I did actually manage to write a couple of blog posts this last week, that’s pretty cool, I don’t usually manage that, so that felt nice. All in all it was a decent week the last one, apart from my anxiety spiking a bit again. It seems like it mostly has cooled down again, and it’s nice not having to go around having my adrenaline spiking for every little thing happening around me, and my body deciding it’s flight- or fight time, just for every little thing happening.

Books

Finished off Ava Stargazer by Alissa Lace, and it was decent, but it kind of missed something, I never really felt like I wanted to sit down and read it, when I did it was decent enough, but that made it take longer than normal to get through this one. The story is decent, the characters are mostly good, and it had a nice ending, I just couldn’t help thinking it was a bit flat, but in the end I enjoyed it, just not something I would call special or exceptional

I’m also very close to finishing Adventure Capital by J.S. Morin, and I don’t have much to say about it, it’s still a really fun read, I like the characters, and all the weird situations they get thrown into, still a pretty solid series 9 books in that I’m having fun reading.

And probably today I will start the last book of the current subseries of the sector universe, hopefully it will be a good one, the last one fell a bit flat for me, but I hope this one can turn that around.

Games

For games this has been kind of a wild week, I’ve been playing around with stuff a lot, after being mostly focused on octopath for a long while I think I just needed to play around with some stuff.

I finished Castti’s story in Octopath Traveler II and got hit with how extremely beautiful this game looks and sounds, her story ending was also really great, I still love this game, I don’t know why but after so long it’s something about the battle system that irks me, or makes me feel kind of finished, but I think mostly it’s about me being in a stretch that has a lot of boss fights, which kind of makes me not want to for some reason, but at least another step further.

I played quite a lot of Shin Megami Tensei 4 and I’ve been having a lot of fun with this one, it feels very exploratory, most of the quests for a while is “just explore around until you find something” and then there are different side quests and stuff to do on the way. I really enjoy how my team constantly changed, on nearly every level up at least one of my demons on the team changes to another one, it feels very dynamic and fun. The vagueness gets a bit annoying with the difficulties for the quests some times, you just wander if you’re going in the right direction, and the quests having a star ranking for difficulty which is weird to parse, so it’s basically just save try to see if it’s doable yet and load if it wasn’t. The story and environment feels pretty fresh as they are apocalyptic Tokyo rather than the normal fantasy fare. It’s a bit too dour for my liking, but I’m still enjoying myself a lot. I’m pretty happy with having chosen to play on easy, for someone not that great at games, it really helps me not getting stuck for that long, and I’m still really enjoying the game, and seeing the story going on.

SMT4 Also really reminds me of Persona 3 Portable in a good way, I think I enjoy the more old school dungeon crawling experience more than the more free form Persona one, I’m not quite sure what it is because SMT4 is still pretty sprawling, and I really enjoy the Persona stories, but I’m starting to think it’s more that the design is more restrained with SMT, and that it just doesn’t hat that overly polished feeling, but I’m not quite sure.

Some more Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen was also something I played with still pretty early on, but it’s a nice game to relax with, the battles aren’t that complex, and it’s just fun to follow the story. It has some of the “flagging” issues of many older JRPGs where you need to talk with specific people in the correct order to get to the next part in the quest, it gets a bit annoying at times, especially since there is no questlog or anything like it. But it’s just a really charming and fun game that I’m enjoying a lot.

And then I was playing around a bit with the Dragon Quest Monsters Joker series, I have 1, 2, and 3 and I was just playing a bit of them in reversed order, I ended up wanting to play the first most for now, it’s a fun game, but really slow, and quite grindy, but I really like the whole thing about finding some new monsters, level them up, and then fuse them together to get new ones with better stats, I’m pretty sure these are some that I’ll be playing just a bit of now and then when I feel like it. And we’ll see, for now at least I have other games that I’m having more fun with.

Misc

There seems to have been quite a shakeup with the Skeptics Guide podcast some weeks ago, since I’m behind on episodes I didn’t see it before now, but one of the hosts had been posting on Twitter and shown himself to have become radicalised in a very right wihg way and generally being an online bag of dicks, now it seems like they are handling it well, and he’s not on the podcast anymore, and they were talking about maybe getting a new host with some more diversity than what they have had, and I think that can only be something good, I’ve been enjoying Cara the most of the hosts, and getting a bit more diversity in would hopefully help the podcast not feel as stale any more, some times I’ve felt like I’ve mostly been listening out of inertia rather than really enjoying it, so hopefully this will shake things up a bit.

I’ve been good at not hyperfixating on tinkering more with my 3DS this week, and actually play games and having fun with what I have, which has been nice. I’ve felt the drag to now and then, but I don’t think I will actually win much by doing it, I’d rather enjoy what I have.

With all the bad news about the game business, and the RAMpocalypse and everything I think I will probably focus even more on older and indie games, I also miss the truly portable gaming systems, something like the 3DS is something that probably won’t become the norm again, but I really enjoyed that factor, and now that I’ve been playing quite a lot on it the last week, it’s been so much fun, when you have games made for the form factor, they work really well, and it’s just so much nicer and easier to take along when you can just put it in a pocket, rather than having to worry about the screen and the sticks like I always really worry about with the switch.