Mathurin47

Seems like I just wrote one of these. Ah, right… I did. That’s what I get for taking so long. Another quick month. Between my bosses vacation’s and a week of late trucks, things haven’t really slowed down. I’m still not completely comfortable in the “leadership” position, but perhaps it just that yoke of responsibility I thought was gone after I left the service desk nearly two years ago. Can’t run forever, I suppose. Nor can I complain about the paychecks. Those 40-hour checks are going to seem so small now.

The Wheel of Time re-read continues. I polished off Book 3, “The Dragon Reborn” and made it through the fourth book, “The Shadow Rising”, as well. TSR is probably my favorite of all the books. I’d forgotten just much more I enjoyed the earlier books when the individual plots didn’t take several books to get resolved. Not that I haven’t enjoyed the recent volumes, they just didn’t seem to go anywhere.

In other news, another birthday has come and gone. That makes 30 now. I usually take the night off, but the boss on vacation and me covering for him, I couldn’t get out of it. I ended heading over to my dad’s the next night for a barbecue, though I ended up sleeping to late and missing it, pan-frying the rather large slab of salmon he had gotten for me instead. Talked to my sister for awhile, though I never returned my mom’s call. It’s been six years since she ran off and I suppose I can’t push her away forever, but I just don’t have anything to say just yet…

Persona 3 Portable	Trinity Universe	3D Dot Game Heroes	Arc Rise Fantasia
The Witcher: Enhanced	Monkey Island 2 SE

March Gain +0 – 0 Achievements unlocked

March Gain – Level + 0 Trophies + 4

Backlog increased by 6 in June

Rank 38 on the MyGamercard.net RPG Leaderboard +3

Game spending vs. ‘09: Monthly +30% | Yearly -22%

I hadn’t planned on getting P3P considering I already had both the original Persona 3 and the FES version. But one thing Atlus does well is dangling those preorder bonuses. I do like the hat, but too bad hats don’t seem to suit me. The 360 port of Witcher seems to be dead, so I grabbed the PC copy along with the Zelda “homage” 3D Dot Game Heroes at a recent GameStop sale.

Treasures 33/102
Stage 5-1
A cute little platformer that is probably meant for a younger audience. Solid, but not spectacular. Having fun with it though.

46:43| 9 August
Battle Party Level 31-33
I’m really enjoying Persona 3 this time around. Pretty much everything I didn’t like about it has been made more like Persona 4 and makes for a much more enjoyable experience.

Green Star Challenge | 148 Stars | 48 comet Coins
Apparently 120 stars wasn’t good enough for this sequel so the developers have scattered another 120 stars throughout the game. Not sure how long it will take, but I will open the final stage.

48:08
Character Quest Chapter 2: Norma
Battle Party Lv 55-57
Set aside during the move, I’ve finally restarted my Tales marathon. Side questing put me against some rather high level foes, so now that I’m back into the main quest things have been proceeding rather smoothly. I’m rather curious if the plot revealing itself in these character quests will tie back into the plot that was resolved with the main game.


Chapter 5 | Level 29
Not quite what I was expecting, though it certainly has its similarities to Cross Edge. The game is essentially a continuous dungeon crawl through the various dungeons that float in and out of orbit of the city the game is set in. There’s not much of a plot, though the game doesn’t take itself seriously at all to hilarious effect. Random encounters are pretty frequent, though fairly easy to power through. Boss encounters, especially in non-story dungeons, are another story. And I’m not even close to being strong enough to take on the Lurkers that roam most dungeons, pouncing when you’ve stayed too long. It’s a niche title, with only a handful of crossover characters. Cross Edge had too many; Trinity too few. Though the dialogue is hilarious, I can see the dungeon crawls getting rather repetitious.

It was a little more than 10 years ago, not long after I started my first semester of college, that I learned of things such as emulators and ROMs. While I recall downloading many of my favorite SNES titles, two games stand out from this time period. One is Seiken Densetsu 3, the Secret of Mana sequel of which an official release is one of two games that would break my Square Enix boycott. The other is Final Fantasy V. While FFV would get an official Western release the following year, at the time a hacked ROM was the only way to enjoy it in English. I doubt I’m the only one who preferred RPGe’s translation over Square’s official one for Final Fantasy Anthology.
And so every few years I would remember that buried deep in my computer was my SNES ROM folder and I would get a little further in FFV. I bought Anthology but the load time was almost as bad as the translation. FFV Advance too, though I didn’t get that far. It was always the ROM I would come back to. And it is the ROM I finally cleared.
Sandwiched between the the far stronger stories of IV and VI, FFV comes across as rather weak. Where V truly shines though, is in its class system. With an ever expanding array of jobs and the ability to mix and match learned skills, battle is an ever changing experience.
Worth going through once, but FFV is not among the best Final Fantasy has to offer.

Take the Bump of Chicken song Laugh Maker, add a Touhou theme and you get this.

3 Pickups, 2 Additions

Atlus & NIS America

Etrian Odyssey III

Others

Ys Seven

Metroid: Other M

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Fallout: New Vegas

Eye on 2010

And so begins Square Enix’s attempts to woo me back after the FFXI fiasco. Here we have a reimagining of 1995′s Tactics Ogre. Not only is the original designer, Yasumi Mitsuno, returning after stepping down during FFXII, the original art director Hiroshi Minagawa is serving as director and the composers Hitoshi Sakimoto (!) and Masaharu Iwata as well. I never got around to trying out my PS1 copy, but this certainly looks promising. Comes as quite a surprise considering they have done nothing with Ogre/Tactics since buying Quest in 2002. Not quite enough to break my boycott, but certainly a nice try.