The Backbloggery

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on june 30, 2024] there is so little I can reasonably say in a single post about final fantasy xiv, or even just this expansion, to encapsulate my experiences with the game. to elucidate on what I get out of this game every time it launches a new expansion and the brainworms reignite would take an immense amount of rambling that doesn't really fit the format of this blog. I really enjoyed dawntrail. I'm going to continue enjoying this game for a long while, I think, barring some serious problems with it. I might have a more spoilery post about it later when I've had more time to chew on it and also it isn't The Third Day It's Even Out.

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on june 10, 2024] y'know, I bought this basically sight unseen a day after it came out (april 28th, 2020) and I have genuinely been meaning to play it since then, despite really feeling like it was going to be an earnest coin flip between tiring trash and genuinely good game it's good! not for everyone but it's pretty fun and I'm gonna 100% it sakura wars, as a franchise, has been one of those things I was always kind of aware of but never felt strongly enough about to get into. there was the ps2 entry, so long, my love , which was, to my knowledge, not very well received by diehard fans of the series; however, those diehard fans were playing the first four games in japanese back in the day. there's been translation efforts now, and I might go look for them, honestly, because good grief, the character moments in this game are strong. the move from turn-based tactics to musou-adjacent action game is bafflin...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on may 29, 2024] for the first time in a while, I truly just do not understand what the writers of a game thought they were doing. I know what they think they were going for, but every tiring step of this game's plot is flimsily justified in ways that feel even more hollow than I expected. at the game's outset, the idea that a group of people could manipulate a nation into going to war to satisfy their personal vendetta against the emperor seemed truly absurd, but I was willing to see how they managed to justify it. they didn't even try. the idea that these five young adults would be sacrificing themselves at the end of the war to atone for their complicity in the bloodshed was also somewhat compelling. assuming, of course, they could actually explain how this would sate the populace or the state. they tried! but it makes no goddamn sense. the final gambit is going "actually, we started the war because of thes...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on may 23, 2024] this game is infuriating. eminently breakable, and infuriating. I'm gonna be bitching under the cut, dead dove etc the partner who I burdened with the weight of playing kingdom hearts is mostly being a good sport about this but I feel bad. about making them play this game with its myriad shortcomings of design after they suffered khfm and its own cocktail of painful Bits, especially if you, as they did, try to get all the annoying trophies in one run. playing through kingdom hearts final mix on proud, without changing equipment, without being allowed to simply continue if you lose a fight, and suffering the painfully doubled damage that proud pointlessly inflicts to do the endgame grinding, even once you can swap equipment, is not how people typically fondly remember kh1. they remember playing the original game on normal! without a bunch of extra challenges tacked on! achievements/trophies are a problem, a...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on may 20, 2024] we talked about wild arms 2 on the podcast so I'm not gonna make a big post about it. I made my points about the game fairly well on the episode, I think. game's good! I love it enough that I am genuinely considering writing a more comprehensive and accurate walkthrough than exists among the several I used to replay it  

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on april 28, 2024] this game struck me, a way too online not-quite-a-furry trans lesbian, as something that would either be very good or make me cringe out of my skin because the writing was Just Slightly Off I liked it. that could really be the whole post lol there's a scene fairly early on where the main character, melody, talks about the name she chose when she transitioned. she talks about choosing "melody" because it's the centerpiece of a piece of music and she was hoping that by calling herself that she could embody some of that energy and become a more interesting person. felt kind of called out by that scene because of how many goddamn times I've argued with my gfs about whether I have protagonist energy. (I don't, but they disagree) anyway this game is full of extremely funny and stupid jokes that range from goofs about game design (seeing a tent, thinking you can walk up to it and interact...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on march 11, 2024] digging through this game was fascinating but not particularly enjoyable for me to actually play. it feels a lot like playing older platformers, but with nicer checkpointing and no lives system, just a slow circling of the drain for your collected gold that you can, in theory, always recover how this played out for someone like me, who gets annoyed when I've lost some money, even if I'm in the final rush and have decided I don't care about retaining my riches, is that I simply frustrated myself trying to avoid the spiral's outcome and trapped myself in the spiral by doing so instead of moving on and making progress. I would rather have a lives system! or, if I was playing an actual old game on an emulator, save states so I could just. not worry about my largely unimportant number going down and just play the game instead! anyway I think I'll probably have more fun with old megaman games ...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on february 25, 2024] we talked about this for an episode of live genre chronicles. I hope you're ok with me recounting a more personal view on games we're playing for the podcast here, on top of the more mediated and measured takes I posit on their respective episodes, because different thoughts will get absorbed differently by the attention I have to give different mediums, and I'm gonna keep doing these little posts for the LGC games. playing final fantasy vii for me happened in a funny way. when I was in middle school, one of my dipshit friends accidentally broke my nintendo ds in a way that sentenced it to a slow and inevitable death (one side of the hinge cracked, meaning it would eventually loosen its wiring and the top screen would slowly lose signal). to make it up to me, he gave me a psp that he had been meaning to sell and some assorted games and accessories and such. I ended up playing the final fantasy ...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on february 8, 2024] this game is heavy. heavier than I would've been capable of dealing with over the last few years, I think, and it shows, from my multiple attempts to play the game through only now finally resulting in something resembling an ending. now that I'm in a better (and more stubborn) place, I can appreciate it, but it's not world-altering for me or even like, a masterpiece. it's good! but it felt lacking in some ways. some days, bad days, part of me wants to not exist. to have not existed . I don't want to take my life. rarely has that thought been any part of my brain's calculus for how to deal with the lows in my life, and it's never anything I take any steps toward, even in those, my worst moments. but at times I have thought that... if I could just opt out, let someone new take over my body and my life, things might be for the better. that there was something baked into my history...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on february 6, 2024] I don't really know how to preface this properly to convey how excited I was to hear this game was finally coming out. I was there, caring about the original game when this spinoff was announced. I was playing granblue off and on for several years, eventually deciding to " take it seriously " and join a crew instead of just chilling in a solo crew for guild wars. I then later joined a top-2k crew where I helped out for a few GWs and then ended up ducking out to make room for someone who actually wanted to be there. the franchise has had some irreversible effect on my brain and my general being that I can't really quantify, and while I've quit for too long to ever really get back into the swing of things, I can't ever shake the itch to return to the grind. I started because I saw art of narmaya blowing up on jp art twitter and was just. perplexed? bewitched? something flipped a switc...