There’s only two I’m watching for certain:

• A Wild Last Boss Appeared!
• May I Ask for One Final Thing?

There’s a couple more I may give a try later, but I’m still going though a backlog of series from the last two seasons.

No, didn’t do a lot of gaming this week and wanted to focus on finishing CrossCode. But I just beat it during lunch break, so I’ll resume that one now.

Playing CrossCode!

On the last stretch, was trying to finish it yesterday but I reached a fairly long and complex puzzle and decided I’d rather stop for the night. 😄 But will almost certainly finish this during the weekend.

I turned combat difficulty all the way down using the sliders in the assists options, which is a fantastic feature I wish was included in all harder games. I don’t think that combat in the game is that hard, but I was underleved due to rushing and there’s some fairly obvious “stat/gear check” moments I was struggling to get past before I did that.

Harvestella is a very flawed game, but I enjoyed my time with it. You’re right that the farming aspects are not as big as people would expect from the way it was marketed, they only takes a few minutes of the daily loop.

The biggest draw of the game is the worldbuilding and story, while gameplay and technical aspects are definitely mid.

~48h including a lot of exploration. There’s certainly things I missed, but I don’t think there’s any “obvious” unexplored spots left in the map.

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Finished Hollow Knight: Silksong!

Only got the “regular” ending, but it’s good enough for me - the game was already getting frustrating and I don’t think I’d have much fun if I tried to go to the “true” ending.

I don’t think I have much to add to what I said about the game last week. It’s a fantastic game, but also one that requires a high tolerance for difficulty and punishing design. Highly recommend anyone interested in the game to play it on PC so you have access to mods in case you need the lower the difficulty or tweak some of the game’s annoyances.

Playing CrossCode!

Resumed this one yesterday and I’m currently in the “lighning” temple. I did lower the enemy damage in the options to make the game a bit more enjoyable to me (in particular after almost getting burned ou by the difficulty in Silksong), I’m using 60% but will tweak this depending on how the battles feel.

The temples are some of the most fun parts of this game, and I’m pleased to know that I have do finish two of these to proceed. I’m also in Chapter 8 (out of 10 according to some Googling), so probably not that much left to finish the game.

No progress on Witch on the Holy Night this week since I was focused on finishing Silksong.

That’s my undestanding at least.

I do the same “stocking” of games for the backlog, and at least for me it has a lot to do with wanting the physical version (which can get hard to find later), or getting a really good deal in a digital version.

Most of the game is amazing, but there’s also incredibly frustrating decisions and moments that can drain all the fun you were having. Its design is very uncompromising - “this is going to be crazy hard and punishing, and I don’t care if you’re not having fun with this”.

Too many things feel overtuned for extra challenge, getting stronger (more life, more damage) is a slow and difficult process, so sometimes you get in a situation where there’s no good option except “suck it up and get good”. But the game makes even that annoying! If you’re stuck you want to experiment with different subweapon/equipment configurations, but if you keep dying you quickly run out of shards to rebuild the tools and have stop and go farm weak enemies to refill.

If you’re still interested in this game I’d highly recommend going for PC, as there’s already a bunch of mods to make it more accessible.

Bold to release Mario Galaxy 1+2 on Switch when they already released Galaxy 1 as part of a three pack for the 35th anniversary. I won’t be buying Galaxy 1 again just for some extra story book pages.

Good news: It looks like you can also buy them individually:

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/super-mario-galaxy-plus-super-mario-galaxy-2-switch/

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/super-mario-galaxy-switch/

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/super-mario-galaxy-2-switch/

The non-linear aspect of this game is really good! I’ve also done quite a few things out of the “expected” order without realizing it.

Yesterday I was doing some exploring and found out the “alternate” path to the Citadel through Sinner’s Road, and from what I’ve heard you can either have Last Judge or Phantom as the final “Act 1” boss depending on the route you take which is really interesting.

Took a break this week from CrossCode since I was getting a little bored with the game. Will resume it after I finish Silksong.

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

I should be putting more time into this (Aoko is such a fun main character), but I haven’t been in a great mood for reading. Still making small progress here and there.

Playing Hollow Knight: Silksong!

This game is amazing, but it’s not something I can recommend to everyone - there’s a line between “challenging” and “punishing” and I think it crosses that line way too often.

It inherits a lot from Hollow Knight, including some of the controversial aspects. Game is super difficult, save spots are sparse (and sometimes quite distant from bosses), the mapping system is the same with all the annoying “must track the map seller in each area”, “must spend equipment slots to see your position on the map” and so on.

I’m finding Hornet a lot of fun to play with. She’s fast (in particular once you get the dash ability), and her moveset is flashy and acrobatic. The inclusion of “crests” that let you swap her moveset is really cool, and people who miss the Knight’s moveset will be happy to know that you can unlock an option to play that way. “Tools” that act as sub-weapons are another great addition, though the fact that they have limited uses and eat resources to recharge can feel limiting. I also love the new “healing” system - it’s more “all or nothing” since you eat most of your meter to heal, but you get 3 life immediately, meaning you have to take less breaks to heal and boss battles get better paced.

Bosses have been generally quite fun and well designed, though I hate the ones who have summons. Savage Beastfly is by far the worst one so far due to the small arena, big hitboxes, and being very RNG-based since some of this summons are far more dangerous than others.

In-game economy is bad. There’s two “currencies” and you always feels starved from one of them. Having to occasionally do “farming” sessions to recover my stash before progressing is one of the worst parts of this game.

The overall “feel” of growth over the course of the game is also lacking in some aspects, with the “movement” upgrades being amazing and “combat” ones underwhelming. You start with 5 life, and by the time you manage to go up to 6 there will be so many enemies dealing 2 damage that you went from “dying in 3 hits” to “still dying in 3 hits”. The first weapon upgrade is so minor that there’s some early-game enemies that still take the exact same number of hits to die. And BTW, did I mention that enemies in this game are annoyingly tanky? Having to hit 4-5 times is incredibly common, and this can get really annoying when dealing with flying enemies that love to stay out of your melee range.

Right now I’m deep into Act 2, just got the “grappling hook-like” upgrade and I’m exploring the upper areas of the citadel.

The good:

• Galaxy 1+2 remaster
• Prime 4 release date
• Hades 2 release date, and confirmation that it supports Switch 1
• New Fire Emblem

The bad:

• Nintendo getting more agressive with paid DLC… Bananza getting it 2 months after launch, and for Pokemon it’s pre-launch!

Not sure how I feel about the two combat systems, feels like I really don’t want to go into turn-based mode because I’ll take a lot of damage, but it also feels like the game really wants me to go into turn-based mode in order to deal damage.

The last two games (Daybreak 1/2) use the same system, and I used the “action” mode for two things:

• Killing weak enemies fast (which is a really good QOL/time-saving feature)
• Stunning stronger enemies so I entered turn-based mode with advantage, which was usually enough to finish them without taking damage

Would you say CrossCode is still worth a play?

So far I’d say yes, the main story (in particular the temples) is excellent. The issue I’m having is that I spent too much time on the optional parts to eventually figure out they aren’t very appealing to me.

Edit: Oh, and when are you starting Silksong? 😛

Already bought it and played 15min just to get a taste of it. 🙂 But I’m trying to resist going too deep on it before I finish CrossCode.

Finished Blade Chimera!

Another “short but good” metroidvania from Team Ladybug.

Fantastic visuals (I really love the animations), flawless performance even on the Switch 1, excellent controls and gameplay. I also enjoyed the flexibility it offers in combat, melee/ranged/magic all feel good to use and well-balanced, leaving the choice of which one to use more to your strategy and personal preferences.

There’s some rather unique choices in this game, with all the “classic” metroidvania movement improvements like sliding and double-jump being optional and acquired from a skill tree as you level up. They also included an amazing fast-travel option, which is a “Warp” mechanic that lets you jump to virtually any room in the map and makes backtracking non-existent - and you can unlock that the first hour of the the game!

Overall I had a great time even though I still prefer the other games from the same developer (Touhou Luna Nights and Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth) .

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

Still on the “slow progress” stage.

Playing CrossCode!

Reached Chapter 8. Story took a surprising turn with some interesting twists and unexpected emotional moments.

But to be honest I’m rushing things because I’m starting to get bored with this game - while there’s a lot of good stuff in it I also think it’s overstaying its welcome. Haven’t touched most recent sidequests, I’m no longer bothering with the environmental/plataforming puzzles, and will probably lower the difficulty to speed up battles.

I think the main reason is that sidequests and environmental puzzes don’t feel rewarding, you spend a lot of time on them to just get some material for crafting/trades that you don’t really care much about.

Including a free Switch 2 upgrade!

Also Steam, and I’ve heard reports of instabilities in PSN and Xbox Store too.

Will just see the review to make sure it isn’t too bad.

From the demo I’m not concerned, looks like Falcom really put their love into this one.