What I'm Playing - No. 22
Welcome back to another weekly wrap-up of the games I’ve been playing over the past week!
I focused mostly on finishing up the games I’d been playing lately, in preparation for the English release of Persona Q2 on the 3DS! It’s releasing this Tuesday, June 4th, and I’m pretty excited for that! I say mostly finishing up what I’d been playing, because as you’ll see in this post…I started another new game this week!
Be warned, minor spoilers may be contained within. Generally, I do try to keep things spoiler-free but this isn’t always possible/practical! If you want to totally avoid all potential spoilers so you can play these games yourself in a blind run, you shouldn’t continue reading! Games contained within this post:
- Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation (3DS)
- Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! (Switch)
- Parasite Eve (PS1)
Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation (3DS)
I finished my Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation playthrough and with it, finished the last entry in the Fire Emblem Fates line!
At the start of the week, I was pretty near the end of the game. I was close enough to the end that I didn’t want to work on any more S Supports or child units. I already had all the units I wanted. Some of my favorites in the end were Velouria, who racked up a lot of wins in battle despite joining later in my playthrough. Siegbert likewise impressed me for the same reasons, his only weakness was his low Resistance but his high HP helped protect him. Xander destroyed everyone in his path, as expected.
A few maps toward the end had moving platforms that moved before the start of each Player Turn. These platforms must be used to move between floating islands. It was a neat gimmick, as you could engage the enemy from the platform, and then it would move you to safety the next turn if you stayed on it. Or, maybe you draw an enemy onto a platform, and they get moved away the next turn. Little things like that made those maps pretty fun.
One of the last maps had a ton of enemies on it. My strategy to deal with this was just to pull back a bit where the map was narrower. The enemies were rushing me, but they could only engage a few at a time and quickly fell victim to my elite kill chamber of powerful units.
Overall, I enjoyed Revelation a lot. I’m not sure if the final battle was easier than Birthright’s Endgame or if my party was just better and stronger. Either way, I didn’t have to retry it or the preceding chapter at all. I made it through both the first time around without losing any units!
Story-wise, Revelation is definitely the most satisfying ending. It provides closure for all the hanging threads left by Conquest and Birthright, and everyone lives happily ever after. You can read my review of all three Fire Emblem Fates games here, if you want!
Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! (Switch)
I finished Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! this week! By that I mean, I became Champion of the Pokémon League. Of course, you can keep playing the game once you’ve become Champion, and there is some post-game content. I’m marking this one off as “Completed” in the backlog, but I’ll probably keep playing it a bit here and there.
In-game, no one knows who the Viridian City gym leader is. Even when challenging the trainers in the gym they keep it a mystery. When you reach the path where the gym leader waits, it’s this big reveal when you find Giovanni there waiting for you, and he’s the gym leader.
Giovanni’s team was a piece of cake. Eevee’s Bouncy Bubble and Victreebel’s grass-type moves made short work of the ground-type team. The Earth Badge was mine!
After leaving the gym, you run into Blue and he mentions how he’ll be taking over the Viridian City gym. This is kind of cool since he’s the gym leader there in the gen 2 Pokémon games.
From there, one last obstacle stood between my team and the Pokémon League’s Elite Four: Victory Road. To get there, you pass through 8 gates, and a guard checks for one of the 8 badges at each gate, only allowing entry to those who carry the badge. I’d forgotten about this, but I believe this is how it worked in the original games as well. I think this is a nice touch, it servers to remind the player of everything they’ve overcome to reach this point in their adventure.
Within Victory Road, I caught some new Pokémon, like Machoke, Exeggcute, Rhydon, and the legendary fire bird Moltres. Like with Zapdos, there was a little cutscene when Moltres is encountered.
In a rare stroke of luck, Moltres was captured by the first Ultra Ball I threw at it!
Shortly thereafter I emerged from Victory Road on the other side, and had reached the Indigo Plateau, home of the Pokémon League. I healed up my team, then headed in to face the Elite Four!
Lorelei and her ice-focused team were the first of the Elite Four. She acknowledged that she met my guy earlier, mocked me for taking so long to reach the Elite Four, then challenged me to battle.
Lorelei’s team was a little bit of a challenge for my team. Many of her Pokémon have a water type, but know ice moves. So Victreebel wasn’t a good counter to them. Nidoqueen’s Thunderbolt would have been a nice option if not for her weakness to water type moves due to her ground type. I made it by, but it was a bit of a struggle.
Bruno was next. His team was a piece of cake, I had a few good options to counter him. Mr. Mime’s fairy type Dazzling Gleam could exploit his fighting team’s weakness, as well as Fearow’s Drill Peck. Fearow’s Drill Peck was a nice one hit KO on Bruno’s Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan, and I had never been more proud of my Fearow!
Agatha and her poison and ghost focused team was the next obstacle in my way. Of all the Elite Four (including the Champion), Agatha’s team gave me the most trouble. My Mr. Mime would have been a great counter for her entire team…except since they added fairy type to him in gen 6, he’s weak to poison, which all of Agatha’s Pokémon use to great effect. Through the use of several healing items and lots of using Floof and his OP stats and attacks, I beat Agatha. It wasn’t pretty though.
The last of the Elite Four, Lance, is a master of Dragon type Pokémon. Even though only one of his Pokémon was Dragon type. He wasn’t trouble at all, I had good counters to each of his Pokémon. I was a little worried about his Gyarados, but Nidoqueen’s Thunderbolt was a two hit KO on it, thanks to its 4x weakness to Electric attacks. His Dragonite was possibly the easiest of all, since Mr. Mime was made to destroy it with Dazzling Gleam.
After beating the Elite Four, I was the Champion, right? Nope! Lance says there’s one trainer left to fight, then Professor Oak walks in. Lances announces that the final trainer is Professor Oak! …and then says he was just joking in his next dialogue box. The game plays an awesome comedic audio cue there, it was pretty funny. Game Freak definitely has a sense of humor.
The real final battle is the friendly rival. He’s beaten the Elite Four just ahead of me, so I needed to take him down to claim the Champion spot.
The championship battle against him was actually a lot of fun. His team has a lot of different types. He also Mega Evolves his Pigeot! After it looked like I would take down his Mega Pigeot, he surprised me by switching Pokémon before I could deliver the final blow! That was cool to see, I don’t remember anyone else in the game switching Pokémon during battle.
After taking down my rival’s team, I was truly Champion of the Pokémon League! Professor Oak entered the room, and I actually got a little emotional when a remix of the Pallet Town theme started to play over this part. The way they bring in the Pallet Town music was just so well done, and it really made me reflect on the journey as a whole, all the way back to the very beginning.
My team was entered into the Hall of Fame. In my opinion, the team I’ve been using isn’t great. It could be better balanced, and it’s lacking against some type match ups (as Agatha’s team proved), but I’m still happy with it. It was a unique team for me, which is what I generally try to do when playing a Pokémon remake.
The credits for this game were absolutely adorable. I loved them.
With the main game finished, the post-game content was now available. One new piece of post-game content in the Let’s Go games are the Master Trainers. Each of these specializes in a specific Pokémon. They’re located around Kanto, and all you have to do is beat their Pokémon with your own Pokémon of that species. This is easier said than done, I’ve heard their Pokémon are just super strong, and you need to max out your Pokémon to beat them in the 1 on 1 battle!
Another area is unlocked during the post-game, the Cerulean Cave. This existed in gen 1 too, and is where you find Mewtwo. There’s also strong wild Pokémon inside to catch. I found and caught Lickitung, and Golduck.
Mewtwo waits at the end of the short dungeon. Like the other legendary Pokémon in Let’s Go, you first have to defeat in battle in order to try and catch it. I quickly realized that my team was not ready for this task. Mewtwo’s Psychic is incredibly powerful, and can 2 hit KO my Eevee. All my other Pokémon are one hit KOs for Psychic, except for Mr. Mime. Psychic isn’t very effective against Mr. Mime…which prompts Mewtwo to use Recover to completely heal itself, negating whatever damage I managed to do up to that point.
I wasn’t able to catch Mewtwo this week, since you only get 5 minutes in battle with it before it runs away and vanishes. I’ll try again in the future. I think I might need a Dark-type Pokémon, since Psychic won’t have any effect against them. Or maybe just reworking my strategy a bit will help.
Parasite Eve (PS1)
Parasite Eve was recently featured in the first spot of my Top 10 PS1 Games in my Backlog post. I was looking for a shorter game to start this weekend, and I figured I’d stick to my word and start a game that I’d said was one of my top priorities.
Parasite Eve basically blends Survival Horror with a turn-based RPG. The result is a pretty unique and fun game! You play as NYPD officer Aya Brea during a fictional 6 day incident in 1997 where some wacky stuff happens. The bad guy here is Eve, a woman who has been taken over and mutated by her mutant mitochondria. Yeah, the premise here is that mitochondria in the human body mutate and kind of become sentient and evil, I guess? Anyway, Eve wants to kill all the humans by making them spontaneously combust. Luckily Aya is immune to this, so it’s up to her to save the day!
The script is just full of the word “mitochondria.” Most of the main characters talk about it at least once.
Battles pop up randomly as you run around the environments as Aya. In battle, you can freely move while your AT bar refills, and you can use this movement to dodge enemy attacks. You battle creatures that Eve has mutated into grotesque forms. Once your AT meter is full, you can attack using your equipped weapon, which is usually a gun. A green wireframe orb shows the range in which your attacks will hit, so you need to be close enough to the enemy to hit them, but not too close that they can easily hit you. This makes battles pretty fun once you learn enemy attack patterns, as dodging comes down to managing your distance and knowing what the enemy’s attacks are like.
The survival horror bits come in due to the grotesque nature of the enemies. Some of these, mostly bosses, get pre-rendered FMV cutscenes depicting their transformation from animal to monster. The other survival horror feature is managing your ammo and scavenging for supplies. In the early parts, I was running out of ammo constantly, and had to beat down a lot of enemies with a club since I didn’t have any bullets.
Early on the game was pretty hard, I got a few Game Overs. After Day 2 though, it seemed like supplies and good weapons became way more readily available, and I stopped getting Game Overs from random enemies! Now that I found a Grenade Launcher, I seem to be basically unstoppable.
My plan is to finish Parasite Eve early this week, because Persona Q2 comes out tomorrow and I want to be able to devote all my time to that! Maybe it was a little silly of me to start a brand new game right before PQ2 came out, but I think I’ll be able to finish Parasite Eve pretty quickly now. It is a pretty short game!
