Kai's Forever Project

Karl-Kai · February 27, 2023

(A reminder I wrote for myself...)

Hello, I am Kai. And, I am one of those guys who have a huge gaming backlog that seems to prefer growing rather than clearing out (especially since I also play one phone game on a daily basis; what a timesink). With this thread, I aim to see exactly how my gaming goes this year and perhaps it will even inspire me to improve my completion rate. But, even though I would love to see the day when my account has a 100% completion rate, I don't think that's realistic since I have some games that are in a disagreement with my skill level. But, I wish to do my very best, hence in that sense every trophy matters whether or not I actually manage the platinum.

Not too long ago, much to my delight I managed to break the 90% completion rate threshold. It is a shaky one, though, since every time I start a new game, it plummets back under 90. Now, whatever that might change into by the end of this year, I wonder. Hopefully it would reach a steady 90 at least. Then again, I have my eyes on many new games, so perhaps I will be even worse off come Christmas, haha.

Now, I think my goal is to update this thread monthly or so, but there's no hard promises, really. Though, that I can promise with certainty that the next post will appear in the beginning of the next month (March, namely) and it will bake into one the two first months of this year.

I have great many trophy-bearing games in my library that I have not played even once yet, so those aren't showing up on my account, but here's the list of my uncompleted games that are already synced (I'll update this list as the data changes):

Spoiler

Games in this list at first, in January: 33

Games in this list right now: 29

-PS4: Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (52/55, A)

-PS4: Satsujin Tantei: Jack the Ripper (12/27, D)

-PS4: Shining Resonance Refrain (26/48, B

-PS3: Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland (15/36, A)

-PS3: BlazBlue: Continuum Shift (44/60, A)

-PS3: Devil May Cry (31/34, A)

-PS3: Disorder 6 (2/23, E)

-PS3: DmC Devil May Cry (44/59, A)

-PS3: E.X. Troopers (45/50, A)

-PS3: Entwined (11/14, A)

-PS3: King of Fighters XII, The (29/51, A)

-PS3: King of Fighters XIII, The (38/47, A)

-PS3: Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories (45/48, A)

-PS3: L.A. Noire (35/61, A)

-PS3: Malicious (5/11, A)

-PS3: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (37/61, A)

-PS3: Never Dead (28/43, A)

-PS3: NieR Replicant (25/42, C)

-PS3: Tales of Xillia 2 (40/49, A)

-PS3: uDraw Studio: Instant Artist (31/40, A)

-VITA: Beniiro Tenjou Ayakashikitan Futaai (0/33, F)

-VITA: Broken Age (40/45, A)

-VITA: DJMax Technika Tune (24/30, A)

-VITA: Dynasty Warriors Next (11/49, C)

-VITA: Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA X (29/31, A)

-VITA: Lumines: Electronic Symphony (11/13, A)

-VITA: Majikyun! Renaissance (6/21, E)

-VITA: Mind=0 (19/36, A)

-VITA: Root Rexx (2/26, E)

Two separate AtoZ challenges, starting from April 2023:

Spoiler

Platinum/100% PS3/PS4/PS5/Vita games AtoZ list:

#

Awakened Fate Ultimatum, The (PS3)

B

Cannon Dancer: Osman (PS5)

D

E

Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition HD (PS4)

Guilty Gear Strive (PS5)

Hermitage: Strange Case Files (PS4)

I

J

K

Last Rebellion (PS3)

Mato Anomalies (PS5)

N

O

P

Q

R

S

Trinity Trigger (PS5)

U

Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden (PS4)

W

X

Y

Z

Played PS1 games AtoZ list:

#

A

B

C

デビルマン

E

F

G

H

I

ジャンピングフラッシュ! 2 アロハ男爵大弱りの巻

ククロセアトロ悠久の瞳

L

マリア君たちが生まれた理由

N

オメガブースト

サイキックフォース

Q

R

S

T

U

バンパイアハンターD

W

X

Y

ゼロ・ディバイド

Edited April 3 by Karl-Kai

Karl-Kai · March 1, 2023

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023:

01. Platinumed: Kingdom Hearts (PS3)

02. Platinumed: The Pillar: Puzzle Escape (PS4)

03. Platinumed: Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One (PS5)

04. 100%ed: Legal Dungeon (PS4)

05. Platinumed: Cat Slide Tiles (PS4)

06. Earned 17 trophies in: Ancient Stories: Gods of Egypt (PS4)

07. Platinumed: Theatrhythm Final Bar Line (PS4)

08. Earned 7 trophies in: Alice in Wonderland: A Jigsaw Puzzle Tale (PS4)

EX. Played: ジャンピングフラッシュ! アロハ男爵ファンキー大作戦の巻 (PS1)

Kingdom Hearts

This one sat nearly platinumed for ages since I was really pulling my hair out with the gummiship missions. Once I finally got the guts to go at it again and consulted guides for help, I managed to bag them -- but it was not fun, especially because I was one of them poor souls who had to endure the horrible whale attack dozens of times... Still, I have to say, now that it is done, I do feel relieved and am kind of proud of myself. This time it was not my head but the wall that cracked.

Now, with the gummiship trophy earned, I had only one other trophy to get to ping the platinum: playing the game through on the hardest difficulty. It wasn't as hard as I had thought it would be, perhaps I have improved in some way or form. But I have to say, once again I was weirdly wishy-washy in my ways, because for some reason once I reached the last save point of the game right before the final boss, I forgot about it and started playing other things. Because there was so little left to do to get the trophy, just one evening I sat down with it to finally make the platinum a reality.

The Pillar: Puzzle Escape

This is a game I bought long ago for a couple of euros and then it got buried under other games, and I rediscovered it while browsing my library. This was a nice little puzzling experience. The atmosphere was relaxing -- the only exception to that was the puzzle type that wanted you to remember multiple quickly flashing cubechains and then draw them in the right order. The platinum didn't ask you to play the game fully to the end, which was pretty odd, but I played it all. It would have been a waste to not to.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One

This is a game I absolutely loved; I already gushed about it in the Latest Platinum thread. I doubt any other game this year will top this one for me; it just hit the exact right spot in me. I am chuffed to have the platinum of this game to be my 100th platinum altogether! I will play the PS4 version at some point, too, but not too soon so that I won't remember everything crystal clear. Perhaps a year later or some such.

Legal Dungeon

I mentioned this one in the 100% game thread. To summarise my feelings, it is a game that has a good idea and a little bit weaker execution, but all in all I had good time playing it. Whilst the data says I 100%ed this in mere two days, I actually took a lot longer than that. On my first playthrough I somehow got to the end without earning a single trophy -- how did I manage that? Either I was always taking the easy way out, or was thinking outside the box during the moments that wanted something more simple.

Cat Slide Tiles

Puzzle games are nice, add in a cat, and it becomes even nicer. Cute and fun, I enjoyed my time with this game.

Ancient Stories: Gods of Egypt

Games like these are fun to fiddle with. It's for a relaxed time, no need to strain your brain. I will platinum this no problem, but there's no hurry to do so this very minute. Right now I feel like playing something else before finishing this one.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

First of all, I adore the Theatrhythm games on 3DS. I've put easily over hundred hours into each of them -- it's just crazy. Now, to me this PlayStation version feels inferior to play, but it's still great fun. The sheer number of songs and characters is amazing (though, it's too bad that once again Luneth and company got the short end of the stick when it came to it who gets to be picked from Final Fantasy III...).

I didn't expect to platinum this game in like four or so days; I think I went a little overboard, but the game just sucked me in. It had the "just one more song" effect hanging about it.

My most-used team comprised of Sephiroth, Cloud, Squall and Wol (Mobius). A very straightforward assembly; no fancy stuff to optimise item collecting or boosting summons or such, but a fun one to get the job done. Of course, I did use and level up a myriad of other characters, too, since the quests were requiring certain tactics and the FF series has many nice people I wanted to play as. Speaking of the quests, a bulk of them were piss-easy, but there were some that really gave me a run for my money, making me experiment with different character/skill/summonstone combinations to clear them. For two quests I actually had to google what other people were doing (one to beat FF12's yiazmat, one to beat Record Keeper's Chaos in 25 seconds) because I was running out of ideas.

While playing, I naturally got 88 in-game feats out of the possible 100. There are easy ones left, yes, but I don't think I will try to get them all, because racking up 98000 points on Supreme sounds bad. I haven't even done that on Master yet.

I would like to try the online play, but since I don't have a subscription and am not planning to buy it, that has to be forgotten for now. Ah, on the 3DS I could play the online for free... Oh well.

Alice in Wonderland: A Jigsaw Puzzle Tale

I love real-life jigsaw puzzles, and I also like to piece them together digitally. I began to play this game in an assbackwards way, starting from the biggest puzzles. It suits me fine.

While the art in this game isn't specifically lining up with my tastes, I enjoy the relaxing gameplay.

ジャンピングフラッシュ! アロハ男爵ファンキー大作戦の巻 (Jumping Flash! Aloha-danshaku Funky Daisakusen no Maki)

Fun little game, this. And, the main character Robitto is stinking cute!

I loved this, despite the fact that I got stuck on the last boss. Because of the unconventional saving system, you get pushed back a great deal if you lose to the baron... I just can't go through the couple other stages more than I already have in order to face him again; I hit the phase where each new try just goes worse. The dark roborabbit is playing me like a fiddle, too! I keep losing the track of him and for some reason the smaller ones somehow get on top of my head and won't fall off. :'D There is something in the old games' jank that messes me up royally (but I still adore retro games very much even if they don't adore me back always! ).

Anyway, the lack of quick 180-turn or free camera control while moving has its effects, but this game still controls surprisingly well all things considered. I have to say, it's funny how satisfying triple-jumping can be~

I'm pretty bad at competing against the clock because it stresses the crap out of me, but this game was lovely enough for me to enjoy it despite the timer ticking in the HUD. One unexpected downside to the timer was actually the fact that I couldn't park my bunny ass in some corner and hang out listening to the background music! (Until unlocking stages in the Time Attack that is; that mode I was able to use as my jukebox). This game has a very nice OST, I tell you.

Speaking of the Time Attack, I am proud of some of the times I recorded there. I have no idea if they are generally good times, but for me they are. Managing to clear a stage under some personal threshold makes me happy. Too bad the Time Attack doesn't have the small icon of Robitto on the stage select or the nice video clip of him arriving in between the world windows. It is very understandable, though, that it has been streamlined in this way, but I just think it's cool how purposeful Robitto looks when they launch him off of the spaceship to soar into the newly opened world... Small joys. It's the small joys with me.

I want to play the sequel as well. I think that that tells just how much of a good time I ended up having with this game despite the shameful last boss thing. Then again, this isn't the first time I beat a game otherwise, but never got the last boss knocked down a peg... At moments like these, I tell myself that if I put hours towards a game, it still has been well worth it even if I failed to see the credits roll.

LancashireLad87 · March 1, 2023

Best of luck to you with your trophy goals. you have some tough fighting games on your list to finish such as BlazBlue Continuum Shift Vanilla and King of Fighters 13. Not sure how prolific you are at the genre but good luck with them. You've completed DMC3 so perhaps you can finish DMC1 off with the correct approach DMC1 isn't much more difficult than DMC3. I see you've played Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, I'm currently slogging through that, great game but challenging platinum.

Karl-Kai · March 3, 2023

On 1.3.2023 at 7:48 PM, LancashireLad87 said:

Best of luck to you with your trophy goals. you have some tough fighting games on your list to finish such as BlazBlue Continuum Shift Vanilla and King of Fighters 13. Not sure how prolific you are at the genre but good luck with them. You've completed DMC3 so perhaps you can finish DMC1 off with the correct approach DMC1 isn't much more difficult than DMC3. I see you've played Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, I'm currently slogging through that, great game but challenging platinum.

Thank you!

Yeah... When it comes to fighting games, I am very drawn to them, but I'm also quite rubbish at them. My only saving grace is how pig-headed I can get and repeat things a million times until I either genuinely learn better or accidentally stumble onto success. BlazBlue and KOFXIII had me pop a blood vessel with their combo missions the last time I worked on them -- I wonder would I fare any better if I tried again now? Then again, I've been thinking of going for KOFXII's character clear trophies first. Perhaps build up some morale on the "I can do this" meter that way.

DMC1 is one of those games that I find hard, but part of me tells me that I shouldn't give up on it. I really want to have the whole trilogy platinumed. Though, when I finally undertake this task, I should make sure I have enough time to dedicate to it, because first I would have to get accustomed to the game again by playing it on the normal difficulty. Perhaps find some more items to add in my inventory to support my back on the Must Die run. Hah, I wonder, just how many stars and holy waters should I have in my bag to actually enter the cheese territory? Haha!

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is an amazing game! But, yeesh, is the trophy list a horror (at least for me, that is). Anyone who manages to platinum that is a real trouper. But be as it may, I rather have it un-platinumed in my account than not have it at all -- it's too good to miss. And, I'm pretty determined to squeeze a few more trophies out of it, even if it's just the easiest ones from the DLCs. I wish you luck and great fun with your Revengeance playing! Hope to see you ping that platinum!

LancashireLad87 · March 3, 2023

7 hours ago, Karl-Kai said:

Thank you!

Yeah... When it comes to fighting games, I am very drawn to them, but I'm also quite rubbish at them. My only saving grace is how pig-headed I can get and repeat things a million times until I either genuinely learn better or accidentally stumble onto success. BlazBlue and KOFXIII had me pop a blood vessel with their combo missions the last time I worked on them -- I wonder would I fare any better if I tried again now? Then again, I've been thinking of going for KOFXII's character clear trophies first. Perhaps build up some morale on the "I can do this" meter that way.

DMC1 is one of those games that I find hard, but part of me tells me that I shouldn't give up on it. I really want to have the whole trilogy platinumed. Though, when I finally undertake this task, I should make sure I have enough time to dedicate to it, because first I would have to get accustomed to the game again by playing it on the normal difficulty. Perhaps find some more items to add in my inventory to support my back on the Must Die run. Hah, I wonder, just how many stars and holy waters should I have in my bag to actually enter the cheese territory? Haha!

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is an amazing game! But, yeesh, is the trophy list a horror (at least for me, that is). Anyone who manages to platinum that is a real trouper. But be as it may, I rather have it un-platinumed in my account than not have it at all -- it's too good to miss. And, I'm pretty determined to squeeze a few more trophies out of it, even if it's just the easiest ones from the DLCs. I wish you luck and great fun with your Revengeance playing! Hope to see you ping that platinum!

After struggling through KOF13's trials it prepared me for games like Super Street Fighter 4 and Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3. If you need any combo advice I'll try and help you out as best as I can. DMC1 isn't too difficult as long as you learn how to use the correct strategy, I wrote a DMC1 Advanced tips status update that trivialised DMD difficulty, granted I cheesed both fights with Mundus but other than Nightmare 3, there wasn't a single enemy who had the chance to devil trigger because they were destroyed before the timer reached zero. I will try and dig out that status update for you and send it to you in a private message so you have it for when you tackle the game.

Yes MGRR is under-appreciated, having gone through the VR Missions I'm hoping that has prepared me for Revengeance but before that I have to grind BP in order to fully upgrade everything for my final bronze trophy which should be fun since you can play on easy difficulty. If I can get through it then I can have a stab at one of the DLC's but we'll see how I fair.

Edited March 3, 2023 by LancashireLad87

Karl-Kai · March 5, 2023

On 3.3.2023 at 10:27 AM, LancashireLad87 said:

After struggling through (.........) we'll see how I fair.

Oh, it's been so long since I tried to tackle trials in KOF13, that I don't remember exactly what my biggest stumbling block was with it... could have been pretty much everything, since inputting the commands precisely and in a quick enough success proved difficult -- I remember that sod of a training partner blocking a lot of my stuff, too, now that I think about it. With all this talk of KOF, I ended up taking a quick gander at KOF12 to asses if I would like to try the character specific trophies now, but to my dismay I realized I had forgotten absolutely everything about the controls and timings in that -- which in turn would incline that KOF13 would ask me to re-learn everything as well, since I seem to recall it being trickier than 12.

Well, I think that right now I should stick with a little bit less stress-inducing games for a while (though I have been working on Tekken Tag Tournament 2 slowly; even that hurts my fingers, heh). In any case, it was very kind of you to offer help with the combos; appreciated. (I actually wish I had been in the mindset to get cracking on this and take you up on your offer!) And, I also thank you for the DMC advice! I read it through and am intrigued. I think I shall re-read it before I attempt the run, for you had pointed out some good things in there and I am interested in trying to combine those tactics with my playstyle. If I get it going, it should smoothen the ride.

By the way, I went to read your MGRR status update and I must say that you are impressive; so much done in so little time. I think you have all the chances at taking the victory home. Oh, I simply must keep an eye out on your updates to see how it all goes.

LancashireLad87 · March 5, 2023

6 hours ago, Karl-Kai said:

Oh, it's been so long since I tried to tackle trials in KOF13, that I don't remember exactly what my biggest stumbling block was with it... could have been pretty much everything, since inputting the commands precisely and in a quick enough success proved difficult -- I remember that sod of a training partner blocking a lot of my stuff, too, now that I think about it. With all this talk of KOF, I ended up taking a quick gander at KOF12 to asses if I would like to try the character specific trophies now, but to my dismay I realized I had forgotten absolutely everything about the controls and timings in that -- which in turn would incline that KOF13 would ask me to re-learn everything as well, since I seem to recall it being trickier than 12.

Well, I think that right now I should stick with a little bit less stress-inducing games for a while (though I have been working on Tekken Tag Tournament 2 slowly; even that hurts my fingers, heh). In any case, it was very kind of you to offer help with the combos; appreciated. (I actually wish I had been in the mindset to get cracking on this and take you up on your offer!) And, I also thank you for the DMC advice! I read it through and am intrigued. I think I shall re-read it before I attempt the run, for you had pointed out some good things in there and I am interested in trying to combine those tactics with my playstyle. If I get it going, it should smoothen the ride.

By the way, I went to read your MGRR status update and I must say that you are impressive; so much done in so little time. I think you have all the chances at taking the victory home. Oh, I simply must keep an eye out on your updates to see how it all goes.

Yes I would strongly recommend working your way up to the harder fighting games that way you can sharpen your skills, shake off any rust from not playing for so long and make progress towards your trophy goals. For myself I got stuck on the combo trials which forced me to purchase the 3 DLC characters for KOF13 and I managed to make it to 200. Other than that my biggest hurdle was the 35 consecutive opponents in survival mode, I tried every cheese method I could find online and nothing worked for me, eventually I got through it which was a huge relief off my shoulders.

Tekken Tag 2 was a fun game I hated the 10 wins in survival mode trophy, what can I say I hate survival mode in fighting games. Again I tried many cheese methods and they didn't work so I had to get better with my chosen team Jinpachi Mishima and Devil Jin and that was far more successful for me. My next MGRR progress report will be released sometime today so watch out for that ^^

Taruta13 · March 5, 2023

I like how you want to clean up your backlog. I have a few backlogged games that are gathering dust and to be honest, I'm not feeling like it. *sigh*

Kingdom Hearts: Funny story, my very first account had this game at 99%. I had completed all of the trophies save one, that dreaded gummi ship blueprints one. I am no good at gummi ship missions and the one requiring you to go from Hollow Bastion to Traverse Town without scoring any points or dying with only a tiny ship is brutal. Glad to see you put this to bed at long last.

Theaterhythm Bar Line: I tried out the demo and really enjoyed bopping to FFXIV songs so I might go for it. Surprised to see someone beat this so early from release date.

Alice in Wonderland: A Jigsaw Puzzle Tale: Having played Jigsaw Zen, this is interesting, but the 768 piece puzzles intimidate me.

Keep at it, friend.

Karl-Kai · March 7, 2023

On 5.3.2023 at 11:29 AM, LancashireLad87 said:

Yes I would (.........) out for that ^^

I don't remember did I buy all of the DLC characters for KOF13 already, but if I didn't, I should do it, because I'm positive I'll be extra screwed without them. Comboing overclocks my brain so quickly, so swiftly. My blood pressure is rising just from the thought of it, heh. And yes! Survival modes are a horrible thing to crawl through. Only this night I finally found a strategy that earned me 11 victories in the TTT2 survival... after many years of trying. And also, I finally cleared the boss stage 3 of the combot laboratory after almost four years of scratching my head over it, but the victory didn't last long since now I'm stuck at the stage 4 boss battle with no idea what I'm supposed to do or even what am I doing the very moment. Such a fiasco battle with my launcher never wanting to work. What a proper tough situation. Especially, since I managed to finally kind of break my overly-loose left stick; now it sometimes pops partly out of the socket, mainly but not limited to, if I push it too hard to northeast. (Hey, I don't suppose you would remember what moves you used to take down the stage 4 bosses with the combot?)

But, anyway, I will have to keep working on this one (lots of ghost battles to play, too) and then later write about my progress in more detail in the March 2023 post.

I read your MGRR report! Just wow. Makes me speechless to see someone own this game in such a manner. I do wish you luck with the last hurdle you have left in order to claim the platinum! And also, thanks for sharing the link to the codec guide. Could you believe it, on my playthroughs I have been listening to codec calls overzealously (at the start of missions, before/during/after battles, when entering/remaining/exiting new locations, after performing special actions etc) and still the trophy never popped for me. Maybe that guide will help me when I retry this -- if it doesn't, then it has to be bugged or something. Like that dwarf gekko trophy...

On 5.3.2023 at 1:22 PM, Taruta13 said:

I like how you (.........)

Keep at it, friend.

Thank you!

Yes, backlog clearing is nothing if not heavy-lifting. At times I feel very demotivated, but at least it has not caused me to throw in the towel for good.

Oh, I can so relate to your Kingdom Hearts trophy story (about this particular game, and other games as well). That mission you mentioned... It was, indeed, horrid. Oof, thinking back to these missions is triggering unpleasant feelings, haha! But thank you, I, too, am more than happy to have this done and dusted.

If you like rhythm games, and especially if you like them and Final Fantasy, then I can recommend Theatrhyhm Final Bar Line to you. There is a certain level of polish in it, in my opinion. The trophy list isn't scary, either, because it doesn't ask you to even look at the direction of the hardest difficulty level.

The Alice in Wonderland game is actually really easy: there's no rotation function, so the pieces are automatically the right way around, and they will attach themselves to each other or the board even if there are no pieces around as long as the spot is right. Sometimes it's even annoying that when I mean to just plonk a piece down to get back to it soon, it actually glues down with a trrring noise, haha. And if you really wanted to trivialise the whole thing, you could split the pictures into smaller sections, filling them in one by one. So, with all this, even if the puzzles had thousand or more pieces, they wouldn't pose any sort of a problem.

Edited March 7, 2023 by Karl-Kai

LancashireLad87 · March 7, 2023

2 hours ago, Karl-Kai said:

I don't remember did I buy all of the DLC characters for KOF13 already, but if I didn't, I should do it, because I'm positive I'll be extra screwed without them. Comboing overclocks my brain so quickly, so swiftly. My blood pressure is rising just from the thought of it, heh. And yes! Survival modes are a horrible thing to crawl through. Only this night I finally found a strategy that earned me 11 victories in the TTT2 survival... after many years of trying. And also, I finally cleared the boss stage 3 of the combot laboratory after almost four years of scratching my head over it, but the victory didn't last long since now I'm stuck at the stage 4 boss battle with no idea what I'm supposed to do or even what am I doing the very moment. Such a fiasco battle with my launcher never wanting to work. What a proper tough situation. Especially, since I managed to finally kind of break my overly-loose left stick; now it sometimes pops partly out of the socket, mainly but not limited to, if I push it too hard to northeast. (Hey, I don't suppose you would remember what moves you used to take down the stage 4 bosses with the combot?)

But, anyway, I will have to keep working on this one (lots of ghost battles to play, too) and then later write about my progress in more detail in the March 2023 post.

I read your MGRR report! Just wow. Makes me speechless to see someone own this game in such a manner. I do wish you luck with the last hurdle you have left in order to claim the platinum! And also, thanks for sharing the link to the codec guide. Could you believe it, on my playthroughs I have been listening to codec calls overzealously (at the start of missions, before/during/after battles, when entering/remaining/exiting new locations, after performing special actions etc) and still the trophy never popped for me. Maybe that guide will help me when I retry this -- if it doesn't, then it has to be bugged or something. Like that dwarf gekko trophy...

Congrats on getting through Tekken Tag Tournament 2's survival mode that was my last trophy for the platinum trophy, if you can get through that the only trophy that can be a pain to unlock in my opinion is reaching Tekken Lord offline because you have to win well over 400 ghost battles which was a slog to say the least. Isn't the stage 4 combot boss the fat guy who throws things towards you, he kind of looks like a power ranger lol. I remember side stepping to the side to avoid his projectile spam as I began to close the distance between him and me then I launched him into a basic combo and repeated until he died.

For the codec entries I did each chapter separately through chapter select and the trophy popped for me once I had listened to the vast majority of them. Sometimes you'll have to constantly ring them until the next codec entry on the guide comes up, I don't know if you can save after reaching a checkpoint. I simply played the entire level and then backed my save on to a USB. Thanks! I'm sure if I can persevere through it most people can my reactions and my fingers don't work as fast as they used to.

Looking forward to hearing about your progress, good luck!

Karl-Kai · March 12, 2023

On 7.3.2023 at 10:29 AM, LancashireLad87 said:

Congrats on getting through (.........) to hearing about your progress, good luck!

Alright! I succeeded in platinuming Tekken Tag Tournament 2! But it came with a cost... Before I mentioned that my fingers were already hurting while playing this game, and in my excitement I went a little bit too far with the last trophies. I injured my thumb; it is now swollen, won't bend properly and hurts a tonne. At least I don't need a splint this time (I have a very frail body; for example, once four of my fingers broke because my mother bumped into me and it left permanent damage), but I was instructed to not use that thumb at all for a while. So, despite I had planned to continue on the fighting game side of things (like, try again KOF12 or dabble with BlazBlue, or just have some fun with my PS1/PS2 fighters), now I made changes in those plans and will play games I can operate with one hand. This is a perfect time to do some repetitive money grinding in Final Fantasy XIII and such, so I'm not too bummed out. Anyway, I have to thank you again for cheering me on with the Tekken game; I think it made a difference in my determination level.

And, big big congrats on getting the Metal Gear Rising Revengeance platinum! That is amazing! I will definitely check out the updates about your DLC progress as well.

On my MGRR run I had called all the people through the codec many times in a row to hear absolutely everything they had to say, so that's why I'm confused I didn't already get the trophy about that. But, I will give it another go when I get to that part of my backlog clean-up.

LancashireLad87 · March 12, 2023

7 hours ago, Karl-Kai said:

Alright! I succeeded in platinuming Tekken Tag Tournament 2! But it came with a cost... Before I mentioned that my fingers were already hurting while playing this game, and in my excitement I went a little bit too far with the last trophies. I injured my thumb; it is now swollen, won't bend properly and hurts a tonne. At least I don't need a splint this time (I have a very frail body; for example, once four of my fingers broke because my mother bumped into me and it left permanent damage), but I was instructed to not use that thumb at all for a while. So, despite I had planned to continue on the fighting game side of things (like, try again KOF12 or dabble with BlazBlue, or just have some fun with my PS1/PS2 fighters), now I made changes in those plans and will play games I can operate with one hand. This is a perfect time to do some repetitive money grinding in Final Fantasy XIII and such, so I'm not too bummed out. Anyway, I have to thank you again for cheering me on with the Tekken game; I think it made a difference in my determination level.

And, big big congrats on getting the Metal Gear Rising Revengeance platinum! That is amazing! I will definitely check out the updates about your DLC progress as well.

On my MGRR run I had called all the people through the codec many times in a row to hear absolutely everything they had to say, so that's why I'm confused I didn't already get the trophy about that. But, I will give it another go when I get to that part of my backlog clean-up.

Congrats on the Tag 2 platinum, well deserved! I remember when I played Tag 2 I looked through the trophy guide and I was like oh 3/10 really shouldn't be too bad, wrong! If it wasn't for reaching Tekken Lord and 10 consecutive wins in survival i might have agreed with the rating but I found it significantly harder. Sorry to hear of your injury hopefully you make a speedy recovery and can start smashing some more games out.

Thanks, yes Metal Gear Rising was definitely one of the harder games I have finished in a while so I was both relieved and excited to finally have the platinum trophy yesterday. I think I'll try Sam's DLC next because he looks fun to play with and that's what games are all about, enjoyment not torture ^^

Karl-Kai · March 31, 2023

MARCH 2023:

01. Platinumed: Alice in Wonderland: A Jigsaw Puzzle Tale (PS4)

02. Platinumed: Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (PS3)

03. 100%ed: Hidden Paws Mystery (PS4)

04. 100%ed: Sudoku Master (PS4)

05. Platinumed: Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)

06. Platinumed: Ancient Stories: Gods of Egypt (PS4)

EX. Played: 上海真的武勇 (PS1)

EX. Played: ピクトロジカファイナルファンタジー≒ (3DS)

Alice in Wonderland: A Jigsaw Puzzle Tale

I started this in February, and finished it now. My thoughts have not really changed from before. This was fun jigsaw puzzling, even though having to piece together the same pictures over and over again started to feel a bit old; you could remember where everything goes.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2

To earn the platinum for this, I had the most difficult tasks left to do: finishing Fight Lab, getting 10 consecutive wins in survival and reaching Tekken Lord rank in ghost battles (I also had to grind for ED movies and combot points, but those kind of accumulated on the side as I chased the big fish).

The Fight Lab was my least favourite thing due to how restrictive it felt; with fighters, if some manouvers are too difficult for me, I just rummage through the tool box and pick something else -- and this, of course, was not how the combot training worked, because it was meant to teach you all kinds of things.

Now, the survival mode, though, was hard for different reasons. The AI got aggressive very quickly and at times could squash me down with a single combo. For a long while I was stuck with 8 wins as Kazuya, solo. After trying this gauntlet with characters I usually fancy the most (like Jin, Devil Jin, already mentioned Kazuya etc), I tried some that seemed to be recommended for easy time like Hwoarang and Lee, but none of it seemed to do the trick. Then, frustrated, I came up with a cheap tactic after spending a good while in training mode: I made a tag team of Heihachi and Angel. When rounds started, I immediately used Heihachi's square+triangle move to knock the opponent down and further away, and then switched to Angel and spammed her square+triangle laser beam. If the beam missed (the opponents liked to crouch out of the harm's way a lot), I would quickly tag Heihachi back in and feed the enclosing opponent another square+triangle attack. Rinse and repeat this, and it was enough to carry me through 11 victories. After that the AI got fed up and pummeled me down like a piñata.

Reaching the title of Tekken Lord was the last hurdle I crossed; the further I got, the more miserable the battles became, because the CPUs got smarter and meaner. They liked to block a bunch and put me in combos I couldn't escape from. It was such a rollercoaster experience in the sense that I constantly flipped between "I can't do this" and "perhaps it is possible" while playing. I tried to be as smart as possibe when picking fights so I could reach desired ranks quicker, and it worked: I was Tekken Lord after 288 wins (and 42 losses... huh, it felt like I lost more than that). I did the rank grinding as Kazuya, solo, because even though I had other fighters higher than him already, I went with the character I had used the most while playing Tekken 7 the last time. I wanted something I could remember, even if vaguely. And, his spinning kick move saved my arse more than once!

Hmm, I have been thinking about trying Tekken6 on PS3, but if TTT2 was this difficult, then perhaps 6 would be too painful? I have played 6 on PSP, but not that much (I put more time towards Dark Resurrection), and that version doesn't even have the game mode most of the PS3 version's trophies are related to.

Anyway, all of this Tekken craziness had me injure my thumb, so the rest of this month I did one-handed gaming -- and also, some reading: Discworld novels and Ahmed Ahne comics.

Hidden Paws Mystery

I really liked this game. Pretty and chill and choke-full of cats -- it's good times. Short and sweet, I found all the cats and the yarn balls in two sittings within one day.

Sudoku Master

I'm into all kinds of letter and number puzzles, so of course I like sudoku, too. However, this sort of bare bones version would have been a better fit for a small screen, and the freezing of the cursor was flow-breaking. Still, it was fun to spend a couple of days with this.

Final Fantasy XIII

Deary me this was a grind fest---! So much gear and components to buy, so little gil... and some of the challenges were quite tough. You needed the right techniques; brute forcing was not an option. But, I'm really happy to have this platinumed finally: after all, this is one of my top 4 mainline Final Fantasy titles (the order of the titles in my top 4 is vague even to me).

While grinding mindlessly and five starring Cie'th stone missions, I liked to use a team comprised of Lightning, Hope and Fang -- in varying order, so each of them got to be the leader in different situations. This was the team set-up I used even in the last boss battle to five star all of the three phases the boss had. I deliberately left the "Superstar" trophy to be the last one, so I would unlock the platinum while watching the ending of the game.

Ancient Stories: Gods of Egypt

Just before the end of March, I managed to squeeze this game's platinum in the tally. My opinion of it is the exact same now as it was back in February when I started playing this: nice, relaxing. Yep.

上海真的武勇 (Shanghai Matekibuyu)

Solitaire mahjong? Love it. Did I love this particular one? Not exactly. Part of it might come from it how frustratingly playing this game began: This game supports the PS1 mouse, and as such, I tried to play it with the said electric rodent. My mouse, however, turned out to be a dodgy little thing, refusing to work properly. Warning signs were present right from the start, because the game wouldn't even boot up if the regular controller wasn't plugged in. During gameplay, the mouse was sluggish, the left-click barely worked and the right-click was kaput. As such, some commands (like reversing tile choices) became impossible, but what took the cake was how the mouse randomly triggered the pause menu to appear and eeny meeny miny moe picking something from there, like resetting your current game or booting you back into the main menu.

Now, since the mouse was clearly having a fit, I changed back to a regular controller and was actually able to play -- but not in zen or anything. This game has no consideration over tile placements, so you will be thrown into tezumaris time and again. The shuffle function is there to help with that, but it doesn't really like to shuffle that much. Most of the time it seemed to relocate only a couple of tiles, and gobsmackingly often it shuffled the game into yet another tezumari! It was actually tragicomical to see the game freeze for a few seconds to think about it what it had done when it rolled a tezumari into a tezumari.

Despite all the trouble, I did clear a bunch of stages with different tile layouts -- but, I don't see playing this one that much. For example, the Shanghai Refresh on Switch is nicer; I feel more eager to go back to it.

ピクトロジカファイナルファンタジー≒ (Pictlogica Final Fantasy≒ )

I love picross. I have played different picross games on different consoles, and this here has to be my favourite if only because it uses the stylus pen. It's so much nicer to fill in the dots with it rather than click a cursor around square by square. This game also had three different kinds of play modes: normal picross, huge plate picross and battles that utilised 5x5 grid. Characters that I liked to use in my battle team the most were Sephiroth, Squall, Luneth, Noctis and one man whose name I just can't remember. In some challenges Edea was a good choice, too, since she could provide some helpful healing alongside decent attack spells. Too bad I never could unlock Cloud or Lightning, because they were barricaded behind a code tied to a mobile game that doesn't exist anymore.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

NEW CHALLENGE!!!

Yes, I decided to try and see if I can do a platinum/100% AtoZ challenge of my own. I will be pulling games from my backlog (synced and non-synced) for the most part; after all, I have quite the collection which helpfully contains almost all letters. I'll do this in my own pace, but if I manage to complete the list within a year, that would be rad.

And, because of my love for the retro games and the huge pile of PS1 games I have accumulated from second-hand stores, I will do a separate AtoZ list of PS1 titles. Just because I can.

Furthermore, I got this idea now, so all the games I played up till now won't count! Only April and forward will be included in the list (and if I play many titles starting with the same letter, only the first one will be added to the list, which I will include in the starter post of this thread). Good luck, me.

Karl-Kai · May 31, 2023

APRIL-MAY 2023:

01. Platinumed: Mato Anomalies (PS5)

EX. Played: ジャンピングフラッシュ! 2 アロハ男爵大弱りの巻 (PS1)

EX. Played: マリア君たちが生まれた理由 (PS1)

EX. Played: サイキックフォース (PS1)

EX. Played: サイキックフォースパズル大戦 (PS1)

EX. Played partly: Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One (PS5)

Preface:

I couldn't make an update here the last month. While the thumb I sprained healed nicely and I was, quite frankly, on a roll, it all came to a screeching halt when I had to go to a surgery (non-related to the aforementioned thumb). Recuperating from it is tough.

Going under the knife makes you feel like crap, so I can't say how active I will be in the near future, but at the very least I want to play at least something and keep updating this thread with that. I'll try my best but seriously, oof, what a curveball.

Mato Anomalies

This is a game I really liked to play. The reading parts, the fighting parts, the card game parts -- it all was entertaining, and I think the game also had a very beautiful design direction. Due to my tastes, I didn't like the very, very end of the story, but such things are personal, so other players are likely to have different opinions of it. While playing this, I was reminded of many other Chinese media in a positive way. I hope that in the future western market will see many more games developed in China, for they have their own style with their own culture woven into it.

So, in Mato Anomalies, besides the gameplay, I liked the characters and the music was really nice, too; especially the song Wu sang after the talks with her was a pretty one -- at least in Chinese, I don't know if it is dubbed in the other languages. But, now, the part of the ending that I did not like (spoilers):

Spoiler

I was upset about the thing with Jun and Kui, them merging into one person the way they did. It was really sad to see Kui's face, but hear none of him when the mouth opened. Then again, it didn't really sound like Jun, either. And when Jun got his normal appearance back, it meant Kui was pretty much wholly gone, in body and spirit, but Jun had changed, too, so... In essence, it felt like you lost both Jun and Kui.

Having a huge, often times even unnecessary twist in the scripts seems to be a trendy thing. I'm not a massive fan of such forced endings that seem to be there just for shock value or some such. But, each their own.

In any case, this game pulled me in effectively and platinuming it was fun, and really, quite effortless, too, since even the grind/luck based trophies didn't feel like a chore to achieve. Good game!

ジャンピングフラッシュ! 2 アロハ男爵大弱りの巻 (Jumping Flash! 2 Aloha Danshaku Ooyowari no Maki)

In January, I played Jumping Flash 1 and loved it. So much so that I wanted to play the sequel. I'm happy I found this game with a decent price tag, and this time, I properly beat the final boss as well! Huh, who knew a giant alien is easier to deal with than a small grandpa.

This sequel had charm and was lots of fun in the same way as the first one was, but while I like both of them, if I had to choose, I think I might prefer the first one more due to its level design and music. In any case, if game makers suddenly remembered this series and made a Jumping Flash 3 nowadays, they would definitely catch my attention. Indeed.

マリア君たちが生まれた理由 (Maria Kimitachi ga Umareta Wake)

I wasn't thinking much when I picked this game... but! This turned out to be an interesting one. Without spoiling too much, the setting is that you take the role of doctor Takano and are assigned a patient named Maria who came to the hospital as a suicide attempter. As Maria suffers from selective memory loss and shows signs of something even worse, Takano does his utmost to help through councelling. This leads to solving things of present and past, the case getting bigger than anyone expected.

I really enjoyed playing this, constantly trying to come up with the answers before they were revealed -- and also trying to make the best decisions. I attempted to be smart about things, though I did let my curiosity rule at times as well, but especially on the tail end of the story I thought it to be fun to become a big blabbermouth, haha! That actually might have saved my bacon since as everyone knew everything, they could be everywhere at the right time. I think I actually got the best ending in the game! Though, that I can confirm only after replaying it. And I really should replay this. Besides the nice writing, I also think that the old, at times slightly creepy graphics enhanced the atmosphere. Man, I love oldies.

サイキックフォース (Psychic Force)

This is yet again one of those games I picked up randomly from a second-hand store. This one I chose because the back of the box reminded me of one other fighting game I love. The levitation system and psychic abilities make this different and fun, and while, perhaps, this isn't as deep as some other fighters, it has its charm full-on.

After my sprained thumb had healed almost fully but was still weak, I found it perfect to play fighting games on a PS2 system instead of newer devices, because that way I could use my arcade stick, making it easier on my thumb.

My favourite fighter to use ended up being Keith, the very same one I had locked my eyes on when flipping through the booklet (to unlock him, you had to finish the story mode with all other characters on HARD or higher) and with him I repeated the Arcade Mode time and again. The whole top times list is now flooded with my name and Keith's face, lol. My best time thus far is 1'52'63, and during that round I did make mistakes. However, I don't consider it that bad a time since even if you beat all of the opponents in 10 seconds (which I don't think realistic), you would still sit on a time of 80 seconds.

When it comes to Keith, I found his back-forth-triangle psychic move to be the most useful based on the levels of fastness, easiness and cost effectiveness it had in comparison to other options. If you timed things right, you could make short work of your enemy by just firing three icicles in a row and finishing it off with a couple of regular projectiles. If done correctly, the opponent stunlocks and you win in a flash. (Speaking of stunlocking; Gates' regular projectile is so OP you can just spam it and your opponent has a snowball's chance in hell). Out of Keith's moves, the one that I liked the most, though, was the ice dragon move, just because of the looks and feeling of it, but because the icicle move was safer to use (even if somewhat liable to miss the target if fired willy-nilly), I didn't use the dragon as much.

I actually got into this game deep enough to check out other media tied to it; anime, manga, radio dramas, the likes. Though, to my annoyance, I couldn't find all of the comic book volumes... I want to see the ending, at the very least! But, I suppose a series that is 20-30 years old isn't easily available anymore.

(By the way, the katakanasation of psychic is saikikku, thus kind of making it a game that starts with an S, but since it's a loan word, I'll count it as a P.)

サイキックフォースパズル大戦 (Psychic Force Puzzle Taisen)

Psychic Force spin-off game. Because the rabbit hole is deep indeed. In this fun and fast-paced puzzle game you pop bubbles as quickly as you can --- I learned (by watching the bonus disc ads) that this is practically a re-skinned version of some other game called Puzzle Bobble.

This game had 1-player, 2-player and story modes. Since I didn't have anyone to play the 2-player mode with me, I instead went on a rampage on the other modes. In the single player mode there was altogether 90 different levels (unlockable character included), and I completed them all in one sitting. They were actually very easy, because if you happened to fail on your first go, the game then gave you a trajectory which helped to nullify some of the aiming problems (though, even with that, the hit detection still shat itself at times).

The story mode, on the other hand, had you clear a string of versus battles against the other characters of the game. This could get heated every now and then, since the opponents had no qualms about playing pretty much perfectly, and in this mode, no matter how many times you failed, you would not get the trajectory. The stories accompanying these battle rushes were comical parodies. Like, in one you played as Burn who decided it's a great day to play american football and set out to find his buddy Keith to make him play with him (even though Keith isn't interested and would rather curl up with a book). While Burn searched, he beat up everyone he bumped into to force them to join the up-coming amefuto match as well, and once he found Keith, he beat him up, too, because 'no' wasn't an acceptable answer. When the battered Keith pointed out they still didn't have enough people for amefuto, Burn made them all play baseball instead. The end.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One

Yes, I have already played the absolute shit out of this, but after recovering enough from the surgery to hold a gaming controller again, I wanted to play something I love. Plus, a friend of mine came to visit for a couple of days and they were interested to see the game as well. So, we played in a way where I controlled Sherlock, but it was my friend who told me what to do, where to go, how to choose. We managed to play close to half of the game during the visit; the rest we will play the next time my friend comes over. It could take months, but I have patience.

----------

By the way, before the surgery I played one more game on PS1, but it's not listed here now because a disaster happened: I had played about two thirds of it and then the memory card just up and died. Everything the memory card had in it vanished like it never existed. Luckily that memory card had "only" two other games besides the one that I was playing that I felt upset about losing the files for, but it didn't stop me from feeling rather devastated. As such, I did not immediately start from a scratch. But, I really, really liked the game, so I will get back to it once the "grieving time" is over, lol.

Karl-Kai · July 31, 2023

JUNE-JULY 2023:

01. 100%ed: Hermitage: Strange Case Files (PS4)

02. Platinumed: Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition HD (PS4)

03. Platinumed: Cannon Dancer: Osman (PS5)

04. Earned 5 trophies in: 殺人探偵ジャック・ザ・リッパー (PS4)

05. Earned 11 trophies in: Trinity Trigger (PS5)

EX. Played: ククロセアトロ悠久の瞳 (PS1)

Hermitage: Strange Case Files

In April, I played Mato Anomalies. Then I realised that a game that I had bought a long time ago (but had not played after downloading it), was from the same developer, Arrowiz. So, I decided to play it now.

It didn't start easy, because I encountered a glitch in a little less than two minutes into the game; the game would freeze during one scene. No matter what I did, I couldn't get past it -- that's why I asked for help here on this forum. Much to my delight, some lovely people replied me very quickly, pondering the problem and finding the solution! (Big thank you to them!). To avoid the freeze, I only had to change the system language of my PlayStation. So: anyone who is thinking about playing the EU version of Hermitage, change your system language to English before launching the game, if you don't already have it set so!

When I got the game running properly, it was smooth sailing. I love detective stories, that's no secret, so I was having a good time. This game's atmosphere and style were very close to that of Mato Anomalies, even down to the overclocking aspects. A good mystery, a little moment of philosophicality -- they're elements that worked here, and that, put together with nice music and characters, gave me a reading experience I liked.

When it comes to trophies, this game is straightforward. I realised it was extremely easy to deliberately get bad endings before continuing onwards with the good ones, so I always messed up the speculations first before doing them correctly. That way I didn't have to worry about saving a lot in different slots for later use. It was strange, though, how in one chapter you unlock both the good ending and the bad ending trophy at the same time. Just one trophy would have sufficed, it's not like you can affect the outcome... or, is that a mysterious story told by trophies? Is the game saying that this ending is both bad and true at the same time? I actually wouldn't put that past Hermitage.

Well, I'm glad the glitch didn't prevent me from playing this. This was a good game worth my time.

Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition HD

I have played the original FFXV before this. I can say this version pretty much has the same strengths and weaknesses as that one: fun gameplay and nice characters, but the tail-end of the story can bugger off into the hinterlands and be eaten by a bear.

While I wasn't happy to re-live certain aspects of this tale, I did have good time going on a monster beating & item hunting romp. And I liked the cutesy, simplified graphics. The sceneries were pretty, non?

Funnily enough, though, despite the simplicity, this game lagged at times.

Cannon Dancer: Osman

These games can be hard as nails, and because I wasn't feeling confident, before I started playing I just filled in all sorts of enhancements and in-game-cheats. Let's make it a soft first contact, yes? No one is scared to tightrope if there is a safety net below, yes? Well, I think I made it too easy, because Kirin and his colour-changing trousers were hurtling through it all like a bullet train. It was a true speed run suplex hell, no time to look left and right when crossing the road: just blindly unleashing everything in the arsenal from basic kicks to hoshimatsuri.

It was a rather beautiful, eclectic action trip -- one which I simply had to play again numerous times with varying amounts of helps activated (it was nice to see that, against my expectations, the boss actually changed at one point, so you got something new on repeat runs). But I also played one purely sightseeing round in which I crawled along at snail's speed and gave a good look at the backgrounds, noting the beauty of it -- and also noticing the clock-face had the number 4 in the place of 6.

I am happy I found this game; by chance, I saw it in someone's game list and decided to check it out myself. It happened to be on sale, so I bit right away.

Yep. I had lots of fun. On hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have put so many help items on me for my first playthrough, but then again, a powertrip has its own merits, too!

By the way, as facepalm worthy as it is, I still don't know how to write your initials at the end, even though I have tried pushing all of the buttons, lol...

殺人探偵ジャック・ザ・リッパー (Satsujin Tantei Jack the Ripper)

Add "tantei" in your game title or advertisement and you shall make me look -- it is another story, though, will that interest hold long enough to warrant a purchase. When it comes to this Satsujin Tantei game, I did buy it immediately and can say it is all worth it -- even though I've yet to see everything it has to offer (I would have completed this game fully already if only I had the Switch version that grants a handheld gaming mode; reading games are better that way. I bought the PS4 version because it was half the price of the Switch one).

This game has an interesting premise. You take the role of a private detective and very soon, as you stumble upon a gruesome crime, something starts to stir up in your brain... it's the soul of Jack the Ripper! The whole thing of having a detective and a murderer as "flatmates" is the selling point of this game and it indeed makes an interesting script. Especially, since you truly are free to embrace either the strait-laced side or vigilantism. I for one really like how Jack the Ripper is portrayed in this game!

By the way, what is it with detectives and their invisible friends? : D There's this, and not too long ago I played Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, and before that I watched Shuangsheng Lingtan donghua -- all employing this gimmick. But I have no complaints, because that way the detective can easily carry around a person to talk to no matter what, no matter where!

Trinity Trigger

No idea how far in I am at the moment, but at least thus far I've enjoyed my time. I need to finish this to have a final opinion! Then I'll say a little bit more.

ククロセアトロ悠久の瞳 (Kouklotheatro Yuukyuu no Hitomi)

This is the game I mentioned in my last post, the one I played a lot, but then the memory card died, destroying all save files within it, Kouklotheatro included. Now I came back to restart and finish this! And what did I think? I totally loved it! This goes in my favourite PS1 games list and I wish it could get a port to PS4/5. Yes, I had that much fun.

The gameplay is addicting ("One more battle! One more muppet upgrade!"), the graphics and style is pretty, music is great, characters are nice (Luca, the boy you play as, was quite the cute hero, all the way from attitude to speech pattern) and the story was old-fashioned in a positive way -- also, the way how it mixed child-likeness with darkness was interesting. Speaking of atmosphere, the special FMVs for the strongest full-area hits in battles had this unique ambiance to them that I liked. The game was otherwise 2D, but these clips had 3D in them, often juxtapositioning deep blackness with striking, vibrantly coloured lights. Made me want to learn all spells even if I didn't need them from a survival point of view.

Kouklotheatro is a strategy game in which you make your team out of muppets, doll vessels that can take the form of different creatures depending on which kind of jewels you hit them with. Building your team, testing out evolution paths, levelling and learning moves, even renaming your muppets -- it's all there, and it is good fun. I tried out many things and I still don't know which team-up was my favourite, but "Eviltiger" became my favourite muppet, staying in my team permanently. The muppets I had with me when I was beating the final boss were Nile and God Kariin, with the aforementioned Eviltiger.

If you dash through this game, it will feel short, but if you zig zag between the dungeons, experimenting with the muppets, you'll start to stack up hours. Of course, if you build up a stellar team, then the game will transform into a cakewalk. Perhaps one could restrain himself and not use the strongest spells... haha! In any case, this is the kind of feel-good game that makes me happy. And hey, now I can go and read the Kouklotheatro novel I bought. Couldn't turn those pages until the credits rolled in the game, to avoid spoilers.

Karl-Kai · November 30, 2023

AUGUST-NOVEMBER 2023

01. Platinumed: Hidden Shapes: Animals + Lovely Cats (PS4)

02. Platinumed: Last Rebellion (PS3)

03. Platinumed: Trinity Trigger (PS5)

04. Platinumed : Final Fantasy (PS4)

05. Platinumed : Final Fantasy II (PS4)

06. Platinumed : Final Fantasy III (PS4)

07. Platinumed : Moto Roader MC (PS4)

08. Earned 52 trophies in: Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (PS4)

09. Earned 1 trophy in: The King of Fighters XII (PS3)

EX. Played: デビルマン(PS1)

EX. Played: オメガブースト(PS1)

EX. Played: Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One (PS5)

Hidden Shapes: Animals + Lovely Cats

A relaxing game with pretty art. These puzzles are very simple, since you are only rotating the tiles instead of moving them around like in traditional jigsaw puzzles, but it's just so... well, relaxing. That really is the word with which I'd describe this. There are more games in this series, and I want to play them as well.

Last Rebellion

I had fun with this. The minimalistic scenarios were tranquil in their retro-feel; it's actually great to play something that has its own substance without too much bravado. The twist in the battle system that had you hitting enemies' body parts in a certain order to inflict true damage was interesting. At first it seems like there's a huge amount of trial-and-error, but very soon you will realise that doubles always go in pairs (like left leg and right leg always came after each other without other body parts in the middle), so guessing the combinations and saving them isn't that tedious.

I liked the opening song: instead of skipping, I let it play out each time I launched the game. The singer sounds familiar...? The humorous secret boss song about a cat mandarin got stuck in my head as well. The lyrics were so hilarious I had to sit there through it all before making any attacks on the boss. Speaking of secret bosses, my luck with the RNG was pretty good, but hoo-boy, one of the Prinnies took its sweet time to appear.

Hmm, yes, I can repeat my opening words as my closing words: I had fun with this.

Trinity Trigger

Nice and colourful, I enjoyed exploring and fighting in this game. This was like a mixture of old-fashioned and more contemporary things, and it worked for me. While most of the time was smooth sailing, there were two bosses (the final boss, and the postgame final boss) that hassled me enough to cause more than one game over. Part of that was also because while generally the AI teammates performed just fine, at times they were quite fatalistic, keeping taking damage like that was their sole mission. It was a little bit difficult to babysit them all at once in some particularly hectic scenarios. I wish there had been a sound cue to tell you if your teammates got poisoned or something. Sometimes I didn't even realise someone had died, haha!

The traditional pen-and-paper look to the character portraits fit the style of this game and I found it pleasant, and the voice acting was nice (the Japanese one, that is). The story; that was basic, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah. I liked this game. A sequel might grab my attention -- I mean, the game ended in a way that it would be easy to continue from there, but then again, the ending was fulfilling as it was, so no more is needed to complete it.

Final Fantasy

I've played quite many Final Fantasies, but never anything older than FF7 (save for the 3D Remake version of FF3). I was curious, and here we are. This very first title in the whole series is quite different than what I expected, especially since I watched someone rampage through the Stranger of Paradise version this year (I want to play that version! But adding such a big commitment to my gaming list right now is not the best idea).

Here, story was minimal, and your team of people was put together of faceless, mute blokes you had to name yourself -- and that blankness didn't get helped by the fact that I christened the bunch of them A, B, C and D. I just couldn't bother at the moment.

I didn't know what would be ideal, so I just randomly picked Warrior, Monk, White Mage and Black Mage in my team to hopefully cover all the bases. It worked pretty well, even though I didn't know how to deal with the Monk, so he was pretty weak throughout my entire playthrough before I realised (in the last dungeon...) that unequipping his weapons made him stronger. Live and learn, huh? By the way, I'm glad this version had the option to block battles whenever you wished so; it made exploring more pleasant. Spinning around a little lost is less annoying when every other step doesn't launch you into a fight. Another good option I'm grateful for is the ability to change the font in the game -- the default one is quite hideous.

In any case, I really liked playing this. There was something nicely languid about it. Ah, and the part in the game where you got the upgrade for your whole team, changing the appearance of the sprites, was a fun surprise.

Final Fantasy II

After FF1, I wanted to try the second one, too. It, once again, was not what I expected. The leveling system was completely different than in any other FFs, and the amount of missables had me keep a record on what I had discovered. This made the game more stressful to 100%, but then again, the different EXP system made fighting really easy due to how exploitative it was. All in all, this was good, simple fun.

Final Fantasy III

FF2 completed, I was curious to see the third one. How different would it be from the 3D Remake I love? The answer is: pretty different, I suppose, even if not astronomically so -- as long as my memory serves right, that is. (By the way, why is this third installment more expensive than the other two? This doesn't feel any bigger a game than the other ones).

Unlike in the Remake, in this game the team members were blank and I had to name them myself, just like in the first FF. I was not imaginative, I just named the guys after the colours of their armours, which of course went to south pretty quick, since those colour palettes changed drastically with job classes. But it was totally ok, it was funny to have the characters yell out "Pun!" randomly.

Like FF1 and FF2, this one was a nice game to play through, even if the missables had me fretting at points. Oh, and I was remembering that the last dungeon with its boss rush would have been harder, but perhaps I overleveled, because this time around it was easy-peasy.

Gee, I so want FF3 3D Remake to be ported to PS4/PS5.

Moto Roader MC

I like to try out different kinds of games. So, now I wanted to try out a new kind of driving game. But... I didn't really like this one. It's definitely not the worst, but it messes with me. All other driving games I've played have been better.

Steering the car was weird business. Sure, little bit of time behind the wheel and it got somewhat easier, but random bullshit still happens, and when it starts to go to hell, it goes there fast. I played through all of the courses and some more, because I want to make the most of the games I buy, but boy, am I glad I bought this one piss-cheap from a sale. I tended to come dead last in the races, though once I got 2nd on one track. Perhaps that cow was cheering me on enough with its mooing... lol. The cars also sounded like buzzing bees, and on speed-pad levels the repeating krsh-pew noise made it all into a mighty fine cacophony.

I also played the omakes and bat-things, and could you guess, even without any opposition from the enemy I struggled. This game really is not for me. Though, I think that this would have been much more tolerable to play with friends instead of the computer. Probably would've been as much chaos, anyway, but less annoyingly so.

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance

I played this game only because you could play as Riku in it. (Reverse/Rebirth has forever spoiled me, lol). Despite shallow reasons, I ended up enjoying this one all-around: creating spirits and fighting with them was nice, and the old-time graphics and structure was pleasing.

The way how this game was split in two halves between the two playable characters was odd and fun at the same time; the forced drops between them disorientated me at times, but not terribly so. Scrambling for a drop-me-not during boss battles was awful, though.

But! Even though this game was half-Sora, half-Riku, poor Riku got the short end of the stick yet again. For him, some of his worlds were more limited in both areas and story, he had less treasures to find, less spirit links to discover and use in battles -- that kind of stuff.

Playing on the Proud mode, I 100%ed this game save for two trophies: the one for raising a spirit's affinity to max and the one for buying something from all of the moogle shops. I can figure those ones out once I feel like it. Speaking of trophies, I think the spirit minigame trophies were the worst ones. I wasn't very good at them, so I had to try them multiple times in order to get the desired scores.

In any case, the story was nonsense, but the gameplay was fun, and I was happy to play as Riku in another KH game. If I remember correctly, I put over 60 hours into this game. That's quite a lot.

The King of Fighters XII

I am so bad at this game. Trying to speed run the arcade in 3 and half minutes is awful; that trophy is really depressing. I've tried it with my best character, I've tried it with Leona whom everyone recommends, I've tried random characters with random tactics. Nothing has worked for me, I'm just too stupid. I mean, the more I play, the less I understand. No more am I even sure what my problem is. Can anyone recommend me a simple, foolproof method?? Or, someone could recommend me an arcade stick that works with PS3. That might help me some; the stick I got for my PS2 really makes a difference with old PS1/PS2 fighters.

In any case, I also tried to do perfect character runs. Failed on a few characters, then I was sure I succeeded with Ryou, but it didn't unlock the trophy, forcing me to re-try it to see if I had messed up or if there was a problem with the trophy unlocking. My second playthrough as Ryou was full of cheesy spamming of the high-damage rapid punching because I was too tired to try as nicely as I had before (Ryou was such a random pick, good thing I discovered that one move by accident; otherwise I might not have made it). This time the trophy actually popped. I'm not sure what was going on, but I'm glad it unlocked in the end.

Platinuming this game is very difficult for me, because it's all about persistent perfection and my energy drops so quick. 15 battles back to back is way too many to perfect. Buuut, this is one of those games that I just don't want to give up on -- even if my preferred way of playing it and the trophy list don't align at all, haha!

デビルマン (Devilman)

This game was hard as nails (probably for the wrong reasons), but goodness me, was this Fun with a capital F! Even the tank controls, which I don't like, didn't stop me from completing this game -- even though some bosses almost did. I really put in the focus and elbow grease to finish this, it just enticed me so much. If I could've recorded my playthrough, it would've been a great circus to come back to on a later date: drunk walking, perma-sneaking, trial-and-erroring left and right, getting lost after a few steps, changing controllers mid-play, live translating to a friend of mine who was watching... and that one enemy, did I accidentally glitch it out of existence due to my cowardice turn on the heels? In the context, even little things like jumping into a pit with gusto without meaning to, and mooncrawling into a corner in the plain sight of a chaser somehow working as hiding were some chuckleworthy chaos moments. It's just, a lot happened in this game. A lot.

The strange but interesting halving this game had going on worked well in my opinion. First half was sneaking and surviving, second half was a brawler thing. I'm not a fan of playing horror games (though I like to watch others play some horror titles), but this game wasn't scary even though some escaping parts were tense. The second half was less suspenseful because you could defend yourself, yet it was also more difficult because of the numerous bosses, and that one timed section involving saving people was brutal for someone like me who can't run well as a tank and got lost in the corridor space. The tank controls really held me down: while battling, I had to come up with strategies that relied on attacks that could move me around, and I had to face the creatures head-on instead of circling around to attack their backs, because walking just wasn't my forte. I swear, it's ironic that Akira's (the main character) surname is Fudou (lit. unmoving).

The last boss was the most difficult one because it had a strict time limit on top of everything else. I died so many times to him, but finally I won by a cheap tactic of just spamming the square-punch in frustration, occasionally tapping the triangle-slash to close the distance. No fancy combos or special moves this time. I was lucky the boss seemed to get stunlocked at times if I mashed square quickly enough. My hands were so dead after this. But, I loved this game. I think it got the atmosphere right. Not everyone might see it, but there was something clever in here.

オメガブースト (Omega Boost)

Fun? Yes. Difficult? YES.

I really liked shooting and flying around as Omega Boost the mecha, but man, the difficulty curve is steep. I didn't reach the end of the game, but I tell you: I spent way more time with this than your average person who clears the game. If I could've decided, I would've wanted the zone mode as the main campaign, and the arcade-like main campaign as the extra mode. That way death wouldn't have sent you back to square one. I can't fathom how you can reach the last level in one run, I'm not a perfect machine. I need my breaks and re-tries. Especially if I'm expected to do dodge-courses in cramped tubes... in those, I bashed and crashed on walls and obstacles like a rocket-boosted pinball ball, the game asking me repeatedly in that monotone voice if I was okay.

Well, I'm happy I at least got over the halfway point of the game, anyway. That shall be a win in my book. This was my first rail shooter, too! (I think. If I have played a rail shooter before, I was not aware it's from that genre). Besides, it was nice to see how I got better run by run. Maybe if I kept at it, I might one day succeed, who knows.

This game is pretty cool, Omega boost itself and the space around it. Even the live-action videos fit in well. Though the levels are limited -- you are on rails after all -- the areas felt more spacious than that (excluding the dodging corridors). The way how you are automatically turned around when reaching the invisible wall is done in a sneakily nice way. I'm poor at flying, always mixing up up and down, but moving in this game was a joy -- as long as you weren't in a corridor. I really am not a fan of the dodge-course corridors; I think that has become clear, lol.

But... Spinning in the deep space, guns a-singing -- that is fun!

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One

Finally, the playthrough with my friend is finished! As such, I don't think I'll platinum the PS4 version as a New Year game as I originally meant to -- that, I shall leave for later. Better give it time to simmer a little bit.

This game is so much fun!

Karl-Kai · December 31, 2023

DECEMBER 2023:

01. Platinumed: The Centennial Case: The Shijima Story (PS5)

EX. Played: ゼロ・ディバイド (PS1)

EX. Played: Shy Cats: Hidden Orchestra (Switch)

EX. Played: Magic Klondike (Switch)

EX. Played: パズドラ X 神の章 (3DS)

The Centennial Case: The Shijima Story

This one was more like a movie than a game, but I liked this. The live-action brought in a fresh breath of air, and the traditional Japanese style woven into everything was lovely. It really set the mood. Playing this game, eating dorayaki on the side --- it's the perfect way to spend an afternoon, would you not say so?

The story was interesting without being too pompous, and the fact that there were cases from both past and present worked really nicely. The ending managed to surprise me a bit, though: (spoiler)

Spoiler

it was a tad silly how many Tokijiku-eaters there were assembling in one room in the last scene!

I had a bit of technical problems while playing this: if I tried to choose "continue" from the main menu, the game would freeze. That, luckily, could be avoided by loading the game from the other tab. At one point, the game's trophies stopped syncing -- even though the game itself showed them popping, they didn't update into the trophy list on the PS5. Some time later it just randomly fixed itself when I launched the game yet again to continue playing. Also, I was being very meticulous to find all clues and make all hypotheses, but the hypothesis trophy wouldn't trigger. When I had finished the game, I loaded one of the saves and skipped movie scenes, starting to repeat hypothesis building scenes I had done before -- I barely got started with that, when suddenly the trophy just popped even though the hypothesis I made was an old one. I don't know why all these things happened, but I'm just glad they all got sorted out easily.

In any case, this is a fun game that is a joy to experience if you don't mind the slight lack of interaction on your part. The story is the big thing here. Hmm, I would like to play more games with live-action. I think this game would've been less charming without it!

ゼロ・ディバイド (Zero Divide)

I wanted to like this game more than I did. It looks good, but plays clunky. The unresponsive inputs, especially directional ones, seem to just disappear into a void, and I swear, getting back up after being knocked down just didn't work as it was meant to, causing me a lot of trouble. In this fighter, the battles can also end in a ring-out -- at first it might sound like a mechanic that makes your job easier, but it's actually the opposite. The opponents will always save themselves by grabbing the ledge and launching a counter on your arse, but what's worse, your ability to dodge and jump around gets basically taken away; if you try to jump over your enemy or to gain distance, your frog of a fighter will leap into the surrounding pit all on their own without any help from the enemy. By the way, even turning around was so slow your opponent could come and stunlock you on the spot.

Also, this game didn't seem to have any sort of dedicated practice mode. As such, trying to learn combos or any other moves before embarking the "story" mode was out of the question. This is also one of those games that won't let you change the minimum requirement of battle rounds to 1, so you must win even the strongest opponents twice to advance. I was flailing and struggling all around, trying to learn the characters in the middle of the action while eating ground. The enemy can be pretty aggressive here. I didn't want to clear the game with all of the characters, but I wanted to try out all of them (whom are robots in this game, by the way), so I cycled through each of them, playing a few battles and then quitting out. To my surprise, whenever you reset on an earlier stage, the "DJ" of the game would yell at you (in English no less despite the game being a Japanese version): "I can't believe you're giving up so soon! You're a BABY!!". I guess I deserve it.

Shy Cats: Hidden Orchestra

A game about cats, music and a keen eye. The thing about the music filling in when you find cats with different instruments is really nice. And, the inclusion of the hidden, locked hint box alongside its hidden key adds a little something to the structure: after all, the hint is crucial in finding the shyest cat of the bunch, because it won't appear in the area unless you pick a certain musician cat combination to play, enticing it. Overall this is a very relaxing and cute game. Just what the doctor ordered.

Magic Klondike

A solitaire game costing under 1 euro? Ok!

Though this game had its own visual style going on about it, it is very barebones and the touch screen won't work, either. You don't unlock anything while playing; you have a handful of illustrations to choose from right from the get-go, and only one music track. That track sounds exactly like something else that I have already heard in some other indie game, so perhaps it's from a free-to-use music library?

The game tracks how many times you play each game mode (1-draw and 3-draw) and your win ratio. I got my first victory in 1-draw on my 4th round, and in 3-draw on my 5th. While it was fun to spend one day with this game, I don't think I'll return to it. I have a better solitaire game on my Switch called "World Solitaire"!

パズドラ X 神の章 (Puzzle & Dragons X Kami no Shou)

This is one of my favourite 3DS games, hands down! I can recommend it!

Storywise, I'm at the tail-end of it, but I deliberately stopped progressing the narrative. Why? Because now that I have acquired Lance as my temporary teammate, it's the prime time to travel around trying to catch every available monster I still don't have. If the game had multiple save files, I would quickly play the game to the end and see if there's a possibility to re-recruit people to fight by your side, and if it was not possible, I could just revert back to my old file where I still have Lancey-boy. But, since there's only one auto-saving file, I'm not risking it. Not only is Lance fun to drag around with me, but he is a serious power house in the battles. He makes battles quicker, which is appreciated, since my luck with the RNG is pretty bad; I have repeated some battles like closer to hundred times, and the prize has still not dropped in my hands.

In this game you make a 5-monster team out of creatures you have caught, and honestly, I have had hard time choosing my main team since there are too many nice guys to pick from! At this moment my most used team set-up includes creatures that are both cool-looking and in synergy with each other enough so that they can battle even in areas that don't offer their energy type drops (they're pretty much all about darkness and water): Ankiryuu Lance, Ankoku Maou Vampire Duke, Gokkai Meiroushin Anubis, Hangyaku no Shitenshi Lucifer, and Tenmetsu no Shinmaou Lucifer.

I was so sad to bench my Kenpyouzan Shiraha -dragon (especially since I finally got him maxed!), but the synergy was better with the set-up mentioned above. But! The game nicely lets you to build multiple teams and easily change between them, so I can have less optimal teams with other monster combinations ready and waiting when I go do other kinds of missions. In any case, I've yet to see all of the monsters there are in this game, and I'm more than sure there are other amazing stuff just waiting to be found! But, heh, it's pretty funny that I have two Lances in my current team: the normal Lance human partner by my side, and his dragon-form as my creature fighter... It's good the game allows this sort of inconsistency to take place!

Karl-Kai · January 2

RECAP OF 2023

In the year 2023, I played 41 games, out of which 27 were trophy-possessing.

I earned 649 trophies, out of which 20 were platinums.

In the beginning of 2023, my completion rate was "barely 90%", in the end of 2023, it is 91,96%.

2023 was my first year with a PS5, and I played 5 games on it. All to completion.

In 2023, I also got an external hard drive for my PS4, enabling me to download even more games (my poor backlog...).

In April 2023, I started two separate AtoZ challenges, and in December 2023, they stand at 6/29 and 7/29. (Can I complete them in 2024?!).

I'm content with the year 2023 gaming-wise, even though I've been way too sick to play as much as I wanted to, or play as taxing game as I wanted to. The games I played, most of them brought me so much joy that I can't really list them in order of preference, but I think my personal GOTY is Sherlock Holmes Chapter One (PS5). So. Much. Fun.

What in the year 2024? As sickly as I am, I still want to continue playing and fill my AtoZ lists. I want to play games I know I will love as well as games I randomly pick up to surprise myself. If I got my completion a little bit higher, great, but if not, no worries. Over 90% is awesome in my opinion.

Cheers!

Karl-Kai · January 31

JANUARY 2024:

01. Earned 38 trophies in: Tekken 8 (PS5)

EX. Played: GUILTY GEAR 鶍 (PS2)

EX. Played: Team Sonic Racing (Switch)

EX. Played: Fashion Dreamer (Switch)

EX. Played: Home Deco Puzzles (Switch)

Tekken 8

So, Tekken 8. I have mixed feelings.

I waited for this game for such a long time, and I got it as a late Christmas present. Some trailers near the release made me question do I actually want this game after all, but I figured that Tekken is Tekken and if it's the finalé to the tale in one way or another, then I should check it out.

Well. First of all, the gameplay is really fun! I'm having a blast playing around in the different game modes, even online (I bought one month of play time just for this game). But, the story is partially disappointing, some character designs are worse than in the previous title, and one character annoys me so much I want to punch a baby and yeet my PS5 out of the window. So, unable to stomach how things are going to be from here on, I think I won't get Tekken 9 if that ever comes out. See, I can always just play the older Tekkens that I love and treasure, after all.

As of now, I already have the majority of the trophies of Tekken 8 unlocked by just messing around, but I'm not focusing on platinuming this yet. My attention will go to online for as long as I have an active subscription, though I do want to clear a couple more character stories (I've only done 3 at the moment) and take one or two characters for a spin in the Ghost Battles, to familiarise myself with them a little bit. Right now I'm pretty much all about Devil Jin, though.

Speaking of online, that is one crazy place. There are so many strong players prowling around! I don't know how much fun my opponents were having with an easy prey, but regardless, I was enjoying myself. Having rare close calls or clutch wins was exhilarating; worth all the repetitiveness of having the floor wiped with my face. People with their unbreakable combos render me an immobile punching bag so easily...! Fighting against real people is an unfamiliar thrill for me, so it's strenuous to some extent; having your pulse shot over 200 is exhausting in the long run.

Apparently people can use that Special Style (or whatever it was called) online, too, and it was a bit discouraging for me, especially since one time when I was about to win a round, my opponent suddenly switched to the easy mode and kicked my arse royally. One single time I tried the easy mode myself against an opponent who was utilising it, too, but I found it somehow confusing and it made me disconnect from my character. So, I rather lose my matches than use the easy mode. It's a good option for people who can't fight otherwise for one reason or another, but I don't want to use it. Because of this, I haven't got all of the wall/floor related trophies since I have no idea what moves to do to break shit up. I'm atrocious at comboing, you see. I'm also bad at escaping and blocking attacks, so you can bet I was really proud of myself when I got a win online due to pulling off one extremely well placed block and getting my following hit to connect, depleting the opponent's last bit of health (I had as little health left as they did). Yes, it sounds basic, akin to nothing for most Tekken players, but for me it was a happy moment.

I already told that I'm playing more or less solely as Devil Jin right now, but I have also put a chunk of time in Jin and a bit towards Victor. I'm planning to go for Kazuya next; he and the Jins have been my favourites in the older games, after all. After playing those characters... perhaps I should play Leroy next? He is cool. In any case, I will rotate through many of the characters, but I'm sure that no matter what, in the end I will have the clear favourites that I stick with most of the time. By the way, for some reason my stats for the offline usage of characters is showing pure zero for everyone else but normal Jin? What gives? Do not all modes count towards that tally?

Anyway. I'm having a tonne of fun with this game -- as long as I close my eyes to the non-gameplay parts that I hate, that is.

GUILTY GEAR 鶍 (Guilty Gear Isuka)

Isuka is quite the poetic name for a fighting game, huh?

It's a shame this one doesn't have a story mode; it tries other things, yes, but still. And the last boss is so big a pain in my backside that I don't like fighting him at all. I have never been able to beat him with a K.O.; the best I have done is to barely keep my life higher than his before the timer hits zero. In here, the character I've played as the most is Faust. He's fun and weird in a good way, I like him. He's such an explosive storm on the battlefield -- plus, when one feels like munching on cheese, his "ue kara" is a friend. The second most I've played as Kai; I like his electricity moves and overall flow. I still haven't cycled through all of the interesting characters, since there are so many of them in this game. Also, since I have spent a ridiculous amount of time in the practice mode trying out different moves, I haven't touched all of the other modes in the game, and I got to play only one round in co-op with my friend.

I've been interested in Guilty Gear Strive for a long time, but I'm not sure if it would be too hard for me. If it's anything like Isuka, then it would probably drive me crazy. The only other Guilty Gear game I have played besides Isuka is Petit, and that one, it was really easy; you could win pretty much by just spamming one move over and over again even without lowering the enemy AI. From playing Petit, I remember the mini stories being funny; in Ky's, he was searching for Fuuenken that had been stolen and finally found Sol frying fish on it. Sol's deadpan reaction of just plainly asking if Kai wanted to have a bite, too, is the thing I remember the best out of it all.

Team Sonic Racing

Unexpectedly, this one became my favourite driving game, so I like to return to it from time to time. While I failed to complete all of the missions (rings, slaloming... ugh), I still enjoy racing for no particular reason other than having fun. Time just flies by playing this. Unlike in some other racing games, in this one the track-reading is actually intuitive.

I race as Shadow pretty much exclusively, because 1) I like the Speed type, 2) His car is the coolest-looking, and 3) He himself is my favourite (I have never played any classic Sonic games, but I have put a craptonne of time in Shadow the Hedgehog on PS2).

I love the fact that this game allows you to change the language to French -- it's the best cast, and Benoît DuPac is the best Shadow there is!

The reason why I got this game for the Switch was the price: this was the cheapest version. I'm actually happy how it all worked out, since using the switch controllers to drive is surprisingly nice, they kind of enhance the flow and make drifting satisfying. The downside, though, is how horribly quickly they're out of juice and have to be charged again. Before christmas I bought a wired controller for my Switch, and while it otherwise works very nicely, it of course lacks the "airy" feeling the little controllers have. Plus, the wired controller has these weird buttons under the handles and I keep pressing them accidentally all the time. But, now that I have two controllers for my Switch, the next time a friend of mine comes over to visit me, we could race together. Though, I might have to wait for a long time for that, since everyone is super busy.

If this game had DLC race tracks, I would buy them all. Isn't it funny that when you'd welcome DLC, there is none?

Fashion Dreamer

A cute and colourful game about fashion. In here your sole goal is to make outfits, dubbed "Lookits", and become a fashionable influencer. Once you have created your own character, you keep dressing them as well as the other characters hanging out in the cities -- both NPCs and other players' characters. This game lets you play online without buying a subscription, so I was able to hop in there and rake in more points than in the solo play. With those points, I got to create my own fashion pieces and open up a Showroom of my own in a quick pace. Of course, I still have lots of items to unlock in order to brush up my fashion brand and Showroom.

I really like my character I made, and styling him and photographing the handiworks is good, innocent fun. I suppose my only complaint is the fact how the game limits what you can wear depending on your gender. It's a bit weird to say that some T-shirt can only be worn by one gender, and that some jeans are fit only for one gender, while you still can make a female wear a beard and mustache if you so wish. I'd like it a lot if the game could have an update that lifts these restrictions, but I suppose there might be some technical reason for all that and such alleviations will not happen.

Anyway, this is the sort of game where you make your own fun and repeat the same steps over and over again, so it might not be for everyone, but I like it a lot. The game lets you go forth in your own personal pace and encourages you even if you arse around. And, limited-time events pepper up the online play as well. I missed the first ones, but I nabbed in all the latest Dramatic event prizes.

Home Deco Puzzles

The name of this game might make one think about a chill interior design game, but no, this is a memory game. You take a look at a room, then all the furniture and knickknacks are put inside boxes. Your job is to pull the stuff back out of the boxes and relocate them in the room, just like they were before. While the idea is good, the execution is clunky. Handling the item explosion with the provided controls and space is a tad bothersome to deal with when you're trying to work quick before you start to forget. And, since the game seems to ask some pin-point precision, jank is not fun. For example, once a shelf got stuck in a wall and I couldn't fish it out of there and move it to its rightful place, and another time a cup would not sit on the table in the right spot regardless my best attempts to shift it around.

Partly fun, partly frustrating, I decided to stop playing this for now. I can go back to the last levels later -- if I remember this game, that is. Right now, I want to steer my attention to other direction.

Karl-Kai · April 3

FEBRUARY-MARCH 2024

01. Earned 5 trophies in: Tekken 8 (PS5)

02. Platinumed: The Awakened Fate Ultimatum (PS3)

03. Platinumed: Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden (PS4)

04. Platinumed: Guilty Gear Strive (PS5)

05. Platinumed: Hidden Shapes: Black Skull + Old West (PS4)

06. Platinumed: Hidden Paws (PS4)

07. Earned 16 trophies in: Asdivine Dios (PS4)

EX. Played: バンパイアハンターD (PS1)

Tekken 8

Some more trophies for Tekken 8! I can round up the rest later; whatever I have left is easy stuff, I think. Now it seems that whenever I boot up this game, I get distracted with other things like the ghost battles -- and I think that that is just fine. I'm not speed running trophies, after all.

The Awakened Fate Ultimatum

There was nothing "ultimate" about this game. The dungeon crawling was fun, but then again, this game if any is an RNG hell. It took ludicrous amount of time to 100% the item catalogue. If I didn't try to platinum this thing, I could have ignored the collectibles and saved a tonne of time, but as it stood, I had to fumble around the dungeons, hoping to have the right items miraculously appear in front of me.

To platinum this, I actually had to not only play the game through twice for different dialogue choices and one enemy that gets recorded only on NG+, but I also had to start a third playthrough to hasten the level up point progress. You really don't have to go out of your way to strengthen yourself to beat the game, but the trophies ask you to grind anyway.

In this game, the story and characters were really boring, and as an insult to the injury, the only character that was somewhat entertaining had to be the one to die besides the big bad (a pointless death, on top of it). Game, what are you doing? x'D

So, running through each dungeon once was fun, but other than that, I wasn't too amused. Well, at least this game is now out of my backlog: I had bought it years ago!

Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden

Warning: If you love this game, you might not want to read what I'm about to express. I don't have too nice things to say.

Alright. The first game in this series was not perfect but pretty fun nevertheless. I really like the card play and narrator system, which is why I bought this second title. But, there was one character in Forsaken Maiden that I greatly despised. For my bad luck, that person was the one the whole shebang was about, so I couldn't completely ignore them. Really, they were dekisokonai in more ways than one...

Near the end of the game there was one forced question: if you answered "wrong", it's a game over. The "wrong" answer was my "right" answer, so if this game didn't have trophies, I would have stopped playing at that point and accepted that game over as my ending. From that point on, I button-smashed through all the dialogue (which is something I never do, even if annoyed) and sped run the best I could. I was sure that if I close the game, I will never open it again. Oh, and this game had one really grating song in one dungeon (I can't handle too high-pitched voices), so I had to go and mute the music from the options. Thing is, I forgot to enable it again, so for the rest of the game I had no BGM on. What does it say about the game, when I don't even realise it's missing its music? My concentration was somewhere completely different. By the way, the difficulty spike in the last boss was really surprising. I got it killed only on my third try.

So. I detest this second title so much I've become apprehended to get the third one in the series. Surely it can't be as bad as The Forsaken Maiden is, but still... Well, perhaps at some point my fondness towards the cards/narrator voice combo will make me try the third title.

Guilty Gear Strive

After having some bad or dull gaming experiences lately, this game was a shining ray of light!! I love this! It really lifted my spirits. And truly, even if I had played stellar games before this one, I would still give praise to Strive and say I love it, because a good game is a good game, no matter what.

I was such a happy chappy, that even though I hadn't meant to sink my teeth so deep into this, it just happened. See, my plan was to just go and get the online trophies while my subscription was still active, but I couldn't resist the urge to play more. I had lots of fun battling, and the moment when I realised that I actually can kind of do this (KoF has been demoralising me), my confidence grew. The positive outlook made trophy hunting more relaxed. It was like the text I spotted on Ky's garments: "Nothing can be done without hope". When I believed, I achieved (though better be able to distinguish hope from false hope). This reminds me of it how one lovely person on this site, LancashireLad87, encouraged me to reach platinum in Tekken Tag Tournament 2 -- I wasn't that sure of myself, but his supportive attitude made a difference. (By the way, the Lad has a nice thread on this forum section about his trophy hunting; you might want to check it out, folks!).

So! My online play subscription was about to end, so I hurried to nab the trophies relied to it and to get as many online battles fought as possible. After all, it is more exciting to play against real people. Feeling the time pressure, right after doing the tutorial and a few missions, I, not really knowing anything, hopped online. Not engaging with the practice mode first was dumb on my part: I didn't remember anything, or really know any moves of the Ky character I had picked: I was the most terrible button-smasher. I felt embarrassed and my opponents must have found me either awfully annoying or the perfect easy prey. It was sheer willpower that led me to wrench a single victory in my hands. To fix this undesirable state of things, I trained offline some before sticking my head out to the online mode again, because not only is it helpful for myself, it's also more respectful towards my opponents. That was when I started to fare better and actually win some of my battles (when I won one round, not a whole battle, against one super strong opponent, even that made me feel good about myself). True, I still can't remember all the complicated and layered systems, but the stuff I got through my thick skull I was able to use. Even though I wasn't a complete laughingstock anymore, I still felt some embarrassment by the fact that if someone was to watch replays of my matches, they would see my inputs in all of their nastiness. I am a restless fighter, constantly doing something, anything. I also do a lot of "empty inputs" because I lack preciseness, and that has led me to often do the same attack twice in a row to ensure that something gets picked up by the game if the first string was no-good. Due to these tendencies, I have even managed to activate Kai's Dragon Install while trying to use Ride the Lightning: when the first attempt fails to launch RtL, the second immediate one causes it to read it all as an install.

And, yeah, my defensive game is poop, so it's no wonder that my last two trophies to pop before platinum were the ones about blocking successfully. I tell you, it is no mistake that my stats have the "guts" rating the highest with everything else behind.

Because of the time limit I was working with, I actually relied on the upload-download trick for the money spending trophy (because I mistakenly thought you can't fish offline...): after collecting a hefty sum of about 10,000, I used it, downloaded my last save, used it again, and so on. It was a pity I couldn't keep all the items I fished up, but what can you do. I can always come back to it later.

Speaking of cheesing things: for the "Not Missing an Opportunity" trophy I used a second controller, because the requirement was terribly specific. Since I couldn't ask someone else to take that second controller to help me out, I used my Qanba arcade stick with one hand and the regular controller with my other one. Worked like a charm.

Starting with online wasn't the only assbackwards thing I did with this game: I also pigheadedly insisted on clearing an Extreme arcade run first. I met success with the DLC character whose name resembles the word "elephant", because I was able to spam the last opponents with her. But, other than that, she's been pretty much benched, because I've been favouring Kai, both offline and online. With Ky I have not been able to clear an Extreme arcade run, but I have managed Hard runs and that makes me happy enough.

Other characters that I've put some time into are Faust, Sol and Shin (the other DLC character I bought). Which means, I still have many other characters to dabble with later on -- that is, if I don't just gravitate towards the one and same character that's become my favourite in this game. By the way, I was disappointed by Testament's new design. Not only did he go through a wardrobe change, but body structure, voice, and mannerism changes as well -- and those last three points didn't speak to me after getting used to the way how he is in Isuka. He was really fun there (if nothing else, he won me over with his walking animation, lol), but he's just unrecognisable in Strive. So, I didn't buy the DLC of him. Oh, though, while I don't like his new Japanese voice, I saw one trailer in English, and the voice he had there was really nice. It just doesn't help me much since I'm used to playing my Guilty Gears in Japanese.

When it comes to DLC, the character I'd like to make their arrival is Dizzy. I'm surprised she's not in the roster already.

Oh yeah, the story mode -- I don't think I have seen this style of complete omittance of battles before! It was like watching a movie, and honestly, I think it was pretty nice that way. There are many other battle modes in this game, so there's nothing wrong with the story mode being purely a story. Actually, even if it had been just text you read like a book, I would have liked it. Now, though I don't have much prior knowledge of GG's narrative, I was able to follow and enjoy what this game offered me, even if the plot wasn't the best. I suppose it was either written in a newcomer friendly way, or then I was just very accepting of having holes in the layout. One thing, though, made me scratch my head (spoiler):

Spoiler

If Sol lost his powers, how is he going to battle efficiently from now on?? He can't be tossed to the side, right...?

I actually asked a friend of mine if they'd play Strive with me, but they totally ghosted my question, lol.

Hidden Shapes: Black Skull + Old West

I enjoyed the first Hidden Shapes game, so I got this second one as well (and am going to get the third one, too). This was mechanically the same: just turn tiles to make up proper line-art pictures, that upon completion, will come to life with extra colour and additions. The style of colouring the pieces was different this time around --- it was pretty, even though I think I preferred the simplistic style of the first game more.

It took me some time to platinum this since I caught a nasty flu that a family member brought home. Whenever someone sick comes near me, I always become sick as well. Sucks to have no immunity.

Hidden Paws

Another title from the Hidden Paws series! After playing Hidden Paws Mystery, I did say that if more of these got released, I would be there to play it. Actually, I wanted to play this immediately after its release, but decided to wait for a patch to fix the bugs first. It would have been nice to play this in December for the Christmas feels, but now wasn't bad either. There's even snow outside, still. Playing Christmassy games around Easter, while peeling open easter eggs in hopes of certain surprises, isn't confusing to me at all. I'm having good time here! Although, while playing this, I couldn't churn through all of it in one or two sittings, because I was still recovering from the aforementioned flu. The way how I frantically spun the camera around in my cat search gave me nausea, lol.

Asdivine Dios

I've got like half a dozen of these Kemco games from big sales, and I figured that it's finally time to play at least one of them. I decided to start with Asdivine Dios.

Gameplay-wise this was the sort of old-fashioned, turn-based RPG that I was expecting, and I had fun with the simple system. Even though there were a tad grindy parts (only if you aimed to platinum the game, mind you), the only draining thing actually was how all of your teammates were drooling after you, the main character. There are too many games that have a dating mechanic of some sort shoehorned in, it's tiring.

That aside, I liked the pixel art and the short music loops. The moment when I realised your level can surpass 99, I got momentarily scared, but reaching LV999 was actually quite easy after I found a suitable training spot on the map. I didn't buy any DLC the game offered to ease your adventure, because none of it was necessary in the slightest (and even if it was, it would have still felt like a waste of money).

The treasure chest collecting ended up being a little bit stressful, since even though I thought I had been very thorough, at the final boss' door I realised I had missed 2 chests. They weren't in the boss room, since beating them sent you to the staff roll and main menu, so I had to turn around and backtrack through multiple locations. Finally, I found those two missing chests in the bottom of the sea, both of them sitting neatly next to each other in some corner I hadn't spotted before.

Anyway, whatever positives and negatives there are, all in all this game was the simple kind of RPG I was looking for to bumble through. I like turn-based battling, and it's an especially good choice when you're in a sluggish mood.

バンパイアハンターD (Vampire Hunter D)

What is Vampire Hunter D? When I picked up this game, I did not know (afterwards I googled that it is a multimedia thing, apparently novels at first); I just thought that the game looked cool and it was pretty cheap as well. And I was right to give this a try, because it was really fun! This game is very beautiful-looking, full of atmosphere, and the sound world of it is neat: music is used sparingly and otherwise it's silence, filled only with footsteps, or perhaps rushing water or whirring machinery.

Of course, this title was one of those tank control games. I and tank controls don't go together, but luckily I was able to substitute a normal controller with my Hori fighting stick. With that, I could be on my merry --albeit drunkard-walk-- way. I'm really happy these accidental accessibility options exist!

I played through this game on the easier difficulty level, so the only challenge, really, was to adapt enough to the tank controls. Walking in a straight line in a tank control game is unexpectedly hard while using a stick; the slightest tilt towards northeast or northwest sends the character veering, and then of course aiming goes off. D, the main character, also had a small slide before he stopped running, so colliding with laser traps or walking over a ledge could happen all out of a blue. However, the environments were designed in a way, that frustration was limited, and the rather surprising fact that you could save anywhere made it so that if you had the patience to save often, mistakes could be erased easily and you lost nothing.

Normal enemies pretty much bee-lined to you and you could just whack them to death with your sword, but bosses liked to run in circles or teleport: that was more annoying to deal with with wobbly walking. While I preferred to kill everything with the sword, one boss character near the end of the game ran so much that I ended up taking care of the last of their health bar with the Plain Wood Stakes subweapon. It had a homing feature, but did very little damage, yet since I had not used any of them during my game, I was sitting on a pile of them (like 40) at this point. I died only once during the whole game, but even then I didn't receive a game over, since fortunately I had the L-Hand bar full on Kaifuku-mode, so it revived me back on the spot.

Speaking of the difficulty of the game: I found something that pretty much broke the whole game. I don't know if it was an oversight or a deliberate choice, but in one room you could pick up a Blood Capsule (healing item) infinitely as long as you re-set the room by going through a door. Discovering this, I couldn't resist stopping there for a while and fill my inventory with 99 Blood Capsules. It was rather absurd, but I found it hilarious. While I used "only" about 30 of them, it still felt calming to have them all in my pocket. The mere knowledge that I could sip on blood whenever disaster stroke actually made me play better because I approached things in a more relaxed manner and I was also more willing to take high-risk-high-reward moments. The only instance when I gulped down a good handful of capsules back to back was during the second last boss battle of the whole game, because before I realised how to actually address the fight, I took quite a lot if hits.

Then again, I think that the most difficult moment for me in the whole game was to cross a pool of water by jumping on two moving stone platforms. I don't know what I was suffering of at the moment! But, also the game had its hiccup: I experienced a glitch were D would fall right through the platform even though I landed squarely in the middle of it. Since the water hurt you, I actually had to reload my save file I had made while arriving in the room, because my HP situation had gone awfully dire. Speaking of the water damage: the first time this concept came up was when D arrived in the sewer area and L-Hand warned him about the water being perilous. This made me perplexed: Do mighty vampires (or dunpeels) have a weakness towards water? I was curious enough to actually google it if this was part of the vampire lore, and lo and behold, according to some beliefs, vampires can't cross running water. I never knew that! Then again, if the reasoning is that water is pure and vampires are not so much, then one could argue that sewer water should not count, lol.

While the game made a pretty good job on informing you about the next goals, there still were some moments where I spun around a little bit lost, but nothing major. The fact that I didn't find the 2nd floor map made things slightly more confusing for a big part of the game, but it was manageable, and at the time when I automatically received the said map due to a story beat, it wasn't as relevant anymore since I had gotten used to the layout by that point.

Apparently this game has 3 different endings. It seems I ended up with the worst of the bunch, whoops! Then again, somehow the tragic (but still calm?!) ending felt fitting for the mood of the game, so I'm not bummed about it. I have 6 save files for the game, each at a different point, so I guess I could reload one of them to more easily aim for an alternative ending rather than starting a whole new game from a scratch, but right now I think I am content with what I've got.

To sum it all up, I really enjoyed this game. Lots of fun!

(While strictly technically speaking this game starts with a B-letter due to how V works in katakana, it is a loan word which I'll readily count as a V. So this is my V-game in the challenge.)

----------

By the way: For my Q-game of the AtoZ challenge, I wanted to play "Quell Memento". It seemed like an interesting puzzle game. However! It was not in the Vita store when I went there to buy it. I don't know if they have deleted it from the digital store, or if it never got released in Europe, but in any case, I was really disappointed. Now I don't know what my Q-game should be! If I don't find anything I feel like playing, then I might consider Q-letter done by just thinking about Quell Memento... how pathetic. x'D

Kai's Forever Project

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