Oh wow. It feels like I haven't touched this in a while. Well, I've been playing in the background. I've also been busy with mental health issues (had a really bad depression flare ups), trying to stay afloat financially, and writing. But I have been playing games.
SMT 5: Vengeance — I bought SMT 5: Vengeance on sale a year or so ago, because I wasn't having fun with the original game (both copies for the Switch). I hit a wall after transitioning back to the school and human world after running freely for well over fifteen hours.
The updated game made it easier to breeze through what I now realize is the prologue (lmao), but even then I wasn't happy with where the game was going. Something about it just wasn't sticking with me. Ugh. Regretfully dropped that one. I doubt I'll ever return to it in the future. There was almost a five year gap between my original run, fyi. The game just isn't for me.
Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- — Now this is one I've been looking forwards to for years. Back when an old friend of mine doubted it would ever be remade. And then we saw news that yes, it was coming! But that friendship ended well before the game actually came out after years of rumors and doubt lmao.
This one was easy to get into from the start, though I didn't expect otherwise. I am a fan of some of Type Moon's other work, primarily the Kara no Kyoukai movies. I even tried to read the book(s), by way of fan translations, but the version I had was rather dry. I knew what I was getting into, essentially. And I have extensive experience with visual novels as a whole.
Now, that said...I find Shiki tolerable for the most part, but he is still a teenage boy. The levels of horniness almost make me wish I'd started Mahoyo first instead (which I later learned is chronologically set before Tsukihime and of course features one of my faves), but I'm trying not to let that bother me. I would just prefer to read from the perspective of someone who isn't being driven by his downstairs long nose.
Everyone else is lovely, and I recently met the vampire herself. And got a much needed lesson on the difference between True Ancestors and Dead Apostles. Those are terms I heard in the past from friends, but now I have full context of them.
I am a slow reader, and have been playing on my Switch Lite. Were the game available for the PC, I would do the bulk of my reading there and finish sooner. Aiming to wrap up by the end of June or July at the latest. It's also tricky because I pick up my Switch in the evening, when I do most of my reading in the afternoon (and I am reading several other books at the moment).
Oh, and after my disappointment with SMT5V, I emulated the first two Persona games and started:
Persona — This one has been oodles of fun so far! Ignoring some clunkiness, anyway...I really don't appreciate how streamlined key aspects became in later games. Fusing personas is difficult in this game as you have to request spell cards from demons, and assign the resulting fusion to users of matching arcanas. The encounter rates were kicking my butt for the last two days, but I am free of the strange high school and ready to explore the "new" world.
I am very early in the SEBEC route, as you may have guessed. I may just watch a video on the Ice Queen route, as I am not 100% sure I have my emu setup correctly and am not ready to start a new route anytime soon. Not after being familiar with some of the pain points.
I may change my mind on that later, but I just want to clear my current route at the moment. I'm most excited to experience the second set of games to their fullest. I own Eternal Punishment on the PS3, and played chunks of that before realizing that it's the latter half of a game. Argh!
So that's what I've been doing for the last few months. Ideally my next post will cover a route from Tsukihime, but it's still too early to say.