Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 52: Goodbye 2022)

[Cacher]

FINAL WEEK OF THE YEAR! I wish you all have a nice and well-heated (those in the Northern Hemisphere anyway) year end. What are you playing?

I reached the final chapter of Harvestella. Absolutely amazing ride. I had multiple great moments during both main story and side quests. Now I am clearing companion stories as well as some farming tasks before entering the final dungeon. I think there is going to be a considerable amount of end game content judging by the number of blank space in the encyclopedia so I would leave some optional things after the final boss.

I also bought and started Assassin's Creed 2 on PC and BanG Dream Girls Band Party on the Switch. Already talked about the former in the steam thread so I will focus on the latter here. It is an Idolmaster-like rhythm game ported from the smartphone to the Switch. Instead of being idols' manager, this game builds around the premise of helping girl bands be better. The main concept of the game is pretty crazy because VAs are required to perform their characters' instrument live in concerts.

I swore to not touch another gacha game in my life but I guess an exception can be made because this game has no microtransaction: all the gacha content are built-in and can be purchased by in-game currency. There are many story segments to unlock and songs to master, and the songs are surprisingly great. Having 5 bands in the game and the style of each band is very different from each other so variation of the songs are great, too. There is also a DLC which adds 2 more bands as well as other content to the game but I haven't gotten it yet. Like most smartphone games, this port has tons of content and I am liking it so far. Very likely that I will stick with it for a long time.

Last but not least, I can't stop listening to these songs so let me share this addiction with you. So many audience in those live clips. This game may be way bigger in Japan than I thought.

 

[Panda Pedinte]

I'll mostly be playing Chained Echoes and P5R. Yesterday I finished Powerwash Simulator and it was a nice and relaxing game.

 

[Stevey]

Max Payne 3 and FEAR 2 currently.

Still a bit of AC: Valhalla as well

 

[curi0usBystander]

Still going through Romancing Saga 2 (glad I found a turbo mod). I got stuck and then unstuck. I've finally become the Final emperor, so I guess there's not much left of the game.

I don't know If I'll try a NG+, to do the stuff I missed. I'll have to think about that.

 

[Parsnip]

Started Days Gone last week and I've been playing that, and by all accounts it's quite lengthy so I'll probably keep playing it for the rest of the week at least.

 

[tetel]

BanG Dream Girls Band Party

Bandori is really fun but it can get pretty stale gameplay-wise - it has limited charting possibilites and relatively samey music. I'm not sure if English mobile version finally caught up (dropped it in late 2020, I think) and has directional flicks now - it should help but then again, flicks are the biggest evil in rhythm games.

 

[curi0usBystander]

Welp, I finished Romancing Saga 2, that final boss was nasty. I ended up cheesing it with a spell that always blocks it's turn., I glad I tried to unlock as much spells/Skills that I could early on.

Now, look If this is a game that is all about costumizing characters, it be nice if I didn't have to return to the starting area everytime i want to change the skills/spells/build of a character it be nice, or at a minimun it be nice to have a way to fast travel out of dungeons (sure, they aren't that big, but it gets annoying).

Anyway, time to decide what to play next.

 

[Deku]

Ending this year with replaying Hitman 2. I always wanted to unlock all achievements for this game. Maybe I can unlock the remaining ones before the year ends. Only got like 13 left

 

[LEANIJA]

I'm game-hopping and have been ever since finishing Dark Souls

Games I've been playing for varying amounts of time...
Disney Dreamlight Valley
Immortals Fenyx Rising
Zachtronics Solitaire
Plague Tale Requiem
Gotham Knights
MS Flight Simulator
Blacktail
Asterigos
Assassins Creed Valhalla
Steelrising
The Uncertain: Light at the End
Sword and Fairy 7
Asterix and Obelix Slap them all
Redress of Mira

cannot really decide/commit to one of them. Will play an hour or two of Game A one day, then an hour of Game B two days later or so, then not play anything for a couple days...only to then play half hour stints of Game C, Game D, Game E, Game F, etc.
BUT Im having fun with each one, at least.
ah well.

–

Ending this year with replaying Hitman 2. I always wanted to unlock all achievements for this game. Maybe I can unlock the remaining ones before the year ends. Only got like 13 left

Hitman 2 is great (as are Hitman 1 and Hitman 3, of course) but there are some co-op sniper achievements that are a bit annoying to get, Stallion Free did those with me a couple months ago
I still didnt do the solo sniper achievements because the Hitman sniper maps arent my bag.

 

[undu]

Bought Elechead with the sale and got into it, pausing my Persona 5 Royal effort.

It's a short, very well thought-out puzzle-platformer. In about 3 hours I got to the end, now I'm looking for all the collectables. I recommend it to finish the year

 

[Deku]

Hitman 2 is great (as are Hitman 1 and Hitman 3, of course) but there are some co-op sniper achievements that are a bit annoying to get, Stallion Free did those with me a couple months ago
I still didnt do the solo sniper achievements because the Hitman sniper maps arent my bag.

I thought that the multiplayer part of the Sniper Assassin was disabled. I remember I had to do those achievements before they disabled it

 

[Parsnip]

Hitman 2 is great (as are Hitman 1 and Hitman 3, of course) but there are some co-op sniper achievements that are a bit annoying to get, Stallion Free did those with me a couple months ago
I still didnt do the solo sniper achievements because the Hitman sniper maps arent my bag.

I think I actually ended up just SAMming the co-op achievements.
The sniper maps suck in general because the progression, mastery, score multiplier, everything, it's all designed to be such a huge grind. And you can't realistically even try the 1,000,000 point achievement until you have done most of the challenges in previous runs to get enough multiplier. And it's just so much waiting for the map to go through its cycle. And they also brought the maps to H3 and while I haven't checked, I bet they didn't tune the grind down even a little bit. At least they didn't bring the co-op achievements forward it seems, but they sure did bring the 1,000,000 point one. I'm not looking forward to doing those 3 maps again.

 

[Deku]

I think I actually ended up just SAMming the co-op achievements.
The sniper maps suck in general because the progression, mastery, score multiplier, everything, it's all designed to be such a huge grind. And you can't realistically even try the 1,000,000 point achievement until you have done most of the challenges in previous runs to get enough multiplier. And it's just so much waiting for the map to go through its cycle. And they also brought the maps to H3 and while I haven't checked, I bet they didn't tune the grind down even a little bit. At least they didn't bring the co-op achievements forward it seems, but they sure did bring the 1,000,000 point one. I'm not looking forward to doing those 3 maps again.

Totally agree on everything. This could be a separate game

 

[LEANIJA]

I thought that the multiplayer part of the Sniper Assassin was disabled. I remember I had to do those achievements before they disabled it

I think they disabled matchmaking but you can still directly invite someone (if I remember that correctly)

but yeah, I see it the same as you and Parsnip – those achievements couldve been left out.

 

[spiel]

I went and started a new save for My Time At Sandrock to catch up on the major story updates released in the later half of the year. It is consuming my life. I can't stop thinking about fulfilling commissions and running my machines and bribing my favourite townsfolk with gifts. This game is going places. If the quality of writing keeps up, it deserves to land a top spot amongst farming life sims.

 

[Kvik]

Last week I've finished my first play through of Minstrel Song. There are the total of 8 playable characters. Hopefully I will be back for NG+ since I never really went back to finish the other characters in Scarlet Grace either.

This final week, I'm aiming to complete Mahoyo, and play a bit more of Star Ocean 6. The traversal and combat is fun, but the story surely takes its time to get going.

Oh, and I picked up Xenoblade 3 too.

 

[Deku]

Woo, I finished all Sniper Assassin challenges and unlocked achievements for these levels. Now I only got DLC locations left to unlock

 

[Cacher]

Bandori is really fun but it can get pretty stale gameplay-wise - it has limited charting possibilites and relatively samey music. I'm not sure if English mobile version finally caught up (dropped it in late 2020, I think) and has directional flicks now - it should help but then again, flicks are the biggest evil in rhythm games.

Yeah, the game was pretty good. I just finished watching the first season of the anime. Damn...

 

[Parsnip]

Finally managed to not mess up the last globe in the Globesweeper Hex Puzzler.

With that I've finished 41 games in 2022. I have no idea how far exactly I'm in Day Gone, but I suspect I won't have the time to finish it in the next couple of days, so Hex Puzzler's going to be the last finished game for the year.

 

[Cacher]

Finally finished the main story of Harvestella before turning the calendar to 2023. Enjoyed every minute of it. This is going to be my GOTY (since I have never been able to finish Judgement and Xenoblade 3 haha).

 

[Kvik]

I managed to finish Mahoyo this afternoon. It's possibly the best T-M VN I've ever read.

I'll post some longer impression later in the VN thread, but for now, my total is 37 games finished in 2022.

 

[Deku]

100%ed all achievements for Hitman 2. That makes the game "finished", although there are a lot of challenges left to do. But I will do them in Hitman 3 instead.

Also, Hitman 2 is my 100th game with 100% achievements