What I'm Playing - No. 111
Welcome back to another weekly wrap-up of the games I’ve been playing over the past week!
No spoilers in this week’s post, read on without fear!
Click a title to skip to that section. Games contained within this post:
Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (GBA)
My path through The Binding Blade was an interesting one this week. For some reason, I decided I was going to try playing through this whole game without using the Restart Chapter option. Usually when I play Fire Emblem, if I lose a character who I’m even remotely attached to or who is useful in battle, I’ll restart that chapter from the beginning to try and keep them alive. But for this Binding Blade playthrough, I decided to mix things up, and attempted a No Restart run. I lost a few units early on, but I also got a few capable new recruits that made up for the losses. Unfortunately, things began to go downhill rather quickly.
There was a particularly nasty chapter in which I lost many useful units all at once. That almost prompted me to give up my No Restart run. But I persevered, despite my army’s dwindling numbers. In the chapters afterward, I kept losing units. A careless mistake here or there, or getting bad RNG and taking a crit, or a strong enemy barrelling out of the fog of war to kill my healer in 1 hit…I guess I wasn’t really playing that carefully a lot of the time, I might be a little rusty at Fire Emblem. The Binding Blade is also pretty challenging at times. Anyway, I managed to make it all the way to chapter 22, but by that point I had only 4 units left capable of fighting. My 4 units against dozens of enemies…the odds were definitely not in my favor. It was at that point that I decided my run was no longer viable. I just didn’t have enough units to take down both the legions of enemies and the boss at the end of the chapter.
Luckily, I’d made a few backups saves at earlier chapters, before I lost many units. I ended up going all the way back to chapter 9, the earliest save I still had, when most of my army was still alive. I went back to playing the way I usually do, resetting whenever I lost a character that I couldn’t stand to lose. I still couldn’t make it through some chapters without losing anyone, despite resetting multiple times to try. In those cases, I pressed onward, simply because I was tired of retrying the same chapter…but I have kept an earlier save in case I have to go back to it again. I’ve also been referring to a guide for each chapter this time around, to make sure I don’t miss out on recruitable characters. The characters you can recruit sometimes can only be recruited by having specific characters who aren’t Roy talk to them, so I want to make sure I bring that character along.
The Binding Blade is tough, sometimes downright frustrating and discouraging, but in the end it’s still somehow fun. When you finally figure out a strategy to get through a chapter with (mostly) everyone alive, it’s a good feeling. As for the translation itself, it’s pretty good. There are some typos and the occasional bit of stiff dialogue, but all-in-all it’s a good experience and I’m grateful I can play through this game in English at all. I’m also glad I’m playing through it on an emulator for two reasons: 1, I can fast forward through enemy turns to save time, and 2, I can use save states to help save more time. Is the second one cheating? Yeah, definitely. I’ve only recently started using save states, generally making a new one at the start of each turn, allowing myself to reset back to an earlier turn if I make a bad call and a character I need dies. Like I said though, this game is tough, and I’m enjoying it more since I started save stating it up. So I’m going to keep at it, and I’ll beat this game one way or another!
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town (Switch)
When I needed a break from the intense gameplay of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, I turned to a game that is the polar opposite in some ways: the laid back, relaxing farming sim, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. I haven’t played it in a while. Last time I left off I was just at the start of year 2, and at the time I wasn’t ready to start a brand new planting season. This week, I was ready to kick back, till the fields, and start my cucumber empire.
Not much else happened while I played to be honest. Van was introduced, reminding me how this series tends to gradual introduce new characters as the years go by, and I like that about it. My character also continued wooing Karen, they’re dating now. I think I need to save up for a bigger house upgrade before they can get married though. To end things off, check out all my cows.
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your week!
