Week of 19 Mar 2023
“The black cat has your wallet…”
Achievements Earned In:
- A Memoir Blue
- Wrestle Kingdom
- Kraken Academy!!
- Chinatown Detective Agency
- CrossfireX
While working on Wrestle Kingdom, I found myself unable to get an achievement Sunday night. My other game, Mensa Academy, is definitely harder to get an achievement in, so I couldn’t turn to that to keep my streak going. That meant I’d need to start a new game! The list of games leaving Game Pass at the end of March included a few I actually had wanted to get around to, and in turn I figured I’d start one of those out of everything. A Memoir Blue was easily my first choice since it’s the easiest of the list and I could at least get this knocked out. The game is a narrative adventure with small vignettes of different types of gameplay and different forms of animation, switching between a cutesy animated version of the characters and a more “realistic” one. There’s absolutely no dialogue in the game at all, with the story being told through actions and artistic interpretation. It’s all pretty, and quite short and easy. A completion time of about an hour or so makes the game a nice and chill one to knock out, though there are many, many missable achievements so a guide is helpful.
Achievements unlocked: 15 (+15) | Completed
Did I remember to turn off the faucet in the bathroom…?
Speaking of Wrestle Kingdom, I managed to wrap it up this week, though not before screwing up the completion. For the penultimate achievement, I needed to collect all of the Title Cards in the game by winning each tournament and championship in the game’s branching Drama mode. When I reached the end of the sixth and final campaign, no achievement popped, meaning I’d missed something somewhere. Took rewatching all my streams from the previous week to finally pin down what I’d passed up! Turns out I had accidentally continued the storyline on my final run after losing a match I actually needed to win. I backed out of Drama mode, but neglected to then reload my save. This meant I didn’t qualify for the shot at the GHC Final Heavy championship, so no card! I really didn’t think I’d messed my final playthrough, so I played through almost every other path and ended up adding way too many extra runs of the game. Siiiiigh. But, hey, at least I figured it out and quickly got that achievement done. All that was left Tuesday was to survive 30 rounds in Free Fight’s survival mode, which was easy enough after turning off rope breaks and disqualifications. Beat a bunch of guys’ heads in until they can’t fight back and the completion was mine!
Achievements unlocked: 7 (+2) | Completed
A truly majestic champion.
Decided to keep checking off games from the list leaving Game Pass, I started up Kraken Academy!!, and with this one I had no idea what to expect. I thought maybe it was an isometric game like Boyfriend Dungeon, or a first-person game like Paradise Killer. But, no, it’s a pixel-art top-down-ish adventure that is all about building relationships with the students of the titular school to free the spirits of the various studies and save the Academy from destruction! …Yeah, weird. The main mechanic of the game is taken right out of Lightning Returns or Majora’s Mask: you have three days to solve the crisis, rewinding time to allow for more when the clock runs out. It is pretty neat, and the game tries to be funny but it just never really pulls it off. It is one of those narratives that just feels like “this happens, then this happens, then this happens”. The whole thing feels disjointed to just further the story, so it was never very engaging. But, hey, it is one of those completions where you don’t really NEED a guide, and can do most of the clean-up whenever you want as long as you do so before the point-of-no-return. Following a guide for the most efficient route is the way I chose and it only took me around eleven hours to finish it all up, though I idled around a good bit while I helped the missus with her care. Near the end of the game there’s suddenly combat to deal with, but an Invincibility toggle in the Options menu makes that a joke. This was a neat game! Glad I got around to it.
Achievements unlocked: 48 (+48) | Completed
I’m sure this is a totally normal room to find in a school.
With the two games leaving knocked out, I didn’t plan on also doing Chinatown Detective Agency at first, but when I mentioned my recent games on Twitter, Sangriaz of The Hidden Levels commented they’d released a guide recently that turned this into a 2-3 hour completion. This put it right back onto my radar and I started it on Thursday. Following their guide it’s a pretty straightforward completion, though it strips the game of its main draw: research. There’s a mystery to solve, puzzles to get through, and the way the game expects you to do this is by using a handy dandy search engine (or an encyclopedic knowledge of paintings, literature, etc.) to figure out the answers. Obviously, a guide will just outright give the correct responses and cuts out most of the clue-gathering needed to find a lead. You don’t even need to choose anything but the default response, so you can mash the A-button through all of the dialogue until the end. There are three storylines you have to play through, and then three endings to see. This is all made easy by just using a save and reloading when needed. I really enjoyed the story and pixel art in the game, and if I wasn’t in a hurry the research aspect of the game would have been very cool.
Achievements unlocked: 16 (+16) | Completed
Back in February, it was announced that the servers for CrossfireX would be shutting down in May. The completion really isn’t that tough, but I’d never gotten around to it because I was concerned about the developer adding achievements at some point. Obviously, this is now no longer a concern, so, since I needed a quick achievement on Saturday before an entire day full of activities in and out of town, I started it and completed a single match. Managed to unlock a few achievements, but they’re only the opening salvo. Kinda excited to dig into this one as it’s been a while since I played an online FPS, and I do enjoy me some run-and-gun!
Achievements unlocked: 3 (+3) | Completion: 25%
Highest ratio: 2.64
Father And Son (Chinatown Detective Agency)
Lowest ratio: 1.00 (tie)
Bottle Collector (Kraken Academy!!)
Down The Rabbit Hole (Chinatown Detective Agency)
