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SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  1yr ago (text post)   2177 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What are people up to that's fun? Myself, I've been playing the recent release of Trails From Zero. It's a game where I already played a fan translation, but the fan translation was pretty rough so it's fun to see what a professional localization effort looks like. The Trails games in general are very long "I hope you like text" games, so this one will take me a bit, but I'm really enjoying it.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for or if this is "fun" in the traditional sense, but I find it fun - I've been focusing on completing a piece of music that's been in the works on and off since March 2021, adding detail to it and fleshing it out. It's quite common for me to have very long track development times (ranging from three months to over a year) and very large projects (over a hundred instrument tracks, at times).

I've also been drafting, planning and writing out some hard sci-fi stories, but these haven't gotten too far because making the stories scientifically plausible and logically sound is not easy. I've been digging into AI, engineering, evolution, biochemistry, astrophysics, planetary science and all sorts of other fields in order to inform what I come up with, which is quite a big task for a layman like me. Trying to write attractive sounding prose is also very difficult (and fairly annoying). Then there's trying to develop the characters - stories have such a huge amount of facets that you really need to perfect if you want something well-rounded.

Other than that, not much. I don't play games myself much (though I used to watch LPs quite a bit), nor do I watch films or shows much anymore unless something sufficiently to my taste comes out or someone else in the room is already watching, so hobbies are usually nearly the entirety of what I do for fun.

I've been doing a no-health-upgrades challenge run of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice the past week. I've made it up to Genichiro (about 40% of the game) after about 8 hours, 3 of which were just stuck on the Blazing Bull. The only other Fromsoft game I played was Bloodborne, which I absolutely loved, and I beat both Bloodborne and Sekiro in their hardest difficulties (or rather, the highest NG+, which are 6 & 7 for them respectively), but I've yet to do a challenge run of this sort, and it's definitely quite something. The enemies may be tougher in NG+, but at least the longer health bar provides decent room for error in fights, whereas on a fresh playthrough with base HP, there's many more one-shot deaths. And having to find/farm upgrades along the way means less access to tactics for cheesing bosses. Only solution is just to get good and consistent enough at the basic deflection gameplay to get through every encounter. It's difficult but exactly the kind of thrill I was looking for when I decided to try this challenge.

Playing dragon’s dogma. It’s a great game if you can get past the janky beginning. Finally got to Bitterblack Isle.

Playing through my first career in the Roguetech mod for Battle tech. It's quite a bit harder than the vanilla game or other mod packs, and supposedly does a good job of emulating the tabletop game.

I finally looped back to Cyberpunk after its bug-filled launch. It's pretty good! There are plenty of flaws, but it's also quite fun, quite beautiful, and has lots of fun options for how to build your character.

Totally agree. Cyberpunk isn't a perfect game by any means, but it has a lot going for it even despite its flaws. Which is not to excuse the buggy state they launched the game in, of course. But now that those issues seem to have been worked out, it's a much different game.

I've been slowly plugging away at Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I think the end is in sight. I'm on the last chapter. Just having fun doing side quests at the moment. Wrapping up a bunch of side stories with respect to the various colonies.

I'm finding XC3 rather weak in a lot of areas. But one thing it's doing well is having the side quests related to a specific colony tell a cohesive long term story about how that location is coping with the changes you are causing in the world. That said, while I enjoy the narrative arcs of the side quest, their actual construction seems the worst of any XC to date.

That said, I'm finding the combat much more poorly balanced that previous entries in the series. And with far less of a feeling of agency controlling 1 party member out of 6 versus 1 out of 3 in previous games. Enemies, especially enemies you enormously out level, are way to damage spongy. The level caps on the job system severely impact my enjoyment exploring it.

I was watching one review of the game, and they said something I really agreed with. Probably the best part of XC3 is it's restraint. XC2 had some serious weeb cringe, and XC3 corrects for that extremely well.

I'm excited to see the ending, but I'm just not feeling myself and pulled through the game as I did in XC1 or XC2. Instead of being excited to do things in XC3, I find myself settling for the lowest hanging fruit. Ah well.

Yeah, to be honest I found XBC3 to be a real letdown. It wasn't bad, I would say it was a solid 7/10 or 8/10 game. But XBC2 is in my top 5 JRPGs of all time. And XBC1 (while I didn't dig it as much) was still way up there as a top tier game. This game I didn't think lived up to either of its predecessors.

In hindsight I think maybe I just got too hyped up? I was more hyped for XBC3 than for anything else in recent memory. When it came out I did little else in my free time except play. So maybe that just put my expectations too high. I do think that the game has problems even if I hadn't been hyped up, but I may not have felt as let down by the game if I wasn't hyped.

I've played Trails in the Sky 1 and 2, and about a third of 3 before getting bored of it, since it's very different from the first two. I haven't played the other series in the franchise, since I was originally planning to play them all in order, but at this point I don't think I'm going to go back and finish trails in the sky 3. If I do skip ahead, where do you recommend as a new entry point?

I would probably skip to Zero. You will miss some context if you skip Sky 3, because some of the plot in Zero is a pretty direct follow-up to what characters were up to in that game. But you can probably infer what you missed, and be ok. Zero is actually a pretty self contained game overall (unlike Sky FC with its giant cliffhanger), but the characters are a lot of fun and it's needed to set up Azure (which is probably the best game in the series).

If you want, you could also skip to Cold Steel. That's what I did when I first played, since we didn't even have fan translations of the Crossbell games (or Sky 3) at the time. You will have some times (in CS2-4 especially) where the game will reunite you with some of the Crossbell characters and it won't mean much, since you didn't play through those games. But the overall story doesn't rely on playing the Crossbell games to be able to follow what's going on.

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