That’s my undestanding at least.

I do the same “stocking” of games for the backlog, and at least for me it has a lot to do with wanting the physical version (which can get hard to find later), or getting a really good deal in a digital version.

The secondary weapons are mostly useless and as the video said, you need to farm resources to be able to use them.

I’d argue these are some of the few “useful” upgrades since some of these tools are really strong. But I agree they made them quite annoying to use due to the need to manage/farm resources.

Fair. Act 1 is fairly tough but one can still go through the mist to skip last judge at least which is where most struggle.

Though that’s quite well hidden and very few people will find that without some Google help. I’d also argue that it’s probably harder to go through Sinner’s Road and Mist than fighting Last Judge, though YMMV.

It goes from 5 dmg --> 9 dmg --> 13 dmg.

That didn’t match my experience, I did a lot of tests after getting the first upgrade and it definitely didn’t cut down the hits by that much.

So I was looking into that and according to tests made by a redditor there’s some kind of “damage reduction” stat in place that negates some of that buff. Their page is a work-in-progress but they’re documenting the exact damage and # of hits to kill each enemy with each upgrade.

https://raiderking.com/hollow-knight-silksong-all-enemy-health-values-skill-and-needle-upgrade-damage-values/

Most of the game is amazing, but there’s also incredibly frustrating decisions and moments that can drain all the fun you were having. Its design is very uncompromising - “this is going to be crazy hard and punishing, and I don’t care if you’re not having fun with this”.

Too many things feel overtuned for extra challenge, getting stronger (more life, more damage) is a slow and difficult process, so sometimes you get in a situation where there’s no good option except “suck it up and get good”. But the game makes even that annoying! If you’re stuck you want to experiment with different subweapon/equipment configurations, but if you keep dying you quickly run out of shards to rebuild the tools and have stop and go farm weak enemies to refill.

If you’re still interested in this game I’d highly recommend going for PC, as there’s already a bunch of mods to make it more accessible.

Bold to release Mario Galaxy 1+2 on Switch when they already released Galaxy 1 as part of a three pack for the 35th anniversary. I won’t be buying Galaxy 1 again just for some extra story book pages.

Good news: It looks like you can also buy them individually:

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/super-mario-galaxy-plus-super-mario-galaxy-2-switch/

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/super-mario-galaxy-switch/

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/super-mario-galaxy-2-switch/

The non-linear aspect of this game is really good! I’ve also done quite a few things out of the “expected” order without realizing it.

Yesterday I was doing some exploring and found out the “alternate” path to the Citadel through Sinner’s Road, and from what I’ve heard you can either have Last Judge or Phantom as the final “Act 1” boss depending on the route you take which is really interesting.

Took a break this week from CrossCode since I was getting a little bored with the game. Will resume it after I finish Silksong.

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

I should be putting more time into this (Aoko is such a fun main character), but I haven’t been in a great mood for reading. Still making small progress here and there.

Playing Hollow Knight: Silksong!

This game is amazing, but it’s not something I can recommend to everyone - there’s a line between “challenging” and “punishing” and I think it crosses that line way too often.

It inherits a lot from Hollow Knight, including some of the controversial aspects. Game is super difficult, save spots are sparse (and sometimes quite distant from bosses), the mapping system is the same with all the annoying “must track the map seller in each area”, “must spend equipment slots to see your position on the map” and so on.

I’m finding Hornet a lot of fun to play with. She’s fast (in particular once you get the dash ability), and her moveset is flashy and acrobatic. The inclusion of “crests” that let you swap her moveset is really cool, and people who miss the Knight’s moveset will be happy to know that you can unlock an option to play that way. “Tools” that act as sub-weapons are another great addition, though the fact that they have limited uses and eat resources to recharge can feel limiting. I also love the new “healing” system - it’s more “all or nothing” since you eat most of your meter to heal, but you get 3 life immediately, meaning you have to take less breaks to heal and boss battles get better paced.

Bosses have been generally quite fun and well designed, though I hate the ones who have summons. Savage Beastfly is by far the worst one so far due to the small arena, big hitboxes, and being very RNG-based since some of this summons are far more dangerous than others.

In-game economy is bad. There’s two “currencies” and you always feels starved from one of them. Having to occasionally do “farming” sessions to recover my stash before progressing is one of the worst parts of this game.

The overall “feel” of growth over the course of the game is also lacking in some aspects, with the “movement” upgrades being amazing and “combat” ones underwhelming. You start with 5 life, and by the time you manage to go up to 6 there will be so many enemies dealing 2 damage that you went from “dying in 3 hits” to “still dying in 3 hits”. The first weapon upgrade is so minor that there’s some early-game enemies that still take the exact same number of hits to die. And BTW, did I mention that enemies in this game are annoyingly tanky? Having to hit 4-5 times is incredibly common, and this can get really annoying when dealing with flying enemies that love to stay out of your melee range.

Right now I’m deep into Act 2, just got the “grappling hook-like” upgrade and I’m exploring the upper areas of the citadel.

The good:

• Galaxy 1+2 remaster
• Prime 4 release date
• Hades 2 release date, and confirmation that it supports Switch 1
• New Fire Emblem

The bad:

• Nintendo getting more agressive with paid DLC… Bananza getting it 2 months after launch, and for Pokemon it’s pre-launch!

Not sure how I feel about the two combat systems, feels like I really don’t want to go into turn-based mode because I’ll take a lot of damage, but it also feels like the game really wants me to go into turn-based mode in order to deal damage.

The last two games (Daybreak 1/2) use the same system, and I used the “action” mode for two things:

• Killing weak enemies fast (which is a really good QOL/time-saving feature)
• Stunning stronger enemies so I entered turn-based mode with advantage, which was usually enough to finish them without taking damage

Would you say CrossCode is still worth a play?

So far I’d say yes, the main story (in particular the temples) is excellent. The issue I’m having is that I spent too much time on the optional parts to eventually figure out they aren’t very appealing to me.

Edit: Oh, and when are you starting Silksong? 😛

Already bought it and played 15min just to get a taste of it. 🙂 But I’m trying to resist going too deep on it before I finish CrossCode.

Finished Blade Chimera!

Another “short but good” metroidvania from Team Ladybug.

Fantastic visuals (I really love the animations), flawless performance even on the Switch 1, excellent controls and gameplay. I also enjoyed the flexibility it offers in combat, melee/ranged/magic all feel good to use and well-balanced, leaving the choice of which one to use more to your strategy and personal preferences.

There’s some rather unique choices in this game, with all the “classic” metroidvania movement improvements like sliding and double-jump being optional and acquired from a skill tree as you level up. They also included an amazing fast-travel option, which is a “Warp” mechanic that lets you jump to virtually any room in the map and makes backtracking non-existent - and you can unlock that the first hour of the the game!

Overall I had a great time even though I still prefer the other games from the same developer (Touhou Luna Nights and Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth) .

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

Still on the “slow progress” stage.

Playing CrossCode!

Reached Chapter 8. Story took a surprising turn with some interesting twists and unexpected emotional moments.

But to be honest I’m rushing things because I’m starting to get bored with this game - while there’s a lot of good stuff in it I also think it’s overstaying its welcome. Haven’t touched most recent sidequests, I’m no longer bothering with the environmental/plataforming puzzles, and will probably lower the difficulty to speed up battles.

I think the main reason is that sidequests and environmental puzzes don’t feel rewarding, you spend a lot of time on them to just get some material for crafting/trades that you don’t really care much about.

Including a free Switch 2 upgrade!

Also Steam, and I’ve heard reports of instabilities in PSN and Xbox Store too.

Will just see the review to make sure it isn’t too bad.

From the demo I’m not concerned, looks like Falcom really put their love into this one.

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

Minimal progress this week, hoping to go back to it during the weekend.

Playing CrossCode!

Reached Chapter 6.

I love the puzzles, in particular the temples which remind me of old PS1 RPGs like Wild Arms. They can get really tricky too, there was a couple spots where I ended up stuck and had to take a look at a guide. But overall they are my favorite parts of the game.

Combat is fun and fast paced, though I feel the amount of damage you take from enemies is way too high for a game where battles can get really chaotic. I’m having a much harder time against groups of regular mobs than bosses, mainly because there’s too much going on on the screen and I often don’t even notice how much damage I’m taking, or get hit with potshots coming from the edges of the screen while focusing on a bigger enemy.

The plataforming parts definitely suck. They’re finicky, you’ll miss jumps you should have suceeded from time to time, walking on ledges is a pain, but the biggest problem is that the 2D graphics don’t do a really good job at showing height - so, so many moments where you go “sure, I can obviously jump in that direction” but it’s actually on a different height. Also, some plataforming puzzles require you to go through 3+ screens and missing a single jump means a lot of wasted time.

I also played a bit of the Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter Demo and was very impressed with it - it looks and plays good, and feels like it preserves most of the charm of the original. But I’m going to keep this one on the backlog until the full game is out since I’m planning on replaying it.

The Switch 2 launch felt oddly rushed.

Lack of details, initial backward compatibility list having only ~20% of games with basic testing finished, the need for SD Express cards that are hard to find. Even the GCK situation is probably due to cost/availability issues that will improve over time.

This DevKit situation looks to me like another example of this.

Looks like there’s a PC demo but the game is not out yet. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3110760/Alabaster_Dawn/

Finished Guacamelee! 2!

Didn’t enjoy this one as much as the predecessor, mainly due to final 1/3 or so the game. It felt like the developers decided the game needed to be harder but didn’t really know what to do, so they just amped up one of the worst parts of the previous game - insta-kills by touching spikes or lava.

Seriously, I think 90% of my deaths were due to this and it gets really frustrating, to the point that I decided to skip optional content and just rush to the final boss to get it done.

It’s a shame because the rest of the game was solid, I liked how they made better use of the “chicken” form and also how the maps were better designed and with far less backtracking.

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

Slow progress this week, finished Chapter 1.5 (“Seven Days of Spinning”), which is optional but a very interesting read. The segment that focuses on Alice hunting monsters was particularly awesome, being the first “break” from slice-of-life into supernatural and leaving a strong impression.

Now reading Chapter 2 (“Little Happening of Last Night”).

Playing CrossCode!

Current side-game, an indie action RPG I bought at a sale a while back. Only played 2h or so but the first impression is really good, mixing puzzle sections that remind me of older games like Wild Arms with fast-paced combat.

Looks kinda fun, but releasing this not too long after MKW seems weird. Will people really pick up 2 Nintendo racing games so close together?