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Birthday, Zelda, Persona and other rambles.
8 years ago
General
I haven't done a general status journal in awhile. I feel it's time to write one down.
Birthday is coming up again on the 5th of May, those from last year remember I did a little mini-event giving out some games if you could solve some cryptos. I plan to do something similar again this year in May. So be prepared for that. I'm deciding on which games to put on offer, and contacting a couple of people for some birthday arts as well.
I've been creating some new character designs with
Moorph recently. Although I need to come up with actual names... and colour schemes for them. And probably soon, I have 17 ponies in the album... and 15 in the concept stage. Some of them are pretty much finalised (this guy http://i.imgur.com/V5ADdkt.png for example just needs a cutie mark and he's good to go). Others may need redesigns or simplifications. I just need the time to think of what to do with them.
That would go with pairings as well, you may have noticed I tend to like to pair up characters in the images together, mainly because they complement or contrast eachother in ways. For example, Terri and Tsukai tend to be the young duo and have a brother/sister style feel between eachother. Sola and Gilly are scientist and assistant, with Sola experimenting and Gilly making sure she doesn't go mad in the process by being a goofball. Eri and Aria are a natural Brain and Brawn combination. I need to think of pairings for the new guys. I actually want to do Teams of 4 in the the future for some more interesting pairings as well.
I'm hoping to do some more dual commission streams in the future as the ones I have done in the past have been fun. If you are interested in pairing up for a streams for some wild ideas, fire some ideas my way and we can negotiate.
---
Now I want to talk about Zelda, as that's the primary game I was playing for March... and... I... think... I... Don't like it that much?
I think I have a simple reason as to why that is. You remember the Triforce Shard hunt from Wind Waker? You need to explore the world for 8 Triforce shards to advance and there isn't too much else outside of that? That's breath of the Wild in a nutshell.
Okay, that's not a totally fair reason. I like the theory that this game is the Resident Evil 4 for the series. It's basically hard to call it a Zelda game since the dynamic has been shifted up. I just found out that I am in the crowd that prefers the original style of the games over this new one (Well, Link to the Past/Ocarina/Majora's/Twilight Princess style). Do note their will be spoilers from what I say here on.
If there is praises to say, the engine is probably the best part of the game. There's fun little dynamics with how things interact in the world with physics. There was a really good video by videogamedunkey showing off the fun physics things you can do like Stasis a block, get an enemy to hit it with their weapon, and then lure the enemy into the path of that block and hit them with their own weaponry. There's some cute touches as well like how a lot of thinks react to the heat/cold system, you can hold flame/ice swords to increase/lower your body temperature for the area.
But man... if you were to tell me that the director of this one also directed Skyward Sword, I would not have been surprised because this game actively wants you to waste your time with a lot of padding. This world is large, but I don't say that as a compliment because it feels very samey. You have your regional difference areas, but no matter where you going, there's going to be a lot of Bobokins, Lizalfos and Moblins there. Enemy variety isn't really that amazing in this game, expect to see the same encampment of enemies over and over again that you have to take out for a treasure chest for like... an Amber... or 5x Bomb Arrows... or a Weapon (We'll get to this). It doesn't help that Link feels like the Slowest Character in the world in traversing this world. A lot of open world games I play tend to have something to make traversal really quick, I'm talking Batman Arkham City and Just Cause with their Grappling Hooks to go about and quickly zoom around the place. Zelda does have a gliding feature... but you gotta climb up first. And climbing isn't that quick. My advice for anyone to pick up this game is to bee-line for the Climbing Gear first as your base climbing speed is horribly slow. You can expend a lot of stamina to do a leap, but for some reason you climb JUST a bit higher if you climb without leaping, and that little difference can make the difference between reaching the cliff and falling back down. So you want to none-leap... but that is awfully slow, and it's not really that much quicker when you get the full climbing set either. And land travel is really slow as well because someone decided to bring back one of Skyward Swords worst features in the Stamina Gauge. You want to run but then your meter empties so you have to slow down till it fills up again so you can start running again... rinse repeat, rinse repeat, rinse repeat too many times. They basically want you to glide over the place... which I described the problem with that earlier, or get a horse. But even getting the Horse is awkward because you have to either go to a stable or be within a reasonable distance of your horses whistle for it to get to. And with how hilly the game is and how much the Horse does not like climbing the rocky hills, I need Chocobo's in this game, or at least a Mountain Goat.
I wish shrines were more interesting, but I got tired of them fairly early on, they all have the same visual aesthetic and music, and sometimes it's the exact same combat trial against the same enemy you've already beaten, except maybe it has a different weapon on hand this time. There are some good shrines in there, but there's a bunch of really bad ones, short ones or too easy ones there in the mix (Along with those with the motion controls, ugh, playing this on the Wii U, they ain't fun). There is also isn't enough rewards for doing them, each shrine you complete gives you only a quarter of a health or stamina upgrade. And it's a really minor upgrade at that, why would I want one more heart when enemies still deal like 5 hearts anyway, I'm better off spending time finding the resources to upgrade my armour so they only deal like 1.5 damage instead.
This game also runs out of cool stuff to reward exploration very early on, you explore, and unless you enjoy finding the landscape (Which is like, alright, but you can feel the graphical limitation of the console in the game hard), you have shrines, which I described above, materials and armour, which is one of the better things in the game to gather, weapons... which I'll get to. And Korok seeds, which are essentially this in a nutshell. https://youtu.be/rtKFy6O9Mtk?t=1m52s I know you can trade them in for inventory upgrades, I wish you could trade them for something cooler like more sword techniques or something. The Korok puzzle types run out super quick as well.
I can go on, there's other stuff like the lacking Music (I'm tired of the same piano tone that's like "Feel the whimsy" when you are walking about), it's awful inventory system (Radial Wheels, please! Don't make me scroll through stuff one at a time), the underwhelming dungeons (Why are they so short?) how shockingly fast you can break the game economy (I can make 50 rupees by cooking 5 apples?) and the shockingly awful amount of stuff locked behind Amiibos (Including Wolf Link by the way, and it wasn't just a skin, no way to get a dog or wolf companion otherwise in the game. That's horrible.) But I save my last complaint for now on... say it with me, the Weapon Durability. Weapons are made of cardboard in this world and the weapons breaking so quickly discourage you from using them. You always want to save your best weapons for the important encounters like Lynels or something, and you just find yourself avoiding encounters because it costs more resources to fight them than resources you get out the encounter. It also weakens the rewards, you go find what lies atop Mt. Lanayru and finish that trial, what do you get? A Frostspear that will shatter in 10 minutes. You defeat a divine spirit, enjoy this champion weapon until it break, you can repair them, but they cost a lot in the process. They say it's to try and make you experiment with weapons, but I say you don't need the weapons to break to do that, just make the weapons fun. If the weapon looks fun to use like it can spit out fire or lightning. That'll be enough reason for me to use it. If you worried someone would just break into Hyrule Castle, grab a super strong weapon and break the game with it... well, shouldn't they be rewarded for breaking into Hyrule Castle without dying and getting it? Just put it in a harder place to find. It just adds to tedium having to see your weapon break and swap to, what is likely to be a weaker weapon and just prolong the fight...
Look, I can go on, but I feel I will need to play more of the game to say more, I don't think it's the worst Zelda, Skyward Sword still holds that title, at least the combat in this game works when you want to do it unlike in Skyward where you hope the delay from the swing and the game response isn't long enough for the enemy to re-adjust their sword position. But I just get burnt out on this game, and it might just be I prefer more linear experiences to open world ones (I fear the man that has used ones kick a hundred times more than the one that knows a hundred kicks and all that) or maybe a lof of what I like in Zelda (Music, Dungeons, Characters, Story) got pushed aside from it. It's not a bad game, but it's a disappointing one for me. I'll come back when if they can patch in some quality of life stuff (Better inventory, menus and quicker cooking and selling please) and if the hard mode difficulty mixes things up a lot (Can't get away with just hero mode if you are charging money for it.)
---
On the flip side though, Persona 5... oh my this is a lot more of my jam. Unlike the 2 weeks I played of Zelda, I've only played 5 hours of Persona 5 so far but I am loving this a lot more. This game oozes with style with some really good feeling attacks and animations, you stealth up behind a shadow guard, rip off their mask to show the shadow and the music kicks in. Just great.
I'm liking the story set up as well. The game is set up in-media-res where you are explaining what happened in an interrogation and playing it through. Life is going against you a lot really, you try to stop what looks like abuse but you injure some political guy and now he's threatening to sue you and you get whacked with a criminal record and have to move to the big city. Despite being the big city though, certainly does everything it can to make you feel cramped, you live in this small alley in a storage room cupboard, have to travel in super compact subways and I won't spoil it but the Velvet Room this time is certainly making you feel trapped as well. Basically this game will do a lot to make you hate the system, and lets you get to the catharsis of rebelling against the system very quickly. The game is quite dark and there is going to be some people you will hate a lot (the first boss is very notable in this regard in how vile that person is) and you will enjoy planning on how to defeat them. The systems as always go in great sync as well like any Presona Game where you want to build your social connections to give you more power to fight in the shadow world. Even recruiting new persona's a lot more fun with holding up enemies and negotiating with them so they join your side (Give some pokemon vibes).
Your allies are very likable as well, Ryuki and Ann awakenings are really grand powerful moments (as well as yours) and Morgana reminds me of Midna a lot with his condescending tone, he does however seem to be a fair bit friendly then midna was at that start I'll say.
And I got all this postives to say just from the tutorial section. Game hasn't even taken the training wheels of yet and let me go fully loose with how I plan tot spend the time to beat the upcoming palace but I can't wait to jump back in and try, something which Zelda never really did for me. I'll be sure to say more about Persona when I've played it more, gonna go a lot into it for Easter.
---
Oh yes, about to finish my probation on my new job, this new job has been very great, nice working colleagues to work with, great location, a lot of social stuff as well, much nicer than my previous one. Easter is up next, and the art pile of bunnys chicks and chocolate eggs is acrewing quickly, London MCM is end of May, hoping to go as a Mimikyu for this one, just need to prepare the outfit. Oh, and birthday in less than a month to. So much to do, my 2017 is going a lot better than 2016 was. I don't know if that's the case for everyone else, but I hope it so.
Right rambles over, may I ramble again sometime in the future.
Birthday is coming up again on the 5th of May, those from last year remember I did a little mini-event giving out some games if you could solve some cryptos. I plan to do something similar again this year in May. So be prepared for that. I'm deciding on which games to put on offer, and contacting a couple of people for some birthday arts as well.
I've been creating some new character designs with
Moorph recently. Although I need to come up with actual names... and colour schemes for them. And probably soon, I have 17 ponies in the album... and 15 in the concept stage. Some of them are pretty much finalised (this guy http://i.imgur.com/V5ADdkt.png for example just needs a cutie mark and he's good to go). Others may need redesigns or simplifications. I just need the time to think of what to do with them.That would go with pairings as well, you may have noticed I tend to like to pair up characters in the images together, mainly because they complement or contrast eachother in ways. For example, Terri and Tsukai tend to be the young duo and have a brother/sister style feel between eachother. Sola and Gilly are scientist and assistant, with Sola experimenting and Gilly making sure she doesn't go mad in the process by being a goofball. Eri and Aria are a natural Brain and Brawn combination. I need to think of pairings for the new guys. I actually want to do Teams of 4 in the the future for some more interesting pairings as well.
I'm hoping to do some more dual commission streams in the future as the ones I have done in the past have been fun. If you are interested in pairing up for a streams for some wild ideas, fire some ideas my way and we can negotiate.
---
Now I want to talk about Zelda, as that's the primary game I was playing for March... and... I... think... I... Don't like it that much?
I think I have a simple reason as to why that is. You remember the Triforce Shard hunt from Wind Waker? You need to explore the world for 8 Triforce shards to advance and there isn't too much else outside of that? That's breath of the Wild in a nutshell.
Okay, that's not a totally fair reason. I like the theory that this game is the Resident Evil 4 for the series. It's basically hard to call it a Zelda game since the dynamic has been shifted up. I just found out that I am in the crowd that prefers the original style of the games over this new one (Well, Link to the Past/Ocarina/Majora's/Twilight Princess style). Do note their will be spoilers from what I say here on.
If there is praises to say, the engine is probably the best part of the game. There's fun little dynamics with how things interact in the world with physics. There was a really good video by videogamedunkey showing off the fun physics things you can do like Stasis a block, get an enemy to hit it with their weapon, and then lure the enemy into the path of that block and hit them with their own weaponry. There's some cute touches as well like how a lot of thinks react to the heat/cold system, you can hold flame/ice swords to increase/lower your body temperature for the area.
But man... if you were to tell me that the director of this one also directed Skyward Sword, I would not have been surprised because this game actively wants you to waste your time with a lot of padding. This world is large, but I don't say that as a compliment because it feels very samey. You have your regional difference areas, but no matter where you going, there's going to be a lot of Bobokins, Lizalfos and Moblins there. Enemy variety isn't really that amazing in this game, expect to see the same encampment of enemies over and over again that you have to take out for a treasure chest for like... an Amber... or 5x Bomb Arrows... or a Weapon (We'll get to this). It doesn't help that Link feels like the Slowest Character in the world in traversing this world. A lot of open world games I play tend to have something to make traversal really quick, I'm talking Batman Arkham City and Just Cause with their Grappling Hooks to go about and quickly zoom around the place. Zelda does have a gliding feature... but you gotta climb up first. And climbing isn't that quick. My advice for anyone to pick up this game is to bee-line for the Climbing Gear first as your base climbing speed is horribly slow. You can expend a lot of stamina to do a leap, but for some reason you climb JUST a bit higher if you climb without leaping, and that little difference can make the difference between reaching the cliff and falling back down. So you want to none-leap... but that is awfully slow, and it's not really that much quicker when you get the full climbing set either. And land travel is really slow as well because someone decided to bring back one of Skyward Swords worst features in the Stamina Gauge. You want to run but then your meter empties so you have to slow down till it fills up again so you can start running again... rinse repeat, rinse repeat, rinse repeat too many times. They basically want you to glide over the place... which I described the problem with that earlier, or get a horse. But even getting the Horse is awkward because you have to either go to a stable or be within a reasonable distance of your horses whistle for it to get to. And with how hilly the game is and how much the Horse does not like climbing the rocky hills, I need Chocobo's in this game, or at least a Mountain Goat.
I wish shrines were more interesting, but I got tired of them fairly early on, they all have the same visual aesthetic and music, and sometimes it's the exact same combat trial against the same enemy you've already beaten, except maybe it has a different weapon on hand this time. There are some good shrines in there, but there's a bunch of really bad ones, short ones or too easy ones there in the mix (Along with those with the motion controls, ugh, playing this on the Wii U, they ain't fun). There is also isn't enough rewards for doing them, each shrine you complete gives you only a quarter of a health or stamina upgrade. And it's a really minor upgrade at that, why would I want one more heart when enemies still deal like 5 hearts anyway, I'm better off spending time finding the resources to upgrade my armour so they only deal like 1.5 damage instead.
This game also runs out of cool stuff to reward exploration very early on, you explore, and unless you enjoy finding the landscape (Which is like, alright, but you can feel the graphical limitation of the console in the game hard), you have shrines, which I described above, materials and armour, which is one of the better things in the game to gather, weapons... which I'll get to. And Korok seeds, which are essentially this in a nutshell. https://youtu.be/rtKFy6O9Mtk?t=1m52s I know you can trade them in for inventory upgrades, I wish you could trade them for something cooler like more sword techniques or something. The Korok puzzle types run out super quick as well.
I can go on, there's other stuff like the lacking Music (I'm tired of the same piano tone that's like "Feel the whimsy" when you are walking about), it's awful inventory system (Radial Wheels, please! Don't make me scroll through stuff one at a time), the underwhelming dungeons (Why are they so short?) how shockingly fast you can break the game economy (I can make 50 rupees by cooking 5 apples?) and the shockingly awful amount of stuff locked behind Amiibos (Including Wolf Link by the way, and it wasn't just a skin, no way to get a dog or wolf companion otherwise in the game. That's horrible.) But I save my last complaint for now on... say it with me, the Weapon Durability. Weapons are made of cardboard in this world and the weapons breaking so quickly discourage you from using them. You always want to save your best weapons for the important encounters like Lynels or something, and you just find yourself avoiding encounters because it costs more resources to fight them than resources you get out the encounter. It also weakens the rewards, you go find what lies atop Mt. Lanayru and finish that trial, what do you get? A Frostspear that will shatter in 10 minutes. You defeat a divine spirit, enjoy this champion weapon until it break, you can repair them, but they cost a lot in the process. They say it's to try and make you experiment with weapons, but I say you don't need the weapons to break to do that, just make the weapons fun. If the weapon looks fun to use like it can spit out fire or lightning. That'll be enough reason for me to use it. If you worried someone would just break into Hyrule Castle, grab a super strong weapon and break the game with it... well, shouldn't they be rewarded for breaking into Hyrule Castle without dying and getting it? Just put it in a harder place to find. It just adds to tedium having to see your weapon break and swap to, what is likely to be a weaker weapon and just prolong the fight...
Look, I can go on, but I feel I will need to play more of the game to say more, I don't think it's the worst Zelda, Skyward Sword still holds that title, at least the combat in this game works when you want to do it unlike in Skyward where you hope the delay from the swing and the game response isn't long enough for the enemy to re-adjust their sword position. But I just get burnt out on this game, and it might just be I prefer more linear experiences to open world ones (I fear the man that has used ones kick a hundred times more than the one that knows a hundred kicks and all that) or maybe a lof of what I like in Zelda (Music, Dungeons, Characters, Story) got pushed aside from it. It's not a bad game, but it's a disappointing one for me. I'll come back when if they can patch in some quality of life stuff (Better inventory, menus and quicker cooking and selling please) and if the hard mode difficulty mixes things up a lot (Can't get away with just hero mode if you are charging money for it.)
---
On the flip side though, Persona 5... oh my this is a lot more of my jam. Unlike the 2 weeks I played of Zelda, I've only played 5 hours of Persona 5 so far but I am loving this a lot more. This game oozes with style with some really good feeling attacks and animations, you stealth up behind a shadow guard, rip off their mask to show the shadow and the music kicks in. Just great.
I'm liking the story set up as well. The game is set up in-media-res where you are explaining what happened in an interrogation and playing it through. Life is going against you a lot really, you try to stop what looks like abuse but you injure some political guy and now he's threatening to sue you and you get whacked with a criminal record and have to move to the big city. Despite being the big city though, certainly does everything it can to make you feel cramped, you live in this small alley in a storage room cupboard, have to travel in super compact subways and I won't spoil it but the Velvet Room this time is certainly making you feel trapped as well. Basically this game will do a lot to make you hate the system, and lets you get to the catharsis of rebelling against the system very quickly. The game is quite dark and there is going to be some people you will hate a lot (the first boss is very notable in this regard in how vile that person is) and you will enjoy planning on how to defeat them. The systems as always go in great sync as well like any Presona Game where you want to build your social connections to give you more power to fight in the shadow world. Even recruiting new persona's a lot more fun with holding up enemies and negotiating with them so they join your side (Give some pokemon vibes).
Your allies are very likable as well, Ryuki and Ann awakenings are really grand powerful moments (as well as yours) and Morgana reminds me of Midna a lot with his condescending tone, he does however seem to be a fair bit friendly then midna was at that start I'll say.
And I got all this postives to say just from the tutorial section. Game hasn't even taken the training wheels of yet and let me go fully loose with how I plan tot spend the time to beat the upcoming palace but I can't wait to jump back in and try, something which Zelda never really did for me. I'll be sure to say more about Persona when I've played it more, gonna go a lot into it for Easter.
---
Oh yes, about to finish my probation on my new job, this new job has been very great, nice working colleagues to work with, great location, a lot of social stuff as well, much nicer than my previous one. Easter is up next, and the art pile of bunnys chicks and chocolate eggs is acrewing quickly, London MCM is end of May, hoping to go as a Mimikyu for this one, just need to prepare the outfit. Oh, and birthday in less than a month to. So much to do, my 2017 is going a lot better than 2016 was. I don't know if that's the case for everyone else, but I hope it so.
Right rambles over, may I ramble again sometime in the future.
