I was going to write about the state of the world, but I got a paragraph in and my anxiety was so high I had to sit and breath and ground myself for ten minutes to stave off a panic attack (it’s difficult handle anxiety when you’re sleep-deprived and the world’s this messed up). So, instead, I figured I might write about The Legend of Zelda again, for the first time in a while. Eight months, almost, which feels pretty significant. Not that I haven’t been tired and sad since then, just that I haven’t needed to write about The Legend of Zelda about it. Anyway, I saw this video on YouTube that proposed to talk about mysterious, forgotten, or unused areas in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which seemed like a really cool idea to me. I love those little strange zones you can sometimes fine where there seems like there should be something and there isn’t for some unknown reason. Unfortunately, this video wasn’t about any of those areas and instead was about various features on the map that were not utilized in-game by any mechanics or quests. Or just were different in Tears of the Kingdom in ways that didn’t make surface level sense. It was a real let-down since the first thing the video showed is literally just good level design. There’s some “unused floors” in the ruined Temple of Time in both games, but they’re literally there so starting out players have places to stop if they decide to climb the inside of the temple instead of outside it, a thing that becomes readily apparent if you look around them at all in any way other than the carefully selected angles the video recorded. So I’m going to talk about some areas that aren’t secret or mysterious but are purposely left empty because the point of the game and its space wasn’t to have something under each rock and tucked into each corner but to build a world rich in potential for storytelling if you just spent enough time on it.
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Pokémon Legends: ZA Was A Lot Of Fun, If Not Anything Terribly New
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 readingPokémon Legends: Z-A Really Has It All
I started playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A over the weekend. I made a file sometime last Friday and wound up turning to the game for entertainment as I clicked through a bunch of crafting macros in Final Fantasy 14. So far, it’s been a lot of fun! There was quite a bit of preamble and introduction as seems to be the case in the more recent Pokémon games, but the only restrictions on me where invisible barriers to prevent me from entirely wandering off while I was still going through the tutorial and early missions. Once those opened up, though, I was able to roam as far and as wide as I liked, taking on side quests, catching Pokémon, blowing all of my money on clothing, earning more money by battling at night, and then blowing even more money on yet more clothing items. It has been quite a rewarding experience, so far, and it’s been fun and engaging enough that I’m only sticking with my nightly forays into Final Fantasy 14 because I’m good at making myself do my chores (and I have a LOT of those to do in the next couple weeks yet). This is the kind of game I could lose myself in for a few weeks to a month, if I could tear myself away from FF14 long enough, and I might yet do that while I’m on my trip to visit people over the holidays (I am writing this before the trip and it was published after the trip, so I’m in a bit of a weird place vis-a-vis timing). I think it will help balance out my Final Fantasy 14 time a bit, though, even if I don’t entirely lose myself to it, so maybe I can start building a more healthy variety of activities. I have so much I still want to play, even beyond Pokémon Legends: Z-A.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy Tactics Isn’t Bad, But I Keep Forgetting It Exists
A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I’d bought it for something to play during my 2-week break from Final Fantasy 14 and while it certainly kept me occupied, it didn’t really hook me. I don’t have the nostalgic tie to it that many other people do and have to admit that it left me feeling a little underwhelmed even after applying a correction to the expectations set by all those people for whom this game was a significant part of their youth. So many people spoke about the impressive story, about some of the subversive lines, and the way the game supposedly flips the bird to authority in a way that was supposedly unheard of in games at the time. I just don’t see it. The writing isn’t bad, of course, but it’s still pretty normal. It’s on the positive side of neutral for a video game, but I think my penchant for reading a lot has worked against the idea that this is excellent, unheard-of writing even for when it originally came out in the late 90s. I mean, there was a lot of subversive media in the 90s, depending on what you consider subversive, and the idea of fighting authority or turning against family in the name of justice is a classic trope in heroic storytelling. I know I was probably just oversold on it to the degree that it has warped even my ability to dial back my expectations, but I have to say that I’m just not hooked by the story in the way so many of my contemparies seem to be. The gameplay is pretty good, though, so it’s not like I’m having a bad time. I am just having trouble sticking to it.
Continue readingKirby and the Fogotten Land + Star-Crossed World Was Short But A Lot Of Fun
I played through the Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 expansion/DLC finally. I thought I’d get it right around my birthday at the end of August, when it came out, and play it immediately, but I was super hooked on Final Fantasy 14 stuff then and had my friends over, so I didn’t really need something to do at the time. Now, though, as I’ve been taking a break from FF14, that made it into the number two spot on my list, right after beating Donkey Kong Bananza. It took a couple nights, maybe five to seven hours total, to get through all of the expansion and find out what was contained within that Star-Crossed World, but I had a fun time doing it. I was incredibly out of touch with the game and it took a few attempts to really get back into the swing of it since I’d forgotten how most of the power-up systems and abilities worked, but I quickly figured it out again. It also helped that one of the abilities is basically the most powerful one you can get and while the utility of the other abilities might make them more useful in the right circumstances, about ninety percent of the expansion involved me using the Morph Sword power. I did look into upgrading it, once I remembered how all the currencies worked, but it didn’t really need an upgrade and the only way to get some of those special currencies is to run the boss rush type tournament things again and again and that’s not exactly my idea of a fun time. Especially because I’m still pretty rusty at the game, even after beating the expansion, and would struggle to take on some of the more difficult fights I did back when I was at the height of my power towards the end of the core content.
Continue readingDonkey Kong Bananza Has A Lot Of Post-Game Appeal
I do not think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve been faked out about the actual end of the game as many times as Donkey Kong Banaza has done to me. There was the ending the game told me was coming from the very beginning, there was the ending I expected from not long after the start of the game, there was the ending after that which I didn’t really expect but thought was kind of fun, there was the ending immediately after that which was exciting and a little over-the-top (in a fun way that very much fit with the game up to that point) and now there’s a new ending I’ve yet to reach that might just be setup for the DLC? I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell what this ending might be other than a pretense in order to let you continue playing the game [this is exactly what it was]. I don’t really know. I’ve got more game left to play, after all, and the story for this part is thinner than ever so I can’t really guess at anything beyond the clearly stated reason everything is continuing to happen. It’s a wild, silly experience that hasn’t damped my fun at any point. The entire series of sequential endings was a joy. The only downside to all that was how much more time I spent playing the game before I finally went to bed. I did expect to be done with the game after a single night, though, so now I’ve clearly got at least a couple more nights of it to go yet. Then I can do the Kirby DLC and, after that, finally start Final Fantasy Tactics. Or whatever other game has come out that feels more urgent.
Continue readingSome Pokémon News And Updates To Pokémon Olds
There was a Pokémon Dirtect last week Wednesday (or the day I started writing this post). It covered a bunch of stuff, as the Direct series of videos are wont to do, but most of it was not of particular interest to me. I’m sure that the news about the TCG games, introduction of some new lifestyle gamification applications, and updates to existing lifestyle gamification apps were very interesting to the people who enjoy those things, but Pokémon Sleep (as a representation of the gamification of sleep) still kinda skeeves me out and I’m not particularly interested in finding new ways to give the Pokémon Company more and more data about me and my life. I could probably write a blog post about the upcoming Pokémon Legends: A-Z and how that looks interesting, but I’m not excited enough by it to really write all that much about it. I will say that it is interesting to see how the Legends series is growing and that my initial suspicion, that Legends Arceus was an early release of the tech they were developing for the games that eventually became Scarlet and Violet, was essentially correct as we see it finally come to it’s full fruition in the demos we saw of Legends A-Z. We probably would have gotten to that point with Scarlet and Violet if the Switch had better hardware, but it did not and now new Pokémon games will have the strength of the Switch 2’s hardware behind them. As will Scarlet and Violet, apparently.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 35
This episode, the latest in the “I’m Tired And Sad” series, is brought to you by escitalopram and it’s horrible withdrawal symptoms! Everything I do is exhausting and I now know what it is like for your brain to skip a beat the same way your heart can, so I’m going to take it easy today and talk about one of the first video game accomplishments I ever felt proud of: getting to 1000 hits in Orca’s Sword Training without ever once using my shield, no forward jump attacks, and only dodging via the counterattack system or, as my friends and I called it, “Sword Master Mode.” Prior to the game’s release, I didn’t have a lot of local friends since all the kids my age had moved away with their families some years prior, but when a kid moved in down the block who was my age and shared my interest in video games, I started to actually feel competitive about video games and my accomplishments. Before then, I’d only ever played against my siblings with any regularity and I was hopelessly worse than my brother at everything and untouchably better than my younger siblings at everything, so there was no real competition for me to engage in. This new friend was at my skill level (largely determined by our age and coordination) and I got my first taste of competitive gaming. I didn’t much appreciate it, though, since it didn’t really feel fun to win and always felt bad to lose and have other people so visibily (and often vocally) enjoy having beaten me. When the latest Legend of Zelda game dropped, though, it gave me something I could compete in that actually provided me with something when I did well (a sense of personal accomplishment) and avoided the whole competitive nastiness thing I dislike so much about directly competitive gaming.
Continue readingI Won A Chance To Buy A Switch 2 Via Nintendo Online
Amidst everything going on, I appear to have won the small lottery that is “getting the opportunity to buy a Switch 2 via my Nintendo Online account.” I’ll admit that I completely forgot that I’d signed up to particpate way back when they announced that it would be a thing, mostly because I saw the requirements for eligibility and I’m not eligible according to them. I don’t share any of my data with Nintendo, I don’t get advertisements or emails, and there is nothing in existence that would convince me to willingly give a company my data in exchange for a chance to pay that company for a product I’m only interested in purchasing if it doesn’t inconvenience me. When I realized that those were required, I put it out of my mind and resigned myself to taking a lackluster stab at ordering one from a retailer online, which I forgot about until it was too late at night to bother with that. Which really goes to show how unexcited I was for the Switch 2. Still, when I got the email telling me that I could now purchase one (within a seventy-two hour window) and verified that this was not some attempt at hacking my Nintendo Online account (which it could still be since my only way to verify that this was correct was looking for other people getting emails from that same address and this could just be a giant campaign meant to steal the credit card and account information of a lot of Nintendo Online users that has fooled tons of people), I decided to wait a bit to actually buy it.
Continue readingA Mishmash of Gender Thoughts And Reflections On Pokémon Games
I started replaying Pokémon SoulSilver recently as my pre-bedtime wind-down video game. I can’t explain where the hankering came for, but I really wanted to enjoy the simplicity of an older Pokémon game and so turned toward one of my favorite entries in the series. It’s old enough that I can play it on my 3DS, new enough to have a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to the series, and is from a period in my life where I could just enjoy things without being aware of what the larger world thought about them, so I’ve got no difficult feelings or frustrations to ignore while I’m trying to calm down for sleep. As I booted it up, deleted my old save file, and started a new one, I discovered quickly why it had been so long since I played a Pokémon game. I was prompted pretty much immediately to identify as a boy or a girl and that little bit of text reminded me immediately of the complicated feelings around gender in Pokémon games that I developed while playing the latest mainline entry, Scarlet/Violet. Feelings that I might have only started to properly examine in the more recent years of my life but that had been foundational and important to me as I grew up in ways that I’m still figuring out. Feelings that developed as the Pokémon franchise developed depictions of gender via it’s ability to actually present characters and Pokémon that looked different. A thing that existed in the first game as only symbols in the name/nickname entry field, symbols on the Nidoran names to tell you which one you got, and as an abstract concept which, for a long time, my childhood brain literally only understand via hair length because that was how my parents and all the media I had access to explained it: boys had short hair and girls had long hair.
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