Nintendo

Finished Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana!

Most of my comments about this game are on previous week's post. There was an annoying difficulty spike on the final boss, but overall a great game that I can easily recommend.

Playing Fantasian Neo Dimension!

It feels like I'm playing a long-lost JRPG from the PS1 era and I'm loving it.

The "diorama" visuals are an interesting take on the prerendered backgrounds from old days, with the constrast between them and the 3D models creating a very nostalgic look. There's that classic exploration where you'll keep finding items at every corner of the city, something I adore but you don't see much in modern JRPGs.

Battle system has some great ideas, Iike how you can "curve" a spell around a tankier enemy to hit a mage on the back row. Being able to "store" enemies and fight them in a batch is a fantastic idea, not only it helps exploration flow better without the constant breaks from random battles, but also makes even weaker enemies offer some challenge as you're often fighting 20-30 of them in a row.

Story... is not much to talk about so far, but I'm enjoying the character interactions. There's also short VN-like "memories" that seem reminiscent of the "A Thousand Years of Dreams" sections from Lost Odyssey, though unfortunately they don't have the same amazing writing and emotional depth. But at least they do a good job developing character backstories.

One thing I'm a bit underwhelmed is the music, mainly because I heard a ton of praise for it. It's a definitely solid OST with some great highlights, but IMO it's nowhere near the masterpiece I heard some people claiming it to be.

Finally, there's two main annoyances worth commenting - one is the controls can be a bit wonky, they don't adjust the way you'd expect when the camera shifts and you have to stop moving if you want them to "reset". The second is that loading times on the Switch are a tad high, with battles taking 5-6s in average to load, but that's only of a problem in the first 1-2h of the game, as the ability to "batch" battles makes this a much smaller issue.

Replaying Tales of Graces f Remastered!

I know I shouldn't be playing two JRPGs in parallel, but since I'm going on vacations starting next week I can probably manage it? 😆 But I love this game, have beaten it 3 or 4 times and the moment I saw the Switch version I knew another playthrough was coming.

While the plot of this game is fairly basic (even for Tales standard), the gameplay is incredibly fun and there's a lot of diversity in playstyles between the characters. The cast is great and has some good chemistry, including some of my favorite skits in the series.

One really interesting feature of this version is that it has the "Grade Shop" where you can buy game modifiers like increased XP gain unlocked from the start - this used to be only a NG+ feature. I chose not to use it but it's definitely a welcome addition as it can make the game easier for those wanting a more relaxed experience, or simply help cut down on grinding for completionists.

Finished Astral Chain, played couple of post-game arena-combat missions, but ignored the rest. Overall, a very good game, the story wasn’t anything out of the world (except literally speaking), but it wasn’t anything bad either. The gameplay and combat was really good.

That game was a ton of fun. We need more good tokusatsu-inspired games.