the weather is warming here and i feel my depression lifting a little. the days when i’m laying in bed awake all night thinking “nothing in this world has the capacity to excite me and everything seems like a waste of time” are coming to an end and instead the nights of me dropping a gba on my face as i fall asleep mid-battle in pokemon have returned. it’s a pattern that has gone on my whole life; maybe that’s why my cheeks are so soft, tenderized by nintendo’s hammer over many years…?
over the past year i’ve had an increasing itch to play some srpg, or at least something with griddy combat; fire emblem three houses was too ugly to consider and i bought a copy of game boy wars advance 1+2 but never ended up touching it for whatever reason. finally i tried out front mission 3 and it’s really hitting the spot. i know the story branches into two routes and i haven’t had to make a choice yet, so i’m inclined to believe i’m not too far into it. so far, the difficulty curve is just what i am in the mood for. i never make it through the battles unscathed, but i also see a clear path to victory every time and am able to actualize it without much trouble. the character (mech) customization is also at a happy medium for me; that is to say that there is a small amount of it but it’s nowhere near, say, armored core which feels like maybe if i hadn’t dropped out of precalc in high school i would have a shot at being able to actually optimize my mechs rather than just change their parts around.
so the mechanics of fm3 themselves are all fine and good but what’s really drawing me to the game are its creative elements. in the past i had a very positive encounter with the aesthetic sensibilities of front mission 2 and although there’s nothing quite as striking as that palette select in this one, the in-game internet is beautiful! there’s a y2kool-feeling start-up screen, customizable backgrounds, a stimulating (though truthfully confusing to navigate) interface for going to different pages…and the websites themselves are fun to pick through, both for their soft worldbuilding elements and for the little puzzles they can contain, breaking into secret sections of the websites and using scripts to decrypt scrambled files. i maintain that even just this ignorable side-content is more interesting and engaging than hypnospace outlaw was for my aesthetic sensibilities.
and with worldbuilding on the mind, i am very interested to see where the story ends up going for one main reason: it seems to focus primarily on south/south-east asia, which is not only a rare frontier for video games to tackle, but is also an area with a ton of history regarding japanese colonization. for a game that (presumably) tackles the human side of war and how futile it can seem (gosh i’m really getting my hopes up for this one) i wonder if it will have anything to say at all about how japan historically relates to the region (okay i know it won’t and i’m just setting myself up for disappointment) besides the standard japanese political tactic of refusal to acknowledge or just flat-out denial. i was gonna say i’m not getting my hopes up but i absolutely am. i am also absolutely on track to being disappointed…but what if front mission 3 is not just a good mech game, but had powerful things to say about imperialism and state violence? what if. i’m sure it’s not. i’m looking forward to being let down.
i’ve been playing a bit of picross s in bed, which i beat last year but i’m cleaning up the few puzzles i used assists on so that’s been nice to pick away at. there’s nothing quite like how picross makes time disappear. i’m able to get through puzzles that stumped me in the past; maybe i’m just smarter than i was a year ago! but at the same time, i legitimately cannot understand what mega picross is asking me to do, so maybe not.
i’ve also been working through king’s field (the first japanese one) over the past week and i’m basically at the end of it as i’ve met the final boss but just can’t beat it yet. i’m really impressed at what this game would have been offering to the console gaming space upon its launch just two weeks after the playstation came out at the end of 1994: a free-roaming (in terms of where to go, but also there’s no grid system the player is stuck to) dungeon to explore, with the only restrictions being the power curve and locked doors/traps.
late-night sessions leaning into my pvm in the dark just like i did with demon’s souls about a year ago feel great, claustrophobic, disorienting; if king’s field 1 is good enough at this, i’m so excited to play the next three in the series. even just minutes into the game i found myself absurdly turned around in some tunnels, resorting to my mental trick of “just hold my hand to the left wall and never lose contact with it” to make it out. i was stoked to get a map (my ex-courier brain works best with maps rather than just raw spatial data) and in a way even more stoked to find that it was incomplete; that the dead fool from whom i looted it was not a bad enough dude to make it into the true depths of the maze.
combat is clunky but fine, as the game is designed around it. circle-strafing isn’t working great for me with the character’s turning speed, so i’ve been having fun getting into a rhythm of stunlocking enemies between sword and magic attacks. speaking of, i’ve got the sword of moonlight and i read that it’s supposed to have a special sword magic as well as a few other weapons. my class is swordmaster and i can get the one on the colichemarde to work just fine, but can’t get a special attack out of any other weapon. if anyone has any insight as to what could be going on, i’d love to know!
ultimately yeah, it’s a little ugly and clunky but even from this first game that fromsoft ever made they’ve really got the atmosphere down. i don’t know that i’ll ever come back to it after beating it, but i’m really looking forward to seeing how these elements are refined over the course of the series.