Xenoblast91

This TMNT: MIM game has been a huge chore. The game itself is decent, it has a tendency for a lot of replay, but there's no actual post game that can make you keep playing though, but the trophies... Oh dear God, this has been an excruciating experience.

All the grind related trophies are related to farming submissions, and awful part of them is twofold. One, is the absurd level of RNG involved into making such missions spawn; and second, the description for earning them are a huge misleading! 

Currently there's just one more trophy related to this, and I've been three days  solid farming this with just poor results. Apparently, "transport 30 money bags" is wrong. There should be 30 missions of such activity, not the amount of bags themselves... Sigh, this has been saddening and tiring. I thought this game would be easier. The guide has been for little help, but just gives you few tips but not the straight stuff to do.

Anyway, I want to vent this, and because this is plainly lucky based is ridiculous how the developers design this game. I hope Shredder Revenge doesn't feature the same shit this presents. Wish me luck guys, I'm losing my grip...

  Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sampling

The work the developers put into crafting lovable and memorable main characters is hilarious, they mixed so well that even you can chuckle with their dialogues, sometimes you really wish you can interact and make a chat with them in real life.
 

It's quite strange to start this entry. I sincerely don't know where to start. But let's begin to talk about what is the RPG genre in gaming. Overall, the games defined by this type, are those focused on combat, strategy, adventure, exploration, leveling up and building solid characters based upon stats and all the above (I'm just thinking vaguely because the intricacies of this are wide). Keeping this in mind, we're ready to understand what's following.

The game was beautifully crafted with details, and that's a lot to say given the amount of indie games that hit far from the mark, even with the resources many teams dispose of. The art style, to say the least, is lovely, absurdly cute and the scenography of the overworld adds a lot of depth and fascination for what you can do with your adventure. That's the nature of an RPG.

The fantastic aspect of the game lies into the fact that dynamics play a lot of the core gameplay and the whole experience of it. The point of this game, which amused me by the huge quantity of players the game has clogged into, as its Platinum percentage is high for a really intricate, yet sufficiently fun to keep you up to the end (I'll talk about that later); also, your strategy will affect greatly your outcomes and results during battles. I've never been good at making solid of buffing builds into this type of game, as creativity and innovation should be the core of the game, I often rely on onto what's already been discovered and tested; as to think about what kind of consequences your build will affect the game takes its time (exactly what I said earlier; a strong RPG is one which makes you think outside the box, write down your resources and think carefully of what could happen, basically the true META (by this I mean the stuff you do outside any title in the genre-).

This game took me more than what I could have expected, to be honest. I clogged into it almost 70 hours (according to the internal clock of the game) but I’m sure it was ~90 in reality. Part of this was due to my own experimenting within the mechanics’ which are incredibly intricate and very well grounded for an RPG, actually. And due to I’m an all-terrain gamer, regardless of my love for RPGs, this was surprised me and had me wondering many possible tactics and how to take advantage of the craftables and builds one possible can do within the stats given in the game, plus few items and powerful METAs–which the game itself forces you to actually look that in real life: let me explain. In this last week of playing it, I had to pluck out a white sheet from a pile and writing down my stats and possibilities with my Team Snakemouth. While I usually do this since very long ago as a way to check collectibles, letting myself know what to do next in a game that I know I’m going to put on hold for a considerable amount of time, or to simply have a quick method to correct and review my progress, this one was completely unexpected (and probably unnecessary).

The plot will drive you through a lot of interesting and memorable characters. The development of background stories for each main character will make you delight into a good storytelling, making them unique and empathize with their desires, like their deeds become yours to while going in the adventure. What isn't apparent, and may be been a loose end for a potential sequel, was the character of Leif, a blue moth that suffers amnesia from his past that in the game is revealed where he comes from, isn't clear about what was the purpose of his powers and why he was apt for them. The game reminds me a lot of a famous Pixar movie which I loved when it came out as a child; nothing less than A Bug's Life. While the movie is based on Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, the game is loosely based on other sources like Tales of Zestiria and Golden Sun. Mix all those, and voilà! You got an incredible title worth of the praise it got.

In a very interesting entry that I wrote a few months ago, I mentioned that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is one of my favorite games ever; that precise title was, in fact, the one who taught me this may be no-so-common habit among gamers. At that time, I was only an 8-year-old kid who was still learning English, so I had to literally have a translator dictionary (yes, made of paper! Look at that pun, heh.) in my side to understand what was going on and to progress in the story. It paid off, and still does.

This is a good screenshot from a normal battle. While it's on Steam, the gameplay is the same. Just look at Team Snakemouth. The three of them are with Medals that buffs statuses. You don't need to spare your medals within characters; you just can make only one the main attacker and the reaming as passive as you wish to create a couch support.

Trophy wise, this game asks you to play everything. And I literally mean, everything! The Platinum itself tell you that you must see all it has to offer you. The funny two-fold thing with this, is firstly  that each aspect of the “Records” as the game calls them, are a mixed and complex series of submissions that one must finish allowing one of those requirements been met. For example, which is actually the most notorious one, is the trophy “Medal Collector” which required you to earn not only each types of medals in the game but even the repeated too! Let’s crumble this into a more digestible point. Medals are one of the most important aspects of the game, if not the core for the whole mechanic of it. They can help you by making “combos” or better properly stacks of buffs and status alteration variances to your characters, and depending on your approach, the team become a single tank, ubers, healers, primary attackers, supporters, etc. got it? Well, but the problem with medals are that they are scattered around all the overworld, and as the guide says, they are often required to be purchased. What makes this trophy so intricate and takes the most amount of time to complete (which is no surprise why many people left it to the end) is because it's tangled with other trophies: basically, you must finish all the story mode first plus, if you didn't be on “Hard Mode” (which is activated by a Medal by the way…) you need to replay the bosses on a VR machine in-game and rematch them to spy them, i.e. get their stats, and then make it count to earn other medals. That’s not the end, no. You need to collect all Crystal Berries, which are a special type of currency that only work to purchase Medals with a vendor in an underground tavern, and aside from that those aren’t useful at all; then you must farm around 1800 berries (now this is the normal currency of the game) to purchase another ones into a zone called Termarcade, where you can play Shovel Knight and Flappy Bird “for free” too and until you don’t finish those you can’t actually buy anything to exchange with tokens in that store (doing so allows you to get the “Gamer” trophy), and then you should buy all the remaining medals from a normal store with an NPC even if you already got all the rest of them.

That’s not all! You actually need to beat another mini-game in order to get the remaining medals. For one of the Crystal Berries, you need to actually win a Yu-Gi-Oh! Tournament plus defeat one character needed for the Bestiary. Once done that, you can now forward. Wait, no… Back in the day, when PM: TTYD came out, one post-game challenge was left for the most daredevil and reckless gamers out there to beat. Its name, The Pit of the 100 Trials. When I was a kid, I went there trembling, expecting something bad to happen. I wasn’t aware how to properly fight and take advantage of the badges and win until the end; I remember my trauma being annihilated at floor 53, a little bit more than the half, unbeknownst to the real challenge of the super boss at floor 100. I managed to beat that Pit until few years ago as I made a rerun just for nostalgia, but now completely aware how to properly play it. Now, returning to the point for Bug Fables, there is a Pit-like place. It’s named loosely as the previous one, but now is The Cave of Trials. Rather than 100 battles in a row, there are only 50 plus a super boss as means of an Easter Egg. Even going fully equipped and with solid build, I lost at the battle #49 leaving me just two more to finish The Cave… Argh, I left the game in frustration and redo it just for the sake of pride, LOL. I earned at the end an item which will be crucial for the Platinum later on, as it allowed me to earn Team Points to make saving attacks when there was no option left. Speaking of which, even Medals are important, to make plenty of use of them in combat you need of said TPs to keep up during hard and long battles, specially those with optional bosses where their stats are absurdly high.

⚠️ This spoiler shows you all the possible awards the game can give you. I'm missing 3 of them, but they aren't required for the Platinum. Since I beat the game, I should earn those pretty easy. Planning to do so sometime in the future, but is beautiful that a game recognizes your effort and persistency into earning everything that it has to offer you. By the way, you can get another companion in your adventure, but I hope not to ruin your experience with that. ⚠️

The second aspect of the Platinum, as I consider a really solid game development, is that you’re required to explore, do and test the whole shebang you’re allowed to. That’s precisely what a Platinum trophy should and must be. Secondary and miscellaneous trophies? Great, they aren’t optional but part of the Plat because you need to wrap it up in conjunction of other stuff. While it can be annoying, I really enjoyed doing exactly that; make every single progression to a higher good. I’m satisfied that a game like this had the length and depth required you to understand the mechanics and push you into experimentation and testing for better results.

I leave the game undone for so long because I got busy and hadn’t the time to jump into it as should be. Finally, I’m freer to play as much I wish. As a side note, I’m kind of romantic about how to tend to earn trophies too; you see, the server checks the date and time of you earning them, so I do that often with every title I touch (or try to). In this case, I leave it for October 22^nd, which is an historical date from the place I live; it has a certain meaning to me, as I don’t know but that day the Fall feels more than ever in during the season. Also, it matched with a saddening event within my family, so this game and entry is dedicated to. I hope you enjoyed this long entry, and you can find the likeness to try this wonderful and charming game. Happy hunting to all of you!

In memoriam,
Thanks for your cheerful and good taste
I have faith you rest in peace,
Uncle D. B. M.

Replaying Ghostrunner since more than a year that has been platted and been reintroduced into a game that has been so underrated even it's on PS+ Extra, and the way it has to be played mesmerizes me due to its DLC, this title has left me thinking and wondering about possibilities within the community. You can't simply take your time to aim your slashes midair amidst a bunch of enemies, or otherwise you're already dead. Thankfully, you respawn in the previous checkpoint and can try again. How does people react to this type of feedback and experience from a game?

I'm not such huge a fan of hard games overall (despite I tend to play from time to time one of those challenging titles, and ask me why I do such self harm by God's sake, but anyway 🙄), and just a few catches me like this. I think this is the version I was expecting from Cyberpunk 2077 and the aesthetics and mechanics of this title aren't that bad. Yes, sometimes the frame rate drops horribly, and you just can do what you really want, but I think the devs made as much they could with the budget they had; I even have discovered few glitches in my run for the full completion and this posts goes in that way. 

The game itself implores you to play it as a speed run; there's a small community dedicated into this game exclusively for that sole purpose. And few trophies actually require you to do it! Pretty annoying because of five things I hate in games, this features two which have made me rage-quit. The game is solid, and you can play it with countless variations depending on your style or creativity.

And this, has led me to post the following. Lurking through YouTube, from time to time, I come across the to mini-coverage videos that are quite inspiring, captivating and alluring. Playing this rerun for DLC reminded me about this incredible feat, and how people or more precisely, humanity always tends to push forwards and improve itself to new levels that only imagination can produce. Enjoy: 

I can't believe the intensity and thrill that COD: MW3 is bringing to me on. Really didn't remember the emotion and addictiveness that games from the 7^thGen brought back in the day. The satisfaction of finishing the Spec Ops is something I hardly have experienced nowadays gaming. I'm genuinely excited to play it to its full.