Just finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Starting Trails of Cold Steel IV. Youtube recommends this video.
Clearly, the algorithm has a sense of humor…

Playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and maybe I'm showing my age, but every time the main character speaks, I just hear Wakko from Animaniacs.

Krillin was incredibly strong for a human, but gets totally power-scaled by being around Goku and the absolute monsters he seems to attract.
That’s what kinda what it feels like to be a Trails protagonist.

I feel like there’s a bit of survivorship bias to be explored here. “People stopped playing this popular game after a month because there’s not enough friction.” Ok, sure. But there’s a ton of games that nobody talks about, because the friction made people quit after the first day.

As much as I want to enjoy Harvestella, I feel like I would have completed it a long time ago, if not for the constant warping out of dungeons because it was past my bedtime…

Was hoping to start Atelier Yumia when I finish Cold Steel II, but the demo experience was rough. Hopefully they can optimize it a bit over the next few weeks.

Been thinking a lot about how a game that costs $100m to make needs to sell 2m copies just to break even. ($70 minus 30% platform take, roughly $50 per copy.) With AAA games costing multi-$100m, and GaaS basically dominating the spend rate, I don’t see how that’s sustainable.

Trails of Cold Steel 1 is in the books; about 8 weeks to clear, 90-ish hours.
Liked that they’ve been steadily building up the geopolitical stakes from previous games.
I did miss the stalwart presence of the Bracers, though.

Not in any specific order, here’s by video game backlog/wishlist. Going into 2025, I’m probably only going to be able to clear 6-8 of these, but I am looking forward to spending time with some of the action-based ones after most of 2024 was working through the Trails series.

Sold the PS5 to MemeStop. Honestly a little sad considering what I had to do to get it back in the day, but it was just collecting dust at this point.

I don’t have strong feelings either way about the combat system. The main thing that I want for the next game is for it to be playable on the Switch-successor and Steamdeck, preferably day one.

For the Algorithm, some things that I currently like:
🎮 Final Fantasy
🎮 Trails/Kiseki
🎧 Garnet Crow
🎧 Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy
📖 86 Eighty-six
📖 Frieren
📖 Ascendence of a Bookworm

Finished Trails to Azure last month, and have been feeling kind of burnt out on Turn-based after pretty much mainlining Kiseki from March.
Been palate cleansing with a bit of COD and lots and lots of reading. I’ll get around to Cold Steel eventually…

Finished reading "Apothecary Diaries" Volume 1 not long ago, and it was an absolute joy from a translation standpoint. Usually, I can still "hear" the Japanese in a lot of LN translations. "Apothecary Diaries" just flows in a way that the English language was meant to, if that makes any sense.