What have you been playing lately?

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I've been playing Tales of Berseria, a game I picked up in 2017, but like many games for no particular reason dropped. Now that I'm well invested into playing, it's hard to put down. It is the first Tales game I've played since the original Tales of Phantasia for SNES, but despite decades between the releases it feels very familiar.

The story is very meh, it has some elements that seem edgy or dark but then never does much interesting with it. You're supposed to be the bad guy, but the narrative often doesn't really support the notion or show interest in the consequences of your actions. It's pretty generic overall.

But the combat is fun and flashy, and there's a certain fun to be found in leveling up the myriad of things you can develop with your characters. The progression system reminds me a bit of Final Fantasy IX, with passive abilities learned from having items equipped.

I think I'm almost done with it. It's nothing special but it is engaging, with fun quirky characters and fun, if a bit mindless combat. An average JRPG that I've found enjoyable, but doesn't inspire me to seek others in the series.

I remember Tales of Phantasia being similar too. Very generic story, but for the time the action gameplay was novel as pretty much every other JRPG was turn based, other than Star Ocean.

The latest Dragon Quest game I played was XI, and I didn't like it. It also had a generic story, but the gameplay was stale too. At least with Tales of Berseria even if the action can be easy and mindless, it's really satisfying to see how high you can get your combo meter up, chaining all the different types of attacks together to stunlock enemies whilst managing your various resource pools. It kind of reminds me of playing a rogue in World of Warcraft.

Ape Escape was my second favorite ps1 game, and as an adult I'm finding it's quite fun under the influence.

I finished Tales of Berseria. It was reasonably fun, but it left the impression of being a good 30 hour JRPG padded out to some 70+ hours.

I didn't care much for the story, it was generic and took itself too seriously for a game that features a mascot character that sounds like they've smoked for longer than I've lived and a final dungeon that lets you skateboard past just about everything to the final boss. Couldn't stand some of the lines like 'your sword is just a weapon... just like ours!' as the hero brandished a piece of enchanted paper. Or the old classic 'I've got a bad feeling about this', repeated so many times over its playtime.

The combat is repetitive but compelling in the same way Disgaea is compelling, throwing the player tons of bars that steadily go up so there's always a trickle of new abilities your characters get, even if they're mostly all passive abilities. It's flashy and mindless, like the combat in Kingdom Hearts, with just a slight amount of management of abilities required during the game to ensure you're not hitting up against enemy resistances.

The last act of the game feels really padded out, throwing tons of cutscenes at you and the little gameplay that's there is mostly revisiting old locations. Why the game decides to arbitrarily remove your ability to fast travel so you can run through areas full of low level enemies is anyone's guess.

Overall, I found the game to be mediocre, but entertaining enough that I finished it and felt compelled to do some of its side content. I would recommend it if you like this sort of game and can pick it up on sale, but not over multiple other better games.

I wasn't sure which game to start playing next. Since I'm in a mood to play another JRPG, it was between The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky or the recent localised release of Baldr Sky. Both are considered classics and among the best in the genre, but for different reasons. Since Tales of Berseria felt very conventional and Trails in the Sky seems in that sense similar, I went with Baldr Sky's cyberpunk mech action. I'm annoyed Mechwarrior 5 didn't release with VR as promised so I'll get my dose of mech action elsewhere while I wait.

I just finished Fairy Fencer F: Dark Advent. This is some particularly trashy kind of trash. The opening dungeon of the game includes a tutorial about how some dungeons will have light puzzle elements, except none of the dungeons actually have any of that. I would recommend this game only to people who love Neptunia and desperately need a similar game.

I've only played one Idea Factory game and it was Mary Skelter: Nightmares. It had some trashy elements, like a minigame where you rubbed the protagonists' clothes off while they made suggestive noises. But besides that I found it fun. A Wizardry style dungeon crawler with some puzzle elements, a job/vocation system akin to FFIII/DQIII, and an interesting take on a limit break system that introduces some risk to recklessly using it. And the cast and setting were all takes on nursery rhymes and folktales, which was cute and novel, and surprisingly not intrusive given I generally don't play dungeon crawlers for story. Not as good as having Etrian Odyssey on the PC, but it was good for what it was.

I'm aware Trails and Tales are fairly different... but they're not that different. They're still of the same genre, drawing from similar influences. I've played the first couple hours a while ago of Trails and it reminded me most of Grandia or Chrono Trigger. Not overbearingly serious with a focus on adventure. I'll come back to it sometime, it's on my huge list of games on Steam I've never finished and it's a priority of mine as it's so highly regarded.

I've only played the first 12 hours of Baldr Sky, which is not very far in considering a play through is expected to take over 100 hours. So far I'm loving it. It's definitely more of a visual novel than JRPG, even if it has all the parts of one. The story and setting feels like Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell with its cyberpunk trappings with a lot of references to the former, mixed with the military and political intrigue and mecha action of Gundam. It's well written, lean and focused, and somehow manages to be totally coherent despite the story jumping back and forth constantly between different times and places.

The action at least at this part of the game is fairly sparse, playing like a top down action game with several different weapons at your disposal. You earn currency and weapon experience which is used to unlock progressively better weapons and 'plug-ins', which remind me of Nier: Automata's chip system. It's fast paced and arcade like, with mechs feeling extremely agile as opposed to the weightiness of something from Battletech/Mechwarrior.

I haven't played enough to form much of an opinion on it yet, but so far it's been great, with interesting characters and a lot of worldbuilding. There's a lot of exploration of engaging ideas, such as how does society adapt as technology makes people redundant, how can limited access to technologies form the basis for a new class structure, and how much power do tech companies have to exploit their users once their their data is out there online. It's a decade old game, but its ideas all feel contemporary. Its depicted world of advanced technology with political and PMCs rejecting science in favour of supporting 'human supremacy' ideals, and of rich and powerful people exploiting virtual reality fakes with likenesses to real world counterparts bought over the black market from tech companies feels timely. It seems like there will be a lot more to it beyond my early impressions.

Horizon Chase Turbo

Excellent game, I think this actually might be my favorite racing game for the Switch.

Swallow up
it's casual and fun and very addictive. I'm on my second playthrough now.

Bought a word puzzle game for Switch on the sale, and that has been fun too.

Got Color Zen, a free download, and it's alright, different from other puzzles I've played.

I've fallen into SpaceChem by Zachtronics. Very addictive for me. I've been digging into TIS-100 occasionally too.

I've been playing Death end re;Quest. You better believe I had to look up the title to render it properly. It's a fairly trashy, low budget Compile Heart game, albeit one where they attempt at an interesting concept. You play as some lady trapped in a bugged VR MMO, and swap out for visual novel sections with her former work buddy, who is trying to figure out what is going on. The game is cheap to a fault (I was surprised when I encountered my first bad end, which was basically just some text saying I got killed with barely any description let alone illustration) but I'm intrigued enough that I want to finish it. That said, a big part of me wishes Compile Heart would give up any artistic pretense and just make Neptunia games forever. Or at least a Fairy Fencer sequel.

I've been playing 2 games a lot now, "Swallow up" and "Subara City". Very casual and fun and highly addictive!

Mostly Battletech, but also some Magic the Gathering Arena.

I finished playing Baldr Sky. After putting about 160 hours into it, I can say it's one of the best VN/JRPGs I've played. From the start its clear how different it is from the majority of the genre, with its cyberpunk setting and mech infused action. Its story draws inspiration from William Gibson's Neuromancer series, popular series such as Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and other visual novels such as Muv Luv, Higurashi and the Zero Escape trilogy.

Its action battle system is engaging and unique, letting you map up to 16 out of a sizeable pool of moves and weapons, leaving it up to the player to create combos out of them. There's a practice mode built right into the game's menus, so that you can freely experiment making whatever weird and wonderful combos you can imagine. I spent many hours just messing around with this, trying to make the most absurd combos.



The fast flow of action is akin to a modern fighting game, with hit confirmation and animation cancelling mechanics. Timing inputs as opposed to button mashing is fairly important if you want to hit with many of the game's moves. Its heat mechanic acts like stamina in a Dark Souls game, but adds a risk/reward mechanic where additional damage is taken at higher heat levels, so that baiting moves out of your opponent and subsequently punishing them is a common tactic in the game's larger fights. The progression system is tied both to an experience system and unlocks during the story, and in many ways is similar to Nier Automata, giving the player a progressively larger pool of purchasable 'plugins'. The game's difficulty is a bit uneven at times, with some spikes that generally can be overcome by changing around your build. But overall it feels good, offering a good challenge especially in its many boss fights.

The game's soundtrack is also a treat, with many good tracks, particularly for the battle themes. It's really annoying that this is a thing in the genre, but it's fairly typical for there to only be one theme for regular fights and one for bosses. In this game, there's a ton of excellent tracks just for battles, well over an hour in total.

It's not without some issues; there's some structural annoyances that mean you'll have to replay some narrative scenes, with only minor changes if any. There's a few plot threads that don't get much development or by the end in retrospect feel like red herrings, and one of the characters is about as one dimensional as they come. There's oversexualisation of some characters that feels tonally dissonant with other things happening in the narrative. But the game's story, characters and gameplay are otherwise excellent, and in terms of pure entertainment this game is best in class.



Next I plan on playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. It's a game I've owned for years and played for a couple of hours before dropping it a while back, but it's a game I've always wanted to come back to since it has a great reputation.

Witcher 3 mostly, it's quite fun lots of hacking and slashing, and good story/cut scenes and of course there are different choices you can make which can effect how things progress. But yeah I like the fantasy world its set in, quite an interesting place to explore.