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Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:01:57 - Divinity: Original Sin II (PC) |
My god. 116.6 hours in and I cannot beat the last fights, which are absolutely nuts. I could load an old save approximately 6 hours back, complete some additional quests, purchase some better gear, and re-do that last 6 hours. I wouldn’t get enough experience to hit level 20. That would probably add another 10 hours to the game. But, I can’t.
Here is how the last fight went. I confronted Dallis and Vredeman in Lucian’s tomb. I fought them. When Dallis’s health is low enough, Vredeman taunts her and you can attempt a persuasion check with either the nearest character or the last character who attacked Dallis (unsure which). I re-did this fight a few times to be able to make the check (strength or intellect) with a character who could pass an intellect check. It was initially using my rogue, who has neither high strength nor intellect.
After successfully making the check, the fight proceeds to phase 2, where you fight Vredeman (who reveals himself to be Braccus Rex) and the kraken. The kraken vomits up three other special enemies, and will continue spawning tough enemies throughout the fight. The first few times I arrived at the fight this way, Dallis and Lucian were also enemies to me, but they would also sometimes attack Braccus et al. I thought it was weird that they would keep attacking me after Braccus betrayed them. Anyway, this fight was absolutely impossible. The kraken teleports around the map each turn, typically to wherever the biggest cluster of your characters is, vomits up a couple enemies and uses massive AoE spells, often straight up one-shotting some characters. Meanwhile, Braccus and the spawned enemies run around decapitating your crew. Seriously, impossible. What am I supposed to do when I have a dead character already coming into phase 2, and then the rest get basically one-shot before they can do anything?
So, I went back to the initial confrontation and chose to give up my source instead of initiate combat. Well, doing this takes you straight to phase 2 with all your characters at fully HP, AND all the enemies from phase 1 (except Braccus) are friends. Now we’re cooking! Braccus et al. are much stronger than you and your allies, especially as the kraken does its teleport-and-spawn-enemies thing. But your new friends tend to go straight for Braccus, Lucian especially, and they’ll bring him down. I figured out that you need to spread out and hide. When I finally beat it, three of my crew were dead and my rogue was cowering in a corner after drinking invisibility potions for most of the battle. When Lucian kills Braccus, the fight is over, so hiding in the corner until that happens is a good strategy.
Or not. Because, to my surprise, once I (or Lucian) killed Braccus, Lohse resurrected and the Doctor showed up. What? As far as I knew the Doctor was an optional boss related to Lohse’s quest. You can meet and kill him (or negotiate with him?) in Arx in Act 6, but he annihilated me when I fought him once (and I didn’t have the option to negotiate), so I just ignored the quest and moved on. Well, APPARENTLY, if you don’t kill him earlier, then he’s the final boss. Who knew?! He kills Lohse, and then you fight him with your remaining party members, who, unlike Lohse, did not resurrect. So, it was my half-health and no-longer-invisible rogue against the final boss of the game. The Doctor one-shotted my rogue. Game over.
How is one supposed to deal with this? I suppose I could distribute scrolls of invisibility to everyone and have them hide throughout phase 2 so that I will have 3v1 for the final battle against the Doctor. Though he kills Lohse, who is my healer and magic armor restorer, before the battle, which means I would be doing a boss battle with no healer. Probably not going to work. The other option is to reload an old save…before the point of no return…HOURS ago. Kill the Doctor, removing him from the end of the game. Except the Doctor fight was also nuts; one level ago when I attempted the fight, he basically one-shot my party. Need to do other quests to try and gain another level. Buy more unique and divine items. Strategize to kill the Doctor. Maybe sneak through his home killing nurses first. After that, re-do the entire final dungeon. That would take an entire day. Why. Why is this game doing this to me!?
*Edit* - A few days after writing this, I mustered the motivation to re-load an old save—not quite as old as I thought I’d have to do, but still a couple hours old. I learned (117 hours into the game) that you can access waypoints via the minimap, which I had to do to escape the Death Room that I had saved in (and had thought—wrongly—that I was stuck in). Wow. It was about 60 hours into the game when I realized you could click on waypoints from the main map instead of physically going to a waypoint to teleport to other waypoints (which is what I had been doing). Some things are not explained well! Anyway, I went back to the Doctor to give that fight the old college try. Impossible! He freaking mind controls (“demonic possession,” permanent debuff) Lohse after three turns, which is barely enough time to get through his (magic) armor, let alone his health. At that point, it is this uber-boss, his four demonic minions, like 8 nurses who come running from throughout his clinic, and demonically possessed Lohse (again, this is my healer and magic restorer, who of course just starts buffing the shit out of all the enemies!) vs. my other three characters. Oh, also, when Lohse is possessed, the Doctor is invulnerable. So, that means that on turn 3 after he possesses Lohse, you need to then focus fire her down to kill her (maybe then you can resurrect her and she won’t be possessed?), and do that while surviving the onslaught of all those other enemies, turn the tide of battle, and kill the Doctor. How? HOW?! I half-assedly looked into completing the few other remaining quests first, but, again, I wouldn’t have gained a level, and two of those had given me tons of trouble earlier, too.
So, I have a horrible taste in my mouth upon reaching the end of Divinity: Original Sin 2. I love so many things about the game. I love that there are challenging battles. I love the magic system, the elements, the dialogue, the characters. It’s phenomenal. But there are some atrocious things about it as well. The insane difficulty spike and surprise bosses and “mandatory” side quests at the end, for one. The biggest thing though is the inventory micromanaging. I disliked the inventory system SO much. It is no exaggeration to say that at least 10% of my play time…easily 15% or 20% if you include looting...was inventory management. Moving items between characters, keeping track of what I’d picked up recently, trying to find specific items amid the clutter, ensuring that wares were on Lohse (who had the “bargaining” trait, so things in her inventory sold for more), dealing with encumbrance, searching random barrels and desks, and so on. The game has THOUSANDS of items. Hundreds of crafting recipes. Ingredients out the ass. Vendors everywhere. Items littering every building and out in the wilds and the dungeons. I was compelled to pick things up, sell them, turn a profit, buy better items. That required the inventory micromanagement. If I knew how it would be, I 100% would have made a warrior character with high strength (carry more weight) and given him the bargaining skill. Instead, it was Lohse, a mage with no strength, who had the bargaining skill. Indeed, none of my characters had strength because I didn’t choose any warriors. Which moves me on to my next point…
I probably struggled more than I needed to throughout the game because of my party composition. I had three mages and a rogue. My party was squishy and lacked mobility. One mage was a summoner/necromancer. Another used fire, geo, and poison magic. The third used air and water magic. I thought that given the game’s focus on battlefield elements, this would be fun. It totally was, but often my battlefields look like rainbows, with red fire here, green poison there, blue ice there, etc. The lack of mobility and constant need for line of sight often meant that my three casters were grouped up—easy targets for enemy AoE abilities. I also just realized way too many useful tips and tricks way too late in the game. Like, there are some amazing talents, like the one that restores you to full health when you are resurrected (instead of like 10% health) or the one that lets you cheat death. Used in conjunction with the full health restoration talent, that means that when you get killed, you cheat death (one more turn to kick ass!). Then, if you do die, someone resurrects you, and you go back to full health, and the cheat death talent refreshes every time you are resurrected. Like, I should have given both of those to every character, but either they didn’t become available until higher levels, or I was thinking about other strategies. Also, apparently I built my rogue wrong. I was dumping points into Dual-wield, which gave some damage bonus, but turns out I was supposed to be dumping points into Warfare, which added like a bigger damage bonus to ALL physical damage. I couldn’t discern that from the tooltips. So my rogue was weak.
Anyway, man, I’m so beaten down by the end. I want to persevere, but I think I need to cut my losses and just say I enjoyed the time I had with the game. I’m so close to beating it, but I would have to replay the entire ending after reloading an old save, completing more extremely difficult quests, doing a ton more micromanaging with potions and scrolls and spells, finding better gear to buy, and so on. It’s going to take forever. I should just look forward to Baldur’s Gate 3, which will have, admittedly, a more familiar set of rules.
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Aug 14th, 2026 at 16:51:49 - Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (PS5) |
What to say? This was LONG! 115 hours. I did the majority of side content, but even without a lot of that, I think I would have pushed 100. The previous game took me 42 hours. So this was almost 3x as long. And I’ve realized something. Part of last year and this year, I’ve focused on playing the longer games in my backlog. After a certain point, my enjoyment (and therefore my review score) tends to decrease. Say, 5% per additional 10 hours over 100, or something. I usually love the games. Otherwise, I wouldn’t sink so much time into them. But, as they near the end, and I am binging them trying to finish, I get so tired of playing them. They often have boss battle difficulty spikes (hello FFVII Rebirth and Divinity: Original Sin 2) at the end that add even more hours and frustrate me. Anyway, I think I made a post about this one already (GameLog offline, so can’t check—go check before posting this!). What comes to mind upon completion? Some of the biggest things are:
Your allies are really limited when you aren’t controlling them. I wish you could set their behaviors like you could in FFXV. There is materia that lets allies auto-cast spells or use weapon abilities, but it is such a rudimentary system compared to FFXV. If I switch away from an ally, they just spam spells or weapon abilities. What if I want them to save their ATB charges? Or save their casting for when I want them to use a spell situationally? Then I shouldn’t use those materia and I should micro-manage them in combat. The one thing they are good at though is avoiding damage while not being controlled. I often switched characters to change my “tank” because enemies tend to go after whoever you are controlling, at least after you do a little damage with them. Cloud getting beat to shit? Switch to Aerith. Enemies target Aerith, who gets beat to shit. Switch to Barrett, while enemies are beating up Aerith. Enemies focus on Barrett. Switch back to Aerith and heal everyone. Etc.
I think I mentioned in the previous post that there are so many combat options. 7 characters (most of the time), each with different play styles, special abilities, materia load-outs, synergy abilities, summons, limits, etc., etc. It’s overwhelming. I disliked playing with half of the characters. I stuck with Cloud, Barrett, and Aerith for the most part. That was a good combination because Cloud is a badass melee character, Barrett is a badass ranged character, and Aerith is a badass spell caster and healer. I usually disliked the (many) instances in which I was forced to use other characters, especially Cait Sith, who mind-bogglingly had an entire 3- or 4-hour dungeon. Every character had at least one segment where you had to use them, but his was the worst and longest by far. It involved horrible puzzles where you had to throw boxes. The aiming felt all wrong.
Since I chose to use the same few characters, combat became very repetitive. I understand this was my choice, but still. The other reason it became repetitive was that I didn’t bother with micro-managing materia. All I did was try to level it up, which meant that my characters all had partially leveled materia and very few mastered ones (save various healing materia and Assess, which were necessary). This resulted in the funny outcome where I had like 100 max-level materia sitting in my inventory, but like 5 max-level materia equipped. But here’s the thing. You don’t need to min-max it! You don’t need to spend time micro-managing everyone’s materia! I beat the game without spending hardly any time doing it. Again, that resulted in combat being less interesting and more button mashing, because since I didn’t pay much attention to materia, that also means I didn’t pay much attention to spells (again, except healing spells and Assess). Sometimes, I would have to pay attention to elemental materia to exploit a boss’s weakness or something. But when I think about how bare-bones I played this game, I wonder why there were so many overlapping combat mechanics. I am sure they make the game easier and more interesting, but I was fine using the combos and play style that worked for me. Also, there are some design choices that would have made me more likely to pay attention to materia, such as if I could save materia configurations. Every time you want to change materia, you scroll through a list of 100 of the things. What a revolutionary idea to let players save load-outs! Like, sometimes, I want Aerith to focus on healing and other times to focus on damage. Two load-outs would be helpful!
One problem spot in FFVII: Rebirth is its tone and target audience. I could not figure out if they were trying to make this game for kids or adults. Often, it was embarrassingly childish and cringy. I’m looking hard at Yuffie, but at many of the other characters, too. Chadley, Don Corneo, the Mooglets, every time the writers had the horrible idea to make someone rap, that gang of biker/thief guys, Roche, Cait Sith, Hojo, Kid G. There are so many terrible characters. I think Remake might have had this problem too, but I cruised through the game so fast that I may not have spent enough time to get annoyed by more characters. Is it for kids or adults? Is the next game going to have a more serious tone? I’m honestly not sure right now if I want to play the final piece of the trilogy!
Exploration was a bore and/or frustrating. I like the Chocobo abilities in different regions, but the later regions become annoying to explore. I very much hated Gongaga and its stupid mushrooms. Cosmo Canyon was a close second at times due to its maze of floating fans. These regions had verticality and maze-like design that made it difficult to figure out how to get to where you were trying to go. The map didn’t do a good job of visualizing verticality in the open world areas.
On the other hand, the thing I looked forward to the most upon discovering a new region was finding Queen’s Blood players. Final Fantasy card games are always so fun! I completed that entire quest line, though I had to look up the location of one missing player (see critique about the map being bad about representing verticality) where the player was on a “hidden” tier of a city and also hidden inside a building so they didn’t show up on the map unless you actually went inside the building. This building is also where the last piece of sheet music was (the only song for which I could not get an A rating!).
On the whole, I certainly enjoyed my time with the game. There’s a lot to do, it’s nostalgic, it’s slick as hell. But it’s long, repetitive, and often cringe. I said in my last post (I think) that there wasn’t the bloat I criticized in Remake. But after finishing this, there certainly is. Tons of side quests, endless Chadley simulator battles, all sorts of shit to uncover on maps…if I knew that there would be so little payoff for so much of this stuff, I wouldn’t have done so much of it, and I would have saved myself like 20 hours (aka another good-sized game). I hope the third game changes some of the things I disliked about this one, but I have a feeling that it won’t. It’ll probably just add even more shit. But if it gets like 90% review scores, I am going to be compelled to play it…sigh!
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May 13th, 2026 at 14:58:07 - Hollow Knight: Silksong (PC) |
Kicking myself for not writing an entry when I was playing this 6 months ago. I am cleaning up my wishlist, backlog, and etc., and the FEELING I get when I see Silksong "in progress" is anxiety. I had jotted a few notes in December, as follows:
"Its true, Silksong is hard. Like, really, frustratingly hard. Like punishingly difficult. I hit a wall at the end of Act 1 trying to beat the Last Judge. The game likes to place benches far away from boss fights, such that retrying boss fights involves slogging back through tough platforming and other sections of the map."
I did kill the Last Judge and complete Act 1. I remember that took a very long time, and that after the Last Judge, I died a few more times and, probably, with shaking hands and rapid heartbeat, said, "I can't do this anymore." Actually, it may have been in one of those rooms with waves of enemies. This innovation is new and unwelcome to Silksong, rooms that lock upon entering and spill several waves of challenging enemies at you. Yeah, I think that is what got me, just being pummeled over and over in one of those rooms, getting tired of exploring the maze-like map, tired of dying, tired of corpse runs, just exhausted. The game became a chore.
Besides that, I loved it, haha. I was definitely into it for a while. It was sublime until it wasn't.
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May 12th, 2026 at 17:20:35 - Turnip Boy Robs a Bank (PC) |
I meant to quickly beat this back in April so I could have a "completion" for the month, but I got really busy after spending barely an hour one afternoon with Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, a bizarre little twin-stick shooter about a turnip...who robs a bank. The game builds off previous games in the series, which I have never played, in which Turnip Boy commits tax evasion and, according to this game at least, seems to have started a war. Work has slowed down for the first time in nearly two months, and while I wait for my next contract to begin, I figured I'd knock this out.
The whole game is silly. The world is populated by sentient fruits and vegetables. You are employed by a pickle / mafia gang leader to rob a bank of a garlic bulb / bad guy / killed your dad. You have a base, where you can get new weapon loadouts by bringing weapons from the bank (always try to return with something new or high-powered!), purchase progression items from the "dark web," and upgrade stuff at another vendor. You go on "runs" to the bank, which are timed (starts at 2 or 3 minutes, goes up to 5 or 6 with upgrades). Runs are over when you die or when you exit the bank. Die and you lose half the cash you accumulated in the run. Survive and you are handsomely rewarded. Upgrade stuff. Go back to the bank. It's a roguelite too.
The bank has a specific layout of rooms, but you'll encounter some randomized areas too, and enemies and treasure are somewhat randomized. Throughout the bank are tons of NPCs with little fetch quests that usually reward you with pictures (fun/ny to look at) or hats (fun/ny to equip). A blueberry might want you to find its wedding ring, a lime wants you to get divorce papers from her lemon husband, a scientist pineapple wants you to find a philosopher mango and ask it an ethical question about experimenting on fruits, etc. I had some good laughs.
In each corner of the bank is a boss. Boss fights were fun, but the most challenging were early on. Once you start upgrading stats, the game becomes easy. It definitely ends up being an "upgrade everything and go nuts on all the enemies!" type game, experience being overpowered.
I haven't played a twin-stick shooter in a while, and while this wasn't revolutionary or anything, it was fun and scratched the itch. I gotta get back to Divinity: Original Sin 2. I might have some extra time till my next gig, so maybe I can boot it up, remember what I was doing, and make some progress this week.
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