Week of 25 Aug 2024
“Dababa badudu!”
Achievements Earned In:
- Front Mission Evolved
- Defenders of Ardania
- Minecraft
- Human Fall Flat
- Visions of Mana
The final Front Mission Evolved boosting session with Jimbo LaFleur occurred on Sunday this week, and it really didn’t take long before I’d hit level 70 and had this marked off. But, in fairness, I stayed until we got him the achievement too, which took the rest of the scheduled session anyway. And done! I need to do more online achievements in Xbox 360 games ASAP before the servers get worse, or taken offline.
Achievements unlocked: 27 (+1) | Completed
Oh boy, was Defenders of Ardania a massive effing headache to complete. Now, you’d think this was because of stages that required grueling memorization or achievements that proved too difficult or something, but nope! The game overall actually wasn’t too tough, luckily since I couldn’t locate any guides or strategies anyway, and even the “limited resources” and survivor modes just required a little thinking. The trouble comes when you spend an hour working on grinding through an annoying survivor level to wave 60 and… no achievement pops. And then you another two or three achievements also don’t unlock. AND THEN once you finally get all of these to unlock by essentially corrupting your profile before attempting each one and the final “unlock all achievements” achievements doesn’t unlock!!! Yeah, this isn’t a hypothetical, this is what I had to deal with. So, once an achievement in this game inevitably doesn’t unlock when it should (for me, it was the one for examining 10 units, the one for building all tower types, and the one for surviving 60 waves) you have to have your profile on an external device, exit the game, load up the game to the publisher Paradox Interactive’s logo, yank out the device your profile is on, then reinsert it when the game gets to the main menu, erasing your progress. Obviously, to unlock all but the final achievement, you simply have to go and redo the requirements. But how do you get that final one if it breaks?! The solutions say to just do the tutorial again…until it unlocks. I did this most of the day on Wednesday, over and over again. What finally got it to pop was I’d given up with that solution and decided maybe re-“unlocking” a multiplayer achievement would do the trick, so I loaded up the game on my alternate console and figured, “eh why not?”, and instead of heading into the multiplayer I started a new campaign (without erasing/corrupting my save) and… bam, got it. I don’t know where in this sequence of steps the game’s coding got back on board, but done. Thank goodness. Bad game.
Achievements unlocked: 12 (+6) | Completed
Who let the bears into the evil citadel?!
As has been the case lately, if I have a day where I’m too busy or just not feeling well enough mentally to play a game to get an achievement for my streak, I load up Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch and call it good. This week was a combination of those factors, so I mined this vein a couple times.
Achievements unlocked: 111 (+3) | Completion: 86%
Ugh, freaking more Human Fall Flat achievements. I wasn’t playing around this time, and got right to it the day after the new Dockyard stage was released. It was the usual batch of achievements: beat the stage, alongside three miscellaneous ones, usually one of those is a stage-long achievement. Nothing too difficult in this one, and even skipped a few sections. I’m so over this game, please.
Achievements unlocked: 119 (+4) | Completed
Somebody! Please! Push the button!
I’m… old. “Older”, at the very least. And one of my favorite franchises of all time is the Seiken Densetsu/Mana series. Like most with an SNES, I came across Secret of Mana at one point, and really enjoyed it. Wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but it was fun. I also played Final Fantasy Adventure a lot on my Gameboy. Where I really became a stan for the franchise was when I obtained Legend of Mana on the original PlayStation console. Something about the art style, the music, the game mechanics, the story… it all hit so hard that it is one of the very, very few games I’ve completed multiple times for no reason besides I wanted to. I have been bugging Square Enix whenever I can to bring the recent remaster to Xbox so I can play one of my top games of all time with achievements, but I figured the next best thing would be to help the sales of their most recent entry, Visions of Mana, released this week. And, man, immediately this game just strikes the right chords with me. First off, I have only played two entries in the series, so I don’t know if there’s some overarching narrative or connective elements, but so many characters from Legend are in this game, so right off I’m happy. It’s also almost a game made out of time, as it sure looks like a beautiful modern game but just feels like something that could have been released on the PS2. That’s not specifically a knock against it, but it is what it is. The gameplay does its job well enough (ARPG all up in here, as always) and none of the mechanics really stand out or anything. But I’m having a lot of fun, so I guess that’s all that really matters. Meanwhile, the achievements all seem to be pretty simple enough, and none appear to be missable or anything, though only a few people have managed to get them all at this point. I just finished Chapter 1 (of 8) as Saturday reached an end, but I’m excited to dive more into it ASAP.
Achievements unlocked: 11 (+11) | Completion: 24%
After the 2 or so hours of intro, cinematics, and tutorials, I'm so ready for this boss fight.
Highest ratio: 19.45
Shattered dreams (Human Fall Flat)
Lowest ratio: 1.00
That Fateful Day... (Visions of Mana)
