Two-Week Report: December

Kingdom Hearts 1 Completed, Re: Chain of Memories Beaten. I've already done these two before so I decided to go a bit harder this time and do the Unchanging Armor achievement alongside Undefeated on Proud Mode. I'll never look at equipment in this game the same way again after that. The numbers in this game are deceptively small, and you wouldn't think they'd matter so much, but they do. You'll be doing chip damage and dying in two hits the entire game even if you picked the shield, which I did. Not getting MP Rage until level 90 is suffering. Dying at the very end of Hades Cup, Final Rest and World of Chaos/Ansem 3 is suffering. Everything is a slog, even more of a slog than Re: Chain of Memories. I'm proud of the achievement but man did it just… take a long time.

Given that it feels like one out of every three games on Steam is a roguelike deckbuilder now, I wanna ask if people who enjoy those games think Re:CoM is any good. It's by no means the worst game I've ever played but I'm pretty sure I'd still rather play Devil May Cry 2. Riku is pretty fun to play, duels clicked with me, but with Sora (whose entire story you have to play first to unlock Riku) it feels like the entire premise of the game is learning how to cheese bosses for free. If you try to actually play Kingdom Hearts, and let the bosses do things, you're not going to be allowed to have any fun because your cards will get broken randomly and you'll take damage instantly. If you solve that problem, you're hitting a sandbag until you win because only one attacking card or sleight can be "in play" at once. I never found a style with Sora where winning actually felt deserved. I did it, in the end, but it still feels like I'm missing something, because playing without sleights almost feels like playing Kingdom Hearts, but if revenge values randomized every second just to troll you, and playing with sleights makes the boss fights free unless they get lucky, draw a lot of zeros in a row and deck you out. Maybe people who like card games enjoy luck being a primary factor, but I generally don't. Level 99 with two characters is going to be a huge grind, too.