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.

That’s just practical thinking right here! Someone else argued for shaving cream pies, which naturally leads to the counterpoint of cannibalism.

Luckily, most of these arguments assume living clowns. Something that can be easily remedied, it just shifts the entire problem space to doing it fast enough!

On that note, what’s their EXP value?

That’s half the fun! Sometimes, the true clown you spawn is yourself.

There’s so much role playing potential in the ability to create a giant mob of clowns at will by repeatedly opening and closing the bag. You almost don’t need anything else!

Spawn them as a distraction!

Use them to hide!

Plug any entry or hallway at will!

Build yourself a mountain of clowns to scale any wall!

Never starve again with their endless supply of pies! (Eaten fresh off your face.)

Use their weight to bring down any air-/ship!

Air drop them on your enemies! (Assuming they have a weight and are bound by gravity, they do damage - all you need is a bit of levitation, a tower, airship or a ceiling to hang from.)

Just crush your entire party by spawning hundreds of them in a closed room!

The possibilities are truly endless.

Still on Baten Kaitos Origins, although I didn’t progress much as it was a busy week.

Since the game is a prequel, it’s fun to see missing backstories from the original game play out here. I know what needs to happen, but I still don’t know how its gonna play out. There’s even been a massive twist that recontextualizes pretty much the whole story setup for both games.

Of course more Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, I’m still on the big grid for deviant armor. For the full set, you need to defeat all 16 difficulty levels about 3 times, meaning 48 fights against the same monster.

Generally speaking, Monster Hunter games get easier as times goes on. Therefore, Rise is the easiest one on Switch.

I haven’t played World, but compared to it Rise added a lot of extra mobility options. Of course you get the Wirebugs to zip around the map and out of pretty much every monster attack. But there’s also a new class of pets you can ride on while healing or sharpening your weapon. It’s also really easy to stack skills on your equipment to help you survive.

None of that is in Generations Ultimate and the games before that are even less accessible.

Wilds is seemingly pretty easy too, but I’d wait for a full version to release.

More Baten Kaitos Origins. I’m at the halfway point, I think.

Overall, I think the game is lacking something. There is just no excitement when opening chests or getting card drops - my normal deck mostly contains only generic cards, and I haven’t changed it much since I’ve started the game. Just replacing the one weapon card per character with stronger ones (weapons get equipped for X number of attacks, generic cards are your basic attacks). With fights being somewhat slow, encounters being common in some dungeons and your party getting fully healed anyway after each fight, I found myself using the remaster options to skip battles - I usually never touch these convince functions in re-releases.

In boss fights, however, the entire thing suddenly works. There’s strategy involved, the deck building is interesting, and I play many character specific cards for longer combos (generic cards are only for chain link 1 to 3, starting with 4 you need to play character specific cards) and healing. I could use the same deck for random encounters, but all that would do is making these fights longer.

I’ve written some longer comments about dungeons being all about resource management before on lemmy and I think that’s the main problem here. With the full heal after each fight, you can just burst down all enemies with no regard to defence or health - which works for everything short of bosses. I’ve even defeated some bosses that way - since I usually fight them once, die and then hit the re-fight button to equip my boss deck.

I also couldn’t stay away from Monster Hunter and started a fresh run of Generations Ultimate with my partner. Unlike with Rise, there’s no challenge involved this time, I’m just focusing on the Charge Blade, which I’ve never used, and compared to Rise just playing MHGU is a challenge. We plan on grinding some deviant armour and just got our asses handed to us by a Dreadking Rathalos. Good times.