Blog Timeline 2023

Remember when I said that I hated 2022? Well, you can probably imagine how this post starts. I hated 2023. And I'll just say it now since I can immediately guarantee a prediction, if I live long enough to say it, but, I hated 2024. And it is only a day before it starts. But it's gonna happen. I'm still surprised a bomb hasn't blown up my area yet, and I don't want one. Nobody does. We don't want to be civilian casualties given the number of conflicts that either started or escalated in 2023. But people in power are nerds who somehow have everything while civilians get nothing. At least I keep my current work position, even if I'm working myself to death this time around, but it felt like I went nowhere. Nobody wants to hire anymore, and it seems that bigwigs in our public and government sectors want it that way. Keep us dumb and desperate. Somebody is going to burst and actually harm them.

Blog: This is the same as before. I only really do something after I finish a game. Or making a post like this. There's not much to write about!

Doomwiki: Arguably what I spent a lot of time on. Yes, even when all secret descriptions are already done whenever a new custom level pack has a page added I'm already on it. Frankly I could care less, I'm just providing a template for when someone decides to expand on it. That's how I see the Doomwiki and I like it that way. I may get more involved with getting descriptions for other custom content in the future though.

Music: More or less the same as last time. There's plenty of great stuff that I remember listening when I flummoxed around on Pandora during college days that I added to my library, and as for new stuff? Got plenty of awesomesauce. Periphery V, Sevendust's Truth Killer, Metallica's 72 Seasons, In Flames' Foregone, Staind's Confessions of the Fallen (I actually saw a concert, my first one!), Unprocessed's ...And Everything in Between, Veil of Maya's [M]other, Taproot's SC\SSRS, Tesseract's War of Being, all are amazing. But my personal favorite this year is Invent Animate's Heavener. This is how you make metalcore utterly beautiful, and it was one of the first releases of the year too. But it's outright unforgettable. We'll see a lot of good tracks from other metal artists soon.

What I've been watching: Nothing much aside from movie reruns and all that. Lame. Okay, I did finish Delicious Party PreCure, but I of course wait until the next season is finished (of course avoiding spoilers) before I start with the next one. DelPa is actually a good season by the way, though I wish the food theme wasn't used all that much. I'll start watching more immediately next year, but the good news is I have at least two seasons to see. Well, that's it.

ROM Hacks: Ten were done this year. That's great. First was Red Fire, meant to be a kaizo Fire Red but not as famous as Emerald Kaizo, then Ephemerald, spicing up a regular Emerald game with variants, then Kalos Crystal, which brings Gen-5 and Gen-6 to a Gen-2 engine. Next was Voda Red, an extreme mess that I hated, then Green Chapter, finally finishing the non-Red manga chapters. Next were two broken hacks, Hyetology and Sky Twilight, the latter is better until the end. Touhoumon Cirno followed, which was playing through Hoenn but with Touhou characters, cute. Next were Kanlara Ultimate and Azure Horizons, both stellar achievements and I used Allen's guides and even helped with new differences for the latter one. I also heavily updated my Pokemon Nameless guides (which I dissected into multiple ones), for the new updates, and damn does that storyline keep getting more interesting. Just glad to be doing what I can. My current playthrough in a ROM hack right now is Polka Aqua 2, and I am creating a guide for it, but it's on a hiatus since I wanted to focus on this next thing more...

RPGs: Got 13 done this year. Overall, this year was more productive in my gaming exploits, and there are moments when I do this while in school which is risky. Anyways, I finished up four Might & Magic chapters, the four Digimon World games (which took up all my summer), Makai Kingdom (quite fun like most other Nippon Ichi games), Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (long but worth it, loads of fun aside from the STUPID JUDGE SYSTEM!), and Tales of Destiny 2 (the real deal, had to go on Youtube for translating the dialogue, shame this was never released outside Japan!). Right now, I'm on the Arc the Lad franchise, having finished the second game which was quite long but already going quite well into the third one. Some games are on my bucket list, the remaining Arc the Lad games, Tales of Symphonia, and I'm hoping to do some games with Digital Devil Saga/Shin Megami Tensei/Persona or some crap like that. Got a lot to go through.

Platformers: Oddly only three, but the only reason I reviewed them is because I'm also rummaging through a 700-in-1 set that I felt the need to. The platformers I found were Spelunker (not related to Spelunky), Nuts & Milk, and Ninja Jajamaru-Kun, all arcade games of some kind. Don't think doing platformer games is going to be a trend in the future.

Overall, 2023 may be a year I hate because of events, but at least I was much more productive with my gaming, as risky as it's getting. I want to survive through these things and I'm gonna. I promise.

A look back at: Arc the Lad II

It's over, thank GOD it's over. Am I mad? Yes. Is this a bad game? NO. But I'm quite mad it took so darn long. Maybe it's cause I have annoying work schedules that make me not play this game for some weeks in time, but that's just how it ends up going. Arc the Lad II, you're expected to siphon around 60+ hours with it, which is six times the length of the previous game. At least I came in expecting that, and expecting the gameplay to be largely similar to the first, with more QoL things like finally having actual equipment, elements to deal with, and actually making the sidequests seem like they are worth a lot.

And that's just the crux of it. You know how sequels in RPG franchises are really fledged out by the SECOND game? Arc the Lad II is just like Breath of Fire II, Lufia II, maybe even Paper Mario: TTYD...okay you can see where I'm going here. Things improve. Almost every character you play as has some sort of tragic moment going on, we've already seen this with the first game's characters like Arc and Iga. All of those guys return (though Chongara is an NPC and Kukuru is only a guest character for real specific moments), and things are slightly more fledged out. We get to finally see how Tosh's past occurs, for instance, and Arc, despite his brand name as a wanted guy, still being a hero but also wanted. As for our new characters, many tragic moments play out. Shante loses her brother, Lieza her village and grandfather, Sania her ENTIRE KINGDOM, Gruga having to deal with adopting a daughter and realizing the main father is a douche monster, and Shu watching the resistance movements to those dictators in Romalia fall. And Elc gets it worst, considering his fire abilities, he would have been converted to a terrible monster, he escapes, tries to find his girlfriend, and she seems fine only to be turned into a bomb. It don't stop there when you realize the villains are manipulative bastards, not just for what they do to ACTUAL CHILDREN, but creating doppelgangers, actively trying to enslave or even brainwashingly sacrifice populations, they do everything. They're already monsters, and they feed off of the misery that humanity has.

And amazingly, these villains actually SUCCEED. Granted, the main villains all die when you beat the game, but like the second-to-last bad guy, the Romalian king? He ends up actually destroying the world, even if it costs him his life. The Dark One has to be sealed again, with Arc having to do it alongside the already-swallowed Kukuru, but then we are left with ten surviving heroes who really only felt like they just survived the end of the world, instead of prevented it. Yeesh.

But enough story stuff. Arguably it and the music are highlights, we don't need that happily ever after stuff all the time, the music by comparison is just amazing and I'm so glad they brought back previous tracks. The main deal with the game's original fast-paced battle system has slowed down somewhat. You can kill a lot of enemies with one spell, but you'll watch as each one has a death animation, going one by one, and those gold coins spill out and the thing takes really long to go by. That's not even getting to the idea that spell animations take longer than they used to. Even simple status buff spells! My gosh, the enemies with these will stand on their spot, use the spell, and you just have to wait, since in every battle, all enemies have the same speed when they are the same class of monster. I do like how you can use Lieza to catch these Poke...I mean monsters though. Oh, and check out those levels, the cap in the previous game was 60, but now you can go up higher, much higher than Level 100, and I think the boss and super enemies go up to 128 or something. The level jumps are a problem and entail grinding (or using a special machine to siphon experience from Diekbeck, the actual faster method honestly). Before getting the Silver Noah, the game makes you use multiple characters in side stories, this is arguably the best thing about the game's plot overall, though after everyone is congregated into one large party, many of the other plot stuff they do with certain characters also is quite fun.

Navigation-wise, since you can now do typical RPG navigation, things are more open, but there were moments where I was pulling my hair. Seriously, how would I know that to get to Heap Cave-In I had to go UNDER THE BRIDGE? I just couldn't figure that out. When the Silver Noah crashed into the final dungeon I though there was no way out of the ship, which was so strange until I had to go out the cockpit window. Come on. And the jobs can have time frames to them, which means that another hunter can take your job and it's permanently gone. I ended up missing the "Super job" as some call it cause I accidentally sold a key item (yes you can sell those, yes your inventory is quite limited which gives you incentive to free lots of space but you may end up losing a key item doing what I just did). I also somehow got the secret character Choko not once, but TWICE, even though I never got her in the first game, I got her in Forbidden Ruins in this game, went through the game after her leaving the ruins, somehow she was in my party during the last few moments, and I "recruited" her again. Weird. The dungeons do require a lot of time to beat them, and there were many, many moments where I just felt the game just did not want me to progress to beat it.

It certainly is an improved sequel, but the many times the game annoyed me prevented me from truly loving it. It lasted a LONG time and it was exhausting.