Weekly Update #40: Trading in Phantasia

September 28-October 4, 2025

No, no, not trading in the game, trading IN the game. Glad I could clear that up for you.

Game Acquisitions

Another big purchase here with Star Wars: Outlaws as mentioned in my September monthly post. I know it didn’t have a very warm reception, but I’m a diehard Star Wars fan and it looks fun to me. Very light week otherwise for acquisitions.

# of Games: 4

Total Money Spent: $17.82

Price/Game: $4.46

I might be the only person who looked at Rygar: The Legendary Adventure for the PS2 and went “that looks cool, but I’ll have to play the original game for the NES first.” My series completion mindset knows no bounds it seems. It actually seemed like it wasn’t a bad game, just notoriously difficult as games tended to be back then. It’s OK, I have save states and rewind to help me through it. I’ve also got the entirety of the Shadow Hearts and Valkyrie Profile games tested and ready to go. I’ve never heard of Shadow Hearts before, but Valkyrie Profile has a solid reputation. I also got all the Pokémon games downloaded for the upcoming testing for that series. I’m planning on playing all the games from my play order collection for that one, and it’ll be a doozy for sure. I’ve never actually played a mainline Pokémon game before. I only dabbled in Stadium minigames and am still an avid Pokémon Go player. I’m excited to see what the actual series is all about.

It's official, I had to stitch two pictures from Playnite to get them all to fit. That marks over 200 games tested so far! And I'm only just getting started it seems 😅 

Game Recaps

I actually got two Phantasia sessions in, one co-op and one solo. This won’t be a habit though; I just wanted to clean up some shopping stuff without my co-op partner sitting there doing nothing. Despite the increased play time, we didn’t accomplish too much. It was mostly exploring the couple of towns we hadn’t been to yet (namely Early, the Twilit Town) that we probably weren’t supposed to go to. We also got lost in the Treant Forest for a while, but at least now we know where we’re supposed to go next after we finish up the volcano area. Check out the playthrough! 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched this week:

·       Marvel Zombies Season 1 Episodes 3-4 (complete)

·       Alien: Earth Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (still watching, show ongoing)

·       Happy Gilmore 2

A light week for acquisitions and a light week for TV too it seems. What did I even do last week? Anyway, shows and movies were just OK this week, not bad but not great. Zombies ended on a cliffhanger which may never be resolved, Alien: Earth seems alright so far but nothing outstanding (how dare they kill a cat though, that’s always unforgivable), and Happy Gilmore 2 was so filled with references that it didn’t feel like it wanted to be its own movie. Hopefully this week is better.

Conclusion/Upcoming

As I feared, Game Pass and Microsoft Rewards went through a total revamp last week. Now you can’t redeem for Game Pass directly and the exchange rate is way worse because not only did the price go up but now you can only redeem for Xbox gift cards which has a way worse exchange rate. I don’t think it’s possible to earn enough points to keep the subscription going indefinitely anymore, it seems they closed as many loopholes as they possibly could. I did manage to redeem four months’ worth before the switch though. Still haven’t gotten around to redeeming it though, just continuing the emulation testing in the meantime. I was at 369 lines left in my file last week and am sitting at 361 now. Next up is the Pokémon collection though which is only one line and will likely take over a week to test on its own, so it won’t look like I’ve made any progress. I am planning on toiling around in the background though.

This week will consist of finishing up Alien: Earth and at least starting Futurama. If I manage to finish both of those, I’ll move on to one of my obscure anime I’ve had sitting on my PC for a while. The next movie coming up is Pitch Black, the start of the Chronicles of Riddick franchise. I watched it like a decade ago, but it’ll be nice to get a refresher before diving into the series proper. Dunno if I’m getting more Tales of Phantasia time in, I certainly hope so. If not this week, then definitely next week while I’m off for the holiday. That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Backlog total: 3,629 (+23)