Gaming

A place dedicated to games that I'm currently playing or have played and loved in the past.

Currently playing (2024-09-07)

Final Fantasy XIV (Endwalker)

I've been playing FFXIV since 2016 (3.3) and my sub has not lapsed once. This game is a significant part of my life and I really enjoyed Dawntrail!

Fields of Mistria

In a fit of tearful boredom I picked this game up because I'd heard nothing but good things about it and I now have nothing but good things to say.

Click here for opinions

Firstly, let me just say, I might be comparing this to Stardew Valley a little bit. That's somewhat unfair; Stardew is the best to ever do it. But Fields of Mistria is very similar and improves on the formula in a number of ways. I think the comparison is warranted and I won't hold back from making it.

General spoilers ahead, I don't go into anything specific. Written as of 2024-09-07.

Story

The game's premise is that you're an adventurer who's come to the farm and accepted an offer to settle down. It's as compelling as reasons to start a farming sim get, and the later motivation to do things like farm and explore the mines is very good. It's almost a mix between Stardew and Sun Haven with its fantasy elements. At the same time, everyone in the town is very charming. Their problems are all nice to think about and read about and deal with, and the general mood is just very uplifting even with only 4 heart events available currently. Which isn't to say there's no friction; there are a few asshole characters who are assholes sometimes to other people and you. But even with that (especially with that) it makes the town seem very full-bodied and real.

Gameplay

Gameplay is really solid. I've been playing for like 60 hours so far and I'm having a blast doing everything. Enemies in the mines require a slight bit more thinking than "just hit it until dead" which is a welcome change of pace even if it's sometimes a little frustrating. There's no way to accidentally give gifts to villagers because your gift giving button is the same as your drop item button and not your speak/interact button. Villagers have an indicator when they have something to say. The core loop of water crops/pet and feed animals -> gather resources -> come back and talk to whoever's around -> go to bed -> repeat is very nice, exactly what I received from Stardew Valley with some additional polish that can only be wrought by a team of dedicated people instead of a single person's passion and time.

My only gripe is that while there is no fishing minigame once you have hooked the a fish (omg yay) the amount of time you have to react and press the button to reel in seems to vary between fish. That being, bigger fish give you less time to react. I thought my reaction time was okay, but I have only ever been able to land a giant fish by gambling on whether it would bite when it was going in for a peck and blindly pressing the button at that moment.

I put in a request to add an accessibility feature to lengthen the time you have to react to fish bites. I really hope they either increase the time or add this, as I will have a hard time completing the log without it!

Music

I'm ambivalent towards the music. It all sounds great, don't get me wrong - but there are some songs with weird time signatures that I haven't been able to process and memorize and sing along to in my head yet. There's one song in Summer that sounds so Weather Channel - the bass goes crazy, it's such a bop - and I'm in love with that one. I wish Winter's music was a bit more chill (like Stardew's) but I get that's not the vibe they're going for since you can still farm and let animals outside in Winter. Overall the music is also really solid, even if it's not really something I would seek out and listen to outside of the game... like Stardew's. I know, I'm sorry.

Conclusion

When I purchased the game in early access a week-ish ago, it was selling for $14 USD. I had been flaky on whether or not I wanted to get it, but a friend pointed out that with early access games, you have to judge them based on their current price vs how much gameplay they had to offer. And after over 60 hours playing and hitting the soft early access walls twice, I have to say, it is worth far more than $14. As such, I really highly recommend it. It seems like updates are going to be consistent and large. I'm very much looking forward to where they take the writing... I can even see some Farmer/Hayden fanfic brewing in the back of my mind. We'll see.

Honkai: Star Rail

I've been playing this since it first came out on and off. I have no great attachment to it, but it's fun to me, chiefly because I'm better at it than I was at Genshin Impact (because HSR is turn-based and Genshin is extremely not). I think I'm at the end of the Penacony arc, at the final boss...

History

Dragon's Dogma 2

Nothing to say about this one other than it's not out yet and I'm seriously looking forward to it. I've been anticipating it for as long as 1 has been out. March 22 2024 please come faster.

I picked up the standalone character creator recently and plan to make my Arisen and Pawn well before the game's release. I'm going to use two OCs that have never been OCs, if that makes sense - they've never had backstories or personalities, they're just the people I made when I made a character in a videogame character creator. We'll see how well that plays out for me.

Update 2024-04-01

DD2 came out and swallowed my life. I've played well over a hundred hours and have seen the true ending, and I'm on my first NG+ playthrough right now. As a huge fan of DD1, what do I think of it? Part of my opinions are colored by the fact that I am no longer the 19-year-old I was 10 years ago with infinite stamina and patience, with the space to obsess in a certain way over a videogame's challenge and details.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is largely the same as 1, for better and worse, but mostly for better in my opinion! They updated some of the systems to be more modern but kept some of the unforgiving and sometimes almost cruel vibes of the original. As I played I was mired in a warm nostalgia that gleamed with a fresh coat of paint. I enjoyed walking around the world immensely - I spent entire days with very few breaks hacking away at everything it had to offer me. A videogame has not had me so firmly in its clutches in a long time. Thank fuck, because I am in a creative slump right now and needed something to really do.

Some bullet points:

I liked all of the characters! Ulrika was cute and my romance ended up being a drunkard former Arisen I found at a spa because I took him on so many escort quests. What can I say, I'm a lesbian charmed by pathetic fictional men.
The soundtrack was good, but not as memorable as the first's. This could be nostalgia talking. When they used motifs and even reprisals of tracks from the first game, like the "you knocked down the monster" theme and the victory theme, I felt like I had been transported back to "a simpler time." There's DLC to change the music to DD1's music and I bought it because I like this game and want further DLC, but when I turned it on, it felt... wrong... lmao....
Not as enamored with the fashion in this one.
Cool new enemy variants mixed with all of the old classics. I liked them all a lot.
Thief is still busted as hell.
Quests were very engaging even if I had to look up what to do sometimes. It's emblematic of Dragon's Dogma to be confusing and even misleading at times, so I was expecting this and was fine with it. It's part of the charm.
I'm really hoping for DLC where you put the strongest weapons you got in postgame to use.

All in all a really solid experience. I'd say it's on par with its predecessor if not surpassing. If you hated Dragon's Dogma, stay away from Dragon's Dogma 2, because it's more of the same.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Picked this one up before Christmas 2023 and have been on it on and off since. A friend told me it's the "we're so back" of Assassin's Creed games, and I believe it - the game is really solid from what I've seen so far. I'm stuck because...

Spoilers for early game

The game wants me to pick a traitor from three people who all seem equally innocent. The traitor must exist and must be one of them, and I saw in a damn video thumbnail as I was looking up something related to the quests leading up to this that you can get it wrong (the text on the thumbnail said something like, "WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU GET IT WRONG") and I was like, oh no. So now I have analysis paralysis.

The Elder Scrolls Online

As of writing this I have dumped over 400 hours into this game over a matter of weeks. FFXIV is in a patch lull and I was craving something in an online game to do, and this filled the gap pleasantly. I really enjoy the plots I've seen and some of the writing has gotten a laugh or a smile out of me on more occassions than I had ever thought it would. I don't enjoy the way people seem to hate new players, and how the game is designed to disfavor them (in your first time in a dungeon you have to lag behind and do quest dialogue, etc, while others sprint ahead and do everything without you).

2 months later from writing that, my opinion of the game has soured a bit due to the aforementioned reasons. I plan to stay subbed so I can pop in at any time and faff about with the story quests, but the gameplay is hard on my hands, so it has to be a once-in-a-while thing, and I haven't logged on in weeks...

And I haven't logged on since as of 2024-3-31.

Update: it's 2024-06-22 and I still haven't logged in. It's dead, folks.

Lies of P

Oh man. I really enjoy this game. It's a Soulsy that totally gets what it means to be Soulsy and what makes the Souls games good and does its own little twist on it, very effectively. The main character gives me gender feelings I don't normally have. I'm near the endgame, but I'm stuck because...

Spoilers for late endgame

I'm at the second Black Rabbit fight and I've only given it one or two shots, but a Souls streamer I follow who's an expert on this shit said he had a hard time with the fight and it wasn't well-designed. If HE had trouble, what chance to I have? I think to myself. When in reality I know I can beat it if I just try. I just have to... try.

I uninstalled the game to make room on my SSD for Dragon's Dogma 2. Perhaps I'll never beat it now. We'll see.

_{back to top}