Played Darksiders 3 some more.
Figured out what happens to souls after you die, a phantom / ghost like thingy start flying near the place, you just destroy it and get back the souls. Got a new powerup, and am at a place with many enemies. Turned it off the game when I kept dying. Will get back to it this weekend.
Also played some Xuan Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains.
So the game is apparently a port of the mobile version, which basically gives you lots of XP so you level up faster, making the game much easier. Which I like, since these older RPGs can be pretty tough.
The game has random encounters, which I am not a fan of, but you get the option to “Auto Attack” which makes these fights much faster, and with increased XP, it keeps the things moving fast. There is also a “Tame” mechanic which allows you to capture different monsters, and then with “Fusion system” you can merge different monsters or items to get different monsters or upgrade your equipment. You can also summon the monsters in battle, and they can help you attack the enemy.
There are also many side-quests and puzzles, but they are quite obtuse if you aren’t used to these older games. The quests doesn’t appear as anything special, you just talk to NPCs and they talk like other NPCs but mention some problem in it, so you have to fix their problem or whatever, without any log or marker or anything. Took me a bit getting used to, and actually missed a few side-quests in the first area.
The story and the world is pretty good though, even with subpar translation and the way font formatting is.
So far, I’ll recommend it if you like older RPGs with good stories, and are willing to deal with some dated mechanics.
What about all of you? What have you been playing and/or plan to play?
Playing Trails Beyond the Horizon!
Quite a bit of progress, I’m on the latter half of Act 2 having just finished the second part of the Rean route.
Seems like the route splits aren’t quite like Reverie, with Van’s side taking most of the playtime (I’d say his team gets 50-60% of the game), but despite their reduced playtime the other two routes have been far more interesting. The end of latest Rean section brought a major reveal that has me extremely interested in direction the story is going alongside a long-waited battle where they nailed both custscenes and challenge.
Rean Route 2 Boss
We finally got the Rean vs Shizuna battle and it was pure hype. And having a 4-way boss battle with her, Kurogane, Kincaid and Ashladd was not something I was expecting to hit mid-game.
One thing I haven’t commented before is the quality of the Switch 1 version, which has some really odd problems - it keeps going back and forth between “this looks pretty good” and “extremely low-res and blurry” very abruptly and all the time. It’s very distracting, and given how much worse it looks than Daybreak 1/2 (which AFAIK runs on the same engine) I think they messed up something in this port.
Fully focused on Horizon so no progress on other games.
Hopefully they will fix the issue.
You’ve mentioned your reasoning before, but as much Switch games as you play, why not just upgrade to Switch 2? Won’t suggest that to everyone but you primarily play on Switch, right?
I will pick one up eventually, but right now it’s being held back by the combo of “only Bananza as an exclusive I care about”, “high console price”, “high SD Express price” and “game key carts”.
Besides Bananza the only Switch 2 games I have in my wishlist are “Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave” (no release date yet) and “The Adventures of Elliot” (June). All recently announced ports fall into “if I cared about those I’d already own a PS5”.
$450 for the Switch 2 is pricy, adding another $200 if I simply want to have the same 1TB I have on the Switch 1 makes it sting a lot more. Simply letting me use my current SD card for my existing Switch 1 library would’ve been a huge deal.
Game keys make everything much worse - I refuse to buy those as a game collector, so for a lot of games I’d end up picking up the Switch 1 version anyway (this includes Trails Beyond the Horizon) or wait for a heavily discounted digital (meaning I wouldn’t be playing them for 1-2 years). And it also adds to the storage problem too.