Seeing as it is Blaugust, I thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and get this feature out of the way. For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing”. The idea is for me to take a summary each month of what I have been playing and write a little bit about where I am in my mindspace with each of the titles. I then in theory us this list to update my “regularly playing” widget in the side bar until the first part of the next month.
It really serves two purposes. Firstly it gives me a pretty easy post by letting me talk a bit about what I have been playing at the time. Secondly it gives me an easy way of marking the passive of time when I am compiling the games I played on a yearly basis… which is another thing that I do. I legitimately go back and look at these posts when trying to remember exactly what I had been playing during a given time frame. I wish I had been doing them for the entire ten plus year long run of the blog. I find it interesting on a personal level to stop and assess where I am in gaming each month.
To Those Remaining
I was admittedly a little concerned that I might be removing this game for reasons I will get into when I talk about Final Fantasty XIV. That said I have been returning to playing it of late and made some more progress. At this point I am a good way into the game, far enough to be able to have gotten the false ending and am now working towards the good ending. For those who are playing I just finished the Hidden Desert and think I am nearing finishing the Secret Lab. It has been a really long time since I have seen a weapon upgrade, so I think at some point I will need to look into finding that. This is still a phenomenal game that makes me exceptionally happy. If you ever loved Castlevania or even if you never played one before… I highly suggest checking out this title.
This is another title that I thought I might be removing from the list this month, however over the last few nights I have dug back in and am working my way through the Solstice of Heroes event. I really want to get the armor and I am reaching the place where I am actually pretty close to finishing the first set. Essentially I need to run a bunch of crucible/gambit and a bunch of strikes. I started chipping away at the gambit specific requirements last night and knocked out generating 100 void orbs. Tonight I will likely do some crucible to finish out the defeat guardians bit and get my powerful gear engram from that activity. The real highlight of the event is the European Aerial Zone event which is exceptionally fun and serves as a high flying boss rush mode as you seem to be able to do superman style leaps due to I am guessing lowered gravity settings? Whatever the case it is fun as hell.
I need to return to this one as I really need to wrap up the seasonal stuff before the season changes. I believe that is going to happen at the end of this month, but I am not 100% certain. Whatever the case I had a lot of fun this previous season and there are a bunch of achievements that are hanging by a thread. I should at the very least go far enough in to unlock the next stash tab. Honestly a running theme is that Shadowbringers threw everything for a loop and caused me to pretty much stop playing every other game I had been playing.
This is still my bedtime activity and probably will be until we reach a point where they stop dropping content back to back. This week they gave us guilds in game, and the Robosquid Armada lives again in Dragalia. This has more or less been our brand for doing nonsense and since most mobile gaming is nonsense it seemed to fit the bill. I am nowhere near as progressed as some of my friends, and I don’t really play this game any other time than the thirty minutes or so before I fall asleep each night. However I enjoy my nightly jaunt into mobile-diabble-land. Right now I am chasing the water variant of the Axe lady in the center panel of the above triptych, Julietta. I’ve not lucked into pulling her, but I am trying… because I am lacking a native 5 star axe-wielder in water elemental type.
I have been fully engaged with Final Fantasy XIV since just before the launch of Shadowbringers. Can we just talk about how amazing this expansion has been? It is without a doubt the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion to date and is quite possibly the best MMORPG expansion story wise I have experienced. In truth this expansion might now be my favorite Final Fantasy game in general but we will have to see what the post first credits roll content is like to determine if it actually bumps Final Fantasy VI out of its well earned spot. Weirdly the class changes have ignited in me the desire to level all of the things and as such I have been pushing a lot of alternate DPS classes through the Deep Dungeon alternate leveling system. I’ve bizarrely fallen in love with Red Mage… a finger wiggler. We are just going to pretend that the vestigial sword makes everything okay.
Still playing this but nowhere near on the level that I was previously. War of the Spark for whatever reason didn’t really excite me, because truth be told… I am not really a huge fan of Planeswalkers . I feel like they make the game of Magic feel like something other than its original core roots, and not necessarily in a good way. War of the Spark however did something important, which was to break the mythic ceiling for Planeswalkers and allow them to start showing up at all levels… also greatly diluting the power curve of them. M20 has recently arrived on Arena and with it I am starting to tiptoe my way back into the game and also starting to factor in what my decks will look like once the rotation happens in September.
To The New and Returning
There are some nights when I want to do more than just run through my Dragalia Lost dailies, and on those nights I have started playing Final Fantasy V on my Android Tablet. I’ve lamented before that I have never actually played this game legitimately. What I mean by that is that I have played through it a few times for the Four Job Fiesta, but never actually played it without restrictions like a proper game. I attempted to play it back in the day with a partially translated version of the rom on an early SNES emulator during the late 90s… and quite honestly the massive amount of frame-skipping required to make it feel like anything other than a slide show killed my joy at trying it. I’m currently up to the post Library of Ancients jaunt into the Desert, but I feel like i probably need to gather up some more levels or at least devise a plan for the Sand Worm before continuing onwards.
To Those Departing
I am certain I will return to Elder Scrolls Online at some point, but I played next to none of it this past month and I am not sure if I will have any time to play it moving forward. World of Warcraft Classic releases this month and with that I know it will start eating copious amounts of my time as I grind up my Forsaken Warrior. I don’t play ESO like an MMORPG really, but instead come in and work on some story content and then wander off. I’m in the midst of the Vvardenfell stuff, which was super good… but I just have to be in the right mood to play it. Once I have cleared Final Fantasy XIV out of my head a bit I fully expect to fire this back up for some relaxing weekend questing.
It turned out to be another fairly stable month with only two titles really changing up the mix. As I said in the above paragraph, this month will see the return of World of Warcraft in the form of the Classic server. I’ve lost all desire to play the live client in any form. That said I really should go back and gobble up the story content that has released since I last played. The biggest problem there is that story content doesn’t work the way it does in other games with World of Warcraft, and it would require a good deal of bandwidth to even figure out how to make sure I was not missing something. All of which are things I have not been willing to really do.