@lagspike's diary

Gold stake on 9 of the 15 decks. Plasma is the most honest test of a build because chips and mult get balanced. Blueprint and Brainstorm copying a scaling joker is the strongest pattern I've found, but it depends on the shop.

40 hours, and about 15 of them were travel between objectives. The core loop is good; the map is too big for it.

Master difficulty in about 6 hours. Wall-run speed carries between surfaces, so you can chain across a whole map without touching the ground.

Campaign on World Tier 2 in 30 hours. The endgame is a paragon board grind that seasons reset every few months, so it depends on how much you enjoy starting over.

Steam Deck verified and it earns it. 45fps cap, about 3 hours of battery, no crashes in 50 hours.

Lethal difficulty, where you and the enemies both die in a few hits. It's the intended way to play, I think: parry windows stay the same but mistakes cost everything, so the stances actually matter. Standoffs turn into 5-kill chains with the right charm and technique upgrades. Ghost weapons trivialize camps by the midpoint, so I stopped using kunai except on archers. Iki Island adds new enemy types and a few more interesting duels. Platinum at 64 hours, nothing missable.

Combat is solid: Eikon abilities on cooldowns and a generous Precision Dodge window. The side quests are mostly fetch quests. 60 hours for everything.

Hard mode from the start, about 40 hours. Enemy placement changes on hard as well as the numbers, which is the right way to do it.

About 45 hours to the credits, 70 for everything. The hardest setting is well tuned: enemies get new patterns rather than just more health.

About 14 hours. The Friend's Pass means only one of you has to own it, and it works across platforms. The side stories have the best one-off mechanics.

Cabaret club and the real estate empire both done, about 90 hours. Majima's Breaker style is the best in the game once the tree is fully unlocked.

About 11 hours for all 60 fates. Answers are confirmed three at a time, which stops brute-forcing without punishing honest guesses.

Checked the frame time graph out of habit and it's flat. Rare for a game this busy.

Played on PC at 1440p, locked 120fps with two settings turned down, loads under five seconds. Very clean port.

My second run on the top difficulty took half as long as the first. That's the best sign a game's systems are learnable rather than random.