<–The State of the Gamer: 10/3/17         The State of the Gamer: 10/17/17–>

A weekly post updated every Tuesday detailing my current gaming projects.  I have quite a backlog of games to either play or watch, and I’m hoping a weekly article will assist with my progress as my other accountable posts have done with reading and writing.  I have an account at Grouvee, which is a essentially Goodreads for gamers, so please feel free to friend me there!

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Currently Playing: 2

Title: Final Fantasy Type-0
Series: Final Fantasy/Fabula Nova Crystallis
Genre: Action RPG – Fantasy
Developer: Square Enix
Platform: PlayStation 4
Release Date: October 27, 2011
Date Purchased: May 18, 2017
Date Started: June 18, 2017

Progress: Chapter 2 – Next Mission (finally)

I finished all the leveling last Friday, and I’m finally back in the game!  I had 1 day and 4 hours left to kill (in game) before my next mission, and that went by really quickly  Doing certain things eats up hours, and leaving the school for any reason drops you down three.  I took a task in Corsi Cave to find something called a Pretty Pelt for someone in the Armory, and within the environs I found a girl whose boyfriend had been turned into a frog.  Unfortunate.  According to what I googled, I can’t do anything for her at the moment, but apparently, she shows up randomly, and you can perform tasks for her.  I also found one of those tags for the moogle who’s looking for them.  Oh!  Speaking of moogles, they’re all wearing costumes!!  I guess it’s for Halloween so the game must have some internal mechanism for knowing what time of the year it is.  It’s really cute.  The last thing I did before Mission Day was accept an invite to this creepy scientist’s lab…where, for lack of a better term, I was immediately roofied…twice.  Thankfully, nothing bad happened (that I know of…) and I received a mega-ether out of the deal.

Title: Final Fantasy V
Series: Final Fantasy
Genre: RPG – Fantasy
Developer: Square
Platform: PlayStation
Release Date: December 6, 1992
Date Purchased: Unknown
Date Started: June 17, 2017

Progress: Karnak Castle

No progress this week.  I didn’t get a chance to play.

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Ongoing Games: 2

Title: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Series: Mario Kart
Genre: Racing/Driving
Developer: Nintendo
Platform(s): Wii U, Nintendo Switch
Release Dates: April 28, 2017 (Switch), May 29, 2014 (Wii U)
Date Purchased: August 21, 2017
Date Started: August 26 2017

Progress: 200cc

Nope, didn’t play this either, though I did find some use for my switch, which I’ll talk about in the Miscellaneous section below.  As always, let me know if you’d like to play, and we can set up some time!  Twitter is probably the best way to get to me if you don’t know any others.  I’m @ash1rose (OneWingedRose) 🙂

Title: Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius
Series: Final Fantasy
Genre: RPG – Fantasy
Developer: Square Enix
Platform(s): iOS, Android
Release Date: June 29, 2016
Date Purchased: March 21, 2017
Date Started: March 27, 2017

Progress: Rank 32

It looks like the devs fixed all the bugs and gave out a ton of consolation prizes to boot.  There was some major hacking incident, which is what prompting the big update, and apparently, the entire game was down for some time.  I like the updates and how things are better organized, but there a few things I’d still like them to do.  For starters, it would be nice if they showed character levels before you go on an expedition, since you can gain a lot doing that, and I’d like to know who is maxed out and who isn’t instead of having to memorize it or write it down.  I’d also like if they allowed you to  go to the next character when you’re figuring out who can be Awakened instead of having to go back out to the prior screen.  These are minor things, but it would save so much time, and I might not have to use an Excel spreadsheet, which I don’t mind.  However,  if I just want to casually play and level people up without needing to know who could be Awakened after that, it would facilitate that.

I haven’t made any story progress this week.

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Games Finished Watching This Week: 1

Title: BioShock
Series: BioShock
Genre: First Person Shooter – Sci-Fi, Dystopian
Developers: Irrational Games & 2K Australia
Platform(s): Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, iOS
Original Release Date: August 21, 2007
Let’s Player: Christopher Odd
Total Number of Videos: 33
Date Started: August 28, 2017
Date Finished: October 9, 2017
Watching Duration: 42 days

Progress: Complete

Wow, that ending.  Chris choose to save all of the Little Sisters as opposed to harvesting them.  It only follows the ending would be different if you opt for the more merciless route.  I found a video that has all of the endings including the DLCs (which I didn’t know BioShock had).  Chris has an LP of the second one, which I can only assume features another character given the ending of the first.  I’m not going to watch it just yet, as I have a ton of LPs to catch up on from blogger friends.

This was an interesting watch.  While the story was a wild ride, it almost seemed interspersed with the gameplay/action instead of a part of it.  There’s a lot you can miss, since finding and playing recordings isn’t mandatory, and you can continue with whatever you’re doing while they’re going on.  Thinking back to SOMA, which also takes place under the sea, whenever you come across an important narrative point, everything stops while it plays, but not so in Rapture.  BioShock also has a very different aesthetic though it takes place in the same locale.  There’s an old fashioned feel to is as opposed to futuristic dystopian due to the 60s motif with the music (which was awesome) and everyone’s inflections.  The terror was more cartoony, despite the jump scares as opposed to SOMA’s existential horror. 

BioShock does have some existential crises, and I’ve been thinking hard about how that ties in with existential horror and if one must exist with the other.  I’d say that an existential crisis creates an existential horror for the character having the crisis, but it doesn’t necessarily invoke existential horror, which breaks the forth wall to reach the observer.  I suppose then in a way one cannot exist without the other unless a narrative manages to present existential horror without forcing any of its characters to have an existential crisis…only you, the watcher, must endure such.

I put BioShock on my Review list, but I’m not sure if I’m going to give it the full treatment.  I need to look up some things, because either Chris missed uploading a video, or I missed something.  At the beginning of the 32nd video, he talks about a bunch of information that I don’t recall hearing in game, so I don’t know how he found it or when it happened.  As I said, there’s a lot you can miss if you’re not paying attention, which is a bit annoying since the narrative is usually the reason I play anything.

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Games Purchased This Week: 1

Title: Mobius Final Fantasy
Series: Final Fantasy
Genre: JRPG
Developer: Square Enix
Platform: Steam
Release Date: June 4, 2015
Date Purchased: October 5, 2017

Price: $0.00

It was free on Steam so I wound up picking it up.  I still need to spend $5.00 on there so I can utilize all of the features, nor do I know when the hell I’m going to get to play this.  It doesn’t seem very popular on Grouvee, but neither did FFBE, and I really like that.

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Games Added to Backlog: 8

1. Mobius Final Fantasy – See above
2. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy – Recommended by The Otaku Judge I suppose in a comment?  I don’t have a link to a review saved, and I usually do that if it’s the case.  Described as an “Ace Attorney meets action and rhythm game.”  Update: here It was :p
   
3. Hyperdimension Neptunia – I’ve hard Cheap Boss Attack talk about this series for almost a year now, so I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to add it.  I love well done satire/tongue-in-cheek.  For some reason reading the description reminded me of the anime Excel Saga, which I guess isn’t surprising since ES was pretty blatant with its poking fun at anime tropes at least from what I watched.
4. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions – It showed up on my Grouvee front page and I added it.  I love RPGs, and I love Mario.
5. Battle Chasers: Nightwar – Recommended by one of my Twitter friends A Scientis[Garbled aka @darkbaldur, after some research, it looks like it’s safe to play on the Switch, though other consoles are buggy.
6. Professor Layton and the Curious Village – I made a new friend on Grouvee, Dallen!  While taking a jaunt through his games, I added this and the one below.
7. Radiant Historia – An RPG about time.  Added.
8. Piczle Lines DX – Um…how did I not have this added already?  I decided to do so a few weeks ago based on a review by Mr. Panda.  I must’ve just said that than completely forgot to add the game *facepalm*

Total Games in Backlog: 155
Change from Last Week: +8

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Games Added to Watch List: 2

1. Spellcaster – Hungrygoriya started this a few weeks ago.  I haven’t had a chance to watch it, so I wanted to add it so I’d remember.  Now that I’ve finished watching BioShock, I can catch up on shorter LPs by friends!
2. Dragon Crystal – I think HG started this one even longer ago.  I believe it’s just one hour long video, so I need to set aside that much time to watch it.  Hm, that might be my next one since I could definitely complete it in one week if not one session.

Total Games on Watch List: 41
Change from Last Week: +2

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Miscellaneous

I’ve been thinking about preordering Super Mario Odyssey, because it looks amazing.  Of course I still want Breath of the Wild, and I downloaded about four demos on my Switch the other day: Disgaea 5 Complete, Voez, and Puyo Puyo Tetris.  I was able to play Voez and PPT yesterday before bed.  I really liked the Tetris game, but I loved Voez.  It’s like DDR for your fingers.  It’s only around $25 so I might pick it up this Friday when I get paid.  There’s also still Piczle Lines DX for the Switch, and I still need to finish the demo for Octopath, though at this point I know I’m going to pick it up when it comes out.  I’ll probably play the demo for Disgaea tonight and wave goodbye to my money and my time.

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What are you currently playing and/or watching? Is it something new or old?  Is it a first time run or a replay?  What’s the genre?  Would you recommend it?  What’s on your radar to play next?

<–The State of the Gamer: 10/3/17         The State of the Gamer: 10/17/17–>

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