Circle of the Moon, etc.

I beat Mega Man 3 later than expected. The Doc Robot levels weren't so easy for me. Wily's Castle was easier, but twice I mistakenly picked "stage select" instead of continue on the game over screen and had to start it over.

I mean, I could have just held the rewind button to reverse the decision. Sometimes I struggle to decide between modern QoL convenience and authenticity of the original experience. For games I haven't played in decades, though (or for games I've never played), I tend to lean to the latter. I figured it didn't really hurt to replay a few stages. The game is short enough anyway and I'm more likely to actually remember it later if I play through it more than the bare minimum.

I've made it halfway through the Robot Master stages of Mega Man 4. It's becoming increasingly clear to me that more of my childhood fandom for Mega Man was rooted in the earlier games than I'd remembered. Although my standard memory is that I mostly kept up on it until the PSX generation, my biggest engagement with it was with the first two games. I really think once through was the maximum I put into any game after that, and that's not really enough to remember much of anything 30 years later.

I've really been enjoying Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. It's funny; my first impressions of that game weren't particularly strong. While there wasn't anything I particularly disliked about it, it didn't feel like half the experience I'd gotten from Symphony of the Night.

And while that's still true, my second impressions of CotM are more favorable than my first ones; I guess the game has been growing on me.

A full experience of the game requires playing it through at least five times. When you beat the game, you get a password that lets you restart the game with changes to your character mechanics and progression, essentially mimicking classic RPG class tropes. When you beat that new "mode," you get a new password again to unlock the next one. It's a more interesting dynamic than I originally expected, and makes the replays feel more fresh than I thought they would.

Although it seems in principle that it shouldn't be a huge thing, I think the lack of an in-game bestiary had a disproportionate effect on my first playthrough. That's especially true when combined with the lack of a shop. With a single exception, the only way to get new equipment or DSS Cards is through enemy drops. With as many enemies as there are, the only practical way to find things without a guide is to track the drops yourself. Once I started my own handwritten bestiary and filling it in, I found it added to my enjoyment quite a bit.

It actually took all four extra game modes and then some to fill it out. I was still missing drops for four enemies by the time I finished the last one. But by this time I had learned that some DSS cards could be dropped by more than one enemy, and I (correctly) realized that those gaps were probably from DSS cards I'd already picked up from other enemies. I played through one final time without picking up any cards to verify that was the case.

Once I finished my hand-made bestiary, I allowed myself to break the guide barrier to see if I'd missed anything. It turns out that, as long as you're willing to make notes, Circle of the Moon is a fairly decent game to do full completion without a guide. There doesn't seem to be really anything I wasn't able to discover on my own.

A few things I could have seen myself missing were: the skeleton medalist (I'd visited his room several times before I even realized there was an enemy there); some of the enemies that only spawn after a certain point in the game (I'm sure I found all of them just looking for 100%, but some of them I'd forgotten about after running across them the first time; and I didn't realize at first that Lilith and Lilim were separate enemies); and the correct input to activate the effects of Apollo and Uranus DSS Card Combos (this isn't necessarily intuitive, but it's still simple enough that I first discovered it on accident, and performed it on accident at least once after discovering it.)

I've levelled my original file up to level 99. It's complete to my satisfaction. I've decided I'm going to do the same for each mode. (I don't think levelling up all five game modes altogether will be as tedious as my single original game file of Symphony of the Night was for hitting level 99).

At some points when I have time and energy, I'm also trying to play through Maria mode on the Requiem version of Symphony of the Night. It was going very quickly, but my progress slowed when I decided to go for maximum map completion, including the area where you find the Spikebreaker Armor in the main game. She's capable of getting past the spikes, but it's not easy. I've managed to pull of getting through the spikes into the area several times now, and seem to be able to manage it at least once every several tries. But there's no save room on the other side, and I haven't yet managed to survive the trip back...

The good news is that Maria is capable of restoring her own health with one of her item crashes. So I can always try the trip back at full health. If I screw up the first part of it, I can turn around and refill. In theory, it should be easier getting back, but since I can only try at after successfully getting through the first way, I don't have near as much practice.

I've got a four-day weekend for Labor Day. I'll probably break from Mega Man, since it's currently my commuter "away" game, but I'm hoping to get some good progress level and stat grinding on Circle of the Moon and Dragon Quest III, as well as finishing that Spikebreaker area and maybe playing at least one other game.

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. 

Blog Reboot?

I more or less abandoned this blog for awhile. I've been detailing my game exploits in public, game specific forums on Gamefaqs.com, hoping for more direct engagement with fans of the games I've been playing. And for the most part, I've been enjoying that.

But again I've been feeling like reaching out more on a more personal platform. Although this blog, as it stands, is not really reaching out, as that would require people actually reading this.

Well, I'm gonna speculate on what I could do about that. It'll probably amount to nothing, and probably very quickly, but we'll see what happens.

I've been playing a lot of retro NES games with arcade-style difficulty, and been enjoying it. Recently I beat Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Gradius, and just a few days ago I finished the massively difficult Ghosts and Goblins.

Truthfully, I kind of lament how little interest there is in old classics like these. Although I would like to try out a lot of games I've missed in the last few decades, the truth is I still have a lot more interest and passion in games from the NES and SNES era, and games that evolved from them. It's hard to find a good balance between trying new things and old, but I don't mind erring on the side of old.

I have a copy of the Mega Man original game collection on the Switch, and I started playing it. I beat Mega Man 1 yesterday. I've been wanting to replay some of these games for 30 years. It should be fun.

More Dragon Questing

I guess I've taken myself down the rabbit hole with Dragon Quest now. It's all I can think about in most of my free time.

I've chipped away a little bit at Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. But most of my free time has been spent with Dragon Quest III, both the Super Famicom and Game Boy versions.

I finally beat Shin-Ryu several days ago. Once my sage was levelled up to normal endgame levels I was able to do it with her and my hero, fighter, and soldier. My soldier spammed the sage's stone while my sage buffed and my other two attacked, with an occasional supplemental sage stone from my fighter. It went surprisingly well. However, when I finished the fight, somewhere over 40 turns, I was chided by the boss on how long it took me. I realized soon after that the boss sets a target turn time of 35 turns to beat.

I thought I could beat that with a refinement of my strategy and my existing characters, but I did a little more levelling anyway before coming back. Last night, it took me longer than I intended. I had a few bad luck runs against the boss and even more mishaps on the way to it. But I finally won again, this time in 25 turns.

Well, when you beat it, you can choose between 3 wishes. On of them, to my surprise, adds a brief new story element to the game, which is the one I picked. I have learned, however, that if you want to choose a second wish, you have to beat the fight even faster. Fortunately, the threshold for the second wish is 25 turns, which I already know I can hit (but even if you meet that threshold before making a wish, you only get one wish per fight). Apparently the third wish takes a higher threshold of 15 turns, which I really wasn't sure I could hit with my current party and strategy.

But I've been both analyzing and researching the fight this morning, and I think it's doable with my current party and a little luck, bolstered by some targeted seeding. I was originally just going to focus my efforts on grinding my party to level 99, but now I'm detoured from that while I try to beat Shin-Ryu in the target time, which I think I can do much sooner.

Meanwhile, while I'm out and about, I've been replaying the GBC version. When I was doing all three together some time back, my GBC cart basically died. Someone looked at it and said something was wrong with one of the chips and the repair would be more expensive than a replacement. So I wasn't able to finish that file. I decided to start over. Actually, it was starting the GBC one that inspired me to finish my SFC file, rather than the other way around.

After working to fill out the enemy list on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I was thinking about the in-game bestiaries for the Dragon Quest games, which all remain unfinished on my game files. Dragon Quest III for the GBC, as near as I can tell, is the first Dragon Quest game that features any kind of bestiary. It doesn't technically have one by design, but the monster medal list still basically functions as one. So I thought I'd fill it out by collecting the monster medals.

My thought is to try and collect one of each non-boss before finishing the game normally. I've now made it up to Dharma and have all the medals up to there, excluding the ones in Kandar's cave. I managed to get a medal by chance for the first Kandar fight (I don't know if he has two medals or not) but not his henchmen. 

I decided to get myself the whistle ability before getting the monsters in the cave, since the encounter rate there is quite low. As it turns out, I had my thief and jester characters learn Whistle and MapMagic at about the same time, so I've taken a brief break to make sure I have all the treasures up to this point as well. I've been playing with a thief to that end, but now that she has the ability I'll take her out of the party for normal fights. I learned online that any successful steal from a thief negates the chance of getting a medal, so from here on out I'll keep her in Aliahan during medal hunting sessions.

Every day I'm thinking of the replays of Dragon Quest IV, V, and VI that are in my queue, but not quite there yet. I've also booted up Dragon Quest IX, where I finally got a Silver Orb from Baramos, and, consequently, a Sage's Stone. Progressing on the postgame on DQIII also makes me want to revisit VIII's postgame and try again to unlock VII's. It's too much. I'm on the verge of overwhelming myself with thoughts of these games, but I'm relishing my actual play time when it finally comes time every day.

I guess it means I have stuff to look forward to in the coming months.

And, Back to Dragon Quest

 I beat Dragon Quest V for my second time ever about a week ago.

Dragon Quest V is easily one of the best games I've played in the last decade. It left a bigger impression on me, for instance, than Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which I recently extolled in this blog. Besides that game, the only other games that I've played in the last ten years that have been remotely comparable have been other Dragon Quest games. Dragon Quest VII and XI have left comparable impressions on me.

I've wanted to replay Dragon Quest V for a long time. I wanted to give it a little breathing room after finishing it the first time, especially since I wanted to keep playing through the series. But I never could get in in my queue with the proper focus until I finished my 100% file on Dragon Quest IV. Before that I tried twice to restart it, but ended up both times not going past the first two towns.

This time around, I was determined to push through to the end. I had a long lull after my basement flood and the subsequent, drawn-out repair process, but this was the first game I resumed. The amount of time needed for translation made it a slow process, which caused me to put the game on the back burner a few times, but I ultimately made it through some seven or eight months after starting.

Now, in the weeks before finishing, I had been thinking a lot about taking a break from Dragon Quest for a bit, and focusing on other games, some of which I had written about here. But I seem to have triggered something upon completing it that is affecting me quite the opposite.

Having finished it my second time, I allowed myself near full access to guides and other online resources. I've determined what is needed for a satisfactory 100% game file, and I've done research into missable items and such. I've started trying to find answers to questions I had after perusing message boards, and in doing so I found the answer to one question that has been asked several times on the message boards I've browsed. The answer hadn't been presented on those boards, and I couldn't find it in English resources. But I ultimately found it on a Japanese wiki and was able to document the answer myself on those boards.

Somewhere in this process, my zeal for the Dragon Quest games has been stirred up quite a bit. I'm torn between going for my 100% game file on V, finishing off my SNES Dragon Quest III, doing my Dragon Quest IV runs that I'd put off in favor of playing V, and moving on to VI. I can't seem to make myself stop thinking about it. I spent the weekend working on III, but I think I'm gonna start grinding on III in the mornings and working on V at other times.

Unfortunately, despite the care I thought I took, I ended up not having some of the missable items in my inventory on my last playthrough of V. It turns out there are about half a dozen ordinary items that you can't get back if you didn't hold on to them. I never threw any away or sold any items on this run, so I think I must have lost them in the transition between generations. I had meant to test if Bianca and Bolongo retain their inventories when you re-recruit them, but I didn't write down what they had and I forgot during the months I was waiting on flood repairs. But since I was missing items, I think that the items in their respective inventories must not have been retained. I also found a Japanese site discussing some of the missables that seemed to suggest as much.

Regardless of how I lost them, I'll have to play through from the beginning again to get full completion. I had originally thought to defer that for a time, but that thought was surprisingly short-lived. I guess I'm not done with this game, even for the time being. I plan to start my new game file tonight. I'm also going for all the monsters and leveling everyone up full, so it will be quite the endeavor. But I won't keep it as my main game. When my enthusiasm starts to wear, as it surely will, I'll keep it as a game to fill in between others that I'll invariably want to play. If I keep this blog going, I'll probably mention it here and there.

But regardless of my progress on V and other games, I'm hoping to beat Shin-Ryu on Dragon Quest III in the coming weeks. More on that to come, hopefully.

Final Fantasy, Four White Mages

I'm getting ready to start another challenge quest on an old RPG. It's possible the first challenge quest I ever really heard of for any RPG, and one I've been interested in trying for many years.

I first read this challenge on a collectible card that was distributed by Nintendo Power Magazine long ago. I don't remember the cards very well; I think they might have been called Power Challenge Cards (or not). But they had cards for a large variety of early NES games, and probably Game Boy and SNES games too. And the cards contained ideas for giving yourself an extra challenge on the games.

At the time, Final Fantasy was one of my favorite games of all time. The challenge given on the card was to beat the game with four white mages. I thought that would be quite the challenge indeed, and kind of wanted to try it. But it's something I never got to. It's partly because you can only have one game file per cartridge and I had two brothers to share with (and don't much like erasing old files anyway). And partly because my copy of the game got stolen after a bit. And at some point, my gaming queue just got so long that I kind of forgot about it.

But I've been trying to decide on a good starting point for getting back into the Final Fantasy games, and I think it's as good as any.

I spend the last couple of weeks revisiting my last NES game file, from around 2003. I brought my characters on that file from about level 39 to max level, 50. That way I can feel a sense of closure on the file and erase it easier. I had other options to choose from (Famicom and Wii Virtual Console) but it felt right to do it on the NES.

I learned a lot about the game the last time I played it on the Famicom. I looked at a lot of online resources at that time, too, just for the heck of it. I was surprised by a lot of what I read.

First off, a great many quirks of the localization process obscured a lot of things from this game that were passed on to later games, but localized differently in those games. For example, staple Final Fantasy spells like Protect, Flare, and Holy, as well as were there from the beginning but named differently for a variety of reasons.

Secondly, a great amount of information I had taken for granted from the old Nintendo Power Strategy Guide is actually incorrect, and much of the game is bugged to not work as intended. For example, none of the weapon elemental or creature type bonuses actually work in the game. Some spells like LOCK and TMPR don't work at all, and apparently LOK2 actually helps the enemy rather than hurting it.

A lot of that was fixed in the Final Fantasy Origins port for Playstation, which I once started but never finished. I think I'll try playing that version alongside my NES one.

It's hard to add RPG's into my queue, but where this is an old one that I've played several times, and a relatively shorter one, I think I can manage it without disrupting the rest of my queue too much. I'll probably start one of the other more recent FF games as well before too long, but that will probably wait (at least) until I can finish Dragon Quest V. 

Thoughts on Metroidvania, Part II

Incidentally, while building up to SotN I decided it was a good idea to revisit the Metroid Series. I replayed Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission. I couldn't find my copy of Metroid II, even though I had it specifically set out not many months ago, but I finally played through Samus Returns, which I had got a couple of years ago for the 3DS. I also replayed Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion. I got all the endings on the two GBA games for the first time, and did bare minimum percent runs for both of those games, which I ended up enjoying.

Besides revisiting a favorite series and finally playing the latest entry, I wanted to replay them as a preliminary step to learning more about Metroidvania in general, and to see how Symphony of the Night compared and contrasted to its counterpart series in the genre moniker. I've also read quite a few articles on a variety of popular indie games that have adopted the Metroidvania term to describe themselves, and downloaded a demo for Ori and the Blind forest (which I've since learned a few relatives have played and liked). I've been looking for a fresh gaming experience, and these games seem to fit the bill.

I've started playing one of the early indie games called Cave Story. The freeware version comes in Japanese only, and although there are unofficial translation patches, I decided to try my hand at translating the language myself. Because of that, it's artificially slow going, and I haven't really made it past the first town, but the game looks promising.

Aside from the Castlevania games, I have a host of other Metroidvanias now that I've had recommended to me which I'm eager to play through as quickly as I have capacity to. I am finding it to be a great complimentary style of game to play alongside the more intensive RPG's I've been playing, to keep me from getting burned out on any one game. I probably can (and I guess really already have) finish two or three of these in the time it takes me to get through one big console RPG, and they seem to be very engaging in their own way.