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Recently completed video games

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For those that have finished Brothers, is this the kind of game that's fun to play through with a spouse? (as in, the controls sound annoying in a way I don't think she'd appreciate, but it sounds like an "experience" kind of game ala Journey that's fun to just be with someone while playing)

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Giant Bomb's Game of the Year The Last of Us

 

Well ok. I appreciate a third person shooter with a different feeling from Gears of War/Uncharted/Etc. I wouldn't say I'm in love with it, but I enjoyed having a more horror/survival/average guy feeling rather than the muscleheaded Arnold Schwarzenneger from Commando/Kill all the dudes for a change of pace. I also think Bioshock Infinite looked better at almost every turn so I don't know what crack the GB guys were smoking to give this "best looking game". If they really wanted to give technical achievement then that award goes to GTAV and no mistake.

 

But that's not really what people raved about this game for did they? And yes the story, at least the personal one, ends up being quite good to me. The world is Half Life 2 mashed up with some I Am Legend movie version. I actually got annoyed when not only the opening of Half Life 2 showed up but then "now I'm in trap town!" moment and etc. Except they ditched the trap town idea to have more (and these are the worst parts) Clicker stealth areas, and then there was that (again, uuuugh) boss fight. Which is a shame because in between these were some great, desperate feeling fights when I couldn't manage to sneak past. So yeah I'm not calling the gameplay consistent. And while the story ends up good, with a really affecting opening and ending, I'm not sure I'd call it consistently good throughout either.

 

It was more than worth the $25 and hours I spent on it though. It's up there with my favorite games of the year. But I also don't get the massive hype a few people put on it.

 

Brothers- Yeah the controls aren't annoying to me at all. Actually the camera was the only wonky thing once in a while. Then again I play games a lot so I've an obviously biased opinion.

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For those that have finished Brothers, is this the kind of game that's fun to play through with a spouse? (as in, the controls sound annoying in a way I don't think she'd appreciate, but it sounds like an "experience" kind of game ala Journey that's fun to just be with someone while playing)

My wife did not like playing it (she gives up easily and she's not used to controllers) but this is one of the first games ever that she wanted to watch me play all the way through without playing herself.

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I also finished Brothers. I didn't like it as much as other people here, but I definitely dug it's concise structure, and the imaginative and gorgeous looking world design.

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I just finished a hard playthrough on the PC version of BioShock Infinite.

I still like that game a lot, a whole lot more than most other people here, it seems.

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Talking of Infinite, I finished Burial at Sea part 1. I don't know. Can you guys answer a question for me? Did you immediately understand the ending? There were various threads that I picked up on throughout relating to Infinite and specifically where Elizabeth came from, but the first thing I did on completion was fire up the wiki and read the plot, just as I did with Infinite.

I'm interested to see if anyone else did this. It's entirely possible that I'm a dunce or simply not concentrating enough and not picking up on obvious plot points as I play, but it all seems overwrought. Reading Comstock's history, it's all a bit breathless and littered with actions that explain the physical events but are emotionally hollow and don't quite ring true rationally either. I really get the impression that the devs sat down and constructed Columbia, an incredible city to rival Rapture, and then some poor bastard had to 'retcon' everything it contained into a narrative. I'd be interested to read more about the development.

 

Burial at Sea was a pleasant couple of hours, but several things grated. The repetition of character models really pulled me out of the moment. I would go up to them, trigger their conversation, steal the coins from the bag beside them, then go to the next identical couple. The city is the main character, I get it, but the inhabitants are dead. Okay, programming paths and NPC interactions would be a huge amount of work, but surely for a game of this budget a few more faces isn't asking too much? I had the same problem with Infinite proper. I've also never found the 'gameplay' tears satisfying (as opposed to the cutscene 'narrative' tears). Okay, so a Machine Gun or a Samurai COULD exist here, so why not a lockpick when I need to open a door, or a tear to a reality where there's no door in the first place? The concept opens a can of worms that makes the paltry choices available feel trite.

 

Ah, Rapture's awesome. I should stop complaining. I admire much about Infinite & Burial and it fires the imagination, but nothing quite adds up.

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Rise of the Triad (2013) :tup:

Warning: this game isn't for everybody. It's a remake of the 1995 game and the gameplay is more or less the same. So you run really fast, enemies are plentiful and dumb. You've got limited health, etc. Even though it's the same gameplay it does feature "modern" FPS element. You can jump, mouse aiming is vital.

So, it's a remake of the 1995 game, and it starts out as an actual remake. The first level is pretty much an exact copy of the original game's first level. After that it starts changing a lot and once you reach the first boss the levels have little resembles of the original game, they do share names. The style also changes. The 1995 game had a lot of large open areas, in the remake this has been reduced quite a lot. None the less, the levels do have a ROTT vibe to them. The weapons are mostly the same. Some of them received a secondary mode. For example, the flamewall allows you to shoot hot shrapnel, and the drunk missle has the option to simply shoot the rockets in high velocity without heat seeking. The boss battles have changed the most. Also, there are mini bosses.

I finished the game on normal, in most cases the levels can be completed without dying, except for the various platforming elements with instant kill. The boss battles are may more difficult and usually take a lot of tries until you get lucky enough to survive.

The thing I hated most about the remake it the god awful "humor". It's really really horrible. For example, you encounter a mini boss at some point which does a constant bad Arnold impression.

The game is rather short. There are 4 times 5 levels, each episode has a secret level which is mostly harmless (except the Vomitorium). In the original the episodes had 7 levels and a secret level which was challenging, the last episode was 10 levels long. The levels are much smaller than the original, and also much less complex. The music in the game is a remake of the original sound track with more added metal, but you can also opt for the original midi music (not actual MIDI, but same sound).

Anyway... I liked playing the game.

 

ps, the Vomitorium in the remake starts like the original Vomitorium, but instead of fighting the NME you have to complete a really insane obstacle course. After a lot of attempts (and quicksaving) I managed to complete it.

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I beat Long Live the Queen, which is like Princess Maker only with more political intrigue and assassination attempts.

 

All you have to do is survive one year and you'll be queen of the realm, except some people are trying to assassinate you, some are trying to take over your country and you suck enough, they might be a revolt...

 

The political and intrigue aspects are interesting, but you also can get married, but frankly, you barely get to know anything about your suitors. The suitor I choose didn't even have portrait, that's how unimportant he was!

 

I died a few times a long the way, but it seems that if you stick to a "path", you only need to study certain subjects to succeed, also your moor will influence how hard you study in each subject. For example,  if you are angry you'll do better at training with weapons. 

 

I just beat Long Live the Queen myself! Honestly, I really enjoy what RPS called a "Sansa Stark simulator". I do wish that the game was longer with more choices and consequences, but I feel like that's a common complaint for visual novels like this. Still, since the gameplay is pretty much just playing the game, losing, and making a note of what skill check killed you for your next playthrough, it would be nice for the tree to go a bit deeper.

 

For my winning run, I basically just maxed out Faith (for divination) and Lumen (for magic), so that I foresaw all threats coming and burned them to death. The epilogue was mainly just the game telling me that that was the brute force method and there were more subtle/satisfying ways to win, by which I was kind of intrigued but not enough for me to dive right back in.

 

I've seen a bit of complaining about the skill checks being exposed, but I don't understand it, because otherwise you'd just die ignorant, rather than your last thought being, "Maybe I should learn more about dogs next time..."

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Gunpoint: Totally awesome indie game I bought during the steam sale (I bought it because Eurogamer told me to), really took me back to the 1990's in terms of of its aesthetic and rewarding gameplay.  Granted it is very short but I played through it in one day, which is rare for me.  Big recommendation.

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Brothers!  Felt like playing a children's storybook.

 

Gameplay suffered a bit from the Limbo problem:  puzzles are clearly puzzles, and always appear as roadblocks to traversal.  You come to a room that you need to drag some things around in order to continue moving forward.  You enter a room and a single enemy appears that you need to beat to continue moving forward.  This makes the game feel like a series of hallways (forward traversal) and puzzle rooms (blockage).  It's easy to lose motivation to keep going.  Some of that may be that I didn't have a lot of faith that the game would present a fresh take on familial relationships, which ended up being the case for me (jaded jerk that I am).

 

It's a cool game, though! Glad I experienced it.

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I beat two games in one day!

First up, Evoland. Mostly it reminded me of DLC Quest, another game I finished recently. It's another parody/satire that criticises but doesn't end up doing anything interesting or different in terms of player interaction from the games it's criticising. The story is played a lot straighter than DLC Quest, mostly just ripping off Zelda and Final Fantasy wholesale, so it's disappointing that they bothered working so hard to make a mechanically and visually competent game only to abandon any hope of it being meaningful or even funny. Is it just lack of ideas? The one part I found kinda fun was switching between the 2D and 3D modes ("time travelling") to get around certain puzzley forest areas, which is also the only time the whole supposed evolution-of-video-games theme felt used in an interesting way.

Expanding on those thoughts, I'm not all that comfortable thinking about the amount of time I've wasted spent on these two games, yet I've finished them while any number of brilliant games sit in my library unplayed. I'm sure this says something about my commitment avoidance or attention span or something, like it's easier to engage if you know a game is basically throwaway and only likely to take a few hours. I even spent an extra hour or so unlocking all the achievements I hadn't quite reached, so now it's 100% complete and I never have to think about it again. :unsure:

Also, this game made me realise just how much I detest random encounters. This might be a bit of an unfair example because here encounters are never any challenge at all, and there's no skill or party systems and thus no interesting decisions to make during battles. But still, they just strike me as an inexcusably inefficient way to design a game, in terms of interestingness per unit of player time. I could even see potential for them to be used to some effect, the way Monopoly isn't necessarily very fun to play but makes an effective statement with its systems, but nobody seems to do that; encounters never seem either fun or meaningful. I'm not all that familiar with the genre, so I'd love to hear of counterexamples!

The other game I beat was Mighty Switch Force 2. God damn, the music in these games is unstoppably catchy. I have a few Jake Kaufman soundtracks in my workday background listening rotation, but hearing them in context is just the best. All the sound is amazing; I especially love the yell of "YOU'RE SAFE" as you kick babies to safety.

I don't have much to say about these games, other than that they're great and I would buy as many as WayForward could make. I've never played any of their other games, though I backed the recent Shantae Kickstarter. I guess I'll start playing the original Shantae (eShop version), so I'm ready when Risky's Revenge comes out on Steam.

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Expanding on those thoughts, I'm not all that comfortable thinking about the amount of time I've wasted spent on these two games, yet I've finished them while any number of brilliant games sit in my library unplayed. I'm sure this says something about my commitment avoidance or attention span or something, like it's easier to engage if you know a game is basically throwaway and only likely to take a few hours. I even spent an extra hour or so unlocking all the achievements I hadn't quite reached, so now it's 100% complete and I never have to think about it again. :unsure:

 

I had very nearly the same reaction to DLC Quest.  It was an entertaining way to blow an afternoon, but most of the "Neat!" factor wore off after about 5 minutes.  And yet I finished both quests and got most of the achievements. 

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DLC quest was ok because it kept changing stuff in a regular pace and wasn't too long.

Evoland became stale quite fast and didn't really explore much of the RPG "evolution".

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Naya's Quest. I loved VVVVVV with all of my shitty heart and Terry Cavanagh apparently has so many great ideas for games he can just give them away for free like this. It's an initially awkward-feeling isometric environmental puzzle game where the perspective is constantly playing tricks on you, you have a button to flip between two views to help you work out where you can stand, and once you're a wee bit in and feeling cocky big Terry adds a number of twists on this to make it a bit more challenging. Some are a bit rubbish (the hexagon one, the one where the directions become straight compass points) but it never goes on long enough to drag the game down and the ones that do work, which is most of them, are fucking rad. I had a great time with this, and would happily chuck him a fiver for three or four hours worth of this on 3DS. It's like what I thought Echochrome was going to be before I bought it and found out it was boring and awful. Nice one Tel.

 

http://terrycavanaghgames.com/nayasquest/

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I beat ICO HD recently. The main character, who I don't think ever gets named, is like a little Nathan Drake except he kills spooky shadow creatures instead of dudes. The game shows its age mainly in the combat and camera control, but the visuals and environmental puzzle part of the gameplay hold up well. And for a game that is essentially a giant escort mission I was rarely frustrated while leading Yorda around, which I think says something.

 

Mainly I wanted to mention this small touch that's there towards the end of the game that I really loved...

After Yorda is extremely weakened by opening the final gate, as you lead her across the bridge you can feel her hear beat while you are holding her hand via controller rumble. A rare time where that feature really adds anything of substance to a game.

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I just beat the PC version of King of Dragon Pass, one of my favorite games both as a gamer and as a historian.

 

So much of this game just works. The events behave with a different logic than what the modern mind us accustomed to, so to succeed at the game, you have to roleplay in a way that approximates quite closely a mix of proto-Germanic and American Indian cultural values. It's really cool, eight or ten hours in, to find your thanes squabbling over spoils and know for sure that the right response is to confiscate all the loot in order to make them see their pettiness. It's not just, but it is right, you know? Plus I think the religious aspect is better handled than most games. You listen to prophecies and honor the gods. I started out ignoring both and that makes for an impossible game.

 

Of course, there's some odd missteps, which is to be expected from a fifteen-year-old title like this. The "short" game of uniting neighboring clans into a tribe is airtight, with a dozen needs pulling you different ways every season. Do you raid, do you invite more farmers into your clan, do you pray for the gods to heal the sick? It's razor-thin sometimes and there's nothing like having an action you took for short-term political gain ruin your tribe. Quick tip, don't piss off the lizardmen. But the "long" game, which is actually becoming king of Dragon Pass, gets a bit linear and humdrum by the very end. Heroquests becoming increasingly important in order to unlock the next step of the event chain, but they also give your clan magic and your elders wisdom, which are the two rarest "resources" when you start. By the time you're poised to make your bid to be chosen king, everyone on your council of elders is probably be "excellent" or higher at their specialty, which has a knock-on effect of making your clan insanely rich in cattle and pretty much everything else. When you're getting goods every year worth five hundred head of cattle, the game's hard choices, which are initially and usually a decision between ten and twenty cattle's worth of goods, become trivial. I actually had to wrack my brain to figure out how to spend all my wealth. Going from clan to clan buying up all their ancestral treasures wasn't putting a dent in it, so I built every single temple too, but that just made the snowball bigger.

 

I suppose that there are occasions where elders die on heroquests and opportunities to mess up or restart the final game-ending event chain that would make the game challenging, but I'm not sure I really want the challenge of having my king-elect die suddenly, which would just mean twenty more years of crazy wealth and dominance while I wait for a new one to be groomed. Still, even with the long endgame, it's a remarkably different and thematic experience that flatly doesn't exist anywhere else, except in pale shadows like The Banner Saga's overworld management. It's $5.99 on GOG (the developers have weird ideas about digital distribution and have fought any sort of wider rerelease beyond iOS) but worth every penny.

 

I promise someday I'll stop talking about this game, too.

 

 

 

EDIT: But not today. I was going to write something more about my favorite moment in the game was having a compromise candidate, chosen by the other clans to oust my clan's elder from the tribe's chieftainship, start a civil war through her incompetence, not to mention my subsequent switching back and forth as I tried to decide whether I would look worse supporting a bad king or joining a revolt so soon after losing the chieftainship, before discovering that both sides felt I had championed their cause to the best of my ability.

 

But really, my favorite moment was having to expand my farmland in order to feed my massive population of fifteen hundred souls, then discovering my herd of two thousand cattle were starving for lack of pasturage, and wracking my brain for a good five minutes before realizing that I'd have to go to raid in order to take land from another clan. That was something I'd never done before in the game. Sure, I'd raided to steal cattle or take prisoners or uphold honor, but never to expand my territory... you know, the principal reason wars have been fought for the last who knows how many centuries.

 

Okay, now I'm done.

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I've finished 2 games this year already!!!

 

Metal Gear Rising: I definitely played all the way to the final boss without using any of the moves which I unlocked. I started struggling then looked up how to beat him then demolished him. i enjoyed it but DMC was a much stronger game overall with the dynamic combo system. 

 

To the Moon: I doubt I can say anything about this that hasn't been said. I enjoyed it after getting used to the awkward controls (please let me use wasd over arrow keys!!). Overall I preferred Gone Home but both are very powerful games. 

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I beat Assassin's Creed: The Bad One.

 

...I know, I know. I was recently gifted ACIV, and at 80% complete ACIII I couldn't justify moving on to Black Flag without beating III first. Y'know what? It got a lot better towards the end. The game's biggest flaw is that Haytham is WAY more interesting than Connor, so all the times that you see Haytham you're just reminded "Fuck, I used to BE that guy..."

 

I had vowed to not get into collect-a-thon stuff, but then I did. The funny thing is, I started collecting things right when the story kicked into melodrama. This means that in my story, Connor responds to having to kill his childhood best friend by dropping everything and running around the frontier collecting bits of eagle. "To atone for my sins, I must collect enough eagle to bury my friend feathers. It is the only way." Also, I couldn't stop thinking of that scene in Futurama where the car salesman is trying to sell Amy a stupidly expensive car by talking about how many eagles were killed to make different parts of it. "That's a lot of eagle..."

 

Finally, this game had one of my favourite unintentionally funny things in games for quite some time. When you get near a chest, you hit B to pick the lock on it. When in stealth, B is the button for whistling to attract a guard. Chests are usually guarded by several people, and the quickest way through this is wanton murder. I would kill a bunch of dudes and then hit B to open the chest. Half the time, however, the game wouldn't recognize the chest because I was still in encounter mode, which meant that my Connor would frequently look out over like seven dead bodies he's just created, put a hand on his hip, let out a long low whistle, and then get back to what he was doing. I laughed every time.

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Finally, this game had one of my favourite unintentionally funny things in games for quite some time. When you get near a chest, you hit B to pick the lock on it. When in stealth, B is the button for whistling to attract a guard. Chests are usually guarded by several people, and the quickest way through this is wanton murder. I would kill a bunch of dudes and then hit B to open the chest. Half the time, however, the game wouldn't recognize the chest because I was still in encounter mode, which meant that my Connor would frequently look out over like seven dead bodies he's just created, put a hand on his hip, let out a long low whistle, and then get back to what he was doing. I laughed every time.

This was great, thank you

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I'm doing a dumb thing where I'm trying to finish 52 games in a year. It can be games I started earlier, and games I've beaten before, but I'm finding myself more drawn to mobile games and all of those Humble bundle things I've bought and never touched to make up the numbers as they tend to be shorter so it should be an interesting experience. I only have a 2009 OG MacBook and a laptop running Debian so I'm a bit limited in what I can play on them though.

 

Anyway, The Room (Android). I've owned smartphones since the original terrible iPhone and this is the first mobile game I've ever got into enough to finish. I thought it was like 999 on the DS without the talking and the anime which was absolutely fine by me as (I loved that game btw) and eagerly await the sequel coming to Android. The puzzles are kind of dumb if you stop to think about them but when you're actually doing it it's really cool somehow and when you get past a bit you were stuck at it's up there with solving a Layton puzzle and having the man in the hat point at you and make you feel all special. Really enjoyed this and three hours or so play for 69 pence is a new one for someone who only ever really plays console games.

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Apart from replaying games that are finally on Steam I've played:

 

Ballpoint Universe Infinite: It's a strange shooter with a platform hub world, the ink paper aesthetic are great looking, but when the platforming gets complicated the controls really make a bit frustrating. I don't really get the point of the hub world though... I guess it's there for story exposition?

 

Ravenwsword: Shadowlands: I'm pretty sure this is an Android/iOS game ported to Steam, it's like a very light version of Skyrim, which is probably why I could stomach it... It's "too short" to bore or annoy me. It's kinda cute to see it try to emulate cRPGs and fail because of the hardware limitations and scope of the story. You can buy a house, but you don't need to sleep, also, you have to carry the furniture in your inventory and I couldn't figure out how to place them well, all of my paintings just clips through the wall into oblivion... It has sneaking, magic, "clans" to join and all that rot, but it's practically useless. I'm not even sure if the reputation has any effect on the game at all!

 

Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage: Part of the same indie bundle. Boy is this different from Shadow Warrior one! The level is much smaller, but it's so much more challenging, since the game adds EXPLOSIVES to the mix! Which you have to dispose of in an incinerator... Of course, all you have to do is put them in a bucket of water and that somehow prevents it from exploding (wouldn't the water evaporate?). Also this game is FILLED with stuff you "shouldn't" break. For some reason "decorative Xmas balls" leave a puddle when they break and you very easily break one if you're not careful. To be truthful, I wasn't even able to 100% it, which to the game means I failed... I literally spent and hour moping everything and looking for debris, but the game still said something was dirty, so I gave up. I just might try it again and destroy everything, even though I'm not meant to, just to find whatever I missed. 

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Bravely Default (3DS). Not the true ending because 1) I really can't be fucked and 2) this actually feels like the direction I'd have gone if I didn't know the true ending was a thing.

This is a frustrating game for me, someone who has doesn't really play JRPGs but has latched on to the big ones like FF7-9, Persona 4, and enjoyed them to varying degrees. The job system is fantastic and allows so many permutations of characters and abilities, the autobattle and speedup thing makes grinding quick not that it's really required, it's staggeringly beautiful in places, the music is great. It's soured by a twist halfway through that I can't believe anyone thought was a good idea for a game this long. I did get over it and got back on with it but if you're kind of casually interested in this style of game and you have a backlog I could easily understand putting it down and never coming back. I forced myself through now because I have so many 3DS games to start that have had to wait because of this but I didn't want to have this nagging away at me every time I saw it on the shelf.

My meaningless JRPG-noob scale has this somewhere below Persona 4 but above any Final Fantasy, which means precisely fuck all as I've only played the PS1 titles that weren't ports and I loved Mystic Quest on the SNES. It's good, but don't go nuts over it because it's deeply flawed. I got my money's worth and look forward to a sequel though.

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I gave War of the Human Tanks another chance and not only enjoyed it, but beat it! It's a strategy game where the "human tanks" are just robots. 

 

It plays a bit like Battleship in the sense that you die in one hit if your character is only one square big and you constantly have to scout and guess where the enemies are. It also play like an anime show with "moe" robots and characters and it even has an ending song and intro song after each chapter, just like if it was a show. It has it's funny moments like when you fight an actual "Human Tank" which is a tank with a girl's face... which is both hilarious and disturbing and... Mr. Cat. Imagine all the firepower of Megagodzilla condensed into one tiny kitten.

 

What really bothers me is that it's a strategy game where you can't save in mid battle, I guess that's a Japanese thing, I don't think you can do that in games like Fire Emblem either? It's still bloody fun!

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So I guess I technically finished Pokemon Y a little while back, but I didn't think about it because I don't ever really care about the story in any of the games. I'm currently in full training mode trying to get a team built. They've made it really easy in this game to breed Pokemon with good IVs (stats).

I beat ICO HD recently. The main character, who I don't think ever gets named

His name is actually Ico I believe.

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