Today sucked. It sucked for a lot of reasons. It started bad, didn’t get any better, and left me feeling like a defeated piece of shit by the time I had the free time to start writing this (aka, take breaks at work). Rather than write about that (I need time to process), I’m going to talk instead about starting to replay The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at sixty frames per second on a 4k TV. You see, I got a Switch 2 and a brand new TV, so of course the first thing I did when I got both those things set up (in a burst of nearly-manic energy on Sunday evening at 11pm) was plop in my BotW cartridge and load up the SECOND save file that the expanded Switch 2 version of the game gets you so I could start a new Master Mode playthrough. I was prepared to buy the expansions since I figured the at least 600 hours (632, precisely, according to the stats part of the new Zelda Notes acitivty in the Nintendo Online app) I have in justified spending another ten dollars, easily, but I apparently get it for free thanks to having a Nintendo Online + subscription (for those sweet, sweet N64 games, of course). I did have to wait a surprisingly long time for the game to update, but I was able to use that time to delete a number of games that were in the download queue that I had little to no intention of playing anytime soon, so it wasn’t entirely wasted time. Still, it felt weird that the download took so long (though I guess it was making some pretty major display changes) and the weirdness didn’t stop there.
Continue readingVideo Gaming
Switch 2 Ownership Is Already Changing Me And I Haven’t Even Unboxed It Yet
I got my Switch 2 yesterday. It was delivered a day ahead of the earliest I thought I could get it (even with paying a small amount extra for expadited shipping), which caused me to scramble to make sure that there’d be someone around to receive the package since the scheduled delivery time overlapped with a physical therapy appointment I couldn’t skip. I didn’t want it sitting out on the stoop where someone might spot it, recognize it as possibly containing a Switch 2, and decide to break their streak of not stealing packages for this one special occasion. It turns out I needn’t have worried. Not only did the UPS driver have the ability to bring it inside, they brought it right to my apartment door, tucking it out of general visibility around the little corner hiding my door from the view of anyone but my across-the-hall neighbor. They also didn’t buzz or knock or anything, so I only knew it happened because I heard a jingle of keys followed by the gentle metal-on-metal clatter of my door jiggling in place. I wasn’t quick enough to thank this delivery person for going the extra mile, but I appreciated their consideration all the same. Especially because of how conspicously inconspicuous the package was. Every possible gap into the box was covered in enormous tape that screamed the phrase “ELECTRONICALLY VERIFIED DELIVERY” or something like that in massive block letters over and over again. The box itself was a non-descript brown cardboard number that was perhaps four or five times as big as it needed to be and the shipping label even avoided any mention of Nintendo save for the incredibly non-specific “NOA” at the head of the return address. Clearly, keeping the package discrete had been a part of their shipping plans for the console, which I appreciated.
Continue reading“What Does It Mean To Be A Hero?”: The Converging Throughline Of Final Fantasy 14
This post is going to contain some pretty major spoilers for every part of Final Fantasy 14 up through the start of Endwalker because I can’t talk about Shadowbringers in any degree of specificity without talking about everything that led up to some of my favorite moments. So! There will be spoilers in pretty much every paragraph, both vague and incredibly specific, so many skip this one if you’re going to play the game (see this post if you’re on the fence) and hate spoilers.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14’s Shadowbringers Expansion Brings The Storytelling To A Whole New Level
It took exactly five months, from January 1st until June 1st, but I finally cleared all of Shadowbringers. This is notable since that particular expansion seems to be widely regarded as Final Fantasy 14 at it’s best and is the first bit of game content you can’t access with a free account, almost like they know they’re sitting on gold and want you to have to pay for it. Which is fair, in my opinion. I couldn’t possibly blame them for it, but then I bought the full game the instant I hit the 3.0 expansion so I could fully invest in all the parts of the game I’d been denied up to that point, so I’m clearly not someone who is going to suggest it might be unfair for game developers to get paid for the great work they’ve done. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the storytelling being done by Final Fantasy 14 and how it reaches what might be it’s pinnacle in Shadowbringers and the related patch content. After all, this expansion represents a moment years in the making, tying things together that have been dangling since the early parts of A Realm Reborn. There is clearly more to come, more that is being built towards and more surprises to catch me off-guard, but that stuff all feels like the final book in a series, meant to wrap up the throughline story while Shadowbringers is the penultimate novel that brings it all together and points it at the finish line so the last book can wrap it all up. It’s an impressive bit of work and while I’ve positively crammed my days with FF14 in order to get to this point in five months, it makes it that much easier to notice everything that has been brought together.
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 readingMeasuring Progress In Final Fantasy XIV
It might not be a Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean I can’t write about Final Fantasy 14! Not that I’ve got a lot to report, to be honest. I mean, I finished the base portion of the Shadowbringers expansion a couple weeks ago and spent, like, two hours a night for three nights in a row crying (good) on and off as so much great storytelling happened. I don’t know how to write about that, yet, since I’m just starting the patch content for Shadowbringers and have quite a bit of stuff left before the whole thing wraps up [I’ve finished most of it now, as of the day this posted, and am ready to talk about it all]. Not that I think it needs more storytelling to properly stand, just that I want to be able to fully couch it in all of the context the full expansion will give me when I write about it (like I did with all the other expansions). I just have been taking longer to get back to it because of the brain fog and being under the weather. I don’t want to play through this important, impactful expansion at a time when my brain isn’t working terribly well. It would be a shame to forget anything. Instead, in the time since I wrapped it up, I’ve turned my attention toward some of the other measures of progress I’ve been ignoring while I sped through the Main Scenario Quests. I’ve done a bunch of leveling of some of my classes, started working on some personal market projects to augment my income, leveled some crafting jobs, worked on some weeklies, and tried to get more invested in the roleplaying side of things. Which means I’ve made a lot of progress taken as a whole, but not a huge amount on any individual metric.
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 readingStarting Up Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic Alongside AMCA
As I mentioned recently, A More Civlized Age has pivoted to covering Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 in order to remain compliant with the BDS movement in a way that aligns with their morals and ethics as a group. Which means this is the first video game I’m going to play for more than a few hours since I started playing Final Fantasy 14 back at the start of the year (literally January 1st). Furthermore, the group has released their mod list (which seems to have been put together by Austin Walker, the only person in the crew to have previously played this game), so I’ll also be spending a decent amount of time (an hour or two at most, I’m sure), setting up my own mods. While their coverage of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a lot of fun to listen to, AMCA has mentioned that multiple people in their fan/Patreon community had a difficult time following along with the podcast if they weren’t playing the game. Which makes sense. While they cover a lot of the details of the game, lacking the accompanying visuals and all of the pieces that go between what they directly mentioned in the podcast would make it difficult to really get a sense of the game being played. This time around, Austin is playing ahead to hopefully steer the group toward a better structure for the show as a whole by figuring out where good stopping points are via his own play rather than trying to guess at them based on his recollections of having played the games in the past (which didn’t work out the best in their KotOR coverage for a lot of reasons but I bet that some of the planets being of very different lengths and levels of involvement didn’t help much). Additionally, Austin’s also recording his playthroughs and posting an edited version of them as a let’s play, skipping over the boring or repetitive bits (or the bits where he looks stuff up for six minutes), which he’s posting to their YouTube channel the week before each new episode releases. Between these two changes, I think AMCA should have the game pretty well covered even for their listeners who haven’t already played it or aren’t currently replaying it in parallel.
Continue readingAfter Four And A Half Months, I’m Finally Ready To Recommend Final Fantasy 14 (With Caveats!)
At this point in time (Monday the 12th of May, 2025), as I near the end of the base portion of the Shadowbringers expansion after four and a half months of playing Final Fantasy 14, I am hesistant to recommend it. You might think that odd, considering that I’ve written about the game more-or-less weekly for the entire time I’ve been playing it. Who would spend this much time on a game they didn’t like enough to recommend? Who would still be playing this game, with it’s monthly costs and life-dominating time requirements, if they’re not having a good enough time to recommend it to everyone they know? I can’t blame you for thinking that. I’ve been chewing that exact question over in my head pretty much constantly since I realized that I’ve passed the 750 hour mark with this game. How come I’m not telling everyone I know to play this game? For a long time, whenever the question of whether or not I’d recommend the game would come up, I satisfied myself with that answer that it was because I knew how much of my time this game was consuming. “I could not, in good conscience, recommend something that might take over a thousand hours of someone’s life just to mostly catch up to the modern content” is about the shape of that thought, more or less, that I’ve kicked up again and again whenever I’ve gone looking for why I’m not trying to involve all my video game friends in the game I’ve easily spend the most hours playing (thus far in my life, at least). But, as I’ve gotten further into the story and grown to appreciate it more and more–grown to love the game as a whole more and more–that answer has continued to ring hollow in a way I can’t continue to ignore.
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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