c/nintendos's Official Head of VNs
I like it a lot. It was clearly developed by Falcom's "B-Team" but has a lot of heart.
It's a mix of Ys-style action gameplay (though not as polished), current-world setting with supernatural elements like Persona, and Trails-style sidequesting. Cast is great, story is classic anime-style "superpowered high-schoolers fighting monsters" and they fully embrace it, I love how they even replay the game opening at the beginning of each chapter as it if was a new "Episode".
The OST is amazing.
Excited for Kyoto Xanado (I love the previous game), and good to get a release date for the Aventures of Elliot.
Not much else for me though. Tons of ports of games I don't care enough or I'd already own a PS5.
Yes! And in two weeks we have an extended holiday here in Brazil for me to play like crazy.
AdHoc absolutely deserves the beating they're taking. Even if they had no way to prevent the censorship they should've announced this a long time ago.
Playing Hades 2!
Finally got a win over the "surface" path boss! Though it seems like I'll need to do it a few more times to progress. I also managed to unlock the remaining aspects of the weapons.
Playing Witch on the Holy Night!
About halfway through Chapter 8.
Playing Trails Beyond the Horizon!
I know I should be focused on Witch on the Holy Night, but it's impossible for me to resist a new Trails game. And it starts hot, with the prologue having us play with the Arkride Solutions Office alongside a few surprise additions.
Rean and Altina are back (and she's more grown up now), and I'm happy they're keeping her as Rean's "default" partner - she was one of my favorite characters on the latter half of the Cold Steel games.
But more important, we finally get to play with Kevin again! It's been so, so long since we last had him in the party! And it looks like he'll have an important role, working alongside the "Imperial Picnicking Front". C and Lapis already joined and Swin and Nadia already got mentioned a few times.
That alone got me so hyped I doubt I'll be putting down this game anytime soon.
Currently in Chapter 1.2, wrapping up a few 4SPGs before I move on.
Edit: Super Robot Wars Y just announced DLC2 will be released next week with 16 new missions. I'm glad no game I'm interested is releasing anytime soon, I have a lot to catch up now.
A bit slower with games these last couple weeks since I started on a new job and I'm still adjusting to the new routine.
Playing Hades 2!
I've gotten used to the "underworld" path and I'm succeeding more than I fail now, even managed three wins in a row.
The "surface" path is much harder, I got to the final boss a few times but haven't beaten him yet. I'd like to practice this path more, but I'm trying to unlock the remaining aspects of the weapons and the items I need are all from the "underworld" path so I still have to do a couple more runs there before I can move on.
Playing Witch on the Holy Night!
Slowed down a bit in Hades 2 in the last couple days and put more time on this one again. Reached Chapter 8.
Playing Earthion and R-Type Delta!
I got a couple old-style shmups in my mailbox recently. Earthion is a game from Yuzo Koshiro, the composer of classic soundtracks like Streets of Rage, and it's a love letter to the Mega Drive/Genesis era of this genre. It's on the easy side due to its very forgiving shield system so might be a good pick for people who don't have much experience with these games, I got a clear on the Easy difficulty on my first attempt.
R-Type Delta is a game that is seen as one of the best in the series but only had only a PS1 release until now. I briefly tried it on an emulator a long time ago and enjoyed, so I'm happy to finally own a proper copy. First impression after a long time without playing it is "this game is hard". It's a very unforgiving, old-school arcade, and even on the easier "Kids" difficulty I've only gotten to Stage 3. But it feels like I just need a bit more practice, like learning some tricky spots where you have enemies coming from multiple directions and you need to shift the force device to the back of the ship to help.
Interesting timing for this post since I just got my copy of R-Type Delta HD.
The "Dimensions" remasters of R-Type 1 and 2 are excellent, if this keeps the same quality I'm definitely purchasing.
[Kubuntu 25.10]
Fingerprint support is weird. The hardware works after installing a driver from Dell but I could never get it to work on both login and lock screens at the same time - I get one working, the other breaks. Also, even when it works the behavior is not consistent between those screens, and also requires mouse movement or key presses before the sensor responds which is annoying.
Bluetooth support has some oddities, like the fact that some apps can properly swap my headset from "High Fidelity" and "Headset" codecs and others can't. I've gotten used to doing it manually when necessary but it drove me crazy earlier on.
rclone is awesome but I really wish it had a way to set auto-mounting or auto-syncing as part of the setup. Took me quite a few attempts to get it working as I wanted.
Pretty good, running Kubuntu for a few months. Had some annoyances at first but they were all solved when I moved from LTS to 25.10.
Ah, I don’t really watch much trailers when I am sure I’ll play the game, so didn’t know about Chronos.
"Death to Chronos" is also the first thing Melinoe says when you start the game. :)
Chronos is the final boss?
I mean, the trailers all say "Death to Chronos" so I figured that was not a spoiler. But yes, he's the final boss of the initial path (Underworld).
There are multiple paths? 😲
Yes! After a while you also unlock the option to go to the Surface path, which is much harder and has completely different areas and bosses. Adds a lot more variety to the game.
You also have to keep alternating between the two paths to unlock things as most are done as "spells" in the witch's cauldron, and each requires ingredients from specific areas.
One neat thing are some tweaks they added to make you less susceptible to RNG when trying to get a specific ingredients - you can recruit "familiar" animals and can bring one with you each run. Each has different benefits, one of them being "higher change of finding ingredients of a specific type". So you need seeds? Bring the Hecuba the dog familiar and he'll find and dig them for you.
Still liking Witch on the Holy Night?
Quite a bit. I'm taking my time with it but I expect my final rating will be at least an 8 out of 10, maybe higher depending on how the second half goes.
Playing Hades 2!
Huge progress this week. Managed to beat Chronos a few times, but I'm still having trouble with the final boss on the other path.
Playing Witch on the Holy Night!
Still on Chapter 7. It's partially due to Hades 2 eating most of my gaming time, but also because this Chapter is fairly long.
It's both an expansion (similar to Royal) with more demons, quests and QOL improvements for the base game and a brand-new "alternate" storyline.
I'm probably thinking of a bigger timeline, don't recall the last time I tried to migrate but it was probably between 5 and 10 years.
Biggest improvement is Steam+Proton. Gaming in Linux was a huge PITA in the past and nowadays it just works automagically.
Wayland was a big deal to me since it supports some features I needed like per-screen scaling, using my 13'' notebook on a desk without that gets really straining. I'm using KDE and I also think Linux GUIs have massively improved in usability.
Hardware support improved a lot, though there are still gaps like fingerprint readers which honestly still suck in Linux. But at least all the essential stuff works very well out of the box.
Docker standardizing deployments made it easier to use any OS you want for coding... which is probably a bigger win for MacOS to be honest. More cross-platform support for development tools (including .Net on Linux) also help since that avoids the need of dual-booting when your day job involves these.
Wow, that’s long. And I can’t even imagine what 80 hours of VN will have in it. That’ll be equivalent to a 1000 page novel or something?
Apparently even longer. I was checking some stats, Fate/Stay Night has roughly the same size as the King James Bible ( ~750k words), which typically is printed in ~1500 pages.
Umineko which is a famous for being a ridiculously long VN is is 50% longer than that (~1150k words). That's more than the entire Harry Potter series with seven books.
Is Witch of the Holy Night long or are you just playing slowly, cause usually you don’t take this much time with VNs.
I am playing slowly, but most of the VNs I played recently were on the short side (~10h or so according to VNDB), with WotHN being triple of that.
There are much longer VNs though. 😀 I have Little Busters or Fate/Stay Night in my backlog that are listed on VNDB as being 80h+.
@slimerancher@lemmy.world congrats on finishing Dark Souls!
For me the last weekend was crazy busy and slowed down gaming progress, and also meant no time for Super Robot Taisen Y again. 🙁
Finished Islets!
Really fun and cute game. It's on the short side, the in-game clock unfortunately counts the time I left it on "sleep" so it's hard to give accurate numbers but probably took me 8h or so.
One surprise was the difficulty, from the visuals I was expecting an easy game but most bosses took me a few tries to defeat and I died quite a few times while transversing the map. It's still a chill game though, you don't lose any progress when you die, save games are plentiful, and you are constantly opening shortcuts so getting back to the spot you died is usually quick.
I also like the upgrade system, besides the mandatory story upgrades you're constantly finding smaller upgrades that give you three options each time, so you have a lot of flexibility on what to prioritize. The fact that these are very abundant (looks like there's 60 of these overall) helps keep a constant sense of progression.
Playing Crypt Custodian!
Another metroidvania from the same developer as Islets, but with a top-down perspective reminiscent of old-school Zelda games. The game stars a cat who ends up having to work as a janitor in the afterlife, using his trusty broom to beat down monsters and clean up dirt everywhere.
The mood is more melancholic than Islets, but still on the "cute" side. It has an equipment system similar to Hollow Knight with "upgrade slots" where each equipment uses a certain number of them, but slots are very plentyful which gives you more options on how to assign things
Still fairly early in this one, just defeated the second boss.
Playing Witch on the Holy Night!
Both parts of Chapter 5 were amazing battles, really impressed by how much they got me hyped. Felt like the "mid-game climax", and also got the main POV characters (Aoko and Shizuki) working together at last.
Just started Chapter 6 and it looks like this one will be a more chill chapter showing how things settled after that battle.
For others who have recently made the switch over, what was your experience like? Any issues? Any tips or helpful suggestions to share?
Switched from Win10 to Kubuntu a few months ago. Had a pretty easy transition, but I work in software development so I'm quite familiar with Linux as a server which helps.
I think it still needs too much fiddling with terminal + config files to be able to recommend it to less tech-savy family members, but that's not a problem for my own usage. Went with the LTS version initially which was a mistake - almost all problems I had were solved my migrating to 25.10.
Biggest annoyance right now is the poor support for fingerprint readers. I got the hardware to work by installing drivers from Dell, but I'm banging my head here trying to get it working in both Login and Unlock screens - I get one functioning and the other breaks, would really appreciate some help with this. But even then it's awkward and inconsistent as you can't just put you finger on the reader like you do in Windows, you have to move mouse/press a key (in the unlock screen) or press enter in the password field (in the login screen) before it responds to the reader.
One very impressive thing was Steam+Proton - it works way better than I expected and got me more interested in a Steam Deck or similar device.
Overall I'm very happy with the migration and can't see me going back to Windows for my personal PC - the annoyances are fairly minor compared to stuff like "oh, here's Windows Defender eating a ton of resources once again".
Wow, it's friday already? This week flew by so fast, was really busy with my new job.
Playing Trails Beyond the Horizon!
Finished Act 1, and looks like from Act 2 onwards we'll get a split storyline between Van, Rean and Kevin.
I went with Rean's route first, and this section has them arriving at Basel, learning the lay of the land then going into a mock battle against the Republic's new mech, the beautiful Excalibur.
Van's route will be next.
Playing Super Robot Wars Y!
DLC2 has arrived so it's time to get back to this game.
This DLC includes Steel Jeeg which got a LOT of love in the animation department, plus an alternate universe Getter Robo and Da Garn from the Brave Series.
So far this DLC has been on the easy side, I guess it isn't balanced for endgame units with Level 99+ and tons of upgrades, but I'm having fun. Curious if the new storyline will be as interesting as the one from DLC1.
With two of my favorite series to keep my busy and a lot to do at work I didn't get any progress on Hades 2 or Witch on the Holy Night.
Thankfully there's no major game release I'm interested this month and we have an extended holiday coming soon (Carnival!) so I hope I'll be able to go back to these games soon.