Finished Episode 06, which was my favorite so far. The original Phantom Triggers were very fun, in particular Aoi, and we finally get confirmation that the main plot will be dealing with the terrorist group that showed up in 04. We also get a view of the “villain” here, which was the only thing I disliked - while the game shows the reasons for that character to go rogue, the transition is too abrupt, they go from a friendly character into a almost cartoonish villain immediately, so I’m hoping they will explore and explain this better in the following chapters.
Also started Episode 07, which is another Shiori-focused episode. This chapter starts with her finding a way to deal with the fact that her students are also soldiers that are going to be put in dangerous situations and reaching an amusing but also perfectly in-character solution. Then we move into gathering all the people we met in the previous episodes to fight the villains.
Two interesting things about 07: It’s much longer, and it actually features choices - all previous episodes were Kinetic Novels, VNs where there are no choices or routes. I wonder if this was done as a callback to the first Grisaia game, where most of the choices (and all the relevant ones) were in the final 1/3 of the story.
Depends on who you ask, as they’re kind of a midway between a VN and a point-and-click adventure.
I’d consider them VNs, VNDB says they aren’t, but I’m pretty sure most people would be fine discussing those on VN-focused forums or communities.
Are you enjoyjng them? I’m a big fan of the series overall, with the third game being my favorite.
As for how it compares to “traditional” VNs: PW games have you interact way more often. You don’t get sections of 1h+ of just reading text uninterrupted in PW games, and that’s fairly common in other games of this genre.
If you’re liking the PW series you’ll probably also enjoy the Danganronpa games. Much darker stories despite the colorful visuals, but they’re another VN/Adventure hybrid with a mystery plot.
In that line of hybrids there’s also 13 Sentinels which has an amazing story and mixes adventure-style exploration with tower defense battles.
Really wanted to play this one but my copy is taking forever to go through customs. :/ Might stick to shorter games for a while and pray it gets here soon.
Despite the somewhat generic premise this one has been consistently fun due to good character interactions and Elria’s hilarious expressions. Only 6 chapters so far, so if you enjoy fantasy+romance stories you may want to take a look at this one.
I was quite stressed this week, and one thing that helps when I’m like this is playing games where I can just shut down my brain and play purely on reflex. So I went back to Theatrhythm Final Bar Line for a few days.
I’m a huge fan of rhythm games in general and this series in particular, even got the fancy overpriced premium version with all DLCs at launch and have been playing on and off since then. I caught up to the DLCs by playing the latest pack focused on Romancing Saga 2 and 3, which brought some of my favorites from that series like Seven Heroes Battle from RS2 and both of the Sinistralthemes from RS3.
I also achived two milestones in this game this week: Over 100h or play time, and finally completed all tracks in the “hard” difficulty (Ultimate). Some of the tracks also have a “very hard” difficulty (Supreme), and I started playing them but the jump in difficulty is crazy - I’m managing to finish those just because I have a party with a ton of HP and defensive skills keeping me alive despite all my mistakes.
As mentioned last week I’m also playing Grisaia Phantom Trigger 5.5 to 08, the second and final batch of chapters for this episodic VN.
Finished chapter 5.5 which was about Shiori’s past - she’s the new civilian teacher that joins near the beginning of the story, and the second “focus character” in th VN alongside Haruto. As per Grisaia standards it’s a pretty sad backstory, but makes it much easier to understand some of the things about the way she acts, and also why she fits well with the others.
I also started chapter 06, which is another flashback story - this time about the previous generation of agents (the titular “Phantom Triggers”), and also about Haruto’s (the main “focus character”) origins. Everything with the Phantom Triggers has been fun so far, they are a very entertaining bunch and it’s pretty cool to see how some of them were in the past.
Haruto’s backstory however is so goddamn crazy that I’m not sure I like or not. I am however having a lot of fun reading about the hijinks of a bunch of assassins trying to raise a baby.
There’s also couple new characters - Aoi, one of the agents and someone Haruto refers to as his “master”, and Enishi, another of the Phantom Triggers and some kind of father figure to him. Given that the chapter starts with them gathering for a grave visit (implied to be Aoi’s) and that Enishi also hasn’t shown up yet in the present I’m curious to see what happened to the two of them.
With all this, which ones do you think I should try? Or if I should try any at all.
I tend to prefer the simpler, arcade-style rhythm games. Think of stuff like Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution.
Definitely try Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. It’s very fun gameplay-wise, has a ridiculous amount of content (something like 380 tracks on the base game, with 100+ extras as DLC if you get the premium version), the RPG elements are interesting, and if you are a fan of FF games it’s also a huge nostalgia trip. There’s even a free demo with 30 songs which lets you get a good taste of the game.
Project Diva Megamix is my favorite “no frills” game in this genre - just choose a song and start playing. Tons of tracks, gets crazy intense on the higher difficulties. But it’s a vocaloid game, and not everyone will enjoy this type of music. There’s also a PS4 version which is essentially the same game with better graphics but no option to use motion controls.
Taiko Drum Master games are generally fun, in particular if you can get your hands on a physical drum, but even on a regular controller I have a good time with these.
There’s Old School Musical which is a hilarious indie rhythm game with chiptune tracks inspired by 8-bit and 16-bit classics. Doesn’t have as much content as some of the games above, but it’s also fairly cheap and fun.
As for more “unique” rhythm games, I enjoy Thumper, which is kinda hard to describe but it’s a metal rhythm game on a racing track of sorts, and Crypt of the Necrodancer which is a rhythm-based roguelike. There’s also a Zelda crossover for this last one called Cadence of Hyrule , but I haven’t played it yet.
Well, that took a while, more than 90h, but I went for full completion - main game, post game dungeon, trials, daydreams, minigames, everything done.
I love the Trails series, it’s one of my favorite JRPG series ever, but it has its fair share of problems - they use the same formula for most games so it’s easy to get burned out if you play many of them in sequence, there’s a lot of cast bloat due it being a series with all games interconnected, an annoying tendency to keep trying to redeem villains, and just being too verbose at times (often because they want to use all members of that huge cast).
Why I’m talking about this? Because while I had a lot of fun with the previous game (Cold Steel 4), it also did showcase all the problems above at full strength, but Reverie does something different and provides a much necessary “break” from the usual Trails experience.
The game is split in three routes, two for protagonists of previous games (Lloyd and Rean) and one for a mysterious new masked character (“C”). This breakdown is a good shift from the usual game dynamic, lessens the issues with cast bloat since they are all spread around, and "C"s route is focused on new cast members making it a much fresher experience.
Another major change is the Reverie Corridor. Most of games in the series are heavy into sidequests, but this time the “main” game barely contains any, only a few optional extra-challenging monsters. Instead, almost all optional content takes place in this dream-like world where time flows differently and memories from the real world as hazy. Here you have access to the full cast of the game (and even some extras!), a randomly generated dungeon you can use to grind freely, a ton of minigames including series classics like Pom and Vantage Masters, and a very nice section called “Daydreams” with a lot of mini-stories showing what’s going on around with both the main cast and some familiar NPCs - very similar to the Doors from Sky 3rd.
This keeps the main story very tight and focused while also having a lot of fun optional content, and gives you freedom to decide if and when to focus on each. I don’t expect this to become the norm for future games in the series, but I enjoyed this structure a lot and I hope they do use something like this time to time to avoid burnout from the usual formula.
Finally, on the story, this is an epilogue for both Zero+Azure and Cold Steel 1-4, so obviously not a game for someone starting the series. It does a much better job story-wise then CS4 IMO, in particular in the Crossbell section - it’s still the weakest of the three routes largely due to it just rethreading old plot lines, but it fixes a lot of the things that bothered in the last two games. Rean’s route is a nice epilogue that touches on the impact of the last game’s events in Erebonia, and "C"s route is just great fun with a cast of anti-heroes.
And now the wait for the next game begins. Really looking forward to see the Calvard arc.
Phantom Trigger is the 4th game in the Grisaia series, with the three first games (Fruit, Labyrinth and Eden) being available as a bundle as well on the Switch. This last game was released as a bunch of 2-5h “Episodes”, and this is second half of that game.
The original Grisaia games have a very interesting structure. The “Common” route of Fruit is 70% of the story and it’s full slice-of-life comedy, but once it splits into the individual routes for each heroine it gets crazy dark as you learn their backstories. Labyrinth shifts into having the main story being dark (it’s the MC’s backstory) with “lighter” after-stories for each heroine. Finally Eden goes towards a more action-focused story, but I wasn’t a big fan of it, and one of the main reasons is that most of the cast was just regular girls, so having they become involved in a spy conspiracy didn’t really work for me, it was just too hard to believe.
Phantom Trigger is more action-focused, much like Eden, but it fixes the above problem by stating from the beginning that the cast is part of “school of assassin” of sorts. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier games, but so far has been a completely independent story with a brand-new cast.
The first five episodes were focused on introducing the cast.
01: Introduction of the initial cast (Shiori, Haruto, Rena, Tohka, Chris and Murasaki) and premise.
02: Rena’s backstory, adds Maki.
03: Tohka’s backstory, adds Gumi.
04: Chris’ backstory, adds Taiga.
05: Murasaki’s backstory, adds Yuuki.
I only had time to start 5.5 for now, but it seems to be centered on Shiori, the focus character of the first episode - a new “civilian” teacher that just joined this school. Looks like this chapter will be about how she is adapting to the her new school and students, but I’ll talk more about it next week.
As for my overall impression of the story, a redditor once described Phantom Trigger as “pretty cozy comfort food reading”, and I think that’s an accurate description. It doesn’t do anything special or amazing, but it’s been consistently fun and entertaining.
I finished the all the english-released games (my mini-review of Reverie is somewhere in this thread), but I still consider Zero+Azure my favorites. Best cast overall (though Estelle is my favorite protagonist), a fantastic setting, goddamn amazing OST.
I love this duology so much, simply hearing the CSPD theme play during one of the sections in Reverie was enough to make me immediately crack as smile.
Minor spoiler about the way the story is structured, does not mention any events or plot pointsAnother thing I love about these two games is how crazy is the ramp on the final stretch. Most Trails games follow the “start slow and increase the stakes near the end” approach, but IMO this duology is where they made the best use of this plot structure.
I was planning on tackling the final dungeon during this week, but instead I ended up going go crazy with optional stuff and doing everything that was available in the Reverie Corridor.
Went as far into the dungeon as the game allows (midpoint of Stratum 4)
Tracked and scanned all missing enemies in Stratum 1-4
Completed all Daydreams
Completed all Minigames (including all Vantage Masters and Pom opponents, and even that stupid “beach date” minigame)
Doing that alongside doing the remaining events in Crossbell took me most of the week.
I left a save yesterday right in front of the exclamation point that triggers the continuation of the main storyline, so I’ll resume this today and hopefully be done with the main story before the end of the weekend. I heard there’s plenty of post-game content but I’m unsure if I’ll play that right now as well or if I’ll take a break.
Oh, and the VNs I mentioned last week did indeed arrive - this is the second half of “Grisaia Phantom Trigger” and also “Little Busters”, both games are japanese version but include english text, and I’ve already decided to start Grisaia after I’m done with Reveri.
I’m more surprised than anything - I’m not one that usually tries to 100% JRPGs, but for some reason I could not stop going crazy trying to do all the optional content in this one.
Anyway, quick update: Did the final dungeon yesterday, saved right in front of the boss room because it was a getting late and I know it’s going to be a long battle with a ton of cutscenes.
Also, to my surprise, I actually managed to get every single treasure chest in this one! And I’m pretty sure I’ll be getting all profiles as well, the ones missing will likely unlock with the final scenes. Not something you usually do in Trails games without using a guide.
Long game is long, but I got some good progress this week. Reached the final chaper, did the whole intial section and I’m now free to explore Crossbell while preparing for what I assume is the final dungeon.
However, there’s a ton of extra content that I want to clear before moving on, so I’m now rotating between:
Going to all locations marked as “NEW” on Crossbell for the extra bosses/events Done!
Doing runs of Stratum 4 of the Reverie Corridor to unlock the missing Daydreams/Minigames/Bonus Characters Done!
Playing the remaining Daydreams Done!
Playing minigames - Pom Pom Party is addictive, but besides that there’s some minigames that include additional story bits like the one about the Tyrfing S
But I think I’ll finally be able to beat the game during this next week. Which would be good because I got two VNs coming from Play-Asia and looking at the tracking information they should arrive soon.
Edit: Also just found out there’s a free book for this game with the backstories of two of the new characters. It’s available in-game and also on the official website. I just finished converting so I can read this on the Kindle, which honestly sounds like it was worth the effort since it turned out to be even longer than I expected, almost 100 pages!
I think I’m getting close to the end, finished Rean’s Act 4 and now working on Lloyd’s route. Game is a huge improvement over CS4 IMO, even though Lloyd’s route is still too cheesy for my tastes.
Also, I kinda like the idea of the Reverie Corridor.
Reverie Corridor spoilers and some coments on CS4___ This series tends to have a ton of sidequests, but in most games of the series the plot starts slow, and by the time it speeds up near the end the number of sidequests shrinks to focus on the main plot. This however doesn’t work on CS4, because you already start the game in a major crisis, making the classic JRPG trope of “why are you playing mini-games when the world is about to end” hit really hard. Reverie also starts with a crisis, but takes a different approach to this: Most of the optional content takes place in this dream-like world where memories from the real world are hazy and time flows differently. Since this is disconnected from the main story it also lets the developer play around, include characters from older games, let you mix parties from different routes, and so on. It’s an interesting approach to this problem.
Just to clarify, I though CS4 was one of the weakest game in the series, which is why I’m glad Reverie is a big improvement.
But even the weaker games in the series are fun, I did play CS4 for 80h-ish hours and had a good time - it just felt like a significant downgrade after CS3 which was one of my favorites.
Exactly, it’s hard to have all games be bangers when there’s more than 10 of them already. But even the “worst” games are still a “B” in my opinion.
And I’m hearing very positive things about the next two (Kuro + Kuro 2) who were already released in Japan, hopefully won’t be long before we get them in the west.
I did, and it’s a good thing because CS4 and Reverie depend a lot on you having played both Zero/Azure and CS1-3. Not a lot of Sky connections on the recent games though, just a few returning characters.
And I want to play the whole series from start, so not playing any of the later games until I have finished Trails in the Sky 😀
I’m one of the renegades that don’t think playing in order is truly necessary. Sky has only one plotline that gets carried into Zero/Azure and CS1-2 is mostly self-contained, so it’s perfectly fine IMO to play these out of order. Yeah, you lose some references and gets some spoilers, but nothing that will ruin the fun from the older games if you play them later.
In fact, I believe I went Sky 1-2 -> CS 1-3 -> Sky 3 -> Zero/Azure -> CS4 -> Reverie, and the only time I truly felt “yeah, I should have played the earlier games first” was during the Crossbell section of CS3.
How are you enjoying the game?
The beginning was kinda mid because it starts with Lloyd’s route in Crossbell and that part feels like we’re just rethreading the plot of recent games, but gets much better once you open the other two routes. C’s route being an all-new cast is really great in making the game feel “fresh”, so much that I wish the game started with that one instead of having us go through the early sections of Lloyd’s and Rean’s route first.
It also has a very strong “Sky 3rd” feel, which is good because I think that game is really underrated. The Reverie Corridor is almost Phantasma 2.0, and each of the main routes seems more streamlined than the average game with this series, with less sidequesting and more focus on the main story.
There’s nothing wrong with Sky 2+3 (I think 2 is one of the best games in the whole series), and playing them in order is better - I just disagree with a good part of the fanbase for that series that thinks it’s not just “better” but the “only way” to play the series.
Trying to force this huge time commitment on potential players is a dissevice to the series, games like Zero+Azure are amazing and worth playing even as standalone RPGs.
Any weird/controversial opinions? I’ll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi’s tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn’t have....
"The Apothecary Diaries" New Key Visual (lemmy.world)
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where can i watch made in abyss?
the crunchyroll release isnt available in my region apparently, and i couldnt find it anywhere else
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[DISC] The Savior's Book Café in Another World - Chapter 18 (mangadex.org)
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What are you playing this weekend? 2023-07-15
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Gaming hot takes?
Any weird/controversial opinions? I’ll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi’s tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn’t have....