I am in Disco Elysium Hellllll right now. My brain has finally come to a concrete decision. Yes, we will be fixated on this shit for as long as it takes to burn out, which in my experience lasts as long as there is a fandom still active so fuck me I'm not getting any rest for at minimum a few months. The good news is I've already burned through like 90% of the fic and all the video and written meta that I can find and am starting to hit redundancies, so that's good. But the bad news is that I have found a fan discord and the discussion there is fascinating and makes burrowing through the lore and picking apart all the possible interactions in the game that much easier, so here I am on play through 3 going at a snails pace because I am now stopping to edit the wiki every time Encyclopedia says something.
The only other thing that half has my attention right now is Chihayafuru. I'm still sneaking episodes of that in once a week or so, and am mid way through season three. I'm enjoying it a ton and love Chihaya so much! And I'm too invested in the love triangle. I know it's impossible but god damn they would make such a good threesome. There's no way in hell Taichi hasn't had the occasional ~complicated feeling about Arata.
I may have a chance to short circuit my compulsion for Disco with a new/old compulsion in a couple of weeks because the Overwatch League is about to start its fourth season, and I have watched something like 80% percent of every season since one, which is a fuck ton of games, and since the number of games this season is fewer and the season shorter there's a good chance I can get to them all. That's a lot of time out of the day let me tell you, and it allows for no other idleness. With the changes made in the off season I feel like even the Shock aren't a sure thing right now. I'm still riding on the Guanzhou train, but I have no idea what to expect from them. Honestly, I'm just pleasantly surprised that the league has lasted this long. When season one started I told myself I'd get what enjoyment I could out of it until it flopped in maybe three years, and here we are, year four!
Until the League starts I am sitting here stewing in the desire to immerse myself completely in all that is Disco. I've been writing but according to my track record I might get one fic out in one year and it will be pretty milquetoast. I'm not sure why the end result of what I write is always like that, when my tastes can get pretty extreme. Fear of exposure maybe.
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.)
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timeasmymeasure
