#i don't exist to insert levity in to your life

[beeseverywhen]

The other day someone described me as quirky and it shook me to my core. In the same conversation someone noted that I was 'just so random' I feel like 2010 is rising to haunt me.

Does anyone know how you can reconnect with old friends without them inadvertently unearthing insecurities you put to bed over a decade ago?

[acornerofnowhere]

Have finished the first Witcher game and realised that systemic RPGs give me anxiety.

More thoughts below the cut (spoilers ahoy):

1. It's taken until this moment for my opinion on the matter to fully crystallise but I just can't with systemic games. People look at me as if I've grown a second head whenever I say I prefer JRPGs but the appeal is very simple: A-to-B, straight line, emotional teen, magical airship adventure, kill god, bish bash bosh and you're done. I'm a doctrinaire completionist, I want to absorb everything a piece of media has to offer, complete every quest, trigger every cutscene, max every relationship, and my trouble with systemic games is that this mindset guarantees an utterly miserable time. You're supposed to go with your gut, let the chips land where they may and reconcile yourself with the game's circadian rhythms, and I'm just not built like that, it gives me anxiety that I'm missing content if I don't have a walkthrough next to me at all times, spoiling myself on every twist just to make sure I reach the point where there even is a twist.

2. There are very occasional glimmers of brilliance in the game's writing that make its frequent atonal clangers all the more inexcusable, like a drunken conversation between Geralt, Dandelion and Zoltan about what the witcher really wants out of a relationship with some genuine humour and pathos sandwiched between fetch quests that are constantly about to fall apart at the coding level. Line delivery is universally flat but that may just be the translation, and you're never sure whether the moments of levity are genuine or the result of engine limitations whacking all gravity out of a scene with a lump of plywood. You can just about spy the potential buried under layers of stitch work and technical compromise but the team's bizarre priorities make them very hard to extract.

3. I haven't investigated how involved Sapkowski was in the development of this game. I got the impression from the famous bad blood between him and CD Projekt Red that he signed off the name and pretty much left them to it, but there's various elements from the game that crop up five years later in his follow-up Witcher book Season of Storms (like the Golden Oriole elixir, the prophet Lebioda, the vodyanoi, even the ongoing sorcerer project to create "superhumans" that Sapkowski proceeds to take the piss out of), which suggests he either was involved and contributed ideas, that CD Projekt Red had access to his notes, or that Sapkowski had played the game much like everyone else and felt entitled to filch whatever he pleased as the whole shebang was ultimately his idea. We may never know.

4. The sexual escapades that Geralt IF/THEN logic puzzle's into are about as titillating as a cheese grater and I kinda love how awful they are? While he does get around a bit in the books he isn't nearly as big a man-whore as the game makes him out to be. But a larger incongruity between book!Geralt and game!Geralt is the inevitable product of being assigned the protagonist role in a tale where his decisions shape the world around him in major ways while in the books he is much more a passive observer of human behaviour and a point-of-view character for the real protagonist of the Witcher saga, Ciri. Incidentally, Yennefer and Ciri are completely absent from this game, and Triss (if you so choose) seems to take advantage of Geralt's amnesia to insert herself as the love of his life. One hopes future games will explore this tension but for now the mere existence of a personality beneath Triss's polygonal exterior requires layering a whole lot of book knowledge atop a very skeletal collection of jittering animations.

Onto The Witcher 2!