What are you playing right now?

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A bit of everything!

Yakuza: Ichin
Yakuza Kiwami 1
Resident Evil 2 Remake
Smash Bros Ultimate
Langrisser for mobile

The World Ends With You. My progress is very slow, which is saying something, since I usually take a long time to play through games.

Witcher 3. Game is so much more fun with mods.

About to start level 29 of Doom II Good Morning Phobos in UV continuous. Only 940 monsters in this map...

Done with Resi 2 (2019) for a while. Sub 2 on each scenario.
Over the 50% completionist mark for Yakuza Kiwami.
GF just bought the Nathan Drake collection - she's playing that, but I'll maybe try it this weekend. I played the first 3 more or less when they came out and not really since then.

still ACNL. I'm busy going to the island and fetching bugs so I can pay Tom Nook and expand my house!

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition. Waited for this version of the game to be released in English for 10 years. It takes way too long to get going, and the whole thing has the usual post-Abyss Tales feel where it feels like the story and character details were written by a committee (a shame given how wild Symphonia was), though Yuri has some great moments (avoiding spoilers here) and the cast is entirely likeable which is unusual for this series. Shame they messed up the port so bad! The frame-pacing is so bad that, unless you apply an unofficial fix, the game is nauseating and honestly worse than a consistent 30fps. Even on consoles. (I don't know if they've fixed the issue on console but they sure haven't on PC)

I also need to get my hardcore S+ rank RE2 playthroughs done.

Startrek Online.

Got into it again, spent some time on my admiral character, but thought it would be more fun to just start a new Fed character and not to continue on the other Romulan and Klingon alts i have.

Haven't played since 2014 (according to the mailbox timestamps), and the game had changed a bit, but was still recognizable. Just took an hour to get to know the game again.

I just realised Beat Saber got an update to all its tracks with Expert+ levels, plus a couple of new tracks, so I have got back into it a bit. I hadn't played it for a while, and strangely having come back into it after a fair hiatus I seem to be doing really well in tracks that were kicking my ass before.

I tried this game on someone else's VR set and it's the one thing that really makes me wish I had one. Even though I was playing in a tiny room and the motion detection constantly glitched out, it was still the most fun I've had in a long time.

Anyway, I got to the final dungeon in Vesperia and I'm having that JRPG fatigue where I really don't want to do the final dungeon because I know the ending of the story is essentially that my guys win and do the thing they want to do. Yawn. This game is particularly bad for that because the villain is someone who you have no animosity towards so I have no compulsion at all to finish except my desire for the game to tell me that I don't have to play it anymore.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to play next. I have a Japanese copy of Trails of Cold Steel 3 that I want to play, but I really need to steel myself because my Japanese isn't great and I'm going to have to learn as a play. I would be playing Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls (I played 1, 2 and V3 recently), but I missed the sale on that and full price is a bit rich for me. I kinda want to read through the Stein's Gate VN or replay Tales of Graces F but both are on my PS3 and my PS3 controllers are bust. Maybe I'll just go with a VN. Very few games nowadays manage to make the gameplay feel like anything more than a chore.

I'd highly recommend Steins;Gate. It's my favourite VN, alongside The House in Fata Morgana, Muv Luv Alternative, and Saya no Uta. It also has an excellent sequel, which I recently played. I like that the setting and premise are fairly unique and incorporate a lot of current day (at least at the time of its release) issues and news, making it feel timely.

I've only read a few VNs but I always enjoy them much more than actually playing a game or watching anime so I'm not sure why I don't just do that more, reading is much more in line with my terrible ADD. Saya no Uta was great, incredibly unsettling and by the end I was somehow rooting for that psycho to murk all of his classmates. Are there any other good VNs that would make me feel uncomfortable? I did Kara no Shoujo 1 and 2 and that first game was pretty disturbing at times, but the mysteries in each game end up being underwhelming because the writers insist on their serial killers having unbelievable or supernatural motivations instead of simply making it so that they love to kill women.

I watched the Stein's Gate anime and it was good but overrated imo, I got the sense while watching it that the VN would be much better because half my time watching the show I was thinking "this isn't how that would work" or "why are you doing this instead of that?" or "this whole plot doesn't make sense now that x has happened" and I want to see if the more wordy VN explains these things better.

My only knowledge about Muv Luv Alternative is that people always advise very strongly that you shouldn't bother with the original at all because it sucks and is boring. That lends Alternative a sort of mystique, I think I'll go for it. My decision making process is extremely arbitrary, yes.

Saya no Uta is pretty unique in that it's a horror VN written by someone who's obviously talented at writing outside of the realms of VNs. It lacks the glacial or staccato pacing of most other VNs, the moe-ification that plagues newer titles, and the weird slavish adherence to a dating sim structure.

I can't think of many VNs that are really that similar, though The House in Fata Morgana is probably closest in my mind. It's definitely less horror and more mystery, though it has similarly marcarbe themes. It similarly has supernatural elements that drive the plot, but ultimately the motivations of its characters are very human and relatable. Higurashi When They Cry is another horror VN, but at least for PC all the releases aren't out yet so I've only read 6 of its 8 chapters. What I've read so far though has been excellent, but it does have pacing issues in its earlier chapters and obviously I have no thoughts on its ending.

I thought the VN for Steins;Gate was excellent and that its anime adaptation was also really good. There's some things in favor of each, with the anime doing much to make it leaner but the visual novel going into more depth. There's aspects in both that I think are silly, like the unlikely harem the protagonist has and the multiple minor story arcs each female character gets. Overall I'd say the VN was better, but don't expect a huge difference; the anime is widely considered to be among the best adaptations of a VN.

If you plan to read Muv Luv Alternative... you have to read the original. Skipping it is not something anyone should even consider. I'm honestly shocked anyone would recommend reading it that way. Alternative is the third chapter in a long narrative and skipping the first two chapters is the dumbest advice I've ever heard of. I would say that the first chapter is definitely weaker compared to the later chapters, but there's no way anyone wanting to read Alternative should skip it. It's like reading the Lord of the Rings from the third volume.

I might be misremembering the Muv Luv suggestion. It wouldn't surprise me because I'm pretty stupid. Actually, I did attempt to confirm that notion before my last reply by checking the rating on VNDB and the original (which I believe contains the first two arcs?) isn't nearly as well-liked as Alternative according to that metric. I'll probably hold back on those then but they're on my list, I'm just not sure of my ability to sit through a fairly standard high-school romance story before getting to the good stuff.

(incidentally I'm EXTREMELY ANGRY that the folks on VNDB misuse the word 'prequel' to mean something other than a sequel set prior to the previous work, this is a pet hate of mine)

Saya no Uta was Urobuchi, right? Yeah, it's a very concise VN which is rare. Kara no Shoujo 2 - which you may not have played - is an overly verbose title which nonetheless has an extremely strong translation, all in the service of wasting your time. Saya no Uta has a very workmanlike translation but it's such a tight narrative that it doesn't matter; it correctly values its own message and doesn't oversell what it's trying to convey but equally isn't afraid to be briefly ponderous for effect. That's especially important given the gimmick of the story is actually quite thin, existing as it does to present a stark moral relativity with every scene working in service of that aim. The true ending very cleverly extrapolates that relativity towards life and death without explicitly stating anything of the sort.

I've heard good things about Higurashi. Maybe I'll go for that and/or Fata Morgana.

Stein's Gate (I will not correctly stylise this, sorry) was kind of adorable in how closely they adapted the format of a VN to an anime. Not that a harem anime is some new incredible creation, but given the context I found it appealing even though I hate this pandering rubbish most of the time. That said, the part where he specifically traveled through time to spend precisely one episode with each of the girls was laughable and made very little sense. I think my biggest problem with the anime was how the CERN plot made absolutely no sense given their capabilities and power, but it's been a while.

Fallout 4

If I have the time I'll check out the newer Wolfenstein titles and maybe even DOOM.

4 Seasons of Doom (for Doom II)

Only four levels, but they're massive (first map has 855 enemies on UV, 'only' 675 on HMP). Graphically excellent, gameplay okay, though based partly on semi-slaughterish set pieces, which I'm not too fond of.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/1 ... n-idgames/