#AND HONESTLY. i think its going to be better than mea at least writing wise. like i know patrick weekes is a good writing.

[arlathen]

i said this about starfield and then ate my words when it was unplayably boring so maybe im jinxing it but

i hope dragon age dread wolf is good and even if it is not i will still play it.

[rigelmejo]

Another April Update Babey!

Upside: like March, I’ve been pretty motivated this month.

Downside: I wanna do Everything. I do NOT have time for everything.

A list of stuff I’m currently doing:

Going through Basic Chinese Radicals (Zhang Peng Peng textbook series) - its only 150 pages, but incredibly dense I did like 30 pages yesterday. Its excellent for writing practice as its a WORKBOOK, and all the radicals and example hanzi in it I should fucking know how to write T-T I don’t know how long this will take but I put it off long enough and its my SHORTEST chinese ‘writing focused’ book so I should use it. Its for the BASICS i should be past this already! But i’m not lol so I’m doing it.

Transcribing the pages in Japanese in 30 Hours with actual japanese under the romaji - good for picking up actual spellings of new words (and picking up the new words), grammar refresher, and I’m finally reading this book through (since the focus on transcribing is helping me be less perfectionist about memorizing everything before moving on). I’m about 1/4 through the book - it took a day. So I may well be done by next week. (Can you tell I’ve been in a really ‘writing practice’ mood lately? I think I just want to engage my touch senses more lately... might also be why active video games are easier for me to focus on, lots of actively affecting/moving things and doing something with my hands). 

Going through  Read and Write Chinese : A Simplified Guide to the Chinese Characters by Rita Mei-Wah Choy and writing the hanzi and mnemonics to remember them - this is actually going to be a very long process as the book has 3300ish characters. Also this book is literally JUST a reference - hanzi, pinyin, stroke order. Why am I doing this? Who knows man. I am writing out the hanzi like 20 times and making up my own mnemonic to remember the pronunciation (and meaning if I don’t already know it). Basically I just want to solidify my knowledge of the hanzi I DO vaguely recognize/partly know. And hanzi knowledge is basically my biggest issue in reading right now - running into new words with hanzi I don’t know, or running into hanzi I do know and forgetting how to properly pronounce them. 

Reading Guardian - I wanna finish this book so bad, like 90% of the rest of everything I’m doing in chinese right now is primarily an attempt for me to INCREASE reading speed somehow so I can read this easier. Also it is THE goal. The first goal I had in chinese, the BIG goal, the goal that eventually led me to my other goals. I want to do it. I’m currently well within the capability of doing it! So procrastinating has no excuse! Its just god it takes me 20-30 minutes to read a 5 page chapter and I am in agony over how long its taking. 

Reading hanshe - its going fine. Ultimately while i LOVE reading it, I don’t know if I should drop it because it is eating up time I could dedicate to other things - primarily Guardian at present. But at the same time I really want to finish it, and enjoy it. I would like to move onto extensive reading after this story for a while though (so no reading in Pleco for a while - I have print books I want to get through).

Nukemarine’s memrise courses - this is actualy going great. Not much to say except to myself: STOP procrastinating by trying to be a ‘prepared perfectionist’. If you can simply brute force the courses? Then do it. While reading Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide with it is ideal, as is reading the Memrise Website version (versus the app) which has all the course details, simply doing it is better than STOPPING to ‘prepare’ if you never actually are satisfied with enough preparation! JUST KEEP DOING IT MEJO I AM BEGGING. (Like... I literally was brute forcing the Tae Kim Grammar Guide portions and it went fine. Was it ideal? no. But I was actually studying versus just stopping out of fear of imperfection).

A list of stuff I WANNA do (not even like in a month, as in I wanna do it today/this month) ToT. Why am I listing it? Because knowing me, even if I have no time, I might do one of these things:

Read through Japanese in 30 Hours - this has potential to happen, as I’m transcribing the book into japanese instead of romaji and like 1/5 through already so like... good chance I’ll just happen to read it as I transcribe. I’ve felt compelled to do this so I might actually. Also! This book, ultimately, is for beginners, so if I keep making progress in the study materials I want to, idk how long this book will be relevant. What I’m trying to use to prevent procrastination: the book’s falling apart so I don’t need to feel bad for transcribing in it, its beginner material and a little out of date so I really should not feel bad if I just read through it without memorizing/re-reading until I’ve perfected a section!

FINISH HANSHE - I really want one book DONE, read and FINISHED. It being digital means a good chance I could do it. I just would... really like 1 book done, to say that I’ve read a full story, AND so as I’m going through Guardian I don’t have another BIG story I’m reading at the same time. I have a lot of books I plan to read/extensively read and they both go slower when I’m juggling multiple. 

Read Alan Hoenig’s Chinese Characters - I SHOULD have already done this. In fact I want to do this ASAP, and it would be great in combo with Rita’s book - because Alan Hoenig’s book has premade mnemonics to help me with memory and SIMPLIFED characters (Rita’s has traditional), but Rita’s book has stroke order and MORE hanzi. However both books are very dense reference materials. I want to read Alan Hoenig’s book. Do I have time? Well no because reference books take me like an hour to get through 5-10 pages lol. But will I read it anyway? Maybe...

Read the Little Prince, or Butterfly Lovers, or Journey to the Center of the Earth, or one of my Sinosplice graded readers - basically I sort of want to read something that is ACTUALLY a 98%-ish comprehension material for me. I’ve been doing some extensive reading, but by artificially lowering the difficulty by reading the english translation first. And I think if I read something ACTUALLY graded lower to level, I could work on improving my reading speed. Also it could be nice to FINISH those stories since I never did. However - that would be adding Yet Another story to the list of things I’m reading ;-;. I do sort of want to do this anyway though. You have no idea how much the biggest thing I wanna do right now is solidify pronunciation/recognition of hanzi I Already Vaguely Know, and improve reading speed. Both of those would make reading So much fucking easier. 

Read Le Francais Par Le Method Nature, recording audio for each chapter myself - while yes the second part could be optional, future me and any (truly lost) learner would probably appreciate an audiobook form of it. even if its pronounced bad, that’s more than currently exists (which is nothing at all audio wise). The textbook has a pronunciation guide under every word, but it would be nice to hear/say it out loud. Also I’ve been meaing to Finish the book for ages - it is over 1000 pages its a BEAST. But theoretically it puts you solidly into B1 or B2 by learning purely through graded comprehensible input that increases with your comprehension level. I am so in the mood to do it right now. I don’t have time. I do not have a solid reason to need my french better right now. But dang do I miss that book ToT

Things I kind of think I should want to do but also have had 0 motivation for:

**Finish reading Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide - I may not do this. Like I “want to do this” in the sense I feel a need. Its important, useful, will help. But actual “Random urge to do”? I do not have. Every time I read it I find myself doing my awful habit of wanting to reread from the very first section again, over and over. Wanting to reread each chapter multiple times and memorize, wanting to not move on to new more challenging material. I very easily stall ever studying new material when I get like this ;-;

**Listening-Reading Guardian - I literally tried a week ago. I got mad the english translation oversimplified so many sentences to the point lots did not match up to the audio, and gave up within a couple pages. Also this activity is time consuming. I’m probably going to put it off for later because honestly? As long as ONLY reading Guardian is an option - as in I can do it and skip the audio - I will tend to JUST read. Until the audio is the only new aspect, I’m likely to keep trying to read rather than listen-read. 

Thankfully, there’s some core stuff I’m managing to stick to doing:

Reading Chinese regularly

Going through the Nukemarine memrise LLJ courses

Who knows if I will stick to any of the rest. But at least I’m making solid Forward progress in each language in specific areas lol.

[meggannn]

andromeda review

I finished the game Monday night so I’ve had a few days to think over my feelings. No major plot spoilers in this post but putting behind a cut anyway.

I want to rip the bandaid off, so I’ll get the bad news out of the way first.

THE BAD

It’s clear what influence Frostbite -- and by extension EA -- has had on Andromeda, and it’s not always good. It’s a big world, which was kind of what they signed on for by setting the stage in a new galaxy: if it wasn’t big, people would complain we never got to “really see” Andromeda. So they made it big and pushed the exploration thing. It’s not as big as Inquisition, thank god, with not nearly so many pointless fetch quests, but there are still enough sidequests to deter the average player and don’t really move the plot further. I’m actually the kind of dedicated idiot who actually doesn’t mind collecting pointless shit across seventeen maps if it actually gives me more information about the lore or characters, but when it just comes with XP and a check mark, it irritates the living heck out of me. Andromeda has a fair amount of both types.

In the long run, this is a very minor complaint, more about what Bioware doesn’t put in the game than what they do, but I was let down in the lack of… creativity? In the new Andromeda species. After finishing the game however, for plot reasons, I can see why there are several reasons why they would keep the bipedal humanoid alien design, but it’s still a little disappointing. Lore-wise, I think traveling to a new galaxy would be the perfect stage to design more mind-bending aliens like the Leviathans or rachni (the Reapers controlled the direction organic life evolved in the Milky Way, but not Andromeda, right?). Aliens with different types of societies! Aliens that are bigger or smaller in scale than us! Aliens that have different ideas of the word ‘intelligence’! And we got only two sentient species, one of which actually has some form of settled home in Andromeda, the other of which we try to slaughter when we’re within fifty meters of each other.

For people who have played the original trilogy, it becomes kind of obvious they’re retreading familiar ground, and sometimes it gets predictable. Not just with their themes -- which I expect -- but their plot twists. I’ll avoid spoiling too much. There are also moments it feels as though they’re trying to ‘top’ the trauma Shepard went through in the original series by putting Ryder through worse, so much so that when Ryder’s in serious danger it feels a bit like they’re crying wolf. They somehow managed to do this without making Ryder feel like ‘the new Shepard’ -- which is a good thing -- but still, it’s a bit odd and disconnecting. It’s like you can see the talks at the tables when the creative director said “and then we’ll do THIS” and nobody considered if it was, um, logical.

With the writing, there was occasionally a lot of -- for lack of a better phrase -- telling and not showing, or in some other cases, stretching the limits of lore believability just to create conflict for the player to fight. I tend to hate when people use “show don’t tell” as a criticism because I think they’re usually overlooking something, but this is a common theme with BW games and in Andromeda it happens pretty consistently. We are constantly told that the angara are always “free” with their feelings and rarely if ever hide their emotions from the world, yet aside from Jaal’s consistent emotional vulnerability (who I thought was great btw), angara mostly tend to speak and talk and walk exactly like us. Having a conversation with an angaran NPC felt exactly like an asari or human NPC, except, you know, in how they looked.

((MILD PLOT SPOILERS: If you’ve reached Aya you’re probably fine to read)) I’m obviously relieved Bioware didn’t go in the colonization direction -- something I didn’t want to have to worry about the first place -- but instead there’s an undeniable white savior (or “human savior”) theme instead. (It became especially prominent later in the game.) This is difficult to document exactly because it’s not as explicit as other classic examples -- in MEA, Jaal has a large presence and is actively involved in protecting and saving his people; the Initiative/Ryder has to work their ass off to prove their intentions are peaceful and even then the angara are portrayed to rightfully still be skeptical -- but at the end of the day, the angara are a POC coded culture and ~only a stranger can save them~. The angara have also become Mass Effect’s elven equivalent from Dragon Age, in terms of how much and how often the story throws them into the mud. At least unlike the elves, they don’t argue that it’s the angara’s fault, but after a while it feels like slow and cruel torture of a native species that’s already been through hell.

The Chosen One narrative is how Bioware operates, I get it. But I’m getting tired of people treating the Pathfinder/Inquisitor like a hero-in-the-making before they have the chance to prove they’re even a person. (Sorry to keep bringing DA2 up, but this is why I liked Hawke so much -- you worked to Championship from the ground up, and everyone knew it.) What is so freaking special about the symbol of Pathfinders that makes everyone flock to you when you first step onto the Nexus? Did the Initiative really pin all their hopes on scouting landscapes and settling colonies in hostile or extreme environments on the shoulders of four people?

The disappointing LGBT romances are already well-documented, but I have to give a particular call-out to how they handled the only mlm’s storyline, because it was terrible. (It’s honestly astounding how it passed the desks of multiple people and nobody thought to say hey, maybe this is offensive?)

After watching Jaal’s romance… I’m still not convinced aliens should ever be straight in any circumstance, but I don’t think just a patch would solve this one -- I think Jaal’s romance employs a lot of you’re-the-girl-of-my-dreams tropes that were meant to specifically appeal to women, so swapping Sara for Scott in this case might feel lazy or contrived. Liam’s romance, though -- which I LOVED and I highly recommend people watch if they have a few minutes on Youtube -- is completely free of any sort of gender stereotypical tropes and would work just as well with any Ryder.

Okay now onto the good stuff, which was fortunately most of it.

THE GOOD

Despite all of the above, I really, genuinely, enjoyed this game and think both old and new Mass Effect players would enjoy it. There are some growing pains -- Ryder asks a few dumb questions for exposition that most ME fans know by heart and other times an NPC comments on this or that lore reference that new people wouldn’t understand in the slightest, but it doesn’t ruin the experience. I finished at around 75 hours and 97% completion with most of the remaining activities the ‘no lore included’ fetch quests I was complaining about earlier. And despite my whining about the sidequests, I actually did genuinely like them, for the most part. They gave me more information about each of the worlds and how people live there, often because the same people would give me multiple quests, or reference each other, so the locations felt like real places that people lived in.

The companions and their relationships -- including romances -- are really good. Like, not to call it leagues better than Inquisition, because Inquisition had great companions, but unlike the Inquisitor I actually felt like Ryder had a place on the ship. I knew what their job was, sure, but I also know who they were when they interacted with people, even allowing for the freedom of player choice. The Initiative isn’t military, and neither is your ship, though plenty of the squad have professional firearms and crisis training, which is a great shift from Shepard and the Normandy -- it comes with more casual banter, but it also has its downsides, because there will be fights on your ship between people, because many of them are not professionals, just highly skilled expertises, and they aren’t used to working with others. It sucks because you have to mediate the arguments, but it’s also realistic.

The animation is fine, and yeah the CC sucks and I wish it were better, but it’s hardly the end of the world. Mass Effect always did better with aliens than it did with humans, so it’s hardly a surprise, and personally I think if people are going to throw a fit over their PC not having the right kind of eyebrows or a glitch where a character holds a gun backwards that happens once in a 70+ hour game, and that ruins the entire experience for them… they might want to pick another hobby.

I’ve seen people complaining that the writing is shit, and it’s true that occasionally I’ll hear a cheesy line and think a fifteen year old could’ve done better, but the largest majority of the time, I wonder what those complaints were smoking. The writing is great. I feel like these are all real people -- and I especially feel Ryder is a real person, a real sister/brother, a real twenty-something thrown into a million problems they’re unequipped to handle.

I was surprised to actually be… impressed by the way they handle angaran relations. The white savior thing is still true and will always be true, but I appreciate that Ryder has to work their ass off to prove they’re trustworthy, and even then, the angara that still openly distrust aliens aren’t wrong for it, and Ryder has to respect that or risk their respect. They’re wary, and they have every right to be, and the story doesn’t punish them for it. (Even the Roekaar are slightly sympathetic in a way, because a majority of them are fighting because they’re scared.)

Open world games are usually something I dread, but I didn’t mind the open landscapes for the most part, because the Mako -- I mean Nomad -- gets you around pretty fast, you’ve got banter to listen to in the meantime, and the upgrades really helped whenever the terrain became challenging. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s really too much, but for the most part, I honestly didn’t mind, and I was surprised I didn’t.

The journal prioritization system reminds me of DA2 in a good way; compared to previous ME games, and even Inquisition, MEA makes it a lot easier to tell which quests are worth doing/plot relevant, and which would just amount to my dicking around in the wilderness for XP or loot.

The combat is excellent -- not to rag on the original series’ system because there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, but I can definitely see major improvements in creativity and flexibility. It’s fluid, much more mobile, and the jumpjets let you get so much more creative. Letting people mix and match powers is a little far-fetched, but you can handwave a lot of with SAM’s profile implant, so I don’t really mind. The only irritating thing is that you’re limited to three powers at once, but since you have about a million powers available to you in the first place and can equip four favorite profiles at once, it seems a fair trade. (I’ve found a way around this anyway -- instead of bringing up the HUD and going to favorites, if you pause the game in the middle of combat, you can fool around with your skills AND change profiles and resume combat with no cooldown.)

It felt like ME1 in all of the best ways. Like I mentioned above, it’s true they’re sort of treading familiar ground in their themes and plot twists, but there were certain parts of the final mission in particular were most definitely purposeful references to/love letters to the original trilogy. It makes it feel like the start of a new journey; I told a friend when I finished that I felt exactly like I had when I finished ME1 for the first time, excited and scared and pumped to start playing sequel.

My overall experience was a great one; I’m planning on starting my second playthrough as soon as I can, probably tomorrow. It was familiar to old fans who loved ME1 for its newness and strangeness, it’s friendly to new players, and I think it’ll be remembered strongly in the future if it is the beginning of a new series like I expect it to be. (LBR, if it isn’t “part one” of a new story...... it makes no sense. It’s practically screaming for more.)