It think it’s a lot of fun, although I tend to just focus on one thing and then is devolves into a check list. Like doing all side quests, then doing all companion quests, then all dungeons… etc. I just can’t bring myself to not do that when everything is available at once.

They finished ZA within less than a week of release, including the 1k trainer battle quest. I really mean it when I say they holed up and did nothing else for several days. Since then it’s shiny hunting.

Guess I’ll only go for the DLC if those classes/characters are really interesting, then. Or if it’s on sale when I get back to FE:TH.

On my side, more Harvestella.

I’ve automated my farm and started with some animals, which I ignored up till now. They are quite lenient. They cannot die, even if you stop feeding them. It just decreases their friendship, which reduces the quality of their stuff once you start feeding them again.

On top of that, I’ve progressed all companion stories. They are quite, but somewhat generic.

Also started Pokemon Legends Arceus just yesterday. We needed a break from Monster Hunter and it’s my partners favorite game.

Haven’t done much yet, basically just trying to do anything but what the tutorial asks of me. The usual.

The price tag doesn’t sit right we me, but I’m still interested. It’s developed by Omega Force, which also worked on Dragon Quest Builders 2, which I thought was phenomenal. Although, I’d much rather see a 3rd game of that series, this could scratch a similar itch.

Somehow I’m really annoyed by this person learning about capital letters mid paragraph.

I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:

• I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
• I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
• I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
• Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.

Then:

• Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
• I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
• Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
• All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.

Oh and:

• Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.

Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.

That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.

I entirely forgot the Three Houses DLC, I don’t think I ever bought it. Curious to see whether you’d recommend it or not.

Anyways, I did play more Harvestella and just like announced last week, I just did a lot of farming to get filthy rich.

I also did most side quests while waiting for the days to pass. The game does this thing where almost all side quests are available at once and I always feel compelled to do them all before going back to the main story - despite knowing better. I did the same for Like a Dragon 8: Infinite Wealth and came to regret it, since I was massively overleveled and the side quests became quite formulaic when done it quick succession. Same here, but I couldn’t help myself.

Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:

God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.

Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.

Played more Harvestella this week.

I went with the suggestion I got and ignored most of the side stuff until after the 3rd chapter, which meant a lot of dungeon crawling and not much farming. I got it done and would recommend the same to everyone else.

The story basically introduces each city and most of the companion characters, which then have their own story you can choose to follow - kinda like Persona does, without the filler events. I haven’t done much of these yet, so I still can’t say much about their overall writing. However, I can already praise the normal side quests for fleshing out minor characters. So far, a lot of characters had multiple side quests progressing their story despite them being average NPCs instead of companions with an actual friendship level. The world feels way more lived in that way.

Anyway, after all that dungeon crawling, I yearned for some farming and have been going all in on that aspect of the game. After the 3rd chapter, you can unlock many useful abilities making it easier to manage your ever growing farm. I’ll go back to the main story once I grow tired of that or once I’m filthy rich.

Just reading about it, I’m motivated to get back to Three Houses, too. I also went with the Black Eagles initially, although that was a compromise. I was in favour of joining the Golden Deer and my partner wanted the Blue Lions - both of us had the Black Eagles in second place. Never did the other routes.

Just a heads-up, you might want to keep at least two save files. While there are only three houses, there are more routes. If you do all routes back to back, you probably don’t want to play the first half of a diverging route twice.

Got any favourites already? Personally, I really enjoyed Hubert and Bernadette. Oh, and Ferdinand, too! The Black Eagles have so many standouts, I almost can’t imagine liking the other houses as much.

After mentioning it a few weeks ago, I’ve started Harvestella.

The game combines dungeon crawling and farming, with quite a bit of story in between. Everything runs on a daily timer with unlimited days, I think. Most actions consume stamina, which can be recovered by eating.

The farming is quite simple thus far. Your basic ploughing, planting, watering and harvesting. You can build a few machines to mill wheat etc. and you can also raise animals, but I’ve not yet played around with these much. There’s also a big list of achievements, like growing X amount of Y, and every few achievements, you unlock some new things.

The dungeon crawling is quite nice, too. And I found myself spending way more time in there, but this might change once my farm grows. You get a basic attack and a jumping button, that it at the beginning. Over time, you get more jobs and unlock special abilities, movement skills and passives. But overall, I think the combat system will remain quite chill. Something I got surprised by is the actual structure of dungeons: It somehow reminds me of Etrian Odyssey games. You’ve got your FOEs to work around (strong monsters to avoid) and points of interest you can interact with, that will either do you some good, some bad or both. You can unlock shortcuts, repair paths, collect stuff and find hidden treasures. Not challenging, but overall quite fun. (Mind you, I’m still at the beginning)

The writing is promising, but I can’t say much about it yet. However, I initially started the game because I got it recommended for its strong character writing.

I get that it would be impractical in the US specifically. I just didn’t think about you guys.

Of course, that works. However, I was thinking about cooking the same meals you get at the park (assuming you guys have actual restaurants in there).

Too european for that, I thought you meant half an hour by foot. Most old people shouldn’t be allowed to drive anymore.

Actually, it’s a win at that age. You get out of the house and can interact with lots of people, that’s something most old people need more of.

Still faster than cooking, too.

Das Problem damit ist, dass diese Stellen mit einem endlosen Nachschub an Arbeitern klarkommen müssen, die nicht motiviert sind, quasi nach dem Anlernen schon wieder weg sind und trotzdem mit dem nötigen Equipment vorsorgt werden müssen, um überhaupt arbeiten können.

Das erzeugt meist alles nur unnötige Kosten und Mehrarbeit, die am Ende keinem etwas bringen.

Nur 1/11 wäre ja der Traum mittlerweile.

As a major fan of Xenoblade, Baten Kaitos being developed by Monolith was one of the reasons I wanted to play through the series. I think I’m only missing Xenosaga now, and a return of those game is rumoured.

I’d still recommend the first game, and the second one is just really divisive. A lot of people think the battle system was massively improved over the first game.

This week, Pokemon ZA released, which meant I had ample time to finish Baten Kaitos Origins! My partner is a big fan of Pokemon and basically locked themselves into a room the minute the game released. Which meant no Monster Hunter this week to distract me, or pretty much anything else.

Overall, I remain with the opinion, that the battle system just doesn’t work for normal encounters. Once I started to use the convenience settings added in the remaster, I never got back to fighting trash mobs myself. Each fight can be approached in the same way, and I basically never changed my deck. I still fought bosses properly, as those are still fun, although these also can be fought with the same strategy throughout the entire game. Well, there’s one exception. I didn’t actually defeat the final boss. I almost defeated him properly, but the game decided to crash three times in a row towards the end of the fight - a 20+ minutes fight, I might add. At that point, I just wanted to be done with the game and toggled the option back on.

In short, while trying to remove the kinks from the first game, they threw out everything that made that battle system interesting. It’s sad to say, but now I get why the series ended there.

On the bright side, I found the story to be interesting - hence why I finished the game. It doesn’t quite align with the first game, despite being a prequel, but the twists and turns had me entertained and changed the context for pretty much everything happening in the first game. That being said, I don’t think the game works as well without having played the other one first.

I haven’t decided on the next game, but I’ll start with the demo for Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree.

That’s a problem across the board. Assuming AI does establish itself, all it’s training data dries up and we basically stagnate.

Also, in this weird inbetween phase until it is actually good, we’ve already generated so much bullshit that AI trains on the hallucinations of other AIs.

I don’t know about you, but the prospect of becoming a warlock themed around blood, flesh and clownery sounds pretty sweet to me!

I’d definitely play that campaign.

Glückwunsch!

Wie hast du den neuen Namen gewählt? Ich würde an dem Schritt wohl bis zum Grab festhängen.