ThaaoNET Blog
~Warmth Like Home Unawares~

Diaries out the wazoo

Heyyy everyone~ Been a while since I updated the ol' bloggo. I'm gonna be picking SCARLET GRACE back up because I'm addicted to it again (basically play for 5 minutes and you get like this... soooo good XD) so get ready for some Urpina~~ I actually played through like almost her entire story before but lost my screencaps to a data corruption thing so I'm starting it all over :,)

The unsaga site is going pretty well and there's not as much left to do on it, so I'm gonna be doing more diaries hopefully. I got stuff to write for unsaga, sagasca, sth, and romasaga2 already quite a bit. And then for R2, I actually completed a no-damage run, but I'm so unhappy with it that I even removed it from my YT channel and will be redoing the whole thing from the beginning~ woo~~~

That's about it :) Thanks for reading. It seems a few more people are hanging around now and I really appreciate it~~~ <3 Keep leaving comments; I like talking with you guys :O

Also, I've been having a hankering to play a different Harvey game recently. Maybe after I finish the current ending on Save the Homeland I'll start a different game? StH doesn't seem to popular honestly hahaha. Plus I'm kinda burned out on it already. I can usually only do one or two endings at a time and need to take a break.

Was thinking of doing FoMT or HMDS...? HM64 is pretty popular right now, too.But IDRK, I might just stick with the things I got right now. I'm doing too many games maybe XD

I also said I wanted to get back into gamedev a while back but I keep piling on the diaries and now the unsaga site ;;; I should maybe try to whittle it back down to one or two games and get back into dev?

2018 schmunny ate teen

Hello, friends~ And happy new year. Just letting yall know, I'm super fixated on working on the unsaga site right now, which means play diaries entries will be coming in a bit slower than normal (I realize they are already slow lol). I've been playing and writing to prevent getting burned out on working on the site lol. I did play romasaga2 for a while last night and maaannnn this game is good. This and Scarlet Grace are pretty much the pinnacle of the open-scenario system IMO. I remember when I first heard sagasca was going to be based on the Romancing trilogy, I was a little miffed, because I wanted it to be a new, experimental game... But in the end, it just took the best aspects of the series for nostalgia fans and then was super creative everywhere else.

Anyway, I'm also wanting to kind of play unsaga a bit more casually, so I think I'm going to start in on the Korean version a bit more. I keep starting games and then not getting far because Korean is hard and I forget so much of it, but I also am kinda tired of all the screncapping from playing the US version (I'm actually working on Ventus's story now and probably have enough for a couple diaries lol) and making sure I get everything 'recorded.'

I've played a bit more into the second run of Save the Homeland as well; I think I might stop doing the 'letters to Grandpa' thing for the new game+ runs because, well... the majority of the content of said letters would be the same? And I don't want to try to work the oddities of new-game+ into the 'story' I had going with the letters. Not that there was much 'story' there; I was mostly just doing it as an experiment and an homage to my grandfather.

I've also been practicing ROCKMAN WORLD, which I actually played for the first time only recently. When I first started playing it, I was like "ehhhh IDK if I care enough to do a no-damage run of this," but after clearing the game for the first time, I grew pretty attached to it. And it's super short and simple so it shouldn't be too hard to do. And determining a stage order won't be so bad because there's only four stages lol. I remember playing RW2 (the only one of the RW games I've played) on my Game Boy and being extremely underwhelmed with it, but the first one really held up a lot better, IMO.

I've been having a hankering to play Super Mario 64 again (I play through like, at least once a year lmao) so I might do a mini-diary about collecting max coins in every course or something, since I've been wanting to do mini-diaries. I started a video series on max coins a long time ago but never finished it; it's really the only thing in the game I haven't done. I've even done all kinds of glitch-exploiting runs and stuff which are usually not my thing. But man, getting max coins is haaaard. Of course, this is doing the 'legit' max coins without glitches or abuse. Honestly the worst part is probably Lethal Lava Land. Well, Rainbow might be a terror but I've never gotten that far.

I'm also marooned at my mate's (which isn't a problem at all, though I did have to make so many phone calls to cancel appointments like WHY DID I HAVE SO MANY APPOINTMENTS FOR THE FIRST WEEK OF 2018 wtf wtf) so I'm not able to do as much game playing here, but I can do lots of writing and junk. I also want to get back to drawing but my carpal tunnel is teerrrrrrriible these days and my hand goes numb within minutes of trying to draw. It's even bad when using my phone. I've been trying to ice it and do stretches and stuff but there's only so much you can do once the damage has been done lol.

I've also made a backloggery solely for games I want to cover in diaries. I actually managed to score the username 'mustache' which was awesome. I have an old backloggery from when I had a huge game collection, but it's so outdated and I've given so many games away now. And then I tried to make a new one but the confirmation email thing seems to hate Outlook, so I was never able to receive it, so I had to use some weird google email address to make this one. Fortunately I didn't try to use 'mustache' as my username for the one I tried to make with outlook :P

But, uh, yeah, that's it for now XD Have a good 2018. If you can. Hopefully it's better than 2017~~

Deliver Unto Me, Leon

Hey, friends!! So, Romancing SaGa 2 is releasing on modern platforms TWO DAYS FROM NOW

Of course, I'm super hyped, and I've already started working on getting a Play Diary set up for it. So hopefully I'll get some entries up very soon after it's released! Like, maybe even this weekend?!

This is also making me think about what I want to do for RSG3 -- I put the old one on hiatus because I was thinking maybe I'll just wait for the English release, but... now there's even hints of a SCARLET GRACE English release (?!!!!) so I might end up instead finishing up my current JP playthrough, and maybe do a couple others if I feel like it, then I can always switch over to the Engilsh-language remaster when it comes out, as part of the diary itself :D

I'm not going to return to playing it right away, though. I'm still doing Save the Homeland (I cleared the game the other night and have already started on a second playthrough loll) and ROCKMAN (I'm ALMOST done with the no-damage videos for R2... basically just have to do the boss rush and final boss, which is all easy, it's just about waiting for the luck to line up with Air and Quick). And then I'll be doing, of course, Romancing SaGa 2.

I'm also heavily working on my unsaga shrine/guide, which I hope to be something like serebii.net but for unsaga. I'm making a database with all the game information so I can dynamically create pages about monsters, arts, etc. and use those throughout the guide itself. I'm also going to be doing a lot of stuff like extracting graphics and sounds from the game and whatever to make this the most complete shrine I can. And I hope to eventually do this with other SaGa games in the future, but for now, I just want to get the unsaga shrine done. I'm trying to think of a good name for it -- I was thinking "The Strelitzia Inn" since Strelitzia is the game's symbolic flower, it's the flower of Iskandar, and it's the name of the inn in Vaftom, so... seems like a fitting name for a fan site, right? And it's kind of inspired by Galbadia Hotel, which I thought was such a neat name for a fan site back when it was in its prime, too XD

I also want to do shrines for some of the Harvest Moon games. Ushi no Tane already has great guide pages for most of the handheld games, but information on the console games is scattered around the internet and full of misinformation and rumors. SO I MUST BE THE HERO.

Anyway, get hype get hype~~~~~~ See you guys soon with the end of the Horse Race story in StH, the debut of R2, and the launch of RSG2!

Poking Lufia

Hey, friends~

So, we ended up getting Pokey yesterday and I did start a bit. And I started Lufia II, as well. I know I said I was going to try to get back into the rhyhtm but with both of these games to play, NXT Takeover, and Survivor Series this weekend, I don't know how much I'll really devote to writing play diaries lolll.

But after this weekend, I should have reclaimed my room from The Bugs and should be able to have a bit more time to myself and hopefully a bit of enthusiasm.

Pokemon Ultra Sun: Naming
Rowlet

In Ultra Sun, I ended up picking Rowlet again. I just... really love this little thing. It may even have become my favorite starter of all time :O And yeah, I ended up doing US because Dens wanted UM. I'm pretty indifferent to which version I play, though.

I was going to name it Jack (after Jack Gallagher) but I ended up getting a girl... there's only like a 12.5% chance of that or something so I was surprised. And then I was stuck with the DOOM that is deciding names of things. I can sit for HOURS worrying about this hahaha. But I ended up thinking of the name 'Jaqueline' which worked pretty well.

After that, I learned that Caterpie was in the game (!!!) so I caught one. I wanted to do a rasslin' name theme but I asked X about what I should name it and she said Julius/Julian/Julio LOL so I ended up naming the little guy Julio.

And that's about all I've done so far; just reached the trainers' school thing. Gonna get my special Rockruff today, then I have to think of a name for that... I am probably going to go with Cedric but if she ends up being a girl, I don't even know. I guess I can just name them what I want regardless of their physical gender lol.

Lufia II: Rise of the
Sinistrals

Over at GameFAQs forums we're doing this group playthrough thing of Lufia II. I'm pretty new to the whole GP thing (the only game I did before this was Sparkster which I ended up quitting in the middle because of all The Things) but it's pretty fun. They're always looking for more peeps so feel free to join.

I only just started. I used to rent this game a lot as a kid, but I never got very far. So I'm really interested to see the rest of the game now. I forgot how puzzley it was -- while it's a turn-based RPG, the dungeons are very Zelda-like, which is great. And there's lots of little puzzles and hidden goodies.

The battles seem pretty generic so far, but I'm still at the beginning with just the starting one character, so I can't really comment properly on that. I don't think I ever got far enough to even have a full party when I would rent the game (I think you can have like 4 members?)

The game is really designed with the player in mind -- text and walk speed is naturally fast, and you can hold down a button to quickly choose all your battle commands. When shopping, after buying an item, you can select a character to instantly equip it (unequipping whatever it replaces). It's very convenient. It even has a sort of "left-hand mode" where the L button responds to everything contextually as a general "action button," allowing you to do almost everything in the game with just the d-pad and the L button. You'll still have to use the R and B buttons now and then, though, as the L button can't do the stand-still-while-turning thing nor can it function as a cancel button.

So I really appreciate this dedication to convenience for the player. SaGa games on the SNES were like this, too, though a bit less refined. There was a 'immediately leave harmless area' button, fast movement and text, you could hold down a button to select battle commands quickly, etc.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the playthrough~

But yeah, I decided not to do a full diary or anything for this. If you want to see game updates about it, though, feel free to follow me on Twitter. There should be a little link in the top right corner of any page. Though during rasslin PPVs you might have to endure me spamming reactions a bit XD

Oh, and I do have more of Save the Homeland and ROCKMAN played through (R1 is actually completed as far as playing goes), I just need to write the entries for them. But yeah... rhythm, rhythm~

An update

Hello friends. So, my grandfather passed away last night. I also have been trying to get the first bit of Save the Homeland up, but the story is literally abuot your player character's grandfather dying so it's been... interesting.

That's all I really wanted to update with. I do have the intro written at least, so there's that! I will maybe try to stream later but I will probably end up doing no mic/cam. Sorry to all of you who come just to see my head stare intently at crop watering.