Board 8 > SaveEstelle/LeonhartFour in New Houses: Trails into Zelda Fantasy Edition [SELF]

(+) Yeah! (+)

Gerudo women all have female Gerudo children, yes (except the 1 man every 100 years or whatever).

Well, I woke up to an email from Amazon saying my copy of Trails is now arriving today!

And just like that, it's been delivered!

I ended up getting my copy of Trails yesterday also and am slowly going through it, though can't say much concrete yet. I might have gotten a bit farther if I didn't get distracted for 2 hours running the tables at the poker minigame >.>

I definitely still love this series even today though.

I'm afraid I'll have forgotten so much by the time I get to Reverie and I know I'll never have time to replay these games again, so here's hoping I can follow it! It'll probably start coming back to me as I play.

User SaveEstelle has already played Reverie for his job and he survived it despite not playing any Cold Steel games yet. That was probably quite the experience for him!

I'm having a lot of trouble remembering some NPC's but so far the game has done a reasonable job reminding you of important plot events. There's also plot summaries for several past games which I didn't look at but are there.

Of course still only 3-4 hours in so we'll see if this holds up.

Leonhart4 posted...

and he survived it despite not playing any Cold Steel games yet.

what the lol

He refused to play the games out of order so he didn't even get a chance to play the Crossbell games until the last year.

I do wonder how it'll impact his enjoyment of Cold Steel whenever he gets to it now.

Oh, I know he was adamant on playing them in order just feels like a weird assignment to give him Reverie then. But work is work.

Yeah, I don't know how much they take your playing history into consideration with stuff like that. I'm guessing not much!

If he played all the Sky and Crossbell games that'd already give him a leg up on the potential reviewing pool, possibly.

I think he was playing it to create a guide, not for a review, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyway, I've finished up with Drake's Breath in Final Fantasy XVI. Not gonna lie, I've been kinda dreading Jill dying ever since Cid's death. I imagine Clive will get Shiva's power eventually, and it feels like that only happens with her dying. Maybe the game will subvert my expectations though like it did at the end of this section by not having a full blown Ifrit fight this time.

I see Joshua is bearing a mark from where he sealed Ultima, and it seems Ultima has been silent in the five years since until Clive destroyed the Mothercrystal (as an aside, it seems like a design flaw to have such a massive structure with such a clear and obvious weakness, but maybe the design was intentional!). I wonder if this Ultima guy is a remnant of the "Fallen," of whom we still know virtually nothing, but I imagine that will change at some point, hopefully.

We had the 20 week ultrasound and found out we are having a girl!

Whew, we got a boy and girl in two tries, so now there's no pressure to shoot for a third, haha.

There's always pressure for 3 because that's when you go positive on birth rate.

Oh that means you're having another kid wow nice!

that's quite the delayed realization...!

congrats, exciting!

In Final Fantasy XVI, we head back to Rosalith Castle to have a big showdown with Kupka, who's learned who "Cid the Outlaw" really is and wanted to draw Clive out. This is a really cool sequence of events, highlighted by Torgal's reveal that he...might be a Dominant/Eikon? Also I LOL'd at Clive slicing Kupka's hands clean off in slow motion.

also hey Waloed you haven't done anything in a while, welcome back to the game

Summer is tough for someone who likes to listen to podcasts because it feels like half of them take off during July for at least part, if not all, of the month.

TotK beaten

Good game.

The ending cutscenes were all pretty cool. I smiled when I saw Ganondorf do a bullet time dodge. Wasn't smiling as much when he did it to avoid a flurry rush. Overall he was pretty free, though. I think I fused the Master Sword with a Silver Moblin horn or something and just did way too much damage to him and the Master Sword had infinite durability for this battle. I have zero idea what any of this means for The Zelda Timeline since Ganon and Ganondorf are somehow completely different people?

Also I did find Hestu while doing prep just before the final boss. I didn't really need more equipment space at that point but it's the thought that matters. From here, I'll probably take a break and finish up the rest of the shrines later.

I completed my exploration of the Tabantha Plains or whatever you call that region between the Hebra/Rito and Lost Woods. Now I'll be striking south from Lookout Landing and then sweeping to the southeast to hit the final 3 areas before all that remains are the 3 areas I'm supposed to go to lol.

Ive still only played like 5 or 6 hours. No idea why, I was definitely enjoying it!

The premise of Gerudo Land is definitely the most annoying of the four major areas. I can say that now.

So they've been doing road work just past an interstate split near where I live, and there have been multi-car accidents in the same area three days in a row now.

Makes me wonder what they've done there that's been leading to accidents like that.

Leonhart4 posted...

The premise of Gerudo Land is definitely the most annoying of the four major areas. I can say that now.

Which premise do you mean? Hot in the day and cold at night?

The sandstorm that renders your map useless

Oh right. Yeah, the way I dealt with that is by going to the islands above and flying over it, then heading for the main quest quick. I think that's the optimal option.

Secret Invasion Episode 4 complete!

Feels like every episode so far has ended with the cliffhanger of somebody being seriously injured and wondering if they're dead or not.

24 Season 2 Episode 9 complete!

This is quite the pickle Jack has gotten himself into this time, but I'm sure he'll find a way to turn it around on Nina.

In Final Fantasy XVI, we've finished up at Drake's Fang. You knew Kupka was never going to be the main threat, but it feels good to give him his comeuppance. Also I guess Waloed is in cahoots with Ultima, for some reason, who gives the typical "wow humans sure are weird" speech to Clive.

24 Season 2 Episode 10 complete!

Sherry is just the worst.

Also I feel like it should've been brought up before now that the Warners lived in Saudi Arabia, but I definitely wasn't expecting Marie to be the mole all along.

felt like that was a bit of a silly twist

South Hyrule Field/That Area South of Lookout Landing cleared out.

Some interesting stuff while I did that: Think I accidentally found the Master Sword lol. I was exploring the sky islands in the region and was about to drop down to a boss fight on a lower platform when I saw the Light Dragon was *right there* and having previously landed on some of the other dragons, I went to do the same here. I aimed for the head and... was that the Master Sword just implanted in its forehead? How is it alive lol? I ignored it for now because that's a Main Quest but huh. Also headed over to the Great Plateau (BOTW's tutorial area) and found a talking statue who asked me to do some stuff. It took me a few moments but I realized the speech pattern was familiar and eventually connected it to the Poe Statue in Lookout Landing. Messed up this quest so much though but I feel like it wasn't my fault. At the part where it asks you to throw its eyes down the chasms I did so and the quest update message pops when you do. So while I would normally expect items to reset their location if I wandered off I thought the eyes would *stay* in the Depths now since the quest update pops and even mentions that they've been thrown down there. So I went around the surface and threw all four down, followed the last and returned it... only to learn the other eyes all reset back to the surface arghhhhhh. Once I finished doing it all *again* though it was indeed a Poe Vendor but I also got a Heart Container so that took some of the sting out of all that.

Also completed the Yiga set so I was able to infiltrate their base in the Gerudo Highlands. Got the Earthwake skill and the Lightning Helm so that's cool. Not sure Earthwake will see much use though since it's unarmed only.

Next on the agenda is to keep going south, to the Faron region!

Three acts into Trails into Reverie. Kinda funny that all the Cold Steel characters are playable and have major roles, but Laura hasn't even shown up yet. Very good game so far, definitely better than CS2-4.

The writing for the Great Plateau Poe quest is absolute garbage.

I also got through Act 3 of Trails into Reverie today. Don't have much specific to say here really but I've also been liking it a lot. If it continues at the current pace it will be my favorite Trails game since Azure, but I don't know if that's a guarantee to happen considering CS3/CS4 also seemed quite strong to me initially before stumbling at various points in the mid to late game. There are a few reasons I'm hopeful this won't suffer the same fate but we will have to see.

I guess one thing is that I think this is easily the best Trails game to-date from a purely gameplay point-of-view.

Oh right, forgot to mention this last night.

24 Season 2 Episode 11 complete!

Kim's ability to randomly find trouble is unparalleled.

S2 Kim is the stuff of legends.

24 Season 2 Episode 12 complete!

Wow, a lot of torture happening in this one.

The more I play Final Fantasy XVI, the more it feels like medieval Final Fantasy VII.

There are some key differences, of course, but I think the games share a lot in common in terms of themes.

Jill does look a bit like Tifa

2x12 is definitely one of the more intense interrogations of the series

TheManaSword posted...

Jill does look a bit like Tifa

I'd say Clive resembles Cloud more than Jill resembles Tifa...!

Clive is very much a final fantasy protagonist

Secret Invasion Episode 5 complete!

Hard to believe there's only one episode left. Wonder what Fury has up his sleeve with this plan of his.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgqGdIoa52s

Man, this game looks so good

Maybe I'll get to it next year...!

Finished Drake's Tail in Final Fantasy XVI. Heck yeah Ifrit/Phoenix vs. Bahamut, that was awesome. Gotta say, I was not expecting Olivier to be some sort of projection of Ultima or whatever. I'm still pretty confused as to what Ultima is actually trying to achieve or why aside from wanting to use Clive as his vessel in the "real world" once he's gained all the Eikons' power or something. I'm not sure why he hates that humans have free will and consciousness so much...!

Faron region explored. 114 Shrines, 671 Koroks. Argh rain and thunder still the worst. I'm up to two parts of the climbing grip set but it's still the worst. One of the very last places in the area I explored was a massive cave where I ended up putting together basically a tank LOL. Started with a parts depot and then basically drove to various enemy bases and picked up more batteries and weapons at each outpost. Though once I ran out of batteries I had so many things attached to it it drained my battery in like 4 seconds. Fun cave tho.

Next up, the uh... Southeast region.

No progress report on Lightroots? Hope you're not saving those to do all at once. Feels like it'd get really repetitive that way...

MacArrowny posted...

No progress report on Lightroots? Hope you're not saving those to do all at once. Feels like it'd get really repetitive that way...

"ha ha ha"

yes i'm basically insane and will end up doing a mega Depths run once i'm done with the surface

i'm pot committed now. it's too late for me

good way to guarantee you won't like this as much as BotW, haha