I’ve written before about games that are so big that you can find almost anything you want to look for in them. In games like Dragon Age: Origins, it leaves you with a game that isn’t really saying anything or that buries the things it would like to say in smaller chunks of storytelling so that you, the all-important player, can make whatever choices you’d like and still wind up doing some form of the “heroic” thing in the end. In games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it never says anything but presents you with enough opportunities for you to say something about what you’re seeing that you will find a story emerging from your experience with the game. I’ve always preferred the latter, where the game relies on setting things up for you to discover or lend your voice to, because all of my experiences with things like the former have left me feeling satisfied with my video game time but unfulfilled. I’ve never really blamed games like that because how the hell are you supposed to write a story that can account for that much player choice without sacrificing a lot of the direction you’d like or rendering most player choice meaningless? How could you craft a story meant to have wide appeal that still makes a stand about what is good and what is bad in a way that will surely be alienating to some people? Well, Final Fantasy XIV does it mostly by (so far) taking a few weak but potentially alientating stands on some issues and letting everyone you skip all the cutscenes you’d like (with a few exceptions, but none of those ever seem to overlap with a story that has something to say beyond “hero good, villain bad”). Which I find incredibly surprising now that I’m digging into more and more of the story following the story that plays out over the first fifty levels of your character in the game given how it abjectly refused to do anything of the sort early on.
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Turns Out I Really Enjoy Healing In Final Fantasy XIV
As I’m writing this post a week ago (compared to when it gets posted, anyway. Who knows when you’re actually reading this), I’m officially two weeks into my time with Final Fantasy XIV and everything I suspected would be true in my last post about it (almost two weeks ago) has stayed true. I’ve continued to enjoy my time with the game, even if I have spent my time pushing myself through the Main Scenario Quests rather than via my preferred “slow puttering” method, but I was eager to unlock more parts of the game and my friends were often making time for me, so I didn’t want to waste the time they could have spent on other things by being lackadaisical about the meat of the game. Now that I’ve finished the first portion of the game, everything up through level fifty (as far as the MSQ and my chosen Job, White Mage, are concerned, anyway), I’m ready to get back to a little bit of puttering, trying out some other classes, and starting to spread myself out a bit more widely as I get deeper into things. I’m still on the free trial, since I’m none too keen to start paying subscription fees for the game, so there’s still a bunch of stuff I can’t access or can only access via a series of convoluted events (like taking my friends on dungeon delves requires a friend to invite me to a group and then promote me to the group’s leader since I can’t make groups with a free account). I’m already looking forward to when I’ve played enough of the game to justify spending money on it so I can join up with the free company my friends are a part of and maybe even start making friends with some of them. There’s still so much of the game out there for me to find and play!
Continue readingMidwinter Video Game Malaise
I’m in another weird spot with video games. A brand new one, this time around, which is kind of refreshing, but it’s still weird. I’ve never really been one to cling to a video game if I wind up not playing it all the way through. The two previous exceptions to this are huge, sprawling games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, both of which take multiple hundreds of hours to play all the way through and are a “sometimes” game for me. Now, though, as I shift most of my gaming time towards Final Fantasy XIV and occasionally dabble in a second playthrough of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a second attempt at a second playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom, and a second playthrough of Chained Echoes in preparation for the upcoming DLC, I find myself looking at games I didn’t finish and wishing I had the time to play games that aren’t either super engaging or just unengaging enough to listen to a podcast throughout. I mean, I WANT to play those games, even if I seem to struggle to make myself do it sometimes. It makes sense that I might have a difficult time pushing myself to play more Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth given how much I don’t enjoy the open-world segments and how many of them there are, but I actually do enjoy playing Armored Core VI but I just can’t seem to make myself sit down and play it with any kind of frequency. Nor can I seem to make myself play Dragon’s Dogma despite being incredible excited by everything I’ve heard about the game and having a podcatcher chock full of podcasts to listen to while I run around it’s wide-open world. Instead, I play a new game with my friends and replay other games when I’m not playing that.
Continue readingFinally, I’ve Joined The Fantasy…
In what should probably not be a surprise to anyone who knows me and my video game habits but is probably nevertheless a surprise to everyone I know, I’ve gotten really into Final Fantasy XIV. To be abundantly clear, given the way some people get super obsessed with this game, I’m playing it a normal amount. I’m slightly less into it than I’m into Baldur’s Gate 3 every time I start playing that again and much less than I was into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which means it will probably become a sustainable habit. Which is probably what is surprising to the people who know me since I’m not really into Massively Multiplayer Online games. The only two I’ve ever played with any regularity are Overwatch and Destiny 2 and have bounced off literally every single other MMO I’ve ever tried. Hell, I eventually stopped playing Overwatch and Destiny 2 as well. Those were extenuating circumstances, though. I stopped playing Overwatch after a couple years because they changed the game to support play at their league level and that made all the things I enjoyed doing absolutely unpleasant to do unless I had a solid team behind me (and that almost never happened). I played Destiny 2 for years and only stopped because the people I played with were no longer available to me due to my connection to them revealing himself to be undependable in a way I couldn’t overlook or let go. Neither of those reasons has anything to do with a commitment or my attention span, but every single other MMO I’ve tried–like Guild Wars 2, WoW, Runescape (back in the day), League of Legends, and so many more–fell by the wayside in less than a month. Even Palia, as much as I enjoy it, rarely lasts a month before I forget it exists for six to twelve months. But Not FFXIV, though. At least not so far, anyway.
Continue readingUnreliable Detection And Definition Of Unreliable Narrators
This post contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you wish to remain unspoiled, you should probably bail out now since you’ll probably be able to guess some amount of them by the time you get to the point below where the spoilers are (there’s text in all caps to let you know). That said, I kind of hop on that particular point somewhat tangentially, so it’s entirely possible that you can read this whole post minus the paragraph with the spoilers and still not figure anything out. Knowing the game and what these spoilers are, though, I wouldn’t risk it.
Continue readingPutting The Past Behind Us: Feeling Unmoored In The Endless Present Of Tears Of The Kingdom
“When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world.” I was a child the first time I heard those words. A bipedal meerkat spoke them as the camera zoomed in on him and he alternated between gesturing at an imaginary world behind the camera and pointing an instructive finger at the young, depressed lion that was just off screen. As far as scenes go in The Lion King, it’s important for the plot but maybe not the most visually interesting. The sort of thing that would normally slip past a child of five or six, which is how old I was when I first saw it, but one of my younger siblings became obsessed with the movie and we watched over a hundred times before a new movie caught their attention. If you watch something that much, enough that you can still recite the whole movie, front to back, about two and a half decades later, you wind up taking it all in even as a child. Maybe especially as a child. It was an interesting thought to me, back then, as it was the answer that meerkat, Timon, offered in response to the suggestion that there is, in fact, something you can do when bad things beyond your control happen to you. It was a big thought for a child, but it was something I thought about constantly and so it stuck.
Continue readingPassing Time With TCG Card Shop Simulator
A week ago today (the day you’re reading this and six days after I’m writing this), I stopped resisting my desire to buy any kind of new game to help me get over Dragon Age: The Veilguard and bought a game I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks now. I’d thought to buy it last month, but I was busy with Dragon Age: Inquisition and couldn’t afford any distractions. I was already distracted enough, thanks to being neck-deep in Dragon Age stuff and Veilguard just around the corner, so I let it pass and figured that, by the time I thought of it again, I’d probably be over my incredibly surface-level interest. I mean, I’m not one for simulator games and TCG Card Shop Simulator is just another entry in a long line of incredibly similar-looking games, so why would this one hold my interest in a way that literally none of the others ever have? Other than, you know, being introduced to it by watching two members of Friends at the Table have a great time playing it and it being focused around not only something I have personal experience with (trading card games, which is what TCG stands for) but something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about (game shops). So, last Tuesday, while in a fit of malaise and depression, I bought the game and immediately lost three hours of my life.
Continue readingWhat’s Actually Next Now That I’ve Finished Veilguard
Every so often, I decide to watch something on Twitch. It’s usually Friends at the Table streaming something because, if I’m being honest, I don’t much care for watching one person play a video game. If it’s a group of people, or one person is playing but there’s multiple voices involved, I enjoy it more, but I still don’t generally enjoy watching people play games. Friends at the Table is different, though, because my entire familiarity with them is listening to them play games, so watching them play games feels like a lateral move. Another reason I tend to avoid it is because I’m a sucker for “this looks fun!” type enthusiasm. I will absolutely get suckered into buying a game because I saw someone else enjoying it and then wind up not liking it myself because a large part of the fun was watching the other person play it. If I avoid watching streams of people playing games, then I don’t have to contend with wanting to buy a bunch of indie or smaller-studio games that I will never play (like 90% of my Steam library) or that I just won’t enjoy for longer than I watched the person stream it. The rest of my reason for not watching much streamed stuff is that I generally enjoy playing a game more than watching someone else play it. There are exceptions to this, of course, but it’s still generally true. All of which is largely beside the point because I’ve been watching a little more streamed stuff lately than I usually do and I’ve been thinking about buying some new games to fill an incredibly specific and empty niche in my life right now.
Continue readingSpoiler-Filled Thoughts On Veilguard Right After Beating The Game
In case the title wasn’t clue enough, this post is going to contain spoilers for the end of Dragon Age: The Veilguard pretty much throughout the entire thing. This little preamble paragraph won’t have any (nor will the full game review I’ll be posting next week), but you continuing to read this before bailing out to avoid spoilers is REALLY risking it. You’re playing with fire here. Just head out before I have enough words to make sure no preview of this post contains any kind of reference to the end of the game or my feelings relating to it. Which is pretty much now. You’ve been warned!
Continue readingSpoiler-Free Thoughts On Veilguard Right Before I Beat The Game
I’ve almost finished Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I’ve explored every map, found every chest (well, the ones included in the counts for each map since I’m positive I missed a few of the chests from the special areas you can only access during certain quests), completed all of my companion quests, gotten all of them up to level nine (saving Harding, my Rook’s partner, who is level ten because I take her everywhere with me), and even gotten an hour or so into the final quest. I’m almost finished with my first playthrough, though I suspect I’ll keep playing it through again as the next year passes. There’s a lot I want to explore in the game, still, and while most of the big decisions haven’t felt that consequential yet, I’m interested to see how they all play out anyway. Plus, I still need to romance the other six companions since there isn’t a single one of them that I didn’t fall at least a little in love with during this playthrough. I just, you know, had to stick to Harding in order to fulfil a dream almost a decade in the making (since I couldn’t do more than flirt with her in Inquisition, which was criminal). I’ve been having a lot of fun, even if I do have to admit that I’ve been playing it as much as I have been not because I enjoy it that much (I enjoy it plenty, though, just to be clear), but because I desperately need to escape life right now and don’t really want to leave myself with extra time to think about things. As far as games go, though, I don’t think I’ve played one in a while that drew me in as deeply as this one has.
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