Still playing Octopath Traveler, it’s alright, although with some really rough spots. I should hopefully be done soon though.

It has some neat mechanics, like hitting enemies with their weakness to eventually stun them and cause them to take more damage, but it also leads to a lot of fights (mostly against trash mobs) that take far too long, because you might not be able to exploit that weakness well or at all.

Also, as the name suggests, there are eight playable characters, with a party size of four. You might think you could easily have an A and B squad, but for some reason, one character is fixed and can’t be changed. This leads to this one character being massively higher level than the other party members at times, and because there’s no exp for inactive party members, makes keeping everyone else roughly the same level a real pain. I just had a main party and would occasionally swap in one of the lower level guys to do their story.

Speaking of story, it’s pretty boring. Every character has four chapters (dunno if there’s more for the whole group afterward) and almost all of them play out the same. Start a story with some exposition, gather intel by speaking with a few NPCs, a bit more exposition, go to a short dungeon, fight a boss, exposition, done. By the way, your whole party never shows up in the “cutscenes,” it’s always just the single character, whose story you’re doing.

I played a few games that were just really mediocre.

• Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor was a super boring ARPG and I couldn’t put in more than a few hours. The levels were super short and just corridors.
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker started out ok, but was just far too long, terribly paced, and the last third was a complete slog. This was probably the one I’d call a “stinker” the most.
• Crisis Core Remake (FF7 spin off) had a boring story and lame characters. The bulk of the “content” were 300 side missions that were usually less than five minutes long in one of like six stages. I picked it up after I enjoyed the FF7 Remake far more than I thought, but this game adds nothing to the overall story. To be fair to the game though, I did complete all 300 side stories, because from time to time I like a mindless grind.
• I’m continuing my four-year-old save of Octopath Traveler, where I got a third or so in. I dunno if it’s the Steam Deck, but there’s just tons of aliasing, shifting sprites and flickering, it just looks bad, and the detailed enemy sprites were the only thing I really liked about the game in the first place. Combat is also a slog at times, so I don’t know if I have it in me to finish the game.

They had expectations like Square Enix for their western titles. Anything below 10 million sales or something is a flop.

I finished Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion and even 100% it. I still think the game is mostly a waste of time, that adds very little to the overall FF7 story. The characters (that aren’t from FF7) are super boring, and the main antagonist is probably one of the lamest in any game. If I wasn’t sick that one weekend, I’d probably not have bothered to go through those side quests, but at that point it was an alright, mindless grind. Asking 50€ for this seems completely insane to me.

Also, finally unlocked all characters in Risk of Rain Returns. Starting with so few items is always a pain in games like this, but once things get going and there’s more variety, it just gets much more fun.

So I’m between games once again, and don’t have anything specific lined up right now. I was holding out for Rogue Trader, but Owlcat being themselves, it seems like it’d be best to wait a few months for patches.

I did a bunch of runs of Peglin on my Deck, and finally managed to clear a Cruciball 10 run (small difficulty increases, that you can unlock after you finish the game, like the Heat system in Hades, just that you can’t choose the modifiers).

Then I decided to give the first Octopath Traveller another shot, also on the Deck. I loaded up my four year old save, where I made it like a third through the game. Of course, I have no idea what’s going on, and I was directly before a boss fight, but managed. I’ll try to go through a few chapters and then decide if I want to keep playing.

yes, he lied to players about that, and he’s apologized many times for that

And I’d like to see one of those apologies. With my surface level searches, I’ve found nothing.

Although I’m pretty sure there never was and never will be a direct apology, since that probably opens them up to litigation, but that’s just baseless speculation on my part.

Saying they’ll create (fantasy) earth seems like a lot, to me that’s not just some random rock in space, but who knows.

Are you pretending they didn’t lie? Sean Murray didn’t say the game had multiplayer even after it was released?

The developers literally spent YEARS adding to the game, completely for free, but they don’t “respect their players”?

They ever apologized for lying for years to the players, who they respect so much?

Since Sean Murray went right back to promising everything, it doesn’t look like it. Although from the reception it looks like gamers haven’t either.