It is surprisingly easy to paint yourself into a corner in this game, since you can switch personas for all characters, not just the protagonist, you can end up with no healing personas at all. And you can switch personas back only in Velvet Room outside of the dungeon.
In the Aerospace museum, there’s an interesting heatwave effect from all the fire in the building. Other than that, though, it’s an annoying dungeon with a real-time timer and a goal to find kids in a maze, interrupted by fights. I’m just glad it’s over.
Before the museum, you need to guess 2 out of 4 buildings Leo planted bombs in. If you guess wrong, there’s a video showing a building being blown, but you can still continue the game, unlike of the timer in the museum runs out. I was wondering how they would reconcile that. Turns out, Leo just blows the buildings still, just later.
After the museum, the game dumps a lot of story on you. Tatsuya, Ekichi and Lisa all played together as kids, but they never seen each other faces, because they were wearing Power Rangers bird masks. They called themselves Masked Circle, same as the terrorist organisation, and the fourth kid is the leader of that organisation. They also met Maia while they were playing, although she is a few years their senior. Maia is the one that thaight them the Persona game, and that’s why all four can use personas.
When Maia told them she has to leave with her family, the kids locked her up in a temple for a night, hoping that she would stay. Tatsuya got locked up as well for objecting the plan. But at night, King Leo stabbed Tatsuya and burned the temple. Kids assumed that Maia died in the fire, and that’s the eponimial Innocent Sin the game refers to.
It might be that I played Innocent Sin and not Eternal Punishment all those years ago. Hard to remember after 15 years, and it doesn’t really matter.
The plot of both Innocent Sin revolves around rumors coming true. A topic Persona 4 will go back to with the Midnight Channel. “If you dial your own number, a Joker will appear”. Only the Joker that indeed appears to Tatsuya attempts to exact revenge on him. Frustrated that Tatsuya has no idea revenge for what, Joker disappears.
It’s interesting how battle system has devolved in later games. In Persona 2, there are attacks that are both physical and elemental. Also, Water and Earth elements were removed from later games. And some spells instead of targeting all enemies, only target enemies of the same kind.
The dialogue system is a bit wonky. The way it works is that you can speak to your team members in any order, but sometimes their reply will be to something someone else says later on.
Being an RPG from PSX era, you really need to read into what people tell you if you’re playing without a guide. There are no quest markers there.
As I mentioned, I’m not a big fan of the dialogue system in Persona games. Each character has 4 lines, that work differently for different personas. Yukki has “reason” line, so she can make “wise” persona “eager” to give you cards, with which you purchase more personas. “Foolish” persona reacts the same to Tatauya’s “Dead stare”. If it was only matter of memory, though. Personas can ask you nonsensical questions, like “is school fun?”, and the answer should also depend on the persona type. That’s where I draw the line. Luckily, the old good grind still works
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Glasgow 1770 and Deanston 12 Whisky
22nd whiskey from the calendar was Glasgow 1770. It is a bit sweet, a bit warm, but nothing spectacular, and honestly, for 40GBP it goes for, I wouldn’t expect anything spectacular either.
Deanston 12 was a nice surprise, though. Sweet, warm, and for 43GBP, hits well above its weight. This is interesting, as I found Deanston Virgin Oak to be absolutely the worst.
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Whiskey Advent Calendar
This year I decided to go with World Whisky Advent Calendar from Drinks by the Dram:
https://www.masterofmalt.com/whiskies/drinks-by-the-dram/world-whisky-classic-advent-calendar/
From the outlook, it has some interesting whiskeys to try, such as Israeli and Japanese ones:
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Persona 4 Animation
Another interesting improvement over the game is that the game is always from the protagonist POV. Here, we get more glimpses into Risette/Rise, and how she quit being a popstart.
One character they added that I think wasn’t in the game is Aya. She was mentioned as the daughter of the owner of the ramen place, and that she goes to the same school.
Until 12th episode, it’s pretty standard stuff. I don’t know what changes (the opening does for sure), but it’s after the 12th episode they’re start messing with the audience, and it becomes spectacular.
The game has a few “bad endings”, where you don’t conclude your investigation fully, the friendships fall apart. And here, they included one of those, but in a way you don’t even understand what’s going on until 10 minutes in it.
Then, the game has a bunch of random characters you need to befriend. And here, they show you all of them, but after you already did, doing a timeskip.
The reward system is a bit strange. The goal of every temple is to rescue one of the seven sages, and the temples hide some unique equipment, but it’s not the sage that gives you the reward, instead, you often find it as part of a “sidequest”. For example the reward for Turtle Temple is the Hyrule Shield, and to get it you need to kill all the ghosts. But it seems you can get to the boss and beat it without the shield, so it’s kind of missable. And all you get from sages is “thanks!”.
You are also tasked to collect hermit crabs around the world. Those are surprisingly useful, as 10 of them allow you to upgrade one of your weapons.
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Asus GL752VW
Over the Christmas break, I decided to give Asus GL752VW another chance after all. Ordered a new motherboard from AliExpress. The only issue with it turned out to be broken DVD connector. Maybe it broke off during transit, or was that way, those are scavenged motherboards after all, with S/N erased. Not sure it’s worth messing with even as a soldering practice. DVDs are kind of obsolete anyway.
Other than that, the most difficult part was replacing the heatpipe, that goes along both CPU and GPU. Reassembled everything, and not it’s working again.
Oh, yeah, the motherboard comes without WiFi and I guess Bluetooth modules, those needs to be scavenged from the previous board. But again, luckily those are also plugable.
Ravenswatch and No Rest for the Wicked are two games I confuse a lot. Ravenswatch is sometimes presented as an ARPG, but it’s more like Hades: generated dungeons, clear weapon telegraphs and danger zones, low character health, cooldown on dodge, direct and AoE attack, you name it. Oh, and three perks with rarities to pick from every level. The only significant difference is that instead of picking different weapons, we pick different fairytale characters.
Also, Hades had an optional timed mode. Here, it’s one of the main features. You have just 15 minutes to clear the map before unavoidable boss fight occurs. You also have limited number of revives. Yeah, just like in Hades.
One interesting mechanic is related to Scarlet, or in other words Red Riding Hood. Every night she turns into a wolf, and every day turns back, repeating this cicle 3 times over a run. I bet that’s the first mechanic they came up with, and then they build the rest of the game around it.
After playing with other characters, though, I feel like it’s a disservice to the players that she’s made the default character, as she’s probably the most difficult to start with. Pied Piper is more of a necromancer, with ranged attacks and swarms of rats that are summoned automatically.
And Beowulf is a two-handed “barbarian”, with some nice fire AoE damage.
In the meantime, I unlocked two additional characters, Guipetto and Mnemosyne. Guipetto is also a summoner, but his summons are slower and hit harder. Kind of like skeletons Vs golems in Diablo 2, or maybe the Engineer from Torchlight 2. I would be all for it, if not for the fact that the runs are time bound.
In fact, and it took me some time to realize, there is a way to turn the time limit off. But I’m not sure if there are any implications except score penalty.
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Tacticus
I opened both Maleus Rocket and Dreaudnough a couple of days from each other. Both aren’t very useful, as you can’t deploy them in campaigns, only Arena or Guild Raids.
But from Guild Raids I got my 3rd mandatory Chaos character, Archimatos. So now the Fall of Cadia campaign is open.
This is good, because campaigns are the best way to open new characters.
It is quite rare that I get to compare hardware. After all, usually I spend a lot of time investigating what platform to buy, but then once you buy everything, you kind of stuck with it for the next 2-4 years.
But because my CPU started to act wierdly and I managed to RMA it, I decided to buy a new CPU for the same socket instead of waiting a couple of weeks without PC at all.
This is quite amazing, really. A supposedly weaker CPU providing 10% performance right of the bat. the 3D is a gamechanger, literally.
Video card offers a much greater boost, of course. But despite 40% performance boost, I’m actually slightly disappointed, as this is 1440p resolution and not even maxed out settings we’re talking about.
Regarding RMA. I shipped the faulty CPU on the 9th, got approval on the 13th and received a new one back on 18th. So less than two weeks turnaround, which is nice.
As a bonus, because they don’t produce 5900X anymore, I got the slightly upgraded 5900XT 😄
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Persona 4 Animation
The best part of Persona 4 was the characters and anime cutscens, and it’s true about many Atlus games. So it’s no wonder anime based on Persona 4 is actually very good. I think they also used same voice actors as the English translation of the game.
I’m not sure it’s watchable if you haven’t played the game. But if you did, the way it treats the original art, music and characters is brillaint.
First, as I read somewhere already, the protagonist now has a name, Yu Narukami, and a character, while it the game, he had none. And the way they fleshed out some character arcs is fantastic as well: mainly Yukiko and her story about a caged bird.
Also, let’s admit, the fights in Persona are nothing special, personas are basically a bag of spells with a shaby animation. Here, Izanagi, Yu’s persona, has some cool fight scenes.
I have a bunch of old HDDs from my previous PCs. One of them had a couple of pins broken, probably when I tried to put it into a badly designed cradle. So I came up with a DYI project. Bought another 80GB IBM HDD for 8GBP, and replanted the board, which is held by just 4 screws, to the new one. And it worked!
There was nothing valuable on it. I just like messing with hardware sometimes.
Finished Ripley.
You can appreciate art without enjoying it. I appreciate the irony that Ripley is not some kind of genius, it’s just that the world around him is very incompetent. And the last episode reenacting Caravaggio’s crime is brilliant.
Completed Persona 4. For good, this time.
Getting True Ending is not as much pain-in-the-ass, as it’s not obvious at all. On the last day you need to visit a few locations without any good reason or hints in a particular order.
The final plot twists is good, though, I admit. Speaking of “playing the long game”. The real villain is the guy at the fuel station, the one you meet on your first minute of the game and shake hands with. By shaking hands he grants you the power to enter TVs. Only that’s not a “he”, but a “she”, death goddess Izumi. Yeah, the same death goddess you’ve been told about somewhere mid-game during a school trip to the school from Persona 3.
The final fight resembles Persona 3 a lot. Same grotesque female shape, same theme of unbeatable foe that falls to the Power of Friendship. I liked how the music themes are mixed to sound more epic.
I don’t like the Fusion mechanics much, but I still fused Belzebub for the final battle, one of the Personas that require 6 personas to fuse, and it’s epic:
As a visual novel, the plot has to many holes. As a dating sim, the sudden time skips are annoying and prevent enjoying it without a guide. And as a dungeon crawler, the fights are too tedious, with some enemies having no weaknesses or constantly healing, and the boss battles too unpredictable, and beatable only if you died multiple times and have memorized the phases.
But with all those flaws, it’s still a great game. Kind of what it tries to teach you: that you need to bridge the gaps to build something great.
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Warhammer 40K Tacticus
Paywall hits on Mission 70 of the first campaign and Mission 12 of the First Mirror Campaign. Enemies that previously wouldn’t do much start one-shoting your characters suddenly. And all you can do is grind. The game turns into a “clicker”. To level up your characters you need 6 pieces of equipment for each. Some of those pieces are also broken into separate subpieces, spread across different missions. You can just roll for the equipment if you completed the mission at least once, 10 rolls per day. You roll, then you roll some more.
A week at that pace, and I’ve opened my second Chaos character and second Eldar character:
Now I have just Makotep from the Indominus campaign to beat:
I also started working towards first support character, either the Maleus Rocket Launcher or Dreadnought.
Finished listening to Shadow of the Gods. It’s an easy read overall, with some well set plot twists: death of the elder of the fishermen brothers, betrayal of the Battlegrim.
One topic the author has troubles with, though, is the scale of the monsters.
Is the dragon as big as two meadhalls or small enough to bite a human’s head off? You can’t have both.
I usually have troubles with character names, and here it’s even more pronounced than usual. Breka is the timid son of Orca, and Dreka is the guy that killed Orca’s husband and kidnapped Breka?
Bjorn is Elvar’s lover and betrayer, and Bjarn is the kid that Elvar set to rescue, and there’s also Bjarn’s father with a similar name 😫
I’ve played Persona 2 Eternal Punishment, which uses the same engine and shares some of the characters, but not the original, probably because PSX version wasn’t officially translated. Luckily the PSP version is.
I decided to compare both versions, and it’s interesting that in order to accomodate PSP wider screen they distanced the camera a little. No 4:3 black borders, but the character sprites look a bit muddier, because the scale is not as precise.
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Bose QC Ultra
One of my constant disappointments with Bose is how their earpads live for about 1 year. I couldn’t believe it, I thought I had them for at least 2 years now for that to happen.
Luckily there are replacement pads that are sold for cheap. But it’s still annoying for a rather expensive headset.
Completed Snatcher.
Don’t assume that all the combat episodes are as easy as the first few. The one in the air duct gets quite brutal.
Guess it’s MSX heritage, but the game can get quite… sugestive at times.
Third chapter starts with a lot of revelations. Gillian and Jamie were found in cryosleep chamber. Harry, the technician that gets killed in the end of 2nd Act, is actually their son, now older than his parents by 20 years. Yeah, that plot twist from Fallout 4? Kojima thought about it 25 years before.
Snatchers kidnap Jamie. There are two more excruciating shooting sequences. Then a 20 minutes long monologue of creator of the Snatchers.
First, Soviet Union has develop a virus called Lucipher Alpha that could wipe an entire city. Then, they developed androids, that would replace the now dead population, adopting their looks. Both Gillian and Jamie were researches on that team, but Gillian was also CIA agent. The head of research was Professor Modnar, and he had a son, Elijah, who became envious of Gillian and Jamie.
So when Soviet Union collapsed, Elijah releases the virus and puts himself, Gillian and Jamie into cryosleep, while his father and Harry, Gillian’s son, manage to escape.
Ten years later, Elijah wakes up from his sleep and resumes the Snatcher program, developing kind of a god complex. When he starts his operation, his father in turn develops an android that would hunt other androids: Random Hajile, being Elijah Modnar in reverse, looking the way Elijah looked when he put himself to sleep. While snatchers are imperfect, unable to withstand ultraviolet for long, Random is perfect, and doesn’t know he’s an android. Now Elijah recoverd Random’s body and plans to make his snatchers perfect as well.
But Random is not dead yet. He grabs his original by the neck, allowing Gillian and Jamie to escape while the facility is blown from space, proving that he’s more human than human.
The game ends with Gillian and Jamie promising to reunite, and Gillian departing to Moscow to destroy the original snatcher factory.
Overall, I’m very impressed with this game. It’s a solid cyberpunk adventure that is still playable 30 years later, without a guide. The only complaint I have are the final figth sequences. I don’t know if the original game was running at a lower frame rate, but I found them to be ridiculuously hard. Other than that, even shameless plagiarism of Kojima can now be viewed as “subtle references”, I guess.
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Warhammer 40K Tacticus
In a way, W40K is ideal for mobile games. You already have some fabulous character designs that are distinct and easily recognizable. And they all speak in cliche phrases anyway, so nobody will notice your lack of writing skills. Speaking of which, your story can be “space marines are fighting xenos because crashed and artifact”, and everyone would be perfectly happy.
The gameplay is rather solid: hexes, different terraint types, one move one action per turn, one unique skill per character that can be used once per battle. Where it all breaks, of course, is the monetisation and the “numbers game”. No matter how good a tactian you are, you won’t be able to progress if your units are damaging enemies for 1HP. To level them, you need not only EXP, but also coins, which you get by completing missions. And to do missions there is another resource, which I don’t even care what it’s called, that recovers with real time, but also can be bought with very real money. Then the new characters are farmes through a gacha system.
