Yeah, it’s all over for me. If even Xenoblade Chronicles X couldn’t bring me back to the straight and narrow, I don’t think any “proper” games can tempt me away from the lure of quick gratification gacha/mobile games. I dropped a whole batch last month, but that didn’t stop me from downloading more. I’m also looking forward to trying Persona 5: The Phantom X when it comes out in June 2025, assuming it works on my computer.

What I’ve been playing recently

Epic Seven – The goodies from the Origin Update and the Carrot Exchange event finally ran out, and with that, so did my grand return to the game. It was a good two-month run which bore a lot of fruit: I got some decent gear, and the light summon ticket gave me New Moon Luna, which is great even though I can only build her to 279 speed right now. I managed to auto the Blooming Saag Lich boss and come close to auto-ing Pain Pursuer Moroi and Hopeless Symaqus. Just need a little more attack on my various DPS’s and we’re golden.

Oh, and I finally, finally, after like three years, finally passed Abyss level 102. After reading countless guides and trying more teams than I can remember, I finally got lucky and finished it. I took a commemorative screenshot:

(It’s in French because I’m studying French so I’ve been switching my games to French. It works, if you can resist the temptation to switch back to English out of frustration)

My winning team was Adventurer Ras on Sword of Ezera (he still died though), Kiris on Andre’s Crossbow, Tenebria on Abyssal Crown, and Afternoon Soak Flan on Bloodstone. If you’re stuck there like I was, you can give that team a try, but honestly a lot of that fight is RNG, so once you get the right team together, you just have to keep trying until it all clicks. I think Afternoon Soak Flan helped a lot though, because she did good damage to Celine that brought her HP down quickly, leaving less time for something to go wrong. Kiris also stuck more of her poisons on the successful run, so really it’s all luck.

I made it up to level 105 without major problems, and I’m pretty sure I can finish that with Fenne and Brieg, but I’d already decided to take a break from E7 by then, so I’ll have to pick up where I left off next time I play Epic Seven again, probably around anniversary time.

Love Nikki: Same old, same old. It’s my comfort game where I log in once or twice a day to footle around a bit, look at some pretty pixels and then log out again. I’ve almost run out of non-diamond suits to craft, but I still have plenty of Lifetime suits to work on (currently doing Grice, Minstrel of Time and Icewind Warchant all at the same time), the Agata task suit should be coming out soon, and I have a ton of recolours to work on if I’m ever so inclined. No plans to drop LN any time soon unless they really mess up like I hear they’ve been doing with Infinity Nikki. I dodged a bullet with that one.

June’s Journey: I saw it recommended on YouTube and gave it a try. En français, bien sûr. Actually no, I started out playing it in English, and it just your average cash-grabby timegated puzzle (?) game with a so-so mystery. I liked the 1920s setting and the art, but that was about it. Once I switched the language to French, though, it became a really handy vocabulary drilling tool.

June’s Journey has a lot of limiting systems which force you to play the same stages over and over again while waiting to progress, and while that is infuriating in English, it’s helpful in French because it refreshes your memory so those pesky words finally stick in that ancient brain. The only drawback is that articles like un, une, l’ aren’t included, so you have to cross-check the vocabs elsewhere to know that cintre is… masculin? Huh.

Vita Mahjong and Haru Cats Slide: Random puzzle games I play here and there. They don’t have much dialogue so I left them in English. I used to play a similar “mahjong” game on Windows years ago, but I remember it being waaay harder than this Vita Mahjong game. Either it really was harder so I didn’t know the trick to the game because I was always running out of moves back then. Haru Cats Slide is like Tetris, but with the tiles coming from beneath instead of above. It’s a lot of fun.

Another Eden: Scheduled to be dropped on May 21st once the anniversary rewards run out. I’m bored with the gameplay and annoyed by the story in part 3, so I need a bit of a break.

And that’s all I’m working on these days. I’m trying very hard to get back into XCX, but it’s just not working. I’m thinking of getting Atelier Ryza 2 and Persona 5 Strikers next time they’re on sale to see if they stir up something within me. I was planning to play them anyway.