My new method for making progress? Be in isolation and play a bunch of visual novels.

The downside? All of the visual novels I own are gut-wrenchingly sad.

Help...

Definitely closest in style to RE4, but much more difficult. Brings the survival back into survival horror, where you kick yourself every time you miss a bullet. I'd recommend them.

So it's entirely possible that my first Final Fantasy game to "" (aside from Mystic Quest but that's not a mainline series game) is going to be FF XIV.

HA! Yeah, this is my first time logging in in several months, I think. Kind of sad. I've made a bit of progress on random backlog titles in the past few weeks but still don't have much time for gaming, and the little time I do have I use for Overwatch.

Yup! I'll likely play through VII, VIII, and IX first, but my "goal" is to play through VII through X-2 and Type-0 this year, possibly on a stream since I now finally have a really good audio setup for it.

For some odd reason I thought you had already beaten Bloodborne.

How'd you do with Amelia? I had a surprising amount of trouble there, mostly due to her habit of squatting to refill health in the second half of the fight. My cane wasn't doing enough damage to counter her health gains so it just became an endless cycle. Didn't realize what numbing mist did at the time and the AI summon always died around the time the Amelia started refilling health.

Anyway, did the Hemwick area, bought Ludwig's Sword, went back and stomped the boss.

There's an area coming up I thought was really cool!

I mean, I liked playing AM2R, and it's probably the most accomplished Metroid fan game, but I found it disappointing that it overlooks subtle things Metroid II was doing that I hoped it would have recognized and expanded on. I feel like asking someone if they liked how Metroid II didn't have a map system is a quick way to gauge what side they might fall on.

Looks like you have plenty of games on your plate, but I'd say just play AM2R for 20 minutes if you're curious about it. That will probably give you a good idea whether to continue or not.

Yeah, overall for the year my "progress" is positive by a huge margin due to all the games I got rid of, but I haven't played as many as I'd hoped I would have by now. A huge part of that has been life changes, Overwatch with some of our mutual friends, and especially the blog. I'm following 10 airing anime and watching one completed series at a time as well, plus writing for the blog and taking notes and posting on Twitter as well. So that takes up a considerable amount of my free time--not as much as it might sound like it does at first, but definitely all of the time I would spend playing single-player games, and to be honest the only reason I'm playing Overwatch as much as I am is using it to connect with those guys. So yeah...backlog progress is kind of halted for now. But at least I've already surpassed last year's total, so goals-wise any more I this year is gravy.

Yeah, that was pretty damn exciting. On the next playthrough I killed Smough first and got wrecked by Giant Ornstein.

Ah, gotcha. Doesn't so much sound like my kind of thing but definitely sounds up your alley. There are a couple of hacker-related things that I might re-add to my wishlist eventually provided I finish clearing out my Steam backlog any time soon.

What's this Type:Rider thingy I see you got? Sounds like a weeb game name.

I bought Dark Souls II on the Steam Summer Sale. Played it for three hours, then refunded it. Just a tremendous drop in quality compared to the first one. World design was nonsensical and it seemed like every other enemy encounter was a bullshit gotcha trap. I'm genuinely upset that it sucks this bad, cause I really wanted another game like Dark Souls but don't want to pay $50 for III.

Ah, nice! I like it!

Any Steam games that I have marked "previously owned" are games that are part of one of the early Humble Bundles, or a bundle on Steam, which I deleted. See, if you add a game via a code to Steam, and that code is for multiple games, then when you go to remove that game from your account, it removes all games under that code. Because I didn't want them sitting around, I decided to go ahead and remove them, and mark any games from the bundle that I had already beaten as "previously owned" in case I decide to sometime go back to replay one of them, in which case I'll keep an eye out for a sale and pick it up cheap (which most of them are even at normal price, fortunately).

Didn't think Dark Souls was my bag, but I watched the entirety of Bloodborne and some of Dark Souls III, and figured it was time to give it a shot. Lovin' it so far.

Not sure which Square Enix sale you're talking about, unless you mean one on PSN, in which case, eh. I rarely turn on my PS3/4/Vita these days, since I've been on a PC/Steam kick. The Anime Weekend Sale on Steam is still going on though, so you haven't missed it.

I've been watching anime off and on. I started to rewatch Durarara!! with Isaac in prep for season 2, but that petered out quick for some reason. I did watch a few episodes of One Punch Man the other week though, and that was some quality comedy gold.

Nice! Glad you enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to playing through it myself, though I'll probably restart it when I get back to it for the story's sake (I don't remember much from the part that I played of it).

I kind of did have the bit about playing any game I wanted to play right then out of alphabetical order already in mind, but I'm trying to do so only sparingly, if that makes sense. Just because I know if I allowed myself to play any game I wanted at that moment on the slightest whim, I'd go right back to the way it was before, skipping around from game to game and finishing nothing. So ultimately, it'd have to be something that I REALLY wanted to play (or alternately, something that I wanted to start recording for YouTube) for me to play it out of order, just because the structure of playing stuff (mostly) alphabetically really does help me make some actual progress. At least it feels that way.

Though to be honest, I haven't been playing many games at all since before last weekend, since I've been on a reading kick. Actually the only game I've played at all this week is Ame no Marginal, which ironically is a kinetic novel, so--basically it was just more reading, haha. (Unless you count Tales of Link, but you shouldn't, because it's a mobile game, and mobile games are for filthy casuals. )

I've actually made it out to Barnes & Noble to read for multiple hours every day this week. This may have been the result of a brief lapse in judgment over the weekend which led to my purchasing...a few too many books, let's put it that way. But between Barnes & Noble being a great place to get coffee and read, and my little reading nook in my room finally being set up (remind me to send you pics if you want--it's pretty legit), I'm sensing that my gaming progress is going to slow down a bit for a while. Which, honestly, is a good thing, I think. All things in moderation and all that.

Except buying more games. The Steam Anime Weekend Sale got me.

Yeah, I plan on it at some point, though so far it's been working for me to go through my Steam games alphabetically. It helps to make sure that I give games I haven't tried a chance rather than just front-loading all the games I am 100% sure I will enjoy, and it also gives me direction when choosing what to play next. Not guaranteeing I'll stick with that method, but if I do it'll be a while before I get to Transistor, naturally.

Sweet. Speaking of, what are your thoughts on Transistor? I liked what I played of it but I guess I wasn't in the mood for it at the time, since it got swept to the side even though it was quite good.

Yeah, now that you point it out, the fact that DLC listed separately skews the count higher is a really good point. I've kind of stopped doing that recently, but I should go back and clean that out. I think I'll leave true "expansion packs" like the Elder Scrolls expansions and stuff like Hearts of Stone for The Witcher III listed as separate "games", just because they are substantive to the point of having as much or more content than some shorter games. But DLC packs like the Resident Evil and Magicka stuff I have listed should probably not count. I guess I can look at it this way--if it would feel cheap to get an extra or off of it after beating the main game, then it probably should not be counted separately in the first place (though, of course, it would still count towards status).