Castlevania and Mega Man

 A few games I've played in the last few days:

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Dragon Quest III (SFC), Final Fantasy V, and Mega Man 1, 2, and 3.

Not long ago I finally finished maxing out my character levels on Symphony of the Night for PSX. I transferred my game to my PSP to do it, so I chipped away at it while walking to and from work, while watching TV, and other miscellaneous times.

Since then, I've been playing the Requiem version on PS4 to clear the Richter and Maria game modes and finish getting all of the trophies associated with the game. I'm a little over halfway finishing the inverted castle for Richter, hoping to finish this week.

I've also been playing Circle of the Moon. I've finished playing through all the different modes except for the Thief mode, which I expect to finish this week. In the next few days I hope to use his high luck to find the last DSS card that has eluded me (Pluto). I also hope to use him to confirm whether I've found all the rare drops available from enemies. Eventually I'll probably try to max the levels out on at least my main file for that.

Circle of the Moon was okay but a little underwhelming to me the first time I played it through. However, I find I've enjoyed it a lot more in my replays.

I've been wanting to replay the Mega Man series for many, many years (possibly decades, even). It's been on my mind even more since I started replaying the Castlevania games a couple of years ago. I got a copy of the Legacy Collection for the Switch at Christmas, and I finally sat down to start playing it in earnest about a week ago.

I breezed through the first two games in a day or two each. I played through the second one twice; once for each difficulty mode. I'm hoping to finish number 3 on my train ride home tonight.

It's clear to me that I remember the first two games a lot better than I remember the third, and probably any one after that. I'm pretty sure I never actually played number 5, and I don't remember if I played 4 or 6 more than once (or if I even actually beat either one of them). For all my fond memories of the series, I think most of my experience with it was with its earliest games.

It's a nice stroll down memory lane, and a fresh experience at the same time since it's been so long.