Yeah, they're just rarely good reasons to get any specific platform because almost none of them are exclusive. Switch probably has one of the smaller selections of them, honestly.
Closing out Uldir season in WoW. My guild ended up 5/8 Mythic, and #1 Alliance on our server.
The first two bosses are fairly trivial (first one is an outright loot pinata), but the next three are all ballbusters for completely different reasons and none of them are melee friendly. Guess what most of our guild's DPS are! One of our rogues recorded our first kills on two of them and DROPPED THE BALL when we finally got Fetid, GOD SUSPENCER.
Vectis makes the most hilariously doofy kill photo. He doesn't have a corpse, just sort of leaves a couple sad red blobs on the floor.
Speaking of dropping the ball, Dad Tank yells at us healers a bit. He does it because he loves us.
At the end of Trails in the Sky SC on Nightmare. Loewe is appropriately ridiculous (as in, autoattacks people for 10k when most non-Agate characters have 9.5 at most) but kind of fun since just to get here you're presumably used to juggling shields and such. MFW I realized he's vulnerable to Clock Down too -- I just kind of assumed for a while that he wouldn't be.
Trails SC Nightmare done. Sweet God that ending is still amazing. I seriously don't think I've ever played another game that earns its conclusion THAT well.
Please play Heartbeat, a heartwarming tale about messy queers going on an epic adventure, making new friends, and making mistakes and fixing them on their own terms.
Also it's just a really good RPG in general, made by people who clearly get what makes JRPGs work, and the music slams so much.
So Trails of Cold Steel 3 is being given to NISA for localization. Apparently either the Ys 8 shitshow wasn't QUITE bad enough to scare off Falcom, and/or they're not happy with how XSeed takes forever to put out a fantastic translation.
Oh God. I'm taking a refresher run through Trails in the Sky 3rd before I attempt it on Nightmare. I forgot how many of the star doors involved long mini-campaigns or duels using underleveled characters who have terrible and/or zero goddamn arts. Pretty sure the optional-win duels like Julia vs Mueller are an automatic writeoff above Normal (why did you load yourself with Lost Mobius when you can only cast it once and have no EP charges?!).
But I'm also finding a lot of characters becoming ridiculously powerful now that I've gone through SC Nightmare with an eye for minmaxing and have a better idea of where the offense thresholds are before they start crapping out huge numbers. I didn't give Anelace a second thought the first time around, but she gets a ridiculous weapon early on that makes her absurdly powerful for the middle third of the game or so.
Also Cassius is going to be a fucking monster. Though I did figure out how to control the lightning dash a bit. It's a standard large radius, so you can spread your casters to opposite corners, bait him to the back with your melee, and use Lost Mobius EX to suction him into place if necessary. Also Divine Eye is the most amazing thing because it lets you get Zodiac with two quartz instead of four, and double it up with a backup Gaia Shield too -- you could do that in SC but you lost your Cast 2 to do it which kind of defeated the point. Also figured out that Richard's iaido move has almost no turn delay, so if you give him Tiger Eye + Gladiator he can spam it near-freely for very respectable output.
Oh, and there's a huge dick move in Grimsel Fortress. You have to go through a small stretch of darkness before you get the Night Vision goggles, and they put one asshole monster in that narrow dark hallway. If you touch the randomly moving monster that you can't fucking see, you go into combat perma-blinded and all of your commands are disabled except to run away. In the moment that's fine, you just flee and keep going until you get the gimmick. But it bites you in the ass at the very end of the game, because you get a Brave Blade / Chicken Knife type choice of ultimate quartz near the very end, and the more useful one by far requires getting that far without ever fleeing a fight. So to get it, you have to save scum that one corridor until you can get your conga line past that one invisible bastard without touching him.
Also re-acclimating to a situation where you actually want to fight a bunch of dudes to begin with. Even on Nightmare, Trails FC/SC were set up in a way where there was pretty much no point to fighting more than a couple enemies in any new area and you spent most of the game fleeing. But 3rd has twice as many characters (most mandated at some point), progresses so quickly through its quartz tiers, and has a couple incentives based on battles fought that you actually do want to fight most of what you come across. On Normal it's a mild annoyance, but on Nightmare it's going to be a huge magic drain.
Just started 3rd Nightmare. It's...exactly what I expected so far. The very first fight can and will kill you, and the pre-prologue jaeger gauntlet gives you JUST enough resources to manage if you execute it perfectly and have a teeny bit of luck. Thankfully Chaos Brand is as stupid powerful as in the last game -- not quite as overwhelmingly broken as FC, but still absurdly good for the early game.
I'm a bit worried about the endgame. You have to kit out four whole teams with nontrivial-to-excellent quartz, and Action is going to be a huge problem. I already had to tank a lot of hits from one of the subteam bosses because I couldn't slot a solid fourth Gaia Shield, and on this difficulty those are probably going to be straight oneshots or damn near it. Worse, all three of the subteam bosses get initiative, and unlike most fights you can't even slip in an S-Break before the boss takes the first turn (and one is very likely to beat you to your first casts with an AOE impede too -- I'll likely have to slot Tita for him to try and instant heal enough to survive that).
Also, read through an LP of Second Chapter. There's a point where you use Kloe to cheese a biometric scan and commit a bit of identity fraud on behalf of her distant ancestor.
VERY distant, apparently. For reference, humans all have a 99.9% DNA match with each other, so this trick should have worked with anyone in your party. It should also have worked with chimpanzees (98.5%), Antoine (90%), the dead rodents Antoine leaves on Murdock's porch (85%), and the hamburger Estelle ate that morning (80%). To get down to the range listed here, you have to dig into stuff like fish, bugs, and plants.
So yeah, the progenitor of Liberlian culture and hero who sealed away the Horrible Thing was a banana.
My guild cleared Battle of Dazar'alor on Heroic tonight for that sweet Ahead of the Curve cheevo.
I have very mixed feelings on this raid. The encounters are fun as encounters, and if I were a DPS or tank I'd love it. But as a healer, it feels very extremely schizophrenic even within individual fights. Almost every fight has one ridiculous phase that takes a ton of healers, but before and/or after it the healing demands are almost nil. For the last two bosses in particular you have to take 4-5 healers to handle a single phase, but for the rest of the fight all but two of them are relegated to schlepping around the Gimmick Ball so nobody else has to worry about it. And as a druid healer specifically, my numbers are total garbage if literally any non-druid healer is present, because anyone else will snipe people to full before my hots can tick more than twice and I feel like I'm only really there for a timely tranquility or tree save.
We're probably going to be pushing Mythic hard now (already near 3/9 just from our off-nights), and I kind of want to run Heroic on my own time with that all-druid guild for the lols.
What it feels like when you bring down the gear check boss and the kill was almost flawless:
What it feels like when you review the logs and realize you beat the berserk timer by 9 seconds, and the guy holding the kill ball was second on threat and would've been dead before he could react and use it.
Okay guys seriously, I don't even watch baseball and I know what these are :P
First picture is players congratulating each other as they leisurely run in the points from a home run. Second one is a guy stealing home plate, which is always extremely close because the ball to tag you out is already getting thrown where you're going.
The main gimmick in the fight is that you kill additional enemies throughout that drop energy balls, which you throw at the boss to cause him to a) interrupt some of his more powerful abilities, b) waste his most powerful move early before it's fully charged, and c) instantly rip off 5% of his max health each time. You only get six of them. The first four "wasted" nukes are nasty but survivable as long as you time it to not overlap with his other moves. The fifth one charges up much faster and is barely survivable if you blow pretty much every defensive move you have. To avoid seeing a sixth one, you wait till he's at 5% then kill him with the last ball.
After a solid night of feeling out the timing, we ended up pulling it off flawlessly.
The problem is after 6 minutes, he berserks and murders the fuck out of the whole raid in seconds. After we signed off for the night, I checked the logs and found we slipped it in under the wire. If one of our ranged DPS was holding the last ball he could at least have popped it off while the boss was dashing around mowing people down -- but the ball hurts whoever's holding it too, and to ease healing during the last big nuke, the offtank grabbed it. Had the boss berserked nine seconds sooner, he would've been second in line to get smashed before he could react, the ball would've disappeared, and it would've been a wipe.
So, I just started playing Alundra. It seems like an interesting game. Some people call this an action adventure game and some call it a JRPG. I'll not sure what it is but it's interesting to say the least.
This was the first kill last week, and given we're a semi-casual guild raiding the hardest difficulty it felt damn nice. We took him down again last night, but it ended up hitting the berserk timer -- thankfully this time we were prepared and didn't have the offtank holding the kill ball, so we were able to finish the fight with a rogue evasion tanking the berserk just long enough to slip it under the wire.
We should be able to get the next one down next week. It's a bit annoying because the opening phase is the hardest part, but the final phase is just complicated enough that you need to be able to reliably get there with everyone alive because you lose people over time to an instakill move.
In completely unrelated news, here's some guy playing one of the only mobile games I can stand and absolutely shredding one of the hardest and most annoyingly gimmicky bosses in the game. For reference, a high-tier kill is to bring him down in 30 seconds of combat time.
This one drops him in less than 4, before he can actually move. By the time the boss dies, most other kills are still halfway through casting their introductory defensive buff.
My favorite part is that Bartz is carrying exactly one attack with only two uses. There's a ton of RNG, though surprisingly few fracture points. Two characters are using full-ATB record materia that only go off half the time, but you can restart the fight immediately if you don't see them both happen. And of course Bartz needs to proc both of his LMs to lose his goddamn mind and hit 20 times in one turn. The rest is surprisingly not that RNG dependent, the other characters were getting pretty reasonable doublecasts. The thing that did the most damage and ripped off half the boss's health is 100% reliable.
Been playing Dragon Quest VIII on the 3DS for the past few days. I have about 5 hours so far. I managed to beat Khalamari who was one of the most toughest and annoying bosses I've ever fought against last night. I can only hope that the next boss will be easier.
Just posting to give you an update on my playthrough of DQVIII. I have over 8 hours on it so far. I'm really liking the game so far. I just recruited Angelo to my group and we are looking for Dhoulmagus once again.
Besides that, I've started playing God of War 3. Having beaten the first two games last year, I decided to play it yesterday. It's great to get into the series and the game looks amazing. The combat is still fun and Kratos is still badass.
Dragon Quest 8 is probably the best of the series. I really like how the storytelling in DQ games is so much less pretentious than the likes of Final Fantasy, but in gameplay they tend to favor grind over depth and 8 is probably the least bad about that.
So, I've been playing Batman: Arkham Asylum. It's a great game, though that's not surprising. I played Arkham City and liked that game so it's no surprise I would like this game.
4/9 Mythic Dazar. Opulence is a fun fight with a relatively low gear gate, but there's a lot of mechanics to trip over and you really need a lot of warm bodies alive at the end, so it took us a solid 2 weeks to learn the opening part cleanly enough to do it. On the plus side, for all the wipes to the golems I think we only got to the actual boss about 5 times before making the kill.
Also there was an awesome moment at the end where I was getting sacrificed to a big soak nuke that had been buffed far past the point that the raid could reasonably soak it (it's only really feasible to soak the first one), and my battle rez came up about three seconds before the nuke killed me. Got my rez off, told him to hold taking it, died, and he popped right up over my body.
So, I started playing Odin Sphere today. It's pretty okay so far. I'll keep playing to get a better opinion. Besides that, I'm still playing Batman: Arkham Asylum and Fire Emblem: Awakening.
So I think I'm done with the side stories in Trails 3rd Nightmare that had me most terrified.
Tita's balloon thingy trial is easy enough with Smoke Cannon, though on Nightmare you have to sit on an S-break to finish them off once they start spamming their rage AOE.
Julia's duel with Mueller is a complete lolnope. She walks into that fight swinging a fucking pool noodle and loaded out her orbment for high-end spells she doesn't have the EP to cast or the ATS for them to do any good. It's doable but obnoxious on Normal, but anything higher is a wash. Thankfully there's no reward for winning so you can just let him throw you into a goddamn exploding black hole because that's what JRPG swordsmen do these days.
Anelace's duel with Richard actually has a very important reward for winning, but thankfully is much more reasonable because she bothered packing significant buff options.
Schera's solo campaign was exactly as annoying as I expected. At least most of the opening matches are optional win, but the 3v1 and 4v1 at the end have to be won back to back without even any time to heal, and either one of them can kill you or Aina in a single turn if the damage doesn't spread perfectly. The trash is pretty tolerable though, so at least you have plenty to farm for items.
The Ravens campaign was excruciating as expected. The Ravens are fucking terrible in every way even compared to level 1 Kid Schera. Their DEX is laughable and they miss constantly, their MOV is even lower than FC prologue characters, their attack stats are pathetic and they can't damage anything without their DEF debuff (which a) can fucking MISS, and b) has forced range and knockback so the guy who uses it is left out of range on his next turn), they'll get double-turned often by most enemies, they're built around healing each other but can't heal themselves if basic attacks knocked them out of each other's shitass MOV range, and they have a STR buff that's comically unusable because it's so short it falls off between the caster's and recepient's turns even if they're adjacent in AT order. The story fights are all enemy initiative, and one of them kills people in one hit. The Cryon Bits are just total horseshit; you fight the first pair of them with only one Lighter so people get frozen constantly and there's shit all you can do about it, and they're immune to the Ravens' DEF debuff. You get one use of fire meatballs, but you want to save it for the Cryon boss when he spawns his adds and pray you get a good shot that will kill both of them. Agate is just completely unfair -- he has several ways to AOE, and depending on who he targets and how he knocks them around he'll either randomly slap too many people to recover from or leave them too far away to heal/rez, and a few turns into the fight he just starts randomly deleting people with his S-craft. You can at least farm green bar from the stone monsters, but even the Ravens' 200-CP ultimate is borderline useless.
The only ones left are Agate's duel with the robot and Renne's trial, neither of which look too awful because like Anelace they're both competent characters with ways to actually get things done. The Gehenna boss will probably come down to force-feeding Kevin a bunch of Zerams, and of course Cassius and Cassius + Loewe are going to be ridiculous. But for the most part I think I'm past most of the potential complete horseshit.
I've been playing Fire Emblem: Awakening for the past week. I have almost 15 hours on it so far. I'm stuck on the Paralogue 15 battle. I'm trying to recruit Noire but she either dies or Chrom dies. It's really hard but I'll keep trying. I have to try to make a better strategy.
The one where she's stuck in the building to the NE, right? Think I paired up Chrom with a Great Knight or something to bait the first wave and rush up there fast enough. Unless you've kicked up the difficulty pretty high Noire can pretty much take care of herself for three turns or so.
Alternately, Rescue staff. You already need a few of them for Severa's paralogue because she stays green and has a fucking death wish, so might as well toss one charge here.
I managed to win the battle in Noire's paralogue yesterday in FE:A. It took a few tries but I managed to do it. And it was pretty funny watching Tharja and Noire interact.
So one of the Star Doors puts you up against like 8 guys that spam petrify, and their resists and HP are too high to nuke them down like on Normal. But there's a fantastically silly way to cheese packs that large. Put the Super Gladiator Headband and Lunar Seal on whoever has the largest S-Craft to give them insane CP recovery. Hitting at least 7 targets at once will immediately bring them back to 100 CP, so you just group them up and spam an S-break until there are too few of them left to sustain the chain reaction.
The best part is the delay isn't even cumulative, it resets after each one. So whoever just hit 7-8 S-breaks in a row still gets their turn during the cleanup as if they only did one.
I managed to finish chapters 19 and 20 in Fire Emblem: Awakening. Walhart and his army have been taken care of. All that's left is Fighting Grima. I have over 23 hours so far. It's a good game.
So, I'm done with Chapter 23 and 24 of Fire Emblem Awakening. I managed to beat Validar and we've met with Naga. Now, Chrom has the power to beat Grima. I can't wait to finish this game. It's been quite a ride.
Comments
I will definitely need to get Breath of the Wild!
Polyroll the Pillbug, for PIÇI
now if only, on startup, it has a choir chant "PIIIII ÇIIIIIIIIIIII"
Also it's just a really good RPG in general, made by people who clearly get what makes JRPGs work, and the music slams so much.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/984560/HEARTBEAT/
Anyway, Hollow Knight is getting a sequel starring Hornet.
2. you should post this to r/Falcom
It's actually the gaming jargon that I couldn't pick up.
Just posting to give you an update on my playthrough of DQVIII. I have over 8 hours on it so far. I'm really liking the game so far. I just recruited Angelo to my group and we are looking for Dhoulmagus once again.
Besides that, I've started playing God of War 3. Having beaten the first two games last year, I decided to play it yesterday. It's great to get into the series and the game looks amazing. The combat is still fun and Kratos is still badass.
I managed to win the battle in Noire's paralogue yesterday in FE:A. It took a few tries but I managed to do it. And it was pretty funny watching Tharja and Noire interact.