May 4, 2012

Played a bit more Picross 3D. Getting bored of it for now.

Played some Bit.Trip Fate. I think, it might’ve been Flux. Doesn’t matter. It was actually fairly good, something I was not expecting after Runner. The 4th boss is being a pain though, but whatever.

I played a little Devil Survivor 2 too, not really feeling like it though. Dunno why either, since I’m actually kinda wanting to replay DS1 again.

I also was trying to figure out a master run for Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. I spent a bit of time figuring out what would be challenging but still manageable. Eventually I settled on the following rules: no weapon, no armour, no red souls, hard mode. So all of my damage must be from either punching (lol) or blue souls. I’d have started a fresh hard mode game, but DoS only lets you start hard mode from a previously beaten file, so whatever, I have all my good souls and everything. I used the Chaos Ring too, because fuck running out of mana every 3 seconds. I don’t personally think the ring removed all that much challenge from this run, all it did was prevent a bunch of tedium.

It was a fairly fun run. Only took about 3-4 hours because I know the game pretty well by now. I think this is like my 5th or 6th run. I mostly just went with Death’s souls active and dodged crap, letting the mini-scythes rack up the damage. It was actually really easy until I hit Death, who takes not much damage from the mini-scythes and just kind of stonewalled me for a bit. I eventually figured out a strategy to win, mostly spamming Spin Devil’s soul. The lack of armour really hurt in this fight, he was doing about 1/4 of my health with a hit. The last boss was not really hard, just tedious since unfortunately Death’s mini-scythes wouldn’t target him, so I had to use a few other blue souls to help out. Spin Devil’s was the best for the first form, since it does MASSIVE damage at the expense of not being able to dodge easily and having a fair charge-up time, but he telegraphs his attacks so much it ended up being a pushover. Second form I used White Dragon’s soul for the most part, since it did reliable damage to him, dodging the little minions was annoying, but Death’s soul did track those, so I switched to it when they got annoying.

Overall it wasn’t that challenging of a run, but I mostly blame the game itself for that, it’s definitely the easiest of the DS Castlevanias. If I had been using armor and weapons and red souls it’d have been even easier, so I think I’ll still consider this a master run.