i type way too much about video games and sometimes music

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 18th, 2023

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  • I started with Freedom Unite on a PSP as an early teen, but had no idea what the fuck was happening, just that it all looked awesome.

    Then in my early 20s I resolved to learn Generations Ultimate. I slightly gripe about how almost all non hunting quests have disappeared in World & Rise, because it takes away your ability to change the pacing of the game without putting it down for a more relaxing game.

    However, what World did to MH’s weapon movesets in its expansion and… sleekening is incredible, and the move to open levels with no load zones along with the interactions of multiple monsters does an incredible amount to the atmosphere and experience.

    So I love GU and I love World. And I love Rise. It’s a series I pre-order because I know that even if it might be different, I know the developers gave a huge fat shit about the game as they made it and it shows.




  • Persona 4 as it was my first. the concept of having to choose how to spend your time, split between training in the dungeons, fostering relationships with friends, or studying and working part time was affecting for me, and its characters and stories are very good.

    By extension Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney for showing childhood me that I liked visual novels, before I even knew what that was.

    Monster Hunter. I learned to play MH purely because of its reputation as an obtuse game, I thought if I can learn to play and maybe even enjoy MH, that the other parts of my life I wasn’t happy with couldn’t be that much harder to figure out. Years later and I still adore this series, and don’t think it’s actually that complex, it’s just hard to teach.

    Dark Souls. Really taught me that games are more than just games. They’re worlds, concepts, feelings. I’m sure I have more games than this that were formative to me, but these are what came to mind.







  • I am glad that others are noticing that change, too. I do believe it was a change necessitated by the Switch, but was also half ideological. In World, the Ancient Forest showed where they could go too far with the map design.

    Even today after how much I played that game, if it weren’t for the guidance bugs I would get lost in that forest because of how mazelike it is. I do actually prefer Rise’s maps that have no loading zones, but are not as gigantic and mazelike, instead more vertical. though I do wish there were more of them, but remember that Rise is made by a different team than World, so not committing to all of World’s design decisions doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gone, as we move back into a new game developed by the World team once again.

    I also feel that there is more to the transition from hunter to killer than the maps. The speeding up of gathering animations, the removal of most gathering and miscellaneous quests in World and Rise means that instead of having a lot more pacing variety in what you could be doing, it’s pretty much constant back to back large monster hunting, and if you want to change pace you have to play a different game instead of tackling some backlog gathering and transport quests.

    I do know that I’m likely in the minority as someone who wants more non-hunting quests back in the games, and who didn’t like that gathering continually gets more and more streamlined out of the game as the series goes on, but I think that the monotony of being constantly railroaded into hunting and more hunting may eventually hit a breaking point.




  • Just beat Catherine Full Body last night. There are a lot of things I like about the game, and some things I both like and dislike. It’s really more of a “this is the main character’s story and you’re mostly along for the ride” than it is a narrative experience where you choose every move the protagonist makes.

    Because of that, I think how you feel about the story will be determined by your own stance on relationships and the morality of them, hedonism, marriage, and things like that. For me, I felt familiarity with my experience watching Breaking Bad in its painful spectation of characters who make questionable decisions and their creation of damning consequences.

    Easy mode treated the puzzles well, just takes away the time pressure of the blocks falling away (save for the boss battles where you’re being chased). I ended up quite enjoying the puzzles! In the end, I don’t know if I’d recommend the game. If you’re interested in games doing something neat and novel with the topic of relationships then I think you’ll find value in it.