games, unctions

catch-up

hiya. been real in my gourd about life since i last posted here. a lot has happened. spaces i was interacting with had to be distanced, conversations i was having became more difficult, and the things i turned to for relief had to shift as a result. my birthday was may 28th (yay), so i took some of the birthday eshop funds i received and purchased donkey kong: tropical freeze per the recommendation of everyone on earth (it should still be on sale for like $40, if you're looking for a great 2d platformer). i returned to death stranding, an open-world game about reconnecting communities after calamity (or.. that's what i'm led to believe this is), and have found a deep interest in riichi mahjong through nintendo's recently released 51 worldwide clubhouse games. i'd also be remiss if i didn't mention that the new pokémon sword/shield dlc allows you to catch dunsparce and heracross, so.. there's that.

death stranding update

in 2011, my then-girlfriend went to study abroad in london for two semesters (8 long months) and while that first week was devastating (i bought a bearded dragon with her the week before she left, an appropriately hornéd reptile, to be my partner in the interim), i eventually found solace in the expansive (if blasé to the genre) skyrim. i lost countless hours (i refuse to count them..) to wandering the nordic tundra, collecting herbs and sneaking in sewer systems as a slippery lizard man. the next year of my life was a blur, every event in my real-life punctuated and remembered by the progress points of my bevy of avatars. i also drank a ton of aloe juice during this time.

death stranding has settled into my life in a similar manner. i'm unemployed, save a few on-going tutoring gigs, and california is heading into another lock-down (at least, i hope it is given the rising numbers), so i remain at home. i put majora's mask on hold because of how dreary the game gets in the final dungeon/post-game, something i don't need any more of right now. i was also playing saga: scarlet grace ambitions at the behest of my good friend bryan, but even with the compelling battle mechanics, the game's dry story and flat overworld couldn't hold my attention in the way i needed it to.

death stranding gives me space and it gives me peace. there are times of minimal stress (“bt's” for example), but they are brief, and as the game progresses i am better equipped to deal with any given obstacle. if i want the challenge, it's there waiting for me. if i want to deliver 300 kilograms of sleeping pills to an elderly gentleman living in the mountains, i can do that. if i just want to pave roads for other players, i can do that. if i feel particularly spicy, i can infiltrate an enemy camp and bind em all up and allow for the online masses to ransack their bases—while it lacks the satisfaction of metal gear solid 5, stuffing folks into lockers and trucks that are hurtling into distant valleys, it'll do.

i don't know where i'm at in the game (hour 25, chapter 3), and i'm in no hurry to beat it. i'm not sure that i have heard of many beating this game, now that i think of it. i dig the weird stuff, i like the terrain, and i'm a big fan of the power skeleton upgrade—i like feeling like a miniature metal gear.

majora's mask update

whittling my way through majora still. forgot how most of my enjoyment of this game is not in the major story chunks (getting through the four temples, fighting majora, etc.) so much as the side quests. i can't think of another game whose sidequests matter as much in the long-run. part of that has to do with how so many of these sidequests bleed into others via mask-collection; in order to start some quests, you need masks from previous ones. some of the best quests require bushels of these different masks (all with their own special, often eccentric abilities) to meet their end. but one other thing that's fantastic is that, while it may seem that the quests are vehicles to get masks and other goodies for your avatar's progression, i'm finding that i enjoy the interactions with the non-player characters themselves more often than the new gameplay features i earn with the masks.

the three masks that you make consistent use of are the ones that alter your species (deku, goron, zora), and each one is obtained through a sort of trauma. the deku through link's apparent irrational fear of the stone-spitting mandragoras; the goron and the zora through the deaths of a warrior and rockstar, respectively, seeking to aid their tribes in this three-day “groundhog day” horror. i'm fuzzy on how the game ends, how it ties up the world's distortion over the three-day period of time (you couldn't possibly beat every temple and side-quest in the limited time they give you, even if time were slowed down). but, if i remember correctly, the game rewinds all the way to the beginning with the evil averted to begin with. what happens, then, to the spirits that aided you along the way? i imagine they are restored, bodily—differently than how you are told to sooth their spirit in-game with the song of healing.

this reminds me of a book series i returned to in the last few years, “the time quintet” by madeleine l'engle (“a wrinkle in time” being the first book, and most recognizable). in the second book, “a wind in the door,” the same cast of murray's from the first are thrust into yet another dangerous mission to defeat the echthroi (greek for “enemy”, a sometimes physical embodiment of evil in the series) at a molecular level within themselves and others. in the process of defeating these harmful spirits they have to relearn lessons from their previous exploits in the first book because they don't remember the events of the first book. when i learned this in the book, i was immediately distressed: this family that had gone through cosmic trials to restore balance to their home and galaxy did not remember the trials or valuable lessons that they had encountered—only glimmers, or faint shadows of what they once knew stuck with them. in the third book “a swiftly tilting planet,” a couple of the family members have to travel through time to right the course of history—evil had crept in to alter the fate of the earth. and just as in “wind in the door,” they were unaware of their previous exploits in great detail. again i was frustrated. as a kid, i only enjoyed the books marginally—there were more bombastic things to read with a greater sense of continuation, “harry potter,” “redwall,” “lord of the rings,” etc.

only in my mid-twenties did i understand what l'engle was trying to do with her “soft-resets.” although the cast may not remember the events that occurred, that does not mean that they did not happen—these experiences still exist within the greater fabric of time. existence as it is couldn't exist without the characters learning to summon this courage through galactic challenges they had faced. this might sound weird, let me unfold this tesseract:

you are struggling to apply for jobs because you lack the confidence to believe that you have what it takes to do X, Y, and Z respectively. you know this about yourself, and it holds you back. in this universe, this is the echthroi, the IT, telling you that you are not enough, that you are flawed or broken. perhaps you are out for a stroll by the creek in your idyllic east-coast country setting, when a frog tells you that it requires your help. you see, his homeworld has been devastated by evil forces, and he believes only you can help him. so you go, you see new lands, new peoples, learn new things about yourself, and in defeating this evil force you have learned to be confident in yourself. the evil is lifted! you are returned to your homeworld, swearing to never forget the memories you made. you wake up, by the creek, and see a couple of frogs swimming in the shallow pools and think to yourself what a wonderful evening it is. you go home, open your laptop and see that job application you'd left open. for some reason, you feel a swell in your chest and for the first time you are able to fill the app out and submit it within a reasonable 30 minutes. you remember nothing of your interdimensional journey, the friends you made along the way, or even what you learned, but somewhere, deep inside, you have been shifted—the evil is lifted, and your self-confidence grows seemingly for the first time within you.

this is what i believe l'engle is getting at. that there is wonder in the world, if only we would seize it. that every moment could be book-ended with some strange and fantastic journey within ourselves to discover ourselves. and who are we to say otherwise? if there is such a thing?

majora's mask is not necessarily getting at this. but i can't help but think that darmani and mikau (the goron and zora who died to give way to your own journey) have in some way undergone their own spiritual transformation so that when link would eventually save termina and move on, they would be able to return to their spaces unaffected, but hopefully with some new understanding of the world they didn't have prior.

i'd like to finish the game at some point soon, so i'll find out if they actually do return to the mortal coil, but until then.. these have been “thoughts” by “me.”

on mazes and majora's mask

i'm in a weird space where i'm having a hard time sticking with anything games-related. there's no science to it, but i'm sure it has to do with the restlessness that comes with unemployment and living in a city that refuses to believe the very real threat of a pandemic. because of that, i'm doing what i did to try and get the blood flowing with my reading, which suffered similarly towards the beginning of this hullabaloo—i'm returning to old favorites that will remind me, “yes, indeed, you did enjoy this thing.”

so i'm playing majora's mask and kero blaster, two games i've enjoyed in years past and have meant to return to with the debut of their newer iterations (majora's mask's remaster on the 3ds and kero blaster's port to the switch, which.. is really just a big improvement for me since i'm not wild about action games on the pc). kero blaster for another post, today i'm going to talk about majora's mask for a bit.

i'm thoroughly enjoying the game, it's gorgeous on the 3ds—i've never seen better pinks and purples in a video game, grezzo does the lord's work here in remastering such a choppy grungy game. this morning i breezed through the forest temple, cleansing it of the dark forces within, restoring the ph balance of the poison ponds, and stopped the monkey-roast. it was great. the princess informed me of the butler's wish to see me, so he could bestow upon me this incredible, puckered gift. but before that, i had to chase him through a maze, which got me thinking: would a 3d platformer based around navigating mazes be any fun?

the butler's maze is similar to dampé's graveyard maze in ocarina for those who remember. it's time, and you try to follow as quickly as you can as the butler/dampé floats away from you, just far enough that if they were to turn a corner you would lose sight of them and have to guesstimate based on the sound their floating makes which direction they headed in. doors close behind you as you travel, to keep you on your toes. there weren't whole alternate paths (plenty of dead-ends), but there were different ways to traverse within larger spaces inside the maze (taking a bigger jump across the chasm to a smaller log for a bigger rupee, etc.). it isn't a typical singular-row-looking labyrinth; there are rooms and chasms, a river, some other features like that. i enjoyed the chase, the visuals, the mix of demands it made upon me—i am intimately familiar with the zelda formula at this point, so perhaps the ease with which i moved and the enjoyment i had was due in a large-part to my understanding of the systems in place. this made me think: are mazes/labyrinths fun enough to be the major feature of a game? would a 3d platformer based around mazes be interesting?

top-down labyrinth games make the maze itself clear to the player, but it utterly removes immersion. the 3d perspective, be it third-person or first, would limit visibility (especially in circumstances where you are in a rush or giving chase), but it would give that unique thrill of being lost. it also makes discovery more interesting. perhaps old dungeon crawlers (daggerfall, ultima, shin megami tensei series, etc.) have known this all along, and perhaps they have already distilled what is valuable from this concept.

but what could make it more interesting? mapping is an obvious choice (i think of the etrian odyssey series here, which has a lovely map creation system), and i feel like survival mechanics bears mentioning even if it is a dead horse at this point.. i'm reminded of the modded frostfall file i had in skyrim where i spent hourssss in shalidor's maze, on the verge of both starvation and hypothermia. in such dire straits, i could not fast-travel and had to carefully chart my way through the maze with the handful of in-game hours of daylight that would allow me safe-passage. there was something about the frenetic energy that came with that maze chase.

i also think of the metroid series, both the 2d entries and the 3d prime games. the environmental storytelling that's available to spaces like this is rife for exploration (have you SEEN how many metroidvania games there are.. yeesh!). i truly think a labyrinth game could be spectacular if there was a way to stud those walls with morsels of lore, or figure out different species of wall for the player to interact with differently (whether it be so blatant as blasting it, being a portal of sorts, or even more interesting: being a being of some sort itself, to interact with.. hm..). in that case, mapping would have to have some sort of indelible texture to compliment it.

i'll keep thinking about it. i'm not close to even knowing what it'd look like to make a video game, but i'll always entertain that thought.

i'll always have paris, etc.

final fantasy vii: remake update/astral chain update/whatever

hello again. i'm all over the place right now!

i finished final fantasy vii: remake the week before last, and it was very good. so good, in fact, that it's been hard to transition to anything else. my last blog i made was the first game i attempted to dive into, the misadventures of tron bonne. and for a time, i was satisfied. unfortunately, it didn't jive with me for the time being—most of my comments from the last blog ended up being true, while i enjoyed the story and the aesthetics of the thing, the choppy gameplay (and the gameplay itself) never really held my attention for very long. so i'm placing that one back on the shelf, i'll wait for inspiration to hit with that one. (the article that i tried to find by games critic jeremy parish in the last blog may have never surfaced, but he just recently posted a wonderful restrospect video on the first game in the megaman legends series that i highly recommend checking out.)

so, while i was wading through my backlog to “spark joy”, i decided to whittle away at the remaining trophies in final fantasy vii: remake, and am now down to only 7 remaining! all of them will be completed in the hard-mode, which is what i will talk about, right, now,,

the hard mode in final fantasy vii: remake is very enjoyable so far, the big changes being that enemies scale with your level (so now everyone's maxed out, so, that's, cool,,), and you cannot use your items anymore—the idea is to focus much more heavily on materia management. i'm about four chapters in now and enjoying the challenge and have an even greater appreciation for the battle system. never before have i been more actively excited about getting into a battle-encounter in a final fantasy game more than this! so, that'll probably be just a static thing i'm playing for a while.

while i've cycled through a couple games in my hunt for the next long-haul, one that i've returned to several times and will probably stick with is platinum games' astral chain—so soon after nier: automata i have been seduced by their silky-smooth action-based gameplay... and i gotta say, this is way more technical than nier ever was. i'm admittedly not completely familiar with platinum games, the only one i've played being nier and the hour or two i was able to spend with bayonetta on my xbox 360 that one summer when my folks weren't around the house... sigh... so, perhaps this is a greater indicator of the depth they're capable of. and soon i will have intimate knowledge of the switch port of wonderful 101 that i kickstarted only a couple months ago! (oh, i also played star fox: zero and star fox guard, but.. let's pretend that zero never happened [i wink, solemnly, at guard, a game that would have been a perfectly-designed multiplayer 3ds game]..).

so, astral chain rules. i'm only a few hours in but it whips, literally, and is probably the closest i've ever been to feeling like i was in an anime? the greatest disappointment i have in the game is the silent protag with the chatty sibling who does all the talking for them (they should have just combined them.. it sucks..), but other than that it is so high-octane that i cannot play it before bed by at least a full hour. it is also has perhaps the smoothest framerate i've ever seen on a portable-mode switch?

for the time being, as i continue to unlock small bits like npc bloodtypes (yeah) and use swords to hack energy currents flowing through my foes' musculature, i'm gonna stick with this and see where it goes. while it lacks character in the avatar, the rest of the game absolutely gushes charm and attention to detail. there are some fantastic blogs about the game that platinum released over several months detailing different facets of the game that i intend to check out while i work on my playthrough as well!

anyway.. i gotta get back to my restrictions of writing much, much less on these, but it's been a while since i've typed out something, so.. excuse the meandering and grammatical whirlygig before you.

misadventures of tron bonne update

i've had this for like five years, and i'm only now getting around to it! part of that was because i could only play it on my psp when it launched on the playstation network and the control scheme was garbage. when i finally did get a ps vita (with customizable button-mapping (nintendo!! what the hell are you doing!!)) i was too distracted with persona 4 and danganronpa and, yes, my millionth first-five-hours of vagrant story. so this collected dust. i picked up mega man legends 1 and 2 over the years, boot them up, felt the jank of the controls, and kinda just.. went back to whatever.

i think part of this has to do with the price of things—i'm more likely to complete something i spend more money on because i feel the weight of that cost when i engage with the given thing. when i pick up 4+ games on a ridiculous steam sale (and the psn has some pretty wild, low prices these days!) those games get shot into a weird oblivion, where the fun was the scandal of obtaining the games for such a cheap price—who knows when i'll have the time to play them...

anyway, this is part of why i made this blog, so i'll get into some stuff i've thought about as i'm just shy of three hours on this play-through of tron bonne.

stuff i'm digging:

• first of all: the voice acting is unbelievably good. did you watch anime in the 90's? did you watch dubbed anime in the 90's? then you know how tron bonne sounds. it's something of a comfort food for me. when i have tons of mindless busywork that i need to accomplish around the house, i'll turn on english dubs of trigun, yu yu hakusho, or even tenchi muyo if i'm feeling particularly lonely, and let them drone on in the background. there's something about that not-quite professional voice acting quality that really puts me at ease. i also love castle in the sky's notoriously whatever dub. anyway, yeah, the voice acting is great in this game.
• the character portraits are also very good. i love it when a game can straddle a 3d environment and still manage to make a 2d overlay that commands just as much character. the character design is very expressive and super fun.
• this game oozes charm and whimsy, and a lot of that is due to the art direction being so clearly inspired by studio ghibli's house style. jeremy parrish did a great write-up on this back in the 1up.com days. [i would have inserted the article here, but apparently there are no archives from that site, which boils my blood because of all the hard work that that crew did is out the window...]
• speaking of studio ghibli's influence, some day i'll write my gigantic piece on how future-boy conan is 100% the source material for legend of zelda: wind waker, from the post cataclysmic water-world scenario, to sidling along a forbidden fortress's sheer walls to save a young girl that seagulls flock to... god, uh, i gotta stay on track here. please hold me to this, readers.
• there's no lighting in this game, (which may sound weird and technical) so the team opted to make detailed textures that created the illusion of.. well.. texture, as well as lighting, which creates a really striking package! faces can be more detailed because they are not limited to the polygonal surfaces they're imposed on (just because the tech was available for that doesn't mean it actually looked good back then. see: most early 3d games.). and the faces in this game.. i'm tellin' ya. it's good stuff. i'm starting to understand why the loss of mega man legends 3 hit so many so hard.

stuff i'm puzzling over:

• i love love love the servbots (the little lego men that you control), but starting the game with over 40 to manage without a concrete concept of how they work within the system of the game itself is a bit overwhelming (i'm guessing the majority of the game is me navigating between 4 kinds of “minigames” to scrounge up dough?). i'm hoping that this starts to open up more and that i can interact with them in meaningful ways that justifies there being 40 of them.. but we shall see.
• i'm having a hard time sitting with the game for more than an hour at a time, and i think that's largely due to the gameplay itself. the game is (right now) broken up into 4 sections: platform-y run-and-gun (that i'm assuming is similar to the mega man legends formula, and is my favorite of the four (and reminds me of solatorobo!)), a box-puzzle game (because there are always box-puzzle games in ps1 games, apparently), a first-person dungeon-crawler, and a free-roam collectathon gauntlet that has mercilessly obliterated me time and time again (and my poor thumb, dealing with the vita's d-pad (which is good.. but.. not good for an hour of frantic “thumb”-ing)). each one of these games lasts about ~15 minutes, and with the overarching goal of making 10 million zenny off of these minigames, it doesn't do a lot for me insofar as keeping my interest for longer than a couple games at a time. i'm hoping this changes, because i so so so love the world and its characters in a way that i had never expected to—this is my first megaman game and that world has just never really interested me until now.

final fantasy vii: remake update

hm.. i just beat final fantasy vii: remake, which was technically against my restrictions (playing games on my backlog), so i wanted to make a quick post here to make note of some things on my backlog that i'd like to play next.

oh, before that, final fantasy vii: remake: owns. everything was good, i loved every second, excited for papa's second (third? (fourth??)) helping. anyway..

i started this blog with a visual novel (phoenix wright: ace attorney: dual destinies (yes, that many colons)), and before that had been focussing on other textually-dense games (trails in the sky fc and disco elysium... i'll get to you soon..), so my transition to nier: automata and now final fantasy vii: remake has been super great as the two have been a nice mix of interesting narrative and compelling gameplay (the action in nier being a level above casual while remaining engaging, where ffviir has had more in the way of strategic action). so i'd like to keep that going for now, heading into even lighter narrative as i continue to get my fill from books and movies (i'm not good at balancing all three mediums at once... just a personal preference). so i'm gonna make note of some stuff with light(er(ish)) narratives and denser gameplay:

• vagrant story (haven't completed since 2007.. need to go back. have some stuff in particular i'd like to write about, about logging onto forums in 2007 to ask for help, about a man who tried to help me and lost his teeth..)
• crimson shroud (would love to just revisit a yasumi matsuno world right now, i find them fertile fields for my writing inspiration. but this one may be a bit too heavy in narrative..)
• misadventures of tron bonne (still haven't played a mega man game.. hell yeah? this looks like it's real good)
• ico/shadow of the colossus/last guardian (picked up ico several times before putting it back down, wondering if i should play lg before sotc. been thinking of these for a while and what they could offer me in my creative writing.)
• star fox 2 (this would be too quick.. maybe?? i really loved the first one for snes, so i'd really like to try out the allegedly better sequel)
• kirby's dreamland 3 (only ever played kirby 64 in a mcdonald's playplace.. which was rad, but that's it. i love the look of dreamland 3, like it was made with crayons..)
• celeste (got to about chapter.. 6?? and then put it down, when it came out, so i'd have to start all over to regain my skillz)
• ape out
• astral chain
• bloodborne (this would take much more time than anything else on this list since i spend more time wandering in fromsoft games than completing them, but i'd like to get this under my belt all the same)

nier: automata update (3)

[spoiler world]

i beat “nier: automata” a week ago today, and if you follow my miserable twitterfeed you knew the moment i did because, in a a fit of passion, after being moved by the game's narrative and tricky post-game Q&A, i.. deleted every save file for the game on my ps4.

i hardly need to remind you we're in [spoiler world], but, again, i will remind you: we are in [spoiler world] for end-game events in “nier: automata”.

shortly after finishing “route e”, which is the final narrative-ending for the game (the other letters of the alphabet are reserved for more comical alternative endings, amongst them: eating mackerel), the game presents you with a nearly immovable object to overcome. at first you are unable to overcome this bulwark on your own, but after a while you can enlist in help from other entities of seemingly nonsensical usernames to help you past. after you accomplish this (still very difficult) feat, you are asked if you wouldn't mind helping others in the way that these little entities helped you through the trial. “sure,” you think. “why not, that was rough as hell.” then a series of questions prod you, until eventually it asks, “you will need to delete all your saved content in order to do you... still wish to help?” i sat there for a minute, utterly in my feelings about the whole thing, and thought,

“i would like to think yes, i would do this even if i lost all my saved content...”

what's weird to me, a week later, is how this has stuck to me. i was well on my way to getting the platinum achievement for this game (something i've only done for “undertale”, one of my favorite games and, coincidentally, one of the easiest games to get a platinum achievement for), and yet in the heat of that moment i was not concerned about my 40+ hours of progress evaporating into thin air, because my action would lead to others having to ask these questions of themselves. would they do the “right” thing for someone else, a stranger, even if that stranger would not do so in return for them, or if they were “someone [they] intensely disliked”?

i was a bit distraught in the aftermath of my decision—my main save file and the back-ups were deleted as the game went through a debilitatingly drawn-out process of eliminating my accomplishments, one-by-one, in the menus i had become so familiar with. my platinum achievement stretched another 30+ hours ahead of me, should i ever hope to work my way back up to that superficial accomplishment. and then a day passed, and another, and another. and eventually i came out of that fog and realized (along with many who'd come before me, i'm sure) that the platinum was worthless and that what “nier” had allowed me to do was something much more powerful.

it gave me an opportunity to reach out, grab someone by the collar, and demand,

“do you have any interest in helping the weak?”

this devastating series of questions (that could be put off, indefinitely) could wedge themselves into the lobes of the gamer, slack-jawed (and hopefully emotional) in front of their monitor, and compel some sort of empathetic reaction from them. or if not, sit there, bitterly, or unheeded, to smoulder in their engine a while longer.

it may seem a bit grandiose or ham-fisted, and perhaps it is. but in a medium like video games, i welcome the occasional subterfuge, especially if it pushes those who engage with it towards empathy.

nier: automata update (2) [spoiler world]

so i just finished route b—

hey uh, just an fyi, if you're reading this and would like to get into “nier: automata”, i'm now in spoiler territory. i wrote “[spoiler world]” up there, that was your indicator. but just in case you were like “the subtitle of this game sounds weird” or “is this a new series for the blog posts” or “i don't want to be spoiled here, but this is not explicitly clear—do i now inhabit a world of spoilers? or am i here to spoil myself with good content?”, i just wanted to be clear.

so.. i just finished route b, titled, “or not to [B]e” (image here of me throwing a rock at the localization team for this pun.. lovingly). very.. very good. i've mentioned before (maybe not here.. ah well) that i've known that this game was going to be up my alley. i didn't realize it'd be tapping directly into concepts i'd written about for fun throughout the last 10~ years of my fiction writing. the sections about “project gestalt” and “mission(?) replicant” were absolutely things i'd tinkered with in my own personal fictions. it was very cool to be seen and also affirming to see similar ideas out there—i.e. human consciousness being relocated to bypass death, creating psuedo-spiritualities to justify said transfers and structures of government to contain them. ahh.. very very good stuff.

i'll keep it vague, even if we're in spoiler territory. i would hate to rob you of some of the cool stuff going on here. while not the most mind-bending things in the world, i like to think of them as rudimentary thought-exercises. “what if.. we were faced with a global pandemic and we found that we couldn't contain/cure said virus?” i'd wager that hits just a little differently in 2020 from 2017.

notes

• i needed to take more advantage of 9s's hacking!!!!! i found out right before the missiles quest (where the game hits end-game state) that you could control enemy units if they were hacked unawares—what!!!!! you get to do a fair bit of it towards the end, and i was very pleased with it... although it made me wonder what it would have been like to sneak up on more interesting/convoluted characters? each enemy type had some very weird/good move-sets.
• the hacking itself was a bit of a back-and-forth for me. as 9s, you forego your “strong” attack that you had with 2b (light attack, strong attack.. up up, down down, left, right left, right,,,) for a “hack” function that allows you to detonate, befriend, or control enemy units. those are cool results! but the hacking itself takes the form of a shmup-lite mini-game, where you are trying to destroy an enemy's core by wiping out the little enemy “ships” inside it. very cool concept, and a nice way to spice up the combat. often times it was repetitive, and when i toggled difficulties to see if i could raise the bar, i found it didn't necessarily change the challenge, just bloated the hit-points for the units. which.. i'm not sure how i feel about that. but they were so zippy that i couldn't really hold it to fault.
• the “rope” function for the pods absolutely, wait for it.. whips! i set my light weapon to the cypress stick (a reference to the famed “dragon quest” series, which has a bunch of great stuff going for it, but most critically changes chests to look like “dragon quest” chests and the numerical values for damage to a font-style similar to that of the same series—very, very good content value), which was very nifty, except 9s's range was somewhat limited in a lot of ways—this rope power allowed me to grapple onto my targeted enemy (be they high or low) and do some serious damage.
• the difficulty in this game is odd. i've done about 40% of the side-quests at this point at normal difficulty and feel that i might have over-leveled myself. the battles became much quicker and i found there was less strategy in my maneuvering. after raising the bar to hard, i found that all it did was raise damage i received and dealt by 400% and made enemies hesitant to jump into battle, which really.. didn't make things too interesting? in hacking, this just bloated the hit-points, and there wasn't a change to the formula (from what i could see). i wonder what could be an interesting way to change the difficulty of an action-heavy game like this..
• i fished a lot in this route (i keep saying route.. there's a bunch of them that stitch together the entire game's story, so it's not really like a second play-through since the mechanics and story are altered) and it made me sit and wonder perhaps my most profound thought throughout this experience: when are we going to get a really good, and i mean really good, fishing video game? not the “bass hunter” games. not natsume's boring swill (i love the look of “the legend of the river king” for gameboy.. but lord, that game, you cannot play it). i want an honest-to-god fishing game. something that truly replicates the experience of fishing, not this alleged pro-level stuff that the industry things people want to play. i want the “i got up early to go fishing with my dad somewhat begrudgingly, and after an hour or two on the water i catch some small-fry and feel the thrill of the chase, start to consider the tacklebox, what's helped and hindered me on my short journey, and become more vulnerable in my pursuit and end up having a short but meaningful conversation with my normally reserved father” experience. who will give that to me..
• i love 9s.
• i'm ready for more.

ring-fit update

so the purpose of this baby blog (for babies) is to post about games on my backlog, not so much the zeitgeist games (i might make an exception for the “final fantasy 7” remake...) or the ones i return to frequently, unless there's something of note there. but i'm sure you don't mind if you're going out of your way to read this little blog, anyway.

i had been playing “ring-fit adventure,” what is essentially the nintendo switch's “wii fit,” on and off since launch, but in the last two weeks of quarantine it has taken on new meaning for me. my father works as a manager in a grocery store, and since i still live at home with my folks i feel uncomfortable leaving the house at all, just in case i'm unwittingly carrying the virus. i'm just pretending like i am. that means i'm cut off from a lot of public spaces and a lot of the walking around i do on a daily basis has been drastically cut short. so i'm very fortunate to have something like the “ring-fit” on-hand during these times.

notes

• i'm convinced that this game is chock-full of warped nintendo sound effects. sure yeah, it's a nintendo game, that may be a given, but like.. some of them seem like deep cuts.
  • gooper blooper's tormented cry when you launch him into the aether from “super mario sunshine” is heard when.. you launch monsters into the aether in battle.
  • armando's great sound effects, along with andma (and maybe even abdonis..?) all sound like they're characters from “the legend of zelda: the windwaker”—specifically orca's “sah!” and link's grandma. hm. these are things i think about
• is this where the assets for the juicer from “pikmin 3” have come to die? there's a fun mechanic for making smoothies (in-game potions) that gives me the same fruit-feels as the ones i felt while juicing away in “pikmin 3.”
• when is “pikmin 4” coming out..
• i'm finally at a point where i'm noticing results from my work-outs and feeling the drive to get up and get at it! very cool how gamifying something dumb like health and fitness can make me interested in wanting my body to last longer!

nier automata: in process

a confession: i never finished “nier: automata” when it launched in that cold february of 2017. while i did enthusiastically enjoy the demo in 2016, i did not end up making much process because the hotly anticipated “legend of zelda: breath of the wild” came out the following month and.. well, we don't remember much as a society, collectively, from that period in time because of “botw”.. so, i rest my case.

that being said, yesterday (april 2nd, this website posts everything a day in the future.. the price of my desire for a minimalistic medium) i sat down for 8 uninterrupted hours with “nier”. it was bliss..

notes

• i believe this is my favorite game to maneuver a character avatar in. developer platinum games has done phenomenal work in the past with their character action games (“bayonetta,” “metal gear: rising revengeance,” “vanquish,” “wonderful 101,” and most recently “astral chain” (also on this backlog)), and one thing they all have in common: the characters move, just, real good. from the fluid gaits of 2b, 9s, and a2, to the clunky and visceral grinding (...pun intended, sorry) of the machine lifeforms, the game shimmers from its careful gloss and polish.

• i have completed the “first” story arc, or collected the first “ending.” (i also ate the mackerel for ending “k”... it was worth it.) this game has an interesting way in which the story unfolds by replaying the game from different perspectives of the cast. at first i was wondering how this would keep my attention, but it fits well within the topics of interpersonal relationships between androids, machines, and men brought up throughout the game's narrative. not to mention fun changes to the gameplay—i went from being a combat android with some slick moves on the battlefield, to the gangly tech (assistant whom i love dearly) who can tackle foes from a distance via hacking (y'know, the uh, computer kind..).

• the story is very good so far, and i'm having a feeling its only going to get denser (which is even better for lore-heads like me). initially, some of the beats (“friendship and love are what separate us from the beasts/machines/what-have-you!”) seemed a little cheap or cliche, but giving the game space to unfold through its side-quests, which unpack more of how this world operates and the characters play their parts, has shown me that there is much more going on beneath the surface of this well-loved game.