Endgame Viable

I spent last night in Final Fantasy XIV standing at the Neverending Storybook (not the actual name) refreshing my memory on story events from the very end of A Realm Reborn and the post-Heavensward stuff with The Word Of The Mother and the Warriors of Darkness.

That stuff is directly relevant to the story in Shadowbringers, so all you people speedrunning through the game right now, don’t forget those parts! (Even though it seems completely random and irrelevant to the rest of the story that’s going on at the time.)

In fact, the Word of the Mother is so relevant to Shadowbringers that I can’t help but wonder why there was an intervening Stormblood expansion. The post-Heavensward stuff looked like a big setup for Shadowbringers, but it’s as if they weren’t quite finished with Shadowbringers, so they just bumped it and replaced it with Stormblood. Maybe that’s why everyone collectively decided they didn’t like Stormblood. (But as a reminder, I thought Stormblood was pretty good, and everyone else is wrong.)

I’m about to spoil some stuff so don’t read anymore.

Final Fantasy XIV has a somewhat infuriating habit of not explaining things in clear detail, particularly when it comes to all the wand-waving magicky mumbo-jumbo that happens with crystals and stars and Hydaelyn and whatever. They have a tendency to use the same words for multiple things, or different words for the same things.

For example, all of these things are the same: Minfilia, The Antecedant, The Word of the Mother, The Oracle of Light, Minfilia (the girl), Minfilia (the previous ones), and Ryne. Or maybe, they aren’t the same. I don’t really know. It depends on the context. It’s rather confusing, to say the least, and the game’s dialog doesn’t do much to clear up the confusion. Maybe it’s intentional, to provide fodder for people to yammer about on forums.

Not to mention, there’s more than a few passing references to the history of Minfilia and Thancred in The Lost FFXIV Version 1.0, which exists nowhere except random out-of-context YouTube videos. (It’s somewhat baffling to me that those cut scenes aren’t in the Neverending Storybook. Perhaps there are legal reasons. But I suppose those stories were different characters anyway.)

Anyway, I don’t remember hearing an adequate explanation for why there’s been a hundred years of reincarnated Minfilias popping up in The First, or why they have weird eyes, or why they have sin-eater-fighting magic powers. Just that they exist, and everyone knows they exist. Perhaps it will be explained later.

On the one hand, I like it when stories don’t spoon-feed knowledge to the reader. But on the other hand, I don’t like it when they don’t give you enough knowledge, either. Particularly when it seems incredibly relevant. It leaves me to try to fill in the blanks myself, and sometimes I make incorrect assumptions.

On this most recent adventure through Allen Town fixing railroad tracks, I thought they said quite clearly that we were going to summon The Oracle of Light, and then The Oracle of Light would “consume” Minfilia the girl (by her own choice, a noble sacrifice to save her world, if you will), and replace her with a Super Powerful Minfilia Of Old, and then they’d be able to find the remaining Lightwardens. That was a really interesting moral quandry for Thancred.

But what actually happened was Minfilia the girl “consumed” (in the words of Emit Selch) The Oracle of Light instead, got new hair, new eyes, and new magic powers, and Minfilia Of Old is … apparently … finally gone. Again, for what seems like the millionth time now, so of course I don’t believe it for one second.

I can’t tell if I completely misread the narrative, or they did it intentionally and it was supposed to be a dramatic twist that I didn’t see coming. In the end it turned out to be somewhat of a let down, a bit flat. All the stuff I thought they were building meant nothing, and now there’s a whole different character dynamic which isn’t as much of a moral quandry for Thancred.

Thancred has never been a character I particularly liked, incidentally. He’s just kind of there. It was interesting to see that they might finally be giving him something meaningful in terms of character development, beyond just “the guy who disappears and gets information off-screen a lot.”

Anyway, I’m happy Ryne is still there. (You hate to watch kids make noble sacrifices for nothing.) She’s the only principle character who seems to have a character arc in this expansion thusfar. I also wish we’d see Lyna more, who has a fantastic voice actor, and that guy Runar. And whatever happened to that kid at the Inn at Journey’s Head? (Which I previously thought was called the Inn at Journey’s End.) All the best characters in FFXIV are the ones we only get to see for a couple of side quests before the main cast moves on.

By the way, there might be people out there dying to explain everything, because if there’s one thing fans of games love to do, it’s explain things. But I do know where to find wikis with all these explanations if I want them. I’m musing about the story in-progress, delivered in the way the storytellers intended, things that we used to do in the old days, before binge-watching, when we had to wait a week between episodes, and we speculated on what might happen next and what the previous episodes meant. Playing an MMORPG expansion for me is, in fact, just like watching a television series.

P.S. It cracks me up that Thancred and Alphinaud used to be voiced by Taliesin Jaffe and Sam Riegel in A Realm Reborn. It’s exactly like listening to Percy and Scanlan from Vox Machina.

Sometimes MMORPGs make you play a different character for narrative purposes and I don’t like it very much.

I reached The Oracle of Light in Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers last night, and all the dramatic story developments therein. I have a number of criticisms about that bit of story but that’s not the point of this post.

Here I want to talk about the dreaded character switcheroo mechanic that MMORPGs sometimes do. Right before we got to The Oracle of Light, a wild boss fight appeared. In this boss fight, you took control of a different character, Thancred, one of the Scions. It made perfect sense, narratively speaking.

But I hated it.

I’ve never liked it when MMORPGs do this. Mechanically speaking, they throw out the hotbars that you’ve gotten used to over the years, and substitute in a totally new one with brand new skills and abilities to learn in a few seconds. I’ve seen this in LotRO, and I think they may have done this in the Guild Wars 2 Living Story once or twice. It’s actually possible I’ve ranted about this subject before, in which case this post would be redundant, and I would feel shame.

To LotRO’s credit, it was always easy when they threw you into these new situations. I remember it being a case of just pressing a key over and over again and it was virtually an automatic win. I don’t remember what it was like in GW2, but I can’t imagine they’d ever give you an automatic win in that game, the one I affectionately think of as the Dark Souls of MMORPGs.

It certainly wasn’t an automatic win in this FFXIV fight last night. I died three times I think. Each time you retry the instance, it conveniently asks if you want to play it on “Easy” or “Very Easy” difficulty, which would be awesome if it actually was easy and very easy. I just skipped right to “Very Easy” because this was supposed to be a story moment, not a game skill challenge moment. And then I died again. And once more after that. Each time it was basically because I failed to instantenously grasp the game mechanics that they wanted me to know. In the end it was really easy … as long as you understand what to do in the moments where you need to do something. Anyone who’s adept at reading instructions that pop up on the screen for a few nanoseconds while you’re in the middle of a fight with flashing lights and telegraphs to dodge everywhere should have no trouble.

Anyway, I would have greatly preferred it if this had been a cut scene instead of a boss fight. It certainly would have had a lot more story impact, because I was so annoyed by the boss fight that what should have been an dramatic and emotional moment in the story was completely undermined and I couldn’t connect with it at all.

This is the second game mechanic that has really annoyed me in Shadowbringers, a feeling I don’t remember experiencing in any previous FFXIV expansion.

In conclusion, I wish MMORPGs would stop doing this. This is not a positive direction that Final Fantasy XIV is going. At least take a cue from LotRO and make these situations so easy that it’s impossible to fail them. Not figuratively impossible, but literally impossible. The story is the important part in the Main Scenario Quest. Leave the skill challenges in the raids.

P.S. Something else I hate about boss fights in Final Fantasy XIV is that they always throw tons and tons of character dialog at you in the middle of these fights, and they’re never on the screen long enough to read, so you have to scramble to open your chat log (because I never have a chat window open in any MMORPG anymore), and then you inevitably get stuck there chat locked typing “esdfsdesefseeseeefs” to nobody, and you can’t move in the boss fight for an impossibly long time so you get hit by the worst AOEs, then you get killed and get even madder at the game. That was my first death in a nutshell.

I wish the arbitrary geometric leveling curve didn’t mess up story pacing.

Somebody, somewhere in the distant past decided that we needed some kind of incremental progression of experience points for every new level. It takes 100 xp to get to level 2, then it takes 200 xp to get to level 3, and so on, and so on.

I think we can all blame Gary Gygax for this, because I first saw this progression on a chart in a 1970s Dungeons and Dragons booklet. Everyone–apparently–agreed that this incremental leveling was an immutable law of role-playing games, both tabletop and computerized, for the rest of time, because everybody does it.

Everybody except ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2, that is. But they’re weird about a lot of things.

I don’t mind it so much, except in one specific case where it bugs me a lot: Leveling through the obligatory 10 levels of a new expansion (eg. Shadowbringers), the time-stretching effect of the leveling curve has a major effect on the overarching expansion story and pacing thereof.

By which I mean that the pacing of the main story tends to bog down into a mire of meaningless side quests the further you progress into the expansion.

I’m seeing this in Shadowbringers right now as I return to Allen Town (not the actual name of the zone but I think the random jumble of letters starts with an “A” and I refuse to look it up) to start into the level 76 Main Scenario quests.

Our objective is to find The Oracle Of Light, I think, so she can use her Magic Plot Device Of Finding Things to locate the Lightwarden of the zone so we can kill it. But before we can do that, we have to cross some mountains or something. But before we can do that, we have to get a train working or something. But before we can do that, we have to restore a golem to working order or something. But before we can do that, we have to go into some caves to find a gem or something. But before we can do that, we have to find out why this guy Magnus is sad or something. And on and on and on it goes.

This is the story we get.

See how it just stretches out? It’s not because these story things need to happen for the plot to make sense, it’s because mathematically, there has to be X number of quests to do at level 76 in order to get the number of experience points needed to get to level 77. They have to make up things for us to do in order to fill in that number of quests, and almost none of it is anything that I’m particularly interested in seeing, or necessary to the plot. It’s the Wheel of Time conundrum all over again (the thing where 75% of the material in the books isn’t necessary to the plot).

I’m very interested in seeing what happens when we get to this Oracle because they’ve set up a very interesting moral quandry there, but I couldn’t care two whits about why trolleys don’t work in the mining town of Tombstone, Arizona. (Not the actual town name, but it looks like old photos of Tombstone, Arizona.)

The point I’m trying to make is, there’s always a heavy sigh at the start of each new quest when I realize that we’re not going to be advancing the story here, we’re just killing time so the math works out. And with each new level, there’s more and more heavy sighs because there have to be more and more time-killing quests so the math works out.

This is the story I want to see.

It really wrecks the pacing of the story, is what I’m trying to say. Stories are supposed to accelerate toward the end, not decelerate. I have to spend days and days doing meaningless busy work on train tracks to get to the part of the story I want to see. And it’s all because of this arbitrary RPG expectation that each level should take longer than the last one. Why do we still do that?

I’m lucky enough to be able to entertain myself despite the delays, by recording videos and doing my own voice acting. Otherwise, I’d be clicking through these dialogs from Jeryk as fast as humanly possible to speedrun through repairing the train tracks or whatever. It’s no wonder most people just speedrun through the Main Scenario, because 90% of it is just filler. The parts people remember are just a tiny fraction–the “good parts,” which are usually just a handful of cut scenes overall.

P.S. Many of the side stories and vignettes along the way are very good (this thing with Magnus was touching in its own way), it’s just that they’re more like side quests and not Main Scenario Quest material.

P.P.S. It’s Amh Araeng. I like Allen Town better.

I ran into a problem with Final Fantasy XIV and I thought I’d share the solution I came up with, because you certainly won’t find it anywhere on Reddit.

Final Fantasy XIV has a very annoying quirk where you can’t abandon a Main Scenario Quest. You can abandon side quests, but not the main ones. The button just isn’t there.

But: If you’re still in the introductory dialog pages and haven’t yet reached the “Quest Accepted” splash page, you can abandon the quest by shutting down the game. Alt-tab out of the game, end the FFXIV game task by whatever means necessary, and log back in. It worked for me.

If you’ve already gotten past the Quest Accepted point, it’s probably too late. I know of no other way to abandon a Main Scenario Quest. Sorry about that. You’ll have to create a new character and progress all the way back to the point before the quest you want to abandon, which is not really a solution at all.

Reddit will tell you that you never need to abandon a Main Scenario Quest, which is silly. Enthusiasts far and wide will rush to help by explaining that you can re-watch any cut scenes you miss in the Neverending Story book in your inn, which is a fair point, but entirely unhelpful in my specific situation.

Here’s what happened to me: I had just finished level 75 Main Scenario Quest “Out Of The Woods,” which is the one where you leave the Tree Village of the Bunny People and return to the Crystarium. The quest deposits you in your inn room for a soliloquy from The Ghost of the Warrior of Darkness, and when it’s over you’re left standing next to the Innkeeper NPC, who has the next quest.

Okay let's do some inventory management!

I observed that my inventory was almost full, so I resigned myself to the gaming chore that I hate so much: Inventory management. For me, currently, in FFXIV, that means throwing any old Bard gear into the Glamour Wardrobe, and selling any non-Bard gear to my Main Company provisioner for Company Seals, because at this point in my lifecycle of Playing An Aging MMORPG, there’s just no way I’m going to have the time or energy to level more than one main job ever again.

At this particular moment, I had picked up six non-Bard gear pieces from the Qatana Ravel, the trust dungeon I had just completed a couple quests ago. So, mentally grumbling to myself about wasting my time on inventory management instead of playing the game, I clicked on the Innkeeper NPC who was right there to go to my inn to throw some stuff into the Wardrobe.

Perhaps you can guess what happened.

The Innkeeper NPC was actually not an Innkeeper NPC at that precise moment, because the Innkeeper NPC was instead a Questgiver NPC. So I inadvertantly started the next Main Scenario Quest.

Perhaps experienced FFXIV players are familiar with the automatic muscle memory reaction that occurs when you click through all the annoying confirmation dialogs that FFXIV loves to throw at you. Well, I did that, because there’s always an “Are you sure you want to enter your inn?” confirmation dialog. Except there wasn’t in this precise moment, because instead, the innkeeper was talking to me and telling me … something … something I might otherwise never know, because I clicked the mouse button automatically on what I thought would be an innkeeper confirmation dialog and immediately advanced to the next pane of dialog.

By this point I realized what I’d done and mentally shrieked in alarm, because this ruined everything. Like I did with Stormblood, I’m recording my entire Shadowbringers playthrough for posterity, but I wasn’t recording yet, because I was just going to do some inventory management. The Neverending Story book is a nice touch and I’m glad it’s there, but it leaves out a lot of little story details, and is mainly just to re-watch “the good parts.”

Oops this is not inventory management at all.

So I knew I needed to cancel out of this quest to start it again, so I could get that first pane of dialog on a video (and also read what it said because I missed it). But how? I don’t remember exactly what I tried to do next, but it involved another mouse button click somewhere, which advanced ahead again to the next dialog pane. I think I was trying to right-click somewhere to see if I could find a context menu to cancel out of the quest. So that was two whole pieces of dialog I missed by this point. An absolute train wreck for my otherwise flawless recording of every word of every quest before then.

My first thought was to simply hit ALT-F4 and exit the game. But whoops. That doesn’t work. FFXIV apparently disables that.

So I had to ALT-TAB out and end the game the hard way. There’s about a hundred different ways to do that in Windows, but I just right-clicked on the taskbar icon and closed it. FFXIV asked me if I really wanted to exit the game, which dismayed me, because it would give the game ample time to save my location in this quest, but I said yes, and the game exited.

I logged back in to find that I was standing back in front of the Innkeeper NPC, who had returned to being a Questgiver NPC, and I had successfully abandoned the quest I didn’t want to start yet. My perfect record of recording every word of every Main Scenario Quest in Shadowbringers would remain intact! And really, that’s the only thing that’s important, after all.

The vitally important lines of dialog that I would have missed, by the way, were: “Ah, I suspected that you might be awake. I could scarce imagine you sleeping through such a commotion. An entire host of sin eaters appears to be advancing upon the Crystarium. Emergency measures are being taken as we speak.” Pretty important story context to miss!

Anyway, if you’re some kind of weirdo who’s not trying to record videos of every game you play, you can find most of the quest text for Final Fantasy XIV out there on the Internet somewhere. I read a complete transcription of most of the end of Stormblood in a wiki, the parts that I skipped over with a potion. One has to assume it was data-mined from a file somewhere, and not painstakingly typed up by someone.

You can also get a decent enough summary of what’s happening by reading the journal (for major story points, at least). In this case the salient point of “we’re under attack everyone’s going to die if you don’t do something” was in the journal, if you need more MMORPG motivation than just “sprint to the place on the map and click the shiny thing as fast as possible.”

Yesterday I flippantly remarked, “Not exactly a deep meditation on the human condition,” about the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers story so far. But there was a conversation that my mind keeps returning to: A conversation between the Crystal Exarch and Lord Vauthry.

Thankfully I found the text on the Internet so I don’t have to transcribe it myself. (I’ve cleverly edited this to remove the bits that don’t quite reinforce my point below.)

Crystal Exarch: For a hundred years, they [man] yearned for a means to fight back against the sin eaters and at last they have found one. Yet you choose to stand idly by and do nothing. Why?

Try to guess which one is the evil one.

I keep thinking about that exchange, because I keep finding myself agreeing more with Lord Vauthry than the Crystal Exarch.

The Crystal Exarch is supposed to be the one who’s good and righteous and Stands Against Evil No Matter What and all that. But everything the Crystal Exarch’s saying here is pure unadulterated bunk. It’s just a bunch of idealistic nonsense with no grounding in reality. Wishes and hopes and rainbows and unicorns; pure fantasy. The dreams of someone who has apparently never stepped outside their isolated bubble. “I want this to be true so therefore I believe and affirm that it is true.”

Lord Vauthry, of course, represents the evils of debaucherous excess in our Shadowbringers tale. One (or more) of the Seven Deadly Sins, a very Christian evil, which may or may not have been intentional. (The world loves to portray Christianity as The Bad Guy these days, but, at the same time, you cannot portray an overweight person as The Bad Guy anymore. Mixed messages here with Lord Vauthry.) The point is we’re not supposed to like him, narratively speaking.

But Vauthry has the far more realistic assessment of the world and its people. (Final Fantasy is still stuck in The Dark Ages and refers to “people” as “Man,” something I’ve strangely not heard a single person criticize Square Enix for online.) People as a whole are, in fact, quite dumb, and live only for today. I think it’s pretty easy to see if you look at any of today’s news, or read about any time period in the history of the world, or spend more than two seconds on any game forum or glance casually at Twitter.

The point here is not to render judgment upon humankind, but to say that was a good, thought-provoking meditation on the human condition, and I will now place that conversation into the Pantheon Of Best Shadowbringers Moments So Far. Which are, for the record, to the best of my recollection:

Anyway I finished the Rak’tika Greatwood last night and I’ll be moving on to whatever zone is after that. Our Hero is currently just waking up from the forced nap they get after every zone, after which I assume we’ll meet the Crystal Exarch to get our marching orders for the next McGuffin Hunt.

P.S. I also got the silly polar bear mount because that’s apparently what you’re supposed to do in MMORPGs to fit in.

The Stupid Face Boss in Final Fantasy XIII and The Gandalf Moment in Final Fantasy XIV.

First a quick XIII update. I’ve grown to enjoy the cognitive confusion that comes with trying to decipher which roman numerals equate to which game, so I just keep spamming them all over the place now.

I’ve reached the Primach boss fight, which I’m going to call the I Hate Your Stupid Face boss. Each attempt at this boss fight takes me about 25 minutes. And you don’t know if you’re going to win or lose until the end of that time period, because that’s when the Stupid Face starts pouring out the damage on you. So you tweak your characters, buckle up, try not to die of boredom and fall asleep for 25 minutes, then see if the changes you made work or not. I’ve died four times now, because my changes were insufficient.

I don’t feel like I should have to say this to any human on earth, but as a subtle reminder, boss fights that take 25 minutes before you know whether you’re going to win or lose are stupid. (Yes, this does include all MMORPG raid boss fights ever.)

I hate your stupid face.

Because the Stupid Face is so stupid, I’ve turned to Final Fantasy XIV again.

In Shadowbringers, I’ve reached the level 75 Main Scenario Quests, the Tree Village of the Bunny People, and what I’m going to call the Gandalf Moment, because it’s so, so obviously a copy of the Gandalf Falling From The Bridge And Fighting The Balrog scenes from Lord of the Rings. (The quest is actually named The Legend of the Not-so-hidden Temple.)

I don’t think for one second that these principle characters who fell into a hole are gone, because principle characters in FFXIV tend to disappear and reappear quite frequently by the time you get to this third expansion.

Anyway this dramatic story moment was undermined significantly because it was preceded by the worst story duty that I’ve ever experienced in the entire game thusfar. This duty has you sneaking through a “dungeon” of tricks and traps, which was actally quite fun … until you got to the end and had to fight some folks, and said fight had an insta-kill mechanic which sends you all the way back to the beginning. And then you have to go through the entire thing again, waiting painfully through all the dialog again and again, seething about getting killed by some inexplicable mechanic that came out of nowhere.

I had to do this several times, because it wasn’t until the third time in this fight that I noticed a stack marker I was supposed to use to avoid getting insta-killed. I thought for sure the game had bugged and the stack marker didn’t appear at all the first two times, but I checked the video and I happened to have my camera pointing slightly the wrong way, and also the orange stack marker is the same color and right in front of a big orange fireball background, so it’s incredibly easy to miss.

I will now ponder a bit on where I think the story might be going, so probably spoilers if you haven’t gotten this far. Luckily I don’t have comments yet so nobody can write out the exact details of how I’m right or wrong and ruin everything for me. (Not that anyone’s ever done that before. People are generally fairly nice about that.)

I do think it would be pretty cool to turn Shadowbringers into a survival horror situation where all the principle characters get killed one by one in dramatic fashion. Maybe that’s why everyone loves Shadowbringers so much. (They can always bring people back with some hand-waving mumbo-jumbo and have their bodies wake up back in The Source, so there’s no danger of anyone actually dying.)

I’m still waiting for the beginning of the fantastic story everyone keeps talking about, here at level 75, presumably the halfway point, or more realistically the one-quarter mark, the way levels exponentially get longer toward the end. So far, the story’s … okay? There’s some interesting groundwork being laid down, but overall, so far it’s just a simple road trip. Go here, kill a thing, go there, kill another thing. Not exactly a deep meditation on the human condition. Again I have to assume the fantastic stuff is still in the future somewhere.

I have a theory that the main reason everyone says it’s so great is that it just happens to be the story that existed at the time people enjoyed playing the game a lot, and it has nothing to do with the story itself. In other words, the thing that people actually enjoyed was the rush of excitment of a new expansion, or playing again with their friends, or playing that new job, or looking around that new map, or something like that. The story was just … there, so people have created a positive association in their minds.

Believe it or not, people said they loved Stormblood when that expansion came out and the rush of expansion fever was high. Now, I think people would report that Stormblood is the worst one, because that’s the general consensus and nobody can ever dare think for themselves by questioning the wisdom of the Internet Meme, even though the Stormblood story was, in fact, pretty good overall. But it’s possible I’m only remembering the individual moments that I thought were good, and ignoring the rest. Maybe someday I’ll be saying that about Shadowbringers, too. Right now, most of what I’m seeing are the parts I’d forget about.

UPDATE: I’d barely even written and posted this before the one principle character was back without a scratch, as if nothing had happened. Only two quests later, and death is completely reversed by hand-waving story magic, as if the game is a weekly sitcom. Alas, they weren’t wearing white, so not as much of a Gandalf moment as I first thought.

I have the day off today, and I have to talk for a moment about the What Up With That SNL sketches.

If you’re a student of the art and science of humor, there’s so much to study in these sketches. They’re a firehose of frenetic absurdity that doesn’t make any sense, but they’re so damn funny, and I feel like a master’s comedy thesis could be extracted from them.

Every performance is perfect from start to finish, executed with amazing technical precision that looks like it takes months to rehearse, and it comes off completely natural and spontaneous. Every one is jam-packed with referential and visual humor, and you can just tell everyone involved in the scene is at the peak of their craft.

Anyway, I have a general appreciation for artistic things that take tons of chances, look like a lot of work to pull off, and turn out perfectly, and those sketches are that.

Secondarily, Lindsay Buckingham is one of the great underrated rock guitarists out there. That acoustic rendition of Big Love he did for The Dance (the bit that was in the sketch) was also that.

Bless Unleashed: I mean, it’s free.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s fine. Average, if you will. If you’ve already played the four or five established, time-tested MMORPGs out there and really, really need a sixth or seventh one to fit into your daily schedule, it’s fine. But I don’t see it making anyone’s top five list anytime soon.

It’s certainly not going to make it into my top-one game slot. I typically play one game at a time, until I’m finished with it or I abandon it, and there’s at least three other games on my hard drive that are more compelling than Bless Unleashed right now (those being: FFXIII, FFXIV, and A Plague Tale).

But after Bhagpuss gave it such a glowing review, I feel kind of bad about uninstalling it after a half hour, so I might try it again.

It looks better in screenshots than when it's moving.

On the plus side, it’s far better than Bless Online was, in one sense at least: You can actually understand how to play it. You no longer need to stare at the nonsensical UI for a half hour to figure out how to even equip a single spell. Now, you just click the left mouse button to pew pew things. So that’s a big improvement.

It lost points on my mental scale in its first half-hour because 1) It crashed when I clicked the right mouse button to go back during character creation. 2) There were no “randomize” buttons in character creation, an extremely groan-worthy problem in games for me. It’s such a chore to go through complex character creation in games, and it never matters in the end, especially since you don’t even know if you’re going to like the game, so why waste even a millisecond on character creation at the very start of a new game. It makes no sense to me.

Anyway, I meant to play Bless again last night. I logged in, looked at the bland screen for a minute, then logged out and played both Final Fantasy XIII and XIV instead. It’s just … bland. Like corn flakes. There’s your game summary. Bless Unleashed: It’s the corn flakes of MMORPGs.

Inspired by Souls-like combat, but ... not quite there.

There’s something about the way Bless looks that doesn’t gel with me, and it’s the same thing I see in Black Desert Online. It just doesn’t look right. Like they’ve messed up the 3D rendering somehow. There’s a tendency in Asian import games to crank up the brightness and decrease the contrast, so all the faces are washed out blobs and the shadows are light gray, and everything looks like a flat Photoshopped photograph instead of like a real 3D environment. There’s also a tendency in games now to throw in tons of chromatic aberrations at the edges of the screen as you might get from a camera lens, and it’s very alienating to me. Combined with the fact that there’s nothing particularly interesting happening in the scenes, they make it really easy for me to log off and do something else.

UPDATE: I think the unpleasant look might be a result of a general volumetric fog effect. Everything looks like you’re standing near a wildfire, or in a fog bank, or in the middle of a cloud. It makes everything in the middle and far distance look flat and gross. (I made this realization driving back from the store today when I noticed that, because it’s a hot, hazy day today, the real world looks kind of like an Asian import game.)

Magi mentioned a topic in the Blaugust discord: “How do you personally get your opinions or thoughts across in a post?”

It’s the magic question in all writing: How do you communicate what’s in your mind into the mind of a reader? It’d be great if there was an easy answer to this question.

Well, there is an easy answer: Simply ask yourself what your words mean to every other human on Earth.

What do these words mean to someone who’s 50 years older than I am? What do they mean to someone who’s 50 years younger than I am? What do they mean to someone who lives in a different country under a different form of government? What do they mean to someone who’s deeply entrenched in that political party in the news that I hate so much? What do they mean to someone who’s devoutly religious? What do they mean to someone who hates religion? What do they mean to someone with a master’s degree in English? What do they mean to someone who didn’t finish high school?

And so on, and so on, for some 9 billion variations. Simple.

Ideally, written words should mean the same thing to every potential reader. I tend to use the simplest words possible. I don’t often stray into complex vocabulary when I’m trying to communicate thoughts and ideas, especially if I think they might be controversial.

Controversial topics are often littered with minefields of “trigger words:” Words which immediately set off an emotional response in the reader as soon as they’re uttered, shutting down any possibility of further communication. They’re usually the same words that end up in the trending topics lists, and the words that content farms and news outlets love to use as they drive higher engagement, the magic currency of the Internet. I try to avoid them. A trigger word might drive a reader into an instant rage, but the exact same thing, stated a different way, might have them nodding in agreement. Because humans generally aren’t too bright, ya know?

I, for example, can’t stand the word “wholesome.” I think it’s a horrible word that stands for horrible things. To me, it has a strong connotation of divisiveness, of gatekeeping, of us-versus-them, of oppression and thought-policing. It reminds me of Stepford Wives and Sunday School and Good Christian Values, of politicians demanding that our children not be exposed to any of That Darn Rap Music because it’s not wholesome. In the immortal words of Huey Lewis from Back To The Future, representing the entire wholesome community, “You’re just too darn loud."

But now I see “wholesome” has made a big comeback and circulates social media as something positive, and it makes me vomit a little in my mouth every time I see the younger generations embracing that cancer of dystopian propaganda.

So, that’s a word I can’t use in any blog posts, since I know it doesn’t mean what I think it means to some readers. I can’t use it for what I think it means, and I can’t use it for what readers think it means. I have to pick some other words, like “that new game is adorable.” As far as I know, the word “adorable” still means the same thing it did when I was a child.

You never know these days, though. Words change meanings really fast on social media.

I would say that getting me to talk or write about myself is like pulling teeth, but I’ve had five or six teeth pulled in my lifetime (or more, I honestly don’t remember), and a ton of root canals, and a ton of dental work in general, so pulling teeth is no big deal to me.

People who cringe about getting a cavity filled make me chuckle knowingly. I once had a dentist shatter one of the teeth he was trying to extract. It wasn’t a big deal, in hindsight. Just felt a bit weird and I could sort of sense the dentist was a little worried about it. Afterward, he said, “Whew, that could have been bad!”

But you can’t really jump into a conversation with someone who’s terrified of dentists and try to one-up their “oh I had my first cavity it was awful” stories. You just have to bite your lip and smile and nod and commiserate.

Those who haven’t experienced extensive dental problems and all the related social challenges during their 20s and 30s are those who live lives of extreme privilege and luxury, if anyone were to ask me.

But, as genetic deficiencies go, it’s not the worst (if you have money to pay dentists). It’s just that you never meet anyone else who has the vaguest clue how much one’s teeth affect their day-to-day lives in ways nobody realizes.