Listen to the Rain

...unless I'm the one doing it to other people in the critically-acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, with an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Stormblood expansion up to level 70 for free with no restrictions on playtime:



That's the gil cap--you are not allowed to carry any more gil on your person than 999,999,999. Fortunately, I have several retainers that I can put my excess gil on, so after I took this picture I gave each of them 100,000,000 gil and now I can work on trying to get all of them up to 999,999,999 gil!

That's not going to happen. It took me years to get to gil cap, I'm never going to hit max gil for everyone.

Now if only real life also required no ongoing costs for food and shelter, no need to sleep, and I could maintain 100% focus on the task at all times, so I could replicate my feat in real life.

I kind of exist adjacent to most fandom endeavors. Despite my long presence on Dreamwidth and Livejournal before it, I've never really participated in any fandom communities. I have a fanfiction.net account and have used it to read maybe half a dozen stories ever, and I have an AO3 account and have used it to post a single story and haven't read anything on that site at all. Of the stories I have read, some of them aren't on fanfiction.net--like the old classic Children of an Elder God that I read while it was updating at university. On fanfiction.net I read Aeon Natum Engel--you can see my interests here, in the intersection of cosmic horror and giant robots--and...I think that's all I can remember? I have a bunch of stories I turned into ebooks with the intention of reading them and then just never did. Part of it is that I'm not at all interested in romance in fanfiction. I found one Stargate/Cthulhu crossover fanfic, an area I had thought would be ripe with potential, and never ended up reading it because 1) it was abandoned 2) it was Stargate: Atlantis and 3) it was mostly slash. The only part I remember is that the nanoswarm cloud in the original Stargate: Atlantis was turned into a rogue shoggoth in the fic. I read a relatively short fic about what if Harry Potter were raised by the Culture (which I really appreciated because it did not assume that the Culture Minds automatically understood magic, they were baffled how an owl traveled thousand of light years from Earth to poof into a room on an Orbital) which ran about nine chapters before it petered out.

I have read a lot of Let's Plays, and some of them approach fanfiction by using video games to tell a story. I read the Final Fantasy VIII Altimate Rewrite, which was very good but also never finished. I read a long narrative let's play of Morrowind that was originally hosted at morningstarlady until it was purged and moved to Dreamwidth, which was then hosted at lady_morningstar until it was locked and limited to access only, and is now seemingly being remade (again!) using models from The Sims at aeronwen. I only got partway through the previous version (they were very long), but I think they never finished as well. You can probably see where the source of me being leery of reading fanfiction comes from, here.

I guess the most fanfiction I've ever read, now that I think about it, are the stories set in The Night Land. I read every single story on that site and keep thinking about buying the books, especially after the untimely death of its maintainer.

The reason I brought all this time is because last night I thought "I wonder if that old Sailor Moon website I found back in the day is still around..." and it turns out it wasn't, but it's still available on the Wayback Machine. Sailor Moon Expanded ran from the late 90s through the early 00s and...well, I have to admit that while there's a ton of fanfics I've never read any of them. At the time, 2010, I had never seen a single episode of Sailor Moon, and wouldn't watch any until Sailor Moon Crystal came out several years later. The part that drew me in was the meticulously-expanded bestiary, maps, and cultural information on the Dark Kingdom and the Silver Millennium, which was envisioned as a magic-based solar-system-wide confederacy that ended with the sealing of magic after Queen Beryl attacked the moon. Or, as I described it at the time, "The war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts when the Unseelie Court wanted summon Cthulhu."

The other reason is A Dark, Distorted Mirror, a Babylon 5 AU fanfic that assumes that the inciting event of most of the plots in the early series--the Earth-Minbari War, a war where the vastly-technologically-superior Minbari curbstomped the humans for two years, only losing a single capital ship in all that time, until on the very moment of victory as they annihilated Earth's last defensive fleet before suddenly ceasing fire and surrendering--did not end with a treaty. As a result, Earth was glassed, most of humanity was killed, and the series is much less hopeful in tone. I did actually make it through the entire first book but tapped out when I had four more books of around 200K words each left, around the size of a doorstopper fantasy book. That one is still online and is finished, though, so maybe I should go back and read it.

I apply to fanfiction nowadays the same principle I apply to fantasy series--once the author finishes it, maybe I'll read it.

If anyone has any recommendations for finished, good Cthulhu crossover fic, I'm all ears. I had a lot of hope for Aeon Natum Engel until the author blew it up with a "rocks fall, everyone dies" sudden ending. They then declared they were going to re-write the entire thing better and higher quality, and I read the first chapter of Aeon Entelechy Evangelion and, when I saw how overwrite and baroque it was, I said to myself "This will never be finished" and stopped reading. And, well...it was never finished.

Was thinking lately about the problems I have with so many survival games and I realized that it comes down to a lack of being punished by the indifferent gods.

Okay, so like I wrote about in my recent gameing update, I've been playing Project Zomboid. It's a lot of fun, but it has a lot of limitations, and I've had some of the veil pulled back in how the game's simulation actually works and now I can't unsee it. For example, by default, zombies sort themselves into small groups that are roughly equidistant from each other, and they'll migrate to nearby areas with no zombies. But, crucially, they'll only migrate the equivalent of a few hundred meters, because the only area that's simulated is the area that far around the character. There's a mod called Wandering Zombies that cause zombies to wander around a bit more, and it does mean I need to be a bit more careful about stragglers and zombies having shown up near houses I've cleared, but it still can't cause zombies to wander too far away. The giant horde coming toward the protagonists' safehouse, one of the staple tropes of zombie fiction, is impossible in Project Zomboid because there are no far-away horde movement mechanics. If you clear out the area near your base, base defenses are useless because no zombie will ever find you.

Zomboid gets around this by just having zombies respawn, which is pretty gamey in a game that tries hard for verisimilitude.

Cataclysm has similar problems. It also only simulates the area near the player, but while it does have horde mechanics, the area it simulates is small enough that it's very possible if you have a large enough base that hordes would appear on the edge of the simulated area which could be inside your defenses. To deal with this, hordes were changed to prefer roads and city centers, but that leads to the same problem as Zomboid, where if you build your base away from a zombie hotspot--the obvious thing to do--you can farm and play post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley without a care. In a game about the inevitable decline of the world, nothing dangerous will come to you unless you go seek it out.

Unreal World has a similar but different problem, which is that the early game is a brutal struggle for survival as you try to carve a homestead out of the unforgiving wilderness but once you do, once you have a small cabin and food stored in your food cellar for the winter and some traps set out for animals, you usually wonder "Well...now what do I do?" and stop playing. I've done that several times and never actually played through winter because I knew I would survive and it would take months of the exact same gameplay to get there. I didn't have to worry about any trouble unless I made it for myself.

And that's my problem. City-builders are very good about providing unexpected challenges that you need to have the resilience to beat, like Timberborn's droughts and Badtide or SimCity's disasters, but a lot of survival games don't seem to have anything like that even when it would be appropriate. Now, I know that some of this is because these are games and if you sow an entire field and it all dies to drought, you're just going to quit the game rather than try to recover from it the way that our ancestors did. But it's very weird to me in a game that's about the zombie apocalypse you can avoid most of the tropes that are central to zombie apocalypse fiction. Zomboid doesn't have NPCs (they've been promising them for 12 years...), which means there's no raiders, there's no person who joins the group while hiding a bite, there's no conflict over who has to do what jobs. It has no wandering hordes so bases are totally safe. Cataclysm has multiple interdimensional invaders fighting over the Earth, except none of them actually fight unless they happen to spawn near each other and you can likewise just ignore most of them unless you deliberately seek out trouble. Once you've brought in one harvest, you've won the game.

I keep looking at Vintage Story for its robust survival mechanics but that has an entirely separate thing I don't like (it keeps the Minecraft-like system of mobs just spawning in from thin air), so who knows.

This is one of those indie games I saw people raving over for months. On a Cataclysm community discord I'm on, basically every single time anyone even mentions it people talk about how great it is. I remember aaron.hosek talking it up too in the bros game chat I'm part of, and when I saw it was for sale at 50% off as part of the Steam Autumn Sale, I bought it with the idea that I would play it as my final game for my twelve games in twelve months series, and that's what I did.

Not without some trepidation, since I have a bit of a rocky history with visual novels. Friends recommended 2064: Read Only Memories to me and I hated it because it only offered the illusion of choice and the further I went in, the deeper the cracks were. On the other hand, I absolutely loved Night in the Woods because it had a branching narrative and actually committed to letting you decide what to do. Which way would Citizen Sleeper fall?


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A lot of the time with these reviews, I have some story about how I learned about the game. Maybe I played it when I was younger, spending hours with my sister together trying to conquer the game, or I read about it in Rock Paper Shotgun, or one of my friends told me about it and said I had to play it, but Timberborn wasn't like that. I saw it in the list of Steam sale games, thought it looked interesting, and bought it. City-builders used to be huge--I spent hours as a child playing Caesar III and trying to convince the patricians to build villas so I could get that sweet tax revenue, or playing SimCity 2000 (released 1993) with disasters off and marveling at the 3D terrain--but nowadays they're incredibly niche. We need to treasure the ones we have, especially if they have such an interesting hook.

You see, Timberborn is about a city built by intelligent beavers in a post-apocalyptic world.


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You'd think I would have written more about this game considering how much I've played it.

Back during the Plague Years, not long after sashagee and I met, she got into a game called Genshin Impact, then still relatively obscure. Her father and brother had started playing it months before, not long after it first came out, and they had gotten her into it in order to play with them. But, as she tells me is often the case, they played much more than she did, rocketed ahead of her in progression, and by the time she caught up with them, they had gotten bored of the game and moved on to another one. She was having a fun time--she's an old gacha hand, having played a ton of the Shining Nikki phone games in the years before she met me until she had to cut herself off from spending too much--but she had gotten herself into a horrible bind. Somehow she had increased her World Level (the difficulty of monsters, basically) up to level 6, but her characters were all severely underleveled and underpowered to the point where she simply could not beat any of the fights necessary to increase your characters' power, which meant she couldn't advance the story either. So she came to me and was like "dorchadas, you're my boyfriend, so I need you to help me."

And that's how I started to play a gacha game.


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So over the past few years, I played through every mainline Legend of Zelda game, in order of release, in Japanese, and wrote a review of every one after I beat it. Here they are:

1. ゼルダの伝説: the Hyrule Fantasy / The Legend of Zelda


2. ゼルダの伝説：リンクの冒険 / Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link


3. ゼルダの伝説：神々のトライフォース / The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past


4. ゼルダの伝説：夢をみる島 DX / The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX


5. ゼルダの伝説：時のオカリナGC裏 / The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time Master Quest


6. ゼルダの伝説：ムジュラの仮面 / The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask


7. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎの木の実 -大地の章- / The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons


8. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎの木の実 -時空の章- / The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages


9. ゼルダの伝説：風のタクト / The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker


10. ゼルダの伝説：４つの剣+ / The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures


11. ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎのぼうし / The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap


12. ゼルダの伝説：トワイライトプリンセス / The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess


13. ゼルダの伝説：夢幻の砂時計 / The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass


14. ゼルダの伝説：大地の汽笛 / The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks


15. ゼルダの伝説：スカイウォードソード / The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword


16. ゼルダの伝説：神々のトライフォース 2 / The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds


17. ゼルダの伝説：トライフォース３銃士 / The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes


18. ゼルダの伝説：ブレス オブ ザ ワイルド / The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Remakes:

• ゼルダの伝説：夢を見る島 Switch版 / Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Switch Version

Non-canon entries:

• Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition
• ケイデンス・オブ・ハイラル: クリプト・オブ・ネクロダンサー feat. ゼルダの伝説 / Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda

More later as I get to them.

I wasn't a huge Zelda fan before I started this, but I certainly am now. What a great series.

sashagee is off at an event tonight so I'm sitting at home. I just finished my exercise (70 minutes a day by the watch) and finished making a couple PRs for Cataclysm, so now I'm sitting down at my computer desk and playing Genshin Impact and watching some videos about the new WoW expansion that's coming out. Am I going to play it? Absolutely not. I'm out of WoW, and everything I've heard of Classic indicates that the way that people play is irrevocably changed and I would hate it if I went back. But the world is one of my favorite fictional worlds, so I still keep up with the story and the community around it no matter how bad things get (and they've gotten pretty dire at times).

On the other hand, I have been looking into buying Diablo II: Resurrected. I put thousands of hours into Diablo II over the years, from the summer of 2001 where uriany, sephimb, and I got together basically every single day after work and played Diablo II for hours right up until around 2017. While Blizzard botched Warcraft III Reforged to the level that it put me off continuing my journey through the Warcraft games (I reviewed Warcraft: Orcs and Humans back in 2017 and then just...never got around to any of the other games. Oops), I've heard that the Diablo II remaster was actually good, made by people who clearly care about Diablo without any of the nonsense from later Diablo games. Spell effects are way more impressive, the graphics are better, and you still have tons of runewords and synergies and so on you can make. Plus it has shapeshifting druids with nature magic, which is probably my favorite character type in any RPG. I'm going to wait for a sale, though--after thousands of hours there's no way I'm paying $40 for the same game again.

We had a Farmer's Market Dinner tonight but I sadly neglected to take a picture. It was (beef) BLTs, with beef bacon being the only non-farmer's market purchase. We used tomatoes from my parents' garden, lettuce and cucumber from Nichols' Family Farms, bread from Lost Larson, and blackberries from the farmer's market we went to last weekend out in the suburbs. Laila's plate had the most picturesque meal, all arranged together and given to her, and of course she smeared it all together within seconds of it being placed in front of her. She ate nearly everything, though.

We also ran into someone at the Farmer's Market yesterday who recognized me from Mishkan and asked if we were going to be at services tomorrow. They're outdoors, and last time Laila had a great time running around in the play area next to where people were seated, so I told her yes. We'll be there.

I usually don't review the same game twice, but MMOs are different. With most games, I play them once, I do all the content, and I'm done. Even with games that receive extensive post-release updates like Wasteland II or Divinity: Original Sin that had enough post-game changes to warrant doing another review, I avoided it by not playing them at all until years after they came out, long after all the additional changes had been made. But I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV for years at this point, through every patch and with all the changes that come out, so I've seen the game as it developed. And my original Endwalker review only covered the story and none of the mechanical changes and was written over two years ago before the patch content. A lot has happened in the game since then!

As before, this review will contain spoilers for Endwalker's story.


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The year was 1997, and I (as I've written about many times on my reviews) did not have a Super Nintendo or a Playstation, so I was playing PC games. Games like Diablo and Age of Empires, or Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Heroes of Might and Magic, or Civilization II and Myth: the Fallen Lords. I read PC Gamer ravenously every month because most of my friends did have Playstations or Supers Nintendo and so they weren't reliable sources for new PC games coming out. Every month, PC Gamer came with a demo disc, and I got to play a bit of Diablo (the demo went through the Butcher and included a "repair items" skill that reduced max durability that didn't make it to the main game) and games I never went on to play, like Interstate '76--I still remember the radio line that plays after the first combat where the cops say "Use of deadly force...is encouraged."

One of the games I still remember to this day was Fallout. It takes place in "Scrapheap" (which was reused for Junktown), a town split by rival warring gangs, where you can side with either of the gangs (or kill them both, or sabotage the generator and doom the town). There's only a couple screens, no character creation, and two quests (deal with the gang, and meet Dogmeat), and I played that demo maybe a dozen times, scouring the entire town for everything I could find it in. Playing other RPGs had already taught me to talk to everyone, and at that point, the lack of total knowledge due to the rudimentary state of the internet meant that every single game was imbued with infinite potential because if I didn't discover something myself, it was possible I'd never learn about it. For example, I only learned you could sabotage the generator when writing this post!

When the full game came out later that year, I bought it immediately.


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This game passed me by when it originally came out. The first portable gaming device I owned was...well, technically it was the Sega Game Gear with its fantastic 30 minute battery life, and I got a lot of usage out of it on family vacations for the 30 minutes that it lasted. But past that, I didn't buy a portable until the PSP, and I didn't buy a Nintendo portable until 2008 right before I moved to Japan, so the entirety of the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance passed me by. That includes Kirby's Dream Land, which I only read about in Nintendo Power barring a few minutes' play on a friend's Game Boy. Lacking any preconceptions, I came into Amazing Mirror and was having a fun time and then I happened to be looking through old podcasts I hadn't finished and found the Retronauts Kirby 3 episode. I loaded up it at the 30 minutes remaining and was immediately greeted with people trashing the game's map and the progression.

I had no idea it was so controversial! But you google it and find out that Nintendo Life gave it a 6/10 and people online are arguing whether that's fair or not. This is what ubiquitous internet access to information has taken from us. By virtue of never playing the game, I went into it with no expectations and had a nice time, whereas if I had gone in after reading a bunch of people trashing it I would have been primed to dislike it. Instead I got the nice surprise that people did twenty years ago: "What you mean they made a Kirby metroidvania?!"


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I don't usually play visual novels--if you look back through the visual novel tag, you'll find only two other examples of games. It's not because I don't like them conceptually or anything, since I've had the install discs for Ever 17 sitting on my hard drive through four computers and I keep telling myself that someday, someday, I'll get it to. And someday, I will! I got to this one first, though, for three reasons. The first is that sashagee told me about it and said it was probably the kind of game I would like, I think because the sequel was advertised to her on Playstation when she was browsing through sale games. The second is that the background is full of fantasy races, with a line about how the "elves have left the forest to build their startups" right in the intro, though that ended up grating on me in the end for reasons I'll get into. The third is that the playtime on HLTB was around five hours and I was running out of time in the month. Even though I intended to play it two weekends ago, and didn't, and then I intended to play it last weekend, and didn't...

Well, I started it on Tuesday and finished it on Friday after about five hours or so. At least an hour of that involved Laila sitting on my lap, wanting to see the game with the "chairs" or the "blue dresses." That makes me feel like I'll probably be playing more visual novels in the future.


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