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I Don't Know If Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Can Get Any Better Than This

Chapters five and six of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth might be some of the most fun I've had in the Final Fantasy franchise. A card game tournament, playing the part of a tourist to get free beachwear and, best of all, riding around town on a "Wheelie."

Now, in my third week of playing, I’ve finally make it into chapter seven of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Chapters five and six were exactly the sort of weirdly enjoyable stuff I’ve been looking forward to since I first saw the Segway–excuse me, “Wheelie”–bits in the game’s trailer. Each one has its own little moments of interesting characterization, some whacky fun (that, in Chapter 5, bordered on…

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A Situation So Bad It's Good In The Leeching Wastes

I really have to give it up for one of my players this time. I gave them some parameters to play out a charm their character had failed to resist and they absolutely knocked it out of the part. An absolutely nerve-wracking session, unlike any other.

My now-Wednesday group, currently playing The Leeching Wastes, has now met four times in a row! What a record! This time, what was supposed to be a short ritual turned into a whole-session activity that was incredibly emotionally fraught. The cliff-hanger from last time, an abysmal saving throw result, wound up snowballing first into a bit of confusion about the reason the party was there at all,…

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Getting Emotional With Andor

I planned to do a big, hefty critical analysis type post for Andor, but I got side tracked with thoughts about the emotions we see in Andor (as opposed to all of the rest of Star Wars) and now you get this post and I'll see if I can get another one done.

One of my favorite parts of Andor, besides being able to watch it all in one sitting so that the only anxiety I had to deal with involved the actual episodes unfolding on my TV, is the range of emotion shown by all the characters. We get people who are angry, sad, happy, and so on. We get the whole range of human emotion. Which is remarkable because Star Wars typically isn’t interesting in the…

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Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Is Making Me Care About Cloud

I'm back to FF7: Rebirth a few days early to talk about the time the game made me actually care about Cloud. Emotionally. I saw some things in the last couple hours of Chapter 4 that melted my heart and I gotta tell you about them.

I just wrote about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and my experiences with the game leading up to a point near the end of Chapter 4 the other day, but I’m back again, earlier than usual, because I played just a little bit more and was absolutely struck by what happened less than an hour of game time after I stopped playing. When I wrote the post linked above, I’d finished my previous gaming time with an…

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The Best Session Of Heart: The City Beneath I've Ever Run

I finally ran a session of Heart: The City Beneath that felt like it lived up to the potential I saw in the system and it is not lost on me that this session included a character swinging for the fences and another character failing so hard they died.

I ran what will probably be the final “downtime” session of my Heart: The City Beneath game. I put “downtime” in quotation marks because it was supposed to be a rather low-tension session that quickly became anything but that. Sure, our Descent Into The Rotting Heart campaign was split into two groups (last session, two party members stepped into a Fracture and the other two decided to stay in…

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Finding The Fun Amidst The Familiar In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

I've still only on Chapter 4 of this game, thanks to a couple weekends spend doing other things, but I'm already starting to notice some major difference, and not just between FF7 Rebirth and the original game.

A few weeks ago, as a part of my on-going quest to document my time spent in the various worlds of Final Fantasy 7, I wrote about Cloud Strife and the way his character is portrayed differently between games. As I’ve gotten further into Rebirth, I’ve thought a lot about the depiction of Cloud in the original game, the way it was different in Remake, and the way it’s different again in Rebirth.…

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Well-Intentioned Peer Pressure In The Workplace

Turns out that peer pressure still sucks as an adult, but not as much as people refusing to listen to why you're not doing something and them all making up their own reasons to argue against as they attempt to convince you to do something.

This has been an incredibly busy week at work for me. Tomorrow will bring some relief, since I’ve got to leave shortly after noon for an appointment and will be finishing the day by working from home, but the arrival of some of my foreign coworkers for their yearly trip into the main office has upended my usual schedule for my week. Not only do I have extra work to do now that they’re…

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Posting Through A Depression Spike

My depression hasn't really gone away since the last time I wrote about it. I've just kept myself too busy to think about. Unfortunately, I'm too tired to do anything but think today and this is all that's on my mind right now.

It has been a while since I’ve written about it as anything other than a tangent on a post, but I’m still struggling with my now months-long depression spike. It has definitely helped that I rarely leave work while it is still fully dark outside and that I’m able to get more sun than ever during my walks (though I’m needing to wear sunscreen now, which is not my favorite, since one of the…

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Basking In The Solar Eclipse

Getting to see the solar eclipse of April, 2024, was a really fun event and not just because I got to see all the cool gear my coworkers had brought with them for the event. Solar eclipses are actually super cool and I'd never pass up a chance to see one.

Yesterday was the date of the 2024 Solar Eclipse (the day I wrote this, anyway: it was a week and a day ago as you’re reading this) and I had the opportunity to go outside for half an hour to watch it happen. Despite my love for celestial events and cool space pictures, I was a bit unprepared for it, since I didn’t have the energy to figure out what glasses were safe to use and then acquire a…

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I Watched All Of Andor In A Single Sitting

I accidentally watched all of Andor in a single sitting (with some breaks for food and whatnot) because it was too good to not watch it all at once. Which makes it the first show I've binged since late 2020 when I lost my appetite for dense media.

This past weekend, instead of playing a ton of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, I decided to bank some more episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, got wrecked by the end of the fifth season, realized the podcast I’m listening to as I watch along (as separate activities) pivots immediately after those episodes to watching Andor, and then wound up binging all of Andor until 1 in the morning on a work…

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Early Thoughts On Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

I'm only six hours into FF7 Rebirth (half of which has been spent exploring the open-ish world aspects of the game by jumping up or down every cliff the game will let me scale) and I'm already super excited to see what they do with the original story!

After a week of cramming what gaming I can into my work nights, I’m about six hours into Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which might sound like a lot, but much of that time has been spend exploring the largely open world available to me about an hour into Chapter 2 of the game. After all, I can’t NOT explore every nook and cranny of the wipe world open world suddenly thrust upon me with its incredibly…

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Closing The Loop In My Dungeons And Dragons Campaign

My The Leeching Wastes group has met for all three of our planned sessions so far and the only thing more exciting than our excellent and growing record is all the cool character stories my players and telling and working through in our game!

Bumping our record to three out of three scheduled Dungeons & Dragons sessions for the first time in years, my group playing The Leeching Wastes met for our third session following the revival of the campaign. Last time, I revealed that their characters were caught in a time loop situation and that there was something going on with the moon thanks to a (relatively) young god performing her first…

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Spring Weather In Winter And Winter Weather In Spring

We've been having such unpredictable and wild weather lately that my attempts to gain a semblance of control over my life have backfired because it's nearly impossible to feel like you're in control of anything when your environment is this chaotic.

I spent my most recent Friday (two Fridays ago from when this gets posted) spring-cleaning my apartment. Which feels a little funny to write today, given the blizzard conditions I drove in last night and the multiple inches of slowly-melting slush that still coat the ground today. A lot of which is only just thawing out from last night’s freeze. We’re solidly in April now and still getting…

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Taking A Break Between Final Fantasy 7s Remake And Rebirth with Intermission.

Despite the fact that the title of this blog post might read like a bit of word salad, those ARE the names of the Final Fantasy games I've been playing and I've had to spend a lot of time in this post making sure I was calling everything the right name.

Over the weekend, taking much longer than I expected, I played through both chapters of the Final Fantasy 7: Remake Intermission. I’m pretty sure I’m missing part of the name, but even after looking it up, it seems confusingly similar to what they’re calling the remake of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core, so I’m just gonna call it “FF7: Remake Intermission” or just “Intermission” for short. Despite…

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Playing A Shipshape Support Character In A Birthday One-Shot

I had a great time playing in a one-shot for my friend's birthday and it was a great experience except for the fact that a I never got to reveal a joke I'd built into my support spellcaster. Which is small potatoes, but I thought it was pretty funny.

Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friends for a birthday one-shot Dungeons & Dragons game. Most of the players were my every-other-Wednesday group (who play The Leeching Wastes campaign I’m running), but this group was originally formed from the available players of a group I’ve never been a part of before. Now, I’ve run a D&D game for everyone in the one-shot’s group before, thanks to…

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Changing The Past By Destroying The Future In Final Fantasy 7: Remake

Now that I've completed Final Fantasy 7: Remake, I don't really have a lot of comparison notes. What I do have is a lot of thoughts about how to make a game about changing the past without time travel or imposing the future's will on the past.

I finished Final Fantasy 7: Remake. I’ve still got to do the Intermission thing with Yuffie and I’ll probably go back at some point to finish collecting the achievements by playing through the game on Hard Mode (I’ve been enjoying the extra challenge of a more difficult game mode lately and I enjoy the combat in FF7: Remake enough to figure overcoming the challenge could be a fun way to spend my…

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Finding Logic Where There Is None In Final Fantasy 7: Remake

I was thinking about some cutscenes I'd seen during my last few days of playing Final Fantasy 7: Remake and the seemingly incoherent rules governing Cloud's ability to jump, so I decided to do a worldbuilding exercise and take them all as gospel.

One of the things that always sticks in my mind about a lot of video games is the often huge difference between the abilities of a character when they’re in a cutscene and when they’re under player control. Compounding this problem is that there’s also sometimes a huge difference in a character’s abilities from one cutscene to another. Take Final Fantasy 7: Remake as an example: Cloud makes some…