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!
It was my birthday this week, and my husband got me both Star Ocean: First Departure and Star Ocean: Second Evolution for the PSP! I haven’t actually played the original Star Ocean outside the first half hour or so, but now I finally own a physical version of it! So of course I spent my time replaying Second Story, whoops. I actually have a digital version of First Departure R on the Switch I plan on starting up, so I’ll play it there, but for Second Story, this is much more convenient than trying to dig out my PS1 copy, plus it’s one of my favorite JRPGs of all time, so I couldn’t resist. SO2 was, after all, the first game I ever bought with my own money. It has a special place in my heart. It was incredibly nostalgic starting it again and watching that familiar opening cutscene and hearing Motoi Sakuraba’s fantastic score. It’s seriously hard to overstate the impact this game had on me. I’m excited to revisit for the umpteenth time. Ashton, here I come! – Leah
I continued my Tactics Ogre Reborn adventure this week. I’ve been pretty sucked into this game, my Switch tells me I’ve now played for over 55 hours. I’ve gotten quite a bit further since I last discussed Tactics Ogre in a Week in Gaming article. I’ve been slowly crawling my way through Chapter 3 recently. I’m now at a point where the majority of the story stages are quite difficult and I typically have to go straight for the enemy leader while trying not to get killed by the mob of grunts. There’s simply not enough time and resources to be spent trying to kill every enemy near or over 1000 HP. I’m not sure if I said yet that I ended up on the Chaos route. I tend to naturally go for more logical routes like this. But I expected to be on the Neutral route rather than Chaos. It turns out, the Neutral route in Tactics Ogre is the route where you’re just a hypocrite and give in. And I imagine Law is the “evil” route where you give in to begin with and do as you’re told rather than thinking for yourself. Maybe it’s not actually an evil route, but based on the decision during the story split, that’s what it seemed like to me. Anyways, I do believe I just got to a big multi-part story battle at Phidoch Castle. I actually had a good battle in the first part, I was able to take out some grunts for once and creep my way up to the leader. Now I’m at the second half of this place which seems like it might be tough, there are two important people to take out.
Aside from Tactics Ogre Reborn, I also continued with playing a little bit of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s been nice slowly pulling out my Toy Day decorations in game and putting on various cozy winter outfits. I enjoy a chill life sim every once in a while and it’s still such a charming game to play, with a fantastic atmosphere. I also now have access to all the Switch Online Expansion Pass features. So I took advantage of that this past weekend and played some online multiplayer in Mario Party 2. Mario Party 2 is a really nostalgic game for me. It’s the only Mario Party my siblings and I had for a long time as kids, I’d play it often with them. I loved Horror Land and copying all the fun lines like, “Peachy got it.” and, “Draw.” Plus it has some of the best classic minigames. I still really want the latest Mario Party on Switch because it has all those classic games and some of those same boards. I do wish Mario Party Superstars had more characters and a couple more boards though, but it’s still something I would like to pick up eventually. – Jenae
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
