This Year (Day 343)

I have finished Borderlands 2! Next on the agenda for co-op will be Divinity: Original Sin but I won't be able to buy that until Friday. Until then we'll probably continue to play Borderlands 2 here and there. I don't expect to hit the level cap or anything, but maybe I'll still jump on from time to time to progress. I like the game a lot, but I can't see investing too much more time into it. I'm in the mood to go out and conquer as many games as possible, as should be patently obvious from the content of this blog over the past few months.

That still leaves me with the two single-player games I'm currently playing to finish. I made some progress on Front Mission 3 today and I played a bit of Fire Emblem last night. FM3 is going smoothly for the most part, but they did just throw a mission at me that requires me to split my eight-man roster into two different squads. Since I've only been using the same four characters for the majority of the game, this prospect is a little troublesome. Some of those characters have really outdated equipment and not a lot of proficiency in their weapons. If this becomes a common trend in the game, I might have to invest a lot more time into training, which will certainly lengthen the game.

In the case of Fire Emblem, I'm regretting more and more my decision to play the game on hard mode. It has been a nightmare just to get to Chapter 10x, where I am now. I've had to sacrifice a couple of playable characters that I otherwise might have ended up using until the end of the game. This is the kind of gameplay decision I do not relish being forced to make, but the difficulty made it close to impossible to go any other way. Combine this with a series of missable items that are required to make it pass chapter 20 and you have a recipe for frustration.

Still, I think that once I start promoting some of my units, things will start to go a lot more smoothly. Many of my higher level first-tier units have several capped stats already. Once they reach the next tier and get those stat bonuses, they'll become quite formidable. I'm hoping that my myrmidon avatar will gain a lot of strength as a swordmaster, because she is actually lagging behind in that department despite possessing incredibly high skill and speed.

I probably won't be able to start playing Divinity for real until Saturday night, although I"ll probably buy it the day before. I've heard some really good things about it and I'm excited to give it a try--but we've committed to playing the game co-op, so I'll have to wait on him before I really dive in.