#also I'm not saying the scene was bad!!! my gripes are mostly personal preference

[ofswordsandpens]

while I do like the added dialogue between Sally and Percy in the minotaur scene, namely Sally's speech to Percy telling him to hold fast, I really wish the scene had more of the urgency that it did in the book. Like Grover's heavily injured to the point of incoherency, Sally and Percy literally have to drag him up the hill, and that's when they're overtaken by the minotaur. In the show, having them all come to a grinding standstill and Grover being fully alert like "sorry I know we're being chased by certain death but your mom's human so she can't come :/" was kind of adflksadfjasdf

oh and in the book Percy doesn't immediately pass out. Instead, Percy doesn't let himself until he's hauled Grover over the boundary line and all the way to the big house because he needs help and it's only then does Percy finally collapse. and idk just the imagery of it all -- Percy crying for help, for his mother -- it always stuck with me and I wish they hadn't taken it out.

[justmybookthots]

Chess & Mate

Okay, first of all: This isn't a bad book. I want to preface my review with that, even if 'bad' is a nebulous term. I want to make it clear that at this point, I'm absolving Ali Hazelwood of her sins with Love Hypothesis. While I hated Adam, I loved Jack from Love Theoretically, and I do like Sawyer… to a degree. I think her heroes have evolved slightly since Adam, and now they're kind of at a very acceptable Jack-Sawyer stage.

I'll elaborate on the hero part in a bit. But for now, I also want to make it clear that while I don't love this book anywhere as much as I loved Love Theoretically, I can see a lot of people loving this, and I understand. It really all boils down to personal preference. (Though that… pretty much sums up any kind of book review, so you can ignore this statement, really. But I guess what I'm trying to say is: Love Hypothesis pissed me the fuck off. Its issues were egregious to me. Chess & Mate got on my nerves a bit, but I recognise it was just due to my own weird preferences as a reader.) 

Anyway. Spoilers ahead.

Things I liked:

Sawyer. He's very similar to Jack and if that's the kind of hero Ali likes, I ain't complaining. He knows what he wants; he's mostly straightforward with his feelings and is unabashed about them. Neither is he growly or saying "babe" and all that cringe stuff. He's just… calm, same as Jack. It's very attractive. And ALSO. He is a virgin. I so, so love that? Too bad this was YA so the sex scenes were closed-door, because I felt that would have been a fun dynamic to explore in an adult book. 

I like that for once, Mallory (the heroine) is the one who sleeps around. It's all very sex-positive and I support that immensely. Also her being bi? I 100% am for it. 

I really liked Oz, for most of the book. And Dfne? I think that's how you spell her name. [But I may be wrong and I'm too lazy to check.]

I think all the loose ends were tied up rather conclusively, re: Eaton and Mallory's family.

Now…. The things I did not like. Hoo-boy.

I'm not into the Mary Sue scene. This is my biggest, biggest gripe for this book. Mallory being this good was not to my liking. She was just winning match after match even though she hadn't played in years. She felt unbeatable, and it took a lot of narrative tension out of the story for me. At some point, I was just like: Okay, I get it. You're the best. And Sawyer is also the best. You are both the best, and you two can sit above the plebs in your couple-y thrones. Reading this book felt like I was reading a power fantasy between two people, and while I get that being everyone's cup of tea, it wasn't mine. At some point, it felt like Sawyer was only ever interested in her because she could play as well as (or better than) he did. 

I wished Sawyer hadn't been interested in her from the start. It would have been fun to really lean into the 'enemies' angle for a bit and have her slowly climb her way up to face off against him later. But then again, that's asking for a major rewrite, and that's a whole can of worms I'd rather not open.

But speaking of interest, I was conflicted on the insta-love on Sawyer's part. Him showing up at her house early on in the book and eating dinner with her family was really abrupt and it took me aback. They went from almost no interaction save for her beating him at the first match and the encounter at the pool to… this? Or maybe there were more encounters that I can't recall off the top of my head now, but it just felt too soon for me.

Oh gosh. Her family. Her mom was fine, but her sisters, especially Sabrina? I was being driven nuts. When Sabrina called Mallory egotistical, I was like: wtf? Mallory was practically slaving her ass off to support her family and she made so many sacrifices for them. I get that that was the point—Mallory was clinging to martyrdom and refusing to let herself need them and it upset them. But being antagonistic to Mallory was NOT the answer. Her martyrdom stemmed from a place of self-loathing and trauma. I hated how everyone at the end of the book was yelling at Mallory to get her head out of her ass. Maybe this wake-up call works in books/fiction, or maybe it works for some people, but it's not ideal. It's callous and cruel. I approved only of how Mallory's mother handled it: she very calmly talked things out with her. 

Mallory had EVERY right to be angry with Sawyer. I hated how everyone, including Eaton, fed this narrative that Mallory was completely in the wrong for her blow-up at him and how everything he did was right for her. If a man I was developing a romantic relationship with was paying for my fellowship/my fucking SALARY all along and omitted telling me (don't give me the bullshit about "you could have just asked"—omission is still lying), I would be furious. This is crucial information that should have been voluntarily shared sooner. Even if he came from a good place, it doesn't make it okay to hide this imbalance of power from me.

I also want to say that the bad guys are cartoonishly bad. Like you know right away who the 'villain' of the book was going to be, and it felt rather juvenile how unapologetically dickish he was. There wasn't a lot of nuance to it, but eh. Whatever.

The PDA between Sawyer and Mallory (her sitting between his thighs and him… biting her earlobe? I… Okay) while they played chess with his friends was… not for me. I had the same complaint with a hauntingly similar scene in Love Theoretically. I get it: this type of thing is just not my cuppa, but Ali loves it.

All in all, while it sounds like I'm complaining a lot, I don't hate this book. I just don't really love it. Or… like it very, very much. But it had its cute moments, so it's, well, not that bad? I think?

- 13 Nov 2023

[hopeymchope]

Final Fantasy VII 8/27/24 Update: FINAL Edition

I haven't updated in a while both because (1) the surgery I had and (2) because I just kinda lost that loving feeling. At a certain point, I was playing this game just to finish it, because I was no longer enjoying the actual GAMEPLAY and was left to use the built-in cheeses of the Switch port to plow through it. And then, over time... I started not being very happy with the storytelling, either.

Yeah. This is a downer of a final entry on this little game log. Sorry.

It's finished now. I beat the game. But as much as I gained love and appreciation for the world and its characters, the gameplay and its core story left me mostly with complaints, and I feel... guilty about that.

I'll start with gameplay:

I've never been a big fan of random battles. I kind of excuse it in old Pokemon games where you can at least see the patches of tall grass on the world, but I much prefer seeing the enemies on the screen and then colliding with them before a turn-based battle starts — like in Earthbound, for example. The PSP remake of the first Lunar did this, too—they made it so you see the enemies visibly and have to come into contact with them before a right breaks out. Even if you can't possibly outrun or avoid them, I like knowing they're coming and expecting that clash. Jump-scaring me randomly with a battle when I don't see it coming and I'm just trying to get some shit done on what looks like a wide-open area? Fuck all that, I say. So I was always going to struggle with the fact that older Final Fantasy games (and MOST older JRPGs, honestly) revel in that stuff.

But another thing I don't like is when an RPG starts to focus too heavily on status conditions that require various items or magics to cure. So you have to constantly stop your turn-based fight to manage conditions or something, and you probably don't have enough items to make a whole party immune, but just one person who gets put Asleep or made Small or turned into a Frog can fuck up your whole fight, so now you gotta spend turns/moves curing them, and while you do that then the other characters try to cure them the bad guys can do it to MORE characters, and OH GOD THIS IS AN ENDLESS CYCLE. So fucking annoying. FF7 adored making most of the climactic boss fights HEAVY on this shit. And I hated that.

Now, the story:

What carried me through everything was that I liked getting to know these characters. Yet even in that regard, by the climax of the game, I was... disappointed? Some plot points are brought up to justify something and then just ignored immediately after, despite the fact that it seems like characters should be RUSHING to take care of those issues. Some characters the team never get any expansion via side quests and thus remain mysterious ciphers. Or maybe I missed some optional side quests that would've told me something, ANYTHING about wtf was going on with them? Or maybe I'll get my questions answered in future remakes/spinoffs? Not that they could've known those were coming when they made FF7 to begin with...

The best thing about the story's last third has got to be the way the crew splits up before the final mission, and we get that excellent scene with Cloud and Tifa on the mountain. It's also one of my biggest gripes. I was both (a) expecting and (b) excited to see every other character's motivations and trips home before they march into a final battle against certain death. But... the game didn't care as much as I did, I guess. So we just get told they went and did those important character-building, emotional scenes off-screen somewhere, and we never learn what they were. Shit. Ok.

This is a deeply beloved game, so nobody wants me to sit here and bitch for ages. That's just a way to earn hatred from EVERYONE ALIVE WHO PLAYED THIS IN THE '90s. And with that in mind, I'm gonna skimp on further details. But my overall feeling at the end was "Hrm. Guess you had to be there." Even so, I'm still glad I took the trip to know these people and get the context on them/their world.

The ending itself was also pretty weird and unsatisfying, imo. But then I promptly watched Advent Children Complete, and I felt much happier for it. So... thumbs up on that.

Sorry for the downer wrap-up to this little series. Sorry to disappoint everyone who wanted to see me love this. But now I'm really, REALLY hopeful that they can take this baseline and really kick things up to another level in the Remake trilogy. And I'm still gonna play Crisis Core, too.

Guess what video game I just started playing for the first time?

Yeah, this is some long-overdue Gamer Homework(TM). Definitely one of those titles that it feels like you have to be familiar with if you're gonna claim you're big into the hobby.

So my Gamer ID Card has been in danger of revocation for many years now. :P