Oh, Right, I'm Back

In the excitement of having fully-functional internet and being able to actually use it and play games with it and the like, combined with the excitement of there being all sorts of news flying about, I never really made a "Hey, I'm back and stable" post.  Though, to be fair, I did not to jynx myself by making one since I was convinced something would wreck right after such a declaration as that is how things tend to work out.  And to further being fair, tomorrow is kind of a big deal to have internet which leaves it as prime "Murphy's Law" territory for my net shitting the bed for absolutely no reason.  Or, you know, any of a dozen other issues.  Basically, I'm just saying that it's Spring and shit happens in Spring to drive me even -more- crazy than I am dealing with the fucking heat and allergies.

Still, it's worth it to bring up that I was gone, I am back now, and I have things I can marginally discuss for now, likely to further elaborate on in the future.  Since, thankfully, I was not forced to be idle during my internet break despite, you know, not having internet whatsoever in the grand scheme of things.  My games all still worked (which I hope to hell won't become a 'Novel Concept' in the next decade) so it was simply a matter of playing them without the luxury of being able to look up a single bit of information on them (which...was honestly and unfortunately harder than you might think).  I did have the net for the majority of one day which was spent mostly as a waste which I will describe below, but that night saw its demise and plunged me definitively into the 90s existence.

I want to get into that one day with internet before anything else, however, to explain the friggin' comedy of errors that day took.  As I stated previously, I have a copy of Deadly Premonition:  Director's Cut and I was slightly worried about the framerate and such when I started hearing complaints throughout the internet of it, but I had a relatively cool day and decided it was prudent to throw the game in and give it a shot.  So my thought process was basically thus:  The game came with Pre-Order DLC, that means a Day One patch to include it, right?  That is the case in 99% of situations, so I prepared myself for this scenario.  I tried to open the Store and it claimed that there was a system update.  Fair enough, I initiated it and let it run and install with no issue.  So I try to open the Store again only to find there's an update for the Store.  Which is pretty frustrating but I would be alright with it if it improved the Store's performance.  (Spoiler alert:  It doesn't.)  Regardless, that downloads and installs and I am then afforded the opportunity to download my Espresso Suit DLC which I had assumed was...more than just that.  (I don't think it is.)

So, I downloaded the DLC and installed it, since that usually works, and was more than ready to download yet another update, this time for the actual game that this whole endeavor was centered around.  Yet, when I put the game in and started it up there was no such update that occurred, only a message telling me the Game Data was incompatible and to delete it and try again.  That confused me, but I did it anyway (The DLC created Game Data, of course) and tried again.  This time it tells me there's not enough HDD space for the Install.  Urgh.  Deciding that I can live without a few choice Game Datas for games that have even bigger patches waiting for them, I go into the game one final time and let it install.  That works.  I exit, re-download my DLC, load the game again to make sure it's compatible and it is.  Thereafter, I was more than able to play the game with the realization that I was also more than able to do so at any point in the two hours spent doing all of the above because there was no game update.

I....didn't play Deadly Premonition that day.  Though I did play it a couple days later and am happy to report that, aside from one of the hub areas, issues with framerates don't seem that bad whatsoever.  Now I just need cooler weather or a cooler environment to actually resume playing the damn thing.

As is likely obvious from the screenshot at the top of the post, I also put a good bit of time into Soul Sacrifice and have come around to seeing why some people don't like it.  It's not to say that I'm starting to enjoy it any less, but rather that I feel like my enjoyment has reached its peak and will remain a constant which, in a sense, will bring it down.  I've reached the point of the game where it's only going to get exponentially harder with every leap, as it likely assumes I'm spending the time that I'm spending grinding up Offerings (and Levels in the meantime), but grinding up Offerings....well, it gets a little rough after a while.  Especially when you're playing a Glass Cannon since you either bring along allies and merely suffer getting smacked around (thankfully for no damage) by their AOE attacks that they love to spam, or leaving the allies at home and potentially losing a 10-minute battle because of a cheap shot.

The problem is that, I'm at an area where the second-tier of spells is the normal expectancy, and getting those buffed up is not nearly as simple as it was for the first-tier since getting second-tier when you don't have a recipe means involving a lot of first-tier.  Using the above picture as an example - that's the second-tier Ice Arrow skill.  Without a fusion recipe, I can still get more Ice Arrow (M) spells because I got that one from boosting Ice Arrow (S) a bunch.  And by a bunch, I mean four levels.  Which means getting two to boost to One-star, getting two One-Stars to Boost to Two-Stars, getting two Two-Stars to boost to Three-Stars and finally getting two Three-Stars to boost to (M).  Shit is exponential.  That is sixteen Ice Arrow (S) for one Ice Arrow (M).  Which means thirty-two for a One-Star Ice Arrow (M).  It's honestly just must simpler, of course, to find a level that offers the damn spell, or to stumble across the fusion recipe, but, well, both of those require treadings into areas where I should already have the spell and it gets all contradictory there.

Still, the actual game part is still fun, which is what matters of course.  It's just that I feel myself getting more into the thought-process of playing the game rather than just playing it, which is the trap I fell into with Disgaea 3.  Though, to be fair, you have to do that with Disgaea if you plan on doing anything but stumbling your way through the lackluster main story.  Still, just because the things you have to do to conquer even little parts of the 'bonus' content (which is lined up, in my case, as the epilogue to the game and doesn't read as 'bonus' to me whatsoever) are 'extra', that doesn't mean you can do whatever the hell you want with them.  Which is something I've been meaning to bitch about, but haven't gotten quite around to it just yet.

I've talked a few times about The horrors of Mushroom Baal and the horrible grind to get close to his level, but something I've really failed to break-down here is the actual context of what's going on here.  Mushroom Baal is the last fight of the epilogue which is basically just a lot of fan-wanking as you fight a bunch of characters from the game and games previous who have 'lost' something to a 'mysterious' Overlord.  As an example of that, the last fight before Mushroom Baal is Laharl, Etna and Flonne along with a field of crazy prinny soldier things.  Without exaggeration, I could throw Dinah as she is into that fight all by herself and she would win it.  Laharl and Co. are somewhere in the Effective Level of 2000-3000 and honestly are not all that impressive.  Dinah is, of course, Effective Level 9999, but her Sum Level is 30,000 and change.  As you've seen, she comes nowhere close to the Effective Level 4000 Mushroom Baal that has 1.2 Million ATK and is the fight directly after Laharl/Etna/Flonne.  I want to make that clear.  You have normal battles against previous characters like Axel and the mentioned trio and then immediately after, NIS just decides to punch you straight in the dick with a character that you cannot kill unless you've been grinding like a motherfucker.

It is further compounded by the issues that have summarily sprung up from my plans to just raise a really good Majin for Dinah to eat for an all-around boost of no small quantity and the Evilties that come along with that.  Majins, as I have stated in the past, simply require more Experience to level up.  Why this is is entirely beyond me because restricting them strictly because they get good Evilties seems a little overboard, but at the same time, the Evilties are literally all the Majins have.  Their stats being overall the same is nice, but unless you buff them with Class World and feed them someone for weapon skills, they're not going to be useful except for in the most specific of circumstances.  There is a lot of work to put into a Majin to make it 'good' even if it didn't have the EXP restriction.  With that, it's just fucking ridiculous.  I mean, I guess the benefit of an automatic 50% boost to all stats because of an Evilty is pretty crazy, but not fifty-hours-just-making-this-asshole-useful crazy.  When all that's going to happen is that he'll end up getting eaten by Dianh for about 100,000 (MAYBE) stat points (in full, not counting HP/SP and distributed between the stats) to be added to her well, and getting the Evilties she so needs.  And I will still have grinding to do to bring Dinah up to combat-readiness with Mushroom Baal after that.

There's absolutely no getting around the stupidly long grind either.  Either I grind this method, or I hop into a Legendary Item or Weapon's Item World and do all one hundred floors of it (not counting floors I have to redo because I went into a mystery panel) all so I have the 'privilege' of trying to Reverse Pirate the item for Statisticians who are the innocents that grant you more EXP when on an item that you have equipped and are, of course, a fucking rare spawn.  Reverse Pirating, by the way, requires that I have a Pirate Ship, which I do have, but if I didn't, that would mean...being in the Item World -again- relying on random chance that Pirates will show up on one floor at some point and I can murder them for their ship.  So I do all that for Statisticians and then I go through some sort of dupe thing with a particular weapon for more of that or something (which I will have to Item World beforehand) all just so I can grind my Majin more, hoping that the statisticians bring him up to normal, if not better, EXP gains.  It's one of those things that helps in the long run, of course, since it means free EXP for anyone when I'm specifically grinding them since I can just give them the item or move the innocents, but it's so fucking monotonous that it's not worth it.

And I cannot....cannot stress enough that this is not even the biggest fucking challenge of the game, this Mushroom Baal fight.  Because it's not the Land of Carnage version of the fight.  In which Mushroom Baal has about 20 Million in most stats.  I am not doing that fight for obvious reasons.  The most obvious among them being fuck you, Nippon Ichi Software.

I just wish I was fucking done with this grinding good goddamn

Tired and Cranky

If there's a few things you've gleaned about me from my blogposts, especially the more personal ones (which are rare, admittedly), one of them is probably that I have struggled lately to be positive about things and generally try and keep an upbeat attitude.  I've done a pretty good job of it with a few hiccups here and there, but it's nothing that I really try and let get me down.  The last couple days have been more of the same about that, but my erratic and silly work schedule has really taken a toll on me that I haven't really registered until tonight when I realized I have been just a cranky person the last few days.  Like, crankier than the occasional piece of snark here or there - more along the lines of full-on, 'fuck this, fuck you, fuck everything' which has been a rare thing for...well, a couple years, honestly.  Which is good that it's rare, but that does then make it a bit unsettling when it does come around.

I think when it really hit was tonight when I was plugging away at the Dragon Fantasy review I've had open since....Sunday.  It's really not coming together the way I want it to and at one point I said to myself, "Am I literally going to explain how an NES-era RPG works?  Is that literally something I'm going to do?"  For a moment, I was so annoyed with that, with the whole concept of it and that I had to consider it, that I just grumbled, saved it and closed it once more as I have three times by now.  Usually, I would try to work through it or something, but instead I did the equivalent of upending the table I was writing on and stomped away.  Admittedly, it's less violent on a computer and in this format, but still, it's bothersome at the very least.

Part of the issue is Spring, as it always is.  I complain ceaselessly about it, but I just cannot handle ridiculous heat, and in my opinion, an indoor temperature of 82 degrees -with- a fan on at 11:30 at night is fucking ridiculous.  I say every year that I'm going to look into some sort of solution, but I never do and simply end up bitching for six months on end while also being miserable for various reasons.  Hopefully this will be the year where I'm motivated enough to -actually- do something about it, since I guess there are now Space Coolers that don't have to be hung halfway out a window to work.  Or maybe that's not a new thing and I am just a dumb.  I just know that a Space Heater is....'necessary' for out here for when it gets colder (obviously, I'm not a fan) so a similar option for when it's hot out here at least should have been a possibility, though the previously mentioned window thing was an issue.  If it's not now, then this might be a bearable Spring and Summer.

Another part of my grumbling is that there are rumors moving about the internet that the just released Deadly Premonition:  Director's Cut runs a little dodgy.  Being that it was a game I was actually looking forward to getting without expecting much, it's hard to say that I'm going into it expecting something bad now, but it's not outside the realm of thought.  It's not that you'd expect Deadly Premonition of all games to be a technical marvel or even 'smooth' (it was $20 on the original 360 release, and only got bumped up for $40 on PS3 because Blu-Rays are a bit more expensive, plus the content added), but rather that you'd expect the port of a two year old game that took something like a year to do would work.  Like, decently.  But with reports of stuttering framerates and strange audio echos or tinniness, not to mention the 'graphic overhaul' doing little for the better, if not for the worse, it's hard to not get discouraged.  Being the internet, it's hard to tell what's exaggerated and what isn't, so the only true test will be playing it myself, which I am understandably wary about doing.

Basically, I'm just being cranky and grumbly and tired because of things and it's really gotten in the way of writing things that I would prefer writing.  So instead, I did this.  Since I very obviously -do- want to write, even if I'm perhaps not in the best place to do so.  Hopefully, it'll pass - after all, I have a day off tomorrow if all goes well, so perhaps a day of simply recharging, getting some Soul Sacrifice in or playing through the end of Thomas Was Alone will assuage my undercurrent of 'bleh'.  Or maybe I'll veg out and catch up on my youtube videos since there's about three dozen of them that I haven't watched yet and are just begging for a marathon session.  Several, in fact, given that the bulk of them are 30-minute videos or better.  Which just makes me glad that the Vita has a Youtube App, because I'd just say 'fuck it' otherwise.  Regardless, tomorrow looks like a day that has potential, so here's hoping.