Almost 3 weeks later, I've finished Suikoden 1 and just recruited my 108th member in Suikoden 2, so I think I have about 3 hours left at the most. Suikoden 1 is an interesting game to go back to, since it has an inventory system that was kind of archaic even at the time (Earthbound is the only SNES ...

I've finished my first book for the year - at least my first non-work-related one: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's a low-tech (or I guess "realistic" as in less Star Trek-y) space opera, where one of the primary characters is a jaded former "Int" - a human surgically ...

5 feels like the pinnacle of the series' design. Good maps and story beats. After I tried out Dynasty Warriors 5 for a little bit... this is probably better than 3. While 3 isn't unplayable, and it's likely the one I played the most, it's pretty rough around the edges while 5 is very polished. Wish...

Finished Metaphor: ReFantazio . Overall I was pretty happy with it, I can understand why it won so many GOTY awards. I do wish it got a little further away from Persona's schedule mechanics, or iterated on them better, but for the time being at least it was relatively forgiving on schedule stuff and...

I'm running out of steam on Metaphor - the Persona games (particularly 4 and 5) really stretch out the ending sequences with fake-out endings, poorly foreshadowed twists, and general padding. Metaphor does it too, IMO. While I still like the characters and the concept, unless something drastic chang...

Getting ~35 hours into Metaphor has made me glad I didn't try out the P3 Remake as I'd expect to be even more turned off by that. While I still appreciate it for most reasons in my previous post, some of the dungeons and enemies are baffling. 90% of the enemies are easy-ish, but I just had an encoun...

Over the two-week break, I finished Horizon's Gate and picked up Metaphor ReFantazio. Overall really enjoyed Horizon's Gate. The final sequence was just a little too hard (perhaps more grinding/exploring was expected, I think I'd explored ~60% of the map) so I turned down the difficulty a bit to com...

I've officially shelved RTK8R although I may return to it later. As planned, surprisingly, I picked up Horizon's Gate and have been really enjoying my time with it. It's a blend of ship-based exploration (Uncharted Waters style) and land-expeditions ("simple" JRPG/CRPG exploration with tac...

I've been continuing on both the games I last mentioned. In UFO 50 , I have finally started every game except Night Manor (I'm mostly playing in front of kids now, while I think it's not graphically intense like Fist Hell, it's likely too atmospherically intense). In RTK8R, I made a Liu Shan analogu...

I've finished two rounds of RTK8R after the one noted above. In only one of them did I actually clear the map - Remake has "regional endings" and "officer endings" so once you reach a certain point you can effectively wrap up the game and get any carry-over rewards (mostly new sc...