This has been another week of churn, and all in all not a great week, not the worst, but there hasn’t really been much to really celebrate this week. Another rainy week, with the weekend being wet enough that I only have 3-4 hours of walking time together through the weekend, and many times when I arrive at my home door looking like a sad drowned puppy. Also it was an on-call week, which are never the great ones, but at least I had some things through. I thought I would do a mini review of Final Fantasy VII as I did manage to finish that one Last week.

Final Fantasy VII Mini review

I got this one on a whim since it was on another sale, and 6€ for a classic RPG is not something to sneeze at. The graphics are.. well.. PS1 Graphics, but the longer you get into the game, the more you start forget about that, and the more you get impressed about how well it all works together, and while the graphics can’t be said to be fancy, you get kind of impressed about it, and it has its own charm, all in all I really liked the look of the game. But if you’re into the more fancy and high fidelity graphics, this probably won’t win you over.

The story is decent, and it does it’s thing of shuffeling you from one set-piece to another, and these set pieces is what is really kind of making me impressed in this game, there are so many memorable moment, cool little sequences that kind of makes this feel like a world spanning adventure, climbing up a skyscraper, climbing up a snowy mountain, dropping in heist style over an occupied city, snowboarding down a mountain or trying to stop a train by jumping from carriage to carriage. This felt like what was driving the game, and It kept on amusing and amazing me how much stuff they added to the game.

Battles are pretty standard fare, kind of like the normal Turn based combat, the limit-breaks kind of are there, and while they are nice to get from time to time, I don’t really think they added much to the battle system. Materia was decent, but I don’t really think they hold anything up to things like the Job system in FFV, it kind of was there in the background, and I didn’t fiddle around with it too much, and if anything it made the character feel more like JPGs with stats to me, since everyone could be anyone, and then just bekame nobody.

I’m pretty happy with the discoverability and leading on of the story, and there wasn’t many points where I was really lost and had to look up what I was supposed to do next, which was really nice, and it’s something that I appreciate, and they did manage this without map markers and the like, which made it feel less like following markers, and more like following the story, which I really enjoyed.

And then we have the last dungeon and boss, that’s where it all fell apart for me, and thankfully for the last boss I was playing on the switch rerelease which let me cheat by filling up all the meters (limit, life, ATB) and speed up the time 3x, the cave leading up to the final boss was okay, and I got through it without cheating, but it had quite a lot of bullshit enemies that seemed to be designed to just eat as many of your resources as possible, which was annoying, it broke the flow of battle and being nocked down by instant death attacks just aren’t fun, I went into the last cave with 40 Pheonix downs, and had 25 when I reached the final Boss. The final boss battle also just was not fun, it had tons of bullshit attacks, and also kept on doing this 40+ second long attack, which just kind of decimated my party, which I had to spend resources to redo, and get in a couple of hits before it started again. I was happy to cheat here, but it just didn’t feel like a good conclusion.

All in all I really enjoyed the game, up until the last cave, and I do understand why this is counted as a classic by many, it really did the transition to 3D well, and all in all I’m really happy to have played FF7. I just wish it wasn’t marred by the bullshit leading up to the end.

Books

I started “Exodus” by Peter F. Hamilton this week, and it’s kind of an intriguing world, and now finally after having read about 200 pages of introductions it feels like the story is starting to move, which is nice. I still really enjoy Hamiltons writing, and his quirks, it kind of feels like coming home, as his was some of the first sci-fi books that I read when I started reading the genre.

The characters are pretty fun to, and while there has been no aliens so far, the gene edited upper classes of humans in this book might as well be, as different and powerful as they do feel from the rest of the characters.

I like most of the characters so far, and the beginnings of a story, but still haven’t quite a hold of what the story will be, but the show place and the characters are now in place, and I feel ready to see what will happen, which is nice.

Games

Finishing of FF7 was kind of a let down, with the ending being how it was, but what’s more natural after finishing a long RPG than, starting another. So well I started playing Persona 3 Portable (the switch rerelease). And I’m now 15+ Hours in since it was a rainy weekend with not much to do.

I did play the beginning of P3P back in 2010 I think it was on my PSP, and this one really dredged out some nostalgic memories. I think I’m starting to get close to where I fell off the last time, but I’m not quite sure. It’s a very enjoyable game though, the split in 2 with story elements, and then some dungeon crawling works pretty well, the story pieces are written really well, and I like the small broken up pieces of story (Apart from Kenji with his teacher crush, fuck him…).

The battles are fun, and the cycle of climbing up levels until you get to the mini boss, go back to heal and fuse together demons, getting something new, and then dive in again feels really good, and it’s kind of really fun to keep in mind having a team that can do what I need in the dungeon, while still being the types to further my goals in the story part. It’s an engaging system that keeps on ratteling on in the back of my mind over the day, which is always kind of fun.

I did start the game on easy, while it hasn’t been much of a challenge in this mode yet, at least it’s not a frustrating block that doesn’t let me continue on, I can always play it on a harder difficulty later with the female protagonist, which from what I heard has a lot of new stuff with it.

Other Media

As far as other media goes there wasn’t really much that sparked too much of an interest with something new and interesting, which kind of let me in a rut, with some light points here and there, I watched some videos about eshop-slop which were kind of entertainment, for some reason I kind of do like watching people talking about bad games :p

So since this section is rather short I guess I will take the chance to write a tiny bit about why I stopped listeing to some podcasts, one prime example being “Trash taste” I do enjoy some of their episodes, but they seem to have been gotten more back into anime/manga, and weeb-culture again, while I mostly am more interested in their japan life stuff, which they used to have quite a lot of, so I put them out of my auto download queue, which usually is okay, because I tend to read through the episode descriptions and get the ones that I’m interested in, but their descriptions are atrocious, so I have no clue what the episode will be about, and end up with just not listening to any of their episodes any more.

On youtube as well, it seems like my japan content has been going down rapidly, Abroad in Japan seems to have almost stopped posting, and Connor’s channel as well, and I kind of grew tired of some of the other channels I did use to watch, I guess I kind of miss it, maybe I will try and look for some new, it’s just tiring to wade through all the shitty ones until I find a presenter that I enjoy, and I don’t really have the motivation and energy to do that at the moment.