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.
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Wrapping Up Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Spoiler warning for the recently re-released twenty-year-old video game, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. They’re casually sprinkled throughout, so best skip this post if you want to remain unspoiled for some reason.
Continue readingGaining Steam On The Dragon Age Hype Train
Well, I’m back on the hype train again, but at least I know when my stop is this time. Finally, after what feels like along time but is probably only a couple months at most, we have a release date for Dragon Age: The Veilguard: October 31st. Halloween. Which means that, in my little group of enthusiasts, I won the betting pool for when the game would come out (my guess was mid November and no one guessed earlier than I) and now have Bragging Rights I’m never going to use. It also means that it won’t come out for two and a half months, which might BARELY be enough time to play Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and all of the DLC I’ve apparently owned for nearly a decade and never once played. My “book” club has resigned ourselves to putting all our actual books on hold until sometime this winter as we try to blast through all of these games and then the new one in time for what might not wind up being monthly conversations. After all, that two to three hours of talking is time we could be spending on Dragon Age games. It’s going to be tough to do, if I’m completely honest, since I’m not sure I’m going to really enjoy this kind of focused gaming binge. I might wind up streaming again to help me keep up the pace since that helped immensely with getting through Breath of the Wind in just over a month, but that might be more bother than I can muster. The downside to streaming is that it’s difficult to focus on the game itself (a problem I don’t have in BotW) and it is rather demanding to stay that social and verbally active all the time. I’d probably get more game time in a day if I just played by myself.
Continue readingReopening Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Twenty Years Later
Content Warning for discussion of childhood trauma in the context of a retrospective about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There’s also spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in there, too, but not super specific ones.
Continue readingDiving Into Dragon Age: Origins After At Least A Decade
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.
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 readingTaking A Break Between Final Fantasy 7s Remake And Rebirth with Intermission
Over the weekend, taking much longer than I expected, I played through both chapters of the Final Fantasy 7: Remake Intermission. I’m pretty sure I’m missing part of the name, but even after looking it up, it seems confusingly similar to what they’re calling the remake of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core, so I’m just gonna call it “FF7: Remake Intermission” or just “Intermission” for short. Despite my confusion and unwillingness to engage with it deeply enough to deal with the overly complex naming scheme used for parts the remake of Final Fantasy 7 that aren’t a part of the “core” game, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The Fort Condor minigame was a lot of fun, if a bit frustrating at times (I beat the grandmaster, but only be restart spamming so I could get an advantageous start and then getting a bit lucky as the match continued), and seeing the other side of Avalanche was an interesting addition to the world. I got a bit tired of how many references were crammed into the game, partly because it made it very clear that Rebirth was going to have less going on in the periphery than the original game did. Which, you know, makes sense given how much they’ve expanded the part of the original game that they turned into Remake. Games aren’t infinite, even if this one comes on two discs unlike literally any other massive PS5 game I’ve played (though not needing the internet to play this game is a pretty big plus that none of those other games can claim), so it makes sense to trim down some parts of the old game to make room for additions like riding Segways.
Continue readingFinding Logic Where There Is None In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
One of the things that always sticks in my mind about a lot of video games is the often huge difference between the abilities of a character when they’re in a cutscene and when they’re under player control. Compounding this problem is that there’s also sometimes a huge difference in a character’s abilities from one cutscene to another. Take Final Fantasy 7: Remake as an example: Cloud makes some truly impressive leaps, runs up falling debris, easily carries people while moving quickly or jumping, and then, in other cutscenes, he can’t make the small jump from one side of a channel to another (which was maybe ten feet–fifteen, tops). Hell, the dude can’t even pull himself up by his arms half the time while, the other half, he can easily support his own weight, Tifa’s weight, and Barrett’s weight without straining. Then, throw him under player control and suddenly the dude has to move slowly and carefully lest he fall into the “abyss” which is less deep than some jumps I’ve seen him make. Yes, I know the interplay between these moments is to create drama or make Cloud seem particularly heroic or cool or to maintain reasonable pathing in a video game with a lot of environmental detail that was clearly not supposed to be interacted with. But what if it wasn’t? What if there was some indiscernible but otherwise still present and consistent logic beneath it all that governed whether or not Cloud was capable of incredible physical feats from one moment to the next? There isn’t any that I know of, but sometimes I like to approach games that pull these kinds of shenanigans in a completely serious manner, as if every instance of this makes sense, to see if I can find some wild (or mild) explanation that fits what I’ve seen.
Continue readingAerith Keeps Taking The Thoughts Right Out Of My Head In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
There’s spoilers for the early parts of Final Fantasy 7 and pretty much all of Final Fantasy 7: Remake in this post. Just all over the place. The thing is lousy with ’em. Read at your own peril. Or because you’ve already played those games. Or because you don’t care and just want to read. I’m not your boss.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 24
When I started this series as an alternative to writing about how I felt and putting myself in a situation where I was just venting all over my blog in a way that wasn’t particularly constructive, I picked this title because I was frequently tired and sad. Most of the time, I was sad because I was tired and not getting enough rest was (and probably still is) the leading cause of periodic depression in my life. I was only occasionally tired because I was sad, though I sometimes descirbed other emotions that were exhausting me as being sad so I could write one of these blog posts to help me get over them, but the two things were always related. I was tired and sad as a result of something specific causing one or the other (or both) and then the missing one would follow immediately behind. These days, though, as I find myself writing these more frequently again for the first time in quite a while (perhaps, as I’ve begun to suspect, that I was too tired and burned out to be anything but physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted), my tiredness and sadness are entirely disconnected and will not be solved by writing about something I enjoy immensely. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a pretty apt metaphor here, somewhere, and I’m way too tired to see it from where I am right now [editing this, I can see it, but I’m going to let you find it yourself rather than call it out]. Instead of continuing to dig for whatever that is, I’m going to write about building weird contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and the three economies involved in that process. While I’m tempted to make the argument that there are two processes, since things work a bit differently if you’re building something you’ve already made in the past than if you’re putting something together for the first time, it doesn’t really make sense to deal with them separately because you can’t rebuild something if you don’t build it first.
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