#i started a new botw run and my goal is to finish that run (all temples and beasts not korok seeds) before totk comes out

[transgaysex]

i finished making my flash cards it took 30 minutes.

[maryellencarter]

have started a new playthrough of breath of the wild with the intention of practicing the combat techniques, which i am quite bad at. (look, shield surfing and flurry rushes both require using three of the control inputs at once, i know i have ten fingers but i was never very good at playing chords on the piano either)

i don't know how far i'll get on any of these goals, but i'm also sort of vaguely considering:

* 100% run? have never finished one. there's at least one korok (near the akkala tech lab, uphill boulder golf with a lynel in the middle of the course) that i'm genuinely just not sure i can complete. i want to do this part glitchless if at all, so no seed duping allowed.

* clear all enemies no blood moon run? this is technically possible, although the timing to get the blood moon shrine to spawn without actually respawning enemies is quite tricky. there's a save-reload exploit that lets you delay the blood moon for a full cycle at a time, which would be pretty necessary for some of the night quests to be completable. my main interest in trying this is to force me to actually fight more enemies (and therefore get better at the combat) rather than rely totally on sneaking around and avoiding them. also to make weapons rarer and therefore more valuable/exciting to find, because in a normal playthrough i usually get overloaded on high tier weapons pretty quickly, especially once i get woodland tower with the respawning royal claymore. it's not actually possible to completely clear the map, because there will always be random spawns, like nighttime stalkoblins, or yiga after you defeat master kohga, but i feel like it'd be pretty entertaining to just be waltzing around past enemy camps you cleared and having them continue to have been cleared.

* all chests run? this would not be a true 100% objective because i have no interest at all in the glitching required to get "impossible" chests. perhaps "poke my nose into every nook and cranny" run would be more accurate -- there are so many tiny hidden things in BotW that even people who've spent thousands of hours in the game have never seen. this kind of goes hand in hand with the no blood moon run, because i'll definitely run out of hero's path time long before i finish any such playthrough, so the main way to tell if i've already been somewhere (other than my own memory, which *is* pretty good for BotW locations because the geology is so realistic it feels like an actual landscape and sticks in my memory the same way) will be if i already killed off the enemies there.

* no guides run. at least until like 99% completion or so. i've been playing pokemon violet with a collectibles map constantly open, which is about the only way i can enjoy that game because the geology/geography is just impossible for me, and i have played BotW the same way on other saves, but... hyrule feels, idk, homey enough? it already lives in my bones enough that i can, and want to, run around it like a real place and get to know every corner. like i did with my childhood hometown, and have not had the spoons to do irl since. i'll definitely make a great deal of use of the sheikah sensor (i've done all shrines before -- on the switch lite, which is a *trip* for motion controls shrines) and any other detection things like the korok mask, any ingame method i'm granted to find the collectibles.

* no amiibo run? this is more practicality because i left my botw amiibos at leia's. but also they always feel a little game-breaky, not even so much with the exclusive drops as just with the extra resources you get early -- i don't even remember most of the places you can find safflina in the game, just because i always get so much from zelda amiibos if i'm scanning them daily, for instance.

i'm playing on my switch lite again because the regular size switch really kills my hands in handheld mode. my beat-the-game save is also on the switch lite and i didn't want to overwrite it so i made a secondary profile. so far i have done the magnesis shrine (failed deeply at using the metal boxes in the shrine to bop the guardian on the head, which will kill it if you do it right but you have to either use motion controls to fling it down or get the guardian to stand under the box while you drop it from a great height) and almost shot king rhoam for a squirrel because he was wandering around in the forest (as the old hermit, of course) and i didn't know he could spawn there if you dick around long enough before completing the plateau. so i'm already discovering things! ^_^

(the main issue with attempting a no blood moon run is that i am absent minded and usually fail to notice it's a blood moon night until it drops the cutscene on me. that will probably be the major obstacle there. i don't expect to run completely out of weapons -- at minimum i can always get more yiga gear, champion gear, and once i have the master sword it recharges. i've never attempted trial of the sword, idk if i will? certainly not until i'm much more confident with my combat techniques)

one of my favorite things about playing video games is that there's always an intended way for you to solve whatever puzzle is presented to you. in games where the intended way is the only possible way, i get pretty frustrated, because i do not have the 30+ years of gaming history knowledge that most games assume -- i got my first controller in 2021 (for PC, so as to decide if i even wanted to get my first console, the switch, which i also did in 2021). but botw is so committed to the open-world creativity thing that there are usually a bunch of different ways to solve the puzzles -- for instance, there are many "stand on this switch and the door opens, now find something to put on the switch and hold it down so you can go through the door" puzzles, and there's always something provided like a barrel or a chest to put on the switch, but on many of them you can also use the stasis rune or 1-3 campfires (which are weirdly heavy) to hold the switch down. so it feels... idk how to articulate this... when i know i *can* just use stasis or a campfire, it's more fun and less frustrating to try to figure out what the game devs were thinking, what the intended method is and especially how they signposted it. (i have watched so many botw streams just trying to get a feel for how the devs handle signposting, because i don't have much of that assumed gaming background -- mainly mass effect trilogy, which handled signposting and loot placement extremely differently in each game -- and i'm not naturally very observant. leia says i'm high INT/low WIS, and that definitely applies to my irl perception score too :P another reason to try for an all chests type of run. getting in the habit of Perceiving things more)

(mass effect 1 is why i even bought botw though. i absolutely love the open world aspects of dicking around on the uncharted planets, except when i trip over thresher maws, so i was like "people are calling this the best open world game ever? i will Investigate" and they were correct)

(also i am very impressed that moldugas are not thresher maws. so damn many things copy dune and have their desert sand burrowing giant enemy be sandworms, complete with the blue tongues, which i always think of as thresher maws because i encountered those way before dune. moldugas are completely unlike thresher maws except for the burrowing and popping up at you. i genuinely can't figure out if there's any rl critter they're supposed to resemble, but by god they're not fucking sandworms)

[hashirun]

Life lately

Last day of registration sa Pinoy Fitness Sub1 10K Challenge last October 15, di na ako nag-register kasi sunod-sunod ang mga ganap at lakad on the weekend of the event. I feel a bit sad about not being able to join but since right now my ultimate goal is to complete a marathon, I decided that it's fine to miss other events leading up to my marathon event in February next year.

So yep, currently training for The Bull Runner Dream Marathon. Two weeks into my marathon training program, I've already ascertained that I can run 10kms in under an hour so I was fairly confident that if I decided to join the Sub1 10K Challenge I'd be able to complete it. No point regretting missing the event, for the next 5 months I should be focusing on building my mileage for the marathon.

Anyway despite getting back to running form I still feel unwell overall. This started when I came down with a fever last month. Even after recovering from my fever I've always felt so weak and tired ever since. Also I've been suffering from some skin condition for two weeks now - I developed rashes on my neck, arms, and body (good thing wala sa mukha huhu). Some days they look like they're finally going away but most days they're just these red, angry presence that's driving me insane.

My family and friends suggested that stress probably caused me to get sick (the fever and fatigue and rashes) and I'm inclined to agree. That said, I know I still need to go see a doctor so that I can be diagnosed correctly. I just want to feel well again.

I finally finished the main mission in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which was to defeat Calamity Ganon. I'm glad I completed the other main tasks prior which were to defeat and free the Divine Beasts and to retrieve all of Link's Memories. Because of this, I got support defeating Ganon on my first try and more importantly I was able to watch the game's "true ending" aaaaaaaahhhh I can't get over it. So much so that I went back and fought Ganon three more times hahaha. I've also been consuming a lot of BOTW content on Youtube dammit I totally ship Link and Zelda.

I wish they would adapt BOTW into a movie. Studio Ghibli please? :<

I'm glad Spy x Family is releasing new episodes again.

This morning, instead of starting my day with coffee, I decided to do some chores first before drinking coffee. I thought I needed a slight shift in perspective. Dati kasi di ako makapag trabaho pag walang kape. I think these days nagiging excuse ko na lang sya para wag muna kumilos. So I decided to make coffee my reward for being productive. Same with playing Zelda. Same with watching anime or reading manga.

Aside from deciding to have coffee only after doing something productive, I really really need to decide what I want or need to do with my life.

[tnc-n3cl]

Fanfic asks for the new year!

Do you have a word-count goal for the upcoming year?

Do you anticipate writing for a new fandom this year? Which one?

Which WIP is first on your list to complete this year? Will you post a snippet?

Do you have a word-count goal for the upcoming year?No. I don't really worry about word-counts. Although, setting a goal might help motivate me some...

Do you anticipate writing for a new fandom this year? Which one?

Given that I'm going to be playing a bunch of Final Fantasy until say late March into April, it is entirely likely that I'm going to end up writing that "Untitled Final Fantasy Fic Idea" at some point.

Honestly, I'm kinda surprised my binge watching of the Castlevania anime back in October didn't make me full on spiral into it. I had/have ideas but they kinda just petered out after a month or two.

Which WIP is first on your list to complete this year? Will you post a snippet?

I'm torn between The Tale of the Realm Walker and Shifting Tides of Fate. However, given that I started TTotRW and never finished it a couple years ago now, I think I'm going to try to focus more on that one. (Really I just need to write the final chapter then do some heavy editing to get it in line with my current plans.)I'll post a snippet of The Tale of the Realm Walker below the cut. This is a story set 20 years after the events of Wind Waker and focuses heavily on the Rito and Twili (through Ildia, daughter of the Hero of Twilight (aka Link) and Midna).

[I'm skipping the very long description of Rinal, the primary Rito character, but he looks a lot like Revali, but with sapphire blue eyes, rust-colored feathers, a single braided ponytail with blue ribbons and yellow beads, and he uses a spear. Possibly a bit taller too... Clothes are like WW-Rito clothes but with leather breastplates. I'm hybridizing the BotW and WW Rito styles, so BotW but their arms transform into wings and vice versa. His wingmen are standard russet plumed Rito but with red eyes like in WW.] [Side note: Kass is the narrator. Originally the story bounced between past and present as Revali's mother read it to him when he was ten. Those Revali focused segments will end up in The Long Nightmare and possibly in The Azure Phoenix.]

As Rinal and his wingmen were flying high above the island, they saw a mysterious woman with a strange, skirisha (ski-ri-sha), or ultraviolet, aura around her body standing near the sign warning people to be careful around the bomb fruits.  The docks that had been built nearby were empty however and there were no ships in sight for miles. 

“Stay right there!” Rinal yelled to the woman before his group swooped down.   

Rinal and his wingmen landed around her in a triangular formation, with Rinal in front of her and his wingmen behind her.  They changed their wings back into arms and Rinal’s two wingmen drew their Heron Spears and pointed them at her as he walked up to talk to her. 

“How did you get here?” he asked her, “Where’s your ship?” 

The mysterious woman replied, “My ship was lost in a storm and I washed up here.  My name is Ildia.” 

He didn’t buy her story at all, for there hadn’t been any storms nearby for days! 

“What are you?” Rinal asked. 

She replied inquisitively,

“What do you mean?  I’m just a simple Hylian traveler.”

Rinal knew better, not only was there a skirisha aura around her, but there were skirisha lines running across her clothes, as if they were under her clothes.  Her outward appearance was some kind of illusion created by magic! 

Rinal drew his spear and pointed it at the woman as he told her, “There are few humans left on the islands, and they don’t glow skirisha.  What are you and why are you here?” 

The woman cocked her head to the side in confusion as she knew nothing of our language.  In fact, she seemed very surprised to see Rinal and his group, as if she had never seen or even heard of a Rito before. 

“Skirisha?” she asked. 

Rinal was surprised she was able to pronounce it right after hearing the word only once as he replied, “It doesn’t have a translation in the human tongue.  It’s a shade of blue you mammals can’t see from what I understand.” 

The woman’s eyes lit up as she realized what he was talking about, then she replied, “Oh!  You’re talking about ultraviolet light.” 

Then the woman waved her hand in front of her face and the aura disappeared. Now Rinal could see her true form!  

She looked like a Hylian, but her skin was a strange blue-gray tone and her hair was an unearthly shade of orange.  The whites of her eyes had a hint of yellow and her irises were mismatched, the left one was light blue while the right one was dark red. She was wearing full plate mail armor black as night with glowing light blue lines running across it and a red cape attached to her back, in addition she had a pair of swords at her waist, one on each hip. 

While the guard and handle looked mostly identical, the pommels were different, one was solid and looked not unlike the one on the legendary blade of evil’s bane.  The other one however, had a clear, blue spherical gem being held in place by four horn like protrusions.

“I mean you no harm, whoever or whatever you are,” the woman said as she put her hands above her head. 

Rinal cocked his head to the left and said, “My name is Rinal.  I am a Rito and as a Warrior it is my duty to protect my people.”

The woman replied, “Well, Rinal, just point me in the direction of Hyrule and I’ll be out of your feathers.” 

This confused him, everyone on the Great Sea knew that Hyrule was lost forever beneath the waves. 

He responded, “You’re standing on what’s left of Hyrule.” 

The woman’s eyes widened and she responded with her voice full of genuine confusion and concern, “What?” 

Rinal glared at her for a moment before he asked, “You really don’t know do you?”

[aiden-png]

Heyy, is there any way for you to possibly share your planning/outlining process? I’m having a lot of trouble myself figuring out how to write my fic, it’s all just out of order and all over the place, and I feel like knowing what you do might help a bit

omg sure!! I know how to outline a few different ways and jump between the methods depending on the story, length, and how much planning is actually needed to achieve my goal. I don’t typically outline unless I’m setting out to write something over 20k words or I have an idea that relies on a series of interconnected scenes (like a 5+1 for instance)! I’ll continue below the cut...

when I’m ‘outlining’ for a multichapter fic below 20k, my notes are pretty simple and typically look like this (example from “5 Times Wild Did Something Wild”): -collecting bomb arrows while it’s raining -electrocuting a group of enemies during a lightning storm -deflecting guardian lasers with his shield/cryo-launching a guardian and sniping it midair -riding a Lynel and killing it from close range* -setting up a trap and killing a Yiga in disguise elaborately* -getting stabbed/shot and pulling the weapon out of himself to finish the fight

these ‘bullet outlines’ are really good for laying out scenes, story beats, or chapter summaries for multichapter fics. when I write a short oneshot however, my notes are 1-5 sentences that summarize the entire plot or the prompt, and I add more notes if necessary when I sit down to start writing. for example, the prompt outline for “Hero Through the Ages” was this: Wild is reverted back to a child and everyone expects him to be rowdy and impossible. Instead he’s entirely mute, very stoic, extremely well versed in swordsmanship, and acts like he’s a knight.

however, when I’m outlining a longggg multichapter fic, I have two methods I really enjoy using and tend to pair them together. first is the summary method, where I write out an overview of what I want the story to be like in paragraph form. it ends up looking like a Wikipedia summary for a book or film when it’s done, but the reason I like this method is because it allows me to brainstorm on the page and develop my ideas where I can reference them again. these methods are supposed to be rough at first and get developed further later, so the next two examples are plans for a fic that ultimately went in slightly different directions by the end! here’s the beginnings of a paragraph outline for my BotW fic “A Major Test of Strength”: Link has been training for a few weeks since defeating Vah Naboris so he has all the supplies and strength he needs to take on Calamity Ganon. He learns of a Spring of Wisdom (or smth actually not in canon) that is said to have healing/restorative properties and it’s suggested that he travel there to try and regain the last of his memories. Sidon decides to tag along to help/see if he can finally work up the courage to confess his feelings to Link. When they get there Link not only gets his memories of this life, but of all other timelines restored at once along with his abilities. Every Champion had a power, and Link always thought the swordsman didn’t. It suddenly makes sense why everyone has believed in him without question since he awoke: Link is the strongest Champion, and he’s just now reached his full potential. Before Link can begin to train his new powers the Yiga stage a plot 100 years in the making, putting Link, Sidon, and the whole of Hyrule in danger. Link has a time limit to face Ganon before the barrier breaks now, and he’ll need all the help he can get to make it there in time.

from the paragraph-style outline I can make a scene-by-scene or chapter-by-chapter (or even act-by-act) outline which is the second method I like, though I have a hard time writing things I know the endings of. I typically outline as I go after the midpoint of a fic so I don’t lose interest, and will place filler estimates for how many chapters will be in the climax and resolution. working from story beats in this case is a lot easier for me, so I’ll make a bullet list where I describe the exposition in quite a bit of detail, summarize to the midpoint, more briefly summarize to the climax, and then stop outlining. it looks sort of like this (same fic as above): 1- Link hears about a Shrine* that is said to help connect those to their past or smth and it’s in the Laynaryu Mountains. He decides to go for it, as he’s still missing a lot of his memory (he’s not super distressed by this, he knows himself and he’s content, he has more important things to handle, but he hopes that the final piece in his puzzle may help him defeat Ganon). He travels to Zora and Sidon insists on traveling with him, it’s not far after all 2- they travel to the location and become close along the way 3- when they arrive the place is surprising and Link emerges from the Shrine with far more than he expected. A Yiga had tailed them, and upon seeing Link’s powers, quickly teleports back to their base 4- Link spends some time training to grasp his new powers and finds himself drawn to Sidon more and more. The Yiga commune with Ganon 5- the Yiga stage an ambush on Link as he travels, kidnapping him and Sidon. The Yiga preform a ritual in front of Hyrule Castle where Link was knighted at the blood moon to rend Link of his powers and Sidon rescues him too late, the Yiga and any information they had disappearing 6- Link and Sidon travel to visit the Great Deku Tree as Link looses his strength, hoping to reverse the spell 7- Link and Sidon make it at the last minute and are shown the secret location of the Temple of Time, where Link completes the ritual, and is sent back in time to before the kidnapping so he can continue his training 8- Link prevents Sidon from being kidnapped with past Link and they journey to Satori Mountain to stakeout the ritual site so they can disrupt the ritual before it’s too late. they talk and share secrets and both realize how they feel 9- Link and Sidon successfully intervene and the two timelines collapse, merging, until Link awakes in the Temple of Time in a fixed timeline with the triforce and knowledge of his powers and his love for Sidon. He confesses instantly 10- epilogue? Link and Sidon share a peaceful day months after calamity ganon’s defeat, Link training future soldiers and running errands for citizens of Hyrule while effectively retired, Sidon and him officially courting, and everything right in the world

there are a lot of different outlining strategies beyond these that you can use too! there’s a flashcard one, where you write out important events and scenes on cards and organize them in whatever timeline you feel works best. there’s the in depth outline, where you summarize the scenes and events in every chapter from beginning to end (this one helps a lot with keeping consistent chapter lengths and maintaining plot threads). when I use an outline, to make sure I don’t forget what I’m supposed to be writing for each chapter, I’ll write myself notes at the end of the doc that I can glance at as I’m typing. I’ve also used the editing method, where I’ll read and edit the previous writing session before starting the current one so I don’t lose track of where I was. when writing a long piece, it can be helpful to stop in the middle of a scene that excites you, so you have the motivation to return later to finish it! it also works well to finish an entire scene or chapter before stopping so you don’t have to read back to start writing again, but since I tend to write every single day until a fic is finished I don’t have a lot of issues picking back up where I left off.

just remember, the outline is only a tool for you to use! it’s not set in stone, it doesn’t have to be neat or completed--the only thing that matters is that it helps you better write your piece. it’s perfectly fine to diverge from the outline when writing, or to edit it as you go! and outlining definitely isn’t for everyone, I rarely use one because I feel it limits my own creativity in some regards. flying by the seat of your pants when you write is a perfectly valid method too, so stick with what makes you comfortable and what works for your style--and remember to have fun! I hope this helped answer your question! :D

[six-of-ravens]

also love that I've started a new save for botw and I'm just running around Hyrule at random with no goal except to get the master sword so I can get into areas with a lot of guardians, but meanwhile in my main save I'm refusing to fight Ganon until I collect all 990 korok seeds even though I also want to finish it before botw2 comes out and the deadline is fast approaching...

[ggdeku]

Breath of the Wild final impressions

As I watched the credits roll on Breath of the Wild I was conflicted. The game had been a ton of fun, a fresh new take on the series while also being a great open-world game in its own right. But despite enjoying my time with it, I ultimately felt very dissapointed.

Breath of the Wild is not a bad game, far from it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t get what I wanted. In their quest to mix up the “Zelda formula” and bring a new structure to the series, the developers left too much behind. Resulting in a good, but ultimately unfulfilling game.

Ask any fan of the series what their favorite entry is and you’ll get a different answer every time. The draw and appeal of Zelda is so varied that fans often disagree as to what elements are most valuable to them. One of the biggest draws for me has been the design of the dungeons themselves. It’s not just about the individual puzzles in each room, but the way these puzzle rooms are connected to make the dungeon a puzzle itself. Zelda dungeons are at their best when they require the player to understand the architecture and mechanics of the space and make it fun to unravel both the individual puzzles and the overall dungeon itself.

For a deeper examination of the way Nintendo designs these structures, I highly recommend watching Mark Brown’s Boss Keys youtube series. Brown talks about each game in the series and analyzes the way dungeons are designed. This series was very influential for me and helped solidify my thoughts on this topic. I recommend the Majora’s Mask video as it perfectly explains why I love that game.

With BotW, Nintendo very clearly targeted the strengths and design values of the very first entry in the series. An open space where the player has agency to make their own decisions about where to go and what to do. With no predetermined narrative-based path, you can do what you want, when you want.  However, in achieving this goal, the pacing and tight design of the Zelda series is mostly pushed aside in favor of player freedom.

Without a strong narrative path, the developers used the shrines as an incentive for players to explore. The 120 shrines mostly use the game mechanics and player abilities very well, but were also responsible for 120 moments of stinging disappointment. Every time I finished one, I felt unsatisfied because it was just one puzzle unconnected to a greater scheme of interlocking rooms or challenges. While completing shrines I often thought about how much more I would have enjoyed the puzzle if it had been connected to the last 20 shrines I finished.

There are several combat challenge shrines, but they aren’t the most interesting or rewarding things to complete. Even the simple change of reducing the overall amount of shrines to make each one the equivalent of two puzzles and a combat room would have done wonders to the game. That change would make discovery and completion of the shrines more meaningful.

The overall quality of the shrines made the feeling even worse because with individual puzzles that strong, a solid, interconnected design would have probably lead to some of the best dungeons in the series.

The aesthetics of the shrines are all the same. The same music and visuals 120 times. I think that does a disservice to the variety of puzzles they feature, in addition to being boring after the first 20. Even simple themes like forest, ice, fire, wind, fortress, etc. would be a great way to mix up the visuals of these challenges.

Shrines at the beginning of the game look identical to shrines you will find many hours into your adventure.

And then there are the Divine Beasts. They are the closest thing this game has to a traditional Zelda dungeon, because they are much larger than shrines, feature a short series of puzzles and end with a boss.

They share very little with the established "dungeon” forumla, but one aspect they do share with their predecessors is an important one, encouraging an understanding of the structure’s architecture. Each beast requires you to understand and manipulate the movement of the structure in order to activate five switches and fight a boss.The moving and twisting beats are impressive, but the actual goals within them leave a lot to be desired.

Not only are they much shorter than the dungeons of previous Zelda games,  they all have the same objective of activating a few switches. Repeated objectives and simple physics puzzles get boring fast. After you complete one beast you have seen everything they can do.

None of the beasts provide the same feeling as a good Zelda dungeon, unraveling and fighting your way through a tightly wound knot of individual and interconnected puzzles rooms and gaining an understanding of the continuous layout of a piece of architecture. They are far too simple in their individual and overall puzzle design and feature very little combat, other than the bosses. Much like the shrines, the Divine Beasts are not bad, but they are a weak attempt at making sure something resembling a Zelda tradition remained in the game.

The beasts also have the same problem as the shrines in terms of aesthetics. They are all located in beautiful, distinct locations in the world, but the beasts themselves share the same theming (which isn’t very different from the shrines).

As someone who greatly values the traditional Zelda dungeon, this disappointment with BotW’s alternatives hit me hard. No one makes games like Zelda. No one makes Zelda-like dungeons. After waiting six years for the next 3D game in the series it sucks to be disappointed in this way.

It’s not just the dungeons, but the progression in complexity that I miss. The way the dungeon design builds from the Great Deku tree to the Spirit Temple in Ocarina of Time, or from Woodfall to Stone Tower Temple in Majora’s Mask is amazing. That hasn't been a part of Zelda in many years.

This was also one of my biggest problem with A Link Between Worlds. That game had traditional Zelda dungeons, but because the player could tackle them mostly out of order they all felt as if they were each designed to be the first dungeon. The game lost any sense of progression in complexity with dungeons that would be lucky if they lasted more than a couple minutes.

However, this game’s best moments are not the attempts to translate the dungeon format to a new structure. BotW’s strength is the open-world and sense of discovery. These were strongest for me in the first half of the game, when the majority of the world was a still a mystery.

Discovering shrines in the first half of the game was exciting, and solving the tiny Korok seed puzzles hidden throughout the world provided a unique distraction. The Korok seeds are so plentiful (900!) that you can always find enough to increase your inventory, but I felt that their implementation did more to help the developers fill up their massive world rather than create a good mechanic for the player. It’s just another meaningless collectible.

While exploration is incentivized by shrines and Korok seeds, the best discoveries were villages and towns. BotW has the best towns in any Zelda game hands down. They all have a unique atmosphere, great music, and are occupied by memorable NPCs that seem to run on a Majora’s Mask-like schedule. Discovering and entering Hateno Village at dawn was one of my all-time favorite video game moments.

Once I had explored the world, found all the villages, and unlocked each section of the map, I realized that the only thing left to find were shrines and seeds. With Korok seeds cast aside as meaningless collectibles, looking for shrines quickly stopped being interesting as I knew the only thing I could find would only instill the same sense of longing for “real dungeons” that I had experienced dozens of times before. 

Thankfully, many of the sidequests to find the shrines were some of the best moments of the game, taking the unique and interesting puzzles and bringing them onto the actual world map. But aside from those quests I did not find much fun in exploring the world. I wanted to avoid combat most of the time because I didn't want any of my weapons to break and the standard enemies often had worse gear than what I was carrying. Exploring for exploration’s sake does not interest me. I’ve never really been the kind of player that messes around in the open world games without a purpose.

The lack of enemy diversity throughout the world was very surprising. BotW has  a strangely small variety of enemies. Zelda’s famous cast of monsters is mostly absent this time around as Link is left to fight standard and large sized Bokoblins and Lizalfos for most of the game. Fighting the same enemies over and over again started to bore me near the end of my playtime and I found it strange Nintendo left out so many different types monsters such as Like-Likes, Darknuts, Stalfos, Leevers, etc. It really doesn’t help the copy and pasted feel of many enemy encounters when the combat barely changes in hour one compared to hour 100.

I did like that they addressed the common complaint of combat difficulty. The enemies here actually put up a fight and provide for some tough encounters that require quick thinking and good reflexes. However, they also included two mechanics that trivialize the combat: Flurry Rush and parries.

Once I discovered how easy it is to abuse and activate the time slowing effects of Flurry Rush and parrying, the enemies were no longer a threat. The window to activate the Flurry Rush is so large that I often found myself triggering it when I wanted to back flip or sidestep for movement purposes. 

The combat itself felt a little stiff as well. The way Link stops moving when he swings his sword felt abrupt and his canned combos felt too automated. When you attack, Link will perform a simple combo string. In past games, the direction and type of attack could vary depending on your input. Link’s moves would actually be based on player input. I missed the choice of horizontal and vertical slashes, a sword thrust, and a crouch stab from behind a shield, among other moves.

The runes were cool, but I did not use them very often during combat. The combat sandbox in general felt a little underwhelming, mostly because Stasis, Magnesis, and Cryonis are the only unique abilities Link gets. 

The addition of infinite bombs seems like a carry over from ALBW’s item system, but don’t add much to the game. Infinite bombs are incredibly easy to abuse and are often more effective than arrows. I still think Wind Waker and the N64 games have the best combat sandboxes as they have a wide array of items and abilities without any overpowered dodges or parrying.

Because of the lack of unique items and abilities, the sense of progression is stunted. Link doesn’t gain access to new areas with the acquisition of tools that allows him to interact with the world and enemies in a different way. You get your rune abilities at the beginning and that is it. You are stuck making water platforms and moving metal objects for the rest of the game. I’ve always felt Zelda was better off closer to the Metroidvania style of design than an open world style, and BotW only reaffirms that opinion. BotW loses the moments of realization that your newly acquired abilities/items/information can be used in an earlier area to access something new, or recontextualize something you thought you had a handle on.

Link’s various armor sets also exemplify the grindy nature of this open world by  requiring you to farm items to upgrade equipment. This is probably the most standard open world aspect of the game and one that is just not worth engaging in.

I also wanted to touch on the story and characters, which is another element that I feel is important to the series (even if many disagree). Because of the open design, the story was pushed out of the players way for the most part. Unfortunately this led to a bunch of underdeveloped characters I never cared about. The hints into each Champion’s history and relationships with other characters was intriguing, but we never got anything more than simple archetypes. It would have been great to see longer story quests build up to the divine beasts.

One of the biggest story fumbles were the memories. While some were interesting they often added so little and often felt pointless. They gave us scraps of characterization for Zelda and that’s it. As for timeline stuff, the game is so vague that it doesn’t really matter (and I’m a Zelda timeline lover).

There are no memorable characters. We get interactions between the various champions and Zelda in flashbacks, but learn almost nothing about them, their personal histories, or see them grow or change in any meaningful way.

Games like Wind Waker and Majora’s Mask have you meet characters that have arcs, relationships, and goals. Players watch the characters grow and change. They inform the plot while growing along with the overall narrative. You see each character receive closure to their own storylines alongside the main narrative.

There is no plot in BotW. You wake up and are told to kill Ganon. If you defeat the Divine Beats you get to see more of Link’s lost memory, but all of that happened in the past, and you know that the four primary characters are already dead. Their fate is known before the player is even introduced to them.

There is no sense of urgency or danger. In Majora’s Mask you can see how Skull Kid’s meddling and the threat of the falling moon have negatively impacted every single one of the residents of Termina. The Deku Swamp’s water has been poisoned, the Gorons are frozen over, the sea temperature has risen and Lulu’s eggs Zora eggs have been stolen by pirates, the Ikana researcher has been turned into a zombie and the land has been cursed to keep the undead from dying completely. In Breath of the Wild, none of the people are in any danger. No one is scared of the obvious and inevitable return of Ganon. After the calamity life went on, the fall of an entire civilization didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the existing citizenry of Hyrule.

For a series that receives such massive amounts of praise, I don’t think Nintendo can keep on barely scraping by in the story and lore department. Nintendo should put more time and effort into a stronger focus on the narrative for this series. It’s a shame when the peak of storytelling in your franchise was over a decade ago (even though Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker were great).

I enjoyed my time with BotW immensely in the first 20 to 30 hours, but once I had a consistent understanding of the world and mechanics, I started to pick apart all the little things that I didn’t like, and it really hurt my enjoyment of the game.

What makes it hard for me is reading other Zelda fans’ impressions stating this is the best game in the series and that they hope Zelda never goes back to the way it was before. This series can and has done more. It has provided interesting worlds, memorable characters, unique and inventive puzzles and challenges that have stayed with me for years. When I think of BotW I just remember all of the things I didn’t like. I just think about how I can’t see myself ever returning to this game in the same way I do to almost every other game in the series.

It makes me sad because the traditional, more linear Zelda formula, despite some bad design decisions in the later games, still provides a valuable experience and is responsible for more than a handful of my favorite video games of all time.

DLC UPDATE:  I really liked the Champion’s Ballad DLC  just because of the shrine and Divine Beast. The new shrines were some of the best in the game, and the new divine beast was by far the best. The boss at the end was a unique challenge and is one of my favorite moments in BotW, it felt like an important event in a way that almost nothing else did in the base game.

[cardinalfeng]

LoZ: BotW Review

I know I don’t really like post game reviews but I’ve loved Zelda for a really long time and I wanted to talk about this new installment because I just finished it.

Let it be said however: Spoiler Warning! I’m talking about all of the main quests and a small amount of the side quests.

So, Let’s start with the great plateau. I thought this area was ingenious. Not only did it get you right back into the feeling of Zelda, with locations like the Temple of Time, but I felt like it was really a mission statement for the game, and I loved it. I encountered the Stone Talus right after the Stasis trial, so I had the hammer, but it took a few tries to realize that the hammer was a better weapon than the swords I had. I thought the sense of mystery throughout the entire area was awesome, and the fact that there were somethings which were just as hard as areas in the rest of the game, like the decayed guardians near one of the shrines. And the fact that you re-encounter the old man at the Temple of Time was awesome, because you have 4 spirit orbs and so, before you know to look at the steeple, you just walk inside and see the goddess statue glowing.

I also liked the run from the Great Plateau up to Kakariko Village. On that trip I encountered moblins and lizalfos, which were the other two extremely common enemies in Hyrule, and the difficulty spike was present but manageable. That whole trip also introduced Hestu, and had one of the most amazing tonal shifts in the game. I went through the East Barracks at night, and it was an extremely hard and lonely area, especially when I had like 2 swords and a few arrows. However, upon leaving that area, you meet a friendly NPC, and then a stable, which leads to not only catching horses, but also changes from the loneliness to feeling like you have friends somewhere at least. 

In Kakariko Village, I feel like they capitalized really hard on the Sheikah. It’s where you learn about the memories, and Hyrule’s past, and the Sheikah’s past, and the Yiga. It was pretty intense in terms of the whole story line. But, it again helped me feel less lonely in Hyrule. And the side quests weren’t hard, but they were full of personality. 

The hike to Hateno Village was also interesting, because of the sheer number of dead guardians you see near Fort Hateno. However, the Hateno Village shrine was pretty terrible. The motion controls are pretty inaccurate and unfun, and I won by basically cheating. Though the goal is to show what the switch can do, I really felt that it was more tedium than fun. I felt the same way about bringing the ancient flame up to the Tech Lab. It was mostly just walking through the village. For comparison, I really enjoyed the Akkala one. However, the NPC’s in both Hateno and Kakariko were fantastic and full of personality, in a way that felt more like an older Zelda, like LTTP.

Meta-game I think was pretty interesting. Sure, it’s basically just Korok seeds, Shrines, Towers, and scavenging. However, the sheer number of things you can find really just filled up my time. And things like shrines and korok seeds are genius little ways to have tons of puzzles filled in the game. Such as the “Steady thy heart” shrine, which was a mini-dungeon, and on the way to finding it, I found like 2 korok seeds, and there’s a bit of combat involved too. And the towers were also their own puzzle-combat combination, which just felt very Zelda, even if it was such a new feature. However, the Gerudo Tower, for the Gerudo Highlands was a load of bullshit, and I had to look it up. It’s just an issue of placement. 

The Divine Beasts were a really cool idea, and I think that there were enough variations in the formula of get to a place, do a fetch quest, fight the divine beast, finish the dungeon, beat the boss. I really liked the Zora’s Domain one, because of the sheer factors involved. The Zora people hate you, you need a shit ton of shock arrows (you didn’t but I played ball), and you need to get inside Vah Ruta. I felt like that mission wasn’t just to get inside of Ruta, but really for Link’s sake, and that of Hyrule. It was multi-layered, and the fetch quest was mostly combat. And Ruta was an interesting gimmick, and I enjoyed the dungeon in its entirety. 

The Goron City quest was fun, and people often harsh on it for getting into Eldin and not being fireproof. However, on either stable next to Eldin you can get fireproof elixirs or fireproof lizards. Plus, Eldin is literally crawling in fireproof lizards. I thought that Rudania as a whole was really fun, but I wish that they’d stuck with the darkness inside Rudania that was there at the start. It might be annoying at first, but the puzzle possibility and interesting mechanics were too good to pass up. I think Arin Hanson is right, however, that the boss cutscenes shouldn’t happen when they do. Rather, when you’re about to fight the Divine Beast, to see it in all of it’s glory. Because I could decide for myself to fight the massive volcano lizard.

My least favorite quest was Vah Medoh. First, getting to Rito Village wasn’t hard. It’s not in a dangerously cold area, Tabantha tower is really close, and Medoh is right above it, so it’s impossible to miss. Second, the fetch quest was really close and not hard to get to, and the task to get Teba on your side was aggressively easy. You have 3 minutes and it took me 30 seconds. Then the battle against Medoh just felt like the same task as the flight range, but with bomb arrows, and one less target. With Teba taking fire, and with Teba as cold and flat of a character, there’s no collateral for Link. Even after you find out that he’s been hurt, I didn’t care because the game gave me no reason to. The Dungeon wasn’t hard, and it’s gimmick felt shockingly similar to Rudania. The boss was easy, and as long as I had arrows, didn’t even mean Link had to get within close range. Furthermore, Revali is annoying and condescending, and has few redeemable qualities until after the boss fight, making me wonder why I even freed that asshole.

I liked the Gerudo quest, but I wish that it didn’t have the rupee gate to get inside Gerudo Town, and it felt like 2 dungeons in one. The Yiga Hideout and Naboris were both a dungeon in their own right. Naboris’s gimmick was annoying at points, and the boss fight had too many phases, but it all felt original and interesting. (Note: I did the beasts in order of Ruta, Naboris, Medoh, Rudania). My biggest point about the game is that there should have been more dungeons. The Gerudo quests left me satisfied, while every other one felt too short. If there were 8 dungeons, plus Hyrule Castle, that might be enough dungeon.

In terms of animals and extra stuff in the game, there were really great things. I liked how Lurelin Village didn’t seem to be balanced on Link, and was just there in Faron. I liked the Triforce Springs, especially the quest to save Naydra, which was new, but fascinating. Tarrey town was super fetch quest filled to build, but another way to make the player really feel how they affect the world. The labyrinths were complicated but fun, as were many shrine quests. The memories got me acquainted with a combination of Hyrule, the modern day, and 100 years ago, and were an interesting way to have a player choose if they want exposition or not. The Master Sword was an interesting way to get the player progress on their own but still have greater goals. Hyrule Castle was really fun, but a little too disjointed to allow for exploration without risking total decimation from the guardians (and the North Gatehouse is such bullshit).

Finally, is the ending. I personally love all of the cutscenes and the boss fights. The first one felt like a greatest hits of the previous bosses, but was still fresh and interesting to see how the mechanics interacted. Dark Beast Ganon was a more classic Ganon fight, but made Zelda’s role both prominent and non-intrusive, and explained the weird malice eyes. All of the cutscenes afterwards were amazing and lead the way to a great set of post-game quests to fix up Hyrule. And then the game stayed the same as if I never beat Ganon. With all of the cutscenes, I would love to see typical NPC Zelda, and travel Hyrule with her, even fix up the castle, use the Guardians to make a game plan against Ganon in the future. Sure it makes Hyrule less dangerous, but it gives the player power in Hyrule’s future beyond Ganon, which is where every Zelda game stops defining Link, and where Botw could have strived to be better.

TL;DR: BotW is a fantastic game that fills the time with tons of activities, and the changes to the Zelda formula only make it more fun. However, the Dungeons were too few and far between, and the ending was particularly underwhelming given the sheer number of hints at post game were in the final cutscenes. But overall, an unforgettable Zelda experience, and the best in a long line of great games.

[intergalactic-nimrod]

Finished Breath of the Wild today (Spoiler Free)

First off, I’m not much of a gamer. Mum never let me get a console when I was a kid, so I never got to get into them. I always knew though that eventually when I would get a console it would be a Nintendo one. Nintendo is the root of video games as they are today, and their main line IP’s have always really resonated with me. So, I preordered a Switch launch day, fully aware it would have problems and a limited selection of launch games, but I wanted to support a game company that still sought to innovate with how people play games, rather than pushing an ultimately futile graphics barrier. There’s only so high of a resolution that the human eye can see, and no matter how realistic you try to make a game it simply will not hold up in time, whereas games with more artistic styles have much greater life spans.

My expectations for Breath of the Wild were sky high. Again, I’m not much of a gamer, especially because of my restrictive budget, but it just looked exciting and fun. I had watched playthroughs of the other Zelda games and loved the general world and culture of the series, and gained a huge appreciation of its history. I loved seeing Breath of the Wild trying to break away from conventions and both defy and redefine what a Zelda game could be. I thought it would make an excellent introduction for me into console gaming, and I just fell for the emotional tone of the trailers.

So here I am, having finished the game 13 days after its release, and I have to say, it was good, but it was NOT a 10/10 game. In fact it was great, it was ambitious, it was almost as perfect as I could’ve asked for it to be in a lot of parts, but this is not the end of the Zelda franchise, with no place for it to go from here.

I enjoyed my Zelda experience immensely. I found myself smiling and giggling throughout parts of it, and I find it hard to feel emotions these days through art and entertainment after being exposed to it my whole life. I felt pure and honest joy through most of it. The game play was always fun and clean, and there were few things I would change mechanically.

The flaws with the game come not out of its mechanics, but out of its philosophy, which paradoxically is also the thing that is so amazing about it. The world is open, it’s free, and you can easily get lost in it, but it’s a happy feeling of being lost. At the same time though, there is the story and general motion/pace to the game that flows nicely and can guide the player, or let them break away from it. The problem with this though, is that at times it can be too much... and I know this is where I may lose some, but after I had finished the story (exempting final boss), about 100 of the shrines, found all the memories, beat all the dungeons, and completed my map of Hyrule, I suddenly found myself bored. VERY bored.

The greatest experience of BotW is that Hyrule itself is a character. Each tower was a checkpoint, but also a step forward as it opened up more of the world to explore. When I first left the Great Plateau and went out into the world, it was wild, open freedom and discovery. As I went on, I would find shrines to serve as mini checkpoints, and that’s the brilliance of the game. You can get lost, but you only get lost exploring. As you open up the map, you see things you didn’t see before, and the shrines serve as stations to teleport you around and get you closer to interesting things. They help you fill out the spaces in the world, and whereas at first I was just a kid named Link, running about, I slowly found myself literally conquering Hyrule. I was going about, enthralled by the story, and mastering shrines, becoming stronger, and facing the wild. It’s an excellent formula: the confusion and wonder of stepping into the unknown, the curve and quest to survive and thrive, pulling the content and rising above its challenges, and then besting it, becoming its master as you teleport around, filling in the gaps of your understanding of the area.

But when all was said and done, I had conquered Hyrule, and suddenly there was nothing to do. The last shrines I missed were a drag to find tucked away amidst the huge map that I had already conquered at 97%, and that last 3% felt like it wouldn’t have been worth it without story to keep my trajectory going forward. There was one last thing really worth doing: Ganon, the biggest, baddest, overhanging quest and priority. I ended up looking up walkthroughs to find and get the last shrines, just because I wanted the final reward and to max myself out for the final challenge.

I thought about finding all the Koroks, but after my entire time playing the game I only found 171 out of NINE HUNDRED. Definitely not worth it. I tried maxing out my armors, but soon found that to be boring, as it was mostly just trying to tediously gather hard to get materials.

I had conquered Hyrule, gone over it a ton of times, and there just wasn’t enough tucked into every percent and square inch of the game to drive me to go beyond the story too much. In fact, that’s another criticism: I love the story for what’s there, but I wish there was more for such a larger game, OR I wish the game and world was smaller to balance out the actual scope of what the story does. It’s very simple, and though it is perfectly done for what is there, the world is too big and its spirit gets stretched thin.

Hyrule is enormous, and that becomes a problem when you start seeing the same towers and art styles and patterns everywhere. I started noticing how geometric a lot of the terrain was, and the imperfections of the world and graphics as I constantly went back over. The world, for as big and fun as it is begins to lose some of its face that it desperately needs its story for. Some things just look and feel too samey, like certain parts were just copy-pasted about. Eventually a lot of shrines were just combat trials to fill in the gaps and most Korok puzzles felt the same. I lost the drive to look around for secrets because I knew they were always going to be the same thing, whether it be a chest with rupees or some weapon I’ve seen a hundred times.

The only mechanical problem with the game was the now infamous glass weapons, which is a criticism I agree with- to a limited extent. I was constantly having new and powerful weapons being thrown at me as I went around, so having plentiful weapons helped to easily balance how quickly they broke, but the constant fear of a weapon I liked or was saving breaking or having to be tossed out of my limited inventory lingered over every battle, and I just wished they would have higher durability so I could experiment more and find a style or set of weapons that worked and made combat situations like a puzzle in themselves, with me having a versatile strategy which I could employ to fit the context of the battle. It makes the player become more skilled and trained with the combat system, but instead I found myself stocking up on high powered weapons and just wailing on enemies until they broke, just to bring out the next disposable weapon and continue the same. It didn’t completely not work, but it felt counter intuitive to the brilliant and challenging philosophy the game had set up about choice, but also choice with the limits of strategy and thinking. You COULD run into a battle stupidly and just go swinging wildly, but it would be more EFFECTIVE and BENEFICIAL to the player to go about things carefully and with thought. Unfortunately, the brittle weapons undermine this idea, and throw a spike into the squeaky clean design of the battle system.

My favorite thing about this game by far though, was its philosophy. In every piece of media, there is the concept and then the execution. Breath of the Wild is an excellent idea, with just a few missteps in execution that I’ve already mentioned that undermine its philosophy. However, don’t let that take away from how brilliant most of it is conceptually and doesn’t belittle the player. It perfectly understands what Zelda games were, what they should be, and did an extremely admiral job of nearly getting there. It’s a game that’s clearly designed and aware of what it wanted to be, unlike lots of other modern games. You could execute the most perfectly polished and well put together turd in history, but it’s still a turd. Breath of the Wild is quite the opposite, though its imperfections in execution are not nearly so horrible as could be eluded from such an absolute analogy.

The best thing that Breath of the Wild could have done is perfect its philosophy, and that much is very clear. The name of the title is The Legend of ZELDA. This is not a game about Link. Zelda is made the most complex and likeable character in this game, and your quest is to go out and remember her, to regain the past that was her, and restore her future. I wish Link were a little less stilted, as in a little more expressive (in cut scenes I mean), but the game clearly understands what Zelda was about in its first inception. Zelda is your ultimate quest, your ultimate goal. SHE is the legend and the core of the game, and so long as I was going after saving her, the game was amazing.

[Very mild spoilers from here on out, but nothing major at all. I’m still keeping things very vague] The final boss fight of the game was good, but almost underwhelming, and it made me wish Ganon had been somewhat of a character, rather than just a force. It would rhyme well with Zelda, as the calamity was the source of her pains and her need to fulfill her duty (and her inability to do so). Making Ganon an actual character again would’ve embodied this force into something more human and relateable, giving part of her struggles a face to identify with. The only face the calamity has is the threatening image of the corrupted Hyrule Castle, always in the distance, always looming. That in itself is very effective, but I still can’t help wishing for more story. Again, it was amazing for what was there, I just wish there was more.

I was also partly disappointed by the ending, partly because I wished it were still harder (and it would’ve been more satisfying if Ganon were a character/individual rather than just a beast), but also I wish the ending would do more than just... end. I’m probably flawed in that I do have a specific image of what I’d like the end of a Zelda game to be, but at that point I’m probably better of making a Zelda movie. For as much as the game redefined the Zelda series and took itself back to its roots while also moving forward, I wish the ending would’ve also moved their world forward. I’ve always hated the Zelda timeline, where every game is essentially a reboot or re imagining (often with some gimmick or circumstantial them). It would’ve been amazing to see a very satisfying ending where it breaks all final conventions, and takes the future of the franchise in a new direction as well. That wouldn’t have just been amazing, that would’ve been REVOLUTIONARY (for the series at least). It’s not all bad, in fact not bad at all, and in a sense it does fulfill my desire be leaving things off in an open way. It really felt like this was just the first installment of a new series, like there was more to come... and thus that brings me to a conclusion.

This is not the epitome of exactly what a Zelda game should be. It’s not PERFECT, and it’s not the Zelda game to end all Zelda games that I hoped it would be. Instead, BotW presents itself as something completely different: a new beginning. From here on out, I want Zelda to continue what this game has started, not just rebooting itself over and over, but expanding and fixing the flaws that lay in the small cracks of its perfect foundation. I think I ultimately found this game a little unsatisfying because the world began to look and feel the same throughout a lot of it. Also, it felt like too much of Hyrule was destroyed and disjointed. I’d like to see the next installment be a restored Hyrule, at its near full glory, but without erasing the ruins of the past. I want the history implied in BotW to still show, like destroyed town and places, but I want to see a more flourishing and characterized Hyrule rising out of its ashes.

The next installment could be made even better by doing just a few simple things. Ultimately, the world was made bigger than the game could comfortably sustain. It lost some of its streamlined nature and its fat began to spill out of its inappropriately fitting clothing (which it could’ve fixed by scaling up, and finding something to wear that was more flattering and appropriate to its larger form, though this is where I end this analogy), and by just making the game less of an open world, it could actually FEEL like more an open world, only one far more interesting. This game can’t afford to look generic like the environments of Minecraft, because in that game the player directly manipulates their world. Here, the players relationship with the world is just a little more restricted, and that’s fine and good and perfect, but that also means implementing more design, environment specific things, and unique areas of interest.

I don’t like numerical grading systems, but I highly recommend this game. It’s a real blast and worth picking up as soon as you can. Seriously, this is not one to miss. My consensus can be most closely comparable to an 8.5 or 9 out of 10 (closer to 8.5 though).

[takunomistudio-blog]

Takunomi Coffee Reveries, Vol. I

Contents

1 - Introduction

2 - Revitalizing the Ancients {Breath of the Wild, Final Fantasy XV}

3 - Coding for Your Own Sake {Coding, Python}

4 - LoFi Hip Hop Radio {Musical Interlude}

5 - Enticing for Computer Science {YouTube, Shōgi}

1 - Introduction

So a break for the better part of March apparently extends to most of April. That's fine. It gives time to reflect, struggle with exams, play some video games, all that good Jazz. In regards to reflection, it became apparent that daily updates was a noble goal, but a bit demanding, and my favorite posts were the Saturday recap posts, so why not try to make irregular but meatier Saturday posts only? As the content above shows, I thought it better if a bunch of good content was gathered for some relaxing perusal, coffee in hand.

Return to contents?

2 - Revitalizing the Ancients

I would be remise not to talk Breath of the Wild. The only problem is, the game pretty much speaks for itself, quality and qualities wise, doesn't it? Yet, since last I posted, I completed Final Fantasy XV, so it's not a bad idea to talk abot how these two ancient giants deal with awakening in today's gaming world.

I wasn't immediately floored by FFXV, but the sort of chill, super-realistic setting of magical pretty-boys and roadtripping in hostile territory quickly won me over. Talking abot it's story is both a laughably sort excercise and a maddingly long one, so I'm going to simply say: It's quite good, and quite incomplete. If you haven't played FFXV, just wait till all the updates and DLC are out, you'll get the full experience.

What FFXV truly was to me, was a fantasy of travelling around a lush green environment and mowing down wildlife and roaming weaponized armor troupes. The open world element, I realized, was simply a part of the mood. I could hardly go wherever I liked, and trying to explore, rarely revealed anything surprising. FFXV was, like so many earlier entried in the series, about it's combat. I'll get to why that's more than ok.

I haven't finished Breath of the Wild yet, but it's not trying to hide where it'll end up, so it doesn't require a lot of confidence to say that I see the bigger picture by now. BotW gets open world design. It gets it like no game before it. Everything is traversable and though there isn't a purpose to going all places, neither does it ever feel like a time waste. The level of detail in both the big picture and the smallest iota, is astounding. To be fair, BotW doesn't play much different from so many other games. Instead, it seems to say "This is how you should do open world", drops a mic and let's you play.

Both FFXV and BotW initially appear to be entering the modern world by seemingly accepting how Western developers design games: Real-time combat, ultra realistic graphics (FFXV) and go-where-ever-you-like, play-how-you-feel-like (BotW). Instead they both end up adhering to their roots in decidedly new ways. The Zelda puzzles, space-comprehension-requiring dungeons, grunting NPCs, tangible environments. It's all there, but in a far greater and smoother scale.

In many ways, it would be easy to call BotW the greater success, but I don't want to seem like I don't appreciate the technology behind FFXV. Consider the first time I entered the wood and monster infested Duscae area. I saw a creature I had a mark for. Me and my bodyguards flung into the fray and started hacking away. As the melee rolled around, we entered the vicinity of nearby monsters who happily obliged and suddenly the brawl was blooming into a war-like scenario. At that moment, a flying tank filled with soldiers came by to have a chat. I realize now, that this is crazy. The number of characters that FFXV supports at one point is mind blowing. No slow-downs, just more and more beasts. BotW on the other hand, nearly cracky my Wii U when I engaged five hulking moblins and a small batch of ice-bats in freezing tree-house. Perhaps BotW could achieve something like FFXV, but it's not the point. To these games, open world means different things. To BotW it's external: Go everywhere, always, whenever. To FFXV it's local: The immediate space is open to the battle system, now, to everyone.

Return to contents?

3 - Coding for Your Own Sake

Why would you want to learn programming? Maybe the idea just appeals to you, or you have some greater goal in mind for the future. Right now, you just don't have a clue what to code.

Here's a way to find a small project: Just recreate another program, in the simplest way possible, and maybe add a tiny spin on it to give yourself a challenge. Cut out visuals, complicated functionality or even user friendliness. Just make it run.

So recently I thought, how about a music player? I'd like to try my hand at Python, that seemed like a pleasant langauge to code in.

Reading around a bit, I discovered that Python is all about importing so-called modules that do a lot of the complicated stuff for you. I simply googled various key words and started copy-pasting something together. I learned stuff about how mp3 files being a bit more complicated than I expected, and so I scaled the project back to simply playing .wav files. Currently doing a course about distributed systems, I thought, maybe I should make it a small radio program? This was bit more complicated, but no more than it all resulted in the following tiny program. Simply start the program with

python3 server.py [name of song].wav

in one terminal window, and start a client in another terminal window with

python3 client.py

and hear the music play. It even works across computers on the same network.

server.py

client.py

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4 - LoFi Hip Hop Radio

Hiphop-like music coupled with looping images from amazingly relaxing anime is apparently a thing, and I see no reason not to endorse it one hundred percent. Below you see Shizuku Tsukishima from Whisper of the Heart feeling as relaxed as I hope you do. The image links to one of those previously mentioned hiphop radios.

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5 - Enticing for Computer Science

The video above is one of toco toco tv's fantastic interviews with interesting and creative Japanese people. Manao Kagawa is a professional Shogi player, and, as far as I can understand, apparently somewhat uncommon, being female.

Besides being a wonderfully relaxing interview, it features a great part in the beginning where Kagawa-san goes to browse the Shirataki Gofukuten kimono shop. It seems that being a Shogi player requires you to wear somewhat formal wear, and the result is that the players looks insanely dashing.

What's even better though, is the mentioning of the Shirataku Ayumi Hai, a yearly Shogi tournament for female players to win beautiful and (I assume) quite expensive kimono.

A quite well-discussed subject, is how the rate of women joining Computer Science and the IT work force in general, is too low. I won't get into politics here, but what is a fact, is that Computer Scientists are in short supply everywhere in the world. At the same time, it seems the education world is mainly drawing from one of two pools of potential students (men). In other words, there is a whole other, quite untapped, pool of with potential students to draw from.

I've seen some really good initiatives to reverse the current trend, but I think the one seen in the video is a wonderfully aesthetic idea. I don't know if it manages to draw in new Shogi players Japan, but having some sort of algorithm competition aimed at high school age (or younger) girl, with very sought-after, classically feminine prizes1, seems like it could draw in a segment that normally has no interest in this branch of science, despite engaging in similar ones (mathematics, medicine, biology).

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Big IT companies sponsor lots of things with huge amounts of money. Winning a Chanel handbag for solving algorithmic problems in high school, seems like quite a carrot. ↩︎

[crystalized-dreams]

So, it had been a bit of a crazy weekend between desperately trying to get a party hat Pikachu before they left today and also getting a Nintendo Switch. I had been wanting to talk about this for a while, but just have not gotten the chance. I’ll get to more of that soon, but for now, let’s get to the start of it all. I will admit this does go into a bit more personal stuff so if you’d rather just stick to more game-focused things, I’d either skip to where I start talking about Pokemon GO or wait until my entry sometime later this week about the latest Story of Seasons game :) But yes, moving on…

With the weather being so… odd lately (in fact, it was quite cold today, is supposed to be hot tomorrow, and then snow sometime later this week…), it’s hard for me to really feel up to doing much lately. I’ll start to feel better and then suddenly feel like I’ve been hit with a bag of bricks and it’s the absolute worst and reminds me of some of my worst days when I was younger. That said, with the fact that this has been something that has been effecting both my husband and myself these last few months, we had a feeling we just might not be able to do the Nintendo World launch event for a Switch. Until the weather normalizes a bit or our allergies get used to it, we both would just end up being very sick by having to wait on line for 24+ hours. Thus, we decided to fully depend on Amazon this time around.

Due to the aforementioned issues, things weren’t going as smoothly though. I at least managed to get the Grey Nintendo Switch and the Special Edition of Breath of the Wild (sadly not the Master) right as Amazon put them, but I missed the Neon Switch (which was put up later), the Amiibo, and the Pro Controller which was pretty discouraging.

Regardless, I was glad I at least got the system and felt, even if we couldn’t get to the launch, at least we’d still have the system, right? And as I heard of some Master Editions being cancelled, I felt maybe it was okay that we only managed to get the Special Edition. Until my order didn’t update on Thursday. Or Friday. And thus, like many others, it seems our preordered Nintendo Switch was currently unavailable.

While I generally may have been able to wait, The Legend of Zelda is one of Mark’s favorite game series and he’d been excited for it since it was just announced as the next Legend of Zelda. And thus, I was pretty upset. Especially as I felt it was my fault for not encouraging us to go to the launch more where, even if maybe it wouldn’t have been the best choice for many many reasons, we would have at least got the system. Heck, we probably would’ve gotten everything else we wanted to. While I was able to somehow preorder all the Amiibo from Best Buy a few weeks ago (which thankfully did all come), we did still want the Pro Controller and who knows, maybe by some miracle they even had Master Editions.

Regardless, I was at a loss and didn’t know what to do. That was when I stumbled upon someone mentioning that the Nintendo NY Store still had Nintendo Switches and even some Master Editions along with plenty of many other things. They mentioned it taking about 15-20 minutes, but I was set and with some help (because I was just not doing great, driving wasn’t really an option), I was off.

The car ride took forever due to so much traffic. I did, however, hatch my 10KM Egg in Pokemon GO and get a Chansey which made me feel like maybe, things would work out and I’d get lucky. I also managed to FINALLY get some Party Hat Pikachu–both males and I was unable to get a female, but at least I’ll have one Party Hat Pikachu and Raichu now… Unfortunately, I wasn’t really dressed to be waiting long due to rushing (I wore a dress–I probably should have worn pants) and it was very cold. The line took about 40 minutes, but thanks to some nice people in front of me for talking to me on line, it made it a lot more bearable and helped me get my mind off a lot of it.

And despite all the craziness (and feeling even worse due to how hot it was in store compared to the coldness of outside), I did manage to get everything we wanted–the Neon Nintendo Switch, the Master Edition of Breath of the Wild, and a Pro Controller. I might have picked up Bomberman too, but it was already sold out. Regardless, I hope we’ll be able to get it soon. One thing I was really surprised about though is I only managed to get 8 StreetPasses… I’m really worried I may not be able to finish the StreetPass games at this point :/ I did complete the main “goal” of Market Crashers though with the most recent group:

And I did at least take some other pictures in the store as well: #gallery-0-9 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-9 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-9 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-9 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

We’ve been having fun playing Zelda since (I mean, we do sleep at points but besides that :P) and I’ve even gotten a Pink Horse I named Shortcake (because Strawberry was too long :( ): I plan to give it the flower mane.

I’m also hoping to find a plain pink horse to give the teal mane and name after the My Little Pony that was made for me: We unfortunately haven’t seen anymore pink horses though :(

I feel like it’ll be a long time before the game is done due to all the exploring. I don’t see us finishing the main plot until every other thing is done.

Moving onto Pokemon GO again, as I mentioned, I got a Chansey and two Party Hat Pikachu on Friday! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get more to either evolve one or get a pair of females as well now that gender differences are in. I really wish they were around longer and had their percentages upped again. They only had them upped once and that was halfway through the event and it still wasn’t enough for me to see them around my neighborhood at all. If I hadn’t run into Manhattan, I never would have gotten any Party Hat Pikachu :/

There’s a lot I like about Pokemon GO, but it just keeps finding new ways to disappoint me mechanic-wise. That said, right now Sprint and Pokemon GO have a fairly neat Rewards Program that will let you redeem some neat stuff including $10 gift cards for Apple Store and Google Playstore. There apparently will be special events as well and you do not need to have Sprint as your phone provider to participate.

Meanwhile, moving onto Fire Emblem Heroes, they are doing their new voting today. I’m stuck between Lucina and Elise, but something tells me Lucina is going to blow the entire competition away… Speaking of Elise, I FINALLY got her thanks to the new Princess Focus. Now Linde is the last super wanted character on my list. I’d like to get Azura as well, but she’s a much lower priority and I’m still debating on Klein who is in the Sibling focus.

I’m keeping an eye out for Super Mario Run’s Android release. I really hope my IOS progress carries over considering I connected it to my Nintendo ID, but I’m really worried it won’t be… Fingers crossed anyway.

I also am super curious about the Animal Crossing one, but still concerned. Regardless, I’m going to stay positive.

Besides BotW and Mobile stuff, I’ve mostly been playing Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, but that will wait until my next entry~

Finally, here’s some lovely pictures of all the Master Edition stuff: #gallery-0-10 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-10 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-10 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-10 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Pokemon GO & Nintendo Switch Adventures (and a few other things) So, it had been a bit of a crazy weekend between desperately trying to get a party hat Pikachu before they left today and also getting a Nintendo Switch.