Mind Occupancy

Lately, to keep my mind busy, I've been pushing myself harder to play video games more than usual whenever I catch myself with even a few minutes of open time. During this time, I've actually gotten some time to play Star Ocean: The Last Hope, practiced a bit in Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3, checked out Waveform on Steam, and started Virtue's Last Reward on the 3DS.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope - I've managed to get off of Aeos with Arumat finally, and now I'm heading to EN II. It's been so long since I've played though, and it took me a while to remember how to play, making the boss battle rather unnecessarily long and tedious until I figured out my best characters for Blindsight attacking. I'm sure there were better, but I ended up dealing the most damage with Reimi, using Chaotic Blossoms. I also noticed a lot of special attacks not combo-ing into other moves as well, so I went around and fixed the moves for characters.

Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3 - I had my early birthday party on Saturday, so naturally, it was the opportune time to play some Marvel with friends. I'm still by no means any good, especially not for online, but I feel like I'm learning a little more about some characters by playing a little more. That being said, I really should decide on a main team for this game. I'm too used to playing with ALL characters a fighting game offers, but that is simply too overwhelming in a game like this. This is no Super Smash Bros., and the game is too deep for someone to do well with a Random team. If I were to pick a team, I suppose a good team combo synergy is something I should look for first. I should learn the timing for OTG moves too; I keep dropping my combos because of it. >_>

Waveform - Uh... I beat Neptune? Really though, I had a short amount of time that I wanted to kill, so I started this, despite my dislike for trigonometry. Thankfully the game doesn't have too much to do with math at all, so it was a pleasant experience. I'm sure I'll get done with this one quickly so that I can write a review on it. Although Recettear needs to be finished too...

Virtue's Last Reward - Ooooo, this game has Japanese audio! Some discrepancies in the dialogue for where some things don't translate too well, I'm assuming, but the audio can throw you off because of how the main protagonist isn't voice acted, and I don't see his Japanese dialogue. The other characters will reply with weird lines sometimes, and leaves me wondering what the hell the main character said to them in Japanese, which is different from their English lines. Not that it's that big of an issue. I might switch it to English voices too in a later play through and see which one I enjoy more. Didn't get through too much yet, the new rules are kind of complicated, but I guess it isn't as complicated as the Digital Root rule in comparison. I always thought that the writing and planning for what characters can go through each door was well done in 999. I wonder how these new rules will affect the branching paths in VLR.

I suppose all this was possible due to me just farming for items and meat in Kingdom of Loathing using KoL Mafia. I figured I'll be busy until Christmas time, and how I'd rather be better prepared for the Crimbo event than rushing to finish a run, and then grind some stats to gain access to all my equipments. I already have a lot of skills permed at this point as well, so I'm certainly in no rush to do speed runs.

As for Pardus, I've been just doing some simple trading runs when I should be ranking to become an Admiral. Someone needs to do it, and I feel like I'm too busy for anything else at the moment, so... yeah.