Nintendo

Finished Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker!!

Cleared the main game (Episodes 1-3) and some of the Bonus stages. Might come back later to do the rest but not sure.

I liked the game but it has some annoying issues. I mentioned last week how it forces you to replay the same stage multiple times and kills the pacing, but there's also inconsistency in the quality of the stages - I think the slower-paced, more puzzle-focused ones are great, but the more action-focused ones can get very frustrating.

The compact nature of the stages make the camera get "in your way" very often, which can be a major pain when you're rushing to escape enemies or raising lava. Also, these action-focused stages often give you a single chance to get Gems or Pixel Toads, forcing you to restart on small mistakes and adding to the repetition problem I mentioned above.

Finished Atelier Plachta (DLC for Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream)!

I've been wanting to replay Atelier Sophie 2 but my backlog doesn't allow me, so I decided to compromise and get this DLC that was sitting in my wishlist.

It's a prologue to the main story, showing Plachta's arrival in Erde Wiege, her first adventure in that world alongside Ramizel and Diebolt, and how she got her Atelier. It also gives small bits of backstory for Plachta and Ramizel (mainly about their relationship with alchemy) that I don't recall being in the main game.

Gameplay-wise you just go around the Atelier, main city, and one (fairly large) area with a boss at the end. Clearing this unlocks this area in the main game and a couple of extra recipes.

Overall it's too short for its cost, but it was a reminder of how good Atelier Sophie 2 is - alchemy and combat are top-tier, the fantastic and colorful world is fun to explore, and it has a great balance of chill/slice-of-life and story moments.

Playing Stella of the End!

Good progress this week, reached Chapter 12 of 21.

This game gives me very strong TLOU vibes - it focuses on a growing parent/daughter relationship between the two leads as they travel through a ravaged land. However, this one goes for a more sci-fi approach - the father figure is Jude, a courier tasked with escorting a "newborn" android called Philia through forests and ruins of the collapsed human civilization.

The worldbuild is pretty damn good here. There's a lot of details in how humans survive in this post-apocalyptic age, including its dangers like leftover war machines or tribes of humans who have gone feral. But you also get some glimpses at the past - one of my favorite chapters has the duo going through the remains of megalopolis while they figure out the conflicts that caused the collapse of its society.