I've always been curious about the Ys franchise of JRPGs and finally bit the bullet recently thanks to a sale on Steam for both Ys I and Ys II. I zipped through the first game quite fast thanks to its strange, but addicting bump combat mechanic:

I also started the second one, which is really just part two of the first game's adventure, and I suspect I'll finish it pretty soon as well. These are, strangely, the kind of JRPGs you can seriously play through in no time at all.

Six days into the new year, and I've already polished off three games so far. Well, four, but we're not there just yet. Despite starting strong, I will probably slow down sooner than later.

Anyways, I "beat" Temple Run 2, which means that I got 19 out of 20 Achievements (the "find an artifact" one seems permanently glitched), and I've bought a ton of upgrades and ran really far and did most of the level-raising objectives, so yeah...let's call it beat. Here, have a comic:

Scroll through my blog to see what other game comics I've done, too.

All right, here's another comic. Only January 4, and I've already beaten three games. This one's for Disposabot, a free puzzle platformer that is both cute and clever, banking on a "keep killing the main robot dude" mechanic that is probably disturbing on some level of the brain:

Okay, now I'll get back to trying to figure out where to go next in Knytt Underground's third chapter; the map is freakin' huge.

Hey everyone. For the past two years, over at my blog Grinding Down, I've written haikus for every game I beat, totaling way too many to count. Actually, no, I can count them. That's 104 haikus in all. Yowza. My lackluster Japanese poetry skills need a bit of break though. So, for 2014, I'm drawing a little comic for every videogame I beat this year, and the first one goes to Gone Home, which I loved and finished up last night:

Stay tuned for more!

I doodled a silly Link and felt like sharing. Also, really enjoying A Link Between Worlds, and I just rescued my first Seventh Sage last night, so only six more to go! Wish me luck.

How I came about playing Phantasy Star II recently probably says too much about my personality, but I'm going to explain my reasoning nonetheless. Because it is not often that I dip back into the Mega Drive/Genesis era of the early 1990s to play a 16-bit Japanese role-playing game that just about tells you nothing as you go from futuristic building to building, fight to fight. See, some time ago, somebody asked Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann what his favorite JRPG was, and his response was a flat, non-emphasized Phantasy Star II. I'm forever always interested in people's answers to this question and--despite that JRPGs are such a niche, often dismissed genre--preferences can surprisingly run the gamut.

First I had to see if I had a copy of Phantasy Star II somewhere in my collection. The name certainly sounded familiar, but maybe only because I've been hearing a lot of grumbling online about how Phantasy Star Online II--totally a different game--is probably not ever coming to U.S. shores. Evidently, Jeff's favorite JRPG is available on a number of platforms, but it turns out it's included in Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, a gathering of Genesis titles for the Xbox 360/PS3 that I played through some years back, eventually unlocking all the Achievements, too. At that time, I was embarrassingly more crazy about Achievements than I am now, and I only played the games included in the collection that were tied to a ping-able digital award, and Phantasy Star II was not part of that big bunch. Either way, it was fun to discover that I already had a copy ready to go, ready to be experienced blindly.

I have no idea what happened in the first Phantasy Star and if II is an actual narrative sequel or more like the Final Fantasy franchise where every story is separate and unique. Anyways, it begins with a nightmare. The embodiment of evil called Dark Force has returned to the peaceful Algo Star System. Mother Brain, a computer system built to control and maintain order, has began to malfunction, and the main character, a blue-haired boy named Rolf, has to figure out why.

And that's all I know so far because I've basically spent my first two to three hours in Phantasy Star II grinding for essential experience points and Meseta, walking back and forth between the town of Paseo and the wild grasslands just outside its walls. Rolf's commander has ordered him to visit the Biosystems Lab where Biomonsters are created and bring back a recorder, and I'll get there soon enough, but it seems impossible to survive the trip unless Rolf--and his purple-haired, pointy-eared friend Nei--are both around level 5 or 6. Something I wasn't prepared for when going into this JRPG was just how little it told you: I've had to learn the combat, what the items do, how the menus work, who can equip what weapon and armor, and so on all by my lonesome. It's all about self-discovery, but for those struggling, there's also this fantastic website: http://www.phantasy-star.net/psii/psii.html. A great example of this is that Nei has a technique called RES, which I stupidly assumed had something to do with raising a character's resistance, but it actually restores health, a spell I should have been using from the first step into the wild.

I walked away early on in Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light because I found the hands-free combat frustrating, and I'm unfortunately seeing similar trends in Phantasy Star II's battle system. Combat is continuous, meaning you press a button to have your party members begin attacking/defending, and they'll keep doing that until they defeat the enemies or you step in to change something up. If you want to change any character's actions for the next round, all you have to do is press a button before the current round ends. Right now, Rolf is my main attacker, and Nei handles healing and being a tank, taking a lot of damage. Thanks to writing this post and doing some light research across the Interwebz, now I know that Nei can attack too if you equip her with Steel Bars. Will do that pronto, for sure.

So far, the music is devilishly catchy, worming its way into my brain and looping for hours. The two tracks I'm loving and hearing the most are, naturally, Paseo's town theme and the jams for exploring the overworld map. The bass is bouncy warm, and the cheery town tune is so dang cheery that I don't ever want to go into a shop and have it stop playing. First-world problems, I know. However, I'm not actually sold on the battle music, and considering you are not actively involved for most of the battles and are just sitting there listening, that's a bummer. And according to Wikipedia, everyone's favorite website to trust, snare drums are much louder in the Japanese version of the game.

I'm definitely going to keep playing Phantasy Star II because I don't think I'm still seeing it. Whatever it is. I mean, in truth, I've barely started this sci-fi journey to save a realm from monster invasion. I just hope I neither find myself overleveling the characters or stuck grinding to make it safely ten steps across the map. I guess once more people join my party and I can better equip everyone, progress will be much smoother, but until then I have to take things slow because I have no clue what anything is, money is tight, the threats are real, and without coddling learning is a poky process.

Way back in the year of our supposedly collective unmaking--2012, y'all--I shared with everyone that I was doing a comics project called 365 BAD COMICS, which is one "bad" comic a day for a whole year. Crazy, but that's me. The main reason I shared here is because I came up with a Mario comic and thought it appropriate for GiantBomb duders, though many did feel the joke was a little too obvious and been done before. Well, I'm back again, because after a lot more non-videogame-based bad comics--yes, I'm still going, all the way until the end of June 2013--I have another, based on The Legend of Zelda. Not sure if it is funny or weird or makes sense or actually bad, but it's been created nonetheless:

Again, if you'd like to see more of my comics or follow along as I round out this project come summertime, I have both a Tumblr site and a Facebook page for 'em. And feel free to suggest what my third videogame-based comic should be.

Over the Thanksgiving break, I decided to switch things up from grinding my Siren away in Borderlands 2, busting out some PS2 games I've been meaning to play for a long, long time. I happily speeded my way through Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters--and have been updating its wiki like a fiend because of this--and attempted to play Hitman: Blood Money again, but the control scheme for the PS2 version is absolutely boggling. Or just not user-friendly. I mean, you have to hold the square button to bring up the inventory menu and continue holding it to explore the items you can use. This makes me not want to ever open the inventory menu. Also, can't seem to throw coins properly. Wah.

More excitingly, I dropped back into Suikoden III. Now, I originally stopped playing this JRPG from 2002 because I ran into a constant loading problem during one of the main character's opening acts, where it would just hang up during the transition from one cutscene to the next. I suspect this stems from a slight scratch on the game's disc, and this is what I get for buying used, I guess. It's frustrating, but ever hopeful and full of prayer, I decided to try something: when the game got stuck on a "now loading" screen, I simply opened the tray disc, took the disc out, gave it a wipe on my pants, and put it back in. Magically, this worked. And so I was able to explore more of the Grasslands region and level up a bit. It's still a fun time, though I have a long way to go until I get a castle I can call my own--truly, that's where the fun starts, collecting people for your army and watching your headquarters expand as they sign up.

There's a whole bunch of strange dialogue throughout the game, with localization not at fault. This stuff is simply absurd. I plan to document some of it. Here's a good one:

Now take a minute to read what Mamie says while also realizing that we're hanging out in Duck Village, a home of duck-people. Um, yeah.

Stay tuned for more.

Still working on Pokemon White 2 here--just got my eighth gym badge and am trying to make my way to the Elite Four--but that progress is going to come to a dead halt tonight, mostly due to today's big purchases. Uh, see above. Yeeeeeah. Gonna sticker and puzzle it up like woah. Also, Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion comes out in a couple days, as does Crashmo. My Nintendo 3DS is in for one helluva pounding. Funny how it's all happening at once...

As you can see, I've been playing some Pokemon White 2, and things are going splendidly for my body. I can't wait to see what I obtain next. Could definitely use some "Fantastic Abs"...