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.

It's been alright.

I took last week off; Thanksgiving and all that.  It was a good week for me!

Dumbchicky seems to actually be successfully (??) incubating some of the quail eggs, so they are progressing with their development; I'm getting ready to lockdown on them so that they can perhaps hatch (??).  We'll see what happens.

I hit lvl 130 in Median XL and now I've started to really see progress slow down; I'm not sure how much more it will take for me to try and tackle the next set of ubers/dungeons, but there was already a lvl 125 boss that I couldn't take out yet.  There's some set equipment that I've tried farming for that would be good for my neutraldin build but haven't managed to find yet, so that's an option.  Interestingly enough, there's actually a new patch coming out on Dec 10th...crazy.

I played through the finished chapter 2 of Deltarune.  This chapter offered another fantastical-type adventure with the same sort of intermingling of genuine character development and slappy humor that I've come to recognize from Toby Fox's work.  It seems like Deltarune is setting up for more questions, more exposition, more...stakes (?) when compared to Undertale.  The dual interplay between the worlds of the "Lightners" and "Darkners" I think facilitates deeper readings of the main characters, and they all feel more layered than they did in Undertale.  I'm not saying that the characters in Undertale were necessarily all one-note, but with Deltarune I feel like it's more obvious that they've got stuff hidden underneath their surface layer and that really makes you wonder exactly who these people are.  The game never spells any of this out for you either (yet), but there is enough there to make you wonder about it very strongly.

In the meantime, I took my break last week as an opportunity to play through a bunch more of The Last of Us 2, completing the majority of it and getting past a supposed "twist" that I heard at least one reviewer mentioning as turning their worldview upside-down.  Sigh.  As usual, I find myself not really agreeing with other people's opinions.  Like when I was watching Brave, the overarching direction and path of the plot was easy to predict early on, but all of the little destinations and detours along the way have proven to be worthwhile.  There's no one singular moment that stands out as jaw-dropping, but there are a multitude of smaller experiences contained within the narrative and environment of TLOU2 that I've really appreciated.

TLOU2 has actually done this really funny thing where every time I start coming down with a criticism of it, it remedies that criticism in the next chapter.  "It feels like they haven't really done anything new with the zombie encounters in this game", I told my friend, immediately before going into a new chapter where a new mechanic around the zombies was introduced.

The gameplay pacing of TLOU2 is entirely familiar (tense exploration, followed by stealth action encounters, culminating in an intense action scene, and then story beats and exposition), but that's because, well...it works.  The dialogue and character interactions, too, take the strengths of TLOU1 and carry it over.  The "Left Behind" expansion story was honestly probably the most memorable part of TLOU1 as a whole and I think they've really taken that experience and used it again here.

TLOU2 does a lot of work with contrasting and contextualizing things under different lights.  That sounds vague, but that's because that statement applies to a lot of different things in TLOU2.  There are extremely obvious ways in which this comes up, but also much more subtle ways as well, and I think it's those more subtle ways that I've really been appreciating as I go through the game.  It's something that would make the entire thing worth another playthrough, I'd imagine.  Unfortunately, this is also the sort of thing that I don't really see called out in reviews.  It's easy to talk about such-and-such plot twist or whatever, but I think it takes a more nuanced critique to call out attention to how color palettes are used, to how subtle parallels are drawn between similar scenes and characters.

At a certain point in TLOU2 I was wondering "what are they trying to say here?  What is the 'point' that they're trying to get across?"  And fortunately, it doesn't actually seem like there is one.  I say fortunate because if that was the case, then no matter what the "message" is, it would probably fall flat.  The best allegories, after all, are the ones that don't tell you what to do with your life.  They merely explore a situation, and make you think about it.  I feel like TLOU2 does this well; it makes you think about things, and it does so in a very fleshed-out way, more than just surface-level.

So far, at least.

"What would Sayuri do?"

It's a question that I find myself asking again, today.

And I realize, as I think about this question, that Sayuri has changed over the years.  She has grown up, somehow, even without me realizing it.  I think the Sayuri of yesteryear would simply not say anything, would simply be fulled along with the flow, with a quiet expression in her eyes.  But the Sayuri I know today believes in herself more than that.  She does what she believes in, wordlessly.  She is not cold as ice, not sharp like a dagger, but she can carry a silence that will undoubtedly make some uncomfortable.  It is not always a silence like that of her older sister...sometimes, it carries a warmth with it as well.

Sayuri is...careful.  I think part of the atmosphere of deliberate motion and action stems from contemplating everything before doing it.  But I think even when caught off guard by something, when put into a negative situation, she would do her best to remain composed.  To choose what is right and then follow through silently.

To be unapologetic, yet push forward with such minimal force that one need not turn around after making a mistake.  It feels almost paradoxical, but perhaps it is similar to taking a step without committing weight.

How does one push forward with so little force?  Perhaps--surely, this is something I used to know.  For now, it is something that I will meditate on.

Why do you always tell me "I should" instead of "I won't"?

--Someone who once believed in you

Let's see here...

I'm back from my trip (and tested negative, yey).  It was a good week, with several highlights here and there.  I spent some time worrying about what exactly I should be doing with myself, but that actually subsided fairly quickly as I settled into a sort of natural balance between doing a tiny bit of work, playing Median XL, and exploring the area and doing various things.  I got to have some nice food, including some shrimp/lobster/crab rolls, and also got to visit the aquarium, which was really nice.

I've progressed very far in Median XL with my Neutraldin build -- now level 125 and starting to try the uber dungeons/rifts that unlock at that level, which are proving to be difficult, haha.  It's been fun though, even though I worry about hitting a wall with the progression at some point.  Honestly, I expected that to have happened already, so I'm a bit surprised that this build has taken me so far.  I had still been waffling between some different builds -- unholy melee paladin seems to be regarded as one of the better ones -- but somehow ended up taking this one all the way so far, and at this point all my gear is specced for that build, so it would be sort of a commitment to try and respec (though I guess it's not out of the question).

I also tried to go reach out to my past.  It didn't work, but I think I learned a lot for myself regardless.

I seem to sort of be back on the train of rolling along with Rhythm Quest development, which feels nice...I feel like with all the breaks that I've taken and trips and everything I've been missing out on days where I just do a good amount of work on it, but today seems to have bucked that trend.

That's about it, I guess?  My latest soundtrack commission has been turning out well, and things in general are in a pretty good spot for me I think.  I've perhaps started to figure out some ways to put a more positive slant on things that maybe have previously struggled with.

I made it to the other side of the country!  Where I will be (temporarily) staying, just for a bit.  Hopefully the chickies at home don't get too stinky.

 

Impostor Factory and the Freebird Games series

I played through Impostor Factory, the third main game in the "To the Moon" series.  The Freebird Games works have a specific brand of intrigue and suspense woven into their stories that I think is really their strong suit.  Though I admit that after a while you start to get a bit accustomed to it and always start wondering how tragedy is going to strike whenever things are going too well.  I suppose that is just standard fare for stories at some point, though.

Impostor Factory itself was good, but how do I say this...it wasn't necessarily personally meaningful to me.  I think my favorite work in the series was "Finding Paradise" if only because it was the only work that I feel like had something to say to me beyond the story itself.  Perhaps this is merely because the themes explored in "To the Moon" and "Impostor Factory" were less resonant to me personally (perhaps, in a similar vein to watching Ratatouille and thinking "that's a cool story which I cannot really relate to"?)

I had a bunch of stuff typed out about To the Moon and Finding Paradise but I'm beginning to really doubt my own reflections of the works, so let's just leave it as a personal preference for now.

There's a world in which I take to replaying these games with an eye towards serious critique and analysis, but that probably isn't something I have the time for now, unfortunately.  However, I do think that the best way to get better at expressing opinions about and analyzing/critiquing works of art is to....practice...

Vacation

Or as much as you can go on vacation while self-employed, anyways.  It's been an interesting week so far and I guess a refreshing change of pace.  I've done various things here and there, nothing big though.  Just mostly taking it easy, as I should.  I've done a bit of walking around, a bit of work, a bit of just hanging out and playing, and today I went to the aquarium, which was really fun.  I even tried cooking shrimp etouffee for the first time, so there's that.

Median XL

Oh, and I've been playing Median XL a bunch, somewhat surprisingly.  There was definitely a sort of initial hump that I had to get past where I was sort of figuring everything out, but I've settled into things now.  Notably, I was speeding through the acts a little too fast and thus running into heavy exp penalties (d'oh).  I was trying to find references for the monster levels in Median XL by area so I could figure out which areas I should actually be in, until I realized that this is built into the new UI to begin with (it displays in the top right of the automap screen, if enabled).  Derp.

Anyways, I played around with a few different characters but decided to take my Neutral Paladin the distance for now -- this is a funny build that uses two buffs that shoot lightning at nearby enemies automatically, so you sort of just walk around as enemies get hurt and fall to the floor.  It's a little more complicated than that in actuality, of course, but that's still the core aspect of the build.  I seem to be doing pretty well, and am level 115, now firmly into the territory of starting to do some of the end-game quests and hidden dungeons and such.  It's been fun!

 

Pokemon Unite

Is taking a bit of a break this week, so I'll probably be back to it next week instead.

Just because there's nothing more you can do doesn't mean that it's over.

Things are...okay.  I wasn't feeling so hot today, so I spent a little time on self-care.  I think it seems to have a helped a bit, maybe?  I read a letter from The Past (with a capital P) and then lied down in a bath for a while.  There have been various thoughts going around in my head, about things, about The Past, about people and different perspectives on things, about self-expression or the lack thereof, as well as just about what I want; what would make me happy.  Just, stuff.

I've got a week more of letters to write, and then another week after that to work hard.  Or, maybe I shouldn't look at it that way.  I've got my next thing to work on for Rhythm Quest as part of my (potential) graphics makeover, which is putting all of the level graphics onto a combined spritesheet (as in, authored as a combined image) rather than just single images that are later combined automatically.  That will let me author all of the graphics (and palettes) for the level at once rather than editing each individual image.  Not really sure why I didn't do that already (or maybe I had at one point??  I don't even remember, really...).  It's sort of more of a "busywork" task than any actual creative challenge, but honestly I feel like a lot of what keeps me making forward progress on this game is breaking down all of the work into small enough little bits that all seem like they're more or less straightforward.  It's way easier to stay motivated when the task ahead of you seems really simple; it helps avoid operational procrastination...

Well, tomorrow I get to pull 3 heads off and then attempt to turn some bodies inside out.  So maybe that will be fun?

Mega Man: Super Fighting Robot

This is the latest Mega Man fangame that I decided to play through.   This one was quite enjoyable!  All the standard stuff is there -- you know, 8 robot masters, NES-style music, etc etc etc.  Physics and movement felt just fine, although one nitpick is that you can't shoot additional buster shots if a half-charged (not fully-charged) buster shot is on screen, making that by far the worst level of charge to use against normal enemies.  Normally in most Mega Man games, the small charge shot can still be fired in tandem with normal pellet shots.  Eh, again, just a minor nitpick.

I played on Normal difficulty -- I tried hard difficulty briefly and it seems like it basically doubles the damage that you take(?).  Normal difficulty was actually a bit easy for me, I only had to retry a stage once or twice and I hardly ever had to use e-tanks at all.  Part of this may be because of the game's upgrade system, which lets you purchase minor upgrades to several facets of Mega Man, giving you a bit of damage reduction, better charge shots, and even faster movement and slightly higher jumps (!).  Granted, there are bonuses/achievements for not using any of the upgrades.  Maybe I ought to have played on Hard instead?  It's hard to say whether the extra damage would have felt difficult in a good way, or whether it would have just felt annoying.  I can't really fault a game too much on its specific difficulty level, especially given that it has added challenges and hard difficulty, but I did find it a little too easy, just as a personal experience.

Besides that, this game does a lot of things right.  The music might not be as "catchy" as some of the classic MM tunes, but it's certainly good (and honestly, it's hard not to be biased since a lot of us have played the old MM games multiple times).  The enemy designs are very good and the levels are all both interesting and challenging.  The challenges feel very fair for the most part as well, and even if you lose a life due to a "gotcha", the rest of the game is forgiving enough that it's sort of within my quota.  The weapons are all very unique, and the bosses are fun to fight as well, though again, a bit on the easy side sometimes.  Maybe I'm just miscalibrated from playing other (harder) fangames...

All in all, it was a good time!  I got through it pretty quickly, and decided not to pursue any of the additional content (I'm not really one for replaying stuff).

I dunno what I'll play next...maybe I ought to try out Emperor?