I’ve been meaning to check out FF XIV for years, but I spent so much time of my youth playing MMORPGs, deep down, I just know I don’t have that kind of time any more. It’s just too much commitment, especially once you join any kind of guild. But I can’t bring myself to remove it from my To-Do list, either.

Anyway, I’ve been continuing with Baten Kaitos. I think I’m close to the end, but it’s hard to tell with this one. By now, I’m mostly out of topics to write about, too.

The most notable thing was a major jump in difficulty. For the most part, the game has been a walk in the park. However, this week, I fought two bosses back to back. The first one was just like the ones before them - I disposed of it within a few minutes. The second one, however, hit hard and actually healed itself. While I never actually lost, we fought for about 25 minutes before I finally won. Some of that may be due to my deck building - his healing came from his life steal, and I simply had no defensive cards at all.

Other than that, I also checked out the demo for Digimon Story: Time Stranger. It’s still janky and a lot of ideas are directly lifted from various Shin Megami Tensei games, however, I can’t help but like it. Should they release on Switch/2, I’ll probably get it eventually. But for the demo, I actually had to play on someone else’s PC.

Maybe some news from Monolith? I think they recruited years ago to develop a new medievel IP. Anything Xenoblade would be great, too. But I guess XB3 was only 3 years ago.

An actual Monster Hunter game would be close a second.

Still on Baten Kaitos, of course.

As if the game itself read my last post, something major happened in the story and I was forced to use a few different characters. Getting their decks up to speed was surprisingly fast, although I didn’t have enough good cards for them to actually replace the missing characters. Mostly because I never chose their cards from the available drops - as you can keep only one drop per battle. I am, however, still annoyed by benched characters getting only half EXP.

Overall, I always liked the story, but the second half of the game started off stronger than what came before. Sadly, it was accompanied by some backtracking through all the major dungeons. It only took a few hours, 2 or 3 I think, but battling enemies you’ve outleveled isn’t interesting, but it’s still slow.

Nothing else came up, but just for the counter, Silksong is on my list! Which means I’ll probably play it this year or next one. I’ve long outgrown the need to consume things as they release.

I’m still confused by the apparent drought of S2 games being released. I’ll get one, eventually, but it’s really just DK and MK for now.

Duskbloods almost got me hyped, but I don’t like online multiplayer.

Still on Baten Kaitos! Currently progressing with a snails pace due to other stuff getting in the way.

I’m still heavily invested in the game, however, a few cracks in its systems start to show.

For starter, you only ever use 3 characters at a time. Each with their own deck. Setting them up and planning their decks feels like too much investment to ever switch them up, which means the other 3 won’t ever get used. Even worse, unused characters only get half EXP.

Speaking of EXP, there’s a system in place where you just collect it. To actually level up, you need to visit a church. And you can level up multiple times at once! Now, here’s the kicker: The more level you gain at once, the more stats you get as a bonus! (Up to 10 levels.) That’s fun in theory, but if you’ve learned anything about me by reading these posts, you can probably guess that I never a batch with less than 10 levels.

There’s also a class level, which you can increase by finding certain items for each character. They often get dropped by bosses. Using them increases the cards you can put in your deck, the cards you can hold in your hand, and how many you can play per turn. As a trade-off, your timer to actually play your cards in a turn decreases. Here’s a second crack: The built-in crafting system is still fun, but you don’t have much time to think about it while actually fighting. Even worse, they waste a turn. Even if you can play 6 cards, the crafting combo is only activated if you play exactly the cards mentioned and no others. Also, since your deck can’t have fewer cards than your actual maximum amount, you need to stall until you draw all combo pieces or fill your entire deck with otherwise useless cards.

This, combined with increasingly convoluted combos, leads to the crafting system being sidelined for the most part. I used to craft stuff organically while crawling through dungeons, now it only happens when I start an encounter with the specific goal to craft. The most convoluted combo I’ve seen yet involves 4 items, three of which you have to craft themselves beforehand. A doll, a monkey statue, a dog statue and a pheasant statue. Playing them all, as a reference to the legend of Momotaro, creates a treasure you sell for a lot of money.

They released almost 30 years ago. Adding a few more years, since you can’t properly play them with no reading skills, we’are looking at enough time for some of them to be grandparents.

Heck, I and most of my peers started with Gen 3 in elementary school. There’s a 3 in front of my age.

That’s likely, but that would only help with the most viral cases. Otherwise, what’s even the chance to come across AI generated content violating your copyright in an exponentially growing ocean of slop?

On the flipside, individuals could probably maliciously claim ad revenue. That’s already a thing with music.

Sooo… is this image copyright infringement?

There are just so many weird cases, based on the wording. Would Youtube need to scan for Danes within all uploads to check for copyright violations? Which is obviously impossible.

More Baten Kaitos, of course. I’m still heavily invested and keep finding new interesting things.

One thing the game does, I’ve not seen much - if at all, is that you are not the protagonist. You input your name in the beginning and take the role of a spirit accompanying the protagonist. At times, he turns directly to the camera and asks you questions. Depending on your answers, you can influence a hidden value for each character, which basically reflect how much they like you. A higher value results in cards temporarily transforming into stronger ones mid-combo more often. Well, at least that happens for the protagonist. I’ve not seen it with anyone else, but I’m quite sure they have a hidden stat of their own.

I’ve also played some more MH:Rise. I’m still on a challenge run with my partner, randomizing weapons for each quest. And rolling a single armour for LR, HR and MR (the three quest difficulties). We’re already at least halfway through MR, however we’ve rolled late game monster for our armour, therefore still fighting them with HR stuff. I can highly recommend the idea, if you guys are into casual challenge runs!

Lastly, I plan on playing the Super Robot Wars Y Demo.

The shampoo, I think, ages after 336 hours. 100% completion seems like madness. Luckily, I’ve botched that already, so I’m not tempted.

As for breaking items: I usually hate those, too. Both the recent Zelda games and the last Animal Crossing suffered from them. But they work here, for reasons I can’t explain. For the most part, I got better items long before the old ones perished.

Having played Midnight Suns for so long, would you recommend it? I’m interested in the gameplay, but I don’t like Marvel at all. At least the movies - I couldn’t get through a single Avengers one. Haven’t tried any comics thus far.

As for my own week, I continued with Baten Kaitos. Thus far, with each passing hour, I like the game more. It’s just so charming and there are so many unique things about it. This week, let’s talk about cards. Everything in this game comes in the form of card:

• Your battle deck, of course, and there is one for every character you can get.
• Out of battle healing items
• Equipment
• Quest items / Overworld puzzle items
• Special items

And these cards have so many weird things about them. Let’s focus on the actual battle mechanics:

• Each card has at least one number, but some have multiple from which you can select each time you play them. You get percentage based bonus damage/healing for pairs or straights - think of Poker. You just have to play them in order in a single turn - called a combo. The bonus is only applied if all your cards played belong to a pair/straight, therefore playing less cards can do more damage. At the start, you can only play 2 cards a turn, but these increase with your class level.
• A lot of cards have elements attached to them. Damage is calculated for the whole turn, not per card. Because of that, they can cancel out each other! Play a fire and a water spell in a single turn, and they negate each other’s damage.
• Some stronger cards can only be played after your combo has enough cards played already, and these usually end the combo, regardless if you could otherwise play more cards.
• Based on your affinity with a character, cards can temporarily transform mid-combo into stronger attacks.
• There’s a crafting system built into your battle system. Playing a combo of a flower bud and a light spell? You get a bloomed flower card after the battle. A lot of the cards used for crafting recipes do nothing on their own. And these things can get complex fast - want steam rice? Play rice, a pot, a water spell and a fire spell in a single turn! (I think, I haven’t managed yet.) Hints for recipes are written into a lot of the card descriptions.
• Cards age. Most healing cards are food based. After a few hours, they permanently perish and turn into debuff or damage items! This does apply to other cards too. Your nice flaming swords? After a while, they turn into normal ones.
• Once your deck is exhausted, you skip a turn to reshuffle your old cards into your deck. The same happens to your enemies, which adds more decisions to boss battles, which can last awhile.

This results in a deck building and battle system which, I think, won’t get stale even for minor encounters. There’s always an interesting decision to be made, and you constantly get new cards, too. I think there are about a thousand different ones in the game.

Even grinding comes in different forms! Of course, you can grind for EXP or money. Grinding could also mean fighting weak enemies to craft a lot of cards. Due to the ageing, it could technically also mean waiting for certain cards to grow stronger. Conversely, if you ignore the crafting, you could get weaker by grinding too much since all your healing items spoil!

No way they would find something that’s not even more disappointing within a single week. Except maybe Silksong - but surely that would have been shown last week.

To be fair, before that I was already afraid to go there too. There are so many people with guns and so many mass shootings, my chances of getting shot would skyrocket.

Reddit? The site with a search so bad, I had to use external search engines? Great idea.

Also, Reddit offers their own AI Q&A? The site that prominently poisend many Google AI summaries? What are they even smoking at this point?

Still working on my backlog. Judging by yesterdays Direct, I’m still in no rush for a Switch 2.

So, I’ve finally starten Baten Kaitos!

I didn’t play much yet as I’ve been quite sick this week, but so far it seems fun. The battle system is kind of Slay the Spire, with an added timer after your first played card and bonus damage for Poker combos. Once again, think Slay the Spire cards, but each also has a random number from 1-12 assigned, so you can get Pairs, Straights, etc. Each card can have any number. All of that in a GC game!

There are many other unique things. For example, monster don’t drop money. You have to play a camera card in your deck, draw it and spend a turn making a picture. These are pretty much the only items worth selling. You can only keep a certain amount of pictures/drops after each battle, so you can’t sit out rounds and amass pictures of bosses.

Stay tuned to read me rambling about these games for the next few months. The collection has both and they are about 60h each.

I thought so, too! However, MH Stories didn’t catch me yet. I’ve tried the demo of Stories 2 and bounced off the combat system hard.

But with 2 Team Asano games and a new Katamari, I really can’t complain anyways.

For sure they are. But historically speaking, we’ll get a MH Wilds DLC and about a year of content drops after that before a new game is mentioned.

I’d like something to bridge that time.

Hopefully we get something about Monster Hunter. Wilds seems to have a lot of problems, but how about World + Iceborn?

Could be just me and the game is definitely worth experiencing. I haven’t checked yet if other people thought so too. However, personally speaking, I thought the second half of ‘Star Ocean The Divine Force’ was executed way better. It does have a similar structure and the same split between two different viewpoints, one native to the planet and one from a futuristic civilization.

Nope, I haven’t played it yet. However, I did mention it several times as a potential next game - I just never commited to the 120h+ journey, assuming I play both back to back.

Almost done with Star Ocean Second Story R, I’m literally right before the dungeon called ‘Phynal’.

My initial love for the game didn’t fully carry over into the second half. There’s been a big change in scenery and ever since that, the writing got worse by quite abit. It’s just one guy with little to no personality sending you from one fetch quest to the next. There are still good things in there, but it started off way better.

Next up, I think I’ll go back to something turn based, which means either Octopath 2, SMTV:V or Baten Kaitos.