Note wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2024 9:13 pm
Made some more progress in Link's Awakening DX the past few days. [...] I'm really enjoying the game so far.
Nice! I had LA DX growing up, but never actually finished it until I was in high school or college. It was always pretty much my favorite Zelda. (Gun to my head, I might pick Wind Waker or Majora's Mask over it, though.)
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Albert Odyssey Gaiden
I started this game after shelving Persona, and like Persona, it's pretty classic-adjacent because it sold well enough in Japan to have a best seller re-release, but it's very niche in the West. I kind of can't believe it sold well at all, to be honest--although, apparently Sword & Sorcery was also part of the Saturn Collection, and that game seems like some hot garbage on the Saturn.
Albert Odyssey Gaiden on the Saturn is really only known outside of Japan as just "Albert Odyssey," but it's actually a side story game released after the first two Albert Odyssey games for the Super Famicom (both strategy RPGs). Apparently AO Gaiden was meant to be on the Super Famicom originally, and while I didn't know that going into the game, it definitely makes sense to me, now. A lot of my initial thoughts on the visuals were that they look like some of the late stage SuFami JRPGs like Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, etc: Large, dumpy sprites; Drab color palettes; Mode 7 world map.
Anyway, I'm at the end of the game, and I kind of hate it. Initially it just seems like a kind of quaint little JRPG with some fundamental issues like brutally horrific balance, five seconds of loading for transitions (such as start of battle), abhorrent encounter rate, slow combat flow, some mediocre writing, and generally bland combat. Everything in the second 'half' of the game gets ratcheted up to extreme, wtf-levels of 'why would they subject people to this torture?' They take away a useful character and replace her with a character who is initially worthless, and only eventually becomes a side-grade; By virtue of that you lose a character with a heal spell, which forces you to use the heaviest DD to use his heal-breath skill (because it's the only party-wide heal) instead of attacking. Bosses just start to hack off 40-70% of most character's health with single target attacks, will regularly target the squishy female characters, and get into loops of using party-wide attacks that knock 20-40% of characters' HP, all while having speed stats that sometimes give them two attacks before all of your party gets one. Buffs and debuffs are also practically worthless, so there's no real mitigation that can be done (even trying to boost Pike's accuracy so he doesn't have his attacks blocked 40% of the time generally only lowers his miss rate to about 30%).
I spent about an hour and a half the other day going through the first of four towers (the south tower) because the pace of the game and encounter rate are terrible, and about 40 minutes of that was against the boss because he had an absurd health pool. I plan to beat this game, because I refuse to let it win, but it's a real chore at this point. The story in the second half is pretty worthless, also, so there's really no enjoyment left, at this point.
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Dragon Quest IX
I've still been playing this, but I've actually gotten into what feels like throwing distance of something sort of resembling "completion." Outside of 16 quests related to weapon skill for weapons I don't use (dagger, staff, whip, pole, hammer, boomerang, bow and fisticuffs), I only have 15 quests out of the 184 in the game left unfinished; Four of those reward legacy boss maps. One of them I can't complete anyway, since it requires Brai's Shoes, which require having 30 people visit my game instance. (I have absolutely no use for the reward from it, though, so it's not that bad.)
I finished all the story quests that are part of those 184 quests, which ended up being kind of interesting. Not spectacular, but interesting. That got me the last of the story NPC party members, and I actually switched out the other two of my created NPCs. That seems crazy, but I got kind of lucky with a lv 96 treasure map off of a lv 77 map, and gained access to some good Metal King and Platinum King farming options. So leveling up got much, much easier. My main character is actually almost out of class based skill lines to invest points into now, but the other three are also beyond the skill point investments of the created characters that got benched for them (I just need to get two of them from lv ~50 up to 99 on their main classes).
I've almost finished all the alchemy pot recipes outside of the legendary equipment, and a number of material wasting recipes that make you revert an item back into its un-upgraded state. I also have everything for equipment out of the Rank 1 through Rank 8 treasure map Blue Chests outside of a staff in the Rank 5 chests, and a whip in the Rank 8 chests. That basically means I just need the Metal Slime equipment out of the Rank 9 chests, and the legendary weapons out of the Rank 10 chests. I've gotten a few Rank 9 chests, but they're very stingy with the Metal Slime gear so far. Not sure if I've actually seen a Rank 10 chest yet, sadly.
Haven't really done much with the Legacy bosses outside of grinding Baramos up to Lv 10, and getting kind of tired of him getting access to Chilling Wave. I'm kind of planning to just keep going with the treasure maps, because there are only two more of those bosses I haven't found yet, and there are a number of monsters in them I need to find to finish up some of the remaining quests. After that, I'll probably hunt the legacy bosses for a bit to get all their equipment drops. The orb drop rates kind of suck, so I don't really know that I want to go through upgrading a bunch of legendary equipment (which I've really been lucky to actually get three pieces of from normal treasure map bosses).
