here’s the past like, month or so in video games for me:
i beat xenogears, had a lot to say about it but unfortunately i used all that energy up in an instagram group chat i made with two friends who have played xenogears called “this is where i will yell about xenogears”. one of them has also beaten all three xenosagas as well and i keep telling him to register here because he has a valuable perspective the world needs more of but he never will. um, xenogears did a lot of things i liked and a some things i didn’t like. what i respect the most is how grand of an experience it attempts to be – i’m the type of person that would rather experience something that reaches for greatness and misses rather than something that settles for less. it’s a cool game. one of the more interesting and has-heart games i’ve played from squaresoft’s hefty output from the ps1 era.
after xenogears i was desperate for more deicide, so i started up shin megami tensei iv (which i’ve beaten before), made it through naraku and then i dropped the game. i realized i really just wanted to listen to the soundtrack. someone on here posted a while ago about realizing that a lot of times the urge to revisit a game can be satisfied just by listening to its soundtrack and looking through concept art and screenshots – that’s definitely the case here.
then i played persona 4, because someone cute i’ve been talking to wanted to play it and i told them i’d play it alongside them. it was both our first times. god damn did i fucking hate persona 4. right out the gate i gotta say i was appalled to find that the transphobia i had heard about in the game was even worse than i had assumed, so that definitely colored my perception of how open-hearted i was willing to be with the game as a whole. ultimately i did think the plot was fine but it got a little goofy towards the end in terms of the antagonist’s motivations. i generally liked the interaction and growth of the crew of characters (and i yelped when teddie turned into an ubertwink out of nowhere), and i thought the message about having to explore and embrace all aspects of yourself was a good message, just one that was handled poorly in a couple instances. i had had the killer spoiled for me in a fuckin 4chan thread right when the game came out in 2008 and have never managed to forget it over the years, but i was surprised to find that even just the journey of deducing who the killer was, and how the game drip-fed me hints, was interesting.
worst part of the game was the fuckin dungeons. the battle system is way too simplistic, why couldn’t they just have made those two aspects…good? like there are only the faintest semblance of puzzles in the dungeons, and everything else is just…grinding in monotonous corridors. for hours. fuck that. if they had jacked the full press-turn system from smt for use in this game it would have made the battles at least a little more interesting? but what they have is just the dust at the bottom of a cereal bag. i beat persona 3 maybe like, 6 years ago? and i truly don’t know how i did it, because that game is even more repetitive than 4.
p4 can be boiled down to a gameplay loop of plot developments - social link growth - dungeon grinding, and the dungeons are by far the weakest link to the point where i think the game would have been better off just as a visual novel. to be fair, though, i’m soured because i lost a few hours of grinding progress in the last dungeon at one point from a random ambush and at that point i sighed and turned the game off and didn’t come back to it for about two weeks. sure, fusing the personas is cool, but i would do without it if it meant i didn’t have to go through those boring-ass dungeons.
i played and beat a short hike because everyone on here was getting really heated about it and i was curious. i thought it was charming, like a quick hug – although erring dangerously on the side of being overly twee – and a good use of a few hours but no more than that.
i started playing rain world, going in intentionally knowing nothing about it. i was sold by someone’s review that was like “you have to approach this game like you are a chimp playing a video game for the first time”. i think that that is a little too exaggerated, but i do like that this game is explicitly not a power fantasy. i’m only one area past the start, but i am already really appreciating the sensation of there being a sort of tangible ecosystem in this game that exists with or without me there – that sort of player-agnosticism is something that i last felt and loved in final fantasy xi, and it’s refreshing to experience it again. at this point in the game i do feel like i’m aimlessly wandering, just figured out how the gates work, slowly and cautiously exploring and waiting for more of the game to reveal itself to me. sometimes i feel like the map is too big, but having a grand space to explore in the midst of being mostly cooped up at home is pretty alright. i am for sure close to the bottom of the food chain, and i’m interested to see if i can discover ways to mitigate that. i am also for sure bad at the combat, but maybe that’s the point of it.
i beat bayonetta. that game is absurdly needlessly horny to a degree that annoys the hell out of me, but also it’s a game about being mixed and hating your dad so at least i have some level on which to relate to it. every cutscene was just so grating, though, they really can’t help but show you how sinfully sexy bayonetta’s nipples poking through her hairclothes or whatever are. please spare me. uh so here’s the thing, the combat is cool but in playing bayonetta i realized that these platinum character-action games have the depth of fighting games…and i have always been unable to engage with the deep elements of fighting games, i’m just not wired for it, and i’ve tried (spent a couple months in the past diving into sf third strike and ggxrd with no results to speak of). so you know what i did? i dropped the difficulty from normal to very easy, treated it as a beat-em-up, and had a good time with it. not a great time, but a good time. i would certainly be interested in playing a platinum game that is more explicitly a beat-em-up – is astral chain like that?
this morning i played a little ape escape 3 and the soundtrack is so fuckin good. i think my pvm is about to die though, when i turn it on it sounds like it’s screaming for its life.
lastly, i started playing moon the other day, and it is charming in the right ways and i really fuck the sentiment the game seems to be espousing. there are many ~subversive~ games in which the player is told at the end of the game “hey, you killed things! you’re actually a bad person! think about your video game player actions!” but moon starts out with that, and the rest of the game is about growing as a person, being accountable for the harm you’ve caused, and the beauty of empathy. i think empathy is the most important thing ever, so a game that focuses on that in a way that doesn’t feel like getting punched in the face by some crying bloke with knuckle tats that say “YOUR MEAN” and actually gives the player some sort of recourse for wrongdoings is very cool in my book!
i know i made that axe thread a while ago about the games i will play next – i got a copy of bumpy trot steambot, so i’ll get to that pretty soon and i’m planning to do a silent hill 2 / siren double feature once spooky month hits. in the meantime i’m making my friends play ps3 demon’s souls and telling my friend who is playing arc the lad 2 to play front mission 3 because it’s like arc the lad 2 but cooler but i haven’t played front mission 3. i should probably play front mission 3. i’ll sooner play that than fire emblem 3h.
oh!!! i forgot the whole reason i started writing this. i started a new town in animal crossing this week after giving up a couple of months ago and i’m giving up on animal crossing. fuck animal crossing, i’m already employed, i don’t need another monotonous menial job. i have played basically every ac that has come out and always been stoked for them and always bounced off of them. when I had a fat tumor removed from my back in elementary school i was able to negotiate a copy of gamecube animal crossing for myself to keep me from dying of boredom during recovery, but i ended up dying of boredom anyway because it was animal crossing. i don’t know why i bounce off these games, there’s so much about them i want to love, but they’re really just not for me.