magid

I finished Burning Shores! I loved the LA archipelago and the new machines and I like Seyka a lot. I didn’t find Londra, the antagonist in this, as effective or as intriguing as Tilda, and gosh I really miss Sylens (isis - thanks for the pointer to the in-game shrine to him! It’s lovely). I may at some point go back and do a hard mode play through of HFW, because I do like the gameplay, but I think I’ll give it a break for now.

I went looking for new puzzle games and ended up playing through Is This Seat Taken?, a cheerful indie game in which you have to put anthropomorphic shapes in the exact places that satisfy their increasingly finicky requests (no noise, in direct sunlight, standing on the left but not adjacent to anyone who hasn’t showered, able to steal popcorn from a neighbour etc) in a series of city-based challenges. I like the aesthetic and I like the gameplay. The (thin) storyline, in which Nate the rhombus wants to be a movie star, could have been better, and I would have also liked more female major characters, but it was fun.

Then I started The Room 3 - the latest in a horror puzzle game series with intricate mechanics and foreboding settings, and I’ve previously played the first two. But those were on my iPad and although I’m enjoying it, my phone screen really is too small, so I am now dithering between pressing on regardless or replaying a good 2/3rds of the game on an iPad. Hmm. So instead I started TR-49, where you are searching through a WWII-era machine containing pieces of various writings, in search of an ultimate secret for as yet unspecified reasons; it’s intriguing and I need more time with it.

However. On the PS5 I have returned to FFVII Rebirth, and finally completed chapter 12 on hard mode after being stuck there for months. Fighting Corneo’s assorted brawlers was fine, and Rude & Elena weren’t too bad once I got used to their attacks, but then you go straight into a solo Cloud battle with Rufus, who is ridiculously fast, and also I was only at half health from all the preceding battles and could not face going back and doing them all over. Lots of dodging, lots of very precise timing required to hit back at all, and lots of staring contemplatively at the Game Over screen, but eventually I did it. I went on to chapter 13 but very rapidly this hits a no turn back point, so before that I have been attempting to complete all of FFVII Rebirth’s many, many mini games, in order to get the Johnnie’s Treasure Trove achievement. This requires 88 (!) mini-achievements. I have now won all the chocobo races at the Gold Saucer, done all the Fort Condor and Gears & Gambits hard mode tower defence games, shot targets in Costa Del Sol, sent Yuffie & Aerith out to clean up cactuars in Corel, etc, etc, etc, and currently I have managed to claw my way to 74.

It is definitely a journey. I prefer the mini games where they’re thematic (sure, the Glide de Chocobo rank III award was a navigational nightmare that nearly gave me tendonitis but you’re riding a chocobo!) or the gameplay ties back to the main game - getting Aerith through Cactuar Crush hard mode required me to upskill dramatically in using her Tempest attack, something I’d previously overlooked. In contrast, I dislike tower defence even when the polygons are cute and shooting targets is not my thing at all, but I am a) stubborn and b) capable of watching a YouTube video and managing to follow at least some of it after multiple attempts.

I have got one more mini game to get through that’s not at the Gold Saucer - it’s the hard mode frog challenge in Junon, in which your party is transformed into frogs (a common occurrence in FF games) and you have to stay on a series of moving platforms for as long as possible - and then I will be back at the Saucer, which has more Queen's Blood challenges, another terrible shooting game I suck at, and the sole remaining side quest, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, which requires me to beat the Shinra Middle Manager and all my own previous high scores on six minigames. Yay. And even if I get through all of those, plus Chadley’s Legendary Challenges, I still have to manage to play piano on the PS5 controller well enough to get an A grade on Two Legs D:

(FFVII Remake is now out on the Switch 2, and Rebirth will be out June. Released with these are patch updates that enable God Mode, which would make it much easier to get any of the fighting trophies - I’m not sure if they will affect the mini games. I don’t have a problem with this mode being available but I would like, if possible, to get the platinum before that).