I dropped Conception II. At some point I didn’t feel like playing it any more, so that was that. It’s in accordance with my motto for 2018: “It’s enough to play just a little bit of a game.” In Conception II‘s case I played a lot and enjoyed it a fair bit, saw most of what it had to offer and I’m not ruling out finishing it someday. For now, it is enough.
The “It is Enough” principle also applies to the next game I played, Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl. I mentioned long ago that I’d always avoided the Etrian Odyssey series because I suspected the presence of F.O.Es would make exploring annoying. Oh, I should explain for the sake of non-fans, F.O.Es are overpowered enemies that you have no chance of beating when you first encounter them. I don’t know why they even exist in this game, but they do. So instead of spending your time happily exploring and hugging the walls to get 100% completion you have to duck and dodge and play peek-a-boo with crazy monsters. Unless you’re super into stealth games, it’s not much fun.
The fun will probably come later once you’re strong enough to come back and take them down, but I don’t want to deal with that right now. That’s why I stayed away from EO so long. But the Etrian Odyssey IV demo was pretty fun, and I’d heard all kinds of improvements (like self-drawing maps) had been made to Millennium Girl so I thought, why not. And then I played for 3 hours. And I realized why not.
The F.O.Es were bad enough, but then you have these rock pig things constantly zooming around the undergrowth. Like seriously, just let me breathe, why are you getting all up in my business, aaarrrgghhh!! Readers will stop and ask me, “But you knew all this before you even started the game!” Yeah, I did. I did but… Huh. I have no excuse.
It’s a colorful and vibrant game with an interesting skill system so maybe I shouldn’t be so hasty to drop it. It’s likely that playing two dungeon crawlers back-to-back is making me less patient with the second one. So Etrian Odyssey Untold is shelved indefinitely while I try something completely different, but I’ll get back to it one day. Maybe.
That “something completely different” was going to be Octopath Traveler but. Eh. I don’t have a Switch any more because my brothers and I dissolved our Switch partnership due to “scheduling conflicts.” The kind of scheduling conflicts you get when you have three homebodies who all love gaming. The good news is I get my money back. The bad news is I don’t want to spend that money on my own Switch, especially since I’ve played what I really wanted to play – Xenoblade Chronicles 2. For the rest of 2018 I’m going to focus on cleaning up any last stragglers on the DS and PSP and exploring a little more on the VITA and PC. That’s enough of an update for one day. See ya!
FWIW, while I also would prefer the EO games ditching the FOEs (which is never going to happen, since that’s part of their identity), they were a lot less annoying in the first three DS games. Starting with IV on the 3DS, the team really went overboard with turning them into movement puzzles. Same for Persona Q. I have yet to see if EO5 does them any better, but I do hope so.
Ick. Persona Q has them too? I was just thinking of it the other day… Welp, that’s one less game on my backlog.
Persona Q is a let down for anyone who likes the Persona series IMO, so you’re not missing much.
Persona Q has good music and decent gameplay. I dont know what makes you so salty over a game LMAO
If it’s just Etrian Odyssey in a Persona skin like they say, then there’s no need for me to rush to play it.
If you don’t like the FOE-System and puzzle gimmick dungeon floors, Persona Q is a pretty big offender on those.
There’s also the fact that they reduce the Persona cast to gimmicky thin stereotyped one trick ponies. Chie talks about meat all the time, Akihito about protein… and pretty much nothing else.
I liked the game well enough, at least for a good chunk. But the final to last stratum, the Inaba Pride one, where you have to constantly dodge some beefy muscle FOEs while someone jokes “bet’cha like those, eh Kanji? Ehhhhh?!” at every corner almost drove me into suicide.
I played P4, but I didn’t see the whole “Kanji = Gay” thing until I went online. So he thinks musculuar guys are cool, so what? He’s a young boy with a sensitive side which he tries to mask by acting tough to avoid teasing, is how I interpreted it.
The FOE/puzzle dungeon thing is not a *complete* deal-breaker, but it does dampen my ardour severely. I like being able to explore freely, not just in dungeon crawlers but in any game.