Games, Games, Games!:

Today multiple exciting games were announced, to be released in the near future.  Final Fantasy Resonance, a new 2d-HD game akin to Octopath Traveler 0.  Xenoblade Genesis, a fantasy version of the sci-fi series coming out on the Switch 2.  Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave is of course coming soon.  Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the conclusion to the remake, is coming out next spring.  Tales of Eternia is getting a modern remaster.

There are so many great games coming it's questionable whether there's enough time in the year to play them all.  The games are overflowing.

I'm still playing Xenoblade Chronicles X, which is a worthy upholder of the Xenoblade brand.  The game is so vast I can play it and play it and still get no closer to victory.  The music is okay.  Unfortunately it used a different composer than Xenoblade 1-3 which really brings the tone down.  The plot and setting are amazing, the perfect setup for the game they wanted to let us play -- a new world to explore in its open vastness.  The graphics are gorgeous.  I especially approve of the ability to dress up everyone in swimsuits or short shorts.  The fact that you can customize how your characters look with 'fashion gear' as opposed to the armor they're actually wearing is wonderful.  Your protagonist for the game is wholly customized and designed by yourself, so I made her a twintailed redhead with green eyes and she's absolutely stunning.  I couldn't be more pleased with how good she looks.  You even get to choose which voice actress you want for the protagonist, so I went with Yui Ogura.  But there were several other fantastic seiyuu I could've chosen, it was a buffet of grandeur.  The graphics of the deep jungles or towering mountains is also beautiful.  There are several great characters in the game worthy of my hall of fame, but I'll hold off until I've actually beaten the game.

I'm playing Xenoblade X on the Switch 2 despite it being designed for the Switch, and it already looks this good.  I have no doubt that a game natively designed for the Switch 2 will also look great.  Whatever the graphical limitations of the Switch 2 it seems the Nintendo designers have found a way to make it work.

My biggest complaint with the game is the actual gameplay.  The mechanics are unbalanced, with some techniques being too strong and others too weak.  No matter who you start a fight with, it feels like dozens of adds swarm in, seemingly warping into existence from nowhere, including super-high-level enemies who one-shot your party, making every fight ridiculously overcomplicated.  The levels of your opponents don't accurately reflect their strength.  Sometimes you can be 10 levels stronger than an opponent and stand no chance against them.  Other times the enemy can be 10 levels higher than you and are easily defeated.  It takes too long for one technique to end and the game lets you choose the next technique, creating a lot of 'dead time' where you're fruitlessly spamming buttons but nothing happens.  It's too difficult to find the treasure chests or hidden quest locations.  You can fruitlessly spend hours trying to find the entrances to hidden caves or jump paths to the next location.  The rest of your party is controlled by AI, but they're all totally useless, and basically the fight comes down to you soloing everything.  Xenoblade X is a great game, but not because of the gameplay.  Virtually anything would be an improvement over this.

While I'm playing Xenoblade X I'm also listening to my chosen songs from Octopath 0 for their designated 100 times to reach my music hall of fame.  I've narrowed the selection down to 26 songs and have listened to them 75 times so far.  The new hall of fame entries from Xenoblade X will be given the new hall of fame songs from Octopath 0, so it will all work together.

In Heaven Burns Red, I got swimsuit Adelheid to limit break level 4, ethereal Kozue to limit break 3, unison Karen to limit break 2, and lots of orb skills, introjection skills, memoria levels, etc.  My ice and light squads had a try at the seraph drill, and got high scores of 107k and 109k, higher than my critical penetration squad.  This proves keeping a squad around for each element is not fruitless, they're still competitive.  Ethereal Kozue is part of my ice squad so that squad is shaping up quite nicely.  Funeral Tsukasa is at limit break 2.5 so I could get to my dream scenario quite quickly from here.

Nevertheless, the latest score challenge featured a weak-to-lightning foe, and my lightning squad couldn't even beat it.  My critical penetration squad moved in and easily destroyed it with a 1.6 million score.  That was sad.

I reached player rank 150, the current max, and got an eternal daphne as a reward.  I now have 3 eternal daphnes I've decided to save for later.  It will be difficult to get any more daphnes so I have to use these last three judiciously.

The World Cup is coming soon, so I'll have to put gaming aside for the next month.  From here on it's all about sports streaming.  What a rich year in experiences.  The Olympics, the World Cup, all these games, all these visual novels, I can never catch up.