Oooh, what happened with Magic the Gathering?

Wizards of the Coast (the game manufacturer) announced they are going hard into "Universes Beyond" sets, which are based on 3rd party IP like LOTR, Final Fantasy or Marvel. They have been releasing a few of these in recent years, but next year that'll be half of their product line.

This is rather controversial for several reasons:

• A lot of players dislike this mish-mash of franchises, and see it a loss of identity of the game. This comic from 2020 has been reposted non-stop during the week as a prediction of the future of MTG.
• So far these sets have been more expensive, likely due to the IP licensing costs.
• They also announced a change where all competitive formats will include those sets, removing the option to play without them.

There's a lot of discussion going on if this is just the cynical attempt at short-term cash grab sacrificing the long-term health of the game, or if this new focus will help increasing the playerbase.

And that adds to a few other problems that are already plaguing the game.

• Product and wallet burnout: They doubled the amount of new cards being released in the last ~4 years making it very hard to keep up. And they announced even more sets in 2025 so this will probably continue keep getting worse.
• Power creep: This is something that always existed in the game, but also sped up a lot recently. There's also concerns that they'll push cards too hard to ensure these "Universes Beyond" sets sell - as an example we had a LOTR set last year and "The One Ring" was an game-warping card. Even worse, 18 months later it hasn't been banned and lot of people are questioning if this is going to be the trend with these sets.

For a lot of people this was the breaking point to drop out of the game, or change the way they interact with it. I'm moving away from competitive play for good, and will only play unnoficial "nostalgia" formats based on the game's past like Premodern (1995-2003) or 2015 Modern (2003-2015) where I can just stick to old decks and ignore all new releases.

TL;DR: "Magic the Gathering" is now "Fortnite the Gathering", and a lot of people are pissed.

Slow week. A lot of drama on another of my hobbies (Magic the Gathering), and I spent quite a bit of time putting in action a plan I had in my mind for a while to change how I interact with that game.

Busy weekend too so it's unlikely I'll be able to play a lot, but I really want to finish my current VN ASAP so I can start Ys X.

Playing My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!?!

Very minor progress this week.

Playing Vampire Survivors!

Played this during the NSO Trial and loved it, it's stupidly addictive and a great game to play in short bursts. Focused on unlocking more characters and items right now.

My MTG money is now getting funneled into more Nintendo Switch games.

I have a Cube which will never contain UB cards, and I'm now in the process of converting all my existing decks for different formats into a "Modern Pre-Horizons" Battle Box since that was my favorite format ever.

Will probably spend some money in this, but after that I'll never upgrade those decks again, and with more focus on UB there will be even less things I care about to put on the Cube.

This way I can keep good memories from those times, have ways to play the game with friends, and never again bother with WOTC's bullshit.

Unfortunately I think this is too little too late. Format was starting to recover but it got two big kicks to the nuts in the last few weeks:

• No Pioneer RCQ season next year is going to hurt a lot Pioneer competitive play,
• Yesterday's announcement is probably going to do some damage to the playerbase, most players I know were into at least partially to avoid UB sets. The likelihood that more sets per year with half of them being UB is going to increase deck prices is going to be another issue for player retention.

One lesson from recent years is that the slope is always slippery with WOTC.

Definitely a little discouraging. I mean it’s fine for fun, but they should just continue to build off their own universe.

I don't expect Magic universe to continue existing after a few more years.

Fortunately I had mostly dropped of competitive play already (though I was considering going back because Pioneer looks good right now), this announcement just pushes me even harder on other hobbies.

Crossover sets like Marvel, Final Fantasy or Assassin's Creed.

A lot of people dislike those sets, but so far you could ignore them depending on the format you played. From now onwards it'll likely be impossible to stay away from those if you want to play competitively.

Besides the overall dislike of this new "Fortnite the Gathering" world, there's also concerns of pricing, these sets so far have been more expensive than regular sets, and also even more product burnout - we're up to 6 major sets/year from the 4 we used to have not too long ago.

A lot of people rank Engage as one of the best in the series on gameplay. I think the only recent game that gets as much praise in that aspect is Fates Conquest.

Finished Harvestella!

I'll stand by what I said last week - this is a very flawed game with major questionable design decisions and technical problems, but it also has a ton of good things including great story, worldbuilding and OST. Even the "farming" part also ended up being way more fun than I expected.

It's hard to recommend this game because not everyone will be able to tolerate those flaws, but there is a very shiny gem hiding behing those problems.

Playing My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!?!

I liked The Fox Awaits Me and its sequels quite a bit, so I decided to track down a copy of this older VN from the same developer.

So far it's kinda mid. :/ The main draw for me in VNs are the characters and dialogue, but the main heroine is way too shy and quiet, constantly speaking in brief sentences, and despite the MC being prone to long monologues he somehow managed to stay uninteresting so far.

But I'm still early in the game, so let's hope it improves.

Mostly physical. I do pick up a decent amount of digital games, but either they are cheaper indie games or were bought with a heavy discount.

It's extremely hard for me to pick up a $60+ game digitally.

Playing Harvestella!

On my previous post I mentioned a lot of problems with this game, and while I still think all of those are valid criticisms the game has grown a lot on me. This is partially due to the game opening up significanty during Chapter 3, with plenty of new characters (which also means more jobs for you to experiment with), more cities, more quests, and a ton of things to do in the farm.

But the main draw of the game for me has been the the worldbuilding and the story. While the game's world is not that big, there's a lot of care in making each region feel unique and alive, I love how many sidequests are connected forming a small storyline for a specific NPC. The main plot also has some surprising twists that are keeping me hooked, plus the OST is amazing, Go Shiina did a fantastic job once again.

As play this I keep thinking of the original Nier for the PS3/360 - both are game with deep flaws, hard to recommend blindly, but that also offer a great payoff if you can get past those flaws.

The game is pretty chill even now. Enjoying it quite a bit.

Older titles have time limits to add a bit of pressure, but plot-wise those games stay chill 90%+ of the time.

It's one of the reasons I like them so much, I find the mix of a chill atmosphere, addictive gather->craft loop and fantastic OSTs incredibly relaxing.

For Switch, I started Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout. It’s my first Atelier game, and I have pretty much just started it, but it seems nice. Very chill, cozy crafting JRPG, without any doom and gloom (yet).

I'm a huge Atelier fan, Ryza is definitenly a nice starting point for those new to the series.

One thing worth mentining is that the beginning of the game is a bit slow, and I recommend focusing on the main plot until you unlock the fast travel option as it makes doing the side quests a lot more enjoyable.

Playing Harvestella!

Since I don't have any games in my wishlist for the next few weeks (next one is Ys X at the end of the month) I decided it was a good time to play a longer RPG.

Despite this game's marketing focusing on the farming/slice-of-life aspects that doesn't seem to be a huge part of the gameplay loop - sure, there's plenty of things you can do to build/expand your farm, but I'm only spending a small portion of the game's day/night cycle doing some chores on the farm and after that it's going out into the world for quests and monster killing.

That would not be a bad thing, weren't for the fact that combat in this game is rather mediocre. It's not horrible, but it's slow, lacks some things that seem obvious in an action RPG like a dodge button, and has some serious issues with the enemy lock-on system. I've seen people argue that it's more of an "Offline MMO" battle system like Xenoblade instead of a real Action RPG, which I don't think is what the developers were aiming for but may be a good approximation of what the game really plays like. There's some good ideas at least, like the idea of having multiple jobs equipped and hot-swapping between them based on the situation, which offers good customization for different playstyles - I've been enjoying to focus more on ranged combat with the mage class and letting the NPC allies do the tanking for me.

There's also some technical annoyances, one being the performance which is usually tolerable but had some pretty massive framerate drops in one boss, and other being the visuals - I'm not usually picky about that, but at least on the Switch it looks incredibly blurry - reminds me of Xenoblade 2 on portable mode, only it's like that even when docked.

Those two are rather big issues making it hard to recommend this one, which is unfortunate because I'm loving several other aspects of this game. The worldbuilding is great and unique, the story is slow but doing a good job keeping me interested, I love the character designs, and there's plenty of activities to do if you need a break from combat.

The water one was the one I couldn’t figure out. That’s the only one I looked up.

I see a trend here, also had issues figuring out that that puzzle and had to resort to google.

I liked the battles though, so maybe I should pick up Engage…

Engage's story is kinda silly, but the maps are fantastic. I highly recommend the game if you're more interested in the battle portions.

If you like VNs check my comment history, I play a lot of these and post my opinions on these weekly threads.

Finished Ginka!

Overall a good VN. Ginka was a great character and I loved seeing all the different sides of her, there were some good twists, and even a nice epilogue showing a bit of the character's lives after the ending.

Finished The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom!

While I still prefer more "traditional" Zelda games, this was a blast to play. The developers seem to be experimenting with a middle ground between the old-school games and more open-world entries like BOTW, and I think they did a really good job here.

There's a few annoyances that could be improved in a sequel, like the lack of good rewards for exploration/puzzles and some clunkiness in the combat, but nothing major.

And since this is a topic a lot of people ask, the performance problems are definitely noticeable and I would have preferred the game to stick to a locked 30FPS, but again it didn't hurt my enjoyment of the game.

Since I finished Zelda 5min ago I haven't yet decided what I'll play next. 😅

Leaning towards towards another VN, in which case Emio: The Smiling Man or Atri: My Dear Moments (link to the Japanese eShop) are the strongest candidates.

Finished Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit (part of Ace Attorney Investigations Collection)!

This game deserves all the praise it gets. Every single case is great, there's some fantastic connecting and foreshadowing between them, plenty of fun callbacks and references to older games, and excellent character development for the cast members - I still can't believe they got me to like Eustace and Gavelle by the end.

Not much more to add here - this is a must-play for everyone who enjoys this series.

Finished Cat Quest III!

The developers clearly tried to go with the "quality over quantity" direction in this one - the world is smaller, there's far less quests and dungeons to explore, but on the other hand they're far more diverse and interesting than the ones in the previous games.

The game is also very open - after you pick up the boat (~5min into the game) can travel anywhere in the map. Which is both good and bad, the exploration is more fun than ever but it's also easy to get lost or end up in areas where you're too weak to explore, and I definitely miss some of the QOL features from the previous games like recommended levels for dungeons and quests.

In the end, I think it is the best game in the trilogy, but it's also the hardest one to get into - I'd definitely recommend Cat Quest 2 over this one for more casual gamers.

Playing Ginka!

A new VN I picked up recently. It's a mix of slice-of-slice and supernatural mystery, and has you try to figure out the disappearance of the MC's childhood friend Ginka, who vanished 5 years prior to the game but suddenly reappears without memories and looking exactly the same she did all that time ago.

I'm really liking the pacing on this one, and Ginka is adorable. Reached a major twist, and I'm very curious where the story will go from here.

Playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom!

Wasn't expecting to get my physical copy on launch day in South America, so when it arrived I could not resist booting this one up and playing for a couple hours. 😆 Ended up finishing the first "dungeon" and so far I'm loving it.

But since I think I'm close to the end on Ginka I'll try to finish that one first so I can focus properly on Zelda.

Your friend has good tastes. 😄

Finished Hatsumira: From the Future Undying!

A solid, well-produced and fun VN.

The highlight is definitely the side cast - there's a lot of fun characters, including a few I would argue are more interesting and/or better developed than some of the main heroines. The lead character is great too, he adds a lot of personality to the game.

But there's two big problems with the game: First is the localization, which goes way too far trying to make the dialogue more "colorful", adding so many accents that even reading the dialogue gets difficult sometimes. The second one is extreme imbalance in screentime between the heroines - if you're playing this game because you got interested in one of the late-joining heroines like Meltyna or Rhea you're going to be seriously disappointed.

Playing Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit (part of Ace Attorney Investigations Collection)!

Finished the third case and it's easy to see why this game is so well-regarded - the quality of the cases so far has been excellent. Turnabout Legacy (Case 3) felt as gripping as some final cases in other games due to its connections with Edgeworth's father and Von Karma.

The one thing I really dislike so far are the main "antagonists" - Judge Gavelle and her "helper" Eustace Winner. I'm guessing this will be explained in one of the latter cases, but it bothers me how the game keeps portraying Gavelle as an intelligent and capable person, yet has her supporting Eustace's stupidity and constantly antagonizing Edgeworth even when he's right.