Nintendo

Under Night In-Birth II: [Sys:Celes] - 1-2 at locals. Bracket was stacked, I was going to lose to both of those players either way, but I feel like I choked a lot harder than I should've.

Super Mario Party Jamboree - Just for shits and giggles, local attempted to run a bracket for this. Started an hour and a half behind schedule, and apparently this game is even slower than previous Mario Parties already were. Took several hours to finish two games and make top 6, lose the tiebreak to not make finals, and get to go home as my consolation prize. Those two games were pretty wild though, stole game 1 through Chance Time and for game 2 we all held onto Boo Bells for the entire game, loaded guns pointed at each other waiting to see who will fire the first shot.

Skullgirls, Vampire Savior - Tonight's locals are gonna be a Halloween themed bracket, so I'm getting back on my SG grind and derusting a bit for VSav.

Riichi Mahjong - Walked a friend through some basic lessons via Clubhouse Games. Don't know how much of it they fully understood just yet though.

Also finally finished that big secret project I've had in the works, planning to publish something this weekend~

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.

What? The weekend's already here? Where did the week go? I need to look at my backlog and choose some games!

I remember Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition for Wii U was amazing. One of the few games that did really good use of the Game Pad, I had a lot of fun with it. I was tempted to get the collection for Switch, I assume it looks way better than on Wii U (which wasn't really an issue for me). But I don't know if I'd play all three of them from scratch...

I finished the desert dungeon in Echoes of Wisdom. I liked it! I thought the water dungeon was kinda boring, so I was a little worried. The list of echoes is getting a little full though. I wish I could blacklist some of them so they don't clog up the list.

Most of my time was spent starting Lightning Returns. It says a lot about Final Fantasy XIII's lack of popularity that I haven't even heard about the third game in the trilogy being very reminiscent of Majora's Mask of all games! I really should have heard about that...

The biggest difference is that you don't live through a 3-day cycle multiple times but a 13-day cycle ONCE. You get one chance and if you fail, you lose. I have read that you don't need nearly that much time for the main quest, but I'm a completionist at heart, so I'm still constantly on edge. They tell you very early on that you can't save everyone, but so far I like the game enough to plan for a New Game Plus with a 100% guide to make the game eat those words! With some side quests being very specific about their time, this will probably be a lot like that time I used a guide for Final Fantasy 9 to race to the final dungeon in under 12 hours to get Excalibur II while staying on level 1 and getting all missables to create the perfect starting point for a 100% completion (which admittedly ended as soon as I got to that point because that was the most interesting part of it).

I also like that the combat is its own beast and not a rehash of the past, like XIII-2 was. It still feels very challenging though. Unless an enemy is exceptionally weak, you really have to pay attention.

I'm also very close to finishing Wild Arms. I know now why that nostalgia is not the reason why I didn't enjoy it as much as I remember. The game expects you to explore. Nobody really tells you where to go and what to do and when I play a game for the first time, that's perfectly fine. I don't explore a game the second time around, though. At that point, I prefer having a brief guide nearby to make sure I don't miss anything and so I came into this game with false expectations, mostly because I really didn't remember nearly as much about it as I thought.

The desire to start a new game of Civ V haunts me every day. I said once a month! Just one more week of patience...

I've been doing a bit of Fire Emblem Engage every evening, and it's really grown on me. The battles are challenging in a way that you really have to think about how you set everyone up at the start, consider most moves carefully, and respond when the enemy does something you don't expect. It all leads to a very satisfying result when you execute it well. I haven't played a FE game since Awakening, so I can't really compare it with more recent games and maybe I've forgotten what FE is like, but it does feel like a really well-balanced game in terms of the battle difficulty.

I finished Inscryption last week, and have already posted a few times in various threads about how great it was.

I highly recommend it, and it's free on Gamepass, if you're a subscriber there.

But now I need a new suggestion. I was thinking about doing some rounds of the endless mode because I didn't get to check that out yet, but I'd rather jump into something new. I like to progress quickly, because I don't have time to grind, and I love wacky surprises like Inscryption had, IYKYK.

I'll keep checking this to see what everyone else is up to!

Good luck, have fun, everyone!

EDIT: Just realized this was the Nintendo group, so sorry about the Gamepass mention. I'm on Xbox and Switch, so I follow both.