Whoops, it looks like I totally forgot to make a post in March. This year is passing by particularly quickly, and I feel like I’ve barely done anything. I’ve been focusing on a lot of things these past two months. I’ve been working out harder during my exercise sessions. I’ve been still practicing piano when I can in preparation of recording my piano arrangements. I ruined my sleep schedule about a month ago and had difficulty falling asleep until it was 6AM. So I’ve been slowly fixing it by waking up a little earlier when I’m able to so that I’d feel sleepier by night time. It’s been rough since falling asleep is difficult, waking up is difficult, I wake up every 2 hours throughout the night, and I feel sleepy throughout the day. I’ve gotten close to a 3AM-11AM schedule, but it’s still not consistent. I’m hoping I can put it back to, at least, a 2AM-10AM schedule. I did end up making that remix from Phantom Breaker’s Main Menu theme.
I’ve been working through more games the past two months, but feel like I’m finishing them too slowly. At least I was able to finish games like Persona 4 Golden (FINALLY, after so many years!), Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2, Borderlands 3, The King of Fighters XV, Splinter Cell Blacklist and Scarlet Nexus. Unfortunately, I still have to do a second playthrough of Persona 4 Golden for the true ending and a second playthrough of Scarlet Nexus to see the other half of the story since the game is played through two separate character perspectives. So those two games, which have already took a lot of time to get through, is going to require even more time before I’m truly finished with them. In an effort to play better games this year, I’ve been trying to eliminate as many mobile games as I can the past 2 weeks. There are a few coming out in the near future that I’ll probably play, so that’s more reason why I need to delete the ones I’ve been holding onto for so long or still playing to make time for things I want to do. But I think the major time sink I’ve had the past 2 months is fighting games again.
Testament’s the 5th and last DLC character to release for Guilty Gear Strive and my friends have started playing it again since then. Melty Blood: Type Lumina also released two new characters and I played a bit, trying to learn one of the new characters. I ended up playing online for Guilty Gear Strive, Melty Blood: Type Lumina, and The King of Fighters XV one week…and got totally destroyed in each of the games. The amount of people playing GGST is still pretty healthy, so I get matched up to a lot of players much better than me and a few closer to my skill level. I know I’ve been learning a lot on character match ups, system mechanics, and basic strategies for a lot of characters, but I haven’t been pushing far enough on character familiarity and high level play to really compete with the skill level that players are at right now, including against my friends. So I’ve been putting the most time into GGST and trying to brush up on execution, creating better game plans, finding and experimenting with new approaches, and just trying to be more consistent with being a threat with the characters that I play. With KOFXV, I tried playing online way too late (around 5-6 weeks after launch?) as the community is already dwindling. I couldn’t match up a single ranked match and ended up playing casual matches, which still took a very long time to find an opponent. I did get matched up to a few players around or below my skill level and got to experience real matches of KOF for once; however, a majority of the matches I got put into are of players waaaaaaay beyond my skill level. I had a player that was ranked “champion” which is the highest rank (the rank goes from 1-30 and then champion, I’m rank 9), and he didn’t even bother playing a second match with me because of how inexperienced I was. As demoralizing as it was, it felt nice to play KOF with a human player now that I have a basic understanding of the game. In MB:TL, matching up with a player was better as I didn’t have to wait too long; however, the connection with the players was REALLY bad with a lot of the matches. I hear the game suffers from one-sided rollback, so one player is feeling input delays and seeing a teleporting opponent while the other player won’t feel much of a difference. I played against a lot of high level players and a decent amount of players around my skill level. The new character I was playing “Mario Gallo Bestino” is a puppet character and was a little tougher to learn and play compared to “Powered Ciel” the other new character. I went up against a lot of P.Ciel and kept losing to neutral because she reaches half way across the screen with her C button. As much as I want to improve in MB:TL, my friends losing interest in the game and a dwindling online community isn’t very motivating. I also ended up going back to a lot of older fighting games I haven’t played in a while and playing them again with new perspective as I’ve learned a lot of new things the past 2 years that has helped in learning new fighting games. I started seeing and doing new things I didn’t notice before in those games and enjoyed them more than I remember from the last time I played them. Fighting games were definitely a huge time sink the past two months, but I had fun playing them.
Going back to Persona 4, after I finished the game, I started delving into all the other related things I wanted to do but didn’t yet because I wanted to finish the main game. I started the story for Persona 4 Arena since Ultimax is now available on Steam PC. I started and finished Persona 4 The Animation within 3 days as I was super hooked. They did a great job condensing a 100 hour game into 25 episodes. I also watched Persona 4 The Golden Animation. And then I watched a show called Trinity Seven. I really wanted to get back into watching more animé this year since I wanted to last year but barely watched any.
So despite sounding like I’ve barely done anything these past two months, I’ve been kept busy. I hope I can get back to working on music and language learning in May and perhaps get around to playing console games again, but I have quite a few things I want to still take care of first. I’ve got to make some decisions and work hard in May, because Summer distractions are approaching.
