2018 debriefing lol
- prolly the most fun I had this year was when i got deep into playing baldur's gate 2 over and over, hot off of replaying baldur's gate 1 over and over last year. still a masterwork of a game densely packed with content in every corner. didn't finish throne of bhaal though, mostly because high level adventures kinda bore me
- right now, i'm playing through the .hack//G.U. rerelease. i've touched it so sporadically that I'm missing my target of finishing it during december (which is when the bonus fourth installment unique to the rerelease takes place, december 2018) by a long shot seeing as I've only finished the first game. which by the way, is a complete mess lol. i remember the second game being the best and the third being the worst, so that's not a winning ratio lol.
- i celebrated spyro: reignited trilogy by not buying it and replaying spyro 1 and 2 on the ps1 instead. spyro 1 is one of the few games I play from 0% to 100% at least once every year, but it had been a while since I had played spyro 2 and it was pretty eh. the transition those latter two games made by replacing platforming with minigames kinda sucks
- played through about 70% of mega man legends 2. dunno why i didn't finish it. actually think i kinda like legends 1 a decent bit more, but legends 2 isn't a significant drop off. prolly the thing I remember the most was spending about 4 hours doing the 100 question quiz lol
- none of my opinions on persona 5 have changed since i played it. it's a 5/10 game that i don't regret playing, but meh. also, it's pretty fitting that they'd have an announcement for the updated rerelease or something and then not tell us anything about it until march, that's very fitting for the game that had such an overwrought production cycle that it was delayed for two years lol
- well, i played a couple of days worth of bloodborne. i dunno, i don't care about it. my favorite thing about souls games are character builds and it's pretty blatant this isn't really about that to anywhere near the extent as dark souls. it seems to emphasize mechs and playstyles in dark souls that i don't subscribe to at all and don't really wanna either. i think i respect it more than dark souls 3 because it's a bit more explicit about how it wants you to play it rather than dark souls 3 giving you the cosmopolitan variety of options of any souls game and then railroading you heavily. i'll finish it eventually i guess but i'm in no rush.
- i played a bunch of mobage during the latter half of the year because i don't know why. prolly the only one that's interesting is fate/grand order, which actually has a story and provides a good 12-15 hours of content per content update. its original plotline just ended yesterday (that's right, you have me to thank that you'll live to see 2019-- wait, why are you throwing stuff at me) and it's authentically nasu-y that it's kinda nostalgic to go through. it has what I like to call "strange journey" balancing where the game isn't exactly fun, but it's oppressive enough that it's satisfying to conquer the progressively-increasing challenges of the game balanced for someone who has played this for 550 days as opposed to my 150. of course, what that means is that farming in it is the worst experience ever, and this game reaaaally wants you to farm a lot. i saved a lot of gems for the top tier incubus husbando servant that came out this month and failed, but managed to get him from a single summon ticket that one of the endgame raid bosses dropped, which is nice.
- this has been prolly the worst year for ffxiv since it rebooted. ffxiv took a piece of content from the last expansion that was so hated that nobody touched it even after they rebooted it and did it again, only it's even more fu
cking miserable to experience. ffxiv has a formula for when and how much stuff comes out with some free space every now and then, and aside from rehashing one of the more successful side attractions from the last expansion as well, they've dedicated all of that free space for the entire expansion to this piece of sh
it. makes the game feel even more sterile -- here's your plot, here's your dungeons, here's your trial and here's your raids, and none of those are gonna up-end the experience of playing the game, and our wild-card attractions are gonna be more of the same too! the main body of the expansion more or less resolved everything that wasn't gonna be part of the raid storyline, so the patch updates have had some pretty fu
cking pointless story beats, like "oh, let's revive the evil genocidal lady and woobie-fy her and displace all of her wrongdoings on this character we've never seen before and then have her become evil again anyway and kill her". the devs have had their heads so far up their own asses for quite a while, so with the new expansion announced, i'm not really looking forward to it!
- and finally, the pathfinder campaign i'm dm-ing is still going happening. one more meeting and we're gonna finish the first book of the adventure path, which has literally never happened to me before.
- alsoalso i'm not gonna bump my anime topic just to say this, but this is the first year since 2007 where I didn't watch a single show of my own volition lol
favorite games that you've played this year?
so yeah
Baldur's Gate 2
Spyro the Dragon
Mega Man Legends 2