I don’t think there will be any gameplay patch for this kind of thing, so guess will have to play as it is.

I’m a bit more hopeful here, they seem to be doing good post-launch support with the control fixes and major Switch performance improvements in the last patch.

Random battles and difficulty in the second half are by far the biggest and loudest complaints you’ll see for this game, so I think there’s a chance we’ll get some tweaks to this in a future patch.

Favourite game of the genre

Favorite in recent years. 😅 Which is still a big deal considering how many good games we’ve been getting in this genre.

Worth mentioning that I’m on the minority of the metroidvania fans that don’t love Hollow Knight - I’ve beaten it, think it’s a great game, and I can certainly see why people put it on on a pedestal, but it didn’t click with me as well as other games in the genre did.

A bit sad to hear about the grind in Fantasian, I am not a big fan of grinding, or random battles,

The worst part that you don’t need to grind, the game simply doesn’t give you the tools to avoid it.

There’s no mechanism to turn random battles off or reduce their frequency. There is a tool to empty your “saved” battles for a fee, but that requires you to warp to a specific town which means it’s really useful if you’re at a fast travel checkpoint.

I recall while you liked Ender Lillies, you had some complaints about the game (unless I am thinking of someone else), does it fix all those issues?

I found my old comments about Lilies and I only complained a bit about the difficulty, which souds about right from what I remember of the game, it had some brutal sections where it crossed from “challenging” into “frustrating” but other than that was excellent.

So far Magnolia has been “just right” for me on difficulty - I’ve died a lot both during exploring and bosses, but so far never got frustrated and/or had to take a break from the game due to this. If they manage to keep this balance until the end this may honestly be my favorite game of this genre in recent years.

Put my Tales of Graces f replay on the backburner to focus on other games. Will still go through it slowly.

Playing Fantasian Neo Dimension!

Quite a lot of progress in this one. And now I can see why the second half of the game is highly divisive.

It goes from a linear story to a more open-ended game, throwing you back into the world with only 3 characters and vaguely defined goals of “go explore, find your missing friends, defeat the bad guy”. Story beats gets faily sparse with a huge focus on exploration and combat. Bosses get a huge spike in difficulty and are also very “gimmicky”, they feel designed with the idea that you’ll lose to them once to learn the boss’ trick then rebuild your party around it to try again, but I didn’t find most gimmicks interesting or fun so far.

The changes above are not necessarily bad, but one thing that absolutely sucks in the second half are the random battles. The game gets extremely anti-grinding, giving close to zero experience when fighting weaker foes, but the random battle frequency is so high you will reach that virtual “level cap” without trying… and still have to keep fighting enemies constantly for very little reward. This is both boring and frustrating, even if the feature to “batch” enemies helps mitigate the problem.

On a positive note I love the new skill tree you get, it adds an interesting customization layer to and it’s great how you can freely respec as you learn more about which skills work better for your playstyle, or simply because you need to shift your strategy for a particular boss.

Playing Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Picked this up as a side-game for when I need a break from Fantasian, and I’m extremely impressed by it so far. Ender Lilies was already a good game and this one improves on it in almost every way with with better movement, combat, and exploration. Difficulty seems to be toned down as well, which I see as a positive but YMMV.

Also, it looks beautiful and runs flawlessly on the Switch.