Antarctic Handshake (Day 154)

I have been thinking about some games I want to revisit in the future. Every time I make one of these posts, I tend to end up not playing a single one of the games I talk about, but one can only hope that I'll get to them at some point in the future. I'm reminded of the phase I went through where I wanted to play all of the Infinity Engine games. I finished Baldur's Gate, the expansion, and the sequel, but stopped at the sequel's expansion. I even tried Icewind Dale but it wasn't holding my attention. Will I ever get back to those games? I will probably play Throne of Bhaal but it's somewhat unlikely I'll ever get back to IWD. 

These are not the games I'm talking about today, though. Let's take a look at the games I've been playing or have finished lately. The big one, of course, is Path of Exile. I've actually played through the main game twice already with two different characters and I've enjoyed it quite a bit. It might be my favorite of all the ARPGs floating around right now, with Torchlight II and Diablo 3 lagging behind. It's also sort of allowed me to catch up with an old friend and co-worker of mine. We used to play WoW together frequently and I think we've committed to playing through a lot of co-op games whenever we have the opportunity to do so. I'm hoping I can convince him to play some old school SNES games as well, because I think that's the only way I'm ever going to get through Secret of Mana.

I was actually well on my way to completing SoM but due to foreseen technical issues, I lost a huge amount of save data. I really didn't feel up to the task of repeating all the content I'd just completed, so I decided to put it on hold. This has happened to me a few times over the years, actually. I had the same problem with Terranigma and Breath of Fire II, both of which are pretty decent games that I definitely would have finished otherwise. If I'm lucky, my co-op partner will agree to play SoM at some point, and if he likes that, maybe we'll try Seiken Densetsu 3 as well, which to be honest is a much better game than SoM.

Right now we're working on Titan Quest, another decent ARPG in the Diablo II vein. I don't think I would have ever had the motivation to play entirely through the game in single player. It's not a terrible game, but it definitely lacks polish. The combat's just not as satisfying as other games in the genre, even if the game does have a lot of great ideas. Spell effects are somewhat lackluster and encounters less than exciting. I very much doubt I'll be giving it a second playthrough, but it seems worth one run at least.

I'm also playing Gungnir, which I just discussed in the last entry. To be honest, it's kind of put me in the mood for SRPGs again. I was thinking of looking into a couple that I never managed to finish, such as Vandal Hearts for the original PlayStation. It had great gameplay, but exceedingly poor art direction and presentation. It was also plagued by a pretty terrible sequel. I've tried to replay it once before (I do actually own the game) but got distracted as I so often do. It's not the only PlayStation game I'd like to revisit, either. There's also Front Mission 3 and Vagrant Story, both honestly pretty good games in their own right. I'm not sure why I never finished those in the first place. FM3 is long and Vagrant Story got pretty difficult, but they would both be worth giving another try. 

I brought up Breath of Fire II, so I might as well throw Breath of Fire III on top of that. I've only finished the first and fourth games of this series--and I feel it's a series that has gotten better with each iteration, so that's kind of strange. I haven't played BoF V: Dragon Quarter, so I can't vouch for that. I hear it's very different, but I wouldn't mind trying it at some point either. 

I think someday soon I'm going to start playing very small increments of games I'd like to finish and write short blurbs about them, perhaps accompanied by screenshots. Maybe that will fool me into thinking that I have even the slighest chance of chipping away at my monumental backlog.