The Winter Doldrums
Given how jam-packed the end of the year was, it's a little surprising to me how I don't really have much of anything to play with Ys X in the rear-view mirror. So instead of a detailed rundown on a game that I've sunk a lot of time into, I figure this seems like as good of a time as any to check in with a bunch of smaller stuff I've been playing lately.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
10-15 hours into Veilguard and a few things have become painfully apparent: 1) Man, it is really unfortunate that I bounced off of Inquisition after a couple hours, and 2) These characters are just...not good. Addressing these points in order, Veilguard picks up basically right after the end of the Inquisition DLC, and it immediately assumes that you know who both Solas and Varric are - and who Solas really is, to boot. I, uh, did not, so that was a fun way to start the game! Beyond that, it calms down with with referencing the prior games, for both good and ill. I suspect that if you were a big Dragon Age fan, this game wouldn't do much for you, but as someone who hasn't sunk any serious time in the series since uh...Dragon Age 1, basically, it didn't bother me that much.
As for the characters, it's hard to say too much because I obviously haven't seen their entire arcs yet, but suffice to say that I'm not particularly enamored with any of them. While the series is no stranger to Whedonisms (yes Alistair, swooping is bad, thanks for your contribution), the fact that I had at least two characters who felt like they were about five seconds away from going "Well THAT just happened" more or less at all times was really grating. To be fair, some of the characters are more interesting than others - Neve is pretty good, but the bare minimum of role playing that I allowed myself said that I wouldn't romance another Shadow Dragon, and the main alternative for my character's affection was Harding. She's voiced by Bioware staple Ali Hillis, and quite competently at that, but I took a nonzero amount of psychic damage every time she made a battle quip. I will not, in fact, fuck Dwarf Lightning. I just can't do it.
Beyond that, it's a perfectly adequate action RPG with little to distinguish itself beyond that. If you want a game that lets you gather your group of dwarves and elves to go murder a dragon and/or gods, then...well, you should probably play Baldur's Gate 3, but Veilguard certainly provides that experience. Does it do much else beyond that? Eh...not really.
Atelier Ryza
The last time I made any effort to get into the Atelier series was way back on the Vita with Atelier Rorona in 2014, a sentence that makes my hands turn to dust just typing it out. The Ryza trilogy has gotten pretty good reviews, and since I'm in-between major releases as it is, why not see if it's got the juice for $15? And after a couple hours of play, the answer is...maybe. I'm familiar enough with the franchise as whole to know that this isn't a series that's going to put you up against world-ending threats, but even after recalibrating my expectations, it's funny just how low the stakes get at the start. Ryza is a lazy girl who doesn't want to help on her family farm, so she goes on little adventures with her friends and gets caught up in petty bullshit with the guy who owns the town well. I can't speak to much beyond that yet, but I fully expect that any stakes that do come about will be more about Ryza herself and her relationship to her friends than anything serious.
As for the combat, it's...fine, I guess? I don't love it, and not having any real way to tell your party members what to do aside from "use your AP attacks" and "don't" gives me Persona 3 flashbacks of the worst kind. The Tactical system in general is kinda weird - you get AP for doing basic attacks, and you can spend it to do your flashier skills, but you can also cash in a bunch of it at once to gain a "Tactics" level, allowing you to gain new effects on your skills and turn your basic attack into a two- or three-hit combo. If you get an ambush on an enemy, you start with enough AP to immediately jump into Tactics L2, but otherwise battles have a really slow start that I'm not a big fan of. It's also really weird that you just don't get any healing for the first dungeon? You don't really need it, it's a very easy section, but I do remember getting Ryza under half health and looking into my pouch, only to find that there was nothing there at all.
Time will tell how much I actually commit to this game - a brief glance at reviews says that it does get horrendously grindy near the endgame, but I suspect I won't get anywhere near there for a while, especially since I'm fully expecting Trails through Daybreak to go on sale soon, with Daybreak 2 releasing this week. Or maybe Fantasian will surprise me and get a decent discount soon. Either way, my feelings on it are largely the same as Dragon Age - an okay game that I'm enjoying, but will probably drop as soon as something I actually want to play comes along.
Master Key
Master Key is an indie game that asks the question "What if Tunic was actually a Zelda-like instead of just pretending to be one?" And it's not bad at that! As of the second dungeon, I can't say it does anything particularly poorly, although this may be an inflated opinion on the back of not having a proper Zelda in well over a decade. It plays like a cleaner, more modern Link to the Past, and you probably already know whether or not you'd enjoy it just from looking at the trailer. Normally, that wouldn't be enough to open my wallet, but the screenshots on the Steam page also show Picross grids which, uh...alright, now you've got my attention, I guess. Can't wait to see how that ties into things, because "Zelda" and "Picross" are two things that don't have a lot of mechanical overlap.
Mystery Game Demos
On a smaller scale, I've been playing through a handful of demos as I get re-acclimated to having an actual PC. The most prominent of the games so far is Urban Myth Dissolution Center, a neat little adventure game which tasks our heroine with investigating urban myths and other paranormal phenomena with her power of Clairvoyance...which, isn't really. Mechanically, it's more like you can see where stuff was, allowing you to make connections like "this shape near the door was made by two people, so it must have been the girl and her roommate fleeing from the ghost" or whatever. I'm doing a terrible job of describing it, but it's a neat little game with a great aesthetic and more than a little of the Paranormasight vibes (another excellent game that you should play). Otherwise, I checked out Lumine Nights and Murder on the Yangtze River, both of which are neat Ace Attorney clones, but I definitely enjoyed MotYR a lot more. Lumine Nights had a pretty rough translation (probably machine translated, if I had to guess?), and the stealth gameplay was pretty bad. It did make me whip out a pen and paper to properly solve one of its puzzles though, and that was a fun moment that I don't get very often. I really want to play The Roottrees Are Dead, but we're waiting to get the gang together for that one.