Playing

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time – YEEAAAHHHH FINALLLYYYY I AM PLAYING THIS WOOOO!!  Fantasy Life was my #1 favorite game on the 3DS (do you remember the feature where you could set your favorite game in your profile so it would be visible to your friends?  I used Fantasy Life for mine!).  I love its adorable and colorful and silly and optimistic world so much.  I tried the same approach I used when I played the first game and chose both a combat Life and a crafting Life (I just can’t NOT be a Tailor!), but with a huge skill tree in this game that wasn’t present before, grinding is a little overwhelming.  And there’s the new Artist Life that I want to try out too… maybe it would be much better to focus only on one Life and grind others later once it’s nice and easy to warp around and gather stuff, rather than doing ALL of the quests for ALL of your Lifes at once.

There are more layers of complication in this entry as well… in addition to the big skill tree for every Life of your own character, you also need to equip your party members with gear, which was never something you had to worry about in the first game.

And there are so many game modes, too… 😵‍💫  There’s the ‘main story’ map (“The Past” with some excursions into the Depths area in “The Present”), the town-building aspect (the non-Depths area of “The Present”), the massive open world which is a whole separate map from everything else and doesn’t seem very involved in the main story (“Ginomorsia”), a roguelike mode (“Snoozaland”, which maybe gets a pass because this was added in a free update patch as a bonus after the game released), and I just recently unlocked some kind of temporary instanced dungeon mode that grows from tree saplings?  That’s like, a lot of unrelated gameplay to manage on top of juggling the various tasks for your Life (which multiplies if you try out more than one) and the main story.

So, there’s a lot more ‘brain energy’ involved in playing this compared to the first game, which makes it a little less cozy and relaxing… but taking your time and exploring what you like at your own pace keeps the many levels of management stress at bay.  There’s not really any way to get anything wrong, just a lot of different areas to invest time in, so you can relax a little.

I’m very, very grateful that there are so many shortcuts in the menu for jumping straight to your Life Master or teleport directly to an NPC that gave you a quest, and the ability to see which material shops in which towns stock the stuff you need for crafting.  Shortcuts that make the repetitive stuff and quest management just a little bit easier make a big difference when there are so many other systems.

Mysterious Thief Emerald – Mentioned this last month in my list of Otome Jam 2026 entries I was interested in.  I LOVE IT!!!  The writing is super fun, the characters are great, and I LOVE A MAGICAL GIRL PHANTOM THIEF, I DO.  The Saint Tail DNA is there, with a magical girl “save the unsuspecting humans from the evil jewel that’s subtly stealing their life force” slant, and I am into it, especially when a second magical phantom thief shows up.  The dynamic between the three main characters is great because they rib each other but generally get along (feels like the kind of story that would be very easy to just have all the characters hate each other and make all of the dialog sarcastic, but Mysterious Thief Emerald avoids falling into that trap).

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Watching the BF Play

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages – Even with Ages being my childhood version of this duology, I’ve NEVER seen how the game changes when you play a “linked game” version carried over from Seasons, so it’s almost like new!  Hey, so it turns out Princess Zelda is in this game??  And bombchu!  AND the Biggoron’s Sword?? 🤯 The sword is so big, it shifts around the interface at the top of the screen lmao.  Never realized there’s such a significant amount of content that’s totally unique to a linked game that you’d never see if you only owned one of the two games.  Playing both from the Switch Online Game Boy collection is nice and convenient, because going back and forth between the two to input codes is very fast and easy.  If you have the Switch Online service then I highly recommend playing it that way.

Dual Hearts – The Playstation era is totally unknown to me as a Nintendo kid, and there are soooo many cool JRPGs I’ve never seen before.  This is one of them!  The character designs and environments in this are soooo nice.  And I LOVE the Alundra-like plot of diving into dreams themed around each respective character (same developers, idk how much of the specific team overlaps).  Really enjoying this one!  Tumble is so cute, he’s like a giant rideable pudding-bunny!

Special Shout-Out To…

A special shout-out goes to Big Walk, which occupied a lot of my attention this month despite that I’m not even the one playing it.  I got invested in three different youtube channels playing it (it’s fascinating how each friend group approached the puzzles & their necessary communication in different ways!), but Stumpt is the only group that continued uploading multiple parts beyond the intro and reached the ending.

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Reading

King Arthur & The Knights of Justice – The 90s cartoon this is based on was mentioned last month, now it’s time to read the modern comic.  I ended up reading both volumes this month!  It’s like a magical boy story but idk, didn’t really grip me, it isn’t goofy like the cartoon, and the premise of “footballers in King Arthur times” is so silly that idk if it works to try to make it serious.  Now somehow I have to track down the crossover chapter where these characters meet Princess Gwenevere & the Jewel Riders because that’s the whole reason I put in this research in the first place lol.

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages – Just like with Oracle of Seasons last month, I was able to read along with the manga while progressing through the game, which is quite a treat.  There is a bit more story and depth explored in the manga and even more great scenes with Ralph (one of my overall favorite Zelda characters btw).  Particularly notable about this volume is the addition of a totally new character that isn’t present in the game, a knight named Raven who serves Queen Ambi in the past and connects Link personally with the time period of the past.  And he’s like, rly cute. 👉👈

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie – A great listen during some car rides.  Some investing twists and turns and over-the-top fake-outs (the girl found in the library is SO extravagant, the method of death for the other murder is SO grisly).  But no one can pull the wool over Miss Marple’s eyes. 🕵️‍♀️

In the Forests of Serre by Patricia A. McKillip – Isn’t the Kinuko Y. Craft cover art sooooo pretty? 🥰  This was my beach read over vacation this month!!  I liked it so much, I picked this book to talk about with my friends when we had a casual book club get-together (of the ‘talk about whatever you’ve read recently’ variety).  McKillip’s writing style is magical and enchanting, like reading a poem, while remaining easily-followable and manages to avoid going abstract or purple.  While reading, I feel like I’m enveloped by the spells that weave around the princess in her dismal situation in the stony cliffside castle and the prince stumbling through the mesmerizing forest in pursuit of the firebird that has bewitched him.

Romance at Droitgate Spa by P.G. Wodehouse – This is so frickin’ funny lmao.  The breakout star of this story is definitely the magician (“The Great Boloni”, sounds like “baloney” lol) that can’t seem to stop performing tricks with every motion, even mid-dialog.  I could envision this character very easily in Ace Attorney with a bunch of animations where they are shuffling cards, pulling rabbits from their sleeves, and producing coins from behind other characters’ ears.  This is a public domain short story that you can either read in one or two sessions or listen to as an audiobook on Youtube in under an hour, and I can’t recommend it enough, it’s SUCH a quick and easy read/listen and it’s guaranteed to make you smile.

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Watching

Galaxy Angel – Officially available on Youtube both dubbed and subbed.  EXTREMELY silly with EXTREMELY 00’s-style anime humor.  Some of the girls’ missions to themed planets and abandoned satellite outposts are great sci-fi premises. I like when we catch glimpses of the absurdly personalized bedrooms each character has on the ship haha.

Sailor Moon Super S – HELIOS TIME AT LAST YEEAAHHH WOOOOOOOOOUUURUAAAAGHH. (One of my favorite Sailor Moon characters btw. I can’t resist a precious gentle unicorn boy 🥺)  This is the very end of what was dubbed into English for TV, so the adventure of reliving that nostalgic time has come to an end. 🥲  Of course we could watch the Viz dubbed version of Sailor Stars, and there’s aaaaall of Crystal to go through if we really want to.  But once the Super S Movie is done we might call the Sailor Moon Extravaganza quits for now and replace this time with other things to watch.  Btw, the ending theme for this arc is bumpin’.

Lucky Star – Yet another old classic which I’d never seen before I started this month… (and yet strangely I feel certain I’ve seen the full introductory dance sequence in the form of gifs… 🤔)  Sometimes I check the wiki for explanations of the references after some episodes, a practice which brings to mind my reading of Sparknotes for an extra layer of understanding when I’m reading classic books lol.  My favorite character is Miyuki because I love her pink hair and that she is sweet and very smart. 😊

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This was a pretty significant month for me IRL, I don’t think I want to make a regular thing of sharing personal life stuff online but it’s enough to say that August was a very happy month for me. 🤗