Dorfromantik, but flags.

Played more Vision of Mana and misunderstood how skill points work the entire time. I thought they were shared among all characters, which didn’t really make much sense to me, but the system with the extra points from gold clovers had me utterly confused.

Meanwhile, in Fallout 3, I’m finally getting to use the one mod that I prepared (aside from bugfixes and visuals). I want to play mostly vanilla, but when I looked through the list of companions to prepare my playthrough, I noticed my favorite companion from my first attempt to beat the game was missing. I experimented with a bunch of mods back then and just forgot this was one of them. But I want to have Bittercup as my companion! She and my character, Jimothy, are two very different kinds of idiots who just happen to perfectly misunderstand each other. I’m almost ready to follow the main story again, but I’ll stop by a DLC that is not too far away from Megaton, though I remember really not liking that one…

Finally, we have a date! This is the only Switch game I’ve been looking forward to for a while now, it’s basically Pokemon Snap as a platformer and I’ve been on board with that since it was announced!

I’ve mostly been playing Visions of Mana. It’s rather average so far, carried mostly by my nostalgia for the series. I hope the gameplay gets a little more depth, I’ve been hoping for more after the banger that was the Trials of Mana remake. But I still find it enjoyable enough.

After some delays, I beat Arch-Tepmered Arkveld in Monster Hunter Wilds. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but I go into all of these battles all by myself for the first hunt and only bring Support Hunters for the grind afterwards. My time in Monster Hunter Tri almost 20 years ago ended poorly with the final boss, Alatreon, only being available in the multiplayer environment. It didn’t really give me any chance to learn, so I was always the reason the hunt failed. That is why I fight everything solo first now, because you can really only learn the attack patterns when the monster is actually targeting you. It’s basically 50% honor and 50% trauma.

I got used to Fallout 3 it’s now in gamplay loop mode. Exploring, doing quests, bombing an ant into the geometry to stretch it into a twitchy eldritch abomination… everything you’d expect, except the main quest. Too much to do!

This is completely subjective, of course, but I thought:

1 had the best world, but the worst side quests.

X had the best exploration, but the worst characters.

2 had the best combat, but Gacha.

3 had the best side quests, but the worst world.

There’s more I could say, but I limited it to the best and worst of each when directly compared. There’s a really good game we could piece together from these four!

I finished Xenoblade X just in time to not benefit from the Switch 2 upgrade! I ended the game with 99% survey completion because the last boss I needed to kill required me to farm too much Bonjelium; the problem being that minerals are the one type of material you can’t get with material tickets. I’ll grind whatever is necessary, but I draw the line at waiting for the items to come in slowly over time.

About the finale:

But overall, this is my favorite Xenoblade, though that’s always been hard to say. The series tends to frustrate me because every game does something exceptionally well and is the worst in the series in some other way.

Replacing Xenoblade as my main game is Visions of Mana, a game I was surprised to find in my Steam library a few months ago. I thought it was still on my wish list! The Mana games on the SNES have been a big part of my early years and Visions always looked very gorgeous. I’ve only played a little bit, but I like what I’ve seen so far.

Monster Hunter Wilds got its latest (and final?) update. I’ve only tackled the new side quests so far and they brought back egg carrying for a Monster Hunter Stories collab quest! That was always my least favorite quest type, but they reworked the mechanics to make it much better, tolerable even. Next up is Arch-Tempered Arkveld, the first 10-Star quest. I’m scared…

I’m finally out and about in Fallout 3. I forgot how stressful it can be to be in a Bethesda city with everyone always talking. The desolate wastes suddenly feel a lot nicer~ I also have to get used to Bethesda physics again. I jump-scared myself by stepping on a skeleton and somehow launching it into my face…

Before I started the game, I was wondering if I should wait for a Switch 2 upgrade. I beat the game yesterday…

A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you’re telling me that was only one year? There’s no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.

I think I’m closer to the end of Xenoblade X than I expected. I thought there’s be new side quests popping up in the new endgame content, but there’s been nothing, really. I finished up the Collectopedia today and then I’m off to the third part of the final chapter. After that, it’s the last few high level tyrants to finish off the map completion. It might still take a while, Part 2 took way longer than I expected. I’m curious how much of this new endgame they actually had in mind back on the Wii U. I find it hard to believe the Lao tease at the end was always meant to be what we got now. Makes me wonder if they scrapped the original plans or if they never had any to begin with.

Wild Arms 2 is beaten. In the end, I much prefer the first one. It’s mostly the story that just lost me near the end of Disk 1. The villains never really did anything interesting while they were around on Disk 1 and Disk 2 didn’t really have any villains to begin with. Your main antagonist becomes a part of space that’s eating up the world or some-such, which just doesn’t hook me. I like my villains to be less metaphysical and more mustache-twirling.

In its place, I started playing Fallout 3! I played it a good 10 years ago but never finished it, because I always stop playing Bethesda games at some point. It’s not even the game’s fault, the literal last thing I did was find a map with all vaults and I was really excited to go see them, and then I just never did. But I really like the world of Fallout, so I’m recording it now because that’s the only way I’ll ever stay motivated to finish it.

Oh hey, another reason for me to want the AEW title on his shoulders.

Sorry, the dog ate my homework. :(

I’m doing the story, but I rushed to get all characters, so I had a lot of side quests piled up that I wanted to work through first.

I’ve only played Monster Hunter Tri, Rise and Wilds, so my exposure to each era of Monster Hunter is limited, but Rise is my favorite of the three. It has all the benefits of the new games with the quest structure of the old games, which is a big win my book. It has its downsides (Spiribirds…) but I’d recommend it over Wilds.

Not sure what to say about World of Light. Most annoying battle effects can be negated with Spirits and if nothing else works, you can always lower the difficulty. I play on hard, but will absolutely lower it for fights like Akuma.

I finally get to continue the story of Xenoblade X as all side quests up to level 60 are taken care of at last! The Red Lobster quest is very demoralizing. It’s no wonder I only found just under half, the other half doesn’t appear until you get the first 49! So if you try to do this without a guide and thoroughly comb through every nook and cranny of the city, your reward is getting to do it all over again. If all of the lobsters were available from the start this would just be a normal, tedious quest.

In the late endgame, the lack of any kind of combat log becomes a real problem. There are some rare cases in which I engage a tyrant and just instantly die and I have no idea what even happened. The enemy list in the game shows their stats and resistances, but not what they do.

In Monster Hunter Wilds, I recently realized I really don’t need most of the extra rewards you get from Tempered monsters in the field, so I’ve switched over to grinding materials from lower ranked regular monsters via the quest list. My wishlist is finally shrinking at a visible pace!

I’m about to finish Wild Arms 2. I recently finished adding all regular enemies to the compendium and fought the optional bosses. I wasn’t able to beat one of them because it would just require too much grinding. If there’s one thing the game is missing, it’s a way to reduce incoming non-elemental damage. You have spells that can raise defense and resistance, but they do next to nothing!

I dug out Smash Bros. Ultimate again for the first time in years. I’ve been doing single character runs of World of Light pretty much exclusively since launch and a list randomizer decided to pick Captain Falcon for this eighth run.

I need a new Decapolice Prayer Circle, the old one clearly wasn’t working.

Xenoblade X is being a bit weird right now. It looks like they didn’t really update the endgame content from the original game. They raised the level cap to 99, but equipment still caps at 60 for requirements. You can find a level 60 weapon that is the best you’ve ever seen of its kind and an hour later you find another, also level 60, that is literally twice as strong. I haven’t touched the story in a long time either, because all the original game’s content is basically available now and there’s a lot to catch up on. I think I’ll stop when the quests reach level 60, though that means I’ll have to deal with the lobster dolls soon. I’m honestly shocked that I only found around half of them on my own! I tend to take all kinds of detours trying to get to quest markers in the city so see if I can find any more but I haven’t found any in months…

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I’m recording my playthrough if Wild Arms 2, so it would have to have absolutely no redeeming qualities for me to drop it. And I want to play the whole Wild Arms franchise eventually and I’ve never played past the second game in the past, so I want to get the full picture.

Alright, here we go, let’s start the year off with the big one. I’ve beaten Metroid Prime 4 with 100% items and 99% Scans (because one boss has a scannable projectile, which is just great) and I have to say that it is my least favorite Metroid game (barring the NES and GB titles on account of their age). I’ll say this first: The visuals and atmosphere are brilliant. The boss fights are very good. Now onto everything else:

At the end of the day remains the question: So it’s a bad Metroid, but is it a bad game? I have no idea. Without the Metroid, it’s not a game I would be interested in playing in the first place, so I have no scope of reference.

I’ll be back in Xenoblade X for now. I’ve played it for the first time in 2 weeks and got my level 60 Skells made. Next stop, proper weapons!

i haven’t updated on this one regularly, but I’ve been playing more Wild Arms 2 on and off this whole time. It does some good things gameplay-wise, but I’m not really feeling the story anymore. The localisation doesn’t help, there are quite a few very awkwardly phrased lines.

Slow progress on Xenoblade X. But that’s fine, I still boot up the game to get my 300 material tickets per day to lessen the grind for the level 60 Skells. I didn’t think the jump from level 50 to 60 was going to be that great, but just looking at the raw defense of the default armor tells a different story. I’m level 59 right now, soon everything will die…

That being said, I’m past what was the ending of the Wii U version. I forgot exactly what it was, but I’m mad all over again that they thought it was a good idea to end the game there. You finally get some answers, but then they change the questions! Curious to see where this goes now.

Still playing Metroid Prime 4. I’ll withhold any comments until I’m done, just to be sure I’ve seen the whole picture. As it stands, it’s en route to become my least favorite Metroid game, barring the NES and GameBoy games on account of their age, and I don’t want to say that too lightly. Let’s see where else this goes first.

Title Update 4 for Monster Hunter Wilds is here and the Switch Axe got some unexpected buffs. Being able to dodge-cancel the charge of the Full Release Slash is huge! They added Gogmazios as the game’s first Elder Dragon. (Editor’s Note: Its definitely not the game’s first Elder Dragon) It starts out as a normal fight, has an interesting interlude and then goes to shit in its third phase. Packing away your weapon and repeatedly shooting it with what is basically a slingshot is just not fun, especially when the ground keeps exploding while you have to look up!

But I’m super motivated to play again regardless, because they added a way to boost lower rank armor to endgame levels. My set has been stagnant for more than half a year and now I can finally work on that again!

‘New path’ makes me think it’s a reboot and that’s why it’s not called Mega Man 12.