Just finished playing
Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold for the billionth time. I had a lot of fun using a glass cannon team (ronin, dark hunter, two survivalists, and a troubadour) that had a ton of evasive capabilities. Nothing feels better than killing a hard-hitting postgame boss fifteen levels early simply because my team managed to not get hit a single time during the entire 25-turn battle.
This playthrough was done with my custom hard mode patch that I showed off last C3. I continue to regularly revise and update this project. The most recent and innovative addition I've made was a series of minibosses on the final postgame floor, which serve to make the floor more of the dangerous endurance test that I feel Atlus was trying (and failing) to do in the base game.
My project is, barring a few bugs, about as complete as I'd like it. I might move onto modding another game at this point. I actually broke down the formatting of
Etrian Odyssey Nexus's map data and can make some custom floors through some easy hex editing. I plan to make proper level editing tools for this, but my time learning C# has been really awful and a combination of depression, low self-esteem, and frustration with learning is making my progress very slow.
What's a better thing to do after playing a game than to play the janky DS game that inspired it? I've been playing the original
Etrian Odyssey 2 on the DS with a weird chaser team: a landsknecht, troubadour, elemental ronin and gunner, and an alchemist. Landsknecht is normally one of the worst classes in the game, but this team gets to bring out its biggest strength (chasers) and is actually pretty fun to work with.
I'm having a lot of fun with this playthrough, even with this game's often-painful design. There's a charm to the pacing, atmosphere, and level design of the original
EO2 that I feel the remake really failed to capture.
I'm also playing
Disgaea 4. I loved this game a lot on the PS3 and being able to play it on the portable Switch with reduced loading and no vacuum-cleaner fan noises is really great. The game still has its fair share of annoying mechanics, but the changes carried overfrom the Vita version, along with some changes made in
Complete, really help smooth over some of the rough patches. NIS unfortunately didn't fix my single biggest gripe with the game: the damage formula.
Still, even with the jank, I love this game. I love how chaotic the item world is, I love monster fusion, I love the weird skills, and I love double magichange. For as many improvements as
Disgaea 5 made, I feel that it made many steps backwards regarding its streamlining and simplification.
I'm cautiously optimistic for
Disgaea 6. I actually like the art style quite a bit but the game feels like it's coming out pretty rushed. There doesn't seem to be much content and it looks to be lacking a lot of polish. I'll still probably import it at the end of the month, assuming I can stabilize my income by then.
Originally posted by SokobansolverDonkey Kong Country 3
It feels like Rare was burnt out by the time they got to this game, like they didn't feel the core gameplay could stand out on its own anymore and had to supplant it with all sorts of annoying gimmicks and overly long levels. I think the game still does many things right, but its highs feel much lower and its lows are way more plentiful and apparent.
... This reminds me, I should finish
Tropical Freeze. I got halfway through the forest world and just stopped playing for a few months. I like the game a lot but something about the zoomed out camera makes things feel... impersonal? I don't know, it's like I'm kinda disconnected from the player character and merely observing them. With my eyesight problems it makes it really easy to lose characters in the environment, too.
I see from the big red text on the top of the page that another C3 is coming up in a few days! I've been too distracted to play
SMW hacks lately, but I promise to get on it and start providing some feedback, at least for C3. I love seeing creativity at work and really enjoy providing supportive and useful feedback.