Happy birthday to your son, OP!
As for me...
Tales of Xillia 2 (PS3)
Tales of Xillia 2 is an interesting game. Narrative-wise, it’s more emotionally-driven than other Tales games, and as a result is better than its predecessor (tbh, I feel like it’s one of the better-written Tales games, though that’s not saying much in a series where the narrative is never one of its strongest suits and the narratives generally fall off a cliff in the third act). I’m having fun with it so far. And the Ufotable animation, once again, is to die for. I wish Tales would just use them from now on. Production IG is good and all, but man Ufotable is
so much better and is preferred. The Arousal Orb system (just think of Abyss’s Capacity Core system) feels better than the Lilial Orb because you have more customization options open to you, but it wasn’t executed as well (because you’re led to believe that you’re learning things
from the orbs, when in reality you’re just equipping elemental amplifiers to learn new stuff). Character episodes are a good addition, and hey man, I like Jude in this game. He’s a bro.
What I don’t like, though, is Ludger’s silence. You can tell that he should be saying things in the middle of cutscenes rather than grunting or saying “mmm, uh, ugh” and other stuff like that, and he makes a move to do so, but he doesn’t. And it’s limiting to his character. They wanted to make the player step into his shoes but it’s not exactly working because Ludger genuinely seems to have his own identity and personality. You just want the guy to talk more but he can’t by design.
Xillia 1 at least had insta-party swap once you got more than 4 characters. This meant that if you pressed R3 that you can swap bench party members into battle with other party members (similar to Final Fantasy X). In Xillia 2, though, once you leave a town, your party members are fixed and you can only use those party members in-battle. This leads to little flexibility in terms of swapping members to take advantage of their various strengths in battle like you could in Xillia 1. For someone like myself, who regularly swapped party members or switched between characters constantly mid-battle, this gets very irritating.
I haven’t gotten completely used to Ludger yet in terms of his fighting style because learning him is like learning three characters in one character. So he has a variety of Artes for each weapon, different animation lengths, an animation length for swapping weapons on the fly, etc. Jude is much slower than his Xillia 1 version, and I think that’s because they wanted to balance the game a little more (because you could definitely solo Xillia 1 with Jude) if you really wanted to. I haven’t used a lot of the other characters manually yet (well, I haven’t played the game much this week since getting it on Monday, so…
.
But I’m having fun. Lots of improvements in this game over the last game (more Link Artes!). And uh, this game has a screenshot option. Isn’t it cool?
Ys Celceta (PSVita)
Adol's back and he has dialogue options! Also, gosh, the map is so
big. I haven’t done much in it so far, but I feel like it’s better than Seven (which I didn’t like). Flash abilities are harder to pull off in this game which is a major plus as it doesn’t make the game feel like a cakewalk. My fear, though, is that Auto-charge + adding attributes/effects to weapons and armour might make you overpowered enough to blaze through the game with little issues. Oh, and Nightmare feels harder than Seven’s Nightmare, imo.
Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation (PSVita)
Sequences 2-4 almost made me drop the game entirely. It's gotten a little better since I've picked it up again, but eh. I can't help but to feel like the game ultimately disappointed me in the long run. Not saying it's a bad game; it's an alright game, but there are some aspects of design and existing bugs that you simply cannot ignore.
It really doesn’t help that I’m playing other games that I’m perceiving as ‘better’ otherwise I would have finished this by now.
Final Fantasy IV (SNES)
Might as well finish the next entry tonight. I can’t wait to finish this game, you guys. Really.
). 
