Lym

I've played it twice now (well, the beginning part that carries over into the full game; I haven't touched the bonus battle stuff and probably wont; I want to wait until the full release to see that stuff) and I might be a little bit in love. Which, to be fair, isn't terribly surprising given the team behind it and their work on FFXIV, and various Ivalice and Ivalice-adjacent games before that. (Hi, Vagrant Story!)

Prior to this I had only seen the reveal trailer, some trailer from a few months ago and the one released a couple days ago, and I haven't absorbed much else about the game aside from seeing pictures of the various Dominants, hearing about Cid's hideout(?) and some lorekeeper npcs, and while that was enough to know the general trajectory of the plot covered by the demo, it still gave me a lot of Feelings.

So here's a whole bunch of notes, random observations and squee because hey, why not!

( There's only one Eikon of Fire! ... Right?! )

And there you have it. Is it (next) Thursday yet? I want to play moooooore.

 I can now confirm that I have, in fact, continued my winning streak of "only light side effect after vaccinations" with the second covid booster. My arm was a bit sore and I slept a, uh, rather unreasonable amount of hours that evening/night and my sleep schedule is still recovering, but the nice thing about temporary tiredness that you can plan for is that it's a side effect that fixes itself in the most comfy way imaginable. (Yunie certainly thinks so; she was cuddled up next to me when I went to sleep and still basically in the same spot when I woke up.)

When I'm not sleeping (or Being An Adult - why does the upcoming week feature so many phone calls and appointments? -.-), I'm still loving Harvestella an unreasonable amount. I'm still in chapter three because I chase after sidequests every time new ones plop up, which they do with great enthusiasm. I finished chapter 3A, did "all" the sidequests and character quests, then set out for the Jade Forest to do 3B and whoops, suddenly it's raining sidequests again!

They're really good though. There was one I didn't care for much so far, but a lot of them genuinely make me feel for the characters, even when they're just generic npcs models. (I kind of wish they had more than one child model though. There is that one quest in Nemea with the teenage boy who sneaks out at night but he looks like he's five years old same as the other kids and it gets a bit funny.)
I really like the party members too; so far, Istina is my very predictable fave. Maybe I'll romance her in the postgame, but let's see if the other chapter threes have some cute boys for me too... 

And then later today I get to play d&d again, wheee! \o/ I'm playing a dwarf for the first time (a, uh... rather homebrewed dwarf) because I wanted that movie!Hobbit Thorin look, haha. He's a good deal more cheerful though, and definitely just here to look into getting some mining rights in the area. Uh-huh. Don't tell my party he's got zero clue about stone stuff.

(I'm also playing in German for the first time in this campaign because one of our players isn't that good at or comfortable with English, so last time we had several cases of "uuuuh how do I even do this in my own mother tongue when my whole character sheet is in English, this feels weird." which is kind of hilarious when you think about it.)

And there you have it. Three things make a post?

I've been playing Café Enchanté on and off for quite a while now, making it through the routes for Canus, Ignis and Rindo, and now I've also finished Il's. Funny enough, I ended up liking each route more than the last (and I don't know if I've just stopped noticing the typos I've complained about before, or if Il's route just got an extra bit of proofreading).

Like, I love the idea of Canus's character and route - he's the headless knight from a faerie world - but never really ended up buying into his and Kotone's relationship, thought there were too many plot holes and not enough done with the plot in the first place, and introducing a faerie side character with they/them pronouns, revealing that all faeries are genderless, and then deciding two lines of dialogue later to use he/him pronouns for that character from then on, is just mean. Can't have us thinking too hard about the fact that our love interest on this route is also a faerie and also included in that genderlessness, I guess. I still really like Canus as a character though; I'm just so weak to knights.

Ignis, meanwhile, isn't really my type, but his route worked better for me overall, and there was even a scene that was really amazingly atmospheric. Hmm, cannibalism... I thought for sure I had messed up somewhere and was on my way to a bad ending when he took a bite out of Kotone's arm but nope, that's just how the story goes. Oh, and it helps that he's voiced by Ono Yuki doing his best fighty boy. <3

I hadn't expected to like Kaoru's route nearly as much as I did, less because of the age difference and more because I was just really, really not getting a romantic vibe from these two. Conveniently enough, his route spends more time actually developing the romance, perhaps because it knows it needs to, and that led to some very sweet moments. It's also fitting that the route of the only human love interest also feels a bit more grounded than the rest. And there are actual Consequences here! I really liked the bit where Kotone realised that part of why he wasn't really taking care of himself was guilt, and got him to cook for himself (and her) again. Later on, while it was clear he wasn't actually going to die partway through his route, I still liked the surrounding scenes and how emotional they got. I think my favoutite scene from his route was actually one where Canus goes to talk to a distraught Kaoru and talks him through it. I adore the friendship between the love interests in this game.

And then there was Il's route, which was so genuinely moving it even made me cry at one point. :o I was a bit wary going in, because Il's helplessness and the dynamic that creates at times with the heroine in particular, but also with the other regulars, could've easily led into squick territory for me, but the more we learned about why he is the way he is, the more development he gets, and the more the plot comes in to say hello, the better the route worked for me, and I ended up loving pretty much every character in it. (Also, damn, Misyr. While I suspect he's in love with Kotone on every route, and always ends up helping his "rivals" in some way or another anyway, his relationship with Il is just the sweetest. He loves this clueless angel so much. <3) Who would have guessed I'd end up having so many feelings about an otome game-loving fallen angel? (... everyone?)

So now I only have the game's "true route" left - the demon king Misyr himself! I think I'm going to throw myself right in! Err, once I've skipped my way through the common route again for another half hour... This game really needs a timeline or skip-to-next-choice option.

(p.s.: I tried some black text on black background for spoilers this time around, so I can link to this post and still have people avoid spoilers if they want even though they don't get cuts. Did it work? Let's see...)

So I've played bits and pieces of Bug Fables ever since it came out in late 2019 and enjoyed it quite a bit. The easy way to descibe it is that it's like the original paper Mario, but with bugs, which is both accurate - the game very much wears its inspiration on its sleeve - and doesn't do it justice at all, because "just a Paper Mario clone" doesn't tell you just how charming these bugs are. I'm quite attached to Vi the bee, with her little beemerang and her big chip on her shoulder about snobby fellow bees, Kabbu the beetle with a Tragic Past and a love for the in-universe equivalent of the power rangers, and Leif the moth who somehow woke up generations past his time, with new ancient magics and an old fondness for cute pets.

It's fun to play, too, but as someone who likes Paper Mario okay but doesn't love it, I was never quite in love with the battle system. This changes a few weeks ago when I restarted the game and did something I almost never do - I turned on Hard Mode.

In this game, "hard mode" is an equipable item that'll make fights harder, but also makes enemies drop more money/items/exp, and if you defeat bosses and certain mini-bosses with it on, you even get unique skills and stuff. One problem I had with the battle system before was that I didn't want to use my items (or MP-using skills when I was away from an inn other other heal point) because oh no, what if I run out?? And that then made battles needlessly annoying.

Hard mode fixed that - the extra rewards mean that I actually "have" to use my items to make space in my inventory for all the additional drops, and because I'm expecting the game to be harder, I also don't get annoyed at a previously annoying enemy, or at having to cook some new meals before I go into a dungeon. So it's a mix of being in the right mindset, and the balance of items used vs items received fitting better into my newly-adjusted playstyle.

(That's not just me, right? That sometimes your expectations for how easy or hard a game is going to be shapes your reaction to a difficult fight?)

It helps that this isn't just the sort of hard mode where enemies just turn into damage sponges and that's it. Every enemy was manually adjusted. Some just hit harder, others do that and have more HP, some have an extra defence point that changes how you need to approach them quite a bit, and some bosses even get new skills. (I just fought one who's a damage race to begin with, and who, on hard mode only, gets an additional bit of defence when he first drops to 25% HP and that really made me think about what to do.)

As someone who's rarely into a games for the challenge aspect, I'm having a great time with it now, and am finally enjoying the battle side of Bug Fables as much as the story, characters and exceptionally hummable music. And now excuse me, I have to help Vi and her sister make up via a surprisingly charming trading sidequest...

I keep meaning to write another FFX translation post but so far I don't actually have anything to write about because the few parts I've replayed since the last post didn't really have anything notable in terms of translation differences. I think I managed to put my finger on why I don't like the Luca plot as much though, despite all the cool things that are going on and it might really just be that there are too many things going on that don't really come together well for me. We've got the introduction of Seymour and Micah, we've got the Shonen Sports Manga storyline of the blitzball tournament, we've got the introduction of Khimari's rhonso bullies, Auron returns and brings a Plot Twist with him, there's the "some Al Bhed kidnap Yuna" storyline, we've got a city excited for the tournament but don't interact much with it (I found myself wishing for a X-2 style minigame of preparing for the tournament and making sure people were having a good time, haha) It's just so much.

It probably doesn't help that I never got the hang of blitzball and lost the finale again, which makes that entire part of the storyline really anticlimactic. (I was doing so well, too! My very first pass/having the ball phase resulted in shooting a goal and I kept it to that 1-0 score until near the end when Waka returns to the field and, well. Then the Goers immediately scored and then one the play-offs. Booo.)

I'm currently halfway down the Mi'hen Highroad, still adore the "laughing scene" and am surprised just how much exposition I've internalised as "there from the beginning" isn't actually delivered until this part of the game. next up: Protecting chocobirds!!

The next major FFXIV patch drops tomorrow and I'm excited!! :D (And concerned because, well, look at how the other .5 patches ended. Combined with this patches title, that is a little bit worrying.) Unfortunately, the patch notes just informed me that my item level is too low to actually do the new (story) dungeon because I'm at 355 instead of 360. That's what I get for being lazy about that grind. ^^;; I still have a necklace and belt at 360 that I can probably replace with 390 stuff in a somewhat timely fashion though, so all is not lost. (My ilevel 300 weapon drags my average down so much...)

Funny enough, I actually did spend some time grinding, but that was mostly just doing custom deliveries to finally get botanist to 70 and, shockingly, some leves to get Weaver to 50 - my first-ever crafting class that has gotten past level 15 or so! Now I should be able to finish both the Ixal storyline and the one actually attached to weaver (the 1-50 one, aynway.)

Granblue Fantasy remains delightful and I have a huge weakspot for the pretty moon boy from the current event. He's great. :D I should stop neglecting the poor main quest though, I'm still at chapter 8 despite the fact that the battles are obviously not putting up a fight yet, especially with all the shinies I got from the "here, have a truly ridiculous number of free rolls" holiday event. Even a low-level Shiva with bad equipment currently oneshots bosses for me with just a skill without me ever having to hit "attack." XD

I'm currently a little frustrated with Atelier Sophie though because I want to discover some recipes but can't really do it yet; one requires me to kill a black puni and while blue punis are the game's first/easiest enemies, black ones can one- or twoshot my whole party, oops. I feel dreadfully underpowered but am not sure I can craft well enough yet to change that. (Like, I can craft better weapons or armour but they're maybe 5% better? Not enough to make up the power difference between me and those puni fiends, anyway.) So I guess I'll just do some easy stuff to progress the story and hope for the best? But I do feel like I'm missing something really obvious.

And finally, I picked Persona 5 back up again. I, err, started it around this time last year, after wandering away from it shortly after launch. <.< At this point I'm about 45 hours in and have just finished the "pyramid" and really wish I loved the game and its social links/confidantes as much as I loved P3 back in the day when that first came out, but I like Futaba a whole lot and Yusuke and I thought the first two arcs were really well done overall. (It was somewhere around the "mafia" dude that I first wandered off in this playthrough attempt because woooow was I bored with that.) Now it's time again do do social inks until the plot wakes up again, so let's see how that goes!

So I've not shown myself here for a bit and even forgot to wish people happy holidays in a halfway timely fashion, but in my defense, I was distracted by an unfairly pretty and very fluffy cat - my mum's not-so-tiny-anymore kitten - and cannot be held responsible for anything under these circumstances, I'm pretty sure. She is very cute.

So my holidays have been pretty relaxing so far and I hope that'll continue it should - I don't have any obligations until January 2nd unless we're somehow counting the continuation of our d&d "one"shot this Saturday but I mean come on.

I've also gotten into Granblue Fantasy as recently as a week and a half ago and am quite enamored with it so far. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's the typical gacha hell but between the ridiculously generous amount of rolls/pulls from the various holiday events and the fact that I'm mostly here for the story (both the really cute sidestories and the charming main plot), I'm quite happy with it. (And like, the whole thing is so pretty. Yeah, there are a whole bunch of characters clearly designed for people who think boobs are really cool but I don't mind?) I'm not even far into the main plot at all yet because all the side stuff is distracting me constantly combined with the fact that I am visiting my mum and her excessively pretty, cuddly cat so distractions are even more expected than usual. ^.~

btw did you hear that there'll be a new Twelve Kingdoms/Juni kokki novel next year? (at least in Japanese; I doubt there'll be more official English translations, but given that all the books and short stories so far have a fantranslation, I'm hopeful) I'm still way behind and have only read the first three books as they were released in English (I have the fourth one too, bought back when it was new and didn't cost a fortune, but I haven't... actually read it yet...) but hearing that Taiki will be involved in the new novel has me excited anyway. I may or may not be rereading Sea of Shadows right now in preparation. <.

The holidays are drawing closer and I'm looking forward to some relaxing time with my mum, her cat and tasty, tasty food & snacks (if I can save them from Her Royal Meowjesty), but I also still haven't come up with any ideas for a present for my father and going to the local Christmas market with some friends didn't help with that either. -.- That one place on the market makes the best potato fritters ever though, so. Still worth it.

- - -

Bouncing between games, as I do, I've also played some Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book over the last few weeks and I'm enjoying it quite a bit; it's so relaxing and adorable and full of nice people being nice to each other in a quiet, calm little village that somehow doesn't seem to have any problems to speak of.

This is the second Atelier game I've played and I'm enjoying it a lot more than Rorona, which I wanted to like so much more than I did. (Part of that was my own fault; I let the generous time limit pressure me into focusing so much on getting the (relatively meaningless) "good ending" that I neglected the character friendships/scenes that are the heart of the game. But part of it is also that Astrid crossed the line for me from "mentor who gives Rorona shit and is generally considered Not A Good Person but who secretly cares" to "asshole who goes out of her way to make Rorona feel bad about her accomplishments and to undermine her when she does show her strengths because Astrid is uncomfortable with Rorona being better at something than her" and then there was that one rape joke that made me super uncomfortable and... well. It probably says something about how much I enjoyed the general gameplay loop of gathering & alchemy and the general cuteness that I finished the game after that.

I'm happy to say that so far at least (I've played maybe a dozen hours), Sophie shares none of these problems and is just generally really cute and relaxing and I like the characters a whole bunch. (Part of me is still expecting a plot to show up because that's just what happens when there is a peaceful little village where everything seems perfect - something bad must happen! But that is not how these games go, and it actually makes a nice change from stories where a dragon would've raised Kirchenbell to the ground half an hour in.

There's Sophie herself, who wants to be a great alchemist like her grandma was and help people out with her alchemy and there's the titular mysterious book Plachta, who talks us into restoring her missing memories because a catastrophe might not be coming for the village but someone's gotta have amnesia. There's the childhood friends Monika (who continually badgers us to go to church more. wtf Monika) and Oscar (who never does his chores because he just wants to go out and talk to plants), there's Harold who's supposed to be a clockmaker but who'd much rather tinker with guns (the anonymous villagers seem to find this concerning, but mostly just because they've decided he has to follow in his father's footsteps and should just Do His Job), there's a knight from some other country who wants to learn more about alchemy, there are some returning characters from the franchise such as the ghost lady who runs the local orphanage and the blacksmith who I think is a player character from the one Atelier game that gave you the choice to play as a guy. I'm pretty fond of all of them, which is neat. :D

(Part of me wants to dig into the little moments where the village does have some typical small town issues - the way Harold is treated and the fact that he seems to have a drinking problem, the fact that somehow the church orphanage needs to be protected with swordfighting people like Monika or the knight (from what??) or that there is an orphanage in the first place, and just little things here and there, but at the same time, I'm also happy to just sit back and enjoy the serene atmosphere.)

And okay, let's be real, this post is also partially an excuse to share some screenshots from my playthrough. the character models are so pretty and detailed! (The game itself is pretty clearly made on a budget and the animation is fairly minimal outside of some flashy battle skills, but I don't mind. It's still pretty.)

( as usual, click on the thumbnails for bigger images )

That recent post I made about my planned D&D oneshot character (it went well by the way! If we ignore that maaayyybe that character wasn't terribly well-suited to a dungeon crawl and that we quite definitely didn't finish, but that's a feature, not a bug. The friend who didn't want to tell what she was playing brought a magical girl warlock, which was just the best. <3) reminded me that I haven't really talked about my Final Fantasy XIV characters on here at all yet, and I can't pass up an excuse, however flimsy, to show them off!

Well, I'll keep it to my two most-played ones currently; my main and the one that I'm slooowly replaying the plot with. The former you might have already seen in one of my icons - Lashushu Lashu (or Lash for short for added hilarity) on Mateus has been around since I was surprisingly charmed by lalafell cuteness in one of the late beta phases of ARR and I know they're kind of love-them-or-hate them depending on who you ask but I certainly adore this cheerful popoto. Always and forever a White Mage.

( Lala screenshots )

And then there's Temlun Qalli, on Zodiark, who is one of entirely too many Au Ra that I've made over the years. <.< (We will for now ignore the cats and roes and highlanders I've also made because Altitis is a serious desease and might be contagious.) Currently a Warrior, but I'm headcanoning them as making friends with Cid at some point and getting way too into tinkering with machines and so I'm planning on trying out Machinist with them and we'll see how that goes.

( Lizard screenshots )

(click on any of the thumbnails for a bigger view)

So, who else is eagerly awaiting our first glimpse at viera designs? Like, as great as it would be I doubt they'll get us more body diversity but I'm still excited what the FFXIV team does with the Ivalician bunnies. The next fanfest can't come soon enough! ;)

I'm replaying Final Fantasy X and man, I forgot how much I love that game. Like, I considered myself fairly aware of loving it but I really love that game. I'm only up to Kilika about three hours in but I'm simultaneously picking up on things I never noticed before (partially thanks to the HD version's fancier graphics and partly just from coming at it from a slightly different angle more than a decade later. Thirteen years later, fourteen? I'm not sure but it's been a while.

( Who else thinks spoiler cuts for a game that's almost old enough to drink are only curteous? )

Wow, I feel like I forgot how to make icons. With the exception of the default one and the two <em>Ori and the Blind Forest</em> icons, they're all carried over from my old journal (and I might bring a few more favourites over but took a break for now) and I've been thinking about other icons I could make of, say, current fandoms and just keep going ??? at paint.net. (Well, mostly I just learned that some FF14 screenshots just really don't translate well to icon format.) Looks like writing journal entries is not the only thing I'm out of practice with but maybe I can get back into the habit...

Speaking of habits, a ridiculous one I've developed since FE Heroes came out a couple weeks ago is that I find myself tapping random party members' portraits or their home screen sprites to hear/read more quotes while I wait for dinner to finish cooking. (I have a talent to get up and check on it like a minute or two before it's ready, it's magical.) I don't know like 99% of these characters but I'm learning all sorts of things about them. Of course, one of them is Niles and the resulting plurk was really charming, so I suppose this is not a bad habit to indulge, hehe.