Happy Monday, duders, and welcome to the latest instalment of The Backlogbook, my weekly video game progress breakdown. If you're not familiar with the format by now then allow me to enlighten you. The Backlogbook is split into two main parts - This Week's Log, which goes into some detail on the game's I've been playing throughout the previous week, and The Lost Pages, wherein I attempt to whittle down my enormous Pile of Shame by identifying the games in my collection that I'm realistically never going to play. This week we have yet more of Grandia, a final lap of the track with LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, and two more underwhelming games will be stripped from my backlog for good. Grab your popcorn and make yourself comfortable, folks. The show is about to start.

This Week's Log

For the third week in a row, the focus of This Week's Log will be Grandia and LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga. The good news is, this is the last week where that'll be the case, as I've successfully managed to score one of those two games off my list following a lengthy time investment, making it my first 'beaten' title of 2017 (spoiler alert - it isn't Grandia). In addition to this, I've made a little bit of space at the end of This Week's Log for a third game, one that I revisited this weekend for the first time in over a year. Make no mistake folks - these may be old games, but we're not retreading old ground here.

In other "what I've been playing this week"-related news, I put a bit more time into my Nuzlocke run through Pokémon Sun, but I won't be writing about that in The Backlogbook since it has its own dedicated blog series. Anyone who's interested in my progress through the Alola region can find the latest chapter here.

Grandia

Jeez, this is a long game, isn't it? Three weeks into my time with Grandia, twenty-five hours on the clock, and I still haven't reached the end of the first disc, which is where I was hoping I'd be at this point. Maybe I've just been spoiled by modern game design conventions, but everything in Grandia feels like it moves at a glacial pace. Exploration, which I'm still feeling conflicted about, takes a long time. Even with my new route-one strategy, it's taking me well over an hour to navigate some of the game's more complex 3D environments. Combat, while still the game's strongest suit for me, often feels drawn out, with the animations for everything always feeling just a bit longer than they really need to be. Thankfully that's mitigated by the steady stream of new skills and spells my characters are learning. I've just surrendered some more Mana Eggs to give Justin a complete suite of four elements, which in turn is going to give him access to even more skills, and I'm stoked to see how his character develops from here. Less exciting is the presence of Gadwin on the team, since his high level and powerful stats are giving my other characters less chances to improve their own attributes. I'm assuming his role on my team is a temporary one, but right now I'll be glad when he's gone and Justin and Feena get more of a look-in in combat.

Even Grandia's story has slowed to a trickle. It seems to have sidelined its central plot in favour of focusing on isolated vignettes of story within each of the game's new locations. On the one hand, those little vignettes have all been pretty cool up to this point. On the other, it feels like we're not really making any substantial progress towards an end goal. It's reminiscent of the bulk of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII, where Cloud and co. spend upwards of fifteen hours chasing Sephiroth across the world map. Except at least in FFVII's case, it made sure Sephiroth kept his hand in with frequent references to "the Man in Black" and the occasional encounter. With Grandia, I don't think we've had anything directly linking to our quest for Alent or the Angelou civilisation since our time in the Dom Ruins, which was... I think about fifteen hours ago? I haven't even heard anything from the Garlyle forces for a while (which to be fair at least makes some contextual sense, since we've crossed the End of the World, a feat that nobody else has yet managed). What I'm saying is, these little mini-stories are all well and good, but I really hope we start seeing some pay-off in the core story soon.

All this probably sounds like I'm feeling really down on Grandia, and I promise that isn't the case. In spite of all my moaning, I'm still enjoying the game and looking forward to whatever the rest of the experience holds. I just wish it would be a little quicker about it. This coming week will hopefully see me push through into the second disc, which in turn might give me some more insightful things to say about it in next week's Backlogbook.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Last week I posited that I would wrap up my time with LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga before this week's Backlogbook entry. I'm happy to report that I was successful in this, earning the remaining 11.5% over the weekend in two lengthy sessions totalling around eight hours. Most of this progress came from picking up various collectibles, most notably the white and blue minikits dotted around the levels in Free Play and Challenge Mode respectively. My process was to open up an online guide pointing me towards all the collectibles, set a podcast playing (either a Bombcast, a Beastcast, or one of @thatpinguino's Deep Listens podcasts), and set about following the step-by-step instructions through each level. Having the podcasts on to keep my mind occupied definitely helped prevent the task from becoming too mind-numbing. Even so, by the time my percentage counter finally ticked over to the full 100%, I'd had enough LEGO to last me for quite some time. Nonetheless, it's a big achievement for me, and it's great to finally be able to put a title on my list of games beaten this year (even if I did technically beat it last year).

While we're speaking technically, I guess I'm not completely done with LEGO Star Wars: TCS. There's still the matter of earning all the Achievements in pursuit of 1000 Gamerscore and the coveted 'S-rank', something I haven't achieved in a game since playing through Assassin's Creed II all the way back in 2011. This is something I'm keen to do, but to be honest it's not something I want to prioritise over playing something new. Right now I have thirty-one of the game's forty-two Achievements and 850 Gamerscore, with most of the remaining unlocks being the paradoxical 'crossover' boss fights. I intend to come back to this later in the year, when I'm not feeling quite so burned out on the LEGO formula, and tie up these last few loose ends to secure my fifth official S-rank (ACII, Just Cause 2, Fallout 3 and Jak & Daxter HD being my others up to this point). Oh, and a huge thank-you shout-out to @ohagan for joining me online yesterday to help me secure the previously problematic Online Player Achievement. Without that duder's contribution, I wouldn't stand a chance in hell of S-ranking this, so thanks.

What's next? I'm not sure, but I do know I want it to be something short and sweet. I picked up the PS4 version of Journey a few months back when it was given away free through PlayStation Plus, and that seems like a perfect 'palette cleanser' - a game I could get lost in for a while and feasibly wrap up in a single sitting. I guess we'll find out what I choose to play when The Backlogbook returns next week.

Borderlands

I hadn't expected to be writing anything about the original Borderlands in today's blog. After all, what would I have to say about a game I haven't touched for over a year? That all changed when on Friday night, I met up with my friend Duncan at the pub. Duncan and I started co-oping our way through Borderlands way back in November 2014, but other commitments started demanding our time and the playthrough lost impetus. We've been back to Pandora a couple of times since, but not in a committed way. When the subject of Borderlands came up over our beers, we agreed to dedicate ourselves to making it through what remained of the game's story. On Saturday afternoon, we started to make good on that promise. We played our way through a few more quests, gained a couple of levels, and advanced the story for the first time since December 2015 (according to the date stamps on our save files). And it was awesome.

I still love the core gameplay of Borderlands. The push for bigger and better loot is a constant driving factor to make forward progress, but for me the most fun lies in the moment-to-moment gunplay and exploring the game's gorgeous cel-shaded environments. That fun is great in a solo run, but it's multiplied when shared with a good friend. It was nice to be back in the shoes of Lilith, Phasewalking my way through hordes of Raiders, Psychos and Skags alongside Duncan's sniper-toting Mordecai. As I said, we've attempted to get back to regular Borderlands-ing before and failed, but this time, I have faith that things will be different. After all, somebody's gotta find that Vault and open it, right?

The Lost Pages

Now for The Lost Pages, the section of The Backlogbook where I take two games from my Pile of Shame, admit to myself that I'll never get around to playing them, and scratch them from my backlog forever. It's a tough, but ultimately cathartic ceremony that I'm starting to look forward to rather than dread when Mondays roll round. For this week's Lost Pages I've chosen two Japanese titles that were released over a decade apart, but are pretty similar at their core.

Harvest Moon GB

Nostalgia's a funny ol' thing, ain't it? It's pretty much the only logical explanation for the first iteration of the Harvest Moon franchise on Game Boy being installed on my 3DS. See, when I was around thirteen, a schoolfriend lent me his copy of Friends of Mineral Town for the Game Boy Advance. I fell for that game hard - I sank hours into maintaining my farm, growing crops, tending to animals, befriending the townsfolk, exploring the environments and generally losing myself in the game's charming world. Since then I've picked up numerous games in the Harvest Moon series, always hoping to recapture that same spark, and always failing dismally. I think the problem with this release is that it's just too bare-bones to hook me in the same way. Sure, the core mechanics are there - the land-tending, the crop-growing, the animal-raising - but it lacks the vibrant world and charming personality of Friends of Mineral Town, and as a result I just can't engage with it as fully as I'd like to. Sorry Harvest Moon GB, but I'm putting you out to pasture.

Rune Factory: Oceans

Rune Factory was originally sold to me as "Harvest Moon with actual RPG mechanics", and that description was enough to get me to drop some cash on the PlayStation Store for a discounted copy of Rune Factory: Oceans (known by the more extravagant subtitle 'Tides of Destiny' in the US). A handful of hours with it revealed it to be a disappointing hybrid of Harvest Moon's farming and life simulation aspects, and some very simplistic dungeon-crawling and combat mechanics. On top of that, it's all wrapped up in a story I don't care about, and a cast of characters that I can't warm to. Every part of the whole feels undercooked, and the end result is a constant reminder of wasted potential. Rune Factory: Oceans is a mere shadow of what it could have been, and I refuse to settle by playing what it is.

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Another week, and another instalment of The Backlogbook comes to a close. Join me next week when I'll doubtless have even more to say about Grandia, some thoughts on a game that isn't LEGO Star Wars, and two more unfortunate titles will meet their demise as they are consigned to The Lost Pages. Thanks for reading guys. Take care, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

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Currently playing - Grandia (PS1C)