got_quiet

I've been having a hard time finding stuff to get into lately. I'm still chilling with Overwatch and Disco Elysium, but all the stuff I written for both are kind of in the grind to a halt phase. And I'm not actively consuming anything there to keep the juices flowing. Overwatch hasn't put lore out in a billion years and DE is a closed canon, though I still want to finish my political vision quest runs. I'm on the facist one now and having a hard time getting Kim to hate me because I tried to be a non-racist facist and that doesn't quite work.

So I'm poking around looking for something new. I watched the first episode of Loki. It was fine. I'm not really into a Loki without Thor though, and I'm not super into a Loki who is not scheming but just sort of reacting to stuff. I don't know if that will change in the future, but that's what the first episode was and I didn't feel compelled to watch the second.

I tried a couple episodes of Sk8 the Infinity too and it was ridiculous. I say that respectfully, because I do enjoy me some ridiculous stuff, but this particular flavor of ridiculous didn't catch me, and the characters didn't compel me either. The whole skater race combat was just like... not a concept that I could buy into I guess. It kind of sucks because I hear a lot of fic is being writing for that show, but I have never had very good luck at following the horde to the next big thing.

Haikyuu still hasn't updated on Crunchy Roll I guess so I still haven't seen the finals, and Chihayafuru is also on some sort of hiatus, so both those shows are effectively over for me.

I'm still grinding through Octopath Traveler, but that's not a game I'm fannish about at all, so it's not a fic type canon for me.

It's gotten to the point where I think I'm going to be... *gasp* reading one of the bajillions of books sitting around waiting for me to pick them up. I've got to finish The City and the City by the end of next week so I can give it back to my friend, so maybe I'll just try to beast through that. And then I have a couple of BL light novels that I never tried to work through, so maybe I should combine my boredom with my need to study and try for one of those.

I'm about 10 hours in to Octopath Traveler now and it's both good and bad.

The good is pretty much all mechanics. The turn based fighting is decent. So far I haven't hit too many super grindy spots, but according to a lot of reviews it does hit a grind at some point. Basically if I seek out areas that are just hard enough that I scrape by by the skin of my teeth I level up relatively quickly. The bottle neck is starting to be gear I think. And I like how you mix and match 4 out of 8 characters to cover bases or use certain utility abilities well enough. The fights feel relatively fair with preparation. The inventory system isn't to obscene, and so on and so forth.

But the writing so far has been atrocious. It's not just the line by line English translation, which adds the most god awful "accents," possibly the worst I've seen in a game in a very long time (I literally want to just not use the hunter or do her quest because the weird ass not-Middle English shit she had going on actually upset me.) But the broader story is also so far been just one cliche after another, with no emotional heft to anything at all. And it doesn't make much sense either. Exactly how am I supposed to believe that a thief who is all about working alone and whose 15 minute intro is about how he's a lone wolf then turns around and accepts the help of 3 other people after a single conversation? It's incoherent. The greater lore is also non-existent. After ten hours I've gotten no sense of place at all. There's the forest area, the cold mountain area, the plains area, the desert area, and I can't find any real relationship between them. The politics are so shallow that I'm not sure any political relationships exist.

I'm back to playing through the BLM VNs. For some reason I'm determined to get through all of them this year and have made them something of a priority. I'm already about 20% through. It's probably because of all the things I could be doing this is the most inconsequential and useless an endeavor, so it has become my preferred method of trying to avoid all of the shit I actually should be doing.

I've also started playing some Octopath Traveler, which iirc is the last game on the list that I bought with the Christmas money I got from friends and family. I'm not really feeling it. The combat is not bad for a turn-based JRPG but the writing is so far about as generic as you can possibly get. I have the audio set to Japanese and the dialog matches up in only the most perfunctory of ways. I'll try to play to the end or at least until I've got all the characters, but I've yet to be hooked.

I'm also feeling frustration that video game developers seem to release their soundtracks in digital format, and in vinyl, but not on CD, which is my preferred medium. So I need to buy the MP3s and burn the shit if I want the soundtrack, but then I don't get a nice insert or anything like that. I still buy CDs on occasion. I know they've all but disappeared in the mp3 age but I like my physical stuff. I don't usually buy soundtracks through, but for some reason I'm thinking about how nothing you "own" in the cloud is safe and really want to build up a proper collection.

Just what I need, another project. I should probably just stick to stickers.

I'm also going a little nuts because after COVID hit my tabletop group moved to discord instead of meeting in person. And I really struggle with this format. I can't stay at attention for stuff that's just audio, especially when I'm only actively participating maybe 5% of the time. I feel bad because I like the group a lot, but I just go insane during these meetings and have been looking for something to do that doesn't take attention but keeps me from screaming in boredom.

I've been playing VNs from the BLM bundle on itch at a pretty quick pace. In fact I'm playing them faster than I want to post reviews, and after hitting a game that kinda broke my momentum I figured I'd take a break, write up the reviews I have to do left, and play something else. So I started up Disco Elysium. I like it a lot. There's a lot going on and it reminds me of one of the old school CRPGS, except they did away with all of the combat and it's just exploration, skill checks, and problem solving. I always can't help but play a nice and rather law abiding character, but it looks like the game is set up to allow for you to be one crazy ass mother fucker, so maybe I'll try another run as a complete fuck up.

I started the game completely spoiler free and I'm trying to avoid spoilers in this post, but I may write a little more as I go on because it seems like a game where plays can take a lot of different paths, and it would be a fun one to read other people's experience with. The mechanics are great. It's mostly a bunch of reading and poking around the environment. You've got your dialog trees, which are pretty complex, and then you have skill checks. The skill checks are mostly retry-able, with a few exceptions, and the way you can open up a second chance is if you upgrade the skill that is tied to the check. It's an interesting mechanic that encourages you to hold back on leveling up until you hit a point where you feel something needs a boost.

The writing is very good, which is kinda important considering the game is almost nothing but writing. It's depressing and does a great job of making choices difficult because there are no perfect answers. There's also a ton of stuff to poke around about, places to explore, stuff to find and puzzles to solve, and people to talk to. It's funny because I often say I don't like "exploration games" aka games where the majority of the play time is spent walking around a map and finding out how interactions work, but it turns out if that all happens with a plot involved than I'm all for it. All my friends are playing Valheim which looks like a higher def minecraft and is unappealing to me, for example, so while they do that I've been playing Disco Elysium, which is more my speed.

And the characters are great. I finished the game a couple of days ago and want more of the characters so now I'm binging on the fic. My only complaint with the fic I've been reading so far is that it all kinda focuses on Harry recovering from all of his substance abuse and really trying hard to be a nice and kind person and all that, but even when you play as someone trying to do the best you are kind of a mess, and I'm hankering for a fic where Harry is still a human disaster at some level, not suddenly a saint. Not that I'm not enjoying what's been written, but I can see the woobie creep going on lol.

IDK, there's a lot I want to say about the game because there's a lot I like about it, but I'm sure it's all been said before and it's all pretty spoilerific. I do wish there were more RPGs out there that took the Disco Elysium route, and that were so daring with their style, approach, and integration of mechanics with play. In that way I kind of see similarities with Super Giant games. All the stats kind of find a canonical expression. But there's a lot of fic out there that seems to think that Harry consciously thinks of them as "skills" and I don't know if that's canonical. I'm not a huge fan of fic that drags game mechanics into fiction. Having the format of the fiction ape the game is one thing, bringing attention to mechanics within the narrative is another. I'm also struggling to find spicy porn fic. Feelings and slow burn are great but I want to read about Harry on his knees giving Kim the best blowjob of his life.

This would have been a fun game to liveblog or something, but I can't be assed to go through that much trouble, lol. (Also I started writing this before I finished the game and finished writing it after so it's an incohesive mess of a post but at this point I am wiping my hands of it.)
 

I've been feeling sick (not plague sick) and my brain is mush so I figured I'd do something brainless and play Dragon Age:Inquisition again for the first time since 2016. It was kind of just what I needed and also kinda frustrating because it was brainless, which is what I was going for, but it's also brainless, which is a disappointing thing for a game to be. The writing is still good and I still like all the companions (yes, all of them), but actually playing the game again is reminding me of all the issues with the core mechanics and game philosophy that make it kind of unfun for me to actually play. Convoluted crafting and large paper doll management systems, having to pause the story to do busy work quests, combat that is too janky and disorganized for the live combat to feel good but doesn't work as a turn/pause model either, more time spent trying to find stuff than doing stuff, and so on and so forth. As a game that you play for the first time the exploration involved tempers some of these issues, but I am not a huge fan of open world games to begin with, and an open world that I already know has nothing for me at all. It feels like so much of the game is a waste of my time.

I usually like to play sword and board but I went with bows this time. At first I tried playing with a few of the "challenge modes," but then I realized that they were meaningless, and seemed to only make combat more scuffed, so I turned them off and am just easy moding throuh the game. I challenged myself last time and all that really does in this game is make you spend a shit ton of time micromanaging dumb AI and chipping away at unreasonable health pools. So I crafted a very good bow and am just one shotting everything. It's not engaging but that's what I was looking for.

To give a demonstration of how far gone my brain is right now, I was running around the Hinterlands and I saw this massive arrow on the map that looked different from every other marker. What the fuck is this? I thought to myself, and went to it and entered the tavern it pointed to. Oh right, that's Dorian's personal quest, and I forgot to tell Dorian about the letter, so I ended up ambushing him with his father by complete accident. I hadn't saved for quite a while so I just accepted it.

On top of wanting to play something that didn't ask me to do any thinking whatsoever, I also started playing because I wanted to play through Dorian's romance again. Cause I'm in a bad mood and wanted something nice. I don't know if I'm going to go through the whole thing though. It doesn't feel as good this time. I don't know if I screwed something up or what but even the romance part feels a little janky this time. I think I flirted twice and then got three cut scenes in a row that ended in a kiss. Oh well.

 Oh, and I forgot to mention, I HATE the mage recruitment quest. I know people talk about how much they hate the fade and Orzammar in the first game but if it weren't for Dorian I'd never do that damn quest again.