Lith's Diary - December (Patreon)

Dear Diary,
Happy holidays! I hope you had fun exchanging gifts, celebrating with friends, whatever you got up to this month. It's the middle of winter here and I believe we're passing the longest nights right around now, so it's important to take some time to be cheerful and celebrate all the good things in our lives. Friends, safety, family, health, they're all so precious, and we can so easily take them for granted until we lose one of them. Stay warm, and stay grateful for all the good in your life, rather than worrying about the bad.

Hmmm. This month I've been really busy again. Or maybe it's more that I'm letting my work stress me out a bit much again. I do feel like I'm getting a lot done, and I've still been taking some time to relax, but my pile of things I should be doing or want to do has been growing again, and that's frustrating. I don't know if I need to shift my priorities or fix my habits a little, but hopefully I'll be able to get a better handle on it soon.

Christmas here was pretty quiet. Just a small celebration, and I tried making a silly baked thing. It's supposed to be like s'mores, where you melt chocolate in a pan or on a plate and bake it with a layer of marshmallows on top. It makes a "s'mores dip" you can dip into with graham crackers, and... it was pretty tasty! But it was incredibly rich, so you definitely need a few people to share it with I think, and it was hard to really get that "crisp" you get to marshmallows when you actually roast them. And the stuff hardens and gets pretty gross as soon as it cools, so you have to finish it all off pretty quickly. I heard you can warm up the leftovers and they're half-decent, but when the last of it turned into concrete I decided I was done with it. Now I have a lot of leftover marshmallows though. Guess I get to make rice crispy treats sometime!

Oh, and I've been picking up a lot of new games, so I'll probably be rambling about lots of new titles soon, haha. I'm awful about game sales and keep buying more when the price gets too tempting. I think I jumped into a new homage to Final Fantasy Tactics right around when I wrote you last, actually. It's called Fell Seal, and it's absolutely, intensely obvious in being "a new FFT," and honestly it does a pretty good job on that. I put something like thirty hours into it and I was enjoying it in... a strange way? It has a huge, elaborate web of classes you can unlock, with lots of stuff you discover by learning new abilities, in such a way it's hard to predict but you always know where to explore next to try and pick out a new piece of the puzzle. I was actually buying a new ability for almost every character after every battle! That was an odd sensation. It was cool, but almost felt like it was becoming too much maintenance and poking around between each fight? Even if I really like fiddling around with classes and abilities. I'm still waiting to give my final verdict on the classes and such, but it's definitely interesting.

The combat is pretty solid and familiar but with some new design elements, and I like most of their choices. I did have a few frustrations with the game, though, and when I ran into one big one, maybe it's just that I was already a little too stressed at the time, but I decided it was time to drop the game for now. The game does feel harder than FFT in some ways, and I think a lot of that has to do with it feeling more like the NPCs get all the same tools you do... and some of those tools are really cool and overpowered. So I'd be excited to try out all my cool new abilities, or I'd be leveling something boring trying to get to the good stuff, and suddenly the NPCs would unload all these crazy things on me that started making me pretty sore. One fight, they gave me an ally NPC that could teleport enemies around, and a lot of characters instantly die in water because they don't have the swim ability. I thought that felt a little overpowered, but it was obviously a fight balanced with this in mind against what would otherwise be overwhelming enemy forces.

But when an enemy showed up in a random encounter that casually teleported my characters into the water to kill them in the second round of the fight? I decided I'd had enough for now. I think this is similar to my problem with Overwatch, actually: flashy, ridiculous abilities look really cool and appealing to use, and it's exciting to use them, but it's very not-exciting to have them used on you. And that aggravation can be worse than the excitement you feel using the abilities yourself. So when your enemies have the same overpowered tools, it becomes a race to who can be the most overpowered first, and it starts warping things in weird ways to feel unfun. In PvP, mirror matches are expected, so while it's frustrating it at least feels reasonable, but when I'm playing a single player game and I'm expected to win dozens of battles in a row, I expect to feel like a hero with some exceptional abilities to get me there. Tactics is a bit part of that, of course, I play to outmaneuver the enemy, but having a few really powerful options at my disposal to get me out of tight spots can be great. Give them to every set of enemies, though, and it quicky feels less like I'm a hero and more like I'm just begging for punishment.

The game does have a ton of difficulty settings, so maybe I'll tweak those later and try again, but I don't think they'll remove stuff like "cheap, reusable ability to instakill half your party one by one." I really want to like the game, but I don't know. And I have a million other games just begging to be played right now...

And I've gone and used so much space ranting about this one! Um! Let me try and summarize some other thoughts real quick, I don't want to go on forever. I'm a good ways into God of War and actually enjoying it more than I expected. It's not too fast paced, the combat is challenging and sometimes frustrating but not too much for me, and the fiddly rpg bits don't seem like as much of a bother as they'd looked watching someone else play. I expected it to be a great story with some problems in the gameplay, but so far the problems have been lesser and I've found new nice touches I hadn't expected, so it's turned into a better game than I expected multiple ways! I'm pretty sure I'll be finishing it, so I'll try to touch on it again next month.

I tried Raft after I'd played it a long time ago and liked it. There's a ton more to it, and I wanted to enjoy it, but I found it was rapidly turning into an anxiety simulator more than anything else. You keep having to juggle a million different demands on your attention and resources while trying to build things up and get more stuff to use to build, and when I found out that islands can just casually turn your raft different directions and allow you absolutely no way to turn it again on your own, AND that I literally can't pause the game, I decided to put it down. Again, maybe someday, but I don't need that stress right now!

I've also watched some stuff! Tokyo Ghoul got a lot worse at the end of the first season, and I kinda dropped it three or four episodes into the second season. It lost a lot of its charm and flair, the characters got less interesting, and the animation quality took a big dive. Maybe another team took over? I said last time I hoped it'd have a big twist or something, and I guess it did, but really not of the type it needed. Dr. Stone has been a lot of fun, I forget if I mentioned it? Basically nerding out over rebuilding civilized technology from stone age resources. It's pretty silly, but also fascinating, educational, and a lot of fun.

I've never gotten into Gundam, but I finally gave Steel-Blooded Orphans a try. Apparently it's kind of a spin-off, alternate universe thing, I don't really know the details, but it was a pretty good show. Very intense, visceral, and emotionally involved, exploring the mentality of "we have no choice but to keep going forward" as both a blessing and a curse. The whole thing is sort of a violent tragedy with a lot of highs and lows and complicated relationships and politics woven in, but I actually found myself following things pretty well and enjoying a lot of it even though I was only half-paying attention. I liked to put it on while I was cooking. Conversely, I tried another Gundam show after and it's just been so much more emotionally shallow, heavy on complicated politics I don't really care about, and kinda disappointing in general. They like to highlight the tragedy of war on a personal scale with these shocking moments of death in high definition animation, but it still doesn't give the same emotional weight as Orphans did. So I feel like main line Gundam still isn't for me, but I did find a pretty nice one off to one side of it.

Alright. I've gone on too long again! For now, I just want to say that I hope you've had a good decade! I know it's been a good one for me. I was pretty lonely at the start, but over the last ten years I've met so many kind people like you! I have loads of friends and we've gone on all these strange adventures, and finally found some... some answers, to some questions I've been struggling with a really long time. We're not done just yet, but I think we can all be proud of all the things we've accomplished in this decade. I know I'm proud, and I'm grateful that you've been here with me. It wouldn't have been possible without you.

So as you ring in the new year, remember to stay warm, and that I count you among the good things in my life that'll put a smile on my face, no matter how hard things may get in the future. Keep looking up, keep hoping, and we'll make the coming decade even better than the last, together!

Happy New Year!
-Lith