It's time for this week's, "What are you playing" thread.
I wasn't able to give as much time to gaming as I thought, who knew running a community can take so much time. Even when all members are so great, and I don't have to moderate anything.
I am still playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, mainly focusing on side quests and exploration right now. With so much to explore, this is going to take a long time.
Other than that, me and wife just got NSO Expansion pass, and started the Happy Home Paradise DLC, while resuming our Animal Crossing play-through. Just cleaning the long neglected island, and helping Harv build the shops.
I never got around to playing Breath of the Wild so the release of ToTK felt like a great time to finally give it a try! Still working my way through veeeery slowly, just about to take on my second divine beast.
They have completely separate roles and moods. Breath of the Wild feels so much like Princess Mononoke and it’s space and exploration feels like a gaming equivalent of meditating
Almost at the end of the vanilla portion of my 100-hour journey through Persona 5 Royal. That'll leave just the extra semester/true ending left to play before I can finally move on to Tears of the Kingdom, lol. I tend not to play more than one game at a time, especially not really big games like P5R or TotK. Each deserves my full attention or I'd never finish them.
Not Strikers, I have enough musou-style games and I don't need another one. I haven't seen Tactica's trailer yet, but if it's a strategy RPG like Fire Emblem or Triangle Strategy I'll probably get it since that's my favorite genre.
I'm getting ready for a local Splatoon 3 tournament in Philly this weekend, put together a quick pickup team for it. Also slowly working through Persona 5 Royal, just finished the third palace.
We went 1-2 in the round robin, which I'm plenty satisfied with. Wasn't really expecting to win with a pickup drafted less than a week ago, especially after seeing our first opponents had matching shirts with their team's logo on it. But somehow that was the set we won.
Octopath Traveller is pretty high on my list. I never got around to playing the first one, so want to play it soon, so that I can get ready to play Octopath Traveller 2 in a few months.
Nice! Yeah the second one is way better imo -- a lot of these games involves grinding and they introduced the ability to run combat at double speed. I can no longer play the first one because it feels so painfully slow to me 😅
Oh yeah TLOZ:TOTK is my go to right now. I'm at the point where I can battle Mr demon king but been side questing and all that jazz now first. I wanna go in and just obliterate him, so I'm focusing on getting the rest of the shrines etc beforehand and collecting better armour blah blah blah
I wouldn't count on the Demon King being a terrible difficult fight. You have to remember that it's a storyline quest, so it has to be achievable by the least common denominator. If you really want a challenge, you should explore the depths under the southwest region of Hyrule Field ;)
never had an issue with it. it's ergonomically perfect for me and more comfortable than switch with original joycons. I do often play it docked though.
FF Thearythm & Zelda TOTK on Switch, Baten Kaitos on GC, and Mario & Luigi Superstar saga on GBA (only short games of course :p). Oh and I am also playing Pokemon Stadium 2 on N64 😅.
Jokes aside, I started too many games this time, I am not generally this busy ^^.
Heh, I have sometimes done the same thing, but when I do that, I end up not finishing any of them. So, now I prefer to start only one big game.
As I mentioned in the post, I just got NSO Expansion pack, so going to try all of these, but one-by-one, not all at once 😀
Any games that you specially recommend?
BTW sorry about those test replies, I just couldn't reply to your message (or anyone's from kbin.social, finally figured out, have to select English as the language, or it won't post)
Indeed, I was following your advice a few years ago, but started to say things like “1 modern game + 1 retro game” is fine, than I added handheld games as category of its own, and that’s how I failed to follow my mantra this year 😅. But it’s very rare I do not finish my games, even if it takes me 4 months playing the same games :).
Mario & Luigi surprised me a lot. I was a bit skeptical about a Mario RPG game, and I enjoy it much more than expected :). Oh and TOTK / FFTheathrythm are games difficult to quit, they are so good 😊.
TOTK still, because once Pikmin 4 comes out I will switch to that
still haven’t even beat a single ‘regional phenomena’ yet… can’t stop myself from randomly exploring, which is honestly my favorite part of botw/totk anyway
I'll probably be playing TotK until Starfield comes out. Though playing TotK makes me want to play other Zelda games so I might try to squeeze in WW or TP.
Starfield is my most anticipated game, but I don't have a PC that can play it (or an Xbox), so won't be able to play on launch. Hope they don't mess it up.
I am also looking for more Zelda, but not going to start anything until I finish TOTK.
I am still playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, mainly focusing on side quests and exploration right now. With so much to explore, this is going to take a long time.
This is me right now. I owe myself do some exploring of the depths and sky islands. Having played BOTW the surface is so familiar that I kinda went quickly around it and probably advanced way too quickly on the main quests. It's time for me to slow down and do the exploration.
I played BOTW at launch, so while I do recognize few places here and there, for me most of the land mass is new, and with the different abilities, and all the caves and wells, there is so much to explore.
Sky islands I have explored least of, and need to focus more on. Specially because there are some things you can only get on Sky islands. 😀
Yes, of course. I need to explore more caves and wells too. And even familiar places have changed. But I feel like I went too fast because, despite the changes, it's still very familiar. It took me no effort to get to the main villages, because I kinda knew how to get there. It felt familiar yet new.
But that familiarity kept me from exploring the new places -and the dangerous places in the surface too-. I want to focus on that now. It's gonna be fun.
Pokémon Scarlet. I’ve got a bunch of the ominous stakes to find still, I was really trying to not use a guide but it’s been a few weeks now. Even with the performance issues I still really enjoy the story.
I also still need to get back to grinding for all the master trainer titles in Pokémon Let’s Go. We’ll see, as I get older it’s harder and harder to finish games at all.
Finding the stakes without a guide is definitely a pain in the ass. But I definitely agree that the game is very fun, even with all the bugs and the performance issues.
Still playing Tears of the Kingdom! I've been playing it nearly every waking moment of free time since it came out and it still feels like there is so much left to explore. I'm at 3 sages and 80 shrines, so I know I'm roughly 75% done, but there are so many discoveries that I just keep tripping over constantly.
3 Sages and around 80 shrines, we are pretty much at the same place. I am hoping this isn't a 75% story wise, hoping for more parts in the main quest after the sage quests.
I'm playing Tears of The Kingdom of course. Side from that I'm feeling like playing Persona 4 Golden. My local weather an vibes feel kinda like this game right now, do maybe that will inspire me trip finish it.
Finally finished my vanilla Persona 5 playthrough on my PS4 a few weeks back, so last week started my playthrough of Persona 5 Royal, and will likely continue that.
Still have the Trial of the Sword quest from BOTW to finish before going to kick sludge Ganon's ass.
Finally I managed to play and not lose interest, which is great, because I was mega hyped when it was announced.
And it is an amazin game (even if I still love A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess better)
Yeah, it's a great game. Personally I liked it more than A link to the Past, but then again, it was kind of my first real Zelda game.
So, as farizer asked, are you going to give Tears of the Kingdom a try? I would recommend to not go into it right away, give it at least a gap of few months so that you don't burn out.
I've been attempting Etrian Odyssey III on the switch but the controller feels clunky for mapping and the game feels so much more challenging than I remember ~10 years ago? lol.
I think we were used to playing difficult games back then, with all the improvements and changes in game design, the old games feel more difficult than they used to.
Have you tried auto-mapping? Does that make game less clunky? Or does it reduces the enjoyment of the game?
Thanks for the reminder about auto-mapping! I haven't got to try it out. I feel like that will help, I loved mapping on the 3DS but I don't think It'll hinder my enjoyment on the switch.
nearing the end of the ToTK main story (i think), so i’ve been debating how heavy i want to go into all the side quests. I can’t believe how much this community has grown, you’re crushing it as the mod!
The game is huge, and sometimes it's okay to consider the game finished after the main story is done, nothing wrong with that. For instance, I am never going for all the koroks. Even all the shrines aren't necessary, but I'll try to do most of the side-quests. At least that's the plan for now.
I still haven't finished TotK and a couple of days ago I bought Octopath Traveler 1 & 2! It was a bit of an impulse buy but they were on sale and I've been eager to play them ever since I played the demo of the first one in 2018 I believe, I'm very excited!!
So, I love Scarlet and Violet as well, for different reasons. PLA was an excellent story. It felt very complete in terms of what it was. Meanwhile, I'm basically foaming at the mouth over the DLC for S/V. One feels like watching a really good movie and the other feels like watching a really great series, if that makes sense?
As for EO3. It's purely by happenstance. My husband was playing it and I decided to pick it up. :)
Just gotten Animal Crossing and wanted to play, by curiosity.
For the rest, still moving of Cult of the Lamb, I know it had a lot of updates, but peoples says it's unplayable when you have 25+ fellows, so I'm still playing to get this number of fellows before making a review. For now, it's kinda good (15 fellows).
I've been splitting my time mostly between ToTK and Metroid Prime Remaster, feels like a pretty good combo to break things up between. Just finally picked up It Takes Two, so I'll probably see if the wife wants to game with me a bit tonight or tomorrow after she's home from work.
I am still working my way through Tears of the Kingdom. I tend to lose steam on open world games and never end up finishing them. So far I am still motivated to finish this one.
BOTW didn't have a long main quest, and I think TOTK's main quest wouldn't be too long either, so if you are losing interest, just go for the main quest, and at least finish that.
You can always come back for side quests and shrines etc. later.
I still really want to pick that one up! I've been saving the demo for when I feel like I have enough time to really sink my teeth into it so I can get a jump on the story. Maybe next time it goes on sale if I feel like I've finished enough side quests in Zelda.
Diablo 4 and Street Fighter 6 both are really good games, and very high on my wishlist. With Final Fantasy 16 coming up, it's a jam packed summer this year.
What is your wife playing these days? Assuming she is using the Switch.
We played Pikmin 3 together prior to her picking up Tears of the Kingdom. She is absolutely addicted to whatever she plays, and then doesn't play anything for long spells. Pikmin 4 is right around the corner, so there likely won't be much of a lull between TotK and that. In general, she plays Nintendo stuff on the Switch.
I finished Yoshi's Crafted World, finally after like 3 years of owning it. So now I've decided "welp I guess it's time to play Breath of the Wild". Enjoying it so far, I do need to get to Kirby tho... which I was planning on doing once I finished Luigi's Mansion 3, Paper Mario and Yoshi's Crafted World, oh well.
In non-Nintendo stuff, I've been playing Fallout 4 on PC because I've gotten that itch. I've only ever played in PS4, I think I got it on PC when it went on sale. It's really weird playing it with a mouse and keyboard, but it's a lot of fun building a new character and trying to figure out their personality... she feels like very sarcastic and mean but will soften up when you get to know her.
Yoshi's Crafted World is such a beautiful game. Our whole family enjoyed it. I am looking forward to a sequel, hope they announce something soon.
I have so many games like that. Astral Chain is one of the big one, and Super Mario Bros U Deluxe... I play games slower than they keep releasing them, so they keep piling up, but the silver lining is, I always have a few great choices to choose from.
Fallout 4 is really good, but for some reason I didn't like it as much as 3 or New Vegas. I really need to go back to it someday, as I love the Fallout in general. What are your thoughts on Starfield, I am really hyped for it, though don't have anything that will be able run it on launch.
I'm a very big Fire Emblem fan and play all story paths of Fire emblem Three houses which i played maybe over 300 hours and on Engage i'm on maybe 200-250 hours into the game. So obviously i like both game, i wouldn't spend so much hours if i don't like a game.
I'm aware that Fire emblem Three houses get a better score and sold better, but i think Engage is a better game. As i already wrote up ahead, i finished a Ironman run and i waited for this so long, because the former game was quite bad for this. Armbush spawn all over the game, not that iteligent map design or boring maps and you don't get a lot more units over the game. Fire emblem three houses has the feature that you are able to socialise with other classmember. So a lot people compare it with Persona, but i think it's not on a level like Persona. I'm not a big fan ob this church mechanik, a lot tasks are just boring or even annoying and dialogues aren't always that good writen outside of the support dialogue that engange has as well. Three houses has a better story, at least people want to tell me that and i maybe see it, but as stupid as some of the character interactions of engage are, i just like the story and how characters are a bit more.
But at one thing engage shines the most and this is gameplay and map design. The core mechanik of a Fire emblem game, because as a long time fire emblem player, the Fire emblem gameplay keeps me playing every game of the series. Out of my head, there are not much maps in Fire emblem three houses that are special, i think there a decents maps, but a lot worse as well. Of course it's easier for me to speak about Fire emblem engage maps because i just played it recently. Fire emblem engage has a lot more maps with interresting maps hazards or designs, choose interresting legacy maps and redesigned it in an interresting way. Playing against Ike was just, how do i ever get to ike and than he breaked though the north of the map, that suprised me a lot and was fun to play. The later maps that gave you a time limit to finish the map but always try to push you units back is for me a good map. And some of the dlc maps are awesome and a really good challange (engage has maybe the best fe dlc out of all games).
The Engage mechanik is as well more interresting than the mechanik of three houses that let you do different moves acording to the (i don't know the name) soldier types you get arround you. The three houses was build arround destroying shield from big monster and some maps were quite good with that (like the map we fight this big turtle) and some weren't fun with this mechanik. I think the mechanik was decent, has pros and flaws like the pairup mechanik of the 3ds games. But the engage mechanik is so fun for me, play besides marth or other heroes and get stronger for a short amount of time let me solve problems in the games but i have to plan ahead because it will run out at some point (endboss use that to kill my precious dragon QQ in ironman). Skill system in Engage is weird and broken in three houses...
In the End i think Engage is better than Three houses, better for core fans of the series, but maybe not better for players that got into the series with three houses. But sadly if i rank all newer Fire emblem games (3ds and switch), three houses would be my least favorite game, but not the worst in the series.
I don't know if my text makes so much sense, just came out of my head and of course engage is more fresh to me than three houses, makes it easier to remember things in engage.
I love it! The story is a lot more silly and not as serious but the gameplay itself is pure fun! The combat animations are really smooth and the dialogue between characters can be hilarious.
I was planning on finishing BoTW so I can start play ToTK, but I literally just bought another voucher and I have no idea what new games to get with it (if any at all at the moment).
Wait for today's direct and see if there's anything new.
Also, you don't have to play the game you buy right away (thought the temptation is very hard to resist), you can just play the older game first and come back to new one later.
Or just play what you want, and then get back to BOTW later. BOTW and TOTK aren't going anywhere. It's not like they are live service games which will be completely different in few months or years.
It's taking me so long with fast travel. Without fast travel, I may never play another game. It does sound fun though. I did that in Skyrim (but not in my first play-through), and enjoyed it immensely.
Yeah I will end up spending maybe 300+ hrs in ToTK but with BotW I often found that there were quests and details that I skipped because of fast traveling. First playthrough I skipped Link's house and Tarrey town entirely.
Been replaying Sunshine and just started Wind Waker again.
I'm really loving these older games. I wish I could appreciate them more in the past.
Oh well, there's always the future!
I think we live in a great time to both witness the earliest games, and also all the advancements we are witnessing, but let's say if you have to choose between:
To live in the past, to play all the games as they were launched, from NES or Atari time etc.,
To live in the future, to play the newer games, with all the improvements and technology. 8K with 120 FPS, or maybe even games with full VR.
Haha, I know that feeling. I have such a huge backlog of games. Still haven't played Astral Chain or Super Mario Bros U Deluxe... so many games, and so little time.
Which Monster Hunter are you playing? Rise? I may start World with some friends soon, not sure how much we will play.
Yup, Rise is correct. I play with a buddy of mine once a week. Although we hunt since the release of rise, we just finished the sunbreak story and slowly fighting our way through the anomalies.
Life often gets in the way but MH is easy to pick up where you left it or to play even when there is not much time.
I've been playing a ton of Diablo 4, but definitely want to find some time to hop back into Hyrule and complete some side quests in TotK. I also want to play through Kirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble on NSO; I never managed to pick it up when it was new on GBC, so I'm stoked that I finally get to play a game that has eluded me for so long!
There's also a NSO mission to play Kirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble this week. For 30 coins. I usually don't care about these coins, but they are useful int buying those avatars.
Which class are you playing in Diablo 4, and how are you liking it?
Thanks for the heads up about the coins! I typically don't care either, but if it's for a game I'm checking out anyway...I mean, why not?
I've been playing Rogue and Sorceress! Both are a lot of fun; I'm using daggers with the Rogue so she's my close-combat character and my Sorc is ice, so going ranged fighter with her.
I'm playing Jack Jeanne, just started the game but I think I'll like it as I've been looking for a visual novel with more interactive elements than story only.
Cannot afford it until I get paid at the end of the month, but I'm so thrilled about the Etrian Oddysey re-release. Usually I'm not big on re-release, but these games hold a special importance for me as my first dungeon crawlers. If only Nintendo priced things more accessibly. 😔
Not that Nintendo would be any better, but the pricing for Etrian Odyssey is on Atlus. The good news is that if you opt to be patient, Atlus games routinely have a habit of going on pretty good sales since their titles often have niche appeal.
Yes! That's a very good point. I'll probably splurge after getting paid, but thanks for pointing the finger to Atlus. 😁 I'll give them a pass just because I love EO games.
Currently loving Cassette Beasts; a great new take on the Pokémon-like with an intriguing story. Still has some performance issues but the recent patch helped a lot and it’s got me hooked in that “I’ll do just one more thing real quick” mentality.
Oh, I came across Cassette Beasts recently, and added it to my "keep an eye on" list. It looked pretty interesting, glad to know it's good when playing too.
Hope they release more patches to fix the remaining issues.
I started playing an indie game called In Other Waters, played for a hour and I dig the vibe so far.
Just checked the trailer and the game looks interesting. Also has pretty good rating. Going to add it to my wishlist. Thanks!
I still have one regional main-quest left, and I am afraid there won't be much story left after that, so not going for that, instead just doing exploration and side-quests. I am liking the story a lot though. Have you gotten all the Tears? I have more than half of them, would try to collect them all before completing the last regional quest.
Regarding In Outer Waters, just get ready to read a lot when playing. The game was built around narrative first, gameplay second, although the gameplay compliments the narrative really well.
Yes, I did get all the Tears in the game. I got so invested in the story that I kind of rushed it just to see what happened next. It was worth it, final Tear cutscene was really unexpected, at least for me. But if you feel like doing more exploration and side-questing, don't rush it, enjoy the game at your own pace and make your own adventure out of it. :)
After a few months of moving about between hotels, I finally got everything all set up a my new place, so I've been enjoying some splatoon 3 again, along with legends arceus.