Munchlax bloated both of my Pearl and Diamond playing times exponentially. I'm now playing Platinum and trying to do it again.

I checked honey trees everyday for months.

Well, obviously both!

But, yeah, I am very much going for a Complete this time. Nothing too crazy like getting Excalibur II, but I do want to get all Skills, all Cards, all Blue Magic, do the Chocobo Sidequest and defeat Ozma. I have only played through the game twice and I never did any of the extra stuff. I have had a desire to replay through the game, so now seemed like a perfect time!

yeah! i played two towers a lot in the early 2000s. going enjoy revisiting

I think going full would be a bit too difficult for me. I have many rhythm games and Atlus/NIS SRPG's that would take many hours for me to complete. I don't have that many hours in my life to do all of that!

I would like to replay some old favorites until Completion and that will be a focus in the future along with buying more games and beating them as well. I was solely focused on beating my Backlog for so long, it is now time to work on the other aspects of the Backloggery as well.

Thank You Very Much!

will rest up for a bit as I enjoy the quiet Backlog.
However, I haven't bought a game since August, so I will be doing some game shopping in the next couple of weeks or so.

What's up! I recall your user name from back in the day, lol.

Are you on a Musou/Warriors binge? I'm loving it. DW2 was my first entry into the Warriors series. I looooved DW for a long time. I played the DW9 demo and wasn't digging it, though.

I really enjoyed AoC, particularly because I really loved BotW. The story is minimal (as with most Warriors games..) but moving. It gets a little whacky later on, but it definitely revealed layers of Zelda you may not have gotten in BotW - I especially like it for that reason. I would say go for it!

I read your notes on DW2 - this is also a good game for busy schedules... you can jump right in and out since the story is pretty clipped. I too am busy and pretty much only game on the weekends.

Jam scale: 7/10

It's decent! Very grindy, very "where do I go now", very NES RPG. But I enjoy it for what it is, and I love the vibe / theme / lore.

Probably not right now. I've just got too many other great games I should be playing and too many other things to spend money on atm. At some point I'd like to look more into the entire rest of the series though.

Hey Mamba! Yeah like 8 years lol. All has been good!

I was gifted Metal Gear through GOG. With a little adjusting from the default settings it seems to be a great way to play it. For some reason they have antialiasing on in the default direct x settings and it makes the game blurry. I just turned it off and set the scaling method to "integer scaling". Looks real sharp now.

I also fiddled with the control settings a little and mapped them to different buttons. I kept trying to open my inventory and accidentally opening the stupid radio. I'm using an xbox one controller.

Hey man, so, your question is the same one I had for years. Some of the achievements for big games I had seen made me go "what the hell is this?" Things like level restrictions, item limits, and other such criteria that would often be grounds for a Master badge over at the Backloggery. That kept me away for a long time. In time I've noticed that the bigger the game, the more try-hard the people making the achievements are.

However, for games that are not Top 10 list material, the achievements are often very reasonable and well-crafted. They have been enhancing my enjoyment of retro games a lot, because it's a cool little reason to go that extra mile. Recently the system as a whole has become way more stable and most of the games are working as they should.

The community is not that great. I personally didn't find it incredibly interesting to get involved in. There's a lot of GameFAQs mentality of "oh, I am good at shooting in videogames so I'm the most awesome person in the planet" which is, you know... unnecessary. But it's perfectly possible to enjoy the website without getting involved.

Do give it a try... add me over there. I'm pretty sure it will add that extra kick to replaying an old game. To me, it was the fuel I needed to 100% the portable Harry Potter games, for example.

I appreciate the encouragement but I'm definitely nowhere close to that, haha. I actually have a big enough backlog spread amongst multiple formats I've struggled to keep track of, so I'm just slowly adding stuff as I get around to playing it.

Maybe someday, eventually, I'll get to that point...

Yeah it's such a strange series for sure. I originally tried the demo for Tri on Wii and was turned off by how many loading areas there were that you had to travel between to track down a monster that was running away. I've briefly tried other demos, and finally just took a gamble on World since it was $15, but I only managed to play a little ways into it before just losing all enthusiasm, even though it was nice to not have so many loading screens. But the Rise demo really made me think "Hmmm this might have something for me." I liked the verticality of the level design and the grappling hook, along with the extremely customizable gyro-based aiming controls for ranged weapons. I still don't know if the core gameplay loop is going to appeal to me, but we shall see!

I really can't rate it as a Monster Hunter game, because actually, part of the reason I got Stories 2 in the first place was to see if a regular ol' RPG could make me feel more interested in the world of Monster Hunter before giving one more attempt at actually getting into one of the mainline games. I wasn't really feeling it with Monster Hunter World, but the demo of Rise seemed a lot more interesting to me... but I'm still unsure if I'll really take to it. Stories 2 is OK... the dungeons are super boring and super samey. I'm unsure if they're all randomly generated or if only some are, but they FEEL all randomly generated because they reuse so much map geometry. Aside from that, it's not bad. I'm not SUPER into monster raising type games (I casually enjoy Pokemon), and the framerate is super terrible on Switch, but it's been enjoyable enough. I don't know yet if it will serve my purpose of hoping it'll help me get into Monster Hunter Rise, but we shall see!

If you want a suggestion from somebody who went through most of them, EOIV is very likely the best one. The difficulty spike between endgame and post-game is much smoother than in the others, and this allows for a more natural progression rather than being suddenly presented with a mountain-sized roadblock. The exploration outside of dungeons is also incredibly fun and fleshed-out. Overall, in case you are not going through them linearly, I'd say it's a great game to prioritize.

NDS Etrian Odyssey 1? You are a brave person indeed.