Phelpssan

I have a Cube which will never contain UB cards, and I'm now in the process of converting all my existing decks for different formats into a "Modern Pre-Horizons" Battle Box since that was my favorite format ever.

Will probably spend some money in this, but after that I'll never upgrade those decks again, and with more focus on UB there will be even less things I care about to put on the Cube.

This way I can keep good memories from those times, have ways to play the game with friends, and never again bother with WOTC's bullshit.

Unfortunately I think this is too little too late. Format was starting to recover but it got two big kicks to the nuts in the last few weeks:

• No Pioneer RCQ season next year is going to hurt a lot Pioneer competitive play,
• Yesterday's announcement is probably going to do some damage to the playerbase, most players I know were into at least partially to avoid UB sets. The likelihood that more sets per year with half of them being UB is going to increase deck prices is going to be another issue for player retention.

One lesson from recent years is that the slope is always slippery with WOTC.

Definitely a little discouraging. I mean it’s fine for fun, but they should just continue to build off their own universe.

I don't expect Magic universe to continue existing after a few more years.

Fortunately I had mostly dropped of competitive play already (though I was considering going back because Pioneer looks good right now), this announcement just pushes me even harder on other hobbies.

Crossover sets like Marvel, Final Fantasy or Assassin's Creed.

A lot of people dislike those sets, but so far you could ignore them depending on the format you played. From now onwards it'll likely be impossible to stay away from those if you want to play competitively.

Besides the overall dislike of this new "Fortnite the Gathering" world, there's also concerns of pricing, these sets so far have been more expensive than regular sets, and also even more product burnout - we're up to 6 major sets/year from the 4 we used to have not too long ago.

A lot of people rank Engage as one of the best in the series on gameplay. I think the only recent game that gets as much praise in that aspect is Fates Conquest.

Finished Harvestella!

I'll stand by what I said last week - this is a very flawed game with major questionable design decisions and technical problems, but it also has a ton of good things including great story, worldbuilding and OST. Even the "farming" part also ended up being way more fun than I expected.

It's hard to recommend this game because not everyone will be able to tolerate those flaws, but there is a very shiny gem hiding behing those problems.

Playing My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!?!

I liked The Fox Awaits Me and its sequels quite a bit, so I decided to track down a copy of this older VN from the same developer.

So far it's kinda mid. :/ The main draw for me in VNs are the characters and dialogue, but the main heroine is way too shy and quiet, constantly speaking in brief sentences, and despite the MC being prone to long monologues he somehow managed to stay uninteresting so far.

But I'm still early in the game, so let's hope it improves.

Mostly physical. I do pick up a decent amount of digital games, but either they are cheaper indie games or were bought with a heavy discount.

It's extremely hard for me to pick up a $60+ game digitally.

Playing Harvestella!

On my previous post I mentioned a lot of problems with this game, and while I still think all of those are valid criticisms the game has grown a lot on me. This is partially due to the game opening up significanty during Chapter 3, with plenty of new characters (which also means more jobs for you to experiment with), more cities, more quests, and a ton of things to do in the farm.

But the main draw of the game for me has been the the worldbuilding and the story. While the game's world is not that big, there's a lot of care in making each region feel unique and alive, I love how many sidequests are connected forming a small storyline for a specific NPC. The main plot also has some surprising twists that are keeping me hooked, plus the OST is amazing, Go Shiina did a fantastic job once again.

As play this I keep thinking of the original Nier for the PS3/360 - both are game with deep flaws, hard to recommend blindly, but that also offer a great payoff if you can get past those flaws.

The game is pretty chill even now. Enjoying it quite a bit.

Older titles have time limits to add a bit of pressure, but plot-wise those games stay chill 90%+ of the time.

It's one of the reasons I like them so much, I find the mix of a chill atmosphere, addictive gather->craft loop and fantastic OSTs incredibly relaxing.

For Switch, I started Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout. It’s my first Atelier game, and I have pretty much just started it, but it seems nice. Very chill, cozy crafting JRPG, without any doom and gloom (yet).

I'm a huge Atelier fan, Ryza is definitenly a nice starting point for those new to the series.

One thing worth mentining is that the beginning of the game is a bit slow, and I recommend focusing on the main plot until you unlock the fast travel option as it makes doing the side quests a lot more enjoyable.

Playing Harvestella!

Since I don't have any games in my wishlist for the next few weeks (next one is Ys X at the end of the month) I decided it was a good time to play a longer RPG.

Despite this game's marketing focusing on the farming/slice-of-life aspects that doesn't seem to be a huge part of the gameplay loop - sure, there's plenty of things you can do to build/expand your farm, but I'm only spending a small portion of the game's day/night cycle doing some chores on the farm and after that it's going out into the world for quests and monster killing.

That would not be a bad thing, weren't for the fact that combat in this game is rather mediocre. It's not horrible, but it's slow, lacks some things that seem obvious in an action RPG like a dodge button, and has some serious issues with the enemy lock-on system. I've seen people argue that it's more of an "Offline MMO" battle system like Xenoblade instead of a real Action RPG, which I don't think is what the developers were aiming for but may be a good approximation of what the game really plays like. There's some good ideas at least, like the idea of having multiple jobs equipped and hot-swapping between them based on the situation, which offers good customization for different playstyles - I've been enjoying to focus more on ranged combat with the mage class and letting the NPC allies do the tanking for me.

There's also some technical annoyances, one being the performance which is usually tolerable but had some pretty massive framerate drops in one boss, and other being the visuals - I'm not usually picky about that, but at least on the Switch it looks incredibly blurry - reminds me of Xenoblade 2 on portable mode, only it's like that even when docked.

Those two are rather big issues making it hard to recommend this one, which is unfortunate because I'm loving several other aspects of this game. The worldbuilding is great and unique, the story is slow but doing a good job keeping me interested, I love the character designs, and there's plenty of activities to do if you need a break from combat.

The water one was the one I couldn’t figure out. That’s the only one I looked up.

I see a trend here, also had issues figuring out that that puzzle and had to resort to google.

I liked the battles though, so maybe I should pick up Engage…

Engage's story is kinda silly, but the maps are fantastic. I highly recommend the game if you're more interested in the battle portions.