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beat ff10 yesterday but don't really feel like I'm done with it... when I was a teenager I played it like a trillion times and it never really got old. which is weird because out of the story-heavy final fantasies I've always felt 10 has the least subtle plot (yes including 13 and its sequels) and I know that plot inside and out. there's a lot to analyze but the symbolism and themes are so in-your-face (and the game comes out and tells you everything lmao) there's not even much fun to be had making connections, except maybe how Seymour parallels both Yuna and Tidus, I think that's the one area where the narrative wasn't like "see!!! he's just like them fr!!!"

one thing I did find interesting is how Yu Yevon looks, I remember people taking issue with how "ridiculous" his design is... oh he's just this pathetic tick-looking thing. I can't get over how rich the symbolism is with Yu Yevon however. he is pathetic, he's a parasite, he's only good for causing death and misery. the Yevonite religious leaders are taking advantage of the populace by selling them false hope and getting rich off of it, literally a parasite class. if Yu Yevon had been like some crazy powerful monster like a dragon or something that would have been thematically inappropriate

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no I really do enjoy that in spite of Ida's apparent ambivalence toward his clone he still set up Amiguchi with a rich family, like. the man's such a narcissist lmao

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I mean when I first played 13 sentinels I didn't expect it to just be Seventeen Again told thru the medium of self-aware science fiction video gaming a la metal gear solid and I think that's why I ended up liking it so much

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well I have officially plugged 200 hours into 13 sentinels across two platforms, if it was also on the PC that would easily be another 100 hours. I can't believe how much I still love playing this thing

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truly 13 sentinels is a game I wish I could play for the first time all over again, obvs. I love going thru the post-game but The Intrigue was too good the first couple times lmao

I still think it's a great game, I just can't muster up the energy to replay the whole campaign fresh. the combat really is not that much fun until you are near the end of the story, and after you play thru area 4 for 100 hours or w/e the story-mode stages are so so so boring

anyway I love it and it's great and I'm still obsessed with it. but it's just not the same after you know what's going on lmao

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Illustration from The Cat Who Went to Sea by Kathryn and Byron Jackson, pictures by Aurelius Battaglia. 1950.

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somehow I've played 13 hours of UO since I bought it Friday

I was not expecting a place called Drakengard in a Vanillaware game of all things. I laughed

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honestly I was very iffy about even buying UO........ until I heard that there were expies of Hijiyama and Okino in it, then I was sold

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okay so I played the first hour

initial thoughts:

the music is great, the graphics are great, the JP voice work is great. the English script has probably gotten the same treatment as Odin Sphere's in that everything has been rendered into High Fantasy lite gobbledygook and some of it works and some of it doesn't imo

the gameplay is fun, no surprise there, this is Vanillaware :v

the character designs are uhhhh not bad? I bought the Monarch Edition on the eshop for the art book and. lmao I appreciate the pretty men in the cast but some of the big booba ladies are just too damn much. 13 Sentinels felt like such a radical step in spite of the fan service in that game, there was just the one actual fan service character and most of the female characters were handled tastefully imo, then again Hirai and Kida were helming the character designs in that one and they're both women, so what can ya do. female artists > male artists 99% of the time. Scarlett's boobs are distracting and so far the lack of female character input doesn't balance this out. but we shall see

the plot is hhhhh yeah pretty corny so far lmao but it's only the first hour! reminds me a bit of Path of Radiance and Sacred Stones, which are my favorite FE games, so no hate lmao

I'm not expecting it to knock my socks off, then again I didn't expect 13 Sentinels to knock my socks off and it ended up becoming one of my favorite games Ever. on the other hand that one had Kamitani at the helm the entire time and the man just has the golden touch

I'm not sure when this SRPG renaissance will die out but I'm guessing this won't be one of the more memorable entries, for me that will always be DioField Chronicle, but then again you can't compete with a game that has Waltaquin in it

anyway also wanting to replay Valkyria Chronicles and time is a finite resource so this may be the only bit I play of UO this month, alas

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hnnnnng finally caved and bought unicorn overlord, heard the story isn't that great but we'll see

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just thinking about how Yakushiji wanted Juro to be her knight in shining robot but she ended up being his instead lmao

I was replaying her prologue last night and couldn't believe the English localization team sort of kneecapped the line that made this really click for me, in English Kisaragi says Yakushiji is a romantic, but in the Japanese voice track she essentially says Yakushiji is waiting for her prince to come sweep her off her feet (riding a white horse and all lmao). her whole arc is one big role reversal, but I feel like the English version of the line sort of diminishes this aspect of her story - it's weird because it's still pretty apparent just through the actions of the characters and the set pieces, but you're never invited to consider the role reversal aspect in the English version. it's still definitely there but your attention isn't really drawn to it imo

idk the entire arc is just one long love-letter to fairy tales (Juro is certainly the strong knightly figure at first, but then he's "cursed," Yakushiji has to make a deal with a magical critter to break the curse, she has to save him from peril, "slaying" "witches," Juro's awakening from his long slumber at the end of the game brings to mind Sleeping Beauty, etc.). thinking about it this way imo also "solves" one complaint I've seen about her arc, that Juro "magically" remembers her at the end - but like. duh. it's the most whimsical portion of the game and you're already being slapped in the face with fairy tale tropes (even with Shippo/426, a black cat, which could be both a nod to a witch's familiar or to Socrates from Odin Sphere, or both, maybe - it would make sense for him to be a call back to OS since so much of the rest of the game reiterates characters, themes, and plot points from OS)

anyway I love this game lmao

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you know, this game explains itself so thoroughly I'm having trouble understanding why people have made "video essays" explaining it lmao. you can go back and replay every scene in the game. every dialogue. it has an in-game encyclopedia free for you to browse whenever. for being so convoluted (and in spite of it never trying to hold your hand, either) it really doesn't ever try to go over the audience's head. literally the opposite of an incoherent narrative

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Thoughts About the Second Hour

Yesterday I finally finished up my play-through of the Switch version and yes I cried during the very final cutscene lol

But then I went back to my new PS4 save and continued on...

Here we are starting to get into the longer prologues... I was able to blast through three of them + tutorial battles in the first hour, here we slow down a little

I'm not sure why exactly the English localization was unable to use H.G. Wells's name in-game but the whole "that one author" thing is awkward as hell, especially with the JP voice track on. when I said in my last thoughts post that the localization was dodgy, well... this is kinda what I mean lmao. I figure this is some copyright-based limitation but it's still silly, especially when the allusions to The War of the Worlds are so explicit otherwise

that said I find it interesting that the world of 13 Sentinels has stand-in fake names for movies from our own, but The War of the Worlds (and its author) is explicitly name-dropped. I just find this interesting because you know what movies they're "not" talking about otherwise (Godzilla, E.T., Terminator, etc.). this may perhaps be due to something we find out later

I love Minami, honestly... this game has really great female characters. I think most of the guys are actually kinda boring (their scenarios are much more interesting than they themselves are, let's put it that way) but the girls are all *chef's kiss*

I also love BJ... you can tell, after he gets oriented, that he thinks Minami is kind of A LOT

I was playing this and going through the last part of Minami's prologue thinking, wow I just love all of this... honestly the end with the Hi-Quads looming in the background (and the one suddenly standing up to look at her on the ridge) is one of the best moments of the early game

this isn't the first time Lonely Struggle is played but I really love this track and its use here... the whole soundtrack is pretty great but sometimes it's easy to forget it's a game soundtrack. Lonely Struggle in particular sounds like it came straight out of a Godzilla movie

Ogata showed up before in Hijiyama's prologue and I didn't like him there, either lmao

finally getting to the battle tutorial section... out of all the sentinels, the 2nd gen and 3rd gen are the ones where I'm reminded, oh yeah, these things are basically walking tanks. 3rd gen in particular are slow as fuck for most of the main campaign

I'll talk about Miura more when I get to his prologue but I think he is actually one of the better-written guys in the game... out of all of the boys I think he has the most nuance, unfortunately on the surface he's kinda boring lmao

another blink and you'll miss it bit of foreshadowing: "this was his last gift to me"

then we get to Yakushiji's prologue, which has to be my favorite in the entire game... all the scenes are really well put-together and memorable, from Kurabe showing up in the sentinel right up to the "contract" scene with Fluffy

another thing we are shown very casually: Kisaragi comes from the same "time" as Yakushiji

I remember this being the first part of the game where I was really truly disoriented... you go from 2024 (hmm) to 1985 (hmmmm) with a flashback to 2025 (hmmmmmm) and I was like wow there's just something kinda cray cray about this. the time traveling seemed very significant when it was shown in Hijiyama's and Minami's prologues but here it's happened so casually and without comment lmao so when the talking cat shows up it doesn't even seem that weird tbqh

when I said the game doesn't spoon feed you information, this is all what I'm kind of talking about... you already got shown that there's something up with Kurabe in his prologue (the documents in Morimura's office), but here we find out three things: he's a time traveler (and from very, very far into the future), he actually was Juro Izumi, and he's suffering memory loss. Kisaragi is also from Yakushiji's time period but we know she's also in 1985 at the same time, as shown in Fuyusaka's prologue. time travel was introduced in Hijiyama's prologue and now everyone can apparently do it lmao. the game does eventually provide explanations for all this but the explanations are usually only stated once and never brought up again

I love the scene with Fluffy, he's honestly a great character. once you know who he actually is all of this is very funny and also note that he never once lies to Yakushiji lmao

do note that no matter what you pick during the "choice" Yakushiji actually refuses to make a contract with Fluffy... she either sarcastically "accepts" or just straight up says no

two great pieces of music play in this prologue, Impending Doom (which was first played in Kurabe's prologue) and A Clause with Claws, one of my favorite tracks in the story sections

finally, the battle segment... we're introduced to sentinel recovery here but during my first play through, I never used it. I forgot it was even a thing to be quite honest until I was browsing YT comment sections and someone mentioned how they almost got a game over in one part of the game... and I was like "oh yeah :o"

I don't like Ogata but I do think he and Kisaragi are a good couple lmao

little tangent: if I ever harp on about how I forgot some significant detail in the tutorial section it's because... the second time I picked this up I believe I played up to a certain point and then put it down for a couple weeks . as much as I love this game, for me it didn't really pick up until a certain series of events several hours into it. the early game is equal parts entertaining, confusing, and honestly kinda boring (which is why I didn't zip through it when it launched, and even back in 2020 I only got about 8 hours into it before I stopped playing). but on a repeat play through you can see just how tight and well-written the narrative actually is. it's just the game is really really invested in getting you to think it's about one thing when it's actually about something else entirely :v

Miscellanea:

I really love the little drone icon on BJ's projected screen.... bless

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best way I could ever describe this game's story and aesthetic is if MGS and Odin Sphere had a baby... the real robot look, muted color palette, and crazy plot twists of MGS but the more down-to-earth presentation, romanticism, and themes of Odin Sphere

but like any good MGS game you need a flowchart to really understand what's going on at any given moment... luckily the game itself provides this to you, again a la Odin Sphere (lol)

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damn my new headphones are fucking great

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getting new headphones tomorrow, will finally be able to start a new play thru, crying

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thing is I realized some time ago that I have a Type (of fictional man) and it's good-looking well-dressed aloof glasses men. Tetsuya Ida was tailor made for my dumb ass