Writing about my gaming journey (game acquisitions, completions, reviews, etc) and anything else that strikes my fancy. Don't worry, my backlog is always growing so there will never be a shortage of things to talk about.
Not much to talk about this week. After beating Fall of
Porcupine, I didn’t play anything for a week and a half because I was so busy.
I did manage to get some gaming time in Friday night and Saturday. Still no GPU
which I expected at this point, but I did finally buy some stuff to upgrade my
recording equipment. I’ve got a new table, second monitor, and a couple of mics
to record co-op games with my friend. It should be fun! Hopefully that will
stop the disaster that was the beginning of our Tales of Phantasia playthrough
from happening again. Let’s get on with the games!
Game Acquisitions
Once again,
these games were all free. Two weeks in a row with no purchases! This should
help offset the cost of all that recording equipment I just bought 😅 Shoutout to ScarletKitsunefor Bionic Heart! Looks like an
interesting short-form visual novel. I still haven’t played Smurfs 1 yet (or
seen literally any Smurfs media) but now I have both games for free. There were
a couple bundles released last week that look kind of interesting (namely
Fanatical’s Build your own Bento Deluxe Bundle and Prestige Collection - Build your own Bundle (Bundlefest 2025) and Humble Bundle’s Deckbuilder Bonanza), but I couldn’t justify the price
for them. The Bento Deluxe bundle actually has a wishlisted game in it for less
than I’m looking to pay (Persona 4 Arena Ultimax), but I figure it’ll be in a
cheaper bundle or cheaper on its own before too long.
# of Games: 5
Total Money Spent: $0
Price/Game: $0
Game Recaps
As I said, I only got some game time in
Friday night and Saturday so not too much here. I feel like I’m nearing the
end-game in Final Profit now. I’m mostly just running the shop to make money to
buy upgrades and progress the story at this point. I didn’t get to play Tales
of Phantasia with my friend either. We did hang out but ended up going out for
a while and then I was stressing about the new recording setup too much to
actually record something. My bad!
My current goal in the main story is to
raise 1 million coins each for six power gems from Faeona to power the Capital.
They were previously siphoning mana from fae but obviously Biz wouldn’t allow
that to continue. At the end of my last session, I bought the VenDRANK! factory
and found out I can place vending machines around the world to make more money.
I spent a good chunk of Friday night running the shop to raise the money to buy
and upgrade all the vending machines. In the process, I got another commodity
upgrade for art.
I also unlocked the ability to craft
compressed VenDRANK! by throwing 999 of them into a portal on the second floor
of my shop. This will be useful to quickly replenish the machines.
I got into a cycle of raising some money
in the shop, buying the building, raising more money, placing the vending
machine, raising more money, upgrading the vending machine, and so forth. While
I was buying upgrades, I came across a new customer who is quite peculiar.
The VenDRANK! has come to life! He only
wants to drink it though and is willing to pay so I don’t mind. More customers!
After a while longer, I raised enough money to buy all the vending machines and
their upgrades and was greeted with a handy perk.
Now I can give compressed VenDRANK! to
the driver outside my shop to keep the machines stocked. I still have to go to
every machine to collect the profits so it’s not quite as helpful as I would’ve
liked. While running the shop some more, I got more commodity upgrades for
fruit and battlepass candles.
Hooray for paying people a living wage!
At this point, I’m focusing solely on raising the money for the power gems.
With the amount of money I’m making from the vending machines, I get enough in
no time. I get five of the six I need and place them in their spots and am
greeted with this cutscene:
Oh shit! That “gather
all my resources and call in all my favours” line sounds a lot like a point of
no return to me. I don’t know if I’m close to the end of the main story, but I
don’t want to risk continuing it if that means I can’t wrap up all the side
stuff. The main story will be put on hold for now. I continued by going back to
Faeona and buying the sixth and final power gem I thought I needed to solve the
energy crisis.
I also remembered
the black orb outside the castle, so I had a quick chat with the old scholar
outside about the nature of royalty then blew his mind by lifting the sphere.
I unlocked something
down there, but I don’t see a way to continue. I’ll have to come back to that
later. Now I’m focusing on raising money to buy properties to increase my
passive income. After buying Magnolia the chicken’s house in Enterpriston, I
get a surprise side quest.
So, she’s from the
same region as the Owl Lich, which makes her quest to hatch her eggs very
similar. While I’m in town, I also decided to buy the auction house too.
So, the auction
house offers a way to buy tax evasion credits for a cool million each. My tax
bill has never been that high so I don’t know how useful that would be. I’ll
take the passive income though. Next, I pop back to the Capital and purchase
the hotel. Haytch isn’t too happy about it.
Since I don’t really
care about the stock market anymore, the premium offering means nothing to me.
Again, I’ll still take the passive income though. I also found the skeleton who
made my utility pouch, and she offered to make me a new tool with some boots of
haste. They cost five million coin, and she wants another two million to craft
it so I have to go back to my shop and make money for a while. After an hour or
so of that, I give her the money for the tool.
The walking speed is
significantly faster which will be handy with all the running around I’m doing.
I went back to buying properties and decided to go for the apartment complex in
Enterpriston which requires buying all the units inside first. Once I did that,
I ran into the weird purple grandma who’s obsessed with VenDRANK! She asks
about the electrical situation. I wondered why it was always so dark in there.
I’m more than happy
to continue making the morally good choices, and the place looks so much nicer
too! At this point, I’ve raised enough money to pay off Faeona’s debt to the Bureau.
I’ve never had so much
money at once in this game, it feels good! I ended my session in the petition hall,
so I’ll start next week’s post by paying off the debt. Hopefully the petition
hall mechanic expands after that because I haven’t gotten to use it yet. After
that, I only have a few more goals that I’m aware of:
·Raise 40 million coin to decurse the last
accessory
·Raise 50 million coin to buy the boots of
f****** haste to get the last apple
·Figure out what the deal is with the
mysterious underground area outside Faeona castle
·Figure out what the deal is with the giant
black orb in the other dimension and the weird orange salesmen
·Buy the rest of the properties
·Continue the main storyline
OK, it actually does
still look like a lot when I write it out like that. Will I beat the game this
week? It certainly feels like I’m getting close to the end, but we’ll see.
·American Dad Season 21 Episode 16 (all caught
up, show ongoing)
·Cowboy Bebop Episodes 1-6 (still watching, show
ended)
·Stardust
Skeleton Crew was a fun watch, I enjoyed it. I knew it
wouldn’t be as gritty as The Acolyte since the main characters are children,
but Jude Law’s character still had some shockingly dark moments. I’m bummed this
one once again only got one season, I thought it had an interesting premise.
Speaking of shows with only one season, I watched all of the Skull Island
cartoon from 2023. It was…not very good. The writing was weird, some of the
voice acting sounded off, King Kong only showed up near the end, and it ends on
a cliffhanger that doesn’t resolve any of the plot threads. It was clear that
this was abruptly canceled which is a shame. Only watch this if you’re a
diehard Monsterverse fan. On a more positive note, I started the legendary
anime Cowboy Bebop and it’s definitely living up to the hype so far. I am
thoroughly enjoying it. 90s anime just seems to hit different than anything
else. The Stardust movie was also really good. I can’t believe how young
Charlie Cox was in it! I didn’t even recognize Henry Cavill in his role. I felt
the humor was just right, and I loved the fantasy setting too.
Conclusion/Upcoming
It’ll take me a little bit of time to set up the new
recording equipment so once again, game time might be reduced this week. I’m
hoping once everything is set up (including the new computer which could still
take some time), everything will be smooth sailing and I can game some more.
I’m hoping to make good progress on Final Profit, and I suspect I’m nearing the
end. I hit max level 99 (nothing happened after 90) and I’ve explored all the
areas. Now it’s just a matter of finishing up all the goals I listed earlier.
If I do beat the game this week, the next game on my list
is something called Lunar Axe.
I think it’s one of those super short hidden object games I got for free a
while ago. Hidden object is not a genre I’m into but reviews said this one is a
little more in-depth so maybe I’ll like it. Assuming I get all the recording
stuff set up, a new session of Tales of Phantasia with my friend is possible as
well. I’ll be watching Cowboy Bebop all week, and maybe a couple episodes of
Scott Pilgrim too. The next movie on my list is The Fifth Element. I don’t know
anything about it but it sounds sci-fi so I’ll probably like it. The name
Stardust sounded like sci-fi too but ended up being fantasy, which I also like.
Anyway, that’s my plan for the week. Thanks for reading!
You may have noticed that this post went up on Monday
instead of Sunday. I’m thinking of doing this going forward, so I have the full
weekend to write my weeklies instead of staying up late on Saturdays to get it
done. I actually got sleep Saturday night, so it seems to be working so far. On
another note, the inevitable finally came to pass. My employer has ordered
everyone back to the office full-time no later than March 17th. This
is a huge blow to my way of living and will likely affect my blog as well. They’re
still working out the specifics on how it will be implemented but just know
that changes are coming. Game time will probably go down as well. Why the
government seems hell-bent on making everyone’s life miserable I’ll never know.
I waited in line at Microcenter again on Thursday and still
came away empty-handed. No GPU for me for at least another week. I won’t be
able to drive up there before my workday once office work starts so if I don’t
get one by March, I suspect it’ll be quite some time until I can get my hands
on one. The old PC lives for a while longer. Sorry for the downer mood, life
has been rough the past week. Let’s get on with game acquisitions.
What’s this, a third game!? 👀 Does this mean what you think it means? If you read the title, I
think you know the answer to that question. I had a decent uptick in game time
compared to last week as well. Let’s start off as usual with…
As soon as I left the power plant at the end of the last
session, Mx. Two was waiting for me. They said One doesn’t trust us and they
were coming with us to the negotiations with Faeona. Honestly, that’s fair.
Wow, that is some serious falling out between Two and their
mother. The deal went through but tensions are high. Now I need to raise
6,000,000(!) coin to get enough large power gems to meet demand, and that’s on
top of the 5,000,000+ I need to remove my cursed accessory. This game is
getting expensive. After the meeting, I meet up with Queen Biremue in the
abandoned castle and fill her in on the details.
She’s got even more Bureau blackmail for me, very nice. I
wonder how that will come into play. I met up with One to be briefed on the
threat that supposedly only the Bureau can eliminate.
The threat sounds serious, but I still don’t trust One. At
least now I’m holding four of the five business cards of the Lords of Business.
That happened way quicker than I expected. Maybe I’m close-ish to meeting the
fabled CEO? I’ll need to raise quite a bit of money before I get there though.
In the meantime, now that I’m back in the capital, it’s time to run a few
errands. I fulfilled the various marketplace quests, although I still don’t
really understand how the marketplace works and probably won’t spend much time
there. I also gave Lady Plenty the money necessary to clean the water system
and Refrain the tokens necessary to purify the gem outside the museum.
Biz and Refrain finally tell each other how they feel about
how the previous queen treated them, although it looks like that hasn’t eased
the tension between them yet. With the errands out of the way, I headed back to
the gem lab to see what Odina wanted to show me.
Yikes, I burned that thing up immediately. Removing free
will is a big no-no for me. We’ll need to use other tactics to deal with the
Bureau. I explored for a while and ran the shops to raise coin and while doing
this, I found the green horse! He’s just hanging out in the first shop.
He wants me to wear three specific accessories at once, but
I can only wear two right now and one of them is cursed! I’ll have to come back
to him later, but at least I know where he is now. After running the shop for a
while, I got a message that I sold 100 permits and to go the Bureau office in
Enterpriston. I head over there and run into the Representative.
He has now usurped the Legislator and become the new
Legislator of Enterpriston. I also set him to visit the store twice as often to
buy even more permits. They get a nice 25% price increase too! I also got
enough levels to unlock the next area with the ghosts to continue that
storyline.
Biz’s grandmother’s fancy axe is in there, but I still don’t
know how to move the black spheres. This will unfortunately also have to wait
until later. While grinding away at the shop for more coin, I finally finished
up Tinto the Dragon’s hoard and unlocked a new area.
I can wear three accessories now! And I can sell Tinto even
more things to earn money even more quickly. Now I just need to remove the
cursed accessory so I can reunite the green foal with his father. I’ll need to
grind for some coin. In the meantime, I decided to pay the Owl Lich a visit
since I have enough health to continue his quest.
I completed the quest, got a ton of money, and learned the
whereabouts of the Owl Lich’s friend. I headed to Enterpriston to find her.
While searching, I ran into the skeleton looking for accessories and completed
her quest too!
She won’t hurt the Lords of Business directly, but she will
let me use her power as a demonstration when the time comes. It’ll have to do
for now. With that out of the way, I head to my shop to grind for a while and
raise the coin necessary to decurse my accessory.
Alright, I can earn quadruple XP from sales now. Not sure
how useful that’ll be since I’m past level 80 at this point, but we’ll see. Now
that I’m curse-free, I can wear all the accessories the green foal wants me to
wear. Let’s pay him a visit.
I completed the quest and unlocked the ability to…bake
bread. I can trade it to other horses, but I’m not sure if it’s worth spending
the time to do that. I’ll have to look into it. With my levels up, I decided to
unlock the last areas of the mysterious cave and talk to the ghost some more.
That record keeper was infuriating! It was a funny bit
though. And with that out of the way, I’ve completed the ghost storyline. I
also have a new customer for my shop! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do
about that entity though. Next, I head back to Faeona and have a chat with
Divina about her murderous plot.
I’ve learned how to exploit the shield gems, and Divina
learned some self-reflection. Continuing across the treetops, I found the area
where the game began, and Biz has some reflection of her own.
With that tough talk out of the way, I head back to the
horse dimension to pick up the final cursed accessory.
It costs a whopping 40 MILLION coin to remove the curse ðŸ˜
It better be worth it. At this point, I decided to look around for some apples
because I’ve been close to clearing out the labyrinth. I finally found a couple
more and unlocked the next area with a little surprise.
I finally learned how to lift those black orbs! That should
open up some new areas, if I can remember all the places I’ve seen them. I decided
to head back to the mysterious cave because I know there was an orb blocking an
apple chest there.
That was a funny conversation. Just north of the chest is
the gauntlet to get grandmother’s axe. I have a Life Insurance Policy now, and
a decent amount of money. Let’s give it a shot.
Oof, that was a million-coin endeavor right there. The axe
doesn’t seem to do anything so not sure if it’s important beyond 100%ing the
game. At this point, I finally decided to head back to my shop to earn some
money. I got a few commodity upgrades in the process.
Those are some nice upgrades. As you can see from that last
pic, I headed back to the capital. I decided on a whim to buy the VenDRANK!
factory because I had just enough coin. Turns out there’s a whole money-making
venture in there regarding vending machines.
It looks like the next thing on my agenda will be raising
the money to install these things. Another successful bout of capitalism! Let’s
move on to my next game.
When we last left off, Finley finally went home after a very
long and exhausting double (triple?) shift at the hospital. After finally
getting the sleep he needed, he heads back to work to find that it’s still just
as busy.
Looks like it’s going to be another long day. Let’s head to
the break room to see what Dr. Krokowski has to say.
So, the cause of everyone’s illness is being narrowed down,
but the hospital is reaching capacity and staff are starting to get sick. Karl
has the idea to open up the ward on the fifth floor to let in more patients.
Finley tags along to help out.
With the cleaning all done, Finley heads down to the
basement to turn the power back on.
Well well well, look who finally decided to show up. Dr.
Theobald, the chief physician, has finally come back and explains his absence to
Dr. Krokowski. The hospital conspiracy was revealed to be the building manager
pulling money out of the hospital for personal reasons and blackmailing Dr. Theobald
to keep quiet about it or risk losing his job and taking the blame. Dr. Krokowski
isn’t taking any of his shit though and demands he shut up and helps out. The
power goes out and Finley heads up to his ward to check up on Mia.
The hospital caught fire! It must’ve had something to do
with turning the power back on. Everyone needs to work together to evacuate all
the patients. Finley heads back up to the fifth floor to check up on Karl.
With that out of the way, Finley heads down to the ground
floor to help push patients out the door. He stops to talk to the doctors of
the other wards on the way down.
After the last patient is wheeled out, Finley heads back in
to check that the rooms are empty. He runs into Dr. Theobald before he can make
it very far.
I have a bad feeling that Dr. Theobald isn’t going to make
it. Finley does as he’s told and takes the next ambulance to the school.
He’s having a rough day, poor guy. Finley arrives at the
school and receives orders from Dr. Krokowski.
The mini-games to treat patients are fast and loose now.
Something interesting happens in one of them.
The mini-game petered out because the patient died. That never
happened before. Finley rushes to the front to help out Dr. Krokowski as the
screen fades to black. On fade in, Finley heads out of the school.
Finley, Karl, and Mia look up at the smoldering hospital as
the game fades to black. I wanted to write something here about how exciting it
is that I finally beat my first game since starting my blog, but then the
ending was all somber, so I don’t want to ruin the mood. A few pictures pop up
during the credits depicting what happened after. I picked out two notable ones.
The hospital building manager was arrested for his crimes,
and Giuliano is seen visiting his mother’s doll in the forest. There’s a
post-credits scene too.
So, it’s confirmed that Dr. Theobald didn’t survive the fire, but he died a hero. It looks like the lab tech that works in the
basement may not have made it out either if the other doll
is any indication. A sad ending to be sure. With my first game completion here,
I can finally add my first game review section. But first, let’s quickly recap
the third game I played this week.
After beating Fall of Porcupine, I pitched my friend the
idea of playing through the Tales of series together. As a completionist, I
wanted to play all the main games in the series with an English translation
after I got Tales of Vesperia in a bundle back in 2023. He foolishly agreed, so
now we get to play through the very first game in the series 😈
First impressions are actually pretty positive so far!
So, my plan for the blog was to use shorter clips with explanations
between them for Final Profit and Fall of Porcupine because I started those
games before I started the blog and so didn’t have any footage for them. Going
forward, I planned to post full plays on my YouTube channel and embed them on my blog with a
brief overview of what I did. This might increase my editing time, but it
should severely decrease my writing time so I’m not spending my week writing
instead of playing. This will be especially important now that I’ll have to be
in the office so my free time will be limited.
Notice in my previous paragraph that I said planned past
tense. This will still be my plan mostly, but I hit a snag with my OBS
recording when we played this week. I’ll put the details in the Conclusion/Upcoming
section at the bottom of the post. I can post the recording I have too but as I
said, it’s just the beginning with no commentary.
The game starts with two boys (teenagers?), a swordsman
named Cless and his friend Chester the archer, who leave their village to go
hunting and bring back food. We renamed Chester to Festerr because both main
characters’ names starting with C was confusing when voicing the dialogue 😋
We successfully caught a boar but when we came back to the village, it
was burned to the ground, and everyone was killed! This included Cless’ parents
and Festerr’s little sister. Cless finds a knights’ sword in his fireplace and
tells Festerr he’s going to go to the town nearby to ask for help. Festerr says
he’ll be along in a bit after he’s done paying respects.
Cless gets to the town and runs into his aunt and uncle and
tells them about the situation. His uncle says he can stay there that night but
then stabs us in the back by telling the knights where he is. The uncle is killed,
and Cless is thrown in the dungeon, stripped of the equipment he had on him. In
there, he meets a woman prisoner that helps him escape. Unfortunately, she’s
killed before he can return the favor, but he does find her daughter Mint and
teams up with her to escape. We renamed her Minty just for funsies. I continue
controlling Cless while my friend controls Minty. We fought through the
dungeon, defeated the Clay Demon prison guard, and escaped, but then Cless collapsed.
Minty carries him to the house of a man named Trinicus Morrison to recover. Festerr
shows back up here too. Morrison runs off to find the special amulet that Cless
was wearing when he was captured but tells the kids to stay behind. Cless’ old
master from the village shows up and tells them to meet him at a cave nearby.
This is where we ended our session. Here’s the footage of the gameplay I
captured.
Game Review
Fall of Porcupine
Ooh boy, my first review. I’m so nervous! Fall of Porcupine
is a story-driven game starring Finley, a bird who has just moved to a new town
to work at the hospital as a junior doctor. The gameplay consists of talking to
other anthropomorphic animals at the hospital and around town as well as little
mini-games when treating patients at the hospital. It is a very simple gameplay
loop. There’s a setting to make the mini-games even easier but considering that
how well you do at them doesn’t seem to affect the story, I’m not sure it
matters.
I thought the story in this game was just OK. It starts off
fairly strong as you meet all the characters and explore the town, but it doesn’t
really expand beyond that. There’s a turn-based bar fight as well as a festival
partway through where you can talk to people in a certain order to get a
special item which mixes things up a little bit. It also escalates at the end,
but then just abruptly ends with little resolution.
The gameplay is about as simple as it gets. Anyone looking
for a game that’s mechanically engaging should look elsewhere; this is
definitely story-driven first and everything else second. Technically speaking,
there was a minor bug with the phone where when you tried to scroll up to read
the latest text message, it would jump to the bottom making it nearly
impossible to select it. The text messages are very few and far between though,
so this did not really affect the game.
I played this one with a friend who works in healthcare, and
we voiced the characters. I felt that this escalated my experience of the game
over if I had just played it by myself. I likely would have been pretty bored
by the end if this was a solo experience. Still, if you’re looking for a story-based
game with some heavy themes mixed with light-hearted humor and simple gameplay,
give this one a shot.
Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 14h:41m
Rating – 7/10
TV/Movie Recaps
Here is everything I watched this week:
·Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Episodes 2-6 (still
watching, show ended)
·American Dad Season 21 Episode 15 (all caught
up, show ongoing)
·Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Episodes 3-4 (still
watching, show ended)
·The Boy and the Heron
Not as much watched this week. Skeleton Crew has been much
better than I expected it to be. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is an interesting
twist from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I like it, I just find it weird how
little Scott has actually shown up so far. Ramona tracking down and reconciling
with her exes instead of Scott fighting them gives some much-appreciated
characterization. The Boy and the Heron is the latest Studio Ghibli film and
the third one I’ve seen. I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service and Ponyo before
this. So far, I love all of these movies. I’m glad too because I have many more
on my list to watch in the future.
Conclusion/Upcoming
Going back to my OBS troubles earlier, I found out after the
fact that the save state button in Duckstation (the PS1 emulator) was the same button
I programmed to stop recording in OBS before I automated everything. That means
the first time I used a save state, my recording stopped, and I didn’t notice ðŸ˜
I had the first half hour of the game recorded, but when I went to check
the footage, I found out that my mic wasn’t working either! That means it’s
just straight gameplay with none of our fantastic voiceover work ☹ We had a lot of fun with those
voices too. I really wanted to see how well my mic performs with two people
too.
These hiccups made me realize that my recording setup is
less than ideal. I already knew my microphone situation was bad since I started
using it a couple weeks ago, but now I realize how important it is to see that
OBS is working while playing. There’s no easy way to do this because I only
have a single TV that I use as a PC monitor so I can’t have it up on a second
screen. Right now, I’m thinking about buying a second monitor and a small desk
to put next to my couch in the living room and running a 25ft cable from my PC
to it. I’m also looking into getting a couple dynamic mics to cut background
noise and improve voice quality. Let me know if this is a good idea or not.
As for what’s coming up this week, I plan to finish Skeleton
Crew (spoiler alert, I already have but not by the end of last week) and start
Skull Island. The next movie on my list is Stardust. I have no idea what that
is but I’m looking forward to it! I plan to get more game time in with Final Profit
and continue Tales of Phantasia if my friend and I get to it. Thanks for
reading this extra long post that includes my first completion and review! See
you next week!
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