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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I spent my time once again with Xenoblade X. Currently preparing for Chapter 9, Lv 67 and 33% of Mira done.

    More details

    I wanted to prepare for Lao’s death and do all his Heart-to-hearts. This meant some grinding to bring up his affinity.

    Went to FN 406 and fought some Puges until I dropped a Phoenix, got level 50 along the way.

    Afterwards I placed a lot of the remaining probes to grind money with and then focused on side quests.

    Now I’m sitting in my Lv 50 Skell with a Phoenix weapon and will probably complete Chapter 9 and then max out all classes by fighting Joker.



  • My equipment is filled with EXP augments. You can get these preinstalled from the shop, they get better when you level up the Sakura manufacturer. Or you can craft the 40% one quite cheap early on only using material tickets. Set one to each piece of armor for a grand total of at least 200% extra. (It may be capped at a 100%, they are so cheap, I never bothered testing).

    My teammates are only lv 33, I didn’t given them any.

    The other ingredient was simply fighting stuff up to 10 levels above me. If you succed you easily get a full level early on.


  • Xenoblade X continued to take up all the time I spend gaming. Got a bit carried away with side stuff and reached Lv 40, currently inbetween Chapter 6 and 7.

    Just got my Skell too, but I honestly don’t like them much. Ground combat feels more dynamic, Skells don’t level in any way and the hefty repair cost doesn’t match my playstyle of stat checking every living thing I come across. Probably why I’m so overleveled.

    Just like in the WiiU version, it will probably get relegated to cheesy grinding tactics, if necessary, and flying.


  • Got sucked into Xenoblade X, it’s from one of my favorite ongoing series after all. Finished the first 4 chapters and did a lot of exploration until my vacation ended and will continue this weekend.

    I could probably blitz through some more chapters if I wanted to. I’m Lv 24 and did a good chunk of the map activies already. Got about 30% of Primordia and a bit of the others.

    I’ve already played the original version and am really curious about the additinal content, but it’s also been nice to test the online features. They were long gone when I played the WiiU one.


  • Played Mario RPG Remake this week. It’s quite short and I was on vacation, so I finished the entire thing. It’s fun, although the post game bosses did get annoying and I didn’t beat all of them - maybe I’ll finish them over the weekend.

    Besides that, I’ll join in on the fun and start Xenoblade X.

    Oh, and I started a replay of Monster Hunter Rise with my partner. This time around, for every mission, we roll a random weapon each we have to beat it with, which is quite fun. After playing about 200h using the hammer exclusively, it’s nice to slowly learn all the other weapons too.


  • I’m a layman, too, so take everything with a grain of salt.

    As for evidence, if I both understood and remember correctly, the maximum distance we can actually see something (Hubble radius) just happens to align quite nicely with the Schwarzschild radius, a parameter based on the mass of a black hole, which correlates to its radius. They have to be identical for this theory to be true. Them almost being so could be a coincidence, though.

    In addition, from our perspective, there’s no real difference between an expanding universe and one with shrinking particles. If the planck length actually shrinks, to us, it will seem like everything else will move away. Within the last 100 years, multiple people created some models for that, proving how it could work while leaving physics as we observe them intact.

    A proof could be found by observing a white hole, the opposite of a black hole. A space you cannot possibly enter, ejecting energy. Think of it as the stuff entering the black hole from the outside, as oberserved from the inside. They are just a theory for now.

    Once again, I’ve got not actual clue and you might want to dive into that rabbit hole yourself. It’s fun in here.


  • Honestly, there is no comfortable way to use Joycons. I practically never used them, the first and only accessory I bought was an adaptor for my DualShock. I just won’t buy games that don’t work with it, just like I did with motion controlled games on the switch.

    Most likely, the feature will be heavily used in early games. Just like every other forced gimmick. After about a year, I’d guess, it will be only mandatory for party games, lazy ports and 3/DS emulation - which I think this feature was kinda made for.


  • I’m still on my Metaphor ReFantazio playthrough, and I’m still loving it! I’m currently in the main dungeon associated with the first tournament trial.

    However, I just unlocked endless mana by virtue of stealing it from enemies and all resource management has been thrown out of the window, I presume. I don’t like limiting myself, but I also think JRPGs need proper resource scarcity to be good - it’s probably both the most important and most overlooked design parameter for a great dungeon.

    Example from my current dungeon

    There are these stealth sections with the main boss, I presume. Every time he catches me, I get to steal mana from him with three characters and on my last turn, there seems to be a guaranteed escape. That’s 15 mana a turn, or 45 per fight, which means I’m fully regenerated within minutes if I want to.

    Due to this excessive amount of MP recovery, these dungeons don’t feel tightly designed at all. Persona 5 was a lot better at this, even though the endless ammunition in Royal made it way easier. I don’t think these games should have any skills to regenerate MP.






  • So, I’ve already finished the main story for Monkey Ball Banana Mania. I’m still messing with the challanges and special stages, but I’ll soon start my next big RPG: Metaphor.

    As for Monkey Ball, it’s not what I’ve expected. I thought about getting some chill precision based gameplay, but it’s actually quite stressful. Kinda like I’d imagine games like Getting over it, just with really short stages. I got a bit frustrated around when the difficulty spiked, but at some point the game just clicked and grinding stages almost became akin to meditation. I can see myself returning from time to time to improve my times.



  • It’s been about 138h, but I actually finished Witcher 3 + all DLCs this week. I completed every single quest I came across, apart from the two ‘Collect all Gwent cards’ ones. It’s been quite a ride! I’d recommend the game for it’s characters, story telling and moral dilemmas. The gameplay was good too, although even on death march, it was quite easy - of course I was rich and somewhat overleveled from having done everything, so take that with a grain of salt. I finished at lvl 51 with the final quest being marked as lvl 49. Despite other claims, the Switch port was mostly good. Although, halfway through Blood and Wine, about 125h in, the game started to lag in fights with multiple opponents and never stopped doing so. I don’t know what happened, even the big bandit camps didn’t lag much before that.

    Anyways, this weekend I’m going to start another run - this time doing a sign build! Last time I was focused on alchemy and basically only used Quen. There are so many gameplay options I never tried much and - nah, just kidding. I’m playing some Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, actually my first entry in the series, as a sort of palate cleanser and then grab a JRPG from my backlog.



  • I can attest to many of the other games mentioned, but I haven’t seen Radiant Historia Perfect Chronolgy mentioned yet. It’s my favorite game on the 3DS. It does feature time travel as a mechanic and has unique battle mechanics.

    If you’re up for SRPGs too (S meaning strategy), I wholeheartedly recommend Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 1 + 2. The first one is overall a bit better.