I had to add the year in to the title this week, I didn’t think of it in the first place, and was kind of thinking it would be a short time experiment, now that I’ve actually done them for a while I think it may be best to future proof them a bit, sot that I will have them work in case I keep on doing these.

It has been a rather bland churny kind of week this week, not that much going on, not much that elevates my mood much over baseline. Fingers crossed for this week, maybe something good will happen. Which lead my concentration to falter a couple of times, and me just looking forward to the evenings to get to enjoy octopath a bit more. The weather is still springing back and forth between rain and baking sun, so let’s see what the week brings.

Books

I’m still working on Cherryh’s Cyteen, this is a big bastard of a book, around 500 pages read now, and that is half way through the book, so it will probably take me a couple of weeks still to get all the way through. It’s getting good though, and she’s building well on all the back story that she has built up, and things are moving at a bit better of a clip now, so I hope and think that it will be kind of keeping up what it has going, rather than going back to the more plodding style of the beginning. I think I will need something a bit lighter and shorter when I get through it. I’m thinking of doing a reread of the Consortium Rebellion series by Jessie Mihalik, I really enjoyed it the last time I read them, and they would fit pretty nicely I think.

Games

I’m still really enjoying “Octopath Traveller II” and it’s still occupying a lot of my mind, so if you don’t enjoy reading about that you can safely just skip this section.

This has been taking up most of my gaming time this week, and I have been getting about 30 hours into it. I’m not really rushing though, so I’m not really that far into the stories. There is just so many things to enjoy and savour here, which is really nice.

Firstly since there are 8 different stories to follow, you don’t really get stuck in a rut in all of them at once, so there is quite a lot of story variation, something that is nice for us as players, and I would think for the developers as well. It’s also an impressive amount of variation and expressivity to the environments and the scenes for each of the story parts which I really enjoy, it’s quite the treat to go on to the next one. It’s also nice that it kind of follows a Dragon Quest kind of story telling with smaller stories that you can play in one evening / session, so that you get a nice little satisfying piece when you sit down to play.

Battles are still fun, and the way the stories are built up makes you automatically need to rotate the team, which is kind of annoying since you have to keep on retraining people, but on the other hand it’s fun because you’re forced to take out some of the people that you have been leaning on, and have to figure out how to work with this new group of people, which keeps things fresh. The battle music is a banger. And I’m starting to gathering up some more secondary jobs so it’s fun seeing them grow as well, there is constant movement foreward, and it’s nice seeing the characters grow.

I was a bit worried about the open world ish build up of the map, but it has been done in a nice way, most of the areas outside of the cities are more or less corridors with some breaks and things in it, even though they look way nicer, so you don’t really continously get lost, but it’s all small enough that on the first run through they feel exploratory and interesting, and still short enough that it’s not a slog going through them the next times, there is just the right amount of chests tucked away on different places, and temples and other goodies to stumble over that helps you going foreward in some way or another.

I really enjoy this game.

Media / Podcasts

It has been another kind of meager week for podcasts, “Into the aether” is back from break which is really nice, it just always feels like there is just not enough, which is good in some ways, because it keeps me wanting to listen, and means I’m not tired of it. “Video game Podtimism” Just started its break, and other ones are a bit more nebulous going back and forth. Dan and Jordan from the Knowledge fight podcast stopped their 60’s TV recap show “A matter of time” which is kind of sad because I like them, and it’s nice to get something a bit less focused on bad things version of their show. I’ve also been a bit more ruthless about just stopping things that are too navelgazing into American stuff and politics without having a bit of levity, so that means a couple of episodes I just skipped or stopped halfway through. So I guess I will probably listen to quite a bit of back log episodes this week again. Still working on the Video game podtimism one, and probably will for a while if I don’t grow tired of it.

I included media here to drag in some videos that I watched as well, even though it’s not that varied either for this week, I keep watching one of my favourites on youtube, olexa’s channel, playing interestig games, and just having kind of a calming voice that I enjoy listening to. They were playing Hempuli’s new solitaire game and it looked really fun, so I’ll probably be getting that one for some enjoyment in between. It looks like a lot of fun.