Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 23 of 2025)

[Cacher]

New week, new thread! What are you playing?

I am continuing Yumina the Ethereal. The game is very long so I am breaking down the content for future reference.

• Act 1 Bad Ending <- I am here
• Main Route: Kurokawa Kirara (Normal difficulty)
• Main Route: Okitsu Ai (Hard difficulty)
• Main Route: Midorishita Yumina (Very hard difficulty)
• True Ending Epilogue

In-between them are 4 DRPG-esque dungeons with 120 floors and numerous side quests.

1st main route requirement: 30 floors each
2nd main route requirement: 60 floors each
3rd main route requirements: 100 floors each

Every route (including bad ending section) has their own events to watch and skills to obtain, and the true ending epilogue was locked behind all three of them so I need to go through everything. All progressions (skills, skill tree, character levels, dungeon etc) are carried onto the next playthrough. I am trying to get the bad ending first so the dungeon progression does not matter now. Conservative-speaking, it will probably take me over 150 hours to complete everything.

Currently I am grinding before facing the Act 1 final boss. Should be able to go after her within a few days.

 

[texhnolyze]

Back to The Division 2 thanks to the 90% discount a few days ago. I'm essentially double dipping though since I already bought it on uplay back then. I was prepared to start over with a new agent, but to my surprise Steam version connects to uplay I can continue with my old agent. The game even synced all the achievements to Steam.

Lots of new stuff has been added since then. So yeah, I'm fully onboard with this and already spent 15 hours so far.

 

[Ascheroth]

Continued on with my Kingdom Hearts binge.

• Finished Dream Drop Distance, which I really liked overall.
• Played through 0.2 Birth by Sleep and it was great to see the jump in visuals going from handheld games to the first console one since KH2. Short but very fun. Nice to get more Aqua.
• Watched the Back Cover movie. It was okay.
• Started KH3 proper!

Also did a short aside trying Ultros from the current Choice. On paper I should have really liked it: metroidvania with a unique artstyle and setting, but unfortunately I dropped it after the first "cycle", which took roughly an hour. I really don't want to play a metroidvania where I apparently constantly lose all (most of?) my progression.

 

[Nebulys]

I’m playing The Last of Us Part II on my new PS5 Pro.

Should keep me busy until I start Mario Kart World later this week.

 

[Parsnip]

More Ryza 2.
And a bunch of HoMM3.

 

[curi0usBystander]

Played a bit of Street Fighter 6. But it's starting to get hot so i can't really concentrate,

 

[Cacher]

Currently I am grinding before facing the Act 1 final boss. Should be able to go after her within a few days.

I lied. Just beat the boss. The fight took me 15-20 mins.

Looks like I can start the main route tomorrow.

 

[Kvik]

I've finished with Atelier Escha & Logy over the weekend. I had an enjoyable time with it, even though it's not exactly the best Atelier game imo.

The next game on the docket is Fantasian Neo Dimension. I was surprised at the variety of the dioramas. These are not easy to make, and I can imagine that they aren't cheap to make either. The result is great, though. It looks beautiful on HDR, too. I feel like this game was made for people who enjoy Squaresoft RPGs made in 1995-2005, because man. The Staples Are Coming In Full Force.

I'm playing on Hard, which is the original difficulty when it was released for Apple platform, and it's not too tough so far, although it might change in the latter half of the game.

 

[Panda Pedinte]

I'm playing Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo and while one can think at firt glance is that it's just a homage to an especific era of gaming until you start the game and see that it can stand on their own legs.

The movement so far is the biggest surprise in the game, chaining the traversal abilities to solve puzzles and cross the rooms just feel amazing.

The art is charming and the OST is catchy with even a song(s?) composed by Yoko Shimomura.

 

[rickyson33]

I haven't really been in a game playing mood in general lately but I have been playing a run of Monster Train 2 every day or so lately

it feels pretty iterative(albeit a bit deeper with some new mechanics) so it doesn't quite hit the point I keep thinking a game in this genre will one of these days where I go from being like 90% sold on it and playing double digit hours if I really like it to 100% and hitting triple digits but it's basically the first game but better so I have been enjoying it considering the first one was my favorite of this sort of game

 

[einstellung]

Being a lazy student, my Spanish progress has been slow. But I have achieved more than nothing. I completed my goal of finishing both paths through Star Ocean The Second Story R while playing in Spanish. Meaning finishing the game with both Claude and Rena. First time was looking up meanings every 3 seconds. Second time was more difficult than expected, but only looking up meanings every 30 seconds for the first half. Then maybe every 2 minutes thereafter. I didn't just read. I also harvested words for flashcards from the scenes the first protagonist doesn't witness.

The second time through I got better at identifying idioms and phrases without knowing exactly what they meant before looking them up, which allowed me to make even more flash cards. And also more useful flash cards.

After 11 months, the very slow journey I've been chipping away at is over. Finished the game all the way through for the second time. I can now read books meant for 13-year-olds in Spanish at a "Needs Improvement" level. I made 5,000 flash cards from Star Ocean.

Certainly not the best way to learn a language. But it did get me somewhere eventually. That's better than I've done before in my very underwhelming foreign languages adventures. Reading and listening are very different skills. I am Alberto Einstein at reading compared to my listening. Next step is to pivot to listening practice.

 

[Cacher]

Progress so far. Story was not particularly good but I Iike that all the characters have decent depth. The four main characters being dorks in varying degrees is also a plus. Very funny writing at times.

• Act 1 Bad Ending
• Main Route: Kurokawa Kirara - WIP
• Main Route: Okitsu Ai
• Main Route: Midorishita Yumina
• True Ending Epilogue

Dungeons:

Marane's Maw - 20/120
Mezelt Tomb - 20/120
Key to Heaven Irukaruo - 0/120
Path of Cracks- 0/120

 

[Durante]

On the weekend I put 14 hours into Elden Ring Nightreign (in coop). I wrote about it in the Steam thread already after the first day, and my overall impression hasn't changed much: the moment-to-moment gameplay is great fun, and some of the new character kits are excellent, but the rogue-lite meta-progression is weak.

In terms of single-player I've continued my quest to actually finish The Hundred Line. Luckily, after several routes which were just complete filler (at least in terms of moving the overall story forward) I seem to be back on one that actually matters.
One thing that I never expected but which gave me some motivation to not just drop it is that they actually patched two of my larger usability/time-wasting issues: you can now skip movies more quickly, and you can skip the bell ringing animation completely. Of course, the implementation still sucks (if I skip it then its because I want to move on quickly, not stare at a black screen for over a second), but it's a big improvement for two of the most egregious time-wasters in the game previously.

 

[Blizniak]

25h into Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.
I barely ever finish RPGs so I can see myself dropping this at some point as the Bethesda formula is starting to get to me. It is however really good. Not as pretty as big budget games but it makes up for it artistically and the setting is really cool. I've not played the tabletop games but I did get sucked into the first game a week prior so it's cool to see this world in a whole new perspective.
There's a lot of meat to the game, I expected it to be a small scale Oblivion but I'm in the second region and there's at least one more and they are filled to the brim with stuff to find and do. Writing's not amazing but there's plenty of quests that give you meaningful choices and stuff you did 15 hours ago can impact what happens next.
I can definitely recommend this one already.

 

[SaberVS7]

Stellaris

Year 2360, Fastest-speed is starting to run slow, the rest of my Federation are all Pathetic in every category, and I have a few too many Protectorates giving me Divided Patronage penalties with my more productive vassals co-prosperity sphere members.

Time to start Integrating and leave my Federation so I can start throwing kindling into The Lathe?

 

[d00d3n]

I spent the day trying to replay FF7 Rebirth on PC. The PC port unfortunately seems to have some issues ... There are so many sources of stuttering in the game! You solve one issue, and it is on to the next one. One of the nastiest issues I have solved today was some weird bug with the iGPU (of my 9800x3d) being active resulting in the most severe stuttering issues during all traversal, which was completely solved by disabling the iGPU in motherboard bios settings. The major remaining issue I am trying to solve is quite distracting stuttering when the camera cuts in cutscenes, where my working theory is that frame limiting should help with this, but I have to continue playing the game to reach more cutscenes to test if it works ...