So one of the reasons I didn't restart the blog last week was because I was taking a bit of a break from writing every day... and then the other reason is that I was busy playing Epic Battle Fantasy 5 (which came out on December 1st) every chance I got.
Just to be honest about how much I was playing it - that came out to about 40 hours of play time, or about 5 hours per day from the 1st to the 8th.
I've played previous games in the Epic Battle Fantasy series and enjoyed them quite a bit (my review for 4 is here), so this doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. It's a fairly traditional RPG along the lines of games like Final Fantasy - your party of characters has to go on an adventure to save the world, with plenty of monsters to kill, treasure to find, and cool weapons and armors to use. And these games have always rewarded scouring every inch for hidden secrets and talking to everyone to get clues about other secret areas and quests, so there's quite a bit to do. Or you can just read all the jokes, memes, and RPG parodies that the story comes up with, which as far as I can tell is "all of them"; it's utterly hilarious.
EBF 5 also allows for a number of different play styles - if you want to just breeze through the game to read all of the story and humor, then you can set the difficulty to zero and do that. Or you can play on Epic difficulty and work on mastering the battle system in order to get every single achievement, if you're more interested in a challenge. And you can change between the two easily, since the difficulty can be changed at any time.
I should mention that I do have one or two complaints, though. One is that right around the 15 or 20 hour mark, simply playing through the game starts to feel a bit like a grind. You don't usually need to grind for gold or EXP in the EBF games, even on the higher difficulties, and this one is no exception. But you do still have to deal with the monsters that are blocking your path through each of the areas, and those battles, plus the extra ones you have to go through in order to get all the treasure, start to get a little old after a while.
The other complaint is less of a complaint and more of an acknowledgement that not everyone is going to find every part of this funny. Personally, I find the mockery the author directs at feminism and political correctness (of which there is very little, to be fair) to be more grating than funny, for example. There are actually options now to tone down some of the mature humor and impractical armor designs for the female characters, but not everything is affected by that.
Overall, I greatly enjoy this game's humor, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to get every achievement I can. I highly recommend it.
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