Skinny update on Xenoblade Chronicles X after 47 hours.

My main character in Xenoblade Chronicles XI was 10 hours along in June, now I’m almost at the 50-hour mark. In another lifetime I would have finished Xenoblade Chronicles X three times over by now, but for who I am right now, this is excellent progress.

…Or is it, hehehe. Just because I’ve put in a lot of hours doesn’t mean I’ve achieved anything. All I’ve been doing for the past 37 hours is sidequests and affinity missions. And those green mission things, I forget what they’re called. Quests, quests, quests. Also some exploration, but not too much because of the problem of overpowered mobs wondering around, as I explained last time. Still, as I suspected, with better gear and more powerful arts it’s possible to take on enemies slightly stronger than yourself, so even though my team is around levels 32-34, we can comfortably take on mobs all the way to 39 as long as they don’t gang up on us. I even took down a level 40 tyrant that popped out of nowhere. That was dicey! And fun!

But you know how it is, all good things and all that. Eventually I had done all the affinity missions I qualified for at my level and almost all the sidequests as well. Plus it was just time to move on and see what else the game had to offer. Storywise all the Xenoblade games have been meh. The first one was okay, at least I could follow along pretty well. The second and third were super tedious, and I’ve heard nothing good about Xenoblade X’s story. Especially the original ending, and the tacked on epilogue.

Xenoblade Chronicles X Ganglion blue ass

I lost all hope as soon as this blue ass sashayed onto my screen.

But still, I gotta do it to unlock more sidequests, so away we go. Currently finished up chapter (?) 6, and now the commander and Elma are murmuring about giving me my own Skell, which I am honestly not crazy about. I like mecha anime as much as the next person, but I really enjoy the process of running around on foot. The exact moment XCX hooked me was when I picked up a quest set in Cauldros and I ran, swam and snuck about 13,000 miles from Primordia, through Noctilum, to Sylvanum and allll the way to my quest objective in Cauldros. I knew it had to be possible because the quest level was low, but it was such an exciting time! 😀 For freedom of exploration alone, I give Xenoblade Chronicles X a solid 9/10 (minus 1 for the stress of high level mobs).

Where was I… Oh yeah, so they want to give me a Skell but I don’t want a Skell, but I have to go through with it to unlock more sidequests and other fun stuff. So yeah, I’m gonna get a Skell and see what happens, and then I’ll be back with another update as and when. Absolutely nothing has happened in the story despite us supposedly being on a time limit, but that’s fine with me.

As if the writers would answer that easily.

Two comments before I let things go for today: first the characters. Through affinity quests I got a bunch of characters hanging around New LA to join my team, and I don’t know how to feel about that. I like a lean cast of playables, personally, but what bothers me even more is that most of the recruits don’t show up in the main story/can’t even be used on my team because the writers can’t be sure who I’ll have at which point. In this most recent story development, I was forced to use Lina, Elma and Lao even though I haven’t touched them in ages. It’s like the story characters in a gacha game who show up in all the cutscenes even though you haven’t used them since the tutorial. I’d rather have a forced cast with story relevance like in the other Xenoblade games than this gacha game approach.

Ugly armor in Xenoblade

The armor is still ugly.

Aaand I forget what the second comment was going to be. I’m getting old. Something else about the characters… Aha, it was about the enemy designs. The random enemies in the field strike a good balance between familiar and alien, but the main antagonists are too humanoid! Blue ass girl is just a girl with a blue ass, then there’s a tiger dude, and another dude, and okay one weird looking blob who nevertheless stands upright and wears clothes like a human. Maybe this will be explained eventually, after all the characters have already questioned why all these alien races can understand each other perfectly. For now, I don’t see the point of traveling across the galaxy to encounter the same old familiar aesthetics. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Right-ho, time to get me a Skell, explore 25% of Oblivia to unlock the next story mission, and do a lot more sidequests!

Epic Seven Auto Expedition teams – Blooming Snag Lich, Brutal Pherus, Destructive Gigantes

In the post I made about Epic Seven‘s Nightmare Raid last year, I promised to write about Expedition auto teams if I was ever able to build them. It took a while to have enough leftover gear to do so, but now I can mostly auto these three at least, so I’m sharing here. Epic Seven Expeditions are the best source of mod gems (change an equipment’s sub-stats) and a good source of equipment reforging materials as well as monthly rewards like molagoras, so it’s a mode worth engaging with despite some annoyances.

Why bother, though?

Doing Expeditions is one thing, but why try to auto-beat bosses in Epic Seven at all? After all, you can open each Expo so others can join and help you kill the bosses. While they occasionally fail, it’s usually not too hard to get max rewards for the month that way, especially if you have lots of friends or are in a very active guild. That’s how I made it through for ages. Moreover, in a recent livestream, the developers Smilegate promised some changes that will encourage more people to hit others’ Expeditions. So, no, you don’t have to auto Expedition bosses.

Setting the “auto” part aside, though, since that is purely for convenience, it helps to be able to defeat your own bosses even if you have to do it manually. Here are seven reasons why, off the top of my head.

1) It saves stamina. It’s free to attack your own Expo the first time, but after that it costs stamina, so repeated attacks are a painful waste.

2) Guaranteed success means guaranteed rewards, i.e. more chances at getting mod gems. Actually I’m sitting on a ton of them since I rarely mod anything, but people love those things, and they do have their uses.

3) It costs 30 stamina (!) to join other people’s Expos. That’s a lot of stamina, so people might not join yours, especially at time when there are a lot of Expos open, or when most people have done theirs already (usually around the middle of the month). That will lead to wasted Expo posters if you can’t finish your own.

4) Even if you rely on others to finish off your Expos, it’s much more likely that people will join if you’ve knocked a big chunk of its HP out already. That way they can complete the Expo instead of hoping it will succeed. Back when I couldn’t auto anything, I wouldn’t even look at untouched Expos.

5) Smilegate has promised Expedition sweeps soon. You’ll save a lot of time and frustration if you can clear your own and others’ Expos in one attack. I’m interested in what mechanisms the devs will put in place to prevent stronger players from instagibbing all the Expos and leaving none for weaker players to pick over.

6) It’s not that hard once you’ve been playing for a while. After a year or two, most players will have almost all of the fire, earth and ice units in the game, and in fact the most commonly used heroes (Brieg, Tamarinne, Adventurer Ras, Cermia) are either free or very easy to get. You will also have a lot of gear that rolled decently but not decently enough to go on your mains, so it won’t be hard to set up teams one by one that can finish off Expedition bosses manually, if not automatically.

7) You get one-time Dagger Sicar reputation rewards for soloing them. Not super important, but nice to have.

TL;DR, beating your own bosses makes your life way easier. Auto-beating them is even better for convenience’s sake. I say that as someone who leeched them for a while but now finds it much more comfortable to start one and tab out and come back when it’s done, like putting a ready meal in the microwave.

Here are teams that worked for me, as well as a simplified explanation of the bosses’ mechanics. Knowing how the boss helps is useful because then you can think up of substitutes more easily.

Brutal Pherus

The easiest boss to solo in the game. So easy, in fact, that I even use Tamarinne as the soul weaver in this fight, even though she should be weak against it due to her element because the boss does more damage to and takes less damage from non-ice elementals.

Boss mechanics:

  • The boss will cast an undispellable silence from time to time.
  • He goes into Offensive Posture, where he has increased defense and attack. If your party can hit him six times in a row before he gets a turn, this posture will be dispelled along with the silence, making him weaker and freeing you to do more damage. So you don’t want your party to be too slow, or you want to slow him down if you can.
  • Furthermore, if you put three or more debuffs on him when he uses an attack called Gust, he will cleanse himself and put all those debuffs on you. Do not want!

You will need a knight in front, a soul weaver, and two ice DPS who don’t inflict too many debuffs. Just defense break and slow should be enough.

Knight: Daddy Brieg. He’s free to get if you progress a bit. He’s excellent for this fight because he brings both defense buff and speed down, letting your party get more turns and do more damage. He can pull off his defense breaking S3 even when the boss uses silence because of the way Fighting Spirit works. Having him on counter set greatly speeds this process along, but you can build him however you like, just make him tanky. I’ve used Rose as a knight in this fight in the past, but TBH I didn’t build her very well so she wasn’t impressive.

Pretty much any artifact will do, though War Horn is probably best in slot unless you’re struggling to keep the team alive.

Soul Weaver: Tamarinne. Also free to get. I’ve used Angelic Montomorancy in the past too, but Tama’s CR push and attack buffs are what make her the queen of PVE.

DPS: Fenne and Choux. Fenne is particularly recommended because she does amazing damage once she ramps up, and she tops up the heals from Tamarinne too.

I used Luna before I got Fenne, she also works well. You could also use Kise. Seaside Bellona and Sigret don’t work well because they deal too many debuffs.

…Huh, it just occurred to me that maybe Fenne alone could keep the party alive with her heals. Time for a quick experiment…

Put Fenne in Choux’s position if you have a release imprint for a slight attack boost to the back row.

And it worked just great, though it wasn’t much faster or safer than the Tama-empowered team. I guess Brutal Pherus is just that weak. Daddy Brieg got down to 850 HP in the second fight, maybe give him a tiny bit more bulk or the Sword of Ezera artifact.

Blooming Snag Lich

Boss mechanics:

  • Does more damage to the unit in front if the unit is not a knight. Like way more damage.
  • Takes less damage from single attacks, so you want AOE.
  • Hits a unit twice if the unit’s HP is under 50% when he attacks. This will almost always strike the frontline unit unless s/he is dead.
  • Uses an attack that does huge damage unless your party has the Immunization buff. The only way to get this buff is to attack the crystal in front of it 5 times. The crystal will respawn after being defeated, and the Immunization buff will disappear once it saves you from the boss’s attack. So basically you need to hit both the crystal and the boss as much as possible at the same time.

In short, you need a tanky knight in front and lots of AOE attacks. For this fight, you can forgo the soul weaver and use a ranger with the Bloodstone artifact if you have it. You might not, since it’s a 5-star artifact, in which case a knight, a soul weaver and two AOE attacks should do the trick. But Bloodstone is worth using an artifact selector on IMO since it is useful in all kinds of PVE situations. I even use it on Afternoon Soak Flan in Guild Wars sometimes.

Full disclaimer: the team below very occasionally fails to auto-clear and leaves Blooming Snag Lich with a tiny sliver of health remaining. I find this happens when Cecilia and Baal & Sezan fail to land enough defense breaks on the boss. Nothing you can do about it except boost the whole party’s damage more to compensate.

Knight: I use Cecilia because she has AOE attacks, defense break and also immunity to keep the poisons at bay. Adventurer Ras would probably work. I could swear I’ve seen someone use Brieg before, and I suppose he could technically work with Symbol of Unity for increased hit chance. Whoever it is must be tanky to prevent the boss from getting more attacks in. I used to have Cecilia on Sword of Ezera for more sustain, but I find War Horn is better for a consistent clear.

Soul weaver: Not recommended if you have the Bloodstone artifact, but otherwise I think Mascot Hazel would be best in slot here because she gives an attack buff to fire units which cycles faster than Tamarinne’s does. Either could work, though.

AOE DPS: Mercedes (free).

Any offensive gear will do. I forget why I built her this way. Magic for Friends is essential.

Bomb Model Kanna. Really great for this fight. Free to get, ranger, holds Bloodstone, has Exclusive Equipment that inflicts the “unbuffable” debuff that prevents Blooming Snag Lich from putting on Attack Up.

Baal and Sezan. Good attack, sticks the boss with defense break and other debuffs and then does damage the more debuffs the boss has. He’s one of the first 5-star units I pulled, and I still remember how excited I was, only to find out he was largely useless. Happy to have found a permanent home for him. I suppose other AOE Fire units can be substituted for B&S, but no one really comes to mind right now.

Destructive Gigantes

Boss mechanics:

  • Does extra damage to the unit in front if it is not a knight.
  • The boss comes with an annoying invincible mob called Inpectio Cannon. It keeps increasing your party’s cooldowns, making it hard to use skills other than S1. You need characters with a way to decrease cooldowns, or characters with high effect resistance, or immunity, etc. Or those with very strong S1 attacks. You get the picture.
  • Destructive Gigantes himself all casts a debuff called Electrocute that damages your whole party after a character takes a turn, unless that character dispels it by using a non-attack skill. If you don’t dispel or outheal it, you will die pretty quickly.
  • Gigantes also casts a defense buff on himself that needs to be cleared so you don’t do piddling damage.

Disclaimer: the team below occasionally fails to auto clear unless I manually turn off Zahak’s skills for the first turn. I will experiment with other teams shortly, like in the next 10 minutes, to find a true auto setup.

Ideally you need a Knight, soul weaver and two DPS, all with at least one non-attack skill. I get away with using Fenne even though she doesn’t have one, because her S1 heals the party to slightly make up for the damage. Also she hits like a TANK, and she applies an immunity buff to herself to somewhat evade Inpectio Cannon’s attacks. If you’re interested in PVE at all, you will not go wrong by using a character selector to get Fenne.

Knight: Daddy Brieg. Inpectio Cannon increasing cooldowns doesn’t affect his S3 for reasons explained with Brutal Pherus, though it does make it harder for him to use his non-attack S2. He will occasionally die because of this, especially if I don’t play the first turn manually, so putting him on Sword of Ezera might not be a bad idea.

Soul weaver: Tamarinne is the best I’ve found for this position because of her attack buff and CR push that can help you slip past Inpectio Cannon’s turns sometimes. Also Fenne is technically a soul weaver, but… phew!

DPS: Fenne and Zahak. I used to use Cermia before I got Fenne, she also works great. I use Zahak because I like his design, and also he has an attack buff that can help speed things along.

Virtually any other DPS with a non-attack skill will do just fine, and might even be better because you don’t have to manual the first turn to prevent him from using it. As a matter of fact, I’ll try someone else right now and report back. Let’s start with Violet.

Okay, Violet works fine. More auto-friendly than Zahak because he’s slower, so he takes his first turn after the Destructive Gigantes’ first turn. But because he’s slower, he takes fewer turns overall, meaning the two runs I used him in both came down to the wire. He also doesn’t buff others like Zahak does.

Let’s try Cermia.Perfect blend. Faster than Violet, hits harder than Zahak, especially when her extra attack pops off. Daddy Brieg, Tamarinne, Cermia and Fenne is the team to go with IMO. But I encourage you to play around with other options to see what works for you. I’d say Destructive Gigantes is the second easiest boss to auto after Brutal Pherus.

Other Expedition bosses

There are two other bosses: Hopeless Symaqus and Pain Pursuer Moroi. However they are out of rotation right now, so I can’t show them. (update: they’re here) I’m still working on teams for them anyway, since I manage to get both of them down to around 5-10% health and then wipe. For Hopeless Symaqus I’ve been using Daddy Brieg, Tamarinne, Lilka and Immortal Wukong. For Pain Pursuer Moroi, I’ve been using Daddy Brieg, Cermia, Zealot Carminerose and Cerise, but I intend to sub in Fenne for Cerise next time. Update/new post to follow next time the roation changes.

I also need to figure out this whole Trial of Constellations mode thing. Or do I… I’m very salty about them getting rid of Nightmare Raid so I dunno. I have other things to do in E7 anyway, like the rest of Abyss, and the most recent Hall of Trials, so I’ll get to it when I get to it. Enough for one day, back to work!

More casual games: Happy Dessert Cafe & My Sushi Story

And also Xenoblade Chronicles X, which I was making real progress on until I hit an annoying roadblock (White Cometite, if you know, you know), but more on that another day.

Happy Dessert Cafe and My Sushi Story are two idle games from the same company (Miya Games) with the same premise (running a café/sushi restaurant) and very similar gameplay at the beginning, though they diverge significantly after a bit.

Happy Dessert Cafe has a much cuter aesthetic and generally feels more “pleasant” to play, but My Sushi Story has much more to do by way of regular events, mini-games and things to unlock, so it’s definitely my preferred experience. It’s also the game I originally set out to play, only adding Happy Dessert Cafe into the mix when I ran out of stamina and started getting withdrawal symptoms. I can’t remember how I heard of either one, though. Might have been a random Google Playstore recommendation.

Story

Somebody or the other left you in charge of a dilapidated restaurant/café, and now you have to get it up and running again. That’s where the story stops in My Sushi Story, but in Happy Dessert Cafe, there’s a little more to it: coffee isn’t well-known in the country you’re in, so you have to introduce it to the folks, overcome resistance and misunderstandings, and win over rivals and critics by building up their affection through bribes gifts.

Dammit Kitty, what do you want from me?!

Gameplay

Merge ingredients to create better ingredients to unlock new recipes to serve to customers to get money to upgrade your staff and facilities. Phew! It’s a simple gameplay loop once you get the hang of it. The idling comes from waiting for stamina to refill so you can merge more ingredients, letting the restaurant/cafe run offline so it earns money for you, and waiting for deliveries, performances, exploration, etc. to end so you can collect the rewards to reinvest in business development.

Just merge the same items over and over again

The last part about deliveries, performances and exploration only applies to My Sushi Story, which has a number of things to do outside of the main sushi part. There’s this mini game where you make sushi to order and send it out for delivery. And there’s another minigame where you have a sailing ship, for some reason, and you go exploring for treasure and diamonds and even do some fishing while you are at it. And later on you unlock a first floor where you hire performers to entertain the VIPs for extra dough.

And on the third floor… Hang on. Come to think of it, what’s on the second floor? Let me check… Oh. There IS no second floor. Due to a poor French localization, there’s a lobby, a first floor (premier étage) and then suddenly a third floor (3ème étage). We don’t talk about the second floor.

And yes, I’m playing My Sushi Story in French because it’s help… helping… me…? learn French? I dunno, I fear I might be learning weird things or bad grammar instead, because some of the things they write don’t make sense. Like this:

This item translation is pants.

What kind of food is “denim de style japonais”? Even Google was stumped. That said, I have picked up a lot of cooking vocabulary from it (especially seafood names like hareng, carassin, poulpe, loup de mer, thon, etc.), but I’ve been second-guessing myself ever since I saw this crazy translation. If you hear about the mad foreigner demanding jeans in a Paris café… yup, that’s probably me ^^;;

As for why I’m (re)learning French, I did mention in my resolutions that I wanted to pick up a language to keep my mind sharp, and I’ve been giving it my best shot with French (disclaimer: I’m not starting from scratch). That doesn’t mean I’m playing or doing everything in French though, e.g. I kept Happy Dessert Cafe in English because my brain can only take so much.

Happy Dessert Cafe does have its fair share of minigames and things to do or unlock, but nowhere near as many as My Sushi Story. If you play for a while, you can unlock a cat cafe on the second floor, where you get to play the most annoying minigame ever: clipping a cat’s claws.

No, Kitty will not hold still while you do this. That might make this fun.

This was definitely designed by a cat owner who wants us to feel her pain.

Events

The main reason why I say My Sushi Story is superior to Happy Dessert Cafe is the frequency of events. Granted I haven’t been playing either game that long, but My Sushi Story has had two events: one summer festival, and on ongoing Tanabata festival event, both with new recipes and other rewards to win.

Happy Dessert Cafe, on the other hand, wasted my time with a month-long photo album campaign where it was blatantly obvious from that start that the album couldn’t be completed without paying real money, and even that would be iffy because the photo fragment drops were random. The whole thing positively reeked of F2P despair. There’s been nothing since then, and TBH I’m kind of wondering why I’m still playing it now.

Sushi-making minigame in My Sushi Story. Kinda pointless tbh

Overall thoughts

I’m on an idle game kick recently, and My Sushi Story strikes the right balance between being an idle game and having stuff for me to do and/or upgrade when I want to. Happy Dessert Cafe focuses more on the pure idling side, which isn’t bad but doesn’t quite do it for me. An idle game should still have a strong game component, IMO.

Criticisms: First, too many ads. If I hadn’t set my phone to block ads, I would definitely complain about ads, because both games constantly try to make you watch ads to get more rewards or double the ones they are giving you. Can’t fault them for trying to make a buck, but I hate watching ads, and I would have quit ages ago if I had to watch them.

The various packs are too expensive as well: $18.99 for a monthly pass that barely does anything is ridiculous. In fact, I don’t like monthly passes in general, but at least some of them have reasonable prices and benefits to make it worth your while. Both My Sushi Story and Happy Dessert Cafe make their ads super obnoxious to push you to get the monthly pass, but at that price, I bet most people will uninstall instead.

Box-packing minigame in Happy Dessert Cafe.

Lastly, it gets to a point where you’re stuck at the same level for a long time and have to wait ages to unlock the next level. This is relatively normal for an idle game, but I wish they had broken it down into smaller goals with easier unlockables to maintain the same feeling of progression as in the early stages. For example, the Chapter of the Sun stage in My Sushi Story has three levels, and each takes weeks to unlock. They could break that down into ten, or even fifteen, so that each level can be unlocked in a few days instead.

Again, the goal is likely to frustrate the player into spending, but again I’ll just quit if it gets too annoying. There are other fish in the sea other idle games in the Playstore… or so I thought, but…

Other Stuff I Tried

Since I’m enjoying these two games, I tried a couple of other games in the genre, but it turns out to be harder than I’d expected to find something I like and can stick with. These three just didn’t work out.

My Hotpot Story: The original game (?) that these two copied (?). A rather ugly affair that lacks the charm and polish of the later games and just looks and feels dated. The restaurant and staff were not attractive and the one minigame I played was not fun. Easy delete.

Fairy Village: I thought it would be a raising sim or a village management sim or even a home decorating sim, but it’s none of the above. It’s a “click something every couple of minutes and maybe something will happen” sim, easily the most boring thing I’ve played in a while. There’s nothing to do except tap the screen and buy a few decorations once in a while.

It’s also very disorganized with no proper tutorial outside of “build a house and go exploring offscreen.” Plus right off the bat, they wanted me to wait 24 real-life hours for a building to be completed before the game could continue. Delete delete delete.

Whole lotta nothin’ going on.

Good Pizza, Great Pizza: Nice presentation, but it requires you to manually “make” the pizza when a customer asks for it. Roll the dough, add the sauce, add the toppings, bake, cut, box. It doesn’t seem like a bad game, to be honest. For example, it might be good for players who want a game that actually simulates the food-making process, instead of having food appear out of nowhere in front of the customer. That’s precisely what I didn’t want to experience, however (also I don’t really like pizza), so I deleted it after a few minutes.

What’s next

I can’t believe it’s already time for Epic Seven‘s 7th anniversary! And indeed I checked just now and the last Epic Dash event began in September 2024, so it’s a lot earlier this time, maybe because it’s their epic seventh anniversary. Either way, I can’t miss out on free rewards, so I’ll be reinstalling for like the tenth time.

Smilegate can get me in the door, but they can’t keep me because they don’t have enough non-PVP content for me to do on a regular basis. Not only that, but they’re actually removing PVE content like Nightmare Raid even though it took me forever to get the right teams to do it. I’m sure they’ve run the numbers and checked the metrics and know what modes make them the most money, but I don’t think PVP will ever be my thing. For now, I’ll just see what they’ve got cooking with the latest anniversary event.

Very early thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles X

cover of xenoblade chronicles x switch versionI was really hyped to get Xenoblade Chronicles X. I’ve been wanting to play it for many, many years, but I didn’t want to waste money on a Wii U, so I just waited and waited and waited. And good things came to me, eventually.

The game is great, and it’s pretty close to my ideal game with plenty of freedom and only the loosest of frameworks for what I have to do and when. My character woke up, got a job and got set free in the field to actually do her job without micromanagement. Also all my seniors defer to my judgment in the field for some reason. Sounds like an intern got into the text files and made a few tweaks to the story when no one was looking.

So yeah, I really like the relative freedom of XCX. I’ve been playing video games for so long that I don’t need much hand-holding. I’ve also read tons of game stories already, so unless the writing or the concept is super strong, I don’t mind dispensing with most of it. JRPG stories always boils down to “Power of friendship!” “Power of humanity!” and/or “Mankind needs no gods!” anyway. Not even a spoiler, if XCX turns out to be any different, I’ll… I’ll… I won’t do anything, because it won’t turn out different, ha!

Other plusses: there are lots of sidequests, which I usually enjoy. If anything, I wish I could take more than 20 at a time. I also love having a percentage counter that goes up as I explore areas. I wish there was a Fog of War mechanic to stop me from getting lost so often, but I suppose I’ll get my bearings eventually. I’m only 10 hours in, give or take a few.

Unfortunately, despite all these positives, it’s possible for a game to do 99% of things correctly and then ruin it with the final 1% thanks to a questionable design choice. In this case, it’s the proliferation of high-level enemies everywhere you look, stopping you from exploring as much as you want. I don’t mind having the occasional Territorial Rotbart giving me jumpscares here and there, but turning the game into a stealth game in all but name by having those crazy high leveled mobs all over the place killed my excitement dead in record time.

XCX could have made the concept work for me by making it possible to work/grind/craft your way to equipment and skills strong enough to take down harder enemies. It could even get to the point where the player actively seeks out enemies with red names because they can take them on thanks to superior gear and strategy. And who knows, the game might be heading in that direction. This is very early days for me, as I said. But I have to deal with the game as it is right now, not in some hypothetical future, and right now I am ultra hating having to sneak around when I should be marching about boldly laying waste to the indigenous flora and fauna.

Don’t get me wrong: It makes 100000% percent sense from a narrative standpoint and explains why our teams are having so much difficulty making headway in exploring Mira. It will also be a lot of fun to come back and beat enemies I used to run away from before. But “makes sense” and “fun to play” are mutually exclusive right now. I’m not in the frame of mind for sneaking around at the moment – in fact, I have never ever been in the frame of mind to play stealth games, and I have quit otherwise promising games over that mechanic. Will XCX be the latest on the list? Probably not. The lure of Xenoblade is too strong. But I’ve slowed way down on playing it because I’m not having as much fun as I thought I would when I shelled out that $59.99. I should have researched the game a little more, but I’m a simple soul: I see Xenoblade and I click “Buy.”

I have a few other issues with the game, especially with my party (who should I use?!) and with the slow pace of getting new equipment. Also the equipment is ugly. Really ugly. But I’ll stop here for today and psych myself up to play another 10 hours before getting into those issues they’re still bothering me at that point. I hope I’ll have something much more positive to write about it next time.

Another month, another batch of casual games.

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.

Euh… bonjour ?

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.

Tried LN in French, but I can’t find any of my clothes any more so I’m gonna switch back.

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.

Beware of faux amis. Chandelier does not quite mean “chandelier,” porte-manteau does not mean “portmanteau”!

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, or I just 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 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.