joelmmd

[joelmmd]

finished katamari damacy

. and we ♥ katamari, which is what this screenshot is from. figured i might as well talk about them both.

katamari damacy is a really impressive first showing of the whole katamari thing. it's a 10/10 concept executed pretty well. everyone loves watching numbers go up, and watching a ball gradually amass size as you roll shit up plays into this hard. it's very satisfying. the controls are weird but work almost perfectly here. my only real complaints are that i never felt too comfortable with the turning speed, and that the climbing fucking sucks. whenever you try to scale something you have to bump into it 2 or more times before the game realizes what you're trying to do, and you have to approach it at a perfect perpendicular angle. it sucks ass and was so frustrating.

the 4:3 aspect ratio also hurts the game. like, i don't think there's much the developers couldve done about that, but having this small a field of vision with the katamari taking up so much of it makes it really hard to get a grasp on your surroundings. it's thankfully not that bad, with how the game is.

well ok, "how the game is" is mostly that the requirements for beating a stage are pretty easy, and the gameplay isn't super moment-to-moment demanding. doing well is mostly a matter of routing and maneuvering, and you don't have to do that well to beat the game. and that's kinda nice. if you wanna half-ass a stage, you totally can. and there's still a lot of room for perfecting your score in a level, if you're okay listening to the same fucking lines of dialogue over and over.

the game's ultimately really charming. it's got a fun and unique style and atmosphere that, combined with solid and fun gameplay, makes it something really special. it's why the game has such a legacy and devout following. i'd imagine. i dunno, maybe it just really tapped into the LOL Japan attitude and that's why anyone cares. im not a doctor or anything.

we ♥ katamari iterates on the already good game of katamari damacy really well. it's a bigger game with greater ambitions. it's got more areas, more customization, and more goals for a given stage. those goals get pretty interesting, even if so many of them boil down to "roll up a ton of shit" like usual. i'm not gonna complain about that when it's the most fun thing to do in this game.

i will say that i kinda wish there were less maps. like, variety is good and all, but it's also really nice to explore the same environment with different perspectives and sizes and goals. most maps were just used twice, though some only once. (POST MADE BEFORE REALIZING THERES BONUS SHIT. Theres a bunch of alternate challenges you unlock later in the game in the same maps. which itself is cool (bonus content) but also is the map thing i was talking about.) there was also not that much small-scale rolling, which is a shame. actually, neither of these games had much of it. you dick around in houses and on top of desks for, like, 2-3 levels, and never look back after that.

i kinda took the whole cousins thing for granted this entire time. it was weird playing damacy and realizing they're only for multiplayer in that game, but they're so nice to see here. even though i mostly just played as the prince (So many of these other guys are Freaks) i like having more options and they're fun to see dicking around in the levels. it adds even more character to the game.

the turning i complained about in damacy might be better here? or maybe i just got used to it. But the climbing still sucks so bad it pisses me off. there's less climbing to do, but whenever youre trying to get up to king kong or whatever i'm screaming. this shit does not work.

i keep understating what i like about the games i talk about. the game is really good. definitely an improvement over katamari damacy. it still has the same annoyances, minus the repetition (faster retries, bonus dialogue for replaying levels), but we ♥ katamari brings more than enough new and good shit to the table that it's just a better game.

i'm shocked these are the first games i've finished since july. just nothing in august at all. i have some stuff i'm definitely interested in playing after this. actually, i think i'm almost done with the simpsons game, which is definitely worth talking about. uh, i've also been meaning to actually fucking finish factorio, though i don't know if i have anything to say about that. i got blue science done, which is the hard part, but who knows if i can put in the effort to do the rest. i really wanna get to the klonoa series, that would be fun. and i imagine i'll suddenly become interested in pokemon or fire emblem again sometime soon.

maybe i just play more katamari. i already have the next 2 in the series downloaded, and there's also a new one coming out whenever. if i can maintain interest this could become a whole thing. but uh, you may or may not know how that is. how that kinda thing goes with me. whatever. maybe i jack off and watch youtube for 4 months. anything can happen You can do anything in this game called life

[joelmmd]

beat dragon ball xenoverse 2

second time, actually. which is kinda funny since i also haven't played the first one at all yet. the game's kinda fun. i liked it but it might just be because of the kind of person i am.

really don't like the visuals. the character models have this weird shading and a lack of texture on their textures that make everyone look really plasticy, like a bunch of action figures. it's definitely a deliberate choice, you can see it reflected in the pre rendered cutscenes and official art. but it just doesn't look great, even if it otherwise captures the series style pretty well. previous dragon ball games looked pretty good, so i don't see why they did this.

i didn't care for the story. the time patrol stuff is actually a really good setup for this kinda thing, since it's a perfect excuse to repeat the classic moments and shove some fun stuff into the timeline for you to deal with. but it's mostly just used as an excuse to do the dbz story beat-for-beat again, like every other fuckin dragon ball game. there are some of the villains from the movies thrown in here, like turles and broly. but they were all of kind of boring. you go off to the side and fight some rando who just showed up and then they leave. the first cooler fight was cool but that's about it. the story does try to do some novel stuff outside of that but it's just, like, Oh what if nappa also turned great ape. What if ginyu swapped bodies with a different guy. it's so boring.

the actual plotline is that mira and towa are behind the scenes powering up all the antagonists in history (and adding the movie guys), which is why you have to go back in time and help out with all the fights. you only learn what the point of any of this was at basically the end, which is also the only point at which any of this becomes interesting. i like mira turning into a battlebrained meathead who only cares about fighting and getting stronger, and bardock's great. but up until that happens it's just "Haha we have plans and machinations!" "What could their machinations be?! I guess we don't know" and isn't really worth the admittedly small portion of the story mode that this takes up. i did really like what they did with the xenoverse 1 hero, even if they spend most of the game Missing and are kinda inconsequential. it was fun.

the gameplay is weird. if you cancel an attack string with a Step, you can just restart the string and repeat that infinitely for infinite damage. but if you have at least 2 things of stamina, your opponent can just burst out of it. you can burst out of anything, even supers and ultimates. which feels like shit. so if your opponent doesn't have stamina, you get to really wail on them in a satisfying way, but if they do then they can just decide when your combo's over. outside of that, it plays like the budokai tenkaichi games, which is fine by me. they were fun, if a bit simple, and the simplicity is less of a big deal here.

the best part about the game is probably the character customization. i'm a sucker for it in all contexts, but it's done pretty well here. you have a selection of races with different attributes and unique transformations, stat points to allocate, moves to use, and a lot of clothes. there's a lot of room for diversity in function and form, and it's great! clothes (essentially) have stats assigned to them, but there's even a mechanic to bypass that so you can just wear whatever you want. it's a lot of fun to experiment with different looks and loadouts, and most it is stuff ripped from actual characters, so i get to pump my fist in the air and say "Oh like from the show" whenever i get launch shoes or beerus blast.

the moves kinda get the shitty end of the stick, though, since they have to actually do stuff. with the way the game works, moves that aren't fast enough to combo into either need to do a Lot of damage or have meaningful application in neutral to be useful, so a lot of them aren't. there's still a lot of good choices, but it sucks if you wanna run a move you like that doesn't fit into the game super well. it does hurt to give up tri-beam because it's infinitely more situational than just a normal beam.

still, being able to play as your very own guy and having so much control over their appearance and moveset makes up for a lot. like, the parallel quests might be annoying and God im fuckin tired of fighting the ginyu force, but i get goodies and loot and eventually something to put on my character. so whatever. story's boring but look there i am theres my guy. hey goku. whats up.

a lot of the appeal of the game is probably lost on people who aren't super invested in dragon ball. i can definitely have a laugh at popping ultra instinct against perfect cell and just completely killing him with yamcha's spirit ball but if you don't know what any of that is you're probably not gonna care. it's all just gonna come off as really self indulgent, which is kind of the point.

i like dragon ball, and i liked xenoverse 2. it's fun seeing stuff from all over the franchise, the character customization really appeals to me, and that all helps distract from the annoyances of the gameplay and the lackluster story. but someone who doesn't share these interests would probably get nothing out of it and just write the game off as the slop it sorta is.

i don't really know what i wanna do next. there's still some xenoverse stuff to complete but i'll get sick of it at some point. i'm in a dreary hopeless mood and wanna push myself to make Content while i have free time to do so but i wanna have a more defined goal than i do right now. i cant just make stuff about everything im currently interested in. thatd suck to watch. and i lose interest in stuff too fast to stick to anything in specific either. i dunno. maybe it'd be best to just start now and worry about that later but we all know how hard starting is. whatever. thanks for reading.

[joelmmd]

finished starvaders

or about as "finished" you can get with a rougelike. lite. there's still stuff to do for Completion but i think ive got it complete enough.

i had good fun with it. it's a turn based grid based roguewhatever deckbuilder. i know reading that is kind of nauseating but i felt like this game made something interesting out of it without reinventing the wheel or anything.

the presentation's great. the game looks really good, partly because of the really good art all around and partly because of the great designs for characters and creatures. there's a lot of good music, too, though i do wish there were a few more tracks. you end up hearing the same handful of songs over and over.

the game itself is fun. there's a lot of strategy to planning out turns and moves, but the random nature of drawing cards from your deck (and some moves just Being random) takes enough pressure off you that it's not too mentally exhausting. there's engaging expression in how you build your deck and what synergies you go for, and most cards aren't hard to understand. you can usually tell something's use case and what it synergises with pretty easily.

there's a bunch of stuff to unlock, and it mostly feels good. there's 3 different mechs that all play really differently and have unique card pools, and then a couple pilots that have further but less dramatic differences. i didn't really care for any of the keeper pilots, but i liked basically everything else. you also unlock cards, but the game opts to do something different here with the whole "sets" system. essentially, in the name of not diluting the card pool with everything you've ever unlocked, you just unlock booster packs, and the game randomly applies 3 to a run. it kinda works. it makes it easier to build your run around anything, especially since the cards in a set are designed to work with each other, but it does kinda make that avenue of the meta progression feel underwhelming when it only has so much of an impact at a time.

i also felt like the game was a bit easy? a lot of my early runs were just upgrading the cards in my starting deck + some deckthinning and that was enough to get me through the hardest normal difficulty pretty consistently. i never felt like i really had to do heavy strategizing with my deckbuilding or my turns, since it was usually overkill. it's fine. probably. i'm not the kinda guy who needs to be challenged to have fun, and there's some bonus modes i might do for extra difficulty. but i am kinda disappointed that i wasn't really pushed to realize the full potential of some of these cards.

i don't have anything super meaningful to say about the game or a meta narrative or whatever. it's a well designed rougegame that i had fun with. i wasn't even gonna make a post since there's not a very concrete Finished point to have and i don't have that much insight into anything to give, but i kept thinking about it and the whole point of this tumblr exercise is to vent out my thoughts about this stuff.

plus im not on track to finish anything else soon. i was playing something that i wanted to post about but i also started another game and i guess that was too much for me. ive mostly been playing umamusume since then. which regrettably i have been having fun with. ill try to get back to something i can post about though but you know how it is

[joelmmd]

finished getting over it with bennett foddy

i quite liked it. the narrative around the game is a bit reductive, which makes me more mad then the game ever did. but i'll talk about the actual game itself first.

it's about climbing a mountain. you can only move by pushing and pulling yourself against the landscape with a hammer, done with the mouse. the mountain is intentionally designed with the idea that making a mistake can lead to you falling down the mountain and losing progress.

the controls sound a lot worse then they feel. you get the hang of it pretty fast, or at least the basics. you can kinda just swing the mouse clockwise or reversa to move right or left. climbing like this, when the layout is simple and easy, actually feels really good. i feel like if the game wasn't hard at all it'd still be fun to just scale the mountain.

of course, the game is hard, and part of that is because of these controls. as you go higher up the mountain, you're expected to do more and more precise movements. but the controls are really granular, and it makes it hard to reliably and consistently move your guy the way you want. even after you figure out, generally, what to do to get past a certain part, executing that still requires a level of precision that's hard to meet with these controls.

and i'm lead to believe this is the point? while you climb, bennett foddy does some narration about this game and video games in general. and in a part of this narration, he praises the Sexy Hiking game he really likes for basically having accomplished this first, that in that game every obstacle is "real" because you're never fully confident that you can get past it, even if you already have.

and i think this aspect is why everything in getting over it with bennett foddy works. older games where losing all your lives means starting from the absolute beginning aren't just frustrating because that means a loss of (possibly significant) progress, but also because getting back to where you were isn't that engaging. you already know what to do, and you feel like you can just do it again. you often start checking out, and that leads to dying in stupid places, and then you just get fed up with the game and stop caring.

but in getting over it with bennett foddy, you can get sent back to an earlier obstacle and still really struggle with it. the challenge isn't gone, you haven't really conquered it just by getting past a couple of times. so what's ordinarily a tedious and frustrating experience in a lot of other games ends up being engaging.

part of this is because the game never* truly sends you back to the beginning. the furthest back you'll ever be sent *with one exception is the part right after the first mound. it's a bit of a technicality, but it kinda does help. more meaningfully, there are also pseudo-checkpoints in the mountain that are designed to catch you if you fall from certain places. it's a meaningful concession that does make the game less frustrating and more enjoyable. and while the game is made to be frustrating it's never a dick about it. except for the bats thing. it would've been easy to make the player mad by trolling them or making the game unfair or putting in some fuck you moments. but the game's pretty good about that.

which is why i resent the general populous labeling this a "rage game". it's dismissive of everything the game does to keep it fun and engaging. it likens getting over it with bennett foddy to the impossible quiz. this shit's not the impossible quiz. it's not just something streamers play to farm clips. it's good!

it's not even that infuriating. i'm no stoic or anything, i frustrate very easily. like, 30 seconds into round 1 of a fighting game. and i never found myself angry at getting over it with bennett foddy. and i know people do get mad at it. and i dont know if that's just a human experience thing or what. i always felt like the game was fair, and that it was respecting you as a player.

the frustrating thing for some people might be bennett foddy himself? i can understand trying to do a video or a stream and getting annoyed when there's this voiceover you have to either tune out to talk over or just let happen. and part of it's probably the quotes. those might be intentionally annoying. i hope. it'd tie into the whole "B-philosophy" thing bennett foddy mentions, and they aren't super meaningful otherwise. i'd be confused if it was genuine attempts at being deep or whatever.

since the rest of the narration was pretty meaningful. there were a couple of things here that resonated with me and really should've sparked some discussion in gaming spheres. but they didn't. probably because of how many people saw it as just a rage game where you tried to get to the top of the mountain and bennett foddy annoys you on the way.

especially the whole thing about gamers just wanting satisfaction. some tricks for the clicks of the feckless and all that. you saw it in the past with walking simulators being chastised for not being interactive enough and thus not having value, and you see it today with people bitching and moaning any time they make a female character who isn't hot. they so fervently argue for games to be considered an artform, but don't want art. because art can be challenging. i guess it shouldn't be very surprising that Gamers weren't great at engaging with a difficult and pretty unconventional game with a metanarrative about how we engage with video games as a whole.

that's about all i have to say. i had a fun time with getting over it with bennett foddy, and i think it's well made. and it frustrates me to see the game dismissed as a rage game for youtubers. it's something really special, and i'm glad it exists. maybe we didn't deserve it.

[joelmmd]

finished sonic riders

im sorry the problem is me. im the problem my problem is that i start a playthrough of a game and then something new catches my eye and that takes my attention for a couple of days and when i come back to the game im like Well ive kinda lost interest in this playthrough i should start a new one and then i play for a bit and then im like Well now i want to do something different with this playthrough so i restart and this repeats and happens until im like Man im fuckin tired of playing the first 12 chapters of conquest and completely lose interest and i go play something else. thats how we get here thats how One playthrough of Sonic Riders is all i have to show after weeks

sonic riders kind of sucks. in the way that there's enough cool stuff and interesting things to make you want to play it but not enough to make playing it all that fun. i'll note now that i dont have a real idea of how normal multiplayer works out in this-it's rare enough that i get to play video games with buddies ever, much less some random specific one that'd require either parsec or whatever dolphin netplay stuff. i'm mostly going off the story mode here and a handful of the missions in the game.

the game revolves around the kinda shitty steering and AIR management. i like using AIR to boost and getting it back from tricks, and i'm honestly fine with the getting off your board thing when you run out. the steering is also fine, you're just expected to make most turns in the game by drifting. it's weird, but i can accept this just being the unique way the game works. but drifting costs AIR? it's really dumb, you shouldn't have to manage a resource to Turn Efficiently.

if you're behind someone they emit an air current/wave (that the game calls Turbulence for some reason ??) that i think is supposed to be a comeback mechanic. you ride the current and it's probably faster and takes you across turns without having to drift and sometimes you can do tricks off them. it doesn't seem too helpful in that regard? so it just swoops you up and prevents you from doing shortcuts or picking up items or rings which can be really frustrating sometimes when you consider that there doesn't seem to be a way to get off? i think. i couldn't find a way to do it myself but i have a really hard time accepting that nobody would think Hey maybe you should be able to get off early. the air currents are at least pretty good at not outright screwing you over, they dont dump you into obstacles or walls and end before those branching paths for each type of character.

but the air currents combined with how attacks work and how collisions sometimes shoot you off at weird angles can really make the game disorienting sometimes. especially without a tutorial! so starting out with the game is a mess of What's happening What am i doing Why did that happen What is this and not figuring out how some mechanics work until hours in.

and this is all honestly fine under normal circumstances. like, yea, you wont do as well as you could if the game was made better, but if you're just Playing you dont need to do well. you can just have fun. But the story mode expects you to win and take 1st place every time on pretty hard tracksagainst ai that's usually pretty good at not making mistakes and taking shortcuts. when even small mistakes lead to restarts, every small frustration piles on and becomes infuriating. it's maybe the worst way to play the game and it's one of the two major avenues for single player content.

the actual story of the story mode is underwhelming. i don't mind it being kind of laid back and not super serious or ambitious or anything, but there really isn't much here. hero story is kind of just an excuse to get the characters in races, which is fine. the ending sucks. babylon story is weird. you'd expect it to be like sonic adventure 2, where you see the other team's perspective and what they were up to offscreen in the other story, but all they were really up to that you get to see is wave putting a bomb on sonic's board and storm fucking around in Ice Factory. i guess jet races some robots? wave & storm & sonic's buddies do too and its the fucking final time you play as any of the babylon rogues in the story for some reason. but the whole 2 stories thing is really boring here, they don't use it for anything interesting. you just get a Final Stage and an actual ending for the characters. i did like how the babylon story showed the rogues being kind of a dysfunctional band of pricks. that was fun. but they carry that energy too hard into all of their scenes and it becomes insufferable really quickly.

i liked jet & wave. they were fun new characters. storm was whatever. the new designs are all pretty good too. it's funny but really dumb how all the male characters just get sunglasses or goggles instead of the actual outfits that all the ladies got.

i liked the general style of the game. it's evocative of bygone days where we were excited about technology and the future and i like that. i enjoy that old style of design. i'm also a big fan of the renders they made for this game & that opening animation. the graphics weren't anything too special but it looked good for a gamecube title.

you can tell that i'm run out of things to talk about. i had some fun with the game but a lot more problems with it. it's really frustrating to deal with all the little annoyances in the game, especially in the story mode. i'm definitely interested in playing the later riders games, i'd imagine those are at least interesting.

maybe that's what i'll play next? i've still got fire emblem on the burner but i'm losing motivation for that fast, so i might just keep doing more sonic riders. I'm definitely not doing all the missions in this game there's way too many of those and i dont want to play it for that long. who knows. anything can happen and also nothing can happen. it's rough man

[joelmmd]

ok sorry i really struggle to truly focus on one thing and Finish it. i keep getting distracted by anything that immediately sounds interesting . i got ~halfway through pokemon soulsilver and thought Well i should really stick to the mainline games and started playing black instead. and ive made jack dick progress in black due to previously mentioned distractions.

The most recent of which has been fucking fire emblem fates again. though im at least doing something new in messing with files and paragon and whatever to replace the player character with setsuna in all ways possible

a lot of it has been simple, just copying over setsuna's assets over all corrins'. for some reason paragon can't edit unit sprites? but copying them over wasn't hard. the model & textures was a bit more rough, since corrin's files are among several that aren't in english and are thus really hard to single out. i definitely did it wrong, the setsuna outfit is being applied for all classes and not just archer. i don't know how you'd fix that, nor do i care. it's quite fine like this.

also i can't for the life of me figure out how you'd change corrin's starting class and items. like, there are functions in paragon to change this stuff but none of them seem to work. changing corrin's class 1 & 2 haven't done anything, and changing the class in the chapter editor also doesn't work? at least for the prologue ones. i'm pretty sure you'd have to change a script or some piece of code with another program, and i don't even know where i'd start with that. i had to just use a save editor, which kind of works and kind of doesn't. it's annoying to do, since you have to start a save and then exit to edit it and then play until after the dragon chapter and then edit it again while the game keeps overwriting your items.

it also means it would have a lot less value as a Thing for people to download, with the extra work you have to do. i probably wont upload the mod anywhere unless i figure this stuff out, which i'm not too bothered by. this is largely a personal project. i only started on this because i had a dream where a friend drew something and i was in it, represented by setsuna, and i really liked it. and im liking this! i usually like modding games as long as it's not crazy hard.

this might give me the push i need to actually beat all of the routes. it'd be sorta illegitimate because of the mod but nobody really cares. get real. then again i've had bursts of motivation to meaningfully play this game in the past and lost interest anyways. hopefully this time will be different? or that i'll at least go back to pokemon black. i just wanna make progress in Something and not abandon it but that shit's really hard

i'll limit myself to just 1 more intermittent post until i actually beat something and can give my thoughts on it. so stay tuned for those? i guess

[joelmmd]

pokemon post again. lately i've come to realize that meowth kicks ass so i've been trying to catch one whenever possible. which brings me to the point of Why is this thing kind of a pain to get for ~most of the series

i've always thought that it's kind of like a pikachu thing where the pokemon's iconic enough to justify being easy to get all the time, but the only games where meowth isn't version exclusive and can just be Caught in a Route are FRLG and scarlet & violet. otherwise there's some kinda crazy lengths to go for for fuckin meowth? like, a trade only accessible to male player characters? only showing up in an area after getting the national dex in a game where it takes seeing every base dex pokemon (150 normally & boosted to 210 in platinum)??

it's at least in every generation, but, like, this seems kinda crazy. you'd expect this treatment to be given to some rando-mon that nobody really cares about but its fuckin Meowth. they're awesome. come on man

[joelmmd]

looking at bulbapedia made me finally realize that almost all of the back sprites in the generation 3 pokemon games are kinda just ripped from gen 2

they're definitely spruced up and look nicer and all but it's really just the same sprite. a couple of the ones i've looked at have some minor differences. like radicate's tail is a little further back and some of them have more of their body in frame in gen 3. you can see even here in the attached image that meowth has different whiskers. which makes it even more confusing since they obviously cared enough to go back for these small details and did a great job updating the sprites for the gameboy advance. but still didn't want to just make new sprites?

[joelmmd]

finished pokemon ultra moon.

i had a good enough time with it. it's not so different from x/y, a lot of what's been changed in terms of mechanics and whatever is pretty surface level. the big difference is in presentation and atmosphere, and neither got worse.

the introduction of regional forms is great, it's a really good concept and they kicked it off with some endearing designs and fun re-typings. while mega evolution is still a thing way later on, it's largely been usurped by z-moves which are less definitely less interesting, but more accessible and less frustrating to play against. the new SOS system is interesting, but annoying whenever you're looking to catch anything. pokemon refresh is nice but once you get poke pelago you can kind of just use rainbow beans and stop caring.

gyms being replaced with trials and leaders with totem pokemon is novel but i think they're less interesting. it fits the tone and atmosphere of the game but i definitely prefer traditional gyms where you fight characters instead of dicking around with whatever minigame.

what's definitely the most frustrating part of the game is how often it'll stop you in the name of either explaining what you're supposed to do next or for boring character moments. it makes the whole experience feel less like an adventure and more like a guided tour, and what's going on isn't interesting enough for that to be any fun.

the story felt like it was building up to something interesting but it was really underwhelming. they establish the aether foundation in a way that definitely clues you in on them eventually having a heel turn but when they actually become evil it's so out of nowhere. and then after necrozma is dealt with we're just done with that? we're cool now? they were torturing cosmog and running evil experiments and funding team skull and they dont even realize their evil ways and turn good or anything they just go back to doing whatever and it's never brought up again.

the characters were also underwhelming. i can see a world where they're fun and interesting, but what's actually in the game is pretty boring. hau and lillie could've had character arcs but instead they have One character shift where they decide to lock in. gladion has some interesting stuff, but they're more interested in letting him be moody and edgy than a character, and lusamine doesn't get to show her stuff at all. she's in one introductory scene and the scene where she's really evil and that's basically it. there's the less consequential captains and kahunas but most of them are standard archetypes and none really stuck with me.

i still liked the game. it's pokemon, you have to fumble pretty bad to ruin the core fun of the series. i liked the battling, i liked assembling my team, i just wish the stuff around it was better. there's still some post game content for me to do and i'll throw myself at that until it gets boring. then i guess i'll move on to black & white? haven't really decided.

[joelmmd]

hello! it's been over a year

This is partially due to me forgetting to blog my stuff here, but also because i kinda havent been finishing any games. i've certainly been playing them, but it's either that i lose interest before making enough meaningful progress to push myself to the end, or that i've been playing games that don't feel like the kind of experience that's worth writing about. i haven't been thinking of blogging much, nor have i been doing much that's blogworthy. especially considering i've stopped my playthrough of the kingdom hearts series after getting fed up with dream drop distance.

i did recently finish fire emblem awakening. maybe not recent, that was in january. it's the last game i've beaten! it was fun. everything about the writing was a stark improvement from fates, the only other game i've meaningfully engaged with in the series. i do resent the dual guard/strike mechanics, it's just adding more randomness to a game about strategery and tactics. also the part where chrom marries you out of nowhere i'm still mad about losing my first playthrough to that. the characters were fine? there weren't any groaners i really didnt like, but i wasn't very attached to any of them either. i have felt this with the bit of the other fire emblems i've played so maybe its a series thing or a me thing. the time travel children part was really neat, it adds a layer to your support pairings that even people who don't care about the characters can engage with. i can see why they kinda shoehorned it into fates. the only thing i can really say about awakening's map design stuff is that it slogs down towards the end. i was playing on normal/casual so it didnt really Matter but it still kinda blew.

i picked up fire emblem engage after awakening, trying to keep the streak going, but i didn't stick with it for very long. it was fun, there's just a lot of stuff to keep track of with all the skills and combat arts and emblems combined with the weapon triangle being Way more meaningful, i just get mentally exhausted so fast. i'll probably come back to it at some point later.

as of right now, i've been playing pokemon ultra moon, which i've been kind of enjoying and kind of annoyed by. i'll reserve my thoughts until i'm done and can write up a proper Thing for it, but i will say now that it's really frustrating for dawn stones to be obtained primarily through some poke pelago bullshit. i just want a gallade and it's looking like that's gonna take fuckin forever.

so i guess look forward to that write-up. i've been meaning to spend 2025 finishing more games and while i'm 3 months in with One game finished i'll keep trying.

[joelmmd]

kingdom hearts post again. dream drop distance is kind of sucking dick right now so i've been playing very little of it at a time. i might not come back to it ever so i'll just give my thoughts now the story hasn't actually gone anywhere yet, it's just teasing you with the idea that maybe it will! here are a bunch of randos from the other games isn't that crazy! pretty frustrating, i want stuff to actually happen. also, sora's more kh1 reminiscent design here really clashes with the post-2 voice and it bugs me. there are these optional story things in-between worlds (sometimes in the middle). the chronicles are nice and i appreciate it telling me what happens in the games i didn't play, but the optional cutscenes are weird. is it just so people who're only kind of engaged in the story can skip those but watch everything else? the gameplay has been sped up, which i'm not against but it was done in a weird way. feels like only the startup was reduced and the recovery of everything is still the same. combos are especially rough, the actual attacks are faster but you have to wait as long between them?? commands are back and they're good. they still work. balloon is kind of busted but that's probably for the best anyways. i just don't like how you have to fuck with the spirit system to get new ones. i don't like spirits. they really easily just get lost and stop engaging in the fight, never feels like they contributed all that much aside from a heal once or twice. also sometimes they'll teleport to catch up and it always startles me because they don't look that different from the enemies. speaking of, the enemies feel too strong here. not numbers or stats-wise, moreso their moves. so many of them have attacks with a lot of range, and you can be fighting like 7 at once, so you're just gonna get hit by stuff that was offscreen all the time. most enemies can be skipped through flowmotion though. i like having a movement system to make all the walking a little more engaging but this is kind of too far, you can just fly over everything as long as wherever you are has walls and a high enough ceiling. can't get staggered during flowmotion attacks so it's at least useful for normal encounters. kind of annoying for bosses since they don't do that much damage and you can trigger flowmotion from, like, rolling into a wall. bosses are already annoying enough, too. they're all big guys that don't get staggered by anything and most of them don't have reasonably sized windows to attack after you dodge something, so they kind of drag on. though part of that's probably just critical mode + skipping a bunch of enemies and missing out on xp talking, i wasn't doing that much damage with non-balloons. the drop system is fine? i think the timer isn't super well paced, without any modifiers you end up dropping ~90% of the way through most worlds so you go do riku's 90% and drop back to wrap up the like two fights you had left. though you get so many drop-me-nots and there's the thing that slows it down, so you can get past that annoyance pretty easily.

overall it's like on the edge of being fun. i'd probably enjoy it enough if the bosses and basic enemies were more fun to fight, but as it stands there's just not much to enjoy. i'll probably just watch the cutscenes online and play re:coded instead.

[joelmmd]

kingdom hearts post again. finished kh2!

couldn't bring myself to keep going for 100% and do all of data organization 13. it took me like a day just to beat 2 of the bosses and i wasn't feeling like grinding the rest out after that and Especially wasn't looking forward to doing the same with lw. i'll probably come back to wrap all that up later, though.

i had a lot of fun with the game! one of my complaints with kh1 was that the combat was ~1 layer of depth away from being engaging for the whole 30 or so hours you'd be playing for, and kh2 has remedied it pretty well. forms are cool and add extra strategy when it comes to which one to use and when, keyblades coming with their own abilities makes it worth switching them around for reasons that aren't just "this has the highest strength/magic", and i feel like some of the abilities here are a lot more impactful than the first game's. the new mp system is weird but ultimately good, rewards players for not getting hit for a while and doesn't enable "fuck you" attacks by letting you stock up like 20 cures to make them not matter. not a fan of using cure Once meaning you can't use magic at all until it recharges but it is how it is.

enemy/boss design (gameplay-wise) is still not great. i'm starting to think this is always the case, and that you just don't see the cracks until the game starts demanding really good play from you. it's harder to get mad about some bullshit way you got hit if it only did like 1/5 of your health, but when it starts putting you at 1 hp you have to actually confront the move and realize "wow that's not ok".

the worlds were really good this time around. definitely appreciated how the game stopped caring so much about justifying why you're helping out the disney guy or riding a skateboard or doing a musical, they just let you do it. i didn't hear a thing about "Sora you aren't allowed to meddle in these worlds!!! Let's just get the keyhole and leave" and it was great.

standout mentions are the pirate world for the realistic ass ghouls & CJS's party member icon looking edited in, halloween town for having christmas town in it, lion king world for being the most egregiously "oc" yet (my lion oc is just a kid but he's super strong... he has spiky brown hair and dark fur and attacks with a Weapon instead of claws and stuff), and timeless river for just being great, it's probably my favorite. they all felt a bit short, though. probably a good thing for some of them, but i would've loved to have more to do after finishing them than just fighting mushrooms.

the story sucks dick. feels as bad as the first game's with way more steps to get there. organization 13 are fine antagonists but they're fighting for the spotlight with fucking Pete. and maleficent. pete really doesn't feel like the right character for "harbinger of darkness with plot to take over world". they end up doing jack dick anyways so i have to ask if they're only here to make sure the tone stays light and to keep the focus at least a little on disney.

i also don't like the whole "nobodies don't have feelings and don't exist and dont have hearts so they're basically nonpeople and it's ok that they're never happy" thing, it feels really weird compared to the rest of the game being generally optimistic and hopeful. especially with the game saying "darkness isn't bad and we need both it and light", feels like a step forward and then a step back in philosophy. waste of potential too! it's a lot harder to get invested in any future nobodies (assuming there are any) if you plain up say they don't have emotion or feelings.

i don't know if i'd say the writing's so bad, there were a few charming moments here and there that stuck with me and it was a lot less "No! The darkness... The light of the heart, Kingdom Hearts, the heartless the darkness... Kairi... Your light..." than the first game. part of it's definitely helped by the better voice acting across the board. there were for sure less moments where it got noticeably bad, and they actually bothered to bring in the whole winnie the pooh cast this time. sora's the big winner here, though, his performance here really elevated the character for me. or maybe he's just more interesting with the extra few years under his belt.

lightning round-prologue is neat in how it kind of prepares you for the real game but it's like 3 hours long, sora's new outfit & the form variations are pretty cool, reaction commands aren't as intrusive as i expected, limits are fun but i usually just healed instead, cure becoming an aoe is a change i like a lot, switching the target you're locked onto is bound to right trigger + flick right stick and it fucking sucks, being able to move the camera around while locked on is pretty great, and donald & goofy were a bit more capable this time around. still died a lot but they very rarely got on my nerves.

long, but i think i've said what i wanted to say. fun times. moving on to Dream Drop Distance now, which i've already got my hopes a bit lowered for from trying it out before. can't imagine it's gonna suck or anything though, as long as i can swing my funny keyblade as riku the game can only be so bad.

[joelmmd]

kingdom hearts post again. currently in what i can only assume is late-endgame, wrapping side content up before actually beating the game so i can get ultima weapon.

getting my ass beat by sephiroth and the flower scythe guy. sephiroth's attacks aren't super hard to dodge at this point but he has so much health and you can die so fast so you just have to keep it up and not make too many mistakes too fast for the whole ordeal. Scythe guy is a little harder to dodge and he has attacks that just kill you that i don't really understand, but i'm also just inexperienced in that fight.

as i get closer to getting everything done a sense of "man i really just wanna move on to another game" is growing simultaneously with one of "Dude i've got so much stuff at this point i might as well go for 100%" which has made the whole thing weird. i'll cut this off now though since i'd like save some stuff for a post-game overview of my experience and thoughts

[joelmmd]

kingdom hearts post again. playing through 2, i've noticed it (on critical) has been a fair amount easier than 1 (on proud). like, sure they probably realized "Wow proud mode is way harder than it really should be" after making kh1, but i also think form levels have something to do with this. normally grinding really bites ass since you're throwing yourself at the same enemies again and again just so numbers can go up enough that you breach the vague barrier of "can reasonably fight enemies". and normal leveling in kingdom hearts isn't that different, you get a stat increase and only occasionally an ability, less occasionally one you'll actually care about. but leveling forms up gives you genuinely cool stuff. i really do get excited to level up my Quick Run or get a new ability, which makes for a solid incentive to grind the levels out. usually in rpgs i'll stubbornly throw myself at something over and over until i win or stop playing just to avoid grinding, but in this game i leveled up my forms just because i wanted to, which not only gave me whatever abilities but also just normal exp along the way, making me stronger. also i've just been having more fun and taking more time to do side content in 2 so that probably helps. but still, i think just having a more interesting incentive to grind does a lot to make the grind more bearable.

[joelmmd]

kingdom hearts post again. wisdom form fucks ass. basic attacks being projectiles is plain cool, even if it has a weird blind spot, and the free movement while shooting or casting spells feels so good. it feels like a whole different game when you activate this, like pre and post unlocking the dash in a movement shooter.

plus it's the magic one and i love magic in these games. valor and limit form are cool and all but they don't let me use cure or any of my spells for that matter so any contest was already over before the cool stuff can even kick in. sorry little buddy.

[joelmmd]

currently playing through the Kingdom Hearts series. started with birth by sleep, recently finished 1, and am currently playing 2.

up until actually trying the games i was led to believe that they kinda sucked ass or were at least for ~12 year olds, so i'm pissed i'm only now realizing that they're pretty fun. outside of some stinker design here and there, playing them has been a blast so far.

kh1 was pretty solid and really nailed the core combat stuff. it feels satisfying just to jump around and hit enemies for a pretty long while, and the way you can quickly get out of the recovery of spells by doing them in mid-air and landing isn't something i feel like you see in many other games. it was just missing like 1 extra layer of depth to be interesting throughout the whole ride, and it still ended up being great fun.

birth by sleep was kinda less interesting in comparison but it was good enough to make me interested in trying out the whole series which is worth something. i like being able to play as the multiple characters, each one having generally different stats and growth throughout the game is a neat concept that i'd say works pretty well. plays fine, too; commands are fun to use and d-links & shotlock are fine enough to be unobtrusive. the story is kinda annoying though, really feels like it's just meandering for a hot while until it decides to let anything happen and what does happen is kinda underwhelming.

hell i don't think i like the story of any of these games. that's the one thing that's lived up to what all the annoying people on the internet told me about the series, it's been pretty bad so far. even trying to honestly engage with the whole thing, it kinda just feels like nothing.

still, i'm having a lot of fun with these games, especially since i have one or two places i can talk about them with other people. definitely looking forward to completing 2 and the, like, 5? other games after.