That’s just having a friend and is perfectly normal. Your ex has no say in that matter.

The shampoo, I think, ages after 336 hours. 100% completion seems like madness. Luckily, I’ve botched that already, so I’m not tempted.

As for breaking items: I usually hate those, too. Both the recent Zelda games and the last Animal Crossing suffered from them. But they work here, for reasons I can’t explain. For the most part, I got better items long before the old ones perished.

Having played Midnight Suns for so long, would you recommend it? I’m interested in the gameplay, but I don’t like Marvel at all. At least the movies - I couldn’t get through a single Avengers one. Haven’t tried any comics thus far.

As for my own week, I continued with Baten Kaitos. Thus far, with each passing hour, I like the game more. It’s just so charming and there are so many unique things about it. This week, let’s talk about cards. Everything in this game comes in the form of card:

• Your battle deck, of course, and there is one for every character you can get.
• Out of battle healing items
• Equipment
• Quest items / Overworld puzzle items
• Special items

And these cards have so many weird things about them. Let’s focus on the actual battle mechanics:

• Each card has at least one number, but some have multiple from which you can select each time you play them. You get percentage based bonus damage/healing for pairs or straights - think of Poker. You just have to play them in order in a single turn - called a combo. The bonus is only applied if all your cards played belong to a pair/straight, therefore playing less cards can do more damage. At the start, you can only play 2 cards a turn, but these increase with your class level.
• A lot of cards have elements attached to them. Damage is calculated for the whole turn, not per card. Because of that, they can cancel out each other! Play a fire and a water spell in a single turn, and they negate each other’s damage.
• Some stronger cards can only be played after your combo has enough cards played already, and these usually end the combo, regardless if you could otherwise play more cards.
• Based on your affinity with a character, cards can temporarily transform mid-combo into stronger attacks.
• There’s a crafting system built into your battle system. Playing a combo of a flower bud and a light spell? You get a bloomed flower card after the battle. A lot of the cards used for crafting recipes do nothing on their own. And these things can get complex fast - want steam rice? Play rice, a pot, a water spell and a fire spell in a single turn! (I think, I haven’t managed yet.) Hints for recipes are written into a lot of the card descriptions.
• Cards age. Most healing cards are food based. After a few hours, they permanently perish and turn into debuff or damage items! This does apply to other cards too. Your nice flaming swords? After a while, they turn into normal ones.
• Once your deck is exhausted, you skip a turn to reshuffle your old cards into your deck. The same happens to your enemies, which adds more decisions to boss battles, which can last awhile.

This results in a deck building and battle system which, I think, won’t get stale even for minor encounters. There’s always an interesting decision to be made, and you constantly get new cards, too. I think there are about a thousand different ones in the game.

Even grinding comes in different forms! Of course, you can grind for EXP or money. Grinding could also mean fighting weak enemies to craft a lot of cards. Due to the ageing, it could technically also mean waiting for certain cards to grow stronger. Conversely, if you ignore the crafting, you could get weaker by grinding too much since all your healing items spoil!

Weder noch, man stellt es so in die Ecke, wie es ist.

Aber wenn man den Zwang verspürt, dann nach Etikette. Leere Flaschen wandern zurück in den Kasten und nicht alle Flaschen behalten den Deckel. Ich will doch Flaschen mit Gewinde nicht anders sortieren als Flaschen mit Kronkorken?

You can’t put that in quotation marks like I ever said something about wasting time. You just have to include all that time in your cost calculation.

No way they would find something that’s not even more disappointing within a single week. Except maybe Silksong - but surely that would have been shown last week.

You can save so much money with CAD if you neither factor in your time to actually learn it or the cost of the printer itself.

Makes crime even better in comparison.

To be fair, before that I was already afraid to go there too. There are so many people with guns and so many mass shootings, my chances of getting shot would skyrocket.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt, for the most part, I’ve mostly enjoyed games released in the third generation and didn’t touch anything past the seventh. The increasing amount of handholding turned me off and degrading mega evolutions from the once advertised evolution of the gameplay formular to a mere gimmick broke the last straw.

That being said: The Gamecube games hands down. The intro cutscene to Colosseum has more story than some generations did in their entirety and instead of you just stumbling into the plot you are actually an integral part of it. As an added bonus, both games feature final bosses that actually fight back. I think Colosseum is the only Pokemon game I ever struggled in.

Of course, taking everything Pokemon into account, Mystery Dungeon is the only true answer, but I wanted to go with an traditional RPG first.

If you insist on mainline games, you’re probably right about the fifth generation. These games have everything you would need, but the execution itself is fumbled - and it has to be, since they questioned their own franchise at its core. Logically speaking, N is right and everyone else is wrong.

There are some interesting things in other generations, but it usually feels tacked on and isn’t actually relevant for 95% of the game. Like, the sixth generation had some nice ideas - but they are mostly implied or retold, without you having any urgency in the matter. Once again why I chose the GC games, two of the few games with you being part of the plot. In the early mainline games, you mostly happen to be there when story happens, in the later games, you sometimes only get told that story happens somewhere.

Reading other opinions? On my echo chamber platform of choice?! /s

Reddit? The site with a search so bad, I had to use external search engines? Great idea.

Also, Reddit offers their own AI Q&A? The site that prominently poisend many Google AI summaries? What are they even smoking at this point?

Ist doch logisch? Die restlichen Fellys.

Still working on my backlog. Judging by yesterdays Direct, I’m still in no rush for a Switch 2.

So, I’ve finally starten Baten Kaitos!

I didn’t play much yet as I’ve been quite sick this week, but so far it seems fun. The battle system is kind of Slay the Spire, with an added timer after your first played card and bonus damage for Poker combos. Once again, think Slay the Spire cards, but each also has a random number from 1-12 assigned, so you can get Pairs, Straights, etc. Each card can have any number. All of that in a GC game!

There are many other unique things. For example, monster don’t drop money. You have to play a camera card in your deck, draw it and spend a turn making a picture. These are pretty much the only items worth selling. You can only keep a certain amount of pictures/drops after each battle, so you can’t sit out rounds and amass pictures of bosses.

Stay tuned to read me rambling about these games for the next few months. The collection has both and they are about 60h each.

I thought so, too! However, MH Stories didn’t catch me yet. I’ve tried the demo of Stories 2 and bounced off the combat system hard.

But with 2 Team Asano games and a new Katamari, I really can’t complain anyways.

For sure they are. But historically speaking, we’ll get a MH Wilds DLC and about a year of content drops after that before a new game is mentioned.

I’d like something to bridge that time.

Hopefully we get something about Monster Hunter. Wilds seems to have a lot of problems, but how about World + Iceborn?

Could be just me and the game is definitely worth experiencing. I haven’t checked yet if other people thought so too. However, personally speaking, I thought the second half of ‘Star Ocean The Divine Force’ was executed way better. It does have a similar structure and the same split between two different viewpoints, one native to the planet and one from a futuristic civilization.

Nope, I haven’t played it yet. However, I did mention it several times as a potential next game - I just never commited to the 120h+ journey, assuming I play both back to back.

Almost done with Star Ocean Second Story R, I’m literally right before the dungeon called ‘Phynal’.

My initial love for the game didn’t fully carry over into the second half. There’s been a big change in scenery and ever since that, the writing got worse by quite abit. It’s just one guy with little to no personality sending you from one fetch quest to the next. There are still good things in there, but it started off way better.

Next up, I think I’ll go back to something turn based, which means either Octopath 2, SMTV:V or Baten Kaitos.

Realistically speaking, how many of them could even follow the game? Seeing every piece, I mean.

Das schreibt man sich immer gern auf die Fahne, funktioniert aber selten. Siehe unter anderem hier, zusammen mit weiteren Punkten.

TL;DR: Tiere können oftmals nicht mehr ausgewildert werden und sterben funktional trotzdem aus.