Phelpssan

Fairly easy, there's a plenty of fast-travel spots around the map and some upgrades like the double jump and slide unlock a lot of shortcuts.

I wanted to spend my last weekend of vacations playing Trails Through Daybreak II but my copy is stuck in Customs. 🙁

Finished Rabi-Ribi!

Cutest metroidvania I've ever played, and it's quite a good game too! Extremely non-linear and open, I finished the "main quest" with only 50% map completion! Between that and some post-game content there's still plenty for me to do here. Oh, and it also has a ridiculously catchy OST that will definitely get stuck in your head.

Had a ton of fun with this one. Easy recommendation to metroidvania fans, and I even added Tevi from the same developer to my wishlist.

Playing Fantasian Neo Dimension!

Slow progress but still following my plan of doing short sessions completing a quest or two. Getting brickwalled by some of the optional bosses though, got my entire party one-shot from full life a couple times already which is never fun. 🙁

Double-posting since I forgot to add this to my initial post, but I replayed Metroid Prime when the Switch port was released and I was quite impressed. Yeah, it has some outdated aspects like the map, but it's kinda crazy how well it plays considering it's more than 20 years old. The port is also really impressive, one of the best looking games on the console while also running smoothly at 60FPS.

But my favorite thing about the game is the atmosphere. It nails perfectly the feeling of a lonely explorer in a wild, dangerous planet.

It’s always nice when a game respects your time.

Definitely. And while writing that I was thinking that main I issue I have with Fantasian is that a lot of things in the second half of the game feel designed in a way that wastes your time.

High random battle frequency with low rewards, gimmicky bosses which you often have to fight twice, constant need to shuffle around in menus rebuilding your party with different skills/equipments to be able to work around those gimmicks.

Finished Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist!

What an amazing game. A massive improvement in almost all areas over Ender Lilies, which was already a damn good metroidvania.

I love most things about it, starting with near perfection in all technical aspects - flawless controls, beautiful visuals and music, and stable 60fps performance on the Switch. Exploration is an absolute joy with the main movement upgrades (dash and double-jump) getting unlocked early in the game alongside with a well designed open world where you almost always have multiple paths to explore.

Another great thing is how this game respects your time, making backtracking as painless as possible. Fast travel between save points is unlocked early and the map lets you know when a room was fully explored so you can try to find as much as possible in your first run though. The map is also quite detailed including information on whether or not you have the abilities required to open a specific door and even the basic platform layout of each room, making it easy to tell if you are ready to traverse it or not.

Combat is really good with a lot of different loadouts to experiment with, though the balance between combat abilities is uneven with some abilities being far better than others. And my one big issue with the game is also related to combat - I hate the system of having a weak protagonist that dies in 2-3 hits combined with a bunch of healing items. But I know that's popular among games in this genre, and I knew what I was getting into when I purchased this one so I can't complain much about it.

I highly recommend this game, easy 9/10 and a must-play for fans of this genre.

Playing Fantasian Neo Dimension!

Resumed this one after finishing Ender Magnolia. Doing good progress and I'm still having fun with it, but I have to pace myself to avoid getting burnt due to the high random battle frequency and difficulty on bosses, so I've been aiming for shorter sessions doing only 1-2 quests.

Since the second half is mostly open-world it's hard to say how far I am in the game. I do have the "Communication Network" area unlocked which seems to be the path to the final boss, but it's recommending level 50 which is 5 or so above what I am right now, so I guess I should still go exploring and sidequesting more in preparation for it.

Playing Rabi-Ribi!

Current side-game, a very cute metroidvania which comes with high praise from fans of the genre. Only played a little bit and finished the prologue since I'm focused on Fantasian right now.

Looking great and from the same people who did SoR4? Hell yeah, I'm hyped.

I’ve got to (probably) the last “to be continued” of Great Ace Attorney collection. The twists at the end are definitely hitting the Herlock Sholmes ideal of whatever you haven’t eliminated is the truth, no matter how improbable. I’m in the middle of walking to the ice cream shop or I’d be racing to the end right now.

GAA2 is so good, IMO one of the best AA games alongside AA3 and AAI2. That final case also has one of my favorite moments in the whole series.

I don’t think there will be any gameplay patch for this kind of thing, so guess will have to play as it is.

I'm a bit more hopeful here, they seem to be doing good post-launch support with the control fixes and major Switch performance improvements in the last patch.

Random battles and difficulty in the second half are by far the biggest and loudest complaints you'll see for this game, so I think there's a chance we'll get some tweaks to this in a future patch.

Favourite game of the genre

Favorite in recent years. 😅 Which is still a big deal considering how many good games we've been getting in this genre.

Worth mentioning that I'm on the minority of the metroidvania fans that don't love Hollow Knight - I've beaten it, think it's a great game, and I can certainly see why people put it on on a pedestal, but it didn't click with me as well as other games in the genre did.

A bit sad to hear about the grind in Fantasian, I am not a big fan of grinding, or random battles,

The worst part that you don't need to grind, the game simply doesn't give you the tools to avoid it.

There's no mechanism to turn random battles off or reduce their frequency. There is a tool to empty your "saved" battles for a fee, but that requires you to warp to a specific town which means it's really useful if you're at a fast travel checkpoint.

I recall while you liked Ender Lillies, you had some complaints about the game (unless I am thinking of someone else), does it fix all those issues?

I found my old comments about Lilies and I only complained a bit about the difficulty, which souds about right from what I remember of the game, it had some brutal sections where it crossed from "challenging" into "frustrating" but other than that was excellent.

So far Magnolia has been "just right" for me on difficulty - I've died a lot both during exploring and bosses, but so far never got frustrated and/or had to take a break from the game due to this. If they manage to keep this balance until the end this may honestly be my favorite game of this genre in recent years.

Put my Tales of Graces f replay on the backburner to focus on other games. Will still go through it slowly.

Playing Fantasian Neo Dimension!

Quite a lot of progress in this one. And now I can see why the second half of the game is highly divisive.

It goes from a linear story to a more open-ended game, throwing you back into the world with only 3 characters and vaguely defined goals of "go explore, find your missing friends, defeat the bad guy". Story beats gets faily sparse with a huge focus on exploration and combat. Bosses get a huge spike in difficulty and are also very "gimmicky", they feel designed with the idea that you'll lose to them once to learn the boss' trick then rebuild your party around it to try again, but I didn't find most gimmicks interesting or fun so far.

The changes above are not necessarily bad, but one thing that absolutely sucks in the second half are the random battles. The game gets extremely anti-grinding, giving close to zero experience when fighting weaker foes, but the random battle frequency is so high you will reach that virtual "level cap" without trying... and still have to keep fighting enemies constantly for very little reward. This is both boring and frustrating, even if the feature to "batch" enemies helps mitigate the problem.

On a positive note I love the new skill tree you get, it adds an interesting customization layer to and it's great how you can freely respec as you learn more about which skills work better for your playstyle, or simply because you need to shift your strategy for a particular boss.

Playing Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Picked this up as a side-game for when I need a break from Fantasian, and I'm extremely impressed by it so far. Ender Lilies was already a good game and this one improves on it in almost every way with with better movement, combat, and exploration. Difficulty seems to be toned down as well, which I see as a positive but YMMV.

Also, it looks beautiful and runs flawlessly on the Switch.

Oooh, vacations! How many do you have?

30 days/year, and I'm taking all of them at once. Since I take a long time to unwind I always need a long stretch of vacations to recover properly.

Slow week for gaming.

It's my first week of vacations but I've been really stressed/anxious recently and I find it very hard to "wind down" quickly to be able to do longer playing sessions. Hopefully I'll be more relaxed next week to put energy the two games below and try to finish at least Fantasian before Trails through Daybreak 2 releases.

Replaying Tales of Graces f Remastered!

Good progress here, finished the desert section and arrived at the Arena.

Playing Fantasian Neo Dimension!

Very minor progress on this one, but there's news worth commenting. Last week I mentioned some control annoyances and long loading times, and there was a patch this week addressing both.

Control issues were fixed, and while it's not listed in the patch notes the battle loading times are down 35-40% from my estimates. This will definitely make it more enjoyable when I resume playing this one properly.