What I Finished, What I Played in 2018

This year, I’m going to go all out with my list of things played in 2018. I’m going to talk a bit more in detail about my playing them, and might even have links!

(The fact that I had to look back through my Video Game category posts to figure out what I had actually played has nothing to do with my linking to my game posts about the games [grin]).

This year was a bit of an odd year for me wrt games. I seemed to have gone through spurts where I played a fair bit of games and then long stretches where I didn’t play anything. And this year was a year where I decided to try to accomplish things and so I played a lot less games just for fun, but had fun anyway.

The big game this year was Blue Reflection. A Persona-style game that supposedly was trying to hit that “girl audience” model, that had potential but couldn’t really hold a candle to the Persona games. This is the game that is closest to a pure and complete finish for me of a new game that I hadn’t played before for 2018, and it was worth playing. But it made me muse about why it’s so hard to make Persona-style games that come even close to the later Persona games. Which struck me even stronger when I replayed Persona 3 and found it to be far superior despite being 12 years old.

Of course, then I also tried to play the original Persona game and Persona 2. I struggled to a semi-ending in the former and gave up on the latter, and despite my planning to return to it have yet to do so. The problem with the former was radically varying difficulty levels, where I went from having an easy time with the game to getting TPKed in the span of two encounters. This always ruins a game for me and was a major reason for me abandoning Record of Agarest War 2. For the latter, the encounter rate was just too high to let me get into that game, which wasn’t overcome by the somewhat lackluster at least early story. Which is sad, because those were the two games that strongly encouraged me to fix my PSP. That I also started playing the PSP version of Persona 3 and abandoned it as well didn’t make me feel much better.

I also ended up starting at least one game of and finishing three games total of Dragon Age Origins. The big impetus for finishing them all off was my being inspired by the SF Debris analysis of Dragon Age 2 to replay and do an analysis of that game. While Blue Reflection is the biggest new game of the year, the Dragon Age games are the ones that contributed the most to the blog in 2018.

I also managed to get more Persona time in, with the Persona 3 and Persona 5 dancing games, as well as replaying the story mode of Persona 4 dancing game. For dancing games, they were enjoyable enough.

I started two games later in the year, with Cultist Simulator and Sunrider Academy. Both of those games demanded a bit more of my time than I could give them at the time, and so have languished a bit.

Finally, I hit some games for a short time. Strategy games Hearts of Iron 2, Master of Orion 2 and Alpha Centauri, as well as the adventure game Spellcasting 101.

So that’s what I was playing and finishing in 2018. I’m reworking my schedule to fit various sorts of gaming — as well as other things in — so we’ll see what happens with that next year.