I am very close to the end of the game.. I assume. Damn thing goes on forever! I think it could have been MUCH shorter. Some of the sections were so unnecessarily massive and really just serve as a timesink. My playtime says 35 hours and I've been playing it a lot in a short amount of time (as in, way more gaming per day than I usually do) to make it this far. I thought I was about to go into a final boss fight and then I've got to activate even more things, fight more enemies, clear more maps, etc. Originally I wanted to 100% this game but there's just no way I want to deal with all that, I want to wrap it up and get back to my other late night hobbies.

The thing that's keeping me going is that I believe I've perfected this build. Builds in Aeterna Noctis are a lot of fun to play with; not only can you reset all your stat points any time you're at a throne (a fast travel point, basically), you cann also change your equipped gems which is the other aspect of a build, so you can customize your perks as-needed (ie. spec yourself for boss fights, for difficult platforming sections, etc). This does make the gameplay loop a lot more fun and I wish more games let you respec for zero penalty.

Anyway, I've got to be close to the end now is what I keep telling myself. I'm excited for something more relaxing to play, this game is really solid but the poor performance on the Switch as I mentioned in a previous update has made it much more frustrating than it normally would have been. Add to that the ridiculous difficulty level, and I'm in need of September - AstroBot and Zelda are exactly the kind of chill my brain needs after the world of Aeterna Noctis!

Closest thing to Hollow Knight I've found so far, both in control rigidity and tone. Dark and ominous, just how I like it.

The downside is that I bought it on the Switch after not properly researching the ports enough, this would have been dynamite on PS5 but the performance is lackluster at best. Not so much the frame drops, those I can deal with, but there is some input lack during boss fights when the screen is busy, and the LOAD TIMES. Holy lord the load times are atrocious. Anywhere from 7 to 14 seconds and backtracking suddenly becomes a pain in the ass.

I'm playing on Hard mode (Noctis) and the platforming challenges are lot of fun - just the right amount of difficulty but with enough checkpoints to keep you from getting frustrated. I find it extremely cool that the developer Red Candle made it so you can switch between Normal and Hard mode at any time, and the platforming sections actually change to reflect that. I don't know this for sure but I believe that's the only time to my knowledge this has ever been done before.

One other issue is that the environments have a lot of background layering, and many times enemies or projectiles will hit you because you can't *see them coming at you, because they are behind something in the foreground. That can get a little frustrating.

Overall, a solid title that sadly suffers from bad performance problems on an advanced aging platform. If you are interested, get it on literally anything else.

lol the boss at the end of the royal stairway died in literally 30 seconds. i didn't dodge any of her attacks i just took hits non-stop and then she just exploded in light and i was like "oh god how do i dodge that the entire screen is filling with light???" and it was just her death animation.

guess all the sidequests paid off? triple homing darkness arrows is really good.

funny after i got the half-reload-time gem i said "i don't use arrows much" and after i got the 100% melee damage gem i said "now that's more like it" but now all i do is use arrows. used the melee gem for only a bit.

• actually now is a good time to maybe ask, i feel like my dark arrows are bugged or something? like they are way too strong. one shot kills everything in one hit lol. i went dragon slayign earlier for the beastiary and they die in one hit. maybe something is just wrong? lol

• lmao whoops. so. when i lost my map file early on, i downloaded cheat engine to try to help recover my progress. i used it a bit to help re-traverse the entire map and then closed it. but earlier while i was beastiary-hunting, i ran into another bug where my soul got stuck off-screen somewhere when i died, so i opened cheat engine again to get back my exp/money if i couldn't recollect my soul. i was able to go off-screen and grab it luckily, so i closed cheat engine. but i think just opening it somehow automatically turned on the "all enemies die in 2 hits" mod and it persisted even with CE closed, so for the entire final area i just thought my triple-homing darkness arrows were just really strong but no i was cheating lmao. whooooooops. i only just started using them so i didn't really realize, i just thought, well, they hit 3 times and it's a lategame ability, guess they're just strong. makes sense i only noticed something was wrong at the boss lmao. the weird thing is light slimes also took many hits to kill, guess it didn't apply to them.

before finishing the rest of the area, i find the 4th seal so take a shoooort detour to go fight the emperor.

two hours later...

whew. if you had told me after my first go of that fight that i was going to not only beat it, but get the first two phases down without taking damage, i would not have believed you lol. literally seemed impossible. but of course, then i remembered that shooting arrows slows down time, and even with that you have like, a split second to react??? is there any way to beat this guy without arrow build??? i saw a reddit post that said they used a sword build and i do not understand - you'd have to be superhuman

unlike the robots though which was just tons of bullshit covering the screen moving around nonstop, this fight was fair and just pattern-based. can't believe i eventually got the air-slice swords down too. feels very Neo by the end of it. damn. very satisfying. and just when i thought surely it must end soon, no, of course there is a final phase that is the hardest. you basically need to go into it with full health and potions/mana, and i just barely won with 1 HP remaining lol. i'll take it.

apparently this is the biggest optional challenge in the game? so hopefully it's smooth sailing from here hahaha...

oh and again, i will say - this reward better be worth it! give me a strong non-arrow red gem!

wahahaaha. okay yeah i'd say that's worth it. all i could ask for, really. thanks.

could i have done this fight later? yeah, probably. would've been easier if i had my 6th gem slot, plus i had no good uncommon gems to use anyway, if there's any uncommon gem that makes arrows stronger then i would've been better off. not sure if there is. but i wanted to do it asap because i figured i'd get a strong reward that'd help for the rest of the game, and i'd say i definitely did.

wow, the gem that slows down time when you fire an arrow is, like, absolutely essential and makes all the platforming way easier to do. this should just be a permanent feature, not something that uses up one of your limited gem slots.

went back through the whole map to get a bunch of stuff, think i basically fully cleared out the forge now and got like a dozen mirror shards elsewhere.

that's all very nice, but... it means that, according to what i can see, i've explored literally everywhere i can other than places blocked off by darkness jelly, and... i... don't see where to go next? nevermind for more secrets, for the main quest! there are at least two more main quest destinations marked on the map and i literally cannot see anywhere to go.

i googled what to do for the robot quest because i want my reward damnit and i felt it might be some obscure thing, and yeah there was a random computer terminal i forgot about that i have to go talk to. and then fight another optional hard boss... great. the last one was already hell, i think this one will be even worse -_- i'll try it and then figure out how to unstuck myself...