Wow. I feel I’ve been living this game for months when in actuality, it’s been markedly less than that. Then again, I have been playing it quite a bit, and I’m rarely playing other games. That’s how I get when I’m really into a game–nothing else exists. I finished up what I could do in my current game before starting a new one to do the one last romance I need in order to get the plat/hundo chievo. Am I mad that I have to do it if I want to 100% it? Yes. But, mostly I’m mad at myself because I knew I had to do it waaaaay back in the second or third season of my playthrough (you have to do it by the a certain event in the fourth season), so it was not like I didn’t have the option or the knowledge to do it at the time.
I just wasn’t expecting to even get close to platting it or wanting to plat it, so I shrugged my shoulders and moved on with my life. Plus, it really seemed odd to me (*SPOILERS FROM HERE ONWARDS*) that this would be a thing in the game–you can romance, marry, and divorce any of several other characters, but not these two if you didn’t do it within a certain amount of time? That just didn’t make sense to me mentally or gameplay-wise.
I will say, I am NOT pleased with how slowly I move or the fact that I can’t fast-travel. And that I have to pick up every item from the ground. You see, at by a certain point in my first playthrough, I had the incantations (incants) for moving quickly and for automatically swooping things up from the ground. And creating them took very little magic.
I will admit that I wish at a certain point, there would have been an incant that gave me the permanent speed upgrade and an innate ability just to hover up everything around me. It was just an irritant to have to do it every week or so, and it did not really add anything to the gameplay.
I also forgot how very little energy I had in the beginning. I get a few permanent upgrades to it later in the game (to my stamina, I mean), but right now, I can swing my axe like ten times before running out of stamina. And it takes three swings to chop up a fallen log. Ironically, when I get the ability to upgrade my axe, it also takes less chops to cut things up.
In other words, I’m very basic in the beginning. In my first playthrough, I spent a lot of my time just talking to people to pump up my relationships. In this case, I’m focusing on the one specific person I need to marry, which means I’ll look up anything and everything I need to make it happen as quickly as possible.
I got on the fish finger trick early. As I said before, it’s the easiest way to make money–by making fish fingers and selling them by the thousands. When you unlock the ability to buy tuna, one tuna plus one flour equals one fish finger. You sell that and make sixty-five gold coins per finger (make one for thirty-five gold coins and selling one for a hundo). Right now, I have to actually fish for my fish, which means it’s pretty tedious. But given than bait costs four gold coins, well, then I can actually make eighty-two gold coins per fish finger.
Also, I’m not bothering with talking to people this time. Or rather, I’m not going out of my way to talk to everyone every day. In my first playthrough, I tried to talk to everyone every day. Then I noticed the repeat in the dialogues, which made it annoying. But I didn’t want to miss anything so I kept doing it. Now, I don’t care. I have a mission, and that’s all I’m going to do. Whatever gets me to that end, I’ll do.
I will say, though, that I’m curious to see what happens when I make different choices. I’ve figured out it doesn’t really matter in the long run, but I want to see if it makes any difference in the short run. The few times I fiddled with answers, it did not matter at all. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there was something that did matter.
Also, I forgot how quickly the witch stuff came up. It’s in the first half hour, which is very early-on. I also forgot all the fetch-questing I had to do in this bit–which was bearable, but not that fun. I’m not huge into fetch quests, especially when I have so little stamina. In the beginning part of the witch stuff, I had to go to and from my house/witchy spot three times in a row. And, as I don’t have fast-travel yet (broom travel), that meant doing it slowly and painfully by foot.
Even my first time around, I was champing at the bit to get going. I will say that not talking to everyone this time around has freed up a lot of my time. I make sure to talk to my intended every day, but other than that, I only talk to anyone who crosses my path.
It’s really weird to be playing the game this way. I prefer my first playthrough, but this makes all the grinding easier, I will admit. I am a bit nervous about missing something that will delay me getting the romance option I want. This person is the hardest to romance, anyway, in part because the recipes for their favorite foods aren’t available until relatively late in the game.
Sigh. I know I’m going to grind until I get it because I know myself. I could quit now because I have nothing to prove to anyone. It’s not like this is a hard achievement in terms of difficult gameplay; it’s just tedious and boring AF.
It’s another case of doing the plat has diminished my joy in playing the game. This has happened before, and knowing me, it will happen again. This is one reason I should not go for plats because I get way too obsessed with them. And I end up liking the game less than I would have otherwise.
That’s it for this post. I will write my actual review tomorrow. In one post. Maybe. But probably more than one. Because let’s face it; I will never say anything in ten words when a hundred will do.