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

Celine’s super cute, though.

For Trails, it’s gotta be Mishy.

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

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

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

Man, feels like Demonschool’s been in dev forever for a project of that size.

Sadly we now know P4R (along with Stranger than Heaven) won’t be out before April.

I nibbled a bit at Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance this past month but couldn’t get into it. I’m going to shelve it for a little bit. Still planning on returning to it. Doesn’t exactly count, but I put a lot of time into Final Fantasy booster draft last month on Magic Arena!

I started Fire Emblem Engage this week. Already liking it more than I thought I would. Hoping it goes well for me, I’d kinda written off Fire Emblem as something not for me.

I don’t think he’s particularly strident here or anything in Japanese, but the headline here would have been better off sticking with the machine translated “nothing has changed” in the article.

There isn’t any optimism in Matsuno’s words here. I would have added “as always” to “economic disparity remains the same” and “again” to his comments about armed conflicts. He sounds tired of the cycle.

Tactics Ogre was also partly inspired by the genocidal conflict in the Balkans. I wish Matsuno was getting new projects like this.

I think it has some good qualities, especially the soundtrack and shifting boss sprites.

I’d be annoyed if this got delayed only because of the Switch 2 port, but Falcom really does need this to be on as many platforms as it can get.

Besides, I’m sure NISA’s happy with the extra time considering the rate they’ve been churning these out.

For story, nothing is lost here (and it arguably flows a bit better without the new stuff).

For gameplay, this kinda sucks. Luso and Onion Knight weren’t anything special, but Balthier’s job class was interesting and Dark Knight was a fun goal to grind towards with a big payoff at the end. Agrias’ birthday event had an item that was great for Geomancers, too, and that’s one of my pet jobs. Since they aren’t adding new battles, this also means the game is shipping with nine fewer battles, not even including the cut multiplayer content. My biggest complaint with FFT was always that the side content was thin, and this is really not helping.

That said, what this article doesn’t mention is that they are still including the animated scenes from WotL, though it sounds like they won’t be in the main story, just additional content in menus. Plus, a lot of the WotL improvements over the base game (bug fixes and upgrading the script, some nice job tweaks) are already in the scope of this project anyway, and it appears it won’t have the negatives, like the slowdown bug, the bad sound, or the weirdly stretched aspect ratio.

You’re not going to find more text/explicit plot than you have already. That said, there is good environmental storytelling in the last zone of the game. The next zone for you (Wrecked Ship) might have a little more for you to chew on. I’d say get through that zone and then see how you feel about it. If you like it, the ending will probably feel rewarding.

Rixia Mao from Trails. I connect with her story on so many levels and she’s a wonderful portrayal of mental health struggles.

I really like Dana too. She and Tia from Ys Seven are the women I tend to think about the most in the series.

Game Overs happened on these only if you chose the wrong dialogue option at the start.

There is some early speculation that we’re seeing controllable Guests, though.

Don’t think I’ve come across anything on why they left. It did seem like the general vibe for a while was that 2K was done with XCOM, and they also didn’t seem happy with the sales for Midnight Suns itself. Maybe the writing was on the wall for the team?

Bit Reactor is the lead dev on Zero Company, and a third of them are XCOM/Firaxis vets.

As much as I love Trails, I felt like each one of the Cold Steel games have a major pacing problem at some point. CS1’s was damn near the whole game, ugh.

Reverie was a very refreshing change of pace on that front.