Eid Mubarak! Though by the time this blog post is up it'll probably already be a few days since Eid, haha! I've been looking forward to this; not the Eid day specifically, but the one-week holiday that came legally mandated with it where I live. I need this holiday so bad, man. Not necessarily because of the work itself—I love my job!—I just really need a few days of doing fuck all, and maybe work on my silly personal projects.
My job has been doing well, though! Wishlist the game we're making!! We've been hard at work refining the core loop, and I think this is shaping up to be something great. Maybe not the heartfelt masterpiece that I yearn for, but it's the heartfelt tribute that I know my friend and coworker and this game's art director yearns for and by god, I will do anything to make his dream real. It's a team effort, yeah? A few people at its heart, and a few more people keeping the gears running.
On the silly personal projects side, I still owe the Arknights community some improvement to the Tetralingual Voice Archive site, the fansite I made to read and listen to the voice files in all the languages they're available in: a way to listen to old versions of the voice, and a voice actor list for easy comparison. The former is going to be necessary since they're removing Showtaro Morikubo from the game (Elysium's JP VA, long story). Not that anyone ever asks me to work on this project, but the community is full of freaks who'd built projects like this for free and I yearn to be considered one of them.
The other silly personal project I'm on is a story, perhaps a novel, set in the Metaphor ReFantazio universe. This stems in turn from another silly personal project: making Wikipedia-like entries telling the story of the game and the things that happened after the ending as if it's history written by someone in the modern age. It's both a writing exercise and also a way for me to solidify how I feel the kingdom will be structured after the ending—despite my current tech-oriented career, I studied world politics in college, so I still constantly yearn to dissect the workings on a nation-state.
I got a little carried away writing those entries that I ended up making a new OC: Queen Eleonora, who reigned about 40 years after the ending of the game. And then I get a little carried away developing her, I got a whole backstory, main story, post-story story, friends and families, basically her life and death and also a whole campaign that could've been a whole game. I have a bunch of notes and about 2k words into The Actual Novel. I... really hope I can write the whole thing! Since it takes place so long after the events of the game, I can probably make it readable even for people who don't know the game.
But lemme put that aside for now. This is a playlist post! Every few months or so I go over the games I've played and just talk about them. It's partially reviews, partially writing (yapping) exercise, mostly braindump.
Guilty Gear Strive & Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising
I started playing Guilty Gear Strive about this time last year. Despite starting on the wrong footing, I ended up getting really into it when my sister also joined in. It made it to my 2024 Game of the Year list! I also fall in love with the music, the world, and goofy-ah characters. Ky Kiske... Another kind family-oriented European man in my pocket (who I develop a minor crush on).
While I've dabbled in fighting games before, Strive is the first one where I actually got a little more serious at it. Mix-ups, footsies, punishes, frametrap—I know the theories but learning the theories are really only half the fun of putting it into practice. Fighting game is a lot about embodying the characters you play, and Strive is so good at making every character play differently, each playstyle tuned to the character's personality. Fighting games are, I daresay, a lot like gacha games in that you develop attachment to specific characters and shower them with love. In fighting games the love you give is the time you spent embodying them in gameplay.
I wasn't thinking about this when I got Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. Mostly I was just thinking of how I had fun when I played it with my friend once with the office PS5 and also how I was hungering for another ArcSys-made fighting game and also it was 60% off at the time, so why not, right? Doesn't seem like I need any background context about Granblue Fantasy to play it. It's a fighting game, after all.
Long story short I'm also now playing an 11 year old gacha game.
Hahahahaaa what can I say, I got attached to the characters!!! GBVS's characters are, to be honest, a little more uniform and a little less character-tuned than in Strive. I'll go so far as to say it's a "less serious" game but I'll probably be cooked by genre veterans for that. It does, however, still have silly character animations and fun interactions and nice voice acting (I switch between JP and EN for this one) and wonderful music. (I still can't believe it's co-composed by Yasunori Nishiki! Yasunori Nishiki!!! The Octopath Traveler guy!!!1)
I think I'm in love with Sandalphon... But I hesitate to say this. I don't know him like that yet. I need to get further into Granblue Fantasy to know his deal
GGST Mains: Ky Kiske, Sin Kiske, Queen Dizzy, Nagoriyuki, Ramlethal Valentine, Slayer, Bridget
GBVSR Mains: Narmaya, Sandalphon, Katalina, Lucilius. Siegfried and 2B are pretty fun too. Pretty easy to switch characters around in this game.
Granblue Fantasy
I remember trying to play this nine wholeass years ago and then immediately stopping once I got past the prologue and into the main menu. That main menu has so much buttons on it! So much banners and live-service nonsense! Little did I know that I'd get desensitized to it when I got into gacha games a few years later.
Anyway, Granblue Fantasy's UI was ass back then and still ass today, but it's a lot easier to navigate when you don't care about the gacha or the collect-a-ton and just beelining the stories. GBF's story is (at least so far as I've experienced) some corny anime nonsense, Saturday afternoon type beat, but it's honestly very charming in that way. Just you and your ragtag bunch of party members, goofing around and beating up villains and uncovering the secret of the world and eventually fighting gods, one way or another. It also has an insanely good English localization, like I'm constantly floored s how good and creative it gets.
The problem is thatike any good Saturday afternoon anime, it's got way too many episodes, and as any good gacha games, it has way too many characters that they spend a lot of time on. I'm gonna have to make liberal use of their skip feature and forego my FOMO—relying on almost nothing but vibes to decide which chapters get skipped—if I want to get to Sandalphon's origin story before the heat death of the universe. Here's to that!
Rift of the NecroDancer
It's always a treat when an indie game that has been years in development gets released (stares in Silksong). This semi-sequel to the hit game Crypt of the NecroDancer was announced in 2022 and finally released 10 years after the first game (though to be fair, NecroDancer 1 got a bunch of DLCs that are functionally sequels). And it's an extra treat that it's exactly as good as I expected it to be.
Rift is kind of a weirdo when compared to similar-looking rhythm games like Guitar Hero or Arcaea or Project Diva, because it's also a lot more like Rhythm Heaven. The notes fall down beat-by-beat instead of continuously, so you can't just rely on your eyes to see how close the notes are to the box, you gotta listen to the beat. Its notes are also "enemies" that you're fighting, each with specific behaviors that you have to look out for. In short, the game needs hand-eye-brain-ears coordination, and also left-hand-right-hand coordination if you play that way.
I'm honestly surprised at how few rhythm games use beat-by-beat animation (or uhh, whatever this is called). It forces you really listen to the rhythm instead of just going by sight. I guess the downside is that you need a specific type of music to make ir owkr this well. Like the first game, Rift's soundtrack is full of music pieces that have strong, obvious beats to better guide you through the game. They're not, err, the best kind of music to listen to, and sometimes not even the best kind of music to play with... but they work really well with this kind of gameplay. If nothing else, the music entrench a powerful sort of identity to the game.
It took only a few hours to get to the ending of the "Story Mode" (the story itself is fine, got some nice character with immense charm, but nothing to honestly write home about), but the main meat of the game is getting mastery of the rhythm. Medium difficulty is often hard enough, but I can see people putting in the time to get to Hard, and maybe Impossible if they're real freaks. Hmm. It might not be for me but always appreciate it when a game has a mode for the Real Freak.
Monster Hunter Rise
Getting into fighting games got me a lot more interested in action games, a genre that I've previously dismissed as something I'm not into. Coincidentally, Rise was in a pretty deep discount on the eShop while I was buying Rift of the NecroDancer, so like what the hell, let's see what it was about.
"Let's see what this action game is all about," I say, and then proceeded to main the bow and play it like a damn FPS instead of the action game it's supposed to be.
I am very early in the game and honestly nothing about it has clicked yet. I know it's slower-paced than most other games, but I feel like all I've been doing so far is flail about. It's a nice game to spend 20 minutes just wandering about, I guess. I always feel bad when a game is "wasting my time" and this game is absolutely wasting my time, but it also feels a little soothing. Hmm. I'll play more.
The Chef's Shift
Quite possibly the first locally-made game not written by a friend with writing that I actually enjoy. I've played this game in a few local events and was charmed by its art and its typing gameplay (I do enjoy typing with my keyboard), so buying this small -team game was a no-brainer, really.
The typing time management gameplay is as good as I expected it to be, but I was surprised by how charming the story is. I was expecting some throwaway lines here and there but it actually has some funny dialogues and goofball scenarios. Mind, it's not anything mind-blowing, but I got a few chuckles out of what I expected to be simple set-dressing. I'm looking forward to whatever zany scenarios Lorenzo the second-rate thief found himself in.
Arknights
As of writing this they had just announced that an old NPC who has hitherto appeared as an awesome black crystal dragon is now a generic anime catgirl. Readers, I am in mourning.
If you've been following me for a while you'd know that I'm obsessed with Arknights. I have a whole flowcart of its stories, I have far too much of its lore tucked in my head, I can name all its 300+ characters and what their hobbies are and how exactly their lives are intertwined with each other, with their nation, with the land itself. I'm always looking forward to whatever new story they're going to add to it, adding to this wonderful patchwork of world I let grow in my head.
But honestly I've been kinda weaning off it in the last few months. The last few events have been dull, as they forego the more serious plotlines for... stupid goofy stories they aren't equipped to write. Oh I'm still logging in everyday and I'm still looking forward for when the next story is releasing, but it's gotten to be kind of a chore, if I'm being honest. Each new event announcement (which we get 6 months in advance because I play on the global server but keep a lookout for developments in the CN server) just keep confirming to me that, hmm, my goat may be washed. I might not like the direction that the game is going.
Need to stop make myself from feeling guilty if I mess up my math. Okay I might not hit the target I was making but do I care enough about the game for it? Is it worth caring about it? I can spend the time getting good at fighting games instead.
Wuthering Waves
"Is Wuthering Waves combat even good?" I wonder to myself as I play it, not too long after I was just playing a fighting game. "Damn, all I do is press the same two buttons in reaction to glaringly visible prompts. No mind games? No split-second reaction to a different decision that the enemy made?" I am fighting game-pilled.
I genuinely think Wuthering Waves's combat is pretty good, but I also admit it's not particularly deep... Or is it? Is it really that good? Why am I more annoyed at its flaws than enjoying it, when the point of playing it is just to relax? Uh, Maybe I should just bite the bullet, obliterate my fomo, and play better games.
Maybe I should just finish my Elden Ring playthrough or reinstall Bayonetta.
Books
I borrowed my cousins' extremely thick and extremely dense book that collects the whole Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I enjoy it, so far, but damn is it a slowburn. I'm still halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book. God knows if I'll ever finish this and return the book. At least he just genuinely doesn't need it anymore (he confessed he wasn't a fan of the writing style either).
I'm also reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi and damn, let me tell you, it'll make you want to beat up the British Empire with your bare hands, those pieces of colonizing shit. But even knowing what they did, Khalidi was also still critical of the Palestinian leadership's failure to organize and fight back. So many things could have gone differently, but could they really? Sometimes it takes a string of bad decisions (and good decisions from your opposition) but sometimes those decisions are inevitable.
In conclusion
I only got a few days left in this holiday and SHIT, I should spend less time doomscrolling on twitter and read more books! Less time on gacha games that make me sad, and get better at fighting games instead!
