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What I've Seen Recently: Early June - Mid July, 2023
i hope everyone is staying cool...! let's talk about some cool things!
video games
i've been trying to clear out my steam backlog a little bit, picking up games i haven't touched in like... shit, more than five years? well at least one of them hasn't been touched in that long:
- i have been playing and finally fully completed papers please. a lot of very smart people have written a lot of very smart words about this game and it's very easy for me to say i agree with all of them. the punishing drudgery of the puzzle work of the game, the oppressive atmosphere and art style, the way certain randomly generated NPCs react to you pressing them on their information that doesn't match up... it's powerful. and even though i said a lot of smart people have said smart words i... still have a lot of stuff to talk about with it because it's just that damn good of a game!
this is strange to comment on as i'm not a very Hardcore Gamer but i actually feel as though it was too easy in some places lol. when you take into account the tone of everything else it feels a bit odd you could infinitely reload if you got more than 2 citations a day to avoid the credit penalty which i HEAVILY abused to make sure i had at least a little credit landing pad. and like when i figured out the ministry official was such a joyless cockhole he didn't even want my son's art hanging on the wall (which btw fuck you buddy) i could just... reload and hang it on the wall when he came after lol. it doesn't feel very deliberate, kinda drew me out of the game a little.
journalists in this game are extreme assholes for whatever reason too, which i find kiiinda frustrating. conditions seem to suck everywhere my dude quit being so snide to me. i let them in anyway at any time regardless of their papers (and took a couple of citation Ls for it) because freedom of the press is one of my longstanding principles but... eh. i dunno. i feel like uniformly making the journalists aggressive, snooty dickheads was a misstep, especially journalists traveling to a totalitarian state. i really don't want to be all #NotAllJournalists but... idk. #NotAllJournalistsNotEvenMostJournalists.
in general my first run i tried to be everything "good" at once and i think my experienced suffered a bit because i was too focused on being a Gamer about it lol rip. like i hardcore minmaxed skipping on heat and food about as long as i could get away with for zero penalty so i could keep all my family members alive, i got 5 out of 7 tokens somehow, i adopted my niece, i joined the terrorist cell because i genuinely believed at first they were trying to do good although i did start to get a little bit sus of them at like... day 24 (and i didn't kill the man in red either because one of the agents said he was Good, Actually), and ultimately i saved all the family members and ran off to obristan which to me is probably the best ending you could ask for in this kind of regime. i also avoided taking bribes as much as i could, kept married couples together as much as i could, and tried not to detain anyone other than a whole ass criminal. that's a personal failing though not really a commentary on the game itself. i know it's an artsy-fartsy game so i shouldn't approach it in a I Have To Win sense yet i still did... not very critical reader of me.
also oh this is not a good look for me but it's a funny as fuck story: i legitimately did not notice the scale near where the rulebook was until day 29. i failed every smuggler check because of this; i tried comparing their weight to their picture and got "no correlation" every time and was like "HOW DID YOU CATCH THIS". i was SO frustrated and googling any combination of it did not help me until i stumbled upon some wikia comments, lmfao. they must have tutorialized it somehow but i just... either did not retain that information or missed that tutorial somehow. i'm a good gamer. i need to go back and get some other endings now, but i've put it on hold for a little bit.
the CWs for this game are generally well known but i'll list them for my own... peace of mind? i guess is the word here. content warnings: totalitarian/dystopian setting, guns, terrorism (both foreign and domestic), systemic racism of a sort. it's just a really bleak, heavy for a video game work. i do definitely think it's worth experiencing though if you think you can handle it. i mean i wrote about a thousand words about it i think you can say it's pretty good.
--
- i started playing the legend of zelda: breath of the wild for realsies recently! just like my above ramble about papers please, this may surprise you to learn, but it's a pretty good video game! yes i am the arbiter of all things that are good (and bad)!
i'm not very far in the game though, so please don't spoil anything for me if you happen to come across this or comment on this part specifically. well i mean it's kinda hard to spoil a zelda game and i already know the most important detail of link sucking and fucking sidon every second of every hour. there's a lot of stuff i don't know though and i liked the surprise of it! oh my god there have been so many enemies that caught me off guard. TREASURE CHEST OCTOROK? MY BRETHEREN IN HYLIA THAT IS NOT FAIR. also i climbed onto a pile of rocks and it turned into a giant golem and i said "ohJESUSCHRIST" so loud i scared my mother. also lizalfos can fucking swim now? i don't remember them being able to do that!! (says the woman who's last zelda game played to completion at all was the minish cap...)
oh, and purah! somehow i got the impression she had an edna incredibles "NO CAPES" style anal personality i wouldn't be a huge fan of... but she's so cheerful and darling, i loved her excited SNAP! when she fixed the slate and she was like "oh you can totally read my diary idc THAT much even if i hope you don't read the cringe pages"... it's adorable. link has a surprising amount of personality too. i didn't know that when you eat mystery/gross food he braces himself for the taste and then is like "oh this isn't that bad actually" haha. and the surprised little whiff he does when you fail to pull out a weapon! what a charmer!
speaking of i thought i would really hate the weapon breaking system, but i have deemed it... Okay. it helps that you can't go five seconds without tripping over a rusty piece of shit or a tree branch or something so you're never TRULY unarmed... but i would have been perfectly satisfied if the game didn't have it tbh, it's not make or break. what has really surprised me though is the shrines or i guess lack of them? i really expected to be inundated with them, but i have found exactly nine (i know this because i have 1 stamina upgrade and 1 heart container upgrade and i "found" another one right at the end of my playthrough). even with the radar... the way people talked about it i thought i couldn't go five feet without stubbing my toe on them. i might just be stupid though.
edit before i post this: i've now found about 24 so i have a sizable health and stamina bar for where i am in the game (about to venture into vah ruta), but i still don't feel like i'm finding a ton of them. i almost wonder if i'm being too skittish about going other places? in general i just unlock the tower and leave. mainly because i get tired of walking every where... you are probably reading this and thinking "you are far enough in the game to have a horse" yeah well i hate riding horses in this game LMFAO. i think the mechanic of getting a horse is neat but actually riding them is kinda tedious and annoying. i would rather have a horse that drives like a car than a horse i'm ngl.
i've discussed before how i'm primarily a sword girl, but spears in this game are so fun to use, i definitely have a bias towards them. i'm actually kinda disappointed when i pick up a short sword right now haha to say nothing of the audible UGH when i finally pick up a claymore. enemies in the early game just do so much damage i like doing 3-5 tiny hits then running away a little bit instead of overwhelming them with pure strength. i just got a guardian spear and i'm SO excited i'm going to hold onto that thing like it's precious gold. it will never break (until i can farm them out or something). that does bring to mind 2 questions though: 1. is there a weapon crafting system? and 2. does the master sword break... worry...
i know all i'm talking about is the weapons system lmao but i'm not far enough yet to really mention anything else. when i am i will, prommy. i can't imagine actually beating the game the next time i post one of these (unless i take another five month break i guess.)
mobile games
- i got the second ending to arknights' is3! i was kinda surprised at how easy it was to unlock. that or my teams got a lot stronger from when i started playing is2... mm, well, not necessarily now that i sit and think about it some more, because i also thought the second boss was totally underwhelming for other reasons too. is2's default boss is one of your beloved companions, a character who you yourself might have used a lot depending on your playstyle, brainwashed and tormented by things he did when he was a naive child and you have to save him and while this is cool and makes me go "oof" he's ultimately just a guy lol. is2's second boss on the other hand is a oversized teddy bear thing that you HAVE to debuff before you even enter the goddamn fight otherwise it instantly heals itself over and over animated by a fallen member of the troupe who begs for death. it's absolutely intimidatingly massive, canonically has the most hp of any enemy in the entire game, and the first time you see it you feel its size. especially if you were like me and had never seen bishop whatshisdick from under tides before encountering big sad lock. (i was baby then okay.)
contrast that with is3's bosses. the default boss is a floating furry jellyfish cthulhu monstrosity that used to be one of your companions. even looking at it makes your operators slow down in disgust. the title of the stage is curse of cognition, as if being alive at all is unbearable to her. the first time i fought it was quite a struggle... although not so much anymore now that i know how strong texalter is lmao. well that's not really the point, the point is the it's more of a monster than a man, same as is2's second boss. contrast that with is3's second boss the last knight and hero thought previously lost to time, hellbent on destroying the thing rotting him from the inside out... but while this is cool and makes me go "oof", it's ultimately just a guy who walks in a straight fucking line to the objective point lmao. see what i mean? i almost feel like the first boss and the second boss should be swapped.
the new (new) event is fun though! arknights introduced invisibility pretty early on and then didn't do much with it imo... i like that there are several different ways you can lose visibility, whether that's through enemy's attacks or environmental hazards like fire and stuff. playing around the marshes (which slow your attack speed) is also kinda fun in a masochistic way. definitely feels like the map is a lot more limited... kinda dreading the ex stages in this event.
figures
am i allowed to talk about figures here. i mean i guess it is my life journal. ANYWAY YUNO GASAI POP UP PARADE WAS ANNOUNCED!!! A BIG WIN FOR THE OTP ETC ETC
i think anyone who has ever spent five minutes around me has known i have mixed to negative views about yuno. being the yandere everyone knows means overexposure is killer and even back when i truly liked her the "jack of all trades master of none" approach kinda... makes wavy back and forth hand motion. yuno's at her best when she's just straight up killing people or planning on killing people, it's why everyone remembers the scene where she decapitates twelfth and not the one where she has yukki piss in a bottle (seriously what is it with yanderes and pee...); the parts of the story where she's NOT doing that are somewhat ironically the parts where the story is the weakest. however, i still have a soft spot for esuno's work, and this is gonna be the only esuno-series figure to ever exist, so i will own it. god this entire paragraph has dick all to do with figures how do i still have this much to say about mirai nikki in 2023
looking at it again though her face plate is kinda weird... looks like they used her design from the happy end OVAs whatever they were called for the face plate. it'll probably look better in color though so i'm not too worried. there's a chance it could come out like that ugly as sin zero two figure, but well... ugly as sin isn't new for esuno sakae fans LMFAO.
oh my god this post is so long. LOOK FORWARD TO MORE INSANELY LONG POSTS LIKE THIS
video games
i've been trying to clear out my steam backlog a little bit, picking up games i haven't touched in like... shit, more than five years? well at least one of them hasn't been touched in that long:
- i have been playing and finally fully completed papers please. a lot of very smart people have written a lot of very smart words about this game and it's very easy for me to say i agree with all of them. the punishing drudgery of the puzzle work of the game, the oppressive atmosphere and art style, the way certain randomly generated NPCs react to you pressing them on their information that doesn't match up... it's powerful. and even though i said a lot of smart people have said smart words i... still have a lot of stuff to talk about with it because it's just that damn good of a game!
this is strange to comment on as i'm not a very Hardcore Gamer but i actually feel as though it was too easy in some places lol. when you take into account the tone of everything else it feels a bit odd you could infinitely reload if you got more than 2 citations a day to avoid the credit penalty which i HEAVILY abused to make sure i had at least a little credit landing pad. and like when i figured out the ministry official was such a joyless cockhole he didn't even want my son's art hanging on the wall (which btw fuck you buddy) i could just... reload and hang it on the wall when he came after lol. it doesn't feel very deliberate, kinda drew me out of the game a little.
journalists in this game are extreme assholes for whatever reason too, which i find kiiinda frustrating. conditions seem to suck everywhere my dude quit being so snide to me. i let them in anyway at any time regardless of their papers (and took a couple of citation Ls for it) because freedom of the press is one of my longstanding principles but... eh. i dunno. i feel like uniformly making the journalists aggressive, snooty dickheads was a misstep, especially journalists traveling to a totalitarian state. i really don't want to be all #NotAllJournalists but... idk. #NotAllJournalistsNotEvenMostJournalists.
in general my first run i tried to be everything "good" at once and i think my experienced suffered a bit because i was too focused on being a Gamer about it lol rip. like i hardcore minmaxed skipping on heat and food about as long as i could get away with for zero penalty so i could keep all my family members alive, i got 5 out of 7 tokens somehow, i adopted my niece, i joined the terrorist cell because i genuinely believed at first they were trying to do good although i did start to get a little bit sus of them at like... day 24 (and i didn't kill the man in red either because one of the agents said he was Good, Actually), and ultimately i saved all the family members and ran off to obristan which to me is probably the best ending you could ask for in this kind of regime. i also avoided taking bribes as much as i could, kept married couples together as much as i could, and tried not to detain anyone other than a whole ass criminal. that's a personal failing though not really a commentary on the game itself. i know it's an artsy-fartsy game so i shouldn't approach it in a I Have To Win sense yet i still did... not very critical reader of me.
also oh this is not a good look for me but it's a funny as fuck story: i legitimately did not notice the scale near where the rulebook was until day 29. i failed every smuggler check because of this; i tried comparing their weight to their picture and got "no correlation" every time and was like "HOW DID YOU CATCH THIS". i was SO frustrated and googling any combination of it did not help me until i stumbled upon some wikia comments, lmfao. they must have tutorialized it somehow but i just... either did not retain that information or missed that tutorial somehow. i'm a good gamer. i need to go back and get some other endings now, but i've put it on hold for a little bit.
the CWs for this game are generally well known but i'll list them for my own... peace of mind? i guess is the word here. content warnings: totalitarian/dystopian setting, guns, terrorism (both foreign and domestic), systemic racism of a sort. it's just a really bleak, heavy for a video game work. i do definitely think it's worth experiencing though if you think you can handle it. i mean i wrote about a thousand words about it i think you can say it's pretty good.
--
- i started playing the legend of zelda: breath of the wild for realsies recently! just like my above ramble about papers please, this may surprise you to learn, but it's a pretty good video game! yes i am the arbiter of all things that are good (and bad)!
i'm not very far in the game though, so please don't spoil anything for me if you happen to come across this or comment on this part specifically. well i mean it's kinda hard to spoil a zelda game and i already know the most important detail of link sucking and fucking sidon every second of every hour. there's a lot of stuff i don't know though and i liked the surprise of it! oh my god there have been so many enemies that caught me off guard. TREASURE CHEST OCTOROK? MY BRETHEREN IN HYLIA THAT IS NOT FAIR. also i climbed onto a pile of rocks and it turned into a giant golem and i said "ohJESUSCHRIST" so loud i scared my mother. also lizalfos can fucking swim now? i don't remember them being able to do that!! (says the woman who's last zelda game played to completion at all was the minish cap...)
oh, and purah! somehow i got the impression she had an edna incredibles "NO CAPES" style anal personality i wouldn't be a huge fan of... but she's so cheerful and darling, i loved her excited SNAP! when she fixed the slate and she was like "oh you can totally read my diary idc THAT much even if i hope you don't read the cringe pages"... it's adorable. link has a surprising amount of personality too. i didn't know that when you eat mystery/gross food he braces himself for the taste and then is like "oh this isn't that bad actually" haha. and the surprised little whiff he does when you fail to pull out a weapon! what a charmer!
speaking of i thought i would really hate the weapon breaking system, but i have deemed it... Okay. it helps that you can't go five seconds without tripping over a rusty piece of shit or a tree branch or something so you're never TRULY unarmed... but i would have been perfectly satisfied if the game didn't have it tbh, it's not make or break. what has really surprised me though is the shrines or i guess lack of them? i really expected to be inundated with them, but i have found exactly nine (i know this because i have 1 stamina upgrade and 1 heart container upgrade and i "found" another one right at the end of my playthrough). even with the radar... the way people talked about it i thought i couldn't go five feet without stubbing my toe on them. i might just be stupid though.
edit before i post this: i've now found about 24 so i have a sizable health and stamina bar for where i am in the game (about to venture into vah ruta), but i still don't feel like i'm finding a ton of them. i almost wonder if i'm being too skittish about going other places? in general i just unlock the tower and leave. mainly because i get tired of walking every where... you are probably reading this and thinking "you are far enough in the game to have a horse" yeah well i hate riding horses in this game LMFAO. i think the mechanic of getting a horse is neat but actually riding them is kinda tedious and annoying. i would rather have a horse that drives like a car than a horse i'm ngl.
i've discussed before how i'm primarily a sword girl, but spears in this game are so fun to use, i definitely have a bias towards them. i'm actually kinda disappointed when i pick up a short sword right now haha to say nothing of the audible UGH when i finally pick up a claymore. enemies in the early game just do so much damage i like doing 3-5 tiny hits then running away a little bit instead of overwhelming them with pure strength. i just got a guardian spear and i'm SO excited i'm going to hold onto that thing like it's precious gold. it will never break (until i can farm them out or something). that does bring to mind 2 questions though: 1. is there a weapon crafting system? and 2. does the master sword break... worry...
i know all i'm talking about is the weapons system lmao but i'm not far enough yet to really mention anything else. when i am i will, prommy. i can't imagine actually beating the game the next time i post one of these (unless i take another five month break i guess.)
mobile games
- i got the second ending to arknights' is3! i was kinda surprised at how easy it was to unlock. that or my teams got a lot stronger from when i started playing is2... mm, well, not necessarily now that i sit and think about it some more, because i also thought the second boss was totally underwhelming for other reasons too. is2's default boss is one of your beloved companions, a character who you yourself might have used a lot depending on your playstyle, brainwashed and tormented by things he did when he was a naive child and you have to save him and while this is cool and makes me go "oof" he's ultimately just a guy lol. is2's second boss on the other hand is a oversized teddy bear thing that you HAVE to debuff before you even enter the goddamn fight otherwise it instantly heals itself over and over animated by a fallen member of the troupe who begs for death. it's absolutely intimidatingly massive, canonically has the most hp of any enemy in the entire game, and the first time you see it you feel its size. especially if you were like me and had never seen bishop whatshisdick from under tides before encountering big sad lock. (i was baby then okay.)
contrast that with is3's bosses. the default boss is a floating furry jellyfish cthulhu monstrosity that used to be one of your companions. even looking at it makes your operators slow down in disgust. the title of the stage is curse of cognition, as if being alive at all is unbearable to her. the first time i fought it was quite a struggle... although not so much anymore now that i know how strong texalter is lmao. well that's not really the point, the point is the it's more of a monster than a man, same as is2's second boss. contrast that with is3's second boss the last knight and hero thought previously lost to time, hellbent on destroying the thing rotting him from the inside out... but while this is cool and makes me go "oof", it's ultimately just a guy who walks in a straight fucking line to the objective point lmao. see what i mean? i almost feel like the first boss and the second boss should be swapped.
the new (new) event is fun though! arknights introduced invisibility pretty early on and then didn't do much with it imo... i like that there are several different ways you can lose visibility, whether that's through enemy's attacks or environmental hazards like fire and stuff. playing around the marshes (which slow your attack speed) is also kinda fun in a masochistic way. definitely feels like the map is a lot more limited... kinda dreading the ex stages in this event.
figures
am i allowed to talk about figures here. i mean i guess it is my life journal. ANYWAY YUNO GASAI POP UP PARADE WAS ANNOUNCED!!! A BIG WIN FOR THE OTP ETC ETC
i think anyone who has ever spent five minutes around me has known i have mixed to negative views about yuno. being the yandere everyone knows means overexposure is killer and even back when i truly liked her the "jack of all trades master of none" approach kinda... makes wavy back and forth hand motion. yuno's at her best when she's just straight up killing people or planning on killing people, it's why everyone remembers the scene where she decapitates twelfth and not the one where she has yukki piss in a bottle (seriously what is it with yanderes and pee...); the parts of the story where she's NOT doing that are somewhat ironically the parts where the story is the weakest. however, i still have a soft spot for esuno's work, and this is gonna be the only esuno-series figure to ever exist, so i will own it. god this entire paragraph has dick all to do with figures how do i still have this much to say about mirai nikki in 2023
looking at it again though her face plate is kinda weird... looks like they used her design from the happy end OVAs whatever they were called for the face plate. it'll probably look better in color though so i'm not too worried. there's a chance it could come out like that ugly as sin zero two figure, but well... ugly as sin isn't new for esuno sakae fans LMFAO.
oh my god this post is so long. LOOK FORWARD TO MORE INSANELY LONG POSTS LIKE THIS