Clearing the backlog #5 Final Fantasy X REMASTERED on Steam

Here we go again. I posted back in January 2018 about my playthrough in August 2017. It must have been the first game I played to completion on this laptop. I bought it for a grand with emergency tax money at the start of August 2017 and it's still kicking. I played FFX and cleared it but didn't really go out of my way to get all the achievements. Because it's combined with FFX-2, I will need to clear that as well to get 100% completion on Steam. Sigh.

Achievements in FFX left to do:

• Win at blitzball
• Win a blitzball tourney
• Pass all chocobo training
• Dodge 200 lightning bolts
• Win Chocobo race with a time of 0.0.0
• Get 5 treasure chests in a race at Remiem Temple and win
• Unlock all slot reels
• Get all celestial weapons
• Find all 26 Al Bhed Primers
• Complete one sphere grid
• Complete all sphere grids
• Defeat Penance
• Defeat Nemesis
• Watch Eternal Calm
• Get all FFX achievements.

Phew.

Eternal Calm is a video you can watch. 15 minutes long and unskippable, but, yeah.

Penance will require beating all the Dark Aeons.

Nemesis requires capturing 10 of every monster and beating every creation.

One sphere grid should be grand. All of them... fine. Cactaur King for AP.

I think I'm missing the 4 missable primers in my completed save file. Might just start fresh anyway.

All celestial weapons... I can get a lot of the parts easily enough. A few are 'behind' some of these other achievements, Lulu's from the 200 bolts and Tidus with the chocobos.

I never cared for the chocobo training or race. Will have to change that.

Blitzball... BLITZBALL how I hate it.

Feck it. I'll post this now and update as I play over the next 2+ weeks or so. I want to play FF13 in March to celebrate it's 10th anniversary so there is that too.

---

Update 29 Feb 2020:

Unlocked Eternal Calm by watching the damn video.

^ Took a 'break' to beat the first few Dark Aeons to unlock Penance. Just Anima, Yojimbo and the Sisters to go.

Completed sphere grid w/ Tidus. Wasn't too difficult:

Completed sphere grid w/ everyone - this was tedious. Grand with everyone except Yuna, who lacked Overdrive abilities so had to grind to get them then eventually got everything.

^ Everyone in the party is hanging out in the bottom left so I'm going to use maybe 10-15 Clear Spheres here then beat Greater Sphere a bunch of times to get Fortune Spheres. Use about 10-20 of those for +40 to +80 luck in this corner then beat Earth Eater a bunch of times to get Tidus, Wakka, Auron , Rikku minimum to 80-100 luck. That should apparently be enough to beat the two superbosses.

These are the 'easy' ones. No idea how I'll do with Blitzball and Chocobos.

Love/Hate #24: Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist

Here we go again.  I have owned only two other Yu-Gi-Oh! games, both on the Game Boy Advance. Both of them were great and played almost to death. I certainly played the first one to death, namely the Worldwide Edition.  Despite occasionally dated cards, there were plenty of strong, relevant cards to make this game extremely fun. I actually managed to beat the campaign, set in Battle City and had duelled most of the opponents into strong win/loss records for me. I played Mokuba over 100-200 times, great way to get cards but he would occasionally kick your ass with Cyber Stein and Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon.

The other was Yu-Gi-Oh! Ultimate Masters: World Championship Tournament 2006 on the GBA. Set in the GX era, it wasn't  too much of a jump for me. This was before Synchros and whatnot and had most of the cards I owned at the time (and still have) and I was able to mostly clear that as well, not sure if I did all the challenges (probably not,must check) but I think I cleared the equivalent of the campaign.

My own history with Yu-Gi-Oh cards is detailed elsewhere, or indeed I will  create a separate post for it if not.

I picked this game  up relatively recently, December 21st, 2019. I only installed it January 31st and played it on the weekends so... maybe 5-6 times, for a total of 19 hours as of today and 14/21 achievements  unlocked.

It starts out kind of tough as you get a starter deck and a few cards and have to go... I tinkered with the starter deck a little  bit  but opted to use the 'story decks' for a while in the campaign mode. There are 5 campaigns and naturally I went for the original one first, followed by GX and the 5DS. As of writing I am a tiny bit of the way into Zexal.

I insisted on beating Kaiba with Exodia. So I lost a few times before it worked...

The campaign was quite fun and would not be matched by the later ones. Also was nice that it wasn't best 2/3 or anything.

Some wacky Joey dialogue on these cards. Why.

I was surprised by the small selection of animations for attacks, mainly for signature cards.

Nice to see one of my old favourite cards. Used to use Prisman in the old 2004 game. With Magic Cards, of course.

I quite liked using the story decks for a while. Got tough after a while  though,especially as they are very stall-y and not fast enough for my liking.

Some duels are deliberately reversed. You can also reverse them yourself, to get 100% completion and new rewards.

There are plenty of dialogue boxes and reasonable exposition at the start of duels. I mainly skipped them but actually stopped to look at someof the later GX/5DS to figure out what the hell.

My aggressive decks started emerging around Battle City. Just pure Beatdown. Also some old faves like Guardian Angel Joan.

I like and dislike the card shop. Slow to get stuff but not too unreasonably random.

Made Strings draw himself to death. I had to.

The duels run really smoothly. You can even change how often the prompts appear but be careful. It didn't  offer me certain prompts to save myself with traps when I set it to minimal.

The actual penultimate duel and what happens when you click 'reverse'.

The beginning of GX. The difficulty did not spike.

My powerful cards were more than adequate to defeat the GX campaign as well.

5DS. Synchro monsters weren't  too tough either.

I started to put together my Dragon deck. Works better in real life than on the screen! But  I'm still missing a bunch of cards from it.

XYZ monsters are great until they're used against you.

I switched back to doing all the reverse duels of the original campaign and tried to get the achievements: reflect damage, effect damage and chain king. Reflect and effect were easy with a turtle, burn heavy deck I put together. Fun too.

Good old Red Eyes!

Of course DM Girl gets an animation.

Guardian Sphinx was an MVP in that defence deck.I got the achievements.

I bought so many Bakura boosters just to get 3 of this guy.

The best! The best! The best!

Had to switch back to full time beat down while doing the reverse GX campaign; Cyber Dragons are SO difficult to fight and don't get me started on Elemental Heroes. I got the Chain achievement and called time on this game for a while.

Final assessment:good, but will never hit the nostalgic highs of the older games. The last 7 achievements might be awkward as 3-4  of them rely on online play to get and that scene is almost completely dead (I tried).  I will buy a friend this game and beat them at it just to get those, however, if I have to. The remaining ones are complete Zexal, complete Arc-V (?) and complete all Duelist challenges (all reverse duels AND individual 'duelist challenges' you can do, haven't looked at yet).

Hard to put together a full, balanced deck. Always feels like there's something missing, necessitating more duels and opening boosters.

So there's plenty left and not TOO hard to get a perfect game. Will return soon or much later but will get full completion.

I will move onto something else soon for the moment BUT March 2020 is when I play Final Fantasy XIII to completion for the first time so watch this space.