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FFXV First Impressions

Impressions So Far (something like 2 hours in):

That opening scene of pushing the car was Actually Clever. It was trying to be clever, but if you succeed and ARE clever “trying to be clever” is allowed!

Running across open ground is a little boring. Definite “Open World-itis” there. They tried to mitigate by including fast travel back to your car. It...sort of mitigates it? But if you’re willing to shrink player perception of the space by including fast travel, then you should show less space and have more space implied.

Night is legit scary. One of the characters mentioned you needed to get in by dark because demons come out and I’m like, “Sure, but I’m an adventurer. Isn’t fighting demons my thing?” That night: I’m running around looking for a hunt target and the asphalt on the road in front of me starts boiling and then up pop a pair of red eyes (literally that’s all you can see of this thing if you’re not standing within 10′ of it). It’s an Iron Giant, and it is level thirty. At this point I am level three. I run. I run immediately and two of my friends still nearly die. I love how they handled night.

The conversation engine needed more time. It’s neat, and a lot of it is good, but it’s not good enough and like human face art it’s gotta be really great to fool humans because we’re used to focusing on it. Two hours in I’ve already hit two or three uncanny-valley type moments where people repeated lines - not just barks but whole conversations. When it’s barks it’s a person having a catch phrase. When it’s a conversation you’re suddenly watching Groundhog Day.

There are parts of this that remind me of the hashtags in KH3 - this weird and too-visible desire of the designers to incorporate some aspect of modern society and its relationship with media but it’s fallen apart because the media isn’t old enough (or the designer not prescient/deep enough) for the designer to conceive of how it really plays out, what it really means in a fantasy space. The mix of having digital GPS yet needing to get rumors about where stuff is on your local map from the local diners is...a weird choice.

When i realized you could mix any ol’ piece of junk you found lying around with your magic to make better magic? Yeah, that’s pretty hot. I wish the system had a faster cooldown for spells (As it is, spells are basically grenades you have to construct yourself before battle, using resources you only find in a couple locations - magic mining nodes, basically - plus whatever physical stuff you wanna combine with them. The magic nodes recharge daily, but you can only make 3 spell-grenades per grenade-slot and only get 4 grenade-slots as far as I can tell). Noctis, your main character, has MP, which should be WP because it’s used exclusively for Warping, at least so far in the game. Personally I think having to spend longer crafting a spell and then being able to use MP to cast it would be rockin’. Like, I would sit there farming up every possible combination of items and spell energy to fill out my spellbook. You could have crazy spells that use 3/4 of your mp gauge, and then you have to duck behind a rock to recover like a proper black mage would have to do and just...I don’t know, I had a similar response of “This was almost as awesome as the magic system I came up with just now that I haven’t tested” back when FFVIII came out. Who knows if my idea for a magic system would actually be any good in practice. It certainly feels good in my head, and frankly I appreciate how close this one came to awesome because this feeling of speculating about the one change to fix everything is really fulfilling for me.

I like the fact that there’s treasure points on your map, and food points on the map, and mining points on the map, but then every now and then you find something valuable that isn’t on the map. It makes wandering around feel just a little more rewarding - It’s better than the fast-travel system at making the open world feel like an okay decision.

I like how wide the range of survivability is! I ran from that level thirty Iron Giant, but I did a level ELEVEN hunt while I was still level THREE. Playing the fights well clearly matters.

I also really like the system for wounds! Basically you have a third score. Normal games have Max HP and Current HP. This game adds in “Current Max HP” which can be between the two. If you get knocked to 0 Current HP your character’s seriously injured and you’re literally limping around hoping for one of your buddies to heal you or trying to get out of immediate danger so you can drink a potion (or trying to limp and drink both at once). While this is happening your Current Max is bleeding out. Let’s say you had 100 max hp and you bleed down to 90 while you pull a potion out. A potion heals you by 50% of your actual Max (so, to 50) and if you can catch a breather out of immediate harm’s way you’ll quickly recover to 90, your Current Max HP. But you won’t recover to 100. Outside of combat, your Current Max rises by 1 every 3-4 seconds until it hits your actual Max HP. This makes it possible to get attacked again when you haven’t really recovered from the last fight, which...isn’t a feeling you get in a lot of these games, especially ones that have regenerating health systems as robust as this one. Just two hours in I’ve already had some really tense encounters where things started going really wrong for me and I pulled out of it but it built that sense of being winded, of being really rattled by the fight, in a way that doesn’t tend to happen.

I think Youtube videos about the game have already said this but I really like that you make your own photo album as you play. By the end of the game you’ve literally got the 200 most meaningful moments to you in that album, or at least your favorite pics. It’s just brilliant, in terms of making a retrospective of stuff that made the game great for you, personally, as the person who played this playthrough of their game.

The food looks delicious, and I’m precisely as disturbed by how much I want to eat it as various people are by how sexy they find cat versions of people in the new Cats movie. There’s one part of my brain that is telling me that it is cartoon food and not real (and that some of it, like the mystery lunchmeat “sushi,” would likely be Super Gross if you could smell it) and it is correct but is also incapable of shutting up the part of my brain that finds the same fake food appetizing.

The collector in me is starting by buying all the skills that grant AP. I have doubts as to whether the game is long enough that I’ll recoup the investment. Like, the one that makes it so Big Catches grant AP costs 99 AP. I think it makes them give 2 AP. Am I actually going to fish up 50 Big Catches in the fishing minigame? (It might even only increase the AP gains by 1, so I’d have to fish up a hundred to profit.) Well fuck it, I know I’m gonna buy every damn skill on every grid anyway so I might as well start with the ones that speed up that process, no matter by how small a degree. The camping and food ones, at the least, were no-brainers.

I have trouble telling the main characters’ voices apart. Say what you will about how dumb Donald sounds in Kingdom Hearts 3, but if Sora, Goofy, Donald, Kairi, King Mickey, Yen Sid, Axel, and Riku were all having a conversation there is no point where you’d be confused about who was talking even if your eyes were closed the whole time. The voices and speech patterns are as recognizable as the silhouettes, in the KH series. Not so much, in FFXV.

I love the way Prompto moves in combat. He is literally always tripping and scrambling to get back up. Seriously, if you have the game play the training session so you can see his move cycle in detail. He spends like half of it with at least one hand on the ground, and I just love it. It’s so dynamic, so expressive, so goofy, so immediately endearing. And then you think, “Wait, we armed our derpiest party member with a gun? What is wrong with us?”

What I want from Pokemon Sword/Shield

What I hope for in Pokemon Sword/Shield. I thought about making this a video, and I might still, but it’s so long that I thought a list here would be better to start with at least.

I know a lot of people are doing videos like this, where they're saying "this is what I'd love to see or not see in Pokemon Sword/Shield", but I'd honestly like to throw my opinion out there, too. There's so much we're hoping from in these games, and some of the points I think of I haven't seen other people address at all. And of course, I just have my own things that would make the games more fun for me, so. In no real order, here's what I hope for in Pokemon Sword and Shield.

1. No Fire/Fighting Starter.

Don't make Scorbunny fighting. Don't make Scorbunny fighting. For the love of god, DON'T MAKE SCORBUNNY FIGHTING.

Look. I like most of the starters overall, and both Chimchar and Torchic are some I think are really good, personally. But unlike the other two, Fire has just gotten this habit of dropping into fighting as its sub-type, and quite frankly that's just boring at this point. Blaziken, Infernape, and Emboar, all one after another, were just too much. They did REALLY good subverting this with the Fire/Psychic starter of Delphox, and while I don't personally care for it, I like the fact that Incineroar was Fire/Dark, even though its theme could have so easily been dropped into fighting.

Make it anything else. Literally anything else. No one cares what its other type is, or if it'll even have another type, as long as it ISN'T. FIGHTING. The little bandage on its face is making us worried, but with Inceniroar you proved you could have a fighting-styled theme without actually being fighting type. Please, do that again.

I, too, will accept literally any type match but Fire/Fighting. Though if I could personally choose, I'd ask for Fairy or Dark again. It'd be nice to have a Fire/Dark I actually really like.

2. No shiny locking.

Nintendo has picked up this habit of making legendaries, especially the cover Pokemon, impossible to roll as shiny.  Basically, they're hard-coded so that when you encounter them, they cannot be shiny. That needs to stop. Just... yeah. Don't do that. Stop doing that. That's really all there is to it. It's a bad thing you're doing and you need to quit. It's literally MORE work to do for no reason. Just stop it.

3. Keep easier ways to find shinies.

Easy is a bit of a misnomer, because there's no way to easily get a shiny, no matter what anyone says. But there are ways to make it easIER, and I think that needs to be kept. Whether it's chain-catching like in Pokemon Let's Go or something else, give us a way that's actually possible to do to get shinies. Do not bring back that stupid "pick the right shaking grass when all of them are two pixels different" minigame. That's a BAD WAY to do it. Give us a way, and give us a way that actually can work, not make us lose our progress because we don't have eyes like eagles.

4. No motion controls.

Now, I don't think Pokemon Let's Go had a bad catching mechanic... IF the game was in handheld mode. The idea of being able to catch Pokemon without wearing down my team was actually really good, and it was something I liked a lot. I did miss being able to battle wild Pokemon and make them easier to catch, but if the Let's Go catching mechanic comes back I won't mind...

IF it works like it does in handheld mode. Docked mode was AWFUL. There's no ifs, ands, or buts, it was just badly. Programmed. No one liked it. No one enjoyed it. It was never consistent and often times was completely opposite to whatever you wanted to do.

5. Pokemon that follow you.

Like in the Johto remakes or Pokemon Let's Go, let your Pokemon follow you. We know you can do it. You actually DID do it in the Alola games, because there's data of every single Pokemon model with walk and run cycles on the cartritage that you just never actually let us access, so don't try to claim this isn't something you can't do. On top of that, the Switch is way bigger than the 3DS' carts. You have room. You have the skill. Give it to us.

6. New Eeveelutions.

Please, please, PLEASE. Give us new 'eons. It's been way too long without getting new Eevee forms, and you have so many types you can still make it from. Give us SOMETHING. ANYTHING. You're creative, you can come up with various ways to do stuff. What about a Steel-type that evolves when you level it up holding a Metal Coat? Or a Fighting-type that evolves if you get it to a certain level? Just give us SOMETHING.

Me, personally, I'd love to see a Dragon-type, Poison-type, or Ground-type Eeveelution, because I'm always short on those types and I think they'd be awesome.

7. Bring back Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves.

They're cool, they're fun, and they make things more interesting. I've heard people complain about how it ruins competitive battling because it's unpredictable, to which I say "Why is your competitive battling completely predictable? That sounds boring and not actually competitive if you can plug in a formula and have it work." Some people say that it makes the game too easy, to which I say "Then stop using them." It's the same as people complaining there's difficulty levels in games; you think the easy mode is too easy for you, then just don't play on the easy mode. If you think Z-Moves or Mega Evolution make the game too easy for you, then just don't use them. No one's forcing you to, and taking away something other people enjoy because you have no self-control over not using them is just really rude. I mean, no one says the magic system in Dark Souls makes the game too easy, so that needs to be removed!

...actually, there probably are people who say that, depressingly enough.

Anyway. For me, I love that I can make my Pokemon feel super powerful for a moment, or just use Z-Move to skip over a specific trainer or specific Pokemon that I just don't want to deal with. It gives you options on how to handle your own game and lets you balance your own difficulty for it, which is what all the best games do. And let's not forget the core, most basic reason: they're just FUN.

8. Skippable cutscenes.

It's 2019. How do you not have this yet? Some people want to replay the game. Some people don't care about the story. Some people just want to get to a certain part. It doesn't matter. What matters is that every single cutscene in your game that doesn't require a vital decision -- and don't try to be dishonest, nothing but the opening cutscene has any actual decisions, they're all fake ones to make you feel like you're actually having an effect -- should be skippable. Straight out, out of the box. No ifs, ands, or buts.

9. No forced tutorial.

I've played Pokemon since Red and Blue. I know how Pokemon works. I know how to catch Pokemon. You're trying to teach a fish to swim.

I'm not against these tutorials. There are plenty of new people getting into Pokemon games every release, and they need it. No one doubts that. But there is absolutely no reason that these tutorials are MANDATORY. If the new people skip the tutorials, that's their own fault, not yours, and they can't complain about the bed they made for themselves. So please, for the love of god, don't torture the rest of us because some idiot might skip the tutorial and then get mad.

10. The Regional Pokedex is what matters.

Sun and Moon did this fantastically. Basically, this means that for things that require you to complete the Pokedex, like the Shiny Charm? Only the Pokemon that can be caught in the actual region count. You can still catch and register Pokemon that aren't in your Regional Pokedex, but you aren't required to in order to "complete" the Pokedex. That was something that was amazing in Sun/Moon and made the game NOT a painful, daunting slog to actually get things like the Shiny Charm in. Please do that again.

11. No HMs.

I sincerely doubt this'll be a problem, since none of the latest generation games had HMs, but this is still something that bears repeating. HMs are not fun. No one likes HMs. They're just irritating, pointless moves that get in your way and force you to either devote a slot or two in your party to a Pokemon you don't care for or trash the combat ability of the Pokemon you actually have. Whether it's Ride Pokemon or Secret Techniques or whatever... make it happen.

I, and I'm sure many other people, literally do not care if you just put a piece of plastic tape over a plot hole. If it means that we don't have to use HMs, every single one of us will ignore the giant gaping hole in space with nary a single comment.

12. Wild Pokemon that walk in the overworld.

This was, to me, the absolute best part of Pokemon Let's Go. Being able to see the Pokemon in the overworld not only makes it feel far more alive, but it makes actually hunting around a lot more enjoyable, too. This mechanic made caves FUN AGAIN. I literally HAD FUN in Mt. Moon and Rock Tunnel because of this. Those weren't fun when they were first released and every other cave after that has never been fun unless you packed hundreds of repels. Now? Caves are enjoyable because you can fight or dodge however you want, because you can SEE where things are.

13. Human Rivals.

Now I know this is a very controversial opinion, and if you don’t like that’s perfectly fine, but don’t try to insult me over it.

I hate rivals with nasty personalities that treat you like shit.

I want a rival that is actually tolerable and acts like a real person, not some entitled whiny manbaby bitch who's high on his own ego.

I will never understand how people seriously enjoyed people like Blue, who were just complete insufferable pricks. They often made me roll my eyes and ruined the experience because they were just so unrepentantly rude and assholeish, no matter what you did, and they never changed. Some people "love to hate" insufferable, intolerable assholes, I guess, and love to beat them down over and over. And if you do? Awesome! I’m glad to hear it.

But for me, they just detract from a game because they constantly have to go "Oh hey, you're that useless shitwad no one likes, hahaha let me treat you like piss on my shoe". Beating them gives you satisfaction, sure, but no matter what you do or how you win, all your interactions with them are negative. That satisfaction comes from "Hah hah, I beat up the dude who's rude to me", and that's just... to me, that doesn't stay satisfying. Eventually I just start getting angry that this shitheel won’t go away and leave me alone, because them being around isn’t fun anymore.

I don't necessarily want the rival to be your best friend or the nicest person in the world. I really liked people like Silver and Gladion, but that was because while they were assholes at the start, you saw them grow and change and become better and happier people as the game went on. Was Silver ever super chummy with you? Pft, hell no! Not even close! But that was okay, because you still saw him change into a dude who was actually tolerable and not stay as the prick with his head so far up his ass he was tasting breakfast. And that was awesome!

My favorite rivals, honestly? Are ones like Hau, who were your rivals but also your friends, so your interactions with them were positive and fun. My mood always skyrocketing whenever I talked to Hau because he was just so friendly and cute, and that’s what I found far, far more satisfying than some prick who’d come around to call me a worthless shithead.

Pokemon Rivals aren't like the big bad in games like Final Fantasy. You're stuck with them, you can't get away from them, and you're not solving some big super evil by getting rid of them and making yourself feel satisfied. You’re just having this asshole who’s being rude to you for literally no reason stalk you and refuse to let you get away.

That’s insanely creepy and nasty. You're just being BULLIED with rivals like that, and I genuinely cannot understand why people seem to love being bullied in their own game by an insufferable prick who's so drunk on their own ego they think they're Arceus' gift to the world. The satisfaction of beating them feels outweighed by the negative feelings you have of them constantly berating and putting you down.

Maybe it's just because I'm from a home life where I was constantly bullied and ridiculed by all of my cousins, but I just can't find that sort of thing enjoyable. It's part of why I don't replay the Kanto games anywhere near as much as I replay the other ones, despite Kanto being my home region. (I honestly thought PLG was better than the original because Blue wasn’t there to be an insufferable, entitled manbaby egotist)

If it were up to me, honestly, I'd let you pick your rival like you could pick your gender. One rival's the Hau-type, one rival's the Blue-type, and the one you don't pick doesn't show up in game. That way, everyone could have what they want. Barring that, I really, really don't want to see another rival that's completely inhuman because all they are is an entitled prick there to bully you. I don't care if it's like Silver or Gladion, where they're rude at first but become genuinely likeable later, or if it's like Hau where they're always nice. Just... give me an actual rival, not some guy's fragile and inflated ego wrapped in a human suit.

I genuinely have no idea how so many people think having a person who doesn’t treat you like you’re a piece of shit unworthy of life is so bad it can be considered a plague and something that needs rectifying.

14. Side games! But make them optional.

Give us more side stuff to do! Pokemon Contests, Pokeathelon, the Festival Plaza... The Battle Tower. These were all fun things to do. When they were OPTIONAL. I think we need stuff like the casino and Voltorb Flip, or an area like the Festival Plaza we can design, because those are actually fun things to do. But I also think they need to be completely skippable for people who don't want them. Forcing people into doing side-games is a sure-fire way to get that side-game hated, but making it available gives us so much more we can do. It'd sure make the post game more fun.

15. Character Customization.

Hair, eyes, skin. These should all be default customization options, either able to change very early on or able to pick at the start. Alola was pretty good at this. Do it again.

16. CLOTHES.

Clothes, clothes, clothes. For the love of god, give us clothes again. Not your shitty Pokemon Let's Go no-effort recolors your artist did while on his way home from work. Not the "two shirt models, two skirt models, and a pants model with recolors" thing you did Alola. Actual clothing. Dresses, different skirts, different pants. What about that big black coat-dress I got from Kalos? Or the boots? The hose? We know you can make these designs. Actually make them.

17. Pokeball Conversion.

Let us put caught Pokemon in a Pokeball different from what we caught in it. If we want to put our starter in a Luxury Ball, just let us spend one Luxury Ball and bam, do it! Overwrite the ball it's in now. It shouldn't really be that hard since you can outright edit IVs.

18. Secret Bases or the Underground!

Give us Secret Bases back! They were amazing and fun, and being able to make your own base -- especially a base your friend could download so they could fight you on your own time! Being able to buy and decorate, or place it randomly, was also amazing. Failing Secret Bases, give us back the Underground from Sinnoh where we could dig and find items and... well, yeah, make a base down there too.

Just give us some way to make our mark on the game world. Even better if we can set a fly-point there and put our own heal station in. That way, if there's a place we want to grind, well. We can just grind there, or if we needed a break because our Pokemon were getting battered. You don't have the make the furniture easy to get, but give us some way to make our own little spot we can get cozy in, rather than the house we'll never revisit because there's no reason to ever go back there.

19. A final area where the game doesn't cheat.

I breed Pokemon competitively. I breed until a Pokemon has the extact right IVs, the exact right nature, the exact right ability. I breed Egg Moves and everything else that would cover their types. And still, things like the Battle Tree are just an unfun, messy slogy for me. The main issue I have with it is that so many times, it seems like the game outright cheats. I can't tell you how many different teams I went in, only to find that a trainer early on had hard counters for every single member of my team. Once is circumstance, twice is happenstance, but three times is a pattern... and I had no less than ten. Different Pokemon, different team comps, different days, and still, I very regularly got hard-countered.

I don't care that these options are hard. By all means, keep them hard! They're meant to be. But stop cheating and making the AI pick out a hard-counter team to yours just because you're "doing too well". I've seen it in so many post-game Pokemons, and it really needs to stop.

Have You Seen These Pokémon? Have You SEEN Them? - It’s Camp!

There was a bit of Pokémon Sword and Shield news in the Nintendo Direct today. Also Sans is in Super Smash Bros. now, but that's another story.

First, here’s the new trailer.  It's not exactly as shown in the Direct, but it's the same stuff.

Starting with the new Pokémon, we have Cramorant. It's a crane or somethng? Well, some kind of sea bird, judging from the Water/Flying typing. Its Ability, Gulp Missile allows it to catch fish when using Surf or Dive. It's not just a cosmetic effect, either, as it will spit that fish at the next Pokémon that damages it. Rumor has it that sometimes it comes up with a Pikachu instead! Maybe that does Electric damage? It's pretty nutty, but I don't really see myself using it. The other Pokémon introduced today, Polteageist, expands the collection of possessed houshold items. It's a little tea pot, short and stout. It's pure Ghost type, and sometimes it's head pops out of its spout. There's not much else to say about this Pokémon, but I kinda dig it. It'll probably show up a bit late in the game for me to want to put it on my team, but I think I'll probably wish I did. Confirming and expanding upon a previous leak, Pokémon Camp is basically the new Pokémon Refresh (which was the new Pokémon-Amie). Just pitch a tent anywhere to set up camp and watch your Pokémon roam around and interact with each other. Yep. Just like in the anime, your entire team comes out to play, and you can interact with them using various toys. I can't wait to annoy my Gardevoir with the cat feather. But that's not all! Pokémon Camp is also the new Secret Base! Granted, it's not quite as secret, but you can visit other player's Camps in the field. That's twelve Pokémon playing around screen at once. I wonder what happens if two or more Camps are set up in close proximity? Alcremie can appear in multiple different flavors. I noticed what I presume to be a mint Alcremie in the Direct, but I was left wondering whether or not that was a shiny until I saw the dedicated trailer. Considering they only show the two, it could very well just be the shiny version, but I think they'd've said if that was the case. Curry is the new PokéBlock, that you and three other players can team up to make it in Camp. There appear to be all sorts of ingredients, not just Berries, that you dump in a pot and cook in a series of minigames. First you fan the flames, then you stir the pot, then I guess they ran out of ideas and just had you throw in hearts (because you cook it with love. Get it? You put your "heart" into it). One explosion later, and it's meal time! Judging by how starting the curry gets the entire camp's attention, I assume its fed to all of the Pokémon at once, but the actual "eating" sequence only shows one Pokémon. Which is to say, you eating in front of the Pokémon in split-screen, as if the wee beastie was checking to see if you enjoyed it. Although considering it's curry, that's probably a precaution. I still think curry is an odd choice, but I guess it's a staple camp food in Japan. I know I've seen it a few times in anime, and I think the first time I saw it in a camping context was an episode of Zatch Bell. Cooking it was a hectic sequence, with campers threatening violence if the curry was too spicy and Zatch throwing whatever he could find into the pot regardless of whehter or not it was actually edible.In fact, curry pots filled with bizarre and exotic (and questionable) ingredients seemed to be a common gag, though I'm not sure if that joke's about curry per se or the skills of the chef. So at camp you can "curry favor" with your Pokémon. There. I finally said it. We knew trainer customization is back since that guy got disqualified from the t-shirt contest, but it appears to have been expanded upon. Jackets and gloves are now separate from shirts, and it looks like dresses are back, too. Hair customization has been improved, as well, as you now get to preview the options before selecting them rather than spending thousands of PokéBucks to see what they looked like in Sun and Moon. And you get to choose your eyebrows. Neat. Oh, yeah. One thing I noticed and don't like is that it looks like you have to go to the store to change your clothes. That wasn't expressly specified, but that was the impression I got and I hope that isn't the case. I really preferred being able to change my clothes in the Pokémon Center in X and Y (and the Photo Club in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon) since you could fly directly there and not have to hunt them down like the stores. Granted, I'd prefer to just be able to change my clothes anywhere like in tons of other games, but maybe I'm just freaky like that. The Direct had not mentioned League Cards. They are basically trading cards you get from other trainers, notably other players. As such, they are customizable, with a selection of frames, backgrounds, effects, expressions, and poses. They may not be as elaborate as the Promo Videos in X and Y, but it looks like they're used in match-up screens for multiplayer battles. Which means everyone will think you're as bland as Hell if you ignore it. I mean, I've seen players in Festival Plaza wearing the default gear and wondered if they were new or just could be bothered to put, like, five minutes into their appearance. It's not like you have to buy items in these games, so at least, like, change your shirt or something? I know I shouldn't judge, and if you like looking like every starting player or don't care if you do then more power to you, but I just don't understand how someone can be presented with any number of character customizations and NOT spend an embarassing amount of time agonizing over every option. Then again, all my IRL clothes are arranged in an effectively-random queue so I cycle through them and not have to actually think about what I'm wearing, so what do I know?

Wow, I started playing Stardew Valley again after ages and I totally forgot all the controls lol

I tend to be badly suited to farming games, i always just burn myself out with obsessive playing for like a week straight and then never touch it for months. I guess its cos routines really bug me?? the more mandatory tedious stuff it has and the less options to choose what you do each day, and the less endearing character stuff to make it all worth it. its why rune factory in particular captured my heart and i could never get sick of it! Stardew DEFINATELY fails in a lot of respects when it comes to coveinence and game balancing. Oh and seriously it sucks to not even be able to see ANY cool character scenes with anyone until youve grinded anywhere between 3 and 5 levels worth of hearts, like how do i even know whether i wanna invest 10 hours of gameplay into someone if i have to do it before i even learn their basic personality traits?? And the fact the fishing minigame is quite literally broken and ive never seen anyone even catch a single damn fish in all the lets plays ive watched and just ARRRGH but its still a REALLY GOOD GAME, its just one where the few minor flaws stand out to me more cos i’m already extra critical on the genre. and honestly these are flaws that almost EVERYONE has in this genre, I’ve just been spoiled by the perfect holy rune factory standing above them all like a beacon of perfect playtesting. (SERIOUSLY MAN, THE WAY THEM BATTLE STATS FUEL THE FARM STATS AND VICE VERSA, MMMMYEAH ANTI FRUSTRATION FEATURES, ACTUAL CHOICE OF PLAYSTYLES THATRE ALL EQUALLY VALID DEAR GOD I LOVE IT)

But anyway I’m having a pretty fun time picking up my farm again after so long and hopefully i can pace myself better this time so I might actually finish the damn thing

BUT

ALSO

I’m remembering how sad I am that Krobus doesnt even have the same amount of minimal friendship scenes as everyone else :( Makes me wonder why they even teased us with giving him a friendship stat if you get literally nothing from filling it?? Seriously, as far as I know the ONLY scene you get is if you max out both him and the unnamed dwarf merchant, and even then its not really anything to do with your friendship with them, you just get to see them meet and be assholes to each other and establish that dwarves and shadows have some sort of ancient war against each other or something. I WANNA LEARN MORE ABOUT YOU TWO AS INDIVIDUALS I WANNA BE ABLE TO ACTUALLY MEDIATE THE CONFLICT aaaaa theyre just such cute monster people why cant i hug em