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!
I’ve been continuing my Bustafellows replay recently, as well as playing more Fantasy Life i. In Bustafellows, I finally just about finished up every single guy’s route. This week specifically, I believe I started and finished Limbo’s route, who I’m pretty sure now is my second favorite of all the guys. Then I finally got to enjoy Shu’s route, who was and still is my favorite. I’ve realized I have somewhat of a type at this point and I always prefer the taller, more mature, and possibly a smidge mysterious, guys in these otome games, who are also secretly really caring and sweet. I’m never into the immature, more little brother-ish types like Scarecrow, those are always my least favorite routes in otome. It was fun replaying Shu’s route, and a bit crazy, I forgot how nuts his route gets really early on. After replaying Shu’s route, I played Mozu’s route for the very first time. Now having played it, I don’t even think I finished replaying/skipping through the common route to get to Mozu the first time I played Bustafellows. Just last night, I stayed up a bit late finishing it and I managed to get his good end pretty easily. I still have to go back and see his bad end. Plus, I feel like I’m still missing some memorabilia achievements from more than just the finale route I still have left. Honestly, I can’t wait to finish up the last of this game and finally get to experience the sequel and see more of both Limbo, and especially Shu. I’m also kind of curious about the new characters as well.
In Fantasy Life i, I did a lot of grinding for the couple days I played it this past week. The game is still super cute and charming, but I’m definitely fully into the grind heavy middle of the game. I raised the Carpenter crafting life a ton, in addition to getting Woodcutter up there a bit when gathering the wood I needed for it. Tailor, I haven’t been raising as quickly simply because materials for that life are a lot more scarce. I ended up having to buy a lot of the materials from the plushling characters. Blacksmith I’ve also still barely leveled, in addition to Alchemist. Alchemist is another one where the materials are easier to buy. And as far as the Blacksmith life is concerned, well the Miner life I need for gathering the materials, is also a bit low. I need to find out where some specific ore is to level up that life further.
Even though it’s gotten grindier, I’m still having a ton of fun in Fantasy Life. I even tried out the online multiplayer for the first time by opening a room and going adventuring with random players who joined. The roguelike DLC dungeon is a bit difficult to keep up for me with random multiplayer additions, but they definitely helped regardless. Although, I think I had the most fun in multiplayer, simply exploring Ginormosia with other players. Also, I think the Treasure Grove dungeons, which I need to run more for goddess fruit to unlock new hairstyles and whatnot, will be much easier in multiplayer. So I may try that out eventually as well. I was glad though that it was so quick and easy to get at least one other player to join my room for whatever. Plus, Fantasy Life i actually has some quick response prompts you can use to quickly communicate with other players, as well as an in-game keyboard and text box option for longer, but slower communication. – Jenae
My sister and I are still chipping away at Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which has been an incredibly fun adventure. As I said before, the game has aged beautifully, but now that we’re in the Inverted Castle, it’s also significantly ramped up the difficulty. Running through Dracula’s Castle originally was a challenge, but one we relatively quickly out-leveled and out-geared, so the Inverted Castle’s sudden shift into merciless was a tad jarring. I figured we’d get a boost in difficulty, I just didn’t expect it to be out the gate. It made exploring both daunting and thrilling, since we were now facing previous bosses as regular enemies (anyone familiar with RPGs should know this phenomena intimately), but it was also really frustrating at times. My biggest complaint with early Castlevania games, and one of the things that always kept me off from trying them seriously, were flying enemies, and the Inverted Castle throws so many of them at you it’s honestly stupid. The Clocktower in particular is awful with Medusa heads, but the Chapel is just as bad with its Imps, especially since Alucard has the tendency to get juggled to death. It reminds me a lot of the same issue I had with Popful Mail, actually. This has been mitigated pretty significantly, however, by obtaining the Crissaegrim, which broke the game so badly I defeated Death in under 30 seconds.
I’m not against game-breaking weapons, obviously. My sister and I played through all the Resident Evil games with unlimited ammo and other features that reduced the combat to more of an afterthought (even if I did try to play legitimately as much as possible). Here, though, I will admit that defeating Death (who was my favorite boss fight in Rondo of Blood), left me feeling a way. I really like the Crissaegrim for running around the castle and fighting regular enemies, because I find that tedious, and SotN has a significant amount of backtracking, so any relief I can find I’ll take. But I was also really digging the challenge these games had offered, so curbstomping a boss ended up being really underwhelming. So when I came to the next boss in the Floating Catacombs, Galamoth, I replaced the Crissaegrim with the Alucard Sword and beat him fair and square. It took four tries and a bunch of healing items, but I did it, and man, it felt really good. If nothing else comes from me playing Rondo of Blood and SotN, my desire to tackle hard games will remain with me for a while yet. – Leah
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
