Even though I liked ME2 and 3 a bit more, the series overall still has my favorite Bioware cast by a mile and one of my favorite casts in gaming.

The ironic thing is I actually find the setting kinda hokey, but the moment-to-moment action is fantastic. The exposition dump towards the end of ME1 that sets the stage for the larger conflict was so satisfying. A classic example of solid script writing and characterization elevating overall plot and setting.

Fire Emblem Engage. Only the third FE I’ve tried, I go back and forth on whether this series is for me. At this point, this one might be my favorite out of the ones I’ve played. The cast is really weird overall but I still quite like a few of them. I also like the character advancement and Engage systems. It’s fun to tinker with my party. The battles also seem to have less of the nonsense and more of the kind of strategy I like than in the others.

Classic. Gorgeous soundtrack, too. I remember as a kid (pre-Internet) actually calling up the store because I couldn’t figure out how to save the game 😂

I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed the main story in Starfield. I normally don’t care at all about it in Beth games. Unfortunately, I was too disappointed by all the missed potential to keep up with it after that (which is just weird to type out, I think I went 200 hours in Skyrim before I decided to actually go through the story). The awful framerates I was getting really didn’t help, either.

Oh, and Starfield’s Neon is gonna look real bad side-by-side with Cyberpunk 2077. Oof.

Yeah, unfortunate. As cool as a lot of this looks (and I’m a big Suiko fan), it’s going to have to get crazy good reviews for me to pick it up.

Gotta say, it’s not inspiring confidence in me that GungHo is chronically late with their trailers on all the marketing for this game.

I’m not playing this one at release anyway, but I hope for everyone else’s sake this isn’t going to be another Ys VIII situation.

Edit: GungHo finally published the English version a week later.

Usually six months after for SQEX titles.

You’ll likely appreciate Sky 3rd more as you go on. If you happened to miss Star Doors 8, 14, or 15, I strongly recommend pulling them up on Youtube or something. They are all quite important.

Too busy to finish stuff lately, but I did do some of Fire Emblem Engage (I think I’m almost halfway?). I also started Breath of Fire IV, I’ve got a bunch of big positives and big negatives with this one. For example, the spritework is gorgeous, along with dynamic character portraits in the text boxes. Feels like it’d be another one of my pet “lost sprite generation” games for fifth-gen games, except they sprinkled in a bunch of 3D models in for some reason. That hasn’t aged well. The control scheme is also bizarre. Everything’s at a diagonal for some reason, and Triangle to cancel? Oookay.

That said, for not-JRPGs, I also finished Kaizen: A Factory Story, which I really enjoyed even though I’m not normally into puzzle games. If you’re looking for something different that’s set in real-world Japan, it might be worth a look.

August doesn’t have any big releases for me so I’ll likely be continuing on with FE and BoF4. Not the case in September though, stuff’s coming!

The good news is that it feels less gacha as you go, since there’s a limited pool of stuff to draw from for the goodies you want (like the Daydreams and the characters).

Yeah, I’m still waiting for Bar Stella Abyss. -_-

I just think it’s ironic that it came to mirror the books in that you can enjoy absolutely top-notch storytelling for a while and then can’t enjoy the ending.

Quite adorable. I audibly gasped when I saw the newspaper recipe visually showing how to make puni drink in Atelier Meruru 😂

Celine’s super cute, though.

For Trails, it’s gotta be Mishy.

It’s really interesting that one of the reasons Diablo 3 was a step down was the increase in handcrafted story elements that kept interrupting the procgen flow. Some games just do really well with it.

Fire Emblem Engage, having more fun with it than I thought I would. After Three Houses, I’d kinda written off Fire Emblem as not for me but only a couple hours in I’m already having fun messing around with character builds.

Given SQEX’s restructuring and what Kitase’s said about how they feel about remakes after FF7, I’m getting the sense this became a “spare time” project like FFT turned out to be. Could be a long while for this one, if it ever does see the light of day.

Two things helped me with this: allergen control (in my case this was moving to a different region and getting better about cleaning) and a septoplasty. I used to get sinus infections three times a year, and now I don’t even really think about it. I might even get a humidifier this winter, which is wild to me considering I had chronic congestion practically all my life.

This reminds me to get on Shogun, I’ve been meaning to start it.

And oof, it hurts me in my soul to see The Night Of that high up. I’ve rarely been so disappointed in a show.