First, a few games I will not be playing:

Brave Sword is yet another one of these “real time strategy RPGs” in the style of Bounty Sword and others. I’ve found most of these games unenjoyable for basically the same three reasons:

• The AI and pathfinding is usually bad, causing a lot of frustration not being able to get your guys to do what you want them to. Whether it’s walking into walls or not attacking monsters right in front of them, it just makes you wish you could control them directly
• And related to that, it just feels like you are watching the game play itself.
• Finally, too many of these games make you mash buttons to get the menu to come up in a desperate attempt to get some kind of spell off because if you don’t, the enemies slaughter you with their own spells and abilities.

Growlanser is the only RTSRPG so far that I’ve actually enjoyed. I played a couple of missions of Brave Sword but it had the added annoyance of a 3D map that made it difficult to see where people were on the map, and walls often got in the way of my vision.

Zoids: Empire vs Alliance fails my criteria because it has no individual named characters you can develop. It’s more like a pure strategy game.

Second, I need a new laptop.

Nearly 10 years ago when I started this blog, I bought an Acer Spin 3. Virtually all of the games I’ve played for the blog have been on this laptop and it’s worked great. Unfortunately, I am getting into the PS2 era and it’s beyond what the laptop can handle. So I will be looking for something to replace it with. If anyone has suggestions let me know — I want something that can handle PS2 emulation with no problem, but I don’t want to spend a bunch of extra money for fancy graphics cards or things that I don’t need.

In the next few weeks I’ll be finishing up 2000 and then getting ready to move on to 2001 for SRPGs. The next three SRPG posts will be Velvet File (Robot Warlords in English) for PS2, Ring of Red for PS2, and Gungho Brigade for PS. I’m about to start Juntei Taisen for Game Boy Color which is the final 2000 game.

The Velvet File post should be up by tomorrow.

Since I started this blog I’ve gotten a lot of spam comments, which the WordPress plugins deal with quite effectively for the most part. They are generally really lazy — some are just straight up “click here for X”. Others try to pose as legitimate comments but they do so in such a lazy, obvious way that the spam filter can catch all of them. Here are some examples:

• Good post! We are linking to this particularly great post on our site. Keep up the great writing.
• This article is both accurate and engaging. I’m impressed by how useful the whole website is.
• Hi, just wanted to mention, I enjoyed this blog post. It was practical. Keep on posting!

These comments take advantage of the fact that you can leave a website in your display name when you post.

Today, though, I had this comment on the Elfaria II post which was initially not caught by the spam filter:

Of course once you see the display name and the e-mail address it’s obvious spam, but clearly this is an AI-written response. I think maybe I felt like something was off from the way it was written, but I nearly hit “approve” before I noticed the username.

When I looked in my spam folder I saw that these kind of comments had been coming in for a while now. Some examples:

• That’s a really interesting bit of history about Shiozawa Kaneto’s involvement. It’s amazing how many different media tie-ins these older games had back then. (on Gate Keepers)
• That’s a really interesting point about it being Sega’s only Master System RPG – I remember hearing about that back then, it’s amazing how different the console landscape was! (on Phantasy Star)
• Absolutely, it felt like nothing else on the Famicom at the time. The world design and story were just incredibly immersive. (On Final Fantasy)

It seems like they started coming in around January of this year.

I’m not sure how effective this can really be because there’s no point in the spam comment if there isn’t a link to some kind of scam/honeypot, which makes it pretty easy to identify (even by a spam filter). I suppose if someone is running a larger blog where they don’t read all the comments it might work?

(My blog does not use AI at all for any posts or images.)

I’m working on Arc the Lad III, for some reason I’m doing all the jobs. I should be done by next Saturday for a post.

I’ve been doing this blog now for 8.5 years; I’m not sure I imagined it going that long. But I think the time has come for me to take a small step back, at least for the short term. It’s kind of where I have been going for a while now but I’m just going to make it official.

Basically I am no longer committing to an update every Saturday. I’m not sure anyone was actually following the site so closely that they even knew I did this, though. I may reevalute this next summer when I have a bit more free time.

Going forward, I’m generally only going to make a post when I finish a game, even if that means that a week or two goes by without a post. I’m also not going to make stage-by-stage posts except for games like Fire Emblem where each stage has something to write about, and I think enough people have played the game that there might be some interest in it. Otherwise, I will just do a review-style post at the end of the game.

This can also allow me to play games that I want to play without having to worry about what I’m going to do with the Saturday post. This doesn’t mean I’m abandoning the site, though, I still want to play SRPGs. I’m playing Mori no Ookoku at the moment.

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Last week I also played Pokemon Crystal. This was a random selection from my huge RPG list. I have never really played that much Pokemon — around 2010 I played Platinum, SoulSilver, and LeafGreen but I didn’t play any of them more than a couple of gyms. So I was interested to see what it would be like to play a whole game.

Overall it’s been fun, although I’ve had a hard time dealing with the rival’s pokemon partly because my Grass pokemon sucks so much. Although now I am stuck at the Elite Four. My main party is:

Cyndaquil, Pigeotto, Gloom, rock dude, water dude, and Gyarados (they are at higher levels than in this screenshot now). But this evidently isn’t enough, and all the recommendations I see involve teams of pokemon I don’t have at all. I don’t like the idea of assembling an entirely new party and grinding them all up to appropriate levels, so I’ll have to think more about what to do to proceed.

I’m working on Suikoden III now, which is one of my games that I bought a while back and have not played yet. I tried to do it on the PS2 emulator but my laptop could not handle the emulation when it got to parts where there were a bunch of people moving on the screen in a town. This is the trusty laptop I got in 2017 when I started the Super Famicom project but it can’t run Windows 11 so I was going to have to do something about it this fall in any case. I may see about getting a gaming laptop with a video card since I’m going to be encountering PS2 SRPGs fairly soon. For now, I am playing Suikoden III on my PS2, which runs surprisingly well given that it’s 22 years old.

This is a list of the next few games I’ll be doing after S3:

• SRPG: Puyo Puyo Gaiden (Puyo Wars) for Game Boy Color
• DS: Sigma Harmonics (thanks for the recommendation)
• SRPG: Fire Emblem 5! (SFC)
• Famicom: Indra no Hikari (Light of Indra)
• SRPG: Front Mission 3rd (PS1)
• SFC: Card Master: Seal of Rimsalia (i.e. Arcana)

One of the things I can “roll” to play between SRPGs is a DS game. Any suggestions? It can be something that’s good or something that’s only in Japanese that you are curious about.

I’ve played Tales of Innocence and Hearts, KH 356/2 days, the FF remakes, Xenosaga I&II, Etrian Odyssey 1, Dragon Quest IV, and the Super Robot Wars games for the system.

I have relatives visiting so I haven’t been able to play much this week except for some Xenoblade Chronicles here and there. Here are the next upcoming games:

• Vandal Hearts II
• Ultima Exodus and Haja no Fuin (both Famicom and Master System versions — I’m mostly going to do the Famicom version since several other bloggers have already done the MS version.)
• Ogre Battle 64 – not sure how much of this I will play
• Kawa no Nushi tsuri 2 (for Super Famicom, I haven’t played any of these fishing RPGs yet)
• Real Robot Sensen — i.e. Super Robot Wars only real robots
• Suikoden III – this has been sitting in my closet for 20 years
• Nadesico: The mission? (Can’t tell if this qualifies as SRPG or not)

Just a quick update — I’ve been gone a lot in the past month, I’ve been playing Xenoblade Chronicles on the Switch. I’m maybe 2/3 of the way through but I will start playing Brave Saga tomorrow. I will probably make slow progress on it until I finish XBC but I’ll post progress in the meantime.

XBC is a decent game; I don’t like the level penalties when fighting guys above your level, but the areas look really good and the system is fun. It is also nice to see Tetsuya Takahashi finally make a game that doesn’t seem to have been plagued with development issues.

I’ve been sick all week so I am not going to make a post — I’m at the end of SF3 but now I have to do a bunch of grinding just to get the parties up to the point where they can fight the last battles…not a particularly good way to end the game.

For some reason the last three posts did not show up unless I was logged into the admin account — I only noticed this today. It seems to have been caused by an issue with a cache plugin for wordpress. So you should be able to see the last few weeks of posts now.

Too bad it’s just my slow crawl through Shining Force III but I’m on the last stage so we’ll be moving on soon!