Now Playing Roundup #1

I'm thinking about focusing a little bit more on clearing out my backlog in the coming months. I've started playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (for the first time in five years, mind you) in bursts over at a friend's house and we're really enjoying it. It's a prototype of a lot of features that showed up in future SMT titles but it really does stand on its own as a fun game with a really spooky/trippy atmosphere. Of course, because it's Atlus, it also has its fair share of humor that occasionally feels a little. . .out of place in a post-apocalyptic setting.

I'm also soldiering on with Tales of Graces, a game that I might be able to call my favorite of the Tales series--although let's back up for a minute and let it marinate before I go tossing that around. The combat system is excellent, though, and very liberating in comparison to other titles. There's no resource management between fights and the pace is positively frenetic. There are tons and tons of moves to unlock and you have a ton of freedom in how you link those moves together in combat. The Graces interpretation of the Tales combat system is really great and I can only hope that Xillia and Zestiria follow suit. I'm deliberately avoiding reading up on them too much so I don't disappoint myself.

I'm trudging miserably through the beginning sections of Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard, already regretting my choice in party composition. It's a team that might be effective later on, but is very low on damage at this stage of the game. It is my hope that there will come a point where my party composition afford me supreme control and extremely high burst damage, but it's difficult to say at this point just how realistic that is as I am continually pummeled into submission by the first stratum's boss.

After scouring my house, I was able to find the long forgetting power cable for my Wii and was therefore able to extricate my copy of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon from my console--a game that I've been wanting to revisit for a long time. It's been a sore on my backlog for years now and I'm genuinely unsure why I've never managed to finish it. I can only assume I was playing through it when my old Wii console died. This catastrophe also halted my progress on games like Klonoa and Muramasa (which I did complete a couple years back), as well as, annoyingly, Super Mario Galaxy. I have few excuses for not having finished that game, especially considering just how much progress I've made on it in the past. It's been lying in wait just begging to be finished for some time now!

Once I finish this round of games (or rather, once I finish Graces), I'll renew my quest to clear out my backlog with fervor. Of course, it's not the first time I've said that, and I've not frequently stayed true to my goal. On the other hand, I did take out a pretty huge chunk of my backlog last year, including the remaining catalogs of two whole consoles. Unfortunately, I've since added one more PS1 game to my backlog (Legend of Mana) and I'm not sure when I'll finish that one.