Symphony of the Night

Played through all of Symphony of the Night in a couple of days!  It was a fun game; nothing was really too bad about it (aside from perhaps the infamous voice acting), though on the flipside i wouldn't say anything was particularly outstanding about it either.  Just an overall good package.  It's really cool seeing an RPG-styled twist on the classic Metroid formula -- one that ended up defining an entire genre together with Super Metroid.  Exploring different areas, encountering new enemies, searching for secrets, it was all pretty enjoyable.  Some balance issues, particularly with the equipment / some of the more overpowered items, for sure, and a few secrets / item descriptions that are a little =too= obscure/cryptic, but even aside from all that everything was more or less fine.  I guess the other thing that's a bit odd is the entire second half of the game being locked behind a "bad end" in which you need to explore and solve a bit of a riddle in order to progress through.  A bit curious since the bad end also gives you the same credits sequence.

Overall I'm pretty glad that I played through it, but at the same time I can see how there's room for improvement and how other games have tried to take the same formula and clean it up a little bit in their own style (looking at Hollow Knight as an example).

Oh, I made it to Master rank in Pokemon Unite as well, so woo.

Now I'm onto starting to play Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.  I'm not sure whether I'll play through on Hard or Very Hard difficulty (Normal is probably too easy), so I'll start on Very Hard and see how I fare through the first couple of missions.  I'm enjoying it so far!

It's been okay.  I didn't really get much done this week, though understandably so.  I did end up getting all of my xmas mailing done, so all that's left there is a few extra things that are still coming in the mail, and then the ol' Santa run.

Since I've still been feeling slightly ill I've mostly been lazing about, though I did end up cleaning out all the chicky stuff this morning; that was good.  I even took some time tonight to actually try and work on a little bit of spriting for Rhythm Quest, so at least it wasn't like it was a zero productivity day.  Tomorrow, maybe I'll try and knock out the last commission piece that's due for the year, and I have some knife sharpening to take care of as well.  Maybe some more spriting too, who knows.  Next week is already Christmas week, so I probably won't really work any.

I finished watching Arcane, since, like I said, I've been lazing around.  Spoilers ahead I guess?  It was alright, if a little overdramatic at points (but I'm not often bothered by this sort of thing).  I didn't have too much specifically to criticize wildly, but I didn't really have that much to specifically laud either, besides the art style being pretty interesting to look at (especially the backgrounds).  I think the central story conflict portrayed between Vi and Jinx is a solid one...but I think the execution maybe left a little to be desired.  There's a point near the end where Jinx says something to the effect of "I thought we could maybe be like we once used to, but I've changed...and you've changed, too."  I think that's set up to be a poignant moment, since that's really what drives the proverbial nail in the coffin (even though you already know it's coming).  But I think it didn't really have as much impact because as an audience I'm not really sure I saw how Vi changed specifically, or at least how Jinx sees her as having changed.  Is it that she's concerned with more people, more bigger picture things now? (Caitlyn, the impending war, etc)  Is it the fact that she walked away from Jinx at the bridge?  Is it just the fact that they solidly on different sides of the conflict?  I'm not really sure.  I think as a storyteller I see the power in this moment coming from the fact that we are ostensibly rooting for Vi and Jinx to resolve their differences and be with each other again.  The shallow tragic end to the Vi-Jinx relationship is for it to be doomed because external forces drive them apart in the end.  The deeper resolution is for there to be a realization as the viewer that it's impossible for them to be with each other anymore, even in the absence of external forces.  I feel like that was not really sold on me effectively, so I guess maybe the execution was a bit lacking in that regard.

Moderna booster kicked my butt, so I've just been sitting around and watching videos all day -- catching up on all the matches from Smash Summit 12, as well as Arcane: LoL.

The birdies have been doing ok...quails are growing up bit by bit -- there is one really fast one (maybe the oldest?), and one really small yellow one (was born after the other two).  The electric chicky heater has replaced mommy dumbchicky as their heat source since dumbchicky is too kicky and doesn't stay put.  Chickies are starting to get a little stinky; hopefully it will be better once they can graduate back to the bigger bin with more pine shavings.

Got 2 more knives, haha.  They aren't for me, though; presents for xmas.  But they are really nice!  One of them has a really pretty handle...

 

The new Median XL patch dropped and I don't think there were a ton of changes / relevant changes to my paladin, but I've instead been working on leveling a sorceress instead.  I tried a poison build for a while, which actually worked really well for leveling, but was having a lot of trouble with bosses (I was missing one piece of the poison set, and probably lacking elemental pierce, maybe that's why?), so I've transitioned out of that and into a lightning build.  I'll probably just be farming K3BA for a while to get levels, so if I happen to get more set pieces for something like a cold sorceress build, I could try that too, or whatever.  We'll see.  I'm honestly a little surprised that I'm still going on strong with this, but I guess ARPGs are just addictive in that way.

 

Still playing Pokemon Unite as well.  I've basically become a Snorlax main, though I keep on wondering whether I should go back to playing more Blastoise since I keep seeing good Blastoise plays.  Mamoswine is apparently pretty good this patch as well.  I might pick up Talonflame, actually...

Baby quails, The Last of Us Part 2, Unholy Melee Paladin Respec, The Matrix: Reloaded

It's been ok....until this morning when I had interrupted sleep for the second night in a row.  The day didn't really go so well.

Let's start with the stuff that's more relevant to the people who are likely to be reading this.

So...dumbchicky has actually managed to hatch some baby quails, amazingly.  I found one dead baby chick (not sure what happened to it, maybe it got stuck, or trampled, or something), and one other egg that might be cracked (in a bad way), but other than that she has four healthy baby quail chicks scooting around and nestling under her belly now.  This was our experiment to see if we could break her out of her brooding by actually giving her some eggs to hatch, and lo and behold, despite her clumsiness she actually managed to do a good job.

Unfortunately since she has been in lockdown she has also been having really stinky poos in her bin since I'm not putting her outside to poo anymore.  I woke up at 5AM this morning because I smelled her poo from the other room ....  .... sigh.  I also didn't get very much done at all on Rhythm Quest done today, so I wasn't in the best mood.

Anyways, we will see what happens with these quails, I think my current plan is to keep them until they start causing any sort of problems, then......they will probably become dinner, lol.  So far they have been causing me a surprising amount of stress despite actually taking care of themselves fairly well.  But I guess that isn't totally surprising.

 

In other news, I finished up The Last of Us Part 2!  The game actually went on a bit further than I expected, but I think it was warranted in order to really reach the appropriate conclusion.

Overall I really appreciated this game, though I don't think it is one for the weak (as should be fairly obvious).  There are fairly gratuitous amounts of violence and gruesome acts depicted (as is probably pretty clear if you know of the game), but I think surprisingly I think a lot of this felt rather necessary in order to really reach the proper impact of the game.  That said, I have some counterpoints that I'd like to bring up about this.  First, while I think that the violence involved in the game's "main" plot scenes is feels justifiable to me, I found myself a bit off-put by the amped-up level of physical violence during gameplay compared to TLOU1, particularly in using melee weapons.  I think that there's a big part of TLOU2 (arguably all of it) that leans into the discomfort of violence, but I think that the melee combat felt a little over-the-top when compared to both stealth kills and weapon-shooting, and this was definitely amped up from TLOU1 from what I can remember.  There's a youtube video I remember watching where a reviewer/player was commenting on how they were excited about how many different "fatalities" were included in the game, when using different melee weapons in different situations.  Regardless of whether or not this person "missed the point", I just felt like this feature in particular was outside of my taste.

I also think that despite the multitudes of accessibility options present in TLOU2 (the navigation assistance/hint feature was a godsend, not to mention the motion sickness options without which I probably could not have finished the game in the first place), there's a distinct lack of options around trigger warnings and violence/gore settings.  I don't want to be too critical here as there is no real way to make this game work without a significant amount of violence and if you included "trigger warning for violence" it'd end up getting redundant.  As I mentioned before, TLOU2 has some very dark and gruesome moments, and I don't think those can really function any differently.  However this is honestly too much to stomach for a lot of people and I'm just wondering whether there could have been an option to simply cut to black during some of the more intense / triggering moments.  I understand this might seem a bit silly, "why not just close your own eyes" you might ask, but I really feel like this is a legitimate concern.

Despite all that, I think they really pulled it all off well in the end, and I really appreciated seeing what they had to show, even though it went into some very unpleasant territory.  TLOU2 does a very good job of pointing out parallels and putting you in similar yet different situations, or maybe similar situations with different contexts.  The story is told linearly for a majority of the game, but there are some important/major exceptions to that, and the game uses that to full effect in order to recontextualize actions and situations which you thought you might have understood at first.

I saw this mentioned in reviews, as well, and I think it's quite obvious how TLOU2 does this on a very surface level.  But I think what makes me appreciate TLOU2 is that it doesn't just stop at a surface level, it goes much deeper than that.  Subtle things such as seeing the same piece of artwork in two different settings (is it graffiti?  Or is it a holy symbol?) really gets your head going.  It's not just a one-and-done thing, TLOU2 is really thorough in how it explores this theme and I was really impressed by that.  TLOU2 makes you feel different ways in similar situations and when it does so, it doesn't feel like a slap in the face; it makes you ask yourself, "why?".

I enjoyed the gameplay as well, I think the additional tools and crafting options compared to TLOU1 really help to spice things up and make combat/stealth feel very fresh.  The downside of this is that the more new things that get added to your toolkit, the more overwhelming it is when you need to quickly do a gut instinct reaction.  In a brain-dead FPS game if an enemy sneaks up behind you, you do the same thing you always do -- wheel around and shoot it dead, using the same buttons you do for everything else.  Here, that isn't so simple, as you've got stun bombs, pistols (with detachable silencers), throwable bricks, crossbows, etc.  This works out great when you're hidden under cover carefully planning an angle of attack on how to assassinate three zombies without making any noise.  However when you run into an unexpected situation, there's this moment of "oh god, what do I press, what weapon do I even have out right now, argh" -- or at least, there was for me.  So I think that was a weak point of the combat design.  Granted, the goal of stealth combat is to =avoid= those sorts of situations in the first place, so perhaps it's not such a big deal, but I did want to note it as that was a moment when things felt a bit clumsy for me.

I could say more about the story and characters in detail but I've written enough and I don't want to do a deep analysis and this has all been spoiler-free anyways, so I'll just call it there.

In Median XL news, I finally took the plunge and respec'ed my Neutral paladin into an Unholy Melee Paladin, currently using the fire-based Blood Thorns skill -- though in hindsight I'm wondering whether I should have chosen to go with the cold-based Lemures skill.  I actually had the complete 4-piece  equipment set for this build, so that was a a pretty good start on things; then it was just a matter of figuring out all the mystic orbs, socketing, skill speccing, etc.  It took a lot of looking at different things (including the only forum guide written on the build, which is...unfortunately several versions out of date), and tweaking a bunch, but that happens to be something I quite enjoy in my RPGs, so I didn't mind a ton!

Funnily enough, I might not have actually went through with the respec, except I still have not been able to find the glove piece of the neutraldin set (despite trying a bunch).  I wonder if luck had been different, if I would have just stayed as a neutraldin?  Anyways, the new build unfortunately actually seems to have significantly less single-target damage (lemures might have been doing better on that.....).  On the plus side, I managed to clear an uber quest that I was really struggling on with the neutraldin build!  The new build also sustains much better, and I'm able to farm areas like teganze and fauztinville without having to resort to chugging potions or anything like that.  So in that sense I think it's been an improvement, which is great to see.  Unfortunately I'm still at a similar plateau of sorts and there aren't obvious ways to drastically improve my build without lucking into some nice sacred uniques or doing more min-maxing of charms and stuff.  But we'll see how it goes from here.  Patch 2.1.0 is dropping in 3 days, so I might just download that and see what that brings anyways, though I don't think there are a ton of changes to Paladins in particular.

I =did= keep a copy of my saves before respecs, so I could also try rolling back and going for a lemures build as well, if I end up hitting a brick wall.  We'll see.

Edit: Right, I guess I can also mention that we watched through The Matrix: Reloaded.  I've seen it before, but this was so long ago that there's no way that I could remember that much about it.  I was unsurprised by the fact that it was....a pretty poor movie.  However this time around it was so much more clear to me exactly why this is -- at least, to me.  It's not the convoluted plot, it's not the dialogue, it's not the needlessly excessive fight scenes, it's not the awkward let's-show-sex-as-if-we're-mature-now attitude, though all of those of course reflect poorly.  It's the fact that there's no stakes or meaning to any of it.  The fight scenes in the first film worked so well not just because they were cool but because they had meaning to them.  Neo fighting Morpheus has a clear undertone of Morpheus wanting to unlock Neo's potential, but at the same time showing him that he's still too weak in his current state.  Even when Neo and Trinity are just blazing guns like crazy to rescue Morpheus, the emotional message is in Neo's confidence -- he's proactive, working as part of the team.  It's notable how little of the fight/chase scenes in The Matrix: Reloaded have any dialogue involved, or at least any meaningful dialogue.

The same is true for all of the exposition and world-building.  In the first film, all of the exposition about Zion, the Nebuchadnezzar, The Matrix, and all of that works well because we're pulled in by the mystery and intrigue set up by the first chapters, by Neo (and ourselves) wanting to discover the truth after it being hinted at for so long.  In the second film, we get a whole bunch of shots that show the architecture and culture of Zion, but there's no reason to care about any of it.  Morpheus (tries to) give a really grand speech about how humanity will prevail, yadda yadda, but again, it falls flat because we weren't given any significance to it.  It almost feels like a Star Wars movie, but...not a very good one.

The ironic part is that the movie itself seems to repeatedly pose the question of "purpose" -- postulating that choices are predetermined, but the only important thing we can do is find out "why".  Unfortunately the film really fails to answer that question for itself.  Why did it matter?  Why did we bother watching this?

There is some actual potential in some of the ideas and plotlines presented in the story.  Neo's visions of Trinity's death are really important, as is the revelation that The One can't actually end the war or save humanity.  Morpheus has built his entire existence upon this belief, so having it torn down so unceremoniously is obviously a huge thing.  There's a story here somewhere about the weight of expectations, and about how even though Neo became The One, up until this point he was still just playing a part.  Who are we when we no longer have a path before us to follow?  Agent Smith becoming a virus -- the very thing he compared the human race to in the first film -- is also significant.  And no, "it gets covered in the third film" isn't a good excuse for any of this.