Endgame Viable

I did a weird thing: I bought Final Fantasy XV on Steam. It’s … not bad? Maybe?

I don’t remember how I came across this, but I found a free demo of Final Fantasy XV on Steam. I was amused because Steam explained to me that since I played Dark Souls III, I would probably like Final Fantasy XV, because they were quite similar games. According to Steam.

Clearly, a game of magic and swords.

Obviously that’s a straight-up lie, because Steam lies about everything in their tags and recommendations.

But since I’m probably done with my abusive relationship with Nioh–probably–the game whose main gameplay mechanic is trolling players and laughing behind their back, I started looking for The Next Game to play, with an eye toward making a video series out of it. Eventually I’m going to run out of The Surge 2 and Code Vein videos to upload (in about a month, to be precise, unless I go back to one video a day).

I half-heartedly want to play A Plague Tale: Innocence, Control, and finish Greedfall, which I already started, but none of those games are particularly good for a video series because they’re very cut scene-heavy. They’re also somewhat “average” games and don’t really grab me by the throat and demand to be played, which is the kind of game I prefer. I only have the time and energy to play the very best of the very best games, the top 1% of the the top 1%, if you will.

I expected nothing at all from Final Fantasy XV, but I figured I’d try out the demo, since I was in a minor Final Fantasy kick after my return to FFXIV. It would be only the second Final Fantasy game I’ve ever played.

The King bestows a Very Important Mission to his feather-haired son.

Not surprisingly, Final Fantasy XV is incredibly strange, and barely similar to XIV. (Apparently there isn’t any story continuity between Final Fantasy games, they’re all stand-alone.)

I tried to think of all the influences that appear in this game: Stand By Me, The Dukes of Hazzard, every road trip movie ever, every dude bromance ever, every teen-has-to-grow-up-too-fast story ever, magic and sorcery and monsters, fairy tale princesses, feudal society and arranged marriages, 1950s cars and industrial society, and cell phones. And chocobos, of course, though I haven’t actually seen one yet. Throw all of that into an open world game that reminds you a little bit of a mashup between Grand Theft Auto and The Witcher 3, and that’s Final Fantasy XV.

Sadly you can't actually steal cars or terrorize motorists.

It’s incredibly strange. But … it kind of works? I think?

The basic story is this: The King of the Land sends his teenaged brat of a son off for an arranged marriage with the Princess of the Other Land, to solidify An Important Alliance, along with his retinue of three friend archetypes–the Brawny One, the Smart One, and the Funny One. They don’t ride horses through the forest, though, they wear trendy black leather emo outfits and drive a car through the desert where they meet every Southern stereotype from The Dukes of Hazzard. Along the way they do quests and hunt monsters with magic swords that somehow appear out of thin air and make camp for the night and the smart guy with glasses cooks food for everyone and they all level up and gain magical powers and all the normal RPG things.

I promise I’m not making this up.

The local diner, where you get food and hunting quests, obviously.

So far it sounds horrible, right? Well it is, because hanging out with four dude bros on a road trip throwing around witter banter constantly, especially in the middle of combat, is kind of awful. But you’re so transfixed by the train wreck playing out before you, you become hypnotized, and then suddenly The Plot Twist and Inciting Incident occurs which raises the stakes considerably. (The brat’s father is killed when his kingdom is attacked and the prince is suddenly all alone in the world and pursued by The Bad Guys and now Things Matters and A Character Arc Begins and will Our Hero with that feathery Final Fantasy hair be able to meet the challenge, yadda yadda, and that was the end of the demo.)

It’s the most basic of fairy tale stories imaginable, the prince forced to be king too soon. But it’s set in this completely bonkers magic-and-industry setting that makes it … kind of interesting? I think?

I do like games that try to be different, and this is definitely different.

The RPG mechanics aren’t terrible, although I don’t care much for the combat. I’m playing on Easy so hopefully I don’t have to learn anything except “press the mouse button repeatedly.” It’s got that brawler, button-mashy feel that you might find in Assassin’s Creed-style games: It feels like mindless chaotic nonsense to me, particularly with three AI companions all fighting at the same time, getting in your way all the time so you can’t really see anything. It’s probably better with a controller, but I always take the mouse-and-keyboard option if it’s available, because it hurts my thumb too much to use a controller for long.

Fighting with magic weapons, see, I told you.

I had a problem with the game crashing a lot, but I went into the Windows Compatibility settings and turned off Full Screen Optimizations, and it seems to be running better now.

It has one feature which at first I thought was incredibly silly, but after thinking about it a while, is actually quite cool. One of your dude bro companions, the Funny One Archetype–who probably has a name I guess but does it really matter?–has a camera and takes pictures all the time. At the end of each day when it gives you the screen that tells you how you did, you can scroll though a list of the “pictures” that he took during the day, which are basically random screenshots of your gameplay from different angles. It becomes a nice summary of your recent gameplay, and you can pick the photos you like and save them. (Naturally, they are saved in some weird proprietary format, though, and you have to screenshot your snapshots to do anything useful with them.)

Reviewing the day's snapshots.

Anyway, it’s a rare AAA game that I actually want to continue playing beyond the first hour, to see what happens next.

But to be clear, Final Fantasy XV is nothing like Dark Souls III.

Here’s a list of some old posts that I’m going to mine for topic ideas this Blaugust, which may or may not turn into a fruitful strategy.

Blaugust 2021 is coming soon! It’s fun! Do it! If you want. I’m not your mom.

I don’t like to give out blogging advice, because:

Blogging is hard work. Grueling, unforgiving, unrewarding, unnoticed work. Day after day, forever. If that scares people away, then I’m happy to have improved someone’s life a little bit.

But if you have the wherewithal to say, “I’m not scared, I’m doing it anyway!” then you might find blogging a fun hobby.

Bloggers who stick around year after year typically have uniquely personal reasons for blogging, such as:

Blogging (and most creative endeavors on the Internet) should serve your own needs, not anyone else’s. Otherwise, it’s probably not going to work out for you, because nobody else is going to give you the time of day.

With those inspiring words aside, why not give it a shot? It’s very easy to try. You don’t have to be a web developer anymore. Sign up for a free WordPress account, type some words into the editor, and click “Post.” Now you’re a blogger. A free account will work perfectly fine for years or forever. (Don’t bother with anything other than WordPress, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot right from the start.)

I know what you’re thinking: “Who would want to read anything I wrote?” It’s what every new blogger, without exception, thinks. The answer is: Almost certainly nobody. But maybe somebody. Probably not, but it’s possible. In any case, no blogger ever expects anybody is going to read their posts, from new ones all the way up to seasoned veterans. You’ll be writing your posts mainly to entertain yourself. Another inspiring blogging pep talk from me to you.

In any case, Blaugust is a fantastic time to start a new blog, or return to an old one, because there’s a little community of nice people looking for new blogs to read.

Unfortunately the biggest problem with Blaugust that hasn’t yet been solved is that it’s impossible to read the sudden influx of new blog posts. Everyone has the best of intentions at first, but after the first week it quickly becomes apparent that nobody can possibly keep up with it all.

So some practical blogging advice I might suggest is to create simple, descriptive titles. It’s good advice any time, but especially in Blaugust. Titles that clearly and succinctly state what’s in the post probably have a much better chance of getting read. Imagine you’re sending an email in a typical busy workplace, where nobody reads more than the title and maybe the first sentence of the email, if you’re lucky.

Okay one more bit of inspiring advice: Turn on full posts in your RSS feed if you want anyone to read your posts. And enable RSS. I’m sorry to say this, but most people don’t want to be bothered going to your site to read your new posts. Most readers want to use Feedly or something similar to make your new blog posts go to them. I’m afraid most of that hard work you put into the layout and colors and fonts and spacing of your site will be entirely wasted. Sorry about that. Readers will usually only see your actual blog site if they happen to land on it from a Google search years later, or if they happen to notice a tweet notification of yours go by in the raging whitewater rapids of a typical Twitter timeline.

As for what to write in Blaugust, there are topic suggestions, but I like to make up a theme-of-the-month for myself. This time it’s probably going to be Revisiting My Old Posts. I’ve made a list of 30-something old discussion posts that might be worthy of more modern epilogues. I’ll put that list in another post if anyone needs any specific writing prompts.

Have fun!

I didn’t really intend to play Shadowbringers. I thought I was done with Final Fantasy XIV forever, actually. But a few things combined to get me back in this game.

Mord Soup, in the ugly Desert Zone

As of this writing, I’ve just reached level 72. Shadowbringers begins with a choice of which zone to start in, as so many MMORPGs do these days. “Illusion of choice” and all that. I started with Alisaie’s quests in the desert, which were pretty short, and then I did Alphinaud’s quests in the bread-and-circuses zone, which are considerably longer. That was the wrong order to do them, according to the Journal, but Alisaie’s were more impactful, though the desert zone was far less visually attractive.

I haven’t yet seen much evidence of The Greatest Final Fantasy Story Ever yet, but the short tale of Tesleen at the Inn at Journey’s End was pretty good, touching on themes of hospice, suffering, and euthanasia, extremely adult topics that older folk like me can relate to.

Alphinaud’s introductory story was the typical rich-versus-poor class warfare story, and the sinister evil lurking behind the posh veil of opulence that we’ve seen a million times before, so it was pretty stock-standard. (Would it kill writers to make a story where the rich people are in the right, and the poor people are in the wrong?) Cool music there, though.

The beach in Bread-and-Circuses Zone

Beyond that, the overarching story is a lofty one about worlds colliding and Sources and Firsts and Calamities and mythical high fantasy mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t really mean anything to normal humans. Saving the world and whatnot, the standard trope that’s impossible to relate to. Who cares if a world full of nobodies that we’ve never met dies? Who cares if there’s another Calamity? Not me, that’s who. Not yet, at least. Eorzea survived the last Calamity just fine. This time, though, supposedly the Warrior of Light (that’s the player) is going to die if we don’t do something, but there couldn’t possibly be a less motivating story motivation in a game. Obviously the player isn’t going to die (not in a story sense, at least). I would have known that even if I hadn’t already known about Endwalker.

Anyway it’s an enjoyable way to pass the time. The voice acting is good, the cut scenes are the standard FFXIV fast-and-cheap-to-make machinima. I liken Final Fantasy XIV cut scenes to watching a puppet show. Never really understood why people complain about them. Nobody ever complains about awkward movements in puppet shows.

The only question is, what’s going to happen when I get to the first dungeon? On that, my entire FFXIV future depends.

Holminster Switch, no PUGs required

I can answer that already: I just completed Holminster Switch, the first dungeon, with Alphinaud, Lyna, and the Crystal Exarch (NPCs). Yes, a solo dungeon run. Best thing that’s been added to the game since the semi-anonymous Alliance Raids. Trust System: It’s all the tedium and repetition of a real dungeon experience, without any of the waiting or humans.

I played Final Fantasy XIV last night. Sort of.

By “played,” I mean that I stood in my inn room by myself, clicking through the cut scenes in the Neverending Story (err… Unending Journey) book that lead from Stormblood 4.3 to the beginning of Shadowbringers.

It was a bit of an ordeal to get to the point where I could do that. Square Enix doesn’t make it very easy to buy and activate stuff for Final Fantasy XIV. Not to mention that the part of their store page where you actually type in your credit card information looks like a janky mafia site that’s going to steal your identity. But I digress.

First I bought Shadowbringers, because I knew I would need that to play Shadowbringers. Pretty straightforward. (You have to leave the Mog Station and go to the Square Enix store to buy it, though. Then you have to copy the activation code from the Square Enix store and paste it into the Mog Station to activate it on your account. Kind of dumb.)

Next I bought a Tales of Adventure: Stormblood potion, which fast forwards through all of the Stormblood Main Scenario Quests to the start of Shadowbringers. It was a bit of a waste for my character, who was only three or four patches away from Shadowbringers anyway. I might have been able to tolerate doing PUGs for the trials and dungeons, but I didn’t quite meet the gear requirement for Castrum Fluminus, and I definitely didn’t want to deal with any gear grinding.

Unfortunately, the store wouldn’t let me buy the Stormblood potion without an active subscription. So I had to subscribe again, and waste my two week free login period.

I kind of wish I could play with a different character now. It feels like my old character is “retired,” and it feels weird to just skip ahead and start fresh with … the same character. From what I remember, Shadowbringers definitely looked like a fresh starting point for a story. I think they intentionally designed it so that nothing that came before it mattered or existed, so new players could easily jump into the game there (a wise decision for a mainstream MMORPG).

Unfortunately, the character I want to use is only level 17, and the Stormblood potion doesn’t increase your level. So I would need to grind from level 17 to level 70, a daunting prospect if ever there was one.

Or, I discovered, I could just buy one of the potions that levels a job to 70. There’s one potion to buy per job that you want to level, a nice racket. But well worth the $25 price to skip hundreds of hours of grinding. If it skipped just one hour of grinding, it would still be worth it.

It’s really tempting to start Shadowbringers fresh with a fresh new character.

But before I even start Shadowbringers, I like the idea of finishing out Stormblood with my existing character. And so I stood in my inn, watching cut scenes from the part of the story that I skipped.

You can watch those cut scenes on YouTube, and I think I did a couple years ago when Shadowbringers was new, but I don’t remember them at all. And it’s so much better to watch them with your character in them. It’s incredibly weird and unsettling to watch a Final Fantasy XIV cut scene with somebody else’s player character in them. For me, at least.

Anyway this is a nice little epilogue to my time in Stormblood. I keep hearing that people didn’t like Stormblood very much, but I liked it more than Heavensward. I can’t even remember Heavensward. It had something to do with dragons, I think. I liked it at the time, but it disappeared from my memory very quickly.

But I do remember Stormblood, which I mainly remember as the very human story of Lyse growing from being “that lalafell’s wacky sidekick” into a real person and leader. And I also liked Fordola’s arc, and I wish they’d done more with her (she did the best voice acting in the expansion). Overall Stormblood felt like an expansion with a lot of relatable and challenging themes for adults, a rare thing to see in video games.

I’m really worried Shadowbringers isn’t going to appeal to anyone who isn’t a Final Fantasy fan, but we’ll see. They say Shadowbringers is the best one yet, which is hard to reconcile in my brain. People also keep saying they like Marvel movies, which is completely beyond my ken.

I simply have no choice but to rant about Nioh for some number of paragraphs.

I’ve been on a Souls-like gaming binge lately, having recently played through The Surge 1, The Surge 2, Code Vein, and now Nioh.

I had a lot or problems with Code Vein as a Souls-like, but that’s in the past now.

Currently I’m having even more problems with Nioh as a Souls-like. I’m finding it more of a repetitive grind-fest of patience-testing frustration than a Souls-like (more so than Code Vein, if you can believe it). I may or may not have already written a post about what makes a game a “true” Souls-like game, but herein I am going to enumerate why Nioh is closer to the “not” side of the Souls-like scale.

Nioh is essentially a series of solo dungeon runs, not terribly different from what you’d do in an MMORPG. You go on “missions” from a world map. In each mission, you go to an instanced place, then you run through the place killing trash mobs and unlocking shortcuts and picking up collectibles, then you fight a boss at the end of the place (which usually takes the majority of your time because it might take 50 tries). At the end you return to the world map for the next mission.

There’s some loose story surrounding these missions, explaining why you’re going to these places, but it doesn’t really matter, because it all feels very repetitive. Nioh doesn’t make any effort to hide the fact that you’re just doing the same thing over and over.

Code Vein was very similar, now that I think about it, although it had a better story to tie it together.

The point is, it’s radically different from the Souls formula, which is usually one big connected world where you can walk from one side to the other, without any instances or world maps.

The World Map

All the loot in Nioh is randomly-generated, and there’s a ton of it, almost like it’s a Diablo-style game. It takes a long time to sort through your inventory to see if you received anything of actual value, and a long time to discard the stuff you don’t need.

There’s a point where you get so much loot in games that it becomes a hassle to deal with it all, and at that point it’s the same as not getting any loot at all. You never want to look at it. Nioh is definitely over that line.

And that doesn’t even count the crafting system in Nioh, which allows you to use materials to make even more loot. I took one look at those screens and threw my hands up. I’d have to study a wiki guide for God knows how long to do anything useful with it.

Again, it’s very different from the Souls formula, which has fixed loot placed in fixed places throughout the game. You know that if you go to Place X, you’re going to get Loot Y, every time. And Loot Y has a very specific purpose in the game. Upgrading equipment is a pretty straightforward system of adding a +X number to the weapons or armor that you like.

One of the great things about Souls is that the combat is fairly simple: Attack, block, or dodge. Those are your basic choices in any given combat situation. (There are more advanced techniques, but that’s the basics.)

Nioh feels like it’s too complicated. There’s a high, middle, and low stance, and it’s infested with “combos,” a style of gameplay that is more suited to fighting games than RPGs. I don’t like fighting games. I don’t like combos. I like one button that does one thing only, maybe modified by a second button.

There’s also a host of “powers” you can buy as you level up, which gives you different moves and styles and stuff that I don’t even understand. It ends up adding even more complexity to the fighting. It’s a lot to think about.

Stamina management in Nioh is considerably more punishing than Souls, too. If you run out of “ki” (aka. stamina) there’s a really good chance you’re going to die, because you can’t move, can’t dodge, can’t block, and can’t attack. You can press buttons all day long but they simply don’t work. All you can do is stand there frozen and pray that your enemy doesn’t attack you while you wait the interminable seconds for your ki to come back.

You can play Nioh with the same simple attack, block, and dodge patterns as a Souls-like and be successful, but there’s a price to pay for it: It’s usually the slowest way to defeat things, which means it requires a lot more patience and perfection.

Thusfar I find combat with trash mobs to be the most enjoyable in Nioh. There’s a fun back-and-forth that reminds me the most of Souls games. If that was all there was to Nioh, I’d probably like it a lot more. It would be a fun combat system to drop into an MMORPG for overland questing, actually.

But when you get to the mini-bosses and boss fights, you’re so far outmatched in terms of combat power that basic combat tactics become almost unusable. You’re very squishy in Nioh so you can’t take hits even from regular mobs, but against bosses the odds of a one-shot death are extremely high.

Nioh has a lot of statistics to keep track of, but most of them don’t mean that much.

It’s one of those games where all of the bonuses and penalties are in teeny tiny percentage increments, so they feel meaningless. So you get a new sword, and you excitedly look to see what it does, and find out it gives you +2% improvement against certain kinds of enemies. That gets nothing but an eyeroll from me, who knows a little bit about math and statistics, because that’s basically identical to +0%.

It’s the same with leveling up your character: The changes to your stats from level to level are so minor that leveling up feels inconsequential. That’s another difference from Souls games, where stat changes have very significant effects on gameplay, which is how RPGs should be.

Not to mention the tons of different consumables in the game that affect combat. I still don’t know what 90% of them are. I don’t even look at them, let alone use them.

And your choice of “spirit guardian” plays a role too. Each one has a long list of passive buffs to consider.

And there are even more passive bonuses to consider from other sources that I can’t even remember right now. It makes you feel like you’re playing in the endgame of an MMORPG, where you have to pour over pages and pages of stats to make sure you’re min-maxed properly, which isn’t the most fun thing for me to do in a game.

Technically there’s “stuff happening,” but none of it makes any sense to me. And it’s not the way Souls games don’t make sense… Souls games are mysterious and opaque, but still fascinating and entertaining.

In Nioh, the story makes no sense and it’s also dull as dishwater. It just doesn’t matter because there’s no character development or plot or even much of a setting. It’s just a series of disjointed cut scenes that aren’t related to each other. Most of them are people you don’t know sitting in a room talking to each other, at the end of which they ask the protagonist to go do something for them.

All the NPCs are interchangeable quest-dispensing robots that mainly communicate through text on the World Map. The little bit of voice acting isn’t that great. I feel no sense of immersion at all, which is very different from a Souls-like.

This is probably just a continuation of the last one.

Normally with a Souls-like game, there’s an intrinsic reward in overcoming obstacles so you can see what’s around the next corner. There might be a really nice treasure you can use to make the game easier, or a new NPC with interesting (or mysterious) dialog, or a new puzzle to solve.

In Nioh, there’s … nothing. There’s never any meaningful treasure, because it’s all random loot. (I don’t even bother to look at anything I pick up.) There aren’t any NPCs to interact with in any of the missions. There aren’t any puzzles. It’s just like a dungeon in an MMORPG: Kill all the trash mobs to get to the boss, kill the boss, the end.

The only satisfaction occurs when you reach a new Shrine, so you don’t have to go back as far when you inevitably die to some random troll mechanic like spiders dropping from the ceiling with no warning.

Otherwise it’s just a series of instanced “missions,” one after another. There is some slight variation in what each mission looks like, in terms of the graphical assets that you see, but not much, and there’s a lot of the same enemies in every mission.

It occurs to me that it’s a very old-school style of game, almost an arcade game: The kind where all you do is see how far you can get before giving up. The kind where you try to set a “high score.” A game from the time before games were meant to be immersive multimedia experiences, and were just games to kill some time. There’s just not a lot of depth to it.

Also, weirdly, I find myself being reminded of an MMORPG a lot when I play Nioh. It’s almost like they started building the game to be an MMORPG experience, but then shifted it somewhere along the way to try to be more of a Souls-like experience, and it ended up as a strange hybrid.

Anyway, it mostly feels kind of pointless, and doesn’t feel like a Souls experience at all.

But every time I tell myself I’m definitely going to stop wasting my time with this game, the next day I find myself starting it up for another hour, just so I can say I did it, I guess. Or it could be that I just don’t have anything better to play at the moment.

P.S. I played a little bit of Nioh 2, with the hope that it might be an improvement, but it’s essentially identical to the first game. It’s slightly better at mouse-and-keyboard controls, and the graphics are slightly better, but that’s about it.

There’s a lot of buzz about Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker expansion, and now I see it’s that time again when Square Enix is letting lapsed Final Fantasy XIV accounts login free for a couple of weeks.

When last we left our intrepid hero, they were adventuring in Stormblood 4.3, Under The Moonlight, logging in during a previous free login event that preceded Shadowbringers back in 2019. I played a whopping two hours of my two week free login period back then, because I got to a Trial quest, groaned, and just stopped, with my character standing outside the entrance to Castrum Fluminus looking up at Tsukuyomi floating at the top of the stairs.

It’s 2021 now, and there’s another free login period for lapsed accounts, which lasts from July 9 to August 23. I thought I would see if I could download the FFXIV client and play a little bit this coming weekend. I started to download the client, and that’s when I realized that triggering the client download also triggers the start of your 14 days of free time. So I guess I have to play this week, whether I like it or not.

Unfortunately my character is probably still staring at the entrance to Castrum Fluminus, and I can’t be bothered to do multiplayer dungeons and trials anymore. Working with other people in a game seems like such an immense chore to me at my advanced gaming age.

I’m extremely tempted to buy the potion that just skips to Shadowbringers, where there is supposedly a way to do dungeons and trials without other people.

But… I still don’t have Shadowbringers. (I’ve been waiting for a time when there is simultaneously a sale and I have some interest in playing it.) I keep hearing Shadowbringers is the greatest story ever told, but I’m dubious about that. I’m suspicious that the story is only going to appeal to people who are deeply invested in the decades-long Final Fantasy mythos, which I’m not. I talked about that in another post. I remember watching the first two hours of Shadowbringers in a YouTube video and I saw zero evidence of a compelling story. I know MMORPGs tend to be slow, but two hours seems like plenty of time to present a decent story hook (or any kind of hook) to a player.

Weirdly there’s no sale on Shadowbringers right now. You’d think that a sale on the previous expansion would be the perfect companion for a free login event. I guess the full price of $40 is still pretty cheap for an expansion, it’s just that there’s a strong chance I won’t play it that much. I’ve reached the point in my FFXIV career (as I have with every other MMORPG) where I’m only going to go through the Main Scenario Quest with one character and one job and that’s it until the next expansion.

In 2021, I find myself wondering what I ever saw in MMORPGs in the first place. None of the new ones coming out are likely to do anything new or interesting. It’s hard to think of any selling points for the genre, when compared to the plethora of single-player and even coop open world-style RPGs.

Multiplayer video games just aren’t that fun for me to play with Internet strangers anymore. I’m a quintessential hermit, so it’s a chore for me to deal with people, no matter how friendly and welcoming the guild is (paradoxically the more friendly people are, the more of a chore it is to reciprocate). It’s a massive mental energy drain. I usually feel “trapped” in groups, unable to control my own gaming time. Dungeon runs tend to last 45 minutes or an hour or more, not counting organization time, at the end of which I’m usually exhausted. (Personally, I wish dungeon runs were 20-30 minutes.)

Generally I just want to be left alone and play on my own schedule, which isn’t conducive to group content.

So, I don’t really know what to do with MMORPGs anymore.

I was thinking about why some boss fights are fun challenges and other boss fights drive me absolutely crazy with needless frustration.

When I wrote this post, I was battling the Umi-bozu boss in Nioh, a gigantic watery gum drop blob that slaps you around with tentacles, and trying to decide whether to rage-quit the game or keep pressing onward in the face of what seemed like a not-fun, time-wasting process of hoping for random luck to be on my side. It occurred to me that there are patterns of why some boss fights are fun and others are not, for me at least. (I suppose it’s possible that other people might have different reactions to boss fights.)

I think these are the major components of most boss fights, roughly in order from least annoying to most annoying:

These are the fights where you try different things and make observations about patterns of behavior that the boss displays, and take advantage of weaknesses that you notice. The ones where you stand behind the boss so they can’t hit you as much, or stay at a certain distance so they only use an easy-to-avoid attack, or something like that. Once you have that “eureka” moment, the boss usually goes down fairly quickly. These are my favorite kind by far.

Examples:

These boss fight feels a bit like a dance, a back-and-forth. There’s a rhythm to the fight: The boss attacks with a certain cadence, and if you’re aligned with that cadence, everything flows smoothly and it almost feels like a rhythm game. Everything “clicks” when you get to the right cadence, but if you’re slightly off, things can go south very quickly. I like these kinds of fights, but only after I get the rhythm figured out. It usually takes a lot of practice to learn these to the point that you can beat it every time.

Examples:

These fights have attacks that come at you with little or no warning, so you either need to predict when they’ll happen, or be fast enough to react to them. These fights are irritating at my advanced age, but I can tolerate them as long as the game lets you recover from mistakes. (Nioh doesn’t at all.) If it’s a one-mistake-and-you’re-dead kind of fight, it’s extremely frustrating (especially if combined with the next category). They tend to require a lot of tries.

Examples:

These fights tend to be extremely simple to understand, but it takes a long time to complete them, because you have to chip away at the boss’s health a little bit at a time. But you have to be vigilant and pay attention the entire time, because the slightest mistake–or blinking at the wrong time, or looking away for 2 seconds to see what the cat knocked over–could result in a quick death and starting over again. It’s a time-waster. They might also involve repeating a strategy over and over and over again. These are the boss fights that take 10+ minutes, where they should normally not be more than 4-5 minutes. Very annoying.

Examples:

These fights tend to feel very chaotic, where a large number of seemingly random elements can combine to kill you at any time through no fault of your own. Basically you just keep trying the boss fight over and over and over again until that one time luck lands on your side and you make it through, but you might never be able to do it a second time. Extremely annoying and wastes the player’s time.

Note: Often paired with the Test of Patience above, because it requires a herculean amount of patience to persevere and keep from breaking your monitor after dying repeatedly to bad luck.

Examples:

These fights have some kind of “trick” or “gimmick” that you need to do to complete them, but there’s no way to know about it unless you read about it in a wiki guide or someone tells you, or you happen to get incredibly lucky and stumble into it. In single-player games, it’s basically trolling the player, and a dick move by game developers. Highly annoying.

Sometimes clues will be provided in the form of NPC dialog or other text you can read in the game, which is somewhat less annoying, but only if you happen to find them. (I’m thinking of Sekiro’s Lightning Reversal here, which I thought was adequately telegraphed throughout the game, even though it was hard to figure out how to actually do it.)

Note: Sometimes there are tricks that will significantly shortcut a boss fight if you know them, for example, using a lightning buff on the Bell Gargoyles in Dark Souls. I don’t count it unless you have to use the trick to beat the boss.

Examples:

Most boss fights sprinkle some or all of these components together. How much they tweak the dials in each area determines how much I enjoy a boss fight, or how much I want to rage quit the game.

It’s the last stretch for The Surge, as Warren finishes out his first day on the job. I hated the last zone in The Surge (the Nucleus) so much I almost uninstalled the game with only a couple hours left to play, but I powered through it because I’d gone too far to throw away so many videos. :)

Previously: The Surge, Research and Development

What’s Next

The Surge 2, and Code Vein, both games I have finished as of this writing. I don’t know if I’ll do the same narrative treatment. It’s easy to streamline and automate video production, but it’s impossible to do the same thing for writing. Also, I want to try uploading two videos a day for a while, because I’m recording videos faster than I’m uploading them, so I keep falling further and further behind. That means I have to write these tiny summaries twice as fast. Ugh. Maybe it’ll get easier the more I practice.

Anyway, I’m currently playing Nioh, continuing to clean out my backlog of Souls-like games.

I saw a tweet the other day that reminded me of a topic of interest to me for decades, and I’m almost positive I’ve never written a blog post about this, so it’s finally something new to write about: The sound of your own recorded voice.

This particular tweeter was lamenting the troubles they were having with streaming because they cringed whenever they heard their own voice. Coincidentally, Roger over at Contains Moderate Peril touched on this subject too, in relation to podcasting, so I guess a lot of people are thinking about

It’s extremely normal to hate the sound of your own recorded voice. Everyone does. We all sound very different on an audio recording (typically higher-pitched) than we do through our own ears because of bone conduction and things of that nature. I’m sure there are exhaustive Google resources out there to explain the science of all that.

In fact, I’ve just learned that there’s a term for this phenomenon called “voice confrontation.” There’s a lot of interesting science and psychology behind it.

So, it’s not just you. It’s everyone.

The first time I recorded my own voice for some kind of project was probably in the 80s. So that’s roughly how long I’ve been dealing with “voice confrontation.” I’m not an expert on this by any means, I’m just a bit of a reluctant hobbyist. I think about it a lot.

I’m not going to talk about how to make your voice sound better, or how to make yourself “sound more attractive”, in the parlance of snake-oil salespeople, because there are a gazillion resources out there for that. (It’s a shockingly common search topic, no doubt because of the rise in streaming culture.) It’s largely subjective, and there is no magical fix.

What I want to focus on here is how I’ve managed to persist in making vocal content when I didn’t happen to be born with the natural voice of a professional broadcaster.

It’s kind of simple, but also hard: I use a form of immersion or exposure therapy. I simply listen to my own recordings all the time. Not just when editing, but I play back stuff as a listener would. Through good speakers and especially through bad speakers. I’ve heard my own voice so much now that it sounds pretty normal to me.

Weird as it sounds, I frequently play back my game videos on an iPad while I’m falling asleep. It accomplishes several things at once: 1) It’s a regular nightly habit that promotes sleep (the standard defense against periodic insomnia), 2) It’s daily practice listening to what my voice sounds like and becoming comfortable with it, 3) It’s a relatively low-impact way to find little incremental things to improve about my videos over time, and 4) As a bonus, I often notice things about whatever game I’m playing that I missed the first time through.

Admittedly, it’s a luxury I have because I live alone, and there’s nobody around to tell me how weird it is.

But, if you listen to yourself a lot, over time you’ll stop hearing “your voice” and start hearing “a voice.” Or even better, “an audio waveform” or “background noise.” It takes time and practice. When I say “a lot,” here, I mean hundreds and thousands of hours of it. Start now. It won’t get any easier later.

Something else I do in particular with game videos is that I avoid watching “professional” streamers or YouTubers: The ones with millions of followers and especially the ones with FM radio DJ voices (ie. most of the popular ones). There’s plenty of reasons to avoid watching streamers that don’t involve vocal confrontation, but for this post, here’s a list of reasons that directly undermine my self-esteem.

So I only watch game videos from lower tier “regular people” gamers. The third of fourth page of search results, or even further down. In other words, the less professional sounding, the better (to a point… I won’t listen to distorted audio). The main reason I do that is so that my videos (and my voice) compares more favorably against them. (In fact, I have an active aversion to “radio voice” streamers and YouTubers, because I just think it sounds weird, like outsiders are invading my nerd hobby.)

I just realized I sometimes prefer game videos made by women, possibly because it’s physically impossible for me to overlap in that space, so there’s no pressure to compare myself to them. Maybe the same thing works in reverse, I don’t know. But it’s something to think about.

And I also just realized that I prefer game videos from people with non-American accents. Again, I can’t possibly sound like them, so I don’t feel any competitive pressure. Something else to think about.

The basic idea is to avoid listening to voices similar but better than yours, so you aren’t constantly bombarded with feelings of inadequacy.

Back to my videos, hopefully each new one is slightly better than the previous one. I’m embarrassed about different things now than I used to be, so hopefully that’s a sign of growth.

Speaking of embarrassment, continuing to upload my videos even though I’m embarrassed by most of them is also a form of immersion therapy for me. It’s the same for any sort of artistic endeavor. It takes a fair amount of practice and repetition to put your most embarrassing self out there and get comfortable with the more-or-less constant sense of humiliation that comes with it.

The most important thing, by far, and it’s the same with any form of content creation, is to make sure you have good reasons for recording yourself besides “I want to be popular like my favorite streamer.” For myself the main reasons are: a) I enjoy audio production and engineering, b) I enjoy reading things out loud, c) I need constant practice with verbal communication, and of course, d) I like to play games and talk about them.

There’s another tangentially-related topic I might address in another post: Unconscious speech patterns and filler words, another thing I struggle with constantly. Unfortunately I don’t yet have any tips or tricks for that one. But I also use my game videos a lot to try to understand better how my brain processes verbal language, or doesn’t, as the case may be.

Anyway, the tweeter I mentioned at the beginning asked if anyone actually liked the sound of their own voice, and the answer is mostly no, definitely not my natural unaffected voice, but I’ve grown accustomed to it.

But occasionally, yes. Sometimes I hear something in my videos and think, “Hey that part sounds pretty good.” It’s almost always when I’m reading some game text out loud, or intentionally changing the sound of my voice.

Those are the moments that I try to remember and replicate going forward. I can tell there’s been incremental improvement every year. If I compare my videos today to the ones I did in 2015, I can definitely hear an improvement.

The bottom line is that, like most things, it’s a journey.

P.S. That picture is the Successor of the Throat from Code Vein. Best I could do.