I had been on a crazy gaming itch lately.

8/3 - GTA: Liberty City Stories - Not bad game overall, it was in the aftermath of San Andreas that I wanted MORE GTA and I had this on the back burner for years. Made me glad I had this on reserve for some GTA craving. Its better than GTAIII, at least a bit more polished.

7/29 - GTA: San Andreas - I had left off about more than mid way in 2 years ago because well some of the missions were frustrating and getting more tedious. It doesn't help that the world and the bits was just LARGE. But its a good standalone GTA though. Something new to the table here and there but yeah its HARD to get back into from GTA IV which I played earlier. All those contrast colors (ORANGES holy shit) was killing my tv. But the best bits of this game were the voices and the dialog.

7/25 - Color Cross - Rental and beaten it in two days. Its a picross game but with colors. They did it alright, but it was awkward to a veteran player like me. I had seen some programs implementing different colors in a picross puzzle better than this game did. But still, it was easy nevertheless since they only punish you by your time. You can still unlock the rest of the game anyway.

7/21 - Limbo - Such an AWESOME little xbla title. For its price, it was well paid for both of us. I liked it for what Braid and Flower had to offer me. Something new, something refreshing, something neat. :D

Lunar: Silver Star Harmony (From a completionist point of view)

- I had just completed this game just about an hour ago. To be honest, I wasn't really overly impressed. I still prefer the PS1 version, over this version by a long-shot. It is not a very difficult game to complete. Obviously to consider it completed you need to collect every bromide, open every treasure chest and get every secret item. There are missables in the game, but if you already completed Lunar: Silver Star Star Story Complete for the PS1 you should already be aware of where many of the secret items are located.

- They have changed some of the locations of some of the bromides, the majority of them you can actually buy from Ramsus's Shop, even the three sisters of the vile tribe you can get from his shop. I would recommend doing your research to make sure you don't miss out on any of the items. There are also new items you can buy for each of your characters to give them a new special attack.

- Some gripes I had about the game, is the voice acting wasn't nearly as good as the ps1 version. I thought that while this game was a decent attempt for the voice acting, the ps1 version was far superior. The game is also much easier, the fact you can carry 99 of every item, especially star lights made it a hell of a lot easier and you didn't have to micromanage your items into each persons inventory. Each character except Alex, had two special attacks which were completely overpowered. The dungeon maps instead of being a wide spread map was divided into several smaller sections, and every time you moved from one section to another the enemies always re-spawned which was a little annoying

In terms of completing this game, there are missables so always keep an eye out, and some things have changed from the other lunar games. It is not difficult, I never got the game over screen once while I was playing this game.

Sacred is dead easy to finish but damn near impossible to complete. Starting a new bronze campaign, you could probably get to the end in well under 20 hours and that would include a lot of exploring. My focused run through to get the achievements for uncovering less than 20% of the map and not buying anything took me about 12 hours. You pick up a lot of achievements just by playing through but some require a bit of effort. None are particularly hard to get, just time consuming. My longest running character, the first one I started, is a level 80 odd Shadow Warrior, up to Platinum difficulty. I got the Niob achievement by joining a game online, I've not yet reached it offline. The max level is 250 too which must take forever to get to, I've spent over 200 hours on my SW game. The annoying thing about Sacred 2 is that skill choices are permanent, meaning that my SW is a dubious build with a few wasted skills. With what I know about the game now, I could have built him much better. That said, he's more than hard enough, rarely takes more than a couple of combos to kill most bosses and the last avhievement I got was the one for drinking 1,000 health potions because he never really needs to (I'm carrying over 3,000 of the things too).

Getting the achievement for visiting all the temples probably needs a guide. I've explored 90% odd of the map and I still managed to walk straight past a couple of them. Getting to level 15 with every character is time consuming, requiring about 12 hours per character and doing the same missions from the start of the game over and over can be dull.

I loved the game (Or I wouldn't have spent over 300 hours playing it) but I can't imagine ever completing it. Doing that would require getting to Niob difficulty, maxing your character and finding all the employees dotted around which would take forever as far as I can tell. If you're a fan of loot-em-ups though, there's few better games out there.

So I beat the single-player today in one sitting, hmmm. I never could really get into the older Splinter Cell games, I always felt like I was "playing it wrong" (similar to the older MGS games) and it was just frustrating. Decided to give this a rent since it seemed to be much more focused on the action. Also bashing a dude's head through a urinal is always cool.

From an Achievements perspective, the game's a bit rough but doable. I only got 280 points from my Normal playthrough; there appears to be a lot of Achievements tied to completing all of the co-operative and competitive multiplayer gametypes. I've heard some of them are a bitch on the higher difficulties, but overall the Achievements in this seem more grindy and time-consuming than anything.

Game was pretty awesome overall; the last case was ridiculous and crazy and awesome. The twist at the beginning of the last case where you play as Edgeworth was pretty great. Like all the PW games though, my only real complaint is that I found myself getting stuck from time to time. While occasionally it was due to me just missing something, often times I completely understood what I needed to do. The problem is that the game either wanted me to do something that was either inane or didn't make sense to reach that resolution, or I had made a leap in logic that the characters hadn't yet. Mildly annoying, but not a huge deal.

Fun game, to be sure. I may be biased because I absolutely love JRPGs. I've only recently begun playing niche JRPGs (usually released by Atlus or NIS) and this game reminded me heavily of Atelier Iris, which I had beaten a while ago. I'm pretty sure some of those graphics were recycled from AI, but nonetheless, the story and mechanics were enough to suck me in for the ~40 hours it took for me to beat it.

What is there to say about it? Well, I suppose this is the first game that has had bits of a visual novel style gameplay in the form of Reyvateil Cosmospheres. I went into the game thinking that this would be the lull and dull parts of the game, but as it turns out, these became my favorite parts of the game. It's really just reading a bunch of text, but games like Phoenix Wright prove that when done well, text is just as gripping as a flashy cinematic.

As for the game mechanics, I found the battle system to be very fluid and intuitive once I got to learn the basics. I'll admit, it took me at least a few hours to completely grasp it, but once I had it, each battle was fun for me. I will say that it's probably one of the more confusing looking games to the occasional passerby, but in actuality, it's not too complex.

I didn't come anywhere close to 100% completion, namely because I already have a huge backlog of other 40 hour RPGs to go through and secondly that it'd probably take about another 20+ hours to really flesh out for 100% completion without the help of a FAQ. Finding conversation crystals will take a lot of exploration, and a lot of topics only come up under certain conditions (e.g. buying a certain item at a certain shop, singing a certain song in battle, talking to a certain person in a town, etc.) By the end of the game for my run, I had explored roughly half of both Aurica and Misha's cosmosphere and barely started on Shurelia's. Finding every kind of Grathnode crystal and getting all of the items to rank S will take quite a bit of time. I didn't even craft the best weapon (assuming Lv. 4 weapons are the highest) for each character because I hadn't found recipe cards for some of the materials.

On the flip side, levels are easy to grind out. I was level 80 by the end of the game and I was STILL leveling up at least 1 of 8 characters every other battle. So, assuming 99 or 100 is the max level, I could have hit the cap fairly easily. The game is also not very hard, so even though I was still leveling at a brisk pace, I would consider Lv. 80 overleveled for the endgame.

Fun game though. I paid $60 for it on eBay to get the game and the accompanying art book. At the time I thought it was a bit much, but after playing through it, I thought it was worth it. Of course, at the time, there was no Ar Tonelico 2 or 3, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Nonetheless. Fun game.

Star Fox (From a Completionist point of view)

- The SNES has always been my favorite system and out of all the games I have played for it; Star Fox has always remained one of my favorites. I'm pretty much going to speak blasphemy, but I actually prefer the original Star Fox over Star Fox 64 because I consider the original one that much more memorable and it has such a beautiful soundtrack especially for a SNES game.

- In terms of completing the game you have to play the game at least 4 to 5 times to make sure you do everything that each game has to offer. You play the game three times for the number of routes you can take to reach Venom.

- Route 1 and Route 2 are actually fairly easy and it makes a good solid transition in terms of difficulty. When you decide to do Route 3, you have a lot more levels to go through and the difficulty dramatically increases to an insane level. Route 3 doesn't start to get insanely tough until you take on Fortuna which is the giant animal planet. Sector Z in route 3 has always remained on of my most hated levels throughout all of star fox. The only bit of advice I can give to make battling through Star Fox a lot easier is to pick up a twin laser power up as soon as possible. This power up actually makes the game a little easier and a lot of the bosses that much more manageable.

- Once you have actually completed all three routes, there are two more things you can do before you can consider this game fully complete.

1.) You can choose route one, and go to the asteroid level . When you see the spinning asteroid belts, don't shoot the center of them right away, wait till they get incredibly close to you, than shoot the middle section. Do this for all three spinning asteroid belts. If you do it correctly, you'll see a laughing asteroid, shoot at it and you'll see a black hole. Fly into it, and you'll gain access to the black hole level. In this level it is pretty much a ship graveyard, but there are three warp points through the level which will take you to various levels across the Star Fox map. It will either take you to Sector Y on route 2, sector Z on route 3, or the first venom level for route 1.

2.) You choose route 3, and go to the asteroid level. Shoot at the second large asteroid to blow it up and a bird like object will come out of it. Fly into the bird and you'll be taken into another dimension. In which you fight paper airplanes, and you fight a big slot machine as the boss. Shoot the lever until you get three 7's. Then the machine will explode and you'll get the credits. You can even shoot letters to make the word THE END.

Once all these things are done you have successfully completed Star Fox.

There's not really much to say about this cute rpg. But yet, I want to explain a bit about why this game should be checked out regardless of its flaws.

In 2D sprite gorgeous landscape and well developed characters, there was a 3 stories to be told in a long game but it doesn't feel long since I only played at least 40 hours or so, but it was just epic in several treks and discovering so much 2D awesomeness. From some mad serious animations of the characters to cute enemies (panda with tire?) to the adaptation of the anime and their scenes being used to tell the heavier graphic parts of the story made this game pretty darn neat to look at.

There's Pietro, the prince of Popolocrois that you play as the main character, you'd discover a lot about him as well as you also discover about the girl you love, Narcia, the forest witch. You also recruit several characters later on that gives your party a neat balance and an awesome set of skills in 2D goodness. An armored Knight, a mechanical evil genius with a major (but CUTE!) ego, a barely born dragon that looks like a sourpuss puppy (in size too), an arabian arrogant tomboy princess, and a kind animal-speaker archer. The story was woven quite well for you to meet all of these characters eventually as parts of the story. At most, they were held hostage of circumstances at some point. ;)

The game was incredible in its finer details. Surpassing any other 2D rpg I could ever recall. Even Chrono Trigger and FFVI is getting their run for their fame with me here. When you visit several townships, you'd understand the massive scope of work involved. Especially the mechanical genius's two purely mechanical kingdoms. And there were a large amount of text involved too since citizens would not only say something new after some minor/major events that occurred outside of their walls, they say in two separate instances and sometimes three. What was astonishing was there barely any "negligible text" or translation errors or all that made jrpgs famous for. That's why I had to give this game major props for the work involved and dedication for finer detail.

However I should also mention that a lot of people would complain about the load times in this game. Between the next area to the battles, yeah, you'd be feeling the pain there when its frequent. But I've gotten past that and loved it for what it had to offer.

Second, the battle system is a little tedious since you have a grid to work with and it turns into simple tactics from there. Each character have a range of skills that affects range, size of the area, and synchronicity with another character to create a combo skill attack (but these are often complicated to pull off and quite often not worth it). This is not new of course, but the loading times that took to the battle scene was pretty big part of the reason why it was rather tedious at best.

I had beaten this game at level 32 (I did not powerlevel, just played normally til I discovered very late of a "battle evasion" skill I didn't know I had), and the game was still rather very easy which can be another deterrent. What's the point of leveling when most of the bosses can be beaten purely by the massed stock of healing items you can buy quite cheap? There's only one point in the game (quite close to the final boss) where all 4 of you were split up and follow the path to meet up with each other. A lot would say, this point of the game was the hardest if you weren't well stocked with items and didn't have a whole lot of levels of hp/def stats behind you. Even at level 30s, it was a bit trying and a little unnerving because I had never died ONCE. I didn't like the idea of starting over the whole THING lol for some random sudden critical hit.

But never mind all that, what this game also lacked the most which would have been made it much more wonderful was music. Its quiet for most part with battle/animated scenes exceptions. But maybe it wasn't LOUD enough lol, my psp was darn quiet for most part.

As for completion, I found out a bit later after this had happened that I missed a small (great finer details again) graphic of a counter being opened and I barely even saw the stairs going down to another shop that sold souvenirs. I only missed two but I realized eventually at end game that I was missing more than that somewhere and couldn't be bothered to try to get everything when I already am missing some of those. Sad face and all, but this game has a several neat quests that you should attempt at completion for anyway. IE recruiting back your people at end game, and you explore a new town or two and finding those summons for the baby dragon was a neat thing to do to attempt on your own. I did happen across one by accident!

In all, this game was a precious little gem of a rpg I liked very much. I just am glad I got the chance to play it. The game seemed rather obscure and graciously so. If you like what I have to say about it, please feel free to pm me and see if you'd like to buy this game from me. :)

Great little game that. Its not all that hard since you don't really die and start over and such. Its probably the easier PixelJunk I had played (haven't checked out Monsters yet). And yeah, I finished it in one sitting today, aka 8 hours or so. That's because I was trying to be diligent in collecting gems as well as clearing away debris to find them. :)

As for completion, I'll probably go ahead and attempt to find all of the gems and get the trophies out of it. It doesn't seem all that hard to achieve 100% soon enough. :D

Nostalgia (From a completionist point of view)

- With Nostalgia, what you have is a good old fashioned rpg that doesn't try to do anything new, but works well for what it is. In my eyes it is actually a very enjoyable and very basic turn based rpg. The fact that it doesn't try to revolutionary is what makes this game very enjoyable. The story is your typical jrpg fare, but it is fun to travel around the world from continent to continent. Since this game takes place on the planet earth with real earth cities.

- In terms of completing this game. What you need to do to fully complete this game is you need to fill out something called the adventurers notebook. The adventurers Notebook categorizes anything and everything you can find in the game. The adventurers notebook covers:

1.) Quests (You can get these at various points in the game when you visit the Adventurers Association; you'll get more quests after you beat the main game.)

2.) World Treasures (You can activate these by talking to various people, and then traveling the world to find these world treasures. Think along the same lines of finding secret locations in Skies of Arcadia.)

3.) Diary (As long as you progress through the main game and do each characters side quest. You'll fill out the diary quite easily.)

4.) Character Data (You can fill out character data quite easily, but you need to complete the extra dungeons after the main game, in order to fully complete the character data section.)

5.) Monster Data (You can visit any dungeon or any area at any time to fill out the monster data. You need to do all quests to fight all of the secret monster data. However there is one section of missable monsters late in the game when you explore the London Exploration Agency. You can only fight monsters there once, and if you don't fight all the monsters there the first time, you'll never get to fight them again, so keep that in mind.)

6.) Map (In every dungeon, and on the world map at medium and low altitude, the entire area is blacked out. In each dungeon you have to walk around on the designated floor to light up as much as the blacked out area until the map flashes and everything turns clear to show that you've explored all the map of each floor. With the world map, it works the same way, with each area of the world map, you have to fly around to uncover much of the world map as possible, once a section of the world or continent is cleared, the rest of the map will clear, showing that you've explored it all. With the map data, there are two major missables.

1.) The Siberian Base (You need to uncover all of the map when you go to Siberian base for the first time. If you don't complete all the map, then when you pass the Siberian Base it becomes the destroyed Siberian Base. Then there are areas you can't explore.)

2.) Mount Fuji Base (The same goes for the Mount Fuji Base, you need to complete the map the first time around, because after wards its becomes destroyed and there are certain areas you won't be able to access.)

The problem with completing all the map data, is that you get into a lot of unwanted random battles, but if your going for 100% you absolutely need to do it.)

7.) Treasure (I think this is the only area you won't have a hard time trying to complete. The map will show you where every treasure chest is, and even with the destroyed bases you'll still gain access to every treasure chest. Possibly the easiest thing to complete in the adventurers note book.)

8.) Item Data (To collect every item, gadget, weapon and armor can be very tedious. A few reminders to make sure you get everything. Every town has hidden secret items scattered all over. You'll need to use a guide to make sure you find them all. Every time you visit a new town for the first time, fly back to London and new weapons and armor will always be available. You need to buy everything at least once whether you need it or not. Remember to also do every quest of the adventurers association, and every character side quest.

9.) Theater (You can access every cinematic in the game. Just finish the main game and do the extra dungeons and you should get access to all the cinematics.)

10.) Game Data (Just records your game data in the adventurers notebook, that is all.)

- In conclusion, I would recommend using a guide to complete this game. There aren't many missables but there are a few. Especially in regards of doing 100% of the map and filling out the monster list. I also took the liberty of maxing out all the skills for my characters and their applicable air ship skills. I think altogether it took me 80 hours to fully complete this game. I'm sure a lot of you guys could probably complete it faster. The only other thing I can recommend is that be prepared when you take on the extra dungeons after the main game, they are insanely tough and make the final dungeon of the main game a joke. Be prepared.

Overall the game was a lot of fun. I have to agree with the general sentiment that Trucy was a waaaaay better support character than Maya was. While I'm still super interested in finding out what the hell happened to everyone else from the first games, Maya didn't have much of personality and Trucy had it in spades. Overall Phoenix is probably a better main protagonist than Apollo, but I wouldn't say by much, I could take it or leave it just in terms of being a main character.

A little disappointed that there was only 4 cases, but eh. As with all the other Ace Attorney games, my only big gripe is that oftentimes I will understand a revelation or clue either way before the game will let me acknowledge it, or the game will want me to do so in a way that doesn't make sense to me. In this regard this one was not nearly as bad as the first three games were for me though, I think there was only maybe 2 or 3 times where I was baffled at how they wanted me to prove or show something I already knew but in some batshit crazy way.

Not bad; once I figured out a control scheme that wasn't garbage (I think I used 3?) it controlled okay, but that was still the main thing holding it back the whole time. I guess I can see why people go apeshit for that game, but playing it for the first time now it's pretty dated. Eh.

Pretty enjoyable straight-forward loot game. Worth the money, although it just got announced for XBL/PSN so I'd probably wait for that. Obviously it being single-player is the main knock against it, but I enjoyed my time with it for sure.

Actually pretty awesome; especially going straight from the original to this, the controls are a billion times better and more accessible. Actually had a good time from beginning to end, except with one or two bosses that are bitches and/or force you to use the melee which is a bit awkward.

It was alright. I don't really get the praise some people heap on this game; it's a fairly straight-forward puzzle platformer, but I never found any of the puzzles to be particularly challenging at all. It's main weak spot was the combat, especially with the enemies that like to respawn a billion times before stopping. It was gifted to me one on one of the occasions where it was on sale for either $5 or $10, which I think is a fair price for it.

First off, it's easy to see where they got a lot of the ideas they refined in TTYD from here. The partner list is huge (8 compared to 6 in TTYD), there's a bit less overall in terms of side-quests and extra stuff to do, but a lot of the fun concepts like the dialogue and character interaction are still there.

The partners are all useful in their own way and give you a pretty great deal of choices as far as battles go. It sucks that BP maxes out at 30 though. I can't remember if that was the limit in TTYD or not.

Overall each chapter had plenty of laughs and the game never felt like it dragged on or got boring. The Ninja Koopas, The Shy Guys, the most uncool cool Latiku ever, oh and Jr. Troopa too. Stuff that just made the game a riot from start to finish.

Koops is the best Koopa out of both games though. Accept no substitutes. Parakarry was pretty neat though.

::Bow ohoho laugh::

Castle of Shikigami III (from a completionist point of view)

Castle of Shikigami III is a shoot'em up that was released for the Wii and remains a hard sought after title in Canada. The game mainly seen a wide release in the United States, but when it was first released the only places you could find it for sale was at Future Shop. You could also rent it at Rogers Video. It is a very solid bullet hell shoot'em up and it is finally a first half decent translation for the Castle of Shikigami series. It finally got a good publisher, and it actually has some pretty decent voice acting because anything is better than Castle of Shikigami II (shudder).

On to completing this game. With most shoot'em ups. They are fairly short. I will be one to admit. I'm not good at the genre, but I enjoy the genre for what it is. I cannot OCC any shoot'em up, the best I managed to do was to beat the game with two continues. Your average play through will run you a little over a half an hour. Despite the shortness of the game there is a lot and I mean a lot to unlock in this game.

In terms of completing this game. You literally have two main objectives. You need to unlock every piece of artwork in the game. You also need to unlock every character scenario. You need to try the game on every mode, and even try boss rush mode in which you need to defeat every boss one one credit. To do all this, and I wish I was kidding, you need to play the game at minimum 55 times. You heard right, 55 times you need to beat this game.

10 times to beat the game with each character on one player mode.

45 times to beat the game with every combination of the characters on two player mode, but you could play two players by yourself by playing dramatic change mode.

The character artwork gets unlocked during the beginning of the game, the ending of the game, the cut scenes before each level, and the interactions with the level boss. Every time the character shows a different pose, that pose is unlocked as a piece of art work. There is artwork for the bosses as well, since they can show different poses all depending on which characters fight them.

Character scenarios are pretty self explanatory, you need to beat the game with all characters on one player mode, and every character combination during 2 player or dramatic change mode.

Once the character scenarios and artwork are completed, give a try
to some of the different modes. Boss rush mode is actually pretty fun. Your going to need to play the game for a while especially if your not good at shoot'em ups, since you start off with a limited number of credits. Play the game enough and you'll eventually get access to free play.

It is a fairly solid shoot'em up with better voice acting. You will need to invest some time to fully complete. The bullet hell patterns may be intimidating at first, but the more you play it, the better you can remember some of the patterns. My two favorite characters are:

Nagano Ite
Roger Sasuke

It is a solid shoot'em up, and there are plenty of WTF, how in the fuck am I suppose to dodge this moments. Give it a try, if your into the genre.

I just wanted to talk about this! Just because I saw someone was struggling with the wrpg concept in Oblivion and I felt compelled to share my experience.

"I hear you on warming up to wrpgs though.

I just finished Oblivion yesterday and mind you though, I watched my SO play this a year or so ago and in few attempts myself, I didn't know what I was doing or what I was supposed to be doing. I figure it out when a friend said he went into the game with a mindset of WHO he should be. Stealthy mofo with invisibility on. I'm like wow, I didn't think of it like that. Basically you have to be very specific in what you want to build your character as to be badass at this game. You just can't be half assed at it, JRPGs didn't offer you the choice of who you can be after all (which I was accustomed to).

In other words, if you want to be something very specific, you have to get that specific when you pick races, classes, and bonuses. In this case, I picked Khajit, Thief class with Thief bonuses. They can see in the dark, and they're nimble and fast.

You can be a tank or a end all mage or a pure invisible rogue. I went rogue and that was the best thing ever in this game (imho lmao). I buffed my Illusion quickly by casting that light spell over and over(cheap and easily acquired early on) and you do NOT have to level up (just don't sleep). So I would be able to get Chameleon and be able to cast it of course. Did the mage guilds quests first til I get to the Enchantment altars. I did all this at level 10 (just to also get Ring of Khajit which offers 35% chameleon), casted Chameleon on one piece of equipment (shield) with a Greater Soul Gem and I got real lucky with one loot that has 20% chameleon (a ring) a while back. So I was decent enough with my sneak, security, marksman, and illusion that I was just killing enemies in one hit by 3x Sneak attack (or 6x sneak attack with blade/blunt) with my Frostwyrm bow that you get from a miscellaneous quest (you can do this early one but lol you can DIE). :D

From what I watched my SO play, I didn't like how buggy the melee attacks were (friendly fire included). So taking on ranged attacks was my major preference to begin with. Best part of bows were you can pick up your arrows to restock your supply in enemies. I also like to have some kind of control of the situation when going up to a group of enemies with 72% chameleon equipped and sneaking. In a group of them, you still can be fast enough to reload to kill the other one by then. Just do it from the outer edges first then work your way in, their range of hearing/sight is piss poor even at level 27. ;)

You just have to know what you're going for in this game and I'm quite sure it'll open up for you to exploit it. Just gotta know what those exploits are though.

I once attempted at level 27 to test my rogue and even then I was nearly invincible and that was just awesome. Only difference was there were more enemies to face the sharp end of my bow all too often lmao. I still love how in the mission, Defense of Burma, I managed to sneak all the way up to Sigil Stone without being detected. Only things that WERE detecting me were those dumb magic turrets. But they weren't a big deal. ;)"

__________________

Its true, I had a huge blast in this game doing what Shin had said he had done. I was able to be a Master Sneak, Master at Security, Expert at Athletics (running), Expert at Aerobatics (jumping), Master at Marksman, Journeyman at Illusion, Journeyman at Mercantile, and Apprentice at Light Armor and few other things at level 10. The only thing the leveling does is just scaling the difficulty/loot with you by smarter AI or better equipment they're wearing. Just go sneak, 75% chameleon, one hit kill with 3x sneak attack with bows or 6x blunt/blade. I barely had any occurrences where I was attacked head on besides riding on horseback outside. Scaled loot wasn't a big deal for me because really, that frostwyrm bow (not sure but must had been the best bow the game could offer) was all I fucking needed. Arrows didn't matter, as long as I was sneaking and silver arrows are great for ghosts.

It was a developing mindset of my own to prefer ranged attacks for a while now, I detested melee attacks ever since I played some (FP specific) games that required rapid melees and that stuff only gave me nightmares. (literally) Anyway, Kyndig said he had issues with the bow and I asked him if he went pure stealth and he didn't say. He probably didn't and perhaps picked up the bow too late to make efficient use out of it. But he went on and raved about Morrowind and how I should play that. After Oblivion, I sure definitely will because I really did have a blast doing what I wanted. Key phrase being "doing whatever the fuck you want".

So yeah, I'm happy with Oblivion, I did try to play Morrowind once or twice a long time ago but it didn't offer me any sort of "breaking into" the game tips or anything to start with which was like incredibly daunting for an unexperienced wrpg player. If anything Oblivion now salivates my taste for wrpgs to try out now. Oblivion had great ambiance music for me (that I couldn't get tired of lol) and the environments were great but yeah, the dungeons were pretty tedious with same looking backgrounds but thankfully I didn't go trekking for long, before I decided to get with finishing the game business.

The guilds were alright, the Arena was SO easy (lol one hit kill from the gate!), Fighters Guild was pretty boring, Mages Guild is interesting to a point but whatever. Thieves' Guild was okay til the very last one and that was the most epic mission I had ever been on and really loved it. I was able to utilize my character a great deal in that mission. Never had to fight a blind Monk. :D Dark Brotherhood guild is hilarious with the language and the victims involved. Poor Lachance, he was great...til the end. xD Main quest was more like "what the fuck? but okay..."

I didn't purposely mean to go 1000'ing it but yeah that's all it took really, just finishing the 4 major guilds (and the Arena), and the main quest will net you 1000 achievement points. I considered finishing the main quest as beating the game, I figure to complete the game you'd just have to like explore EVERYWHERE OMG BORING NO, and finish up all of those miscellaneous and free range quests or something. I wasn't gonna go into that, I got my epic mission from Thieves guild and laughs from the Dark Brotherhood to consider moving on from the game. Good game and all that.

After finishing the previous Fire Emblem (7) on GBA, I find this game a refresher in terms of difficulty for sure. I appreciate being able to access the main inventory from the hero and being able to go into random monster battles to level up my guys. I didn't bother with the tower or anything. I did use the Arena til they were able to be promoted at least. Mostly to find out which characters are godly to keep and using of course. Cormag is my favorite character, he's just a monster on his own. But really, the game was pretty easy enough. You at least get those uber weapons BEFOREhand (fucking FE7... >.<) and see which characters can at least equip those due to having S rank in that weapon.

But whatever, easy tactics, cute game and all that. Didn't bother for completion because well, I'd have to replay through it again with Erika's story and I was tired of tactics gameplay by then. (Playing them both back to back lol.) And of course, on hard mode and keep your characters alive. But yeah if FE7 that fucking hard, I'll be able to play through the other FE games at least. That'll be enough resetting my gba now. ;)

Donkey Kong Country (From a Completionist point of view)

Donkey Kong Country was one of those games that pretty much every kid had. I remember playing this game countless times, trying to complete it. I got exposed to Donkey Kong Country from Nintendo Power, when I received a VHS tape in the mail that showed me what Donkey Kong Country was all about. It even went as so far to show some of the many secrets that the game has to offer.

The Donkey Kong Country series has always remained one of my favorite platformers. Even though I never beat the second one or even played the third one. When I did play Donkey Kong Country I use to spend so much time trying to find all the secret levels, but no matter how much I tried I could never find them all.

This weekend, I decided to dig out my snes and finally complete this game once and for all.

The game in itself is excellent platforming action. The game is fairly straight forward in the sense that as you finish one level it brings you to the next level. You have no fears of ever missing any of the levels since you need to play and pass them all to finish the game.

The true completionist aspect of this game is the numerous amount of bonus levels that are found throughout the game. Some of the levels can have numerous bonus level while some levels do not have any. In order to get 101% on this game you have to find every bonus area in each level.

How do you know if you have found all the bonus areas in the specified level. It is actually quite easy. When your on the World Map and you get ready to go to a level for example:

Oil Drum Alley

If you get all the bonus areas in the level.

It will look like this:

Oil Drum Alley!

The exclamation point shows that you got all the bonus levels in that particular level. If it still looks the same then you haven't got all the bonus levels in the game. Bonus levels are everywhere, and can be incredibly well hidden. You may have to break hidden walls, jump to hard to reach areas, or the entrances to these bonus levels can be invisible and only by seeing a peculiarly placed item it will give you a rough idea that something is there.

With any platformer, having any extra lives is a must since the later levels in this game can be incredibly hard. Make sure to take any opportunity to collect as many bananas as possible, and make sure you get the golden statues of your helper animals. Get three statues of the same animal and you'll be transported to a bonus area, where you need to collect as many items as you can. For every 100 you get an extra life and no matter which bonus animal level you end up in, there will be a giant gold statues of that specified animal that will act as 2x multiplier that will help you get more lives.

With the new Donkey Kong Country game coming out for the Wii in the next couple of weeks, I recommend anybody give this excellent platformer a try before you play the new one. When it came out for the first time it remained one of the most beautiful platformers that had ever graced a video game console. In completing it, I still enjoyed playing it now, as what I did back then.

RENTAL. Let me bold that for you. RENTAL. Yes, this game only took me an entire DAY to beat. Nothing more, and I think the former game of the two was actually longer thanks to having a lot more levels (action levels I suppose even). So this is just pretty darn short in comparison but its a good rental. I had a blast in a one sitting, however, the most of the levels were confided with the use of adjectives only, and there's quite of bit of repetition there in use of puzzle solving using adjectives in a block STAGE of a level, not a narrative type.

But never mind that, they fixed the controls right? LOL, you barely even use your character much anyway, at least from what I saw. You still needed to use the stylus to navigate through the game though. Jumping is still lame.

Anyway, as for completion, I actually did the optional levels with sheer amount of luck. Dumb luck really. Pro-tip for the final optional level, sometimes you can just use the very thing you're having trouble with. AIR VENT, AIR VENT.

But its a rental, so I didn't bother checking what else I had to do for 100% completion like I'm sure there's 3 allowed inputs per chance of the level to get merits? I still beaten those optional levels so. I saw I got merit for just about dying by saving the starlite and doing a lot of chaining of my creations. But overall, this game is okay, it just screams RENTAL.

Great game, very easy, and cute. Sated my fix for kirby somewhat. Their explaining that this wasn't an original IP for a kirby game explains a lot. There are levels that are so easy and so short you wonder if this was made for wiiware. It was unusual for me to see in a Kirby game, they usually have some measure of difficulty that made it fun, but then again I could be incredibly biased since I played tons of kirby games in the past and already experienced enough.

IE there's this one level that was supposedly hard (5 stars) on race challenge but lol, I surpassed the Mara by half of the time for her to get there, but the point was, the levels design were excellent; smooth and fluid. You'd no trouble with the race challenges on nearly all of them.

Thankfully they do offer some measure of difficulty by giving you optional challengers to run up with in the home world. All of these comes with a time limit except for the races. Zeke offers hide and seek, you find 5 of his friends through a level. Beandrix offers you to find all of the gems (they called it something else...) or equivalents of. Buster offers you to kill all of the enemies or equivalents of. Carrie offers you a carry restriction through a level, you find a way to carry her and put her in a spot. Mara offers the races and has 30 of them which is most of all 5 characters' challenges and they were the most fun and utilizes most of these levels to their real challenge imho. At least you'll see how great the level design is. :D

I won't comment on anything else because well, its an adorable game and that is essentially what it is really. I didn't hear of the music for several legit reasons so I cannot comment on that and the graphics are alright. The innovation for the yarn parts is neat, if anything, the best part of the innovation in this game was digging through the fabric. Nothing pops out more innovative than that.

I also appreciate kirby still being able to take on different forms. My biggest surprise was the dolphin. I swear by Ecco that some of the levels using the dolphin had ripped right out of Ecco's page book. LMAO, but its awesome to use the dolphin and it's gameplay mechanics immediately reminding me of HOW AWESOME Ecco was. (The jumps, the nosedive, etc etc.)

As for completion, I'm not 100% sure on this (lazy to check) but you pretty much gotten everything on this game if you were consistent with your levels and getting gold in them and their treasures. What I wasn't sure about is whether if getting GOLD will unlock a challenger's level or not. I pretty much got all of them gold except for 3 of them at the near end and one of them isn't exactly a challenger type of level lmao. But yes, you'll need to get more than just gold in a boss level to unlock two more optional levels and their treasures after that.

I can be safe to say I'm 12 pieces away in fabric (all from challengers) from 100% completion. I'd say I'm just about done with the game after that.

Anyway, great game, highly recommended for anyone.

I would like to think that I have officially completed my Domestic North American Anime Style Game Collection for the Sega Saturn.

YouTube Video

Alright, I can see where Seris was going with this. The first game's plot was at least coherent enough to be somewhat enjoyable but still my first thought the game was just mediocre. This one fare no better, with silly non-plot related events inbetween and consistently not having an idea where to go next. But never mind that though, I like how most of the Djinni were easy to get (and most of them don't even fight you), and the optional boss can be beaten by pure summon rushing it.

I had a 100% file from the first game and had no problems doing that again for this game after all. Dullahan was pretty lame since he fell in 3 turns thanks to summon rushing, and most of our weapons were pretty strong from the blacksmith but lol, the part I hated the most? Running out of space in the inventory! :\ Most of the items on there were equipment (up to 5 pieces or 6), healing/cures/psy stars/revivers, blacksmithing items, plot related items, 3 class changers and the darn psyenergy stones. So its a pain for a completionist when you're constantly recycling the darn inventory to make room for new shit. Yeah.

The music didn't wow me like it did in the first game... it was just so and so. But with all this said though, I still am looking forward to play Golden Sun DS anyway. As a rental at the very least. I still appreciate Camelot trying with these two but I still want Shining Force.

Okay I had quite a bit of fun in this game when I first encountered a cyclops. YEP. Right there, the very powerful monster that can one hit KO you, I had a blast trying to down the fucker even if it took me a hour. From there, I purposely sought out the others that I could find/encounter just to have that added challenge. I eventually switched to black monster. (Batmos in my case were excellent target practice with my bow.)

The rest of the game though is alright, pretty great sprite work and rich environments at least. I also still love Legend of Mana and its homage to artwork here too. The music was enjoyable too. The rest of the game was pretty simple down to magic/class/weapons you can pick from. I appreciate the fact that you won't get penalized if you went one way or the other really.

I really am glad I picked the bow as my main weapon. It would hit the enemy twice in succession when it is above you. Its a sprite space issue. Imagine the arrow from the bow in an arc and you first hit the sprite on its head right, the arrow would keep falling past and occasionally will hit the sprite again at the legs or feet before it hits the ground. Its awesome and not only that you'd still be safe. The only enemies to look out for are the ones that reflects your physical attacks right back at you.

Anyway obviously I went with the heroine and I'm pretty glad I did. Her staff was invaluable in range to cast magic at enemies that are immune to physical attacks. They don't occur often but can be extremely annoying. However, in her case, I went as a Ninja Master with a goal to have extra evade/extra accuracy/extra critical and using that bow was great with it. More over, you could farm a bit for decent smithing parts and you'd be set from little 3/4th of the game.

I thought I could go set about completing this but I saw that in order to have a complete Lil Cactus log, you'd need 5 friends, 5 gbas and 5 copies of this game to get one summon. Its pretty darn lame and I figured I'll just dismiss it and ignore that and go about my business. I ran into another snag, to get all of the spirits, you'd need to do a lot of bullshit pretty much. First spirit are mandatory. Second spirit requires you be dead dedicated at side quests to get Dudbears' gold pieces to buy them (second set of spirits) from a collector. Third set of spirits requires you to be dedicated at searching at the ground near the traveling cannons for those bit of glittering specks on the ground to unleash the spirits within them later on with a previous owner who lost them.

I got this far, then the four/fifth/sixth sets were somewhat interchangeable from what I saw. It was the fourth set that I had trouble with because this isn't concrete or set in stone kind of deal. Its all over the place. Several faqs and my own guide conflicts each other in details. It pisses me off wandering all over and not get them because they're all wrong. Meanwhile I was trying to figure out which enemies drop those elemental coins HIGHER rate of drops and then saw that I have to travel quite a bit to kill those too. So at this point I was more or less said fuck it, I wanted to finish this today!

So I just pretty much RAN and RAN past all of those enemies at the final chapter/dungeon/area towards the boss. I was already high in levels and my bow was good enough to carry me thus far. And even then, the final boss went down in three hits. ^___^ My bow was lv 75 at that point. Its awesome. (Remember, two hits in a row, critical, and no misses.)

That's one thing I liked about SoM, you can play however you like and especially at your own pace. But I still prefer the original though, I just can't remember why lmao. Its been a decade or two!

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (From a Completionist point of view)

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is a strategy tactics games released for the Nintendo DS in 2008 and it is the fourth game for the advance wars series. If you ask me it has been the best advance wars game I've played because the game is actually incredibly well balanced.

When it comes to completing this game, boy are you ever in for a chore. I've been playing this game since I first picked it up and finally I managed to finish everything on the game tonight. There are three main objectives you need to do when it comes to completing this game.

1.) First objective is to finish campaign mode and get an s-rank in every story mission and training mission. This doesn't take as long as what you might think. S rank is based up your scores on Power, Technique, and Speed. As long as your total score is 300 or higher, you'll score a s rank for that specified mission. When you start the game you do not have access to a lot of the training missions but as you complete specific story missions, more and more training missions will open up. Always keep in mind that you want to destroy as much of the enemy as possible, while limiting the amount of damage to your own units and you need to do it in a timely fashion to make sure you get that coveted s rank.

2.) Second objective is to finish every map in free battle mode. This will take a while, but if you have a friend you should be able to finish every map in free battle mode. I took the liberty of finishing every map against the computer instead of playing with a friend and just finishing every map quite easily. In free battle mode you have almost 200 maps you need to clear. If the title of the map is grayed out you have not beaten it. Once the title of the map is highlighted in white, you have finally defeated that required battle map. You have such a wide variety of maps such as classic, trial, 2p, 3p, and 4p. This can be the longest part to finish if your finishing it by yourself, if you have a friend you can do it a lot faster.

3.) Third objective is to get all 270 medals. This will take a lot of time, but there are ways of making it easier. The medals are divided into three sets. You get medals for the amount of units produced, for the amount of enemy units destroyed, and a whole bunch of generic requests such as (defeating the final boss ten times, number of times your sub has surfaced or dive, how many maps traded, how many multiplayer battles you've played, how many wi-fi battles you've played. As long as you keep getting medals your unlock all the badges in this game as well.

The units produced and enemy units destroyed medals are easy to obtain, you need to create and defeat 200 of each unit, but if you create your own map and change the layout in such a way, you can create however many units you wants, and you can also create create the enemy units you want to destroy.

Concerning the other generic requirements to get the other medals, if you finish everything in campaign mode you should have the majority of these medals. Just work on each requirement as you see necessary.

In the end, I consider Advance Wars: Days of Ruin my favorite advance wars game and you don't understand how happy I am to have this game completed. Until the next advance wars.

U.N. Squadron (From a Completionist point of view)

U.N. Squadron is literally one of the best side scrolling shooters to ever grace the super nintendo system. It is actually one of those rare examples in which the snes version is actually better than the arcade version even though there are a lot of differences between the two.

In order to fully complete this game you need to play it four times. You need to play it three times on normal mode. One time for each of the three pilots. This game can be difficult, but with enough practice you can get incredibly good at it.

If you beat normal mode with each of the three pilots you get a little line of text regarding the character you beat the game with.

These are the three pilots that you can use to help you complete this game:

1.) Shin Kazama: He can level up his main gun faster than any of the other pilots.
2.) Mickey Simon: He can use special weapons in a larger quantity than any of the other pilots
3.) Greg Gates: He can recover faster than any of the other pilots.

You will have to use each of these pilots once during normal mode.

The last thing you need to do in order to consider this game fully completed. If you beat the game on Hard or Gamer mode without using continues to see a parade of Mobi-Chans spelling a message at the "Thanks for playing" screen.

It seems like a cheap cop-out, especially for playing the game on a harder difficulty, but I would recommend using Greg Gates due to his ability to recover from damage quickly. There is large contrast between hard and normal, enemies will fire more bullets and bosses will be that much harder to kill.

It will take a lot of practice, but UN Squadron is one of those games that I will never grow tired up because of its addictive game-play and a stellar soundtrack.

Well, this was a friendly challenge by Omagnus and I finally got my butt around to it. Everything is pretty awesome about it except for that heinous battle system. I still couldn't wrap my head around on how bland and how broken it was. But yeah I'll just leave it at that and say that Fina and MP are useless in comparison to items/special moves. You pretty much honed down to one major attacker, one healer, one casting a magic shield and one to cast a physical shield. Rest of the enemies outside of bosses and such are pretty weak enough for Aika's Lambda Burst in one turn. But yeah with bosses, that's your method right there.

But never mind all that... especially if you don't care for the battle mechanics or whatever, you'd love this game for the ship battles, pirate themed settings, some plot, some bosses, and definitely love these characters. There's even sky exploration discoveries for you to find and to collect if you're into that sort of thing. And some music is awesome too. I'm not sure about the DC version but in GC, there's this plot line involving collecting Moonfish and giving it to Maria's chick on Doc's boat. Mannn the music on that boat is pretty captivating. That and the final boss battle... which is a shame because I ended it pretty quickly (something like 5 turns!).

I at first thought some parts of the game were somewhat shallow til some plot certainly surprised me and tore my heart strings once more. Especially just about at the near end really. There were 3 plot twists that caught me off guard and made it much more memorable than I thought it could be. But yeah, I highly recommend this game, just ignore the flaws in the battle system though.

As for completion, I went ahead and did it because its not all that hard to do. Just be dedicated in searching for chests, discoveries earlier on, listening for Moonfish, don't run away/fight more etc. The reward is only to unlock the 3 optional secrets in the game, a spiffy sword for Vyse, an optional boss and a cute sky discovery.

Yep, this great series caught me in its charm and their puzzles were making me to be a fan. I couldn't really go into depth here seeing that most of the game was taken place in a puzzle. I still love this game's puzzle music, and there's some additional music I liked. The first menus, picture book, and wandering about music are all awesome.

I noticed the change in difficulty, its not as bad as the previous laytons whereas you have a bunch of math solutions, you still do get a bunch of trick question puzzles though. The slider puzzles aren't as bad (it also could be that I'm getting better at it), you'll access the most difficult ones in the optional puzzle menu after you beat the game. I still didn't mark this as a complete because really, I did have to retort to FAQs online because I wasn't as good in math lmao. I do love slider/logic deduction/building puzzles though. The trick questions (think outside of the box) were among my favorites.

And yeah, I liked the plot and that ending was a tearjerker too.

Great game. I remember being put off years ago by this whole time limit thing and was concerned that I wouldn't be able to do a roundabout method (hit dungeon and come back) until I actually found to be able to teleport to owl statues on this playthrough. LOL only if I had played a little bit further and realize that there's much faster ways of travel, I'd not worry about the time limit all that much. Wearing the bunny hood, riding Epona, even Goron's Spin-a-dash can be speedy traveling too.

So once I got past that and realize the true gem of this game was in wearing all sorts of masks and being able to do all sorts of things with it. Most of them were useless but a few were great. IE Stone mask makes you invisible to enemies but not on screen which is extremely useful in bypassing a lot of annoying enemies. Another was a Fairy Mask that allows you collect fairies without damning yourself doing some stupid minor little detail of accurate jumping or aiming or needing to get the hookshot later.

So yeah after the first dungeon I was having quite a bit of fun and recognized the gem this game had and especially after OoT which I had loved. Its just a different beast altogether and should had been treated that way.

I didn't bother with completion here because those minigames were very unnerving and frustrating. Didn't go that far to go nuts on it but I did however collected all of the masks. Just to see how majestic this Fierce Diety mask would be. And it WAS! :D

Gifted by Skills on steam and I played the demo of this game before. My first take was great concept, bargaining and ripping people off just like REAL life lmao. But then I hit the dungeon. Ehhhh. I'm not much of a keyboard user so I was put off by it for a while til Skills told me I could I use the controller for it. Lo and behold, thanks to steam, I can use my gamepad for this especially during the dungeon treks. I'd like to be very nimble at my turns and direct hits if possible. It was just too risky to take a whole lot of hits and not know when you'll get another healing item later.

So after I fired it up via gift weeks later, I was engrossed with it and spent nearly 3 days obsessed with it. NOTHING BUT THIS GAME for three days. LOL, I figured out how to do a lot sales and already hit the 200k mark payment before I ultimately bought out everything to start over on another loop on purpose. A loop is essentially a restart right from the first day but you carry over just about everything except your own money. That's right, your level, items, even customer's fat ass wallets are viable. And I was doing SO well on this second loop that by the time I was supposed to pay the 50k debt, I was raking in 800k. LOL there was a very VERY generous boom involving precious metals and equipment. (In other words, just about EVERYTHING I HAD.) Boom is a news topic you'll see marqueeing at the top of the screen telling you the trends of the customers' interests. AKA cold weather warning, warm clothes are in need! I'd put those specific items right on the display windows and then BAM, shit loads of WOMEN would come in HORDES just to buy all that crap.

So yeah, I had a massive increase of customers thanks to that horde of women previous to that double boom. Therefore the increase of customers and their wallets, and my massive mark up on items helped a great deal in a period of three game days. xD It was awesome and naturally once I paid off all of my debt, I went dungeoning for real. I was doing well with Charme, she had a great dash ability that I liked. But then I fought Griff. ;_____________;

You have several dungeon heroes that are to be available to you throughout the dungeons you unlock. Each of them have several different abilities aka like Charme and her dash and to detect traps from chests that you can just avoid altogether. Your first dungeon adventurer is Louie who is basically a tank really. Only good for a starter until you hit harder dungeons. These dungeons can go for 5 floors (10 at the last one) before you can exit through a door. Thankfully, the game saves these exits so you can return through that door and proceed to a new 5 floors after. And thankfully this game ALSO allows you to do Boss Rush, which is conveniently skips the floors but just boss floors only. Most of these bosses are quite easy as long as you're appropriately leveled.

Now after all that, there's fusion. Enemies drop random stuff. Common to somewhat rare to dang rare items. And at the Merchant's Guild, you can fuse these ingredients to create uber equipment for your adventurers (GRANTED if they paid for it lmao or that other way around where you die and they're equipped with it... or something like that, I only got lucky with Charme buying GOOD stuff prior to my needing her then.)

But the best part of the game was just ripping these customers off GOOD. xD I had a blast while it lasted. :D I tend to pick up on it from time to time. I do like the dungeon trekking but the gathering of fusion ingredients can get real tedious. But yes, what a surprise this game took me by!

In the middle of my massive slacking on OTHER GAMES I was supposed to finish, I figured I'll give this a go. Enjoyable game and I love point and click adventures. But lol what was that ending. Don't care, will go for their third once its out. :D

Oh I have NO idea what was the answer to his riddle. If there's a tree in a forest and it falls, what color is it? xD

I didn't get all of the achievements because well I had no idea how to get about those. I'd probably look it up if I'd bother.

Great game. I appreciated the fact that I could take the animated shortcut to move things along quicker. Not only that, there's an Easy mode! My main problem with tactics is I often am too aggressive/impatient/confident in unit advances. And so easy mode solved the problem and help moved the game along swimmingly.

I didn't like Ike at first, but he matured somewhat and the plot definitely got way better in the introduction of furries. :D I missed them from the Shining Force days. And yeah, great memorable cast too. :D

And thankfully, unlike the GBA FE, I haven't lost a single unit. :D And with all that said, I'm still glad I went to Easy mode because Ike got royally screwed on his stats. He barely scratched the Black Knight even at the recommended level. :\

Didn't bother with completion because I'm sure I should at least play Normal/Hard modes at least lmao. And there's those uh extra maps/challenges or whatever. Didn't bother because honestly I was sick of tactics and ready to move on. But yeah, the plot was decent enough to get me even piqued into playing the sequel, Radiant Dawn very soon.

Yeah, I was about to head into Tales of Symphonia when I remember just how much that game pissed me off the last two attempts I took with it. So Omagnus and I were chatting and I asked him what else can he challenge me in picking a game I should play soon. He pretty much picked this since he loved it. What do you know, this game blew me away in the fucking DETAIL.

LOVE LOVE LOVE the sets and hell there's TWO movies referred in this game that I KNOW.

The game was challenging at first with the limited array of weapons, I only got the crappy ones and I figured I'm safe enough to travel/mess about in the desert. WRONG. Cougars would KO me often. So yeah I got smartened up to move forward in the missions to pick up better weapons eventually unlocked in stores or otherwise.

Then the whole game just picked up the pace normally and got easier believe it or not. I loved my Bolt Action Rifle, it has super accuracy and always nailed the bastards in one shot. Saved me a bunch of times.

But yeah I had fun with the hunting aspect and enjoyed finding strangers and doing their silly missions. :D Greatest western themed game I had ever played for sure.

Omagnus is encouraging me to complete this via ingame completion. Not by achievements of course since a third of those are multiplayer only :\ I more or less did all of the ambient challenges because they were fun. But I didn't get much in bounties or try too seriously in finding/unlocking the wardrobe section. I told OP I'll get around to that when I'm in the mood for some more run and gun and hogtying and dragging them lmao.

And man... the string of missions were perfect in Act 3, it was the winding down of the game and you get to appreciate the finer points of how the game was played. I loved it because it gave me a sense of tranquility when unlike in other GTAs, most of those missions were insane and going all out on EVERYTHING. Great ending too.

Bangai-O Spirits (From a Completionist Point of View)

Bangai-O spirits is literally one of my all time favorite games for the DS. It is a shoot'em up that was released by Treasure in 2008.

In order to fully complete this game you only need to do one simple thing. You need to beat all 167 levels that this game has to offer. That is pretty much the only simple thing about this game. You will never play a game in which you can die so fast, so quickly, and so often. It is the challenge that this game portrays is what makes the so addictive and so fun.

You have 167 levels spread over three types of level designs:

Treasure's Best (There are a total of 27 stages that are very attack heavy stages.)

Puzzle Stages (There are a total of 18 stages that have puzzle or maze elements.)

Other Stages (There are a total of 122 stages that have various fighting elements. The tutorial stages are included with the other stages.)

Throughout, the game you have various types of missiles in order to destroy your enemies. You have long range weapons such as bounce missiles, homing missiles, napalm missiles, and break missiles. Break missiles are some of my favorite missiles to use because it can cut through enemies incredibly easy.

You also have the opportunity to use EX attacks which allow you to mix missile types. EX attacks can send a lot of missiles into various directions are incredibly useful when dealing with a lot of enemies or enemy missiles on the screen.

EX attacks are not always attack based. They have other uses that can be used to get through some of the stages in this game such as Reflect and Freeze.

Freeze you can pause the action for up to three seconds which can be incredibly useful when getting through some very tight spots in the game.

My personal favorite is Reflect in which you can use it to reflect enemy missiles back at the enemy which are incredibly useful when dealing with the most annoying enemy in the game which are Longai-O's.

It is an awesome game and one game that every DS owner should have. It is not a hard game to complete but be prepared to die quite a lot.

First things first, easy game is helluva easy, as in comedically so. I've not died once nor come even close to dying. I bought the GotY edition which comes pre-loaded with Knothole Island and the Future thingy. I did the first quest of each before the main quest of the game even kicked off properly and that was the only challenge of the whole game, beating those with crappy, rusty weapons. Of course once I'd done the first bit of Knothole Island the game threw legendary weapons at me, instantly ending any challenge the game might possibly have had. Money is never an issue in the game as you earn rent from houses you own even when the game is turned off so if you play for a short while every evening, each time you turn the thing on you have enough money for a couple more houses and it doesn't take long to earn enough to buy pretty much every house in the game and all the other crap you could ever want for. I chose the money option at the end of the game and got a million gold, to add to the four million I already had...

The fights are easy even without the freely available legendary weapons and there's no hint of a decent boss fight anywhere in the game. I've not managed to beat the Arena thng record yet but only because I've only gone through it once and didn't realise you could use the flame jets in one room to clear it much faster until it was too late. Treasure chests are kinda well hidden but with Knothole Island you can make your dog a level 5 treasure hunter pretty much right off the bat so it's pretty much impossible to miss any chests or dig spots. I'm still a few silver keys short and a couple of gargoyles but I don't see it being too tough to track down the last few.

So the economy is a joke, the fights are easy to the point of being a joke and you can't miss any of the treasure so what is the point of the game?

Well essentially it's just good fun. I went, as I always do in this kind of game, down the pure evil route. There aren't actually that many morality choices in the quests themselves, you get most of your evil points by robbing houses and setting comedy high rents. Oh, and sacrificing a string of wives at the shadow temple. It's fun running into a town and having everyone run away screaming though. The quests are all pretty formulaic but the scripting is amusing enough as a rule. That you can kill everything without thinking about it makes your character feel suitably god-like compared to the general populace, a bit like playing a really focussed Sith Lord in KOTR 2 (My last character killed Darth Treya in two force chokes). The whole thing is basiaclly a no-brainer action game aimed at people who are really crap at action games. It's a nice change to have played an "rpg" that didn't take 300 hours for a change too!

Achievements-wise, there's not much that requires anything more than standard story-following to get. You need to save before the end and reload a couple of times to save yourself playing through three times and there are a few things you wouldn't do by accident but they aren't in any way difficult and I'm up to 950 without a guide, the only things I might possibly look up will be if I get stuck on a gargoyle or silver key or two.

All in all a decent enough game if you want something light-hearted and not too taxing and it's dead simple to get a huge AP haul from it if that's your bag.

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (From a Completionist point of view.)

The funny with regards to Final Fantasy Mystic is that it is game that people either really love or really despite. Its mot commonly known as Final Fantasy USA, Final Fantasy for Idiots, and Final Fantasy for Dummies.

I'm actually one of those few people that actually love the game because when I was starting out in the rpg genre this was actually the first rpg I ever finished. I know that's not saying much because it is incredibly easy but I felt pretty proud beating my first rpg.

When it comes to completing Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest there are two major things that you need to do.

1.) The first thing you need to do is finished every battlefield that the world map has to offer. You can not roam anywhere on the map. Your destinations are already designated to you. In each battlefield you get to fight ten battles. Once they're all beaten, you either get experience, gold, or even an item. Once you've defeated each battlefield, you'll get the message Already Cleaned Out.

2.) The second major thing you need to do is to collect every weapon, every piece of armor, and every permanent item in the game. You can get these things in different ways.

Throughout the game you can find two different kinds of treasure chests. You have wooden treasure chests and you have metal treasure chests.

Wooden treasure chests carry consumable items such as heal potions, cure potions, bombs, arrows, refreshers, and seeds. Wooden chests can be found in both towns and dungeons and they can also be easily exploited. If you already opened up a wooden chest in a town or dungeon and you leave the town or dungeon back onto the world cap. The wooden chest can be opened again. You can use this trip to amass 99 cure potions and 99 heal potions incredibly easily.

Metal Treasure chests always carry permanent items such as a weapons, a piece of armor or an item that you need in order to progress the story. Metal treasure chests can be found in some of the towns and you can always find at least one in every dungeon in the game.

You need to open every metal treasure chest in order to collect every permanent item in the game. You can also get some of the other permanent items in the game by completing battlefields, buying weapons and armor from certain individuals in town, and some of them will be given to you in order to advance the story.

Once we have finished every battlefield and collected every weapon, every piece of armor, and every other important story item. We can know go ahead and defeat the final boss. The final boss is known as the doom king and it seems the customary that for a game so easy the final boss should be easy as well. The Doom King is an undead creature so all you have to do to send a cure spell his way. The cure spell does 5 digit damage to the boss, and you can pretty much kill him in a few hits.

Final Fantasy Mystic quest is a fairly easy game to complete and you should be able to do it within 8 to 12 and sometimes even faster than that. I do love the game for its simplicity and i think its an excellent game to introduce a young child to the rpg genre. Definitely check it out.

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (From a Completionist point of view.)

With finally taking the time of completing the first Donkey Kong Country, I decided to delve into the second game of the Donkey Kong Country series. it is a series that I had played before, but I never ever beat the final boss nor did I do everything that the game had to offer.

When it comes to completing this game, it uses the somewhat same formula of the original donkey kong country series with a few minor additions.

As you go through the game. You need to get 102% in order to consider this game fully completed.

We do that by finding every bonus stage that each level has to offer. Unlike the original donkey kong country in which finishing the bonus level will give you lives, letters, gold statues and other things. The bonus levels in Donkey Kong Country 2 will give you kremlin coins. There are a total of 75 krem coins. The majority of them you can find in the bonus stages and you get a krem coin for every boss you defeat.

You use 15 kremlin coins at a time to open levels of the lost world throughout the game. You pay 15 krem coins to Klubba and he'll grant you access to the lost world.

The other thing you need to do is grab another bunch of items known as DK coins. There are a total of 40 DK Coins and there is one in every level. There are even DK coins located in the lost world levels.

Once you defeat Kaptain K. Rool in his flying fortress and when you defeat him in the Lost World after you collect all 75 Krem Coins and you collect all 40 DK coins. Then the game is considered fully completed.

This game definitely has a good spike in difficulty because I found the difficulty dramatically harder than the original donkey kong country. I just want to say on record, the last level before you fight Kaptain K. Rool in the lost world known as Animal Antics has pissed me off quite a lot. This is a level in the game that I consider the hardest level in the game because it is a level in which you use all of your animal buddies. There is a section of the game in which you use your parrot in a vine area in which the wind is blowing you back and forth and it is a level I have wasted a whole ton of lives just trying to beat it.

Overall, Donkey Kong Country 2 is known as the best of the Donkey Kong Games for the Super Nintendo and with good reason. Just expect a good spike in difficulty, but that's not going to stop it from being an excellent platformer on the Super Nintendo.

So yeah, I finally get into this. I loved the Tales series despite of only having played Phantasia, and both Destinies on the ps1. What threw me off was the not so linear battle field (think Legend of Mana) and it was horribly awkward for me to adjust to in the first two playthroughs I attempted. But soon and third time the charm, after I had it set on Semi-auto, and start executing techs as well as leveling up like mad (7 levels in fact) in the FIRST DARN AREA of the game, I managed to do well for the rest of it after. Once I finally get past my silly (and pointless) gripe, I managed to see more of the game. First I was surprised at how small like all of the dungeons are. Literally like most of them have like 3 to 5 rooms in total. But that was nice change of pace from say Phantasia (lol) and I was worried that it would set in the shallow like setting for the rest of the game. But nah, its perfectly paced and great to get through. Best use of the sorcerer's ring ever.

But that's not what made this game all so fuck awesome for me. Its the skits. And that Kratos dude. HUGE <3 for him. The plot was great, and especially his storyline was huge. The skits were totally worthwhile waiting for in areas because majority of them were hilarious and had me actually laughing out loud which was rare for me from a rpg. I only regret I played this game so darn late and missed out on the fanfare when the rest of the tales series came along. Good thing I'll be catching up on this series this year (for fucking sure).

That's what just great about Tales of Symphonia, it got me hooked again for the Tales series and I'm sooo ready to blow through Legendia and Abyss very soon. :D And then the sequel New World and Vesperia. :D

And fuck no, I'm not playing through this game 3 times for completion. Its awesome but omg, to get all of the titles? LOL that'd be insane. Its doable sure and its a great game to replay several times too, don't get me wrong. I just need to GET onto the other games already lmao.

<3

I barely remember playing the first one on ps1, so I figured this is worth playing through at least once before I put it away. Heh, right away, I remember just HOW I got hooked onto RE series right from the first HOUR into this game. Man, it was that awesome, what the hell happened? But yes, I got obsessed with RE right from Nemesis and got into the rest. Its just fun and silly horror along with silly plot devices to cinematics.

I actually considered replaying this again because it was just that fun and short to play. I'd totally kill for a compilation of the ps1 trilogy for ps3 or something. Man that'd make my day. As for completion, I have no idea what would be it... for this game lol. I suppose playing as Chris also and uh getting everyone out alive? LOL, I didn't even do that with Jill, I just rather fumbled my way out lmao.

<3 Jill forever

I absolutely loved this game very much. I couldn't believe how beautiful it was through and through. Its just as I expected after loving the crap out of its predecessor which is based 20 years after this in the plotline. The battles, the magnus (card system), the characters, the plot, even some VA were awesome. But the music and the backdrops just made this game more awesome in execution. Heck, I didn't mind battlin' thanks to the music! I was rocking out to the tunes in the battle enough times that I was overleveled lmao. But it was perfect in tune with everything else, I couldn't expect anything less from this game. The Guillo character was awesome too.

Its pretty much 10/10 from me. :) I only regret for playing it so late, I recall this game didn't have a guide for magnus mixing and I remember how massively extensive it was in the first game. I was worried I'd get stuck if I didn't have it, thankfully gamefaqs have it nowdays (2 to 3 years later apparently).

But what astounds me is that this game only sold a measly pitiful 6k on the first month. Terrible. Absolutely terrible, and we won't be expecting anymore from this beautiful duo to be a series. :\ Shame, real shame.

And no I didn't complete this game because of the massive magnus mixing and the time required (one required 35 actual real time to mature one of the cards into another...) is pretty insane. Not only that the limited blank magnus you have in the beginning doesn't help. It'd require at least 2 playthroughs and I definitely had my fill from battlin' with that awesome soundtrack.

Yes lmao, Manablade/Tritoch got me this game as a surprise belated xmas gift. It was awesome and simple enough for me to play. I was surprised at how simple it was compared to BHR but then I understood that its meant to be played in that order if I were to know the basics a lot better, I'd have done BHR a lot better. It definitely helps to have the plot set up from the campaign to understand how BHR got set up. :D

First thing I was taken back by how "youthful" it was compared to BHR and the art was more cartoony. They're all great in their telling, and I didn't realize how huge of a character Sonja was in plot and ability. It definitely helps you fully recognize the other characters their abilities by actually fighting them. IE, I had no idea that Eagle's Lightning Strike allows him to MOVE again when I picked up on BHR... I completely fail on that Eagle intro mission lmao. And total lol at this game being released on 9/11. Christ, no wonder why its hard to find.

And no, I'm not gonna complete this game, I'm not a huge fan of tactics when it comes to scoring very well. I tend to FAIL badly. ;)

Great little gem! Just picked it off and got hooked. Great music, great incentive to play, great plot, great characters, great animation! I appreciate the ingenuity of puzzle solving associating with saving a person's life. :)

Not sure what's there to complete here besides exploring everywhere and being sure to make contact with every little core.

This game isn't as long as I thought it'd be. Its a very simple rpg/survival horror with anime movies inbetween. Even with a small cast, it did laid a compelling story being told in form of memories that you pick up and hear/read. I like to say that this game did an excellent job on the VAs during the memories that were being read. The memories are found as a package looking thing that is being glowed by dragonflies (although not always!) and when you take it to a save point, you'll hear the story behind these said items inside the packages.

It also did a very great job with the interaction on cats and the wiimote's speaker. There's a huge emphasis on the wiimote's speaker which I appreciate a greater deal because like with Silent Hill's radio you can hear enemies coming on beforehand.

The sets and the overall theme is pretty well placed and its rather interesting and beautiful in its own human-despair-isolation sort of way. But yes, max level is 35 and I've beaten it in like less than 20 hours even after finding all of the memories in form of items that you pick up along your travels.

As for completion, it wasn't that hard. I was diligent in purchasing those oddball items from the Merchant and finding all of those memory items. I was worried about PoNRs (Points of No Return) though, but thankfully even when I got to the very end, I apparently only missed two that I can access from there without a problem. I was surprised to find a surplus of hidden ones at the Hotel and that quickly garnered my focus on finding them or be extra diligent from there. Good game overall.

Flower (From a Completionist point of view)

Flower was a game that I had known about for a very long time, but it was only within the last month that I finally decided to see what all the hype was about and decided to download it. To be honest this game had surpassed any and all expectations that I had for it.

I have never played that had such a unique tranquility about it. This game didn't need dialogue, it didn't need a complex story, and it didn't need action and explosions. I never played a game in which I actually felt relaxed playing it. I never felt tense it was just such a relaxing game to play and to be honest when I was playing it for the first time I wasn't interested in completing it. To be honest I wish I could stay in the worlds as long as I could. I have a particular fondness for the windmill level and the night level (3rd and 4th levels.)

i played through the game the first time not caring about getting everything but just enjoying the game for what it was and knowing that nothing could ever be missed in the game and that you could go back and complete any of the levels at any time. After the initial playthrough it was time to get down to serious business and get this game 100% completed.

With regards to completing this game there is mainly one thing you need to do. You need to get every trphy that this game has to offer. Some of the trophies can be incredibly easy to get such as:

1.) Spend ten minutes in the room with the flowers without even moving
2.) Don't play for a week, and then play
3.) Illuminate a pond
4.) Ride the windmill 7 times
5.) Once you complete a level, watch the ending credits of the level before you go back to the room.

However, like any game that has trophies there are ones that can be fairly difficult:

1.) Awaken the entire city, which can be easily missed if you don't watch what your doing.
2.) In every level there are three secret flowers and you need to get all three secret for each of the 6 levels.
3.) You need to bloom 10,000 flowers which can take up quite a bit of time.
4.) You need to activate every credit in the ending sequences of the game, another trophy that can be easily missed if your not too careful .

The most annoying trophy that you will need to get throughout the entire game is in the 5th level in which you need to journey to the city unscathed without taking any damage since there are electrical towers all over the place. The biggest difficulty that most people have with this level is in the third section where debris is falling from the sky and sometimes its not always easily avoidable. It is actually quite easy to get through the first two electrified sections, the biggest thing you need to do when it comes to getting through the last section of the 5th level is too simply ride the wind (do not speed up) and stay high up in the air and you should get to the city unscathed.

In the end you need to get all 14 trophies to consider this game fully completed, but I urge you on your first playthrough of this game. Don't worry about getting the trophies or accomplishments this game has to offer. Enjoy the game the first time around for whats its worth, and then get the accomplishments after. So thank you Philia for introducing me to such a great game with a beautiful and tranquil atmosphere and it was well worth all the time I spent completing it.

The game originally came out in December, but about 2 or 3 weeks ago they finally came out with a patch that added online voice chat, different color lasers for the two players, an in-game brightness setting which it desperately needed (couldn't see shit captain), and some minor other things so I'm playing this post patch. It's done by the guys who did Super Stardust HD which I've always heard good things about but never played. As a twinstick zombie shooter it was actually pretty enjoyable. On Normal it was a pretty good length (about 5 hours) for it's intensity level which ramps up nicely.

They give you a good amount of weapons and tools that you unlock as you progress then upgrade with money found in-game. About halfway through the game encourages you to abuse the usable items like Flares and Grenades as they're cheap enough that buying more at the constant shops is negligible. On Normal though you can use the default Assault Rifle which has infinite ammo for the majority of the game. I kept expecting it to get harder than it did. Messing around with some of the later weapons like the hilarious Blade Cannon was pretty awesome.

The "story" and "dialogue" were ridiculous though. Apparently the characters are hardcore commandos who can kill thousands of zombies and tranverse huge areas on foot, survive car crashes, and fly helicopters. Also the ending is ridiculous and sort of nullifies the whole game. The artwork isn't bad though, and the music (what's there) is fine.

I'd say I only had two major complaints, the first being that the default weapon desperately needed to be automatic, or have that button press to be optional; I probably literally pushed R1 about ten thousand times across that 5 hours. Second, even with the in-game brightness options that they added, game is still DARK AS SHIT. This actually works really well for atmosphere, but really shitty for gameplay. It's also not only just that it's dark, but the zombies do a good job of mixing in well with the environment art, so sometimes even when it wasn't dark I'd start getting hit by a zombie that was right next to me which I literally couldn't see. Also, I wish the game "paused" when cycling through weapons or items. Mapping them to the D-pad works well, but late in the game when you have a bunch of different things and I'm getting mobbed by a ton of enemies being able to switch to the item I want without getting destroyed would have been helpful.

Overall the game was pretty good though; I think if it had been on 360 so I could have actually played it with anyone on my friends list we would have gotten some good mileage out of it, as there's a fair amount of unlocks and other things I certainly didn't get.

I cannot believe I skipped this review. This game was utter piece of shit, I imagine that's why. I didn't feel like reviewing how I wasted my time with this game. I'll just let this summarize it for you.

And they had that stupid thing where whenever something happened, every single party member had to react to it, even though about half of them said absolutely nothing of importance (especially Himi, who could have been replaced by a sock puppet for all the personality she had).

oh my god yes

Kraden: So your parents were heroes...
Tyrell: :-)
Karis: :-)
Rief: :-)
Amiti: :-)
Eoleo: :-)
Sveta: :-)
Himi: :-)
Matthew: :-)
Kraden: ...and they went on this dangerous journey...
Tyrell: :-(
Karis: :-(
Rief: :-(
Amiti: :-(
Eoleo: :-(
Sveta: :-(
Himi: :-(
Matthew: :-(
Kraden: ...stop that, it's annoying and it takes time away from my long winded ramblings.
Tyrell: >:-|
Karis: >:-|
Rief: >:-|
Amiti: >:-|
Eoleo: >:-|
Sveta: >:-|
Himi: >:-|
Matthew: >:-|

*SPOILER ALERT*
I first played Golden Sun the year it came out, back in November/December '01 (Best Christmas present ever). I was swept into the fantastic, wonderful game that was a gaming staple in my life for a VERY long, hard time. Years later, I discovered Lost Age, and a new adventure began, an exciting sequel filled with difficult, challenging puzzles, familiar elements, etc. Playing as the 'bad guys' from the first game was one of the coolest plot twists of my childhood, and teaming up with both Isaac and Felix's parties was the epitome of GBA roleplaying games. You all remember.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across Dark Dawn in the game shop. Without hesitation i purchased and started playing it. And... yeahhhh...

1. This game was, well, very, very easy. I can say with complete honesty that I did not ever lose a fight, nor did I at any point spend time power leveling up. Money was never a serious problem, and you learn psyenergy at a quick enough rate that you are always one step ahead of the enemy. Again, with complete honesty, I can count on one hand the number of times I resorted to summoning Dijinn (Slapped together at the last second final boss was not on that list, fyi.) I felt this was a minor setback, as simply playing a Golden Sun-esque game made it seem...acceptable, and I felt smarter than I was.

2. This story was just... terrible. Really, it was god awful. I'm not trying to pick at it, really, I just could not find any enjoyment or care for this world or it's plight. For a very good portion of the game, you are hunting for a roc feather. Yeah, cool, Isaac and Garret trusted us with this awesome task. Oh, save the world on the side, just because we can? Because we're the children of Warriors of Vale? Okay, sure. It's on the way. Blados? Pink haired woman (Chalis? I beat the game twenty minutes ago and I already forget)? Who the devil are they? They kind of randomly appear, push me in the right direction, and then suddenly BAM, final bosses. I'm still not sure what exactly they were trying to accomplish (It's probably explained by one line of dialogue, or reading the mind of someone four destroyed towns ago).

3. Speaking of lines of vague dialogue, notice how frequently it says "the Warriors of Vale were a controversial group?" Name ONE person in Dark Dawn who finds them controversial, beyond Patcher's Place. Nearly everyone you meet is sure you'll help them, because "You're the children of the Warriors of Vale (admittedly, you DO look exactly like them), you must be here to help me!" Also, seriously; Kraden again? Now I understand the whole Golden USn anti-aging thing, but Isaac and Garret are SIGNIFICANTLY older than they were. I don't even think Kraden got new portrait. Also, we get to see him, Isaac, and Garret, but not the rest? Come on, not even Ivan? Karis has been bumming around with Matthew and Tyrell for God knows how long, and he doesn't even poke his head out the door to wish her farewell? Not to mention the lack of Piers, Mia, Sheeba, Jenna, and Felix (although Felix was explained away easily enough, not even cameos from the others who we KNOW exist in THIS WORLD annoyed me).

4. Another thing. The characters you get in this party. I have one in particular to gripe about... Who the BLAZES is Himi? I sneezed during a cutscene and suddenly I have a crappy Japense-themed member of the party. She has less dialogue then some of the Dijinn, I swear; deus ex machina with the whole reveal power. Guess we couldn't just shove it into Tyrell's head, needed to find an eighth character to fill that slot. Also, Amiti's parentage? remember that storyline? Yeah, I do. And Reif's sister! She's off with Piers? gee, that's sweet... Could we SEE that? Suddenly, right before one of the final sequences that girl who was important for one scene is off with a character we'd much rather be seeing than these fools (don't get me wrong, I'm a big Matthew, Amiti, and Eoleo fan). I was almost disgusted with the character choices. I think their mistake was trying to squeeze eight into one game; it just didn't work out. You get the last three almost forced upon you at the last possible second, it was frustrating and weak story.

5. I... I just couldn't get into it. The characters (NPC and otherwise) were annoying and trite, the combat was too easy, the Eclipse event (while admittedly I liked the concept at first) was very annoying to put up with and VERY cheap (I really, really missed the ability to travel back to old towns to use my powers on the objects there, or read the minds of those people awaiting the end of the world. The inability to get back to, say, the Lookout Cabin or eventually Belinsk really bothered me). The ending felt rushed, and... I really just didn't care. I never fully understood why the Blados' crew was doing what they were, the survival of Alex seemed very unecessary, the game simply dropped certain storylines and left things unresolved in the wake of your travels, and it seemed like all of a sudden a simple retrieval quest turned into a world saving quest at the drop of a hat. And why the BLOODY MUFFINS doesn't Isaac live with his wife?! Seriously?! Was it a fling, were they not meant to be, what?! We don't even SEE her in this, and she was an important part of the two first games! She wasn't even on the same continent as this game! Oh, but Piers (though awesome) is around in a ship somewhere, picking up stray water adepts for kicks (and we don't see him either, just know he's there, waiting to take our other cast off characters. Himi's coming your way soon, I promise). The final blow was being teased with old map, and being unable to access it. The Mercury lighthouse was a sad reminder of how fantastic the story was in the first games, and how sadly they've muddled it.

Well, that's it. I don't know if I can handle another Golden Sun game, now. It's going to have to be phenomenally better, because after this evening, my spirit has been broken. My apologies for the length of this rant, but it's being stewing to a slow boil since Konpa Cave. As a writer, I sincerely hope they get everything back on track for the hopefully next wonderful installment, and we can put this behind us.

He pretty much summarized why I hated this game. SO MUCH. So much sadness. Anyway avoid this unless you're a silly diehard GG fan. I also didn't bother with completion because really, just the mere idea of doing the same damn summon rushing Dullahan pisses me right off when I just beaten him in TLA not but mere months ago.

Very adorable dungeon crawl. The voice acting though is extremely atrocious though. The remixes in that game is awesome enough but still. The plot was interesting but embarrassing to watch. o.o' But the best part of it is doing the trial dungeons. They certainly challenge your skills at dungeon crawling. Thankfully I've played a much more difficult dungeon crawlers than this so those trials were nothing. Not even that 100 floor dungeon either. It was very easy imho and I went and completed it because it was that simple enough. Oh, you do need to catch those dumb romantic phrases to give to Romantic Hero X to get those optional trial dungeons from the replay dungeons menu (over in the church).

It was surprisingly convenient along with the ability to switch/take on jobs. You can be a white/black mage or you can be a knight/dragoon/ninja/dark knight. You can also be yourself or a dancer or a thief. Its nifty being able to dungeon crawl differently and be able to match yourself up to par with certain type of enemies you're not sure about killing. The jobs themselves has their own level abilities (up to 8 levels and have up to 12 abilities or less) that makes thing much more even between all classes so you won't screw yourself. AKA if you got surrounded as a white mage, you can cast teleport/escape to get out of that bind easy. If you got an enemy that is invulnerable to physical attacks while you're a knight, you can still use the knockback ability to postpone the attacks towards you while you work out another solution.

The traps aren't all that bad surprisingly. Some of them works FOR you like those green seals, if you were that low enough on hp, they can heal you instead. And most of the status effects can wear off within 10 steps and you're fine. Pretty much nulls the purpose of a ribbon if you ask me. The only effect that is dangerous is the silence because all job abilities are affected by this.

With all that aside, I did like the forging equipment deal. The equipment themselves can be forged with status effects themselves. AKA you can put on a silence protection on it. Or to boost item drops or to boost exp or attack. Or you can put poison on your attack (talons). Its pretty awesome and nifty to be able to do this. Besides the jobs and their abilities, being smart with your equipment goes a REAL long way too. Thankfully you can earn enough gil to pay for the upgrades easy. You just make sure not to sell those with +1 because they're CHEAPER to fuse instead of upgrading stand-alone.

And the reward for completing the 100 floor dungeon? Its the most adorable thing yet. Most adorable thing ever, nothing else mattered. <3 <3 <3

I got this as my xmas gift. I had no idea what to expect when I saw the cover. But apparently the genre was definitely for me. All about mystery, puzzles and a plot to follow from 8 (technically more) people. Not only that, it got 5 extra endings to boot. :D

So yeah I fired it up without knowing a clue what to expect going in. What I got a nifty intro and a lot of suspense going on. And what awesome sprite animations too. :D

First puzzle was easy enough but yet scary enough to get you started with a hint of being rushed as you noticed your own room is being flooded.

Without spoiling everything, the characters you meet are part of why you go through any door since they're assigned with specific numbered bracelets that allows them to form a digital root in pair of three to five people through one door. And yes, there's plenty of rooms and doors and puzzles. :D

And I went about to complete it too. I knew that first ending wasn't enough. I NEEDED MORE. That's the down/positive side of this game. The endings seemed... so abrupt and it just ends. But fortunately it throws you for the loop regarding the characters you have chosen to go with (or rather which doors you chosen to go through). It definitely kept the game fresh and interesting in several playthroughs. Not only that, you get the speedy text option where you can blitz through text that you've seen before and it'd stop at that you haven't read. Nifty, too bad they couldn't do the same for puzzles though. But its still so awesome enough for me to be able to solve on my own. :D

So it was truly worth to complete this at the very least to get the most enjoyment out of the game really. Highly recommend for mystery, puzzle and text adventure lovers. :D

Man yeah, this game rocked. The real reason why I took up the Wii to marathon on. I just finished the prequel to this a while ago. And that game had left me unsettled and wanting MORE for more plot and more awesome tactical endeavors with my favorite units again. And it fulfilled that promise with so much more.

This game was the biggest fire emblem yet I had ever played. With 72 characters to learn/love/converse with in 37 tactical segments to boot! I adore this game so much over the series thus far. It enabled you to take charge on very weak units while learning/adjusting to tactics again from other genres to take up powerful units and still own several chapters with. Really, this game gave you a real freedom to not be all that concerned with leveling all of your characters other besides your own favorites or the ones that you would have to level up with eventually anyway. :)

The plot was great and interesting, the characters were all great and interesting. ;D And yes, I went on EASY MODE. Apparently, easy mode US is actually normal for japanese version. :\ No idea why but personally that's what I recommend anyway just to enjoy the game and not worry too much about losing your favorite units to bullshit moves. Like I do thanks to my impatience... but thankfully greatly rewarded for finishing within 10 turns with lots of bonus exp that you can distribute inbetween chapters. Better yet you can save inbattle and you can definitely do a lot more stuff in this game like forging to checking out other stuff.

Anyway anyway, greatest fire emblem so far. I'm just now can only be let down with some later weak installments. (I'm looking at you Shadow Dragon) I'm so glad I took this up early after finishing the GCN marathon. It definitely made the Wii worthwhile playing on.

This was a b-day gift. Enjoyable text adventure with several stylus tricks in it. But not a whole lot. Like with Hotel Dusk you learn how to converse with a character and see through their weak talking points and get them to spill their guts to you in hyde fashion. :D

I loved Hotel Dusk for their pretentious dark overtones but really, I liked the conversations between characters more of all. And of course exploring and figuring out how to solve a puzzle by interacting with an object (Phoenix Wright style too).

Didn't think I could complete this without at least playing through 3 times for several different outcomes of a conversation with a character (and what to do with that 1000 dollar check). Great little gem imho. Not worth the price though, I'd suggest a rental. Its a real shame that this game was only available in PAL region, and could only imagine how much of a hassle it was to import it when its that small of a game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time (from a completionist point of view)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV is a game that is often referred to one of the best beat'em ups to ever grace the super nintendo system. It was one of the few super nintendo games that I owned as a kid, but I had the liberty of playing this game at the arcade before I ever played it on the snes.

In order to complete this game, you don't really have to do much. It is actually very easy to complete and each play-through of the game can take you anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. You do have to play the game on every difficulty, but beating it on hard is the only way to get the true ending of the game. If you beat the game on any other difficulty besides hard you'll get a message from splinter telling you to play the game on a harder difficulty in order to be true ninja masters.

The only other bit of advice I can give you with regards to completing the game every time you defeat any of the enemies you get points all depending on how you defeat your enemies. For every two hundred points you earn, you get a free life. The best way to reach 200 point is to throw your enemy at the screen. Every time you do this, you get three points because any other way you defeat enemies you will most likely get two points. However the only enemies you can throw at the screen are foot soldiers. The only problem with throwing enemies at the screen is it doesn't work well when your surrounded by enemies. You leave yourself open to be attacked. Use it whenever you have a safe opportunity to do it.

Give this excellent beat'em up a try and it really doesn't require much effort to complete.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep (from a completionist point of view)

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep is yet another spin-off game from the widely popular kingdom hearts series, but this game is a prequel to the original Kingdom Hearts storyline. More than anything this game makes me understand why the Kingdom Hearts series annoys me. However I did make the time to actually complete this game. I will warn you to complete this game is not for the faint at heart. I managed to complete this game at 209 hours, and a hell of a lot of patience since this game actually had the liberty of having one of the most difficult boss fights I've ever had the liberty of fighting in my entire life.

With regards to completing the game you need to play each of the three story-lines and 100% each of them. However you need to beat all three of the story-lines on proud mode (which is the second highest difficulty on the game). The reason you need to do this is that this psp game has trophies. In order to get one of the eight trophies you need to beat all three story-lines on proud mode or higher. So if your a completionist like me you need to put the extra burden on yourself to complete the game on higher difficulty than normal. If you are curious what the rest of the trophies are, here they are:

Arena Sweeper Proof you have finished every quest.
Clockwork Proof you have played for 80 hours or more.
Dairy Devotee Proof you have activated Frozen Fortune 30 times.
In the Munny Proof you have amassed 33,333 munny.
Keyslinger Proof you have taken out 9,999 Unversed.
One Down Proof you have finished one character's story.
Power Walker Proof you have taken 99,999 steps.
Trinity Trophy Proof you have finished all the stories in Proud Mode or
above.

For the most part if you are going to attempt to complete the game, you will automatically get many of the trophies anyway since they are very straight forward to get. The only one that will probably give you a lot of difficulty is the arena sweeper because you need to complete every arena battle in the game which can be a little difficult. These trophies become available once you beat one of three story-lines. You then get an option on the opening screen called trinity archives. As far as I know, getting the trinity trophy is the only true missable in the entire game. When you play any of three story-lines you can go back to any of the levels at any time, so even if you miss a treasure chest, sticker or particular item you can always go back to get it. Once you actually beat each of the story-lines you will be given a report of the game to show how much you have actually completed.

Once you actually go through each of the story-lines after you pass the first level you'll gain access to the report log. This report log will give you the foundation to know if your game has been truly completed. The report log consists of the following.

Story (This is actually fairly easy to complete, once you've beaten the game you have pretty much done each part of the storyline for each specific character. Very easy to complete.)

Secret Reports (You can gain access to all the secret reports by playing through the game and getting every treasure chest. You can get one report by completing one of the arena battles as well. This part is actually not hard to complete.)

Game Records (This one can get a little tedious since you need to complete every mini game in disney town, every battle in the mirage arena, and every command board in the entire game. You also need to use the command link with every side character in the game and use their special attacks to make sure you get a hit count of every special attack in the game.)

Character Files (Character files get documented every time you meet a character from the disney or square enix universe. It is actually fairly easy to complete this section in each of the three story-lines. Since you have to associate with all the characters as you progress through the story. The secret bosses can also appear in the character file but as far as I know they don't contribute to the 100% completion.)

The Unversed (In order to get this section of the report log completed you have to defeat every variant of the unversed and you can't do it by simply completing the story aspect of the game. Some variants of the unversed can only be defeated in the mirage arena, so your going to have to beat every mission in the mirage arena just to make sure you get every type of unversed in the game.)

Ice Cream Guide (Throughout the entire game, in each of the world there are certain areas in which enemies known as prize pods will appear. When you hit these prize pods, you get items to make specific types of ice cream. You need to make every type of ice cream and each of characters story lines use different types of flavors. You won't find all the ingredients in all the worlds though. One ingredient you can only get in a certain arena battle in the mirage arena so keep that in mind.)


Command Collection (Commands are pretty much special attacks that each of your three characters can use. However you can only unlock them my meeting special requirements such as defeating a certain number of unversed, collecting a certain amount of money, or using a specific spell or skill. Each character as quite a few commands to unlock and in order to get the gold mickey mouse icon you need to unlock each and every one of them.)

Treasures (Each world that you visit will have a certain number of treasure chests you can acquire. The best thing about this aspect of the report log is that it will actually tell you how many treasure chests you need to find in each of the worlds. It won't tell you where they are, but just remember even if you miss a treasure chest you can go back to the worlds at any time to get them if you missed them. You need to grab all of them however if you want to get the gold mickey mouse icon for treasures in the report log. Also if your dedicated to getting every skill and spell in the game then you definitely need to grab every treasure chest.)


Sticker Album (Throughout each of the worlds, you will see gold icons in the shape of crowns. Some of them you can get right away, others you will need to get certain skills in order to get them. These gold crowns are stickers, that you can use to post in a photo album, which will give you certain items. The sticker album will also show you how many stickers are in each of the worlds so keep a close eye out. You to get every one of them and post them in the sticker album to get the the gold mickey mouse icon next to the sticker album.)

When you get a gold mickey mouse icon next to each of these in the report log then you've completed everything specific in each part of the report log. When you beat the game with everything in the report log labelled with a gold mickey mouse icon you will get an ending screen showing you have completed the game with that specific character to 100%. However don't let that fool you. If you get the trinity archives when you beat every characters story, it will show you that you haven't completed the game to 100% under records. You may of asked yourself what have you missed.

More than likely you will probably have missed the two secret bosses in the boss known as venitas lingering spirit and the mysterious figure. You will need to beat both them with all three character to get the keyblade they will give you after beating them. Also when you complete the mirage arena with all three characters, more mirage arena battles will appear that you need to complete for all three characters. When you do, you get another keyblade for that as well.

There is a lot to do when it comes to completing this game, but out of everything that i had to do for this game defeating the extra bosses was one of the toughest things I had to do, there is a lot of grinding in this game and its going to take a lot of patience to complete this game. At least for me this game is now officially retired for good.

Sonic Rush - DS (From a completionist point of view)

You know sonic has gotten a lot of abuse especially in the mid to late 2000's because it seems like every attempt sega tried to put sonic in a console game was very lackluster at best. However it has been such a long time since I played a sonic game, the last one I actually played and completed was sonic advance 3 for the GBA. I decided it was time to play another sonic game and since my 3DS was the only system I had while working away from home sonic rush was the next game I was going to complete and in all honesty this may not be the deepest or most complex sonic game out there but it was actually really good and most surprisingly I actually loved the music in this game and the level design was fairly half decent. There is one track I'm always listening to especially lately, this game added a few techno/house style tracks in the game and the music definitely made the levels a lot of fun to play.

I'm totally addicted to this track.

YouTube Video

With regards to completion the game is not really all that difficult to complete. It requires two playthroughs, but I do recommend playing it without worrying about missing anything and then eventually go back to get everything you missed most notably the chaos emeralds. As far as I know there are no permanent missables. I managed to complete this game in about 2.5 playthroughs.

When you start the game you have the choice of choosing one of two characters. The characters are Sonic the Hedgehog and Blaze the Cat. It really makes no difference on who you want to play first. The bosses and levels are completely the same even though the order of the stages are different for each character and you do have an extra task to do in the sonic levels which is collecting all 7 chaos emeralds.

Both Sonics and Blazes story are a little different but they end with the same result.

Sonic Playthrough

Sonic goes through the stages in this order:

Leaf Storm
Water Palace
Mirage Road
Night Carnival
Huge Crisis
Altitude Limit
Dead Line
Final Zone

Each stage has three levels, the first two levels are standard platforming levels while the third level is the boss for that specified stage. While playing as sonic one thing you'll have to watch out for when playing the first two levels of each stage are devices called special gimmicks. Special gimmicks are rotational wheels which are moved by your tension gauge and if you spin it fast enough you'll be transported to the bonus level with an opportunity to get a chaos emerald for that specified stage if you get enough rings. Even if you don't get enough rings to get the chaos emerald you can still use the special gimmick just as long as you have enough energy for your tension meter which can be refilled by performing tricks, defeating enemies, and opening up specific item boxes. The bonus stages just like every sonic game will get progressively more difficult so you can't simply use the special gimmicks in the easiest stages to get all the chaos emeralds, There are a total of three special gimmicks in each level for the specified stage except the boss level. You have more than enough opportunities (a total of 6) to grab a chaos emerald for the specified stage.

When you defeat a level for the specified stage you get a rank anywhere from C to S which is based on your score all depending on how fast you finished the level, how many rings you accumulated, and how many tricks you have performed throughout the level. Thankfully getting s ranks does not get anything extra so its purely for bragging rights.

You keep doing that for each stage until you fight the final boss and get the regular ending.

Then its on to the second playthrough.

Blaze Playthrough

Blaze goes through the stages in this order:

Night Carnival
Leaf Storm
Mirage Road
Water Palace
Altitude Limit
Huge Crisis
Dead Line
Final Zone

Blaze's playthrough is far more simpler because you don't have to play any bonus stages. She will get a sol emerald every time she defeats the stage boss. So when you beat the game she'll have obtained all 7 sol emeralds. You'll get the normal ending for her playthrough.

Once you have beaten Blaze's story and Sonic's story (granted you have collected all 7 chaos emeralds) its time to fight the true boss of the game in order to get the best ending. A third option will come up when the character select screen comes up. You select the third option in order to fight the true final boss and get the best ending for the game. Using the power of the emeralds you turn into SuperSonic and SuperBlaze and alternate taking on Dr Eggman and Dr Eggman Nega. Once you have defeated the boss you have successfully completed story mode to 100%.

The only other thing you need to do is complete the time trials for all the levels and bosses. Once you have completed all the time trials and beat the story mode to 100% you have successfully completed the game.

It is definitely a solid sonic game and I really loved the music for this title.

FF XIII was slated when it came out. Old school FF fans hated that you couldn't explore huge areas and there were no towns. Newcomers complained there was too much cutscene, not enough game and the combat was messy. Both those groups of people can suck a dick.

I actually really liked FF XIII. Sure, the levels are more or less tubes right up till near the end but all "exploring" has ever done in FF games is make you walk further to generate more random battles, there's never been any real sense of excitement in finding stuff for me and with no random battles, there's simply no point in making people walk further for no reason because if you don't want to fight you can swerve the monsters. Likewise with towns, all they've ever been is a long-winded, 3d menu. I prefer having everything laid out easy to find in one place.

I think the reason I like FF XIII and a lot of people don't is that I've always been one for playing rpgs for the system, not for the story. My focus is generally on working out how the system works and figuring the best way to maximise stats and so forth. The badly voiced chatty bits in between times kinda get in the way for me. With FF XIII you are battling down a series of corridors until you reach near the end when it opens up but when it does open up, it's a stat-maxers dream, primarily because of the monster hunts. Sent on a series of missions to take down various big monsters, these in some part represent a real challenge that take some careful planning to beat. Sure you can level up and bull your way past most of them but the fun for me was beating them as early as possible (And using the resulting loot to be hilariously over-powered). I didn't set out to unlock everything in the game but as a side-effect of hunting down all the monsters, I ended up getting most of the achievements anyway. The ones I didn't get are the ones that rely on a massive amount of boring grinding, to complete everyone's Crystarium and beat the last few monsters you'll never take without doing that.

As a FF game, most of you would probably hate it. As an interesting exercise in number crunching, it's worth a look!

I'll admit I've not actually finished this yet but this is a cautionary tale as much as anything. Love the game, romped through, made a few dumb choices but toughed it out to end up with a team of xenos-murdering psychos, launched into the last mission, saved before I left just in case, fought my way easily enough through the base, accidentally rushed into the last room, got killed quickly, pressed retry, had a glitched save that would only let team members with flight packs into the last room (Meaning only 4 of my 6), got owned, reloaded, same thing happened, tried to entice the aliens out of the room, didn't work, went to reload my pre-last mission save, realised I'd saved over it with the glitched one by mistake, was sad.

My previous save is only a few hours before that but it's long enough to have disheartened me for a bit. I'll get back to it at some point.

Achievement-wise, there's nothing too taxing in here. The only one likely to cause problems is the one for completing a game on Classic Ironman. The game is pretty brutal in Classic mode and a wrong choice can easily lead to your whole team getting wiped out. I imagine beating the game on Impossible Ironman is an exercise in extreme frustration but it's not necessary for an achievement. If you find Impossible tough then you could always save and reload through the missions and slug it out that way.

Annoyingly for a long tp play game, you have to finish the whole thing five times for a full house but I'll manage that over the years I imagine.