turns out this format can't really sustain itself when dealing with my ADHD or the sudden lack of time when I start doing a second podcast with my fiancee. whoops!
life hit me in weird ways this last year, obviously, with the anime podcast and the associated jump in time spent watching anime with my fiancee. her two trips to come visit me, too, were somewhat stressful in terms of time management, as they displaced my ability to work from home at my own pace on basically anything off of my phone.
as for the games I picked... I do still more or less want to play all of them. some of them I'm carrying over into the next attempt to do something like this in 2026, with a baker's dozen games to play by the end of the year.
the ones I finished, though, were not terribly motivating. sable, hat in time, quake 1, and unsighted were all somewhere between rough and bad, and while I appreciated yu-no on an academic level, it ended up really not sticking the landing. the fact that flipwitch is the game I have gotten most attached to over the year is bewildering, as well, but it's really quite fun (and funny) to put that into an archipelago randomizer and just watch everyone lose their minds.
I also finished two castlevania games via the dominus collection before the end of the year, but I was going to write about them all in one post once I finished the last one... which, obviously, hasn't happened yet.
25 games is a lot! beating the ones I did was good. I was hoping to beat one more by the end of the year, but... well.
I got drained to exhaustion by dragon quest vii. frankly, I think the game is simply stretched too thin to function as an enjoyable experience, which is a shame, because I really wanted to enjoy it, but it's got pacing issues. in a more generous way, I would say it gives things time to breathe, but... it's so sparse. part of the joy of dragon quest style plotting is that most, if not all, of the little arcs add something to, or reveal something about, the main story. here, the main plot feels like it still hasn't shown up halfway in, and that halfway in is roughly 40 hours deep.
I am so tired. playing the game literally makes me drowsy at this point. early on, I was more optimistic, but now I genuinely start to doze off whenever I open my 3DS, and I feel bad about it, but it's just how it is at this point.
there was a moment I had which gave me hope, where mechanics gave me a compelling character beat... but with the (quite slow) addition of a job system, I realized the game had forsaken its control over meaningful mechanical beats, too. a party member left for good (though that doesn't seem to be true in the upcoming DQ7 reimagined) and his absence, something I hadn't felt all game, left a hole in my teamwork. prior to his decision to leave, I had a full four people in the frontline, and the hero and kiefer (the character in question) shared most weapon proficiencies, meaning it was always a matter of judgment calls on who got the fancy new gear.
kiefer almost always got first dibs; he was stronger, and he had the tools to charge up for a turn and then use an ability to do a lot of damage. he was older, too, being the largest impetus for the adventure in the first place, and the one with responsibilities that he was running from. his departure, intending to settle down with a girl he fell for in the past, was one that was felt mechanically as much as it was narratively. the action economy in this game isn't exactly kind, so dipping from four turns back down to three was rough.
shortly after he leaves the party, you journey forth to a new region, the one that contains alltrades abbey, where you can finally interact with the job system this game has. in the process, though, you're stripped of all magic and abilities, leaving only your martial prowess and items intact as options. while trying to optimize my party for the struggle that presented itself, I found a weapon I'd forgotten about. kiefer had left, but when he did, he was equipped with an iron axe; a bit of an expensive indulgence of a weapon to buy normally, I'd gotten lucky and found one as a drop from an earlier leg of the adventure, and it had made kiefer even more of a threat than he was with the gear from the area.
what providence, then, that this memory of kiefer had returned to assist me, even when he could not. equipping it to the hero felt right, a passing of the prodigal prince's proficiency to help in this dark hour. it made a real difference, too, trimming whole extra turns I'd have needed to take out a group of enemies, and in turn, reducing the number of times I needed to waste battle turns on healing with the infinite-in-battle healing rock.
you can make a story out of anything, and you will make a story out of so much. however, I am not so interested in producing motes of story, here and there, off the materials the creators have brought to me when the creators are ostensibly trying to tell me a story and continually hesitating to get around to it. I am all for letting plot points breathe, but basically nothing has happened after forty god damn hours and I could have replayed dragon quest iv and v in this timeframe, or played dragon quest vi and leveled everyone's vocations to max with not much more required time.
the job system punishes you for overleveling, so I don't get excited to see a metal slime anymore, and the economy of the game is unusually tepid, with rarely any equipment that's actually worth grinding for. what happened, here, and why is it taking so long to get anywhere? I don't know if I'll ever know. or if I'll ever finish this game, frankly. dragon quest viii is probably better but I get the vibe it's the precursor to dragon quest xi which I did not like very much. so I don't know when I'll get around to that, either.
I'm gonna get back to playing my 12 for 12 (or 13 for 12 whoops I asked too many people for games) and warframe and enjoying my life. I'll post when I finish games, probably, because I am trying to keep my criticism muscles in shape, but hoo boy. don't expect consistency or frequency.