Eluvianii

Books are cool, they range from nice distraction to really good. Three and Nine is amazing and lore-important.

For reference, apparently lowest discount CS3 has had is 58%, so Zero and Azure might get into that zone at some point. So far Zero has already reached 20%. For me VM did feel like it was getting consistently harder iirc. Pom was the weird one, it had a few scattered hard opponents with a lot of easy ones. Final boss included among the easy ones.

That's an interesting reaction.

Crossbell in particular is better on the Switch. It was a bit of a controversy last year, how PS got weirdly excluded from getting the good version. Cold Steel is the other way around, resolution and textures are a tad worse on the Switch. I even heard there were crashing issues for CS3 but I think those got fixed.

Not to my knowledge. I seem to remember last time Kondo was asked that, he said he wanted to remake the trilogy. Which is a nice thought but it kinda evades the question. I'm assuming it's a no.

Should probably mention this. Can't exactly confirm it as I haven't personally played it, but from what I heard Reverie is in a way considered to be the third Crossbell game, as it continues (and hopefully closes) some plot threads that were left hanging after the Crossbell games. If you don't mind getting the story out of order then that's ok but I thought you should know.

Yukihiro Jindo is so unreasonably good at making arrangements. I'm completely convinced he could take a literal perfect theme and somehow improve it.

About the gameplay though, gotta say (spoilered for people going in blind)

Pirate crews are so much fun. We're only 3 players (3 active ones anyway), but the ship is getting steadily fuller and fuller with people and creatures. We have a couple npcs, 3 eggs that will potentially hatch into some mini wyvern things, and we just got a mini dragon and a parrot. Not to mention the absent players' characters. Our captain loses no time either and asks basically every npc to join us. Not everyone can fight for balance reasons but just having this many people with so few players is really cool. Gives that illusion of a big, diverse crew. (or it would if we didn't have a game of houses between gods going on, but hey, treason and backstabbing is just a part of piracy)

Finished Tokyo Xanadu eX+, both endings. This game was a surprise, in many ways. I went in expecting a simple slice of life supernatural action game, nothing that went too deep, and you know what? For the first few chapters it delivered. A "burger with fries" story as Brandon would put it. But each chapter just continued to be better than the last one. Somewhere along the middle the game was already in "great" territory for me, but it didn't stop. It just kept getting better. A straight, steady line going up. Now I'm done with it and I'd struggle not to call it one of my favorite games. Another thing was the duration. It's an action game as opposed to turn based, and the chapters are relatively short. 30-40 hours seemed to be what I could expect at most. My cleared save file however clocks in at 75 hours and a half. The endings are a surprise too. The game also has a habit of going on for a long time when you think it's already over but I'm saying too much. Overall a delightful experience I would love to give a second run sometime, not terribly far into the future.

I know what you mean. There was this one heart/dialogue run that took me about 7 hours I think. I loved every second, but there is a lot of that in this game, yes.

Facepalm is going through character development here. So uh, when do I meet Kevin?

I don't even need to ask where you're at.

Malazan won me over as soon as it mentioned dunking cats into a well.

It was cool, and strangely enough, a very happy scene. And well, I guess I'll try to solve the thing still. Not much of a hope to actually do it but it should be fun. And the meat of the mystery is the incidents themselves I suppose. Now, lots to unpack but mainly Beatrice because obviously.

That sounds like an argument supporting Kevin tbh. And too late, I had already listened to episode 1 when you guys said that. Maybe for the third or fourth time as this isn't the first time I try to listen to this. I... don't see how skipping it would help. I did enjoy it more than last time I tried though, not sure what changed. Maybe Nowhere On Air softened me up for Night Vale's style. Either way, looking forward to whatever happens next.

I had already given up on Night Vale but I can't see this level of enthusiasm without feeling like I have to give it another chance...

This talk about tarrasques is interesting, because the way my GM describes it, they are designed to be a literally unkillable campaign ender and any way you manage to kill one is homebrew territory. And yet I still find some stories from time to time describing them as "not that hard".

Yeaaah exactly that. The kind of fight where in the end one of them just defaults to "My power is infinite" and the other replies "Well, my power is infinite plus one!". I hope we get that phrasing at some point. Actually, I have determined that Beatrice is a chuuni, through and through. The Golden Witch is an oc she created that has lived a thousand years and has the 72 demons of Goetia at her disposal and next thing you know she'll be wearing an eye patch. She's thoroughly adorable when she drops the act though. So anyway, on the list of things I didn't see coming.

Man, I love the carefree attitude everyone in this series has. So there's this one quest that goes wrong. Classic case of running into an unbeatable monster a couple ranks above yours. Lots of villagers were in danger, you were in danger, typical stuff. Your boss feels reaaally guilty about it and gets depressed, but literally everyone else is like "Don't be stupid dude, let's do it again!" Incidentally I'm this close to hunting my first Valstrax so there's something to look forward to.

It's no problem. That said, he did say he would have pushed the date back regardless, as he doesn't want the end of the front half to be "just another book", and wants to take his time polishing it. Also, I know people repeat this all the time, but it's thanks to all his non-Cosmere stuff that the Cosmere stuff is so good. If he didn't take breaks from it to avoid burnout, Stormlight would probably be over by now, but it would most likely be a very disappointing series.

Stormlight is 2024 tho.

The excitement around Metroid Prime's remaster caught me, so I decided to play Prime 2. It's a really fun game. I'm enjoying the way they're portraying metroids here. It's easy to use broad phrases like "Space pirates enslave metroids" but it doesn't hit you as hard. This on the other hand let's you see them up close. "This metroid is being tortured by its cage and can't fall asleep" or "This metroid has been milked half to death and its cells are messed up because of it" or "This metroid was fed normal food, presumably for fun, and now has food poisoning". It's a whole new side to it. Metroids are such a sci-fi concept, it's easy to forget that at the end, they're essentially abused animals.

Maybe too much. TPBM likes hazelnut cream.