As of a couple weeks ago, I have played through almost all of Pokémon Legends: Z-A. There’s some battling left to do, the constant siren-song of shiny hunting, and enough research tasks to keep me busy for a while yet, but I’ve caught all the Pokémon I can, cleared all but the last shreds of the story which are locked behind an “endless” battle royale that just isn’t super motivating to me. I’ve also got a few side quests centered around using specific Pokémon in battles and training up Pokémon I don’t use to accomplish specific feats, but the rewards are small and there’s really nothing left for me beyond the grind, at least in the base game. There’s a DLC out that looks interesting and adds a lot to the game, but I’m in my “financially recover from Christmas” phase right now and not buying things. I definitely will buy it either later this month or sometime next month, but right now I’m content to take a break. Pokémon ZA was a lot of fun and maybe the most… “situated-in-the-world” of the Pokémon games I’ve ever played, but there’s a repetitiveness to it that makes it difficult to play beyond reaching your chosen goals. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, since the loop you’re stuck in is a fun one, but you eventually wind up doing the grind for the sake of the grind and I can only do that for so long before I need to do literally anything else. You might argue that this is true of all Pokémon games and while I’d have to admit that you are right on a certain level, most of the games don’t really pretend to have some kind of ever-running Thing To Do within the world itself. Most of the time, Pokémon games require you to invest your time and approach them from outside the game to experience those kinds of features (online challenges, Player versus Player Pokémon battles, The Battle Tower that makes you play outside the normal format of the game), but ZA has one built in as a part of the plot and while it’s not a huge deal to keep doing it, it is asking me to do more of these nightly “royales” than I’ve actually done prior to this point in the game to get there.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
A Recipe For A Better Year
After more than a month of thinking about it and nearly three weeks of sitting on the (frozen) supplies, I finally took the time today (a week before this gets posted) to make a little recipe one of my friends prepared for us when I was visiting over Thanksgiving. It’s a relatively simple chicken dish that is basically a simple stir-fry, but it’s a recipe without a card or instructions beyond what he told me since it is entirely of his own devising. You see, over the recent years, he has taken to cooking not like I do (starting with a recipe card and making alterations based on smell or taste until the recipe becomes my own enough that I don’t need a recipe card or instructions any more), but by learning from professionals on YouTube. There’s a lot of great channels out there that cover quite a variety of things, but the best ones aren’t how to prepare a recipe and the background of the recipe, but how the various components of recipes work. Fats/oils, aromatics, various techniques: that sort of stuff. He’s had to rely on them since he lost most of his sense of smell when he caught Covid a while back, but knowing the basics, how things eventually taste, and why it all works the way it does is clearly the superior method to winging it by nose as I do. It allows him to put things together in new ways without needing a starting point like I do and it seems to be working out really well for him and his wife. And, now that I’ve recreated one of his recipes at home, me too.
Continue readingAt The Heart Of My Desire To Run TTRPGs
As someone who has more than a passing interest in tabletop games, scholastic pursuits, and reflecting deeply on things, following Dr. Emily Friedman, a professor studying games with a focus on tabletop roleplaying games and the Actual Play media created using them, on social media was a no-brainer the instant I first came across her posts. I also wound up following a bunch of people she communicates with regularly for their insights on these interests of mine and, after the fall of Cohost, saw the tabletop scene of that website merge with the growing one on Bluesky, such that it isn’t uncommon for me to find someone proposing an interesting idea and them mutliple other people examining the idea or thought through different lenses. Lately, this has been especially important to me because Dr. Friedman has been writing more and more about how being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master) is a form of labor, how the labor of game-making happens falls so heavily on them, and what that means for the community that exists in the form of players and GM. It has given me a lot to think about as I reflect on what I want out of running games, why I care about games, and what am I actually getting out of all the time and effort I put into running games. This, itself, has sparked a lot of thought about the various games I’ve run over the years and the one lingering campaign I still have these days, even if we don’t play that often, and all of it came to a head when I read a follow-up post to the latest idea proposed by Dr. Friedman (that a specific corner of the hobby that is tabletop gaming is likely comprised almost entirely of poeple who did all the work in group work assignments to make sure it all got done right): RPGs are, in a sense, an unwelcome activity even while doing them.
Continue readingI Like To Play Support In More Ways Than One
The thing I enjoy the most about being in a Final Fantasy 14 Free Company these days is that I get to facilitate a lot of other peoples’ fun. Between all the gear crafting I do, the organization of events I help out with, the formalization of informal activities, and the encouragement to just do the dang thing, I feel like I’ve found myself a pretty comfortable spot in the group. It can be exhausting at times, especially when one thing builds up a lot (currently at the end of a busy week of gear crafting and I’ve still got a full set to do sometime today or tomorrow), but I enjoying helping other people to have fun and get a great deal of personal validation out of being able to offer help to people now that I’ve gotten myself fairly secured in my chosen activities and have learned enough to actually be a positive resource for people. I feel like it fills a bit of a gap in the FC right now, even if I’m not perfect at it, but we really don’t have a lot of people in the group who are the “let me help you have fun” type. Most of the officers only help when asked and the established members of the group tend to be the most vocal and active despite us being a supposedly new-player-friend FC, which means there really aren’t a lot of people asking open questions about what the newer players need or how they could be helpful. It’s way more work and I suspect that some degree of this pattern of behavior in the officers reflects their experiences with players who tend to come and go a bunch before ultimately vanishing, but I still think it’s worth doing even if I can’t do as much as I want and getting any kind of response is like pulling teeth sometimes.
Continue readingThe Rewards Aren’t Worth Doing Battles On Repeat For Me
There is one problem I will always have with Massively Multiplayer Online games that remains an issue in Final Fantasy 14 no matter how much I love the game. I like to do things for the challenge of them rather than for most other rewards, so when I get through something difficult, I stop wanting to do it. I’ve already finished it, you see, and proven myself capable. I might repeat it sometimes to hone my skills or make sure that my success wasn’t a fluke, but I generally don’t like repeating things too much once I’ve done that. In MMOs, though (and many other games, to be clear, as this is not an issue restricted to MMOs alone), this kind of repetition is a key part of the game. You do things over and over again for gear, for cosmetic items, for achievements, and so many other reasons, most of which have to do with the often frustrating fact that few loot drops are guaranteed. Sure, you’re always going to get something and there’s usually some kind of challenge-specific item or items you’ll get every time from the parts of the game you’ll need to repeat a bunch (something built-in so you can eventually buy whatever it is you’re trying to get), but there’s no guarantee that the thing you want is going to show up, much less that you’ll get it when it comes time to roll for loot. I’m just not that interested in doing a challenge up to fifty or one hundre times in order to get the challenge-specific variation of the expansion’s mount. Most of them aren’t that difficult once you’ve done them a time or two, which is why I just don’t have it in me to do them over and over again in hopes of getting lucky one some mount or housing item.
Continue readingSpotting The Differences In My Reflections Amongst My Fellow Players
One of the interesting parts of looking back on a year of playing Final Fantasy 14 is seeing just how disparate everyone’s experience with the game is despite how similar some of our activities and motivations can be. I mean, of course the person who plays every possible scrap of game available in the free version of it before they buy the game proper is going to have a different experience from the person who, a month in, gets frustrated with the cap on their wallet, inability to buy things from other players, and inability to do much social engagement at all such that they use the excuse of being fully bought-in on the story to buy the base game and every expansion as well. A difference of that magnitude describes not just a method of play or preference for a style of play, but an entirely different approach to what play even is or how one engages in play at all. Neither one is better than the other, of course, but there’s no denying that those two people will have incredibly different experiences with the game. It is, however, also very interesting that two people who appreciate the same styles of play, who like engaging in the same activities, and who are similarly motivated can still have such wildly different experiences. This was highlighted for me incredibly recently, as I’ve offered to help a player who has just returned to the game after a long absence. He was playing during my initial months, but he dropped off before long and returned to find a dramatic shift in what our Free Company was doing, not to mention how he’d been left behind by the advancements in gear that occurred over this period. By all accounts, he and I should have similar game experiences to hear our FC leader tell it, but in talking to this other player to discuss getting him geared up, it is clear that we are in incredibly different worlds.
Continue readingThis Is Going To Be An Entire Week Of Final Fantasy 14 Posts
It’s funny to think back to my early days of playing the game. Putting around with side quests, gathering whatever random crap I could, crafting more random crap with what I gathered, fighting low-level mobs, and generally just not being super focused on the game. Then I slowly dialed in more and more as I started to run into the boundaries of what I could do with a free account and, a month into my playtime, bought all the expansions and a subscription. From then on, I was basically all-in. I still had occasional nights off and spent time doing other things on the weekend, but I mostly stopped playing other games and completely stopped being “relaxed” about the game. I had to catch up to my friends, after-all. I had so much stuff to do in order to make up for the months they’d been playing while I was off in Dragon Age Land, playing through that franchise and it wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t focus. Plus, it gave me goals to pursue and I love having goals. I love having targets to aim for. So I spent a lot of time driving myself forward in the Main Scenario Quests for weeks at a time and then took a break to do crafting and gathering stuff before ultimately returning to MSQ. The cycle repeated itself for almost six months when I cleared the final pieces of Endwalker hand-in-hand with my friends and then we all collapsed in exhaustion. I resolved to get back to puttering, my friends resolved to pace themselves, and the rest of our Free Company hinted at what exciting stuff awaited us in Dawntrail whenever we finally got to it. Which, for me, took about four or five weeks. I was content to rest for a while, catch up on some leveling of other jobs and personal projects, explore my island sanctuary, and mess around in a variety of other types of gameplay, but eventually I felt the itch to get moving forward again and let that lead me into the post-Endwalker patches, Dawntrail, and not to being caught-up with the Dawntrail patches.
Continue readingI’ve Been Playing Final Fantasy 14 For Over A Year Now
If, one year ago, you had told me that I’d spend a year almost exclusively playing Final Fantasy 14, I’d have laughed it off. I don’t get obsessed with games like that. I tend to bounce off of things after a while and need to change up what I’m doing often so I don’t burn out or just lose interest. Or at least that was true for the first thirty-three and a half years of my life since I think the only game I’ve played for more than 500 hours, prior to FF14, was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and The Legend of Zelda franchise is an important part of my life. And now I’m approaching 2500 hours in this game, struggling to make the time to play anything else, and really not bothered by it since playing only this MMO means that I’m saving a lot of money on my entertainment every month. I’m also, you know, having a good time with it. Unfortunately, that also means I’ve got growing to-play and to-read piles that desperately need some amount of attention (I also need to get back to playing Wanderstop for the second time since I hit a moment in the game that made me want to stop playing and think about it for a while, but more on that once I’ve beaten the game) and I’m struggling to want to do it because it’s just so much easier to spend more time on Final Fantasy 14 than to spin up something else. Easier to stay invested in what has my attention in a chokehold than to need to tear my attention away from it every time I think I should do something else. I mean, after all, if I wanted to do something else, I’d do it. I’ve got so many unfinished or unplayed games still that I could probably play a similar amount of video games this year and not need to touch FF14 even once, all without spending any money. And yet the only thing I want to do is go home, cycle my retainers, do some daily roulettes, work on some crafting stuff, and maybe hang out with some folks while doing that. It’s nice to spend time with people and FF14 still remains my main means of access to others.
Continue readingCoping With A Normal, Healthy Reaction To What’s Going On These Days
There are days, more and more lately, where I am heartsick at the state of the world or floundering and unable to escape the vortex of my own personal miseries. Unfortunately, the world does not give you space to have days like that. Life must still be lived. Bills mut be payed, money must be earned, food must be bought, and the necessities of life require you to carry on despite how much you want to take a moment to just reel at the enormnity of it all. How do you do that? What can you do to make some distance, create a little space, and find a way to take the next step forward because you have to no matter how much your heart demands you lay face down on the ground? There’s plenty of self-care tips out there for this sort of thing: log off, stay hydrated, make sure you eat, get some fresh air, ground yourself in the present moment, find ways to be active locally, in-person, so you can provide yourself with some measure of control to fight back against the feelings of powerlessness that are often at the center (or at least near it) of these overwhelming moments. That doesn’t always do it, though, because sometimes you also have to clean your apartment or deal with other people who are making reasonable requests of you or you need to find a way to write about something, anything, to help break your mind out of the paralysis gripping it. What do you do for that extra boost, the tiny bit of impetus required to break out of the rut you’re in so you can do the things you really should be doing today but don’t really NEED to do today? You can’t leave it all for tomorrow, you know? Tomorrow will have it’s own things, it’s own trials and miseries to make doing things difficult, so stacking up more and more important-but-not-necessary effort is only ever going to add more weight to your shoulders.
Continue readingNowhere Left For Escapism
Once upon a time, I used to take breaks from the work I was doing to go on social media. I’d see some art, look a whatever had gone viral, post back and forth with some friends, maybe idly browse for a bit, and then return to whatever I’d been doing. It was fun. It was enjoyable. It was a small hit of happiness during my long, often-boring days. Nowdays, I feel like I do everything else in my life as a break from social media before I eventually have to return to doom scrolling so I can keep up with whatever hellacious, objectively evil thing has happened since I last looked. There is no joy to be found there and, more and more frequently, not even any escapism. All I can count on getting from the internet these days is at least a modicum of despair and yet my brain keeps telling me to go back and check again. After all, maybe this time I’ll actually get that little bit of serotonin I’m craving. Maybe this time I’ll just see some nice art or a funny joke or an announcement about something of interest to me and not spend an hour scrolling up and down the page as I trepidatiously follow whatever unfolding disaster has occurred (such as “law enforcement” of various types killing someone in what can only be reasonably described as an execution or the various media and government personal talking about just how reasonable it is for Trump to consider acquiring Greenland through whatever means he desires). Nothing I have seen on social media in the last year comes even close to making up for how much absolute misery I’ve experienced as a result of scrolling around and yet I can feel the need to scroll, to bear horrified witness to these unfolding tragedies, tugging at my attention despite not wanting to see yet another post about how surely, this time, they have gone too far.
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