to see. I decided to pull a bit more on the banner for the new 5* character, because she is absolutely adorable and I needed her. The event is nothing to write home around. Just the typical mini-event that's pretty easy to rush through. Nice little break before we get our next big event with a Limited character at the end of the month.

Azur Lane (Android)

We're in a break period in AL right now, though we do have the next series of PR girls releasing Thursday, so that'll be something to grind away for (each one requires 2-4 million exp accumulation to unlock), but other than that there doesn't seem to be anything on the way until at least another two weeks. So I'll just continue to work on my project of getting every girl in the game to level 120 (or 125 for my favorites).

Aether Gazer (Android)

Another new event started today in the game. This game, unlike most other gacha games, is pretty much endless events. Once one ends, another start. Granted they each last over a month, so there's plenty of time to clear them (I'm terrible and always wait until the last couple of days though), but it does get kind of... dull, when the game is just a constant repeat of the same stuff. The content in the events is rarely ever different from the one before it. Makes it easier to clear everything when you already know exactly what you're going to be faced with, I guess. I did pull for the new character though, even though she's pretty average and won't really be too good for long, but I do like her play style so I decided why the hell not? I have to wait until 3.0 starts (probably Feb/March 25) for the next game-breaking OP "meta" characters anyways, so might as well pull one just for fun while I wait.

Dark Souls III (PC)

I've gotten to the end of the game and am currently just working on farming the items for covenant levels to get the spells locked behind them. Thankfully online is the game was alive enough to where I was able to get constant summons to farm Sunlight Medals with, which saved me from one of the horrible farms of having to get them from enemy drops. Unfortunately I wasn't going to try to see how active the PvP is, since Dark Souls III PvP is usually just you vs four players. So I had to go through the grueling Silver Knight farm for the covenant items to get Darkmoon Blade (only took like 5-6 hours, ended up with over 3,000,000 souls from it at least). Then I went for the Wolf covenant items. Thankfully farming 30- of those was much faster since the enemies that drop them have a much smaller loot pool than the Silver Knights. Now I'm working on the last farm, which has gone decently well. I haven't played for a few days, but I think I'm at around 15/30 of them. Once that's done, I just have to complete the game and then work on NG+ and then eventually NG++.

Dark Souls III has an achievement for obtaining all of the Rings in the game, which includes the +1 and +2 versions of them, which are exclusive to NG+ and NG+2 respectively. The only time a Souls game has hard required a full third play through for 100%. Technically Dark Souls 2 did as well if you didn't want to level up covenants, as an NPC towards the end of the game would sell some of the spells locked behind those covenants on NG+2, but you could also just choose to level them up and avoid going into NG+2. Dark Souls III hard requires it though, as there's no other way to get the +2 versions of the rings. If I remember correctly, they made it so you can't drop rings for other players, and some of the late game bosses hold +2 versions of Rings, requiring you to play through nearly the whole game on NG+2. Easily the toughest Souls game to 100% for people just for that.

Anyways, once I'm ready to hit up NG+, I should be able to blaze through it extremely fast, and NG+2 shouldn't be too long either.

Elden Ring (PS5)

I've up to Malenia right now and hating my life. Turns out fighting her with the Darkmoon Greatsword is actually pretty rough, since it requires you to glue ourself to her ass and that's a terrible idea against this boss. Doesn't help that I don't really know her boss fight either, since I only fought her once before and was using a slightly cheesy build for it as well.

I'm also finding she's spamming Waterfowl Dance a lot more than she did when I fought her on my PC play through. I had her spam it on me threes times during one attempt, all while she was above 90% health. I was just like, "Uhh... the fuck?"

It also doesn't help that my motivation to play this game nosedives when it comes to Malenia because she's probably the most "no fun allowed" boss Fromsoft has ever shit out. She's not a hard boss, she's just cheap and that really makes fighting her not fun and makes beating her not feel fulfilling at all. She's one of those bosses that you don't go, "Yes! I won! WOOOOH!" after beating, you just go, "FINALLY. Thank god this hellish nightmare is finally over," and then proceed to go drink a bottle of straight vodka.

Anyways, I'm sure I'll get her soon. I just have to learn how to fight her up close, since my previous time against her was a mid-range build.This is a type of boss that is completely different when you can keep some distance from her, compared to when you have to be up close and personal.

[Maniakkid25]

SMT V Vengeance (PC)

So, I'm nearing the endgame, so I'm wrapping up a bunch of sidequests rather than do the main quest like I'm supposed to. And I won't spoil the boss, but I got to him, and he immediately nuked my party member for 500 damage, instantly killing it. In the first turn. That was the point that I shut the game off and said "okay, that's enough for today." I didn't lose a lot of progress because you can save anywhere in this version of the game, but I'm absolutely not ready to fight this boss right now. I think his recommended level is 71, and I'm 69 (nice), so I'm not that far off, and its not like I haven't fought bosses above me before. Oh, and one of the demons I got is DLC, and let me tell you, she has been PULLING WEIGHT thanks to her unique attack Frolic. Chance to charm? Sure, whatever. Instantly adding two levels (out of two max) of Attack and Defense debuffs on all enemies on use if they aren't immune? Now that's the good shit!

Edit: and before anyone goes and says "pay to win", the skill isn't actually that overpowered. Why? Because it eats half the MP of a character that already does not have enough MP to use her skills effectively. Don't get me wrong, it's a great opener, but unless you wrap that battle by turn 4 (and you won't), then you are up shit creek with no debuffs. Rasetsu Feast is arguably a better skill (because it also nukes accuracy/evasion and doesn't waste a turn) and that has the low price of having a Jaki race in your active party. So yeah, it's good, but it's not pay to win.

[Kyng]

The Sims 4

Didn't do a whole lot - but, one of my Sims did age up from Toddler to Child .

[Moonface]

Elden Ring (PS5)
I BEAT THE FINAL BOSS OF THE DLC LET'S GO!!!

Definitely the hardest boss in the entire game and while I think some parts of the fight are poorly designed, it was nice to finally have everything click together for me. It took quite a few different builds to figure out what worked best for me, with most of the experimenting being what to equip to reduce the amount of damage I'd take because you can get really quickly messed up in this fight from some of the bullshit moves the boss can do, especially in phase two.

[Dragon Lord]

Elden Ring (PS5)

Finished the platinum. Just have to do it one more time on PS4 and I can be done with this game for good.

[ShiraNoMai]

Oh shit, GG Elden Ring plat. Moony's almost done with that himself.

Pokémon Black/White 3: Genesis
Playing this here and there. Just beat Skyla (7th gym leader), though barely. I forgot Altaria is a Dragon/Flying, which made my strat of "just use my Zebstrika's electric moveset" pretty useless. The only other counter I have for that is using Rock Slide, which two of my other 'mons have. Unfortunately, the big problem here: Altaria knows Earthquake. Not only is my Zebstrika weak to that, but my two Rock Slide-knowing 'mons, Metang (Steel/Psychic) and Excadrill (Ground/Steel) are all weak to it too! Luckily, I have my cop-out strategy: my Lampent (Ghost/Fire) knows Destiny Bond. If I can tank an Earthquake for a little, I can get that Destiny Bond in and next turn, drag that Altaria down with me. It worked; through sheer luck I lucked out with 1HP remaining and got the kill. Luckily, I had my Zebstrika in waiting for the rest of her team (she pulled Altaria out for her 2nd 'mon), and pulled through to get the win.

May need to grind for the next few areas though. I was already underleveled for that gym as it was so I can't imagine my next couple of encounters will go better

[Moonface]

Dead Space (PS5)
Started a NG+ run with the intent of doing Plasma Cutter only so that when I go for the Impossible Mode trophy I can use multiple guns if need be. I'm also seeing how far I can get without dying as a test run for Impossible Mode too and so far I've made it through 8/12 chapters without a death.

[queenzelda]

Baiten Kaitos Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean Remaster [steam]: Yes, this game is on the Switch and PC. I bought on pc since I want a third game. Will probably never happen but a girl can dream. I downloaded the english version for this and added it to my steam files and it's just like I went back in time.

game spoilers

I got as far as rescuing King Ladicon, then talking out Ayme. Am headed to the temple of winds next, fun times.

Pokemon Violet [switch]: Have been mostly shiny hunting. I got alolan Riachu shiny, normal riachu shiny, pikachu, pichu shiny, and a few mikumiku shiny too. I then got all three tatsugeri shiny, as well as a shiny Bronzong. I went shiny hunting for Bayleaf but ended up finding a shiny Grooky instead. Idk what I'll go looking for today, but we'll see. XD

Animal Crossing New Horizons [sweitch]: I have an og switch that I started a new town called Unicornya on. So far, I scanned in Ankha, I was able to find a lot of cute villagers and for some reason this streamer I watch is obsessed with Beardo, who ended up as the first villager in my campsite. It took him over 4k nook mile tickets just to find him. XD
Next up is KK Slider who said he thought my little island looked neat and wanted to visit. So today is KK Slider game when I boot it up. :3

EverAfter Falls [steam]: I have two more dungeons; four total to get though. Am still trying to get through the second dungeon since trying to figure out what ways open up has been a bit more challenging from the first time. Still, I keep trucking and looking around before I'm made to go to bed in game. {Spookies will come get you if you stay up past midnight unless you get an upgrade card to eat for an extra hour. Even then they still get you.]