Tried and dropped Atelier Resleriana – Too sluggish and too stingy

I haven’t played any Atelier games in a while (last proper game was Firis in 2020 IIRC), but I still have a lot of love for the series. A lot of good memories, lots of fun times spent crafting and adventuring, good times. The more recent entries have just left me cold because the focus has been less on that crafting and adventuring and more on character interactions (that never go anywhere in the long run) and “cute girls doing cute stuff” which hasn’t been interesting to me in a loooong time.

But still, Atelier is Atelier, so when I heard a new gacha was coming out, it was like “hey, free Atelier game!” What’s not to like, right? The answer is “plenty.”

The game ran poorly on my phone

The game felt like it had been dipped in coal tar, with everything moving slowly and looooong loading times to do and open every single thing. Every time I want to open a quest, every time I want to switch to a character, every time I want to do anything in this game whether it’s crafting or fighting or just opening the store, it takes forever and a day. Even the skip option doesn’t help because there are still unnecessary scenes to watch before and after. The poor user experience is honestly the biggest reason why I dropped Atelier Resleriana. I may have sat through worse in the Playstation era, but it’s the 2020s now and I’m not doing this to myself any more.

I lowered the graphical settings to see if that would help, but instead I got an ugly game that still ran terribly. It’s possible that the game runs better on Steam (apparently emulators don’t work) but nothing else about it made me want to try a different platform.

The gameplay wasn’t what I had hoped for

When I play an Atelier game specifically, versus your run-of-the-mill JRPG, I want to craft stuff first of all, and I want to forage and go adventuring while I’m at it. For all its many, many flaws, Atelier Online: Alchemist of Bressisle at least let us run around maps and gather all kinds of stuff to make many new things with. Atelier Resleriana takes more of an Atelier Sophie approach to things, with a very small number of largely useless recipes which must be unlocked by jumping through increasingly annoying hoops. Foraging is also no fun, firstly because of the aforementioned sluggish pace of movement and secondly because of the long drawn out fights you have to go through every time you enter a new area.

That brings me to the combat. Which I actually liked, to be honest. I liked the system where you have to juggle the types of attack you use and pick the best time to use items to avoid giving the enemies too many advantages. What I didn’t like was how tanky even the most basic mob was due to the “break” system. I don’t like games with break mechanics, it’s almost always a way to draw out fights by giving enemies extra HP without explicitly calling it extra HP. And, again because of the slowness of the game itself, every turn and every attack felt like wading through mud, so it quickly became a chore I wished I could avoid. Still the Burst system is something I’d like to see done better in a more interesting game, with more skills and options than just spamming S2 and sometimes S1.

I had bad gacha luck

Self explanatory. Part of why I play gacha games is for the dopamine hit of pulling rare characters and other nice things. I pull crap, I don’t get my hit, I don’t want to keep playing. Actually I didn’t do too badly because I had Rorona for attacking and Escha for breaking and they made a good team, but it wasn’t fun seeing people boasting about their super-meta Ryza, Marie, Sophie etc., etc. and knowing it could have been so much better. “That’s a you problem,” you say. Yup, it’s a me problem, and that’s why me quit the game.

The gem income was poor

I hate stingy games. It doesn’t cost you anything to give players a few more rewards, Koei-Tecmo. Especially in a game that just launched and isn’t that great. Giving 50 gems here and 50 gems there when a 10-pull costs 3000 gems, do you think you are Genshin Impact or something? You want me to scrimp and save and get those 3,000 gems and pull crap, and then feel good somehow? Heck no. I’m a little spoiled by Epic Seven and Romancing Saga Re;Universe (developed by the same Akatsuki Games) where you can easily get enough currency to pity several characters a year. Since I know it can be done better, saving drips and drabs for months to get pity at 45,000 gems in Atelier Resleriana sounds like torture. Nope, not doing that to myself either.

The first event was boring and the rewards were pitiful

The game’s first event was a “Score Battle” thing where you have to fight the same boss in stronger iterations and try to deal lots of damage against it. First off, that’s boring and pointless. Like, seriously, what for? Who plays an Atelier game for this? In any case the event was only around for a week and by the time I thought my party was strong enough to fight the stronger levels, it had already ended. The rewards looked like this:

Just increasingly expensive character EXP items and tiny amounts of money. That’s it. No weapon, no event character, no Memoria, no strengthening or synthesis material, nothing interesting to make it worth slogging through pointless battle after pointless battle. The first event of a game is where the developer is supposed to hook players with fun gameplay, an interesting event story and lots of rewards, but this had none of that. It could have been added to the permanent quests and nothing would be missed. I despaired of the future of the game and made up my mind to quit at that point.

The story wasn’t bad, but not enough to stick around for

Cute girls being cute just isn’t my thing any more (was it ever? not sure) so I confess I fast-forwarded everything after the first few scenes, so I have a vague idea of what happened, but not why it matters or why I should care. I figure it’s the writers’ job to make me care, not mine to force myself to care about someone’s alchemy journey. What’s so great about being an alchemist when you can barely make anything you want? Too boring.

Last I saw, some mysterious organization was attacking Valeria and she and her friends barely escaped. You just know that mysterious organization will be after them for 200 chapters before eventually being replaced by even badder guys, and very likely it will turn out the bad guys weren’t so bad and they’ll become available to pull in the gacha etc etc, blah blah. And that’s not even mentioning the roadblocks where they stop you from progressing the story until you clear X dungeon (very boring) or X score battle or whatever. Just let me play and get my ass kicked, then no one will have to order me to go do other content to get stronger.

TL;DR: I’m still open to trying new gacha games, but I’ve got the attention span of a hamster these days, so anything new needs to look good, play smoothly and give me lots of rewards to hold my attention. Atelier Resleriana is not horrible, but it’s not great either, and as a supposedly mainline Atelier game, it is disappointing and completely unsatisfying. I still have at least five “real” Atelier games left to play, so I think I’ll spend my time and energy on those instead.

Epic Seven 2024 update – Made it to Champion V! (plus tips for making your own journey)

In AI arena, of course, not Real-Time Arena. Smilegate actually scared me for a while when they announced a Lionheart Cermia RTA skin, because the two Cermias are some of my favorite characters, but luckily they walked it back shortly afterwards. I like Briar Witch Iseria too, but I don’t use her nearly enough to care about a skin, phew!

In the past I’ve repeatedly stated that my focus in Epic Seven is PVE, not PVP, but several factors occurred that made me broaden that focus just a little bit to encompass Guild Wars and then AI Arena.

1. I ran out of easy PVE content to do. I still need to do Rift, Nightmare Raid and Dagger Sicar achievements, but those are all serious endgame modes which I will chip away at little by little. Especially since I need to build a number of characters specifically for them, like Haste, Brieg (Elvira recall FTW), Surin, Ran, Mascot Hazel, Suthan, etc etc.

2. I joined a guild where Guild Wars was mandatory, and I liked it there, so I had to do GW. In the past I’ve mainly been in casual GW-optional guilds, which is nice and relaxing in its own way, but the rewards of a serious Guild are much better. And in the course of doing GW, I discovered that my characters’ builds weren’t bad at all, and I could actually compete against the average opponent. Plus the process forced me to learn which characters countered which ones (Fribbels GW Meta Tracker helps a ton), who had which passive and how to trigger/avoid it, etc. After that, AI Arena is just Guild Wars on steroids, so it was an easy scale-up.

3. I got two heroes that made climbing in Arena much, much easier. The first was Dark Corvus, who I got from the ML Headhunt event. I intended to use him in Guild Wars, and I do occasionally do that, but he does great in Arena as well when paired with Iseria, Destina and a flex character.

The second character was Elvira, who by shutting down Fighting Spirit made it much, much, much X1000 easier to deal with characters I had been fearing like Navy Captain Landy, Lionheart Cermia (she’s only cool when she’s on my side, otherwise she’s a menace), and Abyssal Yufine. The latter two especially become putty in my hands once Elvira is around, because their scariest weapons are sealed. In fact I run Corvus and Elvira together sometimes against them, and it is a sad, sad sight. For them, that is.

If you squint right, you can pretend it’s a Sigurd Scythe double pull.

4. It was just time. A sense of growth and progression is important for me to keep playing and enjoying a gacha game, so after a couple of years in Challenger V, it was time to finally make the push. Does this mean I might push for Legend once I’ve been in Champion for a while? Never say never, but my first love is still PVE so right now I want to do the new Ancient Inheritance and start working seriously on Nightmare Raid teams this month.

Tips for making the journey to Champion V

So, Champion V in arena, YAY! Those 800 skystones a week are pretty sweet. Now I can unlock past events without making too much of a dent in my skystone stash, really looking forward to that. Epic Seven main stories are so-so and all over the place, but I enjoy most of the side stories. Eulogy for a Saint was great. I thought it would be overrated because of all the praise, but it was good stuff. I liked the Lord of Summer one too. And the Christmas post-Episode 3 story with Alencia, that was good closure.

Louder for the people in the back!

Aww, so nice and hopeful. This is why you shouldn’t get involved with the wrong guy.

If you want to make your own journey to Champion V but have been putting it off for whatever reason, here are four tips that helped me and that you might find helpful too.

1. Figure out what’s stopping you from climbing. For me it was intimidation/fear because everyone looked so much stronger than me and I hate losing. What I actually did last month before starting the journey was to give myself numbing therapy: a whole week where I challenged absolutely every party on the Challenger V list without exception, just to get used to losing and also try out different parties and counter strategies. It’s like how in judo you first learn how to fall correctly, in PVP you must first learn how to lose and be okay with that. Lose, lose and lose again until it’s like, yeah, aight, next!

This girl menaced me until I learned that a well-built Senya can just pop her like a pimple.

If it’s gear stopping you from climbing, do a big re-gearing with the next Free Equip buff and give your best gear to your PVP heroes. I realized that PVE characters usually don’t need the top of the line gear. If the roadblock is learning who counters who, use resources like YouTube, Epic Seven RTA stats, Fribbels GW Meta, etc. and just fight, fight and fight again.

2. Focus on countering a few specific teams. For me, I built two Arena parties – one the Dark Corvus one I mentioned above, and another with Unbound Knight Arowell, Lionheart Cermia, Roana and a flex character (usually Elvira or Mediator Kawerik). With that team, I aimed for parties that dealt a lot of counter attacks, like Abyssal Yufine, Savior Adin (be careful with her tho) and Navy Captain Landy.

Elvira shut down their fighting spirit, LHC procced her S3 off their attacks, Roana’s passive healed like crazy, and Arowell mitigated damage and kept us all alive.  Once I had that engine going climbing through the ranks became a formality. Of course there were still a few surprises and losses here and there, e.g. Angel of Light Angelica can strip Elvira… in fact AOLA just sucks, but for the most part it was quite a smooth process. TL;DR study common defenses, see who you can beat, and build to counter them specifically.

Even in Champion V, you can see from the screenshot above that the same characters appear again and again: Ocean Breeze Luluca, Abyssal Yufine, Belian, ae-Karina, etc etc. If you have a strategy for taking care of common Arena heroes both individually and as a team, you don’t have much to fear.

3. As for who to build specifically, a lot depends on the gear you have and how it rolls. More speed and attack, aim for cleavers. More def and HP, aim for bruisers, that kind of thing. IMO almost any character can work at the Challenger level if their gear is good enough. I always hate those gacha games where you have to build specific characters X or Y with no substitutes or else that content is closed off to you forever. In Epic Seven that usually isn’t the case. And that means you can’t underestimate any character because they could be on a wacky build with 300 speed and 5000 attack just lying in wait like Jaws.

This goes double and triple for any character who was formerly meta but now has “fallen off.” “Fallen off” does not mean “weak!” Don’t make that mistake for a second. It means they can be countered fairly easily with the right characters and right gear/artifacts, but that they can still destroy your team if you go in blind. Special mention goes to Apocalypse Ravi and Violet, brrr.

The only really fast character I have. When he works, he really works.

All that aside, here’s who I actually built and found useful in my climb: Lionheart Cermia (MVP), Roana (co-MVP), Unbound Knight Arowell (needs just a little more bulk), Shadow Knight Pyllis (needs switching to Counter set), Dark Corvus (needs more HP), Zahak, Iseria (PVE build), Briar Witch Iseria (squishy), Destina (needs bulk and speed), Mediator Kawerik (somewhat overrated IMO but most likely mine just sucks), Martial Artist Ken (run him with a cleanser or build Eff, or he’s hard to use), Elvira, Senya (also hard to use but when she works, phew!).

I also built/half-built the following characters but didn’t use them much in my climb (but I still use them in Guild Wars, which counts as PVP): Violet (my overall E7 MVP, hard-carried me from Episode 1, still carries today, Automaton Tower champion, occasionally 1v3s GVG, just haven’t found room for him in Arena), Conqueror Lilias (can’t get her fast enough), Straze, Mercedes, Choux, Seaside Bellona, Savior Adin (mine’s a bit squishy), Byblis (works fine but hard to find room for her).

I have many, many other characters besides, which I use for various purposes like farming hunts, but these are the ones I tried out specifically for PVP. If you have a good number of these, or any of the recent super powers like M’Landy or AYufine, you’ll be able to work something out quite nicely.

He won. Barely, but he won.

4. Don’t worry too much about your defense team. I mean, do your best to have a good team with solid gear and everything, but don’t expect much from them. I’ve tweaked and re-tweaked mine, tried different combinations, and still didn’t manage better than a 25% defense win rate once I started climbing past Challenger III. Some defenses are more annoying than others, but there are no unbeatatable defenses, so don’t stress it. You get more points for winning than you lose for being defeated, so if you keep using your arena flags strategically, a few dozen losses are not the end of the world.

Though if you’re lucky, your defense team can get you a promotion, so don’t ignore it either.

Hope this helps someone! I could post my attacking teams, but honestly they aren’t anything special, and you would get more mileage out of checking the Fribbels Hero Library for top-tier builds. There’s even a Fribbels Gear Optimizer that helps you outfit characters in gear you currently have. I haven’t used it before because despite my issues with gearing, fumbling around with gear is still part of the fun for me, but maybe when it’s time to push for Legend I’ll give it a go.

Nothing else noteworthy to report for Epic Seven. I’m having a lot of fun lately, though I will force myself to take a 30-day break at some point this year so I can get this year’s returner bonuses as well (Smilegate wisely made it only once a year). But apart from that I’ve got a lot to keep me occupied, so I will be playing it for a while longer.

I even got SSS+ in Hall of Trials once. Aiming to make that more frequent.

Other gachas I’m still playing: Love Nikki, Romancing Saga Re;Universe (version 3.50 with background farming just came out today, so awesome) and I recently started Atelier Resleriana. I’ll post about that one shortly, after I drop it. Until then!

Quick update, apparently you only need to win 5 times in Champion V to hit Champion IV (further update, this is not true and the number will vary wildly depending on the day of the week and who else is climbing etc.):

Yay!

Update 2: February 28th:

All of a sudden there is a lot more variety in the defenses, so the “cherry-pick your way up” strategy won’t work any more.

I need to build more characters, especially those I’ve been neglecting like Zio, Moon Bunny Dominiel, Ran, Eda, Lua, Nakhwol, Last Rider Krau, Politis… the list is endless, but I’m going to need more variety to tackle different defenses. The important thing is GEAR! The grind never stops. I should also roll those 1,000 skystones to try and get mystics for the Custom Mystic banner coming up tomorrow. Epic Seven has got me good!

Uninstalled Genshin Impact for 2024

They should have used Nahida if they really wanted to guilt-trip me.

Genshin Impact almost qualified for the “Games I dropped in 2023” list, but was spared because I uninstalled it on a whim on January 1st instead. I’ve taken many breaks from GI in the past, but this is the first time I went so far as to uninstall it. I thought I would have second thoughts after a day or two, but no, I honestly hadn’t touched it in a while before then so it makes no difference in my life. It’s just taking up hard drive space at this point.

Why did I uninstall Genshin Impact?

I’ve played it long enough and enjoyed it enough that I’m wondering why myself. Up until the end of Sumeru, I played it very regularly, so I honestly think Fontaine has a lot to do with it. Firstly, the story was flat out depressing and off-putting, as I mentioned in my last brief post on Genshin Impact. Not just the main archon quest involving Furina being mentally tortured for centuries, but also the whole serial killer sub plot.

In fact, mainly the serial killer sub plot because the game wouldn’t let it go. Even after I finished the archon quest, I played Furina’s character quest hoping for some much-needed catharsis, but nooo. Let’s spend an hour talking about this really great person who got murdered by this guy, along with many others, and let’s read all about her last moments in excruciating detail because that’ll really make players feel good, right?

Also while it was good that Furina was forgiven (?!) by the people of Fontaine and returned to the stage in her character quest, I still felt rotten about all she had to go through. It’s bad enough that she got little acknowledgement for her suffering, but then Paimon had to act like an utter twat and rub in her fallen status. Nyaah nyaah, you’re poor and lonely now. Seriously, Paimon? Even if you don’t know her history, is this how you behave to your friends? Friendly to slimebags like Lyney and mean and nasty to poor little Furina? If I didn’t hate Paimon before, I do now.

And speaking of Lyney and his pals, having to pal around with the Fart-hooey is another reason I didn’t enjoy Fontaine. That organization as a whole has done, has tried to do, is unapologetically continuing to do so many bad things on and off screen, but somehow I have to get myself jailed to save the guy who almost drowned an entire city to please his boss? And I have to work with the shady, dishonest kids to do that in the most boring arc ever? Now I think of it, the beginning of the end for GI and I was when there was a free Freminet given away in an event and I was like “Why the hell would I want that?!” At that point, I had already mentally uninstalled, and January 1st was just a formality.

Apart from the story, the combat is still fun but both working on my parties and fighting enemies has gotten stagnant. Now that I’ve gotten a decent party and grown fairly strong, the sense of progression and growing stronger that I enjoy in gacha games is severely reduced. Doing battle quests and mini-games with my party is still fun in its own way, but not as much as it was when I was relying on kind strangers to help me beat Pyro Regisvine. Good old days.

My major characters all have good enough equipment, and all I was doing in recent times was grinding for optimum artifacts – the quickest way to take the fun out of a game. Crap artifact to decent = big jump, everyone’s happy. But after that the gains are marginal and it gets annoying fighting the same domain 20 times in a row to get 50 pieces of trash. At least the similarly frustrating Epic Seven offers background battling now, but you know Mihoyo will never go for that because they think their game is sooo wonderful.

And it is, really. Objectively speaking. Playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Shin Megami Tensei V recently made me appreciate the exploration in Genshin Impact all the more. The maps are huge, and I can go all over the place as long as I have stamina. Instead of being stumped by a tiny ledge that forces me to take a long detour, I’m climbing literal mountains on just a bowl of almond tofu. And the graphics are gorgeous too. Best of all, it’s completely free! I can put up with a lot of frustation in exchange for “completely free,” let me tell you.

That’s why despite all I have said above, Genshin Impact is only dropped “for 2024.” Although the story leaves me cold and pulling and gearing characters isn’t as exciting as it used to be, the exploration is still rock solid. If I reinstall in late 2025 (God willing), both Natlan and Snezhnaya and maybe some other cool places like the Mare Jivari will be out, and I’ll be able to explore, and explore, and explore, and explore… Whew! So see you then, assuming the game is still running and I still care!

Games I dropped in 2023

The latest in a series of “games that sucked too much to play” posts I’ve been doing since… 2013? No, 2011. This is where I collect all the games I played too briefly to bother reviewing in depth. There were very few of them in 2023, though, because I didn’t focus much on gaming for reasons I’ve already explained.

Brown Dust 2: The only game I seriously tried last year. And not just once, but twice. I downloaded it about two months after it came out, played for two days, couldn’t stand the battle system and dropped it. Then recently I heard they had a PC client and it was their half-anniversary, so I downloaded it again, played for two days again, and dropped it this time for good.

I really thought I would like it because I (used to) like grid-based SRPGs, and I also liked the art style that reminded me of Saga Frontier 2 a bit. But the battle style was too puzzle-like for me, i.e. you have to use specific skills on specific enemies to win. Knock this one back, hit that group with a AOE spell, set up this other move, that kind of thing. I find that kind of gameplay stressful because it means I can’t use my favorite characters to unga-bunga my way through the various stages but have to rely either on my failing wits or a guide. Yeah, not happening.

The second turn-off was playing the Christmas event about some girls in a bar trying to fight against some dictator. I was already turned off by the brutal murder of a character in the event prologue and the extremely bleak mood of the city (obviously we’re going to be trying and failing to defeat this dictator lady for 200 chapters), but it didn’t help that the stage had a stealth component that meant I had to go around dodging lights to make any progress. Get caught and you have to start the stage again. I hate stealth. I hate stealth. I hate stealth. And once more for good measure, I HATE STEALTH!

The third turn-off, which is really just a bonus, was the lack of any interesting characters for me to latch onto. The main character I initially started with is this faceless “hentai protagonist” kind of character that the ladies in his party are nevertheless crazy about… can’t get behind that. Then when I had kind of made my peace with that, I had to switch to another party with more characters I don’t care about. That’s when I dropped the game the first time. Like, you had your chance already.

Brown Dust 2 is a fine-looking game, so if the combat had been to my taste and the event story hadn’t been so depressing, maaaaybe I wouldn’t have dropped it? It’s a big maybe though, because everything else about it didn’t hook me in two attempts and I don’t feel like trying a third time. This experience has also made me a lot less eager to try supposed “strategy RPG” gachas like Archeland and Aster Tartariqus, not that they’re ever going to get licensed anyway.

Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle: I actually played this in 2022 but forgot to mention it in the 2022 edition. I quite liked it, to be honest. I can’t remember what made me install it, or what I was expecting, but I had fun getting stronger and doing bigger and fancier numbers against enemies. Get a load of this power level, Vegeta! Somehow I’d always expected a Dragonball game to have fighting game mechanics, so the colored balls system was like… huh? But it’s always been a wacky franchise, so anything goes.

The main reason I dropped it was that I had installed it on a wonky old phone, so it used to take forever to load, and it crashed very often. I got angry one day and just shut the whole thing down, though I felt a bit sorry afterwards.

The other reason I left was because I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of alternate versions of characters. I doubt I’m exaggerating when I say there were like 50 different Gokus, from child Goku to teen, then adult, then DBZ, DB Super, all in various colors for the different elements. And that’s not even counting the fusions like Gogeta and Vegitto. It made pulling for characters very hard and confusing, though the standard gacha policy of “Get the latest and shiniest version” served me well.

Third reason, which I can easily resolve, is that I haven’t watched most of Dragonball Super, so I didn’t know a lot of the characters, and I didn’t want to be spoiled by what little story Dokkan Battle has. When I have some downtime later this month, I’d like to get back to Super and finally find out who/what characters like Goku Black and Zamasu are. Then maybe I’ll get back into Dokkan Battle, you never know.

Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space: I dropped it long ago, but in my head I always meant to go back. That’s why I carefully stored the ID number I need to recover my account… or I thought I did, but when I redownloaded the game last year and began hunting for the number… oops. Couldn’t find it anywhere. Did I delete it? Upload it somewhere? And what kind of game doesn’t have Google linking in this day and age? There’s no way I’m going to start Another Eden from scratch after all I’ve been through (not to mention I’ve gotta have my Pizzica-chan) so that’s it for me and Another Eden. Aww…

Honorable mentions

Two gacha games I’d previously enjoyed were closed/announced their closure in 2023. Princess Connect! Re:Dive global edition and Dissidia: Final Fantasy – Opera Omnia, may you rest in peace. For Priconne, it’s not so bad firstly because I’m not that big a fan and secondly because the Japanese version is still going strong.

I’m a little sadder about Opera Omnia, because I kept hoping they would pull themselves out of the unfun and unsustainable death spiral that was the Force Era. I’ll miss it a lot, but at the same time I have no desire to play it in its current state, so I understand why it’s going down. Evidently I wasn’t the only one put off by gimmicky bosses with billions of HP requiring specific strategies with specific characters and specific weapons to beat them. I just want to have fun with my favorite FF characters in a gacha game, and I think Dissidia came closest to making that happen. Hopefully Square-Enix will learn a lesson from this and… hahahahaha, I crack me up. Farewell, Dissidia!

Happy New Year 2024! No resolutions this year either!… or wait a minute…

Come to think of it, I should just stop writing (non-)resolution posts altogether and stick to wishing everyone a happy new year. Happy New Year! And a belated Merry Christmas as well. In 2023 I put gaming in the back seat while I focused on getting my financial house in order, so to speak, but I still played a lot of gacha games. I even managed to finish Shin Megami Tensei V on December 31st, more on that in the near future. Please remind me if I forget.

There were plenty of ups and downs in 2023, but in the end I did manage to get some financial ducks in a row. More or less. At the very least I identified some leaks and plugged some holes – and incidentally realized that gaming makes up a miniscule amount of my total spending every year. This makes it totally okay to buy more games so I did get a few things over the holidays (mostly puzzle games). But really I have so many already that it doesn’t make sense to waste money on titles I probably won’t play this year.

So what WILL I play this year? On reflection, apart from my usual gacha fare, I do have a few games I want to either finish or delete for good in 2024.

– Romancing Saga 2: I started it earlier this year and found it really boring, but after playing Romancing Saga Re;Universe a little longer, I got curious about the origins of some of my best characts like Noel, Rocbouquet and Gerard, so I got back into it after finishing SMT V. It’s growing on me…ish.

– Undernauts: I played it for a while and got annoyed by the direction the story was taking, but now I can’t even remember what the problem was, so it should be safe to go back now.

– Final Fantasy XIII: I’ve been struggling to play it for too long. It’s time to put up or shut up. If I don’t manage to successfully play it, or if I can’t even bring myself to try it by December 2024, I’m going to uninstall and delete it and never look back.

– Tokyo Xanadu eX+: Similar situation to FFXIII except I started playing it some years ago and made it quite far before dropping it. But I really like the battle system, so I started a fresh game. And dropped that too. If it’s not finished by December 2024, into the “was nice knowing ya” bin it goes.

– Atelier Lydie & Scumbag: I get a bit irritated every time I see the icon on my desktop. Also it’s been a while since I played an Atelier game, so I might as well. I’ve lost some of my passion for the series, but I still like crafting games, so I should be able to enjoy this as long as I don’t take it too seriously.

Checking last year’s resolutions, it seems I achieved 50% of what I’d said I would do gaming-wise: I beat Episode 4 10-10 of Epic Seven, but I didn’t touch Xenoblade Chronicles 3 all year. I’m not even adding to my “play or delete” list because I don’t want to do either. Apparently the $29.99 DLC extension is good, but bluntly speaking, I can’t see how that would possibly be the case. I loved exploring the various areas of XC3, but everything else… Anyway, we can talk about it in more detail if I ever finish it.

But back to my real New Year’s resolutions, i.e. the non-gaming stuff. Having focused on finances in 2023, in 2024 I want to think about my health. First off, I must stop my waistline from expanding further!! The four cakes and two tubs of ice cream in December did not help, but, I mean, it was Christmas, yeah? But Christmas is over, and it’s time to return to common sense. And just generally try to be more physically active in 2024. All of my hobbies like music, reading, gaming etc. are very sedentary, and now that I’m <a certain age>, I’m starting to feel the effects of too much sitting and lying around.

In practical terms, things shouldn’t change too much except I’ll try to stand/stretch/walk for a while after every hour of sitting or lying down, which will interrupt many a gaming session but them’s the breaks. In theory, gacha games on the mobile phone should be quite conducive to standing up and stretching, doing a few squats or jogging in place while waiting for something to finish… not that I would know because I’ve never tried. Also I play most of my gacha on emulator now anyway… this isn’t looking good ^^; But I’ll give it my best shot!

Okay, that’s enough posting for one day. Time for a stretch break and then I have some characters to gear in Epic Seven. The grind never ends! Happy New Year!