Already approaching May

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 5^th 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.

Drowning in games

I’m still trying to finish up games I picked up during the Steam Winter Sale and plan to get back into console and handheld games and finish up games I’ve started 2-5 years ago.  Some of the most interesting games I’ve played and finished these past two months are: Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection, Huntdown, Vagante, My Friend Pedro, and Lost Ruins.  I picked up Monster Hunter Rise at launch in hopes of playing it co-op with friends.  But everyone was progressing so quickly on their solo runs that I became discouraged to play it.  I still plan on playing when I can, but I haven’t played it nearly as much as I was hoping as I’ve been working through that backlog.  Despite knowing the amount of games releasing these next few months, I still ended up picking up a few games during the Lunar New Year’s sale.  Two games were actually not part of the sale, but were launched with a discount: Alina of the Arena and Blade Assault.

I played the demo of Alina of the Arena a month before its launch to Early Access and really enjoyed the game loop.  It’s a strategy, deck-building rogue-like that has Alina fighting a gauntlet of enemies.  While I do enjoy the game and have played nearly 10 hours of it, I never got past the 2^nd arena and am really struggling with the boss.  No matter how broken or overpowered I felt, the boss proved to be more broken and overpowered every time.  Blade Assault is an Action-Platformer Rogue-like where I’m facing a similar problem of not being able to progress because of the sheer difficulty.  It’s because of the seemingly unreasonable difficulty of Rogue-likes that I have been avoiding them more over the years despite it being one of my favorite sub-genres.  I enjoy both games, but the time it takes to get a little bit better or amount of runs it took to get lucky with perks and items is making it harder to justify spending more time on them when I’m trying to finish more games.

One free game that I’ve been waiting for nearly a decade for finally released.  Lost Ark is a top-down MMORPG that has the action and slick animations of a Diablo-like.  I played that for a bit before being distracted by two other big games.  The other two big games I picked up are Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2 and The King of Fighters XV.  I’ve barely touched Gunvolt Chronicles 2 and have only played the prologue and first level so far.  KOFXV, on the other hand, I’ve put in 32 hours already.  I was thinking of skipping KOFXV so that I can focus my money and time on Elden Ring, but I ultimately decided to pick up KOFXV for the reason that I really want to make an actual effort to finally learn how to play a KOF game and hoping to take advantage of playing it online at launch where there will be the most amount of players while Elden Ring is mostly a single-player experience and will undoubtedly have more players in the long term anyways.  While I haven’t played online against other players this past week and a half yet, I’ve made a lot of progress learning how combos, system mechanics, and team building works.  It feels so exciting that I’m finally understanding KOF and playing at a semi-competent level.  But even KOFXV had to take a backseat with my time this week.

Steam Next Fest started this week where tons of developers and publishers release demos of their up and coming games for people to try out and give feedback.  I’ve spent most of my time with that this past week and played a lot of disappointing games while running into a handful of extremely promising ones.  I think Neon White has been the most impressive demo I’ve played so far.  It was announced last year during a Nintendo Direct and for an entire year I thought it was a first-person shooter rogue-like.  But playing the demo, I realized it was a precision-platformer.  I’ve played quite a few 3D, first-person perspective precision-platformers in the past, but none with as much style, story and personality as Neon White.  I’m definitely looking forward to it.

There was also a demo for Phantom Breaker Omnia which I felt conflicted about.  I was already excited for the game to begin with.  Phantom Breaker is a 2D Fighter I’ve waited nearly 11 years for someone to localize to North America.  But what made me not want to play the demo was possibly enjoying it way too much and wanting to pick it up at launch.  The problem with that scenario is that I’m already picking up quite a bit of games and the release of Phantom Breaker Omnia is, unfortunately, a day before Persona 4 Arena Ultimax.  The last time I bought two fighting games together was one was barely touched and thus wasn’t worth the price I put down for it.  Well, the opposite happened.  Phantom Breaker Omnia definitely got some improvements from previous iterations, but its base gameplay is still kind of janky and unrefined.  I knew it wasn’t going to be incredible, but I didn’t realize just how rigid and clunky the game was going to feel, especially compared to the beat-em-up spinoff Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds.  Still, I did find it enjoyable with the amount of characters, stages, and system mechanics it’ll have for the full game.  What the demo helped me decide was that I wasn’t going to pick it up at launch as even $40 is too steep of a price for a game I won’t be playing with friends, won’t have much of an active online community game, and possibly won’t have much time to play yet.  I’m super happy it’s finally coming to America, and I really do want to support it.  If no other games were coming out, I’d probably put down the $40 for it.  But for now, I might not decide to pick it up until it’s down to $20 or so.

Besides that, the one other demo that really stuck out to me was GhostLore.  It’s a Diablo-like that focuses on East-Asian folklore.  Based on how rough and basic the user-interface looked, I was expecting a truly janky game.  But to my surprise, it looks pretty good, animation is smooth, combat felt satisfying, and character building sounds interesting.  Some things did feel a bit unpolished such as spells not signifying there isn’t enough mana to cast or odd collision detection, but overall it seems like a game that I would definitely enjoy.

So besides some of the games I got from Steam Winter Sale, the biggest distractions I have right now are Monster Hunter Rise, Lost Ark, Gunvolt Chronicles 2, and The King of Fighters XV.  Because of this, I’ve had to skip out on: Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires, and Elden Ring.  And next month, I’m going to have to skip out on Babylon’s Fall, Triangle Strategy, Phantom Breaker: Omnia, Stranger Of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin, GhostWire: Tokyo, and Kirby and the Forgotten Land so I can focus my time on Persona 4 Arena Ultimax and pick up Tiny Tina’s Wonderland.  Things are going pretty well for videogames this quarter.  As for world news, I don’t even really want to talk about it.  Within the past week, Russia has declared war with Ukraine and has already invaded.  It’s depressing.

I was supposed to get back into productivity by doing piano recordings this month, but I still feel like I’m drowning in games and still want to clear some more before I do.  With Phantom Breaker: Omnia releasing in two weeks, I’ve been listening to the music to the original game and feel compelled to do a remix for one of the tracks.  There’s a lot I want to do this year, but I don’t have much of a plan or schedule for it right now.  Return to music projects, language learning, watching animé, improving on fighting games, and reading books are among them.  One step at a time, I suppose.