Merry Christmas everyone! How gameful was your day? I had planned a full day of OreShika and nothing but OreShika, but Candy Crush Soda kept giving me free life after free life after free life, before I knew it half the day was gone. W-what a terrifying game! I finally tore myself away and played a little OreShika, ate some cake, relaxed, basically did the same things I do every weekend and holiday… and every single chance I get, come to think of it.
When I think of Christmas and games, I can’t help remembering the Christmas I spent playing Xenoblade Chronicles. When was it, 2015? Wait, what, 2012?! That long ago?! No wonder it feels so nostalgic. I went back and forth with Xenoblade for a while, trying to decide whether I liked it or not, but by the end of November I was well and truly hooked. And yet it was such a busy December that year, so many activities and family events. I had to shelve the game for almost a month because I couldn’t get any solid gaming time in. I thought to myself, “When I’m 80 years old I’ll regret all the time I didn’t spend with my family, not the time I didn’t spend gaming.” That’s what I thought, but now, 5 years later… I wanna play Xenoblade again! If there’s any way I can make it happen, I will definitely play XC2 next year.
Well, enough looking back into the past. It’s not like I did anything to make the time pass. I just lived one day after another and presto, here we are! The more interesting thing is how much my extended family has changed in that time. Lots of cute little additions, people I didn’t even imagine might exist someday back then. A few very painful subtractions, I didn’t expect those either. What kind of post will I write here in 5 years? Will I even be around or will I be “subtracted” too? Only God knows, so there’s no point thinking about it. On to video games!
Following on from last time, I gave OreShika more of a chance and it got better and worse all at the same time. At least I was able to resolve the matter of needing various keys and tags in the dungeons. There’s a room in the Garden of Purrfection dungeon (locked by a tag in the Heptacolour Springs dungeon) that contains almost every key in the game. You’ll need a guide to get it, but the fact that such a room even exists shows the developers knew what a terrible mistake they made in their dungeon design. In that case, instead of the cheat room, why not design the game better in the first place? Somehow their little admission of guilt makes me more angry, not less.
This is my angry face. Grrr!
Anyway, so I successfully took Nueko to the festival and made her meet bad guy Abe no Seimei. Apparently Nueko is his mother and she has amnesia. The most festivals we take part in, the more of her memory she will recover. There’s just one catch though: every festival you complete raises the difficulty of all the enemies and reshuffles the lands and dungeons you have access to. I have to regrind on Hatafuritaishos and Dakkontaishos all over again. …Which is fine with me. It is a dungeon crawler, after all. This does mean I have to delay going to the next festival while I do a little more exploration and leveling up, but I’m not in a big hurry right now.
I’m beginning to understand the complaints about Nueko, though. She plays havoc with your family plan if you raise her at the wrong time. I have a festival to attend in March and I carelessly raised her in May. This wouldn’t be a problem except I was planning to go to the festival the March after the next one, almost two years in the future. She’ll be dead by then. The plan was:
-Use current party to grind up lots of devotion.
-Create 3 new kids and raise Nueko between February-May the next year
-Raise them for a year till the following March, picking up lots of skill scrolls and weapons in the meantime.
-Take on the festival with fresh, strong kids in the prime of their lives.
And I would have gotten away with it too, if I hadn’t raised Nueko too early. She will almost certainly be dead or dying by the time my plan comes to fruition. Rrghh! So then I decided to kill her off prematurely. When very young characters die in battle, they have a chance to perma-die when you take them back home. I put Nueko alone at the front and made sure she died a few times (yes, I learned entirely the wrong lesson from the story of Uriah the Hittite). In the process one of my treasured veterans also died once. No problem, she’s a tough old biddie, I thought. I get home, Kochin says someone’s about to die, I’m like YES, YES, YES…. NOOOOOOOOOO! Wrong victim, OreShika! Wrong victim!
Crime doesn’t pay, guys. I had to reset without saving and lose over an hour of very solid progress. Now I either have to revise my plan and take on the festival this March or hope Nueko dies early enough to be resurrected in time for the next festival. Nueko really does ruin everything.
It’s a little early, but I’m going to introduce my gaming philosophy for 2018 right now: “It’s enough to play just a little bit of a game.”
Yes, it’s enough to just experience what a game has to offer, I don’t have to finish it or even get very far in it. It’s enough that I tried Final Fantasy XIII and saw what it was like. It was enough that I got some dungeon crawling done in Operation Abyss. It’s enough that I saw what Felistella has done with the Summon Night series. I’m not saying OreShika is dropped or anything, but I’ve seen enough. It’s nice. I like it. Now I want to try new stuff while keeping this on the backburner. What “new stuff” will it be? I can’t decide… but I’ve got some time to think about it, so I’ll figure something out in the next couple of days.
Merry Christmas again and Happy New Year in advance!
The more you mention this game, the more I realize I need to get a vita…too many rpgs I need to play on that system.
I thought I was the only one who waited ages to get a Vita. It’s early days yet, but I don’t regret the purchase at all. I just wish I had more hours in the day to do more gaming!
To be honest, the systems in OreShika remind me of SaGa. Not specifially, but in more general terms of being pretty interesting and unique, but hell if it sounds like I’d ever enjoy that bullshit xD
I had a somewhat similar reaction to Xenoblade. I started it once, played about 30 hours of it (which is enough to get through a normal RPG, but we all know is barely a blink of Xenoblade), while having a lot of nagging little issues that made me never sure I even like the game. And then I got distracted by other, shinier games for about a year. Picked Xenoblade back up way later, played through it in just short of 100 hours (funnily enough, also around December/January)… and came to the conclusion that a) yes, I like it; b) yes, it’s a good game, but c) it’s not as great as people made it out to be and d) one has to be in the perfectly right mood and mindset to enjoy their time with the game. Being aware of most of the nags from a previous play in advance made it a lot easier to not get distracted by them on a replay. The end stage of the game still takes a deep dive in quality, though.
As far as xmas gaming goes: I got Monster Hunter 4 and Etrian Odyssey V, so I used some time in between to build a party and map the first floor in the later one.
Nice. Nothing like a little dungeon crawling to close out the year.
I’m fixing to try the remake of the first Etrian Odyssey game next year. I hear it has an automapping feature, which is awesome because having to draw your own map was the deal breaker between me and the EO series.
Haven’t played the Untold versions, but I assume it is the same like the automated mapping option you can enable in EO5: The game will draw in the floors and walls for you, but you still have to step on each tile for it to happen, and have to put in any kind of icons like stairs, doors or treasure.
I’m OK with that. It’s better than nothing and I step on every title and brush against every wall in dungeon crawlers anyway. Even poisoned or trapped tiles, I just can’t help myself.