Media Log

C'mon, are we even surprised this is here? I grew up on Dragon Age, the Choices game, so of course I was head over heels over a story driven RPG, and one harkening back to tactical gameplay. Although I am not a big DnD person (I only ever played 3.5e), I really enjoy the combat and all the weird things you can do in it.

Unsurprisingly I fell for Gale and his soggy, pathetic energy. My first runthrough of the game took me 60 hours cause I kept exploring every nook and cranny as my dragonborn open-hand monk. Since then I've done two additional run-throughs as Sylvie and Nameless (OCs), and an in progress Gale runthrough, and a durge co-op, and an honour mode runthrough that wasn't all that honourable with mods.

We don't speak how much this poor game has gone through mod hell and how much suffering I've gone through when new patch updates hit and mess up my entire save files.

Anyway 10/10 game would replay again (already have).

To be fair I could consider this my first 'souls-like' game since I could not do Dark Souls 3, and honestly I had a lot of fun even if it was definitely frustrating at points (I'm the type that I google best builds, pick one I like, then keep whacking shit when I could try something else).

Allowing customization helped a lot since I ended up making my own OC in it (hi Hideki) so I had the drive to keep pushing forwards to see my blorbo in cutscenes and take screenshots. I can't say the story is anything stellar and amazing but it had me hooked through the entirety of it (and had some neat twists). I think I got almost every achievement but the bad end cause I do not have the heart to do it. :(

There's a reason this is considered an RPG classic and we do NAWT speak that I have 150+ hours in this game. Shamelessly completed the highest difficulty even if I wanted to break my own skull during it (god it was fun). The combat is clunky as hell, I won't argue, but it really is a strong brain teaser if you like the aspect of (micro?) managing your team or creating more complex AIs for them. Definitely would recommend mods though after a vanilla playthrough.

Otherwise what a great piece of dark fantasy and great characters and writing, it's definitely shaped a lot of my enjoyment of future media.

Y'know what's funny? I actually began Dragon Age with this game, I found Fenris by complete accident and got enamoured with him, so I got DA2 and played that first with absolutely zero context of what the hell happened in the first game. Absolutely the best time of my damn life. I'm a truther for mage sarcastic Hawke and Fenris. It's rough, the map layout sucks shit, but it had a lot of heart and love in the character writing and honestly? I loved the combat, it felt so fluid that when I got around to playing Origins it felt so clunky to me.

God knows that Chantry scene still lives rent free in my brain and the complete heartbreak I felt in that moment because I did not know that was coming.

There is a reason this is ranked as my utmost top favourite game on my Backloggd, and that's because it has a special place in my heart for its characters and my introduction to the Dragon Age series. Yes also beaten on the hardest difficulty, surprisingly less annoying than Origins but still a challenge.

Inquisition ... A+ for having Hawke appear, minus for the option to potentially force Hawke to be lost in the Fade sauce. Either way, I enjoyed the story for what it's worth, and the Trespasser DLC was really fun!! I did personally go for Dorian in terms of a romance, and I enjoyed a lot of the new characters + older characters having major roles within the story itself.

Migrating to such big maps was a ... choice for sure (shudders, Hinterlands...). Combat was ok, but felt more ... shallow? Than previous entries anyway, I can't put my finger fully on it since it's been a while since I've completed a full playthrough of it, but it definitely felt a little less than the previous iterations.

This ... does not feel like a Dragon Age game to me, in the sense that the combat is simplified to a point where it doesn't have the tactile feel of the other games, and the dark tone of the story felt very neutered and watered down; it was hard for me to take the seriousness of the world-ending situation ... err, seriously when it felt like the characters themselves weren't. It also feels like to some degree it disregarded the past entries in terms of story (Ferelden?? Falling to the Blight??) and all of the work done by the previous protags. Like literally the secret ending just pissed me off if I'm going to be honest, it feels like it handwaves everything that has happened in the story.

Perhaps I had too high hopes after a decade, and had to watch them crashing down. I will say I did enjoy learning a lot more about Solas and his history, and how the Veil came to be in the first place plus the history of the Dwarves, though it was funny to get all the memory pieces before we were even allowed to view them.

I can't say I didn't have fun, it was a decent game, it just didn't really feel like much of a Dragon Age game to me; it may have done better as a spin-off game rather than being attached to the mainline story.

Have you heard of 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 Heavensward, and thrilling Stormblood expansions up to level 70 for free with no restrictions on playtime.

No but seriously there is a reason I have 460+ hours even on free trial.

What can I say about the Pokemon game that I started on? I remember watching a Lets Play before I even had a Nintendo DS and being so enamoured with Giratina's design, and I think I remember actually naming my Starly turned Staraptor after that Lets Player's Staraptor as well. I remember staying up stupidly late to beat Cynthia for the first time, who gave me such a challenge back then, I remember falling in love with Garchomp's design, and the Distortion World mechanics of flipping around, and spending hours on the stupid contests and making poffins for everyone. 10/10 game would love to wipe my memory and play it again.

Childhood memories ... god knows I have all the expansion packs and still have the original disks somewhere ... I tried to play Zoo Tycoon 1, but it never stuck with me quite like Zoo Tycoon 2 did, considering I got easily frustrated with the animal requirements and honestly, it just wasn't as fun for me in an isometric world. In comparison, ZT2 felt like it had a lot more freedom with decorating and personalizing the park and enclosures.

Zoo Tycoon 2 being in 3D and having you take on the role of both a guest and caretaker was super appealing to me as a kid and I still think it's a neat concept now. I do not think about how many hours I spent in the dinosaur enclosures hiding in a nest pretending I was a baby waiting to hatch.

Sometimes it is slow, especially during campaigns where you're waiting for things to happen, or money to gather, or specific things to unlock, so I never really finished the missions. But I've definitely played the crap out of it enough to say I've 'completed' all facets of it.

I hope you know this is ~1.3 million words. I hope you know I read this in 6 days and have zero regrets.

It's very hard to summarize my entire feelings around this whole novel cause there are so many of them, so I have to redirect you to OT3's tumblr post about it, but I'll grab the elevator pitch from their post for easy reading access:

My elevator pitch is this: something with the cosmic-scale goofy video game nonsense and intricate setting comparable to Homestuck in its prime, paired with the deft emotional poignancy and emotionally-driven fights of Mob Psycho 100, topped off with the sort of compassionate and heartwrenching metanarrative of Undertale.

First delve outside of the MXTX danmei books and honestly, I've been having a romp so far with this; truly an enemies to lovers and I'm gleefully kicking my feet in wondering how these two will get together when one side has sowed such a wide gap of distrust for him. The political intrigue is really interesting as well, even if the copious amounts of characters sometimes flies over my head, I do still get a general gist of it.

My slip'n'slide into the Transformers hole (like me and many others apparently); I missed a lot of the callbacks to other TF Shows and comics, but I was enamoured by the heartaching friendship between D-16 and Orion Pax not knowing the outcome of it. So you can imagine it's even more heartwrenching after Knowing everything and indulging further into Transformers media ... 10/10 would rewatch again to have my heart ripped out (MAKE A SECOND ONE!!!).

As someone who loves intrigue, I am hooked in what's happening, and I love the details that were put even into side characters, that they're all memorable in their designs and personalities. Maomao aspec rep icon (even though I know there's the whole romance aspect with Jinshi she's so like ... girl ...). Good story, good character development, funny humour balanced out with seriousness, and characters I adore.

My love and hate fandom for the last decade or so; I got into Bleach when catching the anime late at night, and eventually began reading the manga itself. Hell, it was the fandom that got me into making my first true fandom OC and where I was embroiled in for at least 5-6 years. I love it, but I have many mixed feelings on the characters and story choices (Byakuya should've died, thematically it'd make so much more sense), and I'm still stupidly wounded over Ukitake's stupid death and it's why I'm taking a star off. He deserved SO much better than how his story ended (and the shock I had when they revealed in a later story that he ended up taking over as a judge/executioner of hell ... and that's years after the manga was over).

Anyway, one of the big 3 from the early 2000's and the bane of my existence.