I’ve been remembering now how good the Danganronpa OST is. So many memorable songs.

• Mr. Monokuma’s Lesson
• Beautiful Dead
• Climax Reasoning
• Box 15
• Box 16

And of course, my favorite track New World Order.

Glad you’re enjoying Danganronpa!

Finished Super Robot Wars Y - Expansion Pack!

It was fun but I expected a lot more from a bigger and more expensive DLC.

The lack of songs from the original franchise for both Ideon and Nirvash Z was particularly annoying, and I now have “add the Custom BGM function to the Switch version” as my #1 request for future patches or games.

Overall I’d rank DLC1 > DLC3/Expansion Pack > DLC2. But honestly - none of the are really good value unless you’re a massive fan of the franchise like me.

Finished Vampire Crawlers!

An interesting dungeon crawler/deckbuilder mix. Not very long, took me ~15h or so to complete all dungeons, but I’m not sure I’d be interested in more content unless the dev does some big rework on the mechanics.

The game is just too easy, there was a minor difficulty bump midway but once you unlock certain things you’ll be steamrolling everything in your path (the “Wild” gem breaks the game in half). Combined with some of the dungeons being fairly long (a run can easily go past 1h) it got a bit boring near the end.

But it was certainly worth the $10 price tag.

No more gaming after that, but I’ll probably go back and see if I can finally finish Witch on the Holy Night.

After that, started Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc Anniversary Edition. I knew what the game was about, but it feels depressing to play. I prefer happier games, so not sure if I’ll actually finish this or not.

It’s a fantastic game but it goes through a lot of dark spots during its course. I love it but it might not suit your tastes.

Playing the Super Robot Wars Y - Expansion Pack!

Shout out to the developer for the new free stages they added to the base game, they are two cool sets of “flashback” missions. The first one shows some key events prior to the beginning of the game, and the second one gives you the opportunity to play as some of the villains in a side-quest to hunt down a group of deserters.

As for the DLC, I’ve finished all the side content and I’m working on the main story, should be around ~80% now according to the wiki.

Playing Vampire Crawlers!

New side-game, a mix of dungeon crawler and deckbuilding in the Vampire Survivors universe. So far it feels a bit too shallow to have the same longevity of something like Slay the Spire, but it’s definitely fun.

Currently trying to beat level 6-7 stages.

Very busy work week so not too much gaming this time.

Playing the Super Robot Wars Y - Expansion Pack!

I knew there was a SRW stream this week and it would likely be about new DLC… but I was not expecting the new pack to release one day later. And of course I bough it immediately. 🙂

It’s a big expansion, including Ideon, Star Driver, Eureka Seven Movies, Beltorchika’s Children, Idolmaster Xenoglossia, Cross Ange and 26 new missions. For me the biggest highlight is Ideon, an iconic series that hasn’t been in a SRW game since Alpha 3 - more than 20 years ago!

And I’m glad Ideon is getting a lot of love here, the Sword and Gun attacks look great (and as broken as ever), they brought back the “Ide Gauge” mechanic, and it even gets a unique “death” animation for a stage where he’s on the enemy side. Biggest complaint so far is that they didn’t get the rights to the original OST for Ideon and I was really expecting to see iconic tracks like Overwhelming Power again.

They aso included a few new free stages for the base game, and even unlocked the previous preorder-only DLC with Soji/Vangnex and Chitose/Granvang for all players.

Looks like we’re getting new Super Robot Wars DLC tomorrow.

https://youtu.be/9xDTwW9cmmA

Now I know what I’ll be playing this week.

Edit: English trailer now out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYExXSBornU

Recettear is a classic. An upgraded version was supposed to come last year (and I was hoping it would also include a console release) but no news since the original announcement. https://www.gematsu.com/2024/12/recettear-an-item-shops-tale-hd-edition-announced-for-pc

What are you starting next?

No idea. I still have some homework to do sorting MTG stuff (mostly which pricy cards I have for sale now that i finished building decks) and I’m not sure if I’ll focus on this or go back to gaming soon.

Finished Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian!

Wonderful game. After the underwhelming Atelier Yumia last year I’m happy to see Gust haven’t lost their touch.

This game does a much better job than most entries in this series in balancing between a main story to drive the game and the feel-good, slice-of-life vibes that they are known for. The battle system is great, the alchemy system is great, and I really liked the new cast - in particular the main duo of Rias and Slade.

If they ever make a follow-up to this one my biggest request would be more work on the “store management” part of the game. The one they had here is serviceable, but as a huge fan of Recettear I’d love to see a game that manages to scratch the same itch, and the Atelier series looks like a really good fit for this.

Haven’t played anything after finishing Atelier, but will try to get some gaming time in the weekend.

Edit: MTG update, ended up spending most of the weekend giving my old commander decks a big tune-up for the first time in many, many years. Not the biggest fan of this format but playing with the Premodern/Prefire decks I mentioned last week seems to have lit a fire in my playgroup for all types of games, and commander makes for a good change of pace.

There’s a lot of ways to play Magic competitively, going from Pauper which is one of the cheapest competitive formats with average deck price around $70 to Legacy where the average deck costs a few thousand.

These particular set of decks I built are should be in the “middle of the road” for competitive formats, with an average of ~$300-400 or so per deck asides from a couple outliers (MUD Stax is a pile of crazy expensive out-of-print cards). So building these boxes from scratch would be quite pricy. 🙂

However I already owned a ton of cards (I played multiple formats competitively for a decade) and I “financed” most new purchases by downsizing my collection and selling things I wasn’t going to use anymore, so I didn’t really spend that much money in this project.

Edit: Fun fact! I posted about this box on Twitter and it kinda blew up after being retweeted by a couple popular figures in the MTG world. Since we can’t link to that website here I’ll leave this image with the stats.

All of these are from the same “category” which is Premodern, based on Magic from 1995 to 2003, so you can play any of the decks in this box against each other.

The decks cover a broad number of strategies, including agressive, midrange and controlling decks, and also a small amount of combo to spice things up. Exact decklists can be found here.

I also have a second box from another category called Prefire, which is based on Magic from 2003 to early 2019.

Playing Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian!

Good progress this week, got to Chapter 9 and I’m probably near the end of the game.

One boss mid-game was a huge difficulty spike which forced me to stop and go spend some time optimizing gear/items, but other than that I’ve been going through the game rather easily.

Moving to another topic, I finally finished my box of Premodern Magic the Gathering decks! Already did a few sessions with friends while I was building it and had a lot of fun.

Finished Astalon: Tears of the Earth!

Got the “Normal” ending and that’s good enough. I liked a lot of things about this game, but the checkpoint system absolutely ruined my enjoyment of it.

Playing Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian!

I remember being confused when this game was announced because it shares the same name as Gust’s gacha game and I thought it would be some kind of “offline styre mode” for that one - but it’s in fact a brand new game, only taking place in the same world.

What it inherits from the gacha game is the concept of “wanderers”, crossover characters from other games in the Atelier franchise. Your main party is the two new characters (Rias and Slade) plus four returning (Raze, Wilbell, Totori and Sophie), but you also get a ton of other cameos during quests.

The game is a return to old-school Atelier. Low-stakes, slice of life with turn-based combat and a ton of crafting to do. The battle system is very similar to the one in Sophie 2 with characters in the front and back rows constantly switching positions while chaining attacks, and I enjoy how this lets you use your whole party in most battles.

I’m really liking the crafting system. At first it looks very simple, almost reminiscent of the early PS3 games, but the need to “chain” ingredients based color to transfer traits and effects add some really cool puzzle-like elements.

Finally, there’s a new “shop” system where you can sell items to get money and help evolve the city, but I think this one is half-baked. There’s some customization you can do to the store but most of the time it’s just “select some items to sell (usually using the auto-select feature)”, press “Open Shop” and get a ton of money.

No progress on Witch on the Holy Night this week.

Finished Trails Beyond the Horizon. Great game, definitely in the higher tiers of games for that series. But that ending… sure, it was amazing, but how the hell does Falcom follow up from there?

Currently playing Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian. Quite enjoyable, not sure how much I like the “crossover” world but the main duo is solid, the alchemy is miles better than Atelier Yumia and there’s some interesting worldbuilding going on.

No significant progress this week, just a little bit of Witch on the Holy Night and Astalon: Tears of the Earth.

Tempted to start Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian because I think it’s a game that will work better with my current mood.

There’s also storage costs.

In a world where games can easily be dozens of GB and storage is at a premium (thanks, AI companies) having physical media with most of the game data on it makes it a lot easier to juggle between games.

SP is always your bottleneck since you have healing spells from the beginning (Morgana comes with Dia).

Which is why it gets easier later on to complete palaces in one go, some confidants will get you access to SP regen accessories and ways to create SP recovery items.

Wanted to do it all in one day, but don’t think it was possible.

It’s possible for certain palaces, but others have story-related moments where you’re forced to go back to the real world and come back again in another day.

I did all the palaces in P5R in the minimum amount of days (in other words, only went back midway if the story forced me), but it was more of a personal challenge since I was already familiar with the game due to me beating “vanilla” P5 in the past.

It’s honestly a major pain in the first couple palaces since you don’t have good options for refilling SP, and probably not worth it unless you want to challenge yourself, but became fairly easy to do on later ones.

Also worth mentioning that even if you’re aiming to max confidants taking an extra day in early palaces won’t really change much, the biggest time “optimizations” come from things in the real world.

@slimerancher@lemmy.world I definitely recommend reading the first spoiler above. Missing that makes you lose a huge chunk of content, it’s bad enough that I always say “spoilers be damned” and tell that to any friend of mine that plays P5R.

You cannot complete all confidants

It’s definitely possible, I did it my first run through Royal with some time left over. But I agree that this game is better enjoyed if you don’t stress trying to get all confidants maxed.

The easiest option if you want to play MTG without the need to keep updating is to buy some Commander Preconstructed decks (ideally from the same set) and keep them unmodified.

These decks meant to be played against each other and usually well balanced. Just find a collection with aesthetics that appeal to you, get 3-4 and have fun. There’s the option of “in-universe” sets with classic MTG aethetics like Tarkir, Lorwyn or Bloomburrow, or “crossover” sets with popular IPs - they just released TMNT, and there’ll be Marvel and Startrek later this year.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that Commander by far the most popular way to play MTG - but also the most complex one.

It’s free-for-all multiplayer mode with politics, singleton 100-card decks and crazy interactions. If you have an MTG-playing friend they should be able to help you get started, but otherwise I’d suggest playing the free Magic Arena game which has some good tutorials, or look for Youtube videos - there’s a ton of content to help people get started.

Very little gaming time since since I’ve been busy with a Magic the Gathering project - building on a box of Premodern decks, a “nostalgia” format with only cards printed between 1995 and 2003.

I don’t have the time or interest to keep up with the crazy speed of MTG releases nowadays, so this type of format that doesn’t require updates suits me better. The idea is to have a bunch of decks ready and use it as a board game of sorts, just pick up a couple decks and play any time we feel like it.

Will still be working on this for a few more weeks, but now that I got the lists defined and I finished organizing which cards I own and which cards I need to buy/trade I should have more time for gaming again.

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

Progressing through Chapter 8.

Playing Astalon: Tears of the Earth!

Current side-game. An old-school metroidvania with 3 different characters (the classic “warrior, mage, archer” trio), each with different strenghts, weaknesses, and traversal abilities. The map design is great with interesting puzzles, the challenge is “just right” so far and bosses are fun. I think the balance between characters is not great (mage seems way better than the other two), but that’s not a major issue.

However… the checkpoint system really sucks. Health recovery is very limited and anytime you die you go back to the entrance of the castle. Sure, there’s some fast travel spots and you unlock a ton of shortcuts so getting back to where you were before will be much faster than before, but these runbacks get tedious very quickly. I’d also like to add that the key required to use the fast travel is a missable item, which is just mean in a game with this design.

That’s a massive improvement in some games for those who play handheld. Probably should’ve been there from the start, but it’s good that Nintendo finally implemented it.