Puppys

June 2024 Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II: I honestly don’t know why I played this. I did not care much for the first game, which was a glorified walking simulator with annoying voices in your ear the whole time. And that’s what we got here, lol. I will say that the game was beautiful and the story was intriguing. The game reached a huge peak for me during the first “boss fights” of sorts, especially with the attacks in tune with the music. Boss #2 was pretty good as well, and got me thinking that a full-fledged game with less walking and more of these epic bosses would be great. Like a modern-day Shadow of the Colossus. But yeah, that was about it. I got to the ending expecting the most epic of the boss fights and the game fell flat on its face. I’ll give it a solid 7 for being beautiful and having two good fights, but the rest was eh. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank: Played this one because I enjoyed the humor and gameplay of the first game. I didn’t really expect this one to go full-roguelite, but it was alright. There was plenty of weapon variety, but sadly all of them became useless when you could just start with a rocket launcher and magnum. I had slight annoyances with the side quests because of the RNG or just randomness of finding NPCs. The person who wanted me to harvest 110+ souls can fuck off. The boss fights felt so completely random and out of place. Plus the music didn't hit as hard as the first game. Overall it was enjoyable for a sitting but I was rushing it by the end. Probably would ding it more if it wasn't so short. Final Fantasy XVI – The Rising Tide DLC: Planned to play the second DLC in May, but my plans got delayed until the first week of June. I’ll start by saying this DLC was a major step up from the first one, which was basically just a hollow appetizer with an epic boss. In this one we got story, side-quests, new weapons/armor, two new Eikons to play with, and a…roguelite mode ZZZZZ. I enjoyed the new Eikons which both brought fun, engaging abilities that I added to my rotation. The side quests were whatever, mostly fetch quests but allowed me to explore the beatiful area from top to bottom. The game is still not stable 60fps btw, that’s a paddlin. The main boss fight was worthy of adding to my epic gaming moments this year, however I was getting curb stomped by it. Turns out the DLCs increased the max level from 100 to 120, but I was just floating through on Final Fantasy difficulty with the auto-dodge ring. Well I got hit with a massive DPS check because I was nearly 20 levels lower than the boss. Worst of all, I had zero saves that could back me out of this situation, so it was either power through or restart the whole damn DLC. Kinda annoyed that I didn’t get a warning for point of no return, but it was an epic boss fight non-the-less. Loved how the DLC ended and enjoyed the side stories involving returning characters from the main game. That’s where the fun ended, as I now had to go do the roguelite portion of the DLC. Absolutely pointless. I was terrified the whole time because you have to beat all of it in one sitting, including ONCE AGAIN ending in Odin. I got Rebirth PTSD because failing meant another 2 hours in the mines. Thankfully I beat it first try, even though I had several close calls with health. This was probably the least fun “roguelite DLC for a game that does not need a fucking roguelite mode” in recent memory. Just glad it is over. Bayonetta 1 & 2: My original work trip plan was Bayonetta 3, which I purchased in April and didn't get around to. However, I decided to play the entire trilogy because they are fun and fairly short. I had purchased Bayonetta 2 way back in 2018, and it came with the original game as a free download. Plus I wanted to give Bayonetta 2 a second opinion because I disliked it the first time around. I found Bayonetta 1 to be less fun than I remember. The combat was great, but the game looked very dated graphic-wise. I also felt like the story was ALL over the place and tough to follow, despite knowing most of it already. I ended up dropping my 2010 rating by a point. I’m very thankful I could pack it away after a playthrough and not have to spend another 30 hours cleaning up shit. Bayonetta 2 was mostly the same, with a new haircut and much better graphics. I did end up enjoying this more than I remember. I still don’t care much for Loki, but the story was easy to follow and the gameplay felt slightly better. I enjoy not being penalized for using health/power items. It was a perfectly fine extension and a nice, quick 7 hours to clear. This one is still Nintendo exclusive but had in-game achievements should it ever come to other consoles. Can’t see myself playing it again though. Bayonetta 3: It was very clear from the first mission that Bayo 3 was a step up from the previous 2. It looked gorgeous and Bayonetta got another hair glow up. The story was pretty good. Introducing a new threat while playing off the multiple timeline idea was enjoyable. The best thing to come out of that was seeing multiple Bayonettas. My favorite was easily the first timeline with her punk aesthetic and ponytail. Bought that skin and used it the entire game. This game also gave us a new playable character, an entire side story with Jeanne involving stealth, and a taste of the prequel game that I didn’t know existed until just two weeks ago. I’ll probably pick that up on my September trip and check it out. Back to the game: It was exceeding expectations very high in the first couple of missions. I loved the mission with punk timeline Bayonetta so much I got chills, which rarely happens in games. Love that “this is fucking epic” feeling you sometimes get when gaming. The next mission was nearly just as good, giving us a fucking TRAIN demon. That was so damn epic. I was starting to really like the ability to use demons mid-fight and not just during button spam cutscenes. Sadly, that is where Bayo 3 peaked and we started going downhill without a steering wheel. Once we got to Jeanne and the new character, I wasn’t feeling it. Didn’t care for Jeanne’s stealth missions and I didn’t want to play Sekiro with how Viola worked. I will say though, I loved Viola’s battle theme and seeing Cheshire for the first time was pretty cool. Even when I returned to Bayonetta, the levels were annoying to traverse and some overstayed length. I will also say that Bayo 3 has quite possible the worst collectible I have ever seen in my life. Chasing a cat for 10 minutes each level who is way faster than you and can turn any direction instantly was driving me nuts. Don’t care what kind of bonus levels we got for all collectibles, that shit is staying locked. Anyways, the ending was decent and showed a lot of revelations that I won’t spoil. I will say that between the ending and drama with her voice actress, I think Bayonetta is donezo. The ending left a lot of loose ends for potential spin offs, especially with Viola. Thumbs up overall, I was impressed with how long the game took, even if I complained about the final boss having thirteen health bars. Elden Ring – Shadow of the Erdtree (Spoilers ahead): Up to this point I’ve logged like 60 hours in June and I'm heading for the slowest gaming month of all time. Enter the main course: A DLC so large it could have been Elden Ring 2 and we would have paid $70 for it. I had definitely been waiting for this, but I also hampered my hype because I knew the pain we were going to be in for. I mistimed my download a little bit on release, not expecting a 15gb update on top of the DLC download, so I didn’t get started until about 12:45am that night. I wandered over to the first boss, a very easy NPC-like enemy. Between the 1-year rust, being kitted for fighting Malenia from May 2022, and not knowing if my weapons were even good, I died to that asshole like 18 times. It was very frustrating because of the usual “boss must be level 70,000 with all that stamina” or else I would have gotten him earlier. I seriously think some bosses need a stamina tune. After nearly a full hour of doing nothing but de-rusting, I finally killed him and turned it off for the night. What proceeded was popping into the game around 3pm the next day and playing for…12 straight hours. There are next to zero games that can make me do that nowadays, so I’m not even disgusted with myself. I fucked off in every direction, mumbling things like “how do I get there, what’s over here, what the fuck is that.” I also wasted no time throwing away the solo “git gud” mentality and stuck with my mimic tear for fights. This let me skirt through the first two main bosses within 5-8 tries. I was hanging out with a streamer I mod for the entire day, who was also playing the DLC. It was just an incredible comfy day and reminded me why I love gaming. I honestly would give anything for all gaming days to be that good. I spent my Saturday time with Mia as usual, but right after she left it was back to the Shadow Realm. Around this time, I kept seeing how important the scadtree fragments were. I decided to use a map and go around collecting all of them in the areas I cleared, as well as clean up any missed bosses. Sunday blinked by and this DLC had me wanting to leave work on Monday as soon as possible and get right back to it; I love that feeling and yearn for it. There were so many bosses and general areas I loved. Walking into the madness forest and seeing “Torrent cannot be summoned, he is frightened.” Then seeing a scary ass enemy ahead with warnings like “Do not fight it, you cannot run, hide and await your chance” all leading up to the giant ass creepy mansion and the oh so cool Midra fight…Holy fuck what a thrill. And having done all the NPC questlines, I was giddying during that all out NPC fight before reaching the final boss. All of that pales in comparison to my favorite encounter of the entire game. Igon, the man literally too angry to die. I summoned him for the Bayle fight and his dialog was a perfect 10. Igon’s yelling compared with how badass Bayle’s lightning transformation was gave me chills. When the boss goes down and Igon yells “YOU SHALL HAUNT ME, NO LONGER.” I was brought to near tears. Please give that voice actor a bonus. Bayle was one of the last main bosses I fought, simply because I got one-shot on my first visit lol. After Bayle, it was onward to the fissure for boss I missed and then the final area. I heard some pretty bad things about the final boss’s bullshitometer being off the charts, and can’t say I disagree. Phase 1 felt fair but phase 2 went beyond sicko mode with attacks sometimes reaching double digits before you’re allowed to breathe. Hope you didn’t need to heal, cause that was your two second one swing attack window! Unfortunately, even with max power, my mimic and I couldn’t survive. I gave the boss 30 attempts, reaching 40% of his health bar on 3-4 occasions. Not really wanting to be bullshitted any longer, I resorted to human players and it only took one. I summoned someone named “Let Me Tank Her” with the biggest shield I’ve ever seen. That person tanked the entire fight, barely ever taking damage. No doubt a character left over from helping others tank Malenia, what a bro. With that, all bosses were down. In what felt like an instant, I had put 42 hours into the DLC. Every boss defeated, every area explored. Another long 7 hour session and I finished collecting everything I missed. Every weapon obtained (with help from Scotty). Every armor set farmed out. Every single unique item picked up that didn’t need a second playthrough. I even slapped on some new incantations on tried them out. The wide halo ring seemed pretty good and the rot butterflies were pretty, but nothing compares to my trusty Halo Scythe. That thing carried me hard with its Ash of War. So lets get down to rating. A very solid 9. I can’t give it a perfect 10 because I have some gripes that can’t be ignored. First off, early game difficulty (and the final boss). While yes, most bosses could be beaten with some time and using all items at my disposal, the early game was abysmal and the final boss’s phase 2 is bullshit. I’ll still stand by that. I kinda blitz my way through most bosses thanks to Mimic and safety Miquella ring strats, so I missed some of the bullshit I’ve been hearing on the grapevine like General Gaius. My only other gripe was the map layout. They squeezed so much into such a small space that it was frustrating trying to find where to go. The multi-layer map pissed me off so much. It was impossible to see where to go from just looking at the map. Each time you looked down, there was another fucking place to figure out how to get to (aka Google). That’s the bigger source of gatekeeping the perfect 10. I enjoyed the massive amount of variety in enemies, new and old. I was okay seeing recycled bosses here and there because there felt like enough new bosses to offset and keep me entertained. Same with regular enemies and the music tracks. I forget which boss it was that had an absolutely epic score but I need to find it (maybe Midra?). Mizaki promised a DLC as big as Limgrave but we got like 2-3x that. Even with some areas not having much to loot or pick up, I still enjoyed exploring to the fullest. This has been the most hours I’ve put into a single player DLC possibly ever. If every game delivered $40 DLCs this good, gamers would be eating like kings and queens all year. Other activities in June include: Resident Evil 6 (9 Hours) – Started a co-op playthrough with Mia. We finished Leon’s story but still have 2(?) more campaigns. A little goofy on the action so far but still enjoyable. Zelda: A Link to the Past (7 Hours) – Twitch streams. Yugioh Legacy of the Duelist Link Evolution (5 Hours) – Played this on my trip. It was easy to boot up and play a few matches, but damn is the game super slow. I got bored and finally started Bayonetta on day 3 of the trip. GSL Cleanup (3 Hours) – I played 21 GSL games for 21,000 Gamerscore. This was all earned on either June 8th or June 30th. I got boned by Cake Invaders so we’ll stuff that on July. Hidden Cats in Paris (1.5 Hours) – Third game in the series, not getting tired of them yet. I was slightly disappointed in the lack of apparent references, but it’s no biggie. Clone Hero (0.5 Hours) – No stream, just a quick jam session on a Discord night. Looking forward to July Resident Evil 6 with Mia. Continued GSL cleanup, including 50k during a special Twitch stream on July 5th. That should be interesting... Alan Wake DLC, maybe... Finally getting back to the PS4 backlog (fingers crossed).

May 2024 Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: Trying my best to knock off some very long-standing backlog games, so I began May with this one. I started it on May 4th, of course. Aren’t I so clever? The game itself was mostly a hit with me. I enjoyed the combat, familiar enemies, and squadmates. I especially love the actor who plays Cal, as he was in a show I watched all 11 seasons for. I had two jaw-dropping game moments that made me hyped. The first was approaching the arena and hearing The Hu fade in. I love a few songs from this band and the song itself was beyond fitting for the area. Sadly, the arena fight was a disappointment but hey. The second was running into Darth Vader of course. Easily the most recognizable figure in the Star Wars universe and I was so hyped to see his badassery here. What I did not love was the map in this game. It was so fucking bad that I dinged 3 whole points for it in conjuncture with no fast travel and having to 100% explore areas for an achievement. It was such a pain in the ass I almost considered it hopeless trying to wander around and find stuff. For example, I missed 4% of map area in an early location and it took me 2 videos and 30 whole minutes to find it. Dumb as hell. I wrote down some other small pet peeves, such as villain monologuing (one mission only) and a de-synced cutscene, but they pail in comparison to that map. It might be the worst map of all time. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: Okay first of all, I got trolled a bit on this. When I downloaded Fallen Order, I immediately purchased this game physically for about $30. A literal week later, the game got added to EA Play and I could have downloaded it for free. Womp womp… Anyways this game was a huge step above the first one. Fast travel was the best addition ever, and I liked the open world aspect of the game. Its too bad that despite having 4-5 locations to explore, 90% of the game was on one massive planet. Gameplay itself was even more fun than the first game and was refined and well-tuned. The story was also fantastic and once again I loved all of the crew. Add another positive notch for seeing Darth Vader’s badassery return. Bounty hunter fans got a second helping of cake with Boba Fett's cameo as well. Love me some recognizable characters. I also wanted to shout out the chapter where we defended the hidden temple. From chasing Bode down on a speeder, to defending the temple with Merrin, all the way up until seeing just how badass of a jedi Cere was. That entire mission was worthy of adding to my potential best gaming moments of the year list. However, the map is still top tier dogshit. I’m only deducting one point because fast travel and lack of 100% achievements masked the shit scent a little. I am also docking a point for the 30fps cutscenes. Going from buttery 60fps gameplay to 30fps for cutscene transitions was jarring and horrible. I almost would have rather had 30fps all the way through if it was going to be that bad of a transition each time. And lastly, we had another full mission with a monologuing villain. Maybe I should blame CinemaSins for my hate of this, lol. Musynx: I picked up this rhythm game for $1 to play in between my jedi adventures. I didn’t expect much at all for such a cheap game, so it didn’t surprise me when the game fell flat. I recognized only three songs, but did end up adding about 5-6 to my various playlists. That was it; that's about where the positives stop. I am disappointed with the 3D customization in the game. They had like 15 different 2D layouts, but 3D was stuck to whatever crappy one they decided on for those sets of songs. And let me tell you, only about 2 layouts were pleasing to look at. The rest were beyond terrible. I also had a gripe with the fact that there was no stat tracking. Really, no stats in a rhythm game? It made 200k notes a much more painful slog, considering it took up 8 of the 18 hours. I also have to mention that I hate when songs have varying speeds (notes slow down, then speed up mid-section). That shit is so bad, don’t do that. Lastly, I gotta mention the song difficulties. There was just not consistency. The fourth song in the game said “4/10” yet was nearly impossible and scared me shitless. I went full panic mode thinking this game was going to be impossible if that was the fourth song. Then, the fifth song is also a “4/10” but I…Full combo’d it? How about put some kinda effort into your game. Even for $1 I’m not sure if I got my money’s worth. Chants of Sennaar: This was on my radar because of boasting such a high user rating on TA. Once it was added to Game Pass, I jumped on it pretty quickly. So the game is basically a puzzle game where you gotta deduce the languages of four tribespeople. This allows you to piece together puzzles and communicate among each tribe. For me, I struggled a lot with this one. Its like it made sense, but every time I guessed a word I got it wrong. Without learning the words, puzzles became impossible and I spent a lot of the game just following a guide. Still not sure if I really understand wtf was going on in this game, either. The story was hard to follow because of me being dumb and then it got real weird towards the end. I also didn’t really enjoy traversing this game. I got lost several times in the vast areas when backtracking and it added to my game length significantly. I would have rather just gave this a pass. Little Kitty Big City: Now this was a fun one. An indie open world sandbox of sorts where you play as a cat and do cat things. I expected a lot less than I got out of the game, so I was impressed. I enjoyed going around being a menace and got a few laughs here and there, especially with the cucumber outside the market. My only real complaint was having to grind out 100 recycled cans, as there aren’t even 100 in the world. I seriously had to reload my save to get more and it was 10x longer than it needed to be. Still, dusted this one in a single sitting, just shy of 5 hours. I’m also very thankful I did not run into any of the game-breaking bugs. My fast travel raccoon or w/e was bugged so I was panicking, but a game reset fixed him and I had zero issues moving forward. Other activities in May included: Halo MCC (17 Hours) – Mia and I finished the original trilogy plus Reach. Overall Mia didn’t enjoy most of it. Some of this possibly due to not being host, since the net code is apparently terrible. However, she did enjoy Reach the most and liked the story and gameplay of that one. We have no plans to play any other Halo games. Zelda: A Link to the Past (9 Hours) – Twitch streams. Remnant II (5 Hours) – My friend and I completed the second DLC, and it was a major letdown. We had memory leaks so bad it crashed my PC over 20 times. Really hoping the third DLC isn’t this bad, learn to fucking code your game. Clone Hero (3 Hours) – Twitch stream and practice. Human Fall Flat (1.5 Hours) – Two new levels to tackle with my co-op partner Nova. Enjoyable enough but I wouldn’t complain if they stopped making them. Hidden Cats in New York (1.5 Hours) – Still loving these after completing all of them on Xbox so far. Loved that NY had references to Home Alone, Ghostbusters, & Scooby Doo. Vampire Survivors (0.5 Hours) – Stop adding DLC Looking forward to June: Final Fantasy XVI DLC delayed to June because I'm slow af at completing games Work trip coming up -> Bayonetta 3 Mia and I will be playing RE6 as our next co-op game. Finally begin tackling long-standing PS4 games that need to be finished off.

Good job on all the hard work that went into changing the staff clubs. I saw the thread with Necro and co's notes and it looked about like this: Love the new club, looks like I am 2 easy games and a Catlateral Damage replay away from Tiers 1 & 2! Good thing there's a new thorough guide on Catlateral Damage, maybe it will be quicker than my PS4 stack.

March & April 2024 Remnant II: A lot of games to cover so I’ll start with this one. Much to my surprise, I actually enjoyed this one less than From the Ashes. Sure, the QoL changes were top tier and the graphics were much better. But Remnant II tried to increase the size of worlds, which led to a whole lotta nothing when running around. I felt so bored sometimes running from area to area. It became even worse when trying to traverse quickly as the amount of enemies would overwhelm you. Some of the achievements were RNG and annoying, even though we used a save analyzer to reduce the time needed to find exactly what we needed. And while I appreciate the complexity of the new classes, weapons, and mods: I found myself just sticking to one set of guns because of lack of upgrade materials. In fact, we didn’t even finish upgrading our healing items because the materials were so hard to find. Another negative from the worlds being so massive. Like the previous one, I really don’t know what’s going on in the story but that’s because its hard to pay attention when playing co-op with someone. I still enjoyed a lot of the boss fights though and we’ll be starting the second DLC this weekend. Lisa the Painful: Definitive Edition: This was another hidden gem recommendation from Mia, with some similarities to Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. It was also created by one guy, which is a bonus when you have such a good game come out of it. The graphics were…an acquired taste but the gameplay was enjoyable. I thought it was cool that you could get so many party members and any of them could die at any time. The game also gave you some big decisions to make, which had me looking back and forth like the sweating guy and buttons meme. Lastly, there were some amazing tunes that I saved, but overall the soundtrack had a lot of misses in my opinion. This is probably because the one guy who made it had no experience with music. Yeah, that explains why some were bad but also shows how impressive it is to produce some songs I loved. I completed everything not unique to hard mode, including the Lisa Joyful DLC. No plans to go back to hard mode because it removes a lot of saving, which I dislike. I liked the story but some points were hard to follow if something was real or a flashback. Absolutely loved the hidden superboss and the wolf boss from the DLC, which both had banger tunes! Open Roads: Played this because it was short and free. But was it good? It was short. And it was free. There isn’t much to write about it. It reminded me of Life is Strange a little but the gameplay was just walking sim and the story was whatever. The ending was the only thing exciting about it, the was a brief moment of buildup wondering about the outcome and I was intrigued. Would not have paid $20 for this though, god damn. Haimrik: Originally on my GSL “maybe” list, I only kept it around because I was one game away from an XBA challenge tier. The game itself was interesting enough for an indie game, using words in the story to solve puzzles and defeat bosses. Because of the high number of missables, I followed a guide from start to finish and overall had a good time. I would have enjoyed it more if the artwork was in a different style. I didn’t find the artwork pleasing to look out while I was playing it. The artwork reminded me of Deponia and that game was gross. Light Fairytale Episode 2: This is a very good example of both how NOT to make a turn-based RPG and how NOT to make a sequel. I have no idea why they are splitting this game into three parts either, seems pretty scummy and cash grabby. Anyways, I hated everything about this game. The early game was brutal and did not provide enough to get by comfortably. I found myself being soft-locked on two occasions due to lack of healing. Also, I missed an achievement following the PSNP guide because it was not marked as missable, nice! Just unlucky. The combat was not tested at all, nor was it balanced in any way, shape, or form. I ended up dying over 60 times while trying to beat a mini-boss. It involved blocking, dying, blocking, dying, blocking, dying, blocking, dying, using ultimate to heal, get ONE attack in, and repeat 60 times. I’m serious, what the fuck even was that? Around the 75% mark of the game, you get a power that actually does some meaningful damage and can progress much easier, just for the game to abruptly right when it could have redeemed itself. I’m disappointed in this, especially after the first episode was cute and fun. Will not be continuing this pile of wank when the third episode releases. The Last Campfire: The next two games are basically the highest rated game during a “easiest completions on sale this week” article. This one was a cute puzzle game that I enjoyed thoroughly. It was fun solving all of them, which I only needed a guide for 2 puzzles. The game did a poor job of explaining mechanics so that wasn’t even on me. I’m also thankful I didn’t have to get all the collectibles either. So this game ended up being a nice, relaxing completion through and through. I docked a point late in the game due to the boat section being very confusing and inconvenient, but that was my only complaint. A Juggler’s Tale: Second week of picking up the highest rated quick completion, but this one was more of a bust. It’s a platformer/adventure game involving escaping a puppet master controlling your strings. The strings mechanic was interesting in the way that it fit into puzzle solving, so I’ll give it that. But that’s pretty much the only exciting thing going for it. I got super annoyed at one particular achievement for “not touching water.” Not only are the controls finicky, the god damn achievement is split into two SEPARATE sections of the level, forcing you to replay an entire five minute section in-between if you fail. I failed it three times, all due to the finicky platforming, so it was incredibly annoying and docked 2 points. The narrator was annoying most of the time, and I found boss fights annoying and finicky. Would not recommend. Soma: The highlight of April for me. When randomly browsing Reddit threads, Soma never fails to appear when “best games” or “best endings” are mentioned. I never wanted to play this because horror, but a patch years later added a safe mode where the monsters do not chase you. That, and it was leaving Gamepass so I put my butt in gear. The game did feel a bit aged (2017) but the story was fantastic. I loved the sudden jump to a post-apocalyptic setting and the slow reveal that every single human is dead. This game also played very well into the existential crisis and fears some people have on what defines a person. As the ending was approaching, I knew exactly what was going to happen and damn, what a scary thought to be all alone at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. All while another copy of yourself goes onto the paradise promised. Fantastic game overall and I’m glad I got around to it, even if it was six years after release. The Outer Worlds: A Fallout-like game from Bethesda? I’ve been signed up since day one. Yet, for some reason, the DLC for this game never seems to go on a 50% or more sale. Earlier this year, I decided to finally get this over with and bought the season pass at 40% off, the cheapest I’ve personally seen it. To be honest, I expected a lot more from this game. Instead, I was bored from minute one. In fact, I don’t really have any good things to say about Outer Worlds. The fun part of Fallout is exploring the world, and I didn’t get that feeling at all. The early game was brutal, even on normal difficulty. The story did not capture or hold me at all, nor did I care for any of the companions. Companion skills were cool the first time you activated them, and lame the next 100 times. Fast travel became annoying as fuck because the quest marker always covered the ship, forcing me to change quests on more than one occasion. Did you find a cool weapon? Fuck you it’s no longer useful after like an hour and it is impossible to pay the ridiculous fees to upgrade it more than 5 levels. This game’s version of VATS (TTD) was pointless because it only allowed you to fire like, one shot before it was out. Stealing had no consequences, so you could just be like “hurr I wasn’t doin nothin!” and they go about their day. You could also just straight up rob a bar of every single item then sell it right to the vendor. All though looking back that was more of a positive for packrat Aerith. And finally, the DLCs where super over-tuned to the point of me having to turn down the difficulty to easy. Can’t say I enjoyed either DLC at all, and if I had to pick one positive thing, it was the weapon variety. I enjoyed trying all the unique weapons and damage types. I also appreciated that you could speedrun the game on very hard in like, an hour using dialog checks lol. The less I have to play the game, the better. Putting this one behind me. Escape Academy: I played this escape room game for GSL, but they recently decided that absolutely everyone in the entire world would love a PvP update! I guess they got everyone confused with no one, ever. Really all we got was a massive grindfest, having to complete around 200 of the same 15 puzzles for that free 500g. At no point was I entertained in the slightest, other than maybe figuring out ways to cheese the puzzles (like memorizing all the possible answers lol). In the end, this grindfest took me nearly 8x the time it took for the original 1000G and made me want to throw up from hearing Coach Yoach’s annoying ass voice say the same 10 lines on repeat for 8 hours. Suika Game: I needed some things to do on my most recent work trip, so I acquired a few Switch games. I originally wanted to get some Vita stuff, but honestly I don’t like playing handhelds much these days. Still a few trophy whore games I need to do, and a very small handful of games I wanna play on Vita, but its just collecting dust. Anyways, my first order of business was finally trying the hip watermelon game. You gotta wait until the hype dies down to play these popular games, otherwise you’re a normie. The game itself is slightly fun, and I can see how it can be addicting. But after just a few games I made my first watermelon and that was…it. I didn’t feel the need to continue playing because there’s no goal of the game. It would be similar to playing Tetris I guess; fun for a bit but I need goals or targets. Played for a handful more games then hung it up for my next Switch game. Princes Peach Showtime!: I bought three short games to play on my trip. But like usual, I’m too exhausted when I return to the hotel to do anything for long periods of time. I’ll have to save the last game for another trip but I did manage to complete this game 100%. This one is basically a Mario game playing as Peach, so if you like those you know what to expect. I enjoyed this quite a bit for the first playthrough, trying out all 10 costumes and mechanics. But because the game was so short, I wanted to get my money’s worth. I decided to go for 100%, which was…a thing. Having to replay every single level a second time was more annoying than fun. The absolute biggest issue with the game is no checkpoint system. Did you miss a shine 10 minutes into the level because it appeared on a side scrolling screen for 0.1 seconds? Restart! Did you need to practice a section to get a tough shine? Play for 4.5 minutes and then restart! I wanted to give up so badly but every time I did, the next day I found myself firing up the game and beating what I gave up on first try. If only I could translate this over to some Xbox/PS games; taking a break really is a cheat code. In the end, I did manage to finish the 100% after tackling all of the bosses damageless. While I did enjoy my time, it was entirely too short for an expensive ass Nintendo game. Its why I hate buying anything Nintendo because regardless of game age, its always $40-60 or more per game. And lastly, I gotta take a point off for the non-stable 30 frames. There is no excuse for non-stable 30 fps in 2024. Zero excuse. -1. My rating would have been much higher if the game was twice as long or cost half as much. Other activities in March & April include: Halo: MCC (13 Hours) – Playing through the original trilogy co-op with Mia, it is her first time! Zelda: A Link to the Past (10 Hours) – Twitch Streams Killing Floor 2 (4 Hours) – Got gifted this on PC, so played a few sessions with Mia and community. It was enjoyable playing on community maps, just wish I had my max level character. Clone Hero (2 Hours) – One Twitch stream in March. Vampire Survivors (1 Hour) – DLC and DLC and DLC and DLC and DLC and oh guess what I’ll be doing in May? DLC!!! Grounded (10 Minutes) – First update since GSL, but I was able to have a save traded to me from bLaKgRaVy and popped the achievements instantly. Looking ahead to May: Remnant II – DLC released literally 2 days after my friend and I completed the base 1000 and first DLC. Halo MCC – Mia and I are currently on Halo 2. Star Wars – Looking to play the two Jedi Survivor games. Final Fantasy XVI – The second, much larger DLC released recently so I’ll check it out soon.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Journey & Review (Heavy spoilers). Settle in, this will be a long one if you care to read it all. My journey began on February 28th with the Remake demo on my Twitch stream. The demo featured the Nibelheim flashback scene with Sephiroth and Cloud. My immediate thoughts were all summed up in a single word: Love. I loved the new synergy skills, I loved seeing Sephiroth in action, I loved Yeehaw Tifa, I loved the burning village scene, and I loved knowing exactly what happens based on playing the OG. The iconic scene with Sephiroth turning towards Cloud with the flames around him gave me chills and I couldn’t help but to grin ear to ear. The demo also offered a piece of Junon but I declined to play that portion as I wanted to experience it blind. Square was way too eager to give away so much of the game in trailers that I didn’t even watch the final trailer a week before the game came out. I wanted a little bit of to be fresh, sheesh! Fuck. Yes. Just like with the first installment, which I will refer to as Remake, I took a full week off work for this game. I picked up my physical copy on the 29th as well as a nice Chick-Fil-A breakfast and came home immediately. I was blue balled because the game was a massive 171gb download, which took FOREVER even with good internet and a hardwired connection. After the longest wait of my life, I was able to jump in and head straight to chapter 2 and the first open world section. My immediate thoughts were that I loved it. The side quests were well-thought out and not boring at all like most JRPGs. Each one put a lot of thought into both new and returning characters, whether it was from the OG or Remake. I actually did not complete Grasslands on the first visit. I was exploring and accidentally locked into the Midgarsormr fight. This fight kicked my ass, which started getting on my nerves. The difficulty for this game is too easy on easy, too hard on normal, and fucking stupid on hard. Anyways, I beat the boss and once again witnessed an iconic scene from the OG that gave me chills. It helped that I was laughing at some memes about “Did Sephiroth do this?” just a night prior, but seeing it unfold in Rebirth was something else. On to chapter 3 and chapter 4, Junon. What a beautiful rendition of such a small portion of the OG. Junon is where I got a taste of the first bullshit part of the game. One of the Chadley intel required you to do three things during a specific battle. Usually this involves pressuring, staggering, and defeating the enemy within the time limit. Well, the first fight I stumbled upon in Junon against a Fonadu was absolute bs. I had to restart the fight 23 times because I wasn’t able to do enough damage to trigger his move for pressuring, and then it was a frame perfect dodge that I failed 10+ times. I really thought this was going to be bullshit for the next 20+ intel but thankfully that was the only one that gave me THAT much trouble. Another thing I disliked slightly was having to stealth wrangle a Chocobo. Come on man, just let me run around on one. I did like that each region’s Chocobo had a unique ability that plays into the game. As for story beats, we can’t go without talking about the side quest with Salmon and the absolute BANGER that was “Fight for us, Stamp.” That cute little tune got engrained in my head for three straight days and I still find myself going “bow wow wow bow wow wow” every now and then. The main quest for both lower and upper Junon were perfect. I loved the parade and the silliness by the whole team. And thank goodness the parade minigame wasn’t as bad as the OG, because I never did figure that shit out. I will also say that the way they incorporated Yuffie into the story was fantastic all the way through. I did find her slightly annoying, but exactly how I pictured her from the OG. Chapter 4 is also where I started getting annoyed with the amount of minigames. Did we seriously need a dolphin minigame, a Fall Guys frog minigame, Fort Condor, Moogle crap, AND a hard mode version of Fort Condor that made me rage? All in a single chapter and it only gets worse. I was humming the song the entire scene. Chapter 5 was the shortest of them all, with like 5 short fights, a boss, and a card tournament (airhorn noises). I will say this, Queen’s Blood was far and away the best minigame in Rebirth and I’m impressed how much time and effort went into it. I love me a good card game, as denoted by the time I played Gwent with a side of The Witcher. Thank heavens too, as there are so many Queen’s Blood matches forced on you if you want the completion. It was a neat little side story to introduce and give Rebirth some DNA of its own. We quickly arrived in Costa Del Sol, which was the first part of the game I had been looking forward to. I did not, however, care for the addition of four more minigames including the return of Jules the workout god. That was not really a fun time having to be perfect at smashing triggers for 120 consecutive seconds and my hands were hurting by the time I was done. Can’t deny that I adored both Aerith and Tifa’s bathing suits, and the aftermath beach scene made me cry for the first time in Rebirth. Aerith was talking about how much she hated Hojo and the things he did to her, and my protect side came out. I'll be crying a record number of times in this game btw, but that is perfectly fine. The amount of emotion I garnished from this game was like no other. Both are incredibly cute, loved these! Apparently this was Tifa’s choice in swimwear. Chapter 7 was one of my lesser liked chapters, as both split sections felt like a chore rather than exciting gameplay. The climb as Cloud/Tifa/Aerith had a banger tune though and I can’t commend the music in this game enough. 10/10. Anyway, the rail section as Yuffie/Red/Barret was probably my least favorite section in the game (on a first play). It was confusing, long and drawn out, and I got lost on both playthroughs. The minecart ride was where I experienced the worst frame tearing as I dropped to what must have been 25-30 frames. Guess they had too many boxes on screen, lol. Again, it was just another +1 pointless minigame but whatever. We arrived in Corel and the music was on point more than ever. Such a somber but recognizable tune to go along with the vibe. I kinda lost track of the story here, as I thought this was where we went to the prison and had to Chocobo race our way out, haha. But no, it was onto the Golden Saucer, my #2 anticipated moment. What a glow up, its just how I imagined it 20 years ago. The Golden Saucer was beautiful, and hearing the Rebirth version of the theme gave me tingles. It was shortlived though, as the game FORCED you into one of the notorious OG minigames: 3D Brawler. And let me say, this is the point in the game where I mentally dinged the 10/10 rating it had so far. I know there will be plenty of minigames at the Golden Saucer that I don’t wanna play, don’t FORCE them on me. I was actually getting angry at this because there is just no time to react and it was frustrating. This gets even worse later on when you have to fight harder opponents, but I figured out that pause buffering works, otherwise this wouldn’t have been possible for me. I don’t have the reaction time anymore, at all. My Chapter 8 date ended up being Tifa, despite trying my best to be nicest to Aerith. My date was interrupted quickly by Dyne’s shenanigans, which lead into the Coral Prison section. I thought this part was perfect as well. Gus had a fantastic glow up and getting out wasn’t as bad as I remembered. Esther also got a glow up, she was heckin cute. Fast forwarding a bit to the Barret & Dyne section as that was the second time I cried. In the OG, it is kinda whatever and happens quickly, but man was it emotional seeing Barret react the way he does in this game. I am so happy every character is getting the time of day and more to flesh them out. The part where he hands Dyne the picture, man. Terrible day for rain. Then of course we gotta go through ANOTHER MINIGAME to get access to the buggy, which was a funny introduction to Palmer. I remember his fight in Rocket Town (OG) being goofy so this is exactly how I imagined Palmer. Onto Chapter 9, Gongaga. Compassion for a broken man. As a side note, we had a thread going for spoiler free discussion in Mia’s channel for Rebirth. Around this chapter, someone posted their feelings about the ending, and messed up the spoiler tag. I avoided this spoiler by a literal hair. The only reason I was upset was because the person posting their thoughts hadn’t even played the ending, they had looked it up or something. Crow if you are reading this, you are a very lucky person that I didn’t spoil myself and clicked away with lightning speed. Anyways, this incident sparked me to switch from 100%-as-I-go to rush the story to avoid any more potential spoilers. I would just come back to each area post-game and clean up, so no big deal. I flew threw Gongaga, which had beautiful music in every single area. The new overworld theme, the town theme: Square cannot miss in this soundtrack. The actual gameplay was another slight low, as I hated traversing Gongaga quite a bit. I also didn’t care much for the drawn-out section in the reactor. I don’t remember this being in the first game? I think the OG Gongaga visit was very brief. But at the end of the reactor was Cid and the Tiny Bronco. Love Cid so much, but he was the first character that didn’t feel true to the original. That’s not a complaining point, but thought it was worth writing down. Still love him and the little airplane scene was we fly off to my most anticipated area of the game: Cosmo Canyon. Cid thinking about how he will yell at Shera later The Cosmo Canyon theme is my favorite song in all of FF7 OG, so I could NOT wait until I approached the Canyon. But first, I had to do a stupid minigame (wonderful) and stealthily capture a Chocobo. Jim Carry “C’MON” intensifies. After that, I slowly walked along that bridge as the theme faded in. It was so good it brought me to shed a tear at the same time as being confused as hell when Red XIII decided he didn’t have balls anymore. That voice change was jarring as fuck and took me many, many hours to accept and get used to. Not a fan to be honest but I understand it makes sense due to Red being so young. Even though the music was a banger, this chapter ended up being another long, drawn-out slog so the game could explain the Gi. I prepared to cry at the Seto/Red XIII scene, as that was one that made me tear up in the OG. It didn’t feel as powerful as the OG, but it still tugged at the heartstrings and brought the cry count to 4. As I’m focusing on story only at this point, we went straight to Nibel and the dreaded Chapter 11. Once again the game fumbled a bit by forcing you to play characters you would probably bench the entire game. Cait Sith is cool and all, but damn is he awful to play, especially solo. It made some of the fights in Shinra Manor tough, 10x fold when we throw hard mode into the equation. And yes, there was another fucking minigame regarding throwing boxes as Cait which was awkward, slow, and just terrible all around. Can we stop yet? No, we have a full chapter of minigames coming up! Sigh. Vincent was one cool motherfucker though, and again pretty close to how I imagined him. The Galiant Beast fight was INSANE, pretty much Maliketh from Elden Ring. I threw a phoenix down at him and it didn’t work, 0/10. The homestretch was approaching as the gang returned to the Golden Saucer in chapter 12. I believe this diverges a bit from the OG, as the key to the Temple of the Ancients was underwater I think? Or something like that. But first, minigames (more airhorn sounds). I did take a small break here to do all of the minigames. This included Battle Arena, Chocobo Racing, G-Bike, 3D Brawler, Galactic Saviors, and like 10 Queen’s Blood challenges. Look, I knew these would all be here, as all but Queen’s Blood (and Galactic Saviors?) were in the OG. But man, we don’t need 33 fucking arena challenges mostly consisting of the same damn enemies in different pairs. Nor do we need 15+ Chocobo races, even if I was impressed with how fun they actually were versus the OG. Lastly, my disappointment that they did not reuse Remake’s “The Chase” song for G-Bike actually left me sad, lol. Anyways, I did all of this crap and finally got on with the story. Gotta say, the new Loveless play was fantastic (+1 minigame, btw). I loved it because it was rhythm-style and just a fun little addition to the Rebirth to give the game its own identity. And you won’t find me complaining about the Aerith musical, other than it was freakin spoiled at the 2023 game awards. Did Square even want to keep anything a secret in this game??? Whatever, add a plus one to my cry count because Aerith cried and my desire to protect kicked in for the second time. Tifa ended up being my date again, which is slightly disappointing but is more align with what I ship relationship wise. I got the intimate date as well, which finally ended in a much-awaited kiss that was not blue balled this time. All of this fun led into a three boss fight gauntlet of Abzu, Rude/Elana, & Rufus. The entire time I was fighting here, all I could think about was how awful this was going to be on hard mode. No lie, Rufus was not fun to fight in Remake and I knew he was going to be a wall when I got to hard mode. I finished them all off and it was off to the finale. My inner dialog: “Do it! Do it! Do it!” The race to the finish began as I motorboated my way over to the Temple of the Ancients. I was curious to see how they would handle this place and the iconic monsters you fight inside. Unfortunately, this chapter is the definition of being dragging out. It was so, so long and I felt this tenfold on my hard playthrough. It also had its own boss gauntlet, which again was just me saying “can’t wait for hard mode” sarcastically the whole time. The “trials” near the end had me choked up pretty bad and yes, add another notch to the cry count during Aerith’s trial when she breaks down crying. I can’t believe she got me three whole times in a single game, but that’s why she’s my favorite character of all time. Barret’s especially was touching as well since we got a peak into his life pre-reactor explosion, and the devastating aftermath. Finally made it to the Demon Wall, another classic staple of the OG and notorious for being the hardest fight ever if you weren’t prepared. I was wondering if they were going to make this fight hard as fuck but thankfully(?) it was not. My mental health could not take another hard boss for my upcoming 2nd playthrough. Past the demon wall we were onto Chapter 14: End of the World. I thought this chapter would be super long, but turns out you don’t get to explore the Forgotten Capital at all. Maybe in the third game? Either way, I saw Aerith up ahead and mentally prepared for what was coming. Cloud appeared that he was going to defy destiny and I was cheering and shouting. But just as it appeared Cloud deflected the blade, Sephiroth did some Jenova static shenanigans and we see a bloodied blade, indicating what we all knew was coming. My initial reaction was confusion, and I’m not really happy that is how they decided to show this scene. It didn’t generate the emotion I was expecting, and it wasn’t until later on in the chapter that I understood what happened. Either way, we began a 15 phase final boss gauntlet to end the game, which was full of fanservice and beautiful songs both epic and somber. I will start by saying the fights were epic, but I really did not kit out my party correctly at all. Even though I gave everyone except Aerith a nice selection of materia, the forced party splits really fucked me. This was especially the case on the Jenova section where I needed magic, and the final phase where Aerith suddenly goes “on your left” and fights Sephiroth with you. (credit to Snake for that hilarious reference). It wasn’t very fun with zero materia on her but I got through it and watched the beautiful ending. And, just like Remake, the credits rolling gave me a massive rush of emotions that let out a 7th cry. A new record by like, 4 at least haha. I cannot possibly sum up my excitement for part 3 in words. “Whatever you do, don’t look up.” The 100 Hour Post Game Cleanup My play time around when I beat the game was just over 100 hours, but again I had skipped all the side stuff in Gongaga, Cosmo Canyon, Nibel, and a little of Corel. The length of this game could be considered praiseworthy to some, but by this point I was feeling a little burn. That’s not to say I am not impressed, just that like, did it have to be this much side stuff? It certainly didn’t help that some of the most annoying side quests and mini games were still to come, and I haven’t even thought about hard mode. That’s a lie, I’ve been dreading it for all 100 hours let’s not kid ourselves. I slowly cleared each region and each of the many, many minigames. We had Dolphin minigame, Fall Guys as frogs part 2, Gears and Gambits, Gliding Chocobo (the worst minigame in the game), Cactuar Crush (second worst), and hard mode variations of all this shit. Nothing up to this point made me rage harder than Gliding Chocobo and Cactuar Crush hard mode. Both of these minigames tested my patience to the max and made me want it to just end. Special shoutout to the chicken side quest in Gongaga for basically being a minigame and frustrating as fuck to boot. For more insult to injury, we had Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon both be beautiful areas with just the worst fucking traversal ever. I absolutely hated trying to find my way to each intel, fight, moogle, protorelic, whatever as I needed to go around my mushroom elbow to get to my flying Chocobo ass. Bleh. It finally ended with 35 side quests done and all regional intel collected, so all that was left was a single side quest and the superboss fight. The final side quest was terrible, forcing me to once again return to Golden Saucer, once again play every single minigame, and once again hate my life as I struggled in 3D Brawler and the incredibly imbalanced battle square fight (10 Tonberrys? WTF). On a higher note, the superboss from the beloved FFV was amazing. Loved the music so much, especially when the actual fight against him starts. That guitar kicked in and my jaw hit the floor. It was a tough fight but the final one on my journey to completing my first playthrough 100%. It was a very long and amazing journey, but the pain was about to begin. “This isn’t Excalibur! This is Excalipoor!” Hard Mode If my memory serves, I finished up everything possible on the 1st playthrough around 150 hours. Again, I’m super impressed with the amount of content but I am not used to playing games this long. I rarely crack 100 hours with a single game nowadays, much less 150+. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I have played a single player game for more than 150 hours. We would have to go back to pre-Halo 2 days, seriously it has been that long. My first order of business on hard mode was to grind up my materia to max. I wasted no time in getting absolutely everything I could leveled up just in case, and boy did it pay off. The two most expensive materia, Magic Focus and Magic Efficiency, were non-factors in Remake but really put in work later. After that, it was time to tackle the VR missions. Like Remake, Gotterdammerung was locked behind a very tough, hard-difficulty VR mission and I wanted it to make my hard mode run easier. Let me tell you straight away that I’m docking another point for the difficulty of this game. I briefly mentioned it earlier, but at some point I swapped the game from normal to easy because I was tired of getting my ass handed to me. Then, I had to curb disappointment because easy was too easy and I wanted a little more of a challenge. Hard mode is on another level, way more overtuned than Remake. Not to mention, they nerfed both HP Up & MP Up to give you +30% health rather than a full +100%. Ouch. I found myself in for a brutal awakening, as I couldn’t even beat any of the brutal VR missions to even attempt the hardest ones. The PSNP guide was not helpful at all, the forums were saying “gotta git gud,” Youtube videos weren't showing builds or requiring Gotterdammerung (lol), and the Powerpyx guide was written for tryhards who eat, breathe, and shit difficult video games. My saving grace came in the form of PSNP user Optinoob, who had just began putting out “easy” methods on each brutal difficulty on his Youtube channel. And wouldn’t you know it, I beat each one within a few attempts, including the ridiculous Rulers of the Outer Worlds. Yes, that challenge puts you against Phoenix + Kujata, then Titan + Bahamut Arisen, THEN Odin + Alexander, THEN Gilgamesh, and if you aren’t fucking done in yet, a 5th fucking round against a unique version of Sephiroth. Good. Fucking. GRIEF. Was this made with casual in mind at all? But again, Optinoob came in clutch with a cheese build that worked first try and I am forever thankful to him. Funny enough, I scraped through first try with his build, but then died miserably trying to showcase the cheese build to Mia the next day. Oh well, Gotterdammerung was in my possession and it was onto the Legendary difficulty VR missions. She's a beauty and a mainstay for hard difficulty. And within minutes of attempting the legendary fights, I had hit another wall. Theses missions begin with seven solo 5-round fights and end with the two hardest boss gauntlets in the entire game. I took a break to re-visit every side quest in the game for manuscripts, because it would increase my power by like, 1%. We are 160 hours into the game by now and up until this point, I didn’t think I would clear 100%. I just wanted to get my platinum trophy and leave. In a single 5 hour session, I managed to clear all but three side quests that gave manuscripts. Gotta hand it to Rebirth, I am super impressed with how convenient they made a second playthrough with all the fast travel spots. I did not want to bother completing all 35 side quests again at this point, because of course they lock the final manuscript behind side quest #36. Bastards. Needless to say, I did not feel that 1% power increase from my five hours of work. I was banging my head against the challenges until my head busted through and I beat each one. None of them were fun at all, nor were they balanced well. But you know what, by the time I beat all seven I had a newfound appreciation for each character and knew their ends and outs of combat which helped me on my hard mode playthrough. Once all seven of the solo ones were down, it was time for the hard mode playthrough. We're saving those final two hard challenges for last because, well, they scary. Going into hard mode, I flipped the switch to going for 100%. I had come this far, might as well finish strong like I did in Remake. I made note of the conversations I missed, the reverse choice of what I made on first playthrough, and went back for all the Chapter 12 date scenes. As for the story run itself: For the most part, I had some sort of viable strategy. And since you could skip the open world sections, the first 9 chapters were mostly a breeze. This is especially true for any chapter I could use Aerith on, as she was a magic FIEND. Remember my mention of Magic Focus and Magic Efficiency earlier? These materia were very key to me brute forcing my way through hard mode. Special shoutout to a side quest in Chapter 2 that caused me to die five times before being forced to Gotterdammerung Aerith’s level 2 limit break to survive, lmao that was a meme. My first and only story death in Chapter 1-9 was to Gigatrice as Yuffie. The funny part is the Powerpyx tryhard guide said it wasn’t a hard fight, yet I got fucking rocked. Literally. Petrified. Get it? 💀 I made my way to Chapter 10 where the first wall hit. Gi Nattak turned out to be the most bullshit fight outside of the VR simulator. I died four times to his bullshit, each time getting worse and worse as there is no real good way to fight him. It is the seconf fight locked to just Barret/Red and neither of them can output damage fast. Hell I don’t even know what I did in order to finally best him, I think I got really lucky on the skulls part and staggered him before he could do bullshit, then just powered through Doom. Chapter 11-14 is where the difficulty ramped up like a fucking mountain. I had been dreading these chapters all game because they required actually conserving my MP and had all of the stupid hard boss fights I was worried about. Three of Chapter 11’s bosses got me due to instakill bullshit. Seriously, Diabolic Variant, Ying & Yang, AND Forgotten Specimen all had instakill attacks that ruined runs. Not to mention we still had the two hardest bosses after that! To my disbelief, I beat both Galiant Beast and Roche first try. Galiant was a beautiful disaster with so many deaths and so much chaos that I have no clue how I emerged victorious without losing the fight. And for Roche, lets just say Magic Efficiency once again saved my ass on reducing the cost of Cura/Curaga. I had to play very well to beat Roche with a lot of perfect parries and attack reads ahead of time. Chapter 11 was dusted but we were just getting started. Live screenshot of you playing as Cait Sith in Chapter 11: Chapter 12 was my most feared chapter. One word: Turks. They were not the most fun to fight in Remake, and Rebirth doubled down on their appearances. And, annoyingly, I had to redo Chapter 12 a 7th time later as I wanted to pick Aerith as my date again so she would be in the first two fights. Fuck if I was going to lock Cait Sith in as my 3rd partner, lmfao. Anyways, Abzu went down quickly as I expected, even though he also does a stupid fucking instakill attack that took out Aerith early. Can we stop with that shit? The game was generous enough to give me a bench after that fight, so I loaded up Aerith with magic and loaded myself with Magic-Efficiency Cure for the scariest fight to come immediately after. Rude & Elena went down like pushovers due to Barret tanking everything and Aerith dealing over 20k on a loaded magic shot. Magic Focus + Magic Focus + Faith + Genji Gloves + 530 magic on Aerith = chef’s kiss. And then there was one, the solo fight against Rufus. I managed to enter the fight with plenty of MP, a mistake I avoided like a lot of online complaints. The fight went fairly well, all things considered. It was slow, meticulous, and made me play out of my mind to nab as many perfect parries as possible. Each mistake = heal = losing my incredibly tiny damage window. I used my limit break because I was about to die, which almost screwed me as Rufus went to phase 2 with Darkstar. Now this part went horribly. I had no clue how to fight the dog as I limit broke him to oblivion in playthrough 1. I played as safe as possible, learned moves VERY quickly, and SOMEHOW took the dog down quick. This fight of attrition, 20 minutes strong at this point, was wearing me down bad. In the end, I defeated Rufus with zero MP and 314 health left. A single attack from him would have killed me and started it all over and I was shaking so badly I almost missed triggering my triple slash. I felt my heartrate in the 120s once it was over, and breathed a sigh of relief. With the Turks being such a pushover against magic, I was not afraid of them in chapter 13. I want to get off Mr Bone's Wild Ride My replay of Chapter 13 really hit home about the dragging out of some areas. It showed me that Chapter 13 was probably 2x as long gameplay-wise as any other chapter and 90% of it was just boring puzzles or getting fucking lost. The other 10% was the five bosses you had to beat on the way through, including two sets of Turks, the Red Dragon, Iron Giant, and ending with the notorious Demon Wall. Of note: The Red Dragon is currently bugged and will do an instakill attack no matter what, so that was just great. I was forced to Manawall Barret and he had enough HP to survive and revive the others, but that shot his MP for the entire chapter (20 for Arise, 20 for Arise, 22(?) for Manawall). Didn’t matter though, as you were forced into another silly party split for each Turk fight and the Iron Giant. For one Turk fight, I bullied the hell out of them with Aerith’s magic again. The second one was a little tougher, as I didn’t have Aerith. I used Tifa on main with her amazing ability to drive up the stagger gauge, but almost died on a few occasions. I needed both limit breaks’ invulnerability windows to survive and emerge victorious. By the time I slogged to Demon Wall, I could use whatever party I wanted. While rare, that means a very easy victory as you can use the Brumal cheese party of Yuffie/Aerith/Barret. That is exactly what I did, and Demon Wall went down without even looking at me. That just left one very long, 15 phase gauntlet of Jenova + Sephiroth. First off, I managed to make it to the final phase on my first try, then Sephiroth fucked my shit up. In a bit of a rage moment, I quickly paused and hit retry when my 3rd attempt wasn’t going well. Well, you see, I managed to hit “retry from last battle,” which stupidly takes you back to THE BEGINNING OF THE JENOVA FIGHT. Boy did I fuck up there, but why is that even a fucking option??? Owning up to my fuckup, I had to do the fight again, in which Sephiroth interrupted a curaga from Zack and left me fucked in phase 12. I died twice there just trying to survive long enough to heal. Once I finally got back to the final phase with Aerith, I did a lot more raging as this fight is utter bullshit. Not only do you need to learn how to perfect block or dodge everything, Sephiroth can just decide “okay I’m bored” and do Heartless Angel leaving you with 1hp, then fuck you in the ass before you can heal!!! This happened EIGHT times and I was getting so fucking sick of it. Eventually, on my tenth attempt of the final phase, I got lucky enough to time my limit breaks with both Aerith & Cloud to live through Heartless Bullshit and heal the other while taking aggro that would have otherwise killed me. Hard mode was officially complete at the 180ish hour mark. Let's. Fucking. Go. This about sums up the fight, just add in Cloud at 1hp after bullshit move. The Finale For platinum, I only had two fights left. But I had come this far, so I decided to take a breather and go for the final manuscript. I had to do like 10 side quests, but each one was knocked out in minutes thanks to fast travel and cutscene skipping. I used the Brumal Form party to get through the BS fight in the battle arena to earn my 112th and final manuscript page, then finished it off with the 6th and final date scene. I now had 99.5% and it was time to face my fear: Legendary VR missions Bonds of Friendship and To Be a Hero. Ten fights each, including world minibosses and the summons with DOUBLE HEALTH. While I was speeding through hard mode, Optinoob the clutch man put out a video guide for each of these. While the fights are not a cakewalk by any means, he at least laid the ground work for me. I spent an entire hour studying his video like it was the final exam of my college class. I wrote down every fight, step by step, what to do in a pinch, when Optinoob casted, things that could be optimized, you name it. Not even joking, I was taking this more seriously than probably anything else in life. My first two attempts went very poor, resulting in a death on round 2 of 10 and both had very sloppy round one fights against Titan. After a moment of losing faith, I found out I had been misplaying, and got back to attempt 3 with a little boost of confidence. The stars aligned greatly on me, as I took this run straight to a victory. It wasn’t without incident though. You see, this ridiculous 30-40 minute fight ends in Bahamut (round 9) and Odin (round 10), both waiting patiently to just fuck your shit up and end the run. For me, fight 9 went so, so poorly. It’s so easy to watch a guide, do exactly what they do, and just have EVERYTHING go wrong. I don't even know how I beat it. Cloud was dead and your nearly useless AI partner Zack had 1100 HP. I almost put down the controller because I didn't have enough MP for Arise, but said fuck it and picked him up with Raise (weaker Arise), perfect blocked three attacks in a row, and got a spell off that staggered. It was enough breathing room to activate my synergy skill which gives infinite MP for 2 minutes so that partner could heal me because he literally couldn't, I was out of MP. Bahamut almost went sicko mode but one final level 3 spell killed it. I had seconds, and I mean seconds, to spare before he cast Gigaflare and ended the run. Then round 10 went so well I probably couldn't replicate it in 100 tries. I perfect blocked so many consecutive attacks against Odin you would have though I was fresh off a Sekiro platinum. I also got the stagger on Odin RIGHT at 20% hp so he didn't do his stupid ass unblockable undodgable attack. I finished in style by using and both Cloud and Zack's limit break. Even with perfect blocking nearly all of them, I got hit by three total attacks and was in the red for health. My partner WHO I DID NOT CONTROL EVER was also in the red because your AI partners are stupid. We probably didn't have time to heal if those limit breaks did not kill Odin. I fist pumped so hard after beating this one because it was the culmination of blood, sweat, tears, and a sheer fucking will to not let this game get the better of me. I still had another fight, but I wasn’t as worried. It was the same 10 round gauntlet with slightly different mini-bosses, however your partner is gigachad Sephiroth and not squishy Zack. I beat this one first try, but once again round 9 did not go all according to plan. Bahamut wanted so badly to end my run that I’m not even sure how I got through it. The big difference maker was that Sephiroth can generate ATB much, much quicker and safer than Zack, which made a world of difference. I finished off Bahamut with a synergy skill and some infinite MP Firagas from Sephiroth while Cloud just tried to stay alive. Odin worried me a bit, as I knew I would not have a perfect fight like the previous attempt. Sephiroth had enough MP to case re-raise as a safety net, and I’m glad because I needed it on Cloud both times. I was also able to safely generate ATB as mentioned before to get off heals and perform a game-winning, platinum earning Octoslash Prime at the end. Clocking in at 185 hours, I returned to Johnny and popped the platinum, signifying the end of my perilous journey. Yeah yeah we get it, you’re badass. Final Thoughts and Rating I’ll be quick here, as my fingers have been typing so long I am feeling the burn. Rebirth delivered so much content packed into this game that any gamer would be lying if they said they didn’t get their $70 worth. The main story was a 10/10 to me and I love what they are doing with the multiverses and branching off from the OG. I was almost ready to dock a story point for how they handled Aerith’s death, but it made sense to me during the final fight and I’ve made peace with it now. Seems like we are in for a major breaking point for this party heading into part 3. Cloud's mental breakdown, Tifa reaching a breaking point, maybe even some more fleshed-out Barret. The music is easily a perfect 10. This game includes 400 tracks and none of them are reused more than twice. Not only that, they are all such good tunes that can solo paint pictures of happiness, sadness, fear, rejection, hope, bleakness, you name it. This game delivered on all of the music I wanted to hear remastered, then brought out the main course like it already wasn’t a full-course meal. The iconic scenes I was waiting for all delivered and then brought out dessert like I wasn’t already full. I can’t say enough about the ease of access for replaying the chapters to see scenes I missed as well as cleaning up hard mode/side quests. The game delivered content after content and I literally couldn’t keep up. But, unlike Remake, this game is not earning a perfect 10 from me. You might be surprised to hear that after I just spent nearly three hours recalling my epic adventure, but we gotta talk about the elephant in the room: Minigames. There were too many. Way too many. We reached “please fucking stop” territory when I was on stream playing a fucking minigame to pull a mushroom out of the fucking ground. Like please, just stop it. Get help. I really hope we do not see nearly this many mini games in part 3. But please bring back Queen’s Blood, that shit was great. Speaking of way too much: Way too many combat areanas / VR missions. It was basically like hurr hurr refight everything 10+ times in different orders/combinations. Got old very quick. I could tie that into “too many minigames.” It was bad enough having like 30+ minigames, but some of them you had to play 30+ times each! Next up, the difficulty. Again, easy was too easy, normal too hard, hard was unfun. I did not enjoy having to dip down to easy to increase my enjoyment, and I did not enjoy the majority of my hard mode playthrough. Most of my deaths were do to taking so much damage I was instakilled from full health. That’s just stupid. And there is not a single build that can get anyone except Barret to 9,999 health. What the heck man? I loved having 9,999 in Remake across most of my party, it made me feel like I was in the true endgame. I have not mentioned this yet, but the inability to swap materia completely from one character to the next needs to be a QoL feature in part 3. I must have spent 10+ hours swapping materia in this 185 hour completion. That’s just a minor point, though. My last major docking point was in relation to how some areas were dragged out. This became really apparent on my second playthrough where each non-open world section felt like it was just dragged out way too long. Chapter 11 and 13 were the biggest offenders, and I felt like I was going to fall asleep doing Temple of the Ancients again. Literally sighing out loud during the slow walking parts explaining who the Cetra were. Let. Me. Finish! With all that said, I’m considering how much fun I had versus how many hours I was suffering. I would wager I was having a blast for 120/185 hours and then the other 65 were dragging my ass through stuff I didn’t care for or didn’t want to do. I dunno how many of those were “real suffering hours,” but it was enough to ding my rating quite a bit. I am going to settle on a 7/10. However, because the game was so good for 2/3rds of it, don’t be surprised if this game makes top 5 in my 2024 GOTY or even takes #1. I wanted to split my rating between 10/10 (120 hours) and 5/10 (65 hours) but that just sounded silly. Would I do it all again if it was suddenly February 29th, 2024? Hell yeah. Am I excited for part 3 in four years? Hell yeah. Do I want to see another god damn minigame? Get me out. My final screenshots below will be all of my 100% stuff, so I will just leave an imgur link as proof of my conquering. I forgot to save after talking to Johnny so I pray to the Nomura gods that it won’t bite me in the ass, otherwise I’ll have to do the Cloud + Sephiroth shit again down the line if/when DLC releases. I did play a couple of small things throughout March, but I am going to just group them in the April write up cause that will be easier. Thanks for reading. https://imgur.com/a/UPxSNuI

February 2024 Cyberpunk 2077: (Phantom Liberty Spoilers ahead). Ever since the next-gen version of Cyberpunk was announced, I've wanted to return and give this game a fresh go. For those who know/don't know, I played it on release and it was just an absolute mess. The game itself was amazing but the bug count was too god damn high. Happy to report that I ran into much fewer bugs this time, but they were not missing completely. I still had around 10 crazy bugs, 2 game-breaking ones that required a load, and maybe 4-6 crashes. Better than my PS4 run, but not perfect like it should be. Anyways, reading up on my 2020 journey and review was interesting to say the least. It was cool to see myself complaining about things that were improved in update 2.0, such as respecing and clothing previews. Update 2.0 brought a lot more QoL changes that made the game simplified in some aspects and more fun in others. Not tying armor and weapon mods to clothing was a godsend in cutting down my playtime hunting for drip. It also seems that my outfit gravitated pretty similar to the first game too. Cute outfit, not gonna lie. As for weapons, I kinda did the same thing. Tried out most weapons and gravitated towards pistols and shotguns. However, the vast majority of my build ended up revolving around stealth and throwing knives. Puppys? Stealth? Next you'll tell me pigs can fly! But man was it fun to have a very powerful headshot machine and have it be completely stealth too. Only issue I seemed to have was hitting people in the back of the neck way too often rather than the head. Another great update was money. In 2020, I struggled to keep enough cash around for the car achievement. In this version, I must have made (and spent) 5 million dollars. The vehicle achievement auto-popped for me but I still ended up buying them all in the end. The increase in materials also made upgrading things more possible and in the end, I had upgraded nearly everything in the game that I had to Tier 5++. That would not have even been thinkable in 2020. Phantom Liberty added a black market vendor that allowed me to buy missing iconic weapons, which was a +1 from me. I finally completed that weapon wall, which was extended with even more weapons! How cool it could have been to include every single iconic in the game, but this was a nice selection. The Black Market vendor helped me complete this sexy wall of weapons. Let's move onto the story. One change from my previous playthrough is that I romanced River instead of Judy. And I gotta say, ol' River kinda boring as fuck. Not only did he make the Aldacado ending depressing, he was just not much joy to be around compared to Judy. That is about all I'd bother to share from the story, as I remembered most of it as I went along. Still can't pick a "favorite" ending. None of them are really a 'happy' ending to me which makes the V/Johnny relationship that much more powerful. It is a shame there is no ending where both V and Johnny got to coincide happily ever after. So the majority of my new experience was the Phantom Liberty DLC. Overall I'm satisfied but slightly disappointed. It was nice to meet Mr Hands and some of the missions were interesting. But once again, I felt like the four endings of the DLC just weren't happy endings at all. One of them had you do a Alien Isolation-like mission to rescue Songbird and this mission pissed me off so much. Besides, it was one of two game-breaking bugs I had where the objective wouldn't update so I had to reload save after PAINFULLY prodding around for 20 minutes. That ending sucked so much ass. To go even further, the now 9th(?) ending to the game was added with Phantom Liberty, and it is quite possibly the most depressing ending of them all! I was really feeling bad for V on this one and it pained me to let Johnny go. That final ride where Johnny looked out the window of the plane had me choked up. I don't know, the new area and story really didn't live up to the main game for me. Only plusses that came from it were some new guns and cars I liked. I loved the new silenced pistol from, uh, I don't even remember the chick's name from the DLC. Her Majesty was my go to weapon for the last 30 hours of the game. Plus all the new Quadra vehicles had me doing 10+ vehicle missions for Captain. Another shame that vehicles don't have basic paint job customizations, it was really needed. So it's kinda funny that my original rating was a 6/10 with all those bugs, because this time around I'm going 7/10. The DLC felt overpriced and not on par with the main game. The new area was just too small and vehicle un-friendly. The new collectibles don't show up on the map which meant I had to look at all 12 of them to find the ones I was missing. The new abilities didn't add much for me as half of them were related to the arm cybernetics (which I still refused to use, they make my arms ugly). Another funny near coincidence is this time around I only took 93 hours to beat the game plus DLC, one hour short of my original completion time but with more content to do. Shows just how much time I spent clothing hunting in the original haha. I would still recommend this game quite a bit because of the story and gameplay. But maybe after more bug patches? It is safe to say the CD Projekt Red lost my faith in producing another day one purchase from me, so I'm glad the PS5 upgrade was free. Remnant: From the Ashes: This is an interesting one because I began the game with a friend, completed the entire list on PS4 with a different friend in-between, and then finally completed it with my first friend. I'm not very creative when it comes to playing co-op I guess. Anyways, I wanted to mention here some differences between the PC Game Pass playthrough and PS4. First of all, we crashed a grand total of 0 times, compared to 10+ on PS4. That alone was worth a +1 in rating. Second, we were able to use a save analyzer to cut down tremendously on glowing fragment farming. And lastly, my friend and I got ravaged by survival mode on PC. Whether it was bad RNG, tough bosses, or just flat out skill issue, it took us nearly 8 hours to finally nail a 10 run. I suppose I didn't realize how much could go wrong, as my PS4 friend and I completed this on attempt #3. Our successful run was a crazy run too! We fought the hardest boss at level 1, fought the hardest world boss at level 3, and got revenge on the boss who killed our 8 run the week before at the highest difficulty (#10). All of that RNG packed into one tight run, but it felt so good finally beating it and moving onto Remnant II. Reiterating that I still enjoyed the game a surprising amount, and might even see this make a run for my top 5 surprises in 2024. The successful run, we SPED through a run in half the normal time. Yugioh World Wide Edition - Stairway to the Destined Duel: Quite a mouthful title there. This is a game I played the absolute hell out of back in 2004. It was one of the first Yugioh games out there and the nostalgia is real. Add in the fact that I can hunt achievements through retroachievements and I'm hooked. The original plan was to stream this game for a week or two on Twitch, and get as many achievements as I could. I'm not too crazy about 100% on retroachievements, as I've barely done any games on there. I ended up playing it way more than I thought I would, and nabbed 78/79 achievements. By the end of my personal grind, I was using speedup 100% of the time and completing duels brainlessly. The achievement list requires you to get 50,000 DP, which is the equivalent of 1,000 duel wins. Well I had 75 achievements by the time I reached 25k, which just shows how pointless of a grind it would have been to go get that last achievement. Maybe someday I will, but the last achievement would require about 400 wins and even at full speedup that is 15+ hours of commitment. No thanks. Of note: I believe I gave this game a perfect 10 over twenty years ago, but I wouldn't go that far here. My experience was more of a high 6, and I'd much prefer a Yugioh game with more variety in the cards. Can't deny the nostalgia. Resident Evil 5: Mia bought this for me on Christmas so we could co-op together on Saturdays. It took a hot minute to get used to the absolute shit controls but after that, it was a very enjoyable experience. That mid 2000s shooter charm had me all nostalgic and reminded me of games like Halo, Gears, and COD4. I personally loved all the characters from Chris/Sheva to Wesker and down to the badass African guys. We completed the game on veteran, then did a second playthrough on veteran for all S ranks / collectibles. We chose not to use infinite ammo, but I did get Chris's super shotgun which was hella fun to use. Mia showed off her massive collection of guns, which is also impressive for this game. And lastly, we tackled the two DLCs on veteran. The first one was more of a throwback to the first RE (or so I'm told). It was short and sweet. The second one was much, much harder. It was like a massive ass enemy rush and took us quite some time to beat on veteran. The checkpoints were NOT friendly in that DLC, so it took us several hours to beat. Overall that would be one of my only complaints about the game: mid 2000s checkpoints. We are so spoiled today. My second complaint would be the inventory management. 9 slots is just not enough when there are so many cool guns to check out. I feel like the inventory was made for single player so you could shove shit in Sheva's backpack and play that way, lol. Anyways, it wasn't enough to ding a point for me so I'm giving this a solid 8. I'm hearing bad things about RE6 but we still plan on playing it together in the near future. I am still laughing my ass off at this. Miscellaneous: Remnant II (9 Hours): My friend and I started Remnant II immediately after the first one. Love it so far! Lisa the Painful (6 Hours): Playing this on Saturdays while Mia watches. Interesting, fun game. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (3 Hours): Only one Zelda stream in Feb. Clone Hero (2 Hours): One Twitch stream. Looking ahead to March: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: H Y P E. Expect this to be my only big thing in March. I have been avoiding any type of media regarding this so it'll be as blind as it can be. Lisa the Painful: Saturdays with Mia Remnant II: Sundays with Axel

Can't say I have any desire to do The Witcher 3, AC Origins, AC Odyssey, or DOOM all over again among others 🙃

I barely made the cut. Thought I had way more than I did because of stuff I've done on Playstation, so just bronze for now.

Sweet, think I finally can get on the bronze tier of Enthisast/Fanatic!

January 2024 Remnant: From the Ashes: I’ve been playing this with a friend on Sundays, but another friend tabbed me to play this on PS5. Since we were able to blitz through it, I’ll go ahead and write up my thoughts here. First off, this game exceeded my expectations. For some reason I never really got into it, despite having it for free since like, 2020. “Dark Souls with Guns” is a pretty accurate description because the melee feels way too unsafe and underpowered. I enjoyed that each playthrough feels slightly different due to roguelite elements, and thankfully my friend and I did not have to fight RNG as hard as I was expecting. The bosses were, for the most part, all very cool and unique and fun to fight. The story was whatever, don’t even really know what was going on because I guess they expected you to play some prequel I’ve never heard of? Anyway, couple of gripes: Number 1 is easily stamina consumption out of combat. With each world needing a lot of trekking, it was incredibly annoying fighting stamina even at max level recovery. The game ran like shit on PS5 due to PS4 upscaling, and we experienced 10+ crashes. It made survival very stressful, and we are SO LUCKY that we ended up getting the achievement for 10 bosses and crashed on the 11th… PC doesn’t have this issue. My last gripe is just how annoying they made the final grind. You get about 25-30 fragments for a 2 hour survival run, and they wanted you to get, checks notes, 550??? Fuck off. So glad there was a farm outside of survival but it was still a long, boring, very unnecessary 8+ hour farm. Boo. Anyways, PC has a save analyzer that is cutting down on the RNG aspect of my other friend’s farm, but its still brutal. We’ll be done in February and starting on Remnant II! Marvel’s Spider-Man 2: I wanted to play this game when NG+ DLC released so I didn’t have to relearn the game and come back to it. Probably going to be a stupid Impossible Difficulty trophy too, sigh. I couldn’t wait though so I dove in and knocked this game out super fast. Gotta say, there wasn’t really a single thing wrong with this game in my opinion. Gameplay was very fun, combat felt satisfying and slightly challenging, music was fantastic, story was great. I love that they brought back the spider-cat suit for Mile and I was surprised at the amount of suits for customization. I also appreciate that it was a game I could pick up for 10 minutes at a time, or hours if I had the free time. Don’t really want to give this a perfect 10, so lets just say its because the first game had a much more emotional story. Also the zero damage Mysterio challenges, while not required for platinum, can eat me. Very frustrating but I wanted the true 100%. Not excited for NG+ and especially not impossible difficulty (never am, fuck NG+) but I’m down for a DLC pack or two. Some exciting loose ends in the game! Resident Evil 4: The rest of January consisted of completing AAA games’ DLC on my PS account. We’ll start with Separate Ways, the Ada Wong DLC for RE4. First of all, this shit was hard. Double the difficulty because I’m returning to the game 7 months after mastering it, which is my number one reason for disliking DLC. It took me a while to get used to the combat again, and hoy boy did this DLC kick my ass all the way through. It is three steps up in difficulty from the main game, and professional difficulty was driving me nuts. I died to the bosses several times each, and then had to worry about completing the next 20+ minutes without saving!!! Guh, I don’t like that at all and don’t want any more Professional S+ ranks in my life. Setting my pain aside, the DLC was fun. Most of it was just recycled areas sadly, but we got to fight new bosses and tackle new puzzles. We got a nice view with Ada Wong (I wasn’t looking at her ass the whole time, promise, really…) The overlap with main game was a pretty cool idea that not a lot of games dig into with DLC. Only other thing I’ll say is that Mia will be playing this soon on her stream. Excited to see her kick the DLCs ass, hope she enjoys it! God of War: Ragnarok: The new fad is to just add a roguelite mode to your game, no matter what type of game it is. Ragnarok did just that for some reason with the Valhalla DLC but hey, it was free and very enjoyable so it gets a pass. Again, it took me a while to get used to the game again, but there was no difficulty requirements this time around. They also managed to add a little story to this, as well as some amazing throwbacks to the PS2 and PSP(?) games. I was very impressed and enjoyed this just as much as the main game. The roguelite factor worked out just fine and I enjoyed the new boss fight. They even switched up the boss fight each time you defeated him, which is another +1 from me. Took me about 8 hours to get the trophies, which was nowhere near 100% of the DLC (thankfully). Never could beat the arena boss because the difficulty rose the longer you took. But hey, didn’t have to so I got my trophies, left satisfied, and got out. Final Fantasy XVI: Third and final DLC to tackle before getting my completion percentage back to 99.96%. This one was a very short teaser for the bigger one coming this spring, so there wasn’t much to expect. I already started off very annoyed because I had to complete a bunch of side quests to even access the DLC. I had done 100% on my normal difficulty run but avoided side-quests like the plague for hard mode. Also, I kept the auto-evade ring on because fuck having to relearn these damn games to do hard DLC!!!!! Ugh, frustrating. Anyway, the DLC itself was okay, clocking in at about 2.5-3 hours after wandering around like a lost puppy finding the stupid pre-req side quests. The final boss of this DLC was pretty much the only memorial part, but what a fight it was. The boss theme was a 10/10 and you can tell the composer had a ton of fun with it. That boss went hard and lived up to the main game's amazing boss fights. I was able to beat it first try on hard, barely, thanks to the evade ring. While I don’t think the DLC was worth $10 (should have been free), I enjoyed it enough to get hyped for the bigger one coming later. Miscellaneous: Remnant: From the Ashes (20 Hours) – This was my PC playthrough on Sundays; we are almost done. Cyberpunk 2077 (17 Hours) – Finally playing this on PS5 without the one million bugs. Resident Evil 5 (13 Hours) – Co-op playthrough with Mia. Loving it so far, will finish in Feb. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (10 Hours) – Four Twitch streams of randomizers. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (7 Hours) – Finished second round of this with Skilz. Elden Ring Reforged (7 Hours) – Co-op playthrough with Mia and another mod. On hold at the moment. Clone Hero (2 Hours) – One Twitch stream. Looking Ahead to February: Cyberpunk 2077: This is my only plan for February, hope to finish this before FF7 Rebirth. Resident Evil 5: Will be finishing this next week I believe. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth: Lets. Fucking. Go. Will play the demo(s) closer to release and then I have an entire week off starting February 29th.

2023: Year in Review January: Streaming every day on Twitch took up a lot of my time in January, as I was aiming to unlock my follower emotes as quickly as possible. Between practice, retro achievement hunting, co-op seeds with Mia, and streaming, I racked up 74 hours in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in January. Starting on Stardew Valley was another big portion of Jan, as I played a co-op playthrough with Mia. Speaking of Mia, we also cleared Kirby Super Star, adding a +1 to my SNES games for the first time in many, many years. The other two main things in January were Halo Infinite co-op and finishing up the Destiny 2 content I paid for in February 2022. I was finally on my way out of that game. February: I still had a lot of streaming to go for my follower emotes, so we see another 58 hours of Link to the Past. In my free time, I began my 4th unique stack of Skyrim, this time completing it on PS5 with a record of 92 hours. Mia and I continued our Stardew playthrough, but we stopped somewhere mid-year 3. I also did my final 18 hours of Destiny 2 in 2023. For the first time in 4 years, it will not be my most played game of the year. Yay! With a single Clone Hero stream, I only played five unique games in February, quite possibly a record low. March: With my follower emotes obtained, I cut my stream back to once a week rather than daily. My big time sinks in March include Elden Ring Reforged with Mia, finishing Skyrim, and starting God of War: Ragnarok. Mia and I got pretty far into ER before we got screwed because of an update. Said update reshuffled our items, including required ones to bosses we already beat. God of War was incredible and I enjoyed it a lot more than the first game. The last things of note were starting Danganrompa V3 and doing a pointless Far Cry 6 DLC. April: One of my best months with Resident Evil 4 Remake. It was my first RE game and I enjoyed it very much. And yes, the Ada Dong DLC is next on my list after completing the Ragnarok DLC I am currently working on (Jan 2024). I began Hollow Knight for the first time, playing on my own with Mia’s guidance in call. While a fantastic game, I felt like I would have enjoyed it less without her help. It also kicked my ass a lot and I’m still salty about the compass notch problem. I also did Theatrhythm, a fun Final Fantasy rhythm game that I’d never heard of. Lots of other small things but among them was another fun Forza Horizon 5 DLC and being crazy enough to tackle ODST/Reach LASO in Halo: Master Chief Collection. May: Thanks to being refreshed on Elden Ring, I decided to tackle the Xbox stack. Boy did I have a rough time doing that all over again from scratch, both a combination of starting over and coming off the PC Reforged mod. ER took up most of the month, but I also finished Theatrhythm and Hollow Knight (106%). It felt so good defeating Nightmare Grimm because he was very difficult. I also remember toughing out the arena battles and the Radiance final boss. I played it on Steam so I could ignore achievements. I don’t think I could ever complete this game on Xbox/PS; fuck doing that boss rush stuff. June: One of the quieter months of the year, despite taking a lot of vacation time. I did the Horizon Forbidden West DLC, the pointless Ghostwire Tokyo DLC, and began playing Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass on and off with Mia watching. Burning Shores was a very well done DLC and I was pleased to see that the hard difficulty of Horizon did not give me too much trouble. I ticked off Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion before it left Game Pass; that was a fun little hidden gem. And of course, I started my Final Fantasy XVI journey. If it wasn’t for a few depressive days, I could have sank my teeth into that game very deep. But anyways, it had to way until July. July: Final Fantasy XVI. I probably should have done a longer write up of the game like I did for Starfield, but you can find it some notes under my July 2023 post. Overall, the game was near perfection. All it needed was stable 60fps and more fleshed-out side quests to earn a perfect 10. Even without those things, FFXVI quickly became a GOTY contender for me and a shoe-in for the top 5. The only other thing I played in July was South Park: The Stick of Truth. Disgusting humor aside, the gameplay was fun as hell and perfect for an RPG fan. August: I followed up Stick of Truth with Fractured But Whole. Again, the humor doesn’t vibe with me. I didn’t like the gameplay change at first, but it grew on me. I gave both of them 7/10s but with the story being so meh to me, that’s generous. With my first work trip since 2019 popping up, I picked up Rain Code on my Switch. Enjoyed that game quite a bit and it was a perfect addition to the Spike Chunsoft games I’ve played. But that was about it! August easily outdid June in fewest hours played in a single month with 114. I found it hard to find motivation to game while on my trip, and really just struggled to game. September: This month was a mixed bag of random decisions. There wasn’t really a single game taking home all the glory, but I did take advantage of Game Pass. I played the entire Walking Dead series over again in anticipation of The Final Season, even stacking TWD 1-2 in the process. I also played a hidden gem called TOEM and struggled through Coffee Talk 2. The highlight of September was getting to the conclusion of Jimmy & The Pulsating Mass, which made me cry something fierce. What an incredible game from start to finish, and it was all made by a single guy! October: GSL. We normally have it in April, but I was just incredibly busy outside of gaming to really put it together. My full write up is above, but I smashed out 333 games for 508,000 Gamerscore. Most people haven’t even seen a fifth of that in their lifetime. My teammate and I scored one million, a record that will forever stand atop the trash heap of games we played. October is the only month in 2023 where I played 200 hours, and I hit 200 hours on the nose. It really makes me feel bad for not gaming because I’m missing out on so many games I just won’t get to. Where’s that early 20s motivation? I'm getting FOMO. November: Starfield! I did a full writeup in November of my likes and dislikes, ignoring all the hate being thrown at it from all sides. Yes, the game was a disappointment, but its far from the worst game I’ve ever played. If you like Bethesda and/or Fallout, you’d be silly not to play through it. I also started Alan Wake 2 in Nov, along with some serious post-GSL cleanup that followed into December. December: I played three major games in December: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Dead Space (Remake), and Alan Wake 2. All of these games will make my end of year lists in one way or another, so stay tuned! Even though those took up most of my time, I still managed to bang out some great Game Pass games like Cocoon, Gris, Dodogne, Planet of Lana, and began Remnant: From the Ashes. Oh yeah and the Sakura MMO series, which could have functioned as a single 15 hour visual novel. It was entertaining enough to keep my company, at least. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Statistics Alright let’s dive in! On Xbox, I earned 6,769 achievements for 556,645 Gamerscore. Both are new records by a large margin and may remain forever due to the retirement of the GSL tournament. Playstation was quieter this year, with 968 trophies worth the equivalent of 59,880 Gamerscore. My combined achievement/trophy count is 7,737, which is only 800 more than last year. Still, it is a new record that may remain forever. My gaming cost for 2023 is $2,392.05, almost identical to last year. Again, taking out the $1,400 or so spent on GSL and you have a very reasonable hobby cost for the hours invested. There were some things I included that I shouldn’t have, such as Steam gifts to Mia. I’m not sure exactly how much I spent on those, but that wasn’t really my gaming expenses so I’ll categorize better next year. My hours are way down, at only 1,845 for 2023. It is still crazy to me that it comes out to 5 hours per day. Sure doesn’t feel like it! I hope to cut down on silly things like social media (Reddit) idling and instead grind at some games I want to play. Another record on the notch is how many games I played in 2023: 430. Again, the vast majority of them are GSL trash and Sakura trophy stacking. If I removed all that, then I can only say I played 58 games in 2023. Those 58 games account for 1,650 out of 1,845 hours, so only 13.5% of my games took up 89.5% of my time! With the removal of GSL and the dis-interest in stacking, I hope to see some very accurate gameplay stats in 2024. No more records, just pure stats. Works for me. Anyways, among those 430 games emerged only three incomplete ones. Halo MCC is still incomplete, but I am now at 694/700 achievements. Remnant: From the Ashes and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands are the only other two, and both will be completed in 2024. Tiny Tina’s is already done as of this writing. Oh yeah, the games breakdown: 168 Xbox Series X 126 Xbox One 80 PC 28 PS5 23 PS4 3 Switch 2 SNES In 2023, I played 16 games that had DLC, having to “return” to a game for 14 of them. This does not include GSL games that have stupid title updates requiring five minutes of my time. While not a top five list, I wanted to give a shoutout to Horizon Forbidden West’s Burning Shores DLC for being my DLC of the year. On the flipside, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ pathetic excuse for paid content is my worst DLC of the year. Seriously, $30 for 1 hour of content, extended to 2.5 hours because you had to play each one four times. Incredibly stupid. Three games added DLC in 2023 that I did not get to: God of War: Ragnarok, Final Fantasy XVI, and Resident Evil 4. I will be working on these early 2024! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Top 5 Lists For the first time since 2018, Destiny 2 is not my most played game of the year. In fact, it didn’t even make the top 10! Could we see a Destinyless 2024? Here are my top 5 games by play time in 2023: 1. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – 286 Hours 2. Elden Ring (PC & XSX) – 131 Hours 3. Starfield – 112 Hours 4. Final Fantasy XVI – 102 Hours 5. Skyrim (PS5) – 92 Hours Top 5 Disappointments of 2023 1. Starfield 2. The Walking Dead: The Final Season 3. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands 4. Coffee Talk 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly 5. Ballotron Coolbox Even though I enjoyed the game, it goes without saying that Starfield is my biggest disappointment of 2023. The amount of times I said “well if only the game had x” must have been in the dozens. The Walking Dead was a massive letdown, especially after how good TWD 1 & 2 were. The ending can eat me, considering a certain someone died in the first game despite trying the same thing. Tiny Tina’s is another case of “what could have been” if the 2012 Borderlands crew worked on it. Coffee Talk was a huge letdown after enjoying the first game; really glad it was free. And lastly, after Ballotron made my top 10 list of 2022 and 2023 GSL gems, I picked this one up in December. Wow, what a pile of shit! Adding enemies and needing pinpoint accurate shots is not the play, god damn. Now I’m stuck with this game and its updates moving forward… Top 5 Worst 1. Rattyvity Lab 2. Why Pizza? 3. W.A.R.P. 4. Cyber Citizen Shockman 5. Sakura Swimclub The good news about this list is that GSL made up for 4 of the 5 worst games I played this year. That means there never really was a time I was suffering through a 10, 20, or even 30+ hour game. Each of the top four deserve to be delisted and burned in a trashcan, never to see the light of day again. Rounding out my top 5 is the worst fanservice I’ve ever seen. I have enjoyed the Sakura games for the most part up until this one, which had no story and just a ridiculous amount of unlikely encounters with the girls. This is a forgettable entry, for sure. Top 5 Hidden Gems 1. Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass 2. Planet of Lana 3. TOEM 4. Hidden Cats of London 5. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line The hidden gems list gets my two perfect 10s of the year: Jimmy and Planet of Lana. Neither game I had heard of prior to playing them this year, and I am so glad I did. Jimmy is easily my game of the year, but I moved it here due to it seriously being a hidden gem. It’s wishful thinking that it will receive an achievement or trophy list someday, but hey I’d be all over it again. Planet of Lana was one of my last games played in 2023 and it wowed me from start to finish. Literally everything was a positive in that game, especially the cute little relationship with Mui. TOEM is a game I’ve had for a while, but finally played on Game Pass instead of Playstation. It was a cute little game and the world was lively and fun. Hidden Cats was my #1 of GSL and deserves a spot on this list, as I would have never heard of it without GSL. More games like this, please! My top 5 is rounded out by Theatrythm, as I had never heard of it before this year. A great game for Final Fantasy fans, rhythm game fans, or both. Top 5 Gaming Moments 2. Titan Lost Boss Battle – Final Fantasy XVI 3. Conquering Nightmare Grimm & the Arena – Hollow Knight 4. Impossible Difficulty – Dead Space (Remake) 5. Morgan Freeman Boss Battle – South Park: The Fractured But Whole HM: Earning 500k Gamerscore during GSL A new list this year! Instead of spoiling my top five with images above, I slowly revealed my top five gaming moments. While gaming as a whole has not grabbed me attentively lately, I still experienced some amazing moments this year. The same could be said about Titan Lost, the Eikon battle in FF XVI. When I began running towards this massive boss and the theme started playing, I once again got chills. Whoever made that boss theme went all in and I’m here for it. No denying that game had some incredible boss fights and music all around. In third we have the hardest content I did this year. Hollow Knight is a tough little game, but the DLC fights gave me a beatdown. Finally conquering both Nightmare Grimm and the arenas was a feel-good ending. In fourth was beating Impossible Mode in Dead Space. It wasn’t too hard, but it was very stress-inducing at times due to one-hit-KO sections. Even so, I had to display serious skill to beat it as easily as I did, and with no credit duplication or cheating. And lastly, I felt pretty badass taking out the final superboss of Fractured But Whole. This long and tiresome fight had me thinking 2-3 turns ahead and provided a solid challenge on hard difficulty. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Puppys list without an honorable mention. Earning over 500k Gamerscore is no easy feat, but doing so in one month is something only a single-digit amount of people can say they’ve done. This goes double for those of us already garnishing 1mil+ Gamerscore. I was very proud to hit this during a year I’ve been so busy. Puppys’ Top 5 Games of 2023 1. Final Fantasy XVI 2. God of War: Ragnarok 3. Resident Evil 4 4. Hollow Knight 5. Dead Space (Remake) Believe it or not, it was hard to make a top 5 list this year! I played some amazing games for the first time and it pains me to leave Stardew Valley off the list (#6 for sure). I also shuffled Jimmy to the hidden gems #1, even if it was the game I enjoyed the most this year. With its framerate issue and boring side quests, Final Fantasy XVI still takes #1 due to awesome combat, music, and story. Titan Lost wowed me the most, but there were at least 3-4 instances of hairs standing up due to the awesome cinematography. The ending was sick, Odin was badass, Typhon, Ifrit, man. Can’t beat it. God of War: Ragnarok surprised me a lot, as I thought the original God of War was not that game breaking. The story and gameplay really upped the ante in Ragnarok, along with it being such a damn good looking game. My first Resident Evil took home #3, as overall it was a solid 9/10 experience. I played the game myself three times, and watched Mia do like five whole playthroughs but still enjoyed all of it. Fourth is another 9/10 with Hollow Knight. While I struggled a bit on the difficulty and backtracking, there is no denying all the reasons why it is one of the greats. HK ticked that dopamine hit when you finally conquered a boss or area that beat you up several times. Dead Space Remake rounds out my top 5, which could also double as a big surprise to me. That game was beautiful and well remade, like when your memory generates perfect graphics on a game you played 15 years ago. I can’t really find a complaint in any of these games, especially if we take away achievement requirements. 2024 Top 5 Games I’m Looking Forward to 1. Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth 2. Elden Ring – Shadow of the Erdtree DLC 3. Spiderman 2 4. Lisa the Painful 5. Persona 3: Reload It is absolutely zero surprise what my number one game of 2024 is going to be. However, I have been stemming my expectations, ignoring developer commentary, not looking into trailers too much, and above all else: Not hyping myself up. The game will come, it will be great, and it will cement itself as a very difficult to beat 2024 GOTY contender for me. FF7 Rebirth is by far and away #1, but I’m looking forward to the Elden Ring DLC quite a bit. Not really a new game, but From Software never misses on DLC for Souls games. Spiderman 2 is at the forefront of January, just waiting for a NG+ patch so I can do it while I’m still fresh. Fourth is a game that looks similar to Jimmy, and I have that queued up for Jan/Feb as well. And lastly, Persona 3 Reload is looking mighty fine to someone who enjoyed Persona 4 & 5. There was a lot of stuff on my 2023 anticipated list that I didn’t get to. FF7R’s “Winter Release” was actually February 2024 as expected, and Hades II did not come out this year. Ghost of Tsushi is still on my list, I have just been delaying it because of the stupid multiplayer stuff. Better get on it before the population dies, I guess. The rest either had zero interest (Pokemon game), too long (Tears of the Kingdom) or turned out to be shit (Forespoken). I think that’s about it, so I’m putting a wrap on 2023. Thanks for reading!

So I knew I missed a collectible because it was greyed out, but it didn't say what chapter I missed it in (I just knew it was chapter 2). Also, it was the 5th greyed out icon but when I went to the 5th chapter 2 collectible, I already had it. So idk, I ended up just starting Ch2 over and doing them all.

December 2023 Alan Wake 2: (Spoilers) Let me begin by saying that Alan Wake 2 is a great reminder not to overhype myself for a game. I played the original thirteen years ago and played the remastered version about two years ago. Loved both to death. The stage scene with Poets of the Fall blaring and the onslaught of taken still has to be a top 10 gaming moment of all time for me. Today I find it hard to get excited for anything, but geez did I get excited when Alan Wake 2 was announced. I picked it for my GSL winning game and started it in November. The first half of the game is incredibly slow. I felt like the Joe Pesci “What the fuck is this piece of shit” meme when I stood in front of my first case board as Saga. I know Alan Wake is filled to the brim with collectibles, but the number of enemies in the first half of the game was way too low so the first half was just collectible simulator. Maybe it was because I was on easy? Either way, the game was slow and I was feeling bad for getting hyped. The Alan Wake sections of the story were boring, confusing, and frustrating at times. It really wasn’t my cup of tea, at all. The amount of cheap jump scares is astronomical and stupid; easily my #1 gripe. So what saved the game? Poets of the Fall / Old Gods of Asgard. The two songs “Herald of Darkness” and “Dark Ocean Summoning” have been on loop in my head and on my Spotify even as I type this a month later. The second half of the game picked up speed in zero-to-sixty fashion and saved it from being a top 5 disappointment of 2023. The Herald of Darkness play was fucking awesome and we were blessed with two "Remedy music sections." The Dark Ocean Summoning part is my "moment of the year" and man was Scratch a scary, formidable boss. Poor Jaakko. I loved the story and was actually able to understand most of what was happening, a rarity because I’m surprisingly dumb when it comes to these types of things. Let's just say we are set up for Alan Wake 3 boys and girls. I enjoyed the references to Control (the game) and can’t wait to see more of this world being fleshed out. Perhaps we will see a Jessie Faden + Alan Wake meeting in the future? If this game had way fewer jump scares and a fast travel of sorts, we could have had a top 5 contender. Instead, I had to fight super hard not to include this in my disappointments. Now excuse me while I sing "Show me the championnnn of lightttttt" in the shower when nobody is around. ❤️ Dead Space (Remake): At the forefront of December was me playing the Dead Space remake. I’d heard very good things about it and watched Mia stream it early in 2023. Can confirm: This game is fantastic on all fronts. It was even better than I remembered to be honest. The gameplay is fun as hell and the jump scares are very minimal. Maybe it helps because I’ve already played it and knew what to expect. The remake was fairly faithful to the original, with some QoL changes and additional content/story to dive into. I also tackled Impossible Mode, which worried me quite a bit from the get go. Instead, I found that the game was not hard at all, even on hard difficulty. I breezed through that in 9 hours and never had a single instance of being close to dying. The insta-death areas were scary and got the heart pumping. All in all I give this a near perfect rating. My only complaint is having to play the game a full three times. The NG+ only scene was cool and all but not worth a whole god damn playthrough itself. And on the third playthrough of unskippable scenes/dialog I was dead and ready to be done. Thank god I didn't die and need a 4th playthrough! Cocoon: In December I knocked off all the Game Pass games I had downloaded with the intent to play them during GSL. Never did get around to them because I was trading these 3-5 hour games in for 9-10 games each; very valuable gamerscore-wise in my hunt for 500k solo and one million team score. 2023 Indie GOTY’s Cocoon was first up. For starters, the game was fantastic. The puzzles were big brain and the atmosphere was done quite well. I also felt the sound design here was also fantastic. I thought the bosses were cool and provided just the right amount of challenge/thinking. I managed to get through the game with only needing to look up two puzzle solutions, and I don’t even feel that bad because they were super big brain (stacking a world in a world in a world? Crazy). What dragged the game down for me was sense of direction. There were times I didn’t know where to go, which made it annoying to me. Especially since I had to move orbs around to try and advance, only to realize I’m going the wrong way and hit a dead end. That killed a lot of enjoyment for me, but I don’t have any other complaints. Would highly recommend to anyone with Game Pass, or wait out for a sale otherwise. Dordogne: This was a cute adventure game about a girl who visits her grandmother’s house and relives childhood memories. I initially picked it because of GSL (3-4 hours) but I kept it installed because of the cute cover art! It truly can drag me into a game sometimes. The gameplay of Dordogne was simple and satisfying. The story was heartwarming and the visuals reminded me of 11-11 with the water paint style. I didn’t really have any complaints about this game, it was an above average experience I’d recommend to anyone with Game Pass. You'll probably want a guide if going for the completion, cause the collectibles are well-hidden and very missable. The ending confused me a little bit, but maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention to how the little boy fit into the family. He was super cute grown up, though! I didn't cry but got heart warming tingles at the ending. GRIS: This one is a beautiful visual representation of the five stages of grief. While the visuals and sound design were great, I disliked the gameplay. I just didn’t find it fun. It was difficult to see where to go at points, and some puzzles just didn’t click with me. The collectibles were beyond hidden, so much so that I had to open a video guide for most of them because even the text guide wasn’t cutting it. Eventually I got sick of getting lost so I just followed a video guide for the last hour of gameplay. The beautiful visuals didn’t redeem the gameplay and complicated puzzle/platforming. Also, her skinny-ass stick legs bothered me so much I said it out loud several times. I also sadly lost about an hour because I missed a collectible in the longest chapter and had to replay so much of it because I didn’t know which one I missed, ugh! I’m 50/50 on recommending this, I mean its short but I wouldn’t want to play it again. Planet of Lana: Wow. My fourth and final GSL cleanup and what a fucking good game this was. I loved everything about it: Music, gameplay, sound design, puzzling, mechanics, and the story. Everything clicked for me and damn did I get emotionally invested in Lana and her little cat-like companion Mui. I cried like a bitch at the ending, which gave me a sad-cry into happy-cry (won't spoil story). I love when games can garner an emotional response out of me and Planet of Lana ticked that box. Again, the sound design and music was very good and got me humming the little jingle. The achievement list is a bit scary, because you have to beat the game without dying. Luckily you can quit to menu and then resume to undo the death, but I was still terrified of needing a second five-hour playthrough. I died early on and reset the game, but after dying a second time 2.5 hours in, I did that method and prayed. In the end, I died a grand total of five times, mostly to mis-judging a platforming jump. Really dislike those game-long "don't die" achievements, that's for sure. Thankfully, the achievement popped and we did not have to ding this rating. Planet of Lana gets a very rare perfect 10 from me, which is high praise. I recommend this game 100%, even at full price! We are getting a PS release in Spring 2024, but I don't know if I will stack it. No-death trophy is scary. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (PS5): Only 2-3 hours from the completion as of today, so I’ll add this in December. Playing through the game a second time with a second friend, and its going alright. I still feel very disappointed in the content overall and reminisce often about Borderlands 2 when seeing how far this series has fallen. Anyway, my friend wanted to go for all collectibles so that made it fun hunting those dice down, and I enjoyed trying a second class out. I went all in on frost for this character and really enjoyed the synergies between Clawbringer and Brr-Zerker. Found some fun ice weapons and we both love the Swordsplosion's triumphant return to Borderlands. I probably won’t increase my rating on this compared to my previous play, and the DLC is still such a pathetic excuse for content. Expect to see Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands on my most disappointing list for the 2023 yearly review. Sakura MMO 1-4: Rather than starting on the God of War Ragnarok DLC, I decided to play, uh, this. Well I purchased a bunch of these stacks wayyyy back in January and they’ve just been sitting here, so I wanted to see that backlog decrease by four whole games. I was going to give Sakura MMO one hour to impress me, otherwise I’d skip the entire series. And that it did, I enjoyed it! The first game did a great job at introducing interesting characters and worldbuilding. The first game was the strongest by far. In the second game, we continue the trilogy-long story but I began to really get annoyed with the maid Neve. She was so annoying, sheesh. I felt that MMO 2 really dropped the ball on pacing. It had an incredible ending, only for the game to extend another 20 minutes and rip the series up into a third part. Since I’m one of maybe four people buying this game for the story, I was annoyed and took points off for that crap. The third game rounded out the trilogy and provided a satisfying ending, despite the final “threat” being disposed of WAY too easily. And lastly, we have Sakura MMO Extra, which takes place if Viola stays in the MMO world. It was boring and 100% fan service. Added zero value to the series and could have been skipped easily. Side note: I had a really fun time trying to refund Sakura MMO on my Japanese account because JP stacks no longer have trophies. After three calls, four chats, two days, and manually translating to Japanese, I got my refund. Hardest I’ve ever worked for ¥770/$5.50, lol. Overall I enjoyed the series; probably more than Sakura Succubus. I do not expect to finish off the few remaining Sakura games as I am pretty over them. I think there’s an alien game or something? And possibly a second Nova game? We'll see because stacking is satisfying as hell. Miscellaneous Adventures: A Link to the Past: Streams and co-op seeds (14 Hours). Remnant: From the Ashes: Playing this with a friend on Sundays. Fun so far! (12 Hours). Party Animals: Played this on stream for a minigames with mods stream (2 Hours). Clone Hero: One stream (2 Hours). Mario Kart 8: Community night (2 Hours). Ballotron Coolbox: Piece of shit entry to the fun Ballotron games, 1/10. (2 Stacks, 40 Minutes). Killing Floor 2: DLC update #557 or whatever (15 Minutes). Remnants of GSL: In December I played eight games for 8,000 Gamerscore (3 Hours) That wraps up December. Next up will be my 2023 year in review.

November 2023 & Starfield Review/Journey. Starfield: Been a while since I did a huge game review & journey; I miss doing it. As a Bethesda fan, this game was my immediate plan after finishing GSL in October. Yeah, I’d heard all the way up until I began the game just how bad it was. I didn’t want that to deter myself from playing it and seeing what I liked/disliked about the game myself. I’ll begin with saying that I still enjoyed a lot of the game, but like most I left feeling disappointed. There was so, so much potential here its insane. Yet it felt empty and hollow most of the time and all I could think about is what could have been. I’ll start with the dislikes. Spoilers, duh. Nothing to see here, just weapon farming before they patch it. Easily my number one gripe was not having a mini map. Sure, the game gave us a god arrow, but I was lost so many times just trying to explore cities or areas I was in. Next up, I think the challenges required to further update perks was a dumb idea. One of the most useful perks required me to run out of oxygen 50 times before I could upgrade it, and I never did in 112 hours of gameplay. Also, the amount of times I returned to the combat simulator to “destroy X ships” was too damn high. Do away with that, please. While I did not have too many issues playing the game in 30fps, the amount of times I dipped below that was just unacceptable for an AAA game at this point. Last complaints include the amount of unexplained mechanics I had to Google, and getting stuck in my own damn ship over five times (before I upgraded to In Amber Clad). I could nitpick more, but nothing else bothered me enough to write it down. The Bethesda experience. "It just works." As for the likes, I had quite a few! Again, as a Skyrim/Fallout fan, I enjoyed the fact that this was basically space Fallout. I didn’t mind the gunplay and was always looking out for new guns to try. I spent hours farming weapons in my outpost looking for that perfect shotgun or pistol. Legendaries were cool and all but not having unique guns is another notch on the disappointment belt, gosh what a game this could have been. Anyways, I also found myself enjoying the music. Gave me Skyrim vibes when walking around in peaceful areas, and Fallout/Cyberpunk vibes during combat. I appreciated the amount of dialog options that popped up from having perks, like medicine or stealth. Not a new concept but I felt like it showed up a lot more often and with a higher quantity of perks. Despite having to watch like 3 Youtube videos first to understand it, I really ended up liking the shipbuilding. If it didn’t run in 15 fps, I would have kept building the perfect, badass ship. Mine was still awesome as fuck, though. Cairo Jemison, this is In Amber Clad. The carrier's shield is down. I'm in position and ready for immediate assault. My final likes come from the story. I personally enjoyed it, and think its cool how the main story concept plays into NG+. Although I heard someone had to play NG+ 33 times to finally get one of the scenes, why is it RNG? Another disappointment; should have just been guaranteed on NG+. I enjoyed the NASA mission and learning about the truth regarding Earth. I went to Earth very early to find a wasteland and it wasn’t until like 70 hours later I found out what happened. I enjoyed the Entanglement mission that blipped in and out of different realities / multiverses. Personally I love that concept, probably stemming from my enjoyment of the Marvel multiverses. I appreciated the boldness in killing off your closest companion, even if it cost me 2 hours to reload and save Sam. It should have killed off your second highest affinity companion, like come on. It all came to a close and the ending fell pretty damn flat though, which is probably why most dislike the story. Don’t blame you there. He's no Cid from FF16, but damn. Swoons Moving onto the four faction questlines required for completion. Most of them were a hit with me! I enjoyed the UC questline a lot, ending with finding an alien base that was nuked to hell. I enjoyed the Freestar one too, as Sam Coe was a very likable character (and became my husbando). The Crimson Fleet quest was a bit hit or miss. All it needed was to not have the “working with the bad guys behind their back” part of it. Regardless, Kryx’s Legacy and ending was my favorite part of the game and favorite mission. Going through all the trouble to visit a planet with a super electric storm to finally locate the ship full of credits and the final assault on the pirates was chef’s kiss. Oh yeah, the Ryujin Industries questline! …It was shit. I did the UC Questline first to get an awesome house; I was too lazy to upgrade it. But damn, that view! So yeah this was a bit longer but it was a big game to cover. I still enjoyed a lot of it and wanted to put my opinion out there among a sea of garbage reviews. It was a game I could hop on, do my own thing, and hours passed in what seemed like minutes. That’s always a good sign I am content with the game. I actually went and scanned all 1,692 planets/moons. Why? No clue but I was getting dopamine marking them off. I was also very invested in finding all of the snowglobes to visit Earth monuments, but got annoyed because one was missable. I wanted to finish all my quests but was too bored with the amount of loading screens getting from A to B. In the end, my one word answer to this game is “disappointed.” This game had the potential to be a game remembered by generations and nobody will remember it at all. It makes it even more hilarious because Starfield devs are defending the game on negative reviews. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: Been playing this off and on since April with a friend on Steam. If you enjoy Borderlands, its more unique content, skills, and weapons to try out. I found a lot of legendary weapons I enjoyed using, especially the Swordsplosion shotgun and tornado Tediore weapon. I found a very fun combination of classes that allowed two companions as well as allowed me to live two full deaths per 60 seconds, so I rarely died. It also caters to those who love DND. That’s about all of the positives. The humor just isn’t there anymore and I can’t remember more than maybe 1-2 hilarious moments. The map areas were fantastic and massive, but for like, 1-2 quests each? Where’s the life? The game dialog seems to appeal to a younger generation that I don’t relate to as much. I’m also going to go ahead and say that the DLC is probably the biggest rip-off in recent memory, if not all-time. $30 base price for under two hours of content. Sheeesh. The fun lies in playing the game with friends, which I am currently doing a second time on PS5. Might play it again if Mia feels like checking it out; I did buy her a copy of the game after all but she didn’t join us. Also, thank god for cross-play! I don’t care for Steam achievements, but both my friend and I wanted to get the last achievement rather than ending on 45/47. I was able to dupe money through PS5 cloud saving, otherwise it would have been another 30+ hours of boring grinding. The end game of Tiny Tina’s is stale as hell and another negative for those looking for something to grind towards. Boyfriend Dungeon: If you remember my review of this game a year ago, I trashed it hard for adding DLC immediately after having removing it from Game Pass. Waited patiently for the game to go on sale before picking it up and cleaning up the achievements. Both new characters were cute, but again feel like I’m too old for the vibe in this game. The gameplay was not as fun as I remembered, but it wasn’t difficult clearing the new dungeon and the rest of the content. I’ll retract my 1/10 rating and give it 7, but that’s generous. That covers the major games in November. I started Alan Wake 2 but I’ll cover that in December. Lots of other miscellaneous things I did: A Link to the Past: Streams & co-op seeds (15 Hours). Forza Horizon 5: Free DLC. Stories are the worst part of Forza Horizon though, so very meh. (4 Hours). Cruz Brothers: Cleaning up the main game’s 1000g from GSL. Game is very bad lol (4 Hours). Clone Hero: Stream & practice (3 Hours). Mario Kart 8: Community night (2 Hours). Vampire Survivors: Please stop adding DLC (30 minutes). Remnants of GSL: The consequences of my actions. My Xbox card will now forever be tarnished by weekly updates to GSL games I played this year, so I guess I’ll add those here on a monthly basis. In November I did 11k worth of title updates (1.5 hours).