XBannedx

For the month of February I will be playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I never knew that this was a story based game until trailers came out for the sequel. I'm already a few hours in and have been playing every free moment I can get.

Originally I was going to try to play original FF VII, but I just didn't get hooked in again, so that's on hiatus or possibly alternate to play during the month. Monster Hunter Wilds is also on my radar, but I will wait for review to see how performance is for PC systems similar to mine. The beta was bugged out and I was not able to play do to missing textures.

I was able to finish the main story of Grand Theft Auto IV. I found the story to be pretty grounded and enjoyable, granted I had to suspend the impact of the game play aspect. The struggles of an immigrant trying to make his way in Liberty City and the choices he had to make along the way had me wanting to play from story beat to story beat.

I did occasionally just go off the rails and do the crazy stuff you can do in a GTA game just to see what was possible and that was fun. I will say that the music in the game when driving around was varied and enjoyable. I did restore the removed tracks when I found out the selection was missing some and that greatly improved the choices of music playing. Even the talk radio stuff was humorous to me.

I will say the weakest part of the game for me in 2025 is the actual game play itself. It just felt so clunky sometimes. Walking, running, unarmed combat, shooting, hiding in cover and driving were not the worst I've ever experienced, but definitely towards the bottom considering other games of the time as well as games that are out now.

All in all I would definitely still recommend a play through of this game for its story and I am glad that I did.

For this month I will be playing GTA IV. I have never played a GTA game passed 2 I think and wanted to experience a story from this franchise. I asked around and was told IV was the most grounded story while being excellent. I have a feeling I will finish this early on in January so I will probably try to work on a game I've previously started like Control. I will also be probably playing Tears of the Kingdom because I finally got it as a gift, but I don't expect to finish it until February I think playing it only at home on the weekend.

I did complete Atelier Ryza Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout. It was overall an enjoyable but average game to play. The story was much more light hearted which is what I expected going into it. While I did like it over all, I felt the middle part of the game felt sluggish and found myself not immediately reaching to play the game and decided to instead read a book or watch tv. When I finally got closer to the end of the game I found myself drawn in again and was able to get through it relatively quickly. The alchemy part was fun at first, but then I just didn't care about it and made what was necessary to either level up alchemist level or have strong enough item/weapons/armor to finish the game. I didn't really experiment with that system as much; might just not be my thing.

The music was fine, but I probably won't be recalling any melodies or tunes from this one.

The battle system was actually a lot of fun for me. Not having to technically worry about issuing commands to other party members unless I wanted to was nice. So I mainly just stuck to playing Ryza for battles, but did feel hamfisted into a certain party group/composition early on to the end of game. Could be because I didn't want to mess with the alchemy stuff too much after a certain point so that might be on me. I don't know if the Atelier games are for me after this. The new one coming out (Yumia) does look interesting, but I highly doubt I will be playing the rest of the Ryza trilogy.

Well my goal this month is to just finish Atelier Ryza Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout. Don't think I will plan on finishing else this month. Might try to play a campaign of Total War Shogun 2 to completion and call that a beat since I've always wanted to and never have.

I think I am pretty close to beating Atelier Ryza Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout. I just got distracted with some books I was reading as well which were equally enjoyable. I will definitely be finishing this game in December, but it has been a fun game to play during the month of November. Very low stakes, just kind of fun and enjoyable JRPG.

This month I will try to complete two games again, one already in progress as well as start a new one. I found that bouncing between two games actually made playing more enjoyable. The game I will try to complete is Control. The new game I will start is Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout. I will still be playing Monster Hunter World on and off I think as well.

This month I was able to complete Code Vein and the main story of Monster Hunter World.

I started Code Vein a while ago and have been playing it on and off. It is a fun anime dark souls like with pretty fun and also very difficult game play. They story was actually enjoyable to me. Some of the music in this game was very top tier, especially the one that played during flash backs for me. Gear and skill progression was fine. Some of the in game descriptions of skills were not helpful and I had to look elsewhere to find out what it actually did or meant. I would say overall I would recommend this game if you like either a challenge or cliche but good anime type stories.

Monster Hunter world I started at the beginning of this month and beat the main story pretty quickly. I had tried first Monster Hunter Generations on the Switch and hated it and thought this series was not for me. Enter World and something about it just clicked for me and I couldn't stop playing.I honestly only stopped playing so I could finish Code Vein and will be jumping back in weekly to do some kind of hunt.

This month I have started playing Monster Hunter World with my brothers and am aiming to finish Code Vein. I have made progress in both and hope to have both completed by the end of the month.

In the month of September I finished Hi-Fi Rush. It had been in my radar for a while and decided to just take a stab at it. It had all right right genres ticked for me. Action, music, combo scores and a story that was fun and lighthearted. I will come back to it now and then to do the challenges I think.

I dropped The First Descendant. It was fun jumping on board when it released, but the fact that it is so grindy and the story drips are so few it's hard to keep up unless it is my dedicated game. I don't want to stick to just one game forever and can't really find the time to keep playing it as well as beating other games.

I finished The Vagrant on the Steam Deck. It is a 2d action RPG. I was able to beat it in about 11 hours and there is a new game plus that ups the difficulty. I probably won't do that and will be moving on to the next game. The story was light, but enjoyable. The music was good. The combat mechanics was fun. The inventory was okay.

Not sure what I will start or finish next. Still been keeping up with The First Descendant. It's a grind, but it's still casually playable.

I just finished the main campaign of The First Descendant on a mix of Gaming PC and Steam Deck. I enjoyed playing it as Free to Play and spent about 50 hours playing through it.

Starting with the good: The game play of shooting and using skills was fun. They story itself was okay, but I still enjoyed it as comfort gaming. I see myself playing it on and off to do whatever story expansions there are for now. I haven't dug to deep into the grind but it seemed okay from my own experience. I'm pretty patient waiting for things and I will probably grind a for few characters when I just want to turn off my brain.

The bad: I am not sure if it is resolved yet, but damn I had so many disconnects at the worst time that I just stopped playing the game for the night and did something else. I feel the movement could be improved, just giving unlimited grappling shots would make it vastly more fun. Even though I played Warframe years ago I remember enjoying the movement much more in that game. The music is kind of forgettable I suppose as well.

Other thoughts, playing this game made me want to just Warframe, but the fact that I first played the game many years after release, and then only for a few months. Jumping back into it seems daunting and I would no doubt be loss. So maybe not.