I love Phoenix Wright so I am happy with visual novels as long as they have enough gameplay.

Then you should have no problems with Danganronpa in that aspect, the Story/Gameplay ratio is similar.

Congrats on finishing Danganronpa!

How much I like a story-focused game (RPG, VN) is more often than not based on how much I like the cast, and that’s one of the things I love about Danganronpa - the cast is colorful and memorable, it’s easy to get attached to them and feel their struggles.

And now I feel like going back to VNs. 😄

Finished Ball x Pit!

Well, got to credits at least.

Crazy concept for a game, a mix of space invaders, arkanoid/pinball, with Vampire Survivors-like powerups and… base building? But it works and the result is incredibly fun, could not stop playing for days after starting.

Really impressed by how diverse the characters are, there’s a ton of different combinations and builds to make. I’ve just unlocked the New Game+ which lets you play harder versions of the stages so there’s a lot more things to do here, but I’ll take a break and come back for occasional runs when I need a break.

Playing Minishoot’ Adventures!

An old-school Zelda-style adventure game with twin-stick combat. It doesn’t appear to be very long, probably 7h or so looking at my progress, which is a shame because I’m really loving it and could definitely play it a while longer.

I’m playing the game on the “medium” difficulty setting and it seems “challenging but fair” so far, but if you’re not familiar with twin-stick shooters you may need to go down to the easiest setting. Interestingly enough I’m not finding the bosses the hardest part of the game, but rather some occasional challenge rooms with a ton of enemies. Bosses have patterns you can memorize, but things get really chaotic in some of the challenge rooms if you don’t kill enemies fast enough.

What happened to Witch on the Holy Night?

It’s the cart currently inserted in the console. :) But I’ve been more in the mood for action games recently.

Reading your Danganronpa comments and theories is always fun. :)

Finished Yoshi’s Crafted World!

Got 100% of the “Main Game” content, but don’t think I’ll do the post-game stuff.

This game is quite good, but I really wish it would stop trying to make you replay the same stages multiple times. In fact, the main reason I don’t feel like doing the post-game is because it asks you to go through all stages yet again to find a hidden thing in each of them.

Haven’t started any game after this, but might pick up Mina the Hollower later today.

Any plans for Yoshi and the Mysterious Book yet?

No Switch 2 and no plans on getting on yet.

Answering your Danganronpa spoiler.

Playing Yoshi’s Crafted World!

About 80% done I think? Finished the second (large) area, have 4 gems and starting the third part of the map. Can probably finish this during the weekend.

Forgotten Land is a much better game, but I definitely recommend both. Return to Dreamland also has 4-player coop which will probably be fun to play with your kids.

Playing Yoshi’s Crafted World!

Needed a more relaxing game and this one seemed like a good option. It’s fairly chill, though getting 100% in some stages can be surprisingly tricky - damn whoever decided to have those “retry the stage if you fail” challenges. Sure, you can rush through the stages and get back there in a minute or so but it’s still very annoying.

Speaking of annoying, my god the OST in this game is painful. While the tracks are not that bad (but not good either) they’re mind-numbing repetitive - the large majority of the stages either uses the main theme or variations of it.

But outside these two things the game is pretty good. Similar vibes to the Kirby games, though I’d definitely recommend Forgotten Land and Return to Dreamland over this one.

I’ve been remembering now how good the Danganronpa OST is. So many memorable songs.

• Mr. Monokuma’s Lesson
• Beautiful Dead
• Climax Reasoning
• Box 15
• Box 16

And of course, my favorite track New World Order.

Glad you’re enjoying Danganronpa!

Finished Super Robot Wars Y - Expansion Pack!

It was fun but I expected a lot more from a bigger and more expensive DLC.

The lack of songs from the original franchise for both Ideon and Nirvash Z was particularly annoying, and I now have “add the Custom BGM function to the Switch version” as my #1 request for future patches or games.

Overall I’d rank DLC1 > DLC3/Expansion Pack > DLC2. But honestly - none of the are really good value unless you’re a massive fan of the franchise like me.

Finished Vampire Crawlers!

An interesting dungeon crawler/deckbuilder mix. Not very long, took me ~15h or so to complete all dungeons, but I’m not sure I’d be interested in more content unless the dev does some big rework on the mechanics.

The game is just too easy, there was a minor difficulty bump midway but once you unlock certain things you’ll be steamrolling everything in your path (the “Wild” gem breaks the game in half). Combined with some of the dungeons being fairly long (a run can easily go past 1h) it got a bit boring near the end.

But it was certainly worth the $10 price tag.

No more gaming after that, but I’ll probably go back and see if I can finally finish Witch on the Holy Night.

After that, started Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc Anniversary Edition. I knew what the game was about, but it feels depressing to play. I prefer happier games, so not sure if I’ll actually finish this or not.

It’s a fantastic game but it goes through a lot of dark spots during its course. I love it but it might not suit your tastes.

Playing the Super Robot Wars Y - Expansion Pack!

Shout out to the developer for the new free stages they added to the base game, they are two cool sets of “flashback” missions. The first one shows some key events prior to the beginning of the game, and the second one gives you the opportunity to play as some of the villains in a side-quest to hunt down a group of deserters.

As for the DLC, I’ve finished all the side content and I’m working on the main story, should be around ~80% now according to the wiki.

Playing Vampire Crawlers!

New side-game, a mix of dungeon crawler and deckbuilding in the Vampire Survivors universe. So far it feels a bit too shallow to have the same longevity of something like Slay the Spire, but it’s definitely fun.

Currently trying to beat level 6-7 stages.

Very busy work week so not too much gaming this time.

Playing the Super Robot Wars Y - Expansion Pack!

I knew there was a SRW stream this week and it would likely be about new DLC… but I was not expecting the new pack to release one day later. And of course I bough it immediately. 🙂

It’s a big expansion, including Ideon, Star Driver, Eureka Seven Movies, Beltorchika’s Children, Idolmaster Xenoglossia, Cross Ange and 26 new missions. For me the biggest highlight is Ideon, an iconic series that hasn’t been in a SRW game since Alpha 3 - more than 20 years ago!

I’m glad Ideon is getting a lot of love here, the Sword and Gun attacks look good (and as broken as ever), they brought back the “Ide Gauge” mechanic, and it even gets a unique “death” animation for a stage where he’s on the enemy side. Biggest complaint so far is that they didn’t get the right to the original OST for Ideon and I was really expecting to see iconic tracks like Overwhelming Power again.

Also nice that they included a few new free stages for the base game, and even unlocked the previously preorder-only DLC with Soji/Vangnex and Chitose/Granvang.

Looks like we’re getting new Super Robot Wars DLC tomorrow.

https://youtu.be/9xDTwW9cmmA

Now I know what I’ll be playing this week.

Edit: English trailer now out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYExXSBornU

Recettear is a classic. An upgraded version was supposed to come last year (and I was hoping it would also include a console release) but no news since the original announcement. https://www.gematsu.com/2024/12/recettear-an-item-shops-tale-hd-edition-announced-for-pc

What are you starting next?

No idea. I still have some homework to do sorting MTG stuff (mostly which pricy cards I have for sale now that i finished building decks) and I’m not sure if I’ll focus on this or go back to gaming soon.

Finished Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian!

Wonderful game. After the underwhelming Atelier Yumia last year I’m happy to see Gust haven’t lost their touch.

This game does a much better job than most games in this series in balacing between a “good enough” main story to drive the game and the feel-good, slice-of-life vibes that they are known for. The battle system is great, the alchemy system is great, and I really liked the new cast - in particular the main duo of Rias and Slade.

If they ever make a follow-up to this one my biggest request would be more work on the “store management” part of the game. The one they had here is serviceable, but as a huge fan of Recetter I’d love to see a game that manages to scratch the same itch, and the Atelier series looks like a really good fit for this.

Haven’t played anything after finishing Atelier, but will try to get some gaming time in the weekend.

There’s a lot of ways to play Magic competitively, going from Pauper which is one of the cheapest competitive formats with average deck price around $70 to Legacy where the average deck costs a few thousand.

These particular set of decks I built are should be in the “middle of the road” for competitive formats, with an average of ~$300-400 or so per deck asides from a couple outliers (MUD Stax is a pile of crazy expensive out-of-print cards). So building these boxes from scratch would be quite pricy. 🙂

However I already owned a ton of cards (I played multiple formats competitively for a decade) and I “financed” most new purchases by downsizing my collection and selling things I wasn’t going to use anymore, so I didn’t really spend that much money in this project.

Edit: Fun fact! I posted about this box on Twitter and it kinda blew up after being retweeted by a couple popular figures in the MTG world. Since we can’t link to that website here I’ll leave this image with the stats.

All of these are from the same “category” which is Premodern, based on Magic from 1995 to 2003, so you can play any of the decks in this box against each other.

The decks cover a broad number of strategies, including agressive, midrange and controlling decks, and also a small amount of combo to spice things up. Exact decklists can be found here.

I also have a second box from another category called Prefire, which is based on Magic from 2003 to early 2019.

Playing Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian!

Good progress this week, got to Chapter 9 and I’m probably near the end of the game.

One boss mid-game was a huge difficulty spike which forced me to stop and go spend some time optimizing gear/items, but other than that I’ve been going through the game rather easily.

Finished Astalon: Tears of the Earth!

Got the “Normal” ending and that’s good enough. I liked a lot of things about this game, but the checkpoint system absolutely ruined my enjoyment of it.

Playing Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian!

I remember being confused when this game was announced because it shares the same name as Gust’s gacha game and I thought it would be some kind of “offline store mode” for that one - but it’s in fact a brand new game, only taking place in the same world.

What it inherits from the gacha game is the concept of “wanderers”, crossover characters from other games in the Atelier franchise. You main party is the two new characters (Rias and Slade) plus four returning (Raze, Wilbell, Totori and Sophie), but you also get a ton of other cameos during quests.

The game is a return to more old-school Atelier. Low-stakes, slice of life with turn-based combat and a ton of crafting to do. The battle system is very similar to the one in Sophie 2 with characters in the front and back rows constantly switching positions while chaining attacks, and I enjoy how this lets you use your whole party in most battles.

I’m really liking the crafting system. At first it looks very simple, much like a return to the early PS3 games, but the need to “chain” ingredients based color to transfer traits and effects add some really cool puzzle-like elements.

Finally, there’s a new “shop” system where you can sell items to get money and help evolve the city, but I think this one is half-baked. There’s some customization you can do to the store but most of the time it’s just “select some items to sell (usually using the auto-select feature)”, press “Open Shop” and get a ton of money.

No progress on Witch on the Holy Night this week.

No significant progress this week, just a little bit of Witch on the Holy Night and Astalon: Tears of the Earth.

Tempted to start Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian because I think it’s a game that will work better with my current mood.