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got_quietAnyway, despite the non-existent holiday spirit here I enjoyed my day off. I got some cleaning done, which is always satisfying cause I let things go too long, and am sitting down to catalog the literal box of books I've picked up for literally a buck a piece just recently. Going through them now I'm sort of wondering what past me was thinking, but whatever, it's like a Xmas present to myself. (Past me was thinking, 1 dollar a book!!!)
They're all that cheap because they're really random and obscure non-fiction stuff, plus a few books in Russian because for some reason I decided I'd make a serious attempt at learning Russian, but I'm having fun flipping through them and that's what matters. I got a copy of Dostoyevski's Besy, and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (In Russian), because I'm nothing if not an aspirational book buyer. The chance of me actually siting down to figuring them out is extremely low, but hope springs eternal. I also got a book about "Japanese and the other Altaic" languages. My understanding is that there is some debate still about Japanese's relationship to other world languages, and I don't know how well received this book is, but it's been a topic I've been interested in, so now I have a book on it. All of the books are stuff like that. Do I need a intro textbook on Slovak or Czech? No, but I have them now. The big question is where the hell I'm going to put this stuff. I'm completely out of shelf space and am probably going to just have to build a new shelf soon. There's a few inches of wall left in my room where it would fit. The books are piling up on the floor at this point so it's either that or do a purging. Back when I was moving states ever other year the herd would naturally be culled when I had to decide what was going to fit in my car, but now that I've been in the same place for a decade... Shit's starting to hit critical mass.
About a month ago I picked up the Game Pass deal for one month for a dollar and tried a handful of games through that.
Tried Archvale which is just a dungeon crawler top down with lots of stuff to dodge. When you die you lose your gold but that's the only punishment for failure. Was ok. Then moved on to Forager. Was a resource collecting and tech tree game. There are some janky moments. For example, game overs mean absolutely nothing, because the autosaves are constant, so after getting pounced on by a slime when I went back my old save it put me right where I left off. But it turns out it would have been better if I hadn't known that, because as a game it can get very addictive, and since I "only had a month" to play I ended up have some self control issues and spent a literally day doing nothing but playing it, building up tech trees, etc. So it's kind of a fun game, has some janky moments, but is a little too addictive with its stuff constantly generating etc.
Also played some Boyfriend Dungeon. I figured there was so much hooplah about it, particularly about some stalking character that was disturbing people or something, so I was like, fuck it, lets see how this goes.
I was pretty underwhelmed. Ironically the stalker character was the one I first thought would make a good LI until he almost immediately turned into a cartoonish version of a nice guy, saying dumb shit about the racial supremacy of humans over sword people and shit. At first I thought he might be pretty sinister, cause he does stalk you, and send you weird texts and leave shit at your place, but it's a slightly different situation when you're playing as a guy cause it's like, come on, just let me punch him... IDK that plus the fact that he very quickly becomes the butt of jokes for the other LI routes made me feel like he had no teeth. He very quickly became just a pitiful nuisance.
The other LIs were ok, but they felt kind of self absorbed? All of their story lines had nothing to do with the MC, like you weren't really building much of a relationship with them except for the witch, who's path I did like ok. It felt like the game took that approach where they thought making things too much about the LIs falling for your MC would be unrealistic or be too kindness coiny. They didn't really have routes, except that you could end up in platonic vs romantic endings with them. I ended up accidentally getting a platonic ending with one that I was going for, which kind of sucked. Like... I wanted to fuck the guy lol. And there are no money shot sex scenes. It's all fade to black with a very vague comment about how good everyone is in bed. In one relationship the guy you're with is just like, yeah sorry this isn't going to work and fucks off, and that's the end of his route. Basically as boyfriends they're almost all underwhelming, though I do wish I had actually gotten Seven's romance, not like it would have mattered since I think the only difference is that fade to black and a few dialog differences.
The dungeon running, which is a large part of the game time wise, is also janky and also not particularly well done. You level up to a new date with each weapon by using it in the dungeon. There are some weapons that absolutely felt better than others, because generally the combat is a little unfair but also cheesable. Basically, never turn around, just run in circles, and hit what's in front of you, and you can go very far. In fact I went so far by just spamming regular attack while refusing to ever stop moving forward (you run at the same speed as the other mobs, and can quickly get overwhelmed if you ever hesitate) that I ended up on the first boss clearly well before I was supposed to, because I was doing between 0 and 1 damage to it for every hit. But it was also too simple of a boss for me to lose to, so I spent like 30 minutes chipping away at it until it died, and then instantly gained like 10 levels at once! (the game only levels you up once you die/finish a run for some reason) Ultimately the dungeon was so trivial that I completed all of that content well before I had gotten to the max affection of the swords, meaning in order to continue with their stories I had to either give gifts (which worked fine but only can happen in dungeons) or redo old and now trivial content. That was a little annoying.
The game isn't long so I got to what I guess is the final boss within a couple of sessions. I say I guess because I never beat him. I probably could have, but the game started to glitch very badly for me. Basically, when I started the fight the game warned me that I wouldn't be able to save anymore. Weird thing for a game that only autosaves to say but I figured whatever. Turns out this boss just sort of one hit kills. He's relatively low hp but because I'm chronically underleveled on account of the other dungeons being so easy I was just getting instagibbed a whole bunch. Fine, maybe a different sword will make things a little better I thought, and quit the game to reload before the fight. Only... the game took me back to the beginning of that entire session. As in, three dates and half an hour ago. What the hell?! So I skip the dates because they were for swords I didn't care about anyway and try to get all the many dozens of text messages out of the way before running a dungeon to hopefully trigger the auto save and then quitting, with the idea that this will lock in a save right before I have to kill myself over and over again on a badly tuned boss. But no. When I load in I'm brought again to where I started that day, meaning I'd have to go through a bunch of tedious text shit a third time to try again.
At that point I figured it wasn't worth it. What was going to happen? Would any of the rather lackluster romances suddenly get a boost? Probably not. So I was done.
Ultimately, my takeaway for the whole game is that it tried a little hard to be two different things, both the dungeon spelunker and the dating game, but it didn't really succeed at either of those things. The dungeoning was too superficial, and the dating was too on rails and tied to the not great dungeoning. Even though the game felt like it was trying to get away from the classic dating game romance mechanics, it only really resulted in failing to recognize what's so satisfying about getting the guy in the end. Maybe if I found the LI's more appealing I would feel differently, but as it is I'm glad I didn't pay for the game.
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Date: 2021-12-30 11:40 pm (UTC)Oh that's really good to know! I bounce off a lot of Western dating games which seem too embarrassed to really lean into the romance.
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Date: 2021-12-31 05:22 pm (UTC)