read azumanga daioh recently

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I don't think Monster Hunter needs to be open world. I think the games are fantastic as they have progressed so far. BUT. If Monster Hunter Wilds is indeed open world it will probably be one of my Top 5 favorite games of all time.

I've been playing Monster Hunter regularly since 4U (although I played Portable on the PSP when it came out and I didn't progress very far because I was horrible at it). I really enjoyed the 3DS games. But I knew the tedium and the convoluted systems were holding back my enjoyment. The separate armor sets. The slow RNG gathering. The strict decoration system. The lack of proper, modern aiming for ranged weapons. The lack of a lock-on camera... Literally everything I had an issue with was addressed in World without affecting the game's depth. It wasn't easier or overly-simplified, it just changed things that were common sense, and my enjoyment of the game skyrocketed.

I also wanted the games to be more immersive, at the very least to get rid of the separate areas within locations, and to make it really feel like you're tracking/pursuing a monster beyond just hitting it with a paintball and following the pink dot on the map. World did all of that. The only thing I didn't like about Rise was not having to actually find the monster. It's still a fantastic game, but those little immersive features really go a long way. They also just made it so you could go out into a location without a specific objective, so you could gather resources without a time limit or just hunt whatever monsters were present without repeating a quest. In previous games, the locations felt like they existed only to be the stage on which you hunt monsters. World did so much to make it feel like you were in a complex, believable ecosystem, rather than just feeling like you were in a video game level.

All of these features made me much more interested in the world, the lore, the details. These things were always present, but there was a disconnect. Monster Hunter was always fun, but it really benefits from immersion. The final piece of that immersion is to remove the locations altogether. I want to travel from the Hub to the hunting grounds. I want to truly explore the world, to go on a journey and discover things. I want to be able to stumble into something that I might not be prepared to deal with and have to run away like an idiot. I want to hunt monsters across great distances through multiple biomes.

Wilds will probably still be a fantastic game even if it doesn't do any of this, even if it's not open world at all. Not every game needs to be open world. I've been playing through Armored Core 6, and it's honestly refreshing to play something that doesn't feel compelled to be massive. But I think the themes and gameplay of Monster Hunter have always been perfect for an immersive open world experience.

I had a dream that the girls from K-On! met George Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Mugi in particular was very excited.

I've been playing a lot of MechWarrior 4/5: Mercenaries lately, and it really just makes me wish Bandai Namco would make like, an actually good, canonical Mobile Suit Gundam game.

It's really annoying that for the past decade or so, nearly all Gundam games have been PvP-focused mashup games that are basically just saying "Wouldn't it be cool if Amuro Ray could fight Domon Kasshu but also fight the guy from Gundam Seed at the same time?" Like yeah it would be cool! And honestly the Gundam Extreme Versus MaxiBoost Whatever the Fuck™ games look like the best games that have come out of the franchise recently. But then they were like "Okay what if we do that again, but rather than being a 2v2 arena fighter it's just fucking Overwatch? What if we make it so similar to Overwatch that we basically just copy the HUD almost exactly? What if we release this game TWO WEEKS before Overwatch 2 comes out?"

The thing that really bothers me about Gundam Evolution is it had a lot of potential to be a decent Just Another Hero Shooter if they had just put some thought into giving it an actual identity. The gameplay was actually pretty good, but they didn't do nearly enough to make it feel like a Gundam game. It was just Overwatch with a random assortment of mobile suits from 4-5 different universes. The fact that they went so far as to shut it down only a year after it came out is absurd. I'm not surprised that the game wasn't successful, but I'm confused at how they thought it would be, and then it was apparently so unsuccessful (meaning not enough people were buying the cosmetic shit for it to be profitable) that it wasn't even worth keeping the servers up and providing minimal support for people who did actually enjoy it.

Then there's Battle Operation 2, which feels more like what I think a Gundam game should be and is at least limited to UC content, but I just don't enjoy playing it. It's an overly-complicated free to play game that seems to reward players who play (or spend) a lot, which makes it difficult to get acclimated when you're just starting out. I haven't played it enough to feel like I can accuse it of being pay-to-win, but I've seen that argument made by other people, and it difficult not to feel that way a little bit considering how most of my matches have gone. And I'm sure a lot of that comes down to me just not playing the game enough to actually get good, but it just doesn't feel worth the frustration of trying to get there when the game seems average at best. I keep wanting to give it another chance, but I get frustrated every time I do. It certainly doesn't help that I've only been able to play on maybe three distinct maps, and specifically one of them away more than the other two.

Back to the point...

I've been playing MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries and MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries a lot over the past couple weeks. Neither of them are perfect games. They both have unique strengths and shortcomings. A lot of people would probably disagree with the things I like or dislike about them. But I think they're both a lot of fun, because they both make huge effort to make it feel like you're controlling a big bidepal machine loaded with weapons, and to make the combat engaging and satisfying.

The crazy thing about how much I enjoy these games is that I'm not even that interested in the greater BattleTech universe. I've played 20 hours or so of the turn-based video game from 2018 (although I need to go back to it because I don't really feel like I've experienced that much of it) but that's it. I know very little about the tabletop game. I've never read any of the books. I know the basic concepts in the lore and I know of the Houses and the Clans and all of that, but not much else. I know of some of the people but I don't know anyone's motives or ideals. I feel bad saying this, but I just don't care about the universe these games are set in. The plots of the games allude to much bigger events occurring in the background, but without context none of it means much to me. I don't think it's bad at all, but I think it's just not for me. It seems very dense and complicated, and I honestly think if I took the time to read some of it I would enjoy it. But I just don't have the desire to become engrossed within the world like I do with other fictional worlds. I think I'm just not that interested in the whole Feudalism, But in Space genre.

So it's just a bit of a shame that Mobile Suit Gundam games don't get that same level of treatment/production value. A game set in the UC timeline with a gameplay loop similar to MechWarrior: Mercenaries games would probably be my favorite game ever if it was actually any good. I just like good mech games. I loved Titanfall 2 even though I usually hate fast-paced multiplayer shooters. I really need to buy Armored Core 6 soon (speaking of, FromSoft made a Japan-only Gundam Unicorn game a while back, why not let them have another go?). There's so much potential to not only make good Gundam games that aren't PvP-focused, but also to make Gundam games that actually make sense canonically. Bandai Namco somehow felt confident enough to rip off Overwatch and thought that was a risk worth taking, but they don't want to make games that actually acknowledge there are stories and deep lore and a really good science fiction universe behind the big cool robots.

A Short Hike + Scenery

summer heat

What's crazy to me about the Yakuza series is that RGG Studio has been doing near-annual releases for the past decade, and the quality has been incredibly consistent (except for the 3/4/5 remasters, which just haven't aged well in some aspects). That they're mostly making the same kind of game each time and it never feels stale, and they add enough new features/gimmicks each time to keep things fresh but not so much that the games lose their identity.

They made a detective spinoff with Takuya Kimura that managed to be just as good as the mainline series. They teased Yakuza 7 as a JRPG in a sort of double-April Fool's and then revealed it to be true. They took a game that for the previous fifteen years was an action-brawler and turned it into a competent JRPG, without losing it's identity. They created a new protagonist to take over for Kiryu with a distinct personality and an interesting story.

Toshihiro Nagoshi left the studio and the franchise has so-far maintained everything that makes it special. Even as the series has become much more popular internationally in recent years, it hasn't caved to industry trends or westernization.

All of these things on their own are impressive, but even moreso when you consider the frequency of new entries/remasters. At a time when some major studios seemingly can barely manage to put out a finished product due to absurd deadlines and mismanagement, RGG Studio exists on a separate plane entirely. I can only hope that it's a positive work environment and that everyone there is compensated well for their contributions.

devastating

Oppenheimer (2023) | dir. Christopher Nolan

‘Metroid Prime’ was released on the Nintendo Gamecube 21 years ago today in the US.