October 28, 2018
Quick personal update
- I think I’ll be shutting down my sheet music website. I don’t have a date right now. But I’ve really put like 0 effort into transcribing music in the past few months. And I don’t want to keep costing my brother money, so the domain name is going away and it will stay at riulyn.azurewebsites.net but even that will probably only be temporary. I’m looking for a place to deposit them all and not worry about keeping the website alive. I think I’ll remove the website by the end of this year, but I might forget. Anyway, that part of my life might be over soon.
- Government and university shenanigans so I still don’t have my grant money yet. But I’m also not quite ready to take the responsibility? At least mentally. I’ve been having a rough month with a rotation student but I think we are finally coming to an understanding? I didn’t expect that to be so much work…
- I have started streaming a bit with my PS4. I’m anonamor on twitch and my PSN account is riulyn0. So it’s a mix of both of my primary online names haha. Will probably fire up some more Valkyria Chronicles 4 later (as in once I get back from a conference). Streaming has been weird; I kind of just ramble. But yeah, anyway, I think someone was asking me about streaming before and I think I’ll keep doing it at a rather random schedule, playing random things.
- Today was my birthday. Still single, still a loner, still spent most of the day playing video games, also watched a lot of volleyball on stream. I’m happy with this; my parents are out of the country so it was lowkey and I’ll see them when they get back and get free dinner. I might be older but I never want to grow up completely. I like my freebies.
- I’m going to keep this blog up, but I’ll probably shut down my twitter account, at least the riulyn one. I have way too many twitters and I flee from some only to make new ones. I keep changing my mind, though so far anonamorEN is doing okay! I think it’ll stay alive only because I chat with other fanfic writers of the same fandoms on there. I’m glad to be back to being a fanfic writer while I will never admit what my old usernames used to be. (though I think one is obvious, I will pretend it doesn’t exist 😀 – I don’t even know how I would remove that account as I don’t have that email anymore)
Anyway I hope you are all well! I have Valkyria Chronicles 4 for sure to finish this year, and then it’ll be whatever I manage to catch my interest. Tales of Rebirth off to a meh start for me so far; same with Atelier Annie. Maybe I should dive into Danganronpa for real… Whatever it is, I caught up with the Kiseki series. That alone makes this year a successful gaming year, even if my owned backlog got bigger…whoops!
October 21, 2018
Sen no Kiseki 4 Quick Review
The good (in my opinion)
- Appropriate conclusion to the saga. The story made turns I didn’t like, but that started in Sen no Kiseki 2 for me, so it’s not particular to this game. I’m not going to list it in the not so good since it’s spoilers and also probably just my personal taste
- Really upped the character interactions and cameos
- Backstories filled out for some of my favorite characters
- Some battle with turn limits, and a few other battles that had actual quirks
- Quests were good for filling out lore for the Kiseki universe and overall story
- Worldbuilding is still good
The not so good (in my opinion)
- Battle system is still kind of lame, especially once you figure out it’s just a war of attrition and boss mechanics are mostly stupid except for the above
- Dungeon and story padding. I complained that Sen 3 had some dungeon padding, but I feel like it’s a bigger issue here.
- Really not great if you haven’t played the Sky or Crossbell games. The game doesn’t even try to help you out anymore unlike in Sen 3, where at least some basics were explained. Play those games or get the summaries read beforehand
- Inconsistencies with the stupid bonding/romance stuff. Falcom backtracking to keep the waifu lovers happy? Who knows.
In the end it took me about 130 hours-ish to finish. I did “rage-quit” for a few days after a certain section, but it was something personal. I probably wouldn’t have rushed through this game if I wasn’t engaged with the Kiseki fandom online and I wonder if I would have liked it better or liked it less (aka noticed more things I didn’t like). I played the game with urgency to avoid spoilers, but the game itself didn’t really act like things were urgent, which was a bit of mood dissonance because I felt the game should have had way more urgency to it.
Overall my Sen no kiseki rankings are 3 >> 4 ~ 2 (I think 4 might be slightly better) > 1. Solid series overall but I’d say come for the worldbuilding and the cameos and character banter and don’t get into waifu wars. 4 was satisfying but maybe in a way it didn’t live up to its promise after 3 being so good. Just expect a solid conclusion to the arc/saga but not necessarily a game that blows you away.
October 12, 2018
Quick hits/Super quick thoughts on games I’ve beaten recently
I’ve neglected this place a bit but while I have, I finished a bunch of stuff. I figured it’d be good to record my thoughts down, even if just a few sentences, so future self can see how I felt.
Octopath Traveler – I apparently couldn’t stand playing it with H’aanit and her English voice, and it was also an opportunity to practice Spanish, so I did just that. So I won’t review anything about the localization but just the gameplay and story elements. The gameplay was great – the main appeal of the game for me. I liked learning the different job classes and switching up my party composition and figuring out the best way to defeat bosses. A few really through me for a loop (and learning about secondary job classes via the internet instead of in game might be considered a weakness, but the game does want you to explore around so it was sort of my bad too), but overall I thought the difficulty scaled okay considering you could do chapters for any character in any order. The stories and how emotional they got, or even how interesting they got, were somewhat variable. The structures of them were pretty similar, but I’d say Primrose’s stood out to me the most. Mostly functional, but yeah I’d say I was playing the game for the gameplay more than the story, and that worked better for me. I think some people were looking for more story than the game advertised to have…
Overall I’d say a very solid game, recommended for those interested.
Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker – Some people liked the first one more for the story, but I actually liked both the story and the characters better in Devil Survivor 2. I just finished the Triangulum path (the 3DS addition) and it’s also a solid addition and a nice complement to the Septentriones path (highly recommend Triangulum second, though, due to story reasons). I loved having easy mode to be honest, so I could just power through and get to fusing cool demons faster. I mean, that’s the biggest appeal to me compared to other tactical games. In terms of story, the premise and stuff is quite good. The balance of scenes to battles/progression ratio is kind of high towards the scenes. It’s funny because there’s a chance to finish the “bonding” (I forget the term) routes for most but not all of the characters you get. Also it feels like you get a lot, but it’s fine in the end. But yeah, lots of text. Each day is pretty full.
Overall I’d recommend it over the first Devil Survivor game, and I think it’s a solid tactical game with a good SMT flair.
Zero Time Dilemma – I enjoyed this game. The plot still kind of makes my brain hurt. I ended up liking all the characters somewhat, but still skewed towards the returning ones. The puzzles weren’t as crazy as previous games, and I only really got stuck when I couldn’t see or hit a small button that I needed to for stuff. I hear this game is a mixed bag for fans. I guess I’m on the positive side.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna the Golden Country – I actually hadn’t planned to pick this up at first, because I hate paying for DLC. But it’s really a separate story, except with maybe a lot of references to the original game. It’s fast-paced and focused compared to the original, but too short. And some of the most emotional stuff is left to cutscenes and kind of glossed over. But 20 hours for me and I couldn’t stop playing it and I would definitely play it again. I think it was worth my time and money. But I don’t see anyone who didn’t like Xenoblade 2 suddenly liking Torna and having it save the main game in their eyes.
Suikoden II PSP – I’m not used to a Suikoden game crashing on me. The loading times were also long, even just to load animations for unite attacks. I don’t think the ability to run diagonal and the expanded screen is worth the other hassles of this version of Suikoden II. It’s just weird because Suikoden ran fine, at least this compilation’s version of it.
October 11, 2018
Sen no kiseki 4 so far…
Just finished Act 2. Whoo boy… [A lot of spoilers to follow]
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