more often than not when a final fantasy game's mechanics get changed up for something a bit more experimental it doesnt work. final fantasy 8 is no exception lmao
playing this game was a fucking nightmare. girlfriends make us strong, and thats the core mechanic of this game. however junctioning them, magic, and abilities, and having to switch them back and forth between forced party members is such a tedious pain in the ass. there are so many times in this game where its like "change to zell and his gang" for two fights then it switches you back to squall and his gang, and it takes multiple minutes everytime to switch over all my GFs!!! i'm not leaving GFs and magic on characters im not using bc i'm just weaker for it with my main team! even in the final battle its not like you actually NEED everyone, you just let the people you dont want for the fight die so you can use the actual good characters (Squall, Irvine, and Rinoa). on the magic front of things, drawing it from draw points and monsters is fun in theory but just sucks the fun out of the game if you want to play optimally you will draw all the valuable spells 99 times from every enemy. this makes spell quantities pointless, but again, youd be stupid not to do this because it's just the optimal and easy thing to do. and it takes ages! leveling up in this game is basically pointless because the stat ups are minimal, but they can be worth it when you have GF abilities like STR and HP Bonus on your best boy Irvine Kinneas. However when the game deems Squall too high levelled then the amount of XP you get from battles dramastically decreases... for everyone. so if Squall is overlevelled, NO one can level up anymore. tbh I didnt check BUT i'm pretty sure you also have to take Squall with you so you cant get out of this... maybe i'm wrong but i will not be playing this game again to find out! also the game kinda wants to level its enemies with the party; this isnt necessarily a bad thing, but the devs decided that enemies of different level-tiers drop different loot. this means it can be very easy to obtain certain materials from enemies in the early game, but once you level up a bit too much some items because borderline impossible to get your hands on. this SUCKS!!!!!!!!! i could go on and on about all the weird gameplay decisions they made in this game that make it frustrating and not fun a lot of the time, but the gameplay experience overall wasnt TERRIBLE it was just really, really annoying at the worst of times, and reminiscent of better final fantasys at the best of times.

all of that being said, the story in this game is the thing that kept me going. i am, famously, an FF7 fanboy which i love to death. i think that games story is just like, the bee's knees. i love its down-to-earth human action, its lack of divine intervention, its relatable anti-capitalist pro environment message, i Love it. this game leans more into anime asthetics to tell a more personable story about, essentially, teenagers falling in love with themselves, and then other people. its cute! its good even! squall is genuinely insufferable for a really long time, but his inner monologue throughout the game really does a lot to explain why he is the asshole he is. the game even lets you choose how much you want to play into with dialogue options. i didnt want to play squall in anyway other than how i saw him; an asshole; so for a lot of the game i always picked the dickhead options like "whatever" and "shut up" etc etc. but as the game progresses and squall is confronted with love and earnest attempts to open him up, i felt the need to respond in kind, and i enjoyed that i could allow squall to be more open with his friends and be honestt. the simple character arc over 40 hours genuinely works very well! i dont necessarily like all of the characters (sorry selphie) but there's a lot of good stuff in here. the world is more explicitally fantasy/sci-fi and less relatable. Midgar and Shinra's politics in FF7 are much more laid out the state of people in the world made clearer, but in FF8 there's conflict as a plot device that doesnt apply to the characters and its fine. this game also has the interesting idea of having an alternative storyline playing out, with Laguna Loire, Kiros, and Ward. dude, i love Laguna. he's such a himbo. i like his battle theme, i like how handsome he is. I like how he is the polar opposite to Squall. it's a really nice idea! the gameplay doesnt quite compliment it really; i feel like it would have worked better with FF7's materia system where the other party have their own stash of stuff and you dont need to worry about rejunctioning them. then when the characters finally rendevous maybe you can even have them join up for one fun bossfight or something! still, a lot of good and fun story stuff. i like the Shumi, the Moomba, Fisherman's Horizons was fun. I wish there was a bit more with Seifer. I like how the world is populated with goofy, funny characters that Squall just has to react to. i love the idea of stone-hearted Squall looking at Shumi building a statue, KNOWING he needs to assassinate the sorceress, and just going "I could help them build a statue" for no reason. i love that; its great

so thats final fantasy 8. its pretty weird. if it had better gameplay mechanics i probably WOULD play this again, but as it stands, i dont want to go through that shit again bc it suuuuucks. Irvine Kinneas best boy forever; moomba OUT

starting on 10th August last year, 2023, i have been playing animal crossing wild world on my nintendo 3ds (new 2ds XL, sorry) every single day, with today being my last day. okay, few exceptions, i did not play on my 27th birthday, nor did i play on the 10th, 15th, or 24th of november, 13th, of december, 2nd of january, or 2nd of february. so admittedly that's like a week or so of days i didnt actually play on, but considering i started in August of last year and it's May now, i THINK that can be forgiven!!!!!

anyway here's the good old OLD days of animal crossing! it's not quite the good old days, because that's New Leaf, and it's not the good old OLD OLLLD days because that's Population Growing (if you want to be insane like me and call ti that)

as someone who really struggled with New Horizons i wanted to see how possible it would be for me to play Wild World, my first animal crossing game again. i wanted to play it properly, you know, i had goals of what i wanted to achieve. it wasn't maxing out absolutely everything, but rather just the stuff i was interested in. i thought that in the interest of animal crossing being a relaxing game, i shouldnt force myself to do the stuff i didnt want to do, like catch all the fish and all the bugs. so i didnt do that! i caught a lot of them when i started playing but then as the seasons changed i thought "fuck this" and stopped. delightful how you can do that! i did pay off my entire mortage though, and i got the framed photos of all my favourite villagers who moved in. i gotta say, i got LUCKY a lot of the time in this run. ACWW's town variation is surprisingly in depth and there are hundreds of different layouts you can get. there's a few where the river forks and meets the sea at two points, creating a sort of island in your village. i LOVE the island. so my first demand of ACWW was a village with an island. then it was to have cherries as my native fruit - don't ask me why. then it was to have the town hall in the northern most quarter of the map, so that the village wall was against the back of the town hall. and finally, the different functions of the town had to be seperated, as to create a town that felt liek every part of it was worth going to. i mostly got my wishes! i would've liked the museum, or my house, to have been on the island. i dubbed it "orange island" because the only fruit i let grow there were oranges. the museum and shops were a bit too close to each other, and my house was also kinda close, but it was fine... i got very lucky with who moved in too! a lot of the time in AC if you don't like your villagers you just wont talk to them, and as it turns out, the villagers are important! i got cube, coco, octavian, snake, and tangy (although not in that order), and was only missing one of the good snooty girls, like olivia or ankha (dont even think about saying anything about ankha.)

i loved talking to my villagers in this game. they're all so obsessed with food! there's clearly a random food generator baked somewhere into the game's code so that cube can be like "oh man did you try out that spaghetti gazpacho strawberry soda they mentioned on TV the otherday?" or some kind of other insane shit. and the villagers actually talk about stuff. they're not always happy, they'll be like "oh FUCK dude when were you planning on telling me that you'd be recruited into the FBI?!" and you'll just have to go along with their dellusions. makes conversations fun and memorable, and you actually get a good idea of what they're about! what's NOT fun is when tangy is like "hey I could really do with a very specific item of clothing only" and will ask you about it every day for two weeks. like jsut ask me for a fossiL! any fossil or bug! or at least the ones where it's a furniture item from a set works better. but overall i liked the villager interractions in this one. makes the most sense that when tangy asks me to deliver something to snake, she's the one to give me my reward, not snake? i dont know why they changed that in later games. the only way to get nookingtons requiring a second cartridge is fucking evil and i'm glad they took that out of the Wii-U port of the game, but also, who the fuck is playing ACWW on Wii-U, especially these days?!

the soundtrack fucks, and bells are basically worthless! easily 99% of my money only ever went onto my mortage and THEN to donating to boondox. the last three/four months of gameplay were just me logging in every day to hit the money rock and sell foreign fruit to nook for 500 bells a piece. i used my second cartridge to make about 200k every three days and it was booorrring :)
i wouldn't recommend doing this yourself!
i did also accidentally complete the fossils in my town, and that was okay too!!

weird how when i was a kid, decorating my house was so easy. even when i was like 19 and moving to wales and playing New Leaf everyday... but now i can't do it! had no interest in it. maybe it's because decorating is easier in newer titles and ACWW's is more difficult. oh yeah, turnips are worthless in this too! even with the exploit of never-dying turnips, the market just isn't worth it because of how random it is. so don't bother!

ACWW produced a lot in my head when i was a kid. i did a lot of imagining and pretending of things. i used to pretend there was a killer hiding in the cedar trees in the north side of town. i'd dress my villager up with a hockey mask or something, give him an axe, and make him chase my friends when they visited. we used to play sumo wrestling by making a 3x3 grid surrounded by pitfall seeds. and obviously in a double bed we'd make them BUMNP UGLIES IF YOU KNOW WHAT IM SAYING AWWHHYEEEAAAHAHH

special game. really special game. 399 hours logged on my 3DS, but that's not just this town. also, i would've played at least 100 hours more on a DS and DS Lite when i was a kid. long car journeys. playing before school, waiting for nooks shop to open. sharks as something rare and special. those momens with blathers and nook where they'd talk longingly about something. getting to know sable and brewster. hearing about this big city they all lived in, how it hurt them and harmed them and maybe them a little more cold. but that the small village with its flowers, its silly residents, and you, made them all better. that's animal crossing. like having pets they make you softer, i think, and maybe that's been lost with the over nicification in the newer games. idk, its not like this one isnt nice. but it says that your town, your little place, is special. and thats why it's nice. the world is wild, man, but your town is home, not just for you, but for everyone

goodnight

this game has a pretty good GBA port (and a weird DS remake where FuSoYa's stats go DOWN on a level up! but we'll talk about that LATER) and so this version of the game isnt SUPER necessary? it cuts out the developer's room in the dwarven castle which is mondo sad, and also doesnt have the optional stuff at the end of the game (including choosing your party for the final dungeon)... furthermore, and this is both a good and bad thing, this version is markedly easier than the others. the XP requirements for leveling up are less so just by playing the game you level up faster. this was probably due to the fact that you can run diagonally now, meaning you'll get less random encounters. still, it felt a bit too much. bosses i remember struggling against once upon a time didnt mean dick to me here. this includes Lugae and his frankenstein freak, i think Golbez in the dwarven castle, and uh, zeromus? still it was nice to play it again! FF4 pisses me off bc of the low accuracy mages have and that part in the story where you have three fucking wizards with you. also dark knight cecil needed a longer duration in the story!!!

conclusion? kain in the after years is sexy BEFORE he gets paladinised. play FF6 instead

its so funny playing this after FF2 which is genuinely unpleasant to play and experience, and just have this intense quality of life improvement in its gameplay. the leveling system is classic and good, and the job levels in this game is also a fun mechanic. job levels arent too grindy and its very conceivable you'll get at least one to max with just playing the game and not switching classes too much!

about two years ago i finished FF3's 3d variant on steam, based on the DS port. i wasn't so hot on it, maybe bc on a big screen its very ugly, and the actual characters/plot of FF3 arent great! i think the pixel remaster was a wonderful way to experience this because graphically, the pixel remasters are excellent! and aside from the NES version, theres no other pixelated version of this game, unlike the rest of the PR games. all the different job sprites are so charming and wonderful! the problem with FF3 is, as i said, its lacking characters and plot, and mainly that the job system does not actually really compliment the multi-job system. in that there are sections of the game that are designed to be tackled by specific jobs, like the Cave of Nepto being an all mage section or the Cave of Shadows requiring dark knights (who also kind of fall off from this point). don't get me wrong it's not terrible but it does make it feel like some classes simply arent viable. but its fine! i still just enjoyed this game the whole way through, and the dungeons are SO much better than the previous two games! good job FF3 :)

To be clear i didnt actually PLAY this game, i watched ashleigh play the whole thing and sat with her during the class trials and we talked about.

now i dont KIN nagito or anything like that, but when we got into the meat of this game i was definitely pleasantly surprised. you hear so much shit about dandan's romper fans that i thought this was going to suck, be total anime bullshit throughout, and be lame. i was mostly wrong! like a lot of Hard Anime works, dandan's romper has its own world and set of rules that make sense within the context of that world. once you give yourself over to that you can enjoy the game on its merits for what it is: a solid murder mystery story with a conspiracy going on in the background. Each murder, bar maybe one of them, was genuinely really well thought out and written, with a good understanding of logistics behind it. the characters were all interesting anf strange, and even the ones you dislike get depth, and even the cheesey anime silly ones grow on you as time goes on. i didnt like Mafia Boy at all by the start but by the end he was a good man. Dandan's romper is also super self aware, it breaks the fourth wall, acknowledges how its plot is convenient for the sake of the plot, and more. it balances humour and horror in a really satisfying way, its incredibly stylised, and the music fucks. it made me think of persona in that it has very gay and trans coded characters at points, and while it doesnt confirm anything it doesnt do the persona thing of going "whoops they were straight all along heehee!"
Knocked off half a star bc the minigames during the trials are absolutrly atrocious. hangman's gambit is a terrible, terrible way to spend your time. wasteful

souda is the best boy

played it like a pokemon nuzlocke, which was very fun but devastating when some random antlion cast level 5 death and annhiliated three of my girls in one move. made me real mad!

i love this game. marche's motivations are undeniably not explored enough, but there is the seed of something fun in this, a game where "you are the villain" but you think youre the good guy? but also, this game DOES think you're the good guy? idk its interesting! montblanc is very ugly. i wish the sequel's gameplay wasnt like that!