What have we all been playing recently?

Started over on Celeste since I hadn't played it in forever. Managed to get through the hotel. Collected most of the strawberries along the way, with stage one being cleared out entirely. Got the b side tapes for the second and third stage. Madeline continues to be uncomfortably relatable. 'She only helps people to feed her ego.' You're god damn right, brain gremlin.

 

it's been literal months since I last picked up my ds, wow

I started replaying disgaea and it's already consuming my life. I'm having a lot of fun playing with making characters, even if grinding people is pretty slow-going. currently loading flonne with all the magic spells so she'll be a fucking unstoppable magic machine...I'm also really grateful for pleinair and her crazy high evasion because she makes maps so much easier for me and my stupid strategy-blind self who operates mostly by charging in and spamming attacks. (and she's super cute.) I swear this time I'm gonna reach the end of the game, even if I gotta grind a million years to get there first

 

DISAGEA IS SO GOOD AND PLEINAIR IS THE BEST
nothing but respect for my fellow stans

 

chapter two of orwell 2 is literally "find exploitable dirt on an immigrant activist's family before he can publish the dirt he has on the authorities". this is so uncomfortable. and here I thought the first game goes hard...

 

Back into Oxygen Not Included and wow, that's a lot of game updates. Had to start a new game since they broke my old save, and maybe I got lucky with the world seed, but it seems easier now to manage water as a resource.

I love the jobs system now, their little duplicant faces when they put on a new hat...!

 

at the moment I'm playing Hyper Light Drifter and Journey. those are both №1 favorite games of [Important Friend]. feels like I'm experiencing some kind of [Important Friend] Starter Pack.

 

Yessss Moon is my SHIT. May I make a suggestion that you attempt to catch Lunala in a moon ball? It was literally the best aesthetic decision I have ever made in a Pokemon game ever.

 

I've been playing Unravel 2 which OH MY GOD it's even better than the first one which I did not think possible. I'm gonna get into Pokemon Insurgence soon and plan for when I can afford it to play Ori and the Blind Forest. Ori and Unravel 2 are probably my top 2 favorite games in existence at the moment just because of how incredibly well they were done and after the ending of Unravel 1 I am Scared for how 2 is going to end.

 

Started Imperishable Night the other night. Just to see how it'd go. Can get towards the end of the game on normal, but can't get past stage 5 on it yet. Was able to beat the game on easy mode though, so there is that I guess. Kind of tempted to just run in there on lunatic and see how fast I get curbstomped by Wriggle.

 

I just got forsake for Destiny 2, anyone else play destiny?

 

beat Oxenfree. started strong but in the end I didn't like it much except for the sound design. makes sense that it's popular though.
beat Hyper Light Drifter and collected all single run achievements except for the no dying one. I am very powerful and sad. ngl my interest was rekindled after I learned that it's based on the creator's struggle with heart disease. that sure puts the story in a relatable light, for better or worse.
beat, for debatable value of the word, Dr Langeskov. people who worked on The Stanley Parable are actual geniuses and it feels great to be immersed in this sort of storytelling again (last time I played The Stanley Parable idk. four years ago?).
playing Detention. this shit is scary, I love it, I love the designs, I love horror stories inspired by non-american folklore that never really entered pop culture. the only problem is how often I'm too scared to progress through the game...

 

My brother and I are slowly making our way through Persona 5, and I need to share one of our all-time coolest gaming victories that the game refused to give us credit for.

For context, we've been playing on Hard, which is overall a great deal more fun than Normal, but does stretch out the length of battles a little disproportionately much compared to the rest of the difficulty boosts. Which turned out to mean that, while it's a significant but still very playable difficulty hike for most battles, it's a noticeably bigger jump in difficulty for timed boss battles that start by summoning half a dozen waves of high-defense flunkies and follow up by hitting you with debuffs and status every turn of the main fight.

In short: we went into the Shadow Okumura fight completely unprepared for this specific style of gameplay, and we beat it literally the second the timer hit zero. (I'm not exaggerating; it hit zero at the exact moment the boss's explosion animation started.)

... And then Futaba went "oh no, time's up!" and we got a game over, because this game is stupid and does not appreciate us.

But if you think I'm not still taking credit for this as an amazing gaming moment and victory, you are very wrong. :D

 

installed long live the queen and crusader kings 2 on my laptop because I'm not really feeling ftl (the all time best low specs time killer) right now. apparently the theme for today is "monarchism"

 

Formal petition to put forth Insurgence as the best fan-made pokemon game in existence. It just fills so much that official pokemon games either gloss over or just plain don't cover and it adds so much too. If you haven't played it and like pokemon please do.

 

ended up dropping disgaea because I got sick of grinding and grinding, and decided to replay zelda phantom hourglass for the first time in years. I found it enjoyable overall, though insubstantial and not very challenging, but it was a fun way to kill some time if nothing else

Spoiler: detailed thoughts, since I can't just consume a work without having to review it (spoilers!)

imo the temple of the ocean king is the best part of the game; my impression is most people hate it for how repetitive it is, but honestly I liked it for the sense of familiarity it had among all the other shallow locations: that you keep returning to it and it keeps expanding and changing gives it a sense of development no other location gets, and there's some real satisfaction and achievement to be found in being able to progress further as you get new items. it was also the only dungeon that carried a sense of challenge to it, honestly...I breezed through the entire rest of the game (I'm generally bad at video games, so that might be saying something), and it only took me so long to complete overall because of my bad habit of never finishing the things I start. but it wasn't completely boring: there was some satisfaction to be found in solving the puzzles, even if they were easy; the boss fights were decently fun, and I liked all the different kinds of obstacles in the sailing segments. finally, linebeck had a satisfying character arc; I have no complaints there

I have been left with more than a few gripes on the rest of the plot, though

Spoiler: criticisms inside

I'll start with a disclaimer that I have never played wind waker nor seen an LP of it (the only other zelda game I've played is spirit tracks), so I might be missing vital information on the lore or whatever (though tbh, if I am, then it's a failure on PH's part to not relay that for players who haven't played WW)

the beginning and ending are both so forced, honestly. both of the scenes on tetra's ship are just Cringe. it's the kind of comedy I hate, combined with the discomfort of tetra not being taken seriously by any of her pirates despite supposedly being their leader. and then she gets kidnapped and spends all of the game as nothing but a reason for the plot to happen, with the only other female character of any importance being a non-human spirit, so...yeah, thanks for the misogyny, game. back to the forcedness, basically none of the beginning exposition really matters to PH's plot beyond explaining why link is out at sea in the first place--they could have done something with tetra being zelda, but the game never utilizes this nor explicitly connects tetra being zelda to bellum targeting her, so there's missed potential right there. meanwhile, the ending makes no sense--why are the worlds of link and the ocean king separate? why have this dramatic parting scene over them 'having to return to their world'? why couldn't they have just had tetra's ship arrive after bellum was defeated and have link and tetra leave that way? oh, and bellum is more failure too, it's just some Random Evil Parasite with zero personality or explanation or anything. there's little motivation to actually go and personally defeat it beyond to finish the game, because there's not enough substantial characterization in the game to connect to otherwise. (and that's another failure of PH, if it's relying on characterization in WW to create the stakes despite PH being very disconnected from WW.) and speaking of wasted characters--why do the spirits of power and wisdom just not matter beyond being rewards for completing dungeons and collecting spirit gems? they only serve as cheerleaders for link and ciela's the only one who gets any attention (also, why does she randomly have time powers without any actual foreshadowing or explanation? and why is she the only one who gets extra powers? what about her makes her special?), yet saving leaf and neri to find the ghost ship and them being servants of the ocean king we're trying to save suggests they should have something more to them

tl;dr: the plot and characters had potential to be more interesting and make a more complex, rich story, but ultimately they're hardly more than set dressing to give the game a reason to exist; little of the stuff established at the beginning actually matters overall, and the ending makes no sense; and bonus misogyny because why not fill out a checklist of problems while we're here. the gameplay is fun, but honestly, without substantial or compelling characters to emotionally invest me in the story, I have little reason to return to this game now I've completed it

guess I'll replay spirit tracks next. I remember that game being a lot more challenging and compelling overall, so hopefully it'll be a more enjoyable experience. (I do actually own the 3DS remakes of ocarina of time and majora's mask--maybe I should get around to playing those, since they likely provide the more authentic zelda experience than the DS-original games do...)

 

open sorcery! and randomized ori and the blind forest

open sorcery is a game about a magitech nascent AI who is an elemental firewall. its also about becoming a person
that is she's a fire and order spirit in a world where magitech is a thing and she guards four places (a school, a retirement home, and her creators' houses) against supernatural threats
this can range from 'kill it with fire' to 'talk it down' to 'alert your creators that something is wrong " (which is actually helpful in many situations) it's up to you

also the golden ending is canon
like, there is a general sequence of events that is canon. fine details vary especially at the final sequence; there's 10 major endings and lots of variations within those e.g. saving a particular character with healing magic vs saving her by having your creator turn her into a robot both count as saving her but get different ending variations


i got the Elemental ending once, and since to do that you have to dream after getting 100% firepower to open up extra Burn Everything options i just dreamt every night, which also meant that the post-100%-firepower dreams were all about sheep

so it sorta came across as BEL/S burning stuff as a response to the sheep dreams

 

Open sorcery!! I've played that, although I haven't gotten to all the endings yet! I got the game because I liked 16 ways to kill a vampire at mcdonalds, by the same person. Also, I swear to god they made an undertale au fan game too, but I can't find it at the moment

I've been playing No Man's Sky... my computer can barely run it... But it's fun? It's... lonely, but I really like the story so far.

 

How exactly does one randomize Ori??? Like what actually gets randomized?

 

pickups get shuffled! so the exp by start might be clean water. or a keystone. or warmth returned. or swamp teleporter which immediately makes you go Oh No because it allows for the possiblity of annoying teleport chains

also mapstone turnins give you stuff, you can teleport back to the start with alt-R so you can't softlock yourself by jumping into pits without wall interaction, light burst is free because otherwise bash+grenade=Hell, there's new hotkeys like the load seed hotkey and the show progress hotkey, and in the new version you get Sense right off the bat, a few doors are open at the start, and you can grab dungeon teleporters for all the dungeons

plus there's gamemodes like world tour, with custom 'relic' pickups

it's really fun

 

Hmmm...I may have to attempt this after my current run (intermittent for Reasons).