As I’ve previously mentioned, my book club will be playing through the Dragon Age video game franchise as we collectively prepare for the release of Veilguard (I refuse to call it The Veilguard). Since I’ll be away from my computer for a week, I decided to set aside my Switch and Unicorn Overlord for a weekend and dive into Dragon Age: Origins. It took a while longer than I thought it would to settle back into the game, since I’d forgotten what most of the stats did and what my preferred builds were, but I mostly got that out of the way in the first day by reading build guides and remembering what parts I used to enjoy about the game. I’m still settling in after about fifteen hours of game run time (an unknown amount of which is me getting restless, walking away from my PC to fold laundry, do dishes, make food, and so on), but I’m mostly comfortable with the game again. Despite how much I played it on my old Xbox 360, coming back to it has me feeling out-of-synch with the way the game works. Maybe it’s because of the almost two hundred hours I put into Inquisition, which has a very distinct and different feel to it. Maybe it’s because it has been over a decade since I last played it. Maybe both. Regardless, trying to get back into this game has me feeling like I found an old beloved shirt that I’m trying to get to sit comfortably on my frame despite how different my frame is even from when I was in college (my shoulders are the broadest they’ve ever been). It’s fine, mostly, but it just feels a little weird and the comfort I remember is largely gone.
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I’ve Accidentally Gotten On The Hype Train For Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Despite a years-long (nearly decade-long, actually, given that it started in the year or two following the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition) effort to avoid getting swept up in the hype for a new video game or movie, I’ve fallen victim to the excitement around the latest entry in the Dragon Age series: “The Veilguard.” I missed the initial announcement, so I was a little late to last week’s party, but I apparently follow enough Dragon Age fans on Bluesky that I couldn’t help but run into people talking about it. Since it initially seemed like not a whole lot of information, I decided to take a peek. From there, I’ve slowly slid from my place of peace and balance to my current position in the deep end of the Hype Pool as people keep talking about it, as my book club and I turn toward playing through the Dragon Age franchise, as the Dragon Age social media accounts post more and more about it, and as I’ve slowly given up on trying to keep my cool. After all, I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age games since one of my friends in college got super excited about the second one and introduced me to the series as a result (for which I will forever remember her, even if we’ve fallen out of contact at this point). I have plenty of other series that I’ve enjoyed more and franchises that will always get me to buy the next game, but there’s nothing quite like the release of a new Dragon Age game to get me excited about video games. An excitement that, unfortunately, doesn’t always last past the start of playing the game, but which is still fun to indulge all the same.
Continue readingMissing Fire Emblem? Give Unicorn Overlord A Try
I’d heard a lot of alright reviews of Unicorn Overlord. There were plenty of bits that people seemed to love, some that seemed like they were inserting their preferred headcanon and some that was just people sharing the bits of the game they loved most. For example, there’s an exchange between two women in one of the early encounters that is easily read as incredibly gay. It isn’t a stretch at all and while I’m skeptical of actual lesbian representation in this game, I would be surprised to find out that this relationship isn’t canonical. Needless to say, short videos and screenshots of this exchange made their rounds on the internet in the weeks following the game’s release, which is how the game caught my attention. There’s some later interaction that lend to this kind of read as well, but still nothing that actually outright says it or demonstrates it. Shortly after those images and gifs went around, the absolutely delicious food you can get at taverns in the game–as part of the relationship building mechanics of the game–started showing up in screenshots and helped tip my opinion in favor of trying the game out. It all looks so delicious! Not quite like food in a Ghibli film, but close enough that the comparison is deserving. What really hooked me, though, was learning that it was basically a Fire Emblem type game but with different battle mechanics and a better gaming experience than Fire Emblem: Engage provided in early 2023. Which is a low bar to clear, in my opinion, but an important bar given how much I love those kinds of strategy games and how disappointed I was by Engage.
Continue readingClosing The Door On KotOR (For Now)
After what feels like a month and might have actually been a month (it took about 45 hours of gameplay, not counting time lost to reloading old saves to get around glitches and save file corruptions), I’ve finally finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The end of the game was mostly as I remembered it, except that it was so much easier this time around because I’d built a combat-functional character instead of one that relied on skills to be useful to the three-character team and a combination of mines, flight, and the one-medpac-per-turn-via-the-inventory-screen feature to win the final boss fight. Which was almost frustratingly easy this time around, as was pretty much every fight. I just loaded up on buffs and unloaded on ever enemy I came across. I rarely bothered to control my allies, even, since what actions they took largely didn’t matter since all I had to do was move from foe to foe, mowing them down with my dual-wielding powerhouse that slapped the final boss down in two rounds of attacks (since I didn’t bother using Critical Strike to potentially get that down to one turn). At least it wasn’t the nightmarish fight I remember from my youth, though I’ll say that there’s actually a lot of fun to be found in that kind of fear and suspense.
Continue readingRevisiting Knights of the Old Republic Two Decades Later
I’ve once again reached a branch in the saga that is listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age. This time, I’ve begun playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on my PC, for the first time in years. KotOR, as I’ve mentioned years ago, was the game that made me fall in love with RPGs. It is also one of the few games I didn’t replay post-high school since it went “missing” at one point after my brother came home from college for a vacation and then, when I got it on Steam as part of a Star Wars bundle, I just couldn’t get into it again. I played it so much in high school that I’d basically memorized the entire game and I was pretty much the only person I knew who was really into Star Wars stuff so I had no one to talk to about it. There was nothing to keep me there. Which has all changed this year. Now, one of my closest friends is more into Star Wars than I am and my current podcast listening focus is a podcast all about Star Wars media that played through the game themselves! How could I not replay it? I mean, I could have tried to wait for whatever remake is going to happen (which, as of an interview in April of 2024, is still being worked on), but it has been several years since it was supposed to be done the first time and it spent most of the time since then looking like a dead project, so I’m not expecting that to ever bear fruit. Instead, I’m playing the old, kinda janky version of the game (with no mods so I can get the unadulterated experience) and having a blast most of the time.
Continue readingTurns Out I Wasn’t Burned Out On Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
After two weeks of struggling to even force myself to play Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth (much less WANT to play it) amidst a burst of burnout, depression, and other pastimes that needed my attention more immediately, I’ve finally figured out why I’ve been avoiding it. In retrospect, I think the main reason it took me this long was because I was up to my waist in denial, and the rest of it is made up of my general patience, my habit of having a podcast to listen to when there’s not much going on in terms of audio, and my genuine love of Final Fantasy 7: Remake. It is difficult to see clearly past all of those blinding or rose-colored filters. But now I have and I can firmly say that the reason I’ve been struggling to play Rebirth is because the open world is boring and empty. Sure, there’s lots of little collectibles, but having junk to pick up doesn’t make the world feel any less empty. It actually makes it feel even more empty most of the time, especially when I have to wander further and further afield to get all of the random junk I need to craft my own items since the people who made the game decided it would be better to fill your inventory with junk than to just give you chests with items in them. And it’s not like you can just keep collecting this stuff so that you never run out. No. You can have ninety-nine of something and then you can’t pick up any more, which sucks because this is your main avenue for collecting potions and items. You have to craft all this crap, mix up weird combo items, and make sure you’re leveling up your item crafter device so you can make level-appropriate items. It’s a whole-ass crafting system created for the sole purpose of filling this empty world and all it has accomplished is to draw attention to the fact that the world is pointlessly massive.
Continue readingI Don’t Know If Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Can Get Any Better Than This
Now, in my third week of playing, I’ve finally make it into chapter seven of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Chapters five and six were exactly the sort of weirdly enjoyable stuff I’ve been looking forward to since I first saw the Segway–excuse me, “Wheelie”–bits in the game’s trailer. Each one has its own little moments of interesting characterization, some whacky fun (that, in Chapter 5, bordered on being a little over the top for my tastes, but was still incredibly hilarious in the moment) unique to each chapter, and then each included a moment that swept the rug out from underneath me–even during what I was hoping would be a classic beach episode filled with emotional development and inter-character discussion in Chapter 6. This is, in my opinion, the modern versions of Final Fantasy 7 at their best. As long as we can include the bit from chapter four that I wrote about last Tuesday. It would feel wrong to describe the modern FF7s as being at their best without including that moment of intensely emotional characterization for Cloud that is incredibly rare in these games. After all, we get to see a bit of Cloud’s softer side in Final Fantasy 7: Remake, but only in drips and drabs as he plays the part of the invulnerable hero and we never really get it at all in the original game, aside from a few moments during the end of the game where Cloud admits he has no idea what he’s doing but he’s going to keep doing it anyway (which isn’t really that much vulnerability since everyone already knew that by then).
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 7: Rebirth Is Making Me Care About Cloud
I just wrote about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and my experiences with the game leading up to a point near the end of Chapter 4 the other day, but I’m back again, earlier than usual, because I played just a little bit more and was absolutely struck by what happened less than an hour of game time after I stopped playing. When I wrote the post linked above, I’d finished my previous gaming time with an enjoyable hour collecting squads of Shinra soldiers for a parade. Having them waiting for me–coming to attention and shouting greetings as I (well, Cloud), their parade captain, exited whatever building I’d been in–was an absolute delight. Since it was already far too late to still be awake and playing video games at that point, I saved my game and shut everything down for the evening. Then, last night, I fired it back up again, worked my way through the parade, the awards ceremony immediately after it, and then the escape from Junon aboard a cruise ship. What struck me most wasn’t the parade (I could barely pay attention to what was happening in the parade since I had to focus on the quick time event) or even the fun tournament of Queen’s Blood (since every major game needs to have a built-in card game, I guess, which I say somewhat resignedly despite actually enjoying this one), but the way Cloud reacted to being a captain in in charge of this group of soldiers.
Continue readingFinding The Fun Amidst The Familiar In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
A few weeks ago, as a part of my on-going quest to document my time spent in the various worlds of Final Fantasy 7, I wrote about Cloud Strife and the way his character is portrayed differently between games. As I’ve gotten further into Rebirth, I’ve thought a lot about the depiction of Cloud in the original game, the way it was different in Remake, and the way it’s different again in Rebirth. The Rebirth version of Cloud is a melding of the two. The terse, non-committal version of Cloud has returned (which brought back the Classic Cloud Shrug, baybee!), but there are still moments of awkward earnestness that break through this shell. Despite that merge of the two different Clouds I saw, between the original Final Fantasy 7 Cloud and the Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Cloud, there’s still a missing element here. Original Cloud felt like he was playing at being a cool guy. He felt like he was living out his dream and trying to fulfill the image he had in his head of what it meant to be a SOLDIER. This Cloud, the Cloud of Rebirth, feels more like he’s just a million miles away. He tunes in and out, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes seemingly involuntarily. He has moments where is is alive, his personality is a brilliant spark, and he’s driving the group forward with lateral and creative thinking. Other times, he can barely pay attention to a conversation or someone sharing a memory from what should be their shared past in an effort to connect with him. It’s disconcerting to see it play out on the screen but, crucially, the game also makes it clear that the other characters are noticing it as well.
Continue readingEarly Thoughts On Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
After a week of cramming what gaming I can into my work nights, I’m about six hours into Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which might sound like a lot, but much of that time has been spend exploring the largely open world available to me about an hour into Chapter 2 of the game. After all, I can’t NOT explore every nook and cranny of the wipe world open world suddenly thrust upon me with its incredibly limited potential since there doesn’t seem to be much in it other than crafting resources. What if I missed something actually interesting [turns out that following the plot unlocks exploration activities so the interesting stuff isn’t even there or available to you until you’ve gone through the requisite steps]? What if there was a quest that I missed because I didn’t run along the top AND the bottom of each cliff? And, like, after spending some sixty or so hours (probably more, to be honest) playing two Final Fantasy 7 games–Remake and Intermission–that didn’t let me move freely around the world, I might have gone a little bit overboard. Also, you can jump now. Sort of. You have to be next to a cliff that the game judges is short enough for you to jump up, jump down, or somehow clamber over, but you can do it. Only vertical jumps, though, which lends some credence to one of my idle theories from a post that went up just over a week ago. If you want to hop across a small gap, you better hope you can jump down and then back up the other side. After all, you’re not jumping. You’re executing environment maneuvers. Heaven forbid you actually jump. Still, all that aside, it’s been an interesting look at what I might be able to expect from this game as I continue playing.
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