Catching Up

You may have noticed that I haven’t really written much at all this year. In fact, only one article has been published in 2022 and it was a scheduled post from December.

Long story short, it’s been a mix of working two jobs, quitting one of them and then quitting the other in order to accept a new position locally, and the incredibly depressing and stressful return of my oldest cat’s cancer.

I really don’t want to get into any of the latter. I’ll just say the outlook isn’t good, it’s been expensive and stressful, and I’ve been in no mood to write.

Catching you up on the games I’ve played this year should be easy, though, because I’ve only been playing long ass RPGs.

I started off 2022 by finally finishing Persona 5 Royal and earning its respective platinum trophy. It took 130-ish hours to do but I think it’s well worth the time investment. The quality of life stuff and new content are both excellent additions and go a long way in improving the mid-game pacing issues of the original.

After that, I played through the incredible genre-bending sci-fi epic 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. I never thought a game would dethrone SOMA when it comes to sci-fi storytelling, but here we are. The less you know about the story the better, though. Just know that it’s very good and now sits comfortably in my top 10 games of all time.

I finally bought my first PS5 game, despite having the console for a year — Tales of Arise. I definitely think it’s the best combat in the series and has some great characters. The story is very slow-moving at first and suffers from an unfortunate case of whiplash in the pacing department near the end of the game. I shit you not, there is a 5-hour section that is nothing but cutscenes and skits because it needs to tie up some loose ends and exposition dump the story in your lap. It was infuriating. By that point I just wanted it to be over.

I do think the ending was great and I’m glad I stuck around, but for five straight hours, I actively *hated* my time with it.

I was so burned out by the end that I didn’t even bother with most of the post-game content. I was still in a Tales mood, though, so I finally played through Tales of Vesperia’s remaster.

Man, what a game. I miss that era of fix-camera perspectives. It really let the designers craft some stellar environments with cool little things that pop up as you move around, rather than rotating the camera in circles. Fixed cameras and pre-rendered backdrops will always be my jams.

But yeah, Vesperia is still a great game. Some of the best characters and probably what I’d consider the best story in the series, not to mention the s-tier soundtrack. The combat aged like milk, though.

That brings us to the present where I’m 15 hours into the Legend of Mana remaster. It’s one of the best RPGs from the PS1 era and the remaster’s ability to save anywhere and turn off encounters while backtracking is quite nice.

I liked the original game back when it was released, but I’m loving it now in 2022. It really was ahead of its time.

I’m still in a shitty headspace and busy with work so I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting here right now. Maybe just these sparse updates.