3 November 2026
Started the day off by getting Odin and beating down Aether/Cid. The Aether fight was pretty simple and I do feel bad for defeating him so hard. He just misses his family.
Grabbed some side quests too, I'll wrap those up and then probably do the next tier of the colosseum if I can. I'm mildly concerned/paranoid about these tablet shards and having to backtrack to find an errant one or two.
As I write this, currently, I don't know if Belmont's Curse is a canon game for me over Metroid Dread. I've struggled, I've gone back and forth, and there's a clear cleavage of why this is such a challenging choice for me. And why do these two clash instead of just having both? Having both on doesn't say anything new about me, they're redundant on the business card. They just say "Hat likes Metroidvanias." So what's the case for either?
2 November 2026
So I did the Rain and Lasswell duel which was, off the top of my head, the best scene in the entire game. Although it was a little weird. They have this Goku/Vegeta thing going on where they each want to push each other to the edge, but they're somewhat afraid of the consequences of what would happen if Lasswell wins? It has this exchange that was really funny.
Rain: You're going easy on me Lasswell! Why would you do this?
Lasswell: I'm afraid of what it would do to you if I beat you!
Rain: Do you think so little of me? If you beat me I'd be happy for you and I'd train until I beat you. Our friendship can withstand this.
Lasswell: Okay, here goes!
Lasswell handily defeats Rain.
Rain: Oh no he beat me! Not like this Lasswell, everything is ruined!
Lasswell: Oh no I beat him, everything is ruined! Why did I fly too close to the sun? All I ever wanted was to be assistant to the regional manager! I'm not regional manager material!
Rain: Why Lasswell? How could you have done this to me? To us? Our friendship cannot withstand this!
Rain spaces out thinking about his glowing inner light
Rain: Oops actually I do have more power, let's go again!
Lasswell: Okay!
Rain beats Lasswell
Both: Hooray! The proper balance is restored!
There is high drama here but they're both being a little ridiculous. Lasswell's motivations also seem a bit unevenly characterized. There were times when I thought he might flip out of jealousy, a more true Vegeta character who burns with a secret hatred of someone who gains something so effortlessly that they struggled with. His inner Salieri. On the other hand, he was so loyal and good the rest of the time it felt hard to believe he could ever be torn about his adoptive brother.
I did call the Raegan double twist too, the voice was a giveaway.
Wrapped up some additional side quests, we have a fully powered Mechabo! Also did Jake's personal quest and the follow up. I feel like his brother definitely loves Amelia.
1 November 2026
Went through the shrine dungeon some and then had about 10-15 minutes wiped out by a gamenative crash on the Thor. That's the first time that's happened, it's been pretty rock solid, but it was annoying. Got back into it and got to the next save point quickly, I was at least helped by knowing where the missable items were so I was able to minimize backtracking.
Fought some tonberries, that's always a bit of a frightening moment when you encounter them in a Final Fantasy. We got to the end of this shrine and we got a "your crystal is in another shrine" moment. This has to be the gaming equivalent of "it was all a dream."
I have hit what is essentially the final form here on some of these characters. Rain and Lasswell are monsters, multiattacking so hard. I am actually really liking this second shadow shrine, which is essentially a boss rush mode. This is something where I do kind of wish that I actually kept the difficulty higher because I'm able to just brute force a lot of these bosses and they're probably more interesting puzzles and challenges if you can't.
This is something I always have trouble understanding about myself and is likely worth some additional self examination. Not that it's wrong, just to understand why. I could make this game harder and it would be more rewarding if I did, at least in certain aspects. But I don't really want to. Part of me doesn't want to just get bogged down and keep progressing. I think it might be some element of getting used to that pace and then feeling like I'm running behind.
I think there's another frictional piece to it. So one, I don't want to have the difficulty increase on random mobs. That seems much too grindy for me. But I also don't want to have to spend more time in the menus swapping my stuff around, my visions, my party members. If the game allowed you to switch visions or tag in party members mid match, I think I'd be much more amenable to that. But having to quit, reload the save, then make your adjustments is quite annoying. Well, and there's some annoyance in having to rearrange everyone's loadout for one fight, then set it all back afterwards. So they could help me out and let me save a default loadout to restore back to. I suppose I could avoid that by just using a guide to know what I'm supposed to have for a load out in advance but I don't feel I should have to do that.
31 October 2026
We're back at it, making it to the final(?) island. Or are they continents? Anywho, immediately upon getting there, I immediately abandoned the main plot to do a bunch of side quests. The side quests are mostly pretty sweet, especially the party ones. I was a little surprised the follower quests don't have any combat, but that's made them a bit of a nice diversion.
I do wonder where they're going with this elf stuff. It's a curious amount of time to spend on something that appears to have no plot relevance so far.
We've progressed to the doorstep of the final shrine and the plot beats just keep coming. I'm really liking it now. I'm going to guess, due to the flower in her hair, that non-Archwitch Fina is spoiler: Rain's mom? There's probably some weird magical nonsense about Fina inhabiting her body or something as the soul left.
I'm interested to see how much game is left since I believe this isn't the full Brave Exvius story. Being somewhat genre savvy, I imagine some sort of final twist will happen at the end of this dungeon which will set up The Final Showdown and a broad expanse to finish up a bunch of side content before doing that final dungeon.
