#a vast majority of the dislike posts i've seen so far have been in the vein of “nah man this one's just not for me” or ���too maggot”

[thunderberryz]

Star's Rune Factory 3 Special 1st Playthrough, Part 2: Quality of Life

Hello, everyone! Back at it again with blogging my first run of Rune Factory 3 Special and I have a lot to talk about since my last post.

So I've already beaten the second boss AKA Skelefang and the seasons are just about to change from spring to summer. As far as the cast goes, I've already got some characters that I love, some that I despise, and some who my opinions have shifted over time for better or for worse. Definitely the two that stand out for me are Shara and Gaius. Gaius, had he been a datable bachelor, would have been my first choice among the single boys in this game. I'm one of the fandom's resident Arthur simps, I married Martin during my one playthrough of RF5, and "dwarf blacksmith who loves forging so much he forgets to sell his weapons and falls asleep if he lets go of his hammer" meets all the standards that those two have set as some of the franchise's resident workaholics. (Why does this keep happening? Seriously?)

As for Shara, I'm very well aware of all the hate she got in the past for having been pushed as the game's canon candidate and with what I've seen so far... I absolutely love her. Of the available bachelorettes, her personality is by far the least quirky and most down to earth of the girls, and she is just so sweet and kind that one of the only other girls I do find myself interested in romancing is Sakuya. Sakuya is slightly more quirky, but compared to some of her fellow bachelorettes, her personality is probably the most "normal" outside her capitalist tendencies and lack of cooking skills.

And that is the big thing with RF3's cast for me. While RF4 certainly had its quirkier cast members like Porcoline and Illuminata, there are even more of them in RF3 and most in game days I find myself feeling very overwhelmed because many of the villagers are so out there. Even if I don't actually dislike their personality, there are some characters I talk to very sparingly because they're literally too much for me. Prime examples include Marian, Carmen, Sofia, Sherman, and Carlos. Of those, the one I like most is Carmen, but I still find myself not talking to her that much simply because I can't handle how loud she is, which sucks since she seems nice otherwise. (As an aside, I also like Kuruna, but the second I heard that she and Ondorus were childhood friends, my brain went in Directions because I am a sucker for Childhood Friends to Lovers LMAO)

Speaking of comparisons between RF3 and RF4, I do feel awful. I have a fair number of criticisms of RF3S from a gameplay standpoint, but pretty much all of them relate to missing Quality of Life features that were addressed later on in RF4. Stuff like depositing items in the shipping bin, crafting multiples of the same item, the request system, the lack of a fertilizer bin; RF4 ultimately fixed all those minor yet aggravating problems, so claiming that RF3 is the inferior game just because it's lacking those important QoL features, to me, feels very unfair, even if it is affecting my play experience. RF3S, outside those missing QoL features, plays very similarly to RF4S and has a lot of the same features, and whether the story and cast appeal to you is a matter of personal opinion. Overall, it's a solid game and I would recommend it to people who are curious as to how the older Rune Factory games played!

All that said, the biggest thing that has already killed RF3S for a lot of people is the representation; many people have chosen not to buy RF3S because there is no female protagonist option, no datable bachelors, and no same sex marriage, and you know what? It's a perfectly valid reason. As a straight cis woman, my biggest gripe with RF3S is not being able to play as a girl and I'm pretty sure the only reason I'm able to put up with it is because I'm painfully used to it as someone who grew up in an era where the vast majority of game protagonists were straight men. It does help that Micah, much like Frey/Lest and Alice/Ares, has an actual personality and so I don't need to come up with one for him just to enjoy his story or any of his potential romances. He's just a friendly sheep boy trying to put up with the insanity that is the town of Sharance and I 100% vibe with that.

All right, next area is the windy river place. Unfortunately, I have a lot of skills I need to work on, facilities to upgrade, and items to gather. I'm probably going to be grinding for quite a while...

[veebs-hates-video-games]

And now for a couple more. You know the drill.

I found zero things to like about The Talos Principle. I know it's generally considered pretty good by the vast majority of people, and I have friends who like it, but I gave up on it pretty quickly.

It got off to a great start by showing raw CSS instead of button prompts in the menus, which it deserves an award for because that's a totally new way to fail catastrophically that I've never seen before. The CPU/GPU settings are also completely baffling.

Once I finally got into the game itself it immediately crawled up its own butt with some pseudo-deep nonsense narrated by "Elohim", which like, sure buddy. I knew it was a bad sign when I was searching for something completely unrelated and pulled up a post on r/Jung recommending it. It continues to be the policy of this blog that anyone who takes Jung seriously is not to be taken seriously.

Maybe the puzzles are ok, or I'd think so in a different context? I actively disliked the way they're presented though, and I could tell it was just never going to click with me.

In better news Proverbs is a thing. A reasonably fun one too. A bunch of reviews I've seen try to describe it as a cross between Minesweeper and Picross, but it's actually its own previously existing puzzle type that's been around for a while, most commonly known as Mosaic.

In my experience it's not a particularly hard type of puzzle, but it's a good choice for what they wanted to use it for. If you're a super hardcore puzzle person looking for a challenge you've come to the wrong place, but also you probably also are aware of Mosaic and have your own opinions on it already. On the other hand if you're just looking for something pretty chill that has a good feeling of progression then this might be it.

I expected it to take a lot longer to finish after seeing the RPS review that said they spent like 36 hours on it, but it took me well under a third of that. Somehow even though I fell asleep at one point with the game still running I managed to finish significantly quicker than any of the submitted times on HLTB, and I wasn't even really trying to go fast.

I briefly almost had a moment of "maybe the Gamers were right and video game reviewers really are bad at games", but then I came to my senses and remembered that in this situation I'm basically Mosaics Georg since it's been in my rotation for multiple years of things I do while listening to podcasts to help me focus.

I guess while I'm here I might as well mention that I've also been having an extremely mixed reaction to the first couple hours of Cyberpunk 2077 so far. The world and characters and story are interesting enough so far, I guess, but I've been having a harder time with everything else.

I think I might actually like the gameplay even less than The Witcher 3, which is saying something because I actively dislike most of the gameplay in TW3. I'm also pretty sure the menus and UI are even worse in some ways than the already kind of iffy ones in TW2, in totally new and different ways. Whoever came up with using an analog stick to move a cursor around is my nemesis, and I'm not convinced it solves any problem that wasn't already addressed by just having better organization and layout of menus before. I know you can use the d-pad instead too, but it doesn't feel like the layout was designed with that in mind as the only input you're using.

And then one of the biggest problems I have is a problem I have with a lot of big games like that these days, which is the graphics. Yeah yeah, it's very technically impressive and looks nice if you're into that sort of thing. I also can't parse what's going on visually a lot of the time because it's so busy. My vision kinda sucks in a mostly uncorrectable way, and all these hyperdetailed environments with realistic materials and lighting in a lot of recent games are kind of the bane of my existence.

If the real world looked anything like that I would die several times a day from not being able to tell I'm walking directly into a wood chipper or whatever. Back to less detailed/more stylized stuff for me, I guess.

[madara-fate]

You keep saying the Naruto fandom/Sakira haters aren't misogynistic but really..that's naive (Personally, I as a woman have endured a lot of misogyny from haters but I digress).

Just now, one of the bigger Sakura hater accounts on Twitter blatantly outed himself as misogynistic and continues to tweet misogynistic things.

Like here:

https://twitter.com/DarkKageXL/status/1569766249097482240?t=ggZ6HjFa4FwrH5Y9vOwaNA&s=19

what's sad about this is HOW many people liked this tweet because obviously, due to his content he posted before (hating on Sakura) and how he worded those, he managed to get an audience that supports this way of thinking. Sure, I wouldn't generalize every hater as misogynist but there are a lot who are, otherwise these kind of accounts wouldn't be able to grow so much.

Okay you know what, I'm getting really tired of having to repeat myself on this topic. I have never said that misogyny in the Naruto fandom doesn't exist. However, some people in the Sakura fandom have a serious issue with labelling any and all hate that Sakura receives as misogyny, and it's really damn annoying. It's as if people often just assume that if you don't like Sakura, it must be because you're misogynistic, because that's apparently the only possible explanation as to why someone would dislike her. The main reason for the Sakura hatred, is not because of an ingrained hatred of women. It is because of a hatred and bias against Sakura specifically.

This DarkKage guy has been mentioned so many times to me by people complaining about his comments on Twitter, and yes I get it, the guy's thought processes leave a lot to be desired, but then people go and act like the stupid things he says should be reflective of Sakura haters in general, and that's wrong.

In this post, I argued with someone who claimed that Sakura is hated entirely because of misogyny (while again referencing this DarkKage guy), and while I agreed with one or two of their points, mainly with regards to the misogynistic language they highlighted, the vast majority of what they said was very simple to refute, because time after time, it becomes apparent that many Sakura fans really struggle with differentiating between a hatred of women (which is what misogyny is), and a hatred of Sakura specifically, which is what the majority of their examples are. And the ironic thing is that they were complaining about the apparent rampant misogyny that was plaguing the fandom, and yet they were describing everyone who criticised Sakura as an "incel", which is a far larger example of misandry than any example they gave of misogyny. Furthermore, to describe the Sakura haters as incels also excludes the hordes of Sakura hate that I've seen which was perpetrated and spread around by women. So it's not even as if the vast majority of Sakura hatred is perpetrated by men, because a sizeable portion of it is by women.

I'm not being naïve on the matter, I acknowledge that misogyny does indeed exist in the fandom, not least by that same Twitter user that people have continuously referred me to. However, my point has always been for people to stop labelling any random Sakura criticism as misogyny, because the majority of it has absolutely nothing to do with that. They have an issue with Sakura, not with women.