Various thoughts on a variety of topics.
A young girl from the city transfers to a school in the countryside. The students there, most of whom are talking animals, suspect she may be related to a powerful wind spirit called Matasaburo.
A short fairy tale-like story presented with picturebook visuals set in the modern day.
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A story of regrets and second chances. The protagonist receives a letter from her future self, on the first day of the second year of high school, detailing events that will soon occur and the choices she made at the time which in retrospect feel like mistakes. The letter implores her to not repeat them.
The time travel aspect is essentially just a gimmick, a bit of flair to make the show stand out. For the most part it’s a normal, realism-styled school life drama/romance that takes the uncommon step of dedicating a portion of each episode to showing how its characters (may have) ended up a decade later.
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Wanting to try something new after middle school, the protagonist initially wants nothing to do with her high school’s band. Circumstances conspire against her and she ends up joining anyway with her two new friends. Together, along with an old classmate and a childhood friend, they try to improve enough to perform in the national-level competition.
This is an abridged version of 2015’s Hibike! Euphonium. It focuses primarily on the improvement of the music club as a whole, cutting out most of the dramatic subplots and romance aspects.
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An MMO-playing otaku finds out that his online wife (Ako), who’s not a very good player, is a socially awkward girl in real life who can’t separate online fantasy from offline reality. Not only that, she and the other two members of his guild all turn out to attend the same school he does. Together they try to both improve Ako’s skills in game and help her separate fantasy from reality.
The show alternates between virtual reality settings (primarily fantasy), depicting the characters’ online gaming adventures, and a modern day school setting. The comedic setup isn’t much different from an ecchi harem at the base level, the main difference being that only one of the girls is pursuing the male protagonist.
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A continuation of 2006’s D.Gray-man, this series picks up an indeterminable amount of time after the point that one ended. The protagonist(s) get their first chance to visit the Black Order’s new headquarters since being destroyed in the previous series, and Allen finds himself treated like an enemy after learning that he may no longer be alone in his own head.
The show does a decent job explaining the plot for people who may not have seen the earlier 103-episode series, but doesn’t elaborate on or explain the characters’ relationships with one another. So while you can jump right into the story here, treating it as an example of in medias res, you’ll probably not get much out of it since the character behavior/interactions are fairly central.
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Finally got around to playing though the expansions for Witcher 3 (Hearts of Stone & Blood and Wine) and Pillars of Eternity (The White March), after having touched neither game since shortly after they were released.
Pillars‘ expansion is essentially more of the same sort of content/gameplay that you’ll find in the base game. Aside from the Soulbound weapons, which are extremely powerful, and some of the new vignette sequences, which are a bit more elaborate in that they can check for specific spells/abilities, you’ll still be exploring/looting/fighting same as always. Which if you enjoyed the base game will probably be welcome enough. If you didn’t however, then it won’t really offer anything that might change your mind about the game.
The Witcher 3 expansions on the other hand do add something a bit different to the base game.
Hearts of Stone extends the Novigrad half of the main world map a little to the north and a decently large amount to the east. It fills this newly explorable space with mostly the same points of interest found in the base game, the only real difference being that bandit camps actually contain useful loot here and have their own little story linking them all (and that all enemies in the area are leveled to the mid 30s). It also adds two new types of enemies (boars and giant spiders) and of course plenty of quests… which is where the trouble lies. The sidequests are fine, but the main expansion questline (which features an old friend from the first Witcher game) is filled to the brim with extremely forced sequences and questionable content. I did enjoy the Dragon Age: Inquisition reference though.
The second expansion, Blood and Wine, adds an entirely new world map to the game (which seems to be roughly the size of the post-HoS Novigrad half of the Novigrad/Velen map). This new location is filled with both familiar and new varieties of interest points, with the most notable change being that locations near each other are often directly related. If you raid a bandit camp for example, you may find a note describing a danger lurking in a nearby abandoned location. You may even stumble into a full-blown sidequest/contract while doing a simple hidden treasure search. There are new enemies to be found here as well (banshees, barghests, a spiked drowner variety, armored moles, evil plants, panthers, vampires of all sorts, and a few of the same enemies introduced by HoS), ranging in level from the high 30’s to high 40’s, along with quite a number of new quests.
These quests should really, really be done after you finish the main game. It doesn’t seem to matter when you do HoS, but there are quite a number of reasons to not start Blood and Wine until after the Wild Hunt is no more. Similar to HoS the main questline here re-unites Geralt with some old acquaintances, though this time around it’s characters from the books rather than the games (though a couple characters from the first game show up in a particular sidequest). Pleasantly enough these quests do not force you into arguably lore-breaking situations and give a decent amount of leeway in how you can go about resolving them. Honestly, the only negative thing I can say about Blood and Wine is that the English voice acting is extremely uneven; I suspect it may be related to the accents, but a good majority of the ambient dialog just sounds incredibly half-assed/jokey.
Two of the main comments I’ve seen regarding this game are that it’s hard, and that it’s full of bugs. Well, perhaps the earlier versions were, but the only bugs I’ve come across in the Special Edition (with DLC installed) are occasional random freezes… which completely disappeared after adding -force-gfx-direct to the shortcut’s target line. I’m only a little over halfway through the third chapter though, so maybe that will change later.
As for difficulty, yes there are some sidequests that are notably hard (the Dwarf Games and Heart of the Forest quests come to mind). The majority of the main quests up to this point however aren’t particularly difficult so long as you pay attention to the battlefield (always look for interactive objects), don’t neglect buff/debuff spells, and don’t screw up your character(s) builds. That said, it is very easy to screw up a character’s build.
See, the thing about this game is that its statistic system’s a bit overly complicated. There are 8 Attributes and every action except attacking/defending rolls against 3 of them. If any of those rolls fails then the action as a whole fails, and spells in particular rely on all sorts of different attribute combinations. This means that an effective character will tend to only focus on at most 4 attributes and then 3-4 abilities related to those attributes; trying to be a jack of all trades just flat-out does not work here. ‘Dual classing’ (there are no actual classes) is certainly possible though and in fact happens to be a pretty good idea since you don’t get any permanent party members explicitly built for handling archery/traps.
You get two pure mages (the latter of which can be turned into an archer relatively easily) and two pure fighters (the latter of which, again, can be turned into an archer fairly easily). The archer you get toward the end of the first chapter only sticks around until near the end of the second. Why even bother with archery? Because the Triple Shot ability is insanely powerful. Of course, you won’t want more than two archery characters (one for bows and the other for crossbows) as otherwise you risk running out of ammo; merchants have limited inventories and don’t restock. Something else to keep in mind during character creation is that the flashback sequences no longer force you to wield an axe, so the rampant advice to always put some points into axes/maces is no longer valid.
But what about the game itself? Is it fun/interesting? It’s okay. The dialog and quests have been pretty simple so far, but there are hints that the plot might take an interesting turn, many sidequests give you multiple ways to resolve them, and quite a few of the battles have impressively elaborate constructions (the optional and not-so-optional arena battles in particular stand out). While I certainly wouldn’t pay $40 for it, it’s well worth the current $4.49 sale price.
I have not played much of Heretic Kingdoms – The Inquisition (originally titled Kult: Heretic Kingdoms), just the opening Monastery map. Basically it struck me as Diablo with much fewer character building options. Allegedly there’s more to it than basic Action RPG mechanics, and hopefully that’s true because without Diablo‘s skill system the combat looks like it will get real old real fast.
The reason I stopped playing the above so quickly was because Hand of Fate grabbed my attention. This game is not quite like anything I’ve played before; it’s half board game (composed of cards you collect and build decks from) and half arena-hack&slash. While the combat is for the most part fairly simple (enemies basically attack you one at a time, you can dodge/counter/attack), it’s also remarkably well detailed and the arenas are nicely varied. The board/card game part is the real draw though, where you get to travel a series of paths made out of encounter cards pulled randomly from a deck you build beforehand while managing various resources and the protagonist’s equipment. Most encounters provide a choice and can result in combat, a pick-a-card minigame, or resource trading/acquisition. Traveling the randomly generated paths is interesting enough on its own, but combined with the unlocking mechanic (where landing on one card will unlock another related card if you meet certain requirements) it becomes quite addicting.
At the moment I’ve defeated the King of Dust and have unlocked all possible cards at this point except the Merchant Guard Fate’s (while the Iron Hunger cards can theoretically be unlocked at this point, I don’t think it’s likely in practice). Something I realized very late, shortly after defeating the King of Dust, is that you should replay each story point until all available cards are unlocked before moving on. This is because as you progress your deck size gets larger, making it less likely you’ll draw the card(s) you need to unlock the further you progress. It was a real pain unlocking chains like Blood Auction/Charity and the various Fate’s cards halfway through the story… although this turned out to be the perfect time to unlock the Lion Prince’s.
So far my favorite Fates are Shadow Agent (easy pick-a-card segments) and Lion Prince (the health gain mechanic), though Iron Hunger may make the list once I get the hang of building a deck around it. The least fun have been the Nomad (sketchy start), Monk (no gold gain is a real pain), and Apprentice (easy mode is really easy). Quest-wise the Kraken chain stands out for its set-piece end battle (killing the lizards is a trap), The White Minotaur stands out for the insane number of pick-a-card segments you have to win, Decent Into Hell stands out for the unexpected requirements of the second-to-last card (a high-damage weapon and at least three rings in your inventory) along with its rather unfair final battle, and The White Council stands out for how anticlimactic it ends.
Starting out I suggest unlocking the various Fate’s cards (most added by the Wildcards expansion), particularly Apprentice to teach you the basics of combat, Soldier to give you practice building combos, and the first two Warlord cards to unlock a fantastic helm and solid artifact card. Then play with the Shadow Agent Fate for a bit until you get the hang of how the pick-a-card minigame works (it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the card shuffling wasn’t random). After that point just try out each of the Fates until you unlock all their cards to figure out which ones are the most enjoyable for you. Note though that Shadow Agent can’t be fully unlocked until after the Jack of Skulls, Nomad until after the King of Dust, and Warlord/Monk until after the King of Skulls. Also, while theoretically possible earlier, to unlock the Lion Prince & Iron Hunger cards you’ll probably want to wait until after defeating the King of Dust (Lion Prince) and Jack of Scales (Iron Hunger).
Well, Gothic 3 is now finished. Went with the neutral ending and didn’t bother with any of the ‘Destroy the Rebels!’ or ‘Liberate the City from the Orcs!’ quests. Ended up with the following naked stats:
The snow area is a pain in the ass, both because there are tons of enemies and because it’s set up vertically as well as horizontally. I actually stopped looting things here and switched over to a magic-first attack strategy because there’s just far too much stuff to kill and melee is such a crapshoot. It’s very grindy. Not helping matters is that the neutral ending requires you to walk across literally half the world map (from the northeast corner of the snow area to the far west midlands area). At least the Hailstorm and Time Bubble spells are both pretty good. Some things to be aware of if you decide to play this game:
Calling this the ‘midpoint’ is a bit disingenuous, since this is an open world game similar to the Elder Scrolls series and doesn’t have specific story chapters like its prequel. However, I do have 6 Fire Chalices and equipment in the middle/high-middle range of effectiveness (twin crafted/sharpened Bastard Swords, Ranger Bow, & Light Assassin Armor). So, having just unlocked and reached Ishtar I figured this is as good a place as any to mark as the halfway point.
When I first started out I tried to ‘clear’ the area around each new populated area before moving on. Due to the static leveled nature of the game this turned out to be quite inefficient and I switched to getting from town to town as quickly as possible while only really exploring the specific areas quests sent me to. Picking up the Quick Learning skill as soon as possible was in fact a very good idea; waiting so long was a mistake and you can get it even earlier than 9th level if you rush from town to town to collect all the Ancient Tablets being sold. I ended up making three more mistakes though. The first was learning the Pickpocket skills, the second was learning the Frostwave spell, and the third was learning both Sleep and Knockout (Sleep is exponentially better if you have the Master Thief and Water Mage skills).
Pickpocket works similarly to how it did last game, except success is based on your Thieving level and you don’t get experience for succeeding. This isn’t so bad on its own, what makes it worthless is that with the Master Thief skill and Sleep spell you can can steal everything a target has on them with no chance of failure. 15 LP for a chance at stealing small amounts of Gold is quite obviously far worse than 10 LP for being able to steal a target’s entire inventory essentially at will. As for Frostwave, the damage is considerably reduced the further away the targets are, and the Freeze effect doesn’t last very long and ends immediately if the target is attacked. So it’s basically useless.
Aside from those issues and the Russian roulette nature of melee combat it’s been more or less smooth sailing through the desert area in my self-appointed quest to unlock Ishtar. In retrospect I’m not really sure why I wanted to unlock it since I planned to use a Master Sword rather than learn Master Two-Weapon Fighting… but then again maybe I will learn it since making a Master Sword is incredibly difficult; while the recipe can be easily bought, one of the ingredients apparently only shows up in sequential rare chest loot. Character stats at this point are as follows (Big Game Hunter and Resist Heat are from equipment):
My path from here is murky. I need to try out the Ice Explosion and Hailstorm spells to see if either does decent damage at a decent range, and if so then I’ll probably try to get Ancient Knowledge up to 300 for Mana Regeneration. Otherwise I guess I’ll pick up the Bless Weapon spell, raise Dex to 200 for Master Two Weapon Fighting, and then try to find some better swords.
