Last Game You Played

[Maniakkid25]

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (PC)

In Chapter 9 of 18 (?!), and I'm at Wall Market. Wall Market is literally the reason I bought the game, but I'm baffled by it all the same. So, this is gonna require some spoilers of both FF7 and FF7R, so I'm gonna put it in the spoiler box so that people don't complain at me.

FF7 and FF7R spoilers ahead

So, having played the original, I already have an idea of the story playing out here, and here's the weird part: Midgar isn't even the end of the first disc in the original. It's only the first half of it (barring a raid on it later in the game), but FF7R is spent entirely in Midgar. Oh, it gets better. See, Wall Market is actually about 2/3s of the way through the Midgar plotline. Don Corneo (the "ruler" of Wall Market) is how you learn about the plot to drop the Sector 7 plate onto the slums, and Aerith gets kidnapped during it, leading to the storming of Shinra HQ, and Sephy's first major appearance in the original. This is all within a few hours of game time in the original. Now, look at the progress I've made, again; I'm on chapter 9 of 18! How the hell did they manage to expand the story that much?! I'm halfway through the game; what the hell is there left to do?! And Shinra HQ is where you get Red XIII -- and it was confirmed during development he would not be playable, so Shinra HQ HAS to be the endpoint of the plotline! Can you see why I'm confused?!

[Dragon Lord]

Genshin Impact - Finally breaking into the new Nod Krai region and beginning the story and adventuring. Haven't gotten too far into yet so not much to say about it at the moment.

Nioh Remastered - Finally got the last Twilight Mission I needed to clear on Way of the Demon difficulty to get the last DLC trophy for a 100% completion. That's now the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game done, just the Steam version to do eventually.

Cat Quest - Started playing this on Steam last night and ended up staying up way too late (4 AM) being absorbed into the game. It's quite fun, though nothing that will blow you away. For a game you can constantly find on sale for $3-$5 though, it's definitely worth picking up if you just want a relaxing, casual action game to play.

[Kyng]

Transport Fever - Still playing my Denmark game. I'm up to 1910 now, and I've connected all of the towns on the main islands (Sjælland and Fyn). The next job is to connect my network to Jylland (the part of Denmark that's on the European mainland) - but, that'll require an expensive bridge, so first, I'm upgrading my existing network .

[Dragon Lord]

Cat Quest II - Finished up the 100% for Cat Quest a couple of nights ago and jumped immediately into Cat Quest 2 the next day. Finished up the 100% tonight. Quick and easy, but they were enjoyable games. I won't be moving on to Cat Quest III quite yet, but I do look forward to playing it eventually.

[Mr EliteL]

Genshin Impact

Playing through the main story quest on my PC EU, also exploring Nod-Krai on each of my accounts. There's a lot of world quests for some reason, though haven't run into one that is exceptionally long like some have been before yet. Preparing for Flins but feel like I'm going to need a good number or at least 3 Nod-Krai characters on each account during this region patch, as Lauma carried my main in Floor 12 Abyss, had to complete one side twice with different teams to deal with one boss for 36 stars.

Wuthering Waves

Got Ciaccona but not her weapon though as I tried for Iuno, both going to goddamn high pity again, not got to soft pity yet though. Did have the standard 5* gun available for her as I got Carlotta's during the anniversary banners. Did the first part of the new main story act with Augusta, and a puzzle event that was finishing this Sunday/Monday morning.

Zenless Zone Zero

Built my Yannagi although on a 4-star weapon, as well as Harumasa who is only on a 3-star weapon.

[Dragon Lord]

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (PC) - In my continued effort to clean up some unfinished games, I went back and finished the last handful of achievements I had for this game.

[Kyng]

Civilization V

I started a new game with my sister, after finishing our previous game of Civilization VI. This time, we're playing on a Caribbean map (which was from an expansion, which she owned and I didn't - so, I had to buy it before we could .

I'm playing as Polynesia, and she's playing as Indonesia - so, we both have powerful bonuses that are suited for that map. I could traverse oceans immediately from the start of the game, without having to research any technologies (thus giving me a valuable edge in exploration). Meanwhile, she gets bonus luxury resources from her first three cities based on landmasses other than the one she started on (and there are plenty of those, with this being a mostly island map!)

The only issue is, she decided to max out the number of city-states on the map - meaning most of the usable territory is already covered by them. So, at the beginning of the Renaissance Era, we're already running out of good place to settle cities. As a result, we'll probably end up conquering some of those city states (at least, the ones that don't ally with us!)

[Dragon Lord]

Chrono Cross (PC) - Decided to do my 100% play through of this on Steam in the week I had left before FFT Remaster. It's a game I knew I could get done in just a couple of days. One more done off the backlog.

Mind Zero (Vita) - I don't hate this game completely, but boy is it obvious to see that this is just a Temu version of Persona.

Cuisineer (PS5) - I haven't gotten too far into this one yet, but it's pretty cute so far. Game play is fun. Not sure how I'll like the restaurant management part of the game when I get to it though.

[queenzelda]

Trails in the Sky 1st [steam] DEMO: I just wanted to see how it ran on my pc & so far so good I'll probably end up getting it then Final Fantasy Ivalice Chronicles next week (most like).

[Moonface]

Slay the Spire (PC)
I'm trying to get the achievement for beating a run in less than 20 minutes, and it's a lot harder than I expected it to be. I feel like I'm playing as fast as I can and yet I'm already hitting the 15 minute mark by the start of Act 3.

[Dragon Lord]

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (PC)

First thing that I have to say about this game is that I'm extremely disappointed by how lazy the new "hard mode" is. I was hoping that Square Enix might actually put some effort into it and make it so that battles might have different types of enemies in them from the normal mode, or that some enemies might have better equipment than they normally would at that point in the game (could have been a cool way to steal some rare equipment earlier).

Instead they did it the usual lazy Square Enix way and they just turned up the numbers. Enemies get a massive boost to Speed that pretty much makes it so that the entire enemy team goes first in every battle. Then of course they ramped up the damage that enemies do, while reducing the damage that the player does (I've heard by something kind of ridiculous like 30% compared to Normal mode, but I haven't done the math myself).

What really sucks about this is that in some battles you can find 2-3 of your characters killed before you even get a turn. Or worse, in battles where you have to protect a 'Guest' character, they can be killed off by the enemy immediately before you get a turn, and you might literally be stuck there just resetting the battle until RNG goes in your favor and one of the enemies either misses the Guest character of they decide to do something different on their first turn. Has nothing to do with having bad strategy, sometimes you just don't even get a chance to do anything. There's one battle where you have to protect a Guest character and they start in a separate room surrounded by enemies, and you have to spend your first turn just trying to get your characters over there. I had my first... like maybe 10 attempts at this battle ended before I could even do anything because it only took two enemies attacking that character for them to die.

Aside from SE's usual horrible balancing and lack of play testing, the game has been fun. Unfortunately having had put literally thousands of hours into this game between the PS1 and PSP versions, there hasn't been anything really different for me to experience and I've pretty much just romped my way through the game aside from those battles I mentioned above where I wasn't even able to move before being smacked with the game over screen. Still easy to bust the game open by unlocking jobs like Ninja pretty quickly. I'm at the start of Chapter 4 right now, so getting through the game pretty fast. Disappointed by the achievement/trophy list. There's some that I expected (mastering all jobs on one character for example, figured this would be in there), but also disappointed by the lack of trophies/achievements for some other big milestones in the game.

Overall having a great time with the game, though I don't know if I'd play on the Hard mode every time just because of how annoying it is. I was trying to think of some fun challenge runs I could maybe stream using the Hard Mode, like a Solo Ramza Hard Mode challenge, but I don't actually know if there would be a way to do those battles where you have to protect someone with just one character, just because of how insanely high the enemy damage is scaled up. Something to figure out, I guess. One thing I do love about the remaster is the fast forward feature they added (holding R1 down speeds up the game). Makes JP grinding a lot faster and that's a very welcome thing.