Did a little bit of everything this week.

Explored the desert area in Visions of Mana. It’s a good thing I like the style of the game, because there are long stretches where really nothing interesting is happening. But I was also really happy that Vuscav the turtle still makes the same weird sound that he did in Trials of Mana on the Super Nintendo. Back then I assumed the sound was bugged because it’s just so strange!

Did a little grinding in Monster Hunter Wilds, worried I got rusty after not playing for a few weeks. I’m fine, and I got two Lagiacrus Sapphires in a single hunt. I did complain a good year ago that this game made the rare drops too easy to get and they really overfixed that with the monster added in updates later. 1% carve, 2% quest reward, no other sources, I needed 13 to make all the equipment. Only one more…

Played some more Mario Kart World, Free Roam. Some of the challenges are really insane. I had to look up one of them because I didn’t even understand what my fingers were supposed to do to jump across multiple pillars sideways in a wall-ride.

In Fallout 3, I finally got the last part I needed for the Railway Rifle. I’ve picked up 800 Railway Spikes so far, so I’m set for a long time. I don’t think I used this gun on my first attempt to play the game and the description says it can pin enemy limbs to the wall, which sounds fun.

Haha, of course it’s 64 again! XD

But I haven’t played any of the other remakes and reboots since the original and this one looks really nice, so I guess this is the one for me.

April sucked for me and i haven’t played much in weeks. I was laid out by allergies and lost a lot of sleep, plus other things I’ll keep to myself. But that’s all behind me and I’m ready to pick everything back up.

Last I played Visions of Mana, I swapped classes so that physical attacks regenerate MP, so my Palamena can use magic more aggressively. I’ve always liked playing mages the most in Mana games.

I actually did play a bit of Mario Kart World again before things (and me) went down and I hope to pick that up again, too. The changes to Free Roam were long overdue, but now it’s finally playable for completionists.

Fallout 3 was the only game I kept going since I record it. Followed up on the main story again and visited Rivet City. There’s a little more to do in the vicinity and then it’s back to roaming the wastelands again!

I don’t expect to actually finish the crowns, to be honest. I still have other grinding to do and resetting the world for crowns is a good excuse to get a Lagiacrus with a guaranteed Sapphire drop to spawn.

Silver and gold crowns are markers for a monster’s size. Especially large and small monsters are marked with these crowns in the compendium, which has been a stable in the series for a very long time. It doesn’t give you anything except an achievement, but it’s also much easier to do in Wilds. Previously, you learned a monster’s size after you hunt it. In Wilds you have binoculars that reveal this information beforehand, so you can just quickly check every monster in the area.

Mostly Monster Hunter Wilds this week. I’ve been grinding for gold crowns, which I have never done in another game before. I can’t explain why I’m doing this, some bug just bit me and made me do it.

In Fallout 3, I’ve done everything in the metro maze I’ve been wanting to do for now. I’ll still have to go through one soon, but what matters is that I’m back in the actual world!

Speaking of being bitten by weird bugs, I’ve been wanting to play Mario Kart World again for the first time since release for no apparent reason. I haven’t done it yet, but it’s on the table…

AFAIK they’re optional, but I’m sure there’s some kind of reward that’ll be worth it.

Made more progress in Visions of Mana. I wish the game had more boss fights and fewer trial battles with time limits. I started lowering the difficulty for them because I just don’t have the damage output to finish them in time on Hard. And I don’t think your party members are very good at fighting, either. Bosses are fun because you actually have to dodge attacks. Normal battles just don’t have any depth to them.

I’m lost in the metro network of Fallout 3. I remember not liking it when I first played the game, but the DC city area with its isolated sub-areas you can only access via sewers and metro lines is an absolute pain in the rear.

At least I have the Anchorage quest behind me, the Fallout DLC for people who wish they weren’t playing Fallout. Crazy rewards though, I now have armor that makes me invisible when I’m crouched. I knew it existed, but I expected it to have some kind of limit or cooldown. But it’s just busted and its base defense is on par with what I had before, too. I almost don’t want to use it, but invisibility has always been my favorite power, so I find this very entertaining~

It’s not really new, just Nintendo of America adapting to what Nintendo of Everywhere Else has already been doing.

Played more Vision of Mana and misunderstood how skill points work the entire time. I thought they were shared among all characters, which didn’t really make much sense to me, but the system with the extra points from gold clovers had me utterly confused.

Meanwhile, in Fallout 3, I’m finally getting to use the one mod that I prepared (aside from bugfixes and visuals). I want to play mostly vanilla, but when I looked through the list of companions to prepare my playthrough, I noticed my favorite companion from my first attempt to beat the game was missing. I experimented with a bunch of mods back then and just forgot this was one of them. But I want to have Bittercup as my companion! She and my character, Jimothy, are two very different kinds of idiots who just happen to perfectly misunderstand each other. I’m almost ready to follow the main story again, but I’ll stop by a DLC that is not too far away from Megaton, though I remember really not liking that one…

Finally, we have a date! This is the only Switch game I’ve been looking forward to for a while now, it’s basically Pokemon Snap as a platformer and I’ve been on board with that since it was announced!

I’ve mostly been playing Visions of Mana. It’s rather average so far, carried mostly by my nostalgia for the series. I hope the gameplay gets a little more depth, I’ve been hoping for more after the banger that was the Trials of Mana remake. But I still find it enjoyable enough.

After some delays, I beat Arch-Tepmered Arkveld in Monster Hunter Wilds. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but I go into all of these battles all by myself for the first hunt and only bring Support Hunters for the grind afterwards. My time in Monster Hunter Tri almost 20 years ago ended poorly with the final boss, Alatreon, only being available in the multiplayer environment. It didn’t really give me any chance to learn, so I was always the reason the hunt failed. That is why I fight everything solo first now, because you can really only learn the attack patterns when the monster is actually targeting you. It’s basically 50% honor and 50% trauma.

I got used to Fallout 3 it’s now in gamplay loop mode. Exploring, doing quests, bombing an ant into the geometry to stretch it into a twitchy eldritch abomination… everything you’d expect, except the main quest. Too much to do!

This is completely subjective, of course, but I thought:

1 had the best world, but the worst side quests.

X had the best exploration, but the worst characters.

2 had the best combat, but Gacha.

3 had the best side quests, but the worst world.

There’s more I could say, but I limited it to the best and worst of each when directly compared. There’s a really good game we could piece together from these four!

I finished Xenoblade X just in time to not benefit from the Switch 2 upgrade! I ended the game with 99% survey completion because the last boss I needed to kill required me to farm too much Bonjelium; the problem being that minerals are the one type of material you can’t get with material tickets. I’ll grind whatever is necessary, but I draw the line at waiting for the items to come in slowly over time.

About the finale:

But overall, this is my favorite Xenoblade, though that’s always been hard to say. The series tends to frustrate me because every game does something exceptionally well and is the worst in the series in some other way.

Replacing Xenoblade as my main game is Visions of Mana, a game I was surprised to find in my Steam library a few months ago. I thought it was still on my wish list! The Mana games on the SNES have been a big part of my early years and Visions always looked very gorgeous. I’ve only played a little bit, but I like what I’ve seen so far.

Monster Hunter Wilds got its latest (and final?) update. I’ve only tackled the new side quests so far and they brought back egg carrying for a Monster Hunter Stories collab quest! That was always my least favorite quest type, but they reworked the mechanics to make it much better, tolerable even. Next up is Arch-Tempered Arkveld, the first 10-Star quest. I’m scared…

I’m finally out and about in Fallout 3. I forgot how stressful it can be to be in a Bethesda city with everyone always talking. The desolate wastes suddenly feel a lot nicer~ I also have to get used to Bethesda physics again. I jump-scared myself by stepping on a skeleton and somehow launching it into my face…

Before I started the game, I was wondering if I should wait for a Switch 2 upgrade. I beat the game yesterday…

A few years ago I was hit with the sack of bricks that is all Donkey Kong Country games being released one year apart. I have vivid memories of playing the second game for a very long time and then multiple times after while imagining what a third game would be like and you’re telling me that was only one year? There’s no way those games would mean so much to me if we had only had one per console generation.

I think I’m closer to the end of Xenoblade X than I expected. I thought there’s be new side quests popping up in the new endgame content, but there’s been nothing, really. I finished up the Collectopedia today and then I’m off to the third part of the final chapter. After that, it’s the last few high level tyrants to finish off the map completion. It might still take a while, Part 2 took way longer than I expected. I’m curious how much of this new endgame they actually had in mind back on the Wii U. I find it hard to believe the Lao tease at the end was always meant to be what we got now. Makes me wonder if they scrapped the original plans or if they never had any to begin with.

Wild Arms 2 is beaten. In the end, I much prefer the first one. It’s mostly the story that just lost me near the end of Disk 1. The villains never really did anything interesting while they were around on Disk 1 and Disk 2 didn’t really have any villains to begin with. Your main antagonist becomes a part of space that’s eating up the world or some-such, which just doesn’t hook me. I like my villains to be less metaphysical and more mustache-twirling.

In its place, I started playing Fallout 3! I played it a good 10 years ago but never finished it, because I always stop playing Bethesda games at some point. It’s not even the game’s fault, the literal last thing I did was find a map with all vaults and I was really excited to go see them, and then I just never did. But I really like the world of Fallout, so I’m recording it now because that’s the only way I’ll ever stay motivated to finish it.

I’m doing the story, but I rushed to get all characters, so I had a lot of side quests piled up that I wanted to work through first.

I’ve only played Monster Hunter Tri, Rise and Wilds, so my exposure to each era of Monster Hunter is limited, but Rise is my favorite of the three. It has all the benefits of the new games with the quest structure of the old games, which is a big win my book. It has its downsides (Spiribirds…) but I’d recommend it over Wilds.

Not sure what to say about World of Light. Most annoying battle effects can be negated with Spirits and if nothing else works, you can always lower the difficulty. I play on hard, but will absolutely lower it for fights like Akuma.

I finally get to continue the story of Xenoblade X as all side quests up to level 60 are taken care of at last! The Red Lobster quest is very demoralizing. It’s no wonder I only found just under half, the other half doesn’t appear until you get the first 49! So if you try to do this without a guide and thoroughly comb through every nook and cranny of the city, your reward is getting to do it all over again. If all of the lobsters were available from the start this would just be a normal, tedious quest.

In the late endgame, the lack of any kind of combat log becomes a real problem. There are some rare cases in which I engage a tyrant and just instantly die and I have no idea what even happened. The enemy list in the game shows their stats and resistances, but not what they do.

In Monster Hunter Wilds, I recently realized I really don’t need most of the extra rewards you get from Tempered monsters in the field, so I’ve switched over to grinding materials from lower ranked regular monsters via the quest list. My wishlist is finally shrinking at a visible pace!

I’m about to finish Wild Arms 2. I recently finished adding all regular enemies to the compendium and fought the optional bosses. I wasn’t able to beat one of them because it would just require too much grinding. If there’s one thing the game is missing, it’s a way to reduce incoming non-elemental damage. You have spells that can raise defense and resistance, but they do next to nothing!

I dug out Smash Bros. Ultimate again for the first time in years. I’ve been doing single character runs of World of Light pretty much exclusively since launch and a list randomizer decided to pick Captain Falcon for this eighth run.

I need a new Decapolice Prayer Circle, the old one clearly wasn’t working.