oprainfall Week in Gaming: May 15 - 21

While we here at Operation Rainfall love covering the latest in gaming news and sharing our reviews of titles new and classic, we also just enjoy playing games in our downtime. So with that, sit back, relax, and check out what the oprainfall gaming crew have been up to this week!

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising

Full disclosure, I’m a backer for the Eiyuden Chronicle Kickstarter, and also purchased Rising at a discounted price due to that backing. I’m definitely not disappointed that I did, either. I’ve played this side game for about six hours now and it’s a solid little action RPG with a colorful cast of characters, interesting world, good music and deceptively fun combat – especially after you unlock Link Attacks and elemental runes. You play as CJ, a scavenger on the hunt for a giant rune as part of her coming-of-age ritual back home, and she’s come to New Neveah to explore the Runebarrows in order to complete her mission. In typical RPG fashion, there’s main quests and tons of sidequests, but I like how the game uses a stamp system to incentivize side-questing and make it feel less like busy-work and more like CJ’s actually accomplishing something. Completing sidequests helps grow the town, providing CJ with an assortment of businesses she can visit to aid in her exploration, so it behooves you to do as many as possible. Meanwhile, the main quest focuses mostly on rune bandits and helping the town thrive despite an increase in monsters. It’s standard fare, but it’s fun and executed really well, and I can’t ask for much more. – Leah

NieR Re[in]carnation

I make no attempt to hide the fact that I love Final Fantasy XIV, so when my favorite MMO and NieR Re[in]carnation had a collab, of course I wanted to write about it. I’ve been playing the NieR mobile since it released in the West, and as the first (and only) gacha game I’ve ever bothered with, it’s pretty okay. I’m complete free-to-play, but I specifically saved up my gems to roll on the XIV costumes (as seen above). As for the collab itself, it’s basically a simplified retelling of Emet-Selch’s story from Shadowbringers, and so of course I loved it. One of Re[in]carnation‘s strengths is the storybook-style cutscenes it uses for its story bits, and they did a fantastic job here with Emet’s sad tale. I also liked the little touches in his boss fight and how the game recreated XIV‘s AOE effects and such. Hearing Masayoshi Soken’s “‘Neath Dark Waters” playing for the fights was a decided bonus. This was just a fun little collab that smooshed together two games I enjoy. – Leah

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Stardew Valley

I didn’t play much this past week besides more Stardew Valley. First of all, I did end up starting that new beach farm I was thinking about starting last week. I wanted to try out a new map and see what it’s like. Obviously I was able to make a little more progress playing solo, no multiplayer coordination, so I got a good bit into the first season. Once I started the path and got through the intro, I sectioned off an area in the sand for my first crops, which clearly I’ll be manually watering. You can’t efficiently use the smaller regular dirt spot where sprinklers are allowed until you’ve upgraded your axe a couple times. Money making has been going extremely slow so far. I haven’t gotten around to doing much mine adventuring yet and there aren’t as many shells and things spawning on my beach as I thought there would be. I really love the style of the beach farm though. That’s about all I’ve done on that farm at this point, got my starting crop area set up and cleared out various trees, did a smidgen of fishing and donated some of the easier, early game things to the community center. I did say I wanted this to be a Joja path and I think I still do, because this needs to be a different farm than my main for me to have a reason to play. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do the majority of the community center myself first and get all the good rewards, before I buy that Joja membership.

After getting the beach farm set up, I went back to my main farm on my Switch copy of the game. I’m right at the end of trying to finish up the community center and getting to all the fun stuff added in the last big update. I still need a truffle, along with two of the four fish shown in the Master Fisher’s Bundle. Honestly, seeing as I still need two more barn upgrades to get a pig who will look for truffles and the fact that even the easiest two of the four fish I can choose from are difficult, I’ve decided to proceed through my regular farm life, waiting for those last few things to show up in the traveling cart shop. Two of the required fish are sold in the cart and two aren’t, but I only realized this week (took me long enough to notice) that you only need two of them. In the meantime, I’m trying to get more profit flowing. I’ve been regularly hovering around 20-30k in my Stardew wallet with all of my regrow crops planted in the greenhouse and need to start saving more than that. So, I increased my fish ponds from one to four. I’m farming sturgeon for caviar to sell and hoping some rainbow trout will give me prismatic shards. I got Robin to build a coop so I can start raising chickens, hoping maybe I’ll hatch one of Shane’s blue chickens. And finally, before I realized I only need two of the four “master fish,” I actually paid the 25k needed to finish the bundle that fixes the bus. Thus, I took some trips to the desert this week as well, got to floor 25 of the Skull Cavern on one of my trips and I also finished the required quests to unlock Qi’s little casino room. – Jenae

I missed the boat for this last week so I’m going to make this one a double. I started last week finishing off Seven Pirates H. I was pretty excited for this since it had been quite a while since I had gotten my hands on a good Ecchi title from Idea Factory. The middle of the week I played through JAST’s upcoming release Neko Night. This Nukige title features two adorable cat girls doing some very naughty things to the protagonist. The most unique feature of this one was the inclusion of ASMR audio. I will have a full review posted later this week. Lastly I’m about halfway through my first full play-through of Trek to Yomi. I had really good time with this and loved the multiple story paths you can choose. It gives the game a ton of replay value.

This week was one of my slower weeks but I am working on a review of the Steam port of Brigandine The Legend of Runersia. This will mostly be an overview of how the port turned out since there is a full review of the Switch version on the site. I also started reading Hatsumira -from the future undying- from our friends at Frontwing. This one has our protagonist thrust into an fantasy world filled with warring nations and monster girls. I’ve only begun this huge visual novel but I’ve enjoyed it so far! I am working on one other title under embargo I hope to have a review posted for by the end of the week as well. I am pretty shocked by how this one plays actually, I didn’t expect it to be much going into it. – Steve