Another lazy Summer week, another Sunday Summaries with which to summarize very little. Some of that's on me: I've had family around for a different family member's wedding, so most of my weekend starting from Friday has been occupied with various non-computer related activity. Apparently such a thing exists.

In addition to that, I've largely spent what free time I have on Stardew Valley, which has taken over my life in a manner I didn't expect. When the Bombcast (or was it the Beastcast?) says SV's a perfect vacation game, they're not wrong. I'm also starting to think that Animal Crossing's strict "one real-life day equals one Animal Crossing day" system might not be such a restrictive limitation after all; with Stardew, every new day brings with it about four or five little mini-tasks I need to accomplish, and there's this nagging paranoia that if you were to turn the game off and go out and live the rest of your life (or sleep, even), you'd forget what those mini-tasks are by the time you return. Then again, with no real time limit (beyond waiting a long time for the present season to come around again), it's not stressful in the way that time limit-sensitive games can be. It's not Persona 4 where a day wasted playing the capsule machine feels quite as aggravating. I'll go into it a little more later at the end of the Summary, as per usual, but I should probably link to this article I wrote earlier this week that tries to pin down what about the game is so moreish compared to others like it.

While I'm at it, I should also bring up this facetious "ranking tiers" list of Tales characters I've encountered. After completing Tales of Xillia last week and exhausting almost everything I had to say about the game without getting into the individual story beats or world geography (which I did for Tales of the Abyss a couple years back), I figured I'd do something to celebrate the fact that I'm now eight core games into the series. Final Fantasy, while it can have its issues from game to game, is probably the only JRPG series that offers significant story and gameplay differences from one entry to the next: compare that to something like the core entries of Dragon Quest, Ys, Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and indeed Tales which all have similar story beats, themes and visual styles to go with their recurring gameplay and lore aspects (like the always-constant names of healing items and spells). For that reason, I don't tend to play more than one RPG from the same series in one year, and that can put me behind with a busy series like Tales that keeps putting out new games on top of regularly occurring ports and remakes like Hearts R.

Still, I now have a list that will motivate me to play more Tales by allowing me to retroactively add those rosters to the tier structure I already have. Even if that list is as patently silly as comparing one androgynous anime teen to another, I've always appreciated how Tales takes seemingly one-note archetypes and expands them into characters with a bit more definition in the many hours of game time it has to work with.

New Games!

While we're on the subject of JRPGs, the most anticipated game this week (for me, at least) is the international release of Tokyo RPG Factory/Square-Enix's I Am Setsuna: an RPG designed to hearken back to Squaresoft's peak in the PlayStation 1 era. I've tried to avoid learning too much about the game beyond watching the E3 trailer (part of an ill-advised feature to review the hundred-plus trailers to emerge during this year's Electronic Expo event), but from what I've seen, it sort of looks like a classic PS1 RPG with a slightly more elaborate visual style and a Ghibli-esque tale concerning its tragic eponymous heroine. I suspect the actual RPG mechanics might be a bit on the basic side, given the philosophy of recalling a simpler (if way more critically successful) time for the company, but I'm hopeful that the game has still got it where it counts. There's also that forlorn hope that the success of this game might spawn direct sequels of PS1-era Squaresoft games that Tokyo RPG Factory can take on, perhaps hiring Matsuno back for Vagrant Story 2 or a true successor to Final Fantasy Tactics. A guy can dream. Heck, a remake of one of Square's late-era Super Famicom games like Rudra no Hihou wouldn't be a bad idea, since they didn't get anything near the attention they deserved.

Still, anime fans won't have to miss out if I Am Setsuna fails to ignite, because they'll have the localized version of Gal Gun: Double Peace to play too, which also arrives this Tuesday for Sony consoles. How bummed will I be if an artful watercolor throwback Squaresoft RPG ends up selling fewer digital copies than a game where you seduce anime schoolgirls by shooting them in their erogenous zones? Pretty darn upset, I'd imagine!

Xbox One is taking the week off, its only release being a digital XBL game called Cast of the Seven Godsends: Redux, which seems like a Volgarr the Viking style balls-hard retro platformer/action game. ("Run and Gun", I believe is the archaic genre name they used on its Steam page. Genres, eh? We're still working on a new genre list for the wiki, but I dunno how far we've gotten with that. As Jeff often points out, genres have been busted just conceptually for a long time.) PS4 is a little busier, albeit with a bunch of PC to PS4 ports that include the console versions of the open-world survival game ARK: Survival of the Fittest, the Forgotten Realms MMO Neverwinter, the top-down pixelly co-op action-RPG Moon Hunters, and the inexplicable decision to remaster Indigo Prophecy a.k.a. Fahrenheit a.k.a. What the Fuck Happened to the Second Half of This Game?

You want to know how bad the Summer slump is? Wii U has three releases total before October, and the one of those three that is due this week looks to be the usual type of shovelware Nintendo consoles attract. 3DS won't see any new games until the middle of August. Vita has two releases this week (the shmup Soldner-X 2 and the above Gal Gun Double Peace) and one next week and then that's it until the final day of August. The two dying last-gen consoles aren't getting anything until the yearly Madden on August 23rd. Barring some surprise last minute release news, I think it's going to a dry month for everything bar the two leading consoles and Steam. Fortunately, that month-long desert of a release schedule will still include the shimmering oasis that is No Man's Sky, so maybe it's for the best we aren't distracted by other games. It has the last month of Summer all to itself to enthrall us, so let's hope it's up to the task.

Wiki!

Wiki work has been spotty, due to the aforementioned family commitments, so my progress into October 1995's SNES releases has been capped at a comparatively light fifteen game pages. Four of those games were new to the wiki, so they've been added to the usual list for your perusal.

The big stand-out this week is another legenday SNES RPG, in a similar vein to Secret of Evermore's taking of the top spot in last week's wiki round-up. This time it's Quintet's Tenchi Souzou, best known to you or I as Terranigma. The third game in the loosely-defined "Soul Blazer series", and the last of that set to be released on the Super Nintendo, Terrangima continues the unusually philosphical themes of destruction and rebirth that began with 1992's Soul Blazer - which had you building a town through exploring a dungeon - and continued with 1993's Illusion of Gaia - which saw a young psychic travel a transformed world to find his missing father. If anything, Terranigma is even weirder and more disjointed, but being a late-era SNES game it also looks fantastic. Sadly, North America never got to see its own version of the game due to Western publishers jumping the sinking 16-bit ship for the PlayStation and Saturn - the only reason Europe saw it was because we're generally a bit behind with new trends. That worked out in our favor here, and not for the first or last time.

Because two legendary RPGs in one month wouldn't suffice, this month also saw the original Super Famicom release of Quest's Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. This game is best known overseas for its remastered PSP version, as well as for being the thematic, mechanical and graphical basis for Final Fantasy Tactics. The director of both FFT and Tactics Ogre, Yasumi Matsuno, would depart Quest for Squaresoft after this game, beginning his amazing run of games for them and the Sony PlayStation platform. I've yet to get around to either version of Tactics Ogre, but it seems rather reductive to consider it a dry run for Final Fantasy Tactics. I'm sure it has its own intrinsic value as an early Matsuno project, and one divorced from the real-time elements that put me off its sister series Ogre Battle.

Compared to those two, the rest of the game pages I worked on this week seem kinda nondescript, but here's a few of the highlights regardless: Magical Drop, a Bust-a-Move style bubble-matching puzzle game that plays a lot like Money Puzzle Exchanger and saw many sequels/ports; The Mask, a typically bad and unnecessarily labyrinthine licensed platformer based on the Jim Carrey movie that I almost certainly rented once; Crystal Beans From Dungeon Explorer, which is odd for being a late Super Famicom port of a 1993 TurboGrafx-CD/PC Engine CD-ROM game I've previously covered in an Octurbo entry on this site; and the Pac-Mania-meets-Flicky madness of the ludicrously-named GanGan GanChan.

With only eight games left to go in October 1995 (one of which - Tetris Attack - was already processed in a previous wiki project), I don't doubt I'll be knee-deep in November 1995's schedule by the next Sunday update. Getting so close to the end now!

Stardew Valley!

Rather than talk any more in-depth about Stardew Valley this week - given how much I've expounded on it plenty already in that blog post I linked to earlier - I thought it'd be prudent to follow up on what I said in the intro about always having a dozen little tasks to accomplish at any given moment and just look at how my farm is doing where I left it. I'm going to run down the checklist that'll be in my head as I play the next day, 5th of Fall (of Year One).

(It's worth noting before I begin this list that the game doesn't track much in the vein of tasks other than the side-quests you've been given. You gotta remember everything, or take your own notes if you're too forgetful.)

• Wake up. We got work to do.
• It's not raining, so water all the crops.
• Pick any crops that may have ripened - unlikely, since I only planted them four days ago. The wheat has a quick turnaround though, and I've been saving that for... a machine to craft beer! Damn, how are we doing on that? I still don't have the blueprint to make a keg? Maaaan, I need to level up my farming skill more. Can I build a moonshine still at least?
• Remember that I still have chores to do, and go collect all the eggs from the coop and restock the hay for my four chicken ladies (and one duck lady, who has yet to grow up and start earning her keep).
• Check if the new incubator in the coop has given us a new baby chicken yet. Gee, I hope it's not a rooster. The new duck has enough problems fitting in.
• Remove any grass, saplings and rocks (?) that have grown overnight close to my farm allotment.
• Do I need wood? I always need wood. Cut down some trees while I have the energy left.
• All right, time to hit the town. There's a limit to how many gifts you can give out in a certain number of days, but it'll eventually refresh. If so, I have a box of gifts on the farm that I can rummage through for some more ingratiating with the locals.
• Wait, nothing for Abigail though. It's her birthday next week. Gotta make it special, and I also don't want to run out of my gift allowance before then. It is actually Elliot's birthday today, and while I've barely spoken two words to that beach cabin-dwelling weirdo, I suppose I should make an effort.
• Needless to say, I'm looking for stuff on the ground at all times. I've already fulfilled the Fall forage item requirements for the community center scavenger hunt at least. Everyone takes foraged goods as gifts well enough in my experience.
• No quests on the town bulletin board, ah well. Quests don't earn much money and involve a lot of running around, but they're also an easy way to earn villager friendship points.
• Hmm, I could craft myself a Preserves Jar. I have the resources to do it. Would make financial sense given how close we are to Winter.
• Unfortunately it's a clear if windy day, so not only do I wear myself out having to water everything, but the type of fish I need for the community center won't show up unless it's pouring it down. Not a fishing day today, then. Need to go get more bait from bashing bugs in the mines anyway.
• Actually, it's not going to be much of an anything day today with my energy gone, so it's off for a quick dip in the spa. I could buy/cook some food for energy instead, but I don't think I have the ingredients. I should cook more. Like, in real life too.
• I have plenty of refined ingots for crafting from my recent dungeoneering, so let's put exploring the mines on the back burner for now as well. That reminds me, I need to upgrade my damn pickaxe again to make any headway on the dungeon floor I'm on. I could use a better weapon too. Those red slimes take hits like they were nothing. I have the gold bars, but it's a lot of money and time to upgrade to solid gold equipment.
• You know what I could use? A barn. I could put cows in it. Cows go moo, but they also make moolah. Cow puns. It's been a long day. Either way, that's going to take a lot of wood so let's get choppin'.
• It's the end of the day and I'm running on fumes, but I could always use more hardwood and so another quick trip to the Secret Woods is warranted. You can only find hardwood by chopping up large tree stumps, and the stumps in there respawn every day for whatever reason.
• 10:30pm? I'm going home. You don't want to push it past midnight. Not that I've ever stayed up to see what happens. Dump all of my ill-gotten gains in the sales chest for today, and the rest of my materials into storage, and then call it a day.
• I better remember to visit the carpenter Robin tomorrow to get the work started on that barn. I just hope it's not the day of the week when all the moms in Stardew Valley go exercise together in the general store. That's a thing that happens. If so, maybe it'll be raining and I'll take a fishing day. Hell, I make so much money fishing these days that it might be a good way to recover the expenses of that barn and the gold pickaxe. Either way, I'm going to need funds to buy some cows for it eventually. Wait, do I even have a good clear spot on the farm to build it? That's another task for tomorrow.
• Good night!

And this is pretty much every day in Stardew Valley, just with all the details being ever so slightly different. You track your progress across your many disciplines - farming, fishing, foraging, fighting and f...mining - but you end up running around completing twice as many smaller tasks as soon as they appear. Of course, you could just focus on whatever's the most profitable path and save yourself some bouncing around like a pinball, but where would be the fun in that?

Anyway, I don't imagine I'll get another full week out of the game. It's likely I'll soon start maxing job disciplines, hitting the bottom of the mines, filling up the community center scavenger hunts and finding the partner of my dreams from within the town's populace. Then again, I feel I've still got a lot more of Stardew Valley left to discover. It's going to be a fun week, give or take a few hours to water all those crops every day.