Beaten

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 – Post coming soon.

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech – I love the SteamWorld games. SteamWorld Dig, Dig 2, and Heist were all a lot of fun. Hearing they were doing a full on RPG sounded great; then I learned it was a card based rpg. I don’t like card based rpgs. They always seem like they are adding something that actively makes the game worse. That holds true here. The game assembles a fun cast and gives them some interesting ways of interacting in battle, but ties it all to a deck building component that is just not fun. Then in battle, drawing cards is completely random. But hey, there is a fun world, a peppy but not completely weightless story, and some really good characters to explore them with. If you like, or are even neutral on, card games then this game might be for you. Even not liking its central mechanic, I enjoyed this game well enough.

Blaster Master Zero 2 – This game really expects the player to come in experienced from the first Blaster Master Zero. If there has been a significant time lapse between them, like I had, there is going to be some difficulty getting acclimated. This time, the metroidvania action is spread around a multitude of small planets. It is still a lot of fun to explore. You have sides scrolling sections mostly in the tank, and then top down sections on foot. The game does a good job of spreading the action across the two styles. The same can be too hard for me, some of the bosses are just not fun, but for the most part is a really good throwback action game. I hope they keep making these.

Ongoing

Atelier Ryza – I am still trying to really get going in this game. I have spent a little time with this on several evenings, but I haven’t really hit the point where I start making real progress. I like it so far.

Upcoming

Mega Man X series – I have the collections for this series and I have never really played X6, X7 or X8. Or much of X2 or X3 for that matter. This feels like the time.

Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis – For some reason, I’ve been having a hankering to play this GBA game. It was one of the games that got me to buy a GBA. I was big into the second half of this series, falling in love with Ogre Battle 64 and keeping it going with this Tactics Ogre. I never managed to track down the earlier games and have barely touched these two in the last decade or so. I kind of want to see if I still like it.