I have spent just shy of 100 hours (97.8?) in Personal 5 Royal. I just hit the first, original ending.
… I’m not 100% sure I want to keep going? The original ending is pretty good, and while I get the kinda Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya element to the 3rd semester… I might be done?
Great game, though, if you like your light-slogging JRPGs. A little bit of grinding, but only a little, and other than the general background-radiation sexism of almost (if not every) JRPG ever, the story was pretty good. Right on the precipice of progressive. 8.5/10, would consider playing another 10 hours to finish the new final act.
The big stumbling block is Baldur’s Gate 3, which I bought when it was on sale (I held off for almost a week!), and now want to properly dive into. I’ve played a few hours just to make sure it would run (it does, like a dream), and now I want to start over… but I’m trying very hard not to buy any video games until I finish the one I’m on, and I suspect BG3 will soak another 100 hours or so.
I’ll probably hold off a few weeks so I can finish my Cyberpunk course and my painting commission.
As you’ve alluded to, the rest of the game being DLC means it’s a good point to step away and I think you could come back to it reasonably easily if you wanted to without fearing that you’d need to replay the many, many hours of the base game to understand what was going on.
I enjoyed the extended ending, but no more so than the rest of the game. I didn’t feel like it suddenly elevated the game or its story to new heights. If you’re instincts are telling you that you’re done, I’d say to trust them!
After spending an unbelievable number of hours on Total War: Warhammer 3, I reinstalled Star Wars The Old Republic MMO.
Turns out in 2022 they introduced a thing called Combat Styles which lets you choose a 2nd skillset (so if you’re a “use the Force to throw things” Jedi you can also have access to the “lightsaber melee” Jedi attacks).
This is a total game changer, I remember agonising over having to miss out on some, or starting a class to find out that it’s weak in some aspect that you can’t patch.
Anyway, for a 13 year old MMO the SWTOR intro cinematics are better than many Star Wars movies:
I remember watching the game cinematics and being so pissed off that the game itself was a stock-standard MMO with a Star Wars thin (thin-thin) coat of paint.
Granted, I hate MMOs. But gosh the cinematics are spectacular.
I’m still Elden Ringing, about 80 hours in already, and I guess it kind of feels like how MMOs should be if MMOs were actually good. But then I never got much out of the multiplayer aspect of MMOs anyway.
I started totally blind in ER, then something happened that confused me so I looked up what it meant, and found a chunk of story I had completely missed by not noticing a couple of characters who I guess were in obvious places but I just totally overlooked. That led to a brief flurry of spoiling, which felt bad, because I started looking for things instead of stumbling across and being delighted by things. Now I’m back to trying to stick to a spoiler free diet.
I played an excellent demo of Tactical Breach Wizards - lovely writing, and the gameplay is something of a cross between Into the Breach and Xcom: Chimaera Squad. It’s strongly recommended if those things fill up your thrill pops. The demo is free on Steam currently.
Ps on a extra-nerdy level, it’s Tom Francis’s new game, tangentially related to SUSD in that he knows Pip and has presented a podcast (Crate and Crowbar) with her from time to time.
The thing that is preventing me from giving it a go is knowing that there’s no random level generation. If it feels like a scripted puzzle, that’s me out. I suppose I should just play the demo.
With all the rave reviews, I finally got around to playing Slay the Spire, which is good fun, but while I have finished a run with each class, I have not managed to win against the final(?) boss and was getting a bit frustrated. So I was looking for something else to play on my Switch and my brother-in-law lent me his copy of Octopath Traveller, which I have been enjoying the past couple of days. It is nice to play an old-style turn-based cRPG, and I like the boost mechanic in the combat system.
BG3 is on sale too but I’m strangely reluctant. I know I’ll like it but I’m not sure I want to exclude all other games yet. I’m not sure why but I feel like I’m actively avoiding it.
I went for Balatro, Deep Rock Survivor and Xenonauts 2.
I‘ve played both Balatro and Deep Rock Survivor… and enjoyed them
edit: had to check the sale. I have a long wishlist and there are some good discounts. but somehow my wishlist only got shorter because I removed a few items with the „remove“ button and not with the „into cart“ button
Forbidden West was a giveaway some weeks ago on Twitch if you have Amazon Prime. One of the very few times they gave away a good game.
I played it a bit on Gamepass and found it to be pretty fun if you like the chaos of a sandbox.
For me the most interesting one is Baldur’s Gate 3 because I feel it won’t get cheaper than that for a while. And I really want to play it at some point.
Though I heard a lot about Balatro and I also love Deep Rock Galactic and played a lot of Vampire Survivor with my wife on the Switch, so Deep Rock Survivor is on my wish list…
But I am usually careful with buying too much at once, it is the best way to cut down on your pile of shame and right now I am playing the Elden Ring DLC which is great but also big…
Big discount on Steam, I got the Through the Ages and Blood Rage apps for a pittance yesterday (and no comments on my dark circles this morning, please, TtA kept me up till midnight)
