Oop! Late post! Call your therapist if you’re distraught.

YouTube Obsession

Chip and Ironicus is back with another leg of the indecipherable Kingdom Hearts series.

I’ve written about how I love a great Let’s Play and ChipCheezum is the best there ever was. He may take upwards of a year between LPs but I will always be there when he drops something new.

Reading

I love Anne Leckie’s The Raven Tower and consider it one of my favorite fantasy books of all time. Exploring gender, perception, queerness all in a grounded fantasy setting, there’s just not many genre books that read like this.

This prompted me to go back to Ancillary Justice. I read it back in 2017(?) but never felt compelled to finish the trilogy. On my re-read I can see where Leckie’s skill was still being honed. In Justice the queerness, gender and perception themes are all there but they aren’t as gripping as they are in Raven Tower. Still, it’s a solid Sci-fi story with plenty deep mysteries that justify reading the remaining sequels.

Next up Ancillary Sword.

Playing

In the brief window between the BF6 open beta and the launch of BF6 (which I’m still balls deep in) I played a lot of Dragon’s Dogma 2. I played back when it released in spring of 2024 but it the bigger my save file the buggier the game got so I never finished. Despite that I loved the game even naming it one of my favorites that year.

Returning over a year later in hopes that the bugs would be ironed out. They mostly are, though longer play sessions still lead to a build up of jank forcing me to restart the console. I never lost saves or anything but after a 2 hour session monsters started spawning in towns and creating chaos. Often hilarious chaos but nonetheless game breaking.

And that’s how I would quantify this game: Hilarious Chaos. Each venture outside of town leads to my party doing something new and absolutely not what I initially intended to do. It’s like Skyrim in that way. You may want to go to Winterhold for a quest but on the way you fight some giants, you find a cave with vampires and stumble upon a murder cult only to finally end up a Winterhold hours later.

This is also a game that make traversal of the world a key part of it’s enjoyment. Since skills are leveled up by use there’s no reason not to walk to the next town so yiou can get into as many random battles as possible. It’s only going to make your character stronger. And the combat can be surprisingly deep especially with the later classes.

This is the key difference between games like this and Red Dead Redemption 2. Both games have cantankerous fast travel systems but where DD2 succeeds and RDR2 fails is that the base action of travelling from town to town in DD2 is fun. RDR2’s commitment to realism in it’s animations leads to slow and sluggish character movement and there’s literally acres of nothing in some parts of the world. DD2’s characters move quickly or (most importantly) feel like they’re moving quickly and there is always another fight/quest/treasure around the corner.

Other Notables

** Politicians are just like us!

** Democrats Swept Tuesday Night’s Election. Now What?

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