What was the last game you finished?

Finished up Vagrant Story.

Mixed feelings on this one. It was lovely in many ways, with well-done motion work on the characters, an atmospheric setting and soundtrack, and an amazing translation.

Combat however, which takes up the bulk of the game, is very time consuming and clunky. I can see why Square never returned to this sort of system after Vagrant Story and Parasite Eve. In VS, switching between weapon loadouts so frequently became tedious.

I do think the game would do well with a remake. Maybe one of these days.

Finished up Mega Man X on the Legacy Collection

Finished up Uncharted: Lost Legacy.

This felt like a quick one, but definitely longer than DLC, so I can see why they opted to make it a standalone game. It was nice to see Chloe and Nadine fleshed out (and I'm always happy to listen to Claudia Black's voice for a few hours), and Sam Drake was a welcome addition as well.

I found Uncharted 4 was a bit long for my taste, though it has been a few years since I played it. Because this one was so quick, it never seemed to drag. I wouldn't mind if future games in the franchise were shorter campaigns along these lines.

Final Fantasy VI is easy when you over level or use vanish and doom. Whenever I play through it, I refuse to do the latter. Over leveling has to be done if you want to beat the Brachiosaur in the forest. God, I love that score! Can you tell that is one of my favorite games?

Finished up Persona Q2 on the 3DS.  Fire Emblem: Three Houses has been taking up a lot of my time, but I cleared some time this weekend to give Q2 a final push.  Some general thoughts, good, bad and other.

I was a bit disappointed to find out this wasn't getting a dub with the various English voices, but I like all the Japanese voices, and I can see the desire to save expenses. Even though Persona 5 was probably the most internationally high-profile  game in the series so far, and PQ2 features the P5 cast, it is also probably the last major third party release on the 3DS.  I think Atlus expected it would not sell very well internationally, and my understanding is that its sales have definitely been much less that the original Persona Q over the same period.  Given all this, I'm just glad the game got an English-language release at all.

Overall, I really liked it.  They wisely chose to feature the Persona 5 cast from the beginning, unlocking the Persona 3 and 4 cast members as you proceed through dungeons.  It was also great to see the female Persona 3 Portable protagonist show up and have interesting plot revolve around her, despite the male P3 protagonist also being around.  It sometimes feels like she doesn't get a lot of love in the series pantheon, and I think this shows the designers still have a soft spot for her

In most of the Persona spin-offs, a lot of the cast appears as almost one-note parodies of themselves (Junpei is dumb, Akihiko loves protein and is obsessed with training, Chie likes meat, etc).  Since the Q games feature super-deformed character designs, exaggerated personality traits make a bit more sense, but I think they're more sparingly used here than in other spinoffs.  Hikari and Nagi are interesting characters introduced in this game and are developed well enough.

I don't consider this as a spoiler, so I'm not putting it behind a tag.  Both Q games are considered canon, but since they pull characters from different times and places, the Persona casts don't retain memories of the events.  They don't impact the main series, and for example, the P3 and P4 protagonists don't remember meeting before in PQ1.  That said, one of the neat things is that since all casts are pulled from near the ends of their respective gaves (Akechi from P5 and Shijiru from P3 are both present), events and plot twists from the main series can be hinted at. Nothing is outright spoiled, but it is a nice treat for those who have played the main games, and some interactions leave you wondering if character's actions in the main games could have been subconsciously influenced.

Given that Persona 5: The Royal must have shared some development time with Q2, I'm a bit sad that the new Phantom Thief, Kasumi Yoshizawa, wasn't included.  It would have been nice to see her debut in a spinoff, and get some hints to her ark in the main game.  Since the character of Marie was introduced in Persona 4 Golden, she's shown up in various spinoffs with that cast, but I'm not sure how much more spinoff material P5 might get.

Mechanically, the game is pretty close to PQ1 from what I rememeber (it has been a few years). Exploration is lifted from the Etrian Odyssey games, and combat is a fusion of both that game, and the Persona series.  Much like the main games, I found it a pretty satisfying loop, finding enemy weaknesses and exploiting them.  I did find even normal difficulty could a little...excessive when it came to certain boss encounters, even though I was fighting smart and making sure I was ready for endurance fights, so I did find myself turning the difficulty down more than once in order to proceed. This might be less pronounced on new game plus.

Something I found rather unfortunate given the large cast, is that only the characters in your main party normally earn experience, which I find discourages the player from swapping our characters very often if they've got a combination that works.  Side quests offer experience to the whole cast at the end, but probably only accounted for 4-to-5 level-ups each for my back benchers across the whole game. There is an item occasionally found in treasure chests that will raise a character to your current 'Wild Level', which is the current highest level among all the characters, and also determines the level of Personas that can be fused.  This does occasionally allow you to swap in a new character at your current level, but honestly it seems like it would have been easier to just allow your whole party to gain experience even from the bench.

At 50+ hours, the game definitely dragged at points, and I remember feeling the same way about PQ1.  I enjoyed the experience, but much like the first one, I'm tired enough that I probably won't go back for New Game+.

Along with Etrian Odyssey Nexus earlier in the year, it feels we probably won't get any more games in this style.  The manual mapping element is really tied to the DS and 3DS' 2nd screen, and easy to draw because of the resistive touch screen.  Even the Switch, which still has a capacitive touch screen, would make mapping small details difficult, and the manual map would probably take up too much screen real estate.  If we see either the main Ertian Series, or spin-offs like Persona Q continue on the current console generation, I suspect the mapping will just be an automatic feature.  

I've now finished all 4 story paths in Fire Emblem:Three Houses, after almost three months. So I'm done with that, at least until the new story DLC is released in April...depending on what it ends up being. I'll post some thoughts later over in my Fire Emblem: Three Houses thread in the Nintendo section, but clearly, I really enjoyed it.