I’ve beaten Route A of Nier:Automata today. So next is Route B, a.k.a. the reason a lot of players missed the true ending of the game. And I won’t blame anyone, I almost stopped playing there, too.
My progress in Sparks of Hope has been minimal, but I hope to finish World 2 this weekend.
There was a time when I replayed the whole Trilogy every year when summer came around. When it gets hot and sweaty, I still get the urge to dig out the Wii Remote and play them again.
Still playing Nier:Automata, still on Route A. I forgot how much the side quests ask you to run back and forth the same few areas, but knowing what the game is truly about, it actually makes a lot of sense, so I’m okay with it.
I’m halfway through the second world of Mario/Rabbids Sparks of Hope and my first impression is that I preferred the first game in every single way. The battles are no longer rated in any way, so you don’t need to try to play all that well, just win and move on. Most of the maps are kinda bland. No weapon upgrades, it’s just cosmetics. having two characters fully voice-acted when everyone else is silent is really jarring and it’s the first time I turned voice volume to 0% in a game, now I can actually enjoy the comedy more.
But the most jarring thing to me is that it seems like Ubisoft tried to make the Rabbids… cool? Thankfully the volume decrease also gets rid of the snippy one-liners, but why do they speak in the first place? Rabbids say Bwah, nothing else. And why am I picking up pieces of lore about the planets I’m on? It’s Mario and Rabbids, I’m here for slapstick, not world-building! I’m not sure where to even begin about Edge…
I’ll keep playing it out of curiosity, but I’m really tempted to boot up the first game again afterwards to see if it’s really the game or me that changed so much.
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The second game has a secret dungeon that is unlocked by collecting all Djinns in both games. No Djinn is missable within their own game, but this obviously doesn’t apply across games. You can miss 1 Djinn of each element in the first game and the second one will give you an opportunity to encounter them there to help you out, but that’s the end of the leeway.
I stand by what I said originally: Shantae is great when you’re in the dungeons, but annoying in the overworld. I’d say it’s definitely worth looking at for the visuals though. The game is so ambitious that I have to wonder why they made it for the GameBoy in the first place. When the game released, the GameBoy Advance and the GameCube were already out for a year, too! I can only assume development took a really long time and the overall bad timing affected sales enough to get the sequel cancelled. Luckily, it’s being revived now, so I might actually wait for that to keep playing the series in order.
New year, new games. I accidentally managed to do a triple-finish, so I really had to think about this.
I finally finished Baten Kaitos’ New Game Minus! All Achievements gotten! The game finally got hard, actually. I expected the hardest part to be the fight against three antagonists at the same time. One of them gets two attacks per turn and the game forces the weakest character into your party, so it’s technically a 4 on 2 fight. Oh, and you have to do it twice in a row. I thought once that was over with, the rest would be easy, but no, the final boss actually smeared the floor with me pretty hard. I actually had to adapt my decks for the first time. I ended up putting two characters on offense only and loaded up my fastest character with light element armor and the best healing items to revive the attackers who would inevitably die to anything. That strategy even worked first try!
I’ll probably replace the Switch-slot with Mario and Rabbids Spark of Hope. I was going to tackle Baten Kaitos Origins next, but maybe I should take a break after everything…
I completed all Challenge Maps in Arkham Origins, too. I still insist that the game is not as bad as people say, but I cannot overlook the amount of glitches. I’m looking forward to my first playthrough of Arkham Knight eventually, but first…
The PC slot has been replaced with Nier:Automata a few days ago. I already beat the game a few years ago, but that was when I was still unemployed, so I wasn’t playing a legit copy. Now I’m going after the achievements on Steam because the game is definitely worth buying.
I’ve also beaten Shantae on the GameBoy. I’m glad I saved all the overworld collectibles until the end, when you can just fly everywhere. That made it much less of a headache. The ending got a bit confusing though. No spoilers, but you’re dropped into a tense and dangerous situation, only to find it’s not at all dangerous and after five minutes of having zero clue as to what to do had to look up a walkthrough. I’m not replacing this one, three games was a mistake, but the Shantae journey will continue eventually.
It’s a Steam Deck, not a Game Deck!
I expected it to be a more simple platformer, since it’s on the Game Boy, but it’s actually a lot more open the same way future games in the series are. But I can’t say much more than that yet. Like I said, I’ve been mostly grinding money because just getting to the second town with just your basic attack was an ordeal.
I’ve made little progress in Baten Kaitos’ New Game Minus. Skipping past all cutscenes and dialogues and still being able to oneshot every boss is just not particularly interesting. The game truly starts when enemy encounters start to outspeed me, I guess.
This week, I also got my new PC up and running. And so I do what anyone with a beefy new PC would do: Play an older game I could have played on my old PC whenever I wanted to! I’ve been playing Batman: Arkham Origins. I’ve played the game and its predecessors on console already, but for completion’s sake I’m doing them again on Steam before eventually playing Arkham Knight for the first time, which would not have run on my old PC, at least not well. I love this series. Origins isn’t very well received, but I think it’s underrated. It definitely has flaws, but it doesn’t deserve that much hate. But to be honest, all it takes to make me happy is a set of Predator Maps with a varied group of playable characters. It’s just a shame that, unlike the previous Arkham titles, I can’t really complete the game. Some achievements are linked to a long-defunct online mode. It’s been restored by the community, but I really don’t care about it.
I also want to eventually get into the Shantae series. I’ve played one of them on the Wii U (Pirate’s Curse, I believe?), so I’ve gone back to the very beginning and started Shantae on the Game Boy! The spritework and animations are quite impressive for Nintendo’s old handheld brick, though I’ve run into some issues differentiating between foreground and background objects. The number of times I’ve fallen through a platform that was actually in the background is too damn high! I’ve only made it to the second town because I stopped to grind the money necessary to get some expensive items that unlock new moves. I’m sure I would get the money eventually, but armed with just the hair whip alone I find the game difficult in a way that’s not fun.
New Game Minus is its own achievement, so I might as well try.
A normal playthrough should take ~50 hours.
New Game Minus disables levelling up for the game. But since it carries over most of everything else, like a New Game Plus, the raw strength of my cards is still going to carry me through most of the game anyway. And when it does, I can adjust my deck for whatever the boss is weakest to, which you never have to do in a normal playthrough because it’s rather easy if you can play your straights consistently. I’m mostly worried about a fight against three antagonists at the same time, because defense is the awkward part to optimize for me.
I’ve had to fill out Divorce Papers this week… in Baten Kaitos. I made a screenshot, in case this sounds too ridiculous. Divorce Papaers + John Hancock’s Pen gives you Consolation Pay, which sells for a lot of money. Money is never really an issue in this game, but I guess if you really wanted to grind it, you could repeatedly fill out divorce papers? I wonder if any Combo ideas during the brainstorming were shot down at all at this point…
But I’m also done with SP Combos! My card collection now sits at 1017/1022 and yes, one of the missing cards is still the two-week one. My in-game time is past 336 hours though, so I just have to catch up on the lost menu time, however much that is. The others are two cards that I got through the combos that, unfortunately, both change shapes after 24 hours twice, so I’ll need another 48 hours. But I’ll take those into New Game Minus with me if they’re the last ones missing. Even if their timer does reset, I’ll lose 24 hours at worst and that’s not a big deal when I have to beat the game again, essentially. So now I’m grinding some endgame weapon cards until my Shampoo finally changes. It should be soon…
Edit:
I got it! My hair has never looked more splendid. I also forgot this card unlocks the last pieces of music, so there’s technically two achievements tied to this nonsense. That means I can start New Game Minus, which is probably not going to be too difficult until I’m back in the endgame if I really get to keep all of my cards.
I have realized that the SP Combos in the journey towards Baten Kaitos completion are something I have never even attempted in the original version because I have no memory of the nonsense I have to do here. It’s like I’m playing a different game all of a sudden. Here’s my personal highlight so far:
One combo requires the card “Good Fortune” with two other items. The fortune cards rotate through various forms, the Good variant stays that way for a whopping seven seconds. And I learned the hard way that cards can indeed change in combat. So I make sure I have all the cards I need in my hand and cycle through everyone’s turns, hoping the right character’s turn comes up during the seven-second window the fortune lines up.
“But surely the reward for such a combo is amazing!”, I hear you say. The combo results in the card “Pretty Flowers”, which is pretty worthless. And even if it wasn’t, you can just put four flowers together to get the same result. And after ten hours, the flowers rot away anyway.
I don’t alyways complete games. I’ll usually try, but stop when things get too stupid. But there’s stupid-stupid and there’s funny-stupid. And it simply fascinates me how nonsensical this game is beneath the surface, in that dark place a normal playthrough would never touch. I’m now ~50% through the SP Combos, but the pace varies on the cards needed. Every now and then, I have to grind one from an enemy and this game has a stronger desire sensor than even Monster Hunter, I swear.
But aside from the wall of text, I did complete Mario Bros. Wonder. What a delightful final boss and a challenging special world to round it off. I said I wasn’t going to start another B-game, but then I remembered I paused We Love Katamari Reroll for the sake of playing Mario, so I got back to that. I’m sorry for forgetting you, King of All Cosmos. I do love Katamari, I swear!
“Fixed an issue where, when racing against a Ghost in Time Trials on Yoshi’s Island, the red road would not appear even though the Ghost touched the Winged Cloud.”
Why should the road appear when the ghost activates it? The ghost isn’t supposed to interact with the environment in a way that affects the player.
Completing Baten Kaitos is something I was never able to do when I tried back on the Gamecube and it got to the point where I didn’t even enjoy the game anymore. But with the HD Remaster and the New Game+ option, I knew that even if I miss something, it wouldn’t be the end of my entire save file. I ended up not needing it, but it removed the stress.
Wonder isn’t quite beaten yet, but I also have no plans to start anything fancy, especially on the PC side. This is the month I plan on replacing my PC from 2016 in its entirety, so I’ll have to focus on that first.
Alright, weekly Baten Kaitos update. I left the final dungeon right after the penultimate boss became the true final boss because there’s a single unique card that was awkwardly placed in between them and I wanted it now. With it, I now have all weapon, armor and photo cards, which required having a guide nearby for the missables. So now I’m grinding out SP Combos, which isn’t hard, but takes patience. Especially because the list isn’t ordered in a logical way! Some recipes require cards you get from combos much further down the list, so I have to jump around a lot. And then there’s the combos that require cards that have aged to a certain point, but not too far, so I had to buy some grapes and wait for them to rot and become wine in six hours before I can do the combo that needs them. It would have been easier to do them throughout the game, but there’s ~140 of them and none of them just happen naturally. I would have had to spend a lot of time researching when to do all of them before I could even start playing the game. But it’s not like I’m pressed for time, the shampoo is still sitting there, waiting to age…
Today, I beat the last regular world of Mario Bros. Wonder. I’m backtracking to all the Special World locations before continuing though.
Not everything, since I’ll also have to beat New Game Minus for an achievement. I was told a card’s age doesn’t reset upon the transfer, but I don’t really feel like chancing it, even when I’m 99% sure it’s true. But if I have extra time, I wouldn’t mind grinding out some endgame drops for that.
But for what it’s worth, I found the upside of not having much time time to play because of work. The less time I have to play, the more idle time I can get in.
I still need a good 100 hours or so. It’s hard to say exactly, because menu times stop the timer, so the in-game time isn’t anything to go by.
Techically 3, I would say 2 and a half. Route B is mostly the same as Route A, except you play a different character. Many people stopped playing, thinking it was just a bonus, and completely missed that Route C afterwards is a continuation of the story.