sdcSpade

I expected it to be a more simple platformer, since it’s on the Game Boy, but it’s actually a lot more open the same way future games in the series are. But I can’t say much more than that yet. Like I said, I’ve been mostly grinding money because just getting to the second town with just your basic attack was an ordeal.

I’ve made little progress in Baten Kaitos’ New Game Minus. Skipping past all cutscenes and dialogues and still being able to oneshot every boss is just not particularly interesting. The game truly starts when enemy encounters start to outspeed me, I guess.

This week, I also got my new PC up and running. And so I do what anyone with a beefy new PC would do: Play an older game I could have played on my old PC whenever I wanted to! I’ve been playing Batman: Arkham Origins. I’ve played the game and its predecessors on console already, but for completion’s sake I’m doing them again on Steam before eventually playing Arkham Knight for the first time, which would not have run on my old PC, at least not well. I love this series. Origins isn’t very well received, but I think it’s underrated. It definitely has flaws, but it doesn’t deserve that much hate. But to be honest, all it takes to make me happy is a set of Predator Maps with a varied group of playable characters. It’s just a shame that, unlike the previous Arkham titles, I can’t really complete the game. Some achievements are linked to a long-defunct online mode. It’s been restored by the community, but I really don’t care about it.

I also want to eventually get into the Shantae series. I’ve played one of them on the Wii U (Pirate’s Curse, I believe?), so I’ve gone back to the very beginning and started Shantae on the Game Boy! The spritework and animations are quite impressive for Nintendo’s old handheld brick, though I’ve run into some issues differentiating between foreground and background objects. The number of times I’ve fallen through a platform that was actually in the background is too damn high! I’ve only made it to the second town because I stopped to grind the money necessary to get some expensive items that unlock new moves. I’m sure I would get the money eventually, but armed with just the hair whip alone I find the game difficult in a way that’s not fun.

New Game Minus is its own achievement, so I might as well try.

A normal playthrough should take ~50 hours.

New Game Minus disables levelling up for the game. But since it carries over most of everything else, like a New Game Plus, the raw strength of my cards is still going to carry me through most of the game anyway. And when it does, I can adjust my deck for whatever the boss is weakest to, which you never have to do in a normal playthrough because it’s rather easy if you can play your straights consistently. I’m mostly worried about a fight against three antagonists at the same time, because defense is the awkward part to optimize for me.

I’ve had to fill out Divorce Papers this week… in Baten Kaitos. I made a screenshot, in case this sounds too ridiculous. Divorce Papaers + John Hancock’s Pen gives you Consolation Pay, which sells for a lot of money. Money is never really an issue in this game, but I guess if you really wanted to grind it, you could repeatedly fill out divorce papers? I wonder if any Combo ideas during the brainstorming were shot down at all at this point…

But I’m also done with SP Combos! My card collection now sits at 1017/1022 and yes, one of the missing cards is still the two-week one. My in-game time is past 336 hours though, so I just have to catch up on the lost menu time, however much that is. The others are two cards that I got through the combos that, unfortunately, both change shapes after 24 hours twice, so I’ll need another 48 hours. But I’ll take those into New Game Minus with me if they’re the last ones missing. Even if their timer does reset, I’ll lose 24 hours at worst and that’s not a big deal when I have to beat the game again, essentially. So now I’m grinding some endgame weapon cards until my Shampoo finally changes. It should be soon…

Edit:
I got it! My hair has never looked more splendid. I also forgot this card unlocks the last pieces of music, so there’s technically two achievements tied to this nonsense. That means I can start New Game Minus, which is probably not going to be too difficult until I’m back in the endgame if I really get to keep all of my cards.

I have realized that the SP Combos in the journey towards Baten Kaitos completion are something I have never even attempted in the original version because I have no memory of the nonsense I have to do here. It’s like I’m playing a different game all of a sudden. Here’s my personal highlight so far:

One combo requires the card “Good Fortune” with two other items. The fortune cards rotate through various forms, the Good variant stays that way for a whopping seven seconds. And I learned the hard way that cards can indeed change in combat. So I make sure I have all the cards I need in my hand and cycle through everyone’s turns, hoping the right character’s turn comes up during the seven-second window the fortune lines up.

“But surely the reward for such a combo is amazing!”, I hear you say. The combo results in the card “Pretty Flowers”, which is pretty worthless. And even if it wasn’t, you can just put four flowers together to get the same result. And after ten hours, the flowers rot away anyway.

I don’t alyways complete games. I’ll usually try, but stop when things get too stupid. But there’s stupid-stupid and there’s funny-stupid. And it simply fascinates me how nonsensical this game is beneath the surface, in that dark place a normal playthrough would never touch. I’m now ~50% through the SP Combos, but the pace varies on the cards needed. Every now and then, I have to grind one from an enemy and this game has a stronger desire sensor than even Monster Hunter, I swear.

But aside from the wall of text, I did complete Mario Bros. Wonder. What a delightful final boss and a challenging special world to round it off. I said I wasn’t going to start another B-game, but then I remembered I paused We Love Katamari Reroll for the sake of playing Mario, so I got back to that. I’m sorry for forgetting you, King of All Cosmos. I do love Katamari, I swear!

“Fixed an issue where, when racing against a Ghost in Time Trials on Yoshi’s Island, the red road would not appear even though the Ghost touched the Winged Cloud.”

Why should the road appear when the ghost activates it? The ghost isn’t supposed to interact with the environment in a way that affects the player.

Completing Baten Kaitos is something I was never able to do when I tried back on the Gamecube and it got to the point where I didn’t even enjoy the game anymore. But with the HD Remaster and the New Game+ option, I knew that even if I miss something, it wouldn’t be the end of my entire save file. I ended up not needing it, but it removed the stress.

Wonder isn’t quite beaten yet, but I also have no plans to start anything fancy, especially on the PC side. This is the month I plan on replacing my PC from 2016 in its entirety, so I’ll have to focus on that first.

Alright, weekly Baten Kaitos update. I left the final dungeon right after the penultimate boss became the true final boss because there’s a single unique card that was awkwardly placed in between them and I wanted it now. With it, I now have all weapon, armor and photo cards, which required having a guide nearby for the missables. So now I’m grinding out SP Combos, which isn’t hard, but takes patience. Especially because the list isn’t ordered in a logical way! Some recipes require cards you get from combos much further down the list, so I have to jump around a lot. And then there’s the combos that require cards that have aged to a certain point, but not too far, so I had to buy some grapes and wait for them to rot and become wine in six hours before I can do the combo that needs them. It would have been easier to do them throughout the game, but there’s ~140 of them and none of them just happen naturally. I would have had to spend a lot of time researching when to do all of them before I could even start playing the game. But it’s not like I’m pressed for time, the shampoo is still sitting there, waiting to age…

Today, I beat the last regular world of Mario Bros. Wonder. I’m backtracking to all the Special World locations before continuing though.

You can get really strong weapons really fast with Fusion, so I was able to take down black enemies with ease two hours after landing on the surface when in BotW, I was avoiding them for days. Other than that, I’d say the games are equal. The new enemies like Gleeok seem hard when you first run into them, but once you find a way that works, every enemy becomes a chump.

Shrines, on the other hand, I thought were harder but not in a good way. Where BotW asked you “Can you solve this puzzle?”, TotK asks you “Can you get this to work?” and it’s just annoying when you know what to do and still need to do it several times until it works.

I never noticed anything being wrong either. I don’t think the idling would be related, but that’s the only thing that’s different now. And it stays on 100% for a few hours before doing it regardless.

My in-game time is ~115 hours now. It’s more difficult because the Switch goes into Sleep-Mode and stops the timer and after a while, the battery starts draining while in the dock, so I try not to overdo it for the console’s sake.

Still playing Baten Kaitos. Still having Baten Kaitos run in the background when I’m not playing it to grind out time.

I recently beat Assassin’s Creed and started continuing my journey through gaming history I missed out on with Beyond Good and Evil. I’m only three hours in but I can already clearly see why this game is still such a fan favorite. This is a level of charming I haven’t seen since Banjo-Kazooie!

My biggest pipe dream is an F-Zero with an extensive single player mode that’s not even a racing game but plays like a Yakuza game instead. The series has such amazingly stupid characters that it would be a shame if nothing was ever done with them. I want Captain Falcon beating up people in Mute City in that over-the-top Yakuza style.

The achievement is to have all Magnus (cards) in your collection. Some cards evolve over time, like fresh green bananas that deal damage becoming regular bananas that heal and later spotty bananas that deal damage again. The shampoo card is one that, in its description, says you should try using it for two weeks. And they mean that literally. If you have that card for 336 hours, it transforms into a card called ‘Splendid Hair’. It’s not even a useful card, it just also unlocks the last few tracks in the music collection for some reason. It’s legendary in how stupid it is.

And yes, there are 100% speedruns of the game that take slightly over two weeks!

Caligula was okay. I enjoyed the plot of the first one more, but the sequel was a lot easier to complete all sidequests in. For the record, the first game had over 500 NPCs each with a quest and most of them were roaming around certain areas, whereas the sequel has far less and you can easily look up where they are.

Since I’ve finished Caligula Effect 2, I started the Baten Kaitos Remaster today! The plan is to beat the first one, use Super Mario Bros. Wonder as an interlude, and then jump into Baten Kaitos Origins. Which would have been fine, as I expected to play Baten Kaitos normally, without trying to complete it. But alas, the game has in-game achievements so… “Ah shit, here we go again!”. And the 300% game speed option does NOT affect card evolutions, so I’ll have to let the game idle until my shampoo has been in my inventory for 336 hours because that’s normal, right? That’s what normal games ask normal players to do, right?

But there’s one more amazing thing I need to share. So the remaster only has the original Japanese voice acting, not the hillarious English one. But apparently, the opening cutscene before the title screen is English in both versions anyway. Except the overall quality in the Japanese version is better than the English one? How did that happen? Why did the developers of the Japanese version hire English voice actors for that intro, despite all the same characters being voiced in Japanese in the actual game? And if that was so important to them, why were they fine with the localizers getting their voice actors from the bargain bin instead? It’s all so bizarre!

I also started playing We Love Katamari Reroll as my B-Game on the side. Not much to say about it yet, but I wish there was an easy way to see all the stages with target times for their ‘good’ endings and what’s still to collect in them.

For the most part, I see the two original Paper Marios as equals. They both have good and bad chapters, so it’s hard to say which one I prefer on that front. The aspect that pushes TTYD slightly ahead for me is that your stats aren’t capped at 50/50/30 anymore. You can play the game with 10HP and a goombillion badge points if you want and the game won’t stop you!

I need to put extra effort in Caligula Effect 2. I thought the Baten Kaitos remaster released at the end of the month, not the middle, so I’m behind pace.

In the meantime, I also started the first Assassin’s Creed for the first time. I figured, if the series got as big as it is, it’s worth looking into it, especially when you can get the old ones for dirt-cheap in any given Steam Sale. I’m not surprised, but I didn’t expect the blueprint to the Ubisoft Open World formula to be this complete this early, in a game that isn’t even open world yet. It’s fun though, but it’s showing its age.

I don’t think a remaster would cut it. The game clearly wanted to be an MMORPG and I think they’d have to go all in and actually remake it as one.

Finally started Caligula Effect 2 recently. It took me a while to remember what I liked about the first one enough that I bought the sequel, but fighting an enemy three times your level reminded me what made the combat so great. I kinda regret not having put the game on the highest difficulty now, because it definitely shines the most when you’re in mortal danger.