Board 8 > July Game of the Month Club ft. Cassette Beasts, Danganronpa, and Journey

(+) Yeah! (+)

July�s Games:
Cassette Beasts (PC/XS/X/XB1/Switch)
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (PC/XB1/PS4/Switch/iOS/Android/Vita/PSP)
Journey (PC/PS4/PS3/iOS)

Games of the Month of the Year:
Mass Effect (PC/XB1/PS4/360/PS3)
Mass Effect 2 (PC/XB1/PS4/360/PS3)
Mass Effect 3 (PC/XB1/PS4/360/PS3/Wii U)

What is Game of the Month Club?
Game of the Month is a community project open to all B8ers where users share, discover, play and/or discuss a select few games every month. The games featured each month are chosen by YOU the users (and Lady Luck)

The Basics
- Each month will usually feature three games that were chosen via a random drawing from a pool of games that users nominated
- For each game you beat, you get a cool point on our just-for-fun standings as well as a nomination for next month's randomized drawing
- In order to receive the point and nomination, you must beat said game within the calendar month
- If you beat one of the current month's games in the previous month, you can apply for a "recently beaten waiver," but you will only receive a point and no nomination should you do so
- Drawing for next month's games is usually on the 25th
- If you periodically keep us posted on your progress and/or talk about different aspects of the games, then everyone will obviously think you are super awesome!

Nomination Rules
- You get one nomination automatically each month
- You receive additional nominations each month for every featured game that you beat
- Each game you nominate has to be unique from all other nominations and cannot include a game that has already been selected for GotM
- Each game must be a standalone game that can be acquired and played on its own (aka cannot be DLC/expansion that requires the base game)
- Nominations only carry over if you beat a featured game after the drawing for next month's games but before the end of the month
- You have 9 supports you can use throughout the year. Your only limitations are that you can't support your own nomination, and you can only use one support per game per month

Just-for-Fun Top 20 Standings
KCF - 169
gameking - 116
ArkOfTurus - 102
Mr Crispy - 100
Lolo Guru - 70
Cody - 58
KnightOfNee - 35
MegamanX - 28
ViolentAbacus - 28
Seanchan - 27
Wickle - 26
Arti - 23
FakeAccount - 23
scarletspeed - 23
darkx - 18
GreatPaul - 17
MZero - 17
Fenny - 16
Suprak the Stud - 16
JONALEON - 14
tazzyboy - 14

Spreadsheet with history
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X8E8oqzES42W4S82j7WTfNnzNa8c3uXdSE1rnqYG7WM/edit?usp=sharing

Additional noms this month
Crispy - 2

Cassette Beasts is on Game Pass for console/PC/mobile

Cassette Beasts is on sale for $16 USD on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1321440/Cassette_Beasts/

Danganronpa THH is on sale for $8 USD on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/413410/Danganronpa_Trigger_Happy_Havoc/

Danganronpa 1-2 Reload, which includes THH and its sequel, is on sale for $16 USD for PS4
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP1063-CUSA06808_00-DANGANRONPARLDUS

Journey is on sale for $7.50 USD on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/638230/Journey/

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is on sale for $15 USD on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328670/Mass_Effect_Legendary_Edition/

Let's also take a moment to lament Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner becoming the fourth game since the start of 2020, and second this year, to end up with nobody beating in during the month (unless Kenri did and just hasn't gotten around to informing us).

I did indeed beat ZOE2 though I think it was after this topic was up, not sure the exact time. However you want to count that is okay with me.

It was definitely a game from 2003, with exactly the sort of flaws that would imply (awful dialogue/translation, mediocre-at-best VA work, way more NPC escort/defense missions than you'd like, shit-ass Sonic Adventure-style camera that just will not stop freaking out every time you move). However when you look past those flaws it is cool as hell, and I can definitely fuck with the late 90s anime-ness of it all. ...I think I said basically the same thing about Killer7 but to this game's credit it actually has a fun battle system going for it too.

Definitely gonna do Danganronpa. May do Journey as well

I would have played ZoE2 via the hd collection, if my ps3 wasn't probably on its last legs the last time I tried to turn it on.

If I still have access to Journey on PS5, Ill definitely do that.

Anything else is doubtful with Zelda still taking up most of my time.

Definitely gonna do Journey. May do Danganronpa as well (time permitting).

Don't stop believin' I got the first beat of the month with Journey.

Not my first playthrough. Didn't get any new trophies this time.

Probably my only game this month. I beat Danganronpa in the last year or so, and don't really know the other one.

Played the Danganronpa prologue and it's pretty interesting so far. Definitely looking forward to continuing.

I've been playing Cassette Beasts for probably two or so hours so far, and I think that I'm starting to get down some of the peculiar aspects of the game, both in battling and exploring. There being stamina, which allows you to run only briefly is quite the bummer.

I'm about level 20 in Cassette Beasts, which seems a little excessive given I've only played a few hours. I wonder if everything will be like level 90 at the end or something.

I plan to do a replay of Journey over the next few days.

Gonna do journey

I have 0 clue what Cassette Beasts is *googles* oh I'll likely wait for a ps release

Nominate Carto

Just hit ps extra, really neat little game i sampled for bean dive

I don't know who else is playing Cassette Beasts, but I am curiously if they are swapping out tapes a bunch or primarily sticking with what they first got. I'm unsure how deep these evolutions go, but I realize that since player level is the primary strength indicator, I can just have a constantly fluctuating tape roster if I want. I've basically kept my starter beast because it's been my favorite, but everything else keeps changing, not that I have a deep pool of tapes.

I tried swapping out and getting everything to five stars. I'm not sure that was the smartest plan because it occasionally put me in a weird place in some fights. Better, it seems, is to find a team you like, and then use stickers to improve it.

Me, being someone who has basically never played Pokemon, didn't use a single sticker. Then I got to the final boss and got completely destroyed. Watched a few videos of people doing it and they just roflstomped him because of all the passive stickers they piled up.

Evolutions are at most 3 deep. Some creatures have 1, some have 2, and some have 2 with branching paths. If you look at your pokedex after you start to fill it in, it should become clear which is which. The awkward thing is that some of the creatures have very specific requirements for evolutions either in general, or into one of the branching paths. (i.e. it has to be night vs day.)

Yeah, I haven't messed with my items at all, and the difficulty seems to be ramping up, so that's bound to change. I did buy a few stickers, including a rare one from the travelling merchant that seems fun as it has you use a random ability, from I'm assuming the entire ability pool in the game, that your AP can cover

Finished chapter 2 of Danganronpa. My fiance and I are playing it together and it's been really interesting so far.

I've been holding off going down the rabbit hole of sticker/ability builds, but I'm starting to hit a wall in Cassette Beasts. I've done about seven ranger battles and six archangels, but I've had to abandon pursuit of one landholder (or whatever they are called) battle and one archangel battle. I'm currently doing Felix's quest, and maybe I can also venture to the remaining area of the map, the bottom left, but I'm guessing that the enemy levels are the highest there.

I bought Cassette Beasts.

Will I get to it this month? Hopefully...

After 15 hours into the game, I finally got around to using items in a battle, and boy do I feel dumb ignoring that up to now. I also discovered the item shop within the town hall, and upgrading healing item limitations as well as increasing fusion rate has made quite the difference. Fights I had difficulty with before, I could now defeat with somewhat ease. I feel like I am close to finishing it. I have just one captain and two archangels, and who knows what is beyond that.

In chapter 3 of Danganronpa, just before the trial.

Genocide Jill is probably my favourite character at this point, and I always get disappointed when she reverts back to Toko.

KCF has beaten Cassette Beasts

I ended up liking this quite a bit. I don't think that I will be doing much post-game as it seems very grindy in nature, and I have no desire to grind in a static, turn-based game such as this.

Very fun to mix-and-match beasts since they didn't exactly have levels themselves. I kept my starter beast as my main on my character, so when I went to do fusions, which was often, I kept forgetting to swap it out as I liked seeing different base designs for those fusions. Instead I got to see, checks notes as most beasts I could not give you their name (but I could maybe picture them if someone else said their name), Miasmodeus' fusion base form in a bunch of palette swaps. I would have also done a lot with sticker customization, but the process was a little tedious, so I only did it for certain fights that I was previously struggling with.

I ended up with about 60 recorded beasts, which is around half, so that's pretty decent I think for someone who wasn't trying to "record them all." The recording process was one of my least favorite aspects of the game.

I wasn't sure about exploration at first, but I think that I came around to it being one of its better assets, at least in terms of initial discoveries. There's a ton of nooks and cranies and secrets in a relatively small map. Navigating previously explored areas to get around to places though could be a little bit of a pain, especially when several previously completed puzzles that provide important shortcuts or necessary access to places reset for some reason?

I was about to say that this was I think my first creature collecting RPG that I've played since Pokemon X/Y back in 2016-2017 and that this was a nice return to that genre, but then I realized that I literally played (and dropped) one last month and also played Digimon Cyber Sleuth in like 2019-2020.

Man, I really did put 20 hours into this in a 13+ day span. I typically don't game until the evening, so I must have had some lengthy sessions a couple of nights.

I will start off my nominations with

Mafia (Definitive Edition is a faithful remake and would apply here)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game

azuarc posted...

Then I got to the final boss and got completely destroyed. Watched a few videos of people doing it and they just roflstomped him because of all the passive stickers they piled up.

I ended up wiping the floor with the final boss. With whatever my playstyle/approach is, I found that stacking damage effects to enemies was very effective for me. My starter beast was excellent at causing poison, and they also had Trick to hand out random negative effects to opponents, so all I needed was a teammate that could debuff/burn/leech with damaging attacks, and I was golden.

The fights that gave me the most trouble even after finally discovering basic stuff like the town hall shop and how useful healing items were, were the bosses related to the conclusions to the ranger and Viola questlines. The former in particular took several tinkering of lineups/stickers to get through.

Monthly Progress
Cassette - KCF
Dangan -
Journey - Mauron

Nominations
MMX - Carto
KCF - Mafia, Scott Pilgrim

Supports

KCF0107 posted...

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game

I bought the physical version from LRG forever ago, and still have yet to play it.

I've done the first case in DR. With me having played it before nearly a decade ago, I'm getting some amusement of faux dramatic irony, though I'm skipping plenty of dialogue since most of it is uninformative and lame

It all goes downhill from here, so I will be skipping a lot more dialogue

Played about three hours of Cassette Beasts. No confidence I'll beat it by the dead-line, but I like it a lot!

Nominate Citizen Sleeper

I started Cassette Beasts and I kinda love it so far. The openness is fun and I like a lot of the critters. Always nice when a creature collector has a consistent aesthetic for its creatures, even (especially) if it's weird as hell.

also the harbourtown indoors music is soooo dreamy and good, i'm love it

KCF has beaten Journey

The first time that I beat this game in 2017, I think that I played solo pretty much the entire game. This time, I was alone until I entered the area after the broken bridge, and there was someone there. I then proceeded to go through the entire game in one sitting with them, or so I thought.

At the end of the credits, it told me the people I met along the way, and there were two names on there. I first thought that I may have met someone in passing earlier in the game and we just weren't aware of each other's presence. I then checked the trophy list, and it says that there's one for spending the majority of a journey with a player, and since I spent like 80% of the game with what I thought was one person, I apparently had my partner switched, and I never realized it lol. I swear that their behavior seemed quite similar.

I will nominate The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales as a newish Game Pass game.

Drawing in a week

I believe I'm near the end of Danganronpa. Hoping to finish it right away here.

I've been playing Cassette Beasts ravenously and I'm definitely close to finishing out the main story. I have one ranger captain left and I just completed Morgante's song. Pretty curious where the story is going, which is a nice change for a creature catcher. The game threw out a pretty clear hint that the player character is an archangel, or something equivalent, unless that was just a small fourth wall break. Interested to see where it goes either way. I loved Meredith's and Viola's quests and Felix's was extra silly, little bit less of a fan of Kayleigh's and Eugene's but the archangel fights were still hype. My only big complaint is that I wish this game had more full dungeons instead of just little caves. Oh, and I guess the difficulty feels a little uneven but it's fine.

Been trying to finish off the bestiary too, have just over 100 right now. It's a bit hard to puzzle out how to unlock certain remasters, even with the in-game hints, and it took me forever to find Salamagus even with the bestiary telling me which areas it's in.

ArkOfTurus has beaten Cassette Beasts

I also ended up putting way more time into it way more quickly than I expected. It was really good, probably my favorite single player of any Pokemon-type game (including Pokemon.) The difficulty was a bit disappointing (I only lost once to Ianthe, and all it really took to win the rematch was unlocking the confusion curing item), I regret not turning the scaling slider up, at least, and movement could be very clunky at times, but those are my only real complaints. Had a blast, didn't want to put it down, and will either be 100%ing it, or starting a new game with some extra challenge elements quickly.

Ended up mostly settling on a team of Cat-5, Robindam, Grass Bootleg Artillerex, and Ramtasm, with the last two slots mainly just being cassettes I wanted to evolve, with Glaistain snuck in near the end.

Nominate ANNO: Mutationem

I might just power through, aka skip almost everything, Danganronpa tonight since the last two chapters are not interesting.

Kenri has beaten Cassette Beasts

I also sunk way more time into this much faster than expected, to the tune of 33 hours since I started it on Monday. I was under the weather and pretty much just lying in bed that whole time, which helps, but damn.

yeah so i fuckin loved this game. I can't believe it really said the battle with the champion-equivalent is a lesbian couple fusion mirror match. Pokemon would never. Unfortunately Aleph ended up being kind of a pushover, like probably the easiest boss in the game, but it was still pretty hype because of the good music playing and the whole crew fusing. I think I'd have liked the ending itself better if everyone, or at least your character (and maybe your romantic partner, if any) had decided to stay on New Wirral, but I can see how that could make the game feel kinda pointless. I guess you can just make it happen anyway by never leaving on your own file. I also wish the protagonist had been a real character (actually can we just make kayleigh the protagonist, thanks) but that's not really something I expected, it just would've been a nice bonus.

I ended up finishing the bestiary (aside from all the 5 star info and Magikrab) and I'll probably do some of the post-game, though my understanding is that it's absurdly grindy for no real reason so we'll see if I give up on it.

KCF has beaten Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc...again, so doubly unfortunate.

For my last nom, let's do Alwa's Legacy

Monthly Progress
Cassette - KCF, Ark, Kenri
Dangan - Paul, KCF
Journey - Mauron, KCF

Nominations
Ark - Citizen Sleeper, ANNO: Mutation
MMX - Carto
KCF - Mafia, Scott Pilgrim, Bookwalker, Alwa's Legacy

Supports

Drawing on Tuesday

Nominate:

Astalon: Tears of the Earth
Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil

KCF0107 posted...

For my last nom, let's do Alwa's Legacy

Support

because I just bought this during the summer sale

I will support Astalon. I think I did so the last time it was nominated.

Nominate
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion
Kena: Bridge of Spirits

I don't know if Crisis Core Reunion is different enough to be it's own entry, but I specified just in case.

Great_Paul posted...

Kena: Bridge of Spirits

Support

because I just bought this during the winter sale

KCF0107 posted...

For my last nom, let's do Alwa's Legacy

Oh hey, I just beat that this week.

Wow I was absolutely not prepared for the Lenna bonus boss in Cassette Beasts.

That whole area is pretty easy to miss so if anyone is interested and needs a hint: fly west from Mt. Wirral.