Chocobo Mystery Dungeon

It’s a roguelike, it’s the next chapter in TWO long running game series… but is it any good?

I looked at all the RPGs I’ve played this year, trying to pick the one of them all that would be the best of the year. Several stood out, but I couldn’t pick just one. I guess if there were a game that I felt worth spending hours of my life playing, that proved its quality, maybe? Outer Wilds (PS4; finished January 26) This indie game about a hapless astronaut who is trying to stop their sun from exploding in (looks at watch) 24 minutes made a huge splash when it came out last year for all the right reasons. The clockwork solar system our astronaut lives in is full of puzzles everywhere you look. The lore is amazing. The physics are on point. And every 24 minutes, the sun explodes and you start from the beginning again, but you still have retained all you learned. ...

There’s a lot of issues I have with gaming. Lack of time, for one. I’d really like to have a lot more time for gaming, and blogging about games. But then I think – hold on, wait a second, I work. And if I wasn’t working, then I’d be broke, and unable to play games (or at least, unable to enjoy playing games), and then I’d lose the house and be on the streets and be miserable and clutching the Othello set my mom bought me when I was a kid, my last remaining game. ...

I’ve been buying a lot of casual games to pass the time when I don’t have a lot of time to play. Bunches of puzzle games. Some programming games. Some action games (and more on those later). But the one casual game that had that perfect blend of drop-in playability and finely tuned difficulty was one I didn’t even see coming: Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy. CMDEB for the PS4 is a remake of an old Wii game called Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, itself an entry in a long line of entry level dungeon crawlers featuring Final Fantasy and Pokemon characters. ...

June hasn’t been the best month for gaming. Tom and I are ramping up our 3D printing, and working on that sort of stuff is taking more and more of our time. I hope it’s worth it. I have a severe backlog of minis to paint – I have to finish the Gloomhaven PC minis, I have an army of vermlings and cultists to paint for the first few Jaws of the Lions scenarios, some snakes… Plus printing the terrain tiles. ...

I mostly wanted to see if I could pull an animated GIF off the PS4… I posted last week or so ago that I liked Chocobo Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! as a sort of light RPG that I could enjoy while waiting for something better to come along. That something better came in the form of Witcher 3, which is downloaded – all 40+ gigabytes of it – and waiting for me to play. ...

Since I finished Octopath Traveler a few weeks ago, I’ve been looking for another really decent RPG in which to lose myself. My boyfriend had several suggestions: Persona 4, DragonQuest XI, or the Witcher 3. Now I’ve seen the Netflix series, so I kinda know the characters. When there were still places called “libraries” that people could go to, I’d borrowed the “Blood of Elves” Witcher book, which takes place after the events in the Netflix series. ...

I don’t know anyone who has ever played any Final Fantasy game and didn’t say to themselves, “Well, why can’t I play as the Chocobo???2???” I think you can split Final Fantasy players between those who want to play as Chocobos, and those who want to play as Moogles. I don’t think there’s many people in that second category. They’d be monsters. Kupo. “But,” those Choco-philiacs would mutter, “I’d really miss playing those different jobs, like White Mage and Black Mage and Red Mage and Blue Mage and Green M…” let me stop you right there, because in Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon, you can absolutely do all these things. ...

I apologize for the brief news on Crowfall. I’d meant to get deeper into the PvE, but while I was building up my kingdom in the creative mode, the test server came down and I moved on to other things. It’s been years since Chinese publishers ChangYou took over the Shadowbane IP, and eight or so since they released plans to relaunch it. Now, here in 2020, it looks like they are finally really relaunching the famed empire building, PvP MMO. Shadowbane was notable for the huge number of beast races available for play, as well as the EVE-like way armies could gather to siege or defend player-created cities. ...