Short month and got back on the ball with vengeance as far as drawing so don’t have as much to talk about this month

Dragon Age: the Veilguard

So I talked about this last month, complaining about the pace and flow of combat from the perspective of being ~50% through the game. So first of all I was closer to 33% of my way through the game and shortly after my build (was playing as rouge for reference) reached a point that broke my impressions of combat to pieces. Despite the way the game talks about them cross class combos aren’t that important (at least from my experience as a rouge playing on adventurer difficulty) as the only important thing tends to be DPS/raw damage; something that cross class combos can help with (when triggering a cross class combo the target is regularly locked in place during the long animation of it going off giving you time to attack them freely not to mention some upgrades to them achievable with certain passives or equipment) but are far form needed to achieve. add in that the player character is balanced to be more effective as a damage dealer then your companions while also having a class specific resource that some abilities pull from instead of trigger a universal cool down (admittedly reading up on the other classes rouges ability of focus might be a bit overturned due to carrying over between fights so this might not matter as much for warriors and mages) the longer cooldowns the game has don’t really matter much. Honestly upon realizing this and really figuring out my build (focused around a powerful weapon that could inflict bleed on an enemy whenever I hit them and allowed up 6-7 stacks of bleed on a single target) the combat got really fun even though its pretty basic; however the fact that I, largely unintentionally, ended up 100% the game I ended up breaking the level scaling/balance leaving some big climactic battles feeling losing their impact when gameplay started. Ona final note I think this is the only time a game has (indirectly) let you chose the gender expression of one of an authored character; when a companion made said some things about not living up to gendered expectations I remember hearing something about there being a trans companion in the game and figured I knew where there story was going only for that character to end up being non-binary. I suspect this is due to deciding to make my player character non binary (also maybe because in a scene that where their gender comes up I choose an option that was flagged as being supportive from a trans/non-binary perspective) given my knowledge of there being a trans companion came from a trans youtuber and fan of the series talking about it (specifically how it was a very basic narrative about trans-ness which, given its probably likely 80+% the same as the non-binary version of the story, tracks).

House of Necrosis

So I’m a pretty big fan of Mystery Dungeon style Rouge-lite/likes; heck one of the earliest games I can remember playing is Dragon Crystal on the Game Gear. So an indie game that marries that genre with a low poly PSX (i.e. the game console of my middle-school and early high-school years) is very much a me kind of game. I could take or leave the early resident evil paint job (though the shameless ness of it is amusing; the between run base are initially consists of a safe room with an item box and all but literally the entrance hall of the Spencer Mansion) though they do manage to get some appropriate feeling and mechanically fun/interesting enemies and bosses out of it. also having a few bad runs back to back that essentially sent me back to square 1 reminded me of why I have a love hate relation ship with this genre; the tension from the knowledge that everything could go wrong and ruin you, and the frustration when it all but inevitably does.

Squeakross

So I mentioned last month that I like Nonograms (a.k.a Picross) puzzles a lot and this is another solid digital puzzle book. Arguably this is better than Juufuutei Raden’s Guide for Pixel Museum that I talked about last month; having nearly twice as many puzzles as Pixel museum (and that’s before a free update added 100 more) and the puzzles feeding into a cozy Sims like (most people say animal crossing like which I can see the validity of but am hesitant to parrot having never played animal crossing) mode where decorate a house for and dress up a mouse.

Demon Tides

So yeah this game has only been out for for 10 days and I’ve already put in ~15 hours and have nearly 50% completion; I think its safe to say I like this one. Then again Demon Turf was a really good platformer, its sequel/expansion Neon Splash was even better (mostly by axing most of the non platforming elements and tightening up inputs for some moves to make for smoother kinesthetic flow while platforming), and this follows in those footsteps very well. Non platforming elements are reintroduced, though I think in a better feeling way than in Demon Turf, to coincide with the grand adventure vibe. Really the only ting I am not fully sold on are the art style/vibes and how you move between levels: the gloomy vibes filled with 2D sprites in low poly environments being replaced with bright high saturation fully 3D modeled art is different but does bring some fun things to the table (more meaningful/interesting cosmetic unlockables most immediately), though I am a little more iffy on the big fully explorable ocean to navigate between levels as opposed to the more standard hub world and level structure the previous titles used; not enough to put any kind of damper on the fun I’m having

Trigger Happy

So still working on getting back into reading and ended up reading through this ‘old’ (I mean being published in 2000 isn’t really old but given the amount gaming has changed since then even the afterword added to the 2004 revised edition of the book I have feels oddly outdated in some way) book on video games. Honestly it was an interesting read, more high minded academic outside looking in in its energy and execution: featuring an origin of species styled breakdown of vide game genres, a discussion of gaming through a dialectical framework; really the fact that the about the author blurb on the back is two sentences long with a lengthy compound sentence covering their journalistic and academic credentials and a short snarky one saying they also play video games helps to set the tone of this book. That said it is insightful even if it feels very of its late 90s time frame when it was written (e.g refereeing to Grand Theft Auto as a 2D game series since GTA3 was years off, lumping FPS and shump’s together in a single genre making sense in a time were FPS wero only just shedding the Doom Clone moniker and 3rd person shooters weren’t really a thing, lumping Beat em’ ups and Fighting games together and lamenting the move to string based 3D style games of more street fighter inspired mechanics hits different after Tekken basically being the last man standing as far as string based 3D fighters for nearly a decade and beat em’ ups being replaced by several 3D cousins like Stylish action and musou prior to a small genre revival recently) and I never felt like the author didn’t have some personal understanding of the topic or relied on bad research.

Dragon Half

I’ve also been reading through a full series omnibus series of this Manga I bought a few years ago (given I enjoyed the two episode OVA based on the series in 00’s downloaded off file sharing and with fan-subs as well as scanslations of the series I read around 2010 it seemed appropriate to support the official release), and I’m ~70%-80% of the way through the series. Its as funny as I remember it being, with a prevalence of 4th wall leaning, referential, and pun based comedy around fantasy and RPG tropes; though it did leave me thinking about the oddities and difficulties of translating humor. I mean with the prevalence of puns (which tend to largely be a staple of Japanese humor to my understanding), which are a known quantity for difficult to impossible to directly translate without having to explain the joke) and references (which may not even land for Japanese people 20 years after the original Japanese publication) sets a weird and difficult job for anyone trying to translate this comic and there were a few moments where I feel like I could ‘see the man behind the curtain’ as it were. The first one (which likely by putting me in this head space led to me noticing a lot of smaller ones) was a reference to Hydra (form Marvel Comics) when a women shows up riding a 3 headed dragon: the reference makes sense and works in context (in one panel a women rides in on said 3 headed dragon, character A references King Ghidorah, the women corrects them saying she’s on a hydra, character B mishears this and tells character C she is an agent of Hydra with character C saying “hail hydra” in response before the plot actually moves along in the next panel) but the reference doesn’t feel like it comes form a 1990’s Japanese perspective and more a 2010’s American perspective (I mean Hydra has existed in Marvel comics for quite a while, but Phase 2 and 3 of the MCU as well as the whole Captain America being evil and working for Hydra in the comics in the 2010s was probably their peak of relevance). Though the biggest one is a sequence that just feels borderline untranslatable: across a few chapters in the latter half of the story the characters are trying to acquire a magic sword stuck in a container and have to solve 6 riddles that lead them to the instructions on how to free the sword, only for said instructions to say the riddles hold the answer, which requires taking the first character in each riddle and putting them together to spell out the instruction(push form below). When the answer being in the riddles is revealed there is a panel asking the reader if they can figure out the puzzle (before on the next page a character figures it out and explains the answer) and giving you a hint; the translation has the hint be to spend several years studying Japanese as the riddles as shown in said panel are left untranslated (and if you go back and read the riddles as presented in prior chapters the solution described doesn’t work in English). Now I’m not faulting the translators on either of these choices translations can be difficult even in easier circumstances and the material here is hard mode maybe even nightmare level difficulty. I’m actually reminded of a kind of throwaway joke in the anime of Hi Score Girl (a romance/drama story set against the back drop early 90’s gaming, more specifically arcade and fighting game, culture) where the main Character sees the newly released Street Fighter Alpha and comments how weird is that they made Street Fighter then Street Fighter 2 and its various revisions and when you think they’ll finally release Street Fighter 3 they go back to Alpha; this is an accurate translation, but by using the English localized name (Street Fighter Alpha) instead of the Japanese name (Street Fighter 0) the flow of the joke is broken (1, 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3…, 0 vs. 1, 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3…, A)if not the punchline (WTF is up with Street Fighter’s numbering system)