Patreon Letter: 1st August 2020 (Patreon)

Hey folks,

Jackson here with a Patreon Letter. First up, some housekeeping: the Letters are a bit weird lately. Em's currently in a lot of pain and waiting for dental surgery that they should be getting this week, so they'll do their letter when they're feeling better. I, on the other hand, am just late for the normal reason of not having much to talk about? So this is going to be kind of scattered. I've been fairly productive last month, but the two big projects I've been working through are not quite finished yet. One of them I'm not talking about til it is, the other I've tweeted a little about and may as well talk about my Thoughts In Progress.

I've been watching Express Sentai ToQGer. It is my first Toku show, outside of I suppose Power Rangers itself, in the ancient past. I've been mostly enjoying my time with it, and will have more takes when it's actually finished, but for now I'll say that I'm mostly really enjoying myself. It's nice watching one of these shows that is actually for children, because while it is thematically similar to a bunch of shows I've seen and games i've played, it leans heavy on mostly being a show about physical comedy. Which I assume is an observation as precise as "water is wet," but it's my first Sentai, I didn't actually know what to expect!

I feel like I get so bogged down in the thematic weeds of the stories I spend most of my time engaging with that it's nice to watch something which resists it. Hilariously, it's premise is basically exactly the same as Kingdom Hearts, the protagonists fighting on the side of light against the shadows who try to create darkness from the hearts of people and swallow towns (worlds) into the darkness. I promise you I didn't know about this in advance it is just a coincidence. 

Anyway it's not exactly thematically... better than KH, at least not yet, there's a lot of weirdness about the premise that has thus far gone unremarked upon and it's hard to tell what's setup for future plotlines and what is just there. But unlike KH, which screams its contradictions to the camera while the characters stand still and barely emote for 20 minute cutscenes, ToQGer is a children's show and makes sure every 22 minutes has some gags, a slight emotional arc, and a fight. What I'm saying is I'd be more forgiving of Nomura's tendency for weird cop bullshit if it was delivered by a plot where Riku and Sora swapped bodies and so wore headbands with crude drawings of their real selves attached.

What have we learned from this? We've learned that video games are too long and need to stop taking themselves too seriously. I may have hitched my wagon to Square Enix but good god there's cutscenes in FF7r that are longer than episodes of this show where people stand around talking slowly. 

Anyway, speaking of this exact thing and hoisting myself slowly, I started replaying KH on hard already. I feel weirdly, extremely guilty about this, even though I know there's no reason to. I'm an adult, I can do what I want in my free time and if that is do all the secret bosses on Critical Mode then fuck you, you're not my dad. But at the same time, that mental illness do be hitting tho, and so the very idea of simply playing a game in a manner that is purely for me and with no content justification, is legitimately difficult for me to let myself do. Which is partially why I pulled the trigger and started it, because every time I'd skype to Em about it I'd talk about how I wanted to do it but I can't yet, I have to wait, etc etc. So not only was I not doing it, I wasn't really doing anything else, and was just complaining.

The quest to be normal about engaging with media continues. I'm pretty worn down at this stage of the pandemic, I've barely been outside since March, but I can't complain as this is a boat we are literally all in together. And those that aren't are either working way worse jobs than I and deserve all the solidarity in the world, or they're selfish and awful and deserve eternal tourment. Like many of us, faced with something so massive, world-shifting and ultimately uncontrollable - safety is something that can only come when states take the right actions, and ours are doing the opposite - I have started to hyper obsess about the few things in my life I can control. And sometimes that thing is whether you do a second action RPG playthrough.

So while it has taken great effort against my own brain, I have mostly enjoyed just continuing to play the games I like, but focusing on the combat and never really having to think about the story once. It's fun, it's relaxing, it's low stakes, it's I guess what playing games in your spare time is meant to be like. Not much more to report from that front other than I played Chain of Memories the whole way through for the first time and uh, yeah that game sucks. I am famously anti-deck battlers but there have to be better ones than this.

The Unknown fight in KH1 specifically though: that was some excellent stuff on Proud. I've finally unlocked the part of my brain where I think KH1 has good controls, combat and even platforming. I have become the master of the shorthop. Hopefully next month I'll have tackled 2FM Critical, the big one, the reason why I'm here. Legitimately vibrating with excitement.

Anyway thank you for reading, sorry about the more introspective and unfocused letter, but it's the truth of what's going on with me these days. Hopefully later this month I'll finish ToQGer and bring a more complete review of that. The other long term project will take a little longer, but it'll lead to a great post when it's done. 

Hope you're all holding up okay, stay safe, and see you all later this month.

-Jackson