A Pointless Revelation!

You can’t rewind games.

I’m playing 龍が如く (released as Yakuza in the States) and if you talk to a character twice in a row, like in most games, they say the same thing over and over.

This feature in games is sometimes ridiculed and I myself always prefer when a character can say a few different things. But it never occurred to me until right now that this feature is just like rewinding a movie or flipping back a few pages in a book to reread something for further clarity.

In all cases it is a bit jarring, but sometimes necessary for your enjoyment. Can’t believe I’ve never thought of it this way.

My New Friend

As you can see there is some strange shit going on to my right. That’d be my twitter account. I am totally whoring myself to the digital age. And it is addicting.

PORKCHOP SAMMICHES

Damn, it feels good to eat these. Just like mom…used to make? I don’t actually think my mother ever made porkchop sandwiches for me. At least not with tonkatsu sauce.

Just in case

透かす [すかす, sukasu] (1) to look through, (2) to hold up to the light, (3) to make an opening, to leave space, to space (lines), to prune (trees), (4) to fart without making a sound

Waffle Surprise

I don’t know if it’s the getting caught in the rain while biking the past few days or an interstellar virus, but I feel like a bag of awful. And that’s not a bag of awful waffles. Actually I don’t know how awful a bag of waffles could be.

I’m not looking forward to having to redo my lessons for tomorrow. While I have a lesson that works for my opening class (What’s your name? Bingo!), it only really works with twenty-some people. The biggest class of the school that I’m going to tomorrow is sixteen. Even if I scale the bingo board down to a 4×4 instead of the 5×5 I’m using now, that’s still more than the amount of people in the class. Well, I guess I could put a free block on each one and make up some names that I’ll pretend to be and make the kids ask me questions… Hmm…

Waffle.

Whoops!

I’ve asked practically every time for every ceremony and I was told, nah, suit wasn’t really necessary for elementary. And it was mostly true. Outside of the principal people just wore slightly nicer than work stuff. So I played it a bit risky for the opening ceremony and found my risk to be right. No suit needed. There was the welcoming ceremony for the new first grade students today, so heck that can’t be as big as the OPENING ceremony right? The first ceremony of the year has gotta be bigger eh?

I realized I was wrong when I saw some mothers in kimonos bringing their children to school. And every single teacher in a suit.

Whoops!

Sexy time looks for you.

ワン切り 【ワンぎり; wan’giri】 (n) one mobile telephone ring (used by companies, usually sex-related, to register a phone number on a mobile in the hope people will return the call)

Little Blessings

My soap and shampoo ran out at the same time! Less overall trips! Oh how I am blessed.

I have no idea what’s going on

Today was the opening ceremony for the new school year. This involved a lot of standing around, clapping and me only getting a tenuous grasp of what is going on.

Basically the principal at this one school is leaving to another school, along with some other teachers. The new principal here was the principal at one of my other schools. All the teachers are shuffled around entirely and aside from the fifth grade teachers becoming the sixth grade teachers I see very little rhyme or reason to the changes that actually took place! It’s bad enough that with 9 schools I’m incapable of remembering names of teachers but now “sixth grade male teacher at School X” could very well be replaced with first grade female teacher from another school.

I am going to be so confused this month!

Soma Bringer: The Revised and Final Impressions

I picked a class that wasn’t for me.

I’m getting way too self analytical these days? Anyway, after futzing around a bit in chapter 3 while on a train the other night I said “Fuck this. I’m not having fun.” and started again picking another class. My first attempt was at the Corps class which is basically a paladin. Boring for me in most other games and unsurprisingly boring in Soma Bringer. So I picked a Gunner and gave the game another go.

I flew through the first three chapters easily since I knew what I had to do and was having more fun. Chapters four through six weren’t as painful as my original run through the other chapters but my core issues with the game remain.

There really is too much text in this game. I want to read it all for Japanese practice and just because I hate skipping cutscenes. It was hard. I even enjoyed Xenosaga in all of its bloaty goodness. This was just painful. Perhaps it’s just the mindset aligned with the game-type? Diablo clones are not good places for excessive text. I want to be killing things.

And that brings up the other issue. In agreement with my previous fears the maps of Soma Bringer just got bigger and bigger and the enemy count didn’t increase enough. There were definitely some fun and challenging boss fights. But proceeding from the start of the chapter to the end was definitely a struggle at times. If I ever saw that I was approaching a slightly larger group of enemies I knew most of them would be easily taken out with a few shots.

The AI is unfathomably stupid. I set my healer to be in the back and, well, healing. She spent most of her time being hit in the air as she dared to go too damn close to the enemies. As my class was a ranged attacker I knew someone had to get in the thick of it but that’s why I picked a fighter as my third character. Why my healer couldn’t stop dying I couldn’t discern.

The game does happen to shine and thankfully where it needed to the most. Multiplay. There are some ridiculously difficult hidden bosses within the chapters. Taking them on by your lonesome with the AI is tiring and nearly impossible. Doing this with friends makes it a blast. It’s truly a shame that this game doesn’t have wifi play as getting friends together to play is the biggest challenge I’ve had with the game.

That said, it was a good run if not too wordy. I don’t think I’ll touch the game again unless my friends want to take on some of the bonus dungeons. Soma Bringer does a lot of things right but needs more combat and better design for its maps. I look forward to a sequel.

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