haiiii!!! it's been a while huh... i kind of just got distracted whenever i started making a blog post, and then by the time i got back to it i was like hmmm i don't have as much motivation to write about the things i was going to write about anymore... but anyway now we're here and it's fall and i am so grateful for the cooler temperatures.

i haven't been playing that many different things lately so this won't have many different things, but nonetheless lets get the freaking into it!!

games: fire emblem fortune's weave

i'll mention that this will have some premise-based spoilers just because it's hard to discuss otherwise, but i'll avoid major spoilers of course!! but if you're wanting to avoid any fortune's weave spoilers at all, i would recommend going to the next section!

it's been a month since release and i've been playing it constantly and i am still not even close to being done. this is the newest fire emblem game, and more closely resembles three houses than any other fire emblem entry, but i'd definitely say they refined the formula much more!! the game also looks really fantastic, probably the best looking fire emblem game (though engage was also gorgeous), and it's really nice that the switch 2 has made it easier for them to make a game that both runs and also looks great.

this game has four routes you can choose from in part 1, each following a different lord and their respective party as they fight in the heroic games: a fighting tournament where the winner can ask for any wish to be granted by the ruler of dagda, solel. leda is a performer on a quest for revenge, cai is a teenager fighting to save his father from execution, dietrich is a battle-hungry fighter looking to just fight stronger and stronger dudes, and i lowkey don't really know theodora's deal beyond the fact she's the queen of a nation that has had some fucked up stuff done to it because i haven't started her route yet.

i started with leda's route because her design slays and i love a revenge quest and also her retainer is an extremely hot bara guy who has the nickname "demon bear" so like. sorry or whatever. i'm really glad i chose hers first because i absolutely adored this party. leda's route has 5 main characters essentially, with leda being the MOST main character of course, but everyone else in the party has their time to shine, and there was absolutely a lot of careful thought put into making the inter-party relationship dynamics really fantastic and well defined. leda's route has heavy themes of reason to live, and explores suicidality in a way i would not have expected fire emblem to pull off so incredibly compellingly. i think i would honestly love to write a full blog post about fortune's weave at some point, if only so i could write about leda's character. i can't even lie, as i typed that i considered creating a new file literally rn to go and write it LMFAO. BE NORMAL!!!!!!

the next route i did was cai's and i don't really have as much to say about it because i did find it more narratively weak especially compared to leda's route, but that isn't necessarily a fair comparison just because leda's route is soooooo good. there were some weird plot holes that were taking me out of it and i really wished there was more exploration in the main story of cai's relationship with his friends, but it wasn't bad of course!!!

the route i'm currently playing is dietrich's route, and this one is once again making me crazy though. the core concept of dietrich's character is "good hearted person with insatiable bloodlust" and i think that is so fun and so interesting. lately i've been more and more interested in and compelled by characters who have a compulsion that controls them, a need that is irremovable from their self. dietrich is a weirdo, and he is joined by two weirdos who think they are totally normal (they aren't), and then one person who is actually normal and is like Yall r weird asf. at this point in typing this paragraph i went onto an insane and yet wise and profound ramble in my friend's dms about how i think his bloodlust is an allegory for being gay (in a woke way) and i think as i play more of his route i will only become more radicalised in this reading. it's really sweet and beautiful how compassionate the story is to dietrich. it doesn't demonise him for his bloodlust because it's just part of him. i'm really looking forward to playing more.

games: pokemon (dexquest)

dexquest isn't an actual thing but it's what i'm calling my quest to complete the national dex in pokemon home, which, to the uninformed, involves catching every pokemon from every region, of which there are over 1000. i started this a few months ago, and fortune's weave put it on pause, but i really enjoyed it and fully intend to pick it up again!!

so far i've completed the kanto, sinnoh, kalos, galar, and hisui dexes. the completion status of the rest are as follows:

• johto: 18 remaining
• hoenn: 19 remaining
• unova: 22 remaining
• alola: 31 remaining
• paldea: 67 remaining

in total, that's 157 remaining!!! i started with i think around 280 or something remaining? with my largest gaps being paldea (as it remains) and galar, and kalos already being done (because i played the hell out of legends za). my first big target was galar, and part of the difficulty was getting both regis, both legendary horses, and both box legendaries. for context on why those in particular were difficult: the crown tundra dlc introduced regidrago and regieleki, as well as spectrier and glastrier, and you can only get one of each pair in a given save file. also, as with all box legendaries, you can only get the legendary on the box (i have sword, so i can only get zacian, and only one in a given save file).

i actually did have another save file that had completed all 8 gyms because the save file was in japanese so i could get a japanese ditto (for breeding purposes; look up masuda method for more info), but i hadn't done any of the dlc and i hadn't completed the game and gotten my zacian, so i didn't have to start from scratch, but there was still a good bit of stuff i had to do!! i actually hadn't realised that i didn't beat the champion at first so i got through a lot of the crown tundra before hitting the calyrex fight and getting walled and then really confused why i couldn't fight him, so i had to go back and do all the rest of the story, then back to the dlc.

i think the last pokemon i got was regidrago, and catching it was basically torture. it legit hated my ass bruh. i had it on around 3% hp and threw so many ultra balls and timer balls for so many turns that it was able to get to the point of using struggle. for context, regidrago has a total of 60pp across all of its moves so that's... 60... turns...! AUUUGGHHGHHH but the next reload treated me better, and i finally finished galar...

my current goal is paldea, and i had started a replay of paldea a bit before fortune's weave came out, at which point my attention naturally shifted. i actually did start to appreciate scarlet/violet's gameplay loop a bit more, shockingly, though i do still think the open world approach was pretty misguided and i still don't love the art style. i think they had a fun idea with the "let's go" system of throwing your mons out to battle on their own. it makes grinding exp pretty easy, so, paradoxically for an open world game, it's a pretty fun linear experience if you're following the main story objectives in order of level. the game actually running and functioning on the switch 2 definitely helps a lot too. i wish they had more time to polish the game and rework some of the sorer spots, but it looks like wiwa is going to be a total blast, and i'm really looking forward to that of course!!! this year has been a slow burn of me coming to terms with the fact we are not getting more news until february. the light leaving my eyes as i accept that a feb 2027 release was never going to happen. but it's okay it's going to be so good and the wait is worth it!!!

also i am manifesting being able to use the legends za battle system in wiwa. i love the legends za battle system i love legends za!!!!!!

games: deadlock

deadlock is a new third person moba shooter game by valve that is currently in "closed" beta, which i didn't actually realise was still closed because there's like hundreds of thousands of people playing atp and you can get in so easily but apparently it is actually still closed beta.

being completely honest a lot of my enjoyment from deadlock has been coming from watching my bf and friends play it! i've played a good bit myself though and it's really fun. they've done a really awesome job with making the characters feel very distinct and fun, and i love their designs. dynamo is my favourite because he's bear body type but a robot body, and i also really love his playstyle and i'm kind of cracked with the skill 1 angles and people hate me for it. i think i could play nothing but dynamo and i would be happy.

something i'm really looking forward to with deadlock is that the team that made risk of rain got hired to work at valve on deadlock and they're apparently working on a pve mode, and with how the kits and items work in this game, i feel like it's going to be sooooo good. i do enjoy pvp still but i've definitely become less interested in it as i become more and more interested in pve cooperative games, probably due in part to ffxiv.

projects: game dev

probably the last topic of this blog post! i've finally been picking up doing game dev again, and it's felt so good. being completely honest, and if you're an employer reading this i'm actually just being dramatic and i love my job and i love clocking in for work and so on and so forth, but especially given the... current state of working in compsci... doing programming at work feels, frankly, unfulfilling. i don't feel accomplishment finishing any tasks, and the opportunities for creative problem solving are pretty minimal.

picking up game dev has been kind of crazy in that regard, because it does actually feel incredibly fulfilling. naturally part of that is because i don't have to interface with the evil demon which shan't be named, but it also just feels like it's what i should be doing. i'm not really that far into development, but i'll share some of the main goals behind my game.

my game's largest inspirations are persona 3 and caligula effect 2, the latter of which i haven't beat but it's okay we all have the backlog devil. i've been leaning into especially the persona 3 part with a daily-life deal and a calendar system, with the caligula part being more relating to the combat systems i'm planning. i actually haven't done any of the combat system programming yet, partly because ngl i want to make an architectural diagram to ensure that when i actually do program it, it will work without too much fuss.

for context, the caligula combat has something like a "future-sight prediction" system, where, when you're choosing what actions to make your characters perform, you can see what the outcome of events would be if you select any given action; as such, it's like preeeetty important that i have a system which is capable of having this prediction system work pretty consistently. not gonna lie though there IS a distinct possibility i end up going in a different direction just because the nature of the prediction system does kind of make it so that you theoretically can always make a safe or correct move (which is the biggest problem with it in caligula, though it is still a lot of fun), so if i can't find a way to make it feel satisfying i'll almost certainly end up making a different sort of system!

i've been just working on the daily life and general systems so far, as well as some of the daily life environments. i'm kind of basing the game in vancouver (not sure to what capacity quite yet), and right now i'm making a mall based on a mall that i love currently, as well as the older part of a mall that i loved which was shuttered and demolished a year or so ago (to make way for gentrificationslop). my goal is to make the daily life system fun to engage with on its own, even separated from the combat system, though naturally there will be aspects in which doing the daily life systems will reward you in the combat systems and vice versa!

below is just a little clip of the visual style and some of the little systems i've made so far. a lot of things are still wip ofc lol, but just to give you an idea!

for the walking around the fountain the camera actually was kind of a bit choppy originally, but after i recorded it i was like wait i bet this is a problem of ontriggerstay having kind of a race condition with my camera's position update and i bet i could fix it with lateupdate, and lo, it worked. kind of a fawking genius. i love programming!!!!!!!!

i'm really happy with the visual style rn. i'm planning on keeping a 4:3 aspect ratio to complement the 2000s vibe. i do plan on making more posts about my game in the future! i'm considering whether i want to start using bluesky for smaller posts, and i kind of might have to because there's a pesky little thing called "Marketing" and allegedly if you don't do any of that no one will see the thing you made i guess.

right now i'm making a small prequel game with a 1 month calendar that will tie into the main game that i want to make, partly so that i can release something (hopefully) sooner than years from now that people can play.

conclusion

i've been having a lot of fun gaming lately. i honestly think that part of that is because i dropped pretty much every gacha game. i started to think about the fact that like, instead of playing a gacha game that i kind of enjoy, i could actually just play a game that i definitely will enjoy. i know that's like dead simple and lowkey obvious but realising that i wasn't really enjoying gacha games beyond the comfort of always being able to go back to play it helped me realise that like yeah i can just go play something else. naturally this isn't a diss against people who like them, and i might even pick one up again sometime if i just want something chill n such, but for now i'm good!!

i'm really looking forward to the ocarina of time remake. i think the discourse around it was kind of strange? zelda has always had a thing of the games randomly looking very different, and i would say that ocarina of time is a natural evolution of that. it still looks very cartoony and lively, but it's leveraging the full power of the switch 2, and i'm super excited!!!! the volumetric fog looks kind of absurd. i know the switch 2 is powerful but it's honestly insane that it looks this good while also seemingly not using dlss? ocarina of time 3d was my first zelda game and i'm so excited to get to re-experience it. i hope they changed a lot of the puzzles because i'm not gonna lie the autism made replays go platinum for real and i love solving zelda puzzles.

i also would like to advocate for you, the reader, to make a blog!!! if there's media that you love that consumes your every thought, you should type about it so other people can read. there's enough people talking about the stuff they hate on the internet, so why not talk about the stuff you like? it might make you happier. i might even go so far as to say that it will make you happier. i've definitely become a happier person since i started to really focus on the stuff i love and learned to drop media if i'm not enjoying it.

as always, thank you for reading my blog post! have a beautiful day in this beautiful world. xoxo